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Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human
Habeas Viscus focuses attention on the centrality of race to notions of the human. Alexander G. Weheliye develops a theory of "racializing assemblages," taking race as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This disciplining, while not biological per se, frequently depends on anchoring political hierarchies in human flesh. The work of the black feminist scholars Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter is vital to Weheliye's argument. Particularly significant are their contributions to the intellectual project of black studies vis-à-vis racialization and the category of the human in western modernity. Wynter and Spillers configure black studies as an endeavor to disrupt the governing conception of humanity as synonymous with white, western Man. Weheliye posits black feminist theories of modern humanity as useful correctives to the "bare life and biopolitics discourse" exemplified by the works of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, which, Weheliye contends, vastly underestimate the conceptual and political significance of race in constructions of the human. Habeas Viscus reveals the pressing need to make the insights of black studies and black feminism foundational to the study of modern humanity.
209 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
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About the author
Alexander G. Weheliye
5 books29 followersAlexander G. Weheliye is Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University. He is the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity and Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
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February 25, 2023Weheliye can make a sentence turn nicely, but I'm not sure where his intervention lies. Its a satisfying meeting between Black feminist thought and white canonical (but whose canon?) biopolitics, further bolstered by a cool set of musical and visual test cases, but I think most could get by with the Spillers and Wynter by themselves. Well, the introduction at least features a persuasive reading of Black Studies in the 2000s. In general, this comes across as an easier to digest example of what Moten was arguing for the stakes of Black Studies in In the Break, but with more specific attention given to Agamben and Foucault. Weheliye's most intriguing and, I think, clearest, intervention takes shape in Chapter 6, a reading of Douglas' narrative of enslavement, when he rifts on Spillers' call for all to recognize the feminine within (though I'm unsure if he actually cited this concluding passage from her famous essay).
July 27, 2015
One of the most brilliant books I've read all year. Weheliye makes it clear in the introduction that he is out for blood, and pulls no punches. The book is best when he is checking Foucault and Agamben and subjecting them to black feminist critique. Particularly compelling is his expose of Agamben's efforts to systematize Benjamin as a Schmittian. Also when he shows Foucault's indebtedness to George Jackson. Dense, but can't recommend highly enough for those who are already reading continental theory and black feminism.
December 27, 2025
didnt understand a word. jk but like almost
October 25, 2020
'As a demonic island, black studies lifts the fog that shrouds the laws of comparison, particularity, and exception to reveal an aquatic outlook "far away from the continent of man."'
December 5, 2020
I'm going to spend a couple more weeks with this book, but it was good. I'm glad I read it shortly after Bodies that Matter; I think it explained some aspects of subjection/abjection better, and I liked the body/flesh idea. I think I will have to read some Wynter and Spillers soon.
Main problem was the gigantic sentences. Liked the Yeezy references.
For my book list this semester.
Main problem was the gigantic sentences. Liked the Yeezy references.
For my book list this semester.
November 10, 2020
A superlative work of critical race theory that lost me at times in the sheer density of its argument but which is never less than impressive in its suturing together of a wide variety of ideas and cultural texts.
January 16, 2021
Incredible work on what it means to be human, analyzing inclusion/exclusion, fantastic critique of foucault and agamben. it's dense, but oh so wonderful
December 22, 2025
Good stuff
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January 21, 2020oooh i need to reread this
July 6, 2023
Growing up, going to Sunday School, I was always fascinated by the way “the flesh” was talked about.
Flesh was impure, a marker of humanness as opposed to godliness “Those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:8) but when referring to Jesus this flesh would transmogrify into something holy, a marker of sacrifice “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). I wondered then, if to be human is to be fleshy and thus ‘impure’, but Jesus’ flesh was never impure, then did Jesus ever truly become human?
Who amongst us gets to be human?
This question was first raised in my mind when I read The Vegetarian, which was not that standout to me after I had just read it but has stayed in my mind much longer than much of the books I have rated higher. In that book we see a woman refuse to be ‘human’. For her to be human, quite like in the Bible scriptures I read growing up, is not covetable but dirty. She wants instead to be a plant.
Later, when I read Mama's Baby Papa's Maybe : An American Grammar Book I was stunned by the distinction Spillers places between the body and the flesh – one being human and the other not quite. She argues that during slavery Black people, but particularly Black women, were ‘pornotroped’: turned into a fleshy site of violence and sexual impulses and denied a ‘body’ that could be individualised and granted the privileges afforded to bodies at the time by the ‘liberal’ values of America. For Spillers, to be a body and synecdochally a human is covetable and something that Black people were/are denied. This is also felt similarly by Sylvia Wynter who dedicated most of her life to answering this question of ‘who amongst us gets to be human?’.
Weheliye takes up the Wynterian project of defining ‘genres of man’ separated from the white liberal status of Man and proving that race/’racializing assemblages’ as he terms them, deeply affect who is deemed human as opposed to simply sovereignty as theorized by Agamben or pursuantly simply state violence/biopolitics as theorised by Foucault. Through this, he argues that Black studies and Black feminism, as disciplines that study racializing assemblages, are necessary fields of inquiry to understanding what constitutes a ‘human’. Put simply, he asks the question: if time and time again we see that the people who are most dehumanised are racialised as non-white, why has there been such an unwillingness in most canonised (white) theorists of ‘the human’ to name race as a main factor rather than treating it as fringe abject.
As one might be able to tell from my description, this book is so ‘chronically academic’ (and I say this in a non-derogatory way) – It is the kind of book that theorises on theories; the type that you finish reading and you are not quite sure what relevance its ideas have to the modern layperson. Take my review with a grain of salt because though I plan to later, as of writing this, I have not read Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and/or Félix Guattari first hand, so I had to rely on Weheliye’s readings of these theorists which kind of made everything he said seem accurate de facto. It is possible that Foucault, Agamben etc. did pay attention to race in ways that Weheliye misses, but with the limited knowledge I have now, his arguments seem pretty tight. Weaving through several historical, filmic, sonic, and legal examples, he examines cases of non-humans and not-quite-humans being denied the body.
Its tone can be at once scientific, then polemical and there’s amazing subtle sarcasm in there which I really like. The writing style is also quite repetitive at times which helped me even better grasp the ideas that Weheliye was trying to drive home because they are so loaded in philosophical jargon.
Because of this book I watched Mandingo (1975) which I planned never to do, but there’s an extended discussion of it in Chapter Six “Depravation” so I wanted to watch it to fully understand. I only knew of Mandingo because of the cultural lure around it which characterizes it as essentially Wattpad slavery smut, and it certainly lends itself to that critique in many ways, but in an odd way, which Weheliye gets to, it successfully narrows slavery down to the bare mechanisms of the dehumanisation that existed within it as described by Spillers – Black bodies being reduced to sites for violent and sexual urges. An extended motif that I noticed during that film is that Black people are believed to be not-human or not-quite-human: the father places his feet on the belly of a small Black boy to cure his rheumatism after he reads that this can be done with dogs, Hammond lies about Ellen and Mandingo being siblings and hence not suitable for reproduction together and his father says that incest produces genetic mutations in humans, not Black people. Weheliye doesn’t comment on this, but there is a moment at the end of the movie when Hammond finds out that his wife has produced a Black child (the fruit of her affair with Mandingo) and he asks the family doctor to bring “the poison that he uses on nigg*rs” which Hammond gives to his wife. I feel like in this scene there is a subtle acknowledgement that he knows that enslaved people were human in a biological sense (the same poison that is ‘for nigg*ers’ will work on his white wife). I don’t know, I just thought that was pretty interesting.
I think Weheliye spends so much time pointing out the deficits of other theories of the human that he doesn’t really spend a whole lot of time fully elucidating his own beyond the idea of 'racialised assemblages' and echoing what has already been said by Wynter and Spillers. Why is it that certain Black people can seem to make themselves symbolically ‘Black no more’ and have their life be deeply valued for example like Oprah or something idk. Is class part of racializing assemblages? Is there one encompassing theory that can capture what exactly constitutes who is human, non-human and not-quite-human. It would also have been interesting to see Weheliye engage more critically with Wynter and Spillers as I found this idea that they could compensate for white theorists’ deficits without having deficits of their own a bit too convenient for his argument.
I have no doubt that this book has and will continue to have a long lasting impact in stuffy academic towers in many departments, but I cannot properly contextualise its impact because I am not steeped in its tradition enough to fully know where its interventions lie. It was an interesting read for me though and I think anyone who is up for the challenge should give it a go.
Flesh was impure, a marker of humanness as opposed to godliness “Those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:8) but when referring to Jesus this flesh would transmogrify into something holy, a marker of sacrifice “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). I wondered then, if to be human is to be fleshy and thus ‘impure’, but Jesus’ flesh was never impure, then did Jesus ever truly become human?
Who amongst us gets to be human?
This question was first raised in my mind when I read The Vegetarian, which was not that standout to me after I had just read it but has stayed in my mind much longer than much of the books I have rated higher. In that book we see a woman refuse to be ‘human’. For her to be human, quite like in the Bible scriptures I read growing up, is not covetable but dirty. She wants instead to be a plant.
Later, when I read Mama's Baby Papa's Maybe : An American Grammar Book I was stunned by the distinction Spillers places between the body and the flesh – one being human and the other not quite. She argues that during slavery Black people, but particularly Black women, were ‘pornotroped’: turned into a fleshy site of violence and sexual impulses and denied a ‘body’ that could be individualised and granted the privileges afforded to bodies at the time by the ‘liberal’ values of America. For Spillers, to be a body and synecdochally a human is covetable and something that Black people were/are denied. This is also felt similarly by Sylvia Wynter who dedicated most of her life to answering this question of ‘who amongst us gets to be human?’.
Weheliye takes up the Wynterian project of defining ‘genres of man’ separated from the white liberal status of Man and proving that race/’racializing assemblages’ as he terms them, deeply affect who is deemed human as opposed to simply sovereignty as theorized by Agamben or pursuantly simply state violence/biopolitics as theorised by Foucault. Through this, he argues that Black studies and Black feminism, as disciplines that study racializing assemblages, are necessary fields of inquiry to understanding what constitutes a ‘human’. Put simply, he asks the question: if time and time again we see that the people who are most dehumanised are racialised as non-white, why has there been such an unwillingness in most canonised (white) theorists of ‘the human’ to name race as a main factor rather than treating it as fringe abject.
“Because black suffering figures in the domain of the mundane, it refuses the idiom of exception”
As one might be able to tell from my description, this book is so ‘chronically academic’ (and I say this in a non-derogatory way) – It is the kind of book that theorises on theories; the type that you finish reading and you are not quite sure what relevance its ideas have to the modern layperson. Take my review with a grain of salt because though I plan to later, as of writing this, I have not read Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and/or Félix Guattari first hand, so I had to rely on Weheliye’s readings of these theorists which kind of made everything he said seem accurate de facto. It is possible that Foucault, Agamben etc. did pay attention to race in ways that Weheliye misses, but with the limited knowledge I have now, his arguments seem pretty tight. Weaving through several historical, filmic, sonic, and legal examples, he examines cases of non-humans and not-quite-humans being denied the body.
Its tone can be at once scientific, then polemical and there’s amazing subtle sarcasm in there which I really like. The writing style is also quite repetitive at times which helped me even better grasp the ideas that Weheliye was trying to drive home because they are so loaded in philosophical jargon.
Because of this book I watched Mandingo (1975) which I planned never to do, but there’s an extended discussion of it in Chapter Six “Depravation” so I wanted to watch it to fully understand. I only knew of Mandingo because of the cultural lure around it which characterizes it as essentially Wattpad slavery smut, and it certainly lends itself to that critique in many ways, but in an odd way, which Weheliye gets to, it successfully narrows slavery down to the bare mechanisms of the dehumanisation that existed within it as described by Spillers – Black bodies being reduced to sites for violent and sexual urges. An extended motif that I noticed during that film is that Black people are believed to be not-human or not-quite-human: the father places his feet on the belly of a small Black boy to cure his rheumatism after he reads that this can be done with dogs, Hammond lies about Ellen and Mandingo being siblings and hence not suitable for reproduction together and his father says that incest produces genetic mutations in humans, not Black people. Weheliye doesn’t comment on this, but there is a moment at the end of the movie when Hammond finds out that his wife has produced a Black child (the fruit of her affair with Mandingo) and he asks the family doctor to bring “the poison that he uses on nigg*rs” which Hammond gives to his wife. I feel like in this scene there is a subtle acknowledgement that he knows that enslaved people were human in a biological sense (the same poison that is ‘for nigg*ers’ will work on his white wife). I don’t know, I just thought that was pretty interesting.
I think Weheliye spends so much time pointing out the deficits of other theories of the human that he doesn’t really spend a whole lot of time fully elucidating his own beyond the idea of 'racialised assemblages' and echoing what has already been said by Wynter and Spillers. Why is it that certain Black people can seem to make themselves symbolically ‘Black no more’ and have their life be deeply valued for example like Oprah or something idk. Is class part of racializing assemblages? Is there one encompassing theory that can capture what exactly constitutes who is human, non-human and not-quite-human. It would also have been interesting to see Weheliye engage more critically with Wynter and Spillers as I found this idea that they could compensate for white theorists’ deficits without having deficits of their own a bit too convenient for his argument.
I have no doubt that this book has and will continue to have a long lasting impact in stuffy academic towers in many departments, but I cannot properly contextualise its impact because I am not steeped in its tradition enough to fully know where its interventions lie. It was an interesting read for me though and I think anyone who is up for the challenge should give it a go.
January 22, 2015
Challenging but brilliant critique of biopolitics/bare life discourses, as well as an affirmation of modes of life outside the "genre of Man." Emphasizes the ontological relationality of humanity over and against comparison and calcuability as modes of interpreting different forms of domination. I'm still chewing it over!
June 22, 2021
"Habeas viscus: because to fully inhabit the flesh might lead to a different modality of existence."
Can't say I got all of it (this is intricate, abstract and dense) but was nevertheless riveted by it, and simply excited whenever lines of argumentation and thoughts started coming together.
Can't say I got all of it (this is intricate, abstract and dense) but was nevertheless riveted by it, and simply excited whenever lines of argumentation and thoughts started coming together.
July 22, 2025
Fascinating, though difficult to understand at times. Weheliye’s notion of habeas viscus gets beyond Western discourses of bare life and biopolitics which abstract the body into a universal, pre-political and pre-linguistic biological reality, and beyond the tendency of parts of Black studies to focus on cultural specificity, introducing a much needed intervention between these two fields. Weheliye introduces the notion of racializing assemblages to better conceptualize this obscure place of the flesh which is at once constraining and violent while also a potential site of liberation and resistance. Seeing the extreme suffering of places like Guantanamo Bay, Transatlantic slavery, and the Holocaust not as exterior to history but as continuous with the daily realities of racialized subjects, habeas viscus points towards one site (among others) beyond the legal and linguistic structures in which we might find hope. This quote in particular spoke to me: “habeas viscus… insists on the importance of miniscule movements, glimmers of hope, scraps of food, the interrupted dreams of freedom found in those spaces deemed devoid of full human life (Guan tanamo Bay, internment camps, maximum security prisons, Indian reservations, concentration camps, slave plantations, or colonial outposts, for instance).” The language often gets jargon-y and tends to wax a bit poetic at times, and the central argument of the book is not always clear. That said, this book provides a great, imaginative, and concrete answer to the question of how else we can theorize humanity beyond the overrepresented category of Man that goes beyond a mere diagnosing of problems.
November 6, 2022
Very dense, but interesting, critique of Agamben and Foucault. This critique is less useful to me because I do not work with the thinkings of these men, but it's good to know that something exists on this. I am more intrigued by his introduction of Hortense Spiller's writing and his explanation of Sylvia Wynter's work (which helped me to understand her work a bit better!). I also appreciate his use of the flesh and racializing assemblages as concepts to think with. What's missing for me is a deeper engagement of what it means "to claim the monstrosity of the flesh as a site for freedom beyond the world of Man" (p. 125). It seems to me that Weheliye does not provide concrete examples of living in our flesh while arguing that it is necessary to do so - I'm left wondering, what could it look like?
June 20, 2022
Really awesome interrogation of Foucault’s biopolitics and Ambagen’s “state of exception” and “bare life,” but I feel the book could have been an additional two chapters or so. I feel that particular aspects peaked at in “Habeas Viscus’s” introduction such as an analysis of Mbembe’s “necropolitics” and various upheld manifestos such as the those of the Combahee River Collective, the Black Panther Party, and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, would have made for a fascinating expansion of this book’s theorizations.
September 15, 2017
Great discussion of the work of Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Winter, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben. Very contemporary discussion as to the value of black studies, the importance of its object of knowledge, and the relationships between systems of oppression, Man, the body, and flesh. Uses a lot of jargon that could require a slower reading for less-familiar readers. Definitely a must read for anyone who's work involves discussions of biopolitics or bare life.
October 2, 2021
I think Weheliye is making an important intervention into Western thought. A great synthesis of powerhouse Black feminist thinkers, although I think I prefer to go to them (because Wynter, Hartmann, Sharpe, King and others also powerfully reject Western rational humanism).
November 15, 2022
Weheliye's viscous, penetrating theorizing has made me reorient my thinking re: the flesh, race/racialization, and humanity. A wonderful text from which I will proceed to configure my doctoral dissertation.
November 5, 2024
It's a great book, and Weheliye can make sentences sing when he wants to, but the arguments of the book are so widespread in Black studies today that it reads as more of an extended review of the field than an original text. It's also overwritten in parts, so that can sometimes suck.
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November 20, 2025genuinely!! genuinely some of the toughest theory i have ever read. i struggled with this SO much. might just be me, but i found weheliye's language so so difficult to decipher, even though the actual theory part was really interesting.
May 14, 2017
A must-read for anyone interested in the humanities!
March 20, 2018
this would be worth it just for the takedown of Agamben, and then on top of it there's a bunch of other really interesting stuff going on.
June 6, 2018
This book is excellent in analysis of various textual examples and in its critique of Foucault and Agamben with respect to racialized assemblages.
January 23, 2020
This is my new favorite book full of all my favorite things: critical theory, Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, manifestos, and M.I.A.
February 8, 2024
(read for class) besides having the world's longest sentences this was such an interesting and wonderful read! the engagement with Spillers was awesome. flesh! yeah, i get it
July 16, 2024
Dense and brilliant, a book I need to revisit in 5 years when I’m smarter
October 21, 2025
i might be stupid!
March 14, 2017
A really solid examination and troubling of biopolitics and racialization. It can be rough to get into at first, but once you get going, it gets easier and easier to read, and by the end you're really invested. The last chapter in particular is really good in terms of thinking about what it might mean to consider a futurity outside of the western Man. I really loved chapter 5 ("Law") as well, for its examination of how documented "wounding" may be necessary for full personhood. It may really help you to have reader Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter before you read this, but it's not necessary by any stretch. A really good book overall,and one I'm glad to have read.
February 8, 2017
This book is so necessary, it provides a self-determined framework of viewing black ontology. Weheliye excavates the work of Sylvia Wynter (an Afro-cuban theorist whose writings have been neglected by institution) as a way of situating blackness and black studies in society. Weheliye's call for self-determination and promises of afro-futurism through the racial assemblages of body and life and inspiring and offers an innovative way of re-framing Black studies in and outside of the academy.
January 3, 2015
Hands down the best academic book I have read in a while - highly theoretical, addressing issues of racialized identities and their marginalizations through the theoretical principles advanced by Black Feminist theorists such as Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter. Very well written with a touch of hip-hop humor.
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