Loving with bell, Leaping with Fanon, and Landing Nowhere

Abstract

bell teaches us that love is what makes it possible for life that doesn’t matter—life that doesn’t have access to the timeline of Man (or any timeline)—to matter. She writes, “No matter our place in imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchal culture, when we do the work of love, we are doing the work of ending domination.” bell calls on us to abandon our (bad) faith in Man’s positivism and progress in favor of another kind of faith: “spiritual awakening.” In what follows, I pair bell’s insight with Fanon’s argument that “occult instability” is what yields revolution, in order to elaborate love in bell’s own words: as “reckless abandon,” as a “spiritual awakening” that asks us to give up on this world in search of an/Other, even (especially) if we do not (yet) know where or how or if we will arrive at that landing.