Series, Group, Colony: The Concrete Universal in Sartre and Fanon

On Thursday, 15 October, at 2 p.m., we will begin a series of lectures on Sartre, Fanon, and psychoanalysis at the Institute of Philosophy. The lectures will be given by Dr Holden M. Rasmussen, an independent researcher and regular external collaborator of the Institute.

The lectures will be held in a hybrid format, both in the meeting room of the Institute of Philosophy and online via the following link.

Series, Group, Colony: The Concrete Universal in Sartre and Fanon

“Finally, there is one question—only one: Do we have today the means to constitute a structural, historical anthropology?”

— Jean-Paul Sartre in the preface to Search for a Method

“Decolonization never goes unnoticed, for it focuses on and fundamentally alters being, and transforms the spectator crushed to a nonessential state into a privileged actor, captured in a virtually grandiose fashion by the spotlight of History.”

— Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth

At first blush, these two epigraphs appear very different from one another. Sartre’s question is a theoretical one, prefacing a text laying out a philosophical methodology for Marxism, seemingly in the abstract, while Fanon’s observation is based on direct action and the events of the Algerian war of independence, pinpointing the existential precipitate of a concrete and bloody process: decolonization. However, these projects are intimately linked. Both Sartre and Fanon identify features of human relations that affect us at a fundamental level. Additionally, both philosophers explicitly aim to conceptualize the relationship between, on one side, the universal dimensions of social structure and historical becoming and, on the other side, the singularity of a concrete individual life, bound to myriad collectives and groups through processes that far exceed it. 

The overall objective of the course is to take us through these two philosophers’ political and philosophical projects in order to arrive at an articulation of a concrete universal, a conception of group-formation that does not stand above or apart from particular groups but exists only in and through them and, crucially, through their internal fractures, contradictions, and failures. In this frame, Sartre and Fanon are certainly not opposed; read in conjunction, they offer a window onto a new way of conceptualizing the social, the historical, the political, and the existential dimensions of our epoch. They offer, in short, an unwritten theory of group-formation and collective life.

On this course, we will move in three stages. We begin with Sartre’s initial question and his method, which he lays out in Search for a Method: why a sclerotic Marxism cannot reach the concrete individual, and how the mediations of psychoanalysis and sociology, together with the progressive-regressive method, let us read a singular life or work as the totalization of its epoch. We then follow him, in Critique of Dialectical Reason, as he traces a dialectic of the collective, from seriality—the queue, the market, the impotence of the anonymous and the interchangeable in a social structure—to the group-in-fusion, the many welded into a single praxis, and on to his analysis of racism and colonialism, equipped with his method and motifs. Finally, we turn to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. For Fanon, decolonizing violence is the act by which the colonized make themselves a people. This text closes on an enigmatic chapter made up of clinical cases: “Colonial War and Mental Disorders.” We will read these cases for the collective formation they exhibit, bringing our knowledge of Sartre, Fanon, and psychoanalysis—to wit, a form of psychoanalysis neither thinker had on hand—to bear on these testimonies of collective suffering.

The wager of the course is that the colonial is not a late application of a theory worked out in a European elsewhere. Rather, the colony is the site where the structure of the group becomes legible. This is the destination we will be moving toward: extracted from Fanon’s clinical cases, the colonial group shows itself as a concrete universal, the exceptional formation in which the conditions of group formation as such come into view. Fanon does not merely illustrate Sartre but concretizes and completes him. In closing there, the course raises a question: What ultimately binds the colonial group? This presses beyond Sartre and Fanon’s texts toward psychoanalysis, a discipline to which both thinkers lack a straightforward relation.

Holden M. Rasmussen is a philosopher and independent researcher working in psychoanalytic metapsychology and post-Kantian philosophy. His research runs in two veins: bringing the understudied French tradition of psychoanalysis into more direct dialogue with the philosophical traditions, and asking how political collectives are formed, taking the colonial collective as a paradigm for group formation as such. His work has appeared in Filozofski vestnik, Problemi, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, and Hypatia. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from Newcastle University and an MA in Continental Philosophy from the University of Warwick.