Frantz Fanon's essay ‘Concerning Violence’ that opens his famous book The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon 1991; originally published in 1961 under the title Les damnés de la terre) paraphrases Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel [1807] 1977) and parodies his Logic (Hegel [1812–1816] 1969). While it learns from Hegel's narrative how to honour and to suspect the standpoint of immediate knowledge, it seems incongruously unwilling to assent to the logico-ontological propositions that in Hegel's system authorise this strategic solicitude and this ultimate suspicion. For it is not only the Marxist version of dialectical reasoning which, according to the famous formulation, the text asks to be ‘slightly stretched’; it appears to go after Hegel himself. As when the young Marx, in a hilariously sardonic response to the mystifying reconciliations of Hegel's ‘allegory’ of mediation, says, ‘Real extremes cannot be mediated precisely because they are real extremes. Nor do they require mediation, for they are opposed in essence. They have nothing in common, they do not need each other, they do not supplement each other’ (Marx [1843] 1975a, p. 88), so Fanon's text here tells us that our most truthful witness to the colonial context, to the defining logic of the coloniser-colonised relation, is not Hegel but Aristotle: ‘The zone where the colonized live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the colonizers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity. Obedient to the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, they both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous’ (Fanon [1961] 1991, pp. 38–39, translation revised). Hegel is not directly named in this passage.