MA Defence: Jintao Liang, Philosophy

The Question of Horizons in Frantz Fanon’s Critical Philosophy of Race

Jintao Liang

Supervisor: David Morris

ABSTRACT: I show how the concept of horizon, understood with resources from hermeneutics and phenomenology, can account for the fluid meaning of race and adaptative mechanisms of racism. I do so by examining how the horizon concept informs Frantz Fanon’s understanding of race and racism in his critical descriptions of the lived, oppressive experiences of them. Fanon reveals that a racial horizon structures racial experience; it does so by shaping the world around us that affects our experience from outside in. At the same time, he tends to overturn certain aspects of the hermeneutical and phenomenological methods mentioned above. In particular, for Fanon, the racial horizon as a structure of experience is neither natural nor interpretively or epistemologically neutral, but it is saturated with power (horizonpower), developed in the violent history of colonialism. To develop these points, I first discuss the notion of horizon, via a provisional method of ‘critical phenomenology,’ in light of Fanon’s distinctive phenomenological-psychiatric diagnosis of the horizon of human experience. Second, to clarify the role of horizon in constituting non-essentialized and anti-naturalized racial identities, I critically discuss Linda Martín Alcoff’s notion of race as an ‘interpretive hermeneutic horizon.’ Finally, I returned to Fanon’s notion of racial horizons in Black Skin, White Masks, in critical dialogue with both: 1) contemporary phenomenologists, especially Alia Al-Saji’s reading of the colonial horizon as a temporal longue durée, and 2) the historical, philosophical context of Fanon’s ‘racial horizon.’ This includes Sartre’s diagnosis of antisemitism through the blocked horizon of the racialized, as well as Beauvoir’s transformation of horizon into an ethics of ambiguity. Fanon radically challenges and transforms these understandings of horizon and pushes the boundary of this concept to overflow itself at its limit towards a decolonial horizon of freedom.

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