“A Century of Violence” – co-hosted with the Centre for the Study of Violence at the University of Bath.
To coincide with the 100th year anniversary of The Philosopher, renowned philosopher of violence Brad Evans will discuss five of the seminal philosophical texts on violence from the past century.
Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre, 1961) remains one of the most influential and provocative books on violence ever written. Perhaps more than with any other writer, with Fanon the idea of an objective and neutral study of the problem of violence breaks apart. Fanon critically attends to the wider historical developments of regimes of colonial violence and moves onto the ways it operates viscerally at the level of individual lives, quite literally marking out in an all-too-naturalising way the rulers from the subjugated. At its heart then is a meditation on the psychic life of violence and its lived and generational consequences, which continues to ask uncomfortable questions of us all.
This conversation with the renowned Fanonian scholar Lewis R. Gordon reflects upon the impact and continued relevance of his book, attending to dialectical logic of colonialism, the question of revolutionary violence, and the poetry that permeates Fanon’s unique thinking, while asking why Fanon’s question of “who actually constitutes the wretched of the earth?” remains as important as ever.
Lewis R. Gordon is Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, and Honorary President of the Global Centre for Advanced Studies. He is the author of numerous books, including "What Fanon Said" (2015). His latest book is "Fear of Black Consciousness" (2022).
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Brad Evans is a political philosopher, critical theorist, and writer whose work focuses on the problem of violence. He is the author of twenty books and edited volumes, along with over a hundred and fifty academic and international media articles. He is the founding director of the Centre for the Study of Violence (to be launched 2023) and holds a Chair in Political Violence & Aesthetics at the University of Bath.
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