THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH vs. Marilyn Nissim-Sabat

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#6, MARCH-MAY/2019

Marilyn Nissim-Sabat is a retired philosophy professor, a psychotherapist, and a socialist activist who views all of her work as directed towards human liberation. She is the author of a book, Neither Victim nor Survivor: Thinking towards a New Humanity(Lexington, 2008) and numerous articles and book chapters in the fields of critical race theory, feminism, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. Two of her recent publications are: “Melville’s Phenomenology of Gender: Critical Reflections on C.L.R. James Mariners, Renegades, Castaways and Paget Henry’s Caliban’s Reason,” in Melville Among the Philosophers, ed. By Corey McCall and Tom Nurmi, Afterword by Cornel West, Lexington, 2017, and “Richard Wright’s Mission: Initiating a Politics of the Human,” in The Politics of Richard Wright: Perspectives on Resistance, ed. By Jane Anna Gordon and Cyrus Zirakzadeh, University Press of Kentucky, 2018.

Brotherwise Dispatch – Key to understanding the emancipatory trajectory of your intellectual endeavors as exemplified in your work, Neither Victim Nor Survivor: Thinking Toward A New Humanity, is your notion of “a twofold approach” to “combating capitalist ideology”. For our readers who have yet to read your book, just what exactly does your “twofold approach” entail?

Marilyn Nissim-Sabat - I described this twofold approach in the first chapter of the book, titled “What is a victim?” where I wrote that, “The task of combatting capitalist ideology requires a two-fold approach: first, socialist-humanists…should align ourselves…with liberation struggles everywhere; second, radical philosophy needs to find a way to concretize further the analysis of capitalist ideology as a form of victimization [of people] that shackles those who are subjects for a liberatory praxis.” Regarding the project of aligning ourselves with liberation struggles everywhere, my views are consistent with those of Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist Humanism, who believed, and showed in her marvelous books, for example, Marxism and Freedom, that it is vitally important to identify and solidarize with revolutionary movements everywhere, for, she believed, the striving for freedom can never die and we must be there at the moment of its birth. Moreover, just as Marx rethought his conception of communism under the impact of the Paris Commune, it is necessary for revolutionaries to learn from such movements today.

In the same chapter, I proposed that capitalism’s ideology can be identified as victimization, as rendering people victims of the relentless logic of capital that exploits everyone more and more, and, at the same time, indoctrinates us to believe that we are the problem, that we victims are to blame for our own victimization. This indoctrination takes many forms, for example, promoting the notion that, since ours is a free society, if we are poor that is because we are lazy, lack initiative, don’t want to work like normal human beings, are deficient in some way, and so on. Dictionaries define ‘victim’ consistently with the word’s etymology and usage, according to which a ‘victim’ is one who is being attacked by an external force or an illness or in some other way. Recently, however, a broad swath of the population, in my observation, is using the word ‘victim’ to mean the opposite of its usual usage; that is, the word is now acquiring in some circles the meaning that is a justification for capitalism, according to which a victim is someone who sabotages herself, someone who, as the saying goes, “is her own worst enemy,” the cause of her own troubles. In other words, in these instances, the word victim now means that the person so designated is to blame for his own troubles. In my book, in the first chapter, called “What is a victim?”, I show that race, class, and gender divisions generated by capitalism result in the designation of a preferred group, usually of rich, white, and male people, who justify their benefits on the basis that those who suffer discrimination, who are excluded from jobs, homes, clubs, etc., lack certain qualities—e.g., drive, intelligence, self-control, etc. and therefore are the cause of their own failure. Thus, the ideological structure of capitalism, along with its structural classism, racism, and sexism, is so all-encompassing, that the victims of capitalism’s need to divide and conquer often accede to self-blame. This is the process that Fanon designated as “sociogenesis.”

So, the “two-fold approach” is activism, on one hand, and combatting the ideology of capitalism that stifles liberatory praxis. The book itself, Neither Victim nor Survivor: Thinking towards a new humanity, aims to show that the ideology of victimization and victim-blaming has in recent decades had an uptick, such that people now define the word ‘victim’ literally to mean self-blame. This has the devastating consequence of eliminating usage of the term ‘victim’ to mean someone who, or those who, have suffered an unjustified attack from a source external to themselves. What other word do we have for this? Also, people who have succumbed to the ideology of self-blame often say, one way or another, that “I am not a victim, I’m a survivor” which I interpret to mean, “I am not to blame for my suffering, my trauma; and I have survived that trauma.” So, people who say that they are not victims in the sense that they do not blame themselves, and that they are survivors seem to be saying that if they don’t blame themselves, they will survive their trauma. I want to emphasize here that renowned trauma theorists themselves, as I discuss in the book, maintain that all we can ever do is survive trauma, or, in other words, moving beyond trauma by fully reintegrating ourselves and becoming the persons we were before the trauma and developing into people who fully develop our talents and abilities, as we would have if we had not been traumatized, is out of the question for trauma survivors. And this is so because such people are always and ever linked to their trauma and are always and ever just surviving it. The problem with this formulation is that reflects very deeply the capitalist ideology that we are incessantly threatened by catastrophe because of the scarcity of resources and the “war of all against all” (Hobbes), i.e. the alleged competitive, wolf-like nature of humans that always seeks dominance and control. Therefore, all we can ever do is just “survive,” with of course the necessary assistance of the controlled rapacity called capitalism to help us survive. As I show in the book, the ideology of survivalism is profoundly anti-humanistic. The last chapter of the book is an analysis and interpretation of Toni Morrison’s magnificent novel, Beloved, in which I show precisely that Sethe and Paul D survived horrible traumas precisely because they believed that a life of mere survival is not a human life. It is precisely this that the ideology of self-blame and its dialectical other, survivalism, seek to conceal.

BD - Early on in your book, you state that Marx “developed a critique of capitalism that is inseparable from a theory of a subject”. What distinguishes such “a theory of the subject” from what you describe as “the naïve empiricist view with its essentially passive construction of the human subject”?

MNS - What I intended to convey when I wrote of “naïve empiricism” in the chapter “What is a victim?” is actually an attitude toward victim status that was expressed by Nancy Reagan in her phrase that became notorious: she was addressing the problem of substance abuse and her remedy was to encourage substance abusers to “just say no.” Now, though I think I did not actually refer to her phrase in the book, or I don’t remember whether I did or not, there is in the book a very extensive discussion of this point. To urge people to “just say no” seems to be urging them to become proactive in seeking cure, yet in fact it is the opposite of this. Because the phrase, purported to be a path to cure, entirely ignores the subjectivity and experiences of the sufferers of this condition, it can, I think, lead to despair and self-blame when it is tried and the person “fails” to “just say no.” Reagan’s attitude is just what I meant when I spoke of “naïve empiricism” that reflects a “passive view of the subject.” And this passive view of the subject can lead to condemnation of subjects to an inferior status because, from the “just say no” perspective, there can be no explanation of continued substance abuse or addiction other than the superiority of those who have so-called “will power” and “succeed” and the inferiority of those, the vast majority, who lack “will power” and “fail.” (When I wrote this book and the chapter in it, chapter 4, called “Addiction, Akrasia, and Self-Psychology: A Socratic and Psychoanalytic View of Akrasia,” I was already both a professor of philosophy and a certified addictions counselor working in a halfway house facility in Chicago). So, what I meant, in chapter 1, “What is a victim?” is that I was using the term “empiricism” not at all in any scientific sense, but rather to refer to what people observe, and by naivete I meant simply what people observe completely uncritically, without thinking about it, without formulating any questions. For example, if a person is driven to addiction, which can be life destroying or life threatening or both, and can bring harm to loved ones and others, should we not be asking, at the very least from the point of view of prevention, how this person arrived at such a state? What life experiences led to such a state of misery? In my chapter on addiction and akrasia, or weakness of will, I thoroughly refuted any claim that addicts are weak-willed people, and I refuted the concept of akrasia, or weakness of will, defended by Aristotle, through an analysis of Socrates’ stance in Protagoras, according to which a person cannot commit an action that they know, or believe, to be against their own best interest. I was quite amazed that when I presented this as a paper at a meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in Atlanta quite a few years ago, with noted defender of akrasia, philosopher Alfred Mele, on the panel, I received an ovation from the audience in a large, crowded room! So, to continue the discussion, I argue that “naïve empiricism” in the sense just described is based on a view such that the subject is entirely passive, because “just say no” advocates an action that would be a veritable fiat, namely a “choice” that would be entirely external to the subjectivity of the person afflicted with addiction. And as for those who “succeed”, I would certainly assume that they were already well along on the road to recovery when they decided to abstain from their substance of choice. Another example that I discuss at length in the book is that of young men living in socio-economically depressed and fragmented areas, who are subjected to, among other oppressive forces, the poisonous racism built into our society, who become gang members and do the sometimes terrible things that gangs sometimes do. “Naïve empiricists” argue that these young men, are free, they have a choice, and that the fact that some do not join gangs or leave gangs proves this. Now it has been shown that for many young men who grow up in neighborhoods where gross and pervasive lack of social and family integrity exists, where families are threatened on a daily basis with fragmentation and extinction, and life is a daily struggle for survival, join gangs as a substitute for a family, a community, for some form of acceptance and stable attachment. The need for attachment, a need that is most desperate for young men, is quite overwhelming for human beings. We cannot survive either physically or psychologically without it, and this need when unmet is a powerful motive for joining all sorts of groups. So, joining a gang can mean a “choice” to save oneself from psychic death because one feels quite realistically that one’s actual being as a human subject is being extinguished, and that one has no other options, that one does not see or believe that any other options exist, whether or not they in fact do or do not exist. This view does not advocate that people who do terrible things should not be held accountable and responsible for their actions, for accountability, so incredibly lacking in American public, private, and social life, is a component of maturity. But accountability presupposes the conditions for its possibility, namely an intact environment. Lack of accountability is one reason why psychosocial maturation is stifled here in the US, and why grossly immature people hold high office. However, I argue in the book that “naïve empiricism” just is the attitude, including the bourgeois style of life, commodity fetishism, and the alienation, including self-alienation, that is generated by capitalism which seeks to destroy (here I personify capitalism in the sense that Marx referred to it as having ‘a despotic plan’) human subjectivity as such. Capitalism seeks to destroy human subjectivity because, as Marx believed and showed, human subjectivity is essentially liberatory, it is revolutionary subjectivity, that subjectivity that always seeks to actualize the talents, hopes, and dreams inherent in it, the creative self-development that we all long for, and which therefore requires a society that fosters everyone’s self-development, that is, a truly human society in which human beings are whole, not fragmented. In other words, meeting the real needs of the human subject requires the end of capitalism. And this is why I hold the writings of Raya Dunayevskaya and those who fully appreciate them, my colleagues in the International Marxist Humanist Organization, in such high esteem. So, subjectivity, the subjectivity of the people struggling around the world for societies in which free expression and the real opportunity for full self-development in communities of inclusion, of recognition of the humanity of all persons, manifest the revolutionary essence of subjectivity itself, its being as creative activity, not passivity.

BD - I found your critique of positivism as inherently misogynist quite thrilling. With that in mind, in what sense do you suggest that Freud’s “views on morality provide a rationale for his asymmetric theory of gender”?

MSN - I am delighted to hear that you find my critique of positivism as misogynist thrilling! I think that many people would find it to be outrageous! I do think, as I wrote in that chapter in my book, chapter 4, in which I analyzed the work of Evelyn Fox Keller and psychiatrist Edwin Wallace, among others, that positivism and misogyny are indissolubly linked. By the way, this chapter was originally published in the journal Human Studies. I discuss Freud’s views on morality, and, in particular, the origin of morality in chapter 2, “Freud, Gender, and the Epigenesis of Morality.” You are astute in seeing the connection between these two chapters.

Regarding Freud’s “asymmetric theory of gender;” one need only read Freud’s essay “On Femininity” in the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis to see that he believed unequivocally that females are inferior to males, and in three respects: their physical organs of sexual pleasure are inferior; they have “little sense of justice”; and they cannot be scientists because they cannot attain objectivity. It boggles the mind to try to imagine what he would think about the fact that today there are so many prominent female scientists. Also, Madame Curie’s life completely overlapped his own, and she predeceased him. He had to have known that she was awarded two Nobel Prizes, one in physics and one in chemistry, the only person to this day to receive two Nobels in different scientific disciplines. Let me point out here that Freud’s conception of science was entirely positivistic. In the view I advocate, positivism is a scientific ideology sometimes referred to as scientism because it entails the belief that only scientific knowledge of the material world counts as knowledge, and because it operates with a falsely delimited conception of objectivity and reality. I do discuss this at length in the book. Now, if we ask how Freud came by these views and attitudes towards women, that is a question that I did not at all delve into, but others have. The issue being addressed here is, given that Freud had an extremely distorted and unrealistic view of women, what sort of rationale did he provide to justify it to himself and others? Importantly, his rationale was simultaneously a justification of his misogyny and a conceptualization and defense of positivism.

Freud viewed himself as a Darwinian and interpreted Darwin to have shown that for living beings survival is the all-encompassing motive or drive and that ultimately everything that living beings do is aimed at survival. Regarding human beings, he believed that our deepest longing is for love of the father as the one who could protect us, ensure our survival. He furthermore believed that the development in human beings of morality was also in the interest of survival, and he further believed that men have a much stronger sense of right and wrong, a stronger moral sense, than women because of their identification with the father. Now this sounds nice and tidy, but the question arises as to where do women fit into this picture? After all, Freud was not divorced from reality. He well knew that women have talents and abilities, that many women were ambitious, and he himself had great admiration for some of his women patients and associates. For Freud, the sticking point, so to speak, was this: he also knew that infants and children very often also have great love and admiration for their mothers, and that some fathers were undeserving of the love and admiration of anyone. The key point here turns on our conception of what morality is. Freud’s views entail that women, regardless of who they are and what they believe, must, particularly in the eyes of their children, always regard the father as right and correct, even if she thinks that he is wrong and incorrect and wants to do something or advocates something that the wife/mother believes to be immoral and harmful to all concerned. If she does not do this, she will undermine her children’s ability, in particular her son’s ability, to develop a strong superego, the inner voice of right and wrong. Thus, one can ask the following question: Is the father the Authority because, morally speaking, he is right, or, is the father right because he is the Authority? The demand, once expressed to me by a rather prominent psychoanalyst, that the mother be in agreement with and support the father’s decision no matter what in order for her children to be ‘normal’, shows that for Freud, ‘morality’ requires the subordination of women. It requires this because it is empty of any real ethical content and consists entirely in upholding the authoritarian reign of the father independently of any other criteria for right and wrong. That is to say, the developmental path described by Freud entails that the Father, like Thrasymachus’ tyrant in Book One of Plato’s Republic, is right because he is the Authority. In this way, the father, the role of whose superior physical strength was noted by Freud in this schema, can do his Darwinian duty and ensure the survival of everyone. In this way, Freud’s theory of the epigenesis of morality explains gender asymmetry: It is nature’s way of ensuring the survival of the species. From my point of view, I would say that, while Freud conformed to the moral norms of his culture, and actually said that he believed himself to be the most moral person extant at the time, in fact he had very little understanding of morality at all. A good illustration of this is his famous case of Dora, a young girl whom he treated. Freud was perfectly in accord with her parents desire to force her to have an affair with the much older husband of her father’s mistress to compensate the man for his lost sexual privileges. Freud believed that Dora’s resistance to this sordid scheme was neurotic. So, to answer the question, for Freud the urge of the human species to survive requires the inferiority of women. Moreover, positivist science requires the ability to suppress traits that according to Freud women cannot suppress because, ambivalent towards their mothers, they cannot sublimate their love for their fathers, as do mature men. Those feminine traits are of course the ability to feel one’s feelings, to empathize, to consciously experience emotions, and so on. Ergo, women cannot be ‘objective’ and therefore cannot be scientists.

BD - Drawing heavily from Sartre’s virulent demolition of the unconscious in Being and Nothingness and Fanon’s trenchant sociogenic critique of psychoanalysis initiated in Black Skin, White Masks, there is definitely no love lost between Freud and existential liberation theory. And yet, your work involves a rigorous and exemplary attempt at an emancipatory renewal of psychoanalytic discourse while constituting an explicitly feminist orientation of phenomenology in the process. Still, I’m curious what informs your choice to side with Juliet Mitchell and Herbert Marcuse against R.D. Laing, Simone de Beauvoir and William Reich with regards to the unconscious?

MNS - It is true, as you say, that in the context and in the passage in which I lay out some of Mitchell’s views, I do “side with her,” and she does cite Laing, Reich, and de Beauvoir as among those who reject Freud’s notion of the unconscious. I mention in the same context that what Mitchell has in mind is Freud’s notion of the “dynamic unconscious.” Freud understood the psyche to be dynamic in the sense that it is comprised of a play of forces, and that the relative strength or weakness of the forces undergoes change in the course of human psychosexual development, and in psychoanalysis. Mitchell, as I then wrote, believed “that ideological structures,” misogyny, for example, “resist change and extinction precisely because they are dynamically inscribed in the unconscious.” For Mitchell, that misogyny and racism are dynamically inscribed in the unconscious is due to powerful social forces, for example the effect on the psyche of young children of their perception of the inferior social and familial status of women and of black people. The vicissitudes of development in Freud’s account, for example due to “penis envy” along with the discovery of the “castrated” state of the mother, etc., was for Mitchell not inevitable; rather, these inferences or “observations” made by young children are a consequence of the pervasively misogynistic family and social structure. Mitchell, who, it is important to remember, was a Marxist (as am I), explained in this way the perdurance of misogyny and racism, but did not hold these ideologies to be inevitable. For her, the advent of socialism would bring about very different paths of psychosexual development that would not culminate in racism and misogyny. So, her critique of Laing, Reich, and de Beauvoir is that they had no adequate explanation of either the way in which these ideological formations develop or how or why they perdure in the psyches of human beings.

At the time when I wrote my essay on Freud’s moral theory, I was intent on bringing out, as I think that I succeeded in doing, that Freud’s theory of the development of morality, that is of the sense of moral or ethical right and wrong, is in fact deeply paternalistic, self-contradictory, and is the equivalent of Thrasymachus’ argument in The Republic according to which justice is the “will of the stronger,” that is, that might makes right. What I regret is that in that same essay I did not at all discuss post-Freudian psychoanalysis, by which term I am not referring to thinkers like Wilhelm Reich (also a Marxist) or R.D. Laing. Both of these thinkers were psychiatrists, and both spoke out against the outrageous, terrible injustice of a capitalist society, and both were interested in challenging capitalism by bringing out the revolutionary potential of human consciousness, a project that evokes much sympathy in me. Freud himself was a political liberal who, like many liberals, harbored Hobbesian ideas about human ‘nature.’ Freud believed that socialism is a nice idea, but since homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to man), it is a pipe dream. All that we can do, on his account, is try to create, through education for example, conditions that enable us to raise people who are less neurotic.

The psychoanalytic theoreticians who followed Freud, for example, Adler, also a socialist, established schools of psychoanalysis and had a perspective that was and is very different from Freud’s. Here, I will only discuss one such school, British Object Relations, because its intellectual descendants, so to speak, are very active in psychoanalysis today. Melanie Klein, herself a child psychiatrist, a remarkable human being, and a psychoanalytic genius, was the founder of the psychoanalytic paradigm known as “object relations” (all psychoanalysts use the term “object” to refer to the people to whom we are emotionally attached, e.g., for the infant, the attachment ‘object’ is the mother.) The best way to briefly encapsulate the difference between Freudianism and the object relations paradigm is to say this, which is simply repeating what another Kleinian analyst, Fairbairn, said: For Freud, following the biological concept of homeostasis, the human being from birth seeks tension release; for object relations analysts, human beings seek, and need for their survival, an ‘object,’ that is, an attachment to a loving other. Following Klein, her student, Donald Winnicott, also a genius and a very beautiful writer, developed psychoanalytic theory and practice along the lines of the deeply humanistic object relations theory, based on his prolonged observation and treatment of children. Today, object relations theory has been continued and developed by feminist psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin (also a very fine writer) and many others in what is now referred to as the “relational” paradigm of psychoanalysis. All of these theoreticians and practitioners of contemporary psychoanalysis affirm the existence of the dynamic unconscious, and, I think it is safe to say, many of them, women and men, definitely Benjamin herself, are committed to anti-racism and anti-misogyny, and to liberating psychoanalytic theory and practice from its historical, embedded racism and misogyny. Benjamin and others are also highly critical of capitalism. I myself have published several papers on this issue. In my observation, contemporary academia is obsessed with Freud, and also Lacan, who claimed to be the successor to and continuator of Freudianism. In my view, this is profoundly unfortunate. I can’t speculate on the reasons for this here, but someone should study this peculiar phenomenon.

You referred to Frantz Fanon and his “trenchant sociogenic critique of psychoanalysis.” As you know, I have written extensively about Fanon, including a lengthy essay about his idea of psychoanalysis called “Fanonian Musings.” Fanon is an indispensable thinker and guide for grasping the meaning of revolutionary consciousness. His notion of the sociogenesis of social and individual dehumanization, particularly in the context of colonialism, has been very influential the world over, and rightly so. With respect to psychoanalysis, Fanon was both influenced by and critical of both Freud and Lacan. Here, it is important to make explicitly a point that perhaps I should have made above. It is very important to do what Freud did not clearly do: differentiate between the unconscious and its contents. Fanon criticized Freud for his view that neuroses are strictly a matter of individual psychology deriving from the family dynamic, whereas, for Fanon, neuroses are the consequence of oppressive social conditions. This is what her termed “sociogenesis.” But Fanon did not reject the idea that neuroses were a consequence also of the need to repress a forbidden instinctual wish, that is, to prevent that wish from entering consciousness. In other words, Fanon believed in the dynamic unconscious and the dynamic character of the psyche. It is all important, however, not to minimize the incalculable importance of the content. For Fanon, colonialism was so devastating, so totalistically dehumanizing, that it generated in those colonized peoples, and others subject to it, especially, of course, in Algeria, the forbidden desire to be white, a desire that threatened one’s existence, and thus the need to repress this desire. Much of Fanon’s revolutionary perspective reflects this analysis. However, with respect to his profoundly humanistic and Marxist perspective, Fanon rejected despair, and with respect to his understanding of the outcome of both therapy and revolutionary activity, Fanon, even in the face of the horrors of colonialism, was hopeful, the polar opposite of Freud. It seems to me that Freud’s positivism, an anti-humanistic version of science, and his pessimism go hand in hand with his Hobbesian view of the ‘state of nature’ reflected in his fantasy of the “primal horde” that he projected in Totem and Taboo.

BD - In your book, you devote a significant chapter to the thought of Lewis R. Gordon, whose project you describe as “the development of a liberatory existential phenomenology and sociology”. Though as of yet not fully recognized because of his emancipatory relation to a western imperialist continuum, Gordon’s profound influence on contemporary philosophical discourse is unquestionable. How did your engagement with his work provide a theoretical basis for distinguishing between the “Fanonian critique of the modus operandi of universals in antiblack racist thought on the one hand, and postmodern thought’s discarding of universal’s on the other hand”?

MNS - My first encounter with Lewis Ricardo Gordon’s work occurred in the mid-1990’s when one of my graduate students showed me one of his first books, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. When I looked at the book and read its title, I was immediately transfixed. I had read Black Skin, White Masks and was deeply moved by it, and recognized it to be a philosophical and literary masterwork. Also, the phrase “…the Crisis of European Man” immediately called to mind Husserl’s last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. In an instant I recognized that this book synthesized two of my deepest intellectual and emotional commitments: the black struggle and Husserlian phenomenology, the latter of which was the topic of my doctoral dissertation. The book did not disappoint! And the man, the author, whom I met about one year later at a conference, did not disappoint either, for we became, and are still, close friends, as one might discern from the Forward that Lewis wrote to my book.

Though I have been deeply influenced and enlarged by Lewis’ work, and have learned much from it, I would not say that his work provided for me a “theoretical basis for distinguishing between the ‘Fanonian critique of the modus operandi of universals in antiblack racist thought’’’ and “postmodern thought’s discarding of universals.” That theoretical basis was provided, I think for both Lewis and myself, by Fanon and Husserl. For Lewis, also, of course, Maurice Natanson. In Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, a book that I consider indispensable for anyone interested in the thought of either Fanon or Husserl, Gordon shows that comprehending the nature of antiblack racism requires the phenomenological perspective that is embodied in Fanon’s rejection of ontology. He also shows that against postmodernism’s equating of essence and oppression, Fanon’s radical humanism projects, in Gordon’s words, the “open essences” that are given in the attitude of transcendental phenomenology. Gordon’s book is extraordinarily well written and well-conceived, and very moving in its intense focus on the meaning and demands of a consistent humanism. Lewis is not only a brilliant thinker; he is also a very gifted writer. So, while the understanding he provided of Fanon and Husserl were not new to me, since I already shared his love for both Fanon and Husserl, his powerful synthesis of the demands of the black struggle and the contribution of phenomenology to understanding that struggle were and are extremely inspiring, and also extremely validating for me, for I had never encountered such a synthesis in the past except in my own mind.

I’d like to mention another characteristic of Gordon’s work that I value very greatly. A festschrift on his work and the way in which it has inspired new thinking and research has just been published. It’s called Black Existentialism: Essays on the Transformative Thought of Lewis R. Gordon and it is edited by Danielle Davis. The essay I contributed focuses on Gordon’s work, in several of his books, on the phenomenology of ‘options’ and ‘choices.’ One of the contexts for his thinking on this is several incidents in Native Son. Be that as it may, in his analysis, he shows that alleged choices that are made on the basis of an array of options that is severely limited by racism, sexism, and other anti-human social forces leads to devastating psychological and social consequences for individuals and groups. Now this idea, that imposing on people limited or no options is bad for them is not ‘new’—certainly others have pointed this out. But, as far as I am aware, showing the far-reaching consequences of this dehumanizing practice, its immense significance in our social existence, is one of Gordon’s achievements. It has been said that genius is not only innovation; genius also consists in the ability to see the vast significance of factors that have been known but relatively ignored, and Gordon certainly achieves this. In my contribution to Black Existentialism, I discuss the profound implications of the choice/options distinction and its modes of embodiment as explored and phenomenologically understood by Gordon, and I discuss this in the context of psychoanalytic theory and practice. In other words, I discuss the profound and far reaching implications for human psychosocial development from infancy on of the impact of the way in which parents, for example, navigate their children’s options and choices in their child rearing patterns. This is but one example of Gordon’s Transformative Thought, and it is also a testament to the depth, power, and authenticity of his commitment to work to destroy white supremacy and all of the forces that dehumanize us.

BD - 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 Marilyn Nissim-Sabat and THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH,

Peace.

-A. Shahid Stover

(this interview of Marilyn Nissim-Sabat for THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH was conducted by A. Shahid Stover through email correspondence from October 2nd 2018 – February 20th of 2019.)