Heidegger thought that there were (at least) two fundamental attunements which disclosed the whole of the world in a way that confronts us with the nothing, which in turn reveals our finitude, and forces us to realize we have a choice to live as our authentic selves or go on living inauthentically in the way of das Man, the one or the they—living as they do or one does. These two fundamental attunements are profound boredom and angst, or anxiety. They fundamentally cut off our relations to and with the world and reveal that society and culture are at base groundless, Dasein being the null ground of a nullity. This presents Dasein with the choice of authenticity.
What we aim for here is an answer to these questions:

1. Does vulgar political disenfranchisement, in a general sense of disenfranchisement, and the mode of being suicidal reveal the nothing?
2. Does anything else besides the nothing confront Dasein with the choice of authenticity?
3. Are they (from question 1.) fundamental attunements?
4. Do they confront us with the choice of authenticity?
5. What is the fundamental relation that disenfranchisement and the mode of being suicidal have with death?
   

We must first characterize disenfranchisement and the mode of being suicidal. Starting with disenfranchisement, let us question concerning it: what is it to be disenfranchised?
To be disenfranchised, in a general sense, means to be denied or prohibited or refused of something that fundamentally belongs to you or that you have a fundamental right to. A prominent example of disenfranchisement is the denial and prohibition of someone to the right to vote. Disenfranchisement can also consist of being denied or prohibited from participation in a community or social action or interaction, such as having your voice silenced in the deciding of certain community or municipal affairs, or being prohibited through discrimination from marrying certain people. In a certain sense, being disenfranchised means to lose your freedom, as it consists of a privation of something which fundamentally belongs to you or that you have a fundamental right to. Disenfranchisement means to be unfree; it is unfreedom.

Could disenfranchisement in any way confront one with the choice of authenticity? —And it should be noted here that within this question we include the possibility of a person taking on fascism and living this genocidal ideology as their authentic self.

This is a leading framing of the question and we intend it to be, for examples such as this exist within Heidegger’s philosophy. We explicitly recognize, admit, concede, and agree that Heidegger’s philosophy opens itself up, as it were, to the encroachment, infection, and contamination of fascism in its taking over of Heidegger’s project. That is, we posit here that his philosophy is compatible with fascism and that it is implicitly fascist. Indeed, it is not so surprising after all because the man was an explicit Nazi who joined the Nazi party and praised Hitler in several of his writings.

It is, however, the case that, at least in our opinion, Heidegger’s existential, ontological, and phenomenological analyses are themselves accurate, potent, effective, poignant, and profound methods of revelations and insights into the human condition and the human being’s own understanding of being. We feel it necessary to keep his methodology but to entirely strip it from ways in which it opens itself up and lends itself to being taken over by fascism. In order to do this, we invoke Edmund Husserl and apply his essential pithy saying: “Back to the things themselves,” without preconceived notions or prejudices. That is, we look to the eternal enemy of the fascist, the Jew, and we reclaim phenomenology as a philosophical discipline that is renewed with the fundamental task of essentially thinking and speaking being. Phenomenology was founded by a Jew and, in its historical context, we see it as an outstanding and remarkable Jewish contribution and living phenomenon.

Turning now to the mode of being suicidal, let us characterize it. In order to be suicidal, in order to be confronted with the question of suicide, there has to be in the first place a condition of unfulfillment. To be faced with unfulfillment is to be existentially broken. What this means in terms of existing as care temporally is nothing more than having all future modes of possibilities-of-being permanently cut off, covered over, and denied. Existentiality itself, the ability to take a stand on one’s being, existing as existence, is from now on impossible. The world itself becomes revealed, unconcealed, and disclosed as broken.

To be faced with this existential brokenness through unfulfillment is to be faced with hell—being-faced-with-hell. We call this existential hell. All possibilities-of-being are completely cut off. A clue to the full structure of the suicidal mode of being is hinted at in the word “hell.” Through being-faced-with-brokenness as being unfulfilled is to be-faced-with-hell. To be-faced-with-hell is an in-suffering: in-suffering-punishment. We call this full state of being suicidal condemnation.
The meaning of being suicidal is fundamentally to be condemned. Existential condemnation must be attained in the first place for the question of suicide to become a possibility. The state of hell existentially is fundamentally a state of condemnation, that is, a fundamental revealing of beings in their being as being broken, and not, in contrast, “other people” who simply antagonize one to an extreme point of psychological and emotional distress, per Sartre. This given, can the mode of being suicidal confront one with the choice of authenticity?

To the pressing questions regarding disenfranchisement and being suicidal as condemnation: do these states reveal the nothing; are they fundamental attunements; do they confront us with the choice of authenticity; what is their relation with death; and can anything besides the nothing confront us with the choice of authenticity?

Disenfranchisement and the mode of being suicidal are attunements but the question remains as to whether they are fundamental attunements. Fundamental attunements, in Heidegger’s view, reveal the nothing: they reveal the meaninglessness of the world which individualizes Dasein in its recognition of its finitude, of its death, which confronts Dasein with the choice of authenticity. Anxiety and profound boredom are two privileged fundamental attunements for Heidegger which accomplish this. We must now question the way of being and revealing that happens through disenfranchisement and the mode of being suicidal in order to decide whether they are fundamental attunements. What are the basic comportments of both?

Disenfranchisement as a mode of social and political exclusion is a mode of unfreedom. The attunement of disenfranchisement discloses the whole of the world as isolating, alienating, marginalizing, hostile, and oppressive. The isolating and alienating capacity of disenfranchisement seems to hint at and point to the character of individuation that happens in the recognition of death. It is, after all, you or me who has been excluded, refused, denied, and prohibited.
In this cutting off and prohibiting, one can become isolated and alienated and the world can come to presence as a place of hostility and oppression. The one in this regard is the authentic one, the individualized one who, for a moment, has been shocked and drawn out of das Man. The individuating character of isolation and alienation has the potential to give way to a fundamental question and confrontation of meaninglessness and nothingness—it has the potential of revealing the nothing. This means the individuating character of isolation and alienation has the potential to confront one with the choice of authenticity. But this is only a potential.

But disenfranchisement can also manifest as a collective phenomenon wherein it is not merely me who has been excluded, but us. This form of collective disenfranchisement is a collective and historical revealing belonging to a historical people with a shared understanding of being. As systemic hierarchies, discrimination, and inequalities do not exist in a vacuum, it could be said that collective disenfranchisement is a more fundamental and authentic type of disenfranchisement that exists and exists at the intersection of all other hierarchies, discrimination, inequalities, and modes of domination and oppression. But, of course, we are talking about real, that is, genuine and authentic, domination and oppression which always already exist structurally, systemically, and foundationally in society by way of the State and governmental racist laws, including systemic white supremacy, ideological fascism, and sociocultural racism.

By sociocultural racism we mean the everyday racism one encounters in society, such as that manifested by racist family members or general people of the public. Therefore when we say “a collective and historical revealing belonging to a historical people” we explicitly shut down interpretations that frame white people as being oppressed, victimized, and disenfranchised. When talking in this way about a collective and historical people, we specifically refer to Black, Brown, Indigenous, and people of color as they were treated, and continue to be treated, in the history of human Dasein, that is, the colonized—people of colonization.

The collective disenfranchisement of a people also has the potential of revealing the nothing, finitude through the recognition of death, and the confrontation with the choice of authenticity; but here too it is only a potential. This means that, as having the potential for revealing the nothing and the choice of authenticity, both individualized and collective disenfranchisement cannot be fundamental attunements but a mode of everyday attunements as a way of being-in-the-world. Social and political disenfranchisement, whether individualized or collective, is a form of discrimination. We said that disenfranchisement is an everyday attunement as a way of being-in-the-world. We also said it is a form of discrimination. What we mean to say is that disenfranchisement is an everyday mode of being that many non-white people experience and live on a daily basis.
It has the potential for the behavior of a fundamental attunement but it is not a fundamental attunement by itself. Rather, the fundamental attunement of discrimination, oppression, is dehumanization, which is fundamentally a collective dehumanization.

Collective dehumanization has a twofold character: 1. it unequivocally cuts the human being off from its relations with the world and other human beings, which reveals the nothing and 2. it paradoxically discloses a world that has been unworlded but retains its worldhood. What this means is, for example, the Stateless Jews in Nazi Germany reveal the world as a place that is fundamentally against them and has spit them out, exiled them, refused them, while at the same time they still have a fundamental relation and connection with each other and now the character of a world within an unworlded world. Although unworlded, worldhood abides.

The same holds for Black people in their history of becoming slaves, then freemen, then second-class citizens. They are now a sociopolitical object of both direct racism and passive-aggressive, wishy-washy racism by both the populace and the government. Both of whom cannot own up to the fact that Black people are still fundamentally today victimized, marginalized, discriminated against, and structurally and systemically oppressed—due to that very populace and government.

In Praise of Afropessimism: Being as Social Death

—Collective dehumanization as a fundamental attunement of a historical people with a shared understanding of being reveals the nothing. Nothing can show this perhaps as paradigmatically as Afropessimism—a radical philosophy which seems to be essentially in tune with the call of being and the authentic response to it.

Afropessimism says that Black people, from slavery, segregation, and up to now, have been and are fundamentally excluded from the category of self-possession and personhood; that slavery is not something which is merely a thing of the past and therefore historical, but that slavery is still ongoing, and it is an ontological constitution that constitutes Blackness, and it constitutes Blackness as social death, which is juxtaposed against social life which whites and non-Black people possess.

According to Frank B. Wilderson III, a founder of the philosophy, Blackness is a condition of ontological death. Ontological death here means that the Black person who inhabits the condition of Blackness is robbed, denied, and prohibited from personhood and humanity. Black people are constitutively excluded from the category of the self-possessing and rights-bearing human of modernity. Whereas white people possess social life and personhood and are called human because of this, including the non-Black person of color in a diminished capacity, Black people have no identity in terms of humanity and personhood—Black people are the non-human. This means that Black people are essentially dehumanized, that they live as being non-humans with the character of non-personhood. Afropessimism has essentially, accurately, historically, and poignantly described its people (or objects) as being dehumanized, and it has claimed that dehumanization as an ontological constitution.

Collective dehumanization in this way is constitutively a fundamental attunement which reveals the nothing and reveals death as a possibility, which calls Dasein to be presided over by a confrontation with the choice of authenticity. Afropessimism authentically, poignantly, and intimately responds to this call in its claiming and embodying dehumanization. It does not turn, depart, or run away from this ontic and ontological phenomenon. The disclosure of being, the way of revealing of Afropessimism, unconceals the world as a place that is murderous, deadly, hostile, volatile, dehumanizing, and violently exploitative. But only Dasein can reveal and understand being. Only Dasein can disclose a world and take a stand on its own being. But Afropessimism takes up its objects as they have always been taken up historically by non-Black people: as non-human, as non-persons, as non-subjects, as not even being mere objects but objectless.

There are three formulations of what it means to be Dasein that confront us here; only one is essential. 1. is that the human being in its essence is Dasein, which means existence, which means understanding and revealing being. 2. is that humanity is not fundamental to being a Dasein but that Dasein is fundamental to understanding and revealing being. This means that, if according to Afropessimism, Black people are not people, not human beings, their existential constitution of being Dasein is still in tact and tenable, as they still have an understanding of being and ways of revealing being. In this way, admittedly speculatively, even the animal if they possessed language would count as being Dasein, as they would have an understanding of being. This means that, 3., having the capacity for language is above all the condition for the possibility of being a Dasein, which means to have an understanding of being through existence, which means to disclose and unconceal and reveal being and, through it, the world. Language, after all, is the house of being.

But it could be argued, more importantly, that this scheme is another invention of the white European and therefore still inherently racist, colonizing, colonialist, white supremacist, and anti-Black in its relation and orientation toward Black people, still caught up in its inherent dehumanizing depiction and being-with Black people.

Inasmuch as Afropessimism essentially says that Black people inhabit social death as an ontological constitution—being denied; refused; excluded; and prohibited from any classifications of self-having and self-possessing, being dehumanized—it also says, at the same time, that Black people are essentially necessary for the world as we know it to exist, due to its ruthless exploitation and infliction of violence upon them, which enables the world through the violent and exploitative mechanisms which extract profit and resources from Black people.

Afropessimism has revealed the fundamental relation between the human—white and non-Black people—and the non-human—Black people—as being a permanent and irreversible, irreconcilable, problem. This fundamental relation can in no way be overcome, that is, unless the world as we know it comes to its end in a violent overthrowing of it and its entire systems of domination and hierarchy; that means the utter and ruthless destruction of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, the State, and all hierarchies. —In short, this means an anarchist revolution.

In this way, Afropessimism has revealed us, white and non-Black people juxtaposed against Black non-people, as being completely, entirely, and wholly alien to each other with no possible way of relating to and with each other, or knowing each other or dwelling with each other. We are both alien and foreign to each other. We are each invaders of each other, fundamentally due to white supremacy seeing Black people as an internal social enemy and so invades, enslaves, colonizes, and dehumanizes them. That is, the invading is one-sided. As being utterly and wholly alien and foreign, we have different, wholly different, understandings of being.

These fundamentally different relations to being cut us off from each other, and there can be no understanding or knowing or dwelling or relating of any kind to and with each other, that is, unless the whole world as we know it dies, and an utterly new relation to and understanding of being comes to presence, and the Black non-human objects are allowed to come to presence for the first time, and for the first time as a people.

“The human,” and therefore also its begotten “humanism,” in the tradition of Western metaphysics, is a restrictive and excluding category. It restricts what is human to whiteness and it excludes Blackness. In a new relation to and understanding of being that may come to presence in the destruction of the world, what is called human, or a soul, or a person, or a Dasein must be characterized by and first come from Black people; that is, they must reclaim as a first claiming of their souls as being human, people, and personalities. What counts as a person must first come from them, for when Black people are free and liberated and are allowed to authentically inhabit the earth and so first come to dwell, everyone else will necessarily have to be free as well.

This raises a question primarily concerning whites: can there be in any meaningful way a true allyship between whites and Black people, an allyship that proactively and actively does real work on the ground and in the streets which defends and goes to bat for Black people, an allyship that centers the real work and labor on whites and which makes Black lives easier?

From a white perspective, informed by the valuable lived experience of Black people, which gazes toward white people and analyzes current white behavior from those who call themselves socialists or anarchists, the answer seems to be no. For the white allyship sits from the position of white experience, that is, white privilege, and so will betray its principles and, more importantly, real and tangible Black people. White allyship has demonstrated itself to fail when it is needed most, and it defaults to racism out of the experience of white privilege. We cannot give specifics here, but we have heard from Black voices in the activist space, that they cannot count on white allyship, that there is no such thing, truly, as a white ally. For one reason or another, white allyship will leave Black people holding the bag, leaving them to their own devices, just as whites have always done when not extracting profit or resources from them. There can be no white allyship. As we said, there can be no relation or ways of relating with social life to social death.

Allyship as such is a white liberal, moderate, centrist phenomenon and conception. What is needed is radicalism—the same radicalism that was demonstrated by John Brown.
What is needed is for white radicals to show up, shut their mouths, and engage in direct action under the direction, leadership, and blessing of Black people—in a way that centers the hard work and labor on whites. Additionally, in multiracial radical activist and organizing spaces, there should be no white people in organizing positions which carry weight and significance. There should be no white people who figurehead or plan or have a significant say in organizing. White people ought only to defer to Black people and carry out their schemes if Black people wish for one’s white involvement. That is, what is most needed is a radical decentering of whiteness.

We saw that disenfranchisement was not by itself a fundamental attunement but only a potential, but that, however, dehumanization is essentially a fundamental attunement. Dehumanization cuts off all relations to the world and reveals the nothing, which confronts us with the choice of authenticity. We said that through this phenomenon the world is unworlded, and yet, worldhood itself lingers on. The Stateless Jews of Nazi Germany demonstrated this fact through their continued relations with and toward each other. Black people, particularly in the history of the US, also show this in their collective history of subjugation and oppression.

While socially lifeless, not having personhood, according to Afropessimism, Black people and Black culture continue to be influential and innovative. Black people and Black culture in their relation to each other and their shared understanding of being as being the non-human, they have created and promulgated a significant cultural impact in terms of their ownmost and authentic arts. The Black arts are high arts. Black culture as Black arts continue to be widely influential, to the extent that both their popular music and historical genre making, Jazz, Country, and basically all music, have become adopted and even appropriated by the white populace and the white music industry. As we said, Black people are essential for the functioning of the world due to their cultural arts and social impact being wrought with white violence and exploitation in order to produce profit.

From the perspective of Afropessimism, Black people are the non-human. But even as non-human they still live in a world on the basis of an understanding of being which is a revealing. This revealing reveals, from an outside white perspective, the world as a white colonizing world which has no space for them, and which has stolen from them what is most essential: humanity and personhood. Black people are nothing more under the domination of this white colonizing world than commodities, both historically and now culturally. Yet, as having been essentially robbed, they have not been robbed of their souls.

That Which is Soullike

From the roots and lowest, deepest ground of their souls, they have created and continue to develop what is most soulful, that which endures as timeless. From out of a world which has unworlded itself and uprooted any relation to itself in order to destroy any possibility of dwelling, Black people in their ownmost culture and striving remain rooted and grounded to the earth. From out of the firm standing on the earth, grounded in their roots—their historical and essential origin—they have disclosed something more humanlike than white conceptions of humanity, something entirely earlier and more attuned to the earth and the dwelling upon it. This disclosure of that which is more humanlike than white conceptions of humanity, in keeping with Afropessimism’s distinction of Black people as that which is most unfamiliar and alien to the human, that which has the condition of death, we call here a soul and what is soullike.

There are human souls as well as non-human souls, but what is decisive is that something like a soul is fundamental to being a person and having personality, that is, humanness. To be human in the first place or an animal or any kind of living being, one must possess and be possessed by a soul. By soul here we do not yet even know about Christian and theological conceptions of a soul, much less infantile mystical and New Age half-thoughts on the soul. Soul is thought here in a more originary and fundamental essence which makes possible religious and other metaphysical notions of a soul, such as Christian substance dualism.

In this disclosure of what is soullike, which is fundamental to white conceptions of humanity and therefore more humanlike than “white humanity,” this disclosure consists of three parts: resistance, exposure, and transformation. These three parts are revealed in three corresponding ways of being (that is, attunements): in Black conceptions and enactment of community/solidarity, art/creativity, and culture/relation. What this means in its essence is not yet clear. Resistance to what? Exposure of what? Transformation of what?

In a brief summary:

1. Black resistance of social death which is imposed on them, by creating uniquely Black community, art, and culture, which is a way of being that is distinct and not defined by the norms and values of the dominant white society, but is by their own existential struggle and affirmation. Black people have unconcealed, revealed, their own possibilities-of-being in a world that denies them any possibility.
2. The exposure of the limitations and contradictions of the white conceptions of humanity.
3. The transformation of the relations of being-in-the-world under the technological epic of being, which reduces being-in-the-world to a mode of domination and exploitation through calculation and orderability, which sees the earth as a resource to store up and keep on hand as standing reserve—what we call enframing. In contrast, Black people, in their projective revealing, have created new forms of being-in-the-world that are based on community through solidarity, art through uniquely Black creativity, and culture through resistance.
   

It is through these three forms that what is soulful is disclosed and endures as timeless.
Through their art, they have revealed what is most essential and enduring about the condition of being Dasein. But the existential scheme of Dasein, we said, is an invention of the European and could therefore be argued that it is inherently racist and dehumanizing in its relational comportment with Black people. This white European existential scheme which seeks to analyze being and the understanding of being, the kind of revealing which unconceals and discloses the world, does not have any experience or idea of the kind of revealing which discloses the world of Black people through the primordial clearing of being.

White world disclosure only has experience and knowledge of its side of its relational comportment with Black people: the European scheme of Dasein (which it and it only it knows about) vis-à-vis Black people (the world disclosure of which it knows nothing about). It cannot fathom the horrors and dehumanization and violence and death and worse which it has wrought upon Black people, which has prefigured a world-historical and shared understanding of being, a wholly and altogether uniquely Black disclosure of being which reveals the world as what it is for Black people. Any sort of white phenomenology and ontology which seeks out on its own what Black understandings of being are is unequivocally and inherently racist and white supremacist, and smacks of something worse than white liberal justice activism, keeping in mind what MLK said about white liberals.

What Black understandings of being are must be responded to and explained by Black people, if they wish to do so, who hear their ownmost call of being. As we said, the white life-having human and the Black life-non-having non-human have completely different relations and understandings of being.

From their safeguarded souls, they have safeguarded what is most soulful and most enduring, and that is the capturing and disclosure of the distinctly Black world through the enduring creation of their art, which struggles through an essential robbing of who they are by whiteness, a creation of an enduring art which endures as timeless. What is exceptional and remarkable is that, through their enduring and striving through adversity, which cannot be accurately described through words, they have given birth, through an essential and primordial revealing, to a genuinely and authentically new and different kind of art as poetry of the first order; and not only that, they have endured their brutal situation with and through art which imparts what is most essential to Dasein, to a soul. A completely new and different category of revealing, revealing being, has come to presence in an authentic response to the call of being. High Black art in its capturing and disclosure of what is most soulful discloses the whole of this world as enduring. That which is soullike endures through its soulfulness.

(The whole paragraph needs to be articulated better. What is most soulful is captured in art and can be said to be artful, but art itself and as such is not what is most soulful.)

Afropessimism has taken the condition of social death, an ontological death, which whites and non-Black people have wrought upon them, and has claimed it for itself: Black people being the non-human without personhood. But just as Afropessimism has taken dehumanization for itself as a way of characterizing Blackness, Black Dasein—the Black soul—has come to reveal a new fundamental way of being an enduring and dwelling soul through collective resistance, historically and culturally, against these dominating white, that is, anti-Black, views of Blackness as non-human. This collective resistance against ontological death which is forced upon them by non-Black people is another authentic response to the call of being, both a call of and response to being which non-Black people can have no experience, knowledge, or idea of; for the Black plight of violence, death, and dehumanization that plagues them by non-Black people is an entirely new and different category of violence, victimization, death, and suffering.

More clearly that is, the regime of violence that Black people are subjected to cannot be compared to the experiences of other oppressed peoples. The Black plight of the condition of ontological and social death is unequivocally unique to them. As we said, the condition of being “human” consists of the capacity for whiteness—and the remoteness away from Blackness; hence, the relation between all of us exists as humans who possess social life, which are whites and non-Black people of color to a lesser extent, and Black non-humans who possess social death.

But fundamentally: that which constitutes the human in its human-ity must be delimited by the Black soul.