ABSTRACT
Turning to the ways Fanon challenges division and absolute violence, his focus on the ways
history and philosophy are confined through the inscription of race and pleasure and revolutionary
violence into universal history shows a disentangling of the revolutionary event from the telos of
dialectical progression. Fanon’s interest is ‘not simply to counter theways history has been used to
justify supremacist claims and effects, but to escape the normal teleological form of its writing’
(1961, p. 46). Thinking from the vantage of the fantasy of the corporeal makes visible that the
anarchy and order dichotomy is a racial, psycho-pathological and socio-pathological sexual
project, grounding order on a stereotype. This order’s power matrix thrives on assumptions
about a species as a ‘biological-sexual-sensual-genital-nigger’ (Fanon, 1952, p. 202), and a
body of transitional capacity, that is, a ‘colonized’ subject that could integrate himself into the
emerging assembled white regime. Pointing to this co-produced corporeal matrix and ‘global’
order shows that the basic premise of erecting social contracts ‘rest[s] . . . on the necessity of tor-
turing, raping, and committing massacres’ (Fanon, 1988, p. 72). Against Sartre, he says that dia-
lectics can play a role in transubstantiating a master body that is able to transcend its materiality,
while killingwhat has been produced as the stereotype. The stereotypes inBlack SkinWhiteMasks
unfold in a situation of interactions, with the black formed and deformed by the subject/white
master. This turns into a ‘predestined depository’ (1967, p. 179) of violence demanding an invest-
ment in the dialectic and its requirement of a necessary recognition.
