Identifying neoliberalism as the locus of modern violence only coheres the existential commons within which non-black laborers are granted a degree of social access which is bereft of blackness – their theorization that the violence of black people is justified overlooks acts of unjustifiable gratuitous violence. The aff only seeks to rationalize anti-black violence, which is impossible because anti-blackness is completely irrational.

From a practical or historical point of view, the afropessimist story reaches back to Assata Shakur, to the Black Liberation Army, even all the way back to the great Nat Turner, the Dismal Swamp, the Seminole Wars, and so on. But as an explicit body of theoretical work, it begins really with Historian Orlando Patterson (despite his own liberal proclivities). Patterson argued in the early 1980’s that, contrary to Marxist assumptions, what historically defines the slave’s position in society is ultimately not the phenomenon of forced labour. Although frequent, forced labour occurs only contingently or incidentally, and not everywhere slaves are found. The slave relation, Patterson argued, is rather defined by a threefold condition: a) general dishonourment (or social death), b) natal alienation (i.e. the systematic rupture of familial and genealogical continuities), c) gratuitous or limitless violence. This threefold combination gives rise to a being experientially and socially devoid of relationality: the slave relation is a type of social relation whose product is a relationless object. [3]

In the late 1990s Saidiya Hartman, following on the work of cultural theorist Hortense Spillers, added to Patterson’s criteria an ontological dimension: the slave, she argues, is one who finds themselves positioned in their very existence, their being-as-such, as a non-human – a captured, owned, and traded object for another. The ontological abjection of slave existence is not primarily defined by alienation and exploitation (a suffering due to the perceived loss of one’s humanity) but by accumulation and fungibility: the condition of being owned and traded, of having one’s being reduced to a being-for-the-captor. [4]

{[4] Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, (Oxford, 1997), 7, 21, 26: ‘[T]he value of blackness resided in its metaphorical aptitude, whether literally understood as the fungibility of the commodity or understood as the imaginative surface upon which the master and the nation came to understand themselves. […] [T]he fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and, as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate for the master's body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and dominion.’}

Far from disappearing with the 13th amendment, or even in the post-civil rights period, afropessimists argue that the formal traits of the slave relation were reproduced and kept alive through the perpetuation of a form of social and civil death that continues to materially and symbolically locate the Black body ‘outside Humanity’.

At a symbolic level, these theorists argue that the racial abjection of the slave was transferred to an ‘epidermalised’ racial construction of Blackness, which had the effect of inscribing the social death and relationless objecthood at the level of appearance itself: the slave relation now marks itself within the being-as-such of Blackness. Blacks today continue to be constitutively denied symbolic membership within White civil society (both culturally and politically), in such a way that no analogical bridge to White culture exists through which Blacks could conceivably wage a ‘war of position’ or sue for the sort of junior partner status otherwise accorded to White women, non-Black people of colour, or ‘dutiful’ immigrants. The symbolic death or exclusion of Blackness from Humanism means that it is not ‘Whiteness’ or White supremacy, but ‘Humanity’ as an ontologically anti-Black structure as such, which stands [remains] in antagonism with Black bodies, since Humanity’s self-understanding of its own subjecthood as value is coherent only so long as it is measured against the killable and warehousable objecthood of Black flesh.

At a corporeal level, the subjection of the Black body to direct relations of force has been institutionally carried forward through institutional paradigms of convict leasing, police impunity and mass incarceration. Throughout, Black bodies continue to be marked by a constitutive rather than contingent experience of direct material violence. Prior to any transgression, the Black body is subsumed by relations of direct force that do not possess the same sort of logical or instrumental coherence characterising the exploitation of wage labourers by capital, for example. The physical violence marking Black bodies is continuous with the slave relation, in that it remains basically despotic and gratuitous, awaiting no legitimate cause or justification, open to limitless expression, and enjoying institutional impunity.

Modernity is therefore fundamentally organised around a ‘double register’. [5] On the one hand, those included within civil society are subjected to a ‘contingent, ideological exploitation by variable capital’ (a regime of hegemony or exploitation). Yet this hegemonic exploitation nonetheless tends to preserve for the non-Black worker an existential commons that places symbolic limits on their degradation. For example, even where they may be criminalised, as in the ‘bloody legislation against vagabondage’ described by Marx in the first volume of Capital, still a transgression is always logically necessary for this criminalisation to take place, and hence the violence never seeps into the being of the criminal per se, i.e. it never becomes ontological. In this way, a symbolic space of belonging is safeguarded within White civil society through the social reinforcement of a racialised pathos of distance, whose axiomatic was distilled by Fanon into a simple phrase: ‘simple enough one has only not to be a n[epithet]’. This horizon below which non-Blacks cannot sink without scandal is marked off by despotic direct force relations, which function as the existential border separating those who live in a de jure perpetual vulnerability to terroristic violence, and those for whom such violence could only be experienced under a de facto state of exception or subsequent to a transgression.

These two distinct modalities of power do not simply emerge at the same time; rather, one conditions the other. What Martinot and Sexton describe as the ‘ignorability’ of Black death and the impunity of police murder of Black bodies provides the constitutive background for the symbolic rationality of White democracy, and the symbolic currency of social capital within it. The incoherence of Black death is the condition for the coherence of White common sense and hegemonic discourse. For this reason, the entire liberal discourse of ‘ethics’ – inasmuch as it takes place within the White discourses framed by the ‘ignorability’ of police and carceral terror – renders it totally irrelevant to Black existence. [6]

What Wilderson calls the ‘crisis of the existential commons’ therefore describes the constitutive gulf across which any attempt to analogise and tether White visions of emancipation to Black life are bound to stumble. The product of asymmetrical regimes of force, it renders the project of what we could call an ‘affirmative identity politics’ untenable for Black flesh.

It is on the basis of this orienting problematic of social death that afropessimists attempt to demonstrate the one-sided, regional, and limited character of Marxist, anarchist, feminist, and post-colonial visions of emancipation. Each of these traditions remains external to the paradigm of Blackness because of the way in which their grammar of suffering frames the subject of revolutionary practice – the working class, the subaltern, non-Black women – on the basis of ‘mediating objects’ that allow it to analogise itself with White civil society, and which in each case are absent and unavailable to those positioned by social death. Such mediating objects can include ‘land, labour-power, and cultural artefacts (such as language and customs)’. As Wilderson writes, ‘social death is a condition, void, not of land, but of a capacity to secure relational status through transindividual objects – be those objects elaborated by land, labour, or love’. [7]

Since the ability to analogise or humanise oneself is the condition of a struggle in which the social coordinates of identity can serve as an orienting axis for struggle – i.e. it is the condition of any positive identity politics, wherein one seeks to valorise and augment the social standing or symbolic caché of one’s group either by recognition from the State, or by constituting a community bound together by common values, cultural and familial ties, etc. – those who struggle against oppression therefore need to consider the difference between those groups accorded a sufficient quanta of social capital to become ‘junior partners’ of White civil society and Black subjects who remain shut out of this economy of symbolic recognition.

In short – and this point really cannot be overemphasised – if afropessimism is anything, it is the wreck of affirmative identity politics, both Black and non-Black: whereas Black existence is stripped of the symbolic ‘capacity’ to lastingly transform dominant structures of signification (at least, through hegemonic means), since its gestures don’t register in the symbolic except on condition of being structurally ‘whitened’, White life cannot effect such shifts ‘in the name of Black existence’ without reinforcing the latter’s nullity at the same time, by speaking in a voice that precisely draws its signifying power from Black nihilation. Black and non-Black identity politicians who nonetheless continue to pursue a symbolic valorisation of Black life (e.g. in certain currents of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement) do so only provided they ‘structurally adjust’ or whiten the grammar of Black suffering to suit a Human grammar. In this way, rather than seeking a way out of the desert, they in fact only deepen it.