Abstract
Is there a distinctive form of political agency that emerges from the conditions of ‘death-bound subjectivity’? Fanon’s idea of the zone of nonbeing suggests that this is indeed the case. Yet there is an omission in the secondary literature on Fanon in this respect. While a renowned Fanon scholar like Lewis Gordon usefully explores how the zone can be understood as domain of ontological erasure, he typically fails to elaborate on the revolutionary potential of the concept. The nature of the psychical processes underlying this passage to revolutionary agency remains unclear. Of such agency we might ask: what is the animating factor that underlies, that drives the passionate attachment to such death-bound causes? Lacan’s reconceptualization of the death drive as ethical cause—which, to be sure, represents a dramatic departure from the original Freudian conceptualization of a ‘death instinct’—is presented here as a useful auxiliary concept to Fanon’s zone of nonbeing. With speculative reference to the ethical dimension of the Lacanian death drive as a mode of surplus life which both underlies an unceasing fidelity to a cause and delivers the subject to a zone between life and death, we are able to offer an account of the agency of radical negativity that the zone of nonbeing engenders.
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Notes
This, I hasten to add, is not necessarily meant as a critical remark. The political value of many of Fanon’s most innovative concepts—such as his idea of epidermalization to cite but one salient example—is that they open up and encourage radical perspectives, allowing new types of criticality to come into being.
One key conflict here is that between generally phenomenological-existential readings of Fanon’s notion of the zone of nonbeing [such as those propounded by Bernasconi (2018), Gordon (2015) and Webber (2013)] and extrapolations of the same concept developed by Afro-pessimists such as Hartman (1997), Sexton (2011, 2015) and Wilderson (2010, 2020). The latter theorists equate blackness with social death, insisting that the historical institution of slavery has set the paradigm—epistemically, socially, politically—for how blackness and, indeed, black subjects are to be understood, valued and treated (that is, outside the category of the human). Antiblackness is not, moreover, a temporary historical aberration for afro-pessimist theorists; it is epistemically, libidinally, socially, constitutive of the category of the human as we know it. In arguing that blackness and the history of slavery cannot be separated and, advancing—as Hartman (1997), Sexton (2015) and Wilderson (2020) do—that black life is effectively lived as social death, Afro-pessimists run the risk—at least in the eyes of Gordon (2018) and Zalloua (2020)—of ontologizing racism and—we might add—of ontologizing the very notion of the zone of nonbeing. For two excellent recent articles detailing the terms of the above debate, see Ahmed (2018) and Olaloku-Teriba (2018). An additional critique of the Afro-pessimist position—instructive given the argument I will go on to make in this paper—comes from Neil Roberts (2016) who argues that we should “reject the mistaken [Afro-pessimist] conflation of the idea of social death with Fanon’s radical notion of the zone of nonbeing” because it is precisely “existence within…[the] hellishness [of the zone of nonbeing which]… creates the conditions for a salient, genuine upheaval”.
More specifically, in reference to Sartre, and as part of an extended critique of the phenomenological-existential orientation of Lewis Gordon, Marriott (2011) observes that “Fanon identifies in the subject a void-like nothingness-of-being which is….linked to the problem of self-deception in Sartre” (p. 46). This link allows Fanon “to develop thoughts on how the black subject is always belated and dispersed…irrealized and yet forever haunted by its non-appearance and who can only acquire a certain density of being by taking on the tragic neurotic role (of an imaginary whiteness)—which is also why phenomenology can never be grounded in the experience of this subject for its truth is literally void” (p. 46).
I am not the first to investigate how the Lacanian death drive might inform a conceptualization of the agency of politically marginal figures. Edelman’s (2004) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, while adopting a very different approach to my own, is the foremost example of such an initiative.
It is for this reason that we find in Lacan’s (1981) Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis) the idea that the end of an analysis corresponds to a transition from being a subject of desire to a subject of the drive.
I am indebted to David Marriott for this formulation. Azeen Khan’s (2018) essay ‘Lacan and Race’ offers an instructive contrary argument.
This, obviously, is my own interpretation of Lacan’s concerns in his seventh seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. It is an interpretation which may well be faulted for retrospectively overlaying Lacan’s subsequent theorizations in his eleventh seminar, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, upon this earlier work. For more exhaustive accounts of The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, see De Kessel (2009), Neill (2011) and Zupancic (2012).
Marriott (2011) makes a similar point, albeit in a different context, when he maintains that for Fanon “the language of neurosis…[is] never simply secondary to ‘the language of political experience’ (p. 39).
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Hook, D. Death-bound subjectivity: Fanon’s zone of nonbeing and the Lacanian death drive. Subjectivity 13, 355–375 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-020-00109-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-020-00109-6