Social death is phenomenologically, psychoanalytically, and structurally crystallized as the paradigmatic positionality of Black existence.

To say the intervention of afropessimism has been contentious, for both black studies and the general public, would be an understatement. The reviews of Frank Wilderson’s latest work alone express a kind of resentment that is so sharp it’s hard not to believe that these writers did not interpret Wilderson’s work as a hand sealed personal condemnation of their livelihood (McCarthy 2020) (Cunningham 2020). These reviews are often written with a semi-performative defiance of Wilderson’s contention about their ‘social death’, but what cannot go overlooked in these types of responses is that even in their avowed defiance these reviewers cannot escape the political ontology that locates them on the other side, as opposed to the other end, of humanity. These reviews are written from an experience the reviewers often feel can approximate the experience of their apparent fellows, but Wilderson is concerned with the metanarrative of structural positionalities and not the performative capacities perceived in everyday existential experiences or personal expression. Wilderson is not challenging how they may feel from day to day, but what they are, or are not, in the grand scheme of things that exceeds performative political gestures through an extra-ordinary vulnerability.4

The distinction between the performance of blackness and its ontological status that motivates Wilderson builds primarily from the term social death, originally attributed to Orlando Patterson. The term has been adopted and deployed by many to describe the depraved or degraded status of persons under conditions of oppression. Wilderson adopts the definitional components of naked (gratuitous) violence, natal alienation, and dishonor from Patterson, but interprets them beyond certain ontic conditions—where, for instance, for Patterson anyone may become a slave—to a specifically black ontological paradigm that is crystallized phenomenologically and psychoanalytically in the work of Frantz Fanon and the interpretations of his work by David Marriott. Wilderson also takes up Hortense Spillers psychoanalytic framing and vocabulary of a foundational grammar of suffering that reoccurs indefinitely through a violation of the flesh over against a grammar of freedom of the body. Additionally, he builds off Saidiya Hartman—who also has Spillers, Patterson, and Fanon in mind—by replacing the terms of human degradation with logics of the object of commodification, whereby black social death is better conceived in terms of fungibility and accumulation instead of exploitation and alienation. Wilderson conceives the continuity and coalition of these black theorists—and others—to paint the picture of a black existence that demands an entire reimagining of the political through the lens of extra-ordinary vulnerability in three registers that will be explicated in the rest of this chapter: discursively, materially, and psychically.

Beginning at the discursive level, Wilderson’s discussions of black social death offers his readers a number of different perspectives and occasions to recognize the fundamental nature of this paradigmatic condition: from movies and theater, from political to social movements, from domestic to international understandings of blackness. In all these arenas, he remains steadfast in his analysis of the terms of social death as excessive to the limits of their restrictive economies. To reach the level of paradigmatic political positionality, he stresses the separation of the identity formations and performative gestures we may attribute to black people uniquely, or that they may even share with other groups, from the ontological or paradigmatic that overdetermines their stature as fungible, accumulative, and abject. In the essay “End of Redemption,” he states it bluntly:

Blackness is social death, which is to say that there was never a proper meta-moment of plentitude, never a moment of equilibrium, never a moment of social life. Blackness as a paradigmatic position (rather than as an ensemble of identities, cultural practices, or anthropological accoutrement), cannot be disimbricated from slavery. The narrative arc of the slave who is Black (unlike Orlando Patterson’s generic slave who may be of any race) is not an arc at all, but a flat line, what Hortense Spillers calls ‘historical stillness”: a flat line that ‘moves’ from disequilibrium to a moment in the narrative of faux equilibrium, to disequilibrium restored and/or rearticulated. (Wilderson III, Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption 2016)

There are two things to note. First, his contention that blackness is a paradigmatic position often is overlooked or misrepresented. Here he is insisting that the qualities we attribute to the performance of blackness, the unique ‘cultural practices’ or ‘anthropological accoutrement’ that one may recognize as contributing to what it means to be black—for example, black music or other cultural performances—are not definitive of the ontological or paradigmatic position of blackness. This is not to say they are completely distinct, but they are not essential and also cannot be separated, or ‘disimbricated’, from the structural foundation of white civil society as its negation. This is to say blackness cannot be separated from the structural position of ‘the Slave’. Of course, this does not mean blacks in contemporary society are subject to or the object of the same types of violence of chattel slavery, but their metaphysical role in the formation of the political world remains the same. Just as the proletariat who is not forced to work 80 hours or who attains healthcare and vacation days, is still the laborer and not the capitalist, the black sharecropper, prisoner, or CEO (or President!) is still in the metaphysical position of ‘the Slave’ and as such is discursively illegible at the level of political ontology, falling rather into the general economy of white supremacy.

We need only to recall the insistent fashion in which President Obama and his wife Michelle Obama—despite or perhaps in light of his office—had been hailed in terms of abject blackness through images of primates, to realize how their political agency was rendered illegitimate or simply illegible despite his properly America political behavior of, for instance, ordering drone strikes in the Middle East and being scornful of ‘absentee’ black fathers. We can describe this illegibility as extra-ordinary insofar as it exceeds the general level of discourse of an accepted humanism, while at the same time appearing banal, as an everyday regular preoccupation with the affective assertion of white supremacy. In other words, these images and the language of dehumanization supersede the discourse of the human and appeal to the paradigmatic black abjectness as cursed existence, regardless of President Obama’s performance (queue ‘Amazing Grace’) as the highest political agent in the land.

The second thing to note in Wilderson’s passage is that this ‘flat line’ or ‘historical stillness’ in the ‘narrative arc’ of ‘the Slave’ serves as another axis in the description of social death. For some the diachronic narrative arc of black life, particularly in America, projects a trajectory of increasing freedom. This would entail some initial point of coherence or equilibrium that is forgotten through violence and displacement only to be returned to, perhaps in a new light. This may be the narrative of Pan-Africanism, a return to the motherland with a newfound unity, or black liberalism, a return to foundations of American equality and fraternity; that is, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ However, these are false narratives, since with the creation of blackness any original equilibrium was eliminated. ‘Africa’ did not exist prior to European invasion and there is no ‘Africa’ or land of the free (for black people) to return to. With no place to retreat, the contours of a legible vulnerability are imagined with Pan-Africanism, but they are ultimately destroyed, since underneath these restricted conversations, there is no place or time that does not fall victim to the extra-ordinary vulnerability of its destruction by white supremacist disregard and/as destruction.

Instead, what we witness with different black political ‘movements’—the implication of motion can only be metaphorical at the paradigmatic level—is a historical stillness. Imagined equilibrium with moments like emancipation, the civil rights legislation, or decolonization only unveil the persistence of disequilibrium. There is no actual movement, or arc, in this historical narrative; no point of reference to imagine a newness as long as black people remain in the paradigmatic, ontological position of ‘the Slave’. How else does one come to understand the practically rote action and reactions to spectacular violence against black people—death, protests, deceptive or limited legislation,Footnote5 and repeat—if not the historical stillness of the black story; where history instead appears to be an eerily persistent and placid backdrop that exceeds all narrative possibilities? Sexton’s rubric of the general and restricted economies is translated into historiographical terms, whereby non-black political movements participate in restricted economies that contribute and participate in the story of the redemptive human; meanwhile, black narratives have no stable foundation against which to project such a narrative; instead, they are overwhelmed by the excesses of force of the white supremacist general economy that destroys narrative capacities. To further elaborate, the uniqueness of black social death via Orlando Patterson’s concepts, Wilderson explains on the next page:

Patterson’s three constituent elements of slavery—naked (or gratuitous) violence, general dishonor, and natal alienation—make the temporal and spatial logic of the entity and of setting untenable, impossible to conceive (as in birth) and/or conceive of (as in assume any coherence). The violence of slavery is not precipitated as a result of any transgression that can be turned into an event (which is why I have argued that this violence is gratuitous, not contingent); dishonor embodied by the slave is not a function of an event either; his or her dishonor is general, as Patterson writes, or as David Marriott has argued, it is best understood as abjection rather than degradation (the latter implies transition); and since a slave is natally alienated, s/he is never an entity in the meta-narrative genealogy. (Wilderson III 2016)

With Wilderson’s elaborations of Patterson’s elements of slavery in these terms of narrative and event we arrive at a clearer sense of what they entail: these elements are not based on any contingent relationship to the violation of the human story, instead they mark the permanent stature outside of it. In other words, ‘historical stillness’ is maintained because the elements of slavery are not predicated on any form of recognition that justifies their position. There are no events or substantive qualities that circumscribe black identity outside of being black, which must be insistently enforced. Antiblack violence comes from nowhere, everywhere, all the time; their lack of honor not only is an abjection they were born into, but has no origin story, no history—the proverbial Middle Passage and the very real forced miscegenation, territoralization, and one-drop rule obliterated them—and that’s why they cannot be placed in any formal genealogy that can be recognized as such, for Wilderson. Here again we are brought to terms with the extra-ordinary: these three registers of natal alienation, general dishonor, and gratuitous violence explicate the ways in which blackness necessarily exceeds the normal components of forced labor that are horrific but still imply relationality. Blackness emerges from, or recedes into, an ever-present general economy of reproductive material for consumption by white civil society, instead of having the quality of a legible human story with recognizable relations and heritage that confer a sense of origin.

Through these articulations of social death and slavery, we can also see how there is a difference between black social death and the amorphous ‘terrorist’ explored by Butler in Precarious Life. Butler is thorough in her explication of how the designation of people of Middle Eastern descent as ‘dangerous’ (Butler 2004, 76) set them in a precarious position within relation to the law. With the help of classic neo-cons Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and John Yoo, this identity was imposed by indefinitely (to this day) suspending standard judicial procedures which entail the horrifying acts of torture and total disregard of civilian life that facilitate the economic control and exploitation of the Middle East. The rendering of Middle Easterners outside of the juridical norms of the United States— that is, as always already criminal and never escaping the status of enemy combatant even after capture and detention—seemingly locates them totally outside of the political and, in a manner, analogous to social death (Butler 2004, 76–79). The tragedy of America and the West’s policy toward the Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle Eastern post 9/11 are contemptible; nevertheless, they do not occupy the same condition of black social death.Footnote6 A threat to the American nation is ontologically distinct from a threat to the white political order.

To understand this distinction, we cannot only look at the practices of the state or the devastating reality of the current condition of people terrorized by the state. The question and narrative of national security is set in a different key than “the Negro question” and the security of whiteness. The existence and maintenance of Guantanamo Bay does not address or contest ontological and paradigmatic concerns which Wilderson identifies in the first above quoted passage through the idea of a ‘meta-moment of plentitude’ and in the second one as an ‘event’. The crucial difference is that there is a time and/or place imagined for the ‘terrorist’ in Guantanamo or the immigrant or the European American to return to that indicates a cultural, historical, and positional integrity of humanity, that is, a meta-moment of plenitude, that had been violated in their narrative of subjection as human, an identity that had been upset and that, furthermore, may be returned to and where ‘equilibrium’ can be found again. Such a place or time does not exist for the extra-ordinary condition of black people who exist as “a fatal way of being alive” (Marriott 2000, 15).

The economic exploitation and deathly violence against Middle Easterners belong to a narrative arc where a transgression took place, that is, 9/11 or denial of natural resources and land access, that precipitated their stature as ‘dangerous’. In this narrative arc there is a place that still exists, even if physically under siege now, and time that did and, in the future, may exist from where their heritage may be retrieved and/or flourish. An equilibrium can be returned to after the dehumanizing practices of post- or even pre-9/11 destruction and occupation. Such an equilibrium for the positionality of ‘the Slave’ is not conceivable. In “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society” Wilderson uses the work of J. M. Coetzee to describe an anthropological and historical schema used by Europeans to map the integrity of humanness or proper political subjectivity. In this schema, black data is missing from either the anthropological or the historical axis, which if existent would secure this stature of humanness at the discursive level, but since it is absent, this leads to a crisis or a scandal of being uninterpretable. Other groupings may rely on anthropological categories such as clothing and work or historical categories such as entitlements, sovereignty, or immigration (Wilderson III 2003, 234–237). Black people in America, and across the diaspora, are interpreted as missing signifiers in this discourse and thus are illegible within the human narrative. It is in this sense that black vulnerability is not simply pathogenic by the standards described above and sharable with Middle Easterners, rather their vulnerability is illegible, abject—that is, they have no honor or relationality—and normalizing; thus it is extra-ordinary. The constellations of human agency are not diverted or deferred and there’s not simply a ‘sense of powerlessness’ that may be corrected or reoriented. The Slave does and must occupy a structural position without any imaginable recursion to political agency in order for the human identity to live on in strength or peril. Adjacent to the sun of Bataille’s general economic cosmology, blackness emerges from the black hole of white supremacy, which is imperceptible and ultimately unknowable, but nevertheless fuels the cosmological order of the human universe.Footnote7

Now it may also be prudent to emphasize how Wilderson makes a strategic departure from Patterson to identify a crucial distinction in terms of slavery. While Patterson innovatively recognizes that slavery is not reducible to forced labor—the labor you may find also as an indentured servant or even as a contractor in sports—but is structural, he also understands the position of slavery as social death to be applicable to anyone who may, for instance, become a prisoner of war—for example, the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay—even though the slave as prisoner of war may return physically and/or psychically to a prior plentitude, that is, a legible cultural home. For Wilderson, non-blacks may indeed experience slavery, but it is not a constitutive event for their identity or for their narrative. They have the advantage of the capacity to conjure a reason for the violence perpetrated against them that led to their oppression, servitude, or even slavery as the reaction to a performative transgression of normative expectations, even if this transgression is outside of their own cognitive and practical cultural formation.Footnote8 The conditions of black social death prohibit such a coherent formation in as much as it remains in its structural antagonism with the human or white civil society as incoherent, illegible, abject and thus always under the thumb of white civil society by prohibiting any sort of imaginative coherence or semblance of freedom.Footnote9

These examples illustrate the underlying extra-ordinary affective investment by white civil society in its libidinal economy and they can save one from being led too far astray by relying upon another red herring: the tragically true but ultimately misleading accumulation of facts and stats of black abject life. Inasmuch as the facts and corresponding events of black life are discursively approximated—for example, police violence, prison statistics, homelessness rates, the wage gap, and the performative gestures of blacks in responses, for example, public mourning and protest—they do not necessarily get to the excessive affective economy and, therefore, Wilderson maintains that the problem is beyond the expression of language or as he professes in another essay, and just as poignantly, “taxonomy can itemize atrocities but cannot bear witness to suffering.” The ‘grammar of suffering’ that organizes black social death remains op aque at a discursive level, that is, the semiotics of the human, but it subtends the positionality of the black slave, or the ‘position of the unthought.’ Many people may want to compare the quantitative overlap of black tragic facts with those of the poor, and indeed there is overlap, but the coincidence of these facts and atrocities does not get to the fundamental level of black vulnerability that exceeds restrictive articulations. The lists of atrocities, while undeniable and horrific, rely on numbers and data that confuse this violence for a violation of the human that does not extend to black people and thus they divert attention from the affective comfort and security that antiblackness calls forth in a way that literally vitalizes white civil society even if it cannot be spoken of coherently and exceeds rationality.

The transatlantic slave trade, the Maafa, the Berlin Conference, the State of the Unions, had and continue work in the transformation of ‘Africans into blacks’ over against the human and as such forbid narratives of return to a political ‘home’—even the memory of a home—that has not been transmogrified by the shadow of blackness.Footnote10 Under these conditions, how can black vulnerability be legible in any political terms? With no humanity to return to, black people are extra-ordinarily vulnerable and open to violation from a general economy; they have no sanctuary literal or imagined, just a black hole. Experiencing a ‘sense of powerlessness’ or lack of autonomy makes sense only in terms of degradation, not in terms of complete illegibility and abjection. It is literal open season, and not simply for death, but in as much as blackness plays a constitutive role, black people’s vulnerability also becomes the non-discursive backdrop for which white civil society can write their own story and, therefore, complete annihilation would be undesirable. Whether it be a trip to the Heart of Darkness or the Caribbean and New Orleans, c.f. Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, or to the largest protests in American history, blackness is the framework for white civil society’s coming of age; forever illegible because it comes from the illogical general economy of vulnerability found in the excessive resources of the libidinal economy.11