Frantz Fanon: Philosophy, Praxis, and the Occult Zone

Abstract

In 2011, Achille Mbembe asserted that “the human has consistently taken on the form of waste within the peculiar trajectory race and capitalism espoused in South Africa.” He added that the end of apartheid had shifted rather than undone the lines of exclusion and dispute. Since the massacre on the platinum mines in 2012 it has become widely accepted that the state is resorting to repressive measures to enforce these lines and contain the dispute that they occasion. With notable exceptions academic philosophy, and theory more broadly, has offered remarkably little illumination of the widening distance between the promise of national liberation and democracy and the often bitter realities of contemporary South Africa. [i] Achille Mbembe ‘Democracy as Community Life’ Johannesburg Workshop in Theory & Criticism, 2011 http://jwtc.org.za/volume_4/achille_mbembe.htm