Frantz Fanon

The Algerian political theorist Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) analyzed the nature of racism and colonialism and developed a theory of violent anticolonialist struggle.

Frantz Fanon was born in the French colony of Martinique. He volunteered for the French army during World War II, and then, after being released from military service, he went to France, where he studied medicine and psychiatry from 1945 to 1950. In 1953 he was appointed head of the psychiatric department of a government hospital in Algeria, then a French territory. As a black man searching for his own identity in a white colonial culture, he experienced racism; as a psychiatrist, he studied the dynamics of racism and its effects on the individual.

In his first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon examined the social and psychological processes by which the white colonizers alienated the black natives from any indigenous black culture; he showed that blacks were made to feel inferior because of their color and thus strove to emulate white culture and society. Fanon hoped that the old myths of superiority would be abandoned so that a real equality and integration could be achieved.

Alienated from the dominant French culture, except for that represented by such radicals as the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, Fanon deeply identified with Algeria's revolutionary struggle for independence. He had secretly aided the rebels from 1954 to 1956, when he resigned from the hospital post to openly work for the Algerian revolutionaries' National Liberation Front (FLN) in Tunis. He worked on the revolutionaries' newspaper, becoming one of the leading ideologists of the revolution, and developed a theory of anticolonial struggle in the "third world."

Using Marxist, psychoanalytic, and sociological analysis, Fanon summed up his views in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), arguing that only a thorough, truly socialist revolution carried out by the oppressed peasantry (the wretched of the earth) could bring justice to the colonized. He believed that the revolution could only be carried out by violent armed conflict; only revolutionary violence could completely break the psychological and physical shackles of a racist colonialism. Violence would regenerate and unite the population by a "collective catharsis;" out of this violence a new, humane man would arise and create a new culture. Through all this Fanon stressed the need to reject Europe and its culture and accomplish the revolution alone.

Fanon, the antiracist and revolutionary prophet, never saw the end result of the process he described: full independence of his adopted Algeria. In 1960 he served as ambassador to Ghana for the Algerian provisional government, but it was soon discovered that he had leukemia. After treatment in the Soviet Union, he went to the United States to seek further treatment but died there in 1961.

Further Reading

Peter Geismar, Fanon (1971), is a useful biography. David Caute, Fanon (1970), is not a full biography but a study of Fanon's ideas. Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961; trans. 1965) has an interesting introduction by Jean Paul Sartre. For a concise background of Algeria see Richard M. Brace, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia (1964).

Additional Sources

Bulhan, Hussein Abdilahi., Frantz Fanon and the psychology of oppression, New York: Plenum Press, 1985.

Gendzier, Irene L., Frantz Fano, London: Panaf Books, 1975.

writer; theorist; psychologist

Personal Information

Born on July 20, 1925, in Fort-de-France, Martinique; died on December 6, 1961, in Bethesda, MD; married Josie Duble, 1952 (died 1989); children: one son
Education: Studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyon, France, after World War II.
Military/Wartime Service: Served in Free French Army during World War II.

Career

Writer, 1952-61; Bilda-Joinville Hospital, Bilda, Algeria, head of services, 1953-56; Manouba Clinic and Neuropsychiatric Center Jour de Tunis, Tunisia, psychiatrist, 1957-59; All African Peoples' Congress, participant, 1958; revolutionary polemicist, undercover agent, late 1950s; Algerian Provisional Government, ambassador to Ghana, 1960.

Life's Work

When Frantz Fanon's revolutionary tract The Wretched of the Earth appeared in the United States in 1965, it quickly became a bestseller. The book's publisher called it the handbook for black revolution, and African-American militants and other young American leftists took its message to heart: a widely quoted statement attributed to two different leaders of the radical Black Panther group, Eldridge Cleaver and Stokely Carmichael, held that "every brother on a rooftop can quote Fanon." The Wretched of the Earth advocated the violent overthrow of the European and American colonial presence in Third World countries. "Violence," Fanon wrote, "is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect."

As the revolutionary ideology of the late 1960s and early 1970s faded, however, even the Algerian people on whose behalf Fanon worked for much of his adult life would forget his celebrity. Fanon's extreme statements seemed outdated to young people seeking societal change, and conservative Western writers mentioned his name with either irritation or outright dismissal. Yet, even as many of the politically radical pronouncements of the 1960s had come to seem quaint or innocent, Fanon's writings inspired a resurgence of interest in the 1990s and 2000s. Fanon, a psychiatrist, crossed disciplines in his life and his writings, always striving to make connections between his insights into the effects of racism and the concrete political steps that poor people needed to take to bring about change.

Fought for France in WWII

Fanon was born on July 20, 1925, in Fort-de-France on the Caribbean island of Martinique, then a French colony. His parents were better off than most of the island's African-descended population, which consisted largely of sugar-plantation workers, and he received a strongly French-oriented education. Fanon's teachers emphasized that Martinique was part of France and that he should consider himself a Frenchman--yet he also became aware of racism early on, for it was clear that a black Frenchman did not have the same stature as a white Frenchman. "On that small island a cultural schizophrenia was born," noted Chicago Sun-Times writer Hazel Rowley.

Fanon's childhood was outwardly uneventful, but he had an intense temperament that showed itself as World War II broke out in 1939. In one of the few statements Fanon made about his own life, he wrote, according to the Independent's Deborah Levy, that "I arrived in the world, anxious to extract meaning from things." When he was 17, Fanon sneaked away from home and sailed to the Caribbean island of Dominica, scraping together the money for his adventure by selling clothing coupons that belonged to his father. From there, Fanon made his way to France and joined the guerrilla fighters who were resisting the occupying forces of Nazi Germany.

Fighting on the French side for much of the war, Fanon spent time in French-colonized Algeria, on Africa's Mediterranean coast. The disparity in living standards between Algeria's European inhabitants and its native Arab population made an impression on Fanon, but the battle against German fascism remained uppermost in his mind. Fanon was awarded the Croix de Guerre, the French equivalent of the Purple Heart, for bravery during his service in the Free French forces. Yet Fanon experienced racism on an ongoing basis while serving in the military, even in France, where he noticed that white French women refused to dance with the black soldiers who had fought to liberate them. The hurts of Fanon's childhood surfaced, and he recalled thinking, according to Declan Kiberd of the Irish Times, that "this isn't your war. When whites kill each other, it's a blessing for blacks."

Became a Psychologist

After the war's end in 1945, Fanon won a scholarship to study medicine and psychiatry in the French city of Lyon. He was fascinated by the radical ideas of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and by African writers intent on freeing their countries from European colonialism and defining a new black identity. Fanon married a young French woman of similar convictions in 1952; the couple had one son, and they remained together as Fanon moved to Africa and became enmeshed in revolutionary struggle. Fanon's wife Josie declined to discuss their marriage later on in her life.

Completing his psychiatric training, Fanon wrote his first book, Peau noire, masques blancs, in 1952. It was ignored at the time, but after Fanon's death it was hailed as a masterpiece of psychology that investigated how racism induced black people to emulate their oppressors. The book was translated into English as Black Skin, White Masks, and was published in 1967. The book exerted a great influence over U.S. promoters of the idea of black consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s, and it remains, along with The Wretched of the Earth, one of Fanon's most widely read works.

Tired of living in France and feeling trapped by the stereotyping he experienced from Europeans he encountered, in 1953 Fanon accepted a post as the head of a government psychiatric hospital in the Algerian town of Blida, a suburb of the capital of Algiers. Here, Fanon began to feel an increasing kinship with Algeria's urban Arab poor. Applying group therapy methods pioneered by French psychoanalyst François Tosquelles, Fanon, an atheist and foreigner who did not speak Arabic, began to win the trust of Arab and Islamic patients whom other French doctors had sent away.

Fought for Algerian Independence

In 1954, Algerians revolted against their French overlords. Although other African countries gained independence without bloodshed during this period, France responded to the Algerian insurrection with brutal repression that included widespread instances of torture and physical abuse. These events touched off the final stage in Fanon's political radicalization, and he began secretly helping the rebel Front de la Liberation Nationale or FLN. Fanon received death threats from the French and their sympathizers, but his resolve only strengthened. In the words of writer Aimé Cesaire, quoted by Levy in the Independent: "He chose. He became Algerian. Lived, fought and died Algerian." Yet Fanon, as a government-employed psychiatrist, also had to treat French troops, and he is not known to have betrayed his personal patients to the rebel cause.

Early in 1957, the French colonial government exiled Fanon to newly independent Tunisia. The move may have lengthened his life, for Fanon had become ensnarled in factional conflicts inside the Algerian rebel movement, and one of his closest friends had been murdered. Fanon pursued an activist life in the Tunisian capital of Tunis, and his fame spread. Speaking on behalf of African independence movements, he traveled around the continent. He served an ambassador for the Algerian rebel movement's provisional government, traveling to Ghana for the All-African Peoples' Conference of 1958 and circulating through the French colonies and former colonies of West Africa. Fanon founded a magazine called Moudjahid in Tunis and became more and more prolific as a writer himself.

His 1959 book L'an cinq de la révolution algérienne was a series of essays that expounded on his ideas about a new Africa free from colonial rule and called for armed resistance to French power. Another group of Fanon essays of the period was collected after his death and published as Pour la révolution africaine. Not an armchair philosopher, Fanon put his ideas into practice and worked to aid Algerian resistance fighters. He was wounded near the Tunisian-Algerian border in 1957 and survived several attempts on his life.

Wrote Wretched of the Earth Before Death

Fanon undertook a 1,200-mile intelligence-gathering trip from Mali to the Algerian border in 1960, reporting back to his comrades-in-arms on French troop deployments. By the time he arrived back in Tunis, he was seriously ill, and soon he was diagnosed with leukemia. Fanon foresaw his approaching death and worked furiously on what would be his final book, Les damnes de la terre, published in English as The Wretched of the Earth. Its unbridled call-to-arms style may have been partly rooted in the fact that Fanon, who could not type, dictated the book onto tape; it has the rhythms of incendiary speech rather than written prose.

In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon called for a violent revolution on the part of the world's dispossessed peoples. He was not an orthodox Marxist, in that he saw no need for a revolutionary vanguard of the Communist sort; instead, he believed, revolution should arise spontaneously among the poor of the Third World themselves, from "the wretched of the earth." The political independence sought by Algeria and other African countries was in Fanon's opinion only a first step toward the overturning of Western exploitation in a wide range of human activities. Fanon's ideas aroused controversy, but some observers pointed out that his calls for violence should be seen in the context of the violence he had already witnessed and experienced in Algeria.

Fanon sought treatment for his illness in the Soviet Union. In 1961, possibly aided by U.S. Central Intelligence Agency officers intent on learning what he knew about leftist revolutionary movements, he checked into a National Institute of Health hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C. There, at the heart of Western power, he completed The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon died on December 6, 1961, in Bethesda. He did not live long enough to see Algeria gain independence from France. Lionized by 1960s radicals, Fanon was less well regarded as revolutionary ideas fell out of favor with European and American intellectuals. A film biography, Frantz Fanon: White Skin, Black Mask and a new print biography, David Macey's Frantz Fanon: A Life, testify to continuing interest in one of the twentieth century's most unusual figures and most gifted revolutionary writers.

Works

Selected works

• Peau noire, masques blancs, Editions du Seul, 1952; published as Black Skin, White Masks, Grove, 1967.
• L'An V de la révolution algerienne, F. Maspero, 1959; published as A Dying Colonialism, Grove, 1967.
• Les Damnes de la terre, F. Maspero, 1961; published as The Wretched of the Earth, Grove, 1965.
• Pour la révolution africaine: Ecrits politiques, F. Maspero, 1964; published as Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays, Monthly Review Press, 1967.

Further Reading

Books

• Gordon, Lewis R., et al., eds. and trans., Fanon: A Critical Reader, Blackwell, 1996.
• Macey, David, Frantz Fanon: A Life, Picador, 2001.

Periodicals

• Chicago Sun-Times, July 22, 2001, p. 16.
• Independent (London, England), November 18, 2000, p. 10.
• Irish Times, January 20, 2001, p. 74.
• New York Times, September 2, 2001, Section 7, p. 11.
• Times-Picayune (New Orleans), September 5, 1997, p. L30.
• Washington Post, July 8, 2001, p. T9.

On-line

• "Frantz Fanon," Biography Resource Center, www.galenet.com/servlet.BioRC (February 16, 2004).

Other

• Julien, Isaac, dir., Frantz Fanon: White Skin, Black Mask (film), Normal Films, 1996.

— James M. Manheim

(1925-61) Theorist of revolution whose ideology is most clearly enunciated in his last book, The Wretched of the Earth. Born in Martinique, he studied medicine in France, specializing in psychiatry. He joined the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria in 1956, later serving as diplomatic representative in several African states. To Fanon colonialism was a system of racial oppression all the more insidious because its impact was mental as well as physical, distorting attitudes and behaviour alike. Genuine liberation could not therefore be achieved by peaceful negotiation, as was attempted elsewhere in Black Africa in the 1960s, but only as a result of protracted violence involving direct, collective action by the masses as in Algeria. Even then Fanon had reservations about nationalist movements, on account of their privileged, urban, middle-class leadership, susceptible to colonial penetration. The only reliable revolutionary force was the peasantry, with nothing to lose and retaining the capacity for spontaneous protest and explosions of violence. Fanon died of leukaemia before Algeria finally acquired its independence in 1962.

— Ian Campbell

For more information on Frantz Omar Fanon, visit Britannica.com.

Fanon, Frantz (1925-61). Martinican-born psychoanalyst, theorist of anti-imperialist revolution. Born into a lower-middle-class family of mixed racial origin, Fanon was educated at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France (where one of his teachers was Aimé Césaire), and came to political consciousness in an island colony controlled in the name of the Vichy regime by the French navy. In 1943 he escaped, at the third attempt, from Martinique to the neighbouring island of Dominica, whence he joined the Forces Françaises Libres. He subsequently fought with them in Morocco, Algeria, and France, gaining the Croix de Guerre in 1945. Between 1947 and 1951 he studied medicine, specializing in psychiatry, at the University of Lyon, and in 1952 published his seminal work on the psychology of racism and ‘race relations’, Peau noire masques blancs. Heavily influenced by Freud, Jung, Hegel, and Sartre, the work begins as a humanistic or rationalist investigation, but reaches authentically revolutionary conclusions.

Fanon married a Frenchwoman, José Dublé, in 1952 and, after a short period as psychiatric intern at Pontorson in Normandy, was appointed psychiatric consultant at the Hôpital Blida-Joinville in Algeria in 1953. A sympathizer with the FLN from the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954, Fanon resigned from his psychiatric post in 1956 in order to devote himself entirely to the insurgent cause. Expelled from Algeria by the French in January 1957, he went to Tunisia where he worked as a psychiatrist and also contributed regular articles to the FLN newspaper El Moudjahid, which are reprinted, along with other writings, in the posthumous Pour la révolution africaine (1964). In 1959 a searching analysis of the sociology and psychology of the war in Algeria, L'An Cinq de la révolution algérienne, was banned by the French government, and in the same year an attempt was made on Fanon's life in Rome, where he had gone for medical treatment following injury in a land-mine explosion on the Tunisian-Algerian border.

In 1960 Fanon was chosen to represent the Gouvernement Provisoire Algérien in Ghana, but fell ill and, in December 1960, was diagnosed as suffering from incurable leukaemia. Following treatment in Moscow, he returned to Tunisia and there, in the space of ten weeks, wrote his last and most influential work, Les Damnés de la terre (1961), in which he argues not only that colonialism cannot be overthrown without violence but also, and still more controversially, that only violent struggle can truly liberate colonized humanity from the multiple psychological alienations from which it suffers. It was published shortly after his death with a preface by Sartre. Translated into English as The Wretched of the Earth, the work had a massive influence on anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles throughout the world, not least in the United States where it was an inspirational text of the Black Power Movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. Though its conclusions concerning violence seem increasingly questionable, its analysis of the social psychology of colonialism remains unsurpassed.

[Richard Burton]

Bibliography

• D. Caute, Fanon (1970)
• J. McCullough, Black Soul White Artifact: Fanon's Clinical Psychology and Social Theory (1983)
• H. A. Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (1985)

Fanon, Frantz (1925-61) French psychologist and theorist of colonialism. Born in French Martinique, Fanon studied medicine and psychiatry in France after the Second World War. His Peau noire, masques blancs (1952, trs. as Black Skin, White Masks, 1967), analysed the deforming effect of colonialism on both black and white peoples. His best-known work, Les Damnés de la terre (1961, trs. as The Wretched of the Earth, 1964), legitimizes the violence necessary to overthrow the established structural violence of colonialism, and had great influence on the emerging black radicalism of the following decades.

Fanon, Frantz Omar (fräNts ômär' fänôN') , 1925–61, French West Indian psychiatrist, author, revolutionary, and leader of the Algerian National Front, b. Martinique. Educated in France, he went to Algeria (1953) to practice psychiatry. Sympathetic to the Algerian revolution from its inception (1954), Fanon resigned his medical post (1956) to become editor of the Algerian National Front's newspaper. His first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952, tr. 1967), is a psychoanalytic study of black life and the internalization of racism in a white-dominated world. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961, tr. 1963), widely considered his most important work, Fanon employed a fiery rhetoric to call for an anticolonial revolution led by the peasants of the Third World, rather than by the proletariat. According to Fanon, a new type of humanity, modern yet proud of its nonwhite heritage, would emerge from this violent struggle.

Bibliography

See biographies by D. Caute (1970), I. L. Gendzier (1973), and D. Macey (2001); studies by J. McCulloch (1983) and R. C. Onwuanibe (1983).

1925-1961

Frantz Fanon was born on July 20, 1925, in Fort-de-France on the Caribbean island of Martinique and died on December 6, 1961, in Washington, D.C. He is best known for his work in fighting against colonization.

Fanon was the son of a native Martiniquan father (the descendant of slaves and a member of the island's middle-class community), and a French (Alsace) mother (herself the daughter of a mixed marriage). Between 1939 and 1943 he studied at the Lycée Schoelcher, where he was taught by Aimé César, a poet who helped destroy the image of the African created by European colonization. In 1943, then a young man, Fanon became a dissident and agitated against representatives of the Vichy regime in the Antilles. He traveled to the island of Dominica to rally the free French forces in the Caribbean. In 1944 he fought on the European front. Wounded near the Swiss border, he received a citation for his courage, signed by Colonel Raoul Salan, whom he would later fight against in Algeria.

After receiving his baccalaureate at the special session of March 1946, he went to Lyon, France, to study medicine (1946-1951). After a brief stay in Martinique at the end of 1951, he returned to Lyon to specialize in psychiatry under the direction of Professor Tosquelles. There he met Octave Mannoni. The two men became friends, but Fanon was highly critical of Mannoni's Psychologie de la Colonisation (Psychology of colonization). He became a psychiatrist in June 1953. In 1954 he was appointed to a post in Blida, Algeria. He saw patients during the day and, at night, participated in the struggle for Algerian independence. He was expelled from Algeria in January 1957. At the end of the summer of 1958, Fanon settled in Tunis to resume his double life. He died in 1961 from leukemia.

He developed an interest in psychoanalysis fairly early in his career; he speaks of it in his first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1967a), published when he was twenty-seven. His attitude is that of a colonized subject who, disappointed by racism, grows skeptical of European universalism. Yet he began this work with the following statement: "Only a psychoanalytic interpretation of the black problem can reveal the emotional anomalies responsible for the resulting complexes." Fanon saw Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Gustav Jung as more or less the same. His form of psychoanalysis is more of a social therapy based on liberation than of a talking cure.

His ideas, as represented in his books—Studies in a Dying Colonialism (1965a), The Wretched of the Earth (1965a), and Toward the African Revolution (1967b)—can be summarized as follows: There is a specific pathology associated with colonization. The core of the emotional disturbances affecting black people is an inferiority complex, in the Adlerian sense. The Oedipus complex does not occur in families from the Antilles. The unconscious, as described by Jung, is collective. Analysis of the social-historical development of the individual must take precedence over any other approach. Freud, Jung, and Adler were not thinking about black people when they formulated their theories. He rejected the idea of determinism, believing that humankind was abandoned to its own fate.

He was unable to overcome his resistance to psychoanalysis at the time of his premature death at the age of thirty-six.

Bibliography

Cherki, Alice. (2000). Frantz Fanon, portrait. Paris: Seuil.

Fanon, Frantz. (1965a). Studies in a dying colonialism (Haakon Chevalier, Trans.). New York: Monthly Review Press. (Original work published 1958) ——. (1965b). The wretched of the earth (Constance Farrington, Trans.). New York: Grove Press. (Original work published 1961) ——. (1967a). Black skin, white masks (Charles Lam Markmann, Trans.). New York: Grove Press. (Original work published 1952) ——. (1967b). Toward the African revolution: Political essays (Haakon Chevalier, Trans.). New York: Grove Press. (Original work published 1964)

—GUILLAUME SURÉNA

1925 - 1961

French West Indian psychiatrist, author, and ideologue of the Algerian Revolution.

A black man born in 1925 on the French Antilles island of Martinique, Frantz Fanon became the best-known theoretician of the Algerian revolution and, through it, one of the best-known theoreticians of African liberation in general. The child of middle-class parents, Fanon spent the early years of his life attempting to be French. During World War II, however, humiliating experiences of racism in the Antilles and in North Africa and Europe, where he served in the French armed forces, made him increasingly aware of the anomalies confronted by a black man in a world dominated by whites.

After the war Fanon went home to Martinique, but in 1947 he returned to France and entered medical school. He received a degree from the University of Lyons in 1951. In July 1953 he passed his Médicat de hôpitaux psychiatrique and, in November 1953, he accepted a position as chief of staff (chef de service) in the Blida-Joinville Hospital, the largest psychiatric hospital in Algeria.

While serving at Blida, Fanon treated many patients suffering from the pressures of their colonized status and from the trauma of the revolutionary situation. He came to the conclusion that the resentment that had brought about the Algerian revolution was of the same order as the resentment he had come to feel as a black man in a white world. In 1956, Fanon resigned his medical post and secretly joined the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN; National Liberation Front). Receiving in January 1957 a "letter of expulsion" from the colonial authorities, he fled to Tunis, where the FLN was beginning to establish its headquarters. There he became an editor of al Moudjahid, the official organ of the FLN, served in FLN medical centers, and became a roving ambassador to solicit support for Algeria in African countries. In December 1960, Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia. He died of that illness a year later in Bethesda, Maryland.

Fanon wrote three books. The earliest, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Black skin, white masks), appeared in 1952. It diagnoses the psychologically dependent status of Caribbean blacks and suggests ways for them to transcend that dependency and discover self-possession and authenticity. The second, L'an V de la Révolution Algérienne (Year 5 of the Algerian revolution), was written in great haste in 1959 and is essentially a sociology of the revolution. In it, Fanon describes the transformation of Algerian society brought about by individuals' decisions to revolt. In revolting against colonial oppression, militants also revolt against patriarchal and other oppressions. Out of these individual decisions, a nation of free men and women is born, a process that cannot be reversed. Fanon's last book, Les Damnés de la Terre (Wretched of the Earth), was published in 1961. It takes up many of the themes of the preceding works, but with greater urgency. Fanon insists that it is only through violence that colonialism can be defeated and the native overcome his dependency complex. Native bourgeoisies must also be overturned, because they are in a state of permanent dependence upon the West. The Algerian revolution is the model for global revolution, because it represents a peasant revolution led by a genuinely popular party. A fourth book, Pour la Révolution Africaine (For the African revolution), a collection of articles written during Fanon's Moudjahid period, was published after his death.

Bibliography

Bulhan, Hussein Abdilahi. Frantz Fanon and the Psychology ofOppression. New York: Plenum, 1985.

Geisner, Peter. Fanon. New York: Dial, 1971.

Gendzier, Irene L. Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973.

— JOHN RUEDY

Quotes:

"When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the grounds of his color I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men I say that intelligence has never saved anyone: and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men."

"Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent."

"I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization."

"There is a point at which methods devour themselves."

"What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary."

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