"FANON, PHENOMENOLOGY AND PSYCHIATRY"

JEAN KHALFA, Fellow and Senior Lecturer in French Studies, Trinity College, University of Cambridge

Introduced by NATALIE MELAS, Department of Comparative Literature, Cornell University

Monday, March 21, 2022, 4:45 – 6:15 p.m. 

A.D. White House, Guerlac Room

27 East Avenue, Central Campus, Cornell University

Fanon’s phenomenological and psychiatric references are both obvious and intriguing in all of his political works. They seem to determine his interpretation of the colonial situation and the decolonizing processes he was deeply involved in, in Martinique, Algeria as well as in Subsaharan Africa.  In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), the effect of the racist gaze upon its victim is described as and alienation via a destruction of the “body schema, ”a notion borrowed from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who himself imported it into phenomenology from psychiatry. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961) Fanon describes the colonial situation in the same terms as he had described classical psychiatric internment and presents participation in an anti-colonial struggle as a form of disalienation similar to the techniques of psychiatric social therapy which he had pioneered in his clinical work.

With the recent publication of 800 pages of lost or forgotten material by Fanon, Alienation and Freedom (2018 and 2020) (Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté, 2015, 2019), it is now possible to see that rather than providing simple analogies, Fanon’s phenomenological and psychiatric reflections are the foundations of his political thought, and what has made it so enduring.

BIO

Jean Khalfa specializes in the history of philosophy, modern literature (in particular contemporary poetry and writing in French from North Africa and the Caribbean), aesthetics and anthropology. He is the editor of What is Intelligence? (CUP, 1994 and 1996); Afrique du sud: le cap de bonne espérance (with Chris Alden, Les Temps Modernes, 1995); The New French Poetry, a Bilingual Anthology (with David Kelley, Bloodaxe Books, 1996); The Dialogue between Painting and Poetry (Black Apollo Press, 2001); An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze  (Continuum, 2003);  Frantz Fanon, a special issue of Wasafiri, Issue 44 (Routledge, 2005); Pour Frantz Fanon, a special edition of Les Temps Modernes, Issue 635-636 (Gallimard, 2006); the first complete edition of Michel Foucault's History of Madness (Routledge, 2006 and 2009). An interview with Professor Khalfa on Fanon is available at http://www.rfi.fr/francais/radio/editions/072/edition_53_20060219.asp. He has recently published articles on Pascal, Rousseau, Deleuze, Sartre, Fanon, Césaire, St John Perse, Glissant, Michaux, Cavaillès, Maccheroni, Roche, on typographic forms and on the relationship between contemporary poetry and the image.

Professor Khalfa's monograph Poetics of the Antilles: Poetry, History and Philosophy in the Writings of Perse, Césaire, Fanon and Glissant was published in 2017 by Peter Lang. He is working on a book on Fanon's Les Damnés de la terre for Routledge Press and a study of Foucault on insanity. He is a member of Livre Espace de Création, a program of the French Agence Nationale de La Recherche, which digitized a significant selection of livres d'artistes from the Jacques Doucet collection and published several studies on the book as a space of creativity in the twentieth century  Within this program he has coedited Les Espaces du livre/Spaces of the Book with Isabelle Choi (Peter Lang, 2015). He is the organizer of the Choiseul-Praslin Lectures and exhibitions, focusing on the relationship between poetry and image, a member of the Comité de Rédaction of Les Temps Modernes, a member of the editorial board of Wasafiri and Series Editor, Modern French Identities, Peter Lang Publishers. In 2013-14 he held a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship and is a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques.