It is central to the constitution of the identity of the colonized in the face of colonialism’s radical denial of a black subjectivity. In Fanon, of course, violence plays an entirely different role. Because violence is “by nature instrumental” (it can overthrow the colonial rulers), Arendt argues, violence is always a threat to power: “Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance” (1970:51, 56). For her it is “insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same” (Arendt 1970:56). She is insistent and demanding in her distinction. Arendt is clear that violence and power are not interchangeable political concepts, that they must be thought of discretely, even as two forces capable of destroying each other. On Violence responds directly to Fanon’s opening chapter in The Wretched of the Earth ( Wretched), a chapter that bears the same title, “On Violence.” Arendt’s work is an argument against the ways in which Fanon, in Wretched, and Sorel, in Reflections on Violence, understand and deploy the relationship between politics and violence, between revolution-or, the struggle against (neo)colonialism-and violence. Arendt’s work is determined to define violence, to delineate how it should be philosophically conceptualized in order to better understand its political uses. Hannah Arendt’s On Violence is an argument with Frantz Fanon and Georges Sorel, to a lesser extent.
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