Fanon and the Legitimacy of the New Human, a Question of Dignity

Ronald AT. Judy

Given on December 2, 2011, “Transcolonial Fanon: Trajectories of a Revolutionary

Politics” Conference at La Maison Française, Columbia University, New York, NY

©Ronald A. T. Judy

(Do not quote or cite without the author’s express permission)

We are gathered here today to take on the work of Frantz Fanon within 4 days

proximity to the fiftieth anniversary of his passing. If this taking on is commemorative, I

should like to think that rather than commemorating an end we are here now

commemorating a beginning, in that richly nuanced and historicist sense Edward Said

elaborated for us some 36 years ago. Keeping in mind that since ancient times, every

commemoration is a performative iteration the revivifies and sets out new lines of

possibility. Accordingly, I should like to take a few minutes to think about and with

Fanon, under the rubric of the three terms: legitimacy, Neo-humanism, and dignity.

That stated, I’ll start out by describing how I am oriented here in relation to these

terms. I take the bearings of my attitude from a remark recently made by a well regarded

historian of the contemporary Arab World, Ahmed Jdey, who is equally well-regarded as

an activist intellectual from the Tunisian central plateau, the revolution’s epicenter—one

of those euphemistically referred to as the “youth of the revolution.” On a hot sunny

Sunday afternoon this past June, as we walked the length of Avenue Habib Bourguiba,

which has become the agora of the revolution, and participated in one of its spontaneous

symposia, Jdey remarked that: “Looking at what is happening in Tunisia now, one cannot

help but ask how revolutions, or revolts, uprisings, and insurrections, are being born, not
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only in the contemporary Arab and Muslim world but also anywhere else in the world

today. . . . There is clearly an “indestructible dream of a better world,” to which historians

should apply themselves in elucidating.” Then he said to me, almost as an afterthought:

“You know, the analysis Frantz Fanon made of revolution in Africa while he was

residing in Tunisia still served as a template for understanding what is happening here

now. And that whatever the outcome of the upcoming election for the Constituent

Assembly, what will preserve the revolution will be whether the disparate institutions that

emerged in the interstices of the state and the market, which generated the subjects of the

revolution, will preserver in their anarchic dynamics.” While this is a question of poetry

and slogans, it is about the types of socialities articulated with poetry.”

These remarks prompted me to recall Fanon’s prominent role in the Algerian

Revolution as what I call here a craftsman of intelligence. It also reminded me of the

precariousness of the struggle to preserve the indestructible dream of a better world,

against counterforces—Fanon and Abane Ramdane lost their bid to ground the revolution

in the spontaneous intelligence of the people—which, I think, is currently at stake in

Tunisia right now, expressed in the eloquent local metaphor !"#$%& '()*+, and most

definitely what I have in mind by “legitimacy.” This has to do with something Fanon

wrote in the field notebook he kept on his journey south to Mali in 1959, which was

published in 1964 by François Maspero as Pour la révolution Africaine, and then in

English in 1969 as Toward the African Revolution. He wrote that the greatest danger for

Africa was the absence of ideology, having in mind the way in which the processes

historically entailed in, and perhaps constitutive of, the long momentum of revolutionary

bourgeoisie formation—beginning in the seventeenth-century and, culminating in the

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Revolutions of 1848—engender a secularization in the colonial context that, rather than

precipitating the decline of tribalism and religion, reinforces and extends their application.

This is to recognize religion and tribalism as conceptual categories of secular

modernity—and we are well acquainted with their advent as functions of anthropology—

that work to rearticulate ways of living and thinking falling outside of the parameters of

liberalism’s universal history into formations well situated within that history. A more

dramatic way of putting it is that the historical effect of revolution’s application under

imperial colonialism has been to replace old population formations with new ones in

accordance with the logic of bourgeoisie formation. This transformation of nearly all

modes of life into manageable forces has long been construed to be the function of

politics. That same historical tendency toward hyper management, however, also prompts

vectors of performance, of human thinking in action, that aren’t quite so readily

subjugated to the political. Along these lines, think, for a moment about Claude McKay’s

Banjo, a work that records a sequence of pointedly non-bourgeois performances enacted

over a life time that were enabled precisely by embodying almost emblematically what he

called vagabondage, a well known expression of which is his poem “Outcast”:

For the dim regions whence my fathers came

My spirit, bondaged by the body, longs.

Words felt, but never heard, my lips would frame;

My soul would sing forgotten jungle songs.

I would go back to darkness and to peace,

But the great western world holds me in fee,

And I may never hope for full release

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While to its alien gods I bend my knee.

Something in me is lost, forever lost,

Some vital thing has gone out of my heart,

And I must walk the way of life a ghost

Among the sons of earth, a thing apart;

For I was born, far from my native clime,

Under the white man's menace, out of time.

The sonnet does not exhibit a psyche based on or consumed by a sense of loss, but rather

one that is articulated in the perpetual effort to expresses what is imagined, and it can

only be imagined, to be the primal inexpressible. The subject of this articulation is not in

mourning, but rather is compelled by the discrepancy between what can and cannot be

expressed, what can and cannot be comprehensibly represented, to continually be

creative. In this sense, yes, the vagabond is poetic but not as Benjamin understands the

flâneur to be so. That is to say, the dissolution of aesthetic distinction is not indicative of

a desire for return to proper corporeal integrity in relation to things; it indicates the desire

to be free among things. We can fairly designate this latter desire the blues, noting,

thereby, that the oxymoronic figure is not melancholia. Or as Curtis Mayfield states in

“We the People Who Are Darker than Blue,” a poem that is more plaintive than McKay’s

sonnet but so too more expressly concerned with the non-reactionary force of poetic

expression:

We the people who are darker than blue

Don’t let us hang around this town

And let what others say come true.

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Fanon’s remark about ideology, nonetheless, can be construed as a call for

criticism; indeed, it is a call to reimagine the possibilities of secularization through

recognizing the tremendous reach of its machines of desire and imagination, the success

of which has hinged on the Cartesian distinction between being and ways of thinking.

Speaking in Fanon’s pathographic terms, this distinction is a principal factor in the

etiology of modernity’s seemingly pathological inability to fulfill its promise for

universal rights. It is informed by the internal dynamics of a Christendom in dissolution,

none of which concerns Fanon directly at all, and only conceptually as a particular

historical instance of the political employment of ritualized superstition. It must be

underscored, however, that his criticism is not the performance of that which seeks to

merely become something in terms of the current conceptual as well as political order of

Western modernity; rather, it seeks to compel that order to recognize the full range of

forces it has engaged, not as products of that engagement but as sets of facts and powers

and practices, the material existence, historical implementation, and manipulation of

which warrant tracing. Such a performance calls for something else other than “ideology.”

A viable candidate in this context may very well simply be “poetry,” but poetry in

relation to consciousness that is “hantée par le problème de l'amour et de la

compréhension,” as Fanon put it, which brings to the fore the question of how desire

functions or is articulated as an element of what might call “techniques of thinking.”

Alternatively, we might follow Fanon and refer to this as rhythmic attitude (attitude

rythmique), in the sense of timely or eventful thinking; and as he says, the adjective

should be given its full weight, for its expression as well as its source is a poetic practice

that is a living style of spontaneous creation. But what can be meant by spontaneous
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creation except that the poetic image is a material form of imagination as the technique of

living essential to thinking in the world as humans? To ask this is to ask: What defines

the human for whom? And that situates us well within the ambit of the tradition of radical

thinking and imagination, where we find Fanon. On this question of the human we must

draw a point of distinction between Fanon’s concept and the Enlightenment humanists’

conception of “Man” as an abstraction—the lineage that so capture Adorno’s meditations

on the European crisis causing him to conclude that the “human” necessarily requires the

nonhuman as its principal; the lineage that Sylvia Wynters’ boldly and aptly demonstrates

we have no part of and need not do so in order to take up the momentous task of creating

an ethical world. Asked in this manner, the question is concerned with human beings as

articulations of determinable sets of life-practices and grammars. By “grammars” I have

in mind what Cyril Lemieux’s defines as that which enables the members of a community

to judge correctly; that is to say, to correctly link the discontinuities occurring in the

world (bodies, objects, material, gestures, discourses) to descriptions, and to relate

experience to certain of those descriptions as a feeling of fact.” Even more precisely, I

mean something along the lines proposed by the eighth-century grammarian, S!bawayh,

who thought of grammar as a technology of imagination through which a set of relations

to things in reality and each other are articulated as constituting the human world. This is

a question of discovering the adequate language. For, as Fanon asserts in “Ici la voix de

l’Algérie,” : « La Parole de la Nation, le Verbe de la Nation, ordonnent le monde en le

renouvelant, » which is to say that with transformations of grammar—and grammars are

always ultimate and local—we encounter a transformative dissonance in basic perception,

in the very world of perception « un bouleversement de fond perception, du monde même

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de la perception,» Fanon says. In other words, the revolutionary struggle is that of an

emergent collective imagination striving to institute a concordant worldly intelligence.

Turning to this question of the relationship between language, perception, and

imagination as a technology of life, which is where legitimacy and neo-humanism meet,

I’m guided by Albert Murray’s recently professed realization that all poetic expressions

represent or express human feeling, how humans are constituted affectively and so what

they are aware of. This means that local circumstances and predicaments and the

idiomatic procedures evolved to cope with them may have worldwide implications and

application. “Indeed,” Murray proclaims, “such is the function of fiction, which is also to

say poetry, which is to say metaphor; so that, whereas social science surveys are really

about one place at a time, the local metaphor is about all mankind. On this relationship

between fiction, metaphor, and thinking in the world as humans, I recall another moment

with Murray when he told Don Noble, “Fiction s ultimate. Fiction is an attempt to order

chaos. You see,” Murray said, “I now think in terms of particles and/or waves. That’s the

way we conceive of entropy, which is chaos, and the one thing we have or the only thing

we can do about it is to use that endowment that we have that Joyce was talking about

when he referred to the ‘ineluctable modality’ of the visible, of the audible, of the

conceptual. The concept is an attempt to bring some form. Without that, you just have

chaos. So you’ve got to have some sense of form, whether it’s up, down, outside, inside,

round, square, or whatever—he means here style. So “everything is fiction. It’s a matter

of finding an adequate metaphor that would be commensurate with the complexities and

possibilities of our surroundings. That’s something we simply conceive, so the whole

thing is fiction. When a person talks about documentation, it means documenting

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concepts. What serious fiction—such as poetry— tries to do is to bring the deepest, the

most comprehensive insights to bear upon it. Speaking of documentation, what Murray

calls fiction, Ibn Rushd, and before him ibn S!n", and before him al-F"r"b! after al-J"hiz

and al-Kind! called this !"#"$%&', that is “mimesis,” and what he calls documentation they

called al-!"#$%&' !"#$ (the aesthetic community), by which they indicated the living

community of humans articulated and sustain with poetic expression of profound serious

imagination. I could go on and I will because we are talking about documentation and

these resonances matter. As for fiction and form, the preeminent Arabic-language

Algerian novelist, aṭ-Ṭ"hir Waṭṭ"r, who was young man studying at Al-Zaytoun when

Fanon resided in Tunisia and must at least have known of him, and who we lost to cancer

just last year, on the occasion of a seminar on the novel convened by L’institut du Monde

Arabe at the beginning of 1988, stated his “personal and fundamental committed to the

principle of the dialectic of form and content in the sense of expanding the possibilities of

giving adequate form to content, and that form’s being transformed by that content while

at the same time being liberated from its transformation.” That principle was behind his

unwavering !"#$%&' !#'()&' *+,-. $/ 0123, “revolution against the established forms of the

novel,” which was the struggle to disengage the novel as a viable dynamic mode of

representing how many of us live our lives in this world now from the necessities of

historical bourgeoisie formations of life. This revolt is not only against the general form

of the novel, but also against the consecration of form. It is the constant attempt at

innovation of form that embodies what is purported, embodies the content, like a

language that is in harmony with the atmosphere. During the process of innovative

creativity, !"#$%&'$ !"()*+$, Waṭṭ"r functions as what he calls in a idiomatic phrase the drafter
 9

of melodies, !"#$ !"#$%#, and not the conveyor of meaning. This is a rather complex pun

and, at the same time, clearly resonant with Adrian Leverkhün’s remark in Mann’s novel,

Doctor Faustus, that the development section of the sonata form was “a refuge for

subjective illumination.” As I said a moment ago, there are many resonances, a harmonic

dissonance, and to note another, Antonio Gramsci’s remarks in his Notebooks that the

beginning of critical elaboration is “consciousness of what one really is, namely to ‘know

yourself’ as a product of the historical process that has taken place so far and left in you

an infinity of traces without the benefit of an inventory. What is needed is to initiate such

an inventory.” A different cord is struck, if we follow Edward Said and quietly change

inventory into itinerary. So now we are going somewhere having been somewheres else,

and the task is to come up with a plan of travel on the spot with no true bearing other than

where we are now. On needing such an itinerary, Fanon declares, “Je demande qu’on me

considère à partir de mon Désir. Je ne suis pas seulement ici-maintenant, enfermé dans la

choséité. . . Je réclame qu’on tienne compte de mon activité négatrice en tant que je

poursuis autre chose que la vie; en tant que je lutte pour la naissance d’un monde humain.”

I elide a portion of his remark, deliberately perverting it because we are precisely not in

pursuit of anything other than life; Fanon really does provide us with good insights

without the eschatology. “Life,” as an eloquent passage near the end of one of Mahfouz’s

works of serious fiction puts it, “is work, marriage, and a general human duty ( !"#$

!"# $%"&%') and, that is perpetual revolution, which is nothing more than the assiduous

working to realize the will to live.” (!"#$%& !'&() *#+$, ). The phrase “will to live” (!"#$%& !'&())

is the very motto, the local metaphor of the Revolution of Dignity in Tunisia ( !"#$%&# '()*

!"#$ %& '()*+,-./0*1). Not to suggest that the Tunisian Revolution took its inspiration from
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Mahfouz’s 1946 novel. We know better. This phrase, however, signals not only the long

process of what some Arab intellectuals today, in the wake of the revolution, talk about

as the “Tunisification of the Arabs,” but also the poetic character of that process.

Mahfouz is quoting verbatim the title of Abou el-Kacem Chebbi’s 1933 poem !"#$%& !"#$

! "#$% !"#$% %&' . Commonly translated as “Will to Live,” but more literally rendered as “If

the People One Day Will to Live”:

This poem has long been acclaimed throughout the Arab World as a rallying cry

for the core concept of humanity: !"#$%& '(&)* , “human dignity.” That is why it provided

the basis for the revolutionary couplet chanted in chorus by the people demonstrating in

the streets of Tunisia on January 13 2011, and is still motivating the peoples across the

region: “!"#$%& '"()* +,-, ./0%& [The people want to bring down the system].” This

connection, this poetic connection between the human, !"#$%, and dignity is old. It has

long been given that the term dignity necessarily expresses a fundamental concept of

humanity. Under the entry for dignity in the dictionary, al-Muh!t we find the following:

“Human dignity is the ethical principle establishing that the individual human should be

treated as an end in himself rather than as a means, his dignity deriving, above all else,

from his simply being a human.” And human here means specifically “the living thinking

creature, excelling in verbal language.” To which we must add the mimetic capacity. This

sense of the human in relation to dignity is foundational to the “humanist” tendency of

modernity. The concept of humanity as fashioning itself in accord with its spontaneous

imaginative capacity and techniques in concert with its desire is what is at stake in

Chebbi’s “Will to Live” as the definitive element of perpetual revolution, it is the dignity

of humanity. The point here is not simply to mark an Arabo-Islamic element at the
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foundations of modern humanism. The more important aspect of this resonance is the

connection between the concept of dignity and imagination, the material manifestation of

which is poetic expression. The modes of conveyance of these values elude

comprehension, which is why Tunisians refer to !"#$%&' !"#$%&'( !"#$% (inherent Tunisian

ethics) when talking about the spontaneity with which the people of Kasserine established

structures of order in all the chaos during those dark days of early January. They gave

chaos form. The very sense that these ethics inhere necessarily in the Tunisian human, to

still speak idiomatically with the Tunisians, underscores the want of a historical account

of the formation of this emergent revolutionary intelligence that exposes a radical

humanism. I take this to be the gist of Ahmed Jdey’s remark about “an indestructible

dream of a better world, to which historians should apply themselves in elucidating,” and

concur with him that Fanon’s sense of rhythmic attitude is crucial to such elucidation.

Furthermore, a key reason for our inability to comprehend the ways in which the

Tunisian Revolution is the survival and victory of these values is ignorance of the

Fanonian legacy of humanism.

“Je me faisais le poète de monde,” Fanon declares. It is the institution of creative

imagination in the world articulating an aesthetic community, in the full etymology of

aesthesis as the collusion of imagined convention and perception: “La nature même de

l‘émotion, de la sensibilité,” as he describes it. Fanon finds no language of speculative

theory within the ambit of the dominant Western conceptual schemes and systems

adequate to giving an account of this community and its persons as a historical socio-

political force. What still needs elucidating here is the history of mimesis, but this time in

ibn S!n"’s sense of the universal human will to representation that articulates what as I
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said earlier used to be referred to as !"#$%&' !"#$. By translating this as “aesthetic

community” I signal a preference for the traditional Islamic conception of al-umma

because it, unlike the contemporary political translation “nation,” does not imply a

geopolitics of origin as the basis for inclusion, but rather values a shared collective

attachment based on a capacity to imagine in accordance with the conventions of

linguistic expression. This also marks a tangential improvisation of the old political

concept of the aesthetic state that opens up a vector for thinking about poetry, or art, in

relation to structures of power and governance. Here, Fanon’s rhythmic attitude

converges on what I call, taking a leaf from Fred Moten’s repertoire, “poetic socialities.”

What does it mean when a poetic expression, a motto, can marshal millions of individuals

into a collaborative force that institutes change without an integral political ideology?

This is a question of paradigm shift with planetary significance.

Let us attend for a few moments, in closing, then, to some popular Arabic

rhythms from Sgaier Awlad Ahmed, who is widely recognized as the present “national

poet” of Tunisia, and whose expressive trajectory is not to represent the Tunisian human

but humanity and whose work is to display the role of poetry in the process of human

freedom:

:!"#$&% '( "! #$%&'( !" "! #%$ & !"#$%

.."#$! %&'# " ! #$%'& "! $# % "! #$ %&'
!"# "#$%! &'() !"# !#" %$ & !

!"# !" !"#$% !"#

!"#$%&'
!" "! $# %! !
!" !"$# % !
..!" !"$# %& !
!" !" !
"! #$% "! #$ "! #$%&' !"# "! #$% ! "! # !#" $ !"#$
! "
."#$ ! ..!"#$%&
! # $%&'
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"! $# %&'() "! #$%&'() "# !

! $%&' !" "#$% ! !"#$ !#" $% !"$%
!"#$%& "#$ # &'( !
! !"#$&% '# !"#$%& "! $# %&

!" ! $# %'()*
& "! #$% !"#$
! !#" $% "! $# %
! !"#$%&' !"# "! !#$%# !"#$%&' !" !"#$% !"
:!"#$&% '( !"#$% !"#
!"#$%&' "! #$%&'( !"# !"#$%
!"#$ !"#$%& !"#$ !"#
!"#$% !"#$ !"#
!"#$%&! (' *) +(,

You looked into the ashes and saw me:

Black like your shining shoes,
I cannot bear to stare at you.

I am Tunis my brother,
Burnt
I have no hair
I have no eyes
I have no ears
I have no mouth,
As you can see, I may not come back to life,
And I may return
Clear and sharp as a rooster’s crow

Do not give me a pen to write with

Because my fingers flew with a terrible fire in the sky
Do you smell the fragrance of barbeque?

What do you tell your friends?

And who are those two?
Didn’t they understand that winter was at autumn’s door?

I am Central Tunis
I subsist on conviction and rain
I am Greater Tunis,
Destiny
I am the other Tunis
Creative ashes