ABSTRACT
This essay, framed by references to Richard Wright, reminds us that in Black Skin, White Masks, as throughout his life, Fanon was in search of a liberatory method. Fanon’s “fact of blackness,” like Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh of the world,” is an elemental fact that concentrates around it the shared meaning(s) of the world, shaped by reciprocal “looking” and “looking back.” For a racially constructed world, the flesh of this racialized world is the Black skin that is hidden behind a gallery of white masks and images that escapes the grasp of philosophy. Nonetheless, I argue that the phenomenology of Black mind disclosed by Fanon may be properly called philosophy, since, disclosing the intersection of multiple languages and discourses, it is at once the negation of reflections of pre-existing “truths” about race, and is the act (qua performance) of the (self)-bringing forth of truth. In Fanon’s Marxist humanism, the colonial situation, which makes everything Manichean, either “civilized” or “savage,” constitutes a unique relationship of subject to object, and a thoroughly historicized ontology. Fanon’s method of internal intuition of the truth of race comprehends both the logic of the existence of the “colonial situation” and the dialectic of its overcoming in a “new humanism.”
