Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)
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Abdul R. JanMohamed. The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright's Archaeology of Death. Duke University Press: Durham NC, 2005. 328pp. ISBN 0-8223-3488-7 (sbk). $23.95.
<1> Many social theorists erroneously set out from the universal only to have their theories dashed on the rocks of the particular. This tends especially to be the case with a particular as pronounced and stubborn as is the experience of Black America. So it is especially welcome that Abdul JanMohamed sets out explicitly and ambitiously to invert this trend, approaching the subjective effects of death not by way of a movement from universal to particular, but rather by first understanding the particularities of the Black experience of the threat of death in the United States. That is, JanMohamed approaches Richard Wright's immense literary corpus with an eye to its implications for broader conceptions of the role of death in the construction of subjectivity.
<2> But it is revealing that JanMohamed does not couch his approach in terms of universal and particular, but rather in terms of "extreme" and "normal." Wright's obsession with death, the author explains, is indeed extreme, but in an effort to legitimize that extremity, JanMohamed adds the claim that, "because it throws everything into stark relief, [Wright's] is the kind of extremity that better allows us to comprehend the 'normal' effects of the threat of death on the formation of subjectivity" (2). While admirable in its reversal of Eurocentric theoretical traditions - by insisting that Wright has something to offer universalistic philosophy - JanMohamed here fails to escape the pathologization of Wright that so often serves to justify his disqualification.
<3> That said, however, his book is brilliant, erudite, accessible, and fundamentally necessary. In it, the author engages in a double-Foucaultian move, seeking to genealogically reconstruct and recover the work of an author who, he claims, was himself engaged in an archaeological task (38). This joint effort results in the excavation (by Wright) and revelation (by JanMohamed) of what the latter deems a "death-bound-subject." As an author "clearly obsessed with death and lynching," Wright is for JanMohamed the best expositor of the way in which "death penetrate[s] into the capillary structures of subjectivity," shaping and invariably distorting those structures (1-2).
<4> But Wright is by no means the only Black writer to foreground the threat of death. Rather, JanMohamed seeks to situate him at the mid-point of a tradition that extends from Frederick Douglass to Toni Morrison, and which embodies the progressive subjectification of previously impersonal narratives about death (4). Drawing his conceptual arsenal from thinkers like Orlando Patterson and Hortense Spillers, JanMohamed seeks to analyze the ways in which living under the "conditionally commuted death sentence" reveals a "fundamental continuity in the process of coercion" which straddles the antebellum and postbellum (and nominally post-slavery) United States (5).
<5> Lynching, of course, is the sociohistoric thread connecting the two, guaranteeing through its extralegal arbitrariness that the perennial threat that the death sentence finally be carried-out always remain a tangible possibility. But JanMohamed's subject is not lynching, which he deems the "occasion" for the deployment of the threat of death: his subject is instead the subject, the impact of this threat of death on Black subjectivity (6). This is a subject always "readily killable," always available to make the very real transition from Spillers' "flesh" to mere "meat" (10). The space between the two - the liminal realm occupied by the Black subject in Jim Crow society - JanMohamed compares to Giorgio Agamben's "bare life," as which the lynch mob becomes the sovereign arbiter of extrajudicial violence (9).
<6> How does the Black subject respond to this expulsion from the realm of the fully living? In Wright, JanMohamed claims to find a "dialectic of death," which moves between three interrelated terms: Pattersonian social-death (thesis), actual-death (antithesis), and symbolic-death (synthesis) (17). Trapped in a situation in which the master's threat of actual-death produces the social-death of the extraction of lifelong surplus-value, and in which actual-life is at all turns barred (again, with the threat of actual death), the Black/slave subject finds only one path toward freedom. It is only by risking actual-death that one can struggle against social-death, thereby driving forward the dialectic of death.
<7> Here, it is worth quoting JanMohamed's own summary:
The possibility of actual-death is the precondition for the slave's social-death in that it is the slave's desire to avoid that possibility, that is, his fear of death, that forces him to "agree" to become a slave, a socially dead being. However, if the slave is willing to die, if he is willing to risk actualizing his postponed death, then the actualization will totally negate his social-death or his enslavement. Symbolic-death... is constituted by the death of the slave's subject-position as a socially dead being and his rebirth in a different subject position. Symbolic-death takes the form of sublation; it overcomes and preserves that which it supersedes (17).
As a Hegelian sublation (i.e. entailing the maintenance of the subject), can this response occur only on the symbolic register? I will return to this concern below.
<8> It is with the objective of unveiling this dialectic of the death-bound-subject that JanMohamed traces Wright's excavation of that dialectic through the entire course of his literary production. He finds a full sketch of the entire trajectory from actual-death through social-death and on to symbolic-death already present - albeit in schematic form - in Wright's 1938 anthology Uncle Tom's Children (or, to be more precise, the 1940 edition to which "Bright and Morning Star" was added). Wright's formulation of symbolic-death as a response to social-death reaches its fictional pinnacle in the seminal Native Son (1940), and arguably its non-fictional pinnacle in Wright's autobiographical Black Boy (1945). This formulation of symbolic-death is then concretized in more complex form in The Outsider (1953), before turning to a more psychoanalytic view of the matricidal and patricidal features of his Savage Holiday (1954) and The Long Dream (1958).
<9> The analysis is as stunning as it is comprehensive. And as suggested previously, the exploration of the death-bound-subject - that is, the particular relationship between racialized-enslaved subjects and death - is of the utmost importance to decolonial thought. But I have concerns nevertheless.
<10> The most important of these concerns - on the surface - JanMohamed's sources, but the implications for his entire analytical apparatus are serious. We are told early on that "this entire tradition is profoundly, if implicitly, anti-Hegelian in its view of the effectivity of 'death' and 'work' in the formation of slavery" (3). Similarly, Heidegger's seminal analysis of death has significant "shortcomings" that hinder its applicability to the questions faced by the Black and enslaved subject (16). Why, then, do these two European figures weigh so heavily upon the text? Why, despite these "shortcomings" (to put it generously) of the Hegelian and Heideggerian frameworks, does the work of Orlando Patterson serve as mere "supplement" (16)?
<11> Why, in a similar vein, do Hortense Spillers' insightful analyses of "body" and "flesh" operate as mere supplement to Giorgio Agamben's "bare life" (10)? Why, despite the crucial reformulations offered by Fanon, does Lacan figure so prominently? Why, in short, do Hegel, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan, Baudrillard, Butler, and Derrida provide the framework for JanMohamed's analysis, when so many thinkers have reformulated and moved beyond these very same philosophers in an attempt to create a philosophy relevant to the experience of racialized subjects?
<12> The absence of Frantz Fanon is especially striking. He makes a fleeting appearance on the last page of JanMohamed's book (300), despite the close relationship - both personal and intellectual - that existed between Wright and Fanon. It was Bigger Thomas who plays such a pivotal role in Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, and in the latter work Fanon describes JanMohamed's dialectic of death quite simply: "The Negro is a toy in the white man's hands; so, in order to shatter the hellish cycle, he explodes" (139-140). Moreover, while JanMohamed describes his three-pronged methodological approach as simultaneously Marxist, psychoanalytic, and phenomenological, how can one neglect the fact that this complex methodological combination was precisely the same that drove Fanon, and that furthermore, Fanon radically reformulated all three?
<13> Above all, however, how can we think of Wright's "death-bound-subject" without thinking of Fanon's damné, the condemned colonial-racialized subject who lives in a liminal space between life and death so suggestive of JanMohamed's own analysis? Nelson Maldonado-Torres, for example, has theorized the Fanonian damné in terms which are remarkably similar to those of JanMohamed: the colonial subject, qua "condemned," is an inherently and perennially "killable" (as well as "rapeable") subject (Against War, Ch. 6).
<14> This question brings us back to the question of violence. Is Fanon elided for the very real nature of the violence he formulates? JanMohamed pairs Hegel and Heidegger to insist that symbolic-death is both a Hegelian sublation (which he insists "preserves" the subject through a "rebirth in a different subject position") and comparable to (but admittedly distinct from) Heidegger's "demising," which is explicitly non-actual (17). While JanMohamed seems to reject Hegel's dismissal of actual-death as "useless," does he not recreate this same dismissal in his placing that actual-death as the antithesis prior to a final synthesis, and his affirmation that, "it is precisely the difference between the slave's social- and his actual-death that constitutes the use-value of death for him" (18)? In JanMohamed's simultaneous insistence on the merely symbolic nature of Wright's own violence and the primacy of literature, we cannot avoid feeling that there is a process of sanitizing Wright's violence of any contact with the actual in order to make it acceptable and palatable.
<15> Is Wright the novelist, who gives symbolic expression to the strategy of symbolic-death, the true representative for JanMohamed, as opposed to Fanon, the political revolutionary for whom actual-death is central? The latter, in his striking reformulation of Hegelian "work" - begun in Black Skin but only completed in Wretched of the Earth - asserts that, "To work means to work for the death of the settler" (85). The actuality of death and violence here threatens to disrupt JanMohamed's dialectic of death in a very fundamental way.
Works Cited
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, tr. C.L. Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967 [1954]).
---. The Wretched of the Earth, tr. C. Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1965 [1961].
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
George
Ciccariello-Maher
University of California, Berkeley
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