ABSTRACT
This chapter takes seriously the political philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s invitation to articulate a new poesis of being human and how the field of Western psychiatry reproduces colonial conceptions of the human. Wynter, in conversation with Franz Fanon, insists that the world (our ways of thinking and being) articulates itself at the level of language, culture, and poetics. Following this ethic, the chapter explores how language is deployed in psychiatric cultures to imagine, project, and materialize what Wynter calls the ‘biocentric genre’ of the human, or Man-as-Human. The account here reckons with the stakes of psychiatry’s totalizing commitment to the category of Man-as-Human and thinks through what kinds of violence such a commitment makes possible.
