on violence

all quotes from the wretched of the earth by frantz fanon

"decolonization is always a violent event."

"the colonized world is a world divided in two. the dividing line, the border, is represented by the barracks and the police stations. in the colonies, the official legitimate agent, the spokesperson for the colonizer and the regime of oppression, is the police officer or soldier. in capitalist societies, education, whether secular or religious, the teaching of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary integrity of workers decorated after fifty years of loyal and faithful service, the fostering of love for harmony and wisdom, those aesthetic forms of respect for the status quo, instill in the exploited a mood of submission and inhibition which considerably eases the task of the agents of law and order."

"the 'native' sector is not complementary to the european sector. the two confront each other, but not in the service of a higher unity. governed by a purely aristotelian logic, they follow the dictates of mutual exclusion: there is no conciliation possible, one of them is superfluous."

"challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. it is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different."

"the intellectual who, for his part, has adopted the abstract, universal values of the colonizer is prepared to fight so that colonist and colonized can live in peace in a new world. but what he does not see, because precisely colonialism and all its modes of thought have seeped into him, is that the colonist is no longer interested in staying on and coexisting once the colonial context has disappeared."

"the colonized intellectual learned from his masters that the individual must assert himself. the colonialist bourgeoisie hammered into the colonized mind the notion of a society of individuals where each is locked in his subjectivity, where wealth lies in thought. but the colonized intellectual who is lucky enough to bunker down with the people during the liberation struggle, will soon discover the falsity of this theory. . the colonized intellectual witnesses the destruction of all his idols: egoism, arrogant recrimination, and the idiotic, childish need to have the last word."

"whether it be in the djemaas of north africa or the palavers of west africa, tradition has it that disputes which break out in a village are worked out in public. by this i mean collective self-criticism with a touch of humor because everyone is relaxed, because in the end we all want the same thing. the intellectual sheds all that calculating, all those strange silences, those ulterior motives, that devious thinking and secrecy as he gradually plunges deeper among the people. in this respect then we can genuinely say that the community has already triumphed and exudes its own light, its own reason."

"the colonized subject is a persecuted man who is forever dreaming of becoming the persecutor. . . this impulse to take the colonist's place maintains a constant muscular tonus. it is a known fact that under certain emotional circumstances an obstacle actually escalates action."

"in the colonial world, the colonized's affectivity is kept on edge like a running sore flinching from a caustic agent."

"stating the principle 'it's them or us' is not a paradox since colonialism, as we have seen, is precisely the organization of a manichaean world, of a compartmentalized world."

"the existence of an armed struggle is indicative that the people are determined to put their faith only in violent methods. the very same people who had it constantly drummed into them that the only language they understood was that of force, now decide to express themselves with force. in fact the colonist has always shown them the path they should follow to liberation. the argument chosen by the colonized was conveyed to them by the colonist, and by an ironic twist of fate it is now the colonized who state that it is the colonizer who only understands the language of force. the colonial regime owes its legitimacy to force and at no time does it ever endeavor to cover up this nature of things."

"the violence of the colonial regime and the counterviolence of the colonized balance each other and respond to each other in an extraordinary reciprocal homogeneity. . . the colonist's logic is unrelenting and one is only baffled by the counterlogic of the colonized's behavior if one has remained out of touch with the colonists' way of thinking."

"to the expression 'all natives are the same,' the colonized reply: 'all colonists are the same'. . .the theory of the 'absolute evil of the colonist' is in response to the theory of the 'absolute evil of the native'."

"the work of the colonist is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the colonized. . . for the colonized, life can only materialize from the rotting cadaver of the colonist."

"europe's well-being and progress were built with the sweat and corpses of blacks, arabs, indians, and asians. this we are determined never to forget."

"the basic confrontation which seemed to be colonialism versus anticolonialism, indeed capitalism versus socialism, is already losing its importance. what matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences."

"colonialism and imperialism have not settled their debt to us once they have withdrawn their flag and their police force from our territories. for centuries the capitalists have behaved like real war criminals in the underdeveloped world. deportation, massacres, forced labor, and slavery were the primary methods used by capitalism to increase its gold and diamond reserves, and establish its wealth and power. . . and when we hear the head of a european nation declare with hand on heart that he must come to the aid of the unfortunate peoples of the underdeveloped world, we do not tremble with gratitude. on the contrary, we say among ourselves, 'it is a just reparation we are getting.' so we will not accept aid for the underdeveloped countries as 'charity'. such aid must be considered the final stage of a dual consciousness - the consciousness of the colonized that it is their due and consciousness of the capitalist powers that effectively they must pay up."

"it is clear therefore that the young nations of the third world are wrong to grovel at the feet of the capitalist countries. we are powerful in our own right and the justness of our position."

frantz fanon.

from black skin, white masks by frantz fanon


"every act is an answer or a question.  both, perhaps.  by expressing a certain way for my being to excel itself, i am stating the value of my act for others.  conversely, the passivity observed during some of history's troubled times can be read as default on this obligation."

"to speak of society's dreams as one speaks of an individual's dreams, to speak of a collective will as one speaks of individual sexual instinct, is once again to reverse the natural order of things, since, on the contrary, it is the economic and social conditions of the class struggle that explain and determine the actual conditions in which individual sexuality is expressed, and the contents of an individual's dreams depends also in the end on the general conditions of civilization in which he lives." - pierre naville

"i was hated, detested, and despised, not by my next-door neighbor or a close cousin, but by an entire race.  i was up against something irrational.  the psychoanalysts say that there is nothing more traumatizing for a young child than contact with the rational.  i personally would say that for a man armed solely with reason, there is nothing more neurotic than contact with the irrational."

"like every aspect of human behavior, behavior toward authority is something to be learned.  and it is learned within a family that can be psychologically distinguished by its specific organization, i.e., by the way in which its authority is allocated and exercised." -joachim marcus 

"the family structure and the national structure are closely connected.  militarization and a centralized authority in a country automatically result in a resurgence of the father's authority.  in europe and in every so-called civilized or civilizing country the family environment finds the same laws, the same principles, and the same values."

"if we want an honest answer, we have to call on the notion of collective catharsis.  in every society, in every community, there exists, must exist, a channel, an outlet whereby the energy accumulated in the form of aggressiveness can be released."

"the first characteristic seems to be the fear of showing oneself as one actually is.  this is a broad range of various fears: fear of disappointing, fear of displeasing, of boring, of wearying. . . and consequently, of missing the opportunity to create a bond of friendship with others or, if it already exists, damaging it.  the abandonment neurotic doubts whether he can be loved as he is, for he has undergone the cruel experience of being abandoned when, as a child, hence without artifice, he offered himself to the tenderness of others." -g. guex

"make people ashamed of their existence, jean-paul sartre said.  yes: make them aware of the possibilities they have denied themselves or the passiveness they have displayed in situations where it was really necessary to cling to the heart of the world, like a splinter - to force, if needed, the rhythm of the world's heart; dislocate, if needed, the system of controls; but in any case, most certainly, face the world."

"such then is the haunted man, condemned to make his choice of himself on the basis of false problems and in a false situation, deprived of the metaphysical sense by the hostility of the society that surrounds him, driven to a rationalism of despair.  his life is nothing but a long flight from others and from himself.  he has been alienated even from his own body; his emotional life has been cut in two; he has been reduced to pursuing the impossible dream of universal brotherhood in a world that rejects him.  whose is the fault?  it is our eyes that reflect to him the unacceptable image he wishes to dissimulate.  it is our words and our gestures - all our words and all our gestures, our anti-semitism, but equally our condescending liberalism - that have poisoned him.  it is we who constrain him to choose to be a jew whether through flight from himself or through self-assertion; it is we who force him into the dilemma of jewish authenticity or inauthenticity. . . this species that bears witness for essential humanity better than any other because it was born of secondary reactions within the body of humanity -  this quintessence of man, disgraced, uprooted, destined from the start to either inauthenticity or martyrdom.  in this situation there is not one of us who is not totally guilty and even criminal; the jewish blood that the nazis shed falls on all our heads." -jean-paul sartre

"literature increasingly involves itself in its only real task, which is to get society to reflect and mediate.  my book is, i hope, a mirror with a progressive infrastructure where the black man can find the path to disalienation."

"and above all, beware, my body and my soul too, beware of crossing your arms in the sterile attitude of the spectator, because life is not a spectacle, because a sea of sorrows is not a proscenium, because a man who screams is not a dancing bear." - aime cesaire

"the collective unconscious is quite simply the repository of prejudices, myths, and collective attitudes of a particular group.  it is generally agreed, for example, that the jews who settled in israel will give birth in less than 100 years to a collective unconscious different from the one they had in 1945 in the countries from which they were expelled."

"moral consciousness implies a kind of split, a fracture of consciousness between a dark and a light side.  moral standards require the black, the dark, and the black man to be eliminated from this consciousness.  a black man, therefore, is constantly struggling against his own image."

"if the morbid universe is to be understood on the basis of transgression and guilt, a normal individual will be someone who has unloaded this guilt or in any case has managed not to suffer from it.  more directly, each individual must lay the blame for his base agencies and instincts on the wicked genie of the culture to which he belongs (we have seen that this is the black man).  this collective guilt is borne by what is commonly called the scapegoat.  however, the scapegoat for white society, which is based on the myths of progress, civilization, liberalism, education, enlightenment, and refinement, will be precisely the force that opposes the expansion and triumphs of these myths."

"either i ask people not to pay attention to the color of my skin; or else, on the contrary, i want people to notice it.  i then try to esteem what is bad - since, without thinking, i admitted that the black man was the color of evil.  in order to put an end to this neurotic situation where i am forced to choose an unhealthy, conflictual solution, nurtured with fantasies, that is antagonistic - inhuman, in short - there is but one answer: skim over this absurd drama that others have staged around me; rule out these two elements that are equally unacceptable; and through the particular, reach out for the universal."

"self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or recognized." -hegel

"man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose himself on another man in order to be recognized by him.  as long as he has not been effectively recognized by the other, it is this other who remains the focus of his actions.  his human worth and reality depend on this other and on his recognition by the other.  it is in this other that the meaning of his life is condensed."

"it is when i go beyond my immediate existential being that i apprehend the being of the other as a natural reality, and more than that.  if i shut off the circuit, if i make the two-way movement unachievable, i keep the other within himself.  in an extreme degree, i deprive him even of this being-for-self.  the only way to break this vicious circle that refers me back to myself is to restore to the other his human reality, different from his natural reality, by way of mediation and recognition."

"action from one side only would be useless, because what is to happen can only be brought about by means of both. . . they recognize themselves as mutually recognizing each other." -hegel

"in its immediacy, self-consciousness is simply being-for-self.  in order to achieve certainty of oneself, one has to integrate the concept of recognition.  likewise, the other is waiting for our recognition so as to blossom into the universal self-consciousness.  each consciousness of self is seeking absoluteness.  it wants to be recognized as an essential value outside of life, as transformation of subjective certainty (gewissheit) into objective truth (wahrheit).  encountering opposition from the other, self-consciousness experiences desire, the first stage that leads to the dignity of the mind.  it agrees to risk life, and consequently threatens the other in his physical being."

"it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self-consciousness is not bare existence, is not the merely immediate form in which it at first makes its appearance, is not its mere absorption in the expanse of life." -hegel

"only conflict and the risk it implies can, therefore, make human reality, in-itself-for-itself, come true.  this risk implies that i go beyond life toward an ideal which is the transformation of my subjective certainty of my own worth into a universally valid objective truth."

"i ask that i be taken into consideration on the basis of my desire.  i am not only here-now, locked in thinghood.  i desire somewhere else and something else.  i demand that an account be taken of my contradictory activity insofar as i pursue something other than life, insofar as i am fighting for the birth of a human world, in other words, a world of reciprocal recognitions.  he who is reluctant to recognize me is against me.  in a fierce struggle i am willing to feel the shudder of death, the irreversible extinction, but also the possibility of impossibility."

"the individual, who has not staked his life, may, no doubt, be recognized as a person, but he has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness." -hegel

"unsure whether the white man considers him as consciousness in-itself-for-itself, he is constantly preoccupied with detecting resistance, opposition, and contestation. . . the i posits itself by opposing, said fichte.  yes and no.  we said in our introduction that man was an affirmation.  we shall never stop repeating it.  yes to life.  yes to love.  yes to generosity.  but man is also a negation.  no to man's contempt.  no to the indignity of man.  to the exploitation of man.  to the massacre of what is most human in man: freedom.  man's behavior is not only reactional.  and there is always resentment in reaction. . . to induce man to be actional, by maintaining in his circularity the respect of the fundamental values that make the world human, that is the task of utmost urgency for he who, after careful reflection, prepares to act."

"intellectual alienation is a creation of bourgeois society.  and for me bourgeois society is any society that becomes ossified in a predetermined mold, stifling any development, progress, or discovery.  for me bourgeois society is a closed society where it's not good to be alive, where the air is rotten and ideas and people are putrefying.  and i believe that a man who takes a stand against this living death is in a way a revolutionary."