slowly dawns upon truths that are only partial, limited and unstable’ (p. 117). It is militants who have found themselves thrown primarily among the people of the countryside that gradually both learn from and teach the rural masses the construction of a nation in action: ‘these politics are national, revolutionary and social and these new facts which the colonized will now come to know exist only in action’ (p. 117, translation modified). In this manner the nation is constructed through agency and is not reflective of social entities such as indigeneity, ethnicity or race. It is a nation that is made up solely of those who fight for freedom; it is a uniquely political conception. Here the subject is actually created by an ‘excessive’ subjectivity, by the practice of liberation at all levels, collective, individual, social (hence Fanon’s studies of changes in the family, of the veil, of the effect of the radio, etc.).
An underdeveloped people must prove, by its fighting power, its ability to set itself up as a nation, and by the purity of every one of its acts, that it is, even to the smallest detail, the most lucid, the most self-controlled people. But this is all very hard ... The thesis that men change at the same time as they change the world has never been so manifest as it is now in Algeria (Fanon, 1989: 24, 30).4
Yet the role of the leader, of the ‘honest intellectual’, is not to impose a ‘party line’ or his supposedly superior knowledge, but to be faithful to a politics of ‘confidence in the masses’:
To be a leader in an underdeveloped country is to know that in the end everything depends on the education of the masses, on raising the level of thought, on what is sometimes too quickly called ‘politicisation’ ... To politicise the masses ... is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to make the masses understand that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is also due to them (Fanon, 1990: 159, translation modified).
When Fanon refers to ‘we Algerians’ or to ‘we Africans’, as he does on many occasions (e.g. 1967: 196; 1989: 32; 1990: 159), it is clear that he is referring to a conception of the nation that is not based on ‘nationality’ as commonly understood. We are not in the presence here of a notion of the nation founded on indigeneity, nor is it one founded on ‘race’. Fanon was a foreigner and a non-Arab as well as not an African. Yet I also think it is important to point out that his biographer is quite mistaken to search for the source of this view in Sartrean existentialist theory and thus to maintain that ‘for Fanon, the nation is a product of the will, and a form of consciousness which is not to be defined in ethnic terms; in his view, being Algerian was a matter of willing oneself to be Algerian rather than of being born in a country called Algeria’ (Macey, 2000: 377–8). This position constitutes a misunderstanding because it fundamentally depoliticises the question by reducing it to Fanon’s psychology. This view was not simply Fanon’s; it was also that of the people involved in a struggle for national liberation in which ‘the women, the family, the children, the aged – everybody participates’, as Adolpho Gilly puts it in his introduction to Fanon (1989: 8), while continuing by noting that those who risked their lives for independence ‘were not only Frenchmen or Arabs; they were also Spaniards, Italians, Greeks – the entire Mediterranean supported an Algeria in arms’ (p. 15). This subjectivity, then, did not belong to the subject Fanon alone, but was the subjectivity of the sequence; it was that which was ‘obvious’ because its obviousness had been produced by the politics of the situation. In any case, this identity (Algerian) was not just chosen by Fanon; it also refers to how others saw him as well as the other ‘foreigners’ active in the struggle. It is in fact a purely political identity. Fanon’s conception of the nation is not a matter of a psychological act of will; it is rather a question of a subject being produced by fidelity to the collective subjective politics of the (emancipatory) situation.
In sum, the point is to recognise that politics exists beyond identity and that it cannot therefore be reduced to the psychology of individuals. Such a politics consists fundamentally of a politics of affirmation, which is at the core of all emancipatory politics and which is both singular and universal in nature. Indeed, it is only on this subjective basis that an inclusive society can be built; only a politics of affirmation can effectuate a conception of the nation that breaks completely from notions of indigeneity. Thus: ‘we want an Algeria open to all, in which every kind of genius may grow ... in the new society that is being built, there are only Algerians. From the outset, therefore, every individual living in Algeria is an Algerian’ (Fanon, 1989: 32, 152, emphasis in original).5 For Fanon, national liberation was a universal politics concerning humanity as a whole and not a matter of attaining independence in a particular country. Unsurprisingly, national liberation could only be non-identitarian and pan-African in its vision, and this pan-Africanism could only be popularly based:
The optimism that prevails today in Africa is not an optimism born of the spectacle of the forces of nature that are at last favourable to Africans. Nor is the optimism due to the discovery in the former oppressor of a less inhuman and more kindly state of mind. Optimism in Africa is the direct product of the revolutionary action of the masses ... The enemy of the African under French domination is not colonialism insofar as it exerts itself within the strict limits of his nation, but it is the form of colonialism, it is the manifestations of colonialism, whatever be the flag under which it asserts itself (1967: 171).
In this affirmation regarding the universality of national liberation and freedom, a clear similarity can be observed with the writings of Toussaint Louverture during the Haitian struggle for freedom. This is not surprising; after all, we are, in both cases, in the presence of an excess over the extant and hence of the (re-)assertion of a universal truth. But Fanon’s thinking on the formation of the nation is not reducible to that of the formation of a state, and freedom for him is not synonymous with the simple fact of independent statehood.6 Rather, following Rousseau, the people are not considered as a simple given, as in various ‘populist’ positions, but have to first constitute themselves as a collective political subject.7 For Fanon, the core process in national construction is precisely the formation of a people and thereby the changing of social relations and of personal consciousness also, as the effectuation of a nation is premised on this process. It is this that founds the universality of the human. For Fanon, then, in Algeria as in Haiti, it was people (les gens) who constituted the nation by constituting themselves as a people (un peuple), not the state.8 And the people did so through a form of politics that, while not necessarily opposed to the state as such (but only to a particular kind of state, the colonial state), distinguished itself fundamentally from state subjectivity. It is in this sense that any emancipatory politics can be said to always exist ‘at a distance’ from the state. Moreover, the concept of ‘the people’ is understood here as a political concept, not as a social one.
Yet, at the same time as affirming the political universality of the human, Fanon’s nationalism is one founded on a category of the people ultimately represented by a party. This creates a difficulty for his thought of politics, for the idea of the people is no longer exclusively self-created but also represented, which implies that it is created in a political space by a party. Along with the category of class, ‘the people’ comes to be conceived of as a ‘circulating’ category – as a sociological grouping as well as a self-created political subject – with the result that we are also confronted by a reductive relationship between the objectively social and the subjective. This becomes apparent when, immediately after independence, a class whom Fanon refers to as the ‘national bourgeoisie’ detaches itself from the people and becomes unable to contribute to the making of the nation, as its interests link it closely to colonial power. Indeed, the ‘national bourgeoisie’ excludes itself from the nation; it is unable ‘to rationalise popular praxis, in other words to understand its rationality’ (2002: 145, my translation), and so finally excludes itself from the people themselves, for it is
only a sort of greedy caste, avid and voracious, with the mind of a huckster, only too glad to accept the dividends that the former colonial power hands out to it. This get-rich-quick middle class shows itself incapable of great ideas or inventiveness. It remembers what it has
