Introduction Reading against Mastery
Everywhere I see the battle for mastery that rages between classes, peoples, etc., re-
producing itself on an individual scale. Is the system flawless? Impossible to bypass?
On the basis of my desire, I imagine that other desires like mine exist. If my desire is
possible, it means the system is already letting something else through.
—Hélène Cixous, Sorties (1986)
What different modalities of the human come to light if we do not take the liberal
humanist figure of Man as the master- subject but focus on how humanity has been
imagined and lived by those subjects excluded from this domain?
—Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus (2014)
“Mastery,” Hélène Cixous laments, is “everywhere.” In our world, “the battle
for mastery... rages between classes, peoples, etc., reproducing itself on an
individual scale” (1986, 78). Ubiquitous, reproductive, and beyond enumer-
ation, mastery appears inescapable. And yet, Cixous declares, the very exis-
tence of her desire to live beyond mastery suggests that others too might
share this desire. What she learns from her desire is that resistant collectiv-
ities are in reach, that in fact a seemingly impenetrable “system” of mastery
has already been breached. Through my solidarity with Cixous’s desire and
through my own desire for forms of what I call dehumanist solidarity, this
book reaches toward other modes of relational being that may not yet be
recognizable.
Precisely because mastery is “everywhere,” mine is an impossible project
whose impossibility is what has made it inescapable for me. I attempt to
unfold mastery rather than to foreclose it, and to dwell on its emergence
where it is least expected. Rather than to define mastery (and in so doing to
reproduce it), I aim across these pages to trace some of mastery’s qualities,