The Revolutionary Sublime: Hegel, Fanon, and the Fanatical State

Abstract

ed from the speculative impulse of thought and corresponding contingency of the real. The encounter with the colonizer dialectically interpellates the colonized, animating her “signs” of resistance. Revealing through their dynamic alterity, real or imagined, the dialectical instability and thus revolutionary impetus internal to the Enlightenment and its secular legacy, Muslims in the colonial period and in the West today mark precisely what “secularism” cannot acknowledge as inherent in its system: the fundamental sublimity and violent articulation of its signifying regimes. Dogmas of the “understanding”—prescribing, for instance, the liberation of the Muslim woman through laïcit e—mystify that sublimity and violence, repressing knowledge of the always latent potential and actuality of fanaticism and terror by the European state since the French Revolution. As Fanon points out, “fanaticism” and “terror” can be attributed far more aptly to European coloniality than to decolonial insurgency: as examples, Fanon cites the elision of the distinction between the white civilian and military sectors in Algeria; the license granted to the entire settler population—numbering hundreds of thousands—to kill Muslims with impunity; and the systematic torture, rape, and murder of Algerian women. The resulting “terror” consumes colonial society: [The French state decrees that] henceforth all Europeans will be armed and should fire on anyone who appears suspect. The savage, iniquitous repression bordering on genocide must above all be prosecuted by the authorities, according to general opinion. Lacoste [the governor-general] replies: Let us systematize the repression, let us organize a manhunt for Algerians. And symbolically he gives civilian powers to the military, and military powers to the civilians. The circle is closed. In the middle is the Algerian, disarmed, starved, hunted, jostled, beaten, lynched, soon to be shot as a suspect. Today, in Algeria, there is not a single Frenchman who is not authorized or welcome to use his weapon [to kill], who does not have permission or the obligation to find, provoke, and pursue suspects. The unblinking and, for Hegel, ultimately “religious” fanaticism of such programmatic terror in the name of “freedom”—continuous with Robespierre— initially intensifies when confronted with the sublime disarticulation of the colonial dialectic. In this vein, the “terror” unleashed by the state gives rise to “terrorism,” even if in relatively meeker forms, on the part of the colonized as a dialectically inevitable response. As the distinction between European and Muslim appear and disappear through the endless “grand battle” of signification, the evidently contingent and arbitrary “limits” of the colonial project continue to dissipate: The adversary now knew, as certain militant women had spoken under torture, that women with a very Europeanized aspect were playing a fundamental role in the battle. Moreover, certain European women of Algeria were arrested—to the dismay of the adversary, who realized that his own system was breaking down. The discovery by the French authorities of the participation of Europeans in the liberation struggle marks a turning 126 H. LADHA