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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:03.158)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Michael Sawyer, associate professor in the Department of English at University of Pittsburgh and the director of graduate studies. And we're here talking about his book.
in Africana philosophy of temporality, Homo liminalis. Dr. Sawyer, wonderful to have you on today.
Michael Sawyer (00:25.587)
No, I really appreciate the opportunity. I'm looking forward to the conversation.
PJ (00:30.405)
Dr. Sawyer, why this book?
Michael Sawyer (00:34.463)
Well, I need to finish my PhD first. So this is my dissertation. So there's that, right? It was kind of a group as a practical matter. But to be honest, no, I was really fortunate, my grad program to be given the latitude to kind of write the book that I wanted to write as opposed to.
PJ (00:37.564)
Oh, apologies.
PJ (00:50.647)
Mm.
Michael Sawyer (00:52.051)
You know, sometimes, and I know this one being the director of graduate studies here at Pitt, sometimes the parameters of a dissertation can be fairly limited, right? But I was afforded the opportunity by my committee to kind of branch out and take into consideration some broader concepts. And to me, temporality is one that occupies, that really preoccupies in certain ways many different systems of thought, but particularly in the tradition that I'm pursuing,
de-esporic thought, radical thought kind of on an international basis. Temporality is one of the central concepts for me so that's why the book happened. Outside the kind of practical considerations that I had to write a dissertation.
PJ (01:37.797)
Yeah, well we can't ignore the practical considerations for sure.
PJ (01:45.058)
But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition stage, neither caterpillar nor butterfly? Talk to me about what Homo liminalis, if I'm saying that correctly, what that means and why that's the subtitle.
Michael Sawyer (01:58.907)
Yeah, so this is one of those things. So the original title of my dissertation was Homo Liminalis, The Tears of the Caterpillar, basically. And the publishing company had different ideas about that. But so, to this point, right, part of my work is I'm preoccupied with Moby Dick in lots of ways. Some of them positive, some of them negative, but.
PJ (02:14.434)
Yeah.
Michael Sawyer (02:22.991)
And kwee is just that, right? There's that passage that Judas quoted where he's obviously a human being, but considered from those outside of his own traditions to be somehow not quite human, caught someplace between the two, right? And that seems to me to be a central trope from outside of black sociality or conversations about positive black subjectivity that from kind of the middle passage
of Europe basically or those outside of Africa proper with
black subjects, people who became universally understood as black subjects, there's this question of how they fit to the question of humanity. So part of the work, and to me it's a binary proposition, because the question I was asking, and I asked during the book in certain ways and still preoccupies me, is whether the butterfly remembers being the caterpillar, whether the butterfly misses being the caterpillar, whether the caterpillar anticipates becoming a butterfly.
What are those stages in between the caterpillar and butterfly that are just beyond our system of cognition right that happened kind of inside? inside the
Michael Sawyer (03:43.135)
place of transformation of the caterpillar to the butterfly, that whole stage that we just really now, scientists are just really now becoming familiar with what happens inside the cocoon, but just to be able to understand that there's all this process going on that to me alters the temporal relationship of that thing that's both caterpillar, butterfly, and everything in between at the same time to itself in important kinds of ways and also to the world outside of it. So that's where that came from. And that quote from Moby Dick was really generative
or the book in itself and the way I think about that.
PJ (04:16.358)
One, thank you. So, kwee-kwee, how you pronounce it, right? I have a friend who cannot stop raving about Moby Dick and I have the unfortunate history of trying to read Moby Dick because people told me it was good when I was eight and I got bored. And so I have this like, I have this blocker, I have not gotten around to reading it and then I'm continually told how good it is. So, you know, at some point I will maybe do some therapy and get around that experience of being an eight-year-old trying to read Moby Dick. But...
Michael Sawyer (04:29.268)
Yeah. Oh yeah.
Michael Sawyer (04:44.553)
Yeah.
It's not about, yeah, it's one of those things that happens where, and some of this is from the kind of family, the popular way that Moby Dick approached the imagination from the family classics thing with Gregory Peck, right, where it's really about this kind of fight with the whale and the book is very, has very little to do with that, right, because I've talked to Steve's like, what happened to the whale stuff? I'm like, what would get around to that, like, the last 25, 30 pages of the book, or the 600 or so pages? Yeah, you got to get through all of them.
PJ (04:47.072)
Um
PJ (05:10.26)
Yeah. Well, I mean, it looks like that too, right? You have the Count of Monte Cristo, which is a very approachable adventure tale, and it's sold in the same edition as like Moby Dick and like very, very different types of stories, right?
Michael Sawyer (05:26.043)
Right, absolutely.
PJ (05:29.406)
Can you talk a little bit about how temporality plays into this? So you've used that, obviously that relates to time, but you're using that slightly differently. What's that distinction and how does your theory of temporality play into all this?
Michael Sawyer (05:45.051)
Yeah, so there's kind of classic examinations of what exactly time happens to be right and kind of the one of the formative ones for this book and in kind of the Western thinking tradition is when St. Augustine
reviews this in the confessions, right, and is asked, you know, what is time. He's like, everyone knows until they're actually asked what it is, basically. Right, it's like, you know, kind of know what it is. It's like, you know, we're going to meet today at this time, and, you know, we'll be there, etc, right? But to me, that's something that's a kind of measure or common understanding of a relationship between individuals, societies, institutions,
Michael Sawyer (06:30.113)
time right and also the linear understanding of time where we live in a world of kind of befores and afters right like you know
for the rest of our existence, probably everyone will remember the time before and after the pandemic, right, where your perception of the world basically is altered by being able to properly place that kind of before and after, right? And, you know, there are people who live in the before and after 9-11 world, right? There's, for us as individuals, there's the before and after big events, like the before and after you graduate from high school, the before and after college, the before and after you get married, the before and after a child, you know, except-
et cetera, et cetera, all these kinds of things, right? Formative events. So to me, temporality then becomes the way in which as a subject, we're experiencing a variety of different individual or subjects or institutions, relationships, or something like time, right? That then assembles a kind of relationship that to me is a common understanding of what I would consider to be temporality, where those kinds of befores and afters are assembled in a way that create a common understanding of the world.
Now what happens is, and what I'm exploring in this book is this notion of a fractured notion of temporality, where the before and after of the diasporic black subject is fractured because of its relationship to the Middle Passage and an inability to properly access the kind of linear relationship of genealogy, the linear... these are things that Orlando Patterson deals with in his important book on.
on these kinds of questions, right? Slavery and social death, where there's a notion of natal alienation, all these kinds of things, basically create a type of fractured temporal existence that doesn't allow what we understand as a common human relationship, subjective relationship to the before and after, even of who your family members happen to be or who your family members happen to be in the future in a relationship to a common and unstable present. Now, that's a relationship,
Michael Sawyer (08:28.937)
First is in some ways kind of obvious because it's a relationship in the past that we can all think about you know the way the Middle Passage and Diasporic Black people have, me as an exemplar of that, don't have the possibility of tracing ourselves, and this is outside the question of this DNA stuff that's happened recently, but to have a kind of family relationship that's traced easily back through a family tree to some place in...
typically West Sub-Saharan Africa prior to the Middle Passage or kidnapping and being brought through the Middle Passage. But there's also a futuristic relationship because the argument that I make in the book is that the notion of the primacy of death, right, the kind of notion that death can arrive.
out of sequence. And I'm thinking most particularly about the wages of state-based violence, mostly as police violence, where the notion that children are constantly always at risk, right, that, you know, and we've seen this over and over again, right, that, you know, families who have to deal with children being killed out of sequence, right. So then the sequentiality of the relationship between the children bearing their parents is fractured in that way, right. You can make the same argument for people who die as a result of military service, people
parents are not meant to bury their children is kind of the kind of common way we understand that right. When that relationship is altered and some of this is Heideggerian right, the kind of being towards death, when death is pulled directly into the present it creates a fractured relationship with the temporality and also these questions of before and after that are the common understanding of what we consider to be time or the linear progression of time.
The same thing would go if you're thinking about the death row inmate or someone who knows the date, place, and methodology of their death is probably gonna exist in a fractured kind of temporal relationship. Also, my argument is it's subjects who...
Michael Sawyer (10:17.171)
don't have predictable relationships to something like the progression of birth, life, and death, also in a kind of fractured relationship with temporality. And that's what I think is particular about what I'm exploring in the book. And then the question of, to your point, right, the notion of homo liminalis means just that, right? And I'm thinking...
Liminatly in the sense that it's represents itself in the limit function and calculus, which is an instantaneous Snapshot of time right some of this comes from
my relationship with kind of Ralph Ellison's work, An Invisible Man, where he talks about these kinds of nodes where time kind of stops and you leap forward or backward with nothing in between that, right? So it's kind of these forward leaps that happen that have nothing to do with what we just discussed about the common relationship of before, after, and the notion of how the future kind of flows constantly towards us. And the present is this kind of slippery thing that you're not typically able to grasp onto because before it actually becomes, you know, the past, it becomes this,
slippery place that's the present that's going and there's a future kind of approaching you immediately. So what Ellison is proposing is that there's a way in which...
certain subjects are able to extend that cognitive relationship with the notion of the present that gives you a moment to sit in what he considers to be the break and some of this is Moten too, Fred Moten's in the break, that becomes the break and to me that's a point of rest, it's a point of consideration, it's a point of just manifold possibility.
Michael Sawyer (11:54.747)
both positive and negative, all kinds of things can happen. So what I'm trying to explore in this book is the question of how that space can become a positive space of subject regeneration.
PJ (12:09.206)
Thank you.
PJ (12:13.674)
I want to make sure that I'm tracking with you. I think I am. So a couple of questions come to mind, some of it out of my own background in hermeneutics. But just as a kind of basic thing, you know, parents shouldn't bury their children. When you talk about out of sequence, you talk about birth, life and death. And I think even as you're talking about that, this idea of life could be further subdivided into childhood, adulthood and old age.
and this idea that you go through the different stages of life. As a very personal example, we have a relative that my wife is very close to. I'm close to her, but she grew up with this relative. And the relative is, I believe, 95 and has been in the emergency room six times in the last year. And that is a sad thing. That is a grieving thing. But it's very, very different from a child who has leukemia or something like that.
Like there is a certain even release and just a, like it's much, it's a very different journey to become okay with the 95 year old's death than to become, to come to a good spot. Is that fair to like kind of expand on that a little bit?
Michael Sawyer (13:08.267)
sure.
Michael Sawyer (13:23.723)
So.
Absolutely. Yeah, I mean to your point right it's you know, it's kind of notion of you'll hear this right when someone says They lived a good life, right? Which even when someone in 95 years old writes you look back and like, you know this person basically has lived through a Society that has changed so dramatically has seen so many things right and even when you get to that endpoint There's a sense of almost relief and the person going to a particular kind of rest right or you know that the long duration
PJ (13:32.554)
Yeah, right.
Michael Sawyer (13:54.917)
of their life, they've earned the right to kind of go off into that other place, whatever people happen to believe that is. But that's a different conversation when you're thinking about, let's just use Tamir Rice, the kid who was shot to death by the police and playing outside with a toy gun. They show up in two seconds shooting to death. And to speak about fractured temporal relationships and how they are represented by different subject positions.
So in fact, the radio call...
from the police officer says something like black male, age 21, shot is down, right? Actually, it's a 12-year-old kid that weighs 62 pounds, right? It's not a 20-year-old person who's 6'3". So that individual who sees something is also dealing with a fractured temporal cognitive relationship to the actual apparition of that body in front of him. It has everything to do with the way that person is experiencing something about a particular subject positions, right?
the appearance of a 95 year old person in hospice or whatever the case, right? Going, how do you do this notion? Like being towards death, right? So as soon as you're born, you're necessarily dying, right? Necessarily so, that's the whole mortal thing, right? That's, you know, you know this as being a person from hermeneutics and religion, right? It's like, that's what makes us mortal, right? That's mortality, is that, you know, the kind of, you're headed towards that, but to your point, right? There are all these things that fill in the space
birth and death right now what happens is in the subject matter that I'm discussing here and the preoccupation about the notion of fracture temporal relationships to something like life is that if death becomes a constant companion of life then we have a whole nother conversation so you have something like birth death right so you're born towards this question of death always appearing life death right we are living with death kind of as a constant companion right so think about the death row in may think about
Michael Sawyer (15:57.857)
about people living in dire circumstances in war zones that we're witnessing kind of on a day-to-day basis right now, where you become resigned towards the kind of notion of impending doom. Or you're thinking about a person who, for whom lives in a situation where you're constantly warned or worried about being killed and know that there's basically nothing you can do about it because it's predictably unpredictable.
as opposed to being a person who was born and has all these kinds of predictable befores and afters that then are ultimately gonna get to someplace where you're 95 years old, you kinda shut it down, right? And you look back at your life, you're kinda surrounded by your loved ones, and all these kinds of things that we think of, what happens to have a good life, and also what many in kind of Eastern philosophy or in Japanese thinking particularly, we call a good death. Like, what does that mean? To die a good death.
So what I'm saying is that the notion of the kind of fractured temporality that's a result of the long durée of the disruptive event of the middle passage, we'll just use the middle passage to fill in for a bunch of different types of catastrophe, right, that have happened, situates that subject in almost an untenable relationship with the linear progression of time. It creates a type of temporal relationship or subject position that I wanted to explore with the book and that I'm continuing to kind of think about.
about.
PJ (17:24.414)
And forgive my ignorance, I mean I'm pretty sure I know what you're talking about, but just for the sake of our audience too, when you say the middle passage, can you just give a brief definition of that?
Michael Sawyer (17:34.395)
Yeah, so the Middle Passage is both an event, a physical and actual space. So we're talking about the Transatlantic Slave Trade where basically represented by the point of departure, which is called the Door of No Return, and that's represented in West African ports, places like Senegal, Ghana, accepted, Gori Island, et cetera, where...
subjects entered into the Middle Patent of Passage is just that the sea passage from West Africa typically to the West Indies and then for destinations and plantations around what became known as a New World, right? So that passage becomes both a physical manifestation also a metaphysical erasure of the relationship between those people and what happened in their lives or genealogy intellectual genealogy
Michael Sawyer (18:29.057)
from in Africa with whatever ethnic group, with whatever geographic space, et cetera, that event then happens, and then the plantation becomes the kind of necessary for the purposes of white supremacy and the erasure of a relationship, primordial relationship to Africa, and something like, and to create something like diaspora, and to erase the possibility of something like indigeneity, then becomes the long durée of the Middle Passage, right? That then has echoes in things like Jim Crow segregation.
et cetera, et cetera, right? And kind of even our contemporary moment where you have, I was just, the other day I was listening to some discussion about the disproportionate infant mortality rates of kind of black women in urban areas where it simply should not be the case, right? These in my mind are echoes of the Middle Passage that again, both overflows its borders, both before and after it, to become a type of seismic event, right? And there are lots of seismic events like that. The Middle Passage being one that's,
that we, that people in this tradition, you think about Toni Morrison's book, Beloved as Much About the Middle Passage, you think about my colleague here at the University of Pittsburgh, Marcus Rediker's book, work on Amistad and his work on the kind of middle passage itself, right, as a kind of historical event that then has all kinds of.
philosophical, we'll just use that term for the sake of argument, philosophical implications about how subjects are formed, how subjects are disformed, and how subjects attempt to kind of reform, and I mean reform, not reform, but to reform themselves in the indices of Christina Sharpe's work in the wake of that event, like in the aftermath of that kind of sea transit that is really just that, some level just a transit across an ocean that then has so many other implications beyond that.
PJ (20:18.09)
As you were talking about it earlier, the word that came to mind for me was rupture, that rupture of history and identity. Is that another way of, would that be a synonym?
Michael Sawyer (20:23.027)
Yeah.
Michael Sawyer (20:28.551)
Yeah, absolutely. Rupture, catastrophe, disaster. You can go through this poetry about this. There's the Zong incident that talks about the murder of human cargo, people who are human who become cargo, who are thrown off the vessel in order to.
render them an insurance claim because they weren't going to make it to the port in order to sell individuals. So the question for the captain becomes, how can I make the money? I can simply throw the cargo over port, human beings. So the rupture is not just a rupture, a geographic rupture. It's not just a genealogical rupture. It's also a rupture to something like a coherent relationship to humanity, the human. So back to where we started. So then if you're thinking about this kind of question of the caterpillar and you extend
Like, what does that mean to have been one thing before you enter the kind of cocoon of, think about the middle passage as a type of cocoon that comes out of it on the other side. All these things kind of happen. So the question becomes, what is the coherent relationship between the caterpillar and the butterfly and all things in between, right?
PJ (21:41.586)
And I don't want to overstep my bounds here, but one thing I appreciate about your metaphor, if I understand it correctly, is that the butterfly is actually quite beautiful. Okay. All right. I want to make sure I understood that correctly, but I don't. Yeah.
Michael Sawyer (21:50.587)
Right, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And also, and to this point, right, the caterpillar is also quite beautiful in and of itself too, right? All those things in between probably aren't, we just don't necessarily have access to them. So the question becomes very quickly for me, what are those different apparitions of the same thing thinking about themselves across that long durée, right? What does the butterfly see when it looks in the mirror? Right?
PJ (22:03.811)
Hmm.
Michael Sawyer (22:18.047)
Does the caterpillar know it's gonna become a butterfly? Does the butterfly remember being a caterpillar? What is it, or does it think it still is? I mean, some of this, you know, this is, we see this across, you know, this is metamorphosis, right? This is the question of how to metamorph. What does the metamorph remember about itself before and after the event of metamorphosis? And does metamorphosis continue? Can it be reversed? You know, all these kinds of questions, right? And what is the system of cognition during the process of that type of radical change? Or is it no change at all
about the knowing subject internal to itself, right? Is it all just so predictable that it's not really a change, it's just a process, right? You know, because if we think about ourselves, right, I remember being a kid, right? And if I thought back and we're like, you know, and honestly, right, I was thinking, you know, like if someone had told me when I was in college that I'd end up being an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh, I'd be like, you know, that's really...
PJ (23:12.355)
Ha ha!
Michael Sawyer (23:13.783)
possible, right? There's so many other things that would have made complete like a lot more sense to me, right? Then for that to happen But if you if you sit back and carefully think through you can kind of see the progression of it Some of it doesn't make sense until the end But then you just wonder at what if you had known this information during the process what it would have been like Or is the not knowing the actual thing that makes it the kind of the beauty of the transition that becomes the kind of butterfly thing that we become preoccupied with, right?
And the fragility of the butterfly too, right? Because the butterfly always seems much more fragile to me than the caterpillar, right? The caterpillar seems super durable, right, to me, and like, you know.
PJ (23:46.158)
Hmm. Yeah.
Michael Sawyer (23:53.511)
does all this kind of work and then to create this kind of butterfly that then becomes this you know really beautiful creature in its own right that also has a very fragile existence over time. It's like subject to the wind becomes really difficult for the butterfly. It attracts attention because it's just that. It's so beautiful and apparent in the way that the caterpillar can hide itself and be different. So it's a question of the plasticity of the subject as well.
entire process or thinking to your point this kind of metaphor of metamorphosis to think about that as how it relates to the diasporic black subject is what I'm dealing with in the book.
PJ (24:34.29)
What do you think about the idea of different types of durability? Because like a caterpillar is really subject very much to its environment where one of the amazing things about a butterfly, even though it's subject to the wind and so forth, I mean it travels thousands and thousands of miles in a way that caterpillar is not capable.
Michael Sawyer (24:49.577)
Thank you.
Right, absolutely, right? This kind of question of what does it mean to end the question of what is the horizon of possibility for particular subjects, right? And this all gets back to this, like does the caterpillar know that its horizon of possibility is gonna change dramatically when it can actually take the wind and fly thousands of miles, right? Does the butterfly look back with nostalgia to the point where it didn't have to go anywhere? Right, we're kind of, you know, you know, all these, these are.
PJ (25:13.362)
Yeah
Right, right, right.
Michael Sawyer (25:17.835)
super interesting questions right it's like and you know I've seen I've seen butterflies this was just last summer right I was watching these butterflies at my house and there was a hummingbird and these butterflies basically ganged up on the hummingbird and I was like whoa it's like cuz you know chase it away for whatever reason because I guess that maybe and I don't know enough about this right maybe somebody who's an expert in this would send me a note and explain it to me but I imagine that they're probably interested in the same type of nectar or something like that right and so the
PJ (25:33.474)
Yeah.
Michael Sawyer (25:47.909)
was in the you know hummingbird to me seems like a really you know nimble agile and a creature that could really seem to cause it but the but the I mean literally the hummingbird was out of there because it's butterfly was like you know basically chasing it away from whatever that it would happen to be going on whether that was like a kind of you know one-off event or something I just I was like wow that's nothing I never thought about before but to your point right the caterpillar has particular
has a particular zone of possibility, right? And that probably was also true for people who found themselves in central Sub-Saharan Africa, where the question of going across the Atlantic Ocean was completely bizarre and had nothing to do with anything. Right, it's like, you know, why would you wanna do that, right? The world that they exist in is kind of full.
and manifold and interesting and full of all kinds of possibility is the amount of time it took you to walk from kind of one place to the other over a certain amount of time, right? That creates a relationship again, that creates a different relationship with space-time continuum, but that's the kind of limitation of your possibility, right? So if we extend that to our own moment, right? It's like when you think about the way we're communicating right now would have been
you know, 10 years ago would have cost us about $50,000 to have this kind of conversation. Or 10 years before that, we would have corresponded by like written letter, right? Or we could have planned to kind of meet someplace over time and you'll have to fly there and all this kind of stuff, right? So we're in a much different temporal environment while still dealing with the kind of linear progression of time that then allowed us to meet at a particular time.
And the place becomes this kind of space that we've created kind of through technology for ourselves. But all those things have changed the kind of limit, the horizon of possibility for us as kind of subjects and communication in certain ways. And I imagine it's the same thing for the Caterpillar. So yeah, so your question about the different, the.
Michael Sawyer (27:43.231)
The question of the durability and also the question of the possibility is interesting in ways that are really relate itself to what the subject thinks about its own kind of limitations and to be able to think beyond them in certain ways. So to your point, right, does a caterpillar say, you know what, just wait till I can actually fly, right? When it's like watching the world go by, it's like, sooner or later I'll be in South America, right? It's like, you know, I'll get on some, you know, I'll be headed to wherever I'm gonna go.
thing right so yeah these are all things that are interesting to me and they relate themselves to just that right what does the subject who has a fractured relationship to where it's come from a world of kind of contentment a world that had its own rules to then go through a catastrophic relationship and then shatters all those kinds of relations those situations and then forces it to become able to exist in a completely different and foreign environment
PJ (28:43.366)
Um, forgive me, this question will be a little bit longer because I'm going to try and make some connections here. Um, from my own background in her hermeneutics, uh, philosophical hermeneutics, uh, one of the books that was very, really important to me was Paul Recour's Time and Narrative. Um, I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but the, uh, you know, uh, when you mentioned Heideggerian time, uh, Recour does a lot of work, uh, actually out of Augustine as well. It's part of the reason I was like, I mean, these names are coming up, right?
Michael Sawyer (28:47.071)
Sure.
PJ (29:13.13)
on identity, on the relation of history. And one of the critiques I read about time and narrative was talking about it, that his account of time fails for the same reason Heidegger's account of time fails, because it doesn't answer the, what the reviewer said was the objective. And what I would say is maybe if we think in terms of there's, we can think of the world in terms of physics and we can think of it in terms of biology or psychology, right?
And I think this idea of temporality obviously relates to death. And so even as you talk about predictably unpredictable, everyone, like life itself is predictably unpredictable. If you go through and say life will continue as is, you are going to be very disappointed or your expectations are going to be broken. But what you're getting at is that there are fundamentally different experiences of that unpredictability. Right?
And so I guess what I'm asking about and trying to, because I could see where people might get frustrated with this discussion of time is that we are, if I understand you correctly, and this is a common occurrence because I found Ricor, aside from this critique, very helpful is that we are bracketing questions of physics and how are we able to coordinate time in these kind of objective standards. And we're talking about the way that we experience time and...
the way that the narrative shapes our perception of time. Is that bracketing fair so that we could create that space for our discussion?
Michael Sawyer (30:50.023)
Yeah, absolutely. Rekora is a huge interlocutor for this book, right? And Rekora also helps us with this notion of the kind of manifold.
So frankly, so record things about something like the past having components that are basically the past The present past right and the future past So the kind of past sits in the middle of these kinds of things that are coming towards it and to your point Right to try to grapple these in order to be able to have some kind of careful consideration of them becomes Simply almost impossible when your own relationship to all those things is from this question of the present present, right?
as a kind of a as an interlocutor speaking a different language if that makes sense right so the march of kind of time and temporality speaks a type of linguistic that we have to struggle to situate ourselves in some of this is this is a this is summa theologica right this question of you know the angel time is the time is between God time and human time because this is
Catholic and kind of Christian orthodoxy in certain types of ways, right? If we're thinking about the Godhead as a being that has all awareness of all things in past, present, future, basically meaningless in that situation, right? So then to communicate some information to a subject who, past, present, future, the only way in which they can exist requires some kind of interlocutor, some intermediary. So the angel becomes that intermediary. It's able to kind of exist between those different times, with time signatures and be able to express, hey, guess what? Right, if you don't get it together,
pretty soon. It's like, you know, what does that even mean, right? And so that, that in, you know, relating ourselves back to a kind of common theological understanding of the way time works, and this is Augustine, right? Again, right? Why Augustine becomes so important and a threshold.
PJ (32:32.782)
Yeah, right, right.
Michael Sawyer (32:49.867)
thinker in this realm is this is the whole this is the question right the kind of central question of Something like what do we understand to be the relationship of the human to the divine to me is a fundamental relationship about something like temporality right immortality situates, you know people in a completely Fractured relationship or hyper let's if we think about the immortal in one way, but think about the hyper mortal in a different way, right?
that individual that relates to a type of hyper mortality where death is always just right around the corner or death is omnipresent in a particular way is also a different type of subject in on the far ends of a spectrum in the same manner that something like the human and the divine happen to be. And so that's what I'm kind of dealing with. And some of this becomes a goblin unearths this and in his work with the.
home of soccer in a particular way, right? It's no sort of sacred man that can be punished, that can be killed but not sacrificed. You know, all these kinds of things that seem almost paradoxical at the same time, but to me always relate themselves to a fractured relationship to something like the kind of normal progression of life to death.
And then the kind of post-death question of how then, and this is after the book got published, well after, but I'm kind of dealing with it in a new project now, is the people might recall Breonna Taylor after being killed by the police department shows up on the cover of Vanity Fair Magazine, right? And the painting of Breonna Taylor was done by the same artist who had painted Michelle Obama's official portrait for the National Picture Gallery, right?
So...
Michael Sawyer (34:39.027)
the point that I make and then Ta-Nehisi Coates writes the article for Bandy Fair. And so it says a beautiful life, right? And it's like preoccupied with certain ways because I wish I'd never heard of Breonna Taylor, right? I wish Breonna Taylor had lived out this kind of like obscure kind of common existence and went about Breonna Taylor's business and never showed, like the chances of the actual Breonna Taylor prior to this catastrophe showing up on Bandy Fair Magazine was absolutely zero, right? If there were possibly, if it would be less than zero.
There's absolutely no way that Breonna Taylor, the person who understood herself to be Breonna Taylor, could ever anticipate being on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine. So only in the relationship to this catastrophic relationship to something like state violence does the person become relative in a particular kind of way. And I mean relevant, right, is the term I should use, right? Relevant in at all to register at that level, which is tragic, right? That's profoundly tragic because
Michael Sawyer (35:39.821)
and not as a hierarchical question, but common and just common, like just how people live. Breonna Taylor's born, Breonna Taylor goes to school, Breonna Taylor gets this job or doesn't, right, has this successful relationship or doesn't, right, lives in this place or doesn't, gets to some point and passes, and that's it, right? And then people be like, who's that? Oh, you know, somebody I knew from high school, not somebody who was on the cover of Andy Fair Magazine because they were basically killed in tragic circumstances
by a police department. So that to me is a type of liminal subject and a person who then in the aftermath or back again to Sharpe's language in the wake of that catastrophe, the same catastrophe as the Middle Passage, becomes a type of subject who becomes with disproportionate importance in their lack of importance. The disposability of the life of the actual Breonna Taylor makes the afterlife of the kind of post who I would call Breonna Taylor 2.
disproportionately important. And only because of the event of this tragedy, this is back to our question of the before and after. So the before and after for Breonna Taylor is not something like life, birth and death. It's birth, death, and outsized life relationship post death that has nothing to do with the life of Breonna Taylor. It has everything to do with some type of catastrophe. That's tremendously problematic and creates, and is a situation that we're kind of, you know.
I say we, we as kind of human subjects and we in particular in the black radical thinking tradition of which I like to think I'm participating in are trying to figure out how to parse that, right? How to come up with language to basically, a hermeneutics, right? To basically be able to describe that properly and then to prescribe something to alleviate or ameliorate that circumstance.
PJ (37:32.17)
One of the things I really appreciate about what you just did was how much value and dignity you give to an ordinary life. Well, I was going to say it just it and it is kind of an aside to what you're saying. But I think it because there are some people who would say, oh, man, I ended up on Vogue magazine and somehow that's better.
Michael Sawyer (37:43.763)
Yeah, and I think that, go ahead.
PJ (37:59.178)
And I think that's like, and I think that kind of, that's the, that's an immature and unstudied response, right, like, and not understanding, like what makes people truly valuable and why it's important that she should have been able to have a normal life.
Michael Sawyer (37:59.665)
short.
Michael Sawyer (38:10.951)
Absolutely.
Michael Sawyer (38:15.229)
Right.
Michael Sawyer (38:20.551)
Yeah, just common existence, just that. To your point, there's beauty and dignity and just that. Just to get up and go about your business and have that be what you do and have the series of personal relationships that you have, the series of institutional relationships you have, whatever they may be along some continuum, but just have that be what it is without need of qualification or amplification is to me.
what you would want at the end of the day, to have these layers of palimpsestic catastrophe create these kinds of subjects. You can go Michael Brown, George Floyd, on and on and on. These people who are denied just the dignity of just commonality and everything that goes with commonality, the kind of pluses and minuses of anybody's life. Things go right, some things work, some things don't. People have difficulties. All that's nothing but just what being human is about.
when that's denied or you become something that's a person that people necessarily begin to care about and the sacrifice of that mortality is problematic to me.
in really important ways, right? So yeah, to rescue the kind of commonality of life and be able to extol that and to hope for that, right? To hope that people can just live a common existence. This is back to where we were a couple of minutes ago, right? Just, you know, you live and then, you know, ultimately your parents pass and you go to the funeral and you're sad about it, but you also understand they lived a good life, right? There's something very good about that, right? There's something common. That's why those kinds of events
and actual celebrations of those events are so critically important, right? And I'm often struck by, just in the aftermath of the kinds of deaths that we're talking about, the kind of...
Michael Sawyer (40:14.415)
sacrifices that were to these people who are sacrificed to these terrible institutional structures that are designed to kind of undermine the possibility of common existence is just the resignation of their families afterwards right when they go to these press conferences and it's just like you know you're watching these people it's almost as if they knew it was gonna happen right or it reifies a particular understanding where you know what and if it doesn't you're surprised at the fact that it doesn't right and
PJ (40:41.023)
Right.
Michael Sawyer (40:44.369)
And so a lot of the work, and this was kind of the first step in that direction with this book, was to kind of lay out one important aspect of that complicated relationship. But to me, that was this question of temporality.
PJ (41:00.157)
Um...
PJ (41:04.878)
I can't, if you don't want to go in this direction or this doesn't fit, that's fine. I've had Dr. Lewis Gordon on multiple times. And as you talk about finding subjectivity, finding a place for black subjectivity in this temporality, I immediately think of fear of black consciousness. What relationship does your work have to what Dr. Lewis Gordon is doing?
Michael Sawyer (41:33.459)
Yeah, I mean, I think critically important relationship, just as a practical matter, where I did my PhD in Africana Studies at Brown, like Lewis Gordon was one of the people who pulled that whole thing together. I just saw him a couple of weeks ago at.
PJ (41:48.208)
Oh, okay.
Michael Sawyer (41:49.939)
Patrick Henry, one of the professors there at Brown, right? Lewis was back, Patrick was retiring, right? So I kind of made my way to Providence and Lewis was there to be the kind of keynote if that's the way you want to describe it, speaker about the importance of Patrick in our intellectual genealogy, right? So yeah, so Lewis is important.
figure in that intellectual genealogy that I just mentioned I participated right and so his work on black consciousness his work on existentialism all those kinds of things informative and important and my work would not be possible without having that relationship
in a coherent way and to be able to think about and frame what it is that I'm thinking about. So yeah, it's part of that whole conversation, both in real and imagined, real ways in the relationship to kind of Brown and the way I was taught, right? The kind of training that I received as a PhD student and also in, you know, the kind of, to your point, right? The kind of, the continual conversation with scholars, work that happens in direct ways, but also with those who are also to yourself, right?
reflected by your relationship to what Lewis is doing. So we're having a conversation that meets in particular ways that are not directly there. Because we could have decided to have this conversation to talk about Lewis's book, Fear of Black Consciousness, right? We could have come and used that as the kind of common text between us. And actually in many ways that is a common text between us because all the things we're talking about relate themselves to it in that way, right? That's how I like to look at a relationship to different scholars, et cetera. So the core becomes important for us.
of you know mutual in a lot of his Augustan becomes important because Augustan is important to record was important to use important to me you know on and on and on right that's how that seems to work for me so yeah to the long way around your Lewis's work is important for everything
PJ (43:43.502)
What I like about this, and apologies, somehow I missed that whole connection, that's awesome, is that this is a very real example of what was lost in things like the Middle Passage, is that we are able to trace because we have that continuity. And that's why that becomes the conditions for creative and beautiful possibility moving forward. What we're doing now...
what your work is, what your future project is on death. So I wanna be respectful of your time, but I feel like I would be remiss if I didn't ask, how do you use Othello to talk about temporality and why Othello?
Michael Sawyer (44:31.733)
Yep.
So I've always been, they're kind of, everybody, these five or six books that really matter to you, right? And Othello's always been one, I like Shakespeare, like I've said in other forums, right? And I'll stand by it, that as far as I'm concerned, as an English, person who works in the linguistics of English, Shakespeare's probably one of the most important political theorists ever, right? So if you think about.
PJ (44:57.132)
Hmm.
Michael Sawyer (44:58.571)
questions of sovereignty, right? Richard III, Julius Caesar. You think about questions of antisemitism, what he did with Merchant of Venice hasn't been overcome. And for questions of anti-blackness or misogyny, et cetera, Othello is that book, period, right? So what I'm doing with Othello is to think carefully about Othello as a liminal figure, right? As an outsider who basically...
does service to the state, right? And Othello says this over and over again, right? He's given certain service to the state of Venice, and he is to the city-state of Venice, and expects certain things in return. Citizenship, right? That's what he wants. And part of the citizenship, and this is Othello overlapping Phenon on top of Othello, he thinks that part of that citizenship then becomes the notion of being able to be in a coherent matrimonial relationship with a Venetian, a white person, and that can't happen.
Right? That cannot happen, which shows him the limitations of his citizenship possibility, even in the face of his disproportionate service to the state. Right? They need a fellow, right? At the very beginning of it, when he, you know, when they're looking for him, when Yago's running around sounding the alarm about a fellow all over Venice, he's being summoned to go see.
the leaders of Venice to get him to go basically fight this war for them. And at the same time, he's supposedly in trouble because he's stolen away Desdemona, right? And the question becomes, you know, what is the, what witchcraft did you use, right? To kind of, and he's like the witchcraft was basically I told the story of my life, basically. And she was interested in it, right? And that's how it all happened.
And so the reason Othello works for me in that situation, I'm still in this consideration. And this is back to your question of intellectual genealogy, right? Fred Munch has this article about something like why we have to forget Othello, right? He's like, we have to be done with Othello, period. Like, no more Othello, right? And to me, those are not.
PJ (46:55.435)
Yeah
Michael Sawyer (47:00.467)
Those are not disagreements, those are possibilities. Because I disagree, I think Othello is still something that we have to spend our time thinking through. And there are those who are like, we've had about enough of Othello. Because it's fraught with these kinds of mis-estandings, it's fraught with these kinds of possibilities to over-determine certain kinds of things. I get all of that, but I think it's a super important text because of its durability.
because of the common themes that recur even hundreds and hundreds of years later that Shakespeare had perceptively put in front of us to kind of push us to be like in certain ways, why are you still dealing with this problem? Why does this still matter? Right after I thought about this, back in the Globe Theater, God knows how long ago, why are you still having these same kinds of conversations? So that's why it's important. But I thought just to the point, that kind of detail about Othello's notion of a particular type of super citizenship.
or super service to the state would then convey upon him something like a type of common citizenship was not true right so with that you didn't have to think about uh du bois deals with this right so you know in the early 20th century the early 1900s right it's funny when you're born in like the 60s and i have had students say stuff like you know can i use a late 1900s text display
PJ (48:23.099)
Oh yeah.
Michael Sawyer (48:25.403)
That's what it is, right? It's like a late 1900s text. Yeah, so in the early 1900s, Du Bois is pushing for the possibility of black service in the military in order to create this notion of a type of citizenship that we see represented all the time, right? When you get on a plane, they're like, hey, if you happen to be an active duty military person, you get on a plane before everybody else, right? It's like, why? It's like, and I was a person who, you know, I was in the Navy and I'm like, that seems dumb, right? It seems ridiculous, right? Like, it seems like maybe school teachers
or maybe, you know, because none of us would be possible without third, they should be like, you know, third grade teachers, you know, if there are any third grade teachers out there, you know, first class is reserved for you all because you put up with more and make everything possible for all of us and wasted, you know, none of this is possible without the third grade teacher, right? And so, yeah, and that's so that's a fellow to me is, is
is a placeholder for that kind of complicated thinking. What does it mean to give a certain type of service to the state, have your embodiment and the understanding of your embodiment prevent the receipt of those things you think come along with that. You've done this, that, the other, you're supposed to get this, that, the other, and it doesn't happen. So now you're back to this kind of question of abjection where you thought you were gonna be, just norm yourself back to citizen.
Right. Kind of center space of existence. Right. Common. A common again back to the notion of the commons. Just be a citizen. Right. And be able to be protected by the police rather than killed by them. Like how about if you call the police and they come to your house and don't kill you because you called them. Right. That'd be cool. Right. Or how about if, you know, how about if you're, you're a.
your turn signal's not working, and a police officer pulls you over and doesn't kill you, but just tells you, hey, I noticed that your thing's not working. We have these vouchers that you can take to a local place to get your turn signal fixed, instead of the guy having a gun out, because he thinks that somehow in your mind, getting a ticket for a bad turn signal.
Michael Sawyer (50:27.719)
is something that you would rather replace with a capital murder charge, right? It's just the kind of absurdity of that logic, right? That's what Othello's talking about, to me. That's what Othello's talking about. So yeah, that's why Othello is central to the book for me in lots of ways and continues to be important to me.
PJ (50:45.078)
Yeah, a beautiful answer, thank you. As we draw to a close here, besides reading your book, which I would definitely recommend, what would you encourage people to do who have listened to this podcast over the next week after listening to this? What should they chew on, or what's one thing they should try to do?
Michael Sawyer (51:10.439)
I mean, I think for me and the work I'm doing now is to...
to think carefully about how joy and love basically situate themselves at the end of this. So I would do that. I would try to find something that makes you happy and try to find, and some of that, this is stuff that's been well documented by other thinkers. This is in many ways what Lou Ray Jones was up to with blues people, what Ellis ends up to, what Morrison's up to with all this kind of art to me that gets produced, that speaks to a type of beauty
situation of kind of pain and strife and coercive force that we're talking about right there's also this question of the Beautiful things that get produced by that so I would I would say You know and this is not to be Pollyanna sure like you know Willy Wonka and chocolate factories on the right it's like no just find those things understand that these things come out of a particular system
of fractured relationship to something like a coherent relationship to the time and stuff like that but also understand how they create how beauty is created out of that and then to think about how that's a space or a point of departure for new types of possibilities. That's what I would propose that people do if that makes any sense at all.
PJ (52:23.41)
It does. Dr. Sawyer, what a beautiful way to end today. Thank you so much for coming on.
Michael Sawyer (52:29.107)
No, PJ has been great. Appreciate it. Good luck with the, I know you have a hearing coming up for your foster situation. So congratulations with that. So good to talk to you.