Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Truth

As a student, I was never introduced to the work of Martinican philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. I read Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth on my own during my Ph.D. in Paris, and since then Fanon’s ideas have constantly accompanied and deeply shaped my own philosophical thinking. With one exception, however, I have shunned away from writing about him for ten years. This reticence may have had to do with the difficulties one inevitably encounters when trying to find a place for Fanon within mainstream debates in political philosophy and social epistemology.

Let us take, for instance, the epistemic injustice literature. As I argue in a recent piece, while helpfully contributing to bringing attention to previously undertheorized forms of harm and oppression, a significant part of this literature is predicated upon the idea that effectively questioning epistemic injustices requires the establishment of a clear distinction between “what we have a reason to think and what mere relations of power are doing to our thinking” (Epistemic Injustice, p. 3). The insistence of this literature on the cultivation of specific epistemic virtues in those who occupy dominant positions in society is thus readily explained: by learning how to separate reason from power, one can correct the damaging influence of prejudice on one’s own thinking, thereby refraining from perpetrating epistemic injustices. The issue here, as many have noticed, is that focusing attention, once again, on those who occupy dominant positions in society risks concealing or minimizing the agency of marginalized individuals and groups, as well as the crucial role they play in the transformation of our epistemic and social practices.

The idea that it must be possible to neatly separate reason from power, and that casting doubt on this possibility entails a commitment to untenable reductionism (“truth just is power”), is widespread—and shared by political and social philosophers well beyond the epistemic injustice literature. But is this clear-cut separation actually achievable in practice? One of the reasons that makes Fanon “unfit” for most debates in political philosophy and social epistemology is precisely that his work offers us an uncompromisingly messy picture of the social world, and of the complex intertwining of knowledge and power, oppression and resistance.

Is the punishment of a criminal act justified in contexts where the exercise of juridical power does not rely on a freely agreed social contract, but on sheer domination? Is the dismissal of a (colonized) patient’s symptoms that current medical knowledge is unable to explain just a case of “circumstantial epistemic bad luck” (Epistemic Injustice, p. 152), or instead an instance of epistemic oppression? Fanon’s work raises these difficult questions without ever suggesting that the answer is straightforward or unequivocal. It shows that dealing with them is a fraught affair, because we cannot even begin to elaborate a response before we problematize and (at least partially) transform our current epistemic, social, and political practices.

To account for this feature of Fanon’s work, I argue that his philosophical and political project is concerned with what has been called the “politics of truth” (“What Is Critique?”, p. 47). The idea here is that knowledge formations, power relations, and socially situated subjects are linked together in a network of reciprocal relations of co-constitution. Without being simply reducible to each other, these three poles and their reciprocal relations define the outlook of our epistemic and social life at any given time. With no external ground on which to safely rely, critique therefore consists in the attempt to transform the position of the socially situated subject within the complex power/knowledge relations they are part of.

This conceptual framework, as opposed to the epistemic injustice one, fully embraces the messiness of the social world as well as the uncertain, experimental nature of social change and ordinary practices of resistance. As Fanon shows in his psychiatric writings, prejudice is but one element of the more fundamental organization of reciprocal relations between knowledge, power, and subjects at a given time and place. And since, within the politics of truth that characterizes French colonialism, “objectivity” is always “directed against” the colonized subject (The Wretched of the Earth, p. 37), the very possibility of discerning the workings of power and prejudice in their own thinking only becomes available to privileged social actors—such as European doctors and psychiatrists—after the politics of truth they operate within has been destabilized, and what they understand as “objectivity” has been questioned (“The ‘North African Syndrome’”).

Effective epistemic and social change, for Fanon, is therefore always initiated by the individuals and groups that occupy marginalized positions in society. However, his (in)famous call for revolutionary violence is not the only consequence that he derives from this insight. Indeed, Fanon also explores a multiplicity of everyday practices of resistance deployed against the French colonial politics of truth, such as the silences and lies that characterize the undisciplined conduct of the colonized subject who, accused of a crime, refuses “to authenticate, by confessing his act, the social contract proposed to him” by colonial power (“Conducts of Confession in North Africa”, p. 412). To change the social world and make it into a less intolerable place to live, the very framework—the “politics of truth”—that defines what people in dominant positions consider to be true or false, objective or subjective, just or unjust, acceptable or unacceptable needs to be transformed through practices of refusal, resistance, and revolution.

This is why Fanon was, at the same time and inseparably, a philosopher, a psychiatrist, and a militant political activist. Taking his work seriously today means taking seriously the idea that we cannot conceive of a new (social) world, and of a different politics of truth, before we begin concretely transform the current ones. That this idea sits uneasily with many contemporary debates in political philosophy and social epistemology is perhaps its most significant virtue.

Daniele Lorenzini

Daniele Lorenzini is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. His latest book, The Force of Truth: Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in September 2023.