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AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: WHAT IS DECOLONIZATION? FRANTZ FANON’S THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH AND JEAN-PAUL SARTRE’S CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2014

BEN ETHERINGTON
BEN ETHERINGTON*
Affiliation:
School of Humanities and Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This essay argues that Jean-Paul Sartre's notion of “dialectical reason”, as elaborated in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), had a decisive impact on the composition of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961). The relationship between the two works has not before received a thorough textual exposition. Such an exposition, it is suggested, also entails revising the view of the nature of Fanon's work that has become entrenched in anglophone scholarship. Instead of a self-grounding theorist who more resembles the postcolonialists who would succeed him, this essay presents a view of Fanon as a situated theorist, drawing on those resources that could best help him to articulate the task at hand. The notion of “dialectical reason” allowed him to break from his previous understanding of decolonization as the attainment of reason through struggle, and see the “praxis” of revolution as, itself, self-realizing reason. To perceive this allows us better to seize on the thinking that guides his discussions of objectification under colonialism, anticolonial violence, and the role of the national bourgeoisie, and, thus, to clear up a number of controversies.

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Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , April 2016 , pp. 151 - 178
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Gautam Premnath, Priyamvada Gopal, Jarad Zimbler, Nick Nesbitt, Norman Etherington, Peggy Brock, Duncan Kelly and Tim Rowse for their comments on various earlier drafts of this essay.

References

1 In the domain of anticolonial intellectual history, I follow David Scott's lead: Scott, David, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC, 2004), 51–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The history of intellectuals and French decolonization has been considered by Sorum, Paul Clay, Intellectuals and Decolonization in France (Chapel Hill, 1977)Google Scholar; and Lesueur, James D., Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the Decolonization of Algeria (Philadelphia, 2001)Google Scholar. In their Political Theories of Decolonization: Postcolonialism and the Problem of Foundations (Oxford, 2011), Margaret Kohn and Keally McBride read anticolonial literature across contexts in order to distil broad tendencies in theorizing decolonization.

2 The publication history of Les damnés has yet to be written. Gibson, Nigel, “Relative Opacity: A New Translation of Fanon's Wretched of the Earth—Mission Betrayed or Fulfilled?”, Social Identities, 13/1 (2007), 69–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar, gives a useful overview of the history of the English translation.

3 Quoted by Homi Bhabha in his foreword to Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York, 2008), xvi.

4 Gordon, Lewis R., Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean and White, Renée T., “Introduction: Five Stages of Fanon Studies”, in Gordon, Sharpley-Whiting and White, , eds., Fanon: A Critical Reader (Oxford, 1996), 7Google Scholar. Two then recent monographs are cited as further examples: Gordon, Lewis's Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; and Sekyi-Otu, Ato, Fanon's Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge, MA, 1996)Google Scholar.

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8 Haddour, Azzedine, ed., The Fanon Reader (London, 2006)Google Scholar. Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Philcox, Richard (New York, 2004)Google Scholar; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.

9 Gordon, Sharpley-Whiting and White, “Introduction”, 7, original emphasis.

10 Gordon, Fanon, 35.

11 Said, Edward, “Travelling Theory Reconsidered”, in Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London, 2001), 436–52Google Scholar.

12 Sekyi-Otu was the first extensively to argue for a theoretical unity in Fanon's works, reading his texts “as though they formed one dramatic dialectical narrative”. See Sekyi-Otu, Fanon's Dialectic of Experience, 4–5. Gibson has been the most strident in making such claims: “What makes Fanon's work of a piece is Fanon’s dialectic”. Gibson, Fanon, 3.

13 Shepard, Todd, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY, 2008), 5Google Scholar.

14 Ibid., 6.

15 Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (London, 2001)Google Scholar; Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris, 2002)Google Scholar. Page references are given parenthetically in the text. Two page numbers separated by a semicolon refer first to the English translation, and second to the French original. The reasons for this are given in the next footnote.

16 In her translation, Constance Farrington appears to have attempted to simplify or explain Fanon's jargon. “Praxis” is variously translated as “rule of conduct” (68) “practice” (73) “action” (74) “knowledge of the practice of action” (118). I have indicated my modifications to give a sense of where and how the debt to Sartre gets obscured. I have used Farrington rather Richard Philcox's more recent effort, because this edition has been used by the great majority of Anglo-American scholarship on Wretched. Underscoring indicates those words/phrases I have modified; strike-throughs redundant insertions made by Farrington.

17 “The dialectic as the living logic of action is invisible to a contemplative reason: it appears in the course of praxis as a necessary moment of it; in other words, it is created anew in each action . . . and becomes a theoretical and practical method when action in the course of development begins to give an explanation of itself”. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, trans. Sheridan-Smith, Alan (London, 2004), 38Google Scholar; Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris, 1960)Google Scholar.

18 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 89–119.

19 Macey, Frantz Fanon, 450.

20 Cohen-Solal, Annie, Jean-Paul Sartre: A Life, trans. Macafee, Norman (New York, 2005), 431Google Scholar. In an interview with Sartre's biographer in 1983, Lanzmann dated the meeting to the summer of 1960. This is very unlikely as the conversation he recalls concerned events postdating that time. Macey, Frantz Fanon, 579–80 n. 15, suggests that the meeting in fact took place in spring or early summer of 1961 after Fanon returned to Tunis from Moscow.

21 Quoted in Cohen-Solal, Jean-Paul Sartre, 431. Fanon's presence in that border region at the time is confirmed by reports in El Moudjahid. Macey, Frantz Fanon, 453.

22 In her account of Fanon in Force of Circumstance, Simone de Beauvoir comments that Fanon “had been passionately interested by Critique of Dialectical Reason, especially by the analysis of terror and brotherhood”. de Beauvoir, Simone, Force of Circumstance, trans. Howard, Richard (Harmondsworth, 1968), 583Google Scholar, see also 592, 595. See Cherki, Frantz Fanon, 160, 242 n. 8.

23 Unpublished letter to Maspéro, quoted in Cohen-Solal, Jean-Paul Sartre, 433, and Cherki, Frantz Fanon, 230. Some sections of Wretched were drafted before Fanon had read the Critique, namely the fifth chapter and the second part of the fourth chapter. An earlier version of the first chapter appeared in Les temps modernes in May 1961. This includes references to events from late April. See Macey, Frantz Fanon, 454–5. A footnote in this chapter (67; 82) cites a passage from the end of a long footnote from the Critique in which Sartre argues that “serial” collectives require no empathy to bind them together (Critique, 300–3). He gives the example of the colonial situation, pointing out that if the logic of settler racism were taken to its conclusion the settlers would do away with the natives altogether, an impossible aspiration as it would destroy what he understands as colonialism's economic raison d’être. Fanon is making the same point: colonial Manichaeism threatens genocide but must keep alive those it exploits. Closing the circle, Sartre picks up this aspect of Fanon's argument in his preface to Wretched: “He [the settler] ought to kill those he plunders . . . this is not possible: must he not also exploit them?” (14; 24).

24 Zahar sees the influence in Fanon's account of Manichaeism and anti-colonial counterviolence. Zahar, Renate, Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and Alienation, trans. Feuser, Willfried F. (New York, 1974), 55, 76,78Google Scholar. See Caute in his emphasis on the need and scarcity as a primary cause of social violence as well as the hope for a group-driven postcolonial national contract. Caute, David, Frantz Fanon (London, 1970), 75, 92Google Scholar. See Jinadu on scarcity as a defining parameter of colonial conflict. Jinadu, L. Adele, Fanon: In Search of the African Revolution (Enugu, 1980), 94–5Google Scholar. Other mentions: Perinbam, B. Marie, Holy Violence: The Revolutionary Thought of Frantz Fanon (Washington, DC, 1982), 90, 107Google Scholar; Onwuanibe, Richard C., A Critique of Revolutionary Humanism: Frantz Fanon (St Louis, MO, 1983), 129 n. 34Google Scholar; and Hansen, Emanuel, Frantz Fanon: Social and Political Thought (Columbus, OH, 1977), 29Google Scholar.

25 Parallels are drawn at some length by Paul Nursey-Bray, who goes over Sartre's theorization of praxis and group formation, claiming that this gives us a valuable insight into Fanon's account of decolonization in Wretched and A Dying Colonialism. Nursey-Bray, Paul, “Marxism in the Thought of Frantz Fanon”, Political Studies, 20/2 (1972), 152–68, 164–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Very much aware of Fanon's enthusiasm for the Critique, Bernasconi characterizes the Critique–Wretched nexus as a matter of “echoes” (42). Fanon is shown to draw on specific insights (particularly as indicated in the footnote that cites the Critique) and points to correspondences in general terms. He acknowledges that the dialogue between Fanon and Sartre “would become even clearer if one were to give and exhaustive account of their differences” (42). Bernasconi, Robert, “Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth as the Fulfilment of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason”, Sartre Studies International, 16/2 (2010), 36–47, 42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sekyi-Otu, Fanon's Dialectic of Experience, 64–5, 68–70, provides a summation of Sartre's discussion of scarcity, Manichaeism and violence and then of the importance of praxis in breaking the practico-inert in a discussion of Fanon's and Hegelian dialectics in Black Skin, White Masks. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, 21–2, 31–4, discusses Sartre's distinction between collectivity and group-in-fusion and attendant concepts in a section which engages primarily with Black Skin, White Masks.

26 In White Mythologies, Robert Young spends an early chapter discussing the Critique. Though he briefly acknowledges Sartre's influence in a later chapter on Fanon, he comments that Fanon has “little time for the central contention of the Critique of Dialectical Reason . . . that men as self-conscious agents create the totality of history”. Young, Robert, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London, 1990), 120Google Scholar. He revises this view in his introductory essay to the translation of Sartre's Situations V, where he claims that the section on colonialism in the Critique is “the inspiration for the opening chapter [of Wretched]”. Young, introduction, in Sartre, Jean-Paul, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. Azzedine Haddour et al. (London, 2001), xixGoogle Scholar. Gibson also acknowledges Sartre's influence—“Sartre provided some of the theoretical language and framework for thinking about the [sic] violence and fraternity”—but does not elaborate, and rejects any notion that Fanon is a “crude devotee” of the Critique. He claims that Fanon has his own vision which surpassed Sartre's. Gibson, Fanon, 227 n. 2.

27 Macey, Frantz Fanon, 470. He repeats the claim at 478.

28 Ibid., 487.

29 Ibid.

30 Fanon, Frantz, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Chevalier, Haakon (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; Fanon, Sociologie d’une revolution (L’an V de la révolution algérienne) (Paris, 1972)Google Scholar. Page references are given parenthetically in the text.

31 Gibson, Fanon, 227.

32 Kant, Immanuel, An Answer to the Question: “What Is Enlightenment?”, trans. Nisbet, H. B. (London, 2009), 1Google Scholar.

33 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason. Page references are given parenthetically in the text.

34 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Philcox, 2.

35 Said, “Travelling Theory Reconsidered”, 436–52; Bewes, Timothy, Reification, or, The Anxiety of Late Capitalism (London, 2001), 69–74, 81–5Google Scholar. In his review of Philcox's translation, Gibson also cites these two passages together, commenting that it “is undoubtedly clearer and more precise with ‘reification’ connecting to the following sentence quite neatly”. Gibson, “Relative Opacity”, 74–5. Perhaps, but this does not necessarily make it an effective translation.

36 Lukács, György, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Livingstone, Rodney (Cambridge, MA, 1971), 85Google Scholar.

37 A caveat is needed: Sartre uses the term “reification” intermittently throughout the Critique. He reworks the concept into the transhistorical mode of his discussion of the practico-inert. Reification, for Sartre, is “the way in which the praxis of individuals is circumscribed by the practico-inert order, which gives their actions a character of ‘mechanical rigidity’” (see 176; 244). One could posit that “substantification” and “reification” are analogous after all, if it is considered to be the way praxis is circumscribed by the practico-inert.

38 Here I have consulted the solutions of Philcox's translation, 5–6.

39 “Groups constitute themselves as determinations and negations of collectives. In other words, they transcend and preserve them” (348; 384).

40 “Not that freedom ever ceased to be the very condition of acts and the mask which conceals alienation, but we have seen how, in the practico-inert field, it became the mode in which alienated man has to live his servitude in perpetuity and, finally, his only way of discovering the necessity of his alienations and impotencies” (401; 425).

41 This echoes many passages in the Critique. For example: “Earlier we said that the series was nowhere, that is always elsewhere; the group, in contrast, is always here and insofar as we know it to be elsewhere too, it constitutes this elsewhere as the same here” (CDR, 394; 419–20; original emphasis). In his preface to Wretched, Sartre appears to recognize traces of his own argument: “At this moment the Nation does not shrink from him; he finds her wherever he goes, wherever he may be, she is” (WE 19; 29). Paige Arthur's suggestion that “it is better to read [Sartre's preface to Wretched] with the Critique than it is to read it with The Wretched of the Earth, because the ambivalence of the Critique tempers the excesses of the preface”, shows that those in Sartre studies can be equally culpable of missing the significance of the exchanges between the two thinkers. Paige Arthur, Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (London, 2010), 94.

42 Fanon, via Sartre, joins a tradition that looks back to Gustave le Bon's Psychologies des foules and anticipates Tony Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire. Laclau has recently renewed the case for the “intelligibility” of popular action. Laclau, Ernesto, On Populist Reason (London, 2005), 224Google Scholar.

43 “The fundamental ambiguity of Les Damnés de la terre is that, whilst Fanon constantly prophesies the victory of the people, the theoretical model he adopts necessarily implies that the group unity on which that victory is based cannot be sustained.” Macey, Frantz Fanon, 487.

44 Darwin comments that for Fanon “only the complete exclusion of all foreign influence from the new state was sufficient proof that decolonization had occurred. On such utopian criteria decolonization would still be an aspiration, not an accomplished fact”. Darwin, John, “Decolonization and End of Empire”, in Winks, Robin W., ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 5, Historiography (Oxford, 1999), 543Google Scholar). Shipway refers to “Fanon's at times almost-messianic vision of a decolonization that never was”. Shipway, Martin, Decolonization and its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires (Oxford, 2008), 6Google Scholar. Cooper argues that Fanon's vision of decolonization is of an ideal “True Anticolonialism”, that “different groups among a colonized population might bring their own histories and their own interests to a complex engagement with colonial power is lost in a powerful rhetoric”. Cooper, Frederick, “The Dialectics Decolonization: Nationalism and Labor Movements in Postwar French Africa”, in Cooper, Frederick and Stoler, Ann Laura, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, 1997), 407–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.