Fanonian Violence as Deconstructive Praxis in Postcolonial State-Building — Epoche C2
The book, and the sentence it is remembered for Frantz Fanon's Les Damnés de la Terre , written at speed in 1961 and much of it dictated as his leukaemia advanced, was published in Paris by François Maspero shortly before its author died at Bethesda, Maryland, on 6 December of that year; it opens with a chapter titled De la violence , and that chapter is the reason most people who have never read the book are confident they know what is in it. The received summary is that Fanon argued that killing the coloniser liberates the colonised — violence as an instrument, brutal but necessary, whose job is finished when the flag comes down. That summary is not a fabrication; the instrumental claim is genuinely in the text. It is, however, one register of three, and the other two are where the book's argument about what happens after independence actually lives. What follows keeps the classification proposed here originally — instrumental, subjective, constitutive — and supplies what a compressed statement of it omitted: the argument by which Fanon reaches the first claim, the clinical evidence behind the second, and, for the third, a correction. The third category as first stated attributed to Fanon a doctrine of creative or founding violence that his own text does not contain and, in its third chapter, contradicts. Rather than quietly dropping the category, the argument below shows what it was reaching for and what it must be renamed. The premise: a regime held together by force rather than by consent Before the three registers can be distinguished, the argument of the opening chapter has to be stated properly, because it is not a moral argument at all. It is a claim about how a particular kind of regime is maintained, from which a claim about how it can be dissolved follows. Fanon's contrast is between the metropolitan capitalist society and the colony. In the former, obedience is produced by a dense apparatus that surrounds the exploited person long before any policeman appears: schoolteachers, clergy, the aesthetic conventions of respectability, the whole machinery that makes the existing distribution feel like the order of things. In the colony that apparatus is thin or absent, and the intermediary between ruler and ruled is the soldier and the policeman, whose authority is not mediated by any shared moral vocabulary. The colonial world is therefore, in Fanon's description, a compartmentalised world: a settlers' town of stone and light and a native town of hunger, with the frontier between them marked by a barracks rather than by an ideology both sides inhabit. The step Fanon takes next is the one that is usually skipped, and it is the load-bearing one. Marxist analysis, he says, must be slightly stretched for the colonial case, because there the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure: you are rich because you are white and white because you are rich, cause and consequence collapsing into each other. The point is technical rather than rhetorical. If the relations of production and the ideological level are not even relatively distinct — if the classification that assigns you to a place in the economy is the same classification that assigns you a place in the moral order — then there is no ideological terrain on which the settlement could first be contested and then, having been discredited, peacefully wound up. That is the ground of the notorious claim that decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon. It is not the claim that violence is meritorious. It is the claim that the relation in question has no non-violent joint at which to be taken apart, and it is paired with a definition of decolonisation as the replacement of one 'species' of men by another: an absolute substitution, not a reform of terms. Two qualifications belong here, and the compressed version of this essay omitted both. First, the argument is calibrated to settler colonialism, and specifically to Algeria, which was not administered as a colony at all but incorporated as French départements, and where at the outbreak of the war in November 1954 roughly a million Europeans lived among some nine million Algerians — about a tenth of the population holding the land, the administration and the franchise. Where colonial rule ran through indirect administration and local intermediaries, the claim that no ideological joint exists is weaker, because such regimes did manufacture consent through chiefs, missions and schools. Second, Fanon's own biography shows that he did not think the argument generalised into a programme. He was chef de service at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital from 1953, resigned in 1956 in a letter that gave his reason as the impossibility of restoring to health people whose disorder was the permanent condition of their country, joined the Front de Libération Nationale, edited its newspaper, and spent his last years on organisational and diplomatic work, serving in 1960 as the Provisional Government's ambassador to Ghana. The man who wrote the chapter on violence spent his final years building institutions. The first register: instrumental violence, and where the Laṅkā analogy fails With the premise in place, the first category can be given its content. Instrumental violence is the direct physical confrontation with the colonial power: armed struggle aimed at dismantling the apparatus described above. The original comparison offered for it was the war in the sixth book of Vālmīki's Rāmāyaṇa , the Yuddhakāṇḍa, in which Rāma's army crosses to Laṅkā, besieges the city and kills Rāvaṇa to recover Sītā. The comparison is worth keeping, but only if the criterion of comparison is stated, and then the disanalogy — which is the more instructive half — is faced. What the two have in common is the structure of a bounded collective act against an enemy who occupies a defined space, undertaken by a force that constitutes itself in the course of the fighting. What they do not share is the justification. The