Synopses & Reviews
Antiblack racism avows reason is white while emotion, and thus supposedly unreason, is black. Challenging academic adherence to this notion, which seeks theoretical inspiration from white theorists and only experience from thinkers of color, Lewis Gordon here offers a philosophical portrait of the thought and life of the Martinican-turned-Algerian revolutionary psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon as an antidote, an exemplar of "living thought," against forms of reason marked by colonialism and racism. After a discussion of what it means to examine what a great theorist "said" and offering his own theory and method of existential philosophical biography through what he calls "a teleological suspensions of disciplinarity," where a philosopher is willing to go beyond philosophy for the sake of engaging reality, Gordon critically engages such topics as Fanonian dialectics, ethics, existentialism, humanism, philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, political theory, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, race theory, revolutionary praxis, theory of sex and sexuality, and writing through translations of his own from the original French texts. Gordon also engages controversies such as Fanon's writings on gender and homosexuality to those on the underclass and violence and brings together scholarship, some of which have not been translated into English, from across the Global South, which addresses a shortcoming of much avowed "theory from the South," namely, the duplication of the colonial and racist geography of reason as legitimately a Northern enterprise on or about Southern reality. Theorists from the Global South emerge as interlocutors alongside Northern ones as an exemplification of what, Gordon argues, Fanon actually represented in his plea to build new ideas and establish newer and healthier human relationships beyond colonial paradigms.
Review
"What Fanon Said is well researched and stages a very complex dialogue with existing scholarship on Fanon. Professor Lewis Gordon's vast intellectual/academic knowledge allows us to read Fanon in new and different ways: Lewis Gordon contextualizes Fanon's thought in a wide arch of knowledge--from St Augustine and traditional Akan philosophy through Fanon's contemporary interlocutors such as Simone De Beauvoir and J. P. Sartre, L. S. Senghor, etc., through to more recent continental philosophers such as Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida. Along the way Professor Gordon also incorporates the relevant debates from contemporary theoretical movements such as critical race theory. What Fanon Said is a provocative and illuminating study of Fanon's work and it will have a significant impact on contemporary debates about Fanon."--Abdul R. JanMohamed, University of California, Berkeley
"As a careful and systematic analysis of the major controversies that have surrounded the works of Frantz Fanon, this book is a must read. Lewis Gordon delivers on his promise of boldly examining these controversies while at the same time providing a very spirited defense of many of Fanon's positions. What Fanon Said is now the most comprehensive treatment of the many and ever so intense polemics arising out of Fanon's works that continue to be fiercely debated."--Paget Henry, Brown University
As a careful and systematic analysis of the major controversies that have surrounded Fanon, this book is a must read. Lewis Gordon delivers on his promise of boldly examining these controversies while providing a spirited defense of many of Fanon s positions. -Paget Henry, Brown University
Synopsis
Challenging the notion of theory as white and experience as black, Lewis Gordon here offers a philosophical portrait of the thought and life of the Martinican-turned-Algerian revolutionary psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon as an example of "living thought" against the legacies of colonialism and racism, and thereby shows the continued relevance and importance of his ideas.
Synopsis
Antiblack racism avows reason is white while emotion, and thus supposedly unreason, is black. Challenging academic adherence to this notion, Lewis R. Gordon offers a portrait of Martinican-turned-Algerian revolutionary psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon as an exemplar of "living thought" against forms of reason marked by colonialism and racism. Working from his own translations of the original French texts,
Gordon critically engages everything in Fanon from dialectics, ethics, existentialism, and humanism to philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and political theory as well as psychiatry and psychoanalysis.
Gordon takes into account scholars from across the Global South to address controversies around Fanon's writings on gender and sexuality as well as political violence and the social underclass. In doing so, he confronts the replication of a colonial and racist geography of reason, allowing theorists from the Global South to emerge as interlocutors alongside northern ones in a move that exemplifies what, Gordon argues, Fanon represented in his plea to establish newer and healthier human relationships beyond colonial paradigms.
About the Author
Lewis R. Gordon is Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut, Storrs; European Union Visiting Chair in Philosophy at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France; and Nelson Mandela Distinguished Visiting Professor at Rhodes University, South Africa. His books include
Existentia Africana;
Disciplinary Decadence;
An Introduction to Africana Philosophy; and, with Jane Anna Gordon,
Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface, with Acknowledgments
Foreword
by Sonia Dayan-Hezbrun
Introduction On What a Great Thinker Said
Chapter 1 "I Am from Martinique"
Chapter 2 Writing through the Zone of Nonbeing
Chapter 3 Living Experience, Embodying Possibility
Chapter 4 Revolutionary Therapy
Chapter 5 Counseling the Damned
Conclusion Requiem for the Messenger
Afterword
by Drucilla Cornell