Cara S. Greene

In ‘The Genesis of a False Dichotomy: A Critique of Conceptual Alienation’, I locate the origin of the conceptualist-realist debate in the medieval debate between nominalists, realists, and conceptualists; subsequently, I trace the development of realism and conceptualism through Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel’s critique of the Kantian concept in his Logic, but conclude – alongside Sohn-Rethel – that the Hegelian concept failed to capture that all things, including concepts, appear dichotomous under capitalism. Next, I detail the ways in which the division of word and thing mimics the mutual exclusivity of exchange and use. Finally, I claim that Marxist Psychoanalysis has the unique capacity to expose the connection between the concept, the objective world, and the individual; and in turn, reveal our subjective participation in the creation of the objective ‘terms’ of our lives.

Violence, Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon is a volume of secondary literature that dispels common misconceptions about the relationship between Hegelian and Fanonian philosophy, and sheds new light on the connections and divergences between the two thinkers. By engaging in close textual analyses of both Hegel and Fanon, the chapters in this volume disambiguate the philosophical relation between Sartre and Fanon, scrutinize the conflation of Self-Consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and subjectivity in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History in light of Hegel’s reception in decolonial thought, and flesh out the pivotal ontological role of violence in Fanon’s work. In particular, this volume underscores the necessity of Fanon scholars to pay heed to the distinction between Hegel’s dialectic of lordship and bondage and Kojève’s master-slave dialectic, as the latter—an anthropological interpretation of a Hegelian epistemological gestalt of consciousness—is what enables Fanon to engage with the former as a historical dialectic. This review emphasizes that Violence, Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon is a pedagogically significant text, and ultimately concludes that this volume is a vital resource for Continental Philosophical scholarship on Fanon and Hegel.