#black optimism

“Blackness is so fugitive, in other words, that it escapes even the concept that seeks to make sense of it. And as with fact/experience, Fanon pulls out the ontological rug from under the broader optimism/pessimism binary. “Fanonism begins,” Marriott writes, “at the point where both optimism and pessimism become impossible” (216). The question of sovereignty, moreover, gives us a glimpse into what Marriott’s distance from Afropessimism means concretely. Afropessimist critiques of Indigenous theory and struggles, for example, leverage the erroneous idea that sovereignty is reducible to its modern/western form. But as Fanonian scholars are quick to recognize that violence is qualitatively transformed in the hands of the colonized, so too sovereignty, which is not a singular thing, impervious to quality, content, or context. This is why Fanon himself continues to use the word, but also to resignify it as synonymous with the practical dignity of the oppressed (Wretched 139). While Marriott seems to perpetuate this view, we’re concerned less with the word than the thing, and his pivot from disarticulation to rearticulation, from abyss to invention, makes clear that we’re not operating on the terrain of pessimism. Navigating the turbulent straits between optimism and pessimism, Marriott concludes that “blackness can only find its ontological fulfillment by no longer being black—or by entering its own abyssal significance” (Whither Fanon? x). But this “self-oblivion” should not be understood as ceding to the parameters of the antiblack world, since blackness cannot simply melt into whiteness without revealing that the white world stands on feet of clay, utterly reliant on (anti)blackness for its meaning. This is what Fredric Jameson would call the “secret conceptual and even dialectical weakness” of all racial, and more broadly Manichaean, orders, the hidden strength of their apparently weak term (19). To obliterate blackness is to touch on an unpredictable chain reaction that, while not anchored in a solid thing, is always more than pure negativity as well—this is an abyss that remains “penetrated by dark potentialities” (Marriott, Whither Fanon? xix). By refusing the optimism/pessimism binary, and by walking the fine line between the negative and the positive, the abyss and black identity, Marriott thus leaves the reader with a far more dynamic picture than the irretrievably antiblack world of Afropessimism’s ontological straitjacket.”

Black optimism and Afro-pessimism are asymptotic. Which one is the curve and which one is the line? Which is the kernel and which is the shell? Which one is rational, which one is mystical? It doesn’t matter. Let’s just say that their nonmeeting is part of an ongoing manic depressive episode called black radicalism / black social life. Is it just a minor internal conflict, this intimate nonmeeting, this impossibility of touching in mutual radiation and permeation? Can pessimists and optimists be friends? I hope so. Maybe that’s what friendship is, this bipolarity, which is to say, more precisely, the commitment to it. To say that we are friends is to say that we want to be friends. I want to try to talk about the nature and importance of the friendship I want, that I would like us to have, that we are about to have, that in the deepest sense we already more than have, which is grounded in and enabled by that commitment even as it is continually rethought and replayed by way of our differences from one another, which is held within and holds together our commonness

But it is the beauty...of Afro-pessimism that allows and compels one to move past that contradictory impulse to affirm in the interest of negation and to begin to consider what nothing is, not from its own standpoint or from any standpoint but from the absoluteness of its generative dispersion of a general antagonism that blackness holds and protects in as critical celebration and degenerative and regenerative preservation.

This capacity for cartographic coherence is the things itself, that which secures subjectivity for both the Settler and the 'Savage' and articulates them to one another in a network of connections, transfers and displacements" (Wilderson 2010: 181). Absent the "cartographic coherence [that] is the things itself," we must become interested in things, in a certain relationship between thingliness and nothingness and blackness that plays itself out–outside and against the grain of the very idea of self-determination–the unmapped and unmappable immanence of undercommon sociality.

to trace beauty in ugliness

“this bitter earth is the best of all possible worlds”