Violence, Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon
Violence, Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon
Edited by
Ulrike Kistner and Philippe Van Haute
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
Compilation © Editors 2020
Chapters © Individual contributors 2020
Published edition © Wits University Press 2020
Cover artwork © Blessing Ngobeni, Democratic Slave Master, 2017. Courtesy of Blessing Ngobeni and Everard Read.
First published 2020
http://dx.doi.org.1018772/22020096239
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978-1-77614-627-7 (Hardback)
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The publication of this volume was supported with funding from the Faculty of Humanities, University of Pretoria.
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Contents
Preface: Hegel/Fanon: Transpositions in Translations
Ulrike Kistner and Philippe Van Haute
Introduction: Fanon’s French Hegel
Robert Bernasconi
1Dialectics in Dispute, with Aristotle as Witness
Ato Sekyi-Otu
2Through Alexandre Kojève’s Lens: Violence and the Dialectic of Lordship and Bondage in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks
Philippe Van Haute
3Reading Hegel’s Gestalten – Beyond Coloniality
Ulrike Kistner
4Hegel’s Lord–Bondsman Dialectic and the African: A Critical Appraisal of Achille Mbembe’s Colonial Subjects
Josias Tembo
5Struggle and Violence: Entering the Dialectic with Frantz Fanon and Simone de Beauvoir
Beata Stawarska
6Shards of Hegel: Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Homi K. Bhabha’s Readings of The Wretched of the Earth
Reingard Nethersole
Contributors
Index
Preface | Hegel/Fanon: Transpositions in Translations
Ulrike Kistner Philippe Van Haute
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) has cast a long shadow over decolonial thought which has fastened onto particular elements, concepts, figures of thought and interpretations of his lectures and more systematic works. While Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history (Hegel [1837] 2001) in particular have had a bad press, his thinking on freedom realised through a dialectical process of attaining self-consciousness in history became formative for decolonial theorising. This divergence, previously taken up and sharpened in one way or another by Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon, variously structures the reception of Hegel in Black Consciousness and Africana existentialism. It can be seen to indicate fault lines within the tectonics of Hegel’s philosophical system itself, and tensions in the interpretations of his work between theo-logico-metaphysical speculation on the one hand, and inquiries into philosophical-historical and societal conditions of reason on the other. Yet these fault lines and tensions do not impinge on Hegel’s reception in decolonial thought.
As if to hold Hegel’s dialectics to its own precepts drawn together, decolonial thought instates his philosophy in the role of a vanishing mediator. Three elements, in particular, are brought to a convergence in the process: the much-vaunted ‘master–slave dialectic’ attributed to Hegel; his infamous statements on Africa and Africans in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History; and the structure of the dialectic, historically and politically understood. Concepts and figures of thought drawn from these sources have been productive, in turn, for describing and explaining the existential reality of being black in an antiblack world constituted by slavery, colonialism and racism (see for instance More 2017, p. 43). A particular reading of the master–slave dialectic, and Hegel’s placement of Africa and Africans in World History, with Africa as the location of slavery (that is, unfreedom), are combined to explain how a historical legacy becomes ontologically and existentially constitutive in the form of ‘slave consciousness’, manifested in ‘the colonial consciousness of the colonised’ (see More 2017, pp. 43–44).
Yet there is good reason, we believe, to prise this convergence apart and interrogate the respective lineages of thought drawn from Hegel’s work independently of each other, in order to examine the conditions of their convergence in new configurations and contexts. Some scholarship has been devoted to examining the concept of Africa in Hegel’s philosophical scheme of World History (see for instance Bernasconi 1998, 2000); and to an interpretation of the dialectic attributed to Hegel, and applied to Stephen Bantu Biko’s notion of black solidarity as the antithesis of white racism (see for instance Lamola 2016). Comparatively less attention has been given to a critical examination of the so-called master–slave dialectic. Close attention to this figure, and to its instantiations across different philosophical, historical and political contexts, is what brings the essays in this book together. Among the most famous instantiations of this dialectic is that articulated (albeit in negative form) by Frantz Fanon in his seminal text, Black Skin, White Masks ([1952] 1986).
The essays in this collection were initially prompted by the need to rethink the place of the relation between Hegel and Fanon in undergraduate philosophy courses taught in South Africa. The relation between Hegel and Fanon has become doubly displaced under the impact of calls for decolonisation of the curriculum – falling between Hegel’s dialectics and colonial Manichaeism, and between postcolonial and decolonial theorising. This double displacement frames the essays collected in this volume.
The tension between the Manichaeism of the colonial world tending toward a frozen dialectic, and dialectical reason in praxis, is opened in Robert Bernasconi’s Introduction. In chapter