Embrace Ex Nihilo, an anti-humanist black praxis that rejects the idea of a solution.

Indeed, it was Man, the Rational Man in its genre-specific European construction, that socially instituted as “natural” the Negro the irrational body void of Being par-excellence, or as systematically placed at the bottommost regions of the new onto-epistemic hierarchy of Being[xxxii]. Therefore, the Black became the signification of “the qualitative discontinuity in the homogeneous universe of the ontological substructure of natural multiples,”[xxxiii] from within the set of Humanity. It is this ontological schema of natural multiples, or more simply, the metaphysics produced by Man and the now multicultural milieu of Man’s historically situated naturalism that provides the legitimating apparatus for the gratuitous exploitation of the Black body. The situation as such is such that, “The wager of infinity turns on this discontinuity,” for “a limit ordinal is the place of the Other for the succession of same-others which belong to it.”[xxxiv] Hence, the possibility of an infinite relation to anti-Black violence is imbricated in the actuality of the figure of Human and its successors. Alain Badiou writes:

In the limit ordinal, the place of alterity (all the terms of the sequence belong to it) and the point of the Other (its name, a, designates an ordinal situated beyond all those which figure in the sequence) are fused together. This is why it is quite correct to name it a limit: that which gives a series both its principle of being, the one-cohesion of the multiple that it is, and its ‘ultimate’ term, the one-multiple towards which the series tends without ever reaching nor even approaching it. This fusion, at the limit, between the place of the Other and its one, referred to an initial point of being (here, ∅, the void) and a rule of passage (here, succession) is, literally, the general concept of infinity[xxxv].

Thus, what we are after here in our abstraction, of the Problem of Negro and the problem of the Problem, is “the founding of [our] mundane inhabitation as a problem to the problematization of [our] own itinerary of existence,” in order to potentially reach “the elaboration of a fundamental questioning of the possible character and order of social and historical being in general.”[xxxvi] Black being is the corporeal embodiment of the negation of Man’s consistent reconfiguration, and the ontological embodiment of the Human’s Idea/Problem parallax – being re-invented over and over again as Problem. Yet, it is through affirming this structural positionality as Negro, as Problem, as Nothingness that a non-standard analysis of the Human becomes possible. The Black is no-Thing, no-Thing non-representable, no-Thing visible yet invisible that, from within the set schematic that continues to structure the apparatus of Being/Knowing/Truth/Freedom, has been made into Nothing due to its positionality as “the position of absolute dereliction.”[xxxvii] In this way, Blackness, like the infinite and the infinitesimal, encounters metaphysical violence as an attempt to repress the subversive uncountability of an entity which unveils the nature and madness of ontological decision. A decision which once thought can be unthought in order to rupture “the presentative homogeneity of natural being.”[xxxviii]

In this invention as Nothingness, the Black reveals that this “discontinuity which, founding two distinct species, requires legislation upon their [Black] existence.”[xxxix] Furthermore, Blackness reveals that, under the condition of legislation – the rule and law of Man – an unending, infinite relation to violence categorizes the Black as limit. Thus, as Sylvia Wynter so poignantly pointed out, “We cannot as a population group of African descent, wholly or partly, expect any other result but our continued degradation and global disempowerment, within the terms of our present conception of the human, Man, and the order of knowledge by means of which this conception is elaborated. As the Other to this conception of the human, the cultural messages of the order of knowledge which elaborates this conception must by necessity be hostile not only to our realization, but to our survival as a population group. It is it or us.”[xl] These contradictions in the axioms of Man makes Blackness function as an eternal paradox in the set of schemata that continues to render Black being as Problem. Therefore it is not enough to transform Negative representations into Positive re-presentations in order that the World may be undone; it is instead through destroying the entire antagonism, or rather “the problematic or dialectical Idea”[xli] of Blackness and The Human itself that the World begins anew. Or rather, it is through returning to the void that was decided to be named as Man, where the count-of-One began within the set of Humanity, that one de-axiomatizes the existence of the paradigm of anti-Blackness. There is no solution for Anti-Blackness within the axioms of Man since “every solution presupposes a problem – in other words, the constitution of a unitary and systematic field which orientates and subsumes the researches or investigation in such a manner that the answers, in turn, form precisely cases of solution.”[xlii] Frantz Fanon, writing on the Human Sciences notes, “Our only hope of getting out of the situation is to pose the problem correctly, for all these findings and all this research have a single aim: to get man to admit he is nothing, absolutely nothing and get him to eradicate this narcissism whereby he thinks he is different from the other ‘animals.”[xliii] Nevertheless, unlike Fanon and Sylvia Wynter, I have no investment in grasping “narcissism with both hands” as a means to ensure the future of the a New Humanism. If the goal of the Human Sciences is “to get man to admit he is nothing” then it is perhaps better to understand these Sciences as Anti-Human Sciences and Anti-Humanist Black study as the Anti-Human Praxis that seeks to “get man to admit that he is nothing, absolutely nothing” which may perhaps, if combined with the immanent plane of black resistance, help give birth to a new everything, an absolutely new, everything.

Ex nihilo.