Blackness is the limit ordinal through which whiteness exists – whiteness is a mathematical operation of succession through which blackness is the natural negation of the Eurocentric model.

The regulating terms of the dominant grammar of representation (re)produce black(ened) mater as always and already trapped within immanence, burdening black (maternal) female figures in particular with functioning as a signifier that points to what Sylvia Wynter (1990) terms ‘demonic ground’ or what is foreclosed from representability: the nonrepresentable beyond dividing what is sensible from what is nullified and precluded from representability. Thereby, the modern grammar of representation imposes the inhumanity it presumes[xxv].

These axiomatic circulations of representation, the unspoken grammar behind what it means to see and be able to speak “Look! A Negro,” structurally positions the Black as “the negation of the generic ‘normal humanness.”[xxvi] Or rather, from within the set of Humanity/Humanism, under the axiomatics of Man’s infinite multiplicity, the Black functions as the limit ordinal which Alain Badiou, French philosopher and set theoretician mentions, “is essentially different from that of a successor ordinal.”[xxvii] Badiou describes the limit ordinal to be “inaccessible via the operation of succession.”[xxviii] The operation of succession is important because each successor operation – understood as the basis through which something can present itself as different yet remain categorically the same from with a set – is defined by a rule of passage that sets it either within the set or outside the set. The limit ordinal comes to define the absolute boundary within the rule of passage. Thus, if the operation of succession functions according to the recognition of “still one more,” the limit ordinal functions as the “second existential seal,”[xxix] by closing the additive value of the multiple within the borders of its alterity. Thus, if mathematics is ontology and “[o]ntology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man [and woman],”[xxx] then one should think of Blackness and Non-Blackness when Badiou writes:

The Other is, on the one hand, in the position of place for the other-sames; it is the domain of both the rule’s exercise and its impotence. On the other hand, it is what none of these others are, what the rule does not allow to traverse; it is therefore the multiple subtracted from the rule, and it is also what, if reached by the rule, would interrupt its exercise. It is clearly in the position of limit for the rule[xxxi].

In Modernity, under the axioms of Man, the ontological schema of the natural infinity that is the Euro-centric model of being Human, the point of Being, or the name of the void through which the successor ordinals of Man emerge is the Ratiocentric/Biocentric Man as described by Sylvia Wynter and the limit of the rule of being Human in accordance to the axioms of Man is the Black. Wynter describes three major events that marked a paradigmatic or evental rupture in Western historiography thus resulting in the birth of Ratio-centric Man. These events were the voyages of the Portuguese and Christopher Columbus (1492), the creation of the Modern State, and the Copernican Revolution. For Wynter, these events opened the possibility for new ways of knowing the World itself through inaugurating a rupture in the epistemology of the theocentric framework that said: 1) That the Oceans were not navigable; 2) the King had Divine Right to Govern; 3) the Earth stood perfectly still. This schematic conception has crucial thematic implications when one understands Wynter’s conversation on the transformation of this episteme of Truth as not only a re-description of the terms of the Spiritual Man, but additionally a revolutionary severaging of the Human from the Animal. Wynter’s work illustrates how these ruptures allowed for the rise of European Rationalism/Enlightenment which fostered the Western shift away from an overrepresentation of Man as Theocentric to an overrepresentation of Man as Ratiocentric. However, the West’s inability to see its own rationalism as a form of ethno-knowledge codified a new onto-epistemology that denied the existence, or the ontology of the Black due to what was perceived as their inability to reproduce Western forms of ethno-rationalism and their existence on regions of Earth without Western conceptions of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.