![]() ![]() ![]() The claim that humanity is made legible through the irreconcilable distinction between humans and blackness is one of the first principles of Afro-Pessimism, and it is supported by the argument that blackness is a paradigmatic position, rather than an ensemble of cultural, social, and sexual orientations. These irreconcilable regimes of violence create a structural antagonism between humans and blacks: the cultural production and ontological coherence of the human (the various incarnations of subaltern identities) are secured through the impossibility of analogizing violence that disciplines the subaltern with violence that positions the black (or slave). Furthermore, discursive capacity’s condition of possibility is vouchsafed not through speech (Lacan), nor in the inaugural division between proletariat and capitalist, arising from the reification of the commodity form (Marx), but in a prior distinction between the regime of violence that positions blackness and the regime of violence that disciplines human subjectivity. Afro-pessimists interrogate this optimism by arguing that the black (or slave) is an unspoken and/or unthought sentience for whom the transformative powers of discursive capacity are foreclosed ab initio-and that violence is at the heart of this foreclosure. At every scale of abstraction, from psychoanalysis’s topography of the psyche or the Bakhtinian chronotope, ascending to Gramsci’s civil society or the dream of a new, postindustrial commons calved from the glacier of globalization, cultural optimism, or optimism in culture’s emancipatory potential, prevails-as though the transformative powers of discursive capacity were hardwired into being itself. Afro-pessimists argue that critical theory’s lumping of blacks into the category of the human (so that black suffering is theorized as homologous to the suffering of, say, Native Americans or workers or nonblack queers, or nonblack women) is critical theory’s besetting hobble-a hobble subtending another false assumption: that all sentient beings possess the discursive capacity to transform limitless space into nameable place and endless duration into recognized and incorporated events. Most critical theorists are convinced that though structural violence performs differently on different populations (e.g., domestic violence against women in the home has a different performativity than the violence against striking workers), a common regime of violence (i.e., capitalism) undergirds the subjugation of all sentient beings, and, furthermore, it is assumed all sentient beings are human beings. Afro-pessimism is a lens of interpretation that accounts for civil society’s dependence on antiblack violence-a regime of violence that positions black people as internal enemies of civil society, and cannot be analogized with the regimes of violence that disciplines the Marxist subaltern, the postcolonial subaltern, the colored but nonblack Western immigrant, the nonblack queer, or the nonblack woman. ![]()
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