Anti-blackness is the residue that remains, the intransigent substance that makes it impossible to destroy metaphysics completely. The black nihilist must confront this residue, but with the understanding that the eradication of this residue would truly end the world itself. Black emancipation is world destructive; it is not an aperture or an opening for future possibilities and political reconfigurations (Wilderson 2010). The ‘end of the world’ that Vattimo envisions does not take into account that pulverized black bodies sustain the world—its institutions, economic systems, environment, theologies, philosophies, and so forth. Because anti-blackness infuses itself into every fabric of social existence, it is impossible to emancipate blacks without literally destroying the world. Moreover, this means that black emancipation will not yield a new world or possibilities for reorganization—black emancipation is the nihilistic ‘solution’ that would destroy the field of all possible solutions. In this sense, black emancipation becomes something like death for the world—with all its Heideggerian valences.
Calvin L. Warren, “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope,” pg. 238-239







