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Zoonosis and the Polis: COVID-19 and Frantz Fanon's Critique of the Modern Colony
Abstract
The critiques of modernity by Bruno Latour and Amitav Ghosh are important for understanding the global pandemic of COVID-19 as well as modern responses to it. In spite of this importance, each maintains a commitment to the polis and “the body” – a falsely universal body that opposes itself to others. I seek to extend their critique while also addressing the polis. In this essay, I argue that a helpful response is anticipated by French philosopher and decolonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. In The wretched of the Earth, Fanon's critique of the Manichaean distinctions between human and earthly agency, human and body, human and animal is the framework for his understanding of the significance of colonial wartime “cortico-visceral disorders.” The colony is (1) a manifestation on the part of the European polis of disgust for blackness, for animality, the agency of soil, the powers of the sun, for disability that the colony itself often causes and always denies, and (2) simultaneously an effort to install a supposedly nonracialized, non-disabled man, a universal body, and unilateral agency. A Fanonian response to the global pandemic and climate crisis would thus appreciate the myriad crises that arise precisely when humanity is thought to be the opposite of Earth.
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Notes
The phrase “climate change” was apparently originally suggested by US Republican political consultant Frank Luntz in place of the more alarming phrase “global warming.” Luntz's strategical suggestion caught on, as evidenced in the name of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2017), 25.
Fanon borrows this phrase from Maurice Dide et Paul Guiraud, co-authors of Psychiatrie du médecin praticien, refondue en Psychiatrie clinique published by Masson in 1922, cited by Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks,139n25, 160. Paul Guiraud republished this text in 1956, and that is the edition that I have been able to consult. See Paul Guiraud, Psychiatrie Clinique (Paris: Librairie Le François, 1956). Guiraud and Dide write of “Manichéisme délirant,” a formal pathological, clinical symptom of being given to extremes of desire and aversion (Guiraud 424-5). In an earlier essay, I mistakenly wrote that Fanon borrows this phrase from the unorthodox gnostic Christian religion Manichaeanism, begun by Mani and thought to originate in third century of the common era, Babylonia. See William L. Reese, Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion: Eastern and Western Thought, Expanded Edition (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999), 445 and Emily Anne Parker, “On ‘The Body’ and the Human-Ecology Distinction: Reading Frantz Fanon after Bruno Latour.” philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism. 8, no. 2 (2018): 59-84.
This is inconsistently practiced. See for example pages 7, 9, 39, and 53 of the same document, in which animal and human are used as mutually exclusive terms (United Nations Environment Programme and International Livestock Research Institute 2020).
Indeed, this is arguably the conclusion to which the document comes on page 39, namely the concept of “One Health.” But note that One Health retains a “tripartite structure.”
According to the study, “the seven main drivers of zoonoses emergence … are all anthropogenic, that is the result of human action” (2020, 15ff). The first three discussed are “increasing demand for animal protein,” “unsustainable agricultural intensification,” and “increased use and exploitation of wildlife.”
With the use of the term gesture, I attempt to distance myself from the language of concept and its dualistic (e.g., mind-body) implications. “The body” is a way of speaking, thinking, and shaping, a mode of orientation, that obscures the fact that very specific bodies are held to be synonymous with the polis rightly arranged.
For other readings of Fanon's ecological thinking, see Opperman (2019) and Clare (2013). See also Parker (2018).
It is crucial here to keep in mind the modern European connotation of the term “animal” discussed above. I cannot be sure of whether Fanon would agree with Laurie Shannon's analysis, but wretched of the Earth is on my reading consistent with it.
I borrow this way of putting it from Sylvia Wynter's reading of Frantz Fanon (2009).
Fanon's actual statement, the final line of Black Skin, White Masks, reads: “Ô mon corps, fais de moi toujours un homme qui interroge!” “Oh, my body, make me always a man who questions!” I think Fanon uses “un homme,” man, in the same way that this term was used by everyone at the time, as a generic term for humanity. It was not until later in the twentieth century that the practice changed. It was of course a false generic, but Fanon, as I have argued above, was himself in the process of working that out.