Abstract
This essay is a meditation on the ontological contours of Blackness and being. The essay examines, in large part, Calvin Warren’s Ontological Terror. The concept broaches the topics of the humanity inherent in Heidegger’s Dasein and its ontological opposition towards Black being as such. When referring to Black being, I refer to the ontology of being in opposition to humanness as constructed by 20th-century Western existential philosophy (specifically Heidegger’s) and the Western notion of humanness that simultaneously constructs Blackness as an ontology, degrades Blackness and relies upon this very same ontology as an ontological prerequisite for the conceptual birth of whiteness. I import Frantz Fanon’s Double Reference in his text Black Skins, White Masks and Albert Memmi’s dual subjects of The Colonizer and the Colonized and through the onto-psychological prisms of both writers, I attempt to trace a philosophical genealogy of Black being as non-being or Black being as opposition to Dasein. This essay aims to clarify the distinct and paradoxical truth of Blackness as a mode of being that is nullifified as used by white being; in other words, Black being as non-being.
Introduction
Within the realm of philosophical inquiry, certain questions are inherently destabilizing. These are of such a nature that our preconceived moral and ontological bases for existence are shaken and exposed. Ontology, properly understood, is the approach in metaphysical studies concerned with being and the problems of existence from the standpoint of human subjects and their subjectivity. To my mind, one such question is that of Black being in the world. The question of Black being in the world within social, moral, and otherwise ontological contexts still contains a greater index of inquiries into the relationship between humanity and Black being. What are the contingencies of Black freedom were such a thing to exist? What is the moral position of white individuals partaking in racism? How can the ontological terror of Black being, as Calvin L. Warren argues, be reconciled with humanism? Calvin L. Warren, a Black, queer philosopher from Emory University, was compelled by the topic of Black being with relation to Western enlightenment humanism. Probing further, he understood that such humanism contradicts the concept of Black being. This paper explores the moral, phenomenological, and ontological genealogies of Black Otherness. In this paper, I wish to explore the metaphysical and ontological underpinnings of racism and the existential fissures therein concerning Black being in a white world meant to debase it. In doing so, I challenge the assumptions of humanist ethics and human value in light of colonialism and anti-Blackness. Drawing upon theories from Calvin L. Warren, Frantz Fanon, and Albert Memmi, I wish to uncover the philosophical and social foundations of Black devaluation, the moral instrumentalization of Black people, and the perceived notions of the self by Black folks.
To speak of ontological terror is to confront the insecurity of our ethical and metaphysical presuppositions in the face of Black being that exists outside of traditional humanism. It is to wrestle with the uncertainty and elusiveness of the Black Nothingness conferred upon the Negro. For Nothingness to be properly ascertained in this context, further definitions of the Heideggarian precepts of being and freedom will be further elaborated and put in place against the contradictions that comprise the Negro problem. However, we can understand ontological terror as the result of the incorrigibility, contradiction, and ambiguity of the ontological relation of the Negro embodied as metaphysical Nothing. It is the transmission of Nothing’s terror onto Black being and the Negro that encapsulates it.
One of the main premises of my argument is that Black being operates in an inherently anti-Black society. The Black individual and Black collective often experience perpetual hatred and ontological violence as a condition of existing in an opposing white world. All three thinkers discuss the ontology of anti-Blackness, albeit from different vantage points of exploitation, enmity and devaluation. Be it the colonial relationship, the cultural relation of Black being to whiteness or, the ontological terror that defines Blackness in an anti-Black world, Black otherness is ever-present and requires a sincere form of scrutiny. As a matter of clarity, I will be frequently referring to the subject as the “Black Negro.” This is done to juxtapose the metaphysical conception of Black-as-Nothing and the Negro who embodies this Nothingness within the corporeal.
One does well to understand Blackness not merely as a condition of difference and otherness but rather resulting as a problem. I want to explore what it means to be the Black subject used as an oppositional point of reference for inhumane humanist epistemologies that so dominated philosophical examination until this point. I also want to divulge into Black being as an oppositional point of reference in the colonial relationship and the redoubled cultural paradigm as discussed in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. It is important to note, for my purposes, that Black and white folks in this way serve twin functions. This is to say, the phenomenological positions Black and white folks are nestled within an engineered frame of reference that is at once acrimonious, mimetic, and reinforcing. As a condition of cultural subordination to white folks during colonialism, the Black individual understands the hatred felt for him and yet envies and adopts the habits and likeness of the white reference. Moreover, I argue that whiteness requires the ontological hatred of Blackness to exist in reference to itself. The racist relation creates the debased, anti-Black individual just as it creates the hated, misused ‘Black’ individual and this relationship is mutual and reinforcing.
The (In)Humanity of Anti-Blackness
To explore the topic I have described is to probe into the very nature of a relationship and the philosophical substance given to each antithetical entity belonging to this ontological relation. Blackness and its relation to whiteness and social structures that carve out this relationship are of this sort. Therefore, I am claiming that Blackness is ontologically constructed in oppositional relation to the whiteness that loathes it. Therefore, we ought to pay concern to ways in which Black Being exists necessarily outside of human-being as such. In his controversial text, Ontological Terror, Calvin L. Warren refers to the Negro as being Black insofar as this entity embodies a symbolic and ontological Nothing in the metaphysical world.1 Central to the question of Black Being is the ontological position of Black Nothingness that is intrinsic to metaphysical humanity constituted within its traditional guise. One of Warren’s pivotal claims is that Blackness exists in ontological obscurity and enmity to the metaphysical world.
Existing in opposition and obscurity to the metaphysical world is the condition of the Black Negro. This metaphysics is partially underpinned by an existential humanism that Heidegger’s Dasein occupies. Being in the world is fundamentally shaped by our tendency, as it were, our capacity to question our very mode of Being. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, in his Being and Time maintained that we are the beings for which Being is a question. We attend to this question as a means to ascertain our existence and truthfully exist in the world. Heidegger termed this Being as Dasein. Warren’s use of Heidegger is quite rigorous but scarcely charitable. In the text, Warren interrogates the premises of Heidegger’s ontological grounding in Dasein in contrast to the Nothingness that characterizes Black folks. Heidegger understands freedom and its concomitant humanist ethic to shroud the purpose of Being. As Warren asserts, “Freedom exists for Being—it enables the manifestation of Being through Dasein.”2 In the Heideggarian scheme, Dasein possesses numerous potentialities of Being and one of the most important is freedom. Notwithstanding this, however, Warren attempts to challenge both the sublimation of ontological freedom for the Negro into a freedom index of social, political, and legal rights while maintaining that at an ontological level, freedom has been necessarily severed from Black-Being-as-Nothing. According to Warren, “Our metaphysical notions of freedom... miss the ontological function of anti-Blackness—to deny the ontological ground of freedom by severing the (non)relation between Blackness and Being.”3
This is not to suggest that Blackness does not occupy a modality of Being. Instead, it indicates that the Black Negro embodies a mode of Being unlike that of Dasein whose existence is punctuated by its potentiality for freedom among other things and whose pursuit of freedom warrants a humanism advocating for freedom in real moral terms. Rather, the Black Negro attends Being-as-a-problem. What does it mean to Be a problem? Problematic Blackness invites us to examine what it means to inhabit the condition of Being outside of traditional metaphysics as well as to be the object and target of anti-Black hatred embodied in the Negro. This problem is much more loaded than hatred and loathing, however. The Negro’s Being-as-a-problem is not the subsequent hatred it experiences at the hands of the white colonial or in his historical setting generally. This intermediary existence that the Black Negro takes up “between form and formlessness, animal and man, property and human, and nothing and something”4 that form of Being that “renders both “meaning” and “Being” impossible and inadequate existence constitutes the interstice of the Blackness that is denied entry into the realm of traditional ontology and is instead so misused and detested by it. Being-as-a-problem is the condition of Blackness. The question which arises concerning “Black Being” is also problematic. Blackness is everywhere and problematic at all times.
Black Being is both humanistic and inhumane. Suffice to say, there is an (in)humanity to anti-Blackness. Firstly, we can account for the real and ontological violence inherent to Black Being. We may establish the barbarities of the Black experience at the hands of his white oppressors since Black subjugation of the Negro physically, mentally, socio-culturally, and psychologically throughout slavery and since the Antebellum period onwards. Notwithstanding the moral devaluation of Blacks resulting from their exclusion as equal and free citizens under the law for much of the 20th century.5 The inhumanity of anti-Blackness extends to the ontological as well insofar as the Nothingness that is Blackness is closed off from the ontological proposition for being offered to Dasein. The Negro cannot approach the realm of humanity meant for Dasein principally because the Negro embodies a Nothingness that cannot be apprehended and is demeaned by traditional ontology. The Negro is schematized as physical Nothing in the ontological realm. A foundational aspect of ontological terror is ontology’s incapability to apprehend or ground Nothingness within its epistemic field of explanation and self-referential reification.
Ontology and metaphysics, according to Warren, does not, indeed cannot recognize itself in Blackness, and therefore, derides the Negro and laments the reality that it can never fully comprehend the Negro. Quoting Sylvia Winters, Warren exclaims, “the Negro Question cannot be a proper object of knowledge... the metaphysical problems that it carries are positioned outside the frames of epistemology and its attendant discourses.”6 One may say that the Negro is that Being which is excluded from the episteme of man or rather that Black Being is Being-outside-of-Dasein. The Nothingness that defines the Negro instantiates a condition that is obscure and sterile. As opposed to the dynamic Being categorized in Dasein as jotted out by Heidegger, Black folks represent as amorphous non-being as repetition or a falling so claims David Marriot.7 Hence “Blackness and ontology are unavailable for one another.”8 The violence that the Negro has endured in all facets of life is the physical manifestation of whiteness attempting to dominate the Blackness it cannot adjourn. What is more, the condition of Blackness as being-a-problem and being-Nothing is strange and inhuman by virtue of its exclusion of the ontological humanist project by definition. Despite this inhumanity of Blackness, our inquiry is served by a reflection of the very intentionality and construction of Black opposition to the ontological human scope that is made so, in large part, by anti-Blackness.
I have elaborated how Blackness has been conditioned ontologically to be inhuman and outside of the scope and intention of traditional ontometaphysical humanity as instantiated in Dasein. The Black person exists as Nothing which constitutes a problem. Black Nothingness is unavailable and unintelligible to ontology and as such, is not Dasein but [Nichte Da Sein] which is an entity that is absolutely closed off from ontology.9 The confrontation of this ontological terror is made manifest in the violence and hatred which expresses the obsession to eradicate and dominate the Black Nothingness that the white metaphysical realm cannot understand but also refuses to ignore. This understanding illuminates the inhumanity of Blackness, but to contemplate the humanity of anti-Blackness is to accept the very function and cultivation of Black Nothingness in metaphysics and for metaphysics’ purposes. Black Being in its numerous forms, as terror, a target of violence, as a problem, as a repetitious falling is the necessary invention of ontometaphysics, says Warren. Continuing with Heidegger, Warren views the construction of Black Nothingness as equipment, that is, a target and backdrop for violence. This use of Black equipment stems from a particular brand of anxiety experienced by the white collective and is then projected onto the Negro. What Fanon has noted as the “phobogenic object.”10 Because Nothingness is unintelligible to ontometaphysics but despised by it in equal measure, domination is the method whereby the white collective can ontologically justify the elusive substance of the Negro.
According to Warren, Blackness which is an ontological transposition of Nothingness, then further transposed into the Negro is the invention of modernity. The history of Blackness and its unsubtle conceptual forging into reified characteristics, categories, and psychic and cultural positions was the logical extension of the execration of African identity which predates modern conceptions and perceptions of Blackness. One could view these conceptions as the discursive production of the historical condition of the Black individual as “an adjunct to racial slavery”11 and its concomitant or subsequent social structures including American capitalism.
The crucial takeaway from this assertion is that the decimation of the African identity ceded the discursive and ontological territory for the creation and solidification of Black Nothingness. In this way, Black folks are stripped of their African being in favor of an inhuman being punctuated by Nothingness and violence. The purpose of this, however, lay in the intention of ontometaphysics to develop a functioning scapegoat.12 The Black Negro is the non-being created to be violated. The Black Negro is deliberately conceived in opposition to Dasein so that the “existential journey of the human being”13 can be fulfilled. To reintegrate, this fulfulfillment requires an oppositional frame of reference. Ontology requires and negation for its affirmation and the Black Negro was the quintessential embodiment of it. Part of the essence of Dasein consists in the notion that its journey relies on closing off being to the Negro it constructs. The terrorization, enmity, and obscurity experienced by the Black Negro is a mere contingency of the ontological terror produced by the execration of African being into Black Nothingness. The function of the Black Negro is to maintain, as it were, fulfill Dasein’s humanity.
Racism, Colonialism, and Devaluation
The construction of the double frame of oppositional reference was the foundational aspect of the ontological relation born from colonialism. Colonial racism is its single abiding intention. One of Warren’s central claims is that the execration of African being severed the ontological footing that Black folk possessed which, in turn, relegated them to an interstitial space of functional non-being or the excluded equipment of a modern ontological humanist order. Execration, I contend, is a process requiring intention. What this means for the relation between the Black Negro and the white oppressor who execrates his former being is that he plays an instrumental and visceral role in creating the Black Negro and has done so since the advent of colonialism. Colonialism of course, is not uniquely limited to the execration of Black folks but the context applied nonetheless. Colonialism was an enduring event implicating a distortion and eventual execration of being from one of Africanness to Black Nothingness. To my mind, this event cultivated our conceptual redoubled cultural paradigm. As Albert Memmi put it, “The colonial situation manufactures colonialists, just as it manufactures the colonized.”14
The violent origins of this squalid relation are what is of interest to us here. What the execration of African Being and the dehumanization process of the conversion of this Being into Nothingness requires the colonialist to recognize the African. Surprisingly, it was contained in Sartre’s introduction to Memmi’s masterwork that this process is captured so accurately. In Sartre’s words, “No one can treat a man like a dog without first regarding him as a man."15 The conversion into Black Nothingness in its strung out social and temporal struggles beginning with colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade entails a recognition of the African man in his true substance and then drew upon a subsequent desire for its obliteration. Indeed, ontology’s obsession with Black Nothingness, including its penchant for anti-Black violence in real and ontological terms is a perverse yet potent form of recognition for Nothingness. Recognition of its obscurity, recognition of its squalor, its vast emptiness, the terror it poses to the modern world of ontology that produced it.
What follows this recognition is the enmity of the colonial. What presupposes this enmity is the colonial’s alienation and devaluation. As Memmi notes, “Racism sums up and symbolizes the fundamental relation which united the colonialist and the colonized.”16 Slightly differing from Warren’s conception of anti-Blackness, Memmi means to suggest that racism defines the interpersonal metaphysical, relational frames of reference between the Colonizer and the colonized, exclusively in that order. The colonizer is the racist, for he recognizes the colonized and intends to, indeed succeeds at devaluing the colonized Black Negro. Racism is the valiant ontological process of execration into Blackness. The ontological or as Sartre and Memmi referred to it as, ideological components comprising colonial racism were “the gulf between the culture of the colonialist and the colonized; two, the exploitation of these differences for the benefit of the colonialist; three, the use of these supposed differences as standards of absolute fact."17 Memmi explicitly denied the suggestion that this constructed otherness was metaphysical in nature, opting instead for the sociological explanation buttressing conflations of colonial racism and capitalist exploitation. To be sure, other thinkers have established similar sociological linkages18 and the correlation between exploitation in this way cannot be denied. However, to suggest that this relation lacks a metaphysical tint is where Warren’s arguments become more forceful than Memmi’s.
While colonial racism was a socio-economic system, it can be said to be ontometaphysical in dimension as it involved the creation of the psychological systems of reference and Being between the colonizer and colonized mentioned by Memmi. On a purely ontological level, anti-Black violence is the consequence of the exploitation of these differences between modern ontology and African Being. This construction of difference is solidified within the condition of Black Nothingness and further perpetuated by anti-Blackness in all its inimical forms. In addition, colonial racism broaches the questions of ontology because its relations, and its systems of reference and double reference cannot come to be without the devaluation of negative recognition on the part of the colonizer. As the humanity of the African Negro and the subsequent Black Negro is put in view of the consciousness of the colonizer, that human essence is recognized and then sullied. As Sartre argues, the colonialist must evaluate the humanity of the colonized, that is understand the subject of his recognition to be human, and then refuse this notion. On this issue, Fanon is sharp. Fanon understood well that in the colonial situation, hatred wasn’t merely a given. Rather, the colonizer or Negrophobe suffers from the “struggle to acquire hatred” a hatred which “has to be dragged into being” and that “cries out to exist.”19
The Negrophobe must embody hatred to pull it off. Here Sartre goes further with a pivotal point about the ontology of this anti-Blackness. The colonial debases his consciousness with his embodied hatred. Sartre puts it well in saying:
The impossible dehumanization of the oppressed... becomes the alienation of the oppressor. It is the oppressor himself who restores, with his slightest gesture, the humanity he seeks to destroy; and, since he denies humanity in others, he regards it everywhere as his enemy. To handle this, the colonizer must assume the opaque rigidity and imperviousness of stone. In short, he must dehumanize himself...20
The work of dehumanization is inherently dehumanizing. It becomes the tireless work of the colonial and modern Negrophobe to denigrate value and suppress feelings of mutuality wherever he discovers it in the Black Negro. The chilling away of African identity was merely the inauguration of this irrevocable relation lasting from the events of colonialism and slavery and throughout the constructed history of the Black Negro. Therefore, as the ontological position of the Black Negro is Nothingness and the subject of metaphysical enmity, the position of the Negrophobe and ontology properly understood, according to Warren, is one of perpetual violence and embodied hatred, and so, one of inconceivable devaluation.
The Double Reference
Since his inception, the condition of the Black Negro has always been that of double reference. While we may have discussed the redoubled cultural paradigm and the antecedent devaluation of the colonialist and the colonized in earlier centuries as well as the Negrophobe and Negro in modernity, we have not yet broached the question of the Negro’s double reference. I argue that the Black Negro’s affliction is largely tied to his self-execration resulting from a mimetic double reference. In his work, Fanon repeatedly utilizes the notion of the inferiority complex of the colonized subject in modernity. It is not enough to say that anti-Black violence, as I have articulated it here, uproots the grounding of the Negro in the ontological realm. The Negrophobe is not capable of doing this on his own. Warren is mindful that to reduce negrophobic violence to political extermination is to misguidedly ignore the very purpose of anti-Blackness in an ontological which consists in the attempt to eradicate the obscure and evil Nothingness that is Blackness.21 Due to the hue and character of Black Nothingness, this is simply untenable, especially at the hands of the Negrophobe and his embodied hatred. After the execration of African Being since the events of colonialism and slavery by the colonial Negrophobe, the Black Negro is faced with his own execrations. The inferiority complex of the colonial subject, according to Fanon, is the creation of the racist. He sees “in this white gaze that it’s the arrival not of a new man, but if a new type of man, a new species.”22 Put simply, it is the racist relation, namely the racist, that creates the inferiority in the Black Negro.
This inferiority is created as a result of this relation, only for this relation to be carried further by the Black Negro as he spells his own destruction, indeed as he yearns for it. The double reference is a mimesis. A self-induced abnegation of Black Beings for whiteness. Fanon’s recount bare credence to the behaviors of Black folks in French colonies, namely Antillean peoples. His is a reflection of the irremediable tendency of colonized subjects to adopt European postures and values. To acculturate their languages, their intonations, their histories, and various mythologies deriving from European canons. The abnegation becomes visceral as the Negro seeks to dilute his biology and being through copulation and social intercourse with his white counterparts. The Mulatto woman, Fanon says, falls in love with the European man subtly attempting to gain admittance into the white world. The Black Negro renounces her hair and her skin by changing it to suit the fancies of the European. Self-rejection and love of another constitute assimilation. It is baked into the colonial cake and comprises part of the ontological terror of the constructed Black Negro since his subjugation from Africa.
It is precisely because this acculturation and assimilation consist in the translation of Black abnegation into the affirmation of white values and culture why this form of anti-Blackness is the most potent. The Negrophobe sews the seeds of inferiority only for the torch of negation and cultural neuroticism to be taken up by the Black Negro who begins to view himself as evil, as obscure, and in want of annihilation. The colonized person, or, in this context, the Black Negro, Memmi contends will hide “his past, his traditions... all his origins will have become ignominious.”23
Of course, this internalization of anti-Black racism is not initially perpetrated by Black folks, only adhered to. We have established the manifold social mechanisms born out of colonialism and transatlantic slavery which have ostensibly legitimated Black inferiority biologically and metaphysically. This inferiorization was touted through anti-Black pseudoscientific theories of eugenics and phrenology24 and the instantiation of this inferiority was buttressed through the codification of laws barring miscegenation and political participation, and the brutality of slavery, lynching, rape, and segregation was legitimized thereof. Fanon, along the same vein as Warren, would suggest that a society organized in this way draws upon the diminution of the Black Negro to sustain strength, actively cultivating the neurosis of the Negro for the fulfillment of both an ontological and political dynamic. We can agree that it is the European Negrophobe who initiates the execration of African Being and induces the inferiority complex in the Negro that exacerbates this process of execration. On the other hand, the European Negrophobe gives the Negro no choice. Inferiorization is not merely a volitional social circumstance, it is ontological. Self-execration illuminates the final stanza of ontological terror of the Black Negro unto himself. The European Negrophobe with its anti-Black violence instantiates a moral paradigm that sinks the ontological condition of Blackness into the depths of a Nothingness which is explicitly negative and incomprehensible. Blackness is ossified within an ontological frame that is placed in opposition to light, intelligibility, potentiality, and care. In a word, Blackness is ossified wishing an ontological frame that is placed in opposition to Dasein. The only choice left for the Black Negro is no choice at all. A situation is foisted upon him wherein the Black Negro struggles against his own image; where he flirts with his own condemnation, cementing the execration of his Africanness.
The Black Negro is steeped in ambiguity. He is perched on the fence of double reference to himself and the colonial image that is seethed into his consciousness. In having his predetermined Being execrated and then hollowed out he is forced to assume a white form which derides his very non-Being. The Black Negro is shelterless. By virtue of his existence, he is engaged in the symbolism of Black evil and obscurity. Conversely, his oppressors thrust upon him a racist relation of inferiority which sees himself negating himself in order to affirm a culture and ontology which is antithetical. This is why Fanon exclaims:
The Black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man. From one day to the next, the Blacks have had to deal with two systems of reference. Their metaphysics, or less pretentiously their customs and their agencies to which they refer, were abolished because they were in contradiction with a new civilization that imposed its own.25
To exist as the subject of double reference is to exist in exchange without standing. The Black Negro becomes objectified and is a neurotic object without footing in an ontology of his own. The colonial relation strips the Black Negro of an ontological refuge. Because we can view the double reference both culturally and ontologically, we can then broach the prospects of ontological atonement and Black freedom, as well as the contingencies that these are suffused with.
Black Freedom, Contingency, and Atoning for Ontological Terror
One engaging the edifice of anti-Black metaphysics which is simply ontometaphysics as currently constituted is eager to entertain ideas as to how the Black Negro can win his freedom, and, to go further, distill a new form of ontology that grounds Being in something rather than nothing. The crucial error of liberal humanism is its myopic grounding of freedom within the ontological realm of politics, suggesting that the Black Negro is free so long as his equality and rights are guaranteed when placed against another and codified within legal contexts. Warren is delicate in delineating the meaning of freedom with regard to the “free Black”. He notes that “to be free is... an onto-existential condition” in which the human engages in his primordial ontological, phenomenological, and axiological relations. These are projects engaging Being, consciousness, and an ethics of care and projectionality.26As we have come to discover, no such privileges exist for the Black Negro to the extent that his Being is conditioned on exclusion from ontometaphysics as such and this exclusion is the contingency upon which ontometaphysics is built. The execration of African Being and the enduring metaphysical Holocaust that has characterized Black existence.
Warren is charitable in warranting the potential for Black emancipation but highlights the shortcoming of political emancipation in resolving the metaphysical problematic of Black Nothingness which can neither be apprehended nor destroyed. To add to our difficulties, Fanon correctly raises the point in his text that true emancipation of Black people has never been fought for, only secured by white people whose interest it served or whose ethical woes it assuaged. In other words, like so many freedoms, the political and social emancipation of the Black Negro was enshrouded by contingency white moral revaluations.27
Assessing the landscape of the anti-Black metaphysical world is a tortuous entreaty. It reveals the deeply embedded roots of Black nihilism intrinsic to an ontological world that in every way is other to Black existence. But this is our lot. If Black freedom is our pursuit, we must engross ourselves in each of the dimensions that freedom presents itself in. In doing so, we find ourselves at an impasse. We have explored the ontological crevices of Black Nothingness and the racist colonial relation that invented it after obliterating African existence all those centuries ago. Contained in this pregnant relation is a redoubled cultural, psychological, and ontometaphysical paradigm between the negrophobic subject that imbibes hatred and obsession with respect to the Black Negro and, of course, the Black Negro herself who incessantly exists within self-referential neurosis of Black Being and Black abnegation. As Fanon claims, “The issue is knowing whether the Black man can overcome his feeling of abasement and expunge the compulsive characteristic that resembles so much that of the phobic.”28 Towards this unbearable rage, ambiguity, and insularity, Fanon cries out for reconciliation. He is clear in his ambition for “genuine communication to be born.”29 He understands that he bears no right or obligation to chastise or lament over history but only that his demand for mutual and reciprocal recognition be met.
Warren’s approach differs considerably. He seeks to reject humanism on the premise that any such intelligible humanism is crafted to remorselessly instigate Black Nothingness and all the alienation and violence this comes with. Both thinkers, as I suppose Memmi would be too, are pessimistic about freedom. On that note, where Fanon is hopeful about ontological reconciliation of Blackness with humanism, Warren sees only the torment and exhaustion of Black struggles for liberation amid a landscape of the consistent “systemic destruction of... soul, spirit, and psyche”30 which is the projection of ontological terror onto the free Black properly understood. To be sure, our discussion of Black freedom is not about the political, it scrutinizes the irreparable fissures between Being and Nothingness, Blackness and Humanity. Atoning for ontological terror is this discussion and sober in reflection, one finds that such atonement is null. There is no atonement for ontological terror, only the endurance that is the price of heroism and spirituality.31 And so, we ask, whither is he? The Black man, drowned in contingency, stolen from one home and denied another? I am here, I am now; “straddling the crossroads between Nothingness and Infinity.”32
Bibliography
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1952.
Marriott, David. “Waiting to Fall.” CR: The New Centennial Review 13, no. 3 (winter 2013): 163-240
Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.
Rothstein, Richard. The Colour of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 2017.
Wagner, Bryan. Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery. Cambridge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Warren, Calvin, L. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
Wolfe, Patrick. “Race and Racialisation: Some Thoughts.” Postcolonial Studies 5, no. 1 (2002): 51-62
1 Warren, Calvin, L. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.Pg.6.
2 Ibid, Warren. Pg. 15
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid, Warren. Pg. 37
5 Ibid, Warren; Wolfe, Patrick. “Race and Racialisation: Some Thoughts.” Postcolonial Studies 5, no. 1 (2002): 51-62; Rothstein, Richard. The Colour of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 2017.
6 Ibid, Warren. Pg. 30
7 Marriott, David. “Waiting to Fall.” CR: The New Centennial Review 13, no. 3 (winter 2013): 163-240
8 Ibid, Warren. Pg. 43
9 Ibid, Warren. Pg. 47
10 Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1952. Pg. 129
11 Wagner, Bryan. Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery. Cambridge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
12 Ibid Fanon, pg. 160
13 Ibid, Warren. Pg. 27
14 Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957. Pg. 56
15 Ibid, Memmi. Introduction by Sartre Pg. XXVII
16 Ibid, Memmi. Pg. 70
17 Ibid, pg. 7
18 Ibid, Wolfe 2002 & Wagner 2009
19 Ibid, Fanon. Pg. 35
20 Ibid, Memmi. Introduction by Sartre Pg. XXVIII
21 Ibid, Warren. Pg. 59
22 Ibid, Fanon. Pg. 95
23 Ibid, Memmi. Pg. 122
24 Ibid, Wolfe 2002.
25 Ibid, Fanon. Pg. 90
26 Ibid, Warren. Pg. 50
27 Ibid, Fanon. Pg. 194-195
28 Ibid Pg. 33
29 Ibid Pg. 206
30 Ibid, Warren. Pg. 169
31 Ibid Pg. 171
32 Ibid, Fanon. Pg. 120