The Lumpenproletariat, The Subaltern, The Mental Asylum

In this talk, Khanna engages the notion of the lumpenproletariat in Fanon, tracing the concept through Marx and Engels, its transformation through Fanon, and its commonality with and distinction from notions of the subaltern. She draws in particular on the material in The Wretched of the Earth on mental asylums and on Fanon's work as a psychiatrist to think of the radical form of subjectivity announced in mental life, an engagement with an idea of rogues, and a politics that emerges less from a sense of the moral or of right than of desubjectivation.

Respondent: Mark Sanders

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Anglophone Project.

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