In her famous text On Violence, Hannah Arendt severely criticises Frantz Fanon's ‘glorification’ of violence (Arendt 1970, pp. 14, 20, 65 et passim). Arendt rejects the idea that humans can only create themselves through violent action (1970, p. 12). Violence can be necessary or inevitable, but in no way is it essential to the liberation of the oppressed. However, this seems exactly what Fanon is suggesting. Even if violence cannot, for him, be an end in itself, it remains what Alice Cherki in her 2002 Preface to Les damnés de la terre calls ‘an obligatory passage’ (Cherki 2002, p. 11). This passage is not only necessary for empirical reasons. These empirical reasons can be quite real: how to respond to the violence of colonialism except by using counter-violence to break its rule? But Fanon goes further than this. In Black Skin, White Masks he writes: ‘Thus human reality in-itself-for-itself can be achieved only through conflict and through the risk that conflict implies’ (Fanon [1952] 2008, p. 170). And he continues in The Wretched of the Earth (and this is only one example): ‘The colonized subject discovers reality and transforms it through his praxis, his deployment of violence and his agenda for liberation’ (Fanon [1961] 2004, p. 44). Revolutionary praxis is here virtually identified with the use of violence for what seem to be essential reasons, thus making Arendt's critique at least plausible.

In this chapter, I wish to unearth the underlying logic that determines the place of violence in Fanon's thinking, particularly in Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon [1952] 2008) and in The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon [1961] 2004), by showing how this logic has a fundamentally Hegelian – or more specifically Kojèvian – character. More specifically, I will argue that the central place of violence in Fanon's thinking is intrinsically linked to his reading of Alexandre Kojève who, in turn, provides a very specific reading of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon discusses only two authors in a more or less systematic way: Octave Mannoni and Hegel (or, more specifically, the latter's dialectic of lordship and bondage).