A response to Lewis Gordon's 'Fanon & the Crisis of European Man'

by Mbali Baduza, 2012

Introduction:

In reading Gordon’s Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences, I found myself asking why Gordon felt that he had to write this book. What was he trying to do? The answer can be found quite early on in the book when he says, and I quote at length, that:

“This is not a study on Fanon so much as it is an opportunity for an engagement with Fanon... I here regard Fanon as a locus of many pressing questions in contemporary philosophy –particularly in philosophy of human science. Regarding Fanon as an opportunity, I regard myself as working within the spirit of his way of seeing the world... since Fanon respected most of those who have the courage to state what they believe. I believe Fanon was a great philosopher and that his ideas continue to be of great value to other philosophers, cultural critics, human scientists, and laypeople alike”. 

(1995: 2, my emphasis)

Fanon and the Crisis of European Man by Lewis R. Gordon

As the first book to analyze the work of Fanon as an existential-phenomenological critic of the human sciences and liberation philosopher, Gordon deploys Fanon's work to illuminate how the "bad faith" of European science and civilization have philosophically stymied the project of liberation. Fanon's body of work serves as a critique of European science and society, and shows the ways in which the project of "truth" is compromised by Eurocentric artificially narrowed scope of humanity—a circumstance to which he refers as the crisis of European Man.