Whither Fanon?
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Whither Fanon?

Studies in the Blackness of Being

David Marriott

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Whither Fanon?

Studies in the Blackness of Being

David Marriott

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About This Book

Frantz Fanon may be most known for his more obviously political writings, but in the first instance, he was a clinician, a black Caribbean psychiatrist who had the improbable task of treating disturbed and traumatized North African patients during the wars of decolonization. Investigating and foregrounding the clinical system that Fanon devised in an attempt to intervene against negrophobia and anti-blackness, this book rereads his clinical and political work together, arguing that the two are mutually imbricated. For the first time, Fanon's therapeutic innovations are considered along with his more overtly political and cultural writings to ask how the crises of war affected his practice, informed his politics, and shaped his subsequent ideas. As David Marriott suggests, this combination of the clinical and political involves a psychopolitics that is, by definition, complex, difficult, and perpetually challenging. He details this psychopolitics from two points of view, focusing first on Fanon's sociotherapy, its diagnostic methods and concepts, and second, on Fanon's cultural theory more generally. In our present climate of fear and terror over black presence and the violence to which it gives rise, Whither Fanon? reminds us of Fanon's scandalous actuality and of the continued urgency of his message.

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Year
2018
ISBN
9781503605732
PART ONE
PSYCHOPOLITICS
Prologue
According to the etymology, the word disavowal should be linked to the root of disclaimer, meaning to deny a claim (undoubtedly there exist ways of denying a claim that maintain what is denied without confronting it).1 Thus we find ourselves immediately at the heart of the most important problem of Fanon’s political and clinical writing: why do people disavow what could truly liberate them? Is it possible to conceive of another “reality” (as opposed to its disavowal) that goes beyond this fixed and determined belief? We know that Fanon sought, in accordance with his work as a revolutionary clinician, to bring human decision to the status of the real, from the perversions of fantasy to the responsibility of praxis—the moment of such encounter is doubly articulated in his work, as a socialthĂ©rapie founded on that of the group where the patient-actor is compelled to give up their defenses and commit themselves to a new articulation of self, subject, and world. So too he believed that in this encounter with the group the one thing we should be suspicious of is the language of catharsis; Fanon immediately suggests that a cure does not necessarily follow from a change in reality—indeed, his conception of praxis is resistant to the languages of therapeutics and hermeneutics and, as we know, he presents truly revolutionary activity as antipathetic to lived experience, in that it necessarily forces us to exist and act in ways that induce a moral and existential “vertigo,” and this for two reasons.
Firstly, in so far as colonial racism is part of a defensive view of the world, it also disavows certain attributes of the racial other. Hence whatever follows from the encounter with that other (that is, from otherness itself in so far as we understand it to be expressly the seat of anxiety) results also from a vertiginous capacity for racist disavowal. Hence the decreeing of these others as other may quite correctly be said to follow from an inverse reflection: because this image depends especially on the power of projection, it can be very clearly conceived as a projection outwards of a kind of primal splitting of the subject in its encounter with difference. The existence here of a kind of racial fetishism, in so far as the subject perceives something to be missing from the other, is key to this encounter with the other as we have just defined it. Secondly, I have said that the structural motif of disavowal informs Fanon’s telescoping of hysteric anxiety in colonial racism because he defines and explains it as a proximate defense; indeed, a general consideration of racial anxiety and its connectedness with a disavowal of reality is crucial to Fanon’s formation as both a clinician and political thinker.
Thus from both sides the disavowed is felt to be a defense with respect to reality: it is a judgment that fluctuates wretchedly between anxiety and fear. By definition, this scene, its reality, gives a special status to that of psychoanalysis: “Indeed, I believe that only a psychoanalytical interpretation of the black problem can lay bare the anomalies of affect that are responsible for the structure of the complex.”2 And yet there are those who think that Fanon’s clinical thought is extremely rudimentary in comparison with psychoanalysis and those who think that psychoanalysis cannot explain the ineffable necessity of political acts or decisions. Now even—and above all if—the clinic is in a certain manner the limit of Fanon’s politics, it permits the consideration of what this “psychopolitics” might represent. How does politics inform Fanon’s therapeutics? And what of psychoanalysis in the colony? How does Fanon’s reading of Freud, Mannoni, or Lacan, say, inform his politics?
Such are the questions that I wish to raise by submitting disavowal to an analysis of the messages it may contain. We will start with this word vertigo. Why? Because even though it seems to be only a metaphor for certain psychoses, it signifies something veritable in the life of the colony; namely, the ways in which the subject feels itself to be commanded as if by a law, which constrains it, which it fears and yet must follow in order to avoid something worse. Vertigo therefore seems to be an index of what madness and revolution have in common during a time of total war, and refers to a rupture at the level of the subject’s awareness of itself as a subject. Vertigo is a response—implicit—to the ontological void opened up by the ruptures of decolonization as episode, event, or catastrophe. This is why it threatens to violate the workings of disavowal. If vertigo is the sign of crisis, we can be sure that its essence is that of a command prescribed to the subject from the other and is consequently the affect of an abeyance that makes life as such impossible for certain subjects, or at least aporetic. A distinction can be made, however, between a symptom awaiting form—referring to the ways in which fantasies fill in a void experienced as constant and perpetual, and those moments when a subject is called to fill in the void that is its own being residing in the world (for example the hatreds, paranoias, and suspicions due to fears of the other)—and the way in which total war makes the psyche into its informant (willing or no) via these feelings of acting at the behest of a law and under the threat of boundless fears and desires (the vertigo of acting steadfastly on one’s own and yet at the same time under another’s command, and therefore under a judgment whose authority comes both from within and without).
To say that vertigo is a kind of index of the real,3 or evidence of a law that the subject is more or less incapable of grasping, is evidence of one of Fanon’s enduring concerns with how negrophobia—and later psychosis—forms an index of affect, or semblance, that brings with it an anguishladen atmosphere under which the subject lives as if subjected. To say that the unconscious is, accordingly, put in the role of an informant, however, does not mean, at least on the level of desire, that its activity is purely one of complicity, or betrayal, but that it serves to authenticate the reality of colonial war as referent, or event, and so embeds a phantasm of the real as its rationale and meaning.
1
Psychodramas
“The atmosphere of permanent insecurity in which the refugees exist . . .”
FANON, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Farrington, 224
I think that every reader of Fanon is aware of this “atmosphere,” even though I also believe that people do not often agree on what constitutes it. How does one read Fanon’s psychopolitics with respect to this atmosphere? Since Fanon’s relationship to psychoanalysis remains strangely disconcerting to critics, let us begin by considering it. Although this relationship is far from straightforward, I would not presume, as David Macey does, to say that Fanon simply reduces fantasy to trauma and mental illness to social alienation.1 Although this is not the worst example of what might be called a “skeptical” reading of Fanon’s relationship to psychoanalysis, it might be regarded as typical. In what follows, I will attempt to show why this point of view is tendentious and misguided in its choice of oppositions. Since Fanon’s relationship to psychoanalysis cannot be usefully understood outside of the institutional contexts in which he wrote, studied, and practiced, let us begin, accordingly, with those contexts.
Since the best part of Fanon’s work as a clinician was done during a period of war, it is certain that, if we truly want to understand his work in socialthĂ©rapie, we should try to imagine as much as possible the effects of war on Fanon’s clinical work. Furthermore, since all our historical knowledge of this work depends on a limited series of clinical writings, some of which were co-authored, and since we are in doubt as to whether Fanon’s clinical ideas received a clear and distinct final version, all of what follows is necessarily circumspect. Again, since Fanon’s clinical work was on the psychic effects of colonial war, it is certain that this work involves and expresses a conception of a psyche at war, or as a warring self-relation, and that consists in war altogether. This also follows from the fact that, just as the early work was taken up with the aftermath of the war against fascism, the later work is necessarily taken up with how colonial culture continues that war by other means. Let us try and sum up the different clinical messages these wars contain.
The first forays in socialthĂ©rapie were under the tutelage of François Tosquelles’s experiments in thĂ©rapeutiques institutionnelles and immediately focused on the means by which the clinic could question the prescribed rules, as it were, of group psychology; the main innovation was to transform the clinic from a carceral, or juridical, disciplining of the subject, into a space of free, albeit limited, therapeutic intervention, where the foundations of mental health could be reconnected to rules for living.2 At Blida-Joinville in Algeria, for example, and, later, the Charles-Nicolle hospital in Tunis, where Fanon served as chef de service, or director, the transformation of the clinic was undertaken not just at the level of instituting day wards or occupational therapies or allowing patient-led workshops, courses, or discussion groups. These innovations, although wholly essential to maintaining the link between life inside the hospital and life outside it, were no guarantee of any significant intervention in the scene of the symptom, but all belonged to the effort of getting both patients and doctors to reflect on their existence as a group, in both its veridical and cultural dimensions. Françoise VergĂšs is thus right to address these innovations as Fanon’s attempt to overcome the opposition of the hospital as carceral and the hospital as therapeutic institution, innovations that represented a revolution in the medical history of the colony.3 She is also right that Fanon proposed a new methodology in 1952 to counter the theses of the School of Algiers regarding the weak affective and moral life of Algerians.4 But the idea that a “successful” therapy could only take place in a “common culture” shared by patient and therapist is decidedly more complex than she suggests.5
Taken in its entirety, what accounts for the specific character of Fanon’s socialthĂ©rapie, and what was truly unprecedented about it in Algerian medical history, was the constant interrogation of the group as a veridical dimension of the real, since it sought to make being-there part of a group process wherein an awareness of the patient’s “phantasms” “force[d] him to confront reality on a new register.”6 What we have here is a situation organized so as to force the group to become aware of the difficulties of its existence as a group, and then to render it more transparent to itself, to the point where each member is provoked into an awareness of the relation (albeit previously disavowed) between phantasm and the real. It is then at the level of the phantasm that the real unreality of life in the colony could be fully understood: its reality is that of a group phantasm, even though that reality is never experienced as illusion; its reality is that of a kind of imaginary evasion, from which the reality of each member is sheltered. Finally, this is also why Fanon’s socialthĂ©rapie is a development of Tosquelles’s thĂ©rapeutiques institutionnelles. Whereas the latter wanted the psychiatrist to be an actor among actors, and in this scenography of exchange “the persistent and irreducible sociality of the patient” became the founding principle of the practice, in Fanon’s colonial clinic the psychodrama was substantially different; the necessity was not just to set up an analogy between the clinic and society, but to deduce the phantasms defining both.7 As can be seen in books such as Studies in a Dying Colonialism and Toward the African Revolution, Fanon’s major concerns are: first, to trace that sociality, through a genealogy of the group, to racial phantasms and divisions; then, to show that out of this group psychology could emerge the terms of a “transvaluation” of the colony and its modern exclusions; and finally, to show that these terms simultaneously reconfigure and transvaluate the violent history of the colony and its reactive affects.
My concern here lies not with this representation but with how it conceives of another, equally vital point: what was different about Fanon’s use of these methods in Algeria, a “difference with many consequences,” VergĂšs avers, is that in the colony corporeality and affect were necessarily shaped by racist discourses of heredity and fate.8 She notes the “difficulties” that Fanon’s socialthĂ©rapie came up against in Algeria. Referring to these difficulties in an article jointly authored with Jacques Azoulay, Fanon writes: “A leap had to be made, a transformation of values had to be carried out. Let us admit it; it was necessary to go from the biological to the institutional, from natural existence to cultural existence.”9 In light of this, several critics have argued that institutions of Arabic and Islamic culture—their symbolic authority and meaning—forced upon Fanon a need to revise his methods, as did the question of language, etc. “The solution was to train the psychiatrist in local culture, language, and customs. But, more important, the psychiatrist could not, in a colonial situation, exercise his technique.”10 What does this mean if not that the talking cure relies on a common lexicon of cultural signs and symbols in order for the recipient to hear the message, to be the subject of a reading, to be articulable as such, within a hermeneutic system of determination? What seems to go missing here is the insistence on the group itself as symptom, and the dialectical determination of the symptom in its differentiations, thus preventing a deeper symbolization of the group as a precursor to the philosophical-political project of its transvaluation. I propose to call this insistence a transvaluation and this is exactly how Fanon also comes to grasp it, and what he seeks solutions for.
Now if, for Fanon, “madness was one of the means man has of losing his freedom,” and since colonialism was a systemic deprivation of freedom, liberation from the latter should not be confused with freedom from madness, far from it.11 The moment of liberation, of decolonialism, without which, in fact, freedom is not possible, is always a complex network of displacements and valorizations, and to suggest otherwise is to forget the psychotherapeutic terms in which colonialism is to be transvaluated. I would also add that the question of freedom was never just a question of analytic technique, but was always supplemented, for Fanon, by persistent and urgent questions concerning the cultural meanings of his role as both a therapist and a black man. Such questions, politically and analytically necessary, were not to disappear during the struggle, but persisted in ever more malignant and desperate forms.
This is why freedom is not the aim and goal of Fanon’s socialthĂ©rapie and, hence, why, in his account of liberation, the image is that of a group absolutely compelled by its transvaluation as it expiates its own subjection. However insistent the idea of freedom is, it does not allow relief for the modern subject in its desires and exclusions. Are not the affective anomalies that Fanon indicated are at the base of racism (the vertigo, the lysis, the morbidity, etc.) not blunted in their memory if freedom is the only arbiter of their relevance? Does not the belief that alienation is “entirely the result of social, cultural, and political conditions” make readily apprehensible what remains profoundly resistant at the level of the group?12 Indeed, if Fanon’s role as a revolutionary was in tension with his work as a clinician (the politics of the one being in tension with the resistance of the other), such a view fails to see the obtuse angle between them, which Fanon believed opened the field of the signifier totally, that is infinitely, in both domains.
Here the notion of limit situation, which I will come back to, is of relevance. Even if one accepted this tension, what I think gets overlooked here is Fanon’s insistence that a leap had to be made, both analytically and politically, in order for a new society to emerge. This is not so much a politicization of psychiatry, but an acknowledgment that the practice of psychiatry in the colony was already political in its diremptions, not so much in the way passion and suffering were endured, but in the ways in which they were institutionally construed and understood. It follows from this, first, that power does not supersede resistance, or at least that decolonial politics arises from but can never overcome the subject’s unknown relation to itself in the histories and mediations of its desires and resistances. Secondly, the experience of revolutionary responsibility, as we learn from The Wretched of the Earth, is always full of anxiety, or feelings of uneasiness dominated less by fear than by anxiety-ridden persecutions and ravishments that find their movement and impulse in a demand that the s...

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