"Il faut bien détruire ensemble," or Solidarity after Afropessimism

The title of my essay is inspired by Jacques Derrida's two formulations, Il faut bien manger and Il faut bien vivre ensemble. The latter is itself a kind of rewriting of former. Derrida's earlier phrase can be translated into English in two ways: "it really is necessary to eat" (we have no choice) and "it is necessary to eat well." With this formulation, Derrida seeks to move beyond the stale and predictable debate over sameness and difference, pointing out that relating ethically to the other is not a matter of opting for either a cannibalistic or a non-cannibalistic mode of contact. There is no avoiding symbolic assimilation; interpreting others will happen; the question is how to do it: "The moral question is…not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat… but since one must eat in any case…how for goodness sake should one eat well [bien manger]?" (1991, 115). Like Il faut bien manger, the imperative Il faut bien vivre ensemble can be translated as: 1) It really is necessary to live together (again, we have no choice in the matter); 2) It is necessary to live together well (co-existence takes on an ethico-political dimension).

"Il faut bien détruire ensemble" can be translated as 1) It really is necessary to destroy together (meaning: destruction is not an individual project; no one group can do it on its own; it takes a village to destroy); 2) It is necessary to destroy well (destruction is not an end in itself; it is destruction infused with an ethico-political purpose). We may however also add a third translation: It really is necessary to destroy the idea of togetherness. It is helpful here to return to Derrida's own gloss of il faut bien vivre ensemble. Derrida draws attention to the adverbial function of "ensemble" in his formulation. As an adverb, "together" (ensemble) makes living something never full nor complete but always already open to the stranger, to the neighbor as stranger: "There is 'living together' only there where the whole [ensemble] is neither formed nor closed [ne se forme pas et ne se ferme pas], there where the living together [ensemble] (the adverb) contests the completion, the closure, and the cohesiveness of an 'ensemble' (the noun, the substantive), of a substantial, closed ensemble identical to itself" (2013, 28). As a noun, "ensemble" stands for what Derrida describes as an "organic symbiosis" (2013, 27).

In this light, what is being destroyed—the object of the destruction—is the phantasmatic idea that we all belong to some organic whole—let's call it humanity or world, or simply humanist world. I want to purse the implications of this last translation of Il faut bien détruire ensemble in connection with Afropessimism, a recent movement that has energized Black Studies in its unwavering oppositional stance toward European modernity and its conceptualizations of the "Human." Frank B. Wilderson III, a major voice in Afropessimism, would most likely welcome the destruction of the idea of "togetherness," which for him is predicated on the exclusion and negation of Blackness. The destruction of togetherness goes hand in hand with his dismissal of cross-racial solidarity—read as "anti-black solidarity" (Wilderson 2010, 58)—along with any emancipatory leftist project. For the Afropessimists, saving the world—which always meant saving the human—feeds rather than halts the global spread of anti-Blackness. Wilderson stresses that Afropessimism is not after reforming the world, since it would leave untouched the metaphysics of the Human that underpins it; what it wants is its utter destruction: "True Afropessimism is not animated by reformist desire to end discriminatory practices in the world; it is animated by an understanding that world itself is unethical and needs be undone" (2021, 39).

Theory's saving of the world, if such a thing is possible, would, then, do little to alter the social death of Black people. Afropessimists set themselves apart from Marxists and postcolonial or Indigenous theorists. They are deeply suspicious of the Marxist framework of analysis. A Marxist focus on political...