Destiny To Be Set Free
Fanon Between Reparation and Repair
Nica Siegel
Frantz Fanon, the Martiniquean psychiatrist and militant of the Algerian revolution, wrote directly on the question of reparations only twice, in his first book and his last. The initial mention came in 1952, in the fiery conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks, which Fanon attempted, unsuccessfully, to have passed as a doctoral dissertation in psychiatry. Following his psychiatric training in France, Fanon decamped to Algeria, where he was chef de service at the Blida-Joinville clinic. Eventually unable to reconcile his politics with that of the clinic, he resigned his post and fled to Tunisia, where he worked in the last years of his life as both a psychiatrist and a kind of revolutionary journalist. During the last years of the Algerian insurgency, Fanon grew seriously ill at the age of thirty-five. He dictated his final book, The Wretched of the Earth, on the cusp of Algerian independence, which he worked for and helped inspire but would never see. Fanon’s second mention of reparations emerges in the first chapter of this final book, transcribed to his assistant Marie-Jeanne Manuellan in haste, both because of the demands of his double work life and because, as he only rarely admitted to friends, he was dying of leukemia. That this second and final mention of reparations appears in this text testifies to the passion and promise of the moment, and anticipates a series of structural tensions that would seem, in retrospect, prophetic.
In the eleven years between these mentions, Fanon leapt irreversibly into action as the Algerian Revolution gained steam. Reception of his work has tended to treat this turn to political practice as a turn away from the terrain of psychic life, away from the psychic work of disalienation and towards revolution. On the other hand, the recent recovery, publication, and translation of Fanon’s clinical writings, in English in 2018, has allowed us to begin again, asking familiar questions about his relation to the question of psychic repair using fresh and defamiliarizing sources. They remind us that, from his existential first work on reparation in Black Skin, White Masks to the perplexing and powerful addendum “Colonial War and Mental Disorders” in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon remained, resolutely, a clinician. How might this new understanding help us to reframe the standard teleology from repair to revolution?
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Fanon’s first treatment of the question of reparations is not the explicit critique of neocolonial political economy that it would later become in Wretched of the Earth. Instead, in Black Skin, White Masks, he poses reparations as a powerful example of a specific and troubling genre of relation, a crystallization of a more general pathology marking a dead-end road in a colonial, divided world towards recognition of a denied humanity. How does the text stage this anti-reparative thinking?
“I had soon to change my tune,” Fanon writes of his forced entry into thinking about racial alienation. A son of the Black bourgeoisie in French Martinique, Fanon visited France first as a soldier for the French army. Although he brought to his subsequent university experience in Lyon a confidence about his own abilities and place in the world, in 1952, he described relentless attempts to put him in his place, writing, “Only momentarily at a loss, the white man explained to me that, genetically, I represented a stage of development: ‘Your properties have been exhausted by us. We have had earth mystics such as you will never approach. Study our history and you will see how far this fusion has gone.’” In Fanon’s powerful rendering of the movement of Hegel’s dialectic of progress, Black subjectivity is experienced not as the coming into being of some higher synthetic form but rather as retroactive racial reification, as being rendered exhaust of the engine of history. As Anson Rabinbach has written, the idiom of thermodynamics, of engines and exhaust, was part of a “’mobile army of metaphors’ that dominated the language of social description in the late nineteenth century.” To this, Fanon might add that the negativity of this poetics, of who is fixed as the exhaust of the voracious growth of the always-imperial capitalist engine, is always racialized, epidermalized onto the bodies of those who labor before and beyond the dialectics of progress. Objectification and reification result in the paralysis of the subject: “I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things […], and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.”
Indeed, much of Black Skin, White Masks is spent documenting successive realizations that what had seemed like dialectical opposition (of the body, the mind, language) was always already contained, and therefore paralyzed and rendered inoperative and prior with reference to some higher form—a form to be found in European capitalism, in whiteness, in some further, voracious, synthesized stage of history. What mattered above all was to break this cycle, to bring invention into being on its own foundations. It is in the context of this comprehension of the philosophy of history as a form of evolving and ever-adapting racializing entrapment whose snares extend into all purportedly reciprocal relations that Fanon’s earliest claim about reparations should be understood.
“No attempt must be made to encase man, for it is his destiny to be set free.
[…] The disaster of the man of color lies in the fact that he was enslaved.
The disaster and the inhumanity of the white man lie in the fact that somewhere he has killed man.
And even today they subsist, to organize this dehumanization rationally. But I as a man of color, to the extent that it becomes possible for me to exist absolutely, do not have the right to lock myself into a world of retroactive reparations.
I, the man of color, want only this:
That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. […] Before it can adopt a positive voice, freedom requires an effort at disalienation.
[…] it is through the lasting tension of their freedom that men will be able to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world.”
As John Drabinski writes, “Fanon rejects the idea of reparations, for example, precisely because that idea would link Black people to the past in a crucial way and make that link inextricable from imagining justice.” Differing from, say, Melanie Klein’s notion of repair, namely, to come into a virtuous rather than violent circle, reparations, for early Fanon, become a decisive metonym for the cunning of a regnant and retrograde philosophy of history, which always purports to draw colonial subjects into future equality while retroactively positing them as prior or too late for the movement of progress. Klein’s virtuous circle, whatever it might enable, would, for Fanon, be an example of the cunning of colonial reason, a genre of indebtedness and fixing in place. Thus, against these cycles lies the temptation of what David Marriott calls the tabula rasa, the totally new start, the demand to bring into being a zone not available to capture, to explode the offending and conserving logic that fixes man in a relation of debt, so that “man is not merely a possibility of recapture or of negation. […] Man is a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies.” What Fanon required, Marriott explains, was a “a form of radical expenditure.”
The call for a leap into action, an absolute beginning, catharsis is often treated in Fanon’s reception as perfectly anticipating his turn to revolutionary activity in Algeria, his “explosion” of the dialectic in Black Skin, White Masks a siren song announcing the bombs of guerillas in the cafes of Algiers. The relentlessness and power of Fanon’s political vision, its sense of thrall and event, are undeniable, inspiring revolutionary anticolonial and antifascist movements during his life and after. On the other hand, one of the gifts of the recent magisterial translation into English and the 2018 publication of Fanon’s clinical writings in Alienation and Freedom has been the reminder to his readers that Fanon remained a clinical psychotherapist throughout his life, spending much of his time with patients even in his most militant years, and articulating his account of action and its resources in a distinctive therapeutic idiom that sometimes obviously bolstered and sometimes came into dramatic tension with the shifting, effervescent praxes of revolution. How might Fanon’s vision of the work of repair and the politics of reparation come into focus if we sustain and study it as situated within his lifelong work as a clinician?
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Fleshing out this technical question—how precisely did Fanon relate to the work of therapy?—also allows us to tell something of the story of Fanon’s life between his two writings on reparations. Fanon took up postdoctoral training in a distinct French tradition called institutional psychotherapy.[1] Its founder, Fanon’s mentor François Tosquelles, was a trained Lacanian and committed Marxist whose unique approach to clinical work was shaped by his time as a camp psychiatrist and his work co-founding POUM, a collective of Spanish anti-fascists. While interned himself, Tosquelles trained those living in refugee camps to care for one another, and to work with those who were suffering psychic distress in the context of war trauma. This psychiatry “in the mud” (as Camille Robcis quotes Tosquelles) gave Tosquelles confidence in the possibility and desirability of democratizing the clinic in accordance with anti-fascist principles. When Tosquelles and his trainees returned to France, they knocked down the remaining walls of the war-ravaged asylum at Saint-Alban, destroying the carceral border to begin again to imagine what it might mean to repair the therapeutically necessary relation between psyche and social world. We might say that institutional psychotherapy began and sustained itself through this double gesture of refusal to repair the many walls of the prewar psychiatric order. In this, a relentlessly demanding praxis of therapeutics emerged.
Their practice picked up a dropped thread from within doctrinaire psychoanalysis. At St. Alban, Tosquelles, and later Fanon, worked centrally within the framework of psychosis. Psychotics were a category of patients whose symptoms Freud was skeptical psychoanalysis could treat. As Camille Robcis explains in her stunning recent book Disalienation, which chronicles the development of institutional psychotherapy, Freud “was forced to reconsider his understanding of transference when he was presented with psychotic patients who had a relation to language that was radically different from his and for whom intersubjective interactions operated quite differently.” In his study of Judge Daniel Schreber, Freud indeed concluded that the (likely) paranoid schizophrenic jurist had, as Robcis writes, “lost his sense of social reality as his fantasies became autonomous.”
How might Fanon’s vision of the work of repair and the politics of reparation come into focus if we sustain and study it as situated within his lifelong work as a clinician?
Psychotics posed a relational challenge to psychoanalysis: they seemed to be badly served or even harmed by the standard transference between analyst and analysand. The language of their suffering, unlike that of, for example, a neurotic, didn’t seem to hold the kind of nascent kernel of disguised self-disclosure that could be enabled by the presence of the analyst’s listening mind. Instead, Tosquelles wrote, they suffered from a burst transference and tendency toward a destructive autonomy, a sense of themselves as the voice of their own law. This autonomy (auto-nomos, being a law unto oneself), however, indicated not independence but rather a break with shared reality that would eventually destroy the subject. The mind of the psychotic, Tosquelles and his colleague Jean Oury posited, would have to be repaired using “transferential constellations”: relational situations, little worlds (although, prospectively, worlds at whatever scale of ambition was necessary in material terms) designed to draw the patient outward, slowly back into language and the mediation of self and social.
Through this opening up of the consulting room, Tosequelles, Oury, and others provided an exhilarating opportunity to work through, in a new way, the always-fascinating social question at the core of therapeutic work: the relation between psychoanalytic therapy and the scene of repair. The question of what psychoanalysis aims to do and how it might be used—to return the patient to their own desire or teach them to channel it in order to adapt to the world—is an enabling aporia of Freudian thought. Always paradoxical, bedeviling the prospect and democraticity of the cure, within a repressive society, the problems of authority and democracy in therapy come to mimic the antinomies of fascist and colonial political domination. Institutional psychotherapy took this directly on within the clinic, establishing a “neosociety” of reflexive democratization that was porous to broader society, rooting out as far as possible carceral therapeutic forms used to police the boundaries between normal and pathological subjects. If, for example, work rotation randomly assigned today the patient and tomorrow the doctor to clean the shared toilets, it would become more challenging, and less materially rationalizable, for a doctor to deem disgusted resistance to this activity a sign of mental illness.
Institutional psychotherapists understood this work to be endless, espousing an existentialism of vigilant agency, of cultivating one’s preparedness to endure change, which they posed in opposition, as committed Marxists, to what Freud might call the reality principle of capitalism: to maximize productivity, to work. That this was, strictly speaking, an impossible horizon was, in Lacanian terms, part of its ethical drawing forward: each new crystallization would bear the kernel of impossibility and a remainder that would point the way for future, unending creation. In the clinic at St. Alban, therapists and patients alike would have to be both the eventual subjects of this transformation and the stewards, organizers, unionists, and artists of its material possibility in unflinching world-making terms.
Fanon’s encounter with Tosquelles forever shaped the idiom in which he would think about repair. In this, Fanon consistently preferred to speak not of repair, reparatio, but rather its etymological forbearer, preparation, praeparatio. Parare means to “make ready,” or, in Fanon’s favored idiom, to “prepare the ground,” so that prae-parare means, slightly redundantly, to pre-prepare. Etymologically, parare is linked to various logics of potential, including “to give birth” (parere). From parare, the Latin derived imperare (“to command”) and imperium, the spatialized demand made by the other to act, to work, a site that is always coming under their command—in other words, to make empire. [2]
From this perspective, the etymology of repair, of re-preparation, opens toward another meaning, naming an odd but very Fanonian temporality. We might retranslate it as let us restore the conditions of our ability to be future oriented, like we were before. Repair can be understood as an elaboration of preparedness that doubles its injunction in order to address its own conditions of possibility: make possible a re-preparation in the world.
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We might retranslate it as let us restore the conditions of our ability to be future oriented, like we were before.
Following this call, but dismayed by the racism of fellow French analysts and his own difficulties securing permanent employment in France, Fanon eventually sought a post in a remote part of Algeria. Although Blida-Joinville was isolated from the perspective of the metropole, it turned out to be an ideal spot from which to take aim at the edifice of French colonial psychiatry in Northwest Africa. The regnant Algiers School was headed by Antoine Porot, who espoused a theory of psychic development and pathology based in biological-racial difference. Colonial subjects in pain without identifiable organic causes (which is to say, pain that demanded some aspect of a psychic explanation) were immediately viewed as undisciplined subjects, for whom the explanation offered by white doctors was always the same: They don’t want to work! This denial of humanity was doubled by and entailed a willful ignorance of the social conditions of exploitation, insecurity, and stress, an understanding of which is indispensable in any effective treatment of psychic pathology. Reliance on phrenological forms of psychic explanation and ignorance of social conditions disabled therapeutic interventions, replaced them with racist fantasies and a dehumanizing impulse, and obscured the profoundly obvious social sources of alienation.[3]
Furiously, Fanon surveyed sympathetic friends and comrades: How could patients be encouraged to navigate between the clinic and the social world, deeply necessary for their continuity of ego and thus their psychic repair, when the language of social description was so profoundly reifying and thus obscuring of the sources of suffering? When Fanon took over as chef de service at Blida, he had already identified his enemy.
As established by Tosquelles, the porousness of the boundary between the clinic and the outside world served a therapeutic purpose, asking patients to navigate between and be drawn outward by multiple perspectives, thus avoiding the autonomy of psychosis. However, because the social was figured as not only a backdrop for but a vector of therapeutic work, this raised in an acute way the question of whether adaptation to the colonial reality—the ability to work, to participate, to enjoy social life, to obey laws, or at least consider the claims of obligation beyond those of your own desire—was, in itself, good for the psychic life of the patient living under a colonial racial labor regime. This generic paradox of psychoanalytic work—adaptation or autonomy? Repair or revolution?—was radicalized in the context of colonial sociality. As David Marriott asks, was the point to restore a sense of reality or was it that “real unreality of life in the colony could be fully understood”?
Because therapy, for Fanon, always has a material and fantastical pole, neither the retreat into the self nor the refixing of the boundaries of the clinic to be less porous to the world offered a compelling possibility. To operate in the Algerian environment, Fanon realized that he would have to bring Tosquelles and the tools of his training beyond themselves, a critical gesture always wavering on betrayal that nevertheless made him, as Camille Robcis has argued, Tosquelles’s most loyal student. His first move was to rethink the institutions of the clinic, taking up a heterodox form of fieldwork, scouring the Algerian countryside for organic forms of sociality and refusal in the broader world that might be staged to serve as sites of healthy porousness to reality for his psychotic patients. For example, understanding the importance of male-only cafes for Arab sociality beyond the clinic, he had one built within its walls. Perhaps most importantly, inspired in his writings by indigenous models of mental illness, especially those that blamed spirits called jinns for certain pathological behavior, undermining liberal models of responsibility and criminality, Fanon was moved to abolish punitive disciplinary regulations and the use of physical restraint in the wards.[4]
The successes of these efforts validate the core insight of institutional psychotherapy, namely, that clinicians must understand themselves as students, worldmakers, and stewards of those aspects of the environment that militate against inertia and domination, of those forms of life not available to fascism. On the other hand, the escalating social dysfunction of colonial Algeria entered the walls at every turn. There came a point, Fanon feared, where the attempt to keep a connection between the patient and the outside world required not only a creative eye but also a form of mystification. Indeed, the success that Fanon found in generating a reparative “neosociety” within but separate from colonial conditions was a receding horizon within an intensifying revolutionary situation. Fanon was increasingly asked to treat victims not only of colonialism’s everyday violences but also of more exceptional forms: torture victims, beaten strikers, and militants grappling with the psychic effects of their own counterviolence. Indeed, his entry into the Front de libération nationale (FLN) came in earnest when he was asked to smuggle and hide militants on the run from the French colonial police. These men were not not patients, but their antisocial forms of refusal were more or less commensurate with their revolutionary identity. This undecidability between patient and resistor dramatized the paradoxes of the therapeutic gaze in a moment of political tension. Put differently, the problem of social-therapeutic porousness was not only a question of escalating domination, although certainly this, but also of escalating avenues of revolutionary refusal.
To be a good therapist, it seemed, increasingly meant to participate directly in revolutionary activity. This had personal costs, and Fanon was forced to resign from his post at Blida in 1956. His life was certainly in danger, prompting him to flee to Tunisia, but he also identified a specific tipping point in his resignation “Letter to the Resident Minister,” namely, excessive brutality against striking workers. In this, he noted, the possibility of legally asserting any agency against dehumanization had exhausted itself:
“No pseudo-national mystification can prevail against the requirement of reason. Monsieur Ie Ministre, the decision to punish the workers who went out on strike on July 5th, 1956, is a measure which, literally, strikes me as irrational. Either the strikers have been terrorized in their flesh and that of their families, in which case there was an obligation to understand their attitude, to regard it as normal, in view of the atmosphere. Or else their abstention expressed a unanimous current of opinion, an unshakable conviction, in which case any punitive attitude was superfluous, gratuitous, inoperative. […] For many months my conscience has been the seat of unpardonable debates. And their conclusion is the determination not to despair of man, in other words, of myself.”
In 1956, Fanon joined revolutionary activity in earnest and in public, writing for the revolutionary journal El Moudjahid and joining delegations as an FLN representative at international Pan-African meetings. During his long afternoons at the clinic, however, he also began to evaluate revolutionary practice itself for its potential therapeutic significance. In one sense, the turn to the revolutionary scene as a transferential constellation was a logical extension of the dialectics of self and social that he had been pursuing since his time at St. Alban. In another, it reflected his exhilaration at the emergence of the Algerian people as a revolutionary subject, the leap into invention spreading everywhere like the becoming real of a dreamspace. And indeed, within his political writings, Fanon wrote with undisguised zeal about the enthusiasm, the bursting open of inertia and dependence, that the revolution had brought to the Algerian population. In a manner both consistent and imaginative, he played with the idea that revolution itself could be figured as a “transferential constellation,” an assemblage of world-making practices capable, as he wrote of wildcat strikes at the time, of drawing agency outward from its repressive dispersion into the colonial labor regime. The revolution seemed to be inexhaustible in each gesture, to finally dissolve in enthusiasm and revolutionary refusal the Porotian reproach of inertia, clarifying once and for all that the blame lay with the colonial world and not its subjects.
This narrative of rupture and its enabling antinomy, repair versus revolution—itself a clinically inflected iteration of the inexhaustible leftist debate of reform versus revolution—is familiar, constituting, in its most hardened form, a kind of superego for the engaged therapist attentive to the subsuming logics of domination that seem to lie inexorably as barriers to healing.
On the other hand, if we figure revolutionary politics not only as scenes of pure rupture in which all problems fall away but as relational sites of conflict in which, as in all good therapy, enough is shaken loose that the right problems can finally be broached, the framing shifts. In Whither Fanon?, David Marriott reminds us that, doubling the obvious zeal and magic of his revolutionary writing, Fanon wrote (sometimes much less publicly for fear of betraying the cause) of the challenges of repair within revolution, of the cumulative effects of violence on the psyches of his patients. One especially telling case study is offered in the chapter of The Wretched of the Earth titled “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders.” This penultimate chapter both radicalizes his account of the psychic life of revolution and breaks in complex ways with his earlier enthusiasm about revolutionary agency.
In it, Fanon takes up the regnant perspective on Algerian criminality offered by Porot: the Algerian is unsystematic and “pointillistic,” always taking a small slight as a part for the whole. The cure, then, according to colonial psychiatrists, would involve subduing this essentially lobotimistic tantrum. Fanon writes that the difficulty lies not in denying the seemingly undirected violence that causes distress in his patients, but in understanding the way that colonial life encouraged mental distress and anger to be directed against neighbors, partners, and friends rather than against the source of the suffering: the material structures sustaining colonial domination. Before the revolution, violence was indeed pointillistic. Yet, the revolution would offer not a cure or catharsis, but the possibility of the right object. The work of revolt, including its violence, could be understood to be successful when it came to be directed not as a singular cathartic magic ritual (say, the brutal murder of a French solider) but instead as part of creating the conditions, dialectically setting the grounds, for “men and women to exist in true liberation, in other words, to master all the material resources necessary for a radical transformation of society.” In producing these rehabilitations, it becomes necessary to hunt down not only the enemy but also those forms anchoring the “core of despair” directed against the self and the community within colonial subjects.
To be a good therapist, it seemed, increasingly meant to participate directly in revolutionary activity.
Because of the power and necessity of the cause, Fanon argues, it becomes tempting to think of all psychotic reactions in the context of struggle as benign, since they indict the colonial environment. This is not quite true: “explosions” compromise the future of the patient until violence brings a new political community into being; until such time, “explosions” are and must be an attack on the ego without an obvious path toward a cure that is not reconciliatory. To refuse this repair seems a necessary sacrifice, but it is profoundly lonely. Fanon gives the example of a “patriot and former resistance fighter.” This man was afflicted with insomnia and anxiety around the anniversary of the day he had been asked to plant a bomb that killed ten people. Fanon writes that he “never for a moment had a thought of recanting, fully realized the price he had to pay in his person for national independence. Such borderline cases pose the question of responsibility in the context of the revolution” (emphasis added).
The stark simplicity of this claim highlights the psychic tension between the revolutionary cause and the subject, bringing into view the centrality of the figure of the war analyst in the psychoanalytic tradition. From Fanon to Lara and Stephen Sheehi’s recent writings on analysis in occupied Palestine, backward to Tosquelles and indeed to Freud himself, this figure throws into question habitual claims about the conservatism of the discipline, on the one hand, and, on the other, the reliance of the discipline of psychoanalysis for its own theoretical production on a supplement of explosive political conflict that it doesn’t totally avow or find familiar. Alongside the affects of the cure—a certain kind of persistence, a social gaze beyond the self, a loosening of creative capacity—may well belong to both Fanon’s sense of irony and something like the Sheehi’s sumud, a word that they draw from a long Palestinian lineage, meaning something like “stalwartness.”[5]
Fanon’s thinking, in other words, evolved in response to the problem of life during war. There is no plausibly Fanonian vantage from which to extricate this thinking to refuse revolution in favor of repair—psychic life was shaped by the same conditions that had made revolution absolutely necessary. Neither, however, does the story end with an affirmative imaginary of endless war, although it is undeniable that the legacy of the book lies partly in the way it keeps vivid the permanent possibility of revolutionary agency in historical terms. Instead, as is characteristic of Fanon’s socialthérapie, it became necessary to expand the demandingness and scale of the transferential constellation, to ask: What are the conditions under which militant vigilance in its full demandingness could be cultivated over time with others and what are the real practices that could be reconfigured to embed this work in an enduring site?
For Fanon, this meant becoming newly curious about the possible historical conditions for a lasting peace, against the many compromise formations proffered by a flailing but still dominant West whose power was secured by renegotiating conditions of dependence to secure its own wealth. It is at this juncture that Fanon began to think, work, and write beyond the national terrain that had so sustained his enthusiasm, to consider in material terms the way that vigilance against the neocolonial recapitulation of domination required an international, specifically African, form of solidarity.
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It is in the context of this question about the exhilarating, nearly annihilating, vitality of militancy, and its political-institutional fate over the long term, that Fanon’s second and final mention of political reparations comes in The Wretched of the Earth, in the chapter “Concerning Violence.” After Nazism had turned Europe into a veritable internal colony, Fanon writes, the call from within the house was universally that Germany must pay. This essentially moral call for reparations was also a way to reestablish the unity and hegemony of Europe, a negotiated internationalism of debt underwritten by a normativity of shared dependence bolstered by racial solidarity. The colonies relate to the question of reparations quite differently. Fanon writes with optimism, “Moral reparation for national independence does not fool us and it doesn’t feed us.” When Europe approaches the colonies in this moralistic vein, the response must be material:
“The wealth of the imperialist nations is also our wealth. […] Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The riches which are choking it are those plundered from the underdeveloped peoples. […] And when we hear the head of a European nation declare with hand on heart that he must come to the aid of the unfortunate peoples of the underdeveloped world, we do not tremble with gratitude. On the contrary, we say among ourselves, "it is a just reparation we are getting." […] If through lack of intelligence-not to mention ingratitude-the capitalist countries refused to pay up, then the unrelenting dialectic of their own system would see to it that they are asphyxiated.[…] As soon as the capitalists know, and they are obviously the first to know, that their government is preparing to decolonize, they hasten to withdraw all their capital from the colony. This spectacular flight of capital is one of the most constant phenomena of decolonization.”
In response, Fanon addresses the Third World, hoping that the colonies will form a collective autarky and starve Europe of its markets and resources, leading to the collapse of European economies, unemployment and class war in European nations, and, inevitably, the return of capital in the form of aid to “develop” the colonies through investment, if only the European working classes would “stop playing the irresponsible game of Sleeping Beauty.” Fanon’s optimism has everything to do with the propagandistic purpose of his final testament, but it is also grounded in a distinct belief in the fundamental ownership of new Third World nations over their own resources.
In fact, the question of resource sovereignty and its counterintuitive relation to reparations would become a fundamental issue, and eventually a stumbling block, in the development of postcolonial internationalism. When the Évian Agreements were signed in March 1962 by Algeria and France, Algeria gained its independence but also entered a formal cooperation with France. France promised to sponsor the infrastructure of the new nation, and in exchange the new government would hold off land nationalization or, in the case of nationalization, expropriate with compensation. Perhaps most importantly, the Algerian government largely agreed to guarantee so-called “acquired” colonial oil rights and extractive agreements, to hold the debt of French corporations who had invested in extraction under colonialism, on the logic that decolonization was financially damaging to France and that the colonies owed a kind of reparation to the metropole that would take the form of indebtedness or debt-holding-as-cooperation.
While the Évian Agreements held at the national level, many Algerian revolutionaries roundly condemned the de Gaulle-ist ideology of cooperation and continuity. To understand this debate, we have to look to the longer history of contest over acquired resource rights, in which Fanon, too, is implicitly involving himself in Wretched. During his work on the Évian Agreements and in front of the UN, in the discussions that would eventually lead to the adoption of the New International Economic Order, the famous Algerian jurist Mohammed Bedjaoui focused on establishing new legal rights to resources, undermining the call for reparations made by Europe toward the colonies. He had spent much of his early career carefully working through and demolishing the claim that the Algerian state had surrendered or “extinguished” its sovereign rights during colonization. Most crucially, he contested the “acquired rights” that De Gaulle demanded to have recognized over the Sahara “insist[ing] that the Sahara would fall under Algerian sovereignty.” By contesting the claims made by European powers that decolonization had expropriated wealth that was rightfully theirs, Bedjaoui set in place a legal basis for self-determination that would refuse reparative-reciprocal debt relations and inaugurate other visions of the role of unaligned solidarity, of South-South relations, in international law.
The holding of debt in its psychic and material terms, Fanon suggests in the texts that bracket his life, must be abolished
In the end, this most radical view was not adopted in the Évian Accords, and Algeria remained in a cooperative arrangement with France over, for example, the oil resources of the Sahara. The scholar of international law and finance Grégoire Mallard says of Bedjaoui, although he could just as easily be writing of Fanon, “in the debate over international obligations in a post-independence Algeria, it was not so much the legitimacy of nationalizations of either land ownership or concessions that distinguished the interwar solidarists, or the Gaullist advocates of bilateral cooperation, from the thinkers from the Global South, but the question of how to deal with debts associated with the nationalization of concessionary companies or other forms of acquired rights.”
In other words, at the heart of the historical economic debates—the problem of exploitation and the resource curse, the opportunistic use of debt in the sustaining of dependency, the quelling of socialist politics—that are so often mobilized today to underwrite reparations debates, we find a strikingly inverted set of claims that were nonetheless widespread, namely, that French companies who speculatively acquired debt in oil and other forms of extraction should be reimbursed and compensated for the costs of exploration and investment, and that the decolonial costs of lost capital should be compensated by the former colonies themselves, so that debts owed to the French government would not be defaulted upon. For this reason, in parallel, reversed, and circling around the same history of manifest exploitation as the debate about reparations, the call to be paid an unpaid debt that is still owed, emerging from, for example, the Caribbean,[6] in North Africa the movement against “cooperation” took up the slogan “We Owe You Nothing.”
In this rather historical aside, we see both that Fanon’s optimism about the dialectics of repair is incomplete and that its subject is ultimately reversed. The nation of Algeria came to be responsible for holding the debt of French companies whose economies, interests, and obligations to France were unsettled by the international recognition of acquired rights.
What does this reversed genealogy of owing illuminate about the dialectics of reparation today? From this vantage, Fanon’s optimism seems less prescient than does his understanding of the vigilance necessary to avoid neocolonial capture and reversals of indebtedness. The masochistic demand of modernization, the ultimatum that the colonized share responsibility via indebtedness and even reparation for the financial disaster for Europe of their freedom on the cusp (or even attempting to legitimate itself as a mechanism) of practical decolonization would seem to give historical content to the warning offered in Black Skin, White Masks that, as again Drabinski glosses Fanon, reparations “would link Black people to the past in a crucial way and make that link inextricable from imagining justice.” By the end of his life, however, Fanon was in a position to ask not only after the ontological vigilance of endless refusal but also the form of world, of institution and economy, that might serve as a site of demanding externality to sustain independence as an enduring political form.
Put directly, if we take Fanon’s late calls for African solidarity, for new international institutions that we might plausibly put in a genealogy with the kinds of legal forms imagined by Bedjaoui, seriously alongside rather than against his clinical work, a striking thesis emerges. We see that Fanon’s revolutionary internationalism should be understood not only as the political correlate of a therapeutic impasse or its transcending in the fervor of revolution but rather, in the relentless ambition of the Tosquellian worldview, as itself a materially necessary transferential constellation. Flash-frozen in time by the tragedy and drama of his early death at thirty-six, less than a year before the Évian Accords established Algerian independence, Fanon’s turn to internationalism, to African solidarity, becomes a crucial moment of therapeutic imagination, of scale, in a distinctly unyielding method of analysis desperate to bring immanent to itself the critique of (neo)colonial racial capitalism on behalf of its patients, the future terrain of their self-determination.
We might ask ourselves, if we see something still vital in this nascent institutional imaginary (over and above the optimistic and basically incorrect prophecy that the dialectics of colonial resource sovereignty would bring Europe to its knees), what would it mean to be done with calls for entrapping reciprocal repair, to renew focus on “preparing the ground” for a new kind of international configuration? What histories would we need to understand? What kinds of collective subjects would we need to foster (and what pathologies might this generate)? What forms of indebtedness would simply need to be abolished? For Fanon, to speak of repair is to speak of re-preparing, not of rebalancing the past. As he writes, “Today we are present at the stasis of Europe. Comrades, let us flee from this motionless movement where gradually dialectic is changing into the logic of equilibrium. Let us reconsider the question of mankind. Let us reconsider the question of cerebral reality and of the cerebral mass of all humanity, whose connections must be increased, whose channels must be diversified and whose messages must be re-humanized. […] No, we do not want to catch up with anyone. What we want to do is to go forward all the time.”
The holding of debt in its psychic and material terms, Fanon suggests in the texts that bracket his life, must be abolished. This might indeed be a kind of reparation, but it is one that tries to shatter the fantasy of a politics dependent on the past. Today, the political content of this call is up for grabs; it has to be generated through struggle and world making. To repair, Fanon spent his life insisting, is to be the steward on shattered ground of the natal impulse, and the co-organizer of the sites of demanding externality that might continue to bring the future into being.
[1] For this history, see throughout, Camille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021)
[2] Translations to Latin by Professor Niek Janssen of Amherst College, with thanks.
[3] See Frantz Fanon, “The North African Syndrome,” in Toward the African Revolution, trans. Haakon Chevalier, (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 3–16; “Antoine Porot and Jean Sutter, Le ‘Primitivisme’ des indigènes nord-africains. Ses incidences en pathologie mentale (Marseille, France: Imprimerie marseillaise, 1939); and Frantz Fanon, Alienation and Freedom (2018)
[4] See for example, Alienation and Freedom, 188 (editors Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young, Introduction to “Psychiatric Writings”)
[5] Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (London: Routledge, 2021).
[6] See, for example, Adom Getachew, “Reparations and the Recasting of Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery” from Items, a blog of the SSRC, February 22, 2017. Access: https://items.ssrc.org/reading-racial-conflict/reparations-and-the-recasting-of-eric-williamss-capitalism-and-slavery/