Concerning Violence, Part II: Fanon and the Intelligent Machine: Reflections from a Conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Scenes from the Imperialistic Self-Defense: Healing Image, or the Law of Laws

"Let me say from the outset that it would be a mistake to make [Frantz] Fanon into a clay model for revolution," Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak tells me. I've asked her about Göran Olson's celebrated 2014 documentary Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialist Self-Defense that she appears in, reading a preface at the start of the film.¹ Spivak is a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University and is widely acknowledged as one of the most important thinkers and literary critics of our time. In 2012 she received the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, considered by some to be an equivalent to the Nobel Prize in the areas not recognized by the latter. To many of us she is a teacher, a friend, and the author of an influential body of work that includes A Critique of Postcolonial Reason and, more recently, a translation of Aimé Césaire's play A Season in the Congo.² Spivak's participation in Olson's documentary revealed a new facet in her work and career: not just that of film critic but, as I would like to present her in this piece (after Fanon, the protagonist of the film), as a photoelectric analyst of the time dimension, the law of laws according to Jean Epstein.³

Spivak engages Olson's film in signature critical mode. As a counterpoint to the documentary, her preface appearance avoids the often-repeated story of Fanon as a champion of counterviolence. "Instead," she says, "one must understand that in the initial chapters of The Wretched of the Earth, which a lot of people read as an apology of violence, Fanon is actually claiming complicity with what was surrounding him. That is, the violence of colonization." "I will be as violent as they are, when they hold my life as worth less than theirs," says Frantz Fanon, the healer.

What does it mean to be a healer? I wonder. As someone born in the Americas and being from Caribbean and indigenous as well as European heritage, let me answer with an Amerindian emphasis: to be a healer is to be a shaman. The shaman develops an image-based or speech-based technology that allows crowds and individuals to notice their awkwardness and what they endeavor to conceal in everyday life—for instance, with the help of hallucinogenic drugs or chanting and the ritual eating of each other's words. But in these exceptional situations ghosts speak as well and in a voice that the living, in all sincerity, "do not and cannot recognize."⁴ In this respect at least, the shaman performs a healing function. This performance function—the revelation of a looming stranger self that may be threatening and monstrous yet diminished or appeased through its exteriorization in speech or image of a failure in the recognition of an alien perspective that must be heard and made interior from the outside—is something that the shaman has in common with the cinematographer and the psychiatrist or psychoanalyst, hence my reference to what Epstein called photoelectric psychoanalysis and to Fanon and Spivak (the playwright and the translator of playwrights as well as documentary films about a playwright who was also a psychoanalyst) as both healer and image.

Politically speaking, this is to say, first, that I accept as central the question that haunts every revolutionary or decolonization movement: "whether the successors will remain stuck within the trajectory of domination and submission previously occupied by the colonizers or whether they will succeed in shifting from the paradigm of domination to that of liberation."⁵ This question pertains to the time dimension and variation of the anticipation and expectation of liberation, which is concealed in everyday life even under revolutionary conditions. Second, it is because of (not in spite of) this emphasis on inconstancy and the time dimension—the images and voices we hear uttering the contradictions of...