© Philosophy Today ISSN 0031-8256 Philosophy Today Volume 67, Issue 4 (Fall 2023): 851–870 DOI: 10.5840/philtoday2023105506 Consent Not to Be a (Human) Being: A Black Anti-Philosophy of Science JOHN GILLESPIE JR. Abstract: This essay produces a paradigmatic analysis of anti-Blackness from within the history and philosophy of biology in order to explore Frantz Fanon’s concept of ontological resistance . Through developing Sylvia Wynter’s notion of the Darwinian Imaginary alongside an Afropessimist paradigmatic analysis, the paper argues that sci- entific humanism’s claim that the Black is “the ostensible missing link between rational humans and irrational animals” (Wynter 2003: 266) is a form of metaphysical violence that the Black cannot ontologically resist. This heretical reading of three canonical figures in Western bioscience—Carl Linnaeus, George Cuvier, and Charles Darwin—is an attempt to synthesize Wynter’s demonic ground and Wilderson’s grammatology in order to develop a Black anti-philosophy of science that thinks antagonistically about what it means to be “the missing link” in the chain of Human being Key words: Afropessimism, Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, philosophy of science, anti- philosophy, scientific humanism, anti-humanism “What is important to us here is to show that the biological cycle begins with the black [wo]man.”—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (2008: 139) 0. Prolegomena to a Future Black Metaphysics B oth Sylvia Wynter’s and Afropessimist responses to the Human rep- resent critical theorizations stemming from a Fanonian tradition in Black studies which converge at the question of Humanism only to provide “divergent stories and contested points of view” (Hartman 2008: 11). The 852 John Gillespie Jr. following investigation explores this dynamic through a theoretical provocation belonging to the Martinican psychiatrist, revolutionary and “anti-philosopher” Frantz Fanon. Here, I formulate “anti-philosophy” through the definition Alain Badiou gives the term in his seminar on Jacques Lacan when he states, “the basic gesture of every anti-philosophy involves a destitution of the philosophical cat- egory of truth” (Badiou 2018: 8). The Fanonian provocation, which contends that the ongoing project of this anti-Black world is one in which “the black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (Fanon 2008: 90), I argue, is one which necessarily involves the destitution of the philosophical category of truth: namely, and more specifically, the ontology of Humanness upon which this category rest. Nevertheless, destitution is not a resolution and so, this lack of “ontological resistance,” as we shall see, will prove to be debilitating. For, to be unable to “ontologically resist” in “the eyes of the White man” is to be possessed by being rather than to be recognized as possessing a being of one’s own. Fanon states, on the contrary, “From one day to the next, the Blacks have had to deal with two systems of reference. Their metaphysics, or less pretentiously, their customs and the agencies to which they refer, were abolished because they were in contradiction with a new civilization that imposed its own” (90). The aboli- tion of Black customs and agencies, “pretentiously” referred to herein as Black metaphysics , is the abyss, the no-thing, through which ontology coheres itself. The imposition of this new civilization, this all-too Human civilization, was and is such that whatever customs and agencies that existed prior to its metaphysical violence can be said to have been abolished. Ontology is therefore an immanent plane of violence for the Black. As Jared Sexton puts it: “Anti-Blackness is not, to repeat, simply an uncommonly pernicious racist ideology or even a uniquely injurious practice. . . . [I]t is more fundamentally, an unconscious cultural struc - ture, a grammar, a weltanschauung , a metaphysics that lives on well after, and despite, the destruction of metaphysics” (2019: 103). The ontological structure of Humanism finds its originary definition in the sexuating violence of anti-Blackness which functions in accordance to the logic of a scientific Humanism. This “scientific Humanism,” heretofore referred to as homo scientificus , is the scene of a formation of scientific subjectivity which gives rise to the universal narrative of the Human. Denise Ferreira da Silva introduces the term homo scientificus as a way of designating a paradigm of transparent and transcendental subjectivity rooted in the emergence of “the racial and the cultural, the strategies of engulfment governing the contemporary global configuration” (da Silva 2007: 94). Homo scientificus designates an onto-ethico-epistemological given rooted in the transparency thesis or rather, the self-evident transcenden- tality of a scientifically Human subjectivity. In structurally positioning the Black as a fundamentally meta-aporetic configuration from within this paradigm of scientific humanism, the anti-Blackness of homo scientificus functions to “cir- Consent Not to Be a (Human) Being 853 cumscribe the place of operation of transcendentality” (95). This circumscription, from within a biocentric paradigm, cannot be ontologically resisted. The Black remains structurally positioned as “the ostensible missing link between rational humans and irrational animals.” (Wynter 2003: 266). To be structurally positioned at “the ostensible missing link” position within the onto-ethico-epistemology of homo scientificus is to be circumscribed to a position of antagonism, underneath the epistemology of transparency, the metaphysics of Being, and the ethics of relationality. The Black is linked to absence in-the-first-instance of Humanity. This meta-aporia, which positions the Black as the “unbridgeable gap between Black being and human life” (Wilderson 2010: 57), is the space through which this antagonistic reading begins. Here, ontological resistance is understood as the capacity or incapacity to abolish or destroy the ontological regimes of Being/Power/Truth/Feeling/Free- dom, a capacity rooted in a recognition which Fanon, in his critical reading of Hegel, argues is denied to the Black. Fanon puts it in the following way: “The black man was acted upon. Values that were not engendered by his actions, values not resulting from the systolic gush of his blood, whirled around him in a colorful dance. The upheaval did not differentiate the black man. He went from one way of life to another, but not from one life to another” (2008: 194–95). It is the Black’s incapacity to ontologically resist this onto-ethico-epistemic structure of life, value, meaning and naming of Being (that the legacy of scientific Humanism indexes as metaphysical) that leads to the material-semiotic construction of the biologi- cal paradigm of Human classification. Therefore, ontological questions typically discussed in the philosophy of biology, for example, the problem of speciation, have become necessary questions to be taken up from within Black Studies. For, as Fanon puts it, “the black man represents the biological danger” (2008: 143). This “biological” danger is both a racial matter of anti-Black sexuation away from Human being proper, and as Fanon insists, a sexual matter of anti-Black phobia, projection, and desire. Blackness presents the philosophy of biology with a problem for thought insofar as the history of Blackness from within the theoretical history of speciation comes to index “the superempirical, exceeding the empirical because it sets scale and the terms of scale’s legibility.” (Jackson 2018: 621). Put differently, the fact of Blackness as the anti-Human “missing link” positioned in the historical philosophy of homo scientificus is, anti-philosophically speaking, superempiri- cally linked to the fact that the Black represents the inside-outside of scientific Humanism’s classificatory logics. A consequence of this is that a confluence of psychosomatic anti-Black pathologies conglomerate into the symbolic biologiza- tion of the Black. This biologization cathects to sexual organs as racially coded and overdetermined. One of the perverse effects of this phantasmatic relation is that an entire schema of fantasies organize the actions, images, and representations of the body of Black beings. As Fanon put it, “Beneath the body schema I had created a 854 John Gillespie Jr. historical-racial schema” (2008: 91). The “historical-racial schema” organizes the “tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic or visual nature” (91) of Blackness in accordance with pre-logical Negrophobia, which places particular psychic investment in Black sexual and reproductive organs in order to legitimate the logic of its speciation. This legitimation is grounded in what Sylvia Wynter (2003: 324) describes as “the Darwinian Imaginary.” The Darwinian Imaginary is a term which functions to describe the way in which “Negroid physiognomy and origin continent/African prove them . . . to belong to the category of humans most totally of all peoples dysselected-by-Evolution” (324). The relationship between the biological paradigm of Human classification and the phantasmatic—a Darwinian Imaginary—reveals a fundamental anti-Blackness in the structure of the scientific unconscious. 1 This essay produces a paradigmatic analysis of what operates as anti-Blackness in the scientific unconscious of the history and philosophy of biology. It develops Wyn- ter’s notion of the Darwanian Imaginary alongside Afropessimist paradigmatic analysis to elaborate the way in which the Black has come to be situated as the anti-type Other to the Human being While it is certain that Sylvia Wynter and the Afropessimist have crucial differences in regards to their analyses of the Human, the objective of this paper is to place Wynter’s scientifically-inspired critiques of Man into starker conversa- tion with Afropessimist antagonisms of the Human. In doing so, this essay will detail the limits of Sylvia Wynter’s posthumanism on the basis of Afropessimist thought while simultaneously pushing Wynter’s critiques of the Human towards the heretical trajectory, it suggests, Wynter’s work has always treaded. Wynter’s interventions into science studies and the philosophy of biology have been elabo- rated and discussed with the implications that her corpus has become increasingly defined through the lens of being human as praxis (McKittrick 2014). The “anti- philosophical” thrust of this essay is rooted in a “heretical” Wynter who, I argue, presents a lot more pessimistically. In her essay entitled, “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism,” Wynter posits a fundamental antagonism “whereby everything that is new grows out of the permanent need to question all existing absolutes with every current of thought that tries to break away from ‘existing finalites coming in turn to establish other ones of its own’” (1984: 21). Wynter concludes: “This movement can therefore be defined as a dynamic one in which the Jester’s role in the pursuit of human knowledge alternates with the Priest’s role—transforming heresies into new orthodoxies, the contingent into modes of the Absolute” (21). This heretical reading of Wynter pushes Wynter’s antagonism towards “all existing absolutes” up to and including the absolute truth of homo scientificus ’s universal Human. This paper, therefore will suggest that, due to the fact that philosophical sense is impossible without the splitting of Black flesh from the category of the Human, and the consequential metaphysical violence that such an onto-ethico-epistemic splitting has and continues to produce, the Consent Not to Be a (Human) Being 855 Fanonian call that “everything . . . to be started over from scratch, everything has to be rethought” (Fanon 2007: 56) is the kind of articulation that opens the way for an Afropessimist anti-Humanism to be thought with Wynter’s heretical demonic ground. These fundamental antagonisms towards the very taxonomi- cal abstraction of the Human on the basis of the meta-aporia of Blackness raises the stakes of the Black’s incapacity to ontologically resist the absoluteness of the Human subject. The onto-ethico-epistemology of homo scientificus is therefore linked—through metaphysical violence—to an urgent question for Black Studies: Will this anti-Black violence ever end? 1. Homo Scientificus and the Maxim of Life Charles Darwin’s post-Kantian revolution served to reify the inhumanity of Blackness that the modern grammar of representation had already imposed and presumed as early as 1684 in Francois Bernier’s A New Division of the Earth Darwin’s revolution transformed the axioms of Western thought and solidified the rise of homo scientificus . The paradigmatic birth of this figure marked the culmination of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epochal rupture away from the theocentric descriptive statement of the Medieval Imagination, towards the icons of Rationality and Biocentricity as the grounding sociogenic principles of a newly defined conceptual economy. 2 Sylvia Wynter discusses how this para- digmatic framework formed the sociogenic principles of the World, now moved from Man1 to Man2 through a shift away from Ratiocentrism to Biocentrism. This transformation from the Rational Man of Enlightenment to the Biological Man of the Life Sciences “from the beginning” would operate by consigning the Negro “to the pre-Darwinian last link in the Chain of Being” (Wynter 2003: 301). Charles Darwin’s oeuvre enters Wynter’s interrogation of the Human as a way to illustrate how the Western regime of truth shifted from Rationality’s princi- pal construction in relation to answering “the Heideggerian question as to the who, and the what we are” (264), towards Darwin’s more biocentric answer. The publication and eventual scientific acceptance of Darwin’s Malthusian-inflected evolutionary theory begot a biocentric logic that now permeates the field of bi- ology, sexology, embryology, psychology, and a host of other disciplinary fields structured by this evolutionary legacy. The Darwinian revolution was paved by the paradigm of homo scientificus laid down by his intellectual predecessors in paleontology and taxonomy, namely Georges Cuvier and Carl Linnaeus. Together, the foundations laid by these “fathers” of modern paleontology, taxonomy, and evolutionary biology, respectively, parallel many of the characteristics that Thomas Kuhn outlines as fundamental to the prac- tice and history of normal science. In his magnum opus The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , Kuhn describes normal science as “research firmly based upon one or 856 John Gillespie Jr. more past achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice” (2012: 10). Charles Linnaeus’s scientific revolution in the biological sciences began in 1758. His Mammalia —as a taxonomical classificatory logic for the Human’s place in nature—gave the eighteenth century taxonomists, biologists, and zoologists a paradigm to build upon when the Aristotelian model of quadrupedia had begun to run its course. Systema Naturae , Linnaeus’s field-defining text, ushered in the foundations for classifying and arranging the natural diversity of organisms. He constructed illustrations and latinized identifications for a wide range of organisms ranging from plants to animals to whatever it is that he, the author himself, was as well. For this act of sovereignty in the field of nomenclature, Linnaeus has been named “A Second Adam.” An echo of the fact that Linnaeus’s work emerges in and “against a backdrop filled by men who were used to debates on theological questions and who even when the debate concerned questions of a different nature clothed their arguments in a theological form” (Stearn 1959: 4). This latent theological tendency is a testament to the lingering theocentric paradigm which continued and continues to infect the assumptive logics of scientific practice today. For once Man had found its rightful place in nature, this Mammalia , specifically identified as homo sapiens —or the knowing Man—was theo-scientifically imagined to be hierarchically transfixed as a kind of philosopher king of the animal kingdom. Linnaeus’s first classificatory system of the Human species-being followed in the footsteps of his conceptual predecessor, Francois Bernier; and Linnaeus identified four distinct human varieties: the white European, the red American, the tawny Asian, and the black African (Wille 2015). Out of the crisis of the eighteenth century’s theocentric transformation into a ratiocentric paradigm emerged an increasingly biocentric elaboration, Lin- naeus’s homo sapiens , constituted as it was under the new category of Mammalia , introduced a radical reconstruction of the field of science, and though his specific placement of the Human alongside the term Primate encountered some resistance, the term Mammalia “gained almost immediate acceptance.” (Schiebinger 2004: 46). Mammalia stems from the Latin mammae , meaning “of the breast.” The premise of Linnaeus’s argument, that he was sure no critic could refute, was that “every man born of women must admit that he was nourished by his mother’s milk” (45). This argument, however, was founded upon the logic of Linnaeus’s scientific investigation pivoting upon a historical imaginary and materialist representations that produced “the notion that woman—lacking male perfections of mind and body—resides nearer the beast” (55). This “nearness to the beast” makes absent the “beast” of the Black maternal which becomes the sublime condition conditioning the possibility for the generation of onto-ethico-epistemologically determined categories of classification that auto-institute themselves as if they were the only Real available. Linnaeus’s central thematic “of the breast” was rooted in his under- Consent Not to Be a (Human) Being 857 standing of nature and further, his political antipathy for the act of wet-nursing as “a crime against nature.” In Linnaeus’s formulation, it is only natural for a mother Mammal to mother their own. This is an essential element to the Mammal that therefore I am. A mother does not give their child away to be mothered by others, especially not others thought to be, as stated in the words of the eighteenth-century Scottish geographer John Pinkerton, “but one remove above a brute, in point of intellect” (Pinkerton 1812: 194). It is thus in this following sense that Sylvia Wynter’s demonic ground becomes “super-empirical” to that of the empiricism of Carl Linnaeus. As Zakiyyah Jackson summarizes, “neither the iconography of ‘the black female body’ nor its fleshly representationalist doubles are equivalent to it; rather, demonic ground is a sublime initiating absence that signals ontologizing racialization, sexuating domination, and violent gendered assignations, as well as the dense point of potential rupture” (2018: 621). For in contending with the history of Linnaeus’s empiricism, “the black female body” comes to be embedded in a chain of negative nominative associations ranging from “beast” to “brute” to “black female body.” All of which amounts to saying of her what Fanon said of her as well, namely, that science knows nothing about her (Fanon 2008: 157). George Cuvier’s Lectures on Comparative Anatomy and his Animal Kingdom , published at the beginning of the nineteenth century, expanded upon Linnaeus’s classificatory logic in order to generate his notion of the “laws of condition of existence,” which marked a pivotal moment in this burgeoning biological para- digm of the Human. Cuvier’s work on the “laws of conditions of existence” was an achievement which produced a regulation in the field of scientific representation that contributed to the paradigm of biological thought through the regulative capacity of Reason. 3 More importantly, this regulative capacity was authored in and through its productive capacity to provide a metaphysical representation for the species-being of various species under the auspices of the scientific gaze. Zoo- logical nomenclature functions to transform the scientific gaze into the violence of naming, a violence undergirding the metaphysics of all classificatory logics. Zoological nomenclature therefore exemplifies the absolutely material-semiotic nature of performing linguistic practices while simultaneously shedding light on the uniquely scientific capacity for ontologizing a species of being into Being. For rather than simply representing nature through language, zoological nomenclature taxonomizes a being into nature. The material-semiotic relationship between the linguistic practice of scientific naming and the material actant of a being that is named becomes intra-active. Following the logic of this preceding statement requires “a profound conceptual shift” (Barad 2003: 815). Denise Ferreira da Silva discusses how Cuvier’s contribution to thought, specifically on the genericity of the concept of “Life,” became foundational to the life sciences: “Because life, Cuvier teaches, ‘presupposes organization in general, and the life proper to each being presupposes the organization peculiar to that 858 John Gillespie Jr. being, just as the movement of the clock presupposes the clock’” (da Silva 2007: 103). This paradigm of elaboration contributed to a notion of universal Humanity conceptually grounded in mechanistic materialism, organic vitalism, the transpar- ency thesis of the Human, and an antagonism towards the Black as the anti-type Other to the very construction of the Human’s racial-sexual classificatory systems. For this reason, for example, Cuvier is notorious for his infamous dissection of the Hottentot Venus. As Londa Schiebinger states, “Cuvier’s now notorious memoir described the Hottentot Venus in remarkably unflattering terms. At every turn he found her physique and manner bestial” (2004: 171). Given the Dutch name Saartjie or the English name Sarah Baartman, scientific fetish mixed with scientific inquiry in and through the very explicit way in which Baartman’s genitalia served as a window into “the question of all questions,” namely, “the question of how to place humans in nature” (44). Thus, to her own dismay, Baartman functioned as part object of sexual entertainment, and part object of scientific investigation. For the scientific community had intrigue in what was then known as the Hottentot apron. Schiebinger states, “Naturalist hailed the ‘apron’ as a primitive vestige of Hottentot’s animal origin. Linnaeus reported finding it also in the female Homo troglodytes , his second and lowest species of human. . . . From its first sighting in the seventeenth century, the so-called Hottentot apron was pronounced a defor- mity—a departure from the European norm” (164). The search for the meaning of this “apron” constituted a fundamental way in which Cuvier and his crew of zoologist and physiologist turned Baartman’s black body into a “living laboratory” (Warren 2018: 115), even after the fact of her death. For though in the Spring of 1815, Baartman attempted to cover her genitals with a handkerchief in hopes of resisting the gift of knowledge that her flesh had been requested to give “the scientific community,” it nonetheless proved of no avail in the end. Baartman’s paradoxical attempt at ontological resistance did not appear to be recognized by the scientific gaze of the White Man. For despite her unwillingness to “be seen” in and through Cuvier’s lens of nomenclature, in the aftermath of her death, “her body was brought to the museum for further examination. Dissection of her apron—‘that extraordinary appendage which nature made a special attribute of her race’—was the first order of business” (Scheibinger 2004: 170). Cuvier’s philosophy of life as presented in his life’s work presents the concept of “Life” as an outcome of universal reason that would ultimately regulate the param- eters around the arrangement, differentiation, categorization, and specialization of the internal nature of all things. Cuvier’s invasion of the corpse of Baartman is coterminous with an understanding of the Human that exalts the Maxim of Life. For it is the ontological death of the Black, scientifically understood as an anti- Human being generally dishonored away from the category of Human being proper, which grounds the coherence of the true Human being founded and taxonomized into the biological sciences. The “law of conditions of existence” states that only Consent Not to Be a (Human) Being 859 those things which have Life meet the law of conditions of existence and that Life is that which organizes, essentializes, and ultimately permits the taxonomical categorization of the body of beings themselves. If, as Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston state in their work Objectivity that “it is fear that drives epistemology, including the definition of what counts as an epistemic vice or virtue” (2007: 49), then Homo scientificus can be said to discover the ethics of its curiosity for Life in the fear (and disgust) of the Black body, as the precondition of possibility for modern biology’s scientific inquiry. These works set the backdrop for Darwin’s revolutionary transformation of the field of science on new evolutionary grounds. Darwin’s ‘theory of evolution’ not only takes up the notion of Life as a regulating-principle productive of the very origin of all-things, but adds into the very “laws of conditions of existence” a neo-Malthusian description of the “struggle for existence.” Thus, it is impor- tant to note that, despite Cuvier’s influence on the trajectory of Darwin’s theory, Cuvier’s own objections to the pre-Darwinian ideas of evolution did not deter Darwin from expanding upon the scientific paradigm of his progenitors. In fact, what Thomas Kuhn is keen to note in regards to transformations in the scientific field of physical optics is of equal importance to the variegated debates around the multiple “evolutionary theories” of science at the time. He states, “Each of these corresponding schools derived strength from its relation to some particular metaphysic, and each emphasized, as paradigmatic observations, the particular cluster of optical phenomena that its own theory could do most to explain” (Kuhn 2012: 13). While the scientific milieu as previously described functions to provide an intellectual backdrop for the development of Darwin’s scientific theory of the Human, it was the political work of Thomas Malthus which contributed absolutely necessary conceptual categories to the coherence of Darwin’s definitive account. As Wynter describes it in “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?: Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future,” an interview with Black feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick, “Darwinism’s powerful, seductive force as a cosmogony, or origin narrative, is due to the fact that is the first in our human history to be not only part myth but also part natural science. In fact, this mutation—the part myth/part natural science workings of Darwinism—draws attention to Darwin’s powerful neo-Malthusian conceptual leap” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015: 35). For nature, now thought in accordance with the law of natural selection, only selects those naturally fit to survive, fit to go on, fit to withstand Darwin’s evolutionary spin on Thomas Malthus’s notion of natural scarcity. The outcome of this biological paradigm of thought is that homo scientificus comes to stand alone in being able to tell the tale of Humanity and the teleological formation and deformation of every other species-being. For though Kuhn himself argues that a major shift in Darwin’s evolutionary theories of biology was precisely the way in which it offered a “non- teleological theory” of nature, one in which natural selection is said to recognize 860 John Gillespie Jr. “no goal set either by God or nature” (Kuhn 2012: 171), it is the naturalization of unfavourability transposed upon the figure of Extinction which necessarily supernaturalizes the figure of Life into a Maxim. In other words, Darwin’s “law of natural selection” relies upon the orthodoxy of the “struggle for existence” as a Maxim of Life in order to build the conceptual grounds for what would eventually become the biocentric descriptive statement of the Human. Homo scientificus is written outside of this “struggle for existence”—not as a non-evolutionary object, not as a figure thought to be outside of the principle of natural selection, but rather as the evolutionary Subject par excellence. The expansiveness of this scientific paradigm allows one to understand that in the midst of scientific revolutions, there is always already a dialogic imagina- tion formed through the very recognition of oneself as being in conversation with another kind of intellectual capacity of which the Black is thought to be incapable of possessing. Largely inspired by the scientific milieu in which theories of animal generation and species mutation were not new, the notion of natural scarcity crystalizes the absolutely racial and sexual nature of natural selection by positioning the Black from within this struggle for existence at the position of “Symbolic death,” or “that of having been naturally dysselected and mastered by Malthusian natural scarcity” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015: 37). In doing so, an ostensibly secular and scientifically mythopoetic account of race, sexuality, and ontology can form a large part of Darwin’s account of evolutionary theory and the philosophical anthropology of the Human that its constructs. In this sense, Darwin continues the tradition of normal science in the West by safely placing post-Enlightenment Europe in the “sanctified universe of obligation” (Wynter 1994: 2), while writing the “savage races” as always already losers in the struggle for existence. Or, in Darwin’s own words from The Descent of Man : But all these breaks depend merely on the number of related forms which have become extinct. At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes . . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. (Darwin 2004: 201) Here, the Darwinian Imaginary becomes explicit, and a Darwinian prophecy of Black extinction is made real. It is the problematic of the categorical dishonor of the Black within Darwin’s classificatory logic which produces the coherence of this Darwinian prophecy. This general dishonor is the way in which the Black comes to exist as symbolic death within scientific discourse. This symbolic death legitimates the ethics of gratuitous violence and the epistemology of anti- Consent Not to Be a (Human) Being 861 Blackness. This Imaginary, recapitulated in Darwinian terms as the fact that “the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world,” is rooted sociogenically in the idea “of the genetic- racial inferiority of Black people to all others,” which “functions to enable our social hierarchies, including those of the rich and poor determined directly by the economic system, to be perceived as having been pre-determined by ‘that great crap game called life’” (Wynter 1994: 6). Thus the Darwinian Imaginary should neither be taken as a purely fictitious speculation nor as a too-bad-to- be-true eugenic prophecy. On the contrary, the Darwinian Imaginary points to the way in which the fictions of science function to produce a material semiosis which emanates from the anti-Black World as an immanence in the anti-Black World. Which is to say, scientific fictions become indexes for and instances of the real such that the real cannot be thought without the reality of its fictions, and the fictitious cannot be constructed without the immanence of a scientific construction of reality. The current paradigm of science still makes hegemonic recourse to Darwin’s foundational works and text. The normal science paradigm of the biological and biocentric life sciences today still respects Darwin as the father of their field. Therefore, the Darwinian Imaginary is totally wrapped up in our current conceptualization of truth, just as truth is absolutely permeated by Darwin’s imagination. Thomas Kuhn’s philosophical investment in relinquishing “the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientist and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth” (Kuhn 2012: 169) is a necessary but not sufficient component to any critically anti-philosophical philosophy of science. For Kuhnian illustrations of the scientific process of development still rely on the Darwinian Imaginary, or rather, “a process of evolution from primitive beginnings—a process whose successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature” (169). This image of refinement always necessarily finds its coherence in the derelict Other of the Black and primitive. The overdetermina- tion of the Blackened figure of the Primitive in the history and philosophy of science auto-institutes the empirical and the libidinal, the rational and the irrational, the philosophical and the anti-philosophical, the scientific and the pseudoscientific, as “term(s) of war,” whose “basic law” is the structure of antagonism. Wynter states, “By marking the mode of Desire—the desire of Life and of Aversion to Death—these structural oppositional codes function to orient the parameters of motivations/behaviors of the order” (1984: 27). The structural oppositionality of these codes find their fleshly embodiment in the onto-taxonomical account of the Human/Black antagonism. The underlying fictiveness of Western philosophy and science “in the context of our specific socio-human realities” (Wynter 1990: 364) positions the Black as the paradigmatic embodiment of the Primitive (on the road to extinction) and the Demonic (in a position of symbolic and ontological 862 John Gillespie Jr. death). An Afropessimist paradigmatic analysis of science exacerbates the anxiety of antagonism whereby this problem of demarcation coheres. Through an analysis of the density of scientific history, one can begin extend what Sylvia Wynter says about “the regime of truth” (356) within “our present purely secular definition of the human,” and begin “to move beyond this founding definition, not merely to another alternative one, nonconsciously put in place as our present definition, but rather to a frame of reference which parallels the ‘demonic models’ posited by physi- cists who seek to conceive of a vantage point outside the space-time orientation of the humuncular observer” (364). This onto-ethico-epistemological antagonism is such that the Black cannot resist this metaphysical trap even if they desired to do so. What, therefore, do we gain by consenting not to be a human being ? Nothing. In fact, it would seem as though, in doing so, we would have nothing to gain at all. Nothing but the end of the All itself. 2. Consent Not to Be a (Human) Being This essay has sought to unveil the way in which metaphysical violence gives form to the category of Humanness and the generally dishonored category of Blackness. Homo scientificus —as a generic form of Western scientific subjectiv- ity—contributes to the coherence of the scientific project in general through protracting the possibility of the Black ever obtaining gratuitous freedom from its violent universality. The paper has therefore argued that in addition to there being a fundamental antagonism between the figure of the Human and the fig- ure of the Black, there remains a conceptual incommensurability between these figures under the onto-ethico-epistemology of scientific Humanism. The reality of this incommensurability is made apparent through the meta-aporetic and the way in which the meta-aporetic produces incompatible and contradictory visions of what it means to be Human. For example, Sylvia Wynter’s understanding of the Human is separate from her understanding of Man, yet her descriptions of the Human still remain an issue for the incommensurable antagonism between Blackness and the Human as understood by Afropessimism. If Wynter can be taken as an authority in grounding an answer to the question of what it means to be Human, then the central problem of “being a Problem” versus “having a problem” re-emerges full frontal. Wynter’s very own evolutionary-biological answer to what a Human is does not circumvent Afropessimist concerns about the conceptual coherence of the Human, but in fact runs right into Wilderson’s critique of the concept of the Human and the syntax and grammar which gives it coherence. Wynter offers her own definition of the Human as homo narrans when she writes: The paleontologist Juan Luis Arsuaga proposes that the human is not only a languaging being but also a storytelling species. In my own terms, the hu- Consent Not to Be a (Human) Being 863 man is homo narrans . This means that as a species, our hybrid origins only emerge in the wake of what I have come to define over the last decade as the Third Event. The First and Second Events are the origin of the universe and the explosion of all forms of biological life, respectively. I identify the Third Event in Fanonian-adapted terms as the origin of the human as a hybrid-auto- instituting-languaging-storytelling species: bios/mythoi. The Third Event is defined by the singularity of the co-evolution of the human brain with—and, unlike those of all the other primates, with it alone —the emergent faculties of language, storytelling. (Wynter and McKittrick 2015: 25) In other words, what constitutes the Human as Human for Wynter is the fact that beside our specific phylogeny and experiential ontogeny is the capacity to construct a sociogenic principle through language and storytelling. For Wynter, there is the sociogenic, the sociogenic principle, and the “Science of the Word.” Three different levels of enunciation which revolve around similar yet different conceptual issues. The sociogenic is this Third-Event in Fanonian-adapted terms, the capacity to story-tell. It is a capacity, evolutionarily acquired by a particular hominid species which evolved on a 3.5-billion-year-old planet around 77,000 years ago as evidenced by recent archaeological findings in Blombos Cave in South Africa. For as Wynter writes, “Materially and symbolically . . . Blombos Cave reveals the ritual-initiatory transformation of the biologically born indi- vidual subject into that of a now fictively-chartered and encoded, thereby, hybrid, bios/mythos autopoietic form of symbolic life” (68). Or rather, in material and discursive terms, the archaeological unveiling of Blombos Cave signifies the birth of the Human as the storytelling animal. This constitutes for Wynter, in Fanonian-adapted terms, the Third Major Event of cosmic history. This scientific selectivity allows Wynter to wield the symbolic authority of science as a field of knowledge production in order to suture her Fanonian-adapted conception of the Human to an array of scientific discourses and ideas that precede and exceed him. In this sense, even if Wynter’s conception of the Human is freed from homo economicus , it is still tied up in homo scientificus . In other words, as long as the notion of the Human retains a hominid , and as long as the notion of the hominid maintains a shadow of the concept that “the biological cycle begins with the black [wo]man” (Fanon 2008: 139), it may always maintain an anti-Black scientificus Frank Wilderson’s take on language and