Paraontology: Disruption, Inheritance, or a Debt That One Often Regrets

Speaking of the debt he owed to Heidegger, Levinas recalled that one often incurred a debt at one’s own regrets. Scholars in Black Studies have acknowledged their own “debt” to Chandler for the concept of paraontology. Moten, most notably, credits him for the opening of a renewed thinking of resistance. As disruption, paraontology thus offers the possibility of considering blackness beyond the violence of its constitution. But groundbreaking discursive events can compress other hermeneutical passages – including their own discursive genealogies or conditions of possibility. This talk traces the history of the concept paraontology back to its first use by Heidegger’s student Oskar Becker, whose main concern uncannily echoes the concept’s axiomatic use in Black Studies: i.e. a radical disruption in the purist logic of ontology.

Axelle Karera works at the intersection of 20th century continental philosophy, the critical philosophy of race (particularly Black critical theory), contemporary critical theory, and the environmental humanities. In addition to work on Black-ness and ontology, she currently is completing her first monograph titled The Climate of Race: Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics, in which she examines the question of relation-ality in new materialist ontology and investi-gates the ethical crux of critical thought in the age of the Anthropocene, with the aim to attend to its powerful–and perhaps even necessary–disavowals on matters pertaining to racial ecocide.











When: Tue., Nov. 17, 2020 at 7:00 pm
Where: The Cooper Union
7 E. 7th St. | 41 Cooper Sq.
212-353-4100
Price: Free
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Speaking of the debt he owed to Heidegger, Levinas recalled that one often incurred a debt at one’s own regrets. Scholars in Black Studies have acknowledged their own “debt” to Chandler for the concept of paraontology. Moten, most notably, credits him for the opening of a renewed thinking of resistance. As disruption, paraontology thus offers the possibility of considering blackness beyond the violence of its constitution. But groundbreaking discursive events can compress other hermeneutical passages – including their own discursive genealogies or conditions of possibility. This talk traces the history of the concept paraontology back to its first use by Heidegger’s student Oskar Becker, whose main concern uncannily echoes the concept’s axiomatic use in Black Studies: i.e. a radical disruption in the purist logic of ontology.

Axelle Karera works at the intersection of 20th century continental philosophy, the critical philosophy of race (particularly Black critical theory), contemporary critical theory, and the environmental humanities. In addition to work on Black-ness and ontology, she currently is completing her first monograph titled The Climate of Race: Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics, in which she examines the question of relation-ality in new materialist ontology and investi-gates the ethical crux of critical thought in the age of the Anthropocene, with the aim to attend to its powerful–and perhaps even necessary–disavowals on matters pertaining to racial ecocide.

Buy tickets/get more info now