Abstract

Slavery appears as an ambivalent concept in Hegel’s work which at once objectivizes the principles of the rational state and goes against them. The aim of this chapter is twofold: to adumbrate Hegel’s dialectic and teleological narratives of world history and to explore Fanon’s critique of Hegel. Fanon lays bare the ethnocentrism inherent in the dialectic. In Black Skin, White Masks, he shows that color is a factor in the dialectic. In The Wretched of the Earth, he discounts the teleological narratives of progress for their complicity in Europe’s colonial project. Fanon identifies an otherness which is not situated within the dialectic, a difference which cannot be synthesized and digested by world history and which Hegel uses to justify historical slavery.