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 DOI: 10.1177/1470412907087202

2008 7: 65Journal of Visual CultureAlexander G. Weheliye

Pornotropes  

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journal of visual culture

Pornotropes

Alexander G. Weheliye

journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com]

Copyright © 2008 SAGE (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)

Vol 7(1): 65–81 [1470-4129(200804)7:1]10.1177/1470412907087202

AbstractThis article foregrounds the link between slavery and sexualityexplored by Hortense Spillers – what she calls pornotroping – whichexposes some of the limitations of Giorgio Agamben’s ‘homo sacer’(sacred man) figure by calling attention to how political violencefrequently produces forces that exceed it. This is followed by ananalysis of the film Sankofa, ostensibly an uplifting narrative about thehorrors of slavery, which nevertheless cannot help but eroticize thebrutality that the filmmaker seeks to denounce, and which demon-strates the visual logic of pornotroping. Finally, Agamben’s notion ofpotentiality leads to a discussion of freedom in pornotroping, one thatmight lead to novel instantiations of humanity.

Keywordscinema ● Giorgio Agamben ● the Holocaust ● Hortense Spillers ●

sexuality ● slavery ● violence

The plantation is one of the bellies of the world, not the only one,one among many others, but it has the advantage of being able to bestudied with the utmost precision . . . The place was closed, but theword derived from it remains open. This is one part, a limited part,

of the lesson of the world.

(Edouard Glissant, 1997: 75)

In this very violence something rotten in the law is revealed.

(Walter Benjamin, 1996[1921]: 242)

In What Is a Thing, Martin Heidegger (1962) states: ‘To question historicallymeans to set free and into motion the happening (das Geschehen) whichrests and is bound (gefesselt) in the question’ (p. 48, translation modified).1

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This article is concerned with freeing and putting in motion ‘the history thathurts – the still-unfolding narrative of captivity, dispossession, and domina-tion that engenders the black subject in the Americas’ (Hartman, 1997: 51).As opposed to being confined to a particular historical period, echoes of newworld slavery rest in many contemporary spaces for, as Heidegger (1962)explains:

it is a setting into motion (in Gang zu bringen) the initial happeningof this question according to its simplest characteristic moves(Bewegungszügen), which have been congealed in a quiescence. Thishappening does not lie somewhere remote from us in the muted anddistant past but is here in each analytic proposition and in all everydayopinions, in every single approach to things (Dinge). (p. 48, translationmodified)

Heidegger’s conjoining of historicity with bounded subjection and the thingopens a particular aspect encased in the slave qua thing and asks how theunleashing of its happening contributes to the conceptualization of modernpolitics. Although gefesselt signifies captivity and bondage – the most literaltranslation would be ‘tied up’ or ‘handcuffed’ – in the Heideggerian context,echoes of ‘riveted’ and ‘enraptured’ also rest in this word, which locates thehappening of the slave Ding in the province of bondage and rapture.

How does suffering, especially as a result of political violence, function as aparticular property of (black) humanity? What are its specifically racializedcontours? Perhaps these questions can be posed in a different tongue: whatdo distinctive manifestations of black suffering at the hands of politicalbrutalization in slavery and beyond tell us about the general function ofpolitics and/as suffering? This line of questioning insists on the specificity ofthe black body in pain as a (de)tour, a ‘demonic ground’ to a version of thehuman unburdened by shackles of Man.2 I am by no means making anargument about political pain as it appears in various human (and animal)rights discourses since the Enlightenment, where suffering becomes thedefining feature of those subjects excluded from the law, national commu-nity, the human, etc., while paradoxically highlighting their equality withthose ensconced firmly in the hegemonic sphere, insofar as it allows forrecognition by the liberal state in order to assuage this pain and thereforeclaim to free the oppressed. Rather, I am asking whether there exists freedom(not necessarily as a commonsensically ‘positive’ category, but as a way tothink what it makes possible) in this pain that most definitely cannot beredressed by the liberal state, and if this freedom might lead to other formsof emancipation, which can be imagined but not (yet) described.

Beginning with Giorgio Agamben’s ‘homo sacer’ (sacred man) as the centralfigure in modern politics, I argue that by insisting on a limited notion of thelaw, Agamben (1998) preempts a rigorous and imaginative thinking of thepolitics that rest in the tradition of the oppressed. This different politicalimaginary suggests a technology of humanity–technology circumscribed herein the broadest sense as the application of knowledge to the practical aims of

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human life or to changing and manipulating the human environment.Consequently, the figuration of humanity found in the tradition of theoppressed represents a series of distinct technologies – the application ofknowledge – of what it means to be human. The particular technology ofhumanity under scrutiny here is what Hortense Spillers (2003b[1987]) hasreferred to ‘as a potential for pornotroping’ (p. 206). Rather than imaginingmere life3 primarily through the lens of the law as Agamben does, Spillers’thinking accents the processes by which the homo sacer becomes bare lifeand excavates the scopic cum sexual dimension of these mechanisms, itsextra-judicial Bewegungsgesetz (law of motion), if you will. How does thehistorical question of violent political domination activate a surplus andexcess of sexuality that simultaneously sustains and disfigures such brutality?Or, what are the sexual dimensions of objectification in slavery and otherforms of extreme political and social domination? My argument is not abouterotics per se, but dwells in the juxtaposition of violence (bondage) as theantithesis of the human(e) and ‘normal’ sexuality (rapture) as the appositeproperty of this figure. In order to illustrate this point, I turn to renditions oftorture in a film concerned with racial slavery, Sankofa, showing that thecinematic apparatus produces the tortured (slave) body as a deviantdeviation from the world of man.

Bare Lives

According to Agamben’s (1998) influential theorization, modern sovereigntyis haunted and shadowed by the figure of the homo sacer. The homo sacer,a human being that cannot be ritually offered but whom one can kill withoutincurring the penalty of murder, first appears in the city-states of Romanantiquity. Taking this figure as his starting point, Agamben infuses it withMichel Foucault’s concept of biopower, Walter Benjamin’s concern withmere life, Carl Schmitt’s thoughts on sovereignty and the state of exception,and Hannah Arendt’s notion of statelessness. The homo sacer’s ban from thepolitical community facilitates a double movement that is contradictory butnecessary: on the one hand, these subjects, by being barred from thecategory of the human, are relegated to bare or naked life, being bothliterally and symbolically stripped of all accoutrements associated with theliberalist subject. Conversely, this bare life stands at the center of the state’sexercise of its biopower, its force of legislating life and death, which, in thisframework, provides one of the central features of the modern nationstate.As Agamben (1998) writes ‘ the syntagm homo sacer names something likethe originary “political” relation, which is to say, bare life insofar as itoperates in an inclusive exclusion as the referent of the sovereign decision’(p. 85). Thus, the incorporation, production and politicization of zoe (merebiological life), as opposed to bios (‘full’ human existence), forms the coreof political modernity and increasingly comes to define the scope of statepower, particularly in the legal state of exception. For Agamben, Nazi deathcamps provide the ultimate incarnation of this arrangement, albeit not as adeviation but as the sine qua non of modern politics as sovereignty, one that

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resonates in various current biopolitical institutions such as refugee anddetainment camps. The concentration camp and its progeny map a terrain inwhich the central aim of politics is the manufacture of bare life, and,according to Agamben, it is the politics in which we live.

Still, we should proceed with caution here, since equating modern politicswith the concentration camp, as Agamben does to a certain extent by callingthese camps both the nomos (law, convention) and hidden matrix of politics,is surely not the same as saying that the camp forms an integral part ofmodernity, or even that bare life is an essential aspect of state power. Byplacing the severest version of the homo sacer at the core of contemporarypolitics, Agamben seeks to disentangle the Holocaust from its status as anultimate yet historically discrete aberration of modernity. This, paradoxically,grounds the camp in the deviant terrain Agamben desires to leave behind.Considering that most instantiations of the homo sacer do not necessarilyentail physical mortality per se but other forms of political death and if ‘todaythere is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhapsbecause we are all virtually homines sacri’ (p. 115), why does the concen-tration camp function as the embodiment of modern sovereignty?

A number of critics – some directly engaging and reformulating Agamben’s‘bare life ‘– have noted how slavery, colonialism, lynching, and the current USprison system constitute integral components of modern terror and there-fore politics (Dayan, 2007; Gilmore, 2007; JanMohamed, 2005; Mbembe,2003; Vergès, 1999). Paul Gilroy (2000), for instance, draws attention to boththe conceptual contiguity of the plantation and the camp in their suspensionof law in the name of the law, while also showing how the camp emergedfrom assorted forms of colonial domination. Racial slavery, by virtue ofspanning a much greater historical period than the Shoah, and, moreimportantly, by not seeming as great an abnormality both in its historicalcontext and in the way it is retroactively narrativized, reveals the manifoldmodes in which extreme brutality and directed killing frequently andpeacefully coexist with other forms of coercion and non-coercion within thescope of the normal juridico-political order. This is what invents the homosacer as homo sacer, for bare life must be measured against something,otherwise it just appears as life; life stripped of its bareness, as it were.Though murdering slaves was punishable by law in many US states, usuallythese edicts were not enforced, and the master could kill slaves withimpunity since they were categorized as property (Goodell, 1853: 178).Consequently, slavery conjures a different form of bare life than the concen-tration camp, since the more prevalent version of finitude in this context waswhat Orlando Patterson has referred to as ‘social death’, the purging of allcitizenship rights from slaves save their mere life (Patterson, 1982: 39–41).Although racial slavery and the Holocaust exhibit the state of exception, theydo so in different legal and political ways since slavery’s purpose was not tophysically annihilate, at least not as its primary aim, as much as sociallysubdue and exploit, erasing the bios of those subjects who were subject toits workings. The point to be made here does not concern replacing thecamp with the plantation as the nomos and hidden matrix of current politics

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but thinking through these two spaces’ commonalities and disparities with-out awakening the demon of comparison. Setting Agamben’s ideas afoot inthe plantation and its remnants requires an understanding of the life supportsystems that sustain terror and bare life, which frequently appear in more‘benign’ forms of political control, as well as the functioning of social lifealongside exceptional incidents of violence and (social) death.

Agamben repeatedly cites Walter Benjamin’s famous proclamation: ‘thetradition of the oppressed teaches us that “the state of exception(Ausnahmezustand)” in which we live is not the exception but the rule’(Benjamin, 2003[1940]: 392) without including the reference to the traditionof the oppressed (see Agamben, 1998: 55, 2000: 6, 2005: 6, 57). Far moreinterested in the state of exception than he is in the pedagogy of theoppressed, Agamben’s omission amplifies his almost exclusive focus on barelife from the purview of law and hegemony, which leaves intact the homosacer qua homo sacer by repeating the very procedure by which modernsovereignty invents and maintains this category. As a result, the homo sacer’ssocial death appears as the only feature of his or her subjectivity. Taking inother instantiations of mere life such as racial slavery opens up a socio-political sphere in which different modalities of life and death, power andoppression, pain and pleasure, inclusion and exclusion, form a continuumthat embodies the hidden and not so veiled matrices of contemporarysovereignty.

This reliance on a fairly dogmatic conception of not only the state ofexception but law in general materializes in Agamben’s (1998) discussion ofincarceration. Contra Foucault, Agamben excludes the prison from the stateof exception, and thus the production of bare life, because it forms a part ofpenal law and not martial law and is therefore legally within ‘the normalorder’ (Agamben, 1998: 20). But as Angela Davis and Joan Dayan, amongothers, have shown, the violent practices in US prisons do not deviatesignificantly from Agamben’s description of bare life vis-à-vis the suspensionof law (Davis, 2005: 124; Dayan, 2007: 12). Dayan explicitly addresses thecontinuities between slavery, imprisonment, and the torture in the AbuGhraib prison through an excavation of the various interpretations of theEighth Amendment to the US Constitution, especially the phrase ‘cruel andunusual punishment’, which has been evacuated of its meaning by locatingits significance solely in relation to the intent of the perpetrator. Slavery,imprisonment and torture, in US prisons and abroad, are legal in the strictsense and very much part of ‘the normal order’, and still they display manyof the same features Agamben (1998) ascribes to homo sacerization. If wetake into account the racial dimensions of the US penal system, imprison-ment, and torture in their full juridical and cultural ‘normalness’, it wouldseem that racial violence and blackness are always already beyond the lawunder a constant state of siege. In this way, blackness and racism figure asmajor zones of indistinction: blackness is the state of exception.

Which is to say, the judicial machine is instantiated differentially according tovarious hierarchical structures and frequently abandons numerous subjects,

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making them susceptible to premature death within the scope of the normalorder. Instead of being seduced by the supposed omniscience of the law, weshould ask, ‘what does the law mask?’ (Dayan, 2001: 28) which underscoreswhat remains ‘rotten at the core of the law’ (Benjamin, 1996[1921]: 242)or its ‘barefaced two-facedness’ (Spillers, 2003a: 19), especially for theoppressed.4 Agamben goes to great lengths to show that the political tools ofsubjection developed during the Holocaust were not simply ‘blunders’ in theprogressive march of western modernity. However, the dogmatic insistenceon a stringently juridical instantiation of the state of exception reinstitutesthe Holocaust as the most severe and paradigmatic manifestation of bare life(here bolstered by a juridical rather than moral frame of reference),5 and thisargument also neglects forms of bare life that take place within thejurisdiction of the normal legal order. Therefore, Agamben’s homo sacerremains a thing, whose happening slumbers in bare life without moving orbeing emancipated.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s (2002) definition of racism as ‘the state-sanctionedand/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiatedvulnerabilities to premature death’ bases racism not on phenotype or culturebut locates it in the field of bare humanity, highlighting the affinities betweenhomo sacerization and racialization (p. 261). Thus homines sacri not onlylegally and ideologically reside beyond the scope of the political community,even whilst they represent an integral part of said group’s functioning, buttheir alterity is also visually marked, rendering the homo sacer’s ban logicalwithin the constraints of sovereign racial formation. After all, Jews had to beracialized as non-white in order to be excommunicated from the Germannational and ethnic community during the Third Reich (see Burleigh andWippermann, 1991). As Gilmore (2007) states: ‘racism is the ordinary meansthrough which dehumanization achieves ideological normality, while, at thesame time, the practice of dehumanizing people produces racial categories’(pp. 243–4). In other words, the barring of subjects that belong to the speciesof homo sapiens from the prefecture of humanity depends upon the workingsof racialization (differentiation) and racism (hierarchization and exclusion);in fact, the two are indistinguishable. Which is to say that although homosacerization attempts to conjure a sphere more ‘fundamental’ to the humanthan race, it is but another term for racism. Agamben’s (1998) description ofbare life as the political manipulation of ‘mere biological life’ reaches out toa domain that seemingly precedes racialization in its insistence on the mereand biological, yet the techniques by which human beings are transformedinto bare life is scripted onto the bodies of the abjected so that theirexpulsion appears both deserved and natural. This is why bare life (‘group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death’) operates simultaneouslyas the nomos and matrix of modern politics: not because it transcends racein a differential hierarchization of full and mere life but because it is nothingother than race. In the end, we do well to recall that racism, whether in thecolony, the concentration camp, the plantation, the prison, or inGuantanamo Bay exhibits no dire need for a legal state of exception,although it has a hard time refusing it when offered as a fringe benefit.

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Pornotroping

Hortense Spillers’ distinction between body and flesh, which lies at the heartof pornotroping, focuses on the process through which slaves are trans-formed into flesh and then subjected to the (un)pleasure of the viewingsovereign subject. Spillers (2003b[1987]) argues, much in the same way asAgamben imagines the rift between mere life and full life:

before the ‘body’ there is ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social concep-tualization that does not escape concealment under the brush ofdiscourse or the reflexes of iconography . . . We regard this human andsocial irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the person ofAfrican females and males registered the wounding. (p. 206)

Flesh provides both a temporal and conceptual precursor to the body. Fleshworks in tandem with the body within the regimes of liberal democracy asthey are traversed by sovereignty and slavery, since the (white) body – full life– functions as the abstract norm against which (black) flesh – mere life – ismeasured, and it also serves as an exception due to its unattainability for theblack subject.

Besides extracting truth from the victim, torture and political violence ingeneral, I would add, have a second crucial purpose, to ‘create . . . another“race,” a species that is rendered, by the activity of the torturer, not-human’(duBois, 1991: 153). Once again, dehumanization appears far from anteriorto and more fundamental than racialization in this field; it names the veryconditions of possibility for exclusion from humanity. The creation of thetortured as in/human might also be described as the production of both flesh(Spillers) and bare life (Agamben), since the physicality of torture and othermanifestations of politicized brutality depends on the conscription of thevictim as lacking both body and full human existence. Hortense Spillers(2003b[1987]) has referred to the enactment of black suffering for a shockedand titillated audience as ‘pornotroping’:

This profound intimacy of interlocking detail is disrupted, however, byexternally imposed meanings and uses: (1) the captive body as thesource of an irresistible, destructive sensuality; (2) at the same time – instunning contradiction – it is reduced to a thing, to being for the captor;(3) in this distance from a subject position, the captured sexualitiesprovide a physical and biological expression of ‘otherness’; (4) as acategory of ‘otherness’, the captive body translates into a potential forpornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slidesinto a more general ‘powerlessness’. (p. 206)

Spillers brings to the fore several facets of the body/flesh, human/inhuman,sovereign/bare life, etc. pas des deux in her insistence on the simultaneousthingness and sensuality of the slave, which lays bare the extra-legalcomponents of this volatile Ding. Pornotroping unconceals the literally bare,

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naked, and denuded dimensions of the homo sacer, underscoring howpolitical domination frequently produces a sexual dimension that cannot becontrolled by the forces that (re)produce it.

In order to better track Spillers’ brilliant coarticulation of porno and trope, abrief etymological detour is in order. Originally, porno signified prostituteand in the ancient Greek context from whence it sprung, the term referredto female slaves who were sold expressly for prostitution. Also a derivationfrom Greek, trope, according to Hayden White (1978), refers to ‘turn’ and‘way’ or ‘manner’. Later, by way of Latin, trope is aligned with ‘figure ofspeech’. White writes of the palimpsestic structure of this word: ‘tropes aredeviations from literal, conventional, or “proper” language use . . . it is notonly a deviation from one possible, proper, meaning, but also a deviationtowards another meaning’ (p. 2). In pornotroping, the double rotationWhite identifies at the heart of the trope figures the remainder of law andviolence linguistically, staging the simultaneous sexualization and brutal-ization of the (female) slave; yet, and this marks its complexity, it remainsunclear whether the turn or deviation is towards violence or sexuality.Pornotroping, then, names the becoming-flesh of the (black) body and formsa primary component in the processes by which human beings are convertedinto bare life. Or in the words of Saidiya Hartman (1997): ‘the ascription ofexcess and enjoyment to the African effaces the violence perpetrated againstthe enslaved’ (p. 27). Thus the violence inflicted upon the enslaved bodybecomes synonymous with the projected surplus pleasure that always movesin excess of the sovereign subject’s jouissance; pleasure (rapture) andviolence (bondage) deviate from and toward each other, setting in motionthe historical happening of the slave thing: a potential for pornotroping.

Instances of pornotroping feature prominently in literary and visualconjurings of slavery, the Holocaust, colonialism, and the recent images fromthe Abu Ghraib prison, as well as from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.6

In fact, it seems that no cinematic imagining of slavery exists without at leastone obligatory scene of gratuitous whipping, branding, boiling, etc. Besidesthe film I discuss here, other examples include: Roots, Beloved, Mandingo,Drum, The Legend of Nigger Charley, Amistad, and The Middle Passage.Usually these scenes are presented in the form of flashbacks and featurenubile black bodies in pain. In addition, pornotropes appear in a strand ofItalian art films from the 1970’s,7 and there is a whole genre of Nazisexploitation films also primarily produced in 1970s Italy. Overall, cinemaenables the production of bare life as a politico-sexual form of life, whereinthe remainder that is affected by, but cannot be contained by, the legal orderis disseminated in the visual realm.

Sankofa opens with images of an African-American fashion model, Mona, ona photoshoot at Elmina Castle on the Atlantic coast of Ghana, one of theplaces where slaves were gathered before embarking on the middle passageand now a popular tourist destination. As Mona writhes on the beach in ablond wig and a leopard-print bathing suit, white tourists inspect the castlein the background of the frame. Later, when Mona enters the dungeon

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beneath the castle, the voice of a tour guide recedes, and she is transportedback in time. Mona becomes the slave Shola, awaiting the middle passage,despite her protests that she is not African but American. The remainder ofSankofa depicts Shola’s experiences on the Lafayette plantation in Louisiana.

When she returns to Ghana at the end of the film after being a slave andhaving been symbolically reprimanded and punished for her inauthenticblackness, the plot produces a reformed Mona, who epitomizes all AfricanAmericans who have neglected and/or forgotten the history of slavery andtheir ties to Africa.

We literally see Mona’s body transmuting into Shola’s flesh as she attempts totell the slave traders that she is American and not African. The camera pansacross Shola’s bare breasts, resting there, as her body is seared and rippedapart by the branding iron of the slave traders. Everything rotates aroundintensifying its spectacular shock value: the setting, the camera work, thelighting, the positioning of the characters, Mona’s screams, the musicalsoundtrack, and the martyrological, Christ-like iconography of Mona’s body.8

The extra-diegetic soundtrack features Aretha Franklin’s recording of ThomasDorsey’s ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord’. The recording itself is very sparse,functioning primarily as a showcase for Franklin’s rough vocal prowessaccompanied only by a piano and, by the time Sankofa appeared, hadalready accrued a significant political caché.9 The song and scene come to aclimax around Franklin’s melismatic stretching of the line ‘at the river Istand’, which grows progressively louder and in the end completely displacesMona’s screams on the soundtrack. Using the non-diegetic soundtrack(especially expressive black female voices) so prominently in moments ofextreme violence is a common practice in the cinema of slavery and operatesas an index of both the severity of the cruelty and ensuing pain. Here, theblack singing voice signals both a radical alterity by pointing to the aspects ofslavery that cannot be represented visually and stands as a marker forknowability, since it assumes that the black voice can encode the horrors ofslavery aurally. And, although the film does not highlight the religiousdimension of the lyrics, the prominence of the song, Franklin’s delivery andthe visual aspects on the screen make it abundantly clear that we arewitnessing a spiritual rebirth, a baptism of blood.

Furthermore, the grammar of the pornotrope – the cross-fertilization ofviolence and sexuality – is enacted by the camera’s deviation toward thefemale slave’s breasts and the turn away from the branding iron swelteringher flesh. This scene dramatizes nothing less than the primal scene of theAfrican diaspora, the natal alienation of the slave, with the added twist thatthe person undergoing this procedure is a present-day US citizen, which iskey to the allegorical working of Mona’s conversion because it emphasizesthe gulf between body (‘free’ US citizen) and flesh (slave). When Mona goesback in time she encounters a group of mute, chained slaves who serve bothas her historical unconscious and as the witnesses of her homo sacerization.As opposed to the slaves, Mona appears as a person, a full subject by law, abody, which renders this pornotroping more scandalous. When the slaves

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first hold out their hands to welcome Mona to the fold, she runs away in fearand the camera focuses on the slaves as a mass in long and medium shots. Inthe process of Mona’s branding, however, we see extreme close-ups of theirfaces and then the camera zooms in further on their eyes. Finally, after Monahas become Shola, the film uses a tilt shot from her point of view, visuallysignifying her membership in the group and the forced introjection of herstatus as flesh. Correspondingly, the slaves’ positioning as witness–spectatorsenacts Mona’s inability, as a late 20th-century US citizen, to bear witness toher own becoming-flesh. At this point, Mona’s body registers the woundingbut cannot give account of it on screen and sees the slaves only as naked life.However, once Mona’s subjection as Shola is completed, the point of viewshot allows her, and by extension the spectator, to testify to the presence ofthe slaves as more than bare life. Pornotroping operates as the conduit forMona’s transformation from human to subhuman, American to African,subject to slave; it translates the abolition of her body and its rebirth as fleshinto an ocular language.

In a later scene, Shola’s master strings her up naked and the local Catholicpriest exorcizes her, while the light-skinned overseer watches. The priestdouses Shola in holy water and, similar to the branding iron, thrusts a largecrucifix against her breasts so that the tools of subjection once again ruptureher flesh, this time in a (meta)physical sense. Where the earlier sequencerefused to disclose the iron searing Shola’s skin, here the camera deviates tothe corporeal mechanics of her enfleshment. Nevertheless, the film cuts toan image of a full moon when Shola is whipped so that we hear herheartrending shrieks, but we are not granted visual access to the cruelty,dramatizing the scopic deviation from violence towards sexuality that makespornotroping such a powerful (American) grammar book.

Far from gratuitous, these two sequences are indispensable to both the logicof pornotroping and Gerima’s film: the first converts Mona into Shola as partof a group of slaves; the second, in an individuating gesture, shows Mona tohave been fully engulfed by Shola. The abjection, brutalization and sex-ualization in slavery redeem Mona, unleashing her ideal alter ego, Shola,which she incorporates into her newer and better self at the close of the filmwhen she reemerges stark naked from the dark dungeon into the brightdaylight of Elmina Castle. Now Mona’s renaissance is complete. Even if oneessential aspect of pornotroping (violence) has gone missing, Mona’s nudity,which in Sankofa has until this point always been coupled with brutalization,reminds viewers that a potential for pornotroping refuses to dissipate.Overall, Gerima’s film relies heavily on the fallen flesh/redeemed spirittypology, which is enacted in Mona’s transformation from an inauthenticwestern black subject into a noble slave who transcends her materialconditions: her transubstantiation from subhuman to hyperhuman.

Here, Mona surfaces as a new-fangled Christ-like figure; just as Christsuffered and died for our sins, Gerima uses Mona/Shola’s flesh as a conduitfor her salvation.10 Similarly, the Muselmann – the central figure ofRemnants, which represents for Agamben (1999b) the most drastic

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embodiment of the homo sacer – becomes inhuman only insofar as she or hecan be redeemed by testifying to the impossibility of witnessing and as amodel for a novel post-Holocaust ethics.11 And, despite Agamben’s hesitancyin using the term Holocaust because of its Biblical origin, which figuresChrist’s sacrifice as the apex of this term and inaugurates Christian anti-Semitism, the Muselmann’s abjection and salvation strongly echoes the fallenflesh/redeemed spirit typology (pp. 28–31). Nevertheless, as Mona/Shola’srepeated eroticization when under the duress of physical torture makes clear,the film cannot contain the deviance of the pornotrope. As hard as the filmtries to idealize Mona/Shola, her body and its attendant pornotroping willnot be moved; it remains a nagging presence that suffuses Sankofa’s narrativeand visual grammar in toto, which, in turn, sets in motion the bare life thatslumbers in the permanent state of exception, underscoring the libidinalcharge that accrues to the slave.

Although the deviance from violence towards sexuality passes into actualitymore frequently in the context of slavery than other forms of sovereigncoercion, the idea of pornotroping must also be understood as conceptuallyigniting the im/potential libidinal currents that slumber in all acts of politicaldomination; why else does sadomasochism shadow Agamben’s Homo Sacer(1998) and Remnants of Auschwitz (1999b)? However, rather than concep-tualizing sadomasochism’s bond with modern sovereignty as pornotroping –the catachrestic figuration of the sphere where political brutality bleeds intosexuality – Agamben’s theory of biopolitics wields deviance, if only obliquely,as a way of locating both ‘abnormal sexuality’ and fascism elsewhere. In abrief passage in Homo Sacer, Agamben (1998) notes the fundamental co-dependency of sadomasochism and bare life: ‘the growing importance ofsadomasochism in modernity has its root in the exchange [between thesovereign and the homo sacer]. Sadomasochism is precisely the technique ofsexuality by which the bare life of a sexual partner is brought to light’(p. 134). Agamben’s version of sadomasochism differs from pornotropingsince in pornotroping the political acts as the primary technology – at leastnominally – producing a sexual remainder that feeds back into the powerdynamic. Sadomasochism is political for Agamben only insofar as it reflectssovereignty, but the political itself seems resistant to the touch of sado-masochism and sexuality in general, which is precisely what pornotropingoffers as a heuristic model: the contamination of the political.

Remnants contains a fuller argument about the vicissitudes of(sado)masochism than Homo Sacer. In fact, Agamben (1999b) tenders atheory of the subject that arises out of the discussion of (sado)masochismand shame (pp. 107–9). According to Agamben, in sadomasochism‘discipline and apprenticeship, teacher and pupil, master and slave becomewholly indistinguishable. The indistinction of discipline and enjoyment, inwhich the two subjects momentarily coincide, is precisely shame’ (pp.108–9). Yet Agamben does not quite explain how the commingling ofdiscipline and pleasure results in shame, and not simply pleasure.Furthermore, this discussion of masochism as shame is not linked to theMuselmann. The Muselmann and masochism appear as relational only via

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their spatial proximity within the confines of Agamben’s book, but no reasonfor this juxtaposition is tendered. Since Agamben does not connect hisanalysis of masochism to the Muselmann, the reader is left wondering whythey share the same textual space, especially since putatively abnormalsexuality appears in quite a few analyses of fascism.

Far from being diametrically opposed, erotics and fascism have alwayscontaminated each other and pathologically deviant sexuality has frequentlybeen summoned either to explain the appeal fascism has on its followers orthe violent excesses of fascist politicians – the work of Wilhelm Reich, HerbertMarcuse, Klaus Theweleit, and Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Fascinating Fascism’(1980) are perhaps the most prominent examples. In many of these writings,recourse to sexuality in the vortex of fascism serves primarily to prop up thedifference between the normal order and the state of exception. Agambenkeeps pornotroping at bay by either not explicitly thinking sadomasochismtogether with the status of the Muselmann (completely outside politics), orhe configures it as a biomimetic introjection of sovereignty (utterly engulfedand corrupted by politics). Instead of pornotroping, Agamben’s resorts tosovereignty and shame, two categories that are very much located on ‘thecontinent of man,’ in Walter Benjamin’s phrasing (Benjamin, 1999[1934]:802). Slavery and its afterlives do not allow for such an easy disentangling ofpolitical domination and sexuality. While deviant sexuality is summoned asan accompanying feature of moral depravity or a ‘reason’ for fascism, it doesnot appear as a motivating factor for racial slavery, precisely becausepornotroping is such an integral component of the intimacies at the verycenter of the history that hurts, which, in the process, disenables the locatingof both deviant sexuality and slavery beyond the reach of liberal democracy.

Potential/Freedom

In closing, I would like to take up Spillers’ (2003b[1987]) challenge and askwhat it might mean to claim this ‘monstrosity’ (p. 229). Given the systematicuse of torture as a political tool of ‘democratic’ governments – now legalizedin the united states of exception – and the simultaneous sexualization of itsmedial images in our contemporary moment, how might we go aboutviewing and thinking these depictions not as deviations from the normalorder, since that would only affirm the putative externality of pornotropingfrom the center stage of culture and politics? What the pornotropecontributes to the theorization of modern sociopolitical subjectivity is itsfreeing and setting in motion the deviances that lay dormant in bare life andsocial death, whether these are found in current practices of torture in USdomestic and foreign prisons, or in the hauntological histories of theHolocaust, slavery, and colonialism, deviances that repudiate by their verypornotropic existence the equation of domination and violence with thecomplete absence of subjectivity, sexuality, life, enjoyment, etc. Perhaps it isbecause democracy abandons the libidinal silhouette of political violencethat it inevitably returns in the form of deviance. A potential for pornotroping

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is thus far from abnormal given that it shadows so many aspects of modernpolitics and culture. In other words, pornotroping as a way ofconceptualizing politics diverges from the discourses and institutions thatyoke sexuality to political violence in the modus of deviance. Instead,pornotroping traces the detours, digressions, and short cuts that authorizeviolence as a vital layer in the attires of modern sovereignty.

For Agamben (1999a), potentiality and freedom are intimately related:

the root of freedom is to be found in the abyss of potentiality. To be freeis not to simply have the power to do this or that thing, nor is it simplythe power to refuse to do this or that thing. To be free is . . . to becapable of one’s own impotentiality, to be in relation to one’s ownprivation. (pp. 182–3, emphasis in original)

If subjection in slavery provides freedom’s antithesis (and ‘I’d prefer not to’is simply not an option), how do privation, impotentiality, non-Being, lack,and darkness – Agamben uses all these terms to describe the ‘abyss ofpotentiality’ – encounter and rest in the unfree? Although the Heideggerianundertones of this passage should not go unnoticed, Agamben’s discussionof potentiality arises from an engagement with Aristotle’s De Anima, wherepaschein (suffering or undergoing)12 appears as the example that groundsthe movement between potentiality and actuality (p. 184). Freedom stands atthe juncture of the slave’s privation and potentiality: she or he has thepotential to be free, although not the actual freedom to undergo and suffer(paschein) liberty.

Agamben continues, ‘there is truly potentiality only where the potentiality tonot-be does not lag behind actuality but passes fully into it . . . What is trulypotential is thus what has exhausted all its impotentiality in bringing itwholly into the act as such’ (p. 183). Impotentiality, once actualized, kindlesthe originary potentiality that rests in the slave thing, which is nothing otherthan ‘a potential for pornotroping’. Alternatively, the enslaved subject’sim/potentiality rests in the mélange of deprivation (the damaging lack ofmaterial benefits considered to be basic necessities in a society) anddepravation (to make someone immoral or wicked),13 or, rather, in thedeviations that muddle these categories via Spillers’ brilliant conjoining ofporno and trope. The enslaved subject is deprived of freedom, whilst alsobeing depraved by ‘a potential for pornotroping’. This, in turn, justifies theslave’s privation. In racial slavery’s aftermath, freedom performs the role ofimpotentiality/non-Being that has passed into actuality only nominally;pornotroping, having used up all its sovereign autonomy, however, remainsa potent potential that lingers affixed to the black body, even subsequent to‘emancipation’, disenabling the actualization of a different sort of freedom,and therefore liberty’s true potentiality.14

To imagine pornotropic cinema and literature as forceful technologies ofhumanity entails leaving behind Agamben’s world and some of its attendanthumanist pieties. Sylvia Wynter (2003) writes:

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The struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoingimperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e.Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which over-represents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing thewell-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy ofthe human species itself/ourselves. (p. 260)

Technologies of humanity represent the weapons in the guerilla warfare to‘secure the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species’,since these liberate forms of life, thought, and politics from the tradition ofthe oppressed, and, as a result, disfigure the centrality of Man as the sign forthe human. As opposed to depositing pornotroping outside politics, thenormal, the human, etc., we need a better understanding of its variedworkings in order to disrobe the cloak of Man, which gives the human a longoverdue extreme makeover. Heard and seen beyond the world of Man,however, the potential for pornotroping unearths the demonic freedom ofthose subjected to it. As a technology of humanity, (cinematic) pornotropinganimates the politically abject thing and emancipates the true potentialitythat rests in those subjects who live behind the veil of the permanent state ofexception: freedom, a mode of freedom that sways to the futurity of a newsyncopated origin for the human beyond the world and continent of Man.This is part of the lesson of the world.

Notes

1. Page duBois maps a terrain in which the extraction of truth from the pained

slave body via torture in Ancient Greece both initiates and haunts the very idea

of truth as Alethiea/unconcealment (Entbergung) in Western philosophy from

Plato to Heidegger. (duBois, 1991: 127–40).

2. Demonic ground is Sylvia Wynter’s (1990) term for perspectives that move

outside the precincts of the current governing configurations of the human as

Man in order to abolish this figuration and create novel forms of life at the

intersection of biology and culture. In her elaboration of Wynter, Katherine

McKittrick (2006) draws attention to the twofold signification of the demonic as

being at home in the supernatural (spirits, the devil, etc.) and natural sciences,

where it designates ‘a working system that cannot have a determined, or

knowable outcome’ (p. xxiv). This interstitial constellation of the scientific and

supernatural should be understood neither as a land claim concerned with its

particular borders, nor a universal terra nullius, but instead as a ceaselessly

shifting ground that voyages in and out of the human.

3. Daniel Heller-Roazen translates Agamben’s la nuda vita as ‘bare life’, while

Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino use ‘naked life’. In his essay ‘Critique of

Violence,’ from which Agamben takes this phrase, Walter Benjamin terms this

compound bloßes Leben, which has been rendered as ‘mere life’ by Edmund

Jephcott in the English language edition of Benjamin’s selected works. In this

essay, I will use mere, bare, and naked life to mark both the palimpsestic

structure of this phrase in its various translationary afterlives and, at times, to

highlight particular aspects, such as nakedness, of the homo sacer figure.

4. For Benjamin (1996[1921]), ‘mere life’ is not produced by the law, but marks

the precise moment in which ‘the rule of law over the living ceases’ (p. 250).

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5. The Holocaust provides such an apt formation for Agamben’s theorization of

modern politics precisely because the Third Reich as a whole operated in a

legal state of exception after the suspension of regular German law in 1933.

6. Here I’m thinking of the reports of murder and sexual assault in the New

Orleans Superdome in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. We should also recall

the many ways in which lynching and sexualization were imbricated.

7. See Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom, Lina Wertmüller’s

Seven Beauties, Tinto Brass’s Salon Kitty, Liliana Cavani’s Nightporter and

Luchino Visconti’s The Damned.

8. Karen Halttunen (1995) has shown that the rise of Anglo-American

humanitarianism at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries

trafficked significantly in the ‘pornography of pain’ and that pain became an

integral part of pornography in this period.

9. The song was performed by Mahalia Jackson at Martin Luther King’s funeral

and by Aretha Franklin at Lyndon B. Johnson’s funeral. The version used in the

film was one of Franklin’s first releases and recorded live in her father’s Detroit

church in 1956. Here, the difference between the version used in Sankofa and

the later, much better known one found on Franklin’s 1972 album, Amazing

Grace, after she had become a pop star and was returning to her gospel roots,

is significant. Franklin’s voice is far less dramatic and the production much

more polished on the later recording, amplifying how Gerima uses the 1956

version to signal an untainted authenticity and soul. In this way, Mona reverses

Franklin’s journey from authenticity to commodification.

10. The link between martyrology and the tortured black body, especially in the

19th-century abolitionist context, has been explored by others (Wood, 2000:

215–91). For Sylvia Wynter (2003), Judeo-Christianity’s fallen flesh/redeemed

spirit dyad inaugurates the production of western Man’s non-human others,

which in later periods gets transubstantiated to the domains of biology and

economics:

the master code of symbolic life (‘the name of what is good’) and death (‘the

name of what is evil’) would now become that of reason/sensuality,

rationality/irrationality in the reoccupied place of the matrixcode of

Redeemed Spirit/Fallen Flesh. (p. 287)

11. The Muselmänner – in German a derogatory term for Muslim men, though it

was also applied to women – were Nazi concentration camp detainees who

were ravaged by malnutrition and figured as the living dead and rejected by

both the guards and other inmates. Generally, the slur is Muselmane or

Muselman and not Muselmann, which is a term now specific to the death camps.

12. Paschein is also frequently translated as ‘acted upon’ and is distinguished from

poiein (to act).

13. Both definitions are taken from The Oxford American Dictionary.

14. Saidiya Hartman shows that the recognition of black humanity before and

subsequent to emancipation was used to subjugate black subjects in much

more insidious and elaborate ways than slavery (Hartman, 1997: 5–10). Besides

Hartman, my thinking here and in what follows is also in dialogue with Moten’s

notion of a ‘freedom drive’ and Robin Kelley’s account of the ‘freedom dreams’

in and of the black radical tradition (Moten, 2003: 7, 70–1; Kelley, 2002).

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Alexander G. Weheliye is Associate Professor of African American Studiesand English at Northwestern University. He is the author of Phonographies:Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Duke University Press, 2005). Currently,he is working on two projects. The first, Technologies of Humanity concernsthe vexed category of the human in modernity as it pertains to Afro-Diasporicculture. The second, Modernity Hesitant: The Civilizational Diagnostics ofW.E.B. Du Bois and Walter Benjamin, tracks the different ways in which thesethinkers imagine the ‘marginal’ as central to the workings of moderncivilization.

Address: University Hall 215, Department of English, 1897 Sheridan Road,Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208-2240, USA. [email: a-weheliye@northwestern.edu]

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