Notes on Julius Eastman & Glenn Ligon: Evil Nigger

The ‘culture’ of Black culture is negation; the apotheosis of Culture renders its own nadir: blackness “to the fullest extent.” Eastman’s articulation of the parcelled personae of the nigger is the negation of, not Whiteness, but of the Human. The repetitious, basal unit of (non)Being—that repeating unit (doubled, tripled, quadrupled over itself)—is the function and the aesthetic of blackness. Blackness repeats; “our” undone (non)Beingness collapses “us.” This repetition constructs an “us,” and yet, in its incessance—its droning dissembling power—repetition dissolves “us” into an amalgam of abjectionable things. 

Hortense Spillers’s “The Idea of Black Culture” explicates this imperative of Black culture. Subversion, negation, and critique are the technical, spirited methods of Black culture that must be continually sharpened and directed toward Culture writ large. As such, the agentic blacks of Black culture must iterate and reiterate their treason against Culture—particularly the culture(s) of White, patriarchal, capitalist, and neoliberal dominion. This is why I say that the “repetitious, basal unit of (non)Being…is the function and the aesthetic of blackness” because the ontological void of Blackness (re: Calvin Warren) can only assert its existence through the functional dissemblance of Being, of Culture. Therefore, in this voidedness, Blackness does not construct or constitute Beingness; instead, Blackness articulates a metaphysical non-Beingness and manifests a material disarticulation of Being. If Blackness cannot be and is always inimical to the coherence of Being, then for there to be a collective of Blackness, it must be an amalgam of discrete Blacknesses: a repetitious series of subversion, negation, and critique. It is through Eastman and Ligon’s engagement with this practice of repetition that I understand the communication cultures of Blackness.

Words like ‘reclamation’ and ‘empowerment’ have always troubled the waters of language when thinking about the violence of language. Words cannot be reclaimed and their violence cannot be empowering. Dominion is systemic. Death and suffering are embedded in the antiblack violence of ‘nigger.’ I haven’t the research nor impulse to uncover that which lies beneath ‘reclamation’ and ‘empowerment’ as it pertains to ‘nigger.’ What I do have is a recognition—an unfortunate reliance on empiricism—that ‘reclamation’ is actually a subversion of dominion: the antiblackness of nigger is the self-soothing pressure placed on a wound that causes a wincing which turns into a warm suffering. The black voice crying “nigger” is the procedural work to build callouses along the psychic flesh. Its ‘empowerment’ is actually the opposite levied against dominion: a disempowerment of White dominion. When the wounds open anew from the White voice crying “nigger,” their burrow into the flesh is more shallow and they heal quicker than before. The repetition of the nigger—of that impossibly-fast note that burrows into the back of your skull at the base of your neck—reminds of Eric Stanley’s paper on anti-black, anti-queer practice of ‘overkill.’ Murderous impulses duplicate, triplicate, and quadruplicate over themselves and become necessitated by queerness’s / blackness’s attempt at escaping from its position as “that-which-is-not.” The (black and queer) impulse and duty to dissemble is reactive and productive of the antithetical (White and capitalist) impulse to destroy.

Eastman and Ligon repeat themselves over and over. They reiterate the worlds of antiblack and antiqueer desire. Black sounds and noises mutate in the throat and burst forth from the lips. Ligon explores Eastman’s proclivity toward speaking while accentuating Morrison’s eschewing of transliteration of spoken word: “Sth” means nothing and is nothing. And its nothingness is exactly what travels across the ‘diaspora;’ it’s the sound “we” all know and yet I have heard teeth sucked at least four different ways across various diasporic nodes. Ligon explicates the blacks’ proclivity for undermining standardization and naturalization. Eastman explicates the blacks’ duty for undermining standardization and naturalization. The undermining produces something which terrifies “that-which-is” (the standard, the natural), and to endlessly multiply the manifestation of negation is the necessary and desirous impulse of the Nigger Faggot (Eastman, 1978).

“That-which-is-not”...This exhibition is all that is not—all that is not said, not known, not desired, not White, not Human. Evil Nigger is a tongue twister; it warps your lips and opens your jaw in such a way that nauseates: it enlivens exactly “what I permanently thrust aside in order to live” (Kristeva). It confronts me with that murderous desire. Object a can be equated to enslaved-flesh-cum-Black-flesh. Object a is the nigger. And the nigger (more gently, the Negro) is the only way “to be;” it is the only articulable “being” of “being black.” This is something that Eastman knows and Ligon quotes.

Julius Eastman & Glenn Ligon: Evil Nigger (January 24 – March 22, 2025) at 52 Walker