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On the Ungendering of Black Life in Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, And The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts THE VALUE OF INVENTION: ON THE UNGENDERING OF BLACK LIFE IN FRANTZ FANON, SYLVIA WYNTER, AND HORTENSE SPILLERS A Dissertation in Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies by William Michael Paris © William Michael Paris Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2018 The dissertation of William Michael Paris was reviewed and approved* by the following: Nancy Tuana Dupont/Class of 1949 Professor of Philosophy Co-Chair of Committee Dissertation Co-Advisor Robert Bernasconi Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies Co-Chair of Committee Dissertation Co-Advisor Leonard Lawlor Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy AnneMarie Mingo Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Amy Allen Liberal Arts Professor of Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Head of the Department of Philosophy *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. ii Abstract My dissertation brings the works of Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and Hortense Spillers together in order to argue that invention is the central motivation of their engagements with race, gender, and sexuality. Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers provide starting points from which it is possible to not only apprehend the historical experiences of the alienation of Black life under European colonialism and transatlantic slavery but also the contingencies and subsequent naturalizations of race, gender, and sexuality as ontological facts of what it means to be human. It is by revealing how race, gender, and sexuality are enmeshed in a violent system of exploitation and expropriation that the necessity of praxis and invention arises. Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers expose how the modalities of “the human” formed through the dominant economic, educational, and cultural institutions of Western powers have been premised on stolen life. The question of this dissertation is thus: what does one do with a form of humanity whose historical dynamic is the ongoing theft of value? What I argue in the following dissertation is that Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers take seriously the preceding question and, thus, develop an understanding of invention that is decidedly not focused on the creation of a new object or revealing what the human “really” is. They reflect on how the colonialisms and enslavements of European empire crafted a system of existence that could appropriate and make use of any new values that were created by the colonized or the enslaved. On my account, invention is no longer circumscribed by the creation of a new value that can be commodified and exchanged on the market; invention derives its value from the activity of its praxis. Thus, the value of invention for Black life is in being attentive to how it wrenches away from the terms of a system of domination and not in the proliferation of stable products. In this way the struggle against a system of stolen life can be comprehended as a constant activity rather than a teleological process. It is important not to flatten the historical experiences of Black life through colonialism and enslavement into a single, homogenous narrative. For this reason, each thinker will be read according to the space of their thought. Fanon’s oeuvre arises from the French Caribbean and extends into the anticolonial war between France and Algeria. I will show that in his reflections he came to question and reveal how the French state was invested in crafting a racialized system of gender that positions the colonized as outside the purview of humanity and, thus, vulnerable to violence and expropriation. Fanon’s status as a French colonial subject means that his archive will consist of the Négritude movement, Sartrean phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. By working through these discourses it will be possible to see how Fanon links his new humanism to an invention of gender. From this opening I move to Sylvia Wynter of English speaking British Caribbean and her specifically Jamaican sensibilities of colonialism. Wynter moves through the English speaking and Spanish speaking Caribbean to the United States. Thus, her articulation of the trajectory of Black life will be distinct from Fanon’s and explicitly call attention to how Western academic institutions impose a global genre of what it is to be human across the planet. Wynter reveals how a genre endeavors to reproduce itself through bourgeois notions of gender that must be rewritten. Finally, Spillers writes from the United States about the movement of the slave trade from West Africa to the Americas. Her thought takes place about a generation after Fanon and, thus, makes use of different theoretical tools such as semiotics. All three thinkers provide a constellation through which one can understand the necessarily multiple dynamics of invention. iii The centrality of gender to the thought of Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers consists in their comprehension of how Black life has historically been mobilized to make possible the reproduction of systems of Western exploitation and expropriation. From Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers, I claim, we can derive a blackened humanism that would arrest this reproduction and open the space for new systems of meaning. By undoing dominant systems of meaning the historical experiences of Black life are revealed as sites of constant invention that we may engage today. The theme of invention allows us to read Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers differently and, therefore, begin to change our own archives of historical experience. iv Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………...vii INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter 1. THE SKIN OF THE WORLD: FRANTZ FANON’S EROTIC INVENTION OF HUMANISM…………………………………………………………....10 Fanon and the Skin of Praxis and “History”…………………………………….....10 Fanon, Sartre, and the Problem of the Racial Real and Humanism………………..18 Fanon and the Search for Humanism………………………………………………26 “Man” and the Circle of Invention………………………………………………....34 Dépouillement and the Skin of the World in L’an V and Les damnés de la terre…………………………………………………………45 The Veil and Fanon’s Phenomenology of the Skin………………………………...50 The Skin of the World and the Erotics of Violence in Les damnes de la terre: On the à fleur de peau of Fanonian Invention……………………………………...58 Remembering the Skin of the World……………………………………………….66 Chapter 2. THE GENRE OF INVENTION: SYLVIA WYNTER, SOCIOGENY, AND THE WRITING OF BLACKENED HUMANISM…………………………..……………………………………………………73 Wynter and the Perils of Imagination……………………………………………….78 The Writing of Alienation and Imaginative Context………………………………..83 “No Humans Involved”: Wynter’s Open Call for the Committed Intellectual…………………………………………………………..88 The Sociogenic Principle and the Problem of Historical Experience……………….94 Wynter and the Aesthetics of Existence…………………………………………….117 Literature, Invention, and New Forms of Freedom…………………………………123 From Genre to Gender: On the Symbolic Births of “Man,” “Woman,” and the Western Ratio……………………………………………………………….136 Chapter 3. THE PROBLEM OF VALUE: HORTENSE SPILLERS AND THE MYTHOLOGIES OF BLACKENED GENDER…………………………………………….145 Metaphor and the Mythologies of Gender…………………………………………...148 The “Flesh” of Historiography: On the Zero Degree and the Form of Writing………………………………………………………………………….....157 Between Slavery and “Slavery”: Hortense Spillers’s Double-Writing of Blackened Gender…………………………………………………………………165 Anna Julia Cooper and the Value of Black Womanhood……………………………174 Anna Julia Cooper and the Existential Search for Measure………………………....183 The Symbolic Economy of Slavery………………………………………………….192 The Transvaluation of “Black Motherhood”………………………………………...198 Hortense Spillers and the Counter-Mythology of Black Life………………………..203 v Chapter 4. CONCLUSION: THE VALUE OF INVENTION: THE FLESH OF BLACKENED HUMANISM IN FANON, WYNTER, AND SPILLERS…………………..208 Hortense Spillers and the Theory of Mythology……………………………………...212 Sylvia Wynter and the Plot of Humanism…………………………………………….219 Frantz Fanon and the Blackened Spaces of the World……………………………......224 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………...228 vi Acknowledgments The completion of this project would not have been possible without the encouragement and support of family, friends, and colleagues to find my own voice and, in so doing, find the voices of Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers. The many inventions and transformations of myself and this project are due to you. To Ursula, my best friend: There is not an idea in the following chapters that has not been touched by our “dialectical” engagements, our exchange of ideas across continents and traditions. Your wisdom and confidence have sharpened my mind and shown me that philosophical generosity is not only possible but necessary for our vocation. To Desiree, my fellow traveler: Writing does not happen in a vacuum and our sensibilities have always been adjacent to one another. Our revisions and struggles have happened alongside one another and, thus, I am grateful for how much we have read each other’s work even if I have not said so. Throughout this process I have thought of you not only as friend but as a comrade. To Kris, my “Ancient” teacher: You have shown me what it means to be excited by the prospect of ideas unfamiliar to oneself, that we need not be trapped by the ideas others may have of us. Your spirit of experimentation and maturity has taught me the value of communal philosophy and that our
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