L/T - Afropessimism’s ontology of race is insufficient and conforms to the logic of thinkability that negates the value of sex ab-sens which allows the non-being to be. *Potentially Retag*

Nothing could be further from the theoretical argument that Wilder- son presents. Emphasizing an insight central to Afropessimist thought as a whole, he declares, “Blacks are not Human subjects, but are structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sado-masochistic pleasures.”11 By recognizing Blackness as external to the on- tological framework of the human, Wilderson, building on earlier work by theorists like Ronald Judy, can identify anti-Blackness as inherent in the con- stitution of (human) being. It follows from this that politics can never escape the anti-Blackness that structures the human in the first place. Both Seale and Kendi, like Angela Davis, push discussions of racism beyond the trap of intentionality and individual guilt, leading to difficult questions about structural determination that remind us, in Davis’s words, that “if we don’t take seriously the ways in which racism is embedded in structures of insti- tutions, if we assume that there must be an identifiable racist . . . who is the perpetrator, then we won’t ever succeed in eradicating racism.”12 But in doing so they also insist that those structures, because they manifest themselves in human institutions, are therefore subject to change by humans. For Wilderson and others constructing the intellectual framework of Afropessimism, that very embeddedness in the human makes structural change impossible. Thus, Wilderson rejects the prospect of “coherent liberation campaigns” for Black subjects; Afropessimism, he writes, “describe[s] a structural problem but of- fer[s] no structural solution.”13 From within the precepts of Afropessimism such a solution cannot exist. The meaning of structure has shifted here from the contingent power to shape and control particular institutions to an ontological imperative bound up with social organization as such. That imperative, as Bad Educa- tion maintains, grounds being in being meaningful, in conforming to the logic of thinkability that organizes human community. As the introduction argues by attending closely to a passage from L’Étourdit, the Symbolic’s on- tology arises, according to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, through the exclusion of what he calls ab-sens, the nonrelation to meaning. Only this enabling subtraction of what, in itself, is subtracted from sense (even before there is a sense from which it could be subtracted), only this negation of a primal negativity, allows the ontology of the human through the language that differentiates culture from nature. To the extent that ab-sens, according to Lacan, is also what “designates . . . sex,” its ontology-producing exclusion makes sex external to meaning and being, simultaneously incomprehensible and ontologically impossible.14 Unlike the sex whose definition Justice Alito can blithely cite, sex for Lacan pertains to the Real, to the beyond of signification where definition does not obtain. As discussed in Bad Education, then, the sex that ab-sens would designate, a priori absented from being, gives way to sex as the difference that governs the Symbolic as sens-absexe, Lacan’s term for the ontological order linking sexual difference to meaning. Sens-absexe permits signification precisely by absenting sex as ab-sens. It creates, with that negative gesture, the world that swells into being through words. Because sex as ab-sens is exorbitant to the logic of difference and meaning, however, it can have no name of its own. Only through catachresis can it indicate the state of nondifferentiation made unthinkable by sens-absexe, which consigns it to the void of nonbeing that enables being to be. To that extent, the sex foreclosed with the subtraction of ab-sens coincides with incest in psychoanalysis, where incest is seen as impossible either to cognize or to enact, constituting as it does, in Lacanian terms, the impossible Real of sex. Inconceivable in its radical nondifferen- tiation, incest figures, like sex and ab-sens, the exclusion that structures the Symbolic (as the order of language, ontology, and the human) and permits it to function as the reality procured by sens-absexe. With this we may seem to have wandered far from the murder of George Floyd, but Bad Education argues, to the contrary, that this is the immutable structure to which “structural racism” finally refers. While acknowledging historical differences in lived experience, socioeconomic mobility, degree of precarity, access to power, and positioning in the cultural imaginary among those read as Black, queer, woman, trans*, or any other category of social (non)“being” collectively delegitimated as other than human,