This paper attempts to explicate an idiomatic praxis in early black thought that theorizes anti-black logics of signification. I call this meta linguistic theory and praxis Black Rhetoric, and argue that it is a paradigmatic form of idiomatic violence in modernity. Since the 1980s scholars of Black Study and Black Literary History have been interested in how Black writers maneuver Standard Written English for their critical and artistic purposes. For example, Barbara Christian argued that “people of color have always theorized - but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic...our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language” (52). Christian’s emphasis on theorizing as a verb rather than a noun reflects a broader methodological emphasis among her contemporaries on the dynamism, movement, and play of Black discursive practice (verb) over produced knowledge (noun). My work returns to one such contemporary, Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose work traced the West African roots of an inter-textual vernacular tradition called “Signifyin(g),” which borrows figures and motifs so as to revise and deploy them in different contexts. However, Signifyin(g) is not reducible to a literary trope. The key insight in Gates’s Signifying Monkey (1988) is that the West African-derived practice of Signifyin(g) is structurally and ontologically distinct from the European homonym. He draws on Saussure, Jakobson, and Lacan to claim that language operates through perpendicular axes: the syntagmatic axis, which signifies horizontally through combination; and the paradigmatic axis, which signifies vertically via substitution. This model of language was first proposed by Saussure and then revised by Jakobson, who aligned the horizontal axis of combination with metonymy and the vertical axis of substitution with metaphor. Lacan then drew a structural analogy between these axes and the Freudian dream logic of condensation and displacement. That is to say, Lacan’s elaboration of