Fanon's insurgence

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article offers a reading of Frantz Fanon in relation to the word ‘I’, perhaps the privileged term for the reflection on sociality and form in the European, colonial tradition. It considers the refusal and advance of a coherent subject of knowledge and social form in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and its reiteration in The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Through a reading of Sylvia Wynter's interpretation of Fanon, and in a close reading of Descartes’ Discourse on the Method (1637) in relation to Denise Ferriera da Silva's Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), Jacques Derrida's The Animal that Therefore I Am (2006), and Martin Heidegger's ‘The Age of the World Picture’ (1938), I argue that Fanon reiterates the forms he wishes to contest, and that this double gesture suggests his work not only creates an insurgency but that it insurges: it overflows the privileged categories for philosophical reflection and sociality, and in doing so enacts the practice of decolonisation it also promises. This article argues that Fanon discombobulates the temporal terms he also presumes, and that he therefore gives us a practice of struggle, and a sociality, that occurs without a recognisable subject, time, form or sense.