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If the biography of a famous French thinker has been written in the past two decades, chances are high that Adam Shatz has reviewed it. His review essays collage extensive first- and second-hand archival material into tableaux vivants of the once-kicking individuals behind some of the biggest names in North Atlantic philosophy, asterisking their place in the Pantheon with suggestive details about what went on in their private lives. His reviews of books on the personalities of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Edward Said and Claude Lévi-Strauss, among others, double as highlight reels of the profiled figure’s main ideas, with Shatz speculating about the obsessions that must have driven their lifelong commitments to writing, all the while passing judgment on which parts of their oeuvre have aged like wine and which like milk.
In a 2001 review in the New York Times, Shatz celebrated David Macey’s (2000) biography of Frantz Fanon for killing two cultural screen memories with one stone: the first being the Fanon hyperventilated into an “apostle of violence” by the propagandists of U.S. Black militancy, and the second being the postmodern Fanon, as made over by Homi K. Bhaba in his loquacious foreword to the 1986 English reissue of Black Skin, White Masks. Shatz sandwiched the smallest of quibbles between his words of praise: “Macey takes Fanon seriously as a thinker, and though the inner life of his subject eludes him, he has captured the public figure in all its nobility and confusion” (p. 11). More than 20 years later, in The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, Shatz attempts to grasp the “inner life” of the subject that eluded its titanic forebear. The book softens Shatz’s previous scandalization with Fanon’s comments on violence by emphasizing how the “mature” Fanon, the one with ample clinical experience under his belt, warned of the psychological costs of internecine warfare. Shatz also slightly adjusts his
crosshairs on the Anglo-American