The paper questions the foregone view that Arendt and Fanon were theoretically at odds with each other. Both Arendt and Fanon offered critiques of power that sought to counter power not with powerlessness but another kind of power. However, that they differed in their definitions of power, the political and community cannot be denied.
For Arendt, power is always power of the many and it is a modality for the thinking of revolution and freedom. Distinguishing sharply between liberation struggles and revolutionary freedom, Arendt also questions the relation of violence to power. According to her the political is always to be distinguished from the ethical and pertains to the realm of public engagement and responsibility.
Fanon on the other hand approaches the question of power in the context of colonial domination. He is usually represented as endorsing violence as a power tactic to assert human dignity in the face of utter degradation. For him, the political is always a realm where the subject seeks to emerge and is therefore a realm where personal psychological concerns find their articulation with the collective.
In short, Arendt and Fanon are usually contrasted in their critiques of power as respectively anti-subjectivist and subjectivist in their approaches. Nevertheless, there is a point of convergence in their conceptualizations of freedom around the category of will. My paper shows that both held a view of freedom that was founded in a critique of the metaphysics of will which has profound consequences for our understanding of political action.