The alternative’s fatalist understanding of Blackness as irreducible suffering reduces racial ontology to a determinist logic that precludes dialectical engagement and potential transformation – that position is dogmatic and overlooks the complexities of the lived Black experience.

In the concluding pages of Darker Than Blue, Gilroy restates why he finds the ongoing attachment to the idea of race in the US so very unsatisfactory in comparison, say, to the anti-racism of Frantz Fanon:

[Fanon’s] ‘audacious commitment to an alternative conception of humanity reconstituted outside “race” […] is something that does not endear Fanon’s work to today’s practitioners of the facile antihumanism and ethnic absolutism so characteristic of life on US college campuses, where class-based homogeneity combines smoothly with deference to racial and ethic particularity and with resignation to the world as it appears. Fanon disappoints that scholastic constituency by refusing to see culture as an insurmountable obstacle between groups, even if they have been racialized. He does not accept the “strategic” award of an essential innocence to the oppressed and the wretched of the earth. Their past and present sufferings confer no special nobility upon them and are not invested with redemptive insights. Suffering is just suffering, and Fanon has no patience with those who would invoke the armour of incorrigibility around national liberation struggles or minority cultures’. (pp. 157–8, my emphasis)

Whatever one might think of the cogency of these remarks (if only because the notion of a non-racial life is predicated on the idea that the human can somehow reside ‘outside’ of race, a humanism that would always then be constitutively compromised by the racism at its frontier), the question of whether US culture can ever escape racial antagonism is the primary focus of Frank B. Wilderson III’s powerful Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms, as part of a more general reading of US film culture. And indeed Fanon’s anti-philosophical philosophical critique of racial ontology (historically blacks were seen as part of existence but not, as yet, part of human being, a not-yet that forces Fanon to rethink the teleological form of the human as already and essentially violent in its separation from the state of nature from which it has come) forms a major part of Wilderson’s conception of anti-blackness as the major structural antagonism of US history and culture. It is against the conception that racism could ever be simply contingent to black experience that Wilderson protests, reflecting on the fact that racial slavery has no parallel to other forms of suffering, and perhaps most strikingly social death is the constitutive essence of black existence in the US. In brief, slavery remains so originary, in the sense of what he calls its ‘accumulation and fungibility’ (terms borrowed from Saidiya Hartman), it not only has no ‘analogy’ to other forms of antagonism—Wilderson’s examples are the Holocaust and Native American genocide—there is simply no process of getting over it, of recovering from the loss (as wound, or trauma): as such, slavery remains the ultimate structure of antagonism in the US. Whether at a personal level or at the level of historical process, if ‘black slavery is foundational to modern Humanism’, then any teleological appeal to a humanism beyond racism is doomed from the start (p. 22). The problem with Wilderson’s argument, however, is that it remains of a piece with the manichean imperatives that beset it, and which by definition are structurally uppermost, which means that he can only confirm those imperatives as absolutes rather than chart a dialectical path beyond them, insofar as, structurally speaking, there is no ‘outside’ to black social death and alienation, or no outside to this outside, and all that thought can do is mirror its own enslavement by race. This is not so much ‘afro-pessimism’—a term coined by Wilderson—as thought wedded to its own despair. However, this is also not the entire story of Red, White, and Black, as I hope to show.

For example, in Chapter One (‘The Structure of Antagonisms’), written as a theoretical introduction, and which opens explicitly on the Fanonian question of why ontology cannot understand the being of the Black, Wilderson is prepared to say that black suffering is not only beyond analogy, it also refigures the whole of being: ‘the essence of being for the White and non-Black position’ is non-niggerness, consequently, ‘[b]eing can thus be thought of, in the first ontological instance, as non-niggerness, and slavery then as niggerness’ (p. 37). It is not hard when reading such sentences to suspect a kind of absolutism at work here, and one that manages to be peculiarly and dispiritingly dogmatic: throughout Red, White, and Black, despite variations in tone and emphasis, there is always the desire to have black lived experience named as the worst, and the politics of such a desire inevitably collapses into a kind of sentimental moralism: for the claim that ‘Blackness is incapacity in its most pure and unadulterated form’ means merely that the black has to embody this abjection without reserve (p. 38). This logic—and the denial of any kind of ‘ontological integrity’ to the Black/Slave due to its endless traversal by force does seem to reduce ontology to logic, namely, a logic of non-recuperability—moves through the following points: (1) Black non-being is not capable of symbolic resistance and, as such, falls outside of any language of authenticity or reparation; (2) for such a subject, which Wilderson persists in calling ‘death’, the symbolic remains foreclosed (p. 43); (3) as such, Blackness is the record of an occlusion which remains ever present: ‘White (Human) capacity, in advance of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black incapacity’ (p. 45); (4) and, as an example of the institutions or discourses involving ‘violence’, ‘antagonisms’ and ‘parasitism’, Wilderson describes White (or non-Black) film theory and cultural studies as incapable of understanding the ‘suffering of the Black—the Slave’ (they cannot do so because they are erroneously wedded to humanism and to the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, which Wilderson takes as two examples of what the Afro-pessimist should avoid) (p. 56); as a corrective, Wilderson calls for a new language of abstraction, and one centrally concerned with exposing ‘the structure of antagonisms between Blacks and Humans’ (p. 68). Reading seems to stop here, at a critique of Lacanian full speech: Wilderson wants to say that Lacan’s notion of the originary (imaginary) alienation of the subject is still wedded to relationality as implied by the contrast between ‘empty’ and ‘full’ speech, and so apparently cannot grasp the trauma of ‘absolute Otherness’ that is the Black’s relation to Whites, because psychoanalysis cannot fathom the ‘structural, or absolute, violence’ of Black life (pp. 74; 75). ‘Whereas Lacan was aware of how language “precedes and exceeds us”, he did not have Fanon’s awareness of how violence also precedes and exceeds Blacks’ (p. 76). The violence of such abjection—or incapacity—is therefore that it cannot be communicated or avowed, and is always already delimited by desubjectification and dereliction (p. 77). Whence the suspicion of an ontology reduced to a logic (of abjection). Leaving aside the fact that it is quite mistaken to limit Lacan’s notion of full speech to the search for communication (the unconscious cannot be confined to parole), it is clear that, according to Wilderson’s own ‘logic’, his description of the Black is working, via analogy, to Lacan’s notion of the real but, in his insistence on the Black as an absolute outside Wilderson can only duly reify this void at the heart of universality. The Black is ‘beyond the limit of contingency’—but it is worth saying immediately that this ‘beyond’ is indeed a foreclosure that defines a violence whose traces can only be thought violently (that is, analogically), and whose nonbeing returns as the theme for Wilderson’s political thinking of a non-recuperable abjection. The Black is nonbeing and, as such, is more real and primary than being per se: given how much is at stake, this insistence on a racial metaphysics of injury implies a fundamental irreconcilability between Blacks and Humans (there is really no debate to be had here: irreconcilability is the condition and possibility of what it means to be Black).

This argument could be illustrated at many points in Red, White, and Black, which all interconnect. Wilderson is concerned, for example, to argue that a Marxian ontology of labour and/or commodity form is philosophically inadequate for reading black accumulation and fungibility: this idea, which is not altogether new, is supported by a lengthy reading of the film Monster’s Ball (Chapter Four (‘Monster’s Ball’) and is perhaps the most valuable part of his book in its illustration of the links between race, violence, contingency, and death). Other chapters offer critiques of what Wilderson calls ‘empathetic’ as against ‘analytical’ cinema, with the former offering ‘sentimental apologies for structural violence’, rather than ‘paradigmatic analyses’ of black suffering (p. 341). It is not at all clear how this argument differs from film theory’s opposition between a cinema of distraction and a socially engaged cinema: it seems to me that this theory of the filmwork describes quite precisely the distinction between analysis and empathy Wilderson is trying to make (and unsettle). However, unlike film theory, Wilderson’s attempt to preserve the distinction seems to work with an unquestioned notion of film spectatorship—i.e. either seduced or interrogated—which means that the theory of cinema he puts forth somewhat undermines his more general claim that film theory can never understand black suffering. It is also a little strange that a work so concerned with the chasm between ‘Human life and Black death’ should indict cinema for its ‘efforts to reassert relational logic’, but nowhere mentions how the very form of this reproach relies on reasserting the endless non-relational absence of Blackness (and thereby reducing the history and politics of race to a logic of non-relationality) (p. 340). This transcendentalizing of black suffering is fundamentally absolutist (and, once again, moralistic) in effect if not in intention. In the final sentences of the book, Wilderson asks, ‘How does one deconstruct life?’ It remains a pivotal question. But perhaps, after all, the more urgent task is not how to deconstruct life, but to grasp the necessarily-perverse logic of racial determinations of suffering? Red, White, and Black is a thought-provoking study of racial ontology which, whatever its limitations, is a powerful invocation of why blackness just is death, a death-in-life which has no analogy or synonym but which, for the same reason, must be thought differently for blackness to live.