Professor Derek Hook on Fanon’s Lacan

 Fanon's Lacan
Recent research has concluded that the anti-colonial psychiatrist and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon, was more influenced by the work of Jacques Lacan than had often been previously imagined. Building on this research, the current paper aims not only to consider further how Lacan’s work may have influenced Fanon (in sometimes less than obvious ways), but to propose that Fanon’s work anticipated a series of trends in the latter Lacan’s work.  Reading Fanon with a Lacanian standpoint indeed yields a striking number of thematic overlaps, certainly in respect of: the role of fantasy, the social nature of the unconscious, the body-image and the idea of the body-in-pieces, the gaze and the scopic field. By exploring a series of productive tensions in the work of these two psychiatric theorists, this paper aims to outline a distinctively Fanonian version of Lacanian theory which hints at new directions for Lacanian social theory.
This event is organised in collaboration with the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities