Figures of interpellation in althusser and fanon

Radical Philosophy

Volumn 173, Issue , 2012, Pages 9-20

  Macherey, Pierre ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84860710640     PISSN: 0300211X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Note

References (60)

1. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, Seuil, Paris, 1952.
2. We propose this encounter without any regard to the question of influence or confrontation. Althusser never refers to Fanon. But nothing prevents us from bringing the two positions into dialogue, so as to understand better what specifies them.
3. Like a throbbing litany, he repeats the formula: 'But never mind that [Mais laisson cela].'
4. Althusser, Positions, Éditions Sociales, Paris, 1976, p.68All citations have been translated from the French. They are followed below by references to the English translation in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, NLB, London, 1977. Here, p. 124].
5. Ibid., p. 73; p. 128.
6. Ibid., p. 110; p. 160.
7. This is what is aimed at by the thesis according to which 'ideology has a material existence' (ibid., p. 105; p. 155), which seeks to bring it back down from the heaven of ideas to which it has been arbitrarily confined.
8. Ibid., p. 100; p. 151.
9. Ibid; p. 152.
10. This restriction is formulated on p. 101; p. 152: 'in all of history (= the history of social formations involving social classes)'.
11. Ibid., pp. 103-4; p. 154.
12. Sur la reproduction, PUF/Actuel Marx, Paris, 1995, p. 211.
13. Let us nevertheless remark that, between Althusser's perspective and Foucault's, a fundamental difference remains. Foucault is far from, and even altogether opposed to, thinking that the intervention of norms exhibits an omni-historical character, transversal to every historical epoch.
14. This society of the norm is put in place during the second half of the eighteenth century: it instituted an altogether new type of 'power relation', which no longer depended on the violent intervention of an authority that would be external to the field it controls and that would be concentrated upon itself in virtue of its transcendent position.
15. Althusser, Positions, p. 106; p. 157.
16. Ibid., p. 107; p. 158.
17. Ibid., p. 109; p. 159.
18. Ibid., p. 114; p. 163.
19. Ibid., pp. 113-14; pp. 162-3.
20. Ibid., p. 114; p. 163.
21. In the reading she proposes of the interpellation scene in The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 1997, Chapter IV, 'Conscience Doth Make Subjects of Us All: Althusser's Subjection', pp. 106-31.
22. Judith Butler concentrates her attention precisely on the automatic character of this relation between call and response, from which she concludes that the Althusserian concept of subjection remains a tributary of the model of religious conscience. The spirit of her analysis is summed up in this passage: 'The concern here has a more specific textual aim, namely, to show how figures - examples and analogies - inform and extend conceptualizations, implicating the text in an ideological sanctification of religious authority which it can expose only by reenacting that authority' (p. 114).
23. In other words, Althusser would have fallen recklessly (or piously) into the trap that religious ideology, and in particular Christian religious ideology, have set for him, as if in prayer.
24. This idea can be found at the centre of Althusser's article on 'Freud and Lacan', published in La Nouvelle Critique in 1964-65, also reprinted in the Positions collection, for which it constitutes the introduction.
25. Lenin and Philoophy, pp. 177-202.
26. When Foucault refers to this 'order of discourse', he is not returning the representational to the foreground: what this order consists of, for him, in fact, is a concatenation [agencement] of elements, of words, for example, which are not substitutes for things, but things in their own right; it does not therefore subsist at a distance from the real, opposing it [en face de lui] for example, but is a component of it in its own right; it is real, and even, at the limit, the real of the real.
27. According to Butler, this example was not chosen by chance, but represents the case par excellence in which the individual is constituted as subject by the procedure of interpellation.
28. Althusser, Positions, p. 118; p. 167.
29. Ibid., p. 115; p. 164.
30. It was at Saint-Alban that Dr François Tosquelles, a Spanish political émigré, invented what would after him be referred to as 'institutional psychotherapy', a method that would completely revolutionize psychiatric care. Saint-Alban has been a place of intense intellectual creation: Eluard and Tzara stayed there during the war; it was there that the idea of what today is called l'art brut began to germinate, thanks to Dr Lucien Bonnafé
31. Canguilhem, who took refuge there at the end of the war, wrote his thesis in medicine, l'Essai sur quelques problèmes concernant le normal et le pathologique; later, Fernand Deligny went there as well. All of this created an extraordinary atmosphere, in which Fanon's impassioned and unusual reflections naturally found a place.
32. William E. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Arc Manor, Rockville MD, 2008, p. 9.
33. [My translation of the passages from Peau noir, masques blancs quoted in this text closely follows Charles Lam Markmann's 1967 translation of the book (Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C.L. Markmann, Pluto Press, London, 2008), and it is his version that is cited in the footnotes.
34. I have nevertheless retranslated or modified several passages, for various reasons. In particular, I have translated the title of Chapter 5, 'L'expérience vécue du Noir', as 'The Lived Experience of the Black Man' rather than Markmann's freer 'The Fact of Blackness' (siding in this case with Philcox's more recent translation of the book). One change that should be mentioned here has to do with the French word nègre, which floats halfway between the English words 'negro' and 'nigger'.
35. Markmann freely alternates between these two possible translations, while Philcox throws 'black man' into the mix as well. In this translation, I have uniformly translated nègre as 'nigger', since the subject of the text gives us no reason to hide the sting of the word. Trans.]
36. Black Skin, White Masks, p. 84; translation modified.
37. [English in the original. Trans.]
38. In the development of a child, the mirror stage, which takes place before the acquisition of language, coincides with the appearance of the ego, such as it projects itself and 'recognizes' itself in that specular relation by which it enters into the regime of the imaginary. But this ego, which is effectively doubled, is not yet a subject, which, for its part, is constituted by the entrance into the symbolic.
39. The ego is doubled [dédoublé], while the subject is turned [retourné], which is not at all the same thing.
40. 'And already I am being dissected under the white gaze, the only real gaze. I am fixed. Having adjusted their microtomes, they objectively cut away slices of my reality.
41. I am laid bare. I feel, I see in those white faces that it is not a new man who has come in, but a new kind of man, a new genus. Why, it's a nigger!' (Black Skin, White Masks, p. 87
42. Translation modified). The microtome is the instrument a biologist uses to slice tissues in order to view them under a microscope.
43. 'I am a nigger - but of course I do not know it, simply because I am one' (Black Skin, White Masks, p. 148). Being black is an objective condition, which is not spontaneously felt as such by its bearer; it comes to be subjectified [subjectivée] only when the white gaze falls upon its black skin.
44. Fanon makes a passing reference to Lacan, whose article on the family in Wallon's Encyclopédia française has clearly influenced him.
45. 'Since the racial drama is played out in the open, the black man has no time to "make it unconscious"' (Black Skin, White Masks, p. 116).
46. Fanon is interested in another aspect of the unconscious: that of the collective unconscious, which is cultural and not subjective in the sense of individual subjectivity.
47. This collective unconscious corresponds to the power of norms, as analysed by Foucault.
48. What is characteristic of religious ideology is precisely that it interpellates subjects one by one, each for himself.
49. Peau noir, Masques blancs, let us not forget, was published in the Éditions du Seuil's 'Esprit' collection, and so in the same environment where Ricoeur conducted his researches.
50. The last chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, 'The Nigger and Recognition', concludes with a paragraph entitled The Nigger and Hegel' (pp. 168-73
51. Translation modified), where the formula 'dirty nigger!' (p. 172; translation modified) is examined from the point of view of the struggle between master and slave.
52. Fanon proceeds with psychoanalysis in the same fashion, taking an interest in it precisely because of its limits: transposed onto another terrain, it no longer works (according to him, we find no trace of the Oedipal triangle in the Caribbean family).
53. Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 82-3.
54. [The text was translated almost immediately into English by George J. Becker, and published in 1948 by Schocken Books as Anti-Semite and Jew. Trans.]
55. Fanon is no more 'Sartrean', in the sense of globally adhering to a system of thought, than he is 'Hegelian' or 'Freudian'. He brought a lucid eye to bear on Sartre's work, sorting out what seemed useful to him from what did not. He rejects, for example, Sartre's enthusiastic and incendiary account of the thematic of Negritude in 'Orphée noir' ('Black Orpheus'), a text Sartre wrote to serve as the introduction to Senghor's Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (1948), reprinted in Situations III (Gallimard, Paris, 1949). [For an English translation
56. See 'Black Orpheus', trans. John MacCombie, Massachusetts Review, vol. 6, no. 1, Autumn 1964- Winter 1965, pp. 13-52. The text was also published as a stand-alone pamphlet in 1976 by French and European Publications, in a new translation by S.W. Allen. Trans.]
57. Of the Jew and the Nigger, Fanon says that they are 'brothers in misery': 'At first thought it might seem strange that the anti-semite's outlook should be related to that of the negrophobe. It was my philosophy professor, a native of the Antilles, who recalled the fact to me one day: Whenever you hear anyone abuse Jews, pay attention, because he is talking about you.' And I found that he was universally right - by which I meant that I was answerable in my body and in my heart for what was done to my brother. Later I realized that he meant, quite simply, an anti-semite is inevitably a negrophobe.'
58. Black Skin, White Masks, p. 92; translation modified.
59. This is the central theme of the work he published in 1961 through Éditions Maspero, Les Damnés de la terre, for which Sartre wrote the preface. [Translated into English by Richard Philcox as The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, New York, 2004. Trans.] 47. Réflexions sur la question juive, Gallimard, Paris, 1954, p. 96.
60. From this vertical perspective, where the gaze that sanctions the operation of recognition comes from above [est surplombant] and emanates from a source that remains hidden, all subjects are equal [tous se valent]. When Christ says 'Suffer the children to come unto me', he does not specify whether these children should be black, white, or any colour at all: in this sense, one may say that subjects he convokes are simply determined, and not overdetermined. But this message is configured by means of an operation of abstraction, by which religious ideology permits itself to pretend that, for it, all subjects are equal, whatever their situation. But outside of the perspective that defines this operation of abstraction, an operation that artificially and artfully [artificiellement et artificieusement] erases differences, this is not the case at all.