Abstract
Philip Roth’s 2000 novel, The Human Stain, is widely considered a novel about racial passing. However, such a view assumes that Coleman Silk, a light-skinned African American who lives most of his life as a white Jew, is the sole protagonist of the story at the expense of Zuckerman, who, as the narrator and self-proclaimed author of The Human Stain, is no less important than Coleman to the novel. The novel details how Zuckerman abandons his self-imposed seclusion and becomes reintegrated into human relationships after a spontaneous dance with Coleman. Granting equal importance to Coleman and Zuckerman will reveal that Roth’s concern in the novel is not only the historical phenomenon of racial passing but subjectivation in general. To understand the instances of ontogenesis in The Human Stain, this essay proposes an affective materialist perspective, one that, instead of focusing on the macro-level of social structures, as previous criticism on the novel has done, turns to what can be considered the quantum level of pre-perceptual matter. Such a perspective is provided by affect theory, for which subjectivity is always embodied and subjectivation is galvanized by active, creative matter. This paper argues that the 19-year-old Coleman’s racial passing and Zuckerman’s self-imposed seclusion, based on a mixture of the modern humanist concept of self-invention and the postmodern belief in the body as text, exemplify an idealist conception of ontogenesis that is destined to ossification and sterility. In contrast, the 71-year-old Coleman’s unexpected transformation after meeting Faunia and Zuckerman’s revitalization through the dance with Coleman illustrate that embodied subjectivation through affection is the truly productive ontogenesis, which leads to continual openness and creativity.