Essay

Nothing Matters
Black Death, Repetition, and an Ethics
of Anguish

Joseph R. Winters
Duke University, Durham, USA
“Don’t speak to me of living … death is my pulse”—Sonia Sanchez

How does one “make sense” of the present when the present shatters one’s
sense-making capacities and desires? How do you affirm life when social life is
always parasitic and vampiric on social death and those populations associated with
disorder and unruly matter? How do I write in the dis/comfort of my (or the bank’s)
home in the midst of haunting numbers and figures—230,000 and more taken
from COVID in the United States and more than 1 million worldwide; tens of mil-
lions of Americans unemployed and awaiting the next wave of evictions; thousands
of migrants left stranded in the Mediterranean Sea; 7 shots to the back of Jacob
Blake; 8 minutes and 46 seconds before the last gasp of George Floyd; 0 knocks
before Breonna Taylor was shot 5 times by 5–0? Why would someone pretend
to think and write coherently in a moment of crisis? And yet, as Walter Benjamin
suggests, isn’t the state of emergency the norm for “traditions of the oppressed,” for
those who have been plunged from the sphere of recognition and protection?
I write in the break, occasionally in the interrogative, from both a scene of
subjection (in Saidiya Hartman’s words) and a position of privilege. I write to
keep from crying/my writing is a cry. I mourn, therefore I am … not. Riffing on

American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 1–4

Audre Lorde, I write as a practice of survival and a preparation for the death that
is always permeating life.
Repetition is a strange phenomenon. On the one hand, it seems like the most
basic rule that governs life and processes of becoming. The fact of repetition includes,
among other things, imitation and desire, patterns in nature, and the cultivation of
habits and dispositions. But as Kierkegaard’s eponymous work shows us, repetition,
or the replication of some act or event, is never quite complete and always involves a
difference, a supplement, a subtraction, an opening. Moreover, some events, includ-
ing traumatic encounters, require reiteration before they can be assimilated into
some kind of framework of meaning and signification. In the case of trauma, one’s
sense of time and sequence becomes confused; the disruptive event is both prior to
and (experienced) after the event is relived in fragments and shards that one tries to
gather and organize, for the sake of appearing like a coherent subject.
Repetition and trauma are pertinent to rituals of anti-black violence and the
practices of refusal embodied by BLM (Black Lives Matter) and the broader
Movement for Black Lives. Think for instance of the everydayness of anticipating
another State-enabled killing or maiming of a black person … or a co-conspirator
that chose to identify with volatile black flesh. And then there is the issue of the
backlog and buildup of black death that has yet to be revealed, that is being cov-
ered up and covered over by police departments and local municipalities. I shud-
der every time I wake up; sleep might be the cousin of death but being awake/
woke can be terrifying. Take a second to reflect on the ways in which images of
black death and anguish get circulated and re-tweeted to generate support for
racial justice and police defunding endeavors. Reliving death is the necessary
condition of possibility for recognition and justice. How does one escape becom-
ing numb and nonchalant in the face of unending snapshots and simulacra of
gratuitous violence? How does one grieve those who expose the limits of grieva-
bility at a moment when affirming black life has become a brand and a form of
symbolic capital for neoliberal institutions and corporations?
Another kind of repetition happens when activists honor the dead, when
those marching and protesting yell “Say Her Name” or carry signs with names of
those who have been erased by State violence. To reiterate the name of Breonna
Taylor or Sandra Bland, for instance, is a reminder that all deaths are not con-
sidered equal, that BLM has been able to generate more support when the lives
and deaths of cis black men have been prioritized—by the media and the broader
social world—over black women, transgender subjects, trans sex workers, etc.
Refusing to stop saying the names of victims of State and extra-judicial repres-
sion compels us to reflect on the complexities of naming. On the one hand, the
name indicates particularity and distinction; it enables others to address you as
a discrete being in the world. Yet the name comes from elsewhere; it precedes
Joseph Winters 3

the individual’s coming into the world and is one of the preconditions for subject
formation and subjection (what Althusser called interpellation). In addition, the
name outlives individuals. The name lives on even as the individual’s flesh has
taken new form, beyond personhood. To re-say the name of Breonna Taylor is to
participate in a ritual of conjuring and mourning, to be a witness to the afterlife
of black death. Mourning exists at the edge of being and non-being, presence
and absence. Mourning occurs within the remains and the hauntings. And the
insistence on “saying her name,” not unlike performing a die-in, becomes a way
to experience the intimacy between (social) death and life.
And with the repetition of names and slogans, like “black” and “life” and
“matter,” one has to be prepared for differentiation, splitting, and breaks and
ruptures. There is a difference, and a connection, between Amazon publicly
supporting BLM while it profits from the COVID crisis and affirming black life
while being tear gassed, pepper sprayed, hit with rubber bullets, and snatched up
by federal agents. There is a difference between the tenured academic writing
about the antagonism between blackness and the law and activists putting their
bodies on the line in the name of imagining a radical alternative to the world
as we know it. There is a gap between NBA players striking for several days as
these players are increasingly confronted by the tension and overlap between
Negrophilia and Negrophobia (Lebron James is superhuman and so was Michael
Brown according to officer Wilson) and black fast food workers in Durham, NC
striking for hazard pay and a living wage. And perhaps, following Fred Moten and
Nahum Chandler, we need to acknowledge a distinction between blackness and
black people. Blackness names a tumultuous movement of energy that both ani-
mates and exceeds the law; blackness is what is prior to and what hangs alongside
the thrust for order and coherence. Because order misrecognizes its derivative
relationship to tumult and unrest, the operations of law must treat blackness as
excess and lack, as that which needs to be suppressed to reproduce the order-
ing of things. As Moten suggests, black people might have an “underprivileged”
relationship to blackness but a kind of blackening can cut across racial distinc-
tions and classifications. On the flip side, black people necessarily get attached
to, and internalize, norms and projects that are organized against blackness.
Consequently, when we see black agents of the State assaulting black and non-
black activists, this might give us pause but should not be a surprise.
To broach contemporary black studies in the context of BLM is to begin a dia-
logue, to think at the intersection of the University and the proverbial street. Several
scholars have already written extensive and brilliant works on BLM. Here I think of
the works of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Barbara Ransby, authors who provide the
historical and political background of BLM. For these authors, it is important that
BLM is a black feminist and queer organization informed by intersectional logics. It
4 American Religion 2:1

is also important to underscore how BLM is inspired by (and repeats) previous forms
of grassroots-style activism, such as prison abolition movements and organizations
that resist violence against women of color. Rima Vesely-Flad has recently thought
about the ways BLM exposes and refuses a legacy of associating black people with
dirt and contamination. Following her reinterpretation of Mary Douglas, the gen-
eral quest for purity is dangerous for those marked as matter out of place.
Reflecting on the political and religious implications of BLM forces one to con-
front a series of haunting questions: Does black life matter? What is the relation-
ship between blackness and social life? Does the health and life of the social order
depend on anti-blackness? These are the kinds of questions that Calvin Warren asks
in his work. For Warren, the phrase “black lives matter” betrays a horrifying abyss
at the heart of the all too familiar declaration. The assumption in the phrase is that
human beings possess ultimate value and that black people, as humans, should be
recognized as valuable. But Warren contests the implicit syllogism and the assump-
tion that the being of the human can include blackness. On his reading, blackness
has to be included within the sphere of the human only in order to give form to the
nothing that subtends being. Black people have been given the burden to embody
the void at the center of the human being, a position that provides a kind of buffer
and prop for the proper human. A sense of existential security relies on terrifying
endeavors to contain those bodies that have come to signify terror and non-being.
Warren’s fascinating analysis places a primacy on interrogating the non-
relationship between blackness and mattering, where “matter” denotes human
value and significance. But we know that matter also refers to the most basic sub-
stance and composition of the universe; dark matter is that stuff that is difficult
to observe and measure even if it is essential to the movements and becomings
within the universe. Perhaps black mattering reminds us of unruly and undetect-
able interactions, relationships, and modes of sociality. Perhaps linking black life
to matter is to acknowledge with Lauryn Hill and D’Angelo that “nothing even
matters”; to pursue with Denise Da Silva the nothing, that is everything, that
exceeds violent equations and racial arithmetics.
The use and repetition of the “perhaps” is intentional. Among other possi-
bilities, it cuts between any strong opposition between optimism and pessimism,
between black life and social death. The cut is both a wound and an opening;
this cut gestures toward an ethics of anguish. Anguish is both melancholic and
ecstatic, kinetic and pessimistic, unhopeful and not hopeless. Anguish is deeply
interior and profoundly political (especially when it questions the accepted terms
and conditions of politics). Anguish might be called a spiritual virtue but it is not
primarily directed toward the good. Anguish is motivated by the possibility of
incoherence and dissolution…
“I don’t believe in dying, though I too shall die”—Sonia Sanchez
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