ABSTRACT
The problem of impediments to political life is here explored through an examination of Afropessimism as an exemplar of the limitations of ontological thinking posed as a response to Euromodern dehumanization. It is not only this form of thinking, the author argues, that is reductive but also its proposed other side—namely, optimism—which is ultimately rooted in a conception of action that elides the paradoxes of political challenges. Both, in this regard, are forms of bad faith. Political life, the author avers, offers no guarantees and reaches beyond the self to those who are anonymous. Instead of pessimism or optimism, this poses the problem of acting in the face of infinite resignation where instead of a leap of faith there is the paradox of existential political commitment, which, as the author outlined earlier in Chapter 2, transcends epistemic mediations.
