Rousseau and Revolution

General Will and National Consciousness 43
National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood
to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the
new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.
At whatever level we study it [ . . . ] decolonization is quite simply
the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men.
Without any period of transition, there is a total, complete, and absolute
substitution. (Ibid., 35) 1
Success entails nothing less than a social structure changed entirely from
the bottom up. Fanon is clear: this kind of transformation only emerges
when it is ‘willed, called for, demanded’ (ibid.). Its crude form, felt in the
consciousness of the colonized and feared as a terrifying possible future by
the colonizers, must manifest itself in what can only be an historical process.
Neither magic nor nature can substituted for the meeting of two
opposed groups whose relations were created and sustained in history
through violence. In Fanon’s writings, although there are organic intellectuals
who, thrown out of established urban party politics, are retrained
through their experiences of living within the peasantry of more remote
areas, there are no singular outsiders who emerge as Rousseau’s legislators
helping the colonized to envision what they must become.
The colonized must claim themselves the equal of the settlers. What
makes this possible is when in the moment of an actual fi ght the colonized
realize that they fi ght human beings like themselves, that the life, breath
and heart of the colonizers share the strengths and limitations of their own
form. With this grasp of the lies at the core of the social rules that have forcibly
regulated their lives, they easily begin to crumble:
For if, in fact, my life is worth as much as the settler’s, his glance no longer
shrivels me up nor freezes me, and his voice no longer turns me into
stone. I am no longer on tenterhooks in his presence; in fact, I don’t give
a damn for him. (Ibid., 45)
People once weighed down by their ‘inessentiality’ now emerge as ‘privileged
actors, with the grandiose glare of history’s fl oodlights upon them.’
(Ibid.)
Decolonization unites the people by a decision to ‘remove from it its heterogeneity’,
to unify on a national, sometimes racial, basis. For native intellectuals
who have imbibed and defended the Greco-Latin pedestal as their
own, these all become lifeless, dead words. They have nothing to do with
the confl ict in which they are engaged. The language of individualism is