(Ways of seeing : Du Bois and Fanon)

In a famous quote, from which I take the title for this intervention, John Berger writes that "from the conventions of perspective of European art, which made its appearance in the early Renaissance, it is the eye which makes the observer the centre of all things." The sovereignty of the gaze and the primacy of the observer marks modern Western culture well beyond its artistic expressions. Conceptually organizing its philosophy and politics, this perspective deeply influences, in particular, the mode in which the interior of that culture is imagined and its subject is constructed. One can start here, then, to stage a long‐distance dialogue between WEB Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. The philosophical reflection and the political activism of both draw on the background of experience ‐ of slavery and colonialism ‐ characterized by processes of subjectivation through which the "abnormal" is defined against those who modernity has appointed as the "normal". Following different paths shaped by their different geographic, cultural and biographical experiences, together Du Bois and Fanon nevertheless give us an essential contribution for rethinking modernity from a set of experiences that includes those denied and marginalised as the "exception.'' They firmly install these by looking for the prospect of liberation in the materiality of the movements and struggles of those positioned as "abnormal" in a racially segregated United States or in anti‐colonial Insurgencies; in doing so they resist linear modes of analysis that have marked the conceptual frameworks of both democratic citizenship and socialist politics