Setting (on) Fire: Reply to Discussions

ABSTRACT

The author begins by turning to a recent confrontation with four men who chanted homophobic slurs in his neighborhood. He uses this experience to state some of his ideas regarding violence and the setting. Visceral belonging is considered a problem insofar as it is tethered to a setting that constitutively excludes Blackness and queerness in structurally precise ways. Intervention into the setting is theorized as a temporal movement, and the fire of such intervention is couched as a tension of opening and a willingness to burn.

Notes

¹ “This book should have been written three years ago … But these truths were a fire in me then. Now I can tell them without being burned. These truths do not have to be hurled in men’s faces. They are not intended to ignite fervor. I do not trust fervor” (Fanon, 1986, p. 3). How to speak of fire is a necessary question. Perhaps the power of fire is best conveyed when one is possessed by a will to burn, even though fervor or the time of burning has passed.

² This reanimation or “depetrification,” to use a Fanonian term, is not restricted to the body; it also applies to the political, the ontological, the world: It is not a freedom from subjection or a freedom to a new and definite subjectivity. Rather, it is a freedom with a radically contingent horizon that finds itself in a temporality of the moment, where one’s origin and destination lapses, and horizons past and present open.

³ On Blackness, “the ruse of analogy,” and structural positions, see Wilderson (2010).

⁴ All “life” has a phantomatic aspect, an aspect in which it is bare or naked and little more than base matter. How one encounters such debasement is structurally distinct, but the baseness of matter ultimately exceeds any structure that mediates the “how” of that encounter. This is what I take to be the (very Bataillean) point of wrestling with excess as a critical tool. By extension, I do not think addressing the phantomatic in the clinic will necessarily involve verbal exchanges around race, sex, gender, etc. The phantomatic exceeds the social but remains inextricable from it, and clinical analysis can therefore attend to this excess in ways that might not be overtly politicized and yet might also have a political valence by attending to excess at all. Goldberg’s (2012, 2016) work on “sensory symbiosis” and “alter worlds” is notable in this regard, and yet I also want to hear more from him about how attention to the materiality and viscerality of the setting is not simply inductive or creative but destructive to the extent that it rends the frame, exploding and reconfiguring it in a perhaps more ecstatic or transformative “symbiosis.” This might entail supplementing or even substituting a Bataillean erotic continuity for Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmic flesh, and it definitely involves considering the social and political reasons why sensory symbiosis might be more feasible for some bodies in analysis than others. This, of course, is where social structure and the national setting break in on the clinical.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel G. Butler

Daniel G. Butler, LMFT is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice, a Contributing Editor at Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and a PhD Student in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Daniel publishes and presents on an array of topics related to psychoanalysis and cultural theory, and he is the 2019 winner of APsaA’s Peter Loewenberg Essay Prize in Psychoanalysis and Culture.