parallax, 2002, vol. 8, no.

2, 19

Introduction: Fanons Counterculture of Modernity

The work and life of Frantz Fanon has been a site of intense intellectual debates,
political disagreements, and diverse ideological investments among AfricanAmerican, postcolonial, Africanist, Marxist, postmodern, feminist, literary and
cultural critics.1 As Nigel Gibson writes in the introduction to one of the most
comprehensive collections of Fanon criticism, Rethinking Fanon, the fact that Fanon
is engrossing to critics on both sides of the postmodernist/modernist divide; that he
is claimed by Afrocentrists and Marxists; that he is engaged by feminists and
postcolonial literary critics; that he is the object of such varied appreciations as well
as misconceptions is itself an accomplishment.2 Yet, while this continuing debate is
indeed a testimony to the importance and the vitality of Fanons thought to numerous
elds in the humanities, it has often produced many one-sided interpretations of his
texts re ecting the entrenched divisions in our contemporary critical praxis. Indeed,
as early as 1970 Tony Martin called for rescuing Fanon from the critics3 a call
that twenty years later reverberates in a diVerent tonality in Henry Louis Gates Jrs
indictment of Critical Fanonism. Writing in the early 1990s, Gates makes a famous
charge that Fanons texts have been reduced to a kind of narcissistic mirror that can
only re ect the impasses of the post-modern, post-colonial condition. Because of this
narcissistic investment, Fanon has proved to be an almost irresistible gure for a
criticism that sees itself as both oppositional and postmodern.4
Yet, it is perhaps a certain unremarked property of the Fanonian mirror that returns
a disjointed and con icted image of the oppositional and postmodern: in Gatess
own essay, the re ected image of critical Fanonism is immediately split into two
rather diVerent perspectives: a poststructuralist, postcolonial ambivalence and
hybridity a` la Homi Bhabha, and a global theory of colonial power and liberation
a` la Edward Said. More frequently than not, Fanon disappoints those who seek in
his text a validation of their already established positions. To account for this uncanny
property of Fanons thought that refuses to be reduced to a re ective surface
consolidating the critical self , this special issue of parallax proposes to reverse the
interpretative perspective diagnosed by Gates and ask in what way Fanons
revolutionary counterculture of modernity can diagnose and intervene into the
political and ethical impasses of postmodernity. This reversal hopes to accomplish
two goals: on the one hand, it stresses the necessity of a much more complex and
interdisciplinary interpretation of Fanons critical engagements with the multiple
philosophical and political traditions of modernity and their critiques, ranging from
Hegelianism, Marxism, phenomenology to psychoanalysis, from the Negritude
parallax
ISSN 1353-464 5 print/ISSN 1460-700 X online 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/13534640210130386

parallax
1

movement to the African and Afro-Caribbean philosophies. On the other hand, it

hopes to avoid the narrow and reductive versions of modernity and postmodernity
often evoked for polemical purposes in Fanon studies and asks instead how his work
might challenge the modern/postmodern divide.
While the scope of this issue has been meant to be broad to allow for multiple critical
engagements, the following problems have served as starting points for discussion:
the relation between political violence, liberation, and revolutionary ethics; Fanons
critical negotiations with the con icting philosophical and political traditions of
modernity; his equally critical engagement with the multiple strands of the Negritude
movement, Fanons theory of history, temporality and language; the relation between
revolutionary action, the lived experience of the black subjectivity and embodiment;
and nally, the challenge of Fanons revolutionary project of decolonization vis-a`-vis
other attempts to formulate a counterculture of modernity based, for instance, on
radicalized and politicized notion of dialectics (Adorno, Said, Sekyi-Otu, Gilroy),
communicative rationality (Habermas), reciprocity of recognition (Taylor) or
diasporic Black Atlantic (Gilroy).
It is this last issue that I would like to touch upon brie y before introducing the
main arguments of particular essays. We might begin the explorations of Fanons
black counterculture of modernity with Paul Gilroys critique of Habermass model
of intersubjective, communicative rationality. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,
Habermas claims that the distinctive feature of modernity, a feature that has
dominated philosophy since Kant, lies in its monological, subject-centered rationality,
based on the exclusion of its other: body, nature, other subjects. Although the primacy
of the subject and reason has been consistently called into question from Nietzsche
to Lacan and Derrida these postmodern critiques of modernity, Habermas claims,
limit themselves to the abstract negation of the self-referential subject, but fail to
advance alternative paradigms of thought and action. Habermas argues therefore
that the solution to the impasses of modernity can come from the alternative tradition
of modernity based on a diVerent communicative and democratic paradigm of
inclusive reason and its ideal of intersubjective recognition re ecting mutual
understanding between subjects capable of speech and action.5
Although Gilroy acknowledges the counterfactual elements and the deep
commitment to the democratic potential in Habermass counterdiscourse of
modernity, he nonetheless argues that Habermas systematically disregards not only
the history of racial terror, colonialism and slavery but also black intellectualss
critiques of modernity. In his return to the early Hegelian theory of intersubjective
recognition, for instance, Habermas fails to recognize the central insight of the
master-slave dialectic, namely the fact that slavery has been a modernizing historical
force in the West. Consequently, the history of colonialism in Habermass work
surfaces only in the most oblique fashion as a metaphor for the colonization of the
lifeworld by the debased forms of instrumental rationality, technoscience or expert
cultures. In this setting, Gilroy concludes, it is hardly surprising that if it is perceived
to be relevant at all, the history of slavery is somehow assigned to blacks [...] rather
than [being] a part of the ethical and intellectual heritage of the West as a whole.6
Introduction
2

In response to these limitations to Habermass communicative rationality, Gilroys

alternative black counterculture of modernity focuses both on the history of the black
diaspora and on the critical re-reading of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic in the
tradition of black intellectuals such as Douglass, Du Bois and, we could add here,
Fanon. What is thus particularly useful for the interpretation of Fanon in Gilroys
work is his complex negotiation between dialectical black modernity and diasporic
postmodernity. By juxtaposing Hegel with Douglass, Gilroy treats the master/slave
allegory not only as a historical/political diagnosis of the complicity of rationality
and racial terror but also as a revolutionary narrative of emancipation, which stresses
the counter-violence of the oppressed, indeed, the apocalyptic choice of death rather
than the prolonged servitude. In contrast to the Hegelian slaves preference for
bondage motivated by the fear of death, the apocalyptic gure of the slaves choice
of death manifesting itself either in Douglasss manly ght with Covey, the brutal
slave-breaker, or in Margaret Garners killing of her daughter (the basis of Toni
Morrisons Beloved) articulates a new discourse of freedom and negativity. Opposed
equally to calculating rationality, self-preservation and fashionable postmodern
antihumanism, which according to Gilroy trivializes both freedom and negativity,
the black counternarrative of modernity gravitates toward revolutionary and
eschatological utopia. This new relation between freedom and negativity refuses the
Manichean choice of either subordinating black particularity to the totalizing power
of Western universal reason, or its opposite, the equation of the Black political culture
with ethnic and racial particularity. Indeed, it is the refusal of the binary opposition between the global and the local, which structures Gatess critique of Fanon
post-colonial criticism.
Consequently, in contrast to the global theory/local particularity binarism, Gilroys
counterculture of black modernity displays a very diVerent kind of tension between
dialectical negativity and diasporic dislocations a tension, which in diVerent guises
also characterizes Fanons and his criticss texts. Let us recall, for instance, that a
similar oscillation between dialectic/diasporic characterizes Saids assessment of
Fanons oppositional thought in his now classical essay, Travelling Theory
Reconsidered. There are two kinds of travel itineraries in Saids article: the rst
one, leading from Hungary to Algeria, radicalizes Lukacss subject/object dialectic
and turns it into Fanons revolutionary confrontation between the native and the
settler. This trajectory will also be crucial for Nigel Gibsons analysis of the Fanonian
displacement of dialectic from Europe to Africa. The second trajectory, leading from
the Caribbean setting of Black Skins, White Masks to the Algerian setting of The
Wretched of the Earth radicalizes the psychological observations of the latter text into
the philosophical logic of the anticolonial struggle. The eVects of this double
displacement are ambiguous, if not to say antithetical: on the one hand, the progress
of Fanons theory and practice consolidates the previous novelistic impressions into
the philosophical logic of revolution,7 but, on the other hand, this consolidation
carries the seeds of its own dissolution evident, for instance, in Fanons refusal of the
Lukacsian reconciliation and resolution of the dialectical struggle. In Saids words,
the travelling theory oVers itself as a permanent destabilization of the dialectic: The
point of theory therefore is to travel, always to move beyond its con nements, to
emigrate, to remain in a sense in exile. Adorno and Fanon exemplify this profound
parallax
3

restlessness in the way they refuse the emoluments oVered by the Hegelian dialectic
as stabilized into resolution by Lukacs.8
In this juxtaposition of Saids reading of Fanon with Gilroys reading of the Black
Atlantic, the black counterculture of modernity is characterized by the unresolved
tension between the modern dialectical narratives of emancipation and what is more
readily regarded as the postmodern accounts of diasporic formations and
creolizations of identity, which aim to replace the static politics of location with the
dynamic politics of movement. What is at stake in this unresolved tension? Does it
mean that contingent dislocations replace the dialectical process of determinate
negations, or, on the contrary, do we see here an emergence of what Nigel Gibson
has called the radical mutations of Fanons untidy dialectics of history? Is it an
oscillation between two competing versions of the negative: negativity as mediation
versus negativity as rupture? Does it imply an abandonment of the universal for the
sake of the historical particularity advocated by Gates or, on the contrary, a
conceptualization of the politicized and antagonistic process of the particularization
of the universal articulated in diVerent ways by Ernesto Laclau, Lou Turner and Ato
Sekyi-Otu?9 Does Fanons inversion of the master-slave dialectic reject the HegelianMarxian-Lukacsian ideal of reconciliation for the sake of the hybridization of
subjectivity and culture, as Homi Bhabha would claim, or does it subordinate both
modern and postmodern outcomes for the sake of what Gilroy calls the
counterfactual politics of trans guration, dedicated to the emergence of the yet
unknown desires, modes of solidarity and political association?1 0 Can this
counterfactual politics be the basis of Fanons utopian new humanism, so brashly
turned aside by Gates as the impossible transcendence of ones own historical
situatedness?
The tension between dialectical logic and diasporic movement, between determinate
negation and trans gurative rupture in Fanons counterdiscourse of modernity
characterizes this issue of parallax as a whole and marks the critical analyses of
Fanons relation to history, rationality, revolution, subjectivity, embodiment and
language. We can see this tension in the contrast between Nigel Gibsons discussion
of Fanons revision of Hegel and Lewis Gordons analysis of Fanons strategic staging
of the failure of Western human sciences. In his essay, A Questioning Body of
Laughter and Tears: Reading Black Skin, White Masks through the Cat and Mouse of
Reason and a Misguided Theodicy, Gordon argues that the successive chapters
of Black Skin, White Masks poignantly dramatize the failure of the Black subjectivity
to live the options oVered by white modernity: beginning with the failure of the
transformative force of linguistic mastery and the realization of the intersubjective
world of freedom under conditions of racist domination, Fanon proceeds to examine
the impasses of the retreat into the private world of sexuality, the failure of erotic
intimacy, the collapse of reason into the unreason of scienti c racism, the limitations
of psychoanalysis to diagnose adequately the psychopathology of colonialism, and
the deadlock of the Hegelian dialectic of recognition. Yet, Black Skin, White Masks is
written from a double narrative perspective: where the subject of experience fails,
the theoretical/revolutionary subject succeeds to radicalize the Nietzschean critique
of the idols of European civilization. By treating the failure experienced by the
black subject as a symptom of the systemic default of modernity to realize its promise
Introduction
4

of freedom, Fanons radical critique not only calls for the revolutionary restructuring of the world but also stages a peculiarly Caribbean creolization of the
philosophical text.11
If Gordon focuses on the impasses of the Western sciences of Man and the emergence
of the Caribbean text, Nigel Gibson examines how Fanon develops a new
emancipatory counterdiscourse of modernity. Dialectical Impasses: Hegel and the
Black begins with the analysis of the deadlock created by the introduction of race
and racism into the Hegelian dialectic of recognition. However, Fanons critique
does not abandon the dialectical method but rather reinscribes it as untidy
and open-ended. Gibson thus continues the important tradition of dialectical
interpretations of Fanon undertaken by Said, Sekyi-Otu and Turner.1 2 Fanons
radicalization of the dialectic occurs as a result of the double displacement of the
Hegelian trajectory. First we see a historical/geographical displacement from Europe,
where the possibility of the historical actualization of freedom has been blocked by
the racist discourse and the Manicheanism of colonial exploitation, to Africa, where
a new beginning can occur. We should add, however, that it is still a debatable
question whether this dialectical return to Africa as the place of the revolutionary
struggle for new humanism, so diVerent from the Afrocentric discourse of African
particularism, produces a recovery or initiates a new development of African
philosophy. 1 3
For Gibson, this reactivation of the revolutionary struggle depends on the second,
let us call it temporal, displacement of the dialectic at the centre of Fanons regressive
method. Like Julia Kristeva, Fanon presents revolt the disruption of the present
and the opening toward the future as a revolutionary temporal return to the
contradictions of an earlier stage.14 Within the Hegelian dialectical schema, it is a
return to the stage of self-certainty preceding the impasses of the master-slave
dialectic, on the psychoanalytic level, it is a return to the pre-Oedipal stage prior to
socialization, on the cultural level, it is a creation of the counter-discourse of
Negritude. For Gibson, this retreat accomplishes two tasks: rst, it is a condition of
possibility of Black modernity, of making a new beginning out of itself (in the mode
of the Habermasian self-legislation) rather than adopting the pre-existing meaning
created by Europe. Second, it is a condition of resuming the dialectic of risk for the
Black consciousness and a reformulation of this risk in the context of the
revolutionary struggle.
Lou Turners complex essay, (e)Racing the Ego: Sartre, Modernity, and Fanons
Theory of Consciousness, also takes us back in time to the moment when black
consciousness discovers its agency and negativity, but his analysis follows a diVerent
philosophical trajectory. Turner explores Fanons relation to modernity, and the
problem of black modernity more generally, by focusing on Fanons con icting
relation to Sartres phenomenology. On the one hand, Fanon criticizes Sartres
positing of Negritude as transcendence and then collapsing this transcendence
through the sublation of race into a class struggle. On the other hand, Fanons
phenomenology of racism as well as his critique of Sartre, Turner argues, uses
creatively the resources of Sartres philosophy, in particular, his rejection of the
transcendental ego and the emphasis on the negativity and spontaneity of
parallax
5

consciousness capable of transcending the historical facticity of existence. Fanon

agrees with Sartre that the negativity, spontaneity, and temporal becoming of
consciousness is arrested when consciousness is reduced to the ego, which, existing
as a racially and historically constituted object in the world, freezes time into the
past and provides a false unity to consciousness. Consequently, in his revolutionary
project, Fanon wants to recapture the negating spontaneity of black consciousness
from the xity of the ego determined by the history of racism. Yet, in his use of
Sartre against Sartre, Fanon points to the necessity of a double overcoming of both
the white racist ego and the lived experience of the black. Opposed to magical
thinking which merely fetishizes freedom of consciousness at the expense of historical
reality, Fanons critical project of absolute negativity fully acknowledges the
objective, material reality of racism. Yet, the negativity of consciousness enables a
critical/revolutionary moment when those participating in the historical reality can
call it into question.
In her DiVerence Embodied: Re ections on Black Skin, White Masks, Teresa de
Lauretis complicates the analysis of the Black consciousness further by examining
the often contested role of psychoanalysis in Fanons counterdiscourse of black
modernity. What her essay adds to Gibsons analysis of the contradictions of selfcertainty and to Turners discussion of the split between the ego and the negativity
of consciousness is the double problematic of embodied diVerence and the
unconscious. In a dialogue with Homi Bhabha, she argues that by incorporating
sociogeny to psychoanalysis, Fanon radicalizes the insights of the Freudian second
topography where the body ego occupies the space of the permeable, historically
constituted boundary between the outside world of culture and social institutions, on
the one hand, and the inside world of sexuality and the unconscious, on the other.
This outside/inside position of the psyche already problematizes the Hegelian
tautology of self-consciousness identifying with itself. Yet, what for Fanon also
complicates the Sartrean liberation of the negativity of consciousness from the ego
is the traumatic dislocation of the psyche by the introjected racist stereotype, which
acts as an internal foreign body. The second issue implicitly raised by the
juxtaposition of Gibsons, Turners and de Lauretiss essays is the place of the
unconscious in Fanons regressive/dialectical method. By addressing Fanons
problematic rejection of the unconscious, emphasized so strongly for instance by
Sekyi-Otu,15 de Lauretis argues that what Fanon contests is a more commonsensical
notion of the unconscious as the repressed content. Yet, there is a second model of
the unconscious as a part of the mental apparatus with its own peculiar mode of
expression the primary process. This second notion of the unconscious operates in
both Fanons analysis of neurotic symptoms of colonialism, sexual fantasies, phobias,
and in his own ambivalence about sexuality and homosexuality. It is this political
unconscious of colonialism that complicates the project of liberation of the black
man from himself.
We can read Robert Bernasconis essay, The Assumption of Negritude: Aime
Cesaire, Frantz Fanon and the Vicious Circle of Racial Politics, as the third moment
of the regressive/dialectical method outlined by Gibson, namely Fanons complex exchange with the Negritude movement and its role in the formation of his
Black counterculture of modernity. As Bernasconis argument makes clear, the
Introduction
6

revolutionary retreat into the Black self-consciousness is not a regression into a

mythical Black past. By focusing on the issue of temporality, in particular, on the
relation between the determination of history and the unforeseeable future in Fanons
ambivalent attitudes to both Cesaire and Sartre, Bernasconi underscores Fanons
refusal to renounce the open-ended future either for the sake of a mythical past or
for the necessity of dialectical becoming. By exploring the internal contradictions of
Cesaires poetry and political theory, Fanon supports Cesaires revolutionary
revindication of negritude, that is, the reclaiming of the stolen culture from European
imperialism, while remaining critical of his ctitious mirage of the uni ed racial
identity and history, a mirage that can only be sustained by the White gaze. Thus,
whereas Fanon is critical of Cheikh Anta Diop for his primary focus on Black history
and of Leopold Senghor for his tendency to essentialize Black identity, he is much
more ambivalent about Aime Cesaire, who was an inspiration for a possible future,
even if at times he remained locked in the past.
As the next essay makes clear, the tension between dialectical and psychoanalytical
interpretations of Fanon is not about, as Sekyi-Otu argues, the diVerence between
the psychologization and politicization of his work,16 but about the mediation and
rupture in Fanons conception of revolutionary politics. In her I am a Master:
Terrorism, Masculinity, and Political Violence in Frantz Fanon, Kalpana SeshadriCrooks examines the triple tension in Fanons political theory: between the libidinal
core of the political con ict and the discursive legitimation of the anti-colonial
struggle, between the national struggle, gender and embodiment and, nally, between
revolutionary violence and the new discourse of masculinism. Political struggle, Fanon
argues in The Wretched of the Earth, is characterized by the oscillation between the
irruption of the instinctual violence and its discursive sublimation and rationalization.
This release of the instinctual force of the oppressed is more akin to the ego-shattering,
ecstatic Nietzschean will to power, which remains beyond good and evil, than to
the post-Hegelian discourse of recognition. To put it in diVerent terms, the
dialectical struggle for recognition, the basis of Fanons national liberation, has to
confront its non-discursive, libidinal element, which the risk of death entails.
Psychoanalysis designates this risk, discussed in diVerent ways in Gilroys and
Gibsons work, as the confrontation with the disruptive force of the death drive, and
reconceives the Nietzschean/Hegelian oscillation in Fanons counterdiscourse of
black modernity as the disjunction between the drive and the signi er, between
rupture and mediation. Consequently, in the context of psychoanalysis, Fanons
regressive/revolutionary method leads to the encounter with the non-dialecticizable,
non-discursive abyss the destruction and jouissance of the death drive behind
the truth of self-consciousness . Seshadri-Crooks draws crucial implications of Fanons
political theory for contemporary dilemmas of globalization and anti-colonial
feminism.
The last two essays, both of which focus on A Dying Colonialism (LAn Cinq de la
Revolution Algerienne), return us to a diVerent oscillation between language and the
body in the revolutionary and postindependence stages of Fanons restless dialectics,
namely, to the tensions between the formations of national language with its claims
to universality and the transformation of the bodily markers of racial, gender and
racial particularities, which Fanon describes as the process of making the new
parallax
7

skin ( faire peau neuve). In Brian T. Edwardss article, Fanons al-jazair, or Algeria
Translated, the unresolved tensions between the dialectical and the diasporic, local
and global, particular and universal in Fanons counterdiscourse of modernity are
rethought in the context of translation. What Edwardss essay adds to Saids
travelling theory is the political/discursive problem of the formation of national
language under the opposite pressures of multilingualism and globalization. Edwards
hopes that the question of translation might allow us to move beyond a critical
impasse, or at least complicate the terms of the recent debates (for instance, in
Ato Sekyi-Otus, Neil Lazaruss, and Christopher Millers work) over Fanons
representation of Africa and his understanding of the relationship between nation
and ethnicities that cross over national boundaries. By reading Fanons Ici la Voix
de lAlgerie... in the context of John Mowitts, Ato Sekyi-Otus, and Ronald Judys
work, he focuses on the dislocation and Arabization of the French French and on
the erasure of Tamazight (Berber) language in Fanons text. Thus, what Fanons call
for an Algerian voice performs is the loss of the native tongue and the condition of
absolute translation.
If Edwards examines the complex process of translation in the formation of national
language and its claims of universality, Suzanne Gauch returns us to the equally
risky transformation of the recalcitrant particularities of race, gender and culture
inscribed on the surface of the body. By juxtaposing Black Skin, White Masks with
Algeria Unveiled, she focuses on the main contrast between the skin and the veil
in Fanons counter-discourse of modernity. Fanons revolutionary project of new
humanism and the formation of national language involves a transformation of the
naturalized signi ers of race that is, the racist markers of the insurmountable
particularity excluding the colonized from the agonistic participation in universality
into the historically malleable signi ers of culture, which initiate their own
dialectical overcoming. The essay raises three crucial issues: rst, it rethinks the
dialectic of race and gender in the larger context of the transformative power of
language and revolutionary action. Second, it re-examines Fanons project of
liberation as an unresolved tension between the con icting claims to universality and
the historically determined particularities of skin, race, and gender that cannot be
sublated without a remainder. And nally, the essay examines how Fanons new
humanism and new model of nationalism depends on the birth of the new woman
who instinctively learns to manipulate the veiling and unveiling of her body for the
sake of revolutionary action.
The interdisciplinary and theoretically diverse perspectives brought together in this
special issue present neither a uni ed nor a complete picture of Fanons black
counterculture of modernity. On the contrary, they show how the oscillations between
radicalized dialectic and diasporic dislocations, between emancipatory politics and
psychoanalysis, between language and the body, between mediation and rupture
continue to pose a political and intellectual challenge to the inherited traditions of
modernity and the entrenched divisions within postmodernity. As Sekyi-Otu points
out, the responses to these challenges will be diVerent in postindependence Africa,
postmodern Europe, postcolonial diaspora, or in the area of American globalization,
but they are the surest sign of a thinkers originality17 and his continuing legacy.
Ewa Ponowska Ziarek
Introduction
8

Notes
1

For a useful overview of the ve stages in Fanon

criticism, see Introduction: Five Stages of Fanon
Studies in Lewis R. Gordon et al. (eds), Fanon: A
Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) , pp.58.
For a very diVerent conceptualization of Fanon
scholarship from the point of view of cultural and
postcolonial studies, see Alan Read (ed.), The Fact
of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation
(London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1996);
and Anthony C. Alessandrini (ed.), Frantz Fanon:
Critical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1999) .
2
Nigel Gibson, Introduction, in Nigel Gibson
(ed.), Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue
(Amherst: Humanity Books, 1999), pp.3839.
3
Tony Martin, Rescuing Fanon from the Critics,
African Studies Review (1970), pp.381399, reprinted
in Gibson (ed.), Rethinking Fanon, pp.83102.
4
Henry Louis Gates Jr, Critical Fanonism.
Originally published in Critical Inquiry, (1991),
pp.457470, reprinted in Rethinking Fanon,
pp.251268. For a critical response to Gates, see,
for instance, Ronald A. T. Judy, Fanon and the
Subject of Experience, in Cynthia Willet (ed.),
Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current
Debate, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) , pp.303310.
5
Ju rgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G.
Lawrence (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1992),
p.295.
6
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Consciousness (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University
Press, 1993) , p.49.
7
Ato Sekyi-Otus insistence on the rhetorical
complexity of Fanons earlier and later texts, which
he characterizes as dramatic dialectical narrative,
implicitly contests Saids sublation of the literary
by the philosophical. See his, Fanons Dialectic of
Experience (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University
Press, 1994) , pp.45, 2431.
8
Edward
W.
Said,
Travelling
Theory
Reconsidered, reprinted in Gibson (ed.), Rethinking
Fanon, p.213.
9
For the most recent articulation of the contested
universality in democratic politics, see Judith
Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Z izek,
Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (London: Verso,

2000). In the context of Fanon criticism, see Lou

Turners essay in this issue of parallax and SekyiOtu, Fanons Dialectic, pp.1622, 3336.
10
Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, pp.3740.
11
The conclusion of Gordons essay is thus a
response to the claims that Fanon has failed to
produce a creolization of Euro-Caribbean
philosophy because his critique of the European
tradition neglects African existentialist tradition.
For an excellent discussion of this point, see Paget
Henry, Fanon, African and Afro-Caribbean
Philosophy, in Gordon et al. (eds), Fanon: A Critical
Reader, pp.220243.
12
In addition to Saids and Sekyi-Otus works,
cited in endnotes 7 and 8, see Lou Turners
important essays, Frantz Fanons Journey into
Hegels Night of the Absolute , Quarterly Journal
of Ideology, no. 13 (1989), On the DiVerence
between the Hegelian and Fanonian Dialectic of
Lordship and Bondage, in Fanon: A Critical Reader,
pp.134153. See also Gibsons Radical Mutations:
Fanons Untidy Dialectic of History, in Rethinking
Fanon, pp.408446.
13
The diVerence between Paget Henrys essay,
cited in endnote 11, and Tsenay Serequeberhans
article, Fanon and the Contemporary Discourse
of African Philosophy, in Fanon: A Critical Reader,
pp.244254, is a good illustration of this debate.
In contrast to Henrys argument about Fanons
neglect of African existentialist philosophy,
Serequeberhan claims that Fanon is a forbearer
of the hermeneutical orientation in contemporary
African philosophy, an orientation dedicated to
the re ection on African emancipatory aspirations
and the development of new modes of thinking.
14
Julia Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt:
The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeanine
Herman (New York: Columbia University Press,
2000), pp.19.
15
For Sekyi-Otu, Fanons use of psychoanalysis is
purely deconstructive the evocation of Freud or
Lacan ends in acts of metatheoretical parricide,
which, ironically, takes us back to the Oedipal
problematic. Sekyi-Otu, Fanons Dialectic, pp.67.
16
Sekyi-Otu, Fanons Dialectic, pp.56.
17
Sekyi-Otu, Fanons Dialectic, pp.46.

Ewa Ponowska Ziarek is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at

the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction
of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (1995), Gombrowiczs Grimaces: Modernism, Gender,
Nationality (1998) and An Ethics of Dissensus: Feminism, Postmodernity, and the Politics of
Radical Democracy (2001). She has published numerous articles on Kristeva, Irigaray,
Derrida, Foucault, Levinas, Fanon and literary modernism.
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