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“Onticide,” for all its conceptual power, positions the “black queer” as uniquely the catachresis of this “nothing.” Warren supports this claim by noting that the “black queer” doubles “the black’s” exclusion from being while also facing exclusion from “the queer’s” “incorpor[ation] . . . into the fold of humanity.”114 He develops this argument through Eric Stanley’s observation that “the overwhelming numbers of trans/queer people who are murdered in the United States are of color.”115 This prompts him to reflect on the “differential relationship to violence” of “people of color” and “non-people of color” among “those who might identify as ‘queer.’ ”116 Based on the disproportionate representation of the former among “trans/queer people” killed in the United States, Warren argues that the Blackness of “black queers” denies them “symbolic placement, differentiating flesh, and a grammar of suffering”—all of which remain possibilities, if only marginally, for “queers” not “of color.”117 Construing “the black,” through reference to Fanon, as outside “symbolic placement,” Warren asserts that “black suffering” is unintelligible in any “grammar of suffering” (which he now associates with “queer theory”), precisely to the extent that Black suffering “lacks a proper grammar of enunciation.”118 As heir to “the violence of captivity [that] expelled the African from Difference, or the Symbolic,” “the black-as- object,” for Warren, “is situated outside of space, time, and the world,” which is also to say, outside of the human as “the order of differentiating subjects.”119 Blackness and queerness, in other words, have not only different relations to violence but also, as Warren puts it, “a differential relationship to ‘nothingness,’ where ‘nothingness’ is the symbolic designator of the incomprehensible remainder or exclusion. The fact that the overwhelming majority of those murdered are ‘of color’ and the position of blackness in the antagonism is one of non-ontology (negative existence) is no mere coincidence.”120 Underlying this analysis, though, is the conflation of ontological impossibility with entities represented as ontologizing this very impossibility. If, that is, the overrepresentation of people of color among trans/queer murder victims and the “position of blackness . . . [as] one of non-ontology” is, indeed, “no mere coincidence,” then either “the black” must essentially coincide with Blackness as nonontology or the “the black” must be understood as one of its highly charged catachreses. But what could it mean, and how could we know it, if “the black” were essentially bound to the “blackness” that remains, not like but as the Real, excluded from representation? Can an experience historically correlated with African captivity in the Atlantic slave trade uniquely define “the Real of ontology” that, in Warren’s own phrasing, “ruptures and preconditions symbolization”?121 “The black,” no less than “the queer” or “the woman,” is subjectified through language, but what Warren rightly characterizes as the “unresolvable problem for blackness”—the fact that it remains “the ‘unthought’ and the incommunicable,” “outside of life and its customary lexis”—leads him, despite his own warning against it, to slide “between identity and structure” by conflating the ontological exclusion that is “blackness” with the social exclusion of Blacks.122 He thus presents as noncontingent, nonhistorical, and a priori—in other words, as ontological—“ the black’s” relation to the structural position of ontological impossibility.123 Warren himself sounds a warning about the dangers of such a conflation when responding to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s analysis of David Marriott’s On Black Men.124 Jackson, he argues, errs in her effort to “think race and sexuality together”: It is here that we seem to slide between blackness as a structural position of non-ontology and the sociology of race (as an identity). In this analysis, blackness becomes a “type” much like sexologist [sic] created the “homosexual” as a type. Instead of thinking about blackness as the ontological horizon that fractures epistemology, we locate blackness within the Symbolic Order of scientific discourse and sexology. Blackness, then, oscillates between an identity, a marker of the Symbolic order, and an ontological position, the “Real” that ruptures and preconditions symbolization. This sliding between identity and structure is a symptom of what Wilderson would call “the ruse of analogy.” Whenever we equate an ontological position with an identity formation, we perform the very violence that sustains the antagonism.125 Notwithstanding the care with which he makes these distinctions, Warren himself, I have argued, identifies Blackness (as the ontologically excluded Real) with “the black” (as the sociological identity of particular Symbolic subjects). He reads “the black” not only as a “being fallen off the map of conceivability,” as one who “ ‘does not exist’ in the world because lacking symbolic placement,” but also as a social identity whose visibility enables the statistical analysis of murdered trans/queer persons of color.126 This conflation seems to spring from his resistance (rooted in solid political ground) to viewing “the black” and “the queer” as equivalent in their social or historical positions—a resistance reinforced by the preponderance of violence against “trans/queer” people of color. But it results in a less sustainable resistance to the “equivalence” of “blackness and queerness.”127 As “ontological position[s]” that gesture toward what the order of being leaves out, Blackness and queerness would name catachrestically the unnameable void in reality and the enjiety aroused whenever a subject comes too close to the Real. Though certainly inflected by unconscious motivations and by my own position as a subject, my focus on queerness as an organizing term wagers that its indeterminacy of reference (in contrast to the fungible “black-objects” to which Blackness for Warren is essentially fixed) might slow, if not prevent, the slide from ontological position to fixed social identity, thus permitting the negativity of queerness to supplement—rather than to supersede—the ongoing historical and political efforts to read “the queer” and “the black.”128 The work of queer theory thus coincides with interrogations of woman, Blackness, or trans* as ontological exclusions, a point reinforced by David Marriott’s insight “that blackness has no locatable referent or unequivocal name, but is something that escapes all attributes, including the unity of an ontic-ontological fugitivity or again the hypostatized name of ‘absolute dereliction.’ ”