Seminars

In the early 1960s, a group of West African psychoanalysts clinically engaged with the situation of African migrants in Paris. In the process, the group thought about subject formation in new ways, pointing out the salience of racist hostility for subject formation. With this, the paper argues, the group represents a crucial link to posit decolonization as an analytic frame for the 1960s’ avalanche of experiments in subject formation.

In the 1920s and 1930s Indochina became France’s “model” colony and shining example of the potential of mise en valeur. In addition to ample investment opportunities, especially in concessions and infrastructure, Indochina produced critical resources that provided the material basis of modern French life and leisure: the camphor used to make film for movies, the resin used to produce record albums; and, above all, the rubber used for automobile and bicycle tires as well as the rubber belts that smoothed the motion of the film projector. Much of these materials, however, were produced by contract and marginally free labor, pointing to the ways that French economic life was predicated on colonial labor. Taking up the concept of a “temporal fix,” this chapter examines this set of unequal dependencies and how it shaped the development of French industrial capitalism.