Abstract

Drawing on continental and decolonial feminist philosophy, Spectral Inheritance: Unlearning the Maturity-trope addresses the centrality of the notions of “maturity” and “development” in discussions of human subjectivity, temporality and ethics. Building on Sylvia Wynter’s framework, the dissertation proposes to read the Euromodern genres of Man in developmental terms. The notion of im/maturity organizes who is capable of sovereign self-governance and who must be governed. By analogy with a normative developmental model of a racialized figure of “the Child,” immaturity-status is assigned to populations and demographics deemed incapable of self- governance. This invention of the civilizational figure of the Child is central to Developmental Man’s atomistic ontology, which is premised on hierarchy, the denial of vulnerability and the severance from a constitutive web of relationality. Such severance is embedded in histories of colonization and separation of children from their communities in Euromodernity and the transgenerational inheritances thereof. In dialogue with Sylvia Wynter, Alia Al-Saji, María Lugones, Judith Butler and others, this dissertation proposes spectral inheritance as an alternative reconfiguration of the nexus of subjectivity, ethics and temporality. Displacing chrononormative developmental tropes of maturation, spectral inheritance acknowledges the coexistence of the plural past in a structure of reinvention, reconfiguration and response to and through its haunting. It insists on unlearning the response-debilitating legacies of Developmental Man and relearning a response-enabling relation to the plural past. Employing feminist figurations, Fanonian sociogeny, genealogical theories of subjectivation, and engaging feminist theories of response-ability, this text is an exercise in such spectral inheritance, asking what it means to inherit the catastrophic worlds of Developmental Man response-ably as an ongoing work of unlearning and co-becoming through a responsive relation to the plural past.