Paratheological Blackness

I argue in this essay that blackness can and should be thought of as a paratheological ghosting of modernity, where modernity is to be understood as a practice of sovereignty or political theology. As paratheological, blackness has an appositional—and not merely an oppositional—relationship to modernity’s theological protocols, whose scripts are often hidden under the veil of what has come to be called the secular. Thus, blackness names an ecumenical mode of existence, a spirituality, an imagination that is always already in flight. This is to say, paratheologically understood blackness is oceanic, of the Middle Passage, and in the future tense or the not-yet as a trace within the now. I situate and elaborate this claim in relationship to Nahum Chandler’s investigation of modernity as a project of purity, Hortense Spillers’s reflections on the pornotroping of the flesh, and Richard Wright’s unpublished story “When the World Was Red.”