Rousseau and Revolution

42 Rousseau and Revolution
seem to crouch with envy – does to human relationships. This is precisely
the culture of dependence that Rousseau condemns but here theorized not
through imagining what Karl Marx later called the fi rst moment of primitive
accumulation but through its extenuation in global relations created
through colonization and enslavement.
Fanon offers a phenomenological portrait of both sides, of what it means
to see oneself as bringing values and civilization to outposts and backwaters,
as making history, creating an epoch, embodying an absolute beginning
and what, in contrast, it means to be treated as ‘a negation of’ or ‘the enemy’
of values, to be a deforming element that is thought to disfi gure all that is
beautiful or moral; what it is to be the telos toward which others hope to
move, defi ning the terms of their development and what, in contrast, it is to
be referred to in zoological terms, as reptilic, stinking and gesticulating
within what many think would, if left uninterrupted, have remained a prehistorical
vacuum (Fanon, 1963, 41). How would these Manichean poles
meet to discuss anything shared? The thought of the possibility is patently
absurd. To sustain such a situation of disparity requires the bayonet not the
ballot or collective deliberation in which one can trust that others may better
understand what avowed institutional principles intend.
Fanon adds insight to Rousseau’s claim on the one hand that there is no
right to slavery and that the slave is right to escape as soon as he can and
on the other that slavery creates ‘natural’ slaves or habituates people to a
set of conditions that make their legitimate escape extremely diffi cult to
achieve. While underscoring the form and nature of these constraints, that
one risks death and humiliation if one aims to challenge the coordinates of
a Manichean world, Fanon writes that the ‘native admits no accusation,’
that he is ‘overpowered but not tamed,’ ‘treated as an inferior but not convinced
of his inferiority’ (ibid., 53). He lives in a permanent dream to
switch places, with the basic insight that ‘the showdown [between the colonizer
and colonized] cannot be put off indefi nitely’ (ibid.). Until such
time, however, members of the colonized community do live with an anger
that is perpetually lit. The explosions are inevitable but the targets the
undeserving and the battles ultimately displaced. In addition, the colonized
easily forget how fundamentally unstable the power of the colonizers
ultimately must be.
Unlike Rousseau, however, integral to Fanon’s theory is an account of
how people struggle through such conditions toward a legitimate alternative
of how people refuse complete habituation and seek to become the kinds
of subjects that can create the polities they deserve. Fanon emphasizes,
without romance, what is involved. He writes,