Fanon,Violence,and Spontaneous Freedom

Abstract

Frantz Fanon’s writings remain controversial for the force and openness with which they advocate violence in the context of decolonial political struggle. Prima facie, Fanon appears to suggest that decolonial political violence is somehow inherently good; this places him in tension with a certain common-sense thought about the ethics of political violence, which is that it is only OK to commit acts of violence when they cannot be avoided. In this paper however, I argue that this tension with the ‘common-sense view’ is only seeming. I show this by establishing that what Fanon is really interested in is the ability of the native to exercise what Jonathan Gingerich has recently dubbed ‘spontaneous freedom’. Via work by Hannah Arendt, which Gingerich also cites, I argue that this shouldn’t surprise us, since spontaneous freedom is necessary for the establishing and maintenance of political communities. In colonial societies, as Fanon argues, violence is the only means the native has for expressing their free, spontaneous agency. This is why it cannot be avoided.

Frantz Fanon was that rare thing: a revolutionary political philosopher actively involved in the struggle he was advocating for. His 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, now widely heralded as one of the founding documents of decolonial theory, was written not only from the perspective of an astute, external observer: a French-Martiniquan psychiatrist, who had begun practising in Algeria in 1950s, when the Front de liberation nationale was first fighting what would prove to be an eight-year-long war for independence from France. It was also written from the perspective of someone who had himself become a committed member of the FLN: indeed to the extent that Fanon delayed treatment for the leukaemia that would kill him, shortly after he completed The Wretched of the Earth at the age of only 36, in order to prioritise his revolutionary activities.

It is, in many ways, Fanon’s overriding dedication to his cause that ensures he remains such a powerful voice today: where most comparable authors have been bound by the norms and strictures of academia, Fanon was instead bound by the those of a revolutionary guerilla army. There is thus a refreshing pragmatism to his thought. Fanon wrote to serve his movement: his theory exists, in the first instance, as a practical contribution to the post-colonial liberation of Algeria, of Africa; of the whole of the rest of what we now call the ‘developing’ world.

But if this active engagement with decolonial struggle is what makes Fanon so exhilarating, then it is also part of what makes his work, considered as philosophy, so troubling. The Wretched of the Earth, after all, is notorious for the force with which it endorses acts of revolutionary violence. ‘Decolonisation’, he tells us in the first sentence of ‘Concerning Violence’, the essay which opens The Wretched of the Earth, ‘is always a violent phenomenon’. This violence is to be expected, since decolonisation is ‘a programme of complete disorder’; a process which sees ‘a certain “species” of men’ – that is, the settler – replaced by another ‘“species” of men’ – that is, the native (Fanon 1990: 27).

This violence, Fanon emphasises, is something more than just inevitable: it is, it seems, good. ‘At the level of individuals’, Fanon tells us, ‘violence is a cleansing force [la violence déstintoxique]’. ‘It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect’ (Fanon 1990: 74).

Violence, it is said, ‘invests’ the characters of colonised people ‘with positive and creative qualities’. Armed struggle ‘mobilises the people’, and ‘binds them together as a whole’ (Fanon 1990: 73). Ultimately, Fanon suggests, it is on violence that the success or failure of newly liberated, formerly colonised nations turns.

‘During the colonial period the people are called upon to fight against oppression; after national liberation, they are called upon to fight against poverty, illiteracy, and under-development. The struggle, they say, goes on. The people realize that life is an unending contest’ (Fanon 1990: 74).

Fanon’s arguments in ‘Concerning Violence’ prima facie appear to clash, then, with what we might call the ‘common-sense view’ of political violence. ¹ As polite common sense would have it, Fanon’s arguments in support of violence cannot be right, because violence is morally wrong.

By calling this the ‘common-sense view’, I certainly do not mean to denigrate or dismiss it: to imply that it is somehow prudish or milquetoast. Consider, after all, what violence – in this sort of context – actually is. ² Violence is people, real people, getting beaten, and stabbed, and pushed out of windows; tortured, and set on fire. Even when violence is less extreme than that: when it means shops being smashed and looted, for example, it is still very frightening to be caught up in – and still something that can have serious adverse consequences for the victims. Violence is not then, we might think, something anyone ought to want to be involved in, and nor can it possibly ‘bring people together’ in such a way as to produce a ‘strong’ post-colonial nation state. If anything, it seems likely to shatter any prospective nation: to bring the most brutal warlord to power, and create a generation of refugees. ³

Of course, the common-sense view might allow, there may well be some situations in which committing violent acts is unavoidable. The colonial situation, as Fanon himself insists, is an inherently violent one: from the ‘first encounter’ between native and settler, their relations have been ‘marked by violence’, and ‘their existence together – that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler – was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannon’ (Fanon 1990: 28).

The common-sense view’s horror at violence need not then extend to an absolute moral prohibition against violence in the form, for example, of self-defence; the common-sense view might still allow that there is such a thing as a ‘just war’. Violence might thus be seen as an unfortunate, but unavoidable aspect of decolonial struggle: although equally one might do something Fanon, curiously, fails to, and mention Gandhi. ⁴ Given that violence is what it is, it ought – all other things being equal – to be avoided: on the common-sense view then, non-violent struggle is always to be preferred.

Thus, we may formalise the common-sense view of political violence as follows.

(1) In certain political situations, violence may seem unavoidable.

(2) However, violence is morally wrong.

(3) If possible, non-violent solutions are always to be preferred over violent ones.

Cards on the table: my own intuitions align, more-or-less, with the common-sense view. I should therefore want to reject Fanon’s arguments in support of political violence – even if, in practical terms, I might agree with him that the decolonial movement was justified in using violence in their struggle (perhaps the violence was unavoidable; but that does not, as Fanon seems to think, make it ‘good’). But in fact, I think, Fanon is broadly right about the role that violence might play in emancipatory political struggle.

The reason for this, in short, is that the clash between Fanon and the common-sense view is only seeming. This is not something that has previously been apparent in the scholarship: while there are a number of defences of Fanon’s arguments in support of violence in the literature, previous attempts have primarily attempted to defend Fanon by establishing that the common-sense view of violence (or something like it) is somehow either wrong in itself, or else simply misapplied when we’re talking about Fanon – a thinker whose work is perhaps so indelibly rooted in the struggle against colonialism that it is impossible to use it to think about moral or political issues more broadly. ⁵

That there is no absolute clash between Fanon and the ‘common-sense’ view of political violence is something we are able to grasp by considering Fanon’s work on violence through the prism of what Jonathan Gingerich has called ‘spontaneous freedom’: ‘the freedom we experience when we feel “free as a bird”’ (Gingerich 2022: 41). Via Hannah Arendt’s work on ‘action’ and natality, which Gingerich also cites in his 2022 paper, I argue that spontaneous freedom is necessary for political agency. ⁶ With this material on the table, we can see that when Fanon endorses violence, what he is really doing is arguing that in a colonial situation, the only way the native is able to express their spontaneous freedom – and so establish their political agency – is through violent means. This, I claim, is what Fanon is really communicating when he argues in support of revolutionary political violence. And this, likewise, is something anyone interested in emancipatory political struggle might continue to take from Fanon – and also take from contemporary work on spontaneous freedom – today. Engaging with Fanon via the prism of spontaneous freedom, then, might allow us both to achieve a deeper understanding of the nature and significance of political violence (both in Fanon and more generally), and a deeper understanding of the political importance of Gingerich’s notion of spontaneous freedom.

How Fanon Justifies Anti-Colonial Violence

I should start by clarifying something about the scope of Fanon’s claims. When Fanon endorses violence, he is talking specifically about violence by the native – the colonised or ‘settled’ [colonisé], ⁷ against the settler [colon]. The colonial situation, as Fanon defines it, is based on a ‘Manichaean’ separation between native and settler (Fanon 1990: 31): ‘the colonial world is a world cut in two’ (Fanon 1990: 29). Paradigmatically, colonial situations are established when settlers arrive and, in short, declare to the native that they are now in charge. Putting whatever dissent this claim might inspire to the sword, the settler then establishes the colony – as a means of extracting wealth and resources for the metropole (Fanon 1990: 28). It is through this process that the native is brought into existence as native: if previously the natives were, simply, human beings (perhaps the people of a particular kingdom or tribe), they now discover themselves as a subaltern species of men, the inferior partner in their relationship with their new masters, who ‘come from elsewhere’ (Fanon 1990: 31).

Historically, these relationships have been established in a number of different ways, at different times – it thus might certainly be objected that Fanon’s narrative is overly simplistic. ⁸ But while one should be careful of directly conflating Spanish colonialism in the New World with British colonialism in India; Japanese colonialism in Korea with French colonialism in Africa and so on and so forth, one might nonetheless identify a unifying underlying logic. At its heart, colonialism is as Fanon insists both violent and instrumental: the colony, and thus the native, is only sustained by the settler insofar as the settler believes it to be profitable to them to do so.

Crucially, this system both gives rise to, and is itself further enforced by, an ideology which ‘dehumanises’ the native (Fanon 1990: 32); this process is identical with a process of racialisation (Fanon 2021: 191). While the settler represents themselves as beautiful, moral, good, the native – their beliefs, their culture, their practices, their history – is seen as a source of ‘absolute evil’ (Fanon 1990: 32). This ideology is used to explain the native’s ‘backwardness’ – as well as to provide colonial exploitation with a certain moral veneer (the ‘white man’s burden’ and all that). It is, thus, hardly surprising that resistance to this system might emerge: not only does the native ‘know that he is not an animal’ (Fanon 1990: 33); he also covets the settler’s wealth and power. ‘The native never ceases to dream of putting himself in the place of the settler – not of becoming the settler but of substituting himself for the settler’ (Fanon 1990: 41). This, obviously, results in a climate of mutual suspicion between settler and native (Fanon 1990: 30).

It is worth emphasising that the violence which characterises colonial society is not, in the first instance, violence done to the settler by the native. It is violence done to the native by the settler. And it is also worth noting, at this point in the paper, that beyond ‘Concerning Violence’ Fanon often gives a more nuanced view of violence. The most obvious source one might point to here is ‘Colonial War and Mental Disorders’ – another of the essays in The Wretched of the Earth. Drawing on observations from his psychiatric practice, in ‘Colonial War and Mental Disorders’ Fanon describes the very real effects of the ‘bloodthirsty and pitiless atmosphere’ enforced by the settler in the colony: ‘the generalization of inhuman practices and the firm impression that people have of being caught up in a veritable Apocalypse’ (Fanon 1990: 202). Thus, for instance, Fanon describes an FLN militant suffering from impotence after French soldiers raped his wife (Fanon 1990: 204-8); or an Algerian villager who began suffering from homicidal delusions about ‘Frenchman disguised as Arabs’, after French soldiers set fire to his home (Fanon 1990: 208-10).

One natural thought here, then, is that – both for Fanon and in general – decolonial violence might be justified as a form of retaliation. All these horrors, all these indignities have been inflicted on the native: of course it would be understandable if the native inflicted them on the settler in return (Fanon 1990: 31).

Equally, however, one might quibble with this. Yes, the common-sense view might hold, the settler has done these terrible things. It would therefore be quite understandable to think that violent retaliation is inevitable. But wouldn’t it still be better if, per impossible, the colonial situation could be resolved without machetes and AK-47s? As moral philosophers, we might think, we should not allow ourselves to be lulled by the force of Fanon’s rhetoric into endorsing the principle of ‘an eye for an eye’. Yes, the settler should be punished – these colonial societies ought to be held to account. But in practice, anti-colonial violence will mean that this violence is meted out on, for instance, the children of settlers: surely we cannot want a child to be killed for their parents’ crimes?

But it is at least not only as retaliation that Fanon suggests anti-colonial violence might be justified. Fanon’s various justifications might broadly be classified as either normative or non-normative. ⁹

Non-normatively, Fanon suggests that decolonial violence might be justified insofar as it is strategically useful. This, really, is why Fanon rules out non-violent solutions to the colonial situation: he believes such solutions to be strategically weak. Non-violence, Fanon claims, is ‘an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table’ (Fanon 1990: 48); he caricatures the supporters of ‘non-violent’ solutions as mealy-mouthed intellectuals, mostly natives educated in the metropole, who believe in the superiority of settler culture and so feel themselves ‘beaten from the start’ (Fanon 1990: 49). Fanon draws an unfavourable contrast between these intellectuals and his preferred revolutionary class, the peasants, who ‘have nothing to lose’ and so ‘everything to gain’ (Fanon 1990: 47).

Of course, one might respond to this by pointing out that in many cases, the colonial situation was solved non-violently: within Fanon’s own lifetime, colonies such as Ghana or Gabon were (for various historically contingent reasons) granted their independence without violence at the level of that witnessed in anti-colonial struggles in places like Kenya or Algeria. But in such cases, Fanon implies, the dialectic between settler and native has not been properly resolved. ¹⁰ Tellingly, he quotes Gabon’s then-recently installed President Leon M’Ba, who claimed on a state visit to France that ‘between Gabon and France nothing has changed; everything goes on as before’ (Fanon 1990: 52). ‘In fact’, Fanon comments, ‘the only change is that Monsieur M’Ba is president of the Gabonese Republic and that he is received by the president of the French Republic’ (Fanon 1990: 52).

In such superficially ‘post-colonial’ states, colonial extraction can go on much as before, for instance, via private companies based in the metropole – at reduced cost to the former imperial power, who no longer need to maintain the apparatus of a colonial bureaucracy (or fight colonial wars). The only natives who really seem to gain from this arrangement are pet politicians like M’Ba, who might now acquire a percentage of the profits for themselves. ¹¹ With the colonial situation still having been, at the moment of independence, effectively unresolved, it should not surprise us that so many of these states have ultimately been torn apart by civil war.

Another non-normative justification Fanon gives for decolonial violence, is that violence can be educational. Violence, for instance, informs the natives that other natives are just as angry about the colonial situation as they are (Fanon 1990: 54). Meanwhile, they inform colonised peoples about their power against colonial regimes. Fanon here gives the example of the great victory the Vietnamese won in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu. This victory, Fanon claims, ‘is no longer, strictly speaking, a Vietnamese victory’. Rather, it belongs to all colonised peoples. ‘Not a single colonized individual could ever again doubt the possibility of a Dien Bien Phu: the only problem was how best to use the forces at their disposal, how to organize them, and when to bring them into action’ (Fanon 1990: 55).

If Fanon does indeed believe that decolonial violence might be justified insofar as it is retaliation for violence done by the settler to the native, then this would be one form of normative justification. Still more important on this score, however, is Fanon’s belief that violence somehow allows the natives to form a collective political identity. As Fanon claims at the outset of ‘Concerning Violence’, ‘Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men’ (Fanon 1990: 28). Through the process of decolonisation, ‘the “thing” which has been colonised becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself’ (Fanon 1990: 28), that is, through violent struggle.

This is why Fanon talks of violence as investing the natives with ‘positive and creative qualities’ (Fanon 1990: 73); why he calls it a ‘cleansing force’ which ‘frees the native from his inferiority complex… makes him fearless and restores his self-respect’ (Fanon 1990: 74). Through militant action, the natives come to ‘work’ together: ‘To work means to work for the death of the settler’ (Fanon 1990: 67). Together, Fanon tells us, the natives are able to reject the values of the colonial world: ‘individualism’, he tells us, disappears; the revolutionary natives no longer act in their self-interest as individuals, but rather in their capacity as ‘brother, sister, friend’ (Fanon 1990: 36).

The formation of this new political identity might also be thought of as something strategically necessary or useful: after all, it is on this new collective identity that the success or failure of any post-colonial state will be determined. But it makes sense to think of it as amounting, in the first instance, to an ethical imperative. In the Conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth, for instance, Fanon talks in inspiring (if programmatic) terms about the ‘new humanity’ decolonisation is supposed to produce. This ‘new humanity’ is an expressly non-European one. ‘Let us try not to imitate Europe’, Fanon tells his readers, ‘let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth’ (Fanon 1990: 252). Europe, after all, Fanon tells us, talks of ‘man’, of humanity, but in colonising the world has only produced ‘a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders’ (Fanon 1990: 252).

For Fanon then, decolonial violence will (he claims) lead to the formation of a new sort of decolonised political identity; a political identity which, according to Fanon, will correct what is lacking in traditional, Eurocentric humanism. It might even be said that decolonial violence is here justified on what might be identified as Aristotelian ethical grounds: for Fanon, it appears to be justified with reference to a story about human flourishing. ¹² Decolonial violence, Fanon appears to be claiming, is necessary if we are to bring about what we might think of as real human flourishing: a kind of flourishing made impossible by ‘European’ understandings of mankind. Through decolonial violence, a new, potentially flourishing human subject might be born. ¹³

For Fanon, I would argue, this particular normative justification of decolonial violence must trump all the others – both normative and non-normative – that he gives. Imagine, for instance, that advocates of non-violence were right: that decolonisation really could be done completely non-violently, with colonisers just handing over the old colonies to the natives. Well: for Fanon, violence might nonetheless still be necessary to produce this new, post-European human being – so violence could still be a force for good. The same goes for the thought that sometimes, non-violence might really be more strategically effective than violence; that violence, for instance, might provoke such ruthless oppression it would destroy any nascent anti-colonial movement entirely. Violence would still, again, be necessary – if we are to produce this new sort of human being. If violence is educational, then it is most important educational insofar as it informs the native of their humanity. Meanwhile, the violence involved here could be completely disproportionate: well beyond what ‘retaliation’ might justify. For Fanon, this wouldn’t really matter – provided it would result in the production of his ‘new’, decolonised human beings.

Gingerich on Spontaneous Freedom

But of course, this can make it sound as if Fanon is indeed arguing precisely what, in the Introduction, I have denied: namely, that decolonial political violence is justified because violence is morally good. And this, precisely, is what seems like it must offend those who hold the common-sense view of political violence: for Fanon, it seems, violence is good for its own sake, and so ought not to be avoided – even if, in theory, it might be (e.g. if the same strategic goals could be achieved through non-violence). I want to deny this inference, however. This is where spontaneous freedom comes in.

The term ‘spontaneous freedom’ does not, to be clear, appear anywhere in Fanon. Long neglected in the philosophical literature, it was only given the name ‘spontaneous freedom’ by Jonathan Gingerich in a 2022 paper published in Ethics. As Gingerich defines the concept, however, it is I think something we might all recognise: spontaneous freedom is the freedom we associate with the feeling of being ‘free as a bird’ – able, in theory, to do just about anything (Gingerich 2022: 41).

Centrally, Gingerich illustrates the concept of spontaneous freedom by giving the example of the character of Peter Walsh in Mrs Dalloway, who returns to London from India after half a lifetime away, seeking a divorce. Because no-one (other than his boyhood crush Clarissa Dalloway) knows Peter is there, he experiences an ecstatic sense of his own freedom – as if he is ‘stood at the opening of endless avenues, down which if he chose he might wander’ (Woolf 2005: 51, quoted in Gingerich 2022: 42).

‘He had escaped! was utterly free—as happens in the downfall of habit when the mind, like an unguarded flame, bows and bends and seems about to blow from its holding. I haven’t felt so young for years! thought Peter, escaping (only of course for an hour or so) from being precisely what he was, and feeling like a child who runs out of doors, and sees, as he runs, his old nurse waving at the wrong window’ (Woolf 2005: 51, quoted in Gingerich 2022: 42).

From this example, Gingerich draws out a number of features which, he claims, characterises spontaneous freedom. Spontaneous freedom, for instance, is ‘open’: when we experience spontaneous freedom, we are in an important sense uncertain about what the future holds (Gingerich 2022: 42). It is non-alienated: when we experience spontaneous freedom, we get a sense not only that anything might happen, but that we will be responsible in some way for bringing it about (Gingerich 2022: 44). It is non-obligatory: when Peter experiences spontaneous freedom, he precisely feels as if he ‘escaped from what he is’. In experiences of spontaneous freedom, then, we not only feel that we are free to do just about anything; we feel unbounded, in an important way, by social norms (by what would be expected of ‘a man of my class’, for instance) (Gingerich 2022: 45). Experiences of spontaneous freedom have intentional content: as Gingerich insists, experiences of spontaneous freedom can be ‘true or false’ depending on how things actually are in the world (my experience of spontaneous freedom might be non-veridical, if it turns out that I’d forgotten my obligation to pick up the kids from school) (Gingerich 2022: 45).

Another point that Gingerich emphasises is that experiences of spontaneous freedom might arise from either ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ affective states (Gingerich 2022: 47). While Peter’s experience of spontaneous freedom is accompanied by feelings of elation, Gingerich also cites the example of Mona from Agnes Varda’s film Vagabond, who pursues a life of vagrancy out of boredom (Gingerich 2022: 47). In a recent paper that builds on Gingerich’s work, I identified that spontaneous freedom might arise from feelings of anger. In particular, I argued that one might feel free when one feels, and is able to find some appropriate expression for, what we can call righteous anger: my example hinged on that of a disgruntled employee, who tells their incompetent boss where to go (Whyman 2026).

Of particular significance here is the fact that, as Gingerich notes, spontaneous freedom poses a ‘political problem’ (Gingerich 2022: 54) more than it does a metaphysical one (Gingerich 2022: 58). While the notion of spontaneous freedom appears to capture the kind of thing that libertarian incompatibilists are interested in securing (Gingerich 2022: 60), ‘the truth or falsity of a metaphysical thesis is not the sort of consideration that differentiates experiences of spontaneity from those of tedium or constraint’ (Gingerich 2022: 60). According to Gingerich, Peter’s feeling of spontaneous freedom would not be undermined by the truth of determinism; by contrast, it would be undermined by the fact he had a lunch date planned that he’d briefly forgotten about (Gingerich 2022: 60). For this reason, when thinking about how spontaneous freedom might be maximised, we might consider things like our class position; the ways in which we are racialised; or our ability to question social norms. Peter is a wealthy man from a wealthy background; his spontaneous freedom is experienced very differently to the spontaneous freedom possessed by, say, an itinerant labourer from a persecuted minority (Gingerich 2022: 52). Likewise, Mrs Dalloway itself contrasts Peter’s perspective, in which he is able to feel unbounded and free, with that of the female characters in the book: for instance, Clarissa’s daughter Elizabeth, who experiences femininity as something imposed upon her by the gaze of others (Woolf 2005: 131, quoted in Gingerich 2022: 54). Meanwhile the deeply conformist Clarissa appears to have spent her whole life repressing her homosexuality.

But while these social constraints might be blocks to spontaneous freedom (Gingerich 2022: 54-55), spontaneous freedom might also, in turn, help erode various forms of social constraint. ‘The value of experiencing spontaneous freedom comes, in part’, Gingerich tells us, ‘from how it allows a certain sort of artistic creativity to flourish’ (Gingerich 2022: 56). Think of how a group of musicians might start writing a song by improvising together, or how a painter might approach a canvas without having any particular idea of what they’re going to depict. Because they are oriented towards their artistic production in a way that is spontaneously free, anything might emerge – or at least, anything that is a piece of music, or a painting. In some cases, admittedly rare ones, what is produced could indeed be so revolutionary it ends up changing everyone else’s ideas about what a piece of music, or a painting, can or should be. And of course such revolutions might have their ultimate origins in the free mental, internal reflection of individuals as well. Consider by contrast the case of a writer struggling to produce a manuscript according to a quite specific plan, given to them by their publisher – and which they are obliged to produce by a specific date. Such a process is likely to result in something rather more generic: indeed nowadays such an author may well be replaced by generative AI.

By analogy, Gingerich states that when I ‘act in ways that arise from the deep well of my unstructured values, commitments, and identities, rather than according to consciously transparent plans that I have already set in motion, I confirm to myself that my life is, or can be, more and different than what I now take it to be’ (Gingerich 2022: 67-8). In such cases, ‘what we do can feel new and surprising’ (Gingerich 2022: 68). Experiences of spontaneous freedom thus provide me with a sense that I might personally live in ways different to the ones I am used to imagining. If I take up carpentry as a hobby, and successfully build a bookshelf, this experience might induce in me a feeling that I don’t really need to be bound by the professional expectations forced on me by academia; maybe I’d be better off training as a carpenter instead. And they also set an example for others. If a group of families are raising their children communally move in across the street from me, this might make it seem as if different forms of family life are possible for me, as well.

Arendt, Spontaneous Freedom, and Political Agency

Building on Gingerich, we might also consider the role that spontaneous freedom plays in the constitution of political communities. At one point, Gingerich cites Hannah Arendt as an ally in his efforts to foreground the importance of spontaneous freedom – likening spontaneous freedom to what she names, in her central philosophical work The Human Condition, as our ‘capacity for beginning something anew’ (Arendt 1958: 9). Gingerich’s intention is to elaborate the ways in which spontaneous freedom is vital for the exercise of human creativity: ‘We exercise this capacity’, to begin something anew, he tells us, ‘when we act in ways that do not simply execute previously made decisions’ (Gingerich 2022: 57). But for our purposes in this paper, it will be worth exploring the Arendt link further.

In the context of The Human Condition, our ‘capacity for beginning something anew’ is identical with what Arendt calls ‘action’ (Arendt 1958: 9). Action, for Arendt, is one of ‘three fundamental human activities’ – the others being ‘labour’ and ‘work’. Broadly, Arendt uses the term ‘labour’ to refer to the activities associated with our biological existence: ‘the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labour’ (Arendt 1958: 7). ‘Work’, meanwhile, ‘provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings’ (Arendt 1958: 7). When we ‘labour’, then, we do things like eat, sleep, or go to the toilet. When we work, by contrast, we do things to make these ‘labour’ processes easier: we work to grow food, domesticate other animals, build houses, do plumbing, etc.

‘Action’ is quite different. Arendt defines action as ‘the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter’. While labour and work are about doing stuff to things, action is paradigmatically about talking to one another: about ‘laying down the law’; ‘staking claims.’ Action ‘corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world’ (Arendt 1958: 7). In short, action has to do with the ‘founding and preserving of political bodies’ (Arendt 1958: 8-9). In this it ‘creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history’ (Arendt 1958: 9).

Why then is action, in the same breath, identified with our ‘capacity for beginning something anew’? Crucial here is this notion of ‘plurality’. ‘Action would be an unnecessary luxury’, Arendt tells us, ‘if men were endlessly reproducible repetitions of the same model’ (Arendt 1958: 8).

‘Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live’ (Arendt 1958: 8).

Action is thus rooted in what Arendt calls ‘the human condition of natality’ (Arendt 1958: 9). ‘Natality’ – one of the central concepts in Arendt’s thought – names the fact that we are all born as a new individual, a new beginning. We are thus able to distinguish ourselves as individuals: to differentiate ourselves from our parents, our peers; to be this person, as opposed to just a person. At one point, Arendt calls natality ‘the miracle that saves the world’ (Arendt 1958: 247). Natality is what ensures that we are always able, at least in theory, to do things differently: if it wasn’t for natality, natural disasters would have done for the human species long ago (Arendt 1958: 246). Arendt thus calls action ‘the one miracle-working faculty of man’ (Arendt 1958: 246): insofar as it allows us to disrupt the ‘ordinary’ course of both nature and society.

The affinities between Arendt’s ‘action’ and Gingerich’s ‘spontaneous freedom’ should I hope be as apparent to us as they are to Gingerich: this ‘capacity for beginning something anew’ just is a form of spontaneous freedom. But Arendt goes further than Gingerich in at least one way. For Arendt is quite explicit that in order to realise our capacity for action, we need to exist in a political community that somehow minimally enables our acting in it. Arendt thus might be invoked to help us expand, and clarify, the political dimensions of spontaneous freedom.

Since action is so much about talking to one another, we obviously – in order to ‘act’ – need to exist within a relatively unified linguistic community. Moreover, in order for ‘the new’ to be possible at all, it needs to take place against a backdrop of what has come before. Anything ‘new’ needs some ‘old’ stuff in order to seem ‘new’ in relation towards (Arendt 1958: 9). We thus need to exist within a community which has some sort of historical sense of itself. At one point in The Human Condition, Arendt turns to the Ancient Greek polis to elaborate this point: for Arendt, the polis was almost a sort of machine its citizens used in order to ensure that they were able to ‘act’. The polis, after all, was defined by its shared customs and its shared stories; its sense that whatever any individual citizen did, mattered on the level of the city. In theory then, what the citizen did when they were alive might outlast them long after their death: the citizen was able to overcome their as it were ‘natural’ transience, and achieve through the tales poets told ‘immortal fame’ (Arendt 1958: 193). ¹⁴ What is important for Arendt, then, is not only the fact that I can do new and different things. It is that I can do new and different things and be remembered for doing them.

This point has at least two upshots to it. Firstly, via Arendt it is possible to see that political communities do not only limit, but also enable, exercises of spontaneous freedom. It is only insofar as I understand myself as an individual within a particular context, which is at least sometimes also a political, historical context, that I am able to see myself as free to do things differently: to go ‘off-script’ as Gingerich might put it; ‘to begin something anew’. ¹⁵ By this same token, if I lack the appropriate political context, I will be unable to make full sense of myself as a subject that is able to exercise spontaneous freedom; to be the instigator of anything genuinely new.

Secondly, we can read into Arendt an argument that it is necessary for us to be able to exercise spontaneous freedom in order to exist as political subjects at all. ‘Action’, the fundamental aspect of human existence associated with the founding and maintenance of political communities, is only something that can be engaged in by people who are able, at least sometimes, to see themselves as spontaneously free. Action, after all, goes on between plural subjects: individuals, who are able to do things for themselves. If I have no sense of myself as a potential source of ‘newness’ – that is, as someone able to do things, to make demands, on my own behalf; to change things, in the world – it seems difficult to see how I might participate in any sort of political process, in anything other than the most apathetic, disengaged way. This point is reflected in Arendt’s own fears about a modernity which, she wrote, was in danger of being consumed by the ‘sterile passivity’ of its subjects (Arendt 1958: 322). In modernity, Arendt worried, people are increasingly happy to see their actions as passively determined by forces beyond their control. ¹⁶ Such a phenomenon, of course, only seems more apparent nowadays, given how many people are content to replace real human language, real human communication (which again is for Arendt the very stuff of ‘action’), with gunk generated by ChatGPT. As Arendt would have it, AI is eroding the capacities which make us not only most fundamentally, but also most robustly and sustainably, human. ¹⁷

Violence and Spontaneous Freedom

But to return now to Fanon. Above, we have discussed how experiences of spontaneous freedom might have various bases: from elation, to boredom, to anger. In this section, I want to suggest that violence can allow us to feel spontaneously free. And thus I want to suggest that, in a society that affords its members no other way of exercising spontaneous freedom, violence can be a vital source of political agency. I then want to read this argument into Fanon, as a way of understanding his justification of political violence as being compatible with what I’ve called the ‘common-sense’ view.

Clearly, on Fanon’s account, the native in colonial society is denied political agency: the kind of agency that, for Arendt-via-Gingerich, we might associate with spontaneous freedom. ‘The first thing which the native learns’ under colonialism, ‘is to stay in his place, and not to go beyond certain limits’ (Fanon 1990: 40).

‘This is why the dreams of the native are always of muscular prowess; his dreams are of action and of aggression. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, climbing… or that I am followed by a flood of motor-cars which never catch up with me. During the period of colonization, the native never stops achieving his freedom from nine in the evening until six in the morning’ (Fanon 1990: 40).

The native, Fanon claims, has a strong sense of ‘fatality’. This has the effect, in fact, of removing all blame from the settler. ‘The cause of misfortunes and of poverty is attributed to God; He is Fate’ (Fanon 1990: 42).

‘In this way the individual accepts the disintegration ordained by God, bows down before the settler and his lot, and by a kind of interior restablization acquires a stony calm’ (Fanon 1990: 42).

The native can thus seem to be the prisoner of an extraordinary passivity. The settler, by contrast, ‘makes history and is conscious of making it’ (Fanon 1990: 40). Strikingly (if we are bearing in mind what Arendt says about action and natality), Fanon describes the settler as feeling themselves an ‘absolute beginning’ (Fanon 1990: 39-40). ‘This land was created by us’, the settler tells themselves, ‘If we leave, all is lost, and the country will go back to the Middle Ages’ (Fanon 1990: 40). The settler thus feels themselves to have precisely what the native lacks: namely, ‘spontaneous freedom’.

Meanwhile, Fanon describes a world in which the native, quite beyond the question of whether or not violence is ‘justified’, feels themselves constantly driven to commit it. This is seen, for instance, in the phenomenon of inter-group violence – which Fanon holds is common in colonial societies.

‘While the settler or the policeman has the right the live-long day to strike the native, to insult him and to make him crawl to them, you will see the native reaching for his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive glance cast on him by another native’ (Fanon 1990: 42).

Fanon explains this violence as a way of the native releasing their ‘muscular tension’: unable to strike back against the settler, the native instead becomes embroiled in, for instance, tribal conflicts.

‘Tribal feuds only serve to perpetuate old grudges deep buried in the memory. By throwing himself with all his force into the vendetta, the native tries to persuade himself that colonialism does not exist, that everything is going on as before, that history continues’ (Fanon 1990: 42).

Fanon, then, suggests that in colonial societies, natives are drawn to violence precisely because they feel oppressed: they feel unable to express themselves in any other way. In short, we must think, the native turns to violence in order to express their capacity for spontaneous freedom: to get a sense that they really are, quite despite the colonial situation, able to do something in the world.

To understand what Fanon is telling us here, consider the hopefully quite basic thought that violence is something I might resort to. While Fanon’s own arguments about violence are indelibly situated in the context of decolonial struggle, it might nonetheless help – in order to help us grasp the underlying logic of what he is claiming – to use some toy examples here. If my boss enters the office to tell everyone that in order to secure his bonus for this year, he’s going to need to lay us all off, I can still in theory punch him in the face. If I feel overwhelmed at a social event, because people keep talking too loudly and keep on knocking in to me, I can still in theory go outside and kick the wall. Instrumentally, these actions might not achieve very much; indeed in the examples, violence is far more likely to be counter-productive. If I punch my boss I’m still fired; if I kick the wall the party is still too loud. In the first case I might even be arrested to boot; in the second people will probably find my behaviour threatening and weird. Equally however, these actions might have the salubrious effect of making me feel good about myself. Punching my boss might make me feel powerful and strong; kicking the wall might make me feel calm. In both cases, then, I reclaim a certain sense of agency: things were just happening to me (getting fired; feeling overwhelmed by the noise). But now I have managed to show, to express to myself, that I am an active participant in the world. Even if I have no other power over my situation whatsoever, resorting to violence can show me that I am able to do something.

Thus it seems like it must make sense, when Fanon tells us that ‘the colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence’ (Fanon 1990: 68). What the native is discovering here is, in short, their capacity for spontaneous freedom. Having previously felt unable to exercise their agency in any meaningful way whatsoever, that native now realises that they could do just about anything – anything, at least, in the interests of liberating themselves from the settler. The natives’ violence satisfies Gingerich’s various conditions on spontaneous freedom: it is open (accompanied, as I have said, by this sense one might do just about anything); it is, plausibly, non-alienated (the native discovers themselves as an agent, through their violence); it is non-obligatory (while colonial societies normalise settler-on-native violence, and native-on-native violence, they absolutely prohibit native-on-settler violence); it also clearly involves what Gingerich calls intentionality (it can be ‘true’ or ‘false’: might lead to the successful overthrow of colonial society, or might alternatively be forcefully put down).

There are of course some ways in which the violence Fanon describes might not seem like such an obvious fit with Gingerich’s notion of spontaneous freedom. For Fanon as we have seen, violence in colonial societies is inevitable: one might perceive a clash here with the non-alienation condition. ¹⁸ Meanwhile, even if acts of decolonial violence might be non-obligatory relative to the dominant colonial order, they might equally be the result of, and certainly might themselves produce, other forms of social obligation. Decolonial militant groups, Fanon notes, often require that any individual who joins them perform an ‘irrevocable action’ (Fanon 1990: 67).

‘In Algeria, for example, where almost all the men who called on the people to join in the national struggle were condemned to death or searched by the French police, confidence was proportional to the hopelessness of each case. You could be sure of a new recruit when he could no longer go back into the colonial system’ (Fanon 1990: 67).

This point, however, reflects the ways in which Fanon considers how violence might be ‘educational’ for the native: insofar as it informs them that they are indeed ‘fully human’ in precisely the way that colonial society has always denied. By the same token, this is why it makes sense for Fanon to claim that violence might restore the native’s ‘self-respect’ (Fanon 1990: 74). Before the decolonial struggle took place, the native was considered ‘completely irresponsible’. But ‘today they mean to understand everything and make all decisions’ (Fanon 1990: 74). The obligations produced here are thus ones which allow native individuals to stand in true political community with one another. In this then they will result, long-term, in the natives having a greater scope to express themselves as spontaneous agents, not less.

‘Illuminated by violence, the consciousness of the people rebels against any pacification’ (Fanon 1990: 74).

By seeing this, we can also make sense of why Fanon thinks violence is necessary in order to bring about what he understands as a new sort of decolonised humanity. Arendt gives us the resources for claiming that spontaneous freedom is necessary for the founding and maintaining of political communities. If violence is indeed the only way that natives, in colonial societies, have of exercising spontaneous freedom, then it must be necessary in order to found decolonised political communities. ¹⁹ As Fanon writes:

‘The practice of violence binds [the natives] together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upwards in reaction to the settler’s violence in the beginning. The groups recognize each other and the future nation is already indivisible’ (Fanon 1990: 73).

In this way then, we can see that Fanon, for all he might justify decolonial violence primarily on normative grounds – as essential for the flourishing not only of the natives, but of humanity in general – is not trying to claim that violence is somehow ‘inherently’ good; as being good ‘in itself’: an indispensable means to the highest of all aims. Rather, what he has noticed is that, in the context of their emancipatory struggle against the settler, it is vital for the native to find some way of expressing their capacity for spontaneous freedom; their spontaneous agency. When agents have no other way of expressing their spontaneous agency, violence might be justified insofar as it allows them to do this. ²⁰

The Arendt Problem?

Before concluding, I would like to address an issue already briefly noted in the Introduction above. In this paper, I have by and large read Arendt and Fanon as intellectual allies, whose work can help us see how political agency is guaranteed by the ability to exercise spontaneous freedom. But this is prima facie rather strange. Arendt, after all, is one of Fanon’s best-known and most fervent critics: her 1970 essay On Violence attempts really to demolish the arguments we have been considering here from ‘Concerning Violence’, in particular by drawing a distinction between violence and power. ²¹

For Arendt it is ‘power’, not violence, that we really need in order to establish conditions under which we might ‘act’ together. ‘Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert’ (Arendt 1970: 44). By contrast Arendt dismisses violence as something purely ‘instrumental’ (Arendt 1970: 46). While violence and power often go together (violence, for instance, can be employed by the state as ‘a last resort to keep the power structure intact against individual challengers’ (Arendt 1970: 47)), ‘no government exclusively based on the means of violence has ever existed’ (Arendt 1970: 50). ‘Violence can always destroy power’, but it can never create it (Arendt 1970: 53).

Arendt and Fanon are both ‘big’ thinkers: deep and significant, and each with their own by no means obviously commensurate vocabulary and concerns. There is, thus, no way I will be able to completely resolve this controversy within the context of this paper. But just to sketch a response: my suspicion is that the hard contrast typically assumed between Arendt and Fanon is misleading. Both Fanon and Arendt, as I have shown, are interested in the kinds of political agency that are involved in establishing and maintaining political communities: for both Fanon and Arendt, what we need is a form of agency that might be called (via Gingerich) ‘spontaneously free’. Clearly, Arendt does not think that violence could ever be enough to found and maintain political communities on its own – but I’m also not sure Fanon really thinks this either. As I have argued: for Fanon violence is justified, in the context of colonial society, insofar as it allows individuals to express their spontaneous agency. This is why violence is vital. In Arendtian terms, one might say: the native has no power. Violence allows the native to express the fact they might one day be powerful. At the point at which any individual act of violence might be ‘justified’, the appropriate political community has yet to be established – and much more, yes, will be necessary to establish it. Certainly in ‘Concerning Violence’, Fanon’s rhetoric might be thought to get ahead of him at points. But if spontaneous agency is required to establish genuine political communities, then violence might nonetheless be the catalyst. This, I take it, is the central and most important thought that is given to us by Fanon in his work of decolonial violence. Arendt, certainly, would not endorse it. But that doesn’t mean her views are entirely alien to his: their ultimate commitments, I have argued, are remarkably similar in a way.

Conclusion

I wish to conclude by saying something about the ongoing relevance of Fanon’s work on violence today. While Fanon’s work on violence is irreducibly rooted in the decolonial movement of the mid-20th century, his emphasis on the importance of spontaneous agency in our political lives can tell us something about when it might, or might not, be appropriate to utilise violence in emancipatory political struggles more generally (which includes contemporary decolonial struggles). Violence, as I have emphasised, is never something to be taken lightly. But as we can see, via Fanon, the exercise of violence in emancipatory political struggles is not only, as it were, a moral issue: it also an empirical one. If we can exercise spontaneous agency as political subjects – if we exist in a community with robust norms and practices which sustain democratic citizenship, for instance – then of course we do not need to resort to violence. Three questions, then. Who can do this? How can they? And can we?