Cedric Robinson speaks to this imperative when he writes that, in order to ‘cement pain to purpose, experience to expectation, consciousness to collective action’, it is necessary to ensure that ‘the practice of theory is informed by struggle’.įor Fanon, the development of radical reason – which is to say emancipatory reason – certainly includes conversation with philosophy as it is defined by Paulin Hountondji: ‘not a system but a history’. And emancipation – communism, in Marx’s words – is ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’ and not ‘an ideal to which reality have to adjust itself’.įor Marx, the world will only be shaped by the most valuable insights of philosophical striving when philosophy itself becomes worldly via participation in struggle. But the primary ground of militant reason is, in Karl Marx’s words, ‘participation in politics, and therefore real struggles’. For the militant the price for the possibility that, in Fanon’s words written in France in 1952, ‘two or three truths may cast their eternal brilliance over the world’ may be that ‘the possibility of annihilation’ is risked.įor the radical intellectual, the confrontation with the particular may sometimes require solitary labour, as in some forms of prison writing. This is the terrain on which the radical thinkers who produce work that sustains a capacity for illumination and inspiration across space and time ground their intellect. ‘Courage’, Alain Badiou writes, ‘is a local virtue. In the realm of the political, as in the poetic, the truest route into the universal has always been through an intense engagement with the particular in its concrete manifestations in space and time: this piece of land occupied in the interstices of this city, these women rebuilding in the ruins of the last attack, the plastic burning in this brazier as the night wears on, these men stepping out of the shadows with these guns. Like Ernesto “Che” Guevara – another revolutionary who valued the poetic and was a committed internationalist, doctor, soldier, teacher, and theorist – Fanon’s life was marked by a permanent, courageous, and militant motion into the present, and into the specificity of the situations in which he found himself.įanon’s thought carries, in Ato Sekyi-Otu’s memorable phrase, an ‘irrepressible … openness to the universal’. At thirty-six he had been a protagonist in two wars, a political militant in the Caribbean, Europe and North Africa, a playwright, a practicing psychiatrist, the author of numerous articles in scientific journals, a teacher, a diplomat, a journalist, the editor of an anti-colonial newspaper, the author of three books, and a major Pan-Africanist and internationalist. He died in the United States, from leukaemia, on 6 December 1961. On this earth there is that which deserves life.įrantz Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique on 25 July 1925. Wikimedia Commons / Geographicus Rare Antique Maps French colonial map of Martinique from the Covens & Mortier’s Atlas Nouveau, 1942.
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