Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation

In Ontological Terror Calvin L. Warren intervenes in Afro-pessimism, Heideggerian metaphysics, and black humanist philosophy by positing that the "Negro question" is intimately imbricated with questions of Being. Warren uses the figure of the antebellum free black as a philosophical paradigm for thinking through the tensions between blackness and Being. He illustrates how blacks embody a metaphysical nothing. This nothingness serves as a destabilizing presence and force as well as that which whiteness defines itself against. Thus, the function of blackness as giving form to nothing presents a terrifying problem for whites: they need blacks to affirm their existence, even as they despise the nothingness they represent. By pointing out how all humanism is based on investing blackness with nonbeing—a logic which reproduces antiblack violence and precludes any realization of equality, justice, and recognition for blacks—Warren urges the removal of the human from its metaphysical pedestal and the exploration of ways of existing that are not predicated on a grounding in being.

• Stolen Life (consent not to be a single being)
• The Universal Machine (consent not to be a single being)
• Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being)
• Whither Fanon? (Cultural Memory in the Present)
• In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
• Alienation and Freedom
• Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series)
• The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise)
• Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation
• Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing