Alice
Cherki’s biography of Frantz Fanon is anything but a monotonous read. From the
descriptions of Fanon’s childhood to his death, Cherki helps us conceptualise
Fanon the personality, Fanon the human.
Other
than Cherki’s defence of Fanon in the question of violence which has been
widely used to prosecute him, I was struck by a theme that carries the book:
Fanon’s belief in the potential of the human. Fanon’s faith in the potential of
the human, reminds me of a book I have recently read, Antonio Negri and Cesare
Casarino’s In Praise of the Common. In
the preface, Casarino says that “[t]he common
is legion”, meaning that the common refers to a number of people. Put
differently, the common refers to ‘The People’ i.e. all human beings.
Now
the reason why they use the word ‘common’ is because they argue that amongst
all our differences, humankind has something in common, or rather have
somethings in common, namely: (1) the potential of thought, (2) which is
practised through language and (3) the ability to communicate with others- the
actualisation of thought in linguistic practice. Following Dante’s
philosophical anthropology, the authors argue that “the common is defined
according to two fundamental Aristotelian categories, namely, potentiality and
actuality”, what Fanon would understand as the potential of the open-door
consciousness that is inherent to all human beings and like the concept of the
common, has universal application (2008:
13).
And it
is with this insight that Fanon treated his patients at the psychiatric
hospital in Blida (HPB). In understanding that mentally ill people are human
nonetheless and as social beings, they had the potential to think, learn and
heal. Fanon introduced a form of therapy called socio-therapy which not only
sought to humanise the institution but also create an environment whereby
patients and staff were in conversation and thus “the broken thread of personal
suffering can be salvaged and expressed” (Cherki, 2006: 65). Through language
and negotiation patients in HPB were started to be seen as human, but only by
the staff, but by the patients themselves (Cherki, 2006: 68). This form of
therapy through conversation (as well as activity), again reminds me of Negri
and Casarino’s In Praise of the Common. They further argue that the language of the
common is conversation. Conversation, as the language
of the common, “brings us together as different from rather than identical to
one another” (2008: 2). In other words, conversation creates a platform for
different parties to hear, understand and respond to each other and this
process never ends. Unlike in a monologue, or even a dialogue, there is a
tendency to assimilate or reconcile differences according to a certain party
who sets a standard of what the common
should be, rather than what the common
really is. Western philosophy and its
ideas of ontology, epistemology and of what is ethical, has set itself as the
standard of the common, a standard in
which people of colour, throughout history, have had to reconcile themselves
to. And when certain individuals of the common could not, such as Fanon’s
patients in HPB, they are cast aside, excluded and treated as less than human.
It is this very understanding, that the exploitation of difference, be it
through physical or psychological violence, is endemic throughout society and
if we have any chance of re-capturing or humanity, our common, we must, through action and political commitment, heal our
society.
Reference List:
Cherki,
A. (2006). Frantz Fanon: A Portrait. Translated
by N. Benabid, Cornell: Cornell University Press.
Negri,
A and Casarino, C. (2008) In the Praise
of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics, University of
Minnesota Press: London.
