"There is a point at which methods devour themselves"
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A revolutionary warning disguised as a clinical observation: Fanon is describing the moment a tool becomes a trap. “Methods” reads as more than technique; it’s ideology in procedural form - the habits of discipline, the rituals of organization, the sanctioned ways a movement or institution says it gets things done. When those methods “devour themselves,” Fanon points to a grim, familiar curve: means harden into ends, process becomes dogma, and the original purpose is cannibalized by the machinery built to serve it.
The line carries the bite of Fanon’s lived context. As a psychiatrist in colonial Algeria and a theorist of decolonization, he watched systems turn people into functions: the colonial state reduces human life to administration, surveillance, punishment. Anti-colonial struggle can inherit that same logic. Violence, secrecy, purges, the cult of “correct” strategy - these can begin as expedients, then metastasize into identity. The movement starts policing itself with the colonizer’s reflexes, calling it necessity.
The psychological subtext is crucial. Fanon is alert to how trauma and domination reorganize desire: the oppressed can internalize the oppressor’s categories, reproducing them under a new flag. “Devour” is visceral for a reason; it’s not a tidy failure of planning but a kind of self-consumption, an addiction to procedure that feeds on the people it claims to liberate.
The genius of the sentence is its portability. It’s a compact diagnosis of bureaucracies, activist subcultures, even therapeutic regimes: any method, once sacralized, will eventually demand sacrifice. Fanon’s challenge is to keep tactics alive to their purpose - and to notice when the tool starts eating the hand.
The line carries the bite of Fanon’s lived context. As a psychiatrist in colonial Algeria and a theorist of decolonization, he watched systems turn people into functions: the colonial state reduces human life to administration, surveillance, punishment. Anti-colonial struggle can inherit that same logic. Violence, secrecy, purges, the cult of “correct” strategy - these can begin as expedients, then metastasize into identity. The movement starts policing itself with the colonizer’s reflexes, calling it necessity.
The psychological subtext is crucial. Fanon is alert to how trauma and domination reorganize desire: the oppressed can internalize the oppressor’s categories, reproducing them under a new flag. “Devour” is visceral for a reason; it’s not a tidy failure of planning but a kind of self-consumption, an addiction to procedure that feeds on the people it claims to liberate.
The genius of the sentence is its portability. It’s a compact diagnosis of bureaucracies, activist subcultures, even therapeutic regimes: any method, once sacralized, will eventually demand sacrifice. Fanon’s challenge is to keep tactics alive to their purpose - and to notice when the tool starts eating the hand.
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