Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” he exclaims in the “final prayer” of Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon was an atheist; praying to a higher authority would have struck him as ludicrous. And why pray to his body? Did Fanon have some sort of mystical belief in the wisdom of the flesh? Not at all. He was asking his body not to show him the path of enlightenment but rather to rebel against any inclination toward complacency or resignation. The body, in his view, is a site of unconscious knowledge, of truths about the self that the mind shies away from uttering, a repository of desire and resistance. Fanon’s relationship to reality is fundamentally one of interrogation: “Anyone who tries to read in my eyes anything other than a perpetual questioning won’t see a thing—neither gratitude nor hatred. Yet Fanon’s manner of interrogation was not that of a skeptic. “Man,” he writes in Black Skin, White Masks, is not simply a “no,” but “a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies.” His ...

A year ago the critic and cultural theorist  Mark Fisher passed away. Here is one of his pertinent observations: R: How has capitalism persuaded us that it’s the only ‘realistic’ political-economic system? M: "One way of getting to this is by forcing ritualistic compliance, where there’s no other available language or conceptual model for how we understand life, work, or society, except that of business. And that’s one of the key things that happened in that period, particularly with public services – and that’s something I dwell on at some length in the book ‘Capitalist Realism’. It’s the extent to which teachers are now required to go through these self-surveillance procedures, these self-assessment procedures, which have been imported in from business, and the strange subjective disavowal comes with these procedures often - managers who are uncomfortable imposing kind of business rhetoric, business methods, nevertheless will say to workers, say to teachers, ‘You...