Revolution as restoration or foundation? Frantz Fanon’s politics of world building

This article claims that the political theory of Martinican-born psychiatrist Frantz Fanon offers important resources for working through current problems in democratic theory. Political theorists investigating questions of revolution often place paradoxes of constituent and constituted power at the center of their research. Fanon, on the other hand, interrogates whether the proper object of revolution is the restoration of a prior form of life or the foundation of a new political world. Arguing against the tendency to bifurcate Fanon’s work into discontinuous stages, I advance the claim that worldliness operates as the central concept that establishes the continuity of Fanon’s oeuvre and that anchors his conception of colonization. This interpretive claim is crucial since Fanon’s theorization of colonialism as worldlessness authorizes his ultimate rejection of négritude as a politics of restoration and his embrace of revolution as a foundational project of world building.