Abstract
While Sigmund Freud and Maurice Merleau‐Ponty both acknowledge the role that spatiality plays in human life, neither pays any explicit attention to the intersections of race and space. It is Franz Fanon who uses psychoanalysis and phenomenology to provide an account of how the psychical and lived bodily existence of black people is racially constituted by a racist world. More precisely, as I argue in this paper, Fanon's work demonstrates how psychical and bodily spatiality cannot be adequately understood apart from the environing space of the social world. For Fanon, body, psyche, and world mutually influence and constitute each other. In a raced and racist world, therefore, the lived bodily experience and the unconscious of human beings will be racially and racist‐ly constituted as well.
This will show you how in psychoanalysis we take spatial ways of looking at things seriously.
Sigmund FreudFootnote1
Everything throws us back on to the organic relations between subject and space, to that gearing of the subject onto his world which is the origin of space.
Maurice Merleau‐PontyFootnote2
Hence we are driven from the individual back to the social structure. If there is a [neurotic] taint, it lies not in the “soul” of the individual but rather in that of the environment.
Franz FanonFootnote3
Notes
Sigmund Freud, “The Question of Lay Analysis,” in volume 20 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1959), 195.
Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 1962), 251.
Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 213.
For discussions of the implicit role that race plays in Freud's account of the human psyche, see Daniel Boyarin, “What Does a Jew Want?; or, The Political Meaning of the Phallus,” in The Psychoanalysis of Race, ed. Christopher Lane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Jerry Victor Diller, Freud's Jewish Identity: A Case Study in the Impact of Ethnicity (London: Associated University Presses, 1991); Sander L. Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Marthe Robert, From Oedipus to Moses: Freud's Jewish Identity, trans. Ralph Manheim (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976); and Shannon Sullivan, “The Unconscious Life of Race: Freudian Resources for Critical Race Theory,” in Rereading Freud: Psychoanalysis Through Philosophy, ed. Jon Mills (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004), 195‐218.
See, for example, David Macey's claims that Fanon was not at all a psychoanalyst and “not a terribly sophisticated phenomenologist” in Macey, “Fanon, Phenomenology, Race,” Radical Philosophy, 95 (1999): 11, 10. See also Jeremy Weate's reply in defense of Fanon that Macey's criticisms themselves rely on an impoverished understanding of phenomenology, in Weate, “Fanon, Merleau‐Ponty and the Difference of Phenomenology,” in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 181, note 5.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, 63.
María C. Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’‐Traveling, and Loving Perception,” Hypatia, 2, no. 2 (1987): 3–19.
I take the contrasting set of terms “person” and “subperson” from Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997).
Franz Fanon, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952), 175.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 192.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 192–93
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 144–45, 187–91.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 147.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 146.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 110.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 192.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 191.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 193.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 192, 193.
Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 81.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 194.
Franz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 26.
Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 15.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 111, emphasis in original.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 111.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 111.
Merleau‐Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 100, 252.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 112.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 112.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 112, 217. Fanon's analysis of the triple existence that a black person is forced to live reveals the misunderstanding behind Macey's criticism that Fanon focuses on the theme of being‐for‐others rather than on being‐with‐others (Macey, “Fanon, Phenomenology, Race,” 10). Fanon's point is precisely that black people are not allowed to exist with other (white) people—a relationship that suggests their existential equality—but instead are forced by their racial‐epidermal schema to exist for (white) others as thing‐like subpersons.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 139. For an account of Fanon's three bodily schemas that aligns them with Sartre's understanding of alienation, see Weate, “Fanon, Merleau‐Ponty, and the Difference of Phenomenology,” 173–75.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 97.
Merleau‐Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 101.
See, for example, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989) for a phenomenological examination of the shattering of women's bodily horizons that occurs because of sexist oppression.
Merleau‐Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 143.
Franz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 59.
Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 59.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 123.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 135. See also Irene L. Gendzier, Franz Fanon: A Critical Study (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), 228. As Gendzier notes (38, 227), Fanon's ultimate position on Negritude is very close to that of Sartre, which is somewhat ironic given Fanon's initial dismay at Sartre's dismissal of Negritude as a minor term in a dialectical movement toward universalism.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 234, 247.
Thanks to Phillip McReynolds for discussing with me the effects of the different histories of French colonialism in the Caribbean and North Africa.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 153.
Macey, “Fanon, Phenomenology, and Race,” 100; Macey's translation from Fanon, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs, 17, 122. The two quotes can be found in a slightly different form on pages 10 and 150 of Black Skin, White Masks.
Cf. Macey's criticism that Fanon “makes little use of the concept of situation” (Macey, “Fanon, Phenomenology, Race,” 10).
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 193.
For more on the concept of transaction, see Shannon Sullivan, Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism and Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), especially the Introduction and Chapter One.
See, for example, Jon Mills and Janusz A. Polanowski, The Ontology of Prejudice (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997): “Every person by nature is racist” (11), and “[t]he belief that humanity is capable of purging itself of prejudice is not only philosophically incredulous but also psychologically infantile” (1). See also Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child's Construction of Human Kinds (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), which claims that us‐them distinctions are biologically given, which do not have to result in racism but are the ineradicable foundation for it. For criticism of a similar problem in Elisabeth Young‐Bruehl's The Anatomy of Prejudice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996), see Shannon Sullivan, “Pragmatism, Psychoanalysis, and Prejudice: Elisabeth Young‐Bruehl's The Anatomy of Prejudice,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 15, no. 2 (2001): 162–69.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 11.
In this context, see also Fanon's remark that when analyzing a dream about torture by the Senegalese, “the discoveries of Freud are of no use to us here” because the dream must be restored “to its proper time … [and] to its proper place” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 104, emphasis in original).
D. Caute quoted in Renée T. White, “Revolutionary Theory: Sociological Dimensions of Fanon's Sociologie d'une revolution,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, eds Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley‐Whiting, and Renée T. White (Maldon, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 101.
Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, Franz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (New York: Plenum Press, 1985), 195.
For the praise, see Lewis R. Gordon, “The Black and the Body Politic: Fanon Existential Phenomenological Critique of Psychoanalysis,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, eds Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley‐Whiting, and Renée T. White (Maldon, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 76. For the criticism, see David Macey, “The Recall of the Real,” Constellations, 6, no. 1 (1999): 103.
Maurice Stevens, “Public (Re)Memory, Vindicating Narratives, and Troubling Beginnings: Toward a Critical Postcolonial Psychoanalytical Theory,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, eds Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley‐Whiting, and Renée T. White (Maldon, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 216.
Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 72.
See, for example, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 267, 270, where Merleau‐Ponty proposes in his working notes to explain the unconscious in terms of the flesh and thereby save psychoanalysis from anthropology by transforming it into an “ontological psychoanalysis.”
Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1963), 179, and Merleau‐Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, 380.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to explore whether, from a Fanonian perspective, Merleau‐Ponty's later work‐in‐progress also deserves criticism for its position on the unconscious. For discussions of Merleau‐Ponty's relationship to psychoanalysis, including the question of how close he came to psychoanalysis in his later work, see Jacques Lacan, “Merleau‐Ponty: In Memoriam,” Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, 18, nos. 1–3 (1983): 73–81; Joseph Lyons, “The Lived Body in Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis,” in Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis: The Sixth Annual Symposium of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center (Pittsburgh, PA: The Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, 1988), 1–30; Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, “Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis: Preface to Hesard's L'Oeuvre de Freud,” Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, 18, nos. 1–3 (1983): 67–72; Dorothea Olkowski, “Merleau‐Ponty's Freudianism: From the Body of Consciousness to the Body of Flesh,” Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, 18, nos. 1–3 (1983): 97–115; Dorothea Olkowski and James Morley (eds), Merleau‐Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999); James Phillips, “Lacan and Merleau‐Ponty: The Confrontation of Psychoanalysis and Phenomenology,” in Disseminating Lacan, eds David Pettigrew and François Raffoul (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996); James Phillips, “Latency and the Unconscious in Merleau‐Ponty,” in Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis: The Sixth Annual Symposium of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center (Pittsburgh, PA: The Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, 1988), 31–63; J. B. Pontalis, “The Problem of the Unconscious in Merleau‐Ponty's Thought,” Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, 18, nos. 1–3 (1983): 83–96.
Macey, “The Recall of the Real,” 100.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 83.
Macey, “The Recall of the Real,” 103. See Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1990) for more on Lacan's concept of the real.
Macey, “Fanon, Phenomenology, and Race,” 12.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 143–44.
Macey, “The Recall of the Real,” 103.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 145.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 145.
Macey does the latter in “The Recall of the Real,” 99 and 100–01.
See, however, the concern that by remaining with even modified versions of phenomenology and psychoanalysis, Fanon perpetuates the very white privilege he wishes to challenge by appealing to European rather than African theories, in Paget Henry, “Fanon, African and Afro‐Caribbean Philosophy,” Fanon: A Critical Reader, eds Gordon, Sharpley‐Whiting, and White, 236.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 44.
See, for example, Fanon's claim that “muscular action must substitute itself for concepts” (Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 220).
Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan and Renée T. White draw attention to the relationship between land and psyche. See Bulhan, Franz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression, 101, and Renée T. White, “Revolutionary Theory: Sociological Dimensions of Fanon's Sociologie d'une revolution,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, eds Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley‐Whiting, and Renée T. White (Maldon, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 102.
In this context, it is worth recalling that the topic of the last chapter of Wretched of the Earth, “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” is the psychological damage of colonialism, including revolt against it.
White, “Revolutionary Theory,” 104.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 97.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 100, emphasis in original.