Foucault, Fanon, Intellectuals, Revolutions

By Anthony Alessandrini, Jadaliyya

My theoretical ethic is…“antistrategic”: to be respectful when a singularity revolts, intransigent as soon as power violates the universal. A simple choice, a difficult job: for one must at the same time look closely, a bit beneath history, at what cleaves it and stirs it, and keep watch, a bit behind politics, over what must unconditionally limit it. – Michel Foucault, “Useless to Revolt?”[1]

Jacques Rancière: Biopolitics or Politics?

Jacques Ranciere: Biopolitics or Politics? by TigersEye99

Fanon'sLectures in Tunis (1959)

Fanon, Society and Control

by Nicholas Mirzoeff, We are all Children of Algeria

In Algeria, Fanon had created a practice in which staff worked with patients to address their conflicts, eating and socializing with them, rather than maintaining the classic clinical distance. Drawing on the teachings of Fanon's professor, the Spanish anti-fascist François Tosquelles,  this now familiar strategy was then new, certainly in the colonial context, where colonial psychology had claimed that all Algerians were in an infantile state. As late as 1952, the Algerian School of medicine declared in its handbook for physicians: "these primitive people cannot and should not benefit from the advances of European civilization."  That is to say, all Algerians were children from the colonial point of view. The colonized "child" was a peculiar genus because it was held that s/he would never grow up, and thus had to remain in the condition of tutelage. Here, emancipation would refer both to ending colonial rule, and, in the traditional sense, to being granted adult status. For Jews, women, colonized subjects and many others, such emancipation has often "lagged behind" that of white men, creating that sense that the "time is out of joint," the spectrality of the modern.

Abahlali’s Vocal Politics of Proximity: Speaking, Suffering and Political Subjectivization

by Anna Selmeczi, October 2012

Using as its point of departure the claim that today the urban is the main site for the abandonment of superfluous people, this article explores the emancipatory politics of the South African shack-dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo. Based on a notion of political subjectivization as the appropriation of excess freedom, I argue that Abahlali disrupt the order of the ‘world-class city’ when they expose the contradiction between the democratic inscriptions of equality and the lethal segmentation of the urban order. In articulating their living conditions as the unjustified breach of the promise of ‘a better life’, the shack-dwellers prove their equality and thus emerge as political subjects. As the article argues, at the centre of this process is a political practice of speaking and listening that is driven by the imperative to reverse the distancing and delaying practices of an order that abandons them by remaining physically, experientially and cognitively proximate to the experiences of life in the shantytown.

“We are the people who don’t count” – Contesting biopolitical abandonment

by Anna Selmeczi

About a year before his lecture series “Society Must be Defended!”, in which he first elaborated the notion of biopolitics, in a talk given in Rio de Janeiro, Foucault discussed the “Birth of the Social Medicine”. As a half-way stage of the evolution of what later became public health, between the German ‘state medicine’ and the English ‘labor-force medicine’, he described a model taking shape in the 18th century French cities and referred to it as ‘urban medicine’. With view to the crucial role of circulation in creating a healthy milieu, the main aim of this model was to secure the purity of that which circulates, thus, potential sources of epidemics or endemics had to be placed outside the flaw of air and water nurturing urban life. According to Foucault (2000a), it was at this period that “piling-up refuse” was problematized as hazardous and thus places producing or containing refuse – cemeteries, ossuaries, and slaughterhouses – were relocated to the outskirts of the towns.

The Humanism Effect: Fanon, Foucault, and Ethics without Subjects

by Anthony C. Alessandrini, Foucault Studies, No 7, pp. 64-80, September 2009

This article addresses a tendency within postcolonial studies to place the work of Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon in opposition. This has obscured the real, and potentially very productive, similarities between them. The most important of these links has to do with their shared critique of the sovereign subject of humanism: for Fanon and Foucault, this critique of the traditional humanist subject provides a way of opposing what they both see as the dangerous nostalgia for a lost moment of origin. Furthermore, Fanon and Foucault both end in a moment of ethics, but it is an ethics without the sort of stable subjects assumed by humanism. I offer a consideration of some of the links that can be found in several texts by Fanon and Foucault. I then attempt to define the term I will be using to describe their shared strategy of an ethics without subjects: the ‚humanism effect.‛ I conclude by trying to suggest some of the strategic possibilities of an ethics without subjects in the postcolonial context.