Black Execration. A review of Calvin Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation

Black ExecrationA review of Calvin Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation Parisa Vaziri (bio) Warren, Calvin. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Duke UP, 2018. Plumbing Frantz Fanon's frequently cited but not always well elaborated pronouncement that "ontology does not allow us to understand the being of the Black man" (90), Calvin Warren's Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation brings to bear a black archive upon the work of one of ontology's most important critics and thinkers: Martin Heidegger. Warren's premise, which unfolds throughout his book, is that black being, stricken in execration, registers the unthought of metaphysics and its philosophical afterlives. Thus, he launches a unique form of critique potent enough to surprise and inspire both avid and indifferent readers of Heidegger, while contributing—in a highly original way—to a robust lineage of black engagement with canonical Western philosophy. Each chapter of Ontological Terror pursues distinct domains (philosophy, law, science, and visual culture) through the historical example of the antebellum free black, which Warren instructively transforms into a philosophical paradigm: the free black allegorizes the "problem of metaphysics" (51). Deactivated from its historical context, the figure of the free black illuminates its own truth—a truth which resides in this possibility of deactivation. This paradigm defines Warren's experiment with historico-philosophical exemplarity. If, like Warren, we understand freedom as more than a legal or empirical condition, then black freedom disintegrates in the antiblackness of World; this proposition conditions the substrate of Ontological Terror. It also informs Warren's important contention that philosophical anthropology is rarely guided by black archives, reducing black history to the inchoate swell of empirical and irrelevant data. Warren takes on the writing of a number of inheritors of Heidegger's thought ("postmetaphysicians" [5]) to discuss the status and necessity of riven black being in the project of Being's unveiling. His text assumes a minimal familiarity with Heideggerian language and a decidedly greater immersion in contemporary discourses in Black studies, notably, Afro-pessimism. This anomalous set of expectations may posit an idiosyncratic readership, but it also projects a new region of possibility toward which Warren wishes to guide the future of black thinking. Chapter One, "The Question of Black Being," builds a case for the distinction between human and black being that is important for Heideggerian philosophical thought. Heideggerian thought, through its deep engagement with the question of being and metaphysical violence, helps to clarify this distinction in powerful ways. Through the history of African slavery, Warren reinterprets Heidegger's famous arguments that technology is an aid to the human's approximation of Being. Since chattel slavery murders "African existence" and produces the "Negro" as "available equipment … for the purpose of supporting the existential journey of the human being" (27), black being is itself a technology in service of Dasein's movement toward Being. Warren's limited explication of Heidegger's complex position on both technology and Dasein contains and tempers the power of his propositions, which nevertheless remain highly significant. The Afropessimist refrain that antiblackness is necessary to the coherence of global civil society resounds, now, in the analogous necessity of technology and black being. But the impossibility of showing this necessity remains a problem that repetition cannot resolve. To succeed as a proposition, this impossibility demands a stronger thematization. In Chapter Two, "Outlawing," the work of Oren Ben-Dor (Thinking about Law) and Jean-Luc Nancy (The Birth to Presence) on abandonment offers occasion to elaborate Warren's sometimes contradictory claim that Heideggerian ontological difference both depends upon and absolves blackness. Abandonment clarifies a counterintuitive dimension of black invisibility. For Ben-Dor and Nancy, the law of abandonment describes Being's doubled movement of withdrawal and unfolding: a doubling that produces invisibility as the demand to see. To this formulation, Warren adds the "not seeing … of the non-place": the outlawing of black being, which clarifies that "black being … is without a world" (Ontological Terror 70). Black invisibility describes the non-seeing of its non-worldliness and the lack of "there-ness" that is the condition of blackness. Here, as elsewhere in the book, the full relation between Warren's formulation and those of his...