in his discussion of the lord–bondsman dialectic. Inevitably this has contributed to disagreement about what Fanon was attempting in response. In addition to the commentaries on Fanon’s relation to Hegel referenced by the authors of this book, one could also mention the readings given by Gayatri Spivak (2014) and Lou Turner (1996). Given the variety of interpretations these few pages in Black Skin, White Masks have inspired, it might be useful to begin with what can be established with some certainty about Fanon’s reading of Hegel.
First, as Philippe Van Haute, Ulrike Kistner and Josias Tembo all demonstrate in their chapters, Fanon does not address the historical Hegel but the Hegel who was dominating philosophical discussion in France at the time Fanon was writing his book, the so-called French Hegel, the Hegel primarily of Alexandre Kojève. Kojève’s lectures during the 1930s were widely attended, and when extracts from them were published in 1947, his close commentary on the lord–bondsman dialectic served as the first chapter (Kojève [1947] 1969, pp. 3–30). For Kojève and his French followers, however, Hegel’s discussion was read not in terms of a lord and a bondsman, (which is what Hegel’s words ‘Herr’ and ‘Knecht’ mean respectively, as Kistner makes clear) but about a master and a slave. Their misreading has encouraged generations of readers to attempt to make Hegel’s account apply to slavery in the Americas through what Van Haute calls an ‘anthropological reading’. Tembo confronts such a reading directly, by engaging with the work of Achille Mbembe. Fanon also takes as his starting point an anthropological reading, but, as Tembo proceeds to show, Fanon, unlike Mbembe, does not apply the Kojèvian account of the master–slave dialectic to the colonial situation. Indeed, Fanon’s main point is the inapplicability of Hegel’s discussion to the world he lived in. What preoccupied Fanon was not the question of what the historical Hegel meant, but the fact that the French Hegelians were attempting to apply to the world around them what they understood Hegel to be saying. Fanon signalled this focus clearly when, early in the section, even before turning to Hegel, he referenced ‘the former slave’ ([1952] 2008, p. 191). That Fanon set out to prove that the French Hegel cannot be appropriated for an understanding of the world that post-dated slavery is one of the themes uniting the authors published in this book.
This leads to a second point that emerges clearly from this book, and it arises from a major point of disagreement between Fanon and Kojève about the central role the latter gave to the slave’s work in the history of freedom. In fact, Fanon’s objection was not to Kojève alone, but also to Jean Hyppolite, another leading representative of the French Hegelians. Fanon did not read German and so he was reliant on Hyppolite’s translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Hegel [1807] 1947). He also seems to have consulted Hyppolite’s major commentary on Hegel’s text that had been published in 1946, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Hyppolite [1946] 1974). So when Fanon writes of Hegel’s slave that he ‘finds the source of his liberation in his work’ ([1952] 2008, p. 195 n. 8), he is also responding to Hyppolite, who understood Hegel to be saying that it was in work that the slave attained what he described as the authentic realisation of being-for-itself in being-in-itself (Hyppolite [1946] 1974, p. 176). But, as Fanon objected in a crucial footnote, this shows the inapplicability of the French Hegel to the historical slave. Work did not provide slaves with a path to liberation. It was simply what their masters wanted from them (Fanon [1952] 2008, p. 195 n. 8).
The importance of Hyppolite for Fanon’s reading of Hegel can be underlined by a third point. It was in Hyppolite’s Genesis and Structure that Fanon would have read that the thinghood before which the slave trembled was eliminated by work (Hyppolite [1946] 1974, p. 176). From the beginning of Black Skin, White Masks Fanon is concerned to demonstrate how in the colonial world black people are locked into their identity (Fanon [1952] 2008, pp. xii–xiv). Through the white gaze he is objectified: ‘I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at the origin of the world and here am an object among other objects’ ([1952] 2008, p. 89). However, he subsequently introduces a decisive caveat: ‘I ask that I be taken into account on the basis of my desire. I am not only here-now locked in thinghood’ ([1952] 2008, p. 193). This is his direct response to Hegel’s calling of being for the other ‘consciousness in the shape of thinghood (Dingheit)’ (Hegel [1807] 2018, p. 112 – §188). Fanon quite possibly connected that phrase with Aimé Césaire’s equation ‘colonization = thingification [colonisation = chosification]’ (Césaire [1950] 2000, p. 42). It would explain not only why he is so insistent on confronting Hegel on this precise point, but also why his insistence that he cannot be reduced to a thing locked into its objectification reemerges at this point in his book. In any event, when Fanon rejects being reduced to thinghood, he does not use Kojève’s spelling of thinghood as chosité (Kojève [1947] 1969, p. 16), but Hyppolite’s spelling of it as choséité instead (Hegel [1807] 1947, p. 162), suggesting that his polemic on this point is driven more by his rejection of Hyppolite than of Kojève. So what does Fanon mean when he asks that he be taken into account on the basis of his desire? What is his desire?
The desire of the colonised to be recognised for their humanity is a recurrent topic in Black Skin, White Masks. It is especially pronounced in the fifth chapter, where the psychological effects of being rebuffed in this process are carefully documented. His discussion of this theme culminates in the chapter ‘The Black Man and Recognition’. In the first section of this chapter, in what is a clear evocation of Hegel’s lord–bondsman dialectic, Fanon describes how the desire of each Antillean to be recognised in their virility and independence renders them dependent on their fellow Antilleans (Fanon [1952] 2008, p. 187). The fact that they are frustrated in this process recalls the impasse Hegel describes whereby the lord finds that the bondsman, because he is dependent on him and thus of a lower status, cannot provide the recognition he wants (Hegel [1807] 2018, p. 114 – §192). One difference between the two cases is that Fanon insists that any description of the encounter between the Antilleans is radically incomplete if it does not refer to the social structure: when Martinicans compare themselves with their fellow Martinicans they do so ‘under the patronage of the white man’ (Fanon [1952] 2008, p. 190). In saying this he is referencing the argument proposed by Reingard Nethersole in chapter six of this book, according to which blacks had come to hate themselves through having internalised a racist culture by means of a process he calls ‘cultural imposition’ ([1952] 2008, p. 167). Hence it was from whites that they sought recognition of their humanity ([1952] 2008, p. 78).
At this point, readings of Fanon become more speculative. It seems that when, in the second section of the chapter, he turns directly to the discussion of Hegel, he reverses the terms of the impasse that underlies the lord–bondsman dialectic. The basis for doing so is the acknowledgement that through cultural imposition, the desire for recognition by whites is further perverted into the project of wanting to be like their masters ([1952] 2008, p. 125 n. 24). In the Introduction, Fanon expresses this by saying that ‘the black man wants to be white’ ([1952] 2008, p. xiii). This is immediately followed by the observation that ‘the white man is desperately trying to achieve the rank of man’ ([1952] 2008, p. xiii). This means that whites are not yet human and as a result, the Hegelian logic whereby the master cannot receive recognition from his slave is inverted into the ‘vicious cycle’ ([1952] 2008, p. xiv) whereby the former slaves cannot receive the recognition of their humanity that they are seeking from the colonisers, because the latter lack the humanity that would be necessary for self-recognition in the other to secure the other’s humanity.
What comes next in Fanon’s discussion is decisive for the trajectory that leads from Black Skin, White Masks to The Wretched of the Earth, and so must be followed in detail. That Fanon’s proposed escape from the vicious cycle takes place in the context of his reading of Hegel is an indication of why understanding his relation to Hegel is so important. Fanon recognises that Hyppolite’s focus on liberation through work stays within the perspective of the master insofar as the master is the main beneficiary of this work. Work does not give former slaves independence any more than it gave the slaves themselves independence; it does not remove the psychological dependency documented throughout Black Skin, White Masks that was embedded in the colonial culture, and that is reflected in the distorted desire of the former slaves to want to be like their