Black Execration

January 4, 2021 Posted by Webmaster under Volume 29, Number 3, May 2019

Parisa Vaziri (bio)

A review of Warren, Calvin. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Duke UP, 2018.

Plumbing Frantz Fanon’s frequently cited but not always well elaborated pronouncement that “ontology does not allow us to understand the being of the Black man” (90), Calvin Warren’s Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation brings to bear a black archive upon the work of one of ontology’s most important critics and thinkers: Martin Heidegger. Warren’s premise, which unfolds throughout his book, is that black being, stricken in execration, registers the unthought of metaphysics and its philosophical afterlives. Thus, he launches a unique form of critique potent enough to surprise and inspire both avid and indifferent readers of Heidegger, while contributing—in a highly original way—to a robust lineage of black engagement with canonical Western philosophy.

Each chapter of Ontological Terror pursues distinct domains (philosophy, law, science, and visual culture) through the historical example of the antebellum free black, which Warren instructively transforms into a philosophical paradigm: the free black allegorizes the “problem of metaphysics” (51). Deactivated from its historical context, the figure of the free black illuminates its own truth—a truth which resides in this possibility of deactivation. This paradigm defines Warren’s experiment with historico-philosophical exemplarity. If, like Warren, we understand freedom as more than a legal or empirical condition, then black freedom disintegrates in the antiblackness of World; this proposition conditions the substrate of Ontological Terror. It also informs Warren’s important contention that philosophical anthropology is rarely guided by black archives, reducing black history to the inchoate swell of empirical and irrelevant data. Warren takes on the writing of a number of inheritors of Heidegger’s thought (“postmetaphysicians” [5]) to discuss the status and necessity of riven black being in the project of Being’s unveiling. His text assumes a minimal familiarity with Heideggerian language and a decidedly greater immersion in contemporary discourses in Black studies, notably, Afro-pessimism. This anomalous set of expectations may posit an idiosyncratic readership, but it also projects a new region of possibility toward which Warren wishes to guide the future of black thinking.

Chapter One, “The Question of Black Being,” builds a case for the distinction between human and black being that is important for Heideggerian philosophical thought. Heideggerian thought, through its deep engagement with the question of being and metaphysical violence, helps to clarify this distinction in powerful ways. Through the history of African slavery, Warren reinterprets Heidegger’s famous arguments that technology is an aid to the human’s approximation of Being. Since chattel slavery murders “African existence” and produces the “Negro” as “available equipment … for the purpose of supporting the existential journey of the human being” (27), black being is itself a technology in service of Dasein’s movement toward Being. Warren’s limited explication of Heidegger’s complex position on both technology and Dasein contains and tempers the power of his propositions, which nevertheless remain highly significant. The Afropessimist refrain that antiblackness is necessary to the coherence of global civil society resounds, now, in the analogous necessity of technology and black being. But the impossibility of showing this necessity remains a problem that repetition cannot resolve. To succeed as a proposition, this impossibility demands a stronger thematization.

In Chapter Two, “Outlawing,” the work of Oren Ben-Dor (Thinking about Law) and Jean-Luc Nancy (The Birth to Presence) on abandonment offers occasion to elaborate Warren’s sometimes contradictory claim that Heideggerian ontological difference both depends upon and absolves blackness. Abandonment clarifies a counterintuitive dimension of black invisibility. For Ben-Dor and Nancy, the law of abandonment describes Being’s doubled movement of withdrawal and unfolding: a doubling that produces invisibility as the demand to see. To this formulation, Warren adds the “not seeing … of the non-place”: the outlawing of black being, which clarifies that “black being … is without a world” (Ontological Terror 70). Black invisibility describes the non-seeing of its non-worldliness and the lack of “there-ness” that is the condition of blackness. Here, as elsewhere in the book, the full relation between Warren’s formulation and those of his interlocutors is not as clear as it might be. Is his insistence on the outlawing of black being simply inspired by Ben-Dor and Nancy’s writing, or is Warren suggesting that these thinkers misrecognize a crucial dimension of Heidegger’s work on Being—a dimension to which Heidegger too remains blind? Warren’s transitional phrasing elicits such questions. He calls outlawing an “additional problematic” (70) and suggests that Ben-Dor “provides a hermeneutic” (73) with which to discuss it, leaving the relation between blackness and Heideggerian abandonment ambiguous. Even in the introduction, he implies an integration that is not fully explained—perhaps, not fully explainable: “the Negro is the missing element in Heidegger’s thinking (as well as in that of those postmetaphysicians indebted to Heidegger” (9). Elsewhere Warren adds parenthetically that “Heidegger’s philosophy … can be read as an allegory of antiblackness and black suffering—the metaphysical violence of the transatlantic slave trade” (9). How is the reader to reconcile the “missing element” with Warren’s claim for allegory? Such questions remain latent in the text, coalescing in unexpected places, thus demanding and also producing patient readership.

In the second half of the chapter, Warren explains that a move from the ontological to the ontic register of law shows a lack of ontological difference for blackness. He shifts from the law of abandonment to the Dred Scott case—an ontic, legal iteration. Through a close reading of Chief Justice Roger Taney’s language in the Dred Scott case, Warren reads the historical event of slave emancipation as an ontological black condition (nonrelation; nothing), suggesting a fundamental distinction between freedom and emancipation (I will return to the challenges inherent in using historical examples this way, particularly in light of Heidegger’s singular and difficult position on history and Being). According to Warren’s reading of Taney’s language, blacks emerge through modernity as merchandise; their ontological origins as objects debilitate any future political standing for them. Blackness has no place within human relationality and community. Thus it has no place in the world, at either the level of Being or of being, for “the Negro is a saturation of abject historicity and worldlessess; the Negro is the ‘thing’ whose ancestors were imported and sold” (82). Blackness is between thing, animal and human—a theme Warren revisits in each chapter.

As he does with the concept of abandonment, Warren blackens Nancy’s notion of suspension, rethinking its Heideggerian sense of lawfulness in light of American history. For Nancy, suspension conditions and names the difference between undecidability and indecision that allows for Being’s unfolding, while decision closes off Being in an act of self-assurance and security. Warren divines, in “suspension,” the terror of legal emancipation and the transposition of the slave master’s ownership of the slave to the state’s management of blacks’ social condition: “emancipation simply transfers property rights to the state” (97). Warren shows, through historiographical commentaries, that manumission depended on the state’s consent and that the state recognized, in slave emancipation, a major threat to civil society: “the evil of the free Negro … that invades” society (97). Warren calls this suspended freedom, between belonging to the slave master and belonging to the antiblack state, “black time” (97), and develops it in his remarkable essay of the same name. Black time includes the impossibility of self-restoration that Warren sees symbolized in the figure of the freedom paper—the “materialization of this self-as-property” (100)—and in the phenomenon of kidnapping. According to Warren, both of these historical concepts manifest paradigms, showing that the black continues to live for a white civil society, “suspended ontometaphysically” (101), in wait of judgment and death. Just as freedom papers could be easily ignored or destroyed, so kidnappers frequently abducted free blacks, particularly along the Mason-Dixon Line, often targeting children.1

Warren’s analysis focuses exclusively on the antebellum South, but he claims his insights on post-abolition culture carry an analytic force that transcends geotemporal specificity. Though his own evidence for this transcendence is limited to modern American history, the claim is compelling and can instruct scholars of comparative slavery. For example, both freedom papers and kidnapping have cognates in post-abolition cultures of Indian Ocean slavery. As Ehud Toledano and Liat Kozma document, manumitted black slaves were regularly kidnapped and resold in Ottoman territories, and slaveholders considered so-called manumission papers a mere formality that could be ignored (Toledano 199). Ottoman officials showed little concern when cases of kidnapping were reported. The documentation of such cases shows that, like their American counterparts, African slaves in the Ottoman empire often witnessed their manumission papers—and, thus, freedom—shredded before their eyes. Warren uses these examples to abstract historical events into a theory of ontological terror. This is the idea that “the essence of kidnapping is not legal, but ontometaphysical,” for “[one] experiences terror precisely because one never knows when this self will be targeted, or when one will be forced to prove the improvable” (107). Historians of Indian Ocean slavery can learn from Warren’s anti-historicist handling of historical facts.

In Chapter Three, “Scientific Horror,” Warren brings perceptive clarity to the refractory proximity between Heideggerian terminology and discourses of blackness. The challenge for the reader, in this chapter, lies in intuiting how to navigate frictive, seemingly irreconcilable ideas. Warren suggests that blackness is nothing, but also that science projects nothing onto blackness in order to master it. He claims that nothing is the “essence of science—the void, the abyss” (111), and also that science desires “substitutes or embodied projections of this nothing” (111). Blackness embodies this monstrous nothing that is both scientific essence and that which science abhors. Again, Warren’s use of historical examples fortifies what initially appear as wild speculations. He presents a number of antebellum cases which he treats with uncompromising care: the case of Joe, a “young Negro” (112) on a Charleston plantation who claimed and believed that he was dead, and whom his doctor, W.T. Wragg, diagnosed with mental alienation and treated through repeated bleeding, blistering, purging; Benjamin Rush’s medical thesis that leprosy both causes and is the origin of blackness2; Dr. Samuel Cartwright’s study on drapetomania, the fugitive’s pathology—the disease that causes a slave to desire escape—and dysaesthesia aethiopica, mental hebetude or black “rascality” (125); and the 1840 decennial census which collected information about insanity and in whose statistical logic Warren perceives a sharp, “causal relationship between emancipation and insanity” (132). Warren also spends (less) time examining more familiar instances of illicit scientific experimentation on black bodies: Dr. J. Marion Sim’s experiments with gynecological surgical techniques on un-anesthetized black women; the federally backed Tuskegee study, which exploited black sharecroppers in pursuit of research on syphilis and left the study’s subjects to die, uncured and uninformed about their condition; black female sterilization; and modern theories of racial inferiority and intelligence.

Blackness enthralled not only 19th century science but also 18th century philosophy. Although he does not make it explicit, this observation connects Warren’s third chapter with a larger body of race scholarship that implicates this fascination and its perverse, still unrealized consequences for the origins of the humanities. If the title of Benjamin Rush’s 1799 “Observations Intended to Favor a Supposition That the Black Color (As It Is Called) of the Negroes Is Derived from Leprosy” sounds absurd to contemporary readers, Warren’s analyses demonstrate that to ignore such texts as iterations of antiquated pseudoscience is to disavow a crucial stage in the history of modern science. In Toward a Global Idea of Race, Denise Ferreira da Silva demonstrates the sacrifice of rigor for race scholarship that such disavowal entails. In the late 18th century, obsessions like Rush’s were common, and supported the great critical project of modernity. Race scholarship that focuses on this fascination shows that the Kantian critiques emerged alongside Kant’s infatuation with the concept of race.3 More specifically, in lectures on anthropology at the University of Königsberg and in published essays such as “Of the different races of human being” (1775), “Determination of the concept of a human race” (1785), and “On the use of teleological principles in philosophy” (1788), Kant’s fixation on blackness (e.g. why black people are black) informs a crucial distinction between theory and empirical observation (natural history and natural description) that elicits speculation both about the relationship between blackness and critique and between the theory of black skin and teleology. Blackness offers, to philosophy, a fantasy playground for the exploration of causality, mechanism, classification, and, crucially, purposiveness—the route to the transcendental. What Warren’s chapter helps to show is the cryptic, common context of this perverse scientific obsession with black skin: the originary antiblackness of modernity.

This scientific fascination with blackness offers sounder insight into the constitutive relation between blackness and universal science than Warren’s more sensational references to phlebotomy, or “rubbing away” (141). Rush and Wragg’s cures—gruesome-sounding for modern readers—lose some of their depravity in a larger historical context where bloodletting and leeching were common medical practice. This larger context depletes some of the theoretical force drawn from details in Warren’s examples in “Scientific Horror.” The difference in framing symptomatizes the precarity of historical examples as the ground of theory. For history, the meanings examples produce are always vulnerable to dissolution by more history. On the other hand, I believe aspects of Warren’s theory of black time, if enlarged, might protect his historical examples from the self-evidence of specificity and context, or historicism. Black time feels like the auspicious beginning of a unique articulation of historicity.4 Black time embodies the incapacity for orientation that renders all history a kind of vertiginous fall into antiblackness. This embodiment becomes truer the less attached we are to the idea that modernity is merely an enclosed temporal period, rather than the ground of our historical thought and comprehension of historicity. It is precisely this dimension of modernity, magnified in Western philosophy’s articulation of the relationship between universal science and historicity from Hegel to Heidegger, that renders scholarship like Warren’s absolutely crucial. The question of the status of blackness inside the articulation of science and historicity is still relatively unexplored. As the ground of future research, it bears major theoretical consequences for how to think the relationships between subjectivity, universality, blackness, and history.

Warren’s fifth chapter, “Catachrestic Fantasies,” reads an archive of mid-19th century illustrated journalism, including Edward Clay’s “Life in Philadelphia Series,” political caricatures published by Currier and Ives, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, and Harper’s Weekly. The illustrations, and images more generally, issue philosophical pronouncements entangled in antiblack fantasy and desire that reproduce the impasse of the free black. In an 1863 Harper’s Weekly cartoon, a black man with his head held high pops his collar while addressing a group of farm animals. The caption reads, “I ain’t one of you no more. I’se a Man, I is!” Warren sees the illustration as a statement of the ontometaphysical status of “this new creature,” the free black who “lacks a place within the world … [and is] in the interstice of existence” (153), between human and animal. In the foreground of a battlefield illustration, a soldier straps a cannon to a smiling, bare-footed black man seated on the grass. Around him black men are similarly strapped to weapons. The caption reads: “Dark Artillery; or, How to Make the Contrabands Useful,” referring to the Union’s strategic use of “confiscated” runaway slaves for warfare. Warren reads the black man’s smile to suggest obsequiousness, as well as “the masochistic embrace of destruction,” combining the two as a demand or obligation to enjoy one’s annihilation and nonbeing. As he says, “the smile gets us to the essence of the image. What the black weapon is smiling at is nothing” (160). Through these selective examples, Warren argues that “The black body is finished” (160). By this, he means to refuse gestures of rehabilitation, creation, and claims to transgression that he sees exemplified in black humanist scholarship. For Warren, antiblack fantasy circulates in an ether beyond representation. Representation may be one particularly violent manifestation of antiblack fantasy, but the essence of this fantasy lies not in the production of images but in destruction and annihilation. Antiblack fantasy is the projection of nothingness onto blackness and the repetitive destruction of that nothingness—the obliteration of black being.

The transcendentalizing of black suffering may appear dogmatic to readers unfamiliar with Afropessimist thought, and criticism of this body of work—most frequently affiliated with the work of Frank B. Wilderson III—indeed centers on the discomfort, even anger, such absolutism produces.5 Warren’s underlying premise—that unsubsiding reflection on black suffering refigures the meaning of being—grows out of a broader movement of black scholarship that has become affiliated with, appropriated by, or vitalized and inspired by Wilderson’s work in recent years. Names that have become associated with Afropessimist thinking, regardless of these scholars’ endorsements, criticisms, or rejections of Afro-pessimism, recur in Warren’s citational practices without qualification: Hortense J. Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald Judy, Nahum Chandler. To the extent that it inadvertently performs the cohesion of such internally conflicted assemblage or—more powerfully—to the extent that it follows a trajectory of relentless exposure of the structure of antagonism that characterizes the Human-Black (non)relation, Warren’s book is thoroughly Afropessimist. But by taking up ontology explicitly at the register of philosophical discourse and engaging one of philosophy’s most important thinkers of ontology, Warren’s book appears to avoid an abiding suspicion about Afro-pessimism, namely that it reduces ontology to a moralistic logic.6 Afro-pessimism, in turn, invites this concern about a reduction of ontology to ethics precisely because of its claim to speak in ontological terms, where ontology sacrifices some of its rigor in a proliferation whose self-evidence is rarely questioned or thematized: “ontology of suffering,” “ontology of captivity,” “‘Savage’ ontology,” etc.7

The commentary on Heideggerian thinkers in the first part of Ontological Terror suggests not only a serious engagement with Heidegger’s thinking about ontology but a desire to intervene in its scholarship. Precisely because of his sophisticated grasp of Heidegger’s oeuvre, a number of Warren’s moves in Ontological Terror might confound readers interested in the Heideggerian aspect of his work. Heidegger famously distinguishes Being from beings. Reserving a grandeur for the former, Warren’s writing illustrates that unique beingness of the human, whose historicity builds its proximity to Being. Dasein’s distinction from ordinary being threatens to make redundant Warren’s insistence on writing black being under erasure. It is precisely the black’s non-humanness, its non-Daseinness, its being ready-to-hand that Warren wishes to highlight with the negative cipher. Perhaps the case distinction of “being” captures this difference well enough, without the accessory of the bar. In Heidegger’s 1955 Zur Seinsfrage, addressed to Ernst Jünger, he also crosses out das Sein to “neutralize” its object-ness, suggesting crossing-through as a polyvalent grammatical action in need of powerful justification to succeed rhetorically (Derrida 21).

Heidegger’s idiosyncratic terminology makes instances like this inevitable. The special sense Heidegger intends by the word existence is similarly obscured in Warren’s usage when he repeats, at a crucial moment, that “blacks lack being but have existence” (12). This is a crucial moment because Warren counters the obvious charge that Being, by definition, includes everything, including black people—though Being is not a totality, especially not a totality of beings. Dasein’s existence in Heidegger belongs to the etymological sense of ek-sist: to stand forth from a past heritage and to project future possibilities. In sections of Being and Time, existence designates this futural mode of Dasein (Polt 34). The special sense in which Heidegger takes up the term existence, and its translated grammatical variations—”existential,” “existentiell,” etc.—opposes Warren’s intention, that “[blacks] inhabit the world in concealment and non-movement” (13). Instead, black time describes the impossibility of black existence—of “Temporality without duration” (Ontological 97): no heritage (obliterated by the Middle Passage), no future (impossibility of freedom, terror of emancipation), and no present (life in suspension, exposure to kidnapping and death). The black “is nothing—the nonhuman, equipment, and the mysterious” (Ontological 15). Blackness fuels the quest for Being, and it does so precisely through its blackness—a kind of absence and excess of form: “The Negro is black because the Negro must assume the function of nothing in a metaphysical world. The world needs this labor” (6).

More significantly, because of Warren’s recurring emphasis on projection of nothing onto blackness, readers might expect a clearer articulation of the meaning of “nothing” (das Nichts, in Heidegger). This meaning is far from self-evident, and its minimal elaboration makes Warren’s writing susceptible to the same kind of broad, sweeping dismissals that banished Heidegger from the analytic tradition. As Richard Polt writes, it was the precarity of Nothing in What is Metaphysics? that frustrated Anglo-American philosophers, who could not fathom, in Nothing, meaning independent of negation and denial (123). This is a charge of illogic against which Heidegger defends in the text itself. For Heidegger, Nothing bears a sense that is irreducible to pure negation, even if it is not a thing. He says that Nothing is the only “other” to Being (Heidegger 83), that “even Nothing ‘belongs’ to ‘Being'” (89), and that “true talk of Nothing” lends itself to dissolution (30)—it is always unfamiliar. Heidegger’s opening sentence to Introduction to Metaphysics—”Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” (1)—extends the enigmatic integrity of Nothing to beings. In the first section of this concise book, Heidegger expounds, in detail, upon the “embellishing flourish” (24) in the interrogative sentence. He ultimately concludes that the phrase “instead of nothing” is what charges the question with its force, shaking all beings in the extreme insecurity of vacillation between being and a fall into nothing. It is because Heidegger prioritizes the mystery of his own use of Nothing that Warren’s underdeveloped engagement with the Heideggerian sense of the term, despite its centrality to his own argument, is disappointing.

Warren’s ongoing interpellation of those with or, respectfully, against whom he writes shapes the reader’s global orientation toward his project and circumscribes a critique of a field he designates “black humanism”: a body of scholarship that employs humanist tools (historiography, ethnography, statistical research, literary formalism) in black archives without asking how “the metaphysical holocaust” of blackness recursively bears upon the very methods used to describe and represent it. This is one of the more concrete contributions the book offers to Black studies (though the valorization of the concrete, as well as disciplinary progress, are both at stake as problems in Warren’s work). Equally importantly, Warren explicitly rejects “the humanist fantasy (or narcissism) that anything humans have created can be changed. Some creations are no longer in the hands of humans, for they constitute a horizon, or field, upon which human existence itself depends. Antiblackness is such a creation” (24). Framed this way, the intransigence of antiblackness articulates a useful response to the logic certain apocalyptic discourses wield in order to distinguish their often colorblind urgency from the supposedly dated and dating concerns of race scholarship more generally. Warren extinguishes the exhausted assumptions of change that fuel humanist thought about race, and thus crafts a form of urgency independent of duration and temporality.8 Antiblackness is a war without end.

Ontological Terror is an experiential kind of text in that it has the potential to fully absorb its reader into its strong gravity. I attribute its sometimes repetitive quality to the immersive, soberly meditative nature of the book. At the same time, when repetition replaces elaboration, as I have suggested it sometimes does, it produces a feeling of anxious anticipation for an analysis that awaits ripening. To this extent, Warren’s appeal, in the book’s coda, for an “ontological revolution,” for black thinking to “imagine black existence without Being” (171), and to disinvest from humanism and the human suggests Ontological Terror itself as the transformative groundwork for a future of inquiry that will “imagine existence anew” (172).

Footnotes

1. See Carol Wilson’s Freedom at Risk and Rothman’s Beyond Freedom’s Reach.

2. Inspired by the case of Henry Moss’s vitiligo (spontaneous depigmentation), Rush thought that black skin could whiten and that blackness could be cured—again, depleting bleeding black bodies.

3. Robert Bernasconi is, perhaps, the best known figure associated with this scholarship, though interest in Kant and race has continued to grow over the past two decades. See Bernasconi, Race; Eigen and Larrimore, The German Invention of Race; David Lloyd, Race Under Representation; Mensch, Kant’s Organicism. Some articles published on this topic within the past few years include Hoffman, “Kant’s Aesthetic Categories”; Zhavoronkov and Salikov, “The Concept of Race in Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology”; Sandford, “Kant, Race, and Natural History”; Terada, “The Racial Grammar of Kantian Time”; and Hong, “Kant’s Critical Philosophy and Race Theory.”

4. See David Marriott’s Wither Fanon? for work on race and psychoanalysis belonging to this radical rethinking of historicity.

5. For a moralizing critique of Wilderson that reflects the incensing power of Afro-pessimism, see Greg Thomas, “Afro-Blue Notes.”

6. See Marriott’s review of Wilderson’s Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms in “Black Cultural Studies,” 46-49.

7. For a helpful summary of Afro-pessimism’s relation to political ontology, see Kline’s “The Pragmatics of Resistance.”

8. Warren explores this exhaustion of temporality in “Black Time.”

Works Cited

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  • Eigen, Sara and Mark J. Larrimore. The German Invention of Race. State U of New York P, 2006.
  • Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove P, 2008.
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  • Kozma, Liat. “Black, Kinless, and Hungry: Manumitted Female Slaves in Khedival Egypt.” In Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Ninteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean. Edited by Walz, Terence and Kenneth M. Cuno, American U in Cairo P, 2010.
  • Lloyd, David. Under Representation: the Racial Regime of Aesthetics. Fordham UP, 2019.
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  • —. Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being. Stanford UP, 2018.
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  • Terada, Rei. “The Racial Grammar of Kantian Time.” European Romantic Review, vol. 28, no. 3, 2017, pp. 267–278.
  • Thomas, Greg. “Afro-blue notes: The death of afro-pessimism (2.0)?” Theory & Event, 21(1), pp. 282–317.
  • Toledano, Ehud R. As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East. Yale UP, 2007.
  • Warren, Calvin. “Black Time: Slavery, Metaphysics, and the Logic of Wellness. The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture, edited by Colbert, Soyica Diggs, et al. Rutgers UP, 2016.
  • —. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Duke UP, 2018.
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