to be attained through the lord–bondsman dialectic, as a normative horizon (albeit an elusive one), he sees it as thwarted by the relations of colonial racism.
Implicated in this thwarted dialectic is Fanon’s observation, drawn out by Philippe Van Haute in chapter two, that Hegel’s idea of the formative role of work (Arbeit) does not pertain to conditions of slavery and colonialism; instead, it is the role of violence that steps into its place. This philosophical account of the place of violence connects with the discussion of Fanon’s pronouncements on violence provided by Beata Stawarska in chapter five.
The controversial role of violence in the context of a thwarted dialectic is taken up again in chapter six by Reingard Nethersole, who probes Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Homi K. Bhabha’s refractions of Hegel in their respective Forewords to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon [1961] 1967, 2004). Here we find an instance of the second displacement in the relation between Hegel and Fanon. Jean-Paul Sartre, reading Fanon in the context of the politics of decolonisation in the late 1950s, highlights the terms of the Hegelian dialectic (as mediated through Alexandre Kojève’s Hegel lectures [Kojève (1947) 1980]), while they are attenuated if not effaced in Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial psycho-affective reading of Fanon (Bhabha 1986).
There is, however, a counter-current that challenges the scenario painted in these terms. The essays by Philippe Van Haute (chapter two) and Ulrike Kistner (chapter three) show that the construal of the historical experience of slavery and colonialism to which Hegel’s dialectic is being held is based on a questionable translation of Hegel’s figures of ‘Herr’ and ‘Knecht’. In French, the figures named by Hegel are translated as ‘maître’ and ‘esclave’, popularly taken over into English as ‘master’ and ‘slave’. These (mis)translations of Hegel have forged the dominant interpretation of the dialectic in decolonial theorising. The contributions in this collection show that it is only on the basis of this questionable translation that Fanon’s (and to some extent also Sartre’s) rebuttals of Hegel’s dialectic make sense. But, as Robert Bernasconi’s Introduction shows, Fanon’s rebuttals do more than expose the inapplicability of the French Hegel to the historical slave. The essays collected here provide the steps to demonstrate this. Philippe Van Haute problematises Hegel’s so-called master–slave relation, providing a detailed textual analysis of the chapter on ‘Self-Consciousness’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit ([1807] 1977) and its reception, through Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation, by Fanon in the latter’s Black Skin, White Masks. In chapter three, Ulrike Kistner takes up the reception of Hegel in postcolonial and decolonial theory, and analyses the contestations between Frantz Fanon and Octave Mannoni, based on their different readings of Hegel.
Reinstating Hegel’s ontological structure of self-consciousness, and tracking it through its figures and their modulations in The Phenomenology of Spirit as Ulrike Kistner’s chapter does, provides a picture different from that which concretises the relation of ‘master’ and ‘slave’ in particular social formations and political conjunctures. From the former perspective, moreover, the equation of attributions to the ‘slave’ of the Phenomenology with those to ‘Africa’, ‘Africans’ and ‘Negroes’ in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History becomes problematic. In his ‘critical appraisal of Mbembe’s colonial subjects’ (chapter four), Josias Tembo takes on the task of differentiating Hegel’s philosophical armatures imbricated, to contradictory effect, in Mbembe’s account of the postcolony.
Moving along these counter-currents, the essays collected in this volume provide new perspectives on mediations in the reception of Hegel’s concepts and figures in post-Enlightenment philosophy transcontinentally. The contributions to this collection engage in close textual readings that highlight, in their interrelatedness, the entangled history of the translations, transpositions and transformations of Hegel in colonial, decolonising and postcolonial contexts.
References
Bernasconi, Robert (1998). ‘Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti’. In Stuart Barnett (ed.), Hegel after Derrida. London: Routledge.
Bernasconi, Robert (2000). ‘With what must the philosophy of world history begin? On the racial basis of Hegel’s Eurocentrism’. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 22(2): 171–201.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1986). ‘Foreword: Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition’. In Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto Press.
Fanon, Frantz (1967). The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Translated by Constance Farrington. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Fanon, Frantz (1986). Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto Press.
Fanon, Frantz (2004). The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1977). Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2001). The Philosophy of History (1837). Translated by John Sibree. Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche.
Kojève, Alexandre (1980). Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit (1947). Assembled by Raymond Queneau, edited by Allan Bloom, translated by James H. Nichols Jr. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Lamola, M. John (2016). ‘Biko, Hegel and the end of Black Consciousness: A historico-philosophical discourse on South African racism’. Journal of Southern African Studies 42(2): 183–94.
More, Mabogo Percy (2017). Biko: Philosophy, Identity and Liberation. Cape Town: HSRC Press.
Introduction | Fanon’s French Hegel
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is the central text of what has come to be known as critical philosophy of race, where attention has tended to focus on the fifth chapter, ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Person’. This chapter was originally published in Esprit in 1951 as a stand-alone essay, a fact that gave some legitimacy to the reading of it in isolation (Fanon 1951). But when Black Skin, White Masks was published in the following year, it became apparent that it was not representative of the whole work. ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Person’ highlights the white gaze that racialises blacks and rejects some of the backward-looking strategies promoted by the Négritude movement, especially those associated with Léopold Sédar Senghor, where the future is said to lie in reviving ‘a black civilization unjustly ignored’ (Fanon [1952] 2008, p. 201). The chapter ends in tears: ‘I began to weep’ ([1952] 2008, p. 119). By contrast, the final chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, ‘In Guise of a Conclusion’, while continuing the theme of refusing to find salvation in the past, draws most heavily on those parts of the book that are affirming and future-oriented. Indeed, the book’s penultimate chapter, ‘The Black Man and Recognition’, ends by saying ‘No’ to contempt and indignity and a resounding ‘Yes’ to life, love and generosity ([1952] 2008, p. 197).
The second half of that same chapter is entitled ‘The Black Man and Hegel’, and it is the place where Fanon engages with the famous lord–bondsman dialectic from The Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel [1807] 1977). These few pages (Fanon [1952] 2008, pp. 191–97) are the main focus of the essays by Philippe Van Haute, Ulrike Kistner and Josias Tembo in this book. The essays by Ato Sekyi-Otu and Reingard Nethersole mainly address dialectics in The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon [1961] 2004), while Beata Stawarska establishes the link between Fanon’s first book and his last. Taken together, they form a valuable corrective to the pessimistic reading of Fanon that has come to dominate much of the current literature. But they do much more than this. They demonstrate why Fanon still holds the attention of philosophers throughout the world, both for his engagement with the dominant thinkers of his time and for the light these encounters are still able to shed on current racial issues.
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