For the critic Werner Hamacher, the structure of the promise is the pre-structure of language. It precedes language not only in its communicative structure but also in its predicative structure. The promise, unable to be posited, does not name a beginning or an end, nor does it promise to express the inexpressible in nature; preceding all cognition and understanding, the promise does not even promise itself, but, according to Hamacher, promises to be a promise. Having assessed the works of Walter Benjamin on language—“On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” [Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen]—and on violence—“On the Critique of Violence” [Zur Kritik der Gewalt]—this iteration of the promise, as Hamacher shows, concerns a pure violence that is deposing (Entsetzung), a violence so pure that what it sends forth (pro-mittere) never appears as such. Like the promise, which is “infinitely yet-to-come” and coincides with its “infinite nonarrival,” what the promise promises to name withdraws from all that is given to be seen or sensed. Whence comes the principal question of this seminar: How to think the blackness of the promise?

We seek to ask why it is that the blackness of the promise does not promise a name, or why, in the racist fantasy of language as positing, blackness names what deposes the power to name. These matters return us, unquestionably, to Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs, which states that to be un nègre is to be a slave to one’s appearance (‘apparaître’), imprisoned as the eternal victim (‘victime éternel’) of an appearance for which one is not responsible. If, as Fanon shows, appearance, time, and language are co-equal in their irrevocable deceit, then, how might the time of slavery interminably dissimulate the blackness by which racial violence unnames itself? Or, how might the racial violence of language as such permanently blacken what it promises? In response to these questions, we welcome papers interested in blackness and the promise of the name, especially as it concerns the following:

• The afformance of law and the violence of slavery
• Naming and inheritance
• Deposing and the racist fantasy of positing
• The promise of love as a promise that does not arrive 
• The performative in relation to the afformative
• The promise in tandem with gifts and debt
• The promise and revolutionary violence
• The promise as contract, pledge, or covenant
• The promise as (racializing) command or imperative
• The promise as deposing “itself” 
• The promise of blackness
• The promise in the works of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Werner Hamacher, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, J.L. Austin, Frantz Fanon, David Marriott, George Jackson, Huey Newton, Angela Davis, Fred Moten, Sora Han, or Jacques Lacan