Tra volontà e necessità. Il soggettivismo messianico di Tzvetan Todorov e l’oggettivismo rivoluzionario di Frantz Fanon

Todorov and Fanon are two intellectual figures engaged in a bitter denunciation of colonialism. In Todorov, however, this criticism tends to be accompanied by a dismissive judgment towards the entire Jacobin-Bolshevik tradition. Indeed the way in which the Bulgarian essayist holds together these two viewpoints (above all anti-colonialist and anti-communist) is through the adoption of a predominantly moral rather than political attitude in the face of great international conflicts, which gives rise to a sort of romantic anti-colonialism, altogether abstract and susceptible to proceeding in a rather fragmentary way. His own philosophy, moreover, primarily focused on a hypostatic idea of “subjective will,” contributes to encourage and nourish such abstraction. Fanon holds a diametrically opposed perspective. At its core we find the concept of “objective necessity.” In the end, his anti-colonialism appears not only much more uniform, systematic and coherent than Todorov’s, but ultimately, more realistic.

Keywords: Anti-colonialism – Communism – Subjective will – Objective necessity – pity – Human sameness