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Signifying a critical homology between the fields of Black studies and political theology, gratuitous violence is an important keyword for interrogating how religio-political concepts can afford unique insights into issues of slavery, race, and the human which continue to inform our world today.  

I

Central to the field of Black studies and the recent subfield of Afropessimism in particular, the keyword “gratuitous violence” signifies the critical attempt by scholars such as Frank Wilderson, Rinaldo Walcott, Christina Sharpe, Patrice Douglass, and Calvin Warren to account for and reckon with issues of slavery, race, and the human. As such, “gratuitous violence” encapsulates the field of Black studies’ oftentimes antagonistic relationship to historiographical and Marxist (amongst other) interpretations of slavery. Whereas historians and Marxist-orientated critics have generally understood (American) slavery as a historically-specific institution premised upon the violent exploitation of Black laborers, these Black studies scholars have understood slavery as the unending historical event when the very ontological category of “Black” laborers or persons was violently created—and continues to be recreated. 

The concept of gratuitous violence has understandably been traced to Orlando Patterson’s classic work Slavery and Social Death(1982). In that study, Patterson defines the “constituent elements” of slavery as “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons,” a definition of slavery neatly summed up in the idea of “social death” (13). Patterson’s analysis of slavery as a system of social death was notable for its opposition to economic interpretations of slavery as primarily an exploitative system of labor. In that regard, gratuitous violence has been employed within the field of Black studies to distinguish between forms of violence: namely, an exploitative violence experienced by persons and a “metaphysical violence” that constitutes existence itself (as discussed in Patrice Douglass and Frank Wilderson’s “The Violence of Presence”). 

The work of Patterson, then, is no doubt informative to the field of Black studies; however, his delineation of the totalizing power of the master over the slave arguably does not capture the full range of meanings inherent within the concept of gratuitous violence as employed by Black studies scholars. In particular, the framework of power buttressing Patterson’s idea of social death cannot account for the religio-theological dimensions of the concept of gratuitous violence. As the rest of this essay will explore, a critical relationship exists between how Black studies scholars think about slavery’s violent creation of racialized persons and how theologians think about God’s creation out of the world out of nothing. On one hand, the Christian doctrine of ex nihilo articulates the absolute distinction and unequal relation between God and humanity as characterized by God’s divine goodness, so that the condition of possibility for human existence is the plenitude of God’s benevolence and love. On the other hand, the Black studies’ concept of gratuitous violence articulates the relationship between Black persons and the world (and the status of Black people within the world) as “always already void of relationality,” so that the condition of possibility for Black persons continues to be the violence of racial existence itself (Red, White, and Black, 17). Signifying a critical homology between the fields of Black studies and political theology, gratuitous violence is an important keyword for interrogating how religio-political concepts can afford unique insights into issues of slavery, race, and the human which continue to inform our world today.  

II

As a keyword signifying distinct perspectives of the field of Black studies, gratuitous violence might be seen as a microcosm of an underlying grammar sometimes antagonistic to and incompatible with the grammars of other fields of study. Frank B. Wilderson has referred to this grammar as a “grammar of suffering,” a phrase meant to distinguish between the violence of racial enslavement and other forms of violence (e.g., “exploitation” and “alienation”). An appropriation of Orlando Patterson’s definition of “social death,” Wilderson’s “grammar of suffering” defines the “ontological position” of the Slave—in contradistinction to the ontological position of the Marxian or class “laborer”—as one who is “generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure” (Red, White, and Black, 11). Crucially, Patterson sees these “constituent elements” of slavery as confined to the various institutional forms of slavery throughout world history. For Wilderson, however, dishonor, gratuitous violence, and kinlessness continue to formulate in tandem a grammar of suffering which characterizes Black lives even after the institutional dissolution of African-based slavery.

Forging an irrevocable ontological knot between “Slaveness” and “Blackness,” Wilderson pushes Patterson’s notion of social death beyond its historiographical and sociological limits. He revises Patterson’s ideas on the historical violence of enslavement into a radical claim about the transhistorical violence of race or racial being. As a result, gratuitous violence signifies in recent Afropessimistic thought both the historical domination of the master over the slave and the transhistorical existence of Blackness as Slaveness. 

Etymologically, then, gratuitous violence means more than the two words within the keyword ostensibly denote. As employed within Patterson’s historiographical and sociological framework, gratuitous violence might be defined somewhat straightforwardly as the “naked” violence the master inflicts against the slave (whether physical, psychological, or symbolic) without warrant. When employed by Wilderson and others, though, gratuitous violence suggests religio-theological notions reminiscent of the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. As Wilderson asserts: “…modernity marks the emergence of a new ontology because it is an era in which an entire race appears, people who, a priori, that is prior to the contingency of the ‘transgressive act’ (such as losing a war or being convicted of a crime), stand as socially dead in relation to the rest of the world” (Red, White, and Black, 17-18). Wilderson’s use of the terms “a priori” and “contingency” to describe the “appear[ance]” of “an entire race” can be likened to the doctrine of God’s creation of the world “out of nothing.” From that politico-theological purview, gratuitous violence might be understood as a keyword signifying a perversion of creatio ex nihilo, that being racial slavery’s violent creation of Black persons themselves. 

III

Perhaps the central axiom of Christianity, creatio ex nihilo is the cornerstone for other major Christian beliefs. For what one believes about God’s divine creation of the world informs what one believes about God’s transcendental relationship to and providential plan for the world, from the Fall of Man to the Last Judgment. Since its canonical clarification in the early church, then, the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo has continually (re)articulated the distinctiveness of Christianity in opposition to other philosophies, religions, and sciences. As Janet Martin Soskice summarizes, creatio ex nihilo “precipitated a revolution in western metaphysics” (184). This simultaneous centrality within Christianity and antagonism to other belief systems accounts for the important role of creatio ex nihilo as a metaphysical and theological concept within the field of Black studies.

Though implicit within its Judaic beginnings, the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo became an explicit Christian tenet within the Roman world. The early church systematically delineated God’s creation of the world out of nothing in opposition to notions about the eternality of matter. From the philosophical dictum ex nihilo nihil fit (or from nothing, nothing can come), the world either emanates inexorably from God (Neoplatonism) or co-exists eternally with God (Aristotelianism). In opposition to these claims, the early church articulated the creation of the world as a free and intentional act by a selfexistent and eternal Creator and, by consequence, insisted upon the ontological and contingent dependency of creation upon the Creator. 

Creatio ex nihilo thus exemplifies a distinctive metaphysical and theological grammar for articulating the relationship between God and the world/humanity and the ontological nature of that relationship. To view the world as created out of nothing is to define creaturely existence as relation to God, a relation defined not by antagonism, rivalry, or dishonor, but divine goodness. Brian D. Robinette explains that in addition to its ostensible moral sense, “divine goodness” refers to the metaphysical sense of God’s transcendent self-sufficiency as Creator whose relationship to creation is “utterly gratuitous,” so that no tyrannical opposition can exist between them (535). Put otherwise, the hierarchal terms of sex, class, and race common to critical theory—e.g., male/female, rich/poor, white/Black—do not apply to God and the world because God and the world do not “coexist” within the same ontological “continuum” (537-38). As John Webster contends, rather than debasing the creature, the “pure non-reciprocal gratuity” of God’s creation of the world designates the infinite worth of creaturely existence in its very sui generis origination from the infinite plenitude of God’s love and generosity (157).  

IV

Black studies scholars have employed the notion of gratuitous violence to signify the historical event of racial slavery as a veritable perversion of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. If second century theologians defined creaturely existence as originating within and sustained by a relation to God’s divine goodness (existence-as-relation to the divine), Black studies scholars have defined Black existence as originating within and sustained by a perverse relation to the world (existence-as-non-relation to the Human). Rinaldo Walcott thus states that the Middle Passage engendered the very “invention of Black people,” the “metaphysical and ontological transformation that led to Africans entering the holds of ships and disembarking as Black” (52; 57). Following Wilderson, Walcott’s discernment of a “metaphysical” and “ontological” difference between “Africans” and “Black” derives from his claim that the hold of the slave ship “transform[ed]” an indigenous African existence into a socially dead Black existence. Walcott makes clear how the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo makes possible an articulation of a grammar of violence—specifically, the gratuitous violence of racial slavery—not available within prevailing political and historiographical discourses. Whereas other discourses can imagine a violence enacted against or experienced by certain persons, Black studies scholars have appropriated the language of creatio ex nihilo to imagine what Patrice Douglass calls a “metaphysical violence” which “constitutes” and sustains an entire race of persons themselves. 

Within the critical purview of such Black studies scholars, God’s creation of the world out of nothing becomes racial slavery’s creation of Blackness as nothing. On one hand, Christian theology imagines the “nothing” out of which the world is created as a “pure negation,” so that creaturely existence is understood as originating and deriving worth from God’s “utter plenitude and sufficiency” (“Love is Also a Lover of Life,” 163). On the other hand, certain Black studies scholars have imagined the “nothing” of Black existence as another type of pure negation, a social death in which Black existence is understood as originating from and having lack of worth due to a perverse relationship to the world. To be “embodied nothing,” Calvin Warren writes, “is to inhabit the void of relationality” within “an antiblack world” (32; 43). In turn, just as God’s creation of the world out of nothing is not simply an event within history but the event of history itself, racial slavery’s creation of Blackness as nothing or non-relation is the event of modernity in which we still live. For Christina Sharpe, the “birth canal of Black women or women who birth blackness…is another kind of domestic Middle Passage,” insofar as both the “belly of the ship” and of Black women “birt[h] blackness (as no/relation)” (74). Sharpe’s designation of Black women’s “birth canal” as symbolically and continuously re-enacting the Middle Passage rejects progressive or redemptive notions of history. Although the institution of slavery has ended, the Middle Passage continues to re-create Blackness as nothing or no relation. 

V

Despite such bleak claims, Black studies scholars also hold on to the prophetic edge of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. Inseparable from belief that God created the world out of nothing but God’s own divine goodness is the belief that the world and humanity within it are “fallen” or have been corrupted by sin. The “Fall of Man,” however, is but one chapter in God’s providential story also including God’s reconciliation to humanity through the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus and the ultimate redemption of the world in the last days. Notably, the Black studies scholars explored thus far reject both political ideals of progress and religious narratives of redemption. Yet their rejection of political progress and religious redemption gives way to a radical embracement of a politico-theological prophecy predicated upon the destruction of the world.

Indeed, what is arguably most controversial about the field of Black studies, and the subfield of Afropessimism in particular, is its uncompromising view of the structural role of anti-Black violence in the world. Wilderson asserts that “Human life is dependent on Black death for its existence and for its coherence” (41-42). This perverse relation between anti-Black violence and the Human—the “Human” involving the predominate political, social, national, and religious delineations—is irresolvable. Any solutions resting upon reforming or redeeming the Human are bound to fail and ultimately serve to reinforce the perverse relation between anti-Black violence and the Human. 

Instead, Black studies scholars re-think critique beyond the limits of reconciliation, redemption, or even redress. Such “nonnegotiable critique of white supremacy and all its post-Middle Passage legacies” is realized as a politico-theological prophecy based upon an unflinching stance towards the anti-Black world (The Long Emancipation, 91). For Walcott, Blackness “in its most radical livability seeks to reject and rethink the human as a category through which pure radical possibilities for life-making might be available for all of us.” Such “pure radical possibilities” portend nothing else than the end of the world as we know it and a re-imagination of the human as “another life-form altogether” (The Long Emancipation, 72).


Annotated Bibliography:

David D. Robinette, “The Difference Nothing Makes: Creatio Ex Nihilo, Resurrection,  and Divine Gratuity,” Theological Studies 72, no.3 (2011): 525-557.

In his essay, Robinette considers the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo from the perspective of God’s radical transcendence and creation’s utter dependence upon Him. He convincingly argues that such ontological asymmetry does not entail a “relationship of rivalry” but one premised upon God’s divine goodness and generosity. 

Janet M. Soskice, “Creatio Ex Nihilo: its Jewish and Christian Foundations,” in  Creation and the God of Abraham, ed. David B. Burrell (Cambridge: Cambridge  University Press, 2010), 24-39. 

In her essay, Soskice provides a useful overview of the history of creatio ex nihilo. She explains how second century rabbis and theologians articulated a unique doctrine in opposition to the claims of Greek philosophy and Gnostic religion.  

Rinaldo Walcott, The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom (Durham:  Duke University Press, 2021).

A meditation on the problem of “emancipation” in the global history of Black life, The Long Emancipation surveys many of the key issues central to the field of Black studies (such as “Diaspora” and the “Human”). In concise and memorable prose, Walcott interrogates the violence subtending Black existence since the era of racial slavery and imagines the radical “life-forms” that Black existence nonetheless makes possible. 

Frank Wilderson, Afropessimism (New York: Liveright Press, 2020).

Incorporating the controversial critical analysis (Red, White, and Black) and personal self-reflection (Incognegro) of his earlier works, Wilderson’s Afropessimism offers a useful overview of his theory of anti-Black violence. The chapters are discontinuously composed of vignettes of memories and criticism, and in totality, they provide a more approachable introduction to Wilderson’s difficult ideas than his previous academic studies. 

Survivance

Native survivance, in [Gerald] Vizenor’s parlance, is a combination of the words “survival” and “resistance,” and it “creates a sense of presence.” According to him, “The suffix -ance designates a condition, a nature, or a quality that is more than a mere description of survival.”

Relationality

Where relationality is most productive in critical projects is where it transcends its projects of critique and explores the possibilities—ethical, political, and theological—of its account of subjectivity and community.

Martyrdom

Facing the violence of contemporary terror, many intellectuals have spoken in our present times about a return of political theology and religion in its violent forms. Attention to the concept of martyrdom has reappeared due to an increasing interest in religious conflicts.

Autopoiesis

In autopoiesis, there is no separation between what we do and the particular way in which the world appears to us.

Sovereignty

Where state sovereignty as theology would have subjected groups accept their condition with its attending violence and suffering, the micro sovereignty I propose here – not merely as a futuristic idea, but more as a reflection on how subjected groups have dealt with subjection – invites us not to accept that violence and suffering, but to find creative ways out of it through the cracks of Empire.

Abolition

Abolition is a process of imagining alternatives to the settler colonial, carceral present; it requires modes of kinship and care to replace prisons and policing.

Gratuitous Violence

Signifying a critical homology between the fields of Black studies and political theology, gratuitous violence is an important keyword for interrogating how religio-political concepts can afford unique insights into issues of slavery, race, and the human which continue to inform our world today.  

Techno-Orientalism

Asian American literary criticism’s analysis of contemporary orientalisms centered around the figuration of Asian subjectivities reminds political theologians that unconscious (white) fear and fascination with the Orient still guides political and theoretical engagement with the Asian “other.”

Thing

Thing as concept can be helpful to elucidate the specific yet ambiguous interaction of the religious and the political. Using recent thingly theoretical work within these two spheres, with an emphasis on body and shape, I will suggest ways through which thing (and things and thingness) both clarifies and challenges that interaction.

Diaspora

Diaspora might be a problem for political progressives for the very reason that it is so alluring. Diaspora promises both freedom and connection: freedom from national borders or the essentialisms of race and language, connection between people who affirm shared memory and heritage.
But heritage is never really free.

Blackness

If there is one thing that can be said about blackness, it is this: blackness is unruly.

Black Reason

Black reason is propelled by a fantastic imaginary, a changeling animus that aggregates and transmogrifies the desires and fears of whiteness.

Racial Capitalism

The historical and theoretical relationships between race and capitalism are internally contested and in need of further exploration from theologians and scholars of religion.

Eugenics

Sometimes referred to as “population control,” other times “better breeding,” eugenics has been seen as a religious solution to social ills, and sometimes a new religion unto itself.

Humanism

Gilroy’s “planetary humanism” contributes to political theology by offering more than a critique: in his work, humanism is a starting point, a concept to guide multicultural political projects today.

Risk

Official responses to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have encouraged us to understand risk in individual terms. They’re wrong: risk is all about interdependence.

Food Sovereignty

Food sovereignty represents a refusal of a globally commodified food system in favor of systems and institutions that support self-sufficient communities.

Doxa

Doxa is a term used in sociology to contend with belief and orthodoxy without reducing either to behavior or cognition. It explores disposition and embodied belief—the gut sense of the world which is acquired through practice rather than discourse.

Settler Colonialism

I propose Decolonial Settler Theology as a contextual political theology that is uniquely the task of the settler, who must face their own complicity in narratives of ongoing colonization and aim at their undoing.

Police

In an era during which police institutions and ideology are so fundamental to our cultural common-sense, how can theologians and critical theorists challenge this form of power?

Taboo

This essay takes taboo as a critical term to trace the history of our modern present and as a conceptual companion with which to think through the complex entanglement of the ethical, the theological, and the political.

Affect

What is still nascent… is an explicit conversation between political theology and critical theories of affect, particularly in a way that might contribute to constructive projects. The sort of political theology that might emerge from such collaboration would consider how affective regimes intersect with theological constructions or religious performances.

Kinship

While kinship has traditionally held a vibrant conceptual life in anthropological inquiry, more recent studies on kinship as a form of spiritual relationality have opened up a new space of interdisciplinary exploration for political theology.

Command/Commandment

The modern state form itself is inextricable from the commandement, not just as an emblem for sovereignty in Schmitt’s sense, but also because the exemplary political form of modernity, the nation-state, has racist and exclusionary tendencies that can be understood as political-theological transfers of monotheistic principles.

Mourning

That structural violence is always also relational, proximate, and personal is, perhaps, one of the core insights that the concept of mourning brings to the fore for political theology.

Personhood

The conversation about nature’s personhood and rights is always political, often legal, and sometimes theological. Most importantly, it is a localized conversation about the boundaries of a given community – who is part of the community and who isn’t.

Sympathy

For political theology, we might find ourselves compelled by practices that seek to connect us with our ecologies, our communities, and our relations with ourselves – in ways that are more about humility and provisionality than finding cures or solutions.

Queer

Queer, I think, should remain different, differing, dissonant, and plural. It shouldn’t contract or calcify into anything singular or solid.

Care

If theorizations of care are to more directly address the current “crisis of care,” we need not only to prioritize the kinds of embodied, particularized care that care ethics has highlighted in the past, but to explore a wider range of caring relationships and their diverse structures.

Matter

A preliminary question for political theology is how to understand the meaning and significance of matter. The response to this question shapes how a political theology does or doesn’t engage political economy and theological tradition.

Money

The triangulation of money, sovereignty, and divinity is a good point of entry to study the mutual constitution of theological and political concepts and the questions about ultimate value and social form that they raise.

Refusal

Refusal is a strong current resisting the structure of settler colonialism. It crashes, churns, and erodes the death-dealing dams of settler knowing. Its path turns away from the settler’s gaze.

Seva

Seva lends itself to easy appropriation across political and religious contexts, while also furnishing mutually intelligible tropes of service, welfare, and social betterment.

Abstraction

Political theology intimately understands that given reality teems with forms of life that remain opaque to us.

Flesh

Spillers, Cheng, and Halberstam provide us with tools to approach the histories of violence, economics, relationships, desires, and contestation that infuse our experiences with flesh in its multiplicity. Flesh is never neutral.

Indigeneity

It is not always possible (or advisable) to separate the “political” from the “religious” or “cultural” in Indigenous contexts. Indeed, all of these are concepts developed by outsiders to describe Indigenous life. Instead, Indigeneity invites scholars of political theology and related fields to consider the relationships between these threads of cultural life.

Animal

As we watch the illusion that was Man fall apart, we also see these more-than-human worlds that Man called “animal” disrupting and revealing the cracks and fractures in his own divine intentions.

Temporality I: History

William Apess, like Walter Benjamin a century later, sought to shift the paradigms of society with history and theology as orienting poles for colonial critique. Anticipating Benjamin, Apess looked to those who had been wrecked by the advance of colonialism as the grounding site for historical and political theological inquiry.

Temporality II: Futurity

Both Benjamin and Apess discern that historical narratives are imbricated with notions of futurity, that is, which bodies and polities are allowed to inhabit and thrive within the temporality in which the “not yet” and the “always already” co-constitute each other.

Natality

In this short essay, written from my perspective as a Jewish feminist, I draw together a plurality of engagements with natality to engender new conversations in political theology.

Critical Race Theory

CRT is a framework or an approach to understanding the way racism is foundational to systems of judicial, political, social, cultural, religious, and theological power.

Demonology

[S]ituating demonology more fully in its religious and theological contexts furnishes resources that not only nuance understandings of movements for whom demonization is central, but also recontextualize discussions of core political theological concepts, including sovereignty, power, economy, subjectivity, and freedom.

Vulnerability

From Myanmar to Mariupol, from the streets of Memphis to the waves and winds of the Mediterranean Sea: resistance to violence takes many forms. So does political protest against precarity. At which point does the unavoidable vulnerability of the living condition come to expression as political agency? Can such precarious politics constitute or configure an alternative community?

Hunger Strike

“Instead of neatly separating the forms of resistance to biosovereignty into life-affirming struggles and necroresistance and mapping them (and life and death) onto the reform/revolt dichotomy, I suggest that we conceive life and death as relational rather than oppositional categories. For every differentiation and intensification of death creates new possibilities of life; and every differentiation and intensification of life entails experiences of “death” that cannot be reduced to the power of one’s death.”

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