Email: meb10135@nyu.edu
There are so many layers of Kindred by Octavia Butler that one can write books about, but in my reading response I want to focus on the topic of temporality.
In her astounding analysis, Denise Ferreira de Silva writes about “the three onto-epistemological pillars (the theory of knowing, theory of being, and a theory of practice)—namely, separability, determinacy, and sequentiality,” which Dana, the main character in Butler’s Kindred, violates. I am interested in how an artwork (in this instance, a science fiction novel) can destabilize these three onto-epistemological pillars, revealing them to be completely inaccurate descriptors of the reality we experience in general. I will propose here that hauntology, Derrida’s project of haunted ontology or ontology of haunting, can support and complement Ferreira de Silva’s reading of Butler’s Kindred.
Ferreira de Silva writes more about the concept of separability (and the lack thereof) in On Difference Without Separability Ferreira de Silva explains the concept of separability in the following way: “the view that all that can be known about the things of the world is what is gathered by the forms (space and time) of the intuition and the categories of the Understanding (quantity, quality, relation, modality) – everything else about them remains inaccessible and irrelevant to knowledge and consequently determinacy, the view that knowledge results from the Understanding’s ability to produce formal constructs, which it can use to determine (i.e. decide) the true nature of the sense impressions gathered by the forms of intuition.” (Ferreira de Silva, On Difference Without Separability, p. 61.)
Karen Barad is one of the contemporary thinkers who has expanded on Derrida’s project of hauntology, pairing it with quantum physics and queer and feminist theory. In Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations Barad explains a lesson from quantum physics: “Quantum superpositions (at least on Bohr’s account) tell us that being/becoming is an indeterminate matter: there simply is not a determinate fact of the matter.” (p. 251)
Derrida describes hauntology in the following way in Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International: “To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology.” (p. 65)
My point here is that the remarks that de Silva makes about Kindred by Butler (namely, about the failure of the three onto-epistemological pillars to support and hold together our understanding of the world) are not only applicable to this sci-fi novel but to reality and our experience of it. As argued by Derrida and Barad, time fails to satisfy our fantasy of a straight arrow-like procession of events. We are rather confronted with an experience of time that is out of joint – which forces us to deal with debt that was never ours to pay, and which makes it impossible to turn ourselves away from the past or the future. In haunted temporality, no event is ever fully closed, fully gone – like Dana, we may have to meet with some ancestors whom we’d rather never see. That’s temporality of response-ability – of being able, or even being obliged, to respond.
de Silva, Denise Ferreira. "On Difference Without Separability." 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, INCERTEZA VIVA 32. 2016. 57-65. https://www.are.na/block/7078431. Web. October 28, 2023Jacques Derrida. Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2012. Barad, Karen Michelle. Meeting the universe halfway : quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Butler, Octavia. 1979. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press,