“Fucked in the Head and Liking It”: Atomik Aztex, Postcoloniality, Psychosis of Civilization

ABSTRACT

Atomik Aztex by Sesshu Foster is widely regarded as a paradigm of postcolonial intervention in the genre of the science fiction novel and alternative histories. This article marks a departure from such readings by positing the novel as a study of psychosis in the postcolonial subaltern. Through the employment of psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan with reference to Angelo Bravi’s concept of the “psychosis of civilisation,” this article contends that the novel’s narrator-protagonist Zenzon experiences symptoms of psychosis that result in hallucinations of alternate realities. Through the ideations of Dipesh Chakraborty, Ashis Nandy and Walter Mignolo, the article posits Zenzon as a postcolonial subaltern through his failed attempts to trace a postcolonial history beyond the colonizer’s epistemologies. Finally, the article traces the emergence of a subjectless subject from the position of the postcolonial subaltern, who, overwhelmed by his psychotic condition, revels in his subalternity through an avowal of his psychosis.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Stephen Frosh discusses at length how overt forms of racism have colored the institutional practices of psychoanalysis, affecting the formulations of theory as well as terminology, and the subsequent effects of such prejudices on contemporary theory and praxis (141–154).

2. In the early twentieth century, the discipline of “colonial psychiatry” heavily relied on typologies based on racial categories. Studies centered on “ethnopersonality” or “racial psychophysiology” were frequently conducted to identify psychopathological symptoms that were ascribed to “ethnic factors”, allowing the practitioners of psychoanalysis to build stereotyped racial profiles which would further enable the analyst to gauge the predisposition of an individual to specific types of criminal activities based on the race of the analysand (Scarfone 1–17).

3. It is both the title of the seventh session of Lacan’s seminar XVIII held on May 12, 1971, published in 2007 as Le Séminaire, Livre XVIII, D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, 1971, and the essay published in the third issue of a literary quarterly named Littérature. This paper uses Jack W. Stone’s translation of the text from Autres écrits.

4. In his lecture, Lacan refers to the 1959 edition of Ernout and Meillet’s French etymological dictionary of Latin.

5. Dipesh Chakraborty notes the longstanding tradition of representing waste as synonymous with postcolonial landscapes in “Of Garbage, Modernity, and the Citizen’s Gaze” (65–79).

6. “Reality is not the issue. The subject admits, by means of all the verbally expressed explanatory detours at his disposal, that these phenomena are of another order than the real. He is well aware that their reality is uncertain,” (Lacan, 75).

7. In 1590, Jesuit missionary Juan de Mariana presented an image of the Aztecs as people devoid of any cultural capital. In his narrative, Aztecs were painted as ignorant and violent savages, who “sacrificed war prisoners and slaves in such great numbers […] and they ate their flesh without repugnance (Keen, 40).

8. See Lacan 96.

9. See Lacan 78.

10. Bravi believed that most native Libyan Muslims were unfit for psychoanalytic treatment, as their “ethnopersonality” did not allow them to perceive time as linear chronology, making narrative reconstruction and subsequent subjective analysis exceptionally difficult. For Bravi, the native Libyans were overtly invested in the religious factors in every aspect of their lives, which made them predisposed to dereistic thinking. Thus, according to Bravi, the natives were relatively impenetrable by psychoanalysis, displayed an apathetic resistance to psychological examination, and wore a mask of habitual indifference. As a result, Bravi’s diagnosis of patient Z., was heavily colored by his presuppositions about her race and gender (Scarfone, 1–17).

11. Lacan defines das Ding as thing beyond symbolic representation, the object of the drive in its “dumb reality”, the thing in the real, which is “the beyond-of-the-signified,” (54–55).

12. There are several online forums where readers have expressed their confusion regarding the structure of the novels, the convoluted syntax, and the disjointed narratives. A few of those posts may be found at https://www.spiritblog.net/atomik-aztek/ and https://americanhorrorstoriessite.wordpress.com/2017/12/27/cyclical-time-slaughter-and-colonial-violence-in-sesshu-fosters-atomik-aztex/.

13. Lacan defines jouissance as “superabundant vitality”: a surplus of life that fuels the circumlocutory movement of the drive in an orbit around its object, allowing only a partial enjoyment (Hewitson).

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Notes on contributors

Paushali Bhattacharya

Paushali Bhattacharya (she/her) is a graduate student pursuing her PhD in English at Georgia State University. Her research interests include posthuman studies, poststructuralist theories and postcolonial texts.