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Thinking with Ashon Crawley - Pentacostal Breath (some concepts)

Breath

1- The announcement “I can’t breathe” is not merely material for theorizing, for producing a theological and philosophical analysis. “I can’t breathe” charges us to do something, to perform, to produce otherwise than what we have. We are charged to end, to produce abolition against, the episteme that produced for us current iterations of categories of racial hierarchies, class stratifications, gender binaries, mind-body splits”

33- What goes unremarked is how breathing air is constitutive for flight, for movement, for performance. [breathing as fugitive act]

38- black pneuma: the capacity for the plural movement and displacement of inhalation and exhalation to enunciate life, life that is exorbitant, capacious, and fundamentally social, though it is also life that is structured through and engulfed by brutal violence. This life, life in blackness, otherwise black life, exceeds the very capacities of seemingly gratuitous violence to be totalizing.

2- a desire for otherwise air

Black Study

3- the force of belief that blackness is but one critical and urgently necessary disruption to the epistemology, the theology-philosophy, that produces a world, a set of protocols, wherein black flesh cannot easily breathe.

8- knowing at the limits of justice (da Silva) ... “self-life writing” of both “cultural and political critique”

Blackpentecostalism

4- an intellectual practice grounded in the fact of the flesh, flesh unbounded and liberative, flesh as vibrational and always on the move. Such practices constitute a way of life.

5- Blackpentecostalism belongs to all who would so long to live into the fact of the flesh, live into this fact as a critique of the violence of modernity, the violence of the middle passage and enclavement, the violence of enslavement and its ongoing afterlife, live into the flesh as a critique of the ongoing attempt to interdict the capacity to breathe [does not belong to the Saints called Blackpentecostal, those Saints that attend traditionally considered Pentecostal church spaces]

-Being beside oneself, beside oneself in the service of the other, in the service of constituting and being part of an unbroken circle, a critical sociality of intense feeing: this is Blackpentecostalism

Black Tone (after Baldwin)

18- What is needed is an atheological-aphilosophical accounting, a digging back, a movement within, listening to and feeling the vibration of the tone, black tone

White Supremacy (after Dyan Roof’s massacre)

22- White terrorizing, white supremacist ideology, is produced by the suppression, the gathering and destroying, of such an openness [of the church], such a vitality, such a propulsive 6/4 rhythming. White supremacy, its rapacious and incessant antiblackness, is the constant emergence of fear, the fear of being engulfed, and changed, by this radical abundance.

23- What to do, how to move, in such a world wherein your resistance against violent conditions - resistance as prayer meetings or protests, resistance as simply wishing to breathe - produces the occasion for violence?

Choreosonic

23- wherein not one - the choreographic nor the sonic - is privileged

Otherwise

23- otherwise possibilities for organizing, for thinking projects that neither make the flesh diminutive nor discardable

24- Otherwise is a word that names plurality as its core operation, otherwise bespeaks the ogoingness of possibility, of things existing other than what is given, what is known, what is grasped. ... Otherwise names the subjectivity in the commons
25/, an asubjectivity that is not about the enclosed self but the open, vulnerable, available, enfleshed organism.

Categorical Distinction

30- aproblem of modern thought - the invention of racialization is a fundamental, foundations aspect of the maintenance of that project

- What does it mean to be black, to exist in blackness, when the categorical distinction as an imperative modality of thought itself has been interrogated?

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