Fanon’s Lacan and the Traumatogenic Child: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Dynamics of Colonialism and Racism

Fanon and the Traumatogenic Child

Discussion of Fanon and the child begins with ‘The Fact of Blackness’, which is better translated – in line with Fanon’s phenomenological approach – as ‘The lived experience of being black’ (see Desai, 2014). This is Chapter 5 of Black Skin, White Masks (hereafter BSWM), where Fanon depicts an encounter with a white woman and her child. There are competing translations, ² but the text addresses his responses to a child taking fright at the sight of Fanon, as a black man, which precipitates a traumatic installation of a racialized identity. ³

‘Look, a Negro!’ It was an external impetus that flicked me in passing. I smiled slightly.

‘Look, a Negro!’ It was true. I laughed.

‘Look, a Negro!’ The circle was gradually getting smaller. I laughed openly.

‘Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!’ Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be frightened of me. I wanted to laugh till I burst, but that had become impossible.

Whether or not this event really happened, it is what various commentators call a mise-en-scène (e.g. Lebeau, 2005) ⁵ or, in an attempt to frame Fanon as a psychoanalytic theorist, a ‘primal scene’ (Bhabha, 1983) – a logical or epistemological moment in the violent imposition and constitution of a racialized subjectivity, a psychodramatic prototype. It conveys the emotional impact and consequences of such treatment, combining ‘an analysis of a given social-psychological situation and an affective articulation of that same situation’ (Hage, 2010: 113).

Central to this account is the way the skin and the body become signifiers of alienation from self, via Fanon’s notion of ‘epidermalization’. In this he develops a Freudian notion of neurosis but shows how a socially produced event instigates a narcissistic trauma and the interiorization of inferiority. The prioritization of the visual register is also important for discussion, taken up later in this paper, of Fanon’s use of Lacan’s notion of the ‘mirror phase’. Indeed Hook (2012: 114–15) claims:

an intersection of key factors make ‘epidermalization’ virtually a ‘proto-Lacanian’ concept: the strong emphasis on visuality (the role of the visual field in imposing an ‘identity’); the facet of bodily experience, of physicality being held together (or not, indeed, being disrupted) by modes of symbolic interaction and inter-subjectivity; the attention to the (imaginary) aspect of identification-from-without; an awareness of the basic structure of (mis)recognition in others (or the systematic denial of this recognition).

The lack of clarity over its status is also suggested by shifts of setting, as narrated by its commentators. Macey sets the scene in a park, while Hage’s (2010) and Hook’s (2012) discussions mark the scene as in a train. (Fanon’s text mentions both.) It is likely that it is a composite of many insulting scenarios, although the specificity of arenas cited should be noted in terms of the classing of public space: these are not privileged but ordinary spaces – ordinary encounters with ordinary people in modern urban contexts. (As will be discussed later, this sense of specific context or embeddedness is what leads Macherey (2012) to suggest that Fanon could be a better resource for theories of interpellation than Althusser.) Other significant black figures were also ‘caught up in the “Look, a Negro!” scenario’ (Macey, 2012: 165), ⁶ the effects of which are portrayed as cataclysmic. Fanon writes of dislocation, depersonalization and alienation: ‘I took myself off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object’ (BSWM: 79). It is an experience of ‘amputation, an excision, a haemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood’ (BSWM: 79). It was also a confrontation with an image of himself that fundamentally distorts the relationship with his physical and psychological being, and his collective as well as individual identifications. It is an account that has resonated ever since (Oliver, 2004, 2005; Macey, 2010; Hook, 2012) across cultural and geographical arenas to describe the psychological impacts of racism.

The ‘Look, a Negro!’ scene invites analysis of the various forms and stages of racial (mis)identification at play including, for Fanon, the complex ‘both-and’ of being subjected to the universalized and transhistorical black experience, and also divorced from it – as the particularized, exoticized and discretionary exception to the racist rule: ‘When people like me they tell me it is in spite of my colour. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my colour. Either way I am locked into the infernal circle’ (BSWM: 82–3).

This is where Althusser’s (1971) theory of interpellation, or how the subject is hailed or called into being through institutional interactions and by which identifications are forged and sedimented, comes into play. This account of the ideological production and structuring of – in this case a traumatized – subjectivity, which draws on Lacan’s theory of constitutive misrecognition, is taken up in commentaries on Fanon. So Hage (2010) argues that Fanon retains an ambivalence between universalism and particularity that compromises the radical openness some have claimed to find in his work. He names the outcome of this vacillation ‘mis-interpellation’, which he regards as particular to elite racialized subjects, that is ‘cosmopolitan people with high cultural capital who seem to be far more exclusively haunted by the desire for universality at the expense of a desire for particularity’ (2010: 118). He argues that Fanon

exhibits not just a willingness to locate himself in the universal but a psychological fixation with that universal. Such an affective state cannot be understood simply in terms of class aspirations … it is also the product of a particular subjectivity grounded in a specific form of racialization that comes with this cosmopolitan fixation with the universal. It makes one paradoxically both fixated on, and fixated on transcending, the racializing force one is subjected to. (2010: 119)

Child Ambiguities

Despite the role accorded the child, little has been written about this aspect. Indeed the word ‘child’ fails to appear in the index of Black Skin, White Masks, or in Macey’s (2012) biography, or Silverman’s (2005) collection. (The translations of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and A Dying Colonialism do not have an index.) Nor does the word ‘child’ appear in the index of many collections that reprint and discuss this iconic encounter (e.g. Evans and Hall, 1999). The extensive literature discusses the whiteness of the woman and the child, and the gendered, and certainly sexed, relationship between the mother and the hypersexualized black man.

Typically, as Lebeau (2005: 133) comments, analysis has focused on ‘Negrophobia as a symptom of sexualised anxiety, as sign of the hallucinatory sexual presence of black men in a phobic imaginary’. Indeed various accounts take this up to discuss Fanon’s sexism, heterosexism and homophobia (Vergès, 1996), including (as he goes on to argue in BSWM) that white women fantasize about being raped by a black man, and that black women desire to sleep with white men (see also Bergner, 1995; Chow, 1999 ⁷ ). Much of this includes important analyses of the specific impacts of his background and experience (Vergès, 1997). But what of portraying all this as instigated or precipitated by a child?

For all its interpretive problems, Fanon’s account clearly offers an unconventional set of resources to interpret the figure of the child and its role in models of both development and decolonization. Reversing the now globalized model of childhood as innocent and authentic (Boyden, 1990; Steedman, 1995), and through its cultural recapitulations of the exclusions and oppressions of the history of western modernity (Levander, 2006; Taylor, 2013), the extent and complicity of European culture with racism is emphasized. Fanon’s child in this scene is not the ideal-typical subject of narrative identification but rather the index or representative of pre-constituted racist/colonizing culture that instigates psychic ‘amputation’, i.e. the agent of colonizing violence. To mobilize a Lacanian trope, it is the story of ‘The Emperor’s new clothes’ in reverse: the child (figured by Freud (1914) as ‘His Majesty the Baby’, to characterize primary narcissism) confirms the ideological order on which imperialism is built. According to an object relations reading (discussed also later), the child is seen to deal with its existential fears through subscription to a racist symbolic order: ‘Slavery, lynching, segregation: with a child’s looking and pointing’ (Lebeau, 2005: 131).

With respect to the question of interpellation, Pierre Macherey (2012) usefully reads Fanon against Althusser in terms of their relationship with psychoanalysis, and, more indirectly, also in relation to Foucault, but brings into focus the position of the child. While of course Foucault was suspicious of the notion of ideology, Macherey links Fanon’s concern with the collective (or what – after, for example, group analytic perspectives (Hopper, 2002) – might be described as social) unconscious with Foucault’s preoccupation with the constitutive powers of the norm. While both theorists address the question of what happens when the subject is hailed, Macherey argues the ‘hey, you there!’ of Althusser’s (1971) formulation, and Fanon’s ‘Look, a Negro!’ are alike, but also differ in significant ways. What is interesting about their convergence is that in both cases there is a level of determination, that is, the turning around to assume a subject position, to be subjectivized: ‘subjects are people who have turned around in response to the call to become what has been projected at them; the constitution of the subject is a matter of turning around’ (Macherey, 2012: 13). But while Althusser’s paradigm comes from a religious context (of God calling Moses) that invites a spurious abstraction and universalization (presuming that all subjects are hailed in the same way), Macherey proposes that Fanon’s, coming from the field of colonization, highlights the ‘there’ – the field of spatio-historical material and interpersonal relations which structures what kind of subject is identified, and identified with: ‘one is never only hailed/recognized as only a subject, but as a subject in a situation, in a colonial or imperial situation’ (Macherey, 2012: 18).

‘Look, a Negro!’ is said by a child to his mother, where the subject is spoken about, rather than to, but thereby qualified and so implicated. From this a subject is created as black via a process that is outside and beyond the intersubjective; that is, beyond a place of relationship. This is what marks Fanon’s departure from a phenomenological frame into more psychoanalytic and politicized arenas. Macherey portrays the child as ventriloquized by her or his parents, or even the more generalized voice of a hostile society or culture: ‘It is an anonymous voice, which uses the body it possesses as a resonator, rendering in vain the attempt to assign responsibility to anyone in particular: one may be tempted to say, in a language that differs from Fanon’s, that it is the voice of ideology itself that conveys the thoughts and words to be expressed’ (Macherey, 2012: 17). ⁸

Here we have the key features set in play by Fanon – the body (corporeal scheme), the abjection/phobia produced by the installation of ‘raced’ subjectivity, the necessity of attending to the material co-ordinates of a particular social field, alongside the correlative fantasies with which the body is invested – or, in Oliver’s (2005) suggestive analysis, secreted. Yet the fact that this is all generated by the encounter with a child is not sufficiently considered.

A closer reading of the text supports this, in the sense that the child – although pivotal in both the plot of this story and its affective force – remains elusive, its gender amenable to confusion (as discussed further later), ⁹ and its understanding of the significance of its apparently spontaneous response is far from clear. Indeed, although it is the child who claims to be ‘frightened’ and fears that the black man will ‘eat me up’ (p. 80) (which is what sets in motion many of the sexualized interpretations, forging the links between orality and sexuality and bolstering the many other elaborations of the links between racism and sexuality), Fanon’s accusation of attributions of responsibility are more generalized: ‘Now they were beginning to be frightened of me’ (p. 79). The child is amalgamated into the mother, the ‘they’. Child and mother combine, and the subjects of this scene of misrecognition destabilize or are distributed, with uncertain ownership. Notwithstanding Fanon’s psychoanalytic engagements, but corresponding to his psychopolitical project, these are here addressed to the field of cultural, rather than specifically individual, meaning (although there is evidence within his ‘case history presentations’ in Wretched of the Earth of working with metonymy to unravel and ease individual symptoms generated by torture and violence). The question of what it is within the white child that prompts such terror is not Fanon’s main interest, for two clear reasons. First, racism cannot be ‘explained’ and, second, ultimately he is concerned with sociogenesis rather than psychogenesis in order to elaborate his theory of conscious resistance (Hallward, 2011).

For Macherey, the scene of racism/colonialism is not only played out via the white woman and child in relation to a (non-interactive) encounter with an other, who comes to find himself as black (and male). Like other commentators (Hook, 2012), Macherey’s point is that Fanon’s analysis invites us to work more closely with the materiality of the scene itself to highlight the complex and contested relations between class, gender, sexuality, age and racialization. I would add to this the value of reading Fanon's own account of constitutively racializing adult-child relations more closely, to see what it offers for a model of subjectivity that is neither victim nor entirely compliant. Far from being committed to a defined future or development, therefore, the child of ‘Look, a Negro!’ remains subjectively inscrutable, underwritten, and perhaps unreadable, even as ‘he’ also suspends the dominant developmental narrative by positioning the child within a spatially-contingent, ‘development-free’ (Motzkau, 2009) space. Notwithstanding its reproduction of various gendered and generational normalizations (of mothers protecting vulnerable children, etc.), this is not an abstracted, prototypical child; yet it is also not a specified subject bestowed with interiority and reflection. Throughout the narrative various possible frames are mobilized, but also suspended or left undetermined. It is neither the child of developmental psychology advancing towards a presumed normative maturity – the definition of which of course is complicit with historical and current colonialisms and imperialisms (Burman, 2008a, 2008b, 2011, 2013) alongside classed, sexed, gendered and other pathologizations. Nor is it, despite attempts to do precisely this, discussed next, the child of psychoanalysis.

Oedipal Triangle, or Racist Symbolic Order

Fanon’s account of the psychological creation and consequences of an imposed black identity makes claims to subconscious and unconscious features of the black/colonized psyche. Here Fanon’s relationship with psychoanalysis comes into focus, and, in particular, his engagement with the work of Jacques Lacan. While sometimes mistakenly described as a psychoanalyst, rather than a psychiatrist, Fanon had little clinical or theoretical experience of psychoanalysis (though see Burman, under review c, for an account of his practice). Most authoritative accounts portray him as much more influenced by phenomenology and especially existentialism, in particular by Sartre (Macey, 2012; Desai, 2014). The designation ‘psychoanalyst of culture’ (Gates, 1991: 248), as offering an account of racialized sociogenesis or the social construction of blackness and, in particular, black masculinity as ‘phobogenic’ (generating phobia), is much more convincing. Gates (1991) and Macey (2012) are both scathing of efforts to portray Fanon as a proto-Lacanian, notwithstanding the privileged focus he accords visual (mis)recognition in the constitution of the separation between self and other. This focus on the visual is indeed vital and suggestive, and clearly invites a Lacanian narration as disrupting the line of the Imaginary by the installing of a racist symbolic order (see also Vergès, 1997). But even as Hook (2012), among others, reads Fanon through Lacan, what is clear is that in his practice as a psychiatrist Fanon drew on ideas from therapeutic communities (which were known through British and American psychiatric traditions, and to Lacan also; see Burman, 2012). His psychiatric practice drew on a psychoanalytic form of ‘institutional psychotherapy’ he learnt from his internship at Saint Alban with François Tosquelles. Tosquelles escaped fascist Spain, apparently carrying with him over the Pyrenees a copy of Lacan’s doctoral thesis, and established a mode of group therapeutic practice that combined both political and psychological forms of asylum (including for those being hunted down by the Vichy regime) (Macey, 2012: 142–6). ¹⁰ Relevant also is Macey’s report that Fanon attempted to present BSWM as his thesis for medical qualification, but it was rejected (unsurprisingly, given both its form and content), and so he submitted some more conventional clinical, psychiatric case studies instead. At the very least, what can be read from this is Fanon’s engagement with Lacan from his position as a doctor, a psychiatrist, and from this a particular tradition of radical psychotherapeutic practice can be traced (Giordano, 2011).

So although some influence is clear, notwithstanding Fanon’s brief citations (in Black Skin, White Masks), there is only little evidence of explicit engagement with Lacanian (or indeed much Freudian) theory. Furthermore, much of this is poorly referenced, and often only mobilized to be critiqued. So the index of BSWM has four citations to Lacan. The first (p. 44) is to an endnote, ¹¹ which simply references ‘Jacques Lacan’ (p. 166) and concerns ‘fantasy intuitions most favourable to psychosis’ (p. 44). The second, which offers explicit engagement, occurs as an assertion of difference from Lacan where Fanon references Lacan’s thesis to critique the notion of biologically determined ‘psychic constitutions’ of the kind subscribed to in the then contemporary colonial psychiatry being practised especially in Algeria:

Earlier I referred to Jacques Lacan: it was not by accident. In his thesis, presented in 1932, he violently attacked the idea of the constitutional. Apparently I am departing from his conclusions, but my dissent will be understood when one recalls that for the idea of the constitutional as it is understood by the French School I am substituting that of structure. (pp. 57–8)

A further reference occurs in support of his repudiation of the Oedipus complex, where Fanon moralizes on the disintegration of the colonial family produced by Oedipal rivalries. On page 108 there is a footnote to a point which claims that ‘in the French Antilles 97 per cent of the families cannot produce one Oedipal neurosis. This incapacity is one on which we heartily congratulate ourselves’, with the further asterisked footnote devoted to expounding how he is departing from psychoanalytic orthodoxy, taking Lacan as the paradigmatic example:

On this point psychoanalysts will be reluctant to share my view. Dr Lacan, for instance, talks of the ‘abundance’ of the Oedipus complex. But even if the young boy has to kill his father, it is still necessary for the father to accept being killed. I am reminded of what Hegel said: ‘The cradle of the child is the tomb of the parents’; and Nicolas Calas’ Foyer d’incendie and of Jean Lacroix’ Force et faiblesses de la famille. The collapse of moral values in France after the war was perhaps the result of the defeat of that moral being which the nation represented. We know what such traumatisations on the family level may produce. (BSWM: 108)

In a rare exploration of the figure of the child, Lebeau (2005) offers a symptomatic reading of ‘Look, a Negro!’ as a ‘primal scene of anxiety between sexuality and helplessness, longing and a fear of annihilation of self’ (p. 140) according to which, she argues, Fanon – for his own biographical and symptomatic reasons – links the ‘preoccupation with the fearful child into the problematic of sexual trauma and heterosexual and homosexual rape’ (p. 140). But significant and relevant as this may be, it is at the expense of generalizing Fanon’s intervention as if it were an additional or alternative psychoanalytic theory, rather than a challenge to both psychoanalysis and to social theory to forge better accounts of their relations (Parker, 2012). Thus Lebeau attends to Fanon’s origin story of racism in terms of how a child’s terror comes to be displaced onto a particular, and so then vilified and racialized, object.

But, I suggest, in-between the two terrors (ascribed to the child and to the black(ened) man who is increasingly frightened, even traumatized, by the child’s fear), we can notice an exchange between the (black) man and the (white) woman, ‘the mother’, that is little commented upon. The mother says to Fanon, ‘Take no notice, sir, he does not know you are as civilised as we’ (BSWM: 80). This piece of patronizing exceptionalism is presented as enraging Fanon further, but it could still be read as embarrassment at her son’s response. Lebeau interprets this as ‘a civility that reveals her to be an active participant in her child’s fear’ (p. 132). Nevertheless, Bergner (1995: 86, fn. 14) interprets it otherwise, that ‘the mother, at least in this instance, apologises for her son’s outburst’. Her next turn is an indirect communication to Fanon, via a pedagogical address to her son: ‘Look how handsome that Negro is!’ (1995: 81), to which he replies: ‘Kiss the handsome negro’s ass, madame!’. Or in Macey’s (2012: 165) translation: ‘“Look he’s handsome, that nigger”. The handsome nigger retorts: “Bugger you, Madame!”…’. This marks a turning point. For the mother: ‘Shame flooded her face’ and, on seeing this (a particular misrecognition, we might note), Fanon claims to feel some measure of agency return, albeit one built on aggression: ‘the field of battle having been marked out … I had incisors to test. I was sure they were strong’ (BSWM: 81).

Clearly, it is hard to go beyond this gendered and sexed encounter, alongside the manifold discussions of this visual scene of misrecognition – in which what is made through the impact of looking is clearly at issue. Moreover, these characteristics are also ‘guaranteed’ (as queer theorists would claim; Edelman, 2004) as heterosexed through the presence of the child, the offspring of a previous heterosexual coupling. Moreover – mobilizing conventions about not engaging in flirtation or erotic activities ‘in front of the child(ren)’ – how this presence is also what precisely wards off the encounter as primarily constituted by, but also recapitulating, the erotically-charged positioning between the white woman and the black man. Much can and has been said about all this (e.g. Doane, 1999), as also equally the absence of subject position accorded black women (Bergner, 1995). Lebeau continues:

[i]n other words, that model of phobia – Fanon’s attention to the trauma of sexuality, to sexuality as trauma – is bound to his struggle not to think the transfer of a white boy’s fear, his mother’s reason, into the black body, to refuse the fraught opening to the world that the Black comes to represent in Peau noire. (p. 135)

For Lebeau, it is the question of separation, the confrontation with difference, and its resolution via seeking out support and protection from a familiar figure, that is played out through the racialized and racializing encounter between the child and the black man, mediated (in multiple senses) by the boy’s mother. Bhabha generalizes this to develop its political implications:

the very question of identification only emerges in-between disavowal and designation. It is performed in the agonistic struggle between the epistemological, visual demand for a knowledge of the Other, and its representation in the act of articulation and enunciation. (1994: 50)

The Father as Black

Now let us consider Fanon’s fourth, more favourable reference to Lacan. This final citation occurs as a longer footnote (on p. 114) offering an account of Lacan’s mirror stage (which Fanon calls the ‘mirror period’) in relation to racialization. The source for Lacan offered here is the (undated) Encyclopédie française, and it should be noted that this usage anticipates Lacan’s later development of the role of the mirror stage in relation to the imaginary: ¹²

It would be interesting, on the basis of Lacan’s theory of the mirror period, to investigate the extent to which the imago of his fellow built up in the young white at the usual age would undergo an imaginary aggression with the appearance of the Negro. When one has grasped the mechanism described by Lacan, one can have no further doubt that the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man, And conversely. Only for the white man The Other is perceived on the level of the body image, absolutely as the not-self – that is, the unidentifiable, the unassimilable. For the black man, as we have shown, historical and economic realities come into the picture. ‘The subject’s recognition of his image in the mirror’, Lacan says ‘is a phenomenon that is doubly significant for the analysis of this stage: The phenomenon appears after six months, and the study of it at that time shows in convincing fashion the tendencies that currently constitute reality for the subject; the mirror image, precisely because of those affinities, affords a good symbol of that reality: of its affective value, illusory like the image, and of its structure, as it reflects the human form. (Encyclopédie française, 8–40, 9 and 10.) (BSWM: 114, note)

This is no arbitrary connection to make. Lacan wrote the paper as a direct counter to Sartre’s (1944) portrayal in Huis Clos/No Exit of ‘hell as other people’ (‘L'enfers, c'est les autres’). In the ‘Logical Time’ (1946) sophism, Lacan discusses three logically distinct and necessary phases in the (gendered as male) prisoners’ calculations as to their identities – identities which are interestingly figured as ‘white’ or ‘black’, according to discs placed on their backs, which they cannot see but which are visible to others. The warder, according to Lacan, tells them that if they can tell him which colour they are then they can leave. There is the ‘instant of the glance’, when the men look at each other; the second phase is the ‘time of comprehension’ when each reasons that – since they have all been told that there are two black and three white discs – if he was black each of the others would have rushed to leave; finally, there is the ‘moment for concluding’ when, precisely because the others have not left, and as a function of the hesitation on the part of the other two, each man realizes that they must all be white, and so they all get up to go to the door at the same time.

For Lacan, what is important is that each realizes that he is white, i.e. that this is the commonality between them; indeed this recognition is vital to his account of the social constitution of subjectivity. (As a ‘logical sophism’ there is no intentional engagement with notions of racialization, even though such terminology could be suggestive, especially as the paper was written from the French colonial centre at a significant cultural-political moment in relation to precisely the anticolonial struggle that Fanon was to become engaged with.) This clearly invites a particular kind of misrecognition that we might also see, within a racialized, racist social field, as a kind of overdetermined ‘mis’-interpellation. Especially, the consideration arises of what would have happened if they were not all white (here, if they did not all have white discs on their backs). Or indeed that the resolution of the sophism relies on the exclusion or foreclosure of blackness in the production of subjectivity. Yet, contrary to Lacan, this is the scenario Fanon addresses, inhabiting and dramatizing the position of the subject who is made-to-be black (the object rather than the subject of abjection; Hook, 2012). Nevertheless, Lacan’s key point is that there is an intersubjective and therefore social logic to this temporal sequence; each is necessary, and one necessarily follows the other. The guard calls each prisoner to identify himself as the condition of their freedom, but the only way they can do so is via a relational sequence of interpretive inferences. Only on this group-relational basis can individual subjectivity be forged, assumed and so identified with. Thus, contrary to the more individualist, phenomenological accounts to which Fanon more readily aligned himself (and that are of a piece with his radical humanism; Hallward, 2011; Gilroy, 2010, Hook, 2012), individual identification is inevitably, necessarily, created through relationship with the other: one becomes ‘individual’ in relation to the social field. This is what makes Lacan’s a radically social account of the construction of subjectivity, which – potentially – is more convergent with the kind of group/institutional psychotherapeutic practice that Fanon actually engaged in (Macey, 2012; see also Keller, 2007; Razanajao et al., 1996).

Applied to ‘Look, a Negro!’, what Lacan’s ‘logical time’ parable highlights is the mutual contingency of action and reaction. The first ‘call’ elicits a smile; the second a laugh and a sense of greater entrapment (‘the circle was getting smaller’); and, finally, third, the moment of concluding, of assuming a toxic identification, when ‘laughter … had become impossible’. Could we read this accumulation of incidents temporo-spatially (‘having come under attack at several points’), as representing in a particular way what happens when the child colludes with the mother against the father, and how – within a heteropatriarchal paradigm – in this case this racializes the man/father as black?

In BSWM Fanon continues by differentiating between acquiring a sense of oneself as other to an other (that is, what happens through the resolution of the Oedipal complex, or through symbolic castration as a condition of, and for, entry into the symbolic) and being fragmented and, through rejection, unable to establish a relation, and so failing to be able to orient to what is happening:

In the train it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person. In the train I was given not one, but two, three places. I had already stopped being amused. It was not that I was finding febrile coordinates in the world. I existed triply; I occupied space. I moved towards the other – and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea … (p. 70)

Jumping to Conclusions

Yet between these two sentences there is a parenthesis in which Fanon depicts a scenario that, at least superficially, chimes more closely with the structure of Lacan’s ‘logical time sophism’ than any other examples discussed, by him or other commentators (including Bhabha and Khanna). He writes:

(Let us assume, for example, that four fifteen-year-old boys, all more or less athletic, are doing the high jump. One of them wins by jumping four feet ten inches. Then a fifth boy arrives and tops the mark by a half-inch. The four other bodies experience a destructuration.) (BSWM: 114)

Yet what additional rhetorical features do the aged and gendered specifications of this high jump competition convey? Why not adults, girls, or women? One relatively facile reading of this merely reiterates Fanon’s gender chauvinism and inadequacy in relation to (black) women’s positions and experiences. Here a masculinist version of castration elides gendered positionings with ‘race’ in a way that consolidates heterosexed as well as racialized identities in ways ripe for queer destabilizations (see e.g. Musser, 2012; Pellegrini, 2008). A different angle for commentary might be to reflect on the significance of the precise age and gender specifications: are they developmental in orientation (like Fanon’s rendering of the mirror ‘period’, to which this account is proximal)? Or do they convey something more like ‘the time before’, the earlier, (‘younger’) moment before a new transformative structure will come into play. And why does the fifth boy produce a ‘destructuration’ for all the four others?

Misrecognizing Fanon

Given his contributions to this discussion, this is the place to note that Bhabha presumes the child in Fanon’s iconic encounter in BSWM to be a girl, which – as Bergner (1995) discusses – indicates either a significant underattention to gender or lapsing into the attributed transcendent subject position of ‘the child’. Bhabha mistakenly claims that ‘a white girl fixes Fanon in a look and word as she turns to identify with her mother’ (1983: 28). Bergner (1995) comments: ‘Bhabha’s slip suggests that preconceptions of how race, gender and sexuality intersect run deep’ (Bergner, 1995: 86). Indeed Bhabha (1983: 28) maintains the gendering of the white child as female to differentiate the identificatory pathways – and (anticipating Macherey’s (2012) analysis) ‘turns’ – of the white and black child, by continuing in the next paragraph:

The drama underlying these dramatic ‘everyday’ colonial scenes is not difficult to discern. In each of them the subject turns around the pivot of the ‘stereotype’ to return to a point of total identification. The girl’s gaze returns to her mother in the recognition and disavowal of the Negroid type; the black child turns away from himself, his race in his total identification with the positivity of whiteness which is at once colour and no colour. In the act of disavowal and fixation the colonial subject is returned to the narcissism of the imaginary and its identification of an ideal ego that is white and whole. For what these primal scenes illustrate is that looking/hearing/reading as sites of subjectification in colonial discourse are evidence of the importance of the visual and auditory imaginations for the histories of societies. (Bhabha, 1983: 28)

Indeed for Fanon, as we have seen, in his most extensive engagement with Lacan (albeit in a – long – footnote), the mirror stage ‘is basic: every time the subject sees his image and recognizes it, it is always in some way “the mental oneness which is inherent in him” that he acclaims’ (BSWM: 114). In a rather significant developmentalist reading, he calls it a ‘period’. This is of a piece with Vergès’s (1997) analysis: ‘It is a transparent ego. Fanon’s insistence on the cultural, as well as his conception of masculinity, lead him to finally embrace a notion of an unpolluted ego reached through stages of progressive development’ (p. 593).

It is from this understanding of the ‘structural harmony, a sum of the individual and of the constructions through which he goes’ (BSWM: 114–15), that Fanon builds his account of psychosis, specifically the sociocultural psychosis of the black person’s failure to know their colour: ‘Whenever there is a psychotic belief, there is a reproduction of self’ (pp. 114–15, fn). As Bhabha (1994) comments, ‘Like the mirror phase “the fullness” of the stereotype – its image as identity – is always threatened by “lack”’ (p. 77). It is this psychotic hallucination of the ‘neutrality’ of ‘colour’ ¹⁴ that Fanon then exemplifies with everyday stories from the Antilles, including from his own childhood, where he narrates the racist descriptions made by Martinican First World War veterans of the Senegalese soldiers (‘They cut off their heads and collect human ears’, BSWM: 115), which include, from Fanon’s own mathematics teacher, anti-Muslim comments. When the soldiers passed through Martinique in transit to Guiana, they were such objects of fascination that ‘my [Fanon’s] father went to the trouble of collecting two of them, whom he bought home and who had the family in raptures’ (p. 15). This continues with the famous example of the institutionally sanctioned misrecognition of the colonized subject, as exemplified by the French compositions written by Antillean children in schools. ¹⁵

Fanon, Lacan and the Child-as-Suspended-Subject

Political evaluations of Fanon focus on his philosophical debt to Sartre, in particular in relation to his humanism and associated links with notions of individual and collective liberation, while some postcolonial theorists possibly overstate his Lacanian sensibilities. My purpose in this paper has not been to choose between these readings, but rather to explore what is to be gained from their frictions. As Macey (2012) emphasizes, Fanon was neither a psychoanalyst nor a philosopher; he was a psychiatrist and a political revolutionary, who drew on a range of political and intellectual resources to fuel his distinctive account of the formation of racialized subjectivities and the psychopolitical consequences of colonization, in particular the links between psychic and social suffering. As well as Sartre and Lacan, he also cited Jung, Adler and other psychological resources in the service of warranting his arguments, as also reproducing very extensive extracts from other popular and literary texts in BSWM.

Significant as Fanon has been as a resource for anticolonial thinking and practice, his conceptualizations of children have been underemphasized. I have suggested possibilities of discussing the iconic scenario of ‘Look, a Negro!’ in BSWM, alongside Fanon’s citations of Lacan and aspects of Lacanian analysis to elaborate a more fully social account from these of the development of subjectivity (for both child and adult). In turn, as Macherey (2012) suggests, these invite further material specification to attend sufficiently to sexed, gendered and classed, as well as racialized, intersections.

A clear contribution made by Fanon is the disruption and suspension of the romantic humanism with which the child is typically invested, showing how this is the offspring of historical relations of exclusionary racialization (that carry, we might add, equivalently gendered, sexed and classed features). Yet rather than staying with this figure of the child as transcendent repository of a racist culture, there is also a need for a more fully transformational account of subjectivity that can provide a socially situated reading. As Hook (2012: 85) argues: ‘A pressing research agenda comes to the fore: accounting for the intertwining of these registers of racism, of explaining the combinations of racism at the levels of symbolic functioning, imaginary meanings and identifications, and the libidinal investments of embodied passions.’ Given the child’s long history as proxy for the modern humanist subject and, by exclusion, its ‘others’, s/he becomes a vital resource for such interrogations. So while critics (such as McCulloch, 1983) debate whether Fanon has resolved the societal-psychological connection, according to Hook this misses the key point that this is part of a wider methodological and disciplinary challenge. Rather, his contribution is indicative rather than exhaustive:

we do a disservice to Fanon by entrenching mutually opposed allegiances (an exclusive prioritization of either the societal or the subjective) which detract from Fanon’s seemingly ‘impossible’ task of thinking of the complexities of the conjunction of the psychopolitical seriously. Of course, we likewise do Fanon a disservice by pretending that he has summarily solved an intractable problem. (Hook, 2012: 129)

While Lacanian approaches frustrate the recuperation of psychoanalysis into a developmental psychology that would reinstate normativity and teleology, Fanon’s underdeterminations surrounding the child leave ambiguous, or (in Hage’s (2010) terms) open to vacillation, aspects of its identifications and even agencies. Together, they offer fruitful resources for a critical reading of childhood and models of subjectivity. Fanon’s destabilization and at times desubjectifications of the child not only challenge humanist and developmentalist readings of connecting child with individual, social, national and international development. They also reinvigorate discussions of the psychopolitical stakes in contemporary social theory.

Clearly, for Lacan, as for any adequate readings of Fanon, all interpellations, as ideologically structured misrecognitions, are ‘mis’ interpellations, thus making any claims to determine or claim subjectivity problematic. Yet Fanon may provide other resources too. Desmond Painter (2012) discusses ‘This is the voice of Algeria’ (in A Dying Colonialism), which highlights not only the reversals of meaning that the possession of, or even listening to, a radio held for Algerians, but also too how its hiss – that is, even its undecipherable sound when lacking clear reception – came to signify revolutionary commitment. Importantly, like the ambiguities surrounding the subject position of the child, this moment of ambiguity is what makes Fanon remain a fruitful analytic resource. Butler (2000) comments: ‘interpellation does not always operate through the name: this silence might be meant for you’ (p. 157), but here even the boundary between speech and silence is blurred.

Notwithstanding the many Fanons, and diverse contrary readings of subjectivity, and acknowledging the paradoxically closed pre-social versions that linger within his model even as he strived to configure others, it is at these moments of resignification that Fanon is at both his most politically radical and most social. Whereas Hallward (2011) interprets Fanon’s claim (on the last page of BSWM) that ‘The tragedy of the man is that he was once a child’ (p. 165) in terms of a political voluntarism arising from his radical humanism, the multiple temporalities implied by this description invite less determined and stable trajectories. This is no nostalgic celebration of childhood, or only a claim about vulnerability leading to complicity. Nor is it an instrumentalized developmental child, whose current needs, desires and aspirations are co-opted for the (national, individual or even planetary) future. This final formulation from Fanon – that encapsulates the questions explored in this paper – sets in motion an ambiguous dynamic, of uncertain directionality, between child and adult, that foregrounds both the sociopolitical and the affectively invested character of the constitution of relations. In the midst of current superspecifications and exploitation of human resources – emotional as well as physical/material – such underdeterminations represent key spaces of political possibility.