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Preface | Hegel/Fanon: Transpositions in Translations

Ulrike Kistner Philippe Van Haute

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) has cast a long shadow over decolonial thought which has fastened onto particular elements, concepts, figures of thought and interpretations of his lectures and more systematic works. While Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history (Hegel [1837] 2001) in particular have had a bad press, his thinking on freedom realised through a dialectical process of attaining self-consciousness in history became formative for decolonial theorising. This divergence, previously taken up and sharpened in one way or another by Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon, variously structures the reception of Hegel in Black Consciousness and Africana existentialism. It can be seen to indicate fault lines within the tectonics of Hegel’s philosophical system itself, and tensions in the interpretations of his work between theo-logico-metaphysical speculation on the one hand, and inquiries into philosophical-historical and societal conditions of reason on the other. Yet these fault lines and tensions do not impinge on Hegel’s reception in decolonial thought.

As if to hold Hegel’s dialectics to its own precepts drawn together, decolonial thought instates his philosophy in the role of a vanishing mediator. Three elements, in particular, are brought to a convergence in the process: the much-vaunted ‘master–slave dialectic’ attributed to Hegel; his infamous statements on Africa and Africans in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History; and the structure of the dialectic, historically and politically understood. Concepts and figures of thought drawn from these sources have been productive, in turn, for describing and explaining the existential reality of being black in an antiblack world constituted by slavery, colonialism and racism (see for instance More 2017, p. 43). A particular reading of the master–slave dialectic, and Hegel’s placement of Africa and Africans in World History, with Africa as the location of slavery (that is, unfreedom), are combined to explain how a historical legacy becomes ontologically and existentially constitutive in the form of ‘slave consciousness’, manifested in ‘the colonial consciousness of the colonised’ (see More 2017, pp. 43–44).

Yet there is good reason, we believe, to prise this convergence apart and interrogate the respective lineages of thought drawn from Hegel’s work independently of each other, in order to examine the conditions of their convergence in new configurations and contexts. Some scholarship has been devoted to examining the concept of Africa in Hegel’s philosophical scheme of World History (see for instance Bernasconi 1998, 2000); and to an interpretation of the dialectic attributed to Hegel, and applied to Stephen Bantu Biko’s notion of black solidarity as the antithesis of white racism (see for instance Lamola 2016). Comparatively less attention has been given to a critical examination of the so-called master–slave dialectic. Close attention to this figure, and to its instantiations across different philosophical, historical and political contexts, is what brings the essays in this book together. Among the most famous instantiations of this dialectic is that articulated (albeit in negative form) by Frantz Fanon in his seminal text, Black Skin, White Masks ([1952] 1986).

The essays in this collection were initially prompted by the need to rethink the place of the relation between Hegel and Fanon in undergraduate philosophy courses taught in South Africa. The relation between Hegel and Fanon has become doubly displaced under the impact of calls for decolonisation of the curriculum – falling between Hegel’s dialectics and colonial Manichaeism, and between postcolonial and decolonial theorising. This double displacement frames the essays collected in this volume.

The tension between the Manichaeism of the colonial world tending toward a frozen dialectic, and dialectical reason in praxis, is opened in Robert Bernasconi’s Introduction. In chapter one, Ato Sekyi-Otu points to Fanon’s idea of the Manichaeism of the colonial world as truncated dialectic. While Fanon upholds Hegel’s idea of independent self-consciousness, to be attained through the lord–bondsman dialectic, as a normative horizon (albeit an elusive one), he sees it as thwarted by the relations of colonial racism.

Implicated in this thwarted dialectic is Fanon’s observation, drawn out by Philippe Van Haute in chapter two, that Hegel’s idea of the formative role of work (Arbeit) does not pertain to conditions of slavery and colonialism; instead, it is the role of violence that steps into its place. This philosophical account of the place of violence connects with the discussion of Fanon’s pronouncements on violence provided by Beata Stawarska in chapter five.

The controversial role of violence in the context of a thwarted dialectic is taken up again in chapter six by Reingard Nethersole, who probes Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Homi K. Bhabha’s refractions of Hegel in their respective Forewords to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon [1961] 1967, 2004). Here we find an instance of the second displacement in the relation between Hegel and Fanon. Jean-Paul Sartre, reading Fanon in the context of the politics of decolonisation in the late 1950s, highlights the terms of the Hegelian dialectic (as mediated through Alexandre Kojève’s Hegel lectures [Kojève (1947) 1980]), while they are attenuated if not effaced in Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial psycho-affective reading of Fanon (Bhabha 1986).

There is, however, a counter-current that challenges the scenario painted in these terms. The essays by Philippe Van Haute (chapter two) and Ulrike Kistner (chapter three) show that the construal of the historical experience of slavery and colonialism to which Hegel’s dialectic is being held is based on a questionable translation of Hegel’s figures of ‘Herr’ and ‘Knecht’. In French, the figures named by Hegel are translated as ‘maître’ and ‘esclave’, popularly taken over into English as ‘master’ and ‘slave’. These (mis)translations of Hegel have forged the dominant interpretation of the dialectic in decolonial theorising. The contributions in this collection show that it is only on the basis of this questionable translation that Fanon’s (and to some extent also Sartre’s) rebuttals of Hegel’s dialectic make sense. But, as Robert Bernasconi’s Introduction shows, Fanon’s rebuttals do more than expose the inapplicability of the French Hegel to the historical slave. The essays collected here provide the steps to demonstrate this. Philippe Van Haute problematises Hegel’s so-called master–slave relation, providing a detailed textual analysis of the chapter on ‘Self-Consciousness’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit ([1807] 1977) and its reception, through Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation, by Fanon in the latter’s Black Skin, White Masks. In chapter three, Ulrike Kistner takes up the reception of Hegel in postcolonial and decolonial theory, and analyses the contestations between Frantz Fanon and Octave Mannoni, based on their different readings of Hegel.

Reinstating Hegel’s ontological structure of self-consciousness, and tracking it through its figures and their modulations in The Phenomenology of Spirit as Ulrike Kistner’s chapter does, provides a picture different from that which concretises the relation of ‘master’ and ‘slave’ in particular social formations and political conjunctures. From the former perspective, moreover, the equation of attributions to the ‘slave’ of the Phenomenology with those to ‘Africa’, ‘Africans’ and ‘Negroes’ in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History becomes problematic. In his ‘critical appraisal of Mbembe’s colonial subjects’ (chapter four), Josias Tembo takes on the task of differentiating Hegel’s philosophical armatures imbricated, to contradictory effect, in Mbembe’s account of the postcolony.

Moving along these counter-currents, the essays collected in this volume provide new perspectives on mediations in the reception of Hegel’s concepts and figures in post-Enlightenment philosophy transcontinentally. The contributions to this collection engage in close textual readings that highlight, in their interrelatedness, the entangled history of the translations, transpositions and transformations of Hegel in colonial, decolonising and postcolonial contexts.

References

Bernasconi, Robert (1998). ‘Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti’. In Stuart Barnett (ed.), Hegel after Derrida. London: Routledge.

Bernasconi, Robert (2000). ‘With what must the philosophy of world history begin? On the racial basis of Hegel’s Eurocentrism’. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 22(2): 171–201.

Bhabha, Homi K. (1986). ‘Foreword: Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition’. In Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto Press.

Fanon, Frantz (1967). The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Translated by Constance Farrington. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Fanon, Frantz (1986). Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto Press.

Fanon, Frantz (2004). The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1977). Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2001). The Philosophy of History (1837). Translated by John Sibree. Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche.

Kojève, Alexandre (1980). Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit (1947). Assembled by Raymond Queneau, edited by Allan Bloom, translated by James H. Nichols Jr. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Lamola, M. John (2016). ‘Biko, Hegel and the end of Black Consciousness: A historico-philosophical discourse on South African racism’. Journal of Southern African Studies 42(2): 183–94.

More, Mabogo Percy (2017). Biko: Philosophy, Identity and Liberation. Cape Town: HSRC Press.