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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation

Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation

Warren, Calvin L.

Paperback

PhilosophyLiterary CriticismGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 0822370875
ISBN13: 9780822370871
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: May 18 2018
Pages: 232
Weight: 0.75
Height: 0.60 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In Ontological Terror Calvin L. Warren intervenes in Afro-pessimism, Heideggerian metaphysics, and black humanist philosophy by positing that the Negro question is intimately imbricated with questions of Being. Warren uses the figure of the antebellum free black as a philosophical paradigm for thinking through the tensions between blackness and Being. He illustrates how blacks embody a metaphysical nothing. This nothingness serves as a destabilizing presence and force as well as that which whiteness defines itself against. Thus, the function of blackness as giving form to nothing presents a terrifying problem for whites: they need blacks to affirm their existence, even as they despise the nothingness they represent. By pointing out how all humanism is based on investing blackness with nonbeing-a logic which reproduces antiblack violence and precludes any realization of equality, justice, and recognition for blacks-Warren urges the removal of the human from its metaphysical pedestal and the exploration of ways of existing that are not predicated on a grounding in being.

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