Warren misreads history with the concept of onticide—metaphysical commodification was never inevitable and can be unmade

This is a case of “the deployment of mobile classificatory labels whose ‘truth’ depended on their oppositional meaningfulness within their respective classificatory schemas” (Wynter 28). It was a redeployment of the Manichean dualism that Christianity is so fond of, but it is important to note here that the peoples of the Caribbean and Latin America were categorically sorted as “idolaters” (as opposed to Christians) not as inhuman as opposed to the European human. Wynter acknowledges that these representational systems, especially ones that rest on dualism, are usually tautological and result in a feedback loop that is very difficult to halt. But, just as they can be made, they can be unmade. Wynter continues to explain that these categorial models regulate “the behaviors of [those] whose subjects are regulated by the narratively instituted programs that are the conditions both of humanness, the mode of the nos, and therefore of the cognitive phenomenon defining of the human, in other words, the mind” (Wynter 29). Thus, Wynter proves to the reader that the ethical foundation of European civilization was based on the historical processes of Church and State power. Those ethics then informed the white European individual’s understanding of their own purpose and place within God’s creation, which was inextricably linked to that of the idolaters’ place as well. This is a historical analysis of ontological cutting on a societal level. Thus, ontology derives from historical context.

This is critically important to the argument I will apply to Warren. 1492 is undeniably only the beginning of the physical and psychological terror unleashed upon peoples of color by white Europeans, but if we follow Wynter’s logic, it becomes clear that even if white Americans eventually view black Americans as actually inhuman, that was not the original dominant paradigm. However, I will continue to argue that Wynter’s explication of systematic representational systems actually can prove that white Americans did not see black slaves or black American citizens as lacking humanity—white Americans simply didn’t value that humanity.

Calvin Warren does not apply Wynter’s systematic representational systems in his analysis (though he does reference Wynter), and by neglecting to fully investigate the context of surplus violence, Warren’s conclusion is incomplete. There can be no doubt that Warren’s article is grounded in philosophy and not in history, but his claim is subject to historical analysis because he grounds his theory in a specific case study which necessitates an understanding of context.

Warren opens his essay with a description of the murdered, dismembered body of a nineteen-year-old black, gay, boy named Steen Keith Fenrich. Fenrich’s skull was flayed and inscribed on the skull was Fenrich’s social security number and the moniker “Gay Nigger #1.” Warren meditates on this particular branding and uses the phrase “gay n***** #1” to present his essential question to the reader: how do we categorize this specific type of violence? Warren presents “gay n***** #1” as a paradox as he enables both Humanism and Afro-pessimism to describe this surplus of violence. “Gay” indicates an identity, and according to Humanist philosophy, only humans can possess an identity. However, Warren contrasts this presupposition with the thesis of Afro-pessimism: that white identity is based on the repeated destruction of, and thus, lack of, black ontology. Thus, we have the paradox: how can a “thing,” an object devoid of ontology, have an identity? Warren presents his idea of “onticide” as a lexicography to describe the surplus violence suffered by people with black skin and various other minority designations.

However, Warren’s analysis is not solely based in philosophical logic games; it is also firmly grounded in contemporary and historical context, although Warren does not address the context of the victims or aggressors directly. I am not arguing that Warren’s analysis should be purely philosophical. Rather, I think his argument could be more potent with an investigation into the historically informed symbolic representational systems that allow humans to conceive of themselves and others.

For example, Warren compares Fenrich’s murder to the murder of Matthew Shepard, a young, white man who was brutally killed because of his sexuality only one year before Fenrich. Shepherd was murdered by two white men his own age, who orginally planned to rob him, but escalated their crime to a vicious murder that involved beating Shepherd until his brain stem was permanently injured, and tying him to a fence and leaving him there to die. Warren contrasts the way Fenrich’s and Shepherd’s murders were received into the public domain. The results are not surprising: Fenrich’s murder registered two articles in the New York Times (he lived in Queens), both of which focused more on his stepfather (his assumed murderer). Shepard’s murder, on the other hand, launched a social justice movement motivated by national media attention. Warren uses this contrast to highlight his essential point: “the space that Fenrich inhabits is outside public memory, culture, and ethics—it is the ‘unthought’ space cut by the blunt edges of antiblack violence” (Warren 405). Fenrich’s existence “inhabited such a low frequency on the onto-existencial horizon” (Warren) that his death might not even be a death, for he hardly possessed a life. While that conclusion is valid, consider how it might change were we able to define the symbolic representational system of the contemporary American moment. Choosing appropriate documents (in an age of digital media) to craft an adequate subjective understanding of the individuals involved in these murders would be incredibly challenging, but let us consider for a moment the categorial models these straight, white, male murderers used to craft their own ontology. Neither murders were crimes of passion—both would have taken hours to fully complete, allowing plenty of time for the murders to “cool off” and recognize their mistake. What reasons could these men have had to sustain their violence, based on their understanding of their world, and their place within it? Recognizing the time and place (contemporary America) is crucial to ascertaining how these perpetrators reasoned through their actions.

It is important to ask similar questions about Warren’s other example of historic violence: slavery. The deliberate commodification of black bodies is essential to Warren’s argument, but he does little to situate slavery in a historical context, and so it is necessary to return to Sylvia Wynter’s analysis that the European (and then white American) understanding of blacks in relation to themselves and their world evolved into this brutal, large-scale violence—and that this evolution was not a guarantee, nor a necessity. Part of this evolution involved an active, diabolical narrative perpetuated by those with stake in the slave market that black “people” were not “people.” This theory then permeated the social fabric of the United States. Warren points to slavery as the historical moment where both “whiteness” and “blackness” are born, and argues that whiteness is based on the ritual and repeated sacrifice of black bodies and black souls. Not only is whiteness contingent on black erasure, whiteness also uses black murder to elevate whiteness to the ultimate form of Human: “the interdiction on black capacity provides the very possibility for Civilization (and civil society) to exist at all because it allows the human to differentiate himself from and define himself against an ultimate other—an other that lacks the capacity to resist ontologically if we follow Frantz Fanon (1967)” (397). Warren posits that “Blackness emerges in modernity as an adjunct to racial slavery, according to Bryan Wagner (2009), and functions as the ultimate commodity that preconditions modernity and its institutions” (398-7). Warren builds on Hortense Spillers’ idea of “reducing” slaves to objects, and argues that “Reduction not only to a thing but reduction to being for the captor indicates that this reduction serves an ontological function” (398). This violence includes the reduction of the slave to a specifically fungible object, which “homogenizes blackness such that identities and subjectivities are absent” (399).

But, again, consider how Wynter’s description of evolving ethics set a standard for interracial interaction. Is it possible that, just as things once evolved into an active attempt at dehumanization, that the morality undergirding slavery had morphed once again? In order to understand the way white American citizens exploited the humanity of black slaves, a critical historical analysis of societal ethics is required, and Warren does not provide that.

To bridge the gap between Wynter and Warren, I would like to introduce the work of Dr. Kate Manne. Manne’s essay “Humanism: A Critique” deals with the issue of violence, and her critiques of humanism are quite similar to those of Afro-pessimists. However, Manne and Warren diverge at a crucial point in their logic: Manne hypothesizes, and I agree, that actually, completely, successfully dehumanizing another human is an incredibly rare and difficult phenomenon, and is rarely the actual goal of most perpetrators of brutal violence. Manne defines the Humanist outlook on violence as such: “reflexively attributing ‘man’s inhumanity to men’ to some sort of dehumanizing psychological attitude” (390). Dehumanizing actions are defined as “interpersonal conduct of the kind that is naturally described as inhumane, in being not only morally objectionable, but also somehow cruel, brutal, humiliating, or degrading” (390). From the humanist perspective, as Manne describes it, such actions are the result of the perpetrator failing to recognize the victim as a human. Warren would agree: black Americans are not recognized as human, and therefore experience extreme violence as the vehicle for white ontology.