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.