Abstract:
This thesis is written in response to the tendency to think of relations in the history of philosophy in terms of negative opposition. In particular, it responds to the predominant interpretation of the Fanon/Hegel relation which sees Fanon as shouting a resounding ‘No!’ to Hegel. In responding, however, I do not intend to demonstrate that Fanon is a resolute ‘Yes!’. Instead, I seek to demonstrate that the Fanon/Hegel pair is undecidable. This means, that it is impossible to determine it as either yes or no, and that the copresence of the yes and no at the heart of their relationship that must be affirmed. It will be shown that Fanon says both yes and no to Hegel’s concept of reciprocity, and that Fanon both knows and does not know of the Hegelian distinction of concepts and existence. I thus hope to think Fanon and Hegel after Manichaeism, such that the tendency of yes or no thinking is to be actively worked against in all interpretations of their relation. My investigation takes as its red thread Fanon’s reading of the master-servant dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology. This dialectic is the object of Fanon’s only explicit commentary on and contention with Hegel. Part I, outlines the dominant ways of unpacking this reading. It will become evident that the master-servant dialectic is central to the problem of Fanon/Hegel and that Fanon is critical especially of the assumption of reciprocity. From the secondary literature I return in Part II to Fanon and Hegel’s texts to determine which interpretations hold, and whether or not Fanon’s criticism of Hegel is well founded. I then move in the last chapter to sketch the contours of what a speculative reading of the Fanon/Hegel relation would look like. Here I bring together the yes and the now troubled no in order to understand the ways in which Fanon negates and affirms Hegel at one and the same time. This opens up new pathways of thinking into the Fanon/Hegel relation by moving past the idea that Fanon and Hegel are incompatible or that Hegel’s master-servant dialectic is irrelevant. More than this I hope to demonstrate that there is room to think these two thinkers together in ways hitherto unrecognised and, moreover, that there is much that Hegel scholars could learn from Fanon, while at the same time there is much that readers of Fanon can learn from Hegel.