Frantz Fanon. Christopher J. Lee
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Название: Frantz Fanon

Автор: Christopher J. Lee

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары

Серия: Ohio Short Histories of Africa

isbn: 9780821445358

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ life.”8 Fanon would later recall that the Second World War not only affected his perspective but changed how black Martinicans viewed France—a shift away from “the great white error” of an omniscient French colonialism that promised much, but offered little.9

      Still, at the age of twenty, Fanon had an education to complete and a choice of career to make. The island of Martinique appeared small, with limited opportunity in the present and for the future. Contemplating both law and dentistry as options, Fanon passed his baccalaureate at the Lycée Schoelcher and left for France in 1946, with the benefit of state tuition support due to his veteran status. However, before leaving, Fanon, along with his brother Joby, worked for Césaire’s campaign as the local communist party’s candidate to represent Martinique in the French National Assembly.10 Césaire already had been elected to the provisional postwar French assembly and as mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945, a position that he held for a remarkable fifty-six years until 2001. Césaire eventually served in the French National Assembly from 1946 to 1993. In fact, he supported Martinique’s status as an overseas department—an often overlooked paradox given his political reputation and critical rhetoric later captured in Discourse on Colonialism.11

      This political path would further distinguish Césaire from his former student.12 Césaire would continue to believe in the possibilities of working within a revised framework of French republican ideals, whereas Fanon would gradually depart from this premise. Although Martinique continued to be home for Fanon for reasons of family, it started to recede into the backdrop from this moment of departure forward—being a place of origin, not destination.13

       An Elite Education

      Joining his friends Manville and Mosole, Fanon arrived in Paris to study, but soon transferred to Lyon to pursue medicine—a part of France he was familiar with from his wartime service. It was an unlikely decision given the presence of his friends in Paris, as well as of his sister Gabrielle, who had recently moved to nearby Rouen. Similar to the war, this choice marked an initiation into French cultural life distinct from his Négritude predecessors. The provincial character of Lyon contrasted with Parisian cosmopolitanism. It was a time and place apart from the urbane life that Césaire and his compatriots embraced, a fact that Fanon would later reflect upon.14

      His first year in Lyon was largely isolating. The sudden death of his father in 1947 enhanced feelings of loneliness and vulnerability. But compounding these sentiments was his ineluctable status as a racial minority, despite his privileged upbringing, his military service, and his French citizenship by birth. Fanon was well aware of this demographic limitation of Lyon, joking to his friend Manville, “there are too many Negroes in Paris, I want something more milky.”15 Among four hundred university students, fewer than twenty were black. Of those, most were from West Africa.16

      But Lyon fortuitously reacquainted him with Algeria. A sizable Algerian community had been established there during the economic depression of the 1930s, forming part of the working class that labored in the city’s factories. Fanon’s encounters with Algerian patients in Lyon would presage his future experiences during the Algerian War. In the meantime, he gradually developed a new social life. Though he did not become a formal member, Fanon was involved with the French Communist Party, in addition to the university’s Overseas Students’ Association—settings that stirred his political awakening. With education a priority, he took courses in chemistry, biology, and physics to make up for the limited qualifications in the sciences he had gained in Martinique, a necessity before he could formally undertake medical school. This narrow background not only left him unprepared for certain aspects of medicine but also reinforced his literary bent: Fanon was soon drawn to lectures and readings in philosophy, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis.17

      It is important to stress the differences between psychiatry—a medical field that treats mental health as part of the biological functioning of the brain and human nervous system—and psychoanalysis—a field pioneered by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who was trained as a neurologist, but stressed the importance of lived experience, rather than intrinsic biological nature, in determining psychological fitness. David Macey has argued that this distinction is often overlooked by readers of Fanon, who tend to view his pioneering perspectives strictly on psychoanalytic grounds.18 The conflation of these fields can partly be attributed to the prominence and influence of psychoanalysts, such as Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), in France during the 1950s. While it is true that Fanon specifically trained as a psychiatrist, it is fair to argue that psychoanalysis had a significant bearing on his thinking, given its general influence at the time and its particular validation for treating patients on an individual basis, rather than institutionally through asylums and hospitals—a phenomenon that had spanned Europe during the nineteenth century, resulting in the confinement of many. Fanon’s entry into the field therefore occurred at an exciting time when the discipline of psychiatry was undergoing a stimulating redefinition, motivated by the popularity of psychoanalysis. Both trends held appeal for the self-searching student.

      Other developments were also afoot. Fanon arrived during a vital period in French intellectual life, when a number of thinkers were grappling with the effects and meaning of the Second World War. His enrollment in classes given in the philosophy department at Lyon, where he attended lectures by the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), is indicative of his engagement with this emergent scene.19 The war occasioned many disasters and challenges of broad human importance—the rise of fascism and totalitarianism, the Holocaust and its genocidal violence, and the advent of the nuclear age, among them—that raised fundamental questions of individual ethics and community politics for the postwar period. Like Fanon, some—such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (1913–1960)—had directly participated in the war, as members of the Free French. Other intellectuals—Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) and the African American writer Richard Wright (1908–1960), then based in Paris—applied similar scrutiny to intensifying issues of gender and race in the public sphere.

      This intellectual milieu represented in part by the journal Les Temps modernes, edited by Sartre and de Beauvoir, paralleled and interacted with the intellectual circle surrounding Présence africaine, the leading journal of black culture published in France. Founded in 1947 by Alioune Diop (1910–1980), a Senegalese writer, Présence africaine provided a crucial literary venue for the Négritude movement, but it embraced pan-African concerns more generally. Comparing Présence africaine to Les Temps modernes, the philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe has written that the former sought “to bring in the very center of . . . French power and culture what was being negated in [the] colonies, that is, the dignity of otherness.”20 Présence africaine, put simply, sought “to incarnate the voice of a silenced Africa.”21 These two publications consequently framed the intellectual world within which Fanon intended to find a place.

      Unlike Négritude, Fanon first encountered French continental philosophy primarily through reading, not personal connections. The prevalent trends were phenomenology and existentialism. Interrelated in scope, these philosophical approaches built on the nineteenth-century thought of German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), who argued that individual consciousness emerged dialectically between a person and the world, rather than solely through individual deductive reasoning as proposed by René Descartes (1596–1650), the French thinker considered to be the founder of modern philosophy. Drawing on Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Hegel’s engaged method has since become known as phenomenology, as captured in his work The Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807). Among its most influential sections is the rumination on lordship and bondage—more often referred to as the master-slave dialectic—that articulated how self-consciousness (and power) depended on the presence of another person.22 Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), drawing on the parallel work of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) and his own mentor Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), extended phenomenology’s parameters in Being and Time (1927), to consider factors of place and time for further defining СКАЧАТЬ