LIFE GOES ON Over a dozen readers sent in to The Standard Reader articles about Emmanuel Asare, cleaning man and unwitting art critic, who, tidying a London gallery on Oct. 16, bagged as trash an expensive installation by Damien Hirst. Of course, Asare was helped by the fact that it was garbage–literally: used cups, dirty ashtrays, candy wrappers, and newspapers spread across the floor. But the cleaner nonetheless deserves credit. Hirst has gained headlines and wealth by immersing sheep, sharks, and cows in formaldehyde, and calling the result art. At last someone sees his work for what it is. Meanwhile, other readers clipped the Philadelphia Inquirer interview with Harvard professor Cornel West, whose music CD, “Sketches of My Culture,” is about to appear. “It’s another medium. And I’m excited to be part of the black-music tradition,” said West. Everything from missiles to canned goods is being sold these days by reference to the events of Sept. 11, but West’s attempt at promoting sales deserves notice. “We can gain great insight from a blues people,” he explained. “Especially now, as a whole country has the blues.” Spot something The Standard Reader should note? E-mail it to [email protected]. BOOK OF THE WEEK Fanon the Flames: His hour comes around again. By J. Bottum Frantz Fanon: A Biography by David Macey (Picador, 416 pp., $40) Can a book miss its moment so badly it actually curves back into relevance? Take David Macey’s Frantz Fanon, a recent biography of the black psychiatrist from Martinique who, sent by his colonial masters to run a mental hospital in Algiers, became the intellectual cheerleader for the Algerian revolt against the French. Does anyone still remember those halcyon 1960s days when Fanon loomed large for the American Left? R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience, Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man: High on the list of such forgotten tomes is Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth–with its once-notorious introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre, which declared, “Shooting a European means killing two birds with one stone, doing away with oppressor and oppressed at one and the same time: There remain a dead man and a free man.” Fanon wanted an Algerian nation severed from the “sickness of Europe” and an Algerian people who had overcome through violence the psychological restraints induced by their colonizers. He died in 1961 at 36 and didn’t live to see the result of his theory of therapeutic murder or of his claim that America is Europe’s sickness made manifest. Macey hasn’t done a bad job of biography, and the Fanon who emerges is valuable as a marker for that moment in the early 1960s when European Marxists made common cause with Third World anti-colonialists–turning revolutionary doctrine from an economic theory to an anti-economic dogma. Fanon’s name ought to have survived in America as the shorthand way of explaining how racial victim groups displaced the proletariat in the iconography of the Left. But one has to move outside the West to find Fanon’s thought still fully alive. In his 1990 Atlantic essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” Bernard Lewis noted Islamic radicals’ embrace of the anti-Westernism of high European philosophers. Daniel Pipes, in a 1995 First Things article “The Western Mind of Radical Islam,” pointed out the number of terrorists educated in the West. Of the intellectual threads that led to the attack on Sept. 11, an extraordinary number were present in the Paris of the 1950s existentialists–where they were gathered up in an incoherent but lethal combination and offered to the Middle East in The Wretched of the Earth. It was when the hijacked airplanes came smashing into New York and Washington that the faded Frantz Fanon returned to relevance. November 5, 2001 – Volume 7, Number 8
