Time, technology, and the imperial eye

Abstract

The author prefaces the exploration of a tension emergent in the field of black studies, not unrelated to the strife in Moten's writing on the theoretical status of the concept of social death. Black optimism is not the negation of the negation that is afro-pessimism, just as black social life does not negate black social death by inhabiting it and vitalizing it. Afro-pessimism is not but nothing other than' black optimism. The blackness affirmed in and as black social life is always before the anti-blackness confirmed in and as black social death. A living death is as much a death as it is a living. The massive violence that founds and opens a structure of vulnerability, a world-making enjoyment of that violence of enjoyment disappears into the telos of resolution, the closure of family romance, the drive for kinship, where insistence replaces imposition.

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