A liberatory onto-epistemology beyond the Euro apparatus of Logos and Nomos
In a previous piece, I argued that a liberation onto-epistemology, a new geography of reason, should include a collapsing of (space)-time and a consequent reworking of the Derridean grammatology of knowledge. A reworking of the logos and nomos as apparatus.
Anderson theorises a radical understanding of time in Afrofuturism 2.0 through Mbiti and Sankofa as communal, cyclical, and non-linear, with Malian village time as short-term, determinate, and event-based (Mbiti, 1969) and long-term, infinite possibility (Anderson, 2015). Building on this, this project reads alongside other Global South temporalities. It engages with Hindu/Indigenous cyclical cosmology to show that Europe never had the right to make time linear and that hegemonic power is a fallacy.
As the master, Europe can claim ownership of temporality. This forces the Global South to be judged as being in its past and to catch up to Europe’s present in its future. This sovereignty over time becomes another primary apparatus, set through the geographic and racial dynamics of Agamben’s Homo Sacer field, that selects who gets to exist under the law across past/present/future. These doxa dictate that the body is denied to those locked in the past, and that this flesh is ready to be sacrificed despite any overt nomos. We reckon that Rousseau’s social contract is inverted under this distortion into Mills’ aberration, where white supremacy legacy is based on an immoral code as a foundation. The new page doesn’t reject the European base but relocates power elsewhere.
If we are to start seeing time as collapsing in a moment, the past, present and future exist in the materialisation process. Barad affirms this in “Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-Turning, Re-Membering, and Facing the Incalculable” (2017/2018). They look at the dissonance of intergenerational Hibakusha conflating the collapse of the detonation point at 8:15 am Hiroshima / 11:02 am Nagasaki and the continuing plight (specifically thyroid cancer) of the survivors as occurring in the same moment.
Through a Lacanian psychoanalytical lens, we see the trauma of the real, ever lost to language and the loss of the mother as being entangled in a moment of parapraxis. The ungraspable real presents in the slip of the tongue, the lalangue, the hallucination, and the dream. Trauma derives from the Greek word meaning “to pierce.” The piercing of time to return repeatedly. What if the piercing is an anachronism?
Experiencing any trauma feels like the horrific event is happening repeatedly. It isn’t, in Eurocentric linear time; however, for all intents and purposes, the consequences still happen within that moment. The probability function collapses, becomes time-independent, and repeatedly presents itself at the moment of trauma.
This means that Japanese Hibakusha do not really experience post-traumatic stress disorder in my reading of Barad’s work, as that would mean that time is linear: an act happened, and then consequences emanate from that point. The point of fusion and explosion exists in every moment. Similarly, the psychoanalytic real exists before language and, crucially, before time does in childhood development. In the Lacanian sense, the ‘real’ trauma outside of language cannot be captured nor understood. These returns of the real offer opportunities to bring the dissonance into the symbolic order; because the real lies outside time, the probability function collapses in every ‘return’. There is no linear past, present, and future in trauma.
Barad refers to testimony as theory, and they introduce hauntology, a re-turning of the past. Time is entangled, and nothing is ever lost; it exists in every intra-action and is written in every particle’s urtext. Anderson’s imaginative space-telling embraces Barad’s spacetime mattering by delinking Europe from the geographic logos of reason, rejecting its nomos as an apparatus of othering, and moving toward new geographies of reason in anticolonial and decolonial spaces by relocating and finding knowledge and law that form a different world, then projecting this agency onto a future from elsewhere.
We have all fallen into the reaffirmation trap of comparing Eric B. & Rakim to Shakespeare, holding Inspectah Deck’s opening verse to Nobel greats and adding Tagore and Rumi to the canon. Ecumenically pleading for the master to adjust his metrics to include the oeuvre of the Global South can only resist in ways that cut both ways with the master’s own sword, while reaffirming his right to choose his tome of worth. While including melanated work, we re-consecrate his right to humanise and reduce to flesh.
I am not averse to considering power as being essential to existence in any episteme. It is the very nature of the power that installs white supremacy. The Eurocentric episteme is predicated on a familial psychology that is primarily patriarchal, and the master holds the power to grant words meaning. Without a master, a god, king, messiah, there is no differential system of communication. The ‘no of the father / the name of the father’ or the mother’s separation requires a Sovereign to lend his ontological power to the signifier. The logos and nomos then retroactively, through their use as apparatus, reaffirm his right.
Lacan’s master discourse can be described as the master covertly covering his split subjectivity onto the master signifier, through the power of the name of the father to empower the signifier. As the master is incomplete, his promise to complete the set has to be flawed, and all this leads to the production of the petit objet a and the source of communication. The linguistic wages that one gets in exchange for the real. The real leftover, that forever exists, that can’t be brought into language, and the need to capture it all is a prerequisite of the totalising claim of the name of the father.”Now, I was unable, in their analysis, to find any trace of their tribal customs and beliefs, which they had not forgotten, which they knew, but from the point of view of ethnography. It has to be said that everything was done to separate them from this, given what they were, these courageous little doctors who were trying to insert themselves into the medical hierarchy of the metropolis – these were still colonial days. What they knew about this, then, at the level of the ethnographic was more or less that of journalism, but their unconscious functioned according to the good old rules of Oedipus. This was the unconscious that had been sold to them along with the laws of colonisation, this exotic, regressive form of the master’s discourse, in the face of the capitalism called imperialism. Their unconscious was not that of their childhood memories – you could sense it – but their childhood was retroactively lived out in our familial categories.” (Lacan, Seminar XVII, 2007: 91-92)Resistance matters. The regressive form of the master’s discourse can centre Europe through acceptance and rejection. Historically, Senghor seeks value in rejecting Africa on this metric entirely, positioning African emotion as superior to Europe’s supposed rationality with his formulation “L’émotion est nègre, comme la raison est hellène” (Senghor, 1939/1964:288). Fanon’s critique in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Chapter 5, is an apt attack on the dialectical nature of knowledge and feeling, leaving Europe as the crown, judge, and jury of logos, which is then a consequential affirmation of the law of European supremacy. An onto-epistemology of Black Afro resistance should come from a geography of reason that neither opposes nor aligns with Europe. This means rejecting the familial nature of the white psyche while appreciating the thought with the recognition of its colonial ingredients.
If we are to take a paragraph to delve into Lacanian psychoanalysis as a metaphysical ontos: Modern-day racism stems from the psychotic metric that reaffirms fear of the other’s jouissance (Lacan, Television, 1973/1990). This stems from the death of the father, followed by a delusional state to hold the psyche together (Black, 2025). A symptom (sinthome) creates a new law and knowledge to affirm the missing source of power. It is the need to invest in the master, his knowledge and law even in his absence, creating a mutating body that evolves at every crack. The European logos was always fragile; no episteme is complete; knowledge may be operational, but it is always flawed. In Lacan’s oeuvre, he cites the null set as part of every set and, through Russell’s paradox, argues that a set cannot be worthy of the all-powerful, all-totalising master. As nomos then rests on the same fallacy and, worse, carries the consequence of the master’s fragility, racism exists in intra-action with the master’s power and totalising claims, and it holds the pen that scores the obvious hole in the episteme.
Returning to the pertinent example, melanated activists, the world over, have tried to acquiesce to white thought, play the game to include their subversive voice in the tome. They have failed mainly because the mechanism of habitus is intra-active, working to cut with the apparatus of knowledge and law. If reality doesn’t fit the established knowledge, we rewrite the law and create more knowledge to fill the apparent gap. This is because whiteness is predicated on Mills’ adaptation of Rousseau’s social contract. Anderson acknowledges Mills’ work in his introduction to Afrofuturism and World Order. The racial contract is based on white supremacy having to include an agnotology to protect its immoral code inversely; there is no repentance here. This anti-knowledge is part of the episteme, solely aimed at totalising. These Bourdieuian doxa are the nomos, firmly instilled in the Lacanian symbolic order, and the solution can’t be found there. This is the trap of intra-action: there is no access to a library that rejects your existence and makes constant new metrics to ensure your subjection.
If we are to imagine a conception of time which is based on Mbiti (1969) – that time is event-driven – how would the episteme know? What would be important in a world that doesn’t treat time as money but moves toward a more relational approach to being? What would a 21st century look like if a conversation with an elder was always more important than a previously set meeting for material gain? If we embrace Djet or Djed and Sankofa and flip linear time on its head. Should we go back and get it, see our ancestor in the future?I don’t know. What could have been. I am going to have fun creating it.
References
Anderson, R. (2015). Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness. Lexington Books.
Anderson, R. (2025). Afrofuturism and World Order. Ohio State University Press.
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford UP.
Barad, K. (2017). Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, Re-membering, and Facing the Incalculable. New Formations 92: 56-86. [Also 2018 Fordham chapter]
Black, J. (2023). The Psychosis of Race: A Lacanian Approach to Racism and Racialization. Routledge.
Fanon, F. (1952). Black Skin, White Masks.
Lacan, J. (2007). Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Norton. pp.91-92.
Lacan, J. (1990). Television (1973). Norton. pp.32-33.
Mbiti, J. S. (1969). African Religions and Philosophy.
Mills, C. W. (1997). The Racial Contract. Cornell UP.
Senghor, L. S. (1964). Liberté I: Négritude et humanisme (1939).
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