suicide* notes

“suicide* notes” lingers in a break that often feels left behind: a psychoanalytic break that appears across the works of those cited herein. Whether Charles Mingus, Fred Moten, Jared Sexton, Hortense Spillers, Claudia Tate or Frank Wilderson III, when one studies their works on the limits of psychoanalysis, particularly its assumed-to-be universal fields of speech and subjectivity, one finds a sort of Freudian navel, a point at which their analyses meets a resistance that appears to foreclose proceeding any further. This navel becomes one of the foci for “suicide* notes” because it echoes and plays off such assumptions about the universality of speech and subjectivity in political organizing. What seems to trouble these authors, in spite of their analytical differences, is what follows for those who fall out of the assumed universal of speech and subjectivity, who are bound to a field of non-meaning, a field of slaughter, a space in which speech and subjectivity never are, are dead without ever coming to life, if either death or life retain any meaning in this field. Borrowing on the origins of Freudian psychoanalysis as a break that followed from resistances to prior methods, “suicide* notes” begins with the twinned navels of psychoanalysis and political organizing, which constitute a navel of afropessimism, to think through what might become of taking this navel of afropessimism not as an end that all readings of (anti-)blackness lead to, but an opening through which one might develop another form of psychic treatment up to the task of black liberation on a global scale. In other words, taking psychoanalysis as not up to task, the aim is to seek a psychic treatment that is capable of freeing black psyches from desiring politics, no matter their material realities, that are bound to a world in which black liberation cannot be.