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ISSN: 1540-5699. © Copyright by Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press). All Rights Reserved.

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE

Journal of the Sociology of Self-

A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)

The idea of

epidermalization

pointstoward one intermediate stage in acritical theory of body scales in themaking of “race”. Today skin is no

longer privileged as the threshold ofeither identity or particularity.

—Paul Gilroy in

Against Race,

47

I am overdetermined from without. Iam the slave not of the

idea

that othershave of me but of my own

appearance

.

—Frantz Fanon in

Black Skin WhiteMasks

, 116

Dilan Mahendran is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. Dilan’s academic areas ofinterest are in Race Critical Theory, Postcolonial Studies, Philosophy of Technology, Philosophical Anthro-pology and Phenomenology. He is also interested in the methodological problems of positivism and natu-ralism in technology studies and issues of constructivism in the social study of science and technology.Dilan’s research areas are centered around the impact of digital technology in youth amateur hip hopmusic making. He is currently conducting ethnographic fieldwork at Art and Technology after school pro-grams in the San Francisco Bay area that focus on hip hop music production. Dilan received his BA inanthropology from Northeastern University and MS from the School of Information UC Berkeley.

The Facticity of BlacknessA Non-conceptual approach to the Study of Race and

Racism in Fanon’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology

Dilan Mahendran

University of California at Berkeley––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

[email protected]

Abstract: This essay seeks to interrogate Frantz Fanon’s phenomenological descriptions of embodiedexperience of anti-black racism and his appropriation and critique of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology ofperception. I begin this essay by arguing for an embodied understanding of racism rather than thedominant intellectualist account of race which posits an objective racial knowing. Racial knowingprivileges race as a discursive formation—as the only definitive and legitimate account of race and racism.An outcome of privileging of objective racial knowledge marginalizes subjective experience of race asalways leaning towards an essentialist understanding. Since the linguistic turn in Continental and Anglo-American thought the move has been to disassociate power from the body but this has been only madepossible by an Enlightenment universal humanism that indemnified European man’s humanity against allothers. In a triple move the linguistic turn jettisons, takes for granted the human and with great hubrisdeclares it non-operative. This European universal subject’s humanity is normatively guaranteed whilethose whose possibility of a subject position is not a given, those with black and brown bodies’, theirhumanity is dead on arrival. What is interesting is that for Frantz Fanon the body under racism poses aproblem while for Merleau-Ponty the body is a solution to the existential crisis of Western man. ForMerleau-Ponty to address the crisis, Western man must get back to the things themselves which is thealready promised gift of the body in its primordial giveness. Fanon on the other hand sees that a radicallynew conception of the human is needed even to begin to address this crisis.

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The first philosophical act wouldappear to be to

return to the worldof actual experience which is priorto the objective world

, since it is init that we shall be able to grasp the

theoretical basis no less than thelimits of that objective world,

restore to things their concretephysiognomy, to organisms theirindividual ways of dealing withthe world, and to subjectivity its

inherence in history.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty in

Phenomenology of Perception,

66

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This essay is an attempt to flesh out thesignificance of embodied perception of racein lived experience. What I argue in this es-say is the need for a non-conceptual under-standing of race, racialization, and racism.The two previous quotes, the first takenfrom Paul Gilroy’s book

Against Race

andthe second from Frantz Fanon’s

Black SkinWhite Masks

, are included to elucidate themarked difference in scholarship in theo-rizing race today. The third quote fromMaurice Merleau-Ponty points to wherescience would indeed need to go in order todescribe the relation between theory andpractice, as Lewis R. Gordon

1

announces asthe space of experience and situation.

Gilroy makes an explicit critique ofFanon’s understanding of the process of ra-cialization and declares it no longer rele-vant. Gilroy understands Fanon’s conceptof

epidermalization

2

of race as being synony-

mous with skin color as a referent to theidea or concept of race. In this way one’sskin color designates

3

or refers to a conceptor idea and it is in that concept which holdsthe meaning for that skin color. For Gilroy,Fanon’s privileging of skin color is not rele-vant today because what Gilroy and manyof his contemporary critical race theoristshave done is to primarily locate post mod-ern racialization in the space of what is rep-resentable generally and in genomic

4

representations in particular. HoweverFanon is actually not concerned with(re)presentations of race, as concept or cog-itation but its immanence in lived experi-ence from the position of one who showsup as black in an anti-black world. Ratherthan (re)presentations, Fanon sheds lighton the

presentation

of race; meaning how ra-cial intelligibility is manifest to us immedi-ately in perception. To dismiss thequotidian way racial minorities in the Westexperience the violence of race and racismas no longer critical in contemporary the-ory on the subject is incredibly disconcert-ing and shows the investment that scholars

1

Lewis R. Gordon writes in his essay onFanon’s

Black Skin White Masks

“Between Rea-son and History, Theory and Practice, there is

ex-perience

which in this case is the realization of asituation that stimulates an existential struggleagainst sedimented, dehumanized construc-tions”

(“Through the Zone of Nonbeing” in

TheCLR James Journal

vol 11:1 Summer 2005).

2

In


Fanon utilizeswhat can be understood as pathological meta-phors to describe the colonial condition. Fanondeploys ‘

epidermalization’

to characterize thephenomena both perceptual and psychical ofanti-black racism and the primacy of vision thatin a sense metastases as a cancer on the body ofblacks who must live with that skin never beingable to escape it. Epidermalization is the proces-sual intertwining of the ‘historico-racial schema’and ‘racial epidermal schema.’ The ‘historico-ra-cial schema’ are the sedimented and knottedfabric of self experiences of anti-black racismand its interpellating discourses, sort of the pre-reflective consciousness memory of lived expe-riences of racist violence. The ‘racial epidermalschema’ is the immediately manifest intelligibil-ity of blackness or showing up as such.

3

See Charles Taylor’s influential essay“Theories of Meaning” where he describes twoareas of theorizing meaning in the philosophy oflanguage, 1) designative and 2) expressive.

4

The significance of bio-technological artic-ulations of race is not to be dismissed yet geneticconcepts of race help little in situations of DWB(driving while black) or looking Arab in a U.S.airport.

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have in the detachment of their researchfrom the real world and their continual dis-paragement of experience as a founda-tional and valid and form of knowledge. Ina double move this peculiar Western ratio-nality has condemned ‘lived experience’and condemned those that are understoodas only experiential beings (not mindful),that is people of color, to be non-existent inhistory.

In


Fanon com-pares the existential crisis of being Jewishwith that of being black. For a Jewish per-son whose appearance is immediately likethat of his white Aryan oppressor, he canconceal for at least a moment his Jewish-ness because his Jewishness is but a collec-tion of objective facts about him.... that he isfrom Warsaw, from the ghetto, that hisname is Goldstein etc..... The Jew appears towhite others immediately as they are,another white person, in other words, ahuman. Fanon concludes that for a blackperson there is no such possibility in anantiblack world because a black person isimmediately caught out there by whiteeyes in the visual field of human perceptionas either hypervisible or invisible as RalphEllison articulates in

Invisible Man.

5

There-fore it’s not the

idea

of race but the immedi-ate pre-reflective and pre-linguisticappearance of what we call blackness ormore generally ‘racedness.’ Contrarily(re)presentations of race must be cogniza-ble and therefore within the positive sci-ences there is a tendency toward therationally and explanatory models of racetheory. What Fanon argues is that ideas ofrace as abstracted representations of livedexperience miss the gravity of the phenom-ena of showing up as a “nègre” and the for-mation of the self-consciousness of personwho appears to others this way. I would

argue that the relevance of a phenomenol-ogy of race is as much a contemporary issueas it was in post war France. Gilroy’s honestmistake is that he confuses the lived experi-ence of race for its (re)presentation. It is therepresentation of blackness and its com-moditization in popular culture that Gilroysees as shifting in the history of ‘raciology’and not the lived experience of showing upblack which has been durable in the longhistory of racism in the West.

Gilroy is probably not alone here andone can argue that the bulk of race theoryleans toward the privileging of mind inidea, concept and cognition rather than in-cluding bodily experience of being per-ceived as such and such a race. How welive the process of racialization and show-ing up such and such a racial way is diffi-cult to describe because as Linda MartínAlcoff

6

argues the process of being racedappears to us as self evident; a sort of com-mon sense which occurs for us without re-sorting to categories and classifications, inother words without calling to mind(re)presentations. This does not simplymean that racial intelligibility is sublimatedto unconscious and therefore unrecover-able. Merleau-Ponty writes “I can experi-ence more things than I represent tomyself.....there are feelings in me which Ido not name, and also spurious states ofwell-being to which I am not fully givenover” (2002 p345). We can say that the fundof perceptual experience is pregnant withmeaning but meanings that are not alwaysreadily articulable in cognition andthrough language. To pass over the mostmundane experiences such as the intelligi-bility of human bodies seems to implicatethat its depths go far deeper than merethought but are somehow sedimented lay-ers of experience which impinge on ourability to see others as who they really are,

5

Ellison writes

“When they approach methey see only my surroundings, themselves, orfigments of their imagination—indeed, every-thing and anything except me” (p 3); in

InvisibleMan,

20

th

Century Library, New York 1993.

6

See Linda Martin Alcoff’s essay titled “To-ward a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment”in

Race

ed. Robert Bernasconi 2001.

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as human. If race and racism were simplyideas and ideologies

7

it should stand thatwe could rationally rethink our way out ofit but, as I argue, racial perception is impli-cated at a more fundamental level of whowe are and how we experience the world.

Philosophers Linda Martín Alcoff(2001), Athena Coleman (2005) Lewis R.Gordon (2005) and Jeremy Weate (2001)

arebut a few scholars who take up Fanon’sphenomenology and his re-articulation andchallenge to Merleau-Ponty’s descriptionsof corporeal existence. In this essay I at-tempt to extend Merleau-Ponty’s theory ofperception and his subsequent develop-ment of a radical primordial ontology tothe study of racial difference and racism.What makes Merleau-Ponty’s existentialphenomenology interesting here is that wecan take a close look at the experience ofrace and racism from the fact that much ofwhat we understand race difference to be islived by the body. Much of the theorizationof race theory privileges abstract epistemo-logical concepts of racialization that ex-plain structural and discursive formationsof racial ideology and representation. Thisarea of race scholarship, objective racialknowledge, can be seen as an epistemolog-ical approach to the study of race. Meaning

that race is reducible to a concept that iscognizable by mind on an abstract de-worlded level. However emphasis on theabstract objective constructions of race thatappear at the structural level such asthrough media, juridical, and institutional,neglect the problem that race is lived andexperienced through the body both indi-vidually and generally as our bodies. It canbe said that aside from the objective know-ing of the positive sciences there is also abodily knowing that founds the possibilityof any knowing at all—certainly the objec-tive and abstracted knowing of the positivesciences. Merleau-Ponty would say, we areexistent in the world and we are alreadythrown into a shared world. For Merleau-Ponty these abstractions of race would be asort of intellectualism that cannot accountfor the phenomena of racism as experi-enced in our average everydayness. Quo-tidian experience of racism from everydaypeople we share our world with is far dis-tant from the racism exercised by the na-tion, state, and institutions yet thiseveryday intelligibility of race permeatesthese modern structures. Sociological datasuch as statistics showing infant mortality,income distribution, joblessness rates orhome ownership between white Americansand African Americans is extremely usefulbut really only show a part of the picture ofhow race is lived in the body that is alreadyin the world.

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Fanon describes a point in his intellec-tual career where he maintained an objec-tive view of racism but he found that it wasnot sufficient and in fact that turning pointwas not of his own volition. Fanon writes in


“I have talked aboutthe black problem with friends, or, morerarely with American Negroes...But I wassatisfied with an intellectual understandingof these differences. It was not really dra-

7

Representational racial politics in a senseassumes such a reality or rather ideality ; mean-ing that once civic, state and corporate institu-tions are peopled with ‘representative’minorities in all levels of these institutions rac-ism, it will have the effect of making race ceaseto be an issue or at least significantly diminish-ing it. However taking a non-representational ornon-conceptual approach to understanding thereality of racism it is conceivable that an anti-black world is more than possible even whenthese institutions are replete with minorities atall levels of institutional authority. In otherwords simply having blacks in positions of au-thority doesn’t mean that anti-black racism willgo away. One could conceive of a white suprem-acist nation being run by an executive branchthat was predominantly filled with racial minor-ities. The implication of this possibility is thepervasiveness and embeddedness of racism at afundamental way in which we not only see theworld but inhabit and dwell in the world.

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matic...And then the occasion arose when Ihad to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfa-miliar weight burdened me. The real worldchallenged my claims” (pp 110). WhatFanon reveals here is that even though hehad an objective and critical view of racismonce he experienced racial discriminationin the flesh, intellectualist accounts of rac-ism in no way prepared him for the subjec-tive experience. Its seems that Fanondoesn’t necessarily jettison an objective ac-count of racism but more importantly thatthe objective general account needs thesubjective8 individual account in order toget a comprehensive interpretation of rac-ism(s). The linguistic turn in Anglo-Ameri-can Euro-centric scholarship has conflated

experience as a move towards identity es-sentialism where personal, ethnic, racial,gender, class identity becomes a rigid andbounded set of discursive categories withexclusive characteristics. These rigidboundaries when policed include some butexclude others therefore reproducing thesame levels of violence that the groups’members were trying to avoid in the firstplace. However not all meaning is discur-sively produced, so to say that experienceand personal identity is always already adiscursive formation is problematic. Thisnarrow view of experience as ‘condemnedto language’ inhibits the possibility for acomprehensive interpretation of existenceand experience. Merleau-Ponty phenome-nology is critically important on this ac-count because taken seriously the body asthe locus of meaning rather than just lan-guage and mind, the lived body amongstother beings in the world offers radical per-spective on experience.

I would argue that dismissing the bodyand experience has come to pervade evenpost-colonial studies, which ironically hasthe project of elucidating the violent experi-ence of colonial, neo-colonial, and imperialracism. In the following passage from Cul-ture and Imperialism Edward Said invokesGramsci to describe the problems of essen-tialism and essences in regards to ethnicidentity. “If one believes with Gramsci thatan intellectual vocation is socially possibleas well as desirable, then it is an inadmissi-ble contradiction at the same time to buildanalyses of historical experience around ex-clusions, exclusions that stipulate, for in-stance, that only women can understandfeminine experience, only Jews can under-stand Jewish suffering, only formerly colo-nial subjects can understand colonialexperience.” Said goes on to write “if at theoutset we acknowledge the massively knot-ted and complex histories of special butnevertheless overlapping and intercon-nected experiences---of women, of West-erners, of Blacks, of national states and

8 In her essay “Toward a Phenomenology ofRacial Embodiment” (in Race ed. Robert Ber-nasconi 2001), Linda Martìn Alcoff writes aboutthis difference between objective and subjectiveaccounts of race and racism and calls for thecombined approach in order to gain a richer un-derstanding about how racial intelligibilityfunctions in society and for the individual con-sciousness. My understanding of Fanon andMerleau-Ponty is quite similar to that of Alcoffexcept the marked distinction in what subjectiv-ity is for human perception. Beginning withMerleau-Ponty I move in a different directionfrom Alcoff’s notion of “body image” and “bodyschema.” The two are not interchangeable and“body image” refers to one’s conscious reflec-tion on how they see their own bodies and thetype that it is for them. For example the “bodyimage” is that which is a self conscious represen-tation like an anorexic‘s view that they are al-ways too fat and never thin enough. Our “bodyschema” on the other hand is tacit yet unreflec-tive knowledge about our body, its movements,its generation of space—as being-in-the-world.This is not out of habit or mere repetitive move-ment in the world but out of implicit knowledgeof our own space and movement toward objectsand humans that is anterior and foundational tocognition. So I fundamentally differ with Alcoffon two key aspects of Merleau-Ponty, the confla-tion of “body image” with “body schema” and“Perceptual practices or habits” with tacit bodi-ly knowledge and bodily skill. This by no meansvoids her argument but fundamentally shifts toan overt subjectivism of the kind that Merleau-Ponty explicitly argued against throughout hiscareer calling this Kantian anthropocentric ac-count of subjectivity the préjugé du monde orprejudice of the world.

196 DILAN MAHENDRAN


cultures--- there is no particular intellectualreason for granting each and all of them anideal and essentially separate status” (31-2). Said is correct in pointing out the pitfallsof overinvested and essentialized identitiesbut for Said essentialism seems to be an in-evitable outcome of privileging a specificexperience whether it being Jewish, awoman, black etc...

What is striking is that Said invokesGramsci’s notion of an intellectual, one thatGramsci expands from the notion of the tra-ditional intellectual to include the organic.A close reading of Gramsci’s section on in-tellectuals in Prison Notebooks reveals that inorder for Gramsci to obliterate the bour-geoisie’s monopoly on intellectual life heneeded first to obliterate the dominant Car-tesian mind/body split. In the Marxian di-alectical sense mind would refer to thebourgeois intellectual while body refers tothe proletarian factory wage worker. Gram-sci does this by bringing the body and mindback together where the body and bodilyskill were also part and parcel to mind andthinking. Once this dualism is shattered itbecomes possible to see that the craftsmanand worker have as much to bear on intel-lectual life as the professional philosopher.Said does not take Gramsci’s expanded no-tion of intellectual to bear on experienceand resigns himself to the Cartesian one.

Said’s schema of an ‘intellectual’ is onemade in his own image where only cogni-tive understanding of bodily experience issufficient in understanding what it meansto be racialized, colonized, or oppressed.This I would argue is a one dimensionalview of identity and experience as only dis-cursively produced rather than co-depen-dent on identity as lived. In short, Said onlyproffers an intellectualist approach to theinterrogation of identity and one that nom-inalizes experience to always be ‘con-demned to language’ and thereforesubordinate to it.

BLACK TO THE THINGS THEMSELVES

In the preceding paragraph I wanted tobring the body back to experience and Mer-leau-Ponty becomes extremely helpful inthis project.

It must be stated here that Merleau-Ponty never applied his theory of percep-tion and primordial ontology to an inter-pretation of the colonial situation. Merleau-Ponty’s project was to establish a universalontology irrespective of society, culture,and institutions. From his 1945 work Phe-nomenology of Perception to his last workingnotes compiled together in The Visible andthe Invisible published in 1964, Merleau-Ponty consistently placed the perceivingbody9 as the center piece to his new ontol-ogy. It would be this primordial ontologythat would then explain epistemology, cul-ture, society, etc.

As alluded to, Merleau-Ponty startswith the perceiving body, the bare mini-mum biological pre-personal being, there-fore human perception is a prerequisite forhis ontology. It is necessary for Merleau-Ponty to keep his eye on the phenomena soto speak in order to ground human exist-ence. For Merleau-Ponty’s philosophicalproject it becomes important to make a linkto primalness of perception as somethinguniversal to all of human kind. Anthropol-ogy is ripe with these empirical data thatcan be drawn upon as reference to man andthe ‘state of nature.’ What I mean here is

9 What is critical to note is that according toMerleau-Ponty human perception and one’sbody as the locus of the origin of meaning forhumans as being-in-the-world is a subjectivitywithout anthropocentrism, meaning that thesubject or as Sartre would call the for-itself (pour-soi) is not our normative and general way of be-ing-in-the-world. Our general way of existence isneither subject nor object but as our bodies.Some have translated this to be ‘body subject’ butthis is incorrect because designating the body assome sort of subject drags perception into aprivatization of experience to a mere psycholo-gism.

THE FACTICITY OF BLACKNESS 197


that contemporary anthropology deliveredthe concept of the primitive necessary toembark on perception as first philosophythat was put forth in Phenomenology of Per-ception. True perceptual experience inwhich man could perceive things and spaceas they were themselves was somethingthat modern European man had in a senselost. In this way Merleau-Ponty is in theshared company of French Enlightenmentthinkers Jean Jacques Rousseau and Eti-enne Condillac both of whom made thor-ough critiques of Cartesian dualism,Rousseau in his Essay on the Origin of Hu-man Languages and Condillac in his Essay onthe Origin of Human Knowledge.

The inability to see, feel, hear, taste, andsmell the things as they appeared to theperceiving body, was in effect the founda-tional part of the crisis of European man.This crisis was only made visible by look-ing and comparing oneself to non-Euro-pean man, essentially primitive man.Merleau-Ponty writes “a primitive man inthe desert is always able to take his bear-ings immediately without having to casthis mind back, and add up distances cov-ered and deviations made since setting off”(2002 115). No doubt this is a fantastical im-age of the savage. He goes on to write“Primitive peoples, in so far as they live ina world of myth, do not overstep existentialspace, and this is why for them dreamscount just as much as perceptions” (2002332). In much like Rousseau’s ‘savage’ theprimitive here functions as means to showhow the world should appear as it is to theprepersonal corporeal schema or at least aschema that is unfettered by the “crypto-mechanisms” of the modern perceiving Eu-ropean subject. The problem of the modernintellectual European man is that he cannotsee the thing as it appears to his body be-cause he has allowed reason to colonize hisvery perception of himself, others andworld. Merleau-Ponty writes “We musttherefore stop wondering how and why redsignifies effort or violence, green restful-

ness and peace; we must rediscover how tolive these colours as our body does, that is,as peace or violence in concrete form” (2002243).

The power to see things as they reallyare is the already contained promise of ourperceiving body; we need only to ‘redis-cover’ it. Merleau-Ponty makes the redis-covery of bodily perception the primaryproject of the Phenomenology of Perception.Merleau-Ponty was deeply influenced bythe anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss10

both of whom are Rousseauian in their de-ployment of the anthropological categoryof the ‘primitive’ as a means to critique Eu-ropean man and rationalism.

MERLEAU-PONTY’S NORMATIVE BODY

In the following pages I want to de-scribe Fanon’s appropriation and critiqueof Merleau-Ponty’s description of bodilyperception that he articulates in Black SkinWhite Masks. In this text devoted almost ex-clusively to ‘being’11 or more correctly non-being in the colonial situation, Fanonappropriates and challenges Western phe-nomenological and psychoanalytical tradi-tions—the Hegelian ontological position ofJean-Paul Sartre and Freudian view of theunconscious of Jacques Lacan respectively.As well Merleau-Ponty’s theory of percep-tion figures prominently in Black Skin WhiteMasks, which Fanon challenges. ThoughFanon is critical of these Western conceptsof being, I argue that his phenomenology isnot entirely incommensurable with that ofMerleau-Ponty.

There are two fundamental philosoph-ical themes in which Fanon and Merleau-Ponty agree on, the phenomenology of ap-pearances and human freedom. Freedom isfor both philosophers derivative of the phe-

10 See Levi-Strauss’s Savage Mind, a bookdedicated to Merleau-Ponty after his death in1961 and extremely critical of Jean Paul Sartre.

198 DILAN MAHENDRAN


nomena of perceptual world disclosing. Asis probably clear at this point, the issue ofthe appearance of race in everyday lived

experience is my primary concern. The fun-damental critique that Fanon indirectly lev-els against Merleau-Ponty is the argumentthat there is a normative pre-personal cor-poreal schema that all humans share and itis this corporeal schema as a biologicalgiven that cannot be fundamentally alteredby society, culture and language. Fanon ar-gues that if we take this normative corpo-real schema and subject it to a history ofanti-black racism and anti-black existence,Merleau-Ponty’s universal corporealschema loses some of its universal givens.In short, Fanon implicitly charges that Mer-leau-Ponty’s theory of the normative cor-poreal schema12 is based upon Europeanman, a white man.

Merleau-Ponty does show that the uni-versal corporeal schema can be subtendedby other cultural schemas, such as a sexualschema; yet, these second order schema’sonly influence or impinge on the corporealschema and never have the capacity to over-take the primordiality of perception. Fanonargues in an antiblack world a black personhas these other schemas, a “historico-racialschema” and a “racial epidermal schema.”The historico-racial schema is the sedi-mented personal experiences of anti-blackracism that a black person endures. Theseare not memories imprinted on the brain butpredelineate the exterior horizons of what ispossible and what to anticipate in an anti-black world. The historico-racial schema area set of dispositions about how to accept theworld and live in it. The racial-epidermalschema is the interior horizon of self andothers in immediate perceptual experienceof the world. The racial epidermal schemaimpacts a black person’s tacit sense of self.The racial epidermal schema immediatelyin play in the phenomena of appearing orshowing up as black in an anti-black world.

11 The subject of ontology or doing ontology(the science of being) is problematic for Fanonbecause as he correctly argues the black has noontological resistance to the self/Other dialecticof whites and therefore has no possibility of ap-pearing as human at all in an anti-black world.However Fanon is clearly doing ontology anddescribing a postcolonial ontology. Therefore it isnot ontology as a science itself that he rejects butthe ontological assumptions of the West in gener-al and Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in particular.Even more fundamentally, Fanon critiques im-plicitly Heidegger’s fundamental ontology ofDasein because if we understand generally theentity of Dasein as ‘being-there’ then for theblack, according to Fanon, is ‘nicht-sein,’ ‘not be-ing’ or ‘not-there.’ Fanon articulates this exactlywhen he writes ‘I moved toward the other.....andthe evanescent other, hostile but not opaque,transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea.....’(1991 pp 112). If we can say that the anthropolog-ical invention of the primitive shares the sameprecarious existence as do postcolonial blacksthen the implications of Heidegger’s Dasein arefar reaching as he writes about primitive man’suse of language as equipment or technology,

…for primitive man, the sign coincides withthat which is indicated. Not only can thesign represent this in the sense of servingas a substitute for what it indicates, but itcan do so in such a way that the sign itselfalways is what it indicates. This remark-able coinciding does not mean, however,that the sign-Thing has already undergonea certain ‘Objectification’—that is has beenexperienced as a mere Thing and mis-placed into the same realm of Being of thepresent-at-hand as what it indicates. This‘coinciding’ is not an identification ofthings which have hitherto been isolatedfrom each other: it consists rather in thefact that the sign has not yet become freefrom that which it is a sign. Such a use ofsigns is still absorbed completely in Being-towards what is indicated, so that a sign assuch cannot detach itself at all. This coin-ciding is based not on a prior Objectifica-tion but on the fact that such Object-ification is completely lacking. Thismeans, however, that signs are not discov-ered as equipment at all—that ultimatelywhat is ‘ready-to-hand’ within-the-worldjust does not have the same kind of Beingthat belongs to equipment. Perhaps evenreadiness-to-hand and equipment havenothing to contribute as ontological cluesin Interpreting the primitive world; andcertainly the ontology of Thinghood doeseven less. (Being and Time, 113)

12 Iris Marion Young and Don Ihde makesimilar critiques of Merleau-Ponty’s normativecorporeal schema. See Iris Marion Young’s“Throwing Like a Girl” and Don Ihde’s Bodies inTechnology.



For Fanon the historico-racial schema andthe racial epidermal schema tacitly inform ablack person’s sense of self. The question of“who am I” or “what am I” becomes an ev-eryday pre-reflective existential. The ques-tion is to what extent, if any and in whatrelation, do the “historico-racial schema”and “racial-epidermal schema” colonize thebiological perceptual system, the systemthat according to Merleau-Ponty establishesthe possibility for any level of consciousness(pre-reflective, reflective, intersubjectiveconsciousness etc.). As we shall see forFanon racism can at times overrun the nor-mative formation of the self, as one with selfconsciousness that does not negate itself butis always already intersubjective.

First it is necessary to look at the phe-nomenological description of bodily percep-tion that Merleau-Ponty articulates inPhenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Pontywrites “its [the perceiving body’s] spatialityis not, like that of external objects or like thatof ‘spatial sensations’, a spatiality of position,but a spatiality of situation….If I stand hold-ing my pipe in my closed hand, the positionof my hand is not determined discursivelyby the angle which it makes with my fore-arm, and my forearm with my upper arm,and my upper arm with my trunk, and mytrunk with the ground. I know [my empha-sis] indubitably where my pipe is, andthereby I know where my hand and mybody are” (2002 p 114-5). What Merleau-Ponty argues against is a cognitivist or intel-lectualist perspective on how the lived bodyforms its own space and has a tacit sense ofself. The intellectualist perspective on per-ception holds that our bodies are like anyother object that we re-present, that in ourminds we calculate the dimensions, dis-tance, and movement our bodies have, andthen act. For the intellectualist the act ofsmoking a pipe is purely a mental activitywhere mind determines through calculationwhat the body can and should do in an ato-mistic fashion. This Kantian metaphysicalconception of the human and the body

where a conscious knowing subject repre-sents the world including one’s bodythrough mentalist activities as representableobjects splayed out before the knowing sub-ject. However, Merleau-Ponty’s challenge isthat the lived human body in everydaynessdoes not exist as subject13 or object but whathe calls the “third term” or the perceivingbody. In this view the body perceives theworld and objects holistically in unity ratherthan as discrete and atomic sensations thatare compiled together by the mind then rep-resented to the knowing subject.

Merleau-Ponty’s bodily “knowing” istacit knowing or what he calls the ‘tacitcogito,’ a pre-reflective consciousness of thebody in its own spatial field, a certain senseof itself in the world, but not one that im-plies a subject formation or an “I.” For Mer-leau-Ponty the perceiving body is notsimply another object in the world of ob-jects, even in the pre-personal biologicalsense of perception. Merleau-Ponty’s no-tion of this pre-reflective consciousness ofone’s own body in space, its own space is animportant aspect of how Fanon experienceshis own body but with additional schemas,what he calls the “historico-racial schema”and “racial-epidermal schema.” Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema is for him a uni-versal given of human being. For Merleau-Ponty human perception is foundationalfor human existence and being-in-the-world, that most primordial point wherehuman being becomes possible at all.

FANON’S BODY AS ALWAYS FOR OTHERS

Next let us look at the problem of theblack body for Fanon. Fanon introduces us

13 The issue of the subject is fundamental forMerleau-Ponty. Some have incorrectly called theperceiving body or “third term” the ‘body-sub-ject’ but this is misleading because it implies inthe word usage a ‘subject.’ Merleau-Ponty neveractually uses such a description as ‘body sub-ject’.

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to these issues by way of his own experi-ence in France as a black Caribbean immi-grant in a white world. It’s worth herequoting Fanon in full to reveal his positionon a post-colonial situation:

In the white world the man of colorencounters difficulties in develop-ment of his bodily schema. Con-sciousness of the body is solely anegating activity. It is a third-per-son consciousness. The body is sur-rounded by an atmosphere ofcertain uncertainty. I know that if Iwant to smoke, I shall have to reachout my right arm and take the packof cigarettes lying at the other endof the table. The matches, however,are in the drawer on the left, and Ishall have to lean back slightly.And all these movements are madenot out of habit but out of implicitknowledge. A slow composition ofmyself as a body in the middle of aspatial and temporal world—suchseems to be the schema. It does notimpose itself on me; it is, rather, adefinitive structuring of the selfand the world—definitive becauseit creates a real dialectic betweenmy body and the world... Belowthe corporeal schema I hadsketched a historico-racial schema.The elements that I used had beenprovided for me not by “residualsensations and perceptions prima-rily of a tactile, vestibular, kines-thetic, and visual character”, butby the other, the white man, whohad woven me out of a thousanddetails, anecdotes, stories. (1991,111)

Taking a cue from Merleau-Ponty’sPhenomenology of Perception and Sartre’s Be-ing and Nothingness Fanon describes phe-nomenologically the establishment of hisbody in space and time and the body’s use

of tacit knowledge of abstract movement.Much in the same way as Merleau-Pontydescribes tacit knowledge of the humanbody in the spatio-temporal world. Fanonconcurs with Merleau-Ponty that this give-ness of the body and knowledge of itself“seems to be the [body] schema.” This give-ness of the body is for itself, not given bythe other. At the same time the “historico-racial schema” is “imposed” by white oth-ers; therefore, consciousness of himself issubtended in such a way that the pre-per-sonal biological schema has no autono-mous bearing on Fanon’s consciousness ofhimself. Fanon is forced to only see himselfthrough the white others’ eyes, throughtheir stories about Negroes and savages.Directly challenging Merleau-Ponty’s the-ory of the general existence of the livedbody, Fanon himself as a consciousness ofhimself places a historico-racial schema be-low that of the corporeal schema. The his-torico-racial schema is not discursivelyproduced but are the sedimented experi-ences of racism that subtend one’s corpo-real schema; which as Fanon writes is theaffective field (Merleau-Ponty’s phenome-nal field) “the definitive structuring of selfand of the world, one that is not ‘imposed’”on Fanon but given by the body and being-in-the-world. The body is the locus of the“tacit cogito,” the primordial pre-reflectiveconsciousness of self and world.

Merleau-Ponty would certainly agreewith the possibility of the existence of the‘historico-racial schema’; however, the as-sertion that it could nullify the pre-personalcorporeal schema would be generally re-jected but, as I will show later, can be over-run. Fanon was conscious of himself butthrough the eyes of whites as a body al-ways for others. It could be argued thatMerleau-Ponty’s pre-personal corporealschema was in fact subtended by this his-torico-racial schema in a similar way thatMerleau-Ponty argues the sexual schemasubtends it (2002, 178-99). Yet Fanon arguesadamantly that the corporeal schema for



the black man is obliterated and never ableto establish itself as it can for whites. How-ever, Fanon in the situation he describescan still stand and act and his body contin-ues to be the primary locus of this action.Fanon continues on writing...“Then as-sailed at various points, the corporealschema crumbled, its place taken by a racialepidermal schema. In the train it was nolonger a question of being aware of mybody in the third person but in triple per-son. In the train I was given not one buttwo, three places. I had already stopped be-ing amused. It was not that I was finding fe-brile coordinates in the world. I existedtriply: I occupied space. I moved towardthe other... and the evanescent other, hostilebut not opaque, transparent, not there, dis-appeared. Nausea...” (1991 112).

How can Fanon assert that what hecalls the “corporeal schema,” a descriptionthat is commensurable with that describedby Merleau-Ponty, be trumped by the “his-torico-racial schema” and then later a “ra-cial-epidermal schema”? One could arguethat what Fanon is describing are two sepa-rate phenomenal descriptions of conscious-ness. The first being the pre-reflective tacitknowledge of one’s own body in the world,at least not fully a reflecting subject. Thesecond being the “third person” conscious-ness of self that is imposed by the whiteother’s gaze, where Fanon is conscious ofhimself towards becoming a subject. Sorather than a corporeal schema, whatFanon may be describing is his own subjec-tive body image, a reflection of himselfthrough white others’ eyes. Perhaps Fanonis conflating two types of consciousness,one that is a universal biological given andoriginates at the level of the perceivingbody and the other reflective consciousnessof himself that is discursively produced bya racist culture out of “thousands of anec-dotes and stories” of the Negro. The ques-tion is, is the latter so called reflective thirdperson consciousness of the self really a re-flective consciousness of the self or directly

linked to the pre-reflective consciousness ofbody-schema?

The racist phenomena has its root inthe visual field of perception when thewhite other directs his/her gaze uponFanon. Making a hard and fast distinctionbased upon state and content of conscious-ness seems problematic because for Fanonif the second phenomena, generated by thewhite gaze is a pure reflective conscious-ness then this would require, in a sense, ashut off subject, one who is removed fromthe world. This is not the case with thephenomena that Fanon describes, which isexistential phenomena, active being-in-the-world and being with others. The phenom-ena that Fanon experiences is not a intellec-tualist conceptual articulation of raciststories and anecdotes but rather the inter-pretation of these stories projected onto hisepidermis by the white gaze. If recognitionof human being or what a human being iswere simply the phenomena of the corpo-real schema then Fanon is certainly that,because he possesses, as every otherhuman entity, tacit knowledge of his bodyat some fundamental level but this otherlayer of significance (historico racialschema to racial-epidermal schema) doesnot allow for possibility of completehuman recognition and in fact negates thepossibility of intersubjectivity or beingwith others in a direction towards reciproc-ity. Fanon shows up for whites in postwarFrance not as human being and not objectbut something quite outside of the subject/object relation. It is the one way street of thewhite’s gaze that articulates the uncannyontological status of Fanon. Fanon is not asubject as is European man nor an Other oran object, but a thirdly thing; that is there asa living body but not there as human.Fanon is almost an object because he quitesimply exhibits the behavior not of a thingbut of a human that is caught out thereliving in the world while at the same timehe is not afforded a self-consciousness ofthe normative subject. So for Fanon inter-

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subjective consciousness of the self withothers is not simply posterior to pre-reflec-tive consciousness of the corporeal schema.Therefore for him biology is not alwaysanterior to sociality. Referring back to theearlier hypothesis that Fanon, in describingthe phenomena of self consciousness astwo different types of consciousness, onepre-reflective consciousness or tacit percep-tual knowledge of his body and the second,perception of others and others of him, isincorrect. Rather, anonymous biologicalexistence and personal human existenceare interwoven, one effecting the other inboth directions, simultaneously.

Merleau-Ponty is for the most partclear about the distinction of the biologicalfacticity of the body as comprehensivelydeterminant of the pre-personal corporealschema, that for him is universal to humansand is anterior to personal and cultural hu-man existence. For Merleau-Ponty the pre-personal corporeal schema is fundamentalto the historico-racial schema and racialepidermal schema that subtends Fanon’sbody. The crisis of modern being for Mer-leau-Ponty is that personal human exist-ence is thought to overrun the primordialperceiving body. If getting back to thethings themselves is the phenomenologicalspirit for Merleau-Ponty then it becomesnecessary to get back to primal perception.Merleau-Ponty does see our biological ex-istence in synchronization with our humanor social existence as a general way of exist-ing. Merleau-Ponty allows for exceptionsor aberrations of this order where the syn-chronization of the pre-personal to per-sonal is not always seemingly given, hewrites...

…so it can be said that my organ-ism, as a pre-personal cleaving tothe general form of the world, as ananonymous and general existence,plays, beneath my personal life, thepart of an inborn complex. It is notsome kind of inert thing; it too has

a something of the momentum ofexistence. It may even happenwhen I am in danger that my hu-man situation abolishes my biolog-ical one, that my body lends itselfwithout reserve to action. But thesemoments can be no more than mo-ments, and for most of the timepersonal existence represses the or-ganism without being able eitherto go beyond it or to renounce it-self; without, in other words, beingable either to reduce the organismto its existential self, or itself to theorganism. (2002 p. 97)

Here it seems that in ‘moments’ of dan-ger the human situation can overrun the bi-ological anonymous existence of the body.Merleau-Ponty stresses that these momentsof danger can only be fleeting moments.His description of the phenomenon of mor-tal danger, of life and death in times of warare one of the few, if not the only places inthe entire of Phenomenology of Perceptionwhere Merleau-Ponty concedes to an aboli-tion of the pre-personal corporeal schema,the foundation to his thesis on perception.For realists who take seriously the thesis oflived bodily perception that Merleau-Pontyexpounds, the possibility of domination ofhuman existence over its synchronicitywith biological existence will be seen as anaberration.

Is the phenomenon of racism thatFanon describes an exceptional moment inhis everyday life or perhaps serialized ex-ceptional moments? Perhaps, rather thanfocus on the moment as anomalous, weshould look to the essence of that moment.In average everydayness, different than theexceptional moment of mortal danger,Saint-Exupéry says that “meaning is not atstake.” So it is not death itself but the possi-bility of death that evokes meaning, the es-sence of the moment is the contingency oflife and meaning itself as presented to theself. Is then meaning at stake for Fanon? In



that terrible moment of racism Fanonwrites “Look at the nigger!....Mama, a Ne-gro!...Hell, he’s getting mad....Take no no-tice, sir, he does not know that you are ascivilized as we...” Fanon then describes hisexperience of himself and being with whiteothers.

The white world, the only honor-able one, barred me from all partic-ipation. A man was expected tobehave like a man. I was expectedto behave like a black man—or atleast like a nigger. I resolved, sinceit was impossible for me to getaway from an inborn complex, to as-sert myself as a BLACK MAN.Since the other hesitated to recog-nize me, there remained only onesolution: to make myself known.(BSWM, pp 112-4)

Does the violence of the phenomenathat Fanon describes of his own experienceconstitute a challenge to existential mean-ing for him? It is clear that the enduring ef-fects of white racism that Fanon describescall into question consistently the meaningof being human, of human existence. Theexperience of racism by the racializedseems inevitably to always put one’s exist-ence at stake. The further question to pushforward is, are these racist experiences sim-ply anomalous moments or is the generalexistence of the racialized one that calls intoquestion the meaning of being of human?

REFERENCES

Alcoff, Linda Martin. “Toward a Phenomenol-ogy of Racial Embodiment.” Race Ed.Robert Bernasconi. Oxford: Blackwell

2001. 267-283.Coleman, Athena. “Corporeal Schemas and

Body Images: Fanon, Merleau-Ponty andthe Lived Experience of Race.” unpub-lished paper, 2005.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks. NewYork: Grove Press, 1991.

Gordon, Lewis R. “Through the Zone of Nonbe-ing: A Reading of Black Skin, WhiteMasks in Celebration of Fanon’s Eighti-eth Birthday” The CLR James Journal11.1 (2005) 1-43.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the PrisonNotebooks New York: International,1999.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology ofPerception New York: Routledge Clas-sics, 2002.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. NewYork: Vintage, 1994.

Taylor, Charles. “Theories of Meaning.” Manand World 13. (1980) 281-302.

Weate, Jeremy. “Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and theDifference of Phenomenology.” Race Ed.Robert Bernasconi. Oxford: Blackwell2001. 169-183.

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