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  • Caselist.CitesClass[74]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[75]

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Caselist.CitesClass[74]

EntryDate

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1		-2017-01-15 07:01:30.146
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Caselist.CitesClass[75]

Cites

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	1	+Politics are structurally anti-black—claiming we should push for progress generates cruel optimism that supports the propogation of more anti-black violence.
	2	+Warren 15
	3	+Warren, Calvin. Assistant Professor at George Washington University, “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope”: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2015, pp. 215–248
	4	+The politics of hope, then, constitutes what Lauren Berlant would call “cruel optimism” for blacks (Berlant 2011). It bundles certain promises about redress, equality, freedom, justice, and progress into a political object that always lies beyond reach. The objective of the Political is to keep blacks in a relation to this political object—in an unending pursuit of it. This pursuit, however, is detrimental because it strengthens the very anti-black system that would pulverize black being. The pursuit of the object certainly has an “irrational” aspect to it, as Farred details, but it is not mere means without expectation; instead, it is a means that undermines the attainment of the impossible object desired. In other words, the pursuit marks a cruel attachment to the means of subjugation and the continued widening of the gap between histor- ical reality and fantastical ideal. Black nihilism is a “demythifying” practice, in the Nietzschean vein, that uncovers the subjugating strategies of political hope and de-idealizes its fantastical object. Once we denude political hope of its axiological and ethical veneer, we see that it operates through certain strategies: 1) positing itself as the only alternative to the problem of anti-blackness, 2) shielding this alter- native from rigorous historical/philosophical critique by placing it in an un- known future, 3) delimiting the eld of action to include only activity recog- nized and legitimated by the Political, and 4) demonizing critiques or different philosophical perspectives. The politics of hope masks a particular cruelty under the auspices of “happiness” and “life.” It terrifies with the dread of “no alternative.” “Life” itself needs the security of the alternative, and, through this logic, life becomes untenable without it. Political hope promises to provide this alternative—a discursive and political organization beyond extant structures of violence and destruction. The construction of the binary “alternative/no-alternative” ensures the hegemony and dominance of political hope within the onto-existential horizon. The terror of the “no alternative”—the ultimate space of decay, suffering, and death—depends on two additional binaries: “problem/ solution” and “action/inaction.” According to this politics, all problems have solutions, and hope provides the accessibility and realization of these solutions. The solution establishes itself as the elimination of “the problem”; the solution, in fact, transcends the problem and realizes Hegel’s aufheben in its constant attempt to sublate the dirtiness of the “problem” with the pristine being of the solution. No problem is outside the reach of hope’s solution— every problem is connected to the kernel of its own eradication. The politics of hope must actively refuse the possibility that the “solution” is, in fact, another problem in disguised form; the idea of a “solution” is nothing more than the repetition and disavowal of the problem itself. The solution relies on what we might call the “trick of time” to fortify itself from the deconstruction of its binary. Because the temporality of hope is a time “not-yet-realized,” a future tense unmoored from present-tense justifications and pragmatist evidence, the politics of hope cleverly shields its “solutions” from critiques of impossibility or repetition. Each insistence that these solutions stand up against the lessons of history or the rigors of analysis is met with the rationale that these solutions are not subject to history or analysis because they do not reside within the horizon of the “past” or “pres- ent.” Put differently, we can never ascertain the ef cacy of the proposed solutions because they escape the temporality of the moment, always retreat- ing to a “not-yet” and “could-be” temporality. This “trick” of time offers a promise of possibility that can only be realized in an inde nite future, and this promise is a bond of uncertainty that can never be redeemed, only imagined. In this sense, the politics of hope is an instance of the psychoanalytic notion of desire: its sole purpose is to reproduce its very condition of possibility, never to satiate or bring ful llment. This politics secures its hegemony through time by claiming the future as its unassailable property and excluding (and deval- uing) any other conception of time that challenges this temporal ordering. The politics of hope, then, depends on the incessant (re)production and proliferation of problems to justify its existence. Solutions cannot really exist within the politics of hope, just the illusion of a different order in a future tense. The “trick” of time and political solution converge on the site of “action.” In critiquing the politics of hope, one encounters the rejoinder of the dangers of inaction. “But we can’t just do nothing! We have to do something.” The field of permissible action is delimited and an unrelenting binary between action/ inaction silences critical engagement with political hope. These exclusionary operations rigorously reinforce the binary between action and inaction and discredit certain forms of engagement, critique, and protest. Legitimate action takes place in the political—the political not only claims futurity but also action as its property. To “do something” means that this doing must translate into recognizable political activity; “something” is a stand-in for the word “politics”—one must “do politics” to address any problem. A refusal to “do politics” is equivalent to “doing nothing”—this nothingness is constructed as the antithesis of life, possibility, time, ethics, and morality (a “zero-state” as Julia Kristeva 1982 might call it). Black nihilism rejects this “trick of time” and the lure of emancipatory solutions. To refuse to “do politics” and to reject the fantastical object of politics is the only “hope” for blackness in an anti- black world.
	5	+“Progress” does not exist, anti-black violence is only increasing as the very structures of anti-blackness only take new political forms.
	6	+Warren 15
	7	+Warren, Calvin. Assistant Professor at George Washington University, “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope”: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2015, pp. 215–248
	8	+Perverse juxtapositions structure our relation to the Political. This becomes even more apparent and problematic when we consider the position of blacks within this structuring.1 On the one hand, our Declaration of Independence proclaims, “All men are created equal,” and yet black captives were fractioned in this political arithmetic as three- fifths of this “man.” The remainder, the two- fifths, gets lost within the arithmetic shuffle of commerce and mercenary prerogatives. We, of course, hoped that the Reconstruction Amendments would correct this arithmetical error and finally provide an ontological equation, or an existential variable, that would restore fractured and fractioned black being. This did not happen. Black humanity became somewhat of an “imaginary number” in this equation, purely speculative and nice in theory but difficult to actualize or translate into something tangible. Poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and extra-legal and legal violence made a mockery of the 14th Amendment, and the convict leasing system turned the 13th Amendment inside out for blacks. Yet, we approach this political perversity with a certain apodictic certainty and incontrovertible hope that things will (and do) get better. The Political, we are told, provides the material or substance of our hope; it is within the Political that we are to find, if we search with vigilance and work tirelessly, the “answer” to the ontological equation— hard work, suffering, and diligence will restore the fractioned three- fifths with its alienated two-fifths and, finally, create One that we can include in our declaration that “All men are created equal.” We are still awaiting this “event.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. placed great emphasis on the restoration of black being through suffering and diligence in his sermon “The American Dream” (1965): And I would like to say to you this morning what I’ve tried to say all over this nation, what I believe rmly: that in seeking to make the dream a reality we must use and adopt a proper method. I’m more convinced than ever before that violence is impractical and immoral . . . we need not hate; we need not use violence. We can stand up against our most violent opponent and say: we will match your capacity to in ict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you . . . we will go to in those jails and transform them from dungeons of shame to havens of freedom and human dignity. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities after night and drag us out on some wayside road and beat us and leave us half dead, and as difficult as it is, we will still love you. . . . Threaten our children and bomb our churches, and as dif cult as it is, we will still love you. But be assured that we will ride you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we will win our freedom, but we will not only win it for ourselves, we will so appeal to your hearts and conscience that we will win you in the process. And our victory will be double. The American dream, then, is realized through black suffering. It is the humiliated, incarcerated, mutilated, and terrorized black body that serves as the vestibule for the Democracy that is to come. In fact, it almost becomes impossible to think the Political without black suffering. According to this logic, corporeal fracture engenders ontological coherence, in a political arithmetic saturated with violence. Thus, nonviolence is a misnomer, or somewhat of a ruse. Black-sacrifice is necessary to achieve the American dream and its promise of coherence, progress, and equality. We find similar logic in the contemporary moment. Renisha McBride, Jordon Davis, Kody Ingham, Amadou Diallo, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Frederick Jermain Carter, Chavis Carter, Timothy Stansbury, Hadiya Pendleton, Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, Kendrec McDade, Trayvon Martin, and Mike Brown, among others, constitute a fatal rupture of the Political; these signifiers, stained in blood, refuse the closure that the Political promises. They haunt political discourses of progress, betterment, equality, citizenship, and justice—the metaphysical organization of social existence. We are witnessing a shocking accumulation of injured and mutilated black bodies, particularly young black bodies, which place what seems to be an unanswerable question mark in the political field: if we are truly progressing toward this “society-that-is-to-come (maybe),” why is black suffering increasing at such alarming rates? In response to this inquiry, we are told to keep struggling, keep “hope” alive, and keep the faith. After George Zimmerman was acquitted for murdering Trayvon Martin, President Obama addressed the nation and importuned us to keep fighting for change because “each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes toward race” and, if we work hard enough, we will move closer to “becoming a more perfect union.” Despite Martin’s corpse lingering in the minds of young people and Zimmerman’s smile of relief after the verdict, we are told that things are actually getting better. Supposedly, the generation that murdered Trayvon Martin and Renisha McBride is much better than the generation that murdered Emmett Till. Black suffering, here, is instrumentalized to accomplish pedagogical, cathartic, and redemptive objectives and, somehow, the growing number of dead black bodies in the twenty-first century is an indication of our progress to- ward “perfection.” Is perfection predicated on black death? How many more black bodies must be lynched, mutilated, burned, castrated, raped, dismembered, shot, and disabled before we achieve this “more perfect union”? In many ways, black suffering and death become the premiere vehicles of political perfection and social maturation. This essay argues that the logic of the Political—linear temporality, bio- political futurity, perfection, betterment, and redress—sustains black suffering. Progress and perfection are worked through the pained black body and any recourse to the Political and its discourse of hope will ultimately reproduce the very metaphysical structures of violence that pulverize black being. This piece attempts to rescue black nihilism from discursive and intellectual obliteration; rather than thinking about black nihilism as a set of pathologies in need of treatment, this essay considers black nihilism a necessary philosophical posture capable of unraveling the Political and its devastating logic of political hope. Black nihilism resists emancipatory rhetoric that assumes it is possible to purge the Political of anti-black violence and advances political apostasy as the only “ethical” response to black suffering.
	9	+The alternative is political apostasy. The only ethical action is self-excommunication from metaphysical structures of violence.
	10	+Warren 15
	11	+Warren, Calvin. Assistant Professor at George Washington University, “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope”: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2015, pp. 215–248
	12	+“The black nihilist recognizes that relying on the Political and its grammar¶ offers nothing more than a ruse of transformation and an exploited hope.¶ Instead of atheism, the black nihilist would embrace political apostasy : it is the¶ act of abandoning or renouncing a situation of unethicality and immorality— in this sense, the Political itself. The apostate is a figure that “self excommunicates” him-/herself from a body that is contrary to its fundamental belief system. As political apostate, the black nihilist renounces the idol of anti-blackness but refuses to participate in the ruse of replacing one idol with another. The Political and God—the just and true God in Carter’s analysis— are incommensurate and inimical. This is not to suggest that we can exclude God, but that any recourse to the Political results in an immorality not in alignment with Godly principles (a performative contradiction). The project to align God with the Political (political theology) will inevitably fail. If anti blackness is contrary to our beliefs, self-excommunication, in other words “black nihilism,” is the only position that seems consistent

EntryDate

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	1	+2017-01-15 07:01:31.133

Judge

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	1	+Varad Agarwala

Opponent

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	1	+PCDS PW

ParentRound

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	1	+38

Round

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	1	+3

Team

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	1	+Strake Jesuit Chen Neg

Title

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	1	+2 - Black Nihilism K Updates

Tournament

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	1	+Harvard Westlake