Occupying Psychoanalysis in a Post-Colonial World: Fanon's 'zone of nonbeing' and the subject of racism. Gautam Basu Thakur with Sharon Numa (respondent)

This is the second in a series of seminars on Decolonising Psychoanalysis, organised by the Race and Culture Committee of the Guild of Psychotherapists. The series is intended to open up conversations about psychoanalysis by initiating Transatlantic Dialogues between academics and psychotherapists, bringing clinical responses to their academic decolonial work. How will clinicians speak to those concepts from the standpoint of their practice? And how can we use these ideas to think about subjectivity, development, inter-generational trauma and so on.

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Abstract - Gautam Basu Thakur

Few psychoanalysts have addressed the topics of race and racism in their writing or teaching. It is my contention, however, that Freudian-Lacanian theories of subjectivity, desire, enjoyment and fantasy offer us critical opportunities for re-imagining the function and form of race, racism and xenophobia in our contemporary world.
But this exercise remains incomplete without including Fanon – Fanon adds to and unravels the limits of psychoanalytic theories examining racialized subjectivity in colonial and white-majority societies.
Speaking to Fanon’s relevance in our divisive partisan world, this talk will underline how Fanon’s analysis of racial identification and race relations in Black Skin, White Masks allows us to build an understanding of racism in terms of a collective fantasy mediating the racist subject’s relation to the racial other. The racialized other exists in a ‘zone of non-being’ (Fanon) and a state of radical negativity, but is represented in racist discourse as a figure of illicit/excessive enjoyment (jouissance). As an object of both envy and desire, the racial other is experienced as an impediment to the racist subject’s ability to gain his own satisfaction (social, economic, sexual) and as such this other must be erased or confined (socially, economically, sexually). This paradoxical condition vitiates race relations and infects the psychology of both ‘blacks’ and ‘whites.’

Speakers’ Biographies

Gautam Basu Thakur is associate professor of English and the director of the Critical Theory Minor at Boise State University, Idaho, USA, where he teaches courses on critical theory, literature and psychoanalysis, British literature of the Empire, world literature, and global cinema. Trained in canonical British literature, comparative literature, critical theory and, especially, psychoanalytic theory, Basu Thakur is the author of two books, Postcolonial Theory and Avatar (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Postcolonial Lack: Identity, Culture, Surplus (State University NY, 2020); two co-edited books, Lacan and the Nonhuman (2018) and Reading Lacan’s Seminar VII: Transference (2020), and journal articles and book chapters on topics ranging from the cinema of Michael Haneke and Satyajit Ray, to “Žižek’s Eurocentrism”, Bollywood and globalization, Bengali literature, Victorian studies, populist politics, and, most recently, on racism and race-relations in the contemporary world. His current research focuses on examining racism and racial identity through and at the intersections of psychoanalytic theory, subaltern theory, and queer studies.

Dr Sharon Numa originally trained as a Clinical Psychologist, working in the NHS before undertaking the training in Adult Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic. While at the Tavistock she completed a clinical Phd on the topic of Shame. She subsequently trained at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She works in private practice and is a training supervisor and therapist for the British Psychotherapy Foundation, and the Association of Child Psychotherapists; she teaches clinical and theoretical seminars both here in London and in Beijing where she jointly runs a yearly workshop on Kleinian concepts. She has recently edited a book to be published this year by The New Library of Psychoanalysis/Routledge on the early building blocks of identity called On Being Oneself: Clinical Explorations on Identity from John Steiner’s Workshop.

Gautam Basu Thakur's work is wide-ranging and 'intersectional', looking to a psychoanalysis which is genuinely 'postcolonial' and emancipatory. His theoretical starting point is Lacan, but he turns to Fanon as a necessary adjunct for the understanding of racism.
How does his theoretical and political vision accord with the views of a practising psychoanalyst from the Kleinian tradition, who uses the analytic framework in her daily work while also acknowledging Fanon? More broadly, can psychoanalysis and other talking therapies embody an anti-racist approach in their clinical practice and theorising?

Image credit
Illustrator: Anastasya Eliseeva With permission from New Frame Media (Johannesburg, South Africa) https://www.newframe.com/frantz-fanon-and-the-question-of-praxis/