ON

FANON'S MANICHEAN
DELIRIUM
by Alvaro Reyes
Introduction
F
OR MANY readers, entering Fanon's first chap-
ter of The Wretched of the Earth can be a bit dis-
concerting, not only for the positions expounded
there concerning violence, but also for what ap-
pears as an implicit affirmation of the very Man-
icheanism that according to Fanon subtends the
colonial order. That is, when Fanon states that the
colonial world is "a world divided in two," it is in
no way a simple denunciation, but in his eyes, the
objective delineation of tbe parameters of pos-
sibility within the existing colonial situation. As
Fanon reads the scope and direction of the initial
movements of the colonized, he concludes that
their actions do not reinforce, nor seek to replicate,
this initial situation. Rather, the entire "truth" of
the "Wretched's" movement is to actually "split
the world in two" and create a rupture from
the entirety of this situation that will allow the
Wretched to destroy both the colonizer and, figu-
ratively, themselves as colonized. This would be to
turn away from the physical violence of the anti-
colonial war in a strict sense, and toward the inno-
vation required to bring a new subject of political
action into existence. As Fanon repeats again and
again (despite many subsequent misreadings to the
contrary), the success or failure of the Wretched
depends on their capacity to achieve what untu
then had remained, strictly speaking, impossible.
Ambivalence
T
HE AFnRMATiON of Manicheanism has led
commentators to view the opening of Fanon's
Wretched as a retreat from questions regarding the
"ambivalences of identification" touched upon
in Fanon's previous writings, most specifically
with his invocation of Lacanian psychoanalysis
and its mirror stage of the T to approximate
the question of "black psychopathology'" in
chapter six of Black Skin, White Masks. For Homi
Bhabha, it is certainly in the opening pages of
Wretched, so enmeshed in the anticolonial struggle
of revolutionary Algeria, where Fanon is forced
to "impede the exploration of the...ambivalent,
uncertain questions of colonial desire. The
state of emergency from which he [Fanon]
writes demands more insurgent answers, more
immediate identifications."^
In other words, Fanon's affirmation of an
"inversion of colonial Manicheanism" in Wretched
has been interpreted as a kind of deviation from
Black Skin, White Masks.^ Although one could
derive such an argument from Fanon's writings,
the above approach treats Fanon's method of
describing the unfolding of the various moments
of the national revolutionary impulse as if these
moments existed as independent ends.
A s ATO Sekyi-Otu has pointed out, the admo-
.ZAJiition of what Bhabha calls Fanon's "more
immediate identification" with the colonized
in Wretched hinges on isolating the moment of
"reverse Manicheanism" in Fanon from the
larger unfolding of Fanon's own dialectical
narrative of decolonization.* Such an approach
treats the question of "anti-racist racism" and
"race war" as if these were the final rather
than the inaugural moments of struggle. That
is, to borrow from the work of Alain Badiou, it
attempts to use the psychoanalytic structural
Page 13 THE BLACK SCHOLAR VOLUME 42, NO. 3-4
dialectic of "alterity" to interrupt what it
reads as Fanon's appropriations of a classically
Hegelian inflected narrative of alienation and
disalienation. In that narrative, the moment of
encounter implicit in colonization is the unfolding
of a simple term in its becoming other, and the
moment of decolonization as the "negation of
the negation,"^ the return to itself as an achieved
concept. Here not only do we see reduced Fanon's
own thoughts on Manicheanism, but we are also
led to underestimate the achievements Fanon
intuits when this Manicheanism is confronted
and effectively crushed by the thought and action
of the colonized.
A World Divided in Two
N
OT ONLY is Fanon's "world divided in two"
devoid of social ambivalences between col-
onizer and colonized, but Fanon goes so far as
to claim that the distinction itself exists at the
level of a difference in "species,"'' which he fur-
ther describes as "congenitally antagonistic" due
to the very "reification secreted and nurtured by
the colonial situation."' The language of species
used by Fanon is chosen from the vocabulary of
the colonists themselves, whose dehumanization
of the colonized subject leads them to speak in
"zoological" terms when referring, for instance,
to the "yellow multitudes." That is, for Fanon, the
colonists do not tire of referring to the colonized
in terms of "...hordes, ...stink, ...swarming, ...
seedling... etc.""
In addition, these zoological categories are
assigned a hierarchy of value; the animalistic
colonized is incapable of holding human values
and is thus considered "the quintessence of evil."^
These differentiations, stemming from a reduc-
tion to the biological, then lead the colonists to
the necessity of protecting the ruling species from
"infection" emanating from the natives.'" This is
a protection that only arrives by the application
of the "Aristotelian logic of mutual exclusion" ex-
pressed in the strict spatial compartmentalization
of the colony into European and Native quarters
(of which South African apartheid was paradig-
matic but not exceptional for Fanon)." That is,
the heart of the colonists' project can be delineat-
ed through "the geographical configuration and
classification [s]" which it then circularly employs
to produce the very distinction between the species.
Consider Fanon's description of the conditions of
the European quarters:
The colonists' sector is a sector built to last, all stone
and steel. It's a sector of lights and paved roads, where
the trashcans constantly overflow with strange and
wonderful garbage, undreamed-of leftovers. The col-
onists' feet... are protected by solid shoes in a sector
where the streets are clean and smooth, without a pot-
hole, without a stone.. .The colonist's sector is a white
folks' sector, a sector of foreigners.'^
This sector could not stand in sharper distinc-
tion to the natives' quarters:
The "native" quarters, the shantytown, the Medina,
the reservation, is a disreputable place inhabited by
disreputable people. You are born anywhere, anyhow.
You die anywhere, from anything. It's a world with
no space, people are piled one top of the other, the
shacks squeezed tightly together. The colonized sector
is a famished sector, hungry for bread, meat, shoes,
coal, and Ught... It is a sector of niggers, a sector of
towelheads."
Accordingly, in the colony there exists a near
confiuence between geographical location, spe-
cies/race, and social standing. That is, one's so-
cial position within colonial society is directly
correlated to which of these "species," which of
these "races," one belongs, which in turn deter-
mines what physical location one inhabits in the
colony.'* A certain circularity should be noted
here between the classificatory schmas of the
zoological terms and the physical manifestation
of apartheid. That is, there is a relay between the
creation of the colonized as an epistemologically
"knowable" object and the spatial segregation, or
locational "fixing" of that object within the colo-
ny. The circularity of this "bio-geographic deter-
minism" is captured nicely by Charles Mills, who
explains, "you are what you are in part because
you originate from a certain kind of space, and
that space has those properties in part because it
is inhabited by creatures like yourself."''
I
T BECOMES clear then from these descriptions
that the colonial project is the production of
a "Manichean world." In order to keep these
worlds apart, domination cannot be hidden; the
zone of the colonist and that of the native face
each other separated by "napalm and rifle butts,"
direcy opposed but never "in the service of a
higher unity.'"^ That is, for Fanon, the colonial
world stands in immediate contradistinction to
"capitalist societies" that are characterized by
the fact that an educational system, a system of
counselors and teachers, as well as that of a set of
Page 14 THE BLACK SCHOLAR VOLUME 42, NO. 3-4
"moral refiexes" play a mediating role that helps
"to instill in the exploited a sense of submission
and inhibition," and which thus functions to ease
the labor of the particular into the social organi-
zation of the whole."
In colonial societies no such mediation exists
and, consequendy, "the official, legitimate
agent, the spokesperson for the colonist and the
regime of oppression is the police officer and the
soldier."'^ In addition, unlike capitalist societies,
where the "ruling class" is characterized by
their possession of factories, estates, and bank
accounts, in colonial societies the "ruling species"
is characterized simply by being from elsewhere,
by being "the others" to the native. Fanon explains
this situation in the now oft-quoted statement:
"In the colonies the economic infrastructure (the
base) is also a superstructure. The cause is effect:
You are rich because you are white, you are white
because you are rieh."" Again, the Manieheanism
of colonial society makes it so that the "reality"
of the correlation between one's racial belonging
and one's economic standing is "never masked,"
and thus "no conciliation [between these species
is] possible, one of them is superfiuous."^"
Manichean Inversion
F
ANON'S DESCRIPTION is not intended simply to
denounce the Manichean world of the
colonies, but to outline the conditions of existence
that can account for what will soon follow. That
is, it allows us to identify the very structure of the
colonial world, its Manieheanism, as that which
wiU provide the initial impetus for its demise.
Fanon's description allows us to see two aspects
of this impetus. First, we see the inability of
the colonial system to "mask domination and
alleviate oppression."^' As Fanon notes, the lack
of mediation, which presents itself as the reason
for the particular brutality of the colonial system,
is in fact its Achilles heel. The very symbols of
physical subjugation, "the bugle calls and the
military parades," the constant need of the
colonist to announce "Here I am the master!"
which serve as attempts to instill physical fear into
the native, simultaneously and unwittingly allow
him (or her) to externalize and identify the reason
for his plight, while identifying his own continued
resistance as a point of excess inassimilable to the
colonial structure.^^ That is, these actions by the
colonist allow the colonized to "identify his enemy
and put a name to all his misfortune," to move
from defeat to action, simultaneously warding off
the threat of fatalism.^'
Second, this lack of mediation and the
consequent reliance by the colonist on physical
violence creates a situation in which the native
is physically "dominated," but there is nothing
in place to assure that he is "domesticated."^''
As Fanon points out, in words that help us to
understand the importance of the externalization
made possible by the Manieheanism of the
colonial situation, "the native is made to feel
inferior, but by no means [is he] convinced of
his inferiority."^' We might say then (echoing
Ranajit Guha) that in the colonial situation
there is domination without hegemony. These
two elements, the creation of domination and
the constantly identifiable "external" reason for
that domination, allows the native an anchoring
point, a point of decision, in which the logic of
Manieheanism used by the colonist becomes
the very basis for the colonized to conclude that
"destroy[ing] the colonial world means nothing
less than demolishing the colonist's sector,
burying it deep within the earth or banishing it
from the territory" '^^ In sum, the Manieheanism
introduced by the colonizer and built into the
colonial situation as a whole, becomes the basis
for unifying the subjugated race against its foreign
oppressor.^'
B
Y inverting the colonizers' Manieheanism,
the colonized are able to fashion a future
without the colonizer. If the status of the colonist
comes from being "from elsewhere," then certainly
those "from here" can expel the colonizer and
"eject him outright from the picture."^^ The
unification of those "from here" against those
"from elsewhere" allows the natives then to act on
a dream that had until then remained latent, the
dream of "taking the colonists' place," and more
simply of going from the position of persecuted to
that of persecutor.^' In short, for Fanon, it is the
Manichean reality of the colonial situation that
provides all the necessary elements for the initial
and "minimum" demand of decolonization ... "the
last shall become the first."^" Manieheanism best
lays the groundwork for its own inversion and
"the Manieheanism of the colonizer produces a
Manieheanism of the colonized," generating "an
anti-raeist racism," as Jean-Paul Sartre labeled
it, or a "race war" as Eldridge Cleaver would
Page 15 THE BLACK SCHOLAR VOLUME 42, NO. 3-4
refer to it.'' The Manichean reality provides the
material from which the colonized draws to move
from "fixedness" to action, even if this minimal
demand is still firmly in the grips of reaction.
On Violence
H
AVING BROKEN with fatalism and identified
the colonist as the externalizable cause
of oppression, the native is also able to identify
the mechanism through which that oppression
is made a realityviolence. That is, as Fanon
states, it is the settler's unmediated violence that
has shown the native once and for all that "colo-
nialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a
body endowed with reason. It is naked violence
and only gives in when confronted with greater
violence."'^ It is the violence of the colonizer that
has created the colonized; it is through their "bay-
onets" and "cannon fire" that they have destroyed
the very the social fabric of native Hfe, e.g., econ-
omy, lifestyle, and modes of dress.^' Thus it is
through this violence that the colonist not only
imposes a separation of the species but in fact
"fabricates" its other, the colonized. If the colo-
nists can say that the natives are animals, it is be-
cause their violence has done everything possible
to reduce them to an animal-ke existence (all the
more vicious, for never having succeeded). Yet,
according to Fanon, due to the law of "reciprocal
homogeneity" that characterizes the Manichean
reality of the colonial situation, this violence ema-
nating from the colonist shows the native the path
that he must take to freedom... "colonialism only
loosens its hold when the knife is at its throat."^*
Directly following in this line of Manichean
inversion. Fanon states that "the colonized man
finds his freedom in and through violence."^'^ If
the Manicheanism of the colonial situation has
provided an end goal for the nativethe expul-
sion of the colonizerthen the daily imposition
of colonialism through visible violence has in-
dicated the means by which this goal might be
achieved. That is, it is the direct and organized
violence of a unified people that diminishes the
capacity of the metropolis to act, forcing the colo-
nizer eventually to abandon the colony.'^ We here
find ourselves back at the very first lines of The
Wretched of the Earth, "decolonization is always a
violent event."'' It is, then, only in the capacity
to move beyond the initial "minimal" demand,
beyond reaction, that the colonized can move
beyond violence and toward a properly active ac-
tion.
Manicheanism, Partisan Struggle
and Strategy:
Splitting the World in Two
S
EEING THAT the question of violence is in fact a
subset of the larger issue of Manicheanism,
what are we to make of Fanon's insistence on the
force of the colonized's Manichean inversion of
the colonial situation? That is, should we view
Fanon's sympathy for this inversion, as Bhabha
has done, as an oversimplified identification with
the plight of the colonized induced by the exigen-
cies of an anticolonial war? For Fanon, although
this inversion was absolutely necessary to break
from the structure of colonialism, as he is careful
to point out, it is in no way sufficient for a suc-
cessful process of decolonization. It is important
to remember the reason for the necessity of this
"inversion." The first reason is that through the
Manichean inversion, the colonized are able to
see that colonialism did not arise out of ontolog-
ical necessity but rather through the contingent
historical actions of the colonizer. That is, colo-
nization is a historical phenomenon in which the
privileged agents are the colonists. Although the
existence of this phenomenon limits the conduct
of the colonized, the realization of its historicity
simultaneously reopens the field of history to the
possibility of their own agency.
Second, and perhaps more importantiy, the
rediscovery of historical possibility is accompa-
nied by the acknowledgment that ontological and
historical justifications of colonization serve only
to obscure the issue of force, and therefore the
realization that the violent imposition of colo-
nialism can be answered in the violent actions of
the colonized. In this turn of events, success or
failure does not lie simply in a tactical defeat of
the colonizer but in the enormous strategic victo-
ry achieved in exposing the absolute "exhaustion
of politics" under the colonial structure.^^ It is at
this point of exhaustion that, according to Fanon:
Tactcs and strategy merge. The art of politics is trans-
formed into the art of war. The militant becomes the
fighter. To wage war and to engage in politics are one
and the same thing."
Page 16 THE BLACK SCHOLAR VOLUME 42, NO. 3-4
By viewing both colonization and decoloni-
zation as simply "a question of relative strength"
and thus of open struggle, the colonized have giv-
en up on "government inquiries" and "searches
for justice" within the colonial context.'"' Thus
the logic of exclusion that maintains the colonial
structure resurfaces as a point of excess over and
above this structure from which the colonized can
be clear that the only legitimacy sustaining the co-
lonial regime is that of force.*' "Restructuring the
world" is possible.
A
s FANON notes (as early as Black Skin,
White Masks), this realization is worldwide,
and subjects throughout the Third World were
"shattering their chains" with the example of the
Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu to emulate. That
is, through the organization of force, and more
specifically the conduct of "guerilla war" (what
Fanon refers to as "that instrument of violence of
the colonized"), a Dien Bien Phu was "now with-
in reach of every colonized subject.*^ The Man-
ichean inversion allows the colonized to see that
colonization is a question of the organization of
force, and that that kind of organization, through
guerilla warfare, is imminently within reach.
Through this analysis of the "exhaustion of
politics," Fanon is firmly within the formation
of the Third World partisan. This was a figure
developed independently and in particular plac-
es and instances, but which was formed within
the overall situation of colonialism and came
to conclusions strikingly similar to those set out
by Mao Zedong, whom Carl Schmitt called the
"new Clausewitz" (or as we might say today, an
inverted Clausewitz), comparing him to the nine-
teenth-century Cerman military theorist who
famously declared: "war is the continuation of
politics by other means." Mao writes:
"War is the continuation of politics." In this sense
war is politics and war itself is a political action; since
ancient times there has not been a war that did not
have a political character... When politics develops
to a certain stage beyond which it cannot proceed by
tlie usual means, war breaks out to sweep away those
obstacles in the way.. .It can therefore be said that pol-
itics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with
bloodshed.
This conclusion not only produces a challenge
to the colonizers, who cannot fathom a future in
which they are no longer the central subjects of
history. It is also, and more importantly, a contesta-
tion to those would-be or semi- sympathizers who
mistakenly reduce the possible agency of the colo-
nized to a compromise or action within the colonial
stmcture. Fanon righdy notes that these objections
to the organization of force and to the unleashing
of violence repeated a certain developmentalist
logic that makes the colonized losers from the start.
To demonstrate this oft-repeated logic. Fanon cites
a passage from Friedrich Engels' Anti-Durhing that
is worth reproducing in its entirety:
Just as Crusoe could procure a sword for himself, we
are equally entitled to assume that one fine morning
Friday might appear with a loaded revolver in his
hand, and then the whole "force" relationship is
inverted. Friday commands and it is Crusoe who
has to drudge... So, then, the revolver triumphs over
the sword; and this will probably make even the
most childish axiomatician comprehend that force
is no mere act of will, but requires very preliminary
conditions before it can come into operation, that is
to say, instruments, the more perfect of which van-
quish the less perfect; moreover, that these instru-
ments have to be produced, which also implies that
the producer of more perfect instruments of force,
vulgo arms, vanquishes the producer of the less per-
fect instrument, and that, iti a word, the triumph
of force is based on the production of arms, and
this in turn on production in generaltherefore on
"economic power," on the "economic order," on
the material means which force has at its disposal.**
W
ITHIN Engels' text. Fanon saw the
construction of an argument that attempts
to bury confiict within the discourse of economic
development, nullifying the question of political
Wl and thus seemingly freezing tlie relations of
force throughout timefatalism, resignation
and apathy. Given the pervasiveness of this
logic, even within the nationalist parties in the
colonies in which the anticolonial struggle had
been defeated before it was even initiated, it is
important to highlight Fanon's understanding that
the formation of the consciousness of species/
race struggle brought on by the inversion of
colonial Manicheanism ran directiy counter to the
logic exemplified by Engels' text. That is, to use
the terminology developed by Michel Foucault
while analyzing a strikingly parallel situation, what
Fanon is describing is a paradigmatic case of the
formation of the "historical/political" discourse of
the partisan, which faces off against the "juridical/
philosophical" discourse dominant in "the West"
and through which the West assures its dominance
within the colonial situation.*^
Page 17 THE BLACK SCHOLAR VOLUME 42, NO. 3-4
Reversibility/Another Politics
A
CCORDING to Foucault, juridical-philosophic
discourse is the discourse of sovereignty,
which begins with three pre-given concepts: law,
the unity of power, and the subject.*^ By starting
with the "individual" (the subject) as pre-given,
sovereignty is able to present subjection as the
necessary given in any relationship of power.*'
It is worth noting how strong the connection be-
tween the production of the individual and the
structure of subjection is for Fanon as well. As he
states, first among the "values" that the colonist
tries to inculcate into the native intellectual is that
of individualism:
The colonialist bourgeoisie hammered into the
colonized mind the notion of a society of individuals
where each is locked in his subjectivity, where wealth
lies in thought. But the colonized intellectual who is
lucky enough to bunker down with the people during
the liberation struggles, will soon discover the falsity
of this theory. Involvement in the organization of
struggle will already introduce him to a different
vocabtdary. "Brother," "sister," "comrade.""
Thus, in sharp contrast to "sovereign discourse,"
"historical/political" discourse begins with the sit-
uation of domination, with the establishment of
sovereignty through the defeat of one portion of
society by another. Therefore, and much as Fanon
himself sees, it is "the colonist who fabricated and
continues to fabricate the colonized subject," the
historical/political discourse of the partisan sees
the individual and his or her subjection not as a
necessary pre-given but as "manufactured" within
the relations of power (Fanon 2004, 2). To quote
Foucault, the emphasis of historical/political dis-
course is on "how actual relations of subjugation
manufacture subjects" (FoucaiJt 2003, 45). Im-
portantly then, politics for the partisan (i.e., as de-
scribed by Fanon in the Third World movement as
a whole) far exceeds the "political institutions" of
any given society which are in fact a subset of "a
relation of force" wthin which the subjugated, the
colonized, act along with the colonizer. The logic
of the partisan, according to Foucault, is that pow-
er does not emanate from the sovereign; rather,
sovereignty itself is the expression of a given rela-
tion of force that involves the entirety of a society.
As a consequence, the binary or Manichean
logic of the partisan in this "race war" acts as a
rather distinct antidote to sovereignty. That is, it
is the subject of juridical-philosophic universality
which subtends sovereignty, that subject which "es-
tablishes itself between the adversaries, in the cen-
ter and above them, imposing one general law and
founding a reconciliatory order" which is directly
challenged by the partisan insistence that you must
belong to one side or another in this war.*'
Perhaps in light of these insights we can more
fully explore the discussion of Fanon's apparent
praise of the Manichean logic of decolonization.
Within this context, the issue of violence cannot
simply be reduced to physical force; as Fanon
states, "the occupier can easily phase out the
violent aspects of his presence." It therefore might
more productively be seen as the mechanism
through which anticolonial movements as a whole
attempted to link the issue of strategy and tactics
to political outcomes; a new relation of force.^"
This necessitates a logic which has the virtue
of positing all relations of force, unlike the log-
ic presented earlier by Engels and tbe national-
ist bourgeoisie parties, as purely contingent and
thus immanently reversible (an insight that today
seems somewhat obvious, keeping in mind that
such flippancy is only possible thanks to the very
process of decolonization in which Fanon is so in-
tensely immersed). Furthermore, if the colonial
situation is in fact composed from top to bottom
as a relation of force, or a war, that exceeds the
institutions of what in the West has been termed
"the political" (that space contained in the inter-
action between state and civil society), then in rec-
ognizing that war the colonized would have to do
far more than merely expel the colonizer. They
would in fact have to produce entirely new spac-
es for political action; their aim would thus have
to be to achieve the, until then, impossible, and
change politics itself
Beyond War: Innovate
I
T IS EQUALLY important to note that, throughout
the first chapter of Wretched, Fanon captures
the virtue of the inverted Manicheanism of
the colonized while never himself viewing that
Manicheanism as an end. Rather, as he states
on a number of occasions, this demand ("the
last shall become first") is simply the "minimal
demand" which he will later explain is related
to the expression of a vague form of "a national
framework" that is more likely to lead to manip-
ulation by the parasitical "national bourgeoisie"
than to liberation. The truth is that for Fanon
Page 18 THE BLACK SCHOLAR VOLUME 42, NO. 3-4
very little happens in the spaces of the colonizer
or in those of the colonized. In fact. Fanon refers
to this entire "reality," the entirety of the spaces
in the given order of places of colonization, as
the "zone of death." But within the space of the
colonized, the establishment of an "anti-racist
racism" is an initial action that like all first actions
for Fanon is mere reaction, but nevertheless a re-
action (the Manichean inversion) that can be split
within itself
As Fanon explains, this reaction, like aU reaction,
is more likely than not to continue forever in the
logic of "reciprocal homogeneity" and "hate"
that characterizes the colonial situation. But the
reaction that brings to light the "exhaustion of
politics" vthin the colonial structure, far beyond
the mere deployment of physical violence, leads
to the collective realization that colonization/
decolonization must be a question of "relative
strength" between two distinct subjective forces.
In this realization the colonized has stepped
onto the scene to smash the self-satisfied fullness
of the colonizer, not only reintroducing the
possibility of a reversal of fortune, the possibility
of moving from "persecuted to persecutor," but
more importandy, the possibility of what Fanon
would term "scission," a break from the colonial
structure, the space for the existence of another
subject altogether. In Fanon's words, they have
introduced the possibility of turning away from
Europe and affirming "the new." Therefore, for
Fanon, the spaces of the colonized are themselves
split in two between mere reaction, firmly within
the "zone of turbulence," and what Fanon terms
"the zone of action."
T
HIS "zone of action" however cannot by
definition exist between colonizer and
colonized, as Homi Bhabha would have it, as
each of these figures and therefore everything
between them is stiU firmly in the "zone of death."
Rather, the "zone of action" comes into being
in the point of scission, the point of decision of
the colonized to destroy themselves as colonized,
and "the new," or as Fanon had previously put
it, "the unforeseeable." In other words, the
Wretched have caUed the bluff of the colonizer,
and to the colonizers frequent exclamations, "you
are not like us!" they have set out, through an
unparaUeled coUective organization of the wiU
(a careful process of organization, selection, and
discipline detailed in chapters two and three of
Wretched), to make this statement an unqualified
truth, answering, "We wiU make ourselves far
more different than you can imagine!" They have
set out to achieve the alteration of being, to bring
into existence another element, in but not of, the
colonial situationthemselves as an independent
subjective force.
TT^INALLY, we should be careful here, as the pro-
X duction of an actual duality, the production
of the Wretched as an active subjective element is
irreconcilable with the first element (i.e. colonial-
ism), with regard to the question of difference.
The first element, Europe's Manichean dualism
("a world divided in two") is the mechanism for
the production and reproduction of a purely
monological discourse. In contrast, the struggle
of the colonized to bring into existence an ac-
tual duality (the Third World partisan's struggle
described by Fanon as "Split[ting] the world in
two") is the onto-historical condition of possibility
for the end of that monologue, for difference. Far
from the today fashionable declarations of "Long
live difference!" The Wretched of the Earth reminds
us that difference today stands on the shoulders
of millions of anticolonial militants.
Endnotes
1. Bhabha, Homi K., 77! Locatim of Culture (New York:
Routledge, 1994)44.
2. Bhabha, Homi K., "Remembering Fanon," New Formations
7,(1987): 118-124.
3. Gibson, Nigel, "Fanon and the Pitfalls of Cultural Studies,"
Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, ed. Anthony C. Alessandri-
ni (New York: Roudedge, 1999) 102.
4. Sekyi-Otu, Ato, Fanon's Lkaiectic of Experience (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1996).
5. Badiou, Alain, Theory of the Subject (New York: Continuum,
2009)3-12.
6. Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove
Press, 2004) 1.
7. Ibid., 2.
8. Ibid., 7.
9. Ibid., 6.
10. Gibson, Nigel, Fanon: The Pastcoimial Ima^naon
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003) 108.
11. Fanon, Wretched, 3.
12. Ibid., 4.
13.Ibid.
14. Ibid., 5.
15. McKittrick, Katherine, and Woods, Clyde, Black Geographies
and the Politics of Place (Cambridge: South End Press, 2007)
7; and Lipsitz, George, How Racism 7te/1!ace (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2011) 28.
Page 19 THE BLACK SCHOLAR VOLUME 42, NO. 3-4
16. Ibid,. 4.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 3. IfBtack Skin, White Masks, is productively read
alongside, and against, Hegel's Phmomenotogy of Spirit,
I propose that these descriptions of a lack of a site for
mediational education within colonial society will be seen
to be formulated by Fanon more directly in relation to,
and against, Hegel's Etements of the Philosophy of Right. In
other words, what Fanon is most specifically referencing
in the above paragraph is the lack ofexistence of"civil
society" within the colony. See G.W.F. Hegel, Etements of
the Phitesophy of Right (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1991)219-274.
19. Ibid., 5.
20. Ibid., 4.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 17.
23. Ibid., 31.
24. Ibid., 16.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 6.
27. Ibid., 10.
28. Ibid., 5 ,9.
29. Ibid., 16.
30. Ibid., 10. [Fanon's phrase invokes Jesus's words in Matthew
20:16: "So the tost shatt be first, and the first tast:for many are
catted, but few chosen" (King James Bible). Ed.]
31. Fanon, Wretched, 50; and Sartre, Jean-Paul, Btack Orpheus
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) 296.
32. Fanon, Wretched, 23.
33. Ibid., 6.
34. Ibid., 23.
35. Ibid., 86.
36. Ibid., 30.
37. Ibid., 1.
38. Gihson, Fanon: The Postcotoniat Imaginaon, 119.
39. Fanon, Wretched, 83.
40. Ibid., 61.
41. Ibid., 42-43.
42. Ibid., 26 and 31.
43. Mao Zedong and Knight, Nick, Mao Zedong on Diateccat
Materiatism: Writings on Philosophy 1937 (Armonk: M.E.
Sharpe, 1990) 135-136.
44. Friedrich Engels as quoted in Fanon's 77; Wretched of the
Earth, 25.
45. Foucault, Michel, Society Must Be Defended (New York: Pic-
ador, 2003) 57.
46. Ibid., 44.
47. Ibid., 29, 30.
48. Fanon, Wretched, 11.
49. Ibid,. 51,53.
50. Ibid., 91.
Subscribe to
THEBLACKSCHOLAR
INTEGRATION
Individuals-$35.00 yr.
Institutions-$148.00 yr.
Enclosed is $
Start my sub today.
PREPAYMENT IS REQUIRED
Send check or money order
with your order.
Name
Address
City
State/Zip Code.
Paradigm Publishers
c/o Journals Office
5589 Arapahoe Ave.
Suite 206A
Boulder, CO 80303
joumals@paradigmpublishers.com
Ph: 303-245-9054 Fax: 303-265-9051
Page 20 THE BLACK SCHOLAR VOLUME 42, NO. 3-4
Copyright of Black Scholar is the property of Paradigm Publishers, on behalf of The Black Scholar and its
content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's
express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.