Dentistry: the Sartrean vs. the Decolonial
Writes biographer extraordinaire David Macey:
"As he pursued his studies [during the late 1940s], Fanon began to turn away from general medicine and to develop an interest in psychiatry. The reasons for this new change of direction were probably subjective. . . . He has no difficulty in introducing elements of Sartrean phenomenology into his socio-diagnostics, but would have found it difficult indeed to produce a Sartrean theory of dentistry."
(see Chapter 4, herein)
"Indeed" indeed.
Need we mention Macey's research to show that FF nearly became a dentist?
However, let's put aside that unimaginable road not taken.
DM invites us to wonder in passing: Is there "a Sartrean theory of dentistry"?
Let's go to the source.
Did Sartre have "a Sartrean theory of dentistry"?
Consider the following reflections, from Saint Genet:
"Thus, taste remains, but it loses its ground and takes on the name good taste in opposing pure artificialism, which becomes bad taste. . . .
"To be sure, the more Nature recedes, the less we are tempted to admire the imitative character of industrial products. With the progress of dentistry, real and false teeth will disappear together: treated, worked on, transformed by the dentist, the tooth is no longer either real or false; there is no longer either good or bad taste.
"But in this prehistory of industry, bad taste expresses the astonishment we feel at our own power: a synthetic pearl reminds us at every moment, by its sheen, that man, who only yesterday was a natural creature, can produce in himself and outside of himself a false nature more sparking and more rigorous than the true one."
(pg. 362)
Fascinating.
But we concede: FF left behind for us no theory of dentistry, Sartrean or otherwise, that has been discovered.
However might he not along his way have contributed some intriguing remarks towards a "theory of teeth"? And even of fangs?
Consider Black Skin, White Masks.
From its justly famous Chapter 5, "The Lived Experience of the Black Man" (pdf.) / "The Fact of Blackness":
"And there you have it: I did not create a meaning for myself; the meaning was already there, waiting. It is not with my wretched nègre misery, my wretched nègre teeth, my wretched nègre hunger that I fashion a torch to set the world alight. The torch was already there, waiting for this historic chance."
Chapter 7 is particularly biting.
First a swipe at dentists themselves, offered amidst observations of how Martinicans, caught up in a Eurocentric inferiority complex, overcompensate through the hierarchies of "comparison" culture, to pass judgment on each other, and even on old friends, or to remain fixed in epistemological paralysis:
"I know doctors and dentists, however, who continue to throw at each other diagnostic mistakes that were made fifteen years ago." (Philcox's translation) or "I have known some, physicians and dentists, who have gone on filling their heads with mistakes in judgment made fifteen years before." (Markmann's)
Then some pages later, abruptly shifting back into a Césairian mode:
"The 'twelve million black voices' have wailed against the curtain of the sky. And the curtain, cut across from one side to the other, the teethmarks [les empreintes dentales] squarely in place, implanted in taboo's guts, is fallen like the punctured calabash of a balafon."
Above all and finally, may we cite Wretched's "On Violence"?
"The Algerian Revolution addresses the occupying nation as follows: 'Remove your fangs from Algeria's bruised and wounded flesh! Let the Algerian people speak!'"
(all emphases supplied)
We conclude with confidence that Fanon could have worked out and gone beyond a Sartrean towards a decolonial theory of teeth, dentists, fangs, and dentisty, had he so cared to.
Thankfully for us his readers, he had other fish to fry.
posted by TiR at 7:01 AM
