For the person of color, the force of the historical-racial schema, which is congruent with what I have been calling the erotic/phobic assemblage, consists in its capacity to explode one’s phenomenologically lived sense of one’s embodied capacities and potentials. In Fanon’s vivid phrasing, the result is “a hemorrhage that left congealed black blood all over my body.” Thinking through this image of bloody injury, we might issue a Fanonian rejoinder to [Tim] Dean: the historical-racial schema is neither a disciplinary identity nor a stereotype from which we can be liberated by the fragmenting operations of erotic desire and sexual jouissance; it is an incoherent historical assemblage that proves, for people of color, directly and painfully shattering, with or without sex; even as, for white racial fetishists, it functions as the preferred instrument for an enjoyably temporary and much sought-after erotic and ecstatic shattering of the self. These readings of racial fetishism should lead us to question the idealization, within psychoanalytic queer theory, of self-shattering jouissance as something beyond the political that dissolves the social identities on which political orders allegedly rest. Far from destroying social identities, racialized self-shattering relies on incoherent histories of race, which it continually reanimates and reinvests with desire and erotic force. To put it bluntly: sexual self-shattering is not a utopian escape from the social order, but a method of its maintenance. Rather than being the Achilles heel of racist social orders, sexuality can operate as their lifeblood, reinvigorating and nourishing archaic fragments of racial history that might otherwise fall out of collective memory. In fact, I would argue that the source of sexuality’s negativity is less its fragmentation of corporeal and psychic integrity than its uncontrollable historicity—the ways in which its embodied imaginary is continually hurtling backward to violently oppressive historical and cultural pasts.
Kadji Amin, from Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History
