“What can I hope?”: Race, Abyssal Aesthetics, and the Failure of Beauty
Image credit: Limestone deposits along the Tombigbee River in Epes, Alabama, evidence of the Cretaceous period coastline that produced the fertile soil of the U.S. Black Belt (still from “The Ground Below,” Human Footprint, PBS, 2023)
This talk addresses the function of the beautiful in accounts of aesthetic and ethical intersubjectivity. Immanuel Kant’s racialized ideal of human beauty and morality affords an interrogation of colorblind optimism. Engaging the promise of beauty as that of abstraction from the ground of phenomenal experience, I contend with beauty’s failure amidst ongoing histories of racialization and white supremacy. As an alternative to abstraction as transcendence, I turn to Frantz Fanon, Arthur Schopenhauer, and my own embodiment to refigure abstraction as abyssal descent.
Jessica Ruffin is Assistant Professor of Film and Media in the Literature Section at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research and teaching constellate media theory and historiography, German aesthetic traditions, philosophies of race, and auto-philosophical exploration. Her work has been published in New German Critique, qui parle, and Millennium Film Journal. Her current book project, Becoming Amphibious, or the question of ethics in white supremacist worlding is a work of speculative media philosophy, which seeks figures of ethical receptivity capable of undoing white supremacy and racial capitalism worlding environments.
