On Revolutionary Suicide

• Published in: Diacritics Vol. 49; no. 4; pp. 101 - 133
• Main Author: Marriott, David
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.01.2021
• Subjects: African Americans; Death & dying; Murders & murder attempts; Newton, Huey P (1942-1989); Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900); Politics; Revolutions; Suicides & suicide attempts
• ISSN: 0300-7162; 1080-6539; 1080-6539
• DOI: 10.1353/dia.2021.0036

This essay takes up Huey Newton’s notion of revolutionary suicide. Against the objection that black suicide is merely reactive, Newton proposes that revolutionary suicide follows other principles and demonstrations. Revolutionary suicide is resistant but in ways that does not make it always possible to distinguish between resistance and reaction—in fact, Newton argues that black revolutionary suicide should be considered a life-affirmation, and that this affirmation reveals a will to power in a decidedly Nietzschean sense. This means—if we read suicide as resistant in its reactions—that black affirmation cannot be read on the order of a sovereign decision (as a sacrificial relation to life and death); nor as will, representation, or as a refusal which always relates to an end (the end of oppression, or injustice). This is why, strictly speaking, Newton’s reading of revolutionary suicide is not to be confused with a classical notion of sovereignty (whether that of Bataille or Mbembe), nor with the political definition of self-murder as resistance (by Spivak, or Puar). At the end of this essay, the notion of revolutionary suicide is shown to be something else altogether. That is to say, revolutionary suicide serves not only to realize the form of the one and the multiple (according to a non-messianic and non-sacrificial economy), but also puts into question the presumed inescapable relation between blackness and state murder (due to the relentless nature of necropower and anti-blackness).