#hegel

sehen sie sich heute abend die sonnenfinsternis an, herr hegel?

Natural consciousness will show itself to be only the Notion of knowledge, or in other words, not to be real knowledge. But since it directly takes itself to be real knowledge, this path has a negative significance for it, and what is in fact the realization of the Notion, counts for [natural consciousness] rather as the loss of its own self; for it does lose its truth on this path. The road can therefore be regarded as the pathway of doubt, or more precisely as the way of despair. […] [T]his path is the conscious insight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge, for which the supreme reality is what is in truth only the unrealized Notion.

G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit sec. 78

In Black history, there is an even deeper kind of loss, one that is more Hegelian than Hegel could have realised: a loss that loses itself. Given this loss of loss, Black spirit cannot simply turn inward and recollect all that has gone before, but must instead formulate what Hartman calls wayward lives in spaces, often in ‘urban commons where the poor assemble, improvise the forms of life, experiment with freedom, and refuse the menial existence scripted for them.’

Biko Mandela Gray and Ryan J. Johnson, Phenomenology of Black Spirit p. 261

An aesthetic of suffering confronted with a refusal to die, melancholia africana articulates a complex and fragile being in the world where everything becomes possible from nothing. Because it is born from annihilation, this survival displays an ability to be that subsists after the loss of points of reference essential to the individual’s stability. The subject continues to exist in a weakened or marginal state. The subjectivity of the slave, of the colonized person, and their descendants expresses itself through the exploration of what keeps them alive in the womb of death.