Reading Precariousness of the Body and Spectrality in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Works

Abstract

This exegesis is rooted in a semiotics of traumatic consciousness; it proposes to decipher the haunting not only as a psychic affliction, but also as the epistemic paradigm of contemporary social anxiety. Focusing on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s creative art, the study posits that Blacks’ body is not only the site of subjectivity, but the very signified of a spectral system. Whereas classical existentialism universalized anxiety as a metaphysical confrontation with nothingness, Coates historicizes and politicizes it by manifesting it as an index of structural violence, echoing both Fanon’s phenomenological and Derrida’s deconstructive theories. This arouses the ensuing question: How does the spectrality of history and the body function as a critical paradigm of oppressive structures in Coates’s works, and to what extent is this social anxiety a force of awakening rather than paralysis? The main objective of this reflection is to demonstrate that anxiety is not an individual fate, but a necessary knowledge that constitutes a radical political consciousness. For that purpose, the use of a critical hermeneutic method will be helpful ; this will contribute to decoding textual signs as symptoms of a structural evil rather than as individual expressions, asserting that the spectrum functions as an operator for the deconstruction of American myths of innocence. In terms of articulation, three axes will be considered: Phenomenology of the haunting, Paradigm of social anxiety, and Haunting: A critical and emancipatory mechanism.