Becoming What One Is: Friedrich Nietzsche Reads the Autobiography of Malcolm X

• In Event: Fighting against White Supremacy

Abstract

What can Friedrich Nietzsche tell us about the work of Malcolm X? The 2011 publication of Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention proved controversial: while many luminaries praised the book, a number of academics, artists, and activists condemned the text, focusing on what they believed to be Marable’s shoddy scholarship, his salacious focus on Malcolm’s sex life, and his suggestion that Malcolm repeatedly reinvented himself, a claim which, they argued, made Malcolm cynical and inauthentic. Focusing on this last concern, this essay offers a reading of The Autobiography of Malcolm X informed by an account of Friedrich Nietzsche’s work, especially his essay “Schopenhauer as Educator” and his autobiography, Ecce Homo. Nietzsche’s struggle to get out from under the history of Western philosophy is echoed, it suggests, by Malcolm’s struggle to get out from “under the heel of the white man,” with both figures employing similar textual methods. Just as Alexander Nehamas argues that Nietzsche sought originality by creating himself as a literary figure, it is suggested that Malcolm creates himself in the text of his Autobiography as an exemplar for his readers seeking, like Nietzsche before him, to impact upon his audience in productive ways. By offering a political pedagogy predicated upon a genealogy of Whiteness, Malcolm sought to move from an understanding of White supremacy as Truth, to the truth about White supremacy, showing the contingency of that which appeared monolithic and immutable. Like Nietzsche’s ‘free spirits,’ Malcolm sought not to offer a program or a method for others to imitate, rather he aimed, by his own attempts to get free of White supremacy, to demonstrate that it could be done and to provoke others to seek their own paths to liberation. As with Nietzsche’s project, it will be suggested, Malcolm seeks a liberation without ressentiment, an approach which does not seek to forgive Whites for their crimes, but which makes Whites irrelevant to the abundant Black life in which Blacks make themselves, becoming, in the Nietzschean formulation, who they are. It is an approach to Malcolm’s work which suggests that criticism of the reinvention trope misses the constant state of becoming depicted in the Autobiography, and that Malcolm’s assertion that his “whole life had been a chronology of changes” sought to cultivate just such change in his readers, most obviously by encouraging them to fight, as he had, against the constraints that Whiteness imposed upon them. Through this Nietzschean lens, it will be argued, it is possible to see in Malcolm’s work a complex politico-theoretical strategy predicated upon a commitment to Black futurity

Author

• Simon A. Stow, William & Mary