ABSTRACT
Sartre’s dialectic, Fanon says, cannot be resolved at a higher level into the consciousness of
class struggle by sublating the explosive sexed racial protest into the objective universality of
the proletariat. Thus, ‘the natives’ challenge to the colonial world is not a rational confrontation
of points of view. It is not a treatise on the universal, but the untidy affirmation of an original idea
propounded as the absolute’ (1961, p. 41). Fanon’s ‘original idea’ here is life and its plurality.
