John E. Drabinski is Professor of African American and Africana Studies and English at the University of Maryland. He is author of So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic (2025), Atlantic Theory: On the Vicissitudes of Relation (2025), Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss (2019), Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations (2015), Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other (2011), Godard Between Identity and Difference (2008), and Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas (2001).

"A fascinating book that we need now more than ever. Brilliantly juxtaposing the literatures on deconstruction and social death, Drabinski poses clearly a central dilemma, though its solution is daunting: How can an ostensibly socially dead being (e.g. a Black person in a society founded on antiblack animus) ever become free and live free in a polity constructed to ensure that person’s unfreedom?" - Neil Roberts, Williams College "At the Margins of Nihilism offers a wide-ranging series of reflections on issues of enduring importance and interest – colonialism, racism (specifically antiblackness), and social death – through an engagement with major figures in continental philosophy and Black Studies. The book is the work of a mature thinker who moves between philosophical and literary traditions with ease and comfort." - Lisa Guenther, Queen’s University

• Prologue: Sembène, Teno, and the Work of the Outside 1Introduction: Whithering the Decolonial 191 Social Death as a Kind of Deconstruction 382 Racial Formation and the Remainder in Baldwin’s Nonfiction 703 Nihilism and the Refusal of Refusal in Wright and Fanon 1024 The Lower Frequencies after Afropessimism 134Postscript Notes 168Acknowledgments 179Notes 181Index 189

John E. Drabinski is Professor of African American and Africana Studies and English at the University of Maryland. He is author of So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic (2025), Atlantic Theory: On the Vicissitudes of Relation (2025), Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss (2019), Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations (2015), Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other (2011), Godard Between Identity and Difference (2008), and Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas (2001).

"A fascinating book that we need now more than ever. Brilliantly juxtaposing the literatures on deconstruction and social death, Drabinski poses clearly a central dilemma, though its solution is daunting: How can an ostensibly socially dead being (e.g. a Black person in a society founded on antiblack animus) ever become free and live free in a polity constructed to ensure that person’s unfreedom?" - Neil Roberts, Williams College "At the Margins of Nihilism offers a wide-ranging series of reflections on issues of enduring importance and interest – colonialism, racism (specifically antiblackness), and social death – through an engagement with major figures in continental philosophy and Black Studies. The book is the work of a mature thinker who moves between philosophical and literary traditions with ease and comfort." - Lisa Guenther, Queen’s University

• Prologue: Sembène, Teno, and the Work of the Outside 1Introduction: Whithering the Decolonial 191 Social Death as a Kind of Deconstruction 382 Racial Formation and the Remainder in Baldwin’s Nonfiction 703 Nihilism and the Refusal of Refusal in Wright and Fanon 1024 The Lower Frequencies after Afropessimism 134Postscript Notes 168Acknowledgments 179Notes 181Index 189