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Debates
https://www.textezurkunst.de/en/articles/interview-ferreira-da-silva/ 1/12
29/11/2023, 22:44 An End to "this" World Denise Ferreira da Silva interviewed by Susanne Leeb and Kerstin Stakemeier
Frente 3 de Fevereiro, “Flags (Where are the People of Colour?),” 2006/2017, on the wall
of SESC Pompéia, São Paulo, 2017
the notion of critique and the formulation of a possible position beyond critique
that upends the epistemic lineages of continental philosophies; and a
contemporary “poethics” – an aesthetic-artistic practice aimed at disrupting modern
political strategies of racial subjectivation. Professor Ferreira da Silva here
illuminates these and other issues in conversation with the art historians/critics
Kerstin Stakemeier and Susanne Leeb.
KS/SL: Starting off our inquiry into the philosophical, poethical, and artistic
ramifications of your work, we want to ask: In your writing you problematize
“racial critique” as something that does little more than diagnose devaluation. As
far as we understand, your main opposition here is that racial critique remains
entangled in the very universalist claims to truth that have characterized
European modernity?
This presupposition is also shared by the kind of racial critique that stops at the
diagnostic of the devaluation of human populations constructed as non-
white/non-European. At its worst, it presents this devaluation as an effect of
beliefs or ideology and, as such, a deviation from the universal (moral) principles
said to rule modern existence; at its best, it presents devaluation as constitutive of
modern thought, but then moves on to an argument based on the idea of
incompletion (that universality is yet to be realized) or misapprehension (that a
particular has mistakenly been taken for the universal). In both cases, universality
is retained as the proper descriptor of the modern ethical program.
DFdS: The first kind of racial critique I mention in my book Toward a Global
Idea of Race is exemplified by the conception “racial discrimination.” This tool of
the sociology of race relations, prevalent in the USA in the 1940s/50s and ’60s,
captures an aspect of racial subjugation, which is in differential treatment,
leading to the fact that the person and group discriminated against is barred from
access to existing social benefits. Basically, the thesis behind the notion of racial
discrimination is that it results from ignorance toward the racial subaltern
conditions and a lack of enlightenment. As the theory goes, once the whole US
population learned more about black folks’ lives and were educated in their
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29/11/2023, 22:44 An End to "this" World Denise Ferreira da Silva interviewed by Susanne Leeb and Kerstin Stakemeier
The concept of racism, in turn, exemplifies the second critique. The literature is
extensive and varied and the task is complicated by the fact that racism is a
concept that is elaborated in such sophisticated but distinct theories as Hannah
Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Robert Blauner’s Internal Colonialism,
and Stuart Hall’s article Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in
Dominance. Racism’s origins are traced to a time in Europe before modernity,
and its workings in the post-Enlightenment period usually seen as a result of a
rallying by the state, capital, or interest groups (Oliver C. Cox, Michel Foucault,
Aníbal Quijano).
To a lesser extent, the task is rendered difficult because of the more general
tendency on the part of critical scholars to deploy racism as a descriptor of a
social phenomenon that can be explained by the appropriate concept, such as
class or ideology, for instance. Let me just say that to this day the best articulation
of an analysis of racial subjugation – under the concept of racism – is Cedric
Robinson’s Black Marxism, precisely because he refuses to explain racial
subjugation away as an aid to class exploitation. Tellingly, while his analysis does
locate the origin of the notion of race in pre-modern Europe, what his tracing of
the workings of race in merchant and industrial capital provides is the delineation
of what he calls the Black Radical Tradition. Much like Frantz Fanon’s, W. E. B.
Dubois’s, Hortense Spillers’s, Saidiya Hartman’s, Robin Kelley’s, Nahum D.
Chandler’s, and Fred Moten’s, Cedric Robinson’s thought exemplifies the very
tradition he has mapped, with a kind of racial critique that does not reproduce the
reduction mentioned above.
https://www.textezurkunst.de/en/articles/interview-ferreira-da-silva/ 4/12
29/11/2023, 22:44 An End to "this" World Denise Ferreira da Silva interviewed by Susanne Leeb and Kerstin Stakemeier
KS/SL: How does art as critique fall prey to the limitations you just outlined in
“racial critique”? Where – if anywhere – do you see alternative figures of aesthetic
radicalization for contemporary art and aesthetic practices?
DFdS: I cannot answer the first part of this question because it does not work. It
does not work because, as I tried to say in my previous answer, racial critique is
just a variation of a type of engagement – that is, critique – as it was performed
by Kant but also by Marx. In any event, because critique seems to be all we have,
it obviously informs any work of art that explicitly attends to earlier and
contemporary colonial or racial violence, global capital’s current modes of
exploitation, expropriation, and extraction; to the work the state performs for
global capital, to the workings of cis-heteropatriarchy. It doesn’t make sense to
expect otherwise.
At the same time, I find that something else happens when criticality comes
through creative work, when the imagination pursues the ends of critique.
However, I find that to get it we may have to release the artwork from the grips of
understanding (which is the mental faculty to which criticality is attributed) and
allow it to follow the imagination – incidentally, my “we” refers to the artist, the
critic, and the audience.
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29/11/2023, 22:44 An End to "this" World Denise Ferreira da Silva interviewed by Susanne Leeb and Kerstin Stakemeier
subject could be articulated as such; that is, the subject could never “land,” and be
there, for had he been “there” he would not be transparent (self-determined and
self-knowing).
KS/SL: Departing but also differing from French feminist writings, you state that
your critique of self-consciousness “privileges exteriority as a determining
moment in signification.” Could you elaborate a bit more on the idea of
exteriority?
DFdS: I quickly realized that my study of the notions of race and then nation had
taken me beyond sociological and anthropological texts, where I thought I would
find all that was necessary for the assembly of the concept in the 19th and 20th
centuries. In those texts I read for gathering the US and Brazilian national
discourses – published between 1875 and the late 1940s – many (if not most)
times these two terms (race and nation) were employed as if they were
interchangeable. I say as if because there was of course a difference in terms of
the mode of address; that is, the nation usually appears in self-descriptions and
calls to unified action, while race appeared in comparisons and attempts to make
distinctions. In the case of the United States, the comparison was to England, of
course, while, Brazil, on the other hand, was compared to the United States. Now,
these two usages of these concepts at that moment, as we know, were collapsed in
the German National Socialist discourse, in which the official (state) rendering of
the nation was grounded in “purity.” The latter is supported by the notion of
racial difference; that is, it does not primarily invoke a common past and a
common future, but an exclusive territory and a unique body. This means that
racial difference allows for the articulation of exteriority in a kind of text – which
I call the national text – that requests the formal position of interiority. For this
reason, in the effort to make sense of these modes of address and their effectivity,
both when articulated separately and in tandem, I had to move “backward,” from
the 19th-century science of man’s construction of the body as a biological concept
to George Cuvier’s “science of life,” in order to find how the biological itself was
constructed.
What I found, among other things, is that the exteriority that the 19th-century
version of racial difference conveyed had been crucial to modern thought all along
– because it supported its claim to capturing the truth of all things in the world.
But it was only in the post-Enlightenment period that the manufacturing of a
scientific formulation of racial difference was possible, which deployed this
difference (exteriority) in the writings of man/the human, without violating the
attribute (self-determination) that supports the claim that the latter occupies a
unique position in the world.
KS/SL: In line with Fanon, and more recently, writers like Frank B. Wilderson
III, you advocate for an “end to this world.” For someone like Wilderson, poetry
as a mode of written language becomes a praxis for radically repositioning
language, and for Saidiya Hartman, literature occupies a similar role. What is for
you a medium of “ending,” or an artistic practice of “ending” distinct from, say,
deconstruction?
https://www.textezurkunst.de/en/articles/interview-ferreira-da-silva/ 6/12
29/11/2023, 22:44 An End to "this" World Denise Ferreira da Silva interviewed by Susanne Leeb and Kerstin Stakemeier
DFdS: I think the key point here is whether the “ending,” which is the only
reasonable thing one can ask of this racial capitalist world, must happen within or
outside something, and whether this something that is retained is new or a part of
this world.
For Fanon, man/the human is that which would be made anew after
decolonization, and for Wilderson and Hartman, language and literature might
play the same role; that is, of that "something."
I am very worried that we may not be able to stop the end of this world in which
we exist; I am worried about the demolition of democratic structures that, though
limited and perverse, provided at least an anchor to claims for social and global
justice (from indigenous, migrant, LGBTI*, non-white populations everywhere)
and could (at times) limit total violence; I am worried that insects and other
species are becoming extinct, that rivers are drying up, that oceans are being
suffocated by plastic, that fracking is destroying and threatening to contaminate
large areas of underground water. This is a long list. However, I am invested –
because I don’t see how we will be able to exist otherwise – in the end of the world
as we know it.
This new world will have to be rebuilt and recuperated from the destruction
caused by the extractive tools and mechanisms of global capital.
KS/SL: In your text Toward a Black Feminist Poethics, you write that a black
feminist poethical reading reflects on the artwork in relation to its arsenal of
raciality but also considers how the artwork refuses to simply become an object of
“empirical anthropology.” What exactly do you mean by “empirical
anthropology”?
DFdS: There is no short answer. But let me say from the outset that my concern
is with the artist, in particular; with how, much like academics (and I am
including myself here), the work of artists of color is mediated by the
anthropological notion of cultural difference. When compared to the early 20th
century, a major difference is that on the one hand the focus is less on the forms,
materials, etc. than on the artist herself, while on the other hand there is also an
emphasis placed on extraction, dispossession, and oppression. This is very
important politically. Unfortunately, however, the radical force of this double
https://www.textezurkunst.de/en/articles/interview-ferreira-da-silva/ 7/12
29/11/2023, 22:44 An End to "this" World Denise Ferreira da Silva interviewed by Susanne Leeb and Kerstin Stakemeier
movement is always at risk of dissipating under the pressure of the market logic
that prevails everywhere – a logic that requires a great deal, including
simplification.
There are many consequences of this, including the recourse to the familiar tropes
of representation, which are not only already anthropological but also end up
confirming this basis. For instance, there have been a few occasions on which I
experienced or witnessed others forced into the position of having to resist being
addressed as a “native informant” (to use Spivak’s apt term), even when what they
were articulating was an analysis of that very condition. That is, their critical
response to being treated as “native informants” was taken as an “authentic”
expression of their “native”/diverse experience. Incidentally, these occasions were
not very different from those I found myself in as an academic. These are
dangerous times. More immediately, I find there is a danger of missing the
opportunity to take advantage of the radical openings that art can engender. It
may seem a naïve statement. It is not. Back in the 1980s, ushered in by social
movements and with the intellectual support of ideas deployed by a few European
philosophers, academics in the social sciences and humanities announced the
arrival of a postmodern moment, which would eventually transform academic
and other institutional settings in North America, Australia, and New Zealand
dramatically. As far as I know, the original notion of diversity and
multiculturalism (articulated by Left or progressive North American thinkers)
never quite made it to Europe, and only very recently has intersectionality entered
the academic discourse. Of course, once these notions were appropriated and
instrumentalized by the state, institutions, and corporations, it all went downhill.
Still, some of us who made it through that period are still here, occupying spaces
that would not have existed otherwise, now in the position of creating spaces that
would not have been imaginable.
KS/SL: Do you have an idea of how to overcome the split between the global as
universal and the singular artistic practices that are informed by social and
political issue and practices, but which appear stripped of their complexity under
the guise of the global as merely “culturally diverse”?
DFdS: Let’s try this. The global is not a universal, a formal entity; the global is a
material context, a configuration, which includes juridical mechanisms of total
violence and legal constraint, economic mechanisms (extractive, industrial, and
financial) that facilitate expropriation and exploitation, and the symbolic tools of
raciality that delimit the reach of the modern ethical program ruled by the notion
of humanity and the protections it enjoys.
That being the case, we are still able to think of a singular artistic practice as
exemplary of a given moment (a point in space-time) in this configuration. There
is no ontological (or ethical or aesthetic) role for cultural difference here. To be
sure, this is what I find in Otobong Nkanga’s, the Otolith Group’s, and Carlos
Motta’s work, to name a few – that is, the refusal of cultural difference as the
primary descriptor of that which they are imaging.
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29/11/2023, 22:44 An End to "this" World Denise Ferreira da Silva interviewed by Susanne Leeb and Kerstin Stakemeier
DFdS: This is the question, isn`t it? I mean, a possible formulation of the
question is – and I think this is Sylvia Wynter’s – whether the human is the sine
qua non of any ethical program that takes into account the conjugated (in the
sense of chemistry) modes of subjugation that proliferate in the global present. In
my thinking experiments I try to find ways of escaping dichotomies – such as
interiority/exteriority, self-determination/affectability, temporality/spatiality,
etc. – that have been so central to the delimiting of man’s/the human’s privilege.
KS/SL: One last question. At the moment we are witnessing the return of an
overtly racist politics, declaimed by the heads of purportedly democratic states. In
one of your earlier texts, No-Bodies: Law, Raciality and Violence, you talk about
the “replacement of the phantasmagoric ‘terrorist’ towards the ubiquitous
‘undocumented immigrant’ under the ‘security turn.’” You are referring to the
military as implementing state violence against its own inhabitants, and you talk
especially about the favelas in Rio de Janeiro, which as you state are called the
Gaza Strip of Brazil by the locals. Then, of course, we have Orban, Trump,
Bolsonaro et al. Is Bolosnaro just another, more radical player in this “security
turn”?
For most of the 20th century, cultural difference – according to the thesis that
racial subjugation creates pathological social subjects – played a crucial role in
explaining racial violence away as a response to criminal behavior on the part of
the racial subaltern.
Well, we know all too well how it works; the scores of cases of police killings of
unarmed black persons and the courts’ acquittal of them are very clear. Anyway, I
think that what is happening in Brazil – which is what has been happening in the
Philippines for a while now – is an intensification of the logic of obliteration,
which is announced at the same time as the new administration brings about the
end of the last remaining labor protections, as well as the elimination of
constitutionally guaranteed land rights for indigenous and quilombo
communities.
https://www.textezurkunst.de/en/articles/interview-ferreira-da-silva/ 10/12
29/11/2023, 22:44 An End to "this" World Denise Ferreira da Silva interviewed by Susanne Leeb and Kerstin Stakemeier
DFdS: Let me end with a few questions: What happens when the state’s primary
role becomes not to protect the nation (the people) and their interests but to
protect the corporation (their investors) and their interests? What kind of
political counter discourses and practices are required to face this aspect of the
“corporation-state” that is being put in place in Brazil, which can only be called
the privatization (at the level of the individual citizen) of security through legal
mechanisms that make the legal possession of guns accessible to a larger
contingent of the population and expand the number of cases to which self-
defense as a legal defense applies? What becomes of our charges of police
brutality when the current Brazilian Minister of Justice releases a new security
policy, which in addition to those conditions outlined above makes it the letter of
law for police officers to shoot to kill on site/sight in their incursions into
economically dispossessed urban spaces? And I have not mentioned the increased
number of threats of, and actual violent actions taken against, indigenous
peoples, LGBTI*, and environmental activists in Brazil in the past months. The
very idea of social justice is in danger. The concept of social justice fits well within
the nation state. But the security state is now firmly in place, with the sole
mandate of protecting the economy; it is the “corporation-state,” whose primary
roles for global capital are to create juridical instruments and structures and
mechanisms that facilitate extraction, expropriation, and exploitation and protect
the interest of corporations and their investors. What are we going to do?
Denise Ferreira da Silva is Director and Professor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social
Justice at the University of British Columbia.
Kerstin Stakemeier is a professor of Art Theory and Art Mediation at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste
Nürnberg. She lives in Berlin.
photo credits (in order of appearance): Carol Vidal, Christine Clinckx, Carlos Motta and P•P•O•W
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