FANON'S THEORY OF VIOLENCE: A CRITIQUE By B.K.

JHA

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/41855881.pdf

(B K JHA)

“Fanon attaches great importance to violence on several grounds. First, Fanon maintains that it is
only through viole (pg. 360)…. that man creates himself. Revolutionary violence frees man's
consciousness and creates a new man. Fanon's idea is quite different from that of Hegel and Marx.
While according to Hegel man is the product of his thought, Marx maintains chat man is the product
of labour. But Fanon says that man produces himself through violence. According to Sartre, Fanon
makes it clear that "irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrec tion of savage
instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself... The native cures himself
of colonial neurosis by thrusting out the settler through force of arms. When his rage boils over, he
rediscovers his lost innocence and he comes to know himself in that he himself creates his self".9
There is also another sense in which man creates himself through violence. Fanon maintains that
colonized man ' 'finds his freedom in and through violence".10 It may be noted that for Fanon
freedom implies the liberation of consciousness in such a way as to create a new man. He is
convinced that individual can be converted from his previous existence as a "thing" to his new
existence as a "human" being" only through violence”. (pg. 361)

“Second, being a psychiatrist by profession, Fanon uses violence as a catharsis. He argues that
violence is a cleansing force. It frees the colonized from his feeling of inferiority and humiliation. To
quote Fanon, "At the level of individuals, violence is a cleans ing force; It frees the native from his
inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-
respect".11 Thus Fanon believes in the purificatory role of violence. Third, Fanon glorifies violence
because it acts as a unifying force for the native people. He maintains that it is not enough for the
colonized to gain liberation as consciousness. The social and political institutions of the colonial
regime ought to be com pletely destroyed and new ones created. In order to destory these
structures effectively, it is necessary to build solidarity among the colonized. This solidarity can be
built only by violence. It binds the people together to from a collective individual. Fanon writes, "the
practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the
great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upwards in reac tion to the
settler's violence in the beginning. The groups recognize each other and future nation is already
indivisible. The a struggle mobilizes the people; that is to say, it throws them in one way and in one
direction".12 Thus the armed conflict creates a feeling of solidarity and introduces into the
consciousness of the people "the ideas of a common cause, of a national destiny and of collective
history". (pg. 361-362)