Onticide: Afro-pessimism, Gay Nigger #1, and Surplus Violence
Calvin Warren
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies6/1/2017·DOI·Read paper
Abstract
This article argues that black sexuality presents a “problem for thought” within humanism and Afro-pessimism. Humanism continually attempts to integrate blackness into humanity, as a way to make suffering intelligible (structural adjustment); Afro-pessimism, rightly critiquing this structural adjustment, is unable to articulate “particularity” or “difference” (since fungibility presumes an object stripped of human qualities, such as identity). The article analyzes the “murder” of Steen Keith Fenrich as a trapped within the crevices of this methodological problem. Onticide is presented as a procedure for contending with the double bind of humanism and creating intellectual space for an (im)possible violence.
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