Revolutionary inhumanism: Fanon’s De la violence

The article proposes a reading of Les Damnés de la terre by F. Fanon (1968a) via its original and compelling conjugation of a revolutionary, anti-colonial humanism. Insofar as Fanon’s is resolutely a humanism to come, a postcolonial ‘invention of a new species’, what I will call Fanon’s inhumanism must be grasped in its fundamentals as a complex and original critique of colonial, and defense of anticolonial, violence. The article proposes that the incommensurability of heterogeneous colonial situations requires not moralistic commentary but the elucidation of the logic of any singular case and of the greater or lesser necessity of violence there within.