"an outlaw philosopher baad@ss from New York's radical Black leftist intellectual underground."
-Daryle Lamont Jenkins, anti-fascist organizer and founder of ONE PEOPLE'S PROJECT.
"what is here presents a variety of new avenues for thinking about existence and liberation that could only possibly be understood by an engaged reader willing to think with the text."
-Sartre Studies International
"For around a decade, A. Shahid Stover has been building a precise philosophical apparatus with the materials of Black Radicalism, Existentialism, and their intersection. Existential Liberation Critique is the next entry in his development of this apparatus, an invigorating and necessary work of what he calls "insurgent philosophy". Opposing Hegel's master/slave dialectic with an anti-slavery dialectic grounded in the work of Frederick Douglass, Stover simultaneously opposes abstract ontology with a rigorous socio-ontology from which he constructs a precise lexicon. In a time when social theory has dismissed notions of being and subjectivity to the margins of thought, Existential Liberation Critique demonstrates why such notions are not only important but in fact demonstrate universality through the singularity of lived Black experience. Arguing for "the radical ontological freedom of human 'being' as the basis of emancipatory praxis," Stover demonstrates that the struggle to be, as disclosed by Black liberation struggle, reveals the meaning of the human condition itself."
- J. Moufawad-Paul, author of Being Subjects: Preliminary Materials of the Person (2024), Demarcation and Demystification: Philosophy and its Limits (2019), Continuity and Rupture: Philosophy in the Maoist Terrain (2016) and The Communist Necessity (2014).