Fanon’s Clinic: Revolutionary Therapeutics and the Politics of Exhaustion

Abstract

In the interim between the writings that would eventually anchor his legacy, Frantz Fanon spent most of his career as a radical psychiatrist in a small town in colonial Algeria. In his recently anthologized clinical writings, Fanon uses the tools of socialthérapie to confront the simultaneous impossibility of healthy reconciliation to colonial sociality and the necessity of sociality as a basic therapeutic condition with reference to which desire can be cultivated. This article argues for the political theoretical importance of Fanon’s clinical writings, which respond to this impasse and its symptoms, including exhaustion and refusal, with experiments in world-making within the bounds of his clinic, while making critically visible the eventual collapse of this possibility and the turn of his therapeutic imagination outwards. Reframing Fanon’s late work on African Solidarity, the problem of war, and the internationalist critique of neocolonial false peace from this perspective, the article closes by drawing together two otherwise opposed contemporary interpretive legacies that have broader resonance for antiracist and democratic thought today, those which affirm the persistence of world-making praxis in institutional terms, and those which draw from Fanon’s legacy a pessimism that radically disavows the possible success of such efforts.