Towards Black Individuation and a Calculus of Variations

Ramon Amaro and Murad Khan turn to Franz Fanon’s thoughts on language to challenge general notions of psychic negation and categorical human difference. Amaro and Khan address the wider implications of race as a problem of psychic individuation, self-division, and metaphysical assumptions of a passively representative Black image. They consider the larger impact of race as a hierarchy knowledge domain that forecloses on the full expression of the individual, while overdetermining the process of self-actualization. Ultimately, Amaro and Khan ask whether a re-articulation of the individual, as proposed in Simondon’s notion of psychic individual and collective individuation, might bring forth an alternative conception of racial duress as a study in process of Black individuation, and the partial resolution of a more affirmative pre-individual reality.