{"id":1222,"date":"2017-01-11T06:48:26","date_gmt":"2017-01-11T11:48:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/?p=1222"},"modified":"2018-08-11T21:47:49","modified_gmt":"2018-08-12T01:47:49","slug":"introduction-to-frantz-fanon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/introduction-to-frantz-fanon\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernard E. Harcourt | Introduction to Frantz Fanon: Provincializing Nietzsche (13\/13)"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bernard E. Harcourt<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cEach age has its peculiar opacities and its urgent missions. The parts we play in the design and direction of historical transformations are shadowed by the contingency of events and the quality of our characters. Sometimes we break the mold; at others, our will is broken. What enables us to aspire to the fraught and fervent desire for freedom is the belief that human beings are capable of imagining what Fanon once described as a \u2018time [that] must no longer be that of the moment or the next harvest but rather of the rest of the world.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 Homi Bhabha, \u201cForeword\u201d to Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth<\/em> (1961)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Frantz Fanon\u2019s (1925-1961) thought and writings are indeed marked by an orientation toward a possible future both in time and space, captured so poignantly in the closing chapter of Black Skin, White Masks <\/em>(1952)\u2014his call to constantly introduce \u201cinvention into life,\u201d to \u201cendlessly create myself,\u201d to \u201cbuild the world of you<\/em>\u201d\u2014and in the closing line of The Wretched of the Earth<\/em>: \u201ccomrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man.\u201d Fanon\u2019s call on the colonized countries to \u201cstart over a new history of man\u201d is striking, and naturally brings to mind many of the themes we have been discussing in Nietzsche 13\/13.<\/p>\n

One might ask, though, regarding Fanon\u2019s brilliant work that strives to put Europe and European thought behind, why look back <\/em>to Nietzsche? Why look back to a Europe from which these new men and women must emancipate themselves? Why go back to the 19th<\/sup> century, the time of some of the worst imperialist conquests? The answer, ultimately, may be that we should not. And it may well be that with Fanon and his remarkable, radical intellectual and biographical historical trajectory we may finally be able to get beyond Nietzsche. Perhaps, we may even be able to level that necessary critique, that overdue critique, of the Nietzsche 13\/13 project: with Fanon\u2014and our guests, Emily Apter, Homi Bhabha, and Brandon Terry, and others, such as Dipesh Chakrabarty\u2014we may be able to not only provincialize Europe and European historical narratives, but also provincialize Nietzsche 13\/13. The \u201cNietzsche Effect\u201d and our critical engagements with Nietzsche may not, indeed, be universalizable or located beyond a certain time and geography. They may be, or maybe should be<\/em> localized and provincialized.<\/p>\n

But even with Frantz Fanon, it was not always that way\u2026<\/p>\n

~~<\/p>\n

Fanon\u2019s first book, in fact\u2014Black Skin, White Masks<\/em>, published by Le Seuil in 1952 when Fanon was only 27 years old\u2014was book-ended by Nietzsche. A certain Freudo-marxian Nietzsche, a Nietzsche embedded in a psychoanalytic perspective\u2014but a Nietzsche nonetheless. Nietzsche is both the first philosopher explicitly mentioned in text and the final philosopher who closes the last page of the conclusion. \u201cMan\u2019s misfortune, Nietzsche said, was that he was once a child,\u201d Fanon writes in the opening pages of the introduction, before naming Freud or even mentioning disalienation. And Fanon closes his book, after returning to the theme of disalienation, again with the penultimate thought that \u201cAt the start of his life, a man is always congested, drowned in contingency. The misfortune of man is that he was once a child.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Nietzsche, Freud, Marx\u2014the great nineteenth century thinkers of suspicion\u2014accompany Fanon. And as they did, Fanon too would unmask. Unmask those \u201cwhite masks\u201d brought on by European colonialisms and their attendant complexes of inferiority. Much like Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and building on that even earlier critical tradition, Fanon would seek to lift the veil from our eyes, to emancipate us from our self-incurred immaturity\u2014from our childhood.<\/p>\n

For Fanon, the task would not be easy\u2014in part because of the peculiar history of French slavery and colonialism. As Fanon would show in the penultimate section of Black Skin, White Masks<\/em>, titled \u201cThe Black Man and Hegel,\u201d the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave would not play itself out in the same way in the French context, because the French lord as well as the colonized (and here, Fanon drew a distinction with the American experience) is \u201cbasically different from the one described by Hegel.\u201d The colonizer does not seek recognition, and the colonized is far more dependent on him. In the French context, Fanon, writes, \u201cthe black man does not know the price of freedom because he has never fought for it.\u201d It has just been given to him\u2014in diluted and make-believe ways.<\/p>\n

The Hegelian dialectic cannot play itself out\u2014but leads, in this case, only to a purely reactional phase full of ressentiment<\/em>. And it is therefore to Nietzsche and his will to power that Fanon turns to articulate a positive, \u201cactional\u201d call to arms. \u201cNietzsche had already said it in The Will to Power<\/em>,\u201d Fanon writes at the end of the last chapter on \u201cThe Black Man and Recognition.\u201d Fanon adds\u2014once again, accompanied by Nietzsche:<\/p>\n

\u201cTo induce man to be actional<\/em>, by maintaining in his circularity the respect of the fundamental values that make the world human, that is the task of utmost urgency for he who, after careful reflection, prepares to act.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is this positive, willful call to action that Fanon leaves us with in 1952: a call to introduce \u201cinvention into life,\u201d to \u201cbuild the world of you<\/em>, man,\u201d to always question, to disalienate, to \u201ctouch the other, feel the other, discover each other.\u201d To \u201ctake a stand against this living death.\u201d<\/a> To be \u201ca revolutionary.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1952, Fanon is still in conversation with Nietzsche, and with Freud and Marx\u2014Marx, for instance, who receives the epigraph to Fanon\u2019s conclusion (from The Eighteenth of Brumaire<\/em>)\u2014as well as, of course, with Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, his professor at the Lyc\u00e9e Schoelcher in Fort-de-France and mentor, perhaps even more central a figure. C\u00e9saire is present throughout.<\/a> C\u00e9saire\u2019s poetry is at the heart of the work. The Dionysian in C\u00e9saire enriches the soul of the book. In fact, Fanon opens his masterpiece, Black Skin, White Masks<\/em>, with an epigraph from Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire\u2019s just published and radical manifesto, Discourse on Colonialism<\/em> (1950 \u00c9ditions R\u00e9clame; 1955 Pr\u00e9sence Africaine). The passage is sharp and conveys well the intervention that is to follow. Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire writes, and Fanon places his book under this sign:<\/p>\n

\u201cI am talking about millions of men whom they have knowingly instilled with fear and a complex of inferiority, whom they have infused with despair and trained to tremble, to kneel and behave like flunkeys.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Black Skin<\/em> returns to the Dionysian poetics of C\u00e9saire. It harkens back to C\u00e9saire\u2019s conception of \u201cN\u00e9gritude,\u201d<\/a> which we discussed at the last Nietzsche 13\/13<\/a>\u2014in fact, the continuity from that last seminar is striking. It is in C\u00e9saire that Fanon finds the best expression of cultural imposition and of the task ahead: to go all the way down, to reach rock bottom, but to come back up and overcome\u2014bringing \u201cthe black man\u201d with him, \u201clift[ing] him up to the skies.\u201d \u201cRise\/ Rise\/ Rise,\u201d that is the sentiment, and one can almost hear Zarathustra as well in those passages. It is there that Fanon will dig to find the moment when the black man discovers the white man within him, and kills him. \u201cI struck, the blood spurted: it is the only baptism <\/em>that today I remember,\u201d C\u00e9saire writes in And the Dogs Were Silent<\/em>, and Fanon rehearses in Black Skin<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But notice that it is Nietzsche who Fanon places first in text. In the Introduction, a few pages in: \u201cMan\u2019s misfortune, Nietzsche said, was that he was once a child.\u201d<\/a> And Fanon closes on this very thought, on the final page of the conclusion.<\/a> Fanon knows, of course, that for Nietzsche, this childfulness was also a virtue. Fanon knew of the passage from Nietzsche\u2019s Zarathustra<\/em>, with its three metamorphoses that reflect our spiritual transformation\u2014from the camel, to the lion, to the child. For Nietzsche, in certain passages, the child represents something positive: \u201cThe child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a Sacred Yes\u201d (Zarathustra<\/em>, 55). The child is the spirit of creativity and independence, of willing its own will.<\/p>\n

Fanon builds on this notion of metamorphoses from a psychoanalytic perspective to turn the child from the end of the cycle to another beginning. Childhood represents another stage of spiritual transformation, one that is marked from a Freudian perspective by the possibility of complexes and disorders. It is a time of congestion and contingency. \u201cAt the start of his life, a man is always congested, drowned in contingency,” Fanon writes.\u00a0 So, \u201cIt is through self-consciousness and renunciation, through a permanent tension of his freedom, that man can create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world.\u201d<\/a> Through self-consciousness and maturity, man should learn to get beyond these complexes of inferiority and superiority, and achieve full humanity: \u201cSuperiority? Inferiority? Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover the other?\u201d<\/p>\n

In quick succession, in those first few pages of Black Skin, White Masks<\/em>, Fanon cycles through all three masters of suspicion:\u00a0 Nietzsche on page xiv, Freud on the next page (\u201cReacting against the constitutionalizing trend at the end of the nineteenth century, Freud demanded that the individual factor be taken into account in psychoanalysis,\u201d xv), and then, on the opening page of Chapter 1, Fanon alludes directly to Marx: \u201cIt\u2019s no longer a question of knowing the world, but of transforming it.\u201d<\/a> That is, of course, a silent reference to Marx\u2019s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, written in the Spring of 1845, \u201cThe philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.\u201d <\/a>Nietzsche, Freud, Marx\u2014Fanon too is unmasking: unmasking the white mask of European superiority. He is engaging in an emancipatory act through an unveiling. Revealing the false consciousness of the colonized subject who wants to be white, or to have a white woman or man. Disrobing all these layers of confusion. The task is very similar.<\/p>\n

Psychoanalysis plays a large role\u2014Fanon was, after all, a psychiatrist, not an economist, nor, strictly speaking, a moral philosopher, and not a philologist. A psychiatrist with a psychoanalytic inclination. \u201cWe believe, in fact,\u201d Fanon writes, \u201cthat only a psychoanalytic interpretation of the black problem can reveal the affective disorders responsible for this network of complexes.\u201d<\/a> And Marx plays a major role through the notion of alienation and disalienation. Alienation occurs to the black intellectual because \u201che takes European culture as a means of detaching himself from his own race.\u201d<\/a> Alienation in the working-class black man happens \u201cbecause he is victim to a system based on the exploitation of one race by another and the contempt for one branch of humanity by a civilization that considers itself superior.\u201d<\/a> In the same way in which Marx strove for disalienation in his early writings, Fanon seeks to disalienate the black man. And Fanon closes with an epigraph from Marx\u2019s Eighteenth Brumaire<\/em> which extolls the virtue of the future over the past: \u201cThe social revolution cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future.\u201d As for Nietzsche, well, Fanon\u2019s project rings of overcoming our present humanity and going beyond our present morality in order to strive for that someone beyond\u2014perhaps not an over-man, a superman, but surely a new wo\/man. The idea, it seems, is to get beyond notions of superiority and inferiority. Not to respond that black culture is in fact superior or equal to European culture; but to overcome the comparison itself. To get beyond these moral judgments. Not to refute them, not to invert them, to get over them entirely\u2014as if they never existed.<\/p>\n

Not to invert. \u201cIn our view,\u201d Fanon writes, \u201can individual who loves Blacks is as \u2018sick\u2019 as someone who abhors them.\u201d<\/a> The idea is to break the cycle, not continue it. To get beyond it, not to replicate it:<\/p>\n

\u201cOur sole concern was to put an end to a vicious cycle.<\/p>\n

Fact: some Whites consider themselves superior to Blacks.<\/p>\n

Another fact: some Blacks want to prove at all costs to the Whites the wealth of the black man\u2019s intellect and equal intelligence.<\/p>\n

How can we break the cycle?\u201d Fanon, Black Skin<\/em>, p. xiv.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fanon asks the Nietzschean question of the value of values. \u00a0You can hear it well in Black Skin<\/em>, White Masks<\/em>, as Fanon questions the value of intelligence itself, and philosophy as well (\u201cphilosophy never saved anybody \u2026 neither did intelligence save anybody\u201d). But Fanon wants to make sure these are not white or black values. \u201cMy life must not be devoted to making an assessment of black values.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

~~<\/p>\n

However, if Fanon ends Black Skin, White Masks<\/em> with a discussion of the Hegelian dialectic and a Nietzschean resolution of that dialectic focused on The Will to Power<\/em>, things are very different nine years later at the end of his life with the publication of The Wretched of the Earth<\/em>. The thrust now, in 1961, is to discard Europe and European thought. \u201cComrades,\u201d Fanon writes, \u201clet us flee this stagnation where dialectics has gradually turned into a logic of the status quo.\u201d With few exceptions\u2014Jean-Paul Sartre being one\u2014Fanon calls his comrades in arms to leave Europe behind. \u201cIf we want to respond to the expectations of our peoples, we must look elsewhere besides Europe.\u201d And that includes, I would argue, thinkers like Hegel, but also Nietzsche. Nietzsche, it turns out, really does not figure in the final work.<\/p>\n

There are a few gestures to some old friends and mentors. Fanon makes passing references to C\u00e9saire. \u201cC\u00e9saire\u2019s poetry takes on a prophetic significance in this very prospect of violence,\u201d Fanon still writes, quoting at length C\u00e9saire\u2019s And the Dogs Were Silent<\/em>. And there are generous gestures especially to Sartre and even to his Critique of Dialectical Reason<\/em>\u2014perhaps because it is a critique of dialectics, which he says we must overcome.<\/p>\n

But by 1961, Fanon has distanced himself sharply from the \u201cbards of Negritude\u201d and the entire \u201ccultural\u201d approach, as he says, of C\u00e9saire and Senghor. He attacks Senghor in the opening chapter of The Wretched of the Earth<\/em>, calling him a \u201ccolonized intellectual\u201d who had no authentic connection to the struggle of colonial subjects and was still beholden to \u201cWestern values.\u201d Just a few years earlier, in 1959, Fanon had already accused the \u201cbards of N\u00e9gritude\u201d of failing to understand the national dimensions of the culture and politics of independence of the times.<\/p>\n

We know the reasons well: Fanon\u2019s nationalism is opposed to a cross-national or pan-African cultural identity, and even more so to the kind of politics of departmentalization that C\u00e9saire advocated for the Antilles. This not only from a political, but also from a pragmatic point of view. Fanon adopts the \u201cparadoxical proposition: In a colonized country, nationalism in its basic, most rudimentary, and undifferentiated form is the most forceful and effective way of defending national culture.\u201d And also because Fanon embraces a revolutionary, militantly engaged vision of the intellectual who must be part of and mobilized with the people in a violent struggle against colonialism.<\/p>\n

In the end, there may be some shared sensibilities with Nietzsche. Certainly not on the nationalism front, but perhaps on the overcoming of conventional tensions\u2014such as the old dichotomy between capitalism and socialism, which, as Homi Bhabha emphasizes, Fanon urges us to overcomes in order to finally and properly redistribute wealth; and with this idea of overcoming Europe in order to create a new man, or what Fanon calls \u201ca new history of man.\u201d It may also be possible, as Homi Bhabha suggests, to use Fanon\u2019s work toward a Nietzschean or Foucaultian project of writing \u201ca genealogy for globalization that reaches back to the complex problems of decolonization (rather than the simpler story of the death of communism and the triumph of free-market neoliberalism\u201d). There do seem to be some family resemblances or shared sensibilities.<\/p>\n

One does hear them still in The Wretched of the Earth<\/em>. The project is to get past the past\u2014to forge new models, new paradigms. To innovate, to be pioneers, as Fanon explicitly states. On the closing page of his book, Fanon writes \u201cLet us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions, and societies that draw their inspiration from it. [\u2026] [I]f we want humanity to take one step forward, if we want to take it to another level than the one where Europe has placed it, then we much innovate, we must be pioneers.\u201d There is, in Fanon, this Nietzschean impulse to get beyond the resentment of reactivity, in the Hegelian dialectic. One hears a ring of Nietzsche on invention and knowledge as well. \u201cI must constantly remind myself that the real leap<\/em> consists of introducing invention into life.\u201d<\/p>\n

But why, we should ask, does it matter? Why even seek out those shared sensibilities\u2014if all the work can be done by Fanon alone? Although Nietzsche nourished Fanon\u2019s thought in Black Skin, White Masks<\/em>, arguably Fanon let go of Nietzsche, along with Europe, in his last book, The Wretched of the Earth<\/em>. So perhaps it is time for us to ask: Why not also leave Nietzsche behind? To borrow a term from Dipesh Chakrabarty\u2019s book, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference <\/em>(2000), why not provincialize Nietzsche, and with him Nietzsche 13\/13<\/em>.<\/p>\n

With that thought, welcome to Nietzsche 8\/13!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Bernard E. Harcourt \u201cEach age has its peculiar opacities and its urgent missions. The parts we play in the design and direction of historical transformations are shadowed by the contingency of events and the quality of our characters. Sometimes… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38973],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-8-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}