Frantz Fanon, A Life, by David Macey

The further we go from his death, which occurred on December 6, 1961, the more Frantz Fanon seems relevant. This is what David Macey shows in this work which has established itself as the reference biography on the thinker of emancipation, with entangled lives: from Martinique, from where he embarked, as a young man, in the forces of Free France to liberate the metropolis from the Nazi yoke, until his burial in Algeria – his adopted country, only a few months before the independence of this country.

Colonized and descended from a slave, Fanon remained so in every line he wrote. Algerian and African, he became so by choice and by necessity, after his installation as a psychiatrist in North Africa. Placing with astonishing precision each episode of Fanon's life in its context, both historical and ideological, shedding light on this extraordinary destiny thanks to the testimonies of those close to him and his contemporaries, David Macey frees the author of The Wretched of the Earth from the mythologies in which his character has too often been confined, icon of the third world or, later, star of “postcolonial” studies. Rather than making him live in theories, David Macey seeks on the contrary to give flesh to this bubbling man.

By reinscribing him in his time, by not hiding his contradictions and his trial and error, by not neglecting any facet of the career of this revolutionary who was also a psychiatrist, David Macey offers new keys to understanding the extraordinary fruitfulness of the work of Frantz Fanon.

About the Author: David Macey

David Macey (1949-2011) was Honorary Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Nottingham. Essayist and critic, he was also the author of Lacan in Contexts ( 1988), The Lives of Michel Foucault (1993), The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (2000).