Vangeest: Gnosticism and the Contemporary Production of Race 1 Gnosticism and the Contemporary Production of Race Jacob Vangeest Presented at Camp/Camp: A collision of style and biopolitics, 2020 Graduate Student Conference at Western University. October 1-2, 2020. Abstract: This presentation explores the intersection of political theology, colonialism and racialization, drawing upon both a historical and contemporary analysis to understand race as a political- theological product that is intensified by contemporary technological assemblages. Racialization is understood as intimately connected with the psychological, propagandist and intelligence producing aspects of cyber war. I begin by exploring Jared Hickman’s account of racialization as a process of cosmos and nomos. I then explore the way that these processes are intensified and exacerbated in the contemporary landscape with the help of Achille Mbembe’s account of Necropolitics. 1 Gnosticism and the Contemporary Production of Race “Blackness is not only that which relates to the constitutive outside of any social bond—whether that outside be excluded or included is secondary—but also that which relates to the undoing or unraveling of every social bond” -Jared Sexton, “On Black Negativity” Carl Schmitt defines the Greek nomos as the cutting up of the World through appropriation, distribution and management 2 . Pace Schmitt, the Jewish theologian Jacob Taubes suggests that where nomos is the distribution of social order, cosmos is the divinely inspired distribution of the World. 3 Together, cosmos and nomos provide a theo-political determination of the ontological distribution of the World. Sylvia Wynter discusses the way this process of cosmography works 1 This paper is originally written for Nick Dyer-Witheford’s course Cyber War Theory, taught at The University of Western Ontario’s Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism. I would like to thank Nick and my fellow classmates for helping me think through and develop the ideas expressed in this essay. Furthermore, I’d like to suggest that implicit in my investigation is a problematization of what I would term counter-, anti- and non- cosmographical approaches to cosmos. In this case, this problem is particular to racialization, but this question could be more thoroughly generalized to other areas of political theory. This is a line of thought I aim to explore more thoroughly in subsequent research. Before I begin, I feel it integral to acknowledge the realities at play in this essay. As a White scholar working with Black scholarship, I reify the imperialist project. This is something of a double bind. On the one hand, I might ignore the Black experience, perpetuating erasure and white supremacy within the academy. On the other, in working with this material, I cannot help but repeat the act of theft in appropriating Black labour. I acknowledge this not to lament my position, but rather to acknowledge the tension inherent in this essay; a tension that largely mimics threads of thought in the scholarship. As I proceed, I hope to do so with humility, recognizing myself not as an authority, but as a guest who is engaging in order to learn. 2 Carl Schmitt. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. Translated by G. L. Ulmen, (New York: Telos Press, 2003), p. 351. 3 Jacob Taubes, “The Gnostic Idea of Man,” ed. Leo F. Radista, The Cambridge Review 1, no. 2 (Winter 1955): 89.