Monthly Archives: January 2018

How Not to Read Black Intellectuals

Lewis Gordon on how not to read black intellectuals:

The aim of What Fanon Said is to offer a study of Fanon and his ideas in their own right. “What Fanon said,” then, pertains not only to the black letter words in his writings but also to their spirit, their meaning. This task also involves stepping outside of a tendency that often emerges in the study of intellectuals of African descent—namely, the reduction of their thought to the thinkers they study. For example, Jean-Paul Sartre was able to comment on black intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire, Fanon, and Léopold Sédar Senghor without becoming “Césairian,” “Fanonian,” or “Senghorian”; Simone de Beauvoir could comment on the thought of Richard Wright without becoming “Wrightian”; the German sociologist Max Weber could comment on the African American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois without becoming “Du Boisian.” Why, then, is there a different story when black authors comment on their (white) European counterparts? “Standard” scholarship has explored whether Du Bois is Herderian, Hegelian, Marxian, or Weberian; whether Senghor is Heideggerian; and whether Fanon is every one of the Europeans on whom he has commented Adlerian, Bergsonian, Freudian, Hegelian, Husserlian, Lacanian, Marxian,Merleau-Pontian, and Sartrean, to name several.

The problem of subordinated theoretical identity is a theme against which Fanon argued. It is connected to another problem—the tendency to reduce black intellectuals to their biographies. Critics of this approach ask: How many biographies of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Fanon do we need before it is recognized that they also produced ideas? It is as if to say that white thinkers provide theory and black thinkers provide experience for which all seek explanatory force from the former. As there are many studies of Immanuel Kant without reducing him to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who had the most influence on the former’s moral philosophy), my approach will be to address Fanon’s life and thought as reflections of his own ideals, with the reminder that no thinker produces ideas in a vacuum.

(Lewis R. Gordon, What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought)

Against Originality

“The quest for originality is always bound up with a desire to show off. It has meaning only in relation to the Other, from whom one wishes to distinguish one’s self at all costs. This is an ambiguous relationship, inasmuch as the assertion of one’s difference goes hand in hand with a passionate urge to have it recognized by the Other. As this recognition is usually long in coming, the desire of the subject, caught in his/her own trap, grows increasingly hollow until it is completely alienated in a restless craving for the slightest gesture, the most cursory glance from the Other.” (Paulin J. Hountondji).

Street Smarts

Martin Luther King, Jr. taught a senior seminar in social and political philosophy at Morehouse circa 1962. Below is an exam from his course:

Martin Luther King, Jr-Social and Political Philosophy

“Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work,” Gustave Flaubert is reputed to have said. It appears Martin Luther King, Jr. was regular and orderly in his teaching like a bourgeois, so that he could be nonviolent and original on the streets.