Abstract: In the closing remarks of the penultimate chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon invokes Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment. This invocation serves to frame the orientation of one’s moral psychology, to engage in the kind of phenomenology that facilitates actional behaviour, in the struggle for racial restitution. Amidst the Hegelian overtones that have dominated interpretations of Fanon’s chapter in the wider literature, I argue that Fanon’s use of the term ressentiment is useful as a retrospective explanation, for understanding the phenomenological preconditions central to this chapter.
Fanon identifies ressentiment as the mechanism that internalizes colonial projection. This response to the racialized gaze stultifies, by producing a relation of reactional self-hatred. Despite Fanon’s wider (Hegelian) commitment that rationality is central to the process of recognition, this can only be attempted after a kind of cathartic, actional response, like dynamics discussed in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality. However, I argue that Nietzsche’s views on ressentiment develop later, to see ressentiment as potentially facilitating forms of strength and ‘health’ otherwise unavailable to those who have not undergone its “sickness”. I argue that though Fanon does not development his view as Nietzsche does, this construal of ressentiment could compliment the wider Fanonian project. This will be done in two ways. The first will be, following the internal logic to the Nietzschean claim, how ressentiment may itself be instrumentalized as a moral-psychological spur to greater resistance of such phenomenologies. The second concerns the production of great works as themselves motivated by ressentiment. It will be argued that Fanon’s own two great works themselves exhibit the marks of a similar such claim – that Fanon’s works themselves might be positively construed as products of this kind of ressentiment.
Finally, if space permits, I will intimate at a new interpretive stance regarding Fanon’s cryptic call for a “new humanism”, to respond to a “new human”. I will outline the potential merits of reading Fanon along similar lines to Hacking’s ‘dynamic nominalism’. I conclude by exploring how reconcilable this view would be with Fanon’s fundamentally Hegelian commitment to a teleological view of world-history.
Post-Kantian European Philosophy Seminar Convenors: Jack Wearing, Joseph Schear, Manuel Dries, Kate Kirkpatrick and Mark Wrathall
