“Blackness is so fugitive, in other words, that it escapes even the concept that seeks to make sense of it. And as with fact/experience, Fanon pulls out the ontological rug from under the broader optimism/pessimism binary. “Fanonism begins,” Marriott writes, “at the point where both optimism and pessimism become impossible” (216). The question of sovereignty, moreover, gives us a glimpse into what Marriott’s distance from Afropessimism means concretely. Afropessimist critiques of Indigenous theory and struggles, for example, leverage the erroneous idea that sovereignty is reducible to its modern/western form. But as Fanonian scholars are quick to recognize that violence is qualitatively transformed in the hands of the colonized, so too sovereignty, which is not a singular thing, impervious to quality, content, or context. This is why Fanon himself continues to use the word, but also to resignify it as synonymous with the practical dignity of the oppressed (Wretched 139). While Marriott seems to perpetuate this view, we’re concerned less with the word than the thing, and his pivot from disarticulation to rearticulation, from abyss to invention, makes clear that we’re not operating on the terrain of pessimism. Navigating the turbulent straits between optimism and pessimism, Marriott concludes that “blackness can only find its ontological fulfillment by no longer being black—or by entering its own abyssal significance” (Whither Fanon? x). But this “self-oblivion” should not be understood as ceding to the parameters of the antiblack world, since blackness cannot simply melt into whiteness without revealing that the white world stands on feet of clay, utterly reliant on (anti)blackness for its meaning. This is what Fredric Jameson would call the “secret conceptual and even dialectical weakness” of all racial, and more broadly Manichaean, orders, the hidden strength of their apparently weak term (19). To obliterate blackness is to touch on an unpredictable chain reaction that, while not anchored in a solid thing, is always more than pure negativity as well—this is an abyss that remains “penetrated by dark potentialities” (Marriott, Whither Fanon? xix). By refusing the optimism/pessimism binary, and by walking the fine line between the negative and the positive, the abyss and black identity, Marriott thus leaves the reader with a far more dynamic picture than the irretrievably antiblack world of Afropessimism’s ontological straitjacket.”
Geo Maher - Neither Optimism nor Pessimism: A review of David Marriott, Whither Fanon? (2022) [Postmodern Culture, vol. 32 no. 2]
