Brendan J . Brown

University of Western Ontario, Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, Graduate Student

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I am a Ph.D. student at The Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism in the University of Western Ontario. I am primarily interested in analyzing the racial fault lines in Western philosophy and metaphysics through a critique of the history of philosophy with a special focus on deconstruction, colonial historiography, and the Black Radical tradition. I am currently completing my dissertation on an "archeology of speed," which analyzes the philosophical phenomena of fugitivity and messianism. I have written on Walter Benjamin, Sylvia Wynter, the Foucault-Derrida debate, Nietzsche, and alternative strategies of deconstruction. My work has appeared or will appear in the CLR James Journal, Angelaki, Labyrinth, and The Journal of Speculative Philosophy.
Supervisors: Antonio Calcagno

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Ian Alexander Moore

Loyola Marymount University

Francesco Guercio

European Graduate School (EGS)

Kieran Aarons

North Central College

John Krummel

Hobart & William Smith Colleges

Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott

University of Michigan

John Krummel

Steven Levine

University of Massachusetts, Boston

Jared McGeough

joeri schrijvers

North West University Potchefstroom

William Cox

DePaul University

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Articles by Brendan J . Brown

BLOOD ON THE LEAVES / BLOOD ON THE ROOTS: NIETZSCHE, SCHÜRMANN, AND WYNTER ON RESSENTIMENT, BAD CONSCIENCE, DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS, AND METAPHYSICS AT THE BIRTH OF THE HUMAN BEING AS PRAXIS AT THE END OF METAPHYSICS

Labyrinth: An International Journal for Philosophy, Value Theory, and Sociocultural Hermeneutics, 2024

This paper sets out to investigate the Nietzschean connection between Sylvia Wynter and Reiner Sc... more This paper sets out to investigate the Nietzschean connection between Sylvia Wynter and Reiner Schürmann through a reading of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche's account of 'bad conscience' is read through the Wynterian and Fanonian concept of 'sociogeny' to demonstrate its necessity to Nietzsche's project of the Great Redeemer. This paper, then, demonstrates a previously undiagnosed influence of Nietzsche on Wynter and the role that anarchy plays in her construction of the 'human being as praxis'. The essay concludes with an amelioration of Schürmann's epochal genealogy to account for a racialized lacunae present in his Western genealogy of thought. It is by bringing all three together that we understand anarchy as being firmly committed to anti-racist and antianti-Black enactments. It concludes by highlighting the possibility of metaphysics after the withering of epochal archē in what this paper calls 'the multitude of metaphysics'.

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Black Cogito and the History of Unreason: Wynter on the Foucault and Derrida Debate

CLR James Journal, 2023

This essay seeks to unsettle the overrepresented, Eurocentric grounds of a pivotal debate in the ... more This essay seeks to unsettle the overrepresented, Eurocentric grounds of a pivotal debate in the history of Western philosophy. The debate between Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida on the topic of madness has had central significance for twentieth-century continental thought due to its lasting impact on the development, reception, and stakes of the respective thinker’s methodologies. While heavily written on and analyzed from the perspective of Western academic philosophy, little attention has been paid to the racialized, ‘Third World’ origins and structures of the debate and its content. I contend that the work of Sylvia Wynter addresses, critiques, and ameliorates these structures in heretofore previously unacknowledged ways. Specifically, Wynter’s work in “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”, her diptych on the Ceremony (Must Be) Found, and her critical engagements with the submerged “abducting logic” of Western thought marks an incisive critique of both Foucault and Derrida’s interpretation of reason and madness in Western philosophy. As I argue, Wynter is committed to deconstructing the binary of madness/reason so as to unsettle the overrepresentation of Western logos. She does so through the liminal figure of the “black cogito” which disrupts and shakes the foundations of the debate, nor can either conflicting interpretation neatly assimilate this figure. That is, by deconstructing the debate on the history of madness Wynter demonstrates the paucity of their arguments about, on the one hand, the history of reason and the exclusion of madness, and, on the other, the metaphysical ambiguity of the Cartesian cogito. This essay aims to set out on an alternative history of the deconstruction of Western metaphysics initiated from the demonic grounds of being.

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THE HERETIC AND THE ICONOCLAST: SYLVIA WYNTER'S ENGAGEMENT WITH DERRIDA

The New Polis - A Journal of Critical Theory, Social Analysis, and Political Philosophy and Theology, 2022

In this essay, I analyze Sylvia Wynter's account of the transition from theocentric, Medieval met... more In this essay, I analyze Sylvia Wynter's account of the transition from theocentric, Medieval metaphysical determinations of being to secular, anti-Black ontotheological structures of meaning. Utilizing an under-commented upon influence, Jacques Derrida, and deconstruction, I reveal how Wynter interprets the logocentric foundation of Western philosophy through the racialized absences of transformation. That is, what motivates ontotheological transformation is permanently stabilized by anti-Black metaphysics. Following the discovery of the New World, for Wynter, metaphysics is fundamentally altered in the same manner that logocentrism had altered Western philosophy. This project marks a pronounced elaboration of the deconstructive strategies of Sylvia Wynter and culminates in a description of the 'grammatological autopoiesis' of ceremony-finding. This interpretation of Sylvia Wynter marks a departure from the more Foucauldian analyses of Wynter's project. I conclude that such an interpretation of Wynter opens up a new method of ceremony-finding which calls for a coming project of the 'human being as praxis' informed by non-Western deconstructive impulses. Simply, renewing the project of the 'end of metaphysics'.

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Reviews by Brendan J . Brown

Review: Modern Philosophies of the Will, by Reiner Schürmann, ed. Kieran Aarons and Francesco Guercio; and Reading Marx: On Transcendental Materialism, by Reiner Schürmann, ed. Malte Fabian Rauch and Nicolas Schneider

Modern Philosophies of the Will, by Reiner Schürmann, ed. Kieran Aarons and Francesco Guercio; and Reading Marx: On Transcendental Materialism, by Reiner Schürmann, ed. Malte Fabian Rauch and Nicolas Schneider, 2025

In this review for the Special Edition on Reiner Schürmann in Philosophy Today, I read his "Moder... more In this review for the Special Edition on Reiner Schürmann in Philosophy Today, I read his "Modern Philosophies of the Will" and "Reading Marx" to draw out a particular pedagogical style evident in Schürmann's work. Furthermore, I conclude with some potentialities of an "anarchist ethics" on the basis of non-being and praxis.

For the actual review in Philosophy Today, see: https://www.pdcnet.org/philtoday/content/philtoday_2024_0068_0004_0903_0907

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