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| author |
Desmond Coleman
| | title |
Alchemy and Blackness
| | abstract |
For the past few decades, scholars across several disciplines have been recovering the centrality of alchemy for various aspects of Western civilization. These investigations range from accounts of alchemy's pertinence for the history of science and technology, to the direct contribution of alchemists and alchemy to various economic and political formations of European Modernity. Some of this scholarship has investigated the entanglements of the philosophical, techno-scientific, religio-theological, and political-economic aspects of alchemy. I attempt such an investigation in this dissertation. Chapter one, "Get Out: A Cinematic Archaeology," is a film-philosophical interpretation of Jordan Peele's 2017 comedy-horror film Get Out. I argue, by staging a conversation between Gilles Deleuze, Immanuel Kant, Giorgio Agamben, and Toni Morrison, that the film and its central affect-image of the Sunken Place perform a "cinematic archaeology" whereby they conjure the historical and theoretical connections between alchemy and racial blackness that I trace throughout the project. In chapter two, "The Black Hypostatic Body," I apply this cinematic archaeology to excavate the relevance of a sixth century Byzantine alchemical text, Pseudo-Olympiodorus' (Ps. O) On the Divine and Sacred Art, for conceptualizing the pertinence of the history and theory of alchemy for a critical philosophy of race blackness. I focus specifically on Ps. O's concepts of the "hypostatic body" (soma hypostatikon), a "superfluous" body that substands and gives subsistence to (hypostasis) the extraction of "surplus," and "blackening-sinking" (melanosis-kataspao), with the latter being the way the black hypostatic body is produced. Ps. O understands the black hypostatic body and blackening-sinking to be cosmological concepts regarding the first principle and/or origin (arche) of nature, art, and economy. Using a historical-materialist and semiotic method, I argue that these philosophical ideas are ideological, that they reflect political-economic and social realities emergent within the complex historicity of the Byzantine Empire in Late Antiquity, namely, captured energy/work-capacity, surveillance, bound labor, debt, and money. I also take Ps. O's concept of the black and sunken hypostatic body to be useful for theorizing about the archai or first principles of extractive hierarchy, statecraft, and empire. Consequent upon this assumption, in chapter four, "Black Skin, Black Masks," I use the alchemical paradigms of the black hypostatic body and melanosis to present a concise history of the sociogenic intertwining of biopolitical melanosis with biochemical melanogenesis, with the chemical production of eumelanin in "black African" skin. Central to this history is a qualification of Frantz Fanon's notion of a racial-epidermal body schema, presented in Black Skin, White Masks, as racial-epidermal melanosis, and of Karen and Barbara Field's notion of "racecraft" as a "social alchemy." In chapter three, "Hegel's Alchemical Idealism," I give critical evaluation to the work of the work this social alchemy does in German idealism G. W. F Hegel metaphysics, political philosophy, and philosophy of history. Central to this evaluation is Hegel's repeated use of Sunkeness and the alchemical phrase caput mortuum (dead head) to characterize nature, the slave and the rabble, and the "black" African. I conclude with a discussion of Frantz Fanon's rhetorical equivocation between revolution and reparation, arguing that getting out of blackening in its racial-epidermal permutation will require a process of revolutionary reparation.
| | school |
The Theological School, Drew University
| | degree |
Ph.D. (2022)
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| advisor |
Catherine Keller
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| committee |
Hyo-Dong Lee
J. Kameron Carter
Gil Anidjar
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| full text | DColeman.pdf - requires Drew uLogin |
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