36 minute read
African American Studies
Department of African American Studies
Faculty Adviser: Prof. Marquis Bey, Ph.D.
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What is Political Ontology
by John Sweeney
Preface As I have progressed in this paper, I have asked myself, and been pushed to seriously think by my partner, about the ethicality of writing such a large work on matters of incredible violence to which I am not subject. I especially need to take into account how my discussions of race are entering predominantly Black discourses, since my presence in these spaces may contribute violence toward Black people.1 As my partner has reminded me, it is white fragility that orders me to remain silent on these questions, and so I take inspiration from her and Jennifer Nash, in her elaboration of bravery, to address this directly.
As Barbara Christian, in her groundbreaking article “The Race for Theory,” asks white academics and herself, “For whom are we doing what we are doing when we do literary criticism?”2 I write for my partner, because the theory that I encounter that does not broadly engage with Black theory excludes her and her experience. I cannot leave that be, so I must act, even if I may not have an impact.
I also recognize that I have privilege as a white cisgender straight male in this racial cisheteropatriarchy, and when I speak, I am not giving space for those who are actually subjected to these systems to speak. Additionally, there is the great risk of liberal intentions that are in reality voyeurism, which will always lead to an unempathetic engagement, as the theory turns into another game. If I am guilty of this, I deserve to be called on it. I hope to move through this entire paper in an ethical manner — that is, with humility, respect, deep engagement, intention toward dialogue, and realizing that I am no one’s savior and that this is not an intellectual exercise. I write about violence because this violence continues, and I cannot turn away.
1 While this is not the purpose of this paper, extremely important work on the intramural dimensions of race and ideology within the Black community and with other people of color has been created. See Michelle (2020). 2 See Christain (1988, pg 77).
Introduction This paper aims to enter into a complex and ongoing conversation among critical theorists regarding Black sociality, antiblackness, and political ontology.3 Black studies has participated in an “ontological turn,” often expressed in the afropessimist versus Black optimist debates. This paper will first engage with Black nihilist and afropessimist works to tease out what is actually being discussed. Then, it will engage their work in conversations with progressive critical theorists — particularly Oliver Marchart, Fred Moten, and Enrique Dussel — to open up the philosophical terrain of political ontology.
This paper critically analyzes the work of political ontology produced in recent years, and it heeds a warning from one of Calvin Warren’s recent articles: Most Black studies “neglect the ontological dimension of antiblackness, in order to provide resolution and resolvability of the tension between blackness and being.”4 In order to avoid this pitfall, this paper sets out to center the ontological dimension of antiblackness, in the post-Heideggerian sense that Warren has in mind. It is more than possible that this paper sets out to do much more than one paper can coherently accomplish, but I believe these moving parts are all essential and mutually supporting. This paper argues that the terms of political ontology are opened up by a robust engagement between different traditions that all maintain a certain critical attitude towards the current political ontology.
To begin, since this is a work of political ontology that hopes to make the topic more accessible and decipher some of the jargon, we shall start with a brief overview of the afropessimists Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton. Unfortunately, this deciphering will not be simple, as, “‘Ontology’ as an analytical category is used in different ways by different authors.”5 We could easily add metaphysics, race, and gender to that description.
Brief Overview of Wilderson and Sexton This section will unpack some of the grammar Warren and afropessimists use for those of us who do not have as much familiarity with it.
First, we can begin by noting that the similarities Wilderson and Sexton bring as afropessimists are the focus on social death, the centering on the political production of ontology, the orientation to fully be with antiblackness, and the emphasis on world-ending practices as the only
3 I am profoundly influenced by the work of scholar Christina Sharpe, and I follow her notations of Black, blackness, and antiblackness. See Sharpe (2016). 4 See Warren (2017c, pg 272). 5 See Burman (2016, pg 7).
solution. On social death, they are very impacted by the work of sociologist Orlando Patterson, notably quite the conservative. Patterson developed his notion of social death to define the position of enslavement, which has three factors to it: (1) natal alienation, which means removal from the community in which one is born; (2) general dishonor, which refers to quite literally a status of constant disrespect and devaluement; and (3) permanent violence and domination.6 Wilderson and Sexton argue that social death is the constitutive feature of blackness, and is the crucial foil to the ontological production of the Human in modernity. This leaves Wilderson and Sexton to separate gender and other categories, such as class, out from race. They label race as the most fundamental category.7 As Warren succinctly puts it, Wilderson and Sexton “would argue for the non-ontology of blackness. For Afro-Pessimists, the grammar of bio-futurity and political programs will do very little to bring blacks into the fold of humanity; in fact, this grammar is the source of black suffering and dread.”8 The abjection of Blackness preconditions and foils the Human for afropessimists.
Afropessimists also focus on the political production of ontology, which is what we should understand the concept of political ontology to be doing. That is, to use the prefix “political” is to mark the contingent,9 contested, and historical nature of that which we are labelling ontology. Warren again helpfully puts it, “Afro-pessimists demystify ontology, stripping it of its assumed ‘purity’ in the Western tradition, and expose ontology as the product of political processes.”10 The dominant order presents itself as natural, but afropessimists point out that it is naturalized through politics.
Thirdly, afropessimists insist on fully confronting the whole terror of antiblackness. As Sexton writes, “For the immediate question facing such judgment is: resistance or survival in the face of what, precisely?”11 This intense focus on thematizing the structures of abjection through antiblackness has misled some into believing afropessimists do not believe in Black social life. However, this is a mischaracterization, as Sexton explains, “Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social) life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the codes of state and … the modern world system.”12 In the dominant world system, which has been constituted by colonialism,13 antiblackness does not recognize Black life as social life at all.
Lastly, afropessimists explicitly contend that in a world sutured by antiblack-
6 See Patterson (1982, pg 13). 7 See Wilderson (2010, pg 23). 8 See Warren (2017a, pg 220). Afropessimists sometimes use language like “the non-ontology of blackness.” While I of course got the gist, at another level I felt this is a very different usage of the concept of ontology than even other places in their work. I would say that “non-ontology” can be roughly translated as non-being, as imposed by the being of whiteness. 9 I want to clarify that when I say contingent, I do not mean it in contradiction with afropessimists who say anti-Blackness is non-contingent and necessary in a world that is invested in the Human. Rather I simply mean that this ontology is not ‘natural’ or divine, and instead the product of human struggle. 10 See Warren (2017a, pg 223). 11 See Sexton (2016a, pg 19). 12 See Sexton (2016b, 29); also see Ziyad (2016) for real world application of this perspective. Thank you, Dr. Marquis Bey for sending me this. 13 See, Silva (2016).
ness, only world-destroying measures are fundamentally worth pursuing. As Wilderson writes: “Frantz Fanon came closest to the only image of sowing and harvesting that befits this book. Quoting Aimé Césaire, he urged his readers to start ‘the end of the world,’ the ‘only thing … worth the effort of starting,’ a shift from horticulture to pyrotechnics.”14 As he makes clear, the only thing worth pursuing is the destruction of the world, not piecemeal reforms or anything else, literally, an investment in pyrotechnics.
Afropessimists have had a strong effect on many thinkers over the years, so this will help us transition to delving more deeply into the language/grammar of political ontology.
Brief Introduction to the Language/Grammar of Warren
Brief Notes
This paper hopes to avoid the potential pitfalls that others may have encountered in attempting to engage with Warren’s work, specifically: (a) engaging Warren’s work on Warren’s terms, which is to say, post-Heideggerian ontological terms; and (b) conceding without argument that, compared to other racial categories, Blackness is unique in its constitution under colonialism as absolute abjection. In order to allow greater dialogue, with (a), I hope to avoid a potential counterargument that Warren may deploy against those who do not start from a strictly (post-)Heideggarian perspective, which is that a given engagement relies on the antiblack structure of metaphysics. For many not steeped in white philosophical background, and even those of us who are, the distinction between metaphysics and ontology is either fundamentally unclear or wholly non-existent, and their definitions are often vague and unelaborated.15 However, Martin Heidegger has a fundamentally different understanding of metaphysics that is pejorative in nature; in fact, he argues metaphysics is properly understood as domination and violence. While Warren does not uncritically engage with Heidegger, Warren does agree that metaphysics is violent. This paper is an attempt to tease out how we could take this seriously and move forward in dialogue.
With (b), Warren takes as a key point for him, as do other afropessimists, that blackness is uniquely placed as abjection in relation to whiteness and that all other racial locations are able to take recourse from gratuitous violence and towards ontology. Some have taken issue with this, particularly those in critical settler colonial studies who argue for a more complicated organization of race where Native peoples are in a different relation but are not necessarily privileged in this difference. However, this position is not one I am fundamentally wedded to. I think to argue for it would warrant an entire paper in its own right and would result in a failed dialogue in the other ontological parts of the discourse in which I want to engage.
Before proceeding much further, it is relevant to note another thing, as a signpost. Frantz Fanon has been a central thinker for afropessimism, and as a Black psychoanalytic thinker (the larger discourse I will not take up here16), Fanon has an important impact on my thinking.
14 See Wilderson (2010, pg 337). 15 See Wiley (2016, pg 20). 16 Psychoanalysis has been seen as a crucial site of academic engagement for those in the afropessimist
However, I have chosen to elide focusing on Fanon, and therefore I hope to avoid engaging with the Fanon wars, to borrow a frame from Jennifer Nash.17 In my analysis, the Fanon wars describe the “discursive, political, and theoretical battles” marked by an affective posture of defensiveness that emerge over divergent readings of Fanon’s work.18 Part of this defensive posture is created by the elevation of Fanon’s work to, borrowing another phrase from Nash,19 the status of directed by the Holy Spirit. That is, if Fanon says it, it is the fundamental truth. To be clear, I think of Fanon as an important philosopher. But, I also believe that scholars like David Marriott, Frank Willderson III, Jared Sexton, and Calvin Warren are vastly beyond my level of studying Fanon, and in their intense investment, Fanon as a figure in some ways has become overdetermined. Thus, I believe it would cause more obstruction than care for dialogue were this paper to invest in a different reading of Fanon over these thoughtful scholars.
Key Terms: Metaphysics, Ontological Difference, Ontics, Ontological
With those disclaimers out of the way, we can begin to unpack the key terms in Warren’s thought. Calvin Warren relies crucially on German philosopher Martin Heidegger to help develop his understanding of ontology. Warren even goes as far as to say Heidegger “more than any
philosopher understood the violence of metaphysics.”20 With the ontological turn on Black study, which is to say study, Warren’s mediation is a relevant and unique point in this trajectory, and thus, I believe it should be engaged. However, I am worried the obscurity of Warren’s reliance on technical philosophical language primarily derived from Heidegger has made any engagement on equal terms difficult.
Unfortunately, as in all languages, words can only be understood with reference to other words in that language, and so it is impossible to coherently define one concept at a time. Instead, we must attempt to explore one ensemble of related concepts at a time.
The first ensemble of concepts to be unpacked are (1) metaphysics and (2) the ontological difference between (3) ontics21 (beings) and (4) the ontological (Being),
tradition. However, I must confess I know next to nothing about the white psychoanalytic tradition of Lacan, Zizek, and Freud, and I have (perhaps, ironically) an aversion to it. Regardless, my fundamental lack – pun intended – of understanding of psychoanalysis has led me to exclude it almost entirely. However, Black psychoanalysis, such as through Fanon, has much more sway for me, and so we might have some throughout the work. 17 See Nash (2019, pg 35) regarding the intersectionality wars. 18 See Nash (2019, pg 36). 19 See Nash (2018). 20 See Warren (2016b, pg 58). 21 I use “ontics” instead of “ontic” because it does not follow for me that ontic is supposed to be the same as beings and politics and doesn’t have an “s” at the end.
because this is the origin of Heidegger’s project and his continued relevance to Warren. Heidegger, and therefore Warren, is very precise in his understanding of metaphysics, and we should first note that for Heidegger, metaphysics and ontology are absolutely not interchangeable. Heidegger introduces (2) the ontological difference, to distinguish what he calls the ontological and ontics. (3) Ontics is not a common word at all. It roughly translates to a focus on empirical references — which is to say that which can be measured or standardized objectively,22 with beings then referring to actual wholes in their material sense — and is the study of being-quaunderstanding.23 In contradistinction with this idea of ontics, (4) the ontological refers to the level of Being, a transcendental level, being-qua-being, and ground.24 Ontics and the ontological are related but different levels from each other, as the ontological difference signifies. Put another way, the “Ontological difference marks a distinction between Being (capitalized) as event, happening, or opening and being (lowercase) as a metaphysical object, a grounding, and representation.”25
Metaphysics can be understood as a system that attempts to get at Being through ontics, the empirical, and forgets the level of the ontological. Metaphysics, because it only thinks in the register of ontics, can only think through things that are objects; in this way, metaphysics requires objectification and schematization of everything in order to explain the world. To understand this, I find the saying, “when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” a helpful metaphor. This objectification is understood by Heidegger and those that have followed him as violent, and since the main tool of metaphysics is objectification, therefore, “The aim of metaphysics is domination.”26 Warren succinctly defines it: Metaphysics should be understood “as constituting a particularly violent episteme, one that reduces the grandeur of being into a scientific plaything — an object of rationality, calculation, instrumentalization, and schematization.”27 Metaphysics reproduces violence, and ontology moves away from this objectification (ontology will be problematized later).
While we have a brief summary of key terms in Warren, I still think that we are at a disadvantage in being able to robustly engage in this post-Heideggerian discourse. This paper hopes to remedy this by discussing three broad thinkers, who are themselves post-Heideggerians and deeply invested in political ontology, to give us a literature review so that we can see what moves are possible while being faithful to a post-Heideggerian ontological theory. First, I will cover postfoundational political thought, specifically Oliver Marchart,28 who are white theorists who are explicitly motivated by Heidegger’s work but want to rehabilitate it to move against his Nazism and make it more explicitly political. Second, I will cover philosopher Enrique Dussel, who is a landmark philosopher of liberation in Latin America and who himself is deeply invested in Heidegger and ontology but
22 See Marchart (2007, pg 15). 23 See Marchart (2018, pg 9). 24 See Marchart (2018, pg 9). 25 See Warren (2019, pg 48). 26 See Warren (2016b, pg 56). 27 See Warren (2016b, pg 56). 28 Who is explicitly interested in Ernesto Laclau’s political ontology in his book Thinking Antagonism.
is explicitly decolonial in purpose. And lastly, I will cover the philosophy of the eminent Fred Moten, who again is deeply impacted by Heidegger and works to revitalize ontology.
Organizing Definitions In reviewing literature, I have felt that different authors employ different meanings of ontology. I have delineated three different meanings of the word below. This format is regrettably sharp in its format; however, it is important to be specific in the meanings of ontology throughout this paper: • Ontology (1): dominant ontology, and therefore usually unmarked as such since it is hegemonic, which produces white people as having Being and
Black people as having non-Being • Ontology (2): the ontology produced outside the dominant ontology • Ontology (3): the (meta?) ontology that contains both ontology (1) and ontology (2)
Literature Review: PostFoundational Political Thought Post-foundational political thought offers three key tools for helping us think through an ontological theory invested in thinking through Blackness and antiblackness:29 (1) demonstrating how the “nothing” can be thought through, (2) elaborating that at the ontological level all grounds are politically produced, and (3) giving an account of how grounding unfolds, through their conception of politics. (1) The ontological ground of the social is founded upon contingent, temporary, and malleable grounds that are ultimately founded upon nothing.30 As Warren explains, post-foundationalism centers on a “lack of an absolute ground for society. This is not to suggest that there is no ground or that one can offer no claim to a foundation; rather, the ground of the social, the foundation, is weak, contingent, and not absolute.”31 Taking this thought seriously, there is no recourse to some ground that itself does not require grounding. This provides a fruitful orientation for understanding the social (society), not as eternally the same throughout all historical conjunctures, but rather continuously constructed through action.
Post-foundationalists argue that the nothing can be properly incorporated into a political theory by placing the nothing in an interplay with the ground itself because the ground is founded upon nothing.32 The nothing and the ground are constantly in play with each other, chasing each other away and back again. Because there is no absolute ground as in meta-
29 Post-foundational political thought is not meant to describe beyond all foundation similar to anti-foundationalism but also to denote a movement away from strong foundationalism.The anti-foundationalist position is mostly self-explanatory; literally, there is no ontological ground whatsoever that can explain how things are. Conversely, strong foundationalists believe in an absolute ground, which can account for everything, and that itself requires no additional ground. Examples include God, Reason, and dialectical idealism/materialism. 30 The social means society and is at the ontic level. 31 See Warren (2010, pg 14). 32 This recognition of the nothing is relevant because metaphysics, as discussed earlier, strives to objectify everything, and the nothing always escapes objectification and thus threatens the episteme of metaphysics with collapse by exposing its limitations. In this way, metaphysics hates the nothing, so to speak, and as Warren argues, projects it onto Blackness in order to control and neutralize it (Ontological Terror 5).
physics, post-Heideggerians argue that there is in fact nothing upon which the ground of society is founded because that would become the absolute ground, and again we are back at metaphysics. Therefore, if we take seriously the idea that an absolute ground is a metaphysical illusion, then there can be no deeper level that fully grounds the previous ground; put another way, the essential metaphysical quest is to desperately disprove that the social is not in reality founded, in the end, upon literally nothing. 33 Therefore, the post-foundationalist embraces this which terrifies so many metaphysical theorists, which is that there is no fundamental logic or foundation for the social. (2) However, as aforementioned, unlike anti-foundationalists, who argue that there is no foundation whatsoever, post-foundationalists argue that there is no absolute, final ground, but there are contingent, temporary grounds constructed. This is the essence of why they are identified as post-foundationalists; according to them, there is a foundation, but it is founded about an abyss, and so it is necessarily contingent, and importantly, this contingent ground can never assume a total, absolute, or final ground status.34 So, grounds are real, which is self-evident to those of us who seek to understand the colonial nature of our present world, but these grounds are contingent, which is to say created through politics. But what is politics from a post-Heideggerian perspective? (3) Politics is understood as the social actions that either sediment or unsettle the ontological order,35 which is to mean, that which functions to stabilize or destabilize part of the current hegemonic distribution. The hegemonic order in this case is meant to delineate the link from ontics to the ontological; “Grounds emerge from hegemonic paradigm shifts,”36 which is to mean grounds “emerge from … political struggle.”37 In the register of ontics, hegemonic distribution refers to the “terrain of sedimented practices.”38 When this paper speaks to sedimentation, it is referring to the condition of routinized repetition, where there can be more or less sedimentation of a given practice, and the more sedimented it is, the less it is questioned, or even able to be questioned, and vice versa; “sedimentation emerges from repetition.”39 Post-foundational political thought creates an important link for political ontology by labeling the link from ontics to the ontological, via intense sedimentation as the grounding or instantiating of the social world.40 Grounding is the level of the ontological, and “politics should be seen as an attempt at instantiating the [ontological].”41 Politics is nothing
33 See Warren (2010, pg 15). 34 See Marchart (2018, pg 26). 35 These thinkers believed that there is a usefulness in creating a distinction for clarity purposes between the term “politics” and the term “the political,” which follows the distinction of the term “ontics” and the term “the ontological.” Oliver Marchart helps elucidate this position by labelling this separation the political difference, a deliberate homage to Heidegger’s “ontological difference” (Post-Foundational Political Thought 4). 36 See Marchart (2018, pg 172). 37 See Marchart (2018, pg 171). 38 See Marchart (2018, pg 91). 39 See Marchart (2018, pg 94). 40 See Marchart (2018, pg 91). 41 See Marchart (2018, pg 238).
other than “ontic struggles” that prevent the closure of the social, which is to mean prevent an ultimate ground;42 these ontic struggles (politics) attempt to produce one reality which by definition excludes other possible realities, which is what is meant by attempts at grounding. Therefore, our social world is in a constant cycle of grounding and de-grounding, then grounding and de-grounding again,43 and “politics” is the name of the concept that describes the actions that produce this cycle of grounding.
While the ontological institutes ontics, post-foundationalist thought recenters that ontics (politics) produces the ontological. Beyond some interesting exercise of post-Heideggerian thought, I go over this first and foremost to give us the tools to analyze political ontological thought that borrows from these same thinkers. The above overview allows us to answer the question: But what creates ontology? I believe Marchart’s work, for all its failings, creates an essential intervention. The play of difference does not make the ontological subordinate to ontics, and so too does it not make ontics subordinate to the ontological: They create each other,44 so yes, the ontological institutes ontics, but ontics is what creates the ontological.45 As Marchart puts it, “every form of ontological institution must be ontically mediated via action and agency.”46 Ontics is what determines the ontological.47
To put it succinctly, so long as the field of ontics (the social) cannot be closed (which is to say all conflict/change ends), so too can the ontological not be closed. We can never make claims that the order we live under, at the ontological level or at ontics, cannot be closed because politics is what creates the ontological, and politics is always present.
In this section, we covered the three tools we might gain from post-foundational political thought for theorizing political ontology, namely: (1) how the nothing can be thought through, (2) the contingent nature of the ontological, and (3) an explanation of how ontics produces the ontological ground, through its conception of politics.
In this next section, we will go over the philosophy of Enrique Dussel and discover what tools we might glean from his work.
42 See Marchart (2018, pg 151). 43 See Marchart (2018, pg 234). 44 Through an eternal interplay of difference. 45 See Marchart (2018, pg 145), Maldenado-Torres (2008, 221); See also, Maldenado-Torres (2007). 46 See Marchart (2018, pg 145). 47 See Warren (2010, pg 56).
Literature Review: Enrique Dussel The philosophy of Enrique Dussel gives us two additional insights into political ontology:48 (1) the concept of the totalizing system (or totality), and (2) the concept of the trans-ontological.
A quick note: Dussel’s work is profoundly marked by an anticolonial posture, which is an improvement on post-foundationalist thought, but a major weakness is his refusal to thoroughly engage with race and gender. Additionally, when he does, he tends to collapse all non-white races in a similar structural position of subjection. As I laid out in the beginning, this paper is operating with the assumption that the structural position of Blackness under colonialism is uniquely subjected, and so Dussel’s collapse is inappropriate. I would argue that this point of view of Dussel does affect his work, but we can still easily translate his work to our current assumption, and when Dussel claims the domination of non-white (or more often in his words, dominated) people, for the purposes of this paper I will read this as Black people. (1) The concept of a totalizing system, or totality, refers to the dominant ontological order that attempts to institute complete control but ultimately never succeeds. Dussel’s totalizing system links well with the post-foundational notion of the impossibility of a final ground so that the totalizing system never ultimately can close. The totality (which is just a shorthand for totalizing system), attempts to annihilate opposition, but the colonial world never completes its impulse toward complete closure, which is just another way of saying what we discussed earlier, that the final ground can never be reached.49 Marchart writes, “The social is laden with conflict on the ontic plane, because society cannot be concluded into a totality.”50 Dussel and post-foundationalists agree; the social can never be closed into a totality, can never reach a final ground. I want to spell out this implication a bit clearer.
To say that the totalizing system never closes, that there is never a final ground, means (a) that the dominant order does not control all possible actions/possibilities/futures, and (b) there exists something outside this control. We can speak of the internal lives of the oppressed as not totally being controlled by nor ultimately reducible to the colonial situation. This can be seen through the revolutionary struggle, the intramural, and the social life (even if) within the social death of blackness and Black people.51 (2) The analytic of the trans-ontological describes how there exists something beyond the dominant ontological order. Dussel introduces the transontological by defining it in relation to the dominant order, writing, “the transontological level, that is, beyond the dominating totality.”52 Since the totality of the dominant ontological system is fundamentally exclusionary of some people and their politics, there are people outside,
48 Philosopher Enrique Dussel is extensively influenced by Heidegger’s work and is without a doubt within the post-metaphysical tradition (Ethics of Liberation 376-377, 593). 49 See Mills (2018, pg 22). 50 See Marchart (2018, pg 150). 51 See Mills (2018, pg 37). 52 See Dussel (2013, pg 337).
though not totally,53 this totality.54 The two fundamental interventions I then take from Dussel, is that (a) there exists material (ontic) content beyond the dominant ontology, and (b) these people have an ontological being that escapes the directive of the totality.55 According to the dominant system, the colonized are other, and “as other than the system, … one is beyond Being. Inasmuch as Being is and non-Being is not, the other is not.”56 Dussel’s elaboration of the relation of non-being and the system of dominant ontology makes clear that the statuses of Being and non-Being are politically constructed and imposed upon existents.57
Dussel’s analytic of the transontological argues that not only is there social life, but this very sociality constitutes the Being of blackness, which is not reducible to the imposition of antiblackness by the colonial order. As Dussel explains, he uses the prefix “trans-” to get across there is a passing beyond the ontology of the dominant system (ontology (1)), and since the dominant order is de facto hegemonic, this ontology invisibilizes other ontological systems. Nevertheless, in reality, the place that the transontological attempts to go to, which is produced by the oppressed, is itself ontological in a genuine way, by which I mean not an illusion of the dominant system.58 This, I believe, already gives us powerful tools in working with Warren, who reflects about Moten’s mysticism: “What Black mysticism offers is a lexical imagination that aims to take us outside of political ontology and into the metaphysical (or the spiritual).”59 Dussel often refers to the transontological as the metaphysical (breaking with Heidegger and Warren), which makes Dussel’s work appear to follow Warren’s praise of the language of metaphysics to escape ontology: “It is precisely this mysticism that provides our fugitive escape from the confines of ontology. … Thus, mysticism is not inimical to freedom; it is the only aspect of existence that provides hope.”60 Dussel’s philosophy gives us the emphasis on the Black ontic and ontological experience that (1) exceeds the totalizing system, which we find in the (2) transontological level, outside of the dominant ontology.
Warren’s praise leads us to our next thinker, Fred Moten.
Literature Review: Fred Moten One final addendum to create a somewhat accessible ontological language is the brilliant work of Fred Moten.61 Moten gives us two tools that overlap with what we already have discussed: (1) the concept of paraontology as that which describes the
53 See Dussel (2003, pg 47). 54 See Dussel (2013, pg 558). 55 See Dussel (2013, pg 339, 558). 56 See Dussel (2003, pg 51). 57 What I find brilliant about Dussel’s analysis is that he correctly identifies that the ontology of the dominant system is not the only field of ontological existence, and beyond the ontology of the dominant system, there is a different ontology produced by the oppressed. “The ‘liberation project’ is ontological. However, since it unfolds beyond (in exteriority) the current system... I frequently refer to it as transontological” (Ethics of Liberation 628). 58 See Dussel (2013, pg 628). 59 See Warren (2017, pg 220). 60 See Warren (2017, pg 222). 61 This brings us closer to our aim since Moten has had an active and ongoing discussion with afropessimists, and as Calvin Warren notes, Moten is himself a “neo-Heideggerian” (Black Mysticism 221).
level of Being for Blackness,62 and (2) the elaboration of how even under conditions of “social death,” there is still Black social life. As Moten puts it, “blackness needs to be understood as operating at the nexus of the social and the ontological.”63 Hopefully, this is what this paper is doing. (1) Moten deploys the concept of paraontology to signify the ontological register of Blackness (ontology (2)),64 where the dominant ontology (ontology (1)) excludes Blackness from ontology. Dominant ontology places blackness as abjection, but blackness is not reducible to this abjection, and therefore ontology in this sense is not up to the task of Black thinking, which is to say thinking about blackness. When I say “ontology in this sense,” I am talking about ontology (1). I believe Moten says it well: “What is inadequate to blackness are already given ontologies. The lived experience of blackness is, among other things, a constant demand for an ontology of disorder, an ontology of dehiscence, a paraontology whose comportment will have been (toward) the ontic or existential field of things and events.”65 I take Moten to link “already given ontologies” as equal to ontology (1), which is to say, dominant ontology.
Moten’s analysis of paraontology provides a consensus with post-foundationalist political thought and Dussel’s work, in that ontology (1) is not the only ontological system. The colonial world always seeks to create a totality, but as we discussed before, this is impossible. Moten becomes our third figure profoundly influenced by Heidegger to come to the same conclusion: the dominant ontology is not total. And, we can add another conclusion that Moten and Dussel share: If there is life that exceeds the ontology of the dominant system, this too produces its own ontology. To use the language of Moten, this ontology is fugitive because it escapes and cannot be contained by the dominant ontology, no matter the desire of the dominant ontology to capture and destroy it; Blackness “is a theft of being.”66 This fugitive ontology is the ontology that exists in a non-reducible way beyond the dominant ontology, which is to say the ontology (2) that exists beyond ontology (1). Moten (and Chandler) gives ontology (2) the name of paraontology. 67
I argue that Moten’s paraontology and Dussel’s transontology can be productively understood as one and the same, as expressing what I have before (in the poverty of language68) labelled ontology (2).
62 First introduced by Nahum Chandler in Chandler, 2013, Moten modifies his version. 63 See Moten (2018b, pg 150). 64 We should take care to remember “the paraontological distinction between blackness and black people” (The Universal Machine 242). 65 See Moten (2018b, pg 150). 66 See Hart (2016, pg 24). 67 “Moten carries Heidegger’s … ontic/Ontological into the distinction between blacks … and blackness” (Black Mysticism 225). The paraontology level is on something like an ontological level. 68 What Warren might label “grammatical paucity” (Black Mysticism 220).
To reiterate, in a post-Heideggerian vein, one can only speak “ontology” when there is actually something in the empirical realm, i.e., some ontics to speak of.
And as Sexton writes, of course there is Black social life, but the point is that this social life is lived in social death.69 But now moving beyond this misunderstanding, I think a critical question that can be posed is: Is all Black social life reducible to this position of social death? (2) Moten responds to this by clarifying that what is called social death is only a death for a part of the Black social life.70 His intervention is helpful because it helps clarify a distinction that sometimes our language can obscure: that the social death spoken of, in being a political death, is not the totality of what we can call Black social life (or Black sociality).71
The needed intervention that I believe Moten’s work demonstrates is that this political death does not kill the totality of what we can call the social (ontic), or something like it. As Moten expertly puts it, “Stolen life [Black life] is not equivalent to social death or absolute dereliction.”72 One life is killed, and another begins, and this life is not reducible to the ongoing death (and violence) being imposed on it.
Since we can now say that all Black social life (or something like it) is not reducible to ontic powers of the colonial system, we can so too understand the Blackness is not reducible or wholly captured by the ontological system of colonialism, which is what Dussel calls the transontological, Moten the paraontological, and I earlier called ontology (2). According to Moten, Black social life “causes us to recognize the paraontological as the ontological’s (im) proper name.”73 This follows Dussel’s claim that the transontological is ontological.74 Moten makes very explicit that it is this Black social life that exceeds the imposition of domination by whiteness that creates paraontology.75
Moten gives us the (1) paraontological, which is in many ways the same as the transontological, and (2) an elaboration of Black social life non-reducible to conditions of social death, which can productively be understood as expressing similar ideas as the lack of closure of the social for post-foundationalists and the totalizing system of Dussel.
Conclusion This paper argues that the language of political ontology that is important to many Black theorists can be productively opened up by a dialogue between the work of
69 See Sexton (2016b, pg 15). 70 I would note, from my own perspective, Moten, in (correctly) tracing this genealogy to Arendt, perhaps becomes Arendtian himself in some of his analysis, creating a strict separation of the political and social. To be clear, the post-foundational thought that I elaborated above is at odds with Arendt’s understanding of the political because it argues that which is commonly described as political, which is often what Arendt means (e.g., public debate), is itself part of our social (ontic) world. Moten himself notices this and problematizes it (Moten, 2018b, pgs 101, 107); however, when Moten talks of political death instead of social death, I want to put a caveat that I am unsure is explicit in Moten: that this political death is in itself social. (To clarify, I do not claim to correct Moten, I believe we agree completely in the end, but I wanted to make a clarification of translation between his works and how this paper unfolds.) 71 See Moten (2018b, pg 194). 72 See Moten (2018b, pg 151). 73 See Moten (2018a, pg 35). 74 See Duseel (2013, pg 628). 75 See Moten (2017, pg 312).
Oliver Marchart, Enrique Dussel, and Fred Moten. Each author’s unique work offers overlapping and complementary insights that help reveal the plane of political ontology. First, post-foundationalist thought demonstrates how the “nothing” can be thought through, elaborates that at the ontological level all grounds are politically produced, and gives an account of how grounding unfolds through its conception of politics. Secondly, the philosophy of Enrique Dussel gives us the concept of the totalizing system and the concept of the trans-ontological. Finally, Moten gives us two tools of the concept of paraontology as that which describes the level of Being for Blackness and the elaboration of how, even under conditions of “social death,” there is still Black social life.
These insights allow a deeper engagement with the political ontology laid out by Calvin Warren and afropessimists such as Wilderson and Sexton. This is just an introductory effort that hopes to enable fellow scholars to engage with their important work in richer ways. ■
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