Contemporary accounts of individual self-formation struggle to articulate a mode of subjectivity not determined by relations of power. In response to this dilemma, Foucault's late lectures on the ancient ethical practices of “fearless speech” ( parrhesia) offer a model of ethical self-governance that educates individuals to ethical and political engagement. Rooted in the psychological capacities of curiosity and resolve, such self-governance equips individuals with a “disposition to steadiness” that orients individuals in the face of uncertainty. The practices of parrhesia accomplish this task without fabricating a distinction between internal soul and external body; by creating not a “body of knowledge” but a “body of practices”; and without reference to an external order such as nature, custom, tradition, or religion. The result is an “expressive subject” defined through expressive practices sustained by a simultaneous relationship to herself and to others. Individuals develop themselves not through their ability to “dare to know” but as those who “dare to act.”
What does it mean to develop psychiatric method in a colonial context? Specifically, if the aims of psychiatry have traditionally been couched in the language of ‘psychic integration’ and ‘healing’, then what does it mean to practice psychiatry within structures that organize and reinforce the exclusions of colonialism? With these questions, this article examines Frantz Fanon’s psychiatric practices in light of his radical political commitments. I argue that Fanon’s innovations with the institutional form of the psychiatric hospital serve to intervene differently in psychic conflict. Notably, these changes offer different ways to diagnose and respond to patients, along with different strategies for managing psychic disintegration in colonial contexts. The result is a rethinking of the relation between material and imagined worlds, and so the emergence of the hospital as a waystation between a colonial context and a political freedom yet to come.
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