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Nothingness 1AC Harvard

Listen to these suicidal thoughts. Listen to these thoughts as I ponder upon my life.my death..my
suicidal thoughts.
Wait are these thoughts suicidal? Or are they full of life? What is life, what is death? My thoughts are
both suicidal and life affirming, and therefore neither but Im dancing in the break a place where I can
just be. Will you love me? Will you dance with me? The Last poets once told me that:
Black is
Black is so terrible, it's terrifying
Black is a thousand black faces writhing
and a million white faces asking, "Oh my God, what do they want?"
Black is such a shock, it's electrifying1
Black is life
Black is death
Black is in the break
But most of all.
Black just is.
I was born on August 11th, 1996. I was delivered in a hospital bed, and my mother had smiles of joy
plastered on her face, and joy was in the air, but neither of us that this world had already marked my
SOCIAL life by POLITICAL death.
I remember when I was younger; I never really knew I was black. I didnt know how blackness was
positioned in the world, I knew that my white suburban neighbors looked at me kind of strange, but I
thought that it was because I was too loud playing with my sisters in the yard, or maybe they didnt like
the grass stains on my shirt. I came into consciousness in 2012 when I heard about Trayvon Martin, I
remember when I heard about the case for the first time, I didnt know what to think. Trayvon Martin in
2012 marked skittles as a lethal weapon, the trigger was pulled with no conception. This opened up my
eyes to something that for so long I ignored, this made me notice that in society everything aint as
simple as we think. I had never met Trayvon, I dont know his favorite color, what he likes to eat, or any
of his hobbies, but I know him so well.
One day I was outside, I got those same stares from those neighbors that I used to get when I was
younger, but this time I knew. I knew that there were no stains on my clothing, the laughter of my
sisters and I were not too loud, rather, I was Trayvon Martin. Trayvon, Rayvon, both 16 black and caught
in the suburbs. I ran in the house, so much anger within my soul that I felt as if I was ready to burst out
of my bodyand I began to think back to the Last Poets:

Taken from Black is by the Last Poets (http://lit.genius.com/The-last-poets-black-is-annotated)

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Black is misery, black is pain

Black is marching in Alabama
And getting nothing but rifle butts on the brain
and not the freedom that you marched for
Black is life
Black is death
Black is in the break
But most of all.
Black just is.
White Civil Society created a political system in which blackness is universalized by NOTHINGNESS and
SLAVERY. There are 3 tenets of gratuitous violence, general dishonor, and natal alienation used by this
political system. We see that this system, specifically our country used white ontological categories of
life, death, freedom, slavery and places blackness ontologically opposite of whiteness. In the American
Revolution, white people semiotically defined their political ontology against blackness which is
exemplified by lines such as we wont be slaves to Britain, we are free.
In fact, the very community we occupy is a microcosm of this political system, where the scholarship we
produce is policed in order to make sure we are forced to accept the ontological categories of the
western world. This ensures we will always be forced to discuss how to reform this world, and never
pose the question of its destruction. We are always forced to be productive, to try and strive for
political life, assuming it to be a good thing, and locking blackness in a state negative articulation where
our nothingness is a bad thing.
The 1AC is an embracement political death as a form of social life, where we can frolic and celebrate in
our common dispossession. It is to transcend these structures through a refusal of the refusal, which is
to say an affirmation of nothingness, an affirmation of self.
Fuck the human, fuck the text, fuck your life, and come dance with death nigga, come join the dead. You
scared or nah? You mad or nah? Come dance. 8 doobies to the face, nigga fuck dawt.
Moten (Fred, Professor of English at UC-Riverside) in 2013 (Blackness and Nothingness: Mysticism in the Flesh), published in the South
Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013, pg.738-740, C.A.)
Over the course of this essay, well have occasion to consider what that means, by way of a discussion of my preference for the terms life and
optimism over death and pessimism and in the light of Wildersons and Sextons brilliant insistence not only upon the preferential option for
blackness but also upon the requirement of the most painstaking and painful attention to our damnation, a term I prefer to wretchedness,
after the example of Miguel Mellino, not simply because it is a more literal translation of Fanon (though often, with regard to Fanon, I prefer
the particular kinds of precision that follow from what some might dismiss as mistranslation) but also because wretchedness emerges from a
standpoint that is not only not ours, that is not only one we cannot have and ought not want, but that is, in general, held within the logic of
im/possibility that delineates what subjects and citizens call the real world (Mellino 2013). But this is to say, from the outset, not that I will

I will seek to begin to explore not just the

absence but the refusal of standpoint, to actually explore and to inhabit and to think what Bryan Wagner
(2009: 1) calls existence without standing from no standpoint because this is what it would truly mean
to remain in the hold of the ship (when the hold is thought with properly critical, and improperly
celebratory, clarity). What would it be, deeper still, what is it, to think from no standpoint; to think
outside the desire for a standpoint? What emerges in the desire that constitutes a certain proximity to that
thought is not (just) that blackness is ontologically prior to the logistic and regulative power that is supposed to have brought it into
existence but that blackness is prior to ontology; or, in a slight variation of what Chandler would say, blackness is the anoriginal
advocate the construction of a necessarily fictive standpoint of our own but that

displacement of ontology, that it is ontologys anti- and ante- foundation, ontologys underground, the irreparable disturbance of ontologys
time and space. This is to say that what I do assert, not against, I think, but certainly in apposition to Afro-pessimism, as it is, at least at one

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point, distilled in Sextons work, is not what he calls one of that projects most polemical dimensions, namely, that black life is not social, or

What I assert is this: that black lifewhich is as surely

to say life as black thought is to say thoughtis irreducibly social; that, moreover, black life is lived in
political death or that it is lived, if you will, in the burial ground of the subject by those who, insofar
as they are not subjects, are also not, in the interminable (as opposed to the last) analysis, death-bound, as
Abdul JanMohamed (2005) would say. In this, however, I also agree with Sexton insofar as I am inclined to call this
burial ground the world and to conceive of it and the desire for it as pathogenic. At stake, now, will be what
rather that black life is lived in social death (Sexton 2011b: 28).

the difference is between the pathogenic and the pathological, a difference that will have been instantiated by what we might think of as the
view, as well as the point of view, of the pathologist. I dont think I ever claimed, or meant to claim, that Afro-pessimism sees blackness as a
kind of pathogen. I think I probably do, or at least hope that it is,

insofar as I bear the hope that blackness bears or is the

potential to end the world. The question concerning the point of view, or standpoint, of the pathologist is crucial but so is the
question of what it is that the pathologist examines. What, precisely, is the morbid body upon which Fanon, the pathologist, trains his eye?
What is the object of his complete lysis (Fanon 2008: xiv)? And if it is more proper, because more literal, to speak of a lysis of universe,
rather than body, how do we think the relation between transcendental frame and the body, or nobody, that occupies, or is banished from, its
confines and powers of orientation? What I offer here as a clarification of Sextons understanding of my relation to Afro-pessimism emerges
from my sense of a kind of terminological dehiscence in Orlando Pattersons (1982) work that emerges in what I take to be his deep but unacknowledged affinity with and indebtedness to the work of Hannah Arendt, namely, with a distinction crucial to her work between the social

The secular excommunication that describes slavery for Patterson (1982: 5) is more
precisely understood as the radical exclusion from a political order, which is tantamount, in Arendts
formulation, with something on the order of a radical relegation to the social. The problem with slavery, for Patterson, is that it is political death, not social death; the problem is that slavery confers the
paradoxically stateless status of the merely, barely living; it delineates the inhuman as
unaccommodated bios. At stake is the transvaluation or, better yet, the invaluation or antivaluation, the extraction from the sciences
and the political.

of value (and from the very possibility of that necessarily fictional, but materially brutal, standpoint that Wagner [2009: 1] calls being a party

Such extraction will, in turn, be the very mark and inscription (rather than absence or
eradication) of the sociality of a life, given in common, instantiated in exchange. What I am trying to get to, by
to exchange).

way of this terminological slide in Patterson, is the consideration of a radical disjunction between sociality and the state-sanctioned, statesponsored terror of power-laden intersubjectivity, which is, or would be, the structural foundation of Pattersons epiphenomenology of spirit.

To have honor, which is, of necessity, to be a man of honor, for Patterson, is to become a combatant
in transcendental subjectivitys perpetual civil war. To refuse the induction that Patterson desires is
to enact or perform the recognition of the constitution of civil society as enmity, hostility, and civil
butchery. It is, moreover, to consider that the unspoken violence of political friendship constitutes a
capacity for alignment and coalition that is enhanced by the unspeakable violence that is done to
what and whom the political excludes. This is to say that, yes, I am in total agreement with the Afropessimistic understanding of blackness as exterior to civil society and, moreover, as unmappable
within the cosmological grid of the transcendental subject. However, I understand civil society and
the coordinates of the transcendental aestheticcognate as they are not with the failed but rather
with the successful state and its abstract, equivalent citizensto be the fundamentally and
essentially antisocial nursery for a necessarily necropolitical imitation of life. So that if Afropessimists say that social life is not the condition of black life but is, rather, the political field that
would surround it, then thats a formulation with which I would agree. Social death is not imposed
upon blackness by or from the standpoint or positionality of the political; rather, it is the field of the
political, from which blackness is relegated to the supposedly undifferentiated mass or blob of the
social, which is, in any case, where and what blackness chooses to stay.
What does it mean to affirm nothingness? Fred Moten takes us farther in our analysis of the world in
which we begin to see the nothingness of blackness as being full of thingliness, in a complete paradox.

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Unlike Fanon who makes the argument that a black person cannot just be black, rather they can only be
black in relation to a white person we argue the move to explain blackness in terms of ontology is to
explain white structures, but forfeits the chance to explain the beauty of black life. That is to say
ontology presumes a language and a sub-structure that is inherently inaccessible to black bodies and
therefore the lived experienced of blackness is, among other things, a constant demand for an ontology
of disorder, a para-ontology where blackness can understood as operating at the nexus of the social and
the ontological, the historical and the essential. As Moten wrote in his 2008 article, The Case of
Blackness, what is inadequate to blackness is already given ontologies. Blackness is ever-lasting life,
always changing and forming new bonds, celebrating that life even in the face of brutally imposed
oppression.
Listen to these suicidal thoughts. Listen to these thoughts as I ponder upon my life.my death..my
suicidal thoughts.
Wait are these thoughts suicidal? Or are they full of life? What is life, what is death? My thoughts are
both suicidal and life affirming, and therefore neither but Im dancing in the break a place where I can
just be. Will you love me? Will you dance with me? The Last poets once told me that:
Black is the velvet of the midnight sky
Black is so beautiful, it makes you cry
Black is short, black is tall
Let me impress that black is all
But that's not all I have to find
I also found that black is MIND
I also found that black is MINE
Black is life
Black is death
Black is in the break
But most of all.
Black just is.
My affirmation of nothingness is an affirmation of who I am. I affirm the feminine qualities people say
that I have because Im not masculine enough for patriarchy. I affirm the nothingness of my identity as I
am too white for the black folk and too black for the white folk.
This affirmation is nothingness and in itself means something to me that is never seen as productive to
those outside of me. I affirm the person I will be in the future, what this future should look like Im not
sure but I damn sure affirm that shit. I affirm my past, Ive been far from perfect but I love myself
because of all Ive been through Im still affirming.
The affirmation of nothingness is the affirmation of all black everything. From the streets of Detroit to
New York to Puerto Rico black bonds are constantly formed. If we are marked as nothing, our response
should be 8 doobies to the face nigga, fuck dawt, because the entire system is flawed and should be
disavowed. Residing in the rhythm and culture of salsa, hip hop, jazz, residing in a history of resistance,
residing in the food, and the multiplicitous nature of blackness. It is in the moments you share with
other nothings that you form bonds of celebration. This radical affirmation provides us with a space of

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positive articulation, where blackness can be affirmed through political suicide and social life, always in
the break. Working on the categories of life and death but, throwing their very meaning into crisis.
Moreover, within this thingliness we find our Quare social bonds where Charles and I can affirm our
bisexual black identities in the face of an anti-black and heteronormative political system. As E Patrick
Johnson writes, performances of the self and for the self, such as the 1AC, have the potential to
transform the world by bending and breaking the structures placed upon us in our specific spaces by
recognizing the materiality of our performances in spaces such as debate. These performances
represent an act of dis-identification in which Quare bodies can act on and against systems of
oppression and identity categories.
This is demonstrated by the 1ACs working on and against the very ontological categories of life, death,
freedom etc. that have been used to maintain an oppressive political system and similarly our working
on and against the category of blackness in which we throw into crises what blackness even means from
a black Quare perspective. The celebration and affirmation of self is an act that places theory in flesh
and reminds us of the spatial and temporal specificity of our performances, not just to talk about them
in a vacuum as though we occupy the ivory tower.
So even though we do not seek to make claims that we have necessarily solved anti-blackness or
heteronormativity, the 1AC carves out a space for a positive articulation of black quareness which
combats status quo scholarship within this community, and places us squarely in the future where we
are dancing with slaves in the field, amidst the joyfulness that the paranormal, paraontological,
parapolitical. It is here we find the central animation of black thoughts and operations, the complete
overturning of this shit. Here the Last poets gave me another thought:
Black is loving one another
Black is the beginning and end of white
Black is that which was first
Until white stole it, raped it, and imitated it
But it then gained a true self and got blacker
And blacker and blacker and blacked out all whiteness
Black is life
Black is death
Black is in the break
But most of all.
Black just is.
Moten (Fred, Professor of English at UC-Riverside) in 2013 (Blackness and Nothingness: Mysticism in the Flesh), published in the South
Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013, pg.740-742 ,C.A.)
This question of the location and position of social death is, as Sexton has shown far more rigorously than I could ever hope to do, crucial. It
raises again that massive problematic of inside and outside that animates thought since before its beginning as the endless end to which
thought always seeks to return. Such mappability of the space-time or state of social death would, in turn, help us better understand the
positionalities that could be said, figuratively, to inhabit it. This

mass is understood to be undifferentiated precisely

because from the imaginary perspective of the political subjectwho is also the transcendental
subject of knowledge, grasp, ownership, and self- possessiondifference can only be manifest as the discrete
individuality that holds or occupies a standpoint. From that standpoint, from the artificial, officially assumed position, blackness is
nothing, that is, the relative nothingness of the impossible, pathological subject and his fellows. I believe
it is from that standpoint that Afro-pessimism identifies and articulates the imperative to embrace that nothingness which is, of necessity,

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relative. It

is from this standpoint, which Wilderson defines precisely by his inability to occupy it, that he, in a
painfully and painstakingly lyrical tour de force of autobiographical writing, declares himself to be
nothing and proclaims his decision, which in any case he cannot make, to remain as nothing, in genealogical and sociological isolation even from every other nothing. Now, all that remains are unspoken scraps scattered
on the floor like Lisas grievance. I am nothing, Naima, and you are nothing: the unspeakable answer to your question within your question. This
is why I could not would notanswer your question that night. Would I ever be with a Black woman again? It was earnest, not accusatoryI
know. And nothing terrifies me more than such a question asked in earnest. It is a question that goes to the heart of desire, to the heart of our
black capacity to desire. But if we take out the nouns that you used (nouns of habit that get us through the day), your question to me would
sound like this: Would nothing ever be with nothing again? (Wilderson 2008: 265) When one reads the severity and intensity of Wildersons
wordshis assertion of his own nothingness and the implications of that nothingness for his readerone is all but overwhelmed by the need
for a kind of affirmative negation of his formulation. Its

not that one wants to say no, Professor Wilderson, you are,
or I am, somebody; rather, one wants to assert the presence of something between the subjectivity
that is refused and which one refuses and nothing, whatever that is. But it is the beautythe
fantastic, celebratory force of Wildersons and Sextons work, which study has allowed me to begin
more closely to approachof Afro-pessimism that allows and compels one to move past that
contradictory impulse to affirm in the interest of negation and to begin to consider what nothing is, not
from its own standpoint or from any standpoint but from the absoluteness of its generative dispersion of a general
antagonism that blackness holds and protects in as critical celebration and degenerative and
regenerative preservation. Thats the mobility of place, the fugitive field of unowning, in and from which we
ask, paraontologically, by way of but also against and underneath the ontological terms at our
disposal: What is nothingness? What is thingli- ness? What is blackness? Whats the relationship
between blackness, thingli- ness, nothingness and the (de/re)generative operations of what Deleuze
might call a life in common? Where do we go, by what means do we begin, to study blackness? Can there be an aesthetic sociology
or a social poetics of nothingness? Can we perform an anatomy of the thing or produce a theory of the universal machine? Our aim, even
in the face of the brutally imposed difficulties of black life, is cause for celebration. This is not because
celebration is supposed to make us feel good or make us feel better, though there would be nothing wrong with that. It is, rather, because
the cause for celebration turns out to be the condition of possibility of black thought, which animates
the black operations that will produce the absolute overturning, the absolute turning of this
motherfucker out. Celebration is the essence of black thought, the animation of black operations,
which are, in the first instance, our undercommon, underground, submarine sociality. In the end,
though life and optimism are the terms under which I speak, I agree with Sextonby way of the
slightest, most immeasurable reversal of emphasisthat Afro-pessimism and black optimism are not
but nothing other than one another. I will continue to prefer the black optimism of his work just as, I am sure, he will continue to
prefer the Afro-pessimism of mine. We will have been interarticulate, I believe, in the field where annihilative seeing, generative sounding,
rigorous touching and feeling, requires an improvisation of and on friendship, a sociality of friendship that will have been, at once, both
intramural and evangelical. Ill try to approach that field, its expansive concentration, by way of Don Cherry and Ed Blackwells (1982) extended
meditation on nothingness; by way of Fanons and Peter Line- baughs accounts of language in and as vehicularity; by way of Foucaults
meditations on the ship of fools and Deleuzes consideration of the boat as interior of the exterior when they are both thoroughly solicited by
the uncharted voices that we carry; by way, even, of Lysis and Socrates; but also, and in the first instance, by way of Hawk and Newk, just
friends, trading fours. Perhaps Im simply deluding myself, but such celebratory performance of thought, in thought, is as much about the
insurgency of immanence as it is about what Wagner (2009: 2) calls the consolation oftranscen- dence. But, as I said earlier, I

plan to

stay a believer in blackness, even as thingliness, even as (absolute) nothingness, even as

imprisonment in passage on the most open road of all, even asto use and abuse a terribly beautiful
phrase of Wildersons (2010: xi)fantasy in the hold
Listen to these suicidal thoughts. Listen to these thoughts as I ponder upon my life.my death..my
suicidal thoughts.

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Wait are these thoughts suicidal? Or are they full of life? What is life, what is death? My thoughts are
both suicidal and life affirming, and therefore neither but Im dancing in the break a place where I can
just be. Will you love me? Will you dance with me?