Sublime

aporia.

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

aporia, a state of authentic confusion i.e., being confused and aware.

A sense of an ending, of course, may not involve a sense of completion. Things can often end before they are finished: there are ruptures and abandonments and failures of nerve, loose ends that continue to trouble us.

If rhetoric is so mired in exclusionary, oppressive, and seemingly unforgivable theories and practices—then do we really want part in/of it? Is this an instance in which we apply Audre Lorde, or Nick Walker, or Sara Ahmed, and behold rhetoric as the master’s tools?204 Do we need rhetoric? And more, do we want it? Is it in any way a desirous frame?

More particularly I seemed to be asserting that the nature of moral community and moral judgment in distinctively modern societies was such that it was no longer possible to appeal to moral criteria in a way that had been possible in other times and places—and that this was a moral calamity! But to what could I be appealing, if my own analysis was

The Skeptics were particularly concerned with the sort of suffering that arises from being entangled in beliefs and judgments. Their technique was to engage any particular belief in a kind of cross-examination, and they practiced showing that, whatever reasons we might have for holding on to a particular belief, there were equally plausible and

Each crisis calls for decision and action, but decision is impossible and action a paradox when eros stirs the senses.