There is a passage in the famous first chapter, On Violence, of Fanon’s (1961) Wretched of the Earth or Damned of the Earth [Les damnes de la terre] that makes me think of Carl Schmitt:
Thus we see that the primary Manicheism which governed colonial society is preserved intact during the period of decolonization. That is to say that the settler never ceases to be the enemy, the antagonist, the man that must be killed." (pp. 50-1 in Constance Farrington’s (1963) translation. Farrington’s translation is a bit imprecise, so I modestly changed the second sentence, which reads: C'est que le colon ne cesse jamais d'être l'ennemi, l'antagoniste, très précisément l'homme à abattre.)
Decolonization preserves the Manicheism of colonialization. I quote the passage in which Fanon introduces this idea below. By using ‘Manicheism’ Fanon invites us to see both colonialism and decolonization in a continuous cosmic register. To be sure, I don’t mean to suggest that Fanon himself promotes Manicheism; he quite clearly thinks it needs to be overcome after decolonization has succeeded.
Before I continue, I am unsure whether Fanon would have read Schmitt, so I am not making a claim in the history of ideas. It’s more of a conceptual claim that I am entertaining here. For Schmitt (recall), “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”
Like Schmitt, Fanon inscribes his political ideas in a cosmological-theological register. (Take a second look at the title of Fanon’s work!) In fact, the political program of the colonized can be called a success when (repeatedly quoting Matthew 20:16) “"The last shall be first and the first last." Decolonization is the putting into practice of this sentence,” (37; Fanon repeats the point (p. 46).)
That the settler — in Algeria the colons were the original French/European colonists — must be killed is itself an effect, of the intrinsic violence of colonialism. Fanon, who is a very precise author (despite the great haste under which the book was composed under the shadow of looming death), correctly uses ‘mercantilism’ to describe the intrinsic violence of the colonial economy in this very chapter (see p. 51). Fanon puts it as follows (again with Manichean imagery):
Decolonization is the meeting of two congenitally antagonistic forces which draw their originality precisely from this sort of substantiation that secretes and fuels the colonial situation. [La décolonisation est la rencontre de deux forces congénitalement antagonistes qui tirent précisément leur originalité de cette sorte de substantification que sécrète et qu'alimente la situation coloniale.] Their first encounter was marked by violence and their existence together—that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler—was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons. The settler and the native are old acquaintances. In fact, the settler is right when he speaks of knowing "them" well. For it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence. The settler owes the fact of his very existence, that is to say, his property, to the colonial system. (p. 36)
Crucially, then, it’s colonial violence and a colonial intellectual edifice that generates a ‘native.’ Prior to settler-colonialism there were differentiated individuals and peoples with their own hopes and aspirations. After the racialized edifice is imposed by the colonists the locals are othered and dehumanized shaped by a racialized science which reinforces a zero-sum world (property/dispossession; exploiter/exploited, etc.).
A reader may think that the previous sentence goes beyond the evidence of the passage I have quoted from p. 36. But these ideas are very clearly presented in the very passage in which Fanon first explicitly introduced the Manichean character of colonialism:
The colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say with the help of the army and the police force, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil.* Native society is not simply described as a society lacking in values. It is not enough for the colonist to affirm that those values have disappeared from, or still better never existed in, the colonial world. The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of maleficent powers, the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces. (P. 41)
Modern colonialism is not mere theft or landgrab. On Fanon’s account the Manicheanism is introduced by the colonial settler, who classifies the local into a native and who, with the help of human sciences, is intrinsically treated as a kind of devil and a vehicle for a cosmic darkness. The accompanying footnote points to Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, where he explains all the social-psychological mechanisms involved.
Enmity is, thus, introduced by the colonial-settler, when the ‘native’ is represented as the enemy of values (l'ennemi des valeurs). So, the Schmittianism I am noticing is a by-product of the European attempt to justify their violent mercantile practices.
I am not claiming, then, that Fanon is a Schmittian. Rather, I am claiming that Fanon is by necessity instrumentally a Schmittian or diagnosing Schmittianism because of the perverted political condition engendered by colonialism. The Manicheanism of colonialism requires a process equally Manichean to undo.
Schmitt thought that the friend-enemy distinction shouldn’t be conflated with the good-evil (and other ,conceptual oppositions), and was dangerous when inscribed in universalizing humanism. So, I don’t want to suggest Schmitt himself was the theorist of settler-colonialism. But he also recognized that (and perhaps warned against) “Emotionally the enemy is easily treated as being evil and ugly, because every distinction, most of all the political, as the strongest and most intense of the distinctions and categorizations, draws upon other distinctions for support.” This precisely characterizes the Manicheism produced by colonization diagnosed by Fanon. Fanon himself notes that during the process of decolonialization, the colonized eventually learns to overcome this Manicheism in which violence is itself not just a purification of the world, but also part of a step in political education (e.g., p. 138). It’s an open question to what degree it’s really possible to bracket Manicheism in this way.
This is all I wanted to say, but I realize many readers will immediately be drawn to think of the violent events of the past week in Gaza and Israel. This is inevitable for two reasons: first, the antagonists involved often use rhetoric and act in the Manichean manner described by Fanon. (I am not the first to note this, of course.) Second, in modern universities, it is now common to think of Israel/Zionism as a settler-colonial state of the sort that requires violent decolonialization. In fact, several academic friends (who were aware of my recent reading of Fanon — I am teaching him this semester —) alerted me to the topicality of my reading.
Usually, I am happy to leave such inferences to the reader. In addition, since regular readers know I am a (rather critical of actually existing Zionism) Zionist, I don’t think anyone expects from me a neutral or dispassionate perspective on this matter. To the best of my knowledge none of my family and friends were harmed directly this past week, but they have friends who have. I worry that the unfolding events leave them little time for the necessary active mourning.
But the following may be worth stating: in French Algeria and much of twentieth century decolonialization, the settlers had a citizenship relationship with the imperial homeland, France. For example, after decolonialization, the vast majority of settler families returned to France (and a generation later only a small minority are left in Algeria). No version of this scenario is even possible in Israel, which is a sovereign state with the vast majority of citizens having no other citizenship ties. (Settlers on occupied territories of the West-bank, by contrast, can move back to Israel as did the few settlers who once lived in Gaza.)
The underlying Manichean logic of applying a violent decolonization framework to Israel, thus, tends toward genocidal outcomes. Some decolonial-friendly critics of Zionism, who deny the legitimacy of Israel altogether, flirt with (a fantasy of) this in their righteous anger as much as when some Israelis, as happened this past week, propose to nuke or (as seems official policy) starve Gaza.
As regular readers know (recall), I think of contemporary Zionism as hampered strategically by the elevation of a tactical ambiguity over fundamental ends and the final settlement of the conflict. To put the consequences of this diagnosis in terms of today’s post, it, thereby, feeds the Manichean elements of the conflict. How to reverse that underlying logic is no simple matter.
This is why, for example, earlier in the week I proposed that at the earliest possible moment, Israeli governments can express an unambiguous commitment to compensation of individual Palestinian refugees (going back to 1948) with forthright admission that this is long overdue and to start paying out regardless of a final settlement. It would be an important signal that Israel doesn’t think force is the only tool of statecraft it ever takes seriously and that it is willing to treat individual Palestinians with dignity.
Interestingly enough, I am not alone in seeing the significance of reparations. The only mention of Israel in The Damned of the Earth, occurs precisely in this context:
Herr Adenauer, it must be said, at the opening of the Eichmann trial, and in the name of the German people, asked once more for forgiveness from the Jewish people. Herr Adenauer has renewed the promise of his people to go on paying to the state of Israel the enormous sums which are supposed to be compensation for the crimes of the Nazis. (p. 101)
Israelis are rightly allergic to being compared to Nazis. But that’s not the point here. Repeatedly and sincerely asking for forgiveness from those you have harmed is, in fact, required by Jewish law. As Fanon discerns, Adenauer’s actions in word (asking for forgiveness) and deed (reparations) are instructive in the art of statecraft which ought to shape how one conducts war.
This kind of work (Fanon, Schmitt, advocates of violence in general) belongs in the realm of psycho-pathology rather than political theory.
Given the ample evidence that violence rarely produces good outcomes for anyone (Algeria and Nazi Germany excellent cases in point), the kinds of questions that should be asked in work "On Violence" are
* Why does political violence have such psychological appeal, and what can be done to counter that appeal ?
* What are the circumstances in which the strong presumption against violence can be overridden
* Once violent conflict is started, how can it best be ended.?
Whether asking these questions would help, I don't know, but we are now watching the consequences of not asking them.