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Fanon's critical humanism: Understanding humanity through its “misfires”

2022; Wiley; Volume: 30; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/ejop.12837

1468-0378

Magali Bessone,

Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology Research

"In an age of skepticism when, according to a group of salauds*, sense can no longer be distinguished from nonsense, it becomes arduous to descend to a level where the categories of sense and nonsense are not yet in use." Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 19 François Tosquelles, « Frantz Fanon à Saint-Alban »: "In truth, he worked and was worked by his verb. He played with his being, well beyond and below the auxiliary function prescribed to the verb "to be" for certain "times" of the discourse. In fact, neither the poetic dimension nor the rational dimension of his discursive productions escaped him. His speech was carried by all his body." (Information psychiatrique, 10/51, 1975, reproduced in Sud/Nord, 2007/1, 22, p. 13) Seventy years after the publication of Peau noire, masques blancs (PNMB), many different interpretations of the book have been proposed, including about the fact itself that this polysemic text needs interpreting, or that any attempt to actualize Fanon consists in a revisionist expropriation1. I won't try here to propose an exhaustive, or even partial, evaluation of the various theoretical and practical usages that have been made of Frantz Fanon's work for different purposes. I will simply situate my own reading in 2022 France, and contrast two recent and opposed uses of Fanon. Not only will it, I hope, shed light on important, and under-evaluated, aspects of Fanon's work, but it will also allow me to show in which ways his work is meaningful today and helps us to understand the scope of the current French debate about the relations between critical knowledge and political power when it comes to define humanism and universalism. I hope to think here both about Fanon and with Fanon. In January 2022, philosopher Claude Gautier and historian Michelle Zancarini-Fournel published a co-written book, entitled De la défense des savoirs critiques. In the light of recent, and bitter, attacks against academia in French public debates, they propose a historical and analytical study of the opposition between critical social sciences and political power in France since the Dreyfus Affair. They affirm that while in recent polemics, several politicians, media figures and conservative intellectuals have repeatedly denounced human and social sciences as being ideological "identitarian" enterprises producing "communitarian" fractures and destroying the unity of the republic, the academic endeavors these conservative authorities are attacking rather aim at identifying the complexity of domination dynamics in our socio-political hierarchical order, as an indispensable first step to rebuild the political project of a common world. The knowledge produced by critical social sciences actually allows us to delineate the possibility of a "plural universalism" as a horizon for our future society. And Gautier and Zancarini-Fournel frame the last chapter of their book, entitled "Burning questions for our time", with two famous citations from PNMB. First, in exergue of the chapter: "I, a man of color, want but one thing: May man never be instrumentalized. May the subjugation of man by man—that is to say, of me by another—cease. May I be allowed to discover and desire man wherever he may be. The black man is not. No more than the white man." And the last sentence of the chapter reads: "I am a man, and I have to rework the world's past from the very beginning. I am not just responsible for the slave revolt in Saint Domingue"2. They briefly justify their choice to put the final emphasis of their book on Fanon first, by referring to Fanon's colonial situation, and second, by proposing a timely interpretation of Fanon's humanism. I will follow their hint in the rest of this presentation and argue that Fanon's subtle and sharp reflection on what it means to be human, on the one hand, and on the fecundity of a psychiatric, or psychological, answer to this question, on the other hand (where psychiatry is taken as a human science), is deeply needed in 2022 France. The question he poses, how to identify humanness, has a potentially universal scope; the method he uses, psychiatry or psychology, brings us back to the situated plurality of the particular, to the concrete existential conditions of individual humans. This is why understanding what it means to be human, in 2022 as well as in 1952, requires an understanding of what it means to live in a racially divided society, where human characterizations also depend on racial determinants and relations, and where the desalienation of bodies and minds is still a "task before us", to use Dewey's famous phrase. In this line, Gautier and Zancarini-Fournel's interpretation of Fanon's text stands in sharp contrast with (and can even be considered a form of reply to) the one put forward in an op-ed signed by eighty psychanalysts in Le Monde3 on September 25th, 2019. The eighty signers insist that it is important to "warn" French citizens of the danger of "decolonial thought", "a threat to human and social sciences, not sparing psychoanalysis"4. They argue that the psychoanalytic therapy should only consider "the singularity of the individual" and "always singular processes of subjectivation". They oppose those who pretend to explain personal experiences by cultural and social determinations, possibly related to "ethnic" factors. Because decolonial activists value "cultural particularities", says the tribune, their "identity claims are totalitarian" or "communitarian" (one will appreciate the subtlety of the phrasing). According to the signers of the op-ed, by contrast, the "speaking subject", far from any particularism, stands in "the irreducible tension between the singular and the universal". They conclude: "psychoanalysis is a universalism, a humanism", and they enroll Fanon to their view, accusing the "identity-obsessed activists" of "hijacking Fanon's thinking". For these signers, any form of "decolonial thought" (interestingly, in their view, Fanon is thus not a decolonial thinker) is viewed as separatist or communitarian— as erecting artificial particular groups instead of focusing on supposedly universal, decontextualized, "speaking subjects". Decolonial thought is posed as antithetic to the humanist forms of authentic human sciences, among which psychoanalysis, viewed as truly respectful of both individualism and universalism5. In the rhetoric that opposes "decolonial thought" and universalism, conservatist intellectuals claim they know all about humanness, and conservative psychoanalysts claim that they know all about the human mind and the "speaking subject" taken in isolation. In my reading of PNMB for this symposium, I argue that in 2022 France, Gautier and Zancarini-Fournel's is the Fanon we need against the pseudo-Fanon of the eighty psychoanalysts—and that the critical lessons they highlight are the ones we never cease to learn when really reading Fanon. Fanon is a decolonial thinker and a humanist. His lifelong struggle consists in identifying and producing the humanness of humans ("discover and desire man"), through a psychopathological study of colonial, racial, relations producing racialized subjectivities. Far from destroying the republic, this focus on racial particularities could help facilitate a "healthy understanding" between members of the French political community - if one takes seriously the ambition conveyed in the title first envisaged by Fanon for Peau noire, masques blancs, "Contribution to the study of psychological mechanisms likely to impede a healthy understanding between the different members of the French Community". He reaches "the human" (l'homme) through a methodological and existential focus on particular pathological relations - resignifying pathologies within the specific socio-political relations of colonial racism, with a view to curing these pathologies and to producing an inclusive understanding of what makes all of us humans. As he himself defends, "If the debate cannot be opened up on a philosophical level—that is, the fundamental demands of human reality—I agree to place it on a psychoanalytical level: in other words, the "misfires," just as we talk about an engine misfiring" (34). Instead of producing a hegemonic top-down ideal definition of "humanness" and test whether it applies to different racially situated individuals, Fanon reverses the theoretical methodology and looks into the "ratés"— the failures, misses, misfires—of human subjectivities and builds, bottom-up, inductively, a notion of humanness from its processes of alienation. Fanon's work teaches us to question the relation between universal and particular, both from a methodological angle (reflecting on the practice of psychiatry as a medical technique aiming at des-alienating humans whose alienation is determined by situated, environmental, factors6), and by addressing the proper object of "human sciences", humanness: one "discovers" and "desires" the human through a careful inquiry on the particular pathology created by the colonial and racial relation. In the rest of the paper, I will situate Fanon's approach to psychiatry and psychology in contrast both with colonial racist ethno-psychiatry, and abstract, decontextualized universalist psychoanalysis—François Tosquelles' quotation in exergue of this piece testifies, if needed be, how in Fanon's words and actions, the "speaking subject" was always an incarnated and situated subject. This will lead me to defend that Fanon's humanism is specifically decolonial and relational—which does not mean relative, but inclusive. Gautier and Zancarini-Fournel remind us of the historical conditions in which PNMB was written: Fanon had initially intended to present a version of the book as his PhD dissertation in medicine, with a specialization in psychiatry, in University of Lyon, which was refused by the dean of the faculty, who feared that it would entail "political discussions". This episode attests that in the eyes of Fanon, as early as 1950, medical knowledge and politics were the two faces of the same commitment. As Jean Khalfa, Jock McCulloch, and Richard C. Keller all insist7, Fanon consistently considered himself above all as a psychiatrist. He saw curing pathologies and fighting for emancipation as two aspects of the same endeavor, due to the deep connection between mental and political alienation. That psychiatry is a science of the natural and political human being is, however, not a discovery specific to Fanon, but an extension of the very project of colonial ethno-psychiatry. One can trace its roots to 18th century debates8 about the delimitation of normal and pathological, of human and sub-human, ante-human, or non-human, and of (psychological and political) autonomy and heteronomy. These debates were co-constructed in anthropological, medical, and moral-political sciences, which were all empirically descriptive and deeply normative discourses about humans as indissociably natural and social beings. The ambition of the science of the human being as it appeared during the Enlightenment was twofold9. First, as natural history of humanity, it aimed at correctly placing humans in the natural order of living beings: categorizing human groups; identifying the genealogies, origins and derivations of lineages; and evaluating the stages of advancement of populations in relation to an ideal form of accomplished humanity. Second, as natural history of societies, it "linked the variety of peoples to the different stages of human progress"10, thereby establishing a continuous gradation from primitive, inferior societies, to civilized, superior ones. Human sciences, or sciences of "humans", used the protocols of natural empirical sciences—observations and measures of morphotypes, of anatomy, including the size and structure of the brain (craniology, phrenology) and/or other parts of human bodies, to apprehend humans in their diversity; and they used these results to deduce, justify, or prescribe different principles for appropriate and just socio-political organizations adapted to different human groups. The debates about the proper characteristics of humans (and, hence, of less human others) have permeated all the discourses of justification of racial imperialism and colonization until the specific variant that Fanon directly encountered and opposed in Algiers under the form of ethno-psychiatry11. According to historian Richard Keller, "as psychiatry occupies a unique space between the social and natural sciences, the discipline constitutes a crucial locus for study of the relationship between knowledge and power in colonial domination"12. The French (and British) colonies constituted a laboratory for psychiatry in the 20th century and were the places where knowledge was produced that was both at the cutting edge of medical science and violently racist, apprehending the mental illnesses of the colonized from an ethno-cultural prism steeped in racist stereotypes. French colonial institutions (especially psychiatric hospitals) thus "produced a colonized subject who lacked the essential qualities of humanity"13. Ethno-psychiatry is one of the ramifications of the human sciences' attempt to deal with the diversity of humans and apprehend their object by delimitating "authentic", or "achieved", or "perfect", models of "humans"—and less then human, "primitive" forms. Fanon's attempt to "liberate the man of color from himself" (PNMB, 16) is thus both epistemological and political because he has to free colonized subjects from the dehumanizing knowledge produced by psychiatrists based in North Africa. His struggle against colonialism and colonial racism was based on the firm conviction that science and medicine had become important sources of colonial power, with very practical outcomes. While there is undoubtedly an evolution in Fanon's thought between Peau noire masques blancs and Les Damnés de la Terre, it is important to also note the continuity in the way he envisaged psychiatry, in its colonial form, as a dehumanizing human science, and, in its decolonial form, as a science potentially leading to (always indissociably mental and political) human liberation. On the one hand, as early as 1952 and until the last chapter of The Wretched of the Earth14, Fanon relentlessly denounces French colonial psychiatry and general European paradigms of psychoanalysis, which have contributed to producing colonial subjects that are below humanity. In Algeria, Antoine Porot, founder and main theorist of the School of Algiers, developed a theory and a practice of ethno-psychiatry marked by culturalist and racist prejudices and turned towards the justification of these prejudices to establish the legitimacy and permanence of power of the European colonists over the North African colonized. In the famous article "Notes de psychiatrie musulmane", published in 1918, he described the Muslim or North African "personality" in terms of "constitutive primitivism", evidenced by behavioral or temperamental traits, the "psychic formula of the native Muslim", as well as by his particular neuronal disposition15. In a text published in 1955, "Considérations ethnopsychiatriques", Fanon describes this as "racism with scientific pretensions". He demonstrates how the naturalistic reductionism of Porot's School of Algiers, very similar to John Carothers' study of the "African mind"16, equates psychiatric syndromes with neurological deficiency or organic disease, and seeks confirmation of cultural difference in physiological immaturity, thereby playing a powerful role in the legitimation of racist practices and justifying them by the constitutive, essential, inferiority of colonized people. Colonial ethno-psychiatry "alienates" Africans and North Africans from (European) humanity or human condition, which legitimizes their exclusion, confinement, and indifference to their suffering. And in PNMB already, Fanon criticizes the features of primitivism and the production of the figure of the "primitive" or "savage" by civilized Europeans through the phenomenon of Freudian projection, this defense mechanism by which a subject locates in others his fears or the desires that he experiences as forbidden: in psycho-analytic terms, the primitive is the phobic construction of the civilized, a way, for the European "speaking subject", to persuade himself of his own full humanity. On the other hand, the Fanonian practice of ethno-psychiatry constitutes a radical subversion of its racist counterpart, since he puts it at the service of the affirmation of the humanity of colonial populations and of the liberation of humans. While he strongly denounces the racist theses of colonial ethno-psychiatry, Fanon also refutes what Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman call "the universalist model of the French mental health system", which "rejected a priori any idea of ethnic or cultural singularity" and opposed the need for "different care" for the treatment of colonized patients17—a model whose echo is heard in the op-ed of the 80 psychanalysts written in 2019. The "concern for man", the duty to "desire", "demand" the human, according to the terms of the "North African Syndrome" paper18, against the tendency to "reify" or "dissolve" humans in racial prejudice, cannot be actualized in a universalistic representation that under the cover of treating the "speaking subject", or individual abstract human, in every patient, in reality projects a hegemonic form, that of the white European man, taken as a decontextualized form of the healthy, normal, humanity, into colonized persons. "Man, as an object of study, requires a multidimensional investigation"19, writes Fanon in his PhD dissertation: the investigation must be at once psychoanalytical, physiological, and socio-political. The dialectics between emancipation and re-humanization of colonized subjects is at the core of Fanon's inseparable theoretic humanism ("discover and desire" the human) and psychiatric and psychoanalytic practice, which he transforms into an instrument of decolonization (of minds and bodies). Psychiatry, as science of the human taken as a "total social fact"20, is a situated knowledge, considering minds, their biological, cultural, social environment, and interacting bodies. Fanon's humanism is not abstract, but very deeply anchored into an analysis of the concrete, embodied, socio-political colonial conditions of alienation and racial relations. This is why he insists on the necessary contextualization of colonized contestations and resistances against colonial de-humanizing assumptions. He denounces the limits of the theoretical frames with which European societies create and apprehend "humanness", and urges to take into account different socio-historical, and cultural, contexts of knowledge production. Different colonial societies (e.g., Martinique and Algeria, among others) generate their own "human subject", whose limits, normality expectations and pathologies are constructed by specific dehumanization, alienation, and reification processes. This explains why Fanon famously refutes a general ontological approach in PNMB, and shows that this paradigm fails to apprehend the condition of the black colonized subject: "Ontology does not allow us to understand the being of the black man, since it ignores the lived experience. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man" (140) "The being of the black man" is relation: to conceive what it is to be both a Black person, perceived as such and constructed as such in a specific racializing relation, and a human being, it is fundamental to beware of a too abstract application of universal analytical categories, and to consider what the racializing relation produces, both in Black and White mental states and representations of self. The essence of humanity, as well as of blackness, is inseparable from the lived and relational experience of Blacks and Whites: a phenomenological analysis and a socio-political analysis are both necessary to produce a correct "science of the human". A "sociogeny", according to which social factors and social environment (here particularly, asymmetrical and oppressive racial relations) are determinant to understand mental disorders and individual manifestations or expressions of self by individuals, must be substituted to the failures of "phylogeny" and "ontogeny". "Black magic, primitive mentality, animism and animal eroticism—all this surges toward me. All this typifies people who have not kept pace with the evolution of humanity. Or, if you prefer, they constitute third-rate humanity." (162) writes Fanon in PNMB's famous chapter five. And in chapter seven: "Georges Mounin says in Présence Africaine: "I had the good fortune not to discover the black man through reading Lévy-Bruhl's Mentalité primitive in our sociology class (…). I profited perhaps from learning, at an age when one's mind has not yet been prejudiced, that the black man is a man like ourselves." (162–163). In PNMB, the reference to primitivism is first associated with what Fanon calls the "the image of the Negro-savage" and with the work published in 1922 by the philosopher turned anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl La Mentalité primitive. "Primitive mentality" is also the title given to a lecture Lévy-Bruhl delivered at Oxford in 1931, in which he explains the meaning of "primitive": "Where, when, and how primitive homo sapiens lived, we know nothing about it. If, therefore, we persist in speaking of 'primitives', we must always beware that this is a conventional term, used to designate those who were formerly called 'savages', men who, in fact, are no more 'primitive' than we are, but who belong to inferior or uncivilized societies"21. In the introduction to his book, he explains that he relies on the observations made by "a large number of those who have observed [inferior societies] under the most favorable conditions, that is, before they had been modified by prolonged contact with whites" and he gives a list of said observations made among the following "primitives": "Indians of eastern North America", "Greenlanders", "polar Eskimos", "natives of southern Africa", "Bushmen", "Hottentots", "Zambezi", "Bassutos", "Melanesians"… All these observations converge, he says, to identify the same central feature of primitive mentality, "prelogical thinking", which Lévy-Bruhl proposes to understand as this type of thinking or set of mental practices which is not a-logical, but does not seek to "avoid contradiction". He concludes: "the entire mental habit which rules out abstract thought and reasoning, properly so-called, seems to be met with in a large number of inferior societies, and constitutes a characteristic and essential trait of primitive mentality"22. It is important to understand that, according to Lévy-Bruhl, this is not a rudimentary, infantile or pathological form of thought; it is another "normal" type of thinking, adapted to its conditions of exercise. Hence, according to Fanon, what one can learn from Lévy-Bruhl, is that Blacks, as representatives of primitives, are not "men like ourselves" – in Lévy-Bruhl's terms, they are "beings who are both so far removed from, and so near to, ourselves" (13). 'Primitive mentality' proved a useful conceptual instrument in the colonial "science of humans", making possible to determine a hierarchy between fully, civilized, humans and inferior ones, among whom people racialized as Blacks, according to their mental development and world vision: empirical, intuitive or mythical thinking on one hand, abstract and rational thinking on the other hand. In PNMB, this important and seminal distinction between "ourselves", the European civilized human beings, and the "primitives", who are not quite humans, or not human "like us", is not primarily analyzed in its consequences for colonial ethno-psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and bio-medical knowledge. Fanon rather criticizes its impact "on a philosophical level—that is, the fundamental demands of human reality" (34). This is what definitely closes the path of philosophy: for those trying to "discover the human" wherever they may be, and liberate the man of color from himself, the opposition between "us" and "primitives" has led to what Paulin J. Hountondji calls "ethno-philosophy", or "primitive philosophy", a line of thinking that has forgotten to take into consideration "le minimum humain" (148). Fanon quotes disparagingly in this vein both Placide Tempels, La philosophie bantoue, and Leopold Sédar Senghor, "Ce que l'homme noir apporte"23. In both cases, irrationality, magic, animism, emotion, negro or bantu metaphysics of vital force, collective mythical thinking, are considered as characteristic features of "African philosophy", not as this type of theoretical literature that happens to develop on a specific continent, but as this specific particular and collective thinking that comes to define Black thought, as opposed to European rigorous argumentative rationality. Tempels' point of view, in Fanon's reading, simply reflects in what he calls Bantu philosophy a vague "meditation" on ontological forces which aims at justifying socio-political segregation. "And there is nothing ontological about segregation. Enough of this outrage" (230). Senghor's position, more ambiguous, consists in stating that "the black man is seeking the universal" (231) and claiming that Black philosophy can participate in the "civilization of universal", while at the same time essentializing Black particularity, "Negro emotion": Senghor's negritude does not derail philosophy from the path of (European) abstract universalism. Fanon's last hope, phenomenology, which focuses on individual lived experiences, is able to produce a useful diagnosis of the reification and reduction of Black people to their body and of the oppressive political conditions under which colonized people live—but it does not actively provide any remedy, hence it does not help situate racialized people in their "being humans": "at the crossroads between Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep" (182). Both philogeny and ontogeny are thus condemned to "miss" humans; sociogeny is indispensable to psychiatry as decolonial human science and political practice. Fanon reaches out to humans as subjects (both as selves and as political agents) through desalienation, thereby producing a decolonial and relational humanism. Sixty years after his death, critical thinkers are still struggling to construct a world freed from alienation, which is still a "burning question for our time", and political powers are still attached to maintaining a state of oppression. Critical thinkers and social scientists are also fully aware that material emancipation probably calls for other means than critical knowledge—a conclusion also reached by Fanon in 1956, if not earlier, which he expressed in his letter of resignation to the Minister-Resident Lacoste in Algeria. Fanon's legacy today also consists in bringing us to face our own contradictions and make our own choices: "o my body, always make me a man who questions" (292)—to be human is to doubt, and yet, to commit.