What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.
—Genesis 4:10

Last August, photos of eager, bright-eyed children flooded my Facebook newsfeed. A petite girl, with her strawberry blonde hair neatly pinned, primly crosses her legs next to a purple backpack and matching lunchbox under the caption, “Another day, another first day of school.” This marks the occasion as perfunctory. For the young girl’s sign, “first day of pre k 2014–2015,” announces her customary and fluid integration into society. Hers is not an accomplishment, so much as a fulfillment of expectations.

Another friend of mine juxtaposed a photo of her son standing tall, proudly showing a “welcome to preschool” sign, against a pensive girl cupping a sheet of cardboard bearing read handprints and the text “don’t shoot.” The mother’s caption lamented:

I always told myself I have to work really hard to keep my son on the straight and narrow to alleviate him experiencing racial profiling and such. It seems like that doesn’t even matter anymore. Next week I will release my son into the world as he starts preschool and I can only Pray, Hope and have Faith that he won’t ever have the same fate as Mike Brown. #PrayForStl

Here she grieves the impossibility of her black son’s existence in America today. For her son, the first day of school inaugurates his movement into the public sphere, which will reduce him to an expendable criminal. Inculcating him into rigorously self-policing, his every habitus1 will somehow fail.

Mike Brown, those who came before him, Eric Garner, and too many others since, testify to Michel Foucault’s concept of power as relation. Specifically, Foucault articulates the operation of society supplying the demand for crime.2 That is, criminals are necessarily produced, captured, and executed in the name of defending society.3 One cannot exist without the other. Foucault explicitly links this procedure to racism.4 These current events expose American culture’s staging of black males as threatening and disposable subjects. However, the images described above illustrate not only the possibility of resistance, but also its necessity—despite being fraught with hegemony.

Using Foucault to advance activism might come as a surprise to readers who interpret Foucault’s political theory as underscoring the counter-productivity of political resistance. For this reason, Cynthia Nielsen argues in Foucault, Douglass, Fanon, and Scotus in Dialogue: On Social Construction and Freedom that “Foucault’s understanding of power relations assumes free subjects, and his notion of resistance is inextricably tied to his notion of power relations. Power and resistance, for Foucault, are correlative concepts. Thus, the ubiquity and inescapability of power relations goes hand in hand with the always present possibility for resistance.”5 Offering three male examples, Nielsen illustrates the potential for change despite subjectivity proving inextricable from social formation. And so, the relativity of subject formation alerts us to the malleability of the very forces that construct it. Oppression offers opportunity.

Far from biological determinism, Foucault’s theory of subject formation as a relation among people and society illuminates blackness coupled with masculinity on a trajectory of incarceration and/or death in America as profoundly unnatural. Thus, Nielsen avers that Foucault’s theory facilitates insurrectional knowledges and political resistance precisely because subjects and societies are constructed.

While some readers periodize Foucault’s writings relative to his activism, others detect a consistent commitment to dissention. Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Žižek and others critique Foucault’s theory as incompatible with resistance. In opposition, Carl Death posits:

By adopting a practices and mentalities focus, rather than an actor-centric approach, and by seeking to destabilize the binaries of power and resistance, and government and freedom, that have structured much of political thought, an analytics of protest approach illuminates the mutually constitutive relationship between dominant power relations and counter-conducts, and shows how protests both disrupt and reinforce the status quo, at the same time.6

In accordance with scholars like Death, Nielsen enters these debates firmly defending the consistent potential for protest within Foucault’s work.

If Foucault’s praxis offers any indication, he regularly participated in protests. Pictured below, brow tense and megaphone in hand, Foucault demonstrates his discontent in the streets of Paris.

Over the course of his lifetime, the theorist protested prisons, executions, the Polish United Worker’s Party, and the suppression of protests, among other issues. Perhaps an argument can be made for the dissonance between his thought and actions. At the very least, however, his activism suggests that his theory was not intended to subdue citizens into placid compliance with the state.

That being said, one of Foucault’s profoundest insights lies in his unveiling that, due to relations of power, acts of resistance reinforce the very structures they protest because the two mutually constitute one another. Recognizing this dynamic suggests that the subject’s activity shapes and potentially redirects systems and powers, though never in an ahistorical or unproblematic manner. Foucault’s own shortcomings illustrate this, evidenced in the dissatisfactory account of colonialism and sex as trauma in his oeuvre. And yet, the value of Foucault’s insight allows his successors to use his theory against, or at least beyond, his writings.

In addition, like most people, Foucault occupied a complex position both in power and as marginalized. Privileged as a European, male scholar, Foucault could not account for how his prestige circumscribed his analysis. Feminists, queer theorists, and post-colonial theorists underscore such deficiencies. And yet, he was also discriminated against for his sexual practices. Thus he simultaneously inhabited an afflicted position in society.

As Nielsen observes, Fredrick Douglass also pivoted between oppression due to his blackness and oppressor as a male. Similarly, womanists charge white feminists and suffragists with mistreating women of color as they fought for the right to vote. In fact, Elizabeth Cady Stanton cooperated with Fredrick Douglass without regard for women of color. White women and black men in America display the complexity of subject relations due to various factors of privilege and dispossession associated with their bodies. Therefore, neither sex nor race fully defines one’s relationship to power, for one’s reception and options continually shift according to context. In accordance with Foucault’s theory, then, subjects are not classified according to a power hierarchy, but rather shift continually from within the throes of power relations—especially during acts of political resistance.

While I share Nielsen’s optimism concerning the compatibility of resistance with Foucauldian political theory (perhaps I take this even further by asserting resistance as necessary), I hesitate to embrace her account of anthropology. According to Nielsen, all subjects share reason and freedom as defining features of humanity. She writes:

[Foucault’s] genealogical and archaeological descriptions of power relations, freedom, resistance possibilities, reverse discourse, and active self-formation via various intentional and volitional “technologies of the self” presuppose a specific kind of subject possessing cognitive and volitional capacities. These capacities are not created by the subject herself; rather, employing Christian vocabulary, I shall argue that they are gifts given by the original author; they are essential aspects of human beings, of human persons created in the image and likeness of God and thus reflecting in a finite and analogous manner divine rationality and freedom.7

When reason characterizes humanity, how does one account for the historical rendering of those colonized, children, and people with cognitive challenges as subhuman or nonhuman? Applauding a person of color for disproving the irrationality of their people group preserves rather than questions an exploitative system. It comes as no surprise, then, that Fredrick Douglass and Frantz Fanon exhibit misogynistic attitudes in their writings. For their accomplishments testify to the corrupting forces lurking within society, which offer acknowledgment of some semblance of personhood in exchange for participation in oppression. Thus, these two black people become “men” and citizens in their very acts of debasing black women.

Elsewhere, Nielsen evokes limitation and contingency as unique features of anthropology.8 Borrowing from Bonhoeffer, I assert that this approach rightly locates humanity in “the middle” or the already-not-yet of redemption, where people are incapable of sinless action, and yet are not authorized to perpetuate exploitative powers. Rather, this framework suggests that people are called to further the kingdom of God in the present precisely because creatures cannot actualize utopias. Humanity, then, unwittingly abets evil, though never as authorized by Christ.9 Accepting that unlike God, people are not capable of sinless protest need not discourage one from participation. Interrogating and confessing one’s inability to extricate motives and actions from self-service contributes to resistance efforts.10 For illuminating these webs of power protests the fiction of disinterested, altruistic action, thereby expanding protest beyond something “out there” and embracing everyone’s culpability. This alternative anthropology objects to appeals to the imago Dei, which too often functions as a false universal, actually preserving whiteness and masculinity.11

Would not Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of subjectivity provide an alternative framework in which the “splitting” of the subject reveals the constructed and faulty nature of shoring up and protecting one’s ego?12 Though Nielsen asserts that “the ability to resist hegemonic discourses and to (re)construct one’s subjectivity requires an active subject,” is this drive to (re)construct one’s subjectivity a reiteration of the Enlightenment project? Certainly this suggestion goes beyond the scope of Nielsen’s work, though Frantz Fanon was a psychoanalyst. I pose it here as an invitation into further conversation concerning investments in “the self” arising out of modernity. Because Nielsen characterizes Christian “paradigms” as “an ongoing dying to self, an acknowledgement of one’s need for divine aid to renew the self,” Lacanian psychoanalysis might align with a new creation rather than attempt to recover a self that might never have existed in the first place.13

These are significant concerns because they relate directly to anthropology, which is to say that defining the subject shares a sordid history with delineating what it means to be human. Because the two have historically been collapsed with whiteness and masculinity, what might reorienting these towards blackness accomplish? While on the one hand it appears to validate the existence and value of people of color, as can be the case with some imago Dei arguments, it does so according to the same hegemonic terms. Therefore, drawing more bodies into a corrupt system of evaluation in no way disrupts the structure or technologies at work. On the contrary, it merely involves more participants within a nefarious schema. Therefore, offering subjectivity and humanity to more people insidiously preserves the problem. Appeals to natural law, ontology, or rights rhetoric only lubricates the machine professed to resist. And this is one of Foucault’s insights—an acumen that displays its profundity and dynamism in the turning of his analysis back upon the theorist.

In addition, I am curious about the possibilities of eschatological improvisation rather than telic freedom that Nielsen advises. The former more closely aligns with her jazz metaphor for theology.14 This forum uniquely allows for questions and response, therefore I ask: what Foucauldian concepts support Nielsen’s preservation of telos?

Returning to recent protests in America corroborates Foucault’s political theory concerning the complexity of resistance and power relations. Eternity E. Martis writes in the Huffington Post, “Dear Angry White People, The Ferguson Protest Was Not About You.” While the protest is about white people in the sense that it resists a system serving whites, Martis rightly narrates the complexity of ally participation. We might add to her insight by recognizing that people in positions of power struggle to involve themselves in activism without inadvertently reasserting their power and subjectivity. Usurping the quote “Hands up, don’t shoot,” for instance, white people reiterate the problematic iniquity among Americans rather than challenging it. For it is from a location of entitlement that one imagines all scripts as available and fitting for oneself.

Similarly, Kara Brown articulates, “The Problem With #CrimingWhileWhite.” This article illuminates the trouble with allies seeking to express support via sharing stories of white American law breaking without penalty. Brown explains, “I’m really happy for you, but Eric Garner is still dead,” which redirects the discourse to the profoundly dire stakes here. Provocatively, she asks, “Because really, what are black people supposed to do with these stories . . . they simply confirm what we already know: white privilege is f—— amazing.” Also, Brown notes the implicit expectation for gratitude that whites exhibit for merely recognizing advantages they enjoy in society. Again, such drawbacks support Foucault’s theory of resistance, but not necessarily to the effect that they prohibit white participation in protest. Rather, they illustrate how deep inequity permeates even modes of resistance and thus the pressing need for activism.

While Nielsen acknowledges the status of black bodies as socially dead in society, I desire further treatment of the gravity of this non/existence. As the first day of school images described above indicate, bodies determine the im/possibility of performing proper citizenship. Moreover, the consequences of failure prove severe—literal death. And not just any death, rather, recent events brazenly portray senseless shooting and choking of black men in America’s streets. What are the uniquely compounded qualities of death for bodies already rendered socially dead? In this context, does the opportunity for active subjectivity actually function as a burden due to its near impossibility? More pointedly, would not a Christian intervention ideally posit an option that cuts across the rules of this thrown game instead of instructing those disadvantaged in how to best play?

Therefore we are compelled to protest; and yet, to also interrogate how our resistance reasserts white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, etc. In other words, how does activism contribute to recapitulating our selves and others as docile bodies in service to corrupt systems? While Nielsen’s figures “—speaking from the margins and liminal spaces of modernity—expand, strengthen, and offer correctives to the emancipatory dimensions of Foucault’s project,” how might women, particularly women of color, contribute to these insights?15 Although Nielsen addresses this concern briefly in her chapter on Fredrick Douglass, it is also germane to Fanon, who infamously wrote, “. . . about the woman of color. I know nothing about her.”16

Allow me, now, to turn our attention to “the black woman” here. Deemed a repository for multiple forms of discrimination, black women contribute unique perspicacity concerning resistance.17 Consider, for example, Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In the novel, the main character Sethe commits infanticide rather than turning her children over to her slave master. In this instance, Sethe felt physical death posed a better alternative to the non-life of slavery. What does Sethe’s abject desperation and “freedom” of choice suggest? How is her action defiant yet also the fulfillment of prescribed death for black bodies in America?

Morrison’s chilling fiction effectively alerts readers to the cacophony of resistance. Protecting Sethe’s children from the horrors of slavery does not take the form of passive or effective protest. Rather, Morrison pens a sanguine event in which the maternal figure aims to give life via death. However, in the scenes that follow, Sethe finds herself haunted by her child’s spirit. The child’s blood cries out from the earth. Disquieted and pained, Sethe attempts to do penance by coddling Beloved’s spirit. Though, instead of critiquing Sethe for what some might consider an unnatural act, Morrison provokes readers to contemplate the desperation that prompted Sethe.

Among the children introduced above, it is the image of the young black girl whose haunting blood-red handprints and “don’t shoot” text impart context and meaning to that of the black boy and white girl preparing for their first day of school. Her black female body, typically rendered invisible in American society, prophesies against the militarization of the police. The black mother who set this child against her son does not particularize Mike Brown; instead she detects what his death portends for all citizens.18 Her subjectivity moves in relation to others. She does not position herself as an objective observer, hapless victim, or villainous perpetrator, but rather cries out in desperation from within the welter. In this way, she pulls the viewer into the horror of culpability, but not as an end; rather, she exhorts us to participate in her protest.

Cynthia Nielsen’s chapter on Frederick Douglass in Foucault, Douglass, Fanon, and Scotus in Dialogue: On Social Construction and Freedom covers significant ground and represents an insightful scholarly advance on the philosophical and theological dimensions of Douglass’s thought. Particularly significant are Nielsen’s insights on the concreteness of Douglass’s lived experience in contrast to the abstractions of the Hegelian master/slave dialectic. Nielsen emphasizes this point when she writes that there are “problems both with the abstract, ahistorical nature of Hegel’s account and the necessity he posits at each stage of his system,” and that “given the dialectical reversals inherent in his [Hegel’s] system as a whole, his account suggests that over time slavery will simply eradicate itself. Douglass, however, calls this claim into question. Having lived most of his life in a full-blown racialized society . . . Douglass became convinced of the need for active resistance.”1 As is the problem with many white philosophers, much of their work is removed from human experience.2 And although Hegel’s critique of Kant’s abstraction is well known,3 Nielsen deftly points to the deficiency in Hegel’s abstract thinking as it relates to the experience of Douglass’s self-generated attempts at manumission from what he called the “peculiar institution” of American chattel slavery. Moreover, Nielsen succeeds in showing both a convergence with Foucault as it relates to the notions of the panoptic gaze and divergence from Foucault concerning Douglass’s transcultural moral commitments.4

In this essay, I focus on the dialectical role of knowledge in discursive practices and in Douglass’s acts of resistance. Specifically, I want to show how the despair that follows Douglass’s literacy—his attainment of “knowledge”—is not only akin to the knowledge that “Adam and Eve gained through their transgressive act”5 and is thus an indirect communication-generated, Kierkegaardian moment of despair, but also that this knowledge becomes a part of Douglass’s resistance to an epistemic regime of oppression that, I will argue, comes from a rational quest for knowledge that is, in many ways, uniquely philosophical. In both instances, I want to show that knowledge is at once creative and destructive.

Although Nielsen correctly diagnoses Douglass’s existential despair as an encounter with a troubling species of knowledge as an awareness of the profound hardships of life as a slave, there is more depth to the oppressive side of knowledge that one finds within the epistemic regime of whiteness in which Douglass is situated as a piece of chattel. Knowledge is thus at once both liberating and despair-producing for Douglass on the back end, while it is oppressive and racist toward Douglass and all American slaves—and many free blacks—on the front end. Indeed, it is the latter form of knowledge that produces the former type of knowledge in Douglass. It is this sort of knowledge that is the other half of the epistemic dialectic that I believe can take Nielsen’s already provocative, insightful account of Douglass’s subjectivity to a deeper level, for it not only better helps us understand Douglass’s life as a life of resistance to oppression, but it also helps us to understand the nature and origin of the racist, and hypocritically “Christian” regime of whiteness that produced the oppression in the first instance. With a deeper understanding of this so-called Christian regime of whiteness, its idolatrous pitfalls can perhaps be avoided and its devastating effects alleviated.

Douglass, Anxiety, and Despair

The first half of knowledge’s creative/destructive dialectic is Douglass’s existential moment of despair, resulting from a Kierkegaardian moment of indirect communication, double reflection and subjective appropriation. In his 1845 narrative, he gives us an account of the impression that the abolitionist tract The Columbian Orator had upon him. It is in this publication that Douglass finds a fictional dialogue between a master and a slave. Through his reading of this dialogue, Douglass becomes aware of “the power of truth over the conscience of even a slaveholder.”6 But Douglass quickly points out that although reading the dialogue enabled him “to utter” his “thoughts and to meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery” and thus “relieved” him “of one difficulty, they brought another even more painful than the one of which I was relieved.”7 He continues on to point out that “I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition without the remedy.”8 Here, Douglass experiences despair because of an indirect communication, for the dialogue between the master and the slave was a fictional dialogue that effectively removed Douglass’s deception that all he could ever be was a piece of chattel. In contrast, by reading The Columbian Orator, Douglass was able to see himself as the articulate and persuasive slave. He writes that reading The Columbian Orator “enabled me to utter my thoughts and to meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery.”9 So it is that, in a Kierkegaardian sense, Douglass engaged in double reflection and subjective appropriation, committing himself to moral suasion as the principal means to abolition. For Kierkegaard, despair is the existential condition where one wants to be rid of a self that is fundamentally at odds with itself. The self is, all at once, temporal and eternal, finite and infinite, and determined and free.10 It is the realization that he is free that is so difficult for Douglass, for as a slave, his being was already determined. To put it in Sartrean existentialist terms, as a slave, Douglass had an essence that preceded his existence.11 Being a slave was thus a fate to be accepted. But the emergence of Douglass’s literacy brought with it the realization that being a slave was, in reality, not a fate to be accepted with resignation, but rather was a condition to be resisted with passion. And this realization was a harsh one for Douglass, as he wished himself to be a slave: “In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Anything, no matter what, to get rid of thinking.”12 Nielsen is right that Douglass’ newly found literacy is a “transgressive act” akin to Adam and Eve’s, but it is also significantly different, for whereas Adam and Eve sought knowledge of good and evil as an end, Douglass sought knowledge as a means to the greater end of physical, and moral freedom. Recall that Adam and Eve sought a knowledge of good and evil. But good and evil are things that are done, not things that are merely known. In seeking knowledge for the sake of knowledge, an ethical directive not to do so was disregarded, and Adam and Eve had fallen victim to the human tendency for epistemic addiction: they sought knowledge to the exclusion of ethics.13 Such is the nature of Douglass’s world; he is fixed as chattel within an oppressive epistemic regime that I describe below.

Knowledge and Oppression

Douglass—and every other American slave—existed within a theologically and politically justified epistemological framework of oppression. The Hamitic curse, the argument for Negro baptism, and the laws of the slave trade are all grounded in an onto-theological “Christian” conception of the world where black bodies become the victims of Aristotelian-infused conceptions of natural law such that they are slaves “by nature.” It is this antecedent epistemic framework that Nielsen does not discuss, but which nevertheless first defines Douglass as a “nigger,” and a slave. The “god” that is at the core of this oppressive epistemic framework is an idol of human reason. Akin to the Aristotelian first cause, which was borne of a desire to eliminate infinite regress, this god becomes a reflection of the white community that produced it. So it is that even as Aristotle could construct a universe in which god is the first cause of motion, that same god—an imago hominis of Greek thought—is a cosmic representation of pure actuality and presides over a world in which anyone who is born as non-Greek is a slave.14 Scholasticism then absorbs Aristotelian theology into Christianity, making rational arguments for God’s existence a normative endeavor that, despite modern critiques, retained enormous influence throughout the enlightenment, and became absorbed into Christian theology in such a way that Christianity and slaveholding could actually be reconciled to one another!

Consider Reverend Godwin’s argument for Negro baptism. It held that black slaves could be baptized because while their bodies belonged to their slave masters, their souls belonged to God. Beneath this theological sophistry is a pernicious form of Cartesian dualism that effectively splits black identity in half and that justifies slavery throughout life and enables freedom only in death; conveniently at a time when the black slave is of no use to the white slave owner. Douglass himself recognized the profound moral shortcomings of this theological sophistication when he referred to the dialectical subtlety of Reverend Godwin as “too metaphysical.”15 Here we see an onto-theological justification for a slave system disguised as sound theology, but one that is actually a god borne of epistemic addiction. This god represents a reversal of the Judeo-Christian notion that God creates human beings in his image to serve Him, for this “god” is created in the image of humans, to serve corrupt human interests. It is against this onto-theological backdrop that Douglass’s dehumanization is politically and socially justified. This sort of onto-theological knowledge is as creative and as destructive as Douglass’s emergent literacy: it creates a world of oppression, and it destroys not only black and white humanity, but it also destroys Christianity as well, leading Douglass to call slaveholding Christianity “the boldest of all frauds and the grossest of all libels.”16

Conclusion

Nielsen gifts Douglass scholarship with an insightful study of Douglass’s resistance to oppression and the formation of his subjectivity in resistance to that oppression. My aim here was to engage her work through a discussion of not only how knowledge generates Douglass’s existential despair, but also how knowledge also leads to the acts of resistance in the first place. Knowledge is thus dialectical: for both Douglass and for the slave system it was creative and destructive. For the slave system, onto-theological justifications for slavery created an oppressive system and destroyed both white and black humanity, and for Douglass, knowledge helped to destroy that system, and replace it with creative possibilities borne of Douglass’s acts of resistance.

In Foucault, Douglass, Fanon, and Scotus in Dialogue: On Social Construction and Freedom, Cynthia Nielsen moves deftly and patiently between her multiple conversation partners, producing a creative arrangement in which the resonances and dissonances converge in a symphonic expression of a politics founded on the rationality and freedom of all human beings.1 It’s a wonderful text and Nielsen should be commended both for the breadth of the conversation and for unfolding this theme in a cohesive and powerful way.

The subtitle of Nielsen’s book, “On Social Construction and Freedom,” describes her overriding concern to revisit the question of free will and determinism in light of more recent claims that “the subject” is a product of particular institutional apparatuses and their accompanying discourses. A socially constructed subject would be one wholly externally determined and, therefore, it seems incapable of freedom or resistance. Nielsen seeks to show how a politically infused humanism—a politics grounded in the innate and universal dignity of all human beings as free, rational agents—is both philosophically and politically necessary to account for and ethically defend resistance to oppressive social structures like slavery and colonialism.

The following engagement focuses on the fourth chapter, which bears the longest title of all the chapters in the book: “Fanon on Decolonizing Colonized Subjectivities and the Quest for an Historically Attuned Symphonic Humanism.” Instead of summarizing how Nielsen’s chapter approaches and handles the monumental task signified by its title, I want focus on one moment within it: her discussion of Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the dialectical negation of black humanism (Négritude). Besides providing a way to summarize Nielsen’s approach, this moment brings to light a tension or contradiction within Fanon’s own account: the universal humanism he articulates is one he is also struggling in some ways to escape. I will end by suggesting that Nielsen’s notion of freedom as an ability to act “otherwise” can help us move beyond the impasse Fanon faces by placing the excess that is human freedom back in the body.

Fanon, Sartre, and the Dialectics of (Black) Humanism

Fanon’s famous chapter on “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” narrates the lived experience of a human subject in a world that renders him an object. Fanon describes an extreme situation of external determination and social construction, one at, it would seem, the limits of human freedom: instead of the body being developed as an expression of the human will in the world, the black body is over-determined externally, rendered an object under the white gaze such that the black man, upon entrance into white society, is never situated in a body that is “his” but rather one that is always-already constructed against and imposed upon him.2

Fanon, in Nielsen’s reading, ultimately resists such external determination through the politics of Négritude. Not only does Fanon’s endorsement of Négritude signify his “desire to recover African values and to share those values with the world” (90); it also indexes his freedom, for Fanon could and did reject the imposition of white social constructions of blackness by constructing his own. On Jean-Paul Sartre’s interpretation, however, this freedom found in Négritude is only a weak stage in a dialectical progression. Négritude is a reactive and passing historical moment: once its negative work has been accomplished (negating European white supremacy), it dissolves itself for the sake of the truly global humanism of the raceless proletariat.

Nielsen argues that Fanon reluctantly accepts Sartre’s dialectical account. Négritude has, therefore, a kind of “therapeutic function” in which one strategically constructs an ideal notion of black identity to negate white supremacy, although one will “eventually move to an increasingly more complex view of its identity as social construction” (92). Through this “strategic essentialism,” Fanon refuses to accept a social construction—European colonialism—as ultimate and necessary. This reworking of externally enforced social constructions indicates the ways in which Fanon’s politics requires an account of universal human freedom while still being attuned to the needs and complexities of particular historical situations.

For Fanon—and Nielsen does not emphasize this point strongly enough, I think—Sartre’s dialectical interpretation repeats the operative gesture of white supremacy: “between the white man and me there is irremediably a relationship of transcendence.”3 Earlier in the chapter, Fanon narrates the impossible relation between the black subject and its white Other: “I approached the Other . . . and the Other, evanescent, hostile but not opaque, transparent and absent, vanished.”4 As Fanon sought recognition of his self-assertive creativity—expressed in Négritude—Sartre responded by inscribing this self-asserting black freedom within a broader historical development, thereby vanishing himself from the relation and positioning black self-consciousness as something historically determined.5 Sartre, like all the other white interlocutors in the chapter, retains his transcendence to and determination of the field of the properly human, a position that is less interested in affirming or denying black self-consciousness (or humanity) and more focused on sustaining its own sense of self-determination (by vanishing from relation). Sartre, in this instance, remains unaffected by incorporating Négritude as a passing moment within his own personal as well as the global production of a post-racial, anti-capitalist humanism (a Hegelian moment that provides the ideal coincidence of self-production and external determination).6

This construction of white un-affectability (or the ideal of freedom from external determination or constraint) always carries with it, however, the production of human life given over to or dominated by affectability. As Nielsen notes, the subject is always “doubly constructed,” both shaped by external factors and shaping itself (42, 96). However, within the politics of the human, the impetus to secure self-determination from external constraints leads to a split between the exemplary performance of human self-construction (the transcendence of the white man) and those contained within but excised from this human ideal (those failed, externally determined subjects, the damned).7 In this scenario, recognition of the capacity for human self-determination can be one of the strategies whereby the politics of white transcendence and its damnation of black life continue.8 As Nielsen notes (28), even the dehumanizing structures of slavery presupposed a tacit recognition of the humanity of the enslaved, and the end of slavery, which removed the ambivalence of this recognition, failed to undermine the relation of transcendence: “the upheaval reached the black man from the outside.”9

Fanon has, as it were, two ways of envisioning the resuscitation of humanism as an exit from this situation of external determination or damnation and Nielsen discusses them in tandem (95). In Black Skin, White Masks, human self-determination is maintained by preserving the human from any and all external determination: “the density of History determines none of my acts. I am my own foundation.”10 In The Wretched of the Earth, instead of denying the impact of power and violence, violence is embraced and developed through a dialectical progression of liberation.11 Here, activity is not the externalization of an always undetermined, transcendent will; rather the will and consciousness are products of labor and praxis, in this case, the labor of anti-colonial violence. The danger in both movements is that, as Françoise Vergès argues, vulnerability, passivity, and penetrability—affectability, in short—become signs of an improper placement within the community of (self-productive) man and must be “disavowed” for the sake of properly belonging to the human community.

Otherwise Freedom

Nielsen opens a way to move through this impasse faced by Fanon with her discussion of the metaphysics of freedom (though it is unclear to me whether Nielsen herself would advocate taking this path!). If the free will, as free, always retains the possibility of doing otherwise even while engaged in an act (13, 108), then human freedom need not be seen in a negative relationship to affectability: freedom is the otherwise, the excess, within any activity or situation.12 This excess need not be interiorized in and as the self-possessed and self-determining will of the subject opposed to externality and affectability. Rather, it might be located through Fanon’s closing words in this text, the final “prayer” addressed to his body: “O my body, always make me one who questions.”13

The questioning Fanon invokes indexes the excess, the otherwise within any situation, and this excess is generated by and through the body. The body itself, then, with its vulnerability and affectability is not a threatening limit to human freedom but its source, opening up—or so he prays!—this otherwise or excess within any and every activity. And it is precisely this excess that allows Fanon to chart, in his own way, the problems of a decolonial politics of human recognition while still not abandoning a politics of freedom: for his black body rendered object may still be reconstructed with “the intuitive lianas of [his] hands.” Which is to say, what Fanon knows and what Sartre forgets is not just that “the black man suffers in his body quite differently from the white man”;14 what Fanon knows is also what his black body may give him, other ways of being, or, freedom as an otherwise to (white masculine self-possessed) being, which would be, for Fanon, a freedom truly worthy of all our (human) bodies.15

Cynthia R. Nielsen brings several thinkers from the premodern, modern, and postmodern traditions into a fruitful dialogue on social construction and freedom. Her chapter devoted to John Duns Scotus makes a strong case for this conceptual symbiosis. Nielsen argues that Scotus’s conception of freedom as an agent’s self-determining power to cognize and then choose from among available alternatives helps explicate the freedom Michel Foucault attributes to persons capable of pursuing different options in an evolving network of power relationships. Since, according to Scotus, an agent’s choices are not necessitated by anything apart from the agent herself, the resulting conception of freedom offers Foucault a way of avoiding an overly deterministic picture of human beings as entirely conditioned by their prior social and biological circumstances. Reciprocally, Foucault’s emphasis upon the contingency of social conventions counteracts Scotus’s tendency to acquiesce in immoral practices of long duration, such as slavery, as if they were somehow inevitable. Finally, Scotus’s goal-oriented view of human freedom structured by intrinsic, transcultural tendencies to acquire autonomy, pursue self-development, and obtain other natural goods justifies Foucault’s preference for liberating over oppressive power relationships while also clarifying the nature of universal human rights championed by Frederick Douglass and Franz Fanon.

My purpose is not to challenge Nielsen’s insightful analysis but to facilitate further dialogue by pinpointing a problem with the Scotist conception of freedom. Specifically, there is a serious tension between Scotus’s claim that God possesses the absolute power to will contrary to what He actually wills and Scotus’s contention that God cannot dispense from strict natural law. Given this tension, Foucault might object that the Scotist conception of freedom is incoherent, and thus can make no positive contribution to a plausible account of interpersonal power relationships necessary for a proper understanding of social construction. I will argue that his formal distinction and his notion of superabundant sufficiency enable the Subtle Doctor to meet the foregoing objection. Therefore, the Scotist conception of freedom remains sufficiently clear to play the pivotal role Nielsen assigns it in the ongoing conversation about social construction and freedom.

Active Powers, Synchronic Contingency, and Superabundant Sufficiency

Scotus’s ontology includes agents possessing active potencies, or powers, in virtue of their properties. Some powers are purely natural. In virtue of its property of heat, flame possesses the power to burn wood under normal conditions. There are also purely rational powers. In virtue of my property of understanding mathematics, I possess the power to judge that 2 + 2 = 4. A purely natural power or a purely rational power typically yields only one kind of effect under given conditions.1 Flame cannot freeze water, and I cannot seriously judge that 2 + 2 = 765.

By contrast, in virtue of their cognitive and conative properties, human beings, angels, and God all possess freedom as an active power to act differently under the same conditions. In virtue of her properties of judging Tom to be a qualified candidate and desiring to fill a vacancy in her department, Alice possesses the active power of choosing to offer Tom the job, choosing to offer the job to someone else, or even choosing to offer nobody the job. Thus neither her external conditions nor her internal mental properties but only Alice herself determines how she chooses. Although Scotus does not mention it, an analogue of this indeterminacy can be found in nature: in virtue of its properties of length and mass, a stick balanced on one end possesses the power to fall this way or that way or even no way at all but instead to remain balanced. However, this indeterminate power is grounded in the stick’s purely nonmental properties, whereas free will is an indeterminate power grounded both in the agent’s cognitive and conative properties. Hence Scotus regards free will not as a purely natural active power but as a hybrid active power that is partially cognitive (intellectual) and partially conative (volitional).

Scotus attributes two other notable features to free will. The first has become known as synchronic contingency, or the will’s ability to choose otherwise at the very moment it chooses as it actually does. Suppose that at t_n Alice chooses to offer Tom the job. At t_n she can also choose not to offer Tom the job. Scotus’s point is not that at t_n Alice can simultaneously choose to offer Tom the job and choose not to offer him the job, which is impossible, but that when she chooses to offer Tom the job her choice at t_n is entirely contingent. Scotus seeks the ontological basis for this specific contingency. Some philosophers might propose that the contingency of Alice’s choice consists in the fact that at the moment t_n-1 before she made it, she was able either to choose to offer Tom the job or to choose not to offer him the job. Yet if this fact only exists at t_n-1, then it provides no ontological explanation of why Alice’s actual choice is contingent, since her choice only exists at t_n.2 Scotus supplies the missing explanation by “carrying forward” Alice’s ability to the moment of Alice’s actual choice: the contingency of Alice’s choice consists in the fact that at t_n itself Alice is able either to choose to offer Tom a job or to choose not to offer him a job. Though Scotus maintains that the divine nature does not exist in time but only in eternity, he can give a similar explanation of why divine choices are contingent: the contingency of God’s eternal choice to create the universe consists in the fact that in eternity God is able to choose to create the universe, to create some other universe, or even choose to create no universe at all.

Scotus also distinguishes indeterminacy of sufficiency based on a lack of actuality, such as a seed’s potential to grow when exposed to actual sunlight, from what he calls superabundant sufficiency, the second feature he attributes to free will:

Something indeterminate in the second sense, however, can determine itself. If this could occur where some limited actuality exists, how much more where the actuality is unlimited! For it would lack nothing simply required for an acting principle.3

The superabundant sufficiency possessed both by the uncreated divine will and angelic or human wills is entirely rooted in the agent’s own actuality. What this actuality might be will become clearer after we have considered a problem with Scotus’s view of free will.

Strict Natural Law and Divine Dispensation

Scotus distinguishes strict from extended cases of natural law. A strict natural law is either a per se nota proposition that is true in virtue of the meanings of its terms or logically follows from such a proposition. As examples Scotus gives the first two commandments: “You shall have no other gods before me,” and “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” Scotus reasons that “If God exists, then God alone should be loved as God” expresses a per se nota proposition, since by definition God is perfect goodness and only perfect goodness should be loved for its own sake. It logically follows that nothing other than God should be loved for its own sake. Furthermore, since showing something irreverence is incompatible with loving it, God should also be shown no irreverence (e.g., by taking His name in vain). Scotus concludes that God cannot dispense from these strict natural laws. But in extraordinary circumstances God can dispense from natural laws in the extended sense, such as the commandments against killing or stealing, since they neither are nor logically follow from per se nota propositions. Nevertheless, Scotus believes these later commandments to be “exceedingly in harmony” with the first two.4

Something is puzzling here. Certainly it lies within God’s power to command someone to love something else as God, or to command someone to show Him irreverence. God need only perform acts that any free human being can easily perform, such as saying, “John, I command you to love Baal for Baal’s own sake!” or writing, “Jane, you are hereby ordered take my name in vain five minutes from now!” Indeed, Scotus’s application of synchronic contingency to eternal divine choices appears to have precisely this consequence: although God eternally commands that we have no other gods before Him and never take His name in vain, God is eternally capable of dispensing from these strict natural laws by commanding the contrary.

Scotus might reply that the first two commandments are still crucially different from the rest. In extraordinary circumstances God can make it morally permissible or even morally obligatory to kill, steal, have more than one spouse, and so forth. Yet under no circumstances can God make it permissible or obligatory to love something other than perfect goodness for its own sake or to treat perfect goodness irreverently. So, since God is perfect goodness itself, under no circumstances can He make it permissible or obligatory to love something other than Himself for its own sake or to show Him irreverence.

However, this reply does not really get to the heart of the matter. God could dispense from the first two commandments, not by willing that what is contrary to these natural laws be morally just, but by willing that what is contrary to these morally just natural laws be done. For example, even though God commands us to act morally by obeying these laws, rewards us when we do, and punishes us when we do not, He could instead command us to act immorally by disobeying these laws, reward us when we do, and punish us when we do not.

Two unattractive options are available to Scotus. He could deny that God can command us to violate the first two commandments. But then there is something any intelligent creature can do that God cannot do, in which case God is not truly omnipotent. Alternatively Scotus could agree that God can command us to violate the first two commandments but deny that He would then command us to act immorally; instead God would ordain that disobeying these commandments is morally just. More generally, God cannot dispense from strict natural laws because whatever God wills is ipso facto a strict natural law. A disturbing consequence is that if God willed the torture of innocents, then torturing them would be morally just.

A Scotist Solution

Intuitively, an explanation for why God cannot dispense from strict natural law and still be omnipotent ought to lie in God’s perfect goodness. Scotus holds that the idea of perfect goodness is formally distinct both from the divine essence and the multitude of other ideas existing therein. For there to be a formal distinction between X and Y, X and Y must differ independently of our thinking, be thinkable independently of each other, and be capable inseparable existence in something yet separately realizable elsewhere. Intelligence and justice are formally distinct, since they do not differ merely because we think they do, can be thought of independently of one another, and exist inseparably in God yet are separately realizable elsewhere (e.g., in George, who is smart but unjust, and in Bob, who is just but ignorant).5 Similarly, the idea of perfect goodness exists inseparably along with the other ideas in the divine essence; yet the idea of perfect goodness, the divine essence, and the other ideas in it are separately realizable (e.g., in thinking creatures who possess some idea of perfect goodness without possessing the other ideas), would differ from each other even if there were no thinking creatures, and can be thought of independently of one other.

But what is the content of the idea of perfect goodness? Arguably, a perfectly good agent invariably chooses goodness while always possessing the power to choose evil. The point becomes clear in connection with a species of perfect goodness: a perfect altruist invariably chooses to help others even though she can always choose to harm them; a less perfect altruist always helps others but is incapable of choosing otherwise. Consequently, the perfect altruist deserves greater praise for her altruism. Her power to harm others does not negate her perfect altruism; rather, the fact that she can harm others yet never chooses to do so is precisely why she is a perfect altruist worthy of greater praise. Similarly, Scotus might contend, the fact that God is eternally capable of commanding us to love something besides Him for its own sake, to show Him irreverence, or to commit other moral evils while never exercising this capacity is precisely why God is perfectly good. Since commanding someone to disobey a strict natural law is evil, the idea of perfect goodness determines that God can but never will command us to disobey a strict natural law. On the other hand, under extraordinary circumstances commanding someone to disobey an extended natural law is not evil but permissible or even obligatory. Hence the idea of perfect goodness determines that God not only can but also may or sometimes even must command us to disobey an extended natural law.

For Scotus, God’s idea of perfect goodness is not external to God but inseparable from the divine essence, from which God’s idea is only formally distinct. Thus nothing else besides God determines that God can but never will command us to disobey a strict natural law, as well as that God not only can but may or sometimes even must command us to disobey an extended natural law. Superabundant sufficiency is the actuality in virtue of which the will of an intelligent agent possesses synchronic contingency. In God, this actuality consists in God’s formally distinct idea of perfect goodness, in virtue of which God never chooses evil while eternally possessing the ability to choose evil. In an intelligent creature, the actuality consists in the creature itself along with the cognitive and conative properties in virtue of which it chooses. Since the latter actuality does not determine that the creature never chooses evil while simultaneously possessing the ability to choose evil, superabundant sufficiency in the creature is plainly inferior to superabundant sufficiency in God.

Questions remain, but hopefully enough questions have been answered to show that Scotus’s view of the will is sufficiently clear for Nielsen’s purposes.