1AC---Fear of Death---Semis---CEDA

1AC---New
The fear of death produces necropolitical and biopolitical regimes of death through
presumed ontological necessity---instead we need a communal ethics of moving well
together, formed through habit, not abstraction.
Thomas Nail 20. Thomas Nail is Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Denver. “5. The Ethics of Motion” in Lucretius II: An Ethics of Motion. Edinburgh University Press. 2020.
ISBN: 978 1 4744 6665 3.

The ethics of motion is an ethics of living and dying well together. The ethics of life, vitality, generativity,
animacy, and creativity is, by definition, limited to only a tiny fraction of nature and is thus
fundamentally biocentric. Life, for Lucretius, however, is made of inorganic dead flows of matter and
lives only through entropic decay. But his material and kinetic ethics is not merely an inversion of the
bioethics and biopolitics of most other ethical and normative theories. Lucretius is quite clear
throughout Book III that the mere inversion of bioethics and biopolitics entails necroethics and
thanatopolitics. In order to preserve the lives of some, others are systematically dominated,
destroyed, colonised, enslaved, and their land and wealth accumulated by those wanting to live longer,
more, or better. The quest for life is identical with the production and management of regimes of
death.1

Lucretius’ inversion of the ethics and politics of life, however, does not result in merely valorising death
over life but rather in rejecting the whole binary opposition itself. Life and death are historical, ethical,
and political divisions in the entropic movement of matter. Matter flows, but in moving it creates new
life and passes away or dies at the same time. There is no ontological necessity to conceptually abstract
one part of this process from the other as if they were discrete, static states, or substances or be valued
or devalued. Nature does not valorise life over death or death over life. There is only motion.

The argument of this chapter is that Lucretius’ ethics of motion offers a critique of three core unethical
practices that prevent our attempts to move well together. Lucretius provides us with three guiding
suggestions for how to avoid these barriers to ethical action. In other words, Lucretius does not provide
us with a normative theory of ‘the good’ but rather a description of the material conditions by which
matter (including living and non-living matters) can collectively decide to move well together.

Kinetic ethics is thus a kind of anti-ethics insofar as the desire for unchanging ethical values is itself
what is fundamentally unethical. The bioethical and biopolitical drive to preserve life and fix certain
values produces its opposite: the necropolitics of domination and killing. Lucretius’ solution is to show
that life and death are part of the same movement that must be managed together by all those affected.
There is no right or static answer to the question of the good – there are only practices that allow
people to collectively direct the processes of living and dying well together (as they understand it), and
those that stand in the way of this.
Nuclear weapons uniquely entrench and magnify this fear of death.
Frank Sauer 15. Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer at Bundeswehr University Munich, Germany.
“Revisiting Nuclear Non-Use” in Atomic Anxiety: Deterrence, Taboo and the Non-Use of U.S. Nuclear
Weapons. Palgrave Macmillan. 2015. ISBN: 978-1-137-53373-9.

Fear of death en masse as a collective experience

Because humankind learned about the fearful effect of using atomic bombs in 1945 and subsequently,
experiencing atomic anxiety is the emotional springboard of all beliefs that rule against using these
weapons , in short, atomic anxiety is the key underlying element of our thinking about nuclear
weapons and their use. I argue that a collectively experienced feeling of fear, the ‘Great Fear’ (Boyer,
1994 [1985], p. 14) of death en masse, containing deeply and widely felt uncertainties and grueling
worries about the survival of the entire human race – atomic anxiety for short – has been woven deeply
into the cultural fabric of modern society in a process that began immediately with humankind’s first
steps into the nuclear age.

After all, what is unique about nuclear weapons is how they drenched modern civilization in a culture
all their own, an ‘atomic culture’ (Zeman/Amundson, 2004; Szasz, 2012). Historic and cultural studies
such as By the Bomb’s Early Light by Paul Boyer (1994 [1985]), Life Under A Cloud by Allan M. Winkler
(1993) or Nuclear Fear by Spencer Weart (1988) argue this forcefully, plausibly and in great detail.
Numerous facets of atomic culture lend themselves to closer examination. Guy Oakes (1994), for
instance, analyzes the role of civil defense in U.S. Cold War culture (see also Masco, 2008). Kenneth D.
Rose (2001) focuses on the example of the fallout shelter. Peggy Rosenthal (1991) and Titus Constandina
(2004) analyze the mushroom cloud as a global icon. Anne Harrington de Santana (2009) suggests
thinking about nuclear weapons in terms of ‘fetish’ and the ‘fetishism of force’ they represent in
international politics, thus overriding the paradoxical problem that they produce immense amounts of
security and insecurity at the same time. Vincent Pouliot (2010) goes as far as arguing that nuclear
warheads have a symbolic life of their own. E.L. Doctorow (quoted in Gusterson, 1996, p. 1; 2004)
summed it all up like this: ‘The bomb first was our weapon. Then it became our diplomacy. Next it
became our economy. Now it’s become our culture. We’ve become the people of the bomb’.

The symbolic power and cultural status of nuclear weapons transcends the realm of military strategy.
Reconsidering them in this wider context means unhinging them from the comparably narrow context of
deterrence and also expanding on the notion of their being stigmatized devices garrisoned with a society
taboo by society. The aforementioned studies demonstrate the wider impact of nuclear weapons by
exposing the hope initially connected to them on the one hand, the hope for finally ending all wars and
progressing toward the era of world government – the hope of the ‘nuclear one worlders’. However, on
the other hand this literature reveals ‘[h]ow quickly Americans began to articulate [ fear], [ ... ] bone-
deep fear [ ... ], primal fear of extinction’ right at the dawn of the nuclear age (Boyer, 1994 [1985], pp.
15, original emphasis). As the famous American journalist and opinion molder Edward R. Murrow put it
in his radio program on August 12, 1945, ‘Seldom if ever has a war ended leaving victors with such a
sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and the survival is not
assured’ (quoted in Hunner, 2004, p. 38). This is what I focus on here. And while there can probably be
made a case for atomic anxiety pervading all societies, I will concentrate on the postwar U.S. to develop
my argument about the experience of atomic anxiety further.
Specific knowledge in the U.S. about the gruesome effects on the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
was confined to a small circle of decision-makers and scientists at the beginning. And by ‘carefully
stagemanaging’ (Boyer, 1994 [1985], p. 187) the media coverage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S.
military went to great lengths immediately after the dropping of the bombs not to let accounts or
images of destruction and suffering slip out into the general public (Weart, 1988, pp. 236–237;
Gusterson, 2009; 2004, pp. 64, 68). However, with President Truman’s public statement on August 6
about the bombing of Hiroshima, wide public awareness of the existence of the atomic bomb developed
(I will return to this watershed moment). ‘“For all we know, we have created a Frankenstein”’, H.V.
Kaltenborn (quoted in Weart, 1988, pp. 104–105), a famous NBC radio pundit, concluded that day,
setting the tone for the public reaction and the upcoming avalanche of radio commentaries and
editorials. In the days that followed, a ‘dense cloud of fear’ (Boyer, 1994 [1985], p. 29) sank on people’s
minds. Aptly, four days after the Japanese surrender, Norman Cousins (quoted in Boyer, 1994 [1985], p.
8; cf. Oakes, 1994, pp. 43–44) wrote, ‘“Whatever elation there is in the world today, it severely
tempered by a primitive fear, the fear of the unknown, the fear of forces man can neither channel nor
comprehend. This fear is not new; in its classical form it is the fear of irrational death. But overnight it
has become intensified, magnified. It has burst out of the subconscious and into the conscious, filling
the mind with primordial apprehension”’.

That entrenchment transmogrifies necropolitics into nuclear necropolitics, a form of

fear that encompasses past, present and future to transform the species itself from
humans to nuclear subjects.
Gabriele Schwab 20. Distinguished professor at the University of California, Irvine. She holds
appointments in the departments of comparative literature, anthropology, English, and European
languages and studies. She received a PhD in literary studies from the University of Constance and a PhD
in psychoanalysis from the New Center of Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. “Introduction: Why Nuclear
Necropolitics Today?” in Radioactive Ghosts. University of Minnesota Press. https://www-jstor-
org.proxy.library.emory.edu/stable/10.5749/j.ctv182jtjg

Mbembe details the ways in which necropolitical sovereignty aims at “the generalized
instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and
populations.”67 Nuclear necropolitics, as I understand it here, extends this sovereignty to target human
bodies for killing in nuclear wars or to sacrifice them for the extraction of uranium, the manufacture of
nuclear weapons, secret radiation experiments, pervasive radioactive contamination, or even covert
political assassinations. Inextricable from the interests of neoliberal global capitalism and its modes of
instrumentalization, as well as its more specific investment in nuclear power, nuclear politics is thus
obviously deeply involved in the work of death. While the large-scale material effects of nuclearism
operate on a transhuman, geological timescale, such effects are also transgenerational, as nuclear
destruction encompasses damage to biological reproductive capacities and genetic heredity. This means
that, beyond killing instantly, or slowly through radiation sickness or cancers, nuclear weapons also
threaten long-term survival at the most basic material level, that is, the genetic makeup of organic life.
In addition, the psychic transgenerational effects include a pervasive, if often unconscious, nuclear
fear, a fear linked to what I call nuclear necropolitics’ haunting from the future. In contrast to the
transgenerational trauma caused by traditional war, where the trauma originates in a past violent
history, transgenerational nuclear trauma encompasses past, present, and future. People live with the
knowledge not only of the threat of future nuclear attacks but also of the devastating effects of nuclear
contamination that extend over many generations into the distant future.

Nuclear necropolitics thus emerges from a particular negation of nature that by far exceeds the
Hegelian reduction of nature to human needs. By splitting the atom—that is, the smallest constituent
unit of matter—to release unfathomable energies of destruction, humans have irreversibly altered the
entire planet and its atmosphere. While humans have throughout history created their world by
transforming nature, the violence entailed in transmogrifying the atom to create a nuclear world
simultaneously transforms the very parameters of life and death. If we follow Hegel’s claim that the
human being becomes a subject in the struggle and work through which he or she confronts the
inevitability of death, we might similarly claim that, by confronting human beings with the possibility
that they might become the agents of the ultimate death of planetary life, nuclear politics
transforms the human species itself. As the only species that arrogates nuclear power, human
beings are turned into nuclear subjects. In the aftermath of this transformation, all life, including
psychic life, is subjugated to nuclear necropower. This is true even though this subjugation often
operates only at an unconscious level. Moreover, the knowledge of a possible annihilation of planetary
life as an effect of human action manifests as a psychopolitical reality that shapes humans even if it
were never to happen. Because we, as the generations that inaugurated the nuclear age by inventing
the technology capable of such destruction, possess the knowledge that human-induced extinction of
planetary life is a possibility, subjectivity will always bear traces of the nuclear. Such knowledge will
forever shape psychic life and burden humans with a hitherto unimaginable responsibility for the
destiny not only of their own species but of other species as well. In this respect, the boundaries of
subjectivity will henceforth necessarily also encompass the boundaries of other forms of planetary
existence. (I unfold the implications of this claim in chapter 8.

This relation of fear to death is the basis for all Western metaphysical abstraction
because we imagine death as negative---that explains the long history of multitudes of
violence and hatred.
Thomas Nail 20. Thomas Nail is a distinguished Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Denver. “Introduction” in Lucretius II: An Ethics of Motion. Edinburgh University Press. 2020. ISBN: 978 1
4744 6665 3.

By privileging life, accumulation, conservation, and utility, capitalism devalorises and destroys
everything it associates with death, expenditure, reciprocity, and non-useful waste. Hence, we have
witnessed a long history of ecocide, indigenous genocide, slavery, patriarchy, forced migration, and
biopolitics. Lucretius gave us the basic ontological and ethical diagnostic of this problem light-years
ahead of his time.

The fear of death motivates all manner of metaphysical values and idealisms because we think death is a
negativity or lack. We think that death and matter are inert and passive. The Western tradition fears
nothing more than becoming ‘nothing’, and has invented all kinds of ideas to try and escape this fate (God, the soul,
reason, and capitalism). This fear of death is also connected to the Western tradition’s deep-seated hatred of matter and
motion in all their manifestations (women, racial others, the poor, animals, nature, queer desires ).6
Hence, the increasing importance of recovering a new materialist and kinetic ethics today.

Multiple impacts interpersonally, communally, and macropolitically:

A---Will to Supremacy---the Western fear of death grounds egohood so all power
becomes power to deny mortality.
James Rowe 23. Associate Professor of environmental studies and cultural, social, and political thought
at the University of Victoria. His interdisciplinary research program is motivated by a desire to
understand and strengthen social movements working toward social and ecological justice. “The Will to
Supremacy” in Radical Mindfulness: Why Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital. Set to be
published in October, 2023. Taylor & Francis Group.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003406181/radical-mindfulness-james-rowe

To cope with these subcutaneous and often subconscious pulses of fear and uncertainty, we pursue a
reliable and compensatory counterforce, which shores up the autonomous self and the sense of control
it provides. If we can exist as discrete beings bounded from the unpredictability of the world, then that
is the first step toward exerting further control on that world, bringing it to heel . “We would like to
possess our world,” writes Trungpa, “and so we act in such a way that whatever we see around us is
completely in order, according to our desire to maintain the security of ‘me,’ ‘myself’—which is
egohood.”39

The pulse of energy I’m calling “the will to supremacy” is alive in our first graspings for the self, which
then become a reliable staging ground for it. This is to say that what King calls the drum major instinct
and what I am calling the will to supremacy are preconditions for and products of the fictive self. It’s
hard to imagine effectively undoing the will to supremacy without also undoing the myth of the
bounded self that it feeds into and helps reinforce. In his book Buddhism and Political Theory, Matthew
Moore argues that Nietzsche’s counsel to persist in the illusion of a unified self “injects resentment
against existence back into his theory.”40 “Pretending that the world is different than it really is,”
continues Moore, “because we cannot accept the reality, is the root of ressentiment.”41 And as
Nietzsche himself helps us understand, existential resentment is an energetic pulse that can reinforce
dominative impulses, feeding ignoble behavior.

Figure 2.1 represents my argument’s basic flow. I begin with Trungpa’s Buddhist assumption that basic
anxiety (existential fear) is unavoidable for fragile human beings living on this vast planet, which is
spinning in an even vaster and more mysterious cosmos. Basic anxiety includes a cluster of related
fears (uncertainty, the unknown, fallibility), but I concur with Trungpa’s former student Pema Chödrön
that death is “the most fundamental of all fears.”42 Without cultural resources for
metabolizing our fear, it is easy for anxieties to settle into patterns of felt belittlement and
inadequacy. Recall that Hegel called death “the absolute master,” equating finitude with enslavement.
Following along the circuit depicted in Figure 2.1, feelings of belittlement and inadequacy in the face of
a vulnerable and uncertain existence easily morph into a dripping resentment toward the seeming
shit show we’ve been born into. We are fragile and finite beings bossed around by hunger, the weather,
our bladders, by time, and by death, the absolute master.

We compensate for our felt inadequacy and servility by imposing ourselves on the natural world and
other people to exert the control we feel is fundamentally lacking from our basic existence. According
to anthropologist Ernest Becker, a primary influence for the terror management theorists covered in
Chapter 5,

all power, is in essence power to deny mortality. Either that or it is not real power
at all, not ultimate power, not the power that [human]kind is really obsessed with. Power means
power to increase oneself, to change one’s natural situation from one of smallness,
helplessness, finitude, to one of bigness, control, durability, importance.43

This is a fine description of how uninterrupted, subconscious feelings of existential inadequacy and
resentment shape a will to supremacy.

I think it’s important to see the continuities between a will to supremacy— which can sound
exceptional, the preserve of “other people”—and the fiction of the unified self that so many of us
operate from, because they clarify how close at hand dominative impulses can be. This plays out
politically in systemic injustices such as white supremacy but also in the everyday narcissisms named by
King that strain relationships, communities, and social movements. For example, a growing number of
critics such as adrienne maree brown, Sarah Schulman, Olúfẹ́ mi O. Táíwò, Catherine Liu, and Frances
Lee have raised concerns about the corrosive effects of call-out culture on the left, where often
discursive missteps by social movement participants come to consume considerable activist attention,
distracting from the vital structural transformations that are the ultimate movement goals.44 These
critics do not deny the importance of accountability, and challenging comrades to be better, but there
is a growing consensus that a drum major instinct or will to supremacy is lurking behind the collective
enthusiasm for punishment that is making social movements harder places to be.

Schulman, Táíwò, and brown all point to the role of trauma in shaping a hyperjudgmental and punitive
activist outlook. Indeed, Schulman proposes deep similarities between the behaviors of those with
unresolved trauma and those animated by “supremacy ideology.”45 “My conclusion,” she writes, “from
this experience of noticing the similarity of behavior between the projecting traumatized person and the
entitled self-aggrandizing supremacist person is that both need and want dominance in order to feel
comfortable.”46 For Schulman, this linkage makes sense, since so often a supremacist outlook is rooted
in unresolved trauma.

In Chapter 3, I engage with writer Resmaa Menakem’s argument that white supremacy is rooted in the
unmetabolized trauma of European-descended people, many of whom experienced brutal violence and
marginalization before crossing the Atlantic. A question that follows from Menakem’s analysis is, Why
were Europeans dominating and traumatizing one another before their violence was directed toward
Black and red bodies on other continents? In other words, is there an even deeper trauma that
continues to condition a will to supremacy for white-bodied people? For James Baldwin, that deeper
trauma is the ongoing force of existential fear and resentment—what psychiatrist and Buddhist writer
Mark Epstein calls the “trauma of everyday life.” For Epstein, “just being a person in this world brings
suffering because of how insignificant we feel and how impermanent we are.”47

Without cultural resources capable of transforming basic anxiety, inadequacy, and existential
resentment, we move through the world with large stores of dangerous fuel at the ready, fuel that
helped shape our very selves and that we easily burn through under the right circumstances,
contributing to structures of dominance, or engaging in everyday narcissisms that diminish our
chances of collectively undoing those structures.

B---White Supremacy----the fear of death is foundational from both a top-down and a

bottom-up level.
James Rowe 23. Associate Professor of environmental studies and cultural, social, and political thought
at the University of Victoria. His interdisciplinary research program is motivated by a desire to
understand and strengthen social movements working toward social and ecological justice. “White
Supremacy: James Baldwin on Death Denial and Whiteness” in Radical Mindfulness: Why Transforming
Fear of Death is Politically Vital. Set to be published in October, 2023. Taylor & Francis Group.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003406181/radical-mindfulness-james-rowe

Much critical whiteness scholarship has accompanied Baldwin down this psychological mine shaft,
harnessing insights from his first two stops. But Baldwin kept traveling, excavating powerful insights for
antiracist praxis and radical politics more generally. In this chapter, I shine a light on what Baldwin found
at the deepest levels of the white-supremacy disaster zone: mortal terror, a fantastical desire to escape
earthly finitude. For Baldwin, death denial was a powerful driver for not only white
supremacy but also other logics of superiority. In one of his most famous works, The Fire Next
Time, he wonders if
 the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our
lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques,
races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.9

The basic logic that Baldwin pursues is that belittlement in the face of death— what Hegel calls “the
absolute master”—can compel a compensatory will to supremacy for peoples lacking the cultural
resources to metabolize and transform existential fear.10 Unbearable feelings of being less-than in the
face of finitude are softened by the illusion of being more-than vis-à-vis various “others.” While Baldwin
consistently applies this analysis to white supremacy, he also mobilizes it to make sense of
heterosexism, and as the above quote suggests, he sees it as shaping most dominations.11 If Baldwin is
correct that death denial intensifies attachment to white supremacy (and other logics of superiority),
then that has significant implications for radical politics.

Political theory scholarship focused specifically on Baldwin has attended to his death-denial thesis.12
And yet, the practical implications of his existential explanation for white supremacy have not been
fleshed out in the literature. For example, in his recent book Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and
Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, Eddie Glaude Jr. quotes Baldwin’s death-denial thesis from The Fire
Next Time and deploys existential analysis to note how “changes in laws, no matter how necessary, will
never be sufficient to produce a healthier society. Only addressing the deeper fears can accomplish
that.”13 And yet, strategies capable of addressing these “deeper fears” are not addressed . I seek to
build on important Baldwin scholarship by Glaude Jr. and others by fleshing out some of the practical
implications of Baldwin’s death-denial thesis.

While Baldwin was not focused on embodiment practices like meditation and ritual, I argue that his
writings provide support for including them into existing social movements because of their ability to
transform deeply embodied and often subconscious fears. I begin by unpacking Baldwin’s existential
explanation for persistent attachments to white supremacy among many Americans. Next, I show how
Baldwin’s oft-overlooked death-denial thesis can support the goals of critical whiteness studies—
particularly Roediger’s work on the wages of whiteness, a concept integral to the field and the antiracist
education it influenced.14 Finally, I investigate the practical implications of Baldwin’s analysis for
antiracist praxis and radical politics more generally.

Baldwin’s Existential Explanation for White Supremacy

In Baldwin’s work, the existential and the political are fundamentally intertwined. Human societies are
shaped and reshaped in response to inescapable existential realities such as suffering, love, and
death.15 Indeed, for Baldwin, “the entire purpose of society is to create a bulwark against the inner and
the outer chaos, literally, in order to make life bearable and to keep the human race alive.”16 How
different cultures approach human experiences such as love and death has a profound effect on the
resulting social order they produce. “The political institutions of any nation,” writes Baldwin, “are always
menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of the nation.”17

In Baldwin’s experience, the displacement of white people’s pain (existential and otherwise) onto Black
Americans, the conjuring of compensatory myths of supremacy with intense material effects, was
common from Birmingham to Los Angeles.18 Whether in the American North or the South, or among
the wealthy or poor, people betrayed a deluded attachment to whiteness, or, from his perspective,
“assumed I would pay their dues for them.”19
C---Male Supremacy---it’s the ‘rock bottom’ explanation for the continuation of
patriarchal logics.
James Rowe 23. Associate Professor of environmental studies and cultural, social, and political thought
at the University of Victoria. His interdisciplinary research program is motivated by a desire to
understand and strengthen social movements working toward social and ecological justice. “Male
Supremacy: Rita Gross and Hsiao-Lan Hu’s Buddhist Feminism” in Radical Mindfulness: Why
Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital. Set to be published in October, 2023. Taylor & Francis
Group. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003406181/radical-mindfulness-james-
rowe

Because Trungpa did not prioritize the active undoing of male supremacy, patriarchal logics easily
seeped into his organism and shaped his identity and behavior . In Buddhism after Patriarchy, Rita
Gross shares a story of Trungpa introducing an element of Tibetan Buddhism typically undertaken by
men to his American students. He assumed that the precedent should continue in the United States.
“When women objected,” Gross recounts, “he acceded quite readily, but it had not occurred to him to
include women from the beginning.”52

Diana Mukpo shares a story of her husband trying to slap her during an argument early in their
marriage. When confronted, Trungpa responded that “this is just what Tibetans do.”53 Despite years of
advanced Buddhist practice, Trungpa was still deeply shaped by patriarchal conditioning. Trungpa’s
embodied male supremacy, and his unwillingness to actively counter patriarchal logics in the primary
organization he founded, contributed significantly to the crisis the organization finds itself in now.

Rita Gross (1943–2015) became a student of Trungpa’s in 1977. She thanks him in the acknowledgments
of Buddhism after Patriarchy—which was published in 1992, five years after his death—for being a
“brilliant, outrageous, and incredibly kind” teacher.54 Later, Gross became a student of Jetsun Khandro
Rinpoche, one of the few senior Tibetan Buddhist teachers who is a woman. In her many works on
Buddhist feminism, Gross does not often discuss Trungpa or Shambhala. She does share some stories of
casual and institutional sexism and notes how Trungpa’s “activities were problematic to many
women.”55 But while her works are focused on Buddhism more broadly, they can also help shed light
on the limitations of Trungpa’s liberation project.

Two key arguments she makes across her works are that (1) Buddhist praxis needs to be joined with
collective action that targets structural injustice and (2) that patriarchal patterns found within many
Buddhist communities are partly the product of an incomplete Buddhist praxis that regularly fails to
address itself to persistent attachments to gender identity, particularly male supremacy.

Gross identifies as a “Buddhist feminist” because she thinks that undoing patriarchal social relations
requires the existential change strategies associated with Buddhism, such as meditation, and the more
conventionally political strategies associated with feminism, such as collective action that targets
institutions. The primary puzzle that animates Gross’s work is the disconnect between core Buddhist
teachings that are nondiscriminatory and an institutional life that is historically male-dominated.
“Without exception,” writes Gross, “Buddhist teachings and teachers are insistent and consistent that at
the ultimate level, gender is irrelevant. Buddhism may be the only religion which makes this claim so
unambiguously and with such force.”56 And yet, Buddhist practice has been shaped by patriarchal social
relations. Gross sums up the puzzle this way: “There is an intolerable contradiction between view and
practice. To overcome that contradiction … It is important to mandate and institutionalize gender
equality, to build it into the very fabric of Buddhist life and institutions completely, in a thoroughgoing
fashion.”57

For Gross, Buddhist teachings on the Four Noble Truths do not automatically produce practitioners
attuned to the enduring force of male supremacy. One key reason for that is that patriarchal relations
have multiple drivers. “Rather than locating its causes and conditions in one factor, it is more adequate
to find the causes and conditions of patriarchy in a complex mix of economic, technological, social and
intellectual factors.”58 Like James Baldwin, Gross regularly oscillates between material and more
existential explanations for patriarchal relations. For example, near the end of A Garland of Feminist
Reflections, she names “material circumstances, technology, and medical knowledge of the times” as
the primary drivers of “historical male dominance.”59 And yet, at the beginning of that same book, she
argues that the “rock bottom” explanation for the persistence of patriarchal social relations “has to do
with how Buddhist psychology explains the formation and maintenance of conventional ego.”60
Likewise, in Buddhism after Patriarchy, she argues that the “the main cause of patriarchal social
arrangements and stereotypes has always been habitual patterns and egocentrism, even under
premodern conditions.”61

Gross never resolves this explanatory tension, a wise choice since the tension is likely irresolvable:
structural conditions and existential experiences shape each other. The aggregation of ego
attachments sediment into structural forces, but causation does not originate with existential
experience. There has never been some primordial moment absent of structural forces.
For example, when the Buddha started teaching in ancient India in the sixth century BCE, patriarchal
social relations were already heavily sedimented. And those relations were the product of
interpenetrating structural and existential forces.

Nuclear deterrence not only relies on the fear of death but actively exports it while
trying to pass it off as rationality.
Frank Sauer 15. Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer at Bundeswehr University Munich, Germany.
“Revisiting Nuclear Non-Use” in Atomic Anxiety: Deterrence, Taboo and the Non-Use of U.S. Nuclear
Weapons. Palgrave Macmillan. 2015. ISBN: 978-1-137-53373-9.

This central tenet – deterrence relying on fear – is frequently repeated throughout the entire body of
deterrence literature. But without facing the conceptual consequences of this, that is, what that basic
assumption of emotion being at the heart of the idea of deterrence implies for rationality in deterrence
theory, and by trying to fence in such issues by stating that while rationality is required, even a good
deal less than total rationality will do, rational deterrence theory ends up incoherent. By keeping
‘emotionality’ and ‘rationality’ fundamentally at odds with each other at the conceptual level, even
gradually softening the rationality assumption cannot eliminate the theory’s basic conceptual
inconsistency.

Consequently, I argue that rational deterrence theory fundamentally relies on human emotion and
utterly neglects it at the same time (just as deterrence theory claims to be ‘scientific’ while being
impossible to ‘prove’). The kernel of human emotion in deterrence was never adequately acknowledged
and fleshed out systematically in 70 years of developing a theoretical framework for rational deterrence,
not even during the critical third wave.
Against this background, the reason for why Waltz’s writings are influential for and at the same time out
of tune with rational deterrence theory becomes clearer. It is because his thinking is extremely
consequent in that regard. Drawing on a quote by another famous movie character, yet in stark contrast
to how Professor Groeteschele conceptualizes deterrence, I would describe Waltz as strictly endorsing a
‘Strangelovian’ notion of deterrence. After all, in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the ingenious Dr. Strangelove explains deterrence as ‘the
art of producing in the mind of the enemy ... the fear to attack’ (quoted in Lindley, 2001, p. 663, original
emphasis). And indeed, unimpressed by the preponderance of sophisticated rational deterrence models,
Waltz, too, simply and unequivocally states, ‘Deterrence does not depend on rationality. It depends on
fear’ (Waltz, 2003b, p. 154). 14 Furthermore, he inimitably insists that ‘[d]eterrence is not a theory’
(Waltz, 2003b, p. 154). Since ‘rational deterrence theory’ is neither a ‘theory’ nor ‘rational’, according to
Waltz, it all boils down to the practice of instilling angst, terror, and fear in the adversary. Waltz thinks
about deterrence along the same lines as the first-wave scholars such as Brodie did before the second
wave had ‘rationalized’, ‘formalized’ and ‘scientificated’ deterrence: namely as a primarily practical
enterprise. ‘[C]omplicated calculations are not needed, only a little common sense’, Waltz (2003b, p.
154) argues, pointing out that the existential fear of being put out of existence is enough to create the
result that is aspired to. So merely conceiving of deterrence as the art form of producing the feeling of
fear required to keep the enemy in check, the assumption of rationality, as already touched upon in the
passages about deterrence as a belief in Chapter 3, is explicitly exempt from Waltz’s notion of
deterrence. Moreover, along with it the conviction that the intellectual effort poured into ‘theorizing
deterrence’ qualifies the result as a ‘theory’ is dropped. Waltz dials down rationality even more than
concepts of bounded rationality or the sensible actor refinement do. The reason for Waltz’s concept of
rationality being so extremely thin is that even in his IR theory, it adds up to little more than the wish to
survive, a notion he only later and most reluctantly accepted ‘for convenience [to be] be called an
assumption of rationality’ (Waltz, 1986, p. 331). Regarding deterrence, however, this assumption
becomes even more crucial for Waltz’s thinking. After all, deterrence is about creating the fear
of death; hence, the primal need for survival is at the core of deterrence.
Thus:
“Empty handed I entered the world.
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going-
Two simple happenings
That got entangled.”1
as the United States
should disarm
its nuclear forces.
James Rowe 23. Associate Professor of environmental studies and cultural, social, and political thought
at the University of Victoria. His interdisciplinary research program is motivated by a desire to
understand and strengthen social movements working toward social and ecological justice. “The Will to
Supremacy” in Radical Mindfulness: Why Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital. Set to be

1
Kozan Ichikyo. 1360. „An Untitled Japanese Death Poem” https://terebess.hu/zen/mesterek/Death.pdf
published in October, 2023. Taylor & Francis Group.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003406181/radical-mindfulness-james-rowe

The ongoing-ness of “everyday trauma” is why Buddhist thinkers such as Trungpa present mind–body
practices like meditation as central rather than incidental to social change. Because energetic forces like
existential resentment and the will to supremacy can operate prior to intention, embodied practices like
meditation are designed to operate on both subconscious and conscious patterns. For Trungpa,
If you actually look, if you take your whole being apart and examine it, you find that you are genuine and good as you are. In fact, the whole of
existence is well constructed, so that there is very little room for mishaps of any kind. There are, of course, constant challenges, but the sense of
challenge is quite different from the … feeling that you are condemned to your world and your problems.51

We needn’t defend against reality. Meditation allows us to incrementally undo defensive ego
constructions and encounter ourselves and others (in our multitudes) with more acceptance and generosity.52
Experiences of basic anxiety give way to the embodiment of basic goodness. And, for Trungpa,

we can work with the rest of the world, on the basis of the goodness we discover in ourselves. Therefore, meditation practice is regarded as a good and
in fact excellent way to overcome warfare in the world: our own warfare as well as greater warfare.53

Figure 2.2 shows the

alternative affective circuit I’d like to see pursued in the Euro-Americas (one that I think matches John Mohawk’s
description of Haudenosaunee egalitarianism covered in Chapter 4). If, for example, you are born into a society that is cognizant of our
basic anxiety; has developed narratives to counter those feelings; and encourages mind–body practices like ritual, ceremony, or meditation to embody those
narratives, then a
different affective circuit is possible. Basic anxiety is transformed into acceptance of the
basic goodness and workability of earthly life, despite its finitude. This then helps shape experiences of gratitude
for the richness of earthly life and an affective orientation of generosity, which helps support more
equitable social relations.
Figures 2.1 and 2.2 are two-dimensional representations of a highly complex social world. It is possible, for example, to read Figure 2.1 as a straightforward highway
to hell and Figure 2.2 as a circuit leading directly to paradise. And yet, even those of us raised in death-denying
cultures, subconsciously
attached to the soother of autonomous and discreet selfhood, and who sometimes behave selfishly as a result, can
still regularly approach others with great kindness and generosity. Likewise, our imperfect selves can still
advocate for social policy that promotes equity across multiple axes of power.
As described in the introduction, I suspect that stirrings of my own will to supremacy were mercifully stopped from spilling out from under my skin and into the
world at key junctures, thanks to a parental commitment to equity and nondiscrimination. Education and cognitive arguments in favor of justice matter. And yet,
everyday narcissism and supremacist social relations also endure. My argument is that unmetabolized existential
fear, or basic anxiety,
provides endless fuel for wills to supremacy across multiple scales and axes of power, which is why
social and ecological injustice remain so persistent.
Arms control is the compartmentalization of atomic anxiety.
Frank Sauer 15. Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer at Bundeswehr University Munich, Germany.
“Revisiting Nuclear Non-Use” in Atomic Anxiety: Deterrence, Taboo and the Non-Use of U.S. Nuclear
Weapons. Palgrave Macmillan. 2015. ISBN: 978-1-137-53373-9.

A crystallization point of this development, that is, of atomic anxiety becoming embedded in the Cold
War and tied to the Soviet Union, presents itself with the term ‘disarmament’. The development
surrounding it sets in with Eisenhower leaving office. Already for Truman (1947) with his striving for
‘collective disarmament’ and attempts at ‘a concrete, practical proposal for disarmament’ (Truman,
1952), disappointment had eventually set in. After all, ‘until the Soviet Union accepts a sound
disarmament proposal, and joins in peaceful settlements, we have no choice except to build up our
defenses’, was the situation he had deplored (Truman, 1952). But still, ‘disarmament’ was a standing
term for Truman as well as his predecessor Eisenhower and to some extent Kennedy. Yet, eventually it
started to fade away from presidential language. In its place, the new concept ‘arms control’ – non-
existent in all the texts by Truman and Eisenhower under analysis (with the latter aiming to ‘control and
to reduce armaments’ [Eisenhower, 1953c] but never using ‘arms control’ as a standing, meaningful
term) takes over. Arms control made its first appearance with President Kennedy’s first State of the
Union address (Kennedy, 1961a; see also the American University commencement speech, Kennedy
1963b). And by the time of Johnson, the concept of disarmament had disappeared. None of the Johnson
material contains it as an isolated term. If disarmament was mentioned at all, it was done so in the new
formula ‘arms control and disarmament’ (Johnson, 1967; 1968). What is the significance of this change
and how can it be interpreted with atomic anxiety in mind?

Adjusting to anxiety: arms control

Arms control is of course pursued for a number of reasons. 22 But nuclear arms control during the era
of the superpower confrontation can be understood particularly well by analyzing it through the lens
of atomic anxiety.

Arms control provided the welcome effect of breaking down the enormity of the atomic threat into a
subset of political, technical and legal problems that were workable and manageable. No matter how
tedious and politically unnerving, arms control removed the overwhelming and intense urgency of
having either to choose ‘disarmament’ or face ‘doom’. Also, arms control curbed atomic anxiety by
enclosing it in the existing, down-to-earth and pragmatic framework of diplomacy and Realpolitik . After
all, from the perspective of arms control proponents, the initial, revolutionary attempts of breaking free
and leaving the existing international framework behind via some sort of world government – presented
as the only viable solution to the nuclear question by the ‘nuclear one worlders’ back in the day – had
ended in deadlock, paralysis and only more frightful superpower clashes. Hence the honorable but
fruitless hope for ultimate world peace was buried, settling for secondbest instead, allowing for the
diffuse and ominous nuclear shadow to be broken down into separate issues that specialists could then
tend to.

Arms control measures aim to regulate and stabilize the balanced deterrence relationship, 23 curbing
arms races and dangerous excesses by creating transparency, implementing verification measures and
ultimately, maybe, even infusing a level of trust and relaxation into the conflict. In comparison to the
early calls for either creating a world state or at least a nuclear monopoly at the UN or facing disaster,
arms control is a comparably sober enterprise. Interpreted as a type of emotion management,
arms control, with its manifold details and requirements for specialized knowledge and expertise, is
striking because it is fairly technical and arid. It engages experts in idiosyncratic debates over counting
rules and verification regimes, numbers of warheads and launchers, targeting doctrines and so on, but,
most importantly, it does so in professional language free of emotion.

In this way arms control helped put an end to deadlock and paralysis. Instead of opponents helplessly
having to endure an overwhelming anxiety, they were kept busy with compartmentalized technical,
legal and political aspects of the issue. From an emotional perspective this helped manage anxiety
because the scary problem was not only broken down into manageable parts but as a whole it also
seemed a little less frightening with every agreement reached, every verifiable treaty entering into
force. Consequently, arms control exchanged the grand but futile hope for utopia for the small yet
graspable hope of slowly but surely exerting more and more control over the atomic specter step-
bystep. In short, after the elusive atomic anxiety had been given a recognizable face in the form of the
Soviet Union, deterrence complemented by arms control offered a way for dealing with it through the
known means of diplomacy. It was the attempt to assert control over anxiety via the control of arms.
By introducing the metaphor of a ‘step-by-step’ process, the Kennedy presidency represented a sea
change in this development.

In his inauguration address, Kennedy (1961b) proclaimed, ‘Let both sides, for the first time, formulate
serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms – and bring the absolute power to
destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations’. And he, most interestingly when his
words are viewed through the lens of atomic anxiety, also stated, ‘Let us never negotiate out of fear. But
let us never fear to negotiate’.

But negotiation out of fear was exactly what arms control was about . After all, at that time the
widespread worries generated by the fallout from nuclear testing had refreshed atomic anxiety in the
mind of the public. And there were great worries about the further spread of nuclear weapons –
proliferation, an issue Kennedy was especially pessimistic about. And looking forward only one and a
half years, after the U.S. and the rest of humankind would have collectively experienced the intense jolt
of fear that was the Cuban Missile Crisis, it is even more obvious that negotiating out of fear started
during that era.

Invoking ‘world peace’ anew, ‘the most important topic on earth’, as Kennedy (1963b) argued during his
American University commencement ceremony speech, 24 his political reaction to the Cuban Missile
Crisis can be interpreted as an attempt to reformulate the old notion of world peace by tying it to the
new approach of arms control: ‘I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of universal peace
and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream’. Instead, ‘[l]et us focus instead on a more
practical, more attainable peace – based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual
evolution in human institutions – on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements’, on ‘first-step
measures of arms control, designed to limit the intensity of the arms race and to reduce the risks of
accidental war’. Kennedy’s commencement ceremony speech provides the prime example for emotion
management via arms control. To cut atomic anxiety down to size, he insisted ‘Our problems are
manmade – therefore, they can be solved by man’.
Positive feedback loops counter the fear of death at multiple levels---this provides
micropolitical, communal, and macropolitical metabolization of basic anxiety.
James Rowe 23. Associate Professor of environmental studies and cultural, social, and political thought
at the University of Victoria. His interdisciplinary research program is motivated by a desire to
understand and strengthen social movements working toward social and ecological justice. “The Will to
Supremacy” in Radical Mindfulness: Why Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital. Set to be
published in October, 2023. Taylor & Francis Group.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003406181/radical-mindfulness-james-rowe

Structural conditions and existential experiences are always shaping one another. There has never
been some primordial moment absent of structural forces (even if they are simply the contingencies of
climate, topography, and nearby resources and how they shaped community structure) that bear down
on human decision-making. And yet, basic anxiety is arguably always impinging on the present,
shaping human behavior if it isn’t met with an effective counterforce. Existential resentment and a
compensatory will to supremacy are major factors in shaping dominative structures. These
experiences that happen below the skin and out of sight can aggregate and sediment into structures.
And yet, causation is not unidirectional. Existential experience always happens in circumstances
already shaped by social structure, even if those structures are themselves partly shaped by past
sedimentations of subtle bodily responses to the drama of finitude.

Figures 2.1 and 2.2 were simplified to clarify the central and underappreciated role that existential fear
and resentment play in shaping the will to supremacy. Figure 2.3, however, is more complete because it
accounts for the constant interplay between existential experience and social structure. Because of this
mutual shaping, I propose a radical mindfulness that more thoroughly integrates mind–body practices
with social movements that target structural injustice.

The interlocking systems of white supremacy, capitalism, human supremacy, and patriarchy, for
example, continue to be shaped by aggregations of existential fear and resentment. But these systems
have developed institutional logics that need to be addressed through direct action, union
organizing, community organizing, and state action. Workers meditating more will not result in a pay
raise when wage suppression is institutionally incentivized because it helps powerful companies fulfill
their fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. These institutional logics need to be directly
targeted. And yet, as I argue in the remaining chapters of this book, until basic anxiety and the
compensatory will to supremacy are met with effective counterforces, they will be reliable fuel for
dominative systems along with the everyday narcissisms that strain interpersonal relationships,
community health, and social movement power.

Default to the best root causal analysis---presuming a clean break with the fear of
death plays back into its logic, but uprooting upstream drivers of injustice via root
cause analysis is necessary to equity across axes of power.
James Rowe 23. Associate Professor of environmental studies and cultural, social, and political thought
at the University of Victoria. His interdisciplinary research program is motivated by a desire to
understand and strengthen social movements working toward social and ecological justice. “The Will to
Supremacy” in Radical Mindfulness: Why Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital. Set to be
published in October 2023. Taylor & Francis Group.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003406181/radical-mindfulness-james-rowe

Figures 2.1 and 2.2 are two-dimensional representations of a highly complex social world. It is possible,
for example, to read Figure 2.1 as a straightforward highway to hell and Figure 2.2 as a circuit leading
directly to paradise. And yet, even those of us raised in death-denying cultures, subconsciously attached
to the soother of autonomous and discreet selfhood, and who sometimes behave selfishly as a result,
can still regularly approach others with great kindness and generosity. Likewise, our imperfect selves
can still advocate for social policy that promotes equity across multiple axes of power.

As described in the introduction, I suspect that stirrings of my own will to supremacy were mercifully
stopped from spilling out from under my skin and into the world at key junctures, thanks to a parental
commitment to equity and nondiscrimination. Education and cognitive arguments in favor of justice
matter. And yet, everyday narcissism and supremacist social relations also endure. My argument is
that unmetabolized existential fear, or basic anxiety, provides endless fuel for wills to supremacy
across multiple scales and axes of power, which is why social and ecological injustice remain so
persistent.

As I hope Figure 2.2 makes clear, I don’t think we all need to completely overcome our compensatory
ego attachments—achieving full and complete enlightenment—to see a significant reduction in
supremacist behavior and its sedimentation into structure. Buddhist thinkers such as Trungpa hold out
the promise of ego-dissolution, fully seeing and feeling our inseparability from the flow of
impermanence and embracing that reality instead of defending against it with compensatory
attachments. And yet, even in the Buddhist world, stories of whole enchilada enlightenment are not
commonplace (or fully empty enchilada, to complete the joke).

Teachers like Trungpa understood that helping people reduce their defenses against the world and
soften their egos—even if ego-dissolution never happens in their lifetime—would significantly reduce
individual and collective suffering. For me, the promise that Figure 2.2 represents is a significant
reduction in the affective fuel load that supremacist social relations draw from. Any reduction would
make a difference, and aiming for as much as possible—rather than insisting on perfection or nothing
—strikes me as the wisest path forward.

What different worlds become possible when human experiences of basic anxiety are met with
narratives and practices that help us cultivate deep appreciation—instead of resentment—for our
earthly existence? The Haudenosaunee world before colonization—which helped inspire Marxist visions
for classless society—is one example. And yet, it is unlikely that a culture absent of all hierarchies has
ever existed.

Arguably, this human imperfection is partly explained by the ongoing force of basic anxiety and the
ensuing circuit toward supremacy. I agree with William Connolly when he insists that “the possibility of
existential resentment … resides in any and every mortal, in every existential faith, in every ideological
doctrine, and in every political movement.”54 For similar reasons, Georges Bataille did not hold to the
prospect of a utopian future when the “the pursuit of rank and war” would be perfectly and
permanently transformed.55

Connolly and Bataille (and Baldwin, Trungpa, Becker, Mohawk, Hu, and other thinkers engaged in this
book) evince what we might call a “compost radicalism,” a commitment to deep and abiding social
transformation while simultaneously acknowledging the existential challenges that shape finite
human lives. Basic anxiety is an ongoing possibility for mortal beings. We can face and transform it with
affirmative cosmologies and mind–body practices. But like death, there will always be failure in
collective human life. Reason to mourn? Definitely. But also reason to keep organizing, to keep
fortifying the social soil with our failures so that the next round of growth is further enriched.

I fully support the radical search for “root causes.” But the fantasy of a “clean break” from an unjust
past implied by the uprooting metaphor—a fantasy that I continue to wrestle with myself—strikes me
as symptomatic of death denial, of the defensive desire to police strict boundaries between life–
death, self–other, past–future, perfect–fallen. What I am calling “compost radicalism” maintains a
commitment to locating upstream drivers of injustice. But it also recognizes that finitude, and the lively
forces of decomposition, mean that political Eden— or the end of history—is a risky and painful
fantasy it would be wise to let die.

Whiteness self-replicates through images of catastrophe---only accepting a risk of

catastrophe divorces whiteness from species death.
Mbembe 19 – research professor in history and politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economy Research at the University of the
Witwatersrand, Ph.D. in history at the University of Sorbonne, D.E.A. in political science at the Instituts d'études politiques [Achille,
Necropolitics, English Translation published 2019 by Duke University Press, DKP]

The question of belonging remains unanswered. Who is from here and who is not? Those who should not be
here: what are they doing in our home? How do we get rid of them? But what do “here” and “there” mean in a time in which worlds
are intertwining (being networked) but also reBalkanizing? If the desire for apartheid is indeed one of the characteristics of our times, then
actual Europe, for its part, will never again be as before—that is, monocolored. In other words, never again will there be (if it was ever the case)
a unique center of the world. From now on, the
world will be conjugated in the plural. It will be lived in the plural,
and absolutely nothing can be done to reverse this new condition, which is as irreversible as it is
irrevocable. One of the consequences of this new condition is the reactivation, among many, of the
fantasy of annihilation.
This fantasy is present in every context in which social forces tend to conceive the political as a struggle
to the death against unconditional enemies. Such struggle is then qualified as existential. It is a struggle
with no possibility of mutual recognition, and even less of reconciliation. It opposes distinct essences to one another, each
possessing a quasi-impenetrable substance, or one that only those who—under the combined laws of blood and soil—are said to belong to the
same species. Now political history as well as the history of thought and metaphysics in the West are
saturated with this problematic. The Jews, as we know, paid the price for it at the very heart of Europe.
Before that, Negroes and indigenous peoples, especially in the New World, were the first ones to
embark on this bloody Way of Sorrows.
This conception of the political is the almost natural outcome of Western metaphysics’ long-standing
obsession with, on the one hand, the question of Being and its supposed truth and, on the other, the
ontology of life. According to this myth, history is the unfolding of the essence of being. In Heideggerian terminology,
“being” is opposed to “beings.” Moreover, the West is held to be the decisive site of being because it alone is
deemed to have developed the capacity consisting in the experience of a recommencement. All else is
only beings. Only the West could have developed this capacity for recommencement, since it is allegedly the decisive site of being. That
is what makes it universal, its meanings being valid unconditionally, beyond all topographical specificity,
that is to say, in all places, in all times, independently of all language, all history, indeed of any condition
whatsoever. Concerning the history of being and the politics of being, it can thus be argued that the West has never properly
thought through its own finitude. It has always posited its own horizon of action as something
inevitable and absolute, and this horizon has always wished to be, by definition, planetary and
universal. The conception of the universal at issue here is not necessarily the equivalent of that which is valid for all humans as humans.
Neither is it synonymous with a broadening of my own horizons or a care for the conditions of my own finitude. The universal here is
the name given to the violence of the victors of wars that are, of course, conflicts of predation. These
predatory conflicts are also and above all ontohistorical conflicts, since in them a history—in truth, a
destiny—is played out.
Pushed to its logical conclusion, the fantasy of annihilation or destruction envisions not only the
blowing up of the planet but also the disappearance of humans, their outright extinction. This is not an
Apocalypse as such, if only because the Apocalypse presupposes the existence of a survivor, somewhere, of a witness whose task it is to
recount what he has seen. At
issue is a form of annihilation conceived not as a catastrophe to be feared but
rather as purification by fire. However, purification is the same thing as the annihilation of current
humanity. This annihilation is supposed to open the way to another beginning, the beginning of another
history without today’s humanity. It is, then, a fantasy of ablation.
In these anxiogenic times, the signs of a return to the themes of ontological difference are all there.
Owing to the “war on terror” and in line with aerial bombardments, extrajudicial executions (preferably
with the help of drones), massacres, attacks, and other forms of carnage that set the overall tone, the
idea according to which the West as the only province of the world able to understand and institute the
universal is reemerging. Humanity’s division into native and foreign peoples is far advanced. If, with Schmitt
or Heidegger, yesterday’s fundamental demand was to find the enemy and bring him ofiniut in the open, today it suffices to create him so as to
rise up against him, to confront him with the prospect of total annihilation and destruction. For, indeed, these are enemies with whom no
communication is either possible or desirable. No understanding is possible with those who lie beyond the confines
of humanity.
The fear of death explains both the sociopolitical and psychopolitical level of social
alienation of racial hegemony---the threat of death is forms a self conception in racial
hegemony, and only the affirmative shifts that.
Abdul JanMohamed 5. Abdul R. JanMohamed is a professor of English at the University of California,
Berkeley. “Black Boy: Negation of Death-Bound-Subjectivity” in The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard
Wright’s Archaeology of Death. Duke University Press. 2005.

Clearly, at the sociopolitical level, the mechanism requires, as the hint of suicide implies, that the
individual must so effectively ‘‘internalize’’ the external, social boundaries that he comes to restrict
himself ‘‘voluntarily.’’ Racist hegemony seeks to inform the very ‘‘self-conception’’ of the prospective
‘‘black boy’’ in such a way that the subject will become identical to the limited view of him that the
ideological apparatus itself has constructed; indeed, the external construction of the subject should,
ideally, coincide with his ‘‘self-construction.’’ No luxury of choice is available in this process of self-
construction; rather, hegemony forces the developing black individual to accommodate himself to the
very absence of choice, enforced by the threat of death, and to perceive this absence not as the
historical product of social relations but as a natural and even metaphysical fact of ‘‘life.’’

However, on the psychopolitical register, Wright’s remarks about the self-violation produced by the
fear of death demonstrate that the shadow of death falls not just between the world and the self but
between the different psychic agencies that collectively constitute the subject: it falls between will and
desire, on the one hand, and ambition, on the other; it falls between self-regard and a sense of dignity
or honor, on the one hand, and fear, on the other. What Wright’s remarks imply in this regard needs to
be clarified: effective agency of the subject evidently shifts from the side of will and desire to the side of
fear so that the latter is able to overcome and negate the combined forces of the former . This process of
subjectification thus produces a subject deeply divided against himself, alienated from his telos, and,
paradoxically, ‘‘empowered’’ as an agent in his own ‘‘e(masculine)ation.’’

As we will see in the analysis of The Long Dream later in this study, for Wright, ‘‘e(masculine)ation’’
figures as a complex and absolutely essential feature of racialized subjection. However, for this not to be
misunderstood at this stage, it is necessary to emphasize that the psychic forces collected around will,
desire, dignity, etc. together constitute the fundamental erotic cathexis that produces a subject. That
is, these forces, as they articulate themselves together, produce, through a teleological organization
(however homo- or heterogeneous), the kind of ‘‘binding’’ that produces a more or less coherent
subject. Thus, when the fear of death forces the subject to violate the collective force of these
agencies, the subject is ‘‘actively’’ participating in his own unbinding; the final turn of the paradox, then,
is that this unbinding is also the primary, if not the only, process of ‘‘binding’’ permitted to the death-
bound-subject. The binding function of fear must be understood not simply as a local or an occasional
manifestation but as a permanent part of the negative cathexis that produces the death-bound-subject.
As we have already seen, the title of the first book of Native Son, ‘‘Fear,’’ illustrates the process whereby
fear cements the subject in place so firmly that a major act of violence, that is, a major unbinding act,
whether direct externally or internally, is required to break open the subjectivity that is bound and
delimited by the fear of death. Finally, what Wright implies is that the subject is ‘‘death-bound’’ by being
more or less permanently squeezed between the ‘‘external’’ threat of death and the ‘‘internal’’ fear of
death, that ‘‘threat’’ and ‘‘fear’’ constitute the two ‘‘horizons,’’ which work synergistically with each
other (and, to some extent, come to mirror each other as well) in order to produce the full ‘‘suturing’’ of
the death-bound-subject. Or, to put this in Foucauldian terms, ‘‘threat’’ constitutes the process of
‘‘subjugation’’ and ‘‘fear’’ the process of ‘‘subjectification,’’ and together the two constitute
‘‘subjection.’’ The fundamental synergy of the two horizons is such that one without the other is less
than half—one by itself will not suture a subject. This is the fundamental insight of Biko’s meditation on
death: that without the fear of death, the threat by itself is useless .10