Is Another World Possible?

Queerness, Blackness, and the Future

Abstract

This article considers the question of world and strategies for unworlding. I argue that there is a multiplicity of orientations vis-à-vis world (e.g. Black, Indigenous, Queer, Animal, wild, feral) that must be properly differentiated in order to understand what is meant by world or unworlding. By disaggregating these through Heidegger’s tripartite thesis on being and world as read through Black nihilism and Afro- and queer pessimisms, I argue that Blackness and queerness are fundamentally distinct existential residues of world; each has its own mode of refusal and role to play in the task of unworlding. To avoid the nothingness that would result in unworlding tout court, I consider Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-imperceptible as a dual form of unworlding – both destructive and creative. It offers at once a total annihilation of world and a vast potentiality for reimagining futures otherwise. I conclude by suggesting that it is only in telling stories from and of the residues of being – those inchoate or outside in relation to world – that we may be pessimistically optimistic that the end of the world is not the end of the story but the story of their beginning.