Frantz Fanon on reason and racism

Reason was confident of victory on every level. I put all the parts back together. But I had to change my tune.

That victory played cat and mouse; it made a fool of me. As the other put it, when I was present, it was not; when it was there, I was no longer.

- Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Ranajit Guha on the failure to grasp the political agency of peasants

“…[I]nsurgency is regarded as external to the peasant’s consciousness and Cause is made to stand in as a phantom surrogate for Reason, the logic of that consciousness”.

- Ranajit Guha, The Prose of Counter-Insurgency