Fanon’s Frame of Violence

Abstract

The scholarship on Frantz Fanon’s theorization of violence is crowded with interpretations that follow the Arendtian paradigm of violence. These interpretations often discuss whether violence is instrumental or non-instrumental in Fanon’s work. This reading, I believe, is the result of approaching Fanon through Hannah Arendt’s framing of violence, i.e. through a binary paradigm of instrumental versus non-instrumental violence. Even some Fanon scholars who question Arendt’s reading of Fanon, do so by employing a similar binary logic, hence repeating the same either/or paradigm of instrumental versus non-instrumental violence. I aim to challenge such interpretations of Fanon by demonstrating that in the context of anticolonial armed struggle in which Fanon writes, the either/or framework of the instrumental/non-instrumental binary of violence cannot fully capture his perspective. Violence can indeed be conceived as having both constructive and instrumental aspects. My argument is supported by Fanon’s corpus, including his 1960 Accra speech, “Why We Use Violence” in Alienation and Freedom. This piece, I suggest, together with Fanon’s other writings, poses a direct challenge to the Arendtian binary of violence. My analysis resists positioning the difference between Arendt and Fanon through the instrumental/non-instrumental binary. By using Judith Butler’s notion of “frame” I complicate their difference and argue Arendt’s framing of violence prevents her from apprehending Fanon and – more importantly – interpretations of Fanon based on this Arendtian frame of violence inevitably lead to misinterpretations.

Keywords:

• Affective responsiveness
• Arendt, Hannah
• Fanon, Frantz
• frames of violence
• instrumental violence
• non-instrumental violence

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments. I am grateful to Darell Moore, A.J. Johnson, H. Rakes, Caroline McKusick, Tuğba Sevinç and Elif Yavnık who commented on various versions of this article.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Later, I focus on Roberts’ (2004) and Kawash’s (1999) readings as exemplary cases to show how Fanon scholars can get caught up in Arendtian interpretations.

2 By “frames of violence” I mean affective-theoretical lenses through which violence is linked to politics. The notion of frame deployed here follows Butler’s (2010) conceptualization.

3 Butler (2010, 33) articulates the term affective responsiveness to move away from an “ontology of individualism”, which is often accompanied by a liberal, Eurocentric tendency to frame violence in abstract terms.

4 My discussion of violence in Arendt predominantly targets her misreading of Fanon in On Violence. Hence, I only focus on the articulation of the relationship between violence and politics in her writings post-The Origins. For a more comprehensive discussion of Arendt on the topic of violence, see Bernstein (2013, 78–104) and Gines (2014, 93–111).

5 In the context of Turkish–Kurdish relations, colonial practices involve assimilationist policies, denial of cultural rights, militarization of the Kurdish land, forced migration and institutional racism. For further discussion, see Beşikci (1991); Yarkin (2019). Also most interestingly, Bozarslan (2004, 48) claims the ideological doctrine of the Kurdish armed organization PKK (Kurdistan Workers’s Party) “possessed a Fanonian dimension”.

6 With regard to this question, Young’s (2005) essay also powerfully demonstrates the relevance of Fanon’s thought beyond the Academy, as it provides a detailed analysis of Fanon’s impact on the sub-Saharan nations and their decolonization process.

7 The claim that Fanon glorified violence for its own sake did not exclusively belong to Arendt. Even Fanon scholars like Irene L. Gendzier held this view. For a discussion of this point, see Bulhan (1985, 147).

8 For further discussion of Arendt’s responsiveness to suffering, see Scholem (1978, 241) and Nelson (2004, 224).

9 Arendt’s remark is explicitly negative towards national liberation movements. This is puzzling given the fact that Arendt herself advocated the formation of a Jewish army against Hitler. The struggle for Jewish liberation, Arendt thought, was only possible through Jewish armed struggle (see Bernstein 2013, 95).

10 This point is strongly emphasized by Bulhan (1985), Gordon (1995, 2015), Gibson (2003) and Keller (2007).

11 On the everyday effects of colonial capitalism, see the documentary Concerning Violence (Olsson 2014).

12 As Gordon notes, two years after the start of the Algerian War of Independence in 1954, Fanon resigned from his post as the head of the psychiatry unit at the Blida-Joinville hospital and became “a full-time organizer, writer and physician for the FLN” (2017, 48).

13 On the one hand, there is the dialectical formation of subjectivities, which is the result of the Manichean structure of colonialism; on the other hand, there is the rendering of the colonized to the “zone of nonbeing” (see Gordon 2017, 54–55). Due to the latter, colonialism defies the Hegelian logic of recognition.

14 Although not directly addressing the issue of temporality of violence, Bernstein (2013, 114–116) also discusses Fanon’s engagement with temporality in The Wretched of the Earth.

15 Young underscores the difference between WWUV and the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth in terms of the discussion of violence and suggests the former provides a more “historized” account with the aim of convincing the delegates at the conference of the legitimacy and the righteousness of the Algerian armed struggle (2005, 38–39).

16 Underlining the “truth” of the Algerian armed struggle goes hand in hand with why Fanon regards this particular armed mobilization as a “model” for other African anticolonial movements. The latter point is discussed in detail by Young (2005, 33–34).