This meditation is an experimentation with Hortense Spiller’s concept of psychoanalytics. It considers the hieroglyph as a repetitive and enacted (but unrepresentable) force of historical trauma marking black bodies and passed between them generationally (much like the Lacanian object a). Reading the Lacanian pass and erotogenic zones as heuristic features of the hieroglyph, this meditation presents black nihilism as an analytic setting enabling the hieroglyph to speak its ineffable repetition, rather than just a repertoire of hedonistic pleasures and destructive behaviors as described in black optimism.
© 2023 by Brown University and differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
2023
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