Subterranean Fanon

Gavin Arnall’s Subterranean Fanon presents readers with two Fanons: the dialectical prophet of change and the anti-dialectician of destruction. The first Fanon lives above ground in the world we recognize as synthetic and systemic. Taking center stage are translations, theories of revolutions that recompose the possible from the given. For Arnall’s dominant Fanon, “to theorize is to translate, to dialectically convert any inherited doctrine into a new version of itself so as to place it in the service of the struggle for liberation” (11). The second Fanon, buried below ground, is the one Arnall reads as anti- or nondialectical. This Fanon can be excavated in those calls for change that refuse to draw on the past and present: the Fanonian leap and tabula rasa. This is the Fanon Arnall finds in the reader of Nietzsche and in the ambivalent practitioner of electroshock therapy, the Fanon of The Wretched of the Earth for whom colonial zoning is “not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers.” For this Fanon, “The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity.”1The relation between these Fanons repeats the occasion of their difference: the nondialectical at times becomes anti-dialectical, in open antagonism against the dialectic; in other readings, the nondialectical is presented as the yet-to-be dialectical, yearning for fulfillment. The two Fanons sometimes feature for Arnall as complementary, where strategies of change accord to their political contexts. These Fanons depart on issues of contradiction and translation but share a universalism; the former concretizes abstract universals and the latter promises a “universalism of the void” (16). Most often, however, Arnall invites us to archaeologically and symptomatically read the two Fanons as a tension that is latent and unresolved (17–18). Staying with this epistemological agnosticism, Arnall cautions against temptations to systematize (94–95) and deciphers how “Fanon’s internal division divides Fanon studies” (18), sorting major Fanonian interpreters into either intellectual acrobats that turn every inconsistency into a consistency (Ato Sekyi-Otu, Nigel Gibson, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and George Ciccariello-Maher) or political partisans that force a choice between one Fanon or another (Homi Bhabha, Anne McClintock, Benita Parry, and Jared Sexton, with Sexton the Afropessimist representing the only nondialectical decision).The book’s central thesis works on one level as an intellectual biography. Chapter by chapter Arnall tracks Fanon’s writing as it develops, repeats, and intensifies across the chronology of his short life, beginning with recently published plays and psychiatric papers in the anthology Alienation and Freedom, moving to Black Skin, White Masks,then A Dying Colonialism and the speeches and newspaper articles on the Algerian Revolution, and finally culminating with two chapters dedicated to The Wretched of the Earth. And while Subterranean Fanon is not an intellectual biography on the level of reading everything Fanon has ever read, it effectively engages his many European interlocutors (from Hegel to Marx, Kojève, Nietzsche, and Sartre) as well as his clinical and colonial contexts. If Fanon’s plays, letters, articles, speeches, and major works evince one consistency, for Arnall, it is inconsistency: Fanon is deeply Hegelian, yearning to translate dialectics into the colonial context, but also an anti-Hegelian whose colonial world represents the unthought that exceeds dialectical reason (28–29). Fanon’s texts are “at war” with themselves, promising, like in Black Skin, White Masks, to serve as a “mirror” whose “progressive infrastructure” reveals the road to disalienation, while at the same time undertaking “a complete lysis of this morbid body.”2 Alongside elaborating the telic mode of presentation animating much of Fanon’s writing, where antinomies of violence become, as in Arnall’s reading of Sekyi-Otu’s approach, “dialectical contradictions in disguise” (147), Arnall exposes a rivenness on questions of (inter)national consciousness, political organization, action, and leadership, the mummification and mutation of culture, and the meaning of “new humanism” that persists across Fanon’s oeuvre and circulates within every text. Although Wretched, to take Arnall’s most extensive example, recapitulates a triadic orientation toward assimilationist, traditionalist, and revolutionary phases, Arnall details how its first explosive chapter “On Violence” was initially published independently of its supposedly sublating second, while its fourth—“On National Culture”—scrambles the order and relation of decolonial phases (177–78) and its last—“Colonial War and Mental Disorders”—appears so “untimely and out-of-place” (191), its colonial case histories so intractably ruinous, as to undermine any promise of a revolutionary break (or even progressive development).Vertiginous impossibility sits uncomfortably with Fanon’s reminder that “the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence” (Black Skin, 229), and Arnall’s unresolved description leaves us with little sense as to why Fanon could, like a quantum particle, occupy both positions at once. Arnall seems to want to suspend such an analysis as systemizing too soon, even as he makes a crucial decision: to prioritize the “more fundamental relationship that [Fanon] maintains with himself” over the one he maintains with the intersubjective world (29). Arnall’s prioritization seems to follow Fanon the revolutionary psychotherapist for whom, as Sexton writes, external battles are “nearly impossible” and internal battles “actually impossible,” but it is Arnall’s separation of the external and internal that both gives him the critical distance to appreciate Fanonian aporias and abdicates an analytic in which Fanon’s oppressive contexts might be linked to his inner war—“not in the sense,” Sexton argues, “that they are internalized and thus need to be externalized like you eliminate impurities—there are no purities or impurities—but rather in the sense that they constitute us, and so any move against them is a move against ourselves.”3 Arnall’s typography, drawn explicitly from Emilio de Ípola’s reading of Althusser’s “aleatory materialism” (17) (in a book, Althusser, The Infinite Farewell, for which Arnall himself was the translator), enacts the dangers of extracting methods—dialectical and nondialectical—without more expressly working on these methods as part of the movement of the object, an objective surround that for Fanon is not only represented by racial myth but constituted by negrophobogenesis.4While Subterranean Fanon does an admirable job of opening what has often been foreclosed in Fanonian studies, Arnall forecloses on one interpretation too quickly. Afropessimists, in Arnall’s lamentable reading of Sexton, are partisans of the Fanon of destruction, extracting “Fanon from his commitment to a political project of dialectical humanism” (31). If Afropessimism speculatively takes the side of nondialectics, it is in an attempt to theorize not only what cannot be said but why it cannot be said. Taking the “n’est pas” as the core of blackness, as David Marriott’s Whither Fanon? proposes, the misreadings of Fanon manifest a torsion internal to an abyssal blackness Fanon enacts.5 Read in the light of this context, we get not so much a unitary Fanon as a Fanon under the demand to be unitary. Against the “separation imposed by the European” which, once accepted by the black, provides “no further respite” except to be white, Fanon offers “another solution”: the “restructuring of the world” and, in a further twist, the “end of the world” (Black Skin, 81–2; 216). The leap is not a leap of the revolutionary subject into the sovereign, not a leap into space and time, external and internal, but into and through the “zone of non-being” (Black Skin, 12) that informs the operation of dialectics since at least Hegel. It is through the spanner of black oblivion, made available to the world as (but not exhausted by) the difference between dialectical contradiction and nondialectical antagonism, that the politics, methods, and cry of Fanon continue to impress and unsettle. Subterranean Fanon is, then, an exemplary exercise in impressing the important aliveness of Fanon’s writing by reading rigorously and comparatively while refusing easy synthesis, even as the unsettling, world-ending work of black politics will always necessarily happen on terms that exceed any theoretical or literary translation

Sociology · Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity · History · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics

• The Many Tasks of the Marxist Translator

  Gavin Arnall•Historical Materialism•2022

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