Denise Ferreira da Silva

SH

I have so many questions for you. I thought that we could start by talking about your collaborations with artists. You have frequently worked with Arjuna Neuman and Susanne M. Winterling, to name a few. With Arjuna, you made the videos Serpent Rain, 4 Waters, and Soot Breath, and now you two are working on a film about air. I would love to hear your thoughts about working with artists and the possibilities that art grants you, and whether there is something in working with artists that your other work as a philosopher doesn't allow you to do.

DFdS

This is one of the most difficult questions to answer and it is because I only reflect on it when I’m asked. So perhaps the best way to respond is by saying that if you watch the films and see how we do it, and if you read something or listen to a talk of mine, you will find the same ideas in all of it. But in each of these formats, the ideas come in a different way, and they are not entirely translatable.

So, it's not that I write an article and then it goes into a film. The work is not to translate. Rather, the ideas come, and then in the films, they are developed in a particular way because they are developed in collaboration with Arjuna, who is also a thinker. We kind of meet in the films: I am there, and he's there, and then something comes about. It's been eight years now, or nine years, so we have developed a way of working together and we agree on how certain things that we want to convey should, whether through sound or image or interviewing somebody, or when we are editing and we immediately know, "Okay, so this will work. This will not work." And that working relationship happened over time.

It is also kind of an impossible question to answer because I don't have an "intelligent" answer. I do not privilege one format and then say that the others are just where I go do something else. Over those many years, working with Arjuna and doing some work all by myself, and then collaborating with other people, like also with Susanne, Valentina, and with Jota Mombaça, Michele Matthews, with Carolina Itzá in Brazil, and other artists. Sometimes ideas come from a collaboration, so we are thinking about doing—somebody invites me to do something, and I say yes because I'm curious. And then from doing that work together, something comes about.

SH

It's interesting what you say about translation and that some parts just aren't possible to translate because I think the sensorium, or sensory and sensual aspects, are really important to your work as well. You just mentioned sound, and with Valentina Desideri, you've been doing the Sensing Salons where you facilitate collaborative study and experiment with tools such as tarot, astrology, reiki and so on. And so, I think there's something in that which doesn't translate into writing, and which I guess the medium of film makes possible that other formats do not.

DFdS

Exactly. Especially sound, but also the images. Soot Breath is a kind of a funny film because we had a plan, and then went to Death Valley to do the first filming where we spent hours and hours in the desert. It was hot, it was beautiful. We had lots and lots and lots of images, but no movement. And then we realized, "Wow, okay, how do you do this? How do you make a film on the element earth?" Of course, there will be something that will be like a movement of the kind that the film imposes. But at the same time, there must be something else because just the images, the movement of the images will not be enough. And then we found that, "Oh, of course it's all about texture." So, the images are not so much about the movement, but about how it feels to look at them. That offered something else in the film that we did not anticipate.

That then makes me think about other things that are not necessarily related to the films and not immediately tied to philosophical questions, but I know they are because it's about sensibility. The possible formulation of those questions has not arrived yet, but I know that something is there. It might be explored through writing or maybe not, maybe in the Sensing Salon.

SH

Yeah, it also has to do with really pushing the boundaries of what thought can be, what it can do. I know that you work for a long time with the same ideas. And I think sometimes it's also about things that are not immediately clear or visible, but which nonetheless inform one’s thinking, feeling, and then perhaps manifest at a different point. This reminds me of the first time I met you. I don't think you'll remember this, but it was in 2014 in Bern when you gave a talk that was inspired by Hermann Rorschach’s inkblots.

DFdS

Oh, yeah.

SH

You were drawing on the four elements already then and looking at the post-Enlightenment continental philosophies’ disconnection between knowledge and being. You made a cosmogram for Rorschach. I am really interested in the different epistemologies that you were addressing at that moment already—knowing without separation, connecting scientific and indigenous knowledge, somatic approaches or maybe methods where it's not as clear yet where they will go. I would love to hear more about those different epistemologies and also perhaps the role of tarot, astrology and so on in your work.

DFdS

Yeah, maybe I can start from the end of what you are saying, because that is where it starts. I have been studying, practicing, studying astrology and tarot for decades now, astrology for more decades than tarot and then some other things. I started with astrology in secondary school because of math. Back then we didn't have software, so if you wanted to do somebody's chart, you would have to find information from books, and then you had to calculate. I was fascinated by the fact that I could do some math and then have a whole picture of somebody's lifetime. So that was, to me, a discovery. Tarot I learned later, but by the time I learned it, I already had a sense of it, because I had seen people giving readings, and I went for readings. I had more of an understanding of the dynamic between the reader and the person for whom they're reading than an interest in prediction.

Now the critique of the prevailing mode of knowing, and the kind of thinking that sustains it, comes later and is, obviously, related to my academic work. It was something that became crucial to me as I completed Toward a Global Idea of Race. I finished writing the manuscript in 2002, and I finished going over the copy editor’s comments in 2006, as it took a long time for them to come out. As I was going over their comments and suggestions, I read the book that I had written such a long time ago and realized that it just showed the limits of thinking, the limits of thinking given by space and time. I was basically like, "Well, we have a problem." If the boundaries, the possibility for thinking are delimited by space and time, and if that is also what supports the kind of ideas or the justification for actions that are fundamentally violent and otherwise unacceptable; that is, if this particular way of thinking allows for them, we have a problem, which is not only epistemological, it is ethical. Toward a Global Idea of Race dealt with that.

Of course, there was more to it, something that I will call now of a “metaphysical dimension,” which was left hanging, in the back of my head, even as I was writing on police brutality and critical legal theory. In 2012 or 2013, it came to the fore again when I started doing this work with Valentina, who was already studying palm reading and had developed her two practices, Fake Therapy and Political Therapy. And then through the work with Valentina, initially, and later the films with Arjuna, which came just after, I realized, "But I have all these." I have all these practices which are part of ways of knowing, which recall ways of knowing that are not the ones that we have inherited from people like Galileo and then Newton and Bacon and all those other guys. But they are ways of knowing, which those guys were practicing! Bacon was a magician, Galileo was an astrologer, Newton was an alchemist. Okay, so then the modern philosophies in those varied practices met each other. As I studied those tools further in the practice with Valentina, I saw how all those other philosophers departed from something, a way of thinking that was not delimited by space and time, but by something else, which is captured by the classic elements (water, air, fire, and earth).

By the way, something that I realized over the years is that I like thinking. It is pleasurable to me; so, I have to figure out how else can we do it. I’m more comfortable talking about abstract matters. Realizing how the way of thinking I have been raised in and learned to appreciate—that is rational thinking—is so fundamentally violent, of course, was a crisis. Now, to me, it is not a matter of rejecting thinking or seeking an alternative to it but of exploring and experimenting with different ways of doing so.

Anyway, so the elements are one way—the ways we bring together astrology, tarot, and alchemy. So, I thought, "Okay, I can do this…!” I have the tools to go back and see about the other possibilities of thinking, and to think today with these other things that have become available to our imagination, like the weird findings of quantum physics and particle physics. And then also the possibilities that I find in science fiction authors such as Philip K. Dick. Like Octavia E. Butler, both of whom saw it all coming; though Butler’s future is unlike most sci-fi films and stories because most other writers remain within the limits of the current ways of scientific knowledge. They don't push the imagination.

Tarot and these other practices embody different ways of thinking because they include influences from North Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. Tarot is something that connects Europe to everywhere, and so does astrology. So then comes the second thing which is that, instead of merely looking for other ways of thinking that are all over there and creating another dichotomy, I thought, "No, maybe I can undermine Western European philosophy from within." I precisely use the tools from which they borrowed; those philosophers all borrowed their methods from those practices. But I do so with a different orientation, which we can never know using the tools of science.

SH

That's what I admire so much about your work. You're going right in and dismantle the project of post-Enlightenment, continental philosophy from within. And I think it’s such a radical project to really go back and do this. You have this incredibly deep knowledge of its origins, and you're able to turn post-Enlightenment philosophy on its head because of this. I find it so powerful. When I read about your references to Karen Barad, of course I thought about this connection. It makes sense to go back to the most minuscule elements known to us. In the way that you somewhat go back with your project of dismantling, you go back to the tiniest element to be able to do this. Ontological indeterminacy in quantum physics is of course so key to your project and to how you connect with science fiction and with Octavia E. Butler, especially in Unpayable Debt.

DFdS

Right. Because when you go back to that cosmic level you have things like dark matter that has an effect but can never be identified as the cause. That makes no sense from the point of view of the Newtonian or Einsteinian paradigms that we have. And then from the cosmological point of view, everything (matter and energy) is spacetime, as opposed to everything is in space and time. Let me say the impact to me is at the level of the imagination. Is that not about how, "Okay, so now I will develop a method that will emulate those things." No, that's not it. It's about what other questions become askable. [Laughs.]

SH

I feel that's also where science fiction comes into your work, because the way that you use Octavia Butler's Kindred—the story of a woman in 1979 Los Angeles who's traveling back to antebellum Maryland—allows you to speak about the undoing of the linearity of time and space.This linearity is also at the basis of the ontological pillars of post-Enlightenment thinking. So, I would love to hear more about your choice, not only of science fiction, but perhaps for this particular story. Was the story there first? Or did your thinking come after that? Or did you find it as you were developing your argument?

DFdS

I can tell you the long version of this story. I read Octavia Butler's novels back in the '90s when I was doing my PhD at the University of Pittsburgh. I took a directed reading course on Black feminist writings, with Dr. Brenda Berrian, who was a professor in Africana studies. It included everybody. I obviously wanted a science fiction writer, and this is how I came to know Octavia Butler. I first read Clay’s Ark for the course, which led me to read everything that she had written up to then and then what was published later.

While I was a professor at the University of California, San Diego, in the Ethnic Studies Department, I taught a class called “Theories in Ethnic Studies,” which initially I taught as feminist theory course, for many years. I was there for 11 years. There was only one year I didn't teach it. I loved all the feminist theory texts that I was teaching, but I thought, "But there must be something else." And I decided, "Well, maybe instead of looking for another theorist, I could just bring in a writer." So, I brought Octavia Butler’s texts to the theory class.

In 2012, as part of LatCrit, or the Latino/a Critical Race Theory group—a group of Latinx legal scholars based in the US—I went to the 12th session of the permanent forum on Indigenous issues at the UN. So, I was in New York for 10 days, read all the documents, accumulated everything, got really, really, really irritated [Laughs.] and wrote a paper titled “Reading the Dead.” It took me a long time to publish it. The question for me was what would it take for the Zapatista’s words to be recognized as political? I went back to Octavia Butler and brought in quantum physics and science fictions. We need to expand our imaginations to be able to entertain and know other understandings of the political.

In 2013, I was invited to a British Black feminist retreat, which was held just outside of London. I was living in the UK at that time and the organizer invited me among several artists. I wrote something that became the Black Feminist Poethics. For this work, I kind of identified the ontological pillars and then started to think how each character breaks the rules, the separations of space and time, as well as the consequences.

So many things happened in this ten-year period. Also in 2012, Paula Chakravartty and I were writing the introduction to the special issue of American Quarterly on the “Crisis of the Sub-Prime.” I remember thinking, “Okay, so how do we even begin to talk about these things that are unbelievable, unacceptable, that people who have nothing are blamed for the losses caused by people who have everything but who made money out of people who didn't have anything. It makes no sense.” Back in the thick of the crisis, in 2007/2008, I was living in San Diego, and I saw jobs disappearing, houses foreclosed—it was like a desert, it was so horrible back then. So, I had that image of people's dreams of having their home, which they couldn't have because of racial colonial subjugation. It was in 2017, however, that I had just written the original essay which was expanded into the book. I was invited to speak at one of the public program events leading to Documenta 14. I didn’t think that I could go to Greece and tell people about what was happening to them as well. So, I returned to the first draft of the introduction to the special issue, and prepared a talk on slavery, time travel, and what these offer to the critique of capital.

SH

It feels really like a culmination of your thinking—from the text on the sub-prime crisis with Paula Chakravartty and the debt that is not somebody's to pay but, in the end, still is a debt to pay, and how people are both made to pay the debt that is not theirs to pay and also blamed for that debt as a result of systemic subjugation. And this paper led of course to your book Unpayable Debt.

DFdS

And regarding the Zapatistas, the political-economic aspect of racial subjugation, which ties it to colonial subjugation, is never mentioned. So, the Zapatistas’ dead will never make sense because their death was a condition of possibility for the building of the liberal policy—the US is the embodiment of this, connecting racial and colonial subjugation.

SH

Yeah. And that's how you analyze the frameworks of what is thinkable, what is sayable and what is even registered also with regard to the Marxist idea of what value is, and then again make the connection between racial subjugation and coloniality and land appropriation and so on. I think looking at these precise formulas where, by the way, of course, mathematics comes in again, which you mentioned earlier on, and looking at how something just doesn't figure within a certain mathematical formula is really how your work dismantles, and lays bare the very workings of subjugation and how it also works by exclusion of certain parameters from the equation.

DFdS

Yeah, I find beauty in this exercise. I find it beautiful, that's why I do it, even though some people may not see the beauty in it. One of the things about the way we think is about conditions and relations, but we assume that those conditions and relations we study, they're given, they're datum, they're there. And then you develop your methods and strategies, and then you come up with concepts to explain them. I think Das Kapital is a perfect example of this because Marx actually does this. You'll forget that we actually create these relations, and then we delimit those conditions to be able to say anything in this modern way of thinking. Because the other option was say, "Well, God did it. God will tell us." The human mind is so limited that pre-Enlightenment, for over 150 years, until you get to Immanuel Kant, it was thought, "Okay, man can know himself and everything else exists only under certain conditions. And those are the conditions of knowledge." The beauty of mathematical formulas is that you choose your conditions, you choose your elements, you describe the relations, and you tell each what to do, and you make them do the things that they do.

SH

Yeah. It really exemplifies how those frameworks work, but also how to expand them because you can indeed change the conditions which then allows you to have a completely different framework. This, of course, also in regard to science has been recognized by people like Thomas Kuhn who has written about the limits of the scientific frameworks through which we make sense of the world, and how paradigms have to change to accommodate findings that do not fit within these conditions of thinking. In this context, I would love to hear more about your thoughts on representation and anti-colonial artworks. I know that you've thought about the limits of presentation or representation and perhaps rather think about confrontation.

DFdS

I thought a lot about it when I was working on Toward a Global Idea of Race. First, I had to make up my mind regarding Gayatri Spivak’s critique of Deleuze and Foucault about self-representation. And I had to keep that distinction between the image itself and the thought itself. Still the other day here in Paris, someone said we should distinguish between consciousness and the subject—and yes, of course we must, Hegel has told us we have to. But from where I stand, those two beasts are the same family.

I focused on self-determination and self-representation due to how, in this mode of thinking, the ability to self-represent is crucial, it is the first condition of possibility for any kind of representation. It's always and only representation beginning with the inner sense, which is the condition of possibility for knowing anything else—the inner sense that gives you consciousness but also gives you self-consciousness.

Another way of saying this is: representation is the condition of possibility for, is presupposed in each and every descriptor for anything and everything upon which modern knowledge, in particular post-Enlightenment thinking, has been built. Now, is it possible to say anything about anything without assuming this apparatus —that is only inside the head, and that any statement about the reality of things is contingent on that apparatus? Yes. Should we call it representation? I don't think so. You see that representation is a modern thing, and then there are the descriptions, the statements—each yielding many and different readings. I love to call it a reading. I use this word to describe something that not mediated by the tools of representation. At least it is not grounded by mediation and the tools of representation—intuition, understanding, and everything else. Reading is a crucial term in my vocabulary that refers to something else, other than representation, while at the same time, I'm still doing the critical work of looking at the elements of modern thought to see why the categories do what they do the way they do. Which is like the same project as Towards the Global Idea of Race, but now I've figured it out. [Laughs.]

SH

I like to think of process or even kind of a snapshot, which isn't a picture that is somewhat attempting to be a final way to represent, but maybe just a momentary way to not get stuck within linearity, within unity and all of that. And then also, I think that one of the reasons why water is so present in a lot of feminist anti-colonial thinkers’ work these days is because water is not as linear as land purportedly is. It's not this kind of static unity, but it allows for a certain simultaneity, parallelity or even the possibility to say that "Okay, there's no way to represent water other than through itself." So, the separation, which Spivak also criticizes, is not even possible within that. I think people have a hunch that something needs to happen with this category of representation. I think you undo it very convincingly. And I feel that there's also a connection to the way that you think about Joan Retallack’s term, Poethics, which you use to describe a Black Feminist Poethics. Poethics is not about a description, but this term is always involved in creating forms of living as well. So, there's not a separation happening between representation and a thing itself, whatever that may be.

DFdS

Also, not only the separation between representation and the “thing-in-itself,” and also not a separation between different aspects of existence, for instance between art and existence and the political. With the Sensing Salon and Poethical Readings, for us, the practices are fundamentally political practices because they impact the ways in which we exist together right there in that moment. They make something else completely possible and that something else reverberates. It doesn't create anything, it's not going to bring about some kind of revolution because it is instrumentalizable, but it's just because that reverberates. But then of course, if you put your politics in reverberation, you also have to let go of control of the outcome. It requires some other ways of conceiving of the political which I think is important. But I think more important to me is the shift at the level of sensibility, which to me is connected to some image that we have of existence itself, and which attunes us to something and not others—it is selective.

The other day I was in the Monoprix, the grocery store, and I was going up the escalator, and there was a woman coming and she was very much in a hurry, and she was coming towards me and I'm like, "What is she doing?" She came towards me and then eventually, she stopped as she was going down the escalator And I'm like, "Ooh." She did not see me. Why didn’t she see me? It doesn't really matter. What matters is that she stopped, and I said, "You're going down the wrong way." And then she just went away. She wasn't paying attention. She wasn't there, where I was. We go about life pretty much like that, right?

SH

Yeah. The selectivity and again, this kind of lens or set of conditions for how we perceive think, no matter how those conditions are created, but what conditions shape the way that we perceive and the way that we think, and the way that we can also imagine beyond that which is now. I was wondering if we could speak a bit about questions of the environment and the way that you think also about the intersection of the environment and social justice. I know that you’ve recently been thinking about energy, so I would love to hear more about that.

DFdS

Okay. So, we kind of started talking about it just now. Thinking about things we don’t pay attention to… [Laughs.]

SH

Yeah [Laughs.]

DFdS

So, in a way, we don't pay attention to the ecological catastrophe that we have created. And I think that shift at a level of sensibility will have to happen because. . . well, it's happening. There is no other way for us, anyway. That shift is crucial if we are to be able to make the changes that are needed to keep the planet inhabitable, not only for humans, but also non-humans. On the one hand, I tie that to a shift at the level of sensibility, but then on the other hand, which to me is also connected, is that I'm very worried about how we try to make those changes because we have produced those mechanisms that have been there for a long time. One of the things that Arjuna and I are covering in the new film is mining. We filmed in Chile in the lithium mines. So, we want to have those electric cars, which will "save the world," but ignore how they become available through the employment of old and new violent extractive and expropriative mechanisms and strategies.

SH

Well, yeah. [Laughs.] Their production is conditioned on continued extraction, even if at the surface they appear to be more “clean,” while mechanisms deployed to create a supposed geographical and with that psychological distance (from the Global North) hide and bolster the immediate harms of extraction, thereby allowing their perpetuation.

DFdS

More extraction means more encroachment onto other people's lands. That means more regional conflicts, and authoritarian governments, in the African continent and Southeast Asia, in Latin America, that means also more environmental damages. So, for instance, the lithium mine in the Andes that we filmed obtains water from surrounding glaciers. So, they have these huge ducts running kilometers and kilometers and kilometers from the glaciers to the mine, so they can process the lithium in the evaporation ponds. That is going to have so many consequences on the landscape, and on microorganisms that they are dredging, and ultimately on the climate itself.

That's about paying attention to the whole, complex context, right? The solutions to the immediate problem are possible precisely because all the mechanisms are there, and they are being employed without considering the general (human and more-than-human) ecological consequences of that. Anyway, I have been working on an account for the ecological catastrophe that, instead of immediately leading us to reproducing modalities of colonial subjugation, took seriously this subjugation and the ways in which extraction from bodies from Africa, Asia, and Latin America as well as destruction from mining is built upon excess.

In our film, we are thinking about mining as an excess, as disposable wealth—an accumulation which allows for the accumulation of too much wealth, but also for the consumption that excess wealth also allows for. So, in the distinction between surplus and excess, I see the excess as being part of this accumulation perhaps even more than the surplus. But who knows. It's not a competition.

SH

Regarding the lithium mining in Chile, I wrote a book titled Prospecting Ocean about deep-sea mining and extraction from the seabed through the lens of artists' work. And something very similar is happening where the invisibility of the mining endeavors and this colonial paradigm of remoteness occur. The mining sites and humans and non-humans affected are being considered as removed and far away and outside and not us. In this othering of people, non-humans and the deep sea, and also the divide between life and non-life where the minerals are described as non-living even though they are composed of living matter, all of these paradigms you describe are played out. A lot of the things that you're writing about in your other work are closely connected to that, for instance what is excluded from the ways in which we can speak about things and the ways in which we can think about things and how these mechanisms of exclusion are there on purpose to continue to precisely maintain those processes of extraction.

DFdS

They work so beautifully together in perverse ways because extraction and expropriation are both made possible through the expropriation of labor and the expropriation of the land and through interminable local and regional wars of global capital. But then when the people they displace (“refugees”) traverse the Mediterranean Sea, that's cut off. Somehow the discourse shifts and it's no longer about the juridic- economic aspects, but about the symbolic, about cultural difference. It became about racial difference: about “what are 'they' [“the refugees”] doing here? and how “unfair it is,” that they “come to our countries” and want “to benefit from our rights” and “standard of living,” whatever. Anyway, it is important to attend to how those different moments (symbolic, ethic, juridic, economic) work together to facilitate or prevent something from being addressed or e

ven considered in presentations of the post-Enlightenment political architecture. Thinking about the wars of capital, it is not even about considering, "Okay, so how do we really look at the different elements that create those conditions that are also connected to the sale of weapons." [Laughs.] Because that's also part of capital which benefits from that. We need to look at the various moments and components. So, the question is really how can we (intellectually) entertain complexity? And I think then we go back to your initial question about art, because in art we can have more space.

SH

Definitely. I actually think that in your writing, through your use of language, the ways in which you connect words with hyphens or how you use parentheses and slashes, you add complexity to the words, to language itself. You do so too in the way that you include comments by reviewers in your elaborate footnotes, and then you comment on those comments again. Not arriving at a final term or idea, but looking at the various layers, the complexity, making connections and so on, is present in the way in which you write, and also the way in which you work with film and in other formats as well.

DFdS

I like to play and to exploit, as much as I can, possible meanings of terms, but also to explore. It's true in the films, but also words, phrases—they have their own lives, and they may take you to places where you don't want to go. So then at the same time, when I'm writing I'm trying to pay attention to where this may take me and what do I do to prevent it from taking me where I don't want to go. So, one word in English that I use a lot, and which helps me to control some things is before. Instead of setting up a dichotomy, I like to use before, but before in the spatial sense, not the temporal sense. So, it stands before, like in front of, it's there. I have other ways too. This is part of the fun because I do like writing. [Laughs.] It’s painful and it’s alienating, but I also love it.

SH

Yeah, it’s joyful and it's painful. But it's a craft in and of itself, and you're able to create something. In your use of the word before in the spatial sense, there's potentiality. I really think that allowing for complexity to exist, and for potentiality, is so important. Your use of the word before also implies a kind of confrontation or facing something. Even if before is used in a temporal meaning, there is this way to think about something that might happen out of this encounter, or out of this meeting.

DFdS

Exactly. It's not resolved in a relation that defines the two. It's just that there is a space in between, and that is what opens to everything else that you can't even imagine.