![]() The colonized man liberates himself in and through violence. Fanon defined violence more as “absolute praxis.” As he notes: “Violence can thus be understood to be the perfect mediation. In The Wretched of the Earth, violence is not, strictly speaking, a means to this end. To stop “being acted upon,” to become active, he must tear himself from his being, get out of this tragic state. The violated subject has no recourse, but in and through violence. Nine years later, in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon named this necessary anti-dialectic process: violence. My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack. I am not a potentiality of something, I am wholly what I am. Still in terms of consciousness, black consciousness is immanent in its own eyes. The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself. 3 Fanon uses the same framework with the turns and detours which impose a self-consciousness and immediate irruption of “I am” (“Je suis”): If all recognition is in vain, one must then impose oneself, must “gain recognition” (“se faire connaître”). Performing the white man constitutes an unhappy experience that invalidates all dialectical overcomings of my condition. It is at this point that the second mask intervenes: no more to “play” at being white, but to “be” a “dirty negro” (“sale nègre”). He prefers to raise a challenge: that of the subject reinstated, in a state to act, and moreover, in a state to act and to do harm. Evading the pitfalls of Hegelian recognition, Fanon ironically interrogates himself about the very instances of recognition ( Recognized? But by who?) against the fatal call of “negritude” that Fanon keeps at a distance. The first mask makes reference to the dialectic of recognition the second to the affirmation of the self. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon’s 1952 study on the effects of colonialism and racism on black identity, the masks in question represent lived experiences of violence-a violence that seems constantly turned back against itself. Is it pertinent to think that, between the two works, Fanon passed from an analysis of violence tolerated and undergone to an analysis of violence “acted” and undertaken? And to what degree is it possible to interpret this path as a transfiguration of the subject in and by violence, ready to make of violence a means of subjectification modality? On the other hand, Black Skin, White Masks elaborates an epistemology of grief-stricken subjectivity, “straddling Nothingness and Infinity” 2 and charged with violence. If The Wretched of the Earth privileges a political style, the work’s entirety is dedicated to constituting a combative collective conscience in sync with the Algerian insurrection. Some say that Fanon’s point of view radicalized during this period: with an imminently independent Algeria, Fanon abandoned the socio-psychoanalytic point of view which he had elaborated in order to theorize post-slavery French society. ![]() ![]() While Fanon conceived of himself as writing a new history of the ‘Third World’, the unresolved and open-ended nature of the struggle Fanon depicted in Wretched represented a demand for a continued dialectical engagement with liberation in a ‘post-colonial’ future.Commentary on Frantz Fanon’s oeuvre tends to consider The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, as the work that breaks with the Martinican thinker’s post-slavery analysis, which was developed nine years earlier in his first book, Black Skin, White Masks. For Fanon, decolonisation was not the project of the state achieving independence on a merely political level, but a more fundamental dismantling of the cultural and psychological relations of power and their legacies. Wretched incorporated both a theoretical contribution to the emerging ‘post-colonial’ Africa and an implicit critique of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), the main revolutionary body in Algeria. In the words of David Macey: ‘Fanon had spoken of setting Africa ablaze, and it was on fire’. Following the defeat of French imperialism in Algeria after Fanon’s death, a new wave of revolutions erupted in Africa and Fanon’s so-called ‘wretched’ turned to his work for answers. The Wretched of the Earth was his final work, written in a period of ten weeks before his death from leukaemia in December 1961. ‘The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands out the much greater business of plunder… Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand.’įetishized as a ‘prophet of violence’ or re-appropriated as a universalising ‘global theorist’, Frantz Fanon was a fearless critic of colonialism and a key figure in Algeria’s struggle for independence. HWO’s Radical Books series shares subversive, seminal, and seismic te xts that have shaped understandings of radical history, provoked controversy in their time, or sparked social change.
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