MA Defence: Daisy Moriyama, Philosophy

Liminality and Lost Time in Sylvia Wynter’s Origin Stories

Daisy Moriyama

Supervisor: Emilia Angelova

ABSTRACT: Sylvia Wynter’s work on the overrepresentation of the human individual, as a biocentric, and biopolitical, economic subject, gives objective analysis of colonial compulsory enactments of normative modes of being, specifically arguing that these depend on abjecting the becoming of “liminal” differences.  By liminality Wynter refers to suppressed differences, repressed knowledges, or not-yet-realized potentialities that come to be categorized, through structural and symbolic processes of racialization, as the negation of the norm. Importantly, this dynamic is tied up with systems of economic disenfranchisement, along racist, ableist, and cis-heteronormative lines.

This paper examines two modes of temporality implicit in Wynter’s work that, as I argue, correspond to the lived dichotomization of the economic subject and its liminal differences. The first is the linear-progressive ordering of time.  The second is what I will call, after Wynter, “liminal time.” In my study of the first, I show that linear-progressive time binds futurity to the assimilation of values which end up orienting Wynter’s normative man. Based on this reading, I argue that liminality is the sort of temporality that is othered in relation to dominant orderings of time, and thus is premised on a negative time and space that brushes against linearity and progress. Drawing on recent work by Fanny Söderbäck and Alia Al-Saji, I show that liminality is the quality of a temporality that is affectively drawn to a “return” of what is repressed in the making of linear time and its subject.

The paper engages Wynter’s work, in order to draw conclusions about the rebelliousness of liminality, and its ramifications for philosophies of time. In the first place, this reading provides a robust way to think through temporalities of assimilation and the possibilities of difference – with implications for the relation between abjection, affect and temporality. Second, this shows how Wynter expands on, re-positions, and re-contextualizes philosophies of time within historical and ongoing structures of coloniality.