38 pages
Published by Wayne State University.
The Case of Blackness
by Fred Moten
Fred Moten: The Case of Blackness (Wayne State University)
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The title of this essay, “The Case of Blackness,” is a spin on the title of the fifth chapter of Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks, infamously mistranslated as “the fact of blackness.” “The lived experience of the black” is more literal—“experience” bears a German trace, translates as Erlebnis rather than Tatsache, and thereby places Fanon within a group of postwar Francophone thinkers encountering phenomenology that includes Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, and Tran Duc Thao. The phrasing indicates Fanon’s veering off from an analytic engagement with the world as a set of facts that are available to the natural scientific attitude, so it’s possible to feel the vexation of certain commentators with what might be mistaken for a flirtation with positivism. However, I want to linger in, rather than quickly jump over, the gap between fact and lived experience in order to consider the word “case” as a kind …
The title of this essay, “The Case of Blackness,” is a spin on the title of the fifth chapter of Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks, infamously mistranslated as “the fact of blackness.” “The lived experience of the black” is more literal—“experience” bears a German trace, translates as Erlebnis rather than Tatsache, and thereby places Fanon within a group of postwar Francophone thinkers encountering phenomenology that includes Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, and Tran Duc Thao. The phrasing indicates Fanon’s veering off from an analytic engagement with the world as a set of facts that are available to the natural scientific attitude, so it’s possible to feel the vexation of certain commentators with what might be mistaken for a flirtation with positivism. However, I want to linger in, rather than quickly jump over, the gap between fact and lived experience in order to consider the word “case” as a kind of broken bridge or cut suspension between the two.