Preface to a Philosophy by Which No One Can Live

Abstract

This essay proposes an ethics for critical philosophies attuned to global white supremacy and its effects of violence, erasure, and precarity. The essay examines Arthur Schopenhauer as a potential forefigure for critical practices that aim to attend to the precarious survival of the global majority engulfed by white supremacy and racial capitalism. Through Denise Ferreira da Silva’s and Sara Ahmed’s philosophies of race, the essay carries out an autotheoretical dissection—tracing Ruffin’s own myopic relation to the white supremacist moralities that continue to thrive in critical interdisciplinary German studies. As a way out of the aporia that white supremacy enacts, the essay proposes an orientation away from what is thought to be life and toward a critical aesthetics that attends to the unsurviving.