A peculiar sensation

Black and Ashamed 
127
Ellison’s subject, constituted as a “sign” by virtue of its opposites, in the 
“juxtaposition of [its] modes,” represents the limit point of subjectiv-
ization that disrupts the individualizing strategies of identiication and 
ixed systems of social organization. As a “man of parts,” he is most 
visible, being the effractive igure “of visual peace,” and yet, at the same 
time, most invisible, insofar as he resists identiication within the dom-
inant structures of visibility. What is revealed in this ambivalent igure 
of (in)visibility in Ellison’s anecdote is the space of 
non-relation
between 
the subjectivizing language of power and the subject that cannot be fully 
appropriated by it, and it is within this space of non-relation, which, for 
Ellison, is eminently American, that the possibilities of alternate futures 
reside:
His volks-Rolls Royce might well have been loaded with Marxist 
tracts and Molotov cocktails, but his clashing of styles nevertheless 
sounded an integrative … compulsion to improvise upon the given. 
His garments were, literally and iguratively, of many colors and 
cultures, his racial identity interwoven of many strands. Whatever 
his politics, sources of income, hierarchal status, and such, he re-
vealed his essential “Americanness” in his freewheeling assault upon 
traditional forms of the Western aesthetic… Culturally, he was an 
American joker. If his Afro and dashiki symbolized protest, his 
boots, camera, volkswagen, and Homburg imposed certain qualii-
cations upon that protest. In doing so they played irreverently upon 
the symbolism of status, property, and authority, and suggested new 
possibilities of perfection.
56
In terms of the narrative, the disarticulation of the language of 
power that frees up alternate forms of enunciation is represented by 
the narrator’s refusal to assume his own subjectivization within the 
constraining racial schemas that constitute his historical and social 
existence. His “hole in the ground,” that is “
full
of light” to manifest 
his invisibility, to “conirm … [his] reality [and] give birth to … [his] 
form,” (
IM
6) is the space of non-relation and a laboratory of subject 
formation where new, unpresupposable identities not yet legible by the 
existing orders of history can emerge. It is only as invisible that the 
narrator’s 
own
form is reconstituted as visible. It “is incorrect to as-
sume,” as he explains, “that, because I’m invisible and live in a hole, 
I’m dead… I myself, after existing for some twenty years, did not be-
come alive until I discovered my invisibility” (6, 7). For the narrator, 
to be riveted to ixed assignations determined by power relations and 
remain “unaware of one’s form is to live a death” (7). The only way 
for agency and for true emancipatory politics to emerge is to multiply 
subjective positions. “Diversity is the word,” the narrator declares in 
his Epilogue. “Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant 

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128
Zlatan Filipovic
states” (577). This resistance to subjectivizing processes is also where 
Foucault locates the political imperatives of our time. “The political, 
ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days,” he writes, “is not 
to try to liberate the individual from the state and from the state’s 
institutions but to liberate us … from the type of individualization 
which is linked to the state … [and] to promote new forms of subjec-
tivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been 
imposed on us for several centuries.”
57
Soliciting new economies of power relations, however, requires the 
exigency of deconstruction of the language of power in order to open 
up the space of non-relation, “a hole in the ground” that allows for dei-
nition of identities in “juxtaposition of modes.”
58
In Foucault’s terms, 
this space of non-relation could be seen as a heterotopic space, existing 
alongside history in history, an interrogative space accrued by the con-
tradictions of history, and as a “simultaneously mythic and real contes-
tation of the space in which we live,” it can transform the relations of 
power by exposing the contingency of their deinition.
59
For the narrator 
of Ellison’s novel, this was a “thread of reality” (511), loosening the 
skein of its enduring illusions:
I was both depressed and fascinated… My entire body started to 
itch, as though I had just been removed from a plaster cast and was 
unused to the new freedom of movement… [The fact that] you could 
actually make yourself anew … was frightening, for now the world 
seemed to low before my eyes. All boundaries down, freedom was 
not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of pos-
sibility. And sitting there trembling I caught a brief glimpse of the 
possibilities posed by Rinehart’s multiple personalities and turned 
away … if Rinehart could use them in his work, no doubt I could use 
them in mine. It was too simple, and yet they had already opened up 
a new section of reality for me.
(498–99)
The realization that his world is neither binary nor dialectic, that “men 
are different and that all life is divided” (576), that the foundations sup-
porting it are fantasies of the white mythology and that its “beautiful 
absurdity” (559) throbs iercely under our desperate attempts to put it 
“in a strait jacket” (576), is what compels the narrator underground. 
“[B]ecause up above there’s an increasing passion to make men conform 
to a pattern” (576). Refusing the assignations of his historical existence 
and “its narrow borders” (576), he takes refuge in a hole alongside it in a 
space of non-relation where he will write his own narrative of liberation 
before resurfacing again. The world, indeed, may not be ready yet but 
in its fantasies of visible certainties, as the narrator tells us, “an invisible 
man has a socially responsible role to play” (581).

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