Revolutionary Shame
Mediating the error between class and race
Alex Colston
In 1961, Frantz Fanon’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s contretemps culminated over a period of nearly three exhausting days of conversation in Rome—both men sick, with Fanon dying of leukemia. This was when the serialization of Wretched of the Earth in Les Temps Modernes was agreed upon, and Sartre’s preface for the book mapped out.[1] Unflagging, as Simone de Beauvoir recounted in her memoirs, Fanon would not let Sartre quit: “I don’t like men who hoard their resources.” Fanon’s implacable demand distills the colonial relation and his praxis of expropriation in this dramatic scene. It also hearkens, in a way, to Fanon’s own redistributive intellectual engagement, later elaborated in Wretched of the Earth: that the national middle class must “put at the people’s disposal the intellectual and technical capital that it has snatched when going through the colonial universities.” Fanon was doing just this with Sartre, and thus we can read Sartre’s preface to Wretched of the Earth as a strained attempt to meet Fanon face-to-face with his demand. Bracketing whether it was a success (how would it even be judged?), Sartre’s tact in his preface was the very one Fanon had praised in Black Skin, White Masks: “Make people ashamed of their existence.” Make them “face the world.”
This theme and method of politically exacting shame is the force that drives Sartre’s approach in his preface to Wretched of the Earth. It’s the very premise he offers to his fellow white Europeans to read the book: “Have the courage to read this book, for in the first place it will make you ashamed, and shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary sentiment.” In the next sentence, Sartre admits to not being able to rid himself of illusions: he knows he’s appropriating Fanon for his purposes; he knows it’s an intractable situation in Algiers in 1961, that he is marked as on the wrong side of the conflict—despite the gesture, perhaps because of it. But to what does this shame amount? What is shame’s sociogenesis, especially in situations of colonial or racial violence? To what extent is the feeling revolutionary? How does it provide the means to solidarity?
After all, Sartre readily voiced a different kind of shame in his preface, arguing that if the colonized subject capitulates, “shame and fear will split up his character and make his inmost-self fall to pieces.” Shame, however revolutionary, is double-edged: it also works via the “psychological services,” as Sartre puts it, to degrade and demean subjects under colonial and social control. For those employed in such services, one wonders, then, about the social-therapeutic and politically engaged methods of working through shame. How, in a word, does shame become revolutionary? How does one mediate the error where revolutionary shame lapses into a counterrevolutionary reaction formation
How does one mediate the error where revolutionary shame lapses into a counterrevolutionary reaction formation?
In any case, Sartre foreshortened the thrust of Marx’s statement on shame. In the original text, Marx ventriloquizes his interlocutor, Arnold Ruge, on the eve of the 1848 revolutions, imagining him to say, “Revolutions are not made by shame.” Marx corrects him: “Shame is a revolution in itself . . . a kind of anger turned in on itself. And if a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order to spring.” Shame is a dialectical movement: first a recoil, a retreat from the emptied patriotic-liberal sentiments of liberté, égalité, fraternité that find no concrete fulfillment in the political economy of racial capitalism. Then, a rage, a disappointment: this rage is turned inward, made shameful by felt complicity. But as Marx suggests, it must be turned back outward from shameful or rageful quiescence into collective action. Fanon describes one moment of this revolution: “There is an affective exacerbation in the black man, a rage at feeling diminished, and an inadequacy in human communication that confine him to an unbearable insularity.” It is precisely this exacerbation from which Fanon sought to emancipate colonial subjects through the righteous rage of nationalist liberation—of a similar but distinct sort Marx had identified as then roiling the European core amid the nineteenth-century revolutions.
Elucidating the shared ambitions and conflicts between Sartre and Fanon only doubles the need to better understand the revolutionary shame articulated by Sartre in his preface to Fanon’s work. The affect provides a key, theme, and prompt for understanding what clinical praxis could offer to revolutionary, if not reparative, ambition. What is the psychical life of this revolutionary dialectic of rage turned inward into shame and back out into revolt? How does it work, and how does it get worked through and to what end? And, most pertinently, how does it become the spring from which one draws the lionized capacity of revolt? This is both a political and a clinical question. Is it possible to take up Fanon’s incompletely reparative encounter with Sartre—due, in the final analysis, to an errant historical understanding on Sartre’s part—in order to answer this question? Perhaps then we could find a way to work with psychological and political means to refill the arid spring of subjectivity, of being itself—our land of failed revolt in disrepair that our so-called postcolonial period seems at great pains to recuperate. It is not in question that shame exists, but it is not often revolutionary for all that. Yet it might be.
*
Even as it is marshaled and perverted by the psychological services to disable, disfigure, and shatter a person through shameful disciplines, revolutionary shame is inexhaustible and enabling.
Fanon’s contest with Sartre had already reached its apotheosis in chapter five of Black Skin, White Masks. The argument between them is not easily summarized, and it’s further complicated so far as it is couched in Fanon’s engagement with Aimé Césaire and the Negritude movement. Fanon is working his way through his fealty to that project—the poetic project of resuscitating Black antiquity prior to colonization—while at the same time countenancing the historical conditions that have shaped the “manicheism delirium” of colonial racism as a conflict between white and black, good and evil, beauty and ugliness. The poesy of the lived experience of the Black subject was pitted, for Fanon, against the universal and technical white mastery of European history. What ensues is a series of double binds in which Césaire, the Negritude movement, and Fanon all become entrapped. In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon attempts to contradistinguish himself from Césaire (and Sartre). As Gary Wilder has aptly summed, “they [Fanon and Césaire] would come to embody alternative anticolonial visions: the first representing nativist cultural nationalism and the second representing revolutionary political nationalism.”
Wilder further argues that these competing visions turn on what he calls the “race-reason impasse.” “An orthodox understanding of republicanism continues to treat racism and inequality as the failure or absence of universalism and rationality,” Wilder writes, yet for Césaire, “irrational speech, poetic reason, and knowing madness become the vehicle for a metaphysics of black presence and self-expression,” one to which Fanon was ambivalently faithful. Sartre, for his part, becomes something of a vanishing mediator for Fanon to traverse this impasse, because the impasse between reason and race, white universal and Black particular, is embodied by Fanon’s encounter with Sartre’s universalist philosophy. “When I tried to claim my negritude intellectually as a concept,” Fanon writes, Sartre “snatched it away from me.”
“Sartre’s mistake was not only to seek the source of the spring,” Fanon argued, “but in a certain way to drain the spring dry.” In all of his books, Sartre sought out the specter of existential agency, but, for Fanon, he too quickly passed over—through a premature, neutralizing universalization—the vicissitudes of Black existence. Fanon’s charge against Sartre’s intellectualizing philosophy was that he blasted out Black consciousness into a wasteland. Fanon generalized this as his animating verdict of the effects of European heritage on the colonized. Fanon’s “zone of nonbeing,” that “sterile and arid region,” was what Black life had been crushed into at the margins of the metropole.
Let us then take up the passage, the page from Sartre, that Fanon reads and declares, “I felt they had robbed me of my last chance”:
“‘For Césaire,’ says Senghor, ‘the “White” symbolizes capital as the Negro, labor . . . . Among the black men of his race, it is the struggle of the world proletariat which he sings.’ This is easier to say than work out. And without doubt it is not by hazard that the most ardent of apostles of Negritude are at the same time militant Marxists.
But nevertheless the notion of race does not intersect with the notion of class: the one is concrete and particular, the other is universal and abstract. . . . In fact, Negritude appears as the weak stage of a dialectical progression: the theoretical and practical affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis; the position of Negritude as antithetical value is the moment of negativity. But this negative moment is not sufficient in itself and the Blacks who employ it well know it; they know that it serves to pave the way for the synthesis or the realization of the human society without race.”
It’s a dense passage, but under the cover of a Marxist-Hegelian dialectic of history, Sartre counterposes class and race where progression means the falling away of race in the name of class struggle.
Fanon revolts against the passage, and I’d like to pay close attention to each step along the way, because it expresses, in nuce, the lived vicissitudes of shame, rage, and revolution. Track closely the way Sartre’s intellectualization of Black existence unfolds for Fanon. First, there is disbelief: How did the “friend of the colored peoples” and a “born Hegelian” not realize how one must “get lost in the night of the absolute, the only condition for attaining self-consciousness”? Then, there is a descent, even amid a shattering shame: losing oneself in absoluity, for Fanon, meant embodying the “absolute density” of Black existence in which historical destiny marks the Black subject out for nonexistence and destruction. To preserve himself, “I needed to lose myself totally in negritude,” he writes. Then, there is something like a recuperation, a fight. “The dialectic that introduces necessity as a support for my freedom” and “shatters my impulsive position” remains, but Fanon reaffirms “black consciousness is immanent in itself.” “I am not a potentiality of something,” he writes, “I am fully what I am. I do not have to look for the universal.” He resists the idea that Black consciousness would be lost in the movement of history, even as “Sartre, who remains ‘the Other’ . . . shattered my last illusion.”
Against Sartre, Fanon avers that Black consciousness becomes a support for freedom even against the perceived necessity of a dialectical movement that would reduce it to “a weak stage” in a historical process. It’s worth quoting him in full here:
“While I, in a paroxysm of experience and rage, was proclaiming this, he reminded me that my negritude was nothing but a weak stage. Truthfully, I’m telling you, I sensed my shoulders slipping from this world, and my feet no longer felt the caress of the ground. Without a black past, without a black future, it was impossible for me to live my blackness. Not yet white, no longer completely black, I was damned. Jean-Paul Sartre forgets that the black man suffers in his body quite differently from the white man.
Between the white man and me there is irremediably a relationship of transcendence.”
Fanon’s charge against Sartre’s intellectualizing philosophy was that he blasted out Black consciousness into a wasteland.
Against Sartre, Fanon is with him still, even in this paroxysm of rage, because there is no way to dissolve the experience of Black embodiment into a universal movement of class struggle without fully countenancing the struggles of historical destiny in which race has been a primary term. A white European, Sartre cannot know the need of this movement, as Robert Bernasconi has argued, and he cannot be the one to repudiate it. We can understand why Fanon writes of Sartre, “he should have opposed the unforeseeable to historical destiny.” And, in a way, the unforeseeable is where Fanon dissolves at the chapter’s end, in which the destiny of responsibility is itself dissolved in an infinite movement of absolution: “Not responsible for my acts, at the crossroads between Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep.”
Fanon is not content to assimilate to the white Enlightenment master narrative that, as Max Silverman puts it, “situates ‘race’ as simply a stage on the path of progress towards a disalienated society” and where “ethnic attachments are a sign of parochialism and backwardness which must be removed in the pursuit of freedom.” The problem lies in the very phenomenological experience of the white Other—amid the existential dynamics of shame and alienation—and its irremediable transcendence. Silverman writes, “the white gaze shatters a sense of blackness . . . [yet] it imposes a sense of blackness which objectifies and alienates the colonised man. Blackness slides between lived experience and racial term.” Fanon’s phenomenological and psychoanalytic description of the existential structure of Black experience uncovers for the reader a process of psychical working through required by disalienation. It’s only on the other side of shame and rage that class struggle and emancipation—in which “race is the modality in which class is lived,” as Stuart Hall once put it—become possible.
This bears on exactly what kind of humanism Fanon seems to desire. Silverman puts this well when he writes, “the conscious and unconscious demands of the phenomenology of lived experience coupled with the teleology of dialectical thinking establish an overdetermined text in which the concepts of humanity and freedom are never clearly defined.” This overdetermination stages the articulation of certain contradictions—up to and including the intensities of shame and rage over who counts as human or not—in the existential and social texture of our lives and in political struggle. Thus, Silverman concludes, “rather than assume that Fanon opts ultimately for difference over sameness, particularism over universalism, or vice versa, we might instead read the contradictions in the text as an unconscious symptom of a search beyond the constraining logic of the binary itself.” Moreover, working through the symptoms of colonial racism, as Wilder has argued, is not only about mourning absence or loss but engaging the persistence and presence of neocolonial relations, and this requires overcoming social-political and material, not just psychical, forms of repression.
“From time to time you feel like giving up,” Fanon writes. “Expressing the real is an arduous job.” But, of course, this is the psychoanalytic and phenomenological task par excellence. What makes it so difficult? For Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, it is that “when you take it into your head to express existence, you will very likely encounter nothing but the nonexistent.” In other words, the nonexistent becomes what threatens, what limits, against the comprehension of the social-political situation, both inside and outside the clinic. The racialized colonial situation, for all its efficient brutality, structures reality; it makes it comprehensible, even if only through the symptomatic transferential constellations it makes possible. Fanon affirms this in his way when he writes, “the end of race prejudice begins with a sudden incomprehension.” Racial capitalism, again and again, stages the race-reason impasse, where something incomprehensible seems to motivate the racial capitalist order—not even comprehensible to a psychoanalysis that would purport to give reasons to the irrational. The nonsensical and trying existence of the real or nonbeing persists in these interludes of the race-reason impasse in racial capitalism.
To exit the vicious circle of the colonial relation, Fanon’s search for the unforeseeable entailed both a clinical and a political aspect. This kind of social therapy is the only way, as Nigel C. Gibson and Roberto Beneduce have elaborated, “to break the pathological circularity and ceaseless reproduction of alienation, double narcissism (white and black), as well as mirroring neurosis (negrophobia and the inferiority complex, fear, and, above all, mimesis of blacks’ ceaseless and useless effort to become like the white Other).” In short, part of the task of breaking this pathological circularity means tracing how shame is worked through in its own dialectical revolution—as Fanon had done with Sartre’s philosophy. In a way, revolutionary shame mirrors and breaks this pathological circularity of racialized self-shattering, withdrawal, and the loss of vital consciousness—the various ways the body hides itself from the coordinates of social power—but this withdrawal and refusal is also the precondition of rage, collective revolt, and social action that would transform those coordinates.
*
“None who profit by the profit system may exist within it without shame,” Adorno writes in Minima Moralia, “and this deforms even the undeformed joys.” There is an ineluctable unevenness to who profits in the total system of racial capitalism, and the world is divided by the production of surplus: as surplus value and profit are consolidated and accumulated, while wages dwindle and constrict labor power, the surplus population locked out of the wages and forced into conditions of immiseration increase. This surplus population was once embodied by the colonized, who were imprisoned and exhausted by the colonial relation. Still, even as conditions have historically changed, capital remains a dynamic process of exploitation and dispossession that is ongoing beyond the lives of Sartre and Fanon and the struggles and conflicts of their time.
To the extent that we are beneficiaries and inheritors of the global world that empire and racial capitalism made and unmade, we are shamed by the legacy. Indeed, neocolonial relations persist along with the race-reason impasse, and the national form of liberation that once offered an organizational form—a transferential constellation—has become exhausted. Yet, as Nica Siegel has pointed out, Fanon’s inexhaustible legacy turns not on the specific historical politics of national liberation but rather as “a perpetually unfinished innovator across multiple discourses . . . sufficiently flexible to contest new specters of fracture and exhaustion, especially in emergent neocolonial economic forms.” This inexhaustibility finds its quintessential affective expression in revolutionary shame, where the reaffirmation of transformation is possible in the wretched depths of nonbeing, especially articulated through the race-reason impasse.
So long as new specters of fracture and exhaustion persist under the compulsions of world-destroying profit, so, too, does revolutionary shame born out of that exhaustion. Shame is an affective and embodied expression of how we do not coincide with ourselves—that we are always existentially thrown open to the Other, vulnerable to them at our limits and bound with them in shame. Shame involves irremediable exposure to the world. Sartre put this beautifully at the end of his life:
“We yield our bodies to everyone, even beyond the realm of sexual relations: by looking, by touching. You yield your body to me, I yield mine to you: we each exist for the other, as body. … If we truly wished to exist for the other, to exist as body, as body that can continually be laid bare—even if this never happens—ideas would appear to the other as coming from the body. . . . There would no longer be the hiddenness, the secret which in certain centuries was identified with the honor of men and women, and which seems very foolish to me.”
Partly through reading this passage, Judith Butler has discerned that Sartre’s words are resonant with Fanon’s project of reimagining a new humanism through a body that questions itself—its gender, its race, its appearance for the Other, for you. Sartre and Fanon were both adherent to this form of address in the second person: Sartre addressed the “you” of white Europeans, whereas Fanon addressed the “you” of a revolutionary brotherhood. When we speak in the second person, there’s a tremulous intimacy: “Who are you?” “What’s bothering you?” “I hate you.” “I love you.” “Are you my comrade?”
Yet we should, nevertheless, mediate Sartre’s and Butler’s aspiration for a new humanism by recognizing with Fanon the exigent situations that call for political acts other than humanistic hospitality.
Shame and foiled reciprocity are the intentional structure of this second-person address, but they turn on the vicissitudes of the revolutionary situation in order to transform and overcome the shattering sense of shame intrinsic to it. It is remarkable how in Sartre’s early existentialism shame is the motivating example—the affect that indicates the incommensurability of two freedoms—but by the time of his Critique of Dialectical Reason, shame is not mentioned anywhere in the two volumes. Instead, it’s replaced by reciprocity, which is undermined by scarcity: “In pure reciprocity, that which is Other than me is also the same. But in reciprocity as modified by scarcity, the same appears to us as anti-human in so far as this same man appears as radically Other—that is to say, as threatening us with death.” One must know this possible threat—the “you” turned obscene—to witness the destruction of scarcity that uses shame as its destructive weapon.
Instead, Sartre offers a humanism of labor that would bring together a group to counteract this scarcity, this threat of death. Butler summarizes him at length on this point: “When Sartre refers to the ‘the infinite unity’ of the ‘mutual needs’ of all inhabitants of this earth, he does not appeal to everyone’s capacity for violence, but rather to the reciprocal requirements that human embodiment implies: food, shelter, protection of life and liberty, means of recognition, and conditions for work and political participation without which no human can emerge or be sustained.”
And Butler is right to point out that this humanism of labor stages and contests what counts as human: “The human, in this sense, is both contingent and aspirational, dependent and not yet accomplished or realized.” Yet we should, nevertheless, mediate Sartre’s and Butler’s aspiration for a new humanism by recognizing with Fanon the exigent situations that call for political acts other than humanistic hospitality.
The clinic is one such space that is riven through with material antagonisms where socio-clinical impossibilities reflect impossibilities in the total social-political situation. The clinic’s ethos could do worse than set sail by Sartre’s sermon on the reciprocity of yielding what one’s body says to another and the delights of recognition. But when those are exhausted, we must recall Fanon’s work in the depths of nonbeing—in himself, in violent revolutionary struggle, in the clinic, within and beyond the reach of the social—where revolutionary shame stirs a desire for peace. Even as it is marshaled and perverted by the psychological services to disable, disfigure, and shatter a person through shameful disciplines, revolutionary shame is inexhaustible and enabling. This process of working through shame into revolutionary shame ultimately entails a drive for repair even as it remains unsatisfied in historical social arrangements.
[1] This scene has been most recently recounted by Nica Siegel, who is also featured in this issue. See Siegel, N. “Fanon’s Clinic: Revolutionary Therapeutics and the Politics of Exhaustion.” This essay owes much to the analysis of Fanon’s legacy and praxis in that paper. See also Robert Bernasconi’s “The European Knows and Does Not Know” and “Fanon’s ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ as the fulfillment of Sartre’s ‘Critique of Dialectical Reason.’”