Critique of Black Reason - Achille Mbembe

Translated by Laurent Dubois

Originally Published as Critique de la raison nègre in 2013 by La Decouverte, Paris

English Edition Published in 2017 by Duke University Press, Durham, NC

215 pages

ISBN: 9780822363439 (pbk)

LCCN: 2016043545 (print)

LCC: HT1581 .M3313 2017 (print)

It is not much of an exaggeration to say that in the course of Western history, race and racism have, unfortunately, occupied a central place. The wealth of Western nations was built on the bodies of the exploited and enslaved, with the ideological fiction of race serving as a justification for treating other human beings as inferior and less-than-human. Solidified in the American colonies in the 1660s, the invention of race and the positing of racial difference continued throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, leading to pernicious, pseudoscientific ideas such as racial realism and scientific racism (which has historically been buttressed by faulty premises in academic disciplines such as anthropology and biology). 

Yet, despite protestations to the contrary, race and racism still occupy a central place in our global discourse. Even if we are beyond the era of Jim Crow and formal segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa (although it certainly has continued in certain forms, such as redlining and the prison industrial complex), there has been a disturbing rise in racist behavior and language in recent years. Exemplified by events such as the 2016 US election, the Brexit vote in the UK, and the rise of far-right extremist parties in Europe (such as France’s Rassemblement national and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, especially its more hardline identitarian far-right Der Flügel wing), we can see that nativist, xenophobic, and racist discourses are still very-much-alive in the Western world. While these are simply the most visible forms of racism, it cannot be denied that racism has also been at work (in more or less subtle forms) within our liberal institutions, undergirding the functioning of capitalism. 

In the wake of the renewed energy and advocacy for anti-racist education and activism after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, many have found inspiration from Black activists and scholars from the 20th century, and they sought emancipation from the injustices they faced. This legacy of Black literature has taken many shapes, including Critical Race Theory, Privilege Theory, Postcolonial Theory, and Afro-Pessimism (each of which has been praised and criticized in equal measure, usually among partisan lines), as each seeks to center the Black experience. But what does this categorization of “Blackness” mean, and how has it changed throughout history? Synthesizing a wide array of literature from history, economics, psychoanalysis, politics, and philosophy in his book Critique of Black Reason, Cameroonian philosopher and cultural critic Achille Mbembe traces the ever-fluid concept of race and the construction of “Blackness” from the Atlantic slave trade to our current neoliberal era. 

Overview: 

Critique of Black Reason is a deeply complex, comprehensive analysis of the category of “Blackness,” examining how the singular label of “black” was applied to a wide array of Africans and their descendants, and how it has been utilized as a way to dehumanize them to further the interests of capital. Translated into English from its original French in 2017, Mbembe’s book explores the consequences of colonialism, slavery, and global capital in a world that is no longer centered around Europe. Mbembe argues that the category of race is a social and biological construction, and as such, fails to describe our contemporary condition. As Mbembe writes, “There are no more workers as such. There are only laboring nomads. If yesterday’s drama of the subject was exploitation by capital, the tragedy of the multitude today is that they are unable to be exploited at all. They are abandoned subjects, relegated to the role of a ‘superfluous humanity’” (3). Mbembe highlights that the new subject is a prisoner of desire, as we derive our pleasure from turning our private lives into public merchandise and selling it (thin social media), and are constrained to short-term jobs, always forced to adapt ourselves in response to constantly shifting demands. The fusion of capitalism with animism across the globe, in Mbembe’s view, has universalized the term “Black” and the logic of enslavement,  in a phrase Mbembe calls the Becoming Black of the world (6).

According to Mbembe, race and Blackness were birthed by the need for cheap labor in Europe’s plantation economy and have continued to persist in phantasmagoric and flexible ways throughout the centuries. As a result of a deep crisis within European ideas of reason in the early modern era, race was created and sustained through various fantasies that are projected onto both “Blackness” and “Africa.” These two signifiers became “signs of alterity that is impossible to assimilate” (38). Africa then plays the role of a mask in contemporary existence, combining being and appearance and hiding the face by doubling it. It becomes a kind of empty container that is filled with externally imposed meanings, usually derived from the realm of fantasy. Thus, Black Reason consists of an array of discourses and practices that identified “Blackness” with the nonhuman, or next to the animal, and is utilized to maintain oppressive structures of exploitation and domination. 

Similarly, when we invoke the word “Black,” we give a name to something absent, just as the word “Africa” stands in for a fundamental negation. This absence, according to Mbembe, is a result of the work of race, which “contradicts the idea of a single humanity, of an essential human resemblance and proximity” (54). This racial signifier, which insists on inherent difference, serves as an essential underlying component of imperialism and colonialism, which Mbembe explores through various examples within 19th and 20th-century French history and philosophy.  The signifiers of “Black” and “Africa” are ambiguous, often being filled with contradictory meanings, both fascinating, fertile, and exotic as well as terrifying, primitive, and dangerous. As such, Mbembe emphasizes that French anti-colonial sentiments were never monolithic, as reformists advocated for a more humane colonialism while socialists and anarchists saw colonialism as holding the capacity to universalize class conflict. Mbembe also traces the development of liberal democracy with the concept of “Blackness” and the capacity for reason (especially in the thought of Tocqueville). 

The second half of the book is primarily focused on how the traces of Black reason were maintained by Black thinkers and activists who, despite critiquing the concept of racial inferiority, still held onto pseudo-scientific notions of race, remaining within the racist paradigm of racial difference. While black discourse in this era sought universal emancipation, Mbembe argues that it redeployed cultural difference and relied on the fantasy of the racial subject, and ultimately made a link between race and geography, which, in uniting the spatial, racial, and civic bodies, made “Blackness” and “Africanness” an unbreakable chain of cultural identity. 

As such, Mbembe explores the development of the search for Black self-consciousness, which Mbembe claims left the fundamental foundations of 19th-century anthropology intact through embracing the fiction of race. For Mbembe, these Black discourses didn’t question the concept of racial difference, but rather only challenged the inferiority of their race against others. This turns into a project of stunted potential, as “in this context, ‘work for the universal’ consists in expanding the Western ratio of the contributions brought by Black ‘values of civilization,’ the ‘specific genius’ of the Black race, for which ‘emotion’ in particular is considered the cornerstone” (90). Unable to break out of the limitations of Black Reason, Mbembe writes, “Pan-Africanism developed within a racist paradigm that triumphed in Europe during the 19th century” (92). As a result of this deadlock, “such work only reinforced a sense of resentment and the neurosis of victimization among Blacks'' (92). These Black thinkers relied on “Blackness” as a support from which to launch their critique (what Mbembe calls the “black imaginary”), but which ultimately limits reality to the realm of appearances and relies on the notion of the colony as a way to “recall the primordial displacement between the self and the subject” (105). 

Within this reference to the colony in Black texts, Mbembe employs a psychoanalytic examination of the relationship between race, desire, sexuality, slavery, and libidinal economy, positing that “Blacks remember the colonial potentate [rulers] as a founding trauma, yet at the same time refuse to admit their unconscious investment in the colony as a desire-producing machine” (120).  To explain this refusal to confess the unconscious investment in the colony, Mbembe turns to the Black literary archive, showing how the language of memory is largely dependent on a critique of time, which manifests through dance, ritual, and literature.  This description of the accumulation of time is epitomized in the form of the novel, and Mbembe then relates this form of remembering death to the persistent existence of statues, effigies, and memorials to the dead that reify the memory of colonial power. 

Turning to the novel as a form of the transformation of the body into a site of memory, Mbembe closely examines the work of African novelists Amos Tutuola and Sony Labou Tansi. This chapter, Mbembe claims, is the foundation of the entire book, yet is also the densest and most challenging chapter. Mbembe returns to the condition of the Black slave in the early days of capitalism, where slavery served as “the nocturnal face of capitalism.” As such, Mbembe writes “the Black Man is in effect the ghost of modernity” (129). Here, Mbembe writes on the functions of the nocturnal economy of slavery, as it transformed human beings into commodities that could be bought or sold and is a power inhabited by the spirits of the dead. Mbembe, using these novels as a reference, writes on the relationship between power, ghostly violence, bodies as meat, and the work for life, which prevents the body “from becoming a simple object” (143). In these works, Mbembe emphasizes that Blackness, on a psychological level, is like being trapped within a skin that the subject didn’t choose, trapped in a coffin fully aware of what’s happening to them, but rendered powerless to express their experience. Here, in this space between life and death, there are two options: give up and die, or struggle and fight to survive. Black Consciousness of Blackness, Mbembe notes, arises from this “struggle to the death.”

Alongside and against the strains of Black Reason and search for self-consciousness that depends on the racial subject, Mbembe seeks to connect these forms of Black Consciousness with the broader category of humanity to open up various ways of reimagining universal communities that can overcome the deadlock of late-stage capitalism (and the racism on which it depends). To do this, Mbembe utilizes the work of Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Nelson Mandela, and more, ultimately drawing from a wide range of thinkers across disciplines to reconstruct an emancipatory notion of “Blackness.” For Césaire, “Black” communicates something that has nothing to do with race, but is rather an affirmation of “a difference that was not to be simplified, not to be veiled, and from one should not turn away by claiming that it was inexpressible” (159). In Fanon’s exploration of violence, Mbembe takes from it a sense that there is something intangible within every human subject that no form of domination can erase or wholly contain. Mbeme’s solution, therefore, is to “embrace and retain the signifier ‘Black’ not with the goal of finding solace within it but rather as a way of clouding the term in order to gain distance from it” (173).  Thus, “Blackness” conjures a reaffirmation of “the innate dignity of every human being and of the very idea of a human community, a same community, an essential human resemblance and proximity” (173). In this wholly humanist solution (although taking inspiration from the praxis of liberation within Christianity, namely the structure of incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection), Mbembe calls for a new politics and ethics founded on a call to justice that focuses on the Other, which is “at once difference and similarity, united” (178). 

To accomplish this, Mbembe proposes the ethic of restitution and reparation as the basis for establishing universal justice. Reparation is necessary particularly because of the damages and scars left by history, which has consistently habituated itself to the death of others. The proclamation of difference that is found within certain schools of Black thought, according to Mbembe, “is only one facet of a larger project - the project of a world that is coming, a world before us, one whose destination is universal, a world freed from the burden of race, from resentment, and from the desire for vengeance that all racism calls into being” (183). 

Commendations: 

First of all, as you can probably tell from my extensive overview, Critique of Black Reason is immensely dense and full of fascinating insights. It is thoroughly comprehensive and academically rigorous, and Mbembe is scholarly and poetic in equal measure. Laurent Dubois, his translator, has done a phenomenal job in bringing out the poetic beauty and essence of his writing, even if I wonder from time to time whether the dense prose of this work is clearer in its original French. This contribution is an important project in bringing Mbembe’s work into the Anglophone world and its postcolonial discourses. 

In terms of content, Mbembe does a commendable job in demonstrating how Blackness is embedded in the structures of modernity, taking us from the Atlantic slave trade to our current era of globalization and neoliberalism. He utilizes a wide array of literature from the Black diaspora, stitching together fragments of Black thought and discourse to trace their development over the centuries. He also balances sources and perspectives from France, South Africa, and the United States, and shows how their legacies of colonialism, apartheid, and slavery are still lingering in the present. While not wholly original in its tracing of the development of slavery and race, Mbembe’s most innovative and novel contributions are on the shifting psychoanalytic dimensions of the colony within Black thought, as well as reinvigorating interest in the political potential for Frantz Fanon’s work in our contemporary world. In this work, Mbembe synthesizes the development of slavery, apartheid, and colonialism through the lens of Black Reason and shows how these concepts have shaped the self-identity of Black communities. 

Furthermore, I appreciated how Mbembe traces the development of race alongside the demands of capitalism, especially how the logic of race is intrinsically tied to “the logic of profit, the politics of power, and the instinct for corruption, which together precisely define colonial practice” (62). Mbembe constructs this idea of Black Reason as a consciousness of being Black in a Western world that has primarily been constructed by white, European ideology. The struggle to construct a self-identity within Black communities against this Western construction of Blackness gave rise to Black Consciousness, which, in many cases, still held onto the fiction of race as an ontological category. By highlighting this concept of Black Reason, Mbembe reads the texts of Black discourses against the common Western notions of reason and race, thus turning the texts into a site of opposition, brimming with emancipatory potential. As such, Critique of Black Reason is a sweeping interdisciplinary tour-de-force, bringing together insights from philosophy, sociology, history, and political theory to show how our concepts of race have shaped our patterns of thinking. 

Critique: 

On the other hand, while there’s so much packed into this small volume, this naturally makes the text immensely dense and difficult to understand. This is by far one of my most underlined and annotated texts of the past year, rivaled only by either Todd McGowan’s Emancipation After Hegel, Zizek’s Hegel in a Wired Brain, or Eugene Thacker’s Starry Speculative Corpse. As such, if you have no background in postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, or critical theory, then this is going to be a nigh-impenetrable read. In a teaching context, while I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to teach in applicable graduate-level courses, I would be reticent to assign this text to undergraduates, even upperclassmen. 

In terms of content, one of the potential issues within this construction of Black Reason is that, when misunderstood,  it can run into the danger of essentializing Blackness, relying on the category of racial difference to posit a kind of Blackness that is inherent within all Black people. Mbembe addresses this, as he recognizes that to be Black in Africa is different than being Black in America, which is different than being Black in the Caribbean or the Middle East. Thus, Blackness becomes a fragmented and increasingly complex concept, primarily defined by a sense of alterity. But we are left with a strange sense of vacillation in the text in regards to Black Reason. Following Mbembe’s historical account, is Black Reason a constructed fiction that, while structuring our behavior and material conditions, should be overcome? Or, following Mbembe’s positing of Black Reason’s status as an almost transcendental limit of reason, is it a metaphysical critique through which to draw a universal humanity? Mbembe seems to want it both ways, portraying Black Reason both as a product of history and a force that exists as an excess, or surplus, to our limits of reason.  This is only further obfuscated by Mbembe’s poetic deviations throughout the text. While beautiful in places, the obscure prose tends to obfuscate more than reveal.

Also, while Mbembe relies heavily on the work and thought of Fanon, I found it odd that he does not engage with one of Fanon’s greatest influences: Marx. While there is a similar critique of capitalism inherent within Mbembe’s argument, he broadly ignores much of the socialist tradition of anti-racist action through the 19th and 20th centuries within this work. Economics and class are almost completely glossed over in his assessments of the historical development of race and Black Consciousness, which problematizes the notion of a universal “Blackness” that applies to all, regardless of class differences. Too often, Mbembe seems to turn to the psychological effects of colonialism, which is undoubtedly important, but often to the neglect of its material effects and how to concretely move beyond a post-colonial world. 

This is most readily apparent in Mbeme’s reading of Fanon, where he tends to domesticate Fanon’s more radical thought, particularly his 1961 book, The Wretched of the Earth. Mbembe tends to take Fanon’s material critique and turns it into a post-Césairean project of healing and mending with humanity. This precisely misses Fanon’s explicit critique that Blackness must go beyond simply replicating a form of European humanism. Mbembe seems to tacitly agree with Fanon’s notion that violence might be the only recourse that the colonized have against the colonizers but then undercuts this notion by reassuring the reader that introspective reevaluations and non-violence (notably through the example of Nelson Mandela) are the ways to build a universal humanity beyond race. Mbembe seems uneasy around the more radical parts of Fanon’s emancipatory work, but can’t quite bring himself to disavow them, so he rather reinscribes them with an internalized meaning. For many more radical Fanonian readers, this reading will be wholly unsatisfying and will seem rather conservative. Indeed, in a post-Trump era in which racism against Black Americans, Asian Americans, immigrants from Central and South America, and Muslim immigrants still maintains a considerable presence, how do we dispense with the biological fiction of race while also maintaining the political potential of Blackness? 

To answer this question, and perhaps provide a gentle intervention in Mbembe’s conclusion, we could turn to one of Fanon’s other great influences: Jacques Lacan. While Mbembe’s construction relies on the ethics of difference and a Levinasian focus on encountering the face of the Other, it tends to amount to little more than a recognition of the other or an ethic of differences, which reduces the material necessities of politics to purely internal mindset changes, which more often than not amount to little more than platitudes that do little to effect real change in the status quo. As a counter to this, we can recognize that even the face of radical alterity (for Mbembe, “Blackness”) is still registered as a face, and is therefore still mediated through the Symbolic order. In a Zizekian twist (courtesy of the work of Zahi Zalloua in Zizek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future), we can:

truly see the figure of the black not as a fetish but as a candidate  for the “part of no-part, which means, at the very least, to see the struggle of blacks as part of a global struggle against suffering and the destruction of lives...Only through such a global struggle - against the “Becoming Black of the World,” against the voracious and intractable capitalist logic that deprives humans of rights and protection and reduces them to viable and disposable things - can blacks help to bring into existence a new “species” of humanity, a humanity that would violently lay bare the fake and ideological inclusivity of the Human (again playing the ‘white’ egalitarian-emancipatory tradition against itself), that would touch the Real (that would render what is “non-all”), and “redefine the very universality of what it means to be human.” (Zalloua 142)

Many within the Black community around the world find themselves in a proletarian position, alongside Palestinians, immigrants, and many others as they struggle toward emancipation and against the forces of racism. Perhaps the key for the Left will be to unite these suffering and exploited populations across the world to share in a common struggle. Instead of Blackness vying alone to be recognized as a genuine part of humanity, the project for the Left should be to form coalitions of the different groups caught in the same struggle, coordinating their efforts toward the common goal of radically changing the world around us, recognizing that our humanity lies precisely in that terrifying gap between ourselves and the Other. 

Conclusion: 

Overall, Critique of Black Reason, while a difficult and complex read, serves as an important intervention in the discourse of postcolonialism in the 21st century. Mbembe provides us with a genealogy of race and Blackness, showing how the world and our thinking have been shaped by colonialism over the centuries, as well as how we might move toward creating a more just society in our future. For those interested in postcolonial or anti-racist history and theory, this will be an essential read, despite its density. Mbembe gives us a larger context for understanding the creation and perpetuation of race as an ontological category in the Western world, and this translation serves as a wonderful addition of Mbembe’s important work to the English-speaking world.