Fanon’s Revolutionary Gaze
On Combat Breathing
Nica Siegel
And I, igniter of worlds
Words! Words! Words!
I’ll seek stars to use as wings for reason
I’ll become myself
Surging from the power of the act
In absolute contestation.
— Franz Fanon, “Parallel Hands”
Who is allowed to have an undisciplined symptom? In one of his earliest texts, “The North African Syndrome” (1952), the young doctor Frantz Fanon documents how easily fellow practitioners in post-war France were frustrated by the emergence of symptoms that baffled neurological etiology. Every symptom, they had been taught, presupposed a lesion. This “neo-Hippocratism,” Nigel C. Gibson writes, “went hand in hand with an emphasis on function (namely, functioning uncritically within a racist society).” When pain refused, as pain does, to play by these rules, doctors would become suspicious, accusing North African patients of mendacity, lack of discipline, laziness, a criminal attitude. The dominant school of French colonial psychiatry in Algeria, headed by Antoine Porot, went a step further, reifying these stereotypes with a racial-biological explanation that excused psychiatrists from considering social explanations.
Contesting this from within psychoanalysis, Fanon anchored his life’s work in a specific proposition: every pathology must be read as the action of a self trying to make itself known. Thus, although some forms of revolt might require intervention, it was inertia that was the more fundamentally challenging symptom, allowing the human to slip away into himself, fostering chronicity and psychoticization, often met with increasingly carceral forms of treatment. The work of therapy, much like the work of revolution, therefore demanded vigilant, militant interpretation of even the smallest indications of submerged agency—in gesture, in posture, in laziness and work refusal, in the struggle to breathe—as signs of its prospective totality. In demystifying what Fanon described as colonial psychiatry’s “abortive attempt to decerebralize a people,” he found a mode of destroying colonialism itself.
Building on his series of important texts iterating the psychopolitics and philosophy of Frantz Fanon, Nigel C. Gibson’s Frantz Fanon: Combat Breathing (Polity Press, June 2024) is distinctive, first of all, because of how it articulates its occasion. Opening with a tribute to the Movement for Black Lives, the book’s gaze expands to encompass the struggle for Palestinian liberation, the shack-dwellers’ movement in South Africa, and global climate politics. These combine to create the atmosphere of what Fanon calls “the total situation,” articulated universally in the “psychosocial political movement for the subjective element of black trauma,” namely the cry “I can’t breathe.” With Fanon, Gibson proposes to cut against the pathologization of resistance, offering tools and theory—a “Handbook”—by which current movements might critique, transform, and sustain their forms of resistance.
“A steward of the capacity for action, Fanon had a gift for seeing what was alive in scenes of inertia, including his own.”
Moving fluidly from Fanon’s upbringing in colonial Martinique and immersion in Césaire’s Négritude, from vigor to disillusionment with the Free French army, through the political and poetic entanglements of his dissertation in Lyon and subsequent residency with the radical institutional psychotherapist Francesc Tosquelles, through his escalating encounter with the dysfunction of colonial psychiatry in Algeria and the emerging revolutionary resistance, through his exile and work as FLN’s ambassador across Africa, to his fatal battle with leukemia—Combat Breathing reads Fanon as Fanon read his patients and comrades—that is, by patiently and brilliantly reframing and researching Fanon’s life and work, becoming curious about moments of hesitation and stasis, and seeing what kind of self- and world-making such moments might vivify, if allowed to unfold.
A steward of the capacity for action, Fanon had a gift for seeing what was alive in scenes of inertia, including his own. Gibson follows this treatment model in framing Fanon’s life: Fanon’s disillusionment with the promise of French liberté contains the seeds of his explosive critique of the racial reifications of French psychiatry. His tragedy, “The Drowning Eye,” becomes a working out of “zealousness” in order to exorcize individualism (what he later calls the “subjectivist bog”) that he will ultimately pierce in Black Skin, White Masks. We see a similar commitment in the critique of the Algerian bourgeoisie that propels Fanon’s turn to the international, and even in the paralyzing loneliness about his own impending death, which drove him to draft The Wretched of the Earth as an invitation to humanity as a whole.
Gibson, then, offers a new perspective on what is quickly becoming a classic question: how did Fanon’s psychoanalytically informed psychiatric training impact his revolutionary gaze? In a moment overflowing with new archives, translation, scholarship, documentary, and biography of Fanon’s life, Gibson’s account of Fanon’s sociotherapy and his ever-growing involvement with the Algerian revolution is especially vivid, offering new coordinates for the figure of the movement intellectual who can “induce the human being to be actional.” This sociotherapeutic commitment quickly aligns with the fact of revolution.
In this, Gibson’s Fanon is even more vigorous than the legends that circulate in similar accounts furnished by David Macey and Adam Shatz. Fanon did not just treat the vic- tims of torture, he used psychological tools to teach them to withstand it; Porot, his antagonist, was not just sustaining a racist form of ethnopsychiatry, his trainees were “informing counter-insurgency” to French commandos; “Conducts of Confession in North Africa” was not just about the ethics of false confession under torture, its co-author would himself be tortured. When the risk in Algeria finally became too great, Fanon decamped to Tunisia, where his national and pan- African militancy intensified alongside the therapeutic work. In response to accounts that use the tension between the therapeutic and the political as a way of staging Fanon’s ambivalence about violence or questioning the centrality of his role in the FLN, Gibson offers a savvier Fanon, one doubly “without innocence,” as Donna Haraway might write, as concerned the armed struggle.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Fanon’s therapeutically-inflected articulation of the risks of the revolutionary phase, studied from the perspective of the ongoing possibility of struggle and attentive to what would smother it, from inside or out. In his final chapter, Gibson proposes to mine The Wretched of the Earth section by section for theory and tools for the present. This “Handbook” is less an organizing document like Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals than a guide for a particular type of internal questioning that militant intellectuals ought to undertake. This requires both political solidarity and willingness to be out of place or “untimely” in the political dogmas of one’s own moment, even where, as in the case of the infamous final chapter, “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” this creates rift (and so risk). Despite Gibson’s note that “his work as a psychiatrist ended in February 1960 when he became the FLN’s ambassador to Africa,” this final text attests to his continued immersion in sociotherapeutic thinking and work until his death.
In this reconstruction, Gibson occasionally indulges in direct pedagogy (on postcolonial ideology, he instructs that “these sentences should be reread carefully,” for example). Such moments bring us back to the question that inaugurated the book, namely the relation of Fanon’s thought—and Gibson’s—to movements of the present. That Fanon offers us grounds to affirm organized resistance is something no one could doubt, complexities of analogy notwithstanding. But Gibson also mandates such movements consider their internal tensions. For this reason it is all the more noticeable that as Gibson admires the Movement for Black Lives, he leaves in silence what the Fanonian critique might be. Are there, then, specific criticisms motivating his writing of Combat Breathing? He does, in an urgent preface, offer such a criticism of what he sees as the brutality of Hamas on October 7th in relation to the broader Palestinian struggle for psychic and political liberation from occupation, which constitutes a counter-example further motivating the question.
“We might follow the book in asking: where and who are the contemporary movement Fanons and what might they have to do with the therapeutic?”
The lessons the book gleans from The Wretched of the Earth are crucial, perhaps even universal. Avoid senseless brutality. Be wary of the vacuum of leadership. Value the need for internal democracy. Understand the risk of the co-optation of leadership by those with relative class privilege and identification with global elites, and avoid the stages-model of changes that leaves a movement stuck in the phase of the bourgeois revolution (a repeated target of critique for Gibson throughout his career). But when it comes to the movements Gibson addresses, these teachings are not articulated with the kind of historico-theoretical potency that we find in The Wretched of the Earth, which was after all not a rulebook but a theoretical work urgently addressing a specific moment in conversation with others. In this, although Gibson sticks to a largely “Marxist humanist” Fanon, and although he does a remarkable job articulating the global reach of that intellectual horizon in Fanon’s own time, we might nevertheless wonder how this relates to the other left traditions in which Fanon’s work might be located, especially the Black radical tradition, for which his thought has been so significant (and so intertwined with psychoanalysis) in the decades following his death.
All this is less a critique than it is to observe that Gibson does not fashion himself a Fanon. He is less embedded in the movements to which he pays homage, but he does imagine, or hope, that Fanons exist in every movement, close to the action, listening with an socio-analytic ear. We might follow the book in asking: where and who are the contemporary movement Fanons and what might they have to do with the therapeutic? Many possibilities come to mind, from David Marriott’s indispensable reading of Fanon’s war analysis to Lara Sheehi’s account of psychoanalysis under Israeli occupation.
If Gibson’s book engages more with Fanon’s own genesis as a thinker than with the theoretical production coming from contemporary social movements in which we might expect to find Fanon’s influence, one significant exception can be found in Gibson’s account of his meetings with Abahlali baseMjondolo, the South African shack-dwellers’ association, with whose writings Gibson has long engaged. This vector of Gibson’s own political experience, in its moving idiosyncrasy, attests to something which also seems crucial for Gibson’s interpretation of The Wretched of the Earth and for the book as a whole, without quite being acknowledged: that the Handbook is a collective genre, emerging from and reflecting shared conditions of theoretical production, and that this matters for how we think about the proliferation of its commitments and critiques.
Put differently, the form of Gibson’s book, especially if we understand it as one in his series of book-length reiterations of the proper name “Fanon,” authorizes us to question what it also affirms, namely the singular status of Fanon himself. Fanon was distinctive for his powerful political role and his relentless character. In this, Fanon is usually read as standing alone. This emerges in one of the more frustrating dimensions of Gibson’s book, namely the treatment of Fanon’s nuclear family life (although the difficulties of reconstructing this elusive dimension of Fanon’s private life are hardly Gibson’s alone). As Gibson writes of Fanon’s wife and secretary, who together would transcribe the dictations that we now read as Fanon’s books, “This is not to say that Marie-Jeanne [Man uellan] and Josie were not also involved in political discussions, but they were the ones taking care of the children [....] relations between men and women in 1960 were quite different from how they are today.” Gibson is clear that Fanon believed in the disalienation of gender relations through and following revolution, but his texts also retain stultifying dimensions of what Lewis Gordon called a “manhood project.” Despite this opening, it is intriguing that when Josie is invoked, she is often said to be—in one case by Oliver Iselin, Fanon’s CIA handler—“further to the left” than Fanon himself. Gibson documents her playing a proper political role and making decisions which frame Fanon’s legacy today, not least regarding the liberation of Palestine, to which Josie was committed.
Fanon, then, manifestly did not stand alone. This was for me one of the greatest lessons of Gibson’s text, illuminating anew the production of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon’s prophetic and confounding final book. Writing in in an unfurnished apartment “suffused with death” over the course of ten weeks between failing treatments (during which time, apparently, Fanon expressed his desire to live long enough to undergo analytic treatment and to write a psychoanalytic account of his illness titled “Le Leucemique et son double” (“The Leukemia Patient and his Double”), Fanon was, in a sense, at his most singular, abject, and stubborn. And yet, it is just as true that he relied on others—editors, friends, comrades, family—whom Jacques Roumain described, in a poem Fanon often quoted, as a “forest of funeral torches.” They fought alongside him, allowed him to give voice to his dying concerns, found him an apartment, arranged his treatment and many passports across continents, chose to read him as wanting to be known as he died, and disciplined their own desires to see him pursue ever more treatment so that the book, banned in France the moment it was published, could find its way into the hands of the world.
Wretched emerges in Gibson’s text as as an astonishingly collective document, an object evincing that sought-after “brain mass of humanity whose affinities must be increased, whose connections must be diversified” and making its author, therefore, a bit less lonely, more comradely and more loved than he often seems in hagiography. Gibson’s Fanon calls out to ideologues, teachers, militants, and clinicians training for a particular kind of commitment, namely to the interpretation of every kind of human expression, however refracted, as evidence of a social mind trying to make itself known, a “rationality of revolt.” As Fanon tells us, “every time we do not understand, we must tell ourselves that we are at the heart of the drama.” It is for this reason above all, although Gibson has periodically disidentified with psychoanalysis throughout his career, that Combat Breathing will be of interest to those engaged in psychoanalytic research and practice. Pursuing this most immodest demand for collective liberation, the Fanonian has the vocation of refusing and reconceptualizing, with others, any foreclosure, racial reification, decerebralization, or defensive “amputation” of its possibility.