Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon (born July 20, 1925 in Fort-de-France , Martinique , † December 6, 1961 in Bethesda , Maryland ) was a French psychiatrist , politician , writer and thought leader of decolonization .

Life

Frantz Fanon was born the son of Eléonore and Casimir Fanon, a customs inspector, the fifth of eight children into an educated middle class family on the island of Martinique. Fanon's mother, who came from Alsace on her father's side, opened a shop after her husband's death in 1947 to support the family.

Martinique was a French colony until March 19, 1946, then a Département d'outre-mer ( overseas department ). Its dark-skinned residents - like Fanon - were formally French, but were treated as second-class citizens by the white settlers. Casimir Fanon reminded his family on every French national holiday that the ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité ( freedom, equality, fraternity ) propagated in the French Revolution by no means brought freedom to the slaves in Martinique. Rather, slavery was only abolished here in 1848, when the member of the National Assembly and later Senator of Martinique and Guadeloupe , Victor Schœlcher , with the Décret d'abolition de l'esclavage du 27 avril 1848 (decree on the abolition of slavery of April 27 1848) established the end of slavery.

Although not exactly fortunate, the Frantz Fanon family made it possible for Fanon to attend the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France , where he was tutored by Aimé Césaire . Every day the way to the Lycée led Fanon past a monument by Schœlcher. But at the age of ten, Fanon later recalled, he had asked himself why the numerous revolts of the blacks who had fought for the abolition of slavery and were executed for it much earlier were not remembered.

"It was then that I understood for the first time that I had been told a falsified course of history."

- Frantz Fanon

During World War II , when the colonial administration of Martinique sided with the Vichy regime , Fanon wanted to fight for the other side. In 1943, when he was still 17, he volunteered at a contact point of the Forces françaises libres on Dominica , the British colony between the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. However, he was sent back. It was not until March 1944 that he was able to embark for North Africa to join the troops of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny . In the training camp in French Morocco , he experienced everyday racism in the ranks of the Forces françaises libres. The Senegalese soldiers were treated as fourth-class people, the North African-Arab soldiers as third-class people, and the blacks from the Antillean colonies as second-class people because they were French and Christians. In the fighting in the Vosges in late autumn 1944, the 1ere armée (1944–1945) sent the Antillans as cannon fodder. Fanon was also wounded in the battle for Colmar.

After the war Fanon returned to Martinique, graduated from school and then studied medicine and philosophy in Lyon .

In 1952 Fanon married the French Marie-Josèphe Dublé, known as "Josie". In 1953 he was appointed head of the psychiatric department at the Blida -Joinville clinic in Algeria . In 1956 he resigned from this post for political reasons. He then worked for the National Liberation Front in Algeria and at times as ambassador for the Algerian Provisional Government (GPRA) in Accra .

He died of leukemia in December 1961 , the same month in which his major work The Damned of this Earth was published, which is still considered the manifesto of anti-colonialism .

Theory and meaning

Fanon's works are the result and theorization of his political and psychiatric practice. In his Fanon portrait, David Caute attempted to differentiate between three phases of Fanon's work based on the development of thought in Karl Marx and the categories of Hegel : "[T] em people who become aware of their self-alienation" (made clear by the writing Black Skin, White Masks , which appeared in 1952), "the free citizen of Algeria" (Fanon's participation in the Algerian revolution and its theoretical consideration in In the fifth year of the Algerian revolution , published 1959) and "the socialist revolutionary" (whose ideas can be found in The Damned of This Earth , his last work).

In his first major work, Fanon deals with the writings of various philosophers (including Marx, Nietzsche , Hegel or Jaspers ) and psychoanalysts (including Freud , Jung and Adler ) and is heavily influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre , Merleau-Ponty and the existentialist - phenomenological current in France. Later he will develop his own theory and put it in the foreground (in The Damned of this Earth there are hardly any references to political and philosophical currents, even if the influences on Fanon's thinking are still clearly visible). His central theme remains the analysis and overcoming of racism and colonialism, but the treatment of these phenomena changes in Fanon's thinking through his active participation in the Algerian war and his political experiences.

Black skin, white masks

In 1952 Fanon's first major work was published in Lyon under the title Black Skin, White Masks . He had previously set out the main features of his theory on racism and colonial violence in the text The North African Syndrome . Fanon originally wanted to call his book Essay on the Alienation of Blacks , the more succinct title of the work comes from the Sartre student Francis Jeanson, who worked with Fanon on the manuscript and also contributed the foreword. At the time of writing, Fanon's mind was shaped by his concrete work as a psychiatrist in the asylum of Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole in France, where the director there, Tosquelles, used new, progressive methods in the treatment of patients. In addition, his theories feed on the preoccupation with Sartre's existentialism and phenomenology . And the exclusion as black in the white society of France, which he had already become painfully aware of as a soldier, flows into his writings.

Fanon's intention in Black Skin, White Masks is to create a universal, emancipatory-humanistic vision. In his fundamental criticism of racism and colonial oppression, he is considered to be a very early and versatile theorist who was far ahead of his time. He investigated what influence oppression and racism have on the colonized and how an alienated self-perception develops and affects those affected (sociologically: "subject construction"). Here he proceeds psychoanalytically in black skin, white masks, among other things with the help of Lacan's reflection theorem and refers to Sartre's phenomenology of the gaze . He asks how those affected by the oppression by racism and colonialism ( called “colonized subjects ” in sociological language ) can defend themselves against it.

"Black people appear from the perspective of white people as inferior, but conversely, white people with their 'achievements' civilization, culture, or intellect for short, are worth imitating."

- Frantz Fanon

That is why Fanon speaks of the fact that black people are thrown into a neurotic situation if they live in a white society that proclaims its superiority over the black population (Philipp Dorestal). Fanon criticizes that the “black person” has to wear a “white mask” in order to be taken seriously in a colonized world.

In favor of a universal liberation, Fanon in black skin, white masks turns away from the Négritude movement, which previously strongly determined his political thinking. He counters her return to African cultures for the development of black self-confidence that the pre-colonial past cannot be used as a model for future social upheaval. "My real goals must by no means be determined by the past of the colored peoples, and I will in no way deal with the revival of an unjustly ignored culture of the Negro". At this point in time, Fanon could still imagine an emancipation of the black within the framework of the French nation: "We colored people refuse to be outsiders, we fully participate in the fate of France."

Although Fanon's first major work is not yet shaped by his later radical anti-colonial position, which declares “the damned of this earth” to be a revolutionary subject, there was criticism from the communist partisans even after the publication of Black Skin, White Masks . Fanon would not recognize the role of the white working class, which has left racism behind, in building a new social order. These differences with the communist parties should deepen during the Algerian War: While Fanon works for the liberation movement, refuses the PCF to take a stand against the campaign of the French army.

In the fifth year of the Algerian revolution

In 1953 Fanon went to Algeria and became chief physician at the Blida Psychiatric Hospital , 45 kilometers from Algiers . Here he tried out the system of "social therapy" that he had got to know in Saint Alban. Both the strict separation of patients according to the colonial system (separate pavilions for Europeans and Muslims) and the hierarchy between the nursing staff and the inmates were dismantled by him with the help of his assistants. Fanon worked in Blida until 1956 and soon came into contact with the Algerian independence movement. In the hospital in Blida, wounded resistance fighters were cared for and hidden from the French army. Fanon also treated members of the Maquis with mental disorders. After the repression grew stronger and also affected the hospital staff (a nursing staff strike was bloodily suppressed), Fanon submitted his resignation as chief physician in a letter to the then French prefect of Algeria, Robert Lacoste. In response, he received a deportation notice and had to leave the country. After a short stay in Paris, he joined the FLN in Tunis as an activist .

In Tunis Fanon was included in the press work of the FLN and editor of the newspaper El Moudjahid. In 1959 his book In the Fifth Year of the Algerian Revolution was published , which was immediately banned in France and could only be distributed underground. Fanon processes his experiences from the anti-colonial struggle of the Algerian people, the conversations and reports he received from resistance fighters. He tries to generalize the upheavals in Algerian society caused by the national uprising. Based on the insurmountable separation between the colonial rulers and the colonized, he shows that in the course of the struggle the locals acquire the technology and scientific methods of the Europeans, which they had previously rejected as part of the colonial system (Fanon mentions radio and medical science, among other things Treatment). He is also optimistic about the changed role of women: through the liberation struggle, she breaks out of her traditional role in the family and becomes an active revolutionary who no longer feels obliged to her father or husband, but to the armed organization. Her emancipation goes so far that she also sheds the veil that she previously wore as a sign of local culture. What is missing in Fanon's book on the Algerian revolution is the distinction between the individual social strata of the oppressed masses. Only in The Damned of this Earth will Fanon include an analysis of the various social groups (peasants, workers, unemployed, urban and rural populations) in his revolutionary theory and show that only certain classes are ready to carry out the struggle for independence consistently. But already in the work In the fifth year of the Algerian revolution , Fanon developed one of his most important theses: violence and the armed struggle as a catalyst for the anti-colonial uprising.

The damned of this earth

“Let's leave this Europe that doesn't stop talking about people and slaughters them wherever it hits them, in every corner of its own streets, in every corner of the world. For centuries Europe has held up the progress of other people and subjugated them for its purposes and its glory; For centuries it has suffocated almost all of humanity in the name of its alleged 'spiritual adventure'. ... So, my comrades in arms, let us not pay tribute to Europe by founding states, institutions and societies that are inspired by it. "

- Frantz Fanon 1961, The damned of this earth

Fanon's main work was published in early December 1961, and a few days later he died of complications from leukemia in Bethesda (Maryland) near Washington, DC The Damned of the Earth is his most enduring and most famous work and summarizes his experiences, ideas and political analyzes on the fight against colonialism and imperialism together. The famous foreword comes from Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom Fanon was in discussion during his political activity.

Similar to Che Guevara , who went to the Congo in 1965 to "export" the Cuban revolution , Fanon also relied on the all-African perspective from 1958 to connect the anti-colonial movement in the various countries. As a representative of the Provisional Government of Algeria, he visited Ghana , Liberia and Senegal , among others , in order to observe the development of independent African states and to win over the leaders there for a joint organization of African nations. In addition, congresses were held in Tunis, which Fanon helped to organize. But it soon became clear to him that the revolutionary vigor in the independent countries in favor of arrangements with the former colonial powers and the local bourgeoisie was dying out. This insight and the increasing distance to the top of the FLN shape essential parts of his last book: In it Fanon outlines the vision of a socialist revolution in Africa, which is also directed against the new, "native" governments.

Fanon chooses the situation of colonial violence and the counter-violence of the oppressed in the colonized countries as the starting point for his analysis in The Damned of This Earth . Many of his later critics refer to these introductory passages, who mainly accuse him of “glorifying violence”. Ultimately, Fanon is concerned with the concrete relationship between colonial rulers and colonized, which is always expressed in a violent subjugation, the consequences of which have affected the mind and body of the oppressed for centuries. According to Fanon, decolonization is a process that turns the "thing" into a person again, who constitutes himself as an "absolutely set peculiarity" and who, with the help of violence, frees himself from his alienation and subordination. On the one hand, the influence of existentialism on Fanon's thinking can still be felt here; but also his recurring psychological view of the “native” becomes clear when he speaks of “pent-up libido” and substitute actions that “discharge” the prevented aggression of the colonized. The term paleophrenia is also used. Fanon uses violence to constitute the nation, to unite the individual individuals in their struggle. But not all colonized people take part in this collective liberation effort: Fanon defines the role of the local bourgeoisie as a compromise partner of the colonial power and the nationalist parties as their political expression. The urban proletariat in the “Third World” is also considered to be backward and privileged compared to the rural population. For him, revolutionary tendencies develop solely in the peasant masses, and for Fanon it is the duty of the intellectuals to join them. But he also breaks with that traditional Marxist left when he clearly identifies the “lumpen proletariat” (unemployed, slum dwellers) alongside the rural class as the bearers of the revolution.

Fanon rejects the “political parties” associated with the privileged sections of the colonized population. For him, the organization of the revolution must first develop in armed struggle and produce a leadership that directs violence towards the conquest of power.

For Fanon, the framework of the decolonization process is the nation. The developing collective consciousness of the oppressed people is Fanon also always a national consciousness, which he delimits from feudal regionalisms and racist tribal thinking. Fanon's idea of ​​African nations, however, did not prove its worth in practice (and ethnic conflicts still exist in almost every country in Africa today). Because the borders in Africa were drawn by the colonial powers and the emerging independent nations almost always adhered to this arbitrary division. Fanon does not deal with this aspect in his assessment of the nation as the germ of a socialist society.

While Fanon's earlier writings were also written for a European audience, his last work is addressed solely to the “damned of this earth”, whose name is taken from the first stanza of the International . In his revolutionary endeavors, Fanon finally turns away from the European working class and western left intellectuals as allies for the liberation of the colonized countries. He places his hopes in the violent uprising of the African peasantry.

Contemplation of his work

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Fanon sees decolonization as a means to free oneself from deep-seated alienation. He is by no means concerned with violence per se, but expressly with the resistive counter-violence to the existing use of force by the colonizers, which is related to a specific historical-concrete situation and is only seen as legitimate here. In contrast, he clearly refers to the "pathological consequences of excessive use of force" (Dorestal). His theory of liberation is based primarily on the existentialism of Sartre and, as Udo Wolter states, on the " Hegelian master-slave dialectic".

Fanon developed a critical and contradicting relationship to “collective identities” such as nation and people . On the one hand, he saw oppressive, destructive and alienating mechanisms in the nationalism of the colonial rulers, especially for the "colonized". On the other hand, he transferred the liberating effect of anti-colonial counterviolence to the so-called “national liberation movement” and thus to the concept of the nation. As a result, on the one hand, postcolonial critics, in particular Homi K. Bhabha , Stuart Hall , Ania Loomba and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, use Fanon's theories of revolution as a critique of " bipolar oppositions such as colonial rulers / colonized, west / rest, civilization / savagery , male / female etc. ”and with his theory also want to “ deconstructively dissolve the codifications of ethnic and national identities and understand flowing, hybrid subjectivities as the basis of new cultural and political forms of resistant action ”(Wolter).

Even more modern, Marxist- oriented critics of post-colonialism refer to Fanon's work on racism theory and revolution theories. These include: Edward P. Thompson , Henry Louis Gates , Raymond Williams , Paul Gilroy and Lou Turner.

Works

• Peau noire, masques blancs. Seuil, Paris 1952.
  • German: Black skin, white masks. Translated by Eva Moldenhauer . Syndicate, Frankfurt am Main 1980, ISBN 3-8108-0145-3 . (Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-518-37686-1 = Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, vol. 1186). Reprint Turia + Kant, Vienna / Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-85132-676-5 .
• L'an V de la révolution Algérienne. Maspero, Paris 1959. (newly published under the title Sociologie d'une révolution. Maspero, Paris 1968)
  • German (new edition): Aspects of the Algerian Revolution (= st. Bd. 337). Translated by Peter-Anton von Arnim, with an afterword by Armin Scheil. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1969.
• Les damnés de la terre. With a foreword by Jean-Paul Sartre . Maspero, Paris 1961. (Newly published by La Découverte et Syros, Paris 2002.)
  • German: The damned of this earth (= st. Vol. 668). Translated by Traugott König. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2015, ISBN 978-3-518-37168-8 .
• Pour la révolution Africaine. Maspero, Paris 1964.
  • German: For an African revolution. Political Writings. Translated by Einar Schlereth. March, Frankfurt am Main 1972, ISBN 3-87319-110-5 .
• The colonized thing becomes human. Selected writings (= Reclam's Universal Library . Vol. 1147). Edited by Rainer Arnold. Reclam, Leipzig 1986.
• Decolonization and Revolution. Political Writings. March, s. l. 1987, ISBN 3-88880-056-0 .
• The veil. Turia + Kant, Vienna / Berlin 2017. Translated by Brita Pohl. ISBN 978-3-85132-873-8 .

literature

• Frantz Fanon. In: Felix Wemheuer: Left and Violence. Pacifism, tyrannicide and liberation struggle. Promedia, Vienna 2014, ISBN 978-3-85371-370-9 , pp. 113–123.
• David Caute: Frantz Fanon ("Fanon", 1970). Dtv, Munich 1970 (modern theorists).
• Alice Cherki: Frantz Fanon. A portrait (“Frantz Fanon”, 2000). Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-89401-388-5 .
• Andreas Eckert: Preaching Violence? Reflections on Frantz Fanon's classic decolonization. In: Contemporary historical research . Online edition, Vol. 3 (2006), H. 1.
• Peter Geismar: Fanon . Dial Press, New York 1971.
• Pramod Nayar: Frantz Fanon . Routledge, London 2013, ISBN 978-0-415-60296-9 .
• Erik M. Vogt: Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon. Anti-racism - anti-colonialism - politics of emancipation . Turia + Kant, Vienna / Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-85132-694-9 .
• Udo Wolter: The obscure subject of desire. Frantz Fanon and the pitfalls of the subject of liberation . Unrast, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-89771-005-6 .
• Renate Zahar: Colonialism and Alienation. On Frantz Fanon's political theory . EVA, Frankfurt / M. 1974.
• Peter Hudis: Frantz Fanon: philosopher of the barricades , London: Pluto Press, 2015, ISBN 978-0-7453-3625-1

See also

• Colonialism , post-colonialism , north-south conflict , négritude

Web links

• Literature by and about Frantz Fanon in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Frantz Fanon in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)
• Tracey Nicholls:  Frantz Fanon (1925-1961). In: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
• Karl Rössel: Let's leave this Europe: Frantz Fanon - thinker and fighter against colonialism , SWR2 -Wissen, February 9, 2006
• Philipp Dorestal: Apostle of Violence or Revolutionary Humanist? On the topicality of Frantz Fanon on the occasion of his 80th birthday , analyze + kritik , No. 496, June 17, 2005
• Udo Wolter: Frantz Fanon - Anti-colonialism and post-colonialism , lecture, Rote Ruhr-Uni, November 30, 2002
• Jonas Grutzpalk: Umma or Society: The violence in Algeria today from the point of view of Frantz Fanon. In: Christoph Liell, Andreas Pettenkofer (Hrsg.): Cultivations of violence: Contributions to the sociology of violence and order. Ergon, Würzburg 2004, pp. 137–158.
• Robin Pape: Biography of Frantz Omar Fanon . In: Biographical Archive of Psychiatry (BIAPSY) , 2015.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Lewis R. Gordon, What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought , 9.
2. ↑ Frantz Fanon , sahistory.org
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Sabine Kebir : Not a prophet, but an analyst of violence . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of August 17, 2002, international edition, p. 52.
4. ^ Pramod Nayar: Frantz Fanon . Routledge, London 2013. p. 16.
5. ^ Stefan Goodwin: Africa in Europe. Interdependencies, relocations, and globalization . Lexington Books, Lanham 2008 ISBN 978-0-7391-1725-5 . P. 245.
6. ↑ Udo Wolter: The obscure subject of desire. Frantz Fanon and the pitfalls of the subject of liberation. Unrast Verlag 2001, ISBN 978-3-89771-005-4 .