Their system of valuation is dependent on anti-blackness and precludes the possibility of valuing Black life – refusing the empty promise of dialectic reconciliation between blackness and positive life is necessary for thinking and living outside Humanity’s violent enclosure

My point here is that the very arsenal designed to determine and to ascertain the truth of human difference already assumed Europeanness/whiteness as the universal measure, that is, as the bodily, mental, and societal actualization of universality. This has several consequences, the most relevant (to my argument here) being the occlusion of the latter as a term of comparison. More explicitly, economic differences resulting from hundreds of years of expropriating land and labor were attributed to racial and cultural difference. In racial knowledge, they become the effects of particular bodily arrangements, which are established as the causes for particular mental (moral and intellectual) traits, which are themselves expressed in the social configurations found across the globe. Put differently, both the anthropological and sociological versions of racial knowledge transform the consequences of hundreds years of colonial expropriation into the effects of efficient causes (the laws of nature) as they operate through human forms (bodies and societies). In sum, as a category of racial difference, blackness occludes the total violence necessary for this expropriation, a violence that was authorized by modern juridical forms—namely, colonial domination (conquest, displacement, and settlement) and property (enslavement). Nevertheless, blackness—precisely because of how, as an object of knowledge, it occludes these juridical modalities—has the capacity to unsettle the ethical program governed by determinacy, through exposing the violence that the latter refigures.

The Equation of Value

To explore this potential of blackness to unsettle ethics, I will now tackle the unquestioned question reiterated by the disregard for lives lost in the streets of the US and in the Mediterranean Sea: Why don’t black lives matter? To do this, I use that which grounds the modern knowledge program—mathematical reasoning—to devise a procedure that unleashes blackness to confront life. Using what I call the Equation of Value, I describe blackness’s capacity to unravel modern thought without reproducing the violence housed in knowledge and in the scene of value. My proof of this equation is designed to sidestep the hegemony of the Kantian subject and to make it possible to expose the disruptive/creative capacity that blackness hosts/holds.

In the modern Western imagination, blackness has no value; it is nothing. As such, it marks an opposition that signals a negation, which does not refer to contradiction. For blackness refers to matter—as The Thing; it refers to that without form—it functions as a nullification of the whole signifying order that sustains value in both its economic and ethical scenes.

The crux of this exercise is to provide an account of opposition that figures nullification instead of contradiction. This is crucial for distinguishing a radical engagement from a critical one—because the latter cannot but assume the Kantian forms when it seeks to expose their conditions of possibility.

Let us first see how the figuring of opposition as contradiction would work in relation to black life. Life is the form; the positive position vis-à-vis life is figured as “1,” and the negative position is figured as “-1”:

i. positive life = 1

ii. negative life = -1

If blackness occupies the place of negative life—that is, life that has negative value, that does not matter—then

iii. blackness = -1

Let me now figure the relationship between life (1) and blackness (-1) using basic mathematical procedures: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Addition in this case becomes subtraction because of blackness’s negative value:

a) 1 (life) + -1 (blackness) = 0

When simply combined with life, blackness brings about nullification (0); when added to the positive form of life, blackness obliterates it.

As discussed previously, value, because it is both an effect of determinacy (Kant’s account of knowledge) and is equated with determinacy (Kantian and Hegelian ethical scenes), it is (a) determinate, resulting in relations marked by effectivity (efficient causation), that is, relations marked by power differences insofar as one element effectively acts upon another; and it is (b) determinant insofar as it is the effective element—that is, it is the form which is applied to matter (content).

To express the relation between blackness (0) and life (1) in terms of effectivity, I use multiplication (×) and division (÷):

b) 1 (life) × -1 (blackness) = -1

c) 1 (life) ÷ -1 (blackness) = -1

When blackness multiplies or divides life, it remains in its negative expression, as blackness (-1)—that is, as lack, as a symbol of an absence (of life).

My next move is to take blackness’s power to annihilate life (a) and deploy it to multiply (×) life. If

iv. life = 1

v. blackness = 0

then we find that

d) 1 (life) × -1 (blackness) = -1

e) 1 (life) × 0 (blackness) = 0

The movement in both cases is unmistakably violent; it refigures dialectics. In (d), negativity (blackness) engulfs value, and in (e) it destroys it. Put differently, in (d), life without value—that is, blackness (-1)—disappears with life, and in (e), blackness as a figuring of the absence of form (blackness = 0) disappears with the form (life = 1) and releases matter itself (0).

Taking this a step further, it might be possible to move away from dialectics and its deployment of effectivity, which cannot but reproduce violence, by dividing life by blackness:

f) 1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞

Instead of the sublation (d) or obliteration (e) of the form, this procedure has no result because it is impossible to divide something by zero. I have chosen ∞ − ∞ (infinity minus infinity) or ∞ / ∞ (infinity divided by infinity) to picture the result because it is undeterminable, it has no form: it is ∞ minus itself or ∞ divided by itself. It is neither life nor nonlife; it is content without form, or materia prima—that which has no value because it exists (as ∞) without form.

In equating blackness with ∞ and capturing the rare (“of which something consists”) and the obsolete (“substance without form”) meanings of matter, I claim a radical praxis of refusal to contain blackness in the dialectical form. Though Frantz Fanon’s refusal of dialectics is the most celebrated, I find this refusal also in Cedric Robinson’s tracing of the black radical tradition; in Hortense Spillers’s figuring of the flesh as zero degree of signification; in Saidiya Hartman’s refusal to rehearse racial violence as the moment of black subjectification; and in Fred Moten’s descriptions of blackness in the scene of violence which refuse a simple reconciliation with the categories and premises of modern thought. When blackness’s oppositional power refers to matter—or, in Fanon’s words, in the “night of the absolute”—it is possible to avoid the principle of contradiction and the accounts of self-determination it sustains; it is possible to avoid, that is, a return to Hegel (or Marx) via the shortcut of racial eschatology. What I hope this move against determinacy—the very notion presupposed in the question that Black Lives Matter sets out to challenge—makes possible is an appreciation of the urgency of bringing about its dissolution. For the work of blackness as a category of difference fits the Hegelian movement but has no emancipatory power because it functions as a signifier of violence which, when deployed successfully, justifies the otherwise unacceptable, such as the deaths of black persons due to state violence (in the US and in Europe) and capitalist expropriation (in Africa). That is, the category of blackness serves the ordered universe of determinacy and the violence and violations it authorizes. A guide to thinking, a method for study and unbounded sociality—blackness as matter signals ∞, another world: namely, that which exists without time and out of space, in the plenum.