Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences

by Lewis R. Gordon

As the first book to analyze the work of Fanon as an existential-phenomenological of human sciences and liberation philosopher, Gordon deploys Fanon's work to illuminate how the "bad faith" of European science and civilization have philosophically stymied the project of liberation. Fanon's body of work serves as a critique of European science and society, and shows the ways in which the project of "truth" is compromised by Eurocentric artificially narrowed scope of humanity--a circumstance to which he refers as the crisis of European Man. In his examination of the roots of this crisis, Gordon explores the problems of historical salvation and the dynamics of oppression, the motivation behind contemporary European obstruction of the advancement of a racially just world, the forms of anonymity that pervade racist theorizing and contribute to "seen invisibility," and the reasons behind the impossibility of a nonviolent transition from colonialism and neocolonialism to post colonialism.

Genres: Philosophy, Race, Nonfiction, Theory, History, Politics

152 pages, Paperback

First published August 29, 1995

About the author

Lewis Ricardo Gordon is an American philosopher who works in the areas of Africana philosophy, philosophy of human and life sciences, phenomenology, philosophy of existence, social and political theory, postcolonial thought, theories of race and racism, philosophies of liberation, aesthetics, philosophy of education, and philosophy of religion. He has written particularly extensively on race and racism, postcolonial phenomenology, Africana and black existentialism, and on the works and thought of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon.

Reviews

[Luke Echo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting and quite dense text that endeavours to illustrate the depth of Fanon's work, rather than the typical reading focussed on violence in Fanon. Gordon attempts to show how Fanon can be read as developing the thesis that there is a kind of collective or institutional "Bad Faith" (Sartre) in the very concepts of 'humanity', and 'race' that continue to dominate post-colonial discourse.