Per Caritatem

While recognizing that colonialization and the construction of colonized subjectivities are contingent creations and hence malleable, Fanon nonetheless understood that the process of decolonialization and renarrating new, positive identities and conceptions of “blackness” would take time and would proceed in stages. As Pal Ahluwalia observes, Fanon’s complex relationship to the Négritude movement can help us to make sense of his strategy to move beyond the “Manichean structure” of a colonized world.[1] Given the significant influence of the Négritude movement and Césaire in particular in shaping Fanon’s thought, it is necessary to spend some time discussing the movement and how Fanon appropriates and criticizes certain aspects of Négritude’s many inflections.

The well-known Martinician surrealist poet, Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), first coined the term “Négritude” in 1939 in his work, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, and is, along with Léopold Sedar Senghor, one of the founders of Négritude.[2] As one is made aware rather quickly when engaging the literature, it is perhaps better to speak of Négritude movements or variations on Négritude themes. Reiland Rabaka, for example, distinguishes between Sartrean Négritude, Césairean Négritude, and Senghorian Négritude.[3] Over against Sartre’s claims, Senghor emphasizes the positive value of Négritude in the ongoing process of African identity formation. As Rebaka observes, “Negritude, for Senghor, was […] an affirmation of African humanity that was perpetually open to revision and redefinition.”[4] Senghor, very much like Fanon, sought to present a more genuine humanism rather than the pseudo-(racist)-humanism of Europe. That is, Senghor believed that all cultures have something distinctive and important to contribute to humankind and thus promoted, as Rabaka notes, “cultural borrowing” (Senghor’s term).[5] However, Senghor is clear that whatever Négritude might appropriate from other cultures, including European culture, would be put to use to strengthen its own (African) tradition and values. Here the idea is to uphold the uniqueness of each culture or contributing group while respecting the values of others and seeking together to better humankind. Moreover, and here again we find common ground between Senghor and Fanon, Senghor’s version of Négritude in a more authentic humanistic key “breaks free from Sartre’s Hegelian dialectical progression and Manichean thinking, and openly acknowledges that ‘the’ world, as it actually exists, is not merely a series of binary oppositions between blacks and whites, or Africans and Europeans.”[6] Rather, the world, for Fanon and Senghor, consists of multiple choruses and rhythmic movements whose distinctive qualities have the potential to create a symphony—a sounding together; when each part allows the other to be heard, difference can translate into consonant harmony as the various parts contribute toward common goals advancing human flourishing. However, intolerable dissonance sounds when one part seeks to reduce all others to its own voice, a unison voice allowing no variation, improvisation, or syncopation.[7]

As Rabaka explains, Césaire’s prose-poem, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, was viewed by Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Breton, and numerous others as a revolutionary text.[8] During Césaire’s day, educated blacks in the West Indies did everything they could, given their oppressive colonial situation and French education, to deny their blackness; they saw themselves as white and identified with the French elite.  Thus, Césaire’s poem, calling blacks back, not only to their “Caribbean history and culture,” but to their “pre-colonial and anti-colonial indigenous, continental and diasporan African history and culture” scandalized both blacks and whites. In addition to his notion of “Négritude,” the second most important term in Césaire’s poem, Notebook, is his notion of “return.” Gaining a better understanding of these two conceptions will enable us to see the deconstructive as well as constructive aims of his project.

In an interview with René Depestre found at the end of Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire describes Négritude as “a resistance to the [French] politics of assimilation”;[9] it was the creation of a third way, a way beyond the false dichotomy of a civilized European world and a barbarian African world. For Césaire and others, the struggle for a positive African identity was a “struggle against alienation,” and “[t]hat struggle gave birth to Negritude.”[10] In light of the degrading, demeaning constructions of blackness internalized by Antilleans, Césaire recognized the need both to deracinate the negative Eurocentric depictions that the colonized had come to accept, and to recapture and reinvigorate the term nègre with positive, life-affirming, and culturally significant connotations. As Césaire explains, Antilleans had come to associate shame with the term nègre; consequently, they sought “all sorts of euphemism for Negro; […] That’s when we adopted the term nègre, as a term of defiance. […] There was in us a defiant will, and we found a violent affirmation in the words nègre, and negritude.”[11] Because blacks had been forced to live a white world, as Césaire puts it, in a “atmosphere of rejection,” they came to see themselves as inferior.[12] As a result, Césaire was convinced that blacks must create a new identity for themselves, an identity affirming the concrete reality and beauty of phenotypic differences: black skin must not be seen as a sign of negativity, ugliness, evil, and so forth. Along the same lines, black history must be reconceived, or rather discovered through black eyes and reinterpreted to the world, as “a history that contains certain cultural elements of great value.”[13] In short, Césaire states, “we asserted that our Negro heritage was worthy of respect, and that this heritage was not relegated to the past, that its values were values that could still make an important contribution to the world.”[14]

 

 

By connecting what I have written in my two previous posts [part I, part II] regarding Foucault’s critique of humanism with his promotion of local rather than global projects for socio-political change, we can highlight additional consonant as well as dissonant places with respect to Foucault’s complex response to humanism vis-à-vis Fanon’s view. As Foucault himself states, he is for local transformations “which concern our ways of being and thinking, relations to authority, relations between the sexes, the way we perceive insanity or illness” and so forth.[1] Given Foucault’s predilection in his writings to side with the marginalized, we want, as I suggested earlier, to add to his general statements about local transformations examples such prisoners’ or workers’ rights. However, is this a legitimate Foucauldian move, or does it require Foucault to make certain metaphysical commitments that he finds unsavory?

Clearly, Foucault believes in and prefers “these partial transformations” noted in the previous paragraph; however, he is suspicious of global “programs for a new man,” which have been used by various groups to exploit, manipulate, and even attempt to eradicate those portrayed as foreign, other, or enemy. In light of these statements, we may conclude that it is humanism as an ideology, as a grand over-arching metanarrative that Foucault disavows passionately. His comments do not suggest a complete rejection of the concerns for the marginalized and oppressed with which humanism is commonly associated. Nor does his critical philosophical attitude downplay the importance of freedom. His project, in fact, requires free beings with rational capacities. “I shall characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings.”[2] Yet, Foucault, in contrast to Fanon, is reticent to accept the idea of human rights as necessarily linked to some kind of universal, transcultural  human nature.  For Fanon, who presupposes a shared nature common to all humans irrespective of “race,” ethnicity, gender, and so forth, it follows that all humans possess certain rights which should never be violated. For example, because human begins are free agents in a way different from all other animals, they ought not be treated as things. To do so is to violate one of their fundamental rights qua human beings.  Foucault, as I have argued, assumes a minimalist metaphysical position in that his account takes for granted that humans possess rational and volitional capacities. However, as I read Foucault, even if he were to make explicit his minimal metaphysical commitments, he would not want to claim that certain fundamental rights follow naturally or necessarily from these rational and volitional structures. Rather, I imagine that he would claim that whatever rights appear in our archaeological and genealogical analyses of an historical episteme are specific to the particular socio-political institutions and cultural practices of that episteme. If this is correct, then it sounds a significant philosophical dissonance between these two thinkers; interestingly, this dissonance. Rather than ending on a dissonant note (as the two thinkers do have a great deal in common), one might point out that both Foucault and Fanon are critical of “Man,” that is, “Man” as sovereign subject and originator of all meaning.  Given this critical stance, a harmonization of the two thinkers’ position might translate as follows: the particular socio-historical “Man” in needed of de-throning just may turn out to be equivalent to the white, male, European imperialist imposed qua norm.  If so, then that particular subject construction is indeed worth putting to rest.

Returning to Fanon, his vision throughout his works was underwritten by a call to human solidarity, a challenge to both blacks and whites and to all human beings to “move away from the inhuman voices of their respective ancestors so that a genuine communication can be born.”^[3] Uninterested in debates as to which “race” was superior and which inferior, Fanon asks, “[w]hy not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other? Was my freedom not given me to build the world of you, man?”[4] Like Foucault, Fanon refused to accept contingent, historically-formed narratives as universal and necessary truths.  Nor was Fanon content to succumb to the “blackmail” of the Enlightenment. Note, for example, the ambivalence in his largely negative description of Europe’s mixed contributions to human history:

The Third World must start over a new history of man which takes account of not only the occasional prodigious theses maintained by Europe but also its crimes, the most heinous of which have been committed at the very heart of man, the pathological dismembering of his functions and the erosion of his unity, and in the context of community, the fracture, the stratification and the bloody tensions fed by class, and finally, on the immense scale of humanity, the racial hatred, slavery, exploitation and, above all, the bloodless genocide whereby one and a half billion men have been written off.[5]

Rather, Fanon sought to transform and re-form a truly universal humanism appreciative of all cultures, embracing the “reciprocal relativism” of each for the purpose of mutual enrichment and genuine fraternité[6]—humanism as a symphony composed of many cultural voices, each of which has a distinctive part contributing to the beauty of the whole (ongoing) composition. Fanon’s historically-sensitive humanism neither turns a deaf ear to the cries of lives lost to the colonial project, nor chases frantically after “European achievements,” “increased productivity,” or a nostalgic return to nature.[7] Fanon’s quest began and concluded with a call to “reexamine the question of man,” “to invent a man in full, something which Europe has been incapable of achieving.”[8]

Notes

[1] Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”, 316.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 206.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 238.  Another passage highlighting this same begrudging acknowledgment of positive aspects of Europe is the following:  “[a]ll the elements for a solution to the major problems of humanity existed at one time or another in European thought. But the Europeans did not act on the mission that was designated them” (ibid., 237). Fanon, of course, continued to draw upon (not uncritically) the insights of Sartre, Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, and numerous other European thinkers.  See also, Robert Young, Postcolonialism, 274–83, esp. 276.  Differentiating Fanon from other Anglophone and Francophone Marxists, Young writes: “He [Fanon] always remained intellectually centered in Paris, and never resisted European thought as such, as much as he resisted European domination of the colonial world. A product of the western-educated elite, Fanon used the resources of western thought against itself” (276).

[6] Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 44.  In the final chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon expresses similar sentiments: “we do not want to catch up with anyone. But what we want is to walk in the company of man, every man, night and day, for all times. It is not a question of stringing the caravan out where groups are spaced so far apart they cannot see the one in front, and men who no longer recognize each other, meet less and less and talk to each other less and less. […] if we want humanity to take one step forward, if we want to take it to another level than the one where Europe has placed it, then we must innovate, we must be pioneers” (238, 239).

[7] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 237, 238.

[8] Ibid., 237, 236. As Young emphasizes, we must avoid flattening Fanon’s complex, multilayered view of Europe, in particular the European intellectual tradition. Referencing Fanon’s closing remarks in The Wretched of the Earth issuing a call to leave Europe behind, Young reminds us that “Fanon’s own theoretical formulations remain European in orientation, above all towards Sartre,” who “was one of the very few European philosophers and intellectuals who made the issue of colonialism central to his work” (Postcolonialism, 281).

At this point, it is instructive to engage Foucault’s reflections on his own relationship to the Enlightenment in order to highlight later several commonalities between his and Fanon’s critical yet not dismissive attitude toward this complex socio-political, philosophical movement. In his essay, “What is Enlightenment?”, Foucault describes how his historical or critical ontology is different from yet indebted to the Enlightenment “event.” As he explains, his project “rooted in the Enlightenment” is a “type of philosophical interrogation” which “simultaneously problematizes man’s relation to the present, man’s historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as autonomous subject.”[1] This is a concise summary of what I have labeled the “double-construction” of subjects, which Foucault seeks to hold in tension rather than reduce to one side or the other. (We see this same awareness of the “two sides” of subject-construction in Fanon). Foucault goes on to state that his connection with the Enlightenment tradition is not in terms of “faithfulness to doctrinal elements but, rather, the permanent reactivation of an attitude—that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era.”[2] Rather than accept the “blackmail” of the Enlightenment—an either/or false dichotomy stating that one must either remain within Enlightenment rationalism or become a critic of the Enlightenment and “its principles of rationality,”[3] Foucault rejects this dichotomy and opts for a different path.

We must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are historically determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment. Such an analysis implies a series of historical inquiries that are as precise as possible; […] they will be oriented toward the ‘contemporary limits of the necessary,’ that is, toward what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects.[4]

Here Foucault admits that those living post-Enlightenment are nonetheless shaped by the effects of that socio-political, cultural, philosophical, and institutional event. In other words, he acknowledges that an event from a past episteme (the Classical episteme of the 17^th and 18^th centuries) can and does shape the subjects of a subsequent episteme (the Modern episteme of the 19^th and 20^th centuries). The “determinism” he mentions is of course historical, contingent, and thus mutable. Our task as free (and I would add, rational) beings then becomes to investigate, analyze, and expose those limits that have been presented and accepted as necessary. Fanon wholeheartedly agrees.

Foucault then criticizes what he views as a conflation of the (European) Enlightenment-event and (European versions of) humanism. The latter, humanism, he characterizes as a “set of themes” emerging periodically, “over time, in European societies” and “always tied to value judgments.”[5] Foucault observes that humanism as a concept is too vague, having multiple contents in different periods and having been employed and claimed by a wide range of groups—for example, Christians, Marxists, and Stalinists alike have carried programs of social “reform” under the banner of humanism. Yet, he adds, “[f]rom this, we must not conclude that everything which has ever been linked with humanism is to be rejected, but that the humanistic thematic is in itself too supple, too diverse, too inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection.”[6] Though the first part of Foucault’s statement is itself vague, we may plausibly interpret it to mean that not everything characteristically or commonly associated with humanism—fighting for workers’ rights, prisoners’ rights, patients’ rights, upholding the dignity of human beings, speaking out against various forms of socio-political and economic exploitation of humans, and so forth—ought to be neglected or jettisoned. Such an interpretation coincides with Foucault’s own leanings as manifest in his writings on the prison and medical industries.

For Foucault to criticize the term “humanism” simply because its meaning changes over time seems completely inconsistent with his general theoretical commitments. Is it not the case that “madness,” “criminal,” and countless other concepts change in relation to their historical context (episteme), institutional “affiliation,” and function within differing discursive communities? Assuming an affirmative answer, I contend that what Foucault takes issue with is the ever-changing notion of humanism functioning “as an axis for reflection.”[7] A few pages later, for example, he enumerates specifically the three axes “whose specificity and whose interconnections have to be analyzed: the axis of knowledge, the axis of power, the axis of ethics.”[8] No doubt, knowledge, power, and ethics are also context-specific and manifest different meanings in different discursive disciplines and epistemai. Yet, there is something more basic about these concepts structurally speaking. That is, whatever they mean in a particular historical period, they occupy a fundamental place in each episteme and exert a wide-reaching influence over the body politic, shaping who we are individually and collectively. These three axes play a central role in Foucault’s “historical ontology of ourselves,” which, as he maintains, must answer the following questions: “How are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions?”[9]

None of the above is meant to suggest that Foucault embraces openly a traditional humanism entailing the acceptance of some shared, transhistorical, transcultural quality, qualities, or essence. Because Foucault holds that the Enlightenment-event brought with it—even as it simultaneously failed in some ways to take advantage and develop this insight—an awareness of its own “historical consciousness,”[10]he is suspicious of humanisms that staticize some (preferred) quality or qualities of human beings and then refuse any philosophical (or other) interrogation of those petrified, alleged essences.

Foucault’s advocacy for a critical ethos via an historical ontology of ourselves takes its cue from Kant and the latter’s interest in exploring our limits; however, Foucault’s concern is not with discerning what epistemological limits we must take care not to exceed. Rather, his concern with limits has to do with analyzing—and hence adopting an on-going, permanent ethos of interrogation—what “is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory” to see whether these alleged immovable and transhistorical givens (i.e. limitations) are perhaps “singular, contingent, and the products of arbitrary constraints.”[11] In sum, Foucault seeks “to transform the [Kantian] critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible crossing-over [franchissement].”[12]

Foucault’s critical project, as he himself explains, is not transcendental in the Kantian sense but thoroughly historical, genealogical, and archaeological. Elaborating how his methodological approaches, as well as how his aims differ from Kant’s, Foucault states that his version of criticism does not seek to make “metaphysics possible” or to make metaphysics a science; rather, it involves an historical analysis of “the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying.”[13]

Foucault then highlights his amended archaeology, or what I described previously as his expanded archaeology, which, as he explains, does “not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge [connaissance] or of all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events.”[14] Here he underscores the historical, contextualized character of his investigations, which is also to admit that knowledge unearthed via his expanded archaeology is partial, historically-restricted, and thus always open to revision. From the many discursive events it analyzes, archaeology proceeds synchronically, extracting historical conditioning rules (historical a prioris), to which genealogy operating diachronically provides a fitting counterpart. Genealogy’s task—at least one of them—is to retrace the various contingencies that have shaped us in order to open up a new space for self-(re)formation or constituting ourselves anew. In sum, Foucault’s critical philosophical ethos “[seeks] to give a new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom.”[15] Once again, we find significant overlaps in Foucault and Fanon, namely, both are concerned with unmasking the historical, contingent, and socio-political character of subject-formation, which is all too often disguised as necessary and universal.

Notes

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[1] Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”, 312.

[2] Ibid., 312.

[3] Ibid., 313.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 314.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., 318.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 314.

[11] Ibid., 315.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid., 316.

Fanon’s affirmation of a common nature uniting all humans motivates (in part) his desire to articulate a new, more inclusive, “race”-conscious humanism, something much different than the Eurocentric humanism(s) promoted by the Enlightenment yet not completely severed from the latter either. Fanon’s experiences as a black other in white, colonial, “Manichean” world, as Ahluwalia points out, “created the conditions that necessitated the new humanism,” which “was not a radical break with Enlightenment humanism, because of the way in which he drew on Marxism and existentialism”; even so, Fanon became increasingly aware of the need to expand, deconstruct, and revise the previous categories “because the issue of race problematized Marxist universalism.”[1] As many scholars have noted, the term “humanism” has many meanings and variants; yet, a common thread in most descriptions of humanism, including those preceding the Enlightenment, is an appeal to some universal, shared human nature, structure, or set of capacities distinguishing humans from other animals and thus granting them a unique dignity and worth. Disagreements ensue, as one can imagine, over which capacities to include, how to define those capacities, and how to define and specify “human nature.” In addition, historically speaking, various humanisms or humanistic strains have been taken up by religious and socio-political movements—from American Christianity in the Antebellum period to the European colonizing project to Stalinism—touting equality and liberty for all while simultaneously exploiting and even exterminating those scripted as inferior, subhuman, or a threat to “progress.”  Given its unsavory historical track record, one can understand the postmodern suspicion of humanistic grand narratives.

Nonetheless, might it be possible and worthwhile to recover certain humanistic themes both ancient and modern, improvising and reharmonizing them in a more historically-attuned multi-key composition whose final movement continues to be written? Once again, it is helpful to bring Fanon and Foucault into conversation. In the closing section of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon underscores the need for the colonized subject to be future-oriented and to actively reject the white mythos while creatively carving out a new present. For Fanon, given his Algerian context, this included promoting physical violence and outright war if need be in order to pave the way for a new humanism in which no man or woman would be subjected to an enslaved or colonized existence.[2] Yet, his advocacy for violence was never glorification of violence;[3] rather, it was understood as analogous to the violence that must be performed in surgery in order to remove or at least halt the spreading of disease so that healing may begin.[4] In other words, because of the entrenched, systemic, oppressive character of colonialism in which the world of the colonized is transformed into a normalized lawless space, Fanon believed the decolonization phase could only be accomplished through violence, that is, through an armed struggle for liberation.[5] Commenting on the instrumental role of violence in Fanon’s thought, Ahluwalia writes, “[c]olonialism forces violence to become a cleansing agent which has the cathartic effect of creating a new identity both at the individual and collective levels.”[6] Even if one ultimately remains committed to non-violent forms of revolution, one must at least make every effort to grasp, or better, to feel in some way the bloody history of Algeria where men, women, and children were massacred en masse repeatedly for the sake of Europe’s “mission.”[7] Fanon, no doubt, felt that the burden of that history, and its carnage convinced him that violence—at least with respect to Algeria’s part in the unfolding drama—was the required passageway through which the colonized must travel in order “[f]or Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, [… to] make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man.”[8]

Notes

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[1] Ahluwalia, Out of Africa, 62.

[2] As Fanon puts it, “I was committed to myself and my fellow man, to fight with all my life and all my strength so that never again would people be enslaved on this earth” (Black Skin, White Masks, 202).

[3] Contra claims by critics such as the notable Hannah Arendt that Fanon makes violence an end in itself, David Macey contends that “[t]he violence Fanon evokes is instrumental and he never dwells or gloats on its effects. […] The ALN was fighting a war and armies are not normally called upon to justify their violence” (Frantz Fanon: A Biography, 475). For a similar argument against Arendt’s conclusion, see also, Young, Postcolonialism, 281.

[4] Ahluwalia develops this analogy between colonialism and disease, relating it to Fanon’s medical training and his strategy for decolonization.  See, for example, Out of Africa, 63–6.

[5] As Fanon’s writings attest, the Algerian struggle for liberation was no doubt his concrete working paradigm. See also, Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, esp. the chapter entitled, “The Wretched of the Earth.” Given the atrocities committed against the Algerian people, Macey draws attention to the appropriateness of Francis Jeason’s book title, L’Algérie hors la loi (ibid., 476).

[6] Ibid., 64.

[7] Macey catalogues several vivid examples of the long history of violence carried out by the French on the Algerian people. In 1845, for instance, there were three occasions in which civilians (including children) and freedom fighters were driven into caves. The French troops then lit large fires in the entranceways, causing the people inside to die from “asphyxiation and smoke inhalation” (Frantz Fanon: A Biography, 476).

[8] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 239.

Frantz Fanon, born on July 20, 1925, and a native of the French colony, Martinique, belonged to a small group of black Martinicans afforded the opportunity to study at the Lycée.[1] As Pal Ahluwalia notes, “[g]rowing up within the French system of education had a profound influence on Fanon,” one designed to impress upon his mind the idea of a natural, even necessary connection between France and liberty “that made every French colonial subject believe that they were linked inextricably to France.”[2] Seeing himself at that time as one to whom the French slogan, liberté, égalité, fraternité, applied, Fanon decided to join the Free French Army in 1944 to fight against Germany. His wartime experiences brought about a crisis in his identity. In Martinique, Fanon had always thought of himself as French. However, when he joined the French Army, he encountered his first bitter taste of racism both from fellow soldiers and from the French population—in spite of the fact that he had been awarded the “Croix de Guerre for bravery.”[3]

Returning to Martinique and attempting to piece together his fragmented identity, Fanon decided to utilize the scholarships available for war veterans and thus moved to Paris in order to study medicine at the University of Lyons.[4] He defended his medical thesis in 1951 and then began his residency in psychiatry at the Hôpital de Saint-Alban.[5] During this period of study, Fanon found himself in the midst of a community pierced with racial strife; yet, this was also a time when he was exposed to new political ideas. In October 1952 Fanon married Marie-Josèphe Dublé, and in the following year (November 1953), they moved to Algiers where Fanon served as medical director of Blida-Joinville Hospital, Algeria’s largest psychiatric hospital.[6] While serving at this hospital, Fanon “came into close contact with Algerians fighting for independence as well as French police officers, both victims of the colonial experience,” and eventually joined forces with “the Algerian freedom fighters in their struggle for independence from French colonization.”[7] Compelled by his conscience given the atrocities he witnessed in Algeria, in 1956 Fanon resigned from his position as medical director of Blida-Joinville Hospital.[8] That same year Fanon wrote Toward the African Revolution, in which he highlights the complex role Algeria played in the French colonizing project.

“Algeria, a settlement transformed by decree into metropolitan territory, has lived under police and military domination never equaled in a colonial country. This is explained first of all by the fact that Algeria has practically never laid down its arms since 1830. But above all, France is not unaware of Algeria’s importance in its colonial structure, and its obstinacy and its incalculable efforts can only be explained by the certainty that Algeria’s independence would very shortly bring about the crumbling of its empire. Situated at France’s gateway, Algeria reveals to the Western world in detail, as though in slow motion, the contradiction of the colonial situation.”[9]

In light of Fanon’s active involvement with radical political movements, he was expelled from Algeria in 1957. Now known as committed member of the National Liberation Front (FLN), Fanon was subject of several assassination attempts.[10] In 1960, he was diagnosed with leukemia and died the following year while seeking medical treatment in the United States.

As Ahluwalia underscores, “Fanon’s Algerian locatedness is critical.”[11] Employing Abdul JanMohamed’s distinction between a “specular” and a “syncretic border intellectual,” Ahluwalia categories Fanon as a specular border intellectual par excellence. According to JanMohamed, while both types are border intellectuals in that “they find themselves located between (two or more) groups or cultures, with which they are more or less familiar, one can draw a distinction between them based on the intentionality of their intellectual orientation” with respect to a particular culture.[12] In contrast with the specular type, the “syncretic border intellectual” is more “’at home’ in both cultures,” and “is able to combine elements of the two cultures in order to articulate new syncretic forms and experiences.”[13] While equally acquainted with and knowledgeable of both cultures, “the specular border intellectual” is not able to find a “home” in either cultures and operates in a liminal existence. Straddling multiple communities, “the specular intellectual subjects the cultures to analytic scrutiny rather than combining them; he or she utilizes his or her interstitial space as a vantage point from which to define, implicitly or explicitly, other utopian possibilities of group formation.”[14] Fanon, operating in his own “interstitial space” having experienced the contradictions of the colonial system, is compelled to challenge the Enlightenment’s proclamation of “the triumph of reason and the promises of the French empire that, at least theoretically, accorded to its colonial subjects the same rights as in the metropole.”[15] Fanon’s suspicions about the universal application of the French appropriation of Enlightenment-inspired narratives of progress and freedom for all eventually grew into discontent and disillusionment. As Fanon grappled with the “absurdity of the colonial world” and its “dehumanizing effects on the Algerian population,” he began “to consider the possibility of a new society in which both the coloniser and the colonised are transformed through a new humanism, one that is by no means the humanism of the Enlightenment.”[16]

Stay tuned for additional future posts on Fanon’s “historically attuned humanism.”

Notes

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[1] Ahluwalia, Out of Africa, 55.

[2] Ibid., 55.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., 56. Ahluwalia’s text, Out of Africa, stresses the significance of understanding not only Fanon, but Sartre, Camus, Derrida, Cixous, and a host of other “border intellectuals” in relation to their Algerian ties, both literal and metaphorical.

[8] Fanon published his letter of resignation in his work, Toward the African Revolution. Here are a few relevant excerpts: “Madness is one of the means man has of losing his freedom. And I can say, on the basis of what I have been able to observe from this point of vantage, that the degree of alienation of the inhabitants of this country appears to me frightening. If psychiatry is the medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment, I owe it to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization. What is the status of Algeria? A systematized de-humanization. It was an absurd gamble to undertake at whatever cost, to bring into existence a certain number of values, when the lawlessness, the inequality, the multi-daily murder of man were raised to the status of legislative principles. The social structure existing in Algeria was hostile to any attempt to put the individual back where he belonged” (ibid., 65).

[9] Ibid., 65.

[10] Ahluwalia, Out of Africa, 56. As Robert Young points out, although Fanon “took no part in the FLN military campaigns, apart from organizing a new supply route through Mali in 1960,” he did “play a significant part in the international political campaigns which the FLN, more than the French themselves, realized was of almost equal significance to the physical struggle” (Postcolonialism, 277).

[11] Ibid., 57.

[12] JanMohamed, ““Worldliness-without-World,” 97.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid. JanMohamed lists W.E.B. du Bois, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston as examples of specular intellectuals and playwright Wole Soyinka and novelists Salman Rushdie and Anton Shammas as examples of syncretic intellectuals (ibid.).

[15] Ahluwalia, Out of Africa, 41.

[16] Ibid., 54.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon recounts his experience on a train of being “fixed” by a white other—an other which happened to be a child who had already been habituated to see blacks as defined by the white imagination.  As the child’s refrain, “Look! A Negro!”[1] crescendoed forth and came to a close with a fearful questioning of the “Negro’s” next move, Fanon not only experienced the gaze of the white other, he also began to see himself through the white gaze.[2]

I cast an objective gaze over myself, and I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics—and they burst my eardrums with cannibalism, backwardness [l’arriération mentale], fetishism, racial defects, slaves and above all, and above all:  “Y a bon Banania.”  On that day I was disoriented, incapable of existing outside with the Other, the White man, who mercilessly imprisoned me.  I carried myself far away from my Dasein [de mon être-là]—very far away—and constituted myself as an object.  What was this for me, if not a separation [décollement], an uprooting [arrachement], a hemorrhage which congealed with black blood over my entire body.  Nevertheless, I did not want this reconsideration, this thematization of myself. I wanted quite simply to be a human among other humans.[3]

As Fanon takes up the white view of himself, he experiences its all-encompassing reach.  That is, his becoming a white-defined black other involved more than his present encounter with the child on the train; in essence, he entered into the white erasing and re-scripting of black history.  Not only is his present fixed by the white other, but his past is fixed as well.  The child’s unison refrain gives rise to polyphonic lines of “cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism” and the like.

Even if it is the case that the child, because of his lack of cognitive development, is an unwilling or non-culpable participant in furthering racism and racial discourse; nonetheless, the effect—un-reflective racism in children—is a reality that confronts the black other on a daily basis and forces him to experience his phenotypic differences as conceived by the white imagination.  As Fanon explains, “I am overdetermined from the outside.  […] The white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me.  I am fixed.  Once their microtomes are sharpened, the Whites objectively cut sections of my reality.”[4] Fanon’s body, particularly his ever-present, always uncovered black skin, brimming with manifold white-determined meanings, takes on a life of its own.  This second-self is created through discourse—a socially constructed subjectivity—a kind of reverse shadow whose form creates a path upon which Fanon must walk. As the encounter with the child continues and the refrain sounds once again, “Look, a Negro!  Maman, a Negro!”, the boy’s mother, somewhat nervously, cries, “Ssh! You’ll make him angry.  Don’t pay attention to him, monsieur, he doesn’t realize you’re just as civilized as we are.”[5] As Kant, Hegel and other Western philosophers have asserted, the Western tradition, for which white European culture becomes the surrogate, is the standard for determining whether a nation has a culture or could possibly become cultured and civilized, and thus enter into world history.

Kant, paving the way for Hegel, claims that true history begins with the Greeks and that non-Greek peoples are validated only through contact with the Greeks.  On Kant’s estimation, the (non)histories of non-Greeks are simply “terra incognita,” an amorphous X, lacking (Western) form and thus unable to appear as intelligible.  He then turns to the Jews to illustrate how a nation may enter a state of historical and cultural recognition.

This happened with the Jewish nation (volk) at the time of the Ptolemies through the Greek translation of the Bible, without which one would ascribe little credibility to their isolated records.  From that point forward (if this beginning has been properly ascertained) one can pursue its narratives.  And thus with all the other nations (Völkern).[6]

In his lectures on the philosophy of history, Hegel takes up this same line of thinking; however, in order to justify his position, he provides an elaborate narrative in which Geist’s presence or absence indicates whether a nation has historical, cultural or socio-political significance.[7] One might go as far as to claim that the mother’s remark to Fanon has its own genealogical history which is consonant with the Western philosophical tradition; her awareness of this history matters little.  Approached in this manner, echoes of Hegel’s depiction of Africans as cannibalistic can still be heard in the child’s cry, “Maman, the Negro’s going to eat me”.[8]

All of these discourses—whether philosophical, pseudoscientific, or everyday chatter on a public train—comprise the many pieces of Fanon’s “black” self, woven together by the white other.

Notes

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[1] The French reads, ‘tiens un nègre’, which can also be translated, ‘Look! A Nigger’.  Perhaps various English translations have presented a kinder, gentler version, thus concealing the ‘sting’ produced by the child’s repeated utterance.

[2] See also Bart van Leewan, ‘To What Extent is Racism a Magical Transformation?’ Journal of Social Philosophy 38 (2007), 296 ff.  Van Leewan discusses the ‘gaze’ from the perspective of the racist in order to give an account of the motivational structure of racism.  In addition, van Leeuwen’s essay offers several practical anti-racism strategies (see especially, 303–5).

[3] My translation.  Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 90-1.

[4] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 95.

[5] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 93.

[6] Immanuel Kant.  ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (1784)’, trans. Allen W. Wood, 107–120, at 118. Anthropology, History and Education. Ed. and trans. Günter Zöller and Robert Louden.  (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2008), 118.

[7] Robert Bernasconi has devoted several manuscripts to the study of Hegel and his Eurocentrism.  See, for example, Bernasconi, ‘With What Must the Philosophy of World History Begin?  On the Racial Bias of Hegel’s Eurocentrism’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22 (2000):  171–201.  See also, Bernasconi, ‘Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti’.  In Hegel After Derrida, ed. by Stuart Barnett, 41–63.  London:  Routledge, 1998.

[8] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 93.