The Philosophical Anthropology of Heinrich Popitz

This analysis places the English translation of Heinrich Popitz’s (2017) Phenomena of Power: Authority, Domination, and Violence in the broader tradition of philosophical anthropology. It is argued anthropological arguments such as that offered by Popitz give insights not otherwise available to strict disciplinary inquiries. Poptiz’s discussion of power also suggests an important tension in philosophical anthropology. While Popitz contends power relations are “humanly produced realities” not “imposed by nature,” he nevertheless provides some support that physical and biological factors might contribute to an understanding of power. This discussion illustrates this tension using examples drawn from Popitz discussion of power, threats of violence, and the exercise of authority.     

Fanon and Marx Revisited

ABSTRACT

On this 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth, what can we learn from Fanon’s turn to Marx over 60 years ago? This paper reviews Fanon’s active engagements with Marx throughout his work from Black Skin, White Masks to The Wretched of the Earth; from the importance of Marx’s 18th Brumaire in Fanon’s thinking, to what he calls stretching Marxian concepts. In this moment of crisis and retrogression, what can we learn from Fanon’s creative use of Marxian categories?     

Binded by the White: A Discussion of “Fanon’s Vision of Embodied Racism for Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice”

Inspired by Steven Knoblauch’s paper, Fanon’s Vision of Embodied Racism for Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice (this issue), I urge White analysts to (individually and collectively) pursue acts of self-examination that risk destabilizing routines and convictions that bind our practices to Whiteness. Among terms to be interrogated, mutual recognition, diversity, integration, vitalization, and resilience are queried for the violence that is evacuated into the phantomatic register in support of a White ongoing being.     

The comrade on the crossroads of scholarship and struggle: Troubling the exile of Frantz Fanon from social and political psychology

This article traces the presence and absence of Frantz Fanon in the field of social and political psychology. Our work is guided by an assemblage of methods— a critical analysis of mainstream scholarship, a collective interrogation with a transnational gathering of colleagues and friends, and a deep reading of Fanon's texts on struggle, internalized oppression, violence and a new humanism. Through this, our paper is a call for radical disciplinary reflection on why Fanon has been ruthlessly exiled from social/political psychology, the potential his writings hold for courses, scholarship, and struggle, and how we might more boldly theorize, as he did, from within the fire of struggles for justice and liberation.     

Time’s entanglements: Beauvoir and Fanon on reductive temporalities

Continental Philosophy Review - Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon both argue that oppression fundamentally constrains the subject’s relationship to and embodied experience of time, yet...     

Words in the Thorns: Marshall McLuhan,Testing—One,Two, Three

Marshall McLuhan was a medium with a message. According to McLuhan, technology was not merely a neutral means to a particular end but itself content, itself the stuff of moment and decision. Consequently for McLuhan the telephone, radio, television, and computer transmitted the same information in extremely different ways because of how each worked. To this add McLuhan's conclusion that in the technological age where information travels at the speed of light, the printed word on the paper page was dead, an antiquated way of telling the story.

In the following excerpt from the one-man play I Don't Necessarily Agree with Everything I Say: An Evening Imagined with Marshall McLuhan, writer Miles Beller reanimates the wily “Global Village” guru here puckishly explaining it all, from TV's subsuming part to advertising's Machiavellian heart, from human evolution to the thinking machine revolution. Mixing McLuhan's own words with invented dialogue, a portrait emerges of a whip-smart intellectual provocateur who envisioned our current world long before Steve Jobs or Bill Gates made computing personal, long before books went digital and mail traveled as invisible impulses through the Internet. So, please take your seat. The house lights are dimming, the show about to start. The curtains part and Marshall McLuhan takes center stage, arranges his papers and begins.     

What is space? A media ecology approach

We will explore the nature of space from a media ecology/Marshall McLuhan point of view. We will examine both space and time as the origin or etymology of the term ‘space’ includes both the notion of 3-space and time. We show how various media of communication influence how we perceive space and time from the origin of language to today’s digital revolution.     

Frantz Fanon in the Time of Mad Studies

Abstract

Amidst renewed interest in the psychiatric writings of Frantz Fanon, this article reads his work against the background of contemporary mental health advocacy and scholarship. Epitomized in the emergent field of Mad Studies, whose origins lie in anti-psychiatry and psychiatric user/survivor movements, this body of scholarship espouses a discourse of madness as identity and culture. While Fanon continues to be disassociated from or (occasionally) associated with anti-psychiatry, this article elaborates elements in his work that animate such ambiguity. It proposes that Fanon and Mad studies be put in a relation of mutual critique.     

A Tapestry of Black Anthropology of Freedom: Insights from James H. Cone and Frantz Fanon

Abstract: What is freedom without the ability to wonder and imagine new ways of being in the world? This question is at the heart of the works and contributions of Frantz Fanon and James H. Cone in their responses to the colonialities operating in the Black world, and the appropriate response to such colonialities through the medium of strategic alliances and a theological imagination of what it means to be human that is oriented towards blackness itself. However, since blackness is a production of white gaze, it is intended to embody pathologies of dehumanisation. Fanon and Cone do not shy away from shedding light on these pathologies. However, rather than slipping into the realm of nihilism, a pneumatological turn is articulated that allows for blackness to be a medium of encountering the gift of authentic humanity that is in solidarity with God's epiphany of life in the world. Fanon's and Cone's centring of rebellion as the pathway for an embrace of an anthropology of freedom is retrieved as a way of understanding the link between hope and a rich reading of anthropology of freedom that blackness evokes.     

Sartre and Fanon: The Phenomenological Problem of Shame and the Experience of Race

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that existing accounts of shame are incomplete in so far as they don’t take account of the problem of shame. This is the problem concerning the possibility of a primary experience of shame. It is the problem Sartre considers under the terms of a “primitive shame” or shame “in its primary structure” that grounds other more complex experiences of shame. This problem is centred on the tension between shame as an immediate, pre-reflective experience and the requirement that shame must involve an awareness of some definitive aspect of the self. I’m going to suggest, correlatively, how by trying to resolve this problem we end up with a more nuanced understanding of shame. In the second part of the paper, I go on to look at how this new interpretation of shame helps us understand race. Looking at Fanon, I explore how a fundamental and overlooked ineffability in our relation to others impacts upon responses to racialized shame.     

Power and the origins of unhappiness: Working with individuals

Evidence that the ‘ultimate repressed’ in our understanding of emotional distress is power can be gleaned even from Freud's writing. This is a form of repression which community psychology is well placed to lift. Impossible though it is to stand outside the ‘apparatus of power’ (and, therefore to give a complete analysis of it), we cannot achieve an accurate account of the causes of human unhappiness without taking its operations into account as fully as possible. The psychological therapies do have an implicit notion of will power, but this serves only to distract our attention from the external, material nature of power. We have to be careful, moreover, not to ‘psychologize’ power by trying to turn it into an internal attribute to be ‘switched on’ by an essentially mysterious process of ‘empowerment’. We need to specify empirically the types of power that contribute to ‘clinical’ distress and give an account of ‘therapy’ in terms of the powers to which it has access (recognizing also that these are limited).     

Centennial Exploration of the Chinese Road and Adapting Marxism to the Chinese Context

The centennial exploration of the Chinese road started with the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC). This road is essentially characterized by modernization and adapting Marxism to the Chinese context. The fundamental correlation between China’s modernization and Marxism lies in the fact that China must go through a thorough social revolution to lay the foundation for its modernization cause, which charted a historical course from new democracy to socialism. However, only adapting Marxism to the Chinese context can help China’s modernization, because it is this philosophy that is intrinsically related to China’s practice in revolution, construction and reform. The contemporary form of adapting Marxism to the Chinese context is socialism with Chinese characteristics, which holds great significance for both the Chinese nation and international socialism and the overall development of human society in the new historical phase. This is a kind of “significance for world history” because the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation lies not only in its own development into a modern power, but also in the fact that it is actively opening up the possibility of a new type of civilization besides completing the modernization mission and obtaining achievements from modern civilization.     

The Reproduction of the Hypermasculine Male: Select Subaltern Views

Since the 1500s, masculinity and the socialization of men have been defined by colonization. This essay explores the hypermasculine male as a person unemotional yet fearful of intimacy, void of non-masculine attachments and identifications, competitive and aggressive, strong, independent, dominant, powerful, rational, sexist, homophobic, and generally disconnected from his own sense of self and the self of others. Nancy Chodorow’s challenge for the reproduction of masculinity is understood as a call to decolonialize the hypermasculine male as exposed in the political and subaltern psychologies of Frantz Fanon and Ashis Nandy. When the hypermasculine male is not rehumanized, all people are dehumanized, especially persons of color, children, women, and the elderly, and all who are perceived as not manly enough or as not following the rules and systems set by men. The image of the hypermasculine male is recognized in select computer games, where the image is actively promoted.     

Merleau-Ponty and Carroll on the Power of Movies

Movies have a striking aesthetic power: they can draw us in and induce a peculiar mode of involvement in their images – they absorb us. While absorbed in a movie, we lose track both of the passage of time and of the fact that we are sitting in a dark room with other people watching the play of light upon a screen. What is the source of the power of movies? Noël Carroll, who cites Maurice Merleau-Ponty as an influence on his account of the power of movies, agrees with Merleau-Ponty that our perceptual experience of movies draws on many of the capacities at work in our perceptual experience of everyday situations. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception shows that Carroll’s emphasis on intellectual inference and the entertaining of unasserted thoughts is a distortion of the phenomenology of cinematic absorption. According to Merleau-Ponty, such intellectual operations come into play in cases of breakdown but should not be read back into the primary absorbed experience as being implicitly operative all along. After presenting and criticizing Carroll’s view, I interpret and expand upon Merleau-Ponty’s position, showing that his version of the analogy between cinematic perception and everyday perception is more convincing than Carroll’s.     

The Free Harmony of the Faculties and the Primacy of Imagination in Kant's Aesthetic Judgment

This essay argues that, contrary to the prevailing view according to which reflection in Kant's aesthetic judgment is interpreted as ‘the logical actus of the understanding’, we should pay closer attention to Kant's own formulation of aesthetic reflection as ‘an action of the power of imagination’. Put differently, I contend in this essay that the rule that governs and orders the manifold in aesthetic judgment is imagination's own achievement, the achievement of the productive synthesis of the ‘fictive power’ (Dichtungsvermögen), entirely independent of the understanding. While this view does not entail that the faculty of the understanding is not necessary in aesthetic reflection, a stronger emphasis on the role of imagination in aesthetic reflection allows us to realize that its schematizing and interpretive activity, while consistent with, goes well beyond the discursive demands of the understanding insofar as it intimates the supersensible ground of freedom that manifests itself as ‘the feeling of life’. Therefore, I show in this essay that the imagination's unique interpretive power has a special role in completing Kant's critical system by facilitating the connection of the sensible to the supersensible, which further helps us appreciate imagination's practical as opposed to merely cognitive significance.     

The critical impact of Frantz Fanon and Henri Collomb: race, gender, and personality testing of North and West Africans

In 2001, the U.S. Surgeon General declared publicly that culture counts in mental health care. This welcome recognition of the role of culture in mental health appears somewhat belated. In 1956, Frantz Fanon and Henri Collomb both presented culturally sensitive studies of the Thematic Apperception Test at the major French-language mental health conference. The contrast between these two studies and between the careers of Fanon and Collomb reveals some of the difficulties in creating cultural and gender sensitivity in psychiatry or psychology.     

The Postcolonial Heart of African Philosophy

abstract

This piece is one of among a handful that seek in the first instance to reveal the origin of African philosophy as an academic discipline, the source of its unity and distinctiveness. The discipline of African philosophy originates in Ragedy, out of pain, confusion and rage stemming from colonial destruction; destruction that is responsible for what Fanon calls the ‘negro neurosis’ caused by what Biko would describe as the unbearable fusion of colonised and coloniser. I argue that the birth of African philosophy as an academic discipline is largely responsible for its character and, crucially, for its distinctive creative possibilities.     

Theorising and Exposing Institutional Racism in Britain: The Contribution of Ann and Michael Dummett to Critical Philosophy of Race

By helping to introduce the relatively new concept of institutional racism into Britain, Sir Michael and Ann Dummett expanded the concept of racism beyond the limited sense it had been given in the 1940s and 1950s when racism tended to be associated with the scientific concept of race and when the focus tended to fall on the intent to harm or speak harm of a group that was identified as a race by science. They recognised that ‘race’ was primarily a political and not a scientific concept. This led them in a different direction from that taken by the next generation of mainstream philosophers working in this area, such as Kwame Anthony Appiah, who adopted the UNESCO approach of highlighting the scientific deficiencies of the concept of race. However, although they both succeeded in developing ways to break through the forms of self‐deception that allow institutional racism to go unnoticed and at the same time offered instructive insights into the ways politicians hide behind the racism of others, I argue that they failed to see, as clearly as Sartre and Fanon did, that the conception of institutional racism necessitates a structural changes in society beyond anything they contemplated.