19
*  ZRC SAZU, Institute of Philosophy, Ljubljana, Slovenia
margrz@zrc-sazu.si | https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4703-4390
Filozofski vestnik
issn 0353-4510 | Volume 44 | Number 2 | 2023 | 19–52
cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.44.2.02
Marina Gržinić*
The Body in the Field of Tensions between 
Biopolitics and Necropolitics: Analyzing the 
Future of the Prosthetic Body in the 21st Century
1
Keywords
body, biopolitics, necropolitics, prosthetic body, tensions, 21st century, future
Abstract
The article contributes to the understanding of how societal conflict, aggression, 
and racism are intertwined with the concepts of the body and necropolitics. Achille 
Mbembe’s exploration of historical conflicts refers to the way in which states and oth-
er necropolitical entities exert control over life and death. Persistent conflicts reflect a 
form of necropolitics in which certain groups are subjected to violence and death as a 
means of maintaining power. Frank B. Wilderson III’s analysis of aggression towards 
Black individuals reveals how the body, particularly the Black body, is subjected to 
policing and violence. This speaks to the concept of necropolitics as it highlights how 
certain bodies are deemed expendable or “killable” in society, and how the policing 
of Blackness can be seen as a form of controlling and subjugating these bodies. The 
rationalization of racist acts against meticulously selected groups and bodies that are 
highly racialized in contemporary necrocapitalism illustrates how the politics of death 
and violence are used to maintain class and racist hierarchies and control over differ-
ent bodies.
1
1 
This article is a result of the research programme P6-0014 “Conditions and Problems of 
Contemporary Philosophy,” and the research project J6-3139 “Reconfiguring Borders in 
Philosophy, Politics, and Psychoanalysis,” which are funded by the Slovenian Research 
and Innovation Agency.

20
marina gržinić
Telo v polju napetosti med biopolitiko in nekropolitiko: 
analiza prihodnosti protetičnega telesa v 21. stoletju
Ključne besede
telo, biopolitika, nekropolitika, protetično telo, napetosti, 21. stoletje, prihodnost
Povzetek 
Članek prispeva k razumevanju, kako se družbeni konflikti, agresija in rasizem preple-
tajo s koncepti telesa in nekropolitike. Raziskovanje zgodovinskih konfliktov Achilla 
Mbembeja se nanaša na način, na katerega države in druge nekropolitične entitete iz-
vajajo nadzor nad življenjem in smrtjo. Trajni konflikti odražajo obliko nekropolitike, v 
kateri so določene skupine podvržene nasilju in smrti kot sredstvu za ohranjanje moči. 
Frank B. Wilderson III v svoji analizi agresije do Črnskih posameznikov razkriva, da je 
telo, zlasti Črnsko, podvrženo policijskemu nadzoru in nasilju. To govori o konceptu ne-
kropolitike, saj osvetljuje, kako določena telesa v družbi štejejo za potrošna ali za tista, 
ki jih je možno ubiti, in kako je policijsko nadzorovanje Črnskosti oblika nasilnega nad-
zora in podrejanja teles. Racionalizacija rasističnih dejanj proti skrbno izbranim skupi-
nam in telesom, ki so v sodobnem nekrokapitalizmu močno rasizirana, ponazarja, kako 
se politika smrti in nasilja uporablja za ohranjanje razrednih in rasističnih hierarhij ter 
nadzora nad različnimi telesi.
∞
Introduction
My starting point is necropolitics, because it is obvious and it is proven every 
day anew that biopolitics, which has its roots in the post-World War II period, 
has not been able to properly grasp, to conceptualize the new millennium: we 
see increasing racializations, exploitations, militarization, and so on. What I 
want to say is that biopolitics is not enough. The management of life by postwar 
liberal politics occurred in two steps: the reproduction of capitalism and prof-
it after the Holocaust as a massive genocidal extermination of millions of Jews 
who were well-integrated citizens of Europe, despite centuries of exposure to 
the constant pogroms of right-wing political formations in Europe. The extermi-
nation of millions of Black people and communities under transatlantic slavery 
and the horrors of colonialism is an almost unimaginable genocide in terms of 
duration, spatiality, and scale.

21
the body in the field of tensions between biopolitics and necropolitics
I did not adopt these terms and ideas to save my “innocence,” White innocence 
as Ruth Gilmore defines it.
2
 In 2008, I unraveled the constitution of the “Swiss 
jewel” on the sunny side of the Alps, namely how Slovenia was supposed to 
function after its 1991 declaration of independence (undeniably, I say that quite 
clearly) and what we have gotten in the 30 or so years since. Slovenia, in fact, 
has steadily and decisively transformed itself into a nation-state, following an 
almost textbook 19th-century constitution of the nation-state. In 1992, it created 
an internal enemy for itself, and then, with a swift governance that only after 
2003 (when Achille Mbembe introduced the term worldwide) could be called 
necropolitics, for what it really was: an instituted murderous decision who may 
live and who should die.
3
The result was that Slovenia erased 30,000 people from its civil register,
4
 most 
of them in 1992, at that time, they were internal migrants of the working class 
from other republics of the former Yugoslavia. The erasure from the register of 
permanent residents carried out by the administrative authorities of the Repub-
lic of Slovenia was an arbitrary act for which there was no legal basis, as the 
Constitutional Court found. It mainly affected persons who were born in other 
republics of the former Yugoslavia, held citizenship of another republic of the 
former Yugoslavia but lived in the former Socialist Republic of Slovenia, where 
they had a permanent address. 
In 2008, I called this act of erasure, the act of social and real death (in “Eu-
ro-Slovenian Necrocapitalism”),
5
 for the future interests of neoliberal capital-
ism. This necropolitical act found its continuation in the former Yugoslavia with 
a genocide classified as such by both the International Criminal Tribunal for 
2 
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence,” in Futures of 
Black Radicalism, ed. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (London: Verso, 2017), 225–
40. See also Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Insurgent Flows. Trans*Decolonial and Black Marxist 
Futures: A Conversation with Ruth Wilson Gilmore,” by Marina Gržinić and Tjaša Kancler, 
in Political Choreographies, Decolonial Theories, Trans Bodies, ed. Marina Gržinić and 
Jovita Pristovšek (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2023), 218–38.
3 
Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 
2003): 40, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11.
4 
“About Erasure,” The Erased: Information and Documents, Peace Institute, accessed 
August 28, 2023, https://www.mirovni-institut.si/izbrisani/en/about-erasure/index.html.
5 
See Marina Gržinić, “Euro-Slovenian Necrocapitalism,” Transversal (webjournal), Trans-
form, February 2008, http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0208/grzinic/en.html.

22
marina gržinić
the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—the 
Srebrenica genocide in 1995.
6
 In 2002, the late feminist Žarana Papić referred 
to the genocide in Srebrenica by the macabre plan of the Serbian president Slo-
bodan Milošević and the Serb paratroopers of the “Republika Srbska,” the eth-
nic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as “turbo fascism.”
7
The Map
What do we have as coordinates for this article? Let’s start with the historical 
context of biopolitics, drawing on Foucault’s exploration of state racism and its 
development, particularly in relation to Nazi ideology. We also draw on the work 
of Domenico Losurdo, who explores Michel Foucault’s stance on issues such as 
apartheid, torture, and oppression. Losurdo incorporates historical references 
to Karl Marx’s observations on slavery to illustrate the intertwining of racism 
and power dynamics.
In one of the best-known works on biopolitics, “Society Must Be Defended,” Lec-
tures at the College de France, 1975–76, Michel Foucault writes:
At the end of the nineteenth century, we see the appearance of what might be 
called a State racism, of a biological and centralized racism. And it was this theme 
that was, if not profoundly modified, at least transformed and utilized in strate-
gies specific to the twentieth century. On the one hand, we have the Nazi transfor-
mation, which takes up the theme, established at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, of a State racism that is responsible for the biological protection of the race. 
[. . .] Nazism was thus able to reuse a whole popular, almost medieval, mythology 
that allowed State racism to function within an ideologico-mythical landscape 
similar to that of the popular struggles which, at a given moment, could support 
and make it possible to formulate the theme of race struggle.
8
6 
In July 1995, Serb military forces of Republika Srpska invaded the town of Srebrenica in 
eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina. Within days, more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim boys and 
men were imprisoned, abused, tortured, and then executed.
7 
See Žarana Papić, “Europe after 1989: Ethnic Wars, the Fascisation of Social Life and Body 
Politics in Serbia,” in “The Body/Le corps/Der Körper,” ed. Marina Gržinić Mauhler, spe-
cial issue, Filozofski vestnik 23, no. 2 (2002): 191–204.
8 
Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–76, ed. 
Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 82.

23
the body in the field of tensions between biopolitics and necropolitics
In their 2018 Spanish text entitled “Necropolitics: Strategy of Extermination of 
the Black Body,”
9
 Eliseu Amaro de Melo Pessanha and Wanderson Flor do Nas-
cimento, both from the University of Brasilia (UnB), decode some details about 
the possibilities offered by Foucault in relation to the work of Domenico Losurdo. 
Here I refer to Losurdo’s text published originally in German in 2008 to be trans-
lated in Spanish in 2011
10
 and then appearing also in Losurdo’s 2017 Italian book.
11
Losurdo pens that “when Foucault holds his course of lectures at the Collège de 
France analyzed here—we are in 1976—the apartheid regime of racist South Af-
rica is still very much alive. On the other hand, about ten years earlier Hannah 
Arendt had drawn attention to an important point.”
12
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, published in 1963, Arendt writes: “There certainly 
was something breathtaking in the naiveté with the prosecution denouncing 
the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which had prohibited intermarriage and 
sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans.”
13
More, referring to Bernhard H. F . Taureck’s 2004 Michel Foucault,
14
 Losurdo com-
ments:
The protest against the massacre of Algerians in Paris promoted by Jean-Paul Sar-
tre and which also sees the participation of Pierre Boulez, a friend of Foucault, 
the latter does not seem to join. More generally, he does not seem to play any role 
in the fight against torture and the ferocious repression with which power tries to 
9 
Eliseu Amaro de Melo Pessanha and Wanderson Flor do Nascimento, “Necropolítica: 
Estratégias de extermínio do corpo negro,” ODEERE 3, no. 6 (July–December 2018): 149–
76, https://doi.org/10.22481/odeere.v3i6.4327.
10 
Domenico Losurdo, “Como nasceu e como morreu o ‘marxismo ocidental,’ ” trans. Carlo 
Alberto Dastoli, Estudos de Sociologia 16, no. 30 (2011): 213–42. Originally published as 
Domenico Losurdo, “Wie der ‘westliche Marxismus’ geboren wurde und gestorben ist,” 
in Die Lust am Widerspruch: Theorie der Dialektik—Dialektik der Theorie; Symposium aus 
Anlass des 80. Geburtstages von Hans Heinz Holz, ed. Erich Hahn and Silvia Holz-Markun 
(Berlin: Trafo, 2008), 35–60.
11 
Domenico Losurdo, Il marxismo occidentale: Come nacque, come morì, come può rinascere 
(Bari: Laterza, 2017).
12 
Losurdo, “Como nasceu,” 230; my translation.
13 
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: 
Penguin, 2004), 7.
14 
Bernhard H. F. Taureck, Michel Foucault, 3rd ed. (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2004).

24
marina gržinić
crush the struggle for national liberation. It has rightly been observed with regard 
to Foucault that “his critique of power continues to look to Europe.”
15
Losurdo notes meticulously that even prior to the whole period in focus relating 
biopolitics, Karl Marx writes in “The North American Civil War” in London on 
20 October 1861:
At the same time, under Buchanan’s government the severer law on the surren-
dering of fugitive slaves enacted in 1850 was ruthlessly carried out in the states 
of the North. To play the part of slave-catchers for the Southern slaveholders ap-
peared to be the constitutional calling of the North. On the other hand, in order 
to hinder as far as possible, the colonisation of the Territories by free settlers, the 
slaveholders’ party frustrated all the so-called free-soil measures, i.e., measures 
which were to secure for the settlers a definite amount of uncultivated state land 
free of charge.
16
This intertwining, which goes hand in hand and reveals the deadly entangle-
ment of the South and the North on the common ground of deadly racism, is 
obvious on the juridical-legal and constitutional levels.
Following Pessanha and Nascimento, I must emphasize another point high-
lighted by Mbembe in 2016, which reads:
Pushed to its logical conclusion, the phantasy of annihilation or destruction en-
visions not only the bombing of the planet, but also the disappearance of hu-
mans, their outright extinction. This is not an apocalypse as such, if only because 
the notion of the apocalypse presupposes the survival, somewhere, of a witness 
whose task it is to recount what they see. It is a form of annihilation conceived 
not as a catastrophe to be feared, but rather as a sort of act of purification by fire. 
However, it remains the case that this purification would be the same as an an-
nihilation of present humanity. Such an act of annihilation is supposed to open 
15 
Losurdo, “Como nasceu,” 228; my translation.
16 
Karl Marx, “The North American Civil War,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works 
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975–2004), 19:37.

25
the body in the field of tensions between biopolitics and necropolitics
the way to another beginning, the inception of another history without today’s 
humanity. It is, in this sense, a phantasy of ablation.
17
Mbembe’s perspective of annihilation, and purification, is precisely punctuat-
ed, as are David Theo Goldberg and Susan Searls Giroux’s insights into the per-
sistence of racism in the world.
With a reference to Goldberg’s 2015 Are We All Postracial Yet?
18
 and Goldberg’s 
and Susan Giroux’s 2014 Sites of Race,
19
 Mbembe also argues somewhat earlier 
in the text:
Racism—whether in Europe, South Africa, Brazil, the United States, the Caribbe-
an or the rest of the world—will remain with us for the foreseeable future. It will 
continue to proliferate not only as a part of mass culture, but also (we would do 
well not to forget it) within polite society, not only in the old settler colonies, but 
also in other areas of the globe, long deserted by Jews and where neither Negroes 
[Nègres] nor Arabs have ever been seen.
20
The opening sentences of Mbembe’s “The Society of Enmity” are also revealing, 
as he reports on two positions that currently dominate our lives, the Freudian 
and the Lacanian. Mbembe states, “Perhaps it has always been this way”
21
 and 
adds a reference to both in an endnote: “As Freud argued in 1915, history ‘is es-
sentially a series of murders of peoples.’ [. . .] Lacan went further in the 1950s, 
remarking that ‘our civilisation is itself sufficiently one of hatred.’ ”
22
These can be parallel with accounts of Frank B. Wilderson III on the role of po-
licing in maintaining White social equilibrium and psychological well-being, 
particularly with violent re-racialization of Black communities. In an interview 
17 
Achille Mbembe, “The Society of Enmity,” trans. Giovanni Menegalle, Radical Philosophy 
200 (November/December 2016): 34.
18 
David Theo Goldberg, Are We All Postracial Yet? (Cambridge: Polity, 2015).
19 
David Theo Goldberg and Susan Searls Giroux, Sites of Race (Cambridge: Polity, 2014).
20 
Mbembe, “The Society of Enmity,” 31.
21 
Mbembe, 23.
22 
Mbembe, 23n1. See also Sigmund Freud, “Our Attitude towards Death,” in The Standard 
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: 
Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 14:289–300; Jacques Lacan, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–
1954, trans. John Forrester (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).

26
marina gržinić
conducted after the 2014 incidents in Ferguson, Missouri and the shooting of 
Michael Brown, Frank B. Wilderson III says: “Policing—policing Blackness—is 
what keeps everyone else sane. And if we can start to see the policing and the 
mutilation and the aggressivity towards Blackness not as a form of discrimi-
nation, but as being a form of psychic health and well-being for the rest of the 
world, then we can begin to reformulate the problem and begin to take a much 
more iconoclastic response to it.”
23
Ana Guglielmucci’s exploration of misplaced bodies and decontextualized rep-
resentations of death is instructive in this regard. Guglielmucci’s 2020 “Necros -
capes: The Political Life of Mutilated and Errant Bodies in the Rivers of Colom-
bia,”
24
 exposes the misplacement of bodies and corpses as historical fact. Re-
ferring to Pamela Colombo and her 2017 book Espacios de desaparición: Vivir e 
imaginar los lugares de la violencia estatal (Vanishing spaces: Living and imag-
ining the places of state violence),
25
 Guglielmucci reflects on decontextualized 
representations of death in spaces that appear outside of place and outside of 
time, without any clues that might allow us to understand the reason for a par-
ticular death, if I put it in my own words.
Finally, I want to put into the discussion Scott Burnett and John E. Richardson’s 
analysis of racial justifications for atrocities, drawing on current events such as the 
Utøya massacre, the Charlottesville rally, and the mass shooting in Christchurch. 
They note in their 2021 “ ‘Breeders for Race and Nation’: Gender, Sexuality and Fe-
cundity in Post-war British Fascist Discourse, Patterns of Prejudice”:
The demographic threat of racialized Others often features in rationalizations for 
racist atrocities, such as misogynistic fantasies about socialists and women allow-
ing Muslims to “swamp” Europe (expressed by the perpetrator of the Utøya mas-
sacre in 2011), white Americans being “replaced” by other races as part of a Jew-
23 
Frank B. Wilderson III, “We’re Trying to Destroy the World”: Anti-Blackness and Police 
Violence after Ferguson; An Interview with Frank B. Wilderson, III, interview by Jared Ball, 
Todd Steven Burroughs and Dr. Hate (n.p.: Ill Will, 2014), 7.
24 
Ana Guglielmucci, “Necroscapes: The Political Life of Mutilated and Errant Bodies in the 
Rivers of Colombia,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 29, no. 4 (2020): 555–80, 
https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2021.1885356 .
25 
Pamela Colombo, Espacios de desaparición: Vivir e imaginar los lugares de la violencia es-
tatal (Tucumán, 1975–1983) (Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila, 2017).

27
the body in the field of tensions between biopolitics and necropolitics
ish plot (which “united” the right in Charlottesville in 2018), and the Christchurch 
mass murderer’s repetition.
26
Historical atrocities such as the Holocaust, transatlantic slavery, and colonial-
ism call into question the efficacy of biopolitical theories. Foucault’s explora-
tion of biopolitics is significant, his study of state racism and its metamorphosis 
in the twentieth century, especially in the context of Nazi ideology. However, 
contemporary philosophers of Black thought develop a thought-provoking facet 
when they consider the notion that police violence and hostility against Black 
positions and communities could be understood as a manifestation of neoliber-
al necrocapitalist societal well-being and equilibrium. It also invites us to crit-
ically rethink conventional perspectives on social dynamics and delve deeper 
into the intricate webs of power, racism, and ideological justifications. It quickly 
becomes clear, however, that contemporary philosophers of Black thought offer 
an alternative perspective, viewing police violence against Black communities 
as an expression of neoliberal necrocapitalism and challenging conventional 
views of power dynamics, racism, and ideological justifications.
Racism and Racial Capitalism
This is not an epic account of Black thought (for us mostly “innocent” White 
readers and writers in the European context), but a political-theoretical task to 
unearth Whiteness along with racial capitalism. The re-emergence and glob-
al visibility of the actions and protests of the Black community, particularly 
through the Black Lives Matter movement, pushes us to move beyond philo-
sophical rhetoric and engage with the struggles of marginalized communities, 
particularly the Black community. Therefore, we do not only live in necrocapi-
talism, but “racial capitalism.”
27
In his seminal book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 
published in 1983, Cedric Robinson challenges the point of Marxist theory, ac-
cording to which capitalism in its primitive accumulation phase was not yet 
26 
Scott Burnett and John E. Richardson, “ ‘Breeders for Race and Nation’: Gender, Sexuality 
and Fecundity in Post-war British Fascist Discourse, Patterns of Prejudice,” Patterns of 
Prejudice 55, no. 4 (2021): 332, https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2021.2011088 .
27 
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: 
University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Originally published in 1983 by Zed Press.

28
marina gržinić
proper capitalism. Robin D. G. Kelley writes about Robinson’s work in the intro-
duction to the Boston Review’s issue on “Race, Capitalism and Justice”:
Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order but rather 
evolved from it to produce a modern world system of “racial capitalism” depend-
ent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide. Capitalism was “racial” not 
because of some conspiracy to divide workers or justify slavery and disposses-
sion, but because racialism had already permeated Western feudal society. The 
first European proletarians were racial subjects (Irish, Jews, Roma or Gypsies, 
Slavs, etc.) and they were victims of dispossession (enclosure), colonialism, and 
slavery within Europe. Indeed, Robinson suggested that racialization within Eu-
rope was very much a colonial process involving invasion, settlement, expropria-
tion, and racial hierarchy.
28
Robinson’s theory suggests that racial categorizations and hierarchies were in-
tegral to the development and maintenance of capitalist structures. In a racial 
capitalism, economic exploitation is intertwined with the exploitation and sub-
jugation of racialized groups. This theory challenges the notion that capitalism 
operates independently of racial dynamics and shows how these systems inter-
sect and reinforce each other. It challenges us to confront the deeper impotency 
and violence inherent in our White discourses and perspectives.
Robinson writes that the
violent event of colonial aggression and its corollary of “Indian” slavery had al-
ready been transmuted in [Benjamin] Franklin’s [1753] neo-nativistic “American” 
mind into a relationship of supplication secured by an economic rationale; in-
deed, the dependence of “new Comers” on natives already reversed. The curtain 
of supremacist ideology had by now begun its descent on American thought, ob-
scuring from the historically unconscious generations of descendants of coloni-
alists and later immigrants the oppressive violence and exploitation interwoven 
in the structure of the republic.
29
28 
Robin D. G. Kelley , “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?,” Boston Review, 
January 12, 2017, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/robin-d-g-kelley-introduction- 
race-capitalism-justice/.
29 
Robinson, Black Marxism, 77.

29
the body in the field of tensions between biopolitics and necropolitics
It underscores the need to deconstruct these discourses of the White power re-
gime by recognizing our own limitations and the harm that is in our words and 
ideas. Both passages underscore the importance of moving beyond theoretical 
consideration to engage with actions, and consequences that shape the dis-
course of racism, and to work to understand the complexities of racial dynamics 
in ways that are not just neat academic pursuits but promote meaningful change.
Crucial to racial capitalism is a terrifying repetitiveness. A continuous murder-
ous act of capitalism that brings death to Black people again and again, as an 
“afterlife of slavery.”
30
The task will be to once again draw a double root in this context and enter 
into an analysis of Fanon’s 1952 work Black Skin, White Masks.
31
 Fanon, as a 
psychoanalyst, refers directly to Freud, Jung, Lacan, etc., to address the ques-
tion of race and racism, the unconscious, and ultimately the universalization 
of the Black body in the perspective of disalienation rather than through de-
colonization, which, as one of the key themes of studies of anti-colonial strug-
gles, pushes Fanon and other Black thinkers to a particular place “outside” the 
White framework of “universal philosophy and theory” and locates them within 
what is called “separate” studies. Fanon’s analysis in Black Skin, White Masks 
addresses the complex interplay of individual psychology, social structures, 
and racial dynamics. He explores the multifaceted nature of racism and how it 
shapes identities and relations on personal and collective levels.
In 2008, the second translation by Richard Philcox of Fanon’s book Black Skin, 
White Masks was published.
32
 This triggered a series of reflections and compar-
isons with the much more popular The Wretched of the Earth which was pub-
lished in 1961, when Fanon passed away.
33
 Sunit Singh’s 2010 review of Fanon’s 
30 
Saidiya V . Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: 
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). See also Saidiya V . Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, 
Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University 
Press, 1997).
31 
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove 
Press, 1967). Originally published as Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952).
32 
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 
2008).
33 
See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove  
Press, 1963). Originally published as Les damnés de la terre (Paris: François Maspero, 1961).

30
marina gržinić
second translation highlights differences with the first English translation by 
Charles Lam Markmann in 1967 , in addition to many important points in the new 
translation, and continues a number of lines of thought.
34
A crucial point Singh makes is that racism is presented in the context of Black 
Skin, White Masks as a symptom of capitalism. This perspective connects the 
problem of racism to larger socioeconomic structures and suggests that racism 
is intertwined with capitalist systems and power dynamics.
Singh criticizes the newest in the aftermath of the 2008 translation, triptych 
structure of Fanon’s book, that is summarized as follows: “ ‘The Eurocentrism of 
psychoanalysis,’ a bid to reckon accounts with Negritude, and a concerted effort 
to develop a ‘philosophy of decolonization’—as if these formed a triptych.”
35
 Sin-
gh points out, however, that this apparent triptych of concerns is deceptive or il-
lusory (trompe l’oeil), indicating that there might be more complexity to Fanon’s 
approach than a simple three-part framework.
Singh highlights the distinction between the theme of “disalienation” in Black 
Skin, White Masks, and the anxieties about “decolonization” in Fanon’s later 
work, The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks discusses the 
concept of wanting-to-be-White as a form of neurosis resulting from the inter-
nalization of colonial subjugation. He argues that due to the historical context 
of colonization and the promotion of White superiority, Black individuals have 
been made to feel inferior, leading to a desire to emulate White characteristics 
and norms. This internalized sense of inferiority is deeply rooted in the history 
of colonial oppression and economic exploitation, creating what he calls an “in-
feriority complex.”
Fanon’s concept of “epidermalization” refers to the way in which these feelings 
of inferiority become ingrained in their own skin color as a sign of their per-
ceived inferiority, leading to a psychological conflict and a desire to be “White” 
in order to escape this negative self-perception. For the Black man, this aliena-
34 
Sunit Singh, review of Black Skin, White Masks, by Frantz Fanon, Platypus Review  21 
(March 2010), https://platypus1917.org/2010/03/15/book-review-frantz-fanon-black-skin-
white-masks/.
35 
Singh, review of Black Skin, White Masks.

31
the body in the field of tensions between biopolitics and necropolitics
tion results in a double dilemma, the “first, economic. Then, internalization or 
rather epidermalization of this inferiority.”
36
In Singh’s words, an individual Black man cannot overcome racism merely by 
immersing himself in the mythical or cosmic aspects of Black civilization, as 
if it were solely a matter of spiritual salvation, just as a neurotic cannot heal 
solely through knowledge. A “cure” is possible only by analyzing racism as a 
symptom of capitalism. This process involves challenging preconceived notions 
and examining the impact of racism. Fanon challenges the notion that White-
ness is merely the inverse of Blackness. He argues that disalienation, the pro-
cess of regaining one’s true self, cannot be a simple negation of Blackness due to 
the deep-seated and negative associations attached to it.
37
 As Singh points out, 
Fanon’s ideas have parallels with Jean-Paul Sartre’s assertion about antisemi-
tism “overdetermining” the Jew. Both thinkers highlight how certain identities 
are burdened with societal preconceptions and biases that affect personal expe-
riences. Fanon addresses how assimilation remains elusive for the Black man 
due to the burden of historical experiences and the “fact of Blackness.”
As Singh states, “Fanon attempts to hook the temporal core of psychoanalysis 
explicitly to the Marxist conception of emancipation.”
38
Disalienation will be for those Whites and Blacks who have refused to let them-
selves be locked in the substantialized “tower of the past.” For many other black 
men disalienation will come from refusing to consider their reality as definitive.  
[. . .] In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly 
ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to sing the past 
to the detriment of my present and my future.
39
Fanon discusses disalienation for both White and Black individuals who refuse 
to be confined by the weight of history. He advocates for transcending past griev-
ances and not fixating on resurrecting a particular historical identity, as this can 
hinder progress. Overcoming racism’s inherent narcissism involves breaking 
36 
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (2008), xv.
37 
Singh, review of Black Skin, White Masks.
38 
Singh.
39 
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (2008), 201.

32
marina gržinić
free from the neurotic repetition of racial constructs and embracing a vision of 
a more just future. Drawing from Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bon-
aparte,
40
 Fanon emphasizes that the socialist revolution finds its inspiration in 
the future.
41
 However, he also critiques the reification of the concept of “race,” 
which tends to fix individuals into societal roles.
42
Fanon touches on the burden of history that Black individuals carry. Their his-
torical experiences shape their present identities and affect their struggles for 
recognition and agency. Fanon states: “I am not a prisoner of History. [. . .] I must 
constantly remind myself that the real leap consists of introducing invention 
into life. [. . .] And it is by going beyond the historical and instrumental given 
that I initiate my cycle of freedom.”
43
In Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe’s commentary on race emphasizes the 
concept of “race” as an iconic currency, a visual and symbolic representation 
that operates on the periphery of perception and human interaction. He dis-
cusses how power in colonial contexts often revolves around the ability to con-
trol what is seen and what remains invisible, highlighting the sovereignty of 
those who dictate visibility: “To a large extent, race is an iconic currency. It ap-
pears at the edges of a commerce—of the gaze.”
44
 In his discussion of Fanon, he 
points out that “Power in the colony [. . .] consists fundamentally in the power 
to see or not to see, to remain indifferent, to render invisible what one wishes 
not to see. [. . .] Those who decide what is visible and what must remain invisi-
ble are sovereign.”
45
Fanon’s passage and Mbembe’s commentary together underscore the insidious 
nature of structural racism. This form of racism is embedded in social systems, 
including necrocapitalism, and affects not only social structures but also the 
deep-rooted psychological layers of individuals. Fanon’s emphasis on the pres-
40 
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul 
(London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1926).
41 
Singh, review of Black Skin, White Masks.
42 
Singh.
43 
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (2008), 204–5.
44 
Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham: Duke University 
Press, 2017), 110.
45 
Mbembe, 111.

33
the body in the field of tensions between biopolitics and necropolitics
ent and future aspirations of the oppressed speaks to the urgency of addressing 
systemic racism and its pervasive effects on individuals and societies. Mbem-
be’s insights also illustrate how power dynamics are intertwined with the con-
trol of visibility and invisibility and how this plays a role in perpetuating racial 
inequalities.
In 2020, when his life was snuffed out under the knee of a police officer in the 
United States, the three words “I can’t breathe” by George Floyd once again be-
came a call for racial justice and police reform in the United States and around 
the world. The last time these words caused an uproar, they were shouted by Eric 
Garner when police killed him in New York City in 2014. In a historic act of sol-
idarity not seen since the days of the American civil rights movement, millions 
of people took to the streets for weeks. They protested, knelt, chanted, and de-
manded change, not just in the United States, but around the world.
46
 The phrase 
was written in July 2014 to mark the death of Eric Garner, who had been placed 
in a chokehold by Daniel Pantaleo, an officer with the New York City Police De-
partment. In the video, which shows Garner being held down by several officers, 
he can be seen saying “I can’t breathe” eleven times before losing consciousness 
and dying. When it was announced on December 3, 2014, that the jurors had de -
cided not to indict Pantaleo after a two-month review of the case, protests erupt-
ed using Garner’s last words, “I can’t breathe,” as slogans and chants. After the 
acquittal of the police officer who put Garner in a chokehold in December 2014, 
the use of the slogan rose dramatically amid widespread protests.
C. Riley Snorton’s 2017 Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity is 
a book about racial history whose “problem under review [. . .] is time.”
47
 Fol-
lowing Fanon, Snorton is interested in the “mechanics of invention” and seeks 
to understand “the conditions of emergence of things and beings that may not 
yet exist.”
48
 Snorton claims that relating Blackness and transness leads to “in-
sights that surpass an additive logic” and can foster “strategies for inhabiting 
46 
“ ‘I Can’t Breathe’: The Refrain That Reignited a Movement,” Amnesty International, June 
30, 2020, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/06/i-cant-breathe-refrain-reig -
nited-movement/.
47 
C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: 
University of Minnesota Press, 2017), xiv.
48 
Snorton, xiv.

34
marina gržinić
unlivable worlds.”
49
 In search of a new vocabulary, Snorton argues that “black-
ness finds articulation within transness.”
50
 The two categories share connec-
tions that he calls “transversal,” but there are also transitive connections that 
unite the two in “moments of transition.”
51
 Snorton reveals how “captive flesh 
expressed an ungendered position that defines race as the sine qua non of sex.”
52
 
Central to Snorton’s discussion is Hortense Spillers and her formulation of the 
flesh: its existence and persistence “in excess of linear time [. . .] gives rise to 
how sex and gender have been expressed and arranged according to the logics 
that sustained racial slavery.”
53
 “Captive flesh,” he argues, “figures a critical ge-
nealogy for modern transness, as chattel persons gave rise to an understanding 
of gender as mutable and as an amendable form of being.”
54
 Furthermore, he 
discusses “fungible flesh as a mode for fugitive action,” and the Black mother, 
“rendered as the zone of nonbeing,” as an “onto-epistemological framework for 
black personhood.”
55
 Blackness is “a condition of possibility that made trans-
ness conceivable in the twilight of formal slavery.”
56
Snorton writes in his magnificent and painful book about “Blake Brockington, 
a black trans man who garnered national attention in 2014 as the ‘first out trans 
homecoming king in . . . North Carolina.’ ”
57
He continues later on: 
In an interview, Brockington related, “I’m still a person . . . [and] trans people are 
still people. Our bodies just don’t match what’s up [in our heads]. We need sup-
port, not people looking down at us or degrading us or overlooking us. We are still 
human.” The frequency with which he availed himself of interviews and partici-
pated in Black Lives Matter rallies and events associated with Transgender Days 
of Remembrance is perhaps the evidence of an impetus to replace one collective 
49 
Snorton, 7.
50 
Snorton, 8.
51 
Snorton, 9.
52 
Snorton, 33.
53 
Snorton, 53.
54 
Snorton, 57.
55 
Snorton, 12, 106, 108.
56 
Snorton, 135.
57 
Snorton, x.

35
the body in the field of tensions between biopolitics and necropolitics
function with another. In one of a number of photographs taken at a rally in late 
November 2014, Brockington is positioned between two signs, which read “I have 
the right to be alive” and “I am not a criminal.”
58
This photo prompts Snorton to point to another image of racial capitalism. He 
says:
The photograph occurs as an afterimage, what Kimberly Juanita Brown defines 
as “an ocular residue, a visual duplication as well as an alteration,” in a riff on 
Audre Lorde. Dressed in all black, Brockington wears a shirt that bears a list of 
names conjoined by ampersands and “finished” with an ellipsis: “Emmett&Ama-
dou&Sean&Oscar&Trayvon&Jordan&Eric&Mike&Ezell& . . .” A few months later, 
his own name occupied the elliptical space.
59
In 2015, the death of Blake Brockington, the Black trans man and Black Lives 
Matter activist was reported as suicide. Brockington’s shirt with a list of names 
begins with Emmett Till. Till was a 14-year-old Black boy who was brutally beat-
en and killed in the Mississippi Delta in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a White 
woman, Carolyn Bryant.
After kidnapping and pistol-whipping Till, Bryant’s husband Roy and half-broth-
er J. W . Milam shot him in the head, tied a 74-pound cotton fan around his neck, 
and dumped the boy’s body in the Tallahatchie River. Determined to publicize 
the atrocity, Till’s mother Mamie Emmet insisted on an open casket, and images 
of her son’s mutilated body flooded the media to the horror of White and Black 
Americans.
60
In her 2015 The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary, 
Kimberly Juanita Brown writes:
Mamie Till, Emmett Till’s mother, is the other “her” who forces a photograph-
ic engagement with the murder of her only child, and in Lorde’s poem Mamie 
Till is also the “her” who “wrings her hands / beneath the weight of agonies re-
58 
Snorton, xii; brackets in the original.
59 
Snorton, xii.
60 
Anne Sarah Rubin, “Reflections on the Death of Emmett Till,” Southern Cultures 2, no. 1 
(Fall 1996): 45–66, https://doi.org/10.1353/scu.1995.0000.

36
marina gržinić
membered,” and her son’s famous photographic imprint lingers over and through 
Lorde’s articulation. In the doubling properties of her use of “refuse” (“lying 
amid the sidewalk refuse”), Lorde locates an urban iteration of a southern horror 
steeped in what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery.”
61
Mamie Till, the mother of Emmett Till, becomes a central figure in forcing a 
confrontation with the horrifying reality of her son’s murder. In Audre Lorde’s 
poem, Mamie Till is depicted as the one who carries the weight of agonizing 
memories, symbolizing the ongoing impact of the tragedy.
This brings us to Audre Lorde’s “Afterimages”:
I
However the image enters
its force remains within
my eyes
rockstrewn caves where dragonfish evolve
wild for life, relentless and acquisitive
learning to survive
where there is no food
my eyes are always hungry
and remembering
however the image enters
its force remains.
62
The “doubling properties” of Lorde’s use of the word “refuse” connects urban 
settings to the traumatic history of the South. This reflects an afterlife of slavery, 
as articulated by Saidiya Hartman, where historical traumas continue to rever-
berate. Brown defines the position of the afterimage of the Black body as the af-
terlife of slavery, repetitions of the indelible memory of slavery, whether it func-
tions as “afterimage, double exposure, hyperembodiment, or the ocular and au-
ditory meditation of a diasporic riff, repetition brings the figuration of slavery 
61 
Kimberly Juanita Brown, The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the 
Contemporary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 2.
62 
Audre Lorde, “Afterimages,” in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (New York: W.W. 
Norton, 1997), 339. 

37
the body in the field of tensions between biopolitics and necropolitics
into being.”
63
 Easily said, but deeply under the image “we think of the afterimage 
as a violation of the gaze.”
64
 What does “violation of the gaze” mean here? The 
idea of the afterimage as a “violation of the gaze” suggests that these recurring 
images challenge the comfortable viewing experience. They demand attention 
to the distressing realities they represent, breaking away from traditional modes 
of passive observation. It also suggests that contemporary art often appropriates 
images of suffering and the “Other” in ways that perpetuate White innocence. 
These images can become a means for Whites to show emotional concern with-
out necessarily addressing the systemic problems that cause the suffering.
As Michael A. Chaney writes in his 2008 Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black 
Identity to Antebellum Narrative: “Whether through citation to an unexpected 
portrait, appropriation of traditional visual technologies, or proximity to illus-
tration, the intertexts of Fugitive Vision require a critical sensibility open to an 
aesthetics based on experiences of oppression that challenge a hermeneutics of 
accessibility, rationality, and correspondence.”
65
 This requires a critical stance 
that goes beyond mere accessibility and rationality to understand the complex 
layers of meaning behind such imagery.
What is the meaning of this? That there is a whole set of libidinal mechanisms, 
essentially racist, operating at the heart of capitalist society, forming its social 
bond and at the center of the (White) unconscious. It is an intertwining between 
the capitalist system’s pursuit of a never-ending surplus value and an inexora-
ble exploitation made possible by mechanisms that constantly racialize the pro-
duced “Other,” disposable, exploitable, and so on.
Which Bodies Matter?
In his 2022 “Diversity or Exclusion? Psychoanalysis ‘Explains,’ ” Stephen Frosh 
writes that “Exclusions take place across many domains—sexuality, gender, 
class, nationality—and in many circumstances. All these need to be observed 
and documented, but it is probably fair to say that the racialization of exclusion 
63 
Brown, Repeating Body, 13.
64 
Brown, 11.
65 
Michael A. Chaney, Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity to Antebellum Narrative 
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 211.

38
marina gržinić
is paramount.”
66
 Or, to put it more bluntly, as Frosh explains, this rationale is 
central to Afropessimism, something that I think is crucial to understanding, as 
Frosh lays out:
To use the trope activated by Christina Sharpe, we all live “in the wake” of slavery, 
a wake that widens with time; yet, pushing this further, those who are most in the 
wake—the descendants of slaves and the inheritors of the mantle of slavery—are 
now bordered by it, so that they are distinct from those outside the wake, who are 
nevertheless impacted upon by its flow and force. Expressed more simply, let us 
just say that in this view, the lives of black people are radically differentiated from 
the lives of white people; and the barrier between them, which is anti-black rac-
ism, structures this differentiation as subjugation and exclusion.
67
The metaphor of living “in the wake” of slavery, as articulated by Sharpe,
68
 high-
lights the ongoing influence and repercussions of historical events like slavery, 
which continue to shape contemporary society. Importantly, Frosh extends this 
metaphor by suggesting that those most affected by the wake—descendants of 
slaves and those inheriting the legacy of slavery—are not just living in the wake, 
but are effectively bordered by it.
69
 This border creates a distinct separation be-
tween those inside the wake, who experience the direct and systemic effects of 
racial oppression, and those outside the wake, who may still be impacted by its 
flow and force but not to the same extent.
Frosh’s analysis emphasizes the enduring impact of historical injustices on mar-
ginalized communities. These historical injustices, that include colonialism, 
slavery, apartheid, have far-reaching consequences. In simpler terms, Frosh’s 
perspective acknowledges a radical differentiation between the lives of Black 
people and White people, with anti-Black racism serving as the structural bar-
rier that enforces this differentiation through subjugation and exclusion. This 
viewpoint aligns with Afropessimism, a theoretical framework that critically ex-
66 
Stephen Frosh, “Diversity or Exclusion? Psychoanalysis ‘Explains,’ ” Free Associations: 
Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics 86 (September 2022): 9.
67 
Frosh, 10.
68 
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 
2016).
69 
Frosh, “Diversity or Exclusion?,” 10.

39
the body in the field of tensions between biopolitics and necropolitics
amines the persistent anti-Blackness in society and the ways in which it shapes 
the social, economic, and political realities of Black individuals.
As Frank B. Wilderson III argues in his 2010 book Red, White & Black, “no slave, 
no world. And in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world.”
70
 He 
underscores the central role that slavery played not only in the existence of the 
Black community but also in the global world. The violence is unique, particu-
larly during the traumatic experience of the Middle Passage. This violence, he 
argues, erases their metaphysical foundations, customs, and sources, leaving 
them vulnerable and disconnected from their cultural roots. “Rather, the gra-
tuitous violence of the Black’s first ontological instance, the Middle Passage, 
‘wiped out [his or her] metaphysics . . . his [or her] customs and sources on 
which they are based.’ ”
71
 Thus, “as an accumulated and fungible object, rather 
than an exploited and alienated subject, the Black is openly vulnerable to the 
whims of the world, and so is his or her cultural ‘production.’ ”
72
 Wilderson’s 
argument takes a critical turn when he characterizes the Black individual as 
an “accumulated and fungible object” rather than an “exploited and alienated 
subject.”
73
He argues: “ All these Others are none other than the Lacanian contemporaries or, 
in the vernacular most salient to the Slave, Whites and their junior partners in civ-
il society—Humans positioned by the Symbolic order.”
74
 Wilderson sees Lacan’s 
process of full speech for Whites as contingent on the Black Other as a frame of 
reference, “which remonumentalizes the (White) ego” and “is an accomplice to 
social stability, despite its claims to the contrary.”
75
 Moreover, “whereas Lacan 
was aware of how language ‘precedes and exceeds us,’ he did not have Fanon’s 
awareness of how violence also precedes and exceeds Blacks.”
76
70 
Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms 
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 11.
71 
Wilderson, 38; brackets in the original.
72 
Wilderson, 56.
73 
Wilderson, 56.
74 
Wilderson, 70.
75 
Wilderson, 75, 77.
76 
Wilderson, 76.

40
marina gržinić
Wilderson brings in Lacanian theory and contends that Lacan’s notion of full 
speech for Whites is interlinked with the presence of the Black Other as a refer-
ence point. This dynamic reinforces the (White) ego and contributes to societal 
stability, despite claims to the contrary. Wilderson’s analysis challenges con-
ventional paradigms and highlights the intricate interplay of power, language, 
violence, and identity in the context of racial dynamics. This distinction points 
to the objectification of Black individuals, rendering them vulnerable to the ar-
bitrariness of the regimes of White capitalist power, including the manipulation 
of their social and cultural production.
In his 2021 article titled “Do Black Lives Matter in Psychoanalysis? Frantz Fanon 
as Our Most Disputatious Ancestor,” Daniel Jose Gaztambide revisits a similar 
theme and argument.
77
 He begins by noting that each psychoanalytic tradition 
identifies its lineage with a particular ancestor—Sigmund Freud as the “father” 
of psychoanalysis, Sandor Ferenczi as a once-lost “mother,” and Jacques Lacan 
as the prodigal son advocating a “return to Freud.”
78
 These figures have served 
as foundational sources for scholars exploring psychoanalytic perspectives on 
various aspects of society, including race, class, sexuality, and gender both 
within the consulting room and in broader societal contexts. But where does 
Fanon stand in this trajectory? Gaztambide’s article situates Fanon as a contro-
versial and influential figure in this evolving psychoanalytic landscape, contrib-
uting to the broader conversation about the intersection of psychoanalytic the-
ory and social justice.
More, Gaztambide, in his recent 2022 article “Entre Negros, Blancos y Judios: Re -
visiting Claudia Tate’s ‘Freud and His Negro’ with Puerto Rican Eyes,”
79
 refers to 
a now epochal 1996 text by Claudia Tate, in which she presents and then analyz-
es an anecdote narrated by Freud and recalled by Ernest Jones.
80
 The direction 
77 
Daniel Jose Gaztambide, “Do Black Lives Matter in Psychoanalysis? Frantz Fanon as Our 
Most Disputatious Ancestor,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 38, no. 3 (July 2021): 177–84, 
https://doi.org/10.1037/pap0000365.
78 
Gaztambide, 177.
79 
Daniel Jose Gaztambide, “Entre Negros, Blancos y Judios: Revisiting Claudia Tate’s ‘Freud 
and His Negro’ with Puerto Rican Eyes,” Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society (2022), https://
doi.org/10.1057/s41282-022-00304-1.
80 
Claudia Tate, “Freud and His ‘Negro’: Psychoanalysis as Ally and Enemy of African 
Americans,” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 1, no. 1 (1996): 53–62.

41
the body in the field of tensions between biopolitics and necropolitics
taken by scholars like Gaztambide and Tate delves into the complex and often 
uncomfortable intersections of psychoanalysis, race, and power dynamics. By 
revisiting historical texts and anecdotes, they reveal how psychoanalytic theory 
and practice have been entangled with racialization, colonialism, and oppres-
sive hierarchies.
Namely, Freud, who came regularly to Vienna in 1886, actually took his Amer-
ican patient, his “Negro,” as Freud called him, with him. Gaztambide offers a 
number of thoughts that I recuperate here, recalling that Tate argued how
for African Americans, psychoanalysis was both an ally, “a weapon . . . to artic-
ulate the complex effects of racism” and an enemy aligning itself “with the forc-
es of domination and oppression.” Analyzing Freud’s infamous “joke,” “twelve 
o’clock and no negro,” referring to an American patient who missed their session, 
Tate revealed his enactment of a kind of “discursive Blackface,” eliding the equa-
tion of Jewishness and Blackness made in his turn-of-century European world 
while repositioning himself as a colonial master. The effacing of Freud’s racial 
difference as a Jew was made possible by whiteness, whose “social borders were 
marked by ostracized blacks. This confinement repressed the ‘primal scene’ of the 
larger culture and its racial castration.” Anti-Blackness functions precisely as a 
“primal scene” confronting the racialized subject—whether white, Black, or non-
white—with the gratuitous violence visited upon Black people.
81
By obsessively repeating this joke, Freud “reconstitutes the polarized economy 
of [White over Black] power . . . by transforming this relationship into a tripartite 
one of . . . whites, Jews, and Negroes before collapsing the triangular formula-
tion into the simple polarity of white and black.”
82
Tate argued that this allowed Freud “to erase the figurative blackness of the 
Jewish body.”
83
 As demonstrated by Gaztambide, Tate shows how “Freud was 
haunted by this association, performing his anti-Black ‘joke’ as a way of dis-
81 
Gaztambide, “Entre Negros, Blancos y Judios.”
82 
Gaztambide.
83 
Tate, “Freud and His ‘Negro,’ ” 57.

42
marina gržinić
pelling his racial anxieties—as if to say ‘I am not a negro,’ not as statement of 
fact but as anti-Black performance.”
84
Tate’s analysis reveals how this seemingly innocuous joke actually embodies a 
form of “discursive Blackface,” where Freud elides the racial and colonial impli-
cations of his language while reinforcing a power dynamic that positions him as 
a colonial master.
Importantly, Tate highlights the dual nature of psychoanalysis for African Amer-
icans—it can be both an ally for articulating the complexities of racism and an 
enemy aligning itself with forces of domination and oppression. By examining 
Freud’s joke and its repetition, Tate exposes how it reconstitutes and reinforces 
the power dynamics of White over Black, eventually collapsing the intricate tri-
partite relationship between Whites, Jews, and Blacks into a simplistic polarity 
of White and Black.
85
Gaztambide draws attention to the equation of Jewishness and Blackness in 
Freud’s time and the erasure of Freud’s racial difference through the lens of 
Whiteness. This erasure was facilitated by the societal borders marked by ostra-
cized Black individuals, effectively repressing a larger cultural understanding 
of race and its castration of racial identities. He further underscores the role of 
anti-Blackness as a “primal scene” that confronts individuals of all racial back-
grounds with the gratuitous violence inflicted upon Black people.
86
Historicization of the (White) Unconscious: Freud, Fanon, Malabou, 
and the Racial Unconscious
In addition to the civil protests and disobedience of Black African American cit-
izens in the United States in the previous century and their struggles through 
the long centuries of colonialism through the Jim Crow era to Black Lives Matter 
today, the question of the impact on psychic structure under the heavy process-
es of extractivist exploitation and structural racialization has once again, as so 
often in history, risen to the surface. More precisely, where is and where was 
84 
Gaztambide, “Entre Negros, Blancos y Judios.”
85 
Tate, “Freud and His ‘Negro,’ ” 57.
86 
Gaztambide, “Entre Negros, Blancos y Judios.”

43
the body in the field of tensions between biopolitics and necropolitics
psychoanalysis in this process? In the Freudian and Lacanian elaborations of 
the psyche, the libido, and the unconscious, the lineage of Black thought in con-
temporary psychoanalysis is almost absent, but it can be enumerated: Fanon, 
Spillers,
87
 Tate.
But at the same time, in retrospect, we see a reordering of vocabulary and impli-
cations because, due to the specific constellation of the new millennium and the 
war in Iraq and the Middle East, the year 2000 brought to the American public 
corpses and US soldiers disfigured to a degree that even the heavily controlled 
mass media coverage of the post-2001 intervention by the United States and its 
allies in the Middle East could not prevent. The images of the mid-2000s, the 
trophy images (paraphrasing Suvendrini Perera)
88
 captured in hyper-racialized 
selfies of US soldiers in Iraq, and the contemporary trophy bodies captured in 
these racist images in the Middle East as a “gift of freedom” (paraphrasing Mimi 
Thi Nguyen)
89
 from the White Military Coalition, as the Occident embarked on a 
mission of perpetual war to save our “innocent” White civilization, were reflected 
in a theoretical turn regarding the White Unconscious and its new elaboration.
In 2017, in “Racialized Bodies and the Digital (Financial) Mode of Production,” 
I wrote the following, “I want to radicalize the status of images of the digital 
(financial) mode of production; more than that, I want to ask: (1) what is the 
racial(ized) unconscious (see the adjective in front of the unconscious) of these 
images, and (2) what is their status in relation to the imperial, colonial, nec-
ropolitical and racial line that cuts global neoliberal capitalism from within and 
heavily conditions contemporary necropolitical capitalist production and its fi-
nancial-images?”
90
87 
See Hortense J. Spillers, “ ‘All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife 
Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race,” Boundary 2 23, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 75–141, 
https://doi.org/10.2307/303639.
88 
Suvendrini Perera, “Dead Exposures: Trophy Bodies and Violent Visibilities of the 
Nonhuman,” Borderlands e-journal 13, no. 1 (2014): 1–26, https://doi.org/20.500.11937/ 4074.
89 
Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Durham: 
Duke University Press, 2012).
90 
Marina Gržinić, “Racialized Bodies and the Digital (Financial) Mode of Production,” in 
Regimes of Invisibility in Contemporary Art, Theory and Culture: Image, Racialization, 
History, ed. Marina Gržinić, Aneta Stojnić, and Miško Šuvaković (Cham, Switzerland: 
Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 13.

44
marina gržinić
This view holds that racial terms and their extensions accumulate over time and 
form racial populations, driven by predictable effects arising from real physi-
cal experiences and encounters. Controlling the movement and positioning of 
racialized individuals. This control is a form of exercising power that places ra-
cialized bodies in specific social, physical, and psychological contexts. The ex-
periences of marginalization, dehumanization, and racialization Fanon speaks 
of can be understood through the lens of spatial dynamics in which individu-
als are denied full existence and agency within particular spaces, histories, and 
presentations that are reordered by the racial unconscious. Necropolitical racial 
capitalism, in the wake of Robinson theory, has created a new relationship to all 
possible density; no concept can escape the processes of racialization, can it? 
Fanon already hinted at this in the 1950s with a not-so-dramatically different vo-
cabulary (he speaks of the cultural unconscious, disalienation, etc.).
This is consistent with Jeffrey Prager’s thought-provoking 2017 article “Do Black 
Lives Matter? A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Racism and American Resistance 
to Reparations,” in which Prager examines the complex dynamics of racism and 
its impact on the reparative impulse and social progress. Prager’s analysis fo-
cuses on the concept of racism and its role in maintaining a divisive barrier be-
tween racial groups, particularly between Whites and Blacks. Prager writes:
Racism, however, emphasizing the reality of racial difference, continues, as al-
ways, to serve as a powerful defense thwarting the reparative impulse. The result 
has been the securing of physical separation between Whites and Blacks and the 
persistence of psychic enmeshment. Absent the implementation of a politics of 
reparations, African Americans will never achieve externality, or independence, 
from the White mind.
91
 
Prager contends that racism, which focuses on highlighting and exaggerating 
racial differences, functions as a powerful defense mechanism for the regime 
of Whiteness that maintains a physical separation between White individuals 
and Black individuals, thereby perpetuating an ongoing sense of psychological 
91 
Jeffrey Prager, “Do Black Lives Matter? A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Racism and 
American Resistance to Reparations,” in “Psychoanalysis and the Political Unconscious,” 
special issue, Political Psychology 38, no. 4 (August 2017): 637, https://doi.org/10.1111/
pops.12436.

45
the body in the field of tensions between biopolitics and necropolitics
imprisonment. In essence, Prager’s study illuminates the complicated interplay 
between racism, reparations, and the broader struggle for racial equality and 
autonomy. By taking a psychoanalytic look at these complex dynamics, he pro-
vides insight into the deep-rooted obstacles that stand in the way of the need to 
address historical injustices for a more just society.
These thoughts are all the more pertinent given the persistence of the thesis of 
understanding the unconscious, which is mutable and changeable, along racial 
disparities, which received a new theoretical twist in 2007.
In 2007 , Catherine Malabou published the book Les nouveaux blesses: De Freud a 
la neurologie, penser les traumatismes contemporains [The new wounded: From 
Freud to neurology, thinking about contemporary trauma],
92
 translated into 
English in 2012 as The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage (Forms of 
Living).
93
 This is how Catherine Kellog describes it in her chapter “Plasticity and 
the Cerebral Unconscious: New Wounds, New Violences, New Politics,” I quote:
In her 2007 book Les Nouveaux blesses, Catherine Malabou stages an encounter 
between contemporary neuroscience and psychoanalysis that is without peer. She 
identifies a constituency she names as the “new wounded”; those whose brains 
are ineradicably changed as a result of brain damage or severe trauma. These 
wounds can neither be explained nor offered help by way of psychoanalysis, as 
it presently understands itself. In proposing a theory of subjectivity that has the 
“matter” of the brain and its relationship to the psyche at its root, this chapter 
asks whether Malabou’s new materialist approach to psychic events threatens to 
alter a theory of psychic life that was materialist all along?
94
Symptomatically, in 2007, one of the most famous images of the Iraq War was 
a photograph taken by Nina Berman at a commercial portrait studio in a small 
92 
Catherine Malabou, Les nouveaux blesses: De Freud a la neurologie, penser les trauma-
tismes contemporains (Paris: Bayard, 2007).
93 
Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage (Forms of Living), 
trans. Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).
94 
Catherine Kellogg, “Plasticity and the Cerebral Unconscious: New Wounds, New Violences, 
New Politics,” in Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work 
of Catherine Malabou, ed. Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller (Durham: Duke 
University Press, 2015), 114.

46
marina gržinić
town in Illinois. A young couple stands side by side, looking at the camera. The 
groom is wearing a decorated uniform, but his facial features have literally melt-
ed away. He has no nose, no chin, no ears, and no hair. His head seems to hang 
straight down from his shoulders, and his face is so badly burned that it is dif-
ficult to decipher his facial expression. The portrait is just one of a much larger 
series Berman shot on behalf of People magazine showing the recovery, home-
coming and wedding day of Marine Sgt. Ty Ziegel. Ty’s second deployment to 
Iraq was interrupted when a suicide bomber blew himself up near his vehicle 
during a routine patrol. The searing heat melted most of the skin from Ty’s body 
and blinded him in one eye. His skull was so badly crushed that doctors had to 
replace it with plastic. Ty had to endure 19 surgeries. Berman completed the se-
ries over the course of three separate visits. First, he documented Ty’s recovery 
and then, after his release, the couple’s wedding in late 2006.
Back to Malabou and the context presented: what is this we have before us? 
Why does it appear in 2007? While we have images of brutal disfigurations of 
Black bodies and those made “the Other” through ongoing hyperviolent pro-
cesses of racialization, should not we also say that we are looking back from the 
future? As the images of disfigurations are ubiquitous, it is necessary to invest 
in a new logic that also takes in the necropolitical brutalities in general that are 
exponentially increasing along the racial/colonial divide, millions of disposable 
refugees, overkilling. Add to this the connection of the repressed history of co-
lonialism and slavery with disfigurations of soldiers coming home from wars in 
the Middle East. The horrors of disfigurations and brutalized Black bodies, from 
slavery to colonialism, are shaped by racial structures that are visibly imprinted 
on the body. The body is literally melted down in colonialism through whipping, 
beating, and cutting. But also, in recent history, as Kimberly Juanita Brown de-
scribed in 2015 the afterimage of the Black body as the afterlife of slavery, rep-
etitions of the indelible memory of slavery.
95
 Second, the cerebral unconscious 
makes a shift (bypassing the racial unconscious) from what Nina Cvar points 
out in this volume, “from labor to affect.”
96
95 
Brown, The Repeating Body.
96 
See Marina Gržinić in Bogdan Popa, “Insurgent Flows. Trans*Decolonial and Black 
Marxist Futures: A Conversation with Bogdan Popa,” by Marina Gržinić and Tjaša Kancler, 
in Gržinić and Pristovšek, Political Choreographies, 139.

47
the body in the field of tensions between biopolitics and necropolitics
In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon starts a very important sequence of thoughts. 
He is discussing the concept of the collective unconscious and the archetype of 
the “uncivilized savage” or the “black man” that Jung suggests exists within the 
European collective unconscious.
97
 Fanon begins by mentioning that he’s exam-
ining the symbolic crystallization of reality and how it relates to psychology. He 
then introduces Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious, which is a concept 
in Jungian psychology that refers to a shared reservoir of experiences, memo-
ries, and archetypes that are inherited from our ancestors. Jung’s idea, as Fanon 
notes, includes the presence of an archetype that represents “bad instincts” and 
the “uncivilized savage,” which Jung associates with the “black man.”
98
 Fanon, 
however, expresses skepticism about Jung’s interpretation. He states that he be-
lieves Jung is mistaken in linking these negative aspects solely to the “black 
man.” Fanon’s skepticism stems from his broader critique of how racial biases 
and colonial ideologies have influenced psychology and the understanding of 
race. He argues that these ideas have been used to perpetuate the subjugation 
and inferiorization of Black individuals by pathologizing their identity and at-
tributing negative characteristics to them based on their skin color.
In the next step Fanon underlines, “We need quite simply to demonstrate that 
Jung confuses instinct and habit. According to him, the collective unconscious 
is part of the psyche; the myths and archetypes are permanent engrams of the 
species. We hope we have shown that this collective unconscious is nothing of 
the sort and that, in fact, it is cultural, i.e., it is acquired.”
99
 It is not surprising, 
then, that, as Sara Ahmed notes in her 2006 Queer Phenomenology: Orienta-
tions, Objects, Others, “what bodies ‘tend to do’ are effects of histories rather 
than being originary.”
100
 Ahmed emphasizes the idea that human behavior and 
actions are shaped by historical and cultural contexts. This perspective aligns 
with Fanon’s critique of Jung’s concept in that it emphasizes the influence of his-
tory and culture on individual and collective behavior.
In 2018, in “Giving Back the Land,” Burnett writes:
97 
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (2008), 164.
98 
Fanon, 164.
99 
Fanon, 164.
100 
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke 
University Press, 2006), 56.

48
marina gržinić
Fanon invokes a highly context-specific cultural unconscious. He characterises it, 
in a manner that points towards the importance of discourse, as “a constellation 
of postulates, a series of propositions that slowly and subtly—with the help of 
books, newspapers, schools and their texts, advertisements, films, radio—work 
their way into one’s mind and shape one’s view of the world of the group to which 
one belongs.” For white-skinned people, a Black body is a dirty body, both moral-
ly and physically; Blackness is to whiteness as darkness and sin are to innocence 
and “magical, heavenly light.” The unconscious is populated with these indexi-
cal relationships, which shape profoundly individual desire and behaviour.
101
And continues: “The Black imago plays a role in the development of the white 
self, as the perfect Other, ideally not-self and “absolutely unassimilable.”
102
 Bur-
nett, like us, does not want to leave the implications of this reinsertion of Fanon 
in the canonical White history.
In short, racial concepts and their extensions, as well as the control of the move-
ment and positioning of racialized populations and individuals, constitute 
modes of (racial) governance and (racial) sovereignty that place racialized bod-
ies in specific, disposable, disfigured social, physical, and psychological con-
texts. Fanon’s concept of the zone of non-being for highly racialized subjects, 
maintained through the logic of an “afterlife of slavery,” leads to a different un-
derstanding of the unconscious in racial necro-capitalism.
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