Sentient Flesh (Thinking in Disorder/Poiēsis in Black) is an interrogation of the relationship between Negro, poiēsis, and humanism. Names do more than designate things; they indicate an orientation in life, not in some abstract nominalist sense, but in the sense of a grammar that emerges out of a set of human practices that work in the creation of the world. In this sense, they are material indices of a particular semiosis, and may well be indices of multiplicious semiosis, referred to here as para-semiosis. Giving a full account of what para-semiosis means is the work of Sentient Flesh. Its focus is on the relationship between poiēsis and humanism; or rather, it is on a certain history of knowledge that presumptively identifies itself with humanism, with the humanism, as if there were such a thing, and claims poiēsis as its unique definitive property.