Fanon, Freud, and the Intersubjective Sources of Colonial Psychopathology

18 Sep 2012 - 16:00 / 18 Sep 2012 - 18:00

Jackman Humanities Building, Room 616.
170 St. George Street
Toronto

A lecture by Stefan Bird-Pollan (University of Kentucky, Department of Philosophy)

 

 

Abstract:

In this paper I use Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex to illuminate Fanon’s diagnosis of the widespread breakdown of intersubjective relations in the French colonies of the Antilles. I argue that the Oedipal model is helpful in showing that the problem in the colonies, as Fanon sees it, is that the Antillean is not given the opportunity to properly rebel against the father figure and hence to authorize his or her own social relations because the father-figure, from whom this authority is to be taken, is himself
divided into familial father and colonial master. This failure produces a sense of inferiority which can only be overcome when the Antillean becomes conscious of the difference between the colonial master and the familial father-figure. Fanon conceptualizes this movement, I argue, on the model of Hegel’s masterslave dialectic. Accordingly, the only way to become self-authorizing is to engage in the struggle for decolonization and revolution.

Stefan Bird-Pollan (D.Phil Oxford in German Literature; PhD Vanderbilt, in Philosophy) is assistant professor at the University of Kentucky. His research focuses on how the notion of subjectivity is made possible by the notion of intersubjectivity in modern moral and political philosophy. He is working on a book manuscript entitled The Dialectic of Emancipation: Fanon, Hegel and Freud, which places Frantz Fanon’s social critique in the tradition of German idealism. He has published articles on Rawls, Kant, Hegel and Fanon.