...Nicola Masciandaro Copyright © 2014 Qui Parle 2014 Paradisical Pessimism On the Crucifi xion Darkness and the Cosmic Materiality of Sorrow nicola masciandaro Sunt lacrimae rerum —Virgil, Aeneid 1.462 All men have matter of sorrow; but most specially he feels...

...Jon Soske THE DISSIMULATION OF RACE: "AFRO-PESSIMISM" AND THE PROBLEM OF DEVELOPMENT Jon Soske In the early 1980s, an intellectual sea change occurred in the eco- nomic theories describing the former colonial world. Denounced by opponents as a counterrevolution in development...

... manifested themselves, the justification for repression belongs to the world that makes repression necessary. If the social pessimism of Hobbes still had an enlightening, progressive meaning — if it was indeed all about bringing an end to the religious and civil wars through...

... Encounters with Aliens , 140 . 23. Kastrup, Meaning in Absurdity . 24. Lepselter, Resonance of Unseen Things , 67 . 25. Warren, Ontological Terror , 23 . 26. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection , 9 . 27. Douglass, Terrefe, and Wilderson, “Afro-pessimism.” 28...

... of this attitude is nowhere more evident than in the great fear and pessimism about the rise of modern machine technology. Indeed one of the goals of Blumenberg's essay is to uncover the origins of the modern ambiva- lence to technology, either hailed by his contemporaries as the great- 6 ANNA WERTZ...

...- racist, decolonial, and settler decolonial politics, Lowe’s work draws forth some of the intellectual and political tensions be- tween Black studies (particularly the school of thought known as Afro- Pessimism) and Native American and Indigenous studies. Ulti- mately, however...

... disillusionment with neoliberal statecraft has empowered white supremacist regimes across the West. 1 Though its merits remain contested by many, Afro-pessimism—a theoretical and increasingly interdisciplinary conceptual intervention—indicts humanist scholars’ failure to account for the brutal imaginations...

... that all of us as practitioners of the discipline operate under epistemological constraints that compel us to tell stories we often do not notice we are telling. See Saucier and Woods, “Racial Optimism,” 12–15 . 39. Wilderson, “Afro-pessimism and the End of Redemption.” 40. Wilderson...

... that interpretation of African literature focused either on its unique aesthetics or on the documentary evidence it provided ( “Incessant Particularities,” 123–24 ). 19. Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism,” 274–75 . 20. Mavhunga, “Introduction,” 7 . 21. Sexton, “Afro-Pessimism...

... for the present. Negt and Kluge are the eter- nal optimists to the deep pessimism of the fi rst generation of the Frankfurt School. History and Obstinacy also has an important, similarly optimistic intertext in Jean- Luc Godard’s fi lm Histoire(s) du cinéma. Like Negt and Kluge, Godard...

... and precarious, allowing us to critique it as a form of governance by piercing its concept’s reified form. The crude pessimism of the hermeneutics of suspicion that sees neoliberalism everywhere—and thereby dedifferentiates and essentializes late capital, mistaking ubiquity of vision for critical rigor...

... in the form of a system, an ecology, an assemblage, in short, as a network. Alexander R. Galloway, “Network Pessimism” It no longer registers as a shock to hear proclamations of an emerging age of networks, of algorithms, of artificial intelligence, of machine learning, robotics, ubiquitous digital...

..., it fleshes out a history of our present and recent past that is similar to what Robinson’s citizen-historian alludes to and places it within a trajectory that reaches the present of the novel. The justified bitterness and pessimism at the heart of Dawson’s book moreover refuses apocalypticism, understanding...

... Editorial Board, Qui Parle 2019 Black feminism Afro-pessimism Black nihilism Badiou philosophy of math Black feminist poethics, however, presents the secret of mathematics as an unspoken contamination of purity, a noetic sequela—as opposed to the purity of Badiou’s null set. The history...

....20, no.1 artistic practice and of political protest today—wherein dedication is not unlinked from pessimism, imagination is not unlinked from reality, love is not unlinked from knowledge.5 Michel de Certeau says that memory “inserts itself into some- thing...

... University Press, 1993], esp. 160–74. Hereaft er cited as tld). This view cannot be squared, either, with afro-pessimism’s powerful account of racial blackness as the ground of world (see Frank Wilder- son, Red, White and Black [Durham: Duke University Press, 2010 Ver...

... of conspiracy: for revolutionaries, a paranoid optimism anticipating the freedom to come that might yet have been; and for authorities, a paranoid pessimism presaging the inevitable return of revolt. Indeed, revolution can only ever be untimely, the return back to a prior moment foretold by the movement...

... and the grim pessimism of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents Jones: Refl ections on Bergson, Iqbal, and Scalia 233 defi nes precisely the effects of the Great War on European thought. Europe had come to expect death. Having already worked on behalf of the League of Nations...

..., even and especially in their dehiscence.” See Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro- Pessimism and Black Optimism,” InTensions 5 (2011), httpwww.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/pdfs/jared sextonarticle.pdf. 16. In fact, the focus on grammar arises directly from Spillers’s...

... — with new vitalist and popular Darwinian philosophical strains. What he rejected in such theories, however, was the pessimism and determinism of their views on race: he believed in vigorous eugenic and cultural intervention. His work was also notable for its application to questions...