The Idea of the Organic,or the Constitutional,in Fanon’s Phenomenological Description of the Psychopathology of Racial Alienation

Abstract

This paper challenges an unspoken consensus in Fanon Studies, namely, whether Fanon had something other than a social constructivist concept of race, that is, that “race” is not a biological reality, but an ideological myth constructed by a racialized and racist society. A counterfactual case is made in this paper, enlisting forensic analysis and archival research evidence to do so. It also relies on knowledge now accessible in English for the first time. However, the argument presented here, while counterfactual to current knowledge, is best understood as a semantic revision that does not “undo” or “disprove” prevailing knowledge as much as it suggests alternative motifs, engagements, and implications for Fanon scholarship. The Fanonian counterfactual arguments presented in this paper are not just material, but logical; that is, they are determined by the values that constitute the materiality, historicity, and logics of race, the latter reflecting a new connectivity between the empirical and the transcendental meanings of race.