Notes on Fanon's Dialectics

NOTES ON FANON’S DIALECTICS Anisha Sankar A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Sociology The University of Auckland 2019 Abstract This thesis is a study of the dialectics of Martinican philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon. Amidst one-dimensional and reductive readings of Fanon, this thesis proposes a twofold task – to think Fanon dialectically, and to think dialectics in terms of Fanon. To think Fanon dialectically, I map three moments in the evolution of Fanon’s thought which correspond to the three parts in which this thesis is presented: (1) Roots, (2) Fanon’s Dialectics, and (3) Living Thought. Part One considers roots of Fanon’s thought, traced back to the dialectics of Aimé Césaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Fanon’s lived experience. These roots set up the reading of Fanon that follows in Part Two, by addressing the methods and intentions of those from which he draws. Part Two argues that methodologically speaking, Fanon’s work revolves around a dialectics of disalienation, revealing the sites in which contradictions exist under colonial capitalism. Here, I identify three sites his work explores: the ontological, the psycho-existential, and the situational. I call these ‘sites of rupture’ to signal my interpretation of Fanon’s analysis as a demand for disalienation at each of these sites, by way of privileging the moment of rupture. Doing so ultimately presents Fanon as a theorist of rupture. Finally, Part Three looks to three contemporary theorists who engage with Fanon’s thought in a way that reworks his dialectics in new situations. It considers the work of Lewis Gordon, George Ciccariello-Maher, and Glen Coulthard as embodying a ‘revolutionary Fanonism’, engaging Fanon in ongoing struggles of decolonisation. A consideration of the evolution of Fanon’s dialectics is done in the spirit of a dialectical approach to knowledge. Doing so refuses to render his thought static, instead testifying to the strength and malleability of his method. The principles of Fanon’s method demand its engagement with the social reality in which it finds itself. Overall, this study presents notes towards the revitalisation of an anticolonial dialectics. i Acknowledgements Thank you, deeply, to those who have shared in this project. My parents, Meenakshi and Sankar, whose unwavering faith in me gives me courage and strength. Campbell, mentor and comrade, who has guided me to believe in my own thought. Mike, whose warmth, love and support without which I could not have completed this work. Betty, Nat, Shannon and Emma, for taking the time to give considered feedback. Old friends, who hold me with indelible generosity, and new friends I’ve made along the way. !க்க நன்& ii CONTENTS Abstract ..................................................................................................................................................................... i Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................................ ii INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................................... 2 PART ONE: ROOTS ............................................................................................................................................... 8 1 CÉSAIRE’S DIALECTICS ................................................................................................................................ 10 2 SARTRE’S DIALECTICS ................................................................................................................................. 25 3 FANON’S LIVED EXPERIENCE ..................................................................................................................... 40 PART TWO: ON FANON’S DIALECTICS ......................................................................................................... 47 4 THE ONTOLOGICAL ........................................................................................................................................ 49 5 THE PSYCHO-EXISTENTIAL ......................................................................................................................... 57 6 THE SITUATIONAL ......................................................................................................................................... 64 PART THREE: THE PATH AHEAD .................................................................................................................. 73 7 LEWIS GORDON ............................................................................................................................................... 77 8 GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER .................................................................................................................. 88 9 GLEN COULTHARD ...................................................................................................................................... 104 CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................................................................... 117 WORKS CITED .................................................................................................................................................. 123 iii ‘The question at issue is therefore the ultimate end of mankind, the end which the spirit sets itself in the world’. – G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 63. ‘What can I do? One must begin somewhere. Begin what? The only thing in the world worth beginning: The End of the world of course’. – Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 22. ‘Laying claim to and denying the human condition at the same time: the contradiction is explosive’. – Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface to The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, 17. 1 INTRODUCTION It is because we are not past colonialism that we are not past Frantz Fanon. His sharp insight into the nature of colonialism sets Fanon up to be one of its fiercest critics. From whatever context in which he found himself, from Martinique to France to Algeria, Fanon saw contradictions at play with rich and prolific insight. He experienced his own body in these contexts as a site of struggle, pushing him towards a metacritique of colonialism that locates its operation at multiple levels. This complex and layered account of colonialism gives us important insights into the world today. Not only does it indicate the stronghold of colonialism that persists, but it also reveals the points at which its logic is at its weakest. These are the points at which its contradictions occur – clues to its surpassing. The turn to Fanon demands the refusal to read him one-dimensionally. Reiland Rabaka notes a trend in literature on Fanon, observing that ‘as has been the unfortunate fate of many nonwhite intellectual-activists, Fanon’s work is usually approached one-dimensionally with an intense emphasis on either his critique of racism in Black Skin, White Masks, or his critique of racial colonialism in The Wretched of the Earth'.1 In opposition, this thesis considers Fanon’s work as a cohesive body that transcends efforts to reduce it to one particular dimension. Broadening the lens through which Fanon is read reveals a common consistency throughout his work that encompasses all dimensions, which is found in its form and method. Ultimately, there remains a distinctly dialectical Fanon. This thesis is a study of Fanon’s dialectics. I propose to think Fanon dialectically, and to think dialectics in terms of Fanon. In order to think Fanon dialectically, I resist the tendency to subscribe to what Lewis Gordon has called disciplinary decadence. This term is broadly defined by Gordon as the ‘turn away from living thought'.2 In other words, disciplinary 1 Reiland Rabaka, Forms of Fanonism: Frantz Fanon’s Critical Theory and the Dialectics of Decolonization (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2010), 146. 2 Lewis Gordon, ‘Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence', Transmodernity, vol. 1, no. 2 (2011), 98. 2 decadence can be considered the opposite to a dialectical approach to knowledge. This concept can be used to explain the wanton spirit in which Fanon has categorically been reduced to one discipline over another at the expense of dialectical engagement with his work.3 Gordon suggests that this attitude of disciplinary decadence ‘should be avoided in the interests of learning how to read him with imagination and clarity'.4 That is to say, Fanon cannot be confined solely to the disciplines and methods he utilises, or that draw on him. Instead, he should be read in a way that considers his relationship to multiple disciplines without reducing him to one or the other. One commentator observes a disciplinarily decadent norm in Fanonian literature when they note that there exists ‘a wide variety of sometimes contradictory interpretative traditions which seem to function in utter ignorance of one another: there is the Marxist Fanon, the Lacanian Fanon, the existentialist Fanon, the postmodernist Fanon, the essentialist Fanon, the anti-essentialist Fanon'.5 These categorisations neglect that Fanon cannot be reduced to either ‘this or that’. In fact, he can exist within all of these categories simultaneously. This is the case if we consider him dialectically, and understand Fanon as dialectical. To consider Fanon as dialectical means two things. First, it means that Fanon can and is able to simultaneously be none and all of the above Fanons at once. We cannot read Fanon with principles of formal logic (the logic underlying the tradition of western metaphysics) because he does not adopt these principles in the first place. To accept him instead as a dialectical thinker is to allow for a more rigorous understanding of the complex and layered ways in which different theorists, theories and disciplines intersect in Fanon’s thought. Fanon asserts this sentiment in Black Skin, White Masks quite explicitly: When I began this book, having completed my medical studies, I thought of presenting it as my thesis. But dialectic required the constant adoption of positions. Although I had more or less concentrated on the psychic alienation of the black man, I could not 3 Lewis Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renée T White, ‘Five Stages of Fanon Studies’ in Fanon: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers 1996), 8. 4 Gordon et al., ‘Five Stages of Fanon Studies', 8. 5 James Penney, ‘Passing into the Universal: Fanon, Sartre, and the Colonial Dialectic', Paragraph, vol. 27, no. 3 (2004), 49. 3 remain silent about certain things which, however psychological they may be, produce consequences that extend into the domain of other sciences.6 Reading Fanon in this light can correct attempts made by his readers to claim Fanon to any one particular discipline, and make coherent his reinterpretation of theory to analyse the situation of colonialism. This points also to the instrumentality and relationality of the use of varied theories and disciplines as they pertain to an analysis of the nuanced struggles under and against racism, colonialism, and capitalism. These conditions of alienation and oppression form the context from which Fanon writes. It is a context in which the structures of European domination, those of racism, colonialism, and capitalism, meld into a tripartite hybrid that presents itself in Fanon’s day – and ours -– as the ultimate obstacle against the realisation of human freedom. These conditions have, for Fanon, shaped the nature and direction of world-historical struggle. Thus, I suggest that Fanon’s use of various and apparently ‘contradictory’ theories is contingent on their value as weapons in the dialectical struggles of race and class under structures of colonial capitalism, and secondary to his dialectical method itself. Fanon is always careful to stress that his work is ‘rooted in the temporal’.7 Conversely, this means that nothing is fixed – an emphasis conducive to this reading. The second way in which Fanon can be considered dialectical requires further substantiation and is detailed in Part Two of this thesis. My claim is that Fanon can, and should be reconceptualised as a theorist of rupture. By this, I mean that his body of theory revolves around the points of contradiction experienced by a society under the weight of racism, colonialism, and capitalism. In other words, his engagement with varying phenomena of racism brings light to different categories of dialectical rupture. For clarification of my use of the term rupture in this context, I mean the break through the points at which sites of contradiction in the world exist. It is with the aim of pressing on these points until they finally give way to dialectical movement through them, to which his work is dedicated. This 6 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 2008 [1952]), 33. 7 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 5. 4 reconceptualisation also emphasises Fanon’s privileging of the notion of rupture, including the moments of separation this entails, as opposed to the notions of false unity that has hindered the radical potential of his dialectical thought. In conceptualising Fanon as a theorist of rupture, we can read his work as concerned above all else with a dialectics of disalienation. This is because rupture, for Fanon, is the key to breaking through the structures that enforce alienation. His body of theory is his way to expose and agitate these points of tension, making them vulnerable enough to pass through at whatever cost. This was Fanon’s way to ultimately contribute to Césaire’s visceral plea for ‘the End of the world, of course'.8 But what, then, made Fanon possible in the first place? More specifically, what has made Fanon dialectical – that is, a thinker of dialectics and a dialectical thinker? Looking past or through Fanon allows us to better understand Fanon’s body of work, and contextualise what he thought and said regarding dialectics. Such a task also establishes the nature of Fanon’s dialectics as what Lewis Gordon calls ‘living thought’. It understands Fanon’s thought as engaging with the reality of his context, and subjecting dialectics as he grasped it to its own purpose and limitations. To approach this study in light of a dialectical framework then, also considers the question of how Fanon’s dialectics as living thought lives today. This turns the focus to Fanon’s own engagement with today’s reality and its own limitations. As a result, this study does not confine dialectical thought to the way it appears in Fanon which would render it static, but instead treats it as something that is always becoming. This thesis proceeds in three parts that correspond to three moments in the dialectical evolution of a knowledge I have called ‘Fanon’s dialectics’. In Part One, I trace Fanon’s dialectics to the roots it finds in Aimé Césaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Fanon’s own lived experience. These roots form the first three chapters, respectively. Part One establishes a basis that enables my reading of Fanon’s dialectics, specifically contextualising the ways in which Fanon’s dialectics have formed. Regarding the first two chapters on Césaire and Sartre, I do not deny that roots can also be found elsewhere or traced back even further than these 8 Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, ed. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001 [1947]) 22. 5 scholars – the spectre of Hegel underlies both, after all. Yet, Césaire and Sartre’s relationship to Fanon is at such a close proximity that it makes the task of establishing the dialectical thread that runs from them to Fanon clear. Therefore, I offer an exposition of their dialectical thought, characterising this as a crucial moment in the evolution of Fanon’s dialectics. The third chapter provides a brief biographical account of Fanon’s life as an effort to situate his thought within his lived experience. This task establishes Fanon’s early familiarity with the dialectical rhythm at play in his own life. In Part Two I offer a reading of Fanon, seeking to draw out what can be called Fanon’s intuitive dialectics. Fanon’s work can be read as revolving around points of contradictions that exist under conditions of racist, colonial capitalism, with the imperative of dialectical movement in mind to mediate passing through these contradictions in order to surpass them. I argue that this logic of dialectical analysis appears in Fanon at three levels, which correspond to the three chapters in Part Two respectively: (1) the ontological (2) the psycho- existential and (3) the situational. I characterise these levels as three ‘sites of rupture’, ultimately arguing that Fanon should be conceptualised as a theorist of rupture. In Part Three, I look to how Fanon’s dialectics have been taken up by three contemporary scholars: Lewis Gordon, George Ciccariello-Maher, and Glen Coulthard. I consider these scholars as offering some of the most prominent engagements with Fanon’s thought, staying true to Fanon’s decolonial ambitions in their respective projects. They each engage with Fanon’s dialectics in terms of its method, pulling from Fanon a distinctly dialectical thread to weave into their own work. This in turn constitutes a dialectical engagement with Fanon’s thought, subjecting his thought to its own limits, and repurposing it for new contexts and political struggles by identifying ruptures in the contemporary world. As a result, they each use Fanon as an opportunity to engage in an ongoing anticolonial project, signaling their embodiment of what Rabaka calls ‘revolutionary Fanonism’.9 I would like to preface the text that follows by situating my relationship to the knowledge that I have worked with this past year, and to the knowledge I have produced. I am not an 9 Reiland Rabaka, ‘Revolutionary Fanonism: On Frantz Fanon’s Modification of Marxism and Decolonisation of Democratic Socialism’, Socialism and Democracy, vol. 25, no. 1 (2011), 141. 6 abstract subject, after all. My particularity is my point of reference to both thought and politics. I was born in Tamil Nadu, India, a place that endured some 350 years of colonial rule. My parents immigrated to Aotearoa/New Zealand when I was 5, and it is here I have lived most of my life. As a South Indian Tamil living now on a land that continues to face ongoing colonisation based on land dispossession of tangata whenua, and overt systemic racism, the contradictions of colonial capitalism are presented in multitudes and in global proportions. I turn to Fanon for the reason that he resonates deeply with the anticolonial spirit, offering a framework through which contradictions can be analysed. Notes on Fanon’s Dialectics, then, can be considered as notes towards an understanding of the contradictions at play in different landscapes. A focus on his dialectics has been written from the standpoint of a search for a method. The relevance of dialectics is such that it offers a potent, alternative logic to understand the world in a way that resonates clearly with anticolonial politics. Sartre had claimed that ‘we must establish the dialectic as the universal method and universal law of anthropology'.10 To what extent is this true? The potential of dialectics, with an emphasis on the notion of rupture, is both destructive and productive. That is, rupture signals both the destruction of a system, but the way forward to produce new structural forms or ways of being. A ruptural dialectics, then, helps to diagnose a condition of stasis or Manichaeism, advocating instead for the wheels of dialectical movement to be set in motion. It is in light of pursuing a familiarity with this method for the purpose of extending and stretching its use that I proceed. It is as Fanon says, we analyse to destroy. 10 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume One, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso, 2004 [1960]), 18. 7 PART ONE ROOTS Part One of this thesis establishes what I have characterised as a ‘moment’ in which roots of Fanon’s dialectics can be found. This moment encompasses three major influences on Fanon’s thought: the politics and philosophies of Aimé Césaire and Jean-Paul Sartre, and the lived experience of Fanon over the course of his life. In addition to their influence, each in their own way demonstrates the link between anticolonialism and dialectics. The first two chapters offer a brief exposition of the dialectical thought in Césaire and Sartre as two of Fanon’s most well-known antecedents. Fanon’s engagement with both can be considered as a dialectical model of critical intimacy. I borrow the term ‘critical intimacy’ from Gayatri Spivak, who uses it to describe a method of engagement with text that is opposed to the attitude of ‘critical distance’.11 Such a model affords Fanon the ability to engage with the thought of both from the basis of kinship. This kinship is characterised by an attitude of solidarity and love, allowing for both an embrace and a dismantling of their respective thought at the same time.12 Framing Fanon’s relationship with Césaire and Sartre as a dialectical model of critical intimacy aptly considers the complexity of Fanon’s relationship to both theorists and to thought itself. Furthermore, it offers an alternative path to the problem of subordinated theoretical identity that is often the case with non-white scholars. I build on this point in greater detail in Chapter Two, arguing against the tendency in Fanonian scholarship to reduce Fanon to any of his influences, as either a Césairian or a Sartrean. Doing so would also deny Césaire and Sartre’s own movement towards Fanon at certain points of their own intellectual developments. 11 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 425. 12 Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 425. 8 The inclusion of Chapter Three attests to the importance of contextualising Fanon’s thought within his own lived experience that produced it. Fanon himself was always quick to assert his own position or situation. Acknowledging the roots of Fanon’s dialectics demands not sealing Fanon into the realm of objective thought but locating it in relation to his own identity. Peter Hudis puts this clearly: ‘Fanon addressed the world, but always from the zero point of his orientation'.13 This chapter does not attempt to offer an extensive biographical account of Fanon’s life but puts forth some events that ground his thought within his experience. This task offers some illuminating insights into Fanon’s embodied familiarity with contradictions under colonialism. While the chapters below are not an exhaustive account of all roots of Fanon’s dialectic, they cover sufficient grounds to both demonstrate Fanon’s dialectics as living thought, and establish the basis for the reading that follows in Part Two. 13 Peter Hudis, Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades (London: Pluto Press, 2015), 11. 9 CHAPTER ONE CÉSAIRE’S DIALECTICS This chapter opens with Fanon’s key Africana antecedent. The philosophically enriched politics and poetry of Aimé Césaire’s work serves in itself as the focus of vast anticolonial study. Césaire’s refusal to be confined to one discipline, given the range of theoretical and literary instruments through which he expresses his politics, contributes to the extent to which his work remains relevant to many categories of study. This is also true in mapping Césaire’s contribution to Fanon’s own anticolonial theory. The intention of this Chapter is to explore the question of how we can understand Césaire to better understand Fanon’s dialectics. Césaire’s influence on Fanon cannot be overstated. Yet, Fanon’s engagement with Césaire is of a profoundly critical nature, which values his insight as much as it pushes his work to the edge of its own radical horizon. As a result of the appearance of inconsistency, Fanon’s relationship to Césaire is a site of scholarly contestation. Some scholars, for instance Robert Bernasconi, take Fanon’s treatment of Césaire to be ‘ambiguous’.14 Bernasconi acknowledges this complicated relationship, stating that ‘Césaire was one of Fanon’s main sources of inspiration, yet at the same time Fanon maintained a largely critical stance toward him'.15 Yet, through repeated reference to this tension in Fanon’s reading as ambiguous, Bernasconi fails to credit Fanon with the ability to simultaneously accept and reject elements of Césaire as a dialectical intellectual practice, instead implying contradiction in terms of failure. To avoid this pitfall, I read Fanon’s treatment of Césaire within a dialectical model of critical intimacy. This position understands Fanon’s relationship to Césaire as one of solidarity and love. To interpret their relationship within this framework is more accurate than 14. Robert Bernasconi, ‘The Assumption of Négritude: Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and the Vicious Circle of Race Politics', Parallax, 2002, vol. 8, no. 2, 69–83. 15 Bernasconi, ‘The Assumption of Négritude', 69-71. 10 Bernasconi’s reading, giving strength to Fanon’s intellectual capacity, and the multifaceted and dialectical nature of his thought. Framing their relationship in this way allows one to engage with Césaire via Fanon, without either reducing Fanon to the category of a ‘Césarian’ scholar or a critic of Césaire’s discourse on decolonisation. I echo the same sentiment in the following section on Sartre, focusing in greater depth on the politics of why such a disclaimer is necessary, if not more necessary, in spite of the tendency to reduce Fanon to a ‘Sartrean’ scholar. With this in mind, it is acceptable to suggest as David Caute does, that ‘Fanon’s first debt was to Césaire'.16 This claim is reiterated by Reiland Rabaka, who focuses in particular on the position that ‘négritude was the foundation on which Fanon built his discourse on decolonisation'.17 Rabaka goes on to state that ‘Fanon appropriated much from Césaire, and especially his seminal text, Discourse on Colonialism'.18 It is here, he observes, ‘where it may be said the real roots of Fanon’s dialectic of decolonisation and liberation lie'.19 It is for this reason that we start with Césaire in the project of investigating Fanon’s dialectics. To explore the nature of Fanon’s debt to Césaire, I focus on three aspects of Césaire in order to make distinct his dialectical thought. These form the three sections ahead: (1) surrealism (2) marxism and (3) négritude. In Césaire’s dialectics, relating to each of these sections, we find a dialectical threat inherited by Fanon. Understanding Césaire’s critique of Marxism, influenced by his surrealism and his involvement with the French Communist Party, in the context of colonisation sets the foundation for the theory and praxis of négritude. Yet, each of these elements in Césaire contribute to the same narrative of decolonisation that can ultimately enable us to read Césaire as not just a critic of colonialism but as a dialectician, and a dialectical critic of colonialism. 16 David Caute, (New York: The Viking Press, 1970), 21. 17 Reiland Rabaka, Africana Critical Theory: Reconstructing the Black Radical Tradition, from W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral (New York: Lexington Books, 2009), 171. 18 Rabaka, Africana Critical Theory, 171. 19 Rabaka, Africana Critical Theory, 171. 11 Césaire’s Surrealism Woven through Césaire’s narrative of decolonisation is his major surrealist influence. Césaire can be, and is read as, a surrealist poet. However, the significance of this reading must be stretched further to grasp the practical relevance of his work. Discourse on Colonialism allows us to distinguish the twofold methodological use of surrealism in order to understand the political intention of Césaire’s surrealism. To articulate this point, I borrow here from Robin Kelley, who identifies that the text serves first as a ‘discourse on the material and spiritual havoc created by colonialism’ and second, ‘it is a critique of colonial discourse'.20 The use of surrealism is of critical importance equally to both of these functions. Regarding the first function, surrealism allows a deep and powerful illustrative expression of the extent to which material and spiritual havoc has damaged the native (black) psyche. Using the sophistication of surrealist style, Césaire is able to reveal, in his then-wife Suzanne Césaire’s words, ‘the domain of the strange, the marvelous and the fantastic, a domain scorned by people of certain inclinations. Here is the freed image, dazzling and beautiful'.21 The domain of the marvelous resonates with the concept of the radical imagination, where possibilities of a new world become endless. It is a field in which explorations of freedom and revolutionary futures can exist in their richest form. In doing so, it also reveals fundamental truths about the nature of a society in which access to the domain of the marvelous is restricted – a state of alienation from possibilities. Furthermore, Césaire’s surrealism epitomises the liberating power of words in relation to the broader project of decolonisation, but especially in its redemptive capacity. The power of words, embodied in surrealist poetry specifically, is for Césaire the ‘conquest of the self, by the self'.22 This affirmation of conquest via the exertion of agency is conceived by Césaire to be what the salvaging of the world depends on – heeding the voice of black agency. This 20 Robin D. G. Kelley, ‘A Poetics of Anticolonialism', preface to Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 9. 21 Suzanne Césaire, ‘The Domain of the Marvelous’, in Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, ed. Penelope Rosemont (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 137. Quoted in Kelley, ‘A Poetics of Anticolonialism', 15. 22 Aimé Césaire, ‘The Liberating Power of Words: An Interview with Poet Aimé Césaire', by Annick Thebia Melsan, The Journal of Pan-African Studies, vol. 2, no. 4 (2008), 2. 12 fulfills a dialectical function in its redemptive use. Césaire writes, ‘it was Heidegger who referred to words as the abode of being'.23 The revolutionary affirmation of black being (which affirms the ‘fact’ of being black) functions as a reinstatement of humanity (being) to those who have had it violently stripped away. Thus, the function of surrealist poetry is conceived as a decolonial strategy by igniting revolutionary race consciousness. Césaire claims that ‘the effective power of poetry, with its two faces, one looking nostalgically backward, the other looking prophetically forward, with the redeeming feature of its ability to redeem the self, is the power of intensifying life’.24 The revolutionary and redemptive potential exists despite the historical exile to which colonialism has condemned its subjects, in alienating them from the ownership of their history and their future. Returning to Kelley’s point that Discourse on Colonialism can be read as a narrative on the material and spiritual havoc created by colonialism, Césaire’s employment of surrealism serves this narrative to a complex and layered degree. It not only looks at the visceral effect of colonialism via the material and spiritual havoc it has wreaked, but it also looks at resistance to this havoc, and further, the revolutionary potential created and gaining momentum as a result of this havoc itself. If the first point regards the expression of alienation, the second regards the will to disalienation.25 The second point made by Kelley – that Discourse on Colonialism also functions as a critique of colonial discourse – further helps to illustrate the importance of Césaire’s methodological use of surrealism. This involves accentuating the politics of surrealism, which was boldly Marxist and communist in its genesis. The first black surrealists started as a small group of Martinican students in Paris, 1932, and were equally influenced by the philosophy and politics of Marxism and André Breton’s surrealism. They created a collective and journal called Légitime Défense (legitimate defense) in the name of anticolonial political resistance. They ideologically positioned themselves as traitors to the class they emerged from: ‘the 23 Césaire, ‘The Liberating Power of Words', 3. 24 Césaire, ‘The Liberating Power of Words’, 4. 25 Aimé Césaire, ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire’ by René Depestre, in Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 84. 13 French mulatto bourgeoisie, one of the most depressing things on earth'.26 The appropriation of Marxism and surrealism changed the nature of anticolonial discourse, and reinvented the terms of their struggle.27 This was achieved by way of melding together multiple complex theoretical accounts of anticapitalist and anticolonial discourse. Locating Césaire in relation to his emergence from this first wave of black surrealism helps to identify the unique theoretical nature of his critique of colonial discourse. The surrealism of Breton and the first black surrealists embodied in its origins a dialectic that enriched Marxist theory while radicalising it. Césaire’s use of surrealism differs from the European surrealists, like Breton among others, to an arguably greater extent than the first blacks surrealists. It does more than enrich Marxist theory; it allows him to use its relevant elements for his own narrative of decolonisation via the weapon of surrealism. For Césaire, surrealism acts as the mediating tool between Marxism and decolonisation, and a way of embracing multiple ideas in the formation of his revolutionary thesis and critique of colonial discourse. Generally underlying this complex methodological use, surrealism is also Césaire’s way of rupturing a racist colonial landscape (and its discourse) by the assertion that ‘we do not speak the same language’.28 By virtue of his refusal to not only speak the same language as the oppressor (in this case the racist bourgeoisie of his native Martinique) but also to speak within the confines of a racist colonial framework, Césaire employs the rejection of both the socio-political linguistic and ideological customs dictating the terms of his recognition to this 26 Etienne Léro, Thélus Léro, René Ménil, Jules-Marcel Monnerot, Michel Pilotin, Maurice-Sabas Quitman, Auguste Thésée, and Pierre Yoyotte, ‘Légitime Défense: Manifesto [1932]’, in Black, Beige, Brown: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 37. 27 Lori Cole, ‘Légitime Défense: From Communism and Surrealism to Caribbean Self-Definition', Journal of Surrealism and the Americas vol. 4, no. 1 (2010), 15. 28 This quote appears in a collective response to a review of Césaire and his colleagues’ surrealist journal Tropiques by Martinique’s Chief of Information Services, Captain Bayle, who scathingly called the journal racist and radical. The original review: ‘Lettre du Lieutenant de vaisseau Bayle, chef du service d’information, au directeur de la revue Tropiques, Fort-de-France, May 10, 1943’. The collective response: ‘Réponse de Tropiques à M. le Lieutenant de vaisseau Bayle, Fort-de- France, May 12, 1943’, (signed Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Georges Gratiant, Aristide Maugée, René Ménil, Lucie Thesée), Tropiques, vol. 1, ed. By Aimé Césaire [facsimile reproduction] (Paris: Editions Jean-Michel Place, 1978), Documents-Annexes, pp. xxxvi-xxxviii. 14 system of oppression. Suzanne Césaire reinforces this point when she asserts that surrealism ‘nourishes an impatient strength within us, endlessly reinforcing the massive army of refusals’.29 The emphasis on refusal is a revolutionary assertion of agency, in a colonial context riddled with a past of slavery, where silence was for far too long an imposed norm. Thus, surrealist poetry is employed in the spirit of revolt at both symbolic and epistemic levels. It allows Césaire to take control of the language through which he expresses his revolt, and also to redefine the terms on which colonial discourse will be challenged. As I demonstrate in Part Two on Fanon’s dialectics, this same sentiment reverberates through Fanon’s critique of recognition. Thus, understanding the political intentions behind Césaire’s use of surrealism, and the functions it serves in reading Discourse on Colonialism in the ways explained above, sets us up to read him as an intellectual who engages rigorously with dialectics. It opens the door to taking seriously Césaire’s revolutionary poetics, and the impact this has on the way in which we come to conceive of dialectical methodologies. Furthermore, it sets up a reading of Césaire that compliments the project of investigating his influence on Fanon in relation to dialectical thought. Above all, underscoring the importance of surrealism in Césaire’s work reveals the unique nature of his approach to anticolonialism, especially by emphasising his way of opening up the European theory to encompass the radical imagination and by virtue, revolutionary possibilities in imagining a whole new world. Marxism and the Communist party Fanon makes a considerable contribution to the black radical tradition, which, as Cedric Robinson explains in his historiography of the tradition, has roots in a (black) collective dissatisfaction with modes of European Marxism.30 While Robinson mainly explores this 29 Suzanne Césaire, ‘Surrealism and Us: 1943’, in Surrealist Women: an International Anthology ed. Penelope Rosemont (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 136-137. 30 See: Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000 [1983]). 15 thread through three prominent black intellectuals including W.E.B du Bois, C. L. R. James and Richard Wright, both Fanon and Césaire have made considerable contributions to this intellectual tradition. A deeper analysis of Fanon’s relationship to Marxism cannot be achieved without an investigation of the critiques of Marxism that serve as influences for this train of thought, prominently including Césaire and Sartre. Yet, where Sartre’s critique of Marxism is done with the intention of its ultimate revitalisation and emphasis on its all- encompassing nature, Césaire’s critique is constructed with the intention of using Marxism as a means to enriching black anticolonial politics, as opposed to enriching a science of Marxism itself. There are two key Marxist influences in Césaire’s politics, both serving as foundations for his critical engagement with communism. He takes on the surrealist critique of Marxism as much as he takes on surrealist endorsement of Marxism. The way in which he does this exceeds both European surrealism and that of the first black surrealists. Ultimately, Césaire’s critique of Marxism exists in terms of strengthening black anticolonial politics, and as a critique of western epistemologies. I unpack this by first, exploring Césaire’s critique of Marxism via surrealism, and second, using Césaire’s split with the French Communist Party to illustrate in his view the inadequacies of what he identifies as European communism. Here, I draw too on Discourse on Colonialism for its ability to summarise other important aspects of his critique of Marxism. The surrealists had found that the French Communist Party was the only political body at the time that openly denounced colonialism.31 They gravitated to the party and to The Communist Manifesto.32 They appropriated ‘manifesto discourse', recognizing as Lori Cole writes that while ‘originally a formal decree issues by state authorities’, the manifesto could 31 A more in-depth discussion of the emergence and political context of both the European surrealists and the first black surrealists can be found in Lori Cole’s article, ‘Légitime Défense’. Greater historiographical detail is given here regarding the nuance of surrealisms development as a genre and a politics, especially regarding the first black surrealists of Paris. It also covers a wider variety of critiques than can be covered by the scope of this thesis. See: Lori Cole, ‘Légitime Défense: From Communism and Surrealism to Caribbean Self-Defense', 18. 32 See: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Pluto Press, 2008 [1848]). 16 be ‘adopted by dissenting groups to subvert official rhetoric'.33 The surrealists took from the Communist Party and The Communist Manifesto both the politics and the textual paradigm, which were communicated by Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism (1924).34 Breton’s surrealism was defined as ‘psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern'.35 Noting the difference between the surrealists and the Marxists, Robert Short writes that ‘both saw the revolution as a prelude to the founding of a world based on the desires of men, their ideas about the context of these desires were not the same. For the Marxist they were material while for the Surrealists they were primarily subjective and spiritual'.36 As a result, notes Cole, the surrealist tradition reveals its tendency to ‘privilege the individual mind’.37 Surrealism evolved as a means for intra-psychic self-exploration, which went unaccounted for within the French Communist Party’s Marxism. Thus, the tensions between the Marxism and surrealism was by no means uncontested. But surrealism offered Marxism a revision, based on a concern with the individual, unconscious mind. Without denying the need for material change, or Marx’s critique of capitalism in itself, the surrealists sought to bring the radical imagination back into serious consideration. This is the first theoretical difference that distinguishes the surrealist approach to Marxism, and it is one that Césaire adopts in his allegiance with surrealism. Césaire’s own fascination and conviction in the liberating power of poetry is explored through his surrealism. Kelley writes that we live ‘in a world where Black existential suffering is as much an internal, psychic, spiritual, and ideological crisis as it is a crisis of the material world'.38 Césaire 33 Cole, ‘Légitime Défense', 17. 34 See: André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism (1929)’ in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, MI,: University of Michigan Press, 1969 [1929]). 35 Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism, 26. 36 Robert S. Short, ‘The Politics of Surrealism, 1920-36', Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 1 no. 2. (1966), 21. 37 Cole, ‘Légitime Défense’, 20-21. 38 Robin Kelley, forward to Black Marxism: The Making of the Radical Black Tradition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000 [1983]), xxiii. 17 recognised this, along with the first black surrealists, and used the methods of psychoanalytic investigation prescribed by surrealism to explore the nature of this suffering. In the words of Légitime Défense: ‘we want to see clearly into our dreams and we listen to their voices’ as a revolt against ‘the abominable systems of constraints and restrictions, the extermination of love and the limitation of the dream, generally known by the name of western civilization'.39 Thus, affording revolutionary affirmation to the intra-psychic dream- world of the individual mind as a precursor to Marxist, collective revolution, the black surrealists offer a revised Marxism to Césaire, which he accepts into his own critique of Marxism. In his native Martinique, Césaire rose to political power under the wing of the French Communist Party from 1946-1956. The reasons for his split with the party are found in his resignation letter, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez', where he outlines the Eurocentrism of Marxism that contributes to his dissatisfaction with communist politics. He writes thinking about Martinique, the French Communist Party is totally incapable of offering it anything like a perspective that would be anything other than utopian; that the French Communist Party has never bothered itself to offer even that; that it has never thought of us in any way other than in relation to a world strategy that, incidentally, is disconcerting.40 The explicit critique here targets the Communist Party’s subsumption of race, the issue of primary importance to Césaire in the context of Martinique, into the overarching politics of (European) class struggle. In doing so, the Communist Party was guilty of assimilating Martinique politics into its own Eurocentrism at the expense of solidarity with the rest of the Caribbean. Césaire asserts definitively, ‘it is clear that our struggle – the struggle of colonial peoples against colonialism, or better yet, of a completely different nature than the fight of the French worker against French capitalism, and it cannot in any way be considered a part, a fragment, of that struggle'.41 39 Etienne Léro, Thélus Léro, et al., ‘Légitime Défense: Manifesto [1932]', 36-37. 40 Aimé Césaire, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez', Social Text, vol. 28, no. 2 (2010 [1956]), 151. 41 Césaire, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez', 147. 18 More explicitly, Césaire writes, ‘what I want is that Marxism and communism be placed in the service of black peoples, and not black peoples in the service of Marxism and communism. That the doctrine and the movement would be made to fit men, not men to fit the doctrine or the movement'.42 Césaire’s dream for a distinctly Caribbean communism, informed by the particular political aspirations unique to Martinique and the Caribbean, is seen as severely limited because of the Eurocentric grip the French Communist Party, which ‘still bears the marks of the colonialism it is fighting’.43 Thus, the paternalism of the Communist Party strips agency from Martinique and subsequently, as Césaire would say, ‘the right to personality'.44 This becomes further relevant in terms of the importance of négritude. Building on this argument, Discourse on Colonialism pushes Marxist eurocentrism further to its breaking point, exposing that the fundamental problem lies embedded within European colonial epistemologies. Without being as explicit, Césaire still opens with this problematic that ‘the fact is that the so-called European civilization – “Western” civilization – as it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem’.45 Here, Césaire pointedly targets not just European civilization, but Europeans themselves. Of course, Césaire recognises far more unreservedly than other scholars of his time that as a result of two centuries of bourgeois rule, Europeans who inherit the legacy of the first colonisers and continue or are complicit in colonial violence, have undergone a horrific deformation of both their conscience and their epistemological attitudes. One way in which Césaire illustrates this in regard to European colonial epistemology is by claiming that ‘one of the values invented by the bourgeoisie in former times and launched throughout the world was man – and we have seen what has become of that. The other was the nation. It is a fact: the nation is a bourgeois phenomenon'.46 European anticolonialism is 42 Césaire, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez', 150. 43 Césaire, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez', 150. 44 Césaire, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez', 150. 45 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 31. 46 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 75. 19 seen by Césaire as perpetuating the same problematics of colonial discourse from which it is born for the reasons that it cannot think outside of the frameworks it has created. Regarding one’s conscience, when Césaire writes that ‘between colonisation and civilization there is an infinite distance', he not only means that Europe is uncivilized, but that Europeans have internalised this violence unto themselves.47 The combination of these effects on European subjects is that they embody coloniality internally. The solution to the problem of the proletariat, and the colonial problem, then, must come from the external forces in question – those that are excluded or oppressed. Césaire demonstrates the point above in greater depth using an analysis of Hitler and Hitlerism, focusing on the collective shock of the rest of Europe during and after Hitler’s rise to power. Césaire writes, Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him… that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the “coolies” of India, and the “-------” of Africa.48 Césaire characterizes Hitler as Europe’s punishment, but also as Europe’s destiny. The phenomenon of Hitlerism forces Europe to turn to itself as the enemy of not only the colonies, but itself. In doing so, Europe is forced to realise its double standards in the treatment of its own and its Other. This reveals a deeply embedded racism in the European individual without their being conscious of it. 47 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 34. 48 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 36. 20 Furthermore, Césaire’s turn to Hitler identifies the problem of fascism in its relationship to colonialism. As Kelley writes, Discourse on Colonialism’s ‘recasting of the history of Western civilization helps us locate the origins of fascism within colonialism itself; hence, within the very traditions of humanism, critics believed fascism threatened'.49 Kelley understands Césaire as making an example out of Hitler, in showing the foundations of fascism to be within Europe’s epistemological attitude in itself, in its extension of colonial and imperial violence, malevolently turned back on itself. Hitler is, for Césaire, an example of why Europe cannot be trusted to find a solution to the colonial problem. What this critique of European colonial epistemologies also exposes is a dialectical relationship it has with itself. Césarian Négritude The limits Césaire finds in surrealism and Marxism intersect, helping to define the parameters to his conception of négritude. Regarding surrealism, Césaire moves away from its tendency to retain Eurocentric dimensions. His critique of the black surrealists of Paris, for example, helps establish the path its limits pave. Of this group, he writes, ‘there was nothing to distinguish them either from the French surrealists or from the French Communists. In other words, their poems were colorless'.50 If their poems were colorless, their politics were colorless, leading Césaire to conclude that ‘they bore the marks of assimilation'.51 He explains, ‘they acted like Communists, which was all right, but they acted like abstract Communists'.52 The voice of black agency that Césaire was looking to assert with his surrealism needed a new outlet. This limit overlaps with Cesaire’s criticism of Marxism, in which he asserts that ‘Marx is all right, but we need to complete Marx. I felt that the emancipation of the Negro consisted of more than just a political emancipation'.53 His 49 Kelley, ‘A Poetics of Anticolonialism', 10. 50 Césaire, ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire', 85. 51 Césaire, ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire', 85. 52 Césaire, ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire', 85. 53 Césaire, ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire', 86. 21 demands overlap to establish a Caribbean anticolonial, anticapitalist politics which is informed by a distinct voice of black agency. Césaire, along with the other key theorists of négritude, Leon Damas and Leopold Senghor, arrived together at the question of how to pronounce irrefutably the blackness of their past and present. This was especially important in consideration of the general sentiments at the time, in Martinique especially, where black peoples identified with being French at the expense of identifying with their African roots. Simultaneously realizing the inadequacies of European radicalism, Rabaka writes that the theorists of négritude became ‘interested in rescuing, reclaiming, and recreating the denied humanity and “degraded identity” of Africa and the Africans, continental and diasporan'.54 The search for the particularity of black identity also became necessary to re-center black subjectivity, an important task prefacing the reorientation of the terms of struggle, particularly for the Caribbean. It took form, writes Rabaka, with the engagement of ‘“trans-African” aesthetics, politics, economics, history, psychology, culture, philosophy and society'.55 A variety of methods gave strength to the movement that sought to destroy the colonial associations of Africa and Africanity to barbarity and primitivism, the tendency for assimilation on this basis, and instead offer solidarity across the world to all black peoples on the search for identity. The intention behind Césaire’s ‘plunge into Africa’ was to re-educate the diaspora about their history.56 This is a move to re-introduce those particularly within the Caribbean to their own particularity, by situating them within their history. At a step further than re-education, Césaire wanted to affirm the beauty and value of this heritage, that African identity was to be a source of pride, and its roots contain ‘cultural elements of great value’ and trace back to ‘beautiful and black civilizations'.57 Furthermore, he stresses that the lessons that can be learnt from Africa’s past are invaluable to the world. Such lessons could be found in the 54Césaire, ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire', 84. 55 Reiland Rabaka, Concepts of Cabralism: Amilcar Cabral and Africana Critical Theory (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2014), 44-45. 56 Césaire, ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire', 84. 57 Césaire, ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire', 92. 22 material organisation of society, for example, where societies ‘were not only ante-capitalist, as has been said, but also anti-capitalist'.58 Négritude’s plunge into the past of Africana history is dialectical. Therefore, it is more complex than a simple ‘return’ to the past. Césaire anticipates this misreading of his work: So the real problem, you say, is to return to them. No, I repeat. We are not men for whom it is a question of “either-or.” For us, the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but go beyond it.59 To go beyond the past is not to return to a chapter in history by turning back the pages, but to embrace firmly its presence in the present. History for Césaire is not such that you can only go backwards or forwards. As Rabaka emphasises, ‘Césaire’s notion of “return” is rooted in the “real life” (i.e., lived-experiences and lived-endurances) of people of African origin and descent’ and moreover, ‘understands that revolutionary motivation may well stem more from moral outrage over the indignities suffered by ancestors than hope for the comfort of our children’.60 A dialectical conception of négritude understands the raising of race and historical consciousness as what we might call redemptive. This resonates with the philosophy of history presented by Walter Benjamin, who writes that, ‘history is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogenous, empty time', and that ‘the past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption’.61 Négritude, then, makes explicit this secret index. In raising a race and historical consciousness that was previously latent, it collapses the linearity of time to embrace the past in the present. Césaire’s négritude operates on the basis of this dialectical logic. In doing so, it becomes ruptural. As Benjamin writes, ‘what characterizes revolutionary classes at their moment of action is the awareness 58 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 44. 59 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 52. 60 Reiland Rabaka, Africana Critical Theory, 129. 61 Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History', in Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1939-1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2006), 395, 390. 23 that they are about to make the continuum of history explode'.62 This ‘explosive nature’ or ruptural dimension is inherent to Césaire’s work, whose affirmations of négritude are intended as violence to the stronghold of colonialism.63 62 Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History', 395. 63 Césaire, ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire', 91. 24 CHAPTER TWO SARTRE’S DIALECTICS Jean-Paul Sartre is perhaps Fanon’s most widely considered interlocutor. More so than with Césaire, there is an exceptional breadth of scholarship on the dialogue between Fanon and Sartre.64 This dialogue has been taken into consideration on the basis of the parallels between their methodologies and theoretical content, direct convergence in some regards, and their shared dialogue through personal friendship. For the purpose of this thesis, however, I focus on Sartre’s relevance to the project of understanding Fanon’s dialectics. Treatment of Sartre is limited here to his dialectical methodology, constituted by his conception of dialectical reason, from its existential basis to its culmination into a theory of history. There is an acute importance in situating Fanon in relation to Sartre’s dialectics, as it helps to give rigidity to some aspects of Fanon’s narrative of decolonisation and make explicit Fanon’s implicit use of dialectics. Here, I apply the same formula to an analysis of Sartre’s relevance to Fanon’s dialectics as I did with Césaire in the previous chapter. This starts with the initial task of making distinct Sartre’s dialectical thought. Writing for over 50 years, and in many different literary formats, Sartre’s social and political philosophy develops over the course of his life. This is significant because Sartre’s existentialism, for which he is perhaps most well-known, takes on additional nuance and complexity in its maturation. As a result, I proceed in three sections that takes Sartre’s intellectual development seriously. First, I elucidate Sartre’s notion of radical existential freedom, seeking to make its resonance with racialised oppressions clear. Second, I look to Sartre’s Marxism, and particularly the way in which existentialism becomes subsumed to the broader methodology of Marxism. He achieves this by way of a dialectical approach to knowledge. Third, this new methodology establishes a basis on which Sartre is 64 See for example: Jonathan Judaken, Race After Sartre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008); Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and René e T White, Fanon: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers 1996) Rabaka, Africana Critical Theory. 25 able to construct a dialectical theory of history. This offers a dialectical reasoning from which dialectical analysis can find its grounding. Importantly, this dialectical reason informs Sartre’s writing on the concept of négritude, allowing an understanding of why Sartre envisions négritude as a ‘dialectical necessity'. Here, Sartre comes directly into conversation with both Césaire and Fanon, and parallels or divergences from their respective theoretical standpoints will become clear. There are two disclaimers I would like to make at the onset of this discussion that are related to the problem of subordinated theoretical identity. The first is that I do not wish to frame Fanon as someone subordinate to Sartre. There has been a tendency to draw a causal relationship between the social theory of Sartre and Fanon that stems from embedded racial bias within a Eurocentric academe. It is far too common to see Fanon reduced to the status of a ‘Sartrean’ scholar, but never Sartre reduced to a ‘Fanonian'. Thus, I resist any attempt at using Sartre to validate Fanon. I do so in following the lead of Gordon who writes, ‘it is not our intent to continue the long standing tradition of treating the thoughts of black philosophers as derivatives of white ones'.65 This tendency harbours a double standard that determines the way in which these philosophers and their projects are viewed. Against this tendency, then, I frame the relationship between Sartre and Fanon as one that follows a dialectical model of critical intimacy, which eschews both causality and self-sufficiency. Reading them together in a dialectical model of critical intimacy emphasises the intellectual development of both towards each other, rather than a one-sided narrative that reads Fanon through Sartre and not the other way around. While Fanon is influenced by Sartre, Fanon equally pushes Sartre to consider a wide range of issues including race, colonialism, and the limits of European philosophy.66 Recognizing the complexity of their symbiotic relationship 65 Lewis R. Gordon, Frantz Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1995), 14. 66A critique of Bernasconi appears in George Ciccariello-Maher’s chapter ‘European Intellectuals and Colonial Difference: Césaire and Fanon Beyond Sartre and Foucault’, in Race After Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism, ed. Jonathan Judaken (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 141-143. Ciccariello-Maher here accuses Bernasconi of silencing Fanon’s influence on Sartre, neglecting Sartre’s deference to Fanon at points and in ‘Black Orpheus’ as maintaining authority over the project of ‘showing the oppressor to himself’. Instead, Ciccariello- Maher asserts that Sartre’s intellectual development was towards Fanon. 26 allows us to equally distribute testimony and validity both ways, and resist against perpetuating a racist bias within methods of comparative analysis. I approach Sartre’s contribution to Fanon’s dialectics in a manner appropriate to the nature of this problematic. The second disclaimer can also be reframed within a dialectical model of critical intimacy. Gordon writes that there is a ‘longstanding assumption that Africana and black peoples bring experience to a world whose understanding finds theoretical grounding in European, often read as “white” thought'.67 The intention of this section itself – to show Sartre’s influence on Fanon’s dialectics – is at risk of falling into the dynamic that Gordon warns against. This implication of the problem of subordinated theoretical identity is in ascribing universal applicability to the thought of white philosophers, while confining black philosophers’ thought to the particularity of their identity and lived experience. In this sense, Sartre is often afforded access to universality where Fanon is not. The irony is that Fanon anticipates the false basis on which this bias operates, insisting on the particularity of European universalism. The result of this problem, where black thought is treated as a particularity, and white thought is treated as universal, has real implications. One such implication is identified by James Penney, who writes that ‘attempts to grasp Fanon’s work as a coherent and unified theoretical project – limited here and there as any discourse, of course, by symptomatic contradiction – have been all too rare'.68 Although Penney does not ascribe this to the problem of subordinated theoretical identity or Eurocentrism within academia himself, his observation supports Gordon’s point well. The effect renders black thought as incomplete, needing theoretical validation from theory written from within a thin veil of European universalism. Reframing Fanon and Sartre’s relationship through a dialectical model of critical intimacy can hold the terms which set the guidelines for this relationship between theory (white) and experience (black) accountable. 67 Lewis R. Gordon, ‘Reasoning in Black: Africana Philosophy Under the Weight of Misguided Reason’, in The Savannah Review, no. 1 (2012), 88. 68 James Penney, ‘Passing into the Universal: Fanon, Sartre, and the Colonial Dialectic', 49. 27 One of the ways in which Fanon and Sartre’s thought converges most explicitly is their dialectics. On this, David Caute notes that ‘Fanon’s methodology is mainly implicit (and this became increasingly true in his later work) whereas Sartre’s is explicit'.69 Both start from a shared concern with the condition of radical existential freedom that develops systematically in its encounter with the material reality of its situation. Yet, Sartre’s development of dialectics, starting from this origin, is done so within a theoretical framework of dialectical methodology, where Fanon does so within a phenomenological account of racialised and colonial oppression. Thus, where Sartre offers to Fanon the rigidity of a theoretical framework, Fanon offers to Sartre a substantive and rigorous discussion of an actual historical situation to which his framework can be applied. Framing this relationship as moving toward each other, rather than Fanon providing a particular testimony to Sartre and thus reliant on Sartre to be validated, avoids perpetuating this particular implication. Radical Existential Freedom In Existentialism Is a Humanism (1948), Sartre endeavours to work with critiques of existentialism to define, strengthen and reinvigorate its political relevance. Sartre states that the presupposition upon which existentialism rests is that ‘existence comes before essence – or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective'.70 That existence precedes essence suggests that the existence of people precedes any conceptual determination which emerges both from and of people. Thus, any conception of human nature must be a determination to which the subjective existence cannot be confined. Regarding the latter point, existentialism relies on an affirmation of the subjective in two ways. First, it depends on the existential freedom of human subjectivity, and second, it recognises that people cannot transcend human subjectivity. Subjectivity in this regard is equal to radical existential freedom, the condition upon which a person has the freedom to choose. There has arguably been too much focus on the concept of individual choice in 69 David Caute, Frantz Fanon, 33. 70 Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism (London: Metheun 1948), 26. 28 consideration of Sartre’s existentialism, leading to a skewed and misinformed interpretation of existentialism’s radical potential. Yet, if we reconsider this exaggerated concept of individualism within Sartre, we are still left with important ideas considering the subjective. In acknowledging the ability to choose, we encounter notions of bad faith and authenticity, both of which are crucial to Sartre’s existentialism, and his later revisions of orthodox Marxism. Bad faith for Sartre is the condition of ‘not-being-what-one-is'.71 In other words, to deny one’s own existential condition of freedom, or recognising ‘the situation of man as one of free choice', gives rise to a crisis of self-deception, which we call bad faith.72 The concept of authenticity stands in opposition to that of bad faith, and relies on the assumption of responsibility for oneself, but also the rest of humanity. The notion of freedom conceived here is radical, in the sense that existential freedom must will itself, as Simone de Beauvoir writes, to ‘an open future, by seeking to extend itself by means of the freedom of others'.73 Freedom is thus irredeemable without the burden of a humanistic responsibility. To illustrate, Sartre writes of the consequence of freedom, that ‘man being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for our world and for himself as a way of being’.74 And further, they ‘must assume the situation with the proud consciousness of being the author of it'.75 Thus, authenticity in terms of responsibility manifests as a commitment to humanity, and to the betterment of the world through action. Conceiving of freedom and responsibility as inseparable gives Sartre the basis through which he is able to argue that existentialism serves as a doctrine of action. This establishes the ensuing connection between existentialism and humanism. The humanistic aspect of existentialism is what draws Sartre to the eventual dissolution of existentialism within Marxism. 71 Sartre, Being and Nothingness (Washington: Washington Square Press, 1999 [1943]), 70. 72 Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, 51. 73 Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Citadel Press, 1976 [1948]), 60. 74 Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays in Existentialism, ed. Wade Baskin (Secaucus, N.J: Citadel Press, 1997 [1957]), 63. 75 Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays in Existentialism, 63. 29 Given this brief description of Sartre’s basis for existentialism, its pertinence to the postcolonial or anticolonial condition should be clear. Articulations of the will to freedom and liberation form the backbone of anticolonial politics and thought, and is an inescapable concern for all those whose lives are, as Fanon says, ‘overdetermined from without'.76 In other words, the colonial gaze attributes a certain determination on the basis of race, that fixes on to the racialised subject. The result is a denial of the interiority and subjectivity of their existence. The colonised embodies an absence of personhood, in direct contradistinction of the condition of radical existential freedom. Fanon writes, I am overdetermined from without. I am not the slave of the “idea” that others have of me but of my appearance. I move slowly in the world, accustomed now to seek no longer for upheaval. I progress by crawling. And already I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed. Having adjusted their microtomes, they cut away objectively slices of my reality. I am laid bare. I feel, I see in those white looks that it is not a new man who has come in, but a new type of man, a new genus. Why, it’s a Negro!77 The will to liberation involves inhabiting a despair of the most existential kind. This is why Gordon writes that ‘any theory that fails to address the existential phenomenological dimension of racism suffers from a failure to address the situational dimension'.78 Such a claim is supported by Kelley, who as we saw in the previous section on Césaire describes black suffering as existential in nature. This is because racism constitutes a crisis of bad faith that imposes itself onto the existential subject via the signifier of blackness – the black body – which determines one’s self from the outside, accounting for what we might call existential alienation, or alienation from oneself. The connection between racialised experience and existentialism thus takes place around the tensions and contradictions between the notion of radical existential freedom, and the 76 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 87. 77 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 87. 78 Lewis Gordon, ‘Existential Dynamics of Theorizing Black Invisibility’ in Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy, ed. Lewis Gordon (New York: Routledge, 1997), 70. 30 lived experience of race. This relies on a discussion of how and why in a colonial situation one cannot simultaneously be free and black. It is also important to note here that the lived experience of race entails an acknowledgement of the material oppression of racialised peoples, which lends to Sartre’s conception of freedom an important implication. Freedom cannot only be existential. It must also be political, given it is a situated phenomenon. Gordon centralises this claim in black existential philosophy, where he expands the meaning of bad faith to account for the question of institutional forms of bad faith, where bad faith is embodied in the social reality that conditions the black experience and its capacity for freedom. Black existentialism becomes a way to explore the dialectical bind between body and world.79 This particular dialectical bind is of primary importance in Fanon’s conception of the zone of nonbeing, as we shall come to see in the Part Two on Fanon’s dialectics. Consequences of this implication, or the avowed introduction of blackness to the study of existentialism, include a reconceptualisation of the revolutionary subject, in differing from existential subjectivity itself, to black and colonised peoples globally. I address these implications in greater detail in Part Two. Existentialism and Marxism Sartre’s commitment to radical existential freedom, and its engagement with its own limits, leads to his reconciliation of existentialism and Marxism. This reconciliation has two important consequences. First, it radicalises both existentialism and Marxism, accounting for the theoretical weaknesses in both. This reconciliation serves as a critique of Marxism – but critique in this context leads ultimately to a defense of Marxism as a result of a dialectical engagement with it, through existentialism. Second, it is on this basis that Sartre is able to 79 I borrow here from Robert J. C. Young, who characterizes Fanon’s play The Drowning Eye and Black Skin, White Masks, as ‘caught in an irresolvable dialectical bind between black and white, past and future, body and world, desire and insentience, consciousness and transcendental immanence'. Here, Young’s use of ‘dialectical bind’ between ‘body and mind’ succinctly characterizes the tension between radical existential freedom and the lived experience of the black body. See: Robert J. C. Young, ‘Fanon, Revolutionary Playwright' in Frantz Fanon, Freedom and Alienation, ed. Jean Khalfa and Robert J. C. Young, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 31. 31 build his dialectical theory of history, which serves as a methodological foundation that aids the project of understanding Fanon’s dialectics. Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) and Search for a Method (1957) articulate his encounter with various criticisms posed to the theoretical foundations of existentialism. Without renouncing existentialism or the radical notion of freedom on which it relies, Sartre seeks to strengthen and reinvigorate its relevance by engaging with its limits, and to expand its revolutionary potential. He does so through his engagement with Marxism, where he finds the tensions between existentialism and Marxism to be not only productive in re- establishing the methodologies of both, but reconcilable into a new, broader social and historical system of thought. Yet, his commitment to the notion of radical existential freedom is what motivates his growing concern with materiality and history, and the implications that situating existential freedom within materially reinforced systems of oppression might have. I acknowledge briefly two criticisms of existentialism which aid in understanding why Sartre gravitates towards Marxism, to the extent to which he calls Marxism ‘the one philosophy of our time we cannot go beyond'.80 In Being and Nothingness, Sartre identifies two limits of existentialism as follows: ‘(1) The fact that I exist at all and my existing as a free being do not depend on me. I am not free to be free… (2) My freedom is limited by the freedom of the other person'.81 The second limit foreshadows Sartre’s quest to construct a radical social theory that accounts for the external impositions which hinder the realisation of radical freedom. If freedom is limited by the freedom of the other person, it is also, by logical extension, limited by the situation in which one finds themselves unable to be free. In other words, although freedom is rooted in the subjective, it is conditioned to the extent that external factors intervene in its array of possibility. The fact of the situation refers to the material and historical milieu that constructs the reality of the moment in which the existential subject is situated. To illustrate, Sartre writes, ‘I am not “free” either to escape the lot of my class, of my family’, and further, ‘I am born a worker, 80 Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1963), 30. 81 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 481. See also: Hazel E. Barnes, Introduction to Search for a Method by Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1963), xxiii. 32 a Frenchman, a hereditary syphilitic, or a tubercular'.82 This assertion is explored in Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (1946) where he writes that the Jewish person is ‘like all other men… he is free… he is at the same time in bondage'.83 Sartre’s point is that a Jewish person cannot choose to be anything but a Jewish person (although this position also accounts for the fact of race – I return to this point in Chapter Five). If we want to understand what this makes of the Jewish person, then, ‘we must first inquire into the situation surrounding him, since he is a being in a situation'.84 In recognising the domination and control that the situation exerts on the individual, then, Sartre admits that is necessary to politicise his conception of radical existential freedom. This realisation leads him to Marxist theory. Why Marxism? According to Sartre, ‘what has made the force and richness of Marxism is the fact that it has been the most radical attempt to clarify the historical process in its totality'.85 To the extent that the material forces of history govern the capacity to realise existential freedom, Sartre considers Marxism as the only appropriate social theory that can comprehend the political and existential implications of the historical milieu that conditions the situation. He comes to express that we cannot go beyond Marxist ideology as long as society has not progressed beyond the historical moment that Marxism expresses.86 Arguably, Sartre’s insistence on this can be read as a privileging of class over race. Given that the historical moment Marxism expresses in terms of capitalism is inextricably bound up with colonialism, do we not need an equal privileging of both categories? We come back to this idea in Fanon in Part Two, when Fanon stretches Marxist analysis further to accommodate the complexity of the historical moment as he sees it. In the meantime, Sartre poses the question: ‘why then, are we not simply Marxists?’87 This leads to an engagement with critiques of Marxism, testing its malleability and strength. 82 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 481. 83 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken, 1976), 43. 84 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 43. 85 Sartre, Search for a Method, 29. 86 Sartre, Search for a Method, 43. 87 Sartre, Search for a Method, 35. 33 Initially, Sartre expresses ‘unreserved’ support of Marx’s formulation of materialism as follows: In the social production of their existence, men enter into relations which are determined, necessary, independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a given stage of development of their material productive forces. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the real foundation upon which a legal and political superstructure arises and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond.88 So, in extending his concern from radical existential freedom to the material and historical forces that condition the totality of the situation, Sartre is able to base his radicalisation of Marxism by asking how ‘the existential Marxist may hope to understand both individual persons and history'.89 By retaining this commitment to freedom, Sartre is able to argue that the orthodox Marxism of his time is inadequate in its refusal to consider the individual subject. Sartre’s contestation of the orthodox Marxist view is based on the supposition that it can ‘constitute a knowledge’ in itself.90 While Sartre takes from Marxism guiding principles upon which a methodology might be constructed, he rejects it as a concrete truth in itself. For Sartre, orthodox Marxism is insufficient for understanding freedom. In illustrating why this is the case, Sartre critiques Friedrich Engels’ claim that ‘that such a man, and precisely this man, arises at a determined period and in a given country is naturally pure chance. But, lacking Napoleon, another man would have filled his place’.91 Sartre suggests that Engels’ quote is symptomatic of how orthodox Marxism’s determinism refuses to acknowledge the specificity of the subject, perpetuating a tendency to ‘dissolve men into a bath of sulphuric acid'.92 Sartre considers Engels’ stance as ‘an arbitrary limitation of the dialectical 88 Sartre has not cited this quote, but the translator notes that it comes from Karl Marx’s preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (1959). See: Sartre, Search for a Method, 13. 89 Barnes, Introduction to Search for a Method, ix. 90 Sartre, Search for a Method, 35. 91 Sartre, Search for a Method, 56. 92 Sartre, Search for a Method, 44. 34 movement… [and] a refusal to understand'.93 This is considered by Sartre to be a limitation on the basis of which revisions to Marxism can be made. Barnes accounts for Sartre’s primary intention behind Search as follows: ‘a Marxism which reinstates the individual, and his praxis at the very heart of history – this seems to Sartre the proper place for an existential freedom to commit itself'.94 Sartre’s reinstatement of existential freedom to the heart of a Marxist, dialectical analysis of history achieves a similar aim to that of Césaire’s own grapples with Marxism. Although Césaire’s revisions rely on surrealism’s emphasis on psychoanalysis to assert the importance of the human mind, Sartre achieves this by way of retaining existential freedom. Fanon takes on both of these frameworks in his own analysis of history, in particular the history of colonisation, thus reinforcing the primary importance of both Césaire and Sartre’s influence in coming to understand Fanon’s dialectics. This is especially important in recognising Fanon’s multidimensional approach in coming to terms with the way in which individuals matter specifically to the process of decolonisation. Engaging with Césaire allows Fanon to delve into the notion of non-being via surrealist psychoanalytic emphasis on the importance of the human mind. Sartre, however, allows Fanon to be read as giving methodological importance to the subject – the colonised subject – and their role in decolonisation, specifically in reconceptualising who the revolutionary subjects are, and how we can characterise particular groups of people as agents of decolonisation. Dialectical Reason and Négritude The process by which Sartre reconciles existentialism and Marxism establishes a coherent methodology based on dialectical reason. This concept embodies an explicitly dialectical approach to knowledge itself. Sartre’s contribution to the radicalisation of dialectics demonstrates that the task of the true philosopher is a dialectical one, in order for its method 93 Sartre, Search for a Method, 52. 94 Barnes, Introduction to Search for a Method, xxx. 35 to be both ‘a social and political weapon'.95 This assertion transcends the practice that applies dialectics to an external situation, because it allows for Sartre to make a statement about the nature of knowledge and truth. Regarding knowledge and truth, Sartre argues both must be politicised to the extent that they retain their relevance and vitality through the praxis that engenders them. Otherwise, they must be transformed. This is what Sartre demonstrates through his revisions of existentialism and Marxism. Dialectical reason presents the basis for both Sartre and as we shall come to see, Fanon’s philosophical anthropology. Understanding the principles and motivations that underlie Sartre’s dialectical reason sets up the discussion prior of his reconciliation of existentialism and Marxism. Sartre writes, ‘since I am to speak of existentialism, let it be understood that I take it to be an “ideology.” It is a parasitical system living on the margin of Knowledge, which at first it opposed but into which today it seeks to be integrated'.96 In practicing dialectical reason, Sartre is able to strengthen and validate his theoretical claims, and avoid the pitfalls of stasis that arise in concrete, undialectical analysis that are characterised, as he alludes, by a fetish for synthesis.97 Dialectical reason, in comparison to other kinds of reason, is for Sartre ‘neither constituent nor constituted reason; it is Reason constituting itself in and through the world, dissolving in itself all constituted Reasons in order to constitute new ones which it transcends and dissolves in turn'.98 As we shall see in Part Two, Fanon’s resonance with Sartre’s conception of dialectical reason follows the notion of the totalisation of knowledge. He does not only apply dialectical reason to the case of decolonisation, but the practice of this application exemplifies the way in which Sartre believes knowledge must emerge. The additional benefit of this acknowledgement is that it gives us a frame of reference to acknowledge the parallels that exist in Césaire’s relationship with knowledge, discussed in Chapter One. Establishing the similarities that exist in Sartre, Césaire and Fanon’s methods and critical approach to philosophical 95 Full quote for clarity: ‘Every philosophy is practical, even the one which at first appears to be most contemplative. Its method is a social and political weapon'. See: Sartre, Search for a Method, 5. 96 Sartre, Search for a Method, 8. 97 On Sartre’s critique of orthodox Marxist analysis (as opposed to dialectical reason) and its fetish for synthesis via the concept of totality, see: Sartre, Search for a Method, 26-27. 98 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume One, 21. 36 anthropology mediates the task of coming to understand the nature of Fanon’s dialectics in both its application, and approach to knowledge. In addition to knowledge, Sartre also argues that dialectical reason drives the movement of history. Hazel Barnes suggests that Sartre is indebted to Hegel for the interpretation of history as a dialectical process. Barnes writes, Through Marxism, [Sartre] says, existentialism has inherited and retains two things from Hegel: First, the view that if there is to be any Truth in man’s understanding of himself, it must be a Truth which becomes; Truth is something which emerges. And second, what Truth must become is a totalization. In “Search for a Method,” Sartre says, “I have taken it for granted that such a totalization is perpetually in process as History and as historical Truth.”99 Truth manifests in both knowledge and history, and these themselves are interrelated dialectically. Sartre’s conception of both suggests they are characteristically alive, given that they are an active (as they are always becoming), rather than a passive or static phenomenon. They are constantly in motion, driven by the tensions and contradictions that they produce, and through which they pass. Sartre’s conception of history as a result of dialectical movement understands history as a process of totalisation in the same way he considers knowledge as a process of totalisation. He begins from a Hegelian framework, ‘wherein existing contradictions give rise to a new synthesis which surpasses them'.100 Applying this understanding of dialectics to the process of history constitutes Sartre’s ‘progressive-regressive’ method of historical investigation. This method encompasses the general, real movement of history, to understand the phenomena by which history is driven. Placing Sartre’s notion of négritude within this broader framework helps to illustrate how his theory of history plays out. Moreover, it identifies limits to his theory of history, by way of its retention of more conservative elements it seeks to shed. In Black Orpheus (1948), 99 Barnes, Introduction to Search for a Method, x. 100 Barnes, Introduction to Search for a Method, x. 37 Sartre discusses négritude in relation to Césaire and Leopold Senghor. Importantly, Sartre becomes in the process a European response to both, and the voice through which Europe comes to understand the movement. The result is a distinctly ‘Sartrean négritude’, which develops in line with the theory of history this section has elucidated. Sartre’s dialectics, as presented in Black Orpheus, advance by subsuming the particular into the broader struggle of that which he deems universal. This is the internal movement that corresponds to the process of totalisation. The expense of a dissolution of one struggle to another is clarified when we turn to his treatment of négritude. Tellingly, he writes that ‘the notion of race does not mix with the notion of class: the former is concrete and particular; the latter, universal and abstract’.101 Négritude becomes for Sartre a moment in a wider dialectical progression defined by class struggle.102 It faces therefore a ‘natural’ end, in so far as it aids the class struggle – that defining universal struggle that determines the basis on which the future is conceived. In his account, this future takes the form of a predetermined synthesis: a raceless, classless society. This leads Sartre to conclude, reductively, that négritude ‘is for destroying itself, it is a “crossing to” and not an “arrival at,” a means and not an end’.103 If Fanon had trusted Sartre before this, he was now in a position to reconsider his judgement. Fanon, shocked at Sartre’s blunt and relentless placement of négritude as a minor and relative struggle to that of class, replies: ‘the dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself’.104 Fanon brings to light a limit to Sartre’s dialectics. If disalienation from the Manichaeism of racism is justified on the basis of its usefulness to the class struggle, then Sartre has relied on a determinism that goes against his own Hegelian logic. Fanon reminds him that in the Hegelian dialectic, ‘consciousness has to lose itself in the night of the absolute, the only condition to attain to consciousness of self’.105 Sartre, however, had denied the absoluteless and temporal essentialism underlying the 101 Sartre, ‘Black Orpheus’, trans. John MacCombie, The Massachusetts Review, vol. 6, no. 1 (1964), 49. 102 Sartre, ‘Black Orpheus’, 49. 103 Sartre, ‘Black Orpheus’, 49. 104 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 103. 105 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 102, 38 dialectics of négritude. Here, in Sartre’s failure to apply the Hegelian logic of dialectics to the struggle of négritude, he underestimates its radical and open-ended potential. Further, he strips from black struggle its right to be complete and whole in itself. Fanon’s reproach: ‘black consciousness is immanent in its own eyes. I am not a potentiality of something, I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal’.106 While in Black Orpheus Sartre retains a fetish for unity and synthesis in his analysis of négritude, over a decade later he comes to condemn this exact trend in his Critique of Dialectical Reason. This is a point at which one can argue that it is through his dialogue with Fanon that he revises his position later on, and is able to strengthen his dialectics. This highlights the moving of both theorists towards each other, instead of the one-dimensional move of Fanon towards Sartre that many scholars propose. Ciccariello-Maher in fact argues that this change in Sartre as a result of dialogue with Fanon over négritude can be found additionally in his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.107 Before realising this mistake, however, Sartre’s dialectics as it appears in Black Orpheus refuses to lend to race the struggle on its own terms. What we might distinguish then as Sartre’s ‘earlier’ dialectics as they appear in Black Orpheus illustrates a common trend that will reappear in the treatment of dialectics by Buck-Morss and Taylor. I explore this in Chapters Eight and Nine respectively. That such a conceptual failure may happen decades after Sartre had learnt from his mistake reveals the worrying persistence of the conservative dialectical tradition. That Sartre revised this mistake, where more contemporary scholars have not, leaves us to conclude that some scholars are not learning the lessons of the past, especially in relation to anticolonialism and dialectics. If such lessons learnt are forgotten time and time again, knowledge becomes static. A return to a dialectical approach to knowledge of which Sartre writes may account for the escape from such stasis, and only then can Truth, as Sartre says, be something that ‘becomes’. 106 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 103. 107 George Ciccariello-Maher, ‘European Intellectuals and Colonial Difference’, 129-154. 39 CHAPTER THREE FANON’S LIVED EXPERIENCE This chapter offers a brief contextualisation of Fanon’s theoretical endeavours, here detailed within the trajectory of his own life – a somewhat phenomenological account that illustrates in part the theory that I come to explain in Part Two. This in an effort to avoid the mistakes that Peter Hudis accuses many Fanon scholars of, that is, ‘detaching his pronouncements from the lived experienced that produced them'.108 It is therefore an attempt to ground Fanon’s theory within his lived experience by inquiring into the situation in which they were produced. Importantly, it also illustrates Fanon’s own position of embodied contradiction. The significance of this context cannot be understated, given that these life events and experiences have already set Fanon up, however unwittingly, to establish an early familiarity with the dialectical rhythm at play in the colonial world. Martinique, France and Algeria Fanon was born and raised in Martinique. During this time, racism was latent. Its more explicit forms were concealed by an emphasis on the ‘Frenchness’ of black Martinicans at the expense of any acknowledgement of a distinctly African cultural heritage.109 Despite the country’s political power and economic wealth being held by the békés (the white descendants of early European settlers/slave-owners), they made up approximately only 2,000 out of the country’s population of 150,000.110 A heightened sense of economic inequality shrouded the racial and colonial qualities of this dynamic. Of this period Fanon writes, ‘before 1939, the West Indian claimed to be happy, or at least thought of himself as being so'.111 108 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 11. 109 Discussed in Frantz Fanon, ‘The West Indians and Africans’, in Toward the African Revolution, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967 [1964]). 110 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 13. 111 Frantz Fanon, ‘The West Indians and Africans’, 19. 40 World War Two came as a brutal shock to this attitude. Hudis describes this moment in 1939 as an important turning point for both Fanon and Martinique: In October – shortly after the outbreak of World War II – a French military fleet commanded by Admiral Georges Robert arrived in Martinique. It was sent there by the French government to ensure that the fleet would not face a possible German attack. Along with the ships came 10,000 virulent racists who took advantage of every opportunity to lord it over the native population. For the first time Fanon, like many others, had the opportunity to experience overt and systematic racist discrimination up close.112 In addition to the attitude of racism, the soldiers brought to Martinique a period of severe economic destitution. 10,000 soldiers, and sometimes their families too, overwhelmed Martinique’s economic capacity to manage housing, infrastructure, and food. Alice Cherki notes that Martinique began to experience severe food shortages, and that Martinicans began to notice ‘the discrepancy between how these were experienced by the soldiers and the general population'.113 Food that was in short supply was reserved for the French soldiers, while the local population were forced to make do with what they could. The local population, writes Fanon, ‘held those white racists responsible for all this’ and for the first time, began to question their values.114 Following this was Germany’s defeat of France in 1940. Hudis notes that ‘Robert threw his lot in with the Marshall Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy regime – an action that further exacerbated tensions with the black population, which largely identified with Republican France'.115 Although 14 at the time, Fanon’s hindsight in later years drew out the depth of the implications of this moment, describing it as a point in which ‘the West Indian underwent his first metaphysical experience'.116 It was this same period in which Césaire’s 112 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 15. 113 Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, trans. Nadia Benabid (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006 [2000]), 9. 114 Fanon, ‘The West Indians and the Africans’, 23. 115 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 15-16. 116 Fanon, ‘The West Indians and the Africans', 23. 41 emphasis on négritude and black identity began to take root in mass consciousness. The assertion of black pride took on extraordinary liberatory dimensions in this context. The impact of being confronted with their blackness had resounding force on the black Martinicans that seemed to bring to light contradictions that were previously latent in this particular colonial world. The same encounters with the shock of discovering his own blackness were reinforced when Fanon, ages 17, joined the Free French Army in 1944 led by France’s government in exile, and headed by Charles de Gaulle, to push back against Vichy France. Césaire had disapproved of the move that many young Martinicans made, calling World War Two ‘a white man’s war'. It took Fanon some time however, and exposure to hypocrisies of the French for him to eventually reach the same conclusion anticipated by Césaire.117 Initially, Fanon had eagerly insisted on a somewhat race-blind humanism, having said to a friend that ‘whenever human dignity and freedom are at stake, it involves us, whether we be black, white or yellow. And whenever these are threatened in any corner of the earth, I will fight them to the end'.118 This sentiment was not returned by the Europeans he encountered in the Free French Army. Instead, Fanon observed stark racial hierarchies in the army, and the depth of their hatred for Jews, Muslims and blacks. While he had wanted to fight for ‘human dignity', the Europeans seemed to have a different notion of what this meant entirely. Fanon later lamented in a letter to his brother Joby, ‘I’ve been deceived, and I am paying for my mistakes’, and ‘I’m sick of it all'.119 This is emphasised in a letter to his parents, If I don’t come back, and if one day you should learn that I died facing the enemy, console each other, but never say: he died for the good cause. Say: God called him back to him. This false ideology that shields the secularists and the idiot politicians must not delude us any longer. I was wrong!120 117 Quoted in Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 18. Other sources attribute this quote to a friend of Fanon. 118 Said to Fanon’s childhood friend Marcel Manville, who recounted this later. See Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, 10. 119 Quoted in Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 19; and in David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography (New York: Picador USA, 2001), 101. 120 Quoted in Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, 104. 42 These realisations, the result of a series of alienating experiences, establish fertile ground on which Fanon comes to explore the dialectics within and between the ontological and psycho- existential levels. In 1947, Fanon had enrolled in medical school at the University of Lyon to pursue the path of psychiatry. This choice has a dialectical significance. As Lewis Gordon points out, that Fanon chose to pursue psychiatry (instead of his original choice of dentistry, or any other general practice) reveals an early interest in the ‘convergence of the natural and human sciences'.121 This move foreshadows Fanon’s transdisciplinarity that becomes more explicit with his intellectual development. It was in Lyon that Black Skin, White Masks was produced, and it is in this text that we find Fanon’s profound exploration, in equal parts psychoanalytical and philosophical, of a dialectics of disalienation under the conditions of racist colonialism. This text was written at a time in Europe where inadequate attention was being paid to the lived experience of black people, or the phenomenological effects of racism and colonialism. Virtually no European psychoanalyst or philosopher that Fanon came to know of – other than Sartre – seemed to want to understand or be willing to explore these issues.122 The Wretched of the Earth was published in 1961, nearly a decade after Fanon had left Lyon and arrived in Algeria to work at the Blida-Joinville Hospital as a psychiatrist. Although his lived experience in Martinique and France was conditioned by colonialism in some way, particularly around the inner life of racism in the wake of an ongoing colonial project, Fanon’s new position in Algeria enabled him to see clearly and grasp explicitly the actual material and Manichaean structure of colonialism within a national territory. An example of this progression in Fanon’s work can be found in his treatment of ‘North African Syndrome'.123 At the Blida-Joinville Hospital, Fanon and his colleagues found 121 Lewis Gordon, What Fanon Said (London: Hurst & Company, 2015), 13. 122 Hudis notes Merleau-Ponty, for example, who Fanon studied under while in Lyon. See: Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 28. 123 Fanon, ‘The North African Syndrome', in Toward the African Revolution, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967 [1964]), 3-16. 43 themselves presented with North African Arab patients who would complain of vague illnesses. The dialogue between doctor and patient would follow a pattern: “What’s wrong my friend?” “I’m dying, monsieur le docteur.” His voice breaks imperceptibly. “Where do you have pain?” “Everywhere, monsieur le docteur.”124 The doctor proposes a generic treatment, and Fanon identifies two possible outcomes. In both, he says, ‘the patient is not immediately relieved'.125 This leads Fanon to the diagnosis of a North African Syndrome, wherein the nature of the patient’s ‘imaginary ailment’ demands ‘a situational diagnosis'.126 Only a thorough study of the situation in which the patient finds themselves can offer a valid explanation of the experience of ‘a daily death'.127 It is the situation of colonialism and war, after all, in which the patient is ‘cut off from his origins and cut off from his ends, he is a thing tossed into the great sound and fury, bowed beneath the law of inertia'.128 The solution does not come in medicinal treatment. It is instead a material solution Fanon proposes: ‘there are houses to be built, schools to be opened, slums to be torn down, cities to be made to spring from the earth, men and women, children and children to be adorned with smiles'.129 Such a demand could not come without an appeal to decolonisation. From this point on, Fanon’s engagement with the national struggle in Algeria for independence from France gained momentum. The small changes Fanon made in the everyday practices of psychiatry and socio-therapy at the hospital gave way to the urgent need to grasp the material reality of Algeria under colonialism in its totality. If any real change was to be won for those most violently oppressed and alienated from colonial 124 Fanon, ‘The North African Syndrome', 4. 125 Fanon, ‘The North African Syndrome', 5. 126 Fanon, ‘The North African Syndrome’, 10. 127 Fanon, ‘The North African Syndrome’, 15. 128 Fanon, ‘The North African Syndrome’, 15. 129 Fanon, ‘The North African Syndrome’, 15. 44 Algerian society (those who ended up in the Blida-Joinville Hospital, for example), Fanon knew he must gain a comprehensive understanding of the connection between the inner life of racism and alienation and its outer realities. Although in Black Skin, White Masks Fanon had asserted that the problem of racism was primarily economic, he had not provided a material analysis that explained how this was the case. By the time he came to write The Wretched of the Earth, however, he had been seized by the conviction and urgency that can be attributed to the realisation Hudis identifies, that ‘the Algerian revolution was not only important in its own right, but the vanguard of the effort to liberate Africa as a whole'.130 Thus, Fanon’s thesis of decolonisation gains a critical international (and pan-African) dimension on the basis of an analysis of the material structures of colonial capitalism. On 8 May 1945, the same day that World War Two ended, the Sétif massacre began in Algeria.131 Murmurs of independence amidst a celebratory march for the end of the war ended in a five day massacre with French troops murdering 30,000 native Algerians.132 Later that year, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), a new political and paramilitary organisation, claimed responsibility for a series of bombs set off in Algiers. The question of independence was firmly set on the table, forcing its way into public discourse both in Algeria and in France. French politicians and intellectuals, notably even those on the Left and part of the French Communist Party, did not support the cause of independence. The French went to great lengths to repress the movement, establishing martial law in Algeria. Over the next eight years, more than one million native Algerians would lose their lives to French torture and murder during the war.133 The same year, the FLN contacted Fanon because they were in need of a psychiatrist to help those within the movement.134 Fanon agreed, and from this point committed himself to the Algerian Revolution. 130 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 88. 131 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 69. 132 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 69. 133 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 71-72. 134 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 73. 45 Hudis notes that in 1955, ‘the FLN launched a full-scale insurreaction. The French responded by widening and intensifying its repression, and ‘a “Manichaean” divide showed itself between colonizer and colonized'.135 The entirety of his lived experience and his earlier work suggest that Fanon knew very well that the Manichaean divide of colonialism existed at different levels already. But clearly, during a time of war, he saw it in its most intense, material manifestation. Fanon was well placed to observe the actual dynamics of the revolution. He would have also witnessed conversations and events in which the principles of the revolution, and of post-liberated society, were debated.136 Parts of The Wretched of the Earth concerning national consciousness, for example, may have roots in conversations he witnessed regarding the decision to grant immediate citizenship upon liberation to Kabyle and Jewish people, and that the priority of the movement for independence becomes the people within the bounds of the national territory. This recollection of Fanon’s situation does not intend to reduce him to his lived experience. It does however illustrate the layers at which alienation are distinguishable in Fanon’s lived experience. Further, it testifies to how Fanon’s lived experience, his subjectivity, and his particularity, gives him access to a greater understanding of that which may be considered universal. Cherki makes an important distinction between Fanon and culturalism, a category to which Fanon is often designated. She writes, ‘difference, in the hands of the culturalists, is posited as a challenge to universalism that informs the great systems of Western knowledge. Fanon, on the other hand, views culture as a point of temporal and spatial reference that is also a conduit to the universal'.137 Understanding the content of this point of reference, then, is in line with Fanon’s own views on the relationship shared between the universal and the particular. Furthermore, the nature of Fanon’s lived experience foreshadows the three chapters in Part Two by alluding to their tripartite structure. 135 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 74. 136 Those of the Soummam Conference of 1956, for example. See: Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 137 Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, 34. 46 PART TWO ON FANON’S DIALECTICS Frantz Fanon is radically dialectical. Part Two explores the nature of this claim with the intention of advancing Fanon as a ‘theorist of rupture'. By this, I mean that Fanon’s dialectics are a ruptural dialectics. The reason for this is twofold. First, Fanon advocates for dialectical movement through rupture, which is contingent on privileging rupture over notions of unity or synthesis. This means that Fanon’s dialectics have an emphasis on movement through an embrace of the contradictions at the heart of a particular struggle. Rupture, then, is integral to breaking the structures that reinforce alienation at the three sites of the ontological, the psycho-existential, and the situational. Second, Fanon’s discourse on decolonisation is structured according to the different levels at which (or categories in which) dialectics operate. I have chosen to call these levels the three ‘sites of rupture’ around which Fanon’s work revolves, and these correspond to chapters Four, Five and Six respectively. Fanon’s dialectics carefully considers each of these sites as levels at which contradictions occur under colonial capitalism. As we shall see, these sites bleed into each other, the boundaries are not clear cut as the dialectic at one level reinforces and perpetuates the dialectic at the others. This also suggests that one site cannot be privileged over the other. Fanon also maintains a dialectical approach to knowledge. The value he places on the theories he engages with depends on the extent to which they prove useful in analysing the situation of colonisation and/or the process of decolonisation. This approach to knowledge falls in line with the dialectical reason underlying what Sartre had called the ‘totalisation of knowledge’ explored in Chapter Two. This notion is found on the basis that thought must be subjected to ongoing dialectical transformations in order to be integrated into the state of knowledge. Sartre argues for the imperative of dialectical totalisation in its relation to knowledge against notions that harbour a fetish for the synthesis (unified coherence) of 47 knowledge that some disciplines claim. That is to say, knowledge is something that is always becoming, as opposed to something fixed. There is, however, an important difference between Sartre and Fanon at this point. Sartre argues that ‘there is no going beyond’ Marxism, as ‘long as man has not gone beyond the historical moment’ which it expresses.138 That is, Marxism is the mediator by which other disciplines can be integrated dialectically. For Fanon, other disciplines become integrated into the totalisation of knowledge through the medium of decolonisation. This suggests that Fanon holds decolonisation as the historical moment which we cannot go beyond, and all other disciplines and serve as particulars to be worked through to this ultimately universal goal. Tony Martin observes that the majority of commentators on Fanon ‘have evaluated his philosophy around the concept of Marxism.’139 Such evaluations are misinformed. To comprehend the vitality of Fanon’s philosophy, it should be understood that his work, methodologically speaking, revolves around dialectics. 138 Sartre, Search for a Method, 7. 139 Tony Martin, ‘Rescuing Fanon from the Critics', African Studies Review, vol. 13, no. 3 (1970), 384. 48 CHAPTER FOUR THE ONTOLOGICAL The first site of rupture I examine is that of the contradiction of being produced by the structures of racism and colonialism. This contradiction is also referred to as the dialectics of self and other in Fanonian literature. Referring to this dialectic as that of the self and other, and without demarcating the category in which this operates, contributes to the commonly blurred distinction between the two levels. For this reason, I would like to distinguish the dialectic as it operates on the ontological level, from the second site of rupture that operates on the psycho-existential level. In doing so, I hope it is as clear as possible that one can be faced with both an ontological self and other, and a psycho-existential self and other. That said, these categories cannot be wholly isolated from each other, and as we shall see, there is a dialectic that in fact operates in between the two categories themselves. Regardless, the aim behind making this distinction clear is so that I may avoid any reduction of one site of rupture to another. I also hope to show that the dialectic on the ontological level pertains primarily to the dialectics of a particular conception of being, where the dialectic on the psycho-existential level pertains to the dialectics of an existential conception of radical freedom at a subjective level. Not only do these exist simultaneously but they feed back into each other, reinforcing the dialectic at these respective categories. If a site of rupture exists at the ontological and psycho-existential level, then Fanon has reminded his readers that the depths of colonial violence are far more insidious than we might have previously assumed. The opening pages of Black Skin, White Masks introduce the reader to this idea decisively, with Fanon asking, What does a man want? What does the black man want? 49 At the risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man.140 The pages that follow take us into the ‘veritable hell’ of colonialism – a hell that exists simultaneously within and between the boundaries of the ontological and psycho-existential realms. A shift in the emphasis of different parts of the articulation above suggests that Black Skin, White Masks supports the claim to the operation of the dialectic at these levels. The first emphasis on the ‘problem’ of the black ‘man’ refers the reader to the ontological problem at hand, that correlates to the realm of being.141 Asking what the black man ‘wants', however, signals the platform on which desire operates – that of subjective life. At the ontological level, the black man – who Fanon asserts, is not a man – faces the struggle of becoming ontological (Absolute). That is, he faces the struggle to become a ‘man’. On the psycho-existential level, his subjective experience is characterised by lack or absence, which establishes the function of desire – to become a white man. At the onset of the discussion Fanon states, ‘indeed, I believe that only a psychoanalytical interpretation of the black problem can lay bare the anomalies of affect that are responsible for the structure of the complex'.142 What underlies the psychoanalytical dimension of his analysis is both his existential conceptions of radical freedom and assumptions about the ontological. If the black is not a man, after all, then Fanon has recognised that alienation can function at the depth of being itself. Black Skin, White Masks begins almost immediately with an assertion to this effect, 140 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1. 141 Given the nature of this chapters engagement with Fanon and the text it draws from, I cannot wholly avoid the problem of gendered language (‘the black man’; at times ‘the black’ in Fanon refers specifically to the black man). Any use of gendered language on my part is to maintain consistency with Fanon, and also to not shield him from any criticism that might arise on this basis. 142 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 3. 50 There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born. In most cases, the black man lacks the advantage of being able to accomplish this descent into a real hell.143 The black man, in Fanon’s account, is trapped within an ontological ‘flaw’.144 He is, that is, he exists, but simultaneously he is trapped in an emulation of hell – that ‘zone of nonbeing’ that prevents him from truly embodying a state of being or essentiality. It also this ontological flaw that prevents him from being recognised – as we come to see. He is not recognised by the settler as entirely non-human, but he is also not recognisable as fully human, either. It is easy to read Fanon as a rejection of ontology for the reason that at a surface level, he appears to be dismissive of the study of being itself. This is based on his observation that under colonial relations, the black man does not reside in the zone of being in the first place. Why then, would he be concerned with the category of being? Hudis suggests that Fanon denies any such ontology since he proceeds from a phenomenological perspective’.145 But these are not mutually exclusive. Consider the following passage: There is of course the moment of “being for others,” of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society. It would seem that this fact has not been given sufficient attention by those who have discussed the question. In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw that outlaws any ontological explanation. Someone may object that this is the case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem. Ontology - once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside - does not permit us to understand the being of the black man.146 We see from the articulation above that Fanon is concerned, in some way, with the problem of ontology itself, that is, to the extent that one faces an ontological flaw. This is precisely because the dialectic, as it operates within the categories of the psycho-existential and the 143 Fanon, Black SKin, White Masks, 2. 144 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 82. 145 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 32. 146 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 82. 51 nation, reverberate all the way back to ontological level. The dialectics at each level reinforces the ontological negation that concerns Fanon. It reinforces, ultimately, the contradiction that is inherent to any status of the racialised and colonised as less-than-being. Fanon’s work, then, can be read as a critique of ontology. We might point to the limits to a solely ontological reflection, its inability to account for the colonised subject, and contest the rigidity of an ontological category which holds whiteness as its standard for what it means to ‘be’. In a sense, Fanon is moving to politicise reflections on being-for-others, given the social dynamics that make this most necessary condition unattainable. Yet, it is not an outright denial of the fundamental question of what it means to be, or even of the possibility or existence of a black ontology. Consider Fanon’s brief discussion of Bantu ontology, for example, where he posits that the question of Bantu ontology might have interested me if certain details had not held me back. What use are reflections on Bantu ontology when one reads elsewhere: ‘When 75,000 black miners went on strike in 1946, the state police forced them back to work by firing on them with rifles and charging with fixed bayonets. Twenty-five were killed and thousands were wounded'.147 Fanon follows this up by remarking, ‘Bantu ontology knows nothing of the metaphysical misery of Europe'.148 The question of being, then, in Bantu thought, is secondary for Fanon given that Bantu existence is considered to be on the plane of less-than-being in Europe.149 Any ontological claim, or any claim to ontology, then must be simply suspended. This is so that the realm of being has not been taken for granted and can be appropriately investigated, problematised and politicised. What Fanon does is more complicated than denying 147 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 142. Quotation marks added. The part of this quote contained in quotation marks (on the miners) is attributed by Fanon to I.R. Skine, ‘Apartheid en Afrique du Sud’, Les Temps Modernes, July, 1950. 148 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 143. 149 Paraphrased, Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 143. 52 ontological reflection outright – he reveals that contradictions under racist colonialism can function at the ontological level. Fanon’s exploration of the nature of this particular contradiction is constantly at play in the subtext of Black Skin, White Masks. He writes, For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man. Some critics will take it upon themselves to remind us that this proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.150 Ontology does not permit us to understand the being of the black man, because as he has previously asserted, under conditions of racism and colonialism the black is not a man. Under colonial relations, racialised subjects are not given the same material, political or social status as those who are white, which has actual ontological implications - primarily that of losing ‘ontological resistance'.151 Unpacking this observation relies on understanding that Fanon has here foreshadowed the notion of reciprocity as he later discusses in the section titled ‘The Negro and Hegel'. In this section, Fanon begins with a quote from Hegel that establishes quite clearly establishes his intention: ‘self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or recognized'.152 For Hegel, self-consciousness in the full sense of mutual recognition can only be (in and for itself) on the condition that it is also for-others. This makes self-consciousness dependent on the condition that it is recognised by the Other. Fanon accords with the precedent Hegel sets for the intersubjective conditions required for being and freedom. Here, we have a very basic articulation of the dialectic between self and 150 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 83. 151 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 83. 152 This appears in the English translation of Black Skin, White Masks. In Peau noire masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952), Fanon cites Hippolyte’s translation of G. W. F. Hegel, La phénoménologie de l’esprit (Paris: Aubier 1941), 155. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018 [1807]), 53 other – both are simultaneously at odds and dependent on each other for their own affirmation. Fanon interprets Hegel’s articulation of intersubjectivity in his own words: ‘man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognised by him'.153 Attaining the ontological status of human is contingent on being recognized by the Other. Fanon gestures to the colonial context in a pointed way, emphasising that the colonised subject becomes sub-ontological/less-than-being because he is not sufficiently recognised by the Other (the settler). In a world where the philosophies, customs and way of life of the native population were destroyed by the colonizer, genuine intersubjectivity – or mutual recognition – is simply not a given dimension of human relations between colonised and coloniser. The implications of this imposition are ontological, in the sense that Fanon meant when he described the turning point in the history of Martinique when the French Army’s racism confronted the Martinicans with their own blackness. Fanon offers what Hudis has called a ‘critical appropriation’ of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic.154 This point is perhaps most clearly illustrated with the example of the master/slave dialectic found in Hegel, which Fanon uses to pinpoint the implications of a prematurely closed dialectic. In fact, the basic formulation behind Fanon’s reconstruction of the master/slave dialectic underlies the construction of the dialectic at all three levels that I analyse. Fanon only explicitly devotes a total of five pages to a formulation that underlies much of the content of his work. I return to this dialectic in detail again in Chapter Nine of this thesis, looking to Coulthard’s specific use of the notion of recognition. Here, however, I am primarily engaging with it in order to illustrate the lack of being-for-others (from the point of view of the settler) in the colonial context, and the ontological implications of such a dynamic. 153 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 168. 154 Hudis, ‘Frantz Fanon’s Contribution to Hegelian Marxism', Critical Sociology, vol. 43, no. 6 (2017), 867. 54 In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, it is this tension that famously leads to the hierarchical relationship between two consciousnesses that creates the foundational premise of the master/slave dialectic. After the life and death struggle for the assertion of the self- consciousness of each, one consciousness emerges as the ‘master’ and the other emerges as the ‘slave’. The master, who sees the slave as inessential, feels affirmed of their superiority by nature of the relationship characterised by dominance. The slave turns away from the master and to their work – for Hegel, this is where they find their essentiality. The master realises they need the slave after all, and the slave, a newly emerging independent consciousness, becomes capable of imposing their recognition on the former master. The resolution of the dialectic depends on the master coming to a point at which they realise they need the slave’s recognition. In the colonial context however, the master never gets to this stage. Fanon writes, at the foundation of Hegelian dialectic there is an absolute reciprocity which must be emphasized. It is in the degree to which I go beyond my own immediate being that I apprehend the existence of the other as a natural and more than natural reality. If I close the circuit, if I prevent the accomplishment of movement in two directions, I keep the other within himself. Ultimately, I deprive him even of this being-for-itself.155 Under colonialism, the Other is kept within themselves. The colonised subject embodies the slave in this formula, and where in Hegel the master demands recognition from the slave, Fanon points out that in the colonial context, ‘the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work'.156 If the Other does not demand your recognition, you become deprived of that condition that enables your humanity - that ‘being-for-others’ of which Hegel speaks. Much of Fanonian literature considers that Fanon’s emphasis on the lack of reciprocity in the colonial context marks a disavowal of or departure from Hegel’s dialectic. Yet, this is not the case. In fact, Fanon has used Hegelian logic itself to revise Hegel’s dialectic, in reconsidering 155 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 169. 156 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 172, n. 8. 55 how it plays out in the colonial context. Fanon has observed that for Hegel, there must be the condition of reciprocity that mediates each consciousness’ pursuit of absoluteness.157 According to Hegel’s logic, the dialectic is in fact short-circuited if this condition is unattainable. The other becomes trapped within himself – deprived as Fanon says, ‘even of this being-for-itself’.158 If you are deprived of being-for-others, the very nature of intersubjectivity, then you become less-than-being – a non-Other. The dialectic of self consciousness becomes, in a colonial context, frozen. In other words, this contradiction is stopped short of being allowed to play out as it does for Hegel’s master and slave. When Fanon asserts a resounding ‘yes to life', – that is, a resounding yes to be in the world, and urging his wish for man to become ‘actional', he is pleading against the implications of a frozen dialectic. He is demanding that the conditions that dictate this ‘dialectics at a standstill’ becomes something once again to be set in motion.159 He is urging his readers to turn, with him, to the notion of rupture, and direct action towards a contradiction that seems stuck in its place, hindering the conditions of intersubjectivity required for the status of humankind. 157 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 169. 158 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 169. 159 On ‘dialectics at a standstill’ see: Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 10. 56 CHAPTER FIVE THE PSYCHO-EXISTENTIAL The second site of rupture I examine can be considered as both a cause and effect of the dialectic at the ontological level. While Black Skin, White Masks establishes the dialectic at the ontological level, it also explores ‘the fact of blackness’ in a way that focuses quite explicitly on the lived experience of race. The title of the book itself, Black Skin, White Masks, alludes to this second dialectic, gesturing to the dialectical bind between the body and the world. In the previous chapter I demonstrated how under conditions of racism and colonialism, the colonised are not considered wholly ontological. That is to say, they are not considered worthy of recognition by the coloniser, and their own recognition of the other is not required by the settler. Thus, colonised peoples are not accorded the full dignity and worth of a human being under conditions of racist colonialism. The effect of this is an ontological violence. Having obtained a status akin to ‘thinghood’ in Césaire’s words, colonised peoples become to the coloniser a justifiable source of labour to exploit and dispossess of land. Fanon’s discussion of the contradiction at the psycho-existential level is concerned around the question of the nature of an existence without intersubjectivity, or what we make of a life lived under a state of ontological violence, and thus without the necessary conditions for freedom. This turns his attention to the subjective, phenomenological experience of blackness, as it appears in a colonial world. There is a distinctly Sartrean notion of radical existential freedom at play here. It is here that we can come to conceive of Fanon’s concerns as structured around the question of how colonialism denies the existential condition, and the way in which we justify reading Fanon as concerned with the contradiction on the psycho-existential plane. This existential condition is summarised by one commentator who writes that Sartre’s conception of 57 existentialism makes ‘human reality comprehensible only as freedom'.160 The very fact of subjective existence itself is presented as the condition of freedom. Yet, Fanon knows that in the situation of colonialism, colonised peoples are not free. What kind of human reality is comprehensible, then, without the condition of radical existential freedom? Fanon uses the phrase ‘psycho-existential complex’ to diagnose the internalisation of racism on the part of the colonised.161 The psycho-existential complex of which he speaks, is what I seek here to characterise as the dialectic that exists on the subjective plane of lived experience. This complex is often characterised quite reductively as an ‘inferiority complex’, but at the heart of this psycho-existential complex is a deep rooted contradiction that must be worked through. The nature of this contradiction is due to the appearance of a body as black. It is what Fanon is referring to when he asserts that ‘white civilization and European culture have forced an existential deviation on the Negro'.162 The use of this term is supported by Cedric Robinson’s reading of Fanon, who acknowledges Fanon as having authored ‘some of the most path-breaking liberationist social theory and penetrating analyses of the psycho-existential contradictions of colonialism'.163 Black Skin, White Masks is littered with references simultaneously around the invisibility (the ontological lack) and the hypervisibility of the black body as black. The so-called ‘fact’ of blackness that Fanon warns about is that the appearance of the black body fixes the body itself in its relation to the racist gaze. He asserts, ‘the black is a black man; that is, as a result of a series of aberrations of affect, he is rooted at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated'.164 In other words, the black body is always black in a racist world. One is fixed to this identity, by nature of their appearance, which also fixes them to the core of a racist world. 160 Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 82. 161 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 5. 162 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 6. 163 Cedric Robinson, “The Appropriation of Frantz Fanon,” in Race & Class, vol. 35, no. 1 (1993), 79. 164 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 2. 58 To elaborate, Fanon writes ‘I am overdetermined from without'.165 This is in reference to Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (1946), where Sartre argued that the racialised stereotypes Europe had created of Jewish people had ‘poisoned’ the Jewish person's own mind. For Sartre, this poison reaches to the point where the Jewish person’s ‘conduct is perpetually overdetermined from the inside'.166 They become fixed, Sartre argues, to the idea others have of them. Fanon argues that this kind of analysis cannot apply to anti-black racism because the Jewish identity is not demarcated by appearance where the black identity is. Fanon is not denying the horrors that Jewish people faced in his time (nor ours) but pointing out that these horrors happen when they are ‘tracked down'.167 He concedes (somewhat reductively) that the Jewish identity ‘can sometimes go unnoticed'.168 That is to say, there are no consistent physical markers associated with Jewish identity. On the other hand, in Fanon’s account, black people are ‘overdetermined from without’ in the sense that this identity is fixed to one’s appearance from which one cannot escape. This also distinguishes the idea of discrimination from that of racism. In the case of the latter, Fanon laments, ‘I am the slave not of the “idea” that others have of me but of my own appearance'.169 This identity finds itself constantly pressed back against the black or colonised person in their encounter with a racist world. The identity is one substantiated by various stereotypical fictions that become canon in the settler’s worldview – fictions which become fixed onto the appearance of the black body and therefore inescapable. This is what Fanon calls a ‘racial epidermal schema'.170 The racist gaze on the black body reinforces the binary associations that racist colonial society develops with the signifiers of white and black: white 165 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 87. 166 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti Semite and Jew trans. George Joseph Becker (New York: Schoken Books, 1948 [1944]) 68. 167 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 87. 168 Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 87. 169 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 87. 170 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 84. 59 as good and beautiful, and black as evil and ugly. More so, it imposes a distinct racist history on the black identity by reinforcing black people as ‘savages, brutes, illiterates'.171 To illustrate this dialectical confrontation with blackness, Fanon recalls an experience where he is pointed at by a little white boy on a train, who exclaims to his mother that he’s frightened by the black man. Taken aback, humiliated and angered, this moment provokes the observation for Fanon: I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: “Sho’ good eatin’.”172 This confrontation of blackness Fanon had encountered in the train provoked the realisation that the white – the white child, even – had the capacity to ‘unmercifully imprison’ the person of colour within themselves, revealing a power dynamic that existed by virtue of the respective colours of their skin.173 All Fanon had wanted was ‘to be a man among other men’.174 Instead, he found himself constantly up against the irrationality and violence of racism, the gaze that sees him not as a human, but as ‘a thousand details, anecdotes, stories'.175 This situation demonstrates the very real ways in which blackness becomes opposed to the condition of radical freedom that other ‘men among men’ have. This is because blackness is fixed by the racist gaze, or as Fanon says, ‘white eyes - the only real eyes'.176 This tension is 171 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 141, 88. 172 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 84-85. Gordon has translated this passage himself, retaining the original y a bon banania! instead of the ‘sho’ good eatin’ provided in the translation by Markmann. For Gordon, retaining this original French keeps intact the cultural reference Fanon was making in relation to a popular banana flour and cocoa cereal marketed in a racist fashion to Africans at the time, playing on the connection between ‘blacks and apes through the mediating symbol of banana flour'. The motto itself was created as a way of saying c’est bon (it’s good) in pidgin french, which is not true. See: Lewis Gordon, What Fanon Said, 50. 173 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 85. 174 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 85. 175 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 84. 176 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 87. 60 a result of the dialectic embodied. As he illustrates: ‘my life is caught in the lasso of existence. My freedom turns me back on myself'.177 We have, then, sketched the basic formula of the psycho-existential dialectic at hand. The black person is caught between the condition of radical existential freedom, and that of being ‘sealed into crushing objecthood’ by their own appearance.178 This is the nature of the dialectical bind between the body and the world. As Lewis Gordon writes, the lived experience of black peoples, or the black experience, is trapped in a moment of ‘epistemic closure'.179 By this, he means that the radical existential condition of freedom, where one can embody any and all possibilities, is closed off. The actual effect of this dialectic produces what Fanon famously calls a ‘Manichaean delirium'.180 This refers to the constant state of neurosis produced in the colonised subject’s psyche, induced by the psycho-existential alienation that occurs by virtue of one’s physical appearance as black. To constantly be confronted with the irrationality of the ‘fact’ of blackness, leaves one in a state of dialectical crisis. Fanon laments, ‘for a man whose only weapon is reason there is nothing more neurotic than contact with unreason'.181 The psycho- existential transformation undergone has dangerous implications for organic dialectical movement. Once again, we will find that the dialectic carries the risk of becoming frozen. If it is the case that the dialectic becomes frozen at the psycho-existential level, this short- circuits the capacity for any resolution of the contradictions of racism and colonialism at all. This is because the dialectic is not ruptured and worked through. Instead, this Manichaean delirium produces the subjective desire in the colonised to become the master themselves. If the appearance of blackness presents a moment of epistemic closure for the individual, and this is that ‘existential deviation’ of which Fanon speaks, then we are left with a distorted desire for recognition that neutralises and de-radicalises the will to liberation.182 177 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 178. 178 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 82. 179 Gordon, What Fanon Said, 49. 180 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 141. 181 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 89. 182 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 6. 61 We find in Black Skin, White Masks the basic articulation of the psycho-existential transformation undergone in colonial relations as follows: There is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men. There is another fact: Black men want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect.183 The colonised subject internalises this dynamic, and it is from within this internalisation that the desire to be recognised grows. The reason for this desire is because the dialectic is reinforced at both the ontological and material levels. The logic follows the formula below: The Negro wants to be like the master. Therefore he is less independent than the Hegelian slave. In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object. Here, the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object.184 Recognition, in this particular case, relies not on the desire to overthrow the system that reinforces this dynamic and subsequently to be recognised on the basis of difference, but rather to become the master. For Fanon, this constitutes the true realisation of recognition under racism that Hegel could not foresee – not to work but to revolt – and thus revealing the assimilatory pull underlying the politics of recognition. This is what leads Fanon to assert that ‘for the black there is only one destiny. And it is white'.185 Fanon supports this thesis with a psychoanalytic reading of different circumstances in which this logic rears its head. Figuratively, he pinpoints the ways in which black skin adopts white masks. One example of how this plays out is in the relationship the colonised shares with language. Particularly, Fanon seems interested in how the black people ‘of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter – that is, he will come closer to being a real human being – in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language'.186 Black Skin, White Masks takes us through the 183 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 3. 184 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 172, n.8. 185 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 4. 186 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 9. 62 dynamics of race and class that puts middle class Antilleans in a position where they barely or never speak Creole, except to their servants. The mastery of the French language enables status that fulfills to some extent the distorted desire to whiteness that grows out of the Manichaean delirium. The problem with this kind of recognition, however, is that it follows not a dialectical logic but a logic of substitution. By way of switching one group into the customs of the other, nothing has really changed. The colonised substitutes himself into the master’s place by way of language, dress, personal relationships and affiliations in order to obtain a particular standard that the coloniser has set for what it means to be fully human. The point of critical importance here is that in aspiring to recognition on the master’s terms, there is no rupture through the conditions that reinforce and maintain this dialectic. Without rupture, freedom does not look like existential freedom where anyone can embody all possibilities. Instead, it offers no more freedom than that of slaves that are offered a seat at the master’s table.187 In other words, without embracing the struggle at the heart of this dialectic, then there cannot be a breaking through this dynamic. Without rupture, there can be no disalienation for the colonised subject at any level, be it ontological or psycho-existential, or even, as we shall come to see, the situational. For Fanon, the alternative to the logic of substitution is to follow a dialectical movement, involving an open embrace of the particularity that the black identity and body finds itself trapped within under conditions of racism and colonialism. 187 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 171. 63 CHAPTER SIX THE SITUATIONAL As I address Fanon’s diagnosis of the third site of rupture, I shift the focus from Black Skin, White Masks to The Wretched of the Earth, following carefully the move Fanon makes from the individual subject as the focus of analysis to the material conditions in which the subject finds themselves. Fanon foreshadows this move early, acknowledging that ‘besides phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny'.188 Although Fanon has acknowledged in Black Skin, White Masks that ‘the effective disalienation of the black man entails an immediate recognition of social and economic realities’, The Wretched of the Earth deals with the nature of these realities in its primary focus.189 The Wretched of the Earth, then, offers a sociogenic analysis of the situation of colonial capitalism. The context in which Fanon writes by the time he pens The Wretched of the Earth has changed considerably from that of earlier works. This accounts for the shift from a theory grounded in a philosophical and psychoanalytic exploration of the question of colonialism and racism to theory grounded in an understanding of material structures of racist colonial capitalism. This shift in context also accounts for the change in Fanon’s language, from the more frequently used ‘black man’ in earlier works, to ‘the native’ or the ‘colonized subject’ in The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon follows a very similar theoretical journey to Sartre’s navigation of reconciling the existential subject with a Marxist analysis of material reality. As I have argued above, this is based on the conviction that radical existential freedom makes no sense outside of its social reality. For Fanon, this means that radical disalienation at the ontological and psycho- existential levels confront limits in being conditioned by the situation of colonial capitalism. His diagnosis of the effects of colonialism must therefore transcend the individual as the unit of analysis. Realising this, Fanon turns his attention to the material plane, asserting that the 188 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 4. 189 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 4. 64 dialectics at the levels prior cannot be worked through unless they are located within the broader narrative of national decolonisation. In his own words, he asserts this definitively: ‘the immobility to which the native is condemned can only be called into question if the native decides to put an end to the history of colonization – the history of pillage – and to bring into existence the history of the nation – the history of decolonization’.190 The connection between the nation and decolonisation is inextricable on the basis that colonisation created a totally new set of relations between peoples, and between people and the land. This is primarily because the colonial occupation of a national territory leads to the creation and ossification of a national political economy governed by capital. As a result, Fanon is able to take the structures that reinforce both race and class into account in order to set the nation into dialectical movement and the decolonisation this requires. Fanon embraces a Marxist analysis in order to account for the material dialectics of racist colonial capitalism. His theoretical journey follows closely that of Sartre’s, because Sartre’s existential Marxism retains the importance of the individual within a Marxist dialectical materialism. Fanon similarly retains the importance of the the colonised subject by maintaining the complexity he has previously established regarding the dialectics that operate at the ontological and psycho-existential levels, and between the situational level. While this in itself can be seen as a critical revision to orthodox Marxisms, Fanon also exceeds Sartre in being able to offer a thesis of revolutionary decolonisation that explicitly warns of the dangers of class warfare waged on the part of the native bourgeoisie. Fanon is able to bring a basic Marxist articulation of the structure of colonial capitalism into the folds of his narrative of decolonisation. Thus, analogous to his ‘stretching of Hegel’ explored in Chapters Four and Five, Fanon’s work can be read as a critique of Marxism by repositioning it outside of European history, and by using it as a theoretical tool for the political project of decolonisation. Where a Marxist analysis risks failing to consider the colonial (and particularly the racial) dimension of capitalism in the colonies, Fanon purposefully de- 190 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (London: Penguin Books, 2001 [1961]), 40. 65 centres the European subject within world-history, instead centering the intersections of race and class within the boundaries of the nation on which this intersection occurs. What, then, is the basic articulation Fanon offers of the situation of colonial capitalism? It begins with the premise that ‘the colonial world is a Manichaean world'.191 Recall that Fanon’s use of ‘Manichaean’ began in Black Skin White Masks as a way to demarcate the internalized effects of the black-white dynamic of racism. There, he draws the notion of the Manichaean out from this previous metaphorical use, into the material reality of the colonial situation where he identifies what Gordon points out as pertaining to the actual physical ‘structure of segregation and policed borders’.192 Fanon regards the actual topography of the colonial landscape as one that corresponds to the ‘rules of pure Aristotelian logic’.193 This logic, based on formal categorisations and binaries, reinforces the colonial compartmentalisation of the world at a material level. Yet, this compartmentalisation cannot be comprehended solely on the basis of race. The physical Manichaean divide of colonial society becomes further complicated (mystified, in Fanon’s words) by considerations of class. Fanon writes, In the colonies the economic substructure is also the superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why the Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem.194 It becomes blindingly apparent that race and class are inseparable because as categories, they reinforce one another. The distinctions between them however are obscured because of the nature of the dual systems of oppressions at play in colonial capitalism. Fanon’s analysis holds that the dual systems of colonialism and capitalism share an historical, structural genesis. Fanon notes that 191 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 31. 192 Gordon, What Fanon Said, 117. 193 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 30. 194 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 31. 66 Capitalism, in its early days, saw in the colonies a source of raw materials which, once turned into manufactured goods, could be distributed on the European market. After a phase of accumulation of capital, capitalism has today come to modify its conception of the profit-earning capacity of a commercial enterprise. The colonies have become a market.195 Here, Fanon recognizes that early colonial capitalism did not only view the colonial population as a national territory with which to trade, but that the colonised could also become a source of exploitable labour. Colonial capitalism functioned initially as a method of primitive accumulation by which Europe was able to force the colonies into dispossession and reconstruct the national territory and native populations into something more compatible with European capitalism. Working from this understanding of the situation of colonial capitalism, Fanon provides a call for material disalienation by identifying the point of rupture of colonial capitalist society. It is helpful to view Fanon in light of Marx in order to illustrate this diagnosis. In Dennis Forsythe’s account of Fanon’s Marxism, there are four important ways in which Fanon convergences with Marx. First, both Fanon and Marx advocate disalienation in the highest regard. Both posit the desire for ‘the enslavement of man by man to cease forever'.196 Second, both assume to varying degrees a level of economic determinism. For Marx, this sometimes takes on a reductive form. For Fanon, although he accounts for the primarily economic realities on which psycho-existential alienation occurs, he does not deny that this inner alienation can take on an architecture of its own. Third, Fanon and Marx both hold revolution as the natural outcome or mediator of the dialectical process.197 In Marx, it is often suggested that capitalism’s contradictions hold the seeds of its own destruction.198 Fanon does not deny this, but insists that the added factor of colonialism creates different contradictions, and thus different points of weakness, of colonial capitalist society. Fourth, despite their economic 195 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 51. 196 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 180. 197 Dennis Forsythe, ‘Frantz Fanon – The Marx of the Third World', in Phylon, vol. 34, no. 2 (1973), 161-162. 198 Forsythe, ‘Frantz Fanon – The Marx of the Third World', 161-162. See: Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 51. 67 determinism, both were ‘not content merely to watch history unfold itself'.199 They both advocate a theory of action, specifying agents of the revolution who hold the capacity for consciousness and are ideally placed within the structures to rupture their dynamics. There is an important distinction to be made between Marx and Fanon that helps to identify the site of rupture at the situational level. Where Marx identifies the (Euro-)proletarian class as agents of the revolution, Fanon argues that this revolutionary capacity falls on the ‘wretched of the earth’. In doing so, Fanon displaces a European Marxist analysis and accounts for the different layers of contradictions that function in the situation of colonial capitalism. Yet, Fanon knows that the nature of colonised peoples even within the boundaries of a single national territory is heterogenous, and they cannot be lumped into one category defined and bound solely by the category of race. In other words, race itself is not an adequate grounds on which the nation can be unified to wage the war for decolonisation. This is for the reason that in the situation of colonial capitalism, not all colonised subjects are allies to the kind of decolonisation that Fanon advocates. Fanon has already shown himself to be painstakingly aware of the dangers of a frozen dialectic. This premature closure of the dialectical process of decolonisation is the risk that the move towards independence, as opposed to authentic decolonisation, runs. This risk relies on an observation made about the colonised psyche: ‘we have seen that the native never ceases to dream of putting himself in the place of the settler'.200 This is diagnosed as stasis or epistemic closure because it is the dead-end result of neocolonialism. The logic of substitution contributes to neocolonialism, whereby the native national middle class that was created during the process of colonisation receives the transfer of ‘unfair advantages which are a legacy of the colonial period'.201 With their new role as the national bourgeoisie, this particular class of privileged skilled workers are not interested in changing the colonial infrastructure that was imposed during the period of colonisation. Fanon argues that this transfer of power keeps intact the colonial 199 Forsythe, ‘Frantz Fanon – The Marx of the Third World', 162. 200 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 41. 201 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 122. 68 infrastructure that renders the nation exploitable by the West. That is to say, the national economy, during or post-independence, ‘is still concerned with the ground-nut harvest, with the cocoa crop and the olive yield'.202 That in turn retains the economic purpose of the colonies as sites of production for the West. Where nationalisation in the process of decolonisation could (and should) enable the creation of a national industry, it instead goes on running the country as a site of production of raw materials for European consumption. In Fanon’s words, the native bourgeoisie ‘will have nothing better to do than to take on the role of manager for Western enterprise’.203 In this regard, independence runs the risk of operating according to the logic of substitution, as opposed to the dialectical and ruptural logic of revolution which Fanon is proposing as authentic decolonisation. This logic of substitution not only plays out in the case of the absence of decolonial conflict, but Fanon also argues that ‘the bourgeoisie of an undeveloped country is a bourgeoisie in spirit only'.204 That is to say, although they would function in the same way as the European bourgeoisie ideologically, they lack the economic means. This leaves the nation perpetually indebted to and relying on European support and aiding the neocolonial project. Hudis points out that as a result of this dimension of Fanon’s analysis, ‘we learn that the newly independent states become sucked into the world market and fall prey to neocolonial domination'.205 Fanon’s divergence from Marx is also notable in his observation that the native working class constitutes a reactionary class, because it is too bound within the operation of neocolonialism to oppose it. He stresses that the native (particularly urban) working class ‘is the nucleus of the colonized population which has been most pampered by the colonial regime'.206 Fanon argues that the positions they occupy in colonial society, those that include ‘the tram conductors, taxi-drivers, miners, dockers, interpreters, nurses’ and ‘shop-stewards, industrial workers, intellectuals and shop-keepers’,207 are entirely necessary for the smooth 202 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 121-122. 203 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 123. 204 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 143-144. 205 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 114. 206 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 86. 207 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 86. 69 operation of the colonial regime. As the cities would not run smoothly without them, there is an incentive for the colonial authorities to ‘pamper', by which we mean envelop into the folds of the ‘native bourgeoisie’. This results in their comparative privilege to those outside of the city centres. The privileged working class is based, then, on the geopolitics of their position. The native working class are enclosed within the structure of segregation that this Manichaean divide of colonialism has imposed. Given that the native working class are ‘town-dwellers’, Fanon argues that they are implicated geopolitically into the conviction that ‘modern ideas reign'.208 By ‘modern ideas’, Fanon gestures towards the bourgeois ideologies that are imported from Europe and permeate through the layers of class distinctions among the native population. These ideas are internalised by the native working class, who then grow opposed to traditional native ways and customs. As a result, Fanon concludes that while ‘in capitalist countries, the working class has nothing to lose; it is they who in the long run have everything to gain. In the colonial countries, the working class has everything to lose'.209 Fanon turns away from the native working class, identifying instead the ‘lumpenproletariat’, constituted by the native peasantry, as the revolutionary agents of decolonisation. Of this group, he writes that it is within this mass of humanity, this people of the shanty towns, at the core of the lumpen-proletariat, that horde of starving men, uprooted from their tribe and from their clan, constitute one of the most spontaneous and the most radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people.210 There are two important points to emphasise about Fanon’s thoughts regarding the native peasantry that support the overall argument. The first points to their geopolitical location outside of the cities. While the native working class and bourgeoisie reside within the cities, 208 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 86. 209 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 86. 210 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 103. 70 the native peasantry resides in the rural areas. This means that they embody the Manichaean divide of colonialism in a literal sense. Thus, Fanon’s insight captures the physical demarcation of the dialectic that operates on the basis of the nation. Because of their physical isolation from the cities, Fanon points out that the constitution of the native peasantry ‘obeys its own logic, and neither the brimming activity of the missionaries nor the decrees of the central government can check its growth'.211 They are far removed from any privileges that the colonial authorities bestow on the other native groups that reside in the cities. It also points to the fact that they are the least likely to be indoctrinated into colonial capitalist ideologies in the way that Fanon finds the native working class have been. The contradiction becomes apparent as one that corresponds to the physical structure of colonialism. Second, Fanon highlights the importance of the native peasantry’s capacity for spontaneity – a feature he holds in the highest regard. If the native peasantry follows its own logic, this is one that is in tension with the ‘Aristotelian logic’ at play in the cities. More specifically, Fanon’s emphasis on spontaneity suggests that the logic of this class is one that corresponds to a dialectical function. We find the articulation of the conviction shared by both Sartre and Fanon: ‘laying claim to and denying the human condition at the same time: the contradiction is explosive'.212 The capacity for this explosion to take its spontaneous forms is what Fanon ascribes to the native peasantry. These bursts of ‘explosion’ are ruptural, and outside of the static logic that operates within the cities. As a result, they harbour the capacity to rupture the colonial world. This sentiment resonates with Marx and Engels on the nature of the revolutionary subject, even if the subject itself differs. Marx and Engels pinpoint that what makes the proletariat revolutionary is their position within the contradictions of capitalism – the point at which the structure is weakest. From within this position, it follows that ‘the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official [bourgeois] society being sprung into the air'.213 Specifically, any action on the part 211 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 103. 212 Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon (London: Penguin Books, 2001 [1961]),17. 213 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 50. 71 of Fanon’s native peasantry is revolutionary for the same reasons. It is this class, the ‘lowest stratum’ of colonial society, that can put history back into motion by rupturing the dialectical stasis characterised by colonial capitalism. Fanon does not deny that the nature of this spontaneity can be easily manipulated, and thereby take on counter-revolutionary dimensions. But his point remains that the contradictions of colonial capitalism demand its destruction. As Marx says, ‘not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself, it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons’.214 Fanon, stretching this dialectical diagnosis, recognises that colonial capitalism’s contradictions have produced the colonised, working subjects on which it relies on to dispossess and exploit. These peoples are denied ontological status, psycho-existential freedom, and recognised only for their ability to work under colonial capitalism. That they exist within the sites of rupture at three levels and face layers of alienation that transcend each site, signals to the revolutionary strength of this group. Violence, then, is the ruptural quality of making oneself known in action. Any claim to disalienation at the sites of the ontological, psycho-existential or situational, by way of the assertion of self or freedom, or the demand for visibility, constitutes violence to the structure of colonial capitalism. This is the reason why négritude as the assertion of self through culture, or physical violence against the Manichaean boundaries of the colonial nation, share the same quality of ruptural, explosive violence. Fanon writes, ‘it so happens that for colonized people, this violence, because it constitutes their only work, invests their characters with positive and creative qualities’.215 Every act of ruptural violence contributes to the revolutionary momentum that gathers within the contradictions of colonial capitalism. When Fanon says that ‘for the native, life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler’, he means that the true disalienation of the colonised can only come at the death of colonial capitalism.216 Through rupture, there is death to old system, and life for the new. 214 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 42-43. 215 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 73. 216 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 73. 72 PART THREE THE PATH AHEAD Fanon’s polemic against the violence of colonisation holds potent resonance with contemporary anticolonial theory and political struggle. Over the past ten years, across the landscape of anticolonial literature, it is common to find reference to a resurgence of Fanon’s thought. It has been suggested by Lewis Gordon that Fanon’s thought had, in fact, never left us at all.217 Instead, interest in his work has undergone a kind of ‘ongoing dialectical process’ in which dimensions of his thought are projected into mainstream discourse, suited to different generations and therefore emphasising different insights.218 The recent ‘return’ to Fanon is what Gordon considers to be a more ‘useful’ engagement with Fanon’s thought – that is, engagement that contributes to the ‘development of original work across the entire sphere of human studies’.219 This statement can be read as premised upon a dialectical approach to knowledge, with contemporary scholars finding tools in Fanon to rework for their own contexts. This establishes the return to Fanon as not only useful, but as a more dialectical engagement with Fanon’s thought. Part Three, then, offers a third moment in the dialectical evolution of Fanon’s thought itself, highlighting the way in which Fanon’s dialectics lives on beyond Fanon. I examine Fanon’s legacy through the contemporary scholarship of Gordon, George Ciccariello-Maher and Coulthard.220 Each of these thinkers are clear frontrunners in contemporary dialectical engagement with Fanon’s thought. The study of these scholars reveals both the malleability of Fanon’s thought, and allows for a deeper understanding of the ways in which his radical theory of freedom and disalienation resonates with contemporary anticolonial thought and politics. They have each produced 217 Gordon, et al., ‘Five Stages of Fanon Studies', 7-8. See also: Gordon, What Fanon Said. 218 Gordon, et al., ‘Five Stages of Fanon Studies', 7-8. 219 Gordon, et al., ‘Five Stages of Fanon Studies', 6. 220 The scope of this thesis only considers these three theorists. There are many others who engage Fanon dialectically, and with his dialectics, of course. 73 theory that has distinct and deep resonance with Fanon’s decolonial ambitions. More so than a general engagement with Fanon’s thought, these theorists inherit the dialectical thread which runs through Fanon’s work, thus extending Fanon’s dialectics beyond Fanon himself. Their active use of Fanon’s dialectics contributes ultimately to the project of re-establishing a radical dialectical methodology as an important theoretical weapon in the project of anticolonial resistance. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon states clearly, ‘I do not come with timeless truths'.221 He forewarns against any assessment of his work that does not take from him in order to reconstruct and re-invent his ideas within the historical developments that have succeeded him. Philosophy must constantly shift to accommodate the social reality in which it is produced. The way these scholars engage with Fanon respects this demand. It is not just that these theorists grapple with what Fanon said, but the way in which they engage with what Fanon said. Gordon, Ciccariello-Maher and Coulthard refuse to use Fanon in a one- dimensional manner. In the true spirit of anticolonial existence and resistance, they each accept Fanon as an invitation to reinvent the tools of anticolonial emancipation.222 In doing so, they have allowed Fanon to remain open-ended, dynamic, and their transdisciplinary application of Fanon verifies the validity of his dialectics. To support the notion of Fanon’s living dialectics, I draw from Rabaka’s characterization of different ‘forms of Fanonism'. Rabaka asserts that there is a distinct form of ‘revolutionary Fanonism', which stands in stark opposition to what Henry Louis Gates Jr. called ‘critical Fanonism'.223 Critical Fanonism is described by Rabaka as an intertextual exercise, a ‘theoretical substitute’ for the Fanon who committed himself and his life work to the practice of decolonisation. For Rabaka, central to the notion of revolutionary Fanonism is ‘its move above and beyond the interpretations of others’ interpretations of Fanon, its ‘return to the 221 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1. See also: Rabaka, ‘Revolutionary Fanonism: On Frantz Fanon’s Modification of Marxism and Decolonisation of Democratic Socialism’, Socialism and Democracy, vol. 25, no. 1 (2011), 141. 222 I take the expression ‘invitation to invent’ from the follow quote by Ato Seyki-Otu: ‘Everything, on Fanon’s account of the social and symbolic conditions of postcolonial existence, requires to be reread and rewritten. Everything is an invitation to ‘invention'’. See: Ato Seyki-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 40. 223 Rabaka, ‘Revolutionary Fanonism’, 126. 74 sources’ of any form of Fanonism, i.e. Fanon’s thought and texts, and its earnest efforts to sift through and salvage anything from Fanon’s lifework and legacy that might be useful in the ongoing dialectical process(es) of revolutionary decolonization and re-Africanization'.224 Rabaka asserts that revolutionary Fanonism requires more than academic or armchair revolutionary efforts. He draws from Nigel Gibson in order to construct an idea of the revolutionary Fanonian intellectual as follows: In order to initiate the process(es) of revolutionary decolonisation... the anticolonial (on-the-path-to-becoming-post-colonial) intellectuals must radically rupture their relationship with their (neo-)colonial (mis)education and practice critical conceptual generation, putting forward dialectical theory and praxis particular to, and in the best interest of, their specific historical struggle against colonialism, capitalism and racism, among other (post)modern socio-political issues and ills.225 The work of the theorists detailed here are certainly more than an intertextual exercise in determining what Fanon said. They each emphasise the role that their elaborations on Fanon play in the ongoing decolonial project. Gordon, Ciccariello-Maher and Coulthard all contribute to anticolonial theory and politics today with a sense of determination and urgency. Their appeal to Fanon signals the ongoing, pervasive nature of the Manichaean divide characteristic of colonial relations – a divide that Fanon warned against. Collectively, their work signals the decolonial turn that is finally gaining momentum within the academy, and more importantly, suggest the transformative potential of such a turn. That Fanon’s thought has been continued, extended, and stretched, as it were, with such rigour, inhabits the political spirit of Fanon’s life and project. Furthermore, these theorists exemplify how Fanon’s legacy maintains an undeniable power 224 Rabaka, ‘Revolutionary Fanonism’, 127. 225 Rabaka, ‘Revolutionary Fanonism’, 131. This quotes builds from the point articulated by Nigel Gibson who writes, ‘rather than applying an a priori, a crucial task for the Fanonian intellectual was to confront the intellectual’s internalization of colonial ideology that had become mentally debilitating. The native intellectual, therefore, does not simply uncover subjugated knowledges but has to challenge the underdeveloped and Manichaean ways of thinking produced by colonial rule’. See: Nigel Gibson, Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue (Amherst: Humanity Books, 1999), 114. 75 and relevance with a vast variety of subjectivities that exist under the state of contemporary colonial relations. Above all, their work is perhaps the most ultimate testimony of Fanon’s production of living thought. This is engendered by the dual characteristics of vulnerability and strength, contributing to its ability to constantly reproduce itself as what Sartre himself proclaimed as the qualities of true and dialectical philosophy. The chapters that follow offer an exposition of these theorists engagement with Fanon’s dialectics, on the terms of their own analysis. They converge not only on the basis of their revolutionary Fanonism, but also in that their reading of him understands that his work revolves around dialectics. Their use of Fanon’s dialectics transposes the dialectical method to their own focus on analysis. It is on this logic that they aim to contribute to the growing urgency with which many anticolonialists seek to centre dialectical politics and thought. 76 CHAPTER SEVEN LEWIS GORDON Lewis Gordon is widely considered to be one of the most eminent contemporary Fanon scholars.226 Gordon is a staple citation and point of reference in most contemporary Fanonian literature. His engagement with Fanon could be qualified in Derridean terms as a ‘double reading’ of Fanon. Derrida’s development of a methodologically deconstructive reading of a text requires two different kinds of engagement with the text at hand. The first reading is characterised as a ‘reproductive’ commentary of the text, interpreting its textual intent. The second reading is a ‘critical’ reading that disseminates this interpretation. A double reading accounts for the retention of authorial intention while working independently with the author’s thought. If Derrida’s first reading is essentially a question of discerning what the author has said, it is fitting, then, that one of Gordon’s books is entitled What Fanon Said. Gordon here translates his reading of Fanon into a work dedicated to the reproductive exercise of clarifying Fanon’s intention, in the face of interpretative errors and mis-readings present in some contemporary Fanonian literature. In providing a definitive account of Fanon’s thought, Gordon also establishes – or in Derrida’s terms, stabilises – the foundation from which his use of Fanon’s theoretical notions can cohere with Fanon, not just what Fanon actually says, but what he wants to say but does not. Regarding the Derridean notion of the second reading, Gordon has established an astounding breadth of theoretical work, stemming from a Fanonian foundation. Through a categorisation of these texts as second readings, we can consider his ideas here espoused as independent disseminations of Fanon’s thought. These works cover vast ground, from his production of notions around black existentialism/postcolonial phenomenology, to more 226 See for example Reiland Rabaka, ‘Revolutionary Fanonism’, 130. 77 particular theoretical endeavours regarding the social politics of race and class, to the notion of epistemic decolonisation. This chapter offers an exposition of Gordon’s work on epistemic decolonisation in three sections. There are two contradictions that Gordon identifies in his work. The first is within the methodological production of knowledge, and the second is within the disciplinary reproduction of knowledge. The first two sections establishes the nature of these contradictions, first looking to the ‘colonisation of reason’ and second, Gordon’s notion of ‘disciplinary decadence’. Third, I summarise Gordon’s dialectics. The way that Gordon suggests moving through these contradictions establishes him as a theorist of rupture. The colonisation of reason One of Gordon’s earlier texts, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (1995), introduces to us the foundation of what will later become a more developed articulation of his concern with the dialectical problematic of Western thought. Using Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy (1936) as an entry point, Gordon inserts Fanon into a dialogue around the critique of European reason.227 He establishes the argument from the following starting point: We encounter Husserlian crisis immediately, then, as not only a crisis of meaning, but also a crisis of valuative malaise or, as Jürgen Habermas later declares, a problem of legitimation on every level of social life. In Husserl’s hands, this crisis is identified in clinical form. “The European nations are sick; Europe itself, it is said, is in crisis.”228 Gordon correctly identifies that Husserl’s sermon on European reason seemed to fall back onto itself. While Husserl was right in characterising Europe in a state of crisis, and in ‘correctly delineating Europe', Husserl was not able to provide more than the prognosis of a symptom.229 227 Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, 7. 228 Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, 7. 229 Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, 7. 78 Gordon turns then to Fanon, arguing that in Fanon we find the most appropriate diagnosis of the European condition. Fanon’s placement at the periphery of Europe as himself a black man from a colony who finds himself simultaneously inside and outside of European reason, gives him leverage in a project that transcends Husserl’s capacity to address the nature of the malaise at hand. The result is the following observation: ‘whereas for Husserl there was a nightmare of disintegrated reason, for Fanon there was the nightmare of racist reason itself – reason that leaves him out in the cold'.230 Gordon argues that because of his position, Fanon lives as a critique of France. He embodies its critique. From Fanon’s experience, which he claims ultimately counts as an extension of a manifold experience that constitutes the experience of the oppressed, we learn that the twentieth-century person of color embodies a crisis of Europe and Euro-reason.231 If the problem in the case of Husserl is that he is not able to escape the method of that which he analyses, Fanon succeeds because it is precisely this method that he targets. For a person of colour to encounter racist reason – reason that legitimates and extends racism, which in turn constitutes a kind of ontological and existential discrimination – means that Fanon embodies a specific kind of contradiction. The reason to which he appealed did not offer to Fanon the same hospitality it afforded European/white ‘Man’. Gordon writes of the malaise on this modern condition of humanity: Humanity has died in Europe, the United States, and anywhere in the world in which Western Man – that is, White Man/White Culture – is Man and, therefore, Reason. In other words, Humanity has suffered a global death.232 This qualifies Europe/white ‘Man’ as in a state of crisis, and by their self-serving standardisation as ‘Man’, this crisis is narrowed down to the state of what Gordon has called ‘Reason’. This is because Europe has endeavoured to make itself synonymous with a particular conception of reason that legitimises racist colonialism at its base level. Gordon 230 Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, 8. 231 Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, 6. 232 Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, 8. 79 has capitalised the R in his account to denote the particularity of its conception – it does not referring to reason at all, but a misguided idea of what this means, which he also calls ‘Euro- reason'. Gordon locates Fanon as the embodiment of this crisis, because Fanon becomes a signifier of the crisis of Euro-reason. Gordon’s concept of disciplinary decadence holds within it this critique of Euro-reason. Where Fanon has introduced Gordon to the idea of colonial epistemologies, Gordon takes this further, remarking ‘that knowledge has ever been colonized raises the question of if it was ever free'.233 But why this preoccupation with Reason? Because Gordon, like Fanon, and like Césaire before them, understands that ‘the search to understand Man was also producing him'.234 This bears the question of scientific knowledge as a form of reason – particularly European ways of knowing – and more specifically, the methodologies by which reason functions. Gordon uses Fanon to support the following argument: That modes of producing knowledge can be enlisted in the service of colonisation is evident. Frantz Fanon, for instance, reflected in Black Skin, White Masks, that methods have a way of devouring themselves. In doing so, he brought into focus the problem of evaluating method itself, of assessing methodology. If so, then, any presumed method, especially from a subject living within a colonized framework, could generate continued colonization.235 Gordon observes that political developments in European history correlated with a series of epistemological developments that have ‘literally produced new forms of life'.236 In the epistemological production of new forms of life, social relationships and ontological status can be redefined. Of the changing nature of sociality and ways of being, Gordon writes that ‘new kinds of people came into being, while others disappeared, and whole groups of them 233 Lewis R. Gordon, ‘Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence’, 95. It is also worth noting here Gordon’s observation that the construction of Knowledge as a singular or unified body is a concept alien to pre-colonial times. See pages 5-12. 234 Gordon, ‘Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence’, 96. 235 Gordon, ‘Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence’, 97. 236 Gordon, ‘Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence’, 97. 80 occupy the age in an ambivalent and melancholic relationship. They belong to a world that, paradoxically, they do not belong'.237 The contradiction is twofold in Gordon’s analysis. The first is that black peoples find themselves inside a racist world that denies or rejects their ontological and psycho- existential humanity and freedom. These are the people that the ‘dominant organizations of knowledge’ treats as problems, by which Gordon means that their entire subjectivity is constituted as problematic, instead of as ‘people who face problems’.238 This is a contradiction that gestures to the actual position black and racialised peoples occupy on the geographical bounds of racist Euro-reason. Not only have certain kinds of subjectivities been brought into existence by it, but they are denied humanity on the basis of the epistemologies without which these subjectivities would not exist. The second contradiction is deeper within the epistemic foundation of Euro-reason. Not only does the contradiction exist in terms of the actual effect of this on black and racialised people, but also in terms of the question of method. If colonisation operates at the level of material reality, how can it be said it does not also operate at the level of epistemology? The question of method and ways of knowing are in fact entirely capable of reproducing colonisation, reinforcing and reinforced by colonisation at the material level. Elsewhere, Gordon observes Fanon’s concern with the physical Manichaean structure of segregation in the colonial world. It holds no less significance in this particular context of Gordon’s metacritique of Euro- reason: Fanon recognized that colonialism embodies the Aristotelian logic of contraries, rather than the Hegelian logic of dialectics. For Fanon, as we have seen, the human world is sloppy, full of contingencies, and even the meaning of human actions and relationships require a rich conception of social understanding, in other words, a sociogenic interpretation.239 237 Gordon, ‘Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence’, 97. 238 Gordon, ‘Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence’, 97. 239 Gordon, What Fanon Said, 116. 81 We can transpose Fanon’s insight to Gordon’s argument around the colonisation of reason, understanding that colonial logics can apply at multiple levels. To explore the idea that reason itself can be colonised, Gordon employs a distinction between the concepts of reason and rationality that broadly parallels the distinction made above between the Aristotelian logic of contraries and the Hegelian logic of dialectics. In this distinction, what was referred to as Euro-reason becomes synonymous with rationality, given that what colonial epistemologies claim as ‘Reason’ actually functions using the logic of rationality. Having identified that we must interrogate the very question of method in a process of radical reflection, Gordon asserts that this task demands a suspension of method itself. To suspend a method means that it can be interrogated without its disciplinary confines.240 In applying this, Gordon finds that rationality cannot suspend the logic on which it relies. This is because rationality demands the condition of maximum consistency. In this regard, it functions as a science, maintaining rigid boundaries. Its method therefore is not conducive to its own suspension and doing so is beyond its own scope. Rationality therein encounters a paradox. It presumes its own method, and when this is suspended, its logic collapses. This leads Gordon to conclude that rationality is not a reliable or stable method if it cannot withstand critique by means of its suspension. In contrast, reason is radically different to rationality. Gordon implicitly uses a conception of reason that is distinctly dialectical, and is therefore able to argue that reason is capable of embracing contradiction. Its logic can be suspended, and this does not create any kind of paradox. More so, the dialectical logic of reason is open to its own constant re-evaluation and evolution, distinct from the rigid logic of rationality. As such, Gordon concludes that ‘the scope of reason exceeds rationality'.241 The fact that the logic of rationality is claimed as reason when in fact they are opposed, with reason actually being a more ‘reasonable’ method than rationality, signals that (dialectical) reason has been colonised in its employment to 240 Lewis R. Gordon, ‘Disciplinary Decadence and the Decolonisation of Knowledge’, Africa Development vol. 39, no. 1 (2014), 87. 241 Gordon, ‘Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence’, 97. 82 colonial epistemologies. In identifying that rationality masquerades as reason, then, Gordon is able to argue that colonial logic functions at the level of reason, pinpointing the heart of the contradiction within the methodological production of knowledge. Disciplinary decadence Given the established problematic at the methodological level, Gordon turns to the same problem that operates at the disciplinary level. This is termed ‘disciplinary decadence’ to denote the reproduction of (colonial) knowledge through colonial logics. This move relies on a turn to the institution which begins to appear most suspicious: the University. The University functions as a site through which colonial logics are reproduced and disseminated through the construction of ossified disciplines. In other words, one of the consequences of the effort to colonise reason is the production of academic disciplines which serves the interests of Euro-reason/rationality by dividing up branches of thought and knowledge in distinct, segregated disciplines. Gordon describes the fundamental project of modern European philosophical thought as an effort to marry science and reason (as rationality). This can be observed in disciplines that are crafted within the broader categories of the natural and the human sciences. This division of knowledge into sciences follows the logic of rationality because disciplines try to actively contain a particular way of thinking in order to maximise consistency. Maximum consistency, Gordon reminds us, demands that there can be no exceptions. For knowledge to be reproduced through disciplinary boundaries, each discipline is treated as following a set of rules to which only knowledge in that discipline applies. The discipline also actively excludes what does not fit the particular disciplinary methods or narrative. Therefore, disciplines only interrogate knowledge within its own scope, and lessen the chance of encountering other knowledges to which it may not have the means to defend its methods. After all, without being capable of embracing contradictions or exceptions, disciplines do not have the means to interact meaningfully or be open to the possibility of its own evolution. 83 Gordon’s concern with disciplinary decadence involves a transposition of Fanon’s diagnosis of Manichaeism to the level of epistemology. Where Fanon guides Gordon to the problem of method and the point at which reason has been colonised, Gordon goes beyond Fanon to identify that the contemporary division of knowledge into disciplines in academia neatly follows Fanon’s own sketch of the segregated Manichaean structures of colonialism. Following Gordon and Fanon’s claims about the ‘Aristotelian logic’ of manichaeism, we can consider Gordon’s critique as directed towards an Aristotelian model of disciplinary sciences. In light of this, the creation of disciplines is a kind of segregation of different knowledges. Through the construction of disciplines and disciplinary boundaries, knowledge is forced to turn inwards. The implication is that in turn, it must also turn itself away from the world – its own external reality in which it was created and exists. It falls into a condition of solipsism, a world in and of itself that presumes its own complete internal coherence and unity. As a result, knowledge within disciplines becomes focused on the administration and application of method, without questioning the method itself or engaging with external knowledges. This is also referred to as the fetishisation of method. As Gordon points out, it encounters a paradoxical problem therein: ‘Like empires, the presumption is that the discipline must outlive all, including its own purpose'.242 Through disciplinary decadence, knowledge is taken out of the context in which it was born. The effect of this is the dehistoricisation and depoliticisation of its origin and purpose. Disciplinary decadence condemns knowledge to stasis. To remove history and politics from developments of knowledges in order to claim it to science happens at the expense of a holistic understanding of the way in which that knowledge came to be, or the interests it develops to serve. Most importantly, it hinders the potential for the dialectical transformation of knowledge itself. Knowledge is not in fact static, but in constant development. This true condition of knowledge for Gordon is termed ‘living thought’ defined by its engagement with reality and its own limitations.243 Such a condition demands what 242 Gordon, ‘Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence’, 98. 243 Gordon, ‘Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence’, 98. 84 Gordon calls the ‘teleological suspension of disciplinarity’, where as was demonstrated with the suspension of the method of Euro-reason, a suspension of disciplines is necessary in order to interrogate disciplines themselves.244 Gordon’s notion of living thought resonates deeply with Sartre and Fanon’s dialectical approach to knowledge. Collectively, they posit the nature of knowledge as dynamic and ever-changing, and therefore the efforts of disciplinary decadence to contain knowledge is at the expense of its what Sartre has called its totalisation. Recall that Sartre’s critique of orthodox Marxism was on the basis of the assumption that it constitutes ‘a knowledge in itself’.245 Sartre’s critique establishes a basis by which to free Marxism from the science to which it was contained in his particular time. The intention of this is to allow it to engage meaningfully with other strains of thought like existentialism as part of a dialectical approach to knowledge. Knowledge must move and change alongside history, working through its own contradictions instead of ignoring them. Knowledge is, after all, a living thing, constantly constructed and reconstructed according to the living reality in which it is produced. Gordon has here identified the heart of the contradiction within the disciplinary reproduction of knowledge. On rupture Gordon establishes a solid foundation on which to diagnosis a crisis of reason and its reproduction, arguing that this is one of the subtler ways that colonialism functions in our contemporary age. This crisis is dialectical in nature, and Gordon turns to the demand for a movement through the contradictions at hand. I conceive of Gordon as a theorist of rupture who calls for the movement through the stasis of the Manichaean production and reproduction of colonial logics to free the condition of living thought. Gordon’s identification of these contradictions helps to pave the way for the surpassing of epistemological and 244 Gordon, ‘Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence’, 99. 245 Sartre, Search for a Method, 35. 85 disciplinary boundaries in order to think truly dialectically, which, as Sartre says, as is the task of true philosophy. This turn to rupture leads to a project of epistemic decolonisation. Gordon offers a process by which epistemic decolonisation can be practiced, and this in turn functions as a demand for the dialectic to be set in motion. The demand for rupture is a demand for working through the contradictions identified, leading to the call for the suspension of both method and disciplinarity. This process requires that the assumptions inherent to a particular discipline and its disciplinary boundaries are suspended in a way that can free knowledge from its Manichaean bounds. He describes this process as a ‘willingness to go beyond disciplines in the production of knowledge'.246 As such, it is a step further than interdisciplinarity or even transdisciplinarity within academia, because it is willing to entirely reconsider the boundaries of the discipline itself. The only way that new knowledge can be produced is dialectically, that is, as the outcome of a dialectical process. Then, to rupture the Manichaean boundaries and containment of knowledge is to open the door to the dynamic possibilities ahead. This could implicate the revitalisation of a discipline, or its destruction – as was the case with Marxism and existentialism respectively in Sartre’s own dialectical project. Either way, knowledge would be engaging in its own dialectical process through which its outcome will be determined. As Gordon writes, ‘man needs to emerge out of the ashes of the fact of his desiccation’.247 So too is the case for knowledge as living thought in the case of Gordon’s dialectics of colonial epistemologies. Dialectical thinking can teach us how to think without reducing thought to binaries or Manichaeism. Living thought, as a dialectical approach to knowledge, would have a huge political impact. By this, I mean that the project of epistemic decolonisation is a ruptural one that influences social reality as much as it is produced within it. Not only does it change the way thinking is organised, but it demands further implications in the wider project of anticolonialism. To illustrate a project of epistemic decolonisation as ruptural, I look to an 246 Gordon, ‘Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence’, 99. 247 Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, 12. 86 interview conducted with C.L.R. James. Asked about what the future of black studies looks like, he replies, I would like to say this – that if the American universities, where black studies are established and separate, look upon black studies as merely some sort of concession to satisfy the black students, that is not so. Black studies require a complete reorganization of the intellectual life and the historical outlook of the United States, and world civilization as a whole.248 James anticipates Gordon here. Implicit in this quote is that black studies cannot be ossified into a discipline in itself. Its content warrants a greater impact – a ruptural impact. It presents itself as ‘a change to penetrate more into the fundamentals of Western civilization’.249 So too is Gordon’s epistemic decolonisation. Epistemic decolonisation demands something new and radically different. A new way of thinking, a new way of practicing thought, and a new way of thought to engage the social reality in which it is conceived. There is a certain absurdity present in the institutionalised treatment of thought, representing a kind of decline in the activity of thinking. In order to truly contribute something new, thinking should be made a living activity, and knowledge understood as an open-ended pursuit. 248 C.L.R. James, ‘The Black Scholar Interviews: C.L.R. James’, The Black Scholar, vol. 2, no. 1, (1970), 43. 249 James, ‘The Black Scholar Interviews: C.L.R. James’, 43. 87 CHAPTER EIGHT GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER Where Gordon has established the need for the process of epistemic decolonisation to be set in motion, George Ciccariello-Maher has contributed to this process by engaging in the decolonisation of dialectical methodology. Reading these theorists in tandem can help to strengthen both, with Ciccariello-Maher establishing the method of dialectics as an example of living thought by way of subjecting it to decolonial critique. Ciccariello-Maher has worked with and applied dialectical thought in multiple political landscapes. Given the focus of this thesis on Fanon’s dialectics and Ciccariello-Maher’s uptake of them, I narrow my analysis to his more explicit theoretical engagement with Fanon’s dialectics. As a result, this section will focus primarily on the way in which Ciccariello-Maher works directly with dialectical thought at the level of methodology. I read together the texts Decolonizing Dialectics (2017) and ‘‘So Much the Worse for the Whites’: Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution’ (2014). Both texts share the intention of rehabilitating dialectical thought, seeing within it the potential for radical, critical analysis. First, this chapter offers a brief summary of Decolonizing Dialectics, which completes a theoretical, step-by-step decolonisation of the dialectical methodology. This project asserts theoretically what it means to privilege rupture, the consequence of which aims to break ‘the shackles of a conservative dialectical tradition’.250 Second, this chapter looks to Ciccariello- Maher’s ‘Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution’, which conducts a comparative analysis of Susan Buck-Morss’ and C.L.R. James’ narratives of the Haitian Revolution. Such a comparison is guided by Fanon’s dialectics. This task puts side by side a conservative dialectics and a decolonised dialectics, providing a concrete example that illustrates clearly the theoretical premise of Decolonizing Dialectics. 250 Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 7. 88 What Ciccariello-Maher comes to call the ‘anti-dialectical pitfall’ to which Buck-Morss succumbs reveals the ways in which even the most well-intentioned attempts to radicalise dialectical thought can still retain dangerously conservative elements. These conservative elements harbour the ruse of colonial thinking. In particular, they hold the retention of eurocentrism by way of implicitly centering European subjectivity, and a lack of understanding of the concept of dialectical movement as a one through the particular to the universal. A failure to understand the nature of dialectical movement renders a leap to notion of universalism, which will become apparent in Ciccariello-Maher’s critique. Ultimately, his critique of Buck-Morss is illuminating for understanding that a radical dialectics is futile without also being decolonised. Decolonising Dialectics Ciccariello-Maher’s Decolonizing Dialectics explores the intersections of decolonisation and dialectics, settling into the need to reconcile the fraught relationship between them – a relationship observed to be ‘long characterized by mutual suspicion'.251 This reconciliation is achieved by an interrogation of the question of method. Ciccariello-Maher seeks both a dialectics that decolonises its own methodology, and a dialectics that can appropriately narrate the struggles of decolonisation. The ambiguity of the book’s title is a testament to this twofold application. In his reconciliation of decolonisation and dialectics, Ciccariello- Maher implicitly practices a dialectical approach to knowledge. By subjecting dialectical methodology to its own decolonising, he follows a similar path of Sartre’s reconciliation of existentialism and Marxism. Such a move also follows Fanon closely, subsuming other knowledges dialectically into an ongoing project of decolonisation. The decolonisation of dialectical methodology is achieved by centering categories of political identity in order to emancipate the dialectical tradition from its conservative chains. Examination of these categories draws together Fanon with Georges Sorel on the grounds of what he identifies as their ‘radical dialectics of identity'.252 This is on the basis of class for 251 George Ciccariello-Maher, ‘“So Much the Worse for the Whites”: Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution', Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, vol. 22, no. 1 (2014), 19. 252 Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics, 48. 89 Sorel, and both race and nation for Fanon. Ciccariello-Maher points out that their shared connection is bound not strictly on the basis of violence… but instead by locating violence within the broader chain reaction that binds it to the identities it generates and the radicalized dialectics it sets into motion. By doing so, we can begin to think race, class and the nation anew by neither reducing one to the other nor separating these identities hermetically from their contexts, but instead by grasping their shared dialectics and even the micro dialectics of their mutual interplay.253 To privilege political identity here becomes synonymous with privileging moments of rupture and inhabiting them to their breaking point. These contradictions are the identifiable categories of class, race and nation. Therefore, these categories can be considered as three sites of rupture. In focusing on these three sites of rupture, Ciccariello-Maher reveals two things he inherits from Fanon. First, he collapses ‘the’ dialectic. In other words, like Fanon, Ciccariello-Maher also discredits the notion of a singular dialectic that dictates which contradiction should be held as the revolutionary mediator for dialectical movement. Instead, he accounts for the multiplicity of contradictions in contemporary colonial capitalism, ensuring them equal weight and dialectical equivalence. In this way, he avoids the mistakes that Sartre made before him, when he subsumed one ‘minor’ dialectic (race) within the more universal, singular dialectic (class). Second, Ciccariello-Maher explicitly seeks to put forth a dialectics that privileges rupture, as opposed to notions of (false or pre-mature) unity. By validating the dialectical significance of these sites of rupture, he also validates ‘the momentary hardening of group identities’ and grants ‘weight to a separatist moment in dialectics – at the expense of premature reconciliation’.254 Similar to Césaire and Fanon, then, Ciccariello-Maher values the move on the part of those oppressed to become immersed in their particularity. Doing so makes an 253 George Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics, 49. 254 Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics, 6. 90 important statement about the nature of the universal: it cannot be accessed in the immediate present. Quite opposite, such a goal requires the embrace of the separatist implications of rupture. Furthermore, this makes an important statement about the nature of dialectical movement. Contradictions cannot be sidestepped in order to be surpassed. They must be worked through, which entails an embrace of a ruptural dialectics in order to be open possibilities for revolutionary changes. Arguing for the significance of hardened political identities to a ruptural dialectics gives a theoretical clarity to the ensuing section on the dialectics of the Haitian Revolution. Towards the end of the Decolonizing Dialectics, Ciccariello-Maher quotes Grégoire Chamayou, who writes, If Africans are radically excluded from the Hegelian dialectic – and thus also from political subjectivity – that is first of all because of a racist postulate that deprives them of consciousness of life and liberty. But it is certainly also because the point of departure for the relationship of consciousness that is established in the experience of modern slavery does not correspond to the canonical schema of the Hegelian phenomenology of the master and the slave’.255 As Ciccariello-Maher points out, this resonates deeply with Fanon’s own criticism of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, where he argues that the condition of reciprocity does not exist between the coloniser and colonised. This is one of Fanon’s most important contributions to dialectics: difference in political subjectivities in a colonial capitalist context means taking into account the asymmetrical relationship shared by coloniser and colonised. Racialised groups have a different starting point, facing contradictions at an ontological, psycho- existential, and material level. The dialectic therefore goes much deeper than a conservative dialectics accounts for. As we shall see, the respective failure of a conservative dialectics and success of a decolonised dialectics in grasping this is illustrated clearly in the following section. 255 Grégoire Chamayou, Manhunts: A Philosophical History, trans. S. Rendall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012 [2010]), 56. 91 Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution Two observations can help frame Ciccariello-Maher’s comparative analysis between Buck- Morss and James’ narratives of the Haitian Revolution. First, James Walvin’s Introduction to James’ The Black Jacobins (1938) begins tellingly, by observing that ‘the history of black slavery in the Americas can be interpreted in terms of the slaves’ persistent efforts to resist their bondage'.256 More pointedly, he asserts that ‘the heart of James’s book is the slave experience'.257 Second, and contrastingly, Ciccariello-Maher’s analysis reveals that Buck- Morss’ narrative interprets the history of black slavery in the Americas on the terms of the master. At the heart of Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, then, in the name of universalism, is the master’s experience. This framing illustrates the political implications of James’ willingness to privilege rupture, and therefore centre black subjectivity, and the failure of Buck-Morss’ dialectics in privileging unity, and white (slave owning, colonial) subjectivity. Buck-Morss’ Hegel, Haiti and Universal History seeks to draw together decolonisation and dialectics by pointing out that Hegel must have been aware of the Haitian Revolution as it unfolded in Saint-Domingue when he formulated his original dialectic of mastery and servitude.258 Buck-Morss recognises points of this dialectic that mirror the political and economic realities of slave owning masters and their slaves at the time. In doing so, she 256 James Walvin, Introduction to The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Overture and the San Domingo Revolution by C.L.R. James (London: Penguin Books, 2001 [1938]), vii. 257 Walvin, Introduction to The Black Jacobins, vii. 258 Buck-Morss suggests that Hegel’s knowledge of the Haitian Revolution came from his committed reading of journals and newspapers. One particular newspaper that it has been commonly noted Hegel read was called Minerva, which had covered the political landscape of Saint-Domingue from 1972-1805. Buck-Morss makes this connection, writing that ‘Either Hegel has the blindest of all the blind philosophers of freedom in Enlightenment Europe, surpassing Locke and Rousseau by far in his ability to block out reality right in front of his nose (the print right in front of his nose at the breakfast table); or Hegel knew- knew about real slaves revolting successfully against real masters, and he elaborated his dialectic of lordship and bondage deliberately within this contemporary context’. See: Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 50. 92 makes an effort to prove Hegel’s political considerations that other prominent philosophers speaking on the Enlightenment virtues of freedom and equality seemed to ignore.259 This erasure of and/or silence on the conditions of slavery within Western philosophical discourse constitutes for Buck-Morss a kind of paradox of western philosophy. The virtues and ideals here espoused remain depoliticised to that extent that they remain exclusive to European subjectivities, by not taking into account material and historical political reality. By explicitly linking the relationship between slavery and Hegel’s original formulation of the dialectic, Buck-Morss’ work attempts to reconcile this tension in Hegel. Such a reconciliation is done in the spirit of ‘rescuing the idea of universal human history from the uses to which white domination has put it'.260 Buck-Morss does not necessarily try to reclaim Hegel altogether, about whom she admits that ‘it is sadly ironic that the more faithfully his lectures reflected Europe’s conventional scholarly wisdom on African society, the less enlightened and more bigoted they became'.261 She does however try to reclaim the proposed radicalism of a conception of an earlier Hegel. Buck-Morss’ conviction is that within this version of Hegel conceived, we can find an idea of universal human history that we can reclaim from both the reality of white supremacy, and what she sees as Hegel’s own late conservatism.262 Ciccariello-Maher frames his reading follows: ‘the question for our task is whether Buck- Morss successfully escapes the “anticipation of unity” that she rejects as having so overdetermined Hegel’s approach, or, if in her zealous rejection of identities, she has fallen into precisely the same anti-dialectical pitfall'.263 In order to explore this question, Ciccariello-Maher puts Buck-Morss into conversation with James’ narrative on the Haitian Revolution, and Fanon’s reformulation of the Hegelian dialectic of lordship and bondage. 259 Examples presented in Buck-Morss account include John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. See: Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, 23-26. 260 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, 74. 261 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, 73-74. 262 See: Ciccariello-Maher, 'Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution', 21. 263 Ciccariello-Maher, 'Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution', 22. 93 Such a task establishes Buck-Morss’ retention of conservative elements of the dialectic tradition. Ciccariello-Maher commits Buck-Morss to the following passage in which she offers her analysis of the Haitian Revolution. Within this summary, much of her conservatism can be found in her framing of the revolution. She writes, For almost a decade, before the violent elimination of whites signalled their deliberate retreat from universalist principles, the black Jacobins of Saint-Domingue surpassed the metropole in actively realizing the Enlightenment goal of human liberty, seeming to give proof that the French Revolution was not simply a European phenomenon but world-historical in its implications.264 The tone of Buck-Morss’ analysis grants to an entire black population, most of whom were previously enslaved, nearly a decade of ‘deserved’ freedom – that is, deserved up until what she deems a retreat from universalism. This retreat is a reference to the killing of the local white population in 1804 during which an estimated 3,000 deaths occurred.265 By pointing to the ‘violent elimination of whites’, Buck-Morss betrays a troubling sympathy towards European subjectivity over the revolutionary black masses themselves, the nature of which becomes obvious once we see James’ alternative narrative. Additionally, Buck-Morss chooses to narrate the revolution through the lens of the French Revolution, and as Ciccariello-Maher points out, ‘the European Enlightenment as a whole'.266 In doing so, she chooses to universalise the French and not the Haitian. This analysis is supported further by her choice to center the Enlightenment goal of ‘liberty’ as what Ciccariello-Maher points out to be her ‘ultimate yardstick for the universal'.267 This move on her part also resonates on another level with the problem of subordinated theoretical 264 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, 39. 265 Philippe R. Girard, ‘Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic System: A Reappraisal’, The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 3 (2012), 558. 266 Ciccariello-Maher, 'Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution', 22. 267 Ciccariello-Maher, 'Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution', 23. 94 identity, and can be criticised on similar grounds. The choice to reduce Fanon to a Sartrean runs parallel to the choice to reduce the Haitian Revolution to the French. Implicit in Buck-Morss’ framing of the Haitian Revolution is the peripheral treatment of Jean- Jacques Dessalines, a former slave and a revolutionary figure who played a prominent role in the 1804 massacre.268 As Ciccariello-Maher notes, ‘his presence in Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History is spectral at best: mentioned on only a few occasions, but looming in the background nevertheless as the antithesis of the universal'.269 Yet it was Dessalines who gained independence for Haiti in 1804, after succeeding Toussaint L’ouverture as the head of state. Toussaint’s Haitian Constitution of 1801 was seen by many as a setback for more revolutionary aims for complete independence from France, establishing Haiti instead as a colony with its own particular laws.270 Buck-Morss praises this document, reading it as taking ‘universal history to the farthest point of progress by extending the principle of Liberty to all residents regardless of race'.271 In simultaneously praising Toussaint but silencing Dessalines, Buck-Morss paints the former a universalist hero and grants the latter no more depth or dimension than a caricature of ‘brutality and revenge'.272 James’ narrative of the Haitian Revolution presents a Haitian Revolution that challenges Buck-Morss’ narrative in two ways. Firstly, it reveals that Buck-Morss centres European subjectivity – more pointedly, ‘biologically-white colonists’ – and secondly, that it is on the basis of this centering that she forms her criteria for the universal.273 Where Buck-Morss 268 Caribbean historian Girard notes that ‘Dessalines’s black owner was apparently Janvier Dessalines, who married Toussaint Louverture’s daughter in 1787, which would explain the unequal relationship that developed between Louverture, a free black, and Dessalines, the former slave of his son-in-law'. These dynamics are not considered at all in either Buck-Morss or Ciccariello-Maher’s study. See: Philippe R. Girard, ‘Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic System: A Reappraisal', 555. 269 Ciccariello-Maher, ‘Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution', 27. 270 See The Haitian Constitution of 1801 in: Toussaint L’Ouverture, ‘Haitian Constitution of 1801’ in The Haitian Revolution, ed. Nick Nesbitt (London: Verso, 2008 [1801]). 271 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, 94. 272 Full quote for clarity: ‘For all his brutality and revenge against whites, Dessalines saw the realities of European racism most clearly'. Prefacing his insight with this disclaimer portrays him primarily as a revenge-seeking slave, and overshadows his capacity as a leader of the Haitian Revolution. See: Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, 75. 273 Ciccariello-Maher, 'Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution', 27. 95 insists the massacre of whites was a violent tragedy, Ciccariello-Maher looks to James to clarify that ‘this was not a tragedy for the whites'.274 He uses the following passage to illustrate how James decentres European subjectivity in a way Buck-Morss cannot: For these old slave-owners, those who burnt a little powder in the arse of a Negro, who buried him alive for insects to eat, who were well treated by Toussaint, and who, as soon as they got the chance, began their old cruelties again; for these there is no need to waste one tear or one drop of ink. The tragedy was for the blacks and the Mulattoes.275 James centres black subjectivity in his account of the massacre, reminding readers that the massacre was ultimately tragic for those who had to commit it to secure their freedom. In contrast, Buck-Morss extends sympathy to the white slave owning population, constructing the situation as tragic for this group. It is around this population that Buck-Morss builds her conception of universalism, justifying her claim that their deaths could signal a retreat from the universal. Buck-Morss’ centring of European subjectivity gives way to a skewed conception of universalism that does not accurately account for the political asymmetry of degradation and subordination under relations of colonisation and slavery. In fact, her commitment to universalism on the basis of a centering of European subjectivity puts the burden of recognition on the part of the colonised and enslaved. In other words, Buck-Morss refuses to adequately recognise black subjectivity within her narrative of the Haitian Revolution unless black subjectivity conforms to European notions like ‘liberty’. It is only through these notions that Buck-Morss is able to privilege particular subjectivities. While Buck-Morss praises Toussaint, James’ account reveals that ‘on a very concrete level, Toussaint was a failure'.276 He was, therefore, unable to reconcile the dialectic. In fact, his privileging of local whites and sympathetic relationship with the French against the favour 274 Ciccariello-Maher, 'Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution', 27. 275 C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Overture and the San Domingo Revolution by C.L.R. James (London: Penguin Books, 2001 [1938]), 373. 276 Ciccariello-Maher, ‘Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution’, 23. 96 of the black masses fragmented, rather than unified the population. This historical account is elaborated extensively in The Black Jacobins. According to James, ‘the blacks could see in the eyes of their former owners the regret for the old days and the hatred'.277 Despite this fear on the part of the black masses and former slaves, Toussaint remained sympathetic to the colonial power. Toussaint’s Haitian Constitution of 1801 declared openly that ‘there cannot exist slaves on this territory; servitude is therein forever abolished. All men are born, live and die free and French'.278 The proclamation of freedom in the same sentence as insisting on maintaining the asymmetrical connection between Haiti and France proved a fatal error for Toussaint when Napoleon attempted violently to reclaim control over Haiti and restore the conditions of slavery. A relationship with france was antithetical to the abolition of slavery, but Toussaint wanted to maintain both in the name of a false universalism. Having previously disenfranchised the black masses on the basis of their fear of this exact outcome, Toussaint was left captured by French authorities and taken back to France to spend the remainder of his life in jail. James suggests that Toussaint’s error was in part attributable to his lack of understanding that the anti-white sentiments of the black masses was a political, rather than a biological category. This is in so far as anti-white meant anti-slavery, as ‘the whites were whites of the old regime’, suggesting that as long as they remembered the days of slavery, they would constantly seek to repossess the privileges of domination that came with it.279 Ciccariello- Maher concludes that Since there was “no fundamental difference” between Toussaint and his masses – all were subject to the threat of perpetual enslaveability – the explanation lay elsewhere: in his uncritical embrace of the universal as immediately accessible. It was this that led Toussaint to oppose not only discrimination, but any form of racial identity that interfered with the establishment of formal equality in the here and now. It was this that led to Toussaint’s favoring of the whites, his concomitant distancing from the 277 James, The Black Jacobins, 261. 278 Toussaint L’Ouverture, ‘Haitian Constitution of 1801’, 46. 279 James, The Black Jacobins, 286. 97 Black masses, and finally to his execution of Moïse as the very embodiment of a one- sided nationalist dialectic. Moreover, it is this error that lay at the heart of Buck- Morss’ celebration of Toussaint’s universal status.280 Ciccariello-Maher’s point is that Toussaint was blinded by abstract principles of equality and liberty at the expense of the affirmation of his own political identity. This affirmation could only be ensured if it was explicitly anti-slavery, entailing the position of anti-white in that context. Ciccariello-Maher concludes ‘that Toussaint was unable to see this is a testament to the blinding brilliance of the universal'.281 James offers a helpful distinction between the Jacobins and the sans-culottes that when applied to the case of the Haitian Revolution, helps to illustrate this claim. Ciccariello-Maher points to James statement that the Jacobins were authoritarian ‘enlightened despots’, and the sans-culottes ‘wanted to exercise their own dictatorship against the aristocracy, but among themselves they wanted to have a free democratic state'.282 James superimposes this distinction on Toussaint, who comes to represent the ‘black Jacobins’, and the black rebels come to be represented in the figure of Dessalines. As a result, he reconceptualises how the rebels could still maintain the future goal of universal equality while repressing their enemies – who were still their old masters – in the present. Such a distinction does not appear in Buck-Morss’ account. Ciccariello-Maher argues that this oversight on her part leads her to ‘misread the dialectical content of both Dessalines’ Manichaeism (in the 1804 Declaration of Independence) and the universal blackness of all Haitians (as formulated in the 1805 Constitution)'.283 Dessalines’ Manichaeism differs from colonial Manichaeism because of its invocation of an embrace of the particularity of the 280 Ciccariello-Maher, ‘Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution’, 25. Moïse was Toussaint’s nephew, who condemned his 1801 Constitution on the basis of its leniency towards the French. Moïse led an organised insurrection against Toussaint’s government, seeing that Toussaint’s goal was no longer ‘the complete emancipation from their former degradation which was their chief goal’. See: James, The Black Jacobins, 224. 281 Ciccariello-Maher, ‘Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution’, 24. 282 Ciccariello-Maher, ‘Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution’, 28; C.L.R. James, ‘Lectures on the Black Jacobins,’ Small Axe 8 (2000), 105. 283 Ciccariello-Maher, ’Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution’, 28. 98 Manichaeism of colonialism, in order to eventually break from its structure. This resonates deeply with Césaire and Fanon’s ruptural dialectics, where the immersion in the absolute of a particularity plays out in the embrace of racialised identity. Dessalines embrace and enforcement, then, of the political category of blackness carries an important dialectical significance which is far more dialectical than Buck-Morss’ immediate demand of equality, unity and universalism. This 1804 Declaration of Independence, written by Dessalines, is described by Ciccariello- Maher as a Manichaean text precisely because it is openly divisive in drawing a stark line between Haiti and France – a step Toussaint was unwilling to take. The Declaration begins as follows: It is not enough to have expelled the barbarians who have bloodied our land for two centuries; it is not enough to have restrained those ever-evolving factions that one after another mocked the specter of liberty that France dangled before you. We must, with one last act of national authority, forever assure the empire of liberty in the country of our birth; we must take any hope of re-enslaving us away from the inhuman government that for so long kept us in the most humiliating torpor. In the end we must live independent or die.284 Further, Dessalines declares of the French that they ‘are not our brothers, they never will be, and that if they find refuge among us, they will plot again to trouble and divide us'.285 For Buck-Morss, the Manichaeism of Dessalines’ Constitution is sealed into itself, signalling a closure or fixing off of racial identities. Her reading of this Manichaeism thus marks it a retreat from the universal, once and for all. On the other hand, Ciccariello-Maher understands this Manichaeism as a step within dialectical movement. Without this step, there can be no access to the universal at all. In recognizing the complex and dialectical 284 The Haitian Declaration of Independence, written January 1, 1804. See: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre, ‘The Haitian Declaration of Independence’, in Slave Revolution in the Caribbean 1789-1804, ed. Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2006), 188. 285 See: Dessalines and Boisrond-Tonnerre, ‘The Haitian Declaration of Independence’, 189. 99 interplay at work within the Manichaean nature of the stage of independence, Ciccariello- Maher is able to situate Dessalines’ violence within a dialectic of liberation.286 A dialectic of liberation contesting the violence of colonialism itself can be considered through the follow terms articulated by Fanon: ‘the native’s challenge to the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of points of view. It is not a treatise on the universal, but the untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute’.287 Buck-Morss fails to account for this difference, insisting instead on a universalism that corresponds to European standards, and relies on a rational (and peaceful) confrontation between enemies that share an asymmetrical relationship of power. Ciccariello-Maher, on the other hand, takes Fanon’s dialectics seriously. As a result, he is able to reinstate to a narrative of the Haitian Revolution its dialectical content, affording such events dialectical legitimacy where Buck-Morss does not. Ciccariello-Maher uses specifically Fanon’s reconsideration of the aspect of recognition in the Hegelian dialectic to illustrate this point further. He frames this reconsidered dialectic ‘pre-dialectical’, although in Chapter Four of this thesis, I have framed this as a site of dialectical struggle in its own right. Recall that for Fanon, dialectical struggle under conditions of racist colonialism demands an immersion in the particularity of blackness, which is necessary before any kind of access to universalism can gained. This is in lieu of any substitute of black for white. Ciccariello-Maher builds off this understanding, arguing for the legitimacy of Dessalines’ Manichaeism: If symmetry is presumed as our starting point, then it makes sense to look toward a world of reconciled universal humanity, as with Toussaint’s 1801 Constitution and Buck-Morss’ embrace of it. But if we see struggle as the necessary precondition for this recognition (Hegel), and if more importantly we see one-sided, pre-dialectical struggle as the necessary precondition to even this Hegelian struggle for recognition 286 Ciccariello-Maher’s full quote reads as follows: ‘Even the most brutal passages seek to offer “terrible, but just” proof that those who have gained liberty will not easily relinquish it, proudly invoking vengeance but situating it within a dialectic of liberation'. See: Ciccariello-Maher, ‘Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution', 29. 287 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 31. 100 (Fanon), then our understanding of the temporal structure of the dialectic shifts accordingly.288 Buck-Morss’ dialectic in comparison then, reads as singular in its inability to recognize or attribute legitimacy to the content of decolonial dialectical struggle – or indeed, comprehend that there can be multiple dialectical struggles that exist within the process of decolonisation. These comparative narratives also offer different accounts of the nature of dialectical movement. This is a direct result from Buck-Morss’ focus on universalism, which translates accordingly into the desire for the immediate reconciliation of the dialectic. Ciccariello- Maher identifies this as approaching ‘the universal by negating, rather than truly passing through and inhabiting, the particular'.289 In doing so, Buck-Morss negates the moment of combative rupture inherent to the movement of the Haitian Revolution, demanding instead an immediate embrace of the universal on the part of those colonised. In other words, her dialectics cannot accommodate that ‘identitarian, conflictive moment that stands at the heart of a radicalized dialectics'.290 From the viewpoint of decolonised dialectics, Buck-Morss ultimately blocks motion towards the universal, trapping the particular into itself. It is for this reason that we can commit Buck-Morss to the same anti-dialectical pitfall she resents in her conception of the later Hegel. On the other hand Ciccariello-Maher, in line with Fanon, argues that the Manichean reversal of colonial relations where ‘the last shall be first’ does not signal the closure of a dialectic, but instead opens it towards the future where ‘Manichaean oppositions groan reluctantly into dialectical motion’.291 Ciccariello-Maher’s dialectics of the Haitian Revolution instead embrace and privilege moments of rupture, seeking not to reconcile struggle immediately on the grounds of false unity, but by passing through combative tensions and struggle. 288 Ciccariello-Maher, ‘Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution', 33. 289 Ciccariello-Maher, ‘Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution’, 35. 290 Ciccariello-Maher, ‘Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution’, 37. 291 George Ciccariello-Maher, ‘Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution’, 33. Fanon’s original quote, ‘the last shall be first’ in Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 35. 101 Invoking Fanon’s words once directed at Sartre, Ciccariello-Maher notes the same could apply to Buck-Morss as well: Help had been sought from a friend of the colored peoples, and that friend had found no better response than to point out the relativity of what they were doing. For once, that born Hegelian had forgotten that consciousness has to lose itself in the night of the absolute, the only condition to attain to consciousness of self.292 Without this open embrace of rupture and the immersion within particularity – the night of the absolute – Buck-Morss’ dialectics is no more than nominally radical. The dissolution of the dialectical importance of Buck-Morss’ account of events reveals the conservative dimensions retained in her dialectics, and ultimately unable to realise the dream of Cesaire’s of a ‘universal enriched by all that is particular'.293 Like the mistake Sartre made in Black Orpheus, Buck-Morss’ dialectics falls prey to the conceptual failure of its conservative dimensions. For the earlier dialectics of Sartre, black liberation was posited only in so far as it played a role in white liberation – the false universal. Buck-Morss’ dialectics of the Haitian Revolution commits the same error, given her denial of the legitimacy of black liberation on its own terms at the expense of the liberation of old slave-owners. It is against this position that Ciccariello-Maher asserts, ‘a radicalized dialectic of decolonisation’ demands that ‘contingency and unpredictability stand firmly in the foreground’.294 Furthermore, ‘no single dialectic can claim either centrality or inevitability’.295 White liberation cannot act as the yardstick to which the dialectical struggles of black liberation must measure up to. In an interview with Césaire, René Depestre recalls that he had said previously, Haiti is ‘where Negritude stood on its feet for the first time’.296 Césaire replies, ‘yes, Negritude in action. Haiti is the country where Negro people stood up for the first time, affirming their 292 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 102. 293 Césaire, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez', 152. 294 Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics, 19. 295 Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics, 19. 296 Césaire, ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire’, by René Depestre in Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 90. 102 determination to shape a new world, a free world’.297 Depestre responds that ‘during all of the nineteenth century there were men in Haiti who, without using the term Negritude, understood the significance of Haiti for world history’.298 That négritude exists now, but that Buck-Morss and others still do not comprehend its radical dialectical content or its significance for world history in its own right, leaves such theorists prey to the preeminent criticism of Depestre: ‘Negritude has lived through all kinds of adventures. I don’t believe that this concept is always understood in its original sense, with its explosive nature’.299 The failure of conservative dialectics to accommodate black and Indigenous subjectivities, or the explosive nature of their immersion in their particularity that acts as ruptural, testifies to why Ciccariello-Maher conceives of the relationship between anticolonialism and dialectics as fraught. Furthermore, it demands that rupture be privileged within dialectical analysis, and a final end to the false unity and universalisms of European thought. 297 Césaire, ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire’, 90. 298 Césaire, ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire’, 90. 299 Césaire, ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire’, 91. 103 CHAPTER NINE GLEN COULTHARD We now arrive at our third and final theorist, in whom we find once again an important engagement with Fanon’s dialectics. The Dene Nation scholar Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks stands as a polemic against what he calls the ‘liberal politics of recognition’300 – a framework within which Indigenous struggles are largely fought today. We find in Coulthard a transatlantic appropriation of Fanon which resonates, at times explicitly, with both Gordon and Ciccariello-Maher. Yet, Coulthard’s engagement with Fanon’s dialectics encounters a point at which it must diverge. We are therefore presented with a reconsideration of Fanon’s dialectics encountering its limits in the context of contemporary, ongoing colonialism as it pertains to the case of the peoples of the Dene Nation of the Northwest Territories in Canada. Red Skin, White Masks builds an argument that relies on drawing a parallel between Hegel’s master/slave dialectic and the politics of recognition as defined by Charles Taylor. On the basis of this parallel, Coulthard applies Fanon’s critique of this Hegelian dialectic to the politics of recognition. My turn to Coulthard is limited to first, an exposition of the way in which he recruits Fanon to his critique of the politics of recognition; and second, a brief discussion of the point at which he diverges from Fanon, and the implications this presents for Fanon’s dialectics. The second part of this discussion in particular, establishes Coulthard as a revolutionary Fanonist, and contributes to the overall understanding of Fanon’s dialectics as living thought. Further, this chapter relies implicitly on the comparison between the way Taylor and Coulthard use Fanon. Such a distinction reveals what it means to read Fanon one-dimensionally, and to read him dialectically. 300 Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 17. 104 The politics of recognition Red Skin, White Masks begins by contextualising its analysis to the specific colonial landscape of Canada. Coulthard introduces the nature of this context with two broad claims encompassed below: Since 1969, we have witnessed the modus operandi of colonial power relations in Canada shift from a more or less unconcealed structure of domination to a form of colonial governance that works through the medium of state recognition and accommodation; and second... that regardless of this shift Canadian settler-colonial remains structurally oriented around achieving the same power effect it sought in the pre-1969 period: the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands and self- determining authority.301 Coulthard’s observation is that the violence of colonialism exists in far more subtle forms than its prior methods of overt domination, which included at its worst genocide and genocidal policies to erase the histories,worlds, and the actual lives, of First Nations peoples. For Coulthard, it is this same violence which emerges in the form of the politics of recognition, serving the interests of colonial power instead of the liberation that it may seek. But first, we must address the notion of recognition as it appears in Hegel, because it is Fanon’s critique of this notion as it appears here that will be used to lay the foundation for Coulthard’s own critique of the politics of recognition. Coulthard writes that ‘it is now commonly acknowledged that one of Hegel’s most enduring contributions to contemporary social and political thought has been his concept of recognition'.302 He notes at the onset of his discussion however that this ‘is not about Hegel’.303 Rather, it is about the appropriation of the notion of recognition by ‘contemporary recognition-based theories of liberal pluralism’ which may overstate or misunderstand 301 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 25. 302 Coulthard uses Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth to support this point. See: Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 27. 303 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 27. 105 Hegel’s original intent.304 In addition, it is this particular area within Hegel that Fanon’s critique applies, and it is the logic of this particular dialectic thus conceived that Fanon’s critique aims to navigate. The logic of recognition then, elucidates what is seen as ‘the intersubjective conditions required for the realization of human freedom'.305 The nature of this intersubjectivity is one that relies on mutual recognition. Coulthard recalls that in Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, the ‘life-and-death’ struggle between two consciousnesses plays out in the temporary, unequal and hierarchical relationship of the master and slave. The master’s desire for recognition as ‘the master’, that is, as an independent and ‘essential ‘being-for-itself’ is thwarted by the fact that they are only recognized by the unessential and dependent consciousness of the slave, and of course recognition by a slave hardly constitutes recognition at all'.306 The slave, in contrast, turns away from the master, to their work. Through the process of transformative labour, the slave is able to realise their independence ‘qua worker’.307 In the end, this contradiction (the slave gaining more independence than the master) is resolved with the slave making a claim for recognition on the basis of their independence, at which point two mutually-dependent consciousnesses emerge as equals in unity. This narrative conceives recognition as a means for unity and reconciliation. It is this particular conception that has formed the basis for the liberal politics of recognition. For Taylor, recognition constitutes ‘a vital human need’ in the face of Canadian policies that appear to be ‘blind to difference'.308 Taylor writes, ‘nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning one in a false, distorted and reduced mode of being'.309 This resonates to an extent with Fanon’s claims in Black Skin, White Masks regarding the trauma of colonialism, and Taylor mentions this briefly to support his case for recognition. The politics of recognition therefore calls for sufficient political and legal 304 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 27. 305 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 28. 306 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 28. 307 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 115. 308 Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’ in Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 39. 309 Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, 25. 106 acknowledgement of difference, demanding equal status and accommodation of those differences historically erased or ignored. Yet, as Coulthard clarifies, Taylor’s argument conceives of recognition as ‘something that is ultimately “granted” or “accorded” a subaltern group or entity by a dominant group or entity’ but that this ‘prefigures its failure to significantly modify, let alone transcend, the breadth of power at play in colonial relationships'.310 Like Ciccariello-Maher’s critique of Buck-Morss, Coulthard’s critique of Taylor’s politics of recognition demonstrates its inadequacy primarily because it is incapable of addressing the structural factors and power dynamics at play in ongoing colonisation, that recognition by the settler state alone cannot remedy or transform. To support this, Coulthard looks to Fanon, who actually anticipates the failure of a desire to recognition in Black Skin White, Masks. Here, we find Fanon’s critique of recognition as it appears in Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. Recall that Fanon’s intention herein is to argue that Hegel’s master/slave dialectic is unable to account for the racialised dynamics that occur in the real-life unfolding of struggle between the ‘master’ (the coloniser) and the ‘slave’ (the colonised). Fanon’s critique begins by pointing out that recognition for Hegel is constituted by the condition of absolute reciprocity, in that recognition entails the co-dependency of both master and slave. As I explored in Chapter Four, the colonial situation is devoid of reciprocity, making it redundant for the basic condition on which recognition might occur. It is this point to which Fanon alludes when he writes that the ‘not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man’.311 One implication of this, pertinent to Coulthard’s argument, is to say that the identity of the colonised grows to depend on the supremacy of the colonial power. The ‘slave’, in this case, has no ontological resistance because they are not considered to have equal ontological status in the first place. They are resigned to the state of ‘less-than-being’. Fanon sums up the consequence of this dynamic: ‘for Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from 310 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 31. 311 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 83. 107 the slave is not recognition but work'.312 Where Hegel’s slave finds independence in their work, which renders them capable of the mutual recognition they later share with the master, Fanon insists that reconciliation is impossible within the racialised dynamics of colonisation, because the ‘master’ is in fact independent of the ‘slave’. Given that recognition is unattainable in the colonial context, a political consequence emerges. Fanon has thus far argued – and this is the claim to which Taylor limits his use of Fanon to – that nonrecognition leads to an internal transformation in the minds of the colonised. But Fanon’s analysis goes further. In Wretched of the Earth, we find that the colonised internalises the colonial dynamic, resulting in the following desire for assimilation: ‘out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind, surges this desire to be suddenly white'.313 The basic premise of what Fanon is describing is that the desire to be recognized grows in a distorted and malformed way. Recognition starts to mean equality not on the basis of overthrowing the system that enforces unequal dynamics, but a desire to be equal to the master on his terms, that is, to become the master themselves. This constitutes the true realisation of recognition under colonialism that Hegel could not foresee. Fanon thus reveals the assimilatory pull that underlies the desire for recognition in the colonial world. Coulthard draws the logic of this critique out into the contemporary context, applying it to the politics of recognition. On the heels of Fanon, he is quick to assert that recognition, granted by the settler state and thus without conflict or struggle on the part of the colonised population, forecloses the realisation of authentic freedom and disalienation. Instead, it reinforces the master’s powers when ‘the black man is acted upon’, cementing his inessentiality.314 Without the struggle that breaks this dynamic once and for all – indeed, that cathartic violence to colonialism that Fanon boldly proclaimed necessary – then the consequences for the colonised are simply ‘white liberty and white justice; that is, values secreted by [their] masters'.315 It is no coincidence that what underlies this sentiment 312 Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 83, n. 8. 313 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 45. 314 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 38. See also: Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 171. 315 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 221. 108 resonates with Ciccariello-Maher’s use of Fanon’s dialectics to emphasise the importance and necessity of rupture, without which the dialectic is trapped in stasis. For Coulthard and Ciccariello-Maher, true to Fanon’s word, the dialectic depends on rupture as a complete break with the system of colonialism. The politics of recognition, then, entails a kind of epistemic closure, where the dialectic is rendered static and no real change becomes possible without this rupture. Practically, we see the contemporary politics of recognition play out via the likes of land claim settlements, economic development initiatives and self-government agreements.316 As Coulthard writes, these liberal models promise ‘to reproduce the very configurations of colonialist, racist, patriarchal state power that Indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend'.317 Attempt at change or disalienation through the politics of recognition fails for two reasons that correspond to Fanon’s critique. First, as Fanon faults Hegel’s dialectic for claiming that the master wants work as opposed to recognition, Coulthard draws the connection upwards, to the settler government wanting land, labour and resources, as opposed to recognition.318 The one-sided nature of recognition as a result of the asymmetrical power dynamic at play means that if the indigenous population wants recognition, it is not on the basis of mutual reciprocity. Without this condition of mutual dependency and thus an authentic possibility for reconciliation, the dialectic would be prematurely closed. The second point is a result of the pursuit of recognition, despite the lack of mutual reciprocity at hand. We have learned from Fanon that recognition can only lead to liberation if it is dialectical. The point here is that in the colonial context, recognition has lost its dialectical function as the dialectic has been broken down, as Coulthard describes it, into a ‘domestication of the terms of recognition’.319 This domestication is at the hands of the liberal appropriation of recognition, the likes of which have been proposed by Taylor. In fact, the logic underlying Taylor’s politics of recognition touts the same conception of false unity 316 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 3. 317 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 3. 318 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 40. 319 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 40. 109 that Buck-Morss does, as I explored in Chapter Eight. In this case, Taylor centres settler subjectivity, on which the terms of recognition is oriented. As Taylor is concerned with a liberal conception of equality (which in this context can be considered akin to Buck-Morss’ false unity), Coulthard points out that this denies that ‘colonial systems sustain its power by relying on its capacity to transform the colonized population into subjects of imperial rule’.320 The politics of recognition works in fact to this end, transforming the nature of colonial violence into a seemingly friendlier, more liberal form. We can frame the problem in this way if we understand the basis of the situation as thus: ‘colonial powers will only recognise the collective rights and identities of Indigenous peoples insofar as this recognition does not throw into question the background legal, political, and economic framework of the colonial relationship at play'.321 The logic behind a liberal recognition must rely on its complicity with this limit to the emancipatory potential of recognition. Fanon has already warned us that this logic gives way to the assimilatory pull of the dominant entity in colonial dynamics. In the contemporary colonial context of which Coulthard writes, transposing this logic once again to the institutional level of the settler government, this plays out as follows: For the state, recognizing and accommodating “the cultural” through the negotiation of land claims would not involve the recognition of alternative indigenous economies and forms of political authority, as the mode of production/mode of life suggests; instead, the state insisted that any institutionalized accommodation of Indigenous cultural difference be reconcilable with one political formation – namely, colonial sovereignty – and one mode of production – namely, capitalism.322 The burden of transformation, by which we mean assimilation, falls on the shoulders of the indigenous population. That is to say, engaging the Canadian state’s legal and political discourse in order to articulate and effectualise Indigenous political objectives requires indigenous appeals to be on the terms and conditions that are compatible with colonial 320 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 102. 321 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 41. 322 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 66. 110 capitalism. Explicitly, the politics of recognition sees indigenous ways of life becoming increasingly twisted into the folds of capitalism. Surpassing Fanon? At this point, Coulthard notes the deeper implications of undialectical recognition. Importantly, this leads to an intersection at which Coulthard diverges from Fanon, identifying limits to Fanon’s way forward in the struggle for decolonisation. The first implication Coulthard identifies can be understood clearly by looking to his use of Vine Deloria Jr.323 Deloria argues that the fundamental philosophical difference in Indigenous and Western worldviews we encounter is that ‘American Indians hold their lands – places – as having the highest possible meaning, and all their statements are made this with reference point in mind'.324 Coulthard supports this claim, identifying specifically the Dene Nation’s identity as located ‘as an inseparable part of an expansive system of interdependent relations covering the land and animals, past and future generations, as well as other people and communities'.325 Deloria writes that ‘when one group is concerned with the philosophical problem of space and the other with the philosophical problem of time, then the statements of either group do not make much sense when transferred from one context to the other'.326 This metaphysical difference is another way in which the indigenous worldview takes on the burden of being transformed to be understood by the settler. That is, as quoted above, the State insists ‘that any institutionalized accomodation of Indigenous cultural difference be reconcilable with one political formation – namely, colonial sovereignty – and one mode of production – namely, capitalism'.327 As a result, the entire worldview and the metaphysics on which such 323 Vine Deloria Jr., God is Red: A Native View of Religion (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum Publishing, 1992). 324 Deloria Jr., God is Red, 62; Quoted in Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 60. 325 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 63. 326 Deloria Jr., 63; Quoted in Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 60. 327 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 66. 111 beliefs can exist are irreconcilably opposed to the principles that underlie the logic of colonial capitalism. It is this logic to which Indigenous peoples are expected to conform on the basis of the politics of recognition. The second implication is more dangerous still. The only way for indigeneity and indigenous identity to be compatible with colonial capitalism is to become reduced to a category of cultural difference. This is as opposed to valuing indigenous identity as one whose philosophical richness entails certain political, economic and ethical norms, obligations and modes of material organisation. For Coulthard, the Dene Nation’s relationship to the land becomes the sacrifice made for recognition by the settler state. In his practical assessment of land-claims negotiations during the 1970s and 80s, as part in parcel of the politics of recognition, he observes that the State required the claims to come with ‘a depoliticized discourse of Indigenous “cultural rights” that it used to rationalize the hegemony of non- Indigenous economic and political interests on Dene territory'.328 The incompatibility of the traditional sense of Dene identity with the settler’s worldview and economic organisation has reproduced colonial violence and real exploitation through the medium of recognition. Coulthard’s ultimate critique of the politics of recognition applies to levels that transcend the material plane, also looking to how colonial metaphysics can be reproduced through the function of recognition. Returning to Fanon’s critique reveals that the politics of recognition creates a ripple effect of violence to Indigeneity. The point at which Coulthard diverges from Fanon is in his consideration of alternatives to the politics of recognition. Coulthard recalls that Fanon’s demand for making oneself known in the face of colonial capitalism contributes to a dialectical process of self-recognition. Fanon finds elements of this in the politics of négritude, but this is limited to some extent to its dialectical function. Coulthard notes that Fanon’s ambivalence, highlighting that although Fanon always questioned the specifics of negritude based on its, at times, essentialist and bourgeois character, he nevertheless viewed the the associated practices of individual and collective self-recognition through the revaluation of black 328 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 67. 112 culture, history, and identity as a potentially crucial feature of the broader struggle for freedom against colonial domination.329 Fanon’s affirmation of négritude, then, is still contingent on its role in the struggle against colonial domination as its dialectical function. His baseline conviction is that black identity is fundamentally a construction of racist colonialism. Coulthard concludes that Fanon shares Sartre’s view, then, that négritude has a cultural validity in terms of serving this particular historical purpose, as opposed to intrinsic value. Coulthard observes that this element of Fanon presents a possible limit to his dialectics, in the case of its application to ‘settler-colonial dynamics that inform our current circumstances'.330 In limiting the affirmation of black identity to its dialectical function, Coulthard points out that Fanon was ‘decidedly less willing to explore the role that these forms and practices might play in the construction of alternatives to the oppressive social relations that produced colonized subjects in the first place'.331 The implication of this avoidance is that Fanon seems to commit black identity to a category of cultural difference. Speaking to Coulthard’s context, however, means that the reduction of Indigenous identity to its cultural form avoids a critical engagement with the radical potential of Indigenous knowledges. To take Indigenous knowledge seriously, after all, would entail the acknowledgement of the complexity of its worldview, but also of the material structures such a worldview might demand, including different kinds of sovereignty or modes of production. Indigenous identity, Coulthard asserts, can contain within it the foundations for its own political and economic paradigm. The nature of decolonisation thus seems to take on a different meaning for Coulthard than it does for Fanon. While he shares with Fanon the decision to move away from the concepts set forth by Europe, he advocates a return to, and reinvestment in, Indigenous ways of life within a project of ‘Indigenous resurgence’. Such a concept follows the path that Anishinaabe feminist Leanne Simpson invokes when she writes that ‘building diverse, nation-culture- 329 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 132. 330 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 153. 331 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 132. 113 based resurgences means significantly reinvesting in our own ways of being: regenerating our political and intellectual traditions; articulating and living our legal traditions; language learning; creating and using our artistic and performance based tradition'.332 In Simpson’s decolonisation, Indigenous identity holds its own as an ends in itself. Such a call seems out of step with Fanon’s position, when he writes, in no way should I dedicate myself to the revival of an unjustly unrecognized Negro civilization. I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to exalt the past at the expense of my present and of my future.333 In addition to implying a refusal to turn to the past, Fanon denies its radical content. Of the past, he writes, ‘the struggle for freedom does not give back to the national culture its former values and shapes’.334 Therefore, colonialism ‘cannot leave intact either the form or the content of the people’s culture’.335 The above juxtaposition of two distinct demands regarding what comes after anticolonial struggle presents a challenge. Beyond the different contexts to which each speaks, important tensions emerge around what constitutes decolonial visions for the future. Whether or not such tensions are reconcilable involves the negotiation of a vision in which radical possibilities exist, but also in line with what Indigenous communities actually want. This has the added obstacle of navigating the construction of desire, given Coulthard’s critique of the politics of recognition. This intersection is therefore complicated, and warrants careful consideration. What does such a limit mean for Fanon’s dialectics? Coulthard’s argument suggests that Fanon harbours a tendency to view history, and dialectics, as developing in a linear fashion. In doing so, he argues that Fanon ‘remains wedded to a dialectical conception of social transformation that privileges the “new” over the old.”’336 Yet, Fanon’s dialectics are open- ended. He imagines a future unlike his present, but does not harbour a teleological view of 332 Leanne Simpson, Dancing on the Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Press, 2011), 17. 333 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 176. 334 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 198. 335 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 198. 336 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 135. 114 what this looks like. Therefore, he doesn’t project an ultimate telos with any rigidity. Still, reading Fanon with an emphasis on his regular demands for newness (a ‘new leaf’, ‘new concepts’, for ‘a new man’337) does suggest that Fanon underestimated the significance and value of Indigenous knowledges. Such a claim leads to several questions. Does privileging the ‘old’ render Coulthard anti- dialectical? Or, can a return to Indigenous knowledge and traditions be accommodated in Fanon’s dialectics? Coulthard’s treatment of Fanon’s narrative of decolonisation seems to offer two choices that can be presented as a binary: either follow in the path of Europe, or create an entirely new foundation on which society can be based. A return to an Indigenous past in the sense that Coulthard intends, however, would still create a new reality for Indigenous peoples today. The new does not necessarily have to come at the expense of the old. The claim above is supported by a return through Fanon to his roots in Césaire. Recall that for Césaire, a plunge in the past of Africana history through négritude is a dialectical move. Collapsing the linearity of time and embracing not only cultural, but also political, economic and material norms derived from traditional Africana knowledges and societies, is a dialectical practice in which Césaire remains committed to both the old and the new simultaneously. A return to Césaire reminds us that it is not a question of ‘either-or’, but both and neither. This is the going ‘beyond the past’ Césaire demands. Coulthard writes that Fanon, in privileging the new, remains committed to a dialectical logic. Césaire on the other hand, reminds us that a dialectical logic actually accommodates such a return to the past that Coulthard is advocating. In this light, perhaps Fanon’s emphasis on the new instead of the old retains elements of a conservative dialectics in its implicit linearity that Coulthard’s may surpass. Coulthard exceeds Fanon’s dialectics on the basis of a reading that sees Fanon transcending racial identity in order to jump to the ‘new’, yet the principles of Fanon’s dialectics themselves may not require such a choice. Therefore, while a turn to the old might be understated in Fanon, 337 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 155. 115 it remains latent within his dialectical method. Read in this way, it is possible that Fanon’s dialectics can in fact accommodate Coulthard’s decolonial demands. If this is the case, it is arguable that Coulthard’s use of Fanon’s dialectics is in fact more dialectical than Fanon. I hope to have shown how Fanon can be engaged in different contexts, and that his dialectics maintain the malleability to be reworked and rethought for the purposes of decolonisation. To do so testifies to Fanon’s dialectics as living thought. 116 CONCLUSION This thesis has centred Frantz Fanon’s dialectics, demonstrating its primacy in Fanon’s discourse on colonialism. This has been shown in two ways; by exploring his focus on contradictions and rupture at three different sites of analysis, and in making explicit the dialectical logic that underlies his analysis. To strengthen my reading of his work and to enact the treatment of his dialectics as living thought, this thesis has offered three moments in the dialectical evolution of Fanon’s dialectics: its roots, his dialectics as they appear across his work, and his dialectics today. Each Part therefore contributes to the construction of a broader thread of anticolonial dialectical thought, establishing the validity of this method and its ongoing relevance to anticolonial politics. In Part One, I identified three roots of Fanon’s dialectics in Aimé Césaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Fanon’s own life. My focus is to establish dialectics as they operate in each of these roots for the purpose of understanding the grounds from which Fanon draws for his dialectical method. This task acted as a precursor to my reading of Fanon, locating his dialectics within the dialectics of those he draws from without reducing him to any of these roots. It therefore adds valuable insights to the reading of Fanon’s dialectics and addresses methodological assumptions underlying his work. Such methodological assumptions include Césaire’s emphasis on the internal psychic life of racism, which anticipates the need for Fanon’s dialectical analysis to transcend the material life of racism and colonialism. This is further reinforced through Sartre’s retention of the condition of radical existential freedom, which finds itself caught in contradiction in Fanon’s analysis of the dialectic at the psycho-existential level. In addition, both have a dialectical relationship to Marxism, embracing it but on terms that necessitate its revision, and for Césaire, its anticolonial radicalisation. Where Césaire writes that Marxism must be placed in the service of the struggles of black peoples, Fanon takes up this task of its reorientation. 117 The recollection of Fanon’s lived experience and identity in Chapter Three demonstrates two things. First, it notes the familiarity Fanon shares with a dialectical rhythm, and in this sense, puts dialectics into practice, allowing the method to be visualised as it plays out in the colonial world. It allows dialectics to be understood not only as a theoretical tool, but as a lived reality in the cadence of life itself. Second, it demonstrates the importance of the particularity. It enables the reader to become familiar with Fanon’s tension between the particular and the universal, in which it is the very particularity that allows access to the universal. This is especially important in the face of academic fetish for the (false) universal, abstract subject (by which it designates the white, male, bourgeois subject). In Part Two, I focused on Fanon’s dialectics, providing a reading of his dialectical method. Here I identified how in Fanon’s work, dialectics operate at the sites of the ontological, the psycho-existential and the situational. I characterised these as sites of rupture to imply an analysis on Fanon’s part with an active rather than passive intent. For Fanon, contradictions cannot be reduced to, or privileged in, only one of these sites. They share an intra-dialectical relationship in which they reinforce each other, and produce contradictions between these levels. This reading complicates one-dimensional understandings of colonial capitalism, and in particular those that seek to reduce one dialectic to the other. Instead, Fanon’s engagement with multiple contradictions at once and at different levels methodologically revises a conservative dialectics, of which a feature is a singular dialectic that defines struggle and disalienation. Instead, Fanon’s dialectics offer a more comprehensive analysis of racism, colonialism, and capitalism, accommodating the contradictions at the intersections that these phenomena produce. Furthermore, Part Two challenges one-dimensional readings of Fanon that seek to categorise his thought within one discipline or theory he chooses to use, or to confine his thought to how it appears in either Black Skin, White Masks, or The Wretched of the Earth. Instead, I read Fanon across the breadth of his work. This reading allows for a more rigorous engagement with Fanon’s thought, considering his earlier focus on the individual and the later focus on the situation of colonial capitalism as sharing not a contradictory relationship but a symbiotic one that offers a whole system of dialectical thought. 118 Much of the scholarship on Fanon that considers his dialectics as one of ‘self and other’ is unable to distinguish the levels on which dialectics operate on. Part Two seeks to make this distinction clear, looking first to the ontological site and second to the psycho-existential. Therefore, Chapter Four looks to Fanon’s engagement with Hegel, emphasising the condition of being-for-others and genuine intersubjectivity required for ontological status. Racism and colonialism, however, denies this condition, resulting in the contradiction at this level. In Chapter Five, his focus on the condition of radical existential freedom. Fanon’s argument posits here the black body in the antiblack world. The contradiction arises in the tension between the two, where the black body, an indelible signifier of blackness, traps the condition of radical existential freedom unto itself. Chapter Six explores the nature of the contradiction at the situational level. This consolidates the earlier dialectics within the situation that creates them. The contradiction here exists at the intersection between colonialism and capitalism, and is addressed by way of the geopolitics produced by the Manichaean structures of both. In Part Three, I looked to a contemporary moment in the evolution of Fanon’s dialectics, locating its operation in the work of Lewis Gordon, George Ciccariello-Maher and Glen Coulthard. These theorists actively engage Fanon’s dialectics in ongoing anticolonial politics and thought, treating Fanon’s dialectics not as a rigid method, but a malleable tool. Overall, they demonstrate the continuing relevance of Fanon’s dialectics to anticolonial and decolonial struggles in contemporary landscapes. Chapter Seven identifies this in Gordon, who locates the operation of colonialism at the level of reason, and also in its manifestation in the practice of disciplinarity. The confinement of thought to a static formula (Euro-reason) or a discipline, traps thought within itself. It is denied the opportunity for dialectical engagement with itself, and the social reality in which it is produced. Chapters Eight and Nine demonstrate the failures of the conservative dialectical tradition, posing instead an explicitly ruptural, decolonial dialectics. Ciccariello-Maher and Coulthard’s critiques of Buck-Morss and Taylor respectively reveals the problem of a conservative dialectical tradition that privileges false notions of unity and equality over that of rupture. In doing so, they emphasise a theoretical move found in Fanon, but also found in Césaire and 119 Sartre. Ciccariello-Maher offers in his engagement with Fanon, theoretical revisions of a conservative dialectical methodology. Furthermore, he emphasises the decolonial importance of this theoretical move. Finally, Chapter Nine looks to Coulthard’s critique of the liberal politics of recognition which explicitly engages Fanon in the project of decolonisation. Importantly, the point at which Coulthard diverges from Fanon can be justified on the basis of Fanon’s dialectical methodology. This claim is supported by a return to Césaire. A study of Fanon’s dialectics brings to light contradictions of colonial capitalism. The layers that his analysis traverse complicates more one-dimensional or reductionist approaches to understanding the stronghold of this structure today. Fanon’s insight, therefore, is valuable to any attempt to seize the reality of colonial capitalism, and to confront or challenge it. The enduring strength of Fanon’s analysis, however, is that his method is itself capable of accommodating such changes, susceptible to its own stretching. By this, I mean that not only is it open to its own dialectical engagement, but it is methodologically premised on such engagement. This thesis demonstrates this, looking to the other five theorists on which it focuses to support it. Overall, this thesis has sought to establish Fanon as a theorist of rupture. To do so I have drawn on the underlying themes of stasis and movement. Therefore, a ruptural dialectics harbours a temporal specificity which lies latent in Fanon’s dialectics, alluding to the dialectical bind between past, present and future. Understanding Fanon as a theorist of rupture brings to light this temporal dimension. It also forces an understanding of his dialectics to embrace the process of history, and the relationship history (or temporality) shares with colonial capitalism. Sartre recognised this, writing that Fanon ‘is the first since Engels to bring the processes of history into the clear light of day.’338 He continues: more-over, you need not think that hot-headedness or an unhappy childhood have given him some uncommon taste for violence; he acts as the interpreter of the situation, that’s all. But this is enough to enable him to constitute, step by step, the 338 Sartre, preface to The Wretched of the Earth, 13. 120 dialectic which liberal hypocrisy hides from you and which is as much responsible for our existence as for his.339 Implicit in Sartre’s reading of Fanon is the temporal specificity to which I refer. Liberal hypocrisy, the ever-complicit accomplice to colonial capitalism, acts to refuse the possibilities of dialectical change. For Fanon, colonial capitalism immobilises the movement of history. Colonial capitalism is hostile to its own surpassing. Therefore, land on which this structure of alienation, oppression, and exploitation occurs faces the danger of dialectics at a standstill – that is, the condemnation of dialectical movement to stasis. The danger of this standstill today has real, political implications. As this thesis has explored, without dialectical movement, nothing really changes. Rupture, therefore, is an integral part of the dialectical method in a project of anticolonialism. Fanon, in focusing on the three sites of rupture I fleshed out in this thesis, seeks to uproot the colonial world. His ruptural dialectics, then, is both destructive and productive. It seeks to destroy the colonial world, but equally to produce something new in the process. For Fanon, rupture is a key, a gateway to true change and disalienation. Fanon has been called a theorist of violence, and condemned on such terms. A label such as this does a disservice to Fanon’s thought. He should instead be recast as a theorist of rupture. Framing his use of violence within the broader understanding of Fanon as a theorist of rupture puts his use of violence into perspective, in line with its dialectical function. In calling Fanon a theorist of violence, the notion of violence is reduced to an ahistorical, apolitical phenomenon, or violence for its own sake. This puts the burden on the perpetrator, taking the agent of violence outside their historical and political context. Understanding the role of violence within the broader notion of rupture, however, gives back to Fanon the integrity his work demands. Violence plays a ruptural role in a dialectics of disalienation. Framing it through its relationship to rupture, then, reveals Fanon’s ruptural intent – violence is violence to the structure of colonial capitalism. Violence is itself inherent to the ‘ordering of 339 Sartre, Preface to The Wretched of the Earth, 13. 121 the colonial world’. Fanonian violence, then, is a dialectical, ruptural violence against the actual violence of colonialism and ongoing coloniality. In consideration of the dangers of dialectics at a standstill, the revitalisation of an explicitly anticolonial dialectics becomes of urgent and critical importance. Turning to Fanon offers a valuable guidance for such a revitalisation. It is for this reason that this thesis has sought to gain an intimate familiarity with the dialectical method and the relationship it shares to Fanon, and the other theorists it considers. Dialectics should not be forfeited to its conservative tendencies. Unlike other theoretical methods which offer patterns for analysis, formulas from which to subscribe, or other static, disciplinary measures, dialectics offer a way to set history itself back into motion. Therefore, it contains an inherently radical potential. The colonial, capitalist world is steeped in contradictions. An anticolonial, ruptural dialectics not only diagnoses this problem, but recognises these very contradictions as the way to break through the structure itself. Therefore, it offers hope, a way to light up the revolutionary path ahead. This is, afterall, the quality of true philosophy. 122 WORKS CITED Barnes, Hazel E. ‘Introduction’. In Search for a Method by Jean-Paul Sartre, vii-xxxi. New York: Alfred K. 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