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Dissonances of (Un)feeling The new world was not just labor, but labor for the sake of life-making. –Lola Olufemi I had the impulsive urge to become the sad philosopher—the heartbroken body of ruin of another world disenchanted for the event of love, the passion of pleasure, the desire for the object that produces my need for jouissance. Sad because I am pulled into Lacan’s lack and desire as one and the same. Sad because the looming metaphysical catastrophe of the modern world occurred five-hundred years ago—peaking its head in my thinking as a permanent condition. Sad because the loneliness of the self in relation to the world is immeasurable, and I think Sartre has much to do with my feeling of wanting to reject radical freedom, to summon Fanon and wear my mask. The trick of Western consciousness is the yearning for completion, the satisfaction of wants over needs—the death-drive toward ends without an ethics of relation. If I were to become this sad philosopher, I’d be lost to the world of enjoyment—a first world, global north excess of obsessed entertainment to shelter my negative emotions from the world. Feeling down bounces up in the emotions, pulling me close by the edge of the sad philosopher’s dream, a lucid nightmare of pessimist incapacitation. I write here nothing but hyperbolic claims (and an entry to my wayward thought), and perhaps the sad philosopher can teach us something else (and I hope they do). I am caught between a reading of Westernized theory and philosophy (a mode of understanding the world around me) and the theory and philosophy from below, conocimientos that emerge from Black, African, Chicanx, Asian, Indigenous, diasporic, migrant, nomadic, queer, trans, non-binary, and other forms of thought not committed to what we know of Western mode of thinking. There is something of a division, a split, an antagonism perhaps, or what Chela Sandoval called twenty-two years ago as “academic apartheid” in the knowledge production of the great discourses of our times—the dominant ideology consumed by a specific “rhetoric of supremacism.” What we call ethnic studies—and what they called third world studies—is on the precipice of being overcome by negligence, a full frontal attack at theorizing from below that would have us historicize and contextualize rather build struggle with knowledge as a tool for resistance and abolition. What emerges in the metaphysics of conflict here is the figure of the sad philosopher, a rhetorical figure set to offer no escape, no exit, no door to the “open dimensions of consciousness” as Fanon would gesture. The sad philosopher misreads their own history, interprets to disguise, and practices a canon of epistemic concepts to subdue the dialectic of liberation, the methodology of emancipation. Yet, contrary to common understanding of sadness as a negative emotion and/or affect, the sad philosopher is unattuned to Spinoza’s ethics and exceeds its edges for a mode of paralysis that stuns the emotions, mind, and body as a matrixing (to borrow from Chela Sandoval). The task of the sad philosopher is diagnosis without description, reflection without commitment to struggle, and philosophy without material existence. This is not a re-production of the agonistic relationship between materialism and metaphysics, it is a cognitive, embodied detachment from the Earth, the cosmic: a self-alienation from the world to assume an objective wording of it. There is something to be said here, about the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will (a borrowing of Gramsci’s phrasing). There is something here in the in-between, the gap between intellect and will, the idea and the practice, the theory and praxis. This Gramscian materialism tends toward a radical practicality of Marxism that engenders what we know today as critical theory—the European intellectual pessimism of Western culture and society. What would it mean for us, those in the throes of being and becoming La Xicanada, to disrupt this Marxist attitude? What would it mean for us to do away which negligent op-eds and calls to action for a Chicano intelligentsia without naming queer Chicana feminist theorists, philosophers, teachers, educators, organizers, and spokespersons? Rather than enrapture Chicano “barrio philosophers” that mystify the material realities of current conditions, let us re-enchant las atravesadas who name the sitios y lenguas of our world in struggle. It is from this queer nomadic register that I am urged to speak to a Chicanada that obsesses with (Mexican) borderlands culture. Connections here are found in the tensions between from-the-streets Chicanos and the academic-professional Chicanas that confuse the question: How do we bridge the joy of the concrete with the abstractions of a sadness? How does this inquiry generate a dissonance of (un)feeling? The joyful philosopher is understood as a pragmatist in the thick of concrete realities, coupling with the pleasures and enjoyment of life within the existing world. Whereas the sad philosopher is the one paralyzed by the object of the mind, the joyful philosopher is cathartic in the subject of the body. We become entranced in a discourse of object-subject dualisms—a knowledge of the world activated by the search for truth. The joyful philosopher is found in Spinoza and Deleuze, in the treatises, manifestos, and books against lack, repression, and oedipalization. I want to avoid the capture of dichotomy: between a figure of the sad philosopher and its opposite—the joyful philosopher. Both philosophers are reactionaries; they react to the world. They react to phenomena to shroud it under the incumbrance of Westernized splits of consciousness, the Manichean dualisms and forces of division that are cause for suspicion. The heretic is a response—a fugitive planning in the shadows casting spells merging abstraction with material objects. The heretical assemblage is one in search for a mind/body/emotions matrix (as Chela Sandoval formulates it). The heresy is to not choose sides of affect between sadness and joy, to become immersed in and of the Earth as a being loyal to one line of force, one which either can incapacitate us, bring us to our knees. Heresy is to trouble this distinction of binary, of category, of the welding intended to fix us, to disaffect us from the full spectrum of emotion. The heretic as anti-philosopher or non-philosopher emerges from the abyss to articulate from the alchemy of the disorder of things an inner struggle to reckon with the body, to transfigure from the emotions, to re-think the experience of the mind. The heretic refuses the refusal, as much as they refuse the embrace. To become-heretical is to become against the force of desiring affection or disaffection (as if there is a choice to be made), of becoming one with the categories that capture and paralyze us. My work with negative Xicanidades thus far has traversed these feelings of anguish and faith, of an emotional rollercoaster that has me re-thinking the terms and conditions of what I intellectualize as negative Xicanidades. As I tread against category, against theory, against the will to define, I find myself in word vomit—the reader will have to forgive me in my stubborn repetition, my promise to submerge myself in the swarm of words that weave abstractions with the concrete. The reader, if they have followed me from the zine to the inception of the blog, will notice how words distract, how resonances change, how words transfigure and transmutate. I desire the heretic to be the figure or hermeneutic or ghost that stretches the articulations of Xicanidades. All this musing to say: I desire new modes of friendship beyond the “critical” emotional labor that supposes exchange, transaction, and receipt. A friendship beyond debt, and with the love of the enigmatic nothingness from which we emerge, the self and collective we create as a laborious activity of invention. What might it mean to take seriously the sad affects of a Xicanx sensibility, the unfeeling that goes unrecognized as a force of its own? What might it mean to examine how Xicanx sadness is an emotional making beyond melancholia? What if the kind of dissonance of (un)feeling that I am grappling with here is precisely the assembly of joy, hope, happiness, and pleasure as emotions that emerge in the dialectic of existential speculation fused with a thrill of the cryptic? In the reclaiming of negative affects such as sadness, discontent, anxiety, shame, and fear—affects that the world of capital desires to extinguish with enjoyment—perhaps we can attune the brokenness of our being, our incompletion, by being able to access a range of emotion that is not obsessed with the positivity of our fragmentation. This is not an imperative for mastery, but a directness to the open dimensions of our emotions, our feelings with the world. If our bodies endure the legacies of a wound, the colonial wound, we have a responsibility to make sense of suture, or a path toward a shared sense of being well, of healing ourselves in such a way that the reverberations of our kinetic energies could be felt generations on. This is not repair. It is not an act of making the self feel whole. If we are to put words to this act, this path, this suture, then I would name it a re-alignment to relation. The task of Xicanx poiesis is to make felt from the raw material of our emotion the binding of ourselves in an articulation that plays toward bridging worlds. This activity is not without its dangers, its potential for autonomy. This is a Moragian theory in the flesh, and it is a (spirit) politics born out of necessity: from the concrete of desire coupled with the yearnings of feeling brown. Another kind of commons is shared here, full of erotic sadness, and anxious pleasures. The invitation is open: negative Xicanidades is a blissful weeping toward possibilities of (un)feeling. I end with the words of nepantlera philosopher of joy/sadness: “Do work that matters. Vale la pena” (Gloria E. Anzaldúa). With grief and joy, From the depths of the nameless, White Mountain Rabbit
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November 2022
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