Darkening political theory: negative dialectics and guerilla

This article suggests us to read Norman Ajari's idea of Black Communism as a theoretical and practical proposition for decolonial political theory. I argue that Black Communism should be understood from the perspective of negative dialectics characterized by the experience of failure, of the non-identity between a concept and what it refers to. Thereafter, I will argue that Ajari's strategic relationship between theory and practice can be exemplified by Walter Rodney's idea of “guerilla intellectualism”, which I understand as a way to inhabit the space or the distance, between political concepts and what they refer to. My aim here is to expand on Ajari's idea of Black Communism as a way to do decolonial political theory, a doing that does not take ‘decolonial’ as a metaphor. In other words, it is not a decolonizing of political theory, but it puts political theory as a moment of the decolonial praxis