Death-bound subjectivity: Fanon’s zone of nonbeing and the Lacanian death drive

Abstract

Is there a distinctive form of political agency that emerges from the conditions of ‘death-bound subjectivity’? Fanon’s idea of the zone of nonbeing suggests that this is indeed the case. Yet there is an omission in the secondary literature on Fanon in this respect. While a renowned Fanon scholar like Lewis Gordon usefully explores how the zone can be understood as domain of ontological erasure, he typically fails to elaborate on the revolutionary potential of the concept. The nature of the psychical processes underlying this passage to revolutionary agency remains unclear. Of such agency we might ask: what is the animating factor that underlies, that drives the passionate attachment to such death-bound causes? Lacan’s reconceptualization of the death drive as ethical cause—which, to be sure, represents a dramatic departure from the original Freudian conceptualization of a ‘death instinct’—is presented here as a useful auxiliary concept to Fanon’s zone of nonbeing. With speculative reference to the ethical dimension of the Lacanian death drive as a mode of surplus life which both underlies an unceasing fidelity to a cause and delivers the subject to a zone between life and death, we are able to offer an account of the agency of radical negativity that the zone of nonbeing engenders.