The Catastrophe: Black Feminist Poethics, (Anti)form, and Mathematical Nihilism

You can always identify the trauma of white sovereignty, in brief, with the extent to which it derives its essence and suffering from the prosopoeia of black catastrophe.

David Marriott

Ontology is mathematics.

Alain Badiou

Mathematical reasoning grounds the modern knowledge program.

Denise Ferreira da Silva

Mathematics and Thinking

If "ontology is mathematics," as Badiou would insist, is mathematics also life?¹ What is the relation (or nonrelation) between mathematics, life, and being? Do they constitute an indissoluble entanglement, one necessary for thought itself? Is mathematics the repository of conflicts, axioms, principles, and impasses found within being and thinking? In other words, are the solutions to the problems of life, being, and thinking found in mathematics, just waiting to be un(dis) covered with a rigorous procedure? Would the end of mathematics result in the end of life or the impairment of thought? Or, if we desire to "end the world," would dismantling mathematics entail the most effective strategy of world destruction? Moreover, is blackness always already antimathematical within the scene of arithmetical procedures and ontological calculations of existence (in an antiblack world)? These questions bring us to a nodal point of thought and knowledge: why is mathematics so important to life, being, and thinking? To address these inquires, we must turn our thinking toward mathematics and somehow render the indissociable chain of "life-being-mathematics-thinking" fragile, sociable, and dissectible.

But what exactly is mathematics? Which mathematics preoccupies our presentation? Mathematics is an assemblage of practices, operations, and procedures designed to formalize knowledge, ethics, value, ontology, and philosophies of life and death. Even though the operations, calculations, and procedures vary—geometry, set theory, calculus, algebra, statistics, and so on—formalization unifies these diverse fields of mathematical inquiry. To put things differently, mathematics is the formalization of thinking itself. The modern world, then, requires form to think both abstraction and practicality, ethics and politics, being and appearance—in short, all the indispensible concepts and fields of modern knowledge. Rather than presenting mathematics as a particular operation or scientific protocol, mathematics, here, is modern thinking as formalization. The world is a formalized thought experiment, an attempt to unify through a regulatory fiction, as Kant might have it. Form preconditions something like a world to exist at all, as a concept distinct from the earth. And since much of our thinking involves a conception of the world, we often reproduce form and employ formalization as a necessary condition for thinking life, value, knowledge, and so forth. In other words, mathematics is thinking. Regardless of genre, the purpose of mathematics in a metaphysical world is to give form to abstractions and impasses. Our difficulty, then, is to foreground form, extract it from mathematical operations, and (un)think its relation to the world, blackness, and being. This essay attempts to demonstrate a relation between form and mathematics and how such relation engenders antiblack violence. Mathematical nihilism, or the (un)thinking, demystification, and destruction of form (and matter), might set us on a catastrophic path of existence anew.

Doing the Math

In "Do the Math on #AllLivesMatter and It Equals White Supremacy," Sean Eversley Bradwell presents #AllLivesMatter as a dissimulating and violent signifier, one operating under the guise of universal humanism, even as it preserves and justifies antiblack exclusionary logics:

All language is contextual, and at face value, this particular hashtag, #AllLivesMatter, seems to be an affirmation of... "everyone." We are reminded that the Founding Fathers used the same language of humanity. We do, indeed, "hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." In the language of U.S. politics, "all" has never meant everyone. #SomeLivesMatter.

More important, #AllLivesMatter does not have an organic origin. . . . #AllLivesMatter is a rejoinder. It is a retort. It originates in direct response to the creation of the hashtag and movement #BlackLivesMatter. And it is here that we find its promotion of white supremacy.²

Technology transforms the mathematical "number sign" into a discursive/philosophical announcement—#. The hashtag symbol carries the mathematical presumptions of facticity within its announcement. For what comes after the hashtag is, purportedly...