Ángel Octavio Álvarez and I had the wonderful opportunity to have a brief exchange with Frank Wilderson III on Afropessimism (2020) for the weekly radial program Dublineses in Mexico. I am grateful to Wilderson for his time and generosity, since I am aware of his many speaking obligations around the book these past months. Because of time restrictions, both Angel and I did not get to ask Wilderson many questions. In my case, I felt that my last question did not come through in a clear away. In this note, I want to make an attempt to better articulate it here, not just for the sake clarification, but because I think it pushes the discussion forward; at least one of the possible paths of the discussion that Afropessimism elicits. At the end of my review, I asked whether it was possible for Black existence to imagine itself as a figure of friendship with the inhuman. I want to think of friendship as a “positive outside” of solidarity, which is a target in the book, in particular as it emerges in very concrete institutional contexts, such as the university and communitarian self-examination.

I agree with Wilderson that solidarity is always tendentially an apparatus that regulates “intra-communal narrative acts of transformation” (102). But to be committed to the narrative acts means that one is already subjected to its force, which essentially feeds off social death of black existence. In other words, solidary is the apparatus through which certain hylomorphic cohesion of the “Human” is organized and rendered legible. Essentially, this means that the transformative change always takes place at the level of the human (“a new man”, the ideal of Guevarism in the revolutionary imagination of the New Left) in virtue of disposing the inhuman. Humanity is essentially the somnambulism of the inhuman, as it cannot be otherwise. 

         There is production of Humanity through the different exercises of identification and demand – which ultimately entails the equivalence of singular sufferings – but there is also the side of the inhuman and social death in the world. Of course, the ultrapolitical question has been dominated by the metaphysical niceties of leninist reason: ‘what is to be done?’. But as Wilderson himself admits in the chapter on Stella (55-147), the ‘destructive act’ against the world that sustains social death is psychically unenabling and impossible (103). I take it that one of the things that Wilderson is pointing out here is that there is no “exodus” from the constraints of nihilism through sacrificial investment, nor by simple inversion of violence for the ends of liberation. There is also no exit through a narrative of redemption, or for that matter, any practice of narrativization of social death, which already amounts to the domestication in the other’s phantasmatic economy. 

But it is precisely here where the question of friendship emerges; since friendship is irreducible to alliance or subjective solidarity. Friendship is the sharing in thought that is always constitutive of the outside of the sayable. This is how Mascolo defines friendship: a sharing of thought that is suspicious of thinking as a mere “foam of things” [1]. Thought is the event of this encounter for which we are never prepared for. Assuming the unconditional function of thought frees a tonality of innocence that emerges without the compensatory excesses of original sin and guilt. Assuming one can traverse the theological apparatuses of the Christian tradition in his way – for which there is much archeological work to be done – could not one say that friendship is, in every case, the errancy of the afropessimist tonality? In other words, friendship is committed to the sacredness of the inhuman that in its proximity, it delimits an experience that is irreducible to normative ethics or political causes. 

Infrapolitical friendship has no demands and retracts from a “politics of care” (the intramural pole of global solidarity); rather, its inclination is contingent upon the unscripted cartography that provides life with a sense of destiny. This a joy in an inhospitable world. What friendship (philos) finds is also alien to the genus of the Human. Every friendship dwell in the unnarratable fabric of experience. It seems to me that this is one of the gestures of Afropessimism, which resists narrative from experience without exemplum. It is most definitely what emerges in the story about Stella.

Unlike love that demands amalgamating and redemptive competences, friendship is the hard look unto a broken world in which the existence of paradise (outside the apparatus of Human nature) is its aftertaste. This is not merely remembrance, but the passage from metatheory to the event of thought. But this is, after all, only a mere question for Wilderson.

*

Notes 

1. Dionys Mascolo. “L’amitié du non”, Lignes, 1990.