The Question at Play

Taking as its starting point that legibility is made perceptible by an implied outside of illegibility, this essay asks if the nature of inquiry—about questions of blackness and sexuality—is that of a deferred knowing or if it is knowable at all. Does the very distinction between legibility and illegibility impart an element of refusal? When is questioning as a will to know not so very different from the interrogative of scientific racism, with its reification of discourses of mastery? When no amount of negation can extricate blackness from the inchoate space in which it resides, the author suggests, a phantasmatic structure wherein trauma and play cathect a compulsion to repeat might provide a means to tolerate the intolerable. Blackness here is not a fantasy of object loss, but a phantasmatic chiasmus.