The Abyss, the Ceremony, and this Morbid Universe: Fanonian Insights on the Racial Psyche

• In Event: Centering Body, Mind, and Spirit for Radical Transformation in Racial and Ethnic Sociology

Abstract

In recent years, sociological theories of race and racism that speculate on their beginnings have encountered consequential difficulties at the strange crossroads of myth and material, narrative and structure. Where racism is, for some, a divisive weapon wielded by elites to belittle proletarian collectivism and retain (primarily economic) inequalities, others track its influence to shifting cultural and (pseudo)biological discourses of racial difference, or regimes of knowledge, that culminate in the racist implementation of sociopolitical institutions or systems. The preferred explanatory position, of course, bears demonstrable consequences for how one proposes racism be contested. In the essay at hand, I argue Frantz Fanon’s sociodiagnostic, by which the psyche is reconsidered as a social object, requires rethinking the strict discourse-material division in light of a collective unconscious both born to and birthing an antiblack atmosphere. Fanon concurrently understands language as a battleground; speech and thought are haunted and commanded by enslavement and colonization, the terrible inheritance of the white (real) world foreclosed to the one who is black. I therefore aim to contribute psychoanalytically informed evaluations of signification to recent sociological projects that insist social death marks a subtle but analytically important distinction between racism and antiblackness. For this effort, I also draw upon the works of Fanon’s sharpest living dialogists, Sylvia Wynter and David Marriott, in their disparate theoretical elaborations of Fanon’s reproach to ontology. Wynter and Marriott split at the question of the psyche and its autopoietic capacity, which informs their respective interpretations of Fanon's sociogeny. Reassessing sociogeny from each direction catalyzes speculations on the linguistic capacity of decolonial violence that, as Marriott proposes, must speak with "a language yet to be written."

Author

• Dalton Lackey, University of Maryland-College Park