FANON AND ‘THE PITFALLS OF NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS’
Fanon’s work takes three related forms: firstly, sociological analyses of the struggle process and the transformation of popular consciousness, published in English under the inappropriate title of Studies in a Dying Colonialism (1989); secondly, political analysis and journalistic work, collected posthumously under the title Toward the African Revolution (1967); and thirdly, his critical reflections on the outcome of liberation as he was dying of leukaemia in his deservedly most well-known work, The Wretched of the Earth (1990).3 In all three books the dominant theme concerns the change in subjectivities among the masses of the people, the nationalist party, the state and intellectuals both in Algeria and in France. In particular, it is a popular conception of the nation, which he sees as arising when ‘ordinary’ people acquire the confidence of their power, the confidence of control over their destinies, that lies at the core of this work. It is this point that is made again and again, in remarks such as the following: ‘The living expression of the nation is the moving consciousness of the whole of the people; it is the coherent and enlightened praxis of men and women. The collective construction of a destiny is the assumption of responsibility on a historical scale’ (1990: 165, translation modified).
We have here the twin ideas that the nation is produced and that it is made – ‘imagined’, to use Benedict Anderson’s well-known term – from the actions of men and women, of people in general, and not by any structural developments (such as markets or print capitalism) or, for that matter, by any intellectual narratives (Chatterjee, 1986). This consciousness is therefore both one of the creation of the nation through the actions of people and its suppression by colonialism. This process, which Fanon sees as people transforming themselves as they make the nation, refers in Badiou’s terms to a ‘subjective becoming’; it is the ‘untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute’ (Fanon, 1990: 31). It amounts to a clear excess over what exists, over the simply extant. As we have seen, this process in Badiou’s ontology is an event for politics simply because something appears that had not previously existed (Badiou, 2006a: 285). Subjectivity is thus transformed in hitherto unimaginable ways. What appears for Fanon is precisely the nation.
For Fanon, then, the nation is constructed in practice, in political struggle by people themselves; it is a purely political notion, much as it was for Jacobin nationalism during the French Revolution. We could say that it is simply ‘presented’ as a prescriptive affirmation and that it does not ‘represent’ anything outside itself. There is no given colonial subject; subjectivation is a political process of becoming. However, the construction of this subjectivity is not a spontaneous occurrence for Fanon, but a revolution in thought. What is spontaneous is rather the Manichaean dualism of the good embodied in the native versus the evil embodied in the settler. But the nation is not in any way to be equated with a social category of the native, as it is a purely political category. In fact, many settlers ‘reveal themselves to be much, much closer to the national struggle than certain sons of the nation’ (1990: 116) while many natives are to be found on the side of colonial power; ‘consciousness slowly dawns upon truths that are only partial, limited and unstable’ (p. 117). It is militants who have found themselves thrown primarily among the people of the countryside that gradually both learn from and teach the rural masses the construction of a nation in action: ‘these politics are national, revolutionary and social and these new facts which the colonized will now come to know exist only in action’ (p. 117, translation modified). In this manner the nation is constructed through agency and is not reflective of social entities such as indigeneity, ethnicity or race. It is a nation that is made up solely of those who fight for freedom; it is a uniquely political conception. Here the subject is actually created by an ‘excessive’ subjectivity, by the practice of liberation at all levels, collective, individual, social (hence Fanon’s studies of changes in the family, of the veil, of the effect of the radio, etc.).
An underdeveloped people must prove, by its fighting power, its ability to set itself up as a nation, and by the purity of every one of its acts, that it is, even to the smallest detail, the most lucid, the most self-controlled people. But this is all very hard ... The thesis that men change at the same time as they change the world has never been so manifest as it is now in Algeria (Fanon, 1989: 24, 30).4
Yet the role of the leader, of the ‘honest intellectual’, is not to impose a ‘party line’ or his supposedly superior knowledge, but to be faithful to a politics of ‘confidence in the masses’:
To be a leader in an underdeveloped country is to know that in the end everything depends on the education of the masses, on raising the level of thought, on what is sometimes too quickly called ‘politicisation’ ... To politicise the masses ... is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to make the masses understand that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is also due to them (Fanon, 1990: 159, translation modified).
When Fanon refers to ‘we Algerians’ or to ‘we Africans’, as he does on many occasions (e.g. 1967: 196; 1989: 32; 1990: 159), it is clear that he is referring to a conception of the nation that is not based on ‘nationality’ as commonly understood. We are not in the presence here of a notion of the nation founded on indigeneity, nor is it one founded on ‘race’. Fanon was a foreigner and a non-Arab as well as not an African. Yet I also think it is important to point out that his biographer is quite mistaken to search for the source of this view in Sartrean existentialist theory and thus to maintain that ‘for Fanon, the nation is a product of the will, and a form of consciousness which is not to be defined in ethnic terms; in his view, being Algerian was a matter of willing oneself to be Algerian rather than of being born in a country called Algeria’ (Macey, 2000: 377–8). This position constitutes a misunderstanding because it fundamentally depoliticises the question by reducing it to Fanon’s psychology. This view was not simply Fanon’s; it was also that of the people involved in a struggle for national liberation in which ‘the women, the family, the children, the aged – everybody participates’, as Adolpho Gilly puts it in his introduction to Fanon (1989: 8), while continuing by noting that those who risked their lives for independence ‘were not only Frenchmen or Arabs; they were also Spaniards, Italians, Greeks – the entire Mediterranean supported an Algeria in arms’ (p. 15). This subjectivity, then, did not belong to the subject Fanon alone, but was the subjectivity of the sequence; it was that which was ‘obvious’ because its obviousness had been produced by the politics of the situation. In any case, this identity (Algerian) was not just chosen by Fanon; it also refers to how others saw him as well as the other ‘foreigners’ active in the struggle. It is in fact a purely political identity. Fanon’s conception of the nation is not a matter of a psychological act of will; it is rather a question of a subject being produced by fidelity to the collective subjective politics of the (emancipatory) situation.
In sum, the point is to recognise that politics exists beyond identity and that it cannot therefore be reduced to the psychology of individuals. Such a politics consists fundamentally of a politics of affirmation, which is at the core of all emancipatory politics and which is both singular and universal in nature. Indeed, it is only on this subjective basis that an inclusive society can be built; only a politics of affirmation can effectuate a conception of the nation that breaks completely from notions of indigeneity. Thus: ‘we want an Algeria open to all, in which every kind of genius may grow ... in the new society that is being built, there are only Algerians. From the outset, therefore,