Located at: http://www.tamilnation.org/ideology/fannon.htm

This one is a bit more scattered and hurried.

Sartre’s introduction provides a context, namely the colonial structure of feeling in France, for Fanon’s groundbreaking text. Contextualizing Fanon is also an extension of his project because, argues Sartre, The Wretched of the Earth is not addressed to Europeans; indeed, this is part of the text’s scandal. “He speaks of you often, never to you” (3). If Sartre’s astute observation is correct, then Fanon has replicated, and reversed, the colonial structure of address; we speak about you, even for you, but never to you. Replicating imposed methods but reversing them in the name of subversion and freedom, argues Sartre, is precisely Fanon’s goal. That is, the violence exhibited by anti-colonial movements is not the exhibition of an inherent savagery but of lessons learned too well from the imperialists themselves. The opening pages of Sartre’s introduction, accordingly, are spent in reviewing certain colonizing methods.

––Creation of native elites, as a bourgeois buffer between metropole and colony: Transfer of European humanist ideals without noting the inherent contradiction of colonialism relative to them: dehumanization: physical violence:

3:  “Europe has multiplied divisions and opposing groups, has fashioned classes and sometimes even racial prejudices, and has endeavored…to bring about and intensify the stratification of colonized societies”

5: “Everything will be done to wipe out their traditions, to substitute our language for theirs and to destroy their culture without giving them ours.”

But then Sartre offers a different logic, one based on labor and production. Slavery requires bodily and spiritual suffering in order to properly subjugate its victims. By doing so, however, “you reduce his output, and however little you may give him, a farmyard man finishes costing you more than he brings in” (5). Constrained by the profit-motive, the settlers “are obliged to stop the breaking-in half-way; the result, neither man nor animal, is the native” (5). Sartre’s move here is impressive. By tracing the roots and limits of physical violence to market pressure, he places capitalism as the master of the colonial enterprise. Neither colonizer nor “native,” then, are granted subjectivities prior to their location in capitalist logic. Such a genealogy also allows Sartre to locate hope in capitalist logic. “Because he can’t carry massacre on to genocide, and slavery to animal-like degradation, he loses control, the machine goes into reverse, and a relentless logic leads him on to decolonization” (5). We must be careful to note Sartre does not equate decolonization with freedom from market logics, but rather with their realization; implicit here is our always already implicated position in the market.

Weirdly, Sartre then moves to strange psychologizing that posits a depth model of subjectivity and anti-colonial violence as “the same [settler] violence thrown back upon us as when our reflection comes forward to meet us when we go towards a mirror” (6). The logic is strange and almost replicates imperial epistemology; we know how they work and they are essentially higher order monkeys who are good at emulating us. Perhaps I am not being fair to Sartre, but we move on.

A quote that may be useful for the Rwanda project:
 
6:  “In order to free themselves they even massacre each other. The different tribes fight between themselves since they cannot face the real enemy –– and you can count on colonial policy to keep up their rivalries; the man who raises his knife against his brother thinks that he has destroyed once and for all the detested image of their common degradation, even though these expiatory victims don’t quench their thirst for blood.”

Notes on the French Left:

7:  “The Left at home is embarrassed; they know the true situation of the natives, the merciless oppression they are submitted to; they do not condemn their revolt, knowing full well that we have done everything to provoke it.”

“They would do well to read Fanon; for he shows clearly that this irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself. I think we understood this truth at one time, but we have forgotten it –– that no gentleness can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy them.”

Although I deeply disagree with the last sentiment, Fanon’s move to link anti-colonial movements to the French Revolution (the forgotten truth) is an interesting and provocative one. He does not conflate but merely alludes, perhaps in the service of the larger Hegelian claim for historical teleology that he closes with.

8:  “This book has not the slightest need for a preface, all the less because it is no addressed to us. Yet I have written one, in order to bring the argument to its conclusion; for we in Europe too are being decolonized: that is to say that the settler which is in every one of us is being savagely rooted out.”

Gotta love the language of that last clause!

What makes Sartre so interesting in this introduction is the complicated, and sometimes contradictory (dialectical?), way he oscillates between granting agency to the actors involved and subsuming them within larger forces (markets, Man—transhistorical subjectivity, movement of history etc).

9:  “Try to understand this at any rate: if violence began this very evening and if exploitation and oppression had never existed on the earth, perhaps the slogans of non-violence might end the quarrel. But if the whole regime, even your non-violent ideas, are conditioned by a thousand year old oppression, your passivity serves only to place you in the ranks of the oprressors.”