Fanon and Libidinal Economy

Abstract

In this chapter I want to unfold and develop the affective logic of racism that Frantz Fanon presents in Black Skin, White Masks (1986) and do so in a way that pays particular attention to the regular and conventionalized affective operations he details, demonstrating thus how Fanon outlines a particular libidinal economy. This is a line of critical analysis which has its contemporary representatives in postcolonial critique (I discuss an instance of libidinal economy in Gilroy’s work, below). It also brings with it the benefit of sidestepping many of the shortcomings long associ-ated with applications of psychoanalysis to the political field such as the epistemological and political problems that arise from attempts to use psycho-diagnostic categories as means of making prognostications of existing sociohistorical and political conditions (Frosh, 2010). Whereas the political application of diagnostic language results in a sliding to-and-fro between registers of individual and society, a libidinal econ-omy is, by contrast, always necessarily trans-individual.

proud, lazy, treacherous, thievish, hot and addicted to all kinds of lust, and most ready to promote them in others, as pimps, panders, incestuous, brutish and savage, cruel and revengeful, devourers of human flesh, and quaffers of human blood, inconstant, base, treacherous and cowardly; fond of and addicted to all sorts of superstition and witchcraft; and, in a word, to every vice that came their way … They are inhuman, drunkards, deceitful, covetous and perfidious to the highest degree … It is as impossible to be an African and not lascivious as it is impossible to be born in Africa and not an African … [Their] faculties are truly bestial, no less than their commerce with other sexes; in these acts they are libidinous and shameless as monkeys, or baboons. (Edward Long (1774), cited by Mbeki, 2007, pp. 111–12)