The alternative is to refuse political hope in favor of spiritual endurance. That solves---it creates new socialities that towards differing modalities of hope.

One might respond to Warren by claiming that he conflates the Political with all political strategies and possibilities, or that he delimits political struggle to its paradigmatic and structural features, especially those features that define State-centred politics and projects of reform that measure success by the impact on law and policy. While there is something to this concern, I want to stay with a particular intervention by the Black nihilist, one that refuses the compulsory nature of Political hope while opening up space to imagine and practice hope in a manner that will appear unintelligible and non-sensical to the regime of Political hope, a regime that measures our desires and pursuits according to their utility, efficacy, and the capacity to preserve the general order of things (or the commitment to order itself). For Warren, political hope assumes that anti-Black violence can be sutured within and through the very domain that needs to pulverize and get rid of the nothing, the void that subtends being. Even though this is an impossible task, the fantasy of stomping the void out can be maintained by disproportionately directing violence towards those who have been designated as embodiments of the nothing. For Warren, this does not mean that there is nothing that can be done or that we have to accept the ontological and axiological parameters of the human to determine Black worth and value. In fact, as suggested earlier, the fundamental nature of anti-Blackness, which includes the positioning and outlining of the human being over and against Blackness, leads Warren to depart from the realm of (human) being/ontology altogether and embrace practices of the spirit (or practices that involve an openness to the invisible, the mysterious, and the miraculous). As Warren writes, “I would have to suggest that there are no solutions to the problem of anti-Blackness—there is only endurance. And endurance cannot be reduced to biofuturity or humanist mandates. Endurance is a spiritual practice with entirely different aims” (Warren 2018, 172). While he does not flesh out what this spiritual practice consists of, he does indicate that endurance involves going through the “valley of the shadow of death” (172). A reference to Psalm 23, this biblical citation suggests the need for practices and modes of sociality that stay with the lowly, the opaque, the dead and dying, and the death that shadows the reproduction of life. To think with Du Bois’s language, the Black nihilist’s endorsement of spiritual endurance as the only solution to anti-Black violence might be an unhopeful stance but not necessarily hopeless (Du Bois 1994, 128). To put it differently, if there is a space for hope, then this space will be carved out through an abandonment of those repositories of hope and confidence that are tethered to humanism, progress, and other anti-Black paradigms. And yet the language of Black spiritual endurance runs into problems and limitations according to an author like Patrice Douglass. In an otherwise sympathetic review of Warren’s fascinating text Ontological Terror, Douglass broaches a difference between Afro-pessimism and Black nihilism. While the afro-pessimist remains attached to the nothing that Blackness has come to stand in for, Douglass contends that Warren concludes his study with a desire to hold onto Blackness as some-thing, even if that indeterminate thing is aligned with “the soul, psyche, and spirit” (Douglass 2019, 396). For Douglass, Warren “announces that ontological terror is the destruction of something, rather than nothing, that is quite specific” (396). In other words, Warren wants to rescue something; he wants to preserve a spiritual legacy that has enabled Black people to remain in existence under severe duress and anguish. Here we might intervene and underscore that using the language of spirit to describe that which escapes the parameters of what can be conceptualized, measured, quantified, and pinned down is actually all too human and familiar. At the same time, the grammar of spirits and shadows might be the language that best approximates the condition of being forced to give form to the constitutive void, to the predicament of functioning as “equipment in human form” (Warren 2018, 6) while not being completely determined by that anti-Black function.