Queer theory fractures around the black queer body and human-washes the experiences of quare bodies, sustaining the humanist frameworks that makes quare emancipation impossible.

The term “black queer” is a philosophical conundrum, or problem space, precisely because it carries this antagonism, the ethical dilemma of humanism, within its discursive structure. It brings two crises into juxtaposition creating somewhat of a theoretical fatality, a devastating crime scene. At the site of this fatality lies a mutilated, supine black body we cannot quite place within the symbolics of identity, politics, history, sociology, or law. In cases like these, we put “theory” and “philosophy” into service to figure out who did “it,” what was the murder weapon, and what was the injury—if we can even call it an injury. This situation frustrates the researcher (researcher as detective, philosopher, and medical examiner all at once) in that he lacks a coherent grammar to make this suffering legible, the assaulting party is more like a structural phenomenon, and the fatality is a precondition of the world itself. In this sense, the fatality is rendered banal, diurnal, and quotidian, as it sustains the very field of existence.

The theoretical and philosophical instruments that we have to examine and explain this scenario—which I will call “queer theory” and “Afro-pessimism”—fracture around the “black queer,” endlessly encircling it, but never able to approach it. In fact, queer theory and Afro- pessimism are located in different philosophical registers, which are incompatible and irreconcilable. These discourses collide, or crash, at the site of the “black queer”—the black queer becomes a blind spot distorting the field of vision for both discourses, and the result is fatal. The desire to find synthesis and common ground between the two enterprises often results in theoretical misrecognition, false analogies, and impoverished ethics. The “black queer,” then, is theoretically homeless and vulnerable to the impact of discourses traveling at high velocity. Perhaps we ask too much of theory and philosophy. This essay meditates on this itinerancy.

What is seductive about queer theory is that it provides a grammar of suffering for this fatality. The metaphorical space of the closet, freedom from injustice, heterosexist violence, among other concepts makes queer theory almost irresistible to the theorist yearning for a grammar to communicate the horrors of anti-black and non-heteronormative violence. The horizon of queer communicability, however, is not that of the black—as the black-as-object is situated out of space, time, and the world itself. Can we address the being fallen off the map of conceivability? We depend on the grammar of queer theory to salvage this being, to reconstitute it within the logics of life and death (a redemptive “hodological space”). This temptation presents an ethical crisis because the grammar of queer theory is predicated upon the very dissolution of the being it is called upon to salvage. The “black queer” signifies a double-death, a redoubling of the internecine processes of erasure. Indeed,“queerness” is impossible without the derelict being of blackness—its grammar, object, and predicating “subject” emerge through the death sentence of blackness. Queer theory is always already in a relationship with blackness, but not as an “ally.”

We might think of queer theory as a particular humanism (a “closeted humanism”), even as it announces its intention to unravel, displace, and discredit the very humanism that sustains it. It is a disavowed humanism—a humanism that must sustain itself through technologies of forgetfulness, historical suppression, and reanimated/reconfigured social violence. This form of humanism, hiding behind walls of radical proclamations (“emancipatory meditations”), denies itself only to reconstitute itself in the final outcome. In other words, queer theory is caught in a tortuous bind that neither provides ethical relief nor emancipatory transformations for blackness; it parasitically feeds off of the black body and needs this mutilated body as its site of constitution. Many will argue that the queer is not a human, but ruptures humanity and becomes more like a “non-human” or an “anti-human.” For these scholars, queerness is inimical to humanism and presents a serious challenge of its presumptions. This, I would argue, is not the case. The fundamental assumptions about human capacity and space orientation are quite present in queer theory. The anti-humanist thread in queer theory is really a reconstitution of the liberal subject—a liberal subject that divests its privilege. Divestiture retains the old subject under suspicion and, at the same time, disavows this retention. Abnegation and divestiture are still entangled in the “sinews of capacity and power,” as Wilderson would call it; furthermore, only a “subject” situated in space and time, with certain entitlements, capacities, and privilege can surrender, or give up, privilege. It is precisely this “subject” that emerges from the antagonistic violence of humanism, and it is this subject that is inimical to the black-as-object.

Afro-pessimism refigures theory from the position of the derelict object. It acknowledges that the black-asobject is situated outside of space, time, and the world, and therefore, the black “does not exist” in the world because it lacks symbolic placement (Fanon). Blackness is pure object delimiting the boundaries between the human subject and its predicating verbs. As an object, it is fungible (Hartman) and accumulated (Wilderson), and lacks a coherent grammar of suffering. Hortense Spillers reminds us that the captive “is reduced to a thing, to being for the captor”, and that “identities,” or differences, are stripped from this being, neutralizing the multi- dimensionality of its flesh and reducing it to a homogenous commodity of exchange in a pulverizing libidinal economy (i.e.“body” as a unit of exchange). This, then, is the ultimate scandal or ontological violation of the New World: black flesh is reduced to devastating sameness, and becomes interchangeable, or fungible, within an economy of exchange. The violence of captivity expelled the African from Difference, or the Symbolic—the order of differentiating subjects—and relegated it to the vacuous space of undifferentiation. This is a space outside the differentiating function of the Father’s Name and his Law. The captive is pure object—a body without flesh (if we read Deleuze and Guattari through Spillers). This body becomes, as Hortense Spillers reminds us,“ a site of irresistible sensuality,” for the captor, but because this body lacks subjectivity, it cannot desire but is, instead, desired upon. It is this initial murder occurring “over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise,” that sustains the antagonism for modernity.

This condition of being expelled from Difference and reduced to the object-space of undifferentiation presents a crisis for Afro-pessimism that it neither set into motion, nor could it theorize away. We can call this the “double-bind of communicability.” Black suffering is illegible and incommunicable because it lacks a proper grammar of enunciation. Suffering belongs to the human; it is an inescapable feature of the ‘human condition.’ The “violation of the flesh,” however, is a murderous practice without a ‘proper name’ or any name that is recognizable within the Symbolic. Queer theory and its grammar of suffering fails the black-asobject here; its posture toward emancipation and freedom, do not fit the (non)ontology of blackness. Anti-black violence is, indeed, constitutive of the ‘object,’ but does this constitution occur uniformly? Do certain objects receive unique forms of anti-blackness— specific technologies of pulverization designed for particular objects? Are there “differences” between black-objects or are these objects homogenous? Fungability, although a productive way of understanding the crude object-position of blackness, presents anti-black violence as homogenous and predictable. In other words,‘difference’ is the province of the “human,” but without difference, we lack a conceptual apparatus to articulate the way antiblackness impacts objects distinctively. To claim difference would be to claim humanity, which is erroneous, but to insist on undifferentiation would make certain objects more vulnerable to forms of violence not easily recognized as anti-blackness (i.e. what we call ‘heterosexism’ or anti-gay violence might be a particular form of anti-black violence). This is the double-bind that renders ‘black queers’ non-existent in both registers of thought.

This is more than an inquiry of whether “black queers” are black. The issue of internal exclusion is an important issue that overlaps significantly with the agenda here and others have addressed this issue quite powerfully. The “black queer” cannot claim an ontology outside of blackness, outside the nonontological space of crude object form. If we settle the question, at least theoretically, and answer in the affirmative (black queers are in fact black), we still face the problem of grammar—a grammar of suffering. It is the particularity of injury that cuts the object in multiple ways, and this injury, or “suffering,” is compounded by the fact that the “black queer” does not exist either as a human-subject or a “distinct” homogenous-object. Any particular injury directed at this object is incomprehensible and unthinkable— symbolically and ethically. The “black queer,” then, is a catachresis. The problem I am laying out here is not merely the impossibility of folding the black queer into humanity (humanism) or the ‘community’ of objects (internal exclusion), but whether the injury directed at this being is registered as anti-blackness at all. The prevailing problem is that the injury sustaining this catachresis is so incomprehensible that it is doubly erased, and this is what I will call ‘onticide.’