Anti-Blackness, Social Death, and Negative Universality

Afro-pessimism poses one of the most profound challenges to contemporary political theory. By conceptualizing Blackness as social death, it argues that anti-Blackness is not a contingent injustice but the ontological ground of modernity. If Blackness names structural non-being, then universality—the category of the Human—appears intrinsically anti-Black. This article engages Afro-pessimism as a serious theoretical interlocutor in order to test the claim that antagonism grounds a negative universality. It argues, first, that Afro-pessimism correctly identifies anti-Blackness as the paradigmatic modern inscription of universality’s constitutive antagonism. However, it contends that Afro-pessimism risks converting structural centrality into ontological exception by positing Blackness as metaphysical singularity. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Rancière’s account of the “part of no-part,” Žižek’s theory of antagonistic universality, McGowan’s account of shared limitation, and Kapoor and Zalloua’s theory of immanent antagonism, the article proposes that antagonism is universal but its social embodiment is racially stratified. Lack is structural; yet its symbolic management and libidinal displacement are historically organized through anti-Blackness and racial capitalism. Anti-Blackness thus reveals the traumatic kernel of universality without exhausting its logic. Such a negative conception of universality preserves the singularity of anti-Black violence while reopening the possibility of solidarity grounded not in analogy or identity but in shared structural division.