Thinking the Impossible Survivance and Arrivance of the ‘Speaking Commodity’

Conjuring the Specters of Chris Hani, Slavery, and Blackness in Derrida’s Specters of Marx

Auteurs-es

  • Alexander van Biema Cornell University

DOI :

https://doi.org/10.5195/jffp.2025.1105

Résumé

To begin to think the thought of Jacques Derrida as in/of Africa and the African(a) diaspora demands an attentiveness to the impossible survivance and arrivance of enslaved Africans (“speaking commodities”) in the Americas. The invocation of the concept of survivance is meant to signify and articulate the feel of being natally interdicted from the capacity to claim coherent space-time coordinates because of trans-Atlantic slavery and its afterlives. For this reason, the (dis)avowal of survivance can never be complete because it resists completion (in linear space-time). It is from within our common incompleteness that survivance becomes think-able, feel-able and say-able. This is to say, the question of survivance is a fundamentally ante-national and anti-national quest(ion) that enables us to ask the always un-asked question: how do you survive survival? And, resonantly, does the arrivant sur-vive (non-)arrival (arrivance) and survivance?

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Publié-e

2026-03-26

Numéro

Vol. 33 No. 1/2 (2025): Glissant and Derrida: A Forum

Rubrique

Forum

Licence

© Alexander van Biema 2026

Licence Creative Commons

Cette œuvre est sous licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International.


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