In
the fourteenth episode of the Podcast for Social Research, Anjuli, Tony, and
Ajay talk through the life, work, and legacy of Frantz Fanon, the Martiniquean
psychiatrist and philosopher of decolonization who was also a veteran of World
War II and an adherent of the Algerian revolution. This conversation takes up
major texts in Fanon’s oeuvre (Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the
Earth) as well as profound theoretical controversies that radiate from
them—idiocy, the literary dimensions of Fanon’s work, his strangeness of form
and methodology, the psychological inflections of his writing, the political
structure of states and colonies, the best footnote in all of twentieth-century
philosophy, and particularly the nature and meaning of violence as praxis,
“perfect mediation,” symbol, and atmosphere—violence as reason to despair—and
as reason not to.
