Human Studies (2005) 28: 231–249
C
Springer 2005
Revolutionary Becomings: Negritude’s Anti-Humanist Humanism∗ VALENTINE MOULARD-LEONARD Department of Philosophy, The University of Memphis, E-mail:
[email protected] or
[email protected]
Abstract. In this paper I establish an alliance between the thought of Frantz Fanon and Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Difference. In light of Fanon’s critique of Sartre’s characterization of the place of the Negritude movement in terms of dialectic, I point to the inherent limitations of modern humanism’s dialectical accounts for enabling genuine historical change. Alternatively, I appeal to Deleuze’s distinction between history and becoming, and his concomitant idea of intensive becoming-revolutionary. I conclude that such an alliance with Deleuzian metaphysics holds far greater promises for effecting Fanon’s revolutionary project of the creation of a new humanity (and therefore, of a new ethics and a new politics) than his traditional assimilation to Phenomenology and Existentialism.
What I would like to discuss here can be traced back to two main sources: one stems from a personal experience, the other from my most ambitious philosophical aspirations. The personal experience is that of the outrage I felt upon reading Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks while living in Memphis, Tennessee, home of the Blues; the city which saw the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968; the city which, like so many others, goes out of its way to repress the bad conscience that the industrial growth and capitalistic expansion of the post-colonial world has not succeeded and cannot succeed in assuaging. Like King’s, Fanon’s is a cry for basic human dignity, for what the Enlightenment philosophers have equated with universal freedom and the basis of morality. Like King, Fanon wants to be a man, only a man, among other men (Bernasconi, 2001: 186). But unlike King, Fanon’s solution lies with armed, revolutionary violence. We will see why he believes this violence is necessary. Yet the outrage I felt was not due to Fanon’s appeal to violence. His unbearably sincere depiction of “the lived-experience of the black man”1 in a white world convinced me, perhaps more thoroughly than I wished, that this situation demanded a revolution, and that the revolution ∗ The idea of an “Anti-humanist humanism” is a double reference, on the one hand to Leopold
Senghor’s article, “Negritude and Modernity or Negritude as a Humanism for the Twentieth Century”; on the other hand to Sartre’s characterization of Negritude as an “anti-racist racism” in “Black Orpheus.”
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ought to be armed; that only concrete violence could be cleansing or “disintoxicating” (Fanon) enough given the seriousness and the tenaciousness of the poison. My outrage, then, sprang from suddenly having a real glimpse at the situation Fanon describes, at the humiliation and frustration that, through his words, crept slowly into my body. Injustice. Hypocrisy. Shame. I was ashamed, not only of my fellow white men and women, not only of the famed humanist tradition my French heritage has taught me to proudly identify with. More profoundly, I felt the outrage of being suddenly confronted with the subtle, insidious and so far unnoticed racism within me: the racism of the educated, open-minded democrat who unequivocally condemns all exclusions based in “mere” physical appearance, “mere” cultural difference, “mere” social and historical background. The philosophical ambition, I cannot trace with as much clarity. But I can say that this experience provided it with an articulation, a point of crystallization. It began to appear that ethical theories and well-intentioned moral values could not do the trick. Even the most clear-headed historical analysis, or the most heartfelt political activism, could not and would not undo the injustice which, I began to realize, necessarily lies at the heart of this ethics and this morality. As Leopold Senghor suggests, as Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze have understood, what we need, I believe, is a new metaphysics, a new ontology, a novel way of establishing the possibility of a different kind of experience, hence a different approach to knowledge, to psychology, to aesthetics – so as to eventually produce a new morality and a new conception of the political – in short, a new humanity. I will try to show that the Negritude movement, in “shout[ing] out the great Negro cry so hard that the world’s foundations will be shaken,”2 presents us with an historical and political rupture which coincides with the demand for the creation of such a new kind of morality. However, for reasons I will endeavor to explain, I want to explore the possibility of different philosophical avenues than those the Negritude writers envision for the production of this antihumanist humanism. In what follows, I will suggest that these possibilities proceed from an encounter between Fanon’s critique of Sartre’s dialectical accounts of the formation of racial consciousness on the one hand, and a Deleuzian thought of intensive becoming on the other.
1. The Negritude Movement and the (Post)-Colonial World The term “Negritude” was coined by the Martinican poet and politician Aim´e C´esaire in the 1930’s to reflect a comprehensive reaction to the colonial situation, and the consequent profound reformulation of African diasporic identity and culture. Over and above the cultural and geographical dissemination that characterizes the African diaspora, C´esaire and his fellow student Leopold
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Senghor (who was to become the first president of independent Senegal in the 60’s) wanted to lay down the foundations for the elaboration of a collective identity, born of a common historical experience: the experience of colonial subjugation. Accordingly, the Negritude movement crystallizes around the rejection of the political, social, and moral domination of the West through the revalorization of the African cultural heritage. As Senghor and Fanon make clear, the necessity of this reinvention stems from a particular situation, specific to the French colonial practices, whose force lies primarily with educational and cultural processes of subjugation, through which the colonized populations find themselves endorsing French values, history and identity at the expense of their own.3 Thus, what is at stake in this liberation from colonial hegemony is not and cannot simply be a matter of taking over the objective infrastructure and government agencies that perpetuate oppression from without. It is, more fundamentally, a matter of operating a revolution from within the depths of the colonized’s identity formation; in short, it requires a radical reorganization, a re-creation of the colonized’s very subjectivity – and hence, of the colonizer’s, too. Negritude then lies at the crossroads of historical, political, social, and aesthetic issues, which all converge upon the problematic of individual and collective processes of identification. It is in this sense that I want to show that what is ultimately at stake in Negritude is the production of a new metaphysics: a metaphysics of becoming, capable of enabling positive change through affirmation, rather than the phenomenological paradigm based in dialectical processes driven by negation.4 The argument I want to develop here is this: if by dialectic we mean a teleological process of transformation motored by negation (as Hegel, Marx, Sartre and even psychoanalysis imply), then dialectic remains inherently incapable of effecting the transmutation it is seeking. In my view this is because, despite its efforts to account for change and evolution, dialectic remains hostage to an ontology which is caught up within a logic of abstract possibility based in (1) the polar opposition of subject and object; (2) the assumption of a necessary historical progression driven by the projection of a pre-determined goal understood in terms of identity and universality. Such a conception of history, I contend, precludes the creation of a genuinely new system, with new values, which would guarantee the impossibility of any recuperation by the old hegemony. In contrast, and inspired by Deleuze, I will suggest (1) a process of liberation based in the affirmation of pre-individual singularities (Differencein-itself) rather than the subject-object opposition; and (2) a conception of becoming irreducible to (although fundamentally related to) history, driven by an anti-teleological ethics of perversion, defined as “a deviation in relation to the ends.” I will argue that the latter constitutes a much-needed alternative to the dead ends of modern humanism – in the shape of what I would like to call an anti-humanist humanism for the 21st century.
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2. Negritude and the Master and Slave Dialectic Over and beyond the diversity of their approaches, the Negritude thinkers all want to draw on the Hegelian analyses of the phenomenological formation and transformation of historical consciousness. Even Sartre, one of the strongest and most influential upholders of Negritude’s cause, relies on such dialectical processes for insuring the black man’s and woman’s liberation from oppression. But, following Fanon, I want to show that this cannot be an acceptable solution to the fascism within us that perpetuates oppression. Fanon proposes his own version of the dialectic of liberation; but in a Marxian inspiration, he demands that it culminate in an armed struggle, solely capable of effecting concretely the ultimate sublation (i.e., literally lifting up and canceling out) of the totalizing colonial categories. Like any true revolution, then, Fanon’s dialectic of liberation wants to open the future: it must take the risk of throwing history into a radically unpredictable and genuinely unknown becoming. Therefore, unlike the Marxist revolution and unlike the Hegelian phenomenology of consciousness, which both ascribe a specific end to the dialectical process – namely, a classless society for Marx, and the resolution of the particular into the universal for Hegel – Fanon leaves the end wide open. Something radically new must emerge from the dis-intoxicating cure he prescribes. In this respect, I believe that Fanon’s proposal holds more promises for the production of an authentic black subjectivity – a prerequisite for attaining the dignity and equality informing humanistic conceptions of morality. But even if Fanon’s revolution did succeed, even if the bloodshed that such revolution implies were deemed a necessary evil, a mere moment destined to be overcome – a more insidious threat remains. Emmanuel L´evinas has insightfully named this threat “the institution of a war with a good conscience.” In his 1984 “Peace and Proximity,” L´evinas writes, It is not without importance to know – and this is perhaps the European experience of the 20th century – if the egalitarian and just State in which the European is accomplished. . . proceeds from a war of all against all – or from the irreducible responsibility of the one for the other, and if it can ignore the unicity of the face and love. It is not without importance to know this so that war does not become the institution of a war with a good conscience in the name of historical necessities. (1984/1996: 169) Sadly, it appears that the recent world events have not failed to confirm the all too real justification for this worry. This, to me, only points to the fact that the West has failed to engage in the profound self-examination that L´evinas is here asking of us. But even more seriously, I want to show with Fanon and Deleuze that the West cannot engage in such self-examination as long as it does not fundamentally put into question the very metaphysics of recognition on which all its values are built.
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By “metaphysics of recognition” I mean German Idealist elaborations of the universal. Put very simply, Kant wants to show that the very possibility of morality relies on the universalizability of the claims of the rational subject. Many critiques have pointed out not only that this approach unquestioningly presupposes the priority of such rationality to define subjectivity, but also presupposes the suspect character of non-rational (hence non- universalizable) features of human conduct and motivations (Butler, 2000: 15). It is well known that charges of irrationality associated with primitive mentality have served to justify many abuses and humiliations in the eyes of the colonizers. More generally, Left discourses have noted the use of the doctrine of universality in the service of imperialism, as what is named universal is infallibly the monopoly of the dominant culture. One way of drawing this conception of the universal into question is to show that such formalisms are never really as formal as they purport to be. This, Judith Butler (2000) points out, is what Hegel tries to do. First, Hegel argues that the categories of thought which are considered subjective and abstract (hence universalizable), as Kant’s are, are in fact inseparable from the objective, concrete world from which they seek to differentiate themselves. In a typical fashion, Hegel shows that, precisely because the subjective and the objective are permanently in antithesis or opposition to one another, they always contaminate one another. In the realm of the formation of self-consciousness, this fundamental relationality gets played out in terms of “the master and slave dialectic.” There, Hegel gives an account of the process of mutual recognition necessary for the production of self-consciousness – or the subjective identity that grounds freedom. To begin with, the master is an independent self-consciousness whose essence is to be for-itself by excluding everything else from itself (negation). In short, his identity is firmly established.5 In contrast, the slave is that consciousness which is for another: it is dependent. Thus, while the master’s truth lies within himself, the slave is forced to realize that his truth lies outside of him, in the master. This realization initiates a complete reversal of the situation. The truth of the master then becomes “the servile consciousness of the bondsman,” while the truth of the slave coincides with the internalization of the independent consciousness of the master. But servitude is not yet aware that “it does in fact contain within itself the truth of pure negativity” (or independence). It is by means of service that the slave will become conscious of what he truly is. Through the mediation of this objective activity of forming the material object, the worker puts his own subjective life at stake. The particularity of the subjugated consciousness can then lose itself within that abstract universal, thereby operating a synthesis of the concrete and the abstract. Indeed, for Hegel, this demonstration by the slave that he is not attached to any particular life generates the moment of abstraction necessary for attaining universal consciousness (negation of the negation).
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But that is not all. A further step is needed for the completion of the process and the corresponding attainment of a full-fledged self-consciousness. This is the moment of the return into oneself. The moment of abstraction allowed for a lifting up of the slave’s objectivity (or lack of transcendence) and a corresponding suspension of the master’s subjectivity (or of his independence). For Hegel, this abstract simultaneity of the two consciousnesses is also the moment of reciprocity at which they can recognize one another. Finally, this recognition coincides with the reconciliation between the particular and the universal. Each consciousness can then return into itself, but as transformed, lifted up and transcended. One can see the appeal that this dialectical process has for both Marxist thinkers and Negritude writers. Its obvious advantage over Kant’s account is that it situates subjectivity and universality within a historical, developmental process, thereby allowing for further transformations. It injects hope into the closed system of subjugation; it introduces becoming into being. This is indeed the aspect of the dialectic that both Senghor and Sartre pick up on. In “Negritude and Modernity or Negritude as a Humanism for the 20th Century,” Senghor writes, “Negritude is, essentially, a refusal and a commitment, it is a negation and going beyond negation through synthesis, or even better, through symbiosis” (1977/2001: 144). He then goes on to explicate this symbiosis by drawing convergences between African metaphysics and contemporary Western thought. He concludes that in its very specificity, Negritude (here understood as the Hegelian return into itself of Black consciousness) rejoins the progressive Western thought embodied in Bergson’s Life-philosophy. In Senghor’s words, “Black-African thought, which is ‘intuited, lived and based in lived-experience,’ easily converges with contemporary thought, which ‘ceases to be the thought of the world to become the actual experience of the world, the identity of the word [logos] and the real” (1977/2001: 156).6 Finally, Senghor sums up the modern humanism he associates with the thought of such philosophers as Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Heidegger and Sartre in the formula, “the human being making him – or her-self through the world and making the world” (1977/2001: 159, author’s emphasis). In a similar vein, Sartre’s own definition of Existentialism as Humanism is rooted in his confidence in the human’s ability to create himself or herself in and through his or her active shaping and creating of the world. And like Senghor, Sartre wants to ground his New Humanism in the universal bearing of an absolute, inherently creative freedom of choice. In Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre writes, “What we choose is always the better; and nothing can be better for us unless it is better for all.. . . Our responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole” (1973: 29). He then proceeds to illustrate this personal responsibility for Humankind with the following, somewhat facetious yet very telling, example: if, as a worker, I choose to join a Christian rather than a Communist trade union; and if by that
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membership I choose to signify that resignation is, after all, the attitude that best becomes man, then I do not commit myself alone to that view. Resignation is my will for everyone and my action is, in consequence, a commitment on behalf of all humans. Finally, he writes, “In fashioning myself I fashion man” (1973: 30). But the de facto universality that Sartre is here referring to constitutes only one of the two phases of his argument for equating Existentialism with Humanism. The other phase is most conspicuously explicated in his 1948 “Black Orpheus.” In this text, which he wrote as a preface for Senghor’s anthology of Negritude poetry, Sartre vividly expresses his enthusiasm for this “anti-racist racism” which, for him, defines Negritude. But, as Fanon’s penetrating critical gaze underlines, Sartre eventually collapses “the great Negro cry that will shake the world’s foundations” with the cry of the Marxist proletarian revolutionaries. Thus, says Sartre, “Negritude is for destroying itself, it is a passage and not an outcome, a means and not an ultimate end” (1948/1964/2001: 137). In other words, “Negritude appears as a minor moment in a dialectical progression” since, Sartre adds, [The Negro] wishes in no way to dominate the world: he desires the abolition of ethnic privileges, wherever they come from; he asserts his solidarity with the oppressed of every color. After that, the subjective, existential, ethnic notion of negritude “passes,” as Hegel says, into the objective, positive and precise notion of the proletariat. For Sartre, then, it all happens as if “the negritude moment” were to be sublated within the “proletariat moment,” which in turn should be lifted up and cancelled out within the greater, universal whole of a raceless and classless society. Negritude now appears as a very minor moment indeed! But before we turn to Fanon’s astute critique of Sartre’s view I believe we must acknowledge some of the promising resources that Sartre’s analysis provides – and which C´esaire, Senghor (and even Fanon, to a certain extent) have wanted to endorse.
3. Sartre’s Gaze and the Limits of Dialectics In Being and Nothingness, Sartre is able to anchor the rather abstruse Hegelian dialectic of Lordship and Bondage to its existential counterpart. Drawing on Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology, Sartre develops a powerful tool for the structural analysis of the constitution of subjectivity in the social context. “The Gaze,” or “the Look” becomes the central articulation of the reversal involved in the generation of self-consciousness. To take his famous example from Being and Nothingness, as long as I am alone looking through the keyhole, my consciousness is entirely absorbed in its object, leaving no
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room for self-consciousness: I am wholly what I am. It is only when I hear footsteps down the hallway, that is, when the potential other looms, that I suddenly become aware of myself (1943/1975: 349). But as I become aware of it, the self that was “wholly what it is” is no longer identical to itself; it is split open by the fear of being caught in this shameful situation. By means of a reflection forced onto it by the potential gaze of the other, the objective, dense self is thus transformed into a shamed, ambiguous self, which is now at once subject and object. Although the root of this self-consciousness lies in the rather unpleasant experience of fear and humiliation, it is also the springboard for transcendence or freedom. For it is this reflective doubling of consciousness that introduces a crack between pure objectivity and pure subjectivity – a crack which coincides with freedom of choice. Sartre then concludes that the other’s gaze constitutes me. But in order that the self-consciousness that the other human introduces at the heart of my being becomes actualized as freedom, something else is needed. Unsurprisingly, what is also needed here is reciprocity. If the other has the power to constitute me as an object for him or her, thereby constituting himself or herself as a free subject, then I in turn must have the power to constitute him or her as an object for me (otherwise, the dialectic collapses into a vicious circle). When someone stares at me, I feel uncomfortable because he or she controls a meaning which, although it has a bearing on me, remains unknown to me; why are they looking at me so? What is wrong with me? Now if I return the gaze and stare back at them, they in turn become self-conscious. The result is that I do not feel objectified any longer; I have taken control of the gaze and this has liberated me. The key, then, is to take control of the look. The beauty of the gaze structure lies in that it captures concretely the mutual constitution of identity uncovered by Hegel’s dialectic – hence its fundamentally social and historical dimension. Moreover, the gaze embodies the possibility of the simultaneity of the mutual constitution. When we are both looking into each other’s eyes, we are equal. There again, for Sartre as for Hegel, this process of mutual recognition testifies to the shared freedom of contemporaneous subjects. As such, it is the cornerstone of morality, understood in the classical humanistic sense of universal dignity and respect. Great. But then what happens when the other refuses to see himself or herself as being seen? What happens when this purportedly existential though rather logical development is undercut by the irrationality of prejudice, by the bad faith of the racist who remains blind to his or her own racism? What when the richest and most powerful country launches deadly fireworks on the civilian population of a small country who has neither chosen its government nor wants to identify with a handful of fundamentalist assassins – all in the name of “Western values”? What when the motherland of liberty and fraternity decides to institutionalize religious oppression in the name of secular equality?7 In short, what do we do when the democrat repeatedly avoids his or her conversion
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through the humiliating gaze, comfortably hiding behind his or her “just,” universal values, his or her generous paternalistic Christian morality and socalled rationality? This is precisely the aporetic situation that Fanon addresses in The Lived Experience of the Black. There, he describes the specific vicissitudes of the consciousness inhabiting a black body, a self locked up in a body which remains caught up in the shackles of an inescapable, overdetermining white gaze. In what follows, I want to argue that in this achingly illuminating text, Fanon brings out two very serious problems which, I believe, testify to the limitations inherent in the dialectical path for the liberation of the subjugated Negro – and ultimately, for any liberation. I will then point to an alternative approach to the problematic of individuation – i.e., the constitution of personal or collective identity – and to the ethical potentials we can draw from it.
4. Fanon, Beauvoir and Dialectical Violence In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon describes the no exit situation which, as a French-educated Black man from Martinique, he experienced upon arriving in metropolitan France. What his lived-experience testifies to is the radical impossibility of completing the reversal of the gaze necessary for recognition. In fact, the cornerstone of Fanon’s critique of dialectics lies in his realization that the negative moment which, for Hegel as for Sartre, grounds the formation of self-consciousness, is not an option for him. Unlike other kinds of identity formations (Jews, homosexuals), which, he claims (not unproblematically) mainly depend on the subject’s actions and behavior – and that can therefore, for the most part, be chosen – the Black man is hostage to his skin color. As Fanon puts it, “I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from the outside. I am the slave, not of an idea [be it a tenacious negative stereotype] that others have of me, but of my appearing. . . . I am fixed” (1951/2001: 187). In other words, because the Black man or woman is stuck to a bodily materiality whose meaning has been predetermined for him or her by others, the moment of negation that drives the dialectical progression from facticity (in-itself) to transcendence (for-itself) cannot take place. Thus, while the formation of self-consciousness requires the continuous possibility of one’s reinvention of oneself, that self-creation is, for the Black living in a White world, proscribed from the outset. What ensues is the repeatedly frustrated attempt to force the march of the dialectical economy of recognition, by first appealing to the White opponent’s famed rationality. As a medical doctor, Fanon turns to scientific facts for support. “We agreed about the idea: the Negro is a human being. That is to say, the less firmly convinced added, his heart is on the left, just like ours” (1951/2001: 189). But, Fanon continues, “Some pointed out on my chromosomes several more
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or less thick genes that represented cannibalism. Next to the sex-linked, they had now discovered the racial-linked. This science is a disgrace!” At a loss to understand this rather irrational rationality, this “affective anchylosis of the Whites” (1951/2001: 190), Fanon turns to Negritude for support. There again, what he finds, in Senghor’s own writings, is another alienating racial essentialism – albeit of a different kind: this time cultural rather than biological. Says Senghor, “Thus it is that rhythm affects what is least intellectual in us, and does so despotically, to let us penetrate the spirituality of objects, and that attitude of surrender which is ours, is itself rhythmic” (1977/2001: 191). In sarcastic despair, Fanon gestures at the sheer irony of Negritude’s attempted empowerment through the revaluation of African values. For, Fanon suggests, the return into oneself prescribed by Negritude is itself already caught up in an endemically white dialectic. As Sartre put it, “Negritude is a minor moment” (1948/2001: 137). In response to Sartre’s attempt at a dialectical recuperation, Fanon points to the irreducibility of Black consciousness: “The Black consciousness is given as an absolute density, as if filled with itself, a stage prior to any crack. . . . Jean-Paul Sartre, in this work, has destroyed Black enthusiasm. To historical becoming, the unforeseeable should have been opposed” (2001: 197; my emphasis). Now, in light of the fundamental violence that Fanon so acutely uncovers at the heart of modern humanism’s historical endeavors, he, the committed revolutionary, envisions only one solution. If dialectical logic is incapable of sustaining the transformation needed, then perhaps armed violence may operate the transmutation. If the white imperialist always manages to eschew the moment of negativity through which he or she would finally see himself or herself as seen, then, Fanon argues, let the concrete armed struggle explode the dialectical movement so as to finally open the future. In The Wretched of the Earth, he writes, The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity. Obedient to the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, they both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous. (1961/1963: 38–39) And then in response to this Manicheism, he adds, But it so happens that for the colonized people this violence, because it constitutes their only work, invests their characters with positive and creative qualities. The practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upward in reaction to the settler’s violence in the beginning. The groups recognize each other and the future nation is already indivisible. (1961/1963: 93)
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In short, what Fanon proposes here, is to substitute for the abstract negativity implied in traditional dialectic the concrete negativity of armed violence. Once again, for all the reasons I have tried to convey, I find Fanon’s suggestions most seductive. In fact, they confirm Simone de Beauvoir’s own visionary approach to the problem of oppression and her correlative elaboration of a new humanism in her 1947 The Ethics of Ambiguity. There, Beauvoir proposes a re-reading of the Hegelian dialectic in light of her redefinition of freedom as concrete engagement (or involvement) in the situation. This, she says, can only be realized by the individual’s indefinite self-creation (or projection into the future) prolonging itself in and through the freedom of others. There, she agrees that “the scandal of violence” may in some cases be the best choice at one’s disposal, since, she writes, “We have to respect freedom only when it is intended for freedom, not when it strays, flees itself, and resigns itself. A freedom which is used only to deny freedom must be denied” (1947/1948: 90–91; trans. modified). For her, if the “scandal of violence” can ever find a justification, it is because it is grounded in a new humanism, which affirms the absolute value of the individual – for, if the individual were nothing, then there would never even be a community: zero times × still equals zero. Her precept or principle of action quoted above thus amounts to an alternative to the traditional humanism inherited from Kant and Hegel on the one hand, and to Marx’s historical materialism on the other. As we know, the excessive formalism of the former amounts to the failure to account for the concrete, singular, irreducible situations that need to be addressed (i.e., the black man’s and woman’s lived experience is irreducible to the proletariat’s). Appealing to “the dignity of all men” is obviously useless when it comes to cases where some men are actually oppressing others. Whose dignity are we to choose? Furthermore, she points out, the limits of the Marxist approach come into focus when the latter not only prioritizes the collective over the individual, but also affirms the necessity of violence. Not only is the inexorably scandalous aspect of violence overlooked – since such solution is no longer attributable to free choice; but also, this approach goes hand in hand with the failure to recognize the absolute worth of the concrete individual, and the consequent responsibility for the outrage that its death necessarily represents. Like Fanon, Beauvoir proposes her own solutions to the dilemmas implied in revolutionary liberation. And like him, she does this by referring history to the open future. This is because the absoluteness of the value of the human, of the individual and of its heroism is, in turn, founded in the future – since when cut off from its transcendence, the individual is nothing: it can only justify its existence through its project. Thus, the individual’s justification is always to come.8 However, both recent and less recent world events have demonstrated that even the all too real shock of a concrete violent intervention (i.e., 9/11) does
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not succeed in converting the neurotic gaze of imperialism. I conclude that as a means of actualizing fundamental historical and political changes, dialectic, be it in its Hegelian, Marxist or Existentialist mode, is simply impotent. So what do we do? What other means of effecting real changes can thought appeal to? I believe that this is precisely the question that Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy has the power to answer.
5. The Deleuzian Event: History and Becoming I pointed out in my introduction that I believed that what is at stake in the ethical and political dead ends of modern humanism is no less than a wrongheaded metaphysics. In his twin publications of the late sixties, Difference and Repetition and the Logic of Sense, Deleuze proposes a radical alternative to the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies that still overwhelmingly dominate Western thinking. First, by way of an alternative to the classical understanding of difference as opposition so dear to Hegel, Deleuze creates the concept of Difference-in-itself. Put very simply, if traditional difference is always relative, since it is understood in terms of “different from” or “different than,” then it always presupposes well established categories or identities between which difference intervenes by means of negation (e.g., A and not-A). But more profoundly, Deleuze contends, we want to account for the absolute (as opposed to relative) difference that grounds the very possibility of such superficial polarities – and thereby potentially ungrounds them as well. For instance, below the biological individual and conditioning it, there is a continuous process of growth and self-transformation that makes that individual possible (the discontinous counterparts of which we would call stages, e.g., embryo, fetus, baby, puberty, grown adult, etc. . .). In fact, our intellect tends to fix and identify well-defined stages, states, objects and categories for its practical interests; but a never-ending process of individuation is constantly at work in the depths of that so-called identity. This, for Deleuze, is true of biological evolution as a whole, as much as it is true of history, ideas, philosophical problems and, perhaps most importantly for the sake of our present argument, “human” subjectivity. The processes of self-alteration or becoming that account for the formation and deformation of the human subject are indeed essentially inhuman. Notice that this anti-humanist conception of becoming is very different from Hegel’s, but also from Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s. The latter all presuppose, at the origin of the dialectical economy, an already constituted individual or being. In their view, becoming is what happens to this individual; it is the introduction of difference from without. Hence the priority they ascribe to negativity or transcendence.9 In contrast, becoming or absolute movement, for Deleuze (following Bergson), is metaphysically prior to being. In fact,
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Deleuze simply eliminates the distinction between being and becoming, thus providing us with an immanent account of becoming. Alteration does not depend on some external, antithetical event which then logically requires the subject to change through a series of syntheses with the external object. Rather, self-alteration precedes, constitutes (and constantly dislocates) the “subject,” which is thereby neither completely individuated, nor perfectly differentiated from the “object.” Alteration and self-creation are the positive metaphysical processes that coincide with the real. This is where the theory of the Event comes in. While traditional philosophy associates this core of self-identity with the essence, the Philosophy of Difference replaces this notion of a fixed essence with that of the Event. In a comparable inspiration, Sartre tried to prioritize existence over essence, precisely to account for this generative dimension of the human subject. But as we saw, he did not go far enough. For in the end, what happens to the individual (i.e., his or her historical existence) does not fundamentally alter his or her core of freedom of choice (transcendence). In fact, it confirms and strengthens it. By contrast, for Deleuze, the existence assumed by Sartre must be seen as a series of accidents (the term opposite to essence), i.e., that which happens to the constituted individual. But the Deleuzian Event must also be distinguished from the accident (existence). Thus, what happens to the individual only represents one aspect, one side of the Event. On the other side, the Event coincides with the fundamental complex of intensive, internal, positive differences that enter into the formation of the individual (affects and percepts). Because it is a complex of intensive differences, the Event that lies at the core of the individual is not unified or solidified. There is a fundamental crack at the heart of the ego (the “I,” the subject). Again, this crack is not something that eventually happens to the constituted individual and disturbs his or her otherwise fixed identity (as Hegel and Sartre suggest); it conditions this identity transcendentally and undermines it at the same time. This is why there is no need for dialectic. The transformation is continuous, automatic yet unpredictable, involuntary, essential. But because this radically creative self-alteration is constantly threatening us with dislocation, we tend to ignore it, and to cover it up with clear, well-defined, fixed categories (Bad Faith). Hence the subject-object categories that frame all dialectical approaches, as we saw. In other words, what the phenomenological account of Black Consciousness seems to be forgetting is the intensive becoming that subtends all historical formations, thereby making their existence possible (i.e., their transcendental condition) and threatening them with immanent destruction all at once. In fact, Deleuze explains, becoming must be distinguished from history: “it is becoming and not eternity which must be distinguished from history” (2003: 353). He suggests that it is from our tendency to confuse becoming with history that the terrible power of oppressions stems. If the power of oppressions
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is so terrible, he adds, it is not so much because it offends eternal values (such as the all too abstract and empty notion of “rights of man”), as because it hinders movement (1990/1997: 166). What history retains from the event is its effectuation or crystallization in a state of things; but the event in its becoming escapes history. Thus, according to Deleuze, those who keep bringing up the “bad future of revolutions” are actually confusing two things (or the two sides of the Event), namely the future of revolutions in history and the people’s becoming-revolutionary. Yet these cases do not concern the same people! Finally, he writes, “Men’s only chance lies in the becoming-revolutionary, which alone may ward off shame, or respond to the intolerable” (1990/1997: 231). Before I attempt to clarify what Deleuze really means, let me indicate what I believe is at stake here. When Fanon shows the inevitable failure of the dialectical analyses supported by Hegel, Sartre and the Negritude writers, he in effect puts us face to face with the necessity for a revolution. In so doing, his philosophy is calling for a much needed rupture within the fabric of (endemically White) history. However, I want to argue, in order that the revolution he proposes actually escapes the dialectical recuperation it seems doomed to endure, then this revolution must be recast within the Deleuzian thought of revolutionary becomings.10 This would imply, in the first place, that such revolution concerns primarily thought and sensibility themselves rather than bearing head-on, from without, upon the existence of the human socialhistorical formations it seeks to mobilize. In short, while the phenomenological conception of historical becoming is necessarily transcendent (it happens from without), a Deleuzian becoming-revolutionary would have to be purely immanent (or to happen from within). In Foucauldian language, we could say that if the fixed social-historical formations responsible for the oppression of Blacks are but the effect of a particular process of subjectivation, then what is now needed is a process of desubjectivation by means of which the all too dense Black Consciousness diagnosed by Fanon could be cracked open and, accordingly, could rejoin its own singular becoming-revolutionary.
6. Becoming and Pure Immanence Obviously, these two faces of revolution cannot be so easily distinguished. Indeed, with Deleuze it appears that their distinction cannot be a matter of a transcendent, exclusionary or external difference. If one does not exclude the other, it is precisely because the principle of their difference must lie on the side of immanence – which, for Deleuze, also coincides with the transcendental field in which all the determinations of all the aspects the event are produced. In Pure Immanence, Deleuze contrasts his own conception of the transcendental field with Sartre’s:
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[A transcendental field] appears therefore as a pure stream of a-subjective consciousness, a pre-reflexive impersonal consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without self. . .. But the relation of the transcendental field to consciousness is only a conceptual one. . .. Were it not for consciousness, the transcendental field would be defined as a pure plane of immanence, because it eludes all transcendence of the subject and of the object. Absolute immanence is in itself: it is not in something, to something; it does not depend on an object or belong to a subject. (1995/2001: 25–26) This purely immanent transcendental field thus coincides with “the other side” of the Event we mentioned above, or with the zone of intensive becoming which, I argue, holds the power to crack consciousness open, so it may rejoin its own singular becoming-revolutionary. It is crucial to note that for Deleuze, becoming does not produce anything other (in the sense of a fully individuated other subject or object) than itself. What is real is the becoming in itself, and not the supposedly fixed terms in and through which that which becomes would pass – as the latter, obviously, are mere transcendent abstractions cut out from the immanent movement or duration (1980/1987: 291). Thus, Deleuze and Guattari point out, a becoming has no subject distinct from itself, no more than it has a transcendent end – since its end only exists insofar as it is, in turn, encased within yet another becoming, of which it is the subject, and which coexists with the first (1980/1987: 291). This is crucial because it is here, I believe, that the power of Deleuzian metaphysics to truly address Fanon’s worries lies. As I mentioned above, Fanon’s issue with Sartre’s characterization of Negritude as “a minor moment” is at least twofold. First, by some kind of process of appropriation characteristic of dialectic, Sartre-the-White-man is thereby assuming that he knows what Black subjectivity is. Second, Sartre is assigning his own specific end to the dialectic of liberation, thereby disowning the Black Man or Woman from their own struggle for liberation – that is, from their own singular becoming – and more: from their own singular becomings, as there are at least as many series of becomings as there are individuals. Thus, if one reads Fanon’s project through the Deleuzian lens, not only do we not have to pretend to be able grasp the singular experience of living in a Black body; one also cannot purport to impose a transcendent end to the process of liberation. Nevertheless, since blocs of becoming acquire their determinations from connecting to (or forming alliances with) other blocs of becoming, this model does not exclude the possibility of non-reductive alliances between different struggles for liberation (say, the colonized and the proletariat, the Black freedom fighter and the French intellectual, the Algerian revolution and the Palestinian intifada, or the American civil rights movement and the feminist agenda). In short, I want to suggest that unlike the dialectical model, the Deleuzian approach proposed here allows at once for the singularity of individual
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resistance and for collective revolutionary movements. To use Beauvoir’s conceptual framework, I would say that if individual creative freedom must be prolonged in and through the freedom of others, then this prolongation must happen on the plane of immanence rather than being forced through the transcendence of the oppressed which, after all, always remains contingent on the good will of the oppressor, as she and Fanon so vividly show. In her excellent introduction to Deleuze, Claire Colebrook illustrates this process of becoming with the following example. A plant is not a static thing, although we perceive it as such. “The plant is the reception of light, heat, moisture, insect pollination and so on; in other words, it is a becoming in relation to other becomings” (2002: 128). Of course, one may want to object that men are not plants, and that the syntheses of consciousness differ qualitatively from, say, photosynthesis. But this difference does not consist in the addition of some mysterious transcendent “light” to be thrown onto an otherwise inherently inert and obscure “objective” world. Rather, due to perception and the intellect’s essentially pragmatic orientation, consciousness must be deduced from the immanent whole of absolute movement. Thus, consciousness emerges from the dynamic diminution of the mobile and open whole. Brian Massumi astutely explains such an immanent process of qualitative change in the following terms: The dynamic enabling the back-formation [such as “conscious states”] is ‘intensive’ in the sense that movement, in process, cannot be determinately indexed to anything outside of itself. It has withdrawn into an all-encompassing relation with what it will be. It is in becoming, absorbed in occupying its field of potential. For when it comes to a stop in the target, it will have undergone a qualitative change. (2002: 7) As I point out below, the qualitative change that thus informs all processes of identification could also be grasped as an immanent “deviation in relation to the end.” This, for Freud as for Deleuze, defines perversion. Deleuze, however, casts perversion thus understood in a positive light, since it coincides with his ethical alternative for humanist moralities – that is, with “Men’s only chance . . . to ward off shame, or respond to the intolerable” mentioned above.11 In short, we could say that such a Deleuzian ethics of perversion coincides with the becoming-revolutionary necessary for genuine historical change. As Fanon brilliantly diagnosed, the excessive density of a Black consciousness living in a White world stems from a historical situation concretely yet artificially imposed by humans on other humans. From the existentialist perspective he resolutely though partially embraces, it would therefore seem as though it is incumbent upon humans to change this historical state of affairs, by means of resolute, concrete action. Yet my suggestion here is that that, in itself, is not sufficient; that it would be utopian (and therefore irresponsible) to expect the completion, however slow and progressive, of radical historical and
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political transformations, solely based on the empirical side of the event (in the shape of dialectical history). For the latter, as I have been arguing, remains ultimately dependent upon the good will of the modern imperialist – a good will which obviously cannot and must not be assumed. Yet, when re-connected with the other, essential half that conditions it (i.e., the transcendental field or the plane of immanence), the event which only finds partial expression in empirical action may enter into a much needed alliance with deeper processes of becoming that no longer depend on anyone’s good will.
7. Conclusion. Perversion: The Alliance between Negritude and Postmodernism Of course, this succinct presentation does not pretend to hold the key to the problem of oppression. I do not want to claim that I can or even would want to propose a recipe for liberation – in fact, such a prescriptive project would by definition contradict itself, since, as Fanon holds, “to historical becoming, the unforeseeable should have been opposed” (2001: 197). Simply, what I have been trying to do is lay the foundations for forging an alliance between Negritude and Postmodernism, over and beyond the inherent limitations, which, in my view, plague dialectics. I contend that such an alliance holds far greater promises for realizing Negritude’s true potential (i.e., the creation of a new humanity) than its traditional alliance with phenomenology, existentialism, and structuralism. For in the end, we could say that if the Hegelian/Sartrean dialectic fails to offer avenues for a genuinely novel and irreducible post-colonial morality, it is because for them, the crack of the I and the potential for novel ways of thinking and feeling it holds remain dependent on a pre-existing subject, whose own pre-determined ends – his or her freedom of choice – will always require him or her to try to escape, as much as possible, the interruption that the other necessarily represents (Bad Faith). If one presupposes freedom at the heart of subjectivity, as modern humanism does, then this freedom cannot help but become the monopoly of the dominant hegemony. If, on the contrary, the subject turns out to be but the effect of a deeper, unconscious, inhuman, involuntary process of alteration involving its internal relation with other blocs of becoming, then the encounter with otherness cannot be reduced to mere possibility. It becomes a necessity that precedes all choice, all freedom. With Deleuze, then, true morality does not depend on the categories of the possible. In fact, it requires a perversion of all those teleological categories that judge the world in reference to some pre-determined ends. This, I believe, is what Fanon saw. Finally, if by perversion we mean, as Freud does, a “deviation in relation to the ends,” then it is precisely what is required for an authentic anti-humanist humanism capable of accommodating real revolutionary becomings.
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Notes 1. Chapter five of Black Skin, White Masks, “L’exp´erience v´ecue du Noir” translated as “The Fact of Blackness” is in fact the almost integral reproduction of the Esprit article which appears in Race. In what follows, I will be referring to my own translation, “The Lived Experience of the Black” as it appears in Race (Bernasconi, 2001). 2. Aim´e C´esaire, Les Armes Miraculeuses. Quoted by Sartre in “Black Orpheus.” Race (2001: 139). 3. By way of a rather absurd but eminently significant example of the cultural subjugation denounced by Negritude, I must mention this overwhelmingly disturbing fact that was pointed out to me by several white friends who grew up in Africa: as they were usually one of the few white children in their primary school in Senegal or Ivory Coast, they could not help but be surprised by the fact that the whole class was being taught, in history class, “our ancestors the Gauls”! 4. Of course, it is well known that in his 1961 The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon does propose his own dialectic of liberation, inspired by Hegel and Marx. But what I would like to suggest in this paper is that in the current (post)-colonial world, Fanon’s ideas may benefit from being reinterpreted through a Deleuzian lens. 5. I have kept with Hegel’s own non gender-inclusive terminology. 6. The real, for Bergson, must be understood as the fluid flow of duration informing both the evolution of Life and our ability to coincide with it through intuition – rather than the fixed, well-determined, discrete objects to be known through appropriation. 7. What I have in mind here is France’s recent adoption of the “Veil Law,” forbidding public school students from wearing any “ostentatious” mark of their religious appurtenance in the name of secularism. While we must recognize that this is a highly complicated and politically loaded issue, we cannot help but notice that the first effect of this law is to increase and confirm the exclusion of many Muslim girls, either from the public school system or from their own cultural traditions and families. 8. Beauvoir develops these arguments in Part 3 of The Ethics of Ambiguity, more particularly in sections 3 (The Antinomies of Action) and 4 (The Present and the Future). 9. Obviously, this account of becoming in Sartre and Beauvoir could – and no doubt should – be more nuanced, since they both insist on positing an individual whose consciousness is already and necessarily split between facticity and transcendence. It remains, however, that negativity is what drives the process of transformation (freedom, authentic existence), even though this negativity must be expressed positively in action – and cannot remain a mere abstract negation, a` la Hegel. Yet, I contend that unlike Deleuze, existentialist ontology remains profoundly dialectical, in the sense that it relies in the opposition (and constant relation) between being and nothingness, or being and becoming. 10. I am well aware that this claim that revolutions seem doomed to endure dialectical recuperation is a strong one. But my point is that even if the current state of the world differs in many respects from the colonial world (South Africa may be the most obvious example), one can hardly claim that the now independent countries of Africa are actually liberated from some form or another of predatory relationship with the West. The practices of the IMF is one among many possible examples of this. Moreover, as Fanon points out in The Wretched of the Earth, it is well known that in many instances, the Cold War was used as an excuse for thwarting and cruelly repressing many struggles for liberation on the part of colonized countries. 11. For an elaboration of the idea of perversion, see Deleuze’s fascinating commentary on Michel Tournier’s novel Friday in the second appendix to The Logic of Sense, titled “Phantasm and Modern Literature.” For a further elaboration of the idea of an ethics of perversion
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see my article, “Thought as Modern Art or the Ethics of Perversion,” in Philosophy Today.
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