Martinique Between Fanon and Naipaul

An argument for the proximity, if not absolute sameness, of Naipaul and Fanon on the status of the West Indies in the age of colonialism and independence struggle

Epidermalization of Inferiority: A Fanonian Reading of Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Amour

As part of the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the following reflections are akin to his critical work on the psychoaffective impact of colonialism. Fanon’s notion of the epidermalization of inferiority has inspired my analysis of the socio-political struggles in Haiti and the complex antagonisms shaped by colonialism, contemporary political personalities, and constantly clashing perceptions of race, gender and nation. I turn to Fanon’s notion of the epidermalization of inferiority in Black Skin, White Masks to explore the effects of French colonization on the female protagonist’s psyche in Marie-Vieux Chauvet’s Amour. Chauvet was born just short of a decade prior to Fanon, and writes, like him, in the moment of anti- colonial struggle in the Caribbean, exploring like Black Skin, White Masks the psychological effects and affects of colonialism. A Fanonian reading of the text illustrates the psychological impact of colonialism on women in post-colonial societies that remain deeply governed by the former colonizer’s values

The Work of Staying-With

There is a breathlessness to Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon leaves us in no doubt that he is an author with a great deal to say about matters, among which racism, colonialism and the effect of both on the black body and psyche are his preeminent concern, that are politically urgent. As they are. Such is Fanon’s urgency that he uses every resource at his disposal – works of literature that turn on the colonial condition, psychoanalysis (from Freud to Lacan with the likes of Mannoni in between), as well as the occasional philosophical invocation (Hegel is a presence if by no means a fleshed-out one; although, it must be said, it is Jean-Paul Sartre who is called to do duty most often). Although Fanon suggests that he considered presenting Black Skin, White Masks as a doctoral thesis, one finds it difficult to imagine such a prospect, in no small measure because the project is so stylistically incoherent. Black Skin, White Masks is an admixture of the anecdotal (Fanon has no trouble extracting political or psychoanalytic conclusions from his personal encounters; a tendency which applies as much to his Martinican past as to his experience of living in France; a tendency that extends to making deductions based on his observations in colonized Algeria), the psychoanalytic, the implicitly philosophical and the rhetorical. That is, the rhetorical in the sense that this is how Fanon structures his argument: through the declarative, through declamation. A scientific work Black Skin, White Masks is not.

Atlantic Theory and Theories

Notes on Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy XXX, no. 2 (2022

Loving with bell, Leaping with Fanon, and Landing Nowhere

bell teaches us that love is what makes it possible for life that doesn’t matter—life that doesn’t have access to the timeline of Man (or any timeline)—to matter. She writes, “No matter our place in imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchal culture, when we do the work of love, we are doing the work of ending domination.” bell calls on us to abandon our (bad) faith in Man’s positivism and progress in favor of another kind of faith: “spiritual awakening.” In what follows, I pair bell’s insight with Fanon’s argument that “occult instability” is what yields revolution, in order to elaborate love in bell’s own words: as “reckless abandon,” as a “spiritual awakening” that asks us to give up on this world in search of an/Other, even (especially) if we do not (yet) know where or how or if we will arrive at that landing

Returning to the Point of Entanglement: Sexual Difference and Creolization

In this essay, I suggest an entangled analysis of sexual difference theory via Luce Irigaray and creolization via Édouard Glissant. I argue that these two distinct discourses share a critical stance against Western sameness and assimilation into a closed metaphysical system. However, each is born of particular historical socio-political struggles that should not be collapsed. I bring them together to demonstrate that their claims are productively entangled and that a critical re-reading of melancholia can unite readers to locate sources of sexual-racial-colonial violence in disparate locations and epochs, holding collective memory and acting beyond critique. Relying on Francoise Vergès’s account of métissage and anamnesis, I will suggest that Antillean geographical vantages reveal complexities of racial and colonial relation to one’s mother, the state, and the sea. By interrogating psychoanalytic and linguistic claims, I forward a South-South circulation of coordinated but distinctive political reimaginations that challenge static notions of race, gender, and sexual difference.

Descension: The Fanon Zone(s)

The two texts that serve as bookends to the writings of Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs and Les Damnés de la Terre are often situated as taking up two different elements and approaches to decolonization. The former dismantling the colonized psyche with aggressive deconstruction of the individual and the latter the shattering of the coercive regime of empire. This edition affords us the opportunity to linger with Black Skin, White Masks and to consider its seismic resonance over the last 70 years. The thinking in this essay is preoccupied with the “zones” that appear in Black Skin, White Masks in two ways. The first means to ensure that the attention granted to the zone of nonbeing does not distract us from the existence of another zone of subject (re)creation found in the text, the zone of hachures. The ambition here is to do a bit more that present a taxonomy of Fanon’s zones but to demonstrate the manner in which they function as essential components in a chain of reasoning and activity that is aimed at decolonization

The More-Than-Human Other of Levinas’s Totality & Infinity

Emmanuel Levinas’s writings militate against an ontological way of thinking that he claims dominates the history of European philosophy. In their drive towards truth and knowledge, Levinas argues that thinkers like Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger efface the alterity of the Other, the Other’s “otherness,” by appropriating alterity as a moment of self-consciousness or Being. This ontological thinking, Levinas argues, attempts to violently reduce the unthematizable excess of the Other by systematically assimilating the Other in the concepts of totalizing thought. Levinas articulates his opposition to this tradition at length in Totality & Infinity by insisting upon an irreducible heteronomy: an Other who remains radically outside of any relationship that I might have with them

Technically Nothing: Enframing Life and the Properties of Nature

This essay will examine what it takes to be two foundational aspects of traditional metaphysics—the “concepts” of nothingness and nature—to offer a critical reading of how they enframe our understanding of “life.” It asserts that these two concepts are the limit point for metaphysical thought: the tangle that emerges when trying to overcome or reimagine them is an impasse encountered in pressing humanist concerns like ecological collapse, nihilism, alienation, and extinction. Readers of this journal may value a detailed, technical attempt at such an untangling; this article will suggest that a heightened sense of technics can be productive of a new image of thought, one that might escape the anthropocentric basis of these concerns.1 In doing so, the argument will insist on the flaw within certain metaphysical schematisms’ desire to appropriate, to form and hold sense into static and reproducible properties—a desire notably critiqued in Bernard Stiegler’s reading of technics. This flaw, it suggests, is constitutive of a sense of nature and nothingness based on property, one Stiegler notes is how we enframe being(s). It will then discuss Gilles Deleuze’s notable critiques of such “proper” enframing’s impossible limits and, following Deleuze, will turn to Marcel Proust’s writing as suggestive of a new image of thought—one that, focused on imagining (or enframing) nothingness through writing, inscribes an indelible remainder as that very imagination, suggesting that it is nothingness “it”self that will always remain

Erupting Out of the “Zone of Non-Being”: The Cunning of Solidarity

Critical remarks on Geo Maher's Anticolonial Eruptions (2022