the wretched of the earth concerning violence

He prefers to raise a challenge: that of the subject reinstated, in a state to act, and moreover, in a state to act and to do harm. Evading the pitfalls of Hegelian recognition, Fanon ironically interrogates himself about the very instances of recognition ( Recognized? But by who?) against the fatal call of “negritude” that Fanon keeps at a distance.

The first mask makes reference to the dialectic of recognition the second to the affirmation of the self. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon’s 1952 study on the effects of colonialism and racism on black identity, the masks in question represent lived experiences of violence-a violence that seems constantly turned back against itself. Is it pertinent to think that, between the two works, Fanon passed from an analysis of violence tolerated and undergone to an analysis of violence “acted” and undertaken? And to what degree is it possible to interpret this path as a transfiguration of the subject in and by violence, ready to make of violence a means of subjectification modality?

On the other hand, Black Skin, White Masks elaborates an epistemology of grief-stricken subjectivity, “straddling Nothingness and Infinity” 2 and charged with violence. If The Wretched of the Earth privileges a political style, the work’s entirety is dedicated to constituting a combative collective conscience in sync with the Algerian insurrection. Some say that Fanon’s point of view radicalized during this period: with an imminently independent Algeria, Fanon abandoned the socio-psychoanalytic point of view which he had elaborated in order to theorize post-slavery French society. Commentary on Frantz Fanon’s oeuvre tends to consider The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, as the work that breaks with the Martinican thinker’s post-slavery analysis, which was developed nine years earlier in his first book, Black Skin, White Masks.

The wretched of the earth concerning violence