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Nothingness 1AC GSU

Listen to these suicidal thoughts. Listen to these thoughts as I ponder upon my life.my
death.my suicidal thoughts. You know, I wonder if they'll laugh when I'm dead...Why am I
fighting to live, if I'm just living to fight? Why am I dying to live if I'm just living to die? I want to
be loved. I want to be me. When can I be? Will you love me? Will you dance with me?
August 11th, 1996. The day a physician assisted my suicide. 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 life by 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 realize that my blackness was seen as
deadly, as corrosive, as pathology.
In the political world blackness is characterized by absence and slavery. To be black is to be
susceptible to gratuitous violence, general dishonor, and have no kinship structure. As Jared
Sexton recounts in his lecture at UC Berkley, We are not the 99%, we are supernumerary, we
are the uncalculated, the incalculable, we are the most wretched, abject, degraded set of beings
that ever lived since the world began. To be black is to be placed not only outside the realm of
politics and all the codes of Civil Society, but to be placed in contradistinction to the world and
humanity.
Blackness is the condition of possibility for these concepts and the world as we know it, because
if you look at these concepts like in the American Revolution, it is all based off of this circulating
metaphor of blackness. Its based on white people saying we wont be slaves to Britain, we are
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free. They get their whole idea from freedom based upon a non-being, because to even affirm
humanity or freedom already affirms a process of negation of blackness.
This means within our political world, there is a fight between life and death. We are all the
physicians, all of us. We are the physician and the patient at the very same time, constantly
stuck between two options that Wilderson poses for us Will we pretend to join the living? Or
will we make them join the dead? He does this in order to call to attention how our current
political schema is one that puts the black in a position where they must always negate
themselves in order to strive for political life. That is to say, black people can only imagine
themselves as agents of politics, when they are crowded out by politics. In order for the black to
engage the political they must fill the void, the nothingness that is blackness, with a positive
human value.
I couldnt understand why I was marked this way; Im just like everyone else I thought to
myself. I began to try and distance myself from this image of being less than human, of having
no positive value, as being a disease.
It is hard to fucking write these suicidal thoughts because Im stuck in this world, always
searching for when I can be. Always searching for a way. Everything that I see is as positive is
always stripped from me, criminalized, and seen as bad. I see my blackness as positive, they see
it as suspicious and aggressive. I see my bag of purple haze as positive because it relaxes me,
they tell me Im a delinquent.
They attack me without transgression, they try to take my kin away, and they marked our bodies
across the globe as the lowest of sentient beings, but as I realized what they had doneI
realized that my death is good. My death is good because it goes against everything they are. I
am not really dead, Im just politically dead. What does it mean to be living and dead at the
same time?
This community does not want to face the pathology I represent. They are scared that my
disease of blackness, will be spread through my arguments, so they started to quarantine the
debate space, and try to cure anyone who might have been infected. They are scared of the
death that I represent.
ButI want to be. I want to be dead. I want to be alive. I want to be criminal. I want to be the
shame, I am a disease. I am pathology. These are my suicidal thoughts.
Listen to these suicidal thoughts.as I speak these words I think back to my birthmy
death.my first momentmy last moment....are you confused yet? What if I told you I was
dead? Would you call the cops on me? Would you seek the hounds on me? What if I told you I
wasnt human? Would you seek to erase me? Would you try to change me?
If we continue to affirm their ideal, we will always be locked in a state of negative articulation.
Where it is bad to be dead, where it is bad to be black, where it is undesirable to inhabit that
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nothingness. This continues the status quo where black people have endless violence done to
us by civil society, but also engage in a process of psychic harm.
Fuck the human, fuck the text, fuck your life, and come take a hit nigga, come join the dead. I
promise youll want to dance with us after, but you refuse. You scared or nah? You mad or nah?
You want a hit or nah? Fuck sociality, fuck health, 8 doobies to the face, nigga fuck dawt.
The 1AC is a radical affirmation of blackness that embraces the physician assisted suicide of
humanity as a form of para-political social life.
We need to stop seeking life, we need to stop fighting to live, when we are just living to die.
Instead of taking a reactive stance where we orient our politics towards order, purpose, and
rationality, we should affirm the complete disorder that is blackness. To be Black. To become
Black. To affirm nothingness.
Sexton in (Jared, Director, African American Studies School of Humanities) 2011 (Ante-Anti-Blackness: Afterthoughts,
http://lateral.culturalstudiesassociation.org/issue1/content/sexton.html, C.A.)
Fanon and his interlocutors, or what appear rather as his fateful adherents, would seem to have a problem embracing black social life because
they never really come to believe in it, because they cannot acknowledge the social life from which they speak and of which they speak as
negation and impossibility as their own (Moten 2008: 192). Another way of putting this might be to say that they are caught in a performative
contradiction enabled by disavowal. I wonder, however, whether things are even this clear in Fanon and the readings his writing might facilitate.
Lewis Gordon's sustained engagement with Fanon finds him situated in an ethical stance grounded in
the affirmation of blackness in the historic anti-black world . In a response to the discourse of multiracialism emergent in
the late twentieth-century United States, for instance, Gordon writes, following Fanon, that "there is no way to reject the thesis
that there is something wrong with being black beyond the willingness to 'be' black not in terms of
convenient fads of playing blackness, but in paying the costs of anti-blackness on a global scale .
Against the raceless credo, then, racism cannot be rejected without a dialectic in which humanity
experiences a blackened world" (Gordon 1997: 67). What is this willingness to 'be' black, of choosing to be black affirmatively rather
than reluctantly, that Gordon finds as the key ethical moment in Fanon? Elsewhere, in a discussion of W. E. B. Du Bois on the study of black folk,
Gordon restates an existential phenomenological conception of the anti-black world developed across his first several books :
"Blacks here
suffer the phobogenic reality posed by the spirit of racial seriousness. In effect, they more than
symbolize or signify various social pathologies they become them. In our anti-black world, blacks are
pathology" (Gordon 2000: 87). This conception would seem to support to Moten's contention that even
much radical black studies scholarship sustains the association of blackness with a certain sense of
decay and thereby fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common
sense. In fact, it would seem that Gordon deepens the already problematic association to the level of identity. And yet, this is
precisely what Gordon argues is the value and insight of Fanon: he fully accepts the definition of
himself as pathological as it is imposed by a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather
than remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the heterogeneity between a self and an imago
originating in culture. Though it may appear counter-intuitive, or rather because it is counter-intuitive,
this acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to pay whatever
social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow
of social death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the anti-black world. The affirmation
of blackness, which is to say an affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from
blackness in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, life, or sociality. Fanon
writes in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks: "A Senegalese who learns Creole to pass for Antillean is a case of alienation. The Antilleans
who make a mockery out of him are lacking in judgment" (Fanon 2008: 21). In a world structured by the twin axioms of
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white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured
by a negative categorical imperative "above all, dont be black" (Gordon 1997: 63) in this world, the zero
degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that
"resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human' " (Nyong'o 2002: 389). [22] In this we might
create a transvaluation of pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology without pathos. To speak of black social life and black
social death, black social life against black social death, black social life as black social death, black social life in black social death all of this
is to find oneself in the midst of an argument that is also a profound agreement, an agreement that takes shape in (between) meconnaissance
and (dis)belief. 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 vitalizing it. A living death is a much a death as it is a living. Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social) life,
only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the codes of state and civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture,
of people and place, of history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common with the colonized, of all that capital has in
common with labor the modern world system. [23]Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in
outer space. This is agreed. That is to say, what Moten asserts against afro-pessimism is a point already affirmed by afro-pessimism, is, in
fact, one of the most polemical dimensions of afro-pessimism as a project: namely, that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived
in social death. Double emphasis, on lived and on death. That's the whole point of the enterprise at some level. It is all about the implications
of this agreed upon point where arguments (should) begin, but they cannot (yet) proceed. Wilderson's is an analysis of the law in its operation
as "police power and racial prerogative both under and after slavery" (Wagner 2009: 243). So too is Moten's analysis, at least that just-less-
than-half of the intellectual labor committed to the object of black studies as critique of (the anti-blackness of) Western civilization. But Moten
is just that much more interested in how black social life steals away or escapes from the law, how it frustrates the police power and, in so
doing, calls that very policing into being in the first place. The policing of black freedom, then, is aimed less at its dreaded prospect, apocalyptic
rhetoric notwithstanding, than at its irreducible precedence. The logical and ontological priority of the unorthodox self-predicating activity of
blackness, the "improvisatory exteriority" or "improvisational immanence" that blackness is, renders the law dependent upon what it
polices. This is not the noble agency of resistance. It is a reticence or reluctance that we might not know if it were not pushing back, so long as
we know that this pushing back is really a pushing forward. So, in this perverse sense, black social death is black social life. The object of black
black studies. The most radical negation of the anti-black world is the most radical
studies is the aim of
affirmation of a blackened world. Afro-pessimism is "not but nothing other than" black optimism .[24]

But what does it mean to affirm nothingness? Fred Moten takes us farther in our analysis of the
world in which we begin to see nothingness as being full of thingliness, in a complete paradox.
Its to be paraontology. To be para-politics, to be parasitic, to occupy the margins of everything
they have created.
This radical affirmation provides us with a space of positive articulation, where blackness can be
affirmed through suicide. Embrace political death as a form of social life, where we can frolic
and celebrate in our common dispossession. It is in this common lack where you find, what
Moten calls, thingliness in nothingness.
We do not seek to make claims that we have necessarily solved anti-blackness, because unlike a
contingent policy reform, anti-blackness is not this fixable obstacle that we are rid of in one
swift action. Rather the 1AC carves out a space for a positive articulation of blackness 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, the dead occupy. It is in this joyful suicide are we able to turn this
shit out.
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.
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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.
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 subject who is also the transcendental
subject of knowledge, grasp, ownership, and self- possession difference 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,
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 genea -
logical 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 celebra-
tion 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 ani mates 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
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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 pas sage on the most
open road of all, even asto use and abuse a terribly beautiful phrase of Wildersons (2010: xi)
fantasy in the hold

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. Fuck sociality, fuck health, 8 doobies to
the face, nigga fuck dawt.