Hegel and Haiti, Fanon and Algeria, Us and Palestine

Abstract

This article seeks to critique modern humanism through an exegetical reading of three philosophical works: Susan Buck-Morss's “Hegel and Haiti”, Aimé Césaire's “Discourse on Colonialism”, and Frantz Fanon's “The Wretched of the Earth”. An interrelationship will be established between these works, using as a link the critique of pseudo-universal European criticism in its justifications of colonialism as a historical event of moral or acceptable value. The paradox of freedom in the Enlightenment, the relativization of colonialism in the face of 20th-century genocides, the justification of violence as a shaper of the colonial world, and the political identity of the contemporary world are, respectively, the paths that each work leads to the next. I conclude by focusing on Fanon's general critique as a formal alternative for understanding reality and an episteme for overcoming any performative paradox of the contradictory concepts of freedom and alienation in the modern West and their revision in contemporary times. It is necessary to define a reflection on how we observe contemporary movements in our philosophical criteria and whether we abandon the predisposition of Western humanism to create dualisms, civilization (West and partners) and savages, West as normality and Latins, Africans, Orientals and Polynesians as exotic and fixable.