#jared sexton

A living death is a much a death as it is a living. Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social) life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the codes of state and civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of people and place, of history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common with the colonized, of all that capital has in common with labor – the modern world system. Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space. This is agreed. That is to say, what Moten asserts against afro-pessimism is a point already affirmed by afro-pessimism, is, in fact, one of the most polemical dimensions of afro-pessimism as a project: namely, that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in social death. Double emphasis, on lived and on death. That's the whole point of the enterprise at some level. It is all about the implications of this agreed upon point where arguments (should) begin, but they cannot (yet) proceed.

What I assert is this: that black life—which is as surely to say life as black thought is to say thought—is irreducibly social; that, moreover, black life is lived in political death or that it is lived, if you will, in the burial ground of the subject by those who, insofar as they are not subjects, are also not, in the interminable (as opposed to the last) analysis, “death-bound,” as Abdul JanMohamed (2005) would say. In this, however, I also agree with Sexton insofar as I am inclined to call this burial ground “the world” and to conceive of it and the desire for it as pathogenic. At stake, now, will be what the difference is between the pathogenic and the pathological, a difference that will have been instantiated by what we might think of as the view, as well as the point of view, of the pathologist. I don’t think I ever claimed, or meant to claim, that Afro-pessimism sees blackness as a kind of pathogen. I think I probably do, or at least hope that it is, insofar as I bear the hope that blackness bears or is the potential to end the world. The question concerning the point of view, or standpoint, of the pathologist is crucial but so is the question of what it is that the pathologist examines. What, precisely, is the morbid body upon which Fanon, the pathologist, trains his eye? What is the object of his 'complete lysis' (Fanon 2008: xiv)? And if it is more proper, because more literal, to speak of a lysis of universe, rather than body, how do we think the relation between transcendental frame and the body, or nobody, that occupies, or is banished from, its confines and powers of orientation?

The dichotomy between white ethics and its irrelevance to the violence of police profiling is not dialectical; the two are incommensurable.

My Brothers Keeper, a White House initiative meant to ‘bolster and reinforce our African American boys… helping young African-American men feel that they’re a full part of this society,’ was Obama’s answer to George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the killing of Trayvon Martin in the summer of 2013. The official response  of the first black male president to the openly racist murder of a black male teenager was to redouble ex officio efforts among the rest of society to convince black male teenagers that they are educable and employable and therefore valued by the rest of society; as if the spectacular violence of a vigilante assault were a symptom of the victim’s education level or employment status…

Is it any surprise, in an anti-black world, that these gestures are confused by so many, those that mistake an invitation for a threat? How many have resented the invitation blackness makes and defended themselves against it with lethal consequence?

In a related move, Afro-Pessimism seeks to decenter, without diminishing, the analysis of political economy by discerning the libidinal economy that underwrites and sutures its dynamics. And so, in its formulation of power, and particularly of the nature and role of violence, Afro-Pessimism does not only describe the operations of systems, structures and institutions, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the fantasies of murderous hatred and unlimited destruction, of sexual consumption and social availability that animate the realization of such violence. It is an analysis, in other words, of how anti-black fantasies attain objective value in the political and economic life of society and in the psychic life of culture as well. Wilderson ponders, with respect to the medium and institution of cinema: "Can film tell the story of a sentient being whose story can be neither recognized nor incorporated into Human civil society"(96)? We may ask too, can art, literature, music, theater, or, for that matter, theory?