Time is a racial privilege fueling anti-black violence; black nihilism rejects the myth of temporal salvation – black imagination is key to blackness

If we have understood nihilism as the entrapment (and misery) of metaphysics, the reduction of Being to value circulation (axio-ontology) and Being’s forgottenness, and the neutralization of various hierarchies of existence and legitimacy (Vattimo), then Black nihilism would sug- gest that time is not a natural right or intrinsic resource. Time is a su- preme onto-metaphysical value that traffics in anti-Black violence, sub- jugation, destruction, and must also be reduced to myth, fantasy, and displaced. Rather than providing the resource for creativity and power, time is a racial privilege that embeds itself in Being and metaphysics—

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it anchors the human and engenders extreme brutality and destructive pleasure. It is impossible, then, to de-link time from the anti-Black vio- lence saturating it. Enterprises such as Black politics and democratic imagination reproduce the “same” rather than introducing a break in vi- olence. Put differently, the democratic imagination takes time for grant- ed as a natural right or unquestioned condition of existence, rather than bringing this condition under investigation and suspicion; reproducing time, as a creative and synthetic activity, is its primary preoccupation. Black existence exposes time as an unreliable lure, one vested in certain onto-metaphysical fantasies. I would add to Vittorio Possenti’s remark- able anatomizing of nihilism—theoretical, moral, theological, techno- logical, and judicial—spatio-temporal nihilism, since both space and time provide problems for Black thinking in the abyss and demand a protocol of thinking (or imagination?) that is released from the preconditions of Being and ethics. Black nihilism de-idealizes both space and time as offering anything intrinsically or potentially transformative. Thus, the limit of space and time, for Black existence, cannot be re-worked into anything life-affirming or synthesized into anything meaningful.

To put a finer point on this reflection: Anti-Blackness is a problem of time and the democratic imagination. Police shootings and COVID-19 deaths, for example, foreground the failure of time to alleviate Black suffering. Time is not curative; it is a weapon of tremendous violence. Despite the optimism of Black political theorists, time entraps Black thinking in a web of contradictions, absurdities, and impasses. The pa- thetic theorizing of Melvin Rogers, for example in his “Between Pain and Despair: What Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Missing,” presents an incred- ibly impoverished, unreliable, and inept reading of Black pessimism and the crisis of Black existence—it links democratic action to the imagina- tion and clings to an “ontology of change” despite all evidence to the contrary in Black life. His work, however, represents a coterie of Black political optimists so blinded by democracy’s promise that they consider Black pain a form of political possibility. It is a perverse enterprise capi- talizing on what we might call black jouissance—futurity constitutes the “temporal material” for surplus-pleasure in Black suffering, travail, and political failure.

If there is any hope for the imagination and its endless circulation in contemporary Black thought, it will need to abandon time and refuse its seductions. The future is but one temporal value we must de-idealize and insert into an anti-Black will to power—one wreaking havoc across the globe. In these desperate times, Black existence needs a liberated imagination, an imagination liberated from formal thought, the world, destructive transcendence and immanence, and dogmatic preconditions. So, why continue to expend energy re-imagining the future and democ- racy? Let us focus Black imagining on enterprises that sustain us in the abyss. Outlining and presenting such enterprises requires tremendous spiritual and intellectual energy—but such investment is all we have.