Skins and Masks

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Skins and Masks

Flute: Nay, faith, let me not play a woman. I have a beard coming.Quince: That’s all one. You shall play it in a mask, and you may speak as small as you will.

- Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act I, Scene II

C.J. Sentell November 2008

A mask is a covering for a face that disguises the true surface of the skin – the truth of its

appearance – in the service of dissemblance and improvisation. As such, a mask can

alternately be total or partial, on the one hand, and material or immaterial on the other.

Total material masks overlay the entire face, completely obfuscating the appearance of

those who wear them, blocking their vision and muffling their voice. One such mask

worthy of note, precisely because it diverges slightly from this definition, is the death

mask. Used by cultures ancient and modern to capture the facial contours of the deceased

for effigy and remembrance, the contours of such masks are constructed not to disguise

appearance but to represent it as accurately as possible, which is accomplished by

molding its features around the contours of the living or recently living face.

More common, however, are partial material masks that cover only sections,

usually the upper half, of the face. Interestingly enough, even such partial masks typically

have holes fashioned in them, rupturing their surface so as to leave spaces through which

the eyes can see, peering out from the skull underneath. Another such rupture in partial

material masks, and in ancient Greek drama especially, is the break in its surface for the

mouth that amplified the voice of the speaker for an audience exterior to itself.

Traditionally, then, masks are instruments of theatre. Actors and actresses wear

masks, covering over the face of their everyday identity, representing a new figure in the

course of a plot or drama determined in advance. From the Renaissance to the early



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modern period, masks were put on for masques or masquerades, which were formal,

courtly gatherings marked by music and dramatic performance, and often imbued with

ornate and intricate symbolic content. Other types of material masks are distinguishable

by considering a cosmetic mask or a heavy covering of the face with make-up or face

paint. A tattoo, too, can be considered a type of mask as the permanent adornment of the

skin with ink and image. In other contexts still, the mask can be a representation –

usually sculpted or carved – that serves a particular religious purpose or functions more

generally in social ceremony and ritual.

Set aside from the normal course of social life, masks are the outward sign of a break in or suspension of the symbolic order, whereby meaning and mores can be

refigured in the service of an imaginary and/or transgressive order. Symbolizing such a

suspension, masks figure prominently in festivals and carnivals – Mardi Gras being a

noteworthy example – in which certain inhibitions and desires are allowed expression, if

but for a brief period, so as to provide patterns of relief and release in the course of

everyday life. But, generally speaking, the form of a mask expresses as it conceals; its

affect speaks by showing. This expression can be mute, showing nothing, or grotesque,

showing too much. In classical drama especially, the mask was alternatively tragic or

comedic, expressing the universal poles of human emotion in a necessary, oppositional

union.

Having outlined some of the features and contexts of material masks, it is

important to consider the ways in which a mask can be immaterial. One such mask is the

performative masking through pretense or dissemblance; in this sense, the noun “mask”

is transformed into a verb “to mask,” the action of which covers over some truth so as to



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distract, dissemble, or occasion the imagination. Another immaterial mask, and the one

most important for this essay, is the mask of persona or identity. Carl Jung, for example,

holds that an individual’s persona just is a mask, which is that set of behaviors meeting

the prefigured requirements and opinions of their environment. Jung provocatively

continues the metaphor, which, at least for me, invokes the myth of Echo and Narcissus:

Whoever looks into the mirror of the water will see first of all his own face.Whoever goes to himself risks a confrontation with himself. The mirror does notflatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it; namely, the face we never showto the world because we cover it with the persona, the mask of the actor. But themirror lies behind the mask and shows the true face. 1

Immaterially, then, one’s persona or identity is itself a mask that is worn to express one’s being in the world. The mirror that reflects this face…Importantly, this immaterial sense

of mask points to the way in which the identity as a mask is both an aesthetic

phenomenon and a performative phenomenon. That is, the mask appears for others to see

and is itself the performance with which those other interact.

In many ways following Jung’s analysis of persona, and writing more generally in

the psychoanalytic tradition, Franz Fanon in Black Skins, White Masksoffers a detailed

analysis of racialized identity in the colonial situation. In this work – a work that is

explicitly written under the central image of skins and masks – Fanon provides at least

two ways of interpreting how race and skin color intersect with identity and masks. On

the one hand, as offering an account of the way the black person puts on a white mask to

become civilized, so as to take up the mantle of Man. On the other hand, Fanon figures

the black as the animal in man – the organic, corporeal, biological, and genital essence of

man – such that, in a sense, every person is black, putting on the mask of whiteness that

1 Carl Jung, "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious" (1935), in Collected Work s, Volume 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1969): 43.



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is culture. In this essay, then, I would like to inquire into these two interpretations not for

the sake of determining which one, in the end, is the correct one, or even the one Fanon

reallyintends. Rather, I seek to explore these interpretations – using as the guidepost the

dominant metaphorical trope of skins and masks – so that their consequences can be

drawn out for a more expansive consideration of the experience of identity, especially as

it concerns the experience of raced and gendered identities.

It is important to note at the outset the way in which “man,” for Fanon, is used in

a technical way. While Fanon does indeed talk about white men and women on the one

hand, and black men and women on the other – and the various dynamics that occur between them – central to his project is a certain recovery or salvaging of the concept

“man,” or the universal concept human, so as to overcome the physical, symbolic, and

psychic violence inherent to the colonial situation. Indeed, he says: “I believe that the

individual should tend to take on the universality inherent in the human condition.” 2 The

obvious problem, however, is that this concept sits at the heart of the white, colonialist

world. Heretofore, the concept manor humanhas served as the universalized essence of

human being, abstracted from all corporeal encumbrance and defined through the

possession of language and rationality. In short, the color of this man is white and its

gender male, while femininity and blackness have been defined in contradistinction. And

while I take up these issues in what follows, at this point I wish merely to state explicitly

that I will follow Fanon by retaining the language of “man” to refer to this “universality

inherent in the human condition,” but I do so with a good deal of reluctance and

2 Franz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks(1952). Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. (New York:Grove Press, 1967): 10.



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confusion, and not without acknowledging a whole host of problems dealing with the

exclusionary nature of this language and its long history of consequential effects.

With this prefatory remark made, the first interpretation of the relationship

between skins and masks that I would like to explore is the most literal one, namely, that

over black skins white masks are placed. There are several steps to such an analysis, the

first and most obvious of which involves examining what, precisely, Fanon means by

“black face” and “white mask.” The second step, then, seeks to account for the action of

placing the mask over the skin of the face, while the third and final step attempts to

extrapolate what it means, so to speak, to then wear the mask around.In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon explicitly states that his project is meant to

provide certain analytical tools in the service of liberating the Negro from the constraints

of a self-understanding distorted by the colonial situation. “What I want to do,” he says,

“is help the black man to free himself of the arsenal of complexes that has been

developed by the colonial environment.” 3 Using methods developed within

psychoanalytic theory, and applying them to both the experience of individuals and the

experience of social groups based within a collective identity, Fanon aims to initiate a

project of “disalienation” that seeks to interrogate the conditions under colonialism that

have created certain complexes in black experience under colonialism and reconstruct

them along libratory lines.

The central complex Fanon analyzes in this regard is a generalized inferiority

complex, which is the result of a “double process” characterized one the one hand by an

economic inferiority that is the direct result of colonization and, on the other hand, by an

3 Ibid., 30.



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internalization of that inferiority into the psychological structures of their consciousness. 4

One consequence of this is that the world of the black is divided into two dimensions,

namely, that dimension of life exhibited among “his fellows” and that dimension

exhibited among whites. 5 This division of the world, however, is actually a division in

consciousness, and produces not so much a division within consciousness, but a

phenomenon more aptly characterized as a doubleconsciousness – not a divided world,

but a double world. Black consciousness under colonialism, in other words, is marked by

a double nature that is the product of having two separate worlds to negotiate in the

course of experience. Such a phenomenon is unique to the subaltern precisely in their being forced, by means of the colonial situation, to move between two distinct worlds in

their everyday life.

These worlds are above all linguistic – or perhaps it is better to say that the

phenomenon of language is the predominant feature in each of these worlds – precisely

because, for Fanon, any person “who has a language consequently possesses the world

expressed and implied by that language.” 6 It is by means of language, then, that worlds

come into existence. As the primary means by which understanding and meaning are

achieved, language is the central phenomenological feature of the world. “To speak,”

Fanon says, “means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of

this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of

a civilization.” 7 So to use a language is not simply to possess the means of

communication. Rather, and because language is constitutive of the intelligibility of the

4 Ibid., 8.5 Ibid., 17.6 Ibid., 18.7 Ibid., 17-18.



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world, to use a language is to enter into a world whose salient features and meanings are,

to a great and ineliminable extent, determined in advance.

Within the scope of a particular language, then, an entire world comes into focus,

the features of which are marked by the contours of grammar and syntax, and the scope

of possible meanings determined by the histories of their previous deployments. But in

the colonial situation the colonized is confronted not only with their own language and

world, but also with the violent imposition of another language and world, namely, that

of the colonizer, thereby producing the double structure of their consciousness. Fanon:

Every colonized people – in other words, every people in whose soul aninferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local culturaloriginality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; thatis, with the culture of the mother country. 8

This dual nature of their reality poses a question of value in terms of the possibilities for

reconciliation between these worlds, thereby establishing a hierarchy of experience that

places the world of the colonizer in a superior position. Thus, by encountering the

language of the colonizer, the colonized “is elevated above his jungle status in proportion

to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he

renounces his blackness, his jungle.” 9 To the extent that they take up the language

imposed upon them in the colonial situation, then, the colonized are able to enter that

normatively charged world of whiteness, but this always occurs at the expense of a

unified consciousness and results in fragmentation, alienation, and inferiority.

And it is here that we begin to see the sense in which the black skin of the

colonized puts on the white mask of the colonizer. So as to gain access and means of

movement in the world – a world defined by the language of civilization, and a

8 Ibid., 18.9 Ibid.



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civilization defined through the white metaphysics from which it emanates – the

colonized black must take up and put on the white mask of the colonizer. While this

psychic movement is itself the condition for the possibility of another kind of movement,

namely, physical and social movement, for the colonizer it simultaneously produces an

internalization of inferiority that is inscribed in the metaphysics of the white world.

Importantly, however, Fanon says that this internalization of inferiority is actually an

“epidermalization” of inferiority. 10 In a crucial reversal of the movement of

internalization, inferiority is inscribed on the exterior of the skin, and this is the content

of what is internalized , i.e., that the black comes to the white as black, signified beforeself-signification by the color of their skin.

Corresponding to the double consciousness mentioned above, Fanon says, “[f]or

not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.” 11

Fanon recognizes that some will want to assert that the opposite is true as well, namely,

that the white person knows their whiteness only in relation to the black person’s

blackness, but Fanon rejects this converse situation out of hand precisely because the

black man occasions no “ontological resistance” within the white world. Of such

resistance, Fanon says:

The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.Overnight the Negro has been given two frames of reference within which he hashad to place himself. His metaphysics, or, less pretentiously, his customs and thesources on which they were based, were wiped out because they were in conflictwith a civilization that he did not know and that imposed itself on him. 12

Defining metaphysics as a set of practices and the ideological underpinnings on which

those practices are based, Fanon aims to show how the relation through which the black

10 Ibid., 11.11 Ibid., 110.12 Ibid.



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comes to know the white is not one of reciprocal recognition, but one of determinate

negation. The imposition of white metaphysics, in other words, makes blackness into a

set of characteristics defined by the negation of whiteness. And this fact is not simply a

matter of theoretical consistency, but a fact grounded in material and psychic conditions

of colonialism.

With this asymmetrical relation in mind, Fanon seeks to interrogate the way in

which the colonial situation created “the Negro” by discovering them in the course of

colonialism. When the white encounters the black, they fit him into an already arranged

set of categories and concepts that explain away the humanity of the encounter. This is because white world is a colonizing world; it is a world that has been expanded time and

again through exploration and conquest and subjugation: “The white man wants the

world; he wants it for himself alone. He finds himself predestined master of this world.

He enslaves it.” 13 It is a world whose limits are constituted by the knowable, by that

which is subsumable under concepts according to a colonial epistemology: “I am being

dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed …I am laid bare. I feel, I see in

those white faces that it is not a new man who has come in, but a new kind of man, a new

genus. Why, it’s a Negro!” 14 Through this predetermined mastery, the colonizer sorts

and categories the things found in the course of exploration, and the colonized body just

is one of those things.

Thus, when the black is forced to meet the eyes of the white they encounter a

formidable resistance, which precedes and predetermines the categories through which

they can be perceived. Recounting such an encounter in the first person, Fanon says:

13 Ibid., 128.14 Ibid., 116.



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“And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already

there, pre-existing, waiting for me.” 15 Appearing under the sign of their skin, then, the

black appears within a semiotics whose signs are determined in advance – or at least

before their entrance – sketching the contours of possible meanings by which they can

legitimately appear. When meanings fall outside the scope of such a semiotics, a type of

resistance is met. And while Fanon calls this “ontological resistance,” we could equally

well think of it as a semiotic or hermeneutic resistance. The flesh itself becomes a sign

by which a whole host of meanings are transmitted and communicated without a word

being spoken or written. Enclosing the body under gaze, the skin demarcates, contains,and masks the lumps of flesh beneath.

Paradoxically, then, by means of an internalizing externalization, black skin

becomes a sign through which the colonial encounter is made possible; it is a sign that

precedes the colonized, determining him or her in advance for the gaze of the colonizer.

“I am overdetermined from without,” Fanon says, “I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ that

others have of me but of my own appearance.” 16 In this way, the experience of race in

general, and the fact of blackness in particular, is an aesthetic phenomenon the meaning

of which is determined by a semiotics of skin that circumscribes the scope of the

encounter before it actually begins in the course of language. In short, the skin itself

becomes a sign within the larger semiotic structures imposed in the course of the colonial

experience. Thus, according to Fanon, “there is a myth to be faced….The Negro is

unaware of it as long as his existence is limited to his own environment; but the first

15 Ibid., 134.16 Ibid., 116.



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encounter with a white man oppresses him with the whole weight of his blackness.” 17

This oppression occurs precisely by forcing the colonized to see their blackness as a sign

whose signification is already determined through the eyes of a white mask.

Such an encounter inevitably alienates the black from their own experience,

distorting the ideas and images of their own embodiment that emerge naturally in the

course corporeal development. Writing within the phenomenological tradition, Fanon

thinks of this set of ideas and images about the body as a “body schema,” which is “a

slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world.” 18 It

is a developmental process that occurs simultaneously with the development of self-consciousness more generally. It is a coming to awareness of oneself as a body in a

world and as a mind in a body.

Neither stage is primary, but each is dependent upon the other for its full

development and expression. This coming together of the self in medias resis precisely

that moment of recognition that Fanon gestures to when he says that he all at once found

himself an “object in the midst of other objects.” 19 But the bodily schema Fanon invokes

here is neither merely a self-objectification nor simply an imposition of a certain set of

structures that determines how objects within a given field (including the body) are to be

perceived. Rather, a schema is a “structuring of the self and of the world” that is

“definitive” insofar as it “creates a real dialectic between my body and the world.” 20

Thus, one’s particular body schema develops in dialectical relationship to the

17 Ibid., 150.18 Ibid., 111.19 Ibid., 109.20 Ibid., 11.



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environment one is thrown into and the experience of one’s self, i.e., the ego, within that

environment.

In the colonial environment, however, the body schema of the person of color is

skewed in advance, which is the source of inferiority that is Fanon’s target. Through the

colonial language that transmits and structures the self within a colonial world, the

experience of blackness is overdetermined; giving recognition without being recognized,

the colonial subject is negatively constituted by the metaphysics of the white world.

Speaking in the first-person, Fanon says:

The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousnessof the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The

body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. 21

In a sense learning themselves as a “they” before knowing themselves as an “we” or even

an “I,” the person of color in the colonial situation is caught in an affirming negation, by

which they are constituted through the negation of their appearance. The asymmetry this

relationship destabilizes the psychic continuity of colonized, resulting in the “arsenal of

complexes” under analysis, precisely because “assailed at various point, the corporeal

schema [of the colonized is] crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema.” 22

In this sense, black consciousness is “born” into a white world characterized through and

through by an uncertainty of which it is absolutely certain.

Speaking of the formation of the ego more generally, Lacan refers to this as the

“ specific prematurity of birth.”23 This birth is the birth of the ego, which always happens

unannounced, interrupting unconscious experience and disturbing the continuity of the

21 Ibid., 110-111.22 Ibid., 112.23 Jacques Lacan, ÈcritsTranslated by Bruce Fink. (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002): 78.



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consciousness developing in the child. The birth of the ego, in this sense, is always

premature precisely because the child is not aware that they are “pregnant” with it; they

do not know that their ego is about to make its appearance. Within psychoanalysis, this

developmental process is known as the mirror stage of development, which according to

Lacan occurs between six and eighteen months of age when the child can recognize itself

in the mirror but cannot control the actions and movements of its body. 24 The recognition

of its self in the mirror occasions a specular image of the body that becomes the “root

stock of secondary identifications” and “situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its

social determination, in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for anysingle individual.” 25 Through the course of development, this specular image of the body

transforms into a social image of the body, the two aspects of which constitute the frame

– or what Lacan calls the “gestalt” – through which an imagoof the embodied self

emerges.

In the mirror period, then, the power (Lacan uses the French prégnance) of this

frame is linked to the species in that its potential for determining the scope of future

movement, as of yet not fully realized or realizable, is based within a determinate

arrangement of corporeal material. But as such potential is realized, this frame comes to

symbolize the permanence of the ego while simultaneously prefiguring its “alienating

destination.” 26 The ego, that is, comes to an awareness of its own alienated state – that it

is but an object amid a world of objects – and its alienating potential – through the

dialectics of recognition – at the same time in the course of the development of

consciousness.

24 Ibid., 75.25 Ibid., 76.26 Ibid.



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In a footnote discussing the relevance of Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage of

development to an analysis of black consciousness under colonialism, Fanon points out

the upshot for the ego formation of the black is that “the real Other for the white man is

and will continue to be the black man….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,

unassimilable.” 27 Again, blackness is the determinate negation of what it means to be

white within the colonial context, and the image of the black body to the white gestalt is

as its ultimate antithesis. Thus, “when the Negro makes contact with the white world,”

Fanon says, “a certain sensitizing action takes place. If his psychic structure is weak, oneobserves a collapse of the ego. The black man stops behaving as an actional person. The

goal of his behavior will be The Other (in the guise of the white man), for The Other

alone can give him worth.” 28 In this way, we are in a position to understand the way in

which “European culture has an imagoof the Negro which is responsible for all the

conflicts that may arise” precisely because “the Negro faithfully reproduces that imago”

by taking up the European’s language and world. This taking up of the colonizer’s world

is the exact moment at which the black skin dons the white mask.

At this point, the general exegetical features are sufficiently in place so as to turn

to the second interpretation of the skins and masks that I would like to explore in this

essay, namely, that black skins stand for the biological essence of man and the white

masks are the cultural construction through which humanity is attained. This is a more

existential reading of skins and masks in Fanon’s work, which turns on understanding

how blackness figures as the animal nature in man, and whiteness the humannature in

27 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 161.28 Ibid., 154.



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man. Whiteness, in other words and to use Lacan’s striking turn of phrase, stands as the

color of “the madness by which we think we are men.” 29 Within the white metaphysic, in

other words, blackness is the sign for this more primitive state of man, and whiteness for

the progressive development of culture. Within the white metaphysic, whiteness is

associated with light, enlightenment, purity, and civilization, while blackness is

associated with darkness, ignorance, sin, and savagery. Between civilization and

barbarism, then, the dual poles of the color spectrum are the animating features of a

metaphysical narrative that enable and justify the colonial order.

Recalling Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious, Fanon says that Europeancivilization is marked the presence of an archetype, which in relief must necessarily

express an inversion or perversion of the normatively privileged order. He says:

In the remotest depth of the European unconscious an inordinately black hollowhas been made in which the most immoral impulses, the most shameful desires liedormant. And as every man climbs up toward whiteness and light, the Europeanhas tried to repudiate this uncivilized self, which has attempted to defend itself. 30

While Jung locates the collective unconscious in the brain, Fanon argues that the

collective unconscious “is purely and simply the sum of prejudices, myths, collective

attitudes of a given group.” 31 The result of the “unreflected imposition of a culture,” the

collective unconscious is the set of structuring practices by which the world is revealed. 32

The metaphysics of man, in which blackness and whiteness figures in diametric

opposition, is just this set of prejudices, myths, and collective attitudes for those

embroiled in the colonial situation. Remembering Fanon’s definition of metaphysics

29 Lacan, Ècrits, 153.30 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 190.31 Ibid.,188.32 Ibid.,191.



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above, the ideology of the human is the justificatory apparatus underpinning the sets of

practices that operate within colonialism and beyond.

Corresponding analogically to blackness and whiteness is the dualism between

instincts and habits. Instincts being associated with body, they are biological and passed

along in the genetic material of sexual reproduction; habits being associated the social

body, they are cultural and passed along in the transmission of habitual practices across

generations. This dualism fits precisely with the myth of humanity whereby the black

body represents the instinctual, genital nature of man, while the white body is in fact no

body at all – it is disembodied, abstract, and universal. That is, whiteness is the absenceof color and therefore the absence of instinct; it represents the suspension of the organic

and animal nature in man, i.e., culture. The underbelly of the archetype, then, is precisely

that which is repressed in the course of culture, but it is also precisely that which returns

when least expected. The black, animal side of man is feared and repressed in the

ideology of humanity. Thus, Fanon writes:

This phobia is to be found on an instinctual, biological level. At the extreme, Ishould say that the Negro, because of his body, impedes the closing of the

postural schema of the white man – at the point, naturally, at which the black manmakes his entry into the phenomenal world of the white man…What is importantto us here is to show that with the Negro the cycle of the biological begins.” 33

Unable to achieve closure – that precious source of stability and reassurance – the white

schema begins to repress that which prevents the realization of its desire. This

determinate negation of the archetype, Fanon says, is just “an expression of the bad

instincts, of the darkness inherent in every ego, of the uncivilized savage, the Negro who

slumbers in every white man.”34 It is here that the second reading receives its strongest

33 Ibid.,160.34 Ibid.,187, my emphasis.



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support, to wit, that within every white – below their skin and below the surface of their

flesh – there is a black lurking underneath. This blackness is not literally the blackness of

skin color. Rather, it is the blackness of animality, of instinctual desires and needs; it is,

in short, the animal in man that is the observe of the archetype of the human in man.

According to this archetype, the human is sui genreand different in kind from other

animals; the human is the animal with logos, which sets them apart from the rest of the

natural world and is, in turn, the legitimating basis upon which culture, knowledge, and

the justified subjugation rests.

Stretching this skin to cover humanity in its existential predicament: within everyhuman there is an animal repressed, struggling to the surface, but whose continued

repression is the condition for the possibility of being human. The white mask, in this

sense, is the civilizing veneer of humanity that results from repressing man’s animality.

The black skin is this symbol of this animality within the metaphysics of whiteness and

the semiotics of colonialism, and it is by means of this symbol that domination and

oppression are accomplished. And so in the end, Fanon wants to reject this dualism of

white metaphysics while simultaneously holding on to the notion of humanity that forms

its legitimating basis. That is, Fanon wants to retain and assert his humanity amid the

raging inhumanity of the colonial situation. He says that,

“man is a yes…But man is also a no. No to scorn of man. Noto degradation of man. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human inman: freedom. Man’s behavior is not only reactional. And there is alwaysresentment in a reaction….To educate man to be actional , preserving in all hisrelations his respect for the basic values that constitute a human world, is the

prime task of him, who having taken thought, prepares to act.” 35

35 Ibid.,222.



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In this way, Fanon wants to retain the concept of humanity that sits at the heart of the

metaphysics of oppression that constitute the white, colonialist world. Finding himself

thrust into the world, Fanon recognizes that he has “one right alone: That of demanding

human behavior from the other.” 36 Maintaining the idea that there is such behavior,

Fanon rejects the notion that there is such a thing as a whiteworld: “There is no white

world, there is no white ethic, any more than there is white intelligence.” 37 Fanon’s

humanism, in other words, persists in spite of – or because of? – his analysis of the

consequences of that very concept, i.e., humanity, for the consciousness of the colonized

in the colonial situation.This existential reading of skins and masks, then, follows the general structure of

the more literal, racialized reading outlined above, while simultaneously being in tension

with it. That is, both retain metaphors of depth and surface: on top of black skins, white

masks are placed so as to enter the realm of humanity in the colonial predicament; on top

of the black skin that is the animal in man, there is a white mask of humanity that

civilizes the savage and carries culture forward in a progressive march toward an

inevitable destiny of authentic relations. In both cases, masks are signs of repression and

forgetfulness; they are the dissembling gesture of there being something more, of the

possibility of going beyond mere appearance, to the reality below.

So the structure of the metaphors in both interpretations is consistent, while their

consequences seem to be at odds. In other words, in the first interpretation the white

mask is ripped off, exposing the truth of blackness beneath, and in this process the project

of disalienation is brought to fruition. But in the second interpretation, when the white

36 Ibid.,229.37 Ibid.



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mask of Western metaphysics is removed, is seems as though what is left is the animality

of man unadorned – that we are animals aware of our nakedness and have learned to

communicate in a fairly sophisticated manner using language and signs and other tools.

Fanon, however, seems to resist the full import of this reading and seems to maintain that

he can deconstruct the metaphysics of man while simultaneously retaining a cogent

notion of humanity in the face of its overwhelming overdetermination by Western,

colonialist metaphysics.

While I have doubts about the success of such a project in theoretical terms alone,

the issues under analysis do not turn on matters of theory alone. Rather, the projectFanon initiates seems to be to be an absolutely critical one in working to reconstruct the

possibilities for human interaction in the present – that is, in the actual context of

colonialist, racist oppression. Whites and blacks, then, must come to recognize the

inhumanity of the colonial situation, which unequivocally persists to this day, and realize

how the metaphysics of humanity has worked to dehumanize both the colonizer and the

colonized. 38 Fanon writes in conclusion that:

Both must turn their backs on the inhuman voices which were those of their respective ancestors in order that authentic communication be possible. Before itcan adopt a positive voice, freedom requires an effort at disalienation. At the

beginning of his life a man is always clotted, he is drowned in contingency. Thetragedy of the man is that he was once a child .39

To understand this tragedy of childhood, then, requires a return to the mirror stage of

psychic development.

Lacan is most helpful in this regard when he says that the function of the mirror

stage “turns out…to be a particular case of the function of the imagos, which is to

38 Cf. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism(1955). Translated by Joan Pinkham. (New York: MonthlyReview Press, 2000): 35.39 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 231, my emphasis.



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establish a relationship between an organism and its reality.” It is in this establishment of

the original relation between ego and environment that the ineliminable alienation of

experience is first realized, thrusting the self into a world not of its own choice or

making. Because this stage is so central to understanding the project of disalienation

Fanon sets as his aim, it is worth citing Lacan at length:

This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projectsthe individual’s formation into history: the mirror stage is a drama whose internal

pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation – and for thesubject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that

proceed from 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.40

The mirror, in both a literal and a figurative sense, marks the entry point for the ego into

the world: it projects the individual into history and equips them with the tools of identity

that will figure its inexorable alienation from henceforth and forever more. But to

experience this projection requires eyes – one must look into the mirror before one can

see one’s self. When these eyes see themselves, an irretrievable moment of recognition

occurs that is at the same time a moment pregnant with the possibilities of self-

reconstruction. When the corporeal schema is fragmented, as it is in the oppressive

context of colonialism, what results is an “orthopedic form of its totality.” In this sense,

the body is not a body of flesh and skin, but a body of mere bones, the skeleton of a face

reflected in the mirror, eyes empty and hollow. For the colonial subject, then, an imago

emerges of an ego without eyes – or, more strangely still, an ego without an I. But again,

if Fanon succeeds in his project of disalienation, such an eye/I will be restored to the

colonized ego and a new form of humanity achieved. For, as Fanon says:

40 Lacan, Ècrits, 78.



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The eye is not merely a mirror, but a correcting mirror. The eye should make it possible for us to correct cultural errors. I do not say the eyes, I say the eye, andthere is no mystery about what the eye refers to; not to the crevice in the skull butto that very uniform light that wells out of the reds of Van Gogh, that glidesthrough a concerto of Tchaikovsky, that fastens itself desperately to Schiller’s

Ode to Joy, that allows itself to be conveyed by the worm-ridden bawling of Césaire. 41

This uniform light is the light of a universal humanity, purportedly unencumbered with

the oppressive weight of white civilization, which is able to recognize and correct itself in

the very action of seeing. In this way, the mirror and the eyes that look into it are able to

enter the universal at the exact moment they recognize their irreducible particularity and

absolute alienation.So while acknowledging and accepting the pragmatic implications of Fanon’s

humanism, there is nevertheless an uncomfortable conceptual ambiguity between the two

interpretations I have sketched. Thus, by way of conclusion I would only like to begin to

refigure the metaphorical trope of skins and masks with respect to identity formation

more generally, which aims to ameliorate the anxiety of this tension.

To do so, however, it important to note that between this specific metaphorical

dichotomy there is more a general structure of opposition at work. On the one side of the

structure are the natural or biological bases of self, sex, and skin color, while on the other

side are the social or cultural constructs that correspond to the former as identity, gender,

and race. There is, then, a binary formation by which surface and overlay, base and

superstructure, and reality and appearance are set against each other in rigid and

overdetermined ways. At work within this binary, moreover, is a type of modal

continuum ranging from determined necessity to contingent freedom. Obviously, and as

I have attempted to show throughout the course of this essay, this dichotomy is loaded 41 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 202.



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with normative and political implications that are difficult to overcome if the general

structure is maintained.

But the crucial point to notice is that these oppositions are metaphysical in

character precisely by their conditioning the possible ways in which we (are able to)

experience the world, understanding and explaining to each other and ourselves the

salient differences we find and make between us. It is not as if we are somehow slaves to

a metaphysics, so to speak, with the resulting project involving an emancipation from

metaphysics; the orders to which we are called in living are not orders that we can

somehow freely assent to. Rather, we are thrown into a particular matrix of time and place, within a nexus of material conditions that we are always born into, pace Lacan, by

way of an all-too-specific prematurity. Stepping into history unannounced, we take up

the grammar of the world as we find it and are habituated into it from the outset by means

of its inherited orders. Speaking specifically about gender, but with equal relevance for

the point at hand, Butler writes:

“To claim that the subject is itself produced in and as a…matrix of relations is notto do away with the subject, but only to ask after the conditions of its emergenceand operation. The ‘activity’ of this…cannot, strictly speaking, be a human act or expression, a willful appropriation, and it is certainly not a question of taking on amask ; it is the matrix through which all willing first becomes possible, itsenabling cultural condition”. 42

The taking on of a mask that Butler has in view here involves a particularly robust form

of agency that is the fulcrum around which Western metaphysics turns. To adequately

reconstruct such habits of metaphysics– just as agency is – thus does not involve a

wholesale rejection of the concept, but calls on us to account for the conditions through

42 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. (New York: Routledge, 1993): 7,second emphasis mine.



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which such habits appear at all. Noting the ways in which these habits constitute both the

psychic and material foundations of the world in which we actually live, Bourdieu says:

These dualisms, deeply rooted in things (structures) and in bodies, do not spring

from a simple effect of verbal naming and cannot be abolished by an act of performative magic, since…far from being simple ‘roles’ that can be played atwill..., are inscribed in bodies and in a universe from which they derive their strength. It is the order…that underlies the performative efficacy of words…andit is also the order…that resists the spuriously revolutionary redefinitions of subversive voluntarism.” 43

To be sure, a certain resistance is possible here, but it is a resistance circumscribed and

conditioned by so many previous significations, by so many actions that shaped the

course of future possibilities. Nietzsche, perhaps, captures the upshot of this best of all:For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from the flash and takes thelatter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were aneutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no “being” behind doing,effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed iseverything. 44

Resistance, then, is always a conditioned resistance of an actional nature – it is a

performance – the scope of which is determinate upon a given arrangement of material

and a certain ordering of possible activity. The potential meanings of this performance,

therefore, are constructions within limits, for as Butler is keen to point out, “construction

is neither a subject nor its act, but a process of reiteration by which both ‘subjects’ and

‘acts’ come to appear at all. There is no power that acts, but only a reiterated acting that

is power in its persistence and instability”. 45 Agency and subjectivity reveal themselves,

43 Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination. Translated by Richard Nice. (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 2001): 103.44 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: A PolemicTranslated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J.Hollingdale. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989): 45.45 Butler, Bodies that Matter,9.



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therefore, among and amid the contours of these possibilities, but they are cumulative,

supervenient names added to the movements made in the course of living particularity.

Thus, with respect to metaphysics and the metaphorical trope of skins and masks,

instead of maintaining the rigid dichotomy between skins and flesh, on the one hand, and

masks and identity, on the other, perhaps we would do well to consider the ways the skin

itself is a type of mask . Rather than being a surface upon which a mask is placed, the skin

is itself that which masks the depths of being flowing as a susurrus just below. Covering

organs and lumps and bulges of various shapes and sizes, skins mask the vague tragedies

unfolding in every corner of our bodies. In this sense, masks go all the way does, andskins cover every surface. Every skin is a mask of some sort or another, and every mask

is a skin. There is no ontological significance to the skins of our bodies, nor is there a sui

generisimportance to the masks of persona and identity that are worn to adorn them.

They do not represent some unmarked barrier beyond which we dare not go, nor does

their meaning stand in some sacred or authentic relation to what lies beneath. Skin

sloughs off. New layers rise and replenish the death always already occurring at the

surface of things. Masks morph in the course of their movement in place and time. Their

surface acquires new shapes and contours in response to the resistance encountered amid

bodies in motion and at rest.

Skins and masks, then, always occur in a derivative of the ecology of their origin,

namely, the stage. We must resist the hypostatization of skins and masks that thinks

them only in static abstraction, and account for their appearance in the contexts of theatre,

ritual, and performance from which they originate. To ask someone wearing a mask,

Who are you?is perhaps the ultimate irony only when we forget that the world is but a



stage with various scenes being staged within it. The world’s stages collide, scenes are

changed, new masks donned for old and new purposes. Held together by disparate skins

of narrative, masks cover and uncover eyes that see and voices that speak, always

concealing as they reveal the powers already calling the audience to order.

Perhaps in the end the death mask is the closest we can come to finding a material

mask that accomplishes such immaterial deeds?

But, no matter – thinking this way is merely meant to begin to extend a motion

beyond the various and sundry dualisms erected between essence and construction, which

have come by means of constitutive habituation to so saturate my experience that isalmost incomprehensible to think in their absence.

Need I resist? Should I resist?

No.

In what ways must I resist because I can?

In sum, Oscar Wilde is no doubt on to something when he says: “The truths of

metaphysics are the truths of masks.” 46

46 Oscar Wilde, Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Centenary Edition, 3 rd edition. (Glasgow:HarperCollins Publishers, 1994): 1173.

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