«Quand je suis lá, elle n’y est pas»: On Reasoning in Black and the Anxiety of Collapse in Philosophy and the Human Sciences

Abstract

After offering a critique of what the author calls “the theodicy of the text”, where practices
are applied to the reading of canonical philosophers as one would to a deity or sacred text,
this article then explores problems of justification in philosophy in relation to the expanded
reach of instrumental rationality by virtue of scientific hegemony in modern thought. The critique of this expanded and colonizing scope is threatened, however, by a challenge to theory itself, and by that virtue, philosophy, in the adage of the critic and poet Audre Lorde, that masters’ tools lack the capacity to dismantle their houses. Must theory and reason be antithetical to the aims of emancipatory projects? The rest of the essay answers in the negative through differentiating reason from rationality and exploring the metacritical practices of the former and the disciplinary limitations of the latter manifested as what the author calls “disciplinary decadence” and a “teleological suspension”of philosophy.