Subjectivity, Mimicry, and Warfare: Fanon with Lacan

By Andrew Ryder

This paper was given as part of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program Brownbag Lecture
Series at Emory University on October 18, 2005.

In his famous work Les damnés de la terre, Frantz Fanon concerns himself with

the production of subjectivity, situated by the emergent nation and midwifed by violence.

This ontogenesis of the entry into history by a colonized people, the Algerians, in

particular, draws on the insights of phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and revolutionary

Marxist thought, speaking at times as description, at others as instruction. Scholars from a

variety of disciplines have debated the relevance of Jacques Lacan's thought to Fanon's

conceptions since Homi K. Bhabha's reading of Black Skin, White Masks. This paper

intends to serve as a cursory explanation of Lacan's notion of subjectivity, as modeled by

the mirror stage and the practice of mimicry. Further, it will examine the relationship

between Lacan's reading of subjectivity as characterized by an idealized imago and a

repressed stain and Fanon's analysis of European man and his colonized other.

My reading endorses Bhabha's claim that Fanon's political thought is derived from

these Lacanian notions of subjectivity. However, I will challenge Bhabha's conclusion

that a properly Lacanian reading of Fanon contributes to an interstitial politics of

hybridity and negotiation. Instead, I will apply Lacan's insights to that aspect of Fanon's

work which was first most obvious and has since been neglected – that is, the violent and

performative assumption of human identity, the alliance with a class valorized because it

is the most abject, in the service of a commitment to a politics of the all rather than a

quest for parliamentary representation of specific interests.

1. Bhabha and the Politics of Negotiation

 Bhabha, following the neo-Gramscian project set out by Ernesto Laclau and

Chantal Mouffe, attempts to construct a vision of emancipatory politics which avoids

utopian projections and reliance on dualities. This goal runs straight on into Fanon, long

considered the apostle of violence and the advocate of a purely Manichaen structure of

conflict. Bhabha's analytic, which has hybridity, negotiation and translation as privileged

terms,

acknowledges the historical connectedness between the subject and object of

critique so that there can be no simplistic, essentialist opposition between

ideological misrecognition and revolutionary truth. The progressive reading is

crucially determined by the adversarial or agonistic situation itself; it is effective

because it uses the subversive, messy mask of camouflage and does not come like

a pure avenging angel speaking the truth of a radical historicity and pure

oppositionality (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 38).

Here Bhabha sets forth his primary opposition. What is bad in socialist politics is that old

Marxist conviction that while the bourgeoisie rely on ideology, the proletariat armed with

revolutionary theory is the bearer of an absolute truth. It is bad to declare oneself outside

of and superior to the situation. It is bad to declare oneself the true agent of human

history; it is bad to declare one's enemies the enemies of humanity, destined for the

dustbin of history. These illusions are at least counterproductive and utopian; at worst

they are totalitarian and genocidal. Bhabha aims to sidestep this association between

progressive politics and the Gulag, and the impotent workerism of the traditional left, by

substituting a supple politics of negotiation and compromise. Bhabha's political

desideratum is a "socialist community of interest and articulation" (Bhabha, The Location

of Culture 40). This community is stitched from competing interests without recourse to a

Rousseauian general will; these interests are coded by gender, class, and ethnic

distinctions. These politics are supported by a philosophical strata: one that is in favor of

Lacan's anti-humanist, de-essentialized, "messy" notion of mimicry, and against a

Hegelo-Marxist valorization of a class endowed with the ability to destroy the old world

and bring the new one into being, creating a "new man".

Does Lacan's notion of the origins of subjectivity, of which mimicry is one

exemplar, support a politics of the negotiation of competing interests, in contrast to a

disinterested commitment to the politics of the all?

2. Mimicry

Homi K. Bhabha draws his re-reading of Fanon from Jacques Lacan; the famous

mirror stage, certainly, but also from Lacan's notion of mimicry. For Lacan, mimicry

indicates something essential about the process of achieving subjectivity. What is Lacan's

mimicry, what is its relation to subjectivity, and what possible bearing could it have on

Frantz Fanon?

Lacan arrives at mimicry through its role as an illustration of the gaze, a particular

function of the appearance of the gaze projected into the field of vision itself. Maurice

Merleau-Ponty, in his Le visible et l'invisible, criticized the Platonic illusion of an

omniscient perspective, replacing it with an inherently limited notion of subjectivity

thrown into the outside world ("La schize de l'oeil et du regard" 71). Lacan draws on and

modifies this innovation, arguing that the individual gaze, the conditions for seeing at all,

are provided for by "la préexistence d'un regard" (ibid. 69). This pre-existing gaze is

dual-natured; both a specific, limited viewpoint, and an imaginary position within the all
– "je ne vois que d'un point, mais dans mon existence je suis regardé de partout" (ibid.).

["I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides."] Seeing

anything in particular depends on the illusion of being oneself seen absolutely. This

imaginary illumination is a pre-condition for subjectivity. This fantasy essential to the

subject, of being integrated through an all-seeing gaze, participates in a forgetting of

one's particularity, one's gaze as a function of the drive (la pulsion).

"L'oeil et le regard, telle est pour nous la schize dans laquelle se manifeste la

pulsion au niveau du champ scopique" (ibid. 70). ["The eye and the gaze – this is for us

the split in which the drive is manifested at the level of the scopic field."] The subject is

on one hand the acknowledged, conscious vision, a function of the eye. At the same time,

subjectivity carries with it unconscious desire, expressed by the gaze. This gaze,

associated with ça, is primary but also necessarily forgotten. There is "quelque chose

glisse, passe, se transmet, d'étage en étage, pour y être toujours à quelque degré éludé –

c'est ça qui s'appelle le regard" (ibid.). ["something [which] slips, passes, is transmitted,

from stage to stage and is always to some degree eluded in it – that is what we call the

gaze."] The gaze is always present and absent; it is always there, but only perceived in

uncanny moments.

When the gaze is perceived as an object, when one sees the preconditions for

one's own act of looking, it takes the form of objet petit a. Lacan speaks of the distinction

between dream and waking as the differing awareness of the gaze as present and

productive: "dans l'état dit de veille, il y a élision du regard, élision de ceci que, non

seulement ça regarde, mais ça montre. Dans le champ du rêve, au contraire, ce qui

caractérise les images, c'est que ça montre" (ibid. 72). ["in the so-called waking state,
there is an elision of the gaze, and an elision of the fact that not only does it look, it also

shows. In the field of the dream, on the other hand, what characterizes the images is that

it shows."] In this rich passage, Lacan argues that the gaze, which is also the ça, the Es,

the id, shows as well as looks. This is apparent in the dream, while forgotten in waking

life. When he says that "ça montre," this is of course grammatically ambiguous; the

regard performs a function of illumination, showing objects, but also shows itself. This

gaze as objet petit a symbolizes the cut primary to subjectivity; that is, the lack expressed

by castration (ibid. 73). I will re-visit the lack and castration in my treatment of the mirror

stage.

Subjectivity in fact begins with the traumatic primal scene which carries with it

the statement "je me vois me voir" ("L'Anamorphose" 76). ["I see myself seeing myself."]

This visible gaze is not apparent as a gaze turned back on itself. Rather, "Ce regard que je

rencontre [...] est, non point un regard vu, mais un regard par moi imaginé au champ de

l'Autre" (ibid. 79). ["The gaze I encounter [...] is, not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by

me in the field of the other."] This is because perceiving one's one presence in the world

always carries with it the truth of one's own impossibility. The "je me vois me voir", the

awareness of the presence of the gaze, always contains the seeds of self-annihilation

within itself. "A la limite, le procès de cette méditation, de cette réflexion réfléchissante,

va jusqu'à réduire le sujet que saisit la méditation cartésienne à un pouvoir de

néantisation" (ibid. 77). ["When carried to the limit, the process of this mediation, of this

reflecting reflection goes so far as to reduce the subject apprehended by Cartesian

meditation to a power of annihilation."] For Lacan, there is profound self-mutilation in

the notion of the gaze, the presence of the objet petit a. That is why seeing the gaze must
posit the big Other, which would be capable of containing the image of the gaze. The

impossibility of seeing oneself see is apparent to a moment's reflection; clearly, there

would be an infinite regress (what power of perception allows me to perceive my own

power of perception?). However, it is this very impossible occurrence, the unity of

apperception, that provides the transcendental grounds for individual existence.

When objet petit a is a property of the subject itself and its own image, it

performs the function of mimicry. When I see myself, I am always a stain, a bit of

ineradicable dirt. "Et moi, si je suis quelque chose dans le tableau, c'est aussi sous cette

forme de l'écran, que j'ai nommée tout à l'heure la tache" ("La ligne et la lumière" 90).

["if I am anything in the picture it is always in the form of the screen, which I earlier

called the stain, the spot."] Mimicry is becoming this stain (ibid. 92). Drawing on the

phenomena of mimicry in the animal world, Lacan relies on Roger Caillois' Méduse et

compagnie. Callois distinguishes between mimicry and adaptation – adaptation defends

from light and performs a utilitarian function (ibid. 91). Lacan and Caillois both argue

that contrary to common sense, mimicry, unlike adaptation, is non-instrumental and does

not contribute to survival – "on trouve dans l'estomac des oiseaux, prédateurs en

particulier, autant d'insectes soi-disant protégés par quelque mimétisme que d'insectes qui

ne le sont pas" (ibid. 70). ["one finds in the stomach of birds, predators in particular, as

many insects supposedly protected by mimicry as insects that are not."]

Mimicry is rather the demonstration of a certain capacity to perceive both the

environment in which one is immersed, and one's one relationship of immersion in or

distinction from that environment, "en position de maîtriser, non seulement la forme

même du corps mimétisé, mais sa relation au milieu, dans lequel il s'agit soit qu'il se
distingue, soit au contraire qu'il s'y confonde." (ibid. 70) ["in a position to control, not

only the very form of the imitated body, but its relation to its environment, from which it

has to be distinguished or, on the contrary, in which it has to merge."] As Caillois puts it,

"no distinction is more pronounced than the one demarcating an organism from its

environment; at least, none involves a more acutely perceptible sense of separation"

(Caillois 91).The "pathology" of this capacity of differentiation, Caillois finds similar to

mimicry in insects. A schizophrenic will find himself saying "I know where I am, but I

don't feel that I am where I am" (Caillois 100). The schizophrenic, or anyone else

deprived of subjectivity, will be incapable of obtaining this sense of being situated.

Mimicry, while not "useful", paradoxically has a military application: "L'effet du

mimétisme est camouflage, au sens proprement technique. Il ne s'agit pas de se mettre en

accord avec le fond mais, sur un fond bigarré, de se faire bigarrure – exactement comme

s'opère la technique du camouflage dans les opérations de guerre humaine" (ibid. 92).

["The effect of mimicry is camouflage, in the strictly technical sense. It is not a question

of harmonizing with the background but, against a mottled background, becoming

mottled – exactly like the technique of camouflage practiced in human warfare."]

Mimicry has three modalities: travesty (transvestitism), camouflage, and intimidation

(ibid.). Unlike in the case of adaptation, in which subjectivity is elided, mimicry depends

on a certain profound self-knowledge; the insect becomes mottled, transforms itself, after

determining the quality of being mottled apparent to the situation. This action is

analogous to the role of camouflage in warfare: which means, of course, that

camouflaged forces do not forget their allegiances and their enemies. Mimicry apparently
has a similar function; it provides for an assessment of the theater of operations and of

one's own capacities within this field.

Lacan appears to have left us with inscrutable paradoxes. Subjectivity is strictly

speaking impossible, yet the unconscious is said to "se propose à la conquête du sujet"

(ibid.).["offer itself to the conquest of the subject."] Mimicry does not ward off predators

yet performs the role of intimidation. Subjectivity is evident in a practice borrowed from

the animal world, a function of differentiating oneself from the outside environment and

then remaking oneself to be part of it. Mimicry exits the pre-historical, but only inserts its

agent into human history in a contingent, illusory fashion. Can any of this be in any way

germaine to Frantz Fanon, the humanist, the revolutionary, the champion of the rural

masses, the socialist nationalist? Fanon, after all, declared "Il nous faut quitter nos rêves,

abandonner nos vieilles croyances et nos amitiés d'avant la vie. Ne perdons pas de temps

en stériles litanies ou en mimétismes nausábonds" (311). ["We must leave our dreams

and abandon our old beliefs and friendships from the time before life began. Let us waste

no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry."] Can Lacan be any use for this enemy

of dreams, who holds mimicry in contempt?

3. Fanon and the Mirror Stage

Fanon writes vividly of the experience of the abjection of racism in a famous

scene from Black Skin, White Masks. In Lyons, he encounters a small white child who is

frightened of him, white children of the time being educated to find black men both

terrifying and comical. Accused of being a cannibal, his shivering from the cold

misinterpreted as quaking with rage, Fanon experiences an uncanny primal scene in

which he sees himself from the outside as a subhuman nègre. "What else could it be for
me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with

black blood?" (Black Skin, White Masks 110-112) This hemorrhage is a traumatic

moment of "seeing myself see myself," as a repulsive stain in the eye of the big Other, as

a fascinating objet petit a. The moment of mimicry, as Lacan argues, is when the subject

identifies with this stain (""La ligne et la lumière" 92). In Fanon's case, this mimicry has

militant consequences.

Bhabha reads this scene as the place of the stereotype, a fetishistic representation

occuring in the Lacanian imaginary (The Location of Culture 109). Lacan's mirror stage

is the subject's transformation through the assumption of an image ("Le stade du miroir"

93). The nucleus of the I pre-exists. However, subjectivity does not truly take place until

the point when one beings to recognize oneself in the mirror, placed by Lacan at about

six months. At this moment, the subject is "s'objective dans la dialectique de

l'identification à l'autre et que le langage ne lui restitue dans l'universel sa fonction de

sujet" (ibid.). ["objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before

language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject."] Subjectivity is being

propelled into the universal; it is mediated by language; it is characterized by

identification with another. This occurence splits the subject between the untotalized,

unconscious chaos of lived experience, already present in infancy and remaining in the

imaginary, and the "ideal-I", ego, or imago (ibid.). The imaginary is pre-verbal and pre-

Oedipal, and is characterized by aggression and narcissism. It allows for fantastic

relations with oneself and with objects; it is the object of analysis. The imaginary is the

"fantasmes dans la technique de l'expérience [psychanalytique] et dans la constitution de

l'objet aux différents stades du développement psychique" ("Fonction et champ de la

parole et du langage" 240-241). ["fantasies in the technique of psychoanalytic experience

and in the constitution of the object at the different stages of psychic development."]

The ego is produced by an identification with others who have reached maturity

and who appear to have egos of their own. The subject mistakenly believes that the self-

contained images of mastery presented to him by mature adults are the actual and

complete representatives of those people. This is "la fonction de méconnaissance,"

["function of misrecognition"] which the subject than applies in forgetting the role of his

own imaginary and its constitutive drives, in favor of an aspiration to be completely

assimilated to the imago ("Le stade du miroir" 98). The creation of an identity proceeds

from "une image morcelée du corps à une forme que nous appellerons orthopédique de sa

totalité, – et à l'armure enfin assumée d'une identité aliénante, qui va marquer de sa

structure rigide tout sout developpement mental" (ibid. 96). ["a fragmented image of the

body to what I will call an 'orthopedic' form of its totality – and to the finally donned

armor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid

structure."] That is to say, one begins with a body in pieces, and constructs for oneself,

with the help of language, the incest taboo, and the example set by others, a hard and

constricting personal identity. The ego is the site of the conscious mind. However, true

subjectivity can never be reduced to the ego, which "ne rejoindera qu'asymptotiquement

le devenir du sujet" (ibid.). ["only asymptotically approaches the subject's becoming."]

The ego, then, always presents itself with a more or less obvious lack; this lack is what

remains unconscious, and what, when symbolized, we perceive as the phallus. The

production of an imago is not the production of a subject. The subject, rather, is produced

by the conscious mind's attempt to grasp its unconscious obverse.

 Bhabha argues that the stereotype is a sort of flawed imago which occurs in the

imaginary and which stops short of a fully functioning ego. The narcissism and

aggressivity coursing through the imaginary are "precisely these two forms of

identification that constitute the dominant strategy of colonial power exercised in relation

to the stereotype which, as a form of multiple and contradictory belief, gives knowledge

of difference and simultaneously disavows or masks it. Like the mirror phase 'the

fullness' of the stereotype – its image as identity – is always threatened by 'lack'" (ibid.).

This passage lays out a Lacanian notion of a stereotype: remaining in the realm of the

imaginary, it is illogical and does not pretend to obey the law of non-contradiction; it

suggests difference and immediately denies it. Like a true ego, it is always inadequate

and fails to account for the entirety of experience.

What is odd about this apparent identification between the stereotype and a sort of

flawed ego or caricatured imago is that Fanon's primal scene of being perceived as a

nègre, a subhuman cannibal, is partly an identification with an imaginary image, but also

also an experience of being reduced to la tache, the spot, stain, objet petit a. Further, this

identification with the stereotype only occurs in a traumatic moment of "je me vois me

voir," when Fanon sees himself through the eyes of racist child. As he indicates in his

writings on his Martinician upbringing, everyone typically identifies with the racist gaze,

not with the stereotype. Bhabha acknowledges the stereotype as a divided subject, "at

once a substitute and a shadow" (The Location of Culture 117). It is important to clarify

that the stereotype is not an imago threatened by lack – the stereotype is an image but

also that very lack itself, its falling short of a fully socially acknowledged ego. Fanon's
notion of subjectivity pivots around the unconscious attested to by the stereotype rather

than merely insisting on its symbolic inadequacy.

4. Aggression

What is troubling in Lacan is that that there is always "une certaine déhiscence de

l'organisme en son sein" (ibid. 95). ["a certain dehiscence at the very heart of the

organism"] Dehiscence, which is a botanical term for the bursting of fruit at maturity and

a medical term for the bursting open of a surgically closed wound, is the term for the

tendency of the social imago to be overcome by its repressed unconscious counterpart.

The I is "cet appareil pour lequel toute poussée des instincts sera un danger, répondît-elle

à une maturation naturelle" (ibid. 97). ["an apparatus to which every instinctual pressure

constitutes a danger, even if it corresponds to a natural maturation process."] The ego

must constantly protect itself from its own other, its unconscious, which threatens to

destroy the imago completely, eliminating subjectivity in favor of psychosis. One only

enters into the symbolic through imaginary, narcissistic, aggressive desires: "L'agressivité

est la tendance corrélative d'un mode d'identification que nous appelons narcissique et

qui détermine la structure formelle du moi de l'homme et du registre d'entités

caractéristique de son monde" (ibid. 109). ["Aggressiveness presents itself in analysis as

an aggressive intention and as an image of corporal dislocation, and it is in such forms

that it proves to be effective."] Paradoxically, these aggressive urges drive the subject

towards a repression of these very pulsions. (ibid. 95) This has the consequence of giving

some autonomy to human knowledge from the "champ de forces du désir"; ["force field

of desire"] that is to say, human knowledge can attain a quality of disinterestedness and
separation from the appetites. (ibid.) The symbolic, governed by an identification with

the father, stabilizes the I and pacifies destructive urges. (ibid. 116)

However, underlying this identification is the famous Oedipal conflict,

characterized by an urge to destroy the father and possess the mother. This underlying

aggressivity, which is self-destructive as well insofar as it would destroy the foundations

for a self, accounts for "l'agressivité qui s'en dégage dans toute relation à l'autre, fût-ce

celle de l'aide la plus samaritaine" (ibid. 98). ["the aggressiveness deriving therefrom in

all relations with others, even in relations involving aid of the most good-Samaritan

variety."] Lacan criticizes existentialism for grasping negativity only within the limits of

self-sufficiency of consciousness (ibid.). Sartre stands accused of solipsism because he

does not acknowledge the profoundly social nature of subjectivity; prior to accepting the

societal prohibition of incest and mastering language, there is only a pre-subjective

nucleus. By failing to understand these social conditions, Sartre's reading of subjectivity

remains in the narcissistic and aggressive realm of the imaginary. This critique of

existentialism coincides with a measured re-interpretation or alteration of the famous

Hegelian dialectic of lordship and bondage. G.W.F. Hegel had already insisted on the

dialectical nature of power and identification in this passage of the Phenomenology of

Geist. Lacan's mirror stage differentiates itself from the master-slave dialectic in

emphasizing the artificiality of the master's sovereignty (even the master is only

identifying with the imago of mastery) and in intertwining more radically the opposing

terms. This might have the consequence of suggesting violence as primarily narcissistic

and masochistic, rather than a means of eliminating one's enemy and finally rendering
oneself "a man", as Sartre's interpretation of Fanon declares ("Preface", Les damnés de la

terre 18).

The repression of the aggressive drive to kill the father, coinciding with the

identification with the father, allows for the possibility of death. "Indeed, it is by means

of the gap in the imaginary opened up by this prematurity, and in which the effects of the

mirror stage proliferate, that the human animal is capable of imagining himself mortal –

which does not mean that he could do so without his symbiosis with the symbolic, but

rather that, without the gap that alienates him from his own image, this symbiosis with

the symbolic, in which he constitutes himself as subject to death, could not have

occurred" (Lacan, "On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis", Fink

translation 186). This a complex and dialectical passage. "Death" is only fully possible in

the symbolic sense after the completion of the mirror stage. However, for death to exist at

all, for us not to be immortal beings fully identified with our indestructible imago, we

must also be aware of our ineradicable gap. The space between lived experience and

symbolic identity is the gap where death maintains itself.

Fanon writes that "When one has grasped the mechanism described by Lacan, one

can have no further doubt that the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be

the black man. And conversely. Only for the white man the Other is perceived on the

level of the body image, absolutely as the not-self – that is, the unidentifiable, the

unassimilable" (Black Skin, White Masks 161). In this racialized reading, the black man

aims to identify with the white man, entering the symbolic and exiting the violent realm

of aggression and narcissism. The white man, however, derives his symbolic position

through his ability to differentiate himself from his black Other, the animal-child, who
represents all the imaginary urges the white man has repressed. This renders the presence

of the black man a constant stain in the anthropological picture – a reminder of situated

position, governed by drives, cut off from the fantasy of omniscience. Fanon's writings

on the black man as phallic symbol underscore this notion of blackness as signifier of the

lack. As Bhabha points out, this schema has the advantage of being a radically anti-

essentialist view of race, insofar as blackness is in a sense the "truth" of whiteness. Those

with white skin also wear white masks, no more authentically embodying their role than

their black-skinned counterparts. The strategy of racism is part of a desperate and

impossible attempt to amputate the truth of subjectivity, and the experience of racial

abjection is only a special instance of traumatic return to the primal scene.

However, as Slavoj Zizek suggests, we should resist reading a Lacanized Fanon

as suggesting that the answer to racism is a period of introspection and soul-searching in

which one realizes that racial prejudice is in fact a projection of one's own failures and

desires, contributing to a project of self-betterment and renewed commitment to getting

along with others (Zizek 171). Rather, we should, accepting the formal distinction

between ego and ça as a necessary requirement of subjectivity, question the historical and

political circumstances which dictate the racial content of this imaginary correlation of

skin color and universal narcissistic/aggressive drives. The means of resolving or

eliminating the existence of stereotypes would be impossible to find in personal self-

examination, because they are produced socially and could only be changed socially.

Only the mirror stage can project the individual into historical time (ibid.). Within

the imaginary, there is only a sort of eternal present. Time is a function which relies on

the symbolic; the ability to experience one's passage from one moment to the next.
However, time is also radically other and irreducible to its lived experience; it contains

death, as it propels us away from our momentary identification. Time relies on both the

symbolic and the troubling, traumatic real; the moment "où le symbolique et le réel se

conjoignent, [...] dans la fonction du temps" ("Fonction et champ de la parole et du

langage" 308). ["where the symbolic and the real come together in the function of time."]

The passage of history allows for the production of truth. Psychoanalysis has the function

of providing for the patient a reordering of the past which provides meaning. For

psychoanalysis, reality is not what is at stake, "mais de vérité, parce que c'est l'effet d'une

parole pleine de réordonner les contingences passées en leur donnant le sens des

nécessités à venir, telles que les constitue le peu de liberté par où le sujet les fait

présentes" ("Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage" 254). ["but truth, because the

effect of full speech is to to reorder past contingencies by conferring on them the sense of

necessities to come, such as they are constituted by the scant freedom through which the

subject makes them present."]

Lacan speaks of this annihilating and productive power as an entrance into

history: "La suite de la méditation philosophique fait basculer effectivement le sujet vers

l'action historique transformante, et, autour de ce point, ordonne les modes configurés de

la conscience de soi active à travers ses métamorphoses dans l'histoire" (ibid. 77). ["the

process of the philosophical meditation throws the subject towards the transforming

historical action and, around this point, orders the configured modes of active self-

consciousness through its metamorphosis in history."] When Lacan says history here, he

is referring to Martin Heidegger and not to Karl Marx; he means history as a succession

of forgettings of being, not the expression of class conflict. However, as Fanon will
argue, the assumption of subjectivity, in its destructive and creative aspects, is also the

precondition for material praxis.

Fanon's revolutionary insight takes place in the militant identification with the

objet petit a. Only after the primal scene of being cut off from symbolic recognition can

Fanon fully identify with his own negritude, a fact previously repressed in favor of an

identification with French identity. Martinicians thought of themselves as French and

only continental Africans as nègres. Fanon first, in Black Skin White Masks, insists on the

materiality of race, a facticity more important to the consitution of the subject than, say,

Judaism, which is comparatively invisible. Negritude is the practice of rejecting the

partial identification with the white master, and the radically alternative gesture of

recognizing oneself as the stain in the picture. Lacan criticizes "l'homme moderne" for

being trapped "dans l'impasse dialectique de la belle âme qui ne reconnaît pas la raison

même de son être dans le désordre qu'elle dénonce dans le monde" ("Fonction et champ

de la parole et du langage" 280). ["in the dialectical impasse of the beautiful soul who

does not recognize his very reason for being in the disorder he denounces in the world."]

Lacan identifies science as the means of recognizing oneself as complicit in the world's

chaos.

Fanon's immersion in the struggle of the Algerian people, and the theory and

practice of this struggle, leads him to modify the nature of his identification with the objet

petit a. In Black Skin, White Masks, the stain is the melanin present in the skin of a black

person. In the same passage that Fanon invokes Lacan in understanding the psychic

mechanism of racism, Fanon suggests that for "the black man, as we have shown,

historical and economic realities come into the picture" (Black Skin, White Masks 161).
The historical and economic realities conspire to undo the binary opposition between

black and white Fanon explores in his first book. After studying the radically different

roles of subjective identification present in Africa – Africanism, Arabism, Islamism,

bourgeois nationalism, varieties of socialism centered on the urban workers or the rural

masses – Fanon adopts a new mode of social practice. In Les damnés de la terre, Fanon

de-emphasizes the quality of black skin and champions instead the lumpenproletariat and

the landless peasantry. This political choice is comprehensible within the Lacanian

framework we have set out. The formal quality of identifying with the abject remains; it

only shifts from the situation of a single black man in Lyons to the site of the Algerian

political scene, a microcosm of the struggle of the "wretched" worldwide.

4. Antihumanism and Hybridity

Bhabha chooses to read this emancipatory identification as a practice of what he

calls "hybridity": "For Fanon, the liberatory people who initiate the productive instability

of revolutionary cultural change are themselves the bearers of a hybrid identity" (Bhabha,

The Location of Culture 55). Hybridity is for Bhabha a form of mimicry. As we have

established, mimicry is the process of identification with the stain. It has no instrumental

use, but provides for radical subjectivity, a subjectivity with military applications. How

does Bhabha read identification with objet petit a as hybridity?

Bhabha applies Lacan to Fanon as a means of revising Fanon's humanism,

typically assimilated to the Sartrean existentialist scheme of becoming a new man who

exemplifies universal prescriptions for humanity. Bhabha appeals to Lacan in order to

argue that Fanon reveals "Man" as an imago par excellence, devoid of true subjectivity

insofar as it relies on an image which is dehistoricized and idealized.

 Fanon "disturbs the punctum of man as the signifying, subjectifying category of

Western culture, as a unifying reference of ethical value" (The Location of Culture 340).

The punctum is the Lacanian point of fantasy identification, which always recedes and

can only be approached asymptotically. Fanon's humanism eschews the "social climbing"

of identifying with the humanist imago and is instead produced by the struggle of that

which was repressed in order to paint that image: "Fanon's discourse of the 'human'

emerges from that temporal break or caesura effected in the continuist, progressivist myth

of Man" (The Location of Culture 340).

Fanon is perhaps a humanist, he "may yearn for the total transformation of Man

and Society," Bhabha acknowledges, "but he speaks most effectively from the uncertain

interstices of historical change: from the area of ambivalence between race and sexuality;

out of an unresolved contradiction between culture and class; from deep within the

struggle of psychic representation and social reality" (The Location of Culture 57). In this

view, Fanon's humanism is interstitial; it speaks from points where identity is uncertain;

it negotiates between different modes of sociological existence – race, sexuality, culture,

class. "[T]he question of identification is never the affirmation of a pre-given identity,

never a self-fulfilling prophecy – it is always the production of an image of identity and

the transformation of the subject in assuming that image. The demand of identification –

that is, to be for an Other – entails the representation of the subject in the differentiating

order of Otherness" (The Location of Culture 64). In this reading, the Lacanized Fanon

speaks from a radically anti-essentialist position; the subject does not speak from a

certain position of historical advantage, but is always mediated by his identification with
Otherness. The subject is always changing, never fixed, capable of myriad alliances, and

so on. Can we fully endorse this "postmodern" reading of Lacan and Fanon?

Les damnés de la terre does not support a notion of subjectivity which is quite so

free floating as this. It is true that as Fanon becomes more and more attentive to the

formal demand for equality which is borne by the rural masses and their allies, he

becomes less interested in questions of the "content" of the personal militant. This does

not mean that Fanon's notion of equality or the nation conceives of a field of competing

interests, local mores, and personal tastes, to be discussed and mulled over in civil society

meetings. This notion of the political as the art of the possible, horse-trading, you-

scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours, politics-makes-strange-bedfellows, is not what occurs

in the revolutionary moment. What occurs in the revolutionary moment is, first, a mass

collective identification with the excluded and exploited of the political situation; in

Algeria, the rural masses. It is this steady rear guard that is the political objet petit a, the

embodied gaze marring the picture of French Algeria, which best symbolizes the whole

of the oppressed North African majority. Anyone at all who is present to the Algerian

situation is capable of theoretical and practical commitment to the peasantry, and by this

commitment, to the promise of the Algerian nation. As Aimé Césaire puts it in his

epochal Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, "Qui et quels nous sommes? Admirable

question!" (18) ["Who and what are we? Excellent question?"] Fanon himself, neither

Algerian by birth nor belonging to the peasantry by class, took part in this very

identification. In the words of Césaire again – "He chose. He became Algerian. Lived,

fought and died Algerian." ("La Révolte de Frantz Fanon" 24) This is why Fanon

believed that Europeans and Jews could play a part in the revolution. "[A]ny individual
living in Algeria is an Algerian. In tomorrow's independent Algeria, it will be up to every

Algerian to take on Algerian citizenship or to reject it in favor of a different citizenship."

(Sociologie d'une révolution 146-147)

5. The Other as Enemy

The identification with the exploited of the situation, with the rural nègres of

Algeria, with the wretched of the earth, has certain consequences. In this instance, those

consequences include war. This is a war between two distinct positions: the Algerian

nationalists and the French colonialists. These two positions have certain racial, religious,

and cultural valences to them, which are tactically significant but ontologically irrelevant

to the hazardous battlefield of Fanon's Algeria. Bhabha is highly critical of this

Manichean structure: "There are times when he [Fanon] is too quick to name the Other –

to personalize its presence in the language of colonial racism [...]" (The Location of

Culture 86). What is the function of this enemy other in Fanon? What is its empirical

foundation and its ontogenetic consequences?

Fanon speaks of the colonial system as a self-contained and Manichaen world of

internal consistency, in which both the natives and the colonists are enmeshed at the most

intimate level. "C'est le colon qui a fait et qui continue à faire le colonisé. Le colon tire sa

vérité, c'est-à-dire ses biens, du système colonial" (Fanon, "De la violence" 40). ["For it is

the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence.

The settler owes the very fact of his existence, that is to say, his property, to the colonial

system."] This statement introduces the dramatis personae which will struggle throughout

Fanon's writing – the settler colon, who gains his status by virtue of his European lineage,

white skin, and consequent economic advantage; and the colonised indigène, who is
coded as French but not quite, the partial absence and distortion of Frenchness, whose

identity is produced by differentiation from the colonist and whose body and possessions

are rendered inferior. The colonized nègre is human in some partial sense, but is not fully

accorded an identity in the symbolic sense as defined by Lacan. They are born in the

native zone, but "On y nait n'importe où, n'importe comment. On y meurt n'importe où,

de n'importe quoi." (ibid. 42) ["are born there, it matters little where or how; they die

there, it matters not where, nor how."] This existence outside the official registers of birth

and death leaves the natives effectively nameless and without the necessary entry into the

symbolic.

The separation from identity in its full sense produces a consitutive envy: "il n'y a

pas un colonisé qui ne rêve au moins une fois par jour de s'installer à la place du colon"

(ibid. 43). ["there is no native who does not dream at least once a day of setting himself

up in the settler's place."] The identification of the colonial system is produced in a

material fashion, both economic and bodily. On the first count, Fanon is famous for

declaring that Marxist analyses must always be stretched when applied to the colonial

problem, because class is effectively subordinate to racial identification in the colonized

world (ibid. 43). At the same time, the effects of colonization are muscular, cortico-

visceral: "chaque fois qu'il est question de valeurs occidentales il se produit, chez le

colonisé, une sorte de raidissement, de tétanie musculaire" (ibid. 46). ["every time

Western values are mentioned they produce in the native a sort of stiffening or muscular

lockjaw."]

The native is evil as both absence and positive negation: "L'indigène est déclaré

imperméable à l'éthique, absence de valeurs, mais aussi négation des valeurs. It est, osons
l'avouer, l'ennemi des valeurs. En ce sens, il est le mal absolu" (ibid. 44). ["The native is

declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values; but also the

negation value. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the

absolute evil."] The native is then, as in Thomist conceptions of evil, the privation of

good, but also a radical removal from the very ground of good and evil. This paradox

comes from the expulsion of the native from the symbolic order which determines values

and meaning. Caillois writes of the threat of darkness – it "is not the mere absence of

light; it has some positive quality" (Caillois 100). In darkness, the night when all cows

are black, as Hegel famously puts it, one is incapable of differentiating oneself from the

environment; therefore, mimicry and subjectivity are impossible. Fanon writes of how the

Algerians blend in with the natural background of French Algeria (Les damnés de la terre

250). Decolonization, then, involves the certain apprehension of the positivity of the dark

background, in a maneuver called nègritude, and the subsequent emergence, from "I

know where I am, but I don't feel that I am where I am" to "I see myself see myself". As

Fanon puts it, decolonization "transforme des spectateurs écrasés d'inessentialité en

acteurs privilégiés, saisis de façon quasi grandiose par le faisceau de l'Histoire" (Les

damnés de la terre 40). ["transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into

privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history's floodlights upon them."]

This basic division, conveying meaning to both figures, is maintained by naked

manifestations of violence: the policeman and the soldier, who "par leur présence

immédiate, leurs interventions directes et fréquentes, maintiennent le contact avec le

colonisé et lui conseillent, à coups de crosse ou de napalm, de ne pas bouger. On le voit,

l'intermediaire du pouvoir utilise un langage de pure violence" (ibid. 42). ["by their
immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native

and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that

the agents of government speak the language of pure force."] Failing to be allowed a

functioning ego, the natives must be patrolled by materially present superegos. This is an

immersion in the mediating ground of "language", but a primitive language of

unadulterated violence. The policeman and the soldier are enforcers of a symbolic order

of a sort, but are also manifestly agents of naked drives of hatred and envy.

Bhabha aims to correct Fanon's conception of the enemy. "The place of the Other

must not be imaged as Fanon sometimes suggests as a fixed phenomenological point,

opposed to the self, that represents a culturally alien consciousness. The Other must be

seen as the necessary negation of a primordial identity – cultural or psychic – that

introduces the system of differentiation which enables the 'cultural' to be signified as a

linguistic, symbolic, historical reality" ("Remembering Fanon" 189). In this reading, it is

a mistake to overly substantiate the Manichaenism of the opposition between settler and

native which is at the core of the Algerian war, with certain secondary binaries, such as

European/African and black/white serving as additional stratifications. Instead, it would

be necesary to acknowledge a primary hybridity. In Algeria of 1961, this would amount

to an assertion of the intimacy of the existence of colonists to the identity of natives, and

the historical necessity of immersion into French culture in the capacity to conceive of an

Algerian nation at all, even if only as an opposing term. It is, after all, this artificial and

negotiable world of competing interests that constitutes the cultural, as opposed to some

ideology of a pre-historical, pre-symbolic natural. This is an adequate explanation, as it

purports to be, of some features of the symbolic or ideological situation.

 What it does not take into account is the radical upheaval and violent

contradiction that is the very essence of war. Fanon's detailed description of the opposing

zones of native and settler are deeply intertwined and distinguished in a manner

characteristic of a Lacanian reading of Hegel's master-slave dialectic. The settlers cut

themselves off from their native counterparts by means of an elaborate identification with

a white, French imago. The native is compelled to aspire to the status of this imago, but is

at the same time repelled from complete access to this realm, being assimilated to the

compromise formation of the stereotype. The stereotype allows for some social existence,

but also lacks autonomy, being overdetermined by the social imaginaries of both the

natives and the settler.

The failure to accomplish any satisfying reconciliation between the lived

experience of the natives and the white imago, the torturous breadth and strength of the

"bar" splitting colonial subjectivity, necessitates the production of an alternative imago,

which is the duty of négritude, which "ouvrir l'esprit, c'est éveiller l'esprit, mettre au

monde l'esprit. C'est, comme le disait Césaire, <<inventer des âmes>>" (Fanon, Les

damnés de la terre 187). ["performs the function of opening their [the masses] minds,

awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence; as Césaire said, it is 'to

invent souls'."] This imago is itself raised and sublated from the stereotype, which is

itself, as we have discussed, split between an inadequate ego surrogate and an

unacceptable and traumatic stain. This identification with the stain is, in fact, exactly

what Lacan means by hybridity; when Fanon speaks of "mimétismes nausábonds", this is

undoubtably only his name for what Lacan would term adaptation, a cowardly
identification with a social superior. The new and redemptive Ich will derive itself from

the abject Es; Algerian nationhood will be built on the most spat upon of its members.

Ils ne se réhabilent pas vis-à-vis de la société coloniale ou de la morale du

dominateur. Tout au contraire, ils assument leur incapacité à entrer dans la cité

autrement que par la force de la grenade ou du revolver. Ces chômeurs et ces

sous-hommes se réhabilitent vis-à-vis d'eux-mêmes et vis-à-vis de l'histoire. Les

prostituées elles aussi, les bonnes à 2000 francs, les désespérées, tous ceux et

toutes celles qui évoluent entre la folie et le suicide vont se rééquilibrer, vont se

remettre en marche et participer de façon décisive à la grande procession de la

nation réveillée. (Fanon, Les damnés de la terre 126)

["They won't become reformed characters to please colonial society, fitting in

with the morality of its rulers; quite on the contrary, they take for granted the

impossibility of their entering the city save by hand grenades and revolvers. These

workless less-than-men are rehabilitated in their own eyes and in the eyes of

history. The prostitutes too, and the maids who are paid two pounds a month, all

the hopeless dregs of humanity, all who turn in circles between suicide and

madness, will recover their balance, once more go forward, and march proudly in

the great procession of the awakened nation."]

The production of this alternative imago, however, carries with it a great "dehiscence", in

Lacan's lexicon, which requires its own constant redefinition in terms of the uncertainty

of the Algerian situation and its determining valences (Islam, Arabism, socialism, Cold

War alliances), but most of all the elimination of those social forces which would enforce

the content of "Frenchman" in the formal space of punctum produced by the process of
subjectivity, inasmuch as those forces maintain the symbolic recognition of the colonists

as superior and the relegation of the natives to a stereotypical point somewhere in the

realm of the imaginary. The brutality of combat, putting both settlers and natives in the

position of desire for the continuation of mere existence, has the consequence of

dehumanizing both of the adversaries.

However, this is to the advantage of the native, who, never having been privileged

with the name of the human even under conditions of peace, and previously at war with

herself and her fellow natives, now finds herself at least in the endeavor of establishing a

solid identity, that mediated by the Algerian nation. These psychic processes, neatly

enough, have clear material correlatives in the demand for property and for land: "Pour le

peuple colonisé la valeur la plus essentielle, parce que la plus concrète, c'est d'abord la

terre: la terre qui doit assurer le pain et, bien sûr, la dignité" (Fanon, Les damnés de la

terre 47). ["For a colonized people, the most essential value, because the most concrete,

is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all,

dignity."] Just as the settler derives his goods and property from his symbolic position,

which is itself a product of matter and history (European superiority), the Algerian's

ownership of the land allows for "dignity" (Algerian identity) and various social goods

(bread). When Bhabha speaks of not imagining the Other as phenomenologically fixed,

we must disagree insofar as this does not allow for the obvious role of material guns and

butter in determining the content of psychic formations.

For Bhabha, it is as if all of Lacan's complex fabric of identifications and links,

imagos built on hidden stains, drives and their vicissitudes, ultimately culminated in the

simple "anti-essentialist" point that I am not what I think am, and should therefore think
twice before adopting the pretense of truth, be accommodating of infringements on my

desires, and be tolerant of the beliefs and goals of others. Lacan's view of subjectivity,

contra all this, unsettles the ethnic/economic/sexual/religious nexus of identification

characteristic of the contemporary notion of political interest. My petty desires for

symbolic recognition or for a higher category of consumer goods, which are the

respective desires motivating either "voting for values" or "voting with your

pocketbook", are as meaningless to Lacanian subjectivity as they are essential to

parliamentary politics. Instead, Lacan's writing suggests that the true kernel of society's

existence is located with its unacknowledged but essential members: that is, in the

contemporary West, immigrant workers. Inasmuch as Bhabha appeals to Lacan to

reinforce a politics of competing interests jockeying for position, he has misunderstood

the nature of Lacan's subject.

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