I offer here some thoughts on the work of the young Africana philosopher Mukasa Mubirumusoke. His writings include his monograph Black Hospitality: A Theoretical Framework for Black Ethical Life, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2022, which is an intervention into Afropessimist formulations on blackness—black people’s supposed nonhumanity, our intelligibility, our nonbeing, our supposed antithetical status with regard to freedom, and the concomitant avowedly historical claims of black formation from the Middle Passage and, fundamentally, the US technologies of enslavement. The main protagonists from Black Studies in this discussion are Hortense Spillers and Frank Wilderson, and Eurocontinental engagements are mostly from G.W.F. Hegel and Jacques Derrida. The conceptual context of this analysis is “political ontology,” and Wilderson’s claim that de facto ethical life requires the elimination of blackness: a being marked, fundamentally, as the slave.
Contra Wilderson’s apocalyptic, secularized Christological ontology of “end of the world” language, Mubirumusoke offers a theory of “escape” through drawing upon Jacque Derrida’s analysis of hospitality, which, in classical Derridian etymological insight, is both welcoming and hostile. Mubirumusoke calls this “paraontological fugitive blackness,” which addresses the illicitness or “criminality” of blackness’ “escape” from political ontology, with, as well, an outcome of “scarred sociality.”
Before going further, I should like to state that while I am generally critical of Afropessimism because of the many inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and fallacious arguments in the writings of its proponents, the reality is that it has achieved much currency in the near-pornographic white thirst for performances of black suffering, white guilt, and declarations of “impossibility.” This intellectual approach isn’t unique to Afropessimism, as it comes out of movements in literary theory and has ultimately genealogical roots in German Catholic conservatism, such as the work of Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt. That complex history was mediated by additional movements that preceded it in German Protestantism—for example, the thought of Kant and Hegel—and Eurocentric Jewish struggles with assimilation. The combination of the latter was expressed through Euromodern liberalism, in which morality was expected to constrain the contingencies of political life.
Added to all this is the larger history of Euromodern thought as emerging with the global expansion of enslavement while centering freedom in its discourse. The history of political theology and its role in racism and the advancement of capitalism offered rationalizations of a philosophical anthropology in which “the individual” collapsed into stoic models of rationalization instead of understanding the fundamental incoherence of an individual, treated as real in and of itself like an Aristotelian substance, or, worse, a minor, or perhaps egologically inflated sense of self as, a god.
It is in this framework that the obsession with ethics comes to the fore when the production of Euromodern forms of degradation premised on institutions of coercive power elide possibilities of emancipatory power or empowerment. The underlying conflict of Euromodern life is, in other words, one of a constant effort to make morality—the province of rules adhered to by individuals—supervene over politics or political life or the negotiation of power in the form of institutions.
My reading of Mubirumusoke’s work is, however, that he is not only a gifted writer but also a nuanced thinker of that tradition as he works through Euromodern efforts of asserting ethical social life as concrete manifestations of freedom while suppressing their obvious contradictions of formalized and abstract rationalities in which concrete anti-freedom—for example, enslavement—is mired in the opaque. These are familiar moves of theodicy, even when secularized, and I’m surprised that that aspect isn’t addressed in Mubirumusoke’s text since he discussed the thoughts of both Hegel and Schmitt.
One should remember that Hegel’s philosophy was to articulate a theodicy of the Euromodern age in which he addressed head-on the old technique of relying on contraries through his analyses of contradictions. Hegel articulated this not only as a critique but also as a metacritique, and he did so through raising concerns of Absolute resolutions as a meeting of the conceptual and the material in the form of intelligible reality.
One should bear in mind, however, that Hegel’s thought received critique from Black thinkers ranging from Anténor Firmin to C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, and others. The main critique is that no dialectical movement is properly dialectical if there is an a priori epistemic status to the outcome. Put differently, a presumed synthesis and resolution is not dialectical. This metacritical insight comes from their analysis of what is today called “blackness,” but they did so with an understanding of a history of critique that, especially in Firmin’s case, preceded Kantianism and its neo-Kantian legacy. Without foreknowledge, one must, from dialectical commitments, be willing to risk becoming, as Fanon put it in his classic Peau noir, masques blancs (1952), “lost in the night.”
Those ancestors understood the danger of falling prey to idealism and theory fetishism as posed in the quip, “Yes, it works in practice, but does it do so in theory?” They understood that theoretical fetishism often leads to a form of methodological decadence in which both method and disciplinary presuppositions are presumed by such theoreticians as “ontological,” without distinguishing ontological aspiration from ontological reality. This is replete in Afropessimism, even with regard to its historical claims. Claiming that blackness—instead of a specific kind of blackness—emerged in the Trans-Atlantic Middle Passage is both sloppy and is easily demonstrated false. It would, in effect, render blacks or Blacks in Africa unintelligible.
And more, it makes claims that are simply culturally and sociologically false through ascribing a godlike status to white agency and its epistemic reach. Elided is the history of what colonizers, enslavers, and whites learned from the people they captured, and that is because those people were not brute but, instead, skilled, educated, and culturally rich, and the interactions, albeit often premised on violence, were producing formations in which the enslaved and the Indigenous brought meaning, knowledge, and technologies of life and death to what we call the Euromodern world.
I have had many conversations with a Black feminist colleague who laments Afropessimists’ abusive and gratuitous misreadings of her work. She insists she has never argued that black people are not human. Her work addresses the violent, self-delusional projects of enslavers’ attempts to make them so. There are so many contradictions in Euromodern arguments for the nonhumanity of Africans through the construction of the “negro”—just as there were so many misrepresentations of neo-Kantians’ misrepresentation of the history of philosophy to suit their professional aspirations—that it is baffling that Wilderson et al. treat them as “ontological” instead of “symptomatic.” C.L.R. James stated it well at the conclusion of his chapter on “The Property” in The Black Jacobins (originally published in 1938): Why so much violence against the “property”? Because the perpetrators knew, unequivocally, that that specific kind of “property” was human beings.
The weird, reductive U.S. structuralist claims—as opposed to the forms of theoretical structuralism premised on the fundamental incompleteness at the heart of rules and social practices—on language, premised on a metaphysics that treats language as things, scaffolding, or vessels, fails to deal with the dynamic, fundamentally incomplete, and learning or pedagogical functions of language. To treat European languages and their rationalizations as “complete”—in a word, “ontological”—reinforces the logic of contraries in which all being is “within” those languages and nonbeing is “outside.” This, however, is a false dilemma, because it already presupposes ontological completeness. One of the challenges of human reality across many cultures is that of divergence from being or, a loftier claim, Being. As existence and being are not identical, the possibilities posed by human reality is the problem of potential. To have possibility is to transcend being, which makes one of the major problems of Euromodern thought, with its appeals to Greco-Roman fetishization of ontology, its covering human reality with the cloaked status of being. Thus, to make “human” a closed concept rooted in being or Being is to do violence to human possibility.
The “crime,” then, of blackness is that it haunts those claims with the truth, which is that human being has never properly been “being.” The project of producing worlds of “being” and “zones of nonbeing,” is, then, as Fanon correctly stated it, the attempted murder of humanity through locking human life into the logic of contraries. Afropessimism, and related forms of theoretical maneuvers, are thus complicit with that misanthropy.
Additionally, arguments that build the notion of “political ontology” (an ambiguous term—the political consequences of ontological commitments or political concepts as ontological?) from Aristotle often miss an important distinction from Aristotle’s writings from his Organon through to those on practical reason; namely, politics is in the realm of that which can be otherwise. There could be an effort to build politics around a people’s ontological commitments, but the idea that politics is ontological or that there is a political ontology is, at least for Aristotle, a contradiction of terms.
But more germane to Africana philosophy—and by extension, Africana Studies and Black Studies—is the question: why center so much of reality from white perspectives? Fanon, after all, stated that the Black (“Le Noir”) had no ontological resistance “in the eyes [that is from the perspective] of the [White].” But he never claimed the White was correct. The White needs that lie. I can go on, but at this point, it should be clear that I’m concerned that Mubirumusoke gives too much credence to the problematic, almost Zeno-like forms of problematic argumentations of impossibility as well as the concomitant Stoicism of individual resignation—perhaps even ressentiment—that such arguments occasion. The addition of “fugitivity”—a popular term in recent Afropessimistic discourse—doesn’t change this limitation, since empirical evidence reveals so much of African and Black life that are sources of joy to the point that whites revel in it despite claiming its rejection.
Yet, what is excellent about Mubirumusoke’s analysis is that he does articulate a theory of agency within the framework of a reductive discourse of immobility. Ironically, although renamed as “paraontology,” his discussion addresses the contradictions instead of remaining locked in contraries. I don’t see why this is not a dialectical movement that admits problems inherent in aspirations of a priori completeness. Although Mubirumusoke’s focus is ethics, it strikes me that it will be crucial for an actual political theory to emerge out of this analysis. Otherwise, even fugitive paraontology would, nevertheless, be reactive, and, ultimately, conservative. This is a problem that plagues many theories of fugitivity, especially those premised on marronage.
If Black Hospitality piques the reader’s interest, here are some of his articles that may also be of interest. “The Death of God and the Faith of Anti-Blackness” (2022), works through Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche on the problem of legitimation or crisis of authority (G-d as authority ceases in the demand for G-d’s authoritativeness through external processes of accountability) into what could be done when the dialectical movement, via the genealogical limitations, step into the night. Mubirumusoke examines this problem through rallying forth writings of Saidiya Hartman and Hortense Spillers on libidinal economies in which the argument of ethical implications of impossibility come to the fore.
“Prolegomena to Any Future Cosmology” (2022) offers an Afropessimist response to Georges Bataille’s heliocentric cosmology through offering challenges raised by the “black hole.” The critique is a deft intersection of Eurocontinental and Afropessimistic thought. I should add here that a clear conclusion of some of the aforementioned criticisms of Afropessimism is that Afropessimism is ultimately a form of Eurocentric thought of fetishized blackness. Here is a case in point: the practical ignoring of African cosmologies leads to a failure to take seriously African emanation cosmologies in which the sun as a metonymic of appearance is an effect of a nonvisible and indivisible source. It is indivisible because non-phenomenal, which means the divisible/indivisible divide doesn’t work. Thus, even the avowed “indivisible” collapses because “it” is not a “thing” and thus not properly an “it.” This sophisticated argument is at least 3,000 years old among ancient theoreticians of Ra in Kmt.
“How ‘White Privilege’ Obscures Black Vulnerability” (2021) offers Wilderson’s claim that the ability to purchase entails that of being able to purchase the slave. Sounds good, but this is a classic example of Wilderson’s problematic understanding of history. First, enslaved people’s ability to garner additional funds was one of the bases through which some purchased their own manumission. This was known as the peculium (see, e.g., Thomas Meagher’s doctoral dissertation, “Maturity in a Human World: A Philosophical Study” [UConn, 2018]). Rhetorically powerful, as Wilderson’s example is, it distorts the argument. Purchasing a slave was more than the cost of a loaf of bread. This, of course, is part of the Afropessimist program of making blackness and enslavement ontological or absolutes.
“Rapping Honestly: NaS, Nietzsche, and the Moral Prejudices of Truth” (2016) examines gangsta rap as a form of honesty akin to Nietzsche’s critique of the will to truth in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). This is a thoughtful essay that brings to the fore the importance of life-affirming practices. It is an ironic essay in light of the closed Afropessimistic appeals to ontology—something Nietzsche would abhor—yet Black Hospitality brings full circle this argument since the ethicality for which he argues is, despite narratives of saturated death, an affirmation of life.
I look forward to reading Mubirumusoke’s future work. I hope this reflection encourages this blog series’ readers to do the same.
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