Fanon, Violence, and Spontaneous Freedom

Frantz Fanon’s writings remain controversial for the force and openness with which they advocate violence in the context of decolonial political struggle. Prima facie, Fanon appears to suggest that decolonial political violence is somehow inherently good; this places him in tension with a certain common-sense thought about the ethics of political violence, which is that it is only OK to commit acts of violence when they cannot be avoided. In this paper however, I argue that this tension with the ‘common-sense view’ is only seeming. I show this by establishing that what Fanon is really interested in is the ability of the native to exercise what Jonathan Gingerich has recently dubbed ‘spontaneous freedom’. Via work by Hannah Arendt, which Gingerich also cites, I argue that this shouldn’t surprise us, since spontaneous freedom is necessary for the establishing and maintenance of political communities. In colonial societies, as Fanon argues, violence is the only means the native has for expressing their free, spontaneous agency. This is why it cannot be avoided.