The Black subject as a being in becoming: lived experience and the critique of sociological neutrality in Frantz Fanon and Guerreiro Ramos

Abstract

Starting from lived experience, Frantz Fanon and Guerreiro Ramos displace the objectification of the Black subject by the white gaze towards the primacy of a being in becoming, turning the position of the racialized subject into a method for the critique of neutrality in the social sciences. To this end they mobilize two instruments: dialectics and negritude. Hence the central question: which dialectics and which negritude sustain this critique? The research is qualitative, theoretical-conceptual and bibliographical, organized as a comparative analysis of two source texts, “L'expérience vécue du Noir” (Fanon, 1951) and “O problema do negro na sociologia brasileira” (Ramos, 1954a), whose central operators are reconstructed through an immanent and hermeneutic reading. Some commentators read negritude in a Hegelian key, as a configuration of consciousness destined to be sublated. In Sartre this occurs when negritude is defined as the “weak stage of a dialectical progression” and dissolved into the idea of the proletariat; in Ramos’s interpreters, when the niger sum (I am Black) is taken as a step towards a “mestiço society”. Against this closure we argue for another reading. Both the dialectical ambiguity Ramos draws from Gurvitch — for whom only experience decides the process of dialectization — and the unpredictability Fanon opposes to Sartre point towards an open dialectics and an open negritude, in which difference is not eliminated in a final synthesis but preserved, without being determinable in advance. In both, the target is not dialectics: it is the apriorism that closes it.