The Wager of Death: Richard Wright With Hegel and Lacan

Ginger: Listen, we’ll either die free chickens or die trying.
 
Babs: Are those the only options?
 

–Chicken Run

All that [the slave] has is at stake; and even that which he has not, is at stake, also. The life which he has, may be lost, and the liberty which he seeks, may not be gained.
 

–Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

What we know of Richard Wright’s biography supports a psychoanalytic approach to his work. His association with the psychoanalysts Frederic Wertham and Benjamin Karpman, as well as the texts found in his library–among them books by Karl Abraham, Helene Deutsch, Otto Fenichel, Sándor Ferenczi, Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, Theodor Reik, and Géza Roheim–attest to his familiarity with the field.¹ According to Margaret Walker, Wright remained “intensely Freudian”-indeed, “obsessed with psychoanalysis” (286, 245)–throughout his literary and philosophical career.² The potential of the encounter between Wright and psychoanalytic criticism has nevertheless remained largely unactualized. Instead, what one finds is a catalogue of often reductive readings stubbornly deaf to the complexity and inventiveness of Wright’s literary and theoretical oeuvre.
 
Abdul JanMohamed’s study of Wright is a welcome corrective to this history. In The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death, JanMohamed has revised his earlier essays on Wright into a reading that almost covers the prolific author’s entire oeuvre. In comparison with the essays, The Death-Bound-Subject foregrounds psychoanalysis, particularly of the Lacanian variant, as its primary methodological tool. An exemplar of clarity, the study moves chronologically through Wright’s published texts, leaving out only some of his shorter fiction and nonfiction, the travel narratives produced in the 1950s, and the posthumously published novels Lawd Today! and A Father’s Law (the latter came out only in early 2008). Apart from its productive mobilization of psychoanalysis, The Death-Bound-Subject offers an important reassessment of Wright in that it neither disavows nor condemns the troubling insistence with which scenes of graphic (and often misogynistic) violence are replayed in his work. JanMohamed demonstrates that, whereas the reasonable response to the unreasonable repetition of such tableaus of murder, mutilation, and lynching may be to recoil from them, the horror and disgust with which we shield ourselves from the intractable brutality in Wright simultaneously prevents us from observing the hard core of the existence that the author delineates: an existence in which the racialized subject is caught up in, because brought into being through, an endless negotiation with his or her imminent death.
 
If Wright’s readers have been alternately appalled at and frustrated by the relentless negativity of his work–often considered a symptom of the author’s psychic compulsions or the ham-fisted didacticism of his residual communism–JanMohamed shows the absolute necessity of Wright’s insistent attention to scenes of brutality, of physical, social, and psychic humiliation. He explains this focus in terms of Wright’s ongoing negotiation with “the death pact,” a kind of obstinate working-over of the practices binding the enslaved (and, after the abolition of slavery, the racialized) subject to injury, dishonor, and degradation, processes that Orlando Patterson theorizes through the Hegelian master-slave dialectic in Slavery and Social Death (1982). For Patterson, slavery is instituted as “a substitute for certain death,” “usually violent death”; the enslaved subject is a being integrated into the master’s symbolic universe as “a socially dead person” (337, 5). In this death pact of master and slave, the latter’s death sentence what JanMohamed calls his “actual-death”–is commuted insofar as the slave acquiesces to his “social-death.” Only “symbolic-death,” a Lacanian concept that I turn to below, offers a possible way to pry open the slave’s futureless horizon.
 
The Death-Bound-Subject convincingly reads Wright’s oeuvre as a persistent negotiation with the vicissitudes of the death contract. The process begins with his first book, the 1938 short story collection, Uncle Tom’s Children. JanMohamed demonstrates that the early stories play out repetitions of death, imposed and chosen to varied degrees, in the face of the overwhelming realities of black life under Jim Crow. The series of narratives culminates in “Bright and Morning Star,” which features a self-possessed female character rare in Wright’s work. From this character, Aunt Sue, we move to two of Wright’s most notorious depictions of women: Mary Dalton and Bessie Mears of Native Son (1940). JanMohamed notes the dubious sexual politics that mark Wright’s work throughout and make his debut novel ultimately a failed attempt to break the contract that binds Bigger Thomas to his place. Native Son‘s “brilliant exploration of symbolic-death is compromised by the problematics of sexualization involved in the very process of racialization” (136): the text can attack the master only obliquely, by gruesomely killing Mary and Bessie.
 
Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy (1945), shows how the death pact of racialization is reproduced, and the death-bound-subject constituted, within the family before its being sealed, and his being entombed, by Wright’s subsequent encounters with Jim Crow society. The last three novels, The Outsider (1953), Savage Holiday (1954), and The Long Dream (1958), explore the subject’s entanglement in racialized Oedipal injunctions. In his reading of these texts, JanMohamed renders indisputable the fact that, in the course of his career, Wright’s thinking of racialized violence and subjection became increasingly psychoanalytic. Despite his successful rebirth through a subway accident in the aftermath of which a stranger’s body is mistaken for his, The Outsider‘s protagonist, Cross Damon, remains enthralled by such Oedipal knots. Because of “the horror of his oedipal desires” (177), Damon does not (dis)solve the death pact any more than does the protagonist of Wright’s next novel, Savage Holiday. Whereas The Outsider explores the paternal function, the all-white cast (give or take a black maid) of Savage Holiday illustrates, according to JanMohamed, one’s entanglement in psychic fantasies that get expressed in scenes of infanticide and matricide.
 
If The Outsider and Savage Holiday trace what JanMohamed calls the subject’s “‘internal,’ oedipal horizon of death” (233), in his final published novel, The Long Dream written after the important detour into travel writing in Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain (1956), and Pagan Spain (1957)–Wright returns to the “external horizon” of the death-bound-subject, the Jim Crow law. Yet while Wright’s previous work constitutes an unwavering negotiation with death, the final novel “puts its emphasis on the (relatively gradual) unfolding and development of life; while its events are punctuated by deathly cataclysms as horrific as any in the previous fiction, its fundamental rhythm is dictated by the tendency of eros to bind with various and sundry objects” (234). In his concluding chapter, “Renegotiating the Death Contract,” JanMohamed takes up where Wright’s final novel leaves off, giving us an outline, through Hegel, Marx, and Lacan, of the death contract and how it can be reinvented by the slave.
 
Apart from its compelling reading of Wright’s oeuvre, The Death-Bound-Subject offers an elegant synthesis of theoretical approaches, guided by Lacan’s commentary on the Hegelian master-slave dialectic and complemented, in the concluding chapter, by Marx’s delineation of the “labor process.” Through Marx and Lacan, JanMohamed addresses what he considers the double evasion in Hegel’s account of the master-slave relationship. First, Marx’s materialism necessitates that we understand the struggle as “motivated not simply by the [master’s] refusal to recognize the other’s ‘subjectivity‘; rather, that refusal must be seen as a pretext and a precondition for the attempt to reduce the other to what we might call a ‘subject-commodity'” (276). Second–and here JanMohamed’s critique is analogous to that of political theorists irked by the assimilationist emphasis on the necessity of Sittlichkeit in Hegel’s ethics–Lacan allows one to theorize the slave’s futurity other than through the obedient “work” that may lead to subjective recognition. Work in the Hegelian sense becomes that which seals and sustains the death contract between the slave and the master. In order to avoid his actual-death, the laboring slave, as the death-bound-subject, is preserved but immobilized by social-death, the condition that for Patterson results from the slave’s “natal alienation.” Pace Lacan, JanMohamed calls this the subject’s capture between two deaths, a state of nominal existence that he illustrates with Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life.” The working slave lives on within the circumscribed temporality of his imminent but repetitively commuted death sentence. He is forced to earn such commutation by acceding to the futureless temporality of labor. Slavery’s dialectics of death offers no hope of a future different from the present state of things.
 
Mobilizing the Freudian concept of Ent/Bindung through J. B. Pontalis’s work, JanMohamed argues that the slave–whose embodiments one finds in Wright’s Jim Crow subjects–is profoundly bound to and by the death drive.³ The felicitous coinage “the death-bound-subject” names both an irresolvable aporia and an all but impossible exit from this dead end. On the one hand, it refers to a subject constituted not through an attachment to life–eros as the process of binding–but through an intimate relation with thanatos, or “a deathly eros” (256), actualized as the subject’s own imminent extinction. Having acceded to social-death in order to avoid his actual-death, the death-bound-subject is one whose (psychic, social, political) mobility is radically circumscribed and whose processes of binding are all but debilitated. As death-bound–shackled between two deaths–the subject emerges in the form of “an aporetic being” (285). The term simultaneously suggests a way out of the death contract by designating the potential in the subject’s orientation toward death. The death-bound-subject as a being bound by death, that is, can become the death-bound-subject as a being bound toward death. Here emerges the risky possibility for the subject to reinvent the binding contract of death. Continuing from where JanMohamed leaves off, one can suggest that this movement toward death is accomplished not by ignoring the law’s validity but, on the contrary, by taking the law’s pronouncements literally. The slave, that is, begins to take the law at its word, much like, according to Lacan, psychotics do: accepting that (as the death pact tells him) he is a dead subject, he is momentarily released, or unbound, from the instinct for self-preservation, which has also moored him to his futureless existence. The insistence on its letter turns the law against itself, inducing in it a loophole, an aporetic self-contradiction. In Lacanese, the slave, making the conscious choice of death, returns the law’s message to the master in an inverted form.
 
For JanMohamed, the shift from being death-bound as the state of aporetic immobility to being death-bound as a radical orientation toward an unknown future, articulable only in terms of one’s annihilation, names a minimal but potentially momentous move. In slave narratives, this choice of death, as the inversion of the law, is frequently voiced in the form of Patrick Henry’s revolutionary invitation, “Give me liberty or give me death.”⁴ JanMohamed reads this speech act as the “negation of the negation,” a dangerous sublation of social-death and actual-death: “the only way out of the positivity of social-death . . . is through the appropriation of the negativity of actual-death: if one is not afraid of actual-death or is ‘willing,’ however reluctantly, to die, then it is absolutely impossible to have the structure of social-death imposed on one” (102). His revision of Hegel’s master-slave dynamic is largely consonant with Judith Butler’s understanding of subjection. JanMohamed’s observation that “life’s desire for its own continuity . . . allows it to be appropriated by the threat of death” (119) echoes Butler’s account of subjection in The Psychic Life of Power: “within subjection the price of existence is subordination. Precisely at the moment in which choice is impossible, the subject pursues subordination as the promise of existence” (20). JanMohamed identifies the Lacanian symbolic-death with what Butler calls the possibility for a “metaleptic reversal,” enabled by power’s reiterative structure, in the process of subjection (JanMohamed 287-88).
 
As JanMohamed’s agreement with Butler’s project indicates, his critique of the Phenomenology‘s account of slavery remains firmly in the orbit of dialectics. JanMohamed seeks “to articulate a very different form of the death contract between the master and the slave than that contained in the classic Hegelian paradigm” (38). Yet even though his “anti-Hegelian” ambition (31) is to reconfigure Hegel via Lacan, he conceptualizes what he calls “the dialectics of death” precisely according to dialectical progression, in which “the ‘social-death’ furnishes the given condition or ‘thesis,’ the ‘actual-death’ functions as the ‘antithesis,’ and the ‘symbolic-death’ functions as the potential ‘synthesis'” (17). As the Aufhebung, symbolic-death would “negate th[e] structure by, finally, sublating it–that is, [allowing the subject to] dialectically [overcome the structure] by consciously understanding and, hence, preserving it at a higher level of comprehension” (117). Rather than attempting to take us beyond Hegel, the scrambling of the forced choice between actual-death and social-death by the introduction of the Lacanian symbolic-death constitutes a dialectical revision of the Hegelian schema.
 
As such, JanMohamed does not question, or even acknowledge, the Hegelian orthodoxies of contemporary critical theory. Like Butler before him, he seems to have concluded that Hegel’s momentous work comprises the inescapable ground of theory and politics, one whose inevitabilities we are called to contest only through its own tools, that is, through a subversive inhabitation, or inaccurate repetition, of its laws–the critical gesture par excellence of Butlerian performativity.⁵ One should nevertheless note that this adherence to the Hegelian system goes against Lacan’s more radical critique, in his later work, of the Hegelian dialectic. Rather than looking for a happy twist in the progress of dialectical becoming, by introducing “the symbolic death” into the economy of slaveryor death, Lacan in effect seeks to undo the triangular neatness of Hegel’s schema. JanMohamed’s most frequent Lacanian sources are among the first articulations of Lacan’s later work. Here Lacan moves from the structuralist understanding of the symbolic and imaginary orders to consider the real. This real cannot be sublated; its intrusion into symbolic calculations presents us with a break that is not recuperable by the dialectic. Analogously, Lacan shifts his attention from desire–largely premised on Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel–to the drive, a concept that I would argue is, like the real, inassimilable to the Hegelian system. By insistently glossing the later Lacan through Hegelian formulations (however modified), JanMohamed, like Butler, arguably refuses to yield to or experiment with the break that the drive and the real constitute in the Lacanian system.⁶
 
In the spirit of the kind of “persistence” that is embodied in Antigone, Lacan’s figure for the subject’s irrational choice of death,⁷ one might attempt to follow Lacan by taking him at his word–that is, by pursuing the seemingly impossible move in the (theoretical) game that would break the Hegelian contract of contemporary thinking. In this context, Wright’s short story “Bright and Morning Star” would undoubtedly need to be considered not as an early, failed experiment with the contract of death in Wright’s work (as JanMohamed does), but rather as an inassimilable aberration, one whose monstrosity renders it both unsublatable to progressivist narratives and recuperable for future use. What makes “Bright and Morning Star” eminently suitable for a Lacanian reading is that its protagonist, Aunt Sue, is a tragic heroine in the mold of Antigone. A non-Hegelian psychoanalytic reading of the story might proceed by listening to the unceasing “droning” of the rain in the background of Aunt Sue’s actions–the rain that, as the story’s opening paragraph has it, is “‘good n bad. It kin make seeds bus up thu the groun, er it kin bog things down lika watah-soaked coffin'” (221). This inhuman realm of undifferentiation–at the end of the story, Aunt Sue herself becomes a “drone,” unsupported by any of the forms of faith (Christianity, communism, human relationality itself) on which she has attempted to anchor her symbolic order–is both deadly and generative, not unlike the drive itself, whose “will to destruction” may be synonymous with the “will to make a fresh start,” “[the] will to begin again” (Lacan 212).
 
It is with Aunt Sue, in Wright’s work, that one can consider the centrality of the role of “sexuation” in Lacan’s post-Hegelian theory of tragedy (see Copjec 12-47). Her revolutionary activity of self-destructive veiling–playing an obsequious “nigger woman” (Wright 253), she strikes at the law, knowing that she herself won’t survive her actions allows us to consider Frantz Fanon’s “tragic” heroines, the female guerrillas of “Algeria Unveiled,” in the context of Lacan’s reading of Antigone.⁸ After all, the Ethics seminar took place during 1959-1960, a time marked by the turmoil of the Algerian resistance to the French occupation and its consequent, brutal repression–a crisis that Fanon famously addresses in A Dying Colonialism (1959). Lacan’s suggestion that Antigone anticipates “the cruelties of our time” (240), offering “the image of our modern wars” (266), can clearly be read as references to the Algerian battle.
 
While one may gripe about JanMohamed’s eminently Hegelian (and, in more contemporary terms, Butlerian) reading of Lacan, The Death-Bound-Subject provides a sympathetic and productive reading of Wright’s life-long negotiation with the racist dialectics of death he saw thriving, after slavery’s abolition, under the aegis of Jim Crow. The study’s merit for Wright scholarship should be obvious as we celebrate, in 2008, the centennial of the author’s birth. Unlike in numerous other psychoanalytic readings, Wright’s works function in The Death-Bound-Subject as further provocations for the theoretical framework’s complication and reinvention–consequently allowing JanMohamed to steer clear of what Shoshana Felman some twenty years ago criticized as the tendency of psychoanalytic theories to be “applied” to literary texts. Moreover, at a time when monographs concentrating on a single author are notoriously difficult to publish and market, JanMohamed’s volume provides an incisive example of how, at its best, the single-author book makes a considerable contribution to the broader concerns of literary and critical theory.