ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Frantz Fanon's insights into the human condition, the 'certain things' he did manage to say, continue to provide psychoanalysis' theory of subjectivity with a necessary and continuing challenge on many levels. It also argues that the universal that does bind human beings together-this is something that Fanon never gives up on—is always offset and indeed renewed by the particular. In this respect, Fanon wrote out of his own experience of being a black man subjected to an othering gaze, therefore out of a subjectivity marked by a particular social and historical situation, out of which ensued particular narcissistic wounds. Frantz Fanon challenges psychoanalysis to face up to history and his insights show how subjectivity is fashioned by narcissistic wounds. Slavery, lynching, segregation: with a child's looking and pointing, Fanon associates some of the most virulent expressions of that hatred, as if discovering the foundations of racism—its passions, its politics—in the figure of the child.
