From The Philosopher, vol. 112, no. 2 ("Violence")
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Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre, 1961) remains one of the most influential and provocative books on violence ever written. Perhaps more than any other writer, Fanon challenges the idea of an objective and neutral study of violence. He critically attends to the wider historical developments of regimes of colonial violence and discusses the ways that it operates viscerally at the level of individual lives. At its heart, The Wretched of the Earth is a meditation on the psychic life of violence and its lived and generational consequences, which asks uncomfortable questions of us all. This conversation between the renowned Fanonian scholar Lewis R. Gordon and Brad Evans reflects upon the impact and continued relevance of Fanon’s book, attending to the dialectical logic of colonialism, the question of revolutionary violence, and the poetry that permeates Fanon’s unique thinking, whilst asking why Fanon’s provocation “who actually constitutes the wretched of the earth?” remains as important as ever.
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Brad Evans (BE): What drew you to Frantz Fanon’s work? In particular, I’m wondering how you felt after you read The Wretched of the Earth (although I know you prefer the title, The Damned of the Earth). How did you feel after you first read that book and what does that mean to you now looking back?
Lewis R. Gordon (LRG): Actually, the first Fanon text I encountered was Black Skin, White Masks. I was very young when I first attempted to read it, and I didn’t understand it at all. I was probably around eleven years old. However, I remember being struck by the beauty of the writing.
I have these Rastafari uncles who love to buy books, but never read them. But the thing is, having books in the home is great because the children might read them; I picked up The Wretched of the Earth and I understood this one. The reason I’m critical of this particular title is because of the mythopoetics of Fanon's language. He is thinking about damnation because one could be condemned, even though one is innocent. One could be condemned, even though one has done nothing wrong. If we think about the dynamics of colonialism, it is about what is imposed upon a people, which is dehumanisation, without any action of their own causing it. So that’s why I prefer damned. And I also think analytically it works better.
I remember in Jamaica where I’m from, if somebody’s poor, you work with them to see what you can do. There’s a collective responsibility to make the world better. There’s a sense that being poor doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. And I remember when I, as a poor immigrant child in the United States, went to school and my mother got me some cheap sneakers, I realised American kids would make fun of you for not being able to afford expensive things. I was in a country that hated the poor. There is something totally bizarre to me about hating the poor.
My uncle did something powerful by making sure Fanon’s book was in the house, and accessible to me. In this text, Fanon speaks to you regardless of age, colour, race, or class. The powerful way he opened this book had me, as we say, from line one.
BE: I love this description of the spontaneous lived presence of a book and not knowing who is going to pick it up or how it will alter their life and thought. The question I’d love to ask is how do you think we should think of violence in Fanon’s thought, especially in the contemporary moment?
LRG: There are several things. The first thing to mention is just how many people freaked out at a Black man unapologetically talking about violence. On the one hand, there are two words in anti-Black societies that you don’t want to have together: "Black" and "power". In these societies, if you put these two words together, it immediately means violence. This despite the fact that history has shown that no group of people has committed more violence on humankind than the people we designate as "white": people should be trembling to put the words "White" and "power" together!
This response is rooted in a bizarre psychoanalytical projection. If there’s a history of white people being so gruesome, there is a projection that there will be "payback". There is a constant effort to stop Black people using the word violence. However, there are circumstances in which you should stand up for yourself and fight, even if you lose. Fanon saw a form of psychosis that would emerge once there was an absolute sense of unworthiness of the self. Let’s be clear: Fanon himself hated violence. But what he hated more was complicity with violence through a refusal to act. He pointed out a form of tragedy in which the notion of a kind of intrinsic innocence is thrown to the wayside. If you want to live in a world in which people treat each other better, then fighting for it means being positioned as having "dirty hands". Fanon was pointing to the irrelevance of trying to demonstrate you are non-violent when you are part of a group which society has determined should not appear, should not exist.
Fanon himself hated violence. But what he hated more was complicity with violence through a refusal to act.
BE: How does this connect to your work on the fear of Black consciousness, the idea that what becomes truly problematic from the operations of power is existential consciousness? I’m wondering if you could elaborate a little more on that.
LRG: There is a lot of talk about "Black bodies". But what our society would prefer is Black bodies with a white mind or Black bodies with a white consciousness. (This idea is beautifully portrayed in Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out). Fanon was a radical humanist, but by humanist, he is not referring to the idea of species privilege or species fetishism. What Fanon understood very well is that one of the fantasies of the Euro-modern world is the idea that legitimacy depends on looking at humanity from "the outside", which is already a performative contradiction. In other words, the moment you’re in an intersubjective relationship, you’re in a world that’s inside, because humanity lives in a world of meaning. He looks at violence in a very multi-layered way: it is not simply about force. When human beings are pushed out of the world of meaning or intersubjectivity into their insular bodies, this becomes the realm of the corpse, the disembodiment of the body, the collapse of the body from lived body to corporeality.
What struck me about Fanon is that he’s even more radical. When he was fourteen years old, he witnessed the autopsy of a woman who was killed by an automobile. What specifically disgusted Fanon was the very matter-of-factness, the indignity, with which this woman’s corpse was handled. I argue that here he is bringing up something that’s already very developed in creolised languages: that even in death, we are entitled to be treated a certain way. This is why he was disgusted at the inhumanity in the process of the autopsy.
In language, for example, we often rename people, institutions, places, in order to harm certain individuals and groups. But this occurs not only at the level of language. There’s an implicit notion that once someone's humanity is erased, all is permitted. (A professor told Fanon to pretend the human body in the autopsy process was a cat to make it less difficult for him.) An insight Fanon had is that there are people who will argue against the notion of "the other" in order to dehumanise them. Fanon pointed out that there is ambiguity in the notion of the "other"; and the ambiguity, of course, is that the "other" is another human being. We do not, for example, call a chair our "other". The "other" is a freedom with whom one communicates; the "other" is a producer of meaning. Within the phenomenological tradition, "others" are necessary conditions for the appearance of social reality. As Levinas and many others have argued, this "other" also has ethical implications, because it makes you realise you’re also (an)other, and it enables you to take responsibility for your relationship with others. But what violence does, what dehumanisation does, is to deny the existence of the "other". What Fanon was identifying here is the radicality that’s involved in dehumanisation, and the ways in which this is linked to the production of violence. So, the basic thing to understand when discussing Fanon is that when we are talking about violence, we are fundamentally talking about the disruption of the intersubjective relations through which we are able to produce our common humanity. We are talking about dehumanisation.
As much as we may be angry or be fighting with one another, we ultimately cannot have any solution that is not one of building new relationships.
BE: I want to bring this back to the question of dialectics, because the one line which always struck me, especially as a white European, when I was reading The Wretched of the Earth, was that single line which reads, “Europe is literally a creation of the Third World”. I’m wondering how you think of that line, and the importance of the interplay in Fanon between race and class, especially in regards to working class interracial solidarities in contemporary politics today.
LRG: My translation reads “Europe is literally the creation of the third world… So when we hear a European head of state declare with hand on his heart that he must help poor underdeveloped peoples, we do not tremble with gratitude. Rather we say, ‘It’s just reparations owed to us.’” The thing with Fanon that we should always bear in mind is that he had a very important insight that some people today overlook. He was a radical anti-Manichaeist, he was against reductivism. When he wrote Black Skin, White Masks, he was talking about two kinds of lies: the lie that Black people are intrinsically inferior, and the lie that white people are intrinsically superior. Both lies, he argues, are the attempted murder of humanity. What he was saying is that the very production of a global colonial system creates a group of people who have to wear masks and live a lie. That’s whiteness.
Even though there is conflict, we must remember that it is a conflict between groups of human beings. In other words, there is a system that could make white people forget they’re people, and there’s a system that could make Black people ask, “Well, what the hell am I? Who am I?” And so if we’re going to look at what is happening right now in terms of the anti-woke movement, the anti-critical race theory movement, and so on, these efforts are basically to seal, to put more glue onto, the masks, the lies. And what Fanon is saying is that we should face history: a classic psychoanalytic move. There are people who are haunted by ghosts, and ghosts usually pop up because you haven’t done what you’re supposed to do. Ghosts are always, by definition, from the past or from another time. If you’re able to handle those issues from the time you are able to exorcise the ghosts and relate to the history in a different way.
Right now, I think that Fanon would emphasize is that we’re living on a planet with eight billion people and it is much smaller than it was even in his time: the technologies of movement, the fact that we can be speaking from different shores, different states, different places – all this creates a compressed humanity, as a result of which new forms of intersubjectivity emerge. What, then, are we doing wasting our time with ideas of absolutes, of white, Black, and Brown?
Now, of course, we have to take seriously the concepts that maintain these absolutes. For instance, the concept of privatisation by definition means that there are people who are excluded. The concept of a nation-state by definition means that there’s the production of illegal people. There are lots of these concepts that converge. But Fanon's philosophy basically comes down to this: Nothing is meaningful outside of a relationship. As much as we may be angry or be fighting with one another, we ultimately cannot have any solution that is not one of building new relationships. This relationality and the ability to produce new relationships will also produce new kinds of people, new kinds of concepts. This element is a crucial aspect of Fanon's book. The question we face, then, is the question of the responsibility we have, as people, dealing with new kinds of people. Accompanying this is the realisation that one day we may look in the mirror and realise, that new kind of people is us.
The political struggle, the revolutionary struggle, is to increase the options available for human beings to live meaningful lives.
BE: One of the things that always really struck me as deeply important about your engagement with Fanon was, first of all, the question of the ancestral, but also the poetic. I wonder if you can just give a few comments on why you think that poetic element is crucial to our understanding of Fanon?
LRG: Well, first of all, he himself was a poet. Especially when one reads his plays, they’re basically in verse. But that’s superficial. The deeper issue is that when talking about what a human being is in Fanonian terms, it’s never reduced to a single element. He looks at human beings multi-dimensionally. In fact, The Wretched of the Earth is about what happens to human beings when our multidimensionality is eroded, and when we close off those aspects of ourselves. So, for Fanon, for instance, the affective life, the poetic dimensions of life, these are elements that are necessary for human beings to have liveable lives. To put this differently: food, shelter, clothing is all fine, but if you take away the aesthetic dimension of life – the ambiguity of meanings, creativity, dance, musicality – then you’ll have human beings who walk off cliffs. In other words: the revolution. He is absolutely a revolutionary, but Fanon doesn’t have any room for revolutions that kill humanity. Fanon is arguing, like Audre Lorde, that we need to build better houses in which people can live. This liveability is the poetic dimension that he talks about. There are people who claim that Fanon is a materialistic, reductionistic type. No, no, no, no! The man danced, loved life, loved living. He argued that every human being deserves that. The political struggle, the revolutionary struggle, is to increase the options available for human beings to live meaningful lives.
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Lewis R. Gordon is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, USA. He specializes in Africana Philosophy, Existentialism, Race and Racism, and Social and Political thought. Lewis is an award-winning author, scholar, and public philosopher, and his monographs include Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1995), Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (2020), and Fears of Black Consciousness (2022).
Brad Evans is a Professor of Political Violence and Aesthetics at the University of Bath, UK. He is the founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Violence, and the online educational ‘Histories of Violence’ project. Brad has published twenty books and edited collections, many of which address international affairs and theorizations of violence.
From The Philosopher, vol. 112, no. 2 ("Violence")
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