Affective Ankylosis and the Body in Fanon and Capécia

ABSTRACT

Frantz Fanon examines the function of affect to describe colonization as a mode of the production of the body. His idiosyncratic analysis adjusts prevailing conceptions of the body in affect theory, the psychoanalytic study of narcissism, and non-psychoanalytic theories of racialization. This article focuses on the temporality of retroaction that characterizes what he describes as “affective ankylosis,” and links this notion of affect to the process of racialization that organizes a body in the Lacanian mirror stage. Affect under colonial conditions detemporalizes the subject and petrifies a racial schema into a non-binary dual narcissism—leading to the conclusion that the black body is a version of, or name for, the white body. In the same clinical vein inaugurated by Fanon’s literary analysis, I contrast the affective ankylosis and one of its phenomenological manifestations, a neurotic “affective erethism,” to the imaginary exchange that the black Martinican novelist Mayotte Capécia recounts in her semi-autobiographical I Am a Martinican Woman, prefiguring therein the desire of the woman of color as excessive to those politics of the body that colonization renders unsubversive.

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Christopher Chamberlin

Christopher Chamberlin is a PhD candidate in the Program in Culture and Theory at the University of California, Irvine and will be the 2018-19 University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in English at Berkeley. His research examines the nexus of black studies and clinical psychoanalysis, with a focus on literary and critical methods and the history of liberalism. His current project excavates a series of Civil Rights Era psychoanalytic case histories to retheorize the psychic life of racism and antiracism.