I assert that black suffering—especially in the figure of slain black bodies—indefinitely haunts the possibility of a post-apocalyptic political afterlife. What “black death” promises, instead, is a post-apocalyptic world without any signs of ethical transformation—that is, if we are willing to inflect the project of ethics in the Anthropocene with the radical politics it is much in need of. I do not think that my claims are far-fetched or simply a polemical attempt to insert matters of race in a discourse that promises—to use the language of feminist philosopher Nancy Tuana—“a new ontological appreciation of interrelations of humans, environments, and societies.” Racially driven police brutality, the criminalization of climate refugees along racial lines, neocolonial tourism, the outsourcing of toxicity and littering or the militarization of practices of resources extraction—all of which are performed in accordance with a very specific racial geography—deeply problematize what [Claire] Colebrook names the “fetish of unity.” To politicize the Anthropocene—or perhaps, more accurately, to politicize “ethics in the Anthropocene”—and, therefore, to avoid also the haunting setbacks of surrendering to a discourse’s mere potential to no transformative ends, will require—I think—refusing to lose sight of those for whom both the Anthropocene and its apocalyptic imaginaries do not necessarily hold any emancipating value. Given the pervasive silence on matters of race in this emerging discourse, nothing guarantees thus far that the world we could inherent, in the event of successful post-apocalyptic/post-Anthropocenean times, would de facto be non-racist.

In the corpus exanime, where we are riven in effigy, we are not dealing with phenomenological experience. For this experience is not one that can be experienced. There is no longer a body or flesh; there is no feeling of being flooded with sensations délicieuses, oblivious to time or thought. But this suffering that in turn suffers itself as a non-presence is an absolutely unavoidable “wreckoning,” so to speak. It is not the dialectical counterpart of sensibility, and we do not grasp it as a thought, as a category wrung out of us. The corpus exanime has no transitive verb. Nothing responds to this corpus exanime, but this judgement, you are less than; the voice of this judgement is understood and terrorizes because it comes to us from the community but not as the community, but from the whiteness of its law; it is the judgement of a gaze whose function fulfills a relation to the world picture: that is, it locates a point always exterior to the picture, but in relation to what is dead to representation, since the confirmation of something less than life makes the life of representation impossible.

Watching Love Island

But this connection is parasitic and perverse [...] because White and non-Black subjectivity cannot be imbued with the capacity for self-knowledge and intersubjective community without anti-Black violence; without, that is, the violence of social death. In other words, White people and their junior partners need anti-Black violence to know they're alive. If Hattie McDaniel were to truly die [...] it would be tantamount to the death of the parasite's host.

When violence is the law, and not the effect of its enforcement, it presents the rules of narrative with a crisis; because what we have is a situation that resists retelling, for the simple reason that the narrative's causal principle, the ghost in the machine we call causal logic (or "because principle") of the story, is missing. This is how a Black story is jinxed. There is no ghost in the machine; the reason for the violence is beyond the grasp of reason. There's nothing "universal" about it; therefore, the only way to make it intelligible is to leave out the parts that may only be accepted by another Black person, and even then discreetly.