[…] To read Fanon is to experience the sense of division that prefigures - and fissures - the emergence of a truly radical thought that never dawns without casting an uncertain dark. His voice is most clearly heard in the subversive turn of a familiar term, in the silence of a sudden rupture: ‘The Negro is not. Any more than the white man.’ The awkward division that breaks his line of thought keeps alive the dramatic and enigmatic sense of the process of change. That familiar alignment of colonial subjects - Black/White, Self/Other - is disturbed with one brief pause and the traditional grounds of racial identity are dispersed, whenever they are found to rest in the narcissistic myths of Negritude or White cultural supremacy. It is this palpable pressure of division and displacement that pushes Fanon’s writing to the edge of things; the cutting edge that reveals no ultimate radiance but, in his words, ‘exposes an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born’.

The psychiatric hospital at Blida-Joinville is one such place where, in the divided world of French Algeria, Fanon discovered the impossibility of his mission as a colonial psychiatrist:

If psychiatry is the medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment, I owe it to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization.... The social structure existing in Algeria was hostile to any attempt to put the individual back where he belonged.
[…]

Quotes Benjamin: ‘the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a concept of history that is in keeping with this insight.’ [114]

With the question that echoes Freud’s what does woman want?, Fanon turns to confront the colonised world. ‘What does a man want? ‘ he asks, in the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks, ‘What does the black man want?’

I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. In the white world the man of colour encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema … I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects … I took myself far off from my own presence … What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a haemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood?

[…]

‘What does the black man want?’ Fanon insists, and in privileging the psychic dimension he changes not only what we understand by a political demand but transforms the very means by which we recognize and identify its human agency. Fanon is not principally posing the question of political oppression as the violation of a human “essence”, although he lapses into such a lament in his more existential moments. He is not raising the question of colonial man in the universalist terms of the liberal-humanist (‘How does colonialism deny the Rights of Man?’); nor is he posing an ontological question about Man’s being (‘Who is the alienated colonial man?). Fanon’s question is not addressed to such a unified notion of history nor such a unitary concept of Man. It is one of the original and disturbing qualities of Black Skin, White Masks that it rarely historicizes the colonial experience. There is no master narrative or realist perspective that provide a background of social and historical facts against which emerge the problems of the individual or collective psyche. Such a traditional sociological alignment of Self and Society or History and Psyche is rendered questionable in Fanon’s identification of the colonial subject who is historicized as it comes to be heterogeneously inscribed in the texts of history, literature, science, myth. The colonial subject is always ‘overdetermined from without’ Fanon writes. It is through image and fantasy - those orders that figure transgressively on the borders of history and the unconscious - that Fanon most profoundly evokes the colonial condition.
In articulating the problem of colonial cultural alienation in the psychoanalytic language of demand and desire, Fanon radically questions the formation of both individual and social authority as they come to be developed in the discourse of Sovereignty. The social virtues of historical rationality, cultural cohesion, the [115] autonomy of individual consciousness assume an immediate utopian identity with the subjects upon whom they confer civil status.

[…]

For Fanon such a myth of Man and Society is fundamentally undermined in the colonial situation where every life exhibits a ‘constellation of delirium’ that mediates the normal social relations of its subjects: ‘The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority behave alike in accordance with a neurotic orientation.’ Fanon’s demand for a psychoanalytical explanation emerges from the perverse reflections on ‘civil virtue’ in the alienating acts of colonial governance: the visibility of cultural ‘mummification’ in the coloniser’s avowed ambition to civilize or modernise the native which results in ‘archaic inert institutions [that function] under the oppressor’s supervision like a caricature of formerly fertile institutions’, or the validity of violence in the very definition of the colonial social space; or the viability of the febrile, fantasmic images of racial hatred that come to be absorbed and acted out in the wisdom of the West. These interpositions, indeed collaborations of political and psychic violence within civic virtue, alienation within identity, drive Fanon to describe the splitting of the colonial space of consciousness and society as marked by a ‘Manichean delirium’. (p.116.)

‘What is often called the black soul is a white man’s artefact’, The transference, I’ve argued, speaks otherwise. It reveals the deep psychic uncertainty of the colonial relation itself; its split representations stage that division of ‘body’ and ‘soul’ which enacts the artifice of ‘identity’; a division which cutes across the fragile skin - black and white - of individual and social authority. What emerges from the figurative language I have used to make such an argument are three conditions that underlie an understanding of the process of identification in the analytic of desire. / First: to exist is to be called into being in relation to Otherness, its look or locus. […] Second: the very place of identification, caught in the tension of demand and desire, is a space of splitting. The fantasy of the native is precisely to occupy the master’s place while keeping his place in the slave’s avenging anger. […] Finally […] the 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.

[Suggests that Fanon - fearful of his most radical insights - backs away from the ambivalence of his own idea about non-reified nature of the self]: It is as if the question of desire that emerged from the traumatic tradition of the oppressed has to be denied, at the end of Black Skin, White Masks, to make way for existential humanism that is as banal as it is beatific:

Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other to feel the other, to explain the other to myself … At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognise, with me, the open door of every consciousness.
[…]

However, Fanon’s Hegelian dream for a human reality in itself-for-itself is ironised, even mocked, by his view of the Manichean structure of colonial consciousness and its non-dialectical division.

In Fanon’s essay “Algeria Unveiled” the coloniser’s attempt to unveil the Algerian woman does not simply turn the veil into a symbol of resistance; it becomes a technique for camouflage, a means of struggle - the veil conceals bombs. The veil that once secured the boundary of the home - the limits of woman - now masks the woman in her revolutionary activity, linking the Arab city to the French quarter, transgressing the familial and colonial boundary. As the “veil” is liberated in the public sphere, it becomes the object of paranoid surveillance and interrogation. Every veiled woman, writes Fanon, becomes suspect. And when the veil is shed in order to penetrate deeper into the European quarter, the colonial police see everything and see nothing. An Algerian woman is only, after all, a woman. But the Algerian fidai is an arsenal and in her handbag she carries her hand-grenades. 121]