#stuart hall

First, I ask you to note how, within the black repertoire, style—which mainstream cultural critics often believe to be the mere husk, the wrapping, the sugar coating on the pill—has become itself the subject of what is going on. Second, mark how, displaced from a logocentric world—where the direct mastery of cultural modes meant the mastery of writing, and hence, both of the criticism of writing (logocentric criticism) and the deconstruction of writing—the people of the black diaspora have, in opposition to all of that, found the deep form, the deep structure of their cultural life in music. Third, think of how these cultures have used the body as if it were, and it often was, the only cultural capital we had. We have worked on ourselves as the canvases of representation.

Let us put it simplistically. I think it is impossible to read Black Skin, White Masks without acknowledging that it is also—and not just by chance—the product of at least three inter-related but unfinished dialogues, to which Fanon kept returning throughout his life and work. First, there is Fanon’s dialogue with traditional French colonial psychiatry and within that, with psychoanalysis, Freud and the French Freudians. For, if this text is ‘where Lacan makes his interruption into colonial discourse theory’, as [Henry Louis] Gates asserts, it is also where Fanon ‘reads’ Lacan in the light of his own preoccupations. In the long footnote on the ‘mirror phase’, it is Fanon’s appropriation of Lacan which strikes us most vividly. First, the ‘Other’ in this transaction is raced: (‘…the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man. And conversely’). It is difficult not to agree that he writes here as if ‘the real Other’ is indeed ‘a fixed phenomenological point’. Secondly, the split in the subject which the ‘mirror phase’ engenders, and which, for Lacan, is a general mechanism of misrecognition which provides the conditions of existence of all identification, is relocated by Fanon in the specificities of the colonial relation: ‘In the Antilles, perception always occurs at the level of the imaginary… for the Antillean the mirror hallucination is always neutral [i.e. colourless]’. This divergence is critical. On the one hand, it reminds us, as a startling discovery, how racially neutral, how strikingly un-raced, Lacan’s discourse is, and how rarely this unmarked whiteness of his language has received comment. On the other hand, it clearly marks Fanon’s distance from the logic of Lacan’s position. For Lacan, as [Homi K.] Bhabha remarks, ‘identity is never an a priori nor a finished product; it is only ever the problematic process of access to an image of totality.’ To this we might necessarily add that, for Lacan, identity also operates ‘at the level of the imaginary’. Fanon follows Lacan in substituting the psychoanalytic concept of ‘identification’ for the Hegelian concept of ‘recognition’. This is a procedure which marks their common lineage in the French reception of Hegel, via the highly influential post-Heideggerean reading of The Phenomenology provided by Kojève. But, for Fanon, the blockage which detotalises the Hegelian ‘recognition’ of the One by the Other in the exchange of the racialised look, arises from the historically specific, specular structure of racism, not from the general mechanism of self-identification. The political implications of this deviation are highly significant. For the whole thrust of Bhabha’s text—accepting a politics of subversion which lives with ambivalence, without trying to transcend or sublate it (aufhebung)—is the political consequence of a Lacanian theoretical position, where ambivalence is a necessary part of the script. Whereas Fanon’s theoretical position—that this radicalisation of the ‘mirror stage’ is a ‘pathological’ condition, forced on the black subject by colonialism—has the political question of how to end this alienation inscribed in it. Fanon cannot, politically, ‘live with this ambivalence’, since it is the ambivalence that is killing him!

Contrary to common-sense understanding, the transformations of self-identity are not just a personal matter. Historical shifts out there provide the social conditions of existence of personal and psychic change in here. What mattered was how I positioned myself on the other side - or positioned myself to catch the other side: how I was, involuntarily, hailed by and interpellated into a broader social discourse. Only by discovering this did I begin to understand that what black identity involved was a social, political, historical and symbolic event, not just a personal, and certainly not simply a genetic, one.