Madness and the Problem of Sociogenesis

By briefly outlining Fanon's treatment of madness as a problem of sociogenesis, I hope to show how he overcomes the problem of anatomical reductionism to reveal its transformative role. I would like to suggest that Fanon first deals with the problem of madness as a result of the epidermalisation of the colonial sociogenic condition and then as a ‘problem . . . born out of the national war of liberation’ (Fanon 1961: 181). It is in the latter discussions where he details the features of the transformative process it generates. We find most of these discussions in the Wretched of the Earth and the latter psychiatry writings in his collected works, Alienation and Freedom. In the case of the former, although also discussed in these works, I mostly rely on the accounts he gives in Black Skin White Masks (BSWM). This is where he is directly concerned with the question of madness as a problem of alienation. When asserting that ‘there is no black problem’, Fanon wants to make the whites responsible for the problem of madness in colonial societies. He reveals how their own alienation in the ‘arsenal of complexes that has been developed by the colonial environment’ forces them to participate in the reproduction of a racist collective unconscious, to the extent that they themselves also develop neurotic disorders which threaten the black subject. And inversely, their acting out of this ‘psychology of colonialism’ denies the black subject the opportunity to realise his or her consciousness or selfhood.

In BSWM, commenting on cases that his colleague Octave Mannoni investigates, Fanon reveals how the white collective unconscious, dominated by the theme of terror which the image of the ‘nigger’ is associated with, causes neurotic disorders. The cases involve dream narratives where the black figure is experienced as a terrifying savage who is always baying for the blood of white people. These unconscious images of the black figure are a result of a long process of socialisation, and they are brought into consciousness in their everyday encounters with black people. From these observations we can safely conclude that Fanon also regards white racism as a form of neurological disorder, which Mannoni fails to diagnose in the Malagasy cases that he investigates, such that we can say it threatens to turn both the coloniser and the colonised into the Muselmann, in the same way as the Jew and the Nazi executioner in Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. The working out of this process consequently prohibits the black subject from entry into consciousness or selfhood or moral consciousness, which leads to a neurotic disorder. Upon discovering that there is already a meaning awaiting him or her out there, the black subject feels crushed into objecthood. He or she is forced to abandon their being and make ‘attempts at a hallucinatory whiteness’ which they are bound to never achieve. They are confronted by a dilemma which threatens their existence since they find themselves unable to offer any kind of ontological resistance against whiteness.

Fanon provides a detailed account of this condition of alienation in the chapter, ‘The Fact of Blackness’. Here he characterises it as a phenomenological or ontological problem which hinders the generativity of the body and the self. Since his own metaphysics or social symbols are found to be in conflict with those of Western civilisation, he is forced to ignore the value or meaning they produce or the opportunity to harness their transformative potential. Fanon, for different reasons, goes to the extent of saying they are completely ‘wiped out’, such that the black subject fails to make any ontological claims founded on them. In an autobiographical fashion, he describes how any claims that the black subject makes to consciousness or morality are challenged in the real world where he or she is subjected to the white gaze. Through the notion of sociogenesis, he describes how this experience of alienation leads to a process of epidermalisation, which generates a psychopathology.

Fanon insists that, in order to make an authentic appearance in the world, one requires an unhindered development of their bodily schema in such a way that they must experience their ‘consciousness of the body’ as ‘a negating activity’ (Fanon 1967: 83). This is through a process that involves a ‘slow composition’ of the ‘self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world . . . a definitive structuring of the self and of the world – definitive because it creates a real dialectic between . . . the body and the world’ (Fanon 1967: 83). What Fanon is presenting in these formulations is a phenomenological characterisation of the relation between the body, the self, and the world which he extends from Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1962). We also find this characterisation in his Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952 (Merleau-Ponty 2010). It allows Fanon to declare that ‘below the corporeal schema I had sketched the historico-racial schema’ (Fanon, 1967: 84). The latter is what he describes as the sociogenic condition or elements of the white collective unconscious which causes a ‘corporeal malediction’ in the black subject or a failure ‘to construct a physiological self, to balance space, to localise sensations’ through a kinesthetic process (ibid.: 84). Accomplishing this process would mean one is able to successfully constitute an image of his or her body in relation to the self and social historical reality. In what I have referred to as his conception of madness as a problem born out of the war of national liberation, this is where the shift from the unconscious to consciousness is generated as a transformative process. Realising that he or she is sealed into thingness by the white gaze, the colonised subject harnesses his or her neurotic status into a historical force by demanding a conflict.

However, this neurosis is not necessarily like the ‘abandonment-neurosis’ in the Oedipus complex, which Fanon believes can be accounted for at the psychoanalytic level. I will not go into detail about Fanon's position on this question at this stage because it will feature in my analysis of the parallels between him and Lacan in the last part of this discussion. But I want to belabour the point that, unlike Lacan, Fanon does not consider the neurosis of the black subject to be a result of the Oedipus complex. Equally he does not regard the entry into consciousness or the realisation of selfhood that was mentioned above as the demand for an unhindered freedom of the self-reflective ‘I’ or an essence of the Will. His conception of consciousness and selfhood does not go beyond reality, since it is in them that conflict must arise. There must be a realisation that the historico-racial schema or the organising principles of the colonial sociogenesis binds the black subject with all sorts of prohibitions. In this process, the black subject realises that the white gaze denies his or her identity and the ‘imago of the Negro’ imposed on him by the racial schema ‘is resistant at least to being raised to the conscious level’ (Fanon 1967: 148). The image of the Negro which is created by the unconscious racial schema refuses to vanish from consciousness. It throws the black subject into ‘combat with his own image’ and affects his or her ability to achieve ‘moral consciousness’ (Fanon 1967: 150). In this ambiguous status any attempt to internalise leads to an encounter with objecthood and any attempt to externalise is met with resistance by the other. Yet Fanon identifies it as the most important phase in the constitution of a radical political act. He or she must not make any effort to be normal to the other who denies them recognition or the right to realise a scientific objectivity. Instead, they must cease to be normal, and must remain in their state of alienation or neurosis in order to challenge the white collective unconscious and the delusions it conjures.

Another situation which Fanon says produces madness is when the colonised subject agrees to be set free by the coloniser without actually demanding a conflict. Although I may not delve into the details of this declaration, I am arguing that this analogy is very applicable to postcolonial (and settler colonial) societies in Africa where independence largely involved negotiations with the coloniser and the adoption of liberal democratic constitutional systems, which ensures the reproduction of the colonial collective unconscious in postcolonial time. Suffice it to say that Fanon was in this case referring to Caribbean societies after the banning of slavery, not necessarily African societies. For him, the values which founded these societies have not been created by struggle. To put it in his own words, they were ‘not born of the systolic tide of his blood, danced in a huge whirlwind around him’ (Fanon 1967: 171). On the other hand, he believed that, due to colonialism, the African Negro was able to remain actional and maintain the ‘alterity of rupture, of conflict, of battle’ (Fanon 1967: 173). The African Negro is aware that in order to attain the universal, self-consciousness requires the threat of death. Such an experience is transformative because it allows one to attain self-consciousness through their own negating activity.

As I stated above, since Fanon largely reserves this analysis for Caribbean societies or the Antillean Negro whom he does not necessarily regard as black such that he does not demand conflict but recognition, in the following discussion I will turn to his analysis of the problem of madness in African colonial societies in his later political and psychiatry writings. This is where he also considers madness as an effect of the war of national liberation and focuses on how the imposition of the image of the Negro gives rise to conflict. Apart from the focus on questions about method and analysis, I want to examine how he describes the process through which madness transforms into a historical force. Following insights from his ventures into the areas of phenomenology and psychoanalysis, this discussion accounts for how he finds the closest model to Nietzsche's Dionysiac madness, which registers as a ‘demand for ugliness’ (Nietzsche 1999: 7). And if we are to say madness reveals an artistic experience of life or an aesthetic phenomenon, as Nietzsche does with tragedy, then we must treat it as a synthesis or simultaneous transformation of all the elements of the human structure which takes place in reality or the phenomenal world. To account for this process, he evokes the notion of temporal phenomena and the Lacanian notion of the complex. Reading with and against some scholars who have dealt with these questions, the discussion begins with an analysis of how he overcomes the problem of anatomical and psychiatric reductionism in the dominant psychological and physiological interpretations of madness by characterizing it as a problem of language, phenomenology, and time. By working with his notion of temporal phenomena, we will be able to see how he also cautions us against treating his characterisation of madness as a problem of language and phenomenology as an affirmation of these methods.

An Outline of the Connectedness between the Logical Stages of the Process of Madness and the Political Economy of Revolution

In what follows, I examine how Fanon counters the biological evolutionist and psychological evolutionist conceptions of madness in the areas of ethnopsychiatry and psychology through his conception of madness as a generative process which involves the simultaneous transformation of neurological, psychiatric, and cultural disorders into temporal phenomena. I believe this will help us understand his conception of the causal relation between the three clinical structures of madness or his psychoanalytical and phenomenological interpretation of the ‘structure of the complex’ (Fanon 1967: 3). Moreover, this approach will help us reveal how Fanon overcomes the humanist and empiricist assumptions which underpin the fields of psychology and ethnopsychiatry. I argue that his aim is to undermine the tendency within these fields to identify the elements of the structure of madness or the structure of the human as isolable. This notion of isolation is heavily embedded in the biological evolutionist conception of madness, which these fields related to the African natives. That is, both psychology and ethnopsychiatry regarded the African native as defined by the permanent characteristics of his or her biology, and equally, by the condition of madness as a natural essence which manifests through organic unity or psychological unity. They assigned organic totality to the African subject and psychological totality to the Western subject. In the case of the former, they regarded the stages of madness as continuities or sequences of biological phases.

As noted by Khalfa (2018: 196) in the comments to the psychiatric writing, psychology and ethnopsychiatry supported the ‘naturalization of mental illness along racial lines’ by regarding it as madness because of the ‘fact’ that the African is constituted as a biological unity whose pathology can be comprehended at the physiological level instead of the psychic and cultural/historical levels. They maintained that there is no definitive dissolution or alteration of the biological unity of the African native which can lead to the generativity of the psychic stage – consciousness and selfhood. So, I want to outline how he shifts to the psychoanalytic notion of the complex to register his challenge of these unitary conceptions of madness. For Fanon, the psychoanalytic interpretation of the structure of the complex reveals that neurological disorders have psychiatric consequences. This is in the same way that the sociogenic condition also affects the corporeal schema as described above in our analysis of the link between culture and anti-colonialism. He insists that we must abandon the unitary or ‘anatomo-clinical’ conceptions in favour of what he refers to as the proof of the ‘organo-clinical gap’ which is revealed by the structure of the complex (Fanon [1951] 2018:215). This organo-clinical gap allows for ‘the temporal integration of phenomena’ and relation, transformation, dissolution, or alteration of all the elements of the human structure. But the colonial ethnopsychiatrists and psychologists who regarded the African native as a biological unity could not acknowledge the consequences of the failure of this process because they thought of madness ‘in terms of organs and focal lesions when’ they ought to have thought of it ‘in terms of functions and disintegrations’ (Fanon [1951] 2018: 215).

This spatial and temporal conception of the process of madness enabled Fanon to consider the role of the colonial sociogenic condition in the failure of transference or the engendering of a relation between the elements of the structure of the colonised subject. And most importantly, he used it to contest the idea of confession in the area of medical jurisprudence and in his analysis of the sociology of perception and imagination in Muslim, women which I briefly consider in this discussion. The medical jurisprudence of the Algiers school regarded criminality and lying as fundamental to the genetic disposition of the African native. It maintained that the African native failed to take responsibility for an act committed due to his or her inert racial incapacity. And to challenge these claims Fanon offers a political, sociological, and philosophical analysis of criminality which enables him to present it as a performance of struggle. He maintains that, like madness and anti-colonialism, criminality is a fundamental problem of alienation and depersonalisation. Hence it must be submitted to a process of phenomenological analysis since it raises questions about the ontological status of the colonised body under a system of domination. But the medical jurisprudence of colonial ethnopsychiatrists prevented them from understanding this complexity because they regarded criminality and lying as proof of the phylogenetic weakness of the colonised subject.

To use Jean Baudrillard (1993: 152), these are some of the aspects of medical jurisprudence which are founded on the pseudo-scientific rationality of colonial modernity which ‘produces the distinction of the living and the non-living on which biology is based’. To overcome these problems, Fanon shifts to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and Lacan's psychoanalytic theory. This is where he treats madness and criminality, or the failure of the imagination in Muslim women, as a fundamental problem of sociology, history, or culture. This shift is wrongly characterised by postcolonial theorists like Derek Hook (2020), Lewis Gordon (2015), and Sylvia Wynter (2000) as an indication of how Fanon's psychoanalytic and phenomenological concerns were intended to enlarge ‘our ethico-political sensibilities’ in postcolonial time (Hook 2020: 3). They all pursue this argument because it fits into the postcolonial narrative of national liberation. More than anything, Fanon does not make this shift in order to affirm a metaphysical conception of madness and criminality. Instead, as he states in his analysis of the conducts of confession, this is to highlight how the colonised subject cannot express himself as a ‘coherent man’ or produce meaning through the colonial register. I have already indicated how his notion of sociogenesis undermines any form of ontological reductionism in our analysis of his interpretation of the link between culture and anti-colonialism. When outlining this position in relation to the status of confession, he maintains that the African native is unable to assume responsibility for his act because he does not feel bound by the social contract which founds the colonial order. That is, the ontological system of the colonial order prohibits him from making ‘any subjective assent to the sanction, any embracing of the sentence or even any guilt’ (Fanon [1955] 2018: 411).

Again, my argument is that the philosophical considerations that Fanon gives on these conducts of confession do not reproduce the humanist and transcendental paradigms of Sartre's existentialism. Relating how Sartre's protagonist, Hugo, in the play Les Mains Sales, accepts responsibility for his actions, he maintains that it raises the problem of internality for the European man. That is, since Sartre's existentialism is premised on the humanist idea of the subject as a constitutively ‘free’ self, Hugo is regarded as the author of his criminal act, and he can assume the responsibility for it and discover its truth. Furthermore, he can express himself as a ‘coherent man’ because he is given manumission or a head-start by the existing legal regime or dominant power which binds the social group he belongs to. He is not alienated from his being and social historical reality in the same way as the colonised subject, since he is a party to the social contract and collective values which bind his social group. And he can give his life meaning and escape the absurdity of his crime in order to be reinstated or reintegrated into the social group, where he can claim his rights as either a citizen subject or a working-class subject.

The colonised subject, on the other hand, is not given the opportunity to speak to the ‘real self’ or establish the internal coherence of their criminal act in the same way as Hugo. To reach this conclusion one must consider how the colonial order forecloses any relation of encounter between the political demands of the coloniser and the colonised. It is for these reasons that the criminal act of the colonised subject should be given a social historical definition which marks it as a form of resistance or radical refusal. That is, since it cannot be considered within the ontological system of colonial laws and forms of representation, one must investigate how it presupposes the dialectical foundation of concrete social historical reality and experience. Take the example of the Azanian People's Liberation Army (APLA) combatants who were denied amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in ‘post-apartheid’ South Africa. The TRC and its amnesty committee could not classify their charges as political acts or criminal acts. What the committee regarded as acts of murder, robbery, or theft were military operations which were sanctioned by APLA commanders. Hence I argue that, for Fanon, criminality and madness in the colonial context are forms of struggle which register the political demands of the colonised subject.

From these observations, we can say that there is an ambiguity which appears for the colonised subject whenever it is summoned to assume responsibility for or give meaning to its action. As indicated above, Fanon also raises this problem of ontological inconsistence in relation to the failure of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) in Muslim women. As in the analysis of the conducts of confession, he focuses on the failures of these tests from a phenomenological perspective. They were used by the Algiers school to make diagnoses on the alterations of the personality of the colonised subject. In the same way that they regarded criminality as a revelation of phylogenetic weakness, they also identified these alterations as the manifestation of a certain ‘genetic constitution’ (Fanon and Geromini [1956] 2018: 431). Just like the conducts of confession, for this test to be successful the patient must link their identity with specific ‘perceptive panoramas’ which ensure the reconfiguration of personality and ‘permit the emergence, at the level of interpretation, of ambiguous meanings’ (ibid. 1956: 427). In these tests the patients were required to interpret cards which represented different ‘social situations’ in order to develop a narrative structure. And Fanon explains how this process is supposed to ‘arouse the involvement of the ego’ or ‘stimulate literary creativity’ (ibid. 1956: 431). But the social reality they represented was alien to the Muslim women. Like the colonial order, they represented a ‘scene elaborated by westerners and for westerners’ (ibid. 1956:430). That is, the cultural patterns that the cards revealed could not engender the dialectical movement of the ego or the constitution of the corporeal schema of the Muslim woman. Instead, they evoked a hostile rejection or resistance because they were not homogenous to her ‘psycho affective forces’ (Fanon and Geromini [1956] 2018: 432). Fanon indicates that the only card which stimulated the creative and performative capacities or developed the imagination of the Muslim woman was the white card, which did not represent a predetermined social historical reality or cultural values. The card revealed the spatio-temporal overdetermination of aesthetic value in ways that justify the process of invention that I suggested above through Marriot (2011). In this case, the patient is given the opportunity to participate in a transformative process where the future is not predetermined.

Using examples of the cases that Fanon analyses in the psychiatric writings, I have demonstrated some of the ways through which he avoids the conception of madness as an effect of the abstraction of the psyche. Such measures regard psychology or psychiatry as a science of the psyche which is based on the infinite singularity of personality or the individual. In other words, they support a one-dimensional approach to the analysis of the process of madness which is based on psychological evolutionism. And its proponents in the Algiers school that Fanon challenges forget that there can be no science of the psyche, because a science entails the analysis of the transformation of social historical reality. That is, madness cannot be regarded as a fundamental aspect of human nature since it is generated by the failure of the subject to establish a relation with the environment. And in the case of the colonised subject, it is primarily caused by the absence of its frames of reference within the colonial register. Hence, Fanon treats madness as determined by social, historical, and cultural factors. Now, looking at his relationship with Lacan, I want to examine how he regards the organic, the psychiatric, and historical stages of madness as constitutive of pathological features which affect the movement and transformation into the next stage. This will also help us outline the model of causality that Fanon supports with his proto-structuralist notion of dissolutions and temporal transformations. That said, the argument that I want to make is that these stages cannot be described as purely biological phases or purely psychic phases, and they do not have underlying causes but are relational. As Khalfa (2018) notes, the analysis of this process of transformation provided Fanon with an opportunity to examine the factors which are responsible for ‘the progressive destruction of colonial structures’ from a spatial and temporal perspective. These observations will also help me highlight where I believe Fanon differs with Lacan on the theory of the ego or the theory of the subject. This is something hinted by Khalfa in his comments to the psychiatric writing, although he does not necessarily provide the details of the argument in the same way as he does in his analysis of how Fanon's challenge against the dominance of biological evolutionism in psychiatry owes greatly to Lacan's structuralist turn.

Most of the problems I raise in this part of the discussion have already been dealt with above in one way or another. So, any repetition that the reader may encounter is meant for emphasis and clarity. We have seen how Fanon considers the body schema as an important factor in the projects of action and the creative processes undertaken in the anti-colonial struggle. Fanon wants us to understand that the process of disintegration, dissolution, or alterations that the body undergoes should also be extrapolated to the other elements of the human structure – the psychic and historical structures. Hence, he shifts to Lacan's structure of the complex to show how the structure of madness cannot be analysed as a totality of isolable elements. Here he reveals that it should be regarded as constituted by elements and functions which form a metaphysical enigma, which highlights the intersection and connectedness of spatial properties and temporal properties. In other words, he abandons the organic process in terms of spatial localisation and the psychiatric process in terms of the excessive freedom of the ego. And it is in the case of the latter where I argue that he mostly parts ways with Lacan. We see that, although he owes a lot to Lacan's theory of language, unlike him, Fanon chooses the symbolic process because it allows him to identify madness as a result of the subject's failure to correspond with a situation or social historical reality. This focus on the failure of the symbolic or the vertiginous process for the colonised subject will enable us to understand how the pathological distortions of the body, the psyche, and culture in the process of madness manifest as forms of struggle which address political demands.

An Assessment of the Parallels between Fanon's and Lacan's Psychoanalytic Theory

I have indicated that the failure of the colonised body to correspond with the colonial sociogenic condition forces the psyche and the body to develop defensive mechanisms. And now I want to examine how Fanon uses psychoanalytic theory to argue that that this process might take the form of muscular contractions or organic disorders and psychosomatic disorders which are linked to the process of anticolonialism. Moreover, I have indicated that Fanon's analysis of the conduct of confession and the TAT process in Muslim women reveals how he regards madness as a pathology of freedom due to the fact that colonial history did not provide the determinate social historical circumstances or the language and phenomenology which could lead to the dissolution or alteration of the psyche of the colonised subject. This condition of alienation, which is caused by the absence of a frame of reference within the colonial order, generates a pathology which runs through all the stages of the human structure within the colonial context. Hence Fanon insists that the appearance of madness as a form of organic disorder in the colonial context is a result of the failure of the dissolution or transformation of the body. If successful, this dissolution or transformation should automatically lead to the next stage or generation of the psyche and the capacity for invention or creation.

I have indicated how this capacity for meaning making or the formation of the imagination and fiction as epiphenomenal entities is undermined in the TAT process, and my argument is that this is what provokes Fanon to adopt an anti-humanist and anti-essentialist stance to the problems of madness and anti-colonialism or culture and anti-colonialism. Even to prioritise the self as the lone figure responsible for this process, as Marriot (2011) does with his existential phenomenological notion of invention, is what Fanon tries to undermine through his responses to Sartre which I detailed above. He does not necessarily focus on a specific element in isolation as does Lacan, who believes that madness is primarily caused by the subject's attempts to overcome everything which hinders or forecloses the fulfilment of the ego. Rather, he chooses to focus on the relation between them and the functions they produce in their integration as temporal phenomena. This explains why he insists that the failure of the transformation or translation of each element to the next stage ‘opens the way to phantasms of bodily fragmentation or the crumbling of the ego’ (Fanon [1959] 2018: 497–8 and 502–503). To contradict Khalfa (2017: 431) in this regard, I argue that the alteration of these elements of the human structure within the colonial context presents both the body and the psyche as ‘projects of action’ against the world, rather than as ‘fragments of objects within the world’ or models of affirmation, as those concerned with the status of the moralist postcolonial condition suggest.

In instances where Fanon locates madness in the psyche, he maintains that the failure of its dissolution, just like that of the body, would mean that the colonised subject remains embedded in its own pathological images and fiction. So, he does not necessarily prioritise the transformation of the psychic dimension, as is sometimes suggested in Lacan's cogito, which is often overshadowed by Merleau-Ponty's and Descartes's phenomenology and notion of the vertigo of separation. That is, unlike Lacan, Fanon maintains that madness must not be regarded as a process which primarily involves the mechanical generativity of the psyche throughout all the clinical structures or stages of madness. Thus, for Fanon, psychiatric pathology is a result of the colonised subject's failure to establish a link with its frames of reference rather than a manifestation of an excessive freedom which is founded on the infinite generativity of the ego. It results from the subject's enclosure in its own fictions which cannot correspond with what is going on out there in the world, such that we can say madness is an effect of the failure of representation or the failure to shift to a mythical or figured conception of reality which is represented in one's cultural milieu. Fanon's diagnoses of madness and colonialism as problems of language is founded on this assumption of the presence of a phenomenological system which prevents the vertiginous relation of all the three clinical structures, such that we can say his shift to phenomenology, language, and psychoanalysis is not necessarily meant to identify madness as an effect of the transcendental and topographical alterations or transformations of the ego but the failure thereof. But Lacan's theory of the ego, on the other hand, regards these images and fictions as forms of self-representation or knowledge which must get access to the horizon of meaning. He takes forward this argument in his analysis of the hysteric structure, where he identifies madness as a form of excessive freedom rather than a pathology of freedom. And it is mainly this conception of the alterations of personality which sets Fanon apart from Lacan – especially on the theory of the ego.

Perhaps I should indicate that this is not to suggest that Lacan's cogito is directly extrapolated from Descartes, who declares its emergence as an abstract entity which leads to the complete disappearance or elimination of the body from the process of madness. In other words, I am not suggesting that Lacan fails to overcome these conceptions of the cogito as a self-possessive or self-sufficient identity and sovereignty which gains charge through all the stages of madness. In his Book XI (Lacan [1978] 2005), he overcomes these limitations of Descartes's principle of certainty by turning to physics, which helps him to explain the conditions and characteristics of the psyche as determined by a principle of uncertainty or a ‘conjectural science’ of all the elements of the human structure. That is, he believes that, as a manifestation of the libido economy or the drive, the psychic formation represents a conceptual anomaly which cannot be isolated or structurally ascertained in relation to both the biological and the symbolic. In other words, it is not distinct from the other elements of the human structure. Its position and momentum are impossible to determine, because it is always traversing the distance between the biological and the metaphysical elements which underly its formation or within which it is constituted, such that we can say there is no precise form of measurement for this transition into the psychic stage in modern scientific knowledge.

In his materialist turn, like Fanon, Lacan maintains that it is the transformation of the body or its alteration by an external force which leads to the emergence of the psyche as a relational mode of existence. And for this process to be successful, both the body and the psyche must not face any foreclosure. But unlike in Lacan's theory of the subject, Fanon does not use this approach to prove how the anti-colonial struggle registers as a demand for the affirmation of the psyche. These are some of the interpretations of the parallels between Fanon and Lacan in Peter Hudson's (2013) description of the return of the repressed ‘colonial unconscious’ in postcolonial time or national liberation time as a specific mode through which colonialism reproduces itself through the principles and practices of liberal democratic constitutionalism. Hudson also argues that this repressed unconscious bears the same ontological consequences for the white subject and the black subject. This is in the sense that they are both vertically related to it and horizontally related to each other as ‘empty’ identities through a process of differential relation. In the horizontal instance, since the colonial symbolic or white master signifier fails to produce any structuring relation for both, they create ‘the conditions of possibility and the conditions of impossibility of each other’ (Hudson 2013: 266). Indeed, this method of encounter and notion of differential relations helps us challenge the ontological claims of the white subject as a self-reflective subject or human par excellence.

In order to show where I part ways with Hudson, let me briefly examine the foundations of his assertion that the colonial relation or signifying dyad institutes itself as an asymmetrical and topographical interdependence where both the white subject and the black subject rely on whiteness as a master signifier. As I stated in the first section, I argue here that his characterisation of Fanon's concerns with the ontological status of the black subject is indeed suitable to the analysis of the problem of alienation in Black Skin, White Masks, but it cannot be translated to the analysis of his later psychiatric and political works where he examines how madness alienation induces violence. I have already demonstrated how in BSWM Fanon accounts for ways in which the ‘field of action’ of the colonised subject is limited by the failure of the body schema and how it is constituted under ‘the function of desire’ as a ‘want-to-be’ by the white signifier – to use Lacan ([1978] 2005: 29). In the case of the failure of the body schema, it is not so much a result of the failure to establish a link with one's own cultural milieu, as we see in the psychiatric writings from his time at the Blida-Joinvile psychiatry hospital. Rather, it is a result of the colonised body's paralysis due to the internalisation or epidermalisation of the coloniser's racist gestures or the ‘postulates’ and ‘series of propositions’ produced by colonial history. This explains his concerns with his personal identity as someone who identified himself as white and French. As noted above, having successfully assimilated the myths of the white collective unconscious, he maintains that, unlike the African Negro, the Antillean Negro identifies ‘with the civilising power’ and makes ‘the nigger the scapegoat of his moral life’ (Fanon 1967: 150). In other words, in these psychiatric wirings, Fanon does not focus on ontology as primarily a problem of the internalisation or epidermalisation of the coloniser's racist gesture. From his time at the Blida-Joinville psychiatry hospital he does not treat ontology as a problem of the white master signifier but as a question of the failure to establish a link with or to rely on the innovatory qualities of one's own culture and history. In other words, it becomes a question of the subject of illusion and its aspiration to establish a link with its own culture and history through a process of struggle.

Again, I want to acknowledge that, even when read from the perspective of cultural performance, this analysis supports the example of the TAT cards given above in relation to the European woman for whom a homogeneity existed between her and the world presented by the cards such that she could develop a narrative structure and produce psychoanalytic value through interpretation. But, on the other hand, we saw that there is no possibility of assent or identity for the Muslim woman since she could not identify with the elements on the cards. In other words, the Muslim woman does not internalise the structures of the colonial order like the European woman. And what I'm arguing against Hudson in this instance is that, although alienated by colonial history, the colonised subject does not regard whiteness as a fetish, Big Other, or a constitutive symbolic order from which it can expect confirmation or affirmation. This topographical notion of the colonial matrix is founded on the extension of Ferdinund de Saussure's (1966) structural linguistics model which heavily underpins Lacan's structuralist turn.

Moreover, it reveals the consequences of Hudson's adaptation of the conception of the relation between the subject and the master signifier which is founded on Lacan's analysis of the role of speech and desire in his interpretation of the hysteric structure. First, it is important to reflect on Hudson's interpretation of this relation not only for the purpose of criticism but for our understanding of the role of liberal democratic constitutionalism in the return of the ‘colonial unconscious’ in the consciousness of white subjects in post-apartheid South Africa. Second, it will help us understand how Lacan's theory of the ego runs the risk of turning madness as the self-sufficiency or self-consciousness of the subject into a possible mode of existence. Third, this can help us establish the similarities and differences between Fanon's and Lacan's conception of the process of madness, especially how they conceptualise the causal relation between the real, imaginary, and symbolic forms of domination or organic disorders, psychiatric disorders, and cultural convulsions that I discussed above. That said, I want to emphasise that, although Lacan does not directly reproduce the features of de Saussure's logic of langue and parole, which suggests that speech bears the capacity for affirmation, he still believes that speech exists as a signified which represents the metaphoric dispersal of the repressed meaning of the signifier. And the reproduction of the colonial symbolic order through the principles of liberal democracy or the return of the racist colonial unconscious in the consciousness of white subjects is the best example of this process of signification and performance of power.

For Lacan, speech remains an expression of truth, knowledge, reason, and science, but he also considers it a logic which is refused, foreclosed, rejected and not affirmed. Whilst I don't agree with the first characterisation, he shares the same position with Fanon on the second. That is, they both believe that madness is an effect of the failure of an affirmation within the imaginary and symbolic registers. And indeed, this interpretation helps us consider the transformative role of speech within the real register where it manifests as violent gestures in the form of voice, sound, or screams which can produce the epiphenomenal functions of language. So, if we are to consider it as an expression of madness, this is how it relates to the struggles and political demands of the colonised subject. But for the white subject, it reveals how the subject can be overcome by a narcistic overvaluation of the ego in terms of the first characterisation.¹ In other words, the white subject or the coloniser does not regard speech or madness as a pathology of freedom, according to Fanon, but as a form of excessive freedom according to Lacan's cogito. For Lacan, in the structure of the hysteric, this status of speech is represented by how the hysteric only listens to the ‘internal echoes’ of their own voice or the repressed I think because of the failure of transference or as a gesture of resistance (Lacan 1993: 162). That is, the meaning held by the hysteric is turned into an ‘obsessional neurosis’ which is expressed in the form of speech through displacement, slips, actions, and symptoms as a resistance against the dominant meaning sustained by the master signifier but not necessarily against the master signifier itself. He refers to this meaning as an imaginary allusion which is sustained by the subject's ambiguous relation to both the real and the symbolic.

The analyst must bring the constitutive value of these verbal expressions to the level of language and meaning or the symbolic as demanded by the analysand in his or her address. These are some of the ways through which the white subject, unlike the black subject, corresponds with the organising sociogenic principles of colonialism. But on the side of resistance, which he shares with Fanon, he maintains that the hysteric is brought into relation with an external force (qua the master signifier) which it identifies as ‘an unexpected and enigmatic monster’ (Lacan 1993:169) which must be confronted and embarrassed. Hence, in analysis the analysand makes all efforts to resist transference into the symbolic order meaning or full meaning of the analyst due to the fear of annihilation. However, when treated through the lenses of the theory of the ego, even this refusal and failure of transference or exchange can be regarded as a result of the hysteric's need to see his or her own sign or meaning as the dominant one in the symbolic order or the sphere of power occupied by the analyst. But he or she realises that the analyst as the master signifier or ‘Big Other’ institutes a law which forecloses the possibility of realising this objective.

That said, unlike Fanon, who relies on the incapacity of the colonised subject to produce the Oedipus complex due to its radical refusal of the paternal imago represented by the colonial symbolic order, Lacan's hysteric also wants to usurp the place of power that the ‘master signifier’ occupies by waiting for the latter's death through suicide – not murder – because it regards it as the ‘ultimate field, the field . . . of fulfilment’ (see Lacan [1978] 2005: 204). That is, ‘the hysteric's desire . . . is to sustain the desire of the Father’ or to maintain an attachment to the Oedipus complex (ibid.: 38). It is, however, a desire which is always left unsatisfied and unrealised in the event of the failure of cure or the failure of the master signifier to transform itself from full meaning to empty meaning. In this sense, Lacan's hysteric behaves like the racist settler coloniser/white subject who does not demand the destruction of the colonial capitalist social symbolic order. This is what he suggests in his notion of the emptying of the meaning of the master signifier which, as Fink indicates, ensures that if the entry into the symbolic or cure is to be successful, the analyst must act ‘the part of a blank screen’ and must take all the projections of the analysand as registers of meaning which must be translated into fantasy or desire (Fink 1999:114).²

In instances where analysis or transference is successful, as in the case of the white subject and the colonial symbolic order or sociogenic condition which is transformed into a structure of coloniality in postcolonial time through a liberal democratic constitutional ontology, the hysteric eroticises the knowledge it receives from the master signifier as some form of affirmation. Hence, I argue that Lacan's hysteric subject also identifies itself in relation to the meaning of the master signifier, although it sees it as a nothingness, a pure lack and a void which albeit cannot provide it with affirmation or full satisfaction, yet does not abandon it as its fantasy or fetish. And it is this failure of the affirmation or satisfaction of the ego or the psyche which creates desire or generates the death drive. But this failure only proves that the meaning of the master signifier does not provide it with adequate support for plenitude, although it acts as a condition for its aspirations. Hence, I maintain that the economy of the death drive cannot allow us to consider the conditions for revolutionary violence or rupture, because it is again the recognition by the master signifier which functions as the cause of desire³ or movement and transformation, not the failure or disavowal thereof, which is suggested by Fanon. Equally, the relation between the white subject and the black subject does not only feature as a horizontal ‘differential antagonism’ between two identities. Instead, as he rightly notes, it primarily features the white subject in a vertical ‘differential closure (or suture)’ by the colonial unconscious or the colonial symbolic order as indicated in this aspect of the relation between the hysteric subject and the master signifier or the analysand and the analyst.

Conclusion

Perhaps I should state that the issues raised in these discussions go beyond the scope of this article. Some of them are taken up further in my forthcoming book, The Logic of Democracy and the Politics of Death, where I use Fanon's work to examine how the conception of death as a transformative historical force can help us consider the possibility of the conditions for struggle in the colonial context. I also plan on taking them further in my continuing work on the debate about method and analysis in Fanon's work. Again, I think it is important to mention that the themes explored here are mostly owed to many scholars who have looked at the implications of Fanon's analysis of the dialectics between culture and anti-colonialism, the dialectics between psychopathology and anti-colonialism, and the dialectics between culture and psychopathology. It is also important to note that, although Fanon praises Lacan's notion of the complex, he works hard to avoid relating it as a topology which is anchored by an artifice or the signifier. As I have shown, he was aware of how the Oedipus complex – even when structured as a lack – orientates struggle towards a politico-philosophical strategy which undermines the conditions for the possibility of rupture in the colonial context.