Abstract
This dissertation examines the relationship between the work of Fred Moten and Harold Bloom. I argue that Moten's oeuvre can be understood as the development of an intellectual agenda first articulated in his undergraduate thesis on the literary theory of Harold Bloom. In that thesis, Moten diagnoses a problem in Bloom's theory of the literary sublime and proposes what a "genuine counter-sublime" might look like.
For Bloom, the literary sublime is a privileged mode of knowledge that he calls "gnosis," based on a syncretic reading of the Valentinian speculation, Lurianic Kabbalah, Nietzsche, and the twentieth-century writings of Gershom Scholem and Hans Jonas. Using literary theorist Jared Hickman's notion of "racialized Gnosticism," I argue that Moten's "genuine counter-sublime" constitutes a "religious" or "spiritual" answer to the problem of a "Gnostic" world order––a phenomenon which I term "Black Gnosis."
My interpretation of Moten's relationship with "Black Bloom" unfolds through a series of transdisciplinary archival and literary readings of Frantz Fanon, Maurice Dide and Paul Guiraud, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Jacques Derrida, Immanuel Kant, Nishida Kitaro, and Claude Levi-Strauss using the metaphorics of Gnosticism and jazz to develop a "grammar of contradictory identity," "pidgin," or "impure language," namely, the conditions of possibility for a form of improvisational, ensemblic racial encounter outside and before the problematics of recognition, reparation, and/or reconciliation.
Where for Harold Bloom, "the American Religion" characterized the spirit of a uniquely American will-to-power over the past structured by the logics of mastery and totality, indeed, a drive to become the Demiurge, Moten's "genuine counter-sublime" suggests otherwise possibilities and excavates the racial unthought of Bloom's Gnosticism.
