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)
• Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
• None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Theory Q)
• Whither Fanon?: Studies in the Blackness of Being (Cultural Memory in the Present)
• Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being)
• In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
• Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies)
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
• Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (Sexual Cultures Book 14)