Fanon's Engine: The Politics of Exhaustion

• In Event: The Politics of Ugly Feelings

Abstract

In the opening pages of Alienation and Freedom, a decisive and disorientating recent anthology of the recovered clinical writings of Franz Fanon, the editors argue, “Fanon’s life work was to overcome the fascination of sleep." My paper, which tracks Fanon's study of and resistance to exhaustion as a critical experience, opens by offering a field of intelligibility for Fanon's claim in Black Skin, White Masks that "the mechanism [of the dialectic] is exhaustion." It proceeds immanently, through Fanon's reading of Hegel, and on the terrain of Fanon's idiosyncratic, psychoanalytic Socio-thérapie found in later works. In this, it asks: what did exhaustion mean for Fanon, and, in turn, for us? What kind of psycho-political experience is it and how might it illuminate broader questions of the relation between critique and political action? Reading Fanon's resignation letter from his clinic in Algeria under conditions of widespread torture, it is clear that he turns his attention to revolt as a therapeutic site, one that offers both (particularly in his political writings for the FLN cause) a possibility of a new kind of endurance (Exhaustion was only ever a colonial fantasy. The revolution shall endure forever because it is itself oxygen) and a new worry about the kinds of dissolutions and psychoses that war produces for the self and nascent community. In particular, I am interested in the production of an attachment to a desire to overcome exhaustion, as a metonym for a specific psychic-political colonial impasse, and the way in which the guerilla fighter becomes the uneasy bearer of that desire. From this perspective, Fanon's late enthusiasm for African solidarity should be understood as an attempt to articulate and indeed organize for the conditions under which it might be possible to imagine an end to war that does not simply re-embed or maintain the subject in a colonial form of psychosis, that disrupts the “engine” of exhaustion.

In the second part of the paper, I consider the afterlives of Fanon’s study of exhaustion. In Incognegro, an important origin point for the discourse now known as afro-pessimism, Frank Wilderson lays claim to Fanon's legacy in and through a claim about the simultaneous persistence and disavowal of war and, through this, the disarticulation and poetic persistence of historical revolutionary desire. I locate one imporant origin of Wilderson's thinking is in his particular and rarely considered experience of having been a member of umkhonto we sizwe, the military wing of the ANC in the anti-apartheid struggle (like Fanon, he came to join a fight that was not quite his own). As he attests, Wilderson experienced late apartheid as a war, with war trauma, war solidarity, and leftist visions of the kinds of international solidarity that both enabled the fight and would be required to create peace, and, ultimately, of having refused to demobilize when ordered to by Mandela’s administration. Wilderson’s early writings reflect the experience of the transition as produced by a series of disavowals in law and discourse that there had been a war, the disavowal of the figure of the militant, as well as the experience of civil strife in the late 90’s and the persistence of martial law categories of amnesty and indemnity in and through the TRC, and in the new Constitution. Offering a Fanonian reading of the official discourses of disavowal and liberal reconstitution with reference to a series of documents about veterans trauma produced by renegade military units in the late 90s, I rethink the now infamous claim that blackness exists in a "state of emergency" as a claim about what means to live through a simultaneous and compounding persistence and disavowal of war into the present, and to experience and become critically attached to this impossible remainder of war as the paradoxical and unstable bearer of a desire for the self-actualization and collective solidarity that Fanon thought was perhaps only possible through war, but, crucially, bears within itself the possibility of ending war and not simply transforming its forms. Reconsidering, then, the relation between historicity and ontology in this aspect of Fanon's radicalism, I rethink the structure of feeling of contemporary Fanonism by tracing the effects of his unstable but undeniably generative encounter with exhaustion, and the ongoing work of this concept in and through his readers and fellow fighters.

Author

• Nica Siegel, Yale