{"id":1231,"date":"2017-01-14T04:39:41","date_gmt":"2017-01-14T09:39:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/?p=1231"},"modified":"2017-01-14T04:39:41","modified_gmt":"2017-01-14T09:39:41","slug":"homi-k-bhabha-thinking-the-burdened-life-with-fanon-baldwin-and-coates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/homi-k-bhabha-thinking-the-burdened-life-with-fanon-baldwin-and-coates\/","title":{"rendered":"Homi K. Bhabha | Thinking the Burdened Life with Fanon, Baldwin, and Coates"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Homi K. Bhabha<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI must constantly remind myself that the real\u00a0leap<\/em>\u00a0consists of introducing invention into life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the start of his life, a man is always congested, drowned in contingency. The misfortune of man is that he was once a child.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014\u00a0 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks<\/em> (1952)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the Nietzsche 13\/13 seminar on Frantz Fanon, I will return to the \u201cLook a Negro\u201d scenario in Black Skin, White Masks<\/em> as it repeats in James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates with a startling family resemblance. This has led me to think of the distinction\u00a0between \u201csecurity\u201d and \u201csafety\u2014in conversation as well with Jeremy Waldron and Foucault. I would like to explore what I call \u201cethical risk\u201d and put this concept in conversation with Fanon and the idea of \u201cburdened life,\u201d rather than bare life.<\/p>\n

There is a conversation amongst writers who believe that close encounters with figures of death\u2014loss, fear, risk, vulnerability, negation, the void\u2014are testing grounds for the good life. Death, in this figurative sense, is an ethic of \u201cironic tenacity\u201d in the face of injury and injustice. Levinas, alluding to what he calls \u201cthe death-life metaphor,\u201d writes that \u201cit is in being answerable for [the neighbour\u2019s] life that we are already with [the Other] in death.\u201d The side-by-side proximity of death-life repeats in the everyday emergencies of our present history\u2014migration, climate change, racial deaths, targeted terror\u2014and severely tests the method and mettle of our critical thinking.<\/p>\n

People who are forced, each day and night<\/em>, to snatch their authority from under \u2018the foot on your neck,\u2019 without hating the hater, develop a remarkable ethical resilience, Baldwin argues. To understand his version of the death-life metaphor, we must visualize Baldwin\u2019s dialectic of reversal, his chiasmatic<\/em> strategy for throwing off the foot on his neck to achieve his own authority\u2014a resilient ethical agency.<\/p>\n

A half century after The Fire Next Time, <\/em>Coates borrows his title from a crucial phrase in Baldwin\u2019s text\u2014Between the World and Me\u2014<\/em>and takes on the challenge of ethical risk to conceive of a \u201cvulnerable cosmopolitanism<\/em>.\u201d Coates\u2019s insight into vulnerability as a worldly diasporic condition begins with his poetic intuition\u2014preceding his political conviction\u2014that there is an ethical lesson to be learnt in the acutely contradictory and ambivalent conditions of death-life that constitute the risky survival of the discriminated and disempowered. To survive the worst that life can bring, day by day, forces you \u201cto look beneath<\/em> appearances\u2026and to hear the meanings behind<\/em> the words.\u201d And once you find yourself in possession of \u201cother\u201d interpretations and \u201calternative\u201d realities, you are well on your way to inverting, reversing, and displacing the angle of visibility, in order to create your own \u201ctantalizing contradictions,\u201d at your own risk.<\/em><\/p>\n

It is with this in mind that I will return to a Nietzschean-inflected reading of Fanon\u2019s writings to explore questions of ethical risk and burdened lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Homi K. Bhabha \u201cI must constantly remind myself that the real\u00a0leap\u00a0consists of introducing invention into life.\u201d \u201cAt the start of his life, a man is always congested, drowned in contingency. The misfortune of man is that he was once… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38973],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-8-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1231\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}