Denise Ferreira da Silva’s work dissects race regarding colonial and economic perspectives by juxtaposing Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979) imaginary and theoretical authors Aníbal Quijano, Sylvia Wynter, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Marx, in order to offer a contribution of the “capital as juridical-economic architecture” (2017, p. 106) model that assembles both social and financial Black lives nowadays.
By using passages from Kindred to build a solid Kantian critical analysis, Silva points what she called “racial dialectic” to demonstrate why race shouldn’t remain as a datum, a matter, instead of being part of an economic category, as a foundation for an economic model that already uses the Black people (and Latinxs) as value for bank profits by extracting their “financial deficit, namely the lack of assets and collateral, which renders them tools of colonial and racial subjugation” (2017, p. 89).
Aesthetically thinking (perhaps poetically), it’s interesting that Silva wrote “Thanks to the resilience of the Kantian program, this is a task for the intuition and the imagination” (2017, p. 111). As the connection between Dana and Rufus in Kindred, the unpayable debt seems to be present in a certain proportion in Silva’s paper. By using Kant method, the author (who is a black, latina, woman person) defies Kant himself, using his tools and methods to raise a substantial analysis that confront some of his own racist and misogynistic bases present in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795) and the Foundation of the metaphysics of morals (1785), to point a few of them. In the first, Kant refers to the “savages” as people who are passionate about their non-European rules as animals, people who aren’t able to think rationally. Besides, he indicates the purity of white race due to the purity of the iron in their blood, referring to the historical scientific practices of classification of races through biology experiments. In the second, he confabulates about the liberty of all men, and makes clear that women must be subservient to her husband. Her analysis, thus, complete a dialectical materialist theory where, in the past, her own existence as a thinker was the antithesis herself.
While Silva uses imagination to fulfill the spaces that, not even were ignored, but they were thought and chosen to remain that way as a juridic-economical foundation (in Kant, in a colonial system, in Marx value equation), it’s possible to imagine with the author how her writing will be sequentially juxtaposed in a future differently from this reality.
Kant, Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. US: Pearson, 1785. Print.Kant, Immanuel. Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. US: Legare Street Press, 1975. Print.da Silva, Denise Ferreira. 2017. "Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time" The documenta 14 Reader. Edited by Quinn Latimer, and Adam Szymczyk. 81-113. Kassel, Munich: documenta and Museum Fridericianum, Prestel Verlag, Butler, Octavia. 1979. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press,