Sensing Blackness, or: the (Racial) Difference of the Same

This paper stages an encounter between the notion of différance in Jacques Derrida or Jean-Luc Nancy and various theorizations of blackness by Christina Sharpe, Achille Mbembe, and David Marriott. I suggest that différance offers a useful framework for understanding the claim to "ontological blackness" in Sharpe and Marriott that troubles the boundary between, on the one hand, the essentializing logic of racial difference in its colonial guise, and on the other, the universal humanism in Mbembe which erases blackness as merely a non-ontological historical fantasy. Différance allows one to treat racial difference as, in Nancy's words, the "difference of the same," escaping the reductive logic of both difference and universalism. Throughout the paper, I trace a line of différance across the way that Sharpe and Marriott explore blackness. For Sharpe, this emerges from her description of "anagrammatical" or "annotated" blackness, where blackness is defined by its shifting definition and interpretation that always defers any essentialized meaning, and thus where it forms an "excess" close to Nancy's understanding of the excess or "suspended step" of sense. I then take this argument one step further through a reading of a Derridean logic in the work of David Marriott, who contends that blackness, properly speaking, can never appear as anything but a negation. In this way, blackness operates through precisely its place of non-presence or perpetual erasure and deferral, and différance offers a helpful corrective in "making sense" of this blackness that can never appear. I therefore contend that différance opens toward a properly liberatory logic of blackness that follows its own tracks and cannot be essentialized into "universalism" or "difference" since it never truly arrives as such.