Violence, Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon

Ulrike Kistner, Philippe Haute, Robert Bernasconi, Ato Sekyi-Otu, Josias Tembo, Beata Stawarska, Reingard Nethersole, Ulrike Kistner, Philippe Haute

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781776146253
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Hegel is most often mentioned – and not without good reason – as one of the paradigmatic exponents of Eurocentrism and racism in Western philosophy. But his thought also played a crucial and formative role in the work of one of the iconic thinkers of the 'decolonial turn', Frantz Fanon. This would be inexplicable if it were not for the much-quoted 'lord-bondsman' dialectic – frequently referred to as the 'master-slave dialectic' – described in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Fanon takes up this dialectic negatively in contexts of violence-riven (post-)slavery and colonialism; yet in works such as Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth he upholds a Hegelian-inspired vision of freedom.
The essays in this collection offer close readings of Hegel's text, and of responses to it in the work of twentieth-century philosophers, that highlight the entangled history of the translations, transpositions and transformations of Hegel in the work of Fanon, and more generally in colonial, postcolonial and decolonial contexts.

1 | Dialectics in Dispute, with Aristotle as Witness

Ato Sekyi-Otu

Pairs of opposites which are contraries are not in any way interdependent, but are contrary one to the other. The good is not spoken of as the good of the bad, but as the contrary of the bad, nor is the white spoken of as the white of the black, but as the contrary of the black.

— Aristotle, Categories

I am suspicious of dialectics.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Letter to Georg Brandes’

Frantz Fanon’s essay ‘Concerning Violence’ that opens his famous book The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon 1991; originally published in 1961 under the title Les damnés de la terre) paraphrases Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel [1807] 1977) and parodies his Logic (Hegel [1812–1816] 1969). While it learns from Hegel’s narrative how to honour and to suspect the standpoint of immediate knowledge, it seems incongruously unwilling to assent to the logico-ontological propositions that in Hegel’s system authorise this strategic solicitude and this ultimate suspicion. For it is not only the Marxist version of dialectical reasoning which, according to the famous formulation, the text asks to be ‘slightly stretched’; it appears to go after Hegel himself. As when the young Marx, in a hilariously sardonic response to the mystifying reconciliations of Hegel’s ‘allegory’ of mediation, says, ‘Real extremes cannot be mediated precisely because they are real extremes. Nor do they require mediation, for they are opposed in essence. They have nothing in common, they do not need each other, they do not supplement each other’ (Marx [1843] 1975a, p. 88), so Fanon’s text here tells us that our most truthful witness to the colonial context, to the defining logic of the coloniser-colonised relation, is not Hegel but Aristotle: ‘The zone where the colonized live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the colonizers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity. Obedient to the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, they both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous’ (Fanon [1961] 1991, pp. 38–39, translation revised). Hegel is not directly named in this passage. Nevertheless, it is evident that the text here reenacts a debate with Hegel that goes back to ‘The Negro and Hegel’ in Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon [1952] 1967, pp. 216–22). There Fanon considers the celebrated fable of recognition in the Phenomenology and questions its applicability to the colonial-racial system of mastery and bondage.

What is it about this paradigmatic narrative which ‘The Negro and Hegel’ finds alien to its universe of discourse and which will lead ‘Concerning Violence’ to invoke Aristotle’s logic as a more apposite account of the colonial relation? Simply – and tautologically – put: the fact that Hegel’s narrative is dialectical in its configuration of the origins, subsequent transformation and eventual outcome of the story of intersubjectivity. The Phenomenology narrates a history of recognition whose governing principle, made manifest even in the relation of mastery and bondage, is reciprocity. Reciprocity is at once the foundational promise of human intercourse and the ironic outcome of its deformation. True, the plot structure revises Hegel’s earlier account of desire presented in the fragment entitled ‘Love’: ‘True union or love proper exists only between living beings who are alike in power and thus in one another’s eyes living beings from every point of view; in no respect is either dead for the other’ (Hegel [1797 or 1798] 1971, p. 304). Such a cosy consensualism is no longer sustainable by a philosophical anthropology chastened by the dismal science of Hobbes. What the Phenomenology will not jettison is the premise of reciprocity, now rendered antecedent and transcendent to the history of subjugation and inequality: reciprocity as the pristine promise of the human association in all its modulations.

So it is that at the origin of the encounter between his dramatis personae, Hegel places a scene of ‘the pure Notion of recognition’ consisting in ‘the double movement of the two self-consciousnesses’:

Each sees the other do the same as it does; each does itself what it demands of the other, and therefore also does what it does only in so far as the other does the same. Action by one side only would be useless because what is to happen can only be brought about by both … Each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself, and each is for itself, and for the other, an immediate being on its own account, which at the same time is such only through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another. (Hegel [1807] 1977, p. 112 – §184)

Presently, ‘the process of the pure Notion of recognition’ will come to ‘exhibit the side of the inequality of the two, or the splitting-up of the middle term into the extremes which, as extremes, are opposed to one another, one being only recognized, the other only recognizing’ ([1807] 1977, p. 112 – §184).

This is the momentous consequence of the ‘life-and-death struggle’ which ‘the two self-conscious individuals’ must undergo in order that they may ‘raise the certainty of being for themselves to truth, both in the case of the other and in their own case’ ([1807] 1977, pp. 114, 113). In a famous passage which Fanon would recall, Hegel affirms the necessity of violence for the process of individuation and self-authentication:

And it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won; only thus is it proved that for self-consciousness its essential being is not [just] being, not the immediate form in which it appears, not its submergence in the expanse of life, but rather that there is nothing present in it which could not be regarded as a vanishing moment, that it is only pure being-for-self. The individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness. ([1807] 1977, p. 114 – §187)

The result of this violent confrontation, however, cannot be the death of one partner and the survival of the other. The death of one participant would eliminate the possibility of recognition demanded by the other. Hegel therefore calls such an outcome ‘an abstract negation, not the negation coming from consciousness, which supersedes in such a way as to preserve and maintain what is superseded, and consequently survives its own supersession’ ([1807] 1977, pp. 114–15). The dialectical outcome of the ‘trial by death’, then, is not liquidation but the ‘dissolution of that simple unity’ that characterised the original being of self-consciousness and its encounter with another self-consciousness. And the consequence of this dissolution is that ‘there is posited a pure self-consciousness, and a consciousness which is not purely for itself but for another, i.e. is a merely immediate consciousness, or consciousness in the form of thinghood … The former is lord, the other is bondsman’ ([1807] 1977, p. 115 – §189).

But if domination occurs as an inexorable consequence of humanity’s self-formation, Hegel insists that a radically dualistic mode of difference – one in which the two agents are not only unequal but ‘exist as two opposed shapes of consciousness’ – cannot be sustained: ‘But for recognition proper the moment is lacking, that what the lord does to the other he also does to himself, and what the bondsman does to himself he should also do to the other. The outcome is a recognition that is one-sided and unequal’ ([1807] 1977, p. 116 – §191). The offended god of reciprocity must now be avenged, but not through a simple restoration of the erstwhile relation of complementarity, a simple return to the ‘pure Notion of recognition’. Rather, the act of expiation and restitution will take the form of an ironic transformation of roles.

For one thing, the victorious master confronts an ‘existential impasse’: he is nothing without the slave; well, not much.

In this recognition the unessential consciousness is for the lord the object, which constitutes the truth of his certainty of himself. But it is clear that this object does not correspond to its Notion, but rather the object in which the lord has achieved his lordship has in reality turned out to be something quite different from an independent consciousness. What now really confronts him is not an independent consciousness, but a dependent one. He is, therefore, not certain of being-for-self as truth of himself. On the contrary, his truth is in reality the unessential consciousness and its unessential action. ([1807] 1977, pp. 116–17 – §192)

Nor is this all. The bondsman undergoes a reformation by virtue of his servile work. Was it not due to the fear of death and the love of life, mere life, that the slave succumbed to the master in the struggle for recognition? Now vanquished, he is compelled to work for the master. But in so doing the slave ‘rids himself of his attachment to natural existence in every single detail; and gets rid of it by working on it’ ([1807] 1977, p. 117 – §194). Whereas the idle master consumes what he has not produced, the slave fashions with his labour something enduring, accomplishing thereby a surreptitious triumph over death: independence lost and regained. The product of the slave’s ‘formative activity’ becomes irrefutable testimony to his autonomy. ‘Through this rediscovery of himself by himself, the bondsman realizes that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own’ ([1807] 1977, p. 119 – §196). The transcendence of mere natural existence and the consciousness of freedom are no longer the special prerogative of the idle master but a human universal predicated on the norm of intersubjective reciprocity.

‘The Negro and Hegel’ underscores the telic primacy of the norm of reciprocity in Hegel’s paradigmatic fable of recognition: ‘At the foundation of Hegelian dialectic there is an absolute reciprocity which must be emphasized’ (Fanon [1952] 1967, p. 217). ‘Absolute reciprocity’: this is the condition of possibility of the surreptitious solidarity which binds the two protagonists in peace and in war, of the inadvertent reversal of roles they undergo in the aftermath of the trial by death, and of the ironic independence which the bondsman achieves by virtue of his work. And it is precisely this founding principle and its dialectical consequences which, according to Fanon, are conspicuous by their primordial absence in the colonial-racial system of domination. Neither in the primal encounter of our two collective subjects, nor in the subsequent history of antagonism, nor in the work of the subjugated does Fanon’s text detect any immanent redemptive possibilities. We are in an entirely different universe of discourse.

I hope I have shown that here the master differs basically from the master described by Hegel. For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work.

In the same way, the slave here is in no way identifiable with the slave who loses himself in the object and finds in his work the source of his liberation.

The Negro wants to be like the master.

Therefore he is less independent than the Hegelian slave.

In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object.

Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object. (Fanon [1952] 1967, pp. 220–21)

In a wilful misreading of the history of resistance and insurrection under plantation slavery, Fanon’s text reduces the condition of the black subject to one of enforced passivity. The will to violence is here tamed by the unilateral action of the master. ‘There is not an open conflict,’ writes Fanon, ‘between white and black. One day the White Master, without conflict, recognized the Negro slave’ ([1952] 1967, p. 217). Again: ‘Historically, the Negro steeped in the inessentiality of servitude was set free by his master. He did not fight for his freedom’ ([1952] 1967, p. 219). An emancipation proclamation suddenly promoted ‘the machine-animal-man to the supreme rank of men’. The consequence?

The upheaval reached the Negroes from without. The black was acted upon. Values that had not been created by his actions, values that had not been born of the systolic tide of his blood, danced in a hued whirl round him. The upheaval did not make a difference. He went from one way of life to another, but not from one life to another … The former slave, who can find in his memory no trace of the struggle for liberty or of that anguish of liberty of which Kierkegaard speaks, sits unmoved before the young white man singing and dancing on the tightrope of existence. ([1952] 1967, pp. 220–21)

That the emancipation was solely the master’s deed simply reiterates the monological character of action in the black-white encounter. Not Hegel’s bondsman but Nietzsche’s slave is the prototype of the black subject.

Curiously, Fanon’s interpreters have viewed this portrait as either a faithful successor version or an impoverished copy of the Hegelian archetype. In a suggestive attempt to show the continuing relevance of Hegel’s teaching, Trent Schroyer – basing his reading more on The Wretched of the Earth than on Black Skin, White Masks – describes Fanon’s analysis as a contemporary restatement of Hegel’s ‘sociocultural interpretation of lordship and bondage’ (Schroyer 1973, pp. 96–97). On the other hand, Renate Zahar argues that ‘colonialist domination and enslavement’, the subject of Fanon’s narrative, ‘are a new historical form of the relationship between master and slave analyzed by Hegel’ (Zahar 1970, pp. 86–87). Only, Fanon leaves out of his account ‘the element in the Hegelian theory which alone makes the emancipation of the slave possible, namely the process of material labor’, replacing it with ‘the political process of emancipation through violence’ (1970, pp. 86–87). In this view, Fanon ignores ‘the economic derivation’ of colonial alienation (1970, p. 29 n. 25). By contrast, Irene Gendzier recognises in Fanon’s account the category of work. Yet this is not the redemptive work of Hegel’s bondsman, but the wholly abject labour of the servant. Fanon, according to this thesis, ‘may have been reflecting on the utter disdain in which the white master held the black servant, a disdain so totally destructive that it seemed to obviate any consideration of the servant, save as a labor producing machine’ (Gendzier 1973, p. 26). Gendzier muses that this is the result of the ‘non-philosophic sense’ in which Fanon understood the category of Labour (1973, p. 26).

But this is not unlike shooting the messenger! A normative but frustrated Hegelian Marxist in many aspects of his implicit social ontology, Fanon quite evidently subscribed to the view of value attributes which that tradition ascribes to human work, even the work of the bondsman. This much is attested by Fanon’s reference to the Hegelian slave ‘who loses himself in the object and finds in his work the source of his liberation’. But it is precisely this normative Left-Hegelianism that leads him to discern in the drama of labour and interaction under conditions of racial bondage an entirely different, indeed heterogeneous, story. A loyal revisionist, Fanon suggests that an experience of labour disjoined from the pristine promise of reciprocal recognition is incapable of engendering the possibility of liberation. There is something far worse here, Fanon’s text suggests, than the alienation of labou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface: Hegel/Fanon: Transpositions in Translations
• Introduction: Fanon’s French Hegel
• 1 Dialectics in Dispute, with Aristotle as Witness
• 2 Through Alexandre Kojève’s Lens: Violence and the Dialectic of Lordship and Bondage in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks
• 3 Reading Hegel’s Gestalten – Beyond Coloniality
• 4 Hegel’s Lord–Bondsman Dialectic and the African: A Critical Appraisal of Achille Mbembe’s Colonial Subjects
• 5 Struggle and Violence: Entering the Dialectic with Frantz Fanon and Simone de Beauvoir
• 6 Shards of Hegel: Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Homi K. Bhabha’s Readings of The Wretched of the Earth
• Contributors
• Index