Ficek, Douglas

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Genre

Thesis/Dissertation

Date

2013

Author

Ficek, Douglas

Advisor

Gordon, Lewis R. (Lewis Ricardo)

Committee member

Gordon, Jane Anna
Ware, Owen
Alcoff, Linda M.

Department

Philosophy

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/1192

Abstract

What is the meaning of Fanonian liberation? That is the question that animates this work, which is (negatively) inspired by the reality of misanthropy, practical and theoretical, and neocolonialism, external and internal. To answer this question, I first situate Frantz Fanon within the larger discourse of liberation, emphasizing the relationship between his liberatory work and the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez, Paulo Freire, and Enrique Dussel. From there, I argue that there is today an unfortunate privileging of ethics, and that this privileging is used to discredit the political as an intersubjective domain. To establish (what I call) the primacy of politics, I carefully analyze Fanon's first book, Black Skin, White Masks, and his sociogenetic conclusions. I then turn to The Wretched of the Earth and to the phenomenon of petrification, which is, I contend, one of the most important features of colonialism and neocolonialism. To fully explain this phenomenon, I consider both its mythopoetic significance and its relationship to Jean-Paul Sartre's conception of seriousness. Finally, I argue that the solution to the problem of petrification can be found in Fanon's second book, A Dying Colonialism, in which there are rich descriptions of political playfulness and (what I call) philosophical archaeology, which can be defined as the descriptive and evaluative analysis of meanings as contingent human artifacts.

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Theses and Dissertations

"Man Is a Yes": Fanon, Liberation, and the Playful Politics of Philosophical Archaeology