In the conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon seemingly rejects the role that the past can play in the creation of decolonized futurities, famously writing: “I am not a prisoner of History (l’Histoire). I must not look for the meaning of my destiny in that direction.” On this basis, Fanon’s thought has often been read as opposed to the more prophetic vision of the past offered by Édouard Glissant, which emphasizes the contrapuntal potentialities that inhere in Black vernacular (...) cultures and histories. In contrast to such readings, this paper contends that Fanon and Glissant similarly uphold a dual conception of the past as encompassing both History (l’Histoire), or the racialized fantasy of chronological linearity that was invented by Western modernity, and histories, a subterranean and mobile network of memories that always remains fugitive to the colonial machinations of History. Tracing this more ambivalent conception of the past through Black Skin, White Masks, Wretched of the Earth, and the writings that Fanon penned during his time as a psychiatrist in Algeria, I argue that Fanon’s thought on the past, far from being opposed to Glissant’s, in fact similarly upholds the prophetic value that the past qua histories can play in unleashing decolonized futurities. (shrink)

This paper develops a response to the ethical conception of the human Other formulated by Gilles Deleuze in his review of Michel Tournier’s 1967 novel Friday. The central contention here is that although Deleuze develops a compelling notion of intensive ethics in response to Tournier’s novel, that ethics also remains deeply problematic in refusing to ascribe a positive role to the human Other. My wager is that some of these problems can be brought to light by placing Deleuze’s philosophy in (...) dialogue with that of Emmanuel Levinas. As I seek to show, Levinas’s philosophy of alterity not only reveals that Deleuze is mistaken in failing to ascribe a positive ethical role to the human Other, but also begins to point the way toward a more positive conception of ethics that does not oppose the Other to the intensive realm that Deleuze so much values. (shrink)

In their shared works, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari repeatedly advise that ethical practices of experimentation must be imbued with a large dose of prudence. Among commentators, this concept of prudence has primarily been read in cautionary terms, as that which merely enables ethical subjects to avoid the “many dangers” of experimentation. By contrast, this article develops a wider, more positive reading of Deleuzo-Guattarian prudence. Focussing specifically on A Thousand Plateaus, I show that, for Deleuze and Guattari, we must always (...) exercise prudence in ethics because prudence constitutes one positive means of maximizing the success of experimental ethical praxes. (shrink)