Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Whither Fanon?

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0950236x.2011.537550

1470-1308

David Marriott,

Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes The following abbreviations to works by Frantz Fanon are used throughout the essay. (BS) Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967); (DC) Studies in a Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (London: Earthscan Books, 1989); (TAR) Toward the African Revolution. Political Essays, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Books, 1988); (WE) The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (London: Penguin Books, 1963). In some instances, the translations have been modified in the interest of accuracy. David Scott, Refashioning Futures. Criticism After Postcoloniality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Achilles Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001). Page references to these two works will be given in the text. No attempt is made here to do justice to Nigel Gibson's interesting but somewhat wayward Fanon. The Postcolonial Imagination (Cambridge: Polity, 2003). Important essays by Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Cedric Robinson, Stuart Hall, and Azzedine Haddour, all of which contain discussion of the future of Fanonism, are not discussed here. Patrick M. Taylor, The Narrative of Liberation: Perspectives on Afro-Caribbean Literature, Popular Culture and Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); see also David Scott, Refashioning Futures for a different reading of this narrative. For readings of Fanon along these lines, see Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970). Walter Benjamin, 'Critique of Violence', in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. E. Jephcott (New York, NY: Schocken, 1985), pp. 277–300. See also Jacques Derrida, 'Force of Law: The "Mystical Foundation of Authority"', in Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, trans. Mary Quaintance (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3–68; and Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994). Derrida's reading of a 'messianic without messianism' has some interesting affinities with Fanon's reading of the tabula rasa as a moment whose timeliness is always untimely and so cannot ever quite be reduced to a teleological narrative or schema. In a companion piece to this, I try to explore some of these affinities with respect to the question of transience. The first commentator to elaborate Fanon's theory of violence in Benjaminian terms was Ronald Judy in his valuable essay, 'On the Politics of Global Language, or Unfungible Local Value', boundary 2, 24.2 (1997), pp. 101–143. Judy's understanding of violence is considerably different from mine, however, since he holds that from the tabula rasa of revolutionary violence emerges the 'revolutionary expression of a new law' (p. 124). Judy rightly observes that revolutionary violence is law making, but he wants to distinguish the absolute ('fateful') violence of the tabula rasa from what he conceives of as violence as 'the agency of historical change' (ibid.). Thus, Judy claims 'the fact that revolutionary violence requires both the features of eruption and continuity in order to be conceived of as the agency of historical change keeps the antinomy [between law-making and law-preserving violence] insoluble' (pp. 124–125). This argument is untenable, since it reintroduces the opposition between means and ends that the tabula rasa suspends: even on Judy's own account, there can be no criteria for this abrupt, interruptive disjunction between discourse and the world. On the contrary, the coming into being of the wretched puts into crisis all the inherited diremptions of civil society and the nation-state, for the simple reason that they precipitate a foundational crisis in the colony. Furthermore, the logic of tabula rasa enables a new understanding of this fatefulness that haunts both colonial law and sovereignty. Fanon did not strive to translate or present the wretched as a new measure for mastery or community, but sought to affirm their generalized impropriety – their incommensurability to the field of onto-political thought. Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (New York, NY: Routledge, 1995); Ato Sekyi-Otu, Fanon's Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Page references to these two works will be given in the text. See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) especially chapters 2 and 3. Nigel Gibson, 'Thoughts About Doing Fanonism in the 1990s', College Literature, 26.2 (Spring, 1999), p. 113. Homi Bhabha, 'Remembering Fanon', New Formations, 1 (Spring, 1987), p. 119. Ronald A.T. Judy, 'On the Politics of Global Language, or Unfungible Local Value', boundary 2, 24.2 (1997), pp. 118–119. See my analysis of this motif in 'That Within', in Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), pp. 33–69. See Germaine Guex, 'Les conditions intellectuelles et affectives de l'œdipe', Revue Française de Psychanalyse, 13 (1949), pp. 273–274. Lewis R. Gordon, 'The Black and the Body Politic: Fanon's Existential Phenomenological Critique of Psychoanalysis', in Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renée T. White (eds), Fanon: A Critical Reader (Oxford:Blackwell, 1996), pp. 74–85. Lewis R. Gordon, 'The Black and the Body Politic: Fanon's Existential Phenomenological Critique of Psychoanalysis', p. 80. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York, NY: Philosophical Library, 1947), p. 167; L'Être et le néant. Essai d'ontologie phénomènologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1940). Hereafter BN and EN plus page no. Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Imaginaire, psychologie phénomènologique de l'imagination (Paris: Gallimard, 1940). Reprinted, Collection Idées, 1986, p. 58. Jean-Paul Sartre, L'idiot de la famille, G. Flaubert de 1821 à 1857 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), Vols I and II; The Idiot of the Family, trans. Carol Cosman (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), Vol. I, p. 714. Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations IV, p. 196. See my analysis of this problematic in 'On Racial Fetishism', Qui Parle, 18.2 (Spring/Summer, 2010), pp. 215–249; See also Robert Bernasconi, ed., Race: Blackwell Readings in Continental Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell: Oxford, 2001). For an interesting exception to this narrative, see Paul Gilroy, 'Fanon Again', in Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Gilroy takes Fanon to be an antiracist thinker whose disturbing insights make him 'our contemporary' (p. 155): this is clearly linked to Gilroy's argument, in 'Race and the Right to be Human', in After Empire. Melacholia or Convivial Culture? (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004, pp. 31–65; the book is based on the Wellek Library Lectures given at the University of California, Irvine, in 2002), that the continuing role of race in political culture calls for 'acts of imagination and invention that are adequate to the depth of the postcolonial predicament he [Fanon] described' (p. 58). Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1973): cited in David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity. The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 47. See also David Scott, 'Tragedy's Time: Postemancipation Futures Past and Present', in Rita Felski (ed.), Rethinking Tragedy (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 199–218. See Frantz Fanon and J. Azoulay, 'La Sociothérapie dans un service d'hommes musulmans', L'Information Psychiatrique, 30.9 (1954), pp. 349–361; Frantz Fanon and Charles Geronimi, 'L'Hospitalisation de jour en psychiatrie. Valeur et limites', Tunisie Médicale, 38.10 (1959), pp. 689–732; and Frantz Fanon and S. Asselah, 'Le Phénomène de l'agitation en milieu psychiatrique', Maroc Médical, 38.380 (1967), p. 252. Indeed, Scott's reading of alienation, focused exclusively on a Marxian-existentialist genealogy, overlooks the term's various meanings in psychiatry which Fanon resorts to when trying to clarify specific symptom formations in Black Skin, White Masks. Vicky Lebeau, 'Psychopolitics: Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks' in Jan Campbell and Janet Harbord (eds), Psycho-politics and Cultural Desires (London: UCL Press, 1998), pp. 113–123. See Francoise Vergès, 'Creole Skin, Black Mask: Fanon and Disavowal', Critical Inquiry, 23.3 (Spring 1997), pp. 578–595; David Macey, 'The Recall of the Real: Frantz Fanon and Psychoanalysis', Constellations, 6.1 (1999), pp. 97–107; Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (New York, NY: Plenum Press, 1985). David Scott, 'The Tragic Sensibility of Talad Asad', in David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (eds), Powers of the Secular Modern (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 134–323; see also my 'On Racial Fetishism'. The standard case would be that presented by Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970); and Jean-Paul Sartre's justly infamous 'Preface' to the Wretched of the Earth; for a reading of Sartre's 'Preface' which also misreads Fanon on violence, see Judith Butler, 'Violence, Nonviolence: Sartre on Fanon', in Jonathan Judaken (ed.), Race after Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism (New York, NY: SUNY Press, 2008), pp. 211–231. Butler, albeit more cautious than either Sartre or Arendt, repeats the tendency to read violence in Fanon as 'an instrumentality in the service of invention', which leads her to ask 'whether violence continues to play a role in what it means to create oneself, what it means to produce a community, what it means to achieve and sustain decolonization as a goal' (p. 225). Butler's basic premise, which she supports by alluding to Rey Chow (and others) on the masculinism of Fanon's texts, is that the model of self-creation through anti-colonial violence remains hypermasculinist, which is false, and that there are other more universal modes of address (what she calls the 'constitutive sociality' of a 'you') which bypasses that hypermasculinity, but how it does so is left obscure. Or, to put it another way, Fanonism is not reducible to the violence of anti-colonialism which remains particular, racial, grounded in the male (and female) bodies of the colonized, and is politically instrumentalist. However, only quite brief scrutiny is required to show that these oppositions are all wrong: violence, for Fanon, is neither positive nor negative, but marks the possibility of every relation in the colony (including ethics, politics, race, and gender), which is why violence is not opposed to the human, but inextricable from its very possibility (in the 'Conclusion' to Wretched of the Earth, Fanon also recommends that any new humanism should try and avoid becoming a 'caricature' of European humanism, especially the latter's violent separation of humanism from war, genocidal violence, and massacring force (WE, p. 252)). In all his major texts, Fanon shows how violence is at work in the formation of any (racial) identity and thus fantasmatic exclusion cannot be eliminated from any self-creation be it an 'I', 'he', 'she', 'they', or 'you'. To posit such a possibility is to reduce antagonism to an imaginary thesis or delusion in which non-violence is duly prescribed as the teleological end of politics (rather than, say, force). In other words, his appeal to a new humanism entails a thinking of irreducible violence that is not derivative of some prior or hoped-for peace, or some symptomatic alienation to be overcome by lex talionis. It is striking how few commentators note that the tabula rasa (like all revolutionary or undecidable moments) is more or less violent, but nonetheless necessary (in its undecidability) for the constitution of any humanism as such. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001). Achille Mbembe, 'Prosaics of Servitude and Authoritarian Civilities', trans. Janet Roitman, Public Culture, 5.1 (Fall, 1992), p. 139. Achille Mbembe, 'De la scène coloniale chez Frantz Fanon', Rue Descartes, 4.58 (2007), p. 54. Achille Mbembe, 'Prosaics of Servitude and Authoritarian Civilities', trans. Janet Roitman, Public Culture, 5.1 (Fall, 1992), p. 133. Achille Mbembe, 'Provisional Notes on the Postcolony', Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 62.1 (1992), p. 4. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Scwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985). For an elaboration of this argument, see my 'On Racial Fetishism'. In a 2008 interview with Isabel Hofmeyr, Mbembe says: 'The last chapter [of On the Postcolony], "God's Phallus", was written as an allegoric dialogue with Frantz Fanon'. 'Writing Africa. Achille Mbembe in conversation with Isobel Hofmeyr', in Nick Shephard and Steven Robins (eds), New South African Keywords (Jacana: Ohio University Press, 2008), p. 253. In the same 2008 interview with Isabel Hofmeyr, Mbembe says: 'I was struck by the quasi-impossibility of revolutionary practice in the [African] continent. There are social upheavals to be sure. Once in a while, things break loose. But the latter hardly translate into an effective, positive, transformative praxis. It is almost always as if what ensues is a continuation in the void'. 'Writing Africa. Achille Mbembe in conversation with Isobel Hofmeyr', p. 252. On this logic, see Abdul JanMohammed, The Death-Bound Subject (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). For a discussion of Fanonian ethics more generally see my 'Afterword: Ice-Cold' in Haunted Life. Visual Culture and Black Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), pp. 225–241.