Description
This article introduces the abject into the framework of ontological security to better understand a feeling often avoided, the feeling of nonexistence. As ontological security studies has developed to better understand the constitution of subjectivity and continuous feelings of self, it has encountered questions about the type of subjects that fit within its scope. In laying out the experience of the abject or rejected, this article explores a category of being at the margins that feel nonexistent as they resist a world that denies their subjectivity. Following Frantz Fanon's articulation of racialized existence, alongside Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, I build the concept of the Black abject as an entity that, in resisting objectification, leaves behind the structures that provided coherence and, in so doing, orients towards enacting a new world and different subjectivity. The Black abject highlights how experiences outside of frameworks of security, such as blackness under the governing fiction of white supremacy, act to constitute ways of being that are free.
