Fanon grounded Adorno’s negative dialectics in materialist desire to theorize unconscious racism

Evidence

Fanon in fact does not fit into the either/or category; he deployed ideas at the cutting edge of philosophical and analytic thinking in his time to explore the psychic violence committed by racist and colonialist regimes in the name of a “superior” Western reason. En route he turned Adorno’s negative dialectics off its Hegelian head and onto its materialist feet by demonstrating how racist discourse is embodied in and through the desire of the other. As such his work constitutes a fresh starting point for a consideration of unconscious racism and how it might be critically, and politically, engaged. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1356

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Fanon’s distinctive move — turning Adorno’s negative dialectics away from idealist Hegelianism and onto embodied materiality.
• XREF: connects to: Adorno believed unconscious make-up mediates objective economic laws into prejudice — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1839