On Charles

Recently, I went on a date; it was the second, and the last. This is because my date told me, in no uncertain terms, that I’d cultivated an utter lack of sexual charm. “You haven’t flirted with me once,” I was told. I was, of course, shocked. We’d just spent nine hours (the sum total of the two dates) talking at length about Fred Moten, the epistemic (non)value of astrology and tarot, the (para)ontologies of the black evangelical church, Adrian Piper’s catalysis, anarchist architecture, etc.: you get the picture. If that wasn’t flirting, then what the fuck is? 

That’s just to say that philosophy has always been erotic, affective, the context and landscape of my emotional life. Philosophy is my pneuma, my biological imperative, the thing I do to communicate and feel the entirety of the thing I imprecisely call “me.” So what else can I do, when I’m most feeling something like love, but do philosophy? Philosophy is how I love and how I grieve.

And I am grieving, thanks to a mammoth excess of love. Charles Mills has died. What the fuck else can I do? This is a time for philosophy, which is to say, for me, that this is a time for love to animate thought and feeling.

Because I wanted to say something. I had to write something. But I hesitated, until this moment. I’ve known Charles for a little over two years. This makes me but a small, relatively insignificant cell in the massive organism of brilliance, entanglements, and bonds of love that we imprecisely call “the life of Charles Mills.” These words, of course, I write largely for my own benefit; I’m not foolish enough to think that I have anything to say other people need to hear. But I found myself hesitating even given that; what right have I, to claim him?

What a fucked up thing, I realize now; to see these words as staking a proprietary claim. What a fucked up thing, in other words, if public words of love are nothing but chits of ownership on the beloved (chits of the exact kind I have decided to spend my philosophical life warring against!). My discomfort and hesitation was a product of the realization that if I had to say something, I had better say it right, and with feeling. Testaments of love that served to warp “Charles Mills” into a feature of my world-picture, my narrative, would be pathetic and embarrassing. 

And so, as always when I realize that what is called for is emotional sincerity, I came to philosophy. This is not, of course, to say that philosophizing is the only sincere way to say something, with love, about Charles Mills. It’s how I’m gonna do it. 

Because all this got me thinking: propriety, and sovereignty, and the transmutation of the terrible beauty of this fucked up, surreal thing called love into ownership. Specifically, it got me thinking about what it means to call Charles (fuck) an ancestor. 

I’ve always felt uncomfortable with black ancestor discourse. My black abolitionism-anarchism – as the motivating force of my life and thought – attempts to, as Moten might put it, make some sweet music with the nightmarish atonality of social death. The loss of kinship is a good thing. Another one of my teachers and heroes, Tommie Shelby, has taught me to be suspicious of reified notions of black cultural identity and solidarity (such suspicion has, as some may know, clearly stuck with me). But this is different. The loss of kinship isn’t the loss of an cultural identity (cultural identity can survive the loss of kinship); it’s the loss of an ability to make a claim on those who have come before. As Stephen Best reminds us, David Walker’s demand that “none like us may ever live again” might be seen as a perlocution severing the umbilical cord that strung him to those – us – who came after. Blackness disowns us. The blood-stained gate out of which we are born is a Qlippothic initiation rite, which is to say that it is the antithesis of an initiation.

This is a great tragedy, or else a great opportunity. For in the absence of the proprietary claims, which is the operative impulse of kinship, we find ourselves living a different kind of too-loud ensemble, a way of being together in which love is felt precisely as the absence of proprietary claims. No “ancestor” is mine; they outstrip me, which is not a lack of the most gorgeous and glorious of entanglements but its precise condition of possibility. I am not my ancestors’ wildest dreams, because my life is not the climax of a narrative arc that began with them; my life and theirs share something deeper, grittier, more material, more ineffable, more mystical. 

I have always thus felt uncomfortable with the very concept of “ancestor”, specifically in the transformation of those we admire – black mythic beings like Charles – into congealed form. I guess what I’m afraid of losing is the fleshy glory Liam so lovingly sketched here; the way Charles ruptured out of “Charles Mills” with of(f)-color humor and patois and, simply, the irreducible anarchism – the fundamental excess of concepts – that is the thing we call human life. I’m afraid of attempting to perform a surgical operation of fit on someone who did not fit; including, and most especially, who did not fit into academic philosophy, who did not fit into conceptions of what the greatest philosopher in living memory should be. Being around Charles, I was constantly entangled in the absolute nothingness that is sociality, that is love, the absolute absence of control. 

But perhaps that is the deepest tragedy of death; not an absence, but the filling of that absence. Not a lack, but the violent and once-and-for-all congealment of the unspeakable, cheeky blur that was Charles Mills via the abnegation of “Charles Mills,” which resulted in the most absolute of nothingness that resulted in the most absolute of beauties. (Is this making sense? I wish Charles could tell me; he always let me know when I wasn’t making sense.) Perhaps what I miss is just Charles, plain and simple. Perhaps what really scares me about “ancestor” is that its congealment is, rather than some insidious project of the National Sovereign, simply the naming of the congealment that is death. Maybe I just fucking wish Charles was still here, which is to say that I wish he was not-here-nor-there again, which is to say that he was alive again. Can the dead blur? What is social death to the dead? Can we be social with the dead? How the fuck do we love the dead? How the fuck do I love Charles now?

Two months ago, I asked Charles if he would be my advisor for a project. He said yes. I wanted to write a paper wherein I argue that black philosophy, at its most radical, is the same kind of thing as my favorite video game, The Witcher 3. I could hear his laughter in the words he wrote in the last email I ever received from him, in which he said he would “try his best” to keep up with me and with Liam (who, I told Charles, had been helping me with this project). Reading Liam’s own words on Charles this morning, I see the connection with Charles’ classically-roguish comment that Liam’s beautiful, wonderful work for and in this discipline would do, “until someone better came along.” The absurd thing about Charles’ improbable sense of humility is that he truly, I think, did not think or care that he, or anyone, was the best. I learned very quickly that the merit of my work for and with him was, in some sense, immaterial. Or, better, the merit was precisely in the materiality of the work: the worth of working with Charles was in the gritty sensuousness of figuring shit out. He shrugged aside ideal theory as a way of life. Perhaps this is why he could listen to me rant to him about my Zhuangzist account of the ineffabiltiy of blackness, or my obsessive analytic rendition of Munoz’s Disidentifications, or my bizarre ideal that the structural model of the work we both do can be found in an RPG video game for LOTR nerds, all without laughing in my face. (Instead, we laughed together.) I think – I’ll never know, and I’ll treasure that unknowability as a souvenir of the blur we shared – that Charles cared a great deal more about the journey then the destination, because the journey – the pragmatics, rather than the semantics, of black philosophy – is where liberation lies. From Charles I learned that philosophy is a game, a joke, a way to be skeezy and sly and funny, an exercise in excess, a bizarrity, a circus act, all in service of the complete and utter eradication of the horrors of this fucked-up world. This contradiction, as someone who cares deeply about the philosophical power and pleasure of contradiction, is Charles’ greatest gift to me. 

Charles didn’t own his philosophy, I guess is what I’m trying to saw. And he taught me not to own mine. Charles taught me that black radicalism is the death of ownership, the death of the commodification of thought, which is to say the death of seriousness, in service of the blurring of the very concept of claim. He taught me that ownership is so much less fun than self-abnegation, self-deprecation, than love. He taught me to love blackness. I loved him. 

I don’t have anything more to say. I guess now the work is to learn to say that I love him, rather than that I loved him. I guess I have to figure out how to – not keep him alive, in any sense – but to love him in death. I guess we have one more project to work on together. I guess there’s still time for philosophy.