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

0:00 Mark: This is not bad. It's good.

0:02 Wes: Yeah. What do we think the word existence is translating?

0:07 Mark: We've gotten into chapter five, the fact of blackness. So law, you taught this. We are getting stuck here on all this existentialist lingo. Do you just skip over that when you're teaching it? What is the point of this chapter as far as you are concerned here?

0:19 Lawrence: What Franz Fanon is getting at here is he's trying to construct what it means to be black. And so that's the reason why in my translation, I don't know what Dylan has going on over there, but in my translation, it's called the fact of Blackness. And the reason why is because, in a nutshell, what he's up to is he's trying to imply here that the idea outside of racial discourse, the terms black and white possess no meaning. And what I do is I start off by just kind of looking at the text itself directly and just kind of walking them through the text, because it's a very dense text to kind of read through, particularly if you're not accustomed to reading philosophy.

Fanon argues that the social absorption of black as a negative term has led to the association of blackness with negativity. And so as a result of that, people who are of African descent, or call them black folks, they categorize their sorb via their skin, the same negative images or ideas and are forced to wear the uniform, the way that blackness is perceived by whiteness. And so therefore, their identity has been fixed or established, thus making their blackness a fact. And that's the reason why it's called the fact of Blackness. So what's going on here, then, is just me trying to get the students to begin to kind of wrestle with these ideas.

And later on in the text, when it moves away from this kind of existential language, it becomes a little bit more direct where he's using illustrations. So things like look a Negro or Look a Negro. He says that multiple times. Right. That's when they begin to kind of put together the pieces of what he's up to in this particular text.

1:58 Wes: Yeah, the facticity part is the problem. And then he moves on to the various failed solutions and that kind of dialectical progression, as Mark called it. But I like, in the. You know, in the very beginning, it's a very cool, Merleau Ponty esque discussion of the body and the development of a bodily schema. It's not just cognitive in the abstract sense, in the way we might think as a neuroscientist or psychologist about the way someone's body is represented to themselves, but it is imbued with the gaze of the white man. This whole look at a Negro thing, the sense that other people might be afraid of you, the desire to disappear, to become invisible. All those sorts of things are felt at a visceral, bodily level.

2:48 Mark: So he raises, you know, we had with Du Bois this idea of double consciousness. He talks about himself as a triple person. It comes to this weird Self consciousness of yourself. It's hard to just be natural. And at the bottom of page 83, he gives this example of reaching for a cigarette.

3:08 Seth: It's on 83, not 84. I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to reach out my right arm and take the pack of cigarettes lying at the other end of the table. The matches, however, are on the drawer on the left, and I shall have to lean back slightly. And all of these movements are made not out of habit, but out of implicit knowledge. A slow composition of myself as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world. Such seems to be the schema. It does not impose itself on me. It is rather a defining structure of the self and of the world, definitive because it creates a real dialectic between my body and the world.

3:44 Wes: It says below the corporeal schema. I have sketched a historico racial schema. The elements that I used have been provided for me not by, quote, residual sensations and perceptions, primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic and visual character, but by the other, the white man who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories. This is the thing that I was trying to summarize up front.

4:11 Dylan: He makes that cultural embeddedness like a bodily curse.

4:16 Wes: It's one's physical appearance that is being reacted to, yes? And bodily, physical presence. In these ways, it was no longer

4:24 Mark: a question of being aware of my body in the third person, but in a triple person. In the train, I was given not one, but two, three places I had already stopped being amused. Okay, so this is where people are being afraid of him and saying, look, a Negro that, you know, he's being very self conscious about. I existed triply, colon. I occupied space. I moved toward the other and the evanescent other, hostile, but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared, nausea. I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors.

So are those the three? I just wasn't really clear in this section what the relationship between, you know, the double consciousness. In other words, remind me if I'm right about this, but it's just being aware of oneself in the third person, right? You have your. The you as you appear to you and the you as you are labeled by the hostile society. And is that the double consciousness? So what is being added to here? What is the triple?

5:19 Lawrence: He wouldn't call it double consciousness because he's not really operating from that Du Boisian kind of way of thinking. But we can look at what he's saying. And call it double consciousness. So that's one part of it. But. But he's adding on this corporeal, physical aspect to what he's up to here. That is really, at the same time, simultaneously, it's a part of double consciousness, but it's also something other that he's laying on this psychological kind of additional layer that is a little bit more complex and convoluted in a way.

5:50 Mark: So, okay, so it sounds like the additional. When I was saying double consciousness, and I could have sworn he referred to Du Bois in here somewhere, but I just did a search and I couldn't find it in the PDF. So maybe I'm totally wrong about that. But Du Bois, you know, if it's just my view of myself versus other's view of me, it doesn't bring in the cultural aspect. So he's saying this historical, racial thing underlying. He's saying there's an awareness of the other's awareness of my body as a physical object. And he really goes on along like this is that, you know, that the black body is seen as pure biology, purely physical, hyper sexualized.

Like this is part of the image, you know, so he's reaching for the cigarette and like just the attention to detail of the body is warped by the other's view of the body and sort of fascination with the body. And. But then there's also underlying that. It sounds like you're saying that separate from the view of the body is this historical cultural view that would make you scary to someone, you know, because they've been saturated with this, with this view of blackness.

6:52 Lawrence: That's a negative view.

6:53 Mark: Yes, exactly. So two external and one internal.

6:57 Wes: If that's the triple, he moves on to talk about, says on that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence. Far indeed. And made myself an object. And then he's going to describe all the various ways in which he made himself an object. So for instance, some identified me with ancestors of mine who had been enslaved or lynched. I decided to accept this and we get various objectifications.

7:30 Mark: Do you think then these are successive mistakes that he's making, or are they correct insofar, you know, in the Hegelian sense? They are to be overcome ultimately, but they are necessary steps in a dialectical self understanding.

7:45 Wes: Well, he says straight up at various places. He makes them sound like mistakes. In every case, there are things to

7:50 Lawrence: be overcome quite clearly.

7:52 Mark: So like on page 86. He's thinking he's ugly. Where can I find shelter from these externally imposed standards? In quotes. Look how handsome that Negro is. His response in quotes. Kiss the handsome Negro's ass, Madame. Shame flooded her face. At last, I was set free from my rumination. At the same time, I accomplished two things. I identified my enemies and I made a scene. A grand slam. Now one would be able to laugh. The field of battle having been marked out, I entered the lists. What? While I was forgetting, forgiving and wanting only to love, my message was flung back in my face like a slap. The white world, the only honorable one, barred me from all participation. A man was expected to behave like a man. I was expected to behave like a black man, etc.

8:33 Lawrence: Why'd you stop reading?

8:34 Mark: What's going on?

8:39 Wes: I like that solution.

8:41 Mark: Yeah. I was told to stay within bounds, to go back to where I belong. So it seems like that. That response. To defy their expectations, to assert my individuality. There was something freeing about that. I don't think he's.

8:53 Wes: That's just being reactive. I mean, the end of the book will make clear. Right. You know, I have no right to. Right. In this robust sense of honoring one's own subjectivity. Right. To go this kind of reactionary route and define myself by way of the insults of another. Whether you're doing it positively or negatively, it doesn't matter. Right. You like the rebound. You start out with this consciousness based on the negative representations of another. And the way out is not simply to reverse it and make it positive.

9:24 Lawrence: I mean, but I think that this is an example of the experience of many black people, not just in the time period that he's writing, but now that you kind of go through this process of embodying all these other negative connotations of being black until you kind of come to some kind of synthesis at the end, where you kind of figure out who you are. And so what he's up to is he's engaging. He's kind of writing this out in a Hegelian sense, where he's saying, I tried this and this didn't work. I tried this and this didn't work. And then he kind of comes at the end to this notion that we have to kind of take up arms and kind of define ourselves according to ourselves by ourselves.

And so this is a process that he's kind of going through. It's a Hegelian process that he's going through, and he's trying these things, and it doesn't work. But nevertheless, It's a process that one must go through. And I think it's a process that many black people go through to kind of try to figure out who they are going to be and how they're going to operate in the world. But I would argue that probably it's a process that many people go through, not just black folks, but certainly black

10:23 Dylan: folks too, articulated that way. It's a process of seeing one defined by another and then rejecting it in different portions, or maybe accepting it and then rejecting it.

10:38 Lawrence: It's a process. At some points you accept it, at some points you reject it. But ultimately this process needs to happen in order for you to achieve the unique self that you're going to be at the end.

10:48 Wes: The way he describes these stages to me sounds, you know, at various points, mocking is not the right word, but the tone is definitely one of where you don't have to get to the end of it to know that he's not endorsing the position that he's taken when he's talking about the rhythmic attitude and the magical Negro culture. And then at one point, he's basically on page 99. I rummaged frenetically through all the antiquity of the black man. What I found there took away my breath. The white man was wrong. I was not primitive, not even a half man. I belonged to a race that had already been working in gold and silver 2,000 years ago. And then they turn out to be sort of a perfect society and superior to the white man. He quotes from this other author. What he finds.

11:36 Mark: Was it Wakanda?

11:37 Wes: Yeah, right. I put the white man back. This is now on page 100. I put the white man back in his place, growing bolder. I jostled him and told him point blank, get used to me. I am not getting used to anyone. I shouted my laughter to the stars. The white man I could see was resentful. His reaction time lagged interminably. I had won. I was jubilant. When you juxtapose this to the chapter 8, by way of conclusion, if you had any doubts about any of this, these are the sorts of moves that he will explicitly reject. So the idea, for instance, of finding out that not only is one not inferior, one is superior, none of these solutions work.

And the way the segue here is, it brings him back to. He gets to this idea that basically, whether you think of the black man as superior or having this special rhythmic poetic ability, it becomes something for the white man, right? It becomes a diversion. It becomes, hey, we're these Stodgy people dominated by industry and scientism and politeness. And we want to loosen up. And so we embrace blackness insofar as it represents that looseness. All those stereotypes about black people are good at this, black people are good at that. But ultimately that doesn't lend one any dignity.

And it still happens in relation, right, to this project of reforming the other's view of you, which is the project you have to give up.

13:08 Mark: But he does say so on that page that you've quoted from 178 about the things you know. There is no Negro mission, there's no white burden. However, he says, I do not have the duty to be this or that. If the white man challenges my humanity, I will impose my whole weight as a man on his life and show that I am not the sho' good eatin'. That he persists in imagining as a

13:29 Wes: man, though not as a black man.

13:32 Mark: Sure. So that makes it sound like he is a humanist.

13:35 Wes: I'm afraid that is my reading.

13:37 Mark: There is no white world. There is no white ethic, any more than there is a white intelligence. There are in every part of the world, men who search again. I think I see when you're in a conflict, you know, when you find yourself being oppressed, when you find yourself in this historical situation, to get out of that, to transcend it, to ultimately say there's no such thing as race, there's no such thing as any of this. There's just individuals and their freedom. There are still steps to get out of that. And you don't have to answer every ignorant person. But at least going through these steps where you're playing the game and you're scoring some points, like you don't just go from being meek and oppressed to being existential ubermensch. You gotta go through this, standing up for yourself in ways that are not ultimately well founded in order to get beyond them.

14:28 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a plausible interpretation. I just don't see him saying that directly.

14:33 Dylan: You're questioning, Wes, whether or not the particular steps of the dialectic are required, as opposed to it being a kind of phenomenological account of his own steps in dialectic.

14:44 Wes: It might be that they're required. I think that's completely psychologically plausible. But it might be that they're not, or it might be that people get there in different ways. You know, I'm just noting the fact that he doesn't make that claim directly.

14:55 Mark: Yeah, it's hard to tell with some of these things he throws out. And like, is he approve of this? Does he not approve of it? He's throwing out a lot of things to feed your thought. I think in some ways you could see this not necessarily as sketching out a coherent, you know, here's my list of theses and now I'm going to argue for them, right? This is definitely not structured that way. It could be more food for thought.

15:21 Seth: I'm not sure I agree with that. To me, there's a very clear line of thought that runs something like this. Colonization. It's the imposition of a set of identifications of superiority and inferiority. It's an association with the epidermal. White is good, black is bad. If you're black, you're part of. There's this broad brush sense in which if you're black, you must have the characteristics of being black, and if you're white, you must have the characteristics of being white. And Fanon is first of all calling attention to that, that by being automatically objectified by being black or subjectified by being white restricts your ability to self actualize in the Hegelian sense of becoming a self consciousness.

But he's also then criticizing. There's a lot of discussion in here about the difference between Martinique and Senegal and a Senegalese versus the Martinique in page 143. Negro experience is not a whole, for there's not merely one Negro, there are Negroes. And then he references another poem. This chapter five is thick with poetry. The point is, and this is going to be the transition for him from class or race to individuality is that ultimately there's an existential fact about all human beings have a certain irreducible individuality. And by classifying them as black, white, poor, rich, whatever, that already is a form of oppression.

It's one thing to be oppressed as a white person identified as white in a society where being white is the dominant position. And there's another thing about being identified as black in a society where the black person has been colonized. And he mentions also he talks about, about how colonization creates strife between, for example, people who are dark, black and mulatto or whatever the appropriate term is that, you know, it's the whole divide and conquer kind of concept.

17:34 Wes: Well, also with the Senegalese, right, he's talking about Senegalese troops that were employed by the French, I think, right, in the conquest of Madagascar. That's specifically the kind of, you know, when he's talking about those dreams, we're talking about the brutalization by Senegalese troops of a local population. The Tensions and the views of them created by that circumstance. But in the service, the French colonialism,

17:59 Seth: that's the whole turning of the colonized upon the other, Using colonized peoples to oppress other colonized peoples. He's trying to point out that that structure exists in such a way that how could you, as a Senegalese soldier, come to some kind of self realization in that construct? The French colonial machinations are creating these artificial tensions, these artificial divisions, and there's no way for somebody who's caught up in that to self actualize in the same way that a white Frenchman would be able to do back in France. The point I'm trying to get is he makes the transition in chapter five from talking about this general construct to, yes, but ultimately the reality that colonization effaces is the reality that there are only individuals.

This is where he brings it back to the existentialist point. But as individuals, the colonized are not permitted the freedom. Like you have to be part of the dominant culture to have the existentialist experience of realizing your own freedom and self actualizing. So he's essentially, in a weird way, he's criticizing existentialism. And at the same time, in chapter eight, it seems that he kind of falls back on that. It's a weird and interesting tension, I think.

19:21 Wes: Yeah, so our interpretations differ, but I just think the. In the beginning, just to get at one of these points, he seems to suggest that the colonialist is also undermined by this psychologically, that the activity of

19:35 Dylan: colonizing is bad for the colonized and the colonizer.

19:39 Wes: Yeah, so he says, for instance, in the introduction, this is page three. The black man wants to be white. The white man slaves to reach a human level, which I took to be. Mark, I know you took this differently. Sort of like reach a human level as in reach the existentialist ubermensch level? Something like that. But I just took it as to sort of deal with the compromise of being in the dominant position. And the way that also psychologically undermines the white man is sealed in his whiteness, the black man in his blackness. We shall seek to ascertain the directions of this dual narcissist narcissism and the motivations that inspire it. These make it sound as if both participants in this relation are undermined by the relation. It forms a part of their facticity and their contingency that are obstacles to genuine autonomy.

20:28 Mark: Yeah, I think clearly he thinks that the colonizers are screwed up too. It's just that they're not the focus of this book. So he refers to them kind of in passing several times and points you at Sartre's anti Semite and Jew that is more evenly distributed between actually talking about the anti Semite, the problem of the colonizer and then the problem of the oppressed person that both on Sartre's view have bad faith issues. So I think Fanon agrees with that but is just trying to apply this. You know, he makes specific comparisons to that book and how well at least if you're Jewish you can pretend to not be Jewish. It's not just written there on your skin. There's a difference there.

21:10 Wes: If you're Jewish you can pretend to be white. Is that what you meant?

21:13 Mark: Yes. Let me point in another quote here that maybe will help here. Just so one of the things that disturbed me that I was wondering like what does he really think of? This is. So at one point he quotes Jaspers. So page 66 on metaphysical guilt. This is the so called dependency complex

21:31 Wes: chapter, chapter four, page 66.

21:35 Mark: A little earlier, page 63 he says once and for all I will state this principle. A given society is racist or it is not. He in this context is saying, you know, it's kind of beside the point when you say well you think France is bad, go to the American South. The American south is really bad. He wants to say that there's too much emphasis on that kind of talk. I don't think he would actually deny that it can be more unpleasant in certain places to be the oppressed minority than in others. But you shouldn't like take comfort in the fact that your society is not as bad off in this respect as others. Like they share the same moral bankruptcy. They share the same structural problem which

22:15 Wes: is to say they are applied against the same object men. They are a deprivation of the quote unquote of the possibility of being a man. So yeah, colonial racism, to quote him again, is no different from any other racism.

22:30 Mark: Yeah, so it's the end of that paragraph. I cannot dissociate myself from the future that is proposed for my brother. Every one of my acts commits me as a man. Every one of my silences, every one of my cowardices reveals me as a man. And then he has a footnote, a very long footnote about Jasper's concept of metaphysical guilt which I'll read a little of. There exists among men because they are men of solidarity through which each shares responsibility for every injustice and, and every wrong committed in the world and especially for crimes that are committed in his presence or which he cannot be ignorant if I do not do whatever I can to prevent them.

I am an accomplice in them. If I have not risked my life in order to prevent the murder of other men, if I have stood silent, I feel guilty in a sense that cannot in any adequate fashion be understood juridically or politically or morally. That I am still alive after such things have been done weighs on me as a guilt, and that cannot be expiated. I have trouble with that kind of sentiment.

23:27 Wes: Yeah. I think the idea that people can be collectively guilty is at the root of a lot of mass violence. Right. And it sort of lends itself to the concept of, you know, the essences of others. The Jew is like this, and they do this and that, and we can hold Jews and in general responsible for any behavior of any particular person who happens to be Jewish. That sort of thinking, I think this

23:51 Mark: is just one of the puzzles of existentialism more generally, is how can you believe that there are no predetermined standards to which we must measure up, but yet be so damn judgmental of everybody?

24:02 Dylan: Part of existentialism is being responsible for yourself. And how do you talk about being responsible without having some kind of judgment of that activity?

24:12 Mark: There's a solidarity which each shares responsibility for every injustice and every wrong committed in the world. So that's different than what Wes was just saying. You know, all whites are responsible.

24:23 Wes: There are other formulations later on. So every European has equally to answer for the crimes perpetrated by Nazi savagery. That's in the footnote. And then later on, on the next page, he will quote Francis Jeanson paraphrasing, every citizen of a nation is responsible for the actions committed in the name of that nation. And then going on into that quote, others dirty themselves in your place. You hire thugs. And this whole idea of complicity. And I think it sort of lends itself to a concept of collective guilt I see as dangerous.

24:56 Dylan: It's not clear in that he's assenting to that collective guilt. At the end of that paragraph, he says, every act is an answer or question. Both, perhaps by expressing a certain way of my being to excel itself, I am stating the value of my act for others. Conversely, the passivity observed during some of history's troubled times can be read as default on this obligation. Jaspers says that every European must be capable of answering for the crimes committed by Nazi barbarity when confronted by an Asian or Hindu. Jeanson has described the guilt of those who remained neutral during the occupation in a confused way. They felt responsible for all those dead in all the Buchenwalds. I see him pointing to it more than anything else.

25:42 Wes: I just think of the history of World War II and the aftermath, right? Once the Nazis were defeated, of course, the atrocities that occurred in the name of punishing collaborators or punishing people who were not even collaborators, but just seen as too passive. So that's all. I don't want to belabor that point.

25:59 Mark: Well, this is why I was saying he's putting things out as food for thought or something like. In other words, he's using the same kind of style that Nietzsche does. He's saying in no uncertain terms, you know, no society is more racist than any other. But like, obviously they are. And he's gonna acknowledge that in other places. So it sort of depends on what part of the argument that he's in. So here, yes, everybody is responsible for the wrong that he or she allows to happen. But then later on page 178, there is no Negro mission. There is no white burden.

So how can these two things be compatible? Well, you can interpret it as a dialectical that, you know, you kind of have to go through the steps of undoing the injustices before you reach the point of complete existential freedom. Or it could just be you need a balance between these two seemingly competing, seemingly varying sentiments. But they're both true in some way. I have a harder time making sense of that, but it's par for the course, for the kind of thing Nietzsche does all the time.

26:58 Wes: One of the larger points he's building to in this chapter is just the idea that when he's saying all the racisms are the same, and he's responding to people who want to say France is unquestionably one of the least racialist minded countries in the world, he wants to talk about racist structure. So he said, I said just above that South Africa has a racist structure. Talking about things in terms of the particular motivations of particular parts of a given population. The best people in France aren't racist. It's not the powers that be, it's the pros or something like that.

All that is irrelevant to the fact that South Africa has a racist structure. Europe has a racist structure. He wants to lift us up from personal psychological explanations to the overall social fact, as Durkheim would put it. So this is sort of one of the non existentialist strands that looks more like an attempt at being a sociologist. And then finally he gives an explanation, right? He gives an explanation of the feeling of inferiority. This is what I see as the other major point of the chapter on the top of page 69, which is that the feeling of inferiority of the colonized is the correlative to the Europeans feeling of superiority.

Let us have the courage to say it outright. It is the racist who creates his inferior. And he's responding here to Mannoni's idea that there is this ingrained inherent sense of inferiority that's exploited by the colonialists. It's not that any population can be colonized, that there are certain peoples with myths of the arrival of strangers who they will readily deify and all that. So that there's this complex that's ingrained. The whole thesis of this chapter is no, there's not a priori dependency complex. It's created by the colonizer. And I thought here of Nietzsche's line I know I've repeated many times, but from the genealogy of morals, political superiority resolves itself into psychological superiority.

In other words, victims blame themselves. To be at the losing end of power relations automatically creates this sense of inferiority. And the people who are on the winning side, they have those valuations of good and bad which are based entirely on power and excellence. But just basically it's the whole ethos of dominance of the blond beast, as Nietzsche puts it. But the psychology of this is just. You don't have to have a pre existing inferiority complex. You just have to lose this particular sort of battle. And then that becomes something that can produce bad conscience.

In other words, you can turn this very contingent thing which has nothing to do with you, your value as a person or you morally. But you moralize it. You say I am inferior because these other people were more powerful than me.

29:45 Mark: Yeah, you bring up Nietzsche in that context makes me again think that. So the ultimate solution is to stop playing these comparative games of power. But you know, a necessary step in that would be to do a revaluation of values is to turn it around on the colonizer. And you know, as a preliminary step, say no, actually what you call good, I'm now calling evil. And what I call evil. You know, that sort of moralizing is something to be overcome, but you can't overcome it perhaps from the current position of blaming yourself. Like you have to get over that first before you can get rid of the idea of blame altogether.

30:21 Wes: We know Nietzsche's diagnosis of that. Right. The idea of calling the oppressor evil, he thinks just actually is an internalization of master slave harshness and essentially involves ressentiment and all these sorts of things which he thinks become a sickness for society.

30:40 Dylan: The End of chapter five. There's a dialectic that goes back and forth throughout the chapter, and the end is a kind of sorrowful resignation as they point it outwards. Just the last couple paragraphs. The black man is a toy in the hands of the white man. So in order to break the vicious circle, he explodes. I can't go to the movies without encountering myself. I wait for myself. Just before the film starts, I wait for myself. Those in front of me look at me, spy on me, wait for me. A black bellhop is going to appear. My aching heart makes my head spin.

The crippled soldier from the Pacific War tells my brother, get used to your color the way I got used to my stump. We are both casualties. Yet with all my being, I refuse to accept this amputation. I feel my soul as vast as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers. My chest has the power to expand to infinity. I was made to give, and they prescribed for me the humility of a cripple. When I opened my eyes yesterday, I saw the sky. In total revulsion. I tried to get up, but the eviscerated silence surged towards me with paralyzed wings, not responsible for my acts at the crossroads between nothingness and infinity, I began to weep.

31:59 Lawrence: Even I now, years after being first

32:02 Dylan: exposed to it and even studying and

32:04 Lawrence: looking at it with Georgianci, I don't fully understand it. I mean, I think that what's going on here is he's expressing the despair that he feels being a black person in this world, but it's haunting them nevertheless. What's going on there is that it's absolutely haunting that he feels this depth of despair and sadness being in the body that he's in and being in the condition that he's in.

32:29 Mark: He sounds very romantic here, but elsewhere, when he's talking about sartre, so page 103 or so, nothing is more unwelcome than the commonplace you'll change, my boy. It was like that too, when I was young. You'll see, it will all pass. It seems like this romanticism that he's engaging with at the end of the chapter is not the end point is an example of this soulful reaction, humanistic reaction to being against the oppression. Whereas ultimately, where this is heading is this will pass. He needed to see Sartre pointed out to him. It's unclear in this, you know, when he's talking about Sartre here, he's talking about specifically Black Orpheus is the name of the Sartre's essay.

So it's the One shortly after Anti-Semite and Jew, he says, sartre makes certain mistakes. Sartre is not black. It's an intellectualization of the experience of being black. Sartre's mistake was not only to seek the source of. Of the source, but in a certain sense, to block that source. So in other words, he's talking about. I looked at that essay a little bit, but he's talking about why Negro poetry is so great. Exactly the kind of thing that Fanon was just displaying here, the depth of my suffering. That there's something different, Sartre points out, between that and like, there's nothing in the proletariat itself.

Workers of the world, unite. That sounds very kind of poetic. It's at least a chantable slogan. But there's nothing about, oh, I'm being used by the bourgeois for my labor, and I'm being disassociated from the value of my. Like, that just doesn't ring poetic in the same way that this kind of stuff does. But Sartre ultimately says it's a step in the dialectic, that we have the oppressive system. You have the reaction to the oppression. But then those will eventually both be gotten over into a new attitude that's beyond that, which is what I see that this existentialist goal that we've been pointing at, where you kind of get over the worrying about some of these competing for status and blah, blah, blah.

But whether you have to go through the stage of being hyper romantic, certainly he is going through that stage and seems to return to it at will. Even from his endpoint, he still sort of uses that mojo, even if he's, strictly speaking, above it all. So, in other words, the goal is to be completely colorblind. But, like, given the facticity of the situation and the continuance of the suffering and the continuance of the racist structure of society, you can't just say, I'm beyond race. That would be itself false consciousness.

35:08 Lawrence: It's the tension between wanting to live in a world where color doesn't matter, but the reality of living in a world where color does matter. And so what you have is just oscillating between those two positions.

35:23 Mark: That is what I was trying to ask, you know, in asking, is he a humanist? Because if he's a humanist, what he's really saying is, everybody's the same. We're only important as individuals. Our categorization doesn't matter. And that's like what existentialism is telling us, that you are only to be judged as an individual. How you are to be judged. I mean, we create our own meaning. So maybe creating a meaning where you judge people as a group per the Jaspers quote, might be an option. I'm not entirely clear. But if he's not a humanist, if humanism is in fact racism, then it could be that again when you pretend that there is no race, you are actually just reinforcing the dominant.

You're saying if you would just give up your insisted upon difference and assimilate completely, then there wouldn't be a problem. And that's essentially what conservatives who think we're in a post racial world want to do. They're saying, you know, we no longer have official racism, so get over it.

36:17 Lawrence: I'm still wrestling with your question of is he humanist? Because I don't know. I mean this is a question that many people wrestle with. Many people have different interpretations of him. And to be honest, we have to take into account other things that he's written to kind of answer this question. I want to say yes, he is, but a very cautious one. But he's a humanist that's aware of the way that that can be kind of twisted into a form of white supremacy. Does that make sense?

36:45 Seth: A humanist who recognizes that humanism can go wrong? Just help me understand that a little bit.

36:51 Dylan: I think it's what Mark was relating and how you would understand humanism is racism is understanding that it can be used as a way to marginalize on its own terms. It's like saying we're all just people, we're in a post racial society, so get over it. And using it as a bludgeon, as a way to ignore the fact of differences in the world.

37:19 Seth: Isn't that the argument for not being a humanist? That's the argument I use for not being a humanist. Why would you want to adhere to that? How can he be a humanist and also recognize the pitfalls of humanism? It's inherent in humanism that there will be dominance and totalitarianism and fascism, the tyranny of reason.

37:39 Wes: Why is that inherent in humanism?

37:41 Seth: It's inherent in humanism because humanism is about the universalism that is supposed to come about the application of reason to the human experience. Once we use our natural faculty of reason to overcome all of the contingencies of existence and recognize that we all share this faculty which allows us to access the non contingent truths of existence, we can come together as this combined universal experience. And humanism is about the idea that people from any walk of life, any geographical, historical, sociopolitical situation can unify by the very fact of their humanism, which is really to say their ability to reason.

Any movement that seeks to unify people through this kind of universalism, ultimately, to me anyway, is also, I don't want to say runs the risk because that suggests that you can do this without running that risk or avoiding that risk. But essentially, universalism is the effacing of difference. It is totalitarianism.

38:54 Wes: I don't agree, but this is all too broad. I can't.

38:57 Seth: Okay.

38:58 Wes: I don't know how to address this. And we'd have to have a discussion about what humanism actually means and more specifics.

39:04 Mark: It's just based on what we said. I'd try to cut through that just by saying if he's a humanist, he's a humanist in the sense that in quotes. Here's the name of Sartre's essay. Existentialism is a humanism. In other words, if you're an essentialist humanist and you say we're all the same and that actually means something substantial, then maybe you're in trouble and maybe you're going to run afoul of the things that Seth is pointing out. But if. If we're all the same in that we're all spinning in a void, having to create values and that kind of stuff, like. Well, there's much less inherent risk of totalitarianism in that.

39:38 Wes: See, we're all the same is just a very loaded phrase. You could say Aristotle said we're all the same, but it doesn't mean. The most pejorative caricature of that would mean. It would mean, though, that there is some sort of common essential humanity. There are certain common features that define our humanness, including rationality and including a certain kind of psychological account that Aristotle gives. But reject that or accept it, or partially reject it or accept it. I don't see it as automatically totalitarian or something that can be rejected outright.

40:13 Dylan: I took the take on humanism, or when Fanon says that he's a humanist, I take it in terms of this notion of recognition of other human beings being like yourself and not being categorically different. That account of it as being his point of view makes a lot of sense to me, given how strong the theme of the analysis of the colonized and the psychoanalysis, of the trauma of being objectified is. All of that comes down to not being recognized by other people as a person.

40:53 Wes: Yeah, and the existentialists especially. Right. The idea is that you don't find yourself by finding an identity. Hey, if I just establish an identity I've found myself, and everything's going to be all right. It rejects that whole method, and that's what I think Fanon does in this.

41:08 Mark: So it's much more challenging of sort of a liberal status quo than one might expect out of this text that is used for that purpose. You know, that seems ironic that reading this is good food for thought in establishing your identity. But he's ultimately, according to that interpretation, against the notion of identity. You know, as a cautious humanism. I like the way that you put that law, you know, early on. And then later at the end of the book, he says a couple times that he thinks experiences are fundamentally communicable, which is another thing that I think is often denied in current discourse now.

Like, we have to have the voices of the oppressed. They have to have to have this representation because nobody else can express that. Nobody else can really even understand, ultimately, unless you're in that situation. And he seems to deny that in the abstract. But at the same time, at different parts of the book, he's like, yeah, Sartre is insufficiently imaginative about what it's like to be black. Or, you know, says this of various different authors. So, yes, these experiences are communicable. But you can't just say, I get it. It's quite difficult to communicate and to understand.

42:17 Dylan: Wouldn't you say that's part of the reason why he has so much quoting of literature and why he gets so poetic at that? Part of that is trying to communicate some of, in fact, the biographical nature of. I guess it's chapter five where he's doing this kind of phenomenological experience of his own history and recounting it. And yes, it's dialectical, but it's also illustrative and poetic and filling that void that he's accusing Sartre of having. Do you find that to be true law, that it's trying to fill in that part a little bit or communicate in that way? Communicate about the. That experience.

43:00 Lawrence: I'm still thinking it through because I haven't thought about that before. I mean, I think maybe, but I still hold on to the fact that he's a cautious humanist.

43:08 Dylan: I guess part of what we're struggling with, even when we ask the question, is he a humanist or not, is this question of what it means to be a partisan of identity, which seems to be in tension with this notion of identity, especially identity that is somehow radical, that is only experienced by an individual and isn't somehow shareable in some deeply important sense. I mean, there's going to be a range there. But even if you acknowledge that, yes, of course, every individual experiences themselves in a unique way, but there's something decisively communicable about it or not. And I think that's part of the tension that we're seeing there.

43:49 Mark: I think one of the issues is it's not just is it communicable, but is it communicable to everyone? So it could just be that you seek out solidarity, that one of the ways out of this marginalization is to decolonize your mind and get in touch with other people in the same situations who have similar decolonized their minds. And you too can understand each other as having fellow experience. But to explain that to an outsider, to explain that to a colonizer, to explain that to someone out of the country, is just not going to be possible. But I think a humanist is committed to the fact that, like, whatever barriers there are between individuals, like, yeah, maybe every individual has a certain impermeability, but if it's shareable among members of a group, it has to be shareable outside the group too, as long as the people are willing to give it proper thought.

And, you know, have heard the whole account. And maybe you do need literary devices like this to really convey the experience.

44:46 Lawrence: And also, and just very quickly, maybe this is him developing, because maybe we are approaching him as though he's fully formed and fully thought it through. And maybe this is a guy who's. Who's in the process of thinking through this stuff, developing an idea that comes into fruition later on. Or maybe he never kind of completes it, but he's very young.

45:06 Seth: Your comment law reminded me earlier in the conversation when we were talking about lived experience. My reading of the use of the term lived experience is essentially it's code for irreducible, unshareable. My lived experience as X means that you cannot understand. You cannot understand my lived experience. It's when you look at a lot of the rhetoric around current social justice movements and all that is that lived experience basically means. My lived experience as a black woman means that you, as a white man, cannot understand it.

45:46 Dylan: I didn't know there was that code for that.

45:48 Seth: Maybe that's me imposing, projecting on it.

45:50 Wes: This is the way Fukuyama interpreted it. He talked a bit about this.

45:54 Seth: That's the way Fukuyama mentioned it, and that's the way that I read it when I see it in other writings. But the point is, if you're talking about Fanon being committed to a humanist principle, what he's Saying is lived experience is not irreducible. That the human experience, in whatever form it takes, needs to be communicable as an individual's experience and needs to be something that can be, if not understood. I don't know what the right term is. It at least has to be communicable in a way that allows us to connect with each other as individuals and share our experience outside of some kind of social context that defines what that experience is.

We have to be able to communicate as human beings. If humanism has any validity, it has to mean that we can communicate individual to individual, as human beings in a way that somehow doesn't necessarily transcend or overcome our social context, but acknowledges it and yet allows us to bracket it to some extent and connect as human beings.

46:58 Mark: Give us a closing law.

47:00 Lawrence: The more that I read this, the more that it's becoming clear to me that this is the beginning of the idea for him. And maybe, and it's been so many years since I've read his other stuff, but maybe he's kind of matured it later on. But the Fact of Blackness. That essay is a strong essay, and it's in a strong point of turning from one way of doing things to another way of doing things. But the book as a whole just kind of feels incomplete. I think it's worth wrestling with, with the eye for how this is the beginning of the idea, not the full mature manifestation of it.

47:35 Mark: Yeah. Anybody else? Closing thoughts?

47:38 Seth: I would like to quote from chapter eight. I find myself suddenly in the world, and I recognize that I have one right alone, that of demanding human behavior from the other one duty alone, that of not renouncing my freedom through my choices. I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek, therefore, the meaning of my destiny. I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. I, the man of color, want only this, that the tool never possessed the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever, that is, of one by another. That it may be possible for me to discover and to love man wherever he may be. The Negro is not any more than the white man.

48:27 Wes: That's great, but also like the last sentence you read was the first sentence I was going to read. So I will continue. The Negro is not any more than the white men. Both must turn their backs on the inhuman voices which were those of their respective ancestors in order that authentic communication be possible before it can adopt a positive voice. Freedom requires an effort at disalienation. At the beginning of his Life. A man is always clotted. He is drowned in contingency. The tragedy of man is that he was once a child.

49:01 Dylan: And I was going to read the very end.

49:07 Mark: Keep it going, Dylan.

49:08 Dylan: It is through self consciousness and renunciation, through a permanent tension of his freedom, that man can create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world. Superiority, inferiority. Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other? Was my freedom not given me to build the world for you, man? At the end of this book, we would like the reader to feel with us the open dimension of every consciousness. My final prayer. O my body, always make me a man who questions.

49:43 Lawrence: A very existential ending.

49:45 Seth: Beautiful. Yes.

49:46 Mark: Yeah, Ann. Sounds super humanist there.

49:49 Lawrence: Oh, it does.

49:51 Mark: In that communication is the goal. Yeah.

49:53 Dylan: Law. The next time you do chapter five, I think you're gonna make it even more challenging by doing chapter eight and chapter five at the same time.

50:02 Lawrence: Really? I may never teach this shit again.

50:08 Mark: Then. We've done our jobs. That was the only purpose.

50:11 Seth: We've disabused yet another person of philosophy.

50:14 Wes: Ruin Fanon for you.

50:17 Mark: Well, thank you so much for joining us, Law. This was a long time coming and I'm glad we finally got to it. When I was in a more charitable mood than I was so many years ago when I just saw this is kind of over dramatic and young, and as you say, he was a young guy. We don't want to interpret the is. He's a sage and if something seems contradictory, it must not really be like, no, maybe it was just kind of wandering and thinking things.

50:44 Wes: Yeah.

50:44 Seth: But the passion and the brilliance is there.

50:48 Wes: But also he's a very acute, subtle psychological and social observer or observer of the psychological and social scene. So just when he's quoting poetry and other sources and dreams and also talking of personal accounts sort of fantasizing out loud, it's really great stuff. That philosophy needs more of sort of what Mark called phenomenology. And it's in the tradition of Sartre, where you get down into very concrete details and think about them and put them on the page. And it also, you know, happens to be much more enjoyable to read as well.

51:27 Mark: So next time we're actually going to read the Sartre text that Fanon most often quotes here. Anti Semite and Jew from 1946 and Black Orpheus from 1948. Today's closing song, appropriately enough, has African lyrics. It's called Malaika, which is Swahili for angel by jazz singer Vimala Rowe. This is from an album she did with John Etheridge, the British guitarist whom I interviewed for Nakedly Examined Music, episode 85. About this project and other things he's done. Listen to that@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com I want to remind you there are still tickets to PEL Live, though they are going fast.

If you want to see us in New York City discussing Brave New world on Saturday, April 6th shows at 4pm and also that there is free shipping on the partially examined life 2019 calendar, please help us get rid of those. You can find both of those via the banner ads@pre partiallyexaminedlife.com all right, good night folks.

52:16 Wes: Good night. Good night.

52:18 Lawrence: Peace.

52:24 Wes: Sam

52:52 Seth: malaika.

53:00 Mark: Malai.

53:41 Lawrence: Namalis.

54:07 Seth: Ra.

54:33 Lawrence: Jakob me.

57:06 Seth: It.

58:49 Mark: Sa.

59:14 Dylan: Sam.