91 | Fanon’s Dialectic of Violence

whenever you offer a definition, the first thing we philosophers do is come up with a counter example. We're annoying. But like dehumanization seems to be the worst kind of. Yeah, I know the worst. Sorry. By the way, sorry, we've made a 90 episode long philosophy podcast. Hello, this is what's left of philosophy. I'm Will. Here with me today is Lilian, Gil, and Owen. Hey, y'all. Hey. Hello. Stop everyone. Today, we'll be discussing the revolutionary anti-colonial text of Franz Fanon's The Retrieve of the Earth. For many of our listeners, this is perhaps a text that needs no introduction. It was Fanon's most well-known writing. Translated into English, even before Black Skin White masks, we do have an episode in that. Go check it out. It served as a theoretical source of inspiration for movements such as the Black Panther Party in the United States. Publish in 1961, Rechit offers Fanon's analysis of the emancipatory possibilities and potential pitfalls of the Algerian Revolution. From 1954 to 1962, the Algerian National Liberation Front, or the FLN, waged an anti-colonial struggle for independence from France. Fanon, for his part, was a member of the FLN, writing a number of articles for their newspaper, "L Mujaheed." Many of these articles can be found in the book a dying colonialism that contains some of my personal favorite essays on the role of the radio, not the Algerian struggle, and there's also another essay on the tensions within the practices of medicine in the colonial situation. Throughout these writings, Fanon traces the dialectical transformation of colonial tools of domination, such as the radio, and "western practices of medicine, into tools of liberation." On this score, Rechit is no different. Now, I just used the word "I hate" dialectical. It is one of the two essential concepts for grasping the famous or infamous "Chapter on violence in Rechit." The other concept is that of "situation," on which I will briefly discuss near the end of my remarks. My hesitancy with using the word "diallectical" is due to the fact that many people use the word "demean." These two things are related, or sure seems like there's a process going on here, or you think I was inconsistent my argument? That's just because you're not thinking dialectically. I call this the "walt-wittening defense," where he writes and leaves of "glarus." "Do I contradict myself?" Very well then. I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes. Fun story. I used that once with a philosopher, friend of mine, Megan Hisco, a guest on the pod, and she said, "You know, people just call that inconsistent. She really ate me up there." The hangleheads will hate to hear this, but these uses of dialectical are not wholly wrong, but they are "waltfully insufficient." What they are missing is the idea of a qualitative transformation or leap of a concept. Side note, if you are a new listener and want to hear more about dialectics, you should go check out our "What is dialectic series?" Now, what do I mean by leap? In wretched, phenomen politically, encyclologically reconstructs the process of violence between the French colonizers and the FLN. For those unfamiliar with the Algerian revolution, you should know that violence is not a metaphor here. The French beat, tortured, experimented on, and violated Algerian women and men in myriad ways. I won't repeat the visceral examples from the law and offers in this introduction, but suffice it to say that the French did not fight a "clean war." They did not even acknowledge that it had been the war until 1999, and Macron only offered a sort of apology in 2021. The movement of the chapters one of internalization and externalization. The Algerians internalize the degradation and aggression from the French colonial forces. It wreaks havoc on their psyche and their social bonds, by inculcating feelings of rage, shame, and apathy. However, the state of internalization cannot last forever. The violence boils over and is externalized back into the world and back on to others. Fnanz does not offer a romantic account of this process as he notes that this externalization of aggression is first against other Algerians, or is sublimated through dance and other social practices. Insofar as the externalization remains in this place, being externalized against one's fellows or only through cultural practices, he thinks there is no leap or change in the quality of the violence. It is only when the externalization of violence takes the form, and that's an important word I think for Fnanz, the form of decolonization. I.e., the proper object of the source of violence, French colonizers, is overtaken by the self-activity of Algerians as subjects. In other words, the externalized violence takes a political form. To be rather technical, Fnanz is reconstructing the transformation of those who had been objects of violence into subjects and those who had taken themselves as the subjects of history and progress, becoming the properly apprehended object of constraint, limitation, and domination. This reversal of subject object is the core, or to use Marx's language and capital, I would say the cell form of the chapter on violence. Without an appreciation for the subject object relation, the chapter becomes either mere sociological description or the arbitrary endorsement of violence. However, from what I've said, you would be right to ask, where is the dialectical leap? Is this not a re-instantiation of the dreaded cycle of violence, a phrase people in the West love the use when talking about almost anywhere else in the world? Is Fnanz not simply endorsing revenge, that the colonizers have the right to make themselves moral monsters like the French? A merely external reading of Fnanz could lead people to these conclusions. After all, violence is violence, no matter who makes use of it. One could try to help Fnanz by claiming that his positions at counter-violence is justified, but the cost would be making Fnanz out to be a rather anadine contemporary political philosopher, who is only interested in judging whether an act is justified. No shame, but I think there's more going on than him just being an analytical philosopher. More seriously, it does not escape the problem that Fnanz set out all the way back in black skin white masks. It does not get the colonized beyond being merely reactive rather than actionable, and thus ironically does not break the cycle of violence. The qualitative leap that can only be comprehended dialectically is the understanding that the form of violence that the Algerian's employ has its concept, its germ, the principal of self-ammancipation. Comparatively, the form of violence the French employ has as its concept, domination, and submission. It is only from the elaboration of self-ammancipation that qualitatively new society can be developed by the Algerians. So while the violence between the French and the Algerians may look the same from the outside, as it were, in reality the quality of the violence has been fundamentally altered, with this said, allow me the quote Fnanz. Quote, decolonization is an historical process. There's the process talk. In other words, it can only be understood, it can only find its significance and become self-coherent in so far as we can discern the history-making movement which gives it form and substance. But how do we make this discernment? Fnanz goes on to say, decolonization is the encounter between two can generally antagonistic forces, so there's a relationship between two things in contradiction. It focuses on and fundamentally altars being, and it infuses a new rhythm specific to a new generation of men with a new language and a new humanity, and that is the qualitative leap I've been talking about. But all of this can only be discerned in so far as we integrate our analyses into the colonial situation. There's the second concept of situation. You can understand this as the historical context through which the colonial violence emerges. For Fnanz, the situation precedes the actors and thus must grasp the character and form the situation if we are to understand the truth of decolonization and violence. Without the concept of situation, we will not be able to make sense of the internalization, externalization process between subject and object. Furthermore, it is only with the abolition of the colonial situation that the leap of freedom can be actualized. However, earlier I said, phenom politically and psychologically reconstructs the process of violence, but you may have noticed I have really only focused on the political reconstruction or the externalization half of the internalization externalization dyad. No doubt this is what Fnanz is most known for, but we should not forget that Fnanz was trained in practicing psychiatrist. He saw firsthand what violence does to the subjectivity not only of the victims but those who employ violence, both colonized or incolonized. There's a tendency to read the first chapter in violence as Fnanz finalized. word before he moves on the discussions of nationalism and spontaneity. But the last main chapter of the book is a collection of his case files for Algerian and French patients during the war. And yes, before Fanon resigned his position at the French Psychiatric Hospital, he treated French colonizers who were traumatized by their own torture of Algerians. It's crazy. Indeed, in one particular case of a French torture who terrorizes his wife and children home, Fanon notes that, quote, "He asked me in plain language to help him torture Algerian patriots without having a guilty conscience, without having any behavioral problems, and with total peace of mind." This last chapter, titled Colonial War and Mental Disorder, strikes a rather dour note to end the text on the promise of revolution. He writes at the beginning, quote, "But the war goes on, and for many years to come we shall be bandaging the countless and sometimes indelible wounds inflicted on our people by the colonial onslaught." He goes on to say, "Perhaps the reader will find these notes in psychiatry out of place or in timely in a book like this. There's absolutely nothing we can do about that. We had no controller of the fact that the psychiatric phenomenon, the mental behavioral disorders emerging from this war, have loomed so large among the perpetrators of pacification and the pacified population." A truly dialectical comprehension of Fanon's concept of decolonization must integrate this double helix of political externalization and psychological internalization and bring out their tensions and contradictions. I will conclude with an example. Fanon describes treating a patient and participating in a successful struggle for independence in another African country. Fanon, of course, does not say which. They did so by placing a bomb that killed ten people. The patient suffers anxiety and suicidal ideation on the anniversary of the explosion because he has no way of knowing if he did not kill some innocent passers-by. Fanon notes, "This militant who never for a moment had a thought of recanting fully realized the price he had to pay in his person for national independence." Such borderline cases pose the question of responsibility in the context of revolution. As we think that either victory or the justice of a cause, all the magli reconstructs the psychology of the subject, Fanon writes in the footnote about this patient, "In other words, our actions never cease to haunt us. The way they are ordered, organized, and reasoned can be a posteriori, radically transformed, is by no means the least of the traps history and its main determination set for us. But can we escape vertigo? Who dares claim that vertigo does not pray on every life?" Why even include this? Where are the "new men" of the first chapter? I think it is a shame that people rarely discuss these lines because without them, we lack the comprehension of the double helix between politics and psychology that animated much of Fanon's theory and practice. I sense that the tendency to screen this chapter out of discussion of Fanon and violence is that it lacks the heroism and transformative verve of the first chapter. Indeed it might seem as if the chapter negates the argument of the first. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead the lesson is that Fanon saw violence soberly without the unreflective excitement at some, even those who agree with him have attributed to him. He saw the psychological shattering of violence and still could grasp its necessity. Our task, I think, is to grasp why. It is only through this dialectical structure of the double helix between politics and psychology and situations of violence that Fanon continues to have something to say to us. It is through this double helix that we can elaborate Fanon's unfinished concept of freedom. So I apologize for the long introduction but I wanted to set up the readings that we did and the stakes of it and all of that. But with that I will conclude and I will hand it off to you all. What did you all think of the reading? Well, yeah, I'll start. That was a really wonderful introduction. Thanks, Will. I am really happy. I was saying this to you before we hit record. I'm really happy that you had a look at the mental disorder chapter from the end of the book. I think you've got to be right about why it is that this sort of falls out of the discussion because the tone is very different. I think that if you only read chapter one of wretched and I've been guilty of this for a long time, it's the way that it gets taught most often. For instance, and it's an understandable why, right? You said it's a transformative verb to it. And it also does contain the most convincing argument in favor of the necessity of violence, especially for emancipatory and liberatory struggle that you're likely to find anywhere as far as I'm concerned. But you can also, if that's all you look at, walk away with a very sort of one-sided to insist with you that this is a dialectical thinker. A very one-sided understanding of what it is the phono is up to and what he actually takes to be true here, where it seems as though you get all these lines, right? The emancipatory violence is this transformative act in which everything changes. And one becomes part of this movement of a new humanity in throwing off the shackles of the oppressor in this compartmentalized world in which there is nothing but dehumanization. Right, that also sounds dope. That should sound tight. Sick. I love the death of dehumanization. We fucking love the dehumanization. I love the birth of the new human being. Let's go. And then he gets to the last chapter and he's like, all right, and then like, what are we going to do with these kids? They're 13 years old. They just live in this context where like they killed one of their classmates and he's like, why? And they're like, what do you mean? And it's devastating. Yeah. It's devastating. And so like he's very, he said sober. That's the word for it, right? It's not uncritical celebratory. It's not like just like loud atory that this is like, it's going to be fun and cool. It's like, no, this is a tragic necessity that he's struggling to articulate. And I just think that's really important. So I was really grateful for it. Yeah, it's really, it's really jarring to read like not not the like the middle sections but to read those two, the front and the end together because the language that Fanon uses when he talks about violence in that first chapter, he connects it to, like, forces of enlightenment that there's a therapeutic element to it that it restores like dignity, that there's a kind of not just the material necessity of trying to undo the colonial situation violently, but there's also a kind of psychic necessity to restoring one's sense of self, one's dignity, one's standing. So it has not only that material necessity also has a kind of psychic necessity in order to become free. And yet that thing, which is psychically necessary, is also psychically destructive. And so one gets this sense that trying to figure it out that it's hard to, it's hard to understand a way out that doesn't involve like deep psychic harm because not doing anything, remaining subjugated, remaining pacified as he puts it, right? Remaining pacified absolutely distorts and mutilates like one's subject to. And yet like the attempts to violently get out will also leave like incredible scars, distortions, symptoms. And so I really appreciated it in your intro the way you frame like the tension between these two. And I honestly don't know exactly how Fanon sees, I don't think there's a resolution to it, but how he ways these two considerations. Yeah, in response to what Owen was saying, I mean, you know, the reason why I want you to be able to read the concluding chapter is not because at the end of the day I want to say see, to take some sort of more or less extent of see violence is bad. So the people who are colonized and let's not be around the bush, those who are colonized today in Israel's heinous war, we can call it that against Gaza. Fanon didn't draw the conclusion of so people should just take it. They should just avoid it. But I think what is important is that there is a deeper principle that play into the deployment of violence than it's simply being violence as such. He is hoping that the violence articulates what I call the sort of a principle self-amantopation. But what you're saying, oh, and you know, the thing is, I don't want to do the whole thing of saying, well, partially it is you, Fanon graced the finished book because he knew he was dying from cancer. And so one might look at it as you know, it seems like the book might not be as finished as it could be. I think it's too easy. I think, and I'll see what you all think about it. I think Fanon searching for the mediation that will allow psychic and political emancipation to mutually enforce one another. And I think one of his answers was the work of creating the nation. And it would be in that collaborative, cooperative work that you know, at a sufficient, let's say, a sufficient level of scale that you know, those who participated in the anti-colonial effort will be able to process their experience and you know, normatively arranged such that it no longer is like you're almost a stick in the machine of their working. Whether we find that answer convincing or not, I think that's the answer he's looking for. So it's important to try to maybe say that you know, say that he tries to offer an answer so that you know, listeners don't think that, oh, so it turns out for them. non-actually thinks violence is never necessary and we just only define a good therapist. That's not where he ends up. But I thought it was important to show that the movement forward politically doesn't necessarily mean that there will be the same type of movement forward psychologically he thinks. I want to ask about the dynamic of, I forget how you put it well, like it repression and then externalization. Oh, internalization, externalization. Internalization and externalization of violence. Do you think that this is a classically like psychoanalytic view of psychic power or do you feel like he's up to something else? Like is this a repression? Reality principle is like kind of problem. I mean, I know it's not the same, but is that this similar dynamic that he's talking about or is it a shift away from that in some important way? I think it's similar in so far as there could be, I guess a few years ago, all of his psychiatric writings were collected in a single volume. It's massive stuff. And I think the work is just not being done of who phenomenally is actually reading in psychiatry and all of that. Yes, he had read some Freud, but even in black and white mass, you see him becoming disenchanted with Freud and he thinks it's too a historical. He has this joke in black and white mass where he's like, yeah, the rifle in the dream of the colonized, it doesn't represent the penis. No, it represents the rifle that's been pointed at him in his actual life. So one of them says, he buys the idea that our organism responds to our environment. And he's working with a theory that new, and he's sort of psychic pain, will have some sort of also physical symptom. But I think that's as far as it goes. And now he's trying to move away from a sort of trans-historical architecture. Moving more towards a concrete historical explanation of how we become actionable beings, how we interact. And he actually, if you read the violence chapter, he constantly comes back to the word work, how we work on the world. And for him, I think it means how we externalize, but also bring the world back into us. Yeah, I guess the reason I asked is because, so this was also my intuition that if there was kind of like a Freudian background here at all, which I wasn't sure, that there does seem to be like a criticism of that a historical, like the kinds of things I would say about psychoanalysis. I think he might likewise be saying, but part of what he's searching for, I was wondering if it was okay right to put it this way, is like, what would create a shift in the reality principle? Like what would make it change shape? Because that's like a concept that Freud uses that like feminists and various other social philosophers will criticize for like having a structure that isn't, that is a social stuff. And I think it's not, I think people, they're kind of like back away from psychoanalysis or don't when they get stuck on how to shift the social content of that around. So that's like what I was thinking of when you were talking about the link between the psychological and the political. I think the reality principle for him is the situation. You know, again, I want to make it clear even when he's doing the case files, he says explicitly, all of these disorders we assume that they are drawn from the situation first and then they appear in the individual. And so the, to use the kind of literature, use of the reality principle, the situation represents a type of horizon of activity and it can appear as if it's unsurpassable. But he wants to show that no, that reality principle is not reality as such. That's why he uses this kind of fluorid metaphor of decolonization, almost creating a new reality. And you know, I'd like to hear what you all think about. I never quite know what to do with him saying it's like a tabularasa. It wipes the slate clean. And it seems like for him, he means it's uprooting the reality principle or the situation. It makes possible a type of invention of creativity that could not happen under current conditions. But the reason why I don't know what to make of it is, but then you get to these case files and it's like, where is the tabularasa? So yeah, I don't have a fully fledged answer, honestly. I mean, it's a very sort of, I understand it as a very Marxian sort of thing, right? It's that line, right? Man create history, but under conditions, not of their own choosing. Like situations away. And this is someone on Twitter when we posted, we were going to make a, a, a, a, a, a, in an episode, I won't name them, but mention like, oh, I hope you talk about the critique of that. That's the reason. Like, there's a lot here. It's a search in concept situation in a lot of ways. And also that dynamic of internalization, externalization is something that he's trying to work out in the CDR. You know, we have practice and counter-praxis and finality and all this sort of stuff. And our ways of thinking about how one is able to sort of exercise a minimal degree of agency or autonomy, but only within circumscribed limits that themselves turn out to be mutable and variable. It's not as though the situation is given once and for all, but also that, you know, what for no is specifically interested in is the sort of political exigency and psychopathological consequences of this precise kind of situation, this precise kind of situation called that of colonization, in which I think the, I mean, I'd be curious to hear what you all think. I think that the overriding principle, what distinguishes this from anything else is the fact of dehumanization. You know, there's more we could say, perhaps, about like, you know, what distinguishes this or that colonial situation or, you know, whenever you offer a definition, the first thing we philosophers do is come up with a counter example we're annoying. But like dehumanization seems to be the worst kind of, yeah, I know the worst. Sorry. Anyway. But yeah, I don't know the fact of dehumanization, like there's, I don't, I don't think there is tabular asset in the sense of like the situation is a faced entirely, but something about what becomes possible and in through anti-colonial, decolonial struggle is something like opening a crack of a window onto a world where dehumanization isn't just given as a fact, something like that. I don't know if that's sufficient. History, history is the, it's the, if there's prehistory in history, I think that's the Marxian stuff. And he employs that language. The prehistory of humanity is literally like how Marx talks about that. No, and then history might, the beginning of the real history of humanity might in fact be the top. I mean, I was wondering if the only way you get a clean conceptual break like that is if you think about prehistory and history because what's starting now? Like what, what would you be? Yeah, I think that's, I think that's right. Because the language that he uses at the end of the violence chapter where he talks about the fate of the third world and moving forward like how decolonization and like liberated society should proceed. He's very much like he's put so really strong emphasis on like this is when the new human can be created. Obviously like the violent part of decolonization is a necessary element of that. But he says like between even amongst Europeans and he has this appeal to the European proletariat to say like this is the chance to create a new human and a new humanity. It's like deeply universalist at that moment, right? He's, you know, so that, I think that's a good reading of what that time of the Raza means. It's not, it doesn't show up the day after the colonizers kicked out. It's like it might be under the banner of a new international, like a new international or a new internationalism. A new human is possible. Europe will have to play his part. And so obviously we'll formally colonize people. But I think that's, yeah, I like that. Yeah, I mean clearly, I also like that we have the end of prehistory in the beginning of history because he keeps coming back to that. So, you know, for those who haven't read it, you know, one of the thematics he keeps coming back to is that colonialism is a type of petrification. There's a French word, substantialization is translated as right reification. I don't know if that's the French translation of Lukach or something like that. But anyway, this idea that, you know, for so long colonized have been regarded as if they were not a part of the historical creation of human freedom. And so it's important to know that part of the fire of violence is that the colonized seeing themselves as a part of history and feeling themselves as being active again. He loves using stuff like you're being on the move. He uses them, you know, and now I don't think that they're really just metaphors about the sort of working out of the muscles and all of that. I think he's probably also literal there. And he's he's thinking that this feeling of movement and creation, that even the proletarian Europe, they want that as well. They want to no longer be cramped in their regimes of exploitation, etc. But he's saying you need to, this is where history is moving to. And so it's a type of appeal. And I like that you end up at the universalism because I think sometimes people think phenomenon isn't a universalist. And I don't know, I hate to tell you, you know, you might not hate that he read Marx and he was actually really favorable to Marxism, but he never gave it up. And he thinks that it could only work with a type of universalism, which isn't the same as saying don't acknowledge any differences. No, of course. I think about those lines all the time. I'm glad that you pointed that out. The sort of being frozen in place, petrification, rigidification. Like, again, I read him is very much like in dialogue with this existentialist tradition for whom freedom is understood not as a static property, but a movement, a movement of transcendence precisely. And this is why I think it's so closely tied to the critique of dehumanization. Is there anything less human than being put, quote, in your place and being prevented from being able to move? That's, you know, the compartmentalized world is this like, that's where you're supposed to be and don't fucking move, right? And it's and we've got guns on the borders to make sure you don't 100% you have your place, right? And that's just that's in human. That's in human. And then the lines then about like, you know, muscular tonality and like the dream of movement, the dream of not being confined. It's very literal. I don't take that to be metaphorical at all. It's a dream of freedom. And how could that not be universalist? I don't understand the non-universal reading. I don't get it. I'm trying to be better and not dunk too much. So I will, I will leave it there. I will say it's not convincing but not universalist reading. To go back to that scary word, I mean, I think part of the problem for a lot of readers I've known is that there are clear moments where he emphasizes the the specificity of race and nation and the rule that that specificity can play in liberation. But you just have to not be understand that he's a dialectical thinker to like assume that that means then that he's not a universalist and not. It's a stage and it's a, it's a concrete step. He doesn't think that we can just say, okay, we're all universally humans. I mean, what happens in the second, like a second third of violence chapter is violence in the international context and we could talk a little bit more about this. He starts talking at least as well as he is able, starts talking about economics. He's like, no, they end. It's essential. No, of course. He almost sounds, someone will eventually read in the podcast. He almost sounds like a meal called Crabral. He's talking about we need to understand the soil and you know, and reinvigorating it and growing what we need. And so again, violence for him isn't metaphorical. It isn't also some weird sort of enthusiasm of getting revenge. He's talking about what treats these conditions for stable flourishing social life. And these are going to be questions that need to be answered. I actually would like to like pursue that line of thought a bit further because I think that there are, I think, for good reason. So basically when it comes to nationalist politics, I think that the a pretty broad scope of left-wing positions is skeptical of nationalist politics to a point. And I share this. So like, I'm not saying this about other people. I share this. So if I think nationalist politics is strategically necessary, it is only as strategically necessary. Not because I think that the left should develop an uncritical or even comfortable alignment with nationalist politics. This is my view. I think that the reason for that discomfort is the claims that people tend to make about the land and self-determination. And who is properly there and what the harm being done is. I think in the immediacy of the situation, the colonial situation, make a great deal of sense and then are very difficult to generalize about. And I think that this is just like the basic problem and like point of contestation. Because there is an obvious way in which all of those kinds of claims can go sideways and become reactionary very quickly when they are not specifically about the thing that you are discussing. The act of colonial environs. I think that also all claims to the land are not necessarily nationalist. Like I think that's usually too quick. Like that's not the automatic. I think in the post-colonial anti-colonial sliding into independence, there were nationalist movements and there was an ideology and a set of arguments about self-determination that were tied to nationalist projects. And those recur. Like those are not irrelevant now. But they're just not like claims about the land and self-determination are actually not reducible. But where, you know, those boundaries are is not clear and that's where the anxiety is. So I'd like to know like what is it about the land? That creates this kind of harm and psychic harm. And I think this is this should be a materialist point but also the land is like the most fundamental and basic thing that I often feel like maybe is it too obvious? Is it too obvious the harm is being done? Is it just like it's so it's so clear with this harm is that the rights to the land are obvious? Or is there something that people that we don't think about enough? Yeah. I don't know exactly how to answer it but I just do think as a bit of context. It's hard for me not for my mind not to immediately go to thinking about some of the claims that Zionists make about Palestine, which is that Zionists will often say there's so many places Arab countries around here. Like why don't why do you care so much about staying here? Just go. What is it about this land? You could be, they speak your language and have your religion in Jordan and Egypt and all of you. It's something that I have been trying to think through. I don't think I have, I mean there are some obvious answers which is like it's fucking not yours but I don't have, I don't have, I've been trying to think in a bit more complicated way about it. Yeah. I think I'll just try to like you see what maybe you'll phenomenally think about this. I think at a very high level of abstraction, the land, we can talk about the land as being a place of crops but also the land is where attachments to home are but I think what he's thinking for we're staying with this, you know, the word of the dialectical is like it is through the land that that I work and you know find out who I am with other people and so to lack access to the land is to lack the ability to externalize myself. I know that this sounds like a kind of a galean account but you know for example, it's very important that whatever freedom is it can't remain at some nominal level. It can't be you know the freedom to think what you want to think or can't be the freedom to believe what you want to believe. No, you need to be able to see the evidence of the freedom because that is how you learn about things like cooperating with others and you shaping your historical conditions and so without that, without you know the land where freedom can be be activated and again at a very high level of abstraction, then this is freedom that is merely psychological, merely psychic. It doesn't have that mediating link where you engage with the object and then you bring it back and so I think that is at least the core of what he's thinking that to not only be barred from the land but locked into the space but he also kind of uses metaphor where the colonial forces actually think of the colonized as themselves simply land or anywhere or merely natural resources is to be what is worked on with no ability to respond and you shape yourself and so without the land, I think that's just the condition of possibility for anything like an integrated form of collective agency. Yeah, it's wrapped up with the dehumanization question too. There's a line from the colonial war and mental disorders chapter that really hit and again thinking about like the resonance with what's going on in Palestine today where he says you know under the German occupation, the French remained human beings and the French occupation, the Germans remained human beings. In Algeria there is not simply domination, not simply domination, but the decision literally to occupy nothing else but a territory. And the settler colonial reverie is that of a depopulated space which is always false, which is always not true. A land without a people for a single other land. Exactly. And he already sees this here as being kind of establishing the parameters of coordinates within which something like the birth of a new humanity is going to have to be possible. This is the crucible of it. I'm also just, can I just say this? I'm second fucking tired of living in prehistory. Can we please get out of prehistory? I feel like we've been waiting so long. We're the nice right now. What's just a little scrap of history, please? A tired of this. Yeah. I mean, I guess this claim about what it means to be trapped like that. If you listen to Norman Finkel's scenes like many podcast interviews since October. A bunch. A bunch. A bunch. He where he starts talking about what was going on before then and he describes Gazzens as a God for sake in people. Like I actually think that's where he even he lost hope that anything would change. That he'll say like I confess that I too thought that this was over, that nothing was going to happen. And then he starts talking about God for sake. his way of saying that is actually that they had no past, no present, and no future. So like he creates this interesting moral equivalence between like the not having of a history and the God for Saken characterization of it. That has like for some reason, I mean I think for obvious reasons, it's like an impactful thing to say. But it actually has stuck with me quite a bit over the past months because it makes me think about Ilan Pope's book about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the like description of the like signification of the land, the renaming of forests, the putting up of playgrounds, the just literally remaking of the map, not like letting it happen on accident, but just destroying a memory and refusing to let anybody who tried to go back and see it or try to see where their village had been. And just brutalizing them if they even tried to slip into like a forest. There is I think what has to be important about the harm being done is that there is a link, there is a political link between those things, the memory destruction, okay, and then the being trapped and being God for Saken and without a history. You know, like those are, those seem to be me to be like a very strong equivalence, you know, like the double helix between like the psychological and the political. And so when you say, why does the land matter? Why are they right of return? Why does it matter to rectify this land specifically? Yeah, well, it doesn't have to be this land specifically if you don't care about addressing that problem. Like, I mean, if it's some other kind of problem, it doesn't have to be this land. If it's, you know, but do you care about these people at this time and what was done to them and what the, and the answer to that question is then this land matters. And the only way you get to say otherwise is if you just think, you know, those, the, the memorial side of the Nakba or that's, I think what puppy calls it. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's just not a constitutive part of the problem, but the problem is, is for those people, both in reality and for the people concerned, it is. And I also think you, you get to this concrete conclusion of why land matters. Not because of, I, I realized, you know, I always imagine people listening to some being the most ungenerous, you know, assholes imaginable. You're like, oh, so what's the philosophy they believe in mystical ties? You're like, no, Lily, what you're describing are, are these, you know, concrete structures and names and histories that, you know, allow a sense of belonging and the social integration of being a person. And so you can only think. There's a psychic importance of that, man. Yeah. And that, that's how we, we develop and understand ourselves as part of a we. And so if you think that the answer is simply, well, why don't you just move? You know, so there are two things I'd like, I think, would be very clear. And what Fennel would say, you could only have that answer if you think that these are people who are simply without a history, without any wants, desires, that they are mere objects that you can just place somewhere else. Well, if you think that, then you don't fucking think they're human, okay? And two, it's not about staying, but I think what Fennel would say, it maybe just brings it back to a little bit about his strategic relationship to the nation. I do think strategic, because in deeper in the book, you know, he sees some of the people becoming political leaders and he thinks that they're nightmares. He's really worried about the national bourgeoisie that emerges. That's clearly going to cut off the movement. I'm a nationalist part of this. But he thinks you can only really feel yourself as having the ability to move and go other places, once you have been able to say, oh, there was a place that I belong, and I see I am leaving because I desire to. I'm not leaving because I'm being ejected. And this goes back to the psychological stuff of being able to process the experience. Being ejected doesn't allow for the processing of the experience of saying, this is what I choose, what I want. And to think that you can, then just actually says what you think about these people, you don't think of them as people, you don't think of them as part of history. You think of them as something that's completely different than what you take yourself to be, which is having an attachment to the things that you love, the language that you speak, the histories that you reflect yourself through. Yeah, I think that's right. And it's only that grotesque level of dehumanization that enables, and this is also important that, I think, in Phenones analysis of the effects on the French colonizers as well, like the way that they are. Yeah, I'd be sure he thinks that fucks them up too. Oh, yeah. And you can see that when you look at these, like, all these viral videos of, of, like, IDF soldiers, like, fucking, like, the glee with which they engage, like, in the, like, in the, in the, in the genocidal destruction that they're doing. I mean, you can see that these, this is not, like, these people, not just, not just those individual people, but the psychic damage being done to that, like, body politic. If you can even call it that, but that body politic is going to be, like, absolutely, I mean, it's already immense. You can't maintain an apartheid system without, like, intense psychological degradation on the part of the people that benefit from that apartheid system, but it's actually frightening to think about what the psychic results of this stage of that brutality are going to look like. And I also think, like, on the land, on the land point, there's such another, just, I don't want to make it all about this, like, kind of, resonance, but it's so hard to avoid that. What's for known talks about the justifications that the French games for, for me, for like having a right to that land, it is exactly what the Israeli state says, basically, which is that, well, we made this land productive. Like, we, this land was, this was a desert when we arrived here. Okay. And we're the ones that have, like, introduced, like, through our technological brilliance and all this stuff. Like, now we have a claim to it. Now, forget, put aside the A historical biblical claims, which are obviously stupid. But the, like, the, the more, kind of, I think that for them, the more legitimate, it's very John Locke, coded, well, yeah, the more legitimating claim, I think for them is that they made, they made the olive girls grow. And they made the, you know, they made land yield. Yeah. I mean, that's why I want you all to read those files. I didn't want you all to just read the really tragic stuff, like the stuff with the kids. I mean, you know, that just, you know, blades your heart and it's, I mean, that was one of the most harrowing things I've read, you know, really long time. Just to be clear, it's about these two, the kids that kill Europeans, two Algerian kids that kill their European schoolmate. They didn't even describe as their best friend. Yeah. But felt, yeah, it was their friend as their best friend. Yeah. But the idea that they were all the idea that like the French wanted to kill all Algerians, which the French made pretty clear. Like, where it didn't show that that's, you know, they didn't, they internalize that. Yeah. But I also want you all to read, you know, again, imagine Phanon, a black guy sitting there in front of a French guard. He's like, please make me well so I can torture and not bring this home. You know, I want you all to read because you all know this. How can I, how can I do my tortures without feeling so bad? But imagine how fucked up you have to be at the place. And Phanon even says, like, he knows where the source of his anguish is from. It's the work that he does. He does. He's doing work, which means you can't engage in type of violence without it coming back. And so the idea that you can do something like this and it doesn't radically alter the psych structure of those who do it. That at least no form of psychology that's empirically testable bears that claim. It will shape the character, the practices, the habits, except that so Phanon is basically looking at this and saying, this situation, yeah, it's killing the Algerians. But that's not humanity over there. I totally, well, this is where, yeah, this is where again, like I can't understand, like you said, it's a point in your introduction to something that I quite like, which is just like, yeah, he's not just like a kind of like, I don't know, a positivist political theorist who's just like, well, you know, revenge is justified. Like that's not interesting and that's not what he's saying. And I think that this is where he has to be understood as like a universalist because the dehumanization that is effect that is like inflicted upon a colonized people by the colonial oppressor is also their own dehumanization, right? There's not a way, like you said, it's not humanity on the other side of the wall either, right? It is in fact a situation of total dehumanization on both sides. And then of course, the response to that can't be like, our turn to dehumanize now. That's not it, right? It's not like a, it's not a counter response like that in any way. It's a demand for actually putting an end to dehumanization, which means that of the oppressor as well. It has to be or or again, then we are in something like, I don't know, an inevitable cycle of bloodshed or something like this. And he just does see that there is a possibility for something other than that to be taking place here. And it's not always born out and it's not always easier obvious or like clear how it could be effectuated. But it's not just our turn. That's just not what he's talking about. That's why I kind of like that language that I use. It's my language. So if you want to disagree with me on this, I guess go ahead. But I do think there is a weird way that I have looking at the violence chapter, which is phenomenal. Trying to say, this is what the development of that principle self-mancipation would look like. He didn't live long enough to see the end of the Algerian war. So someone for the saying there, it had not yet come to pass. But I said that this is the logical arc of it. And the thing that I want to leave you all with you. So it might seem, you know, again, I don't know who's listening. We're talking the personalization. dehumanization that seems so ethical. But you know what you can't do well if you're dehumanized or depersonized? Build robust political institutions. What types of politics emerge, not just from dehumanizing others, but I'm thinking about what type of society and political institutions emerge when that becomes the foundation of what your nation is doing. Again, you know, I look at Israel as those are not robust democratic institutions either. And so you can't even be responsible politically human being when inflicted. - But also like imagine living in a situation in which you are going to continue to affirm that you are going to, that you are always and everywhere going to be under siege. Like the mentality as far as I can tell in Israel is that no one in the world has any idea of what kind of danger we are in. You know, and like I just think the sounds like what a way to live, man. That doesn't sound good. That doesn't sound good for anybody. I'm just putting it out there. Like that kind of both paranoid narcissism in which that it has to go internal 'cause you can see the glee they take. And you know, I'm not, I'm gonna generalize just because that I'm generalizing about the violence that I see, you know, with my ever loving eyes on the fucking internet, the glee that is being taken in the destruction of these people is the sickest thing I've ever seen in my entire fucking life. I have many times since October, thought to myself, I know what it is like to watch a lynching now. You know those postcards that the people in the American South made like come join the lynching and we're all gonna laugh and chortle and act like we're having a great time and we look at those and you're like, how? How's that possible? Now I know, we're watching it right now. That has to get into your soul and create such extreme neurotic angry tension. I don't know how you could live like that. And I, you know, and people should realize actually you don't have to. You don't have to live like that. I feel like that's the point here. - One of the symptoms of that is like how irrational and bizarre those officials sound like every time they go on the news. Like they have been like completely psychically distorted by like the glee and that violence. Like it looks like it's fake. Like it's an AI or something. It can't possibly, like you have dehumanized yourself to such an extent that like, I mean, there's already been lots of jokes about how nothing, none of these stupid things that they try to produce that are supposed to be funny or actually funny. Like, oh look, it's a blue hair personality college campus who loves some awesome, whatever. These are the most cringe things imaginable. But I actually think that's important because it's like that is, and to go back to our other episode of "Fanon," like that is what the destruction of like reason, dignity, and the quantity, like looks like. And those are the spiritual degrading consequences of doing that. You can't be funny, being funny requires some degree of reason. - I actually like that. Yeah, I think picking up on the last episode, like I was noticing maybe because of that episode, how much I was noticing every time Fanon mentions reason, because I think there is an attempt to like, dialectically recover enlightenment for some extent and uses the word, like he described his violence as enlightenment, also a one-pointing attacks. And he really, really kind of focuses on like, on reason, when he talks about the transformation that's taking place in the elimination of individualism, like the surpassing of individualism, and the kinds of, I don't want to use the word, "deliverative spaces," because colonialism is not a, doesn't allow for it itself delivered in, like, a deliverative space. - He says it's a machine, but the colonized themselves, exactly, it's never found to reason, right? It's a machine incapable of thought, like colonialism. But then he describes what the, the neighborhood assemblies are like, and what they're kind of organizing, the kind of experience of organizing. And he says that those communal experiences, exude light, they exude reason, right? Like the, the kinds of organizing. And that's where you get to the importance of like, if you only focus on violence, it's easy to miss, the indications of what the creation of a new humanity looks like in that chapter. And what it looks like is in those moments where individualism gets, well, they're able to take actually surpassing the individual. Not as a matter of like a concept or a decision, but as a form of practice in which they, there's a kind of collective reason, which underneath all of that terror and edcy, online and mendatin' and endastony, there's a kind of, there's the light of reason that is evaded from, yeah. So, yeah, I just thought that in those moments, it says like a new vocabulary spontaneously starts to emerge. It a new lexicon, a new way of, yeah, calm, rather, a new articulation, right? In which something like a collective we infused with like a reason and a light becomes kind of aware of itself as, yeah, precisely not just a heap of individuals, but as something more significant, participating in a humanity that has university and its aspiration. I don't know, I think these moments are really beautiful. - Yeah, yeah. - That was really struck by the design. - I actually, I do wanna follow up maybe one, like last comment on what you said about comedy. I think that's really right that like, comedy has to be rational, I didn't thought about it that way, but in order to be genuinely funny, because it's a practice of auto critique and reflection. So that's why, you know, political correctness and comedy, you don't need to worry about political correctness if it's funny. - Of course. - Yeah, yeah, everyone's serious, 'cause there's a kernel of reason in it, that's not the way. - And by the way, I think like, it doesn't matter if you're right wing or left wing in comedy, if it's funny, it's funny, and everybody knows it's funny, and there's no debate about it. And it's not true that people of different political persuasions can't be funny. The problem is, is that you have to find that they're there. And if it's funny, if people are laughing, it's because it's funny, and there's no additional, there's no add-ons required, if people aren't laughing, it's not funny. But I was just thinking that the thing that makes the humor, you know, I was listening to that famous interview, Cat Williams did, with Shannon Sharp, that incredible interview, where he, 'cause Cat Williams is really funny, and he knows he's funny. It's extremely funny. And he's like, the thing is, it can't be condescending. He's like, when I'm making that black woman joke, I'm making it to my black woman friend. When I'm making that white man joke, I'm talking to my white man friend. And the reason it's funny is because it doesn't matter from what perspective you approach it's from, it's gonna be funny because you know, there's rationality to it. You don't need to sit around and pick it apart. It's like, ha ha, he got me, or them, or whatever. That's it. - And even approaches the object as another person, rather than a thing evacuated of all life and all of that. I think my last glue in common, I really like the ground that we covered in this episode. And I think I just want to leave it at, for Fennon, you need to remember that the violence isn't the point. The violence is a symptom of a fucked up situation. The point is humanization. You could even call it socialization. If the counterfactual it uses, if it were possible to achieve decolonization without a single bullet being fired and a new world being created, Fennon would jump, he would be the first to jump that. If it were possible to leap over the nation form. - Because he's a care worker. - He would. He would be there. Yeah, and I like that, yeah, 'cause he is a care worker. And that's why I want you to read the medicines stuff because he is a philosopher revolutionary, but he also is a doctor. He took that very, very seriously, 'cause he took liberation seriously. - They took humanity seriously. - That does it for us today. New episodes of What's Left The Philosophy come out every two weeks wherever you get your podcasts. Also check us out on YouTube for videos and live streams. Before closing out today, we'd like to take a minute to think some of the people who are supporting the show in Patreon. We couldn't do this without you and we're really grateful. 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