Abstract
This paper considers the implications of Hannah Arendt's criticisms of Frantz Fanon and the theories of violence and politics associated with his influence for our understanding of the relationship between those two phenomena. Fanon argues that violence is a means necessary to political action, and also is an organic force or energy. Arendt argues that violence is inherently unpredictable, which means that end reasoning is in any case anti-political, and that it is a profound error to naturalize violence. We evaluate their respective arguments concluding that in her well-founded rejection of the naturalization of violence, Arendt's understanding of the embodied nature of violence is less insightful than Fanon's.
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Notes
An early version of this analysis was presented at the conference ‘The Barbarisation of Warfare’, Wolverhampton University, June 2005. This analysis of Arendt and Fanon was presented to the panel ‘Power, Violence and the Body’, American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, August 2006. We are grateful to participants at these events for helpful discussion. Kimberly Hutchings benefited from study leave from LSE for the academic year 2005–2006 when a good deal of the research for this paper was conducted. Elizabeth Frazer had study leave from the University of Oxford and New College for autumn 2006, and was a visiting researcher at Cevipof, Centre Recherches de Sciences Po, when this paper was written. We are indebted to these institutions for their support.
This paper does not aim produce an exhaustive account of everything that Fanon and Arendt thought about violence; rather it is to focus on this particular dispute, between The Wretched of the Earth and On Violence, and to consider how it illuminates the troubling normative and phenomenological questions that arise when we consider the relationship between politics and violence. In the context of this paper, we take ‘violence’ to refer primarily to the intentional infliction of physical injury on others for political purposes, and seek to draw attention to the conditions and the broader effects of such violence for individuals and for social and political structures, institutions and relations.
Insofar as economic actors, or religious authorities, have recourse to violence to secure their positions they are acting quasi-politically, we might say. There is a tension or contradiction in Weber's remarks on this subject. He insists that politics is defined solely by its means, and not by its ends (Weber, 1978, 55). But it is clear that, for instance, the economic actor who uses violence is not, just by that fact, a fully political actor (p. 54). Political actors seek control of a territory and its people and resources (p. 55). That is, some ends are implicated. According to this analysis, gangs and bands of warriors are political actors. Of course, the ultimate political actor to date is the modern state that gets to say whether gangs and the like are, or are not, illegitimate (p. 56).
Stephen Spender has 12 entries in the index (but six of these are to footnotes), Karl Marx 17 (1), Georges Sorel 9 and Jean-Paul Sartre 7. Frantz Fanon comes third with 10, one of which is to a footnote, but in our rough estimation Fanon takes up more space than anyone else in the text.
References
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Frazer, E., Hutchings, K. On Politics and Violence: Arendt Contra Fanon. Contemp Polit Theory 7, 90–108 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300328
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300328