Hegel, Freud and Fanon

The Dialectic of Emancipation

Stefan Bird-Pollan

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781783483020
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Revolutionary theories from Marx onward have often struggled to unite the psychological commitments of individuals— understood as ideological— with the larger ethical or political goals of a social movement. As a psychiatrist, social theorist, and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon attempted to connect the ideological and the political. Fanon’s work gives both a psychological explanation of the origins of ideology and seeks to restore the individual to autonomy and political agency. This book explores the deeper philosophical foundations of Fanon’s project in order to understand the depths of Fanon’s contribution to the theory of the subject and to social theory. It also demonstrates how Fanon’s model makes it possible to understand the political dimensions of Freudian psychoanalysis and the psychological dimensions of Hegel’s social theory. This is the first book to bring these two central dimensions of Fanon’s thought into dialogue. It uses Fanon’s position to provide a deeper interpretation of key texts in Freud and Hegel and by uniting these three thinkers contributes to the creolization of all three thinkers.

Chapter 1

Kant, Hegel, Freud, and the Structure of the Subject

In this chapter I give a sketch of what I take to be the theoretical parameters for the current study. I outline the general view of idealism which I take to be operative in the work of Kant, Hegel, Freud, and Fanon. More specifically, the idealism I am concerned with has three elements: the dialectic between inner and outer, the transformation of the material world via the process of desire-satisfaction into structured subjectivity, and finally the idea that these two previous elements can be understood as a process by which the subject integrates itself in order to achieve a proper self-relation. This proper self-relation is understood as autonomy, or freedom.

INTRODUCTION: A COMMON THEORETICAL MODEL

The theoretical reconstruction offered in this chapter has two broad goals. The first is to show that all three thinkers considered in this study subscribe to the basic idea that subjects constitution is also the project of the achievement of freedom. This shared lineage makes their thinking compatible. The second goal is to distinguish between the different levels of philosophical analysis at which these thinkers work within this common conception. Subjectivity integrates itself at many levels. Conceived of individually, the subject seeks to satisfy its desires with the material world it encounters. Socially, however, the subject seeks to integrate itself in the larger community by harmonizing its desires to those of the community. The integration achieved at one level may put the subject at odds with the integration it seeks to achieve at another level. While the difference between these levels thus presents us with a practical problem total integration is nevertheless an imperative. Indeed, the point is that under the idealist model I employ, there can be no satisfactory subject integration unless the subject is completely integrated, not only within itself as an individual body but within the larger social context as well.

Furthermore, it is my claim that the different theorists I consider in this study contribute in unique but compatible ways to an understanding of this demand for total individual and social integration. While Freud has a powerful theory of the individual project of integration, he is less concerned about the political implications of such integration. Hegel, on the other hand, says little about individual self-integration but has much to say about the larger social questions as well as about the meta-theory of such integration. Hegel also has little to say about psychopathology, a subject that is of central concern for Freud and Fanon. Together, however, these three theorists form a powerful theoretical paradigm that presents both the project of the complete integration of the subject as imperative while at the same time being able to diagnose the problem such a total integration presents to the concretely situated subject.

IDEALISM

In this section I sketch what I take to be the critical idealism operative in all of the thinkers I examine in this study. This account centers on the claim that thinking is both a response to the world while also being constitutive of the relationship between subject and world. The idealism I have in mind holds that neither the material nor the conceptual have priority over the other. I will frame this thought in Kantian language since this seems to be more accessible.¹ This account is meant only to give a general indication of the theory of subjectivity I employ throughout this book.

By idealism I mean the idea that the subject plays a central role in the organization of the world.² This thought implies a certain view of the subject’s agency—namely, one in which the subject is in an important way the author of the organization of the world. This is perhaps most obvious in the case of practical reason, where, quite literally, what I do changes the world, even if only in a small way. This idea of agency is named autonomy by Kant and refers to the subject’s ability to be the final arbiter of the norms or rules by which it lives.

Another way to put the thought of autonomy is that the subject is responsible for its norms.³ That is, when the subject decides to do something, it does so in response to an encounter with nature or the world. Being responsive to the world implies a meeting between mind and world, subject and nature, in which the subject’s autonomy is always conditioned by what it encounters. Responsibility can thus be understood as seeking to accommodate the world to the subject’s projects in a way that is equally faithful to how the world is and what the subject wants from the world.

Idealism thus always implies an equal consideration for how the world is to the subject and what the subject wants from the world. It is central to the idealist thought, however, that the world is always framed by the subject—that is, that the subject is the starting point for the encounter with the world. Kant puts it thus: “thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind,” meaning that thoughts must be world directed in order to have something to be about but it is also only by being reflected in thought that whatever world is (intuition), has meaning for the subject.⁴ The core thesis of idealism is thus that subject and world are in an inextricable and dialectical relation with each other.

Idealism thus opposes the one-sided tendencies of both empiricism and rationalism. While empiricism errs too far on the side of taking objects as given in themselves, rationalism errs too far in the direction of believing that thought alone constitutes the true nature of the world. This opposition was neutralized by Kant, who argued that the understanding, the faculty of the mind receptive to experience, stands in dialectical relation with reason, the faculty of the mind which is essentially concerned with agency. This dialectic is radicalized by Hegel at the level of thought itself rather than as different categories into which we separate the world of objects and the world of values.

What, exactly, is the nature of this dialectic itself? That is, what does the subject want from the world, what orients the subject’s encounter with the world? Kant’s answer is that the subject seeks totality. Distinguishing the faculty of knowledge or speculation from the faculty of practical reason or will, Kant writes, “The interest of [reason’s] speculative use consists in the cognition of the object up to the highest a priori principles; that of its practical use consists in the determination of the will with respect to the final and complete end.”⁵ The goal of the subject, what makes the subject a subject, is that it continually seeks to unify itself into a whole or totality, and hence strives to unify all opposition into itself. But this can only occur when the world is appropriately structured to achieve wholeness, self-integration, totality, or what Hegel calls the absolute.

The idealist position is articulated in many ways by different thinkers but some instances relevant here are the Kantian idea that acting pursuant of the categorical imperative is simply to organize the world according to a normative structure (maxim) that one has determined to be right through one’s own rational reflection. For Hegel, Geist, humanity as a whole, builds its own social world by reflecting on the norms that most satisfy its fundamental desires. In Freud, who is not usually considered an idealist, this idealism appears in the axiomatic claim that only by investing the world with meaning can meaningful satisfaction be achieved in it.

Switching registers now in order to relate the idea of striving for unification or totality to a more psychoanalytic and Hegelian paradigm, we can say that this striving for totality must at the same time be understood as the desire for the re-establishment of a lost totality. The key transition is here provided by Hölderlin’s conception of judgment, or Ur-teil, which is foundational for Hegel’s conception of totality.⁶ According to this conception, the meaning of desire itself is the desire to extinguish desire by achieving satisfaction, completeness, or totality. This means that the constructive notion of self-integration as each subject’s project is at the same time driven by the experience of lack to which self-integration is the answer. It is this lack that Hegel calls the negative.

IDEALISM, NEGATIVITY, AND MATERIALISM

In order to head off the misunderstanding that idealism is in some way opposed to materialism (a charge Marx levels), it is important to emphasize that the sort of idealism I am discussing here is necessarily also a materialism. The core thought here is that the striving for totality is a striving that necessarily takes its departure from a material condition, which is simply the fact of materiality, embodiedness.⁷ It is, in other words, only because subjectivity is necessarily embodied or material that the subject strives at all. The subject is thus divided between the demand for unity and the material fact of disunity.

This division has the important consequence that in the striving for totality subjectivity is constantly making conceptual sense of the “fact” of its own materiality. In pursuing its fundamental project of self-integration, the subject also makes sense of nature. Each encounter with the world—that is, each encounter with opposition—prompts the subject to take that part of the world up into itself, making it part of its project. Subjectivity is thus an attempt at the rationalization of materiality.

At the same time, however, the subject is made rational by its engagement with materiality in the sense that the materiality subject takes up into itself remains within the subject as a law that gives the subject structure and necessity. That is, materiality has only been properly taken up when nature informs my orientation, not as nature per se but rather as that which has become a norm for me. In other words, I can only be said to be responding to your need (nature) when my response takes that need and transforms it into a (conceptual) solution. In this mind-nature interaction, the subject achieves the compromise between the absolute freedom of mind and the absolute mechanical determinacy of body. Rule, law, or norm is the name given to this compromise.

The full integration of mind and nature is not yet achieved. The striving for integration is thus the subject’s constant work to make sense of the world while always falling short of complete integration. This thought, of course, is often put in the language of desire, as I too shall do in this book. Thus, centrally, for Hegel and Freud, subjectivity is the desire for satisfaction as the resolution of the tension between mind’s demand for totality and nature’s inertia. Desire is thus not, as Freud sometimes tends to think, merely a material interest. It is rather, as Hegel recognizes, a force for subject integration.

It may be in order to say something at the outset about my attempt to connect Hegel and Freud. While I believe that the success of this project depends on the argument as a whole, I should say here what I take to be the stakes of this comparison. It is not my intention to argue that Freud sought to craft a dialectical theory in the Hegelian sense. Freud took himself to be a positivist. Rather, what I show is that Freud’s theory can be reconstructed from a dialectical and idealist standpoint and that a theory reconstructed in this way is of significant value for a theory of subjectivity. In pursuing such a reconstruction I stress elements ...