Frantz Fanon: Il faut faire peau neuve
By Sujaya Dhanvantari
This year, 2025, marks the 100th year anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s birth in Fort-de-France, Martinique, which was then a part of the French colonial empire. A much-anticipated centenary celebration of his life and work is underway, with conferences, symposia, and talks, feting this legendary Martinican figure – a Black revolutionary, anti-colonial philosopher, and clinical psychiatrist – who died an untimely death at age 36, amidst the throes of Western colonialism’s so-called last gasp. Yet, truth be told, colonialism and its rapacious imperialist wars appear to be in ascendance today.
Many readers are enthralled (if not repelled) by Fanon’s revolutionary politics with its inexorably violent concatenations. In French intellectual life, his infamous toppling from the plinth of his French contemporaries, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, began with a book ban placed on his fiery final tome The Wretched of the Earth [Les damnés de la terre], published in 1961 – his death year. [1] What was lost in the legacy of French censorship are Fanon’s original philosophical theses on the human existence and experience of les damnés, conditioned by the racial and colonial world. For Fanon shows us that our bodies remain entrenched in concrete lived realities, untowardly sculpted by and reactive to the touch of the worlds we inhabit.
Tunneling through a lost philosophical lineage, we discover that Fanon was also a trailblazing phenomenologist. In Black Skin, White Masks [Peau noire, masques blancs], published in 1952, Fanon’s focal point is the body’s sensorial experience under the brutalizing conditions of racial and colonial power. On the face of it, our skin phenotype appears to us to be a natural organ disconnected from the historical, social, and political world in which it is immersed. In general, the subjective orientation of the self to world in classical phenomenology abstracts the body from the quasi-transcendental structures of the social world. [2]
Departing from such notions of a neutral and universally shared bodily experience, Fanon tells us that even the most outwardly primordial sensations of my body are deeply historical. German psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers speaks of historicity (BSWM 92) [l’historicité PN 109-110], Fanon says. It follows that bodily experience is anything but neutral – rather, it exudes its historical moment. Colonial power, according to Fanon, has fashioned specific tools, to fabricate a specifically racialized skin – or flesh, to draw on Hortense Spillers. [3] While it serves its biological function, skin, it turns out, is also the preserve of racial oppression in a racist lifeworld.
French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for example, views the body as primally oriented to its externalities, eliciting a common foundational experience. [4] But, for Fanon, temporality – simply put, our relationship to time – tells us that bodily experience cannot be shared if time is split into two: the dominant present time of the colonizer’s progress set against the so-called retrograde, defunct past of the colonized. Fanon excavates the collective unconscious [l’inconscient collectif] of the colonizer, to find it teeming with negative stereotypes, racial epithets, and suppressed histories, ready to be trawled for projects of racial supremacist and imperialist power. What follows is a plethora of disavowals and projections in the everyday life of the colonizer.
Fanon coins the term historico-racial schema (BSWM 91) [un schéma historico-racial PN 109], to show that the concept of linear progress gives rise to the transmutation of non-white, non-Western peoples’ pasts and histories into demeaning stereotypes. It follows that the colonizer – unwittingly or not – turns to this gruesome treasure-trove, to fabricate what Fanon calls the racial epidermal schema (BSWM 92) [un schéma épidermique racial PN 110]: a bodily experience of objectification leading to the epidermalization of inferiority. But the racialized body that the colonial archive produces ends up not being a body schema akin to Merleau-Ponty’s, since the body and person are dissolved, leaving behind merely flesh. Not any flesh, of course, but what comes to be known as skin color.
There is nothing natural or providential about the amplification of skin color. However, in the colonial world, all that counts for the racialized other is that the negative associations imprinted on skin color thwart possibility and eviscerate dreams of liberation. The designation of color is thus reserved for Black and non-white skin, which appears outwardly as purely biological matter even though it is deliberately made for the maintenance of the colonizer’s supremacy. In Fanon’s words, the mechanical composition of skin as racialized is mastered by the techniques of “the white man who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories” (BSWM 91) [le Blanc, qui m'avait tissé de mille détails, anecdotes, récits PN 109]. Black skin, woven into the Black livery (BSWM 164) [la livrée noire PN 181], becomes the sign of bodily subjection in the white colonial world.
[Eduard Delputte, “A Man Covering His Face With His Hands,” 2023]
“[T]he weight of this corporeal malediction” [Le poids de cette malédiction corporelle PN 109] burdens Fanon (himself and his fictional I), who feels it “peeling, stripping my skin, causing a hemorrhage that left congealed Black blood all over my body” (BSWM 92) [Qu'était-ce pour moi, sinon un décollement, un arrachement, une hémorragie qui caillait du sang noir sur tout mon corps? PN 110]. The burden of this malediction is carried by the racialized and colonized body. From generation to generation, racialized bodies continue to bear the imprint of the racial epidermal schema. The actual effects of racial and colonial oppression are not identical across time, nor are their impacts equally allotted in any given era. But the clinical psychiatrist Fanon peers into the rich affective life of the racialized and colonized subject, to discover the devastating effects of colonialism’s longue durée.
The Black subject is distinctively weighed down with the history of racial oppression—from slavery to colonialism. Fanon envisions the time from the Middle Passage to the fugitive experience of the enslaved in the Americas: “I tried to escape without being seen, but the Whites fell on me and hamstrung me on the left leg” (BSWM 109) [J’avais essayé de m’évader par la bande, mais les Blancs m’étaient tombés dessus et m’avaient coupé le jarret gauche PN 126].” The imposition of the historico-racial and racial epidermal schemas, along with the terror they induce, are woven into the fabric of bodily experience– and are continually at work in the constitution of the historical-social world.
Peeling, hemorrhaging, burning, tearing, asphyxiation, and amputation are literal and metaphoric wounds permeating somatic and psychic life. From the brazen violent attack to the microaggression, racialized bodies are cruelly shaped by the constant litany of dire sensations. In “Too Late: Fanon, the dismembered past, and a phenomenology of racialized time,” Alia Al-Saji writes, “Significantly, tactile sensings that burn, tear apart, dissect, dismember are not localized on one part of a coordinated body schema (as would be assumed in a Merleau-Pontian phenomenology). This sensitivity extends all over, through skin and folds, giving that through which a racial-epidermal body is formed” (188). Hence, the corrosive effects of racism and colonialism flood the body structure. The Black bodily experience is substantially different from that of the white. Yet, it remains an incongruity not addressed in classical phenomenological theory.
In search of a release from racial and colonial oppression, Fanon finds that the body itself unfolds the truth (and lie) of the racial epidermal schema. In fact, the refusal to accept the racial epidermal schema is found in the body’s own responsiveness to its proper pain. First, the colonized body refuses the colonizer’s attempts to infect it with the paralytic disease tetanus in order to deaden liberatory possibility: “I refused … any affective tetanization (BSWM 92) [“je refusai toute tétanisation affective” PN 110]. Fanon begins by crawling (BSWM 95) [par reptation PN 113], secreting “pseudopodia” (BSWM 16)[pseudopodes PN 30], and growing long antennae (BSWM 96) [mes longues antennes PN 113] therein increasing his sensory and perceptual range. Fanon professes to have become sensitized (BSWM 99) [Je suis devenu sensitif PN 117], by cultivating a practiced discernment of the oppressive vileness engrained in the colonizer’s touch upon his skin.
But Fanon refuses to stomach the tetanic spasms that aim to steer him toward a future with no leeway for change. When a disabled army veteran links the experience of wartime disability to that of racialization, it elicits in Fanon a rejection of the bodily limitation – or amputated possibility - imposed by the racial epidermal schema. He says, “with all of my strength I refuse to accept that amputation” (BSWM 140) [de tout mon être, je refuse cette amputation PN 137]. [5]
Later, in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon writes, “we must grow a new skin” (my translation) [“il faut faire peau neuve” DT 305]. Well-nigh like a snake, the racialized and colonized body must cast off its racial epidermal schema. In “Frantz Fanon’s Engagement with Phenomenology,” Robert Bernasconi calls this casting off “a divestment of one’s skin, a dépouillement” (402). But this divestment is not solely assigned to the racialized other, since this oppressive violence remains embedded in the white collective unconscious. Despite the immensely grave toll on the Black and nonwhite body, Fanon forewarns that the work of shedding la lamentable livrée (PN 13/ BSWM xvi) also demands the engagement of the white. Until such times of anticolonial revolution, the realization of a decolonized and new bodily experience will remain entirely beyond our reach.
Notes
[1] See Adam Shatz. The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024, 344.
[2] See Lisa Guenther. “Six Senses of Critique for Critical Phenomenology.” Puncta 4:2 (2021): 23.
[3] See Hortense J. Spillers. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17:2 (1987): 65–81.
[4] See Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald Landes. London: Routledge, 2012.
[5] For an in-depth reading of the racialized epidermal body’s configuration, see Alia Al-Saji. “Touching the wounds of colonial duration: Fanon's anticolonial critical phenomenology.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 62:1 (2024): 2-23.
References
Al-Saji, Alia. “Too Late: Fanon, the dismembered past, and a phenomenology of racialized time.” In Fanon, Phenomenology and Psychology. Eds. Leswin Laubscher, Derek Hook, and Miraj U. Desai. London: Routledge, 2021: 177–193.
Bernasconi, Robert. “Frantz Fanon’s Engagement with Phenomenology: Unlocking the Temporal Architecture of Black Skin, White Masks.” Research in Phenomenology 50:3 (2020): 386-406.
Fanon, Frantz. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952. Cited as PN.
Fanon, Frantz. Les damnés de la terre. Paris: La Découverte Poche, 2002. Cited as DT.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Cited as BSWM.
Sujaya Dhanvantari is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, specializing in French existentialism, twentieth-century phenomenology, ethics, and social and political philosophy, especially the writings of Frantz Fanon and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as critical race, decolonial and feminist philosophies. She is the author of 2 articles and 1 book chapter on anticolonial philosophical concepts and theories of racialization, primarily in the work of Fanon.