Conceive of what Calvin L. Warren calls “ontological terror”—the absolute annihilation of Being wrought by antiblack technologies—and there can be no conceits or concessions. 1 By comparison, Carolyn Lazard’s video work Red (2021) is compassionate, only a rehearsal of life’s cruelties. Its strobing red monochrome made me giddy and nauseous. Despite the video being only 10 minutes long, I couldn’t watch it continuously. I had to close my eyes, or the browser tab, or look away for a moment. The papule-red of Red , a strident siren monochrome importuning our sensory fields, is bewildering and expedient, but Lazard extends their viewers a little mercy in the form of periodic trigger warnings: ten-second countdowns that let us know when the hazy disorientation will stop, and when it will begin again. Here, the video form trains viewers to inure their faculties against potential trauma. Art has softened the blow, but has it finally lived up to its alleviative reputation? The reality is that ontological terror is a “permanent condition of black being and the world itself” that is “beyond [humanist] resolution and abandonment,” conciliatory affective politics, and artistic representation because “the world depends on this terror” to continue turning on its dispossessive axis. 2 If Warren’s nihilistic thesis is chilling and depressive, it is only because we recognize its veracity, pervasiveness, and permanence. Unlike Lazard’s considerately factored warnings, “one experiences terror precisely because one never knows when this self will be targeted.” 3 Parsing archives of antebellum New Orleans, Emily A. Owens similarly traces the “terroristic anticipation” of enslaved women in slaveholders’ iniquitous games of “pursuit,” in which the language of consent was forcefully solicited and hence perverted in fabricated “scene[s] of transaction” that “transform a
and Nihilism, error: Blackness, Ontological T 1 Calvin L. Warren, 60. , 2018), (Duke University Press Emancipation 65–75. 2 Ibid., 107. 3 Ibid.,
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