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ОглавлениеIntroduction | Fanon’s French Hegel
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is the central text of what has come to be known as critical philosophy of race, where attention has tended to focus on the fifth chapter, ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Person’. This chapter was originally published in Esprit in 1951 as a stand-alone essay, a fact that gave some legitimacy to the reading of it in isolation (Fanon 1951). But when Black Skin, White Masks was published in the following year, it became apparent that it was not representative of the whole work. ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Person’ highlights the white gaze that racialises blacks and rejects some of the backward-looking strategies promoted by the Négritude movement, especially those associated with Léopold Sédar Senghor, where the future is said to lie in reviving ‘a black civilization unjustly ignored’ (Fanon [1952] 2008, p. 201). The chapter ends in tears: ‘I began to weep’ ([1952] 2008, p. 119). By contrast, the final chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, ‘In Guise of a Conclusion’, while continuing the theme of refusing to find salvation in the past, draws most heavily on those parts of the book that are affirming and future-oriented. Indeed, the book’s penultimate chapter, ‘The Black Man and Recognition’, ends by saying ‘No’ to contempt and indignity and a resounding ‘Yes’ to life, love and generosity ([1952] 2008, p. 197).
The second half of that same chapter is entitled ‘The Black Man and Hegel’, and it is the place where Fanon engages with the famous lord–bondsman dialectic from The Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel [1807] 1977). These few pages (Fanon [1952] 2008, pp. 191–97) are the main focus of the essays by Philippe Van Haute, Ulrike Kistner and Josias Tembo in this book. The essays by Ato Sekyi-Otu and Reingard Nethersole mainly address dialectics in The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon [1961] 2004), while Beata Stawarska establishes the link between Fanon’s first book and his last. Taken together, they form a valuable corrective to the pessimistic reading of Fanon that has come to dominate much of the current literature. But they do much more than this. They demonstrate why Fanon still holds the attention of philosophers throughout the world, both for his engagement with the dominant thinkers of his time and for the light these encounters are still able to shed on current racial issues.
One should not expect to find here a uniform view of Fanon’s relation to Hegel. There is no consensus about what Hegel was attempting in his discussion of the lord–bondsman dialectic. Inevitably this has contributed to disagreement about what Fanon was attempting in response. In addition to the commentaries on Fanon’s relation to Hegel referenced by the authors of this book, one could also mention the readings given by Gayatri Spivak (2014) and Lou Turner (1996). Given the variety of interpretations these few pages in Black Skin, White Masks have inspired, it might be useful to begin with what can be established with some certainty about Fanon’s reading of Hegel.
First, as Philippe Van Haute, Ulrike Kistner and Josias Tembo all demonstrate in their chapters, Fanon does not address the historical Hegel but the Hegel who was dominating philosophical discussion in France at the time Fanon was writing his book, the so-called French Hegel, the Hegel primarily of Alexandre Kojève. Kojève’s lectures during the 1930s were widely attended, and when extracts from them were published in 1947, his close commentary on the lord–bondsman dialectic served as the first chapter (Kojève [1947] 1969, pp. 3–30). For Kojève and his French followers, however, Hegel’s discussion was read not in terms of a lord and a bondsman, (which is what Hegel’s words ‘Herr’ and ‘Knecht’ mean respectively, as Kistner makes clear) but about a master and a slave. Their misreading has encouraged generations of readers to attempt to make Hegel’s account apply to slavery in the Americas through what Van Haute calls an ‘anthropological reading’. Tembo confronts such a reading directly, by engaging with the work of Achille Mbembe. Fanon also takes as his starting point an anthropological reading, but, as Tembo proceeds to show, Fanon, unlike Mbembe, does not apply the Kojèvian account of the master–slave dialectic to the colonial situation. Indeed, Fanon’s main point is the inapplicability of Hegel’s discussion to the world he lived in. What preoccupied Fanon was not the question of what the historical Hegel meant, but the fact that the French Hegelians were attempting to apply to the world around them what they understood Hegel to be saying. Fanon signalled this focus clearly when, early in the section, even before turning to Hegel, he referenced ‘the former slave’ ([1952] 2008, p. 191). That Fanon set out to prove that the French Hegel cannot be appropriated for an understanding of the world that post-dated slavery is one of the themes uniting the authors published in this book.
This leads to a second point that emerges clearly from this book, and it arises from a major point of disagreement between Fanon and Kojève about the central role the latter gave to the slave’s work in the history of freedom. In fact, Fanon’s objection was not to Kojève alone, but also to Jean Hyppolite, another leading representative of the French Hegelians. Fanon did not read German and so he was reliant on Hyppolite’s translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Hegel [1807] 1947). He also seems to have consulted Hyppolite’s major commentary on Hegel’s text that had been published in 1946, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Hyppolite [1946] 1974). So when Fanon writes of Hegel’s slave that he ‘finds the source of his liberation in his work’ ([1952] 2008, p. 195 n. 8), he is also responding to Hyppolite, who understood Hegel to be saying that it was in work that the slave attained what he described as the authentic realisation of being-for-itself in being-in-itself (Hyppolite [1946] 1974, p. 176). But, as Fanon objected in a crucial footnote, this shows the inapplicability of the French Hegel to the historical slave. Work did not provide slaves with a path to liberation. It was simply what their masters wanted from them (Fanon [1952] 2008, p. 195 n. 8).
The importance of Hyppolite for Fanon’s reading of Hegel can be underlined by a third point. It was in Hyppolite’s Genesis and Structure that Fanon would have read that the thinghood before which the slave trembled was eliminated by work (Hyppolite [1946] 1974, p. 176). From the beginning of Black Skin, White Masks Fanon is concerned to demonstrate how in the colonial world black people are locked into their identity (Fanon [1952] 2008, pp. xii–xiv). Through the white gaze he is objectified: ‘I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at the origin of the world and here am an object among other objects’ ([1952] 2008, p. 89). However, he subsequently introduces a decisive caveat: ‘I ask that I be taken into account on the basis of my desire. I am not only here-now locked in thinghood’ ([1952] 2008, p. 193). This is his direct response to Hegel’s calling of being for the other ‘consciousness in the shape of thinghood (Dingheit)’ (Hegel [1807] 2018, p. 112 – §188). Fanon quite possibly connected that phrase with Aimé Césaire’s equation ‘colonization = thingification [colonisation = chosification]’ (Césaire [1950] 2000, p. 42). It would explain not only why he is so insistent on confronting Hegel on this precise point, but also why his insistence that he cannot be reduced to a thing locked into its objectification reemerges at this point in his book. In any event, when Fanon rejects being reduced to thinghood, he does not use Kojève’s spelling of thinghood as chosité (Kojève [1947] 1969, p. 16), but Hyppolite’s spelling of it as choséité instead (Hegel [1807] 1947, p. 162), suggesting that his polemic on this point is driven more by his rejection of Hyppolite than of Kojève. So what does Fanon mean when he asks that he be taken into account on the basis of his desire? What is his desire?
The desire of the colonised to be recognised for their humanity is a recurrent topic in Black Skin, White Masks. It is especially pronounced in the fifth chapter, where the psychological effects of being rebuffed in this process are carefully documented. His discussion of this theme culminates in the chapter ‘The Black Man and Recognition’. In the first section of this chapter, in what is a clear evocation of Hegel’s lord–bondsman dialectic, Fanon describes how the desire of each Antillean to be recognised in their virility and independence renders them dependent on their fellow Antilleans (Fanon [1952] 2008, p. 187). The fact that they are frustrated in this process recalls the impasse Hegel describes whereby the lord finds that the bondsman, because he is dependent on him and thus of a lower status, cannot provide the recognition he wants (Hegel [1807] 2018, p. 114 – §192). One difference between the two cases is that Fanon insists that any description of the encounter between the Antilleans is radically incomplete if it does not refer to the social structure: when Martinicans compare themselves with their fellow Martinicans they do so ‘under the patronage of the white man’ (Fanon [1952] 2008, p. 190). In saying this he is referencing the argument proposed by Reingard Nethersole in chapter six of this book, according to which blacks had come to hate themselves through having internalised a racist culture by means of a process he calls ‘cultural imposition’ ([1952] 2008, p. 167). Hence it was from whites that they sought recognition of their humanity ([1952] 2008, p. 78).
At this point, readings of Fanon become more speculative. It seems that when, in the second section of the chapter, he turns directly to the discussion of Hegel, he reverses the terms of the impasse that underlies the lord–bondsman dialectic. The basis for doing so is the acknowledgement that through cultural imposition, the desire for recognition by whites is further perverted into the project of wanting to be like their masters ([1952] 2008, p. 125 n. 24). In the Introduction, Fanon expresses this by saying that ‘the black man wants to be white’ ([1952] 2008, p. xiii). This is immediately followed by the observation that ‘the white man is desperately trying to achieve the rank of man’ ([1952] 2008, p. xiii). This means that whites are not yet human and as a result, the Hegelian logic whereby the master cannot receive recognition from his slave is inverted into the ‘vicious cycle’ ([1952] 2008, p. xiv) whereby the former slaves cannot receive the recognition of their humanity that they are seeking from the colonisers, because the latter lack the humanity that would be necessary for self-recognition in the other to secure the other’s humanity.
What comes next in Fanon’s discussion is decisive for the trajectory that leads from Black Skin, White Masks to The Wretched of the Earth, and so must be followed in detail. That Fanon’s proposed escape from the vicious cycle takes place in the context of his reading of Hegel is an indication of why understanding his relation to Hegel is so important. Fanon recognises that Hyppolite’s focus on liberation through work stays within the perspective of the master insofar as the master is the main beneficiary of this work. Work does not give former slaves independence any more than it gave the slaves themselves independence; it does not remove the psychological dependency documented throughout Black Skin, White Masks that was embedded in the colonial culture, and that is reflected in the distorted desire of the former slaves to want to be like their masters ([1952] 2008, p. 195 n. 8). When Fanon writes that ‘[only] conflict and the risk it implies can, therefore, achieve human reality, in-itself-for-itself’ ([1952] 2008, p. 193), he is correcting Hyppolite’s reading of Hegel by turning from the perspective of the colonisers to that of the colonised.
Fanon demands that attention be given not to the former slave’s work but to his or her ‘negating activity’ (‘mon activité négatrice’), which Richard Philcox inexplicably translates as ‘contradictory activity’ ([1952] 2008, p. 193; Fanon 2011, p. 239). The allusion is once more to Kojève, who had written that ‘all activity is negating’ (Kojève [1947] 1969, p. 4). For Fanon, the destruction is part and parcel of the restructuring of the world that he advocates at earlier points in the book (Fanon [1952] 2008, p. 63). But, as with Kojève, it is not entirely negative. The fuller sense of what Fanon means by negating activity is what links him to Hegel most closely and allows him to sound like Hegel, even while turning him upside down: ‘I pursue something other than life, insofar as I struggle [lutte] for the birth of a human world, in other words, a world of reciprocal recognitions’ ([1952] 2008, p. 193, translation modified). The major difference is that Fanon locates himself within the struggle, whereas Hegel merely observes it.
Hegel and Fanon agree that the struggle, the fight, is not for life, for self-preservation, but for something higher. Fanon shows this when he paraphrases Hegel as saying that each self-consciousness ‘wants to be recognized as an essential value outside of life, as transformation of subjective certainty (Gewissheit) into objective truth (Wahrheit)’ ([1952] 2008, p. 192; Hegel [1807] 2018, p. 111 – §186; see Kojève [1947] 1969, p. 12). Fanon can underwrite this formulation by understanding it to say that the colonised surpass life when they risk their lives by fighting for the birth of ‘a world of reciprocal recognitions’ (Fanon [1952] 2008, p. 193). But whereas in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit reciprocal recognition awaits the end of chapter six and the final pages of the discussion of reconciliation, where it is identified with absolute spirit, following a journey in which consciousness has been educated by Greek ethical life (Sittlichkeit) and the Enlightenment (Hegel [1807] 2018, p. 388 – §671), in Fanon the entry into a human world does not involve him passing through a history from which he has been excluded. Fanon insists that unless the colonised risk their lives, they will remain locked in their identity and their psychopathology.
It is a great merit of Van Haute’s reading that he emphasises the role of death in both Hegel’s and Fanon’s discussions. Death seems to be only a subsidiary theme in many English-language interpretations of the lord–bondsman relation. It is tempting to conclude that this is because the early editions of A.V. Miller’s translation, which was the standard translation from 1978 until Terry Pinkard’s translation of 2018, dropped the vital phrase (see Harris 1979). When Hegel turns from his discussion of servitude in relation to lordship to a discussion of what servitude is in and for itself, he acknowledges that servitude finds its essence in the lord, but he insists beyond this that it has implicit in it the experience of the truth of pure negativity. Miller’s translation stops with the phrase ‘its whole being has been seized with death’ (Hegel [1807] 1977, p. 117 – §194). It thus omits the crucial point, said of the bondsman, that he ‘felt the fear of death, the absolute master’ (Hegel [1807] 2018, p. 115 – §194). Both Kojève ([1947] 1969, p. 23) and Hyppolite ([1946] 1974, p. 175) agree that the slave and not the master faced death.
Fanon agrees that facing death is decisive (Hegel [1807] 2018, p. 111 – §187), but for him it comes into the picture not, as in Hegel, to address how the slave became a slave, but rather to indicate how the former slave can be freed from the psychological dependency that arises through cultural imposition. Freedom from slavery is not enough if freedom comes to the slave from the outside, without a struggle. Much has been made of Fanon’s observation that the slaves were freed without risking their lives, which ignores the Haitian revolution and all the slave revolts. Instead he highlights the struggle that African Americans were engaged in at that time (Fanon [1952] 2008, p. 196). The most one can say in his defence is that here, too, Fanon does not want to be backward-looking, as Senghor was. By contrast, he insists on fighting for a better, freer future, a future that bears its own value precisely because one has risked death ([1952] 2008, p. 194).
Fanon makes this point also in terms of action, and it seems that it is against the French Hegel that he shifts the focus from work to action. The affirmations of life, love and generosity with which chapter seven ends are all about establishing values through action ([1952] 2008, p. 199). Fanon’s observation picks up on a comment from his previous chapter that associates the collapse of the black man’s ego with his not being actional ([1952] 2008, p. 132). Beata Stawarska’s chapter five in this book is especially helpful if one wants to understand this point about action because, even though she does not mention Hegel, she lays out how this conception of violent action as liberatory praxis links Black Skin, White Masks to The Wretched of the Earth and points the way to escaping the vicious cycle. Fanon does not advocate violence for its own sake, but because it is indispensable to liberation in the sense of psychological decolonialisation (Fanon [1961] 2004, p. 33). This became in The Wretched of the Earth the idea of violence as a cleansing force (la violence désintoxique) ([1961] 2004, p. 51). That is to say, violence is given a dialectical function.
There are a number of references to dialectics in Black Skin, White Masks, but it is only in the context of Fanon’s questioning of Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of the Négritude movement that its technical sense is uppermost ([1961] 2004, p. 111). However, this is the dialectic in the somewhat mechanical sequence of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, an account that at one time was attributed to Hegel, even if that association is now largely discredited. A more fluid, transformative sense of dialectic is evident in The Wretched of the Earth, but the immediate influence here is not Hegel but Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre [1960] 2004), a book, as Nethersole shows, that Fanon studied carefully (Bernasconi 2010). Stawarska in particular, and Nethersole to a lesser extent, defend dialectical readings of The Wretched of the Earth that are at odds with the impression left by the extract from Sekyi-Otu’s Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Sekyi-Otu 1996) that is included in chapter one of this book.
Sekyi-Otu highlights the moment when Fanon references Aristotelian logic. Fanon wrote: ‘The zone inhabited by the colonized is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the colonizers. The two zones are opposed to each other, but not in the service of a higher unity. Ruled by a purely Aristotelian logic, they obey the principle of mutual [réciproque] exclusion. There is no possible conciliation. One of the terms is superfluous’ (Fanon [1961] 2004, p. 4). Sekyi-Otu reads this as Fanon saying that it is Aristotle, not Hegel, who is ‘the most truthful witness to the colonial context’. Certainly the problem that both Sartre and Fanon address in their late works, as Nethersole acknowledges, is that of the frozen dialectic, a dialectic in stasis ([1961] 2004, p. 237). This is reflected in the reciprocal homogeneity of the violence of the coloniser, and the counter-violence of the colonised is a prominent theme in The Wretched of the Earth ([1961] 2004, p. 46). But that was not the last word on the subject, and one should read, alongside Fanon’s comments on the principle of reciprocal exclusion, these words that he would have read in Sartre: ‘the only possible intelligibility of human relations is dialectical and … this intelligibility, in a concrete history whose true foundation is scarcity can be manifested only as an antagonistic reciprocity’ (Sartre [1960] 2004, p. 805). Coloniser and colonised may live in opposition to each other according to an Aristotelian logic, but their relation becomes intelligible only from a dialectical perspective. Eventually one of the opposed terms will prove superfluous, and it will not be the colonised because the colonisers are dependent on the colonised. Indeed, Fanon makes precisely that point when he quotes from the Critique Sartre’s observation that the absurd temptation of the colonisers to massacre the colonised would be the destruction of colonisation (Fanon [1961] 2004, p. 43 citing Sartre [1960] 2004, p. 303). Furthermore, as Fanon makes clear, this happens in praxis: ‘The colonised discovers the real and transforms it in the movement of his praxis, in the exercise of violence, in his project of liberation’ (Fanon [1952] 2008, p. 21, translation modified). The relation of concrete praxis to dialectical reason is crucial here as a source of illumination as well as of transformation ([1961] 2004, p. 44).
With her intricate reading of the responses to The Wretched of the Earth from Sartre to Bhabha and beyond, Nethersole returns us to the question of who Fanon is for us today. With his notion of cultural imposition, Fanon recognises that, in the aftermath of the Nazi ideology and the strategies used to counter it, the locus of racism lay in culture more than in biology, with major implications for critical philosophy of race (Bernasconi 2019). He demonstrates the importance of dialectical reason based in praxis. He challenges the tendency to dwell in the past. He also challenges the tendency to want to close the book on European thought as unworthy of consideration. Fanon’s pages on Hegel in Black Skin, White Masks have become a symbol of how it was in dialogue with the Western philosophical tradition, including Hegel, one of its more racist representatives, that he pushed his thought in new and radical directions. It is not by accident that Black Skin, White Masks culminates in a critical discussion of Hegel and the Kojèvian interpretation of history in the light of Hegel. The present volume is an excellent guide to that discussion.
References
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Bernasconi, Robert (2019). ‘A most dangerous error: The Boasian myth of a knock-down argument against racism’. Angelaki 24(2): 92–103.
Césaire, Aimé (2000). Discourse on Colonialism (1950). Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press.
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Fanon, Frantz (2004). The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.
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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2014). ‘Fanon Reading Hegel’. In Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Readings. Kolkata: Seagull Books.
Turner, Lou (1996). ‘On the Difference between the Hegelian and Fanonian Dialectic of Lordship and Bondage’. In Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renee T. White (eds), Fanon: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
