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 ANGELAKI
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 22 number 2 june 2017

This book first arose out of a passage in

[Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that
shattered, as I read the passage, all the fam-
iliar landmarks of my thought – our
thought that bears the stamp of our age and
our geography – breaking up all the
ordered surfaces and all the planes with
which we are accustomed to tame the wild
profusion of existing things, and continuing
long afterwards to disturb and threaten with
collapse our age-old distinction between the
Same and the Other. This passage quotes a
“certain Chinese encyclopaedia” in which it
is written that “animals are divided into: (a)
belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed,
(c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fab-
ulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the eva hayward
present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innu-
merable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair che gossett
brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken
the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way
off look like flies.” In the wonderment of IMPOSSIBILITY OF THAT
this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in
one great leap, the thing that, by means of
the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic
us, even if forgotten or repressed (13). Borges
charm of another system of thought, is the
describes a scene, the zoo, as “terrible
limitation of our own, the stark impossibility
of thinking that. grounds” that the child (us) “enjoys” (ibid.).
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things xv The enjoyment of the child, he speculates,
indexes something inherent to childhood – “all

J orge Luis Borges’s The Book of Imaginary

Beings was first published in Mexico in
1957 under the title Manual de zoologı ́a fantá-
stica [Handbook of Fantastic Zoology], and
then published in Buenos Aires in 1967 as El
libro de los seres imaginarios. In the preface
to the 1957 edition, Borges (with Margarita
Guerrero) frames the book with the figure of
“A small child is taken to the zoo.” Borges’s
child is a general child, a state of development,
a condition of the human, who has always been
children, by definition, are explorers” (ibid.).
“The child” is a primal scene: the promise of
the social, the human, and the future
(Edelman). But, and importantly, the zoo is
the primal scene of conquest, of nation building,
and of state power – the “terrible grounds”
where the carceral is a scene of sadistic pleasure,
where animal (human and non-human) bodies
become “flesh” (Spillers). As such, “the child”
is necessary for the ongoing-ness of colonialism,
either as conscripted labor (modes of

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/17/020015-10 © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group
https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2017.1322814

15
 impossibility of that
enslavement, and the necropolitical economy
therein) or as elaborating, proliferating, and
productive engines of empire. In this way, for
Borges, “terrible grounds” (zoos, scientific
racism, taxonomy, etc.) are the effects of colo-
nial power, and serve both as instruction for
“the child” (for the white child, a promise; for
the black child, a threat) as much as “the
child” (in its social logic) is also “terrible
grounds.” An explorer of “terrible grounds”
prefaces – defines the aims of – Imaginary
Beings and Fantastic Zoology. How might the
explorer of terrible grounds be about a “colonial
imaginary” (Chalaye)? Or, more precisely, how
might the effects of colonialism always find chil-
dren enjoying terrible places?
In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault saw
Borges’s text as
breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all
the planes with which we are accustomed to
tame the wild profusion of existing things,
and continuing long afterwards to disturb
and threaten with collapse our age-old dis-
tinction between the Same and the Other.
(xv)
For Foucault, Imaginary Beings named the
crisis of collapsing order, the upending of “the
world.” Wild and profusive: things exceed the
imperative of this. Specificity, this event, this
thing, this one inaugurates the order of things.
Foucault continues
In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the
thing we apprehend in one great leap, the
thing that, by means of the fable, is demon-
strated as the exotic charm of another
system of thought, is the limitation of our
own, the stark impossibility of thinking
that. (Ibid.)
Despite, or perhaps because of, its localism, its
particularity, specificity unavoidably serves the
universalism of taxonomy, of classification,
through “one great leap”: the relational. This
is inserted into Western systems of classifi-
cation, which demand relationships of hierar-
chy, of order. The relational, in this context,
aims toward consolidating Borges’s “terrible
grounds,” in part because the relationship
assumes shared-ness, an innocent, deracinated
ontological meeting. However, the very con-
ditions of colonial racism – the subtending
logic of the zoo – foreclose the humanist
project of a shared “Human” (Wilderson).
Borges’s fantastic compendium, in contrast,
gestures to “the stark impossibility of thinking
that.” Distinguishing between this and that –
a difference predicated on proximity: “this is
closer than that” – Foucault reveals how that
exists beyond the order of this. For Foucault
too, then, this is terrible ground, is the scene
upon which order is installed and legislated.
This is always hungry for that – always
seeking what remains beyond thinkability,
beyond order. And yet, while that may be
impossible, it is so only provisionally. That
will become this – or so colonial reasoning
teaches. The presence of that is a provocation
that solicits mastery, and perhaps it is the
space (or transition) between this (this zoo
animal, for Borges “jaguars, vultures, bison,
and – what is still stranger – giraffes”) and
that (again Borges, “the zoo of mythologies, to
the zoo whose denizens are not lions but
sphinxes and griffons and centaurs”) that
reveals something about the child’s (our)
enjoyment.
In a psychoanalytic idiom, one that holds
close to the trouble of children and the trouble
of enjoying terribleness (sadism), Lacan too sup-
poses that the Imaginary (what resembles the
formation of Freud’s “ego”) desires coherence
rather than fragmentation (for Melanie Klein
“the body-in-pieces”). The Imaginary generates
a compromise – an idealization of the self as
whole (rather than fragmented) – between the
unbearability of interiority and exteriority (Sil-
verman). In addition to imagining the self, the
Imaginary is the necessary scene of imagining
and interacting with others – fictional, simu-
lated, and the virtual. For Lacan, the Imaginary
is unavoidable, the obligatory state of existence
for speaking subjects, and constitutes very real
effects (Grosz). Where Borges tries to signify
the Imaginary – what is a world in pieces, mon-
strous fragmentations, an impossible world of
that – Lacan’s Imaginary tentatively, fantasti-
cally, precariously constitutes a sense of self
16

through alienation. Even for Lacan, the logic of
self (or subjectivity) is predicated on yet another
colonial project: alienation is managed through
irascible precarity (for instance, “the child”
enjoying “terrible grounds”; that is, “the
child” is terrible grounds, while the zoo, for
instance, is educating “the child” through its
“terrible grounds”). So even that which is this
(closest to me, most intimately mine) exists
through colonial gains. No wonder zoos, as
Borges suggests, constitute a primal scene of
colonial violence through which fantasy and
imagination, dragons and unicorns, are articu-
lated, organized, rendered as “elsewhere.” The
zoo began as an ancient institution and was
transformed by the event horizon of modernity
– colonization. Frantz Fanon dramatizes the
ways in which colonization is animated by zoo-
nomia as phantasy: “When the settler seeks to
describe the native fully in exact terms he con-
stantly refers to the bestiary” (Wretched 7). Psy-
choanalysis, as the contributors and editors of
Unconscious Dominions remind us, by extend-
ing Derrida’s concept, is always already colonial
“geo-psychoanalysis” (Anderson, Jensen, and
Keller).
The transitional tendency of this-to-that pro-
vokes the proliferation of other thats – why Fou-
cault describes that as starkness or severity –
which invites the question: what would an
anti-colonial that be? Can we (as sadism’s chil-
dren) hold to the impossibility of that long
enough (transitory rather than transitional) to
dis-orient (Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology) the
demands of this? If that becomes inevitably
this – a problem that Lacan’s Imaginary demon-
strates as a central compromise between the ego
and its images (childhood) – then, perhaps, one
anti-colonial project is to elaborate the impossi-
bility of that (as, in Donna Haraway’s terms,
“The Promises of Monsters,” the title itself
revealing her commitment to Borges by way of
Foucault) while indexing its becoming
mastery. Or, in a different register, to pressure
this toward that is to resist the classificatory cer-
titude of mastery for what remains starkly una-
vailable. Perhaps this-to-that reveals how
Imaginary Beings and Fantastic Zoology
always carry a colonial logic, a conquest
17
hayward & gossett
paradigm, while also un-resting (if not necess-
arily liberating) the enjoyment of terrible
grounds.
If, as Foucault following Borges proffers,
specificity is constituted relationally (this-to-
that) then the question of trans is unavoidable.
Eva Hayward and Jami Weinstein write:
“[Trans] is not a thing or being, it is rather
the process through which thingness and being-
ness are constituted. In its prefixial state, trans*
is prepositionally oriented – marking the with,
through, of, in, and across that make life poss-
ible” (196). This-to-that suggests transit, trans-
formation, trans-differentiation as a trans-
heuristic that does not transcend the colonial
project but reveals the force, the process, and
the material constraints of trans. In other
words, if trans- (etymologically) references a
movement from here to there, then it does so
through both indexing what subtends the vari-
ables – it makes available the process by which
force moves in relation to substance. “Trans*
life,” as Hayward and Weinstein propose, is
not innately progressive or liberatory, and as
Foucault and Borges suppose, the relational is
what turns that-into-this. Trans, we might say,
is a charge, a provocation, even an intensifica-
tion that may, or may not, reify “terrible
ground.”
In the 1967 edition of Imaginary Beings,
Borges invites “the eventual reader in Columbia
or Paraguay to send us the names, accurate
description, and most conspicuous traits of
local monsters” (12). As yet other eventual
readers, we offer to his abecedarian this-to-
that imaginaries with their own conspicuous
traits – traits that foreplace those terrible
grounds of colonial violence that pre-stage
Lacan’s Imaginary or Symbolic (Wilderson).
We offer trans as not simply a heuristic or inter-
pretive – turning life into capacities for use, the
logic of slave-making – we suggest how trans
(which is always, here, about the conditions of
trans life) works in relation/resistance/reifica-
tion to colonial and racial violence (see
Gossett, “We Will Not Rest in Peace”;
Snorton and Haritaworn; Stanley, “Gender
Self-Determination”). Moreover, we might say
that trans does not have to reify that category
 impossibility of that
of “the Human” – trans/gender/sexual can
break from the line of succession that consoli-
dates species differences (predicated on raciali-
zation, as in “human/black”) with sexual
difference (see Chen; Hayward, “Spider City
Sex”). Trans is not necessarily a progressive
mechanism for revealing cultures of violence;
rather, the formation of trans (transgender,
transsexual, trans*, gender queer, gender non-
binary/conforming) is always part of the ways
sex and gender are inscribed to manage,
conceal, reinforce, displace, and the effects
and histories of race and racism. This said,
because it is installed as a crisis associated
with sex and gender, it also indexes how estab-
lished categories of sex and gender have always
worked to stabilize technologies of colonial
racism.
Black feminism and black thought as always
already trans have troubled the categories of
binary gender and of medically assigned sex
for their historical and contemporary violences.
For example, we might read the Combahee
River Collective Statement and see how their
critique of biological essentialism as a “danger-
ous and reactionary basis upon which to build
a politic” also corresponds with the black trans
feminist political horizon of Sylvia Rivera at
the 1973 Pride March where she offered an abo-
litionist vision of trans liberation that began
with incarcerated trans women. As Eric
Stanley argues, “to center radical black, antico-
lonial, and prison abolitionist traditions is to
already be inside trans politics” (“Near Life”
4–5). In a similar vein, Riley Snorton and Jin
Haritaworn suggest that the “inconceivability”
of the trans of color subject is a condition for
“trans necropolitics” (70). The necropolitical
indexes the racial and colonial violence of
slavery and the Middle Passage. As Mbembe
argues, “any discussion of modern” – and here
we might name anti-trans – “terror must begin
with slavery” (14). Following Spillers, we see
how blackness troubles gender through this
violent reduction of the black body to commodi-
fied flesh. Spillers argues that the flesh was
“ungendered,” and blackness forces us to recon-
sider the very terms of trans/gender, how black-
ness is trans/gender trouble, how the violence
of the gender binary imposed on enslaved Afri-
cans through the settler colonial site of the slave
ship shattered cosmological life-worlds. Here we
see the trans/gender trouble of blackness in the
biopolitical and necropolitical site of the slave
ship. Modernity has been an anti-trans project
in its foundational violence of colonization and
racial slavery – “ungendering” through the
violent reduction of the body to the “flesh” as
Spillers illustrates and the genocidal violence
by settlers specifically targeting indigenous
people as violating white gender normativity.
In this way, trans studies begins in and as
Black Studies and Indigenous Studies.
Black trans abolitionists from Miss Major and
CeCe McDonald to Reina Gossett show how the
prison is an anti-trans necropolitical institution,
and undermines the ruse of racial and trans lib-
eralism that posits rights and incorporation into
the fold of the carceral state (Stanley and
Smith). Abolition allows for both a critique of
anti-black legal/sovereign violence and for the
radical potentiality of social transformation. A
renewed effort is required to ask better ques-
tions about trans life (and trans studies
broadly), which would also require attention to
how black trans women are resisting conditions
of fungibility and the genealogies of that very
resistance.
In an effort to articulate the that of trans
(institutional identities, studies, and politics)
through alienation from gender systems, trans
has become this, which seems to be content
with the “impossibility of thinking that.” How
might the that of trans speak to: (1) trans as
an effect of white supremacist thinking that
needs incoherent genders to make gender
matter at all; (2) our attempts to answer ques-
tions posed by trans expose how trans has
been conceptualized, generating interpretations
that reify rather than refuse anti-black violence
(consider Transgender Day of Remembrance or
hate-crime legislation); and (3) when trans
became this – an effect of gender – then it can
only serve regimes of power (however imagined
as resistance) because the logic of gender is
anchored to the effects of the Middle Passage
(Spillers). In other words, that of trans starts
with attention to the colonial/slave-making
18

logic of this, and a commitment to thinking the
impossibility of that.
What follows is a series of transfigurations, or
better, cascading provocations, which work
alongside Borges’s compendium. They do not
aim to be complete, thorough, or resolved –
remember that Borges worked through descrip-
tion rather than definition. Intentionally, these
transfigurations only suggest questions without
answering them, to break from an interpretive
paradigm that demands solution-making over
and against problem-generating. To some
degree, this is an effort to figure the impossible
without resolving or refusing that-ness. As such,
the following sections are not meant to be read
in any order – they differently describe pro-
blems with “the human,” anti-black racism,
colonialism, trans/gender/sex, and the chal-
lenges for thinking “the impossibility” of abol-
ition, decolonization, and freedom.
bestiary
At times this Manicheism goes to its logical
conclusion and dehumanizes the native, or
to speak plainly, it turns him into an
animal. In fact, the terms the settler uses
when he mentions the native are zoological
terms […] When the settler seeks to describe
the native fully in exact terms he constantly
refers to the bestiary […]
Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth 7
Who am I? Who are we? What are we in this
white world?
Léopold Senghor to Aimé Césaire
A specter haunts Jacques Derrida’s seminars on
the beast and the sovereign – the specter of
blackness. One of Derrida’s most perspicacious
points is to show how the sovereign, the beast,
and the criminal are all in conceptual proximity
in their figuration as circumventing, or moving
outside of, the law. Yet neither in his perceptive
recognition of the enmeshing of the figure and
discourses of the sovereign, animal, and crim-
inal, nor in his unpacking of them does
Derrida consider blackness, which is rendered
“unsovereign” and stateless, criminal and
beast. Through the Middle Passage, personhood
19
hayward & gossett
is torn asunder, relinquishing “the body” to
“flesh.” Hortense Spillers’s hermeneutics of
flesh names this process – one of de-subjectifica-
tion. Spillers reworks the soma-politics of the
body of the racial-colonial category of the
human, to the anatomo-political flesh of the
commodity. The flesh is pre-discursive material,
a zone of non-personhood, and a state of abjec-
tion – derived from the Latin, meaning “to be
cast down.” Spillers’s flesh reveals how the cat-
egory of “the Human” is concretized through
colonial racism.
As such, the Human/Animal divide is a
racial and colonial divide. Concealed by the
Human/Animal opposition is the carno-politi-
cal question of flesh under the regime of racial
capitalism. In the afterlife of slavery, animals
are also rendered flesh under carno-political
regimes of racial capitalist valuation. We
might read Fanon’s statement “the terms the
settler uses when he mentions the native are
zoological terms” as positing a colonized/
Human relation that haunts the ontology and
anthropology of the human and how this
“genre of Man,” as Sylvia Wynter names it, is
also always already what we might call the
genre of the animal. What if “the wretched of
the Earth” also includes “non-human” animals
– all those cast down, abjected, wretched, and
damned under colonialism? What if Fanon’s
notion of “combat breath” is read as both the
belabored breath of the colonized and captured
animal as well as colonized humanity? The
psychic life of zoophobia and zoophilia are tied
up with Negrophobia and Negrophilia. White
anthropocentrism is at the core of racial coloni-
alism, and decolonization is a radical upending
of a world organized by the entanglement of spe-
ciesism, anti-blackness, and colonialism. Black
thought always already indexes the animal –
through concepts such as flesh, sentience, and
the maroon (whose origin is the Spanish word
cimarrón – which originally referred to
escaped cattle before it referenced the fugitivity
of slaves). Blackness as fugitivity from the
human, in its proximity to what is called the
animal, in what Frederick Douglass termed
“invisible agency,” discloses how “the
Human” is always already predicated on the
 impossibility of that
logic of anti-black racism, and “animal turns”
reify species divides (Human/animal) as tech-
nologies of race (Human/black) (see Jackson,
Hartman on the liberal subject, Wilderson on
the black/Human, etc.). Blackness is/as an
optic – a reveal – through which to think “the
animal” beyond the human; this reveal is a
break through what Frederick Douglass calls
“invisible agency” and fugitivity (Douglass,
Portable Reader 83). For example, elephants
produce fugitive sound. Elephant “infrasound”
is produced through vibrations that are not
audible to the human ear (Sukumar). How
does this underground form of sociality, this
infrasound, imply an infrapolitics of fugitivity?
Fugitivity as a concept helps us to think about
these occluded forms of social life occurring
within a broader field of bio- and necropower.
+*
Positive. Asterisk. Marks, types, printed charac-
ters: typography is the domain of style, of
appearance, of aesthetics. And yet, these dark
notes on a white page (or screen) gesture to a
political chiaroscuro – a history of silhouettes.
For African American visual artist Kara
Walker, the silhouette is a genteel invention –
a romantic play of black and white – that
reveals the shadow-work (dream work) of gratu-
itous violence, the enduring effects of white on
black violence. Typology is as much about print-
ing as it is about technologies of race. For
Walker, the black silhouette against a white
background is a provocation, an unbearable
invitation into the ongoing scene of anti-black
violence, a scene that continues to stage social
life. Marks, types, characters have double
lives: their print lives are made possible
through their racial profile.
what, then, of +*?
+ is positive, an alter-ego to negative (−). Pres-
ence opposed to absence. A proton. Optimism
and confidence. Of a photograph, showing
lights and shades true to the original. Scientific
positivism – verifiable, rational truth, a rejec-
tion of metaphysics. Astrologically, positive is
fiery air – active, masculine forces. From the
Latin positivus, “placed.” The original sense
referred to laws as being formally “laid down,”
which gave rise to the sense “explicitly laid
down and admitting no question.” For HIV
testers, + reveals a precarious life, a life assigned
to social death, a life made possible by anti-:
anti-virals, anti-biotics, anti-fungals, anti-
bodies. Pos or + is full of presence – microbial
and pharmaceutical agents, global histories full
of human and non-human actants. But HIV+
is also a silhouette, a presence that indexes an
absence. To be + is to be the walking dead.
Like Walker’s plantation shadows, HIV+ tells
a story of race, of black death. Che Gossett pre-
cisely describes the inextricable “vectoring” of
criminalization, transphobia (especially trans-
misogyny), anti-black racism, and AIDS
phobia – they write:
We are living in a time of “chains and
corpses,” death, loss and mourning, of
outrage and activism in response to mass
incarceration, mass detention and deporta-
tion, HIV criminalization, AIDS phobia and
the ongoing AIDS epidemic, anti-queer and
anti-trans police violence. (“We Will” 31)
Adam Geary, in his Antiblack Racism and the
AIDS Epidemic, rewrites the correlation
between AIDS and risky sex (the homophobic
narrative that defines risk prevention programs
across the planet) to address how the AIDS epi-
demic is an effect of anti-black racism. The
AIDS epidemic is an effect of social violence.
Geary writes: “The ecologies in which people
live, or are forced to live, materialize these orga-
nized relations of inequality and violence within
built and biological environments, to the advan-
tage of some but to the disadvantage of many
others” (47). +, then, is a symbol, a typographi-
cal sign, an index of Walker’s shadowy world.
the asterisk of +*?
The glyph * is a diminutive star. Eva Hayward
and Jami Weinstein describe asterisks as like
soft asterisks of pollen or tentacular viruses, *
is a limb-y reach, is a grasping (199). Rather
than demanding precision, * errs on the side
20

of over-population, over-use, and excessiveness.
For instance, the asterisk can denote a database
search, censorship (“f*ck”), or, differently,
within fluid mechanics * points to sonic speed.
In word processing, asterisks around a word
will embolden it. Asterisks designate multipli-
cation, or sometimes a disclaimer/fine print,
or mark genetic identity. They indicate pseudo-
nyms or names that have been changed. Aster-
isks can point toward impossibility (“that”) or
the unattested, or become “the star of life.”
More recently, an asterisk follows trans.
Trans* is meant, in part, to break open the cat-
egory of transgender, trans woman, or trans
man – a liberal project of inclusivity. In some
ways it instances a false notion of inclusivity,
like the silent T in LGBT, to include all trans
identities. But the asterisk reveals a crisis
inherent in trans, the question of being-ness
(of ontology). In a 2013 New York Times
piece, Laverne Cox wrote: “At the heart of the
fight for trans justice is a level of stigma so
intense and pervasive that trans folks are often
told we don’t exist.” As such, the multi-
pointed asterisk is needy, is fingery, as if
putting greater political emphasis on both the
prepositional and the prefixial valences of
trans to signal an ontological refusal. If trans
was not understood, in at least one of its
modes, as always already relational, working
and playing parasitically at the level of language,
thought, and ideology, then the * repurposes,
displaces, renames, replicates, and intensifies
terms, adding yet more texture and the possi-
bility of nearby-ness. The anemone that is this
asterisk is hungry for connection.
+*, then, is a paradox, is an ever-expanding
negativity. If + registers the racial violence of
AIDS and * indicates a proliferating trans iden-
tificatory gesture, then +* reminds us that one
in three trans women is HIV+, the vast majority
are black trans women (see CDC report). Gratu-
itous violence compounded with ontological
refusal – a refusal indexed by a profusive rela-
tional matrix – is what +* marks. In this way,
perhaps +* resonates with the fictional Ooloi
in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy.
Butler builds a world in which nuclear destruc-
tion has left Earth uninhabitable, and an alien
21
hayward & gossett
race, the Oankali, rebuild non/human life and
the planet. Colonization is the effect of an apoc-
alypse (suggesting an analogy between the
history of colonization of the Americas in
relation to the Middle Passage). Abjected and
yet desired, Ooloi have starry limbs (*) that
allow them to alter, mutate, evolve genetic
material. Butler’s trilogy of novels Xenogenesis
– the prefix xeno- naming the “stranger,” “the
alien,” as in “xenophobia” – reveals a proliferat-
ing difference (genesis) built through pessimism
(xeno). Like the Ooloi, +* runs riot because
being-ness (that-ness) is foreclosed, and in the
very act of foreclosing, burgeons (genesis). In
other words, the alienated stranger (what in
bad faith is positive, is +, is about precarity
and anti-black racism), what is, for Butler and
+*, xeno is propped up against genesis (*),
but also against a colonial drive, against a
longing for being-ness.
abolishing world
It’s terrible to have come from nothing but
the sea, which is nowhere, navigable only in
its constant autodislocation. The absence of
solidity seems to demand some other cer-
emony of hailing that will have been carried
out on some more exalted frequency. This is
exacerbated by the venal refusal of a general
acknowledgment of the crime, which is, in
any case, impossible, raising the question of
whether the only way adequately to account
for the horror of slavery and the brutality of
the slaver, the only way to be (in Sexton’s
words) a witness rather than a spectator, is
to begin by positing the absolute degradation
of the enslaved. This is not a trick question;
it’s not merely rhetorical. If the slave is, in
the end and in essence, nothing, what
remains is the necessity of an investigation
of that nothingness. What is the nothingness,
which is to say the blackness, of the slave that
it is not reducible to what they did, though
what they did is irreducible in it?
Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness
(Mysticism in the Flesh)” 744
In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre
proffers existence as a condition of nothingness
(no thing-ness, a negation, a void), and being is a
 impossibility of that
compromise formation (a conscious choice) in
relation to nothingness. The compromise is
anguish because choice designates a limit on
freedom, causing the individual to retreat into
“happy endings.” Fred Moten retorts, in his
essay “Blackness and Nothingness”: “It’s terri-
ble to have come from nothing but the sea,
which is nowhere […].” “Nowhere” also
recalls Hortense Spillers’s earlier summoning
of nowhere when she writes:
Those African persons in “Middle Passage”
were literally suspended in the “oceanic,” if
we think of the latter in its Freudian orien-
tation as an analogy for undifferentiated iden-
tity: removed from the indigenous land and
culture, and not-yet “American” either,
these captive persons without names that
their captors would recognize, were in move-
ment across the Atlantic, but they were also
nowhere at all. (214–15; emphasis in original)
For Moten and Spillers, nowhere signals to
assumptions installed in Sartre’s phenomenologi-
cal account: being and nothingness – and the “bad
faith” crises these states inaugurate – are the
effects of the “terrible grounds” of colonial
racism (the Middle Passage). No-where is rela-
tional before the thing (even no-thing). If the
ontological (being-ness) is vexed by nothingness,
then we might say nowhere dis-orders or voids
the scene of nothingness. For Moten following
Spillers, nowhere is the Middle Passage, is the
event horizon of (white) being and nothingness;
that is to say, nowhere is the wound from which
nothingness (and its effect, being) emerges.
Poet Dionne Brand describes the ongoing
effects (the afterlife of slavery) of the Middle
Passage as the wound in the world. Said differ-
ently, “the world” is an effect of gratuitous vio-
lence. Spillers, Moten, and Brand reveal not just
a crisis of meaning that must be ameliorated by
yet another critical turn, but about the nowhere
of meaning itself. A nowhere that subtends – or
perhaps even abjects – “the world.” As such,
the world is bound up with slave-making and
ongoing anti-black violence. The world, then,
must be abolished – the end of the world.
Black ecology and black eco-criticism – from
Richard Wright to Zora Neale Hurston to Toni
Morrison and Lucille Clifton to Gwendolyn
Brooks and Angela Davis – have long fore-
warned of the violence of the world, of the Plan-
tationocene, the ground on which the so-called
Anthropo/cene stands with its foundation in
the colonial anthropos. Abolition, as a critical
“infrastructure of feeling,” offers up and for
the world a radical vision of planetary relation,
a way to rethink “the Human” and exceptional-
ism within the contemporary racial-colonial
“Capitalocene” (Haraway, “Anthropocene”).
Donna Haraway has popularized the term Capi-
talocene as a more critical way to understand
what geologists and scientists have termed the
age of the Anthropocene (“Anthropocene”).
Haraway argues that the environmental crises
of global warming and disaster should not be
naturalized and depoliticized/dehistoricized,
but are in fact attributable to racial capitalism’s
functioning as what Jason W. Moore calls a
“world ecology” (160). Working on Haraway’s
insight, we might say that planetary crisis, eco-
logical devastation, and climatological collapse
are built upon trans-global capitalism, a mode
of capital predicated on slave-making, fungibil-
ity, and capacitating life. That we live in plane-
tary end times underscores the proliferating
force of anti-black racism.
In his 1972 film Space is the Place, Sun Ra
signaled the failed projects of Planetary Human-
ism and Earthly Liberalism, inviting blacks
living in Oakland to leave the gratuitous violence
of the world. Afro-futurism – as a heuristic that
pulls into productive tension(s) Afro-Pessimism
(Sexton; Hartman; Wilderson) and Black Opti-
mism (Moten) – is not simply a utopic project,
or even a project about reproductive futurity
(Edelman). For Sun Ra – and for Octavia
Butler and Samuel Delany – Afro-futurism is
about the impossible, the unbearable, about the
failure of the world. Sun Ra’s call to leave the
planet, to leave Earth and its world, holds close
to the devastating insights of Afro-Pessimism
(blackness as loss, as nothingness) while cleaving
to the radical politics of abolition. For Sun Ra,
the Earth is no longer a place, is “nowhere,” is
the legacy of anti-black racism. To abolish the
world is a provocation that demonstrates how
being and nothingness are the metaphysics of
22

white subjectivity that is built upon the flesh of
disembodied Africans – conscript for the planta-
tions and industries. Ontology (being) and its
unbearable twin nothingness are made possible
through and with black bodies
cannibalized by a racial capital-
ism and its scientific jaws. Abol-
ishing the world is neither
cynical nor utopic; it is an invita-
tion to otherwise.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by
the authors.
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