Vie éthique et pensée de la libération. Lecture critique des usages senghoriens de Marx à partir de fanon

Abstract

In Senghor’s writings, the focus on the theme of liberation, between the end of the Second World War and the accession to independence of African states in the 1960s, along with the challenge of formulating an African path to socialism, rests upon a specific practical and theoretical usage of the thinking of Karl Marx, in articulation with the notion of négritude. Such a usage of Marx opens up, in Senghor’s thought, a site for the questioning of the meaning of the ethical life that is organised in terms of the affirmation of the primacy of culture as a path to de-alienation and as a condition of the genesis of man. This strategic option would be called into question by Frantz Fanon as early as in Black Skins, White Masks (1952). What is at stake in the critical analysis of Senghor’s usage of Marx, by way of Fanon’s thought, is to highlight, from the perspective of praxis, tensions within the theory of liberation formulated by the thinker of négritude, in the context of anticolonial struggles after 1945.