In our current world, which has become a world of general enmity, Achille Mbembe, the historian, and philosopher of postcolonialism, tries to find the origin of this violence as well as the ...possibilities of reparations. He finds in the work of Frantz Fanon, through his principle of vulnerability and his pact of care, the bases of a true sharing of the Earth. By going beyond the wars of identity, Mbembe introduces his "ethics of the passer-by" and thus shows the bases of a planetary democracy which includes all living beings on Earth, not only humans.
While several scholars have explored the connections between the work of Frantz Fanon and Pierre Bourdieu through their shared relationship to French Colonial Algeria, comparatively less work has ...examined the shared perspectives on colonialism from which they both draw and where the discontinuities emerge. This paper explores the differences between these two thinkers, namely in their conceptualizing of the potential for a revolutionary consciousness to emerge from colonial populations during anticolonial actions. I argue in this article that where Bourdieu conceives of the horror of colonialism as a violent clash of cultures producing ‘hysteresis’ and a level of socio-political alienation from the most dispossessed sectors of society, Fanon conceives of a revolutionary consciousness emerging from the threat of racialized violence genocide and colonial subjection. Bourdieu however suggests that anticolonial revolutionary fervor cannot emerge from populations most dispossessed by the violence of colonization. While Bourdieu’s analysis drew solely from the Algerian case, Fanon recognized anticolonial struggle to be a fundamental type of revolution that could be theorized. In this, Fanon analyzed the Algerian revolution in the context of other anticolonial actions taking place across Africa and the world. Fanon thereby lays out a theory of the role of racism in structuring colonialism and fostering a revolutionary consciousness that is distinct. This cleavage of perspectives from two seemingly similarly inclined theorists emerges from a divergent view of the role of racism in dehumanizing and structuring colonial subjectivities and the effects of colonialism on those most aggrieved by it to spur political action.
Where does the consulting room begin and end? And how do those limits impact the therapeutic aims of psychoanalysis? Drawing on clinical work conducted at the margins of European empire across the ...twentieth century, this essay explores how psychoanalytic notions of political subjectivity are mediated by the contingent spatial aesthetics of the clinic in moments of revolutionary struggle. It brings clinical uses of the psychoanalytic frame by Frantz Fanon, Wulf Sachs, Marie Langer, and Juan Carlos Volnovich into conversation with Derrida’s conceptualization of the
to examine the boundary between clinical space and the “context of the world” in which it is situated.
In 1959, in the midst of the liberation struggle in Algeria, Frantz Fanon published
L'an v de la révolution algérienne
(
A Dying Colonialism
), which contained a chapter dedicated to the role of ...radio in anticolonial resistance. The chapter, “Ici la voix de l'Algérie” (“This Is the Voice of Algeria”), describes how the radio changed from mouthpiece of the French occupation to voice of the Algerian resistance, primarily between 1954 and 1956. Before the liberation struggle, Fanon tells us, over ninety-five percent of radio receivers belonged to Europeans, for whom the radio was a link to Radio-Alger—or, simply, “Des Français parlent aux Français” (“Frenchmen speaking to Frenchmen” “Ici” 309;
Dying Colonialism
74). The station was a “réédition ou écho de la Radiodiffusion française nationale installée á Paris” (“re-edition or an echo of the French National Broadcasting System operating from Paris”) and “exprime avant tout la société coloniale et ses valeurs” (“is essentially the instrument of colonial society and its values” 305; 69).
Some 25 years ago, the editors of Fanon: A Critical Reader spoke of “Five Stages of Fanon Studies,” the fourth of which referred to poststructural and postcolonial critiques of Fanonian liberation ...largely located in the western academy, while the fifth pointed toward a still-new stage comprising radical scholars and activists “doing work with and through Fanon” to confront the persistent white supremacy and coloniality of the present (Gordon et al. 7). On the one hand, this fifth stage exploded with the viral return of Fanon in the age of Black Lives Matter—no fewer than four books on Fanon appeared in 2015 and several more since.1 On the other hand, however, this return of/to Fanon as revolutionary icon has also been accompanied by the emergence of Afropessimism. The resonances seem clear, as when Marriott describes antiblackness as “the discourse through which a singular experience of the world is constituted” (Whither Fanon? x), seemingly echoing Afropessimism’s re-ontologization of the world. ...the implied political subject of this ontology— jealously guarded by Afropessimism’s hostility to intercommunal solidarities—coexists with Marriott’s broader appeals to the “nonwhite subject” and the “dispossessed everywhere,” the former incompatible with and the latter anathema to Afropessimist commitments (Whither Fanon? xv–xvi). More importantly, the failures and reorientation of therapy in the context of the colonial war, the abyssal obliteration of the decolonial subject, force Fanon to embrace what Marriott terms a “poetics of dissolution,” with the clinic providing a space for both radical disarticulation and a potential future rearticulation (Whither Fanon?
This article examines the relationship between psychiatry and politics in the thought of Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. The article aims to ...demonstrate that Fanon developed a unique approach to psycho-politics that dialectically engages psychiatry and politics from his earliest works. Fanon’s psycho-politics can be traced from his work in the early 1950s, namely his doctoral dissertation and Black Skin, White Masks (1952). From his doctoral dissertation to Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon tries to explain colonialism as a psychiatrist. This search manifests itself again in Fanon’s best-known work, The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Although The Wretched of the Earth is known as the influential work of a political militant, it is the book of a scientist-thinker who analyzes colonialism from a psychiatric perspective. However, the connection between Fanon’s psychiatric thought and practice and his political writings has not been sufficiently revealed. Fanon has been thought of as a ‟Third World militant.” But there is a dialectical relationship between Fanon’s theory and practice of psychiatry and his political thought. Understanding Fanon’s thought can only be possible by analyzing its psycho-political structure. The aim of this article is to examine the development of Fanon’s political thought through his earliest psychiatric writings and clinical practice, to link psychiatric theory and practice to his political theory, and thus to outline Fanon’s psycho-politics.
Da un lato erede dell'antico umanesimo universalista, a tal punto imbevuto della superiorita della propria cultura da non provare imbarazzo nei panni del colono, e dall'altro classe lavoratrice, la ...popolazione francese era ambiguamente divisa tra la complicita con l'oppressione coloniale e la sua stessa condizione di subalternita. Le pagine della prefazione di Sartre chiudevano con un presagio: ?Il terrore ha lasciato l'Africa per impiantarsi qui? (ivi, 22), scriveva, una frase che sembrava rimandare in un tempo solo all'urgenza del riconoscere l'anima coloniale d'Europa, quella tendenza celata sotto l'egida di una modernita progressista a cercare sempre nuove terre da cui estrarre risorse a basso costo e mercati di sbocco, e la furia dei popoli oppressi, che si sarebbe scagliata contro l'oppressore, presto o tardi, per farci pagare la vergogna dei crimini mai riconosciuti della nostra storia. Potremmo rileggere l'intero lavoro di Fanon per rinvenire nel corpo i sintomi della mistificazione coloniale, quel discorso pervasivo dentro il quale il colonizzato non solo subisce violenza, ma e designato colpevole di tutto cio che gli accade. ? L'eterogenesi delle cause della crisi, quell'uso istituente del linguaggio che produce il corpo della popolazione colonizzata come colpevole, e il perno stesso della legittimita coloniale.
In the heat of the decolonisation struggles of the 2000s, there has been little space or tolerance for conceptual criticism of this important moment in global history. Using the South African case, ...this article outlines some of the dilemmas of decolonisation as a concept and method for dealing with legacy knowledge in the aftermath of colonialism and apartheid. The status of whites as citizens rather than colonials, the lack of determination of meanings of decolonisation within public universities, and the defanging of a potentially radical concept are among the concerns raised in this critical work on the uptake of the idea in post-apartheid society. What this criticism points to is the need for a theory of institutions when dealing with radical curriculum change rather than a politics that relies so much on the rhetorical, the symbolic and the performative in the demand for decolonisation.
Or Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o who, in Secure the Base (2016), points out how western nations “Keep Africa eternally weak, eternally divided, eternally fighting religious wars, eternally buying weapons of war, ...eternally using the military against African populations, eternally assuming that the West, Europe in particular, is heaven.” Erin Babnik/Alamy Stock Photo Massimiliano Donati/Awakening/Getty Images Writing, notes Arundhati Roy in her recently published collected non-fiction (My Seditious Heart, 2019), is for her about uncovering “the relationship between power and powerlessness and the endless, circular conflict they’re engaged in”. Over 20 years of writing fiction and non-fiction (her two novels, The God of Small Things 1997 and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness 2017, are investigations into the politics of the personal), Roy has constructed a surprising and compelling contribution to the canon of global health. ...those struggles must take place not in parliaments or courtrooms, but “in the fields, the mountains, the river valleys, the city streets, and university campuses”.
Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon both argue that oppression fundamentally constrains the subject’s relationship to and embodied experience of time, yet their accounts of temporality are rarely ...brought together. This paper will explore what we might learn about the operation of different types of reductive temporality if we read Beauvoir and Fanon alongside each other, focusing primarily on the early works that arguably lay out the central concerns of their respective temporal frameworks. At first glance, it seems that these two models of temporality have radically different emphases. While Beauvoir suggests that reductive temporalities work to sever the future from the past and present, Fanon locates this destructive operation in the heightening of their entanglement. However, I will contend that there are deep affinities between these accounts: For both Beauvoir and Fanon, freedom is bound up with futurity, with its lack therefore cashed out in terms of stagnation, repetition, and the entrapment within a hollow moment that prevents authentic projection. Both resist teleological perspectives; problematize the endeavor to describe the structures of lived temporality in neutral terms; and show that temporality is crucial to the pursuit of a political phenomenology. These resonances, however, should only serve to recast rather than dissolve the tension between their approaches; ultimately, we need to acknowledge the distinctiveness of their differing concerns and aims.
