IB Philosophy 10.4.6 Violence and Liberation Notes

From Black Skin, White Masks to The Wretched of the Earth

1. Frantz Fanon's thinking moves from the psychological and philosophical analysis of Black Skin, White Masks (1952) toward the explicitly political arguments of The Wretched of the Earth (1961). The later work answers a question the earlier book raised but left unresolved: if colonialism produces deep psychological devastation (10.4.4), and if its humanist ideology is false universalism (10.4.5), what form must liberation take?
2. Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth while serving as a spokesperson for the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). The text is not merely a theoretical exercise but a philosophical reflection grounded in revolutionary practice, shaped by Fanon's direct experience of anti-colonial struggle.
3. The central and most controversial claim of the text is that violence is a necessary component of decolonization. Fanon argues that colonialism was established through violence and is maintained through violence.
   1. Its dismantling therefore cannot proceed through negotiation or moral persuasion alone. The colonizer will not voluntarily relinquish power.
4. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his preface to The Wretched of the Earth, endorsed Fanon's argument with characteristic directness, writing that the colonized person "cures himself of colonial neurosis by driving the colonist out by force." Sartre's preface placed Fanon's work squarely within the tradition of existentialist engagement with political action.
5. Fanon's argument about violence must be understood in the context of his psychiatric analysis. As 10.4.4 established, colonialism produces alienation, inferiority, and self-hatred.
   1. Fanon contends that the colonized person's aggression, previously turned inward (against the self and one's own community), is redirected outward against the colonial system through revolutionary struggle.
6. The seed of the therapeutic argument is already present in Black Skin, White Masks, particularly in the chapter on 'The Negro and Psychopathology' (Chapter 6), where Fanon argues that the Black person's aggression, directed inward through self-hatred, must ultimately be redirected outward through political engagement. The violence argument of The Wretched of the Earth is a political extension of this psychological analysis.

The Therapeutic Argument: Violence as Psychological Liberation

1. As 10.4.4 established, colonialism turns aggression inward, redirecting it against the self and one's own community. Fanon argues that revolutionary struggle transforms this into apolitical act and a form of collective psychological healing.
2. Fanon draws a sharp distinction between the violence of the oppressor and the violence of the oppressed. Colonial violence is systemic, ongoing, and designed to maintain domination.
   1. Anti-colonial violence is a response to an existing condition of violence, not an initiation of it. To condemn the violence of the colonized without acknowledging the prior violence of colonialism is, for Fanon, a form of moral hypocrisy.
3. The Manichaean world described in 10.4.1 (the colonial division of reality into two irreconcilable sides: civilised settler and primitive native) here takes on its spatial and political form:
4. The concept of the "Manichean world" is central to Fanon's analysis. The colonial world is divided into two irreconcilable zones: the settler's zone (clean, prosperous, protected) and the native's zone (overcrowded, impoverished, policed).
   1. This spatial division reflects a total separation that, Fanon argues, can only be overcome through a total transformation of the social order.
5. Fanon is clear that the goal of revolutionary violence is not destruction for its own sake but the creation of new social relations. The purpose of the struggle is to build a society in which the colonial division between settler and native no longer exists, a society grounded in the new humanism he calls for at the end of Black Skin, White Masks (as discussed in 10.4.5).
6. The relationship between violence and identity is philosophically significant. Fanon argues that the colonized person who acts, who resists, who fights, is no longer the passive object described by the colonial gaze in 10.4.2.
   1. Through action, they become a historical subject, capable of shaping their own future rather than being shaped by colonial power.

Philosophical Dimensions of Revolutionary Violence