Fuoco B. Fann is a post-structuralist and cultural theorist. He is noted for synthesizing Post-structuralism with American Literary Criticism, Intercultural Philosophy, and Material Culture Studies. He taught at Lanzhou Jiaotong University, China before moving in 1989 to the United States, where he guest-lectured at California State University, East Bay and UC Davis, and has since resided in California. Fann currently guest lectures at UC Berkeley. Fann's monograph on post-structuralism and intercultural philosophy, This Self We Deserve: A Quest after Modernity, was published in 2020.Fuoco B. Fann, This Self We Deserve: A Quest after Modernity (Berkeley: Philosophy & Art Collaboratory, 2020), https://www.worldcat.org/title/1322088967 in library collections at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, Harvard University, Princeton University, The University of Chicago, UCLA, New York University, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Works
Post-structuralism, Intercultural Philosophy, and Continental Philosophy The novelty of Fann's work demonstrates four main unprecedented arguments: (1) Our current social conditions resulted from our knowledge structure. Modern knowledge seems to have lost its certainty and become precarious,Edmund Mendelssohn, White Musical Mythologies: Sonic Presence in Modernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023), 20-21. "In This Self We Deserve: A Quest After Modernity (2020), Fann embarks on an incredible project, drawing together Derrida's critique of the west's logo/phonocentric metaphysics; Foucault's narrative of the archaeological mutation that produced the figure of Modern Man (l'homme) through the 'dangerous intermediaries' of the modern human sciences; Jean-François Lyotard's characterization of 'postmodern' knowledge as 'discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical,' 'producing not the known, but the unknown'; Lévinas's contention that western philosophy has most often been a form of 'ontological imperialism'; Gilles Deleuze's declaration that 'we have become simulacra,' forsaking 'moral existence in order to enter into aesthetic existence,' which, in his view, is a positive alternative to the metaphysical dualisms that have long burdened western aesthetics (i.e., original/copy, true/false, God/ man); and Jean Baudrillard's contention, contra Deleuze, that simulacra and simulation signal an ever-deeper alienation (in a Marxian sense): the vast landscape of consumer goods and the 'dizzying whirl of reality' on screen convey a fictive sense of communal warmth when in fact we moderns are more alienated than ever.... In short, the instability of our present knowledge runs deep." an instability that results from a continuous "modern tradition" of thought that, in our time, "makes us malfunction in everyday life,"Fann, This Self We Deserve, 29. See Mendelssohn, White Musical Mythologies, 21. "Through the course of Fann's exegesis, one gets the sense that western metaphysics is premised on something that does not exist, the fictive 'now' that has been written into being in Derrida's sense and that Fann incisively links to the fictive self-assurance of the modern subject, one who is gifted with a kind of ontologically endowed speech to say what is. This 'modern speaking subject, being self-conscious of one's freedom,' nevertheless stands on empty ground." and implicates many aspects of societies. (2) This instability of knowledge is compounded by the "modern phonetic language": while language in general is a copy of things, Fann demonstrates that phonetic-alphabetic language is a copy of a copy. Since phonetic writing copies the sounds of speech which in turn refer to ideas of things, in Foucault's words, alphabetic writing demands that "we place ourselves in the virtual space of self-representation and reduplication,"Michel Foucault, "Language to Infinity," in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. II, ed.James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: New Press, 1998), 91. and in its modern form, Fann argues, phonetic language "creates an abyss between self and reality whose edge can never be reached."Fann, This Self We Deserve, 118. (3) In this problematic "modern tradition," the foundational aphorism of western rationality, René Descartes' famed "I think, therefore I am," has reversed today into "We think, therefore We are." This original constellation of Fann's claims is indeed the first to formulate this specific coinage (We think, therefore we are") as a direct inversion of Descartes, and to link it explicitly to: the disconnection between "I think" and "I am" in modern epistemology; the collective conformity to shared values (freedom, equality, power) and consumer symbols; and the dissolution of Weberian methodological individualism. No major figure in the Western canon—neither Hegel (who gave us the "we" of Spirit), nor Heidegger (who gave us the "they" of das Man), nor Adorno (who critiqued the culture industry), nor Foucault (who announced the "death of man")—has formulated this precise inversion as a reversal of the Cartesian cogito.Fann, This Self We Deserve, 90; see Mendelssohn, White Musical Mythologies, 21. "In one of many striking reversals described in This Self We Deserve, Fann suggests that Descartes's famed cogito, ergo sum should be recast today as 'We think, therefore We are': this modern subject, who 'uniquely simulates a self-projected autonomy as the individual,' winds up thinking, speaking, and consuming the same mass-mediatized images, the same inner narratives, and the same salable goods and ideas as everyone else." (4) Citing G.W.F. Hegel's thesis from The Philosophy of History that throughout history "the superior principle overcame the inferior,"Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree (1899), http://sqapo.com/CompleteText-Hegel-PhilosophyofHistory.htm and displaying Hegel's derogatory remarks against Blacks in Africa—including accusations of cannibalismHegel, The Philosophy of History. "Tyranny is regarded as no wrong, and cannibalism is looked upon as quite customary and proper. Among us [westerners] instinct deters from it, if we can speak of instinct at all as appertaining to man. But with the Negro this is not the case, and the devouring of human flesh is altogether consonant with the general principles of the African race; to the sensual Negro, human flesh is but an object of sense—mere flesh." —and excluding "immovable" empires of Asia out of "the History of the World",While Hegel denigrated Africa as the "land of childhood... exhibiting the most reckless inhumanity and disgusting barbarism," he claimed that East Asia was a land of "Despotism" and that "the History of the World [travelled] out of China to the West in order to realize its telos." Hegel, The Philosophy of History, quoted in Fann, This Self We Deserve, see pp. 53-56. Fann suggests that the "teleological, linear, and progressive Hegelian... conception of History" amounts to "ontological violence."Fann, This Self We Deserve, 56. Fann has been acknowledged as the first scholar to clearly articulate these four contentions together, suggesting that the Modern Imperial domination is deeply abetted by "Hegelian metaphysics and ethnocentrism." Fann's originality is not in the discovery of Hegel's racism, but in coining the term "ontological violence," and its integration with his larger project of reversing the Cartesian cogito.See Mendelssohn, White Musical Mythologies, 34. "It seems strange to me, especially given our present-day sensitivity to such matters, that while every PhD student in the humanities must gain some familiarity with Hegel, simply quoting Hegel's words from The Philosophy of History—who does this?—is enough to uncover the epic, teleological, and dialectical progression of the Spirit that becomes itself through a heroic propulsion across time and space as something of an ontological cartoon. Hegel's Philosophy of History lays out the empirical 'evidence' for the abstract claims he makes in his Phenomenology: the movement of the Spirit encountering its other, clashing with it, finally internalizing or sublating alterity, has a real-world correlate. This dialectical movement structures the whole of Hegel's Philosophy of History, in which the Greeks sublimate the Persians, the Romans sublimate the Greeks, the Germans eventually sublimate the Romans, and so on: in each case, Hegel wrote, "the superior principle overcame the inferior," a universal principle that he termed an "a priori proof." Fann quips: "[i]t sounds like 'gangster proof,' but is indeed an ontological proof that has dominated the world since the nineteenth century."