In the Introduction to his Black Skin, White Masks (BSWM), Frantz Fanon makes the claim that ‘a Black is not a man’.[1] To understand what Fanon means by the claim that the Black is not a man, a claim that he admits is ‘at risk of angering [his] black brothers’, we must explore the construction of Fanon as a racialised subject, a colonised subject, a Black subject, or – as he says – a ‘Black’, ‘not a man’, via a reading of Fanon himself, as well as of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose existentialist phenomenology provides the grounding for much of Fanon’s BSWM. This essay makes the claim that Fanon was not Black before he reached French soil: not only does he encounter his Blackness upon arriving in France from Martinique, he becomes Black – where Blackness is defined by the racist white Other in relation to whiteness, as less than whiteness, as less than human, as not man. He undergoes a metamorphosis via his objectification in the look of the white Other, and his submission to the hostile testimony of the white Other.
The essay begins with a discussion of Sartre’s conception of the human subject as well as of his concept, being-for-others, the fundamental idea to be utilised in understanding Fanon’s metamorphosis. I divide the concept of being-for-others into what I take to be its two dimensions in Sartre’s work: the look and self-knowledge mediated by the Other. These two sub-concepts are utilised to analyse Fanon’s becoming-Black, his becoming-not-a-man. The essay also makes the case that Kafka’s Metamorphosis can serve as an allegory for Fanon’s own metamorphosis. However, we will see that unlike Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, Fanon’s metamorphosis is not all-encompassing. By using Du Bois’ concept of double-consciousness, we see that although Fanon has submitted to the hostile testimony of the white Other that he is not a man, he also knows that ontologically, he is a man, and thus there is a space for liberation within his split consciousness.
The Sartrean Subject & Being-for-Others
In his Existentialism & Humanism (EH), Jean-Paul Sartre famously declares of the human subject: ‘existence precedes essence’.[2] The human subject is distinct from, for example, a hammer, created by a human subject who has a concept of what they are producing, and of the purpose that the hammer-to-be-created will serve: an essence. The essence of the hammer precedes its existence. On Sartre’s ‘atheistic existentialis[t]’ account, there is no divine creator of human beings, no God, and therefore, human beings do not arrive in the world with any predetermined purpose or concept, no essence (EH, 29). The human subject, for Sartre, as he expounds in his Being and Nothingness (BN), is ‘being-for-itself’.[3] That is to say, contrary to ‘being-in-itself’, that which simply ‘is’ (BN, ixvi) – a hammer (to continue the example) – human being is a ‘transcendence’, that ‘which is what it is not and which is not what it is’ (BN, 56). The human being as the for-itself, is ‘a lack’ (BN, 565), a lack of being, without essence, and is thus capable of transcendence and ‘perpetual re-creation’ (BN, 58). However, human being is concurrently a ‘facticity’, that is, human being’s transcendence is limited by factors such as its body, its past (BN, 56). The in-itself, by contrast, is solely factic.
An important element of the Sartrean human subject’s existence is their ‘being-for-others’ (BN, 137), which we can divide into two dimensions: (1) ‘the look’ (BN, 252), and (2) knowledge of oneself mediated by the Other. We will first consider the look.
It will be helpful to consider the look via an illustrative example of the concept, provided by Sartre. He describes himself peering through the keyhole of a door in a state of ‘non-thetic self-consciousness’, that is, he is entirely absorbed by what he is witnessing taking place on the other side of the door; in this moment, he is conscious only of this, ‘a pure mode of losing myself in the world’ (BN, 259). His self-awareness is available to him but in this moment, he is not conscious of himself. Suddenly, he hears footsteps approaching and becomes immediately aware that he has been seen, or at least that there is a possibility that he has been seen, by the Other, and he becomes ‘shame[fully]’ (BN, 261) aware of himself: ‘I see myself because somebody sees me’ (BN, 260). He becomes aware of himself as an ‘object’ for the Other, made an object by the look of the Other (BN, 257). He need not even see the Other or be certain that the Other has seen him; the possibility or probability that he has been seen is enough to make him conscious of his object status. The look initiates a power dynamic: this power dynamic is, for Sartre, reciprocal, but it is a power dynamic all the same. Sartre is seen by the Other, a subject, a transcendence, and is cast as an object. Objectification in the Other’s look entails a feeling of ‘shame’, shame that the subject has been made an object, stripped of their freedom and status as a for-itself (BN, 261). In this moment, for the Other, Sartre is an object with an essence, a fixed nature: he is a peeping-Tom, a voyeur. For the Other, this is all he is. Sartre is condemned to object-status, unfreedom, the realm of the in-itself, his ‘possibilities’ ‘alienate[d]’ from him – that is, until he reciprocally directs his look at the Other, and objectifies them in turn (BN, 263).
The other dimension of being-for-others is knowledge of oneself mediated by the Other. Sartre expounds this idea in the chapter ‘Existential Psychoanalysis’ of Being and Nothingness. Unlike traditional, Freudian psychoanalysis, existential psychoanalysis does not seek to uncover drives or instincts, or delve into the unconscious, but rather, its purpose is to ‘reveal […] the unification of an original project’ (BN, 561), the ‘original choice’ (BN, 564) made by the human subject, the choice that inaugurates the subject’s ‘person[hood]’ (BN, 574). Indeed, human existence is equated with ‘choosing for itself’, on Sartre’s account (BN, 572). Key to Sartrean existential psychoanalysis is the tenet that the human subject is not ‘in a privileged position to proceed in these inquiries concerning himself’ (BN, 570). The subject can know themselves, can analyse themselves, but must approach themselves objectively, as if they were analysing another. Indeed, existential psychoanalysis utilises both the ‘data of reflection’ and crucially, ‘the testimony of others’ in its endeavour to enable the subject to know themselves objectively and accurately (BN, 571). He explains our means of self-knowledge in more depth in Saint Genet (SG), his existential psychoanalytic biography of the writer, Jean Genet.[4] Sometimes our intuitions and reflections ‘overlap and complement’ the testimonies of the Other; sometimes, the two forms of data can be utilised as correctives of each other (SG, 31). Much of the time, however, the two forms of data do not overlap as they are ‘not of the same nature’: I appear as an object to the Other; this is – by and large – not how I appear to myself (SG, 32). ‘[T]he objective qualities which [the Others] recognise in me express not so much what I am in myself as what I am with respect to them’ (SG, 32). There is a distinction between my being-for-myself and my being-for-others, and ideally, I should be able to ‘distinguish’ between the two (SG, 32). However, were I to afford the testimony of the Other too much certainty and fail to afford my own intuitions and reflections sufficient certainty, I may experience ‘alienation’ (SG, 34) from my being-for-myself. Sartre claims that this may arise out of ‘submission [to] or respect’ (SG, 33) for the Other. We witness a dramatisation of the perils of the subject’s overreliance on the testimony of the Other in Sartre’s play, Huis Clos (HC).[5] The characters of this play find themselves in a room, which the vain Estelle despairs to discover contains no mirrors. Inez offers to be her mirror: ‘Suppose I try to be your glass?’ (HC, 197). Despite promising to be as ‘candid as any looking-glass’ (HC, 197), Inez lies to Estelle, telling her that she has a pimple on her face, before revealing her deception: ‘Suppose the mirror started telling lies?’ (HC, 199). Of course, whether Estelle does or does not have a pimple on her face is trivial, but the scene dramatises the perilous position of a subject who is reliant on the testimony of a dishonest or hostile Other for their self-knowledge.
We see an unholy matrimony of the two dimensions of being-for-others in Sartre’s Saint Genet (SG). ‘His life is divided into two heterogeneous parts: before and after the sacred drama’ (SG, 1). On Sartre’s account, the trajectory of Genet’s life was radically altered owing to a certain ‘metamorphosis’, undergone – and as we shall see, to an extent, willed – by him, as a young boy (SG, 2). Much like Sartre being objectified as a voyeur in the gaze of the Other, Genet is caught by the Other committing a theft. He is told this by the Other, and then by his wider community: ‘“You’re a thief”’ (SG, 17). The Other objectifies him. Doing becomes equated with being: Genet is defined by this theft; for the Other, Genet’s being – his essence – is thief. As D. G. Cooper writes, ‘Until that moment he had lacked an identity. Now he became confirmed. All at once he became a certain Jean Genet’.[6] Jean Genet = thief. He has been constructed, ‘fabricated’ as a thief by the Other, no longer a transcendence (SG, 7). Were the scene reversed, were Genet to offer his testimony of the Other to the Other, he would have been roundly disregarded. But Genet is a young boy, a small boy, motherless: he submits to the testimony of the Other. His being-for-others, and therefore, his being-for-himself, is thief. Sartre asks, ‘What happened?’ (SG, 18). The answer: ‘Actually, almost nothing’ (SG, 18). In a sense, the act of pilfering – (the act qua act) – matters little: it is his being-for-others that matters, that he is seen to be a thief by an Other looking for a whipping boy, made a thief, told that he is a thief, and left with a perverted self-understanding. Ultimately, Genet responds to being made a thief by the Other by declaring that he is a thief: ‘“Thief! I’m a thief”’ (SG, 41). Thereby his factic object status as a thief coincides with his choice, his project of thiefdom, his transcendental subject status as a thief. It is his original choice: ‘I will be the thief’ (SG, 50).
Fanon’s Metamorphosis
Having discussed Sartre’s conception of the human subject as well as the two dimensions of his concept of being-for-others, we can consider Fanon’s metamorphosis into a ‘Black’, what he means by the claim that ‘a Black is not a man’, and how he arrived at this conclusion (BSWM, viii).
Like Genet, Fanon undergoes a metamorphosis, but a metamorphosis of a qualitatively different – and more complex – nature. Having travelled from his home, the colony of Martinique, to France, the colonial metropole, he encounters his – racialised – being-for-others, his object-status in the ‘white gaze’ (BSWM, 95). He offers a phenomenological analysis of his ‘confront[ation]’ with his Blackness in the fifth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Man’ (BSWM, xiii). However, Fanon does more than discover or confront his Blackness in France: he becomes Black.
The White Gaze
We will first consider Fanon’s experience of the look, an experience modulated by race in ways – he notes – that Sartre has failed to consider.[7] ‘As long as the black man remains on his home territory […] he will not have to experience his being for others’ (BSWM, 89). He did not know that he was Black, or, in Martinique, he was not Black. As he writes, ‘not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man’ (BSWM, 90). Black is a status, as white is. In the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, ‘The Black Man and Language’, Fanon claims that whiteness is equated with human being: the closer that one comes to achieving the status of whiteness, the closer that one becomes to attaining human status. Whiteness is equated with being human; Blackness is equated with not being human: thus, ‘a Black is not a man’ (BSWM, viii). As George Yancy writes in his Black Bodies, White Gazes (BBWG) the white subject is ‘human being simpliciter’.[8] Fanon’s appearance – his skin colour, his features – qua appearance – is not of fundamental importance; what is important is what his appearance represents – and can be made to represent – for the white Other, and for himself, as mediated by the white Other.
In Martinique, Fanon was simply a man, a transcendence, a for-itself. In France, he finds himself to be ‘an object among other objects’ (BSWM, 89). The white Other has cast its look over him and made him an object. As we have seen, for Sartre, the look is a reciprocal relation: one moment, I am an object, the next, I objectify. However, ‘The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man’ (BSWM, 90). The reciprocity of the power relation borne of the look evaporates when the Black subject encounters the white Other: ‘the white man is not only the “Other,” but also the master’ (BSWM, 117, fn24). Fanon is condemned to objecthood in the white gaze. In a twenty-first century United States context, Yancy writes that the Black body ‘is imprisoned by ideological frames of reference that reduce the Black body ontologically to the level of the criminal’ (BBWG, xxxv). The white Other does not perceive Fanon as a fellow human, a transcendence, a free subject; rather, they see a Black body, an object with a fixed nature; their gaze informed by the racist ideological frames of reference of mid-century France. Inscribed on Fanon’s skin: ‘cannibalism, backwardness […] the grinning Y a bon Banania’ (BSWM, 92). In Martinique, Fanon had not been Black in his being-for-others, nor in his being-for-himself: he was not Black. On French soil, he becomes a Black body-object for the Other, reduced to an in-itself, ‘fixed’ by the white gaze (BSWM, 95). He desires to be ‘a man’, a human subject: this existential request is flatly denied by the white master (BSWM, 92).
In the carriage of a French train, surveilled by white passengers, Fanon becomes intensely aware of his body, his objecthood. Through the look of the Other, Sartre sees himself as voyeur, Genet sees himself as thief, and Fanon sees himself as Black, as not a man. He is cast into the realm of shame. ‘Shame. Shame and self-contempt. Nausea’ (BSWM, 96). His body loses its affirmative, enabling force, and becomes a ‘negating’ force, as though he has reverted to infancy and is learning to coordinate his limbs again (BSWM, 90). Not only does he see himself as not a man, and as an object; he feels himself to be not a man, an object. The look strikes him not only in his mind, but also in his body and how it engages with the world and objects. We will return to this point in greater detail later, in the context of a discussion of Kafka’s Metamorphosis as an allegory of Fanon’s own metamorphosis.
The Testimony of the White Other
We have seen how Fanon becomes an object in the white gaze, objectified in his Blackness, but we must also consider the second dimension of his being-for-others in France: how did he “learn” his Blackness, that he was not a man?
The Other who inadvertently provides Fanon with a testimony of who he is, is a small white child, sat with his mother in the train carriage. The child, terrified of Fanon, yells out: ‘“Maman, look, a Negro; I’m scared!”’ (BSWM, 91) and ‘Maman, the Negro’s going to eat me”’ (BSWM, 93). As we saw, Genet is told that he is a thief: his essential, fixed nature is that of a thief. Here, Fanon is told that he is Black, and he is told this by a child who reacts to Fanon as if he were an untamed wild animal or a monster: ‘an animal […] bad […] wicked […] ugly’, certainly not a man (BSWM, 93). His being-for-the-white-Other is a beast, monster, not a man. He believes this – to an extent – hence, ‘the Black is not a man’ (BSWM, viii). The small white child holds enormous power over Fanon. The child is a representative of the racist white French society that socialised him. As we saw in Saint Genet, for Sartre, the subject sometimes affords the testimony of the Other too much certainty, owing to submission to, or respect for, the Other. Fanon, as a Black man in mid-century France, receiving the testimony of the white Other, a child, but a white master nonetheless and a member of the dominant, majority race of this colonial metropole, has little choice – in this instant – but to submit: ‘I […] gave myself up as an object’… ‘I decided that I would accept this’ (BSWM, 92).
As we will recall, crucial to Genet’s metamorphosis, for Sartre, were Genet’s choices. Indeed, Sartre equates human existence with choice: ‘for human reality there is no difference between existing and choosing for itself’ (BN, 572). Genet’s metamorphosis was initiated by two choices: (1) the choice he made to commit a theft, and (2) the choice he made to accept and embrace his status as a thief. Fanon had no luxury of a choice, at least a choice analogous to Genet’s initial choice. Genet was caught by the Other in the enactment of a choice, in committing a theft. Fanon was caught by the white Other in his Blackness; Fanon committed no act, no transgression. As David Macey highlights in his article ‘Fanon, Phenomenology, Race’ (FPR), Fanon ‘has done nothing, said nothing’.[9] His being Black in France was his transgression. In the white gaze, he was always already guilty of being Black. ‘Even in the womb, the Black body is already against the law’ (BBWG, xxxv). Comparing his situation to that of Jewish people as theorised by Sartre, Fanon writes, ‘I am a slave not to the “idea” others have of me, but to my appearance’ (BSWM, 95). The same is true of Fanon in relation to Genet, truer than it is of Fanon in relation to Jewish people. Society’s idea of Genet is that he is a thief: he committed an act and now society thinks of him as a thief. It is true that society also has ideas of Fanon: we will recall the ideological frames of reference aroused in the white mind by Fanon’s appearance. But, one must have prior knowledge, a prior idea of Jean Genet the individual, to regard him as a thief, unless of course, they have caught him committing a theft. Fanon merely needs to be seen in his Black skin to be regarded as Black, as Y a bon Banania, as less than white, as not a man.
Kafka’s Allegory
As we have seen, Sartre regards Genet’s becoming a thief as a ‘metamorphosis’ (SG, 2), and indeed, in his analysis of Genet, he makes references to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (M), a short story in which the central character, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning to discover that he has metamorphosed from a human being into a human-sized insect, a ‘monstrous cockroach’.[10] We can read Kafka’s text as an allegory for Fanon’s metamorphosis into ‘a Black’, ‘not a man’ (BSWM, viii).
Although, unlike Gregor Samsa, Fanon does not undergo a literal bodily metamorphosis, it is as if he does. Unquestionably, Fanon’s self-perception does undergo a transformation, and indeed, as we noted earlier, the look of the white Other strikes him in both mind and body in terms of his bodily engagement with the world and the objects around him. Before arriving in France, as we have seen, he had never truly been aware of his Black body, his Black skin: he did not know what it could represent or be made to represent for the white Other, and consequently for himself, as mediated by the white look. Previously, in Martinique, Fanon’s body had been like any other body: an enabling body, a factic body. In France, his body was transformed by the white Other who ‘had woven [him] out of a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories’ (BSWM, 91). In the French train carriage, Fanon begins to struggle with his body. Rather than grounding his free human subjectivity, his ‘body schema […] collapsed’ (BSWM, 92): it becomes wholly limiting, ‘negating’ (BSWM, 90). He loses his subjectivity in the spotlight of the white look, and is left as a body, an object, ‘an image in the third person’ (BSWM, 90). It appears that he has found the realm of objecthood inescapable. Weighed down by a thousand racist signifieds, he finds himself cripplingly conscious of his body: he moves about ‘slowly’, cautiously (BSWM, 95).
In the task of picking up a cigarette and matches, he is deeply conscious of his body, how he manoeuvres his limbs to complete the task: ‘I make all these moves not out of habit, but by implicit knowledge’ (BSWM, 91). It is as though Fanon has reverted to infancy and has to relearn how to coordinate his limbs. Samsa, of course, finds himself in a new body, the body of an insect, and likewise struggles with his bodily schema. Every movement is slow, a ‘difficult manoeuvre’ (M, 86). Samsa, aware of the fear that his body strikes into those around him, is cautious and considerate in his movements. It seems that Fanon shares these concerns: he finds that his shivering scares the small white child in the train carriage. The terrified reaction provoked by Fanon’s Black body is of a kind that one would expect in response to an untamed animal or monster, or indeed, a human-sized insect. Samsa’s insect-body provokes responses of fear from his family and their domestic staff. His mother faints, runs away from him, and screams, ‘“Help, oh please God, help me!”’ (M, 89). Her screams of terror recall those of the child in the train carriage. Samsa’s father responds with anger and fear, hostility, and physical violence. Samsa muses on the ‘liberation he had once used to feel’, as a human being (M, 99). This resonates with the plight of Fanon, condemned to objecthood in France, longing to be a human amongst humans, a transcendence amongst transcendences. Samsa is unable to revert to his human body; he dies as a cockroach at the end of the story. Fanon, however, has a choice to make. Genet’s second choice, having chosen to commit a theft, was to embrace the thief-status ascribed to him by the Other. Fanon must choose how to approach the Black-non-human status ascribed to him by the Other.
Double Consciousness and Liberation in Weeping
Fanon, as we have seen, has experienced a degree of alienation from his being-for-himself, his understanding of himself as a human being, a man, a transcendence. He accepts his position as an object in the white gaze, his construction as Black, as not a man, but, as we shall see, although he utilises the language of acceptance and giving up in relation to this, he does not accept comprehensively or give up entirely. The metamorphosis undergone by Fanon is not complete: his previous understanding of his being-for-himself is not utterly unretrievable. In his essay ‘They Can’t Turn Back’, James Baldwin writes, ‘It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here’.[11] The key term here is ‘half-believed’: if there is but a small element of Fanon’s being that does not believe the testimony of the white Other, there is a space, an opportunity for liberation from the realm of Blackness, objecthood, and inhumanity, to which he has been condemned. There could be an opportunity for him to expel these half-beliefs and do away with them. It will be helpful here to look to W. E. B. Du Bois’ concept of ‘double consciousness’, as set out in his The Souls of Black Folk (SBF).[12] Du Bois, writing as an African American at the turn of the twentieth century, describes feeling a certain ‘two-ness’, a double consciousness: he is both and at once American and Black (SBF, 8). He defines double consciousness as a ‘sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of the others’: he sees himself through his own eyes as well as through the eyes of the white American (SBF, 8). This recalls Fanon’s encountering himself as a Black object in the white look, seeing himself as Black through the eyes of the white Other in France. That Fanon makes the claim that ‘a Black is not a man’ (BSWM, viii) suggests that he is in a state of single consciousness, a single alienated consciousness. It suggests that he is beholden to a bastardised, white coloniser consciousness and that he can only see himself through the white gaze and has totally submitted to the testimony of the white Other. However, this is not the case. Rather, it seems that Fanon is in a state of double consciousness. In Black Skin, White Masks, particularly in the chapter ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Man’, we witness him struggling with how to approach his Blackness. As we have seen, one of these approaches is to submit, to give up. An alternative approach that he considers is to ‘forget everything, provided the [white] world integrated me’ – to put the historic legacy of the violence of racism, as well as his own personal experiences of this racial prejudice, aside, provided that he is accepted (BSWM, 94). He finds that this fails: the white Other is uninterested in recognising him as a human. He attempts to utilise reason as his weapon, but finds this approach wanting too: he is unable to rationalise with the irrational white Other: ‘for a man armed solely with reason, there is nothing more neurotic than contact with the irrational’ (BSWM, 98). Following this, he opts for the ‘strategic essentialism’ of the Négritude movement, to accept and embrace his Blackness, and his (supposedly) essentially Black qualities (FPR, 12). However, he is somewhat ambivalent towards Négritude, sarcastically quipping, ‘Yes, we […] are backward, naïve, and free’ (BSWM, 106). He finally abandons Négritude upon reading Sartre’s essay ‘Black Orpheus’, in which Sartre describes the movement as merely a necessary stage in a dialectic, the antithesis to ‘white supremacy’, a ‘negative moment’ that is ‘not sufficient in itself’.[13] Fanon is disheartened by Sartre’s characterisation: ‘I needed not to know’ (BSWM, 114). He wanted to credit ‘black impulsiveness’ for Négritude, to experience his own agency in the fight against racism but has found the movement to be a mere means to an end, a necessity: it was always going to happen that way (BSWM, 113). Thus far, it seems that Fanon remains condemned to inhumanity, and indeed, he closes the chapter with ‘I began to weep’ (BSWM, 119). That he is engaging with these approaches, that he is making choices about how to approach his situation, and indeed, that he is weeping, however, demonstrate that he is not simply consigned to a single alienated consciousness, that somewhere within, he knows that he is a man, or should be a man, that he is not wholly alienated. Paradoxically, this weeping at his own unfreedom is evidence of a morsel of freedom in his consciousness. Weeping at the thought that he is not a man is evidence that somehow he knows that – ontologically, if not on the social plane – he is, and should be treated as such. In the Introduction, he proclaims, ‘we must unleash the man’: there is a man within, waiting to be unleashed (BSWM, viii). By the eighth chapter, ‘By Way of Conclusion’, Fanon declares multiple times, ‘I am a man’ (BSWM, 200, 201): a direct and obvious contrast with his claim in the Introduction that ‘a Black is not a man’ (BSWM, viii). It appears that, though he may remain in a state of double consciousness by the text’s end, the unalienated side of his consciousness is gaining traction: he is free, at least in a space in his mind, from the chains of Blackness and inhumanity in which he has been bound; he knows that, somewhere within, there is a transcendent subjectivity. Like Baldwin, he, at most, only half-believes.
Conclusion
This essay has, via a discussion of Fanon through the concepts of Sartrean existential phenomenology, examined Fanon’s claim in the Introduction to his Black Skin, White Masks that ‘The Black is not a man’. It has made the case that upon arriving in France, Fanon undergoes a metamorphosis. He becomes Black. He loses his human-status. He is objectified in the white gaze as Black and submits to the hostile testimony of the white Other that he is not a man. Thus, his being-for-himself and his being-for-others is Black, is not a man. We have seen that Kafka’s Metamorphosis can serve as an allegory for Fanon’s own metamorphosis, but that unlike Gregor Samsa, there is a space for liberation for Fanon in the double consciousness that he seems to be experiencing. That he makes choices about how to approach his situation, that he weeps, is evidence that he only half-believes the testimony of the Other that he is not a man, and thus there is a space in his consciousness for liberation from his subjection.
–
Notes
[1] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox, s.l., 2021, viii.
[2] Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism & Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet, Methuen, Slingsby, York, 2020, 30.
[3] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, Philosophical Library, New York, 1956, lxiii.
[4] Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2012.
[5] Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Huis Clos’ in Huis Clos and Other Plays, trans. Stuart Gilbert, Penguin, London, 2000.
[6] D. G. Cooper, ‘Sartre on Genet’ in Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy 1950-1960, R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper, Vintage Books, New York, 1971, 72.
[7] It should be noted that in his ‘Black Orpheus’, Sartre does observe the modulating effects of race on the relation of the look, but his discussion of the concept in Being and Nothingness is essentially a phenomenology of the white man.
[8] George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America 2nd ed, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 2017.
[9] David Macey, ‘Fanon, Phenomenology, Race’, Radical Philosophy 95, May/June 1999, 10.
[10] Franz Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’ in Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Franz Kafka, trans. Michael Hofman, Penguin, s.l., 2015, 75.
[11] James Baldwin, ‘They Can’t Turn Back’ in Collected Essays, James Baldwin, The Library of America, s.l., 1998, 646.
[12] W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Brent Hayes Edwards, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007, 8.
[13] Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Black Orpheus’ in “What is Literature?” and Other Essays, Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Stuart Gilbert, Penguin, London 2000, 327.
Bibliography
Baldwin, J. They Can’t Turn Back. Collected Essays. Baldwin, J. s.l.: The library of America, 1998 (622-637)
Cooper, D. G. Sartre on Genet. Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy 1950-1960. Laing, R. D. and Cooper, D. G. New York: Vintage Books, 1971 (67-92)
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. ed. Hayes Edwards, B. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007
Fanon, F. Black Skin, White Masks. trans. Philcox, R. s.l.: Penguin, 2021
Kafka, F. Metamorphosis. Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Kafka, F. trans. Hofman, M. s.l.: Penguin, 2015 (73-126)
Macey, D. Fanon, Phenomenology, Race. Radical Philosophy 95, May/June 1999 (8-14)
Sartre, J-P. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. trans. Barnes, H. E. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956
Sartre, J-P. Black Orpheus. “What is Literature?” and Other Essays. Sartre, J-P, trans. MacCombie, J. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988 (289-332)
Sartre, J-P. Huis Clos. Huis Clos and Other Plays. Sartre, J-P. trans. Gilbert, S. London: Penguin, 2000 (181-223)
Sartre, J-P. Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr. trans. Frechtman, B. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012
Sartre, J-P. Existentialism & Humanism. trans. Mairet, P. Slingsby, York: Methuen, 2020
Yancy, G. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America, 2nd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017