Frantz Fanon and the crisis of europeans ontologies: phenomenological and existential shifts

deslocamentos fenomenológicos e existenciais

Abstract

In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Frantz Fanon declares the impossibility of any ontology to comprehend the Black being if it sets aside existence. In this article, we investigate the displacements provoked by the Martinican psychiatrist as he claims Black existence against universal ontological pretensions that, more than merely insufficient, reveal themselves as pillars of the colonial world. We take the crisis of European rationality enunciated by Husserl—who diagnoses the detachment of modern sciences from the lifeworld (Lebenswelt)—as a necessary point of contrast. Although his diagnosis is legitimate, Husserl remains bound to a confidence in Europe’s spiritual vocation as the normative center of the human, which reveals the limits of his critique. Fanon radicalizes this issue by showing that the crisis is not limited to the loss of meaning in the sciences, but manifests as the colonial failure of universalizing claims: European ontology reveals itself as a particularist description of the White-European model. We argue that Fanon does not simply reject ontology but places it in crisis by tensioning and displacing it starting from the colonial situation, proposing, in turn, his own phenomenological-existential descriptions of being, corporeality, and the relation with the Other.