The Psycho-Politics of Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault: A Critical Dialogue

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Fanon has primarily been read as a theorist of violence, colonialism, and race. I intend to use Fanon's newly-available psychiatric writings to show he is also a theorist of psycho-politics. Fanon's psycho-politics is strikingly similar to the much better-known psycho-politics of Foucault. However, in spite of their overlapping intellectual contexts, Foucault never mentions Fanon's work, and was virtually silent on colonialism. I aim to force Foucault out of these conspicuous silences, bringing his psycho-politics into a historically-informed, critical dialogue with Fanon's. We are living through a "mental health crisis". One of the primary responses has been to "destigmatise" mental illness, framing psychiatric disorders as the psychic analogues of physical illnesses. Whilst countering discrimination, this response fails to challenge psychiatry's biomedical model of mental illness as a neurological pathology located within the sufferer. This model individualises and depoliticises mental illness, obscuring its embeddedness within oppressive social structures, as well as presuming the benevolence of mental healthcare. The politics of mental health urgently demands philosophical analysis, critique, and the articulation of emancipatory visions of care and recovery. Political theory, however, has remained remarkably quiet about mental health. This reflects the discipline's historical neglect of disability, which has only recently begun to be remedied. Researching past philosophical critiques of psychiatry and the pathologisation of madness can suggest alternative ways of responding to the current "crisis". Foucault is perhaps the best-known psycho-political theorist in the history of political thought, whereas Fanon has historically been overlooked. Fanon's psychiatric work has been dismissed as incidental, if not detrimental, to his politics - partly because, until recently, it has remained scattered and untranslated. The newly-available collection of his psychiatric writings, Alienation and Freedom (2018), means this is no longer a valid excuse. Both Fanon and Foucault theorised the relationship between the production of maddened subjects and systems of psychiatric power and knowledge. My research question is: What are the resonances and dissonances between the psycho-politics of Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault? Very little has yet been written on this subject. The only sustained and general comparison I have found is Taylor's 'Fanon, Foucault and the Politics of Psychiatry' (2010); it regrettably neglects how Fanon and Foucault's differently-situated experiences of French colonialism and racism affected their conclusions. Renault's, Lorenzini and Tazzioli's, and Faramelli's more localised comparisons show greater sensitivity to how Fanon poses a decolonial challenge to Foucault's Eurocentrism.My thesis will be a historically-informed work of comparative political theory. It will be structured as follows: 1. I will compare Fanon's sociodiagnostic and Foucault's historical approaches to depathologising madness, and their denaturalising critiques of modern psychiatry's putatively humanitarian reforms. 2. I will compare their accounts of the parallels and collusions between psychiatry and the criminal justice system, with particular reference to their analyses of juridico-psychiatric confession. 3. I will compare their psycho-politics of space, arguing that Fanon offers a further-reaching critique of confinement. 4. I will weigh up their visions of psycho-social "recovery". 5. I will counterpoint their psycho-politics of life, death, and the death wish.