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	1	+The endpoint of the 1AC is the antiblack status quo – blackness is defined in terms of an ontological structural antagonism with white civil society that is reproduced by any attempt to use existing legal structures or philosophies. Warren 13
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	3	+Calvin Warren, Onticide: Toward an Afro-pessimistic Queer Theory" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, 2013. NS
	4	+
	5	+We could suggest that the term “black queer” dramatizes the fundamental tension in humanism itself, especially contemporary iterations of it: how to eradicate the violence that limits human potential, and expand the category of the human, when the violence rejected is absolutely necessary for the human to exist as such. In other words, humanism is caught in an ethical dilemma, or double-bind. The “emancipatory meditations” against the violence that produces contingent experiences of unfreedom for humans also provides the grounding for the category of the human around which these meditations mobilize. The “human” is a repository of violent practices and technologies that has crystalized over time. The ethical impulse is to resolve the tension within humanism, to wrest the “human” from the historical violence upon which it is founded. This ethical enterprise inevitably fails, for in the end, the human is nothing more than this very violence, rendering violence and the human mutually constitutive and coterminous. The experience of unfreedom (suffering) is the outcome of this violence. Making this suffering legible is the ethical drive of humanist thinking and the objective of a politics invested in “freedom.” Violence, humanity, unfreedom, and freedom constitute an unending cycle of desire, deferral, and despair. This cycle of violence captures the tension in humanism that much of contemporary theory either attempts to resolve (Ethics) or wishes to abandon (divesture). The violence that constitutes the human and produces suffering is sustained through an ontological antagonism. The boundaries of the human are shored-up by this antagonism and without it, the human, and the world within which it lives, would cease to exist. The non-ontology of blackness secures the boundaries of the human; it delimits the coordinates of the human. Blackness is an exclusion that enables ontology. In its exclusion from the realm of ontology, blackness is un-thinkable, innominate, and paradoxical. In essence, blackness exists to not exist—it embodies the most perplexing paradox that sustains ontology (or in psychoanalytic terms it is the Real of ontology). The field of Ethics, then, conceals a dirty secret: the ontological ground upon which it is situated is unethical. Ethics subverts itself, but it can only exist through this very subversion. All ethical discourses organized around the elimination of suffering or the experiences of freedom are imbricated in this unethicality. Blackness is both the life and death of humanism and its ethics, and for this reason, it lacks a legible grammar to articulate this dread. It is an incomprehensible suffering, or an unending injury not understood as legitimate injury. To take matters further, there would be no human suffering without the prior exclusion of blackness, but there would also be no world or human without this exclusion either. It is an unresolvable antagonism. 2 The term “black queer” is a philosophical conundrum, or problem space, precisely because it carries this antagonism, the ethical dilem- ma of humanism, within its discursive structure. 3 It brings two crises into juxtaposition creating somewhat of a theoretical fatality, a devas- tating crime scene. At the site of this fatality lies a mutilated, supine black body we cannot quite place within the symbolics of identity, politics, history, sociology, or law. In cases like these, we put “theory” and “philosophy” into service to figure out who did “it,” what was the murder weapon, and what was the injury—if we can even call it an injury. This situation frustrates the researcher (researcher as detective, philosopher, and medical examiner all at once) in that he lacks a coherent grammar to make this suffering legible, the assaulting party is more like a structural phenomenon, and the fatality is a precondition of the world itself. In this sense, the fatality is rendered banal, diurnal, and quotidian, as it sustains the very field of existence.
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	8	+The fungibility of blackness is structure that makes the settler’s endless expansion possible. King 14
	9	+
	10	+Tiffany (Lethabo) King an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University. “Labor’s Aphasia: Toward Antiblackness as Constitutive to Settler Colonialism.” Decolonization. JUNE 10, 2014. TF
	11	+
	12	+While labor as a discourse may work for non-Black and non-Native people of color as a way of interpellating themselves within settler colonial relations, it does not explain Black presence, Black labor or Black use in White settler nation-states. Theories that attempt to triangulate Blackness into the Settler/Native antagonism in White settler states do so by positing Blackness as the labor force that helps make the settler landscape possible.3 It is true that Black labor literally tills, fences in and cultivates the settler’s land. However, this singular analysis both obscures the issue of Black fungibility and reduces Blackness to a mere tool of settlement rather than a constitutive element of settler colonialism’s conceptual order.¶ Fungibility represents a key analytic for thinking about Blackness and settler colonialism in White settler nation-states. Black fungible bodies are the conceptual and discursive fodder through which the Settler-Master can even begin to imagine or “think” spatial expansion (King, 2013). The space making practices of settler colonialism require the production of Black flesh as a fungible form of property, not just as a form of labor. In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman argues that the enslaved embody the abstract “interchangeability and replaceability” that is endemic to the commodity (Hartman, 1997, p. 21). Beyond, the captive body’s use as labor, the Black body has a figurative and metaphorical value that extends into the realm of the discursive and symbolic. What Hartman names as the “figurative capacities of blackness,” allows the Settler-Master to conceptualize Blackness as the ultimate sign for expansion and unending space within the symbolic economy of settlement (Hartman, 1997, p. 7; and King, forthcoming). Blackness is much more than labor within both slavery’s and settler colonialism’s imaginaries.¶ Like Hartman, I argue that Blackness’ figurative capacity and interchangeability has a life—or afterlife—within the discursive and spatial projects of settler colonial expansion (King, forthcoming). Settler colonialism requires a symbol of infinite flux in order to animate and imagine its spatial project (King, 2013). In my dissertation, In the Clearing, I argue that Jennifer Morgan’s book Laboring Women: Women and Reproduction in New World Slavery, configures Black women as spatial agents who are symbolically essential to the settlement of land during the colonial period in the coastal regions of the South and the West Indies. In fact, the Black female body must be discursively constructed in order to make it possible to even conceive of planting settlements during the “first generations of settlement and slave ownership” in South Carolina and Barbados (Morgan, 2004). Morgan argues that 18th century settlement required particular symbolic constructions and particular uses of the Black female body (Morgan, 2004, p. 26).4 Black fungibility represents this space of discursive and conceptual possibility for settler colonial imaginaries. Black fungible bodies work beyond the metrics and “metaphysics of labor” in White settler colonial states (Jackson, 2012, p. 215). Labor becomes a limiting frame for conceptualizing Blackness on White settler colonial terrain. Reimagining Blackness and theorizing anti-Black racism on unusual landscapes requires that we rethink the usefulness of convenient and orthodox epistemic frames. We must venture beyond labor and its limits in order to think about settler colonialism’s anti-Black modalities. Fungibility and other frames deserve our attention as we continue to think about anti-Black racism, Native genocide and the US settler-slave (e)state.
	13	+
	14	+Comparative analyses of oppression create an environment of competition that only considers black inquiry and suffering as an after-thought. Endorsing criticism of domestic settlerism decenters antiblackness and is doomed to fail. Sexton 10
	15	+(“People of Colorblindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text 2010) If the oppression of nonblack …relative to the category of blackness.76
	16	+
	17	+If the oppression of nonblack people of color in, and perhaps beyond,¶ the United States seems conditional to the historic instance and functions¶ at a more restricted empirical scope, antiblackness seems invariant and¶ limitless (which does not mean that the former is somehow negligible and¶ short-lived or that the latter is exhaustive and unchanging). If pursued with¶ some consistency, the sort of comparative analysis outlined above would¶ likely impact the formulation of political strategy and modify the demeanor¶ of our political culture. In fact, it might denature the comparative instinct¶ altogether in favor of a relational analysis more adequate to the task. Yet all¶ of this is obviated by the silencing mechanism par excellence in Left political¶ and intellectual circles today: “Don’t play Oppression Olympics!” The¶ Oppression Olympics dogma levels a charge amounting to little more than¶ a leftist version of “playing the race card.” To fuss with details of comparative¶ (or relational) analysis is to play into the hands of divide-and-conquer¶ tactics and to promote a callous immorality.72 However, as in its conservative¶ complement, one notes in this catchphrase the unwarranted translation¶ of an inquiring position of comparison into an insidious posture of¶ competition, the translation of ethical critique into unethical attack. This¶ point allows us to understand better the intimate relationship between the¶ censure of black inquiry and the recurrent analogizing to black suffering¶ mentioned above: they bear a common refusal to admit to significant dif ferences of structural position born of discrepant histories between blacks¶ and their political allies, actual or potential. We might, finally, name this¶ refusal people-of-color-blindness, a form of colorblindness inherent to the¶ concept of “people of color” to the precise extent that it misunderstands¶ the specificity of antiblackness and presumes or insists upon the monolithic¶ character of victimization under white supremacy73—thinking (the¶ afterlife of) slavery as a form of exploitation or colonization or a species¶ of racial oppression among others.74¶ The upshot of this predicament is that obscuring the structural¶ position of the category of blackness will inevitably undermine multiracial¶ coalition building as a politics of radical opposition and, to that extent,¶ force the question of black liberation back to the center of discussion. Every¶ analysis that attempts to understand the complexities of racial rule and¶ the machinations of the racial state without accounting for black existence¶ within its framework—which does not mean simply listing it among a¶ chain of equivalents or returning to it as an afterthought—is doomed to¶ miss what is essential about the situation. Black existence does not represent¶ the total reality of the racial formation—it is not the beginning and the end¶ of the story—but it does relate to the totality; it indicates the (repressed)¶ truth of the political and economic system. That is to say, the whole range¶ of positions within the racial formation is most fully understood from this¶ vantage point, not unlike the way in which the range of gender and sexual¶ variance under patriarchal and heteronormative regimes is most fully¶ understood through lenses that are feminist and queer.75 What is lost for¶ the study of black existence in the proposal for a decentered, “postblack”¶ paradigm is a proper analysis of the true scale and nature of black suffering¶ and of the struggles—political, aesthetic, intellectual, and so on—that¶ have sought to transform and undo it. What is lost for the study of nonblack¶ nonwhite existence is a proper analysis of the true scale and nature of its¶ material and symbolic power relative to the category of blackness.76
	18	+
	19	+They fail to chart to cartography of the black matrix – that’s an act of violence that perpetuates anti-black intimate violence at the site of captivity. James 13
	20	+Joy James. "Afrarealism and the Black Matrix: Maroon Philosophy at Democracy's Border." The Black Scholar 43.4 (2013): 124-31. Web EE
	21	+
	22	+Afrarealism recognizes two coterminous phenomena: democracy as a boundary defining freedom through captivity, and maroon philosophy at the borders reimagining freedom through flight. Afrarealism does not equate democracy with freedom as some black philosophy does. Rather, Afrarealism's journey moves adjacent to a democracy originating and reproducing amid racial captivity and racial rape. Afrarealism also sojourns with black philosophy's challenges to racial supremacy. Afrarealism sees through the lens of a black matrix. As both spectacle and spectrum, the black matrix allows a broader grasp of anti-black state and citizenship terror, and wounded agency pursuing freedom. 6 A form of maroon philosophy (all black philosophy is not radicalized as maroon philosophy), Afrarealist political theory treks beyond conventional militarized borders to survey democracy's violence toward the black matrix and black reproductivity. The violent exploitation of black productivity in agricultural, industrial, penal, and cultural markets is a historical and structural feature of democracy. These aggressions and violations I have earlier described as "state violence."7 Democracy's aggressions against the black matrix, its terror against black reproductive labor, its sanction of racial rape I describe here as state "intimate violence." State violence and intimate state violence are two related but distinct phenomena. Violations of black productivity coexist with terror against black reproductivity. Afrarealism witnesses both and calls for greater scrutiny to assaults against black reproductivity, an under-theorized feature of black captivity. Reproductivity Equally violently exploited in labor, black captive males and females enriched racial capital. Yet the inequities of the terror in their reproductive labors were diminished in both enslavement and abolition narratives, initially shaped and controlled by propertied white males. (In fantasies of democracy, the enslaver rescues the savage from barbarity, and the abolitionist saves the savage from the enslaver. Afrarealism sees both forms of "salvation" as captivity.) Colonial, imperial, and corporate state violence fomented and structured anti-black practices and policies. Productivity in work and labor, based on economic exploitation, and civil and human rights violations became the primary analytical framework for critiquing democracy's rapaciousness toward black captivity-a capacity first legalized in the US Constitution's "3/5 clause" and later in its thirteenth amendment codifying enslavement through imprisonment. Reproductivity, marginalized as a theoretical space for analyzing (and undoing) democracy's terrors, points to the black matrix as the site for the symbolic and material subjugations that birthed the maroon philosopher. When and wherever the concept of racial capital overshadows the phenomenon of racial rape, the outline of democracy's boundary and the contour of its terrors are obscured. Terror against the black matrix shapes those borders. Afrarealism redirects maroon philosophy to criminal violence and political terror directed toward the exteriority of black productivity and the interiority of black reproductivity. Anti-black violence and terror also exist within maroonage complicating the enterprise of freedom; particularly if the terror registers most through forms of sexual predation. Racial Rape Historically, captive females were violently forced to labor alongside captive males. This seeming erasure of gendered differences masculinized black suffering. Under patriarchy, violence against the female form is often denied or deflected through language that renders female trauma invisible, inconsequential, or self-inflicted. The "uncut bond" of black exploitation and trauma under white supremacy meant a folding of black female trauma into the black male frame, from which it receded from common view, typically emerging as spectacle only and not as spectrum. Thus common perceptions of black suffering became embodied in and represented by male trauma-emanating from the lash, shackle, the brand, convict lease, lynch mob, death row, mass imprisonment, and "stop-nfrisk." With the norm and apex of black suffering centered on violence in the public realm and the public spaces of the private realm (cloistered plantations and prisons), racial rape became subsumed under racial capital. The official chronology of and narratives about violence and terror that constitute US democracy's borders-chattel slavery, the convict prison lease system,9 jim Crow segregation, mass incarceration, "stop-n-frisk"- crowd out the black matrix, displacing it from philosophical inquiries into subjugation. The interiority of this trauma zone has paltry public record and memory. Racial rape, the dominant threat, appears in black women's writings, memoirs, fiction, and art, but in these forms may be categorized as emotive performance, mere illustrations for rather than inherently forms of critical philosophy. Racial rape is complicated and mercurial although all blood trails are traceable to the black matrix. Part of the trauma of captive males entails their sexual violations. Boys and men could be forced into being proxy rapists, coerced to rape for the entertainment, edification, or enrichment of their captors or "masters." And black boys and men themselves are rape victims. (legal discourse has changed to acknowledge male victimization as rape; recently the US justice Department under Eric Holder redefined "rape" to include males.) Outside the narratives of compulsory heterosexuality, black males were raped by their white captors or were forced to rape others, or both. Outside of the narratives of compulsory black solidarity, captive males raped for pornographic, sadistic pleasure or material gain (more food and benefits, fewer beatings, etc. from violent authoritarians). Any philosophical aversion, emotional dissonance, political "shame" toward critiques of racial rape leaves black masculinity theory adrift or disengaged. Either it dangles as strange fruit or following the broken branch collapses heavily upon the black matrix. If black philosophy undervalues male entanglement and investment in racial rape and violence against reproductivity, it loses sight of the violence manifested through sexual trauma and denigration, forced breeding or sterilization, or abuse of or contempt for children. Thus the currency of black philosophical engagements with freedom is undermined. Male captives "feminized" through blackness, and terrorized by mutating manifestations of white supremacy, have structural male supremacy over black females. Male captives did and do not, could and cannot suffer rape as routine entertainment or the terrors of forced reproductivity. Hopefully, we agree that this discussion is not about which (trans)gendered being suffers most under racial subjugation; rather the focus rests on the "nature" of the subjugator's extensive reach into interior spaces, its colonization and scarification of black wombs and matrices that have no public record. American democracy's generative violence uniquely and strategically targets the black matrix because it offers the foundational frame for building the border between democracy and captivity, and deniability of state inmate violence. The black matrix is where patriarchal, racial-sexual violence, economics, and privatized terrors meet. The maroonage is where they are dissipated into the dust of Afrarealist departures. Historically, captives and fugitives painted political ethics and theory so that maroon philosophy could map freedom along the contours and fault lines of colonial and imperial democracies.10 When early rebellions and multiracial maroonage receded to leave only blackness at democracy's outermost borders, that blackness solidified into the silhouette of the black matrix, as the basic boundary between domination and power, 11 between the violence of productive labor for the marketplace and the terror that reproduces "plantation babies.''12 Encompassing democracy's anti-black animus and maroonage's anti-black feminist sentiments, the black matrix both points to and constitutes uncharted territory on the other side of democracy. Its objective is to destabilize democracy's mythology and maroonage's demystifications as a form of pleasure, as well as justice.
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	24	+Thus the alternative is to embrace the demand of the slave - the end of the world. Wilderson 02
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	26	+Frank Wilderson, The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal, resented at Imprisoned Intellectuals Conference Brown University, April 13th 2002. NS
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	29	+If we are to take Fanon at his word when he writes, Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder (37) then we must accept the fact that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the Black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the Black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence through which civil society is possible: namely, those other bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for Blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of History, no data for the categories of Immigration or Sovereignty; it is an experience without analog a past, without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Imaginary for whoever says rape says Black, (Fanon) , whoever says prison says Black, and whoever says AIDS says Black (Sexton) the Negro is a phobogenic object (Fanon). Indeed and a phobogenic object and a past without a heritage and the map of gratuitous violence and a program of complete disorder. But whereas this realization is, and should be cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament, or worse, disavowal not at least, for a true revolutionary, or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison abolition. If a social movement is to be neither social democratic, nor Marxist, in terms of the structure of its political desire then it should grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death that present themselves; and, if we are to be honest with ourselves we must admit that the Negro has been inviting Whites, and as well as civil society’s junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-White, but it is to say that it is almost always anti-Black which is to say it will not dance with death. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. Not because it raises the specter of some alternative polity (like socialism, or community control of existing resources) but because its condition of possibility as well as its gesture of resistance functions as a negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a program of complete disorder. One must embrace its disorder, its incoherence and allow oneself to be elaborated by it, if indeed one’s politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take this country down. If this is not the desire which underwrites one’s politics then through what strategy of legitimation is the word prison being linked to the word abolition? What are this movement’s lines of political accountability? There’s nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself: no one, for example, has ever been known to say gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all. But few so-called radicals desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of Blackness and the state of political movements in America today is marked by this very Negrophobogenisis: gee-whiz, if only Black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all. Perhaps there’s something more terrifying about the joy of Black, then there is about the joy of sex (unless one is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps coalitions today prefer to remain in-orgasmic in the face of civil society with hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. But if, through this stasis, or paralysis, they try to do the work of prison abolition that work will fail; because it is always work from a position of coherence (i.e. the worker) on behalf of a position of incoherence, the Black subject, or prison slave. In this way, social formations on the Left remain blind to the contradictions of coalitions between workers and slaves. They remain coalitions operating within the logic of civil society; and function less as revolutionary promises and more as crowding out scenarios of Black antagonisms they simply feed our frustration. Whereas the positionality of the worker be s/he a factory worker demanding a monetary wage or an immigrant or White woman demanding a social wage gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the Black subject be s/he a prison-slave or a prison-slave-in-waiting gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil society: from the coherence of civil society, the Black subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war. A civil war which reclaims Blackness not as a positive value, but as a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of absolute dereliction: a scandal which rends civil society asunder. Civil war, then, becomes that unthought, but never forgotten understudy of hegemony. A Black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation) but must nonetheless be pursued to the death.
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	31	+Framing issue. Their refusal to engage in discussions of the way that anti-blackness shapes the world will lose them this debate. Sexton 16
	32	+Jared Sexton, Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, associate professor of African American Studies and Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word,” Rhizomes issue 19,sections 1-8
	33	+- A shift away from politics of inclusion is the only real ethical move
	34	+- Pessimism is a political position that we need to use to understand the world
	35	+
	36	+1 Afro-Pessimism is a contemporary phenomenon, some may even scoff that it is trendy, but its political and intellectual evolution is considerably longer and its ethical bearings much broader than one might expect, and there is work yet to be done regarding a genealogy of its orientation and sensibility. No individual or collective effort, of course, springs forth whole cloth and yet the controversy that has accompanied the emergence of this discourse over the better part of the past decade has suffered greatly from a refusal—on the part of most critics and too many proponents as well—to follow the old Jamesonian edict to historicize the theoretical aim and object (Herman 2003). I only note the problem here, as the development of proper context would require far more space than available at present. The vacuum-packed controversy has been surprisingly pointed as a result, and it is easy to miss the true significance thereof between the epiphanic tone of recent acquaintance and the acrimony of recurrent denunciation. 2 Some part of the pace and extent of debate about Afro-Pessimism to date is no doubt due to the proliferation of social media platforms in the same moment when the professoriate groans under the intensified administrative command to turn research into output with eventual market value (including the market value of "civic engagement"); the subsequent migration of much previously refereed scholarly commentary to these less (or differently) regulated forums in search of greater and faster measurable impact and, for better or worse, readership beyond the ken of advanced higher education; and the increased if uneven porosity of deliberations among activists, artists, educators, journalists, non-profit workers, researchers, etc. afforded by the digitization of print culture and the growing access to recordings of conference panels, public lectures, radio interviews, and the like. It is no exaggeration to say that, as a result of this convergence of global economic restructuring and technological development, there are thousands of online conversations underway across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe, especially among students and young scholars, adjudicating the relative merits of Afro-Pessimism. 3 But this much could be said about any number of topical discussions featured anywhere from chat rooms and microblogs to virtual meetings and TED talks. What accounts for the particular critical purchase and affective resonance of what I called elsewhere "a highly technical dispute in a small corner of the American academy" has more likely to do with a growing understanding of the common (which is not to say shared, much less identical) political conditions of diverse black life-worlds with respect to claims and practices of freedom. That common sense of things is bound to a terrible and terrifying acknowledgement of not only the tragic material and symbolic continuities everywhere revealed by the history of post-emancipation societies throughout the Diaspora, but also, more fundamentally, the uncontainable categorical sprawl of the epochal transformation that names the emergence of racial slavery as such. In this, the postulate of a free black - whether non-slave or former-slave - would appear as oxymoron. None of which should stop anyone from believing its true, that being the crux. If Afro-Pessimism has captured the imagination of certain black radical formations and suggested a critical idiom, provoking a basic rethinking among more than a few of their non-black counterparts by the way, it has also, and maybe for the same reasons, struck a nerve among others, all along the color line, who fear that open-minded engagement involves forsaking some of the most hard-earned lessons of the last generation. 4 The reticence expressed about the force and signification of Afro-Pessimism, which in some quarters has bloomed into open if largely uninformed resistance, has taken on the logic of preemptive strike. Though we have little engagement in print thus far, due in part to the recentness of the published literature, certain discussions are nonetheless afoot on the left "devoted to blaming pessimism for whatever crisis is thought to occupy us at the moment." Afro-Pessimism, in this case and on this count, is thought to be, in no particular order: a negative appraisal of the capabilities of black peoples, associating blackness with lack rather than tracing the machinations through which the association is drawn and enforced, even in the black psyche, across the longue durée; a myopic denial of overlapping and ongoing histories of struggle and a fatal misunderstanding of the operational dynamics of power, its general economy or micro-physics, reifying what should be historicized en route to analysis; a retrograde and isolationist nationalism, a masculinist and heteronormative enterprise, a destructive and sectarian ultra-leftism, and a chauvinist American exceptionalism; a reductive and morbid fixation on the depredations of slavery that superimposes the figure of the slave as an anachronism onto ostensibly post-slavery societies, and so on. 5 The last assertion, which actually links together all of the others, evades the nagging burden of proof of abolition and, moreover, fails to acknowledge that one can account for historically varying instances of anti-blackness while maintaining the claim that slavery is here and now. Most telling though is the leitmotif of offense, and the felt need among critics to defend themselves, their work, their principles and their politics against the perceived threat. In place of thoughtful commentary, we have distancing and disavowal. The grand pronouncement is offered, generally, without the impediment of sustained reading or attempted dialogue, let alone careful study of the relevant literature. The entire undertaking, the movement of thought it pursues, is apprehended instead as its lowest common denominator, indicted by proxy, and tried in absentia as caricature.1 6 Astonishingly, all of this refuses to countenance the rhetorical dimensions of the discourse of Afro-Pessimism (despite the minor detail that its principal author is a noted creative writer and its first major statement is found in an award-winning literary work of memoir) and the productive theoretical effects of the fiction it creates, namely, a meditation on a poetics and politics of abjection wherein racial blackness operates as an asymptotic approximation of that which disturbs every claim or formation of identity and difference as such.2 Afro-Pessimism is thus not against the politics of coalition simply because coalitions tend systematically to render supposed common interests as the concealed particular interests of the most powerful and privileged elements of the alliance. Foremost, Afro-Pessimism it seeks, in Wilderson's parlance, "to shit on the inspiration of the personal pronoun we" (143) because coalitions require a logic of identity and difference, of collective selves modeled on the construct of the modern individual, an entity whose coherence is purchased at the expense of whatever is cast off by definition. The subject of politics is essentially dividual and there is in effect always another intervention to be made on behalf of some aspect of the group excluded in the name of the proper.3 The ever-expansive inclusionary gesture must thus be displaced by another more radical approach: an ethics of the real, a politics of the imperative, engaged in its interminably downward movement. This daunting task entails making necessity out of virtue, as it were, willing the need for the black radical imagination and not just its revisable demand. If certain scholars whose work has been instructive or inspirational for Afro-Pessimism miss this point too, it may have something to do with the search for a method of gaining agency that, while rightly suspending the assumption of an a priori agent, nonetheless rushes past the hidden structure of violence that underwrites so many violent acts, whether spectacular or mundane. 7 Such may provide reassurance for those informed by the basic assumptions and animated by the esprit de corps of the theoretical orientations and conceptual frames in question, but it cannot be mistaken for an adequate defense of a disposition. We would do well, on this score, to heed Joshua Dienstag's rather germane suggestion in Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit that "some thought should be given to why this word functions so well as a gesture of dismissal" and, likewise, to "the routine use of 'pessimist' and its cognates as a casual intellectual put-down" (Dienstag 2006: x). For present purposes, Afro-Pessimism as epithet would be the obverse of the unasked question: Why has this discourse found its articulation now? Rather than simply motivating speculation about the psychological states and political commitments of theorists, commentators, students, advocates or adherents; the intervention and implications of Afro-Pessimism, however they are adjudged, "need to be addressed at the theoretical level at which they arose" (Dienstag 2001: 924). Dienstag writes further: Critics have often mistaken a depiction of the world for a choice about our future, as if scholars had rejoiced at the decline or decay they described. ... Yet, despite the abuse they attract pessimists keep appearing—and this should not be surprising since the world keeps delivering bad news. Instead of blaming pessimism, perhaps, we can learn from it. Rather than hiding from the ugliness of the world, perhaps we can discover how best to withstand it (Dienstag 2006: x).4 8 As if they rejoiced about the wrong things and, by contrast, failed to rejoice about the right ones. Why not turn this (moralistic) accusation into (political-intellectual) opportunity? Indeed, the moniker "Afro-Pessimism" emerges at a certain inaugural moment as the embrace of a critical outlook deemed, upon review, to be disappointing or discouraging to an ostensibly progressive, even modernist anti-racism (Hartman 2003). Détournement. Resignification. A simple enough term for withstanding the ugliness of the world—and learning from it—might be suffering and Afro-Pessimism is, among other things, an attempt to formulate an account of such suffering, to establish the rules of its grammar, "to think again about the position of the ex-slave," as Bryan Wagner puts it in his Disturbing the Peace, "without recourse to the consolation of transcendence" (Wagner 2009: 2). The difficulty has to do with the special force that the consolation of transcendence—be it cultural, economic, geographical, historical, political, psychological, sexual, social or symbolic—brings to bear on the activity of thinking, no less of speaking and writing, about those whose transcendence is foreclosed in and for the modern world.

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	1	+2017-02-15 01:14:06.565

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	1	+Panel

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	1	+Notre Dame DS

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	1	+71

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	1	+Triples

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	1	+Harvard Westlake Engel Neg

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	1	+1 - K - Afropessimism - Settler Colonialism Links

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	1	+Stanford