Reciprocal relativism and total liberation
Thinking out loud about Adam Shatz's biography of Frantz Fanon
I am, I’ll confess, quite in awe of Adam Shatz’s accomplishment in The Rebel’s Clinic. He has written a biography with the verve of action and adventure—Fanon’s extraordinary life lends itself to such drama—while at the same time writing a work of intellectual history, situating Fanon’s thought amidst debates in mid-twentieth century French philosophy as well as the anti-colonial & post-colonial literary environment. This is a remarkable feat. Shatz’s deft summaries of theoretical discussions never feel like digressions; instead of bogging down the narrative, the philosophical discussions illuminate a life, and Fanon’s life shows what’s at stake in philosophy (in a way that makes a mockery, it should be said, of Sartre’s supposed engagement).
As someone who was trained in 20th century French philosophy, especially phenomenology, for me the Algerian war always loomed behind the work of Albert Camus, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, and others. Fanon, of course, was engaged directly in the revolution and fight for Algerian independence, and so his life brings the colonial oppression of Algerians from periphery to center. It was, for me, an education.
It seems to me that Shatz makes two key decisions the frame his account of Fanon. The first is to emphasize Fanon’s relationship to his native Martinique, and in particular in contrast to the Négritude literary movement associated with figures like Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor. The second is to emphasize the importance of Fanon’s clinical work, first with dispossessed African immigrants in Lyon, then in Algeria, as both the incubator of his critique of colonialism and the laboratory in which he tried to help oppressed people find wholeness. Fanon’s participation in anti-colonial revolution was not a deviation from his work as a doctor, Shatz argues; it was rather its ultimate expression.
The young Fanon was something of an MLK-like character, one might say: a critic of the mistreatment of those in the French colonies, particularly Blacks, but precisely because they were barred from being properly accorded full French identity and inclusion. This youthful critique mostly castigated France for not living up to its own promises, and held out hope that such inclusion was just as-yet unrealized, but still realizable.
That hope died on the battlefields of World War II. Fighting as a French soldier against Nazi white supremacy, Fanon also witnessed the white supremacy internal to the French Republic. When, during the liberation of Paris, de Gaulle excluded Black colonial soldiers from the triumphal march into the capital (capitulating to American demands), Fanon witnessed “a process of blanchiment” at home, so to speak. It changed everything for him (and others). Shatz summarizes:
The Second World War was not just a slaughterhouse but also a political dream factory for the men of color who fought against fascism in the armies of the countries that denied them citizenship rights and treated them as something less than white men—even when they were in uniform. After the war, they launched revolutions and revolts, turning their protests—and sometimes their guns—against countries they had helped liberate. Fanon was one of them.
Much of Shatz’s book provides the biographical context for the analyses that inform Fanon’s books, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Shatz traces the clinical experiences by which Fanon begins to realize that colonialism “was a system of pathological relations masquerading as normality.” Madness, sometimes, was a human response to deranged environments. “Mental illness, he argued, was not freedom’s extreme edge but rather a ‘pathology of freedom.’”
We see Fanon wrestling with Hegel and Marx and their phenomenological inheritance in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.1 This milieu is crucial for the emergence of Fanon’s own distinct contributions. For example, he is at once indebted to and distances himself from Merleau-Ponty’s rich, embodied account of lived experience. Merleau-Ponty uncorks something in him, gives him a way to understand the holism of Black experience. But “he found that he could not accept Merleau-Ponty’s arguments to the letter; Black people, he was convinced, lacked something that Merleau-Ponty considered essential to human freedom: physical anonymity.” This stemmed from an indelible experience while Fanon was a student in Lyon, in which a child on a bus exclaimed to his mother, “Look, maman, a nègre!” Shatz describes this as a “primal scene” in Fanon’s thinking. This shapes his critique of Merleau-Ponty. As Shatz comments, “Black people, however, were marked and could not avoid being seen…Under the white gaze, they were simultaneously hypervisible (as members of a stigmatized collective) and invisible (as individuals).”
But here is where Fanon’s debts to Hegel become important, and why Shatz resituates Fanon amidst contemporary debates about universalism, anti-racism, and Afro-pessimism. For Fanon, the “white gaze” and its “epidermalization” was “a historical-racial schema.” If the global experience of Blacks under colonialism (and not only in colonies) was universal, this universality of being at once hypervisible and invisible was a historical schema. That meant the schema was contingent and could be otherwise. Fanon “did not abandon universalism,” Shatz argues, but he realized that universality was an aspiration of critical thought, rather than its premise.” This is why Fanon rejected Négritude, as “the antithesis of the thesis of whiteness, rather than a destination.” Fanon’s labor toward “disalienation” imagined a more radical Aufhebung:
As he sees it, the triumph of disalienation—over the racial complexes from which both Black and white people suffer asymmetrically—depends on the future, not on the old universalism, in which freedom is white and whiteness is freedom. Nor does it depend, for that matter, on a fantasy of Black supremacy. The challenge is to create a new universalism, in which Black and white coexist on the basis of equality, recognition, and solidarity.
This is out of step with some current sensibilities, and this is probably Shatz’s more controversial thesis in the book.2 He recognizes how this could be misunderstood. “Talk of a common humanity can seem quaint, if not fraudulent—a rhetorical ploy by right-wing activists who claim the mantle of color blindness and invoke universal standards as a cudgel in their opposition to racial justice.”3 [Think: “All Lives Matter.”] Indeed, it can seem almost scandalous that Fanon, like James Baldwin, expresses how colonialism and racist schemas affect the colonizer, too. (In his clinics, Fanon treated both tortured and torturers.) Shatz’s conclusion will be puzzling unless one hears the Hegelian echo about the historical, contingent nature of these unjust configurations.
His version of anti-racism was anti-essentialist and universalist, but to reach the shores of the universal, where the color of one’s skin would be as politically meaningful as the color of one’s hair, one first had to pass through the murky—and sometimes perilous—waters of racial consciousness. To pretend otherwise was to deny the lived experience of racism.
If Fanon’s solidarity ultimately found expression on the battlefield, fighting for Algerian independence, the solidarity was first forged in the clinic where he began to realize that mental illness in the Muslim population—which French psychiatrists lazily dismissed as “North African syndrome”—was the inevitable result of their dehumanization under colonialism. If Fanon never gave up on universalism as an aspiration, in Algeria he learned that this could never be abstract because human flourishing depended on belonging. And belonging was often forged by rituals and practices of solidarity. Thus one of his most revolutionary clinical acts was to introduce Muslim practices of prayer and eating into clinical life. Fanon’s “experiences with the mentally ill in Algeria suggested that culture and the ability to breathe were inextricably connected—that cultural belonging, even clinging to seemingly outmoded traditions, could be a way in which the colonized body continued to draw breath, and affirm its will to live.”
This is why the universality of justice to which Fanon aspired was not some bland genericization of humanity (which sounds more like the desire of consumer capitalism). This is why anti-colonialism couldn’t settle for mere reversal. As Shatz summarizes: “The efforts of the colonized to reclaim their cultures, and to force their oppressors to recognize their value, are therefore no substitute for what he calls ‘total liberation.’” Total liberation, Fanon wrote, is an achievement of mutual recognition that preserves difference. Such “universality resides in this decision to recognize and accept the reciprocal relativism of different cultures once the colonial status is irreversibly excluded.”
This, of course, is why Fanon, had he lived, would have been crushed and disappointed by what the Algerian revolution accomplished, which was the restoration of Muslim Algeria rather than the revolution he thought promised. This is always a risk for the engaged intellectual: they misread on-the-ground realities, imagining revolutionary movements in the image of their ideas (French intellectuals were guilty of the same misreading of the Soviet Union). Too late, intellectuals realize they were convenient rhetoricians, or usable fools, for actors with very different intentions. “For all that he tried to be a hard man,” Shatz remarks, “Fanon remained a dreamer.”
Dream on. How else could we imagine the world—this world, our world, the one we’ve made such a horrible mess of—how else could we imagine it otherwise?
In an aside, Shatz notes that Fanon never read DuBois.
I have only just begun reading Jesse McCarthy’s new book, The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War, but early on he is skeptical of “a dematerialized category of ‘the universal’ or the rubric of an abstracted liberal individualism.” I’m not sure that’s the sort of “universal” that Shatz or Fanon have in mind, since the Hegelian universal is also concrete and communal. More later, perhaps.
Way back in 1996, theologian Willie James Jennings published a remarkable essay in Modern Theology: “‘He Became Truly Human’: Incarnation, Emancipation, and Authentic Humanity.” He imagines a different basis for common humanity: “What is needed is an incarnational view of emancipation that proceeds from baptism and moves toward a kind of intellectual revival. Then humanity as an idea can again express a salvific hope. Such a hope refuses both the false universal of a common humanity as well as the abstract longing for human liberation bound in sexual, cultural, or social-political desire. Instead it seeks the re-creation all things by the triune God, a promise made real in the body of Jesus.” I’m not sure if this is an argument that Prof. Jennings would make today, but it’s an essay I think about a lot.