ABSTRACT
Late in Peau noire, masques blancs, Frantz Fanon says: “we need to touch all the wounds that score the black livery (toucher du doigt toutes les plaies qui zèbrent la livrée noire).” 1 And then, citing Aimé Césaire: “for life is not a spectacle, for a sea of sorrows is not a proscenium, for a man who screams is not a dancing bear” (PN 181/187/164; Césaire 2017, 94). While Fanon often deflects questions of formal method (PN 12/12/xvi), to touch the wounds of racialization, to make them felt and to dwell in them, brings us closest to his phenomenological method. This allows us to understand why a phenomenology of racialization is a phenomenology of affect, and not primarily a phenomenology of (visual) perception or the visible. 2 At stake is affectivity that remains beneath the level of intentional sense-giving (even as it motivates perception and emotion), more atmospheric or thalassic than object or act. 3 Yet, this Fanonian approach also questions and reconfigures phenomenology—just as his work, in its irreducible methodological plurality, questions psychoanalysis, psychiatry, political philosophy, and ontology. The challenge is not only that of “expressing” or “inventorying the real” (PN 134/137/116; 181/187/164), when Fanon has insisted on the multiplicity of racialized and colonized experience and on the differential positionalities within Blackness (PN 14/14/xviii), and when that “real” has been repressed through the spectacle staged in its place (Hartman 1997, 39). I argue that the difficulty for phenomenology is threefold: the risk of specularization (Section 1); how racialization structures affect, calling into question immediacy (Section 2); and the failure of phenomenological reductions to account for the weight of colonization (Section 3).
