In this chapter I will develop an intertextual reflection on struggle and violence to rethink the dialectic of interhuman reciprocity, drawing on a broad range of Simone de Beauvoir's and Frantz Fanon's philosophical writings that share a deep intellectual commitment to the emancipation of socially subjugated groups. Several scholars have already productively interpreted Fanon's analysis of white colonial racism in Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon [1952] 2008) alongside Beauvoir's analysis of white patriarchy in her 1949 work The Second Sex (Gordon 2015; Moi 2008; Renault 2014). I propose to expand this intertextual reflection in the light of works that have received less, if any, attention amid the burgeoning Beauvoir–Fanon scholarship, namely Beauvoir's 1940s Philosophical Writings (Beauvoir 2012a) and Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon [1961] 2004). I will argue that both thinkers expressly occupy the ‘French Hegelian’ dialectic of interhuman reciprocity from a subjugated personal-philosophical viewpoint, in order to envisage an emancipatory struggle for women and blacks as an urgent moral task. In doing so, I will borrow Beauvoir's analysis of violence as morally and metaphysically justified in cases of extreme human degradation, to lend moral legitimacy to Fanon's encomium to retributive violence within anticolonial resistance. Finally, I will consider the productive ambiguity of violence as bodily vitality that includes destructive/reactive expressions as well as productive enactments of novel subjective and social formations.

The encounter

An encounter between Beauvoir and Fanon did take place. They met in Rome, in July of 1961, for a three-day intellectual marathon, in the company of Jean-Paul Sartre. The meeting left an indelible mark on Beauvoir's thought; Fanon, the revolutionary intellectual, clearly stands out in her intellectual autobiography among a gallery of giants featuring Fidel Castro and Nikita Krushchev, as the figure who impressed her the most. ‘He was an exceptional man,’ she writes. ‘When I shook his feverish hand, I seemed to be touching the very passion that was consuming him. He communicated this fire to others; when one was with him, life seemed to be a tragic adventure, often horrible but of infinite worth’ (Beauvoir 1994, pp. 318–19, translation modified).

The horrors of the Algerian War (1954–62) haunt Beauvoir's intellectual autobiography (covering the years from 1952 to 1962); she pens the most uncompromising accounts of the war in Algeria, compared with those she wrote about political excesses in Cuba and the Soviet Union (Beauvoir 1994).