a dialectic of negativity
By now, Fanon’s penultimate claim in his rejoinder to Sartre is well known: “ontology - once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside - does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black; but he must be black in relation to the white man.” Fanon is arguing that, though Blacks are indeed sentient beings, the structure of the world’s entire semantic field - regardless of cultural and national discrepancies, that is, “leaving existence by the wayside” - in other words, the Modern episteme, is sutured by anti-Black solidarity. This is a dialectic of negativity, that offers no imaginable synthesis - not Sartre’s dialectic through which the Black becomes the proletariat, nor Biko’s dialectic through which the Black becomes a “man” (sic).
Frank B. Wilderson III
Biko and the Problematic of Presence
in Biko Lives! (2008)
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