Of Exorbitance: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought

In one sentence

Chandler argues that "the Negro" is not an object waiting to be described by knowledge but a problem that unsettles the very ground of modern thought, and that Du Bois, read closely, already worked in this register, refusing both the essentialism his critics attack and the false neutrality those same critics assume.

The argument

The immediate target is a critique that governed African American and Diasporic studies from the mid-1980s onward, associated with Anthony Appiah, Adolph Reed and Kenneth Warren: that Du Bois and the "Africanist" tradition are essentialist, and must be cleared away before a properly de-essentialized study can begin. Chandler grants the critique of a simple essence, and then turns it back on itself. A discourse that claims to have escaped essence, he argues, still presupposes the pure opposition it says it has dissolved, essence against non-essence, and so quietly reinstalls essence as the ground of its own authority. Here he leans on Spivak: the moment of essentialization is irreducible.

From this he draws the central claim. Against a distinction already in force, in this case the racial mark, simple denial or an appeal to neutrality changes nothing, because the buried recognition keeps organizing the field and leaves the hierarchy intact. The only move that does work is to displace the distinction, through what he calls, after Derrida, a "double gesture": first overturn the hierarchy, then mark the opening toward a difference the old order cannot contain. That double gesture is the frame for everything that follows.

Object & method

The object is not Du Bois's biography or his politics but the "problematization" that produces "the Negro" as a matter for thought at all: since the sixteenth century, the joined history of modern slavery and its aftermath, and the global practice of distinction among humans gathered under the concept of race. Chandler's insistence, easy to miss, is that this same problematization also set loose a question about the ground of a "European" or "White" identity. That hidden face is half of his object.

The method is openly Derridean, and the essay names its own steps in the notes: solicitation (shaking a structure at its keystone to expose its lability), overturning of the conceptual hierarchy, reinscription or paleonymy (inhabiting old terms such as "race" or "Negro" in a new way, under erasure), and the marking of the "interval" toward a new concept. He reads two exemplary scenes: Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, as the project of purity, and Du Bois's three essays of 1897, as its most searching response.

Key concepts

• Exorbitance. The title term. The dominant discourse produces the Negro as an exorbitance, something outside the orbit of what truly counts. Yet that very positioning opens another exorbitance the discourse cannot contain, and by the close of the essay exorbitance names a generative excess, "the very movement of freedom."
• The project of purity, the problem of pure being. The demand that identity rest on a pure, categorical ground. Chandler shows that the discourse on the Negro is really governed by a hidden claim to the purity of the "White."
• The double and redoubled gesture. Affirm a strictly nominal subject position while elaborating its always already differential condition, and recognize that the problematic arises only through an agonistic irruption, never as a calm description.
• Economy. His concept-metaphor for the bind in which no pure or neutral position is available, drawing on the Greek nomos and oikos and on a sense of historical violence.
• Historial and existential. The two frames he takes from Du Bois's 1897 program: the "social" or systemic environment, and the "internal development," the "distinct social mind."

The reading of Jefferson

Chandler reads Jefferson on the Negro (Query XIV of the Notes) as exemplary, not because Jefferson is typical, but because his text exposes the metaphysics at work. To sustain a hierarchy he cannot ground on evidence, Jefferson must presuppose, analytically and not merely presume, a ground in "nature": "It is not their condition then, but their nature, which has produced the distinction." His famous ambivalence, Chandler argues, tracks the instability not of Negro identity but of a presumed "White" one. "It is a dogmatism in the midst of the Enlightenment." The decisive point is that this dogmatism is not the foundation of Africanist discourse. It is already a response, provoked by the enslaved African. Chandler refuses to let the racist archive stand as the origin.

The reading of Du Bois

Chandler concentrates on a single year, 1897, and three texts: "The Conservation of Races," "Strivings of the Negro People," which becomes the first chapter of Souls, and "The Study of the Negro Problems." He finds a double movement. On one side, when Du Bois tries to think the ground of "the Negro," he is forced to use the inherited logic of race, and his discourse looks indecisive, caught in the aporia of having to speak "as if" the Negro already exists as a coherent entity. Chandler's own gloss is exact: "Perhaps this is the price of criticism."

On the other side, Du Bois persistently dramatizes the actual, "historial" character of Negro life as excessive to that inherited ontology: the emphasis on "Negro capacity," on an open horizon of becoming, on a "distinct social mind" grasped through something like Verstehen. This is where Chandler makes his sharpest interpretive claim. Double consciousness and second-sight carry both a negative and a positive sign at once. They are not only a wound but a "gift," a second-sight that enables critical reflection on the very scene of its own production. The African American subject is therefore "both/and" and "neither/nor," a figure that displaces the Aristotelian law of noncontradiction rather than failing to meet it. Chandler reads "The Study of the Negro Problems" as "the founding programmatic text of African American Studies."

What it contributes

• It reframes the field. "The Negro" stops being an object for a science of race and becomes a problem that reopens the questions of essence, of the human, and of the limits of knowledge.
• It answers the essentialism charge without pretending Du Bois never uses "race." It shows his practice as a strategic, ironic, "doubly inscribed" negotiation rather than a naive belief.
• It places Du Bois inside the turn-of-the-century configuration, Husserl, Weber, Durkheim, Freud, Saussure, Boas, as an original thinker of essence, sign and historicity, not a derivative one, and argues his situation was in one respect harder than theirs.
• It turns "the color line" and "double consciousness" into concept-metaphors that thematize the conditions of inquiry itself.

Limits & blind spots

Four are worth stating plainly, since the essay's admirers rarely do. First, difficulty. The prose is dense, recursive and Latinate, and Chandler concedes that the difficulty "must be reproduced as a problem in our own enunciation." A reader has to decide whether that difficulty is doing philosophical work or shielding the argument from testing.

Second, the Derridean apparatus. The essay reads Du Bois so thoroughly through Derrida that it is fair to ask whether the framework illuminates Du Bois or supplies the coherence it claims to find. Chandler anticipates the charge and insists Du Bois precedes and exceeds the vocabulary, but the reader should weigh that independently.

Third, abstraction from politics. Apart from the Jefferson reading and a note on the Tuskegee Machine's destruction of Du Bois's academic base after 1903, concrete historical texture is thin. This is exactly the cost Adolph Reed, whom Chandler is answering, would name: that reading Du Bois as a philosopher of exorbitance loses the situated political actor.

Fourth, exorbitance as sublime. The term does real analytical work early, then tilts by the close toward celebration, "the very movement of freedom." It is worth marking where description ends and affirmation begins.

The company it keeps

• Derrida, the dedicatee and the method: Positions, Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology.
• Spivak, for the irreducibility of the essentializing moment, the hinge of the whole argument.
• Heidegger (the precomprehension of being) and, as the thing to avoid, Hegel's Aufhebung, the negative that consolidates an absolute subject.
• The turn-of-the-century human sciences: Husserl, Weber, Durkheim, Freud, Saussure, Boas.
• Du Bois as the central example, Jefferson as the counter-example.
• The tradition it defends: Wheatley, Walker, Stewart, Douglass, Cooper, and as later kin Fanon, Ellison, Hortense Spillers, Karen Fields.
• The critics it answers: Appiah, Reed, Warren.

How to cite it

• For reframing Du Bois's field as "the problem of the Negro as a problem for thought," and for reading "The Study of the Negro Problems" (1897) as the founding text of African American Studies.
• For the argument that the de-essentializing critique presupposes the essence it claims to escape, with Spivak.
• For the double sign of double consciousness and second-sight, wound and gift together.
• For the reading of Jefferson's Notes as "a dogmatism in the midst of the Enlightenment."

For a seminar

1. Chandler says the critique of essentialism presupposes an essence of its own. Is that a decisive objection to Appiah and Reed, or a way of never having to give up "the Negro" as a category?
2. Does the Derridean vocabulary open Du Bois's 1897 essays, or does it supply the coherence it claims to find?
3. If "the Negro" cannot be the final object of a science, what becomes of Du Bois the sociologist, the empirical author of The Philadelphia Negro?
4. Chandler calls exorbitance "the very movement of freedom." What is gained, and what is lost, by ending an analysis on that note?