Abstract
The relation between (social-)psychological accounts of colonial racialization and psychoanalytic theory is a problematic one. This is partly due to the dominance of a philosophy of consciousness in the history and theory of the colonial encounter, and of decolonization. This chapter interrogates the notion of (self-)consciousness mediated through the reception of Hegel in (Africana) existentialism and phenomenology, and in decolonial theorizing. The (self-)consciousness in question is here confronted with the question of the ‘colonial unconscious’.
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Notes
- 1.
The groundwork was laid with the Project for a Scientific Psychology (1896), but Freud began work more decisively on The Interpretation of Dreams between 1897 and 1898, transposing neurophysiological conceptualizations into distinctly psychological ones, while retaining some of the accounts of dynamic forces from the earlier conceptualizations.
- 2.
as distinct from neurophysiology.
- 3.
Paget Henry describes what Du Bois takes from Hegel’s Phenomenology as an “imperfect fit” (2006, 5); in Henry’s description, Hegel’s universal breaks away from Europe.
- 4.
This is important to bear in mind when considering some of the Africana phenomenology readings of Hegel derived, through some detours of translation, largely from the French Hegel reception.
Du Bois’ ‘originality’ in reading Hegel emerges at an earlier point, as he reads Hegel against the teleologies construed by the dominant American Hegel reception of his time. As Zamir points out,
[Du Bois’] use of Hegel can be read against the widespread adoption of Hegel in support of American nationalism and manifest destiny in America in the nineteenth century, from the voluminous productions of the S. Louis Hegelians to the essays of the young John Dewey. (Zamir 1995, 13)
- 5.
This footnote casts the relation between “the white man” and “the Negro” in terms of the relation between ‘master’ and ‘slave’ attributed to Hegel:
… the master differs basically from the master described by Hegel. For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work.
In the same way, the slave here is in no way identifiable with the slave who loses himself in the object and finds in his work the source of his liberation.
The Negro wants to be like the master.
Therefore he is less independent than the Hegelian slave.
In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object.
Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object. (Fanon [1952] 1986, 220–21)
- 6.
See also Hegel’s 1825 Berlin lecture on ‘Herrschaft und Knechtschaft’ (Hegel [1825] 1978, 342–43).
- 7.
Elaborating this position in relation to Jürgen Habermas’ ‘communicative action’ and Axel Honneth’s social theory of recognition is one of the principal aims of Cobben’s interpretation of Hegel’s paradigm of recognition. Summing up what I have here called the ‘intrasubjective’ position, he explains:
Hegel’s thesis is that the internal unity between freedom and nature is tied to the relational form that is symbolized in the lord/bondsman relation.
Freedom can only be conceived of as the essence of nature if it is conceptualized as the essence of the social organism. The lord/bondsman relation expresses the minimal condition under which freedom and nature can be understood as an internal unity. (Cobben 2012, 3)
- 8.
This position is represented by Habermas’ theory of communicative action, and Honneth’s Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conflict (1995), which cast Hegel’s Jena lectures and his Phenomenology as ‘social philosophy’ with ‘intersubjective innovation’.
- 9.
Hegel explains:
… in Roman law, … there could be no definition of ‘man’, since ‘slave’ could not be brought under it—the very status of slave indeed is an outrage on the conception of man ….” (Hegel [1821] [1952] 1967b, 15 §2)
… from the point of view of what is called jus ad personam in Roman law, a man is reckoned a person only when he is treated as possessing a certain status. Hence in Roman law, even personality itself is only a certain standing or status contrasted with slavery. (Ibid., 48 §57)
- 10.
It has been noted that in the postulation of the transcendence, in and through consciousness, of the given, Kojève, following Heidegger (and not Hegel), constructs a dualistic ontology (see Butler 1987, 69; also Kleinberg 2003, 116).
Kojève had been studying with Jaspers in Heidelberg, completing his PhD with Jaspers in 1926, at a time in which Jaspers’ and Heidegger’s ideas were still responding to each other.
- 11.
Elaborating on this non-coincidence with itself, Hyppolite states:
The attributed adjective which recurs most frequently in Hegel’s dialectic is disquiet (unruhig). This life is disquiet, the disquiet of the self which has lost itself and finds itself again in its alterity. Yet the self never coincides with itself, for it is always other in order to be itself. It always poses itself in a determination and, because this determination is, as such, already its first negation, it always negates itself so as to be itself. It is human being “that never is what it is and always is what it is not”. (Hyppolite [1947] 1974, 150)
- 12.
It is this earlier conceptualization of the ‘mirror stage’, first presented at the 14th International Psychoanalytical Congress held at Marienbad in August 1936 under the chairmanship of Ernest Jones, and published in an article on the family in Encyclopédie Française in 1938, that Fanon takes up in his chapter on ‘The Negro and Psychopathology’ (in Black Skin, White Masks), in which the imago, the body image, for the young white boy is that of the Negro, who represents the real Other for the white man—unassimilable, unidentifiable (Fanon [1952] 1986, 161).
- 13.
Lacan laconically comments:
[…] if there still remains something prophetic in Hegel’s insistence on the fundamental identity of the particular and the universal, an insistence that reveals the measure of his genius, it is certainly psychoanalysis that provides it with its paradigm by revealing the structure in which that identity is realized as disjunctive of the subject, and without any appeal to any tomorrow. (Lacan [1966] 1992, 80)
- 14.
Sartre’s rather reductive categorizations render the extent of his engagement with Freud’s writings questionable (see Roudinesco 1996, 274).
- 15.
The ‘dreams of the colonial subject’ highlighted by Fanon closely correspond to the ‘thoughts of waking life’ by which Sartre seeks to supplement if not replace the dreams indicative of the working of the unconscious interpreted psychoanalytically by Freud:
The first thing the colonial subject learns is to remain in his place and not overstep his limits. Hence the dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, and climbing. I dream I burst out laughing, I am leaping across a river and chased by a pack of cars that never catches up with me. During colonization the colonized subject frees himself night after night between nine in the evening and six in the morning. (Fanon [1961] 2004, 15)
- 16.
Even though some of the French theorists of anticolonialism did not reject psychoanalytic theory, and in fact invoked its categories in accounting for the psychosocial impact of a history of colonialism, the relation between psychoanalysis and history was understood to be a homological, transparent one, once again under the primacy of ‘consciousness’, as for instance in the essay entitled ‘Psychanalyse de l’histoire’ by René Ménil (1981):
A concrete psychology, descriptive of the consciousness of real Martiniquais, that gave a synoptic table of condensations, repressions, frustrations, nervous ailments that we work on, will allow us to understand and to explain the nature and dispersion of historical visions described by our historians. (Ménil 1981, 47)
- 17.
Fanon, likewise, did not adduce the ‘collective unconscious’ as a concept, but used it in a loosely descriptive fashion, to convey a sense of “common individual experiences” (Davids 1997, 67).
- 18.
Mannoni undertakes an analysis of a sample of dreams “typical of the dreams of thousands of Malagasies” which he finds to “faithfully reflect their overriding need for security and protection” (Mannoni [1950] 1990, 89).
- 19.
A critique, accompanied by deconstructive readings, of the ‘domination’-‘repression’-‘resistance’-‘liberation’ models had earlier been articulated in post-colonial theory—most notably the work of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha—from the nodes at the intersection of post-structuralism, critiques of ‘Orientalism’, subaltern studies, area studies, comparative literature, cultural studies and psychoanalytic theory.
More recent studies bringing ‘race’ into focus—particularly those under the auspices of critical race theory, (Pan-)Africanism and African philosophy, African(a) existentialism and phenomenology, referencing histories of conquest, slavery, colonialism, and poverty and inequality generated by dispossession, dislocation, and disenfranchisement—tend to reframe an emancipatory project in terms of ‘decoloniality’ and to re-instate ‘the Manichean allegory’ that did not find a status as concept-metaphor in postcolonial theory. With this refocalization, psychoanalytic theory attains a different role; in explaining symptom formation between individual and collective psychology, unmediated by textuality.
- 20.
Fanon talks there about the correspondence between the structures of primary and secondary identification within an ‘integral’ society, which is disrupted under the racializing impact of colonialism (Fanon [1952] 1986, 142–43; see also 154), producing pathogenic conditions.
- 21.
Davids maintains that racialistically structured fantasies and symptoms have remained largely unanalyzed in the psychoanalytic literature, starting with Freud himself (see Davids 2011, 128; also Calvo 2008, 60, 61, 63). Only from the late 1980s onwards does the theme of racializing exchanges between analysis and analysand, in transference and counter-transference, feature in the psychoanalytic literature (Davids 2011, 197) without, however, producing a coherent psychological theory of race and racialization (ibid., 201).
- 22.
Davids explains:
Within the institutional structure responsible for race and equity matters there is a contradiction between its conscious task of managing change with respect to racist practice, and its unconscious one of providing a container for the racist object relationship of its members. Institutions manage guilt through the mechanism of repetition of the original act, and if this is finally revealed ranks close in a cover-up, which can include politically correct action, whose aim is to prevent proper engagement with the real issues. (Davids 2011, 228)
- 23.
In one of the earliest references of Freud’s to his emerging work on jokes, he refers to them as “a collection of deeply significant Jewish stories” (see letter to Wilhelm Fliess, no. 65, 12.6. 1897 in Freud 1954, 211).
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Kistner, U. (2020). Can Black Folk Dream—in Theory? Psychoanalysis and/of/in Coloniality—Anamnesis of a Failed Encounter. In: Feichtinger, J., Bhatti, A., Hülmbauer, C. (eds) How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-Making. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 53. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37922-3_10
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