Episode 4 - Jean Khalfa: Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and revolutionary

Jean Khalfa is an unusual figure: a French intellectual who was joint editor of Les Temps Modernes, the famous journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, yet who has spent most of his academic career at Trinity College Cambridge, and a cultural entrepreneur who has organized exhibitions about the Caribbean avant-garde poet and politician Aimé Césaire and the Cuban-born surrealist artist Vifredo Lam. But it is on account of his major contributions to the understanding of Frantz Fanon that we have asked him to take part in our podcasts, for Jean has edited the complete works of Fanon, in two volumes published by La Découverte and in English by Bloomsbury. This involved a quasi-archaeological exploration of Fanon’s incidental writings, his journalism and his writings on psychiatry and his correspondence, much of it previously unpublished.

In our conversation Jean places Fanon’s writings on colonialism in the context of the training he received as a student of psychiatry under the guidance of the Catalan psychiatrist Tousquelles whose work prefigured the revolutions of the 1960s. His experience as a young psychiatrist during a vicious civil war paved the way for writings in which the cultural and supernatural dimensions of resistance would be highlighted. Understanding Fanon the psychiatrist sheds a wholly new light on his ideas about the individual and collective responses of colonized peoples to racialized violence.