Yesterday, I complained about the psychoanalytic approach Fanon employed in Black Skin, White Masks, Chapter 4, The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonised. Today, I share my feelings about Chapter 5, The Lived Experience of the Black Man. But first, let’s reorient the reader to my own perspective.
I am decidedly anti-colonial and even anti-post-colonial, or at least I see this trajectory as tragic. All of this is consonant with the views expressed in my Anti-Enlightenment Project.
On one hand, I want to complain about the circuitous approach he took in Chapter 5. It was meant to be metaphorical and poetic. Whilst I feel it’s a bold move to present an areasonable approach – one that refuses the terms of Enlightenment rationality without simply inverting them – it seems that he cherry-picks his tools from the arsenal of Enlightenment thought. This applies to much of the post-colonial project broadly, though my objection there is less to any particular theoretical allegiance and more to the foundational commitments: I oppose colonialism, empire, and hegemony on grounds that precede the debate about which critical vocabulary best serves their dismantling.
Fanon’s anti-Enlightenment critique is weakened where he imports psychoanalysis too trustingly. Psychology and psychoanalysis are themselves Enlightenment byproducts: systems for rendering the human subject legible, classifiable, interpretable, and administrable. To use them against colonial Reason without first subjecting them to the same suspicion risks reproducing the very machinery under critique. The result isn’t fatal to Fanon’s charge, but it is methodologically untidy. I don’t necessarily object to using Enlightenment-derived tools after critique; I object to retaining them as though their own conceptual machinery were innocent. Psychoanalysis may be useful as metaphor, rhetoric, or historically situated vocabulary, but if it’s treated as a valid evidentiary lens without scrutiny, it smuggles Enlightenment legibility back into an anti-Enlightenment critique. That’s where Fanon’s chapter loses force for me.
Fanon is at his strongest when he shows that colonial ‘reason‘ produces the colonised subject as irrational, bodily, affective, and deficient. He rightly treats unreason not as a natural property of the colonised but as a category imposed by colonial order. My difficulty is that he then routes this insight through psychoanalysis, a method I regard as metaphorically suggestive but evidentially weak. The critique of colonial rationality survives; the psychoanalytic apparatus remains suspect.
In the end, we may both at least tacitly agree that colonialism, and the Enlightenment more generally, was not the best path. Where we part is on what should have been taken instead. Cue Robert Frost.
But the more searching question isn’t which fork we should have taken – it’s what we do with the road we’re already on. When the system itself is the problem, the question of what within it is worth retaining rarely gets answered on its merits. More often, it gets answered by inertia: by what is convenient, familiar, or already institutionally embedded. Fanon isn’t exempt from this, and neither, if we’re honest, is any thinker who inherits a tradition whilst attempting to dismantle it. The tools available are always already compromised. The most we can ask – and what distinguishes the sharper critiques from the merely passionate ones – is whether the thinker knows this, and accounts for it. Fanon sometimes does. In Chapter 5, at the moments that matter most, he doesn’t quite.
NB: I used ChatGPT for the cover image. I think it did a good job.
Philosophics 