Thinking dialectically: Charting new passions and forces with James and Grace Lee Boggs

Abstract

Frantz Fanon argues that in antiracist and anticolonial thought "Marxist analysis must be slightly stretched" (Fanon, 1963(Fanon, /2004). 1 To stretch the dialectic is to resist the impulse to reduce colonial and racial domination to epiphenomenal hints of capitalist structures or arrange every possibility into a prearranged historical logic. Importantly, though, to stretch is not to break. It resists the impulse to particularize and fragment. It is to see the colonial situation and antiracist struggle as a vantage from which dialectical thought must begin, rather than a temporary or provisional detour. At stake, here, are classic debates about the relation between apparently "universal" economic developments and their "particular" appearance under signs of race and colony. Importantly, Fanon's injunction complicates the question of whether race and colony are ways in which capital must appear, or whether capital is a form of racial modernity whose beginnings were sown in capitalism's infancy. The question remains how far the dialectic as a logic of history can be extended before ceasing to be the dialectic.Recently this question has been opened with particular force in political theory. To borrow a term from Ciccariello-Maher's (2017) Decolonizing Dialectics, dialectical thought has been reasserted at the edges of Marxist analysis in a "dialectical counter-discourse" (p. 6). With regard to Fanon's injunction, dialectical thought is stretched here by warding off the ever-present possibility of a premature unification, totalization, or reconciliation, mobilizing antagonism to "attend to the contradictoriness and negativity without forcing a reconciliation or resolution" (Kramer, 2017, p. 100). This counter-discourse, "by foregrounding rupture and shunning the lure of unity . . . grants weight to a separatist moment in dialectics-at the expense of premature reconciliation-but does so without succumbing to a hermetically essentialist separatism" (Ciccariello-Maher, 2017, p. 6). Dialectics here is a logic not (only) of turning aporetic and antinomic opposites into contradictions with a ground. It is a logic of resisting reconciliatory movements that risk-mistaking domination for settled unity-pacification for peace. For example, Coulthard (2014) argues that the apparent move toward mutual recognition and reconciliation in contemporary settler colonialism in fact represents a reconfiguration of the settler colonial project of "the elimination of the native," utilizing the recognition of group rights as a way of converting self-governing peoples into constituencies requiring protection by the colonial state. Indeed, reconciliation amounts to a reconciliation of Indigenous people to settler colonial violence (Coulthard, 2016, p. 168). This discourse has not abandoned; however, the possibility of reconciliation (in the widest philosophical sense of the term). A dialectical sensibility excavates the conditions of possibility of concrete reconciliation-decolonization and emancipation-by taking aim at its conditions...