J. Reese Faust

This article reads Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ontology of the “flesh of the world” alongside the ontology that seems to undergird Frantz Fanon's sociodiagnostics as well as his theory of sociogeny. It argues that reading Fanonian sociogeny in terms of the ambiguity and intercorporeality of the flesh of the world renders the ethical and political imperatives of Fanon's decolonial project all the more pressing, since the “new human” is prefigured—if not totally determined—in the national consciousness obtained by “les damnés” through the decolonization process. It then examines how Sylvia Wynter's Fanonian call to (re)fashion the future of humanness through (re)conceptualizing “being human as praxis,” also seems to rely on this ontology of the flesh of the world. Bringing these arguments together, the article suggests that the conceptual content of the new human can be found in the liberation struggles of les damnés across what Wynter calls the “poverty archipelagos” wrought by colonial humanism. Hence, the “new skin” for which Fanon calls is fashioned through forming international solidarity with les damnés, with the conceptual content of the new humanism emerging sociogenically—and autopoetically—from those struggles themselves.

Bruce Baugh, Philosophers’ Walks (New York: Routledge, 2022), 251 pp., $48.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-3673-3313-3 Marco Cavallaro and George Heffernan (editors), The Existential Husserl: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Springer, 2022), 354 pp., $119.99 (hardback), ISBN 978-3-031-05094-7 Mary L. Edwards, Sartre's Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 258 pp., $115.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-350-17347-7, $39.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-350-33107-5. Elisa Magrì and Paddy McQueen, Critical Phenomenology: An Introduction (Cambridge and Hoboken: Polity, 2023), 240 pp., $24.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-5095-4112-6 Michael J. Monahan, Creolizing Practices of Freedom: Recognition and Dissonance (Lanham: Roman & Littlefield, 2023), 206 pp., $105 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-5381-7461.

This article argues that, despite their distance across the colonial divide, a creolizing reading of Frantz Fanon and Paul Ricœur can yield valuable insights into decoloniality. Tracing their shared philosophical concerns with embodied phenomenology, social ontology and recognition, I argue that their respective accounts of sociogeny and hermeneutics can be productively read together as describing a shared end of mutual recognition untainted by racism or coloniality – a ‘new skin’ for humanity, as Fanon describes it. More specifically, Fanon contributes to Ricœur an understanding of how divergences in social location can be overcome through liberatory action that posits a new logic of sociality; likewise, Ricœur provides Fanon with an account of how liberatory horizons are produced through this praxis, based on the imaginative connection between ideology and utopia. This article concludes by arguing that these congruent methodological and normative concerns can be read together to concretize – and potentially actualize – the utopic end of liberatory struggle in mutual recognition through fashioning this new skin.

Peter Fitzpatrick’s intellectual relationship with Jean-Luc Nancy centred on the related problems of myth and community. In this article, I will explicate the ‘restlessness of the negative’ that Nancy describes in Hegel, in order to further develop Fitzpatrick’s notion of ‘law as resistance’. Set against the backdrop of myth and community, law can be understood as a community’s fragmentary attempt to explicate its essence. Modern law becomes an artefact of the negative twisting through a community’s attempts to construct itself through a Nancian ontology of ‘being singular plural’. In this manner, one might understand Fitzpatrick’s claim that there is ‘always more to be done’ as affirming the necessity of some extra-formal legality—that is, the political—that must be opened through the resistance wrought by negativity.