Fanon and Recognition

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 96-105
Author(s):  
Peter Visscher ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
Hegelian Dialectic ◽  
Essential Prerequisite

This paper applies Hegel’s master-slave dialectic to Fanon’s issue of pseudo-recognition discussed in the essay, “The Negro and Recognition,” as a way of establishing a form of self-consciousness. I begin the paper by arguing that in the Hegelian dialectic establishing a self-consciousness is an essential prerequisite to Fanon’s goal of mutual subject-recognition. I then argue that given the position of black people as slaves within the master-slave dialectic, they are denied the recognition required to attain being in-itself for-itself, which in reality can only be obtained if black people establish self-consciousness on their own terms. I then make the case that this required self-consciousness can only be obtained through struggle, essentially reversing the stages of the dialectic to create a new master/slave relation. In particular, I argue that this moment of struggle provides a moment of proto-recognition which can be used to build a new mutual subject-recognition. I then theorize on what form this new relation must take, making the case that it must be a relation where the categories of master and slave are made irrelevant, and where all subjects are capable of mutual recognition.

scholarly journals Fanon and Recognition

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-105
Author(s):  
Peter Visscher
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
Hegelian Dialectic ◽  
Essential Prerequisite

This paper applies Hegel’s master-slave dialectic to Fanon’s issue of pseudo-recognition discussed in the essay, “The Negro and Recognition,” as a way of establishing a form of self-consciousness. I begin the paper by arguing that in the Hegelian dialectic establishing a self-consciousness is an essential prerequisite to Fanon’s goal of mutual subject-recognition. I then argue that given the position of black people as slaves within the master-slave dialectic, they are denied the recognition required to attain being in-itself for-itself, which in reality can only be obtained if black people establish self-consciousness on their own terms. I then make the case that this required self- consciousness can only be obtained through struggle, essentially reversing the stages of the dialectic to create a new master/slave relation. In particular, I argue that this moment of struggle provides a moment of proto-recognition which can be used to build a new mutual subject-recognition. I then theorize on what form this new relation must take, making the case that it must be a relation where the categories of master and slave are made irrelevant, and where all subjects are capable of mutual recognition.

Hegel and Twentieth-Century French Philosophy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Stone
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Black People ◽  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
Racial Inequalities ◽  
French Philosophy ◽  
Full Participation ◽  
Central Elements ◽  
Struggle For Recognition

This chapter looks at Hegel’s impact on twentieth-century French philosophy by focusing on Kojève’s influential interpretation of Hegel, which enabled Beauvoir and Fanon to adapt Hegel’s philosophy to theorize gender and racial inequalities. Kojève took the struggle for recognition and the master/slave dialectic to be the central elements of Hegel’s thought. On this basis, Beauvoir and Fanon came to understand gender and racial oppression in terms of distortions in human relations of recognition. They argue that women (for Beauvoir) and black people (for Fanon) have been excluded from full participation in the struggle for recognition. However, these existential-Hegelian views are sometimes thought to have been superseded by the anti-Hegelianism of post-1960s French post-structuralism. Against this position, the chapter explains how the post-structuralist ‘French feminist’ Irigaray takes up and transforms Hegel’s notion of mutual recognition, to recommend that differently sexed individuals accept and recognize one another in their irreducible difference.

A Fanonian Philosophy of Race

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Armond Towns
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
White Male ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Central Function ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Similar Vein

Frantz Fanon was one of the most important voices in decolonial and black liberation struggles of the mid-20th century. Writing about race and colonialism in Martinique, France, and Algeria, he articulated the importance of blackness to Western frameworks of the human. The black studies scholarship influenced by Fanon has continued in a similar vein, arguing that much of modern, Western thought either does not discuss race at all or considers race as an add-on to the larger discussion of Western subjectivity. Alternatively, Fanon and his interlocutors argue that race is the central function of the larger fields of Western philosophy and science, even if race is not mentioned at all. To make this claim, they largely point toward two tendencies in Western thought. First, Fanon and his interlocutors often examine the centrality of time and space in modern Western philosophy. Indeed, much of Western philosophy and science has implicitly and explicitly examined time as a linear trajectory that is largely monopolized by the Western European and North American white male subject; alternatively, space has been theorized as the static and nondynamic measure of the Western subject’s capacity to progress. Second, Fanon and his interlocutors also critically interrogate the related discussion of mutual recognition that is assumed in much of Western thought. As such, Western thinkers have often contended that, historically, the self recognizes itself in the other, and vice versa, and that self/other relationship is the basis for concepts of subjectivity. Yet, Fanon and his interlocutors have also pointed out that the lack of recognition of black people as human or as subjects has done little to foreclose whiteness as the position overrepresented as the human. Rather than recognition, white people have historically enacted racial violence against black bodies as a central mode through which to enter into humanity. As such, time and space and the lack of recognition as outlined by Fanon and his interlocutors suggest that nonwhite bodies have always provided a crisis for Western concepts of universality and subjecthood.

God as a White man: A psychological barrier to conceptualizing Black people and women as leadership worthy.

2020 ◽  
Vol 119 (6) ◽  
pp. 1290-1315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven O. Roberts ◽  
Kara Weisman ◽  
Jonathan D. Lane ◽  
Amber Williams ◽  
Nicholas P. Camp ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Psychological Barrier

Economic Way of Thought and Legislationon Nonprofit Organizations

2012 ◽  
pp. 48-63
Author(s):  
L. Yakobson
Keyword(s):  
Nonprofit Organizations ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Nonprofit Sector ◽  
Social Medium ◽  
The State ◽  
Rapid Changes ◽  
Comparative Advantages ◽  
Essential Prerequisite

The article considers proper legislation as an essential prerequisite for actualization of NPOs comparative advantages. Restrictions imposed on NPOs are reasonable if they are compensated by benefits from greater trust. The rigidity of constrains and requirements should be optimized while accounting for peculiarities of a social medium, the state of the nonprofit sector, and the governments readiness to encourage the development of the latter. As empirical data suggests, Russian NPOs being on different stages of maturity need separate legal treatment. In the meanwhile, interests that prevail in the NPOs community are not always conducive to rapid changes.

Impossible Divisions: Fanon, Hegel and Psychoanalysis

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Morgan Wortham
Keyword(s):  
Racial Difference ◽  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
Mirror Stage ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Black Skin

This chapter concentrates on Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, where the Hegelian theme of mutual recognition as the origin of man’s self-consciousness and potential freedom is tested against the complex circumstances of colonialism. Fanon’s idea that the ‘Negro slave’ is recognized by the ‘White Master’ in a situation that is ‘without conflict’ suggests a possibly double, or self-resistant, meaning: the colonial situation after slavery ushers in something like a phony war; but also colonialism’s historical interpretation is not exhausted by the Hegelian master-slave logic. Through this double possibility of the colonial, one wonders whether after Hegel it is historical interpretation or the historical process itself that has gone awry. Such dynamic tensions suggest an impossibly divided dialectics at work throughout Fanon’s corpus. The section of Fanon’s ‘The Negro and Recognition’ devoted to a critique of Adler points to an earlier footnote in Black Skin, White Masks which offers a lengthy engagement with Lacan, allowing us to reread the politics of racial difference into the scene of the Lacanian mirror-stage. Here, the resistant ‘other’ of psychoanalysis unlocks the possibility of another ‘politics’ capable of addressing, by better recognising, some of its most significant impasses.

African Americans and the Crisis of Modernity

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 53-60
Author(s):  
Eric S. King
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Family ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Crisis Of Modernity

This article examines Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun by exploring the conflict between a traditionally Southern, Afro-Christian, communitarian worldview and certain more destabilizing elements of the worldview of modernity. In addition to examining the socio-economic problems confronted by some African Americans in the play, this article investigates the worldviews by which these Black people frame their problems as well as the dynamics within the relationships of a Black family that lives at the intersection of racial, class, and gender inequality in Chicago during the latter 1950s.

Having Their Say, Leaving Their Mark

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-153
Author(s):  
Adolphus G. Belk ◽  
Robert C. Smith ◽  
Sherri L. Wallace
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Adverse Conditions ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Independent Organization

In general, the founders of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists were “movement people.” Powerful agents of socialization such as the uprisings of the 1960s molded them into scholars with tremendous resolve to tackle systemic inequalities in the political science discipline. In forming NCOBPS as an independent organization, many sought to develop a Black perspective in political science to push the boundaries of knowledge and to use that scholarship to ameliorate the adverse conditions confronting Black people in the United States and around the globe. This paper utilizes historical documents, speeches, interviews, and other scholarly works to detail the lasting contributions of the founders and Black political scientists to the discipline, paying particular attention to their scholarship, teaching, mentoring, and civic engagement. It finds that while political science is much improved as a result of their efforts, there is still work to do if their goals are to be achieved.

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