Chiasmi International

One of the strongest critiques against Fanon’s work centers on the idea that Fanon leaves black subjects caught in slavish regard of whites. Such a depiction of the black subject does not explain Fanon’s own life and his ability to escape slavish regard of whites and become a formative intellectual. Such slavish regard of whites, in other words, the idea of an inferiority complex has been challenged by notable current black philosophers, including Lucius Outlaw. In autobiographical references within Fanon and Outlaw’s work, the two scholars share similar childhood experiences but draw very different conclusions on the development of an inferiority complex. I argue that this estrangement in slavish regard of whites occurs when reading Fanon’s work only through a dialectic framework. A phenomenological reading of Fanon’s work illuminates the ambiguous possibilities of experience. In a phenomenological reading of experience, admitting inferiority complexes does not necessarily debilitate and trap subjects in perpetuity.

Drawing from Frantz Fanon’s writings on racialized alienation and psychopathology, this paper argues that Fanon’s engagement with phenomenology shaped his framing of the sociogenic origins of racialized perceptions of criminality in French psychiatry and that such a novel etiology reflects a commitment to political transformation. First, I trace Fanon’s notion of sociogeny as it develops both in his early writings, and in secondary scholarship on Fanon that highlights the phenomenological dimensions of sociogeny. In the second section, I turn specifically to racialized conceptions of criminality within French colonial medicine and Fanon’s writings on psychiatry to trace some complicated aspects of his critique of colonization and its relationship to medical institutions, including the forced confinement of psychiatric patients. I then conclude by briefly returning to how Fanon’s conception of sociogeny functions in a phenomenological register, and I propose that Fanon’s interests in Merleau-Ponty are based on important shared political and sociological commitments across their respective writings. However, I propose that Fanon’s interventions in phenomenology during the mid-twentieth century contain core critical insights, not shared by his predecessor, that remain relevant for critical phenomenologists today.

In this essay, I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s Institution Course Notes to clarify Patrick Wolfe’s claim that, for settler colonialism, “invasion is a structure, not an event.” I also engage critically with colonial assumptions in Merleau-Ponty’s own work, including his Eurocentric response to questions such as: “[I]s there a field of world history or universal history? Is there an intended accomplishment? A closure on itself? A true society?” In this essay, I ask different questions – with Merleau-Ponty, against him, and beyond him. I neither defend Merleau-Ponty against his own worst self nor disown him as “bad” philosophical kin. Rather, I learn what I can from Merleau-Ponty for a critical phenomenology of settler colonialism and for amplifying movements to transform and abolish settler colonial structures at the level of thought, being, and politics.

In his notes for the course entitled “The Problem of Passivity: Sleep, the Unconscious, Memory,” Merleau-Ponty describe the notion of “negative hallucination” as “a perception, but not recognized for what it is.” This essay analyses this figure as it is taken up by Merleau-Ponty in direct dialogue with Freud’s work. To begin, through the double category of the “negative” and the “perceived,” Merleau-Ponty broaches the question of the “place” of dreams by adopting an eccentric position that sheds light on an unexplored pathway of Freudian theory. Moreover, a crucial point can be found in the idea of a negative margin, that appears to implicitly configure a redefinition of the hallucinatory in the direction of chiasm. To highlight this aspect, I review in a preliminary manner some passages of Phenomenology of Perception in which the question of the “place” of negative hallucination emerges in particularly dramatic terms.

This essay aims to shed new light on Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology through the analysis of the problem of incommensurable, by taking into consideration Gaetano Chiurazzi’s work, Dynamis. Ontologia dell’incommensurabile. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of expression is assumed as the reading key of this comparison: it allows to connect the theme of incommensurability (considered in the first part) both to the problem of history and of intersubjective relationship (analyzed in the second part), and to the fundamental problem of perception (third part). In particular, the analysis of the concept of expression will stress the ontological value of the phenomenological description of perception, pointing out a particular affinity between the ontology of incommensurable and the phenomenological approach. Therefore, the discovery of incommensurability and the phenomenological method will be interpreted as two different starting points for one and the same path, which leads to a non-substantialist and relational conception of Being. Rather than providing a new interpretation of this definition of Being, this comparison aims to make it clearer and better understandable, by underlining some of its essential aspects. In particular, I will consider the possibility to interpret consciousness and the subject as expressive events, analyzing the philosophical consequences of this definition.

Building on Gilles Deleuze’s famous declaration that “the brain is the screen”, wholly emblematic of his thinking on cinema, this essay interrogates the place of the body within this thought in relation to Merleau-Pontyan-inspired critiques. My aim is to determine whether Deleuze offers a theory of the perceiving body in relation to spectatorial experience, despite the risk that it possibly imply a logical contradiction in the construction of the diptych on cinema. Indeed, the insistence of the body in this experience, as can be seen from Deleuze’s two works, could deny the very possibility of this “objective and diffuse” perception to which the movement-image would give us access according to the philosopher.

The time of the confrontation between psychoanalysis and philosophy seems to belong in the past, and even to be outdated. A new path, however, is available to us today. We must concern ourselves less with the benefits of philosophy for psychoanalysis (claiming, for example, that it could illuminate that which it looks for differently) and more with the shockwaves that psychoanalysis has generated within philosophy. Philosophy, and phenomenology in particular, has reached its “limits.” These limits are not the limits of a discipline, but those of thought itself. “Can we think the unthinkable?” – such is the question that psychoanalysis asks phenomenology. By retracing Freud’s trajectory, and in particular his passage from the first to the second topical, which was caused by phenomena leading him to radicalize his thought (First World War, death of his daughter Sophie, cancer), this essay attempts to make visible how phenomenology, too, must now deepen its project. The expression « Ça n’a rien à voir » (in which Ça refers to the Freudian id) will say, strictly speaking, that the “Ça” in the second topic cannot be seen because it can neither be seen nor aimed at, and yet it always stays there. This obscure point of thought is also that which phenomenology today must attempt. It is on this basis, and on this basis only, that the confrontation between psychoanalysis “and” philosophy will find its impetus and be renewed.