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The Riot of the Literal

When Hortense Spillers speaks of ‘the hieroglyphics of the flesh’, she closes in on the lethally generative coincidence between racialized violence and symbolic production. Reading backward from her essay's last words, in which she incites an emergent praxis of naming, this study of ‘Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe’ moves with attention to the unsettling of figure and ground that Spillers's writing induces. In doing so, I draw out her insights into theoretical abstraction's complicity in extracting value from colonial slavery's dispossessing mark on black flesh. Kazimir Malevich's Black Square models this dynamic, insofar as the dereliction of those who are epidermally marked grounds, in eclipse, the freedom of ostensibly non-racial abstraction. For Spillers, a corresponding differential between the figural and literal becomes a site of intervention for discomposing grammars that codify asymmetrical laws of use, such that the forcible inscription of non-whites serves instrumentally as raw material for the predication of ‘Human’ meaning. Spillers's disruption of the tropological offers an occasion for working through theory's ‘death’ as a problematic re-centered on the intransigence of flesh to theoretical reflection; and, further, points the way to a feminist practice of reading, living, and dying that does not forsake racialised literality.