Impossible Divisions: Fanon, Hegel and Psychoanalysis

Abstract

This chapter concentrates on Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, where the Hegelian theme of mutual recognition as the origin of man’s self-consciousness and potential freedom is tested against the complex circumstances of colonialism. Fanon’s idea that the ‘Negro slave’ is recognized by the ‘White Master’ in a situation that is ‘without conflict’ suggests a possibly double, or self-resistant, meaning: the colonial situation after slavery ushers in something like a phony war; but also colonialism’s historical interpretation is not exhausted by the Hegelian master-slave logic. Through this double possibility of the colonial, one wonders whether after Hegel it is historical interpretation or the historical process itself that has gone awry. Such dynamic tensions suggest an impossibly divided dialectics at work throughout Fanon’s corpus. The section of Fanon’s ‘The Negro and Recognition’ devoted to a critique of Adler points to an earlier footnote in Black Skin, White Masks which offers a lengthy engagement with Lacan, allowing us to reread the politics of racial difference into the scene of the Lacanian mirror-stage. Here, the resistant ‘other’ of psychoanalysis unlocks the possibility of another ‘politics’ capable of addressing, by better recognising, some of its most significant impasses.