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  • Notes Toward (Inhabiting) the Black Messianic in Afro-Pessimism's Apocalyptic Thought
  • Andrew Santana Kaplan

There will be no peace in America until whites begin to hate their whiteness, asking from the depths of their being: "How can we become black?"

James H. Cone,1 A Black Theology of Liberation

[To] allow[] the notion of freedom to attain the ethical purity of its ontological status [i.e., as gratuitous rather than contingent], one would have to lose one's Human coordinates and become Black. Which is to say one would have to die.

Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black

What shall we say then? Should we persist in sin so that grace might abound? Let it not be! We who have died to sin, how shall we live in it? Or are you unaware that we—as many as were baptized into the Messiah,2 Jesus—were baptized into his death? … For the one who has died is absolved from sin. And, if we died with the Messiah, … [we] are not under Law, but rather under grace. … And having been liberated from sin [we] were enslaved to righteousness.

Paul the Apostle, Letter to the Romans

argument

This essay aspires3 to put in contact two contemporary movements in radical political thought. The first is Afro-pessimism, coined by political theorist Frank B. Wilderson III to name a set of thinkers who theorize the Middle Passage as modernity's (ongoing) singular event, which invented anti-/Black positionality as the World's constitutive structure of antagonism. The second is the contemporary turn to Paul by continental philosophers/theorists who attempt a modern reinterpretation of the Apostle's apocalyptic announcement of the messianic event as a paradigm for radical politics. This essay will argue that, on the one hand, Paul's apocalyptic-messianic framework can both elucidate and situate how Afro-pessimism uncompromisingly inhabits its antagonistic nonrelation to the World as such. On the other hand, Afro-pessimism can show how Blackness, as Saidiya [End Page 68] V. Hartman puts it, is "the position of the unthought" (185) that contemporary Paulinism is unconsciously parasitic upon—circumscribing its theorists' attempt to radically formulate apocalyptic-messianic fidelity in the modern World. The motivation for staging this encounter lies in their shared conviction that true justice demands the end of the World.4 My essay aspires to dialogically elucidate this shared conviction by constellating their homologous theses. Put explicitly in the context of this special issue on pessimism: if it is still possible, in the wake of the Middle Passage, to hear the Apostle's summons to messianic life (Welborn 2015) and outlaw justice (Jennings 2013), then, in modernity, Afro-pessimism is its singular mode of fidelity. Accordingly, anything less than an unflinching fidelity to Afro-pessimism's demand for the end of the World is, in the final analysis, complicit with the katechontic-restraining-power-of-anti-Blackness.

methodology

This essay begins with an extended methodology on three concepts that will scaffold my approach to reading Afro-pessimism with contemporary Paulinism (and vice versa). The methodology draws on: 1) Feuerbach's notion of the capacity to develop another's idea, which will suggest how I intend to arrive at "the Black messianic" through the aforementioned discourses; 2) Agamben's theses on the paradigm, which will elaborate the significance of maintaining the logic of singularity belonging to (the analysis of) anti-/Blackness; and 3) Calvin Warren's notion of Black being, which will establish how modernity constitutes itself through the metaphysical invention of Blackness as (the incarnation of) nothingness. This methodological scaffolding then gives way to subsequent sections constellating concepts from Afro-pessimism and contemporary Paulinism. They will show how the former's apocalyptic thought tacitly gestures to the logic of the messianic, and how the latter's messianic thought tacitly gestures to the paradigmatic singularity of Blackness—together yielding the paradigm of the Black messianic. Space does not allow for me to be exhaustive; this includes neither doing justice to the range of contributions to each area of thought nor teasing out all the conceptual nuances in tension both within and across them; this essay is but a gesture toward a line of...

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