ABSTRACT
Jacques Andre argues that Frantz Fanon's attempt to combine a psychoanalytic with a political explanation leads him to underestimate the agency of the unconscious. At the beginning of Peau noire, masques blancs he insists on the necessary contribution of psychoanalysis: 'nous pensons que seule une interpretation psychanalytique du probleme noir peut reveler les anomalies affectives responsables de l'édifice complexuel'. This chapter argues that Lacanian pro-and anti-psychoanalytic observations form a pattern: that is, Fanon's ambivalence towards psychoanalysis is motivated by a single perception that is never articulated clearly. Andre then goes on to argue for the primacy of the unconscious, and hence for the importance of psychoanalysis. Thus Andres observation that Fanon privileges the real over the unconscious is susceptible of a different interpretation, in which the 'real' is not to be understood as the socio-political sphere of rational collective action, but as the Lacanian 'reel' that resists symbolization, the foreclosed element.
