Afropessimism’s Ethics

By analyzing the xenopathic status of the gaze and the voice during the “mental breakdown” described in Frank B. Wilderson III’s latest memoir, this essay reads afropessimism as a formalization of the lived experience of psychosis. It argues that Wilderson’s understanding of antiblackness is significantly modeled on the imaginary mechanisms and ruses that define neurotic reality and confer psychic coherence to the neurotic subjects of liberal multiracialism. Treating psychosis as an immanent critique of antiblackness, this essay concludes by offering a clarification of the stakes of afropessimism’s ethical imperatives: to end the antiblack world (of neurotic misrecognition) and to assume the position of social death (of a desire outside-of-language).