Philosophy Today

Volume 67, Issue 4, Fall 2023

The Intersection of Black Studies and Continental Philosophy

Politics after Slavery?
On Afropessimism’s Practical Philosophy

Afropessimism incites controversy within and without the academy for the provocation that modernity’s ethical life, including its purportedly progressive facets, is entirely undergirded by a rejection of blackness. On this basis it squares a self-concept as a non-prescriptive theoretical framework with a negative prescription of “world-abolition.” I reconstruct Afropessimism’s conceptual apparatus in light of its criticism in academic philosophy. I then relate the theory’s negativism with Theodor Adorno’s view that “in wrong life there is no right life,” to argue that Afropessimists should take up the implication that there is no right thinking.