Otherwise than Blackness: Feeling, World, Sublimation

This essay thinks through the centrality of the concept of "the World" to theorizations of affect and the presumed correlation between feeling and world—that is, the notion that affective experience is necessarily generative of world(s)—that operates as an uninterrogated maxim in both contemporary and classical theories of affect. Focusing on the figure and question of the World and its grammars of relation(ality) and becoming, this essay considers the implications of an insistence on worlding in the context of anti-Blackness. It argues that the sustenance of the very concept of theWorld necessitates a foreclosure of Black affect's destructive drive. Black affect is therefore an impossibility within theWorld, as that unbearable negativity which drives us toward its necessary destruction. In light of this, the essay argues further that the tendency toward an uncritical embrace of affect as a mode of world-forming within strains of Black critical theory—represented by turns to "the otherwise"—performs a sublimation of Black affect's radical negativity, as encapsulated in the desire for the End of the World.