Fanon for the Present

In a little-known play, L’Oeil se noie (the eye drowns), Frantz Fanon the dramatist sought a world beyond the grim polarities of race. This may or may not be surprising given Fanon’s memorable accounts of what it means to be black, to be objectified as Negro in Black Skin, White Mask—which virtually exhaust his political position for many readers. This celebrated study was, in light of this play, but for other reasons as well, a curious means to a different kind of otherness than the “black” and “white” of its title. Set in a driving rain with characters who drift from areas of the stage marked, on the one hand, by complete darkness and, on the other, by a glaring and (according to his stage directions) “metallic” brightness, L’Oeil se noie is as much about seeing and being seen as it is about escaping determinations (2015, 65). An oblivious blind black cat lounges on the sofa; a servant enters, similarly blind. An incessant rain yields to an imagery of the sea as though the characters themselves were liquid, or speaking underwater (“les vagues . . . leurs toilettes d’écume”—the waves . . . their toilette of sea foam), and thus could easily slip away from the solidity of anything that one might pin down, available to surveillance by being intractably, physically there (“cette cielée d’yeux qui tambourine aux portes de ma chair”—a sky filled with firey eyes mercilessly gazing down at one “drumming at the gates of my skin”) (80).¹

The play’s three characters, who form a love triangle, are introduced to us entirely on the basis of their color—or rather their lack of it: Lucien is “the color of pewter,” Ginette the “color of a drop of rain,” and François, the “color of blotting paper”—all extrinsic rather than intrinsic, reflecting or absorbing the colors around them; or, in the case of pewter, changing hews depending on the angle of the light. Fanon’s images are, as a matter of deliberate desire, post-racial—prohibiting even the possibility of the familiar social game of the invidious comparisons of conflicting skin tones.

There has been, as some will acknowledge, much interpretive violence done to Fanon—what Edward Said once called, in an unguarded moment, his “trashing” at the hands of a literary critical world upset by his obvious quest for universals, his positive relationship with Sartre, his involvement in armed national liberation movements, and his deeply Hegelian modes of thought (2001, 192).² The inspiration for another of his plays, now lost, was Paul Nizan’s La Conspiration, (the conspiracy)—a sardonic portrait of the revolutionary pretensions of academic philosophy and the gullibility of intrepid youth who latch onto an undigested theory as it leads them to political disaster.³ Another of Fanon’s plays, Les Mains parallèles (the parallel hands), is an unmistakable allusion to Sartre’s Les Mains sales (dirty hands), as a useful way of expressing his lineages, who he was thinking about, whose world he was entering (2015, 91–133). The moods, pacing, and environments of Fanon’s imagination, in other words, redraw today’s portrait of him as primarily a psychologist of race, downplaying the extended analysis of the middle classes in The Wretched of the Earth, his appeal to the need to “stretch” Marxist analysis when dealing with the colonial program (without at all departing from it), or his frank statement—even in his most psychoanalytic book—that the black inferiority complex had “primarily economic” sources (1966, 155). We know of his intense apprenticeship in the writings of the avowedly Marxist and humanist Sartre—this is scarcely controversial—himself the perpetrator of a co-optation of the inter-war phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger so that existentialism became a message of civic responsibility, historical agency, the validity of experience, and independent self-invention: freeing people from “the exploitation of man by man” to take a phrase attributed to Marx that Fanon enthusiastically repeats in Towards The African Revolution (1969).⁴ It is elementary that he “stretches” Marxism when identifying a liberatory class on the basis...