Leung

For Moten, blackness is not only prior to the “new ontology” of modern slavery, but is in fact prior to all ontology: “blackness is prior to ontology … blackness is the anoriginal displacement of ontology, that it is ontology’s anti- and ante-foundation, ontology’s underground.” In other words, blackness precedes anti-blackness, and must not be determined by any traditional “ontology” that is informed by the “intellectual prejudices” of anti-blackness. Because, in Moten’s view, to do so would effectively be formally subordinating blackness to the traditional ontological discourse of Being qua anti-blackness...Accordingly, we can see why Moten places much emphasis on the ontological priority of blackness/nothingness – an emphasis which finds much resemblance in Heidegger’s notion of nothingness or “the nothing” (das Nichts) in his 1929 Freiburg inaugural lecture What is Metaphysics?. As Heidegger (

Citation1993, 97) notes in this much-debated lecture:

Is the nothing given only because the “not”, i.e. negation, is given? Or is it the other way around? Are negation and the “not” given only because the nothing is given? … We assert that the nothing is more original than the “not” and negation.

Just as blackness/nothingness is for Moten not the product of some operation undertaken by Being (e.g. negation), nothingness is for Heidegger not an outcome of the negation of beings but rather “more original” and indeed ontologically prior to negation.

Following this insistence that nothingness is not conditioned or produced by negation or anything else (but is rather the ground which makes negation possible),Footnote8 Heidegger (Citation1993) controversially proposes that nothingness is constituted by nothing other than its very own sui generis operation of “nihilation”:

[T]he action of the nothing … is the essence of the nothing: nihilation. It is neither an annihilation of beings nor does it spring from a negation. Nihilation will not submit to calculation in terms of annihilation and negation. The nothing itself nihilates [Das Nichts selbst nichtet]. (103)

Without entering the debate over the meaning of Heidegger’s thesis that “nothingness nihilates” (see Inwood Citation1999), it suffices here to note that Heidegger (Citation1993) associates the self-nihilation of nothingness with “the Being of beings” insofar as “the originally nihilating nothing … makes possible in advance the revelation of beings in general” (103). To quote Heidegger one last time:

Only on the ground of the original revelation of the nothing can human existence approach and penetrate beings … For human existence, the nothing makes possible the openedness of beings as such. The nothing does not merely serve as the counterconcept of beings; rather, it originally belongs to their essential unfolding as such. In the Being of beings the nihilation of the nothing occurs … The nothing does not remain the indeterminate opposite of beings but reveals itself as belonging to the Being of beings. (103–4, 108)

Insofar as there is this ontological coincidence of the nothing and the Being of beings, Heidegger notes that Hegel’s proposition that “Pure Being and pure Nothing are therefore the same” (108) is correct (while explicitly dissociating himself from Hegel’s argument from indeterminateness).

King-Ho Leung