Through the Hellish Zone of Nonbeing Thinking Through Fanon, Disaster, And the Damned of the Earth

7/26/2019 Through the Hellish Zone of Nonbeing Thinking Through Fanon, Disaster, And the Damned of the Earth

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ISSN: 1540-5699. Copyright by Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press). All Rights Reserved.

HUMAN

ARCHITECTURE

Journal of theSociology of Self-

A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)

Fanon Studies has gone through a con-siderable set of changes since the days ofprescient scholarship by Renate Zahar andcritics such as Hannah Arendt and JackWoddis in the wake of his death and the setof 1960s and 1970s radicals who looked tohim as a prophet of the revolution.

In those days, where the thought of ablack intellectual who did not stand as anapostle of nonviolence was enough to inau-gurate the firing of professors who wroteon him and the expansion of secret servicefiles on those who cited him, one couldnever imagine a future conference on uni-versity campuses as those held at PurdueUniversity in 1995 and New York Univer-sity in 1996, and the ones in 2007 at LewisUniversity and the University of Massa-chusetts Boston, in addition to a meeting onhis work in the fall of 2007 organized in

Paris by UNESCO. Particularly striking atthe University of Massachusetts meeting isthat Winston Langley, the Associate Pro-vost for Academic Affairs and Professor ofPolitical Science and International Rela-tions at that university, presented a talk onFanon: Violence and the Search of HumanDignity.

Fanons thought has gone through sev-eral stages from that of ideological critiqueto postcolonial anxiety to engagement withhis thought

. In my work, I have argued thata great black thinker should be engaged asone would any other great thinker.

1

Onecould not imagine, for instance, writing abook on Kant, Hegel, Marx, or Sartre thatwas concerned solely with the biography ofthose thinkers without addressing theirthought. If the intellectual is worthy, his orher ideas should offer much fruit for the de-

Lewis R. Gordon is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Judaic Studies at TempleUniversity, where he also is Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Cen-ter for Afro-Jewish Studies. He is the author of several influential books, including Fanon and the Crisis ofEuropean ManandHer Majestys Other Children, which won the Gustavus Myers Award for OutstandingWork on Human Rights, Existentia Africana, and Disciplinary Decadence. He is co-editor of Fanon: A CriticalReaderand his forthcoming books include An Introduction to Africana Philosophyand, with Jane Anna Gor-don, Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age. He is President of the Caribbean PhilosophicalAssociation.

Through t he Hel l i sh Zone of N onbei ng

Thinking through Fanon, Disaster, and theDamned of the Earth

Lewis R. Gordon

Temple University

[email protected]

Abstract: This article offers a reading of Fanons mythopoetic imagery of hell and damnation toilluminate the question of violence in the context of disastrous subjectivity.


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velopment of our own intellectual work.Fanons being also a black

thinker unfortu-nately stimulated the usual antipathies to

what he had to say.The problem is that critics of blackthinkers often place them under the yoke ofexperiential phenomena. This was at firstdone for noble reasons of combating themodern notion of black people as beingswithout an inner life, without an inside,without consciousness. The focus on expe-rience afforded the assertion of an inner be-ing, of an agent, with a point of view. Butthis at first important admission was even-tually subverted into a dialecticalreassertion of subordination. Black be-

came so heavily associated with experi-ence that the two fell into a symbiosis. Inthe academic realm, the study of black folkis often followed, after ellipsis, of their ex-perience: the black experience. Thedanger, however, is the subjectivism of ex-perience itself. Much of the critical force ofblack plight loses its impact when en-trapped in the language of experience thatslides into affect and eventually oversensi-tivity. How often are patterns of antiblackracism characterized as feelings of dis-crimination? What happens to the legiti-

macy of protest when injustice is presentedas perceived, believed, or felt?

An insidious dimension of experience-reductionism is the structural posing ofthought as an inauthentic imposition on ex-periential beings. Experience by itself is in-sufficient for the understanding of reality.Think of the experience of trying to figureout our experiences. The meaning of expe-rience requires theoretical and interpretive

resources. The collapse of color into experi-ence entails a reliance on other theoreticallyinformed narratives to bring meaning to

that experience. The result is a form of epis-temological dependency. At a structurallevel in the academy, this took the form ofthe black world of experience, and the non-black, often white world of theory and rea-son brought to that experience. The connec-tion between that way of thinking and thetendency to treat a black intellectual such asFanon solely in terms of his biographycomes to the fore.

Fanons writings have affected the livesof so many people. He argued in Black Skin,White Masks

that he was trying to make

people actional

.

22

I have interpreted this asa call to transform people from self-implo-sion, of being without impact on the socialworld to the point of expressing their hu-manity solely through self-inscription,through adverbially acting upon them-selves to the point of becoming, as Foucaultwould put it, bodies imprisoned by theirsoul. It is difficult to read Fanon and staystill. I have heard many stories over theyears. A relative during difficult timessought refuge in my home. He stayed onthe futon in my office. There, he came upon

Fanons books. A short time later, hegreeted me with his bags packed.

Where are you going? I asked.Ive read Fanon, he replied. I do not

know where. I only know its time to go.The postscript is one of much success.

An unruly teenager in a high school inBaltimore was suspended for another caseof bad behavior. Frustrated, his social stud-ies teacher threw a book at him as he left forhis mini-vacation at home in the projects.The book, The Wretched of the Earth

, came tothe youths attention on the second day ofhis pedagogical exile.

3 Reading the first fewpages on the settlers home versus the na-

1 See, e.g., Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the

Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophyand the Human Sciences

(New York: Routledge,1995) and Existentia Africana: Understanding Afri-cana Existential Thought

(New York: Routledge,2000). For discussion of the various stages ofFanon Studies, see the introduction to Fanon: ACritical Reader

, edited by Lewis R. Gordon, T. De-nean Sharpley-Whiting and Rene T. White (Ox-ford, UK: Blackwell, 1996).

2 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

,trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York:Grove, 1967).


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tives, he looked around and thought aboutthe projects in which he lived and the afflu-ent white neighborhoods nearby. He de-

cided to read more. He subsequentlyreturned to school, enrolled in a commu-nity college, went on to achieving his un-dergraduate degree at a historic blackcollege, and then his PhD and began teach-ing at the local college in the communitywhere he grew up. A colleague mentionedreading Fanon in high school in Chile andof how his thought helped her throughtimes of difficult political upheavals. Fanoncame into my life through one of my mater-nal uncles, a Rastafarian who purchasednearly any book he could find with the

words black and revolution in them.He oddly never read these books. But theywere there, on his bookshelves, and I readthem although it took a long while for meto understand them. Fanons prose was sopoetic that it seemed magical. Like theblues, his words offered a tragic under-standing of the maturation process of life.

My subsequent work as a scholar fo-cuses on, among other things, conditions ofappearance. I look into the lived-reality ofpeople hidden in plain sightpeople whoare submerged and, as a consequence, sup-

posedly do not exist. It has always struckme as odd that people could be invisiblewhile standing right before us. It was, asFanon himself experienced, an evenstranger realization to experience such in-visibility. Fanon understood the role andimpact of colonial forces on appearance inthe modern worldthat appearing raisedthe question of what one appears as

. Likethe Akanian response to the Cartesian

Cogito ergo sum

, where I think, therefore Iam raises the question, Am what?Fanon reminds us that we always appear as

something. Here we find the existential di-mension of his thought. The etymology of

the word existence points to standingout

ex sistere

to emerge. Appearance is aform emergence.

I will not here offer my interpretationon the correct way to read Fanon. The socialtheory forum that occasion this collectionof articles present a variety of readings ofhis work. Instead, I should like simply tooffer observation on a particular theme inhis work. This theme relates to my ownwork in several ways. Africana philosophy,I have argued over the years, raises ques-tions of philosophical anthropology, socialtransformation and freedom, and metacrit-ical reflection on reason.

4

Fanons thoughtpertains to all three. Although not all peo-

ple of African descent were enslaved in themodern world, the impact of modern sla-very, its correlative racist rationalization,and global colonization by European na-tions led to the discourse of questioned le-gitimacy of such people as members of thehuman community.

The initial response of demonstratingthe humanity of African Diasporic peoplesbetrayed some of the problems of reductiveexperience: To prove that black peoplewere as human as white people presup-posed white people as the human standard.

Given the injustice unleashed against peo-ple of color in the modern world, a criticalresponse would be that such a standardwould be a very low one. An added prob-lem, as Fanon demonstrates in his discus-sion of language in Black Skin, White Masks

,is that the posing of the white as the stan-dard for a dialectic of recognition rendersthe plight for black humanity a stillbornone with only one solution for the blackbecome white. The humanity of black folk,then, requires meditation on what it meansto be human. Issues of social transforma-tion and liberation link philosophical an-thropology to the question of freedom;

3 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

,trans. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Grove, 1963).

4 For elaboration, see Lewis R. Gordon,AnIntroduction to Africana Philosophy

(Cambridge,UK: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming2008).


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what kind of subject, in other words, is it towhich or to whom the question of freedomis relevant? An important distinction arises

here between liberty and freedom. Theformer is purely negative (the absence ofconstraints) and exemplifies what we sharewith other animals, whereas the latter en-tails responsibility and maturation. Onecould have liberty without freedom.

The metacritique of reason addressesthe epistemic conditions of the first two. Asin the aforementioned discussion ofepistemic dependency, what emerges hereis the importance of a critique of epistemiccolonization. Fanon put it this way: Coloni-zation made rigorous entails subjugation at

the methodological level. Since the methodand its logic call for critique, neither can bepresupposed in an analysis without beg-ging the question of the scope of coloniza-tion. Fanon thus had to be willing toexamine human phenomena at the level oftheir failures. This placed him in a paradox-ical relation to his own work. For their fail-ure was a metatextual assessment. Thatmeans that the internal consistency of thetext could be a manifestation of its failure.Fanon argued that this relationship of ex-ternal triumph over internal failure, or ex-

ternal failure over internal triumph, calledfor an appeal to the understanding ofmeanings generated by the social world,which he called sociogenic phenomena.

Fanons reflections on failure are linkedto his appeal to psychoanalysis. Althoughhe explored a variety of psychoanalyticalconcepts, one of crucial importance is thesubject-forming effect of melancholia, aninsight subsequently explored by JudithButler and Paul Gilroy in the contexts ofgender, race, and Postcoloniality. Melan-cholia is a form of suffering that is a conse-quence of a loss that is distinct frombereavement. In the case of death, there isnot a chance of reconciliation with the lostobject. But in the case of melancholia, thereis a continued presence of that which hasbeen lost. The separation of child from par-

ent, for example, is lived as melancholicwhere the parent continues to be presentbut out of bound. Various forms of loss that

continue this process are manifested intransitions from infancy to childhood to ad-olescence and then adulthood. As Fanonwas fond of saying, echoing Jean-JacquesRousseau through Friedrich Nietzsche,Mans tragedy is that he was once achild. One could think of modernity as in-augurating a unique form of melancholiathat formed the black subject. The situationis a frustrating one of a longing for a preco-lonial existence as what one is

, of longing forblack existence in a form that blacks couldnever have existed. Fanons infamous criti-

cisms of history and the past come fromthis insight: There is no place in the past forblack people; there is no place to whichblack people can return

.A dimension of philosophical anthro-

pology that is often overlooked is that it in-volves an investigation into a subject that isthe source of its own inquiry. This meansthat there is always a breakdown of iden-tity claims as the inquiring subject trans-forms itself into an object of study. Giventhe critique of methodological assump-tions, a danger emerges where the human

subject is squeezed into the disciplinarypresumptions by which it is studied. Thediscipline would, in other words, becomedeontological or absolute; its methodologi-cal assumptions would be presumed iso-morphic with the intentional life of itssubject as well as reality itself. I call this pre-sumption disciplinary decadence. Such aphenomenon occurs when a disciplineturns away from reality by presupposingthe absoluteness of its method, of its unlim-ited application. One result of such deca-dence is that one discipline presupposes itssupremacy over all others. In the humansciences, a consequence has been the meth-odological presupposition of the illegiti-macy of religious and mythic life. ThatFanon raises psychoanalytical questionsmeans also the consideration of the mythic


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life that informs symbolic order. Myth isnot here at the level of content but also atthat of form and grammar.

Fanon was aware that the grammar ofmeaning is premised also on the resourcesof mythic life. That understanding enableshim to articulate the imagery of humansubordination in the modern world. Al-though we speak today of Europe, it shouldbe borne in mind that such a concept reliesmore on geopolitics than coherent notionsof a continent. One look at any contempo-rary map reveals the absurdity of Europe asanything short of a western peninsula ofAsia. What has become Europe was in facta region governed by a geopolitical theo-

logical constellation known as Christen-dom. That terrain suffered a recession of itsgeographical reach by the eighth century asIslam became the theological-geopoliticalorder under the leadership of the Moorsthat reached through the Iberian Peninsulainto the borders of France. Muslim controlof Mediterranean trade devastated thenorthern economies and collapsed Chris-tendom into underdevelopment. What istoday understood as modernity began withthe expulsion of the Moors from Grenada inJanuary 1492. It was the reconquest, as

the Christians called it, in the name ofChristendom. One could imagine how dif-ferent history might have been if thehermeneutics of those events were anti-co-lonial instead of a celebration of conquest.The notion of reconquest brought the my-thopoetics of that expansion.

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By March 1492, the Reconquest becamethe Inquisition, which called for vanquish-ing the damned. The word damned isfrom the Latin word damna, which refers tothe hurt, the lost. We would be remiss to

end our etymological excursion here. I havefound that ancient Latin words often havefoundations in Greek and Kamitian or an-

cient Egyptian ones, interestingly often alsomediated by Hebrew terms. The peculiarconnection here with the Hebrew adamah(ground), which is also related to the Kami-tian/EgyptianAtum, which in turn comesfrom dem(man and clay or ground). Oddlyenough, there is a connection between be-ing damned and being put down; onecould interpret this as the consequence ofwhat happens when man attempts to begod. Recall that in both Judaism and Chris-tianity, man is the result of a fall. What,however, happens when a human being

falls below humanity? The result is to gobelow ground. This motif of being putdown, to fall, echoes the concept of, inChristendom, Hell.

Ironically, there is no actual biblical im-agery of Hell. Much of the hellish poeticshave been inherited over the ages byDantes depiction in his Inferno.6 Manythemes of sadistic suffering exacted accord-ing to ones vices are familiar enough tomost readers, but what is often overlookedis the concluding ethical message of thetext. At the end of Canto XXXII, the protag-

onist, guided by Virgil, encounters the hor-rid image of two heads stuck in ice from theneck down next to each other. One (CountUgolino) is consumed by hatred to thepoint of becoming consumption itself. Hestretches over and chews at the head of hisenemy (Archbishop Ruggieri) so as to exactrevenge on him. After witnessing thisghastly consequence of a soul consumedliterallyby revenge, he is released by hisown sinful attachments and the path un-folds as follows at Canto XXXIV, 127139:

5 For more discussion, seeAn Introduction toAfricana Philosophy, introduction and chapter 1,and see also Cedric Robinson, An Anthropologyof Marxism(Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001) andThe Golden Age of the Moor, edited by Ivan VanSertima (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Pub-lishers, 1992).

6 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy ofDante Alighieri, vol. 1, Inferno, trans. Allen Man-delbaum (Toronto, Canada: Bantham Books,1982).


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There is a place below, the limit of

that cave, its farthest point fromBeelzebub,

a place one cannot see: it is discovered

by earthere is a sounding stream thatflows

along the hollow of a rock eroded

by winding waters, and the slope iseasy.

My guide and I came on that hiddenroad

to make our way back into the brightword;

and with no care for any rest, weclimbed

he first, I followinguntil I saw,

through a round opening, some ofthose things

of beauty Heaven bears. It was fromthere

that we emerged, to seeonce morethe stars.

Fanons work is replete with similarimagery. He is not imitating Dante. He is,however, speaking from that grammar ofcondemnation. They are familiar to us:There is the fire in him that simmers but isnot extinguished and the hell that the blackcannot fall to because of already having oc-cupied in the introduction to Black Skin,White Masks.7 There is Fanons famous ref-erence to the zone of nonbeinga zone nei-ther of appearance or disappearance. Andthen there is, of course, Les Damns de laterre, The Damned of the Earth, whichcontinues to bear the English translation of

The Wretched of the Earth.Fanons texts take the reader through a

living hell. He functions like Virgil, but alsoas both guide and traveler. He guides thereader through this modern hell and at-

tempts, in at least two installments, to dem-onstrate the dangers of consumed hatred.In Black Skin, White Masks, hope is in the in-terrogative prayer to the body at its conclu-sion. In Les Damns de la terre, it is the ascentoffered by the shedding of our skin and set-ting afoot a new man/day.

Much happens at sunrise. Dawn is acleansing period. In the past, monsters arevanquished at sunrise. These themes ofheaven and hell raise questions of the sig-nificance of disaster. The term disaster isastrological in its origin. It has roots in the

Italian term disastro, meaning ill-starredor bad planet, which in turn is from theLatin astrumand the Greek astron. Think ofwhat it means for something, in effect, tofall from the heavens. Such a loss is a sign,and where it falls suffers. A problem raisedfrom seeing such a sign is whether it signi-fies a continuum that falls upon the onewho sees it. Such a continuation would be adisaster, a catastrophe (from the Greekfrom katastrephein (to fall down), whichstimulates the wise counsel of lookingaway. Should one not look away, one could

get caught up in the continuum of disaster,and the result of becoming a sign is also tohave become a disaster. As a sign, the con-tinuum is also a warning, a monstrumfromwhich developed the term monster.Fanon wrote much of disaster in all hisworks. Modern colonialism has created di-sastrous people, modern monsters.

The situation of such people becomes aneurotic one. There are a few levels of non-being: To appear means to over appear.Thus, to appear at all becomes a disaster.The political dimension becomes the frus-trating situation of an anti-political politics.Politics is public, which entails appearance.But disastrous appearance privileges dis-appearance. The result is a politics that can-not be. The theme of melancholialivinglossreturns. For those who want to over-

7 For more discussion, see Jane Anna Gor-don and Lewis R. Gordon, Of Divine Warning:Reading Disaster in the Modern Age(Boulder, CO:Paradigm Publishers, forthcoming 2008).


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come that loss, it requires an attachment toappear within the system. But the addedfrustration is that the pathologies of such

appearance are generated by such a system.One can reject this and live with this melan-cholia. In the African Diaspora, it takes onmany forms with many names. I call it theblues. The blues exemplify the loss re-quired for mature existence in a world thatmilitates against ones humanity.

There is also the disaster of recognition.Racist imposition has made the structureone of the white self and related Other, theblack self and all Others, but no white selfand black Other. This below-Otherness isthe disaster of black existence. It is the Zone

of Nonbeing.The theme of damnation illuminates

perhaps Fanons most controversial reflec-tion: on violence. The limited space avail-able for this article affords no elaboration.In summary, damnation means that theblack (or better, the blackened) lives the ir-relevance of innocence. Without the possi-bility of innocence, the blackened lives thedisaster of appearance where there is noroom to appear as nonviolently. Acceptablebeing is nonexistence, nonappearance, orsubmergence. Today we speak, for in-

stance, of nonviolent resistance in the CivilRights Movement, but we should remem-ber that the black activists from that periodwere chronicled as violent. At a more philo-sophical level, the absence of a Self-Otherdialectic in racist situations means the erad-ication of ethical relations. Where ethics isderailed, all is permitted. The result is atwofold structure. The absence of ethical re-lations means living with what Abdul Jan-Mohamed has called death-boundsubjectivity.8It means living with the pos-sibility of ones arbitrary death as a legiti-mate feature of a system. It also meanswitnessing concrete instances of arbitrary

death and social practices that demonstratethat one group of peoples lives are lessvaluable than others to the point of their

not being considered to be really people atall. The second feature is the conservativeresponse of being nonviolent by not chang-ing anything. To change things is to appear,but to appear is to be violent since thatgroups appearance is illegitimate. Vio-lence, in this sense, need not be a physicalimposition. It need not be a consequence ofguns and other weapons of destruction. Itneed simply be appearance.

There are many implications of such afrustrating outcome. Fanon was not a pessi-mist or a nihilist. The implications of such a

mythopoetic vision must wait for anothercontext. For now, what should be borne inmind is that a dimension of existentialthought is an abiding faith in contingent di-mensions of human affairs, which, in thiscontext, amounts to a luta continua.

8 Abdul JanMohamed, The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wrights Archaeology of Death(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).


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Through the Hellish Zone of Nonbeing Thinking Through Fanon, Disaster, And the Damned of the Earth