Triggering the End of the Colonial World: Tosquelles and Fanon

Abstract

François Tosquelles’s thesis provides an important and underappreciated foundation for Fanon’s discussions of violence and lived experience. Reconstructing the psychological trigger for decolonization is my central aim. Essential to this is Tosquelles’s concept of the lived experience of the end of the-world in madness. Elucidating Tosquelles’s central hypothesis, this article reconstructs his conception of this symptom as key to a form of generalizable psychosis. Psychopathologically speaking, this insight finds its historical grounding in Lacan’s thesis. As I show, these concepts influenced Fanon’s thinking from 1950 onwards. Located within this theoretical lineage, Fanon’s concept of violence and decolonization reveals itself as an ostensibly mad, but necessary desire for the end of the colonial world. Eventually, it becomes clear that this desire operates on the psychic level of disalienation. Such a desire is summarized by Fanon in Black Skin: ‘the only thing in the world worth starting: the end of the world, goddamn’. This drive for a definitive break is the core psychic mood of decolonization. It is through this lens that we can understand the ostensibly irrational trigger for violence. No mere metaphor, the ‘end of the world’ is a lived-phenomenon with potentially profound political consequences. Examining this trigger is essential to an understanding of Fanon’s revolutionary project.