Kingston University workshop on Fanon & Philosophy

One-day Workshop on Fanon and Philosophy

Kingston University: 20 November 2015

In Goran Hugo Olsson’s recent film essay Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialist Self-Defence (2014) Lauryn Hill recites the line from Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth that ‘the colonised man is an envious man’. The film largely confirms Sartre’s view in his Preface to Fanon’s last work that the resentment of the colonised is both justified and justifies the violence of anti-colonial resistance. Fanon in short continues to be read in terms of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic and its privileging of the struggle for recognition. But does this do justice to Fanon’s philosophical formation and views? This workshop will explore this issue by returning to Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, highlighting its debt to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and emphasising Fanon’s search for an affirmative anti-colonial philosophy and politics.

Speakers:

•     John Narayan (University of Warwick)

•     Matthieu Renault (University of Paris 8)

•     Shela Sheikh (Goldsmiths, London)

•     Howard Caygill (CRMEP)

•     Lucie Mercier (CRMEP)

•     Peter Hallward (CRMEP)

“From Prescription to Volition” by Peter Hallward

Peter Hallward, Politics & Society

I stand by the ‘politics of prescription’ that I outlined back in 2005, and that Timothy Kaposy has kindly taken the time to consider in his article above. I think the general emphasis on universalisable and egalitarian principle, on subjective commitment and resolve, on the logic of consequence and anticipation, on an engagement with the strategic constraints of a specific situation, etc., remain pertinent to any conception of emancipatory politics worthy of the name. If anything, the last few years (2011-2014) have shown that these themes deserve more systematic attention, and appreciation, both in the domain of practical politics and in the domains of philosophy and political theory.

Defiance or emancipation?: Peter Hallward review's Howard Caygill's 'On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance'

Defiance or emancipation?: A review of Howard Caygill's 'On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance' by TigersEye99

What Is Political Will? Peter Hallward Interviewed by Samuel Grove

Monthly Review Magazine

Samuel Grove [SG]: For a while now you've been working on and defending the old idea of 'the will of the people', and you've described it in terms of a 'dialectical voluntarism'; what do you mean by this?

Peter Hallward [PH]: I'm not stuck on the terminology, and I'm leery of the way these sorts of labels can be slapped onto a way of thinking or line of inquiry.  Some sort of label is unavoidable though, and any defence of voluntarism has to begin with its account of the will: an account of political will should, I think, allow us to consider political action in terms that privilege the role of free, voluntary and egalitarian self-determination, both as a form of political practice and as a critical norm for assessing the exercise of such practice.  The goal is to recognise the importance of deliberate and purposeful action, on both sides of the fundamental class antagonism that divides society, rather than to dismiss it as in some sense secondary or derivative, as the effect of more profound structural or determining forces.  

Open Letter to James Nxumalo, Senzo Mchunu & Jacob Zuma on the Repression in Cato Crest, Durban

To:

James Nxumalo, Mayor, eThekwini Municipality, Durban, South Africa
Senzo Mchunu, Premier, KwaZulu-Natal
Jacob Zuma, President, Republic of South Africa

We are writing to you to express our grave concern at events unfolding in the Cato Crest shack settlement in Durban.

After an illegal eviction in Cato Crest by the eThekwini Municipality in March this year, shackdwellers occupied an adjacent piece of land. They named the settlement “Marikana”. Since then, two activists have been assassinated -Thembinkosi Qumbelo and Nkululeko Gwala. A third, Nkosinathi Mngomezulu, is in critical condition after being shot by the Land Invasions Unit. A number of activists have been seriously beaten by the police. Other activists, including Bandile Mdlalose and S’bu Zikode of the shack dweller movement Abahlali baseMjondolo who have been supporting the residents, have been threatened with death. 

Peter Hallward: Continuing the Revolution: Rousseau through Gramsci

Peter Hallward: Stifling Democracy in Haiti, 2000-2012

Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy

Peter Hallward-Think Again Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy-Continuum International Publishing Gro... by kabir_jaso

Hallward, Peter - Deleuze and the 'World Without Others' by Ian Burzynski

Out of this World: Deleuze & the Philosophy of Creation

Out of This World - Peter Hallward by dcgster

Politics and aesthetics an interview with Jacques Rancière

Interviewed by Peter Hallward, 2003

For me, democracy isn’t a form of power but the very existence of the political (in so far as politics is distinct from knowing who has the right to occupy power or how power should be occupied), precisely because it defines a paradoxical power – one that doesn’t allow anyone legitimately to claim a place on the basis of his or her competences. Democracy is, first of all, a practice, which means that the very same institutions of power may or may not be accompanied by a democratic life. The same forms of parliamentary powers, the same institutional frameworks can either give rise to a democratic life, that is, a subjectivation of the gap between two ways of counting or accounting for the community, or operate simply as instruments for the reproduction of an oligarchic power.

Fanon and Political Will

Peter Hallward, Cosmos and History, Vol.7., No. 1., 2011

The categories that defined the immediate context of Fanon’s last years and publications—decolonisation, nationalism, redemptive violence—belong primarily to an historical era that ended, in the 1970s, with the last victorious wars of national liberation. The central notion at work in these categories, however, is both much older than this historical sequence and no doubt much ‘younger’ than its still-limited set of political consequences. Although its opponents had already sought to consign this notion to the dustbin of conceptual history well before Fanon himself came to rework it, its real significance is still oriented towards the future.

Beyond Formalization: An interview with Alain Badiou. Conduted by Peter Hallward & Bruno Bosteels, Paris, 2 July 2002

Peter Hallward: We’d like to start with some questions about the book you’ve just finished on the twentieth century, then talk about your current lecture series on aspects of the present historical moment, before finishing with a few points relating to your major work in progress, Logiques des mondes [forthcoming]. Starting then with The Century what is your basic thesis in this book? In particular, can you explain the relationship between the “passion for the real” [passion du réel] you describe as characteristic of the truly inventive or innovative sequences of the last century, and the various programmes of radical formalisation that this passion inspired?

Occupy has the power to effect change

by Peter Hallward, The Guardian

Occupy movements in the US went on the offensive last week, a few days after police forcibly cleared tents in cities from New York to Oakland. In addition to holding their ground in the face of violent intimidation, they began to interrupt business as usual. Rejecting the logic that compels the poor to bail out the rich, they restricted access to New York's stock exchange, they marched on bridges and subway stations, they targeted banks and corporations, they overwhelmed university campuses. Meanwhile, in defiance of an eviction order, Occupy London undertook a "public repossession" of an abandoned office building and began its conversion into a "bank of ideas"; in its first couple of days, this new variation on a public university has already arranged a full schedule of meetings and talks about privatisation, tax havens, globalisation, direct democracy, the Tobin tax, photography and contemporary fiction. More forceful protests against neoliberal austerity measures and other forms of tyranny, meanwhile, have continued in Tahrir Square and in cities across Europe and the Middle East.

Peter Hallward on NGOs & Popular Struggles in Haiti

Click here to read '2003-2004 Preparing for War' which is chapter eight of Peter Hallward's Damming the Flood and deals with the role of NGOs in supporting the repression of the popular movement in Haiti.

Peter Hallward on 'Absolutely Postcolonial'

Peter Hallward responds to BBC Radio 4 program on Haiti

Tanbou

January 11, 2011
Dear BBC Radio 4,

Re.: Edward Stourton on NGOs in Haiti.

I teach at Kingston University, and have some comments about this morning’s program on ‘Haiti and the Truth about NGOs’ (Radio 4, 11 January, 9:00 to 9:45, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programs/b00xcc0k).

Edward Stourton makes some sensible points in this timely program about the failings and organizational limitations of NGOs and international agencies, but he hardly begins to address their real political purpose and impact. By depoliticizing the issues he distorts them considerably.

Radical Politics & Political Will

Radical Politics Today, Peter Hallward, May 2009

Absolutely Postcolonial

Absolutely Postcolonial

This innovative book provides an incisive critique of well-established positions in postcolonial theory and a dramatic expansion in the range of interpretative tools available. Peter Hallward gives substantial readings of four significant writers whose work invites, to varying degrees, a singular interpretation of postcolonialism: Edouard Glissant, Charles Johnson, Mohammed Dib, and Severo Sarduy.

Jacques Ranciere and the Subversion of Mastery

by Peter Hallward

Ranciere's most basic assumption is very simple: everyone thinks, everyone speaks. Like many of his philosophical contemporaries, Ranciere further assumes that thought or discourse always proceeds at odds with itself, through forms of creative disjunction or ambivalence which resist any mechanism designed to pin them down or straighten them out. Thinking evades regulation and contests classification. To think is itself to subvert any rigid distribution of classes, places and norms.