Fanon-Lacan Conversations

"That being said, we are routinely warned about overly psychoanalytic readings of Fanon just as we are told that postcolonial readers "overstate the importance of the psychoanalytic strand in [Fanon's] work". What, however, if there is more of Lacan's influence in Fanon than had previously been thought?" (1)"In a more pointed critique of Lacanian theory, Kelly Oliver insists that Lacan's conceptualization of subjectivity "presupposes a privileged subject and cannot account for the subject of oppression." Lacan, moreover, is guilty "of theoretical moves... [that] cover over the alienation inherent in oppression by postulating a universal alienation that renders invisible concrete forms of alienation." These critiques beg the question, of course, of why Fanon - who was clearly aware of such issues - did nonetheless go ahead and draw on Lacanian and other psychoanalytic resources in his work, even if in crucially strategic, adapted and "customized" ways" (2)"the critiques that Fanon famously mounts in Black Skin, White Masks against the depoliticizing and universalizing tendencies of psychoanalysis" (2)"The commonplace rejection of psychoanalysis risks dismissing the prospective value of Lacanian theory precisely as a resource for political conceptualization, indeed, for furthering Fanon by Lacanian means. Indeed, was this not, at least in part, one of Fanon's insights, that certain psychoanalytic conceptualizations can help enlarge our ethico-political sensibilities?" (2)"We can thus anticipate two prospective errors in Fanon scholarship. Firstly, the tendency to side-line Fanon's psychiatric work and conceptualizations on the basis that it is fundamentally psychoanalytic and thus subject to all the critiques - and dismissals - of psychoanalysis. Secondly, the possibility of overlooking the fact that psychoanalysis at the time held a radical promise beyond the remit of biologically reductive forms of psychiatry" (3)"Desire, furthermore, as Fanon observes, is essentially for Lacan social in its origin, its meaning and its exercise - a characterization that the younger student of psychiatry clearly felt great affinity toward" (4)"Fanon also considered in some detail the role of the image in Lacan's early work, Lacan's earliest thoughts on the mirror stage, and the idea that "the primordial Ego... remains ontologically unstable" engaged in a struggle with "the existential complex" such that "there is an essential discordance within human reality"" (4)"Lacan's ideas of misrecognition, Lacan's preference for a historically located notion of psychic life, and the priority afforded by Lacan to the role of paranoia in human intersubjectivity. "It is easy," say Gibson and Beneduce, " to see why the dialectic between recognition and misrecognition placed at the heart of delusion by Lacan, was of interest to Fanon and that this played a part in his subversive analysis of alienation and persecutory ideas among the dominated"" (5)"The phrase "historically founded logic of madness" points to a crucial common denominator between the two psychiatric thinkers. It pertains as much to Fanon's own subsequent theorizations of the pathogenic nature of the colonial condition as it does to Lacan's own preference for viewing disruptions of psychic life via a detailed consideration of the symbolic order through, and by means of which, they emerge" (5)"Differently put: Fanon's concern is not only with the contents of psychic experience and how they arise within the brutal conditions of colonial oppression, he is also, as a psychiatrist, interested in the processes of their traumatic influence, with the ways in which they become internalized, subjectivized in an actively psychopathologizing way" (6)"Fanon himself was a psychiatrist and Black Skin, White Masks contains multiple novel theorizations of just such psychical operations, from ideas concerning the racist productions of the Collective European Unconscious, to notions of epidermalization and lactification, from the conceptualization of the "corporal malediction" entailed in the psychical/bodily trauma of colonial racism, to the phobogenic nature of white racism" (6)"[Gibson] "Fanon was dismissive of the liberal colonial culturalist insight that neurosis and alienation were simply a result of prejudice or the effect of European "modernization" and "civilization" on a colonized people"" (6)"It is, unfortunately, often the case in the secondary literature that Fanon's critique of "Freud's ontogenetic reductionism" is read as a dismissal of all ontogenetic and phylogenetic issues, and indeed, as a rejection of psychoanalysis tout court. At some level, this attack is something that we should appreciate: tehre are certainly many moments within the history of psychoanalysis where the facts of political oppression have been read as the result of psychical conflicts and intra- and inter-psychical psychodynamics (Mannoni's Prosper & Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization again serves as a case in point). And yet, to foreclose all analytical attention to the psychical, the unconscious, and indeed, the individual, would likewise represent a critical and crucial omission in developing an adequate strategy of decolonization" (7-8)"We need to hear in mind, in other words, how racist structure is psychically mediated" (8)"Sociogeny, she insists, needs to be differentiated both from phylogeny (which concerns the evolution of the species) and ontogeny (the progressive development of the individual)" (8)"If we jettison completely the notion of the unconscious, as David Macey so often seems to read Fanon as urging us to do, then we lose an awareness of the psychic life of power. This is arguably why a Fanonian project of decolonization can - or should - never completely jettison psychoanalysis, at least insofar as the latter provides a means of uprooting the subjective and unconscious dimensions of oppression. What this means, in more overtly Lacanian terms, is that we need to take into account the patient's relationship to the cultural situation (to the symbolic order, the "big Other"), a relationship necessarily mediated both by structural (social, historical, political) factors and by the particularities of fantasy and the unconscious" (9)Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks's Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race (2000)"to view the dynamics of racism in a purely psychological register (as a dual or narcissistic relation between the self and other) is to lose sight of the structuring role of the symbolic (indeed, of the big Other) in the psyche of the subject" (9)""Racism... is only one element of a vaster whole: that of... systematized oppression... Psychologists, who tend to explain everything by movements of the psyche, claim to discover this behavior on the level of contacts between individuals... The habit of considering racism as a mental quirk, as a psychological flaw, must be abandoned"" (9)"This is what Fanon offers in his attention to what he calls "the Negro myth": an outlining of the fantasy frame, the configuring parameters of racist ideation which are not themselves explicitly stated but nonetheless condition racial comprehension. The "Negro myth" is a racist system of representations and attitudes that is in a sense more substantial - more socially rooted - than individual psychological experience" (9)Franz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution"the term "European collective unconscious" to describe how pervasive and systematic is this image of blackness: "the archetype of the lowest values is represented by the negro"" (10)Peter Hudson,"The State and the Colonial Unconscious""This colonial unconscious is likewise apparent in the return of the colonial repressed, that is, in the reappearance of often extreme, unreconstructed forms of racism in ostensibly democratic or liberal societies" (11)"Turning to "the white order of being with which he seeks to identify," the black "sees himself as non-existent," stresses Hudson. The black subject is hence torn between two impossible positions - to be white and to be black, the first of which is barred in the colonial context while the second is "an impossibility in its own terms as there is no black 'being'"" (11)Peter Hudson seems like he's in conversation with Afro-Pessimism in the way he is framing the absence of black 'being'. I will check out his work!"Decolonial strategy that focuses its energies in attacking whiteness is likely to be unsuccessful if it is the case - as Hudson, following Fanon, suggests it is - that whiteness operates as a master signifier. This is particularly the case if - again following Fanon - this master signifier is one which the colonized remains unconsciously identified with. Differently put, focalizing whiteness as the object of critique makes whiteness no less central in our (post)colonial present" (14)"Attacking, reviling whiteness is an inadequate political programme inasmuch as it risks simply re-inscribing - the colonial Big Other, rather than advancing a fully fledged and definitive separation from this Other. The current condition of colonial emptiness needs to be, further, more radically, emptied out, fully separated from the signifier" (14)