THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH vs Lewis R. Gordon (round two)

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#17, SEPT-NOV/2015

Lewis R. Gordon is a philosopher belonging to that rare humanity of genuinely engaged intellectuals whose emancipatory trajectory of thought resonates in the streets as well as in the Academy. This interview, which is our second round of dialogue with Gordon, focuses on his latest book, What Fanon Said, as yet another insurgent philosophical contribution, alongside such previous works as Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, Bad Faith and Anti-Black Racism and Existentia Africana. Gordon is currently Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at UCONN-Storrs; European Union Visiting Chair in Philosophy at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France; and Nelson Mandela Distinguished Visiting Professor at Rhodes University, South Africa.

Brotherwise Dispatch - How would you frame and distinguish the theoretical significance of your current book, What Fanon Said in relation to your earlier seminal work Fanon and the Crisis of European Man?

Lewis R. Gordon - What Fanon Said belongs in part to what I call the sixth stage of Fanon studies—namely, that area of study standing on its own. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (Routledge, 1995) belongs to the fifth stage, where Fanon’s thought is engaged for its usefulness for other theoretical work. My aim in that book was to show how a human science of liberation is possible. Fanon was an inspiration and guide for that effort. I refer to What Fanon Said as belonging “in part” to the sixth stage because I outline the debates in Fanon studies and jump into the fray in terms of my position on debates about his biography and thought. The other part is connected to the fifth stage because this is also a work of Africana philosophical biography. In Existentia Africana (Routledge, 2000) and An Introduction to Africana (Cambridge UP, 2008) I argued against a pernicious tendency in intellectual history and philosophy—the reduction of Africana thought to “experience” and the appeal to European intellectuals as sources of legitimate thinking or theory. The result is the de-intellectualizing of Africana thought. Thought, I argued, belongs to everyone. Africana abrogation of responsibility for thinking—for doing theoretical work—would lead to intellectual dependency on Europe or epistemic colonization. Taking on the task of building theory is therefore an important element of struggles for decolonization and liberation. It is not, however, an easy affair. In An Introduction to Africana Philosophy, I realized I had to write a philosophical introduction in the sense of outlining the problems of engaging Africana philosophy in intellectual terms. This meant also examining, in a critical way, problems of history and what it means to do intellectual history when the subject of thought is not only Africana but also black. This is because black subjects faced historical erasure as agents. History, in other words, needed to be decolonized. In effect, then, to introduce Africana philosophy, I needed also to write a philosophy of history, which made the work also an example of Africana philosophy of history. I ended up writing a portrait of thought focused on one and a half millennia with references, here and there, to the past three thousand years of thought. In What Fanon Said, these concerns moved to the question of a specific thinker. Biography became the focus instead of history. As many historians also write biographies, the old problems came to the fore: their philosophies of history informed their biographies. Thus, I now faced the problem of Africana philosophical biography. After all, there have always been biographies—and even autobiographies—of black intellectuals. Many, however, are contradictions in that they are de-intellectualized biographies of those intellectuals. Consider the case of European intellectuals such as Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, and Karl Marx. No biography that ignores the thought of each would be taken seriously. In fact, it is sometimes the other extreme where their thought is focused on at the expense of the thinker’s biography. In the case of Fanon, for instance, there is a very thick book available that I don’t think many proponents have actually read. Had they done so, they would see that its purpose was to subordinate Fanon’s thought and also render him an illegitimate intellectual. Rather than devote much time to what’s wrong with that and several other works, it struck me that it was more important to focus on Fanon’s thought itself, to push aside the veils that were hiding its appearance, and offer, in practice, a way of doing such work. A powerful aspect of Fanon, after all, is that his thought and life were one. To subordinate either would be an injustice.

BD - At your reading of What Fanon Said sponsored by the Marxist Education Project and held at The Commons in Brooklyn, New York, I was struck by the lively crowd whose diverse turnout included an overwhelming number of activists from the grassroots, as well as the academy, who were either arriving from ongoing protests taking place in solidarity with the Baltimore rebellion against structural-inert anti-Black police violence, or were actually making preparations to leave and go protest after the reading itself. How might such an occurrence speak to maturing potentialities of contemporary social justice movements towards creating a genuine culture of praxis in which the inevitable tension between emancipatory theory and social activism is embraced as a progressive rhythm, rather than exacerbated as an implacable dualism?

LRG - The community that gathered at The Commons that night honored Fanon’s memory well. I had insisted on giving two talks in celebration of the book. One was at Book Culture because of my commitment to supporting small, independent bookstores and also because doing that, too, was an homage to Fanon, who loved and frequented such stores. The other was to speak where Fanon himself would have been speaking if he were alive. The Marxist Education Project at the Commons is his kind of place. It’s a metaphor for the larger community of intellectuals with whom he would have been involved—that is, activist intellectuals who don’t separate theory from praxis. One of the things I mentioned in that meeting was that Fanon wrote to the world, not to an exclusive group of intellectuals or narrowly defined academics. In fact, I had quipped that Fanon writing for tenure would be a ridiculous thought. I also added an ironic feature of Fanon’s thought: He wrote hoping to be wrong. His continued relevance is both tragic and a reflection of love, for only a loving intellectual offers a truthful diagnosis with the hope of being wrong. Fanon also believed in the revolutionary potential of people who take responsibility for their existence, which then translates into the realization of our existence. I heard that the stream from The Commons session did not record well, which is unfortunate. I would love for others to hear the many insights from that audience of activist intellectuals. I remember hearing that bridges were shut down that night from activists in solidarity with those fighting the gangs of police in Baltimore. I call the Baltimore police (and, unfortunately, many who dominate urban centers and certain towns across the country) “gangs” because that is what they are: agents of organized crime. They don’t protect the people. They are at war against them. And they do so with extraordinary profits. The activists who gathered in the Commons in Brooklyn that night were strikingly relational. They were each aware of the connections between local struggles and global ones. When New Yorkers are talking about Baltimore and St. Louis, in addition to Gaza, Marikana, Rio de Janeiro, and so many and much more, it becomes clear that there are generations engaged in Fanon’s proverbial observation of finding their mission and, fortunate for the rest of us, embracing instead of betraying it. These concerns came together well afterward in Baltimore as a fusion of what occurred at The Commons emerged at the bookstore Red Emma’s. The theory versus praxis formulation is, at least as these events and Fanon’s thought attest, a false dilemma. Much of it emerges, I argued at The Commons and in a variety of other contexts, from a misconception of what participation in struggles is. Too many people attempt to enter as gods or the end-all-be-all agents of change. What they fail to reflect upon is their role in terms of what they have to offer. What struggles need are for people to contribute the best of what they could offer. Some moments may not require our best, true, but that is because contexts vary. But understanding this requires consciousness, and that emerges from engaging, learning, participating, reflecting, what, in short, Fanon called becoming actional. I so enjoyed my experience at The Commons that I recently returned to participate in two discussions: The Streets are Polyphonic: Marxism as Improvisational and Can the Working Class Unite: Features of the Generalization of the Proletariat. What became clear from those events is that we need to think differently about what intellectuals and the problems we face are today. The conditions are, after all, unprecedented: We are living in the Anthropocene era, the age of our species dominating the planet, which places the welfare of life on this planet in our hands. There are eight billion of us with a large portion having access to the technological resources of affecting everyone in the proverbial blink of an eye. Fanon’s closing reflections from Les damnés de la terre (1961; available in English as “The Wretched of the Earth”) are highly relevant here: We need new concepts to set afoot a very different kind of humanity—one attuned to the problems indigenous to our times and the conditions they are setting for generations to come, provided, of course, that there is sufficient time for them to emerge at all.

BD - How do you approach the dialectic consultations occurring within the interpersonal discourse, as well as within the intellectual work, of Wright, de Beauvoir, Sartre, Jeanson and Fanon, without falling into the popular trap of contextualizing such epistemological reciprocity as merely a hierarchal narrative between Sartre and his ‘disciples’?

LRG - The only one on this list who was for a time a disciple of Sartre was Jeanson, and even he declared his independence in important ways. De Beauvoir was certainly her own woman, and there is much evidence, as de Beauvoir scholars such as Debra Bergoffen and Peg Simons have shown, that her creativity and powerful personality were more an influence on Sartre than many critics and proponents of their work may imagine. The same for Wright. His genius was manifested in writings he produced before his acquaintance and subsequent friendship with Sartre. In addition to his critical relationship to the U.S. left, there was also his affinity with Kierkegaardian existentialism, and beyond that, there was is independent diagnosis of social and political impotence resulting in uniquely modern forms of rage. Sartre, however, shouldn’t be short changed in terms of how he related to other intellectuals. One of the things I like about Sartre was that he approached intellectual work much like jazz musicians do: contributions to the music could come from members of any generation. That’s why it isn’t unusual to see an adolescent playing with old jazz musicians. Sartre always sought to learn with and even from younger generations, and he respected the contributions of those who preceded him. I argue in What Fanon Said, for instance, that there is no way that Jeanson wouldn’t have shared Peau noire, masques blancs (1952; available in English as “Black Skin, White Masks”) with him, which means Sartre must have known about Fanon’s critique of “Orphée noir,” especially the point about being lost in the night, of the importance, that is, of genuine discovery in dialectical thought. Sartre’s Hegelian efforts in his notebooks, which also included his reflections on the enslavement of Africans in the Americas, were heavily influenced by de Beauvoir’s studies of Hegelian dialectic and social morality (versus ethics), and his effort to engage Hegel to write his own promised ethics must have been shaken up by Fanon’s observation that his thought was becoming closed—that is, in effect nondialetical. Given Sartre’s openness to learn from the young, he must have taken Fanon’s criticism very seriously. We know he abandoned orthodox dialectics by the early 1950s and began the path of existential Marxism that culminated in the extraordinary arguments for open dialectics in Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; available in English as “Critique of Dialectical Reason”), the work that solidified Fanon’s resolve for their continued intellectual engagement.

BD - You define epistemic closure as a “moment of presumably complete knowledge of a phenomenon”, in what sense does this result in what you conceptualize as ‘perverse anonymity’?

LRG - Ah, a return to some of my earlier thought. I’m delighted it’s a concept by which I still stand. The opposite of epistemic closure is openness. It’s where one is open to learning about and from another. In that relationship, the other person is a possibility. Anonymity is an important element of social reality. It is what is manifested when one takes on or is engaged in a social role. These are ideas from Alfred Schutz and Maurice Natanson in their phenomenological work on social reality. In a social world, a human being participates in a way that is properly addressed by the indefinite article. This is because as a role, anyone could occupy it. And “anyone” is an ideally typified way of addressing each human being as a potential. Thus, anyone who registers for a class could be “a student.” Anyone who enters a store could be “a customer.” And when it comes to certain identities, a similar judgment could be made about “a man” or “a woman,” and even further, I’ve already being using such language in “a human being.” Things get perverse, however, when what is involved in being “a human being” is erased from certain subjects. Simply identifying them as an example of certain types leads to erasure of their other possibilities. Thus, identifying someone as “a black” in an antiblack society means pointing out all one needs to know. Misogyny functions in the same way. Meeting another human being as a possibility rejects this perversity. One meets “a black” or “a woman” not as a closed system, the end of what needs to be known, but the beginning, an opportunity to be in a human relationship with that person. This human-to-human encounter is part of sociality, and it is the opposite of bad faith, which is an attempt to close off sociality through in effect denying human presence when encountering members of certain groups. The difficulty, however, is that the problem also emerges in relation to one’s own group, as black antiblack racism and female misogyny reveal. That is why Fanon, at the end of Peau noir, masques blancs asks his body to make of him a man who questions. In phenomenology, consciousness is never separated from the body except as a delusion in the form of bad faith. Thus, appealing to his body was another way of Fanon’s calling to consciousness the human relationship of possibility not only with others but also oneself.

BD - How does Fanon tackle “the benign colonialism” which makes the “moralistic claim of defending Algerian women from the backwardness of their men”?

LRG - He shows it no mercy. In L’An V de la révolution algerienne (1959; available in English as “A Dying Colonialism”), Fanon is adamant that colonialism is degradation of a people’s humanity. This is consistent with his arguments in Peau noir, masques blancs, where he in effect shows that colonialism and racism infantilize groups of people and that coherent models of maturation are crucial for their health and liberation. In L’An V, he unmasks the hypocrisy of so-called concerns for Algerian women in the form of a supposedly liberating colonialism. What Fanon’s critics often overlook, however, is a crucial dimension of his argument. Fanon never insisted that Algerian men were liberating Algerian women. He insisted that Algerian women must liberate themselves. They must be liberated not as girls being dragged into adulthood but instead as women seizing their freedom, taking responsibility for their existence. In this sense, he is agreeing with the Chinese feminist revolutionary He-Yin Zhen, who wrote half a century before him. In her essay “On the question of Women’s Liberation,” she wrote:

The cause of women’s rights must be won through women’s own efforts. It must not be granted by men. If we allow women’s rightful role to be imposed by men, we are renouncing our freedom; and if we allow ourselves to look up to men and ingratiate ourselves to them, whatever rights we obtain in this way are handed to us from above. As we continued to be instrumentalized and remain men’s appendages, we would be liberated in name only and our rights could never really be our own. I argue that we women must rely on ourselves to find the joy of liberation and should never expect men to be our liberators. Today, Chinese women still expect men to come to set them free; we are content with playing a passive role. We have not risen to the level of self-consciousness. Not only do we fall easy prey to men’s manipulation, we also pay homage to them. Is this not a disgrace?

I take it that He-Yin Zhen has no problem with women and men fighting alongside each other, equally, for national liberation and varieties of other struggles, but the idea of men liberating women is an anathema. Men should do what is right (don’t be obstacles to the dignity of women), which means when it comes to women’s freedom, whether Algerian or otherwise, that must come from them. What many white French women forgot was that they were part of an imperial order. As benign colonialism is analogous to the idea of giving another her freedom, it is in effect an affirmation of colonial relations through cultivated dependency. That is why many of those women actually objected when Algerian women exercised their independence. Fanon, as I understand him, agrees with He-Yin Zhen.

This has been another one of our BROTHERWISE FIVE interview series, during which The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH interrogates intellectuals, artists and activists with five probing questions to the delight of our readers.

On behalf of Lewis R. Gordon and The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH,

Peace.

-A. Shahid Stover

(this interview of Lewis R. Gordon for The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH was conducted by A. Shahid Stover through email correspondence from July 2nd – August 31st of 2015)