Having been said to be nothing, this is a love letter written to we who have been, and are today still, said to have nothing. This is a love letter written to a tradition of such nothingness. In having nothing, we putatively speak nothing. Such speaking echoes, such speaking reverberates, but such speaking is considered—in normative theological-philosophical thought—nothing. Nothing of consequence. Nothing of weight. Nothing of materiality. This is a love letter to a love tradition, a tradition that emerges from within, carries and promises nothingness as the centrifugal, centripetal, centrifugitive force released against, and thus is a critical intervention into, the known world, the perniciously fictive worlds of our making. Some might call this fictive world “real.” Some might call this fictive world reality. Some might call this fictive world the project of western civilization, complete with its brutally violent capacity for rapacious captivity. This is a love letter to a tradition of the ever overflowing, excessive nothingness that protects itself, that—with the breaking of families, of flesh—makes known and felt, the refusal of being destroyed. There is something in such nothingness that is not, but still ever excessively was, is and is yet to come. […] If something makes itself felt, known, from the zone of those of us said to be and have nothing, then the interrogation of what nothingness means is our urgent task. The nothingness of possibilities otherwise, of living the alternative.
Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility
