Black Flesh Matters! The Human Stakes of BLM and Rethinking the Psychoanalytic Subject

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article is a reflection on the significance of the Black Lives Matter movement in relation to the psychoanalytic movement in the United States. To understand the profound resonance of the phrase “Black lives” requires a retracing of the history of modern Western understandings of the human, as they have been expressed through the psychoanalytic subject’s relationship to the human body and, metonymically, the skin. Frantz Fanon’s prescient observations in his mid- 20th-century work, Black Skin, White Masks, continue to resonate as a theorization of the relationship of Blackness to unacknowledged narratives that shape the psychoanalytic tradition. This article historicizes and theorizes the racialization of the skin, specifically, in relationship to psychoanalytic thinking on the human, and contrasts the latter with a Black feminist genealogy that centers on this most charged question of our contemporary moment: What is the meaning of Black life?