Arendt, Fanon and Political Violence in Islam

Patrycja Sasnal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000638981
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book looks at contemporary political violence, in the form of jihadism, through the lens of a philosophical polemic between Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon: intellectual representatives of the global north and global south.

It explores the relationship of Arendt's thought, mostly as expressed in On Violence (1969), to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and the transposition of that relationship to the contemporary phenomenon of violent Islamic extremism. The book reveals a greater commonality between Fanon and Arendt as well as the universal function of jihadism that satisfies the conditions for political violence, as categorized by Fanon in the global south and Arendt in the global north. Read in tandem, Arendt and Fanon help uncover the fundamental problems of our European, American, Middle Eastern and African political systems as well as north-south relations. By studying political theory, the book finds global political commonalities in a postcolonial reality.

Written in an accessible style, this book will be of great interest to undergraduates and graduates in philosophy, political sciences and international relations (IR), sociology and Middle Eastern studies as well as scholars and professionals interested in radicalization; violent extremism; and the foreign policies of European, Middle Eastern and African countries.

1 Fanon and Arendt

A black man and a Jewish woman

They seemed to differ in almost everything. Frantz Fanon, 19 years younger than Arendt, was a black Martinican-French psychiatrist (later Algerian by choice) who devoted his adult life to treating patients, analysing racism and helping the Algerian independence cause, which he made into a general Third World independence from the colonist. Arendt was a Jewish-German philosopher who spent her life teaching students and analysing the human condition in the West, later in her years in the United States. Two messiahs of two different worlds: the dispossessed black and brown Third World and the dominant white Western world. The uniqueness of Fanonian experience is perhaps marked the most by his blackness. The strength of the skin colour as a social trait does not compare with any other, not even with underprivileged gender. As influential public figures at the time Fanon and Arendt have become to be easily categorised, their philosophies – simplified.

The two had much more in common than reveals itself at first sight. Both were escapees from the milieus that betrayed them: as a black man Fanon escaped racist and colonist France, as a Jew Arendt escaped Nazi Germany. Both were fighters in their own right: Arendt in the US fighting with her pen, Fanon in Algeria fighting with his pen and skills as a medical doctor. Both experienced the horrors of the Second World War: Fanon in the French army (he went there to fight fascism for France and ended up fighting racism in France), Arendt in the Gurs internment camp. Both hailed from the oppressors and the oppressed at the same time. Fanon was French and yet he was black – Arendt was German and yet she was a Jew (and a woman). Both ran away from the oppressor part of their identity. Fanon quit his French identity and became Algerian – changing his name to Omar Fanon in 1958, Arendt abandoned her German identity for the American one. Both loved their mother tongue and revelled in immersing themselves in French and German, respectively – the languages that housed the origins of racism and fascism. Both continue to stir interest and the proliferation of books about their lives, activism and philosophies is unyielding.

Fanon writes WotE on his death bed. In fever and anxiety. Parts of the book are made of his former statements at the African summits. The original work is the chapter about violence. He has done no research except for his lifelong readings and experience. What is telling for the way WotE sounds is Claude Lanzmann’s recollection of his first meeting with Fanon: “death (…) gave his every word the power both of prophecy and of the last words of a dying man.”¹ WotE is a deeply personal work, a last gasp uttered as loudly as possible. Writing might have meant the same for Arendt – EiJ was an “intensely personal work,”² she admitted. OV is short and not particularly novel – it strikes the tones already reverberating in OoT, HC, EiJ, OR and Crises of the Republic.

The book was inspired by events, perhaps by fear. Arendt admits that she writes it in the context of the 20th century violence (OV, 3). She witnesses it in the US where daily violence occurs at the universities and the cold war rages, although she does not write it to students. Arendt is already an established, widely read academic who can influence opinions. In OV she also, or perhaps primarily, takes an overdue position in the debate that unfolded among French intellectuals in the 1950s about the dilemma that leftist thinkers found in the terror of the oppressed in Algeria.³ Fanon writes WotE between Algeria and Tunisia, where he treated patients at psychiatric hospitals in Blida and then Tunis. He is engulfed by violence not least in his medical milieu but also in his contacts with the Front de la Libération Nationale (FLN) as their spokesperson.

Both develop a unique style of writing – distinct at first sight but not without similarities. Fanonian language is poetic, lofty and religious, almost sacral but meaty rather than ephemeral (“the almighty body of violence,” “the last shall be first,” “Europe’s tower of opulence” – WotE, 50, 2, 57). One explanation for it is that Fanon, himself a messiah of the dispossessed, proposes a religious brotherhood, a mystical doctrine.⁴ He describes the coloniser in biological and animalistic terms (“parasites,” WotE, 7). At times his language turns mystical, as if taken from fables (opulence, diamonds, silk, cotton, oil, gold: WotE, 58). He is partially a fiction writer and a poet. When asked by one of his translators to explain a passage he responded: “This passage is inexplicable. When I write such things I seek to touch my reader in his emotions, i.e. irrationally, almost sensually.”⁵ The visceral naturality of Fanon’s language can easily impress on the reception of the text. The feverish tone corresponds not only with the state of the author’s body at the time but also with the boldness of his project. His message was to inspire the creation of a new man – in what other language can this endeavour be given an initial push if not that of prophets, poets and philosophers?

WotE’s style seems to contrast with the calm, reflective tone of Arendt’s works, including OV. If Fanon is interested in the sound of words, Arendt seems to be preoccupied with their meaning. But Arendt’s tranquillity is illusive. It’s marked by subdermal fear and an equally daring project that she had embarked on. Like Fanon’s, her language is literary, even if inspired by different literature than Fanon’s. In the mottos and in-text literary insertions she makes her drama unfold effortlessly but surely. Fanon also avails himself with literary quotations (frequently from Aimé Césaire⁶) but he equally employs the style into his own writing. One example of this difference in technique but similarity in tone is the comparison between Arendt’s opening of her book about the trial of Eichmann with a quotation from Bertold Brecht’s: “O Germany, …, but whoever sees you, reaches for his knife”⁷ and an almost analogical in tone and meaning quotation of Fanon’s words from WotE: “When the colonized hear a speech about Western culture they draw their machetes or at least check to see they are close at hand.”⁸

Philosophical influences: philosophers of beginnings

When studying medicine in Lyon (1947–51) Fanon read Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, Jacques Lacan, but also Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the young Karl Marx⁹ – we also know that a couple of years later in Algeria he was given Friedrich Engels’s Anti-Duhring. In 1947/8 he attended lectures by Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the University of Lyon. Merleau-Ponty lectured then on the unity of soul and body in the philosophies of Nicolas Malebranche, Maine de Biran and Henri Bergson.¹⁰ Fanon never talked to him in person, but he read the journals that Jean Paul Sartre established with Merleau-Ponty: Les Temps Modernes and Présence Africaine. There is a consensus that Sartre imprinted the strongest influence on Fanon¹¹ and so the role of Maurice Merleau-Ponty is usually, with minor exceptions,¹² downgraded. However, phenomenology, rather than existentialism, suited his experience as a black man and his thoughts on racism. In Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty develops a conception of consciousness that comes from the bodily interaction with the world, in which a body is a form of consciousness.¹³ The book, published the moment Fanon found himself in Lyon attending Merleau-Ponty’s lectures, influences Fanonian thought in the prominence that it gives to the body and experience. In Fanon’s writing on racism reverberate the words of Merleau-Ponty: “the subject has simply the external world that he gives himself.”¹⁴ Existence, meaning being in the world through a body, serves as a basis for Fanon’s understanding of human experience. In Black Skin, White Masks (BSWM), published nine years before WotE and before Fanon’s Algerian adventure, the central concept is the lived experience, expérience vécue, used by Merleau-Ponty and common in psychiatric research at the time. Fanon cites Merleau-Ponty to say that the black man does not see himself “normally” – he abnormalises himself, while the white man is both a mystifier and mystified.¹⁵ What remains in WotE of Merleau-Ponty’s thought is the accent on the body and experience that allows the man of colour to be free and give himself the external world.

The density of History determines none of my acts. I am my own foundation. And it is by going beyond the historical and instrumental given that I initiate my cycle of freedom.

(BSWM, 204–5)

In WotE, indeed, it is Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique that imprints its mark most ostentatiously. Fanon read the book the moment it was published in 1960 and is known to have later given lectures about it to Algerian forces.¹⁶ In 1961 he asked his editor – François Maspero – that he convinces Sartre to write the preface to WotE. The two men, and Simone de Beauvoir, had a couple of intense meetings in Rome (facilitated by Lanzmann), where, on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: violence and Europe-Middle East coupling 1960s–2019
• 1 Fanon and Arendt: a black man and a Jewish woman
• 2 Violence vs. power
• 3 New humanism
• 4 Jihadism and other remains of colonisation
• Conclusion
• Index