In Conversation: The Antinomies of Afropessimism
01:03:30 Share

Behind those cozy nights at home, thousands of employees at BP go to work every day. People producing more U.S. natural gas. People building grid-scale solar capacity. People turning landfill waste gas into pipeline-quality renewable natural gas. And people delivering all of that power where it's needed. They're part of the more than 300,000 jobs BP supports across the country. Learn more at BP.com slash investinginamerica.

Hi everyone, this is Caleb Zakarin, one of the editors at the NewBooks Network. We've just launched discussion forums for every single episode, powered by Disqus. These forums are thoughtful, engaging spaces where you can explore ideas, ask questions, and connect with other listeners.

Thanks to Discuss, all comments will be filtered for spam and hate speech, ensuring a respectful and focused environment for serious discussions about important books. So join the conversation today at newbooksnetwork.com. We really can't wait to hear your thoughts. We think this is going to be a really amazing place for people to talk about books. Welcome to the New Books Network.

Salam. This is In Conversation with Network Reorient, in association with Reorient Journal and the Critical Muslim Studies Project. We aim to explore the post-Western, reconnect the Islamosphere. In this episode, Professor Salman Saeed is in conversation with Professor Banar Hesse on the antimonies of Afro-pessimism. Assalamualaikum. Afro-pessimism has emerged as a significant black intellectual movement.

It's been acclaimed as developing new possibilities for thinking in relation to and beyond the black radical tradition. At the same time, it has been charged by its critics with the twin sins of political quietism and theoretical inconsistencies. Some of these tensions can be seen in play when we look at the global protests associated with the Black Lives Matter movement.

On the one hand, we can clearly see the influence of Afro-pessimism in providing some of the intellectual energy animating these mobilizations. And yet, at the same time, some of the core ideas of Afro-pessimism seem to suggest nothing more than nihilism or at least a disinterest in political and cultural transformations. In this episode,

we look at these antinomies of Afro-pessimism and the light that they can shed on understanding the post-Western condition. To help me with this, I am delighted to welcome Professor Barnard Hesse from Northwestern University. Barnard teaches in the Department of African American Studies. He is the author of Racocracy, White Sovereignty and Black Life Politics.

co-editor of After Hashtag Ferguson, After Hashtag Baltimore, The Challenge of Black Death and Black Life for Black Political Thought, editor of Unsettled Multiculturalism, and the co-author of Beneath the Surface, Racial Harassment. He has written widely and innovatively on critical race theory and black political thought. Welcome, Barnard.

So, Barnard, I think it might be a great idea if we start off by trying to broadly summarise the main theoretical thrust of Afro-pessimism, emphasising some of its key interventions, and say something about the political and theoretical circumstances in which it arises. I think that would be useful if you could describe the main contours of Afro-pessimism as you understand it. OK. So, if I could start with the circumstances in which it arises...

Afro-pessimism argues that there is this fundamental grammar of suffering experienced by black people that's not addressed by and is unaddressable by whatever passes for humanist discourse, whether it's humanist discourse in terms of liberalism or post-colonialism or even the black radical tradition.

So in order to think about where this idea of a very specific, unique grammar of suffering comes from, we have to think about how Afro-pessimism is breaking epistemologically with two previous kinds of political movements. On the one hand, the civil rights movement, and on the other hand, the Black Power movement. So in relation to civil rights, there's a sort of liberal humanist subject that

that in the civil rights movement attempted to translate black suffering into the terms of liberal democratic ideas. The idea that somehow the specific racial experiences of black people could be overcome in terms of the liberal democratic state. And this has proven to be unsuccessful in the post-civil rights era as questions of racism and white supremacy have remained.

But what I think the specific focus of Afro-pessimism is not simply trying to subvert and challenge the idea of the liberal subject, but to subvert and challenge the idea of the revolutionary subject associated with the Black Power movement, the Black radical tradition.

which in its own terms try to argue that the experience of racial discrimination and segregation and racism was not like the civil rights movement suggested, contingent to the system, but was intrinsic to the system. But even the Black Power movement failed to challenge the nature of the system. It was blocked, it was overthrown, it was undermined, people were jailed, people were killed.

but it still retained a commitment to a humanist subject. So from the Afro-pessimist point of view, it's that very humanist subject, whether the liberal humanist subject or the revolutionary humanist subject, that is constructed in such a way that it represents the antithesis to the black subject that is still inscribed in the position of the slave, despite our occupying the afterlife of slavery.

Well, that's really helpful, Vahna, because I think the way you've talked about the two different traditions within Black political thought, it'd be a useful way to begin our conversations about some of the things around apophessivism. I mean, surely like any other political intellectual movement, there are a mixture of contingent and contextual factors. And I think it's just useful for us to understand

that despite these kind of various factors there, it's gained traction, both explicitly among activists, organic intellectuals and academics who proclaim it, but implicitly, I think it's become part of the kind of background, part of the...

grammar of a specific contemporary conjuncture that many people who may not necessarily buy into Afro-pessimism explicitly often end up validating it, endorsing it, speaking about it, or being informed by its logic.

And I think it'd be just useful if you could sort of say something about how you think Afro-pessimism has been successful. What are the main achievements? What has it actually managed to do to transform this sort of, bring about this transformation of this conversation? What do you think the main points, what does it contribute to this kind of the current conjecture?

Well, I think we can point out four things, at least the four things that I see that are important. And I think we need to cast them against a general overall background proposition from Afropessimism, which I think you can describe as follows, that the world is based on the fundamental structural antagonism of the human and the black. So every non-black person

composition or population as part of the human. And that fundamental premise, what they describe as a paradigmatic structure, has ongoing political consequences. So, for example, Afro-pessimism argues that all emancipatory movements and ideas are incapable of comprehending or responding to this ontological structure. The only way it can be transformed is by ending the world.

Everything else is futility of reform that changes nothing fundamentally. So against that background, we can point out, I think, at least four compelling ideas, certainly that I've noted. So firstly, Afro-pessimism rightly points out that Black political movements within a liberal democratic capitalist system

whether liberal or revolutionary, appeal to an emancipatory humanism that excludes black populations constitutively. This results in a politics of futility. For example, in my terms, you know, I would argue white sovereignty is always in place. You can never dislodge it, although they wouldn't put it that way.

The second feature I think that's important is their identification of what they describe as a libidinal economy, which is intertwined with a political economy that continually circulates blackness as a phobic object throughout the culture.

in which images and themes regularly demean and deride Black people. This is evident against cultures ranging from China and Saudi Arabia to the Netherlands, Australia, Israel, United States. Third aspect I would draw attention to is the way in which Afro-pessimism exposes as structural both historical and contemporary

of gratuitous violence against black populations. This is largely highlighted now in the regular police killings of black people, previous decades lynchings. We can see this in the UK, we can see this in Brazil, the US, France. It argues that that kind of mobilization of violence against black populations is a structural feature of these societies.

And the fourth aspect I think is important is the argument that there is a distinctive social and political force of anti-blackness that cannot be subsumed under the generic idea of racism and that it's most fundamentally a racial force in delineating the societies, Western societies like the U.S. and elsewhere.

So if you take those four aspects, what Afro-pessimism does is to bring these together in a single philosophical and political ontology that actually speaks to the contemporary experiences of Black people, particularly young Black people right now. See, this is interesting because one of the issues about a critique of liberalism

is implied around some notions of white supremacy, that if you reconceptualize racism as white supremacy, you are saying a little bit more than the idea of a generalized, ahistoricized prejudice, which often racism gets turned into through the liberal kind of lens, that racism is just something that, you know, bad people have bad ideas about bad people in general.

And it's been interesting to see in recent years this kind of evocation of naming that racism more and more closely as white supremacy and seeing that as a global institution, seeing it as a specific form rather than just generally racism, which opens up different kinds of configurations. So I'm just kind of interested in the way that if you have...

white supremacy, which tells you a very interesting story, and I think quite a powerful story, of understanding the kind of racial configuration of social relations, both local and global and national as well. Afro-pessimism's focus on anti-Blackness seems to at least...

What does the focus of anti-Blackness do to the question of white supremacy? To put it another way, one argument would be that white supremacy creates racialized subjects among many of them and creates sort of a blackness is being constantly perpetuated by white supremacy.

Maybe you could say what the implications of that focus within Afro-pessimism, I suppose, you know, it's kind of leading that focus shifting from white supremacy to anti-blackness. Do you want to say something about that? Oh, you know I do. So now we're going to get to the heart of the matter. Yeah.

You know, I find the, you know, many of the arguments of anthropessimism very compelling. But then on the other hand, what I find myself being drawn to are some of the, you know, what one might politely call some of the inconsistencies and some of the theoretical claims. And largely this arises from what are particular categories, what a particular conceptual category is doing.

So if we take the question of white supremacy and even race, these two categories seem to have been displaced and replaced with, on the one hand, anti-blackness and on the other hand, social death, which we'll come to later. But if you think about the kind of narrative that Afro-pessimism begins to develop,

it has to draw upon some kind of historiography that it shares with other traditions so we can all recognize the world in which we live. And in drawing upon this other historiography, you know, one might say, you know, the colonial world beginning in 1492, it's almost as if these questions of white supremacy, colonialism, and race become subplots of

within the larger narrative of how the world is structured by anti-Blackness. So that has a couple of immediate implications. The first would be it clearly conceptually precludes the possibility of any analogy of anti-Blackness with the colonial experiences and the racialized experiences of other subjugated populations.

under white supremacy and race. So you can see that conceptually foreclosed from the get-go. But secondly, and this is an interesting sort of underdeveloped aspect of Afro-pessimism, such an intervention requires a complete re-critiquing of the colonial history of Western modernity that would make anti-Blackness its fundamental structuring principle.

Now, to date, I haven't actually seen what that account looks like. But if you're going to give such a central, make anti-Blackness such a central feature of the world, then it seems to suggest that much of how we've accounted for the world, those of us who critique Western modernity through its colonial formation, that critique has to now become subsidiary.

The basis upon which that claim can be made, the basis upon which one would want to make that argument seems to me fundamentally unclear. But let's look at some of these things more closely. Let us take the category of anti-Blackness on its own terms. And in taking it on its own terms, let's try to find out what it entails.

Frank Wilderson's recent book, Afrocentrism, one of the observations he makes, which enables us to think about this in more detail, is this. He says that the black is a sentient being, though not a human being. The blacks and the humans' disparate relationship to violence is at the heart of the failure of this analogy.

The human suffers contingent violence, violence that kicks in when he resists the disciplinary discourse of civil society's rules and laws. But black people's saturation by violence is a paradigmatic necessity, not simply the performative contingency. So the reason I read that out is because it's one of the places that gives us a sense of

how and why anti-Black violence has the kind of privilege that it has in the argument. And one of the things that you'll have noticed is the distinction that Wilderson makes between contingent violence that human people can experience for some kind of transgression, something that they've done, and the gratuitous violence that Black people experience, particularly Black people in the U.S.,

Now, this is one of the places where some problems begin, theoretically. What do I mean by that? Well, it's worth bearing in mind that gratuitous violence can also be contingent. Gratuitous violence, if it is gratuitous, is not happening every second of every day. It can happen at any particular time, in any particular circumstance, which means it's contingent.

So I guess what Wilderson is really trying to get at is not so much that gratuitous violence is contingent, but that it lacks any coherent rationale. But here, too, is another problem. If we think about some of the experiences of gratuitous violence, and let's take the most sort of spectacular form in the early 20th century, lynching. Lynching could happen at any time.

Lynching happened, and it happened to Black communities. Not everybody got lynched, but sufficient people were lynched in order for terror to be induced in those communities.

If you then think about the whole act of terror and terrorism induced in black communities, we begin to see a sense of its rationale. Yes, it's gratuitous. Yes, it can happen any point in time. But it does have a political rationale. This is one of the things that Ida B. Wells, in her research on lynchings that she's writing in 1892,

points out the strength and the force of the resistance of Southerners to what they call white domination, sorry, Negro domination, the possibility of that, and how important it was for them to reemphasize that society was subject to white rule.

So what I'm trying to get at here is that even though there's a conceptual move to somehow exempt blackness or the black subject from the wider colonial world, which does have a rationale, once we begin to look at some of its conceptual moves, i.e. gratuitous, violent, see it as contingent, we begin to see it has a political rationale, and that political rationale is expressible through blackness.

white supremacy. I suppose one argument would be and would be to say, well, okay, it has a rationale, but why is it that that political rationale is fixated on violence on black bodies? So in a way, what you've done is displace that moment of you still haven't answered the question about why black bodies. And I think that sort of links back to the notion of

of the idea of anti-Black world and the displacement, as you put it, of the colonial formations. And whenever we wonder, we can have a dispute about when the colonial formation begins, but it tells a quite a powerful narrative of the, where you can think around that this is at what this moment that the Black subjectivity in its kind of,

enslaved and violated form appears at that point. Now, what I'm kind of interested in is where do you think is that beginning of the foundational? If you don't say there's a black violence which is foundational for the formation of the world, then there is a question that either you retreat into some kind of perennialist thing that it becomes basically from the beginning of time itself,

Now, that would be one argument, that there's always Black violence, Blackness has always been attacked and violated. And there's passages in some of Wilderson's work that I think that there's an impression that's given there, which, of course, dehistoricizes that historiography, turning it into basically something that cannot be explained on that.

The other issue that comes in there, and I think it's important that you mentioned, for example, right now in India, there are regular reports of kind of lynchings of Dalits and Muslims around that process there. And you could argue there's the same kind of rationality being imposed in terms of there is a certain kind of disciplinary terrorism, the disciplinary horror that is being pushed through that because the public act of what those are.

So you could imagine there are different kinds of circumstances in which these types of violence may become more prevalent than others. So I guess what I'm trying to get at here is really, is where do you think both this kind of temporal sweep of the formation of anti-Blackness, where does anti-Blackness begin? If it doesn't begin in the colonial formation itself, in the founding of the colonial order, where does anti-Blackness begin? And also in relation to what

the specificity of that anti-Black move, bound by the sort of non... how does anti-Blackness, how does it become so specific compared to other acts of violence? Okay, so as usual, you're giving me these double-barrelled questions and expecting me to remember all the elaborations beforehand, but I'll do my best, right?

I think that, so what I'm doing is trying to recuperate the conceptual moves and at the same time as sort of validating those moves, also trying to open them up to other kinds of questions. So clearly the condition of possibility for anti-Blackness is slavery.

Once we make that explicit, then the question is, how is that notion of slavery historicized, right? You may wish to begin from 1492 onwards, but there's also, it seems to me, there's a move within Afropessimism to project a longer time period for slavery in

where they may, and I know we'll talk about this later, connect with what sometimes is referred to as the Arab slave trade or the Muslim slave trade, and to sort of push it back into a sort of almost into antiquity. But the main point is it's slavery that creates the conditions of possibility for

for violating blackness insofar as the black and the slave begin to be conflated as if the one is the other. But what interests me about that particular sort of conflation is what is the figure of the slave? I mean, there are different figures of the slave. Is the representative slave position one which is the recipient of gratuitous violence?

Or is the representative slave position one that is constitutively resisting?

gratuitous violence. What I'm trying to suggest is that here is a moment of undecidability as to how does one figure the slave, right? And how one figures the slave will then raise questions as to how one figures the black. Let me give you an example. There's a, you know, one way we could read the, you know, the rationale for gratuitous violence is

against the black, to use the terminology of Afro-pessimism, is by reading that gratuitous violence as preemptive, a kind of violence that's being done in order to subdue the possibility of challenge and resistance that's identified with the black.

We kind of see that under Jim Crow. There's a preemptive violence there, right? It's, you know, what this kind of reading would suggest, and if we're looking at slavery in the Americas, and we're not just looking at the U.S. or North America, and we're looking across the 17th century into the 19th century, you will see

a myriad of slave rebellions, runaways, attacks. So there's a sense in which over a period of time, those who enslaved Black populations perceived those Black populations as unruly, as restive, as challenging. And the acts of violence had part of that focus

in their sort of their orientation. So what I'm trying to get at is, you know, one of the ways in which we could understand gratuitous violence against black populations, which is a move not taken under Afro-pessimism, is that this is violence is preempted, directed against political mobilization and challenge. So that'd be one thing I would say.

But I also want to get back to this human distinction, you know, the concept of the human and the Black. I think there's a lot going for this argument, which says that somehow the very notion of the human has been based upon, you know, the constitutive outside of the Black. But once again, if we try and examine how these conceptual categories are put together, some...

issues begin to tumble out. And I'll just give you a very brief one, which sort of troubles me. And it comes out of, you know, Frank Wilderson's latest book, Afropessimism. So one of the things he says in that book is that, you know, a way of distinguishing the position of the black is that any human person

can commit murder or genocide against the black person. Okay? This is one of the arguments that's made there. But what's curious about that is right away we can see that both murder and genocide are legal categories based on the human.

So if you're going to make those kinds of claims that any human can commit genocide or murder against the black, what you're doing is you're implicating the black in the very human category that they're supposed to be outside.

So it's unclear to me why a humanistic concept of law would be used to describe the killing of the so-called black. All I'm pointing out are areas in which certain kinds of theoretical claims are not being sustained by the internal consistency of the theoretical claim. And I find that troubling only insofar as it seems to me

this should be obvious. Okay, but why do you find it troubling? Because I think that reaches into really the place, I guess, more general argument, which I think it's worth just touching upon, is if there is theoretical inconsistency, what does it matter? Well, it's a good question. It may not matter. I think the point about theoretical inconsistencies is that we should be able to

remedy them and resolve them and make a theoretical paradigm more rigorous. But the problem is if one is making huge claims on the basis of theoretical inconsistencies, what happens to those claims? You know, does the whole thing come tumbling down? Let me give you an example, another example. Take the concept of anti-blackness or the anti-black world.

One thing should be clear right away is that once you invoke anti-Blackness, you cannot talk about something called anti-Black racism.

Because if you talk about anti-Black racism, that then implicates you in the possibility of analogy with other groups, right? You're one racism among many others. And sometimes I find some of the commentators make that move, which seems to me a sort of anti-Afro-pessimist move. So if we stick with the anti-Black structuring principle,

A couple of things here seems to me that we need to work through. One would be this, that the idea of a anti-Black world seems to suggest a world devoid of Blackness. So in that case, Blackness would be the constitutive outside of the anti-Black world.

If the world is anti-Black, the question arises, what is it taking so long? Why is it taking so long to eliminate this Blackness? You know, is there some impediment? It's an anti-Black world. How is it possible to have Blackness in an anti-Black world? You know, are we at the beginning of this process? Are we in the middle of this process? What is the structural logic there? But then to put this another kind of way,

It'd be worth asking the question whether or not blackness in an anti-black world, if one can establish the coherence of making that claim, is it possible for blackness to be resistant to anti-blackness? Because that's the only way I could see blackness

managing to sustain itself in an anti-Black world, as if it's constitutively resistant to the logic of anti-Blackness. Wouldn't that be a cause for optimism, then? Well... If you think of Blackness as resistant, as basically it's the resistance of Blackness that constitutes the world as anti-Black, but not being able to actually erase Blackness... Yes. What...

How does that thrust work in? Because you're now talking about Blackness as being resistant. Yes. Well, let me leave the question of optimism to one side, you know, as a homegrown cynic. But what it would give you is the possibility of thinking otherwise. You begin to see where something like the Black radical tradition comes from.

you begin to recognize that the anti-Black world doesn't have it all its own way, that the exercise of power is not the exercise of absolute power, that power is constituted by the very fact that something's trying to resist it. So we'd have to rethink power relations and we'd have to rethink what is meant by the question of Black political subjectivity.

Well, I think we're going to talk about that a little bit. And I think it's really important that we started talking about power relations, because one of the things that we want to look at is really the kind of understanding of social death, which is one of the concepts that are creatively kind of conscripted within Afrofessimism and much use is made of that concept. Do you want to say a few things about the kind of work, the heavy lifting work

that the category of social death does for Afro-pessimist accounts, bearing in mind what you just said about this kind of, I suppose, the kind of, while you probably haven't said it, let me say it rather than accusing you of saying it. Thank you. It's the kind of depoliticizational element, the depolitical logic of the refusal to accept that black resistance movement

is actually implied in an anti-Black world. And I know you're going to say that this is the question I want you to answer, but I want to sort of give a bit of a background here because I was listening to you and one of the things that occurred to me in the question around theory and theoretical inconsistencies, I think a lot of people talk about anti-Black racism at the same time they talk about Afro-pessimism. So to see Afro-pessimism as an account of anti-Black racism

And I think that's one of the ways that it's kind of energy comes from that, because it seems to be part of that kind of more generalized grammar around anti-Black racism. And then Afro-pessimism is simply a position on that. So while there are theoretical inconsistencies by putting those two things together,

I think there's a sense at a certain level where Afro-pessimism exists as a metaphorical and a symbolic logic which informs this idea of the specificity of anti-Black racism.

So I guess one way of then sorting that out or distilling that might be then to return to the category of social death and the specificity of anti-Blackness and the part that social death plays in constituting the Black subjectivity. Okay.

So I want to say that, you know, from my reading of Afro-pessimism, anybody starts talking about anti-Black racism is at that moment breaking with the, you know, one of the tenets of Afro-pessimism, which is that the Black is outside of humanism. See, once you start talking about racism, you're within the remit and orbit of humanism. So

we're definitely talking about anti-blackness and social death is a very interesting category but it's not simply social death it's also death itself

what I would like to call existential death. And I think that these two modes of death are often conflated in Afropessimism and need to be unpacked. Let me give you an example. So in Red, White and Black, one of the many observations Wilson makes is that is the following. It's impossible

Blackness from captivity, mutilation, and the pleasure of non-blacks. Blackness marks reference names and identifies a corpse. And a corpse is not relational because death is beyond representation and relation always occurs within representation.

So, if we're thinking about the question of death there, we know that the black is identified as being captive, as the slave is marked for violence, is marked for death. But which death are we talking about? Certainly existential death is unrepresentable, but social death is representable.

and it's not always clear which death is being spoken of and the reason that i say this is because the you know if you dig deeper into the afro-pessimist paradigm one of them one of the the claims is made is that the you know the black stroke slave occupies a position of non-relationality now

I wonder about what non-relationality means, you know? And, you know, one of the things that, you know, philosophically it must mean is that the entity itself has no, in order to constitute itself, is not related to anything outside of itself for its constitution. But if you're thinking about something like social death,

Social death is not self-induced. Social death is relational because it's externally imposed. It's something that's rendered on the other to, you know, to force them to conform to a certain, you know, absence of life. So what I'm trying to suggest is this.

that there's an equivocation around the centrality of the meaning of death and Afropassimism. But let us say that, you know, generally when death is mentioned, it's social death. So we need to know exactly what they mean by this. This is where, you know, Orlando Patterson's concept comes into play because it's taken from Orlando Patterson's Slavery and Social Death.

Social death comprises three things. One is dishonoring. The slave was continually dishonored and debated. Gratuitous violence. The slave could always be open to violence. And the third thing is natal alienation. The slave was forced to be devoid of any sort of ethnic lineage, social affiliation, so on. And it's usually this last aspect

which has given a lot of emphasis. So I wonder about this because, you know, it's presented as an ontological category, social death. And one thing we should know about any ontological claim is that they're always inscribing an archive of a kind of historical anthropology that they draw upon in order to create this more general sense of what structures a reality.

So if we think about something like social death, it's never clear to me how social death is recognized as having accomplished its business, as having been successful. Over what period of time does social death emerge? Now, if you're thinking about transatlantic slavery, you're realizing that at any point in time,

whether it's in North America or what is now known as Latin America or the Caribbean, you had a mix of slave populations, creolized, recent Africans. The Haitian Revolution, for example, was mobilized by many enslaved who were recently from Africa, right? So is there an absolute uniformity around social death? But then how...

out for things like the proliferation in the Americas of African spiritual systems, the forging of different ways of speech, the making and remaking of community, the things that we call black culture that refuses to be erased.

in part of the Americas, often hiding behind the imposed Christian forms on Black culture. So there's a whole range of ingenuity of making and remaking of Blackness that for some reason, the deployment of the concept of social death simply erases

Whereas I think there has to be some accountability with that. You know, it's the very thing that enables people in the 21st century to be writing Afro-pessimism. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a really important point because, as you mentioned, the category of social death ranges. I mean, in Orlando Patterson's book, there are almost 66 societies which are

manifesting forms of this social death. And these are quite, now that's quite different from the narratives around total slave societies, for example. And I think it's worth thinking because in the concept of social death, the actual instance of who suffers social death is actually a wide number of, it's a range of populations, human populations, going from

all across the planet in a way. And at different points, different formulations of coming onto that. And I think the question has been sort of listening to you and been reflecting upon the question about blackness and really its kind of relationship to Africa here. Because

Part of it is a very simple narrative that is to do with the Black experience is singularly an experience which comes through the violence of enslavement, right? So that is one constitutive element on that. But I know you already pointed out that once you start talking about the gradations of social death, or the variations of social death, both kind of temporally, spatially, etc., that line becomes quite much more complicated, right?

Now, it seems to me that what is perhaps one of the things that's been covered in social death, which might be worth reflecting a little bit on again, is really the idea of social death as a foreclosure of a type of politics, if not the political itself. And if social death then is one aspect of it, is a kind of moment of foreclosing politics, then what...

does Afro-pessimism, which seems to reject a kind of Black politics, how does that stand on to that? Because in a sense, the rejection of politics should also mean the end of the Western political tradition or what you call white sovereignty. So I think it might be in light of sort of Afro-pessimism, how would you position a Black subjectivity and its relationship to the political?

Well, these are good questions. And we've had, you and I have had lots of conversations about this. I mean, there are two ways we can go at that question. One ontologically and the other politically, because in a way, I notice Afro-pessimism often represents itself as a political ontology.

So if we went at this initially ontologically, we'd have to start with what is the status of the structural antagonism that's posited between the black stroke slave and the human? What I mean is what is the theoretical status? Okay. So when we begin to examine that, because this is a fundamental claim, two things happen.

occur to me, which give me sort of pause for concern. The first thing is the idea of structural position. So what Afropessimism seems to deploy really is a structuralist model, okay? A structuralist model, this is, you know, for those who know the work of

Claude Léves-Strauss, Althusser. This is the idea that the social or the cultural reality can be summarized through identifying the various different, on the one hand, structures, and on the other hand, subject positions,

that comprise the possibility of various different kinds of variations of relations between these structures and positions, which would enable you, once you knew the rules of combining these kinds of relationships, you could more or less know the totality of possibilities of expression in the culture. All of which comes down to this idea that

So subjects in subject positions are simply a function of that position. So a slave in a subject position functions as a slave. A working class subject in a working class subject position functions as a working class subject. But one would then ask the question, where is the antagonism?

Because the very idea of antagonism is to show that the system itself or the structural system itself exhibits, contains tensions, instabilities that have to be covered over, have to be secured. So what you find in the structuralist model, which is imported into Afropassimism, is that there's no gap conceptualized between the subject and

and the subject position. There's no possibility of the subject reacting against the subject position. You know, in this model, a slave could not run away from being a slave, right? You can only do that if the subject and the subject position are not accorded in any kind of symmetry. The antagonism is when there's asymmetry.

So that's one area in which depoliticization takes place by foreclosing the possibility of antagonism in the relationship between subject and subject position, despite this whole structural antagonism. But then in the other area of antagonism, if we're thinking about, you know, between the human and the black stroke slave,

There's also no dynamism in that notion of antagonism. So without going through the whole thing that we've discussed before, but a robust concept of antagonism would accept that the impact of antagonism on either subject position in that relation is to prevent either position from

finding itself fully expressed as an identity, it prevents it from actually representing itself to its fullness. So what you're getting in effect is the subject in the subject position of the slave preventing the slave owner, if you wanted to put it that way, from fully expressing themselves as a slave owner and the slave owner

preventing the enslaved from fully expressing themselves, trying to get them to conform. So you have partially constituted subjects in that relationship of antagonism and the wages, the struggle is over trying to constitute oneself in that position. That too is eliminated. So you have structural antagonism without antagonism

in the very areas where you would expect it to be there conceptually. And the history and the historical evidence is all against that. I mean, I think this is a really interesting point because there's a lot of talk about the, a lot of dichotomy set up, oppositional, but there seem to be more, either there are kind of logical contradictions between

anti-Blackness or they have this characteristic of being an opposition rather than an antagonism in like the way you've described it. And that I think in a way leads on to one of the vulnerabilities, and I think we've teached it on that one, that really is to do with the way in which some of the conversation we'll be having here

You commented upon the kind of historical and historiographical challenges that many critics of Afro-pessimism make on those grounds. But I suppose you could sit around and say, well, actually, Afro-pessimism isn't really that interested in historical, historiographical arguments. It's not, it's bad kind of thing. It's not really that into it.

but it's more concerned and it repeats it's constantly repeating on the ontological here. So in a way that the ontological moves it out of the critique of historiography and historicity. And I think it might be helpful if you kind of focus back and bring this in the close by really concentrating on what do we make of this ontological focus?

of Afro-pessimism, which, to be honest with you, I think is one of its more refreshing and distinctive features, that it moves away from a certain type of study, which is mainly about recovering a certain history or has a certain kind of historiographical element involved in it around the experience of Blackness. So this focus on ontology seems to be around that. And perhaps you could sort of

see how you view the way that on the role of ontology in Afro-pessimism. Well, I actually think the question of ontology posed by Afro-pessimism is extremely important and one of its greater contributions. But there's a lot of talk of ontology without really saying much about it, right?

And I've listened to, you know, in recent years, I've listened to students talk about the importance of ontology and I do ontological work and so on. I think that's always bemused me about this is that it's almost as if the discussion suggests that ontology is like an oracle.

Whereas, you know, I think it's more productive to think about ontology in terms of ontological claims and that there are different kinds of ontological frameworks that one can use. The question then becomes why this particular ontological framework rather than another. But we should just refresh our minds as to what's going on when we talk about ontology. So

Basically, we're talking about the kinds of fundamental presuppositions of what exists, what constitutes a social or political or cosmological reality that underlines any and all empirical descriptions. So the value of ontology is that we can say in a kind of summation what the structural nature of reality is without endless empirical descriptions.

We can say something about the architecture of this reality, politically and socially, the things, the objects, the entities, the processes, the relationships we think constitute reality, how they hang together, how they connect. So how do we justify a particular ontological approach? Afropessimism does something very curious to me. And I have to say, as we're going through this, I expect all of the questions and the issues I've raised to

to be easily responded to and answered by, you know, Afro-pessimist thinkers. I'm just pointing out things that are of interest to me. So if we want to look at the source of ontological thinking and Afro-pessimism, it's at this moment, I think there's always a recourse to Frantz Fanon. And there's a quotation that's

always referred to. It's a single sentence. It's in that famous chapter in Black Skins, White Masks, you know, translated into English as the fact of blackness. And I quote, in the eyes of the white man, the black man has no ontological resistance.

In the eyes of the white man, the black man has no ontological resistance. Now, in many respects, we've been discussing and problematizing the second half of that sentence, no ontological resistance. When we're having a conversation about antagonism, I was talking about how conceptually foreclosed is the possibility of any, let's put it in these terms, ontological resistance.

But it seems to me that there's a case for arguing that what Afro-pessimism often does is to forget the first half of that sentence in the eyes of the white man. I think Fanon there is making an ontological statement about the way in which the white man has an ontological understanding of the world.

Now, the white man functions in Black Skins, White Masks and all of Fanon's work as a figure of the colonial master, if you like, the colonialist. And if one was to try and give an ontological account of the world from the position of the white man, it logically follows that the black man, the black woman, black people have no ontological resistances.

But the obvious question is, why would we want to confine ourselves to an ontological account of the world from the position of the white man? What does an ontological account of the world look like from the position of the enslaved who conceive themselves as having resistance and resisting? And you sort of get to a conclusion that you don't want to get to at times.

But it looks like this, and I'd be interested to hear what the repost to this would be, that the ontological account of the world that we get in Afro-pessimism borders on the ontological account of the white man. And it borders on giving us an ontological account of the white man because there is no ontological category of whiteness in Afro-pessimism.

It's not a regional category. It's folded into this very interesting non-Black composition.

And that non-Black composition which underpins the human, in order for it to have any coherence whatsoever, because we're not given a history of how that non-Black composition comes together to constitute the human, it's almost as if that in itself draws upon a kind of social contract theory, where a group of non-Black people got together to constitute the human. It would be interesting to see

what the history is that accounts for that. But, you know, leaving that to one side, you know, it'd also be interesting to see, well, what does an ontological account of the world written from the position of the enslaved look like? Well, there's enough material here for a conference, to borrow a phrase from a 1970s British sitcom.

In another episode, I'd like us to maybe explore a little bit more Afro-pessimism's relationship to what Sherman Jackson and Ali Mazzari call a Black Orientalism. But I think for today, I'd just like to thank you for being in conversation. Well, thank you for inviting me. It was a very interesting conversation to have without you interrupting me for a change. Thank you.

This has been another episode of In Conversation brought to you by Network Reorient, the podcast arm of Critical Muslim Studies. Thank you for tuning in. Have a listen to our other episodes and please leave a rating.