Fanon on the Ambivalence of Anti-Colonial Violence

Chapter five of Wretched of the Earth, Colonial War and Mental Disorders,¹ is a hard read. I want to try and think through its structure.

My first instinct is to say it is structured as a clinical text, a series of case studies on – as the title indicates – mental disorders related to colonial war. But then it starts as a discussion not of colonial war but the colonial condition as a pathogenic situation. This discussion of the colonial condition more generally frames the discussion of the case studies, Fanon comes back to it at the end in the section From the North African’s Criminal Impulsiveness to the War of National Liberation². In this last section Fanon talks about said Criminal Impulsiveness, which was widely accepted in the psychiatric literature, as maladaption to the colonial condition, which anti-colonial resistance breaks through. Anti-Colonial war here becomes, in a sense, therapeutic. The pathology of the colonial situation that Fanon draws out, is one of {m|d}isplaced anger. Because the true conflict colonist/native can, by virtue of the colonial organisation of society, not be expressed, violence turns inward. “Wars of national liberation bring out the true protagonists” (p. 230) insofar the pathogenic conflict is confronted.

The case studies that make up by far the largest part of the chapter are then positioned between two sections that could function on their own as one text about the pathogenic condition that is colonialism and the curative potential of anti-colonial struggle. Positioned like this, the case studies are a break in Fanons discourse; they are concerned with anti-colonial struggle as the pathogenic condition and thus problematize any temptation to romanticize it. The break between the sections is underlined by a stylistic change: Fanons voice in the case study is much more clinical and distant than in the framing sections, compared to those the language of the case studies is almost impassive, not least because Fanon avoids direct judgement of his subjects.

If one of the elements of the curative potential of anti-colonial struggle is how it enables the emergence of native identity and subjectivity, Fanon traces quite a few of the pathologies in his algerian patients to problems in exactly that process: The kids that kill their friend as a representative of the colonizers, the ex-fighter that shatters when the absolute antagonism between him and the people he killed becomes unstable through new friendships with French people, the fighter who struggles with the connection he’s making between his own mother and a French woman he killed. These and other cases are clearly related to the specific modes of how “the true protagonists” (see above) of the conflict emerge, need to be stabilized and remain problematic, psychically and materially.

The structure of the chapter introduces an ambivalence towards anti-colonial violence which consequently is not – cannot be, as indicated by the absence of an explicit discussion of the ambivalence – disavowed but certainly problematized. The ambivalence is present not through Fanons manifest material but through the split of the chapter itself.

The ambivalence towards anti-colonial violence resonates strongly with Foucaults question “How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior?”, that Camille Robcis brings up in her discussion of institutional psychotherapy,³ though I’m somewhat sceptical of her reliance on Foucaults english preface to Anti-Oedipus⁴ to characterize that book and institutional psychotherapy more broadly. Specifically Foucaults notion of ’inner fascism’, that she uses quite a lot, seems to me somewhat counter to what I take to be the distinguishing characteristic of institutional psychotherapy: The focus on the precendence of the group, the sociogenesis of interiority and thus the need for antifascist institutions contra a focus on pure interiority.