–    Fanon develops a radical critique of colonialism to which he applies a psychological and psychoanalytical grid. In Peau noire, masques blancs, he analyses the effects of racism on the psyche of the colonised. He examines the question of his relationship to language, the gaze cast upon him, the relationships between the woman of colour and the white man, the black man and the white woman, the psychopathology of the black man as the result of a relational complex. In Les Damnés de la terre, he envisages an end to the colonial situation through struggle and the use of violence, and warns young African nations of the risks of missing out on emancipation. The DT present themselves also as a warning to decolonised nations against the solidification of new institutions in parody of old.

• These first 2 authors thought about disalienation in the context of post-World War II African anti-colonial struggles.

• Karima Lazali thinks about the effects of coloniality on the contemporary subjectivities of subjects from the 3rd generation. The latter have not lived through colonial history, particularly its violence, but are heirs to it, and it has been passed on to them in the whiteness of a thick silence.

Fanon : elements of biography

• Born Fort-de-France 20 July 1925, died Washington 6 December 1961. Buried in Algeria.
• Born into a family from the well-to-do petty bourgeoisie of Fort de France. At 18, he joined the armed resistance against the Nazi occupation. Battalion 5. North Africa, 2nd armoured division. Algeria (Bougie, Oran). Then the battle of Alsace in 1945. Fanon was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his courage. He fights against Nazism, but suffers racism in his own camp (French army and peasantry. Cf letter he addresses to his parents).
• “If įe did not return, if you learned one įour my death in the face of the enemy, console yourself, but never say įamais: he died for the beautiful cause (…) I was mistaken. Nothing here įustifies this sudden decision to make myself the defender of a farmer’s interests when himself without madness.”
• Demobilised in 1945, he returned to Fort-de-France, passed his baccalaureate and left to study medicine in Lyon, where at the same time he studied philosophy and in particular took classes with Maurice Merleau-Ponty
• In 4th year, he turns to psychiatry. Placement at the Grange-Blanche hospital. Stay there inspired him to write “le syndrome Nord- Africain”, one of his very first texts published in the review Esprit in February 1952. In it, he denounced the reduction of psychiatry to organicist thinking (medical thinking that goes from the symptom to the lesion) and spoke out against the racism of the medical profession towards North Africans. Psychiatric institutions dehumanise patients.
  

• Peau noire, masques blancs was the manuscript submitted for his medical thesis, which was rejected and replaced by a subject deemed more academic, earning him a doctorate in 1951.
• Fanon applied for the post of head physician at the Blida- Joinville hospital in Algeria. He took up the post on 23 November 1953, aged 32. He remained there until 1956, three crucial years during which the Algerian war was being waged. Fanon became involved in what he interpreted as an “Algerian revolution”.
• He sent his letter of resignation to the resident minister Robert Lacoste, in response to which he received an expulsion order and left for Paris, then went to Tunisia in 1957. From 1958 Fanon was the representative of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Algeria (GPRA) in African countries committed to independence (Ghana, Guinea)
• On his return from a tour of black Africa, he discovered he had leukaemia and knew his days were numbered. In July 1961 he handed Maspero the dictated manuscript of Damnés de la terre for which he requested a foreword by Sartre. On 10 August 1961, Maspero received Sartre’s preface and the book was published in November 1961. It was immediately seized on publication for “undermining national security”.
• Fanon died at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, a US government clinic in the state of Maryland, USA on 6 December 1961, three days after he had his copy of the published work and the first press cuttings. He will be buried on Algerian soil in accordance with his request.

Fanon in Black skin, masks white (PNMB)

1. Fanon in Peau noire, masques blancs (1952)

At the heart of PNMB’s approach, which is a revival of his thesis originally entitled De la désaliénation du noir, is an affirmation as well as the search for a new humanism. His stated project: to liberate the man of colour from himself. His thesis: The confrontation of the white and black races in the context of colonial slavery in the West Indies creates a psycho-existential complexus in black people, and the analysis he makes of it aims at its destruction.” Fanon believes that only a psychoanalytical interpretation of the black problem can reveal the affective anomalies responsible for the complex edifice born of racism. He analyses the psychopathology of black people as the result of a relational complex. Fanon presents his work as a clinical essay. Many whites and blacks will not find themselves in this analysis. Fanon makes it clear, however, that he mainly analyses the complexes (of the black West Indian) that he observed at close quarters.

The analysis he undertakes in PNMB is psychological, yet the disalienation of the Black man implies a consideration of his economic and social realities. If there is an inferiority complex, it is the result of a dual process. The first is economic, the second is the internalisation or epidermisation of this inferiority. For Fanon, alongside phylogeny and ontogeny, there is sociogeny (return to this point later).

–    Fanon is opposed to reducing the mental to the neurological he concludes to the relational, interpersonal and social dimension of mental illness. Most illnesses originate in a neurological pathology which requires organic treatments, but these are not enough.

–    PNMB may be thought of as a phenomenology of mind describing the phases of alienated consciousness in the West Indies. PNMB can also be considered as a rewriting of Freud’s Malaise in Civilisation (Matthieu Renault)but from an anti-colonial point of view. Notion in Fanon of ” black crescent ” of the European psyche. An archetype in the terms of Jung : a centre charged with energy.

–    Racial projection in Fanon engages a conception of civilisation as a generalised process of psychic split. Dissociation between the conscious and unconscious parts of the collective unconscious. The conscious personality can be domesticated, but not its unconscious dimension. The Negro is not a concrete being, but an unconscious character, a dissociated, projected and personified fragment of the civilised psyche. If the Negro is the negative of the white man, in his encounter with the latter, the anguish of the return of the projected/refouled is at play. Race is the intimate division of European man. The black man is nothing other than a product of the white unconscious.

–    Fanonian critique of civilisation originates in the 2nd World War in which he participated. Césaire states in the Discourse on Colonialism, that Nazism can also be understood as the repetition of colonialism within the borders of Europe. It was Hitler who carried out this transfer of the dark part of Europe that had been projected onto and exerted on the non-European world, and whose return, or re-introjection, Nazism signalled. For Jung and Césaire, Nazi barbarism was a long-prepared phenomenon in the depths of the European unconscious and/or in the enslavement of the non-European world: colonisation and the history of the European unconscious are the two sides of the same coin, faced with these crimes, two attitudes: either the feeling of (collective) guilt, or the projection of this onto another set up as the incarnation of Evil.

–    This second path was the one followed by Europe, this was the condition of possibility for the formation of the morality of civilisation. This is how the Negro became the scapegoat of homo occidentalis. Fanon describes this process as racial repartition of guilt, the fundamental law of the psychopolitics of civilisation, of the psychic economy of racism, of the distribution of drives and affects according to race.

–    Psychological binarisms. Since the psychological split is the effect of a moral conflict, racism is based on the binary opposition of antagonistic principles of good and evil. Racial thought is based on a disjunctive judgement, on a system of antinomies, dependent on a binary logic founded on a series of antagonistic pairs: civilised/primitive, beautiful/ugly, black/white, light/dark. To undo these binarisms is to demonstrate that between their two terms exist zones of hybridity.

–     Fanon’s critique is above all a critique of the dualism of civilisation, of colonial and racial binarisms which proceed from the inner psychic division of white-civilised man (Matthieu Renault).

–    Fanon, basing himself on the Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler will emphasise the superior/inferior couple. Every human being, asserts Adler, is marked from birth by a feeling of inferiority which he will seek throughout his life to compensate for by aspiring to superiority.

–    There are humans in whom compensation becomes overcompensation, a desire for pure superiority and a will to power.The neurotic sees and uses only oppositional relationships.It’s a primitive way of orienting ourselves in the world. The colonial psyche reveals a deep-seated inferiority complex in the coloniser, who overcompensates by trying to make the colonised a being inferior to him, a being he dominates. This overcompensation makes dialogue impossible. The space of civilisation is a psychic space founded on the dynamics of psychic ascension that attempts to sublimate these aforementioned complexes. (MR).

–    Fanon’s relationship to history is interesting to observe. Fanon defends a non-compensatory relationship to the Negro civilisations of the past (“In the guise of Conclusion in PNMB”). He believes that an individual must tend to assume the universalism inherent in the human condition. ” I am a man, and in this sense the Peloponnesian War is as mine as the discovery of the compass. He refuses to be locked in his body and in his

passed.”. In Fanon there is an absolute desire to free oneself from the determinations of history. This desire is paradoxical, since his revolutionary action is to some extent determined by history. He will even go so far as to assert that he is  “his own foundation” and that “it is by going beyond the historical, instrumental given that he introduces the cycle of his freedom.”

Fanon in the Damned of the earth

1.   La question de la Violence. Chapitre 1 intitulé De la Violence.

–    Considerations on the violence of the colonial fact, on the colonised intellectual, on the peasantry, on the compromise of the local bourgeoisie. According to Fanon, decolonisation proposes to change the order of the world, it is thus a programme of absolute disorder.

–    Decolonisation is about being. The thing colonised becomes man in the very process by which it liberates itself. In decolonisation there is therefore a demand for a complete questioning of the colonial situation. The colonised who decides to carry out this programme (…) is prepared from time immemorial for violence.

–    Violence of the colonised unifies the people. During the colonial war, the people are invited to fight against oppression. After national liberation, they were called upon to fight against illiteracy and underdevelopment. The struggle continues. The people verify that life is an interminable struggle.

–    At the level of individuals, violence detoxifies. It rids the colonised of his inferiority complex, of his contemplative and desperate attitudes. It makes them fearless and rehabilitates them in their own eyes. Even if the armed struggle is symbolic, and even if it is demobilised by rapid decolonisation, the people have time to convince themselves that liberation was everyone’s business. Violence raised the people to the level of the leader. The myth of the national “liberator” was rejected. This makes mystification difficult.

2.  The question of violence and of disalienation

–    Jean Khalfa (writings on alienation and freedom)along with Robert Young stress that the question of la violence chez Fanon doit se penser par rapport à son travail de psychiatre, sinon elle peut faire l’objet de mésinterprétations.

–     Violence in colonial society corresponds in Fanon to violence in the asylum. A shock has dissolved a balance: the balance of the personality in the neurological or psychological shock to the individual, or the balance of society in the historical shock of colonisation. This shock has responded to a pathological reconstruction: the whole range of mental illnesses that we observe in individuals, are nothing but faulty reconstructions of the personality (examples : (self-denial, self-shame, servility) in the West Indies (or negritude as compensation), or for the case of Algeria: criminality, or refuge in the fantasised version of religion, are sick forms of

reorganisation-reconstruction of the social bond destructured and damaged by colonial violence, in colonised society.

–    In his psychiatric thesis1, Fanon asserts that psychiatric disorder never derives from neurological disorder alone. It presupposes not only psychogenesis in the Freudian sense, but also sociogenesis. He makes a link between the neurological and the psychiatric on the one hand, and the psychiatric and the social, on the other.

–    Also, disalienation will take place in the samem wayon both fields (psychiatric and social). A new shock will be needed to dissolve these pathological reconstructions; electroshock or insulin comma for the patient, revolutionary struggle for the colonial society, followed in both cases by a vigilant reconstruction of the personality, through various forms of psychotherapy at the level of the individual to resocialise him or her, and through a more systematic approach to the problem;resocialise him, and by a revolutionary social construction at the level of the collectivity, based on the collective emancipation of human groups, and paying extreme attention to the risk of new despotisms (this is the constant concern of Damnés de la terre and the texts written for the FLN organ, El Moudįahid, which precede its writing).

1

–    Thesis of psychiatry defended in 1951 on a hereditary neurodegenerative disease

” Friedrich’s ataxia” (disorders of coordination and balance).

–    Jean Khalfa notes that “Fanon understands the human not by what defines it but exclusively by its resistance to everything that denies it. The concept, both ethical and political that derives from this and which could define his philosophy, is that the human is nothing other than vigilance.” This concept runs through Fanon’s work, and he devoted one of his first published texts to it, an editorial in the journal of the Saint-Alban hospital in Lozère where he was doing his internship with the revolutionary Catalan psychiatrist François Tosquelles, one of the founders of institutional psychiatry in France. François Tosquelles, having lived through the experience of occupation several times in his life, concluded that the ‘occupation’ was not simply a historical reality, but a reality that had to be overcome;historical but that it created a psychic structure in the individual, and that to achieve freedom, it was necessary to proceed to ” disoccupation”.

–    The colonial world is a compartmentalised, segregated world. There is the native city and the settler city, and this apartheid is a form of compartmentalisation. In the same way, the psychiatric hospital is a prison world, a world of restraints. Conventional hospitalisation limits the patient’s field of action by forbidding him or her to compensate, to move around, by restricting him or her in the space of the hospital;in the cramped space of the hospital and forcing him to exercise his freedom in the unreal world of fantasies.

–   “The first thing the native learns is to stay in his place, not overstep the limits. (…). The colonised doesn’t stop freeing itself between 9 in the evening and 6 in the morning “.

–    The consequences of these confinements are similar.The social violence that characterises colonial societies can be understood as a liberation from the muscular tension of the colonised in bloody explosions. […] Collective self-destruction in tribal struggles is one of the ways in which the muscular tension of the colonised is released.

–    Fanon analyses the world of religious fantasies, of trances, as a compensatory form of behaviour in colonial confinement. He notes that if there is no political organisation capable of channelling these emotional discharges towards a social construct, this violence will be turned by the colonised against himself.

–    Fanon first considered violence from the angle of the derealisation engendered by a universe (world) “compartmentalised” in a chosified consciousness, and then he analyses the process of reconstituting an autonomous consciousness.

–    At Blida-Joinville with the help of his interns (Jack Azoulay and François Sanchez) Fanon developed therapeutic practices that he called “social-therapy”, creating structures within the hospital analogous to those in the real world, where the patient would constantly be put under the necessity of making decisions and could gradually regain autonomy : “Social therapy rips patients out of their fantasies and forces them to face reality in a new way. In the same way in the anti-colonial struggle, the same effect follows from the political confrontation with reality, in the revolutionary struggle”:

–    The psychiatric and the political are the two sides of his thought and Fanon warns decolonised nations against the solidification of new institutions in parody of the old in the same way as he warns against the institutionalisation of the mentally ill in his therapeutic practice.

–    At Blida-Joinville Fanon was entrusted with the pavilion for European women and that for Algerian Muslim men.The social therapy he offers works for the European women, because the film club, the hospital newspaper and the music association are tools that help patients to relearn how to make sense of the elements that make up their environment.It doesn’t work for Muslim men because it’s far removed from their cultural universe of reference. It appears (as Jean Khalfa points out) that the cognitive work of assigning meaning can only take place within certain frameworks of reference;of references, and that these are not universal but culturally determined (not based racially, but culturally)

–    Fanon will put himself in the school of Algerian-Muslim culture, he studies the way in which mental illnesses are conceptualised there (exorcisms of marabouts, beliefs in jinns) and will open a café Maure, in which traditional festivities will be celebrated with a band of local music and storytellers and It will have satisfactory results.The results of this experiment corroborate Fanon’s thesis that mental disorders are determined by social and cultural factors. While it is true that mental illnesses often have neurological problems at their genesis, this therapeutic experience confirms the irreducibility of psychiatric syndromes to the neurological.

–    The relationship to time. According to Fanon, man is man only when totally turned towards the future. The present serves to build the future and it future is not that of a cosmos, but that of his century, his country and his existence. ” I belong to my time and in and no way įe must propose to prepare the world that will follow me.”. ” I am committed to myself and to my fellow man, to fight throughout my existence, with all my strength, so that never again on earth will there be enslaved peoples.”

–    Life and Violence. Fanon’s political philosophy of life rooted in Hegelianism and his medical studies. Hyppolyte’s Hegelian struggle for life and death. For Hyppolyte, the Hegelian struggle for life and death is never a purely vital struggle. Through the struggle, man ” frees himself from the only possible slavery, that of life “. Even more than a slave to the master, the slave is a slave to life. For Hegel, life becomes conscious of life, breaking with naive, organic life, because to become conscious of life is both to oppose it and to find it within oneself. As the negation/overcoming of organic life, la vie de la conscience est conscience de la mort. Fanon reverses Hegel’s argument (MR).

–    Fanon’s second theoretical source, his medical studies. Tragic feeling of life and death will inhabit him at every moment of his existence (death of his sister Gabrielle on 4 February 1955.Fanon is in Blida + his experience as a doctor).

–    Fanon thematizes the concept of hormed theorized by Monakow. The hormed is the vital force, the matrix of instincts, the basis of vital activity. (Each cell is endowed with a conscience). What interests Fanon is not so much the maintenance or re-establishment of

life than that of its expression and expansion. The non-existence of the colonized is a death-in-life, the zone of non-being in which he survives is a zone of death. In the colonial situation, Fanon asserts that it is not so much the disappearance of indigenous culture that is pursued, but its mummification, a continuous agony, maintaining the illusion of life by preserving the corpse from putrefaction. The colonist feeds off the agony of the slave, and agony is the struggle of life against death. Colonialism is based on an economy of death. The colonial scene is a death scene. Life is not defined by its power to flourish, but negatively in the face of death. Living is not about embodying values, it is about surviving. To live is not to die. In this context, to exist is to maintain life. (MR)

–    Fanon signs a return to the struggle for life. Rooting the Algerian revolution in a struggle for life is linked to the role he gives to violence; violence whose Indo-European root refers to the idea of life, of vitality.It is first and foremost natural violence, stemming from the instinct for life as an instinct for survival, self-defence  To bring life to revolution, is to bring death to the enemy. Fanonian vitalism is the source of his theory of violence. Theory of the vital split. (MR)

Albert Memmi

Elements of Biography

• Born 1920 (15 December) in Tunisia and died 2020 (22 May in Paris) in France. Father craftsman of Italian Jewish origin, mother Sephardic Jew of Berber descent. Mother tongue Judeo-Arabic. Primary school and Lycée Carnot in Tunis. Baccalaureate in philosophy in 1939, studied at university, first in Algiers and then at the Sorbonne. Prepared for the agrégation but did not obtain it. Taught at the Lycée Carnot in Tunis, then at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, then at Nanterre. Returned to Tunisia after independence but had difficulty finding his place in the new Muslim state. He returned to France.
  

• First novel published in 1953, La Statut de Sel, autobiographical, prefaced by Camus.

The Portrait of the Colonised. Albert Memmi

• Dehumanisation. The coloniser does not wish to grasp the colonised in his reality. He is busy transforming him by shrinking. Series of negations. The colonised is not this, is not that. He is never considered positively. Or if they are, the quality considered is a psychological flaw (e.g. Arab hospitality: profligacy, irresponsibility, lack of foresight, etc.). Humanity of the colonised refused by the coloniser.
• The mark in the plural. Depersonalisation (They are this, they are that, … you can’t rely on them)
• Stubborn effect of denaturing. It is hardly a human being. It tends towards the object. Ambition of the coloniser: the colonised should only exist according to the needs of the coloniser, i.e. transformed into an object.
• This mythical and degrading portrait ends up being accepted and experienced by the colonised. Process of successful mystification. Ideology of a dominant class is adopted by the dominated class. By consenting to this ideology, the dominated classes in a way confirm the role they have been assigned. This explains the relative stability of societies. Oppression is tolerated willy-nilly by the oppressed.
• Complex of dependence. Colonisability. A certain adherence of the colonised to colonisation, which is the result of the colonial fact and not its cause. Manufacture of consent. Colonised to survive, to live, must accept himself as colonised (at least initially).
• Situation of the colonised. Ideological aggression which tends to dehumanise and then mystify him. Aggression supported by institutions, administrations and a jurisdiction. How to escape low wages, the law, the agony of one’s own culture?
• Just as it cannot escape colonising mystification, it cannot escape these concrete situations that generate deficiencies. Put out of the game of history and the destiny of his city. They are no longer subjects of history. Social and historical mutilation. Momification of colonised society in the colonial situation. – No longer in control of its own destiny, its own legislation or its own organisation, colonised society can no longer align its institutions with its deepest needs. Yet it is these needs that shape the organisational face of any normal society. If there is too great a discrepancy, there will be sclerosis or revolution. The colonised society is sick/unhealthy, it is a society in which the internal dynamic can no longer lead to a new structure.
• It retreats into its traditional values, refuge values. Family/Assigned roles/Religion/Meaning of safeguarding the collective conscience. Considerations on religious festivals that are out of time. At the origin of history and not in history. Since the moment they were instituted, nothing has happened in the life of this people, nothing peculiar to its own existence that deserves to be retained by the collective consciousness and celebrated.
• Colonial bilingualism different from a linguistic dualism. Participation in two different psychic realms.

The two responses of the colonised

–    Self-hatred. Looking like the coloniser. The other end of the comparison. The latter suffers no shortcomings, has all the rights, enjoys all the goods and benefits from all the prestige. Wealth, honour, technology, authority. The primary ambition of the colonised is to match this prestigious model, to resemble it, until they disappear into it. Self-denial and love of the other. Candidates for assimilation. Shame of self, then hatred of self. The colonised person not only seeks to be enriched by the virtues of the coloniser in the name of what he wishes to become. They are determined to impoverish themselves, to tear themselves away from themselves. To free himself, or so he thinks, he accepts to destroy himself. Example: negrophobia of the negro.

–    In the colonial framework, assimilation proves impossible. Weary of the exorbitant price he has to pay, which he has never finished paying, to assimilate, it is not enough to give up his group, he has to enter another, and he meets the coloniser’s refusal. A man straddling two cultures rarely sits well. A few individuals will manage to dissolve into the group of colonists, however collective drama will never be exhausted by individual solutions.

–    Necessity of changing the whole colonial condition. Now this can only be changed by the abolition of the colonial relationship. The colonizer cannot consent to this (because total upheaval of his state, condemnation of colonial privileges), this would lead him to end with himself.

–    Revolt. Revolt is the only way out of the colonial situation that is not a sham, and the colonised will discover this sooner or later. His condition is absolute and demands an absolute solution, a break with the past, not a compromise. Breaking out of this infernal circle. The colonial condition cannot be arranged; such a straitjacket, it can only be broken.

–    Racism of the colonized is neither biological nor metaphysical. It is social and historical. It is not founded on the belief in the inferiority of the hated group, but on the observation that it is aggressive and harmful. This is not a racism of aggression but of defence. It is relatively easy to disarm.

–    Self-assertion. The colonised excluded from universality. We have hardened to the point of substanfication that which differentiates him from other men. Well, he will be that man. He will assert his differences, which are his essence. To expect the colonised who has suffered so much from not existing by itself, that he be open to the world, internationalist, seems a cosmic foolishness, Memmi believes.

–    The ambiguities of assertiveness. Taking up the challenge of exclusion, the colonised accepts himself as separate and different, but his originality is that defined by the coloniser. He recovers, but continues to subscribe to the mystification of the coloniser. The colonised in revolt begins by accepting and wanting himself as negativity. Production of a counter-mythology. Replacing the negative myth of the coloniser with a positive one. Reactionary attitudes.

–    Drama of the man-product and victim of colonisation. He almost never manages to coincide with himself.

–    Conclusion. This book is a diagnosis. It does not propose remedies. It is born of reflection on an accepted failure. In order to live, the colonised needs to do away with colonisation. But to become man, he must suppress the colonised, in order to become a man like any other again.

Karima Lazali. Le Trauma Colonial

–    Clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. She practices in Paris and Algiers. Her reflections arise from her comparison between her experiences from her clinic in France and Algeria. The usual tools of psychoanalysis enabling patients to discover their own alienations were not enough to provoke in his Algerian patients a separation of the various injunctions of the intimate, the social and the political.

–    How do we think about (the notion of resistance was not appropriate to think about this) this difficulty in getting out of the ban on thinking and authorising oneself to live fully other and singular? In Algiers, this sought-after revolution of the intimate is systematically unfinished, constantly thwarted by an Other: the family, politics, religion. How can we analyse this feature of a confiscated revolution of the intimate ?

–    Although subjectivity permanently avoids any form of linguistic and historical political identity assignment, it uses all these elements to weave the invisible threads of the intimate. The question arises as to what psychoanalysis conveys about the underlying politics. How can a cure also shed light on the socio-political-linguistic weave at work in society ?

–     In Paris, French patients from the 3rd generation say they are encumbered by a colonial history experienced often by grandparents about whom they know very little. These “heirs” are plagued by questions relating to shame and responsibility. They are caught up in a history they have never known and which has been passed on to them in a thick silence. How do you work out your personal history when parental silence joins the white of politics?

–    The work of historians cannot suffice to help these patients to elaborate the unthought they inherit, because subjectivity exceeds the historical fact. On the other hand, it calls for and requires admissibility by the political. Without this, the part of History refused by the political is transmitted from generation to generation and manufactures psychic mechanisms that maintain the subject in a shame of existing.

–    In contemporary Algeria, permanence of the colonial question. A historical matrix. However, in its official expression, history is frozen, univocal, and therefore devoid of depth. Confiscated by the political. Everything happens as if the evocation of the destructive effects of colonisation could only come under a consensus that it would be pointless to question through multidisciplinary analyses. The colonial is One, massive, and it closes the debate.

–    In Algeria (as elsewhere in Africa), understanding coloniality is a matter of the unthought. Everything possible is done in France and Algeria to ensure that this unthinking persists, so that the question of the responsibility of each individual in the construction of History as fact and interpretation of fact is never revealed. History is amputated and the subjects are forbidden to visit the recesses of their often complex and nuanced family histories.

–    The realisation of this inadmissibility of colonial history imposed the need to enter it differently by renouncing its legendary and mythical parts, in favour of the backstage of historical fact.

–    History does not speak for itself, it is the subjects who make it speak and in the best of cases, they dispute the interpretation of it with historians and politicians.

–    Psychoanalysis cannot do without History and, yet to We would miss the intimate part that works tirelessly to interpret it, which is both historical and anhistorical. The subject is constructed in and through History, but it also entrenches itself in order to escape and its evade any question bearing on its responsibility.

–    For this work, use of historians’ works and works of Algerian literature in order to link statements of fiction to historical statements of fact, as the literary text is closer to the subjective texture.

–    Existence of very few clinical works in Algeria and France on the psychic effects of colonisation apart from those of Fanon.On the other hand, this concern with the clinical effects of the colonial era has appeared in other disciplines: history, anthropology, sociology and literature. Are existing categories, particularly that of trauma, sufficient to think about colonial violence?

–    Perpetuation of colonial logic in discourses, thoughts and practices. Something intractable is at stake, in the sense of treating: caring for and examining. This observation appears whatever the position of the subjects : ex-colons and ex-colonised. In coloniality.

Difficulty in pursuing a clinical task of identifying issues and deciphering the muted residues of colonial violence. Existence of a field of survivals which does not make trace although it is active at the level of subjectivities and political discourses. The clinician thus enters a world in which history is deprived of archives (in real and metaphorical senses). Henceforth, it is no longer a question of the work of deconstruction, but of the construction of traces