THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#22,JUNE-AUGUST/2025
Brotherwise Dispatch – Although, as you mention in the prologue to Being Subjects: Preliminary Materials of the Person, “this book is not about the struggle of Palestine against Israeli settler colonialism”, how does your own philosophical engagement with human subjectivity speak precisely to questions of western imperialist power, coloniality and genocide?
J. Moufawad Paul – I wrote that part of the prologue when I was finalizing the draft for submission in early 2024. Obviously, the genocidal war in Gaza was on my mind; like all of my work, Being Subjects does not exist outside of my political commitments. Since the book is concerned with personhood––and how in philosophy, since modernity, the notion of personhood has been thought through the concept of the subject––then the war on Gaza was a pertinent entry-point into thinking a contemporary situation where personhood was at stake. That is, as with all conflicts between the oppressed and systems of oppression, there is an accompanying discourse about who counts as persons, even humans. Clearly, the dominant discourses presented Israelis as persons who were rights-bearers, autonomous individuals, and worthy of care; Palestinians were depicted as having less humanity, not even allowed to be seen as persons, often named as subhumans or non-human animals.
But when I said it was not a book about the struggle of Palestine per se, I meant that was just one example of why this discussion of the subject––which can seem abstract at first glance––matters, what it can teach us about the subject positions we occupy, the ways in which the very concept of the subject developed its dominant discursive form in relation to settler-colonialism, the birth of capitalism, and ongoing imperialism. Part of thinking through the archive of the concept of Subject, its relationship to concepts such as being, is to think the ways in which politics and ideology are intimately involved with subject formation. To think the subject is to also ask what it means to be counted as a person, what it means to become a person in ideologically fraught circumstances, what it means to be a person who struggles for their personhood against oppression… All of which means that if we are examining subjectivity and subjecthood critically, then we cannot help but also address the problems of imperialism, coloniality, and genocide which not only function to strip peoples of their personhood (and their humanity), but also generate subject positions dedicated to oppression. As you know, aside from the leading example of Palestine, I also speak of the modern horrors of slavery and settler-colonialism and their relationship to the archive of the concept, and continuously return to other examples of contemporary oppression that divide humans into multiple subject positions.
BD – How would you describe our contemporary geohistorical situation in relation to what you term “the concept of Subject” which “has been rendered amphibological” yet actually “does tell us something important about social reality”?
JMP – I don’t think the contemporary conjuncture can be explained precisely by the concept of the Subject, but understanding what it means to become a subject, and the various subject positions generated by politics, helps us understand aspects about social reality. For example, we can understand that someone’s commitment to liberal or reactionary political worldviews is the result of a subjectivation where their consciousness, rather than being simply false, actually reflects the way in which they have become conscious beings and the way they think reality––and how reality exists for them.
Thus it is not as simple, as liberals tell us, as winning an argument and proving the truth of the matter to change the world. This viewpoint itself is the result of a certain type of subject position, a consciousness that is devoted to a liberal vision of the world. That understanding of reality is one I reject as false, and it can be proven as false by empirical facts and reason. (What’s funny is that, according to the liberal, reason and facts are supposed to help us change the world through debate and argument, and yet it is impossible for a committed liberal to accept this argument despite the worth they put on debate.) The problem, then, is that there is a true consciousness that is devoted to a false understanding of reality, reinforced by ideology that reinforces this kind of consciousness. The same goes for all types of reactionary and obscurantist subject positions.
Once we understand that politics are implemented by subjects––even if these subjects are collective subjects, institutions/organizations that stamp their members with forms of partisan consciousness––which in turn generates more ideological affects, which in turn reinforces subject positions. For example, to use a recent example: someone is consciously invested in the Democratic Party in the US, they carry out its political line in elections, they argue that everyone has to get behind Kamala Harris because Trump is far worse to the point of ignoring demands that the party listen to its base about the genocide in Gaza and deportations (generating a particular ideology buttressed by a lot of liberal ideology), and when they lose they believe precisely the ideology they helped disseminate (Harris lost because people didn’t understand the existential threat of Trump, not that she failed to listen to the very people who would have otherwise voted for her). But that’s just an example of bourgeois electoral politics.
All sorts of politics are implemented by subjects every day, throughout the world, and of course I’ve always been more interested in the kind of radical partisan politics that seeks to establish a more humane reality. Such revolutionary movements, when they do emerge, understand that politics are implemented by subjects, and that there are entire classes of people who have been subjectivated to actively oppose revolution; their consciousness cannot so easily be changed through peaceful debate (although it is possible with some people) because their entire sense of personhood is invested in defending a very real politics devoted to the state of affairs. Thus, it makes more sense to seek out those subjects whose consciousness is already counter-hegemonic, or at least leans in that direction, and pull them into another kind of subjectivity: an organization that collectively, possess a consciousness devoted to building a better world. While I realize that you, along with others I respect, aren’t necessarily going to agree with an argument for Lenin’s party formation, there is hopefully one thing that Lenin says you can agree with: this is the notion, with which I conclude Being Subjects, that politics requires a subjective element. The objective circumstances can be right for revolution (in fact in these days, with the possibility of full environmental destruction, the objective circumstances have been right for a long time), but consciousness can always lag behind. It is not enough to say “oh the time for revolution is here so it will happen,” which is an economic determinism, a spontaneism, and in fact the kind of “Marxism” that Lenin weirdly gets accused of upholding when in fact he would have seen this as revisionism. In fact the reason why Lenin argues for his conception of the party of the avant garde as a partisan war machine is precisely because of the importance of subjectivity: he saw the party, as a comprehensive fighting party, as that which would be a collective subject capable of collective self-determination. Without this subjective factor, without some form of Subject, then there can be no revolution.
Indeed, I end the book with a discussion of “the subjective factor” that not only emphasizes Lenin’s insights but connects it with the insights of Fanon. As I have written elsewhere, both Lenin and Fanon are theorists of what Moten and Harney call “the general antagonism.” Where I diverge from Moten and Harney, however, is that I see this general antagonism as being informed by subject positions. Like Lenin, Fanon understood the general antagonism of oppressive orders being the result of a division of humanity into antagonistic subject positions: a colonized subject cannot have a beneficial argument with a colonizer subject about the terms of their existence, their right to be even deemed persons. In oppressive situations, subjects are set against subjects in a context of violence. This notion frames the entirety of Wretched and is repeated in other essays. For example, in “Medicine and Colonialism” Fanon talks about the way in which the subjectivity of colonial doctors is informed first and foremost by a consciousness driven to promulgate colonialism, so even doctors––who should care about healing people––are devoted to upholding the colonial system in the way they “treat” the colonial patient.
This is why I conclude that final section of the book by critiquing Achille Mbembe’s utilization of Fanon that strips out this subjective factor and downplays the violence this clash of subject positions both rests on (the structural violence of colonialism) and necessitates (the counter-violence of anti-colonial struggle). Both forms of violence are also reinforced by these antagonistic subject positions. Although I think some of Mbembe’s work is useful, and I have learned a lot from him, it is also the case that his commitment to post-Heideggerian thinkers such as Agamben results in a refusal to listen to Fanon’s philosophical commitments. But we should listen to these commitments, so as to grasp why this struggle between subject positions forms the general antagonism of every contemporary state of affairs, if we want to change the world for the better rather than get swept up in the liberal solution which is no solution: participation in bourgeois electoral politics, which has changed nothing––and the evidence that it has changed nothing is logically undeniable, but a certain subjective devotion to this democratic sacrament remains part of common sense ideology.
BD – In your interrogation of the Subject, what discursive orientations provided you with the most assistance in being able “to delve beneath the ways in which it has been rendered obscure” and “decidedly convoluted”?
JMP – Orientations that were aimed at the revolutionary overthrow of all that exists. As someone who believes that current existence must be overthrown by revolution, then of course I’m drawn to those thinkers whose agenda is building a better world. When it comes to the concept of the Subject, when thinking through the archive I was guided by those thinkers who were skeptical of the archive’s commitments. Most importantly, while I wanted to deal with the complaints of radical thinkers regarding the notion of the subject (i.e. Fred Moten, Ashon Crawley, etc.), I also wanted to pick up on that tradition provoked by Fanon that found the notion useful, but in a way that was critical of the hegemonic archive.
Obviously, as an historical materialist, I begin with Marx and Engels––and move out to Lenin and Mao––and this is my overall categorization of things based on how I understand my theoretical terrain. But that’s not enough, especially when it comes to this category of thought. But they were the guiding posts, they were the overall theoretical terrain within which I was operating. So they could only speak to the overall political decision that defined my investigation. When it comes down to the actual philosophy of the matter, it was always Fanon first and everything that fell within that tradition. (Having done the index calculations, it is worth noting that Fanon is referenced the most, over any other thinker, in this book.) But that tradition, that fell beneath Fanon’s influence, was a tradition of a milieu of radical thinkers opposed to the European hegemony of thought and yet still concerned with the notion of the subject. Your own work was instrumental in this regard, and needs to be mentioned here. When I was writing the initial draft of this project during the first year of pandemic lockdown, I had just read Being and Insurrection and it impacted what I was trying to do with this manuscript. And when I was at the end of my initial draft of the book, when I was proposing it as a research project, I had just read Epistemic Ruptures, Insurgent Philosophy (which I still need back from a friend I loaned it to), and that also helped guide certain thoughts of the manuscript.
So as much as I tried to use a historiography of the archive to delve beneath the ways in which the subject had been rendered obscure, I also relied on the work of radical thinkers––such as yourself––whose work was dedicated to the importance of the subject as a political category who weren’t obscurantists. Aside from thinkers I mentioned from the Black Radical tradition, I have also used important Indigenous thinkers (Glen Coulthard, Jodi Byrd), Arab thinkers (Samir Amin, Abdaljawad Omar), Indian thinkers (Ajith), and others from the so-called “third world” milieu.
BD – Renes Descartes is often the first philosopher that comes to mind when the question of human subjectivity is grappled with philosophically. And yet, based on your own insights in Being Subject: Preliminary Materials of the Person, how would you describe the importance of now recognizing Frantz Fanon as “the last great theorist of the Subject”?
JMP – Descartes is where the modern notion of the subject begins as a philosophical concept. As I argue in the book, while we find glimmers beforehand, the concept doesn’t really begin until Descartes founds it with his cogito. The archive of Subject then develops from Descartes onwards. Largely this is because the historical conjuncture was such that––at the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the so-called European Enlightenment––there was an attempt to think the meaning of conscious personhood against the notion that humans were subordinated to the Great Chain of Being. The linguistical term is an inheritance of this thinking: rather than being merely subjects of the sovereign (i.e. a king who is under the sovereignty of God), persons are their own sovereign subjects. The grammatical concept echoes this development: the subject is not the predicate but the central notion of the statement.
But European modernity’s notion of the conscious person who is self-determining, who can sit at the centre of knowledge processes, emerged at the same time as the violent processes that would bring capitalism into existence: settler-colonialism, the slave trade. Sylvia Wynter speaks of this historical process as developing a notion of Man (because it is not just European but also gendered) that excluded its victims from the category of human being, and thus also the category of personhood. Hence you find liberal philosophers such as John Locke talking about the subject as being that which can own property while simultaneously defending the institution of slavery; proper subjects can own slaves. The category of Subject thus emerges as a compromised category: this is born out in the historiography of its archive with Hegel dismissing all of Africa, Feuerbach speaking of “brutes” who are human but not persons, and all of this is because of the way in which Descartes initiated this notion of personhood within the crucible of European global hegemony that was just beginning during his time.
Fanon, however, comes after all of this bullshit and rather than falling into the traps of the archive pulls out something extremely productive. Although I know some see Fanon as just developing what the classical existentialists were saying with their conception of the subject, I actually don’t think Sartre and Beauvoir would have had much to say without Fanon’s additive––though they should be commended for supporting him. And while I am also amenable to the argument that says this kind of thinking about the subject existed prior to Fanon in the work of Douglass, Du Bois, and others, I’m of the mind that we only find this kind of thinking of the subject in these precursors because of Fanon. That is, like Borges argued about Kafka, Fanon defines his precursors. If there was no Fanon, we would not see these particular elements in those thinkers that preceded him.
And this is why Fanon is the last great theorist of the subject. In retrospect, after I sent this manuscript to publication, I recalled why I even used that line about him being the last great theorist of the subject. It was because I was listening to the podcast Millennials are Killing Capitalism where they interviewed Fred Moten and he said that Frank Wilderson was the “last great theorist of the subject.” At the time I was annoyed because I immediately thought, “no that was Fanon, not Wilderson.” But when the statement made it into my book I forgot where it came from, and only recalled after the manuscript was already in process when I re-listened to that episode. So I apologize for forgetting the origin of that thought; I wish I could have recalled at the time and provided a footnote for its origin. But what I meant, and why I wrote it beyond challenging Moten’s claim, is that here we have the compromised archive of the subject from Descartes to the present, and Fanon comes along and says that the notion is important but it must be wrested completely from the sickness of European modernity. In doing so he provides us with a conception of human personhood that is generated from the split human being of situations of oppression. This is the last word on the concept of Subject, to my mind, and every meaningful conception of the subject must deal with this reckoning. That is, if you say that conscious personhood derived from human being (what it means to be part of the human species) matters, then in a world that is fundamentally divided by oppression being/becoming a full human person also means struggling against oppression.
BD – Although both Alain Badiou and yourself both claim a political affinity for Maoist orientations of radical thought, how would you describe any significant differences between the both of you regarding the question of human subjectivity?
JMP – First, a qualification. Unlike me, Badiou’s Maoism was the kind of “Maoism” that existed in the 1960s and 1970s, which was more an anti-revisionist Marxism-Leninism that sided with China over Russia in the Sino-Soviet split. So Mao instead of Khrushchev, with a concern for returning to the anti-revisionist principles of Lenin against the claim of a “peaceful co-existence with capitalism.” In Continuity and Rupture I discuss how contemporary Maoism (which has its own line struggles and divisions, which I will not get into here) emerged in the late 80s and early 90s, as crystallized in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement’s position paper “Long Live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!” which declares that Maoism is a third stage of revolutionary science. Badiou had some notions similar to that claim in some of his earlier work, but ultimately it wasn’t fully developed, and now he has walked away from even that theoretical position without, thankfully and unlike some of his contemporaries who became reactionaries, denouncing it. But I do find this background of his work interesting and intersecting with my own work, and some of his work in that “Maoist” period, such as Theory of the Subject, I draw upon in my book.
I have always found Badiou’s work helpful since he is a very rigorous, though complex, thinker. Even when I disagree with him I still learn from him, and I respect large portions of his project and his integrity as an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist philosopher. Overall, as I’ve said elsewhere, I find his attempt to found a systematic ontology a dead-end because, as a materialist, I don’t think these kinds of ontological projects can be anything more than forms of theological thinking. Searching for some scaffolding to all of reality, even if you call it mathematical or materialist or what-not, is ultimately a form of mystification in my opinion.
When it comes to his conception of the subject (which I tried to synthesize from his “Maoist” period to his current work), there are some things I find useful and other things with which I part ways. His attempt to build a conception of the subject through the Althusserian experience is useful: instead of going Foucault’s route where, following Althusser, the notion of the subject is decentered and treated as discursive subjugation, Badiou attempts to build something productive while accepting a general notion of ideological interpellation. He ends up speaking of processes of subjectivation, where subject positions are activated, and links this to politics noting how there can be an array of subject position responses to an event: I think that this is a very correct insight. Where I have significant differences, however, is that he links subject formation to what he calls “events”. I’m simplifying here, but an event, for Badiou, is a kind of world historical situation which only becomes an event (is comprehended as world historical) because of the subjects it generates and their retroactive ability to grasp this situation as an event, as momentous. For example, the French Revolution (typical example for a French intellectual), which only becomes momentous because it generates subjects generated to uphold it and opposed to it which make it an event… All events are contested which is why they generate opposed subject positions. In the sciences we could call the Copernican Revolution an event. But overall, while there is truth in these events calling forth multiple subject positions, I don’t think events are the only things that generate subjects. The way he ties subjects to events means that subjectivation is a rare phenomenon. Whereas I think subjects, and subject positions, are generated by everyday life all the time. Yes, some of these positions are more momentous than others, and yes everyday life is itself impacted by big moments of history, but there is a much more banal notion of subjectivation where people take on a conscious notion of themselves as persons in relationship to their own material experiences that have nothing to do with world historical events aside from bearing their historical weight.
Moreover, the fact that Badiou has an account of the subject as a process but does not address or engage with Fanon’s work is something I find bothersome. Although I don’t want to say that someone should be critiqued for not engaging with a specific philosopher I find important, the fact that the so-called “grey eminences” of French philosophy from Althusser to the present write as if Fanon did not exist is quite troublesome considering his work was written in French and he was engaged with French intellectual life. For example, the fact that Foucault will mention colonialism and racism in his work and not mention Fanon at all is a bizarre omission. Worse when it comes from an intellectual, such as Badiou, who actually cares about anti-imperialist struggles. Beyond this overall omission, the fact remains that Fanon had a conception of subject formation as a process––what Badiou calls subjectivation––that is worked out in Black Skin White Masks and, much more clearly, in The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon thinks a complex dialectic of the subject, of how a human being divided by oppression generates a process of becoming and then being subjects, that could have affected Badiou’s work if he had bothered to take it seriously. And at the end of the day, while I think Badiou’s clarification of subjectivation in relation to ideology and politics is important, Fanon’s work is ultimately more salient. Badiou, if he had bothered, could have learned from Fanon.
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 J. Moufawad Paul and THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH,
Peace.
-A. Shahid Stover
(this interview of J. Moufawad Paul for THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH was conducted by A. Shahid Stover through email correspondence from January 25th – January 27th 2025.)
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