Frantz Fanon, Fifty Years On: A Memorial Roundtable

8/13/2019 Frantz Fanon, Fifty Years On: A Memorial Roundtable

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Radical Philosophy Review Volume 16, number 1 (2013): 307324

DOI: 10.5840/radphilrev201316125

Frantz Fanon, Fifty Years OnA Memorial Roundtable1

Lewis R. Gordon,

George Ciccariello-Maher,

and Nelson Maldonado-Torres

Abstract: Originally delivered to mark the iftieth anniversary

of both Frantz Fanons death and the publication of his seminal

discourse on decolonization, The Wretched of the Earth, these

remarks seek to offer a preliminary outline of Fanons continuing

relevance to the present. Conceptually spanning such touchstone

elements of Fanons thought as sociogeny, race, violence,

the human, and the relation between decolonial ethics and

decolonial politics, the authors turn our attention to diagnosingthe neoliberal face of contemporary coloniality/modernity and

contributing to movements from the Arab (or North African)

Spring to the Occupy movement, from Philadelphias lash mobs

to the new Latin American Left.

1. Lewis R. GordonWhy are we talking about Fanon at all? In the irst place, Fanon is one of

those thinkers that people love to hate, and this is because, in a way, hes a

bit of an embarrassment. What kind of an embarrassment is he? We attend

meetings about critical theory, and we hear a lot of people talking about pol-

itics and activism and so forth, but Fanon was a person who went out there

and risked his life and stood up for things because he had a profound belief

1. These remarks were originally delivered at Critical Refusals, the fourth

biennial conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society at the

University of Pennsylvania, on October 28, 2011. George Ciccariello-Maher has

edited the three presentations to prepare them for this publication, including

inserting direct quotations, references, and italics.
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.5840/radphilrev201316125&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2013-08-22


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308 Lewis R. Gordon, George Ciccariello-Maher,


in the value of human beings. We live in very weird times, in the wakeat

least I hope it is the wakeof postmodernism and post-structuralism, in

which people valorize how people are able to phrase words as the exempli-

ication of political life. In this context, it makes absolute sense that Fanon as

a symbolic igure is their enemy, as opposed to someone like Homi Bhabhaor Gayatri Spivak. But at the same time, this is also why Fanon is also such a

hero to so many.

But if Fanon were simply a brave young man who fought in revolution -

ary struggles, he would be interesting biography; we would not be here

right now because he would not have left us with ideas. Every one of us in

this room, although we may have very strong political convictions, are in-

tellectuals; we are ultimately connected with the conviction that someone

is worth looking into because he or she has left a legacy of ideas that wemay ind very useful. The question is, what are these ideas? There are many

other aspects of Fanon that are often overlooked, and part of the point of

this panel is to try and not talk too long, so we can have a conversation with

you to bring out the value of his ideas. What I want to give is just a very short

statement about him to just set the framework, and George and Nelson will

continue from there.

One of the things that the Fanon haters love to say is that Fanon was

wrong, Fanon was wrong, Fanon was wrong, but when you actually look

at what they say he was wrong about, it turns out consistently that Fanon

was right, Fanon was right, Fanon was right. The problem is that Fanon

wished he were wrong. I was talking earlier about what it was like when

Obama was running for president, and the Obamanuts didnt want you just

to support Obama, they wanted Obama to be the savior. So if you say some-

thing sober like, Well, you know, its a conlict between neoconservatives

and neoliberalism, so the future is going to look like a neoliberal future,

they would look at you as if you had spoken sacrilege. But of course, when I

would say things like that, I was hoping I was wrong; boy I was hoping I was

wrong. Fanon was very similar. He found himself in the paradox of articulat-

ing a truth that he was hoping was false. I would argue that Fanon brought

to the forefront three important problematics, three paradoxical truths, that

enabled him not only to diagnose the situation of his times but also to be

prescient about the future: the question of our humanity, the meaning of

freedom, and what I call the metacritique of reason.

First, Fanon recognized as a central problematic of the modern world

the interrogation of what it is to be human. If we look at all of Fanons writ-

ings, we see that he brought to the forefront the limitation of asserting our

humanity simply in terms of how it is challenged. In all of his writings, Fanon

was looking into the struggles of those who in the modern world were be-

ing challenged in terms of the legitimacy of their belonging to the human

community. Now, of course, if someone is going to tell you that youre not


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Frantz Fanon, Fifty Years On:

A Memorial Roundtable

309

a human being, one of the ways you could defend yourself is simply to say,

What are you talking about? Im a human being; Im just as human as you

are. But if you were to make that assertion, you would commit the error of

making the person challenging your humanity the standard of that human-

ity. As I often say when I bring this up, what if the person who is challengingyou represents a very low standard? To set up racism, sexism, homophobia,

and the idea that being economically poor makes you inferior: thats not the

kind of standard to use to say youre a human being. So then you may say

that youre going to use yourself as the standard, but what makes you the

standard? And so what happens is, as you begin to think about it, you begin

to interrogate the very meaning of what it means to be human, and this in -

terrogation becomes one of the central problematics for not only Africana

philosophy and decolonial studies but also for Fanons irst book, Black Skin,White Masks.2

One of Fanons insights was that he also saw the symbiotic relation-

ship between the question of the human and a second problematic, the very

question that we struggle with in the modern world. The modern world is

one big rhetorical celebration of the question of freedom: you hear about

freedom all over the place; you know in the modern world that slavery is

wrong. But we also know that while the prime representatives of the mod-

ern world celebrated freedom, they did so while making more rigorous the

implements of enslavement. So we have this contradiction in which, as we

celebrate freedom, whether through capitalism or a variety of other mecha-

nisms, we have also ine-tuned the implements of enslavement. In fact, we

now have a world of contemporary enslavement in which there are more

slaves than ever.

But in the midst of this, Fanon did something additional, and this is

the third problematic that I want to highlight. In his interrogation of the

question of colonialism and continued enslavement, if Fanon had stopped

there he would simply have been a political or social critic. What Fanon did

in Black Skin, White Maskswas the next move, bringing the question back

to the very method by which we interrogate any interrogation. I call that a

metacritique of reason, and in interrogating reason in this way, Fanon identi-

ied a problem that we could call epistemic colonization, when colonization

emerges at the very level of the activity of producing knowledge. A lot of this

was articulated by Fanon before Foucault. (Foucault had a tendency to use

the ideas of a lot of Black people without citing them, and Fanon was one of

those people.) In doing this, Fanon said something that is heavily relevant towhat this conference is about.

2. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove

Press, 2007).


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Of course, its about critical theory, and one of the things you may have

noticed is that critical theory talks a lot aboutcritical theory, and thats be-

cause a lot of critical theory is metacritical theory. But in the Fanonian con-

text, the question of metacritical theory raises a question of the radicality

of the critique of critique itself. So what you have then in Fanon is a radicalcritique of metacritique, which means in his thought a critique of critical

theory. You may also notice this because a lot of what you have been hear-

ing in terms of critical theory seems to speak of critical theory as if it fol-

lows a singular, linear line through Europe, but what is not paid attention

to is the fact that, simultaneous with the emergence of that formulation of

theory, we have also had the development of what we could call theorys

dark underside.

Theorys dark underside is connected with the fact that theory, in orderto present itself astheory, has often presented itself in a hegemonic way as

being maximally consistent with itself in its search for rigor. However, one of

the problems with theory, if theory is going to wed itself to that form of ratio-

nality, is that it has had to struggle with a profound conundrum. Ill put it in

very plain language: absolutely nobody in this room would like to be in a rela-

tionship with a maximally consistent person. Think about it. In fact, if youre

with someone who is very consistent and very rigorous, you will say that that

person is unreasonable. And so we come to an insight from Fanon that is also

a subtext of the critique of critique, and that is that Fanon identiied some-

thing that he characterized in Black Skin, White Masksas follows: he noticed

that reason had a habit of walking out the room whenever he entered.3

What he is identifying here is the anxiety in the modern world of see-

ing theory and seeing reason in a Black body. But if Fanon were to ight this

reason that is rejecting him (and in French its la raison, so its feminine), the

problem is that his struggle would take the structure of the male subjuga-

tion of the female; it will have the structure of rape. What Fanon identiied

right away is that he had this problem: if he is rejected by reason, he cannot

force reason to recognize him; he had to do something else. What Fanon

found he had to do was a paradox: he identiied unreasonable reason with

which he had to reason reasonably. In effect then, Fanon outlined the funda-

mental problem of what it is to be engaged in the world of ideas, of theory,

of philosophy, of any intellectual enterprise from what Enrique Dussel calls

the underside of modernity.4

3. Reason was assured of victory on every level. I reintegrated the brotherhoodof man. But I was soon disillusioned. Victory was playing cat and mouse; it was

thumbing its nose at me. As the saying goes: now you see me, now you dont.

Ibid., 99. [Lewis R. Gordon suggests that a more accurate translation of the

above saying is: When it was there, I was not.Ed.]

4. Enrique Dussel, The Underside of Modernity, trans. Eduardo Mendieta (Amherst,

NY: Humanity Books, 2007).


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311

Now in doing this, Fanon did some rather provocative things that con-

nect to the present in rather unusual ways. One of the things he did was blow

out of the water a trope that has dominated Western thought all the way to

the contemporary academy. If youre going to deal with questions of philo-

sophical anthropology, of politics, the question of how you deal with critique,inevitably the discourse of the self and the other emerges. Fanon showed that

what racism is about is the derailment of the self-other dialectic. In the self-

other dialectic you can be in an ethical relation with the other, but if you are

pushed outside of the self-other dialectic, if the very question of your Black

body is treated as the antipode of reason, then literally, for you to appear

would be a violation of appearance. In effect, it is a lot like proiling: being

seen while Black is a violation, and your very being collapses into violence.

How do you respond to this? Fanon pointed out that what has hap-

pened in modernity and colonialism is that there has been not simply a de -

railment of human relations but that derailment has also created a subver-

sion of ethical and political relationships. In effect, you face a situation in

which you have to articulate the political conditions by which ethical rela-

tionships can be made manifest, and this means that if the political begins

to supervene over the ethical, then the moment of antiracism is a moment

of the suspension of ethical life. So what happens in the modern world when

ethics is suspended is that we ind ourselves in a constant tension around

the question of violence.

This brings us to the text that we are now celebrating on the iftieth

anniversary of its publication. Discussing Fanon ifty years later is a com-

plicated matter because Fanon was looking at the North African and West

Asian situation, and one of the things that Fanon was very acutely aware of

was that the West had articulated itself asthe West by constructing the East,

and in fact the EastWest dialectic elides the subtextual repressed term of

the Black. But one simpliies Blackness as always being the South, and so in

effect, the Global South as a signiier of the darker side of modern life has to

be brought to the forefront to address the very question of social change. In

that kind of an argument, Fanon raised the question through which we can

offer a critique of what we call today the Arab Spring. Fanon would say no,

its a North African Spring, and the North African Spring requires under-

standing the different relationships through which the question of Africa

relates to the question of West Asia.

I dont want to speak of The Wretched of the Earthbecause I argue that

Fanon didnt mean wretched.5There are a lot of reasons why he means Lesdamns de la terre, and if one looks within the framework of the Quran and

the framework of Islam, we can see some reasons that les damnswould

5. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York:

Grove Press, 2004).


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work better. What Fanon is saying within this framework of Les damns de la

terreis that this very problematic becomes a question of struggling over the

very meaning of how we understand the set of relations that constitute the

human world. So we have in Fanon this critical question of the dehuman-

ization of human institutions. Now, a lot comes along with this, and in thediscussion we can spell out more, but I want to raise two observations from

Les damns de la terrethat might be interesting for many of you.

The irst is that, in the text, Fanon brings up the distinction between

the Germans occupying France and colonialism, where Europe was dealing

with the stratiication of the world that we have come to know as the Global

South. He writes that Under the German occupation the French remained

human beings. What Fanon is pointing out is that at no point when Europe

was occupying other parts of Europe was the question of the human statusof the Frenchmen and Englishmen, the Swede, the Italian, in question. How-

ever, in colonialism, what happens is the writing out of the humanity of the

people so that the people become part of the landscape, as with the trees,

as with the sandin other words, the notion that there are no people there:

The Algerians, the women dressed in haiks, the palm groves, and the cam-

els form a landscape, the natural backdrop for the French presence.6When

we think of the conquest of the Americas, we can see this kind of logic at

work, and so the project of realigning human relations becomes part of the

question of Les damns de la terre.

But Fanon then ends the text in a way that is relevant to a lot of what we

struggle with today, especially around the question of a critical theory, and

this is the second observation. He ends the text by talking about the need, not

only to articulate new material conditions, but also new concepts. His articu-

lation of the colonization of knowledge thus comes back when Fanon argues

that the realignment of knowledge actually produces different forms of life.

As a result, what Fanon begins to do is bring the question of political re-

sponsibility to the very heart of responsibility itself. He ends, in other words,

by asking humanity to take responsibility for responsibility. So in that frame-

work, the very question of how we understand theory and intellectual work

becomes one that is intimately linked not only with the question of freedom

but also with the question of social change as something that lies at the heart

of what it means to be the beings who are responsible for the world.

2. George Ciccariello-Maher

To speak of the relevance of the Caribbean-born psychiatrist turned Alge-rian revolutionary Frantz Fanon in the present is a daunting task, albeit

not for the reasons we might initially expect. The challenge is not one of

stretching Fanons powerful formulations of race and colonialism on this

6. Ibid., 182.


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313

iftieth anniversary of both his death and the publication of The Wretched

of the Earth in an effort to make these speak to our ostensibly postracial

and postcolonial age. No, our political present does not allow the optimism

of preixes such as post-, organized as it is according to those very same

structural parameters which deined Fanons work. In other words, oursis a fundamentally racial and colonial era, an era that does not lack but is

instead totally saturated by Fanons relevance. In what follows, Im going

to attempt to move through Fanons contributions with constant reference

to contemporary political struggles and movements, drawn above all from

Oaklandmy former city, which is very much in my mind and heart today

and Philadelphia, my new city.

While I will return to this, I want to say briely that the colonial nature

of our present was made painfully clear in Philadelphia over the summer, asa wave of racist hysteria at the so-called lash mobs and their so-called vio-

lence swept the city, resulting in a draconian curfew that was racist not only

in its motivations but also in its upholding of the geography of segregation

that already governs the city. Just yesterday, despite a campaign of opposi-

tion, this curfew was made more permanent by a near-unanimous vote of

Philadelphias City Council. With regard to Oakland, the struggles we have

seen in the past week should not be considered in isolation, but are instead

part of a cycle of struggle that began after the murder of a Black man, Oscar

Grant, by a white transit cop in the early hours of 2009, which laid bare the

colonial nature of the Oakland Police Department that we are seeing mani-

fested again today. (I mean colonial literally: the vast majority of the OPD

does not live in Oakland, and recent gang injunctions have only proven to

further dehumanize young Black and Brown Oakland residents.)

In a moment in which white supremacy is rearing its ugly head in these

ways, in which late capitalism is generating more surplus populations than

economically necessary ones, and in which space is not decreasingly but

increasingly governed by the logic of segregation and concomitant function

of the police, the serious challenges posed to any and all who would de-

ploy Fanons thought as a lens through which to view this present is simply,

where to begin? As daunting as this question may seem, begin we must.

One starting point is the existential question raised by this diagnosis

of the present: if our political present is still very much racial and colonial,

then this entails the need for a decisive confrontation with that order, or as

Fanon puts it in the conclusion of Black Skin, White Masksin a nod toward the

colonial world, to ight is the only solution.7This is a position that Fanonhimself only arrives at in a simultaneous and intertwining unfolding that is

both biographical and methodological. While he insists that method has a

tendency to devour itself and rejects the rigidity of thinking otherwise, his

7. Ibid., 3; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 199.


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own methodological and political transformations draw upon the concept

of sociogeny as their underpinning. Sociogeny for Fanon essentially means

that when confronting human trauma and suffering, it is often social struc-

tures that are to blame. But this also means that to transform this condition

and to undo this suffering, we must also directly attack those structures, andit was this impetus more than any other that Fanon embodied in practice

when he resigned his post as a psychiatrist at a French clinic in Algeria to

hurl himself headlong into the struggle for that countrys liberation. And it

is precisely in his letter of resignation from that post that we ind perhaps

the most potent formulation of where this concept of sociogeny leads. As

Fanon writes in 1956, The function of a social structure is to set up institu-

tions to serve mans needs. A society that drives its members to desperate

solutions is a non-viable society, a society to be replaced.8

If our present is racist and colonial, we must strugglebut how? Here,

Fanon is equally or even increasingly useful, for understanding this point of

departure has implications for how we understand reality, how we under-

stand our opponents, and how we understand the struggle we are bound to

undertake. In what follows I will speak in terms of three general points or

tools that Fanon provides for our struggles in the present, and these pertain

to irstly, the nature of the colonial world; secondly, the implications for how

struggle unfolds in that world; and inally, how we can expect that struggle

to be received and resisted by the forces of order.

The irst, which I have already mentioned, is that the colonized world

isfundamentally divided, Manichean, and compartmentalized. As Fanon put

it in words that I probably dont need to quote for this audience, The colo-

nized world is a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border, is repre-

sented by the barracks and the police stations, and colonized subjects are

contained by rile butts and napalm.9Here again, the function of police in

maintaining colonial segregation in Philadelphia, Oakland, and elsewhere is

thrown into sharp relief, although the napalm has been conspicuously re-

placed by rubber bullets, tear gas, and lash-bang grenades. The colonial

world is a world divided, but this division is more than merely a bad dream

from which we must do our best to awake. Fanon is clear that these param-

eters of the colonial world do much to structure how our struggle against it

unfolds, providing a clear and intuitive understanding of how the power of

the enemy operates.

Here the lesson is a fundamental one, and it contains a potent warning

for the Occupy movement and the so-called 99%. In Philadelphia as else-where, an unwillingness to speak of questions of race within an ostensibly

8. Frantz Fanon, Letter to the Resident Minister (1956), in Toward the African

Revolution, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 53.

9. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 3-4.


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315

economic and antibank movement led to the spontaneous creation of People

of Color caucuses. While the responses to these caucuses has been mixed,

there has been a powerful tendency by some in the Occupy movement to

view such caucuses as separatist and divisive at best and aggressive and

racist at worst. The mantra that we are all the 99% has been deployed bysome to close down any discussion of the complexities operating within the

poorest 99 percent of the population. Now, Fanon is clear on the fact that he

doesnt believe in race. But this doesnt render white supremacy imaginary;

quite the opposite, despite being a biological iction, race and racism is a

fundamental element of our social reality. We ight it head on or not at all.

The second point is drawn from the very irst page and indeed the very

irst line of Wretched, when Fanon insists that decolonization is always a vi-

olent event.10

Here we need to walk carefully and precisely to avoid missingthe point. When we take up the struggle against a colonial condition, as we

have said that we must, Fanon is insisting that this struggle will inevitably

be violent, and he adds that In its bare reality, decolonization reeks of red-

hot cannonballs and bloody knives.11But if this is what is occurring on the

level of what he calls bare reality, something much more profound is also

happening. Whereas the colonizer fabricated and continues to fabricate the

colonized subject, the fundamental task of decolonization is in many ways

an attempt to reverse this process, to defabricate the colonized subject and

create her anew in the struggle. In short, Decolonization is truly the cre-

ation of new [human beings], and what Fanon refers to by violence is this

process of creation, whereby those previously considered to be subhuman

nonbeings and even the embodiment of evil stand up, rebel, and shake off

the dead skin of their former selves, a sort of spiritual intifadathat allows

them to take their seats at the table of humanity.12The bare reality of this

struggle might very well be bloody, but what lies beneath this bare reality

is what matters most.

Fanons third key insight grows out of the second, out of this question

of the inevitability of violence once we undertake the destruction of a colo-

nial situation, setting out on the path of radical decolonization. Here I refer

to the fact that what makes decolonization violent in bare reality is the

embedded resistance of those defending the status quo and the privilege

it endows upon them. Colonizers simply dont give up that easily. We know

well enough by now that the violence of the oppressed pales historically in

comparison to that of the oppressor, and we know that questions of means

can never trump the imperative need to transform the existing order. Thismuch is true, but Fanon is more precise than this, and he skillfully draws

10. Ibid., 1.

11. Ibid., 3.

12. Ibid., 2.


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from the Algerian struggle a veritable panoply of tactics and strategies that

those in power will deploy in an effort to destroy resistance, many of which

circulate frantically around this question of violence itself.

Despite the fundamental Manicheism, the deining opposition of colo-

nial reality which pits colonizer against colonized, the outbreak of strugglesees the emergence of a third sector, one comprised of the colonized but

which does the work of the colonizer. Fanon describes this sector as violent

in their words and reformist in their attitudes: as self-appointed mediators

between colonizer and colonized, this sector uses violent words to stoke an-

ger among the colonized; in the words of Fanon they brandish the threat of

mass mobilization as a decisive weapon, whipping the masses into a frenzy

only to justify their own position as moderators, compromisers, and nego-

tiators.13

They fancy themselves capable of both creating and destroyingmovements, and they brandish these credentials proudly to the colonizer.

Occasionally, however, things leap beyond their able grasp as move-

ments slip the yoke of those who would control them. When this happens,

these mediators introduce what Fanon calls a new notion, nonviolence,

which he describes in the following terms:

Nonviolence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around the negoti-

ating table before the irreparable is done, before any bloodshed or regret-

table act is committed. But if the masses, without waiting for the chairs tobe placed around the negotiating table, take matters into their own hands

and start burning and killing, it is not long before we see the elite and the

leaders of the bourgeois nationalist parties turn to the colonial authorities

and tell them: This is terribly serious! Goodness knows how it will all end.

We must ind an answer, we must ind a compromise.14

I should note that this is only one form that nonviolence can take, but we

should admit that the suspicion Fanon raises about the rhetoric of nonvio-

lence in general is a powerful one.

When racialized and colonized subjects in particular engage in strug-

gle, moreover, this dynamic is exacerbated: as Fanon demonstrates and as

Lewis Gordon among others have expanded upon, colonized subjects be-

come violent without even raising a inger. Since the entirety of the social

order is premised upon their invisibilityfor which hypervisibility is but

a painful remindereven appearing in public as a nonauthorized subject

is perceived as a violent act. Here the so-called lash mob phenomenon in

Philadelphia, in which young and largely Black youth temporarily occupy

space in the center of the city, provides perhaps the most powerful contem-porary example. Even before there had been a single incident of violence

at a lash mob, the anticipation and expectation of violence was palpable,

13. Ibid., 22, 28.

14. Ibid., 23-24.


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317

because the most violent act of all had been committed already. The prob-

lem wasnt that lash mobs were violent, it was that Black youth had broken

the bounds of informal segregation, daring to gather in large numbers to

reclaim a city center that has long been off-limits. And of course, were it

truly a question of violence, the resulting curfew would have focused onNorth Philly or West Philly and not the white and afluent central business

and university districts.15

Lamentably, this dynamic of self-appointed mediators is all too rele-

vant to struggles of the present. Whereas in Fanons Algeria, it was the po-

litical parties who served to moderate, in Oakland it was and is progressive

nonproits tied to city government and aspiring political leaders, and in the

Occupy movement in Philadelphia and elsewhere it is those who divide the

struggle with a double-gesture: excluding those elements deemed too pro-vocative and radical, while calling upon the policethe guardians of the co-

lonial orderas a part of the 99%. Those struggling for fundamental change

are painted as violent and irrational extremists by those whose nonviolent

rhetoric is nourished by privilege and deployed in patently bad faith. I wish

I were exaggerating.

Luckily, our enemies often do our work for us, making our arguments

increasingly undeniable, as was the case this week in the brutal assault on

Occupy Oakland and subsequent establishment of something approaching

martial law in the streets. For many, the relationship between the police and

the 99% had been made clear once and for all, but self-delusion in the ser -

vice of reducing cognitive dissonance occasionally knows no bounds. Amid

swirling tear gas of the Oakland streets and in the aftermath of an assault

by police that left a two-tour Marine veteran in a coma, a comrade of mine

was threatened with citizens arrest by a group which, despite themselves

having been on the receiving end of the assault, were nevertheless unwilling

to tolerate even verbal attacks on the guardians of order.

Fanon believes with every shred of his being in the task of building

what he calls the world of you, a truly universal and reconciled humanity

in which love reigns supreme.16But this is simply notthe world we have to-

day, and if we take Fanon seriously at allwhich I insist that we mustwe

need to recognize that the new world in our hearts becomes possible only

through struggle.

3. Nelson Maldonado-Torres

I want to begin by saying that I think that, were Fanon alive, he would cometo a conference like this to share ideas with people like all of you. He may

have some reservations, as some of us have, about critical theory, but not

15. George Ciccariello-Maher, Flashmob Hysteria, Counterpunch, August 26, 2011.

16. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 206.


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about its power of critique, of unveiling reality in its barest aspects instead

of as natural laws that need to be obeyed. His reservations would be with

the other side, with some of the things that come packaged with this, and

speciically the continued assertion of Eurocentered forms of critical rea-

son. This is a very interesting phenomenon, because after the unleashing ofdifferent forms of critical theorizing, there seems to always be a return to

the same ground.

I always remember an insight from Fanons The Wretched of the Earth

where he said that the North African didnt have to wait for the French to

know what critique was, because that critique already existed in the very

forms of community engagement, in different local practices of critique.

Self-criticism, he argued, was irst of all an African institution. Whether it

be in the djemaas of North Africa or the palavers of West Africa, tradition hasit that disputes which break out in a village are worked out in public.17This

statement invites us to look for theory and critique in multiple locations

and multiple forms, in different relationships between theory and practice,

and I think Fanons work, his own praxis, was a statement about that. If we

follow this Fanonian clue, we might see critical theorizing as much richer

and different today, and actually it would register not only at the level of

teaching theory, of learning theory, but also actually at the level of practice,

insofar as there would be multiple languages of critique and different forms

of political practice. One of the questions on the loor for everyone here is

the question of translating those different sources and forms of critique, and

I think this would lead to engagement at the level of both education and

praxis itself.

Now, if Fanon were here today, I bet he would likely be thinking about

the Arabcorrection, North AfricanSpring. He might also be thinking about

the Obama administration in relation to race and foreign policy as well as

about the relation of the Tea Party and the Occupy movement with lingering

questions about race and coloniality in the twenty-irst century. He would

likely talk about the disinvestment in education and how texts like Paulo

Freires Pedagogy of the Oppressedhave been banned from the system, be-

cause where Freire is on a list of readings, its very likely that Fanon is too.

He would also be talking about the expansion of the neoliberal model to

more and more spaces in society and throughout the globe. I think that he

would talk about the Asian economic boom and the different forms of activ-

ism emerging in the region.

And he would deinitelytalk about Latin America. It is said that beforehe died, he wanted to come to Cuba for a visit and to establish a relationship

between the emerging Algerian government and Cuba. So today we have

Hugo Chvez, Evo Morales, and the emergence of the World Social Forum in

17. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 12.


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319

Brazil, which has today spread to many places across the globe. He would

likely be having a caf with Subcomandante Marcos somewhere in the

mountains of Chiapas as well, talking with him about how to confront state

power and global capitalism today, and he would likely be sharing some of

that with us, at least insofar as it would be allowable considering his verylikely involvement in organizing activities that could not be entirely public.

The case of Latin America is interesting because there was a massive wave

of neoliberal adjustments in the region, and in a way this leftist turn across

the continent is in part a response to the drastic results of such privatiza-

tion, particularly in contexts where there are indigenous people whose rela-

tion with the soil and the resources are different from hegemonic Western

ones, so when you privatize these resources its not only a means of survival,

its also part of who you are.I think that Fanon would also be analyzing that and comparing reac-

tions in the North with reactions in the South. Now we are seeing the North

confronting heavy pressure from neoliberal adjustments in public educa-

tion, in health, people not inding jobs. In a way, its very serious, but there

are a few seconds every now and then when I think about how interesting it

is that people are now getting a sense of what it is to live in the Third World,

in a process of Third-Worldiication. Of course Im not happy about it, but I

hope that at least it prompts a relection about how, on the one hand, there

is a system that is predicated on the consumerism and the well-being of the

North on the basis of the devastation of the South, and now there is in a way

a devastation of the North to some extent.

This is not unrelated to the question of the demographic shifts occur-

ring in some places, because that South has displaced itself to the North, and

the face of the public is changing, for example, in the United States. In a way,

with the face of the public changing, even if you are white but you belong

to that public, you begin to suffer those very effects. So we get to a moment

once again where there is the question of whether there is going to be a

politics that is going to capture these different elements and mobilize these

different sectors, with a theory that is comprehensive enough to articulate

how these different populations are being affected without closing them off

from one another. I feel that Fanon would be, in a way, trying to help us pro-

vide the analysis that we need for these different sectors to feel that they

understand better what is happening and to mobilize in a way that is not

exclusive of what each other is doing.

But of course, I think that thats when we get to the question of Fanonshopes versus the reality, when different folks begin to direct the move-

ment in one way or another or when they continue repeating some of the

very problems that we have found beforefor instance, in the assertion of

critique as being European reason and forgetting the basic ideas that we

have learned in the last twenty to thirty years. So that would be my little


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exercise in thinking what Fanon would be sharing with us if he were here.

What mainly matters of course is what we ourselves are doing here and the

relevance that Fanons work has for us. Lewis and myself are members of

the board of the Frantz Fanon Foundation, Fanons daughter Mireille Fanon

Mends-France is the president and founder of the Foundation, and in a wayit is dedicated to continuing the legacy, not only by publishing his works

in different languages, but also by having different interventions in differ-

ent places, and Mireille herself is an international human rights activist and

scholar. So we are trying to continue the legacy of Fanon in both ways, as

intellectuals but also as activists.

Now, I want to center on the work of Fanon for a second and highlight

seven elements of the architecture of Fanons own critical theory which I

think are key for helping us navigate our present reality. These are sevenkey concepts that I think in a way enter into a relationship with the three

problematics Lewis laid out: the problem of philosophical anthropology

(the question of the human), the question of freedom, action, and liberation,

and the question of the metacritique of reason. These are more punctual

elements that I think it is also important to have in mind.

The irst of these is the Fanonian view of the subject. You see this

throughout most of his writings, particularly Black Skin, White Masks, where

hes dealing with the Black subject, a subject whose existence is denied in

a very direct and potent form. Its not denied, for example, through the ap-

propriation of surplus value of the work produced by that subject; its not

denied by the capitalist as a part of accumulated capital, but its a form of

denying humanity that is direct and straightforward toward the subject in

question. This denial is even present in the intersubjective relation itself:

even a child can look at a Black person and suddenly become the means

of asserting the lack of humanity of that subject. Chapter 5 of Black Skin,

White Masksbegins with Look, a nigger, and its a child who is saying this.18

Fanon selects of all people a child, so a child is in the social position to make

this kind of judgment and take another human being and put her or him in

another sector completely. So its not the institution, its not the bourgeoisie:

its a child, and its direct, its brutal. Its not that there is no exploitation; of

course there are other forms of domination, but I think that Fanon puts his

inger on one that, despite being so brutal and direct, is often denied, so he

decides to focus on that.

Another element of the Fanonian conception of the subject is not only

this condition in which the subject is found in a colonial, anti-Black world,whose being is directly denied and who inhabits what he calls the zone of

nonbeing.19It is also that that subject, behind those masks that are adopted

18. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 89.

19. Ibid., xii.


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321

to deal with that situation, is a twofoldsubject, characterized by a negative

and a positive dimension. The negative side he calls the dimension of tran -

scendence, and it is the dimension of the powers of the subject in differ-

entiating himself or herself from objects out there. It is the power of tran-

scending, of not being merely one with the world, but being separate, beingconscious of your surroundings when you establish a distance. This is for

him a negative moment, which is, of course, connected with the Hegelian

tradition of negativity and the emergence and unfolding of consciousness.

But then immediately, Fanon says, Man is not only the potential for

self-consciousness or negation. If it be true that consciousness is transcen-

dental, we must also realize that this transcendence is obsessed with the

issue of love and understanding. Man is a yes.20There is a moment of posi-

tive afirmation right there at the very heart of that subjectivity that hasbeen denied. This subject is both a no and a yes, and the no is this dif-

ferentiation; the no signiies in the mode of crying out against any attempt

that aims to reduce that subject to a thing, because that subject is precisely

a subject insofar as it is not a thing (this connects with Sartrean ontology).

But that subject is also a yes, an absolute positivity that Fanon describes

in two ways: understanding and love, an intersubjective connection. While

with the negative element that subject refuses the collapse of subjectivity

into things, there is another force that looks toward enacting a relation not

with something but with someone.

But what racism and colonialism entail is a twofold violation of that

subjectivity. On the one hand, as I said, trying to collapse the subject into a

thing, but on the other hand also trying to eliminate the possibility of any

signiicant contact between that subject and another subjectivity out there.

So when you go to chapter 5, Fanon described that subjectivity as coming

out to the world and suddenly being stopped: I approached the Other . . .

and the Other, evasive, hostile, but not opaque, transparent and absent, van-

ished. . . . I hailed the world, and the world amputated my enthusiasm.21You

are then enclosed; you cannot engage in this world in an intersubjective,

relational way. For Fanon this is ultimately a form of dehumanization inso-

far as the subject is precisely not a substance but a relation characterized

by those two forces, negative and positive. So for us to understand what

race does and what colonialismand decolonizationis, Fanon offers us

these two elements. It is not only expropriation of surplus value, its also

20. Ibid. Also, inversely, from the conclusion: The I posits itself by opposing, saidFichte. Yes and no. We said in our introduction that man was an afirmation.

We shall never stop repeating it. Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. But

man is also a negation. No to mans contempt. No to the indignity of man. To the

exploitation of man. To the massacre of what is most human in man: freedom.

Ibid., 197.

21. Ibid., 92, 94.


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something that happens directly at the level of the subject, and of course,

once Fanon posits that element of the yes, the positive, this also leads to

some differences vis--vis the Hegelian notion of dialectic and with the

Marxist interpretation of liberation as well.

This takes us to decolonial ethics and decolonial politics, points twoand three. Precisely because he understands the subject in this way, as con-

fronting this twofold violation, Fanon posits that the consistent response to

that context is not to continue looking for recognition from the master by

putting on different masks, nor is it to make the mistake of saying, Well,

Im taking my mask off and now I know who I really amwho are you re -

ally? As he puts it in a very brutal way: What is called the black soul is a

construction by white folk.22So when you take the mask off, there is likely

another mask there underneath. The solution is not so much inding somekind of authentic self underneath but actually engaging in relations not with

other masters but with other slaves, not to look for their recognition but to

make yourself available to participate in a liberatory, decolonizing moment.

Maybe in that very struggle you will discover your new face; you have made

your new face in that very struggle. That is one fundamental element of the

Fanonian lesson, that the struggle itself creates new symbols, new ideas,

new forms of being, and we should welcome those that seem more progres-

sive, not the ones that seem less so. So of course, we need intellectuals to be

thinking and debating those elements of the changing process.

In that sense, Im saying that there is a decolonial ethics in Fanons

response to this context, but that this ethics is also a politics, because the

ethics that leads this subject to have a relation, to make herself or himself

available to the other slave, to join in the struggle of liberation, at the end it

is a struggle for liberation that they are after. The process doesnt culminate

with oh, you are a slave, I am a slave too, so we recognize each other. No,

you come out, you put yourself in a vulnerable position, but the process is

the political transformation of reality. So I think that the ethics and politics

in Fanon are dificult to separate and are linked to each other, but it is im-

portant to recognize that ethic because sometimes it is said, and actually

this happens with post-Marxist discourse, that you have to focus on politics,

and everything else is secondary. I think here, ironically, Fanon has been

accused of being a preacher of violence, but it turns out that when you read

well it is not actually like that; its always the political linked with a very

thick conception of the human subject as interrelational and ethical, and the

core of decolonial politics is profoundly ethical. Again, I think these are les-sons that can help us when we think about movements.

Related to the topic of the ethico-political, I would like to add that if

Fanon were here he might be talking about the 99%, and I think that when

22. Ibid., xviii.


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323

I read Fanon, there is also the insistence to try to ind that commonality

and point to the problems with that privileged 1%, but I think he would

also call attention to the ways in which sometimes the other 1 percent, the

lowest1 percent, might be invisibilized in the very process of asserting the

politics of the 99%. I think part of the logic of decolonization is always tosee, at the level of ideas and theory but also at the level of practice, what it

would mean to think seriously about that1 percent. The tension would be

no, we represent them or well, I talked with them and Im doing this for

them, and the question of building that relation is not easy at all. That is in

a sense why Fanons own writing and practice took pedagogical forms, and

thats why the connection with Freire is so apt. Its a pedagogy of liberation,

not a pedagogy of I teach you to be really radical because you dont know.

Its another kind of approach. Decolonial politics and ethics are connectedwith a decolonial pedagogy, so I think that when we look at movements, we

always need to look at these different elements that could be potentiated or

strengthened.

The fourth element, which George already referred to, is sociogeny, or

the view of the self as intrinsically related to society. Yes, Fanons view of the

self has this core of the yes and the no, but it is a subject that is not complete

without being embedded within society. Society is made in part of institu-

tions but also of subjects, and the consciousness of subjects has been shaped

by society. Subjects and institutions form a core, and so for Fanon the libera -

tion needs to be dual: we need to try to change both the subjects and the

institutions, the society and the individual. This is another key question for

diagnosing movements today. Just as he says that the liberation of the white

and the Black needs to be dual and twofold, so too with the individual sub-

ject and institutions. When one of those sides constantly refuses to change,

then Fanon says that at the end of the day for blacks on the plantation of Le

Robert, what they have to do is to ight; theres no question.23And in a way

they would be helping the masters by changing the character of society and

creating a more human society. The ifth element is race which, combined

with racial analysis, is crucial to sociogenesis or sociodiagnostic. He comes

to the idea of race not only as a question of prejudice but also as a sort of

intentionality that is built into modern cultural symbols and institutions.

So part of the challenge of race is not only to change ones opinions but to

change the culture and symbols and institutions and to recreate them on the

basis of a nonracist practice.

The sixth point is gender, and Fanon has also been heavily criticizedfor that, in part because people say that he viliies Mayotte Capcia in Black

23. We would not be so naive as to believe that the appeals for reason or respect for

human dignity can change reality. For the Antillean working in the sugarcane

plantations in Le Robert, to ight is the only solution. Ibid., 199.


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Skin, White Masks, or he gloriies the action of the Algerian women in Toward

the African Revolution. What I ind interesting about him though is his no-

tion that in order to understand society, agency, activism, change, you need

to look at these different subject positions. We can disagree about the way

he understood the agency of each, but I think that not only did he do this inhis writings about Martinique, he did it again in his writings about the revo-

lution. Ultimately, what he is pointing to is the liberation from traditional

gender roles, not through some abstract and preconceived notions of what

gender is, but through the kind of relations that are enacted and come to be

in the very decolonial process. Thus he shows that even the family itself can

be restructured, and cultures can begin to change as a result of the dynamics

that emerge from that process, instead of preaching from the outside.

Finally, Fanon raises the question of the state, and in this respect I indit intriguing that Fanon believed in the power of the wretched but also in the

decentralization of power. What would this mean for us today and for Latin

America? At a moment in which the Left is in power in Bolivia, Venezuela,

and Ecuador, what would Fanons idea of decentralizing power mean, and

what would it mean to question, as Fanon does in The Wretched of the Earth,

even the very idea of having a single capital?

Frantz Fanon, Fifty Years On: A Memorial Roundtable

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