Thinking the Impossible Survivance and Arrivance of the ‘Speaking Commodity’

To begin to think the thought of Jacques Derrida as in/of Africa and the African(a) diaspora demands an attentiveness to the impossible survivance and arrivance of enslaved Africans (“speaking commodities”) in the Americas. The invocation of the concept of survivance is meant to signify and articulate the feel of being natally interdicted from the capacity to claim coherent space-time coordinates because of trans-Atlantic slavery and its afterlives. For this reason, the (dis)avowal of survivance can never be complete because it resists completion (in linear space-time). It is from within our common incompleteness that survivance becomes think-able, feel-able and say-able. This is to say, the question of survivance is a fundamentally ante-national and anti-national quest(ion) that enables us to ask the always un-asked question: how do you survive survival? And, resonantly, does the arrivant sur-vive (non-)arrival (arrivance) and survivance?