Optimism type of nihlism

 Jared Sexton fused some of Fred Moten’s Black Optimism/Black Operation ideas into Afro Pessimism to improve the theory “A living death is as much a death as it is 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 colonised, of all the things that capital has in common with labour – the modern world system.”

More from here https://web.archive.org/web/20220307162206/https://salvage.zone/the-flatness-of-blackness-afro-pessimism-and-the-erasure-of-anti-colonial-thought/

“Jared Sexton shows that Moten’s Black Ops is nothing other than what he instead calls ‘the social life of social death’. There is no either/or distinction between social life and social death: we can think both together by positing that Black life is lived in the underground. Moten even acknowledges, in ‘Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)’, that the AP™ and Black Ops are engaged in the same theoretical project:

“In the end, though life and optimism are the terms under which I speak, I agree with Sexton – by way of the slightest most immeasurable reversal of emphasis – that 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”

Afro Pessimism needs to add some class theory (Black Marxism by Cedric Robinson would be a good start)  as criteria or something to fill its void of rejecting Intersectionality (maybe Fourth Political Theory i.e 4pt?), as you will find collaborationist elites within any racial or ethnic group and they sometimes manage to retain the class privilege they acquired as colonial collaborators even in post-colonial eras. 

4pt rejects that the main subject of politics is individualism and instead roughly refers to the experience of being unique to humans (sort of like Lived experience). A being that is aware of and must confront such issues as personhood, mortality and the dilemma or paradox of living in relationship with other humans while being ultimately alone with oneself. 4pt talks about rediscovering Pre postmodernity that would be understood not as the past, but as the a-temporal structure of principles and values.  

One way for Afro Pessimism to fix its essentialism and anti politics issues as follows: (from this article https://web.archive.org/web/20220307162206/https://salvage.zone/the-flatness-of-blackness-afro-pessimism-and-the-erasure-of-anti-colonial-thought/):

“Aimé Césaire’s attack on Roger Callois in Discourse on Colonialism illustrates just how ingrained the cultural exceptionalism of Europe was (is) in many intellectuals’ minds, and just how necessary it was (is) to counter such exceptionalism with a ‘thin’ essentialism of one’s own – even if this expression is mainly poetic. 

Whereas the Afro Pessimism essentialism retreats from the realm of politics, the essentialism of the Césaire’s surrealism takes racism and colonialism head on. This ‘strategic essentialism’ – a positivist essentialism that is critical of the ontological idea, while making use of it for specific political purposes – represents something quite different than the ‘thick’ ontological Blackness of the Afro Pessimism, who have no political strategy whatsoever! 

Nonetheless, we must remember that the emphasis in strategic essentialism is on political action; while Césaire focused on achieving the deconstruction of essentialism through poetry and art, we must move beyond the realm of artistic expression and posit a concept of Blackness aimed at the revolutionary transformation of existing social relations.”