This existential and materialist view became essential for Fanon. Written in 1852, it was Marx’s poetic and dramatic historical account of the 1851 coup by Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, with its focus on how people make history but not under conditions of their own choosing, that incited Fanon’s attention. Before, the expression exceeded the content now the content exceeds the expression. In order to find their own content, the revolutions of the nineteenth century have to let the dead bury the dead. Earlier revolutions relied on memories out of world history in order to drug themselves against their own content. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all its superstitions concerning the past. The social revolution cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. The quote, which begins the concluding chapter, “By Way of Conclusion”, is taken from Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon:
But his most important quote from Marx is in Black Skin, White Masks (1952). In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon’s critical engagement with Karl Marx is developed from within Algeria’s revolutionary anticolonial movement. If the door had been slammed shut by racist, colonial, European claims to monopolise universality, it would be re-opened by the concrete universal of the anticolonial struggle. Self-determination had to invent the world rather than conform to a pre-existing script. There was always an open-endedness to his politics. To reach beyond this image and to return to Fanon, to his life and work, is to appreciate how original he was as a thinker.įanon’s theorisation began from lived experience. Today, Frantz Fanon is frequently evoked in movement politics, but he is often misunderstood to be a Manichean thinker. Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window).Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window).Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window).Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window).
0 kommentar(er)
