Neste texto, Calvin Warren aponta os limites do Afropessimismo e da Teoria Queer ao se aproximare... more Neste texto, Calvin Warren aponta os limites do Afropessimismo e da Teoria Queer ao se aproximarem do/a Queer Preto/a. Nomeando de Onticídio o cruzamento entre a posição de não-ontologia da Pretitude e a experiência de não-liberdade da Experiência Queer, o autor discute im/possibilidades éticas baseadas em aparatos da justiça humanista/humana.
Esta é uma tradução Bibliopreta. Ela pode e deve ser circulada, compartilhada, citada e revisada ... more Esta é uma tradução Bibliopreta. Ela pode e deve ser circulada, compartilhada, citada e revisada livremente. Notas da tradução são sempre indicadas como tal, as demais notas são originais do texto. As referências bibliográficas foram mantidas no inglês original. Conheça @bibliopreta (Twitter e Instagram) ou entre em contato em
There is much in Hortense Spillers's work to celebrate—from black feminism to literary criticism.... more There is much in Hortense Spillers's work to celebrate—from black feminism to literary criticism. One of her crucial contributions, however, has received little, if any, scholarly attention. Calvin Warren calls this a black discourse theory. Although we've focused on “the American Grammar Book” and its discursive violence, her proposed “solution” to this violence is virtually neglected. These remarks are intended to foreground this intervention by reconstructing her discourse theory of “the One” and “Interior Intersubjectivity.” In particular Warren notes the influence of Jürgen Habermas on her discourse theory, and how both find psychoanalysis beneficial in the task of restoring speech and addressing muteness. In short, this reconstruction provides a brief overview of the theoretical infrastructure rather than an exhaustive exposition and assessment.
This meditation is an experimentation with Hortense Spiller’s concept of 'psychoanalyti... more This meditation is an experimentation with Hortense Spiller’s concept of 'psychoanalytics.' It considers the hieroglyph a repetitive and enacted (but unrepresentable) force of historical trauma marking black bodies and passed between them generationally (much like the Lacanian object a). Reading the Lacanian pass and erotogenic zones as heuristic features of the hieroglyph, this meditation presents black nihilism as an analytic setting enabling the hieroglyph to speak its ineffable repetition, rather than just a repertoire of hedonistic pleasures and destructive behaviors as described in black optimism.
In this thought experiment, I provide a philosophical reading of the "Karen call" to explain its ... more In this thought experiment, I provide a philosophical reading of the "Karen call" to explain its persistence and impact. I argue the call is an act of shepherding in the twenty-first century-fulling the ethical responsibility and duty of Dasein, as Heidegger presents it in his philosophy. Every call performs ontological labora guarding and surveillance of Being-requiring a vigilant policing of ontological boundaries and a marshaling of violence (state sanctioned) to prevent black encroachment (the violation of ontological interdiction). The cell phone, as modern technology, is the nexus between "the call of Being" and the "call to law enforcement" (Karen call). This guarding relies on the cell phone as an indispensable technology of surveillance. The Karen call is a response to an ontological emergency.
What type of life is possible without metaphysical guarantees? How does one practice living, or i... more What type of life is possible without metaphysical guarantees? How does one practice living, or inhabit existence, without the grounding, foundation, and security metaphysics promises? Can we liberate life from metaphysical captivity, and if so, what "weapons of warfare" accomplish this liberation? These questions, I believe, sketch a putative path for (re)thinking black life, black death, and antiblackness as problems of metaphysical living. Put differently, antiblackness is a crisis of faith-or the grounding of existence, and life itself, in ontotheology (the supreme metaphysical structuration).1 Antiblack and white supremacist religions and practices, then, are deceptively anti-faith. And the consequence of grounding life, existence, and worship in metaphysics is unmitigated cruelty and ritualized violencesince the "God" of metaphysics is pure violence.
Does time heal all wounds? Or does time require certain wounds to sustain itself? Is the curative... more Does time heal all wounds? Or does time require certain wounds to sustain itself? Is the curative function of time an onto-metaphysical fantasy, one concealing the internecine operations of temporal subjuga-tion? What happens to existence, or life itself, once we abandon time, its unquestioned positivity, and its presumed givenness (as gift, indispensable resource, or a priori condition)? Furthermore, is the activity of imagining even possible without recourse to time, temporality, or its durative schemas? Is the imagination a temporal captive, and does abandoning (or dare I say abolishing) time liberate the imagination to perform different tasks and pursuits? Questioning time is a difficult task, since thinking requires it (to reorient existence beyond Newtonian, post-modern, or neo-liberal time and eschatology). Questioning, as meta-commentary, would require an exceptional position, both within and without time simultaneously, a position capable of investigating the very thing that enables investigation-holding time in abeyance. But the seeming impossibility of this enterprise would require a different noetic apparatus, since thought (as questioning) depends on time as its oxygen. The imagination, then, offers the promise of liberation from temporal tyranny, an enterprise contravening the conditions of reason, knowledge, forms, and, indeed, the possible itself. The potential "trans-gression"-to use a hackneyed term in American Studies-of the imagination is diminished, however, when it is bound to democracy. Democracy tethers the imagination to time, since democracy is an elaborate schematization, instrumentalization, and defense of time. During any moment of political and social crisis, we are importuned to re-imagine democracy, as imagining the future. To consider democracy futureless, or that its time has run out, or that futurity (and progress) is its devastating temporal myth, is to open oneself up to charges of theoretical heresy,
Moonlight, as a cinematic mode of thinking, presents a terrifying question: What is a (black) fag... more Moonlight, as a cinematic mode of thinking, presents a terrifying question: What is a (black) faggot? This destructive question provides a paradigm for thinking blackness without being. In this meditation, I suggest the (black) faggot is the exorbitance of thinking sexuality and humanism, blackness and being, and queerness and anti-blackness. To be a (black) faggot is a mode of non-being redoubled, an existence we struggle to understand with the philosophical resources at our disposal. Through a close reading of the film, I limn the depths of blackness nihilism-the condition of inhabitation without being, sexuality, humanity, justice, and redress. The (black) faggot, then, is much more than onomastic destruction or injurious speech; its purpose is to absorb the terror of onto-metaphysics and, for this reason, it is absolutely indispensable. Abstract Black film theory, as an intervention, would have a more destructive impact if it foregrounded the impossibility of a Black film, the impossibility of a Black film theory, the impossibility of a Black film theorist, and the impossibility of a black person except, and this is key, under "cleansing" conditions of violence. Only when real violence is coupled with representational "monstrosity," can Blacks move from the status of things to the status of…of what, we'll just have to wait and see.-Frank Wilderson, Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonism Cinema is a mode of thinking-Kara Keeling, The Witches Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense I. How do you think the impossible? What protocols of thinking and noetic strategies sufficiently (re)present the impossible? How is thinking possible, at all, within a destructive enterprise? Must destruction obliterate the conditions (or modes) that make thinking itself possible. If cinema is, indeed, a mode of thinking, then black cinema (as black thinking) constitutes a problematic "mode"-a way of encountering the impossible, the unanswerable, the inescapable, and the destructive. As a mode-if we consider the mathematical resonance of this term-black cinema as black thought must confront the repetition within its "thinking-set," that concept or element which appears most often within the cinematic frame of re-presentable things. It is precisely this repetition , this mode of thinking, that often goes undetected within black cinema, until it is exposed and disclosed through black thought. Destruction, then, is the exposure of what is concealed within black cinema and the obliteration of a certain repetition. But such obliteration of the repetition, the most consistent element within the "thinking-set," will inevitably situate the impossible since the set depends on this very repetition for its existence, for its mode of intelligibility, for its narrative clarity. Destroying the repetition, then, is the unbearable, and perhaps impossible, weight of black cinema, one which humanism, as a cinematic pleasure Calvin Warren is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. Warren's research interests are in Continental Philosophy (particularly post-Heideggerian and nihilistic philosophy), Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, Afro-pessimism, and theology. Duke University Press published his first book, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (2018). He is currently working on a second project Onticide: Essays on Black Nihilism and Sexuality, which unravels the metaphysical foundations of black sexuality and argues for a rethinking of sexuality without the human, sexual difference, or coherent bodies.
Fred Moten offers a unique philosophical perspective on the deadlock between black optimism and A... more Fred Moten offers a unique philosophical perspective on the deadlock between black optimism and Afro-Pessimism. This essay presents Moten's " black mysticism " as a philosophy that imagines blackness without Being, thus shifting emphasis from a phenomenology of anti-Blackness (political ontology) to a phenomenology of black spirit (black mysticism). By shifting emphasis, Moten opens up an alternative grammar for understanding black existence and black endurance in a hostile world.
In any investigatory procedure concerning African-American culture, a given episteme fractures in... more In any investigatory procedure concerning African-American culture, a given episteme fractures into negative and positive stresses that could be designated the crisis of inquiry that reveals where a kind of abandonment-we could call it a gap-has occurred…we are confronted, then, by divergent temporal frames, or beats, that pose the problem of adequacy-how to claim an abandoned site of inquiry in the critical discourse when the very question that it articulates is carried along as part of the methodological structure as a feature of the paradigm itself under suspicion, while the question itself foregrounds a thematic that cannot be approached in any other way.
Neste texto, Calvin Warren aponta os limites do Afropessimismo e da Teoria Queer ao se aproximare... more Neste texto, Calvin Warren aponta os limites do Afropessimismo e da Teoria Queer ao se aproximarem do/a Queer Preto/a. Nomeando de Onticídio o cruzamento entre a posição de não-ontologia da Pretitude e a experiência de não-liberdade da Experiência Queer, o autor discute im/possibilidades éticas baseadas em aparatos da justiça humanista/humana.
Esta é uma tradução Bibliopreta. Ela pode e deve ser circulada, compartilhada, citada e revisada ... more Esta é uma tradução Bibliopreta. Ela pode e deve ser circulada, compartilhada, citada e revisada livremente. Notas da tradução são sempre indicadas como tal, as demais notas são originais do texto. As referências bibliográficas foram mantidas no inglês original. Conheça @bibliopreta (Twitter e Instagram) ou entre em contato em
There is much in Hortense Spillers's work to celebrate—from black feminism to literary criticism.... more There is much in Hortense Spillers's work to celebrate—from black feminism to literary criticism. One of her crucial contributions, however, has received little, if any, scholarly attention. Calvin Warren calls this a black discourse theory. Although we've focused on “the American Grammar Book” and its discursive violence, her proposed “solution” to this violence is virtually neglected. These remarks are intended to foreground this intervention by reconstructing her discourse theory of “the One” and “Interior Intersubjectivity.” In particular Warren notes the influence of Jürgen Habermas on her discourse theory, and how both find psychoanalysis beneficial in the task of restoring speech and addressing muteness. In short, this reconstruction provides a brief overview of the theoretical infrastructure rather than an exhaustive exposition and assessment.
This meditation is an experimentation with Hortense Spiller’s concept of 'psychoanalyti... more This meditation is an experimentation with Hortense Spiller’s concept of 'psychoanalytics.' It considers the hieroglyph a repetitive and enacted (but unrepresentable) force of historical trauma marking black bodies and passed between them generationally (much like the Lacanian object a). Reading the Lacanian pass and erotogenic zones as heuristic features of the hieroglyph, this meditation presents black nihilism as an analytic setting enabling the hieroglyph to speak its ineffable repetition, rather than just a repertoire of hedonistic pleasures and destructive behaviors as described in black optimism.
In this thought experiment, I provide a philosophical reading of the "Karen call" to explain its ... more In this thought experiment, I provide a philosophical reading of the "Karen call" to explain its persistence and impact. I argue the call is an act of shepherding in the twenty-first century-fulling the ethical responsibility and duty of Dasein, as Heidegger presents it in his philosophy. Every call performs ontological labora guarding and surveillance of Being-requiring a vigilant policing of ontological boundaries and a marshaling of violence (state sanctioned) to prevent black encroachment (the violation of ontological interdiction). The cell phone, as modern technology, is the nexus between "the call of Being" and the "call to law enforcement" (Karen call). This guarding relies on the cell phone as an indispensable technology of surveillance. The Karen call is a response to an ontological emergency.
What type of life is possible without metaphysical guarantees? How does one practice living, or i... more What type of life is possible without metaphysical guarantees? How does one practice living, or inhabit existence, without the grounding, foundation, and security metaphysics promises? Can we liberate life from metaphysical captivity, and if so, what "weapons of warfare" accomplish this liberation? These questions, I believe, sketch a putative path for (re)thinking black life, black death, and antiblackness as problems of metaphysical living. Put differently, antiblackness is a crisis of faith-or the grounding of existence, and life itself, in ontotheology (the supreme metaphysical structuration).1 Antiblack and white supremacist religions and practices, then, are deceptively anti-faith. And the consequence of grounding life, existence, and worship in metaphysics is unmitigated cruelty and ritualized violencesince the "God" of metaphysics is pure violence.
Does time heal all wounds? Or does time require certain wounds to sustain itself? Is the curative... more Does time heal all wounds? Or does time require certain wounds to sustain itself? Is the curative function of time an onto-metaphysical fantasy, one concealing the internecine operations of temporal subjuga-tion? What happens to existence, or life itself, once we abandon time, its unquestioned positivity, and its presumed givenness (as gift, indispensable resource, or a priori condition)? Furthermore, is the activity of imagining even possible without recourse to time, temporality, or its durative schemas? Is the imagination a temporal captive, and does abandoning (or dare I say abolishing) time liberate the imagination to perform different tasks and pursuits? Questioning time is a difficult task, since thinking requires it (to reorient existence beyond Newtonian, post-modern, or neo-liberal time and eschatology). Questioning, as meta-commentary, would require an exceptional position, both within and without time simultaneously, a position capable of investigating the very thing that enables investigation-holding time in abeyance. But the seeming impossibility of this enterprise would require a different noetic apparatus, since thought (as questioning) depends on time as its oxygen. The imagination, then, offers the promise of liberation from temporal tyranny, an enterprise contravening the conditions of reason, knowledge, forms, and, indeed, the possible itself. The potential "trans-gression"-to use a hackneyed term in American Studies-of the imagination is diminished, however, when it is bound to democracy. Democracy tethers the imagination to time, since democracy is an elaborate schematization, instrumentalization, and defense of time. During any moment of political and social crisis, we are importuned to re-imagine democracy, as imagining the future. To consider democracy futureless, or that its time has run out, or that futurity (and progress) is its devastating temporal myth, is to open oneself up to charges of theoretical heresy,
Moonlight, as a cinematic mode of thinking, presents a terrifying question: What is a (black) fag... more Moonlight, as a cinematic mode of thinking, presents a terrifying question: What is a (black) faggot? This destructive question provides a paradigm for thinking blackness without being. In this meditation, I suggest the (black) faggot is the exorbitance of thinking sexuality and humanism, blackness and being, and queerness and anti-blackness. To be a (black) faggot is a mode of non-being redoubled, an existence we struggle to understand with the philosophical resources at our disposal. Through a close reading of the film, I limn the depths of blackness nihilism-the condition of inhabitation without being, sexuality, humanity, justice, and redress. The (black) faggot, then, is much more than onomastic destruction or injurious speech; its purpose is to absorb the terror of onto-metaphysics and, for this reason, it is absolutely indispensable. Abstract Black film theory, as an intervention, would have a more destructive impact if it foregrounded the impossibility of a Black film, the impossibility of a Black film theory, the impossibility of a Black film theorist, and the impossibility of a black person except, and this is key, under "cleansing" conditions of violence. Only when real violence is coupled with representational "monstrosity," can Blacks move from the status of things to the status of…of what, we'll just have to wait and see.-Frank Wilderson, Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonism Cinema is a mode of thinking-Kara Keeling, The Witches Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense I. How do you think the impossible? What protocols of thinking and noetic strategies sufficiently (re)present the impossible? How is thinking possible, at all, within a destructive enterprise? Must destruction obliterate the conditions (or modes) that make thinking itself possible. If cinema is, indeed, a mode of thinking, then black cinema (as black thinking) constitutes a problematic "mode"-a way of encountering the impossible, the unanswerable, the inescapable, and the destructive. As a mode-if we consider the mathematical resonance of this term-black cinema as black thought must confront the repetition within its "thinking-set," that concept or element which appears most often within the cinematic frame of re-presentable things. It is precisely this repetition , this mode of thinking, that often goes undetected within black cinema, until it is exposed and disclosed through black thought. Destruction, then, is the exposure of what is concealed within black cinema and the obliteration of a certain repetition. But such obliteration of the repetition, the most consistent element within the "thinking-set," will inevitably situate the impossible since the set depends on this very repetition for its existence, for its mode of intelligibility, for its narrative clarity. Destroying the repetition, then, is the unbearable, and perhaps impossible, weight of black cinema, one which humanism, as a cinematic pleasure Calvin Warren is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. Warren's research interests are in Continental Philosophy (particularly post-Heideggerian and nihilistic philosophy), Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, Afro-pessimism, and theology. Duke University Press published his first book, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (2018). He is currently working on a second project Onticide: Essays on Black Nihilism and Sexuality, which unravels the metaphysical foundations of black sexuality and argues for a rethinking of sexuality without the human, sexual difference, or coherent bodies.
Fred Moten offers a unique philosophical perspective on the deadlock between black optimism and A... more Fred Moten offers a unique philosophical perspective on the deadlock between black optimism and Afro-Pessimism. This essay presents Moten's " black mysticism " as a philosophy that imagines blackness without Being, thus shifting emphasis from a phenomenology of anti-Blackness (political ontology) to a phenomenology of black spirit (black mysticism). By shifting emphasis, Moten opens up an alternative grammar for understanding black existence and black endurance in a hostile world.
In any investigatory procedure concerning African-American culture, a given episteme fractures in... more In any investigatory procedure concerning African-American culture, a given episteme fractures into negative and positive stresses that could be designated the crisis of inquiry that reveals where a kind of abandonment-we could call it a gap-has occurred…we are confronted, then, by divergent temporal frames, or beats, that pose the problem of adequacy-how to claim an abandoned site of inquiry in the critical discourse when the very question that it articulates is carried along as part of the methodological structure as a feature of the paradigm itself under suspicion, while the question itself foregrounds a thematic that cannot be approached in any other way.
In any investigatory procedure concerning African-American culture, a given episteme fractures in... more In any investigatory procedure concerning African-American culture, a given episteme fractures into negative and positive stresses that could be designated the crisis of inquiry that reveals where a kind of abandonment-we could call it a gap-has occurred…we are confronted, then, by divergent temporal frames, or beats, that pose the problem of adequacy-how to claim an abandoned site of inquiry in the critical discourse when the very question that it articulates is carried along as part of the methodological structure as a feature of the paradigm itself under suspicion, while the question itself foregrounds a thematic that cannot be approached in any other way.
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