Calvin L. Warren ONTOLOGICAL TERROR Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from Duke University Libraries https://archive.org/details/ontologicalterroOOwarr ONTOLOGICAL TERROR Publication of this open monograph was the result of Emory University’s participation in tome (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries, tome aims to expand the reach of long-form humanities and social science scholarship including digital scholarship. Additionally, the program looks to ensure the sustainability of university press monograph publishing by supporting the highest quality scholarship and promoting a new ecology of scholarly publishing in which authors’ institutions bear the publication costs. Funding from Emory University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation made it possible to open this publication to the world. WWW.OPENMONOGRAPHS.ORG ONTOLOGICAL BLACKNESS, NIHILISM, AND EMANCIPATION TERROR Calvin L. Warren DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS | DURHAM AND LONDON | 2018 © 2018 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper «> Designed by Matthew Tauch Typeset in Warnock Pro by Copperline Book Services Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Warren, Calvin L., [date- ] author. Title: Ontological terror : Blackness, nihilism, and emancipation / Calvin L. Warren. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2017045250 (print) | lccn 2017051441 (ebook) isbn 9780822371847 (ebook) isbn 9780822370727 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9780822370871 (pbk.: alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Race—Political aspects. | Racism. | Race awareness. | Blacks—Race identity. | Nihilism (Philosophy) | Ontology. Classification: lcc HT1523 (ebook) | lcc HT1523 .W375 2018 (print) | ddc 305.8 — dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017045250 Cover art: Sondra Perry, still from Black/Cloud, 2010. Courtesy Bridget Donahue Gallery, NYC. DEDICATED TO Fannie Warren, Lurene Brunson, and Jane Elven (my three mothers) For their love, patience, and unending support CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix INTRODUCTION The Free Black fe Nothing i CHAPTER 1 The Question of Black Being 26 CHAPTER 2 Outlawing 62 CHAPTER 3 Scientific Horror no CHAPTER 4 Catachrestic Fantasies 143 CODA Adieu to the Human 169 Notes 173 Bibliography 201 Index 211 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is born out of numerous conversations, spirited debates, no¬ etic experiments, and silent reflections. My intention is to reinvigorate and expand a philosophical field, one often neglected and ignored: black nihilism. The thinking here represents my attempt to center the onto¬ logical crisis blackness presents to an antiblack world. This is a difficult task, and many have provided intellectual and emotional support to ac¬ complish it. I am grateful for those who have endured my negativity, un¬ conventional thinking, and exasperation. It takes an exceptional constitu¬ tion to support a nihilistic thinker, especially when the very ground upon which the support is extended is also called into question. Words are inadequate to express my deep gratitude for those willing to travel to the depths with me, the “valley of the shadow of death,” and think what seems ineffable. Identifying origins is always difficult, since innumerable factors influ¬ ence the emergence of thought, but Yale University has been formative in my thinking. I would like to thank Dr. Robert Stepto and Dr. Glenda Gilmore for supporting my graduate work. Dr. Diane Rubenstein’s rigor¬ ous postmodern/psychoanalytic engagement and intellectual generosity have cultivated my thinking since I was an undergraduate, and I continue to learn from her work. I am exceptionally grateful for her continued sup¬ port. Dr. Hortense Spillers has left an indelible imprint on my thinking and has provided me with a model of intellectual courage, excellence, and generosity. We all need intellectual aspirations, and she constitutes such an aspiration in my life. I hope that this project reflects my deep indebt¬ edness and admiration for her philosophical contributions. Darien Parker, Carlos Miranda, Suzette Spencer, Uri McMillan, Shana Redmond, Nicole Ivy, Sarah Haley, Kimberly Brown, Erin Chapman, Libby Anker, Jennifer Nash, Melvin Rogers, Gregory Childs, Jared Sexton, Chelsey Faloona, Christina Sharpe, and Zakiyyah Jackson have greatly enriched my thinking through intense dialogue, humor, and friendship. I am especially grateful to Melani McAlister, Gayle Wald, Floyd Hayes, Shannon Sullivan, and Marshall Alcorn for supporting my work and en¬ couraging me through uncertainty. Tommy Curry and Rinaldo Walcott are not only tremendous interlocutors, but also extraordinary mentors and friends—their presence is invaluable. The Ford Foundation, Mellon Mayes Fellowship, and the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fel¬ lowship provided necessary institutional support for this project. Colleagues at Emory University have helped me expand my thinking and given me an intellectual home. I would like to thank Elizabeth Wil¬ son, Lynne Huffer, Kadji Amin, Irene Brown, Rachel Dudley, Carla Free¬ man, Michael Moon, Beth Reingold, Pamela Scully, and Deboleena Roy for making the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies a rigorous place in which to think. I am especially grateful to Falguni Sheth for friendship, intellectual rigor, and mentorship. I am fortunate to have friends and family who have made this journey bearable: Fred Willis, Kelnesha Smalls, Christopher Shaw, Cynthia Bea¬ ver, Dwayne Britt, Chrystal and Michael Emery, Nkosi Brown, Jeff Brown, Chris Roberson, Bob Carter, Duvalier Malone, Dr. Timothy Hatchett, Aaron Davis, Kenzio Howard, Demetrius White, Damas Djagli, Trevor Reaves, Jaccob Miller, Donnie Wynn, Cody Hugley. Without the love and support of Peter Flegel, Brandi Hughes, Lisa Head, Candace Kenyatta, Michaelangelo Wright, Mariah Morrison, Carolle Hepburn, and Helen Bjerum, Tina, Tonya, Jess, and Greg Robbie, this project would never have seen the light of day. They keep me looking beyond the dark clouds into the sun. This book is dedicated to Fannie Warren, Lurene Brunson, and Jane Elven for sustaining my spirit. Duke University Press provided wonderful editorial support. Elizabeth Ault believed in the project from the very beginning, and I could not ask for a better editor. Her keen eye, patience, and support are truly remark¬ able. I am grateful for all her hard work. Susan Albury provided invaluable suggestions, editing, and helped me refine my ideas. I would also like to thank my two anonymous readers, who helped expand my thinking and clarify my ideas. I would like to thank the journals Nineteenth Century Contexts and cr: The New Centennial Review for publishing earlier iterations of chapter 3 and a section of my current introduction. X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Kevin Lamonte Jones, Esq., has been with this project since the be¬ ginning. He has not only given encouragement, support, and advice, but also enabled me to endure the heaviness of antiblackness. I am eternally grateful for his presence and perseverance. I thank my Creator and the ancestors for courage, power, and revelation. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi INTRODUCTION THE FREE BLACK f& NOTHING When we got about halfway to St. Michael’s, while the constables having us in charge were looking ahead, Henry inquired of me what he should do with his pass. I told him to eat it with his biscuit, and own nothing; and we passed the word around, “Own nothing" and “Own nothing!" said we all. FREDERICK DOUGLASS, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass OWNING NOTHING A deep abyss, or a terrifying question, engenders the declaration "Black Lives Matter.” The declaration, in fact, conceals this question even as it purports to have answered it resolutely. “Black Lives Matter,” then, carries a certain terror in its dissemination, a terror we dare to approach with un¬ certainty, urgency, and exhaustion. This question pertains to the “meta¬ physical infrastructure,” as Nahum Chandler might call it, that condi¬ tions our world and our thinking about the world. “Black Lives Matter” is an important declaration, not just because it foregrounds the question of unbearable brutality, but also because it performs philosophical labor—it compels us to face the terrifying question, despite our desire to look away. The declaration presents a difficult syntax or an accretion of tensions and ambiguities within its organization: can blacks have life? What would such life mean within an antiblack world? What axiological measurement determines the mattering of the life in question? Does the assembly of these terms shatter philosophical coherence or what metaphysical infra¬ structure provides stability, coherence, and intelligibility for the declara- tion? These questions of value, meaning, stability, and intelligibility lead us to the terror of the declaration, the question it conceals but engages: what ontological ground provides the occasion for the declaration? Can such ground be assumed, and if not, is the declaration even possible with¬ out it? “Black Lives Matter” assumes ontological ground, which propels the deployment of its terms and sustains them throughout the treacheries of antiblack epistemologies. Put differently, the human being provides an anchor for the declaration, and since the being of the human is invaluable, then black life must also matter, if the black is a human (the declaration anchors mattering in the human’s Being). But we reach a point of terror with this syllogistic reasoning. One must take a step backward and ask the fundamental question: is the black, in fact, a human being ? Or can black(ness) ground itself in the being of the human? If it cannot, then on what bases can we assert the mattering of black existence? If it can, then why would the phrase need to be repeated and recited incessantly? Do the affirmative declaration and its insistence undermine this very ontological ground? The statement declares, then, too soon—a declaration that is re¬ ally an unanswered (or unanswerable) question. We must trace this ques¬ tion and declaration back to its philosophical roots: the Negro Question. 1 This question reemerges within a world of antiblack brutality, a world in which black torture, dismemberment, fatality, and fracturing are rou- tinized and ritualized—a global, sadistic pleasure principle. I was invited to meditate on this globalized sadism in the context of Michael Brown’s murder and the police state. The invitation filled me with dread as I antic¬ ipated a festival of humanism in which presenters would share solutions to the problem of antiblackness (if they even acknowledged antiblackness) and inundate the audience with “yes we can!” rhetoric and unbounded op¬ timism. I decided to participate, despite this dread, once students began asking me deep questions, questions that also filled them with dread and confusion. I, of course, was correct about my misgivings. I listened to one speaker after the next describe a bright future, where black life is valued and blacks are respected as humans—if we just keep fighting, they said, “we’re almost there!” A political scientist introduced statistics and graphs laying out voting patterns and districts; he argued that blacks just did not realize how much power they had (an unfortunate ignorance, I guess). If they just collectively voted they could change antiblack police practices and make this world a better place. The audience clapped enthusiasti- 2 INTRODUCTION cally; I remained silent. Next, a professor of law implored the audience to keep fighting for legal change because the law is a powerful weapon for ending discrimination and restoring justice. We just needed to return to the universal principles that founded our Constitution, “liberty, equal¬ ity, and justice!" (I thought about the exception clause in the Thirteenth Amendment, the Three-Fifths Compromise, and the way the sharecrop¬ ping system exploited the Fourteenth Amendment in order to reenslave through contract. I continued to sit in silence.) The audience shouted and applauded. I felt a pit in my stomach because I knew what I had to do; it was my time to step up to the podium—-it was my nihilistic responsibility. I told the audience there was no solution to the problem of antiblackness; it will continue without end, as long as the world exists. Furthermore, all the solutions presented rely on antiblack instruments to address anti¬ blackness, a vicious and tortuous cycle that will only produce more pain and disappointment. I also said that humanist affect (the good feeling we get from hopeful solutions) will not translate into freedom, justice, rec¬ ognition, or resolution. It merely provides temporary reprieve from the fact that blacks are not safe in an antiblack world, a fact that can become overwhelming. The form of antiblackness might alter, but antiblackness itself will remain a constant—despite the power of our imagination and political yearnings. I continued this nihilistic analysis of the situation until I heard complete silence. A woman stood up after my presentation and shouted, “How dare you tell this to our youth! That is so very negative! Of course we can change things; we have power, and we are free.” Her voice began to increase in intensity. I waited for her to finish and asked her, “Then tell us how to end police brutality and the slaughter of the youth you want to protect from my nihilism.” “If these solutions are so credible, why have they consis¬ tently failed? Are we awaiting for some novel, extraordinary solution— one no one had ever imagined—to end antiblack violence and misery?” Silence. “In what manner will this ‘power’ deliver us from antiblackness?” How long must we insist on a humanity that is not recognized—an insis¬ tence that humiliates in its inefficacy? “If we are progressing, why are black youth being slaughtered at staggering rates in the twenty-first century— if we are, indeed, humans just like everyone else?” People began to re¬ spond that things are getting better, despite the increasing death toll, the unchecked power of the police state, the lack of conviction rates for THE FREE BLACK » NOTHING 3 police murdering blacks, the prison industrial complex and the modern reenslavement of an entire generation, the unbelievable black infant mor¬ tality rate, the lack of jobs for black youth and debilitating poverty. “This is better?” I asked. “At least we are not slaves!” someone shouted. I asked them to read the Thirteenth Amendment closely. But the intensity of the dialogic exchange taught me that affect runs both ways: it is not just that solutions make us feel good because we feel powerful/hopeful, but that pressing the ontological question presents terror —the terror that onto¬ logical security is gone, the terror that ethical claims no longer have an anchor, and the terror of inhabiting existence outside the precincts of humanity and its humanism. Ontological Terror engages this question and the forms of terror it produces. 2 The event also put the metaphysical infrastructure into perspective for me. Two philosophical forces were colluding (and at times conflicting) to orient the solutions proposed and the audiences’ responses, and both presented “free black” as a concept with meaning: black humanism and postmetaphysics. I use these two terms to docket a certain posture toward metaphysics—and the ontological ground metaphysics offers. Black hu¬ manism enters into romance with metaphysics. It appropriates schema- tization, calculation, technology, probability, and universality—all the in¬ struments of metaphysical thinking—to make epistemological, ethical, and ontological claims concerning blackness and freedom. Freedom is possible, then, because metaphysics provides it with ontology; from there, all sorts of solutions, policies, and practices emerge to address antiblackness. Scien¬ tific reasoning, technological innovation, and legality are tools black hu¬ manists use to quantify suffering, measure progress, proffer universal nar¬ ratives of humanity, and reason with antiblack institutions. All problems have solutions for black humanists, and their task is to uncover the solution the problem conceals, as this uncovering equates to an eradication of the problem. Black humanism relies on an eclectic approach to antiblackness— Hegelian synthesis, Kantian rationalism, Platonic universals/idealism, Car¬ tesian representation, and empiricism. In short, black humanists lay claim to the being of the human (and the human’s freedom) through metaphys¬ ical thinking and instruments. Postmetaphysics, in contrast, attempts the surmounting or twisting [■ verwunden ] of the ground and logic of metaphysics. 3 It insists that meta¬ physics reproduces pain and misery and restricts human freedom. Rep- 4 INTRODUCTION resenting the human as an object of scientific thinking (e.g., biology, economics, law) destroys the spontaneity and uniqueness of the human— things that make the human special. The ground, then, upon which meta¬ physics relies is problematic, and this ground must be destroyed (i.e., twisted) and deconstructed (i.e., displaced) to free the human. Postmeta¬ physics would advocate for a self-consumption of this ground through hermeneutical strategies, unending deconstructions, and forms of plu¬ rality (such as hermeneutic nihilism). The post is rather a misnomer, if we think of post as an overcoming [ iiberwunden ]; the postmetaphysician will never overcome metaphysics. A residue will always remain, but the postmetaphysician hopes to reduce this metaphysical residue to render it inoperative. The postmetaphysician understands antiblackness as a prob¬ lem of metaphysics, especially the way scientific thinking has classified being along racial difference and biology. The task of the postmetaphysi¬ cal project is to free blacks from the misery metaphysics produces by un¬ dermining its ground. Hermeneutical strategies, which contest ultimate foundations, would question the ground of race (racial metaphysics) and its claim to universal truth. Black humanism and postmetaphysics, however, leave the question of being unattended as it concerns black(ness). Both assume being is ap¬ plicable and operative—black humanism relies on metaphysical being and postmetaphysics relies on multiple interpretations or manifestations of being. In other words, the human’s being grounds both philosophical perspectives. Although postmetaphysics allows for a capacious under¬ standing of the human and Being, it still posits being universally as it con¬ cerns freedom; no entity is without it, even if it manifests differently, or as difference, if we follow Deleuze. This is to suggest that both discourses proceed as if the question of being has been settled and that we no longer need to return to it—the question, indeed, has been elided in critical dis¬ courses concerning blackness. Ontological Terror seeks to put the ques¬ tion back in its proper place: at the center of any discourse about Being. Ontological Terror meditates on this (non)relation between blackness and Being by arguing that black bo i ng incarnates metaphysical nothing, the terror of metaphysics, in an antiblack world. Blacks, then, have func¬ tion but not Being—the function of black(ness) is to give form to a ter¬ rifying formlessness (nothing). Being claims function as its property (all functions rely on Being, according to this logic, for philosophical pre- THE FREE BLACK tS NOTHING S sentation), but the aim of black nihilism is to expose the unbridgeable rift between Being and function for blackness. The puzzle of blackness, then, is that it functions in an antiblack world without being—much like “nothing” functions philosophically without our metaphysical under¬ standing of being, an extraordinary mystery. Put differently, metaphysics is obsessed with both blackness and nothing, and the two become syn¬ onyms for that which ruptures metaphysical organization and form. The Negro is black because the Negro must assume the function of nothing in a metaphysical world. The world needs this labor. This obsession, how¬ ever, also transforms into hatred, since nothing is incorrigible—it shat¬ ters ontological ground and security. Nothing terrifies metaphysics, and metaphysics attempts to dominate it by turning nothing into an object of knowledge, something it can dominate, analyze, calculate, and schema¬ tize. When I speak of function, I mean the projection of nothing’s terror onto black(ness) as a strategy of metaphysics’ will to power. How, then, does metaphysics dominate nothing? By objectifying nothing through the black Negro. In this analysis, metaphysics can never provide freedom or humanity for blacks, since it is the objectification, domination, and extermination of blacks that keep the metaphysical world intact. Metaphysics uses blacks to maintain a sense of security and to sustain the fantasy of triumph—the triumph over the nothing that limits human freedom. Without blacks, I argue, nothing’s terror debilitates metaphysical procedures, epistemolo¬ gies, boundaries, and institutions. Black freedom, then, would constitute a form of world destruction, and this is precisely why humanism has failed to accomplish its romantic goals of equality, justice, and recognition. In short, black humanism has neglected the relationship between black(ness) and nothing in its yearning for belonging, acceptance, and freedom. The Negro was invented to fulfill this function for metaphysics, and the hu¬ manist dream of transforming invention into human being is continu¬ ally deferred (because it is impossible). Ontological Terror challenges the claim that blacks are human and can ground existence in the same being of the human. I argue that blacks are introduced into the metaphysical world as available equipment in human form. 6 INTRODUCTION METAPHYSICS, HEIDEGGER, AND DESTRUKTION Black thinking, then, must return to the question of Being and the relation between this question and the antiblack violence sustaining the world. It is my contention that black thinking is given a tremendous task: to approach the ontological abyss and the metaphysical violence sustaining the world. Ontological Terror suggests that black thinking cannot be overcome— we will never reach the end of black thinking or its culmination, unlike the end of philosophy describing postmetaphysical enterprises. 4 In other words, post metaphysics has broached the question of being and has com¬ menced the destruction [ Destruktion ] of the metaphysical infrastructure, which systemically forgets being. Postmetaphysics, then, is a project of remnants, as Santiago Zabala suggests. After we have used hermeneutics, deconstruction, rhizomes, and mathematical sets to devastate metaphys¬ ics, we are left with ontological rubble—a trace of metaphysics and a re¬ constructed being. Postmetaphysics, then, must ask, “How is it going with Being?” Or what is the state of Being in this contemporary moment, and how does the world remain open to Being’s unfolding and happening (as well as its withdrawal and abandoning of Daseln)? “How is it going with Being?” is the fundamental question of our era, according to postmeta¬ physics; only the twisting and severe rearranging [verwunden] of meta¬ physics can usher this question into the world. Both metaphysics and postmetaphysics, however, have forgotten the Ne¬ gro, just as they have forgotten Being—to remember Being one must also re¬ member the Negro. The Negro Question and the Question of Being are in¬ tertwined. Postmetaphysical enterprises reach a limit in destruction, since it is the Negro that sustains metaphysics and enables the forgetting of Be¬ ing (i.e., metaphysics can forget Being because it uses the Negro to project nothing’s terror and forget Being). In a sense, the global use of the Negro fulfills the ontological function of forgetting Being’s terror, majesty, and incorrigibility. The consequence of this is that as long as postmetaphysical enterprises leave the Negro unattended in their thinking, it inadvertently sustains metaphysical pain and violence. This, I argue, is why we will never overcome [iiberwunden] metaphysics because the world cannot overcome the Negro—the world needs the Negro, even as the world despises it. This is, of course, a Heideggerian approach to the thinking of Being and Nothing. More than any other philosopher, Heidegger pursued meta- THE FREE BLACK tS NOTHING 7 physical violence and the question of Being relentlessly, and for this rea¬ son I find his philosophy indispensable and necessary. Ontological Terror thinks with and against Heidegger, since I believe Heidegger’s destruc¬ tion of metaphysics can assist black studies in the tremendous task of thinking Being and blackness, as Grant Farred has suggested. 5 Heidegger’s Destruktion covers a wide range of philosophical issues, and it is not my objective to address all of these complexities; my interest is the relation between Heidegger’s critique of metaphysical violence, available equip¬ ment, and the task of remembering as it concerns blackness. What I hope to broach in this book, with all the aporias such as broaching encounters, is that the Negro is the missing element in Heidegger’s thinking (as well as in that of those postmetaphysicians indebted to Heidegger, such as Jean- Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Gianni Vattimo). If, as we learn in Being and Time, Dasein uses tools to experience its thrown- ness in the world (establishing its facticity) and to develop its unique proj¬ ect oriented toward the future (projectionality), the Negro—as commod¬ ity, object, slave, putative backdrop, prisoner, refugee, and corpse—is the quintessential tool Dasein uses. The use of the Negro metaphysically and ontologically, as a tool, is what black thinking is tasked with pursuing. Thus, black thinking (and postmetaphysics) must ask the unasked ques¬ tion “How is it going with black feeiftg?” Without broaching this question, all forms of destruction are just reconstitutions, since the world continues to use the Negro (as black and nothing) to forget Being and the sadistic pleasure of this forgetfulness. I shared this argument with a good friend at a conference, and he po¬ litely whispered to me, “You know Heidegger was sympathetic to Na¬ zism, don’t you?” I immediately whispered back, “Even more reason for black studies to read and engage him!” Heidegger might well be the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, since the question of Being resides at the crux of every philosophical enterprise, and he raised this question relentlessly. For me, this means that we cannot escape Heidegger; his Destruktion of Being has left its trace on all our think¬ ing—whether we admit it or not. We cannot escape Heidegger because we cannot escape the question of Being. If the trace of Heidegger has left an indelible impression, despite the attempts to purge him/his thought, con¬ temporary thinking still bears the abhorrent, the unforgivable, the disas¬ ter, the devastation. The question, then, is not just whether Heidegger was 8 INTRODUCTION a Nazi (or antiblack for my purposes), but what his critique of metaphysics can teach us about systemic violence and devastation . 6 Turning a blind eye to Heidegger will not resolve anything, although affect might make us feel ethically enlightened. Confronting/engaging Heidegger, I argue, helps us understand the relation between black suffering and metaphys¬ ics, slavery and objectification, antiblackness and forgetfulness, thinking and remembering. ( Heidegger’s philosophy, in many ways, can be read as an allegory of antiblackness and black suffering—the metaphysical violence of the transatlantic slave trade .) 7 To broach the insatiable question “Why are blacks continually injured, degraded, pulverized, and killed?” would require, then, an understanding of metaphysical violence and pain—since black suffering is metaphysical violence, the violence of schematization, objectification, and calculative thinking Heidegger spent his entire pro¬ fessional career exposing. Perhaps Heidegger was really talking about black(ness) and black suffering all along. BLACK NIHILISM AND ANTIBLACKNESS A mentor once asked me a terrifying question: why are blacks hated all over the world? Stunned, I remained silent, but the question remained with me. This book, in many ways, is a return to my mentor’s question, a question that might lack any sufficient answer, but a question that must be presented nonetheless. We can call this hatred antiblackness-, an ac¬ cretion of practices, knowledge systems, and institutions designed to im¬ pose nothing onto blackness and the unending domination/eradication of black presence as nothing incarnated. Put differently, antiblackness is anti-nothing. What is hated about blacks is this nothing, the ontologi¬ cal terror, they must embody for the metaphysical world. Every lynching, castration, rape, shooting, and murder of blacks is an engagement with this nothing and the fantasy that nothing can be dominated once and for all. Therefore, unlike Heidegger, nothing is not a cause for celebration in my analysis; it is the source of terror, violence, and domination for blacks. Heideggerian anxiety transforms into antiblack violence when Dasein flees the anxiety nothing stimulates and projects it as terror onto blacks. The unfolding of Being for Dasein, through the aperture of nothing, is predicated on the imposition of nothing’s terror onto blacks. This is why, THE FREE BLACK t» NOTHING 9 I argue, the world needs blacks, even as it tries to eliminate them (this is the tension between necessity and hatred). Ontological Terror insists, then, that Heidegger’s Introduction to Meta¬ physics, for example, be read to understand the antiblack strategies the world employs to avoid nothing (as Heidegger says, “The world wants to know nothing of nothing”) and its terror—how Dasein deals with its "own oppression by its own nothingness,” as Oren Ben-Dor might call it. 8 Dasein’s freedom is contingent on avoiding this nothing metaphysically— even though Heidegger would insist that nothing provides the opening for a new thinking about Being. Thus, calculative thinking, as I will ar¬ gue in chapter 3, is a strategy for imposing nothing onto blacks. In un¬ derstanding the particular way metaphysics oppresses, we get a better understanding of antiblackness as metaphysics. Antiblackness provides the instruments and framework for binary thinking, the thinking of being as presence (e.g., the obsession with physicality and skin complexion), the objectification of Being (one only needs to think of slave ledgers as the extremity of Heidegger’s metaphysical nightmare, for example), and tech¬ nocratic oppression (e.g., racial surveillance, police warfare equipment). The aim of postmetaphysicians, then, is to weaken metaphysics; this is the nihilistic strategy of the enterprise—to first weaken philosophy and its rigid foundations. Nihilism is important because it undermines the metaphysics, which sustains extreme forms of violence and destruction. But it reaches its limit when antiblackness is left unchecked. The Italian nihilist Gianni Vattimo has revived and developed the philosophical tradition of nihilism in gravid ways that speak to contem¬ porary threats of annihilation and destruction. His project is important because it permutes the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and in do¬ ing so, it not only offers an important critique of modernity but also puts this critique in the service of a politico-philosophical imagination—an imagination that conceives of the weakening of metaphysical Being (ni¬ hilism) as the solution to the rationalization and fracturing of humanity (the source of modern suffering or pain). In short, this project attempts to restore dignity, individuality, and freedom to society by remembering Being (proper Being, not metaphysical Being) and allowing for the neces¬ sary contextualization and historicization of Being as event. In The End of Modernity (1988) and Nihilism and Emancipation (2004), Vattimo reads Heidegger’s destruction of ontology as a philosophical com- 10 INTRODUCTION plement to Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger offer trenchant critiques of metaphysics, and by reading them together, he fills in certain gaps—in particular, the relationship be¬ tween metaphysics and social rationalization, foundations and ontology, and sociological philosophy and thinking itself. We can understand both Vattimo’s and Heidegger’s projects as the attempt to capture the relation¬ ship between what we might call metaphysical Being (fraudulent Being as object) and Being (in its proper contextualized sense). This relationship, indeed, has been particularly violent and has produced various forms of suffering. This suffering is the essence of metaphysics, or what Vattimo would call “pain,” and it is sustained through the will to power, violence (e.g., physical, psychic, spiritual, and philosophical), and the destruction of liberty. The metaphysical tradition has reduced Being (an event that structures historical reality and possibility itself) to an object, and this objectification of Being is accomplished through the instruments of sci¬ ence and schematization. The result of this process is that Being is for¬ gotten; the grand aperture that has provided the condition for relation- ality for many epochs is now reified as a static presence, a presence to be possessed and analyzed. In this sense, we lose the grandeur of Being and confuse it for being, the particularity of a certain epoch. The nihil¬ ist, then, must overcome the oblivion of Being through the weakening of metaphysical Being (what Vattimo will call “weak thought”). Vattimo re¬ covers Heidegger’s term Verwundung (distorting acceptance, resignation, or twisting) as a strategy to weaken metaphysical Being, since the nihilist can never truly destroy metaphysics or completely overcome it (iiberwun- den). This strategy of twisting and distorting metaphysics helps us to re¬ member and re-collect [andenken] the grandeur of Being ( Ge-Schick as the ultimate gathering of the various epochal presentations of being ) 9 and to place metaphysical Being back in its proper place as a particular man¬ ifestation of this great historical process. Only by inserting our present signification of Being into the grand gathering of Being ( Ge-Shick ) can we properly contextualize our own epoch—the epoch of social rationaliza¬ tion, technocracy, metaphysical domination . 10 For the black nihilist, however, the question is this: will the dissolu¬ tion of metaphysical Being that Vattimo and Heidegger advance eliminate antiblack violence and redress black suffering? What would freedom en¬ tail for black objects (as distinct from the human that grounds Vattimo’s THE FREE BLACK tS NOTHING 11 project)? Antiblackness becomes somewhat of an unacknowledged inter¬ locutor for Vattimo: “Philosophy follows paths that are not insulated or cut off from the social and political transformations of the West ( since the end of metaphysics is unthinkable without the end of colonialism and Eu¬ rocentrism) and ‘discovers’ that the meaning of the history of modernity is not progress toward a final perfection characterized by fullness, total transparency, and the presence finally realized of the essence of man and the world.” 11 Vattimo adumbrates a relationship between metaphysics and colonial¬ ism/ Eurocentrism that renders them coterminous. If, as Vattimo argues, “the end of metaphysics is unthinkable without the end of colonialism and Eurocentrism”—which I will suggest are varieties of antiblack violence— then traditional nihilism must advance an escape from antiblackness to accomplish its agenda. Furthermore, if philosophy follows paths created by sociopolitical realities, then we must talk about antiblackness not just as a violent political formation but also as a philosophical orientation. The social rationalization, loss of individuality, economic expansionism, and technocratic domination that both Vattimo and Heidegger analyze actually depend on antiblackness. Ontological Terror opens a path of black nihilistic inquiries. The objec¬ tive, here, is to trouble the ontological foundations of both postmetaphys¬ ical and black humanist discourses. In chapter 1 ,1 argue that the question of black being constitutes a proper metaphysical question, and this ques¬ tioning leads us into the abyss of ontology: blackness lacks Being (which is why we write being under erasure in relation to black). Unlike human¬ ists and postmetaphysicians, I argue that Being is not universal or appli¬ cable to blacks. Now, some might offer the rejoinder that everything has Being—even an object. 12 It is here that I will introduce a distinction be¬ tween ontology and existence, one that Fanon insisted in Black Skin, White Masks. Blacks have an existence in an antiblack world, but ontology does not explain this existence, as Fanon argued. Furthermore, we might also gain clarity from Heidegger’s rereading of Greek philosophy. He suggests: For the Greeks “Being" says constancy in a twofold sense: 1. Standing-in-itself as arising and standing forth {phusis ) 2. But, as such, “constantly” that is, enduringly, abiding ( ousia ) Not-to-be accordingly, means to step out of constancy that has stood- 12 INTRODUCTION forth in itself; existasthai— “existence,” "to exist,” means, for the Greeks, precisely not-to-be. The thoughtlessness and vapidity with which one uses the words “existence” and “to exist” as designators for Being offer fresh evidence of our alienation from being and from an originally powerful and definitive interpretation of it . 13 My presentation of black existence, then, reworks this Greek understand¬ ing of existence as non-being (or more precisely “not-to-be”), according to Heidegger (since this Greek presentation of the human’s being, I will argue, has already excluded the Hottentot, the black thing). To allow Be¬ ing’s unfolding, or to be, is the melding of standing-forth and abiding, or enduring, such standing. In an antiblack world, such standing forth, or emerging/becoming, is obliterated, and this is what we will call the “metaphysical holocaust”—the systematic concealment, descent, and withholding of blackness through technologies of terror, violence, and abjection. To exist, as black, is to inhabit a world through permanent “falling” (in the Greek ptosis and enklisis). David Marriott might describe this as an interminable fall, in which there is neither event nor becoming; indeed the falling figures [black boing ] do not come to their end, nor is there any possibility of destina¬ tion . . . these falls are unending, and precisely because they fall into nothing . .. these falls inaugurate nothing but waiting, a sort of non- event, an event of nothing which both calls for and annuls repetition . 14 To be, according to Heidegger, is to become, to emerge and move within Being-as-event. But what happens when such becoming does not occur? When the event of Being does not stimulate a productive anxiety of actu¬ alization, but gets caught in a repetition of event-less demise and nothing¬ ness? To inhabit such a condition is to exist as perpetual falling, without standing-forth, without Being. This, then, is the devastation of the meta¬ physical holocaust: black boing never becomes, or stands forth, but exists in concealment, falling, and inconsistency. When I say, then, that blacks lack being but have existence, I mean that they inhabit the world in con¬ cealment and non-movement (this is the condition of objects, despite the work of object-oriented ontologists who project humanism onto objects). Thus, the task of black thinking is to limn the devastating distinction be¬ tween "existence” (inhabitation) and “being.” THE FREE BLACK « NOTHING 13 What is black existence without Being? This is the question black thought orbits—the question that emerges through urgency, devasta¬ tion, or the declaration “black lives matter.” 15 It is a question that, per¬ haps, cannot be answered adequately—or any answer resides outside the world, in an unimaginable time/space horizon. My objective, then, is to build a way into an abyss—without recourse to the metaphysical finality- teleology of an answer. (Even the term existence is inadequate to describe what is black be i ng , as it still retains metaphysical resonance.) The lack of language and grammar to describe what preconditions Being makes the enterprise a difficult one—inevitably encountering explanatory impasse. We, however, attempt to undermine metaphysics as we deploy it. The concept “nothing” provides a paradigmatic frame for describing this black thing without ontology. For nothing constitutes a mystery or ontological exception. We cannot reduce it to Being completely, but it is something outside metaphysical ontology (and at its very core), and, at the same time, it is what enables Being (humans experience Beings unfold¬ ing through the anxiety nothing presents in death or the breakdown of symbolic functions/meaning). What is nothing? This metaphysical ques¬ tion undermines itself from its very deployment, since it debilitates ev¬ ery copula formulation. Heidegger argued that the metaphysical copula formulation (what is) provided the frame for our metaphysical domina¬ tion of Being, but nothing is precisely what lacks isness, by providing it with its condition of possibility. To claim, as I do throughout this book, that black boing is nothing is to read the ontological puzzle of blackness (the unanswerable copula query) through the puzzle of nothing. There is no coincidence, then, when philosopher David Alain or Afro-pessimist scholars argue that black is nothing. Blacks are the nothing of ontology and do not have being like those beings for whom the ontological ques¬ tion is an issue (i.e., human being). In chapter 1 ,1 read Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Ronald Judy, and Nahum Chandler through and against Heidegger to present this ontological puzzle. Even though it can never be answered apodictically, since this would mean the death of the world, my presentation will lead to more questions, complications, impasses, and silences; this is unavoidable when broaching the question of black boing . Philosophy lacks a grammar and a tradition to explain ac¬ curately the Negro Question. Thus, Ontological Terror wrestles or tarries 14 INTRODUCTION with critical traditions designed to exclude black(ness), including, most of all, Being and ontology. PARADIGM, HISTORY, AND THE FREE BLACK The term free black carries tension within its structure; it brings two disparate grammars into collusion and produces an ontological catastro¬ phe. The term black is precisely the puzzle, the great abyss, of something outside the precincts of ontology. It is a metaphysical invention, void of Being, for the purpose of securing Being for the human. It has something like existence but no recourse to the unfolding of Being or the revela¬ tion of its withdrawal. It is nothing —the nonhuman, equipment, and the mysterious. Freedom, however, is the site of this unfolding for the hu¬ man; it is the condition of caring for Being and embracing its withdrawal and unfolding . 16 Freedom, in other words, is a (non)relation to Being for Dasein—it propels its project (projectionality) into the world. Freedom is ontological. As Heidegger insisted in his critique of Kantian freedom (metaphysical causality), “The question concerning the essence of human freedom is the fundamental question of philosophy, in which is rooted even the question of being ... freedom is the condition of the possibility of the manifestness of the being of beings, of understanding of being .” 17 Humanism often conflates freedom with liberty, rights, and emancipa¬ tion, but this conflation undermines the ontological ground, which makes any claim to freedom possible. In other words, reducing freedom to polit¬ ical, social, or legal conceptions leaves the question of being unattended. Freedom exists for Being—it enables the manifestation of Being through Dasein. Our metaphysical notions of freedom also reduce antiblackness to social, political, and legal understandings, and we miss the ontological function of antiblackness—to deny the ontological ground of freedom by severing the (non)relation between blackness and Being. What I am suggesting is that our metaphysical conceptions of freedom neglect the ontological horrors of antiblackness by assuming freedom can be attained through political, social, or legal action. This is a humanist fantasy, one that masks subjection in emancipatory rhetoric . 18 "Free black,” then, stages an impossible encounter: between the on- THE FREE BLACK « NOTHING 15 tological (non)relation and the mysterious abyss of nothing. Put differ¬ ently, it expresses a Hegelian desire of synthesis between “two warring ideas,” as Dubois might call it. We might, then, envision the encounter as a form of war, an ontological disaster from which various forms of antiblack violence emerge. “Free Black” is a grammatical and syntactical battlefield upon which dead bodies—Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride, Michael Brown, among countless others—are displayed. We can also call this disaster the “metaphysical holocaust,” as Frantz Fanon describes it. It is the systemic and relentless wiping out of black cosmologies, histo¬ ries, and frames of reference/orientation. The metaphysical holocaust is violence without end, violence constitutive of a metaphysical world. It is a “violence that continuously repositions the Black as a void of histori¬ cal movement,” as Frank Wilderson describes it. 19 This void and stasis of temporal linearity is precisely the nothing blacks incarnate. The term free black, then, is the syntactical reflection of the metaphysical holocaust, the violence between the terms free and black that is unresolvable. Throughout this book, I use the term free black in two ways: (1) as a philosophical concept capturing the continuous metaphysical violence between black bokfrg and human being/ontometaphysics and (2) as a par¬ ticular historical figure that allegorizes metaphysical violence. Thus, the free black here is both philosophical allegory and historical figure. But, the problematic that the latter presents (i.e., the free black as historical figure) is that such a figure does not exist. It is impossible for any black to be free in an antiblack world. The term free black is a misnomer for describing a historical condition, or particularity, of blackness, since the ontological relation is severed. It is precisely this misnomer, a taxonomic necessity of sorts for historiography and legal studies, that is of interest to me. The struggles and challenges that free blacks experienced in antebellum society were really ontological problems. The free black presents or forces confrontation with the Negro Question. It is through the free black that the Negro Question emerges with ferocity. Can black “things” become free? What is the status of such boingo ? These questions are not merely legal questions or questions of legal status, but primarily ontological questions, I argue. The debates con¬ cerning free black citizenship were deceptive in that antebellum society mobilized them to answer the ontological question, “How is it going with black being ?” Has the metaphysical world evolved such that blacks can 16 INTRODUCTION ground existence, indisputably, in the being of the human? Thus, it made little difference whether one was born free, received the “gift” of freedom from a master, purchased freedom, resided in the North or South; the ontological question, the Negro Question, remained. The intransigence of the question and its continuity across diverse space and temporalities is what concerns me. For we might look to the historical figure of the free black to understand the birth of the proper metaphysical question, since society could not resolve the tension between human freedom and black objects. As Maurice S. Lee suggests, philosophical perspectives on black¬ ness and metaphysics were articulated in many ways before the Civil War (in particular the literary form for him ). 20 My objective here is to read the Negro Question as a philosophical site of anxiety, terror, and metaphys¬ ical sensibilities. Although engaging the historiographical figure “free black” (the in¬ vention of the historiographer), this book is not intended to contribute to historiography; rather, my objective is to question the ontological ground or metaphysical infrastructure upon which such historiographies pro¬ ceed . 21 Antebellum free-black historiography is rich with archival discov¬ eries, and to this my research is indebted. But we reach a problem with historical narration, or what the historiographer does with the archival material retrieved. Historiographical narration is not a philosophically neutral enterprise; it is loaded with philosophical presumptions, primar¬ ily metaphysical humanism. As Possenti asserts, "it is precisely meta¬ physics that keeps watch over history; not because it engulfs or digests history as irrelevant, but because it can direct history toward its goal .” 22 It often proceeds without broaching the ontological question—or taking the historian Ira Berlin’s phrase slaves without masters seriously . 23 When historian Dr. John Hope Franklin remarks, “The free negro as a subject for historical treatment abounds in elusive and difficult problems,” I under¬ stand these problems not just as archival but also as an inherent problem of narrating within a humanist framework . 24 The research acknowledges tension between blackness and freedom (freedom often described as a set of liberties and rights, not an ontological position) but resolves this ten¬ sion into a synthesis of metaphysical humanism—that is, blacks are still human, even though they experience captivity and systemic discrimina¬ tion. What ground enables the historiographer to make such a claim or presume apodictically this black humanity? The research carries a philos- THE FREE BLACK NOTHING 17 ophy of universal humanism into its reading and narration practices. His¬ toriography reinforces philosophical humanism. It is precisely these pre¬ sumptions that Ontological Terror intends to unravel. I bring the Negro Question to historiography to suggest that the metaphysical holocaust destabilizes such humanism . 25 We need to imagine an antimetaphysical historiography (a thinking against metaphysics), one that proceeds from the puzzle of black being and confronts the ontometaphysical question. Thus, my objective in this book is to introduce an ontological compli¬ cation that exceeds, but also engenders discriminatory law (mandatory emigration laws in Southern states, for example), surveillance, and phys¬ ical brutality (the free black whipped just like the slave) of free blacks. These antiblack tactics have been well documented, as it concerns the disciplining and subordination of free blacks. What has been neglected, however, is an analysis of what exactly happens to blacks once emanci¬ pated, or free—the transubstantiation between property and something else. Did the black become a human once free? If we answer in the affir¬ mative, does the freedom paper undermine the being of the human, given that without it, such claim to humanity cannot be sustained? Are “mas¬ terless slaves,” as free blacks have been called, still property—property of whom? What determines the distinction between human masters and masterless slaves? Is emancipation ontological creation, and what enables the malleability of black being ? These questions, questions still remain¬ ing, build a path into a discussion of ontological complications the free black presents. Ontological Terror broaches these questions to illumine something more sinister about the condition of black being , a condition that impacts all blacks in an antiblack world, not just the antebellum free black. The historical singularity of free blacks knots together a deep phil¬ osophical conflict between Being, blackness, and freedom—it is an ex¬ traordinary paradigm for black thinking. My hope is that historians, phi¬ losophers, and theorists will consider the free black, much more than an anomalous population, a speculative frame within which the foundations of humanism and metaphysics in general are challenged. Furthermore, my concern is not to fetishize agency or will. It is cer¬ tainly the case that those boi - ngo we call “free blacks” experienced the world through bonds, courage, despair, friendship, and hope. These can¬ not be denied, but I do not think these render these beings human or an¬ swer the metaphysical question in the affirmative. No matter the bond, l8 INTRODUCTION the act of courage, the indefatigable fortitude, or the institutions estab¬ lished, the metaphysical holocaust remains consistent. No political action has or ever will end it—it is necessary for the world. Thus, if we bundle certain capacities into something we call “agency,” this bundle does not undermine metaphysical violence or the exclusion of blackness from Be¬ ing. The existence that provides the condition for something we might call “agency” is not human ontology and not freedom. Our desperation to incorporate blacks into a narrative of humanistic heroism often results in a disavowal of the problem of ontology, which engenders the condition against which the courageous fight in the first place. Black thinking, then, must explore what existence without Being entails. Free blacks do not inhabit the world in the way the human does—historiography proceeds as if the problem of existence has been resolved. It has not . 26 My focus, here, will be on the condition of the metaphysical holocaust or its man¬ ifestations and not on individual narratives of free blacks. That work is certainly important, too, but in this project I want to read the archive to understand an ontological condition of execration. Ontological Terror confronts both the ontological puzzle (metaphysi¬ cal holocaust) and the historical figure we call “free black” through a par¬ adigmatic approach. In The Signature of All Things, Agamben describes the paradigm as not obeying the logic of the metaphorical transfer of meaning but the analogical logic of the example. Here we are not dealing with a signifier that is extended to designate heterogeneous phenomena by virtue of the same semantic structure; more akin to allegory than to metaphor, the para¬ digm is a singular case that is isolated from its context only insofar as, by exhibiting its own singularity, it makes intelligible a new ensemble, whose homogeneity it itself constitutes. That is to say, to give an ex¬ ample is a complex act which supposes that the term functioning as a paradigm is deactivated from its normal use, not in order to be moved into another context, but on the contrary, to present the canon—the rule—of that use, which can not be shown in any other way . 27 A paradigmatic approach uses the structure of allegory—juxtaposing two singularities—for the purpose of illumining a new ensemble of re¬ lations, or what we can call “paradigm.” The singularity must be deacti¬ vated, meaning it must be momentarily extracted from its usual context THE FREE BLACK « NOTHING 19 and conceptualized in another way. The deactivation is necessary because we can only understand or illumine the paradigm by extracting, deacti¬ vating, and juxtaposing the singularity, or example. It is a paradoxical fig¬ ure: both example and other than example. Ontological Terror approaches the problem of black as nothing through a paradigmatic juxtaposing of the free black and the critique of metaphysical violence Heidegger and others (including Agamben and Jean-Luc Nancy) present. Since nothing is also a paradox, both outside Being and as an opening for Being, one could only approach it through a set of allegories. In other words, we can never fully understand nothing with our metaphysical instruments, even with the most rigorous destructive or deconstructive procedure—something of nothing always escapes. Ontological Terror deactivates the antebellum free black (and the general concept free black) to set it alongside meta¬ physical violence to illumine the paradigm of black nothingness or on¬ tological terror. The free black, then, serves as a historical allegory for metaphysical violence, and metaphysical violence serves as an allegory for the tension between free and black that the historical figur efree black ex¬ periences. My objective is not to rob or neglect the singularity of the free black—although the category itself is under suspicion—but to demon¬ strate how this singularity is much more than traditionally thought by historians. Given this, my objective in Ontological Terror is also to address what I consider a form of philosophical antiblackness: the neglect of black ar¬ chives. Rarely, if ever, do nihilistic or postmetaphysical philosophers engage black archives. A philosophy of history or a philosophical anthropology very often proceeds with an archive (i.e., Homo sacer, Nazi concentration camp, Greek polis) to illumine a paradigm. The choice of archive is also a philosophical statement; it reflects what body of knowledge is worthy of philosophical examination and what experiences contribute more to thinking than just singularity. Black archives are often reduced to mere singularity, perhaps an interesting singularity, but never taken up para- digmatically. Or as Alexander Weheliye cogently states the problem, there is “a broader tendency in which theoretical formulations by white Euro¬ pean thinkers are granted conceptual carte blanche, while those uttered from the view point of minority discourse that speak to the same ques¬ tions are almost exclusively relegated to the jurisdiction of ethnographic locality .” 28 As distinguished philosopher Tommy Curry has argued, “Tra- 20 INTRODUCTION ditionally, in philosophy, the only limitation of philosophical concepts is the extent to which the conceptualize-er imagines; however, when the task placed before whites entails a philosophical encounter with the real¬ ities of Blacks, philosophy is suddenly limited—incarcerated by the white imagination’s inability to confront its corporeal reflection .” 29 Ontological Terror confronts philosophy’s vapidity when confronted with blackness. Furthermore, the fact that post-metaphysics claims to destroy metaphys¬ ics, but leaves the triumph of metaphysics unattended (antiblack violence) is disturbing and befuddling (especially when Vattimo claims that de¬ stroying metaphysics is unthinkable without addressing Euro-centrism). What this reveals to me is that antiblackness is a juggernaut that must be fought on many battlefields—including philosophical formations. Thus, I read postmetaphysics alongside the free black archives (such as The African Repository, freedom papers, and The Census 0/1840 ) in order to illumine the philosophical richness of the black experience in an antiblack world. ITINERARY The book builds upon the arguments that blacks incarnate nothing in a metaphysical world and that the world is both fascinated with this noth¬ ing and terrified of it. Antiblack violence is violence against nothing, the nothing that unsettles the human because it can never be captured and dominated. Blacks, then, allow the human to engage in a fantasy—the domination of nothing. By projecting this nothing as terror onto blacks, the human seeks to dominate nothing by dominating black being , to erad¬ icate nothing by eradicating black bo i ng . The free black, as the conceptual/ embodied intersection between nothing and blackness, is absolutely es¬ sential to a metaphysical world desperate to avoid the terror of nothing. The book proceeds by engaging the projection and terror of this nothing. As I have mentioned before, the field of free black historiography is ca¬ pacious, and there are numerous issues to investigate. I proceed, here, by choosing four fields of inquiry, in which the free black presents on- tometaphysical problems: philosophy, law, science/math, and visuality. I chose these fields to demonstrate what Foucault might call a polymor¬ phous relation . 30 By this, I mean that philosophy, law, science/math, and THE FREE BLACK NOTHING 21 visuality constitute intersecting vectors of terror for black being —each producing and sustaining the destruction of black being in its own way, but accomplishing the same objective (i.e., severing of the flesh or the metaphysical holocaust). I hope to demonstrate that ontological terror unites these diverse fields, and the proper metaphysical question (i.e., “What is black boing ?/How is it going with black being ?”) constitutes the vehicle of movement between the fields. Ultimately, I suggest that these fields expose a deep problem: given the failure of postmetaphysics to twist [verwunden] antiblackness severely and black humanism’s romance with metaphysical schemas of humanity and freedom, black thinking can only ask a metaphysical question, the question that remains after destruction. In chapter 1, “The Question of Black Being ,” I present the Negro Ques¬ tion as what Heidegger would call a “proper metaphysical question.” The aim is to understand how the problem of metaphysical blackness and the concept of nothing converge on the Negro as a way of resolving the ten¬ sion. I read Hortense Spillers, in particular, as an ontometaphysician who describes metaphysical violence as the “severing of the flesh.” In reading Spillers through and against Heidegger, I intend to show how the trans¬ atlantic slave trade realized the horror Heidegger dreaded and sought to destroy in Introduction to Metaphysics, Being and Time, and The Question Concerning Technology, among others. But Spillers also questions the pro¬ cess of Destruktion, I argue, because no such twisting, or reconfiguring, of metaphysics is possible for blackness—the ontological relation is sev¬ ered permanently—no recourse to Being is possible. In chapter 2, “Outlawing,” I present two notions of law: the Law of Being (the law of abandonment determining the relation between the human and Being) and the being of law (the metaphysical instantiation of law as rights, amendments, judicial opinions, legislations). Building off post¬ metaphysical work, I argue that the being of law is subordinate or sub¬ ject to the Law of Being—ontic distortion conceals this fact. Turning to Dred Scott, freedom papers, and emancipation, I suggest that the legal problems free blacks presented to antebellum society were not merely problems for the being of law (the restriction of rights, liberties) but a deeper problem with the Law of Being (the nonrelation between blackness and Being). In other words, the reification of black boing in materiality (freedom papers), the terroristic space of emancipation, the uncertainty of what free black constituted legally were all symptoms of ungrounded 22 INTRODUCTION black being . The being of law merely reflects the exclusion of blacks from Being and into a space of ontological terror. In chapter 3, “Scientific Horror,” I think through the way scientific and mathematical thinking relies on blacks to explore nothing. It is both a horror and a fascination and perhaps the only way science can contend with nothing. The chapter reads the writing of Samuel Cartwright, Ben¬ jamin Rush, and the Census of 1840 as philosophical discourses hiding behind epidemiology, vital statistics, and neurology. The aim is to strip through scientific presentations to expose the metaphysical obsession with blackness as nothing. In chapter 4, “Catachrestic Fantasies,” I argue that nothing is visual¬ ized through fantasies and catachresis (the lack of a proper referent), thus enabling boundless fantasizing about blacks. I turn to illustrated journal¬ ism and the artwork of Edward Clay as visualizations of black as noth¬ ing. The question “What is black boing ?” is answered in different ways through different illustrations. I suggest that philosophy relies on fantasy to make philosophical statements when it reaches its limits of rationality and proofs. Because the free black « nothing, one can only approach this philosophical puzzle with fantasies. I turn to Lacanian psychoanalysis be¬ cause it provides a frame for understanding fantasy, nothing, and projec¬ tion in a way I think is productive. The aim is to think of psychoanalytic theory allegorically as it relates to black being . I also find it productive in thinking about the unconscious fantasies of humans and the way that black-as-nothing centers these fantasies. In short, the chapter is about human fantasizing of a catachrestic entity through illustrated journalism. The coda, “Adieu to the Human,” argues that the metaphysical holo¬ caust and its question are still with us. Police shootings, routinized hu¬ miliation, and disenfranchisement are symptoms of this unending war. Part of the aim, then, is to dethrone the human from its metaphysical pedestal, reject the human, and explore different ways of existing that are not predicated on Being and its humanism. This is the only way black thinking can grapple with existence without Being. This book begins and ends with a question: “How is it going with black Boing ?" This structure reminds us that temporal linearity and narratives of progress are deceptive ontologically. Time rebounds upon itself in a space of ontological terror—there is only temporal circularity or black time, an abyss of time. I challenge linearity (the invention of metaphysics THE FREE BLACK +S NOTHING 23 and historiography) throughout this book by defying chronology (I, in¬ deed, have an irreverence for it). Thus, I begin in one period and move to another and then back again, or I begin with the antebellum period and move to the Civil War and back again. This strategy, I hope, will demon¬ strate that no matter the time period, the metaphysical question remains. Our obsession with chronology and linearity is no more than a humanist fantasy of resolution and movement, which I hope to unravel. I also reject the humanist fantasy (or narcissism) that anything humans have created can be changed. Some creations are no longer in the hands of humans, for they constitute a horizon, or field, upon which human existence itself de¬ pends. Antiblackness is such a creation. Thus, chronology provides no re¬ lief with its obsession with change concerning antiblackness. What many proponents of the agency thesis (i.e., we have power to change anything we create) are actually doing is comparing different forms of antiblack¬ ness and neglecting the terror that antiblackness remains as a consistent variable, despite variations in form. Variations in antiblackness do not signal progress; rather, they are ontic distortions of the underlying onto¬ logical problem—blacks lack Being. We can begin our paradigmatic investigation and end our introduc¬ tion with a literary allegory, one demonstrative of ontological terror. In Edward P. Jones’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Known World, we encounter ontological terror. The scene begins with Augustus, a free black man, returning home from a business transaction by wagon. Patroller Harvey Travis, the sym¬ bol of the law, stops Augustus in a routine inspection of the wagon. Travis has stopped Augustus many times before and knows that Augustus is a free black and, as such, has the right to travel and the freedom of move¬ ment. Travis demands Augustus's freedom papers, although he’s read them many times and basically has them memorized. When Augustus in¬ sists that it is his prerogative to travel as a free person, Travis sardonically replies, “You ain’t free less me and the law say you free.” Travis expresses animus about Augustus’s refusal to act obsequiously before white people, to assert a right he does not indeed possess. As Augustus continued to assert his freedom, Travis began to eat the freedom papers. Starting at the bottom right corners, he chewed and swallowed them. After eating the freedom papers, Travis mockingly retorted, “Thas what I think of your right to do anything you got a right to do.” Travis licked his fingers in sat- 24 INTRODUCTION isfaction and wiped his mouth. “Right ain’t got nothing to do with it,” he said. "Best meal I’ve had in many Sundays.” Oden, one of Travis’s companions, laughed at him and said, "I wouldn’t want to be you in the morning when you have to shit that out.” Travis re¬ sponded, “I don’t know. It might make for a smooth run off. Couldn’t be no worse than what collard greens do to me.” Darcey, a kidnapper of free blacks, purchases free blacks from Travis and sells them as captives for a handsome profit. Travis explains to Darcey that his timing is fortuitous because he has “a nigger who didn’t know what to do with his freedom. Thought it meant he was free.” Travis sells Augustus to Darcey. Unable to prove his freedom, Augustus becomes the property of Darcey, instantly losing the very rights he was so certain freedom ensured. Augustus thought that his freedom paper meant he was free, but as Travis demonstrates, this freedom was not freedom at all. What exactly does Travis consume when he eats the freedom papers? Consumption al¬ legorizes the metaphysical holocaust—reducing the free black to a reified object (freedom paper) and it can be eaten (e.g., put between a biscuit and swallowed, as Frederick Douglass instructed) or destroyed at any time or place. Consumption is both a form of domination and sadistic pleasure, as Vincent Woodard would describe it . 31 We, then, must investigate the manner of consuming black flesh and not just the body, consuming the flesh as consuming the primordial relation itself. Ontological Terror ex¬ poses the insatiable appetite of antiblackness. THE FREE BLACK NOTHING 25 ONE THE QUESTION OF BLACK B E I NG This essent, through questioning, is held out into the possibility of nonbeing. Thereby the why takes on a different penetration. HEIDEGGER, Introduction to Metaphysics A question whose necessity is so fundamental that it must be unasked—the question of the meaning of black being, the question of the meaning of (black) things. We study in the sound of an unasked question. Our study is the sound of an unasked question. We study the sound of an unasked question. FRED MOTEN, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)" BUILDING A WAY One must ask a certain question of black being , 1 a question that opens us onto a horizon of representational and conceptual crisis. This question emerges within a context of urgency: the intensity of black suffering, spir¬ itual and physical deprivation, political demoralization, and the prolifera¬ tion and permanency of necropolitical agendas. The question, its urgency, and the crisis that it engenders recycle historically in various guises, and in each (re)incarnation, it demands an address—an address that seems impossible, since the discursive material we use to formulate an answer is also called into question. Hortense Spillers meditates on certain facets of this redoubling problematic when she suggests that in any investigation of black boing , “we are confronted by divergent temporal frames, or beats, that pose the problem of adequacy—how to reclaim an abandoned site of inquiry in the critical discourse when the very question that it articulates is carried along as part of the methodological structure [or metaphysical structure], as a feature of the paradigm that is itself under suspicion, while the question itself foregrounds a thematic that cannot be approached in any other way.” 2 The “unasked question,” as Fred Moten would call it, is this “abandoned site of inquiry.” My objective in this chapter is to return us to the abandoned, arid ontometaphysical space—the space and place of the question in ontometaphysics. 3 1 use the unasked and unanswerable question to "build a way,” as Heidegger would describe it, through the treacherous terrain of ontometaphysics and antiblackness. 4 What follows is a tracing of this question through the discourses of ontometaphysics and the paradigm of the free black. My propositions at¬ tend to the important function of the Negro, or black bein g, in ontometa¬ physics: (1) The Negro is the incarnation of nothing that a metaphysical world tries tirelessly to eradicate. Black boing is invented precisely for this function ontologically; this is the ontological labor that the Negro must perform in an antiblack world. (2) The Negro is invented, or born into modernity, through an ontometaphysical holocaust that destroys the coordinates of African existence. The Negro is not a human, since boing in not an issue for it, and instead becomes “available equipment,” as Heidegger would call it, for the purpose of supporting the existential journey of the human being. Black boing is the evidence of an ontological murder, or onticide, that is irrecoverable and irremediable. The condi¬ tion of this permanent severing between black be i ng and Being is what I call the "execration of Being.” In this sense, Being does not withdraw from the Negro, as it does from the human, for what withdraws can re- emerge. Instead, Being curses black- boing by creating an entity unintel¬ ligible within the field of ontology. (3) The Negro Question that becomes the obsession of antebellum culture (“What do we do about our free blacks?”) masks the ontological stakes involved in answering the ques¬ tion, since what the question is really about, as I propose, is what we do about the nothing that terrorizes us, that destabilizes our metaphysical structure and ground of existence. The terms free and black do not just present political problems of citizenship, rights, and inclusion, but also present serious ontological problems, since the boundaries of ontology— between human and property and freedom and unfreedom—are thrown into crisis with the presence of the free black. Ultimately, I propose that THE QUESTION OF BLACK 27 the Negro Question is a proper metaphysical question, since the Negro is black and black(ness) has always been a terror for metaphysics. These propositions unfold through an engagement with different ontometa- physical discourses in the black radical tradition alongside and against Heidegger, since Heidegger's critique of metaphysics, as the disavowal, forgetting, and contempt of Nothing assists us in understanding how metaphysics engages the nothing that it despises but needs (the tension between hatred and necessity). I, however, depart from Heidegger, since black boing is not human being (or Dasein) but available equipment, equipment in human form, that Heidegger does not consider because of his Eurocentric perspective. BLACK, NOTHING, AND THE NEGRO We can consider the Negro Question a proper metaphysical question. Heidegger reminds us that every metaphysical question always grasps the whole of the problematic of metaphysics. A proper question emerges within a context of urgency, but the investigation of the context and the question itself destabilizes the entire edifice within which the investiga¬ tory procedure is carried out, since the answer becomes a symptom of a larger problem. It is this larger problem (the “whole of the problematic of metaphysics,” as Heidegger calls it) that the proper question is designed to address through a series of questions that, as they unfold, open the hori¬ zon of an empowered thinking. The proper question exposes an abyss, a black hole within the ontometaphysical tradition and its attendant dis¬ courses or, as Nahum Chandler aptly describes it, “the black in the white¬ ness of being, in the being of whiteness .” 5 The philosophical conditions that enable the tradition are themselves brought forward, questioned, and thrown into relief. To present a proper metaphysical question of black being , however, our question, and procedure, must align with the phil¬ osophical instruction of Hortense Spillers to “strip down through lay¬ ers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time; over time, assigned a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of [our] own inventiveness .” 6 The objective of this question and our questioning is precisely to strip through layers of metaphysical baggage and attenuated meaning as they violently encrust over deep time and history. We can 28 CHAPTER ONE describe the whole problematic of black being , then, as the aggregate, or collection, of these burdensome layers, which are traumatically imposed during the initiation of the transatlantic slave trade. But since “a genuine question is not done away with by finding an answer to it,” according to Heidegger, the question remains as a feature of our own inventiveness. In other words, the question remains at the heart of black being . And we must ask this question, since there is no getting rid of it, despite the marvelous power of our inventiveness. We can think, then, of Spillers's protocol of stripping through layers of attenuated meaning as the cor¬ rection to Heidegger’s Eurocentric Destruktion, or the “destructuring of the history of ontology,” as he describes it in Being and Time. This is to say the destructuring of metaphysics must address the concealment of the Negro—buried deeply beneath layers of metaphysical violence. Our questions bring us to this concealment, within the history of ontology, as that kernel of antiblackness sustaining both metaphysics and ontology . 7 The question has been with black being , as a constitutive feature of it, since black being was invented—since modernity gave birth to it through dispossession and abjection. We have grappled with this funda¬ mental question for centuries, in various forms. Dubois asked a variation of this question: “What does it mean to be a problem ?” 8 This is, indeed, a proper metaphysical question, since it requires us to strip through layers of pulverizing meaning to arrive at a kernel of (non)meaning, or mean¬ inglessness, as the answer to the question of black being . The question that Dubois presents, “What does it mean to be a problem?,” is both a metaphysical riddle and a formulation of black being —black bcbtg is this riddle. The question of black b e i ttg must, then, start with the ontology of the problem. To be a problem is the being-ness of blackness. It is this prob¬ lem that will preoccupy our concern here—the question of black be«*g as the problem of ontometaphysics (put differently, we can rewrite Dubois’s question as "what does it mean to be the problem of ontometaphysics?” What is the condition, or inhabitation, of this problem?). It is impossible to uncouple black boing from this problem. Exactly how does one be a problem? Or “inhabit” a problem, as Nahum Chandler might suggest is the riddle of blackness in modernity. When Hortense Spillers suggests that the black body is “reduced to a thing, to being for the captor ,” 9 we can understand this being as the problem itself. Black being embodies an ontometaphysical problem for the captor. Black boing becomes a site THE QUESTION OF BLACK 29 of projection and absorption of the problem of metaphysics—a problem that the captor would wish to ignore or neglect by imposing it onto black being . Thus, black being is not only necessary for involuntary labor and pornotroping, but also necessary ontologically; it inhabits the problem of metaphysics . 10 This inhabitation is the space and place of the Negro Question—our proper metaphysical question. Thinkers from the antebellum period presented this problem as the “Negro Question.” The question of the Negro is precisely the question of this problem. For Sylvia Wynter, the Negro Question cannot be a proper object of knowledge, given that the ruling episteme does not accommo¬ date this strange being . 11 Thus, the question itself and the metaphysical problem that it carries are positioned outside the frames of epistemology and its attendant discourses. For Wynter, the Negro is that being , or more accurately entity, that is excluded from the discourse of man and its over¬ representation of being otherwise. The problem that the Negro Question opens up is this position outside of man. We can present a reformulation of this proper metaphysical question, following Wynter: why does this outside position constitute a problem for the whole of metaphysics (and its paradoxical answer)? This problem is spatialized as the outside, which preconditions the metaphysical architecture of man, the privileged inside. But given that this outside position is actually an intimate aspect of the inside, since it provides the inside’s condition of possibility, the problem is at the heart of the ontometaphysics of man. Black boing is the absent cen¬ ter of the whole of metaphysics, and it, cartographically, constitutes the paradoxical inside/outside position of metaphysics. This begins to provide a path of investigation toward this proper metaphysical question. Why is black boing a problem? Why is this problem constitutive of an inside/ outside paradox? Answering these questions, however, inevitably leads to more questions, or what I will call a fundamental question: How is it going with black boing ? In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger presents the question “How is it going with Being” [Wie steht es um das Sein?} to indicate that this question is the fundamental question, even more fundamental than “why are there beings at all instead of nothing ?” 12 The importance of this question resides in the philosophy of the remains of Being, as Santiago Zabala has persuasively argued . 13 Since being has become “just the sound of a word, a used-up term,” Heidegger argued that we must destroy, or dis- 30 CHAPTER ONE mantle, the structure of metaphysics to renew a forgotten relation to Be¬ ing, not as presence or object, but as the opening of existence itself—what Heidegger will later call “appropriation .” 14 Thus, the proper metaphysical question “How is it going with Being?” emerges after the destruction, or dismantling, of metaphysics; and after we have worn out the term, we must re-member Being by recollecting the fragments—the ontological pieces left after the destruction. “How is it going with Being?” is a way of inquir¬ ing about the status of Being after it has been thoroughly dismantled— what is left? Ontological investigations must now start with this funda¬ mental question, according to Heidegger, to contend with the being abuse that has plagued the philosophical tradition from Plato onward. Reading Heidegger through Spillers, then, we could suggest that the task of De- struktion is to strip through layers of attenuated meaning, made in excess through the procedures and practices of metaphysics. The Heideggerian enterprise here is postmetaphysical to the extent that it urges us to twist metaphysics and instigate its self-consumption. This postmetaphysical movement marks the end of philosophy as we know it and inaugurates a thinking otherwise [Andenken] to arrive at a more fruitful understanding of the relation between Being and Dasein. “How is it going with Being?” dockets an uncovered or re-membered relationship between Dasein and Being, and it is the task of philosophy to illumine it. If the aim of this postmetaphysical enterprise is to urge us to twist metaphysics to ask a more appropriate ontological question (i.e., the move from what is being to How is Being, as event and happening), it assumes that the metaphysics of being, its ontic science, has been settled and we can now get over metaphysics (even though we are still entrapped). Black being , however, does not easily afford this postmetaphysical movement, since the metaphysical question of black being —what is it?—has not been resolved, and thus, the ontological question, if one can be truly posed, what is the relationship between black being and Being (or How is it go¬ ing with black being ?) is an unanswerable one (which, again, is why we must continually write black being under erasure). Put differently, the problem with the Negro Question is that we can never truly arrive at an appropriate ontological question, since black being is not ontological, but something other, something that lies outside of epistemology and ontol¬ ogy. This makes the Negro Question unanswerable on the register that Heidegger proposed for Dasein. The Negro Question is situated on a plane THE QUESTION OF BLACK BEING 31 within/without metaphysics, but also outside the precincts of ontology. The space and place of the Negro Question are a problem for the whole of metaphysics, but a problem that provides the condition of possibility for human being to ask its fundamental question, “How is it going with Be¬ ing?” The unpresentability of the Negro Question is the necessary ground for Dasein’s ontological presentation. To suggest that black boing constitutes the problem at the center of on- tometaphysics, in the form of an unanswerable question, is to suggest that Heidegger’s Destruktion relies on the indestructibility of antiblackness in modernity. Metaphysics can only be dismantled for Dasein because a pri¬ mordial relationship between it and Being exists that metaphysics cannot pulverize, even though it tries with science, schematization, and technol¬ ogy, according to Heidegger . 15 Thus, the dismantling or destruction of metaphysics is really the opening of a primordial relationality between Dasein and Being. But even though we can destroy metaphysics, in terms of twisting it and instigating its self-consumption [verwunden], we can never completely destroy it; a remainder or remnant will always persist within the very heart of the destructive enterprise. This remainder, this intransigent entity, is indestructible and, in fact, structures the project of destruction. It is indeed a paradoxical formulation that destruction de¬ pends on the kernel of indestructability at its core, but when we consider that something must remain for the philosophical enterprise to continue, then we understand that this remainder keeps the destructive movement going—it is its metaphysical fuel. I would also present another audacious claim and suggest that black boi - ng is the name of this indestructible ele¬ ment because black bemg’s function within metaphysics is to inhabit the void of relationality—relationality between it and Being and relationality between it and human-being-ness and the world itself.^ Thus, we must reconceptualize black boing ontometaphysically as pure function and not relation (put differently, black boing emerges in modernity primarily to inhabit this treacherous position as function, which enables human be¬ ingness to engage in its projectionality into the world and to restore its forgotten relationship with Being. In a word, black bofftg helps the human being re-member its relation to Being through its lack of relationality. The essence of black boing , like the essence of technology, is to open up an un¬ derstanding for Dasein, it is always kef a g for another. Black boing , then, is precisely the metaphysical entity that must remain for the postmetaphys- 32 CHAPTER ONE ical enterprise of freedom (the loosening up of metaphysical strictures) to occur for human beingness (or Dasein). This indestructible remainder is a problem for metaphysics, since it retains the trace of objectification that restricts complete freedom for Dasein, but it is also the answer to meta¬ physics, given that it serves as the catalyst for the self-consumption that engenders greater freedom, if not complete freedom, for Dasein. But this formulation presents more questions, proper metaphysical questions, that chart the course to the abyss of metaphysics, which is black being : why is black being indestructible? Why has metaphysics been unable or unwill¬ ing to dismantle its remainder? How do we articulate the problem of black being , which is the problem for the whole of metaphysics? Alain David provides a guide through these difficult questions in his philosophical meditation "On Negroes.” David poses a proper metaphysi¬ cal question of his own: why are Negroes black? I describe this as a proper metaphysical question because the juxtaposition of black and Negro in his inquiry (Negroes are black, as a copula proposition) opens us onto a paradox of black boing understood through the Negro. I would formulate this paradox as this, following David: the Negro is the excess of form in an antiblack world, but also the interruption of form, the formless, given that the Negro is blackness within metaphysics. What could this mean? For David, metaphysics encounters a crisis. On the one hand, it attempts to move beyond form, the specificity of beings into the realm of Being (the formless); on the other hand metaphysics cannot seem to free itself completely from anthropologizing metaphysics, of a metaphysics that organizes ontological imagining around differences of race and skin complexion; thus, the purported formless, indifferent field of ontometa- physics is predicated upon anthropological differences, and this interplay between formlessness and form is what David would call "race.” For him, "race is that hyperbole of form affirming itself over against that which would prevent form. Race is like a transcendental condition of the onto¬ logical argument .” 17 When it concerns the Negro (as black being ), then, the distinction between the indifferent metaphysician and the anthropol¬ ogist obsessed with difference collapses. But the collapse, I would argue, is necessary given the function of black boing , of the Negro. The question “Why are Negroes black?” can be approached through the metaphysical question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” for David. It is the status of this nothing that preoccupies the metaphysician, since, ac- THE QUESTION OF BLACK 33 cording to David, it is this nothing that interrupts form for metaphysics. Nothing occupies the paradoxical position (as Heidegger also argued in his Introduction to Metaphysics) of indexing formlessness, the breaking of metaphysics, at the same time conceptualized through metaphysical form (as a something). This leads David to appropriate a childhood riddle for philosophical purposes and ask: what is nothing while being something? The answer to this riddle is black for David: Black means nothing, nothing means black. Or, rather, nothing does not exactly mean black, since in nothing positivity is erased. Why is there something rather than black? According to this formulation, “black” is something, and yet, as I’ve said it is nothing. Nothing other than dazzlement. Light itself. And this black that is nothing, without this nothing being nothing, is the something that prevents any something from belonging to the whole. One must, then, wonder what this posi¬ tivity is that, inscribed in the nothing—an inscription of the nothing— converts the nothing into its enigmatic nuance of black . 18 Black, here, is not the color black, but is the index of formlessness, since color would assume a sensible form within metaphysics . 19 Despite indexing this formlessness, black assumes form as a something: posi¬ tivity. The function of this something that is also a nothing is designed to “prevent any something from belonging to the whole,” as David ar¬ gues. In other words, this something serves as the precondition for the whole itself, as its inclusive exclusion (or excluded inclusion); its func¬ tion is to fracture the whole through its exclusion, which constitutes the center—the absent center. Black is the something that is also nothing, a nothing that cannot be adequately captured within the precinct of meta¬ physics, but a something upon which metaphysics depends. But David also wonders “what [is] this positivity that, inscribed in the nothing—an inscription of the nothing—converts the nothing into its enigmatic nu¬ ance of black?” How, then, is nothing converted into black? How does that which interrupts metaphysical form (its grammar and conceptualization) appear as form, as a translation from the ineffable to the conceptual or worldly? These inquiries return us to David’s proper metaphysical question: why are Negroes black? He suggests that this question could be reformu¬ lated as “How does the interruption of form appear as form?” Although 34 CHAPTER ONE David reaches a limit with this metaphysical question, since the philo¬ sophical exercise reaches a limit—of both meaning and knowledge (and he begins a discourse of what he calls "imaginary Negroes” to make sense of the senseless)—I would propose a response to David’s inquiry: the Ne¬ gro is black precisely because, within an antiblack world, the Negro is forced (through forms of terror and violence) to inhabit the position of black within metaphysics and to provide form for the formlessness of the interruption (which is why we can call the Negro “black being ”). If, as Heidegger insists, metaphysics attempts to transform everything into an object so that it can dominate and control it, nothing would become an¬ other object that metaphysics desires to dominate—an ultimate object. How does metaphysics transform nothing into something, so it can dom¬ inate this nothing? Through the Negro—it gives a form for the formless, but a form that perplexes and threatens. Perhaps this is why Negroes, historically and philosophically, have served as the "intermediaries be¬ tween animal and man,” as David describes it. The Negro is the interstice of metaphysics, the formless form between man and animal, property and human, whose purpose is to embody formlessness as a corporeal sign. As an intermediary, its position within metaphysics is paradoxical, as an excluded inclusion, an untranslatable entity without a proper referent (a catachresis within metaphysics). As Ronald Judy argues, “The Negro can¬ not enable the representation of meaning, [since] it has no referent .” 20 The Negro, then, is pure function; this function is to be black, but a b e i ng that is not (or Fanon’s West pas ). 21 And this is why the invention of the Negro is so essential to metaphysics. When, for instance, Afro-pessimists assert that black(ness) is unbearable or that black suffering is illegible, it is a way of articulating blackness as function—black being as pure func¬ tion, metaphysical utility, nothing more. It is the function of bearing the nothing of metaphysics, black as formless form, that is unbearable and also the crux of black suffering. The world is antiblack because it despises this nothing, this nothing that interrupts its organization of existence, its ground of intelligibility and certainty (which is why antiblack violence is a global problematic). Returning to Wynter, we can understand why the Negro Question can never serve as a proper object of knowledge, since the Negro, as black being , constitutes a nothing, a formless form, that episte¬ mology cannot accommodate—nor can ontometaphysics. How does metaphysics provide form for this formlessness, form as THE QUESTION OF BLACK BEING 35 knowledge ? This has been the task of postmetaphysical thinking (from Heidegger onward) to encourage a thinking outside of metaphysics in order to open up a horizon of the unknowable—unknowable within the grammar and logic of metaphysics (a philosophy against the dominance of form). But (post)metaphysical thinking has forgotten the Negro, much like man has forgotten Being. This forgetfulness is necessary, since to re-member or integrate the Negro would require a contention with this dreaded nothing. Vattimo suggests that “the end of metaphysics is un¬ thinkable without the end of colonialism and Eurocentrism .” 22 I would argue that colonialism and Eurocentricism are antiblack strategies for attempting to obliterate, and to forget, dreaded nothing—since black bodies, cultures, and existence are assigned this unbearable formlessness within modernity. Put differently, the human cannot re-member Being (or its primordial relationship with Being as Dasein) without re-membering the Negro. The Negro is invented precisely to absorb the terror of this nothing, of the interruption of time and space, within modernity. This is why it is unthinkable to end metaphysics without ending the various systems of antiblackness within the world. Antiblackness and its tech¬ nologies of destruction are designed to obliterate nothing: nothing as formlessness, nothing as interruption, nothing as black, and, ultimately, nothing as the Negro. But our original, proper metaphysical question, “How is it going with black being ?,” opens up the dread of this nothing in an antiblack world. The world and its institutions must mute this question, rendering it absurd and irrational, to sustain the whole of metaphysics (or the world itself, as black nihilism would assert). This question is the fundamental formulation of proper inquiries that have guided our thinking: “Why is the Negro black?” "Why is there something rather than nothing?” “What does it mean to be a problem?” The question “How is it going with black boing ” exposes the problem of metaphysics, the problem with “black” and “nothing” because it compels thinking about the function, status, utility, and necessity of black within an antiblack world. It forces us to entertain the strange juxtaposi¬ tion between being and black(ness), between formlessness and form col¬ liding on the existence of the Negro. The disruptive question that Dubois posed, then, “What does it mean to be a problem?,” invites us to consider the unbearable suffering of inhabiting this problem for metaphysics— what metaphysics despises, what it hates. What it means to be a problem 36 CHAPTER ONE is to exist as an intermediary between form and formlessness, animal and man, property and human, and nothing and something—to “strad¬ dle Nothingness and Infinity,” as Fanon would say. What it means to be a problem is that this being (being as a problem) renders both “meaning” and "being” impossible and inadequate. The Negro is the limit of both meaning and being and embodies ontological terror (the terror of the nothing within an antiblack world). Moreover, it means that one must embody a nothing that the world works tirelessly to obliterate—which means that the violence directed toward the Negro, black being , is gratu¬ itous and will never end as long as metaphysics remains (and postmeta¬ physics admits that it is impossible to destroy metaphysics. We can only twist it, but there will always be a remainder). It means, to rephrase the perspicacious insight of Hortense Spillers, “The [world] needs [the Negro], and if [the Negro] were not here, [‘it’] would have to be invented.” THE INVENTION OF THE NEGRO AND THE NECESSITY OF BLACK BE I NG What is this Negro? Negro as black being ; Negro as nothing. We return endlessly to this metaphysical question and the tension of the copula (the “is-ness” of a [non] being ) that sets the metaphysical inquiry into motion. Perhaps this question cannot be answered with apodictic certainty, since the Negro is neither a proper object of knowledge nor a proper referent (catachresis). What we can propose, however, is that function, or utility, re¬ quires an instrument, and instruments are invented for the purpose of ful¬ filling the agenda of utility. I have suggested thus far that the Negro serves the function of embodying metaphysical nothing(ness) for modernity— a weighty, burdensome, and dangerous function. The world needed a fee¬ ing that would bear the unbearable and live the unlivable; a being that would exist within the interstice of death and life and straddle Nothing and Infinity. The being invented to embody black as nothing is the Negro. An antiblack world desires to obliterate black as nothing—nothing as the limitation of its dominance—so that its schematization, calculation, and scientific practices are met unchecked by this terrifying hole, nothing. With the Negro, metaphysics can triumph over this nothing by impos¬ ing black(ness) onto the Negro and destroying the Negro. The Negro is THE QUESTION OF BLACK BEING 37 invented precisely to be destroyed—the delusion of metaphysics is that it will overcome nothing through its destruction and hatred of the Negro. The Negro, then, is both necessary and despised. But it is important to remember that this Negro, the cipher of meta¬ physics, is the invention of a desperate world. The Negro is not a human being that is simply mistreated, but is, instead, an invention designed to embody a certain terror for the world. I say this because thinking in this way will require us first to discard naturalism and the conflation of hu¬ man being with black boing . This is a difficult task because of the ruse of resemblance (the Negro looks human, so must be one). But as Lindon Bar¬ rett taught us, modernity produces “anthropomorphic uncertainty” by which “racial blackness overwhelmingly disappoints the modern resem¬ blance of the human, signaling instead the unleashing of the inhuman that specifies the ‘human’ population of the modern state .” 23 Biological and visual resemblance does not render the Negro a human being—these are nothing more than ontic illusions. Ontologically and metaphysically, the Negro is anything but human. Hortense Spillers might call this an “altered human factor.” In describing the transport of Africans to Eu¬ rope, she suggests that they embodied a radical otherness and alterity for the European self. “Once the ‘faithless,’ indiscriminate of the three stops of Portuguese skin color, are transported to Europe, they become an altered human factor.... The altered human factor renders an alterity to European Ego, an invention, or ‘discovery’ as decisive in the full range of its social implications as the birth of a newborn .” 24 Once on European soil (and in the hold of the ship), the African ceases to exist and instead becomes “other,” an alteration of humanity. Something new emerges with the transport of the African. The African becomes black boing and se¬ cures the boundaries of the European self—its existential and ontological constitution—by embodying utter alterity (metaphysical nothing). Meta¬ physics gives birth to black boing through various forms of antiblack vio¬ lence, and this birth is tantamount to death or worldlessness. The inven¬ tion, emergence, and birth of black boing are not causes for celebration, however, since this invention is pure instrumentality and function (not the existential freedom, self-actualization, or sacred natality of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Luc Nancy, for example ). 25 Black boing follows a different trajectory than the celebrated human being of metaphysics and ontology. 38 CHAPTER ONE Its birth is death—death as nothing, death as the Negro, death as black¬ ness, death as the abyss of metaphysics. It is also important to reiterate that black being and African existence are not synonymous, although we might argue that African existence is transformed into black being through violence, transport, and rituals of humiliation and terror. Bryan Wagner clarifies the distinction: Perhaps the most important thing we have to remember about the black tradition is that Africa and its diaspora are older than blackness. Blackness does not come from Africa. Rather, Africa and its diaspora become black during a particular stage in their history... blackness is an adjunct to racial slavery... blackness is an indelibly modern condi¬ tion that cannot be conceptualized apart from the epochal changes in travel, trade, labor, consumption, industry, technology, taxation, war¬ fare, finance, insurance, government, bureaucracy, communication, science, religion and philosophy that were together made possible by the European system of colonial slavery. ... To be black is to exist in exchange without standing in the modern world system . 26 To “exist in exchange without standing” is pure instrumentality, a be- +eg that is not human being, but something other, something unlike what modernity had known before. The disjuncture between being and black being is the gulf of metaphysical and ontological violence. Black being , then, does not originate from Africa but is invented in a (non)temporality that we might call the transatlantic slave trade. Put differently, African existence is an identity, whereas black being is a structural position or in¬ strumentality . 27 Identities circulate within the symbolic of humanity; they are discourses of the human (or genres of man, if we follow Sylvia Wyn- ters). Identities provide symbolic covering for the human and differentiate his/her existence, or mode of being, from other human beings. A struc¬ tural position, on the other hand, ruptures the logics of symbolic identity and constitutes function or instrumentality. Black be i ng is a structural position and not an identity because it exists, or is invented, precisely as an anchor for human identity (human self adequation); the anchor is an inclusive exclusion and subtends human identity but is not incorporated into it. To be positioned structurally and not symbolically means that structural existence is a preconditioned instrument for the maintenance THE QUESTION OF BLACK BEING 39 of the symbolic—the symbolic here meaning the signs, symbols, and re- lationalities of the world itself. A structural position is pure use value (or function), and it lacks value outside its utility and the antiblack symbolic that determines the matrix of value (axiology). This, of course, is in con¬ tradistinction to human being, whose ultimate value resides outside the matrix of symbolism and into the esoteric or the horizon of Being-as- event. Black being is the zero-degree position of nonvalue but, paradox¬ ically, is all too valuable because it enables the very system that excludes it (it is valued because of its utter valuelessness). Thus, black being is not birthed into presence through the generosity of Being, contrary to the ge¬ nealogy of human being articulated by Heidegger and Jean-Luc Nancy, for example; black beiftg is introduced as the execration of Being; its ultimate withholding of generosity, freedom, and care. Moreover, the distinction between African existence and black being is the site of onticide, or a murderous ontology. What I am suggesting is that black being is the execration of Being because it emerges through a death sentence, through the death of African existence (“existence” is the best we can do grammatically because of the double bind of the copula formulation inherent in language). Black being is the evidence of an onti- cidal enterprise. Ronald Judy describes this as “thanatology.” In describing the coming-into-being of Equiano (an African captive transformed into black being , or the Negro), Judy suggests that the death of African mate¬ riality and the African symbolic body (or existence) provides the condi¬ tion of possibility for the transformation. In short, black being emerges through the murder of African existence and not its generosity: The death that is emancipating is the negation of the materiality of Africa. Writing the slave narrative is thus a thanatology, a writing of annihilation that applies the taxonomies of death in Reason (natural law) to enable the emergence of the self-reflexive consciousness of the Negro ... writing the death of the African body is an enforced abstrac¬ tion. It is an interdiction of the African, a censorship to be inarticulate, to not compel, to have no capacity to move, to be without effect, with¬ out agency, without thought. The muted African body is overwritten by the Negro, and the Negro that emerges in the ink flow of Equiano’s pen is that which has overwritten itself and so become the representa¬ tion of the very body it sits on . 28 40 CHAPTER ONE Judy’s argument here is that the Negro is thought to gain a sense of subjectivity by displaying Reason through writing, since writing is pre¬ figured as the ultimate sign of Reason, and Humanity, within an antiblack symbolic order. But to gain this subjectivity, this Negro-ness, he must first kill the African body (African existence). But, I would argue, if reason and humanity are the purported payoffs for a murder, then the Negro has indeed been defrauded. For displaying reason through writing (slave narratives and otherwise) has not folded the Negro into the family of the human [Mitsein] or rendered him a subject—there is nothing the Negro can do to change its structural position. Writing, reading, philosophiz¬ ing, and intellectualizing have all failed as strategies to gain inclusion into human beingness (despite the hopeful insistence of black human¬ ists). Instead, the Negro remains the nothing that metaphysics depends on to maintain its coherence. With the death of African existence, the Negro, or black being , is indeed nothing or no-thing that translates into any recognizable ontology. To say that the Negro is nothing is also to say that the Negro lacks ontological ground. The human being grounds its ontology in the beautiful relation between Being and Dasein (or the “space of existence,” as Heidegger would call it). Black being , however, lacks any legitimate ground, outside the oppressive logics of use value, for its being . Since it emerges through the execration of Being and not the gift of Being, it can lay recourse neither to Being nor to a primordial relation (since this primordial relation has been annihilated or murdered as the condition of its existence). / would also suggest that the Negro is not responsible for this murder. Metaphysics (or the world and its symbolics) systemically murders this re- lationality, so that to be born black within modernity is to have always already been the material effect of an ontological murder. In other words, antiblackness is the systematic and global death of this primordial rela¬ tion, and whether the Negro attempts to write him/herself into existence or not, this death has already occurred. When it comes to the Negro, sub¬ jectivity is a fraudulent hoax or ruse. What do I mean by the “execration of Being”? I simply mean the death or obliteration of African existence. This obliteration provides the nec¬ essary condition for the invention of the Negro, or black being —black as metaphysical nothing or groundless existence. One anchors one’s exis¬ tence in this primordial relation, but the Negro is precisely the absence of THE QUESTION OF BLACK 41 such relationality, a novelty for modernity (or a “new ontology,” as Frank Wilderson would describe it). The Negro is born into absence and not presence. We can also describe this death of a primordial relation as a “metaphysical holocaust,” following Franz Fanon and Frank Wilderson. For Fanon, “Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man . . . the black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man ... his metaphysics, or less pretentiously, his customs and the sources on which they are based, were wiped out because they were in conflict with a civilization that he did not know and that imposed itself on him .” 29 Ontology provides intelligibility and understanding for the human be¬ ing because she is embedded in a primordial relation with Being (as free¬ dom and care). We can describe the entire field of ontology as the history, evolution, and maintenance of the various customs and resources that the human being needs to secure this relation. But “ontology... does not permit us to understand the being of the black man” because ontology is intended to preserve the customs and resources of human beingness and not black being . We will always experience tensions, contradictions, and impasses if we attempt to gain intelligibility for black being from a field that excludes it by necessity—because blackness is outside ontology as this nothing but most intimately situated within ontology as its condi¬ tion of possibility (its inclusive exclusion). Ontology, then, does not pro¬ vide the resources to understand this paradoxical thing—blackness is the abyss of ontology . 30 But what is worse is that the customs and resources that once served as grounding for African existence were wiped out. This wiping out of the ontological resources to ground this primordial relation is the thanatology or onticide of African being . 31 This metaphysical holo¬ caust is the execration of Being—it is a particular process of producing black boing through the murder of African existence . 32 The execration of Being also conveys Being’s curse and denouncement of the Negro as black (I would also suggest that the pseudo-theological term Hamitic curse is a variation of this execration in a different register). Rather than thinking of Being as having abandoned us and that this aban¬ donment can be addressed through temporality, thinking anew, and a renewed relation (as is the position of Heidegger and neo-Heideggerians), the execration of Being is beyond abandonment. It indexes the oblitera- 42 CHAPTER ONE tion of the relation to Being and the absolute irreconcilability between the Negro as black and Being. Thus, the nothing that black boing incarnates is not a celebratory portal or opening up onto Being for blacks—as if reject¬ ing metaphysical thinking will reunite us, as it were, with Being as noth¬ ing . 33 This only works for the human (and the “black is not a man” within an antiblack metaphysics, as Fanon insists ). 34 The essence of black suffer¬ ing, then, is this very execration, to inhabit permanently the “zone of non- being,” as Fanon might call it. This zone is a spatiotemporality without a recognizable name or grammar within the philosophical tradition. The problem of black boing is precisely the inhabitation of an execrated con¬ dition. This is the new ontology that modernity brings into the world—a being that is not one (available equipment in the guise of human form). Black being is paradoxical—it is a metaphysical entity that is invented to illumine something beyond metaphysics, a nothing that metaphysics hates and needs. Within the Negro, metaphysics wages its war against the nothing that terrorizes its power and hegemony. This, again, explains why the Negro is black, to return to Alain David’s proper metaphysical question. The Negro is black because the Negro is the physical manifestation of an ontological puzzle : black as nothing. The field of ontometaphysics does not have the resources to explain nothing; in fact, it works earnestly to forget and avoid it. This is because the field of ontometaphysics is really the imposition of metaphysical prerogatives and investments. Given this arrangement of resources, nothing is not a proper object of knowledge within ontology as metaphysics because it cannot be explained through its episteme (put differently, the incorporation of nothing would destabilize the metaphysical episteme). Or, to echo Fred Moten, "Blackness and ontology are unavailable for one another .” 35 This is to suggest that the problems of nothing are transposed onto the Negro, since it is embodied nothing within an antiblack world. When Fanon suggests that the civilization “imposed itself” on the Ne¬ gro, I interpret this to mean that the imposition is an ontometaphysical imposition; the Negro does not have ontological resistance because of the metaphysical imposition of black and nothing. Furthermore, we can describe the “two frames of reference,” as Fanon would call it, within which the Negro has had to place himself as “nothing” and "black” in an antiblack world. This imposition is the execration of Being or the meta¬ physical holocaust that produces black b