A New Skin for the Wounds of History: Fanon’s Affective Sociogeny and Ricœur’s Carnal Hermeneutics

Abstract

This article argues that, despite their distance across the colonial divide, a creolizing reading of Frantz Fanon and Paul Ricœur can yield valuable insights into decoloniality. Tracing their shared philosophical concerns with embodied phenomenology, social ontology and recognition, I argue that their respective accounts of sociogeny and hermeneutics can be productively read together as describing a shared end of mutual recognition untainted by racism or coloniality – a ‘new skin’ for humanity, as Fanon describes it. More specifically, Fanon contributes to Ricœur an understanding of how divergences in social location can be overcome through liberatory action that posits a new logic of sociality; likewise, Ricœur provides Fanon with an account of how liberatory horizons are produced through this praxis, based on the imaginative connection between ideology and utopia. This article concludes by arguing that these congruent methodological and normative concerns can be read together to concretize – and potentially actualize – the utopic end of liberatory struggle in mutual recognition through fashioning this new skin.

Rewriting the flesh of the world for the new human: Merleau‐Ponty, Fanon, and Wynter on the ethics of futurity

“…In the previous section, I examined Merleau-Ponty's notion of "flesh" as establishing an ontology of embodied intersubjectivity and sense-making across spatio-temporality, such that 1 This section reuses material first published in Faust (2023), which I take to be consistent with the claims made in this article. However, its current form has greatly benefitted from two anonymous journal referees.…”

“…Elsewhere, I have argued that counterviolent resistance by “the wretched” ( les damnés ) against the total, comprehensive violence of colonialism, generates the affectively charged semiotic content for a revolutionary, decolonial national consciousness that points beyond reified colonial relations, which can be used to fashion new narratives of community and belonging (Faust, 2023; cf. Fanon, 2005).…”