A Cosmic Love That Burns: Black Radicalism Toward the End of the World

Abstract: A set of lines in Aimé Césaire's poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land relates "end of the world" with a worthy "beginning." Unlike an eschatology that views the end of the world as the beginning of, or entrance into, a new world, Césaire describes the end of the world as something he "must begin" himself. Césaire describes ending as both an action and a responsibility. This paper will provide a critical genealogy of Césaire's phrase "end of the world" and how the phrase has been taken up by thinkers of critical Black studies. In particular, Césaire's use of surrealist free-association metaphor will give us the means to theorize the end of the world as a present power that connects Black flesh to the flesh of the world. Against the leftist figuration of eschatology, this genealogy will provide a way of thinking of ending as a power—a Black power—that can be embodied instead of an event that is to come. Ultimately, this paper seeks to add a different vision of what the Black radical tradition can imagine as its political end.