{"id":1226,"date":"2017-01-11T13:52:05","date_gmt":"2017-01-11T18:52:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/?p=1226"},"modified":"2017-01-19T15:58:53","modified_gmt":"2017-01-19T20:58:53","slug":"emily-apter-fanon-nietzsche-notes-and-readings-for-nietzsche-813","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/emily-apter-fanon-nietzsche-notes-and-readings-for-nietzsche-813\/","title":{"rendered":"Emily Apter | Fanon & Nietzsche: Notes and readings for Nietzsche 8\/13"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Emily Apter<\/strong><\/p>\n

In his post for this week\u2019s 13\/13 Bernard Harcourt<\/a> exhorts us to essentially \u201cforget Nietzsche\u201d (using Nietzsche contra <\/em>Nietzsche, as only Nietzsche might commission his own, nihilistic self-forgetting); to provincialize Nietzsche in line with Dipesh Chakrabarthy\u2019s injunction to provincialize Europe; and to think the times – the strange tragedy of our raced actuality, the violent untimeliness of the dawn of a new Confederacy shored up by openly racist policy – with and through the medium of a singularly Fanonian theory and praxis of ressentiment<\/em>, flush with Fanon\u2019s ambivalent, self-critical dialectics of blackness (\u201cn\u00e9gritude\u201d).\u00a0 This last point comes to the fore in the chapter of Black Skin, White Masks <\/em>on \u201cThe Negro and Psychopathology\u201d where Fanon approvingly cites Gabriel d\u2019Arboussier\u2019s\u00a0 denunciation of Sartre\u2019s existentialization of generic black suffering, which d\u2019Arboussier calls out as the \u201cdangerous mystificatory aspect\u201d of \u201ctheories of negritude.\u201d \u201cThe objection is valid,\u201d writes Fanon, \u201cit applies to me as well\u2026 Against all the arguments I have just cited, I come back to one fact [\u201cune \u00e9vidence]:\u00a0 Wherever he goes, the Negro remains a Negro.<\/em>\u201d [o\u00f9 qu\u2019il aille, un n\u00e8gre demeure un n\u00e8gre<\/em>].\u00a0 As recent work on Fanon\u2019s library confirms (with reference to passages that Fanon underlined in his copy of Charles Andler\u2019s Nietzsche, sa vie et sa pens\u00e9e.\u00a0 Le pessimisme esth\u00e9tique de Nietzsche: sa philosophie \u00e0 l\u2019\u00e9poque wagn\u00e9rienne <\/em>[1921]), Fanon appears to have been drawn to the transvaluation of suffering, itself fused with Nietzschean terms of normative right, specifically, the right to civilization and to life.<\/p>\n

This situated Fanon \u2013\u00a0 beyond the time of Euro-philosophy\u2019s unconditional priority yet within the perdurable, generic time-signature of the so-called \u201cevidence of blackness\u201d or more specifically, a Fanonian\/Nietzschean raced psychopolitics (inflected by\u00a0 Black Lives Matter and the advent of a presidential biopolitics steeped in white suprematicism) \u2013 helps frame and bring into focus emergent languages of ethicopolitical militance and vigilance.\u00a0 These languages have produced marked terms of anti and decolonial struggle, drafted for an early twenty-first century age of assaults on civil liberties, black citizens\u2019 rights (including but obviously not limited to voting rights), and economies of existence that refuse to reduce racial difference to \u201cbare life.\u201d\u00a0 Particular attention in my brief remarks will be devoted to three psychopolitical constructs that could be said to sublate aspects of Nietzschean ressentiment <\/em>and\/or Fanonian \u201creactivity\u201d) at the contemporary pass: \u00a0Alexander G. Weheliye\u2019s notion of \u00a0\u201chabeas viscus<\/em>,\u201d (encompassing the political viscosities of black flesh, the sociogenic imprints on the hieroglyphs of the flesh, \u201cpornotroping\u201d as depravation, racialized assemblages); Achille Mbembe\u2019s post-Schmittian take on the \u201cpolitics of enmity\u201d [\u201cpolitiques de l\u2019inimiti\u00e9s\u201d], retournement, <\/em>and juridical humanity (that reworks, through a Fanonian psychiatrized lens, the relation between violence and colonial force of law in the context of racist structures of securitization and anti-migration); and the institutionally proliferating and highly problematic term \u201cmicroaggression,\u201d whose performative effects vary wildly depending on illocutionary context and the subject-positioning of speakers and addressees.\u00a0 A central concern undergirding this discussion: how might we think with Fanon to re<\/em>think the micropolitics of racist psychopolitics, especially at the present time of militarized policing and the rhetoric of the new Confederacy?<\/p>\n

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Readings\/Prompts:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n