Fanon, Hegel, and the Problem of Reciprocity

Abstract

Abstract In this article I put forward an interpretation of what is at stake in Frantz Fanon's claim that there is a reciprocity at the basis of G. W. F Hegel's master-servant dialectic. I do this by staging a critique of the ‘shared-humanity’ interpretation of Fanon's claim. Fanon's problem, as this interpretation understands it, is that the master-servant dialectic describes a situation in which two human beings knowingly confront one another as such. Such a situation—because human-to-human confrontation is assumed—does not adequately describe a racially divided situation because of racism's dehumanizing force. Fanon's problem would thus be that Hegel assumed shared humanity. I contest this reading by claiming that Fanon's issue is not reciprocal humanity but reciprocal struggle. To get to this point requires demonstrating that the shared-humanity reading is implausible on a variety of grounds. Thanks to the work of Philippe Van Haute it can already be said that in Hegel's text no shared humanity takes place. But Van Haute nevertheless claims that the shared-humanity problem is present in Kojève. Thus, it first needs to be shown that Kojève's text disallows such a reading. With this result in hand, I move to show the textually unsupportable nature of a subset of the shared-humanity reading—the ‘ontological reading’—whose strategy of reading Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks obscures the Sartrean-Beauvoirian commitments which would in fact allow a more accurate reading of Fanon's claims about reciprocity in Hegel to be made. I then seek to show—with reference to these commitments and a broadly Kojèvean emphasis on the centrality of struggle in human subject-formation—that Fanon's comments about reciprocity take aim at the question of mutual struggle in Hegel and Kojève. ‘The French Negro’, Fanon argues, did not get to experience the cost and value of freedom, unlike Hegel's servant.