Ontological terror: blackness, nihilism, and emancipation, paperback/calvin l. warren

Contributor(s): Author: Calvin L.

Warren 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.