Zoonosis and the Polis: COVID-19 and Frantz Fanon's Critique of the Modern Colony

Abstract

The critiques of modernity by Bruno Latour and Amitav Ghosh are important for understanding the global pandemic of COVID-19 as well as modern responses to it. In spite of this importance, each maintains a commitment to the polis and “the body” – a falsely universal body that opposes itself to others. I seek to extend their critique while also addressing the polis. In this essay, I argue that a helpful response is anticipated by French philosopher and decolonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. In The wretched of the Earth, Fanon's critique of the Manichaean distinctions between human and earthly agency, human and body, human and animal is the framework for his understanding of the significance of colonial wartime “cortico-visceral disorders.” The colony is (1) a manifestation on the part of the European polis of disgust for blackness, for animality, the agency of soil, the powers of the sun, for disability that the colony itself often causes and always denies, and (2) simultaneously an effort to install a supposedly nonracialized, non-disabled man, a universal body, and unilateral agency. A Fanonian response to the global pandemic and climate crisis would thus appreciate the myriad crises that arise precisely when humanity is thought to be the opposite of Earth.