David Marriott

Whither Fanon? (eBook, ePUB)

Studies in the Blackness of Being

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

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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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 432
• Erscheinungstermin: 5. Juni 2018
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781503605732
• Artikelnr.: 52381677

Autorenporträt

David Marriott is Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction
chapter abstract
This introduction considers recent responses to what has become known as
"critical Fanonism." Is Fanonism reducible to a narrative of liberation in
which national and human liberation remains both telos and eschatology? Or
does his work offer a different way of thinking about the relationship
between time and event, law and violence, sovereignty and subject? Taking
its cue from Fanon's meditation on the revolutionary moment as a tabula
rasa, this introduction considers two broad ways of dealing with critical
Fanonism: as a dialectical phenomenology and as a politics of redemption
and/or liberation. Along the way, it asks why "narrative" and "experience"
continue to be more or less the principal terms for engaging with Fanon's
thought and attempts to show how Fanon escapes the teleological and
phenomenological hold of both terms in a way that suggests differing
theoretical possibilities.
1Psychodramas
chapter abstract
This chapter presents an overview of the development and genealogy of
Fanon's socialthérapie, showing how this innovation in clinical method
followed from a radically new approach to the colony as both group idea and
praxis. Drawing on Fanon's clinical papers, it pursues the following
questions: how does politics inform Fanon's therapeutics? And what of
psychoanalysis in the colony? What is the relation between Fanonian
socialthérapie and François Tosquelles's thérapeutiques institutionnelles?
And why did Fanon describe group therapy as a "transvaluation"? In the
course of the discussion, Fanon's notions of madness and alienation are
presented-including his view of the clinic itself as a form of psychodrama
and psychic life as a form of occupation.
2The Clinic as Praxis
chapter abstract
This chapter compares Fanon's critiques of colonial neuropsychiatry and, in
particular, its diagnostic use of racial heredity to the institutional
innovations of his own therapeutic practices, including his use of
psychoanalytic therapies. The chapter charts the complex evolution of that
usage from 1952 to 1958, a period in which the notion of therapy changes
from that of a mirror of disalienation to that of a more unnameable n'est
pas in which resolution is no longer seen as a move towards egoic
reintegration. It becomes clear that identification is conceived no longer
in specular terms as an imaginary misrecognition but more in terms of
something foreclosed, lost, or missing; in other words, the experience of
colonial racism is compared to that of an unconscious content that is
irreversible, nontransferable, and inexplicable and yet is coextensive with
the feeling of an uncanny wretchedness.
3Negrophobogenesis
chapter abstract
This brief chapter outlines the main diagnostic terms of Fanon's
socialthérapie-epidermalization, petrification, and sociogeny. The question
of how racism comes to be embodied, or how the body comes to acquire a
racial signifiance, for example, is shown to be a key element of Fanon's
conception of le vécu noir, or black lived experience. What that conception
shows is the dilemma of becoming black when becoming is established via a
certain historicity of hatred that fails to go beyond the level of affect,
which remains tied to the various episodes of its racialization.
4Historicity and Guilt
chapter abstract
The chapter begins with a reconsideration of the relation between
institutional therapy and the entire problem of the semblable, then moving
on to discuss Fanon's struggle, in his clinical writings, to understand the
resistance to treatment by the colonisé. The starting point for this
discussion is Mannoni's Psychologie de la colonisation and Fanon's critique
of its oedipalization of cultural conflict. It is here, in this critique,
that Fanon begins his alternative investigations of guilt, truth,
historicity, and reason-defined and elaborated via Jaspers's notion of
Grenzsituationen, language and cultural translation in the colony, and the
cultural conflict over signs, signification, and media. In the course of
the discussion, Fanon's alternative ideology of the sign-which indicates a
new psycho-political message-is elaborated.
5Racial Fetishism
chapter abstract
This chapter presents Fanon's work on anxiety in relation to fetishism. The
aim here is to show how negrophobia-as stereotype, fantasy, idea, and
affect-functions as a source of traumatic energy in the psychic life of the
colonized. The chapter begins with a detailed survey of one of the longest
case histories in Black Skin, White Masks in order to elicit Fanon's
explanation of racial anxiety, before moving on to consider the stereotype
as a type of fetishistic thinking and practice in the libidinal and
political economies of the colony (and postcolony). The
stereotype-as-fetish is integral to Fanon's discussion of disguised or
repressed representations and what he calls the overdetermination of
blackness as phobic object. What is also clear is that representation
itself does not allow us to accurately recognize the differences between
Vorstellung and Darstellung in Fanon's analyses, nor the question of racial
capitalism more generally.
6Desire and Law
chapter abstract
Though the initial hypothesis of this chapter-that Oedipus as colonus must
be distinguished from its classical version-has met with little if any
discussion, it is nonetheless fundamental for understanding the way in
which the colonisé experiences both its desire and its inhibition as a form
of guilty indebtedness. The chapter explores this guilt as arising from a
flaw that is both de facto and de jure subject to a command that can
neither be forsworn nor borne. The chapter also discusses Fanon's analyses
of dispossession together with his clinical study of subjects who have
succumbed to an absolute depersonalization during total war. Accordingly,
the following questions are discussed: how is this flaw experienced as
Erlebnis? How can blackness appear to itself other than as guilt and
expiation? What is the role of this anti-Oedipus in colonial war, torture,
and state violence?
7The Condemned
chapter abstract
This chapter discusses Fanon's refusal, in contrast to the supporters of
cultural nationalism, to advocate a black conception of the world, ethics,
and politics, alongside his rejection of any teleological view of time,
emancipation, or freedom. The chapter looks at Fanon's call for a blackness
that is n'est pas and that cannot be put to work either dialectically,
speculatively, progressively, or fugitively. Only the n'est pas is capable
of expressing the temporal sensibility of Fanonism and its struggle to make
known the pathologies of blackness and its reactionary culture of
ressentiment. The chapter charts this struggle via afro-pessimism, which it
uses to illustrate the central antinomies of what are, by definition, the
blackest characteristics of Fanon's thought.
8Invention
chapter abstract
This chapter discusses the various notions of invention in Fanon's work.
Fanon invokes invention as a descent that is also a surpassing, a leap,
that allows the colonisé to grasp the non-permanent nature of colonial
historic truth. This is why, politically, Fanon's thinking of invention
criticizes traditional notions of political organization, or sovereign
will, and argues overtly for a revolutionary violence that is separated
from the institutions of politics. In this chapter, Fanon's notion of
invention is compared to that of Georges Sorel and C. L. R. James-two
thinkers who make invention synonymous with class struggle and who thereby
oppose spontaneity to certain forms of bureaucracy and the values of the
bourgeois order as such. While James situates invention in a Marxist
milieu, the chapter argues that the form in which Fanonian invention
manifests itself cannot be plotted according to the preestablished forms of
Marxist philosophy or dialectics.
9Existence
chapter abstract
This chapter examines invention not as a figure of history, scientific
method, anthropology, or politics but as a question of existence. It shows
how invention cannot be limited to knowledge, narrative, or even the
political command for a greater awareness of illusion or reality. These
paths-which continue to dominate readings of Fanonism-are shown to be
simplifications of what Fanon expresses as the sociogenic truths of
colonialism. In a reading of sociogeny that engages with the psychoanalytic
genealogy of the term, the chapter argues that modern readings of sociogeny
need remedying in order to link sociogeny to trauma, repetition, and
neurosis.
10The Abyssal
chapter abstract
This chapter revisits Fanon's complex relationship to negritude and, in
particular, to the poetry of Aimé Césaire. On the one hand, it establishes
a clear link between Césaire's abyssal theory of negritude and Fanon's no
less poetic attempt to rethink the relation between the universal and the
particular at the point where either becomes the abyssal mediation of the
other in the conjoined sphere of an enriching saturation. The abyssal, for
its part, indicates a profoundly original approach to black writing and
thought and designates a perpetual opening that is, by definition, oblique
and singular. This opening is pursued via the interrelated figures of
corpsing, social death, and orphic descent.