Ranjana Khanna the Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern

South Atlantic Quarterly

Ranjana Khanna

The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern, the Mental Asylum

Nineteen sixty-one was a watershed moment in the history of the mental asylum. It saw the publication of three important texts on the topic. Michel Foucault’s monumental History of Mad- ness (Folie et déraison [1961]) was originally translated in condensed form as Madness and Civiliza- tion (1967). He wrote of “The Birth of the Asy- lum” in that book well before his formulations concerning the biopolitical. In the United States, Erving Goffman published Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, in which mentally ill patients open us to an understanding of sovereign rule. And Frantz Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth) appeared—a text usually seen less as an analysis of madness and its relation to state practices and more as a manifesto of decolonization. If we think through the lens of the history of medicine and its analysis in the sociological, philosophical, and medical realms, we see that these works were published in the larger contexts of antipsychiatry, deinstitutionalization, and decolonization. R. D. Laing, the Scottish psychiatrist who was deeply influenced by existential thought, was responsible for the publication of Folie et déraison in England through the Tavistock series

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Studies in Existentialism and Phenomenology. Laing had written The Divided Self (1960), contrasting the ontologically secure person with a person who “cannot take the realness, aliveness, autonomy and identity of himself and others for granted” and who consequently contrives strategies to avoid “losing his self” (43). In 1961, he followed up with Self and Others (1961) in which he analyzes how the pressures of conformity act on indi- viduals in society and shows how authority figures judge others and create realities for both themselves and for those being judged. In demonstrating a person’s situation in an environment, he revealed the processes of being influenced by other people and the environments they create. In a different vein, Thomas Szasz’s 1961 book, The Myth of Mental Illness, criticized the field of psychiatry, its problematic relationship to the juridical, and its pharmacological imposition. All these books sought to analyze madness in situated contexts (to use Jean-Paul Sartre’s terminology employed by Fanon with a less hopeful sense of a potential for freedom), even as they were informed by different geopoliti- cal, philosophical, and disciplinary strains and contexts. And all expanded an understanding of madness. Foucault showed the historical requirement of a specific organization of thought that allows us, indeed impels us, to clas- sify madness and unreason. The growing fear of madness and the threat of apparent unreason lead to the birth of the asylum. Somewhat idealistic ini- tially in his understanding of madness as an “inaccessible primitive purity” (Foucault 2006: xxxiii), Foucault nonetheless shows the mechanisms of power that control the sane and the insane alike in modernity through the birth of the asylum in which unreason comes to be linked to madness and the two come to be seen as a form of degeneration generalized as mental illness. A strong moral uniformity therefore gets established for the place of the asylum just as there is a stripping down of the carceral aspects of madness. The apparent benevolence of the loosening of chains for the mad is paralleled by the establishment of a sharp distinction between madness and civilization. Foucault demonstrates how this distinction is a mechanism of power in which the poor, the mad, and the criminal are incarcerated and coexist with the prison in conjunction with an idea of degeneracy and the lowlife echoed in the pathologization of the lumpenproletariat in Fanon. Goffman’s notion of the total institution describes an entire bloc of people living under bureaucratic control. The “inmate” of the institution is excluded from knowledge of the decisions taken concerning his fate. Whether the official grounds are medical, as in concealing a treatment plan, the diagnosis, and the rough length of the institutional stay from tuberculo-

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Khanna • The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern 131 sis patients, or military, as in concealing the travel destination from enlisted men, such exclusion provides staff with a special basis of control over and distance from the inhabitants, whom he refers to as “inmates.” People who enter a total institution are deprived of the support provided by the social arrangements of their home worlds and experience, what Goffman calls mortification of the self through social and physical abuse. Goffman based his research on work in St. Elizabeths mental asylum in Washington, DC, and then generalized from that to show how the structure of the asylum functioned in other contexts—prisons, army training camps, naval vessels, boarding schools, monasteries, and nursing homes were all closed worlds. Like Foucault, then, he reveals how the establishments designed to control the mad demonstrate how madness and sanity are differentiated and how other institutions not necessarily understood as sites of social control are modeled along similar lines. In all these texts, the mental asylum is a world deeply shaped by power structures affecting every aspect of life, whether institutional or familial, and these power structures exist equally in the benign institutions as in the ones in which we more obviously see punitive, violent measures. The idea, then, of the asylum, or sanctuary, as a protective site is revealed to be at least questionable. It is instrumental in the control of people. Sometimes this control is driven by the growing management of every aspect of life by governmental force, and sometimes it is more explicitly about rendering some figures disposable. None of these books adequately addresses questions of sexual difference in the asylum; such work came before and after, for example, in the somewhat racially obtuse works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and more recently in numerous texts on both the wrongfully incarcerated and on the liminal figure of the madwoman.1 It is worth putting Fanon’s work in the larger context of so-called antipsychiatry (a misnamed movement because it was not against the pro- fession as such but was highly critical of the mechanisms of state control that were apparent within it, especially in the confines of the asylum structure). What Fanon’s work shows is a different sort of relationality that remains particularly insightful for work today. He understands the situation of colonialism to produce a supplementary and disposable population— those in asylums and those seeking asylums—to show us something about a form of supplement as theorized by that other Algerian, Jacques Derrida, as both confinement and excess and as critique. In “Cogito and the History of Madness,” Derrida criticizes Foucault for his reading of René Descartes as the figure who instituted an opposition between reason and madness.

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Derrida showed, in fact, how Descartes never “interns madness.” Derrida writes, “The Cogito escapes madness only because at its own moment, under its own authority, it is valid even if I am mad” (1978: 55). In order to explain the notion of supplement further, let me turn to Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism:

Mrs. Christian Lilliestierna, the Swedish newspaperwoman, talked in a camp with some of the thousands of Algerian refugees. Here is an extract from her report: “The next in the line was a boy of seven marked by deep wounds made by a steel wire with which he had been bound while French soldiers mistreated and killed his parents and his sisters. A lieutenant had forcefully kept the boy’s eyes open, so that he would see and remember this for a long time. . . . “This child was carried by his grandfather for five days and five nights before reaching the camp. “The child said: ‘There is only one thing I want: to be able to cut a French soldier up into small pieces, tiny pieces!’” Does anyone think it is easy to make this child of seven forget both the murder of his family and his enormous vengeance? Is this orphaned child growing up in an apocalyptic atmosphere the sole message that French democracy will leave?” (1965: 26) In this instance, it appears that it is the structure of French democracy itself that has created this supplement of madness at its periphery—a madness that will remain in the mind of the boy witness as he is bound by the memory of violence to his sisters and as he speaks a passion for violence that traps one into a form of Manichaean thinking with which Fanon would ulti- mately break. Reading Fanon’s example through the lens of Derrida’s “Cogito” reveals how a history of writing informs notions of thinking—an economy that relates reason, madness, and death emerges in the Fanonian example. The apocalyptic lies not only in the moment of extremity but in the ongoing and everyday life of the people of the postcolony (the future national body) and the men and women—the future boy child and the specter of his dead sisters—who seem to haunt so many of the narratives of colonial mental disorders in Wretched. Women killed due to madness, wives tortured, the threat of the dead mother—the madness of the Algerian revolution seems so frequently to play itself out in the actual or fantasized slaughter of women. One could think of these mad male killers—like the two teenage boys who kill their best friend (1963: 270–72)—as figures who show how survival in a sense makes them violent. The journalist Lilliestierna draws perhaps too

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Khanna • The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern 133 crude a reading, and yet she shows how any pure idea of a political future seems to die with martyrdom (frequently gendered feminine in Wretched), rendering the survivor mad, rogue perhaps, even if recognized as such only sometimes. Paradoxically this supplement that equates madness and violence also constitutes its undoing. The supplement will always supplant that which has been included into the force field of the frame, in this case, madness as resistant to the force field of French democracy. One supplement will substitute for another only in the sense that each, in its singularity, will do damage to the frame and, having done damage, will inevitably be damaged by another supplement. Derrida says this not to create the nihil- istic that is endlessly deferrable. Rather, he asks us to do the work of not accepting closure, not simply including the marginalized and giving them the privileges of the center, and not recentralizing. Such gestures do not take into account the betrayal of difference made in such a gesture and do not allow for the damage done to something that has been revealed as an unjust frame—the frame of French democracy itself that developed with and against colonialism. The supplement, which is marked by some form of radical alterity however it was historically engendered and conceived, allows for a thinking of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak refers to as “a functional change in a sign system” (1987: 197) brought about through the manner in which difference haunts. Thinking through the Gramscian terminology of the subaltern and its revisions by Ranajit Guha and others2 in the subaltern studies group would then not necessarily see the subaltern subject as a subject or a people whom we would have to identify as autonomous or not, pure or assimilated, into the terms made familiar by either traditional or for that matter organic intellectuals. It is marked, rather, by a remainder, a supplementarity as it were, that cannot be assimilated and perhaps works with a different form of worlding or world making. Such world making, through Fanon’s lens, would have to include the world making of the mad—the worlds made in asylums—the surviving rogues and wretched who inherit the earth, who indeed display no real moral worth but who also function as a supplement, a grounding and a running aground as it were of an autoimmune reason, as if when French democracy sails south it runs aground and then becomes a ship of fools (see Derrida 2005: 120–23). To get to this point, however, I want to move first through Fanon to consider how he presents the wretched of the earth as a way of reaching my topic—asylum—and how it figures life.

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Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth is perhaps the most famous manifesto of decolonization. When it was published posthumously in 1961, it called for a new model of man, an ontological shift that did not bow down to the frames of Europe:

When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders. . . . So, comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions, and societies which draw their inspiration from her. Humanity is waiting for something from us other than such an imita- tion, which would be almost an obscene caricature. . . . If we wish to live up to our peoples’ expectations, we must seek the response elsewhere than in Europe. (Fanon 1963: 315) The call for a new form of the nation is equally a call for a psychical structure that is yet to be conceived. The translation renders visible the mus- cular and robust rendition of a future man pitted against both a feminized Europe and a dead sister. The three stages of decolonization mapped out by Fanon—the assimilative, the nativist, and the combative—were understood as inadequate to the task of entering into an international public arena, which he understood as the demand of nationalitarian struggle, something he saw as distinct from nationalism for its own sake. The text is most often read as a call to arms and what Cedric Robinson described as “immersion in the revolutionary consciousness of the Algerian peasantry” (1993: 82), which marked a maturing of Fanon out of the “petit-bourgeois stink” (82) of the earlier, more psychiatric evaluations of colonized figures. It is indeed a combative text, but it does not, as some have claimed, simply take up the peasant revolutionary struggle and leave the psychic life of decolonization behind, finding the new man in a romantic, even prelapsarian version of the peasantry. Indeed while the fourth stage of decolonization is not mapped by Fanon, who insists (even as he at other times criticizes Lenin) in true Lenin- ist style that we will not know what comes after the revolution, he ends the book with the inhabitants of the mental asylum in Blida, a suburb of Algiers. The mental asylum is revealed as a site of pre- and postrevolutionary radical indeterminacy, and the case studies are designed less to individuate or to offer an empirical figure of a consciousness of the decolonized (of Euro- pean, Arab, or Berber descent; Jew, Christian, Muslim, etc.) than to suggest their incommensurability with any notion of the healthy he had available to him—the psychiatrically defined healthy man or the figure of the rights- bearing citizen. There is certainly a sense, however, that those seeking a site

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Khanna • The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern 135 of repose or sanctuary in a new independent state will be the wretched of the earth who have no moral worth as such. It is true that some of the figures Fanon describes there and elsewhere in his work (for example, in A Dying Colonialism) are institutionalized because they are deemed to be radical elements (an argument similarly made by feminists and those, like Szasz, supporting deinstitutionalization), and it is also true that part of Fanon’s argument suggests that there can be no adequate psychiatric treatment without decolonization because the historical and economic contexts deplete people of their mental health. He describes symptoms that seem fabricated in order to earn the homeless a bed for the night. This makes perfect sense to Fanon even as it baffled those in the Algerian psychiatric school that had been run by Antoine Porot, an extremely influential and sometimes quite innovative experimental psychiatrist, in spite of his (and perhaps because of his) colonialist outlook (Fanon 1965; Fanon and Lacaton 1955: 1115–16). But Fanon includes at least some of those he deems mad in the category of the lumpenproletariat—a term, some would argue, he was responsible for reviving. It is perhaps among the inhabitants of the asylum, or maybe among those who seek entry into it, that one can see the emergence of a new notion of the political, of the political as a zone of indeterminacy, a futurity that less characterizes the national subject than it characterizes those who interna- tionally fail to fit the category of the political subject, in part because they are outside its logic. Karl Marx recounts a notion of figures who exist outside the lens of political economy, but Fanon—the doctor—goes further. Marx writes of “the rascal, swindler, beggar, the unemployed [or the unoccupied, to give a more precise translation of Marx’s term die Unbeschäftigen], the starving, wretched and criminal workingmen—these are figures who do not exist for political economy but only for other eyes, those of the doctor, the judge, the grave-digger, and bum-bailiff, etc.; such figures are spectres outside its domain” (Marx 1975: 3:283–8). Here and elsewhere, Marx attempts to substitute the lumpenproletariat—a category that suggests a group or an ideality— with a list of identity categories, particularizing as if to give specificity and thus to disperse as a force of historical world making. He does not see them as a political force, unlike Fanon, who as the doctor gives life to spectral figures. Such spectral figures have been of interest in postcolonial studies and are included in the category of the subaltern and those of us who inherit the work of Fanon the psychiatrist. How much does the madman or madwoman need to become human rather than remain his or her troubling, abjected

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136 The South Atlantic Quarterly • Winter 2013 self? And how and through what means does he or she—or can he or she— become human? One could argue usefully for the manner in which spectral- ity, which is both prior to and yet to come, demonstrates a notion of tempo- rality that questions concerns about subjects being pre- or postpolitical in the indeterminate zone of haunting. Fanon, of course, did not seek out the Gramscian term subaltern but rather dwelled on the term lumpenproletariat partly because of its suspicious- ness. Let me spend a few moments on the classic understanding of lumpenproletariat in order to explain how Fanon makes a different sort of argument in his use of the term. In Marx’s treatment of lumpenproletariat in The Eigh- teenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1978b), class seems less a social, super- structural form of differentiation that emerges when the narrowly defined political state “decrees that birth, social rank, education, occupation, are non- political distinctions” (1978a: 29), as he wrote in On the Jewish Question, and more as something politically put together. Whereas the lumpenproletariat were sometimes seen as raced, nomadic, and tribal, and according to Frie drich Engels, “a phenomenon that occurs in a more or less developed form in all the so far known phases of society” (Engels 1978: 408), in The Eighteenth Brumaire they become particularly manipulable, contingent, and shaped by state interests. The lumpenproletariat were made up of the waste of all levels of society. Even as they had been the “rotting mass” seen as distinct from the active and organized proletariat, Marx begins to see the figures as spread elsewhere: “the finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society” (Marx and Engels 1978: 51). The lumpenproletariat became a category that, as Michael Denning (2010: 87) has reminded us, allowed Marx to resist the idea that the poor and working class were as a whole immoral and, in conversation with Mikhail Bakunin, to resist the idea also that criminals and thieves were a revolutionary political force. Peter Stallybrass has shown indeed how Marx and Engels effectively changed the meaning of the term proletariat—which had been used to describe the mostly passive pauper element of criminals, in other words, those who ended up in the category of the lumpenproletariat, who we could think of in more mundane terms today, in this moment of late or advanced capital, as a form of complicity in our context of saturated capitalism. The challenge of The Eighteenth Brumaire is that it threatens to question the understanding of the political function of representing heterogeneity. Stallybrass, following Georges Bataille, writes of the manner in which the spectacle of heterogeneity (evident, for example, in the endless identifica-

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Khanna • The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern 137 tory lists of the apparently differentiated waste products of society) circulated fully in Marx’s time in literary texts that fed Marx’s imagination. Like Bataille, Stallybrass links fascism and Bonapartism. He writes, “For Bataille, the ‘heterogeneous’ includes everything ‘resulting from unproductive expen- diture,’ everything that homogeneous society defines as ‘waste’ or that it is ‘powerless to assimilate.’ At the same time, ‘social heterogeneity does not exist in a formless and disoriented state’ but is itself structured through its relation to the dominant homogeneous forces” (1990: 81). Fanon resists the entirely negative sense of the potential of the lumpen proletariat whose sense of uselessness he effectively views as a colonialist position. Rather than a waste product alone, the lumpenproletariat have to be seen as the abjected remainder of colonialist capitalism. If we were to take the Grundrisse to the notion of the lumpenproletariat, we could say that it is a manifestation of capital—the repulsion that is garnered by the attrac- tion of wage labor, the threat of precariousness that comes with every pos- sibility afforded by labor power (Marx 1973: 604). They are, in other words, figured as supplement. Fanon writes:

It is among these masses, in the people of the shanty towns and in the lumpenproletariat that the insurrection will find its urban spearhead. The lumpenproletariat, this cohort of starving men, divorced from tribe or clan. . . . These job- less, these species of subhumans, redeem themselves. . . . The lumpenproletariat. Once it is constituted, brings all its force to endanger the “security” of the town, and is the sign of the irrevocable decay, the gangrene ever present at the heart of colonial domination. So the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed, and the petty criminals throw themselves into the struggle like stout working men. . . . The prostitutes too, and the maids who are paid two pounds a month, all who turn in circles between suicide and madness, will recover their balance, once more go forward, and march proudly in the great procession of the awakened nation. (Fanon 1961: 81, 130) Fanon describes the waste products of colonial society as the lumpenproletariat as a pack of rats but gives them the active force of the Marxian proletariat. But the remainder still obtains—those in the asylum remain mad, outside the militaristic language of processions or indeed of subalterns but within the constraints of the colonial mental asylum as if a reminder that no romanticization of these subhumans should obtain even as they may be a revolutionary force, no sense that those deemed worthless will be a force for good even if they do bring about a functional change in a sign system.

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The grown boy child will become the pimp who prostitutes the specter of his sister. The colonial asylum then remains as supplement of the colonial and the independent state—incommensurable with state politics and yet perhaps a site of the purely political. Marx aimed to rescue the moral force of the proletariat by divorcing it from the lumpenproletariat, and Fanon in a single gesture asserted the mercenary potential of the decolonizing lumpenproletariat only to leave us with the remainder of the mental asylum, in which the moral worth and political redeemability of the mad remainders of colonial rule are at least questionable. The subhuman that do not fit the terms of potential entry into humanity or into civil society retain some level of difference without any spectacle of it. So what can Fanon help us think through today? He allows us to understand madness beyond the technicalities of the mental asylum because he allows us to think continuity between the mad and the wretched—the mad as the wretched, and the wretched as mad, the mad and the refugee together in search of sanctuary or asylum. To think futurity, let us turn for a moment to the distinction between the subaltern and the lumpenproletariat and why it may be useful to think them together to give an admittedly post- humanist reading of the humanist Fanon. What does the space of the asylum tell us about the distinctions between the subaltern and the lumpenproletariat? If we look for subalterns in our present or future, are we perhaps looking at the lumpenproletariat— the waste products of both civil and political society? In his “Notes on the Methodological Criteria for the History of the Subaltern Classes,” Antonio Gramsci (1971) writes of how the subaltern is visible only retrospectively, making the category obviously attractive to historians and any field that deals with the past. Is it visible retrospectively because it can be given a trajectory? And is this desire to trace a trajectory in Hegelian fashion the prob- lem itself—one that poses the whole question of futurity? If we understand subalternity as a “functional change in a sign system” as Spivak does in her Derridean interpretation, we have to allow for a different kind of reading practice—the attempt to read for difference and the nonassimilable—to read for alterity rather than for a subject with agency who appears as if the cogito never included the economy of madness that undergirds it. Fanon’s work in mental asylums and his attention to the mad as part of the apparently disposable life produced by French democracy—constituted through the colonial relation—has received more critical attention in the past fifteen years than it had previously. Françoise Vergès (1999), David

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Khanna • The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern 139

Macey (2000), Richard Keller (2007), Abdenour Zahzah and Bachir Ridouh in the film Frantz Fanon: Memories d’asile (2002), and Alice Cherki (2006) have all opened up the picture of Fanon as psychiatrist, a man who worked both with very traditional forms of psychiatry like electric shock treatment and with innovative ones. A less than hagiographic picture of Fanon emerges in some of these works, but there is also a sense of Fanon’s extraordinary sympathy—for the perpetrators and the victims of violence in Algeria who all suffer the colonial situation, albeit with complicated and differential results and relations to power. Not unlike Philippe Pinel, Fanon made changes in the asylums in which he worked, aiming to make them more humane. As he began working at Saint-Alban with François Tosquelles in his early years, he was informed by psychoanalysis though he remained critical of some forms of it, as he thought (incorrectly, I think) some of it too deterministic and unable to understand the reactive forms of mental illness that resulted from social circumstances. Saint-Alban was a religious asylum, later discussed by Jean Oury, Félix Guattari, and Tosquelles (1985) as an important experiment in psychotherapy. Fanon (Fanon and Asselah 1957: 21–24) learned from Tosquelles the importance of analyzing institutions as such, to be critical of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry, to produce a kind of ethno- psychiatry (which has more recently become more banalized), and he learned, too, the importance of introducing the outside habitat into the asylum. Later, in Blida, for example, Fanon wanted to open a café so the male patients could reproduce that important site of everyday living in the asylum itself. He also encouraged nurses to sit and eat with patients rather than to maintain a clinical distance. He trained and worked with many psychiatrists to change the culture of asylums. His psychiatric writings have been given less attention than they should. His work with the recently deceased Jacques Azoulay, his intern at Blida, questioned standard French psychiatric methods at Blida and developed, through fieldwork, different models based on different nor- malizing techniques.3 Fanon saw his trainees tortured and killed during the struggle for independence. After Blida, when he left Algeria and worked in the Hopital Razi in Manouba, Tunisia, he worked closely with the North African Jew- ish community to think through psychiatry in the colonial situation. When he lobbied for day treatment rather than confinement for the mentally ill in Hôpital Charles Niccolle, he sought to allow patients another form of inhabiting madness and cowrote articles on the topic (Fanon 1959). But he also was then able to work with refugees in the camps at the borders of

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Algeria who were in need of some form of sanctuary, bringing together the three forms of asylum Fanon allows us to understand—the sanctuary, the mental asylum, and the political decision to admit the stateless person. Fanon situated the mad as one of the futures of an independent postcolony through thinking the coming together of the asylum constituted through French democracy. In other words, in gesturing toward a future for the postcolony, he does not let us forget the damage done to a people through that process of colonial modernity. The postcolony as asylum is then produced as the supplement of democracy—the uncertain future of the lumpenproletariat with no guarantees of liberty. How can we understand forms of difference that, if we perceive them at all, are thrown out as lumpen—rags and tatters, to translate Marx, waste products, the disposable, the nonassimilable loss we know psychoanalytically as melancholia, and perhaps the nongovernable? While waste may be the site of difference, it remains that many of those in the mental asylum, and by defini- tion all asylum seekers, would prefer some entry into a more hospitable civil society and to assimilate to its terms. (One could think here of the Spivakian double negative whereby she describes what one cannot not want.) So what kind of idea of justice is afforded by this attention to the nonassimilable marked by spectral subhumanity? To open to this waste or disposability is indeed to open one to risk. It is not an opening to subalternity that is retrospectively brought to light, but instead an opening to the lumpen proletariat, with a difference that is unpredictable, good or bad, because they come to constitute a zone of the political in which such moral evaluations are called into question. (I have resisted the categories of the vulnerable— criticized now in development literature, the suffering, precarious life, griev- able life—Judith Butler’s terms, surplus population from Marx and then Arendt, or even bare life from Arendt and then Giorgio Agamben, partly because of what I see as a humanism, liberal or Marxist, which often goes along with them, not to mention the redemptive quality with which they are treated.) Part of what might be called for, then, is further work in The History of Madness and The Birth of the Asylum along the lines of Foucault in order to retrieve an analysis of power through the changing meaning of madness and its instruments of control. One might also consider what the concept of asylum itself does to a notion of the political found implicitly in Fanon’s work. In the larger project, I attempt to analyze asylum at its broadest: a site of sanctuary offering apparently unconditional hospitality even though determined by ecclesiastical, “divine,” and sometimes royal parameters; an

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Khanna • The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern 141 institution and building for the mentally unstable, or those labeled as such; the right of a state to grant refugee status, residency, or citizenship to a per- secuted foreigner; the right neither to deport nor to extradite. What kind of a concept is it? Religious, medical, political, juridical, local, global, androcen- tric, anthropomorphic, philosophical, or antiphilosophical? As a flawed opening to alterity, it allows for a thinking about how disposability and the lumpen, not political subjectivity, come to subtend the concept of the political and effectively change the way in which we consider sovereign decision and being (as new man, for example) as always already an anthropomorphism and a constitution of sexual difference. For Fanon, if the mad outside the mental asylum show how madness and violence are flip sides of the same coin, those in the mental asylum offer a model of what the independent nation-state could mean—a site of sanctuary for those who bear the burden of abjection from the heart of French democracy and for the wretchedness of masculine survival and its supplement of woman.

Notes

I would like to thank Mark Sanders for a response to an early version of this essay that drew out the gendered implications of the colonial mental asylum. 1 Szasz (1961) was interested in this topic, of course, but more significantly we see Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1997), Lisa Appignanesi (2008), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (2000), and so on. 2 See, for example, Gramsci 1971; Guha and Spivak 1988; and Spivak 1988. 3 See also Fanon and Azoulay 1954; Keller 2007; Bégué 1996; Adams 1970; Robertson and Walter 2009; Razanajao, Postel, and Allen 1996; Keller 2007; Hopton 1997; Frank 2006; Razanajao 1974; and Allen 2011.

References

Adams, Paul L. 1970. “The Social Psychiatry of Frantz Fanon.” American Journal of Psychia- try 127, no. 6: 809–14. Allen, Mazi A. 2011. “Frantz Fanon’s Clinical Studies (1954–1960).” PhD diss., State Univer- sity of New York at Binghamton. Appignanesi, Lisa. 2008. Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present. London: Virago. Bégué, Jean-Michel. 1996. “French Psychiatry in Algeria (1830–1962): From Colonial to Trans- cultural.” History of Psychiatry 7, no. 28: 533–48. doi:10.1177/0957154X9600702805. Cherki, Alice. 2006. Frantz Fanon: A Portrait. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Denning, Michael. 2010. “Wageless Life.” New Left Review, no. 66: 79–97. Derrida, Jacques. (1967) 1978. “Cogito and the History of Madness.” In Writing and Differ- ence, translated by Alan Bass, 31–63. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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