Hence the repeated emphasis, in her many readings of Kant, that “if we cannot fit things into those categories [which are a priori], we can’t experience them at all; they can’t be incorporated into the structure of the self” (“Critique” 87). But if it is a force, how can racism be reined in by etiquette or convention? Marriott's most recent book of poetry is 'The Bloods' (Shearsman, 2011). Unable to communicate directly with her offenders, her cards take the place of voice and word at once. Burke’s theater of the eye registers a series of aversions, including negrophobia, but by doing so it simultaneously demonstrates the conventional limits of our notions of difference. The distrust of the aesthetic in Piper, her critique of fetishistic pseudology are so many attempts at this rethinking; they are attempts to lay down (in the sense in which Lacan says the gaze is laid down as a kind of mimicry or camouflage) the visual and categorial limits of racist self-delusion. Often, the effects of Kant’s ideas were so strong that I couldn’t take it anymore. 3,5″ x 2″ (9,0 cm x 5,1 cm). Indeed, Piper is at least as ruined by these semantic as by these rhetorical improprieties. Artwork that draws one into a relationship with the other in the indexical present [a self-critical standpoint encouraging reflection on one’s responses to the work] trades easy classification—and hence xenophobia—for a direct and immediate experience of the complexity of the other, and of one’s own responses to her. He is the author of several books of poetry and many articles on modern black literature and thought, including recent studies of C.L.R.
In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange.

©2020 Regents of the University of California. They refer to an equivocation, on the one hand, between the desire to be immediately, uniquely known, to be exposed and revealed as a subject—the truth that, according to Piper, concerns the uniqueness of transcendental personhood—and, on the other hand, the sense that there is something lacking or veiled, a no-thing at the core of the self that can only be illusorily eaten or represented, a “food” for spirit.  
“[I]nformation that violates our conceptual presuppositions threatens our belief system and thereby the rational integrity and unity of the self” (“Critique” 88). He currently lives in San Francisco and teaches in the History of Consciousness program, University of California, Santa Cruz.Yosefa RazYosefa Raz lives in Oakland and sometimes in Tel Aviv. What if, as in the case of etiquette, these calling cards can only refer to black veiled life through the conventionalizing fictions of race? If racism works through shared interpersonal contexts, it would seem that to question the meaning of those exchanges as ever contractually given is to open up racism to further questions regarding institutional precarity and politics. While for Kant the imagination tries but fails to furnish a direct, sensual presentation of an Idea of reason, thus experiencing its impotence, for Piper the understanding itself is put in crisis by the failure of reason to find an appropriate presentation for the anomalous. Collection of Eileen Harris Norton, USA. 2 Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit, 1971 (photographic reprints 1997). The photographs in Food for the Spirit do not alter the scenario: the fourteen black-and-white images are used essentially as orthopedic props and, as such, they reference a form of self-quotation. Can one return racist speech to its utterer by merely pointing out its faux pas? Finally, the dissociative meaning of the statement – the simultaneously emphatic and elliptic reference to Piper’s blackness – can only leave its mark if read literally, immediately, and without abstraction, exchange, or, dare I say it, politeness. This is grounded upon, but also grounds, the relation of imagination and understanding “without the mediation of a concept” that is peculiar to the aesthetic judgment of taste (Kant 176). Part of the demonstrative power of blackness is to collapse geometric vision into psychological unseeing. One often hears in artistic circles that to focus on sensibility is to be apolitical. What prevents us from reading My Calling (Cards) and Piper’s work more generally in this way is the ambiguous pleasure she takes in unpleasure without ever articulating it as such, a pleasure that allows for the circulation of the cards in the first place.