“The tragedy is already staged in a system where innocence suffers. The good among both will suffer. Colonialism, enslavement, and racism are tragic so long as we understand that that the suffering of the damned is ignored or, for the most part, doesn’t matter. It is a lived reality of not mattering.”
Category: Fanon
Chad Kautzer: “A Political Philosophy of Self-Defense”
“To develop a critical theory of community defense, however, we need to move beyond the rhetoric of rights or the idea that all self-defensive violence is quasi-natural or nonpolitical. The self-defense I discuss in this essay is politicalbecause the self being defended is political, and as such it requires both normative and strategic considerations. This…
Adam Shatz on Fanon’s “Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté”
This new volume of uncollected writings “reflects Fanon’s search for ‘freedom as dis-alienation’, itself a response to his experience of what Sartre called ‘extreme situations’: the battlefields of the Second World War, the asylums of North Africa, clandestine anti-colonial work.” His tragedy was that “his vision of freedom and solidarity lost out to the narrower…