The Wretched of the Earth

by Frantz Fanon

I want to turn now to Fanon's exploration of the psycho-affective realm, which is neither subjective nor objective, but a place of social and psychic mediation, and — if I may quote Fanon out of context—"the glowing focal point where citizen and individual develop and grow. . . ."30 It is Fanon's great contribution to our understanding of ethical judgment and political experience to insistently frame his reflections on violence, decolonization, national consciousness, and humanism in terms of the psycho-affective realm—the body, dreams, psychic inversions and displacements, phantasmatic political identifications. A psycho-affective relation or response has the semblance of universality and timelessness because it involves the emotions, the imagination or psychic life, but it is only ever mobilized into social meaning and historical effect through an embodied and embedded action, an engagement with (or resistance to) a given reality, or a performance of agency in the present tense.