The Rebel's Clinic Quotes

“was not merely the incidental expression of a pathology; it was a pathology, born of slavery and colonization.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“Existentialism, with its fundamental conviction that “existence precedes essence,” ran counter to the essentialism of Senghor’s version of Négritude, with its evocation of an eternal, immutable African spirit. (Césaire’s version was far more user-friendly to existentialists.) It proposed that we are not determined by biological or cultural destiny: human subjects create themselves by the decisions they make, as they assume the burden of their freedom.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“man. Whatever he did—take a stroll, dissect a corpse, make love, speak French—he did while being Black. It felt like a curse, or a time bomb in”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“of each group measure themselves in relation to their distance from the dominant group and despise anyone below them in the structure.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“Graças à ingenuidade e à determinação de Balvet e seus colegas, Saint-Alban escapou do destino de outros hospitais psiquiátricos durante a guerra: a chamada extermination douce, ou “extermínio suave”. Entre 40 mil e 45 mil pacientes psiquiátricos — por volta de metade de todos os da França — morreram de fome, má nutrição, frio e outros males. As condições eram tão desesperadoras que alguns pacientes comiam capim, insetos, até as próprias mãos. Nem o governo de Vichy nem os ocupantes nazistas tentaram salvá-los; os que padeciam de doenças mentais eram considerados sub-humanos, como os judeus. (O panorama dos hospícios durante a guerra na França muitas vezes foi relacionado ao univers concentrationnaire dos campos.) Ao amealhar comida, treinar os pacientes para apanhar cogumelos comestíveis nas florestas próximas e por meio de intervenções astuciosas no mercado clandestino, os médicos de Saint-Alban transformaram o que com certeza se tornaria um necrotério em um símbolo de desafio e sobrevivência.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“Para Mannoni, o protótipo do colonizador não era um conquistador como Cristóvão Colombo, mas sim um náufrago, como Robinson Crusoe, que se encontrava cercado por homens e mulheres “selvagens”. Acometido por um senso de inferioridade, ameaçado por uma ansiedade de castração, ele busca estabelecer sua superioridade por meio de um ato de projeção psíquica, retratando o colonizado como seu oposto fraco, efeminado e inferior, de modo que pudesse voltar a se sentir um homem. Ao apresentar esse argumento, Mannoni se apoiava não em Freud mas em Alfred Adler, um membro dissidente do Círculo de Viena que defendia que o principal impulso entre os europeus não é a libido, mas a necessidade de superar um complexo de inferioridade enraizado nos medos da infância de vulnerabilidade física. Essa necessidade, sugeriu ele, resultou em uma afirmação compulsiva de superioridade, e uma perigosa vontade de poder. A dominação colonial, afirmava, oferecia aos colonizadores europeus perpetuamente inseguros um tipo de terapia coletiva, um meio de exorcizar seus medos de inferioridade e castração. Nativos desregrados pagavam o preço, nos atos de “fabuloso sadismo” por meio dos quais os europeus os lembravam de seu poder total.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“Fanon compartilhava a crença de Lacan de que a doença mental não podia ser reduzida a distúrbios neurológicos no cérebro; mesmo quando suas causas subjacentes eram orgânicas, as formas que ela assumia eram moldadas pelas relações sociais e familiares dos pacientes. Ele admirava a tese de 1932 de Lacan sobre a paranoia, que defendia que como a loucura não tinha uma origem única, ela deveria ser examinada à luz da sociologia e da psicanálise, bem como da neuropsiquiatria e da medicina. Em sua tese de doutorado de 1951 sobre a ataxia de Friedreich, uma doença hereditária neurodegenerativa que costuma ser acompanhada de sintomas psiquiátricos, Fanon chamou Lacan de “lógico da loucura”. Mas essa caracterização também era sutilmente zombeteira, e insinuava que Lacan fornecera uma racionalidade para o irracional.
Fanon nunca conseguiu chegar a endossar a fantasia surrealista da loucura como — na famosa expressão de Rimbaud — o “desregramento de todos os sentidos”. A doença mental, argumentava ele, não era o limite extremo da liberdade, mas sim uma “patologia da liberdade”. Essa alienação pulverizante do eu, Fanon acreditava, apresentava um obstáculo quase intransponível às relações normais com outros. A solidão forçada dos loucos, prisioneiros de seus delírios, não era romanceada por Fanon. O fato de ele repudiar a defesa lacaniana da loucura — o fato de enfatizar a vulnerabilidade, o sofrimento e a perda de liberdade experimentada pelos pacientes psiquiátricos, em vez da natureza “visionária” de sua percepção, ou o êxtase da alucinação — é um lembrete do valor que sempre atribuiu à autodeterminação. Ter um transtorno mental era abdicar de todo o controle sobre a própria mente e, portanto, do próprio corpo e destino. Para um descendente de escravizados de uma antiga colônia açucareira, era impossível confundir a condição de desintegração mental e física com emancipação de uma ordem social opressiva.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“Balvet publicara havia pouco um artigo intitulado “La Valeur humaine de la folie” [O valor humano da loucura] na Esprit, uma revista da esquerda católica que Fanon começava a ler com atenção. Descrevendo a loucura como uma “mina extraordinária”, talvez até “um novo modo de conhecimento”, Balvet a comparava tanto à conversão mística quanto à experiência de se apaixonar. Como o êxtase religioso e a paixão romântica, argumentava ele, a loucura era “um florescer, um novo nascimento” cujo Erlebnis — termo filosófico alemão para “experiência vivida” — tinha de ser entendido a partir do interior e reconstruído fenomenologicamente. O psiquiatra que reside “externamente à loucura” é como “o crítico de arte que pode facilmente nos dizer a data de uma pintura e nos contar sobre suas vicissitudes, mas que nunca nos devolve as cores”. Se a loucura era o “ressurgimento monstruoso e perturbador” de toda a vida de um paciente, ela “deve ser sentida” — sobretudo, em seu “momento de cristalização”, quando “a neurose transforma-se em psicose”. A loucura, para Balvet, era indissociável da condição humana. “A loucura está dentro de nós”, escreveu ele, “e nos revela.”
Erlebnis se tornaria um dos conceitos centrais de Fanon. E embora ele permanecesse cético quanto à descrição um tanto romântica que Balvet fazia da loucura, partilhava de sua perspectiva de que a doença mental tem muito a nos dizer sobre as sociedades em que vem à tona, e que sem um entendimento da experiência vivida do paciente, um diagnóstico completo é impossível. Aliás, Fanon parece ter compreendido isso muito antes de sua formação psiquiátrica ter sequer começado, graças ao trabalho que vinha fazendo entre os operários norte-africanos em Lyon — homens cujos rostos lhe eram familiares de suas experiências nos tempos de guerra.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“We become ‘rich’ alongside others, we acquire multiple identities.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“The white cloth signified a refusal of the white mask, and the conqueror’s culture.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“Yet once this “dead element,” the haïk, is wedded to the resistance, it ceases to be a sign of “modesty” or women’s subordination; on the contrary, it expresses an attitude of cultural rebellion, like Négritude: “It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the Negro who creates Négritude.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“Yet once this “dead element,” the haïk, is wedded to the resistance, it ceases to be a sign of “modesty” or women’s subordination; on the contrary, it expresses an attitude of cultural rebellion,”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“While the veil was worn by many Algerian women, he acknowledged, “because tradition demanded a rigid separation of the sexes,” it was also worn “because the occupier was bent on unveiling Algeria.” It was a protection from the occupier’s aggressive attempts to possess women, to make them visible to the male European gaze.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“They and their patients “shared the ingredients of the same humanity”; the only difference was that the caregivers “were still standing.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“As it turned out, Fanon would aid the FLN inside Algeria not as a fighter, but as a doctor. But to make himself useful, he first needed to establish contact with this clandestine and highly secretive organization.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“But his experiences with the mentally ill in Algeria suggested that culture and the ability to breathe were inextricably connected—that cultural belonging, even clinging to seemingly outmoded traditions, could be a way in which the colonized body continued to draw breath, and affirm its will to live.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“Writing itself provided a means of overcoming isolation, of advancing mutual understanding: “Writing is certainly the most beautiful discovery, since it allows man to remember, to present things that have happened in order and above all to communicate with others, even when they are absent.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“If you want to go deeper into the structure of a particular country, you have to visit its psychiatric hospitals.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“The individual, Tosquelles insisted, does not exist alone; therefore, madness is never merely a “personal affair.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“that he was intrigued by “the frequency of mental illness, the tragic toll that the urban environment exacted of the black peasant.” He came to believe that fear was “the fundamental emotion guiding black personality and behavior,” even if it sometimes appeared in the “disguise that is called Negro laughter.” If Black people “unleashed physical and psychological violence on one another,” he argued, it was because they were “unable to retaliate” against their white oppressors. He described his novel Native Son, published five years earlier, as a book that offered “the psychoanalytic point of view” on race relations.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“prove his superiority over others: “It’s on the ruins of my entourage that I must build my virility.” The West Indian’s drive to overcome his inferiority complex is aimed not at the French, or even at the békés, but at his own peers of color, whom he seeks to dominate, a bleak reminder of how colonial oppression is internalized and reproduced, after the formal end of colonialism. The Adlerian themes in Mannoni—the colonizer’s fears of inferiority, the psychic pleasure of domination, colonial repression as narcissistic and spectacular exhibitionism—would later find even more powerful expression in The Wretched of the Earth. But Fanon historicized the pathologies of colonial psychology by situating their formation in the structures of racial and economic domination, rather than in parent-child relations.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“Fanon would write in Black Skin, White Masks. “In his collective unconscious, the West Indian has made all the European archetypes his own.” In their nightmares of rape and sexual aggression, Creole women, the “almost white,” invariably imagined a Senegalese or “so-called inferior.” It was nearly always “in reference to the essence of the white man” that West Indians perceived one another’s skin color, even their character.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“In a brash footnote in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon suggested that Sartre’s entire framework for understanding alienation “reveals itself to be false” when applied to Black consciousness, because for the Black person, “the White is not only the Other, but the master, whether real or imaginary.” But while Fanon resented Sartre at the time, the essay clearly left him unsettled. Whenever he wrote of Négritude, he would hear Sartre’s voice. Today, Fanon is often seen as a champion of Blackness. But in the course of his reflections on racism, Négritude turned out to be a passing phase. He would emerge as its most eloquent, and often scathing, detractor.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“When you removed the gag that was keeping these black mouths shut, what were you hoping for? That they would sing your praises?… Here are black men standing, looking at us, and I hope that you—like me—will feel the shock of being seen. For three thousand years, the white man has enjoyed the privilege of seeing without being seen … Today, these black men are looking at us, and our gaze comes back to our own eyes; in their turn, black torches light up the world and our white heads are no more than Chinese lanterns swinging in the wind.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“people, however, were marked and could not avoid being seen even if their deepest wish, as Fanon would write in Black Skin, White Masks, was “to be anonymous, to be forgotten.” Under the white gaze, they were simultaneously hypervisible (as members of a stigmatized collective) and invisible (as individuals).”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“TOWARD A BLACK EXISTENTIALISM”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“Fanon could never bring himself to endorse the surrealist fantasy of madness as—in Rimbaud’s famous expression—the “disordering of all the senses.” Mental illness, he argued, was not freedom’s extreme edge but rather a “pathology of freedom.” This pulverizing alienation from the self, Fanon believed, presented an almost insurmountable obstacle to normal relations with others. The enforced solitude of the mad, prisoners of their delirium, held no romance for Fanon. That Fanon repudiated the Lacanian defense of madness—that he emphasized the vulnerability, suffering, and loss of freedom experienced by the mentally ill, rather than the “visionary” nature of their perception, or the ecstasy of hallucination—is a reminder of the value that he always placed on self-determination.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“with Algerians on the rue Moncey.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“Algeria’s struggle for independence arose in large part in the French diaspora, among expatriates who had often identified more strongly with region, locality, tribe, or ethnicity (Arab, Kabyle, Chaoui, etc.) than with a unified Algerian nation. Once they were in France, they came to think of themselves as Algerians, and in the 1920s the idea of an independent Algeria began to gain ground in the industrial cities of the métropole.”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“The child, in his innocence, precisely embodies the hypocrisies of a republic that claims not to see race yet instills racial “expertise” in its youngest citizens. (Baldwin wrote of America’s glorified self-image, “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”)”
― Adam Shatz, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon