Sublime

the neoliberal attempt to subordinate every form of life and knowledge to the logic of the market has heightened our awareness of the danger of living in a world in which we no longer have access to seas, trees, animals, and our fellow beings except through the cash-nexus.

we may wonder, once we have been converted to neoliberal reason – when we no longer talk about the good and why we value what we value, but only talk about (and in terms of) profitability and money – what we will make of our former selves, and their supposedly abundant preoccupations, which were, it turned out, never what we really wanted; which

The reason for the essay’s astonishing success, then, is that for all its sensationalist style, it’s really a kind of clever compromise between two or perhaps even three contradictory positions on the most urgent social and moral concerns of eighteenth-century Europe. It manages to incorporate elements of the indigenous critique, echoes of the

one that we do well to see, while never forgetting it is a mirage, never forgetting that it’s the powerful light of…

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As for its symbolic functions of initiation, the contemporary “democratic” state is bankrupt.

Surveillance capitalists know everything about us, whereas their operations are designed to be unknowable to us. They accumulate vast domains of new knowledge from us, but not for us. They predict our futures for the sake of others’ gain, not ours.

do not seek to explain or resolve the question of this exclusion in terms of assimilation, inclusion, or civil or human rights, but rather depict aesthetically the impossibility of such resolutions by representing the paradoxes of blackness within and after the legacies of slavery’s denial of Black humanity. I name this paradox the wake, and I use