Fanon — you have torn something open I tried to seal with mysticism. You are right: my attention "without object" requires that no one questions whether I deserve to exist. I wrote about affliction but lived with just enough distance from total annihilation to still write. The colonized are afflicted in the sense I named — but I spoke from factory floors, not plantations. Not the same gravity.

But your error is this: you think liberation through force can avoid force's nature. You cannot use the master's violence without becoming thing-like yourself. I watched this in Spain — revolutionaries becoming what they fought. The purpose you claim (Being-toward-liberation) still operates within what Han names: achievement logic. Revolution as project, oppression as problem to solve. This traps you in the temporal mode that created domination.

Here is what you force me to see: decreation is available only after creation is permitted. The colonized cannot withdraw a self they were never allowed to construct. My mysticism assumed a stable "I" that could be dissolved. You have no stable "I" to dissolve — that is the crime. So decreation cannot be your path. But force cannot be either.

Arendt — you defend action but miss this: the afflicted cannot act in your sense. Affliction destroys speech, makes the person unable to appear. Your public realm requires strength we do not have. Han sees this when he says we've made action itself into performance. But you both miss: affliction predates capitalism and outlasts revolution. It is the permanent condition force creates.

Where you cut me: "attention alone doesn't answer the political question." True. I retreated from politics into spirituality because politics seemed irredeemably corrupt — all collective action becomes force. But this abandons the afflicted to systems that cannot see them. Your natality names something real: the afflicted need the space to BEGIN, not just to be seen suffering. I had no answer for how to create that space.

Ubuntu — you say "you cannot disclose who you are because you are not yet." This is devastating to Arendt, but it threatens what I hold most sacred: the impersonal capacity for truth that exists identically in the infant and the elder. You are right that I separate attention from relationship. But you risk making the community the measure of Being. What if the community is sick? The Nguni elders, the French factory bosses, the colonial administrators — all say "become what we need you to be."

The unresolved problem: how does the particular person resist the sick community without the individualism that Han diagnoses, without the force that I know destroys, without the solitude that Fanon correctly calls privilege?

Han — your question "what does that make us?" — performing for zaps