The alternative’s radical negativity refuses questions of political feasibility and liberal choice in favor of changing the coordinates of politics so as to pose a demand in excess of any present imagination – Afropessimism is an ethics of the real which insists on abolition as the foundation for ending the world.

There is no such thing as a positive aggressive strength, only a negative defensive one. Attackers always only attack themselves. We can truly approach another only in the experience of our mutual weakness. (This is something I’ve discussed over the years with Jaye Austin Williams, who is now teaching at Bucknell University. Her research and writing on black feminist playwrights Kia Corthron, Lynne Nottage, and Suzan-Lori Parks is animated, in part, by her own martial arts background. In addition to her work as scholar-educator, writer-director, and actor-singer, she’s also a 4th Dan aikidoist.) This is the crucial distinction: the baseless, centered outreach of tenderness, and the well founded, off-center overreach of aggression. Is it any surprise, in an anti-black world, that these gestures are confused by so many, those that mistake an invitation for a threat? How many have resented the invitation blackness makes and defended themselves against it with lethal consequence? The intensification of negativity is a way of thinking seriously with and through the various black colloquialisms to “break it down.” Blackness might be that spirit of inquiry and argumentation that, borrowing a phrase from Public Enemy, says “bring that beat back,” a gesture that says you didn’t really understand all there is yet to understand, feel all there is yet to feel, hear all there is yet to hear—within your own experience. We have no trouble seeing how black musical forms have not only done right by the diverse aesthetic practices they have engaged around the world, but have also often improved upon or enhanced the source material. They have at the very least made something else beautiful and discerning right alongside: complement, supplement, compliment. The global histories of jazz and hip-hop and the increasingly visible itinerary of black art song are just several of the more prominent examples. Could we develop a similar sensibility for appreciating how black thought attempts something kindred? So, too, black political movement. Sylvia Wynter (2006) has that fantastic line in her interview with the journal Proud Flesh: “When I write, I want to sound in theory the way Aretha Franklin sounds in song.” By that she means not only—only!—that she wants all that she writes to be liberating, but also that she wants to allow her thinking to unfold in a non-linear, creative fashion, as a poesis of thought. Many have waxed romantic about this poesis of late, but it is a process that involves all of the destructive and violent counter-forces of a peaceful martial art that can destroy your joints and break your bones and even end your life if you don’t figure out how to go with the flow. DB: “There is no such thing as a positive aggressive strength, only a negative defensive one.” This remark, as index of an aikido according to blackness, brings to mind a question you ask in one of your recently published articles: is there not a way to think … about a violence indifferent to hope, violence unmotivated by rage, violence irreducible to the dialectics of love and hate? Is there a violence that, as Nikki Giovanni once said, simply ‘cannot take the weight of a constant degradation’ (Fowler, 1992: 96), a violence that operates as a response per se, as what we might call defense without positive content? (2016a). I wonder whether it would make sense to connect the line of thought you’re pursuing here to the question of—the question that is—“the relation between defense and the outstretched hand.” I’m also struck by the resonance between your emphasis, following Wynter, on a mode of thinking that “unfold[s] in a non-linear fashion” and your articulation of negativity within the context of your writing. Such negativity is inseparable from the demand—which is “so much bigger”—in that it insists, amidst delimitative aggression, on this demand’s unfolding. If one means of delimiting this demand is imposed by the linearity of an “expectation of realization”—by investment in linear temporality, a horizon of the historically successive and successful—then negativity insists on, or as, a question of time. Specifically, it asks not whether the demand is realizable, but rather why the demand must be thought within, delimited by, the terms of realizability. In this moment, “the question posed by and as blackness” seems to emerge as the seeking, asking, desiring—the offering—of time itself. One of the ways in which I see your work posing this questioning of time, or offering this time of questioning, is through the motif of “interminability.” In fact, I sense that such interminability is at issue in what you’ve here described as “a ceaselessly universalizing universality” or, once again, as a demand in excess of any presently imaginable form of realization. The absence of a term adequate to the demand is also the absence of a terminus and of the calculability that such a point of arrival could claim to make possible. In this vein, you’ve described abolition as “the interminable radicalization of every radical movement” (2016b: 593) and invoked “an ethics of the real, a politics of the imperative, engaged in its interminably downward movement” (2016a). Your elaboration of this downward—one might say unfathomable—itinerary draws on an engagement with David Marriott’s account of the subjection of black persons to “the interminable time of meaningless, impersonal dying” (Marriott, 2007: 230; cited, with emphasis added, in Sexton, 2015: 168). I mention this particularly in view of your remark that the real according to which interminability unfolds is a matter of non-life. JS: I think you’re right to draw this link between “an aikido according to [or with] blackness” and my earlier, speculative thoughts on black feminist violence as a practice of “response per se, a defense without positive content.” We are, in a very basic way, always responding to the world, to ourselves, to the world in ourselves, to ourselves in the world, more than we are initiating, in thought and action. Any initiative or initiation would seem to be marked as such by a kind of permanent time lag or belatedness in which all thought is afterthought and all action is retroaction. But, then, we are also always active in that fundamental responsiveness, so much so that even passivity (whether waiting or resting or languishing) is a type of activity, that of our active being, that which brings forth life from the non-life with which it is commingled. Our being is active, but that doesn’t mean our being is always in-action. Why, in our political and intellectual circles, all the pointed concern about activity, why the worry, or fear, about being misunderstood as passive, individually and collectively? And why the close association between being passive and being victim or between passive-being and victim-being? Indeed, that tension between active/passive states provides the principal ground for the symbolic and material production of differences of race, gender, sexuality, class—all differently arrayed for different reasons, of course. I’m reminded, on that note, of a question Wilderson asked me years ago about an often overlooked passage in Fanon, from his critique of Octave Mannoni in Chapter 4 of Black Skin, White Masks, where Fanon is meditating on the aim of his vocation as a politically engagé mental health clinician. (I have some thoughts, by the way, on what I think Fanon misses in his reading of Mannoni in my article, “Curtain of the Sky”). Here’s the passage: As a psychoanalyst, I should help my patient to become conscious of his unconscious and abandon his attempts at a hallucinatory whitening, but also to act in the direction of a change in the social structure. In other words, the black man should no longer be confronted by the dilemma, turn white or disappear; but he should be able to take cognizance of a possibility of existence. In still other words, if society makes difficulties for him because of his color, if in his dreams I establish the expression of an unconscious desire to change color, my objective will not be that of dissuading him from it by advising him to “keep his place”; on the contrary, my objective, once his motivations have been brought into consciousness, will be to put him in a position to choose action (or passivity) with respect to the real source of the conflict—that is, toward the social structures (Fanon, 2008b: 74-75). So, Fanon moves initially from this deceptively recognizable psycho-political activist guideline, where the unreason of alienated compliance gives way to the reason of disalienated resistance, to a parenthetical clinical modulation, where he no longer seeks to enable action per se, and action in a particular direction at that, but rather decision; decision in the proper sense, rather than the forced choice, the vel, of hallucinatory whiteness: “turn white or disappear.” No decision can be made within the terms of a forced choice, Fanon reveals, only a decision about the terms of its imposition. (Aside: the Philcox translation has it as: “whiten or perish.” I like the Markmann phrasing better here because it stays with the dynamics of hyper/in/visibility that Fanon is exploring, the peculiar problem of overdetermination from without, which is to say of anti-black racialization, of victimized appearance, but also of a certain ethics or aesthetics of disappearance that we can glean from a reading of Fanon. Kara Keeling (2007) and Huey Copeland (2013) and Simone Browne (2015) have elaborated on this nexus generatively in their respective work.) Wilderson’s question was to the effect of: What would a properly decided, freely chosen, passivity toward the social structure look like? Is there such a thing—ethically, politically—as radical passivity? (I ended my first book with a slightly modified reference from Thomas Carl Wall’s (1999) text bearing that very title. I wonder about this genuinely still and tend to think, yes, there is such a thing.) Žižek, to take another well-known example, has played on the pop psychological notion of “passive aggressive behavior” in his withering critique of so much leftist activism today. In The Parallax View, he writes: perhaps, one should assert this attitude of passive aggressivity as a proper radical political gesture, in contrast to aggressive passivity, the standard ‘interpassive’ mode of our participation in socio-ideological life in which we are active all the time in order to make it sure that nothing will happen, that nothing will really change. In such a constellation, the first truly critical (‘aggressive’, violent) step is to withdraw into passivity, to refuse to participate—Bartleby’s ‘I would prefer not to’ is the necessary first step which as it were clears the ground for a true activity, for an act that will effectively change the coordinates of the constellation (Žižek, 2009: 342). Now, Zizek’s “Bartleby politics” are obviously not quietist, insofar as they are meant to prepare the way for a true political act. (Frédéric Neyrat [2014] has a related conception: “Rather than its heart, passivity should be the skin of politics. Without passivity, without a ‘negative capability,’ to refer to Keats’s notion, there isn’t any creative imagination, this chaotic imagination that generates the promises of new worlds.” And, not for nothing, Hortense Spillers (2003) makes another, earlier argument for “negative capability” in a pair of essays first published in the 1990s, “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date” and “All The Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race.” But the interregnum that opens up between the frenetic, aggressively passive “activism” of the current socio-ideological constellation—in which “the anxious expectation that nothing will happen” competes with “the desperate demand to do something”—and that new constellation brought into being by the introduction of some fundamental indeterminancy—a negativity that is, as you rightly note above, strictly unfathomable—that interregnum would seem to require the cultivation of an oxymoronic passive activity. Does it make sense to speak of a need for “passivism” (not to be confused with the homophonic term “pacifism”)? Think of the performative contradiction of trying to relax; the harder you try to attain it, the more it evades you. As every athlete worth their salt knows, your best performance requires your least effort. The more you relax, the more intensely you can exert yourself. In this scenario, you do more the less you try. It’s worth thinking about this seriously in the Trump era (using Trump here as a symbol for the consolidation of a whole post-civil rights, post-cold war, post-9/11 dispensation), given how greatly the ongoing reactionary campaign benefits from and requires any and all imagery of protest, political or pedestrian, as evidence—“alternative factual evidence”—supporting a narrative, ultimately, of white victimization and oppressive black power (and all the conflictual transliterations of this antagonism seen today—from the land and resource battles in the heartland to the travel bans at the borders). Given, that is, how frustratingly ineffective that protest seems to be in the face of an entire infrastructure that not only absorbs resistance, but solicits it too. It makes you nostalgic for the days of good old-fashioned repression and co-optation (days which, of course, never really existed in black), because at least then you knew you were on to something truly oppositional, subversive, alternate. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, under such conditions, black (or blackened) artists are drawn with some regularity to paradoxical ideas about fighting anti-blackness by over-identifying with its desire to disappear or distort or disfigure blackness, essentially taking it over and enforcing it hyperbolically, satirically, even vindictively. I think Paul Beatty’s literature has done this to great effect for twenty years or more—from White Boy Shuffle (1996) to The Sellout (2015)—and you could add to that titles like Darius James’s Negrophobia (1992) and Kola Boof’s Sexy Part of the Bible (2011); consider as well the work of Betye Saar and Kara Walker and Michael Ray Charles in the visual arts, the comedy of Dave Chappelle and Leslie Jones, or films like Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000) and Lars von Trier’s Manderlay (2005) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). I don’t want to get too much into the weeds of the current conjuncture and lose track of the larger structural problem posed by blackness and anti-blackness, a problem that confounds the very distinction between structure and conjuncture in the first place. It is not just the exigencies of the present moment or the strategic and tactical challenges facing the Movement for Black Lives that raise the question of how to intervene, of how to introduce “invention into existence,” as Fanon put it. What I’ve called “a groundless or baseless politics that does not proceed from a margin of power, a politics with no (final) recourse to foundations of any sort, a politics forged from critical resources immanent to the situation, resources from anywhere and anyone, which is to say from nowhere and no one in particular” (Sexton, 2016b: 589); this approach to politics would seem to entail a total rejection of transcendence, a politics of pure immanence without the Archimedean point. And in one sense it is, but I am attuned to the difficulties arising from an abandonment of the negative in our enthusiasm for the affirmative, and so I want to think not so much about transcendence viz. immanence as about the various forms or modalities of transcendence and immanence that can be mobilized.