Afropessimism’s Ethics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.46.3.11Keywords:
antiblackness, afropessimism, Willy Apollon, ethics of the real, Jacques Lacan, Frank B. WildersonAbstract
By analyzing the xenopathic status of the gaze and the voice during the “mental breakdown” described in Frank B. Wilderson III’s latest memoir, this essay reads afropessimism as a formalization of the lived experience of psychosis. It argues that Wilderson’s understanding of antiblackness is significantly modeled on the imaginary mechanisms and ruses that define neurotic reality and confer psychic coherence to the neurotic subjects of liberal multiracialism. Treating psychosis as an immanent critique of antiblackness, this essay concludes by offering a clarification of the stakes of afropessimism’s ethical imperatives: to end the antiblack world (of neurotic misrecognition) and to assume the position of social death (of a desire outside-of-language).
Downloads
References
Allouch, Jean. “Psychotic Transference.” In Lacan on Madness: Madness, Yes You Can’t, edited by Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler, 112–26. London: Routledge, 2015.
Apollon, Willy. “The Subject of the Quest.” Translated by Daniel Wilson. Penumbr(a) 2 (2022): 1–14.
Apollon, Willy. “Theory and Practice in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychosis.” In Lacan and the Subject of Language, edited by Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher, 116–39. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Apollon, Willy. “What’s at Stake in the Freudian Clinic.” Newsletter of the Freudian Field 2, no. 1 (1987): 27–46.
Apollon, Willy, Danielle Bergeron, and Lucie Cantin. “The Treatment of Psychosis.” Translated by Tracy McNulty. In The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists, edited by Kareen Ror Malone and Stephen R. Friedlander, 209–28. Albany: SUNY Press, 2000.
Brown, Wendy. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.
Dunker, Christian. The Constitution of the Psychoanalytic Clinic: A History of its Structure and Power. London: Karnac, 2011.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Markmann. London: Pluto Press, 2008.
Fanon, Frantz, and Slimane Asselah. “The Phenomenon of Agitation in the Psychiatric Milieu: General Considerations, Psychopathological Meaning.” In Alienation and Freedom: Frantz Fanon, edited by Jean Khalfa and Robert J. C. Young, 437–48. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
Fimiani, Bret. Psychosis and Extreme States: An Ethic for Treatment. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
Freud, Sigmund. “Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937).” In Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, and Other Works (1937–1939), edited by James Strachey, 209–54. Vol. 23 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1964.
Freud, Sigmund. “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926).” In An Autobiographical Study, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Lay Analysis, and Other Works (1925–1926), edited by James Strachey, 75–176. Vol. 20 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1964.
Freud, Sigmund. “Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse (1933).” In Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse und Neue Folge, edited by Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards and James Strachey, 447–608. Vol. 1 of Studienausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1969–75.
Freud, Sigmund. “Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides) (1911).” In The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique, and Other Works (1911–1913), edited by James Strachey, 1–82. Vol. 12 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1958.
Freud, Sigmund. “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (1914).” In The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique, and Other Works (1911–1913), edited by James Strachey, 145–56. Vol. 12 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1958.
George, Sheldon. Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2016.
Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2022.
Holland, Eugene W. Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, book 11. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.
Lacan, Jacques. The Psychoses. Translated by Russell Grigg. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, book 3. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
Lacan, Jacques. “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious.” In Écrits, translated by Bruce Fink, 671–702. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.
Lacan, Jacques. “Variations on the Standard Treatment.” In Écrits, translated by Bruce Fink, 269–302. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.
Marriott, David S. Lacan Noir: Lacan and Afro-pessimism. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
Marriott, David S. Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018.
Metzl, Jonathan M., and Anna Kirkland. Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality. New York: New York University Press, 2010.
Moten, Fred. “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh).” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (2013): 737–80. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2345261.
Santner, Eric L. My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Santner, Eric L. The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Sexton, Jared. Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Sexton, Jared. “Antidoting.” The Black Scholar 51, no. 3 (2021): 5–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1932383.
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” In Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, 203–29. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Tate, Claudia. “Freud and his ‘Negro’: Psychoanalysis as Ally and Enemy of African Americans.” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society 1, no. 1 (1996): 53–62.
Vanheule, Stijn. “A Lacanian Perspective on Psychotic Hallucinations.” Theory and Psychology 21, no. 1 (2011): 86–106. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354310369275.
Wilderson III, Frank B. Afropessimism. New York: Liveright, 2021.
Wilderson III, Frank B. “The Black Liberation Army and the Paradox of Political Engagement.” In Postcoloniality—Decoloniality—Black Critique: Joints and Fissures, edited by Sabine Broeck and Carsten Juncker, 175–210. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2014.
Wilderson III, Frank B. Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. London: Verso, 2000.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Authors
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors guarantee that the work is their own original creation and does not infringe any statutory or common-law copyright or any proprietary right of any third party. In case of claims by third parties, authors commit their self to defend the interests of the publisher, and shall cover any potential costs.
More in: Submission chapter
