The Rebel's Clinic

October 30, 2023
In this perceptive biography, Shatz (Writers and Missionaries), the U.S. editor of the London Review of Books, chronicles the life of psychiatrist and political theorist Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), covering his childhood in French colonial Martinique, service in the Free French Forces during WWII, disillusionment with the “myth of French color blindness” while studying medicine in Lyon, and immersion in the 1950s Algerian independence movement. Elucidating the ideas and figures that animated Fanon’s thinking, Shatz discusses the theorist’s skepticism of the negritude movement, his work on a Marxist “collective approach to care” at the Saint-Alban asylum, and the influence existentialist Jean-Paul Sarte’s Anti-Semite and Jew had on Fanon’s understanding of racism. The nuanced narrative skillfully illuminates how the disparate threads of Fanon’s life fit together, as when Shatz suggests that Fanon’s commitment to providing psychiatric patients with a “sense of selfhood and dignity” while practicing in Algeria led him to embrace the country’s independence movement. Shatz also provides discerning commentary on Fanon’s two masterworks (Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth), contending that the latter’s endorsement of violence’s redemptive power was “at odds with his findings as a doctor” to Algerian patients suffering from “hallucinations and muscular rigidity, suicidal and murderous urges, depression, and apathy” after battling French forces. The result is a striking appraisal of a towering thinker.