Notes on Fanon&#39;s Dialectics

Anisha Sankar

Notes on Fanon's Dialectics

Anisha Sankar

2019, Notes on Fanon's Dialectics

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Abstract

This thesis is a study of the dialectics of Martinican philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon. Amidst one-dimensional and reductive readings of Fanon, this thesis proposes a twofold task – to think Fanon dialectically, and to think dialectics in terms of Fanon. To think Fanon dialectically, I map three moments in the evolution of Fanon’s thought which correspond to the three parts in which this thesis is presented: (1) Roots, (2) Fanon’s Dialectics, and (3) Living Thought. Part One considers roots of Fanon’s thought, traced back to the dialectics of Aimé Césaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Fanon’s lived experience. These roots set up the reading of Fanon that follows in Part Two, by addressing the methods and intentions of those from which he draws. Part Two argues that methodologically speaking, Fanon’s work revolves around a dialectics of disalienation, revealing the sites in which contradictions exist under colonial capitalism. Here, I identify three sites his work explores: the ontological, the psycho-existential, and the situational. I call these ‘sites of rupture’ to signal my interpretation of Fanon’s analysis as a demand for disalienation at each of these sites, by way of privileging the moment of rupture. Doing so ultimately presents Fanon as a theorist of rupture. Finally, Part Three looks to three contemporary theorists who engage with Fanon’s thought in a way that reworks his dialectics in new situations. It considers the work of Lewis Gordon, George Ciccariello-Maher, and Glen Coulthard as embodying a ‘revolutionary Fanonism’, engaging Fanon in ongoing struggles of decolonisation. A consideration of the evolution of Fanon’s dialectics is done in the spirit of a dialectical approach to knowledge. Doing so refuses to render his thought static, instead testifying to the strength and malleability of his method. The principles of Fanon’s method demand its engagement with the social reality in which it finds itself. Overall, this study presents notes towards the revitalisation of an anticolonial dialectics.

NOTES ON FANON’S DIALECTICS Anisha Sankar A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Sociology The University of Auckland 2019

i Abstract This thesis is a study of the dialectics of Martinican philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon. Amidst one-dimensional and reductive readings of Fanon, this thesis proposes a twofold task – to think Fanon dialectically, and to think dialectics in terms of Fanon. To think Fanon dialectically, I map three moments in the evolution of Fanon’s thought which correspond to the three parts in which this thesis is presented: (1) Roots, (2) Fanon’s Dialectics, and (3) Living Thought. Part One considers roots of Fanon’s thought, traced back to the dialectics of Aimé Césaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Fanon’s lived experience. These roots set up the reading of Fanon that follows in Part Two, by addressing the methods and intentions of those from which he draws. Part Two argues that methodologically speaking, Fanon’s work revolves around a dialectics of disalienation, revealing the sites in which contradictions exist under colonial capitalism. Here, I identify three sites his work explores: the ontological, the psycho-existential, and the situational. I call these ‘sites of rupture’ to signal my interpretation of Fanon’s analysis as a demand for disalienation at each of these sites, by way of privileging the moment of rupture. Doing so ultimately presents Fanon as a theorist of rupture. Finally, Part Three looks to three contemporary theorists who engage with Fanon’s thought in a way that reworks his dialectics in new situations. It considers the work of Lewis Gordon, George Ciccariello-Maher, and Glen Coulthard as embodying a ‘revolutionary Fanonism’, engaging Fanon in ongoing struggles of decolonisation. A consideration of the evolution of Fanon’s dialectics is done in the spirit of a dialectical approach to knowledge. Doing so refuses to render his thought static, instead testifying to the strength and malleability of his method. The principles of Fanon’s method demand its engagement with the social reality in which it finds itself. Overall, this study presents notes towards the revitalisation of an anticolonial dialectics.

ii Acknowledgements Thank you, deeply, to those who have shared in this project. My parents, Meenakshi and Sankar, whose unwavering faith in me gives me courage and strength. Campbell, mentor and comrade, who has guided me to believe in my own thought. Mike, whose warmth, love and support without which I could not have completed this work. Betty, Nat, Shannon and Emma, for taking the time to give considered feedback. Old friends, who hold me with indelible generosity, and new friends I’ve made along the way. !க்க நன் &

iii CONTENTS Abstract.....................................................................................................................................................................i Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................................ ii INTRODUCTION.................................................................................................................................................... 2 PART ONE: ROOTS ............................................................................................................................................... 8 1 CÉSAIRE’S DIALECTICS ................................................................................................................................ 10 2 SARTRE’S DIALECTICS ................................................................................................................................. 25 3 FANON’S LIVED EXPERIENCE..................................................................................................................... 40 PART TWO: ON FANON’S DIALECTICS......................................................................................................... 47 4 THE ONTOLOGICAL........................................................................................................................................ 49 5 THE PSYCHO-EXISTENTIAL......................................................................................................................... 57 6 THE SITUATIONAL ......................................................................................................................................... 64 PART THREE: THE PATH AHEAD.................................................................................................................. 73 7 LEWIS GORDON............................................................................................................................................... 77 8 GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER .................................................................................................................. 88 9 GLEN COULTHARD ...................................................................................................................................... 104 CONCLUSION..................................................................................................................................................... 117 WORKS CITED .................................................................................................................................................. 123

2 INTRODUCTION It is because we are not past colonialism that we are not past Frantz Fanon. His sharp insight into the nature of colonialism sets Fanon up to be one of its fiercest critics. From whatever context in which he found himself, from Martinique to France to Algeria, Fanon saw contradictions at play with rich and prolific insight. He experienced his own body in these contexts as a site of struggle, pushing him towards a metacritique of colonialism that locates its operation at multiple levels. This complex and layered account of colonialism gives us important insights into the world today. Not only does it indicate the stronghold of colonialism that persists, but it also reveals the points at which its logic is at its weakest. These are the points at which its contradictions occur – clues to its surpassing. The turn to Fanon demands the refusal to read him one-dimensionally. Reiland Rabaka notes a trend in literature on Fanon, observing that ‘as has been the unfortunate fate of many nonwhite intellectual-activists, Fanon’s work is usually approached one-dimensionally with an intense emphasis on either his critique of racism in Black Skin, White Masks, or his critique of racial colonialism in The Wretched of the Earth'. 1 In opposition, this thesis considers Fanon’s work as a cohesive body that transcends efforts to reduce it to one particular dimension. Broadening the lens through which Fanon is read reveals a common consistency throughout his work that encompasses all dimensions, which is found in its form and method. Ultimately, there remains a distinctly dialectical Fanon. This thesis is a study of Fanon’s dialectics. I propose to think Fanon dialectically, and to think dialectics in terms of Fanon. In order to think Fanon dialectically, I resist the tendency to subscribe to what Lewis Gordon has called disciplinary decadence. This term is broadly defined by Gordon as the ‘turn away from living thought'. 2 In other words, disciplinary 1 Reiland Rabaka, Forms of Fanonism: Frantz Fanon’s Critical Theory and the Dialectics of Decolonization (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2010), 146. 2 Lewis Gordon, ‘Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence', Transmodernity, vol. 1, no. 2 (2011), 98.

3 decadence can be considered the opposite to a dialectical approach to knowledge. This concept can be used to explain the wanton spirit in which Fanon has categorically been reduced to one discipline over another at the expense of dialectical engagement with his work. 3 Gordon suggests that this attitude of disciplinary decadence ‘should be avoided in the interests of learning how to read him with imagination and clarity'. 4 That is to say, Fanon cannot be confined solely to the disciplines and methods he utilises, or that draw on him. Instead, he should be read in a way that considers his relationship to multiple disciplines without reducing him to one or the other. One commentator observes a disciplinarily decadent norm in Fanonian literature when they note that there exists ‘a wide variety of sometimes contradictory interpretative traditions which seem to function in utter ignorance of one another: there is the Marxist Fanon, the Lacanian Fanon, the existentialist Fanon, the postmodernist Fanon, the essentialist Fanon, the anti-essentialist Fanon'. 5 These categorisations neglect that Fanon cannot be reduced to either ‘this or that’. In fact, he can exist within all of these categories simultaneously. This is the case if we consider him dialectically, and understand Fanon as dialectical. To consider Fanon as dialectical means two things. First, it means that Fanon can and is able to simultaneously be none and all of the above Fanons at once. We cannot read Fanon with principles of formal logic (the logic underlying the tradition of western metaphysics) because he does not adopt these principles in the first place. To accept him instead as a dialectical thinker is to allow for a more rigorous understanding of the complex and layered ways in which different theorists, theories and disciplines intersect in Fanon’s thought. Fanon asserts this sentiment in Black Skin, White Masks quite explicitly: When I began this book, having completed my medical studies, I thought of presenting it as my thesis. But dialectic required the constant adoption of positions. Although I had more or less concentrated on the psychic alienation of the black man, I could not 3 Lewis Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renée T White, ‘Five Stages of Fanon Studies’ in Fanon: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers 1996), 8. 4 Gordon et al., ‘Five Stages of Fanon Studies', 8. 5 James Penney, ‘Passing into the Universal: Fanon, Sartre, and the Colonial Dialectic', Paragraph, vol. 27, no. 3 (2004), 49.

4 remain silent about certain things which, however psychological they may be, produce consequences that extend into the domain of other sciences. 6 Reading Fanon in this light can correct attempts made by his readers to claim Fanon to any one particular discipline, and make coherent his reinterpretation of theory to analyse the situation of colonialism. This points also to the instrumentality and relationality of the use of varied theories and disciplines as they pertain to an analysis of the nuanced struggles under and against racism, colonialism, and capitalism. These conditions of alienation and oppression form the context from which Fanon writes. It is a context in which the structures of European domination, those of racism, colonialism, and capitalism, meld into a tripartite hybrid that presents itself in Fanon’s day – and ours -– as the ultimate obstacle against the realisation of human freedom. These conditions have, for Fanon, shaped the nature and direction of world-historical struggle. Thus, I suggest that Fanon’s use of various and apparently ‘contradictory’ theories is contingent on their value as weapons in the dialectical struggles of race and class under structures of colonial capitalism, and secondary to his dialectical method itself. Fanon is always careful to stress that his work is ‘rooted in the temporal’. 7 Conversely, this means that nothing is fixed – an emphasis conducive to this reading. The second way in which Fanon can be considered dialectical requires further substantiation and is detailed in Part Two of this thesis. My claim is that Fanon can, and should be reconceptualised as a theorist of rupture. By this, I mean that his body of theory revolves around the points of contradiction experienced by a society under the weight of racism, colonialism, and capitalism. In other words, his engagement with varying phenomena of racism brings light to different categories of dialectical rupture. For clarification of my use of the term rupture in this context, I mean the break through the points at which sites of contradiction in the world exist. It is with the aim of pressing on these points until they finally give way to dialectical movement through them, to which his work is dedicated. This 6 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 2008 [1952]), 33. 7 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 5.

5 reconceptualisation also emphasises Fanon’s privileging of the notion of rupture, including the moments of separation this entails, as opposed to the notions of false unity that has hindered the radical potential of his dialectical thought. In conceptualising Fanon as a theorist of rupture, we can read his work as concerned above all else with a dialectics of disalienation. This is because rupture, for Fanon, is the key to breaking through the structures that enforce alienation. His body of theory is his way to expose and agitate these points of tension, making them vulnerable enough to pass through at whatever cost. This was Fanon’s way to ultimately contribute to Césaire’s visceral plea for ‘the End of the world, of course'. 8 But what, then, made Fanon possible in the first place? More specifically, what has made Fanon dialectical – that is, a thinker of dialectics and a dialectical thinker? Looking past or through Fanon allows us to better understand Fanon’s body of work, and contextualise what he thought and said regarding dialectics. Such a task also establishes the nature of Fanon’s dialectics as what Lewis Gordon calls ‘living thought’. It understands Fanon’s thought as engaging with the reality of his context, and subjecting dialectics as he grasped it to its own purpose and limitations. To approach this study in light of a dialectical framework then, also considers the question of how Fanon’s dialectics as living thought lives today. This turns the focus to Fanon’s own engagement with today’s reality and its own limitations. As a result, this study does not confine dialectical thought to the way it appears in Fanon which would render it static, but instead treats it as something that is always becoming. This thesis proceeds in three parts that correspond to three moments in the dialectical evolution of a knowledge I have called ‘Fanon’s dialectics’. In Part One, I trace Fanon’s dialectics to the roots it finds in Aimé Césaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Fanon’s own lived experience. These roots form the first three chapters, respectively. Part One establishes a basis that enables my reading of Fanon’s dialectics, specifically contextualising the ways in which Fanon’s dialectics have formed. Regarding the first two chapters on Césaire and Sartre, I do not deny that roots can also be found elsewhere or traced back even further than these 8 Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, ed. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001 [1947]) 22.

6 scholars – the spectre of Hegel underlies both, after all. Yet, Césaire and Sartre’s relationship to Fanon is at such a close proximity that it makes the task of establishing the dialectical thread that runs from them to Fanon clear. Therefore, I offer an exposition of their dialectical thought, characterising this as a crucial moment in the evolution of Fanon’s dialectics. The third chapter provides a brief biographical account of Fanon’s life as an effort to situate his thought within his lived experience. This task establishes Fanon’s early familiarity with the dialectical rhythm at play in his own life. In Part Two I offer a reading of Fanon, seeking to draw out what can be called Fanon’s intuitive dialectics. Fanon’s work can be read as revolving around points of contradictions that exist under conditions of racist, colonial capitalism, with the imperative of dialectical movement in mind to mediate passing through these contradictions in order to surpass them. I argue that this logic of dialectical analysis appears in Fanon at three levels, which correspond to the three chapters in Part Two respectively: (1) the ontological (2) the psycho- existential and (3) the situational. I characterise these levels as three ‘sites of rupture’, ultimately arguing that Fanon should be conceptualised as a theorist of rupture. In Part Three, I look to how Fanon’s dialectics have been taken up by three contemporary scholars: Lewis Gordon, George Ciccariello-Maher, and Glen Coulthard. I consider these scholars as offering some of the most prominent engagements with Fanon’s thought, staying true to Fanon’s decolonial ambitions in their respective projects. They each engage with Fanon’s dialectics in terms of its method, pulling from Fanon a distinctly dialectical thread to weave into their own work. This in turn constitutes a dialectical engagement with Fanon’s thought, subjecting his thought to its own limits, and repurposing it for new contexts and political struggles by identifying ruptures in the contemporary world. As a result, they each use Fanon as an opportunity to engage in an ongoing anticolonial project, signaling their embodiment of what Rabaka calls ‘revolutionary Fanonism’. 9 I would like to preface the text that follows by situating my relationship to the knowledge that I have worked with this past year, and to the knowledge I have produced. I am not an 9 Reiland Rabaka, ‘Revolutionary Fanonism: On Frantz Fanon’s Modification of Marxism and Decolonisation of Democratic Socialism’, Socialism and Democracy, vol. 25, no. 1 (2011), 141.

7 abstract subject, after all. My particularity is my point of reference to both thought and politics. I was born in Tamil Nadu, India, a place that endured some 350 years of colonial rule. My parents immigrated to Aotearoa/New Zealand when I was 5, and it is here I have lived most of my life. As a South Indian Tamil living now on a land that continues to face ongoing colonisation based on land dispossession of tangata whenua, and overt systemic racism, the contradictions of colonial capitalism are presented in multitudes and in global proportions. I turn to Fanon for the reason that he resonates deeply with the anticolonial spirit, offering a framework through which contradictions can be analysed. Notes on Fanon’s Dialectics, then, can be considered as notes towards an understanding of the contradictions at play in different landscapes. A focus on his dialectics has been written from the standpoint of a search for a method. The relevance of dialectics is such that it offers a potent, alternative logic to understand the world in a way that resonates clearly with anticolonial politics. Sartre had claimed that ‘we must establish the dialectic as the universal method and universal law of anthropology'. 10 To what extent is this true? The potential of dialectics, with an emphasis on the notion of rupture, is both destructive and productive. That is, rupture signals both the destruction of a system, but the way forward to produce new structural forms or ways of being. A ruptural dialectics, then, helps to diagnose a condition of stasis or Manichaeism, advocating instead for the wheels of dialectical movement to be set in motion. It is in light of pursuing a familiarity with this method for the purpose of extending and stretching its use that I proceed. It is as Fanon says, we analyse to destroy. 10 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume One, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso, 2004 [1960]), 18.

8 PART ONE ROOTS Part One of this thesis establishes what I have characterised as a ‘moment’ in which roots of Fanon’s dialectics can be found. This moment encompasses three major influences on Fanon’s thought: the politics and philosophies of Aimé Césaire and Jean-Paul Sartre, and the lived experience of Fanon over the course of his life. In addition to their influence, each in their own way demonstrates the link between anticolonialism and dialectics. The first two chapters offer a brief exposition of the dialectical thought in Césaire and Sartre as two of Fanon’s most well-known antecedents. Fanon’s engagement with both can be considered as a dialectical model of critical intimacy. I borrow the term ‘critical intimacy’ from Gayatri Spivak, who uses it to describe a method of engagement with text that is opposed to the attitude of ‘critical distance’. 11 Such a model affords Fanon the ability to engage with the thought of both from the basis of kinship. This kinship is characterised by an attitude of solidarity and love, allowing for both an embrace and a dismantling of their respective thought at the same time. 12 Framing Fanon’s relationship with Césaire and Sartre as a dialectical model of critical intimacy aptly considers the complexity of Fanon’s relationship to both theorists and to thought itself. Furthermore, it offers an alternative path to the problem of subordinated theoretical identity that is often the case with non-white scholars. I build on this point in greater detail in Chapter Two, arguing against the tendency in Fanonian scholarship to reduce Fanon to any of his influences, as either a Césairian or a Sartrean. Doing so would also deny Césaire and Sartre’s own movement towards Fanon at certain points of their own intellectual developments. 11 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 425. 12 Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 425.

10 CHAPTER ONE CÉSAIRE’S DIALECTICS This chapter opens with Fanon’s key Africana antecedent. The philosophically enriched politics and poetry of Aimé Césaire’s work serves in itself as the focus of vast anticolonial study. Césaire’s refusal to be confined to one discipline, given the range of theoretical and literary instruments through which he expresses his politics, contributes to the extent to which his work remains relevant to many categories of study. This is also true in mapping Césaire’s contribution to Fanon’s own anticolonial theory. The intention of this Chapter is to explore the question of how we can understand Césaire to better understand Fanon’s dialectics. Césaire’s influence on Fanon cannot be overstated. Yet, Fanon’s engagement with Césaire is of a profoundly critical nature, which values his insight as much as it pushes his work to the edge of its own radical horizon. As a result of the appearance of inconsistency, Fanon’s relationship to Césaire is a site of scholarly contestation. Some scholars, for instance Robert Bernasconi, take Fanon’s treatment of Césaire to be ‘ambiguous’. 14 Bernasconi acknowledges this complicated relationship, stating that ‘Césaire was one of Fanon’s main sources of inspiration, yet at the same time Fanon maintained a largely critical stance toward him'. 15 Yet, through repeated reference to this tension in Fanon’s reading as ambiguous, Bernasconi fails to credit Fanon with the ability to simultaneously accept and reject elements of Césaire as a dialectical intellectual practice, instead implying contradiction in terms of failure. To avoid this pitfall, I read Fanon’s treatment of Césaire within a dialectical model of critical intimacy. This position understands Fanon’s relationship to Césaire as one of solidarity and love. To interpret their relationship within this framework is more accurate than 14 . Robert Bernasconi, ‘The Assumption of Négritude: Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and the Vicious Circle of Race Politics', Parallax, 2002, vol. 8, no. 2, 69–83. 15 Bernasconi, ‘The Assumption of Négritude', 69-71.

11 Bernasconi’s reading, giving strength to Fanon’s intellectual capacity, and the multifaceted and dialectical nature of his thought. Framing their relationship in this way allows one to engage with Césaire via Fanon, without either reducing Fanon to the category of a ‘Césarian’ scholar or a critic of Césaire’s discourse on decolonisation. I echo the same sentiment in the following section on Sartre, focusing in greater depth on the politics of why such a disclaimer is necessary, if not more necessary, in spite of the tendency to reduce Fanon to a ‘Sartrean’ scholar. With this in mind, it is acceptable to suggest as David Caute does, that ‘Fanon’s first debt was to Césaire'. 16 This claim is reiterated by Reiland Rabaka, who focuses in particular on the position that ‘négritude was the foundation on which Fanon built his discourse on decolonisation'. 17 Rabaka goes on to state that ‘Fanon appropriated much from Césaire, and especially his seminal text, Discourse on Colonialism'. 18 It is here, he observes, ‘where it may be said the real roots of Fanon’s dialectic of decolonisation and liberation lie'. 19 It is for this reason that we start with Césaire in the project of investigating Fanon’s dialectics. To explore the nature of Fanon’s debt to Césaire, I focus on three aspects of Césaire in order to make distinct his dialectical thought. These form the three sections ahead: (1) surrealism (2) marxism and (3) négritude. In Césaire’s dialectics, relating to each of these sections, we find a dialectical threat inherited by Fanon. Understanding Césaire’s critique of Marxism, influenced by his surrealism and his involvement with the French Communist Party, in the context of colonisation sets the foundation for the theory and praxis of négritude. Yet, each of these elements in Césaire contribute to the same narrative of decolonisation that can ultimately enable us to read Césaire as not just a critic of colonialism but as a dialectician, and a dialectical critic of colonialism. 16 David Caute, (New York: The Viking Press, 1970), 21. 17 Reiland Rabaka, Africana Critical Theory: Reconstructing the Black Radical Tradition, from W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral (New York: Lexington Books, 2009), 171. 18 Rabaka, Africana Critical Theory, 171. 19 Rabaka, Africana Critical Theory, 171.

12 Césaire’s Surrealism Woven through Césaire’s narrative of decolonisation is his major surrealist influence. Césaire can be, and is read as, a surrealist poet. However, the significance of this reading must be stretched further to grasp the practical relevance of his work. Discourse on Colonialism allows us to distinguish the twofold methodological use of surrealism in order to understand the political intention of Césaire’s surrealism. To articulate this point, I borrow here from Robin Kelley, who identifies that the text serves first as a ‘discourse on the material and spiritual havoc created by colonialism’ and second, ‘it is a critique of colonial discourse'. 20 The use of surrealism is of critical importance equally to both of these functions. Regarding the first function, surrealism allows a deep and powerful illustrative expression of the extent to which material and spiritual havoc has damaged the native (black) psyche. Using the sophistication of surrealist style, Césaire is able to reveal, in his then-wife Suzanne Césaire’s words, ‘the domain of the strange, the marvelous and the fantastic, a domain scorned by people of certain inclinations. Here is the freed image, dazzling and beautiful'. 21 The domain of the marvelous resonates with the concept of the radical imagination, where possibilities of a new world become endless. It is a field in which explorations of freedom and revolutionary futures can exist in their richest form. In doing so, it also reveals fundamental truths about the nature of a society in which access to the domain of the marvelous is restricted – a state of alienation from possibilities. Furthermore, Césaire’s surrealism epitomises the liberating power of words in relation to the broader project of decolonisation, but especially in its redemptive capacity. The power of words, embodied in surrealist poetry specifically, is for Césaire the ‘conquest of the self, by the self'. 22 This affirmation of conquest via the exertion of agency is conceived by Césaire to be what the salvaging of the world depends on – heeding the voice of black agency. This 20 Robin D. G. Kelley, ‘A Poetics of Anticolonialism', preface to Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 9. 21 Suzanne Césaire, ‘The Domain of the Marvelous’, in Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, ed. Penelope Rosemont (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 137. Quoted in Kelley, ‘A Poetics of Anticolonialism', 15. 22 Aimé Césaire, ‘The Liberating Power of Words: An Interview with Poet Aimé Césaire', by Annick Thebia Melsan, The Journal of Pan-African Studies, vol. 2, no. 4 (2008), 2.

13 fulfills a dialectical function in its redemptive use. Césaire writes, ‘it was Heidegger who referred to words as the abode of being'. 23 The revolutionary affirmation of black being (which affirms the ‘fact’ of being black) functions as a reinstatement of humanity (being) to those who have had it violently stripped away. Thus, the function of surrealist poetry is conceived as a decolonial strategy by igniting revolutionary race consciousness. Césaire claims that ‘the effective power of poetry, with its two faces, one looking nostalgically backward, the other looking prophetically forward, with the redeeming feature of its ability to redeem the self, is the power of intensifying life’. 24 The revolutionary and redemptive potential exists despite the historical exile to which colonialism has condemned its subjects, in alienating them from the ownership of their history and their future. Returning to Kelley’s point that Discourse on Colonialism can be read as a narrative on the material and spiritual havoc created by colonialism, Césaire’s employment of surrealism serves this narrative to a complex and layered degree. It not only looks at the visceral effect of colonialism via the material and spiritual havoc it has wreaked, but it also looks at resistance to this havoc, and further, the revolutionary potential created and gaining momentum as a result of this havoc itself. If the first point regards the expression of alienation, the second regards the will to disalienation. 25 The second point made by Kelley – that Discourse on Colonialism also functions as a critique of colonial discourse – further helps to illustrate the importance of Césaire’s methodological use of surrealism. This involves accentuating the politics of surrealism, which was boldly Marxist and communist in its genesis. The first black surrealists started as a small group of Martinican students in Paris, 1932, and were equally influenced by the philosophy and politics of Marxism and André Breton’s surrealism. They created a collective and journal called Légitime Défense (legitimate defense) in the name of anticolonial political resistance. They ideologically positioned themselves as traitors to the class they emerged from: ‘the 23 Césaire, ‘The Liberating Power of Words', 3. 24 Césaire, ‘The Liberating Power of Words’, 4. 25 Aimé Césaire, ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire’ by René Depestre, in Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 84.

14 French mulatto bourgeoisie, one of the most depressing things on earth'. 26 The appropriation of Marxism and surrealism changed the nature of anticolonial discourse, and reinvented the terms of their struggle. 27 This was achieved by way of melding together multiple complex theoretical accounts of anticapitalist and anticolonial discourse. Locating Césaire in relation to his emergence from this first wave of black surrealism helps to identify the unique theoretical nature of his critique of colonial discourse. The surrealism of Breton and the first black surrealists embodied in its origins a dialectic that enriched Marxist theory while radicalising it. Césaire’s use of surrealism differs from the European surrealists, like Breton among others, to an arguably greater extent than the first blacks surrealists. It does more than enrich Marxist theory; it allows him to use its relevant elements for his own narrative of decolonisation via the weapon of surrealism. For Césaire, surrealism acts as the mediating tool between Marxism and decolonisation, and a way of embracing multiple ideas in the formation of his revolutionary thesis and critique of colonial discourse. Generally underlying this complex methodological use, surrealism is also Césaire’s way of rupturing a racist colonial landscape (and its discourse) by the assertion that ‘we do not speak the same language’. 28 By virtue of his refusal to not only speak the same language as the oppressor (in this case the racist bourgeoisie of his native Martinique) but also to speak within the confines of a racist colonial framework, Césaire employs the rejection of both the socio-political linguistic and ideological customs dictating the terms of his recognition to this 26 Etienne Léro, Thélus Léro, René Ménil, Jules-Marcel Monnerot, Michel Pilotin, Maurice-Sabas Quitman, Auguste Thésée, and Pierre Yoyotte, ‘Légitime Défense: Manifesto [1932]’, in Black, Beige, Brown: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 37. 27 Lori Cole, ‘Légitime Défense: From Communism and Surrealism to Caribbean Self-Definition', Journal of Surrealism and the Americas vol. 4, no. 1 (2010), 15. 28 This quote appears in a collective response to a review of Césaire and his colleagues’ surrealist journal Tropiques by Martinique’s Chief of Information Services, Captain Bayle, who scathingly called the journal racist and radical. The original review: ‘Lettre du Lieutenant de vaisseau Bayle, chef du service d’information, au directeur de la revue Tropiques, Fort-de-France, May 10, 1943’. The collective response: ‘Réponse de Tropiques à M. le Lieutenant de vaisseau Bayle, Fort-de- France, May 12, 1943’, (signed Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Georges Gratiant, Aristide Maugée, René Ménil, Lucie Thesée), Tropiques, vol. 1, ed. By Aimé Césaire [facsimile reproduction] (Paris: Editions Jean-Michel Place, 1978), Documents-Annexes, pp. xxxvi-xxxviii.

15 system of oppression. Suzanne Césaire reinforces this point when she asserts that surrealism ‘nourishes an impatient strength within us, endlessly reinforcing the massive army of refusals’. 29 The emphasis on refusal is a revolutionary assertion of agency, in a colonial context riddled with a past of slavery, where silence was for far too long an imposed norm. Thus, surrealist poetry is employed in the spirit of revolt at both symbolic and epistemic levels. It allows Césaire to take control of the language through which he expresses his revolt, and also to redefine the terms on which colonial discourse will be challenged. As I demonstrate in Part Two on Fanon’s dialectics, this same sentiment reverberates through Fanon’s critique of recognition. Thus, understanding the political intentions behind Césaire’s use of surrealism, and the functions it serves in reading Discourse on Colonialism in the ways explained above, sets us up to read him as an intellectual who engages rigorously with dialectics. It opens the door to taking seriously Césaire’s revolutionary poetics, and the impact this has on the way in which we come to conceive of dialectical methodologies. Furthermore, it sets up a reading of Césaire that compliments the project of investigating his influence on Fanon in relation to dialectical thought. Above all, underscoring the importance of surrealism in Césaire’s work reveals the unique nature of his approach to anticolonialism, especially by emphasising his way of opening up the European theory to encompass the radical imagination and by virtue, revolutionary possibilities in imagining a whole new world. Marxism and the Communist party Fanon makes a considerable contribution to the black radical tradition, which, as Cedric Robinson explains in his historiography of the tradition, has roots in a (black) collective dissatisfaction with modes of European Marxism. 30 While Robinson mainly explores this 29 Suzanne Césaire, ‘Surrealism and Us: 1943’, in Surrealist Women: an International Anthology ed. Penelope Rosemont (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 136-137. 30 See: Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000 [1983]).

16 thread through three prominent black intellectuals including W.E.B du Bois, C. L. R. James and Richard Wright, both Fanon and Césaire have made considerable contributions to this intellectual tradition. A deeper analysis of Fanon’s relationship to Marxism cannot be achieved without an investigation of the critiques of Marxism that serve as influences for this train of thought, prominently including Césaire and Sartre. Yet, where Sartre’s critique of Marxism is done with the intention of its ultimate revitalisation and emphasis on its all- encompassing nature, Césaire’s critique is constructed with the intention of using Marxism as a means to enriching black anticolonial politics, as opposed to enriching a science of Marxism itself. There are two key Marxist influences in Césaire’s politics, both serving as foundations for his critical engagement with communism. He takes on the surrealist critique of Marxism as much as he takes on surrealist endorsement of Marxism. The way in which he does this exceeds both European surrealism and that of the first black surrealists. Ultimately, Césaire’s critique of Marxism exists in terms of strengthening black anticolonial politics, and as a critique of western epistemologies. I unpack this by first, exploring Césaire’s critique of Marxism via surrealism, and second, using Césaire’s split with the French Communist Party to illustrate in his view the inadequacies of what he identifies as European communism. Here, I draw too on Discourse on Colonialism for its ability to summarise other important aspects of his critique of Marxism. The surrealists had found that the French Communist Party was the only political body at the time that openly denounced colonialism. 31 They gravitated to the party and to The Communist Manifesto. 32 They appropriated ‘manifesto discourse', recognizing as Lori Cole writes that while ‘originally a formal decree issues by state authorities’, the manifesto could 31 A more in-depth discussion of the emergence and political context of both the European surrealists and the first black surrealists can be found in Lori Cole’s article, ‘Légitime Défense’. Greater historiographical detail is given here regarding the nuance of surrealisms development as a genre and a politics, especially regarding the first black surrealists of Paris. It also covers a wider variety of critiques than can be covered by the scope of this thesis. See: Lori Cole, ‘Légitime Défense: From Communism and Surrealism to Caribbean Self-Defense', 18. 32 See: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Pluto Press, 2008 [1848]).

17 be ‘adopted by dissenting groups to subvert official rhetoric'. 33 The surrealists took from the Communist Party and The Communist Manifesto both the politics and the textual paradigm, which were communicated by Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism (1924). 34 Breton’s surrealism was defined as ‘psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern'. 35 Noting the difference between the surrealists and the Marxists, Robert Short writes that ‘both saw the revolution as a prelude to the founding of a world based on the desires of men, their ideas about the context of these desires were not the same. For the Marxist they were material while for the Surrealists they were primarily subjective and spiritual'. 36 As a result, notes Cole, the surrealist tradition reveals its tendency to ‘privilege the individual mind’. 37 Surrealism evolved as a means for intra-psychic self-exploration, which went unaccounted for within the French Communist Party’s Marxism. Thus, the tensions between the Marxism and surrealism was by no means uncontested. But surrealism offered Marxism a revision, based on a concern with the individual, unconscious mind. Without denying the need for material change, or Marx’s critique of capitalism in itself, the surrealists sought to bring the radical imagination back into serious consideration. This is the first theoretical difference that distinguishes the surrealist approach to Marxism, and it is one that Césaire adopts in his allegiance with surrealism. Césaire’s own fascination and conviction in the liberating power of poetry is explored through his surrealism. Kelley writes that we live ‘in a world where Black existential suffering is as much an internal, psychic, spiritual, and ideological crisis as it is a crisis of the material world'. 38 Césaire 33 Cole, ‘Légitime Défense', 17. 34 See: André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism (1929)’ in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, MI,: University of Michigan Press, 1969 [1929]). 35 Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism, 26. 36 Robert S. Short, ‘The Politics of Surrealism, 1920-36', Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 1 no. 2. (1966), 21. 37 Cole, ‘Légitime Défense’, 20-21. 38 Robin Kelley, forward to Black Marxism: The Making of the Radical Black Tradition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000 [1983]), xxiii.

18 recognised this, along with the first black surrealists, and used the methods of psychoanalytic investigation prescribed by surrealism to explore the nature of this suffering. In the words of Légitime Défense: ‘we want to see clearly into our dreams and we listen to their voices’ as a revolt against ‘the abominable systems of constraints and restrictions, the extermination of love and the limitation of the dream, generally known by the name of western civilization'. 39 Thus, affording revolutionary affirmation to the intra-psychic dream- world of the individual mind as a precursor to Marxist, collective revolution, the black surrealists offer a revised Marxism to Césaire, which he accepts into his own critique of Marxism. In his native Martinique, Césaire rose to political power under the wing of the French Communist Party from 1946-1956. The reasons for his split with the party are found in his resignation letter, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez', where he outlines the Eurocentrism of Marxism that contributes to his dissatisfaction with communist politics. He writes thinking about Martinique, the French Communist Party is totally incapable of offering it anything like a perspective that would be anything other than utopian; that the French Communist Party has never bothered itself to offer even that; that it has never thought of us in any way other than in relation to a world strategy that, incidentally, is disconcerting. 40 The explicit critique here targets the Communist Party’s subsumption of race, the issue of primary importance to Césaire in the context of Martinique, into the overarching politics of (European) class struggle. In doing so, the Communist Party was guilty of assimilating Martinique politics into its own Eurocentrism at the expense of solidarity with the rest of the Caribbean. Césaire asserts definitively, ‘it is clear that our struggle – the struggle of colonial peoples against colonialism, or better yet, of a completely different nature than the fight of the French worker against French capitalism, and it cannot in any way be considered a part, a fragment, of that struggle'. 41 39 Etienne Léro, Thélus Léro, et al., ‘Légitime Défense: Manifesto [1932]', 36-37. 40 Aimé Césaire, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez', Social Text, vol. 28, no. 2 (2010 [1956]), 151. 41 Césaire, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez', 147.

19 More explicitly, Césaire writes, ‘what I want is that Marxism and communism be placed in the service of black peoples, and not black peoples in the service of Marxism and communism. That the doctrine and the movement would be made to fit men, not men to fit the doctrine or the movement'. 42 Césaire’s dream for a distinctly Caribbean communism, informed by the particular political aspirations unique to Martinique and the Caribbean, is seen as severely limited because of the Eurocentric grip the French Communist Party, which ‘still bears the marks of the colonialism it is fighting’. 43 Thus, the paternalism of the Communist Party strips agency from Martinique and subsequently, as Césaire would say, ‘the right to personality'. 44 This becomes further relevant in terms of the importance of négritude. Building on this argument, Discourse on Colonialism pushes Marxist eurocentrism further to its breaking point, exposing that the fundamental problem lies embedded within European colonial epistemologies. Without being as explicit, Césaire still opens with this problematic that ‘the fact is that the so-called European civilization – “Western” civilization – as it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem’. 45 Here, Césaire pointedly targets not just European civilization, but Europeans themselves. Of course, Césaire recognises far more unreservedly than other scholars of his time that as a result of two centuries of bourgeois rule, Europeans who inherit the legacy of the first colonisers and continue or are complicit in colonial violence, have undergone a horrific deformation of both their conscience and their epistemological attitudes. One way in which Césaire illustrates this in regard to European colonial epistemology is by claiming that ‘one of the values invented by the bourgeoisie in former times and launched throughout the world was man – and we have seen what has become of that. The other was the nation. It is a fact: the nation is a bourgeois phenomenon'. 46 European anticolonialism is 42 Césaire, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez', 150. 43 Césaire, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez', 150. 44 Césaire, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez', 150. 45 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 31. 46 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 75.

20 seen by Césaire as perpetuating the same problematics of colonial discourse from which it is born for the reasons that it cannot think outside of the frameworks it has created. Regarding one’s conscience, when Césaire writes that ‘between colonisation and civilization there is an infinite distance', he not only means that Europe is uncivilized, but that Europeans have internalised this violence unto themselves. 47 The combination of these effects on European subjects is that they embody coloniality internally. The solution to the problem of the proletariat, and the colonial problem, then, must come from the external forces in question – those that are excluded or oppressed. Césaire demonstrates the point above in greater depth using an analysis of Hitler and Hitlerism, focusing on the collective shock of the rest of Europe during and after Hitler’s rise to power. Césaire writes, Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him… that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the “coolies” of India, and the “-------” of Africa. 48 Césaire characterizes Hitler as Europe’s punishment, but also as Europe’s destiny. The phenomenon of Hitlerism forces Europe to turn to itself as the enemy of not only the colonies, but itself. In doing so, Europe is forced to realise its double standards in the treatment of its own and its Other. This reveals a deeply embedded racism in the European individual without their being conscious of it. 47 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 34. 48 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 36.

21 Furthermore, Césaire’s turn to Hitler identifies the problem of fascism in its relationship to colonialism. As Kelley writes, Discourse on Colonialism’s ‘recasting of the history of Western civilization helps us locate the origins of fascism within colonialism itself; hence, within the very traditions of humanism, critics believed fascism threatened'. 49 Kelley understands Césaire as making an example out of Hitler, in showing the foundations of fascism to be within Europe’s epistemological attitude in itself, in its extension of colonial and imperial violence, malevolently turned back on itself. Hitler is, for Césaire, an example of why Europe cannot be trusted to find a solution to the colonial problem. What this critique of European colonial epistemologies also exposes is a dialectical relationship it has with itself. Césarian Négritude The limits Césaire finds in surrealism and Marxism intersect, helping to define the parameters to his conception of négritude. Regarding surrealism, Césaire moves away from its tendency to retain Eurocentric dimensions. His critique of the black surrealists of Paris, for example, helps establish the path its limits pave. Of this group, he writes, ‘there was nothing to distinguish them either from the French surrealists or from the French Communists. In other words, their poems were colorless'. 50 If their poems were colorless, their politics were colorless, leading Césaire to conclude that ‘they bore the marks of assimilation'. 51 He explains, ‘they acted like Communists, which was all right, but they acted like abstract Communists'. 52 The voice of black agency that Césaire was looking to assert with his surrealism needed a new outlet. This limit overlaps with Cesaire’s criticism of Marxism, in which he asserts that ‘Marx is all right, but we need to complete Marx. I felt that the emancipation of the Negro consisted of more than just a political emancipation'. 53 His 49 Kelley, ‘A Poetics of Anticolonialism', 10. 50 Césaire, ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire', 85. 51 Césaire, ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire', 85. 52 Césaire, ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire', 85. 53 Césaire, ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire', 86.

22 demands overlap to establish a Caribbean anticolonial, anticapitalist politics which is informed by a distinct voice of black agency. Césaire, along with the other key theorists of négritude, Leon Damas and Leopold Senghor, arrived together at the question of how to pronounce irrefutably the blackness of their past and present. This was especially important in consideration of the general sentiments at the time, in Martinique especially, where black peoples identified with being French at the expense of identifying with their African roots. Simultaneously realizing the inadequacies of European radicalism, Rabaka writes that the theorists of négritude became ‘interested in rescuing, reclaiming, and recreating the denied humanity and “degraded identity” of Africa and the Africans, continental and diasporan'. 54 The search for the particularity of black identity also became necessary to re-center black subjectivity, an important task prefacing the reorientation of the terms of struggle, particularly for the Caribbean. It took form, writes Rabaka, with the engagement of ‘“trans-African” aesthetics, politics, economics, history, psychology, culture, philosophy and society'. 55 A variety of methods gave strength to the movement that sought to destroy the colonial associations of Africa and Africanity to barbarity and primitivism, the tendency for assimilation on this basis, and instead offer solidarity across the world to all black peoples on the search for identity. The intention behind Césaire’s ‘plunge into Africa’ was to re-educate the diaspora about their history. 56 This is a move to re-introduce those particularly within the Caribbean to their own particularity, by situating them within their history. At a step further than re-education, Césaire wanted to affirm the beauty and value of this heritage, that African identity was to be a source of pride, and its roots contain ‘cultural elements of great value’ and trace back to ‘beautiful and black civilizations'. 57 Furthermore, he stresses that the lessons that can be learnt from Africa’s past are invaluable to the world. Such lessons could be found in the 54 Césaire, ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire', 84. 55 Reiland Rabaka, Concepts of Cabralism: Amilcar Cabral and Africana Critical Theory (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2014), 44-45. 56 Césaire, ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire', 84. 57 Césaire, ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire', 92.

23 material organisation of society, for example, where societies ‘were not only ante-capitalist, as has been said, but also anti-capitalist'. 58 Négritude’s plunge into the past of Africana history is dialectical. Therefore, it is more complex than a simple ‘return’ to the past. Césaire anticipates this misreading of his work: So the real problem, you say, is to return to them. No, I repeat. We are not men for whom it is a question of “either-or.” For us, the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but go beyond it. 59 To go beyond the past is not to return to a chapter in history by turning back the pages, but to embrace firmly its presence in the present. History for Césaire is not such that you can only go backwards or forwards. As Rabaka emphasises, ‘Césaire’s notion of “return” is rooted in the “real life” (i.e., lived-experiences and lived-endurances) of people of African origin and descent’ and moreover, ‘understands that revolutionary motivation may well stem more from moral outrage over the indignities suffered by ancestors than hope for the comfort of our children’. 60 A dialectical conception of négritude understands the raising of race and historical consciousness as what we might call redemptive. This resonates with the philosophy of history presented by Walter Benjamin, who writes that, ‘history is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogenous, empty time', and that ‘the past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption’. 61 Négritude, then, makes explicit this secret index. In raising a race and historical consciousness that was previously latent, it collapses the linearity of time to embrace the past in the present. Césaire’s négritude operates on the basis of this dialectical logic. In doing so, it becomes ruptural. As Benjamin writes, ‘what characterizes revolutionary classes at their moment of action is the awareness 58 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 44. 59 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 52. 60 Reiland Rabaka, Africana Critical Theory, 129. 61 Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History', in Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1939-1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2006), 395, 390.

25 CHAPTER TWO SARTRE’S DIALECTICS Jean-Paul Sartre is perhaps Fanon’s most widely considered interlocutor. More so than with Césaire, there is an exceptional breadth of scholarship on the dialogue between Fanon and Sartre. 64 This dialogue has been taken into consideration on the basis of the parallels between their methodologies and theoretical content, direct convergence in some regards, and their shared dialogue through personal friendship. For the purpose of this thesis, however, I focus on Sartre’s relevance to the project of understanding Fanon’s dialectics. Treatment of Sartre is limited here to his dialectical methodology, constituted by his conception of dialectical reason, from its existential basis to its culmination into a theory of history. There is an acute importance in situating Fanon in relation to Sartre’s dialectics, as it helps to give rigidity to some aspects of Fanon’s narrative of decolonisation and make explicit Fanon’s implicit use of dialectics. Here, I apply the same formula to an analysis of Sartre’s relevance to Fanon’s dialectics as I did with Césaire in the previous chapter. This starts with the initial task of making distinct Sartre’s dialectical thought. Writing for over 50 years, and in many different literary formats, Sartre’s social and political philosophy develops over the course of his life. This is significant because Sartre’s existentialism, for which he is perhaps most well-known, takes on additional nuance and complexity in its maturation. As a result, I proceed in three sections that takes Sartre’s intellectual development seriously. First, I elucidate Sartre’s notion of radical existential freedom, seeking to make its resonance with racialised oppressions clear. Second, I look to Sartre’s Marxism, and particularly the way in which existentialism becomes subsumed to the broader methodology of Marxism. He achieves this by way of a dialectical approach to knowledge. Third, this new methodology establishes a basis on which Sartre is 64 See for example: Jonathan Judaken, Race After Sartre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008); Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renée T White, Fanon: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers 1996) Rabaka, Africana Critical Theory.

26 able to construct a dialectical theory of history. This offers a dialectical reasoning from which dialectical analysis can find its grounding. Importantly, this dialectical reason informs Sartre’s writing on the concept of négritude, allowing an understanding of why Sartre envisions négritude as a ‘dialectical necessity'. Here, Sartre comes directly into conversation with both Césaire and Fanon, and parallels or divergences from their respective theoretical standpoints will become clear. There are two disclaimers I would like to make at the onset of this discussion that are related to the problem of subordinated theoretical identity. The first is that I do not wish to frame Fanon as someone subordinate to Sartre. There has been a tendency to draw a causal relationship between the social theory of Sartre and Fanon that stems from embedded racial bias within a Eurocentric academe. It is far too common to see Fanon reduced to the status of a ‘Sartrean’ scholar, but never Sartre reduced to a ‘Fanonian'. Thus, I resist any attempt at using Sartre to validate Fanon. I do so in following the lead of Gordon who writes, ‘it is not our intent to continue the long standing tradition of treating the thoughts of black philosophers as derivatives of white ones'. 65 This tendency harbours a double standard that determines the way in which these philosophers and their projects are viewed. Against this tendency, then, I frame the relationship between Sartre and Fanon as one that follows a dialectical model of critical intimacy, which eschews both causality and self-sufficiency. Reading them together in a dialectical model of critical intimacy emphasises the intellectual development of both towards each other, rather than a one-sided narrative that reads Fanon through Sartre and not the other way around. While Fanon is influenced by Sartre, Fanon equally pushes Sartre to consider a wide range of issues including race, colonialism, and the limits of European philosophy. 66 Recognizing the complexity of their symbiotic relationship 65 Lewis R. Gordon, Frantz Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1995), 14. 66 A critique of Bernasconi appears in George Ciccariello-Maher’s chapter ‘European Intellectuals and Colonial Difference: Césaire and Fanon Beyond Sartre and Foucault’, in Race After Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism, ed. Jonathan Judaken (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 141-143. Ciccariello-Maher here accuses Bernasconi of silencing Fanon’s influence on Sartre, neglecting Sartre’s deference to Fanon at points and in ‘Black Orpheus’ as maintaining authority over the project of ‘showing the oppressor to himself’. Instead, Ciccariello- Maher asserts that Sartre’s intellectual development was towards Fanon.

27 allows us to equally distribute testimony and validity both ways, and resist against perpetuating a racist bias within methods of comparative analysis. I approach Sartre’s contribution to Fanon’s dialectics in a manner appropriate to the nature of this problematic. The second disclaimer can also be reframed within a dialectical model of critical intimacy. Gordon writes that there is a ‘longstanding assumption that Africana and black peoples bring experience to a world whose understanding finds theoretical grounding in European, often read as “white” thought'. 67 The intention of this section itself – to show Sartre’s influence on Fanon’s dialectics – is at risk of falling into the dynamic that Gordon warns against. This implication of the problem of subordinated theoretical identity is in ascribing universal applicability to the thought of white philosophers, while confining black philosophers’ thought to the particularity of their identity and lived experience. In this sense, Sartre is often afforded access to universality where Fanon is not. The irony is that Fanon anticipates the false basis on which this bias operates, insisting on the particularity of European universalism. The result of this problem, where black thought is treated as a particularity, and white thought is treated as universal, has real implications. One such implication is identified by James Penney, who writes that ‘attempts to grasp Fanon’s work as a coherent and unified theoretical project – limited here and there as any discourse, of course, by symptomatic contradiction – have been all too rare'. 68 Although Penney does not ascribe this to the problem of subordinated theoretical identity or Eurocentrism within academia himself, his observation supports Gordon’s point well. The effect renders black thought as incomplete, needing theoretical validation from theory written from within a thin veil of European universalism. Reframing Fanon and Sartre’s relationship through a dialectical model of critical intimacy can hold the terms which set the guidelines for this relationship between theory (white) and experience (black) accountable. 67 Lewis R. Gordon, ‘Reasoning in Black: Africana Philosophy Under the Weight of Misguided Reason’, in The Savannah Review, no. 1 (2012), 88. 68 James Penney, ‘Passing into the Universal: Fanon, Sartre, and the Colonial Dialectic', 49.

28 One of the ways in which Fanon and Sartre’s thought converges most explicitly is their dialectics. On this, David Caute notes that ‘Fanon’s methodology is mainly implicit (and this became increasingly true in his later work) whereas Sartre’s is explicit'. 69 Both start from a shared concern with the condition of radical existential freedom that develops systematically in its encounter with the material reality of its situation. Yet, Sartre’s development of dialectics, starting from this origin, is done so within a theoretical framework of dialectical methodology, where Fanon does so within a phenomenological account of racialised and colonial oppression. Thus, where Sartre offers to Fanon the rigidity of a theoretical framework, Fanon offers to Sartre a substantive and rigorous discussion of an actual historical situation to which his framework can be applied. Framing this relationship as moving toward each other, rather than Fanon providing a particular testimony to Sartre and thus reliant on Sartre to be validated, avoids perpetuating this particular implication. Radical Existential Freedom In Existentialism Is a Humanism (1948), Sartre endeavours to work with critiques of existentialism to define, strengthen and reinvigorate its political relevance. Sartre states that the presupposition upon which existentialism rests is that ‘existence comes before essence – or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective'. 70 That existence precedes essence suggests that the existence of people precedes any conceptual determination which emerges both from and of people. Thus, any conception of human nature must be a determination to which the subjective existence cannot be confined. Regarding the latter point, existentialism relies on an affirmation of the subjective in two ways. First, it depends on the existential freedom of human subjectivity, and second, it recognises that people cannot transcend human subjectivity. Subjectivity in this regard is equal to radical existential freedom, the condition upon which a person has the freedom to choose. There has arguably been too much focus on the concept of individual choice in 69 David Caute, Frantz Fanon, 33. 70 Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism (London: Metheun 1948), 26.

29 consideration of Sartre’s existentialism, leading to a skewed and misinformed interpretation of existentialism’s radical potential. Yet, if we reconsider this exaggerated concept of individualism within Sartre, we are still left with important ideas considering the subjective. In acknowledging the ability to choose, we encounter notions of bad faith and authenticity, both of which are crucial to Sartre’s existentialism, and his later revisions of orthodox Marxism. Bad faith for Sartre is the condition of ‘not-being-what-one-is'. 71 In other words, to deny one’s own existential condition of freedom, or recognising ‘the situation of man as one of free choice', gives rise to a crisis of self-deception, which we call bad faith. 72 The concept of authenticity stands in opposition to that of bad faith, and relies on the assumption of responsibility for oneself, but also the rest of humanity. The notion of freedom conceived here is radical, in the sense that existential freedom must will itself, as Simone de Beauvoir writes, to ‘an open future, by seeking to extend itself by means of the freedom of others'. 73 Freedom is thus irredeemable without the burden of a humanistic responsibility. To illustrate, Sartre writes of the consequence of freedom, that ‘man being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for our world and for himself as a way of being’. 74 And further, they ‘must assume the situation with the proud consciousness of being the author of it'. 75 Thus, authenticity in terms of responsibility manifests as a commitment to humanity, and to the betterment of the world through action. Conceiving of freedom and responsibility as inseparable gives Sartre the basis through which he is able to argue that existentialism serves as a doctrine of action. This establishes the ensuing connection between existentialism and humanism. The humanistic aspect of existentialism is what draws Sartre to the eventual dissolution of existentialism within Marxism. 71 Sartre, Being and Nothingness (Washington: Washington Square Press, 1999 [1943]), 70. 72 Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, 51. 73 Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Citadel Press, 1976 [1948]), 60. 74 Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays in Existentialism, ed. Wade Baskin (Secaucus, N.J: Citadel Press, 1997 [1957]), 63. 75 Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays in Existentialism, 63.

30 Given this brief description of Sartre’s basis for existentialism, its pertinence to the postcolonial or anticolonial condition should be clear. Articulations of the will to freedom and liberation form the backbone of anticolonial politics and thought, and is an inescapable concern for all those whose lives are, as Fanon says, ‘overdetermined from without'. 76 In other words, the colonial gaze attributes a certain determination on the basis of race, that fixes on to the racialised subject. The result is a denial of the interiority and subjectivity of their existence. The colonised embodies an absence of personhood, in direct contradistinction of the condition of radical existential freedom. Fanon writes, I am overdetermined from without. I am not the slave of the “idea” that others have of me but of my appearance. I move slowly in the world, accustomed now to seek no longer for upheaval. I progress by crawling. And already I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed. Having adjusted their microtomes, they cut away objectively slices of my reality. I am laid bare. I feel, I see in those white looks that it is not a new man who has come in, but a new type of man, a new genus. Why, it’s a Negro! 77 The will to liberation involves inhabiting a despair of the most existential kind. This is why Gordon writes that ‘any theory that fails to address the existential phenomenological dimension of racism suffers from a failure to address the situational dimension'. 78 Such a claim is supported by Kelley, who as we saw in the previous section on Césaire describes black suffering as existential in nature. This is because racism constitutes a crisis of bad faith that imposes itself onto the existential subject via the signifier of blackness – the black body – which determines one’s self from the outside, accounting for what we might call existential alienation, or alienation from oneself. The connection between racialised experience and existentialism thus takes place around the tensions and contradictions between the notion of radical existential freedom, and the 76 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 87. 77 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 87. 78 Lewis Gordon, ‘Existential Dynamics of Theorizing Black Invisibility’ in Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy, ed. Lewis Gordon (New York: Routledge, 1997), 70.

31 lived experience of race. This relies on a discussion of how and why in a colonial situation one cannot simultaneously be free and black. It is also important to note here that the lived experience of race entails an acknowledgement of the material oppression of racialised peoples, which lends to Sartre’s conception of freedom an important implication. Freedom cannot only be existential. It must also be political, given it is a situated phenomenon. Gordon centralises this claim in black existential philosophy, where he expands the meaning of bad faith to account for the question of institutional forms of bad faith, where bad faith is embodied in the social reality that conditions the black experience and its capacity for freedom. Black existentialism becomes a way to explore the dialectical bind between body and world. 79 This particular dialectical bind is of primary importance in Fanon’s conception of the zone of nonbeing, as we shall come to see in the Part Two on Fanon’s dialectics. Consequences of this implication, or the avowed introduction of blackness to the study of existentialism, include a reconceptualisation of the revolutionary subject, in differing from existential subjectivity itself, to black and colonised peoples globally. I address these implications in greater detail in Part Two. Existentialism and Marxism Sartre’s commitment to radical existential freedom, and its engagement with its own limits, leads to his reconciliation of existentialism and Marxism. This reconciliation has two important consequences. First, it radicalises both existentialism and Marxism, accounting for the theoretical weaknesses in both. This reconciliation serves as a critique of Marxism – but critique in this context leads ultimately to a defense of Marxism as a result of a dialectical engagement with it, through existentialism. Second, it is on this basis that Sartre is able to 79 I borrow here from Robert J. C. Young, who characterizes Fanon’s play The Drowning Eye and Black Skin, White Masks, as ‘caught in an irresolvable dialectical bind between black and white, past and future, body and world, desire and insentience, consciousness and transcendental immanence'. Here, Young’s use of ‘dialectical bind’ between ‘body and mind’ succinctly characterizes the tension between radical existential freedom and the lived experience of the black body. See: Robert J. C. Young, ‘Fanon, Revolutionary Playwright' in Frantz Fanon, Freedom and Alienation, ed. Jean Khalfa and Robert J. C. Young, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 31.

32 build his dialectical theory of history, which serves as a methodological foundation that aids the project of understanding Fanon’s dialectics. Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) and Search for a Method (1957) articulate his encounter with various criticisms posed to the theoretical foundations of existentialism. Without renouncing existentialism or the radical notion of freedom on which it relies, Sartre seeks to strengthen and reinvigorate its relevance by engaging with its limits, and to expand its revolutionary potential. He does so through his engagement with Marxism, where he finds the tensions between existentialism and Marxism to be not only productive in re- establishing the methodologies of both, but reconcilable into a new, broader social and historical system of thought. Yet, his commitment to the notion of radical existential freedom is what motivates his growing concern with materiality and history, and the implications that situating existential freedom within materially reinforced systems of oppression might have. I acknowledge briefly two criticisms of existentialism which aid in understanding why Sartre gravitates towards Marxism, to the extent to which he calls Marxism ‘the one philosophy of our time we cannot go beyond'. 80 In Being and Nothingness, Sartre identifies two limits of existentialism as follows: ‘(1) The fact that I exist at all and my existing as a free being do not depend on me. I am not free to be free… (2) My freedom is limited by the freedom of the other person'. 81 The second limit foreshadows Sartre’s quest to construct a radical social theory that accounts for the external impositions which hinder the realisation of radical freedom. If freedom is limited by the freedom of the other person, it is also, by logical extension, limited by the situation in which one finds themselves unable to be free. In other words, although freedom is rooted in the subjective, it is conditioned to the extent that external factors intervene in its array of possibility. The fact of the situation refers to the material and historical milieu that constructs the reality of the moment in which the existential subject is situated. To illustrate, Sartre writes, ‘I am not “free” either to escape the lot of my class, of my family’, and further, ‘I am born a worker, 80 Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1963), 30. 81 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 481. See also: Hazel E. Barnes, Introduction to Search for a Method by Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1963), xxiii.

33 a Frenchman, a hereditary syphilitic, or a tubercular'. 82 This assertion is explored in Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (1946) where he writes that the Jewish person is ‘like all other men… he is free… he is at the same time in bondage'. 83 Sartre’s point is that a Jewish person cannot choose to be anything but a Jewish person (although this position also accounts for the fact of race – I return to this point in Chapter Five). If we want to understand what this makes of the Jewish person, then, ‘we must first inquire into the situation surrounding him, since he is a being in a situation'. 84 In recognising the domination and control that the situation exerts on the individual, then, Sartre admits that is necessary to politicise his conception of radical existential freedom. This realisation leads him to Marxist theory. Why Marxism? According to Sartre, ‘what has made the force and richness of Marxism is the fact that it has been the most radical attempt to clarify the historical process in its totality'. 85 To the extent that the material forces of history govern the capacity to realise existential freedom, Sartre considers Marxism as the only appropriate social theory that can comprehend the political and existential implications of the historical milieu that conditions the situation. He comes to express that we cannot go beyond Marxist ideology as long as society has not progressed beyond the historical moment that Marxism expresses. 86 Arguably, Sartre’s insistence on this can be read as a privileging of class over race. Given that the historical moment Marxism expresses in terms of capitalism is inextricably bound up with colonialism, do we not need an equal privileging of both categories? We come back to this idea in Fanon in Part Two, when Fanon stretches Marxist analysis further to accommodate the complexity of the historical moment as he sees it. In the meantime, Sartre poses the question: ‘why then, are we not simply Marxists?’ 87 This leads to an engagement with critiques of Marxism, testing its malleability and strength. 82 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 481. 83 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken, 1976), 43. 84 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 43. 85 Sartre, Search for a Method, 29. 86 Sartre, Search for a Method, 43. 87 Sartre, Search for a Method, 35.

34 Initially, Sartre expresses ‘unreserved’ support of Marx’s formulation of materialism as follows: In the social production of their existence, men enter into relations which are determined, necessary, independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a given stage of development of their material productive forces. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the real foundation upon which a legal and political superstructure arises and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond. 88 So, in extending his concern from radical existential freedom to the material and historical forces that condition the totality of the situation, Sartre is able to base his radicalisation of Marxism by asking how ‘the existential Marxist may hope to understand both individual persons and history'. 89 By retaining this commitment to freedom, Sartre is able to argue that the orthodox Marxism of his time is inadequate in its refusal to consider the individual subject. Sartre’s contestation of the orthodox Marxist view is based on the supposition that it can ‘constitute a knowledge’ in itself. 90 While Sartre takes from Marxism guiding principles upon which a methodology might be constructed, he rejects it as a concrete truth in itself. For Sartre, orthodox Marxism is insufficient for understanding freedom. In illustrating why this is the case, Sartre critiques Friedrich Engels’ claim that ‘that such a man, and precisely this man, arises at a determined period and in a given country is naturally pure chance. But, lacking Napoleon, another man would have filled his place’. 91 Sartre suggests that Engels’ quote is symptomatic of how orthodox Marxism’s determinism refuses to acknowledge the specificity of the subject, perpetuating a tendency to ‘dissolve men into a bath of sulphuric acid'. 92 Sartre considers Engels’ stance as ‘an arbitrary limitation of the dialectical 88 Sartre has not cited this quote, but the translator notes that it comes from Karl Marx’s preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (1959). See: Sartre, Search for a Method, 13. 89 Barnes, Introduction to Search for a Method, ix. 90 Sartre, Search for a Method, 35. 91 Sartre, Search for a Method, 56. 92 Sartre, Search for a Method, 44.

35 movement… [and] a refusal to understand'. 93 This is considered by Sartre to be a limitation on the basis of which revisions to Marxism can be made. Barnes accounts for Sartre’s primary intention behind Search as follows: ‘a Marxism which reinstates the individual, and his praxis at the very heart of history – this seems to Sartre the proper place for an existential freedom to commit itself'. 94 Sartre’s reinstatement of existential freedom to the heart of a Marxist, dialectical analysis of history achieves a similar aim to that of Césaire’s own grapples with Marxism. Although Césaire’s revisions rely on surrealism’s emphasis on psychoanalysis to assert the importance of the human mind, Sartre achieves this by way of retaining existential freedom. Fanon takes on both of these frameworks in his own analysis of history, in particular the history of colonisation, thus reinforcing the primary importance of both Césaire and Sartre’s influence in coming to understand Fanon’s dialectics. This is especially important in recognising Fanon’s multidimensional approach in coming to terms with the way in which individuals matter specifically to the process of decolonisation. Engaging with Césaire allows Fanon to delve into the notion of non-being via surrealist psychoanalytic emphasis on the importance of the human mind. Sartre, however, allows Fanon to be read as giving methodological importance to the subject – the colonised subject – and their role in decolonisation, specifically in reconceptualising who the revolutionary subjects are, and how we can characterise particular groups of people as agents of decolonisation. Dialectical Reason and Négritude The process by which Sartre reconciles existentialism and Marxism establishes a coherent methodology based on dialectical reason. This concept embodies an explicitly dialectical approach to knowledge itself. Sartre’s contribution to the radicalisation of dialectics demonstrates that the task of the true philosopher is a dialectical one, in order for its method 93 Sartre, Search for a Method, 52. 94 Barnes, Introduction to Search for a Method, xxx.

36 to be both ‘a social and political weapon'. 95 This assertion transcends the practice that applies dialectics to an external situation, because it allows for Sartre to make a statement about the nature of knowledge and truth. Regarding knowledge and truth, Sartre argues both must be politicised to the extent that they retain their relevance and vitality through the praxis that engenders them. Otherwise, they must be transformed. This is what Sartre demonstrates through his revisions of existentialism and Marxism. Dialectical reason presents the basis for both Sartre and as we shall come to see, Fanon’s philosophical anthropology. Understanding the principles and motivations that underlie Sartre’s dialectical reason sets up the discussion prior of his reconciliation of existentialism and Marxism. Sartre writes, ‘since I am to speak of existentialism, let it be understood that I take it to be an “ideology.” It is a parasitical system living on the margin of Knowledge, which at first it opposed but into which today it seeks to be integrated'. 96 In practicing dialectical reason, Sartre is able to strengthen and validate his theoretical claims, and avoid the pitfalls of stasis that arise in concrete, undialectical analysis that are characterised, as he alludes, by a fetish for synthesis. 97 Dialectical reason, in comparison to other kinds of reason, is for Sartre ‘neither constituent nor constituted reason; it is Reason constituting itself in and through the world, dissolving in itself all constituted Reasons in order to constitute new ones which it transcends and dissolves in turn'. 98 As we shall see in Part Two, Fanon’s resonance with Sartre’s conception of dialectical reason follows the notion of the totalisation of knowledge. He does not only apply dialectical reason to the case of decolonisation, but the practice of this application exemplifies the way in which Sartre believes knowledge must emerge. The additional benefit of this acknowledgement is that it gives us a frame of reference to acknowledge the parallels that exist in Césaire’s relationship with knowledge, discussed in Chapter One. Establishing the similarities that exist in Sartre, Césaire and Fanon’s methods and critical approach to philosophical 95 Full quote for clarity: ‘Every philosophy is practical, even the one which at first appears to be most contemplative. Its method is a social and political weapon'. See: Sartre, Search for a Method, 5. 96 Sartre, Search for a Method, 8. 97 On Sartre’s critique of orthodox Marxist analysis (as opposed to dialectical reason) and its fetish for synthesis via the concept of totality, see: Sartre, Search for a Method, 26-27. 98 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume One, 21.

37 anthropology mediates the task of coming to understand the nature of Fanon’s dialectics in both its application, and approach to knowledge. In addition to knowledge, Sartre also argues that dialectical reason drives the movement of history. Hazel Barnes suggests that Sartre is indebted to Hegel for the interpretation of history as a dialectical process. Barnes writes, Through Marxism, [Sartre] says, existentialism has inherited and retains two things from Hegel: First, the view that if there is to be any Truth in man’s understanding of himself, it must be a Truth which becomes; Truth is something which emerges. And second, what Truth must become is a totalization. In “Search for a Method,” Sartre says, “I have taken it for granted that such a totalization is perpetually in process as History and as historical Truth.” 99 Truth manifests in both knowledge and history, and these themselves are interrelated dialectically. Sartre’s conception of both suggests they are characteristically alive, given that they are an active (as they are always becoming), rather than a passive or static phenomenon. They are constantly in motion, driven by the tensions and contradictions that they produce, and through which they pass. Sartre’s conception of history as a result of dialectical movement understands history as a process of totalisation in the same way he considers knowledge as a process of totalisation. He begins from a Hegelian framework, ‘wherein existing contradictions give rise to a new synthesis which surpasses them'. 100 Applying this understanding of dialectics to the process of history constitutes Sartre’s ‘progressive-regressive’ method of historical investigation. This method encompasses the general, real movement of history, to understand the phenomena by which history is driven. Placing Sartre’s notion of négritude within this broader framework helps to illustrate how his theory of history plays out. Moreover, it identifies limits to his theory of history, by way of its retention of more conservative elements it seeks to shed. In Black Orpheus (1948), 99 Barnes, Introduction to Search for a Method, x. 100 Barnes, Introduction to Search for a Method, x.

38 Sartre discusses négritude in relation to Césaire and Leopold Senghor. Importantly, Sartre becomes in the process a European response to both, and the voice through which Europe comes to understand the movement. The result is a distinctly ‘Sartrean négritude’, which develops in line with the theory of history this section has elucidated. Sartre’s dialectics, as presented in Black Orpheus, advance by subsuming the particular into the broader struggle of that which he deems universal. This is the internal movement that corresponds to the process of totalisation. The expense of a dissolution of one struggle to another is clarified when we turn to his treatment of négritude. Tellingly, he writes that ‘the notion of race does not mix with the notion of class: the former is concrete and particular; the latter, universal and abstract’. 101 Négritude becomes for Sartre a moment in a wider dialectical progression defined by class struggle. 102 It faces therefore a ‘natural’ end, in so far as it aids the class struggle – that defining universal struggle that determines the basis on which the future is conceived. In his account, this future takes the form of a predetermined synthesis: a raceless, classless society. This leads Sartre to conclude, reductively, that négritude ‘is for destroying itself, it is a “crossing to” and not an “arrival at,” a means and not an end’. 103 If Fanon had trusted Sartre before this, he was now in a position to reconsider his judgement. Fanon, shocked at Sartre’s blunt and relentless placement of négritude as a minor and relative struggle to that of class, replies: ‘the dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself’. 104 Fanon brings to light a limit to Sartre’s dialectics. If disalienation from the Manichaeism of racism is justified on the basis of its usefulness to the class struggle, then Sartre has relied on a determinism that goes against his own Hegelian logic. Fanon reminds him that in the Hegelian dialectic, ‘consciousness has to lose itself in the night of the absolute, the only condition to attain to consciousness of self’. 105 Sartre, however, had denied the absoluteless and temporal essentialism underlying the 101 Sartre, ‘Black Orpheus’, trans. John MacCombie, The Massachusetts Review, vol. 6, no. 1 (1964), 49. 102 Sartre, ‘Black Orpheus’, 49. 103 Sartre, ‘Black Orpheus’, 49. 104 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 103. 105 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 102,

39 dialectics of négritude. Here, in Sartre’s failure to apply the Hegelian logic of dialectics to the struggle of négritude, he underestimates its radical and open-ended potential. Further, he strips from black struggle its right to be complete and whole in itself. Fanon’s reproach: ‘black consciousness is immanent in its own eyes. I am not a potentiality of something, I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal’. 106 While in Black Orpheus Sartre retains a fetish for unity and synthesis in his analysis of négritude, over a decade later he comes to condemn this exact trend in his Critique of Dialectical Reason. This is a point at which one can argue that it is through his dialogue with Fanon that he revises his position later on, and is able to strengthen his dialectics. This highlights the moving of both theorists towards each other, instead of the one-dimensional move of Fanon towards Sartre that many scholars propose. Ciccariello-Maher in fact argues that this change in Sartre as a result of dialogue with Fanon over négritude can be found additionally in his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. 107 Before realising this mistake, however, Sartre’s dialectics as it appears in Black Orpheus refuses to lend to race the struggle on its own terms. What we might distinguish then as Sartre’s ‘earlier’ dialectics as they appear in Black Orpheus illustrates a common trend that will reappear in the treatment of dialectics by Buck-Morss and Taylor. I explore this in Chapters Eight and Nine respectively. That such a conceptual failure may happen decades after Sartre had learnt from his mistake reveals the worrying persistence of the conservative dialectical tradition. That Sartre revised this mistake, where more contemporary scholars have not, leaves us to conclude that some scholars are not learning the lessons of the past, especially in relation to anticolonialism and dialectics. If such lessons learnt are forgotten time and time again, knowledge becomes static. A return to a dialectical approach to knowledge of which Sartre writes may account for the escape from such stasis, and only then can Truth, as Sartre says, be something that ‘becomes’. 106 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 103. 107 George Ciccariello-Maher, ‘European Intellectuals and Colonial Difference’, 129-154.

40 CHAPTER THREE FANON’S LIVED EXPERIENCE This chapter offers a brief contextualisation of Fanon’s theoretical endeavours, here detailed within the trajectory of his own life – a somewhat phenomenological account that illustrates in part the theory that I come to explain in Part Two. This in an effort to avoid the mistakes that Peter Hudis accuses many Fanon scholars of, that is, ‘detaching his pronouncements from the lived experienced that produced them'. 108 It is therefore an attempt to ground Fanon’s theory within his lived experience by inquiring into the situation in which they were produced. Importantly, it also illustrates Fanon’s own position of embodied contradiction. The significance of this context cannot be understated, given that these life events and experiences have already set Fanon up, however unwittingly, to establish an early familiarity with the dialectical rhythm at play in the colonial world. Martinique, France and Algeria Fanon was born and raised in Martinique. During this time, racism was latent. Its more explicit forms were concealed by an emphasis on the ‘Frenchness’ of black Martinicans at the expense of any acknowledgement of a distinctly African cultural heritage. 109 Despite the country’s political power and economic wealth being held by the békés (the white descendants of early European settlers/slave-owners), they made up approximately only 2,000 out of the country’s population of 150,000. 110 A heightened sense of economic inequality shrouded the racial and colonial qualities of this dynamic. Of this period Fanon writes, ‘before 1939, the West Indian claimed to be happy, or at least thought of himself as being so'. 111 108 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 11. 109 Discussed in Frantz Fanon, ‘The West Indians and Africans’, in Toward the African Revolution, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967 [1964]). 110 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 13. 111 Frantz Fanon, ‘The West Indians and Africans’, 19.

41 World War Two came as a brutal shock to this attitude. Hudis describes this moment in 1939 as an important turning point for both Fanon and Martinique: In October – shortly after the outbreak of World War II – a French military fleet commanded by Admiral Georges Robert arrived in Martinique. It was sent there by the French government to ensure that the fleet would not face a possible German attack. Along with the ships came 10,000 virulent racists who took advantage of every opportunity to lord it over the native population. For the first time Fanon, like many others, had the opportunity to experience overt and systematic racist discrimination up close. 112 In addition to the attitude of racism, the soldiers brought to Martinique a period of severe economic destitution. 10,000 soldiers, and sometimes their families too, overwhelmed Martinique’s economic capacity to manage housing, infrastructure, and food. Alice Cherki notes that Martinique began to experience severe food shortages, and that Martinicans began to notice ‘the discrepancy between how these were experienced by the soldiers and the general population'. 113 Food that was in short supply was reserved for the French soldiers, while the local population were forced to make do with what they could. The local population, writes Fanon, ‘held those white racists responsible for all this’ and for the first time, began to question their values. 114 Following this was Germany’s defeat of France in 1940. Hudis notes that ‘Robert threw his lot in with the Marshall Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy regime – an action that further exacerbated tensions with the black population, which largely identified with Republican France'. 115 Although 14 at the time, Fanon’s hindsight in later years drew out the depth of the implications of this moment, describing it as a point in which ‘the West Indian underwent his first metaphysical experience'. 116 It was this same period in which Césaire’s 112 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 15. 113 Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, trans. Nadia Benabid (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006 [2000]), 9. 114 Fanon, ‘The West Indians and the Africans’, 23. 115 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 15-16. 116 Fanon, ‘The West Indians and the Africans', 23.

42 emphasis on négritude and black identity began to take root in mass consciousness. The assertion of black pride took on extraordinary liberatory dimensions in this context. The impact of being confronted with their blackness had resounding force on the black Martinicans that seemed to bring to light contradictions that were previously latent in this particular colonial world. The same encounters with the shock of discovering his own blackness were reinforced when Fanon, ages 17, joined the Free French Army in 1944 led by France’s government in exile, and headed by Charles de Gaulle, to push back against Vichy France. Césaire had disapproved of the move that many young Martinicans made, calling World War Two ‘a white man’s war'. It took Fanon some time however, and exposure to hypocrisies of the French for him to eventually reach the same conclusion anticipated by Césaire. 117 Initially, Fanon had eagerly insisted on a somewhat race-blind humanism, having said to a friend that ‘whenever human dignity and freedom are at stake, it involves us, whether we be black, white or yellow. And whenever these are threatened in any corner of the earth, I will fight them to the end'. 118 This sentiment was not returned by the Europeans he encountered in the Free French Army. Instead, Fanon observed stark racial hierarchies in the army, and the depth of their hatred for Jews, Muslims and blacks. While he had wanted to fight for ‘human dignity', the Europeans seemed to have a different notion of what this meant entirely. Fanon later lamented in a letter to his brother Joby, ‘I’ve been deceived, and I am paying for my mistakes’, and ‘I’m sick of it all'. 119 This is emphasised in a letter to his parents, If I don’t come back, and if one day you should learn that I died facing the enemy, console each other, but never say: he died for the good cause. Say: God called him back to him. This false ideology that shields the secularists and the idiot politicians must not delude us any longer. I was wrong! 120 117 Quoted in Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 18. Other sources attribute this quote to a friend of Fanon. 118 Said to Fanon’s childhood friend Marcel Manville, who recounted this later. See Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, 10. 119 Quoted in Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 19; and in David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography (New York: Picador USA, 2001), 101. 120 Quoted in Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, 104.

43 These realisations, the result of a series of alienating experiences, establish fertile ground on which Fanon comes to explore the dialectics within and between the ontological and psycho- existential levels. In 1947, Fanon had enrolled in medical school at the University of Lyon to pursue the path of psychiatry. This choice has a dialectical significance. As Lewis Gordon points out, that Fanon chose to pursue psychiatry (instead of his original choice of dentistry, or any other general practice) reveals an early interest in the ‘convergence of the natural and human sciences'. 121 This move foreshadows Fanon’s transdisciplinarity that becomes more explicit with his intellectual development. It was in Lyon that Black Skin, White Masks was produced, and it is in this text that we find Fanon’s profound exploration, in equal parts psychoanalytical and philosophical, of a dialectics of disalienation under the conditions of racist colonialism. This text was written at a time in Europe where inadequate attention was being paid to the lived experience of black people, or the phenomenological effects of racism and colonialism. Virtually no European psychoanalyst or philosopher that Fanon came to know of – other than Sartre – seemed to want to understand or be willing to explore these issues. 122 The Wretched of the Earth was published in 1961, nearly a decade after Fanon had left Lyon and arrived in Algeria to work at the Blida-Joinville Hospital as a psychiatrist. Although his lived experience in Martinique and France was conditioned by colonialism in some way, particularly around the inner life of racism in the wake of an ongoing colonial project, Fanon’s new position in Algeria enabled him to see clearly and grasp explicitly the actual material and Manichaean structure of colonialism within a national territory. An example of this progression in Fanon’s work can be found in his treatment of ‘North African Syndrome'. 123 At the Blida-Joinville Hospital, Fanon and his colleagues found 121 Lewis Gordon, What Fanon Said (London: Hurst & Company, 2015), 13. 122 Hudis notes Merleau-Ponty, for example, who Fanon studied under while in Lyon. See: Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 28. 123 Fanon, ‘The North African Syndrome', in Toward the African Revolution, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967 [1964]), 3-16.

44 themselves presented with North African Arab patients who would complain of vague illnesses. The dialogue between doctor and patient would follow a pattern: “What’s wrong my friend?” “I’m dying, monsieur le docteur.” His voice breaks imperceptibly. “Where do you have pain?” “Everywhere, monsieur le docteur.” 124 The doctor proposes a generic treatment, and Fanon identifies two possible outcomes. In both, he says, ‘the patient is not immediately relieved'. 125 This leads Fanon to the diagnosis of a North African Syndrome, wherein the nature of the patient’s ‘imaginary ailment’ demands ‘a situational diagnosis'. 126 Only a thorough study of the situation in which the patient finds themselves can offer a valid explanation of the experience of ‘a daily death'. 127 It is the situation of colonialism and war, after all, in which the patient is ‘cut off from his origins and cut off from his ends, he is a thing tossed into the great sound and fury, bowed beneath the law of inertia'. 128 The solution does not come in medicinal treatment. It is instead a material solution Fanon proposes: ‘there are houses to be built, schools to be opened, slums to be torn down, cities to be made to spring from the earth, men and women, children and children to be adorned with smiles'. 129 Such a demand could not come without an appeal to decolonisation. From this point on, Fanon’s engagement with the national struggle in Algeria for independence from France gained momentum. The small changes Fanon made in the everyday practices of psychiatry and socio-therapy at the hospital gave way to the urgent need to grasp the material reality of Algeria under colonialism in its totality. If any real change was to be won for those most violently oppressed and alienated from colonial 124 Fanon, ‘The North African Syndrome', 4. 125 Fanon, ‘The North African Syndrome', 5. 126 Fanon, ‘The North African Syndrome’, 10. 127 Fanon, ‘The North African Syndrome’, 15. 128 Fanon, ‘The North African Syndrome’, 15. 129 Fanon, ‘The North African Syndrome’, 15.

45 Algerian society (those who ended up in the Blida-Joinville Hospital, for example), Fanon knew he must gain a comprehensive understanding of the connection between the inner life of racism and alienation and its outer realities. Although in Black Skin, White Masks Fanon had asserted that the problem of racism was primarily economic, he had not provided a material analysis that explained how this was the case. By the time he came to write The Wretched of the Earth, however, he had been seized by the conviction and urgency that can be attributed to the realisation Hudis identifies, that ‘the Algerian revolution was not only important in its own right, but the vanguard of the effort to liberate Africa as a whole'. 130 Thus, Fanon’s thesis of decolonisation gains a critical international (and pan-African) dimension on the basis of an analysis of the material structures of colonial capitalism. On 8 May 1945, the same day that World War Two ended, the Sétif massacre began in Algeria. 131 Murmurs of independence amidst a celebratory march for the end of the war ended in a five day massacre with French troops murdering 30,000 native Algerians. 132 Later that year, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), a new political and paramilitary organisation, claimed responsibility for a series of bombs set off in Algiers. The question of independence was firmly set on the table, forcing its way into public discourse both in Algeria and in France. French politicians and intellectuals, notably even those on the Left and part of the French Communist Party, did not support the cause of independence. The French went to great lengths to repress the movement, establishing martial law in Algeria. Over the next eight years, more than one million native Algerians would lose their lives to French torture and murder during the war. 133 The same year, the FLN contacted Fanon because they were in need of a psychiatrist to help those within the movement. 134 Fanon agreed, and from this point committed himself to the Algerian Revolution. 130 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 88. 131 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 69. 132 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 69. 133 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 71-72. 134 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 73.

46 Hudis notes that in 1955, ‘the FLN launched a full-scale insurreaction. The French responded by widening and intensifying its repression, and ‘a “Manichaean” divide showed itself between colonizer and colonized'. 135 The entirety of his lived experience and his earlier work suggest that Fanon knew very well that the Manichaean divide of colonialism existed at different levels already. But clearly, during a time of war, he saw it in its most intense, material manifestation. Fanon was well placed to observe the actual dynamics of the revolution. He would have also witnessed conversations and events in which the principles of the revolution, and of post-liberated society, were debated. 136 Parts of The Wretched of the Earth concerning national consciousness, for example, may have roots in conversations he witnessed regarding the decision to grant immediate citizenship upon liberation to Kabyle and Jewish people, and that the priority of the movement for independence becomes the people within the bounds of the national territory. This recollection of Fanon’s situation does not intend to reduce him to his lived experience. It does however illustrate the layers at which alienation are distinguishable in Fanon’s lived experience. Further, it testifies to how Fanon’s lived experience, his subjectivity, and his particularity, gives him access to a greater understanding of that which may be considered universal. Cherki makes an important distinction between Fanon and culturalism, a category to which Fanon is often designated. She writes, ‘difference, in the hands of the culturalists, is posited as a challenge to universalism that informs the great systems of Western knowledge. Fanon, on the other hand, views culture as a point of temporal and spatial reference that is also a conduit to the universal'. 137 Understanding the content of this point of reference, then, is in line with Fanon’s own views on the relationship shared between the universal and the particular. Furthermore, the nature of Fanon’s lived experience foreshadows the three chapters in Part Two by alluding to their tripartite structure. 135 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 74. 136 Those of the Soummam Conference of 1956, for example. See: Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 137 Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, 34.

47 PART TWO ON FANON’S DIALECTICS Frantz Fanon is radically dialectical. Part Two explores the nature of this claim with the intention of advancing Fanon as a ‘theorist of rupture'. By this, I mean that Fanon’s dialectics are a ruptural dialectics. The reason for this is twofold. First, Fanon advocates for dialectical movement through rupture, which is contingent on privileging rupture over notions of unity or synthesis. This means that Fanon’s dialectics have an emphasis on movement through an embrace of the contradictions at the heart of a particular struggle. Rupture, then, is integral to breaking the structures that reinforce alienation at the three sites of the ontological, the psycho-existential, and the situational. Second, Fanon’s discourse on decolonisation is structured according to the different levels at which (or categories in which) dialectics operate. I have chosen to call these levels the three ‘sites of rupture’ around which Fanon’s work revolves, and these correspond to chapters Four, Five and Six respectively. Fanon’s dialectics carefully considers each of these sites as levels at which contradictions occur under colonial capitalism. As we shall see, these sites bleed into each other, the boundaries are not clear cut as the dialectic at one level reinforces and perpetuates the dialectic at the others. This also suggests that one site cannot be privileged over the other. Fanon also maintains a dialectical approach to knowledge. The value he places on the theories he engages with depends on the extent to which they prove useful in analysing the situation of colonisation and/or the process of decolonisation. This approach to knowledge falls in line with the dialectical reason underlying what Sartre had called the ‘totalisation of knowledge’ explored in Chapter Two. This notion is found on the basis that thought must be subjected to ongoing dialectical transformations in order to be integrated into the state of knowledge. Sartre argues for the imperative of dialectical totalisation in its relation to knowledge against notions that harbour a fetish for the synthesis (unified coherence) of

50 At the risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man. 140 The pages that follow take us into the ‘veritable hell’ of colonialism – a hell that exists simultaneously within and between the boundaries of the ontological and psycho-existential realms. A shift in the emphasis of different parts of the articulation above suggests that Black Skin, White Masks supports the claim to the operation of the dialectic at these levels. The first emphasis on the ‘problem’ of the black ‘man’ refers the reader to the ontological problem at hand, that correlates to the realm of being. 141 Asking what the black man ‘wants', however, signals the platform on which desire operates – that of subjective life. At the ontological level, the black man – who Fanon asserts, is not a man – faces the struggle of becoming ontological (Absolute). That is, he faces the struggle to become a ‘man’. On the psycho-existential level, his subjective experience is characterised by lack or absence, which establishes the function of desire – to become a white man. At the onset of the discussion Fanon states, ‘indeed, I believe that only a psychoanalytical interpretation of the black problem can lay bare the anomalies of affect that are responsible for the structure of the complex'. 142 What underlies the psychoanalytical dimension of his analysis is both his existential conceptions of radical freedom and assumptions about the ontological. If the black is not a man, after all, then Fanon has recognised that alienation can function at the depth of being itself. Black Skin, White Masks begins almost immediately with an assertion to this effect, 140 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1. 141 Given the nature of this chapters engagement with Fanon and the text it draws from, I cannot wholly avoid the problem of gendered language (‘the black man’; at times ‘the black’ in Fanon refers specifically to the black man). Any use of gendered language on my part is to maintain consistency with Fanon, and also to not shield him from any criticism that might arise on this basis. 142 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 3.

51 There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born. In most cases, the black man lacks the advantage of being able to accomplish this descent into a real hell. 143 The black man, in Fanon’s account, is trapped within an ontological ‘flaw’. 144 He is, that is, he exists, but simultaneously he is trapped in an emulation of hell – that ‘zone of nonbeing’ that prevents him from truly embodying a state of being or essentiality. It also this ontological flaw that prevents him from being recognised – as we come to see. He is not recognised by the settler as entirely non-human, but he is also not recognisable as fully human, either. It is easy to read Fanon as a rejection of ontology for the reason that at a surface level, he appears to be dismissive of the study of being itself. This is based on his observation that under colonial relations, the black man does not reside in the zone of being in the first place. Why then, would he be concerned with the category of being? Hudis suggests that Fanon denies any such ontology since he proceeds from a phenomenological perspective’. 145 But these are not mutually exclusive. Consider the following passage: There is of course the moment of “being for others,” of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society. It would seem that this fact has not been given sufficient attention by those who have discussed the question. In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw that outlaws any ontological explanation. Someone may object that this is the case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem. Ontology - once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside - does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. 146 We see from the articulation above that Fanon is concerned, in some way, with the problem of ontology itself, that is, to the extent that one faces an ontological flaw. This is precisely because the dialectic, as it operates within the categories of the psycho-existential and the 143 Fanon, Black SKin, White Masks, 2. 144 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 82. 145 Hudis, Frantz Fanon, 32. 146 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 82.

52 nation, reverberate all the way back to ontological level. The dialectics at each level reinforces the ontological negation that concerns Fanon. It reinforces, ultimately, the contradiction that is inherent to any status of the racialised and colonised as less-than-being. Fanon’s work, then, can be read as a critique of ontology. We might point to the limits to a solely ontological reflection, its inability to account for the colonised subject, and contest the rigidity of an ontological category which holds whiteness as its standard for what it means to ‘be’. In a sense, Fanon is moving to politicise reflections on being-for-others, given the social dynamics that make this most necessary condition unattainable. Yet, it is not an outright denial of the fundamental question of what it means to be, or even of the possibility or existence of a black ontology. Consider Fanon’s brief discussion of Bantu ontology, for example, where he posits that the question of Bantu ontology might have interested me if certain details had not held me back. What use are reflections on Bantu ontology when one reads elsewhere: ‘When 75,000 black miners went on strike in 1946, the state police forced them back to work by firing on them with rifles and charging with fixed bayonets. Twenty-five were killed and thousands were wounded'. 147 Fanon follows this up by remarking, ‘Bantu ontology knows nothing of the metaphysical misery of Europe'. 148 The question of being, then, in Bantu thought, is secondary for Fanon given that Bantu existence is considered to be on the plane of less-than-being in Europe. 149 Any ontological claim, or any claim to ontology, then must be simply suspended. This is so that the realm of being has not been taken for granted and can be appropriately investigated, problematised and politicised. What Fanon does is more complicated than denying 147 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 142. Quotation marks added. The part of this quote contained in quotation marks (on the miners) is attributed by Fanon to I.R. Skine, ‘Apartheid en Afrique du Sud’, Les Temps Modernes, July, 1950. 148 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 143. 149 Paraphrased, Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 143.

53 ontological reflection outright – he reveals that contradictions under racist colonialism can function at the ontological level. Fanon’s exploration of the nature of this particular contradiction is constantly at play in the subtext of Black Skin, White Masks. He writes, For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man. Some critics will take it upon themselves to remind us that this proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man. 150 Ontology does not permit us to understand the being of the black man, because as he has previously asserted, under conditions of racism and colonialism the black is not a man. Under colonial relations, racialised subjects are not given the same material, political or social status as those who are white, which has actual ontological implications - primarily that of losing ‘ontological resistance'. 151 Unpacking this observation relies on understanding that Fanon has here foreshadowed the notion of reciprocity as he later discusses in the section titled ‘The Negro and Hegel'. In this section, Fanon begins with a quote from Hegel that establishes quite clearly establishes his intention: ‘self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or recognized'. 152 For Hegel, self-consciousness in the full sense of mutual recognition can only be (in and for itself) on the condition that it is also for-others. This makes self-consciousness dependent on the condition that it is recognised by the Other. Fanon accords with the precedent Hegel sets for the intersubjective conditions required for being and freedom. Here, we have a very basic articulation of the dialectic between self and 150 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 83. 151 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 83. 152 This appears in the English translation of Black Skin, White Masks. In Peau noire masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952), Fanon cites Hippolyte’s translation of G. W. F. Hegel, La phénoménologie de l’esprit (Paris: Aubier 1941), 155. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018 [1807]),

54 other – both are simultaneously at odds and dependent on each other for their own affirmation. Fanon interprets Hegel’s articulation of intersubjectivity in his own words: ‘man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognised by him'. 153 Attaining the ontological status of human is contingent on being recognized by the Other. Fanon gestures to the colonial context in a pointed way, emphasising that the colonised subject becomes sub-ontological/less-than-being because he is not sufficiently recognised by the Other (the settler). In a world where the philosophies, customs and way of life of the native population were destroyed by the colonizer, genuine intersubjectivity – or mutual recognition – is simply not a given dimension of human relations between colonised and coloniser. The implications of this imposition are ontological, in the sense that Fanon meant when he described the turning point in the history of Martinique when the French Army’s racism confronted the Martinicans with their own blackness. Fanon offers what Hudis has called a ‘critical appropriation’ of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. 154 This point is perhaps most clearly illustrated with the example of the master/slave dialectic found in Hegel, which Fanon uses to pinpoint the implications of a prematurely closed dialectic. In fact, the basic formulation behind Fanon’s reconstruction of the master/slave dialectic underlies the construction of the dialectic at all three levels that I analyse. Fanon only explicitly devotes a total of five pages to a formulation that underlies much of the content of his work. I return to this dialectic in detail again in Chapter Nine of this thesis, looking to Coulthard’s specific use of the notion of recognition. Here, however, I am primarily engaging with it in order to illustrate the lack of being-for-others (from the point of view of the settler) in the colonial context, and the ontological implications of such a dynamic. 153 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 168. 154 Hudis, ‘Frantz Fanon’s Contribution to Hegelian Marxism', Critical Sociology, vol. 43, no. 6 (2017), 867.

55 In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, it is this tension that famously leads to the hierarchical relationship between two consciousnesses that creates the foundational premise of the master/slave dialectic. After the life and death struggle for the assertion of the self- consciousness of each, one consciousness emerges as the ‘master’ and the other emerges as the ‘slave’. The master, who sees the slave as inessential, feels affirmed of their superiority by nature of the relationship characterised by dominance. The slave turns away from the master and to their work – for Hegel, this is where they find their essentiality. The master realises they need the slave after all, and the slave, a newly emerging independent consciousness, becomes capable of imposing their recognition on the former master. The resolution of the dialectic depends on the master coming to a point at which they realise they need the slave’s recognition. In the colonial context however, the master never gets to this stage. Fanon writes, at the foundation of Hegelian dialectic there is an absolute reciprocity which must be emphasized. It is in the degree to which I go beyond my own immediate being that I apprehend the existence of the other as a natural and more than natural reality. If I close the circuit, if I prevent the accomplishment of movement in two directions, I keep the other within himself. Ultimately, I deprive him even of this being-for-itself. 155 Under colonialism, the Other is kept within themselves. The colonised subject embodies the slave in this formula, and where in Hegel the master demands recognition from the slave, Fanon points out that in the colonial context, ‘the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work'. 156 If the Other does not demand your recognition, you become deprived of that condition that enables your humanity - that ‘being-for-others’ of which Hegel speaks. Much of Fanonian literature considers that Fanon’s emphasis on the lack of reciprocity in the colonial context marks a disavowal of or departure from Hegel’s dialectic. Yet, this is not the case. In fact, Fanon has used Hegelian logic itself to revise Hegel’s dialectic, in reconsidering 155 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 169. 156 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 172, n. 8.

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Notes on Fanon's Dialectics

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