Whistling Past the Graveyard

• Author: Jared Loggins
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221128894
• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Date: 01 February 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221128894

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(1) 162 –177

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917221128894

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Article

Whistling Past the

Graveyard

Jared Loggins1

Abstract

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The

ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective

but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will

political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What

claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-

five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in

their future contexts? How will the consistent concerns of political theorists

evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from

now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough

equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is

one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries.

[Power] is something like a shadow cast into the future by action . . .

—Patchen Markell, “The Moment Has Passed”1

Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation.

—Toni Morrison, “Memory, Creation, and Writing”2

1Amherst College, Amherst, MA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jared Loggins, Amherst College, 220 South Pleasant Street, Amherst, MA 01002, USA.

Email: jloggins@amherst.edu

1128894PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221128894Political TheoryLoggins

research-article2022

1. Romand Coles, Mark Reinhardt, and George Shulman, Radical Future Pasts:

Untimely Political Theory (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014).

2. Toni Morrison, “Memory, Creation, and Writing,” Thought: Fordham University

Quarterly 59, no. 4 (1984): 385–90, https://doi.org/10.5840/thought198459430.

Loggins 163

The ghost has its own desires, so to speak, which figure the whole complicated

sociality of a determining formation that seems inoperative (like slavery) or

invisible (like racially gendered capitalism) but that is nonetheless alive and

enforced. But the force of the ghost’s desire is not just negative, not just the

haunting and staged words, marks, or gestures of domination and injury. The

ghost is not other or alterity as such, ever. It is (like Beloved) pregnant with

unfulfilled possibility, with the something to be done that the wavering present

is demanding. This something to be done is not a return to the past but a

reckoning with its repression in the present, a reckoning with that which we

have lost, but never had.

—Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters3

The editors of Political Theory have asked respondents to confabulate

about the following question: “what claims might political theorists or their

descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time?” To

this, I pose my own: how should we regard talk of the future in light of a

present that is experienced as necropolitical in its effects and a past that has

not been mourned?4 Racial technologies of the present are driven axiomati-

cally by the disappearance of the vulnerable (as literal and social death).5 In

this death drive, the histories of violence and dispossession of Black life

amount to the repressed but still present inventory fueling its reproduction

now. Thus both the past and present of racial disappearance mutually consti-

tute one another in the shaping of the political order—and, crucially, in the

practices of memory and forgetting deployed to preserve it. This raises the

stakes of mourning as a radical democratic project. Such a project is con-

cerned, as it must be, with the future but not at the expense of an accounting

of the brutal past and, as Avery Gordon put it in her epigraphic invocation of

Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the “unfulfilled possibility” of the graveyard.

Disappeared Black lives (now and in the past) are our tragic inheritance in

3. Avery F. Gordon and Janice Radway, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the

Sociological Imagination, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota

Press, 2008).

4. I draw my use of necropolitics from J.-A. Mbembé and Libby Meintjes,

“Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.

5. For two accounts that conceptualize the dead of the past (slavery and other

regimes of violence) as part of the ongoing inventory of racial capitalism, see

Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(Ion) of

Blackness Toward the End of the World,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014):

81–97; Endnotes, “The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality by Chris Chen,” https://

endnotes.org.uk/issues/3/en/chris-chen-the-limit-point-of-capitalist-equality.