Subterranean Fanon by Gavin Arnall;

Author:Gavin Arnall;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

THE LIMITS OF SPONTANEITY AND THE REDISCOVERY OF POLITICS

Toward the end of the second chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, it is revealed that the explosive moment of widespread spontaneous violence is not enough on its own to achieve decolonization. Instead, it sets the stage for a new moment in the dialectic of armed struggle during which the colonialist forces launch a counterattack in an effort to regain their position of authority. The colonized fight just as before, surging head-on toward the enemy with rash confidence, but they are met with heavy machinegun fire and many lives are lost. The peasant rebels hold their ground and refuse to retreat, as though “their own mountain peak [were] the nation.” Casualties multiply as a result and those who survive are plagued with doubt; the intense suffering “throws the euphoria and idyll of the first period into question.”118

It is worth pausing to reflect upon the similarities between this moment in the armed struggle and the dilemma that Épithalos faces in Parallel Hands.119 After his explosive act of violence, he too is surrounded by death and suffering, and his steadfast conviction toward the significance of his act is shaken. In both cases, the same questions arise: Was the act that promised a complete and total change destined to fail? Does the revolutionary event merely contribute to completing another revolution of the same tragic circle that leads from order to disorder to order again? Was the euphoria of the struggle the product of an illusion? Fanon begins to answer these questions in The Wretched of the Earth when he transitions from a focus on the grandeur of spontaneity to a critical account of its various weaknesses. This is also the moment when he implicitly refers to and problematizes a number of claims put forward in “On Violence” during his conflicted account of decolonization.

Fanon’s critique of spontaneity begins with a discussion of its voluntarism: “This spectacular voluntarism … [has] proved in light of experience to be a very great weakness. As long as he imagined passing, without transition, from the state of the colonized to the state of the sovereign citizen of an independent nation, as long as he believed in the mirage of the immediacy of his muscles, the colonized achieved no real progress along the road of knowledge.”120 Notice how this passage calls into question Fanon’s previous claim that decolonization constitutes a transitionless substitution of the colonized thing for the new man. When the peasant masses spontaneously revolt, they believe that this kind of change is possible and that the exertion of brute force is its guarantee. But Fanon maintains that experience reveals this belief to be a voluntarist illusion of spontaneity. The colonized may demand an immediate exchange of one kind of being for another, but history moves at a different rhythm. It should be clear, however, that Fanon is not calling for a return to gradualist reformism but rather for a dialectical overcoming of transitionless substitution. In Fanon’s words, “This voluntarist

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