Phenomenal Blackness by Mark Christian Thompson;

Author:Mark Christian Thompson; [Thompson, Mark Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT000000 Literary Criticism / General, LIT004040 Literary Criticism / American / African American, LIT020000 Literary Criticism / Comparative Literature, SOC001000 Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies, SOC056000 Social Science / Black Studies (global), PHI036000 Philosophy / Hermeneutics
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2022-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

[ CHAPTER FOUR ]

The Revolutionary Will Not Be Hypnotized

Eldridge Cleaver and Black Ideology

I. Marcuse and the Minister of Information

Despite his deep admiration for Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver radicalizes Black ideology to exclude linguistic performance under the racial terms of the public sphere. Maintaining the idea of separate and unequal spaces, he rejects the desire to gain recognition from within the white-dominated public sphere and concentrates instead on intraracial acknowledgment. Looking at the work of its minister of information, this chapter shows that Black Panther Party ideology is centered on a project of racial enlightenment that rejects white recognition as a matter of course and focuses instead on African American self-perception. The cult of the Black self is, however, qualified. This Black lumpenproletariat are generally young, male, impoverished, imprisoned, and prepared to commit violent acts in the name of Black liberation. This subject rejects universal humanism and any notion of “brotherly” love in the name of the revolutionary embrace of Blackness.

Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968) advances a cosmology for sexuality—gleaned mostly from Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and Plato’s Symposium—that encompasses a universal history with the material teleological goal of utopian harmony in social oneness. In Eros and Civilization (1955), Marcuse writes in this vein about different forms of violence. Criticizing the “strange myth according to which the unhealing wound [that] can only be healed by the weapon that afflicted the wound [and that] has not yet been validated in history,” Marcuse concludes, “the violence which breaks the chain of violence may start a new chain” (1955, xxi). He goes on to speculate that “in and against this continuum, the fight will continue. It is not the struggle of Eros against Thanatos, because the established society too has its Eros: it protects, perpetuates, and enlarges life” (xx). Here, Marcuse differentiates two different types of violence. The struggle between Eros and Thanatos produces one type of violence, while the quest for justice engenders another. The former type is ultimately instinctual and ontological; the latter conforms to the social and historical patterns of the affluent society even while attempting to correct their oppressive imbalances. In other words, one order of violence obeys natural law and the other obeys the positive. Nature causes authentic, instinctual conflict, while the violence of the affluent society endeavors to suppress natural aggression. Violence within the continuum of the second order can only be met with more violence, yet this increase in violence will never redress the prior wrong, as both acts of violence belong to the same genre of aggression. Only violence that abolishes second order aggression completely can unleash the natural violence between Eros and Thanatos, which for Marcuse is the force of freedom, or freely flowing libido.

Marcuse frames his Freudian concept of Eros philosophically by recalling the psychoanalyst’s explanatory reference to Plato. Following Freud, Marcuse notes that in Platonic philosophy sexuality is considered the atomic striving for reunification in matter’s original state of oneness. The world was formed when matter was smashed into atomic particles, which sexual desire then seeks to reintegrate.

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