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A review by books_ergo_sum
On Violence by Hannah Arendt
reflective
5.0
This is Hannah Arendt’s response to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (his chapter also called On Violence and Sartre’s Preface, specifically) about decolonization and national liberation.
In the simplest terms, Fanon thinks violence is the answer. When a colony is violently oppressed, the oppressor, “is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.” Because as Ghassan Kanafani so elegantly put it, ‘peaceful negotiations’ with your occupier are a “conversation between the sword and the neck.”
And Arendt disagrees. Kind of. The popular discourse around these two books is that they’re total opposites and you basically have to choose one (if that’s the case, I’m Team Fanon).
But I actually think Arendt and Fanon are more compatible than that. And Arendt improves on Fanon, rather than opposes him.
Arendt challenges the synonymousness of power and violence. The resistance movement seeks power (self-government and autonomy). Fanon wants to get there via violence. But Arendt stresses that:
“Violence can always destroy power… what can never grow out of it is power.”
This felt, to me, like Arendt was targeting Fanon’s interpretation of Hegel. Fanon says, “Violence can thus be understood to be the perfect mediation”—a reference to Hegel’s argument that violence is ‘an imperfect mediation’, one which leads from abstract freedom to “terror” instead of self-government.
Likewise, Arendt insists that:
“Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination… Terror is not the same as violence; it is, rather the form of government that comes into being when violence, having destroyed all power… remains in full control.”
I don’t think Arendt and Fanon are total opposites here. Ultimately, their goals are the same: powerful national liberation movements. And I think, on this little detail (that violence and power aren’t synonymous), Arendt (and Hegel) are right.
Which makes Arendt’s On Violence a great companion to Fanon’s book (which I also recommend).
In the simplest terms, Fanon thinks violence is the answer. When a colony is violently oppressed, the oppressor, “is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.” Because as Ghassan Kanafani so elegantly put it, ‘peaceful negotiations’ with your occupier are a “conversation between the sword and the neck.”
And Arendt disagrees. Kind of. The popular discourse around these two books is that they’re total opposites and you basically have to choose one (if that’s the case, I’m Team Fanon).
But I actually think Arendt and Fanon are more compatible than that. And Arendt improves on Fanon, rather than opposes him.
Arendt challenges the synonymousness of power and violence. The resistance movement seeks power (self-government and autonomy). Fanon wants to get there via violence. But Arendt stresses that:
“Violence can always destroy power… what can never grow out of it is power.”
This felt, to me, like Arendt was targeting Fanon’s interpretation of Hegel. Fanon says, “Violence can thus be understood to be the perfect mediation”—a reference to Hegel’s argument that violence is ‘an imperfect mediation’, one which leads from abstract freedom to “terror” instead of self-government.
Likewise, Arendt insists that:
“Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination… Terror is not the same as violence; it is, rather the form of government that comes into being when violence, having destroyed all power… remains in full control.”
I don’t think Arendt and Fanon are total opposites here. Ultimately, their goals are the same: powerful national liberation movements. And I think, on this little detail (that violence and power aren’t synonymous), Arendt (and Hegel) are right.
Which makes Arendt’s On Violence a great companion to Fanon’s book (which I also recommend).