Cruel Decolonization: Reading Fanon After Lauren Berlant
The ongoing horror of the war in Gaza affirms that the issue of removal/elimination, the most extreme manifestation of which is elimination, has become more real than ever. This is elimination that is expressed in words and in fantasies but also in concrete plans of settlement – which are essentially plans of occupation and elimination, and even before the war were spread openly by the settler right-wing in relation to Gaza and the West Bank and has to some extent accompanied Zionism from its inception (the image of an empty land being one of the familiar manifestations of this fantasy). However, since the beginning of the war, the fantasy and the act of elimination have flashed across the surface of the Israeli mainstream in an unprecedented way. The fantasy and the act are perceived to a large extent as a response to the fantasy of elimination on the Palestinian side and the real elimination perpetrated on October 7, which was understood as a momentary, but explosive, realization of this fantasy.
This article undertakes to think about the same decolonial elimination fantasy, which after October 7 was formulated by various voices on the global left in a more or less systematic way, as part of an attempt to legitimize the actions of Hamas. This rhetoric was based, among other things, on the writings of Fanon and the paradigm of settler colonialism. Faced with the question of elimination and contrary to the logic behind it, I wish to challenge these readings of Fanon and the concept of decolonization that derives from them. Following Lauren Berlant, I propose to read Fanon as someone who saw in violent resistance to colonial violence an expression of cruel optimism – a desire for a different future whose structure is almost doomed to replicate the present from which it seeks to free itself. Together with Fanon and beyond, the article examines different concepts of decolonization and solidarity in order to clarify the conditions for overcoming the disastrous present we are living through.
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