Reconfiguring the Colonized Body: Revolution as Rebirth in the Writings of Marie Cardinal and Frantz Fanon

In his short polemic, “The Politics of Subjectivity,” Terry Eagleton laments the absence of a theory of the subject that can provide the control, organization, and direction required by a fundamental political transformation such as Revolution (48). For Eagleton, such a theory would grasp “social transformation as at once diffusion and affirmation, the death and the birth of the subject” (48). He is explicit in his understanding—or misunderstanding—that the splitting of the subject precludes the possibility of concerted political action. Eagleton does not explore the primary effect of that splitting—namely, the creation of the subject as desiring and the consequent emergence of agency on the basis of this desire. Instead, Eagleton sees desire as coterminous with the diffusion of the subject and thus as an impediment to the subject's pursuing a coherent political goal.

I shall argue, in contrast, that far from being in opposition to agency, desire is its very ground. Furthermore, I will demonstrate that identification, a process fundamental to political action, is both a cause and an effect of desire. Through an examination of The Words to Say It, an autobiographical fiction by French-Algerian writer Marie Cardinal, and the revolutionary writings of Frantz Fanon, I will explore the relations among desire, identification, and political action in the constitution of the revolutionary subject. In so doing, I will draw a distinction between the subject produced within a psychoanalytic discourse and the subject constituted within the master discourses of Revolution and Colonization.

In the colonized subject, the intra-psychic antagonism produced by social antagonism is particularly evident, and it is this intersection of the psychic and the social that Eagleton's formulation does not address. It is a significant omission. The subject formed within a condition of antagonism experiences a radical disjunction between his sense of who he is— his identity—and the subject positio