Notes Toward (Inhabiting) the Black Messianic in Afro-Pessimism's Apocalyptic Thought

Notes Toward (Inhabiting) the Black Messianic in Afro-Pessimism's Apocalyptic Thought Andrew Santana Kaplan The Comparatist, Volume 43, October 2019, pp. 68-89 (Article) Published by The University of North Carolina Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/739698 Access provided at 15 Nov 2019 23:56 GMT from Emory University Libraries Andrew SAntAnA KAplAn Notes Toward (Inhabiting) the Black Messianic in Afro-Pessimism’s Apocalyptic Thought  There will be no peace in America until whites begin to hate their whiteness, asking from the depths of their being: “How can we become black?” James H. Cone,1 A Black Theology of Liberation [To] allow[] the notion of freedom to attain the ethical purity of its ontological status [i.e., as gratuitous rather than contingent], one would have to lose one’s Human coordinates and become Black. Which is to say one would have to die. Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black What shall we say then? Should we persist in sin so that grace might abound? Let it not be! We who have died to sin, how shall we live in it? Or are you unaware that we—as many as were baptized into the Messiah,2 Jesus—were baptized into his death? . . . For the one who has died is absolved from sin. And, if we died with the Messiah, . . . [we] are not under Law, but rather under grace. . . . And having been liberated from sin [we] were enslaved to righteousness. Paul the Apostle, Letter to the Romans Argument This essay aspires3 to put in contact two contemporary movements in radical political thought. The first is Afro-pessimism, coined by political theorist Frank B. Wilderson III to name a set of thinkers who theorize the Middle Passage as modernity’s (ongoing) singular event, which invented anti-/Black positionality as the World’s constitutive structure of antagonism. The second is the contemporary turn to Paul by continental philosophers/theorists who attempt a modern reinterpretation of the Apostle’s apocalyptic announcement of the messianic event as a paradigm for radical politics. This essay will argue that, on the one hand, Paul’s apocalyptic-messianic framework can both elucidate and situate how Afropessimism uncompromisingly inhabits its antagonistic nonrelation to the World as such. On the other hand, Afro-pessimism can show how Blackness, as Sai68 diya V. Hartman puts it, is “the position of the unthought” (185) that contemporary Paulinism is unconsciously parasitic upon—circumscribing its theorists’ attempt to radically formulate apocalyptic-messianic fidelity in the modern World. The motivation for staging this encounter lies in their shared conviction that true justice demands the end of the World.4 My essay aspires to dialogically elucidate this shared conviction by constellating their homologous theses. Put explicitly in the context of this special issue on pessimism: if it is still possible, in the wake of the Middle Passage, to hear the Apostle’s summons to messianic life (Welborn 2015) and outlaw justice (Jennings 2013), then, in modernity, Afro-pessimism is its singular mode of fidelity. Accordingly, anything less than an unflinching fidelity to Afropessimism’s demand for the end of the World is, in the final analysis, complicit with the katechontic-restraining-power-of-anti-Blackness. methodology This essay begins with an extended methodology on three concepts that will scaffold my approach to reading Afro-pessimism with contemporary Paulinism (and vice versa). The methodology draws on: 1) Feuerbach’s notion of the capacity to develop another’s idea, which will suggest how I intend to arrive at “the Black messianic” through the aforementioned discourses; 2) Agamben’s theses on the paradigm, which will elaborate the significance of maintaining the logic of singularity belonging to (the analysis of) anti-/Blackness; and 3) Calvin Warren’s notion of Black being, which will establish how modernity constitutes itself through the metaphysical invention of Blackness as (the incarnation of) nothingness. This methodological scaffolding then gives way to subsequent sections constellating concepts from Afro-pessimism and contemporary Paulinism. They will show how the former’s apocalyptic thought tacitly gestures to the logic of the messianic, and how the latter’s messianic thought tacitly gestures to the paradigmatic singularity of Blackness—together yielding the paradigm of the Black messianic. Space does not allow for me to be exhaustive; this includes neither doing justice to the range of contributions to each area of thought nor teasing out all the conceptual nuances in tension both within and across them; this essay is but a gesture toward a line of thought I aspire to continue elaborating. FeuerbAch ’ S EntwicklungsfähigkigkEit In the introduction to Agamben’s Philosophical Lineage (2017), Adam Kotsko and Carlo Salzani include a section on Feuerbach’s notion of Entwicklungsfähigkigkeit [“capacity for elaboration”] as the last of four key concepts (including tradition, study, and citation) for understanding “Agamben as a reader.” In the preface to Toward (Inhabiting) the Black Messianic 69 his 1837 book on Leibniz’s philosophy, Feuerbach “called the ‘essential’ task of philosophy that of ‘immanent elaboration,’ which makes the ‘capacity for elaboration the very mark of what philosophy is’” (Kotsko and Salzani 9). It is in the spirit of this philosophical task that I pursue the immanent elaboration of the “unsaid” in Afro-pessimism and contemporary Paulinism. As Kotsko and Salzani explain: “This ‘germ’ is the ‘potentiality’ of a work that, while present, remains unstated and undeveloped, and thus is left for others to unveil and elaborate in different ways.” I aspire to show how Blackness is the undeveloped potentiality in contemporary continental Paulinism and how the messianic is the unstated idea in Afropessimism’s apocalyptic thought. Yet, this pursuit inherently risks taking the undeveloped potentiality of the Black messianic—the singular dialectical image that flashes in the constellation of these discourses5—in “directions unforeseen[,] and perhaps undesired[,] by the author[s], and thus transform[s] into something no longer attributable to them” (Kotsko and Salzani 10). On this note, Agamben suggests that it “is precisely when one follows [Feuerbach’s] principle that the difference between what belongs to the author of a work and what is attributable to the interpreter becomes as essential as it is difficult to grasp” (Signature 8). I follow such a principle in constellating Afro-pessimism and contemporary Paulinism because, as Feuerbach emphasizes, “critique lies in elaboration itself ” insofar as critique “is possible only through the separation of the essential from the accidental” (qtd. in Kotsko and Salzani 10). Accordingly, I argue that what is essential for hearing and attending to Paul’s apocalyptic-messianic announcement in modernity is the paradigm of anti-/Blackness. AgAmben ’ S theSeS on the pArAdigm Agamben opens “What is a Paradigm?” (2009) by noting a decisive methodological misunderstanding of his Homo Sacer project by readers who presume it to be primarily historiographical. Though his figures “are all actual historical phenomena,” he clarifies that “I nonetheless treated them as paradigms whose role was to constitute and make intelligible a broader historical-problematic context” (Signature 9). Agamben posits six theses defining the paradigm. First, a “paradigm is a form of knowledge that is neither inductive” (i.e., that moves from the particular to the general) “nor deductive” (i.e., that moves from the general to the particular) “but analogical,” which “moves from singularity to singularity” (31). The paradigm is not merely a particular phenomenon, nor is it a universal, but is rather “a singular case that is isolated from its context only insofar as, by exhibiting its own singularity, it makes intelligible a new ensemble” (18). Thus, the paradigm is an analogical6 figure that, by standing “beside” the set of phenomena it “exhibits” (para-deiknynai), does 70 the compArAtiSt 43 : 2019 not exactly belong to the set, but remains singular in its immanent constitution of the new ensemble’s intelligibility. Agamben’s second thesis on the paradigm claims that it supplants the “dichotomous logic” of universal/particular “with a bipolar analogical model” (Signature 31). As an example, consider Warren’s study of Ontological Terror (2018), where he situates the antebellum free Black “alongside metaphysical violence to illumine the paradigm of black nothingness” (20). Following standard dichotomous logic, Humans think of racial-chattel-slavery as a particular historical phenomenon, with Being as the universal register of Humanity (to which the Black presumptively belongs). But the analogical model posed by the free-Black paradigmatically exhibits the bipolar structure of modernity—Human-Freedom and Black-Slavery—insofar as the former-pole constitutively excludes the latter-pole by policing its threshold with ontological terror. That is, the free-Black paradoxically illuminates Blackness’s metaphysical nothingness in that its emancipation is structurally met with the gratuitous violence characteristic of racial-chattel-slavery. This is the case because Blackness is ontologically synonymous with (modern) Slavery, which makes the singular analogical figuration of the free-Black a metaphysical impossibility (i.e., Black nothingness) within modernity’s bipolar field. And such an understanding is foreclosed by the World’s dichotomous logic of universal/particular. Warren’s example gives way to Agamben’s third thesis, where the “paradigmatic case becomes such by suspending and, at the same time, exposing its belonging to the group, so that it is never possible to separate its exemplarity from its singularity.” Warren suspends the exemplary case of the antebellum “free” Black from its historical context to expose Blackness’s singular position of ontological enslavement. Likewise, Afro-pessimism’s paradigmatic analysis suspends the exemplary impossibility of Black testimony—since anti-Blackness is the very grammar that makes Human testimony possible in the World—to expose Blackness’s singular condition of ontological muteness (see Wilderson, “The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents” [2011]). Agamben’s fourth thesis further illuminates this dynamic: “The paradigmatic group is never presupposed by the paradigms; rather, it is immanent in them.” For Afropessimism, Blackness cannot be presupposed because it is constitutively foreclosed by the grammar providing presuppositions’ intelligibility; thus, Black nothingness can only realize (a semblance of) “intelligibility” immanent in its paradigmatic analysis. This is possible because, as Agamben’s fifth thesis claims, in the paradigm “every phenomenon is the origin [archē],” which accounts (in part) for why Afro-pessimism insists on modernity’s foundation in anti-Blackness. Without such a claim, an analysis of anti-Blackness at best regresses to a politics of coalition positing the Black as a possible participant in the World; whereas Afro-pessimism Toward (Inhabiting) the Black Messianic 71 demands the World’s end in the name of Blackness’s singular ontological foreclosure. Finally, the foundational claim immanent in Afro-pessimism’s paradigmatic analysis is elucidated by Agamben’s sixth thesis: “The historicity of the paradigm lies neither in diachrony nor in synchrony but in a crossing of the two” (Signature 31). Afro-pessimism’s analysis of anti-Blackness is reducible neither to the historical development of “a single carceral continuum” (Wacquant 52) nor to the specific phenomenon of racial-chattel-slavery; it is instead “a crossing of the two” that renders intelligible modernity’s constitutive grammar of gratuitous violence, which structurally positions Blackness in and as non-Being. As I hope to have shown, I believe Agamben’s theses help elaborate the function/logic of Afro-pessimism’s paradigmatic analysis—as well as lay the groundwork for my hypothesis of the Black messianic as the Pauline paradigm for inhabiting Afro-pessimism’s apocalyptic thought. wArren ’ S blAcK being Modernity invented Blackness to function as the paradigm of metaphysical nothingness in the World, with the Black as its existential incarnation. The paradigmatic form Black Being takes in the World is the anti-Human Slave. As such, the Black is not simply contiguous with the slave of antiquity, who remains Human (see Aristotle, Politics 8 [book I, chapter 5]; Agamben, Use of Bodies 78–79); the modern Slave is racialized livestock. While anthropogenesis—the becomingHuman of the Human—once maintained its zone of indistinction between Human and Animal through the paradigm of the slave of antiquity, its threshold of indistinction in modernity is catastrophically collapsed, reified, and forgotten in racial-chattel-slavery. As Fanon observes, the Slave “is reduced to the state of an animal” (Wretched 7). Constituted as racialized livestock in modern Slavery, the Black is ontologically dead in the World. Hartman poignantly describes this phenomenon through its perverse logic of resurrection: “Slavery annulled lives, transforming men and women into dead matter, and then resuscitated them for servitude. Toiling away in the aftermath of death could only be a curse, not a miracle” (Lose Your Mother 68). Afro-pessimism takes up Orlando Patterson’s sociological conception of social death (vis-à-vis civil society) by way of Fanon’s phenomenological and psychoanalytic conception of the zone of non-Being (vis-à-vis the World) to theorize the Black/Slave’s politico-ontological death. Warren’s conception of Black being elaborates these contributions through a rigorous engagement with fundamental ontology. I draw on his Black nihilist7 thought because I contend that any account of the political in modernity can only be properly theorized as always already grounded in the metaphysics of fundamental ontology. Such an understanding re72 the compArAtiSt 43 : 2019 veals the significance of the apocalyptic-messianic for any truly radical thought since the real task of radical politics is to destroy the ontological order—the structure and horizon of the World—so as to transvalue all values through, following Fanon, the introduction of invention into existence. Warren starts to build a way to ask “the question of Black being” by observing that it “opens us onto a horizon of representational and conceptual crisis.” Given that modernity is founded on the simultaneous invention and foreclosure of Blackness from Being-in-the-World, such a question is literally impossible to think within the horizon of anti-Blackness we are thrown into. As Warren explains: “the proliferation and permanence of necropolitical agendas” demands “an address” that “seems impossible” because “the discursive material we use to formulate an answer is also called into question” (26). Warren lays out three propositions to address the metaphysical function of Black being. The first two have been previously established in this essay: 1) the Black incarnates and performs the ontological function of nothingness “that a metaphysical world tries tirelessly to eradicate”; 2) Blackness is invented in modernity’s “ontometaphysical holocaust that destroys the coordinates of African existence.” Warren calls the “condition of this permanent severing between black being and Being,” the execration of Being—and he calls the ontological murder that results from it, onticide. This is how “Being curses black being by creating an entity unintelligible within the field of ontology.” Warren’s third proposition emerges from his paradigm of the “free” Black. It lays out the stakes of a requisite—while paradoxically impossible—ontological account of Blackness in order to build a way toward theorizing the conditions for Black liberation. He writes: 3) “The terms free and black do not just present political problems of citizenship, rights, and inclusion, but also serious ontological problems, since the boundaries of ontology—between human and property and freedom and unfreedom—are thrown into crisis with the presence of the free black” (27). The fundamental ontological problems that the “free” Black presents leads Warren to make a decisive distinction: between emancipation and freedom. The conflation of this juridical term with this ontological term is mistaken insofar as the Black’s emancipation from slavery in no way yields access to Human freedom. This is why the Worldly privileging of citizenship, rights, and inclusion fundamentally reinforces our constitutive forgetfulness of the question of Black being. Warren uses Heidegger as a guide through the problem of metaphysics and the question of Being, but ultimately departs from him given Heidegger’s investment in a project that constitutively requires anti-Blackness. He argues that if Black being “constitutes the problem at the center of ontometaphysics,” then “Heidegger’s Destrukution [of metaphysics] relies on the indestructibility of antiblackness in modernity.” Warren elaborates this internal limitation of Heidegger’s project with the tacit invocation (and condemnation) of Derrida’s deconstructive insight: Toward (Inhabiting) the Black Messianic 73 Heidegger’s conception of “destruction depends on the kernel of indestructability at its core”; and anti-Blackness is “the name of this indestructible element because black being’s function within metaphysics is to inhabit this void of relationality” constitutive of Being in modernity (32). Incarnating modernity’s metaphysical void, Blackness’s “pure function” is to preserve the anthropogenic segregation of Human and Animal that provides the grammar for asking the question of Being. In order to thus preserve its metaphysical void, the modern World systematically murders [black] relationality, so that to be born black within modernity is to have always already been the material effect of an ontological murder. In other words, antiblackness is the systematic and global death of this primordial relation [to the Being], and whether the Negro attempts to write him/herself into existence or not, this death has already occurred. (41) Yet, if the Black is dead on arrival in the World, then perhaps Paul’s apocalypticmessianic model of inhabiting ontological death can help build a way to “stay in the hold of the [Slave] ship” (Wilderson, Red, White & Black xi). critchley ’ S pAuline meontology & FAnon ’ S tAbulA rASA Warren’s Black nihilism could be conceived as a meontology of Blackness, providing a starting point for this essay’s constellational aspirations. Simon Critchley’s The Faith of the Faithless (2012) includes a section on Paul’s singular notion of hos me [“as not”], which Critchley describes as “a meontology, an account of things that are not.” Critchley notes that Paul’s is in fact a “double meontology:” the Apostle announces simultaneously the passing figure of this World and the “becoming nothing” of Worldly entities (178). As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians: “God has chosen the things that are not (ta me onta) in order to bring to nought those that are (ta onta)” (1:28; qtd. in Critchley 178). Paul’s meontology is fundamentally antagonistic to, and thus indiscernible in, Being. Drawing on Badiou, Critchley notes that “Paul is announcing . . . an event which is not,” and an event is “indiscernible in the situation”—whether the situation be the Roman Empire or modernity. Though Critchley does not name the Black’s singular incarnation of nothingness in the modern World, he unconsciously invokes the paradigm of Blackness when noting that Paul’s meontology announces “why we must become the filth of the world” (178). Critchley proceeds to ask: “How does one live in a world that is trash when one has declared oneself the trash of the world?” This is where Paul’s notion of as not is decisive—and the modern condition of Blackness perversely incarnates its paradigmatic function. For instance, one finds Critchley’s Pauline question to rever74 the compArAtiSt 43 : 2019 berate in Christina Sharpe’s contemplation of being in the wake of the Middle Passage: “What, then, are the ongoing coordinates and effects of the wake, and what does it mean to inhabit that Fanonian ‘zone of non-Being’ within and after slavery’s denial of Black humanity?” (20). Critchley responds by claiming one lives in fidelity to “an anguished community, an abased community, an ecclesia [“church”] of the wretched of the earth, living in the world” as not “by attending to a call or demand that is not of this world” (178–79). Following these allusions to Fanon, I would suggest that, contrary to Agamben’s notion that the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1968) show Benjamin to be Paul’s modern inheritor, The Wretched of the Earth (2004) has a stronger claim to the Apostle’s meontological signature (providing, in lieu of its postcolonial discourse, one abides by Wilderson’s paradigmatic privileging of Black Skin, White Masks [1994], which is instead “predicated on [the Slave’s singular] need to put the Human out of the picture”; Red, White & Black 122). One can hear this meontological signature when Fanon writes on the first page that “decolonization is quite simply the substitution of one ‘species’ of mankind by another.” He apocalyptically adds that this “substitution is unconditional, absolute, total, and seamless.” Accordingly, Fanon’s meontological revelation goes on to “describe the kind of tabula rasa which from the outset defines any decolonization.” And it is decisive that the apocalyptic-messianic announcement “starts from the very first day with the basic claims” of the Slave because the only “proof of success lies in a social fabric that has been changed inside out” (Wretched 1). To attend to the Black messianic call that is not of this World8 is thus “clearly an agenda for total disorder” (2)—which is how I conceive the Black meontological as not. ŽiŽeK ’ S trAumAtic meSSiAnic Kernel & wilderSon ’ S end oF redemption I will now show how the Black messianic inhabitation of nothingness is, decisively, beyond redemption. To begin, in The Fragile Absolute (2009), Žižek questions the Foucauldian thesis that psychoanalysis is the teleological culmination of Christianity’s confessionary mode of discourse. Instead, he situates psychoanalysis in its “originary Jewish attitude” toward tradition’s irreducible spectral presence. This specter, Žižek argues, “entails the acceptance and admission that all of our discursive formations are forever haunted by some ‘indivisible remainder’ . . . that resists ‘confession’” and, accordingly, “in Christian terms, can never be redeemed-delivered.” Though Žižek does not consider modernity’s paradigm for this “traumatic kernel which persists as the obscene/monstrous ‘undead’ remainder” that “keeps the discursive universe ‘alive’” (98), he does provide an apt description of the condition/ function of Black being. In this way, he helps build a way for psychoanalysis (and the messianic) to become a “black art and science” (Sexton and Barber). Žižek’s Toward (Inhabiting) the Black Messianic 75 unknowing contribution to a Black (messianic) psychoanalysis hinges on his point that it entails “the acceptance of the very fact that our lives involve a traumatic kernel beyond redemption, that there is a dimension of our being which forever resists redemption-deliverance” (98). But is Žižek’s Judeo-psychoanalytic insight thus incompatible with a Pauline messianic discourse? Here, his Hegelian reading of Christianity’s immanent sublation of Judaism can speak to the place of the messianic remnant beyond redemption. In The Puppet and the Dwarf (2003), Žižek argues that while Judaism preserves the transcendence of its spectral trauma in an ineffably distant God (e.g. consider the Book of Job), in Christianity, this traumatic distance becomes immanent in the event of the Messiah’s crucifixion. More precisely, this transformation occurs in Jesus’s being forsaken on the Cross: “We are one with God only when God is no longer one with Himself, but abandons Himself, ‘internalizes’ the radical distance which separates us from Him. . . . [O]nly when I experience the infinite pain of separation from God do I share an experience with God Himself (Christ on the Cross)” (91). The Messiah is subtracted from transcendence once God’s separation becomes-immanent in the World through the event of crucifixion. In modernity, the paradigm for this traumatic kernel of immanent-separation is Blackness. As James Cone argues, the modern-day cross is the lynching tree (The Cross and the Lynching Tree [2011]). And the lynching tree’s infinite pain of separation—repeated through all of its contemporary necropolitical modalities—is but a reiteration of its evental precedent in racial-chattel-slavery that forecloses redemption to Blackness. Wilderson’s analysis of anti-Blackness poignantly dovetails with Žižek’s claim regarding the necessary function of the irredeemable for cohering the symbolic universe of redemption. In “Afro-pessimism and the End of Redemption” (2017), Wilderson argues that Blackness is “both barred from the denouement of redemption and, simultaneously, needed if redemption is to attain any form of coherence.” Blackness marks the end of redemption because its ontological death, its metaphysical nothingness, is fundamentally aporetic to (and thus haunts) the discursive-symbolic universe of Humanist narratology—which provides the very grammar for historical redemption in modernity. Black being is necessary for the redemption of degraded Humanity insofar as Blackness’s “[a]bject inhumanity stabilizes the redemption of [Whites] who do not need it, just as it mobilizes the narrative project of [non-Blacks] who strive to be re-redeemed.” Most explicitly significant for my idiosyncratic understanding of the Black messianic (in contradistinction to standard Paulinism), Wilderson confronts us with the devastating fact that the narratological form of historical redemption “exposes redemption as an anti-Black modality.” Accordingly, I propose that it is essential to reconceive the messianic subtracted from the narratology of redemption (and thus, importantly, 76 the compArAtiSt 43 : 2019 also from eschatology9): instead, the Black messianic’s “real leap consists in introducing invention into existence” (Fanon, Black Skin 229). Paired with his theorization of the irredeemable kernel, Žižek’s discussion of the Pauline remnant can help elaborate Afro-pessimism’s tacit Black messianic politics beyond redemption. Žižek argues that “the singular agent of radical universality is the Remainder itself, that which has no proper place in the ‘official’ universality [of redemption] grounded in [the Black state of] exception” (Puppet 109). Because Black being lacks “any specific difference” in the World’s universal set of particular identities, it singularly “stands for the absolute difference” between Human and anti-Human—which is to say “for pure Difference as such.” This pure Difference, Žižek claims, marks “Pauline universality” as “a ‘struggling universality,’ a universality the actual existence of which is a radical division which cuts through the entire particular content” of the World (109). However, since anti-Blackness is constitutive of any grammar of the universal in modernity, I will instead proceed by considering Agamben’s logic of the messianic remnant that refuses universalism (cf. Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism [2003]). Doing so will lead me to Hortense Spillers’s theorization of the ungendered captive flesh as, I suggest, modernity’s singular biopolitical remnant in the wake of the Middle Passage. AgAmben ’ S meSSiAnic remnAnt & SpillerS ’ S cAptive FleSh Before constellating Agamben’s commentary on the messianic remnant with Spillers’s theorization of the captive flesh, it would be useful to begin with his emphasis at the start of The Time that Remains (2005) on Paul’s self-proclaimed status of being a slave to the Messiah. As Agamben notes: “Even before he presents himself as an apostle, Paul chooses to present himself to the Romans as a slave,” which “refers to a profane juridical condition and at the same time refers to the transformation that this condition undergoes in its relation to the messianic event” (12). What Paul seeks to exhibit in this equivocal self-presentation is “the neutralization that the divisions of the law and all juridical and social conditions in general undergo” in the aftermath of the messianic event (13). Though it is important to observe that this neutralization does not occur as a matter of “fact” within the empirical and hermeneutic horizon of the World, I contend that it amounts to a radical libidinal and (quasi-)ontological neutralization. As such, it clears a path for inhabiting the World as not, yielding the conditions for a fidelity to total disorder. Accordingly, Paul’s in-vocation of the slave as his paradigm for neutralization can be constellated with Afro-pessimism’s affirmation of the Slave as the singular revolutionary position in modernity. Toward (Inhabiting) the Black Messianic 77 Blackness, I contend, is the messianic remnant of modernity. This means that following Paul’s model of being a slave to the Messiah today calls for contemplating the unthinkable: “being” a slave to Blackness—that is, “being” a slave to the Slave of modernity. This does not amount to raising the Black to a sovereign position, but instead entails “abolishing sovereignty” altogether (Sexton 9). Here, the logic of the remnant’s singularity is important in contrast to the logic of a “struggling universality.” The relation between the latter and the hegemonic universal too easily accommodates the people’s (or the multitude’s) struggle for sovereignty (even if it is in the diffused form of the Commons [see Wilderson, Red, White & Black 247–83]). Instead, Paul’s announcement is a singular division of Worldly divisions: “I will call my own people a non-people” (Rom. 9:25; qtd. in Agamben, Time 50).10 According to Agamben, this “messianic division introduces a remnant into the law’s overall division of the people,” rendering all peoples, chosen and otherwise, “constitutively ‘not all’” (50). Agamben’s elaboration of the remnant as the messianic division of Worldly divisions implicitly operates through a paradigmatic, rather than dichotomous, logic. So rather than having a dialectic between the particular “struggling universality” and the general hegemonic universal, that dichotomy is neutralized in the singular remnant as non-non-universal. Thus, while the Black is categorically suspended from the Human under modernity’s constitutive Law—collapsing the slave-threshold of anthropogenesis’s biopolar field with its Animal-pole— Afro-pessimism’s affirmation of Black being gestures toward a “suspension of the [Law’s] suspension.” Such a paradigmatic gesture, I argue, (re)opens the messianic threshold at the heart of anthropogenesis by demanding we “risk ourselves in this emptiness” of Blackness’s total disorder (Agamben, The Open 92). And this Black messianic logic of paradigmatic singularity is of the utmost significance for nonBlacks insofar as it offers a means of fidelity to Blackness11—without mistaking an equivalency. Instead, the Black messianic remnant marks “the impossibility of the part [e.g. the Black] and the all [e.g. the Human] to coincide with themselves or with each other” (Agamben, Time 55). Therefore, the Black messianic ultimately coincides with neither Blackness nor the Human, but is rather the antagonistic contact between them—void of representation—that Afro-pessimism demands Blacks to affirm and non-Blacks to inhabit in fidelity to the end of the World. Agamben goes on to situate the messianic remnant’s logic as the zero-degree signifier that is irreducible to the discursive universe(-as-World). Alluding to LéviStrauss’s work, Agamben writes: “According to this theory, signification always exceeds the signifieds that could match up with it.” Thus, the “gap between the two then translates into the existence of free or floating signifiers in themselves void of meaning, yet with the sole function of conveying the gap between signifier and signified” (102). If the World represents a relational-totality of signified-positions, then Blackness is modernity’s zero-degree signifier conveying the gap between that 78 the compArAtiSt 43 : 2019 totality(-as-transcendence) and its disavowed excess(-as-immanence).12 This is the ingenious insight of Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987). Likely drawing on Lévi-Strauss, she introduces the following distinction decisive for Afro-pessimism: “I would make a distinction in this case between ‘body’ and ‘flesh’ and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions. In that sense, before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape under the brush of discourse” (67). As the zero degree of social conceptualization, the captive flesh signifies the metaphysical nothingness that Being forecloses as the condition of possibility for (cohering) civil society’s (ontologically) liberated bodies. The Middle Passage, Spillers continues, “create[s] the distance between . . . a cultural vestibularity and the culture” (67). That is, civil society’s modern free individual (of nation, gender, and class) is created through its metaphysical distance—maintained through policing and incarceration, both figurative and literal—from the Middle Passage’s “materialized scene of unprotected female flesh . . . ‘ungendered’” (68).13 Accordingly, as the “pre-view” of modernity (67), Spillers argues that the ungendered captive flesh “offers a praxis and a theory, a text for living and for dying, and a method for reading both through their diverse mediations” (68). And following in her radical Black feminist path, Sharpe powerfully elaborates Spillers’s offering through her notion of wake work—which exemplifies my understanding of the Black messianic (cf. Welborn, Paul’s Summons to Messianic Life: Political Theology and the Coming Awakening [2015]): If . . . we think the metaphor of the wake in the entirety of its meanings (the keeping watch with the dead, the path of a ship, a consequence of something, in the line of flight and/or sight, awakening, and consciousness) and we join the wake with work in order that we might make the wake and wake work our analytic, we might continue to imagine new ways to live in the wake of slavery, in slavery’s afterlives, to survive (and more) the afterlife of property. In short, I mean wake work to be a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives. With that analytic we might imagine otherwise from what we know now in the wake of slavery. (17–18) While Agamben constellates the messianic remnant with the biopolitical remnants of the Holocaust to contemplate the biopolitical machine’s (im)potential inoperativity (see Remnants of Auschwitz [2009]), he is blind to the more fundamental constellation with the ungendered captive flesh’s metaphysical holocaust. Thus, contrary to Agamben and following Spillers, I argue that, in the wake of the Middle Passage, modernity’s singular biopolitical remnant—the ungendered captive flesh—offers a praxis, theory, text, and method for Black-messianic-wakework. Toward (Inhabiting) the Black Messianic 79 tAubeS ’ S ApocAlypticiSm And wilderSon ’ S AntAgoniSm The Black messianic end of the World entails a fundamentally apocalyptic valence, which Afro-pessimism unequivocally invokes. In The Political Theology of Paul (2003), Jacob Taubes approaches Paul’s apocalyptic orientation by way of Benjamin, suggesting that nihilism “is the guiding thread of the hos me [as not] in Corinthians and Romans,” which works “toward the destruction of the Roman Empire” (72). While this is a fruitful line of thought to pursue—especially in light of its conceptual resonances with the previous discussions of Warren’s Black nihilism and Fanon’s meontological disorder—Taubes has a more explicit and relevant discussion of the apocalyptic in Occidental Eschatology (2009). Before directly drawing on Taubes’s reflections, it would be useful for my discussion to make note of his intellectual context. Translator David Ratmoko situates Taubes alongside his contemporaries Carl Schmitt and Karl Löwith because political theology (Schmitt) and philosophy of history (Löwith) are the pillars of Taubes’s study. Yet, Ratmoko notes that “only Taubes endorses the eschatological tradition”—that is, the Judeo-Christian concern with the end of history—“from the view of the oppressed.” Though Schmitt “shares an eschatological view of history,” he notably “advocates translatio imperii [i.e., the succession of empire qua the state] . . . along with the retarding force of the katechon, described in The Nomos of the Earth as ‘the restrainer [that] holds back the end of the world.’” In the context of anti-Black modernity, I argue that the katechon is civil society—that is, the World as such. The articulation of civil society and the World lies in the fact that the former is the locus of Human value(s) establishing the hermeneutic horizon of the latter in modernity—for which the state (like God) functions as the guarantor of their shared anti-Black structure. (This is why Warren observes that Heidegger’s Destruktion of metaphysics relies on the indestructibility of anti-Blackness as that which preserves the sanctity of Being, since the Human’s ability to ask the question of Being in modernity always already entails Being-in-the-[anti-Black-] World.) In this light, returning to Ratmoko’s discussion, one can hear the resonances of his distinction between Schmitt and Taubes with my study: “Schmitt’s view of history can thus be said to be katechontic, seeking divine legitimation of power, while Taubes’s is emphatically apocalyptic, seeking ‘a theological delegitimation of political power as a whole’” (Occidental Eschatology xvi). Given Enlightenment modernity’s divination of the World as such—significantly facilitated by the mechanisms of secularization—I argue that all politics invested in the preservation of civil society are fundamentally katechontic. In the wake of radical Black feminist theory, Afro-pessimism dis-closes the alternative to such katechontic politics in the singular insurgent ground of the ungendered female flesh. As Spillers shows, with the Black’s pre-dis-position toward the “power of ‘yes’ to the ‘female’ within”—the 80 the compArAtiSt 43 : 2019 female that “stands in the flesh [as] both mother and mother-dispossessed” (80)— such immanent affirmation of the flesh becomes a pure means of delegitimizing civil society. In other words, as the byproduct of the “human and social irreparability [of the] high crimes against the flesh” (67), the Black’s power to say yes to the mother/-dispossessed within, when affirmed, delegitimizes the (desire for the) World as a whole. Though the apocalyptic is commonly associated with the end of the World, etymologically, it primarily means to un-cover, which is precisely how Paul uses it. For Paul, apo-kalupsis names the un-veiling of the messianic event and the passing figure of this World. Therefore, the popular association of the apocalyptic with the destruction of the World neglects the fundamental function of revelation, which shows that the World needs to end because it is cast in error. Taubes emphasizes as much when he writes: “if this error which holds sway throughout the world is experienced for what it is, then the way to avoid it becomes clear. Knowledge of error, as error, is the pathway to escaping from error on the way to the revelation of truth” (Occidental Eschatology 6). Accordingly, Afro-pessimism’s apocalyptic thought is not reducible to its demand for the end of the World. Rather, this demand emanates from its paradigmatic analysis, which reveals modernity’s project of peace and freedom to be erroneous insofar as it is a priori grounded in the gratuitous violence positioning Blackness in ontometaphysical enslavement. To reduce the apocalyptic to apolitical destruction, as is often the case in popular culture, symptomatically mystifies its revolutionary function. On this note, Taubes goes on to further nuance the concept in ways that are pertinent to receiving Afropessimism’s apocalyptic thought: Apocalypticism is at first not concerned with changing [i.e., reforming] the structure of society, but directs its gaze away from this world. If revolution were to mean only replacing an existing society [i.e., the World] with a better one, then the connection between apocalypticism and revolution is not evident. But if revolution means opposing the totality of this world with a new totality that comprehensively founds anew in the way that it negates, namely, in terms of the basic foundations, then apocalypticism is by nature revolutionary. (9) In Taubes’s analysis, one can hear Fanon’s apocalyptic-revolutionary substitution of Humanity that is unconditional, absolute, total, and seamless. While Taubes is arguing for a necessarily revolutionary understanding of the apocalyptic, I suggest that Afro-pessimism’s paradigmatic analysis demonstrates the necessity for an apocalyptic understanding of revolution. This is the case because the apocalyptic, along with the messianic, is an intervention in the very Law of Being. Warren suggests as much when claiming that Black nihilism (and Afro-pessimism) demands “an ontological revolution, one that will destroy the world and its institutions . . . Toward (Inhabiting) the Black Messianic 81 since the metaphysical holocaust will continue as long as the world exists.” Further, he emphasizes the fact that “such a revolution will destroy all life—far from the freedom dreams of the political idealists or the sobriety of the pragmatists” because “the antiblack world is irredeemable” (Ontological Terror 171). That is, there is nothing to save of civil society that would not be parasitic on centuries of onticide: modernity’s essential murder of Black being. When considered in opposition to Schmitt’s World-preserving katechontic political theory of antagonism, Taubes can be read as developing a World-destroying apocalyptic-messianic political theory of antagonism. But the centrality of antagonism toward the World in apocalyptic thought comes into sharper relief in Wilderson’s analysis—radicalizing Taubes’s Humanist grammar. For instance, on the one hand, Taubes notes that the “theme of self-alienation is to be heard for the first time in the context of apocalypticism,” because “[a]lienness or exile [die Fremde] is [its] first great base word” (Occidental Eschatology 26). Without disputing this claim, on the other hand, Wilderson’s analysis shows that the grammar of alienation is insufficiently apocalyptic in the wake of the racial-chattel-slavery. If alienation is the first great base word of apocalypticism, then Afro-pessimism tacitly argues that modernity’s apocalyptic base words “are not exploitation and alienation but accumulation and fungibility (as Hartman puts it): [Blackness’s ontological] condition of being owned and traded” (Wilderson, Red, White & Black 14). The Human’s alienation belongs to “the rubric of conflict (i.e., a rubric of problems that can be posed and conceptually solved).” But the Black’s accumulation/fungibility belongs to “the rubric of antagonism (an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positions, the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions)” (5). The conflicts of alienation can be solved in this World because they are legible to civil society, and thus cannot truly claim revolutionary-apocalypticantagonism toward the World. But Blackness is antagonistic because civil society is constituted on the accumulation/fungibility of its ungendered captive flesh, leaving the only path for redress in the apocalyptic laying hold of gratuitous violence in the name of gratuitous messianic freedom. As Fanon puts it: “this same [gratuitous] violence will be vindicated14 and appropriated when . . . the [enslaved] swarm into the forbidden [World]” and bury “it deep within the earth” (Wretched 6). AgAmben ’ S meSSiAnic time And wArren ’ S blAcK time Key to inhabiting the Black messianic is an attunement to temporality fundamentally heterogeneous to the World. This section elaborates on such an attunement by first attending to Agamben’s distinction between apocalyptic and messianic time, and then considering Warren’s notion of Black time. Before proceeding, one can initially gauge the isomorphic comportments of messianic time and Black nihilism 82 the compArAtiSt 43 : 2019 from the following passages. First, Agamben writes that “Paul decomposes the messianic event into two times.” From this “issues the paradoxical tension between an already and a not yet” where the “messianic event has already happened,” but “in order to be truly fulfilled, this implies an additional time” that awaits the end of the World (Time 69). Second, Warren writes that “Black nihilism must rest in the crevice between the impossibility of transforming the world” in modernity “and the dynamic enduring power of the spirit.” I contend that Black messianic time inhabits “a phenomenology of black spirit” (Ontological Terror 171) between the “already” of the Middle Passage and the “not yet” of Black messianic justice. Before Agamben distinguishes the apocalyptic from the messianic, he addresses the difference between the prophet and the apostle. While the prophet is oriented toward the future “coming of the Messiah,” the apostle “speaks forth from the arrival of the Messiah” (Time 61). However, “the apostle must be distinguished from another figure, with whom he is often confused, just as [in a related manner] messianic time is confused with eschatological time.” According to Agamben, even worse than confusing the messianic announcement with prophecy is mistaking it for apocalypse: where the latter concerns the eschatological end of time, the messianic concerns “the time of the end.” The apostle inhabits “the time that contracts itself and begins to end”; that is, “the time that remains between time and its end” (62). If the time of the World follows the narratological structure of past/present/ future, the messianic event contracts the Worldly divisions of time through a singular division between time and its end—engendering the now time as its remnant. Thus, the messianic time of the now is not to be confused either with the Worldly present or with the apocalyptic-eschatological end of time, but is instead the now of the messianic event that is simultaneously heterogeneous to and immanent in the World. Warren’s theorization of Black time can be taken under consideration as a potential elaboration and understanding of messianic time in modernity. In “Black Time: Slavery, Metaphysics, and the Logic of Wellness” (2016), Warren exposes “the fetishization of progress narratives” as complicit with the metaphysics of antiBlackness in seeking “to enter a temporality beyond slavery—to inhabit the [historical] present” (53). Warren’s primary intervention is to situate racial-chattelslavery as a metaphysical “event-horizon” that structures the World. Accordingly, it is thus irreducible to the “historical object” that nominally ends with emancipation. He elaborates by noting that Black “slavery exceeds the frame of the historical event that we are so eager to get over and indeed provides the condition of possibility for the liberal grammar of humanism that undergirds the compulsion to get over it in the first place” (54). In contrast, Black time “is the black hole of time that resists linear narrativity” (65). It is a result of “the violent metaphysical process of objectifying time” that places Blackness “outside the horizon of time that defines Toward (Inhabiting) the Black Messianic 83 the human and into [Black being’s] indistinct zone of temporality” (61). Extending the constellation of the messianic remnant with the captive flesh, I propose that to inhabit the now time of modernity is to inhabit Blackness’s singular “time without duration” (54).15 That is, Black time names the singular division of Humanism’s narratological past/present/future that contracts into the now time of Slavery— immanently heterogeneous to the historical present. Thus, the Black messianic names the inhabitation of this now time without duration that exists in the crevice between the time of the World and its end. concluSion: on the SAyAbility oF Anti- blAcKneSS And the Function oF blAcK FAith The question is: how to become/remain attuned to Black now time and the apocalyptic-unveiling of the World’s katechontic grammar? This question is all the more vexing since, drawing on Benveniste’s insight, Wilderson observes that “our grammar goes unspoken” and “is assumed” because it “is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible” (Red, White & Black 5). As Agamben notes: “This is the insurmountable opposition between semiotic and semantic where Benveniste’s extreme thought foundered” (What is Philosophy? 9). Hence, intelligibly testifying to the World’s anti-Black grammar presents a structural impossibility within its horizon. However, Agamben idiosyncratically proposes that philosophy, or what Warren distinguishes as Black thinking, is the “thought that wants to risk itself in this experience” of impossibility in “the gap—or contact—between” our grammar and speech (28). Elaborating on this endeavor, Agamben claims that the “unsayable is in fact nothing else than a presupposition of language” and, “as such, it can only be eliminated in language” (35). Afro-pessimism thus aspires, I contend, to eliminate the presupposition of the World’s grammar through the “impossible” performance of its sayability in the unflinching demand for the end of the World.16 Inhabiting Black now time coincides with perceiving Afro-pessimism’s gesture. Just as the former entails a different experience of time, the latter calls for a different experience of the word. These challenges dovetailed for Paul concerning his apostolic announcement. Paul emphasizes that hearing the apocalyptic-messianic word demands faith.17 According to Agamben, “the word of faith enacts its meaning through its utterance” because “revelation is always and above all a revelation of language itself, an experience of the pure event of the word that exceeds every signification” (Time 131, 134). As such, faith—or, more precisely, Black faith—can materialize the apo-kalupsis of Black now time and the World’s anti-Black grammar. Warren implies as much when he writes: “either we will continue this degrading quest for human rights and incorporation or we will take a leap of faith . . . and reject the terms through which we organize our existence” (Ontological Terror 170). 84 the compArAtiSt 43 : 2019 Black faith, I am suggesting, is the real leap that enables one to inhabit the Blackmessianic-wake-work of Afro-pessimism’s apocalyptic thought: what Sharpe suggests is to “reimagine and transform spaces for and practices of an ethics of care (as in repair, maintenance, attention), an ethics of seeing, and of being in the wake as consciousness” (131). In this spirit, one can receive perhaps the Apostle’s word as follows: “I died to Law so that I might live to [Blackness]. I have been crucified along with the [Black]. And I live no longer, but the [Black] lives within me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faithfulness that is of [Blackness]” (Gal. 2:19–20). To play on Heidegger’s parsing of this passage, “[Black] Faith: is dying with [Blackness]” (90). Therefore, in the final analysis: do I die with Blackness, or do I remain invested in the katechontic-power-of-the-anti-Black-World?  Emory University noteS 1 Cone notably expresses reservations concerning the use of Paul to contemplate Blackness given how he was (fraudulently) invoked to legitimize obedience to SlaveMasters. However, in contrast to “white theologians [who] have done almost nothing to liberate [Paul] or themselves from white supremacy,” my project aspires to as much (Cone, “Wrestling” 221). See Jennings 189–92 for a commentary on how Romans 13 is isolated from its messianic context; and Welborn 70, 123–24 on the possibility that Romans 13:1–7 is interpolated by a later writer. 2 Translation modified; though using The New Testament: A Translation, which translates Christos literally as “Anointed,” I opt for the Anglicized Hebrew word “Messiah” to retain its “family resemblance” to the messianic; relatedly, see N. T. Wright’s gloss of Paul’s usage: “‘the Messiah’ is not only Jesus, but above all those who are ‘in the Messiah.’ It is an incorporative term” (283). 3 In using this word here and throughout the essay, I intend and attempt fidelity to Christina Sharpe’s invocation at the start of her “Coda” to In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016): “Aspiration. Aspiration is the word that I arrived at for keeping and putting breath in the Black Body” (130). 4 See Wright’s clarification: “It has been fashionable in modern times to imagine that the early Christians saw the coming judgment as the literal . . . collapse and destruction of the planet. . . .” However, “what sounds to us like ‘end-of-the-world’ language is used to denote and refer to . . . major sociopolitical upheavals” and “to invest those events with their inner, God-related significance” (223–24). 5 “It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present [casts] its light on what is past; rather, [a dialectical] image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill” (Benjamin 462). 6 Space does not suffice to elaborate the nuanced distinction, but I suggest that Agamben’s idiosyncratic deployment of analogy through the paradigm is not equivalent to what Wilderson calls as the “ruse of analogy” made between Blackness and other Toward (Inhabiting) the Black Messianic 85 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 86 positions in the World (see Red, White & Black 35–53). Agamben would attribute the ruse’s performative condition to dichotomous logic: “Only from the point of view of dichotomy can analogy (or paradigm) appear as tertium comparationis” (i.e., comparison through a common denominator). Instead, for paradigmatic analysis, the paradigm (e.g. Blackness) is an “analogical third” term that manifests “through the disidentification and neutralization of the first two” terms (e.g. Human and Animal), “not to take them up into a higher synthesis,” but as what remains once they “become indiscernible. The third [term] is this indiscernibility” (Signature 20). Though it would be hasty to presume a relationship of identity between Afropessimism and Black nihilism, space does not suffice to tease out their subtle differences; accordingly, this essay will use the terms interchangeably. While not of this World, the Black messianic call does not transcend it. Rather, as Daniel Colucciello Barber argues: “What is transcendent is the world. This is to say that [the] immanence [of Blackness] is . . . a matter of turning away from . . . the world by turning toward (a terminally unthought) nowhere” (“World-Making” 593). Accordingly, I want to clarify that the Black messianic does not imply the Middle Passage is part of “God’s plan.” It is noteworthy that Rom. 9:25 serves as the epigraph to Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved (1987)—and that it was published the same year as Spillers’s seminal essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” The example of Paul is instructive here as he persecuted messianic communities prior to becoming their apostle. See Barber on Blackness as the material “zero-point of immanence”: “it is the point of indistinction between the incapacity to be something—the incapacity to be positioned in terms of the divisions and relations between things—and the operative immanence that antagonizes the total configuration of positions.” He adds that this “zero-point of material—as the point of indistinction between incapacity for and antagonism toward relationality—is metarelational.” This “metarelation remains nonrelational, but it differs from nonrelationality in that it emphasizes construction, or names material’s excessive demand for the construction of no” to the World (“Nonrelation and Metarelation” 18). “Ungendered” because in “becoming being for the captor,” i.e., chattel, “we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific” (Spillers 67). Cf. Boyarin’s commentary on Paul’s ungendering of the messianic community (180–200). See Romans 3:28: “For we reckon a man as vindicated by faithfulness, apart from observances of Law.” As Hart explains: “the verb δικαιόω (dikaioō) [. . .] can be translated as ‘make just,’ ‘make right,’ ‘rectify,’ ‘correct,’ or alternatively, as ‘prove just,’ ‘show to be right,’ ‘vindicate’; . . . I believe [Paul] used the word in both senses” (557–58). Also, see Sharpe’s notion of “residence time” as the time of the wake: “These are questions of temporality, the longue durée, the residence and hold time of the wake. At stake, then is to stay in this wake time toward inhabiting a blackened consciousness that would rupture the structural silences produced and facilitated by, and that produce and facilitate, Black social and physical death” (22). “We, Black people, exist in the compArAtiSt 43 : 2019 the residence time of the wake, a time in which ‘everything is now. It is all now’ (Morrison, 198)” (41). 16 See Agamben’s discussion of the concept of demand and its implications for the categories of modality—possibility, impossibility, contingency, necessity—in The Use of Bodies (2016): “A rethinking of the categories of modality is not possible without a definition of the concept of demand. Not only existence but also possibility and contingency are transformed and modified through demand. . . . [H]ow are we to think existence, if it is nothing other than demand? And what if demand is more original than the very distinction between essence and existence, potential and act?” According to Agamben, demand can be thought of as more original than this distinction because it “corresponds neither to language nor to the world, neither to thought nor to the real,” neither to potential nor to the act, “but to their articulation.” That is, if “language and world stand opposite one another without any [a priori] articulation, what happens between them is a pure demand—namely, a pure sayability” (168–70). 17 Hart notes that while “the noun πίστις (pistis) [is] often rendered as ‘faith,’” it “can mean both ‘trust’ in something and the ‘trust-worthiness’ of something,” as well “as ‘fidelity’ or ‘faithfulness.’” As a verb, though “often rendered as ‘to believe’ or ‘to have faith,’” it “does not really mean ‘to believe’ in an impartial and merely intellectual way, but ‘to vest faith in’ or ‘to have trust in’ something or someone, and sometimes even ‘to entrust’ [. . .] oneself . . . to another” (558). worKS citied Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2009. ———. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. ———. The Signature of All Things: On Method. Trans. Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Attell. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2009. ———. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Trans. Patricia Dailey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. ———. The Use of Bodies. Trans. Adam Kotsko. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. ———. What Is Philosophy?. Trans. Lorenzo Chiesa. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. Aristotle. Politics. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Kitchener: Batoche Books, 1999. Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Barber, Daniel Colucciello. “Nonrelation and Metarelation.” Academia.edu, 2015, 1–19, Accessed 29 August 2018. www.academia.edu/15367568/Nonrelation_and _Metarelation. ———. “World-Making and Grammatical Impasse.” Qui Parle 25, 1–2 (2016): 179–206. Accessed 29 August 2018. https://www.academia.edu/30488099/World-Making _and _Grammatical_Impasse. Toward (Inhabiting) the Black Messianic 87 Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Boyarin, Daniel. A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Cone, James H. A Black Theology of Liberation. Philadelphia: J B Lippincott & Co., 1970. ———. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2011. ———. “Wrestling with The Cross and the Lynching Tree.” Theology Today 70, 2 (2013): 220–27. Accessed 18 August 2018. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177 /0040573613485527d?journalCode=ttja. Critchley, Simon. The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology. London: Verso, 2012. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1994. ———. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004. Hart, David Bentley. “Concluding Scientific Postscript.” The New Testament: A Translation. Trans. David Bentley Hart. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. 553–66. Kindle Edition. Hartman, Saidiya V., and Frank B. Wilderson, III. “The Position of the Unthought.” Qui Parle 13, 2 (2003): 183–201. Accessed 18 August 2018. https://sites.tufts.edu/english173 /files/2017/01/Saidiya-Hartman-Interview-with-Frank-Wilderson-The-Position-of -the-Unthought.pdf. Hartman, Saidiya V. Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008. Heidegger, Martin. The Phenomenology of Religious Life. Trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Jennings, Theodore W. Outlaw Justice: The Messianic Politics of Paul. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Kotsko, Adam, and Carlo Salzani. “Agamben as a Reader.” Agamben’s Philosophical Lineage. Eds. by Adam Kotsko and Carlo Salzani. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. 1–12. Ratmoko, David. “Preface.” Occidental Eschatology. Trans. David Ratmoko. By Jacob Taubes. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. xi–xxiii. Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: on Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Sexton, Jared, and Daniel Colucciello Barber. “On Black Negativity, Or the Affirmation of Nothing.” Society & Space, 18 Sept. 2017. Accessed 18 August 2018. societyandspace .org/2017/09/18/on-black-negativity-or-the-affirmation-of-nothing/. Sexton, Jared. “The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the Unsovereign.” Critical Sociology 42, 4–5 (2014): 1–15. Accessed 18 August 2018. http://planetarities.web.unc .edu/files/2015/01/sexton-unsovereign.pdf. Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, 2 (1987): 64–81. Accessed 18 August 2018. http://engl651-jackson .wikispaces.umb.edu/file/view/Spillers+-+Mama%27s+Baby.pdf. Taubes, Jacob. Occidental Eschatology. Trans. David Ratmoko. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. 88 the compArAtiSt 43 : 2019 ———. The Political Theology of Paul. Trans. Dana Hollander. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. The New Testament: A Translation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Kindle Edition. Wacquant, Loïc. “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘Race Question’ in the US.” New Left Review 13 (2002): 41–60. Accessed 23 August 2018. https://www .princeton.edu/~ereading/wacquant,%20slavery%20to%20incarceration.pdf. Warren, Calvin L. “Black Time: Slavery, Metaphysics, and the Logic of Wellness.” The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture, Eds. by Soyica Diggs Colbert, et al. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016. 55–68. ———. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Welborn, Laurence L. Paul’s Summons to Messianic Life: Political Theology and the Coming Awakening. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Wilderson III., Frank B. “Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption.” Franklin Humanities Institute, 25 May 2017. Accessed 18 August 2018. humanitiesfutures.org /papers/afro-pessimism-end-redemption/. ———. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Kindle Edition. ———. “The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents.” In Tensions 5 ([De]Fatalizing the Present and Creating Radical Alternatives), 2011. Accessed 23 August 2018. http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5 /articles/frankbwildersoniii.php. Wright, N. T. Paul: A Biography. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2018. Žižek Slavoj. The Fragile Absolute: or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London: Verso, 2009. ———. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. Toward (Inhabiting) the Black Messianic 89