#vattimo

Anti-blackness is the residue that remains, the intransigent substance that makes it impossible to destroy metaphysics completely. The black nihilist must confront this residue, but with the understanding that the eradication of this residue would truly end the world itself. Black emancipation is world destructive; it is not an aperture or an opening for future possibilities and political reconfigurations (Wilderson 2010). The ‘end of the world’ that Vattimo envisions does not take into account that pulverized black bodies sustain the world—its institutions, economic systems, environment, theologies, philosophies, and so forth. Because anti-blackness infuses itself into every fabric of social existence, it is impossible to emancipate blacks without literally destroying the world. Moreover, this means that black emancipation will not yield a new world or possibilities for reorganization—black emancipation is the nihilistic ‘solution’ that would destroy the field of all possible solutions. In this sense, black emancipation becomes something like death for the world—with all its Heideggerian valences.

Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God… is in no way comprehensible as a metaphysical assessment of the non-existence of God (as if there were a ‘structure’ of Being in which God cannot exist); it is a real announcement, the ‘narration’ of a ‘fact’ or, at least, of an experience that humanity, or Western culture, has undergone. This ‘fact’ proves nothing in the strictly logical sense of the word; it is cited as a rhetorical appeal, as a way to persuade by referring to an experienced which everyone is assumed to have had… This appeal to fact and experience implies a sort of paradoxical historicism, as if one were to say that we must think this or that because an event, the death of God, has occurred. If God is dead, that is, if foundational thought has been dissolved by the experiences of philosophical reason in the course of history, then the only way of ‘proving’ a thesis is to appeal to these experiences. In a sense, then, we have to conform to a ‘logic’ which is inscribed only in the course of events, to which we cannot object in the name of some different legitimacy.

In Nietzsche’s terms, thought does not return to the origin in order to appropriate it; all that it does is travel along the multiple paths of errancy, which is the only kind of wealth and the only kind of Being which is ever given to us.

…This is also the meaning of the Ereignis in many ways, the idea that Being is the event, just what happened.

…[to] find a new “disposition” for the relation between philosophy and society

…the strong frameworks of metaphysics (archai, Grund, primary evidences, and ultimate destinies) are only forms of self-assurance for epochs in which technology and social organisation failed to render us capable of living in a more open horizon, in a horizon less “magically” guaranteed. The ruling concepts of metaphysics turn out to be means of discipline and reassurance that are no longer necessary in the context of our present-day organisational capability of technology.

“…death of God, which is at once the culmination and conclusion of metaphysics, is also the crisis of humanism…”