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The subject of rebellion: Fanon’s call for (re)action

Abstract This essay seeks to understand the tangible expectations that Frantz Fanon held for his calls to revolutionary action. Fanon’s references to the inevitability of focused subversive action in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), for instance, may easily strike one as wishful thinking given the difficulties of consensus and the intransigence of divergent political opinions. I argue, however, that Fanon’s vision is founded not on the expectation of a considered political response, but a sudden reaction where the subject drops its attachment to a prevailing social order without thinking. This moment does not mark a point at which rebellion ‘makes sense’, but rather one where the codes of behaviour the subject has followed are revealed to be arbitrary and contingent. Drawing on the work of Sartre and Lacan, I delineate a shift in Fanon’s subject from its psychoanalytic symbolic identification to an existentialist potential that frames a revolutionary response.