Malte Frøslee Ibsen raises three important questions regarding my book. I do not have a very satisfying answer to Ibsen’s first question about my decision to leave out all authors from the critical theory of the Frankfurt School from my book, other than my desire to write about other thinkers. The Frankfurt School has been central to my training as a critical theorist, and I continue to read, teach, and write about these authors (in a recent article, I use Walter Benjamin’s theory of dialectical images to qualify the political ability of Claudia Rankine’s play, The White Card, to capture the masochistic, rather than sadistic libidinal structure that white supremacy takes under neoliberalism). The Frankfurt School is, however, not the sole tradition of critical theory missing from my book; many others are, for I was not trying to be comprehensive. I, however, can imagine a Militant Intellect II focused exclusively on the Frankfurt School’s conceptual personae, with chapters on Benjamin’s Baudelaire, Herbert Marcuse’s Orpheus, and Narcissus, and so on. Maybe Ibsen and I can coedit that book one day.
His second question refers to my qualification of the intellect as militant, and thus with the intimation of effects like rage, which T. W. Adorno considered inimical to critique in his late essay on “Resignation.” All I have to say here is that while there is an important tradition critical of these negative effects—traceable to Friedreich Nietzsche’s critique of ressentiment—there is also a feminist Global South tradition that recuperates their political potential. Think of Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger” (1981), Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (2005), or Laura Quintana’s excellent way of distinguishing “political anger” from ressentiment in Rabia (2021). Thus, I prefer Glen Sean Coulthard’s nuanced claim in Red Skin, White Masks (2014) that “under certain conditions Indigenous peoples’ individual and collective expressions of anger and resentment can help prompt the very forms of self-affirmative praxis that generate rehabilitated Indigenous subjectivities and decolonized forms of life” (p. 109) to Adorno’s blank rejection of these effects.
Finally, Ibsen is concerned that my understanding of revolutionary time is potentially oversimplifying if not altogether “morally questionable,” for I do not condemn armed struggles tout court, as is clear from my chapter on Fanon’s decolonial version of the militant intellect. This does not mean, as Ibsen seems to suggest, that I think of armed struggles as the only way to conceive of emancipatory struggles. My inclusion of a chapter on the nonviolent alternative theorized by Judith Butler—which should by no means be considered as correcting Fanon’s—proves this wrong, as do other chapters. What form revolutionary action takes is a historical question I neither engage nor make normative claims about. My book is not even about the form that critical theory takes under revolutionary conditions, even if there is enough in my chapters on Fanon and Karl Marx to consider this. My book is about the ways in which critical theory cultivates a free intellect even when revolutionary conditions are absent, and about one rather than the way it does this well: by producing conceptual personae capable of dramatizing critical thinking. Here, I do feel closer to Adorno, but not as Ibsen implies, for I do not endorse Adorno’s disengaged position. Rather, I feel closer to the Adorno that defended critique as an essential democratic attribute (hence my reference to the general intellect and to universality), because it brings “the power to resist existing institutions, to resist everything that is merely posited, that justifies itself with its existence,” as he put it in an essay on “Critique” published in the 2005 edition of Critical Models (p. 281-2).
