Ordinary Unhappiness 17: Fanon the Clinician feat. Nica Siegel
Fanon and Gandhi
- Nica Siegel hadn't taught Frantz Fanon's "Wretched of the Earth" for 10 years.
- She originally paired it with Gandhi's texts, unintentionally preemptively discrediting Fanon's radicalism.
Fanon's Reception
- The Anglo-American reception of Fanon often sets him up as the violent "other" to non-violent thinkers like Gandhi.
- This is influenced by figures like Hannah Arendt and interpretations of non-violence within the Civil Rights Movement.
Student Resistance to Fanon
- Students sometimes approach Fanon with preconceived notions, calling him a "psychopath" before engaging with his work.
- Others focus solely on violence, ignoring his clinical work.
Abby and Patrick welcome political theorist Nica Siegel, author of a forthcoming manuscript on the politics of exhaustion, including a recently published chapter, “Fanon's Clinic: Revolutionary Therapeutics and the Politics of Exhaustion,” and a brand-new essay in Parapraxis.
Nica tells our listeners about Frantz Fanon’s life, situating both his personal journey and his writing within the context of his work as a clinician and clinical theorist. As Nica recounts, Fanon’s clinical writings were only recently collected and translated in the 2018 volume Alienation and Freedom, which has ushered in a renaissance in Fanon studies in the Anglophone world. Tracking Fanon’s story from Martinique to metropolitan France to Tunisia to Algeria, a focus on Fanon as a clinician helps us to rethink and recontextualize the major texts that bracket his life: Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Abby, Patrick, and Nica also discuss resistances to Fanon; distinctive clinical concepts like the “transferential constellation”; neurosis versus psychosis; syndromes as political resistance; political exhaustion and the exhaustion of the political; revolutionary subjectivity; the superego of the contemporary left; and much more.
Nica’s Parapraxis essay on Fanon as clinician, “Destiny to Be Set Free: Fanon Between Repair and Reparation” was, happily, released online earlier than we expected: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/destiny-to-be-set-free
Primary texts we discuss include:
- Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
- Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
- The volume of Fanon’s clinical writings Nica is discussing is Alienation and Freedom, edited and compiled by Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young, translated by Steven Corcoran
Some of the other books that Nica invokes include:
- David Marriott, Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being
- Camille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France
- Fred Moten, The Universal Machine (consent not to be a single being)
- Hannah Zeavin, The Distance Cure
- Nigel Gibson and Roberto Beneduce, Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics (Creolizing the Canon)
You can learn more about Nica’s work and get in touch with her at nicasiegel.com
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