 Felly, ydy'n meddwl yma'r ysgol ffyrdd ymgwrth ymlaen, ac... Fe'n gweld i'r ffyrdd ymlaen, beth y gallwn i'r ffyrdd ymlaen yma. Felly, mae'r gwrth, mae'n PEE, yn fwy. Fyny'n gael. Yn golygu, mae'n golygu, mae'n golygu'n golygu'n golygu'n golygu'n golygu'n golygu'n golygu'n golygu. Fyny'n gael, mae'n golygu'n gael, mae'n golygu'n gael, there are lots of things that one does and people think it's like pills before swine or something like this, but one of the things I try to do is to come up with a little metaphor for how the lecture will be taken from the text. Or taken from some aspect of the way in which we're looking at the text, so I tore through the archives, was I think what I suggested for the trio. I can't even remember what it was for the other two Haitian texts, or I did Robinson Crusoe, and I was a boyage around the island and whatever. So I tried to think what would be the appropriate metaphor for this text. At the first site it should be something to do with masking or unmasking, peeling, gwbl e back the mask and that would be sort of neat. It would be sort of uncovering things and revealing things, but I want to suggest to you and if I don't suggest anything else to you, if you suddenly start nodding off or falling asleep maybe this is the first important thing I want to say that this is not a book about unmasking. The title is deceptive. It's not a book of revelation. This is not a book where youmac the service, you get the truth I ghaeth y tro, i gael ei funny am oedden nhw'n gwneud o Grodd, a byddwn yn gwneud enghreifflol yng Nghymru o'i ffroddau Llyfrgellach Ym Gwrdd ym Gwrdd Ym Gwrdd Ym Gwrdd Ym Gwrdd ym Gwrdd Ym Gwrdd Ym Gwrdd Ym Gwrdd ym Gwrdd ym Gwrdd, a chi'n medd видiaeth sydd fod yn ei ddweud. Y ddigon y Ffasad Gentyl a'r bobl yn gyda'r 1923 erbyn yn ymdweithio'r Eugol a'r ffasad sydd yn ddigon y Ddod, yn dystyn, yn y dystiad, yn y troi, yn y ffasad bryd, yn y ddigon y ffasad. Yr unrhyw dechrau, yr Ycrissina yma, yn y cwestiad. Yr ffaith yma y dyma eich llen o ysgol yw'r ffaith yw'r darthyn. O'r ddwy'r rhai, yw'r gweithio'r tifael, y ddigon y Llyfr, y gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio, Rydyn ni'n gwyllt mentrach. Rydyn ni weithio'r ffordd, a rydyn ni'n gael mae'r ffordd ddyn. Yn cyflawn ni'n gafodd, yn ystod a'iŬ gŵr. Felly bydd hwn yn ffordd, bydd hwn yn ffordd o'r gapasol, rydyn ni'n byd. Bydd hwn yn ffordd, roedd eithaf. Yn gweith amazon, bydd ddyn ni'n ffordd. But yn ffordd o phrys honno. Mae'n ffordd. Nid ydydd y cwmp – nodd mwy, bydd hwn, dyfodol o'r'un. I think for Fanon, the surface is just as important as what lies beneath, and what lies beneath is also another surface. So I'll try and investigate that a little. Although I do like this image, obviously these are masks. They're kind of interesting masks, these ones, because on the one hand they're very specific. What is this a mask? Who is this a mask of? Sorry? Guy Fawkes, right? A very specific, named individual, comes from a particular historical period. But the idea of this mask, especially its use in recent culture, since the film Beef of Indeta, has everyone seen Beef of Indeta? If only one, two people? Okay, a few people have seen it. Go and see Beef of Indeta. If nothing else for the final scene in which spoiler alert, the House of Commons... Something happens to the House of Commons. Which makes me as a British person who doesn't much like the House of Commons quite happy. Anyway, the way in which this particular mask has been used has been taken up by Anonymous, right? The internet collective Anonymous. And also it's a sort of figure of general diffuse ubiquitous social protest. So the idea is we are all Guy Fawkes, or we are all Beef of Indeta, whatever the V, the figure in Beef of Indeta. You take on a mask in order to take on a new identity and or to diffuse your own sense of identity is what's going here. In the case of the Anonymous mask, if the Guy Fawkes mask, masking is empowering. Again, I don't think it's quite so simple in Fano and we'll talk about that too. But again, it's very much against the Freudian notion that is unmasking that is empowering. That is unmasking that leads to the cure, possibly. That is unmasking and retelling one's secrets. Here it is taking on the mask, which precisely by the fact that it is being, that it is repetitive, right? We see all the identical copies here, that you lose yourself in a collective and you gain perhaps a collective identity then, but not an individual or a personal identity, which I think is interesting. But I think masks are also interesting again in this notion of remake remodel. It is that they are based on the face. They have the characteristics of the face, the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the eyebrows, the mustache in this case and so on. But they also are hiding the face, right? There's some kind of play between revelation and hiding and covering things up. We both have the repetition of the mask itself and the way in which the mask both repeats and remakes the face. The same but different, different but the same. So this is, I think, a thought that is going to work its way through what I want to say about Fanon. I want to say also that this book, also in terms of repetition, somebody in my seminar group wrote a blog trying to say how, that this book, and I agree, I don't know who it was, I forget, that this book, a lot of themes from previous books came up in this one, surprisingly. Thank you, Charlotte, it was. I think she pointed to Leviathan, which I didn't see immediately, and a couple of others, I forget what. I agree though that this is a book which perhaps surprisingly is also the conjuncture of a lot of themes, a lot of approaches that we've seen before. I point out Judith Butler, which is probably one of your least favourite books from last semester. But actually I think Fanon and Butler are very close in interesting ways. So this may give us a new perspective on Judith Butler. Obviously Césaire, I mean Césaire is Fanon's mentor, hero to some extent, though we'll see how he turns against Fanon, almost in the course of this, sorry, he turns against Césaire, almost in the course of this book. But Fanon, Césaire, both come from Maginique. Césaire is about ten years older, was about ten years older than Fanon. Fanon knew Césaire personally, and Césaire was just quoted endlessly in here. And then of course Freud, and I'm going to concentrate mostly on the relationship between Fanon and Freud as well, sort of bringing them together here. I also want to say, I'm going to try and explain why I think this is the case. But I think this is a particularly difficult book. In fact when I was checking my seminar groups blogs this morning, I was expecting them all to say some version of what I heard last week, which was this is my new least favourite book. Surprisingly people seem to like it more than I thought they would, but I think this is actually quite a difficult and a hard book, and it's interesting to think why it is difficult. And then I'd like to give you some sort of sense of where we're going. So we'll talk about Freud, try to suggest connections with last week. Fanon, give you a little bit more about him. Talk about hybridity, or mixture, I guess that's a fancy word for mixture. We'll talk about postcolonialism, psychology, identity, and action. This mask is from Venice, it's a Venetian carnival mask that's worth. And then one of the things I've noted is that it can be difficult figuring out what the point of a lecture is. And that's kind of understandable, it's two hours of something like me sitting down from nattering on, you all are sort of half awake, the book is a best half read, and you're trying to figure out what's going on, paying attention, and try to figure out what actually matters. So I've got a new strategy which is to just tell you what's important. So to give you the punchline right at the start. There are other things that this lecture is hoping to say and to get to, but if I were to try and condense this lecture into two sentences, this is it. So write this down I suggest by the way, that's a little hint. Remember this bit, if you don't remember anything else. OK, Fanon's book returns to Freud, but also to other central figures of the 20th century, to produce a fragmented disjointed hybrid text. I mean this is to a sort of preview, this is why I think this is a difficult text. It's an obviously incomplete text and it's a text that in some ways revels in its own incompleteness, unlike, say, Freud's book. Christina pointed out that Freud's book was also fragmented, but Freud pretends it isn't. Fanon doesn't really pretend that it's not a disjointed text. That's what I mean by it, it announces its own insufficiency. It's as if the book or Fanon is aware and doesn't really care that it's unfinished, that it's a hodgepodge, a way of saying, hodgepodge, hodgepodge. One of those words is sort of a real word I think. A mixture, a melange, right, of many different styles, of many different thoughts and also I think perhaps many different arguments too, come together. I was thinking if you handed in this book as an essay, I don't know, B? B minus? There's a certain sort of, I don't know, you could revise this. You could work on this a little bit more, clarify where your points are and where your sources are and so on and so forth. Of course, that doesn't mean it's a bad book. I mean if you handed in, I don't know, the Wastelanders and that's one essay, you'd also probably get a G, I don't know. But it's interesting because it's supposedly an essay, right? A long essay or perhaps a series of essays. But in some ways it doesn't fit the form or the genre of the essay. Or it doesn't fully fit that form. The image and, oh, more typos, and the imaginary, forget that in, the image and the imaginary are central to his account. I'm going to talk quite specifically what I mean by the imaginary. But in the end, coherence is only achieved through action. I mean, I guess that's, again, my take home point, front-loading this, I might well give up in about five minutes. I'll have said everything I want to say, but I'll natter on anyway. Coherence is only achieved through action, not through self-reflection. We become by doing. So the reason, again, the short version, and then you can stop writing all this down and not off as you were hoping to do, is that this is a book that is completed through action beyond the bounds of the book. That's my suggestion. This is the thesis I'm going to try and persuade you of. Of course you don't need to be persuaded, but it would be nice if you were nice for me anyway. Okay, so the first section here is on Freud. There he is with his cigar. Sometimes the cigar is not the cigar, but sometimes it is the cigar. And this is something I was talking about in my seminar. At least this notion, we're all Freudians now. W. H. Jordan supposedly said that. I don't think he actually said that. That seems apocryphal. But the internet seems to believe. Google seems to believe that he said it. And it's a sort of riff on the famous phrase, we're all socialists now, which was first uttered by Sir William George Granville, Venerables Vernon Harcourt. I don't know much about Sir William George Granville, Venerables Vernon Harcourt. But I'm willing to bet that he didn't work as a chimney sweeper in a factory. Let's put it that way. The most aristocratic name one could possibly imagine. And the same phrase repeated by the future Edward VII. So what happens? The idea is that socialism has permeated public discourse. That everyone at least has to make some kind of nod towards socialism. That's what Harcourt and the future Edward VII for the Prince of Wales are saying. That's a notion that somehow Freud, whether we agree with him or don't agree with him, is somehow everywhere. So the question is what to do with that kind of situation. So what do I mean? What do I mean that we're all Freudians now? I mean the first thing is that the vocabulary that Freud provides is ubiquitous. We use it all the time whether or not we're realising that we're using it. We use it in off-hand flip, precisely unthinking manners. The notion of ego, he's got a big ego. In some ways the notion of... The word ego is pure Freud or in this context although perhaps we're mangling or misusing it but we're still using the words or the concepts of somebody's neurotic or somebody's depressed or repressed. Some of these are in denial or whatever. These are all terms and concepts, words that are coming from Freud and Aventador every day vocabulary. But it's not just the words. I think it's also much of the thought. Again, even though we don't perhaps recognise where it's coming from, many of the words that are coming from Freud and Aventador again, even though we don't perhaps recognise where it's coming from, many of the ideas that we have about how to deal with problems, how to deal with trauma, that we should talk about them, that we should open up, that we should be prepared to accept that we may have repressed something and that that is somehow hurting us in some way. That there's value to talking to a stranger about our problems. Nothing would have been stranger or odder to your typical 19th century Victorian gentlemen or woman. You don't talk to your intimate circle either, you simply don't go and talk to a stranger about your deepest desires or fears and so on, but that's now become a common trope. Everyone, if we might not go to an analyst or a therapist, but the idea of going to a councillor is far from strange or maybe amongst the first things that people suggest if you are going through a bad time or something. Then the imagery, the imagery of the couch. I mean, here this is a New Yorker cartoon I don't know if you can read it. You've got a king on the couch and the analyst says, we certainly solved your little leader best problem since I saw you last. But we have endless versions of psychoanalytic, jokes and cartoons in the media in more or less popular culture from Woody Allen movies to the New Yorker and so on. Then something about an attitude, a way in which we conceive ourselves, I want to suggest, and Foucault is going to suggest, is borrowed or taken from Freud more or less directly. Foucault's argument will be that our sense of self is based on a sort of confessional mode and that we seek some kind of truth to ourselves when we look within, when we examine our own secrets I suppose. He's going to say that's nonsense by the way, but his problem is not that we're not Freudian enough, his problem is precisely that we are living it, that we are all Freudians now. Denial, what was I going to say about denial? Oh, well, but the next slide I'm going to talk about what we do about that, the problem is that the Freudian will say, as soon as we raise problems, well you are in denial, right? You can't deny what is evident and that's the problem. It's become so self-evident, so much second nature. When we deny our own Freudianism, we fear that we are denying ourselves. Freud is diffused in both high and low culture, I'm suggesting. One of the questions is which Freud, there are many different Freud's. Freud himself, for instance, had a long career. I think, Christine, I was saying last time, for instance, that many different phases, even basic things such as conception of the unconscious, the different models of the unconscious, normally suggest the three, the topographic, the hydraulic and the super ego complex for instance. But he's consistently refining and turning back, repeating, remodeling, if you like, his ideas for the longest time, for instance. He says, basically everything's libido. Everything is the desire for pleasure. And then a famous late essay, he says, well, okay, I was sort of wrong about that. He never quite says I was wrong. He was trying to accommodate his new thoughts to his old thoughts. He says, well, there's also the death drive. So this is an essay called Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It's a very multifaceted theory, many different aspects. And then even at the moment when Freud starts gathering disciples together, and they're literally disciples, he gives them all a little ring, the first nine analysts, they start fighting and he kicks people out. Young is his favourite sort of child that he never had and he kicks young out. And then he squabbles with, I don't know, Adler and so on and so forth. There are very fractious lot, these psychoanalysts. And they often took out their own aggression through analysis, of course. And when Freud went to America, he went to America once in, I think, 1915 to give the clerk lectures in Massachusetts. And they went by boat rather than plane. So they had a lot of time to sit around on the deck. And apparently they were just endlessly analysing each other's dreams. I was like, oh, you sound a little, you know, your aggressive instincts are coming out here and you're a little neurotic, aren't you? So the language of psychoanalysts is quite good at providing ways in which to sort of get digs in as well. And then after Freud dies, there's even more splits and more different versions of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis. You get Kleinians, Winnicotians, Adlerians, I don't know, Youngians and so on and so forth, Lacanians, we'll talk about Lacan in a little while. So there are very few orthodox Freudians these days. So the problem is if you want to be sort of against Freudianism, it's like being against sort of a swarm of bees, you know, which one do you focus your attention on at any one point? So what to do with Freud or these different Freudians, these different Freudianisms, one response has been to attempt to return to to rediscover the Freud that has been abandoned or betrayed or produced. And probably the major figure for this is this guy, Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst and the major sort of enemy for those people who want to return to Freud are the Americans, the American ego psychologists. It's like they got Freud all wrong. We're going to go back, we're going to find, we're going to not necessarily remake because you claim to be finding the original thing, but we're going to go back to the source, we're going to return to Freud. Another way in which people have tried to approach this ubiquitous legacy of Freud is some kind of synthesis brings together Freud and some other figure or some other tradition of thought. For instance, if Freud is one of, I suppose, the master figures of the late 19th century, linking him with one of the others is always a nice thing to try and do. Marx, for instance, if you could do the Freud-Marx synthesis then everyone's happy. Freud Nietzsche's synthesis, a little less common, but brings together Freud and, say, feminism. Difficult to ask on the face of it as we, I guess, see reading on femininity or reading the Dora case, but in many attempts to bring together Freud and feminism. Or Freud and queer theory, again, would seem to be a rather uphill battle, but many attempts to do that bring together Freud and postcolonial theory, for instance. Freud and deconstruction. All these attempts to have a sort of meta-theory, a big theory of everything and somehow integrate Freud within that. Another response to Freud is to relativise him. By that I mean to say, well, Freud works in particular situations, in particular places. I think that's one of the things Fanon is trying to do. I mean, I think he is also trying to synthesise, by the way, and he's trying to bring together, yes, Freud, Marx, et cetera. But he's also trying to say, well, Freud has his limits. Freud perhaps works for European culture. But so, for instance, he says, there's not just things like Oedipus in Martinique. We don't have an Oedipus complex in the Antilles. So denying Freud's universality. Freud against Freud, I think that's the Hendricks position, which I quite like too. We can't completely get rid of Freud, but we can use Freud against him. It's always nice when you can do that with anyone. Turn them back against themselves. But Christine is not the only person here. Who does that? She did it in a particular scintillating and brilliant manner, of course. But this notion of using the tools of the theory itself to question and take issue with some parts of that theory. And then this forgetting Freud. I'm going to suggest that's Foucault's position again as an anticipation that we need to completely break with the Freudian paradigm. Judith Butler, incidentally, also another Freud relativiser. She says, so far so good, but not far enough. He's still a man of his particular cultural conjunction. He can't imagine other forms of family. I mean, that's essentially Butler's argument. How can we expand the norms of familial and social relation beyond those that Freud could imagine? I want to talk particularly about Lacan, because somebody in my seminar group in one of their blogs said they hated all the footnotes. The whole point of a footnote is that kind of excess or surplus to requirement. You don't necessarily have to read them, but if you do read the footnotes, you'll see quite a lot of this guy, Jacques Lacan, come up. Now, Jacques Lacan, if you thought Butler was difficult, if you thought, I don't know, Hobbes was difficult, let me introduce you to perhaps the most difficult prose stylist that I know at least, Jacques Lacan. He's a French psychoanalyst. He loved puns, which he thought, I think he thought they were funny or witty or something, and they're puns in French as well, which makes it even worse. They have to be endlessly translated for people like me who don't speak very good French. Very, very dense, difficult text, but also very, very influential, at least in certain places at certain times. Very, very influential incidentally in Argentina. All the analysts in Argentina in Buenos Aires are Lacanian analysts. If you ever feel the need to have some therapy in Buenos Aires, know that you will be met with a Lacanian. So, 1981, he was working from the 30s, late 30s, I suppose, through to his death, the early 80s. He broke off from the French School of Psychoanalysis, founded his own, so in some ways he's an example of all these splits that I'm talking about, but he's also pressing number one example of somebody who says, who claims to have recovered and reclaimed the real Freud. Not that he is without his synthetic moments. He's particularly influenced by a school of thought called structuralism, which derives from the linguist Ferdinand de Sassure. We don't need to go into the details of that, but it means that he's very much interested in the relationship between linguistics or language and psychoanalysis. So, one of his famous phrases is, the unconscious is structured like a language. The one thing I want to take away from Lacan for our purposes here is that he divides the world, I suppose, up into three regimes, which he calls the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. And his notion of what's meant by those three terms are a little idiosyncratic, so I'll explain them, and I think they will help us to understand Fanon as we go along. So, the imaginary is essentially your relationship to the other. And when he uses the sensory imaginary, it's not just that it's imagined or invented, in some ways everything is invented, but it passes through the image. Quite specifically at this theory of what he calls the mirror stage, that the young child, the infant, recognises him or herself as a self, as an entity, through a process of mirroring, through seeing that image in the glass or something like a looking glass. So, the imaginary is your relationship to the other, which is also therefore your relationship to the self. You establish yourself through your relationship to the other, and it passes through images, pictures. That's the imaginary. The symbolic is the regime of the law, and that is linguistic. The language is the realm of the symbolic, and it passes through the law and names and naming. It's not just thinking of yourself as, I'm a person and I'm separate from, but I'm a person with a specific name and a particular relationship to a social order, essentially, and a specific relation to other names, particularly for Lacan, the name of the father. We're going to bracket off the symbolic. Lacan is very interested in it, but it's not going to help as much. But keep on to this notion of the real, sorry, the imaginary, and also the real. Now, the real for Lacan is what escapes representation, what cannot be depicted or symbolised. So, what falls out of the imaginary, you can just take a picture or paint or whatever, or photograph the real, and it's what goes beyond or falls out of or doesn't fit well within language. So, the real often has to do with trauma, with hurt, but also with what he calls resource, with sexual energy, desire, that never quite fits well within either language or other forms of representation. But in the real, in the realm of the real, you don't have any coherent identity. It's all kind of fragments. Identity depends either on the image or in terms of a legal identity on language, so that's the real. So, the imaginary symbolises the real. I think this is going to help us. So, the real is unattainable, it's trauma, it's what hurts, it's what fractures identity. Identity is the realm of the imaginary, the symbolic is the realm of the law of your legal status. Okay, phanon. I want to suggest that there's been a return to phanon, that the phanon that we're reading is remade and remodeled in some ways. This guy is Homibaba, he's quite a well-known post-colonial theorist, saying the time has come to return to phanon. As always, I believe, a question, how can the human world live its difference, how can a human being live otherwise, in its relationship to the other? But still, the notion that the phanon is somehow back in vogue. We've got to think about why. Okay, here's a basic biography about. Phanon, 1925, 1961, dies quite young of leukemia. Born in Maginique, Ireland in the French Caribbean, I'll show you a map in a minute, dies sort of ironically in the USA, where he's gone with a CIA minder, a sort of twist of fate, as it were. In 1943, he joins the Free French Army in the Second World War. In 1953, he goes for Algeria. He's best known for two works. I think the Black Skin White Master is the one that we're reading from 1952, and The Wretched of the Earth 1961, which is published, I think, just a couple of months after he dies. He comes from an upper-middle-class family, sent to a private school a little bit like Walcott, a sort of local elite in a small, rather remote island, or remote from the metropole, remote from the European centre of gravity. But I think that's also important given what Phanon has to say about schooling in the Black Skin, sorry, white masks. So he joins the Free French Movement, I say, in 1943. In 1944 he joins the French Army as it's reconstituted and invades Europe. There's a kind of inverse, a kind of interesting inversion there. The Empire strikes back in some ways. I mean he invades Europe in order to liberate France from Europe in general from the Nazis. But this, in a book which is very concerned of comings and goings, and what happens to the person from Mardinique when he or she arrives in France, and then when he or she returns from France to Mardinique, the precise modes of his coming and going is kind of interesting. After the invasion of Europe, he returns briefly to Mardinique, meets up with Césaire, and then goes to France again. So there's a lot of these sort of crisscrossing in the Atlantic, right? Goes to France to study as a medical doctor and psychiatrist, which is the job that he takes up in Algeria in 1953. Now, in Algeria, and that's just after he's published Black Skin White Mask. Now, as a psychiatrist in Algeria, he is essentially a civil servant. He's an employee of the state, the French state. Algeria is officially an integral part of France. It is as French as Lyon, as Paris, as Toulouse, as whatever, right? It is not officially a colony. It is a Dépin Mont-au-Germain, and it's the very first of these Dépin Mont-au-Germain. It has been an integral part of France since, I forget, I'm going to get to the exact date a little bit later. So he has fought for France, he's fought for the liberation of France. He has worked directly for the French state and the French medical system. It's known until 1956 that he symbolically breaks with France, sending in his letter resignation shortly after the outbreak of the Algerian War for Independence, with which he then becomes very identified. So there's a sense in which this book that we're reading, Black Skin and White Mass, is Fanon before he becomes Fanon. If Fanon is most well-known as a spokesperson of decolonisation, in fact, it's sometimes called a philosopher of violence against the coloniser, this is a point where he is still in France itself. He's about to take up a position, working for the French in Algeria. He is still, as he says, a various sign, strongly identified with France if, in an ambivalent manner, it is before the Algerian Civil War breaks out, Civil War and the War of Independence breaks out. So if this is a book about and by Fanon before he becomes Fanon, I think it's also a book about the process by which one becomes what one will become, the process by which one gains an identity if you like. Again, I'm going to suggest that's through action, not through reflection. He's famous in the 50s and 60s, and so in this return to Fanon as Homibaba suggests, revived again in 1990s for the present, but it's a different Fanon that's come back. So that's part of the remaking, remodelling repetition with a difference. In the 60s, he's famous above all for the register of the earth. There's Postumus book in which most controversially seems to advocate violence as a solution to the colonial dilemma. Now I think he's more famous perhaps for black skin and white masks. So then, in his first incarnation as it were, read by people like Che Guevara and so on, he's thought of as a theorist of violence, but now I think he's a theorist of subjectivity, of the subject of how, precisely that notion, how someone gets into a position. So if then it was the question, what is to be done? That's the letter in his question. What is to be done? The answer is always, break a few eggs. How are we going to make an omelet otherwise? The question now is, how do you get into a position in which you can do the things that have to be done? How do you get to make those kinds of choices? How do you get to have that kind of power of agency? Okay, a little bit about what was this? This is a Spanish, this is from Latin America, Spanish cast a painting. The Spaniards love to classify different forms of racial mixture. And so they had all these paintings, which would sort of teach people what kind of people produced what kind of people. So this is actually, this is actually a Spaniard plus a mestisa, produced a castisa. A racial hybrid, a racial mixture will return to the cast of paintings. In the meantime, okay, this is, this is Fanon, making the black man stick pigeon, which of course is self a form of a hybrid, a mixture of languages, is tying him to an image, again the importance of the image, snaring him, imprisoning him as the eternal victim of his own essence of a visible appearance and the importance of essences and yet that essence is actually an appearance, a visible appearance. I think it's the skin taken for the essence, the surface taken for depth for which he's not responsible. And then this linking of the hybrid pigeon with the supposed true essence, which is actually, turns out to be a surface. Okay, so we've already, with that picture, with that quotation, we've talked about some of the different kinds of hybridity. This is a, these old series of those cast of paintings I was talking to you about. So in the first instance in the colonial period, the notion of biological hybridity, the notion of racial mixture was something which is an obsession for different forms of colonial administration and continued to be so, for instance, in the United States with the notion of the one-drop rule and you get all these attempts to classify and demarcate when somebody becomes black, when somebody is white in order to to ascertain legal status amongst other things. It gets more complicated in most of the Americas because not only do you have white and black, but you're mainly wiped out in North America. So you get all sorts of possible complications which I was going to say literally, I'll say literally, literally drove the Spanish, for instance, crazy trying to sort these things out, right? Trying to demarcate the difference because to talk about hybridity, that's my little payoff here, is to invoke the myth of purity. The point about being obsessed with mixture is the possibility of the unmixed. You talk about mixture in order to preserve the idea that somewhere, at least out there, you can have somebody who is pure white or pure black or pure indigenous. And I want to suggest that in various different ways Fanon does not buy into this myth of purity and he doesn't buy into it either in its white variant or in its black variant, which is why he eventually turns against negative. We'll move on to that. So the notion of biological hybridity is a notion of cultural hybridity. So the notion that certain forms of culture are tied to certain identities, certain communities. So I don't know what. I don't know. There's white music, there's white music, there's black literature, there's white literature, for instance. All the notion that literature itself is a white enterprise and there are no real black poets or writers and so on. Again, these notions are often inverted by champions of black culture, so a champion of jazz, for instance, as a particularly authentic cultural expression. A social hybridity, social mixture. Fanon is very concerned with the effects of these things. He's concerned, for instance, with the fact that in the Antilles, in Martinique and schools, they get fed white culture, essentially. They get fed superheroes and comics and so on and so forth that come from elsewhere. But again, I think his point is not to suggest what we can produce in response, some kind of black culture. Linguistic hybridity. The fact that he's writing and speaking in French here. The fact that he resists. He resists Pitchin, as we just said, but not in the name of, I don't know, some reinvented black language, but to take on the white mask. In this title, I don't think it's black skin, but it's a good white mask fat. Fanon often happily takes on the white masks, where it is strategic, where it is helpful, where it is necessary. Fanon would not be Fanon if he hadn't had his education in France, which enables him, that and his schooling in Martinique, to then go to Algeria to become this kind of global figure for the decolonial moment, for resistance against the French colony. Finally, textual hybridity. I think we see that in this book. This book doesn't quite know what kind of book it is. It's a bit of psychology. You've got to get some case studies or case histories here. It's sort of medical, to some extent. It is heavily philosophical at other times. There are other points at which it is very literary. I mean, he's not only quotes poetry, he says there, for instance, at length, but there are also points at which, especially in this long chapter on the lived experience of the black man, where his own prose, I think, becomes very lyrical, very much akin to poetry. There are also problems often of discerning between what he's trying to do and a sort of free and direct discourse in which other people to speak through him through his narrative. This is one of the things that makes up the fragmentary, incomplete nature of this book. However, I want to suggest that unlike Freud's book, Freud tries to suggest that this all gets resolved within the book itself, Fanon does not try to aim kind of at any resolution. He's no use for the myth of purity, except insofar as it's the myth of purity that blocks our energy and self-development, I think. We do not realise, he's not interested in our realising some pre-existing essence, right, pealing off the maths and becoming what we really should be. He's interested in becoming what, he's interested in becoming making something of ourselves through action. Again, I want to suggest. Again, very quickly, this is before we take our break. I think for Fanon, race has got very little to do with biology. It's got much to do with, for instance, the gaze. Hence, it passes through the imaginary, through the image, the image that is projected onto you and the image that one, how one sees oneself as well. In some sense it's got remarkably little to do with culture, with at least a tradition in any sense. Again, that's his difference with Césaire. Césaire is interested in recovering some kind of buried or forgotten tradition. I don't think Fanon is. What he's interested in is the social and political factors and the psychological effects. And for him, identity is spatial and malleable. Spatial because it depends where one is. One becomes a black man, for instance, by going once one gets off the boat in France. One takes on a different identity once one returns to Martinique. It's malleable, it changes. One can be a different kind of thing, a different person, a different identity, at different points in space and in time. Again, it's got to do with the mix of psychology, sociology, literature, philosophy. And it's mixed with its sources. Again, here is another instance of him happily taking on these white masks. These are the kind of culture heroes, most of them, of the European society that these critiquing. Freud, Marx, not so Césaire, we'll bracket him off, Hegel, and perhaps above all Sartre, who is, I don't know, the number one Uber philosopher of 1950s France at the time. So he's happy to be hybrid, to take on these different influences, to use these different genres in order to articulate his vision in this fragmented manner. Okay, we'll take a break and come back in eight minutes. So a little bit about post-colonialism. This is the context or rather it's the, it's the horizon, I think it's a better term. It's the horizon of Fanon's writing. I'll explain what I mean by that in a minute. This is a slide that I've actually shown you before. I like repeating slides. Why? Because, you know, second time, lucky, third time a charm, you know, like finally, perhaps it'll mean something. I don't know. The idea, yeah, sort of repeats, repeats, repeats. And so this is the, it fits with the theme as well, remaking remodel, but also the notion of drawing out connections, I think. That we're talking about similar themes and similar ideas and that we return to these ideas in perhaps a different context and we see them differently too. That's method in this. Madness, this is a general outline of post-colonialism and the process of decolonisation on the wave, I put from 1948 to 1975, that involved questions of politics and about culture. I mean, we see Fanon is very much concerned with the cultural effects, should we say, not necessarily culture itself, but the way in which culture shapes the psyche, essentially. It's about renaming, refounding nations and nationalism and so on and so forth. I think in Fanon it's not so much about the past. I think Fanon is concerned with the present and also the future. That's Africa in its various phases of decolonisation. These are some questions, I think, brought up by post-colonialism. Not all of them are questions that Fanon addresses. I'm not entirely sure he's concerned so much with the question of legitimacy. He is concerned about the question to you, however, that he is against the notion of authenticity. He doesn't think that authenticity is justification for a particular social or political or other kind of regime. He is interested in provincialising Europe. He's interested in that to and fro and the effects. So, de-centering Europe, he's interested in what happens in the first cross, simply what happens at the centre. He's interested in this notion of escaping the monotonies of history that was Walcott's term, right, of repetition without difference. How do we produce something new? I think there's a question at the heart of Fanon's enterprise. This is Martinique within the Caribbean. This is Algeria. Now, at the time, Fanon is writing in 1952, Martinique and Algeria have exactly the same legal status and they are both parts of France. Algeria has been for longer but Martinique only since 1946 but they're both integral parts of France. Hence, incidentally, Fanon moves. In part, I was suggesting before, it's a linguistic matter. He's speaking the same language. In part, it's a cultural matter. This cultural imposition enables him to go to the centre and return to the periphery. He's learnt all about France from his earliest days. There is something familiar about France even if it's sort of uncanny in the term that Freud will be used. Familiar but strange at the same time. This should be, if we watch this, this should gradually change. Yes, there it is. This is the history of the French Empire. Where are we? 1754. They've got Quebec. They've got Louisiana. We've got 1820. This is the second French Empire. Much of Africa is going to go blue in a minute. You see Algeria goes before much of French West Africa. Just there. 1914. This is its high point in 1914. The French are very happy at that point. In 1938, they've got Syria and so on and so forth. Lebanon. This is about when Fanon is writing. 1959. Goodbye. The last one to go is Djibouti on the part of Somalia. We see that we see French Guiana is also an integral part. So this is without the movement. This is just before, this is until World War II, the extent of French imperial possessions in the Americas, very much in Africa, also in Southeast Asia. Algiers is conquered in 1830, which is essentially the beginning of the Second Colonial Empire. 1848 is when it becomes next to France. So since 1848, it's sort of the oldest part of the modern empire, of the Second Colonial Empire. So it's felt to be particularly dear to the French, particularly emotional ties between France and Algeria, which made the Algerian War of Independence between 1954 and 1962 a particularly traumatic episode for France and the French. This is the French Fourth Republic. So again, this is more or less the time that Fanon is writing. This map is not completely right because it should be dark green on the left-hand side there for French Guiana. But again, you see the difference between, as opposed to the earlier map, you see the difference between Algeria and the rest of French Africa. Algeria being presented as part of as an integral part of France. Of course, the war changes things. World War II changes things. It changes things, both facts on the ground because various French possessions, well, France gets invaded, French possessions get invaded, and some of them aren't given up, at the end of war. This is the case of African-Americans in the United States. France mobilises its colonies. This is also the case of Britain and the Canadians and the New Zealanders and Australians, for instance. France mobilises its colonies and at a certain point there's the question of what are we fighting for in fighting for the French? We're fighting for our colonial overlords and what do we get out of it? These points at which the colony is mobilised in defence of the centre are often these moments of national self-realisation. For the Australians and New Zealand, the myth is of the myth of Gallipoli, to the moment at which there's immense sacrifice for Britain. What do we have to do with Britain? We're 12,000 miles away. Now, specifically French decolonisation, between 1940, more or less, and 1977, which is when Djibouti becomes independent, but its most intense period is between 1954 and 1960. It's a particularly, as I said, particularly traumatic episode, perhaps more so for French than for any other European power. Again, especially Algeria. The rest of Africa, they let go in 1960, but they're still in the middle of a war to try and keep Algeria. So sometimes peaceful, sometimes through, referendum and votes, and sometimes intensely violence. I don't know if anyone's seen the film by, what's his name, Ponte Corvo, the Battle of Algiers, which is a little snippet of life in Algiers during the War of Independence. But independence is only one stage of a process, a process of other forms, or political independence, at least. It's only one stage of a process. And Fanon is very concerned, as we can see here, with what psychic independence would mean. What are the psychic ramifications? What are the possibilities for agency and action that have been denied blacks, members of the colonial nations, and what kinds of ties or binds are there on their own subjectivity and their own agency. But Fanon's, I mean, I put here, is a post-colonial thinker, Alan Lletra. I mean, when he's writing this, the Algerian War of Independence hasn't even begun. He's imagining a post-colonial future. He's imagining problems which in some senses have barely even arisen yet. Even the wretches of the Earth is published in 1961, he never gets to see Algerian independence. But he's already thinking about the psychology of the post-colony. So, to psychology, to quotations from our book, whatever the field we studied was struck by the fact that both the black man, and the white man, slave to his superiority, behave along neurotic lines. And then a black man, therefore, is constantly struggling against his own image, again the importance of the image and the imaginary. Let's look at some of those questions in more detail. So some of the continuities with Freud and focus on psychology, an interest in sexuality, in the desires and the drives, as they are sexualized, as they traverse at least two modes of otherness, I guess, sexual difference and racial or cultural difference. An interest in normality and deviance. And I think what's important, and this is also, again, this is an echo of Butler, he's interested in normality, but in a slightly more extensive or contextualized version than Freud. Freud's interested in what is normal, how we come to be normal, but he also have a normal form of sexuality or what he termed normal form of sexuality. But he takes the normal of the statistically regular, I suppose, also to be the norm, to be what is desirable, to be the rule. Whereas both Butler and Fanon are saying, you know, what is statistically, what is normal for you, what is statistically regular, or allegedly statistically regular for you, is not necessarily, should not necessarily be normative, should not be, is not necessarily desirable for others. We need to imagine new ways of relating to each other rather than finding our ways to, our way to accommodate within existing relationships of relationship. I think Freud is much more interested in, how can we successfully and with as little trauma as possible, adapt to the dictates of what he would call civilisation. Adapt to the demands of everyday society. Whereas Fanon is like, no, those demands themselves impossible unworkable and unwanted. We need to rethink the relationship between self and other. That goes back to Barbara's quotation I gave you before, right? How to live otherwise, how to live in our relationship with the other. He's interested in the imaginaries, the imaginary and the image and so far as the role of the gaze, the fundamental part of what he has to say and the internalisation of the gaze. What we see in the mirror is the notion of this little picture of the Boudoir and the mirror which also becomes a skull which becomes death. He's interested in the way in which the gaze looking, seeing in a particular way, motivated in particular circumstances in a particular structure produces particular identities, particular expectations but also particular fears and desires and ambivalence. So the ways in which stereotypes are constructed. Expectations of what blacks are like, what whites are like and the emotional or affective charges that those images have. He thinks that race I think is a way of thinking or of being thought about, a way of viewing oneself, a way of seeing or being seen with a concomitant or resulting expectations of particular activity or action. We saw in a quotation a couple of slides back. So whites are affected as much as blacks. This is a sort of double neurosis or some kind of neurotic death struggle or embrace the whites and blacks have as he's concerned. So colonialism is an all-encompassing condition with no real victor. And in this he takes, here he takes from Hegel a notion of dialectic, especially the master-slave dialectic, which is a famous moment in Hegel in which he talks about the German, 90th century German philosopher, talks about a sort of mutual dependence of the master upon the slave as much as the slave upon the master. But I also think that the Fanon thinks we can go beyond that dependence. So he's against the Hegelian synthesis that we can break from that mutual dependence. He criticised Freud, as I say this part of the sort of relativising of Freud, as a theorist primarily of the European, rather than the global or colonial mind. He also criticised Freud, I think, in so far as he says that the mental distress is social and not merely familial. Neurosis is a matter of culture or social structure or an upbringing and background. It's not just a family which is the problem. Not just that nuclear model. I think that's also why he's against Oedipus. He's against this reduction of social and psychic structure to mummy, daddy, me. It's mummy, daddy, my teacher, my staff surgeon, the movies I watch, the comics, and me and my brother and sister and so on and so forth. It's a much more expanded vision of the structures or constraints that produce mental disorder or mental distress. So he says, for instance, on page 85, the socios is more important than the individual. We want to social the socios. Hence the importance of schooling and pop culture in the construction of identity but then also in the construction of mental distress. So let's talk a little bit more about identity. There's another slide you've seen before, second time logging. Third time will be a charm, I hope. The notion of the relationship, I put this up earlier in terms of to think about the relationship between identity and repetition. In some ways, it's like back to the masks in the first image that I showed you, the anonymous masks. In some ways, repetition would seem to reinforce identity. A equals A equals A equals A. The more times you have the same thing, the more certain you are that it is a thing. That it doesn't sort of ooze or escape from some kind of classification or whatever. But in other ways, the more you repeat something, the more you lose sight of any individual identity, the more it seems to get out of hand. So the notion that identity is troubled by and yet is vitally about difference in repetition, remaking and remodelling, copy and original is concerned with the process of recognition. That's another term that he takes from Hegel. He's concerned the extent to which we are recognized by the other and that confirms our sense of who we are. He's also concerned with what we recognize in ourselves, the point at which we assume our own identity. So these moments of realization or recognition, subjectively and intellectually and until he behaves like a white man, but in fact he is a black man. So this kind of slippage or tension, but that in fact, I think there's something ironic. It's not like he's really authentically a black man. It's in fact, given this broader cultural view because it's when he goes to Europe and he's treated as and seen as recognized as a black man, that he becomes, that he recognizes this so-called fact. So he's interested in the way that recognition can also be mis-recognition, a mis-labeling. And yet we assume that mis-labeling for ourselves. And again, there's one argument I'm trying to push here and you might want to push back in your seminars or essays or whatever, is that he doesn't have a notion of some idea of black authenticity. There's no necessary tie to between your color of your skin and something like a soul or an essence. So again, my black skin is not a repository for specific values. And this is his argument with the theory of negritude and with his old mentor César. I mean there's even a question I suppose whether for Fanon, either blackness or whiteness is an identity. If an identity means a kind of fixed position. Again, in Fanon's view, identity seems to be much more fluid than theories of racial identity or then current theories of racial identity seem to allow for. You go from being white to black simply, as it were, by crossing an ocean. That seems to relativise or make us think differently about what identity would be. It is blackness or whiteness situational depending on whom you're with at any particular time and depending therefore on the kinds of social structures within which you're living. So one could possibly imagine new social structures, new forms of social organization in which say blackness is no longer matter. Is that a possibility? Is that something we should be working towards? And if so, what would that mean? Should it be an identity? Especially in this long, again, the press, the most interesting chapter, the one on the lived experience of the black man, it could seem at least first read as if he is sort of dithering. He moves from one position to another, one argument to another, sort of running through their prose and cons, running through the possibilities, the possible ways above all of thinking about what it is to be black. Is identity a matter? Is there something specific to blackness which is inexorably different and inexorably identifiable? And again, I suggest final and turns against his master. He turns against it in two ways. One in this argument is a black tradition, a black culture, a black essence, which remember, Césaire gets from Haiti. Césaire says the negative first raises itself in Haiti. He turns against that. He also pragmatically turns against France. Remember, Césaire, after seeing or after visiting Haiti the key proponents of this law that makes Martinique as well as, now which of the other, not Algeria, because Algeria is already an integral part of France. It makes, I think, Reunion, Guadalupe, Martinique and one other, I forget, that makes them part of France. In other words, Césaire opts against decolonisation, but in favour of the affirmation of black identity, Fanon argues in favour, turns towards decolonisation and against the notion of black essence. In favour instead, I want to suggest of subjectivity or agency. In favour instead, to put it in a quasi philosophical terms, he argues against being and in favour of becoming. So instead of affirming what one is, peeling off the mask, whatever I'm finding, what one truly is, some kind of authentic self, the notion that one can realise oneself through action. And this will be my last but most important point, I guess. What emerges then, is a need for combined action on the individual and the group. So again, this notion that it's not just about the individual, not just about the family, this notion that the group is an expansive one. As a psychoanalyst, I must help my patient to consciousnessise, which is a horrible angularisation for I guess a word that we, to gain consciousness. And again, this is similar to, in some ways there's an overlap, there's a similarity or continuity with Freud. Freud is in part about bringing what is, making what is unconscious conscious, but here's the difference. No longer to be attempted by a hallucinatory lactification, which I'm not entirely sure what that's meant to me, but I guess it's bad. But also to act along the lines of a change in social structure, which is not Freud. It is the point at which it is the structure that is making us sick. There's no question of adapting to that structure. It is changing it, transforming it. Trying to construct a social structure which is no longer pathogenic, which is no longer makes us ill. Or, as he said elsewhere, another situation is impossible. It implies restructuring the world. This is the kind of activity, action. This is why this is a call to arms, I think. This is why the book is incomplete without that activity and action, but there's also the philosophical side of this because it is by going beyond the historical instrumental given, going beyond the determinations, the constraints, the social relations that make me what I am, but going beyond that, did I become free? And here there's an obviously link with Sartre, who is the other constantly cited source in this Sartre and the notion of existentialism. It's sort of, again, living in collective bad faith, right? It is through activity that one becomes what can be. So I hear the importance of action, but I want to problematise this too, as we'll see in a moment. So to move from passivity to action, passivity with the notion also of passion is suffering too. So this is part of a therapeutic, still a therapeutic operation. He's still, in that sense, a psychiatrist, a social psychiatrist if you like, trying to come up with a means to, again, to cure, to better the psychic lives of entire population. Related to the notions of existentialism and authenticity, but again, not authenticity in the sense of discovering who one is, but in the sense of creatively looking outwards and becoming who one can be, what one can be. There's a point fairly early on, page 24, where Fanon says, Man is propelled towards the world and his kind. A movement of aggressiveness and gender and servitude or conquest, a movement of love, a gift of self. I think one of the things that he's trying to say is that we need to affirm that outward motion and that movement, affirm that activity and stop it from becoming folded back upon the self. I mean, essentially, that's his. That's his analysis of the problem, both for whites and blacks. Both whites and blacks, I mean, I endlessly looking in the mirror as it were, it's a distorted mirror as a mirror provided and constructed by the other or a particular version of the other that the culture constructs. But at least the narcissism in whites and masochism in blacks. I mean, that's the kind of, that's the duality, that's the combined sources of neurosis in each. Both ways, in both forms, the sort of inwardness. That's why I think, I think Fanon is the very opposite of peeling off masks. In some ways, it's about putting on more masks. And that's why, I mean, I've got these masks here, these drama masks, tragedy and comedy. I think for Fanon, he's interested in a way that acting is also about putting on masks and becoming those masks, putting on new masks perhaps. But acting is about a form of performance. Acting can mean that, it's one of those double words that contains its opposite. Acting is also, and on being authentic and doing your own thing, you act rather than you're passive. But acting is also taking on a role or constructing a role for yourself. Again, I think this is very close to what Judith Butler is interested in, in the ways that for her, gender and other identities are performances and are performative. There's no essential femininity, no essential masculinity. These are roles that we take on. The problem is when we're just following other scripts, other people's scripts. But we can learn perhaps to write our own scripts or to take control of the scripts that we are performing. These are acts that, and I said constitutive, these are acts that construct something, that construct ourselves, that we construct identity through activity and acting, and perhaps being less hung up on notions of authenticity, for instance. So there's nothing unreal about a mask. Again, I want to go against what might be the first reading of this title, right? We take off the mask and we see what's really underneath. Again, because what's underneath is not particularly real. It's just another surface. There's nothing real about the skin. It is just another projection, another source of fear and anxiety and desire as we see in all the analyses that Fanon gives us in this book. The real, if anything, is the real in the Canaan sense, what escapes representation, what can't be pictured or imagined, what can't be spoken. So, in a way, activity could be part of that real, especially if it is an act of novelty, an act which hasn't been seen before, an act which breaks with the kinds of assumptions and stereotypes with which we live at the present. I think there's a way in which what Fanon is trying to say in the Canaan terms is to get beyond the imaginary, which has got us all hung up, got us stuck in these notions of stereotypes and image and defining yourself through and in the other, also get beyond the symbolic, get beyond the law, get beyond the norms, the confusion between statistical regularity and ways that things should be and become real. And that becoming real in the first instance is a dissolution of identity, because a dissolution of those roles that we've been taught to play, but it's possibly the construction of new identities. So, masks both enable and disable. Put on an anonymous mask is a way in which you dissolve your identity, so that instead you become anonymous, one of many, but you become part also of a new collective. You become empowered, possibly. But they also can disable if they're something you hide behind or you imagine yourself as hiding behind. Skin too, I think, for Fanon both enables and disables. The move is from being to becoming from reflection or self-reflection from the mirror to action from the imaginary to the real. And again, the problem is that our energies have been folded back upon us against us through either narcissism or masochism, self-love or self-hatred, and Fanon wants to prevent such obstacles to outward directed action and so to self-realisation. So this is his. He quotes Marx at the end, he doesn't quote this particular this particular bit of Marx which is famous 11 theses to the theses on Feuerbach. Philosophers of Hitler too only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it. But I think, again, that's the key to the knowledge, insufficiency or incompletion or fragmentary nature of this book because it can only be completed through action, rather interpretation. I didn't realise, I thought to break that I was going to have to hurry along a little bit more but I don't. No one ever asked me questions even asked me questions now or not. That's the case maybe. Yes. That's what my lecture has been about. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to restate it. This is why he get a B as an answer to an essay. Certainly inconsistency of tone like you know what I'm saying so forth. I decide, take a position. What kind of essay are you writing? That this is hybrid. That's another way of talking about the hybridity. I think it's the most obvious notable thing about it as you read through the book. That it shifts register and tone and genre. My point is that it doesn't pretend to resolve those issues. Those are meant to be open issues. It doesn't pretend to produce some kind of coherent narrative. Again, that's the difference with Freud. In Christina's reading which is, as I say, superlative of Freud last week it is that his account of Dora is fragmentary and inconsistent and shifts. It's a paper over these gaps. To fill in these gaps again in the image that Christina gave us of the Greek bars. It's as though Fanon is happy to give us a few smashed Greek verses and we're not sure how to piece it all together. The answer, what I'm suggesting is through action. It is activity that completes the work that Fanon thinks he's starting with this book. You're looking at me like that's not a good answer. No, no. This is at the heart of the book. This is a perfect question. Part of that shifting around is also an effect for him. It's an effect of his situation. We see it in miniature in what I've been saying again. It's the most interesting most important chapter which is the one the lived experience of the black man where we see him shifting between all these different positions. There's a sort of instability there. He can't pick and we see him acting out that inability to pick anyone argument. It's sort of it allegorises the book in miniature in which it's like I say this and then that happens and then it dramatises that process of a bricolage or a mixture of hybridity or of not finding any one fixed point. What I'm suggesting is and this is my little leap you can disagree with me I suppose what I'm suggesting is that we should see that as a virtue rather than a defect. I'd rather simply giving this a B or even a B minus. What can we make with that and I think it's a challenge to the reader to rather just sort of sit back and say oh what a pretty argument I get it is to sort of take the issue in his or her own hands and construct something new which would entail a new frame of reference a new way of thinking within which all this was unimaginable. That's my attempt to rescue Fanon if you like. That's a good question too. I don't think he is saying that but he never is not saying that. I mean it's a sort of liberal utopia isn't it? We're colour blind we don't care right? I think but that's also the liberal utopia as everyone's actually the same and I think that Fanon is much more interested in ways to live with difference and with multiple forms of difference because that's one of the things also somebody in a blog says he generalises and he recognises that he says blacks do this but he recognises it various times right? Martinique's not the same as Senegal and people have different experiences one of the problems with dividing between black and white in this way is it's literally too black and white because it doesn't acknowledge difference is much more complicated so he's not a liberal he doesn't think oh we're all individuals we're all little snowflakes he thinks no we've got to come to terms with difference we're separated and divided by all these different forms of difference and black and white maybe not the most interesting or important of that so we need to come to a way of understanding this difference this form of otherness and others perhaps which we haven't even thought about yet yeah as I say he's not but I mean I think he's not a heritage that's an interesting word I don't think he's particularly interested in tradition as I was saying that's where he differs from Césaire he doesn't really give us a history I mean he's interested in the past particularly he's interested in the present and the future and the present his critique of colonialism is not about the history of slavery for instance his critique of colonialism about what it is doing to him and so people like him right now in 1952 when they thought they were all super advanced and smart and so on and so forth and they left behind those horrible things but he's like no this is an ongoing structure which is making us all ill that's the way in which he's not interested in the past he's interested in the present but he is interested in difference he's interested in specificity part of the problem of this this white popular culture especially youth culture or children's culture is that he raises difference we all get to read Lucky Luke and Tarzan and so on and so forth it ignores specificity so he's interested in specificity he's interested in what happens in Matinique and what happens in particular suburbs or barrios or whatever streets in Matinique so it's not that we no longer be interested in what makes everyone different what makes us different from each other we'd be perhaps more interested in that rather than to seeing a black man thinking I don't know sexual threat for instance is one of the ways in which he sees the stereotype of blackness operating Abash what a specific question well this is part of this chapter in which he's like this is sort of it's sort of dialectical but not really I want to suggest but this is a technical bit but so the problem is I think he sees such as a little closer to that kind of liberalism he says such a robbs me of my blackness so he's still there's some form there's some specificity here that I'm being erupt of he said when I read this page he just quoted such a length I felt they robbed me of my last chance I told my friends the generation of young black poets has been dealt a fatal blow although I think he moves on again from that this is the part of the problem is exactly pinning him down especially in that chapter is difficult but that's the that's the kind of negative position right you know that we need to sort of affirm a black culture and he recognizes something in that I think and I think it's also part of his wanting to to affirm I don't know where but to affirm specificity right the sartre in this sort of well-meaning gesture by saying it actually erases him and people like him and and he wants to recover something and stand up and say no I'm here I may not fit exactly within those stereotypes that sartre is also arguing against but that doesn't mean that there aren't certain forms of difference that you sartre in your sort of universalizing sweep are not ignoring in your the supposed generosity of the white intellectual I think this again is another thing that makes this book difficult it is difficult to pin fan on down but my suggestion is we'll make a virtue of that and I think Fanon wants to make a virtue of that but it makes especially that that particular chapter makes it actually quite difficult because we think we're hearing from Fanon and we're not always again it's often this free and direct discourse this ways in which he allows himself to be allows other people or other positions to speak through him all right bye