human reality, in-itself-for-itself’ ([1952] 2008, p. 193), he is correcting Hyppolite’s reading of Hegel by turning from the perspective of the colonisers to that of the colonised.
Fanon demands that attention be given not to the former slave’s work but to his or her ‘negating activity’ (‘mon activité négatrice’), which Richard Philcox inexplicably translates as ‘contradictory activity’ ([1952] 2008, p. 193; Fanon 2011, p. 239). The allusion is once more to Kojève, who had written that ‘all activity is negating’ (Kojève [1947] 1969, p. 4). For Fanon, the destruction is part and parcel of the restructuring of the world that he advocates at earlier points in the book (Fanon [1952] 2008, p. 63). But, as with Kojève, it is not entirely negative. The fuller sense of what Fanon means by negating activity is what links him to Hegel most closely and allows him to sound like Hegel, even while turning him upside down: ‘I pursue something other than life, insofar as I struggle [lutte] for the birth of a human world, in other words, a world of reciprocal recognitions’ ([1952] 2008, p. 193, translation modified). The major difference is that Fanon locates himself within the struggle, whereas Hegel merely observes it.
Hegel and Fanon agree that the struggle, the fight, is not for life, for self-preservation, but for something higher. Fanon shows this when he paraphrases Hegel as saying that each self-consciousness ‘wants to be recognized as an essential value outside of life, as transformation of subjective certainty (Gewissheit) into objective truth (Wahrheit)’ ([1952] 2008, p. 192; Hegel [1807] 2018, p. 111 – §186; see Kojève [1947] 1969, p. 12). Fanon can underwrite this formulation by understanding it to say that the colonised surpass life when they risk their lives by fighting for the birth of ‘a world of reciprocal recognitions’ (Fanon [1952] 2008, p. 193). But whereas in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit reciprocal recognition awaits the end of chapter six and the final pages of the discussion of reconciliation, where it is identified with absolute spirit, following a journey in which consciousness has been educated by Greek ethical life (Sittlichkeit) and the Enlightenment (Hegel [1807] 2018, p. 388 – §671), in Fanon the entry into a human world does not involve him passing through a history from which he has been excluded. Fanon insists that unless the colonised risk their lives, they will remain locked in their identity and their psychopathology.
It is a great merit of Van Haute’s reading that he emphasises the role of death in both Hegel’s and Fanon’s discussions. Death seems to be only a subsidiary theme in many English-language interpretations of the lord–bondsman relation. It is tempting to conclude that this is because the early editions of A.V. Miller’s translation, which was the standard translation from 1978 until Terry Pinkard’s translation of 2018, dropped the vital phrase (see Harris 1979). When Hegel turns from his discussion of servitude in relation to lordship to a discussion of what servitude is in and for itself, he acknowledges that servitude finds its essence in the lord, but he insists beyond this that it has implicit in it the experience of the truth of pure negativity. Miller’s translation stops with the phrase ‘its whole being has been seized with death’ (Hegel [1807] 1977, p. 117 – §194). It thus omits the crucial point, said of the bondsman, that he ‘felt the fear of death, the absolute master’ (Hegel [1807] 2018, p. 115 – §194). Both Kojève ([1947] 1969, p. 23) and Hyppolite ([1946] 1974, p. 175) agree that the slave and not the master faced death.
Fanon agrees that facing death is decisive (Hegel [1807] 2018, p. 111 – §187), but for him it comes into the picture not, as in Hegel, to address how the slave became a slave, but rather to indicate how the former slave can be freed from the psychological dependency that arises through cultural imposition. Freedom from slavery is not enough if freedom comes to the slave from the outside, without a struggle. Much has been made of Fanon’s observation that the slaves were freed without risking their lives, which ignores the Haitian revolution and all the slave revolts. Instead he highlights the struggle that African Americans were engaged in at that time (Fanon [1952] 2008, p. 196). The most one can say in his defence is that here, too, Fanon does not want to be backward-looking, as Senghor was. By contrast, he insists on fighting for a better, freer future, a future that bears its own value precisely because one has risked death ([1952] 2008, p. 194).
Fanon makes this point also in terms of action, and it seems that it is against the French Hegel that he shifts the focus from work to action. The affirmations of life, love and generosity with which chapter seven ends are all about establishing values through action ([1952] 2008, p. 199). Fanon’s observation picks up on a comment from his previous chapter that associates the collapse of the black man’s ego with his not being actional ([1952] 2008, p. 132). Beata Stawarska’s chapter five in this book is especially helpful if one wants to understand this point about action because, even though she does not mention Hegel, she lays out how this conception of violent action as liberatory praxis links Black Skin, White Masks to The Wretched of the Earth and points the way to escaping the vicious cycle. Fanon does not advocate violence for its own sake, but because it is indispensable to liberation in the sense of psychological decolonialisation (Fanon [1961] 2004, p. 33). This became in The Wretched of the Earth the idea of violence as a cleansing force (la violence désintoxique) ([1961] 2004, p. 51). That is to say, violence is given a dialectical function.
There are a number of references to dialectics in Black Skin, White Masks, but it is only in the context of Fanon’s questioning of Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of the Négritude movement that its technical sense is uppermost ([1961] 2004, p. 111). However, this is the dialectic in the somewhat mechanical sequence of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, an account that at one time was attributed to Hegel, even if that association is now largely discredited. A more fluid, transformative sense of dialectic is evident in The Wretched of the Earth, but the immediate influence here is not Hegel but Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre [1960] 2004), a book, as Nethersole shows, that Fanon studied carefully (Bernasconi 2010). Stawarska in particular, and Nethersole to a lesser extent, defend dialectical readings of The Wretched of the Earth that are at odds with the impression left by the extract from Sekyi-Otu’s Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Sekyi-Otu 1996) that is included in chapter one of this book.
Sekyi-Otu highlights the moment when Fanon references Aristotelian logic. Fanon wrote: ‘The zone inhabited by the colonized is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the colonizers. The two zones are opposed to each other, but not in the service of a higher unity. Ruled by a purely Aristotelian logic, they obey the principle of mutual [réciproque] exclusion. There is no possible conciliation. One of the terms is superfluous’ (Fanon [1961] 2004, p. 4). Sekyi-Otu reads this as Fanon saying that it is Aristotle, not Hegel, who is ‘the most truthful witness to the colonial context’. Certainly the problem that both Sartre and Fanon address in their late works, as Nethersole acknowledges, is that of the frozen dialectic, a dialectic in stasis ([1961] 2004, p. 237). This is reflected in the reciprocal homogeneity of the violence of the coloniser, and the counter-violence of the colonised is a prominent theme in The Wretched of the Earth ([1961] 2004, p. 46). But that was not the last word on the subject, and one should read, alongside Fanon’s comments on the principle of reciprocal exclusion, these words that he would have read in Sartre: ‘the only possible intelligibility of human relations is dialectical and … this intelligibility, in a concrete history whose true foundation is scarcity can be manifested only as an antagonistic reciprocity’ (Sartre [1960] 2004, p. 805). Coloniser and colonised may live in opposition to each other according to an Aristotelian logic, but their relation becomes intelligible only from a dialectical perspective. Eventually one of the opposed terms will prove superfluous, and it will not be the colonised because the colonisers are dependent on the colonised. Indeed, Fanon makes precisely that point when he quotes from the Critique Sartre’s observation that the absurd temptation of the colonisers to massacre the colonised would be the destruction of colonisation (Fanon [1961] 2004, p. 43 citing Sartre [1960] 2004, p. 303). Furthermore, as Fanon makes clear, this happens in praxis: ‘The colonised discovers the real and transforms it in the movement of his praxis, in the exercise of violence, in his project of liberation’ (Fanon [1952] 2008, p. 21, translation modified). The relation of concrete praxis to dialectical reason is crucial here as a source of illumination as well as of transformation ([1961] 2004, p. 44).