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[Frank Wilderson] is a Fanonian in a strict sense. I would almost call him like a fundamentalist Fanonian. There’s certain moment in [Black Skin White Masks] when Fanon says, “The black man is not any more than the white man.” Frank takes it seriously as a moment that ought to have an impact on your critical formulation. What does it mean to say “the black man is not”? Part of what I think that tends toward is close to what you might talk about under the rubric of “thingliness” but it’s more extreme.

You could say, “the black man is not a person, the black man is a thing,” and that’s pretty tough. Frank would say, “the black man is not.” Stop. Ok, what is this “not”? What is this “nothingness”? He develops a pretty rigorous understanding of normative subjectivity, and he understands normative subjectivity precisely as that which moves by way of the expulsion of black possibility, of the possibility of the black entering into that.

Immanuel Kant early on in the Critique of Pure Reason makes an argument for the necessity of what he calls the “transcendental aesthetic.” Which is simply a sense of space and time in the world, a sense of how we locate ourselves in the world. What Frank does, by way of a Lacanian thing, is to say that there’s no such thing for black people. Black people sort of don’t exist in this world. We are radically excluded from this world, and in fact the making of this world is predicated on our exclusion. So that within the context of this world we are, literally, nothing.

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— Fred Moten | Thing Theory, Blackness & Nothingness 3/13/2014 (deleted as of 2016)