Frantz Fanon has been fragmented, just as capitalism fragments the integrity of reality. It is its way of dominating every glimpse of emancipation. The modern dissident subject takes, leaves, moulds or twists the Fanon that suits him, without being aware that in doing so he betrays the revolutionary in a double sense: he destroys the possibilities of a free, radically complex subject, for which Fanon fought, and he feeds the reproduction of the alienation that afflicts colonial society, a malleable product that does not disappear with the end of colonialism sensu stricto. There we have the genocide in Gaza, which has brought to a head one of the last bastions of settler colonialism, that of Israel in Palestine, and ulcerated the open colonial wound between the global North and South.
Fanon’s intellectual legacy, his biography, the model of activism he embodied, his psychiatric methods, and the revolutionary ideology that his work unravels break with the synoptic forms of enlightened understanding, which is not the same as reason, which he never renounced. Not in vain, Fanon was first and foremost a psychiatrist: “Oh, my body, always make me a man who questions!” says the end of Black skin, white masks (1952), his first work and his first classic, and Adam Shatz makes this assertion the axis of his magnificent biography, which is literally titled The rebel clinic.
The rebel, the Martinican Fanon by birth, Algerian by choice and French citizen by default, fought with the forces of Free France in World War II and was a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front until his early death at the age of 36, a few months before Algeria achieved independence. Fanon rejected the idea that identities, whether political, cultural or epistemological, should be transformed into destinies. He was a psychiatrist who diagnosed two evils of the capitalist structure: racism and colonialism, and predicted their future effects. Hence the perennial nature of his ideas, some of which are highly disputed, such as the liberating power of violence in alienated societies. Alice Cherki, a colleague of Fanon who published an indispensable portrait for understanding the rebel—another fundamental biography is that of David Macey, which focuses on the socio-historical context—highlights the psychiatrist who humanized fury and taught the oppressed to take control of their destiny.
The psychiatrist diagnosed two evils of the capitalist structure: racism and colonialism, and predicted their future effects.
But giving oneself over to the struggle, redirecting the emotional elements of hatred into reasons for battle, cannot be sustained within the identity framework of them-us. Fanon also wrote in The Wretched of the Earth that “hatred cannot constitute a program.”
Shatz focuses on the intellectual Fanon and makes a history of the ideas that marked the second half of the twentieth century. Those that Fanon followed or discussed during his lifetime—Freudian transference, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Sartrean existentialism, Senghor’s negritude, orthodox Marxism—and those that owe much of their formulation and achievements to Fanon—Foucauldian power or Said’s orientalism. Shatz’s in-depth analysis of Fanon’s two middle works—Sociology of a Revolution and For the African Revolution—is very timely, and has been less addressed by postcolonial studies. Black skin, white masks and The Wretched of the Earthand yet they articulate a praxis of emancipation that links the third world movements of the sixties and seventies with the Black Lives Matter of today.
Although Shatz does not hide the weak points of Fanon and Fanonism, in particular their silence in the face of the rise of Arab-Islamic nationalism and the gap between liberation and freedom, he stresses that Fanon believed fervently in the uprisings, in the defiant hope of a world without white masks, a world of men and nothing more. Such was the end of the ideology that so frightened the “beautiful souls of the European left” and that the post-colonial black elites betrayed.
The Rebel Clinic
Adam Shatz
Translation by Raquel Marques
Debate, 2024. 507 pages. 26.90 euros
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