The “Recognition Trap”: Self-Constitution,Culture,and Mutual Recognition in Fanon’s Project of Freedom

Abstract

Frantz Fanon’s relationship to the politics of recognition is ambiguous; securing recognition from one’s fellow members of a political community is necessary for the full realization of dignified freedom, and yet seeking such recognition can be equally damaging to this very freedom. This article seeks to clarify the ways that Fanon attempts to navigate this tension—what I call the “recognition trap”—and pave a middle path between the theorists of the recognition paradigm and its radical critics. Focusing on the ways that cultural considerations figure into Fanon’s later clinical writings and practices, this article argues that the Fanonian alternative to the recognition paradigm is a view of freedom as self-constitution, for which certain forms of recognition serve a necessary albeit subordinate function.

Introduction

Frantz Fanon’s relationship to the politics of recognition ¹ is an ambiguous one. Many commentators appeal to Fanon’s reformulation and critique of G.W.F. Hegel’s master-slave ² dialectic in order to suggest that Fanon rejects the recognition paradigm, whether it be due to the “fixing” quality of recognition, the unrecognizable “subontological” status of the colonized subject, or the inherent coloniality of Hegelian dialectics. ³ Kelly Oliver captures this view when she argues that rather than “embrace a recognition model of identity and self-worth, or unproblematically endorse the struggle for recognition of oppressed people, Fanon suggests that active meaning making and self-creation are necessary to fight oppression and overcome the psychic damage of colonization.” ⁴ Others suggest that while Fanon complicates Hegel’s account of mutual recognition, recognitive reciprocity still lies at the foundation of his new humanism. ⁵ The corollary of this view is that Fanon understands colonial and racist oppression, at least in part, as a form of misrecognition, particularly through the colonizer’s freedom-disabling imposition of demeaning images and narratives upon the colonized. ⁶ Fanon’s critique of recognition, to the extent that it exists, could then be understood as being directed toward an incomplete, excessively abstract, or one-sided form of recognition rather than toward recognition as such. ⁷

Each of these readings captures an important feature of his thought. Fanon is both deeply attentive to the ways that systematic misrecognition disfigures the psyche and to the ways that recognition-seeking can undermine, or fall short of, freedom. The path to freedom, then, cannot rest at either pole of these coexisting tendencies or currents running through Fanon’s thought; it can neither consist in disavowing the hope of achieving recognitive reciprocity and a new humanity nor in solely seeking greater accommodations, tolerance, and respect. Instead, Fanon captures a tension at the heart of recognitive politics: securing recognition from one’s fellow members of a political community is necessary for the full realization of dignified freedom, and yet seeking such recognition under “non-ideal” ⁸ circumstances—that is, the very circumstances that make a struggle for recognition necessary in the first place—can be equally damaging to this very freedom. This article seeks to clarify the ways that Fanon attempts to navigate this tension—what I call the “recognition trap.”

The argument will be as follows. First, I will attempt to briefly outline what I take to be Fanon’s ambiguous relationship to the recognition paradigm. Here, I focus primarily on Fanon’s discussions of recognition in Black Skin, White Masks, where he outlines the features of the recognition trap. On the one hand, the very real threat that misrecognition poses to freedom can be articulated as a form of objectification that becomes psychologically internalized. On the other hand, Fanon warns us of the ways that seeking the source of our self-worth through recognition can give us a false, superficial, or self-undermining sense of what it means to be free. The “trap,” in other words, is that we mistake one form or another of recognition for freedom itself. Turning to the ways that Fanon seeks to overcome this dilemma, I suggest that Fanonian freedom can be characterized as an open-ended process of self-constitution, for which certain forms of recognition serve an essential but necessarily partial or limited role within a broader view of a free life. To get a better sense of the function that recognition plays for this self-constitution, I turn to one of Fanon’s sometimes overlooked practices of freedom and disalienation: his social therapeutic approach to psychiatry. ⁹ Here, I argue that Fanon’s understanding of “authentic” culture becomes the key to understanding not only how we may reconcile the individual’s therapeutic process of disalienation and the irreducibly social nature of freedom, but the ways that mutual recognition figures into practices of freedom. Recognition will be reconceptualized as one feature among others of a free life. At the same time, I conclude that contextually dependent disavowals of recognition can be necessary. This “turning away” from the master, either figurative or literal, is only temporary, however; Fanon holds onto hope for a future of egalitarian cultural, and therefore recognitive, reciprocity.

What’s Wrong with Misrecognition?

Fanon begins his chapter of Black Skin, White Masks titled “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” with the frightened exclamation of a French child: “Look! A Negro!” ¹⁰ Fanon elaborates: “I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at the origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.” ¹¹ Fanon expresses here his disappointment—which followed him from his early experiences fighting for the Free French Forces in the Second World War ¹² —in the false promise of French universalism. “I wanted quite simply to be a man among men,” Fanon writes, “I would have liked to enter our world young and sleek, a world we could build together.” ¹³ Instead, Fanon describes a deeply hostile world that at every opportunity racializes his body, inscribing it with countless histories, lore, stereotypes, prescriptions: “I was responsible not only for my body but also for my race and ancestors.” ¹⁴ The threats posed by such racialization of the body, however, are not merely external in nature (e.g., injustice, mistreatment, exclusion, etc.); they also have the power, according to Fanon, to alter the self-understanding of the subject: “My body was returned to me spread-eagled, disjointed, redone, draped in mourning on this white winter’s day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is wicked, the Negro is ugly; look a Negro.” ¹⁵

Fanon expresses here not only a harrowing portrayal of “the black man confronted with his race” ¹⁶ but a commitment to a fundamental premise of the politics of recognition, that the “projection of an inferior or demeaning image on another can actually distort and oppress, to the extent that the image is internalized.” ¹⁷ This projection—that is, misrecognition—has the power to cause such harm because, for Fanon, the self and its constitutive identity is, to borrow a term from Charles Taylor, fundamentally “dialogical.” In contrast with an atomistic understanding of the subject, the dialogical understanding of the human being suggests that we “become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression,” ¹⁸ such that “I negotiate [my identity] through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others.” ¹⁹ One’s self-understanding, in other words, can only be made sense of within a network of culturally, politically, and linguistically mediated self-other relations. When Fanon describes the internalization of racist ideas in the form of inferiority complexes and related neuroses, he is appealing to a view of the self as ontologically porous, wherein external norms or discourses shape what we typically view as internal: one’s subjective values, psychological constitution, and self-image. One example Fanon gives is of René Maran’s character Jean Veneuse in Un homme pareil aux autres. Veneuse, an intelligent and introverted orphan of Antillean origin who lives and studies in France, suffers from an abandonment neurosis, characterized by a self-devaluation and anxiety that takes on a racialized significance: “Above all, he wants to prove to the others that he is a man, that he is like them. But let us not be misled: Jean Veneuse is the man to be convinced.” ²⁰ Veneuse forecloses his own possibilities on the basis of his racialized self-understanding. He loves a white woman, Andrée Marielle, who loves him back. Yet, he is completely unwilling to accept this love as anything but a fantasy. ²¹

The primary way that Fanon describes this psychically harmful racialization of the body is as a form of “thingifying” ²² depersonalization: It is essentially the process of one self-conscious subject reducing an other to object, corporeality, and bare life. Much like Hegel’s master who seeks self-conscious freedom—that is, being more than mere being, being a “pure being-for-itself” ²³ —through the subjugation of the slave clinging to bare life, misrecognition here consists in inscribing the essence of the other with “self-sufficient being, or with thinghood itself.” ²⁴ Conversely, the slave initially internalizes this objectification, for whom “life, or being for an other, is the essence.” ²⁵ The body, for the systematically misrecognized subject, becomes no longer treated as a situation—a site of both freedom and facticity, or freedom within facticity, according to Jean-Paul Sartre ²⁶ —but is rather “overdetermined from the outside.” ²⁷ Sartre’s concept of the “look” partially captures what is at play in this overdetermination. Sartre recounts the formative phenomenological experience of encountering another subject as an external object and becoming aware of this subject as subject. One only experiences this process, though, in exchanging phenomenological positions and developing consciousness of oneself as object, as being “degraded, fixed, and dependent” in the eyes of this “Other.” ²⁸ Fanon suggests, however, that though “Sartre’s speculations on the existence of ‘the Other’ remain correct [. . .], their application to a black consciousness proves fallacious because the white man is not only ‘the Other,’ but also the master, whether real or imaginary.” ²⁹ In the subjugating white gaze, not only does the Black recipient experience himself as object but he “feels the weight of his melanin.” ³⁰ Lewis Gordon aptly notes that “theoretical articulations of the nègre’s condition on the basis of Self–Other relations fail” because they “presuppose the subtle symmetry of ‘Otherness.’” ³¹ For Sartre, while the “look” does indeed have the power to render me-as-object, there is the presence of a “subtle symmetry” insofar as I am able to return the objectifying gaze. Since racism, however, “is a denial to an Other attributes of the self and even those of another self—in other words, even of being an Other—the resulting schema is one of location below” ³² —that is, the famous “zone of nonbeing.” ³³ It is a systematic dehumanization that precludes the possibility of this objectifying reciprocity.

The threat that misrecognition poses to freedom should now be readily apparent. Self-conscious subjectivity consists, at minimum, of having a complex phenomenal existence and the capacity to abstract from mere givenness—i.e., to be this or that or to do this or that. The mutual recognition that substantiates and emboldens this subjectivity consists in acknowledging the other as recognizing one’s own self-conscious freedom, such that one is necessarily recognizing this other as the type of being—that is, as an equally self-conscious subject—that is capable of bestowing recognition. The white gaze as Fanon describes it, on the other hand, collapses the distinction between its recipient’s self-consciousness and body. According to Fanon, racism therefore often manifests as a particular form of misrecognition, in which the objectification of the individual consists in the conflation of one’s partial or entire being with the demeaning ideas and images fallaciously signified by the racialized body—for example, “[t]hey inscribed on my chromosomes certain genes of various thickness representing cannibalism.” ³⁴ The degree to which this misrecognition is freedom-disabling depends in part not only on what external or physical barriers might be erected as a result but also on the extent to which the individual has internalized this sense of inferiority. This process of objectification and, subsequently, internalization does not suggest, however, that the systematically misrecognized individual actually ceases to be a self-conscious subject; rather, Fanon’s claim is that as dialogically constituted subjects, we may convince ourselves that we are unfree and foreclose our own possibilities.

In this way, Fanon departs from many critics of the recognition paradigm who question whether misrecognition and its harmful effects can be a primary source of injustice or wrong. For instance, Nancy Fraser eschews a “psychological” understanding of recognition’s moral and political significance for a “status model” that focuses on the ways that misrecognition results in a denial of “the status of full partners in social interactions.” ³⁵ Likewise, Patchen Markell argues that widespread patterns of misrecognition are symptomatic of, and often epiphenomenal to, the primary source of injustice—namely, “ways of patterning and arranging the world that allow some people and groups to enjoy a semblance of sovereign agency at others’ expense.” ³⁶ Fanon, as we can see, takes seriously the intrinsic or internal harms of misrecognition. Moreover, his diagnosis of this wrong or injustice need not imply some discernible intention or benefit on the part of the privileged party failing to offer adequate recognition. Fanon’s example of experiencing misrecognition at the hands of a little French boy is illustrative: the norms and values that produce systemic misrecognition may be pervasive and reproduced unconsciously while in no way attenuating its harms. But Fanon is not suggesting that because pervasive misrecognition poses its own distinct harms, the phenomenon is unrelated to structural inequalities. Indeed, Fanon illustrates a double process whereby economic inferiority leads to the “internalization or rather epidermalization of this inferiority,” ³⁷ which subsequently takes on a life of its own with relative independence from its economic origins. For this reason, Fanon claims that liberation must unfold at both the objective and subjective levels. ³⁸

The “Recognition Trap”

While misrecognition forecloses freedom to a significant degree—Fanon agrees with Hegel that “human worth and reality depend on [. . .] recognition by the other” ³⁹ —liberation is not accomplished through recognition alone. Worse than that, seeking this recognition from the other may in fact end up undermining, rather than fostering, freedom. I argue that Fanon’s skepticism toward many forms of recognition and recognition-seeking can be characterized as viewing recognition from the other, especially the literal or figurative master, dominant society, or colonist, as a kind of trap. This “recognition trap” consists of mistaking recognition for freedom itself. As we shall see, this trap-like quality that Fanon identifies with recognition-seeking indicates both that there are ways of recognizing and being recognized that are flawed from the outset and that securing any recognition, either in a monological or dialogical form, necessarily falls short of what Fanon views true human freedom to be.

The dynamics of the recognition trap are captured most clearly in Fanon’s critical employment of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic to describe the Black experience post-slavery in France. “Historically,” Fanon (perhaps erroneously) writes, “the black man, steeped in the inessentiality of servitude, was set free [without a struggle] by the master,” with Schœlcher’s pronouncement that “[s]lavery shall no longer exist on French soil.” ⁴⁰ Formally and legally speaking, therefore, Black individuals enjoy many of the same rights and liberties as their white European counterparts. In actuality, however, such formal egalitarianism reinforced by recognition obfuscates real inequalities—the white man says, “[T]here is no difference between us,” but “the black man knows there is a difference.” ⁴¹ Appealing to Hegel’s claim that the “individual who has not risked his life [. . .] has not achieved the truth of being recognized as a self-sufficient self-consciousness,” ⁴² Fanon argues that the “black man does not know the price of freedom because he has never fought for it.” ⁴³ Instead, Fanon suggests that the “black man was acted upon. Values that were not engendered by his actions, values not resulting from the systolic gush of his blood, whirled around him in a colourful dance. [. . .] He went from one way of life to another, but not from one life to another.” ⁴⁴ Here, we begin to both get a sense of what Fanon might mean by the word “freedom” as well as why recognition alone is not enough to constitute it. The intrinsic threat posed here is of mistaking recognition from the other, however mutual it may be, for freedom itself. Worse, Fanon equates this recognitive bestowal or supposedly benevolent granting of “freedom” as a fallacious form of freedom—a false or superficial freedom that, though in some sense necessary (Fanon is not, of course, arguing against the abolition of slavery), can serve as a ruse or a false promise. Instead, freedom must be initiated by one’s own subjectivity: “I am my own foundation. And it is by going beyond the historical and instrumental given that I initiate my cycle of freedom.” ⁴⁵

Now, Hegel tells us in his rendition of the master-slave dialectic that it is the slave who paradoxically experiences the first hint or taste of freedom. Whereas the master’s freedom as independence reveals itself to be a dependence on the slave’s labor, the dialectical inversion goes both ways and the slave “comes to acquire a mind of his own” through the labor process, wherein an abstract idea is translated into an objective actuality. ⁴⁶ But Fanon distinguishes his depiction of the slave from Hegel’s on this point: “The black slave wants to be like his master. [. . .] Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object.” ⁴⁷ Once the master-slave relationship is situated in a context of pervasive and dehumanizing racialization, there are residual attitudes, norms, and inequalities that persist long after the formal relationship of master and slave has dissolved, which continue to animate and undermine attempts at equal recognition. The idea that one would “want to be recognized not as Black, but as White,” Fanon concludes, is a “form of recognition that Hegel never described.” ⁴⁸ Indeed, Fanon suggests that we understand race, at least in part, as a hierarchized socio-recognitive category. Fanon observes accordingly that “the more the black Antillean assimilates the French language, the whiter he gets—i.e., the closer he comes to becoming a true human being.” ⁴⁹ The futile attempt to make this ascent to (white) humanity is a neurosis that Fanon calls “lactification,” the pathological desire to whiten oneself. ⁵⁰ Fanon, quite controversially, ⁵¹ uses Mayotte Capécia and her semi-autobiographical book Je suis Martiniquaise as his case study. One of the principal ways that Capécia seeks to climb the ladder of racialization is through her love of a white man—or, at least, what she perceives as love, for Fanon bluntly claims that “love is out of bounds for the Mayotte Capécias of this world.” ⁵² Capécia’s “bad faith”—that is, a form of self-deception, in Sartre’s words, that generally manifests itself as either a denial of one’s transcendence or facticity ⁵³ —is such that she appears psychologically incapable of authentically affirming the “fact” of blackness and only seeks freedom by attempting to flee from her situation.

Capécia’s case of “lactification” can be understood as, in part, an attempt to transcend the inadequacies of formal and legal equality. She diagnoses her world correctly: whiteness is identified with dignity and freedom—being a “true” human. But, it should be clear, Capécia mistakes recognition from the white world for freedom and, even worse, reinforces the racial hierarchy that undermines her own freedom in the process. ⁵⁴ Rejecting the bad faith attempt to seek vicarious power and prestige through a proximal whiteness logically leads one to instead reject whiteness and what it symbolizes in white supremacist societies in favor of embracing one’s marginalized identity—in this case, one’s blackness. Fanon describes his own attempt at such reclamation:

Whereas I had every reason to vent my hatred and loathing, they were rejecting me? Whereas I was the one they should have begged and implored, I was denied the slightest recognition? I made up my mind, since it was impossible to rid myself of an innate complex, to assert myself as a BLACK MAN. Since the Other was reluctant to recognize me, there was only one answer: to make myself known. ⁵⁵

In this case, combating a sense of inferiority through the empowering embrace of one’s marginalized identity consists in the resuscitation of past traditions and debunking colonial myths of savagery. This reclamation—chiefly represented in Fanon’s account by the Négritude movement—initially appears as an attractive route toward disalienation. Indeed, Fanon tells us that it “triggers a change of fundamental importance in the colonized’s psycho-affective equilibrium.” ⁵⁶ This is especially true, Fanon observes, of the “cultured class of colonized intellectuals,” for whom the “recognition of a national culture and its right to exist represent their favorite stamping ground.” ⁵⁷

This path too, however, Fanon ultimately dismisses as a dead end. The preeminent danger that Fanon identifies in seeking this recognition of one’s group identity, culture, or ancestry is the familiar problem of “essentialism.” The dead end that Fanon attributes to the Négritude movement, for instance, is that the “historical obligation to racialize their claims, to emphasize an African culture rather than a national culture” ⁵⁸ overlooks the fundamentally different objective problems faced across African nations and diasporas. ⁵⁹ In sum, essentialist recognition is often predicated on what Fanon calls a “mummified” conception of a group identity, ⁶⁰ which has the potential to gloss over internal diversity, painting an overly homogenized picture of a people. Kwame Anthony Appiah voices a concern that broadly captures the substance of the critique of essentialism:

Demanding respect for people as blacks and as gays requires that there are some scripts that go with being an African-American or having same-sex desires. There will be proper ways of being black and gay, there will be expectations to be met, demands will be made. It is at this point that someone who takes autonomy seriously will ask whether we have not replaced one kind of tyranny with another. ⁶¹

Fanon shares this concern with Appiah and goes at great lengths to distance himself, especially in Black Skin, White Masks, from most group-based essentialisms or identifications. Fanon definitively claims that “the black experience is ambiguous, for there is not one Negro—there are many black men.” ⁶² To assume otherwise, for Fanon, would be to quickly lapse back into the misrecognition already discussed: the “constantly affirmed concern with ‘respecting the culture of the native populations’ accordingly does not signify taking into consideration the values borne by the culture, incarnated by men. Rather, this behaviour betrays a determination to objectify, to confine, to imprison, to harden.” ⁶³

Of Fanon’s own immersive contact with Négritude and the reclamation of blackness, he writes that, for a moment, “I had been recognized; I was no longer a nonentity.” ⁶⁴ But, as Sonia Kruks aptly puts it, although interpersonal recognition may be psychologically empowering, Fanon arrives at the conclusion that to “affirm one’s identity is not, in itself, to change the world.” ⁶⁵ As we shall see, however, Fanon does not entirely abandon the importance of recognizing cultural differences and practices, nor does he ultimately contrast authentic cultural identity with freedom or changing the world. As of yet, however, we do not have a clear grasp of what exactly freedom demands.

Fanon’s Alternative: Freedom as Self-Constitution

Summarizing Fanon’s views on freedom, let alone philosophically expounding his ontology of freedom, is no simple task. ⁶⁶ In this section, I give a cursory view of what I take to be the main features of Fanon’s conception of freedom, before more concretely elaborating on how recognition figures into this view of a free life in the following section. What do we know about Fanonian freedom? We know that its demands and conditions go well beyond much of what typically qualifies as liberty. In a critique that resembles Karl Marx’s famous assessment of individual liberties in On the Jewish Question—e.g., “the state can be a free state without man being a free man” ⁶⁷ —Fanon suggests that freedom is not reducible to one’s political or legal status (such as the one granted to the freed slave), nor can it be articulated in solely negative terms. ⁶⁸ Hobbesian non-interference falls short of Fanon’s high standards for freedom because its materialism—“when the words free, and liberty, are applied to any thing but bodies, they are abused” ⁶⁹ —fails to capture the phenomenological dimension of non-freedom that Fanon views as indispensable for fully understanding racism and colonialism. Freedom as non-domination comes closer to grasping what is at stake by orienting our attention to arbitrary or unjust power differentials that exist irrespective of how they are deployed or abused. As Philip Pettit succinctly puts it, “I suffer domination to the extent that I have a master; I enjoy non-interference to the extent that that master fails to interfere.” ⁷⁰ But, as we have seen, Fanon is not satisfied with the mere absence of a master, either. Instead, we must be attuned to the free or unfree subject’s actual capacities and possibilities within a determinate social context.

For Fanon, attending to the subject’s capacities in this way demands that some degree of non-alienation be taken seriously as a necessary condition for true freedom. We know from Fanon’s lengthy descriptions of the experience of misrecognition in Black Skin, White Masks that alienation is a hindrance to freedom. But I argue that the constructive role that non-alienation, or a sense of belonging, serves is expressed especially clearly in his psychiatric writings and practices. There is a close-knit relationship between alienation, mental illness, and the loss of freedom. “Madness,” Fanon writes in his resignation from his post at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in Algeria in 1956, “is one of the means man has of losing his freedom. [. . .] If psychiatry is the medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment, I owe it to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization.” ⁷¹ Alienation produces madness, or madness can be understood as an extreme form of alienation: “the mad person is someone who can no longer find his place among people.” ⁷² Writing against what he describes as the Lacanian view of madness as an extremity of freedom—the madman being “one who has accepted to inventory all the abysses that freedom offers” ⁷³ —Fanon classifies madness as a “pathology of freedom.” Mental illness, in other words, is a real impediment to freedom; it “situates the patient in a world in which his or her freedom, will and desires are constantly broken by obsessions, inhibitions, countermands, anxieties.” ⁷⁴

On the one hand, non-alienation is, therefore, essentially conducive to freedom in a merely negative sense. If the presence of alienation, or its extremity in madness, hinders or destroys one’s freedom, then the absence of alienation signals a degree of autonomy. The therapeutic practice of disalienation is world-expanding in the sense that the scope of objects, activities, and possibilities that one has access to, unhindered by fixations and psychological immobilization, is radically widened. This is why disruptions to one’s “psychological notion of the body” ⁷⁵ or, following Maurice Merleau-Ponty, one’s “body schema,” ⁷⁶ also has “impacts on the patient’s psychic personality.” ⁷⁷ It is by means of a body schema that “I hold my body as an indivisible possession and I know the position of each of my limbs.” ⁷⁸ But the body is not an object among other objects. It is primordially experienced not as a positional spatiality but a situational spatiality. ⁷⁹ The ways that Fanon describes the psychiatric symptoms of neurological disruptions of the body schema are remarkably similar to the ways he describes the effects of systemic relations of misrecognition. Fanon concludes in his doctoral thesis, which examines the prevalence of psychiatric disorders in cases of Friedrich’s ataxia (a neurodegenerative disorder that affects motor and sensory capabilities), that individuals experiencing such a “progressive limitation of [their] field of action, [often] cannot conserve an intact psyche.” ⁸⁰ Similarly, once the elaboration of one’s body schema becomes racialized, the body schema collapses into an “epidermal racial schema” ⁸¹ and frustrates the ability to express one’s possibilities in relation to the body’s position and proximity to objects. This is why Fanon argues that “any ontology is made impossible in a colonized and acculturated society” ⁸² ; universal onto-phenomenological categories cease to capture the racialized experience of being-in-the-world. In “the white world,” Fanon writes, the “image of one’s body is solely negating. All around the body reigns an atmosphere of certain uncertainty.” ⁸³ Here, instead of a strictly physical or neurological impediment, it is what Fanon calls an “affective tetanization” ⁸⁴ that has the potential to restrict one’s range of actions. Hence, fantasy and dreams begin to replace the wish for unimpeded freedom in the here and now: the patient in the overly oppressive classical hospital setting is condemned “to exercise his freedom in the unreal world of fantasy” ⁸⁵ and, likewise, the “dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality. [. . .] During colonization the colonized subject frees himself night after night between nine in the evening and six in the morning.” ⁸⁶

But freedom as non-alienation also has a positive connotation when freedom is to be understood, in part, as a kind of belonging—or, at least, when freedom cannot be articulated without recourse to some form of belonging. Fanon tells us that “systematized delusions, hysterical manifestations and neurotic behaviours must be considered reactional conducts of an ego at odds with intersocial relations.” ⁸⁷ The “I” or self’s irreducibly social or dialogical nature reveals the importance of maintaining, to the greatest degree possible, the psychiatric patient’s existing social relations. Because “mental illness is often manifest through an alteration in the notion of the ‘I,’” ⁸⁸ it is of the utmost importance to allow patients to hold onto personal items, clothes, wedding rings, etc., in order to preserve a stable sense of self—for example, to “call a married woman, a mother of two or three children, by her maiden name, means obliging her to take a step backward.” ⁸⁹ In line with many theorists of recognition, Fanon argues that much of the importance of maintaining a unity of the self is for the sake of practical identity formation. ⁹⁰ The basic idea here is that we cannot know what to do without having recourse to appealing to some idea of who we are. Freedom and the proper exercising of subjectivity does not exist in a vacuum, outside of determinate social context. One’s sense of self, identity, or self-understanding plays a constitutive function in giving freedom its content. So, as we shall see, in arguing in favor of integrating more culturally relevant events for the patients at Blida-Joinville, Fanon says that “for a Muslim, to live also means to have the chance to celebrate the end of Ramadan.” ⁹¹

The source of this non-alienation or belonging, however, cannot become rigid or fixed. In other words, for Fanon, belonging cannot come at the expense of human dynamism and ceaseless rejuvenation. Fanon’s famous “final prayer” that concludes Black Skin, White Masks—“O my body, always make me a man who questions!” ⁹² —conveys a radically non-teleological view of freedom as process or a “permanent tension.” ⁹³ This conviction or principle of freedom is arguably predicated on an existentialist ⁹⁴ evaluation of the human being’s essential qualities and capabilities: “In the hospital [. . .] people are what constitute the goal, that is the goal of our daily action, [so] it becomes clear [. . .] that no dose of habit, of habituation, of automatism can intervene. For people have the extraordinary quality of being in constant renewal.” ⁹⁵ Here, the enemy of freedom becomes not so much alienation or a lack of belonging but habit, routine, inaction, weariness, etc. One of the problems Fanon associates with classical internment approaches is that it offers “a false protection” in the form of asylum, which fosters “the patient’s lethargy, a sort of wakeful sleep.” ⁹⁶ Therapeutic practice must speak to this feature of human freedom, then, and ought to consist in “life in movement, the involvement of the boarders, their commitment, their engagement.” ⁹⁷

So, Fanon tells us, a “person makes or unmakes him or herself every day. Every day the task has to be conducted with tenacity.” ⁹⁸ But this making or unmaking never occurs in isolation. And against the formal freedom procured through the pronouncement that “[s]lavery shall no longer exist on French soil,” ⁹⁹ Fanon reminds us that the “real leap consists of introducing invention into life. In the world I am heading for, I am endlessly creating myself.” ¹⁰⁰ Freedom, we may summarize, is self-constitution. The active and voluntary participation of the individual in the cultivation of this self is necessary, though the content and source of this self and its practical reasons are not derived exclusively internally but are irreducibly and unavoidably socially mediated. ¹⁰¹ While Fanon arguably gives us some possible examples—ranging from being a parent to a Muslim to a revolutionary—he does not attempt to delineate which shapes or kinds of selfhood one ought to pursue. ¹⁰² Beyond some broad and largely egalitarian normative ideals, ¹⁰³ what self-constitution concretely looks like is necessarily context-dependent while remaining to a large degree open-ended, both with respect to the nature of the context-dependent self and the possibilities for the creation of entirely new shapes of selfhood. Fanonian self-constitution may be briefly contrasted, here, with a closely related shape of freedom—self-realization. The term “realization” arguably implies a latent substance that preexists and anticipates its realization. In this case, the critique of essentialism, for instance, often holds weight; recognition is granted to a preexisting self and misrecognition disqualifies this self from being granted dignity and respect. As self-constitution, however, freedom is understood as something transformational. Therefore, for the revolutionary movement, Fanon asserts that what is fundamentally at stake is “the type of social relations they will establish and their idea of the future of humanity.” ¹⁰⁴ It is a new form of life that must be forged through the struggle for independence. “Decolonization,” Fanon writes, “never goes unnoticed, for it focuses on and fundamentally alters being” and, therefore, “is truly the creation of a new men.” ¹⁰⁵

Fanon’s Therapeutic Strategy of Freedom: The Role of Recognition and Culture

We now have a broad picture of what freedom means for Fanon: not only autonomy and agency without arbitrary barriers but non-alienation and constant renewal, too—in sum, I have argued, self-constitution. It remains to be seen how this picture of freedom as self-constitution more-or-less successfully navigates the recognition trap. I continue in this section the line of inquiry into how Fanon’s clinical studies and practices shed light on the nature of freedom and self-constitution. I especially focus on Fanon’s attempts to implement social therapy in Blida-Joinville, not because I suggest that social therapy is a worthy substitute for broader political transformation or that the therapist plays a privileged role in the pursuit of decolonial or anti-racist freedom but because it gives us a clearer view of the ways that recognition necessarily figures into a free life. The foundational importance of culture for disalienation revealed in these clinical practices and studies, in turn, gives us a more precise, albeit no less open-ended, view of Fanonian freedom.

Fanon arrived in Algeria in the fall of 1953, promptly taking up his post as medical director at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital and getting to work introducing social therapeutic reforms. Fanon’s description of the treatment of North African patients in France in the 1952 essay “The ‘North African Syndrome’” largely mirrors what Fanon came to find in Blida. The North African in France—whom Fanon describes as “starving for humanity [. . . and] complete recognition,” ¹⁰⁶ whom the doctors “thingify by calling him systematically Mohammed” ¹⁰⁷ —faces medical personnel with an “a priori” attitude. It is frequently assumed, Fanon describes, that the North African has no real illness and so, instead, is diagnosed with the so-called “North African syndrome.” ¹⁰⁸ Algerian Arabs, Fanon describes, likewise continue to be systematically misrecognized in the hospital setting by the largely European staff. Antoine Porot, one of the designers of the Blida-Joinville Hospital and the founder of what would become known as the “Algiers School,” had firmly established an ethnopsychiatric paradigm prior to Fanon’s arrival, explicitly diagnosing Muslim North Africans across the board as essentially and naturally primitive and prone to crime and dishonesty. ¹⁰⁹

Fanon would come to find, however, that employing just any humanistic or social therapeutic approach for addressing the patients’ disorders, which the Algiers School regime could only have exacerbated, would be deficient. In other words, simply importing the social therapeutic methods Fanon practiced at Saint-Alban with the radical psychiatrist François Tosquelles turned out to be a “methodological” error made “possible only through an attitude devoid of objectivity.” ¹¹⁰ Initial social therapy measures at Blida-Joinville included celebrations organized by the patients, participatory theater, film nights, a hospital journal, and weaving workshops. Fanon and his colleague Jacques Azoulay report in a 1954 article that while these measures were an immediate success among the European women, they were a complete failure among the Muslim men, who represented over half of the hospital division. ¹¹¹ The Muslim patients, they write, experienced a “twofold alienation resulting from the tyranny of subjectivity”—that is, not only were they experiencing mental illness, but their abilities to feel at home were doubly threatened by the sociocentricity of the hospital’s cultural practices. ¹¹² And the reasons for the inefficacy of the new program were clear: the social therapeutic measures were not adapted to the Muslim patients’ cultural and social milieu. The games and films were European, the celebrations were often not religious or familial in nature (which the authors report as appearing rather abstract to the Muslim patients), the hospital journal was attempting to cater to a largely illiterate population with a strong oral tradition, and the handicraft workshops were viewed as unappealing “feminine” work to the men. ¹¹³ “Socio-therapy,” Fanon and Azoulay conclude, “would only be possible to the extent that social morphology and forms of sociability were taken into consideration.” ¹¹⁴ Taking the Indigenous “forms of socialibility” seriously, practically speaking, meant establishing a Moorish café, bringing in a professional Muslim storyteller, and introducing regular celebrations of traditional Muslim feasts and holidays, among other things. ¹¹⁵ If the point of social therapy is to rediscover one’s freedom, as Fanon suggests, then it must entail the immanent situation of the possibilities of this freedom within an already existing self-understanding or cultural context. The point, Fanon writes, is to “relearn [. . .], not to add onto an existent personality a sum of behaviors. [. . .] It is a matter of enabling the boarder to reprise, to begin again by helping him or her to understand better, to grasp things better, that is to say, to grasp him- or herself better again.” ¹¹⁶ For the socially minded therapist, this means granting affirmative recognition to the patients’ cultural particularity and attempting to understand the ontological and metaphysical assumptions they carry. ¹¹⁷

At the same time, this recognition is only significant to the extent that culture is understood as a practice of freedom. Against the fixed or reified view of culture we have already seen Fanon critique intellectuals and the Négritude movement for, what Fanon might conversely call “authentic” culture ¹¹⁸ cannot be untethered from social practice. It is not an abstract ideal or set of values that a cultural community must reach toward or resuscitate. Culture “eminently eludes any form of simplification. In its essence, it is the very opposite of custom, which is always a deterioration of culture.” ¹¹⁹ Instead, Fanon descriptively and normatively depicts culture, when colonialism is absent, as being “living and open to the future [. . .], permeated by spontaneous, generous, fertile lines of force.” ¹²⁰ Fanon’s conception of culture as a dynamic and open-ended process is, I suggest, the practical means by which he seeks to reconcile freedom’s principles of non-alienation and ceaseless rejuvenation, as well as both the irreducible sociality Fanon associates with the self and his seemingly individualist sovereign declaration, “I am my own foundation.” ¹²¹ These principles may otherwise appear to be in tension, for non-alienation or belonging might evoke a sense of stasis, which stands opposed to the ceaseless movement or spontaneity that characterizes a kind of existential freedom. But despite the fluid nature of culture, Fanon suggests that cultures still provide “systems of reference.” ¹²² Since it is not “possible for a man to evolve otherwise than within the framework of a culture that recognizes him and that he decides to assume,” ¹²³ one of the preeminent wrongs of colonialism’s cultural imperialism is its liquidation and denigration of a more-or-less coherent system of values, norms, and practical identities that substantiates or grounds to a large degree individual practices of freedom.

To summarize, cultural membership or a sense of belonging within a political community “cannot take place without the prior reciprocal recognition of the group by the individual and of the individual by the group.” ¹²⁴ But because culture is understood as social practice or a form of life, as opposed to an abstract ideal, it is not reducible to intersubjective reciprocity alone. Fanon’s demands for the radical transformation of the socioeconomic order—“disalienation will have been achieved only when things, in the most materialist sense, have resumed their rightful place” ¹²⁵ —should remind us that his project is not concerned with recognition or identity at the expense of what we may designate as “material” considerations. ¹²⁶ But Fanon does not then follow Fraser’s suggestion in adopting a “two-dimensional conception of justice”: one recognitive, the other redistributive. ¹²⁷ Both elements are bound up together in culture and, by extension, a fuller picture of freedom. ¹²⁸ While it is imperative to avoid morally corrosive varieties of recognition, especially pernicious forms of essentialism and recognition-seeking that reproduce recognitive inequalities (e.g., “lactification”), recognition remains both an essential and necessary feature of lives. It substantiates the culturally situated practical identities that we take up in the process of self-constitution while ideally keeping in view the inherent plasticity of these identities. Michael Monahan makes a clarifying distinction between propositional and practical (re)cognition. The former “demands full and complete knowledge of the authentic identity of the recognized as a kind of static object to be ‘grasped’ in a determinate and final way.” ¹²⁹ Conversely, practical knowledge consists of “knowing-how” rather than “knowing that,” as might be the case when one states that they “know” how to play guitar. ¹³⁰ There is no definitive telos to Fanon’s project of freedom, just as it would be foolish to declare that there is some discernible final end to a musical tradition. Beyond some broad normative commitments to a new form of humanism, he does not give us an outline or blueprint for what this self-constitution might look like. Fanon, much more so than Marx, avoids “writing recipes [. . .] for the cook-shops of the future.” ¹³¹

Conclusion

This inquiry demands further investigation. On the one hand, a variety of perplexities arise that are, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this article. The most striking among them concerns Fanon’s famous defense of decolonial violence in the opening chapter of The Wretched of the Earth. How can doing violence to the other and recognizing the other both be integral features of a project of freedom? A partial answer to this question is that Fanonian freedom is arguably predicated on what is at most a contextual—that is, not ontological—necessity for violence, however intrinsic this articulation of violence may be. ¹³² This opens possibilities for decolonial “work” that grants the oppressed a sense of dignity and independence while avoiding some of the tragic and self-destructive effects of violence. ¹³³ Recall that the problem with the master granting “freedom” to the slave was not the absence of struggle or violence per se but that the freed slave had not enacted their own transformative cycle of freedom. The dialectic of freedom that Fanon outlines in The Wretched of the Earth, however, points not only to contextually bound trade-offs between political independence and recognitive reciprocity but a sequence of priorities; decolonial liberation is one of the “conditions necessary for [. . .] culture.” ¹³⁴ Whether it demands violence or not, a “turning away” ¹³⁵ from the literal or figurative master may be necessary to secure certain basic preconditions of equality that subsequently serve as a foundation for reciprocal recognition. It is only “once the colonial status is irreversibly excluded,” Fanon tells us, that a more universal process of freedom-production can take place and that the “two cultures can affront each other, enrich each other.” ¹³⁶ We may likewise wonder whether authentic culture really provides a satisfying answer to the recognition trap. Culture may be necessary for scaffolding individual agency, but what happens when one finds oneself in a culture that is too restrictive or arbitrarily limits one’s self-constitutive agency? A preliminary answer might suggest that the necessity of open-endedness for Fanon’s idealized view of culture exists partially for the sake of cultural responsiveness to problems that emerge internally. Conversely, a reasonable critic might also suggest that the existentialist emphasis on novelty and the ceaseless rejuvenation of cultural practices and identities demands too much of everyday life and threatens belonging to a much larger degree than is acknowledged here.

On the other hand, I think that the relevancy of Fanon’s insights cut across diverse struggles for recognition, freedom, and belonging. Against, or between, proponents of the recognition paradigm and its radical critics, Fanon helps us think about both the positive and negative, freedom-affirming and freedom-denying, roles that recognition can play in our social and political lives. Crucially, despite whatever trade-offs or “traps” we might encounter as we seek affirmative recognition from the other, Fanon does not advise us to abandon the ideal of recognitive reciprocity. Here, Fanon departs from the existentialist view of intersubjectivity as necessarily antagonistic, along with its rejection of the Hegelian notion that two recognitive subjects might come to “recognize themselves as mutually recognizing each other.” ¹³⁷ In declaring a supersession of the subject-object relation an impossibility, Sartre ontologizes misrecognition: “I am—at the very root of my being—the project of assimilating and making an object of the Other.” ¹³⁸ The Other for Fanon is portrayed as something not to assimilate but touch, feel and discover. ¹³⁹ Racism, and therefore pervasive and systematic misrecognition, “is not a constant of the human spirit” but “a disposition fitting into a well-defined system.” ¹⁴⁰ The hope for reciprocity and mutual recognition, not merely as a regulative ideal, is made possible by the irreducibly social character of oppression: “I am fighting for the birth of a human world, in other words, a world of reciprocal recognitions.” ¹⁴¹