Many recent debates with a significant public echo, including the Cecil Rhodes statue case, have shown that the topic of the relationship between former colonizers and former colonized is far from exhausted and probably will not be any time soon. The already heated debate has become further exacerbated by the so-called ‘migrant crisis’, the resurgence of nationalism and nativism at the highest levels of politics, etc. This is true also of the academic philosophical debate on related topics, where the opposing parties often seem to adopt unilateral and militant tones, instead of engaging in constructive arguments. It is in fact rare to find a philosophical work able to bring together in a productive way Hegel and Fanon without playing the one against the other. Bird-Pollan’s book is able to do exactly that (with the inclusion of Freud), and in a brilliant, competent and insightful manner. Rather than merely looking for a neutral compromise between apparently opposed positions, the author shows an admirable capacity to retrieve an affinity of spirit and concerns behind the different terminologies and contexts. He can achieve this, in the first place, because of his attempt to recover a positive, illuminating, unified theory of the subject, a topic which is not a very fashionable one in the philosophical debate of the last decades.
The book’s opening baldly declares that it
seeks to defend three theses in the theory of the subject. The first is that theories of pathology require a “normal” structure to become intelligible and vice versa; the second is that the relation between pathology and the “normal” structure is dialectical; and, the third is that the individual and the social cannot be understood without each other [and that the thinkers examined in it] Hegel, Freud, and Fanon, each endorse these theses, even if not exactly the way I have formulated them. (1)
The author also makes it clear from the beginning that the discussion of the three authors ‘is in the service of my three theses and only secondarily a work of the exposition of the thought of each of these thinkers’ (2). The three theses may look like ordinary, even commonplace claims; this is not so, however, as they go against the flow of most poststructuralism, postcolonialism and trauma studies, and their rejection of a subject with a ‘normal’ structure, unity and freedom. Against this rejection, Bird-Pollan argues, again only apparently in a commonsensical way, that:
if there is no normative or normal conception of the subject underlying the pathological or fragmentary subject, then it is surely hard to press any ethical or political demands on the part of the ‘non-normal’ subject. Such a position would thus seem to contravene precisely the sort of arguments postcolonial theory and trauma theory were conceived to produce: normative critiques of the current status quo. (2)
Thus, the idea of rehabilitating a ‘normal’ structure of the subject comes together with a decided rehabilitation of German Idealism (especially Hegel, but also Kant) in a commonly unfriendly context, and with a strong critical intention (substantiated through an elegant reading of Freud and Fanon).
The main device keeping together all the different threads is a three-level model of the conception of subjectivity, featuring an ontological, a metapsychological and a psychological level. The ontological level concerns the very structure of subjectivity as such, namely, following Hegel, ‘the search for harmony between subject and nature’ (5) or, in other words, freedom: without this level, there is no subject at all. The metapsychological level, indebted to Freud and corresponding to Fanon’s ‘sociogenic’ perspective, mediates between the universal or ontological level and the psychological or individual one and so can be said to be concerned with the level Hegel calls particularity. This level concerns general psychological structures or categories, which take different shapes at the third level, the psychological or individual one, again thematized by both Freud and Fanon. Bird-Pollan takes the three levels to rely on each other in a dialectical way, influencing each other, and thus enabling the detection and critique of shortcomings while at the same time preserving the possibility of a ‘healthy’ functioning of both the individual and the socio-political realm.
The book is made up of five dense but plainly readable chapters, preceded by a clear programmatic introduction and followed by a short conclusion. The first chapter develops the ontological level through an intriguing and convincing reading of the master–slave dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, whereby the constitution of the subject is linked to the struggle for freedom. The author prepares the groundwork for the whole argument by committing to the ‘core thesis of idealism’ according to which ‘subject and world are in an inextricable and dialectical relation with each other’ (15). This leads to the idea of a necessary theoretical structure of subjectivity, which was ‘most adequately articulated by Hegel’ (17). Hegel’s account of the subject, effectively reclaimed by Bird-Pollan, is a dynamic one which never separates the essential struggle for freedom from the experience of suffering and ‘radical oppression’ (31). This account lays the ground for the later dialectical account of the revolutionary subject between aggression and construction, an account mediated also by a Hegelian reading of Freud’s drives theory and the Oedipal complex.
The second chapter deals with the metapsychological level. It criticizes ‘fragmented subject theories current in postcolonial studies (Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak) as well as . . . trauma theory (Cathy Caruth)’ (9), and argues against them (but with Fanon) that the talk of fragmentation only makes sense with reference to a non-fragmented, ‘normal’ constitution of the subject. Bird-Pollan emphasizes that ‘Fanon’s work is a denial of the fragmentary or postcolonial and trauma models of subjectivity’, and it is in fact committed ‘to the Hegelian paradigm of recognition’ (84), which the author interprets in a liberal, quasi-Rawlsian way against the liberalism-critical version put forward especially by Honneth (see 88). Bird-Pollan affirms a strong continuity from Kant to Fanon, passing through Hegel and Freud, thus claiming back the Enlightenment-idealistic ideas of subject, universalism and freedom as necessary pieces of a critique not only of colonialist and racist ontology, but also of the postmodernist and postcolonialist ‘fragmentation’ project, including Foucault (see 67). The latter project, while aiming at emancipating the colonialism debate from Western bias, is said to lead to ‘devastating’ political consequences insofar as it essentializes the colonial condition of the subject as a more authentic point of access to the nature of subjectivity, instead of seeing it as the pathological result of the colonial false ontology and oppression (71).
The metapsychological and the psychological levels are then brought together, with a constructive aim, in chapter 3, which engages in a focused reading of colonial psychopathology in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Bird-Pollan argues here that the failed development and the distortions of the colonized ego are a direct result of colonial oppression and injustice, against which the colonized subject has a ‘just demand’ for cure (116). The last two chapters accordingly shift the focus from ‘the analysis of colonial oppression to decolonization proper’ (151). Chapter 4, focusing on Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, addresses the ‘rebirth of the revolutionary subject’, whose liberation struggle is ‘based on the dialectic between the two primordial impulses of the death-drive (aggressivity) and Eros (a constructive narcissism)’ (11). However, as was clear already from the Hegelian discussion in the first chapter, not only the diagnosis but also the therapy need to consider the subject not in isolation, but as fundamentally universal or intersubjective.
The dialectic of aggressive-critical and constructive-ideal tendencies in the struggle for emancipation is pursued at the social level in the conclusive chapter, where recognition is shown to be ‘an immanent process that proceeds through the continued positing and negation of a conception of unity’ (11). The intersubjective character of emancipation and recognition, and hence the issue of the historical and political constitution of intersubjectivity, are addressed in this chapter by bringing together ‘Hegel and Freud’s philosophies of history … with Fanon’s theory of decolonization’ (181). Here the author also discusses and endorses, from a Hegelian point of view, Fanon’s criticism of Sartre: by prophesying ‘that negritude […] will lead to socialism’ (212), Sartre not only contradicts the Hegelian view of philosophy as the owl of Minerva, but also commits to a politically untenable point, insofar as he essentializes ‘the black man’s experience, experience that Sartre continually acknowledges to be inaccessible to him’ (212). The last section of the chapter closes the circle, addressing the specificity of Fanon’s critique of Enlightenment, and concludes that he ‘endorses a version of Kantian universalism and … that it is really this universalism that makes his critique of Sartre and of European colonialism more generally possible’ (214).
While the book is likely to spark some polemics, it has several undeniable merits. First of all, it is written in a clear, accessible way, refraining from the linguistic idiosyncrasy common to much post-structuralism and post-colonialism, as well as many contemporary reprises of Hegel. The topics discussed are of the highest relevance, for academic philosophy and beyond. In the contemporary context, the aim of recovering a strong, idealistic view of the subject not against, but together with, a strong appreciation of the critical core of Fanon’s (and Freud’s) main theses, is certainly welcome. Besides, this aim is pursued with an effective combination of competent textual analysis and the will to get to the spirit beyond the letter. While the authors mainly considered are traditionally associated with continental philosophy, Bird-Pollan also usefully draws, at some significant turning points, on analytic authors, such as Rawls, Brandom and Korsgaard. For all of these reasons and more, the book is in my opinion to be considered as a successful achievement within the ‘creolization’ enterprise.
One point I would like to raise, though not so much as a critique of the book, concerns the universalizability of the Hegelian model of the subject. While Bird-Pollan focuses on the Phenomenology, one should not forget that in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right freedom requires not only subjective autonomy in the context of intersubjective recognition, but also a whole ethical, social and institutional apparatus. For Hegel, freedom in its fullest sense is only possible in the modern state, with rational institutions, division of powers, a free civil society, the commitment to a conceptual-discursive foundation and justification in the public sphere, i.e., all requirements typically associated with Western modernity. Hence one may ask whether, seen from the point of view of the Philosophy of Right, including its philosophy of history, we can really take for granted Bird-Pollan’s assertion that the ontological model he puts forward ‘is not itself culturally specific and so not “Western” in any meaningful sense’ (64). In other words, is it realistic to think that Hegel’s main institutional requirements for the development of the freedom of the subject are universal or universalizable? And, if not, can one think of holding on to the Hegelian model in the context of a different institutional apparatus?
