Notes on Fanon's Dialectics

Abstract

This thesis is a study of the dialectics of Martinican philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon. Amidst one-dimensional and reductive readings of Fanon, this thesis proposes a twofold task –to think Fanon dialectically, and to think dialectics in terms of Fanon. To think Fanon dialectically, I map three moments in the evolution of Fanon’s thought which correspond to the three parts in which this thesis is presented: (1) Roots, (2) Fanon’s Dialectics, and (3) Living Thought. Part One considers roots of Fanon’s thought, traced back to the dialectics of Aimé Césaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Fanon’s lived experience. These roots set up the reading of Fanon that follows in Part Two, by addressing the methods and intentions of those from which he draws. Part Two argues that methodologically speaking, Fanon’s work revolves around a dialectics of disalienation, revealing the sites in which contradictions exist under colonial capitalism. Here, I identify three sites his work explores: the ontological, the psycho-existential, and the situational. I call these ‘sites of rupture’ to signal my interpretation of Fanon’s analysis as a demand for disalienation at each of these sites, by way of privileging the moment of rupture. Doing so ultimately presents Fanon as a theorist of rupture. Finally, Part Three looks to three contemporary theorists who engage with Fanon’s thought in a way that reworks his dialectics in new situations. It considers the work of Lewis Gordon, George Ciccariello-Maher, and Glen Coulthard as embodying a ‘revolutionary Fanonism’, engaging Fanon in ongoing struggles of decolonisation. A consideration of the evolution of Fanon’s dialectics is done in the spirit of a dialectical approach to knowledge. Doing so refuses to render his thought static, instead testifying to the strength and malleability of his method. The principles of Fanon’s method demand its engagement with the social reality in which it finds itself. Overall, this study presents notes towards the revitalisation of an anticolonial dialectics.