Camus recognised the pitfalls of anti-colonial violence more accurately than Fanon, as were his predictions of what would come to pass if the revolution succeeded. Still, he naively and stubbornly hoped in vain that France could reform itself. On the other hand, Fanon held onto the illusory image of the glorious mujahidin until his untimely death in 1961, only a few months before the end of the war. He argues at length about the potential risks of anti-colonial struggles but fails to see how the new despots emerge not, as he argued, from the self-serving mediocre indigenous bourgeoisie that benefited from colonialism but from the ranks of the Front de libération nationale (FLN) after the more democratic wing of the movement had been silenced by both French and FLN murderousness and most especially after the murder of Fanon’s friend, Abane Ramdane, in 1957. (Tabensky 2023)
Pedro Tabensky’s Camus and Fanon on the Algerian Question is the first book to offer a systematic comparison of the philosophies of Albert Camus and Frantz Fanon. It shows how the ethical, political, and psychological outlooks of these two influential thinkers can further our understandings of how to bring about justice in the face of deep power imbalances.
Tabensky foregrounds the bloody Algerian War of Independence in his analysis of the philosophies of Camus and Fanon. Although neither supported French colonial occupation of Algeria, they held radically different views of the conflict. Fanon supported emancipation through violence, which the author argues has been uncritically romanticized. Camus, on the other hand, supported an ethics of moderation that shunned indiscriminate violence. The author argues that Camus has been unfairly accused of being an apologist for colonialism. Finally, the author draws out the common endorsement of humanist values that drive both Camus’ and Fanon’s thought.
Camus and Fanon on the Algerian Question appeals to scholars and advanced students interested in twentieth-century Continental philosophy, postcolonialism, existentialism, and African philosophy.
Author Bio
Pedro Tabensky was born in Santiago, Chile, to refugee parents. His mother is a Holocaust survivor born in Hungary two weeks before the final stage of the final solution. His father, of Polish Jewish ancestry, is a refugee of the Chinese revolution. He has lived a peripatetic life since the age of three, ending up in South Africa in 2001 and meeting his wife, with whom he has two children. Tabensky is the founding director of the Allan Gray Centre for Leadership Ethics (AGLE), Department of Philosophy, Rhodes University (South Africa). He is the author of Happiness: Personhood, Community, Purpose and of several articles and book chapters. Tabensky is also the editor of and contributor to Judging and Understanding: Essays on Free Will, Narrative, Meaning and the Ethical Limits of Condemnation; The Positive Function of Evil; and, coedited with Sally Matthews (his wife), Being at Home: Race, Institutional Culture and Transformation at South African Higher Education Institutions. He has a book, published in 2023 by Routledge, titled Fanon and Camus on the Algerian Question: An Ethics of Rebellion, and is commencing work on another book provisionally titled Ethics and Education as Practices of Freedom coming out with Lexington, probably in 2026.
Discussant
Thando Njovane
Literary Studies in English
Rhodes University