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Decolonial realism: Ethics, politics and dialectics in Fanon and Dussel

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Abstract

This article approaches contemporary European debates on the subject of realism through the lenses offered by two decolonial thinkers: Fanon and Dussel. Whereas both share with realism a fundamental emphasis on reality as the starting point for theory – an assumption shared by much decolonial thought – they nevertheless provide another layer of specificity in their consideration of the colonial condition, diagnosing a fundamental absence of reciprocity that dictates the course of decolonization as a transformation of reality. Reconsidering the debates on realism in light of these insights therefore provides a powerful basis for both formulating a specifically decolonial realism and for engaging in comparative political theorizing more generally.

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Notes

  1. I drop the optimistically conclusive ‘post-’ for the more dynamic ‘de-’ for a reason. The newly burgeoning field of decolonial studies surpasses both post-colonial thought (and indeed emerged as a Latin-American split from the perceived Eurocentrism of subaltern studies) and the study of decolonization concretely understood. Decolonial thought sets out from the understanding of colonization as a complex comprising not only the political and economic, but also questions of epistemology, gender, sexuality, race and the lasting legacies of colonization for each (what Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano pioneered under the concept of ‘coloniality’). On coloniality, see Moraña et al (eds). (2008). On the critique of post-colonial studies, see Mignolo and Tlostanova (2007). For a taste of emerging decolonial theory, see the double issue of the journal Transmodernity dedicated to the subject (Issues 1.2 and 1.3), edited by Maldonado-Torres (2011, 2012).

  2. Mantena (2012, p. 455) similarly distinguishes between ‘transformational’ and ‘moderating’ realisms.

  3. An entire revisionist literature disputes this age-old equation of Machiavelli with the phenomenon we have come to call ‘Machiavellianism’. Strauss famously characterized Machiavelli as a ‘teacher of evil’, and his nonchalance at beginning from this ‘old-fashioned and simple opinion’ speaks volumes about prevailing interpretations (1958, p. 9). Many have argued that Machiavelli’s virtù was far more substantive than mere Realpolitik or the subordination of means to ends. Furthermore, scholars have consistently found in The Discourses a Machiavelli concerned with questions of class and popular democracy. For recent interventions in this direction, see the special section on Machiavelli in Political Theory, comprising essays by McCormick (2012) and Winter (2012).

  4. Here, too, we must be careful. Machiavelli, for example, wrote of maintaining power as much as taking and transforming it. Furthermore, the far reaches of revolutionary thought also run the risk of losing contact with ‘reality’ in an abstract Jacobinism that views society as a tabula rasa to be shaped by revolutionaries. Thus, Edmund Burke, very much a realist, assailed the abstraction of the Rights of Man in the French Revolution, a critique taken up by both moderates (for example, Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution) and revolutionaries (for example, Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence).

  5. See the recent debate in the European Journal of Political Theory on the subject (North, 2010).

  6. The classic account is Arendt (1969), although she insisted that there was something quite unrealistic about Fanon’s optimism with regard to violence. In the same year, Tucker (1978) submitted his thesis comparing Fanon and Machiavelli, but did so precisely through a rejection of the Machiavelli of caricature. In a later publication, he would argue that, like Fanon, ‘Machiavelli deals compellingly with what is while not rejecting what ultimately ought to be’ (p. 397).

  7. In different ways, see Gates (1999), Posnock (1997) and Gilroy (2002). Here Fanon’s relation to ‘realism’ overlaps with the question of the reality of race. For a critical survey of the race question in Fanon, see Cusick (2007).

  8. In different ways, see Bhabha’s 1986 foreword to the British edition of Black Skin (1999) and Robinson (1993). Even many of the more nuanced approaches to Fanon’s thought neglect the precise temporality of action in the present, suggesting, for example, that the time for identity has passed. For a critique of this distinction, and the way that it overlaps with post-structural and (determinist) dialectical readings, see Alessandrini (2009).

  9. For a similar formulation of the Fanonian critique of Hegel in the context of the murder of Trayvon Martin, see my ‘The Dialectics of Standing One’s Ground’ (2012).

  10. Despite having systematically plumbed the ethical dimension of Fanon’s thought, Maldonado-Torres (2008) is clear about this. At a recent round table discussion commemorating the 50th anniversary of Fanon’s death and the publication of The Wretched of the Earth, he puts the ethical–political relation in Fanon as follows: ‘there is a decolonial ethics in Fanon’s response to this [colonial] context, but this ethics is also a politics, because the ethics that leads this subject to have a relation, to make herself or himself available to the other slave, to join in the struggle of liberation, at the end it is a struggle of liberation that they are after’ (Ciccariello-Maher et al, 2013).

  11. I have argued elsewhere (2010) that the importance of this violence lies mostly in its ‘symbolic’ function of re-establishing the Being of the colonized.

  12. The three-volume Politics is still in the final stages, but a short handbook version was translated as Twenty Theses on Politics (2008). Dussel’s (2013) massive Ethics is forthcoming in English .

  13. For a substantive discussion of Dussel and Levinas alongside Fanon, see Maldonado-Torres (2008).

  14. Not coincidentally, Dussel, like Fanon frames, the division between Being and non-Being as one that renders Hegel’s master-slave dialectic ‘no longer possible’ (p. 51).

  15. For a similar critique, see Bernasconi (1997). Barber frames this as ‘overcoming Levinas’, but is at pains to emphasize that this overcoming involves the dialectical preservation of much of Levinas’s contribution (1998, pp. 50–51). Bell (2006, p. 112) has argued that whereas ‘Levinas does not politicize his concept of the other’, Dussel does. Slabodsky (2010) has sought to use Dussel toward reconsidering this critique of Levinas’s Eurocentrism.

  16. While his own decision to cut the Gordian knot of metaphysics by mapping alterity onto global geopolitics can be critiqued, this it is not for the same reasons (see Maldonado-Torres, 2008). Kohn and McBride (2011, p. 133), for example, diagnose Dussel’s slippage between abstract metaphysics and concrete particularity and between a multiplicity of overlapping systems and subject positions and singular references to a single system.

  17. I am grateful to Corey Robin for drawing my attention to this second aspect.

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Ciccariello-Maher, G. Decolonial realism: Ethics, politics and dialectics in Fanon and Dussel. Contemp Polit Theory 13, 2–22 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2013.11

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