To Lose Oneself in the Absolute

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ISSN: 1540-5699. © Copyright by Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press). All Rights Reserved.

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE

Journal of the Sociology of Self-

A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)

While we have no reason to think thatMartinican-born revolutionary FrantzFanon based his theory of violence in any di-rect way on the work of French syndicalistGeorges Sorel, it is highly unlikely thatFanon was totally unfamiliar with this phi-losopher whose name had come to be so co-terminous with violence. However, most ofthose who discuss the relation betweenthese thinkers—whether for the sake ofdrawing them together or pushing themapart, whether to endorse or dismiss them—consistently fall into erroneous reductivistand formalistic interpretations of what bothSorel and Fanon mean by “violence.” When

interpreted correctly, once we remove thecustomary prejudices attached to the names“Sorel” and “Fanon”—by clarifying that forboth, violence represents the content of amythical form of revolutionary identity—we can find in these two thinkers strikinglysimilar theories of revolutionary violenceand subjectivity.

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The textual relationship between Soreland Fanon is peculiar, to say the least, notleast because it is mediated by Jean-PaulSartre’s dismissal, in his preface to Fanon’s

George Ciccariello-Maher is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at the University of California, Berkeley.His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Monthly Review, Radical Philosophy Review, Journal of Black Stud-ies, Qui Parle, Listening: Journal of Religion and Culture, and The Commoner. He currently lives in Caracas,Venezuela, from where he contributes regularly to Counterpunch.

To Lose Oneself in the Absolute

Revolutionary Subjectivity in Sorel and Fanon

George Ciccariello-Maher

University of California at Berkeley––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

[email protected]

Abstract: In this article, I analyze the theories of revolutionary subjectivity that emerge in Sorel’sseminal Reflections on Violence and in the discussion of Négritude in Fanon’s Black Skin, WhiteMasks and national consciousness in Wretched of the Earth. Both thinkers formulate revolutionaryviolence in terms of the absoluteness of identity, but an absoluteness which is necessarily transi-tional: for Sorel, absolute working-class identity is a mechanism which operates on a world-his-torical scale and transforms everything that it touches, whereas for Fanon—in his critique ofSartre—the limitations of Négritude cannot be skillfully inscribed within a broader and deter-minist dialectic. Finally, I discuss the degree to which Fanon’s formulation exceeds that of Sorel,resolving a tension which becomes exceptionally acute in the work of the latter: the tensionbetween a non-objective theory of class and an insistent class-centrism. As a result, Fanon’s inter-vention helps us to realize what is most useful in Sorel’s framework.

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Wretched of the Earth

, of “Sorel’s fascist utter-ances” (Sartre 1963: 14). Here, Sartre dis-avows Sorel on behalf of Fanon, but it isworth asking why Fanon had not done sohimself, and what is tacitly affirmed by Sar-tre’s disavowal. As to the first, it is clear thatthe imperative to distance oneself from theSorelian legacy certainly weighed moreheavily in France than in the revolutionaryperiphery. But despite the fact that Sartre isthe first to tell us that Fanon’s work does notspeak to Europeans—“they will go on talk-ing among themselves, without even lower-ing their voices”—Sartre neverthelesschooses to contradict this position by sub-mitting Fanon’s work to the intellectual pi-eties of the French milieu (1963: 13).

More interesting still is what it is pre-cisely that Sartre says in the passage in ques-tion: “if you set aside Sorel’s fascistutterances, you will find that Fanon is thefirst since Engels to bring the processes ofhistory into the clear light of day” (1963: 14).Sartre’s dismissal of Sorel takes the paradox-ical form of an affirmation, since he tacitlyadmits that Sorel falls within that exception-ally perceptive group of thinkers who recog-nized the role of violence in history.

1

ThatEngels informed Fanon’s understanding ofviolence is clear, claims to the contrary not-withstanding: Reda Malek is known to havegiven him a copy of Engels’

The Role of Forcein History

, and Fanon cites the

Anti-Dühring

on several occasions (Gendzier 1973: 203).

2

But what of Sorel? Sartre’s dismissal at-tempts to erase this crucial question before itis even asked.

This gesture has been repeated, albeitwith notably less venom, by a number ofsubsequent commentators, mostly partisansof Fanon. But in so doing, a number of errorshave been committed. These can be broadlygrouped under two headings: reductive andformalistic interpretations of the work ofboth Sorel and Fanon (often leading to thesame outcome regardless of whose work isbeing distorted), and relatedly, the exagger-ated fidelity to any number of categories(class, the proletariat, syndicalism) consti-tuting the perceived contexts of the thinkers.As we will see in what follows, it is only bycombating the former that the latter is re-solved.

In what follows, I will delineate the of-ten overlooked parameters for properlygrasping violence in Sorel’s formulation, be-fore turning to Fanon in an effort to deter-mine whether Sartre’s fascinating disavowalindeed reveals more than it conceals. Inboth, we will see that the key to a non-reduc-tive understanding of their theories of vio-lence lies in a recognition of the continuity ofthe theme throughout their work. Onceproperly understood, their respective theo-ries of violence provide the key to graspinga more fundamental link between the twothinkers: the structure of their respectivetheories of revolutionary subjectivity, of theformation of radical consciousness.

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The fundamental interpretive error ofthose who understand Sorel’s violencewholly according to its formal characteris-tics—i.e., what we commonly understandby the word “violence”—is to have ne-glected Sorel’s own self-proclaimed pur-pose. In closing his seminal if infamous

Reflections on Violence

, Sorel expresses hissatisfaction at having “accomplished thetask which I imposed upon myself; I have, infact, established that proletarian violencehas an entirely different significance fromthat attributed to it by superficial scholars”

1

This is perhaps not paradoxical at all, giv-en some discussions on the structure of dis-avowal as tacit recognition; see Sybille Fischer,

Modernity Disavowed

.

2

Despite recognizing that Fanon read andcited Engels, Gendzier’s understanding of “in-fluence” seems to be limited to positive influ-ence. Indeed, Fanon cites Engels mostly to refutehis simplistic claims about the technological de-terminants of violence and to doubt his politics,but this does not undermine Engels’ influencemore broadly, or the possibility that Fanon wasbuilding on Engels’ prior efforts. [Did Sartre citeEngels in the

CDR

?]

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(1961: 248-249). Such “superficiality” unfor-tunately extends to most discussions ofSorel in the present.

What does it mean to assert that suchviolence is not to be confused with what isgenerally understood by the word? It isabove all to assert what is for Sorel an essen-tial distinction: that between bourgeois“force” and proletarian “violence.” Sorel’slong and markedly varied career is notablefor its continuity in a small number ofthemes, one of which is his hostility to whathe deems “Jacobinism,” a phenomenonwhich clearly derives its name from theFrench Revolution but whose existenceSorel—as early as his 1889

Trial of Socrates

—projects backward into even ancient times(1987: 62; 67). This Jacobin tendency, definedby its “superstitious cult of the state,” is thebasis of bourgeois force (1961: 109).

Proletarian violence, on the other hand,is an entirely different beast: it consists of“acts of revolt,” since “the object of force isto impose a certain social order in which theminority governs, while violence tends tothe destruction of that order” (Sorel 1961:171). Violence, for Sorel, is necessarily anti-statist, and this is because it is inherently op-posed to the repressive machinery of minor-ity governance. This, again, was visible ineven Sorel’s early work, as in opposition toAthenian “Jacobins,” Sorel demonstrates apalpable scorn for the new class divisionsthat Socratic philosophy facilitated, and theminority rule of the “philosopher-king”(1987: 65-67). For Sorel, violence is expresslymarked by its

content

, by its revolutionaryanti-state and anti-bourgeois orientation.This is by definition a violence of the op-pressed.

Such violence is, moreover, dismissedas “irrational” by most, and it is through thisclaim that we can see that these formalisticinterpretations really constitute

inversions

ofSorel’s thought. This is because it is inSorel’s notion of “myth”—rather than “vio-lence”—that we find the formal element inSorel’s analysis. This mythical mechanism

had been recognized early on by Sorel, longbefore his contact with French vitalist HenriBergson. As early as his

Trial of Socrates

(1889), Sorel was concerned with Socrates’efforts to formulate a science of war: to do sois to contradict the very spirit of warfare it-self, and thereby to short-circuit the sourceof Athenian virtue. Rather, the power ofmyth bears a striking resemblance to war-fare: it is by shunning all pragmatic calcula-tion and identifying absolutely with thestruggle at hand that a truly powerful revo-lutionary subjectivity is crafted. Hence Ho-meric epics are to be celebrated over a drySocratic rationalism (1987: 63; 69-70).

For Sorel, the myth is but one form—and a particularly potent one—that prole-tarian violence can take. There can be mythswithout violence (as was the case with theFrench Revolution), and there can be vio-lence without myth, in which case “one maygo on talking of revolts indefinitely, withoutever provoking any revolutionary move-ment.”

3

Revolution requires the unity of theform and the content: “

violence enlightened bythe idea of the general strike

” (249). When di-vorced from its violent, liberatory content,the myth can be turned to positively reac-tionary ends: the French Revolution turnedsuch myths toward a Jacobin Terror. TheLaw of the 22

nd

Prairal was, for Sorel,merely an extension of a royal justice whose“

essential aim was not justice, but the welfare ofthe State

” (1961: 107-109). When united with proletarian violence,

on the other hand, the myth becomes essen-tially a mechanism for the consolidation ofrevolutionary identity. In Sorel’s context,this takes the form of a working-class sepa-ratism embodied in and established throughthe proletarian general strike—the unity ofliberatory violence with the absolutism ofmythical identity—in which a strike againstthe bosses is transformed into a “Napole-onic” battle and “the practice of strikes en-genders the notion of a catastrophic

3

For the former, see Sorel 1961: pp. 49, 249.For the latter see pp. 42, 49, 51, 101, 103, 125.

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revolution” (1961: 78). Its mythical characteris clear in the fact that syndicalists “restrictthe whole of Socialism to the generalstrike… they see in each strike a reduced fac-simile, an essay, a preparation for the greatfinal upheaval” (120). The general strike is

the

myth

in which Socialism iswholly comprised,

i.e.

a body ofimages capable of evoking instinc-tively all the sentiments which cor-respond to the different manifesta-tions of the war undertaken bySocialism against modern soci-ety…the general strike groupsthem all in a co-ordinated picture,and, by bringing them together,gives to each one of them its maxi-mum of intensity (127).

The general strike’s mythical form is afirmness of faith, an absoluteness of iden-tity: “we obtain it as a whole, perceived in-stantaneously” (128).

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As was the case with Sorel, most com-mentators reduce Fanon’s theory of violenceto literally violent manifestations, which isperhaps more understandable in the case ofFanon since he deploys no clear distinctionbetween violence and force, and since helinks his discussion of “violence” more di-rectly with physical attacks and terrorismthan had Sorel.

4

But this interpretation canonly result from placing an undue emphasison the chapter “Concerning Violence” in

Wretched of the Earth

. While this indeed con-stitutes the most sustained discussion of the

role of violence in the constitution of revolu-tionary subjectivity, a proper understandingof this dynamic must set out from a muchearlier work:

Black Skin, White Masks

. It ishere that the revolutionary Black subject dis-covers her own racialization, and it is herethat Fanon develops a theory of violence asontological self-assertion, one which willthen provide the content for a theory of rev-olutionary subjectivity that is in many waysas “mythical” in form as Sorel’s.

This self-confrontation emerges in thefifth chapter—“The Lived Experience of theBlack”—which according to Fanon “por-trays the Negro face to face with his race…driven to discover the meaning of blackidentity,” torn between either renouncing anidentity which has become incomprehensi-ble to her or “heroically” accepting the abso-luteness of that identity, hurling herself intothat “black abyss” (1967: 13-14). On a Paristrain, a racial epithet provokes a singular ifcommon crisis in Fanon’s being. Suddenly,he is “an object in the midst of other ob-jects,” thereby rendering intersubjectivity, orbeing either through or for others, impossi-ble (109). Fanon finds himself “sealed into acrushing objecthood,” and is suddenlystruck by the insufficiencies of the Hegeliandialectic, since “every ontology is made un-attainable in a colonized and civilized soci-ety” (109). This experience had revealed theweight of a “historico-racial schema” whicheffectively prevents black being from havingany “ontological resistance in the eyes of thewhite man” (110-111).

It is on the basis and as a result of thisexperience that Fanon later turns more di-rectly to the Hegelian master-slave dialectic.For Hegel, according to Fanon, full human-ity can only emerge through the attempt toimpose one’s existence (as “subjective cer-tainty”) onto another (thereby converting itinto “objective fact”) (217-218). In this“quest of absoluteness,” the resistance of theother yields

desire

, “the first milestone on theroad that leads to the dignity of the spirit”(217-218). Desire, moreover, requires that I

4

See especially Macey (2000: 465). Gendzier(1973: 200) seems to clearly grasp the distinctionin question and the importance of the Hegeliandialectic in Fanon’s later theory of decolonial vi-olence. Arendt (1969: 13, 71) argues that unlikeFanon, Sorel wasn’t speaking of “violence” aswe understand it, and that this was partly be-cause “Fanon… had an infinitely greater intima-cy with the practice of violence.”

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risk my life in conflict for the object of thatdesire, thereby pushing me beyond bare lifeand toward independent self-conscious-ness. Historically, however, the black slavehas been granted his freedom by the formerslaveholder, who “decided to promote themachine-animal-men to the supreme rankof men” (220). “The black man was actedupon,” since it was not by his actions or hisdesire that this freedom was attained, and asa result access to full humanity—which canonly appear by way of mutual and conflict-ual recognition—was blocked (220). His wayof life changed, not his life, because accordingto Hegel, recognition gained without con-flict can only be recognition as bare liferather than as a free and complete human.

“‘Say thank you to the nice man,’ themother tells her little boy…but we knowthat often the little boy is dying to screamsome other, more resounding expression”(220). Since there has been no reciprocity inthe process, since blacks are denied access toontology, they have not, according to Fanon,been able to follow the Hegelian path ofturning away from the master and findingliberation in the object. Instead, lack of reci-procity leads the slave to turn toward themaster and abandon the object (220-221).This, at least, is the case in France, but Fanonfinds some grounds for optimism: “in theUnited States the Negro battles and is bat-tled,” and in some parts of Africa, colonizedblacks have “sought to maintain their alter-ity. Alterity of rupture, of conflict, of battle”(221-222). We can already grasp the broadstrokes of Fanon’s theory of violence: self-consciousness as human requires symbolicviolence, it requires the assertion of reci-procity within a historical situation markedby the denial of such reciprocity, and if nec-essary, the provocation of conflict throughthe assertion of alterity.

It is this lack of ontological resistancewhich provokes an outburst by Fanon, onewhich bears within it the structure ofFanon’s theory of violence:

Where shall I find shelter from nowon? I felt an easily identifiableflood mounting out of the count-less facets of my being. I was aboutto be angry… “Kiss the handsomeNegro’s ass, madame!” Shameflooded her face. At last I was setfree from my rumination. At thesame time I accomplished twothings: I identified my enemies andI made a scene. A grand slam. Nowone would be able to laugh. Thefield of battle having been markedout, I entered the lists (114).

Why should the identification of the en-emy cause such a seismic ontological shift?Because to discover an enemy, and to dis-cover it clearly, was also to discover some-thing essential about oneself: “I had incisorsto test. I was sure they were strong” (115).

Since ontology was denied throughwhat has been deemed the “coloniality ofbeing” (Maldonado-Torres)—kept in thehands by a small minority of ontological “Ja-cobins”—since there was no basis for thesmooth operation of the Hegelian dialectic,such a basis had to be violently created. Thisontological self-assertion provides the con-tent for Fanon’s revolutionary dialectic, butwhat form does this assertion take? As wewill see, this violent self-assert assumes aform strikingly similar to Sorel’s myth, sinceself-assertion is an assertion of identity:

I was denied the slightest recogni-tion… I resolved, since it was im-possible for me to get away froman inborn complex, to assert myselfas a BLACK MAN. Since the otherhesitated to recognize me, there re-mained only one solution: to makemyself known (115).

For Fanon, to assert his black identitywas to clear the ground for his ontologicalequality, and thereby for the proper opera-tion of the master-slave dialectic, one in

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which the slave was capable of turningaway from the master. Violence here meansthe violent-self assertion of an identitywhich could be deemed “mythical” in its ab-soluteness.

Here he found his solution, howevertentative and ambiguous. But it was soon tobe “snatched” away by an alleged “friend ofthe colored peoples”—Jean-Paul Sartre—who would reduce negritude, as a subjectiveand existential phenomenon, to the status ofa “minor term of a dialectical progres-sion…insufficient by itself” (Orphée Noir, inFanon 1967: 133). Fanon’s reply is stinging:

For once that born Hegelian hadforgotten that consciousness has tolose itself in the night of the abso-lute, the only condition to attain toconsciousness of self. In oppositionto rationalism, he summoned upthe negative side, but he forgot thatthis negativity draws its worthfrom an almost substantive abso-luteness. A consciousness commit-ted to experience is ignorant, has tobe ignorant, of the essences and thedeterminations of its being (133-134).

Sartre’s dismissal of negritude hadforced Fanon to clarify the mythical struc-ture of violent ontological self-assertion. Byreminding Sartre of his Hegelianism, Fanonis reminding him that the master-slave dia-lectic cannot operate on a rationalized basis,here sounding a great deal like the Sorelwho attacks Socrates.5 Yes, negritude mayvery well be transitory, but to declare so be-forehand is to short-circuit this very process.Sartre intellectualizes black experience, andblocks the source of its radical transforma-tion, thereby undermining his own existen-tialist pretensions: by reinscribing black

rebellion within the dialectic, he robs it of allagency, he places the “torch with which toburn down the world” beyond the reach ofblack hands (134).

Negritude—and the “violent” assertionof black identity—could not exist as mere“historical becoming”:

Jean-Paul Sartre, in this work, hasdestroyed black zeal. In oppositionto historical becoming, there hadalways been the unforeseeable. Ineeded to lose myself completelyin negritude. One day, perhaps, inthe depths of that unhappy roman-ticism… In any case I needed not toknow. This struggle…had to takeon an aspect of completeness…The dialectic that brings necessityinto the foundation of my freedomdrives me out of myself. It shattersmy unreflected position. Still interms of consciousness, black con-sciousness is immanent in its owneyes. I am not a potentiality ofsomething, I am wholly what I am.I do not have to look for the univer-sal. No probability has any placeinside of me. My Negro conscious-ness does not hold itself out as alack. It is. (135)

“Black zeal” is a mythical identificationwhich by necessity refuses all explanation,all attempts at analytical dissection: it is atonce “unforeseeable” and “unreflected,”“immanent” and “complete.” After all, howprecisely does one adopt an identity whichis dismissed ahead of time as transitory?Sartre becomes a condescending adultspeaking to a child: “You’ll change, my boy;I was like that too when I was young…you’llsee, it will all pass” (135).6 Despite this at-tack on his being, or rather this attack on hisonly hope for being, Fanon nevertheless

5 Even when Sartre maintained his Hege-lianism—according to Fanon—he followed thelatter into error, presuming as well unlimited ac-cess to ontology (138).

6 This critique was eventually taken on ful-ly by Sartre, as evident in his self-critique in the“Preface” (Ciccariello-Maher 2006).

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pushes forward: “I defined myself as an ab-solute intensity of beginning… My cry grewmore violent: I am a Negro, I am a Negro, Iam a Negro” (1967: 138). And it is here thatsymbolic-ontological violence—in “mythi-cal” and anti-rational form—becomes ap-parently compatible with violent acts: it ishere that Bigger Thomas appears, and it ishere that the neurotic inability to inflict vio-lence on whites is seen as equivalent to on-tological nonexistence itself (139).

In Black Skin, we can already see some-thing very much like Sorel’s revolutionaryMarxist dialectic: a violence which is neces-sarily of, by, and for those oppressed by mi-nority rule (political-economic or racial-ontological), which is deployed “mythi-cally” through an assertion of the absolute-ness of identity. Sartre, by failing torecognize the mythical and irrational char-acter that such identity must take, was un-able to successfully turn the Marxiandialectic toward a proper understanding ofrevolutionary subjectivity. Moreover, forFanon as for Sorel there exist two violences,and while Fanon doesn’t distinguish theseterminologically, there can be no compari-son between the violence of the slaveholder,the “force” of the master, and the violence ofthat non-being who seeks only the access toontological reciprocity: here, the “force” ofthe master is something worse than even theminority rule so loathed by Sorel, it is minor-ity access to ontology, to being itself. As a re-sult, Fanonian violence is, as wasproletarian violence for Sorel, an attack onthose coagulated structures of privilegewhich operate to enforce a perpetual hierar-chy dividing the human race.

However, the most crucial similaritiesbetween the Sorelian and the Fanonian sche-mas—as well as some of the most funda-mental divergences and developments—only emerge through a discussion ofWretched of the Earth, as it is there thatFanon’s Hegelian dialectic is opened out-ward into a second dialectic of revolution-ary anti-colonial war. If we had any doubt

that the “violence” discussed in the openingchapter of Wretched of the Earth was theoreti-cally equivalent to the ontological self-asser-tion of Black Skin, our doubt cannot last long.After all, it was in the earlier work thatFanon would observe that, “without a Ne-gro past, without a Negro future, it was im-possible for me to live my Negrohood. Notyet white, no longer wholly black, I wasdamned” (1967: 138). That non-being—priorto a violent and mythical self-assertion—isprecisely the damné, the “wretched” as it isrendered in English, that would coalesce asa revolutionary subject in Fanon’s last work.“Decolonization is the veritable creation ofnew men,” Fanon will tell us, and this is anontological gesture: “the ‘thing’ which hasbeen colonized becomes a man during thesame process by which it frees itself” (1963:36).

Fanon’s analysis in Wretched, however,threatens to undo our argument in twoways: firstly, by encouraging a formal un-derstanding of violence, and secondly andas a result of the first it undermines the dif-ference between liberatory violence and op-pressive force. After all, are we not told thatviolence is equivalent to “searing bulletsand bloodstained knives,” to a “murderousand decisive struggle” (37)? And does notthis realpolitik understanding of violence re-flect the fact that the violence of the native is“furnished by the settler,” linked to the lat-ter by “an extraordinary reciprocal homoge-neity” (84; 87)? It should be clear,nevertheless, that the analysis offered inBlack Skin remains intact here: the colonialworld, Fanon tells us, is “compartmental-ized” divided and sustained by “lines offorce” (38). Faced with the Manichean archi-tectural force of colonial geography—a divi-sion which epitomizes the “Jacobinism” ofoppressive minority governance that Fanonhad already documented in ontologicalterms—only violence will suffice (38). The at-tempt to destroy the apartheid inherent tothe colonial system is in no way equivalentto those efforts which established and main-



tained it, since it is precisely the tight rela-tion between settler and native that revealstheir incommensurability: “For the native,life can only spring up again out of the rot-ting corpse of the settler. This then is the cor-respondence, term by term, between the twotrains of reasoning” (93).

But perhaps the best proof that Fanon’sviolence is irreducible to violent acts lies inthe fact that the violence of ontological self-assertion precedes the violent act, since “it isprecisely at the moment that he realizes hishumanity that [the colonized] begins tosharpen the weapons with which he will se-cure its victory” (43). Violence is rebelliousconsciousness, dignity in revolt (as the Mex-ican Zapatistas describe it). The native’sclaim to equality is in fact proof of that equality,and this is but one step prior to the struggle(44). This intention to struggle creates theground for Hegelian reciprocity:

Thus the native discovers that hislife, his breath, his beating heart arethe same as those of the settler. Hefinds out that the settler’s skin isnot of any more value than a na-tive’s skin; and it must be said thatthis discovery shakes the world ina very necessary manner (45).

This “shaking” of ontological categoriesallows the native to turn away from the mas-ter-settler, and to turn toward the object, inthe terms laid out in Black Skin. But in thiscontext, the object in question is the knife orthe gun, and the liberation provided by la-bor has taken on a new significance: “Themilitant is also the man who works,” butnow, “to work means to work for the deathof the settler” (85). The immobility of theNegro in Sartre’s Respectful Prostitute hasbeen definitively superseded, and in takingup the “violence” of the settler, the nativehas already surpassed it and transformed itbeyond all but the most formal recognition.

Moreover, it is in this very surpassing ofthe settler’s force, in the demarcation of the

revolutionary violence of the native, that thecontent of that violence emerges in a specificform, and one which closely parallels the for-mulation of Sorel. Simply put, the practice ofa violence which has been appropriatedfrom the settler—an appropriation whichsets the stage for ontological reciprocity—operates mythically, as it “introduces… theideas of a common cause, of a national des-tiny, and of a collective history” (93). Muchlike Sorel’s myth of the general strike, Fanondescribes the natives aspiration “to wreckthe colonial world” as “a mental picture ofaction which is very clear, very easy to un-derstand” (40-41). This is “not a rationalconfrontation of points of view… but theuntidy affirmation of an original idea pro-pounded as an absolute” (41). Those verymyths which had been the supreme proof ofnative backwardness were now to be turnedtoward liberatory ends. These “old warrior-like traditions” are what sustains the anti-colonial struggle, and hence Fanon’s hostil-ity to those Europeanized native intellectu-als who rejected them in favor of an abstractuniversal (116). The first murmurings ofspontaneous peasant rebellion take the formof “a confraternity, a church, and a mysticalbody of belief at one and the same time”(132-133). These formulations closely resem-ble Sorel’s celebration of the Homeric epic:from 1952 traditional Algerian storytellersreturned once again to the epic form, and itwas no coincidence that colonial forceswould repress this movement as early as1955 (241).

Hence, while Renate Zahar avoids anoverly reductive view of violence by observ-ing that Sorel and Fanon share an emphasison the violence of the poor, she falls into er-ror in the claim that, unlike Sorel, Fanon “isaverse to any myth and analyses conditionsscientifically” (1974: 86, see also Macey 2000:465, Gendzier, 1973: 204). Just as Sorel con-sidered his work to be “scientific” in termsof understanding the role of mythical vio-lence in driving human history, so too doesthe same understanding of science apply to



Fanon: both formulate a necessarily libera-tory violence which takes on and operatesthrough what could be deemed “mythical”mechanisms, providing the revolutionarycontent of the latter. Zahar, moreover, claimsthat this difference—which does not exist—is rooted in divergent understandings of vi-olence. This too is erroneous, and it is per-haps unsurprising that the author marshalslittle direct evidence to support this claim,aside from a quotation from Marcuse whichis openly dismissive of Sorel (86-87).

THE DIALECTIC OF SUBJECTIVITY

It is on the basis of this unity of violencewith the myth—a unity which, once under-stood correctly, can be seen in both Sorel andFanon—that we can trace the broad strokesof the operation of radical subjectivity inboth thinkers. In so doing, we will be able topinpoint and assess crucial divergences be-tween the two thinkers. For both, the nexusof liberatory violence with the mythical pro-jection of identity contributes to a virtuouscircle: somewhat paradoxically, it is onlythrough the violent self-assertion of an an-tagonistic subjectivity that the revolutionarysubject can be created and consolidated.

For Sorel, the consolidation of revolu-tionary subjectivity requires above all deci-sive action, in which “oppositions, insteadof being glossed over, must be thrown intosharp relief… the groups which are strug-gling one against the other must be shownas separate and as compact as possible(1961: 122). This is where the proletariangeneral strike—the unity (in Sorel’s context)of liberatory violence with mythical iden-tity—in which, “all parts of the economico-juridical structure, in so far as the latter islooked upon from the point of view of theclass war, reach the summit of their perfec-tion; society is plainly divided into twocamps, and only into two, on a field of bat-tle” (132).

It is only through such a division inter-nal to society that Marxist science regains its

objectivity. Liberal radicals and parliamen-tary socialists would preach social harmony,seeking to “educate” the worker into accept-ing the current division of labor, and if theyare successful, then only social decadenceand barbarism could ensue, “and the futureof the world becomes completely indetermi-nate” (90). Against such a threat, the mythi-cal violence of the proletarian general strikeoperates on society, and the workers are ad-vised

to repay with black ingratitude thebenevolence of those who wouldprotect the workers, to meet withinsults the homilies of the defend-ers of human fraternity, and to re-ply by blows to the advances of thepropagators of social peace… [this]is a very practical way of indicatingto the middle class that they mustmind their own business and onlythat. I believe also that it may beuseful to thrash the orators of de-mocracy and the representatives ofthe Government... But these actscan have historical value only ifthey are the clear and brutal expres-sion of the class war (91).

Only then might the middle classes “getback a part of their energy” and return totheir role within the dialectic which driveshistory: “proletarian violence confines em-ployers to their role as producers, and tendsto restore the separation of the classes, justwhen they seemed on the point of intermin-gling in the democratic marsh” (92). Classseparation restricts capitalism to is “mate-rial role” and restores to employers their“warlike qualities,” thereby in turn reinforc-ing the same in the working class and“mak[ing] the future revolution certain”(92).

Sorel’s understanding of revolutionarysubjectivity, then, is one in which liberatoryrevolt—that is, the content—is “thrust on the[mythical] road of the absolute” (259). This



separatist dialectic of myth and violence isboth efficacious and ethical: the absolute-ness of revolutionary identity embodied inthe myth is deployed through violent oppo-sition to the oppressor—in this case, thebourgeoisie—thereby feeding the reinforce-ment of the identities involved, and eventu-ally the total renovation of the social basisfor those identities. It is this function of vio-lence that Sartre tacitly endorses in his“Preface,” and which in many ways prefig-ures that of Fanon.7

Like Sorel, Fanon too sees the operationof mythical violence in terms of the dialecti-cal consolidation of a revolutionary subjec-tivity. In Black Skin, we have seen how thisviolence takes the form of an ontological selfassertion which ruptures racial overdeter-mination, thereby clearing the way for theoperation of the master-slave dialectic.Black non-being is converted through vio-lent self assertion into a being which, how-ever subordinate, was not denied access tosubjectivity a priori. But this self-assertionneeded to take the form of an identificationwith negritude, identification with a con-cept and an identity which, however imper-fect and empirically dubious, provided thenecessary mythical mechanism throughwhich the dialectic of subjectivity could op-erate. It was only through an accentuation ofdifference—through a separatist moment—that black consciousness could force this di-alectic: “to make myself known” meant “toassert myself as a BLACK MAN” (1967: 115).

This separatist dialectic is repeated inWretched, but now the white-black dyadoverlaps with that of settler-native, andwhile Fanon maintains the significance ofthe racial element of colonialism, negritudeis definitively replaced by national con-

sciousness. Here, the two phases of the anti-colonial struggle overlap consistently withthe two phases of radical consciousness vis-ible in Black Skin: the separatist moment inboth is necessarily superseded by a subse-quent universalizing moment. In this firstphase, hatred is directed toward the colo-nizer in concentrated form, and the scene isripe for conflict: “The atmosphere becomesdramatic, and everyone wishes to show thathe is ready for anything. And it is in thesecircumstances that guns go off by them-selves” (1963: 71). It matters little who firesfirst, since the effect is the same: the dialecticof separation begins to turn.

Both the “absolute evil of the native”and the “absolute evil of the settler” becomemore acute (93), the native’s rebellion is metwith repression and positions harden on ei-ther side. Specific acts of violence are re-quired as a “royal pardon” which preventsthe native from returning to the colonial sys-tem (86). “The armed struggle mobilizes thepeople; that is to say, it throws them in oneway and in one direction” (93), and formerlyuncommitted intellectuals find themselvesin a “backward surge” which draws them“toward bases grounded in the people” (46).In this first stage the efficaciousness ofmythical identity is clear, since “the most el-ementary, most savage, and the most undif-ferentiated nationalism is the most ferventand efficient means of defending nationalculture” (244). The consolidation of identitywhich marks the separatist stage of the dia-lectic of revolutionary subjectivity is the di-rect result of the unification of liberatoryviolence with a mythically-projected iden-tity, and it is in this dialectic that ultimatelydraws Sorel and Fanon together in many as-pects.

It is worth mentioning that the shift inFanon’s mechanism of radical identity—from negritude in Black Skin to national con-sciousness in Wretched—leads many readersto distinguish too firmly between the twoworks. The two reflect a common under-standing of the operation of radical subjec-

7 Sartre’s critique of negritude might sug-gest that his position toward Sorel and the mythmight be more critical. However, we must bearin mind that by the time he penned the “Pref-ace,” he had already moved much closer toFanon’s position regarding the dialectic of sub-jectivity (Ciccariello-Maher 2006).



tivity, and their divergence is largelyhistorical: in 1952, negritude remained a his-torical necessity (as Fanon makes clear toSartre), whereas by 1961 it had largely be-come a reactionary tool in the hands of neo-colonial puppets in Africa. This, moreover,is largely a result of the fact that negritudehad by this point traveled from the first (sep-aratist) moment toward the second (univer-sal) moment of the dialectic: those “wishingto skip the national period” were guilty of pre-cisely the same error Sartre had committedin Orphée noir, that of an abstract universal-ism which short-circuits identity (247).

Finally, the assertion of theoretical con-gruency between Sorel and Fanon is notmerely an end in itself, but is moreover apoint of departure for grasping the funda-mental divergences that exist between thetwo thinkers, or better put, the degree towhich Fanon surpassed Sorel’s formulation.While much can be said on this subject, dueto space restrictions I will make some briefsuggestions regarding the notion of class.Sorel set out from the recognition that thereexisted no objective basis for class, but alsofrom the desperate need to construct the ideaof class, thereby inverting the traditionalMarxist schema by placing the class-for-it-self prior to the class-in-itself (Laclau andMouffe 2001: 39-41). Fanon goes a step fur-ther, broadening Sorel’s inversion by recog-nizing that, at least in the colony, it is notmerely class-in-itself and class-for-itself, butbase and superstructure as a whole whichare inverted. In so doing, Fanon pushes de-cisively beyond Sorel’s class-centrism: why,Fanon asks, should we continue to privilegeclass if it has no objective basis? If Sorel’s an-swer is political efficacy, then Fanon re-sponds on the same terms: to speak ofpolitical efficacy in the colonies is to rejectthe traditional working class, and moreoverto reject class identity as central in the firstplace. He exploits a clear weakness in Sorel’saccount to force a decolonial turn. This en-tire relation is missed by those like Gendzier(1973: 204), who exaggerate the specific di-

vergences between the thinkers at the ex-pense of the general similarities.

It is only on the basis of these very realtheoretical convergences between Sorel andFanon—specifically, that of the dialectic ofrevolutionary subjectivity—that we canthen credibly chart their divergences with-out giving in to the temptation of reductivisterrors.

REFERENCES

Arendt, Hannah. 1969. On Violence. New York:Harcourt and Brace.

Ciccariello-Maher, George. 2006, Fall. “TheInternal Limits of the European Gaze:Intellectuals and the Colonial Differ-ence.” Radical Philosophy Review 9:2, 139-165.

Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth, tr.C. Farrington. New York: Grove Press.

Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks, tr.C.L. Markmann. New York: Grove Press.

Gendzier, Irene L. 1973. Frantz Fanon: A CriticalStudy. New York: Grove Press.

Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 2001.Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards aRadical Democratic Politics. London: Verso.

Macey, David. 2000. Frantz Fanon: A Biography.New York: Picador.

Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. Forthcoming. “Onthe Coloniality of Being.” In The Decolo-nial Turn, edited by Ramon Grosfoguel,Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and JoséDavid Saldívar. Boulder, CO: ParadigmPress.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1963. “Preface.” Pp. 7-31 inFrantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.New York: Grove Press.

Sorel, Georges. 1961. Reflections on Violence, tr.T.E. Hulme. New York: Collier Books.

Sorel, Georges. 1987. “From The Trial ofSocrates.” Pp. 62-70 in From Georges Sorel:Essays in Socialism and Philosophy, editedby John L. Stanley. New Brunswick, NJ:Transaction Books.

Zahar, Renate. 1974. Frantz Fanon: Colonialismand Alienation, tr. W. Feuser. London:Monthly Review.

To Lose Oneself in the Absolute

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