17: Fanon the Clinician feat. Nica Siegel

Abby and Patrick welcome political theorist Nica Siegel, author of a forthcoming manuscript on the politics of exhaustion, including a recently published chapter, “Fanon's Clinic: Revolutionary Therapeutics and the Politics of Exhaustion,” and a brand-new essay in Parapraxis. Nica tells our listeners about Frantz Fanon’s life, situating both his personal journey and his writing within the context of his work as a clinician and clinical theorist. As Nica recounts, Fanon’s clinical writings were only recently collected and translated in the 2018 volume Alienation and Freedom, which has ushered in a renaissance in Fanon studies in the Anglophone world. Tracking Fanon’s story from Martinique to metropolitan France to Tunisia to Algeria, a focus on Fanon as a clinician helps us to rethink and recontextualize the major texts that bracket his life: Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Abby, Patrick, and Nica also discuss resistances to Fanon; distinctive clinical concepts like the “transferential constellation”; neurosis versus psychosis; syndromes as political resistance; political exhaustion and the exhaustion of the political; revolutionary subjectivity; the superego of the contemporary left; and much more. Nica’s Parapraxis essay on Fanon as clinician, “Destiny to Be Set Free: Fanon Between Repair and Reparation” was, happily, released online earlier than we expected: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/destiny-to-be-set-freePrimary texts we discuss include:Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White MasksFanon, The Wretched of the EarthThe volume of Fanon’s clinical writings Nica is discussing is Alienation and Freedom, edited and compiled by Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young, translated by Steven CorcoranSome of the other books that Nica invokes include:David Marriott, Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of BeingCamille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar FranceFred Moten, The Universal Machine (consent not to be a single being)Hannah Zeavin, The Distance CureNigel Gibson and Roberto Beneduce, Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics (Creolizing the Canon)You can learn more about Nica’s work and get in touch with her at nicasiegel.comHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! 484 775-0107 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music