Dirty Hands and Making the Human: Fanon, the Algerian Revolution and an Ethics of Freedom

Abstract

Such was the beginning of the French domination of Algeria. What began ostensibly as the honorable surrender of a sovereign ruler and nation quickly resulted in the domination and desecration of an entire population. One hundred twenty years later, this domination was ended through the Algerian Revolution, the longest and possibly most costly of the postwar anticolonial insurrections. The Algerian Revolution provided current social theory with one of its most interesting and informative interlocutors, Frantz Fanon, whose work regarding the real and ontological aspects of anticolonial revolutions has provided insights for much of postmodern, postcolonial, and critical race theory. What has often been ignored, however, are the ethical insights and lessons that Fanon’s depiction of the Algerian Revolution provides us. In his work, Fanon not only delivers to us what I would call an ethnographic depiction of the processes by which the Algerian peoples liberated themselves, but also serves as prognosticator for the ultimate success of the revolution in achieving one of its purported primary goals—the creation of a new form of human being.