Rousseau and Revolution

General Will and National Consciousness 41
‘[a]n endless task, the cataloguing of reality. We accumulate facts, we discuss
them, but with every line that is written, with every statement that is
made, one has the feeling of incompleteness’ (ibid., 172).
To explore this phenomenon and its alternatives, Fanon insisted that our
methods themselves must become a question. One cannot assume that
methods are not part of the colonial projects that so determine the character
of the world of which they are a part. We cannot be sure that they do not
produce rather than give an account of the very kinds of relations that
Fanon sought to interrupt. He writes of his own aims and those of a radically
humanistic political theory, ‘The prognosis is in the hands of those
who are willing to get rid of the worm-eaten roots of the structure [ . . . ]
Reality for once, requires a total understanding’ (ibid., 11). In spite of the
exhaustiveness of much psychological literature, they often, by contrast,
‘lose sight of the real’ (ibid., 83).
Fanon continues in a spirit much like the opening of Rousseau’s Second
Discourse :
It is good form to introduce a work in psychology with a statement of its
methodological point of view. I shall be derelict. I leave methods to the
botanists and the mathematicians. There is a point at which methods
devour themselves [ . . . ] I believe that the fact of the juxtaposition of the
white and black races has created a massive psychoexistential complex. I
hope by analyzing it to destroy it. (Ibid., 12)
If for Rousseau the index of the quality of writing is its capacity to compel
virtuous action, for Fanon ‘truth’ is what sets or enables the creation of
conditions for people to encounter one another as human beings. He
states, ‘It is not possible for me to be objective’ (ibid., 86). He describes his
own text as a ‘mirror with a progressive infrastructure, in which it will be
possible to discern the Negro on the road to disalienation’ (ibid., 184).
Manicheanism and Liberation
The context of this alienation is one of political illegitimacy, of coercively
created and maintained inequalities outlined in the Wretched of the Earth.
This describes what the construction of a Manichean world, a world violently
divided in two – one strongly built of stone and steel in which garbage
disappears and people, white and foreign, are well-nourished with covered
feet; the other densely populated by people who are dark and hungry, who