Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a Martinican psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary whose work analyzes the colonial subject’s psychic formation and the violence of decolonization. Born in French Martinique, trained as a psychiatrist in Lyon, Fanon worked at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria during the early years of the Algerian War, joined the FLN (the Algerian National Liberation Front), and wrote his major works while serving as a revolutionary spokesman and clinician. He died of leukemia in 1961, before Algerian independence; The Wretched of the Earth was published the same year, with a preface by Sartre.

¶Core ideas

• The colonial situation as psychiatric. Fanon’s training as a psychiatrist informs his analysis: colonialism is not just a political-economic structure but a condition under which the colonized subject’s psyche is formed under the colonial-racial gaze. The pathologies the discipline observed in colonized populations were not constitutional but situational, products of the situation rather than failures of the subject.

• The sociogenic principle. Black Skin, White Masks (1952) develops the claim that the human is constituted not just biologically (phylogenically and ontogenically) but by sociogeny — the symbolic-cultural order in which the subject is formed. The black subject is constituted as black not by their biology but by the colonial-racial symbolic order that addresses them as black; “the white man’s gaze” is what the black subject must contend with as part of their formation.

• The violence of decolonization. The Wretched of the Earth (1961) makes the controversial argument that decolonization is necessarily violent — not because the colonized are violent but because the colonial situation is constituted by violence and cannot be undone without confronting that violence. The argument is psychiatric as much as political: the subject cannot be reconstituted out of colonial subjection without action that breaks the subjection.

• National culture and the post-colonial subject. Fanon’s analysis of national culture — the conditions under which a colonized people can constitute themselves as a national subject in a world structured by colonial categories — anticipates much of the subsequent decolonial debate. He is critical of romantic-nativist appeals to pre-colonial authenticity and of liberal-universalist appeals to a universal humanism that leaves Western particularity in the universal position.

¶Significance for cybernetic postliberalism

Fanon is foundational. The sociogenic principle is the upstream source for Wynter’s account of the human, which is itself foundational for the framework’s account of genring. Fanon’s psychiatric register grounds the framework’s account of how subjects are formatted by the structures they inhabit. Fanon’s analysis of the colonial situation as a total form (economic, political, psychic, symbolic, somatic) is the methodological model for the framework’s reading of californication as a similarly total operation.

¶Key texts

• Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
• A Dying Colonialism (1959)
• The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
• Toward the African Revolution (posthumous, 1964)