on the pain of a thing that has been tossed out into the great mayhem
Richard Pithouse
Hello everyone
We’ve had an extraordinary response to the proposal, by my colleagues, that we set up a reading group on Fanon in the lead up to the conference on Fanon that we’ll be hosting in early July.
We’ve decided, given that the long weekend stretches out before us, that it would be better to start on Thursday next week (i.e. the 28th of April) and not, as we had originally planned, this week. We’ll confirm the venue early next week and let you all know where we’ll meet in good time.
When we meet we can discuss the best way to choose the readings over the next weeks. My initial thoughts were that we could start with four or five selections from Fanon’s work, moving on in chronological sequence, and then look at some of the best regarded secondary literature. But we can certainly consider other suggestions.
I was asked to select a reading to get us going and it seemed to make sense to start at the beginning, with Fanon’s first academic publication, The “North African Syndrome”. It was first published in a journal called Esprit in February 1952. At the time Fanon was a student studying psychiatry in Lyon. Later on in that year he published his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, which is often taken to be the moment in which the discipline of critical race studies was inaugurated.
The “North African
Syndrome” was later included in the collection of Fanon’s essays published in
French in 1964, three years after his death, and in English in 1967 under the title
Toward the African Revolution. Many of the passions that would animate his later work are clearly evident in this student essay.
Alice Cherki worked closely with Fanon in Algeria and in Tunisia from 1955 till 1961. Her biography of Fanon, which was first published in English in 2006, is a concise, beautiful and perceptive book which is, I think, the most elegant introduction to Fanon’s life and work.
This is what she says about The “North African Syndrome”:
This article, unlike much that was being written at the time, is not a clinical account of a specifically North African pathology. It is, rather, an extraordinary meditation on the rejection and objectification of the other, who is known by the various names of bicot, bougnole, raton, melon (all terms of contempt). Fanon exposed the French medical system’s racism and dismissal of North Africans who came into its establishments to report their pain. These patients, he argued, were their pain and incapable of functioning in a linguistic register that exacts specificity. The physician, whose confidence is precisely bolstered by this specificity, expects the patient to relate a specific symptom, but the patient’s suffering follows from his exiled condition as a “man who dies anew every day, living in a feeling of total insecurity, threatened emotionally, and isolated socially,” excluded from the agora, deprived of the right to a real existence. The North African worker, cut off from both his origins and his goals, is turned into an object, a thing that has been tossed out into the great mayhem. This text reveals how, above and beyond the linguistic barriers, the physician of the Metropolis fails to perceive the ways in which this other has been reduced to the status of an object, and how he fails, as a physician, to set aside irritation, disdain, and hostility in favour of greater openness and genuine receptivity. The essay was as shocking as it was pioneering, and the ideas it sets forth have retained an uncanny applicability to this day.
It is attached, in pdf.
Richard