Ontological Terror

Abstract

This book is born out of numerous conversations, spirited debates, noetic experiments, and silent reflections. My intention is to reinvigorate and expand a philosophical field, one often neglected and ignored: black nihilism. The thinking here represents my attempt to center the ontological crisis blackness presents to an antiblack world. This is a difficult task, and many have provided intellectual and emotional support to accomplish it. I am grateful for those who have endured my negativity, unconventional thinking, and exasperation. It takes an exceptional constitution to support a nihilistic thinker, especially when the very ground upon which the support is extended is also called into question. Words are inadequate to express my deep gratitude for those willing to travel to the depths with me, the "valley of the shadow of death," and think what seems ineffable.Identifying origins is always difficult, since innumerable factors influence the emergence of thought, but Yale University has been formative in my thinking. I would like to thank Dr. Robert Stepto and Dr. Glenda Gilmore for supporting my graduate work. Dr. Diane Rubenstein's rigorous postmodern/psychoanalytic engagement and intellectual generosity have cultivated my thinking since I was an undergraduate, and I continue to learn from her work. I am exceptionally grateful for her continued support. Dr. Hortense Spillers has left an indelible imprint on my thinking and has provided me with a model of intellectual courage, excellence, and generosity. We all need intellectual aspirations, and she constitutes such an aspiration in my life. I hope that this project reflects my deep indebtedness and admiration for her philosophical contributions.

Stories We Tell

“…In light of such incongruence, social work is confronted with having to either alter its existing professional and pedagogical models, resign its current identity, or mute its detractors. If defaulting to the last option, the voices and positional knowledge of those who are not only in the profession but best situated to testify to its internal dissonance must be marginalized, muted, or omitted (Warren, 2018). Within this context, intentional or not, the presence and more specifically the voices of Black social work faculty, serve to disrupt and undermine the legitimacy of the existing social work project (Harney & Moten, 2013;Lomax, 2018;Moten 2018;Warren, 2018;Wilderson, 2020).…”

“…If defaulting to the last option, the voices and positional knowledge of those who are not only in the profession but best situated to testify to its internal dissonance must be marginalized, muted, or omitted (Warren, 2018). Within this context, intentional or not, the presence and more specifically the voices of Black social work faculty, serve to disrupt and undermine the legitimacy of the existing social work project (Harney & Moten, 2013;Lomax, 2018;Moten 2018;Warren, 2018;Wilderson, 2020). As a result, the act of epistemological-omissions must be, if it is expected to aid in stabilizing the perceived legitimacy of the professional narrative, chronically protected, pervasive, and transmittable (Dubois, 1920;Glaude, 2016).…”

“…Furthermore, social work must also reproduce and re-assert this narrative within successive generations of practitioners, faculty, and administrators (Baldwin, 2010;Glaude, 2016;Mills, 1997). This medium of narrative-identity production serves as an autopoiesis -that is, a self-perpetuating and sustaining system of interactions -that not only engenders normative-whiteness, but positions the experiential and professional epistemological realities of Black social work faculty as aporetic -that is, a source of internal contradiction (Baldwin, 2010;Mills, 1997;Merriam-Webster, 2016;Warren, 2018;Wilderson, 2020).…”

The Inhumanities

“…Adjacent to this theorizing of a praxis of the human sits a set of experiences and discourses articulated by black theory (black feminisms and Afropessimisms) that name black natality and its genealogical afterlives in the void rather than in the caesura between life and nonlife (i.e., born into slavery as property rather than person; see Hartman 1997;Moten 2003;Spillers 2003;Wilderson 2003;Weheliye 2014;Warren 2018). Black radical thought has highlighted the difference between populations targeted for erasure and those already erased; what Philip (2017) refers to as Bla_k, as the blankblack dynamic of erasure that marks black life from Middle Passage geographies to the present space of death-worlds characterized by carceral enclosures and terrorizing architectures (Mbembe 2003;Wilderson 2003).…”