Neither Optimism nor Pessimism

Geo Maher (bio)

A review of Marriott, David. Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being. Stanford UP, 2018.

“The time has come”—with these words, penned more than a decade ago, David Marriott opened the original essay that would later serve as keystone and namesake for this volume (“Whither Fanon?” 33). Such a frame seems only fitting for an examination of anticolonial revolutionary Frantz Fanon, for whom all human questions are necessarily “grounded in temporality” (Black Skin xvi). But what is the time that, according to Marriott, has come? Whither Fanon? was published in 2018, squarely between the rebellions in Ferguson and Minneapolis, but it has been in the works for far longer. The original essay appeared in 2011, before Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin, long before Donald Trump’s presidency, and directly amid the disillusionment of Barack Obama’s first term. Marriott’s overarching concern in the original essay was to trouble the postracial mirage of the Obama moment, a quaint prelude to the storm and stress that have battered the world since. It’s worth asking whether Marriott’s project speaks to this moment or past it, or whether this is the wrong question entirely.

Some 25 years ago, the editors of Fanon: A Critical Reader spoke of “Five Stages of Fanon Studies,” the fourth of which referred to poststructural and postcolonial critiques of Fanonian liberation largely located in the western academy, while the fifth pointed toward a still-new stage comprising radical scholars and activists “doing work with and through Fanon” to confront the persistent white supremacy and coloniality of the present (Gordon et al. 7). Today, however, the theoretical frame has shifted dramatically in response to the heat radiating off the streets, albeit not uniformly for the better. On the one hand, this fifth stage exploded with the viral return of Fanon in the age of Black Lives Matter—no fewer than four books on Fanon appeared in 2015 and several more since.¹ On the other hand, however, this return of/to Fanon as revolutionary icon has also been accompanied by the emergence of Afropessimism. Particularly in the work of Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism retains poststructuralism’s psychoanalytic bent and skepticism toward grand narratives of liberation, but, in a sort of anti-anticolonial turn, dispenses with Fanon’s internationalism in favor of a new ontology grounded in the pure negativity of antiblackness.

How should we locate Marriott’s book in relation to this new framework? The resonances seem clear, as when Marriott describes antiblackness as “the discourse through which a singular experience of the world is constituted” (Whither Fanon? x), seemingly echoing Afropessimism’s re-ontologization of the world. For Marriott, however, this is less about ontology than about what Fanon calls the ontological “flaw” (Black Skin 89), and he remains deeply skeptical of any new ontology. Moreover, the implied political subject of this ontology— jealously guarded by Afropessimism’s hostility to intercommunal solidarities—coexists with Marriott’s broader appeals to the “nonwhite subject” and the “dispossessed everywhere,” the former incompatible with and the latter anathema to Afropessimist commitments (Whither Fanon? xv–xvi). But more interesting than asking whether Marriott is an Afropessimist—his own response is a cryptic “perhaps” (213)—is tracking what he does on the way to answering this question. As we will see, Marriott walks right up to the brink of Afropessimism’s most radical (and troubling) contentions without leaping, leaving open the possibility of a very different kind of movement, one more dialectical than immanent.

Marriott sets out from what is arguably both Fanon’s most enigmatic and most troubling statement: that “there is but one destiny for the black man. And it is white” (Black Skin xiv). While many are unsure what to make of Fanon’s condemnation of blackness, Marriott embraces this uncertainty as inherent to its object: racial identity “confers no certitude in this world,” but instead “reveals a void” and little else (Whither Fanon? ix). For Marriott as for Fanon, we are thus not talking about either a black essentialism (what Marriott terms, too easily to my mind, “identity”) or the postracial denial of race’s social reality. Instead, only by tentatively stepping on the ground of racial identity do we discover just how unstable that ground is, just how quickly it gives way beneath our feet in an ontological landslide that famously condemns Fanon to both the “veritable hell” of the “zone of nonbeing” and to the difficult path forward (Black Skin xiv). Clearly, such vertiginous uncertainty is incompatible with romantic narratives of liberation or the untroubled revolutionary subject they presuppose. A central goal of Whither Fanon? is therefore to reincorporate Fanon’s clinical practice into his politics. In the wake of the monumental publication of Fanon’s Alienation and Freedom in 2018, such an approach might seem less than novel, but Marriott’s skill lies in mapping the consequences of Fanonian psychopolitics.

To read the political as strictly bound to the clinical may seem counterintuitive for a thinker who sought to draw a line between clinical psychiatry and revolutionary war in his famous 1956 resignation letter, which argues that any effort to reintegrate individuals into a pathological world is doomed. As Marriott rightly argues, however, this is more continuity than break. After all, Fanon’s concept of sociogeny (viewing social structures as generative of psychic afflictions) dates to his earliest work, and the need “to treat the institution itself in order to cure the patients” is a basic premise of Fanon’s socialthérapie (Marriott, Whither Fanon? 59). More importantly, the failures and reorientation of therapy in the context of the colonial war, the abyssal obliteration of the decolonial subject, force Fanon to embrace what Marriott terms a “poetics of dissolution,” with the clinic providing a space for both radical disarticulation and a potential future rearticulation (Whither Fanon? 37). While we might object that Fanon had long been exposed to poetic disarticulation, from surrealism to early Négritude, the point is that desire and dissolution become increasingly central to his politics over time, and that, particularly after 1958, “the cure becomes more aporetic” as the project of disalienation becomes both more indefinite and elusive (Marriott, Whither Fanon? 64).

Projected forward, the consequences for revolution, violence, and sovereignty are immense. Decolonization can no longer be viewed through the sort of romantic narrative that so many still, quite inexplicably, attribute to Fanon, but must instead be grasped “as itself a kind of hysteria” (Marriott, Whither Fanon? xiv). Violence, both explosive expression and later sharpened tool of that revolution, seeks to provide the individual and collective basis for confronting this hysteria, however imperfectly and unpredictably, to produce a tendentially free subject “able to look the enemy in the eye without trembling” (a sort of decolonized Hegelian Selbständigkeit) (xv). This freedom, finally, has “nothing to do with political sovereignty” (xv) but with a “non-sovereign form of politics” (255) in which poetic rearticulation takes the form of “invention as tabula rasa” (254) whose future contours remain indeterminate. This open-ended politics of invention proceeds directly from the abyssal character of blackness itself, incarnate in those wretched unsovereigns in whose timeworn hands the future nevertheless lies.

While centrally concerned with what he calls the “pessimistic revelation” of Fanon’s thought (x), Marriott’s accent is as much on the latter as on the former, on what is disclosed in a revelatory moment that remains a mere moment in a broader dynamic. In what’s framed as a mediated conversation between Jared Sexton and Fred Moten, Marriott draws out what he views as the complicities uniting Afropessimism and black optimism, noting that “one reproduces the logic of the other at precisely those moments when either a pessimistic or optimistic reading of black social life is insufficient” (213). For Moten, blackness is constituted in the oscillation between its “fact” and “lived experience” (214)—two contending translations for the central chapter of Black Skin, White Masks. Too many dismissals of the former (Fanon’s included) tend to neglect the latter: the profound creativity of black life that escapes every fact in a radically fugitive manner. For Sexton, by contrast, Fanon’s goal is to diagnose “why blackness is unlivable in an anti-black world” (213), but he insists that since this unlivability is an architectural feature of that world, to diagnose it isn’t to dismiss the richness of black experience in that world.

Both approaches miss the mark, Marriott argues, in part because both seek to explain what blackness is rather than the ways that blackness is not. Where Moten’s optimism springs from a fugitive parallax between fact and experience, Marriott reads Fanon as exploding the very conditions of fugitivity—the cartography according to which such flight could even be mapped. Blackness is so fugitive, in other words, that it escapes even the concept that seeks to make sense of it. And as with fact/experience, Fanon pulls out the ontological rug from under the broader optimism/pessimism binary. “Fanonism begins,” Marriott writes, “at the point where both optimism and pessimism become impossible” (216). The question of sovereignty, moreover, gives us a glimpse into what Marriott’s distance from Afropessimism means concretely. Afropessimist critiques of Indigenous theory and struggles, for example, leverage the erroneous idea that sovereignty is reducible to its modern/western form. But as Fanonian scholars are quick to recognize that violence is qualitatively transformed in the hands of the colonized, so too sovereignty, which is not a singular thing, impervious to quality, content, or context. This is why Fanon himself continues to use the word, but also to resignify it as synonymous with the practical dignity of the oppressed (Wretched 139). While Marriott seems to perpetuate this view, we’re concerned less with the word than the thing, and his pivot from disarticulation to rearticulation, from abyss to invention, makes clear that we’re not operating on the terrain of pessimism.

Navigating the turbulent straits between optimism and pessimism, Marriott concludes that “blackness can only find its ontological fulfillment by no longer being black—or by entering its own abyssal significance” (Whither Fanon? x). But this “self-oblivion” should not be understood as ceding to the parameters of the antiblack world, since blackness cannot simply melt into whiteness without revealing that the white world stands on feet of clay, utterly reliant on (anti)blackness for its meaning. This is what Fredric Jameson would call the “secret conceptual and even dialectical weakness” of all racial, and more broadly Manichaean, orders, the hidden strength of their apparently weak term (19). To obliterate blackness is to touch off an unpredictable chain reaction that, while not anchored in a solid thing, is always more than pure negativity as well—this is an abyss that remains “penetrated by dark potentialities” (Marriott, Whither Fanon? xix). By refusing the optimism/pessimism binary, and by walking the fine line between the negative and the positive, the abyss and black identity, Marriott thus leaves the reader with a far more dynamic picture than the irretrievably antiblack world of Afropessimism’s ontological straitjacket.

All of this points toward a crucial question that remains outstanding, one I also have for Gavin Arnall’s Subterranean Fanon, reviewed in this issue. Why not understand the explosive dynamism of this chain reaction in dialectical terms, as Fanon himself so explicitly does? Marriott positions his conversation against those dialectical accounts that foreground the moment of resolution, insisting that if Fanonism is indeed best understood as a poetics, then “it cannot be underwritten by dialectics, or by the current state of things as understood or known” (Whither Fanon? 36). It’s unclear whether this “or” is to be understood serially or as an equivalence, but the latter seems likely since the tabula rasa of decolonization—its “agenda for total disorder” (Fanon, Wretched 2)—evokes nothing if not “perpetual dissolution” (Marriott, Whither Fanon? 37). But there is a dialectics, or better, there are dialectical approaches for which resolution is not the primary concern, and in which the “current state of things” is subjected to just such a ruthless dissolution. It seems strange that such a reductive view of dialectics persists amid an otherwise complex and nuanced reading, and Marriott is not unaware of this. Indeed, his turn to rearticulation as invention sets the stage directly for a thoughtful engagement with C. L. R. James’s Notes on Dialectics, in which dialectical motion is synonymous not with closure but with the leap into the unknown. Of course, James differs from Fanon in some key ways. In particular, James is undeniably less attentive to racial hatred, and therefore to the experience of antiblackness, in part because he claims (somewhat implausibly) that he experienced very little racism while living in the colonial metropole (England) (66). This was of course not true of Fanon’s traumatically formative experience in France, but these differences, while grounded in experience, should not be overstated.

Marriott goes to great lengths to put the dissolutive power of James’s dialectics back into Pandora’s box, and to do so with Fanon’s more explosive dialectics is more difficult still. For Marriott, the figure of the wretched as impossibility incarnate forecloses on dialectics, but this is not how Fanon sees things, and for good reason. Just as Fanon subjects phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and even sovereignty itself to the transformative weight of antiblackness, so too dialectics.² By anchoring dialectical motion in abyssal negativity, Fanon understands that—pessimism be damned—it is precisely from the desolation of the zone of nonbeing that “a genuine new departure can emerge” (Black Skin xii), and on the basis of this insight he formulates a one-sided and open-ended dialectics stripped of all reciprocity and determinism whose only motor is the irrepressible cunning of the wretched.³ With no guarantee of victory, this is neither an optimistic nor a pessimistic dialectics, since “the war goes on” regardless (Fanon, Wretched 181).

In the end, both optimism and pessimism rely on a certitude that the “resolutely anti-foundationalist” Fanon simply cannot provide (Marriott, Whither Fanon? 3), and Marriott— faithful to his spirit—holds every category (blackness, sovereignty, dialectics, and especially freedom itself) in a sort of suspension “as a difficult question that cannot be resolved” (36). “[A]t the crossroads between Nothingness and Infinity,” Fanon famously writes, racked by his own lived experience of this vertiginous uncertainty, “I began to weep” (Black Skin 119). His tears, however, were but a prelude to something far more explosively generative, the unpredictable emergence of a tabula rasa for the self-writing of existence.

Geo Maher is a Philadelphia-based writer and organizer, and Visiting Associate Professor of Global Political Thought at Vassar College. He has taught at Drexel University, San Quentin State Prison, and the Venezuelan School of Planning in Caracas, and has held visiting positions at the College of William and Mary’s Decolonizing Humanities Project, NYU’s Hemispheric Institute, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He his co-editor of the Duke University Press series Radical Américas and author of five books: We Created Chávez (Duke, 2013), Building the Commune (Verso, 2016), Decolonizing Dialectics (Duke, 2017), A World Without Police (Verso, 2021), and Anticolonial Eruptions (University of California, 2022).

Footnotes

1. In March 2015, Lewis Gordon, What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to his Life and Thought (Fordham University Press, 2015); in August, Peter Hudis, Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades (Pluto Press, 2015); and in November, both Christopher Lee, Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism (Ohio University Press, 2015) and Leo Zeilig, Frantz Fanon: The Militant Philosopher of Third World Revolution (I.B. Tauris, 2015).

2. This was the fundamental point of my Decolonizing Dialectics (Duke UP, 2017), which was similarly a reaction to Obama’s postracial moment, trapped somewhere between Black Skin and Wretched.

3. This is a central argument of my recent book, Anticolonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance (U of California P, 2022).

Works Cited

• Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press, 2008.
• ———. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 2004.
• Gordon, Lewis R., et al., editors. Fanon: A Critical Reader. Blackwell, 1996.
• James, C. L. R. “Lectures on The Black Jacobins.” Small Axe, no. 8, Sep. 2000, pp. 65–112.
• Jameson, Fredric. Valences of the Dialectic. Verso, 2009.
• Marriott, David. Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being. Stanford UP, 2018.
• ———. “Whither Fanon?” Textual Practice, vol. 25, no. 1, 2011, pp. 33–69.