A Reading by Boz Deseo Garden

In conjunction with tabernacle, FoCA presents “The Nocturnal Letter: Blackness, Enjoyment, and the Slavery of Discourse,” an abridged reading/preview of an upcoming essay of the same name by Boz Deseo Garden.

Garden briefly takes up Lacanian frameworks of desire, enjoyment, and suffering and further situates their reliance upon racialized language of slavery and abyssal blackness. Discourse is figured here as a temporary architecture, the decrepit labyrinth, which the Subject establishes atop the “barracoon of the real” in every instance of speech. Through an Afro-pessimist framework, Garden continues a tradition in contemporary critical Black thought which asks: how do our most radical paradigms of thought continue to evade the grammars of Slavery which are decidedly still with us?

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