AGAPE & EROS
This June, I will release two companion volumes—AGAPE: A Fugitive Planner’s Guide to Empire and Fugitive Erotics: Black Rites of Breakage and Repair. Conceived as a diptych, these works play on the distinction between AGAPE—the general will and general antagonisms that shape the molar mass—and EROS—the sensual desire that animates intimate, molecular bonds. Together, they articulate the horizon between resisting the structural violence of Empire and affirming the intimate (in-/re-)surgences of the flesh.
The first volume, A Fugitive Planner’s Guide to Empire, offers a strategic cartography of Empire: its planetary machines of conquest, segregation, and extraction. It compiles dispatches summarizing the first cycle of investigations conducted by the AGAPE (Against Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide) research group, tracing the operations of imperial violence across territorial, ecological, and epistemic scales.
The second volume, Fugitive Erotics, turns to the libidinal economies that Empire appropriates and reshapes in order to animate its machinery of control. It explores how power dismembers not only social structures but also bodies, intimate relations, and desires. Where A Fugitive Planner’s Guide to Empire outlines the structural blueprint of Empire’s apparatuses of domination, Fugitive Erotics tracks the vital energies upon which those apparatuses feed—mapping the faults, the fractures, the lines of seepage through which in-/re-surgent forms of life, intimacy, and imagination may leak, pool, corrode, and ultimately inundate the colonial machine.
Each book stages a confrontation with one of Empire’s foundational logics. A Fugitive Planner’s Guide to Empire counters the analytics of raciality, which stratifies the general mass by assigning differential value to populations, places, and historical periods. Fugitive Erotics counters the colonial order of sexuality, which dismembers the individual sensuous body—coding desire into hierarchy, severing intimacy from reciprocity, and conscripting flesh into regimes of domination.
At the heart of both books lies the recognition that these logics—the analytics of raciality and the colonial order of sexuality—are not cultural residues or ideological aftershocks. They are abstract machines, deeply embedded within and continuously reinforced by the concrete infrastructures of imperial rule.
AGAPE and EROS are not merely theological metaphors. They are the two sides—sky and earth—of a transformative social horizon. Together, these books trace a fugitive itinerary from the dialectics of domination to the tidalectics of liberation. What follows offers a summary of key arguments from both texts, while also providing contextual ground and interpretive subtext for readers to engage them more fully.
The Analytics of Raciality
Drawing on Denise Ferreira da Silva’s seminal formulations, AGAPE begins with a deep analysis of how raciality functions as the logic that partitions the human. Empire does not simply classify—it encodes. It uses demography to assign bodies to fixed racial identities. It uses geography to tether identity to territory. It uses historiography to stage a developmental drama in which some identities are cast as modern and “advanced,” and others as primitive and “retarded.”
Demographically, whiteness is rendered the universal standard of civilization. Blackness, by contrast, is marked as pathologically primitive: a deviation, a deficiency, a threat. It is not one race among others—it is the racial limit, the constitutive outside of the human. Others are made to jockey for positions proximal to whiteness and distant from Blackness—those who fare best achieving honorary whiteness; those who fare worse dishonored by their proximity to Blackness.
Geographically, this logic becomes spatial: whiteness is mapped onto Europe and, concomitantly, onto temperate climates and zones of good governance; Blackness onto Africa and, concomitantly, onto the tropics, the ghetto, the periphery. To move freely through Europe is to be entitled to dispossess and denigrate; to be immobilized within Africa is to be subjected to dispossession and denigration.
Historiographically, Africa is frozen in time. Not as sacred origin, but as primitive void: always earlier, never arriving. Black Africa—and, by extension, any place where Black Africans and their descendants concentrate—is rendered a site of perpetual deferral: always behind, always in need of rescue. This is not error—it is infrastructure. It justifies humanitarian intervention, sustains global apartheid, and legitimates the ongoing plunder of land, labor, and life. The measure of progress and development is defined by proximity to European standards of living; the measure of backwardness is to live, still, like the imagined African savage.
Together, demography, geography, and historiography do not merely reflect racial difference—they manufacture it. They fracture the world into zones of inclusion and exclusion, value and waste. And they do so in the name of order.
The Colonial Order of Sexuality
If the analytics of raciality organizes the collective, molar mass, then the colonial order of sexuality targets the intimate, molecular bond. It is a system for regulating desire—who is allowed to want, who is allowed to touch, who is rendered desirable and in what ways, who is expected to serve and give pleasure, and who is entitled to be served and receive it. It operates across three interlocking scales: sub-molecular, molecular, and molar.
At the sub-molecular scale, the body disintegrates into its organs. Desire is dismembered. Flesh is fragmented into parts—cocks, cunts, hands, wombs—reassembled as spectacle for the white male gaze. The colonized body is no longer a person but a sensorium of consumable organs. And the pornoscopic gaze of the colonizer is not confined to any one man—it is distributed across eyes trained to see Blackness as abject and whiteness as subject, including eyes tethered to Black bodies themselves.
At the molecular scale, relation becomes hierarchy. Bonds are polarized. The white man, and those proximal to him according to the analytics of raciality, are positioned as the ultimate possessors. The white woman, and those proximal to her, are positioned as the ultimate possessions. The Black man, and those proximal to him, are either disciplined or fetishized—reduced to laboring hands and violating cocks: they are compelled to find pleasure in serving the ultimate possessor, accessorizing the ultimate possession, or performing as props in perverse dramas fixated on the spectacle of violated ownership. The Black woman, and those proximal to her, are rendered both disposable and indispensable—laboring hands beside Black men, cunts for white male fantasies of conquest, exoticized and fetishized features to be appropriated and parodied, mimicked and mocked by white women to titillate the pornoscopic gaze of white men, or wombs conscripted to reproduce more cocks, cunts, wombs, laboring hands, and exoticized and fetishized parts to be harvested, replicated, and consumed. Even homosexual and interracial intimacies, when left unexamined—unqueried, unqueered—can reproduce this asymmetry, aestheticizing domination in the name of difference.
At the molar scale, these libidinal patterns are abstracted, normalized, optimized, and embedded into institutions, policies, and procedures—law, media, medicine, education, welfare. As a result, even when individuals forge molecular bonds that run counter to the colonial order of sexuality and its pornotropes, the operations of its molar machines of administration ensure that this order remains palpable—a persistent probability, always on the horizon. At any given moment, the machinery of domination may cast a white man, or those proximal to him, as the ultimate possessor; a white woman as the ultimate possession; and a Black man or Black woman—or those proximate to them—as the prop. Just as, at any moment, a person plugged into The Matrix might be activated as an agent, so too can these roles be imposed, reproduced, and enforced through the apparatus of Empire.
Across all scales, the colonial order of sexuality is a machinery for breaking the link between intimacy and autonomy. It does not prohibit pleasure—it manages it. It makes desire a technique of rule.
From Ordered World to Entangled World
Following the seminal formulations of Denise Ferreira da Silva’s work, these books diagram abstract machines aimed at confronting and dismantling the Ordered World of Empire, sustained by the analytics of raciality and the colonial order of sexuality. This oppressive world naturalizes demographic determinability, geographic separability, historiographic sequentiality, and a colonial ordering of sexuality—embedding and entrenching racial hierarchies into the techniques, infrastructures, and logics of policing, bordering, governance, and intimate life. At its core, this world systematically excludes Blackness, and all those proximal to it, from full humanity, perpetuating domination and exploitation under the guise of progress and civility.
By deconstructing this Ordered World, the books envision the possibility of an Entangled World—one characterized by demographic indeterminacy, geographic non-locality, historiographic non-eventuality, and a fugitive eroticism.
Demographic Indeterminacy rejects rigid, hierarchical racial, ethnic, and cultural classifications. It counters the colonial logic that uses fixed categories to dictate value, inclusion, and governance. Instead, it embraces opacity, multiplicity, and confluence, unmooring populations from rigid markers of difference historically used to justify domination.
Geographic Non-Locality disrupts the colonial spatial logic that ties identity to bounded, segmented territories. It rejects the idea that certain people inherently “belong” to specific places, challenging systems of inclusion, exclusion, and dispossession. In the Entangled World, space is reimagined as relational, porous, and entangled—resisting the territorial fixity that reinforces control.
Historiographic Non-Eventuality departs from linear, teleological history and the notion of universal developmental stages through which all peoples are expected to progress. It opposes the colonial narrative of “progress,” proposing instead a revolutionary, relational, non-causal, and non-hierarchical understanding of time—allowing diverse temporalities to coexist, influence one another, and merge into confluences without subordination to a Eurocentric timeline.
Fugitive Eroticism centers erotic proximity over pornoscopic distance, improvisational ineffability over fixed typologies, and sacred invisibility over hyper-visibility. It resists the colonial order of sexuality not by seeking inclusion within it, but by queering its ruptures—transforming sites of fragmentation into apertures for intimacy, vitality, and re-embodiment. Exemplified by Afro-diasporic spiritualities forged in the wake of displacement, this eroticism reclaims the sensuous as sacred—restoring relation where it was severed, re-animating flesh where it was dismembered, and gathering what was scattered to recompose new, in-/re-surgent wholes.
Black. African. Primitive.
Yet, in championing the above, there must first come an overturning. Jacques Derrida, in a key interview collected in Positions, offers a crucial insight into the nature of philosophical oppositions:
“In a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand. To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn [renverser] the hierarchy at a given moment. To overlook this phase of overturning [phase de renversement] is to forget the conflictual and subordinating structure of the opposition. Therefore one might proceed too quickly to a neutralization that, in practice, would leave the previous field untouched, offering no hold on the former opposition and thereby preventing any effective intervention in the field. We know what always have been the practical (particularly political) effects of immediately jumping beyond oppositions, and of protests in the simple form of neither this nor that. When I say that this phase is necessary, the word phase is perhaps not the most rigorous one. It is not a question of a chronological phase, a given moment, or a page that one day simply will be turned, in order to go on to other things. The necessity of this phase is structural; it is the necessity of an interminable analysis…”
In confronting the analytics of raciality and the colonial order of sexuality, we must resist the temptation to leap prematurely into the neutrality promised by demographic indeterminacy, geographic non-locality, historiographic non-eventuality, and fugitive eroticism. The field must be overturned. The last must be made first.
Thus, what is taken for Black (demographically), African (geographically), and Primitive (historiographically) must not merely be rescued from denigration—it must be championed. The Black, the African, and the Primitive must become the site of in-/re-surgent affirmation, a counterweight powerful enough to displace the governing logic of racial supremacy. And equally, so-called “white European civilization”—the figure enthroned atop the colonial order—must be brought low: dethroned, defaced, revealed as the violent fiction it has always been.
To champion the Black, the African, and the Primitive is not to reify Blackness, Africanness, or Primitiveness as colonial anthropology conceived them. It is to reclaim the suppressed modes of being, relation, and world-making that Empire sought to extinguish by weaponizing those categories. It is to refuse the demand that we purge ourselves of what was marked as “Black,” “African,” or “Primitive” in order to become visible and legible.
My two new books aim to accomplish precisely this: to overturn the violent hierarchies that structure the analytics of raciality and the colonial order of sexuality, and to reclaim the Black, the African, and the Primitive—not as fixed identities, but as fugitive erotic forces of refusal, relation, and re-creation. A Fugitive Planner’s Guide to Empire and Fugitive Erotics are offered as tools for those who feel the weight of Empire’s abstractions in their bodies, their histories, their desires. They are for those seeking to deconstruct the analytic machinery that fragments life into zones of control and discard, and to reconstruct forms of being and ways of becoming in the wake of rupture. They are maps that do not merely chart the terrain of domination, but trace the fault lines where pressure builds and erupts, where old territories are subducted, shattered, or displaced—sites of desedimentation and destratification that nourish in-/re-surgent forms of life.
