Ep. 210: Frantz Fanon’s Black Existentialism (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 210 is something like, how does growing up in a racist society mess people up? And we read Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, white masks from 1952. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, who, despite growing up in the 80s, never wore a blackface for Halloween in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:29 Lawrence: Oh, my gosh.

0:30 Seth: Mmm. This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:35 Wes: This is Wes Owen in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:38 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:41 Lawrence: And this is Lawrence Ware in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

0:45 Mark: Welcome back. La.

0:46 Seth: Yeah. How many years has it been?

0:48 Lawrence: Oh, man, it's been a few years. Man, it's good to be back with you guys, man. It seems like a lot has happened with me since we began, but yeah, man, it's good to be back with you guys.

0:57 Mark: Yes, you're big time.

0:59 Lawrence: Oh, I am not big time. Get out of here.

1:02 Dylan: None of us has even won New York Times Op Ed piece, much less several.

1:08 Lawrence: So I might have signed a little bit of a contract with him. So the next one will come out on Sunday, actually. This Sunday.

1:14 Seth: Oh, really? Okay.

1:15 Dylan: Yeah.

1:16 Mark: What is the topic?

1:17 Lawrence: The movie Green Book and the inherent problems that I have with it.

1:22 Mark: All right. When we were talking to you about our very first episode that you were on many years ago, you recommended we do this book. We were already doing several other readings, and this seemed like it was a little too much to bite off and chew on top of that other stuff. I had looked a little at the time, didn't really understand where it was coming from. Now, years later, you know, we've done Sartre, we've done a lot of the other intervening stuff that was more directly influencing him. So it's not as strange to me. Do you want to give us a little background sort of where you were coming from with this text? Have you taught this before? What was your passion for this originally?

1:57 Lawrence: Yeah, I've taught it before. Frantz Fanon is just kind of a foundational figure in philosophy of race. He predates the modern way that we do philosophy of race. But he's a very influential person, particularly of all the things that he's written this book, and particularly chapter five, the Fact of Blackness. If you're going to take seriously the philosophical examination of race in America, even though he's not coming from America, but if you're going to take it Seriously, then he's just a figure that you have to kind of wrestle with.

2:25 Mark: So this was his first book. He actually tried to turn this in as his PhD thesis and it was not accepted. And so he wrote something else, more physiological, more straight, clinical, and that was accepted. But he published this as a book itself.

2:39 Lawrence: This is something that he was wrestling with for a while and then when the time was right, he put it out there into the world. But it took a while for it to make its journey to the popular reader.

2:49 Mark: Do you want to go around in kind of between the bunch of us, give an outline of what this text is about, why we're doing this today, what we hope to get out of it.

2:57 Wes: I was actually surprised to find out the degree to which Fanon seems to be an existentialist. That's not something I associated with him with. Before we read this, of course, I knew very little, but I heard the name thrown around in the context of certain arguments which essentially emphasize the concept of identity. And in a way, as an existentialist, he's sort of repudiating a certain identity based solution to the problem of racism or to the problem of being a people who is despised or oppressed in a colonial society, for example, but also in societies where colonialism is hundreds of years old, like the United States.

And so, as Law mentioned, chapter five seems to be the sort of meat of everything. And it reads as a rejection of a certain anti existential solution to the problem of racism, which is to search for a certain kind of essence, whether that's human. So he describes his own journey which started out with him trying to show that he essentially has a human essence, that is to prove to white people that he is human, which is another way of saying rational or possessing of dignity, something that's fine in the abstract but doesn't really work very well in practice.

So people might accept that in the abstract, but in practice they're still just as racist as ever. But if you turn in the opposite direction in search of what he calls a quote unquote magical Negro culture or the celebration of blackness, whether it's an idea of rhythm or emotional sensitivity or poetic power, that sort of collapses into pejorative notions around primitiveness or being in some sort of earlier stage of development in civilization. And the same thing, if you try to look back at black civilizations and say, well, look, they were actually more advanced from the very beginning.

Thousands of years ago they were working with gold and silver and they were in fact superior to the colonials who came afterwards in morally and in many other ways, that doesn't work either. And in the end, sort of in the very conclusion of the book, you sort of get this existentialist cry to arms around rejecting those sort of solutions and the idea that we should embrace essences of those sort. And rather, he says things like, we have the right not to know ourselves as superior or inferior, for instance. Not to sort of engage in resentment or in feelings of superiority or whatever, white or black, but only to demand human behavior from the other, as he puts it.

5:33 Dylan: I think Wes, in terms of summary, captured it really well. I had never read Frantz Fanon. I found myself taking in, on the one hand, his very poetic writing. It reminded me a lot of the experience of reading other sort of poetic philosophy. And it changes in its sort of poetry in different parts. The beginning starts off very, very existentially poetic. In the end, it's a little more straightforwardly as a cry to arms, so to speak. I found myself keying in on this existentialist question. And also this criticism of ontology as being a way of engaging in the world and revealing truth, which is essentially a kind of existentialist criticism. But the way he focuses in. On the notion of being as being problematic, particularly in the relation of colonized people as being essentially being ized out of their humanity.

6:34 Wes: Did you say being ized out of their humanity?

6:37 Dylan: I did. I just made up a word. So that was the part that was interesting to me.

6:44 Mark: I just want to give a little overall background of that. He's a trained psychiatrist. He studied philosophy. He studied under Merleau Ponty. In fact, I had read he's writing from the French colony of Martinique. So that's in the Antilles, it's in the Caribbean. A lot of the background of this is that it's a colonized people. All culture, as far as they were concerned, came from France. Of course, we know France is very uppity about its own culture and its own cultural contributions. If you're in France, you gotta speak French. He went and he trained in France.

A lot of this is him telling about his experiences. Going. Going to France, training in an academic setting, reading Montesquieu. There weren't a lot of, I want to say, African Americans. There were a lot of black guys in his school. And then the weird things about going back again. This was supposed to be his dissertation for psychoanalysis. But at the beginning he says, look, I'm not going to give you my method up front, Right. If this was a proper scientific paper, he would kind of say, here's what I'm going to do. But it's more free form, it's more essay like.

And part of this is because he was just so young and. But he was. And he was writing with a lot of passion. He was writing. He said, I. I can't be scientifically objective about this because the patients that I'm concerned with are my family members, my friends, people that I know. And so he's concerned primarily with the question that I gave at the beginning of what the psychology is of black people who are raised in this environment to in outline see themselves as the other, that culture. You know, this is where all this talk of marginalization, this is one of the primary texts that gives us that talk because folks in that situation saw themselves as by necessity, like, you know, when they would reflect back on the triumphs of civilization.

While it was all European white people and French in particular, it was their language. Any sort of aspiration that you might have as a black person there was always toward that central dominant culture was toward whiteness. So he's dealing with the kind of envy as Wes was giving. There are other options in how to of respond to this. In that one chapter that he referred to, the fact of blackness is actually presented as a dialectical stream of. First I had this attitude that didn't work. So it sort of pushed me to this attitude that didn't work.

He's talking about other writers, he's bringing forth poetry, he's bringing forth fiction. He brings up media studies is one of the first people that I know about to that he has some nasty things to say in chapters that we did not focus on about interracial couples, really just being kind of suspicious of the. The motives involved. So we have to take this very specifically in a certain way about his time and place. He really is analyzing the people of that particular culture. What you want to take from that and say how much is applicable to today.

Just look at the intellectual history of how these ideas have changed between now and today. Certainly, as Wes pointed out, the existentialism part, which Law when you pitched this to me, he was like black existentialism. At least that's the first thing I heard. I didn't know so much about the psychoanalytic stuff before several years ago, before getting into this. A lot of this seems to come right out of Sartre. In other words, accusing people of bad faith in various ways, accusing themselves as thinking that they have a fixed essence, when in fact they don't.

9:59 Seth: I don't know if this is right or wrong, but in my own intellectual history, for some reason, I have Fanon not connected with, but in the same field of vision with Said and his book Orientalism and the notion of colonial studies and the idea of colonialism as an interpretive framework for an entire culture or peoples. I gotta say it freaked me out about reading Fanon was that I feel like his dialogue starts talking about colonialism as a sociopolitical phenomenon and how it impacts. But he brings it down to the psychological in a way that of course, Said never does, or at least didn't in that book, which I hadn't read for 20 years.

I read it, you know, in college and started reading again this year. Just coincidentally, the significant move for Fanon was the move to bring in Hegel and to make it a very personal psychological thing as opposed to an economic or sociopolitical thing. And he does it so seamlessly in the sense that you're reading along and you're suddenly brought into that dialectic. That's the thing that was most impactful, most interesting to me. And I think it sets up the last chapter where it's aggressive and scary. It's a tight and very impressive. It's not a narrative, it's not a diatribe, it's exhortatory.

Whatever it is, it's extremely powerful. And it's set up by all the work he does to start from the notion of colonialism, starting in the most abstract way and bringing it to the personal, individual and psychological, existential. And then he just ramps it up and brings it home in that last chapter. It's phenomenal writing. It's emotionally impactful.

11:51 Lawrence: Most people don't really do much with that last chapter. I know I don't teach it, and I know a number of people who teach. Fanon usually don't teach that last chapter. They usually kind of zero in on the fifth chapter, the fact of blackness, or maybe they do the Negro and language or something like that. But very few people teach that last chapter. But I think that if you take it seriously, that last chapter really does kind of tie it all together and bring it all together. Maybe I should look at teaching it more often.

12:17 Mark: I guess I should just lay out structurally. So he has a nice introduction where he explains he's not going to give a method and it's very poetic. And then chapter one is the Negro in language. Then the next one we focused on was chapter four, the so called dependency complex of colonized Peoples. That's mostly a specific response to another writer. And then five, the fact of blackness is the One that we keep mentioning that is more personal, more phenomenological. And then chapter seven, the Negro and Recognition. So that's where he brings up Hegel specifically and the master slave relationship.

And pretty much what are people looking for? This relates very directly, obviously, to the Fukuyama interview that we just had. And then the short last one, by way of conclusion, where he wraps it up. So that's what we're looking at. We focused on basically four chapters, plus the very beginning and the very end.

13:08 Wes: So, shall we say, the way he sets it up in the beginning, what does he tell us he's trying to accomplish? In the introduction, he calls it a clinical study.

13:16 Dylan: Page 16, he says, this book is a clinical study. Those who recognize themselves in it will, I believe, have made a step in the right direction. My true wish is to get my brother, black or white, to shake off the dust from that lamentable livery built up over centuries of incomprehension.

13:33 Wes: It's interesting because there's a certain irony in writing calling it a clinical study, because it's not. If you read clinical studies, there are accounts, right, of therapy with someone and their dreams. Although, of course, there are dreams in this. But it's a clinical study of culture. A clinical study that rises to the level of the cultural.

13:53 Mark: Yeah, there's some case studies. There's some individual, you know, patient. There's some kind of informal. I asked my friends about this, or we asked a lot of people, black and white, about this. But a lot of it is, here's something that a poet said. But right here on the first page of the introduction, he throws out some weird existential language. Bottom page one. At the risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man. Okay, well, what could that possibly mean? Well, the next three paragraphs sort of tell you there's a zone of non being, an extraordinary, sterile and arid region.

An utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born. In most cases, the black man lacks the advantage of being able to accomplish this descent into a real hell. So right there it sounds like he's going to say something, that the zone of non being has something to do with the black man's characteristic. But no, it's actually the human condition has something to do with descending into a real hell and having an authentic upheaval. He goes on, man is not merely a possibility of recapture or negation. If it is true that consciousness is a process of transcendence, we have to see too, that this transcendence is haunted by the problems of love and understanding.

So in other words, transcendence is like the existentialist. You are not a particular thing in the world. We don't have it in nature. Consciousness necessarily transcends that. But we're not entirely free. We're haunted by the problems of love and understanding. Man is a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies. Uprooted, pursued, baffled, doomed to watch the dissolution of the truths he's worked out for himself one after another, he has to give up projecting onto the world an antinomy that coexists with him. Okay, that's weird. The black man is a black man that is, as the result of a series of aberrations of affect, he is rooted at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated.

So the way I was interpreting this whole thing is that according to existentialism, the human condition is pretty bizarre as it is.

15:42 Lawrence: Right?

15:43 Mark: We're dangerously free. This is what I see. Uprooted, pursued, baffled, doomed to watch the dissolution of the truths he's worked out for himself one after another. In other words, we think we figured something out and we always transcend this. Things don't stay nailed down in the way we would like.

15:57 Wes: These are truths about the self, the sort of things that he runs through in chapter five, the ways we define ourselves as a kind of solution.

16:04 Mark: But that's all just a prelude to. Is a black man the result of a series of aberrations of affect? In other words, by being raised in a racist society, by being colonized, he's rooted at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated. So the black man faces different existential problems. And you might ask, isn't this true to some extent, in some way, of everybody? Right. There's facticity. We were born into a family. People are telling you what you are. And to really gain independence from that, to gain a self, you have to do something to rip yourself out of that. But you might say that there's white privilege at work for most of us, that if you're tied in this colonial situation, you're buried extra deep. And you know, the purpose of this book is to help you work your way out and orient from there.

16:52 Seth: I think this is where he employs Hegel to. One of the things that's great and also frustrating about existentialism is the universality of it, that existentialism is attractive in the idea of the creation of meaning and the. The sense in which we have this radical freedom to create the worlds that we're in. But to a certain extent it doesn't take into effect the realities of systems of power and oppression, and even beyond oppression, just the social conditions that create the things against which you potentially can express your individuality.

And I think one of the things that's really interesting here is that Fanon later on is going to bring in Hegel to give a metaphysical underpinning for how there's a difference between the experience of individuals, that radical freedom in the existential sense is not identical for everybody, or at least maybe more appropriately said against which that radical freedom chase is not the same for every individual and in a very meaningful way.

18:00 Wes: So, Seth, he said systems of power. And I think that's really interesting because that gets us directly back to the existentialist concept of essence. In other words, you can think of systems of power in terms of top down power, who has the institutional power. But also thinking of Foucault, there's a lot to be said for the power of the Panopticon, just the power of who's recognizing you and what do they expect and how that shapes you. As Mark pointed out, this paragraph about the aberrations of affect, that really does apply to everyone because we are all subject to a set of influences at varying levels that determine an essence for us, determine who we are, determine our personalities.

So that could be our culture, it could be our family situation, but also just the sorts of things that happen to us as we grow up, or relationships with peers, chance events in life. And I think for at least the kind of existentialism that attracts me, it's not that we don't have that essence, but it's that we can transcend that and we ought to transcend that, or to use the word that Fanon uses in that paragraph, something from which we must be extricated. And so whether that's being a black man or being a white man, or being a waiter, for instance, to use one of the Sartre's famous examples, or any other role that we are going to inhabit as a way of sort of hiding from some kind of sense of responsibility or sense of freedom.

That's the sort of thing from which we must extricate ourselves. It's an interesting point of comparison, right, to think about, well, what effects did my parents have on who I became? And then what's the effect of being enslaved, being brutalized, being robbed? Systematic societal oppression that affects a whole people? So yeah, those things are very different in scale, but I think we're talking about the same sort of thing.

19:57 Seth: In invoking Hegel, I think if you take the straight existentialist position that you kind of just articulated, Wes, the idea that we're all radically free individuals, we just have different things against which we have to struggle. You're French, I'm American, born in the war, you're female, you're male, whatever. And I think the way that Fanon deploys Hegel in this argument is to suggest that there's qualitatively something different in the sense that the colonized don't get the opportunity to become individuals to the extent where they could essentially participate in the radical freedom that existentialism describes.

Because that existentialism doesn't account for or articulate the systems of power that exist in the colonial mind. And he uses consciousness and self consciousness, the Hegelian master slave dialectic, to basically point out that if you are not able to come face to face with a pure self consciousness, that in order to become a fully self conscious, you have to come in contact with and be acknowledged by an equal consciousness. And that's how you come to self consciousness. And that that's the thing that's denied to colonized peoples. The colonized are never recognized.

21:20 Dylan: Exactly.

21:21 Seth: And so to talk about the colonized participating in this radical existential freedom when they've never achieved self consciousness in the sense that's required for existentialism is what's part of the problem. That was my read of it.

21:36 Wes: Most people don't achieve that radical existentialist freedom, and then even those who do. I think it's a rare occasion. Your point is well taken. I just think that the radical existentialist freedom, that's a very high bar to which we aspire. The barriers that he's describing are unique and again of a. Whether you want to call it a certain scale or kind that's different than average, let's say every day. But the average every day includes a lot of horrible things as well.

22:02 Mark: To clarify. So we all, according to Sartre, have this freedom, like whatever situation you're in, right? Even if you're in chains, you could change your attitude about the chains. But of course, the reason that we hate Sartre when he makes this point is because it's so frickin insensitive to people that, you know are in chains or really have anything going on with them at all. So I would say maybe we're distinguishing here between the radical freedom, which he says that we all just have all the time, and, and being able to realistically make a determinate free, feeling, choice. You know, he's gonna say, it's always free, it's always free. But it doesn't clearly doesn't feel free.

22:41 Wes: Well, there's free and there's free. There's free in the sense that we potentially, you know, we are capable of free acts. But to be free in a larger sense doesn't mean we behave autonomously. Most of the time, we don't behave autonomously. Right. Whether it's Kant or Sartre or Beauvoir, they recognize that we don't live up to that standard, even if we have that capacity. And there are reasons for us not to live up to that standard. You know, this is de Beauvoir's ethics of ambiguity. We stand in two realms at once. Not just the realm of freedom, but the realm of determinism, the realm of being shaped by social and psychological forces.

23:16 Dylan: There's that last part, that embeddedness, that is the theme of the colonized and running throughout Fanon's book. The effect of that embeddedness, particularly in terms of the recognition and the unleashing of the man. In the introduction, near where we were reading before, he says, the truth is that we must unleash the man. It's an existentialist cry of freedom. But that, you know, the rest of the book is about the ways in which that is prevented in this particular environment. It's not even clear that, you know, that it's happened to you. And the whole language of trying to become something new and grow gets infected with where he'll say that the black man is just trying to be white, or the white man is defined in terms about not being black.

24:03 Wes: Well, in the final chapter, right, he says, for the black man, there's only one destiny, and it is white. Which I take to be a way of saying that to try and inhabit that particular identity in whatever way I want to do it is inevitably reactionary. It's inevitably defining myself by way of another, you know, that none recognizing other. There is no way out within that paradigm of again, defining an essence for oneself. That's what that is saying. I think, in a way it sounds hopeless, right? It sounds hopeless through much of the reading. It's sort of a situation which it seems like one.

You can't extricate oneself. You're stuck in such a terrible history. What can one do? You know, you're living in a society in which to be accomplished is to speak French, to basically assimilate to the culture of the oppressor. There is no way out under the paradigm of Defining oneself in terms of an essence, the way out is just to reject that manner of solution law.

25:01 Mark: How do you teach that? How do you explain that?

25:03 Lawrence: I really don't teach the introduction very much. I really do more of chapter five because like I said, to really get into some of this stuff, you have to take all of it into account. You can't kind of zero in on just the introduction and kind of zero in on one passage because you have to kind of put it in conversation with everything that's happening. The only chapter that you can kind of do that with, to my mind at least, is chapter five. However, when it comes to him talking about the only way out is to become white. I mean, I kind of see that as him playing with words.

And this is where some of the criticisms kind of comes in, because some people think that what he's saying is that he's equating whiteness with being human. And I'm not sure if I fully agree with what he's doing there. It's hard to teach that part. It's really hard because many students. I've had students who got up and walked out when reading that section. So it's a complicated part to kind of teach.

25:53 Wes: It's a rejection of the whole idea of destiny. So if we are thinking in terms of, you know, again, looking at it in terms of chapter five, I'm going to define. I'm going to recapture my dignity by talking about poeticness or rhythm or about great civilizations in the past. Those are questions of essence, which are also questions of destiny. Right. Destiny is just the thing that sort of flows from one's particular facticity, let's say. Right. One's particular makeup, nature. And the whole point is there if you want to live according to that idea. If you say, what is the destiny of the black man? And I got to find that out. And that's the solution. This is his way of saying that, no, I reject that. If you want to go the destiny route, that always leads to white.

26:38 Dylan: Well, especially if you include that adjective. Right. The black man or the white man or whatever.

26:43 Lawrence: Right.

26:44 Dylan: I can't put my finger on it right now. But he lays claims. He says, you know, the history of the Peloponnesian War is no less my history than any other history. He's making a very strong claim, as he says at the very beginning, a humanist claim, of the thing that we have to free ourselves from is, you put it as particular destiny, an essence ness of our own individuality. That is the thing that we are Potentially becoming. He rejects this whole notion, this Aristotelian notion, which I think someone who's an existentialist would, that you are becoming the thing that you are. And he seems to reject that altogether. I am not potentiality of something. I am fully what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. There is no room for probability inside me. That's on chapter five, page 114.

27:34 Wes: Yeah. My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack.

27:38 Dylan: It is that lack part is really important, right? What you hold is not your mode of lacking.

27:46 Wes: So before that, Dylan, the part that you were reading from, and this is on page 103, this is where again, he's talking about losing what he says, you know, this need to lose myself completely in Negritude, again, lose oneself in a certain essence. And then the entirety of that paragraph from which you read a part, Dylan, the dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself. So negritude, or any sort of essence, of course, being the representative of necessity, as in certain things and behaviors, propensities, characteristics necessarily follow from my belonging to a certain class.

It shatters my unreflected position, which, you know, this is straight Sartre. Still, in terms of consciousness, black consciousness is imminent in its own eyes. I am not a potentiality of something. I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. No probability has any place inside me. My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack. It is. It is its own follower. Which is to say it's not a lack. That's looking for a narrative. You know, I'm not looking for one of these narratives in order to shore up Negro consciousness, one of those many narratives that he's given above.

29:01 Lawrence: And just for the sake of clarity, Negritude is of course, this movement that happened in the 1930s from Paris or whatnot, where one is. It came out of the French speaking black graduate students from French colonies in Africa and the Caribbean territories. In it, it has to do with race identity. And so it's important for us to have it in the background and not just kind of introducing new words, but it's an entire movement that has kind of gone out of style. But it's something that was very important for what Fanon is up to.

29:29 Mark: I wouldn't overstate the existentialist point, as if it is his only point and his end point that he even says, look, it would be great to do research and unearth the history of black civilizations. And he's not discouraging that. He just doesn't want you to go so far as to get lost in that.

29:47 Wes: Well, he says it would make a difference, though, to a child who is suffering under oppression in the present.

29:53 Mark: Okay, so we're doing two things. I mean, at the beginning, he says there's two prongs to the solution here. One is a psychological one. He's doing a psychological analysis. He's saying, how do you decolonize your mind? But then at the same time, you have to actually decolonize society. Right. You can't be a healthy individual in a sick society. That's a strong point here. And he doesn't go on and on here. I know in his later work and in his actual action, going and fighting in some African independence movement against the French in Algeria.

30:23 Dylan: Yes, yes, he was first. Algerian independence.

30:27 Mark: Right. So part of that was I've been assigned to help these people fix their psychological problems, become accustomed to their situation, basically. But if their situation is so bad, maybe they shouldn't become accustomed to it. Maybe there's something messed up about that. And so there are concrete ways that do share characteristics with, I think, what he would be hearing out of the Negritude movement. Like, for instance, you know, if you need recognition, don't keep asking the white man to give you recognition. That's not going to happen. Individuals might.

But like, he, you know, he gives all these examples, like they try about his fellow scholars and they'll introduce him as like, oh, isn't this a curiosity that we have a Negro that reads Montesquieu and like, they try to compliment him, but in so doing, you know, it's like calling Obama articulate, like, it's that kind of mistake. So if you're really gonna get recognition, it has to come from fellow blacks, people that are in the same situation, but because they're all similarly colonized and they're all similarly kind of referring to the white French civilization, European civilization, as the master civilization.

They kind of despise each other and despise their blackness and wanna be, you know, so it really is a significant interim step to becoming a full, aware, existential ubermensch, aware of your ultimate freedom to just establish mutual respect with other black people. He thinks that this cannot happen in the colonized society, so that, you know, you have to figure out various ways of doing that. So I think that there's a lot to researching that kind of ancient civilization just to block out, supplement the narrative that says, oh, everything that's good came from France.

Like, we gotta fix These things in the media that present all blackness as evil and whiteness as purity and things like that. Even though to a pure existentialist, these things wouldn't matter to people, they do matter.

32:25 Wes: Does he say that in the reading that I did, the, you know, the basic chapters, does he say the talk about altering the representation at the societal level?

32:35 Mark: Representation is in there. There's a whole long thing about chapter

32:39 Lawrence: six, maybe the Negro psychopathology.

32:41 Wes: Yeah, yeah.

32:41 Mark: Talks about cartoons and even white people who have never had contact with a black person would have no reason to be racist for that reason, because of this imagery and stuff. Have a warped view.

32:54 Lawrence: Right?

32:54 Wes: Is he suggesting a social program around that?

32:57 Mark: I merely inferred that one would want to do something. Since he does say at the beginning, this has to be a two pronged attack. We're fixing the individual, but we're also fixing the society. A lot of this is just the various interpretations. I listen to several podcasts and things

33:11 Wes: on this because the way I thought he put it is, you know, if you're a therapist and you're treating an individual, in this case, you're not just telling them, look, hey man, you have a complex. You're saying, yeah, it's not your complex, it's society's complex. But I didn't see it as you're waiting on curing society in order to do something therapeutic with the patient. You give them the tools to actually act at a social level. So in other words, they don't just go out and try and fix themselves. They get involved in social projects around fixing those injustices. So it's not necessarily them waiting on society to be fixed, but for them to be actively, freely engaged in the fixing.

33:49 Mark: I know we're jumping around here, but I want to finish the intro here to address the destiny is white thing again. So I guess I'm interpreting this in terms of something like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that the existential ubermensch, as we were just talking about, is searching for self actualization. And he says early on, like, you can't expect people who are fighting for bread to be interested in these, you know, highfalutin literary ideas. He says, the black man wants to be white, the white man slaves to reach a human level. So in other words, being existentially free is that human level.

That is the future that the black man just needs to get out of these complexes, both from decolonizing his mind and working to decolonize society. And eventually he'll be as screwed up as the white people. Are now, he's not consistent about feeling that the white man is existentially free in this way because he also sometimes talks about the white man as obsessed with blackness as I think Dylan said early on, like defining whiteness as the non black, and we need a scapegoat. So, like, that's something that white people, specifically, that colonizer specifically.

In fact, he even says the colonizers in particular, those are the people that couldn't make it in the regular society. Right. That they just, as a group, rejected the power structure that they were born in, and so they went off to colonize somewhere else so they could sort of have their little fiefdoms. And so they're basically antisocial. They're basically the bastards among the white people.

35:22 Wes: They have the fantasy of a world without men, basically.

35:26 Mark: Yes. They're gonna have problems that they have to get over.

35:28 Wes: They would love to annihilate everyone there. He's relating someone else's interpretation. Can we look at it in context? It's in better context than the last chapter. Because it sounds like you're not buying my interpretation. Right. The rejection of destiny per se.

35:42 Mark: I'm trying to stress that there's a dialectic here, that there are steps that ultimately you will reject a destiny, but they're sort of determinate destiny steps that you might have to go through to get to the point where you have embraced whiteness. In other words, you can reject a destiny.

35:59 Wes: Yeah. So on the bottom of page 177, he's segueing from if the question of a practical solidarity with a given past arose for me, it did so only to the extent to which I was committed to myself and to my neighbor to fight for all my life and with all my strength so that never again would a people on earth be subjugated. It was not the black world that laid down my course of conduct. My black skin is not the wrapping of specific values. And then he goes on to talk about Sartre, and he says, the black man wants to be like the white man. For the black man, there is only one destiny, and it is white.

Long ago, the black man admitted the unarguable superiority of the white man, and all his efforts are aimed at achieving a white existence. Have I no other purpose then, but to avenge the Negro of the 17th century? You know, when you put it in that context, whether you're involved in emancipation, right, or revenge or becoming like or any of those projects, it all amounts to the destiny of being white. That itself is what's being rejected the idea that we operate according to a destiny, or according to my skin being a wrapping for specific values, or so on and so forth.

37:12 Mark: So here's a question again. I listened to several podcasts about this to sort of get an idea of how do people talk about decolonization now? And I've heard both that Fanon is a humanist and that he is not a humanist. Right. The people that sort of inherited him. One of these other podcasts I was listening to is this person, like, has a bumper sticker that she made, which is Humanism is racism. Again, it sort of depends what you mean by humanism. If what you mean by humanism is you're falsely universalizing from a set of norms, you know, the European norms, and saying, insofar as you attain this, then you are human, like, that would clearly be racist.

When you're talking about decolonizing philosophy in particular, Lewis Gordon is an article that I was looking at that was talking about the decolonization of philosophy. And it's a way of continuing the Cartesian project and questioning yourself, how can I be sure that what I'm saying is true? And so the things that you associate with humanity. And that could even be, you know, maybe Sartre himself. I think that as Sartre and as Fanon is, he's also criticizing Sartre in some places, that Sartre seems to be wrongly universalizing. Certainly he thinks Merleau Ponty, in his phenomenology, supposedly universal phenomenology, of what it's like to be in a body, was not reflecting the black experience, that that would be an attempt to be humanistic that ends up being racist sort of accidentally.

38:46 Lawrence: It excludes the black experience.

38:48 Dylan: Yeah. And at the very least, is making a mistake of not understanding what embeddedness is because it's not extensive enough of a view.

38:57 Wes: Well, there's a natural tension, right, between existentialist and Marxist explanations of things, even though Sartre obviously was a Marxist. To talk about things in terms of freedom and the transcendence of essence on the one hand, and then on the other hand, to talk about the development of history, including the superstructure, the world of ideas and all that stuff as a product of material conditions and economic conditions and class conflict, those are two different things. And then the inheritors of Marx go further than that. It's not just class conflict, but it's racial, ethnic, gender identities, all those sorts of things in the way they interact and broadly cultural explanations of human behavior.

So talking about freedom on the one hand, and cultural determinations on the other, and naturally, in tension with each other. And we get some of the other side of that right in chapter four.

39:50 Lawrence: I don't want to leave the point of what Mark was saying earlier about the tension between some people seeing Fanon as a humanist and people seeing Fanon as a person who's not a humanist, because I do think that's an interesting question that is really not fully answered here. Although, I mean, you can come to different conclusions about what he's up to here. But if you look at the totality of what he's up to in this book and then at the arc of what he's up to in the other books, I mean, it's clear that he's a person who is pushing back against the humanistic notion of white European modes of being as being humanist.

Right. He's pushing back against it. And I think it's very important that we be clear about that here. He's putting these two things in dialogue, and he's putting them in dialectical dialogue with one another. But it's very clear that he's trying to kind of make a way forward. And that last chapter really kind of brings us together. He's trying to think of a way where a person can be a black person and be proud of their blackness while simultaneously living in a world that says to them that they are somehow othered.

40:58 Dylan: It's the tension with the notion of having an identity and not having it be definitional or something, having pride in your self, understanding in your identity, without it becoming a box. Because at the end, I mean, in the last chapter, he seems to be pretty clearly asserting a kind of radical individual freedom when he says things like, I am my own foundation. And it is by going beyond the historical and instrumental given that I initiate my cycle of freedom.

41:30 Wes: In no way should I dedicate myself to the revival of an unjustly unrecognized Negro civilization. I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to exalt the past at the expense of my present and of my future.

41:43 Dylan: I, a man of color, want but one thing. May man never be instrumentalized. May the subjugation of man by man, that is to say, of me by another, cease may be allowed to discover and desire man wherever he may be. Well, I guess one of the ways I would put this thing that was most surprising, and we mentioned this a couple times, is the way in which, in many parts of the book, Fanon seems to be calling into question any kind of adjectival understanding of yourself, including being black or being White as a kind of substantive. The beginning of the chapter where he says, in fact, he doesn't even use the word black man.

He uses that phrase we mentioned earlier. I shall say that a black is not a man, whereas he's using it as a substantive. And I think that that's in some ways the existential criticism of saying it becomes really powerful within the horror of oppression of a whole people in terms of being objectified. This is what I meant by that terrible word I used, beonized out of existence, where you are no longer seen as anything except a substantive. And therefore you lose your humanity and you lose your freedom. And then his inclusion is analysis, that psychoanalysis of the effect on a person who is in that environment where they are consistently and constantly, not just abused economically and disadvantaged and oppressed in those ways along that sort of Marxist criticism, but in that psychoanalysis of it, that it affects your very understanding of your being.

That ends up being deeply problematic for one. Recognizing their own freedom. And in the chapter on colonization, chapter four, that's what it is, is really a criticism of a book that was written that he wants to point out that you're just misunderstanding the psychology of what it means to be colonized. What happens to a person in that situation.

43:41 Seth: I would like to get to chapter five and quote therefrom. This is in support of what you just said, Dylan. Right on the very first page of chapter five, which is entitled the Fact of Blackness.

43:55 Dylan: Incidentally, my translation says the lived experience of the black man, which is the only translational difference that I so far found to be interesting. Lived experience just sounds different to me than the fact.

44:07 Seth: I didn't realize we were working from different translations until you started.

44:11 Wes: You and Wes quoted, obviously, a much more recent translation.

44:16 Seth: Right. Well, what's the original? French. Exactly. Let's not argue it, okay? It says, I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, subjectivity. My spirit filled with the desire to attain the source of the world. And then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects. Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others. Their attention was a liberation running over my body, suddenly abraded into non being, endowing me once more with an agility that I thought I had lost. And by taking me out of the world, restoring me to it.

But just as I reached the other side, I stumbled. And the movements, the attitude, the glances of the other fixed me there in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others. There is of course, the moment of being for others of which Hegel speaks. But every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society. This is the thesis that the book hinges on, which is the idea that in order to become a subject, you need to be able to have a certain kind of experience amongst other subjects in a colonized society.

If you are one of the colonized, you are denied that possibility. You are denied the possibility of having an experience where you can essentially go through the dialectic from consciousness in the encounter with another consciousness to self consciousness. It's denied you. This is the pivotal chapter. When I think he transitions from. He invokes Hegel here from some kind of abstract socio political critique of colonialism, which is France picturing Martinique or Antilles or North African society in a certain way, to the psychological implications of colonialism are that colonized individuals never have the opportunity afforded to the colonizers, which is to become fully subjective human beings.

46:41 Wes: Well, just to read on a little bit, Seth, ontology, once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside, does not permit us to understand the being of the black men. For not only must the black man be black, he must be black in relation to the white men. And overnight the Negro has been given two frames of reference within which he has had to place himself. His metaphysics, or less pretentiously, his customs. And the sources on which they were based were wiped out because they were in conflict with a civilization that he did not know and it imposed itself on him. This is the explanation of this idea that ontology is made unattainable in a colonized or civilized society. And the idea that the black man can't experience his being through others without the black in relation to. To white thing.

47:29 Mark: You don't find calling that ontology strange because.

47:32 Seth: Right.

47:32 Mark: The ontology is just the list of things that you think exist. And clearly in a colonial society. The whole point is that the colonized are considered things and not full persons. So they are in an ontology.

47:46 Wes: It's Hegelian ontology in terms of the in itself, you become an in itself for itself. We want to think of the self conscious being as among the objects of the ontology. Unlike right. For Kant, consciousness just sort of exists outside of our view. It's not itemized in the ontology. And then we have all the appearances and the objects and things. Hegel's innovation is to put the subject into the ontology, but it comes into that by way of mutual recognition and the ontology fails. If the recognition fails, and that's what he's saying here, does that make sense? Do you disagree with that?

48:18 Mark: Yeah, I'm just trying to read that in the context of ontology, once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside, does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. What is that leaving existence? By the way, I was interpreting existence in the existentialist sense. So either essence would be thingship, existence would be full self consciousness. I'm right that blacks are considered part of the ontology, but they don't have existence in the ontology. In other words, like you just said, they are not admitted as self conscious beings for themselves in the ontology.

48:52 Wes: Yeah, I think that's right. Although now that you've made me think about this word existence, now I'm a little confused.

48:56 Seth: But yeah, look at a couple sentences before. In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people, there is an impurity, a flaw that outlaws any ontological explanation. Someone may object that this is the case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem. Ontology, once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside, does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black, he must be black in relation to the white man.

49:31 Dylan: I'm not trying to be a pain about this, but this particular sentence about leaving existence by the wayside, this guy translates it. Ontology does not allow us to understand the being of the black man, since it ignores the lived experience. That to me seems pretty clear is that the thing that's missing is basically what Mark was referring to is that the actual experience of the individual and their lived experience.

49:56 Mark: It seems like yours is a philosophical translation that the fact of blackness. What does that mean? Oh, it's the lived experience of the black. Like yeah, this person is giving an interpretive translation.

50:07 Wes: It does sound very interpretive.

50:09 Seth: Yeah, yeah, it could be back to the French.