{"id":264708,"date":"2024-06-17T12:00:44","date_gmt":"2024-06-17T11:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=264708"},"modified":"2024-06-17T06:50:46","modified_gmt":"2024-06-17T05:50:46","slug":"the-partisan-psychiatrist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/06\/the-partisan-psychiatrist\/","title":{"rendered":"The Partisan Psychiatrist"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Rebel\u2019s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon <\/em><\/strong>by Adam Shatz. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024, 464 pp.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Frantz Fanon and the medical team at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria, where he worked from 1953 to 1956.\u00a0 (Wikimedia Commons)<\/p><\/div>\n

Frantz Fanon\u2019s psychiatric work was the most practical manifestation of his larger ambition to restore agency to alienated subjects. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Spring 2024 <\/em>– Frantz Fanon\u2019s stature swelled in the late 1950s as he crisscrossed the nascent Third World, winning support for the Algerian nationalist cause. As a member of the National Liberation Front (FLN), the party fighting a war of independence against Algeria\u2019s French colonial rulers, Fanon held a dizzying number of responsibilities: he provided psychiatric treatment to FLN fighters; he helped produce the party\u2019s official newspaper; he delivered lectures on philosophy and history to soldiers at the front; and he traveled across the African continent as a formal ambassador for the provisional Algerian government-in-exile, raising political and financial capital for the revolutionary movement.<\/p>\n

Such prominence came with enormous risk. As Fanon ascended through the ranks of the FLN, French forces put him in their crosshairs. In 1959, La Main Rouge, an anti-FLN paramilitary death squad funded by French intelligence, followed him to Rome, where he had traveled to receive medical treatment after a car accident in Morocco. Just before an FLN operative went to pick up Fanon from the airport, a bomb detonated underneath his car, killing a nearby child. Upon hearing that his whereabouts had been publicized in a news report about the explosion, Fanon demanded to move hospital rooms and narrowly escaped an armed assassin who burst into the original room. Following this close call, Fanon slipped out of Rome and returned to Tunis, where he\u2019d been living in exile.<\/p>\n

Fanon\u2019s enemies weren\u2019t restricted to French colonial forces; he also found adversaries within the FLN itself, an organization rife with internal power struggles. As a quiet critic of the leadership, he could well have emerged as a target of the FLN\u2019s post-revolution purges, which saw scores of operatives kicked out of the party and many others killed. But he died of leukemia at age thirty-six, months before Algeria won its independence in 1962. One of the final acts of his truncated life was dictating what would become his most influential work to his secretary from his deathbed. The Wretched of the Earth<\/em>, heralded by Stuart Hall as the \u201cBible of decolonization,\u201d diagnosed the political, social, and psychological conditions of colonial rule with a degree of clarity and force unseen until (and since) its publication. It also defended the use of revolutionary violence by the colonized against their colonial oppressors, an aspect of his work that has received disproportionate attention and been stripped of all its nuance.<\/p>\n

In the years following his death, Wretched<\/em> vaulted Fanon into the pantheon of anti-colonial luminaries. Radical nationalist movements across Africa, Asia, and South America championed his writing, as did the Black Panther Party in the United States. In the 1980s and \u201990s, his work was embraced by the academy, where cultural theorists and post-structuralists enlisted his corpus into esoteric and politically inert debates. Meanwhile, activists who were rightly wary of attempts to defang his revolutionary politics wrestled over which Fanon was the authentic one. In the quest to define \u201cthe\u201d Fanon, however, we risk losing what made him so extraordinary. Fanon had no singular identity. He spent his life in perpetual motion\u2014physically, intellectually, and politically.<\/p>\n

Of the numerous English-language biographies chronicling Fanon\u2019s life and work, Adam Shatz\u2019s The Rebel\u2019s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon<\/em> is perhaps the most intellectually rich. Shatz, one of the great essayists of our time, presents an imperfect and brilliant figure\u2014one that complicates the predominant myth of Fanon as a one-dimensional apologist for violence. For over two decades, Shatz has reported from France and North Africa, writing on the lingering legacies of colonial rule, and he boasts an incredible command of the multiple intellectual and political contexts that shaped Fanon, including the N\u00e9gritude movement, the postwar Francophone philosophic and literary milieu, the fissures splitting the FLN during the revolution, and the burgeoning clinical movements displacing orthodox French psychiatry.<\/p>\n

Shatz\u2019s admiration for his subject is evident, and yet he carefully avoids the hagiographic impulse that drives much of the scholarship on Fanon. He scrutinizes Fanon\u2019s uncomfortable and, at times contradictory embrace of revolutionary violence; he uncovers deeper dimensions of Fanon\u2019s debts to female writers such as Suzanne C\u00e9saire and Simone de Beauvoir; and he critically appraises Fanon\u2019s apparent dismissal of Freud by illuminating his numerous inheritances from the founder of psychoanalysis. In the process, Shatz breathes life into Fanon, urging us to think alongside him to make sense of our current world.<\/p>\n

Fanon\u2019s body lies in a martyr\u2019s cemetery in eastern Algeria. While he died an honorary Algerian, he was born thousands of miles away, on the small Caribbean island of Martinique. This was where he first inhabited the racial hierarchy structuring colonial society, though it would take years for him to develop a deeper understanding of the colonial condition. Two episodes helped furnish this consciousness: encountering racism from white Europeans during the Second World War, in which he fought as a member of the Free French Forces, and his subsequent experiences as a medical student in Lyon in the late 1940s. His first book, Black Skin, White Masks<\/em>, is a sprawling study of the social alienation of colonized Black people and its manifestations in politics, literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. The book began as his medical dissertation, until his department rejected the topic (he eventually submitted a deferential yet rigorous dissertation on Friedreich\u2019s ataxia, a neurodegenerative disease).<\/p>\n

After his residency and a short stint practicing psychiatry in Martinique and France, Fanon received a clinical posting in Algeria in 1953 at Blida-Joinville, the largest psychiatric facility in the country. Already politicized, he covertly joined the FLN within two years of moving to the country. Fanon treated the occupying French police and military officers in his official clinical capacity by day and FLN resistance fighters by night.<\/p>\n

Unlike David Macey, who authored the last great Fanon biography over two decades ago, Shatz offers a robust examination of Fanon\u2019s career as a psychiatrist, an aspect of Fanon\u2019s life that has received renewed attention since the 2015 publication of dozens of his psychiatric writings. Shatz explores Fanon\u2019s tenuous but formative relationship with psychoanalysis. Notions of the unconscious, repression, and Lacan\u2019s mirror stage informed his conceptions of Black and colonial subjectivity, and yet he argued that psychoanalytic ideas centered on European family structures, such as the Oedipus complex, couldn\u2019t be uncritically applied to the Algerian subject. (He also maintained a personal interest: \u201cAs soon as I\u2019m finished with this Algerian Revolution,\u201d he said to his secretary, \u201cI will undergo analysis.\u201d) As head of Blida-Joinville, he strove to reform the clinic\u2019s approach to treatment. He experimented with institutional psychotherapy, a radical form of institutionalization that aimed to restore subjectivity to patients by blurring the boundaries between society and the hospital.<\/p>\n

For Shatz, Fanon\u2019s psychiatric work is at the heart of his political project. It was the most practical manifestation of his larger ambition to restore agency to fundamentally alienated subjects. In colonized societies, just as in psychiatric hospitals, freedom required the development of the consciousness through the active creation of new social, political, and psychic structures. For Fanon, this capacity for freedom was critical, and it distinguished him from segments of the postwar French intellectual milieu that, under the spell of surrealism, romanticized madness as a \u201cvisionary\u201d or liberating force. \u201cFor a descendent of slaves in a former sugar colony,\u201d Shatz writes, \u201cit was impossible to confuse the condition of mental and physical disintegration with emancipation from an oppressive social order.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the end of his life, Fanon found himself increasingly disillusioned with the FLN. He had been inspired by the promise of a revolutionary movement that could cultivate a nation grounded in a liberatory social consciousness. But now he saw a party overrun with myopic, ideologically unmoored military men, eager to marshal ethno-religious chauvinism to forge an Algerian identity that excluded ethnic and religious minorities. Drawing on these experiences in Wretched<\/em>, Fanon predicted that most national independence movements would end with a consolidation of political power by native elites, whose self-enriching impulses would calcify colonial-era social and economic divisions. Meanwhile, neocolonial powers such as transnational corporations would continue to plunder formerly colonized nations. Against this bleak future, it was critical to build internationalist solidarity\u2014for Fanon, this meant a Pan-African project\u2014to free newly independent nations from the power structures of the old world.<\/p>\n

Unlike some postcolonial thinkers, Fanon never rejected Western modernity per se. Instead, as he wrote in Wretched<\/em>, he sought to transcend it by creating a universal consciousness rooted in a \u201cnew humanism.\u201d This radical project, which required \u201clook[ing] elsewhere besides Europe\u201d for inspiration to \u201cinvent a man in full,\u201d remained his goal through the end of his life. Postcolonial national consciousness was a conduit to that end. What that tangibly meant for a new nation-state is hard to say.<\/p>\n

Fanon made some explicit recommendations for a postcolonial society, including redistributing wealth in order to collapse the power of the native bourgeois and ruling classes. But he never provided granular models of political institution-building, nor did he discuss the mechanics of governance in any detail. As Edward Said wrote in Culture and Imperialism<\/em>, Fanon does not present \u201ca prescription for making a transition after<\/em> decolonization.\u201d Still, we can sketch the outlines of a postcolonial nation reordered along Fanonian lines: an emancipated, democratic, pluralistic, and collectivist society, attuned to the necessities of psychic repair and committed to dismantling colonial hierarchies.<\/p>\n

This ambitious vision has largely been overshadowed by Fanon\u2019s infamous engagement with the question of violence. Jean-Paul Sartre\u2019s preface to Wretched<\/em>, which extols the virtue of violent action, came to overshadow and mischaracterize Fanon\u2019s more nuanced position. Some readers of Fanon have taken revolutionary violence to be the paramount expression of agency and self-determination, and by extension, the only important vector through which Fanon\u2019s revolutionary commitment may be appraised. In doing so, they hold that any act of violence by the oppressed against their oppressors is (morally, politically, or otherwise) sanctified. For Shatz, Fanon has a more complicated relationship with violence, one that is partly obfuscated by the problem of translation. For example, in some English versions of Wretched<\/em>, the phrase \u201cla violence d\u00e9sintoxique\u201d appears as \u201cviolence is a cleansing force,\u201d when it means something more like \u201cdetoxifying violence,\u201d the implication being that the colonial condition induces a sort of stupor that violence can serve to awaken the colonized out of. These sorts of misapprehensions may appear minor, but they have disproportionately shaped how we remember Fanon today.<\/p>\n

Two weeks after October 7, Shatz penned an essay<\/a> in the London Review of Books<\/em> reflecting on the violence in Israel and Gaza. Much of the piece soberly reflected on the suffering caused by the Israeli occupation and offered a grim prognosis of the bloodshed that lay ahead for people in Gaza. Shatz also took aim at some members of the \u201cdecolonial\u201d left, who \u201cseem almost enthralled by Hamas\u2019s violence and characterise it as a form of anti-colonial justice of the kind championed by Fanon.\u201d The essay ignited a fierce, and productive, debate on how advocates of Palestinian freedom ought to engage with the use of violence.<\/p>\n

As in The Rebel\u2019s Clinic<\/em>, Shatz sought to counter simplistic readings of Fanon by presenting a more multidimensional figure. As a partisan of the FLN, Fanon actively supported violent tactics. At the same time, as a psychiatrist, he worried about the lingering psychic and social wounds that violence could cause. Fanon ends Wretched of the Earth<\/em> with case studies of Algerians and French people who suffered from war-induced mental illness. \u201cThe overwhelming impression left by Fanon\u2019s case studies . . . is that the disintoxicating effects of violence are ephemeral at best,\u201d Shatz writes. Violence is akin to shock therapy\u2014and just as shock therapy alone cannot cure a patient (and can cause new harms), violence alone cannot birth a just society. Against the tendency to flatten Fanon into an icon of violent resistance and nothing more, Shatz presents a portrait of a man whose position evolved as he grappled with the most urgent questions on the quest for liberation.<\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/p>\n

Arvin Alaigh<\/em> is a writer, activist, and PhD student at the University of Cambridge.<\/em><\/p>\n

Dissent is a magazine of politics and ideas published in print three times a year. Founded by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in 1954, it quickly established itself as one of US\u2019 leading intellectual journals and a mainstay of the democratic left. <\/em>Dissent is a non-profit organization that publishes the very best in political argument and takes pride in cultivating the next generation of labor journalists, cultural critics and political polemicists.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 dissentmagazine.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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