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	1	+They have purposefully left out a major part of Agamben’s work and fetishize his concept of “bare life”. This drive to engage dereliction reproduces anti blackness – you have a specific obligation to reject it independent of the kritik. Sexton 11
	2	+Sexton, Jared. "The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism." InTensions 5 (2011): 1-47. EE
	3	+
	4	+In the same vein, and based on a reading of “raw life” as a synonym rather than an opening toward another frame of reference, Moten rails against what he sees in “a certain American reception of Agamben” as a “critical obsession with bare life” that “fetishizes the bareness of it all” (Moten 2008: 216 fn. 6).v What is unattended or forgotten in this “constant repetition of bare life,” which is how Moten reads this troubled and troubling reading of Fanon avec Agamben, is an engagement with Agamben’s (affirmative) notion of “form of life.” And here one is unfaithful to the best of Agamben if one’s theorization “separates life from the form of life,” just as one is unfaithful to the best of Foucault if one overlooks his “constant and unconcealed assumptions of life’s fugitivity” in support of a mistaken conviction that misattributes to the great French historian and political philosopher a thesis about the absoluteness of power (ibid). What links these two observations—a strife internal to black studies and a failure in the understanding of power—is a relation of mutual implication. A central point of “The Case of Blackness” obtains in a caution against and a correction of the tendency to depart from the faulty premise of black pathology and thereby carry along the discourse being criticized within the assumptions of the critique. If one misunderstands the nature of power in this way, then one will more than likely assume or, at least, agree to the pathology of blackness and vice versa. Chandler might identify this entanglement less with a problem of attitude and more with an error of judgment. Wilderson’s concurrence with the spirit of this gambit would, in turn, warn against the tendency to “fortify and extend the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense” and its theoretical underpinnings (Wilderson 2008: 36). However, before we adjudicate whether the authors of “Raw Life” or the dossier of articles that it introduces or, for that matter, Fanon himself truly suffer from “an explicatory velocity that threatens to abolish the distance between—which is also to say the nearness of” a whole range of conceptual pairs requiring a finer attunement to “their difference and its modalities” (Moten 2008: 182)—I think it paramount to adjudicate whether the fact that “blackness has been associated with a certain sense of decay” is, in the first instance, something that we ought to strain against as it strains against us. And even if, in the last instance, we decide to stay the course, need we mobilize a philosophy of life in order to do so?
	5	+
	6	+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
	7	+
	8	+Calvin Warren, Onticide: Toward an Afro-pessimistic Queer Theory" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, 2013. NS
	9	+
	10	+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.
	11	+
	12	+In its ontological absence the black is a fungible object open to gratuitous violence and void of relational capacity. R.L. 13
	13	+
	14	+R.L., WANDERINGS OF THE SLAVE: BLACK LIFE AND SOCIAL DEATH, 2013,
	15	+Mute Magazine NS
	16	+
	17	+For the Afro-pessimists, the black subject is exiled from the human relation, which is predicated on social recognition, volition, subjecthood, and the valuation of life itself. Thus black existence is marked as an ontological absence, posited as sentient object and devoid of any positive relationality, in contradistinction to the human subject’s presence. How does this negative relationality originate and maintain itself? Through a structural violence, which is the formative relation that positions the slave, making it the central ontological foundation of black existence: Structural vulnerability to appropriation, perpetual and involuntary openness, including all the wanton uses of the body … should be understood as the paradigmatic conditions of black existence in the Americas, the defining characteristics of New World anti-blackness. In short, the black, whether slave or ‘free,’ lives under the commandment of whites.10 Contrary to contingent applications of violence in accordance with legitimate cause (transgression of law, as repressive strategy, as reaction, etc.), violence against blacks is gratuitous, without any prior reason or justification. It is the direct relation of force as the basis of the slave relation, which essentially structures the disposession of black existence, an ontological disposession of being. This gratuitous violence, on the one hand, subjugates black existence to an irrational accumulation of bodies, and subsequently produces a condensed delimitation of blackness in space. Whether it was the owning and trading of slaves or the contemporary phenomena of the ghetto and mass incarceration, black existence is excluded and stockpiled as so many objects within a spatial boundary. In this condition, life is reduced to a statistical quantity, black existence is made exchangeable with any other. Therefore, on the other hand, black existence is also a fungible object, infinitely malleable in its content due to the abstraction of its quality and open for use for anyone who can claim subjecthood.11 These structural features come to their fullest expression in the contemporary scenario of police shootings. The endless stream of young black men shot by police borders on excess, demonstrating the pure interchangeability of such names as equivalents, meaning that such seemingly particular empirical cases are in actuality a general condition. Blackness is as devalued as it is susceptible to all aspects of material and social containment, control and debility. Yet, in these instances, even morally indignant liberals are complicit with anti-blackness by focusing on police shootings as a contingent rather than structural feature of black existence.
	18	+
	19	+The position of blackness is the root cause of their idea of biopolitics – we control the internal link and only we have the correct starting point. Dillon 13
	20	+Stephen, “Fugitive Life: race, gender, and the rise of the neoliberal-carceral state”, P. 69-71
	21	+
	22	+Chattel slavery is central to the contemporary politics of the market in addition to the politics of life and death in general. Indeed, terror’s constitutive relationship to the production and management of race began on the “floating dungeon” of the slave ship. As a paradigmatic technology of modernity, the slave ship—a machine that was simultaneously a prison, a factory, a market, and an instrument of warfare—and its social relations inaugurated the economic, discursive, and institutional life of transnational capitalism.136 The carceral, the imperial, and the industrial were intertwined in the biopolitical regulation of black life, the expansion of capital, and the production of blackness, whiteness, and white supremacy. The slave trade produced methods for controlling populations; disciplining, torturing, and immobilizing the body; regulating health and hygiene; and extending the market beyond the economic. Additionally, it produced regimes of race and racism wherein blackness was subjected to “open and absolute vulnerability,” making white life dependent upon black (living) death.137 In short, the slave trade inaugurated methods for ranking life and measuring value that have yet to be undone.138 We can position slavery and its various technologies of domination (ship, plantation, sexual violence, management of birth) as preceding Giorgio Agamben’s argument that the concentration camp is the paradigmatic figure of modernity.139 In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben argues that the juridico-political structure of the camp is a “hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living.”140 For Agamben, the camp is the “new biopolitical nomos of our planet,” and our future resides in our ability to recognize the ways that the camp inhabits and drives the architecture of cities, airports, and the distribution of life and death across the globe. The camp is not a historical anomaly but a temporal and spatial structure that is continually brought back to life. That is, it may change name and shape but its function remains the same. As with Agamben’s call to see space, time, and power in a new way in order to make visible the camp’s possession of our everyday, I am arguing that we must learn to see the spirit of slavery in spectacles of racialized violence and death. In addition, we must also learn to recognize it in the operations that go by the names freedom, humanity, and democracy. Such a project requires an understanding that the biopolitics and necropolitics of slavery are not relegated to an amputated past, nor do they reside in a time progress will soon leave behind. Rather, the slave trade’s logics and technologies have intensified, expanded, and become more insidious. The past does more than repeat: it envelops, seduces, and multiplies.141
	23	+
	24	+Thus the alternative is to embrace the demand of the slave - the end of the world. Wilderson 02
	25	+
	26	+Frank Wilderson, The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal, resented at Imprisoned Intellectuals Conference Brown University, April 13th 2002. NS
	27	+
	28	+
	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.
	30	+
	31	+Recognizing that blackness is pathologized is key to embracing social life in social death – solves the case. Sexton 11
	32	+
	33	+Jared Sexton, ANTE-ANTI-BLACKNESS: AFTERTHOUGHTS, Cultural Studies Association Issue 1, 2011. NS
	34	+
	35	+Against the raceless credo, then, racism cannot be rejected without a dialectic in which humanity experiences a blackened world" (Gordon 1997: 67). What is this willingness to 'be' black, of choosing to be black affirmatively rather than reluctantly, that Gordon finds as the key ethical moment in Fanon? Elsewhere, in a discussion of W. E. B. Du Bois on the study of black folk, Gordon restates an existential phenomenological conception of the anti-black world developed across his first several books: "Blacks here suffer the phobogenic reality posed by the spirit of racial seriousness. In effect, they more than symbolize or signify various social pathologies – they become them. In our anti-black world, blacks are pathology" (Gordon 2000: 87). This conception would seem to support to Moten's contention that even much radical black studies scholarship sustains the association of blackness with a certain sense of decay and thereby fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense. In fact, it would seem that Gordon deepens the already problematic association to the level of identity. And yet, this is precisely what Gordon argues is the value and insight of Fanon: he fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather than remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the heterogeneity between a self and an imago originating in culture. Though it may appear counter-intuitive, or rather because it is counter-intuitive, this acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow of social death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the anti-black world. The affirmation of blackness, which is to say an affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from blackness in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, life, or sociality. Fanon writes in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks: "A Senegalese who learns Creole to pass for Antillean is a case of alienation. The Antilleans who make a mockery out of him are lacking in judgment" (Fanon 2008: 21). In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative – "above all, don’t be black" (Gordon 1997: 63) – in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that "resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human'" (Nyong'o 2002: 389). 22 In this we might create a transvaluation of pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology without pathos. To speak of black social life and black social death, black social life against black social death, black social life as black social death, black social life in black social death – all of this is to find oneself in the midst of an argument that is also a profound agreement, an agreement that takes shape in (between) meconnaissance and (dis)belief. Black optimism is not the negation of the negation that is afro-pessimism, just as black social life does not negate black social death by vitalizing it. A living death is a much a death as it is a living. Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social) life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the codes of state and civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of people and place, of history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common with the colonized, of all that capital has in common with labor – the modern world system. 23 Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space. This is agreed. That is to say, what Moten asserts against afro-pessimism is a point already affirmed by afro-pessimism, is, in fact, one of the most polemical dimensions of afro-pessimism as a project: namely, that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in social death. Double emphasis, on lived and on death. That's the whole point of the enterprise at some level. It is all about the implications of this agreed upon point where arguments (should) begin, but they cannot (yet) proceed. Wilderson's is an analysis of the law in its operation as "police power and racial prerogative both under and after slavery" (Wagner 2009: 243). So too is Moten's analysis, at least that just-less-than-half of the intellectual labor committed to the object of black studies as critique of (the anti-blackness of) Western civilization. But Moten is just that much more interested in how black social life steals away or escapes from the law, how it frustrates the police power and, in so doing, calls that very policing into being in the first place. The policing of black freedom, then, is aimed less at its dreaded prospect, apocalyptic rhetoric notwithstanding, than at its irreducible precedence. The logical and ontological priority of the unorthodox self-predicating activity of blackness, the "improvisatory exteriority" or "improvisational immanence" that blackness is, renders the law dependent upon what it polices. This is not the noble agency of resistance. It is a reticence or reluctance that we might not know if it were not pushing back, so long as we know that this pushing back is really a pushing forward. So, in this perverse sense, black social death is black social life. The object of black studies is the aim of black studies. The most radical negation of the anti-black world is the most radical affirmation of a blackened world. Afro-pessimism is "not but nothing other than" black optimism. 24
	36	+
	37	+Framing issue. Their refusal to engage in discussions of the way that anti-blackness shapes the world will lose them this debate. Sexton 16
	38	+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
	39	+- A shift away from politics of inclusion is the only real ethical move
	40	+- Pessimism is a political position that we need to use to understand the world
	41	+
	42	+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.

EntryDate

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	1	+2016-10-16 14:09:02.210

Judge

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	1	+Eric Melin

Opponent

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	1	+Strake Jesuit CP RC

ParentRound

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	1	+20

Round

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	1	+5

Team

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	1	+Harvard Westlake Engel Neg

Title

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	1	+SEPT-OCT - K - Afropessimsim

Tournament

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	1	+St Marks