The Colonization of Significance and the Future of the Nation: Fanon, Derrida, and Democracy-to-Come

Abstract

Frantz Fanon’s theoretical and practical challenge is to identify how self-determination is possible for a subject whose agency and significance have, through colonization, been appropriated and shaped by others, a challenge to which he responds with the invocation of “national consciousness.” In this paper I describe this national consciousness and show how its exclusivity paradoxically establishes the ground for a kind of international or universal inclusiveness. I differentiate this inclusiveness from the universality of Western political ideals, which Fanon challenges, and conclude by discussing how the tension between nation and internationalism in Fanon is illuminated by Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the idea of democracy and particular democracies in Rogues.