Afro-pessimism derives from black feminist theories of scholars including Hortense Spillers and Saidiya V. Hartman; from challenges to and critiques of the neo-Marxism and post-Marxism of theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and Giorgio Agamben; and from an engagement with the postcolonial, critical, and cultural theories of, inter alia, Achille Mbembe, Kra Keeling, Ronald A. T. Judy, and David Marriott. It takes as its structuring logic the pronouncement made by psychiatrist and freedom-fighter Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks: 'ontology - once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside - does not permit us to understand the being of the black man' (1970, p. 77). As Afro-pessimist philosopher Calvin Warren (2017) argues, this means that the black/slave is a derelict object that has no 'symbolic placement' in the space-time of the modern world, ontologically foreclosed by a semantic field inhered in an enduring commitment to anti-blackness. Consequently, the black/slave, constituted by existential negation, is a sentient being whose unthinkability as person/human/subject scaffolds modernity.