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Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation

Version 2 2022-08-21, 14:36
Version 1 2018-07-26, 14:41
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posted on 2022-08-21, 14:36 authored by 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.

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Emory University as part of the TOME initiative

History

Publication date

2018

ISBN (Print - Cloth)

9780822370727

ISBN (Print - Paper)

9780822370871

ISBN (Ebook For Sale)

9780822371847

Publisher Name

Duke University Press

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    Duke University Press

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