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Abstract

This essay centers on the difficulty of modern sensibility in relinquishing ideas about sovereign power even after recognizing, objecting, and denouncing the use of its violent coercion. The discussion picks up at the point of wonderment about this difficulty being equivalent to that between language and subjectivity. It identifies the partisan work that normative aesthetics performs in convincing the oppressed that their sense of an inferior racialized subjectivity is innate and unavoidably genuine to their being. It then settles into presenting the ugliness of shame and the desire to quell its unpleasant feelings by aspiring to the normative beauty prescribed by the relentless propagation of established conventions. It is mainly concerned with what it takes to no longer obey the command to use the “war machine” model to achieve Truth. Its inspiration is to redescribe and transcode alternative ways of refocusing breath about the shared nonlinguistic capacity of living flesh.

Keywords

aesthetics power racism sovereignty

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Sovereignty and the Power Aesthetics of Racism

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