Ontological terror
Subtitle: blackness, nihilism, and emancipation
By: Calvin L. Warren
Contributors: Duke University Press
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 220
ISBN-13: 9780822370727; 9780822370871
Copyright date: 2018
Subjects: Political aspects; Blacks; Race identity; Racism; Race awareness; Race; Nihilism (Philosophy); Ontology
Description: The author intervenes in Afro-pessimism, Heideggerian metaphysics, and black humanist philosophy by positing that the "Negro question" is intimately imbricated with questions of Being. The author uses the figure of the antebellum free black as a philosophical paradigm for thinking through the tensions between blackness and Being. He illustrates how blacks embody a metaphysical nothing. This nothingness serves as a destabilizing presence and force as well as that which whiteness defines itself against. Thus, the function of blackness as giving form to nothing presents a terrifying problem for whites: they need blacks to affirm their existence, even as they despise the nothingness they represent. by pointing out how all humanism is based on investing blackness with non-Being - a logic which reproduces anti-black violence and precludes any realization of equality, justice, and recognition for blacks - the author urges the removal of the human from its metaphysical pedestal and the exploration of way of existing that are not predicated on grounding in Being.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages [201]-210) and index.
Table of contents: title: Acknowledgments; title: The free Black is nothing; title: The question of Black being; title: Outlawing; title: Scientific horror; title: Catachrestic fantasies; title: Adieu to the human; title: Notes; title: Bibliography; title: Index.