In a short and opaque text entitled “On the Black Universe,” the French thinker François Laruelle extends this idea of black as a cosmological principle. Neither an aesthetics of color nor a metaphor for knowledge and ignorance, black is, for Laruelle, inseparable from the conditions of thought and its limit. Separate from “the World” we make in our own, all-too-human image, and apart from “the Earth” which tolerates our habitation of its surface, there is “the Universe” – indifferent, opaque, black: “Black prior to light is the substance of the Universe, what escaped from the World before…