Debate’s an arch of redemption in which the resolution blackmails us to restore the equilibrium of standards for “plenitude” that subjugates suffering to enhance the clock of academia.

But here’s why I would say that the things can’t be reconciled and why I’m fascinated with the way high school and college debaters are using it. I think it was—I don’t know what sociologist—Max Weber (you know; I quote all sorts of people except right out fascists)—I believe he said that the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all. And the way that the question is posed in the world of debate in January—the question that carries one through the entire twelve months—is posed in a way that cannot be reconciled with the basic lens of interpretation of Afropessimism. The question is always posed on what I call and others call an arch of redemption. In other words, the question assumes an instance of plenitude, say, the free association and the free assembly—the right to free assembly—of citizens, and then it moves from that assumption to a rupture. So it moves from equilibrium to disequilibrium, which is to say the manifestation of the surveillance state. And so the third move in the tripartite arc of narrative is, of course, the move of redemption, which is to say how can the plenitude—whether it’s a historical materialist plenitude, a social formation having its rights and liberties disrupted—how can that be restored. It’s that movement from equilibrium to disequilibrium to equilibrium restored which is precisely at the center of the critique of Afropessimism. Afropessimism is not an offering for historical redemption; it’s not an offering for the restoration of a body in need of redress the way that postcolonialism is, the way that Marxism is, the way that radical feminism is, the way that Indigenism is. It’s a critique of the rhetorical structure of those lenses of interpretation, critiquing them as to a) what they don’t or are unable to say about the violence that subjugates and positions Blacks and b) why it is that they actually need Blackness as slaveness to be outside of their lens of interpretation. So there’s a way in which—to come full circle to where I started—there’s a way in which the rhetorical structure of debate, the demand of debate, the protocols are already ideologically laden. It doesn’t matter what question you pour into those protocols. The protocols, themselves, are all ideological straightjackets which preclude the kind of investigation of suffering. In order for Black suffering to be part of the debate question, it would have to go through a structural adjustment to begin to look like the suffering of some other group. The way Hartman talks about this is by suggesting that what you have in the world of subalterns—degraded humans who suffer—you have narratives of the possibility of real or imagined redemption, which is to say, narratives which are structured around the question of how to relieve the suffering that didn’t happen before the invasion of some sorts. But what she says with respect to Blacks is that you cannot tell the story of before the invasion, before the destruction. So, without being able to do that, she says when you think of narrating Blackness, you have to think of repetition as opposed to redemption. And so when we were off the air, one of the things I said to Marquis and to Josh is that one of the foreseeable problems with the future of Afropessimism is people kind of cherry-picking from it to enhance the explanatory power of their own suffering. And that cherry-picking will actually, inevitably, leave by the wayside the very deliberate absence in Afropessimism, and that is the absence of redemptive theorization, which is present in everything else. Redemptive theorization is theorized through all three volumes of Das Kapital; it’s theorized in the psychoanalytic feminism of Hartman and people like Julia Kristeva; it’s theorized in the work of Ward Churchill and Vine Deloria. It’s not only theorized. I should take a step back. It’s assumed. It’s assumed. And so, these are metacritiques of relationality. What Afropessimism is is a metacritique of the metacritique, to show how pure and simple relations are dependent upon—they’re parasitic—using [black people] as a parasitic host.