Frantz Fanon (Fort-de-France, 1925 - Washington DC, 1961) was a Psychiatre and Essayiste French. Very committed thinker, it sought to analyze the psychological consequences of colonization on colonized. Its most famous book, Damnés of the ground , is appeared in 1961 with a foreword of Jean-Paul Sartre

Life

Frantz Fanon was born on July 20th, 1925 in Fort-de-France in Martinique.

During the Second world war, it joined the free French Forces then engages in the regular army after the rallying of the French West Indies to the Général de Gaulle. It fights with the French Army of the general of Lattre and is wounded in the the Vosges. After its return in Martinique where it passes the baccalaureat, it returns to Metropolitan France and continues then studies in medicine, while following the lessons of philosophy and psychology to the University of Lyon (inter alia, courses of Merleau-Ponty). In 1953, he becomes head doctor of a division of the psychiatric hospital of Blida-Joinville and introduced there modern methods of “sociothérapie” or “institutional psychotherapy”, which he adapts to the culture of the Algerian Moslem patients, work which will be clarified in the thesis of its pupil J. Azoulay. He then undertakes, with his interns, an exploration of the myths and traditional rites of the Algerian culture. Its will of desalienation/decolonization of the Algerian psychiatric medium is worth to him the hostility of part of his/her colleagues.

At the beginning of the war of liberation, it engages near resistance Algérie and does not have contacts with certain officers of the ALN (Armée with national release) and with the Directorate of Political Affairs of the FLN, Abane Ramdane and Benyoucef Benkhedda in particular. It gives its resignation of head doctor of the hospital of Blida-Joinville in November 1956 to the governor Robert Lacoste, then is expelled of Algeria in January 1957. It joined the FLN with Tunis, where it collaborates in the central body of press of the FLN “El Moudjahid”.

In her most known books, Frantz Fanon analyzes the process of decolonization under the sociological, philosophical and psychiatric angle. But he also wrote important articles in his discipline, the Psychiatrie.

Pennon also became an intellectual guide for many intellectuals of the Tiers-monde. Its most known book is Damnés of the ground , which it designed like a proclamation for the fight anticoloniale and the emancipation of the third world. This work and, perhaps more still, the foreword written by Jean-Paul Sartre, were perceived retrospectively like founder of the critic third-mondiste (see, on this point, the very critical book of Pascal Bruckner appeared in 1983, the Sob of the white man). It inspired the liberation movements in Africa or the Black Panther Party in the United States.

Today still, Fanon is revisited by many authors. The current of criticisms post-colonial in particular initiates a second reading of the inhabitant of Martinique author. Edward Said, in Culture and Impérialisme , very often includes the writings of Frantz Fanon. Other contemporary authors were interested in its work, for example Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabba and Judith Butler, and in particular with white black skin, masks .

He dies of a leukemia on December 6th, 1961 at Washington DC in the United States of America. He leaves behind him his wife (Marie-Josèphe Dublé says Josie, deceased on July 13rd, 1989 and buried with the cemetery of El Kettar in the middle of Algiers). He had two official children: Olivier (born 1955) and Mireille (widow of Bernard Mendès-France) and other Algerian children whose existence was concealed by the French family for material reasons.

Thought

Master and slave

Dialectical the hégélienne of the Master and the slave (as interpreted by Kojève in its courses at the School of the High Studies between 1933 and 1939) is the framework in which Fanon will not cease fitting Black Peau, white masks until the Damnés of the ground . In the first of these two works, he insists on the need for the Black colonized of a open fight for the recognition that the abolition of slavery did nothing but make more improbable: “One day the White Master recognized without fight the negro slave (…) The White is a Master who allowed his slaves to eat with his table”. In addition to the fact that the Black was not prone of its release, he saw himself conferred, said Fanon, a purely abstract freedom, not an effective freedom but an idea of the freedom which is perhaps the condition of possibility of the colonial constraint. The Black is a nobody (Hegel), a slave émancipé (Marx), it was not recognized yet like man. This is why it remains fixed in its to be for different the , this other, the White, in which “the direction of its life condenses”. More still, the Black is not only for the White, it is, in the colonial world, built in its nature by him: inspiring of reflections sartriennes on question Jewish (“it is the anti-semite which makes the Jew”), Fanon writes that it is the White which by its gestures, attitudes, glances, fixes the Black “in the direction where one fixes a preparation by a dye”. It is in the sense that he states duty to give up ontology hégélienne because it could not explain what one can call the being by the other of the Black, his external surdetermination ; it could not give an account of the impurity, of the tare introduced by the White into the Weltanschauung of colonized. It becomes impossible to think the being of the Black “because the Black does not have to be black any more, but with the being opposite the white”. The reflection can then relate only to the existence. It is here that Fanon joined the existentialism of Sartre. But so in a direction this last provides keys to the comprehension of the existential situation of the colonized Black, in another direction, it makes impossible any going beyond of this situation. On the one hand, affirming that so-called “the Jewish problem” is “our problem”, Sartre advances the idea, intolerable for Fanon, that the Jew cannot anything with his own release with regard to the anti-semitism. Sartre poses an externality of the freedom which, recalling curiously the moment of abolition, prohibited any form of fight. In addition, in its introduction to the Anthology of black and Malagasy poetry , it affirms that the movement of the Négritude is weak time, the moment necessary of negativity in a dialectical progression forwarding itself to the synthesis or realization of the human one. Pennon again sees there a form of dispossession of its means of action, the inscription of the latter in a movement whose direction precedes it and determines it: it is not him which “foutre fire in order to will set fire to this world, but it is the torch which was there, awaiting this historical chance. ” Pennon reproaches Sartre this “hégélien-born”, to have forgotten that “the conscience needs to be lost in the night of the absolute”. This absolute, signs of a return to Hegel, it is him which will be with work in Damnés of the ground, works in which the national liberation struggle of the Algerian people, fights requiring the recourse to the violence , will be anything else only this fight to the death for the recognition thought by Hegel, and which only, for Fanon, offers the prospect for a self-awareness authentic.

Double conscience and splitting of the ego

Actually, the remote setting of the thought sartrienne has place in black Peau, masks white , not only when it is a question of thinking the means of release but as of the position of the problem “to be it by the different one”. Indeed, Fanon affirms that the reflections that Sartre develops in the being and nothing on the being-for-others are false for a negro conscience because “the White is not only the Other but the Master, reality or imaginary besides”. This assertion, which is again the sign of a deep fidelity with Hegel, however carries in it the germs of an essential transformation, even of a subversion of the dialectical process. Pennon quotes Rene Ménil evoking “the introduction in the conscience of the slaves, in the place of “the driven back” African spirit, of an representative authority of the Master, authority instituted with the subsoil of the community and which must supervise it like a garrison the conquered city”. However, there is an almost literal recovery definition that Freud gave Surmoi in Malaise in civilization . The white authority is interiorized, introjectée; the White is presented then in the form of a new psychic authority of ego of colonized, authority of observation, criticism, censure. Pennon, clarifying the relations between West-Indian does not affirm another thing when he writes that they are not relations in the two terms polarized by ego, but that they are capped by a third term, the White as a leading fiction . However Freud, in the worrying strangeness , affirmed that in the pathological cases of the desire of monitoring, there is dissociation of ego by cleavage. It is such a pathology that Fanon detects at the colonized Black; it constitutes even the main object of its reflections in black Peau, white masks . It is what one can call the problem of the double conscience, in reference to the thought of the writer Afro-American W.E.B Of Wood with which the philosophy of Pennon present of remarkable affinities. Pennon, describing the cultural imposition of the white values of the colonizer (White Justice, the White Truth, the White Virgin), notes that the Black comes from there to have same the unconscious collective as the White. However, in this unconscious, the Black is the sign of all the “exchange-values”, fished, ugly, the evil; it is identified with this “excessively black crescent, where sommeillent the most immoral impulses, less avowable desires”. Thus the Black comes from there to be duplicated, to indicate itself as what it has to fight: “after having been slave of the White, it car-esclavagise”. The hatred of the Black could not however suffice for such an unfolding. This last implies in addition (and simultaneously) a process of identification to the “white values” (that Fanon exposes in particular in its second reading of the Mirror stage of Lacan). In particular taking the example of the young West-Indians délectant adventures of the white hero of the illustrated stories, Fanon poses that there is a integral identification Black with the White: “the young Black adopts an attitude of White subjectively”. It is that the White is not only authority of censure, it is also that which is recognized like superior, it is the model for which it is necessary to resemble, it plays the Ego ideal part of . From where this desire of lactification , of which the West-Indian novelist Mayotte Capécia is the symbol, a symbol of alienation in what it reveals that this identification, which is presented in the form of total, can never be “accomplished” insofar as she is always refused (at the same time as prescribed) by the White. Because the colonial world is a world manicheist , tracing a border insuperable between Noir and White, colonizer and colonized. It is this social cleavage, material, which is introjecté by the Black, which becomes Splitting of the ego : “as from the moment when the Black accepts the cleavage imposed by European, it does not have any more respite. ” The Black recognizes and denies simultaneously its absence of whiteness (in the specular hallucination, he says himself “without color”). It produces a substitute of reality, a fetish, which one can name the white heart (like whole of the behaviors, attitudes, words, “properties of coating” of the White) and which masks the racial difference. However, it would not have to be thought that only colonized either led to such a Fétichisme; alienation in the colonial world is necessarily reciprocal alienation (just like is the recognition at Hegel). Homi K. Bhabha, taking as a starting point Pennon, thus revealed the nature of fetish of the racial stereotype , this one being anything else only one instrument making it possible “to accommodate” the racial and cultural difference but this that as it can be reabsorbed in “already known”, i.e. denied as a difference. This same author moreover knew to draw certain conclusions from the penetration of Pennon in the “black side of the man”, consequences in front of which the psychiatrist inhabitant of Martinique himself would have moved back. Already Freud had affirmed that the splitting of the ego deeply questioned this design of the “synthesis of ego as self evident”. Of the same Bhabha shows as the plays of unfolding taking place in the colonial world make problematic the idea of a self-awareness , breaking with the duality and being defined, finally, in its identity . So as affirms it Fanon itself, the desire, in the colonial situation, is always in reference to the place which occupies the Other (colonized wants to take the place of the colonist, dreams of a “inversion of the roles”), so consequently this desire always the individual in at least two places at the same time, shouldn't it registers be concluded from it that the phenomenologic assignment of the places of the Master and the slave, their fixing in a posture of opposition or unambiguous contradiction, is impossible? In this direction, isn't this the wish hégélien of Pennon of an ultimate reconciliation which proves to be a dream? Bhabha, of which one should not ignore that it leads to its ends the thought of Pennon and rather prolongs it by his clean than he interprets it, opposes, with the idea of a going beyond of the opposition or cleavage, a strategy of subversion , employed sometimes by Fanon itself, and who uses of the cleavage as of a weapon of the colonizer turned over against this one.

The policy of the body and names of race

This strategy of subversion could perhaps be illustrated by what one will call the policy of the body of Pennon. The presence of the white Master causes an explosion of the body which is not without pointing out, by reversing it, “the narcissistic fear of the lesion of the clean body” which at Lacan orders the fear of the “Absolute master” which is death. Splitting of the ego and parcelling out of the body are indissociable, the task of Pennon being presented then in the form of an attempt at Re-corporisation : “I exploded. Here the menus joined together pieces by another me”. It is a task of rebuilding of the Image of the body which must face the difficulties encountered in the white world by “the coloured man (…) in the development of sound body Diagram”. The dialectical one, “hégélienne”, from the colonizer and of colonized, does not go without this dialectical effective who “settles between my body and the world”. The lived experiment of the Black, of which clarification occupies a whole chapter of black Peau, white masks , is a body lived , an experiment of the me-body . It is here that the meeting at Fanon between Existentialisme and Psychanalyse is done most profitable (the role of Merleau-Ponty, whose Fanon followed the courses to Lyon, thus requires to be studied). If the lived body one is so essential for Fanon, it is because in the colonial situation, the body, as a skin and a race , is literally the operator or the instrument of cleavage. The body diagram thus replaces a racial épidermique diagram; the skin, this envelope, this limit of ego and the world, ego and others, become, because of its sensitivity and its visibility, the object first of colonial racism. Pennon, far from resting on a denial, a claim of the absence of bases of the categories and values of racism, far thus defending a universality, data a priori, of the man (universality becoming at his place tension , in a direction quasi-physics, towards the universal one) or taking part in a new estimate of the value of the African cultures (with the manner of the thinkers of the Négritude), agrees to make race and me-skin at the same time the origin and the stake even of its speech. It is in the sense that there will be subversion of the discriminatory speech. Pennon, describing the experiment lived of the Black, which only his clean, is not anything else made to express the body: “the vigorous heels against the side of the world”, “the arteries of the world”, “to redden of blood”, etc It should not be been unaware of that here, the psychiatrist inhabitant of Martinique recalls his own genesis and in this direction, account of stages or now exceeded moments returns. It does not remain about it less than when it writes: “I secrete a race”, race staggering under the weight of the rate/rhythm , element O how much body, there am the prefiguration of this essential strategy of writing consisting in using without measurement of the names of races (the negro, black conscience, etc) to dispute, by leading them to their limits, the “properties” known as natural which are fixed there; to demolish, by developing some the forms, the effects of the discriminatory speech. This thought of the body, Fanon prolongs it in Damnés of the ground ; The idea fanonienne of a need for violence in the liberation struggle of the Algerian people does not answer a strategy as well, as it is rational or irrational, than it causes approval or the judgment, than with a body economy . Violences and frustrations of any kind exerted by the colonizer on colonized are the origin of a accumulated muscular tension whose discharge is presented in the form of a physiological need. If there is strategy, it will well rather relate to the methods of this discharge, the stake becoming to avoid the self-destruction and to mobilize violence in a power struggle, in a fight where only it can be exerted with profit as it is even turned over against its source. We finish by quoting the last words of Pennon in black Peau, white masks : “My ultimate prayer: O my body, always make ego a man who questions”.

Work

the eye drowns , the parallel Hands , the Conspiracy , three new plays written between 1949 and 1950. Untraceable works.

• white black Skin, masks , 1952.
• the Year V of the Algerian revolution , 1959.
• Damnés of the Earth , 1961.
• For the African revolution , 1964.

Extracts

white black Skin, masks (1952)

• " The Negro does not exist. Not more than the man blanc"
• " Don't I have thus on this different ground thing to make only avenge the Blacks for the 17th century? "
• " I do not have the right, me coloured man, to wish crystallization at the White of a culpability towards the past of my race. Will I ask the white man to today be responsible for the slave traders of the 17th century? (…) I am not slave of the slavery which dehumanized my pères."

Damnés of the Earth (1961)

• " Let us not have not another thing to be made only create third Europe?”
• " Let us not waste time out of deads litanies or nauseous imitations. Let us leave this Europe which does not finish any speaking about the man all while massacring it everywhere where it meets it, with all the corners of its own streets, with all the corners of the monde."

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