Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation

• Type of Material: Book
• Authors: Calvin Warren, Emory University
• Language: English
• Date: 2018-04-06
• Publisher: Emory University Libraries
• Publication Version: Final Published Version
• Copyright Statement: © 2018 Duke University Press
• Place of Publication or Presentation: Durham
• Grant/Funding Information: Funding from Emory University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation made it possible to open this publication to the world.
• Research Categories: Black Studies; Philosophy

Abstract

In Ontological Terror Calvin L. Warren intervenes in Afro-pessimism, Heideggerian metaphysics, and black humanist philosophy by positing that the "Negro question" is intimately imbricated with questions of Being. Warren 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 nonbeing—a logic which reproduces antiblack violence and precludes any realization of equality, justice, and recognition for blacks—Warren urges the removal of the human from its metaphysical pedestal and the exploration of ways of existing that are not predicated on a grounding in being.