52 chApter one
cannot be avoided. Gandhi’s own confessed failings to act in purely non-
violent ways, and the irreconcilability of his ethico- politics, is precisely the
messiness we have to risk if we are to act differently in and toward the
world. In this regard, what Gandhi saw as the limits of his spiritual capac-
ity, and what I have identified as some of the tensions and contradictions
within his thinking about how to live ethically, are essential resources that
his thought continues to offer us today.
The Entanglements of Love and Violence
Fanon’s oeuvre likewise reveals that his popular legacy is founded on strik-
ing elisions of the critical nuances of his anticolonial writings. Fanon’s repu-
tation is largely built on readings that emphasize his advocacy of violence
while disregarding the many moments in which his thinking is inflected
by love, and in which he articulates his vision for an almost romantic, thor-
oughly deracialized and declassed future of man. Situating Fanon within
a squarely humanist frame, Nigel C. Gibson reminds us that far from a
simplistic desire for violence, Fanon’s project was “to understand as well as
to abolish the divisive and hierarchical zones that divide, fragment, and de-
stroy human beings” (2003, 6). Gibson writes that although Fanon is pop-
ularly remembered “for his powerful descriptions of, and prescriptions for,
a violent engagement with colonialism and its logic, his project and goal is
to get beyond Manicheanism both in its colonial form and as an anticolo-
nial reaction” (6). Fanon was in fact explicitly geared toward new world
dynamics that fundamentally relied on mutual love in the formation of
emergent subjectivities. In an idealist gesture toward the end of Black Skin,
White Masks, for example, Fanon asks: “Why not the quite simple attempt
to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself ?” (1967b,
231). It is in such moments that we see crystalized a postcolonial vision in
Fanonian thought that is no longer bound by the racial politics of coloni-
zation. Like Gibson, Homi Bhabha sees in Fanon the powerful potential to
begin to live with/in difference. Bhabha declares: “The time has come to
return to Fanon; as always, I believe, with a question: how can the human
world live its difference; how can a human being live Other- wise?” (1994,
64). While Fanon points us toward a politics of love- in-difference, differ-
ence in his thinking is chartered through the terrain of racialized mascu-