Nietzschean critique of reactional European morality is mobilized to affirm life, love, and generosity while rejecting resentment-driven reactions. The affirmation project—"to induce man to be actional"—is paired with a refusal of contempt, indignity, exploitation, and the massacre of human freedom. The Genealogy of Morality can be read as a form of historical materialist political philosophy rather than mere moral psychology. That reading locates reactional psychology in ruling-class interests and enables redirecting Nietzschean analyses from reactionary politics toward revolutionary, anti-colonial aims that oppose oppression and restore human dignity.
Although the first reference is a misattributed quotation, the second is a lengthy passage endorsing Nietzsche's attempt to overcome the reactional, negatively-grounded values he believed dominated European morality: We said in our introduction that man was an affirmation. We shall never stop repeating it. Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity....There is always resentment in reaction. Nietzsche said it in The Will to Power. To induce man to be actional... that is the task of utmost urgency (197).
In the same passage, Fanon also underlines his opposition to Nietzsche's reactionary politics, directly tying the project of overcoming reactional values to overcoming human oppression: But man is also a negation. No to man's contempt. No to the indignity of man. To the exploitation of man. To the massacre of what is most human in man: freedom. Although Fanon does not mention Nietzsche in The Wretched of the Earth, its account of colonialism is clearly indebted to On the Genealogy of Morality.
This has been underappreciated in part because the Genealogy has mistakenly been reduced to a work of moral psychology and philosophy. As I argue elsewhere, it is better understood as a peculiar variant of historical materialist political philosophy. Fanon draws on precisely this overlooked aspect to reconstruct critically Nietzsche's history of reactional psychology, tracing its origins to the ruling class rather than the oppressed, subversively redirecting it away from reactionary political aims toward revolutionary ones.
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