What’s in a Mark? Or, Black Time and the Hieroglyphics of the Flesh

In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers draws a parallel between the discursive and material field of violence that assisted in the production of the captive body. She asks: “We might well ask if this phenomenon of marking and branding actually ‘transfers’ from one generation to another, finding its various symbolic substitutions in an efficacy of meanings that repeat the initiating moments?” In response to her inquiry, this paper presents a theory of “transfer” of hieroglyphics from one generation to another through a semiological reading of language and myth. This theory of “transfer” will ultimately argue that because language must be iterable, and thus communicable in different contexts, black time is structured by both continuity and severe disjunctures that perform a series of symbolic substitutions for use outside of their initiating moments.