The Humanism Effect: Fanon, Foucault, and Ethics without Subjects

Authors

  • Anthony C. Alessandrini Kingsborough Community College - CUNY

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i7.2637

Abstract

This article addresses a tendency within postcolonial studies to place the work of Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon in opposition. This has obscured the real, and potentially very productive, similarities between them. The most important of these links has to do with their shared critique of the sovereign subject of humanism: for Fanon and Foucault, this critique of the traditional humanist subject provides a way of opposing what they both see as the dangerous nostalgia for a lost moment of origin. Furthermore, Fanon and Foucault both end in a moment of ethics, but it is an ethics without the sort of stable subjects assumed by humanism. I offer a consideration of some of the links that can be found in several texts by Fanon and Foucault. I then attempt to define the term I will be using to describe their shared strategy of an ethics without subjects: the “humanism effect.” I conclude by trying to suggest some of the strategic possibilities of an ethics without subjects in the postcolonial context.

Author Biography

Anthony C. Alessandrini, Kingsborough Community College - CUNY

Anthony C. Alessandrini is an assistant professor of English at Kingsborough Community College-City University of New York in Brooklyn. He is the editor of Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, and has published articles on postcolonial literature and theory in a number of journals, including Arab Studies Journal, Cultural Studies, Diaspora, and Reconstruction. He is also a poet whose recent work has been published in Hanging Loose, MARY Magazine, Splash of Red, and Tin House.

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Published

2009-09-07

How to Cite

Alessandrini, A. C. (2009). The Humanism Effect: Fanon, Foucault, and Ethics without Subjects. Foucault Studies, (7), 64–80. https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i7.2637

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Articles