Derek Hook’s essay for the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, published online in advance of the paper edition.
Derek Hook – ‘Fanon via Lacan, or: Decolonization by Psychoanalytic Means…?’: JBSP Special Edition Capital, Sex and Africa (Originally published online: 27 February 2020).
Abstract: Lacanian psychoanalysis is often considered antithetical to Frantz Fanon’s decolonizing political project. This paper argues, by contrast, that by exploring hitherto under-explored aspects of the Fanon-Lacan relation we are able to re-articulate many of Fanon’s most crucial political insights. The paper adopts three routes of enquiry. Firstly, it investigates Fanon’s earliest citations of Lacan, noting how Fanon utilizes Lacan’s ideas of historically-situated forms of madness, (mis)recognition, paranoia and psychic causality. Secondly, it highlights a series of conceptual affinities that exist between the work of the two theorists including idea of sociogeny, the importance of symbolic (or social) structure, the notion of fantasy and of a social (or transindividual) unconscious. Thirdly, it provides an instructive example of how Fanon’s theorizations of colonial oppression might be supplemented by means of Lacanian social theory especially in respect of how the colonized are positioned as “non-subjects” relative to the master-signifier of whiteness.
Full article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2020.1732575
Derek Hook, Department of Psychology, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA; Department of Psychology, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa
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