In his essay, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” Fred Moten asks, “Can there be an aesthetic sociology or a social poetics of nothingness?” This seminar takes up Moten’s question, exploring its terms and their implications for undisciplined, embodied, and coalitional study. What’s the relationship between “Blackness” and “Nothingness”? How might poesis (broadly construed) catalyze the generativity of flesh consigned to nothingness? What forms of unthought collectivity (queer, ecological, etc) can this poetry make palpable, especially on the edges of what counts as poetry? Much like Moten, who refuses to define mysticism or flesh in his essay, the seminar aims to proliferate approaches to radical embodiment and its “verbivocovisual” (de)formations (de Campos). 

The mystical vocabularies emerging in Black Studies (via Moten, Frank B. Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, Christina Sharpe, Nathaniel Mackey, M. NourbeSe Philip, J. Kameron Carter, etc.) unname excessive, fugitive fleshliness amidst what Moten calls “the burial ground of the subject.” Specific to black performance, Moten’s mysticism describes survival and sociality “in the wake” (Sharpe) of the Middle Passage. The brutal nothingness of political death remains, for Moten, unthinkably generative; he understands black performance as insistent animaterial fleshliness. While specific, Moten’s mysticism is also radically ecumenical. As “consent not to be a single being” (Glissant), mysticism in the flesh refuses the carceral purity of racialized categories. This seminar, then, explores social poetics (de)formed by diverse mystical traditions, cosmologies, (a)gnosticisms, and embodied practices of attunement. How do poetic forms (of many kinds) improvise aliveness amidst genocide and geocide? Where do generative nothingnessess, socialities, and mysticisms converge, impurely, across historical and geographical distances? 

Papers are welcome to explore single author/artists and/or theoretical debates, and comparative projects are also welcome. As we investigate plural mysticisms, difference, limit, and legacies of violence will also inform discussion. How might we theorize “limit” as formal constraint, exhaustion, and/or unknowing? While Moten clearly distinguishes his work from religious ontology linked to antiblackness, threads of Afropessimist thought resonate with the unsayings of apophatic theology. How might “mysticism in the flesh” as black “paraontology” address, disrupt, beat within or break through religious vocabularies and epistemologies? What are the limits of poetic practice?

Papers might explore: Black radical theory, jazz, Native cosmologies, experimental poetry, queer occultisms, medieval Christian mystics, “mu,” broken/improvisational forms…

Approaches may include conglomerations of: sound studies, poetics, theology, film studies, ecocriticism…