Читать книгу Unexceptional Politics - Emily Apter - Страница 11

In his “Introduction to Frantz Fanon: Provincializing Nietzsche (13/13)”, Bernard E. Harcourt exhorts us to forget Nietzsche (using Nietzsche contra Nietzsche, as only Nietzsche might commission his own, nihilistic self-forgetting); to provincialize Nietzsche in line with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s injunction to provincialize Europe (Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference [2000]); and to think the times—the strange tragedy of our raced actuality, the violent untimeliness of the dawn of a new Confederacy shored up by openly racist policy—with and through the medium of a singularly Fanonian theory and praxis of ressentiment, flush with Fanon’s ambivalent, self-critical dialectics of blackness (négritude).¹ This last point comes to the fore in the chapter of Black Skin, White Masks on “The Negro and Psychopathology,” where Fanon approvingly cites Gabriel d’Arboussier’s denunciation of Sartre’s existentialization of generic black suffering, which d’Arboussier calls out as the “dangerous mystificatory aspect” of “theories of negritude.” “The objection is valid,” writes Fanon; “It applies to me as well … Against all the arguments I have just cited, I come back to one fact [une évidence]: Wherever he goes, the Negro remains a Negro [Où qu’il aille, un nègre demeure un nègre].”²

How to overcome the impasse of the black man’s overdetermination as a nonbeing because of his color, his occluded self-sovereignty, the condition of his foreclosed access to universal humanity? In Fanon’s clinical foray into the philosophy of a new subject there was recourse to Nietzsche from the start. The Zarathustran man of affirmation, poetically captioned as a “yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies” (“oui vibrant aux harmonies cosmiques”), occupies a universe that must become a universe of the black man too, even at the price of cauterizing the historic black subject, cutting him out of himself, severing him from his antinomies and his agonistics.³ As scholarship on Fanon’s library confirms (with reference to passages that Fanon underlined in his copy of Charles Andler’s Nietzsche, sa vie et sa pensée [1921]), Fanon seized on the necessity of the transvaluation of suffering infused with Nietzschean terms of normative right, specifically, the right to civilization and to life.⁴

A temporally situated Fanon—inside the Nietzschean cosmic chronotope (and thus beyond the time frame of Euro-philosophy’s unconditional priority), yet within the perdurable, generic time signature of the so-called “evidence of blackness” (a raced psychopolitics today inflected by Black Lives Matter and the advent of a presidential biopolitics steeped in white supremacism)—helps frame and bring into focus emergent languages of ethicopolitical militance and vigilance. These languages have produced marked terms of anti- and decolonial struggle, drafted for an early twenty-first-century age of assaults on civil liberties, black citizens’ rights (including but obviously not limited to voting rights), and economies of existence that refuse to reduce racial difference to “bare life.” Particular attention will be devoted to several psychopolitical constructs that could be said to sublate aspects of Nietzschean ressentiment and/or Fanonian “reactivity” at the contemporary pass.⁵ The first is Achille Mbembe’s post-Schmittian take on the “politics of enmity,” retournement, and juridical humanity, which reworks, through a Fanonian psychiatrized lens, the relation between violence and colonial force of law in the context of racist structures of securitization and anti-migration. The second is Mbembe’s notion of “nanoracism,” which stands as a politically nuanced alternative to the institutionally proliferating and highly problematic term “micro-aggression” (whose performative effects vary wildly depending on illocutionary context and the subject-positioning of speakers and addressees). The third is Alexander G. Weheliye’s concept of habeas viscus, a term denoting “sociogenic imprints on ‘the hieroglyphs of the flesh,’” “pornotroping” as depravation, and what he calls, critically building on Deleuze, “racialized assemblages.” A central concern undergirding this discussion: how might we think with Fanon to rethink the micropolitics of racist psychopolitics, especially at the historical conjuncture of militarized policing and the rhetoric of the new Confederacy?

Achille Mbembe builds his book Politiques de l’inimitié (2016) (The Politics of Enmity) around the problem of “Schmittian enmity-amity,” in which inimitié (enmity) is calqued on amitié (friendship). The ambivalent relation between enmity and friendship, carefully deconstructed by Derrida in Politiques de l’amitié (Politics of Friendship) extends to homophonically related terms such as inimité (inimicalness, inimitability, matchlessness) and intimité (intimacy, proximity). The spine of Mbembe’s book lists the title erroneously as Politiques d’inimité, which translates roughly as “incomparable politics,” prompting the suggestion that this slip is not entirely wrong; Mbembe may in fact be addressing what is inimical to politics—its peerless capacity to mask hostilities as acts of friendship and goodwill, its ability as a medium to foment and circulate hostilities of every stripe and scale.

Inimitié, which gained traction in the eighteenth century as a synonym of enmity implying targeted charge at a person or collectivity, is akin to ressentiment, particularly its French ascription as untranslatable from the French. Both terms are premised on the objet a, a causative object-desire exterior to the subject that entrains loving the enemy, desiring the enemy as oneself. For Nietzsche, this neighbor-loving is the trap of the noble (Christian) man against whom the man of ressentiment, “whose soul squints,” must gird himself. Enemy-desire must be used against itself, resisted through a politics of concentrated hate that leaves its traces, as Mbembe sees it, in apartheid, fantasies of extermination, hate speech, logics of suspicion, conspiracy theories, anxiogenic formulas of the “War on Terror,” and a host of other symptoms of paranoid democracy and racist ethnonationalism. Under such conditions, to be, as it were, deprived of enemy (qua subject-substance rather than any particular enemy), becomes the worst punishment, tantamount to removing pretexts for negative disinhibition.⁶ The hallmarks of ressentiment associated by Nietzsche with slave morality—envy, insecurity, frustration, defensiveness, guilt, weakness, mesquinerie (nastiness, the nursing of petty grudges against perceived slights)—are thus recouped as permits for the maintenance of a politics of inimitié. If hostility must be preserved at all costs, ressentiment functions as a prophylactic that wards off the privative consequences of comity, peace, compassion and care. By means of this inverse reasoning, a logic of defensive instrumentality—enshrined in the obsession with securitization—is privileged as the overriding principle governing juridical humanity. Its manifest symptoms include the unilateral justification of deportation, collateral damage, world policing, and mass incarceration, all of which allow hostile phantasms to thrive and multiply.⁷

Ressentiment inscribes the possibility of backlash, reverb, and recursivity in its very prefix. The “re” of “re-feeling” redounds to the affective subject, with self-transformation and self-destruction equally possible in the becoming. Ressentiment, in its Nietzschean associations, resonates with return (“eternal return,” retournement as in life-changing, transformative experience, being turned; from Deleuzian anti-dialectics, the will to power as infinite devenir); with recurrence (structural violence, cyclical repetition, OCD, colonial mimicry, autoimmunity, Mbembe’s planetary à rebours identified with necropolitical inversions of human value, ecopolitical regress)⁸; and with reversal (Christian love, renversement as in the Deleuzian critical reversal, the differential element from which the value of values issues forth). All these effects are registered in Mbembe’s enmity politics even if he does not explicitly name ressentiment as the catalyst. They inform his descriptions of pathogenic modes of reactivity and structures of regression. And these structures lead back to Fanon, who, in Black Skin, White Masks, is concerned with working through the devastating effects of ressentiment on the black psyche. Fanon devoted many pages to dissecting the black subject’s “pathological sensitivity” (what he dubbed “affective erethism”); desire for vengeance; his or her morbid, will-sapping fixation on past injuries; or the painful realities of black on black ressentiment (named as such), as when Guadeloupian blacks become the object of resentment on the part of Martinican blacks for trying to pass as Martinicais, or the hatred of Senegalese solders by Antilleans.⁹ Such infraracisms were and remain easily marshaled as psychopolitical technologies through which societies of control divide communities of color.

The concern with countering the self-defeating recursivity of ressentiment brought Fanon to strategies for “breaking the cycle” that included “going beyond comparison,” and going beyond the “Negro as comparison” (where the “Negro” is the yardstick of nonbeing against which white humanity is measured and through which the measure of black humanity is erased).¹⁰ As Bernard Harcourt reminds us,

The idea, it seems, is to get beyond notions of superiority and inferiority. Not to respond that black culture is in fact superior or equal to European culture; but to overcome the comparison itself. To get beyond these moral judgments. Not to refute them, not to invert them, to get over them entirely—as if they never existed.

Not to invert. “In our view,” Fanon writes, “an individual who loves Blacks is as ‘sick’ as someone who abhors them.” The idea is to break the cycle, not continue it. To get beyond it, not to replicate it:

“Our sole concern was to put an end to a vicious cycle. Fact: some Whites consider themselves superior to Blacks. Another fact: some Blacks want to prove at all costs to the Whites the wealth of the black man’s intellect and equal intelligence. How can we break the cycle?”¹¹

For Fanon, the stakes of breaking the cycle (or “vicious circle”) embedded in the dialectics of ressentiment point to a sublation that might today be associated with “woke” racial consciousness.¹² In Mbembe’s book, by contrast, there really is no moment of critical awakening, or structure of sublation. Ressentiment is baked into modes of being in the political present; it is a persistent feature of enmities that are themselves identified with self-destructive practices of biopolitical annihilation, autophagy, baffled revolutionary telos, the continuous reproduction of sadomasochistic social relations and inferiority-superiority complexes whose contemporary narcotic form is nanoracism. Mbembe chillingly identifies nanoracism as a modern pastime. Where before there were outlets such as public games, circuses, palace intrigues, cabals and gossip, now there is nanoracism, a sick divertissement, a narcotic version of racial prejudice reliant on poisonous compounds that induce tetanized stupor, paralysis and contracted sociality. Nanoracism—traceable to Fanon’s pharmacy—proliferates in the guise of “miniscule madnesses” (“folies miniaturisées”) distributed through systems of social existence in dosed portions of neurosis, psychosis, and erotic delirium.¹³

For Mbembe, nanoracism, whether identified with the lived experience of people of color or with expressions of white domination, has become a common denomination of planetary enmity. In this picture, politics is a psychopolitics, characterized by a reactivity typically ascribed to persons. This approach to the Political allows Mbembe, much like Fanon and Nietzsche before him, to diagnose state violence through the lens of subjectivized history (not personified history, but history comprised of agents in the process of being reactively subjectivated). Mbembe will chart the dynamics of injury and hate within social microcosms and global networks of nanoracism, mapped as countless discharges of negative affect within force fields of brute sensualism and capitalist lubricity.¹⁴

Interestingly, one important characteristic of nanoracism is its indifference to scale: the smallest gestures can trigger great trauma, thus placing quotidian blessures on the same plane as world-historical catastrophe. Micro-aggression and genocide, though not proportionally equivalent or similar in kind, become at times structurally interchangeable within an omnibus system of stress disorders that perforce introduce a certain ethical relativism. This relativism makes it impossible to rationalize trauma within ethically coherent systems of retribution and redress; it presupposes and posits an extra-juridical subject of injury that is stranded, irrecuperable even by nosological standards. Nanoracism thus renders virtually impossible the conversion of focused, soul-destroying, pathogenic rage and suffering into self-determination. It arguably impedes, to borrow Joseph F. Lawless’s terms of the Deleuzian-Nietzschean paradigm, the shift from the “active-reactive” to the “affirmative-negative” mode, whereby negation proves foundational to an emancipatory becoming.¹⁵ Rather than tarry with the negative (that is, with Nietzsche), Mbembe returns us to a Hobbesian state of nature in which the most one can hope for is a return to the unfinished Fanonian project of politico-existential psychiatry forged in the crucible of militant anticolonialism. For Mbembe, I would argue, the poisoned chalice of the Fanonian pharmakon contains a pessimistic politics of “inimities” specific to the contemporary global condition, which is to say, characterized by intractable iniquities and inequities at levels both great and small. As nanoracisms proliferate and gather momentum, they prepare the ground for a new Confederacy, itself shored up by the defensive and ultimately self-defeating political calculation that took hold in the Obama administration when it was presumed that any ownership of the “black agenda” would, as Attorney General Eric Holder put it, produce “a reaction in the larger community that would have prevented the things you wanted to do.”¹⁶ The result, by the end of Obama’s second term, was a forestalled black agenda and the unimpeded political ascendency of white nationalism.

Where Mbembe updates Fanonian psychiatric politics for a politics of psychosexual enmity—writ large in white hegemony’s curtailing of black civil liberties, in policing apparatuses of security societies, and in international juridical institutions tailored to the latest forms of ethnonationalist racism—Alexander G. Weheliye makes the clinical Fanon newly relevant to contemporary critical race studies. Though he does not engage with the psychiatric writings directly (many were, until recently, unpublished or discredited on account of their controversial support for electroshock treatment and subordination of psychoanalysis to neuropsychiatry), Weheliye arguably sources his concept of habeas viscus from Fanon’s theories of dermal subjectivation.

Fanon’s 1951 thesis, “Altérations mentales, modifications caractérielles, troubles psychiques et déficit intellectual dans l’hérédo-dégénaration spino-cérébelleuse,” commences with an epigraph attributed to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (but which in fact hails from an early version of Ecce Homo and is only partially cited).¹⁷ Nietzsche’s full phrase was “Ich will das höchste Misstrauen gegen mich erwecken: ich rede nur von erlebten Dingen und präsentiere nicht nur Kopf-Vorgänge” (original emphasis), which may be freely translated: “I seek to arouse the greatest suspicion against myself: I only speak of things I experienced and don’t just present processes of the head.” Fanon cites only the second part of the sentence: “Je ne parle que de choses vécues et je ne représente pas de processus cérébraux” (literally parsed as: “I speak only of things lived, and I do not represent cerebral processes”).¹⁸ The allusion here to “choses vécues” resonates in the title of a 1951 essay published in Esprit—“L’expérience vécue du moi,” later reprised as a chapter title in Black Skins, White Masks—in which “l’expérience vécue” was famously mistranslated by Charles Lam Markmann as “the fact of blackness.” According to the interpretation offered by Ronald A. T. Judy, the expression “lived experience” had an ambiguous status in Fanon—with tension, first, between “the factual” as “in-itself, independent of consciousness” and the factual as “in-itself-for-consciousness”; and second, between factuality and “lived-experience,” where the latter is taken to designate no objective event, but “a reality” or “process in which objects acquire their status as such for-consciousness.”¹⁹ Regardless of how we read the finer points of vécue, whether “in-itself” or “for-consciousness,” the arc that leads from the Nietzschean erlebten Dingen to the Fanonian variants of chose vécue and l’expérience vécue brings us to a concept of material-subjective ontology linking Fanon’s thesis to his career-long ambition to invent sociotherapies grounded in lived life and responsive to racial difference (rather than focused, as was neuropsychiatry at the time, on brain lesions). The thesis served as a dress rehearsal for Fanon’s introduction of the problem of black alienation into white neuropsychiatry, and on this point, it is relevant that Fanon’s first title for Black Skin, White Masks was “An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks.” This early work cast aside ethnopsychiatric idées reçues—notions of “primitive mentalities,” or “dependency complexes”—that were nothing more than racist constructions congealed into History. “History,” Fanon wrote in his thesis, “is little more than the systematic valorization of collective complexes.” (“Nous montrerons alors que l’Histoire n’est que la valorization systématique des complexes collectifs.”)²⁰ To negate the valorization of this History, he borrowed from Karl Jaspers a notion of historicity as “immanent reality,” which fosters the examination of instances of subjectivation in real time. This heuristic may well have led Fanon to the epic discovery—precipitated by the interpellation “Tiens, un nègre!”—of the triplex “racial epidermal schemata”; a self in three places: “occupying here, moving toward the other, and not there, because rendered transparent, opaque, disappeared.” (“J’occupais de la place. J’allais à l’autre … et l’autre évanescent, hostile mais non opaque, transparent, absent, disparaissait.”)²¹

George Yancy underscores the portent of this discovery for theories of corporeal subjectivation. Commenting on the powerful invocation that closes Black Skin, White Masks—“My final prayer: O my body, make me always a man who questions!”—Yancy observes that Fanon “appeals to something that is beyond abstract political rights discourse. He appeals to his own body, something concrete and immediate. Fanon asks of his body not to allow him to be seduced by forms of being-in-the-world that normalize violence and dehumanization.”²² What Yancy identifies is the all-important category of the Fanonian soma: integral to Weheliye’s construct of habeas viscus, it is an order of inscription that concentrates on racial subjectivation at every level of embodiment, extending the referential range of flesh to include viscosity, blood, saliva, taste, streams of life, intestinal viscera, and neuro-chemistry. Deferring to Fanon, and in tune with Silvia Wynter, Weheliye writes,

Since the being of nonwhite subjects has been coded by the cultural laws in the world of Man as pure negativity, their subjectivity impresses punishment on the neurochemical reward system of all humans, or in the words of Frantz Fanon: “My body was returned to me spread-eagled, disjointed, redone, draped in mourning on this white winter’s day” … Political violence plays a crucial part in the baroque techniques of modern humanity, since it simultaneously serves to create not-quite-humans in specific acts of violence and supplies the symbolic source material for racialization.²³

Working off of Hortense Spillers’s phrase “hieroglyphics of the flesh,” Weheliye conceives of flesh as something that supersedes legal notions of body as container of an individuality to which the subject is entitled:²⁴

If the body represents legal personhood qua self-possession, then the flesh designates those dimensions of human life cleaved by the working together of depravation and deprivation. In order for this cruel ruse to succeed, however, subjects must be transformed into flesh before being granted the illusion of possessing a body.²⁵

The crux of depravation and deprivation, the conjoining of sexuality and political violence (crucial to Fanon’s diagnostics of colonial violence), compose what Weheliye dubs the “pornotrope,” localized in titillating sadomasochistic fantasias of rape and beating that produce surplus enjoyment from afflictions centered on the captive body. Though such enactments may pass under the moral cover of consciousness-raising and political good intentions, the effects of objectification, dehumanization and alterity, induced by the spectacle of violence, rebound, and in doing so they reproduce cycles of race violence. Pornotroping is rampant in literary and visual stagings of slavery; as Weheliye notes, hardly any “imagining of slavery exists without at least one obligatory scene of gratuitous whipping, branding, boiling.”²⁶ On this point, we can fast-forward through a history of cinema from D. W. Griffith’s 1915 Birth of a Nation, to blaxploitation films of the ‘70s, to Haile Gerima’s Sankofa (analyzed in some detail by Weheliye), to, most recently, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave, and Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation. Each instance of the genre harks back to examples cited by Fanon—Strange Fruit and Uncle Remus—in which the black subject is portrayed “as the keeper of the impalpable gate that opens into the realm of orgies, of bacchanals, of delirious sexual sensations”; and in which he or she acts as an incentive to white fantasies of masochism that involve “going to ‘houses’ in order to be beaten by Negroes.”²⁷