The rhythm of anti-fascist protest: author’s own photo taken during fieldwork at a demonstration against Le Front national in Aubervilliers in 2017.
This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin.
Deconstruction’s Hemiolas
Naomi Waltham-Smith
I
Steve McQueen’s 2020 film Mangrove is an historical drama about the racism of the criminal justice system and Black resistance against police repression in London in the late 1960s and early 1970s, through the prism of the trial of a group of demonstrators known as the Mangrove Nine. One scene set in April 1970 shows a young Darcus Howe, recently returned from Trinidad, trying to educate a distracted Frank Crichlow, the owner of the eponymous Caribbean community restaurant in Notting Hill that was subjected to a dozen police raids in the period January 1969 to July 1970: “Trinidad has been remade, Frank. I saw it. I heard it. The revolution has changed the very rhythm of the people’s speech, talking with greater deliberation, pausing before speaking and such. As if it has provoked an unconscious social patience. It was truly something to behold” (Siddons and McQueen n. d.: 34). It was fitting to cite this passage in a paper given in the city of Montréal.[1] The immediate spark for the Black power revolution in Trinidad was a demonstration against the visit of the Canadian Governor-General in solidarity with students from the West Indies at Sir George Williams University in Montréal who had been singled out for arrest after an occupation on campus protesting a professor’s racial prejudice.
Before he can invoke C. L. R. James, Howe is interrupted by the phone ringing. Crichlow’s speech, as he complains in vain to his local MP about police harassment of a Black business, is hurried and marked by increasing exasperation, cutting across the measured rhythm delivered by revolutionary action that Howe extols. Frustrated by the impunity with which the police engaged in racial targeting and violence, members of local community, together with Black Panther activists, organized a demonstration on August 9, 1970 at which the Mangrove Nine were arrested. They were later charged with incitement to riot in what was widely seen among Black communities and leftwing allies as a deliberate strategic attempt to put a halt to the emerging Black power movement in Britain. One of the striking features of the trial was that Howe, who would become a prominent anti-racist campaigner, writer, and broadcaster, and Altheia Jones-LeCointe, who was the leader of the Black Panther Movement, would choose—against the advice of the majority of the defendants’ white lawyers—the radical tactic of self-representation. Toward the end of the film, Howe, played by the British second-generation Jamaican actor Malachi Kirby, delivers what a newspaper at the time described as a “‘blockbuster’ defence closing speech” at the Old Bailey (Post Mercury 1971).
In the absence of surviving court transcripts, the screenplay drew on extensive documentary research: a newspaper that serialized the proceedings, other publications at the time, and the files of the radical white lawyer Ian Macdonald representing one of the other defendants which contained a copy of Howe’s closing statement (Siddons 2020). The screenwriters punctuate Howe’s speech with iterations of the phrase “it’s closing time” to signify that, while the case may be coming to an end, it marks the opening up not only of specific issues but also, irreparably, of British history as a whole to Black consciousness. It marks, in short, the necessary possibility that any closure or teleology be interrupted. This is what brings the rhythm of speech into critical dialogue with the rhythm of history’s unfolding and of the metaphysical unfolding of the concept of history. As if to analyze this asynchronicity, Howe prefaces his rhetorical triple strike with a reference to Hamlet, scribbled by his co-defendant and partner Barbara Beese on the top of his script and itself a syncopated repetition in that it displaces the white sovereign subject of politics and thereby disrupts the rhythm of Shakespeare’s line, itself an interruption of verse by prose: “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever a Black people were born to set it right” (Siddons and McQueen n.d.: 87; emphasis mine).
This is a film in part about rhythm and its syncopation. A letter from 1946 to his second wife Constance Webb shows that Howe’s hero, C. L. R. James, is very much attuned to rhythm. While James is more interested in Shakespeare and other European examples, he shares with Caribbean musicians an awareness of how rhythm can not only materialize racial and class oppressions but also analyze them critically and express the struggle for liberation (James 1992: 151–52).[2] This may seem paradoxical for a close reader of Hegel such as James. The German philosopher reserves the radical capacity for openness to the other and for negativity to the white European, leaving Africa without relation and without history, as Rei Terada (2023) has argued. And yet James continues to think the syncopated rhythm of revolutionary history with, not against, speculative logic. His idiosyncratic reading of Hegel and its ramifications for his politics are beyond the scope of this article, except to note that, in his close readings of the Logic in his Notes on Dialectics, the self-movement of the dialectic in the mutual implication of subjective consciousness and object—what in the Preface to the Phenomenology is figured as “the immanent rhythm of the concept” (1977 [1807]: 36; trans. modified)—lies at the heart of James’s theory of historical development and working-class emancipation (1980 [1948]).[3] What I will, however, suggest is that the radical rhythmic action of the Mangrove Nine, on the streets and in court, participates in a heterodox syncopation of Hegel that has affinities with deconstruction, without collapsing into or being exhausted by it. There are, if you like, syncopated deconstructions.
In what follows, I will analyze the key sections from the Phenomenology’s Preface and then, with reference to a few passages where Derrida speaks to the notion of rhythm, I will assess to what extent the self-differentiation of Hegel’s speculative proposition might be said to anticipate or even already to march in step with deconstruction’s law of spacing. Baart Zandvoort (2020), for example, summarizes the issue at stake—namely, whether there is another difference whose contradiction would not be merely a moment on the way to self-identity—while also questioning whether Hegel and Derrida can be so cleanly distinguished on this point.
Where is the point where arrhythmia breaks away from rhythm to be located? How can we be sure the arrhythmic pulsation of the arrest will not be resolved once again in a more rhythmic rhythm? The impossibility of deciding on such a point, which Derrida elaborates again and again, is already fully prefigured in all its baffling complexity in Hegel (Zandvoort 2020: 368).
Especially given Derrida’s idea of the trace as re-marking, as a double strike, the thought would be that that a genuinely radical rhythm necessarily remains at least somewhat arrhythmic, that it would always already have to have interrupted even itself and have ruined any teleology—and, with it, any Eurocentrism—in advance. The idea that the concept is irreducibly syncopated is not unique to deconstruction. But deconstruction may nonetheless be the movement of philosophical thought that is most passionately moved by, even finds its own engine in, the rhythming of the concept—in its beating, spasming, jerking, pulsating, vibrating. In its syncopated re-marking, rhythm resists being subsumed by the totalizing and exclusionary point of the concept. This gives deconstruction an affinity with other heterodox modes of conceptualization—decolonial, Black-radical, anarchist, queer thought that is inextricably rhythmed with practice and syncopated against Hegel.
II
Hegel invokes the metaphor of rhythm as a way to distinguish two ways of thinking or reading. The difference between speculative and ordinary proposition is likened in §61 to “to the conflict that occurs in rhythm between meter and accent” (Hegel 1977 [1807]: 38).[4] The notion of rhythm had been introduced in §56, which asserts that logical necessity just is the “self-moving” and “self-differentiation” of the subject in its being its own concept (34), and in §60 the concept is said to “present itself as the coming-to-be of the object” (37). This “rhythm of the organic whole” is characterized as an interruption of what Hegel calls “picture-thinking [Vorstellung],” as well as of formalism. In each of those kinds of thinking there is a degree of stasis or stability. In the ordinary propositions of representational thinking, the subject relates to the content as predicate or accident, “remaining inertly over against it” as a “fixed self,” “passive” in the face of a multiplicity of passing predicates (37–38). Formalist argumentation, in §58 meanwhile, is “freedom from all content, and a sense of vanity towards it” (35), turning its presentation into the “principle of the content” (36).
Speculative thinking and reading, Hegel contends in §60, leaves this “solid ground” “shaken” (37). Once the subject has passed over into the predicate, it finds there is not a predicate as such but the substance of the concept and that, instead of being able to float freely above, it has entered and is absorbed into the content. As the predicate becomes the organic whole, it has the effect of weighing down thinking, depriving it of a sovereign liberty. The effect is akin to a rhythmic jolt. Thinking, which at the same time “in reality feels itself checked by the loss of the Subject” as something that is not already implicated in its own otherness, “missing it, is thrown back on the thought of the subject” (38). In §62, Hegel repeats the same propulsive metaphor in conclusion: “Thinking therefore loses the firm objective basis it had in the subject when, in the predicate, it is thrown back on to the subject, and when, in the predicate, it does not return into itself, but into the subject of the content” (38).
The speculative proposition is said to “destroy” the ordinary proposition in a “counterthrust [Gegenstoß]” against the distinction between subject and predicate that it presupposes (37–38). Katrin Pahl expressly reads speculative logic as a syncopation of ordinary representational thinking, disrupting its grammar’s triple strike of “A is B” by failing to deliver the predicate’s expected third-beat accent (2012: 111–12). Figured as a dance in Pahl’s analysis, speculative logic leaves the choreography tottering by throwing the subject back on the other foot, only for it to miss its own first-beat accent in an “awkward pirouette.” Pahl wants to read Hegel as a deconstructionist avant la lettre.
To assess the extent to which Hegel’s rhythm is already arrhythmic, let us read closely what he says in §61 about the rhythm of the concept and the conflict between meter and accent:
Rhythm results from the oscillating midpoint and the unification of the two. So, too, in the philosophical proposition the identification of Subject and Predicate is not meant to destroy the difference between them, which the form of the proposition expresses; their unity, rather, is meant to emerge as a harmony. The form of the proposition is the appearance of the determinate sense, or the accent that distinguishes its fulfillment; but that the predicate expresses the Substance, and that the Subject itself falls into the universal, this is the unity in which the accent dies away. (Hegel 1977 [1807]: 38)
Translating Hegel’s “schwebende Mitte” as “juggle,” Pahl contends that “this harmony, to be sure, amplifies dissonance, interference, and syncopation” and that “for Hegel, this conflict [between identity and difference] does not have to be (dis)solved but can be made productive as a harmonic disunity in oscillating motion” (2012: 109–10). On this interpretation, speculative logic balances the two rhythms by treating syncopation as a kind of counterbalancing act. And yet, Hegel openly concedes, this unifying harmony results in accent dying away. Notwithstanding the argument she wants to make about the priority of syncopation in Hegel’s conception of rhythm, Pahl’s metaphorical footwork illustrates precisely this point: that, far from creating, say, a hemiola, any off-beat accentuation actually falls away in the harmonious unity of a vibration. This raises an interesting question about the rhythm of reading—one which preoccupies Derrida in Geschlecht III (2020b) where he employs a tactic of leaping and zigzagging when reading Heidegger so as to head off the risk of collapsing its different and sometimes conflicting beats into consonance. When a text declares A to mean B, not simply does it allow for a strong reading “C” that it says without meaning to; it has perhaps already gone so far as to declare that A is C. Does this rhythm of reading Hegel itself exhibit the juggle that Pahl attributes to Hegel?
III
Writing in the left-hand column of Glas about the “ternary rhythm of the ‘potencies’” in Hegel’s philosophy of nature, Derrida takes a different view:
What Hegel says about the structure of the Potenz—which will also be true of the dialectical moment—explains to us how he, Hegel, intended to be read. One can transpose what he states about each Potenz to each organized totality of his text, which both repeats and anticipates, and yet marks a leap, a jump, a rupture in repetition, all the while ensuring the continuity of the passage and the homogeneity of a development. A plurality of continuous jolts, of uninterrupted jerks: such would be the rhythm. (Derrida 2020a: 121b)
Derrida’s reading depends on the way in which “the absolute totality arrests itself,” much as, in §58 of the Phenomenology, Hegel describes how the subject, in order to “sink [its] freedom in the content,” in a “refusal to intrude into the immanent rhythm of the concept,” must exercise a measure of restraint “which is itself an essential moment of the concept” (Hegel 1977 [1807]: 36).
Derrida analyzes the way in which the concept holds itself back under the heading of what he calls here and elsewhere “stricture,” a self-strangulation that makes the gl catch in the throat and which logic, he claims, “organizes Hegel’s text”:
Any commentary would disqualify itself that, qua commentary, did not follow its prescription or that dragged its feet hesitating between explication and rupture, within all the oppositional couples that sustain in general the history of the historians of philosophy. There is no possible displacement of this history without displacement . . . of what in Hegel’s text imposes this rule of reading, i.e. a displacement that itself would escape the dialectical law and its strict rhythm. It seems like we are not there yet; and this can no more be done in one blow than by continuous approach. The event cannot be as noisy as a bomb, as flashy or burning hot as metal placed in the fire. Even if it were an event it would here be—stricture against stricture—unobtrusive and marginal. (Derrida 2020a: 123–24a)
In the right-hand column, Derrida glosses the gl as
a voiceless voice stifling a sob or clot of milk in the throat, tickled laugh or gluey vomit of a gluttonous baby, the imperial flight of a bird of prey swooping down all of a sudden on the back of your neck, the sticky, frozen, cold piss name of an impassive Teutonic philosopher, with his well-known stammer, sometimes liquid and sometimes guttural and tetanic, with swollen or cooing goiter, everything that rings strange in the tympanic pit or canal, spit or paste on the soft palate, orgasm of the glottis or uvula, clitoral glue, abortion cloaca, spermchoke, rhythmic hiatus of an occlusion, staccatodance spasm of an eruptojaculation, syncopated valve of the tongue and lips, or a nail falling in the silence of the milky voice” (137–39b).
The displacement of Hegel’s rhythm would entail neither continuous transformation nor rupture but stricture against stricture, the syncopation of stricture. Instead of one rhythm against another, there would be arrhythmia against arrhythmia, and a redoubling of speculative logic. Or as he puts it in his introduction to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Typography, if rhythm’s double bind “is still too linked to opposition, contradiction, dialectic . . . to that kind of undecidable that derives from calculation and from a nervous dialectical contraction . . . it would be necessary to think an other undecidable, to interrupt this double bind with a gap or a hiatus—and recognize in an arrhythmic caesura the respiration of rhythm” (Derrida 1989: 34–35). The “antirhythmic” rhythm that Derrida thinks with Hölderlin and Lacoue-Labarthe interrupts interruption as oppositionality (1989: 42).
Glas is replete with references with spasmodic rhythms. In a key passage it refers back to one of Derrida’s earliest and most extensive discussions of rhythm in “The Double Session,” which I am proposing to read as elaborating a way of breathing rhythm into arrhythmia, less as a transcription of the voice than of a machinic pneumatics. Rhythm is involved early on with a footnote to Émile Benveniste, who emphasizes its pre-Socratic conception as movement rather than form: “what . . . works toward the decapitation or ungluing of the text is the regular intervention of the blanks, the ordered return of the white spaces, the measure and order of dissemination, the law of spacing, the rhuthmos” (Derrida 1981: 171). Rejecting the hypothesis of an infinite undifferentiated polysemia, Derrida speaks of “a kind of poverty, I would even call it a very singular and very regular monotony,” which is rigorously distinguished from the totalizing power of the concept to pin down multiplicity to a single point (251). Rather, the blank folds back upon or re-marks the play of meaning. This mark, imprint, or strike belongs to the series that it might be added to or subtracted from without being its transcendental origin or end while pointing to the blanks, gaps, or spacing between the terms in the series (252–254). It thus “re-marks” the syncopations that make the series possible through the relations among the elements that unite them in their dispersion—syncopations on account of which seriality, as identity, is impossible.
Rhythm is also at the front of Derrida’s mind in Geschlecht III where his theme is, as already mentioned, reading “in abrupt jumps, leaps, and [this time—NWS] zigzags” (2020b: 1). Setting deconstruction against the rhythm of metaphysics, he upbraids Heidegger for gathering the plurality of poetic tones into the harmonious resonance of the fundamental tone or Einklang, which literally means sounding as one (71). Analyzing the distinction that Geschlecht III draws between polysemia and dissémination, Geoffrey Bennington provocatively suggests that deconstruction’s rhythmic re-marking or re-striking may yet invite a closer comparison than Derrida might want with the harmony of metaphysical logic.
We might still wonder if the monos of the monotonous re-mark does not invite a more generous re-reading against all the unifying or gathering motifs that Derrida is so suspicious of in Heidegger, and even whether that kind of monotony (or writing, textuality, trace, dissemination, différance . . . ) is really so clearly distinguishable from what Heidegger repeatedly characterizes in terms of oneness, unity, uniqueness, Einklang, and so on. (Bennington 2020: 435)
IV
Is there, though, a political urgency to syncopate monotonies? For Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda (2018), the syncope in the speculative dialectic is re-marked by a mark—the dash that comes at the Phenomenology’s closing time, signaling, if not a lapse of consciousness, then digression and also propulsion. But one ought not be seduced by its monotonous regularity into reducing the Derridean blank to the simplicity of self-propelling speculative thought, “having its otherness within itself” (Hegel 1977 [1807]: 34). One consequence of Derrida’s rhythming of arrhythmia, his syncopated stricture, is that there is no “the” deconstruction that would march to the same beat but rather multiple deconstructions each choreographed to rhythms out of step with one another and even with themselves, a series of deconstructions only by virtue of the spacings that separate them. Every other is every bit other.
These multiple, syncopated deconstruction give rise to a vertiginous precipitation, as Derrida might put it—as the kind of accelerated rush to close embodied in the hemiola as we approach a cadence. Rushing headlong into these syncopations, then, Jean-Luc Nancy’s rhythm of the senses—which must also be understood as the syncopations that disjoin them—and his deconstruction of Hegelian dialectic do not coincide with Derridean dissémination but tend more toward an “archaic propulsion” or primordial recitative that opens up the space of the subject (Nancy 2013: 254–55). Nancy’s transcendental vibration is rhythmed, Bennington suggests, even to the point of noise—“rhythm’s scum,” he quips (Bennington 2011: 19). Even Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s twin embraces of rhythm as condition of possibility subtly beat against each other, one drawn toward haptocentrism, the other psychoanalysis.
Then there is Hélène Cixous’s virtuosic meditation on the rhythms of puppetry, in which every person and object involved in the theatre is imagined as being “put into movement by . . . the gentle shocks of the puppeteer” (Cixous 2016 [1999]: 66). Puppetry is a metaphor not only for writing, reading, and staging but further, I am suggesting, for speculative rhythm. The playwright dreams of being a drumskin on which characters stamp out a rhythm with puppet steps (64). The movement of the puppet, “so abandoned to the motilities and movements of its puppeteer that it no longer bangs at the edges,” enjoys a suspended freedom, not weighed down by having to tap its feet on the ground (68). Equally, on its immobile face there is “a scrolling through of all the great tragic grimaces” (72). The puppet must be “two-but-one” in a simple, exact unfolding of the dance, without jerking (70–72). But it also has a double rhythm that evokes the blanks of “The Double Session” without collapsing into them: “The puppet writes with time, in full intervals, in (invisible) whites [blancs], separating and tying together the regular full stops, the sentences, the lines, the bonds of passion, drawing the space from which will burst forth the shout, the crisis, the access, disjoining, cutting” (Cixous 2016 [1999]: 72).
Cixous’s description of punctuation as outburst, as the release of vibrational anticipation, like “the leap of the cat crouching for a long time in the vibrating body” (72), brings me to my final example. Fred Moten’s explicitly political filtering of the Derridean deconstruction of dialectical oscillation as a “deconstruction of the machinery of exclusion” in his reading of Amiri Baraka’s essay “The Burton Greene Affair” (Moten 2003: 125). In Moten’s reading, Baraka’s essay is all cross-rhythm, syncopation, and stammering in a recalibration of the “rhythmic marking of racial difference” (127). In turn, the vibration of improvisation and Black aesthetics in Moten’s thought is set—in syncopated resonance with and resistance to Derridean deconstruction—against the “interminable and systematic opposition and oscillation” of European metaphysics between identity and difference, collection and division (132), which, he reminds us, “begins and ends at the illusion of the originary” (130). In an interesting re-punctuation of Derrida’s assault on the gathering power of the logos, Moten’s focus is the question of “ensemble.” Via this concept, he reminds us of the political stakes of rhythm and its deconstruction: that the question of rhythm and its interruption is also that of community and belonging, of being together. Situating Baraka’s particular variant of nationalism amid the neocolonial capture of Third World liberation movements, amid “a certain economic world picture in which the dual motion of fragmentation and homogenization, exclusionary differentiation and metaphysical sameness, are evident” (130), Moten underscores the possibility of “obfuscate[ing] the ensemble in the spirit of an other tradition, one that would read, reflect, and transcend the interinanimation of being, language, race, and (the crisis of European) humanity” (131). This ensemble, he exhorts, “will have been given in the cut between rhythms . . . in the arrhythmia that separates these rhythms” (127).
The ensemble of hemiolas that I have enumerated—more in precipitous haste toward closing time than measured rhetorical strikes—likewise resists any unity or gathering into a harmonious resonance. There is no “the” deconstruction of Hegelian rhythm. And deconstruction and Black radical thought, if they make an alliance, it is not in a traditional convergence of struggles under a single banner or a unity of tactics. Rather, it comes only in the negotiations, the tension of one thread or string beating against the other, even as they become more or less tightly entangled. If there is any single strike, any monotony, among this scattered or shattered set of arrhythmias, it is found only in the syncopations that separate their deconstructions. And politics perhaps just is the insistent sustaining of these hemiolas.
References
“Why I’ll fight the heavy mob.” 1971. Post Mercury, December 17. The National Archives, catalogue ref: MEPO 31/21. Accessed March 1, 2024. https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/mangrove-nine-protest/source-eight/.
Bennington, Geoffrey. 2011. “In Rhythm: A Response to Jean-Luc Nancy,” SubStance 40, no. 3: 18–19.
Bennington, Geoffrey. 2020. “Geschlecht pollachos legetai: Translation, Polysemia, Dissemination,” Philosophy Today 64, no. 2: 423–39.
Cixous, Hélène. 2016 [1999]. “Theatre Surprised by Puppets” [Le Théâtre surpris par les marionettes].” In Cixous, Politics, Ethics and Performance: Hélène Cixous and the Théâtre du Soleil, bilingual edition, edited and translated by Lara Stevens, 64–79.Melbourne: re.press.
Comay, Rebecca and Frank Ruda. 2018. The Dash: The Other Side of Absolute Knowing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1981. “The Double Session.” In Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson, 176–285. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1989. “Désistance.” In Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, translated by Christopher Fynsk, 1–42. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2020a. Clang. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and David Wills. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2020b. Geschlecht III: Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity, edited by Geoffrey Bennington, Katie Chenoweth, and Rodrigo Therezo, translated by Katie Chenoweth and Rodrigo Therezo. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1977 [1807]. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ilieva, Evgenia. 2024. “Notes on Dialectics: C. L. R. James’s Hegel.” Hegel Bulletin 45, no. 1: 144–65.
James, C. L. R. 1980 [1948]. Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin. Westport CT: Lawrence Hill & Co.
James, C. L. R. 1992. “Letters to Constance Webb.” In The C. L. R. James Reader, ed. Anna Grimshaw, 151–152. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mahabir Joy A. I. 2002. “Rhythm and Class Struggle: The Calypsoes of David Rudder.” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 6, no. 3: 1–22.
Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2013. “Récit Recitation Recitative.” In Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous, edited by Keith Chapin and Andrew T. Clark, 242–55. New York: Fordham University Press.
Pahl, Katrin. 2012. Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Siddons, Alastair. 2020. “How Research Allowed Co-Writer Alastair Siddons to Nail Every Detail for Steve McQueen’s ‘Mangrove.’” Interview with Joey Moser. Awards Daily, November 25. Accessed March 1, 2024. https://www.awardsdaily.com/2020/11/20/how-research-allowed-to-alastair-siddons-to-nail-every-detail-for-steve-mcqueens-mangrove/.
Siddons, Alastair and Steve McQueen. n.d. Mangrove screenplay (Small Axe Films Ltd.). Accessed March 1, 2024. http://tvwriting.co.uk/tv_scripts/2020/Drama/Small_Axe_1x01_-_Mangrove.pdf.
Terada, Rei. 2023. Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Zantvoort, Bart. 2020. “Arrested Development: On Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 28, no. 3: 350–69.
Notes
[1] I first presented this essay at the 2024 Annual Conference of the American Comparative Literature Association as part of a seminar, organized by Erin Graff Zivin and Jonathan Leal, on “(Rhy)pistemologies: Thinking Through Rhythm.” I am most grateful to the comments and questions made by participants and auditors.
[2] On the political significance of rhythm in Caribbean music, especially Trinidadian calypso, see Mahabir 2002.
[3] For a discussion of James’s reading of Hegel’s Logic, see Ilieva 2024.
[4] Throughout I have modified the translation of this text in various places for clarity.