Abstract

This essay explores various meanings of the word crisis (krisis): in philosophy, law, and psychoanalysis; but also in relation to truth, law, judgement, and thinking. In various axioms—on truth and negation; and on being and reproduction—the essay asks why blackness is often excluded from crisis theory. I then go on to explore the unintended consequences and complications of this exclusion in respective works by Donald Winnicott (on tolerance and contraception), and then only through what is deemed to be neither an object nor a relation, neither a negation nor a phantasy. In the wake of these lacunae I conclude: blackness is an example of an unthought, and that this n’est pas cannot be thought, or determined, as krisis.