Debts

Abstract

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• Debts
• Dan-el Padilla Peralta (bio)

Only way he comin' back is through his unborns

—Lil Wayne, "Uproar" (2018)

Recently I've been spending some time in the intellectual company of longtermists, not because I find their arguments persuasive but because they seem to have stumbled upon an effective rhetorical strategy. As I understand it, their move is to direct attention away from the muddy moral universe of the present to that final frontier of the far-off future, so invitingly fraught in the glistening promise of its unknowability. And there's no denying the strategy's success: books here, media coverage there, stacks of funding everywhere. Yet the more I read the longtermists, the more they seem like twenty-first-century versions of Augustine of Hippo, their heavenly city populated by blissed-out distant generations. But I'm convinced, too, that, much like Augustine's, their fixation on the future contains an important message about the valuation of the past. It's a message about valuation and struggle.

I use the word valuation carefully. I want to think about value. The longtermists would have us assign the greatest value to the lives of future generations, indeed of future selves: vast, in fact potentially unknowably vast, in their quantity, and therefore exerting obligations on us by the sheer force of their number. But I submit that the greatest obligations we have are not to selves in the future whom (with the exception of our children, grandchildren, and, if we're lucky, great-grandchildren) we won't ever know, but to the selves of the past whom we can, at least in principle, come to know. Not in the fullness of their personal interiority, of course; even the recently dead are shadowy, and those dead for many years or decades or centuries or millennia much more so. But because they existed, we can come to know them, and cultivate relationships with them, in ways precluded by the still-not-existence of the unborn. And the mere prospect of those relationships creates ethical demands. The realization of those demands comes down, ultimately, to the business of value, and to the necessity of struggle. [End Page 64]

The field that has come to be known as Classics is all about value. That much is apparent from its very name. If we are not to disavow that name (and I think there are good reasons for doing just that), then we need to think harder about the demands and merits of struggling for value in a way that simultaneously honors our obligation to this confounded and confounding world, and to the pasts—and past people—who brought this world into being. My belief is that this struggle must be reparative: not only must it directly confront the ill-gotten gains of racial capitalism, it must actively seek to reverse and redistribute them. This struggle is unavoidably political in nature; nothing is gained by pretending that it is not.

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The trailblazer doyenne of Black Studies, Sylvia Wynter, has repeatedly singled out the "overrepresentation of Man" as a defining feature of early global modernity. By this she specifically means the elevation of the white European male as paradigm of rationality and subjecthood, as cornerstone of what counts as fully Human. This elevation moves in rhythm with the global transformation that, taking off in the centuries after the first contact of 1492, draws its fuel from settler colonialism and racial capitalism. The overrepresentation of Man is inconceivable without these two processes, which also interact with one of the signature features of the construction of the Human as a category in early modernity: the reanimation of ancient Greece and Rome in connection with Renaissance humanism. I see my work as committed, in the first instance, to confronting the legacies of that overrepresentation, which warps our ability to construct and engage responsibly with the ancient Mediterranean past and with the history of those disciplines that emerge around that past's study. But there is no effective method for ethical recovery and attentiveness to the pluralisms of the past, and to the staggering diversity of that past, that can exist independently of the struggle to redistribute the resources that...