5       Damaged Materialities in Political Struggles and Aesthetic Innovations

The diagnosis of the violent severance between destroyed materialities and abstract political forms discussed in chapter 4 reveals a new task for feminist, antiracist political struggles and new stakes for aesthetic innovations. The task is to contest not only racist and gendered injustice but also the severance of symbolic political forms from bare life because such severance itself is the source of violence. In chapter 1 I showed that the suffragettes’ militant struggles for inclusion in citizenship and political rights redefine the politics of recognition as a revolt aiming to create a new organization of political life. In the context of our analysis of the biopolitics of sovereignty, it becomes clear, however, that at stake in such struggles is not only intersubjective freedom but also the transformation of the violent split between materiality, bodies, and political forms. In other words, women’s revolutionary struggles acquire a bodily and materialist turn that goes beyond both symbolic recognition and the materialist politics of redistribution because it addresses not only capitalist relations of production but also calls for a new model of reciprocal interaction between damaged materialities and abstract forms of life.¹ As we have seen, the absence of such interconnection and the expulsion of gendered and radicalized bodies from the polis are two sides of the same political operation.

Such severance between form and materiality is also opposed by experimental aesthetics. Thus I propose to read the materiality of aesthetic form, traditionally acknowledged by aesthetics, not merely as a source of enjoyment or apolitical formalism but as a necessary intervention into the violent abstraction of commodity form and citizenship. In contrast to conservative formalism, such as T. S. Eliot’s abstraction of mythical structure from the disorder of everyday life, the experimental literary works I analyze provide a new model of interconnection between damaged materials, violated bodies, and literary forms.

Let me begin with facts that tend to be all too easily taken for granted: at the turn of the twentieth century racialized and gendered subjectivities were still marginalized in Western democracies and, as such, associated with the occluded proximity to bare life. As Falguni A. Sheth argues, the political effectiveness of racism depends in large measure on the danger of being abandoned by the law.² And yet these marginalized subjectivities were also the “bearers” and creators of a very different legacy of modernity—the legacy of multiple liberation movements, from international suffrage struggles to labor protests and decolonization movements. By analyzing bare life as the target of sovereign violence, Agamben allows us to diagnose new forms of domination and political danger in modernity. Although any praxis of freedom is dependent on such a diagnosis, such praxis at the same time requires reflection on the often occluded role of bare life in another paradigm of democratic modernity—that of revolutionary traditions. The first section of this chapter looks at the two important examples of insurgency in which bare life itself is at stake: the hunger strike of British suffragettes at the beginning of the twentieth century and struggles against antiblack racism. Why bring together such diverse historical cases on the two sides of the Atlantic? As I have argued in the previous chapter, what these two cases reveal is, first of all, the paradoxical racial and gender differentiation of the violated bodies stripped of all meaning and their subjection to different kinds of violence. Second, despite their differences, the hunger strike and the struggle against anti-black violence reveal the sovereign power’s dependence on life deprived of its political status. It is precisely because of such dependence that bare life can be a contested terrain, that it can mobilized by political movements.

The Feminine Invention of the Hunger Strike

The British suffragettes’ use of the hunger strike in the struggle for women’s voting rights at the beginning of the twentieth century, one of the most dramatic turns of the suffrage movement, reveals new possibilities of the mobilization of bare life in the struggle for freedom. In fact, suffragettes’ hunger strike can be regarded as an invention of a new mode of political contestation that mobilizes bare life for emancipatory struggle. What is at stake in the hunger strike is the struggle to endow the female body—understood in the political imaginary as a remnant of bare life, subservient to the reproduction of the species and exposed to sexual violence—with new, embodied political forms of public speech and collective action. The hunger strike can become such an important method of political intervention for the subjugated groups of the twentieth century and in our own times because life itself has become the object of political violence and disciplinary regulations. Yet suffragettes’ hunger strike shows that mere life, although always already the object and aftereffect of biopower, can nonetheless be usurped as a weapon by oppositional groups. In a crucial supplement to Agamben’s theory, the suffragettes’ hunger strike not only reveals the hidden gendering of the split between bare life and abstract human rights but also shows how this severance can enable revolutionary transformation. By willing to destroy their bodies for political freedom, hunger striking suffragettes put bare life at the center of the struggle for human rights. In so doing, they not only refuse the status of bare life deprived of a political bios but turn it into a weapon against the sovereign power of the state. And yet, if bare life can be used in the struggle for political freedom, this means that such struggle invents a new reciprocal interaction between bodies and citizenship.

In the British militant suffrage struggle for the vote, the deployment of the hunger strike, followed by governmental retaliation through forcible feedings, is one of the most paradoxical and dramatic episodes. According to Jane Marcus, the hunger strike and the reprisals of forcible feedings are “perhaps the primary image in the public imagination regarding the ‘meaning’ of the suffrage movement.”³ What does this “primary” political scene tell us about the white feminine body, its function in oppositional democratic movements, and the “biopolitical” paradigm of sovereignty?⁴ In what sense can the weapon of self-starvation be mobilized by women as a rebellious response to the government’s punishment of women for their public demand for the constitutional rights of which they were deprived despite the long history of suffrage agitation? The performative and political effects of the hunger strike expose the modern relations between bare life, revolt, human rights, and the violence of sovereignty. As Kyria Landzelius puts it, the hunger strike is a “corporeal challenge” to “the discursive practices of power,”⁵ a bodily intervention in the complex network of relations between politics, power, discourse, and the ritual of self-sacrifice.

Although one of the most dramatic episodes in the struggle for women’s suffrage, hunger striking and the political reprisals of forcible feeding are, like the hunger strike in general, still undertheorized means of democratic protest. In his monumental study of nonviolent political action, Sharp classifies the hunger strike as a means of political intervention that demands a transformation of power relations and a redress for injustice. Although, as Kyria Landzelius argues, the historical origin of the hunger strike is unclear, the hunger strike was practiced in ancient Rome, medieval Ireland, and India as a means of protest, usually to force the debtor to return his debt or to exert moral pressure.⁶ After the Easter Rising of 1916 in Ireland, the hunger strike tactic was adopted by the Irish struggle for independence in 1917⁷ and, most famously, by Mohandas Gandhi, who fasted at least fourteen times in British occupied India.⁸ Nonetheless, it was British militant suffragettes who in 1909 revived and redefined the hunger strike as the modern political weapon of an organized social movement by linking it for the first time with the discourse of human rights. The political practice of hunger striking in the suffrage agitation was initiated in 1909 by suffrage artist Marion Wallace Dunlop, who was arrested and sentenced to one month’s imprisonment for having written on the wall of Parliament an extract from the Bill of Rights guaranteeing the right of petition to all British subjects.⁹ Suffragettes appealed to and tested the modern usage of this right when they organized deputations to the prime minister, the representative of the king, who refused to receive them. While in prison, Dunlop began hunger striking to protest her having been denied the status of “political offender.” After ninety-one hours of fasting, she was released from prison because prison officials, ignorant about the effects of a hunger strike, were afraid to create a martyr for the suffrage cause. When other prisoners were also released before the expiration of their sentences, the hunger strike was adopted by the suffrage movement as an effective political weapon both to terminate prison sentences and to create new possibilities of revolt within the disciplinary apparatus of the prison. In response to this unprecedented act of protest, after King Edward VII’s personal intervention in August 1909, the home secretary, Herbert Gladstone, ordered forcible feedings of the hunger striking suffragettes—a brutal punitive retaliation that, up to this point, had been practiced primarily in insane asylums.¹⁰

How can we understand this configuration of the hunger strike as a weapon of resistance and the sadistic brutality of forcible feedings, which have often been compared to rape? Why, in the struggle for the vote, which classical liberal theory defines as an abstract contractual possession, did women’s bodies have to undergo such violence in order to challenge the law? We may say that the hunger strike is a continuation of revolutionary struggle by the summoning of the starving body in place of banned political speech and action. Consequently, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the starved bodies of the hunger striking suffragettes subjected to the state machinery of “forcible feeding” staged a new political conflict in which bare life was both the target of sovereign violence and a weapon in the struggle for political rights. Suffragettes reverted to the hunger strike not merely to reduce their prison sentences but to reverse the position of femininity in relation to the political: they risked the destruction or injury of the body for the sake of political freedom, speech, and action.

Consider, for example, the letter of another leading militant suffragette, Lady Constance Lytton, written to the Times on her own behalf and that of eleven other hunger striking suffragettes on October 10, 1909. As this letter suggests, the hunger strike is both a protest and a demand for new freedoms, an appeal articulated through the double medium of the publicly circulating press and the starving body secluded in prison and barred from public appearance. Lytton claims that subjugated groups resort to violence against their bodies when rational arguments based on law fail—that is, when instituted political speech is deprived of its performative power: “We want to make it known that we shall carry on our protest in our prison cells. We shall put before the Government by means of the hunger-strike four alternatives: to release us in a few days; to inflict violence on our bodies; to add death to the champions of our cause by leaving us to starve; or, and this is the best and only wise alternative, to give women the vote. We appeal to the Government to yield, not to the violence of our protest, but to the reasonableness of our demand.”¹¹ Lytton’s emphasis on the “violence” of the hunger strike seems paradoxical: such violence, inflicted on the self as a substitute target for political power, acts by refusing to act; it collapses clear distinctions between passivity and activity, victim and enemy. On the one hand, the hunger strike repeats, mimics, and exposes in public the hidden irrational violence of the sovereign state against women’s bodies. On the other hand, by usurping the state’s power over bare life, self-starvation calls for the transformation of citizenship.

The liberal government’s response to the “four alternatives” posed by the suffragettes was the physical and moral torture of forcible feeding—a failed attempt to degrade femininity to a life stripped of all political meaning and reduced merely to physical survival. In the context of Agamben’s definition of bare life as the referent of sovereign decision and violence, the torture of forcible feeding is also paradoxical. What Agamben’s theory allows us to clarify is that the violence of forcible feedings does not represent a juridical punishment but rather a case of the sovereign decision to restore the normal situation of the law’s operation. Although all the trappings and the representation of forcible feedings as a “medical treatment” administered by the prison doctor were meant to mask this sovereign violence by relegating it to medical science, the medicalization of torture most clearly reveals the biopolitical character of sovereignty. However, forcible feedings compel us again to expand and supplement Agamben’s notion of sovereign violence. First of all, this case reveals not only a negative gendered and class differentiation of bare life but also the sexualized character of sadistic violence to which it is exposed. The objective of forcible feeding is neither murderous violence nor the production of social death but a camouflaged sexualized violence of bodily penetration that reenacts rape. Forcible feedings reveal, therefore, not only the fact that the rational authority of the law is haunted by archaic sovereign violence but also that this violence manifests itself in different ways in relation to gender and racial differences: as the power to kill without committing homicide or the power to inflict torture and rape with impunity. The double character of sovereign violence has been obfuscated in modern democracies by women’s unequal access to the political, so that rape appears as a private act of violence, still difficult to prove as a crime, rather than as a remnant of sovereign biopower. At the beginning of the twentieth century women were not only excluded from the rights and aporias of citizenship but were subjected to a different form of sovereign violence—to the seemingly “apolitical” violence of rape masquerading as “medical” treatment. Second, as the “reactive” attempt to reestablish the normal frame of reference of the law disturbed by the suffragettes’ hunger strike, forcible feedings reveal the government’s struggle to regain power over bare life. Yet, if the torture of forcible feedings is an attempt to recapture bare life as the referent of sovereign power, this means that sovereign power over bare life is tenuous and open to contestation. The consequence of this state of affairs is that in modernity mere life is the contested object of diverse political struggles and thus can no longer be taken for granted as the exclusive referent of sovereignty.

Although not analyzed by Agamben, the emphasis on the collective political struggles over resignification of bare life is an important element in Lady Constance Lytton’s January 31, 1910 speech, which, as Jorgensen-Earp suggests, offers the first “political theory” of the hunger strike.¹² Lytton defines the hunger strike as a weapon providing an alternative to physically violent struggle against the political enemy:

People say, what does this hunger-strike mean? Surely it is all folly. If it is not hysteria, at least it is unreasonable. They will not realize that we are like an army, that we are deputed to fight for a cause, … and in any struggle or any fight, weapons must be used. The weapons for which we ask are simple, a fair hearing, but that is refused us…. Then we must have other weapons. What do other people choose when they are driven to the last extremity? … They have recourse to violence … These women have chosen the weapon of self-hurt to make their protest, and this hunger-strike brings great pressure upon the Government [but] … does not physically injure their enemies.¹³

In response to antisuffrage propaganda, Lytton argues that hunger strikes are not unreasonable attacks of hysteria but a political strategy of the last resort by an “army” of the dispossessed. As acts of “warfare” by the paradoxical means of self-injury, hunger strikes allow suffragettes to continue revolutionary struggle without a direct engagement in war. Furthermore, by extending possibilities of militancy from the street and the public sphere to prison itself, the hunger strike reverses imprisonment into new means of “fighting for a cause,” transforms punishment into rebellion, and turns subjection into the ambiguous political agency of “self-hurt.” It puts physical health and biological life at risk in order to regain political life and to terminate women’s exclusion from citizenship.

The most suggestive way Lytton’s speech evokes the notion of bare life as a new weapon of oppositional movements is through the figurative juxtaposition of feminine, animal, and divine bodies. Her speech begins with an analogy between the degraded female body, deprived of rights, and a deformed animal body, humiliated and abused on its way to the slaughterhouse, and ends with the contrast between the tortured and despised body of imprisoned suffragettes, condemned by the prison priest, and Christ’s sacrificed body. Unlike the sacrificial lamb with which Christ is frequently compared, the deformed sheep, a powerless “creature” mistreated by the crowd, is the very opposite of either a human or a divine sacrifice. Designating the passage between the animal and the human, “the old and misshapen” sheep is the figure of damaged life, deprived of political or religious significance, a life whose biological survival is at risk.¹⁴ When, in a sudden insight, Lytton discovers this hidden relation between white aristocratic femininity, sheltered by class privilege, and deformed, abused animal life, she decides to join the suffrage militant movement—a decision that transformed her life and gave it a political and collective meaning. We can glimpse the depth of this transformation from the contrast between the frightened isolated animal, powerless to protest its abuse, and the “army” of women forming a revolutionary collective movement in order to fight for access to the political.

Suffragettes’ usurping of the sovereign decision over mere life in the struggle for political rights suspends the unjust law, at least on the symbolic level. Yet this act does not constitute a state of exception, which, through an act of exclusion, establishes the normal frame of reference or, as in the case of fascism and totalitarian regimes, turns exception into a new norm. Rather, suffrage militancy represents a revolutionary call for a new law yet to come. As Landzelius argues, the hunger strike stages a political trial of the existing law and political authority. In this “metajuridical” trial, the private act of starvation reverses the guilty verdict imposed on the militant suffragettes into a public condemnation of the government. Thus the starving female bodies “pervert” juridical punishment into a means of interrogation of the law itself and a contestation of government’s authority. By reversing the roles of the defendants and the accusers, the drama of the hunger strike publicly condemns the government, delegitimates the authority of the existing law, and calls for its transformation. In opposition to sovereign violence, hunger-striking suffragettes “seize hold” of their bare life, wrestle it away from the hold of sovereign violence, and transform it into an inseparable component of embodied political forms of citizenship. Thus suffragettes’ public redefinition of the female body, so that it no longer bears the repressed signification of bare life and acquires instead a political form, not only challenges the sovereign decision over bare life, but calls for a new interrelation between life and form outside the parameters of that decision. In contrast to the absence of the relationship between abstract rights and bare life in democratic citizenship, the hunger strike performs a double interaction between bare life and the law: on the one hand, it transforms the private act of bodily starvation into a condemnation of the existing law; on the other hand, it summons and legitimates the as yet nonexistent authority of law by risking the physical life of the body. In a catachrestic movement, the struggle over bare life anticipates what is unpredictable and beyond anticipation: a new embodied law and a future resignification of female bodies. In so doing, the hunger strike reveals modes of inseparability between life and political form outside the purview of sovereign decision.

White “Parasitism,” “the Scream” of Commodities, and the Black Struggle for Freedom

Let us now move to the other side of the Atlantic and consider a much earlier paradigm of the mobilization of bare life in liberation movements, namely, black struggles for freedom. In contrast to the self-inflicted bodily violence of the hunger strike as a means of protest against the law, black subjectivities were brutalized by sovereign power, and such violation was authorized by law. This contrast between self-inflicted bodily hurt and the brutal violation of bodies, as well as the legacy of different forms of struggles, is one of the pivotal racial differences between white and black femininities. Nonetheless, despite the very different positions and valorizations of black and white bodies, both the hunger strike and the struggle against antiblack racism show that bare life, deprived of its political status and meaning, can be the object of political contestation.

What black feminists and theorists of slavery like Hortense Spillers, Alexander Weheliye, and Orlando Patterson show is the obfuscated and disavowed dependence of sovereign power on black bodies. Such dependence provides a new ground for struggles against racism and the devastating effects of slavery. In a very significant move, Patterson stresses the reversal of the slaveholder’s absolute domination into its dependence on black bodies. In so doing, he rewrites the Hegelian master-slave dialectic—which explains such dependence in terms of the desire for recognition by the other—as “human parasitism” (SSD, 336). The consequences of adopting the biological “framework of parasitism” far exceed Patterson’s claim that it merely clarifies and amplifies the Hegelian discovery of the slaveholder’s dependence (SSD, 336). More than ten years before the publication of Homo Sacer, Patterson’s turn to social biology implicitly replaces both the philosophical and political analyses of power and recognition with a biopolitical paradigm. It is not only the last chapter, “Slavery as Human Parasitism,” that makes the biopolitical framework of Patterson’s study apparent; the implied biopolitics of slavery is equally at work in his discussions of social death and natality. How does “the parasitism of slavery” supplement both Agamben’s and Hegel’s philosophies? What it adds to Agamben’s theory of sovereignty is the parasitical and unstable dependence of power on bare life; the novelty it introduces to the Hegelian struggle for recognition is the “biopolitics” of the body—the “consumption” of bare life by the parasitical master (SSD, 46, 336). Indeed, as Patterson points out, social parasitism is meant to reveal the instability of the master’s dependence on his subjugated other: “The dominator, in the process of dominating and making another individual dependent, also makes himself (the dominator) dependent…. On this intersubjective level the slaveholder fed on the slave to gain the very direct satisfaction of power over another” (SSD, 336–337). As the other side of mastery, the parasitical dependence of power on bare life is precisely what escapes both Agamben’s biopolitical paradigm of sovereign will and Hegel’s paradigm of recognition. Like a reversed figure of the vampire sucking the blood of the living, the parasitical side of absolute power suggests that perhaps sovereignty is one of the most powerful political fantasies, masking power’s dependence on bare life, which, although socially “dead,” continues to threaten and provide sexual satisfaction.¹⁵

The parasitical dependence that Patterson detects in relations of absolute exploitation has another important consequence that is downplayed in Agamben’s theory of sovereignty: such dependence provides a new ground for the possibility of resistance and rebellion. Sometimes such resistance took the form of a direct rebellion and the practice of what Houston A. Baker Jr. calls “radical marronage” or the creation of independent communities among the fugitives;¹⁶ in other cases, even fleeting acts of resistance refused dehumanization and cultivated among subjugated people a desire for respect, community, and freedom. As Saidiya Hartman writes, such every day acts of resistance “encompassed an array of tactics such as work slowdowns, feigned illness, unlicensed travel, the destruction of property, theft, self-mutilation, dissimulation, physical confrontation with owners and overseers. … What unites these varied tactics is the effort to redress the condition of the enslaved, restore the disrupted affiliations of the socially dead, challenge the authority … of the slaveholder, and alleviate the pained state of the captive body.”¹⁷ The emphasis on resistance culminates in Patterson’s claim that the fundamental discovery of enslaved peoples is freedom, enshrined as one of the most cherished values of Western democracies: “The first men and women to struggle for freedom, the first to think of themselves as free … were freedmen. … Without slavery there would have been no freedmen” (SSD, 342). Freedom, for Patterson, emerges from the negation of social death and human parasitism as well as from the yearning for the creation of new forms of political life. Although Patterson is uneasy about making enslavement even a contingent condition of freedom, nonetheless his insistence on the ongoing struggle for liberation by dominated peoples points to another legacy of modernity that Agamben sidesteps in his analysis: the legacy of revolutionary and emancipatory movements.¹⁸

If, for Patterson, the possibility of freedom and liberation lies in the manipulation and contestation of the parasitical dependence of power on bare life, for Hortense Spillers resistance is more directly intertwined with the invention of a new, embodied grammar of race and gender. In her emphasis on crimes against the wounded flesh, Spillers also recognizes the biopolitics of power and its sadistic dependence on captive bodies. Building on Spillers’s analysis, Robyn Wiegman has demonstrated how identification with the masculine gender—which constitutes one form of the politics of symbolic recognition—has been for black male writers an important rhetorical strategy in the struggle for political enfranchisement and the subversion of white supremacy.¹⁹ In Spillers’s argument, however, such a symbolic politics of recognition of the existing gender formations, though essential, is insufficient. What she calls for is a formation of new embodied masculinities that would reclaim, rather than reject, proximity to the maternal body, a proximity negated by the normative kinship structure: “The African-American male has been touched … by the mother” in ways he cannot escape through paternal identification the way the white American male can (MBPM, 79–80). Rather than being a threat, or a mark of illegitimacy imposed by white supremacy, the black maternal touch is, on the contrary, a condition of resistance. According to Spillers, the African American masculinities must reclaim the “power” of “yes” to the “female” within (MBPM, 80). In response to Spillers’s analysis, Fred Moten argues that the resistance to enslavement, “being maternal … is indistinguishable from it being material.”²⁰

By contrast, since black femininity was historically associated with the maternal reproduction of illegitimacy (the memory of which still haunts racist American culture blaming the “destructive” power of black mothers for the economic and social injustices suffered by African Americans), reclaiming the female gender as a route of resistance has been more difficult: “This problematizing of gender places her, in my view, out of the traditional symbolics of female gender, and it is our task to make a place for this different social subject” (MBPM, 80). To create a new significance for black femininity and to reclaim their power of insurgency amounts, according to Spillers, to “claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to ‘name’), which her culture imposes in blindness” (MBPM, 80). This provocative reappropriation and redefinition of monstrosity as an alternative means of black women’s struggle for freedom implies a double strategy. First of all, the monstrous power to name, which racist ideology has associated with the power of the black mother, jams the reproduction of social illegitimacy and rewrites the function of the maternal body: rather than reproducing social nonvalue, it contests the white/paternal monopoly on value and the expulsion of wounded flesh from political life. Second, such monstrosity inscribes the hieroglyphics of flesh within the new symbolic language and, in so doing, contests the violent separation between empty symbolic forms and damaged bodies.

As Spillers argues, this double strategy of usurpation of symbolic power and inscription of the wounded flesh within language is intertwined with the radicalization of the negative, which “‘overreaches’ the given discursive conditions” rather than producing identifications with racial and gender norms.²¹ In the context of Adorno’s work, the monstrous radicalization of the negative implies a certain spiritualization of black bodies since the movement of spirit, understood in the dialectical tradition not only as conceptual work but also as the struggle for freedom, depends on the contestation of oppression. By repositioning black female bodies as the bearers of embodied freedom rather than social illegitimacy, such monstrous spiritualization of the “female with the potential to name” (MBPM, 80) does not repress materiality and non-identity but, on the contrary, reclaims what sovereign power and the commodified gender and racist systems of exchange disavow: sexual and racial differences, traumatized stolen flesh, and the damaged remnants of materiality. By negating these disavowals, monstrosity transforms the failure of specularization, associated by racism with social death and the proximity to the maternal body, into a vital source of resistance to the “total mortification” of bodies by the economic values of racist homosociality. Consequently, Spillers’s reappropriation of monstrosity also implies a different model of social relations. Through the negation of the autonomy of production and the abstraction of social values, such collectivity preserves the “hieroglyphics” of wounded flesh as a source of resistance and thus as a necessary moment of the materialization of the “spirit” of freedom.

If, following Spillers and Patterson, we can theorize possibilities of resistance within the biopolitics of power, Fred Moten, like Luce Irigaray, locates such possibilities by disarticulating the paradigm of commodification. For Moten, the impossible figure of such resistance is Marx’s “counterfactual” (inscribed only as “as if”), improper metaphor of the speaking commodity. By juxtaposing Marx with Frederick Douglass, Moten hears in the impossible speech of the commodity the scream of the violated body of Douglass’s Aunt Hester. Because Marx fails to see the relationship between the intercourse of commodities and the traffic in slaves, he “underestimate[s] the commodity’s powers, for instance, the power to speak and to break speech” (ITB, 17). This improper figure of speaking and breaking speech performs a passionate protest against subjugation; it constitutes a material disruption, or a “cut,” of the abstract commodity exchange. According to Moten, the black performance of freedom and free citizenship both inaugurates and repeats the performative transvaluation of values: It transforms “material degradations” and exclusions into a creation of new embodied values (ITB, 14). The passionate transvaluation of values is the effect of “the freedom drive that animates black performances” (ITB, 12). By contesting abstract exchange values, such a performance preserves both the trace of the maternal body and the trace of the materiality of the object in its passionate production: “We must be attuned,” Moten argues, “to the transmission of the very materiality that is being described while noting the relay between material phonography and material substitution” (ITB, 15). In contrast to essentialism, the element of materiality in the black performance of freedom is but a trace that marks loss as well as the materiality of inscription. Such material transmission of the commodity’s scream in the black performance of freedom is both a testament to the past and an anticipation of a more capacious freedom to come: It “takes place on the bridge of lost matter, lost maternity, lost mechanics that joins bondage and freedom” (ITB, 18).

The struggle for liberation from gendered and racist oppression implicitly or explicitly points to the often occluded role of bare life in the revolutionary traditions of modernity. Exceeding the logic of recognition, such a materialist reformulation of revolutionary struggles also goes beyond the materialist politics of redistribution (to use Nancy Fraser’s well-known formulation) because, in addition to contesting capitalist relations of production, it addresses damaged materialities stripped of their value. This inscription of damaged materialities in political praxis not only contests the violent severance of abstract political forms from their bodily remainder but also calls for a new interrelation between form and materiality outside the paradigms of commodification, citizenship, and sovereign violence. By stressing the inseparable interaction between form and materiality, such mediation does not reify racial and gender differences—on the contrary, it marks openness to what is yet to come: a possibility of political transformation, a creation of new, embodied forms of life, and an arrival of a more expansive conception of freedom and speech.

Materiality and Form in Aeasthetic Innovation

In the first half of this chapter I have argued that the contested role of bare life in political praxis calls for a new interaction between political forms and materiality. Now I want to explore the possibilities of such a transformative interconnection between aesthetic form, artistic materials, and bodies in the context of a feminist aesthetics. At first glance, aesthetics seems to be a more promising domain for these explorations than politics because sensible experience and the body are its central concerns. According to Adorno, for example, the inseparability of materiality and form can be more readily achieved in artistic production than in the degraded political practices available in late capitalism. Indeed, in contrast to the abstraction of political forms, the Western philosophical tradition of aesthetics emphasizes the embodied aspect of aesthetic experience and the sensibility of form as the basis of its self-definition. From the definition of aesthetics as sensible experience in Aristotle,²² the definition of art in Hegel as the work of the sensible spirit speaking through and to the senses,²³ to the partage of the sensible in Rancière,²⁴ the materiality of form and sensibility are fundamental parameters of Western philosophical aesthetics. The transformative role of sensibility and the body is also at stake in different articulations of feminist aesthetics. Despite ambivalence and the numerous critiques of the appropriation of female bodies in Western art, sensibility and the body have played an essential role in diverse feminist approaches to aesthetics, from Woolf’s materialist, erotic conception of poetry in A Room of One’s Own; Irigaray’s poesis of sexual difference; Kristeva’s conception of the sensible “revolutionary” poetic language and a feminine alphabet of sensibility;²⁵ the language of black female desire theorized by Tate and Henderson;²⁶ to the Deleuzian aesthetics of sensible intensities elaborated by Grosz.²⁷

Yet, feminist engagements with the sensible and the material aspects of aesthetics are also fraught with ambivalence and impasses. As Irigaray has already noted, the association of the feminine and sensibility in Western aesthetics and philosophy has been the invisible place of the exploitation of the feminine (TS, 76). In fact, the crisis of melancholia, explored in chapter 2, is one of the manifestations of such exploitation. In philosophical aesthetics the subordinate role of the feminine and racialized hierarchies in the structure of aesthetic categories marks the exclusion of marginalized subjectivities from the artistic tradition. This is especially the case with black femininity, which, despite the modernist fascination with primitivism and black sexuality, has been excluded even from models of feminine beauty. Thus, despite the promise of a central role of sensibility in philosophical aesthetics, the feminist project is confronted with gender and racial exclusions inscribed in the conceptual apparatus of aesthetics, including the opposition of matter and form.²⁸ Not surprisingly, historically, the first task of feminist criticism, to put it in Irigaray’s words, has been to make this invisible place of the exploitation of the feminine visible. However, once we move beyond the critique of aesthetic terminology to a feminist reformulation of relations between sensibility, matter, and form, we encounter a different aporia, namely, suspicions of essentialism.²⁹ Consider, for instance, Rita Felski’s argument that any connections between innovative form and embodiment/sexuality either tacitly rely on the gendered content of literature or on the essentialist evocation of feminine bodies.³⁰ Despite different orientations, feminist analyses of materiality and form still seem to be suspended between either a critique of the exclusions of the feminine from the history of aesthetics, on the one hand, or suspect references to sexuality and women’s bodies without “proper” political mediation, on the other.

One way to move beyond the impasses that mark these encounters between feminism and aesthetics is to recover and transvaluate the suppressed “feminine,” “racialized” possibilities of mutual interaction between matter and form that lie within the tradition of aesthetics in order to open up new possibilities beyond its boundaries. At stake in my approach is not only the negative critique of aesthetic categories but, more fundamentally, an interrogation of the seemingly apolitical aesthetic matter/form binary in the context of the political violence inflicted on women’s bodies and materiality. In other words, through interrogating the relationship between aesthetic form, political violence, and female embodiment, I argue that the form/materiality interrelationship is a crucial feminist concern in political and literary practices. In the concluding chapter of this study I will examine in greater detail the relation between the materiality of literary form and political violence by focusing on the work of Nella Larsen and the debates about art and politics in the Harlem Renaissance. The task of this chapter, however, is to elaborate a new feminist theoretical approach to the transformative interaction between aesthetic form, bodies, and materiality in the structure of the work of art. I begin this transvaluation of aesthetic values with the dialectical tradition of aesthetics, in particular, with the work of Adorno and Hegel. In what sense can a feminist engagement with Adorno’s and Hegel’s philosophies help us to articulate such a transformative aesthetic model of mediation between form, bodies, and materiality in women’s modern literature? What I find productive in this “body” of work is the emphasis on the historical and social role of aesthetic practice without disregarding the specificity of the artistic process itself. It thus answers, most emphatically, feminist worries about essentialism without subordinating aesthetics either to apolitical experience or to instrumental political ends.

The importance of Adorno for my project lies in the fact that, although he works within the dialectical tradition, he finds the Marxist replacement of the form/matter opposition by the aesthetic form/social content dialectic insufficient. As we have seen, according to Fredric Jameson, the Hegelian/Marxist notion of form is “sharply distinguished from that older idea of form which dominates philosophical thinking from Aristotle to Kant and for which the conjugate term is … matter, inert materials, filling, the passive.”³¹ To be sure, Adorno eloquently demonstrates the interaction and the contradiction between form and content, construction and expression, in the work of art: Aesthetic form is always already a sedimentation of an older political content, whereas new content seeks its articulation in experimental form. Yet the form/political content dialectic is only one side of Adorno’s aesthetic theory; another important task is to work out a dynamic exchange between form and matter so that we depart from the static opposition of passive receptive matter and active but abstract form. As we have seen, this opposition is a source of political exploitation. Indeed, as Irigaray’s and Butler’s readings of Plato and Aristotle suggest, the notion of passive, formless matter is one of the scenes of the exploitation of the feminine, providing ideological support for the fantasy of heterosexual intercourse and political violence in the Western philosophical imaginary.³² Consequently, Adorno’s question of how the process of artistic making can contest the sociopolitical domination of materiality, bodies, and nature is a critical issue for feminist aesthetics, even if Adorno disregards the gendering and racialization of aesthetic categories. To diagnose the contradictory manner in which gender and race are inscribed within the matter/form dialectic, I return to Hegel’s aesthetic theory, where such gendering and racialization are still visible. Thus this return to Hegel is a feminist transvaluation of values, a mobilization of the devalued possibilities of aesthetics associated with femininity and blackness against hegemonic trends of the Western dialectical tradition.

If there is one shortcoming of the dialectical tradition, it lies in the fact that even its emphasis on the practical, material, and historical aspects of artistic practice remains open to the charge of privileging truth over sensibility. It is precisely at this point that feminist theory provides intervention. Indeed, my critical engagements with Adorno and Hegel are framed by feminist concerns, especially by Hortense Spillers’s critical deployment of the “monstrous” black female body with the power to name (MBPM, 80) and Luce Irigaray’s notion of the “sensible transcendental” (a neologism invented to contest the opposition between immanence, associated with sensibility/matter, and transcendence, ascribed to productive form).³³ Although I approach bodies as always already regulated by discursive mechanisms, political decision, and economic exchange, the aesthetic paradigm of mediation that I propose preserves the remnants of nonsublatable materiality as a source of resistance and nonconceptual expressivity. Elaborated on the basis of aesthetic praxis, the interrelation between materialities and form not only testifies to the damage and domination inflicted on bodies, feminized matter, and nature but also contests the abstraction of the political/economic forms that are one of the sources of this damage.

Let us begin with the most important point in Adorno’s aesthetic theory for my project, namely, his emphasis on the revolt of modern experimental literature against the sociopolitical domination of materiality, body, and nature. Modern literature and art can expose what is erased by abstract commodity exchange and testify to the damaged remnants of materiality, which, as I have argued, include feminized and racialized bare life. For example, Larsen’s novel Passing opens with a detailed description of the outer appearance of the seductive and dangerous letter of black experimental writing, which stresses its materiality, foreignness, and illegibility—“its almost illegible scrawl” (P, 143). Nonetheless, modern literature’s protest against the social destruction of materiality is ambiguous: on the one hand, literary experimentation exposes and negates the social domination of matter, sensibility, and bodies. As we have seen, such domination culminates in the abstract equivalence of commodity form and the sovereign violence expelling bare life from the political realm. On the other hand, however, this contestation risks collapsing art into “crude” physicality or, to recall frequent feminist arguments, into essentialism and primitivism, both of which are in complicity with reification. If women’s literature is to avoid this crude physicality, it has, first of all, to foreground in its own process of making the fact that the materials entering art—paint, color, sound, or literary language—are always already socially formed and exploited. As we shall see in chapter 6, for Larsen the most emblematic example of such material devastation of language is the biblical curse of slavery and the transmission of its racist and sexual violence in destroyed female writing and the suffocating tongue—the bodily instrument of voice. Second, modern literature and art not only expose the history of violence and the exploitation condensed in its materials, but gather those materials that have been eliminated from the social constitution of meaning and reduced to nonsignifying refuse: “Art is related to its other as is a magnet to a field of iron fillings…. Work’s gravitational force … gathers around itself its membra disjecta, traces of the existing” (AT, 7). In Larsen’s novels the petrified female tongue, the destroyed writing, the destitution of the world, are exposed as the effects of the violence of white supremacy and heteronormativity. At the limit of signification, the speaking tongue turns into a paralyzing, nauseating “thing” that, in its suffocating materiality, bears the traces of tortured and sexually violated bodies. Similarly, in A Room of One’s Own the violent tearing and “pulling asunder” (RO, 50–51) of both the artwork and the female poet manifests a history of violence against women’s bodies, matter, and nature (RO, 48). For Adorno, as for Larsen and Woolf, the materials entering the artistic composition bear scars and “traces of damage” (AT, 107) of political, economic, and aesthetic violence.

We should pause and think about the status of the damaged materiality bearing scars inflicted by political domination and capitalist production—the status of materiality as membra disjecta (AT, 7) of the historical world. This is certainly one of the most important points in Adorno’s aesthetics for feminist theory. What Adorno allows us to diagnose is not only the historicity of the material world and female bodies but, more importantly, their destitution and injury as effects of sociopolitical praxis. Furthermore, this concept of damage is not limited to bodies and organic life, because, as we have seen in Larsen’s novels, political and economic violence also “ruins” language and the world itself. Prefiguring the destruction of the body of the writer, Clare, the fragments of the destroyed black female modernism are scattered on a barren landscape (P, 178). Thus, despite different genealogies of power in Adorno, Woolf, and Larsen, I argue that the terms of material damage, scars, and ruin resonate with Agamben’s notion of bare life and Spiller’s violated flesh but expand the notion of injury and destitution beyond the human, beyond the very distinction between political/biological life, to the scorched landscape of the world.

The first task of the literary work is to recover the material remnants obliterated by the history of political violence and capitalist production: art “seeks to salvage what the active spirit … reduced to its materials” (AT, 107). Yet this act of recovery is contradictory because it can occur only through the artistic process of making, which is also implicated in unjust social relations, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and sexual violence. For Adorno, this is the central dilemma of modernism: “How can making bring into appearance what is not the result of making,” the other as such? (AT, 107). Nonetheless, by negating the unmediated materiality as illusory and by maintaining the protest against historical domination, artistic praxis can initiate a different process of “forming” in which damaged materials themselves play an active role. Consequently, artistic process not only makes explicit the contested role of bare life and wounded flesh in political struggles, analyzed in the first half of this chapter, but, more importantly, shows the coimplication of matter and form in the creation of meaning. By preserving rather than obliterating the otherness of materiality, aesthetic form foregrounds the conflicting but inseparable interrelation between the intelligible and the material, the conceptual and the sensible in the creation of meaning. Adorno calls such an inseparable interrelation a “synthesis from below,” which means that a sensible form of the work of art emerges from a relation between divergent elements: “The art work is to be organized from below. There is nothing, however, that guarantees in advance that the art work, once its immanent movement has blasted away the overarching form, will in any way cohere, that its membra disjecta will somehow unify” (AT, 108). The synthesis from below is what is at stake in the familiar modernist rejection of established literary forms. As Virginia Woolf famously declares, in the work of art “nothing—no ‘method,’ no experiment, even of the wildest—is forbidden, but only falsity and pretense” (MN, 36). What is however less frequently noted is that experimental search for meaningful relations among heterogeneous “membra disjecta” is an act of noncoercion opposed to political violence.

Such an interaction between matter and form is predicated on the assumption of a certain expressivity of the material elements that artwork brings to the fore. As Adorno puts it, the composition from below seeks to uncover “eloquent relations” among material elements: “The synthesis achieved by means of the artwork is not simply forced on its elements” (AT, 7), as is the case in commodity form or sovereign power. On the contrary, literary form is inseparable from materiality because it “recapitulates that in which these elements communicate with one another; thus the synthesis is itself a product of otherness. Indeed, the synthesis has its foundation in … material dimension of works…. This unites the aesthetic element of form with noncoercion” (AT, 7). The noncoercion in the work of art is intertwined with a strange mode of communication removed from the exclusive domain of the subject and extended to material elements of language and the world. Although deformed by traces of violence and mediated by the subject, material elements are endowed in artistic praxis with a certain degree of expressivity of their own, expressivity irreducible to subjective intention, conceptual language, or sociopolitical determination. Consequently, the aesthetic noncoercion stands in stark contrast to the violence of biopolitics and commodity production.

Because material communication exceeds subjective intentions and remains opaque to comprehension, the artwork can preserve nonidentity and otherness on the level of form and resist the compulsion to identity imposed by truth, capital, globalization, and heteronormativity: “Aesthetic identity seeks to aid the non-identical which … is repressed by reality’s compulsion to identity” (AT, 4). Such aesthetic eloquence, which exceeds subjective expression and emerges from a relation among diverse material elements, is inseparable from antagonism, discord, and heterogeneity: “in artworks, the criterion of success is twofold: whether they succeed in integrating thematic strata and details into their immanent law of form and in this integration at the same time maintain what resists it and the fissures that occur in the process of integration” (AT, 7). By preserving scars, fissures, and nonidentity on the level of aesthetic form, which nonetheless aims for aesthetic coherence, the work of art expresses the tension between heterogeneous material fragments in its formal composition. Such multiple tensions express in an immanent way, on the level of literary form, political struggles in which bare life, damaged materiality, and commodification are at stake. As Adorno famously puts it, “the unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form” (AT, 6). In Larsen’s novels such political struggle manifests itself in the episodic structure and the abrupt tragic endings of her texts, which expose the irreconcilable historical contradictions between aesthetic harmony, on the one hand, and mutilated black female flesh, on the other hand. For Larsen, such contradictions not only bear witness to black suffering but also reclaim the foreclosed possibilities of inauguration: the “revolutionary” possibilities of renaming, desire, and community.

By gathering rejected social refuse and preserving the expressivity, otherness, and nonidentity of materiality in the process of composition, modern literature speaks in a way that is denied subjects potentially reducible to bare life or commodified objects. It is perhaps only in the material eloquence of art that we can hear what Fred Moten has called the “counterfactual speech” (ITB, 13) of commodities and what Irigaray describes as “commodities talking among themselves” (TS, 192–197). By critiquing Marx’s inability to anticipate the speech of commodities, Moten detects in the aesthetics of black performance the trace of commodities’ speech, which exists as if “before” exchange value (ITB, 10) and anticipates a new kind of sociality without domination. Moten stresses the sensual, embodied aspect of black artistic improvisations, which both testify to the violation of flesh and preserve “objections” of the commodified object: “The revolutionary force of the sensuality that emerges from the sonic event” of commodities’ speech is “itself broken by the irreducible materiality … of the commodity’s scream” (ITB, 12). Animated by black artistic performance, such a counterfactual sensual speech of commodities, interrupted by the scream of violated flesh, has nonetheless the capacity to break and remake the abstract process of exchange, the values of property, spirit, and form. As the last chapter of Larsen’s Passing suggests, the damaged materialities stripped of value—brutalized bodies, torn letters, and destroyed things—are retrieved from the circuit of commodities and the cycle of violence and returned into the common “pool of talk” (P, 237). In the shortest imaginable parenthesis between recurring racist and gender violence, damaged materialities are transformed into collective objects of enjoyment and improvisation, freely drawn from the collective reservoir of language, which belongs to everybody and yet cannot be owned.

Such material expressivity and “eloquence” of modern literature contests the dialectical relation between matter and spirit as well as the implicit gendering and racialization of these concepts. In philosophical aesthetics, the activity of the spirit, in contrast to feminized and racialized sensibilities and passive matter, has been associated with the self-determination of the subject and the constitution of meaning. Although feminist aesthetics cannot entirely dispense with the notion of the sprit because it has also been historically intertwined with the critical potential of art to contest domination, the self-determining spirit of both idealism and materialism is illusory and violent. When separated from the sensuous, the spirit of freedom reverses into the domination of materiality and otherness, which includes but is not limited to “othered” subjectivities. As Adorno, Moten, and Irigaray point out in different ways, if we call art’s expressivity an “aesthetic spirit,” then such spirit is a “carnal spirit” (AT, 88), inseparable from materiality and “the concretion of the aesthetic structure” (AT, 92). It is only by making spirit sensible that art can preserve its truth as the labor of the negative and the struggle for freedom on which both the critical potential of modern literature and political contestation depend.

By contesting the violent schism between abstract forms and damaged materialities, between activity and passivity, the work of art performs both the incarnation of the spirit and, to use Adorno’s apt formulation, the “radical spiritualization” (AT, 92–93) of damaged materialities otherwise stripped of their meaning, form, and expressive capacities. Like Irigaray’s notion of the “sensible transcendental,” contesting the opposition between the immanence of feminized matter and the transcendence of productive spirit,³⁴ Adorno’s “radical spiritualization” implies a nonabstract mediation in which damaged materials play an active role in the constitution of meaning. Thus, in contrast to the subjugating abstraction of commodity form and political forms violently separated from bare life/wounded flesh, aesthetic mediation establishes a dynamic, conflicting, and mutually constitutive relation between matter and form, the sensuous and the spiritual. Although the spiritual and sensible are not reconciled or unified, they are inseparable because through their multiple tensions they constitute each other as well as the form of the work of art: “Spirit forms [sensible] appearance just as appearance forms spirit” (AT, 87). For Adorno, “nothing counts in artworks that does not originate in the configuration of their sensual elements;” yet “the sensual in artwork is artistic only if in itself mediated by the spirit” (AT, 87). On the one hand, this dynamic and conflicting exchange between matter and form, sensibility and spirit, preserves the traces of expressive capacities in the remnants of materiality reduced to social waste. On the other hand, such dynamic interaction particularizes and materializes the abstraction of social relations, breaks down their violent autonomy, and reveals their dependence on and struggle with disavowed others: flesh, sexuality, and remnants of matter. In so doing, modern literature and art embrace the affective, the impure, and the hybrid. Inseparable from the aesthetic configuration of material elements, the incarnate and impure spirit nonetheless points toward the possibility of becoming and embodied freedom.

Although developed in the context of Adorno’s aesthetic theory as well as feminism, the reciprocal exchange between form and matter is not limited to art alone but reveals a blueprint for progressive politics and thought. It contests the static opposition of passive receptive matter and active but abstract form, which, as feminist critics have shown, is one of the original philosophical tropes of the exploitation of the feminine in providing ideological support for the fantasy of heterosexual intercourse. In the context of feminist political theory, such a model could not only enable a better diagnosis of the damage inflicted on gendered, racialized bodies by the schism between abstract exchange value and the nonvalue of material waste, between political forms and bare life, but also contest the domination of materiality, bodies, and nature. It is therefore rather ironic that neither Adorno nor his feminist critics follow through the political implications of his aesthetics for a feminist rethinking of embodiment, sexuality, and racial differences.

Given the paucity of explicit references to sexuality or antiblack racism in Adorno’s work, I would like to develop further gendered and racialized dimensions of the form/matter interaction by turning to Hegel’s aesthetic theory where such gendering and racialization are still visible. This return to Hegel is not a historical regression but a feminist transvaluation of aesthetic values—values associated with the devalued feminine, blackness, and materiality—against the dominant trends of the Western dialectical tradition. In particular, I want to focus on Hegel’s racialized and sexualized symbol of the monstrous figure of the Sphinx. In Hegel’s aesthetics, let us recall, the Sphinx is the discredited symbol of symbolic Egyptian art, which, in predictable Eurocentric fashion, like the enslaved body analyzed by Spillers, represents the least spiritualized, and therefore least liberated, art form—the very antithesis of Christian art. Yet, as Paul de Man suggests, we can contest this devaluation of the symbolic on the ground of Hegel’s own philosophy: “In a dialectical system such as Hegel’s, what appears to be inferior and enslaved may well turn out to be the master.”³⁵ For de Man, Hegel’s aesthetics as a whole “is a discourse of the slave” and, “as a result, it is also politically legitimate and effective as the undoer of usurped authority” (AI, 118). If the whole of Hegelian aesthetics is a discourse of the slave, then Egypt, a slave of a slave, might claim most legitimately the role of political contestation. It is the possibility of such a dialectical reversal leading to the overthrow of white supremacy that has constituted the grounds for the rereading of the master/slave dialectic by black intellectuals, from Du Bois to Gilroy, and Hortense Spillers’s reclaiming of the transformative potential of enslaved black female flesh can be read as a black feminist intervention in this tradition.

Another important aspect of Hegel’s aesthetics for my argument is his emphasis on the sensible and collective significance of art. In fact, it is the sensibility of form that gives art its specificity by distinguishing it from philosophy, religion, and, we can add, the commodity form: art “represents even the highest ideas in sensuous forms, thereby bringing them near to the character of natural phenomena, to the senses, and to feeling” (ILA, 9). Furthermore, the Hegelian aesthetic underscores the struggle between form and content—a conflict that preserves the alterity of the material, despite the fact that the labor of spiritualization already attempts to “strip the outer world of its stubborn foreignness” (ILA, 36) and to transform objects into a mere reflection of the hegemonic subject. Thus, even though Hegel defines the perfection of classical art as a harmony of form and content (ILA, 44), in fact all art is characterized by different modalities of the contradiction between the spiritual and the sensible, the interior and the exterior.

This contradiction is nonetheless most striking in symbolic art, associated with Egypt and the figure of the Sphinx’s riddle. Thus, even in terms of Hegel’s own aesthetic theory, some critics, like de Man (AI, 93), have claimed that the most characteristic features of Hegel’s concept of art are embodied by Egypt rather than the classical art of Greece or the art of Christian Europe. Symbolic art represents a diametrical opposite to Christian art in the sense that it does not yet reach “that perfect unity of inner meaning and external shape” that modern art already “transcends in its superior spirituality” (A, 143). In other words, if in European art the spirit transcends its material form, then in symbolic art the material resists the domination of sprit. It is precisely because of such resistance to spiritual transcendence that the Hegelian notion of symbolic art prefigures some of the most characteristic features I would like to reclaim for a feminist aesthetics of modernism, such as the sensibility of form, the primacy of the object, antagonism, and, most importantly, the enigma of art, associated with the otherness of sexual and racial differences. For instance, the most important feature of symbolic art—the foreignness and divergence of its external shape from its internal idea—anticipates in an uncanny way Adorno’s definition of the form/materials interaction as “the nonviolent synthesis of the diffuse that nevertheless preserves it as what it is in its divergences and contradictions” (AT, 143). In both symbolic and modernist art, the interaction between matter and form “interrupts itself through its other just as the essence of its coherence is that it does not cohere. In its relation to its other—whose foreignness it mollifies and yet maintains—form is what is anti-barbaric in art” (AT, 143).

For Hegel, symbolic art represents the first step toward liberation from immediate sensuous existence through the double negation of labor and death. Rather than representing sensuous immediacy or unifying the spiritual and the material aspects of aesthetic production, Egyptian art represents unconscious artisanal labor similar to “the building of a honeycomb by bees.”³⁶ For Hegel, this artisanal labor corresponds to the immediate negation of natural existence by death, which becomes the first determination of spirit’s content. By contesting this association of artisanal labor with death, Adorno reinterprets it as a testimony to the concreteness of social labor and its dependence on the material, which is not yet negated by the abstraction of the commodity form. In his discussion of Egypt, “Hegel,” Adorno argues, “includes human labor in its concrete material form among the essential characteristics of spirit as the absolute. Only a little more would be needed—remembrance of the simultaneously mediated and irrevocably natural moment in labor” (H, 25).

Yet perhaps something else needs to be remembered in the context of Hegelian aesthetics in addition to the testimony of symbolic art to the concreteness of labor and its irreducible dependence on materiality. What also has to be recalled is Spillers’s claim that the persistence of materiality is a condition of resistance. In the context of her work, the failure of spiritualization in Egyptian art, like the failure of spiritualization ascribed to black female bodies, can be reinterpreted as an act of resistance to the Western spirit’s hegemony and domination. We can see traces of such resistance in Hegel’s emphasis on the unreconciled conflict between the material and the collective spirit, which in turn corresponds to the contradiction between form and content, the sensible and the intelligible. Thus, in contrast to the complete mortification of sensuous materiality by the abstract commodity form or sovereign power, the symbolic artwork becomes a veritable battleground between materiality and intelligibility, exteriority and interiority: “In so far as symbolic art just struggles towards true meanings and their corresponding mode of configuration, it is in general a battle between the content which still resists true art and the form which is not homogeneous with that content either…. In this respect the whole of symbolic art may be understood as a continuing struggle for compatibility of meaning and shape” (A, 317). Because it preserves the traces of foreign matter, Egyptian art is an aporetic and antagonistic art that refuses to disguise domination as a reconciliation between social spirit and its subjugated others: “This wrestling [of Spirit] with itself before perception by means of art … is characteristic of Egypt” (A, 354). For Hegel, the antagonistic, symbolic art, in which materiality resists the domination of spirit, is a sign of failure; yet it is precisely this failure that feminist aesthetics can transvaluate as a paradoxical achievement of modern art and literature. The antagonistic and aporetic character of the form/matter relation points to political conflicts and struggles in which ruined materiality, damaged bodies, and objects are at stake. It is these conflicts that, to recall Adorno’s formulation, “return in artworks as immanent problems of form” (AT, 6). The return of political antagonisms in the structure of modern art and literature not only renders abstract spirit more sensible, but associates formal experimentation with struggle and resistance.

The preservation of antagonism in the artistic process not only refuses the false reconciliation offered by commodity culture but voices the “protest against the mastery over material itself” (AT, 212). Ultimately, what Hegel views as defect—and I regard as a unique accomplishment of the work of art—is art’s relation to traces of materiality and alterity, to what remains nonidentical: remnants of nonsymbolizable matter, flesh, sex, and the scars of bodily injury. For Hegel, Egyptian art presents an affinity between both “meaning and shape” and their “mutual externality, foreignness, and incompatibility” (A, 300). Unwittingly, in his notion of symbolic art, Hegel gives us a theory of the work of art that testifies to the resistance of matter/flesh to the violence of spiritualization and abstract formalism. Unlike the specular character of the commodity form, or the sovereignty of biopolitics, here the foreignness of matter exceeds and resists political and aesthetic forms. This last point is important because any unmediated relation to the body or alterity would collapse into another version of the reification, essentialism, or ideology of primitivism. Consequently, the remainder of materiality cannot be confused with immediacy. Rather than representing the unmediated truth essentialism ascribes to bodies, such a remainder contests the absolute autonomy of social production and political sovereignty and their erasure of all traces of otherness and nonidentity.

This active and resisting role of materiality in the production of the work of art is most striking in Hegel’s concept of enigma, which resonates with Irigaray’s notion of wonder, Spiller’s monstrosity, and Adorno’s enigmaticalness.³⁷ Consequently, the excess of materiality cannot be confused with essentialism because it constitutes the cipher of art rather than a disclosure of the immanent truth of the body. Such rupture is what is at stake in Irigaray’s definition of the wonder of sexuality as that which cannot be anticipated or known.³⁸ According to Irigaray, wonder is often regarded as monstrosity because the conceptual categorization cannot tolerate the surprise of enigmatic sexuality and its resistance to power/knowledge.³⁹ This is precisely why Hegel interprets the enigma of Egyptian art as monstrous. Resisting the autonomy of production, the monstrous symbolic form veils its significance not because the process of mediation “vanishes without a trace,” as is the case with commodity form, but because the remainder of alterity obstructs the progress of spiritualization and turns the work of art into “the objective riddle par excellence” (A, 360).

In contrast to Hegel, however, feminist aesthetics reclaims enigma as a crucial feature of modernist art and literature. The enigmatic figures of women’s modernism represent neither an immanent truth of the body nor a deficiency of aesthetic mediation. On the contrary, enigma is a paradoxical achievement of women’s modernism, which preserves the foreignness of materiality within literary form. In Larsen’s Passing, for example, the enigma of writing and the female body, of sexuality and race is both a constitutive feature of aesthetic beauty and a source of fear in the world of white supremacy. Consider, for instance, this dangerous intertwining of enigma, beauty, and nonnormative female sexuality in the figure of Clare, who is also a writer of the illegible script of black modernism:

Dark, sometimes absolutely black, always luminous…. They were Negro eyes! Mysterious and concealing…. Yes, Clare Kendry’s loveliness was absolute, beyond challenge, thanks to those eyes which her grandmother and later her mother and father had given her.

(P, 161)

Puzzling again over that look on Clare’s incredibly beautiful face…. It was unfathomable, utterly beyond any experience or comprehension of hers.

(P, 176)

What the juxtaposition of these passages shows is the constellation of “absolute” female beauty, “absolute” blackness, and the enigmas of desire and art exceeding comprehension. Can we read this repetition of the adjective absolute as the ironic reinscription of the Hegelian absolute onto black female aesthetics? If so, the enigma associated with the feminine, blackness, and illegible script exceeds the limitations of Hegelian aesthetics. Oscillating between attraction and fear, such enigma poses a challenge for the hegemonic values of aesthetics in complicity with white supremacy and heteronormativity.

In Hegel’s aesthetics the breakdown of abstract equivalence that reveals the racialized and gendered struggle with the body, sexuality, and the enigma of art is of course most evident in the symbol of symbolic art, that is, in the monstrous figure of the Sphinx. Mediating two extremes of symbolic art—the preserved human corpse in the externality of the pyramid and the live animal body revealing a “higher,” though still “repugnant,” intimation of the living spirit (A, 357)—the Sphinx is the heterogeneous figure par excellence. Yet what Hegel regards as the monstrosity of art, which ruins the principle of identity and negates the reconciliation of binary oppositions, feminist aesthetics reclaims as another crucial feature of women’s modernism. Like the insurgent, monstrous female figure of resistance that Spillers imagined, the Sphinx’s refusal to reflect the immortality of the white soul, the sovereignty of the spirit, or the abstract values of commodified labor presents aesthetic process as the site of struggle, as the turbulent, reversible passage between the human and the animal, spirit and body, form and matter, the subject and the other, labor and its objects, the West and Africa. In contrast to the self-determination of the Hegelian spirit, the autonomy of production, political sovereignty, or the utter indifference of the abstract commodity form, the impure figure of the Sphinx bears witness to spirit’s parasitical dependence on and entwinement with its disavowed others: “Out of the dull strength and power of the animal the human spirit tries to push itself forward, without coming to a perfect portrayal of its own freedom and animated shape, because it must still remain confused and associated with what is other than itself” (A, 361). What Hegel calls here intermingling and confusion of spirit with its other—flesh, animality, matter, femininity—constitutes the necessary moment of the materialization, sexualization, and racialization of artistic form.

But ultimately what is most interesting about the aporetic figure of the Sphinx in Hegel’s text is the fact that this alternative model of aesthetic “intermingling” of matter and form bears an implicit testimony to the not-yet-forgotten, not-yet-erased enigma of sexual and racial differences at the very moment of its erasure. Although Hegel fails to analyze this enigma, his text produces it as the very riddle of aesthetics. In his work, the body that struggles but fails to extricate itself completely from materiality and nature, the body that marks the irreducible obscurity and estrangement of spirit from itself, is presented as a feminine, non-European body. And even though the feminization of the Sphinx is more readily apparent, its racialization is produced through the denial of any connection between Egypt and black Africa in order to subordinate symbolic art to what de Man calls an “ideologically loaded genealogy of the modern as derived from the classical, Hellenic past” (AI, 108). Associated with animalistic “wild” and “natural” sensuality, Hegel’s construction of “Africa proper” (emphasis added) bears no connection to civilization, history, or art: Africa “has remained—for all purposes of connection with the rest of the World—… the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night.”⁴⁰ Even African “Fetich” has no religious or aesthetic value.⁴¹ As if in response to Hegel, Du Bois, in his celebrated essay “The Criteria of Negro Art,” argues that it is precisely the racist propaganda of Western aesthetics that presents “The Cathedral at Cologne” as an example of beauty but fails to see aesthetic value in an African village (CNA, 319).

Yet, although Hegel claims that Egypt can be regarded as a “center of independent civilization” only insofar as it may be separated from the rest of Africa,⁴² the very possibility of such separation is negated by the hybrid, improper figure of the Sphinx. By making the erasures of racial and sexual differences legible, the impure body of the Sphinx poses an enigma of sexual difference and black flesh, an enigma inscribed in the aesthetic mediation between spirit and matter, form and meaning. This enigma is repeated in the very form of the Sphinx’s riddle, which vacillates between abstract spiritual essence (“what is”) and the process of temporalization and materialization of spirit (“what in the morning goes on four legs, at mid-day on two, and in the evening on three?” A, 361). Despite Hegel’s emphasis on the immobility of symbolic art, the Sphinx’s “conundrum” is split between fixed identity and bodily becoming, between abstract universality and the movement of differentiation, between specularization and materialization. By contrast, Western oedipal masculinity is associated in Hegel’s text with a self-conscious, autonomous spirituality that determines its meaning from within. The imperative of self-knowledge obliterates the aesthetic enigma of the flesh and sex and presents this obliteration as the condition of the self-production of the hegemonic subject. In response to the riddle of the Sphinx, the oedipal abstract and universal answer—“a man”—remains blind both to the split form of the question and the impure locus of its enunciation. Anticipating the course of Western philosophy, Oedipus wrongly assumes that the beginning of the question, namely, “What is it?” can sublate flesh, temporality, and disavowed sexual and racial differences into the principle of identity. By substituting universal subjectivity, which is nonetheless associated with whiteness and masculinity, for the antagonistic relation between the temporality of differences and the universality of the concept, the oedipal answer in Hegel’s text culminates in a double erasure: in a disregard of sexual and black flesh, on the one hand, and in the denial of finitude, temporality, and alterity, on the other. The oedipal answer in Hegel’s text constitutes, therefore, the beginning of the damaging specularization/abstraction of the body that Irigaray detects in the commodity form.

Yet the condensation of sexual differences, black flesh, and the symbol in the body of the Sphinx resists the philosophical solution to the enigma. This solution would not only reduce the significance of the work of art to the imperative of self-knowledge but also present the practice of mediation as the abstract work of the concept, which disavows the traumatic limits of flesh, finitude, and sexuality without at the same time materializing and particularizing the universal. Persisting beyond the oedipal answer, the interconnected enigma of art, sexuality, and black flesh troubles and disorients European modernity, its ideological genealogy, and its equation of the labor of mediation with the spiritualization of matter culminating in the abstract commodity form. For Hegel, this preservation of enigma, antagonism, and nonidentity is what constitutes the monstrosity of symbolic mediation. For feminist aesthetics, however, monstrosity, as the other side of wonder, contests the abstract equivalence of the commodity form and the violence inflicted on bare life. In so doing, it refers to a reciprocal and conflicting exchange between matter and form. As Spillers suggests, the critical reappropriation of the monstrous transforms the failure of specularization, associated with the social death displaced onto black bodies and black Africa, into a vital source of resistance to the monopoly of white values. It is precisely the oedipal answer to the insolvable enigma of aesthetics, race, and sexuality that is contested in Larsen’s and Woolf’s novels.

In this chapter I have juxtaposed the problem of form in two seemingly unrelated social phenomena: the hunger strike of British suffragettes and the struggle against antiblack racism, on the one hand, and the formal experimentation of modern literature, on the other hand. What this juxtaposition of political insurgencies and aesthetic innovation reveals is that the seemingly neutral form/matter opposition is at stake in both feminist political struggles and aesthetic interventions, and, therefore, that matter and form are both aesthetic and political categories. The consideration of form/matter in politics shows that what is contested in feminist, antiracist struggles is not only racist and gendered injustice but also, implicitly, the violent severance of abstract forms from bare life, insofar as such severance is the source of political violence. Consequently, political forms and damaged materialities—bare life, injured bodies, commodified objects—are themselves contested terrains, mobilized by political struggles. And such contestation implies inseparable interconnection between form, matter, and antagonism.

If feminist politics implicates the form/matter distinction in violence, bodily damage, and the struggle for liberation, the task of feminist aesthetics is to elaborate a new model of interaction between damaged materialities and aesthetic form. Although the sensible qualities of art and literature have been traditionally acknowledged, the notion of a feminist aesthetics I have proposed in this chapter not only contests the gendering and racialization of the matter/form distinction but also stresses a new understanding of the materiality of aesthetic form. In opposition to formalisms of various stripes, or worries about essentialism, an aesthetic invention of a reciprocal and often conflicting interaction between literary forms, damaged artistic materials, and violated bodies in experimental literature has to be considered a critical response to the violent abstraction of commodity form and citizenship. Through my explorations of the feminist and dialectical traditions of aesthetics, I have proposed different formulations of such interaction, ranging from monstrosity and enigma to the “sensible transcendental.” Although damaged bodies are always already regulated by political and economic mechanisms of power, the dynamic, interactive exchange between form and matter I have elaborated preserves remnants of nonsublatable materiality as a source of nonconceptual expressivity and resistance to the absolute autonomy of production, sovereign power, and oedipal heteronormative desire.

Contestation of the violent, gendered, racialized schism between passive matter and abstract political/aesthetic forms shows that the “new formalism” is the other side of the new materialism and vice versa. On the one hand, the new materialism not only embraces the Marxist notion of labor and power relations but also the feminist analysis of gendered, racialized matter and critique of violated bodies. Yet, on the other hand, the new formalism cannot be limited to innovation alone, as has been recently proposed in modernist studies, because it contests the violent split between damaged materialities and political/aesthetic forms. The interconnection between formalism and materialism stems from the dynamic interaction between form and matter in the production of meaning and reveals a conflicting but inseparable relation between the universal and the particular, the intelligible and the sensible. Such interaction between materialities and forms does not reify racial and gender differences—on the contrary, it marks an openness to what is yet to come: the possibility of political transformation, the creation of new, embodied forms of life, and the arrival of a more expansive conception of freedom and speech.