Marriott, “Lacan Noir: Lacan and Afropessimism”

In ‘Lacan Noir: Lacan and Afropessimism,’ David Marriott, then-Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies at Penn State University, looks to incisively analyze the connections between the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon and the Afropessimist theorist of Black/Slave positionality Frank Wilderson. Marriott reads across Lacanianism, Fanonism, and Afropessimism like a meticulous investigator at a scene of a mysterious crime. The mystery in question – the crime at hand: Blackness and the unconscious, or the unconscious anti-Blackness of the ab-sens of Blackness in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Beginning with the question, “To whom does Lacan speak?” (Marriott 1) Marriott builds an immanent critique of Lacanianism, Fanonism and Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism that provides an in-depth account of what is at stake in each of these radical analyses of suffering, both in conversation and independent from one other. By reading through and between their encounter, Marriott works-through their points of dissonance, contradiction, conflict, antagonisms and aporias contending that, “If you look for blackness in his [Lacan’s] work, you will not find it. So why try and think blackness through Lacan? Should one not be indifferent to this indifference? Perhaps.” (Marriott 1) Nonetheless, by taking into account these three interlocking theoreticians and their respective projects, Marriott provides a reading that illuminates the radical potential for thought and scholarly significance of thinking-with all three of these psychoanalytically inflected analyses of suffering. 

Marriott’s book is broken into three sections: Part 1. Slave and Signifier; Part 2. The X of X; and Part 3. Tell It Like It Is. In Marriott’s critique of Lacan, he innovates Lacan, thereby developing a radical account of Lacanianism that cannot be thought without underscoring the significance of Lacan’s thought to both Frantz Fanon and Afropessimism. In addressing the revolution that Lacanianism was in theory and practice for the psychoanalytic institutes of his day, Marriott historicizes the tide of institutionality and psychoanalytic orthodoxy that Lacan rose up against in order to answer back to the presumption of a Black Studies (or any discourse of philosophy) that might contend that indifference to Lacan is justified. Lacan’s criticisms of the mainstream subject-centered psychoanalytic institutions derive from both his innovative theoretical concerns as well as the experimental clinical praxis of Lacanianism itself. In Marriott’s words: “This is Lacan’s twofold struggle: against those who reduce signification to meaning (subversion to institutional epistêmê), contenting themselves with producing inventories of existing symbols; but also against those who reify, or idealize, psychoanalytic techniques by deriving them from the authority of psychoanalysis, from so-called ortho-doxies of treatment (the cost and the length of treatments, etc.).” (Marriott 3). Lacan’s insistence that to be human was to be “enslaved as a speaking subject,” (Marriott 4) produced radical consequences and experimental concepts. Many of these concepts and consequences are discussed and summarized throughout Marriott’s piece: from Saussurian structural linguistics to the Lacanian formulas of sexuation to the expulsion of Lacan from the International Psychoanalytic Association to the creation and dissolution of Lacan’s own schools and institutes. 

However, it is from the “dungeon” of Lacan’s insistence that “a rhetorical apostrophe to slavery,” is “the only knowl-edge of what it means to be human,” where Marriott will argue that one begins to “see blackness emerge.” (Marriott 6) To be human, in Lacan’s thought, is to be subjected to a fiction of universal slavery to the signifier, the notion that “it is the whole structure of language that psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious,” (Lacan 413) is followed by an analysis of language that declares the signifier to be a master of which the subject is but a slave. In Lacan’s own words, “the subject, while he may appear to be the slave of language, is still more the slave of a discourse in the universal movement of which his place is already inscribed at his birth, if only in the form of his proper name.” (Lacan 414)

Marriott will build his critique of the ab-sens of Blackness from Lacanianism through the whiteness of this thought. Through the fact that from within this form of thinking one can begin to see how psychoanalysis presents a certain, “conformity of thought by which psychoanalysis expresses difference,” (Marriott 6) where slavery becomes central, but Blackness is unthought. The unthought of this Blackness conditions the possibility of a Fanonian exploration into psychoanalysis that is not rooted in the concept of Blackness as an identity formation, but rather as the absence of identity, the negation of a proper name. The nègre is a mythic position of that which is not. Therefore, the fact that “ab-sens is assumed to be universal, formal. And white,” (Marriott 5) while the position of Blackness from within psychoanalytic discourse comes to function in the field of its discourse as nothingness, subtraction or n’est pas is the paradoxical enigma that undergirds the development of Marriott’s precise investigation. Marriott’s investigation sets out to challenge the mysterious way in which Blackness is conceptualized as symbolically meaningless to the discourse of psychoanalysis, an absolute exclusion from its thought. Henceforth, for that very reason, “Lacan’s work allows us to investigate these exclusions and precisely because he does not look at them (do we see only what we know?) because they are devoid of mean-ing.” (Marriott 6) 

Fanon and Afropessimism provide useful tools for Marriott to dig through the assumptive logics of the unthought of Lacanian theory. Frantz Fanon sits at the middle of the scene of this reading as the literal centerpiece of a tripartite investigation into the mystery of Black critical theory’s confrontation with Lacan. As one of the foremost readers and thinkers of Fanon, Marriott’s Lacan Noir elaborates upon his extensive reading of the psychopolitical stakes of Fanonism in his book entitled Whither Fanon: Studies in Blackness and Being. Marriott’s analysis of Fanon elaborates the stakes of Lacanianism for Black Studies and the logic behind Lacan’s influence on Fanon’s thought. In Marriott’s words, “It is as though Fanon, distrusting the way psychoanalysis has been ‘applied’ in America [the same distrust that inspired Lacan’s turn against mainstream psychoanalysis] and knowing that Freud, Jung, and Adler, ‘did not think of blacks in the course of their researches’, turns to Lacan to further demystify this critical blindness to the fact of blackness (BS, 152 tm).” (Marriott 51-52) In this way, Marriott reads through Fanon’s Lacan to think about how a ‘critical blindness’ to the fact of blackness has come to constitute the position of Blackness in the unconscious of psychoanalytic discourse. To think this blindness with Lacan’s influence on Fanon allows Marriott to situate Fanon as one of Lacan’s earliest psychoanalytic readers. For example, in taking seriously, Fanon’s engaged reading of Lacan’s early text entitled, “Les Complexes Familiaux,” Marriott argues that this early essay by Lacan was early evidence of an intellectual trajectory towards his later interest in topological structure. Why does Fanon find the text so significant? Marriott provides an answer: “Fanon will reply: structure, but not the structure of speech and language, but structure as a form of antago-nism defining our earliest attachments.” (Marriott 53) Here, Marriott outlines the ways in which a radical reading of Fanon cannot be thought without the details of the revolution in psychoanalysis that Lacanianism was in theory and practice. Marriott then affirms that there are no theorists in Black critical theory more cognizant of this than the Afropessimist. 

The question of antagonism and the ruse of analogy sit at the center of the Afropessimist engagement with Lacan and Fanon. For this reason, one can see how Frank Wilderson, one of the ‘founders’ of the school of thought known as Afropessimism, sees the limitations of the function and field of Lacanian thought in the ruse of its analogy of a universal slave, subject to the distinctions of empty versus full speech. Marriott contends, “What [Frank Wilderson] attacks in Lacanian cultural studies is precisely the mania for seeking universal formula, the ruse of an analogy that ‘errone-ously’ seeks to locate ‘Blacks in the world.’” (Marriott 131) The figure of the universal slave mastered by the signifier, for Afropessimism, embodies the ruse of analogy which functions to leave the Black slave unthought. Through a Fanonian reading of psychoanalysis, Wilderson puts forward the position that the analogy of slavery obscures the grammar of Black suffering. For, according to Wilderson’s reading of Fanon on violence, the Black is not a slave to the signifier, but rather, Blackness exist in a different structure of antagonism all together whereby gratuitous violence zones off the world in which the Black cannot be meaningfully entered into the symbolic at all. Wilderson puts it as follows, “Unlike Fanon’s baseline Black, situated a priori in absolute derelic-tion, Lacan’s baseline analysand is situated a priori in personhood and circumscribed by ‘contemporaries’ who are also persons. Lacan’s body of subjectification is not of the same species as Fanon’s body of desubjec-tification.” (Wilderson III 82) In this sense, there is a Fanonian return to the conception of Blackness as non-being, no-thing, without subjectivity. It is, therefore, violence, to the Afropessimist, which structures the illegible grammar of Black suffering (not language) giving Blackness a name which is nothing more than a mask. Marriott’s summarizes Wilderson’s Afropessimism as follows: 

Wilderson’s fundamental point is that we need to focus on the structure of political ontology, “a framework that allows us to substitute a culture of politics for a politics of culture,” in order to understand the unbridgeable gulf between black being and human life. The call is for a new ethics and a new language of politics.

But how should we go about it? (Marriott 133)

One of the most intriguing aspects of Marriott’s reading is the way he takes up and thinks seriously with the Late Lacan. The Lacan who moved away from a purely symbolic register of enunciation towards a more formalist approach rooted in mathematical graphemes and concepts. Topology or “the matheme” represent “the figural form of the unsaid,” (Marriott 131) i.e., the real. The slave is a topology of the real insofar it is not a symbolic metaphor but the “real of speech” i.e., the unsayable, without grammar. In thinking-with the Late Lacanian turn to mathemes, topology, and Borromean knots, Marriott stays with Lacan’s innovations in thinking the symbolic, imaginary and the real in a rigorous way. This would prove useful for Marriott’s reading of Wilderson’s Afropessimism. For when Marriott emphasizes that Wilderson’s critique of Lacan in his magnum opus Red, White and Black: Cinema and The Structure of US Antagonism, primarily critiques the early work of Lacan this leads Marriott to ask: “[I]s Wilderson able to see how Lacan could himself contribute to this need for a new language of abstrac-tion? What of Lacan’s late work and the attempt to formalize difference as a logic of impossibility?” (133) Marriott suggest that Blackness communicates at an abyssal level, a fall, between Fanon’s “nothingness and infinity.” (Fanon 119) In this sense, Blackness is not, n’est pas; Blackness is a category given to that topology of sentient flesh that “can only fall as the infinitely finite form of the non-identical.” (Marriott 131) Hence, the zone of non-being of the Black slave or the unsayable non-relation of the Lacanian real.

In this way, Lacan Noir, embodies a clarification of Marriott’s own position in way that his other more exegetical books do not. Lacan Noir is still a “reading” but the moments in which Marriott pushes against Lacan, Fanon, and Afropessimism assert the uniqueness of Marriott’s own philosophical position. This work of immanent critique reads Lacan, Fanon, and Afropessimism closely for what they all have to say about Blackness, analogy, antagonism, metaphor, slavery, and sexual difference, and through this reading, a new direction for Afropessimism emerges as its own invention: Lacan Noir. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008.

Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: WW Norton & Company, 2006.

Marriott, David S. Lacan Noir: Lacan and Afro-Pessimism. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

Wilderson III, Frank B. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.