Fanon claims that Merleau-Ponty’s inclusive, unified notion of the corporeal schema exhibits an asymmetry and disunity

Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and The Difference of Phenomenology
from Per Caritatem by Cynthia R. Nielsen

Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema describes the way in which the body’s agency makes manifest the historical world. For Merleau-Ponty, our bodies are not objects in space, rather they inhabit space and through them we experience the world and the other. The relationship between body and world is one of mutual transformation, of “reciprocal transfer” (171). While one can certainly engage in theoretical reflection on the interplay between body and world (as I am right now), Weate directs our attention to the pre-theoretical interplay between the two that occurs in our everyday engagements in the world and which “engenders a coporealized conception of freedom” (171). In so far as the body is able to participate in and transform its historico-cultural horizon, it is free; in so far as its capacity for expression and its ability to alter its own history and given context are denied, it is not free.[1] As Weate explains,

“Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the corporeal schema leads implicitly to a conception of history as characterized essentially by difference. Each moment of a culture’s transfer across time through the agency of bodies is at the same time the site of its own differentiation. Moreover, there is therefore no ‘originary’ moment to any culture: every culture that attempts to assert its sameness across time has to repress the difference at work in its origin in very present” (171).

According to Weate, Merleau-Ponty’s general point seems to be that “the relation between agency and historical freedom” is intimately related to our habituation. That is, “it is a matter of habit and habituation that we perpetually contribute to the differentiation of our historical world (our “habitus”), from one moment’s action to the next” (171).

With this background in mind, we turn to Fanon’s text in order to explain why he substitutes schéma historico-racial and schéma épidermique racial for Merleau-Ponty’s notion of schéma corporel. Fanon argues that a phenomenology of blackness-the experience of skin difference and of being the black other-can only be understood in the encounter with whiteness or more precisely, the white imagination (171).[2]

That is, in a mostly black community in the Antilles, Fanon was “content to intellectualize these differences”; however, once he entered the white world and felt the weight of the “white gaze,” he experienced his otherness and became aware of pre-theoretical racial attitudes that up to that point had not existed for him (Fanon, 90). Fanon continues, making his first explicit references to Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema:

“In the white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in elaborating his body schema. The image of one’s body is solely negating. It’s an image in the third person. All around the body reigns an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. [...] A slow construction of my self as a body in a spatial and temporal world-such seems to be the schema. It is not imposed on me; it is rather a definitive structuring of my self and the world-definitive because it creates a genuine dialectic between my body and the world” (Fanon, 90-91).

As Weate explains, Fanon initially agrees with Merleau-Ponty’s claim that both the self and the world are constructed through the corporeal schema. However, it becomes evident that when applied to the “interracial encounter of black bodies in the west,” the corporeal schema fails.

“Beneath the body schema I had created a historical-racial schema. The data I used were provided not by ‘remnants of feelings and notions of the tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, or visual nature’ [Jean Lhermitte, L'image de notre corps, Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Critique, p. 17] but by the Other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories” (Fanon, 91).

Here Fanon claims that Merleau-Ponty’s inclusive, unified notion of the corporeal schema through which the self and world emerge in fact exhibits an asymmetry and disunity with regard to whites and blacks in their experience of and active participation the world.

“In the interracial encounter, the White is able to participate in the schematization of the world, whilst the Black may not, for his skin difference closes down the possibility of free agency. A with mythos inserts itself between the black body and its self-image, becoming the ‘elements used’ in a reflexive understanding of black subjectivity. In contesting the terms of Merleau-Ponty’s account of bodily freedom, Fanon provides a genealogy of the existential unfreedom of the black body in the racialized encounter” (172).
Notes
[1] Admittedly, I am speaking of the body in a reified way; however, body should not be understood as a res, but rather as a crucial aspect of the psychosomatic whole, which constitutes a human being.
[2] “As long as the black man remains on his home territory, except for petty internal quarrels, he will not have to experience his being for others” (Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. Rev. ed. Trans., Richard Philcox. (New York: Grove Press, 2008): 89.