The scholarship on Frantz Fanon’s theorization of violence is crowded with interpretations that follow the Arendtian paradigm of violence. These interpretations often discuss whether violence is instrumental or non-instrumental in Fanon’s work. This reading, I believe, is the result of approaching Fanon through Hannah Arendt’s framing of violence, i.e. through a binary paradigm of instrumental versus non-instrumental violence. Even some Fanon scholars who question Arendt’s reading of Fanon, do so by employing a similar binary logic, hence repeating the same either/or (...) paradigm of instrumental versus non-instrumental violence. I aim to challenge such interpretations of Fanon by demonstrating that in the context of anticolonial armed struggle in which Fanon writes, the either/or framework of the instrumental/non-instrumental binary of violence cannot fully capture his perspective. Violence can indeed be conceived as having both constructive and instrumental aspects. My argument is supported by Fanon’s corpus, including his 1960 Accra speech, “Why We Use Violence” in Alienation and Freedom. This piece, I suggest, together with Fanon’s other writings, poses a direct challenge to the Arendtian binary of violence. My analysis resists positioning the difference between Arendt and Fanon through the instrumental/non-instrumental binary. By using Judith Butler’s notion of “frame” I complicate their difference and argue Arendt’s framing of violence prevents her from apprehending Fanon and – more importantly – interpretations of Fanon based on this Arendtian frame of violence inevitably lead to misinterpretations. (shrink)

Este artículo aborda las dimensiones de la historicidad y la liberación en la obra de Frantz Fanon. A partir de allí la lectura se concentra en el problema de la experiencia colonial y las formas que adquiere la imaginación de los procesos históricos, filosóficos y políticos en la respuesta crítica de Fanon. En particular se destaca el carácter heterogéneo y ambivalente de su escritura vis-à-vis las opciones abiertas por otros pensadores latinoamericanos. Así entonces, a la par de examinar estas dimensiones (...) se propone una serie de problemas para la reflexión en el campo de la teoría crítica y en lo que podría definirse como políticas de la historia. (shrink)

The publication of the Phenomena of power: Authority, domination, and violence into English allows for the English-speaking world to engage the work of Heinrich Popitz. Popitz provides a thorough and organized description of how power operates in social relations that should be valuable to any scholar of the human sciences. This essay is supportive of Popitz’s project, but seeks a critical engagement by extending the analysis on violence and technical power. I argue that reading Popitz alongside the decolonial thinker, Franz (...) Fanon and the media ecologist, Marshall McLuhan can provide important correctives. In particular, Fanon’s analysis that the colonial use of rhetorical power to dehumanize the oppressed and McLuhan’s comment on the importance of the control of medium are missing in an otherwise very thorough philosophical anthropology on the phenomena of power. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race provides up-to-date explanation and analyses by leading scholars of contemporary issues in African American philosophy and philosophy of race. These original essays encompass the major topics and approaches in this emerging philosophical subfield that supports demographic inclusion and diversity while at the same time strengthening the conceptual arsenal of social and political philosophy. Over the course of the volume's ten topic-based sections, ideas about race held by Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche are (...) supplemented by suppressed thought from the African diaspora, early twentieth-century African American perspectives and Native-, Asian-, and Latin-, American views. The contributors bring philosophical analysis to bear on the status of racial divisions as categories of humanity in the biological sciences, as well as within contemporary criticism and conceptual analysis. Essays present the special applications of American philosophy and continental philosophy to ideas of race as methodological alternatives to more analytic approaches. As a collection of analyses and assessments of 'race' in the real world, the volume pays trenchant and relevant attention to historical and contemporary racism and what it means to say that 'race' and racial identities are socially constructed. The essays analyze contemporary social issues including the importance of racial difference and identity in education, public health, medicine, IQ and other standardized tests, and sports. Additionally, the essays consider the societal limitations and structures provided by public policy and law. As a critical theory, the volume compares the study of race to feminism. Historical and contemporary, academic and popular, racisms pertaining to male and female gender receive special consideration throughout the volume. While this comprehensive collection may have the effect of a textbook, each of the original essays is a fresh and authentic development of important present thought. (shrink)

Perhaps no other novel has received as much attention from moral philosophers as South African writer J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace . The novel is ethically compelling and yet no moral theory explains its force. Despite clear Kantian moments, neither rationalism nor self-respect can account for the strange ethical task that the protagonist sets for himself. Calling himself the dog man, like the ancient Cynics, this shamelessly cynical protagonist takes his cues for ethics not from humans but from animals. He does (...) not however claim much in the way of empathy or understanding of animals, and his own odd motives remain a puzzle throughout the stages of his ethical transformation. Many scholars approach Coetzee’s text through an ethics of alterity, and even argue that Disgrace is exemplary in this regard. Kristeva’s rendition of alterity ethics brings us close to the novel’s vision, and yet the novel points towards a more primordial basis for ethics in the search for meaning through the human encounter with other animal species. (shrink)

While early theory and research on cosmopolitanism have been criticized for their European focus, a number of works have incorporated non-Eurocentric perspectives. This article contributes to this literature by examining the colonial production of cosmopolitan orientations as evidenced in the writings of Frantz Fanon. Colonialism has been treated as a deviation in the historical sociology of cosmopolitanism, but Fanon helps disclose how colonialism has also contributed to a particular form of cosmopolitanism that has been overlooked in existing theory and research: (...) postcolonial cosmopolitanism. This form of cosmopolitanism, forged from the spaces of colonialism’s contradictions, emphasizes global citizenship and humanism but strives to remember rather than repress the history of modern empire. It seeks to negate colonialism’s contradictions and thus realize the ideals which Europe had initially pronounced but which it failed to institute. (shrink)

In a world where, as Martin Heidegger puts it, ‘homelessness’ has become its destiny, the colonized/Oriental Other that once exclusively constituted and was neglected from the matrix of the Western imaginary has no longer maintained its distance as ‘out there’. Instead it is embodied as a ‘refugee’ appearing on the borders of the ‘home’ with its complex cultural, colonial history. The majority of refugee studies feature the refugee as the outcome of the interplay of the two concepts of the ‘rights (...) of man’ and the ‘rights of the citizen’, who resides on the threshold of nativity and nationality as the limit phenomenon of the nation-state stands before the law in its totality but cannot be classified under any of its provisions. However, this thesis investigates the philosophical underpinnings of the emergence of the phenomenon of the refugee that appears at the threshold of one’s own experience of home as an alien who does not belong to the privileged normative structure of the home. Drawing on Anthony Steinbock’s approach to the Husserlian phenomenology of generativity, this study phenomenologically examines the possibility of an ethical relation in the Homeworld and Alienworld encounter. Focusing on the mode of givenness of the alien to the home in interpersonal relations, the main question of the thesis is:If phenomenologically the Other is accessible to home in a mode of inaccessibility, then how can the ‘I’ initiate an ethical relation to the Other?As the result of addressing this question, building on Edmund Husserl’s late project of ethical renewal and Bernhard Waldenfels’ phenomenological ethics of Responsivity alongside Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of givenness, I develop a new understanding of the experience of violence versus morally experiencing the Other. Although James Dodd contributed greatly to the development of the phenomenology of violence, this thesis gives a new perspective to the concept of ‘violence’ versus the ‘ethical’ from the perspective of types of phenomena and various modes of givenness. From a phenomenological perspective, by analyzing the mode of givenness peculiar to the experience of the Other in the intersubjective realm, I propose that violence is a disposition toward receiving the Other in experience as a denigrated phenomenon. However, an ethical relation to the Other means to receiving the Other as saturated phenomenon that is non-objectifiable. Chapter One discusses how phenomenology as critique can be a critical reflection on experience in order to justify and turn back to the question that concerns the refugee subject as ‘an alien other’. Applying Besinnung enables me to unravel the meaning structure that is operative in colonial subjectification and de-subjectification and the concept of violence that is embedded in the colonial situation. Dodd’s phenomenological account of violence and Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of ‘the camp’ gives me the opportunity to analyze the current manifestation of colonial violence in Australian offshore refugee detention camps. Considering various sorts of violence that are operative in the colonial structure, Chapter Two focuses on a specific type of violence that is hidden in the cognitive structure of our consciousness: epistemic violence. Building on Miranda Fricker’s notion of ‘epistemic injustice’ and Husserl’s phenomenological notion of ‘horizon-structure of experience’ that he proposed in Experience and judgment I develop a phenomenological analysis of the horizon structure of experiencing two types of epistemic injustice, which are testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. Phenomenologically thematizing the intersubjective structure of the home, Chapter Three investigates the way the institutional violence of the colonial system can affect meaning constitution. A regressive inquiry into the pregiven lifeworld of the colonial situation as a violent situation that emerges out of the disrupted world of sense, the chapter enquires into the relation of the ‘I’ with the ‘alien’, and asks how does the ‘I’ experience the Other and constitute it as alien? Doing so, I argue that I experience the other as always present in its absence in a way that its presence is withdrawn from the accessibility of home as inaccessible. Chapter Four examines the mode of experiencing the alien Other by the home as a liminal experience in which the alienworld is inaccessible and incomprehensible to home. Furthermore, building on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Steinbock, I intend to liberate the phenomenon of the alien from the constitutive conditions of the home by discussing how the Other person is absolved from a disposal relation with me. This is to discover the most profound relation to the other that is given in moral experience. Chapter Five analyzes the moral experience of the Other in terms of the modality of the givenness of the Other, and in terms of the type of phenomena given in vertical givenness in the intersubjective realm. Reading Steinbock together with Marion, I explore the type of phenomenality of the alien Other who is given in the mode of revelation as a saturated phenomenon. I argue that by abandoning the givenness of the Other as a saturated phenomenon, I open the possibility of violence toward the Other. This way, I propose that the two concepts of violence and ethics are phenomenological orientations toward the reception of the call of the Other as a saturated phenomenon. (shrink)

This essay explores some conceptual and diagnostic frameworks to advance epistemic decolonization in the US philosophical profession. A central focus is the distinction between those philosophies of formerly colonized peoples that are culturally alterior or, simply, alterior and those that are analectical in the Dusselian sense of emerging from a subordinated political position. The paper begins by reflecting upon connections between coloniality, the alterior, and the analectical to frame the discussion of epistemic decolonization in the philosophy profession. It then considers (...) a knower's core theoretic reconstruction in the task of epistemic decolonization and identifies some ambiguities in reconciling alterior traditions with analectical theoretical reconstruction. The work of Charles Mills and Enrique Dussel are considered as case studies. The paper concludes with critical reflections on the institutional network of canon, curriculum, and other conceptual and credentialization structures that constitute institutional Eurocentrism. (shrink)

Ubuntu has been described as an African moral philosophy that finds actions grounded on good will to be right if they promote shared identity. I contend that freedom of expression is consistent with ubuntu. Freedom of expression enables people to be the most they can be, enabling the establishment of communities in which people can live together harmoniously. With reference to the violent South African society, the study examines broadcast media violence that may harm children to draw new insights concerning (...) the moral philosophy of ubuntu, media practice, and media literacy. (shrink)

Most readers of Habermas would not classify him as an existential thinker. The view of Habermas as a philosopher in German Idealist and Critical traditions from Kant to Hegel and Marx to the Frankfurt School prevails among Continental as much as among analytic philosophers. And the mainstream Anglo-American reception of his work and politics is shaped by the approaches of formal analysis rather than those of existential and social phenomenology or even current American pragmatism. One may argue that both these (...) readings eclipse richer existential dimensions of a thinker who challenges the notorious methodological and political splits among analytic, Continental and pragmatist orientations. I argue that Habermas’ critical relation to Heidegger’s a historical history of Being and his misguided political career cannot explain a competing narrative of his own affirmative appropriation of existential-ethical dimensions of thought and activism. Second, if one sets in the foreground this competing narrative, there emerges a weak thesis, whether or not a plausible complementarity between the communications critical social theory and concrete existential categories can be established. Third, one may inquire further into a stronger thesis whether or not this link must be developed in order to render Habermas’ own theory of a communicatively competent self sufficiently concrete and critical. (shrink)

Political theorists are increasingly drawn to the recovery of anticolonial thinkers as global figures. Frantz Fanon is largely excluded from these discussions because of his presumed commitment to the nation-state and its territorialist assumptions. This essay claims, by contrast, that Fanon’s writings reveal an alternative way of thinking about worldmaking, less as a question of political and economic institution-building spearheaded by leaders than as a multiscalar project that permeates the production of the built environment and the creation of selves. I (...) show how Fanon challenges the dichotomy between the global and the national by seeking to transform not just the national scale in relation to the international, but also the corporeal, urban, rural, and regional scales of an imperially configured world. In order to read Fanon as a scalar thinker and to highlight aspects of his thought that have been relatively neglected, I draw on concepts from geography, and specifically scalar analysis, which, I demonstrate, allows political theorists to develop a richer understanding of the operations of power in colonial contexts and how they can be restructured to inaugurate more liberated ways of being human. (shrink)

Human skin, photography, and consumer culture combine to produce striking images designed to promote visions of the good life. Branding and marketing imagery mobilize skin to resonate and communicate with consumers, which influences the meaning-making possibilities of skin more broadly. Representations of skin in consumer culture, including marketing communications, are anything but ‘blank’ backgrounds or ‘neutral’ meaning spaces. We analyse how skin ‘appears’ to work, and how its appearance in consumer culture imagery reveals ideological and pedagogical aspects of skin. Building (...) upon psychodynamic and interdisciplinary understandings of skin, we discuss dimensions of the body that feed marketing communications and branding. We highlight representational fetishization and the epidermal schema as conceptual tools to interrogate the commodification of skin and as constitutive elements in processes of skin commodification. We provide theoretical insights to address the ways in which skin is implicated in new and emerging concerns of digital representational practices. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper presents Husserl’s concept of Europe as a postulate of phenomenological reason. I begin by showing that a certain interpretation of history is necessary in order for phenomenology to be possible as science. I then show how Husserl’s concept of Europe enables this interpretation. Working with a general definition of postulation that brings Husserl into conversation with Kant, I examine the motives and truth conditions for asserting that Europe is what Husserl claims it to be. I highlight the critical (...) import of Husserl’s concept by identifying three criteria it establishes for authentically European history: denationalization, renaissance and Europeanization. I conclude by considering the inherently controversial nature of “Europe” and outline the space for a contest of concepts that would serve the same theoretical–practical function. (shrink)

Fleur Johns argues that the contraposition of a ‘bottom-up’ approach of politics of prototypical technique rather than the ‘top-down’ politics of the master plan or normative principle no longer seems as straightforwardly radical as it appeared when James C Scott posited the value of local knowledge or métis against grand plans of high modernization, just over 20 years ago. This paper seeks to follow Johns’ call, ‘to capture and probe some of the effects of sensibility, rationality or style widely reproduced (...) in the details of development work’. It draws upon fieldwork in Nairobi to open up a discussion of a shift in sensibility from a ‘bottom-up’ or ‘postliberal’ approach to a framing of open-ended encounter. The paper critiques this imaginary of relational encounter by engaging contemporary work in critical black studies. It suggests that the problem of critique is that it reproduces the problems of governing imaginaries, continually seeking to rework the human subject via adaptive capacities, sensitivities to difference and openness to alterity, while leaving intact the coloniality of being, the antiblack world. (shrink)

La circulación de la escritura de Frantz Fanon en medios intelectuales y políticos de los años sesenta y setenta en la Argentina, ofrece la oportunidad de analizar dos dimensiones centrales de sus tesis sobre el colonialismo: por un lado, el carácter revisionista que ellas tienen con respecto a visiones eurocéntricas de la modernidad y, por otro, las formas específicas en que se articularon con algunas posiciones intelectuales del período. Recorremos algunos aspectos de tres lecturas de Fanon: las de Francisco Delich, (...) José Sazbón y Carlos Fernández Pardo y las ponemos en relación con los debates poscoloniales y descoloniales acerca de la colonialidad del saber y la diferencia colonial. The circulation of Frantz Fanon's writings in the political and intellectual milieu of the sixties and seventies in Argentina offers the opportunity to analyze two central dimensions of his theses about colonialism: first, their revisionist nature in relation to Eurocentric visions of modernity, and second, the specific ways in which they articulated with some intellectual points of view from that period. We visit here three readings of Fanon, by Francisco Delich, José Sazbón and Carlos Fernández Pardo, and place them in relation to postcolonial and decolonial debates about the coloniality of knowledge and colonial difference. (shrink)

This article critically addresses the view that ubuntu values limiting freedom of expression to what elders find agreeable. I present a heterogeneous argument in favor of an attractive conception of ubuntu that values individuals by investing in the worth of community. I assume that socioeconomic development is directly related to the extent to which people are granted freedom of expression. The point is that freedom of expression enables everyone to be respected and governed in ways that are associated with the (...) establishment of communities where everyone can be the most they can be. (shrink)

Resignifying the Universal: Critical Commentary on the Postcolonial African Identity and Development The dimension of the debate on the relation between the universal and the particular in African philosophy has been skewed in favour of the universalists who argued that the condition for the possibility of an African conception of philosophy cannot be achieved outside the "universal' idea of the philosophical enterprise. In this sense, the ethno-philosophical project and its attempt to rescue the idea of an African past necessary for (...) the reconstruction of an African postcolonial identity and development becomes a futile one. A recent commentator even argues that works concerning African identity are now totally irrelevant and misguided. In this essay, I will be arguing, on the contrary, that the universalist's argument, much like its critique of ethno-philosophical reason, mistakes the nature, significance and necessity of such a resistance (rather than original) identity that the ethno-philosophical project promises. I will also argue that the fabrication of such an identity facilitates the avoidance of an uncritical submersion in the universal as well as a proper conception of an African development. This, furthermore, is the only avenue by which the imperialistic ontological space of universal humanism, in which most universalistic claims are rooted, can be made more polygonal and mutually beneficial for alternative cultural particulars. (shrink)