1In this paper, we propose that Frantz Fanon’s analysis of language develops an immanent critique of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language. Frantz Fanon adopts a phenomenological approach to language from the perspective of linguistic experience, as lived by the speaking subject, rather than represented in the form of an object, that is, a semiological system or a system of signs. Fanon shares a phenomenological approach to language with Merleau-Ponty, whose lectures on language and communication at the University of Lyon he attended (1947-1948).
2However, the details of Fanon’s analysis are quite different from Merleau-Ponty’s, as are their respective subject positions: Fanon provides a phenomenological description of a Black subject speaking the language of the colonizer in a colonial setting, in contrast to a French metropolitan subject speaking their first, national language assumed by Merleau-Ponty. Although these two speakers and scholars share a focus on the French language, their lived experiences of speaking and listening are remarkably different, as are their differing social positions as a citizen of the colony and/or the metropole respectively. Motivated by the difference of positionality, Fanon transforms the phenomenological method in order to account for the Black speaking subject’s experience through his sociogenic account of language in a colonial context.
3Fanon contextualizes the speaking subject in a particular socioeconomic and political milieu: that of a subject whose origin story includes the French Antillean colonial “department” of Martinique. Fanon’s account centers the situation, location, and exact language of the speaking community, whereas Merleau-Ponty does not specify the situation, location, nor the spoken language tacitly assumed in his account. As such, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy assumes an aura of a general, quasi-universal understanding of language in contrast to the acknowledged situatedness and specificity of Fanon’s account.
4We propose to consider Merleau-Ponty’s ontogenetic (individual-centered) account of speaking subjectivity through the lens of Fanon’s sociogenetic (sociohistorical relations of power) understanding to reveal the implicit colonial assumptions present in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. We detail the historical context of the encounter between Fanon and Merleau-Ponty in the first section: Langue and parole, synchrony and diachrony. We describe Merleau-Ponty’s introduction to Saussure’s semiology and its impact on his phenomenology of language – as evident in the collection of essays compiled into Sense and Non-Sense (1948) and the course on language and communication Merleau-Ponty taught at the University of Lyon (1947-1948). Fanon attended these lectures and was familiar with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language. According to the latter, the French colonial language has a robust diachronic dimension, as its history, literary significance, and cultural import are widely recognized; in contrast, the language of the colonized tends to be relegated to a synchrony without diachrony, as the historical past, literary significance, and cultural import of Creole are denied and erased by the colonizer. We discuss how the devaluation of Creole and the hypervaluation of French play out within Fanon’s critique of the Saussurian-inspired account of language Merleau-Ponty provides in the Lyon lectures and in the “Metaphysical in Man”, an essay in the Sense and Non-Sense collection that was part of Fanon’s personal library.
5In the second section of the paper: Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity, we turn to “The Body as Expression, and Speech” chapter from Phenomenology of Perception, which offers a more detailed presentation of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas already found in the lectures. While Merleau-Ponty does not overtly espouse colonialism, his account construes language in a manner consistent with French colonial practices and is reflective of the position of a colonial subject living in the French metropole. We shall see that Fanon’s account of language from the perspective of a speaking subject subjected to French colonialism offers a powerful immanent critique of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding, challenging notably the assumptions about subjectivity and intersubjectivity that reflect the relation between the family and the state in the European colonial society.
6Further, we thematize a connection between Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the body-schema and what we call a language-schema, that is, an intuitive non-representational modality through which habitual linguistic sense is expressed. Drawing on Fanon’s analysis of how the body-schema of a colonized Black subject is replaced by a historical-racial schema and then collapses into an epidermal-racial schema, we argue that the language-schema is similarly an historical-racial and epidermal-racial construction for a Black colonized speaking subject. We detail the implications of being subjected to a racialized language schema in Fanon’s phenomenology and consider the latter’s implications for future developments of critical phenomenologies of language.
7Fanon was familiar with Merleau-Ponty’s work in phenomenology of language. In addition to The Structure of Behavior, his personal library included a copy of Sense and Non-Sense (published in French in 1948), a collection of essays, which includes “The Metaphysical in Man” (Fanon 2018: 745). The latter essay, originally published in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale in 1947, marks Merleau-Ponty’s introduction to Saussure’s semiology. In the same year, Merleau-Ponty began a course on Communication et language at the University of Lyon, which Fanon attended (Beauvoir 1965: 314). While Merleau-Ponty focused on language already in Phenomenology of Perception (1945), notably in the chapter “The Body as Expression, and Speech,” he examined it as a gestural expression and bodily articulation that resonated deeply with Husserl’s phenomenology of subjectivity and intersubjectivity (notably in the emphasis on the non-representational ownness or mineness of sense in experience and the coupling-like character of communication) (Merleau-Ponty 2012). By the time of the 1947-1948 Lyon lectures, “Saussure’s semiology had begun to take effect on Merleau-Ponty’s thinking,” in a clear sign of a developing intersection between phenomenology and structuralism (Silverman 1979: 168-181; Stawarska 2015). It was this intersectional, subject- and structure-based approach to language, that provided Fanon with an academic introduction for his own explicit engagement with language in chapter one of Black Skin, White Masks, “The Black Man and Language”. To borrow Lewis Gordon’s term, Fanon studied language in the phenomenological tradition by wanting to explain the Black subject’s experience (Gordon 1996, 2015).
8While we do not have first-hand descriptions of their encounter, Simone de Beauvoir details that “Fanon had attended Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy classes without ever speaking to him; he found him distant” (Beauvoir 1965: 314). Even though Beauvoir’s comment about perceived distance is very brief, it may point toward a lack of reciprocity between an established French scholar and a Black Francophone student of phenomenology. Arguably, this interpersonal dissonance reflects the larger difference of subject positions between colonial and colonized subjects, which is ultimately reflected in their theoretical works on language and communication. A lack of emotional responsiveness is echoed in Fanon’s descriptions of the difficulty encountered by many Martinicans who left their home ground of the then colonial “department” of France to study and work in the French metropole. As he notes, a Black subject living in Europe is made to feel inferior; he “feels the weight of his melanin” (Fanon 1991: 127-128). Described in psychoanalytic terms, the Black man is a “phobogenic” object, a trigger of fear and fascination for the white public. Fanon’s encounter with Merleau-Ponty did not break with this larger societal trend.
- 1 Our engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s lectures is indirect in that we draw on Silverman’s English-lan (...)
9Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on Language and Communication remain unpublished, but Silverman’s summary of student lecture notes provides a detailed overview of the three main areas covered: (a) the critique of scientism in the human sciences, including linguistics; (b) the relationship between language and thought; (c) the role of the speaking subject in communication (Silverman 1979: 168-181).1 In this section, we focus on the effect of Saussure’s semiology for Merleau-Ponty’s ideas developed especially in relation to (a) and (b), and on their critical uptake in Fanon’s philosophy of language from a Black subject’s experiential and epistemic position.
10The critique of scientism challenges the naïve methodology of human sciences that leads to the tendency to study their object in an artificial detachment from the scientistic subject – as if it were comparable to a mineral placed in a magnetic field. This vulgar realism can be found across human sciences like psychology, sociology, and history, but it is also evident in linguistics. In the latter, “Language is turned into a thing” (Silverman 1979: 169) – that is, a self-standing system of laws whose interplay is thought to capture the basic facts of language. Merleau-Ponty’s objection to this scientistic approach draws on reflections developed already in “Metaphysical in Man,” where he concluded that “metaphysics is the opposite of system” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 94). Differently put, any attempt to posit a system “suppresses metaphysical consciousness and, moreover, does away with morality”, that is, it forgets that a linguist speaks a language, a sociologist is a member of society, and a historian dwells in history (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 94). It is because and not despite of this entanglement of the subject in the object under study that they come to understand it and are able to theorize about it. Importantly, metaphysical consciousness includes also the moral consideration of a life shared with others – what Merleau-Ponty describes as “the common fate which men share and their oneness, which is not merely a biological resemblance but is a similarity in their most intimate nature”; as a result, science lies in proximity to philosophy as well as religion (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 98). In sum, metaphysical consciousness indicates a reclamation of human subjectivity – both in the sense of a knowing subject and a morally responsive one.
11Adopting the lens of metaphysical consciousness, Merleau-Ponty receives Saussure’s semiology as an approach that legitimates «the perspective of the speaking subject who lives in his language (and who may in some cases change it) (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 87). Importantly, neither the subject nor the language system can claim to be “the only reality”; even if a speaking subject modifies the language, the novel modes of expression must be comprehensible to others; it follows that linguistics as a discipline “finds itself confronted by the task of going beyond the alternative of language as a thing and language as the product of the speaking subjects” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 87). Speaking subjects find themselves “surrounded” by language, with its inertia and internal logic, as well as a relative openness to subjective initiative.
12Scholars of language find themselves situated therefore in the midst of a dialectic, and the latter informs how Merleau-Ponty interprets the famed oppositional pairings from Saussure’s semiology, such as the distinction between synchrony and diachrony. While diachrony pertains to the historical developments of world languages (for example, the passage from Latin to old French to modern French), synchrony indicates an atemporal structure or alternatively a time-slice of a given language (for example, a cross-section of contemporary French). Following Jakobson’s interpretation of synchrony and diachrony as being far from irreconcilable opposites, Merleau-Ponty deliberately reconciles the dialectical tension between them by means of the category of “a lived language”. Silverman notes that “a lived language” (langage vécu) like French both has its historical origins in Latin and is the language spoken by contemporaneous individuals» (Silvermann 1979: 170). Dia-chrony indicates a perspective that traces linguistic developments across time, while syn-chrony considers contemporaneous arrangements of linguistic elements at a given time. The distinction is methodological and does not indicate an ontological split within the sphere of language itself.
13Similarly for the distinction between the language system (la langue) and speech (la parole). Language exists only in and through speaking subjects and it involves a process of temporal becoming that allows for subjective initiative and innovation. In the lectures, Merleau-Ponty compares it to a symphony.
There is the musical score and there is the particular orchestra that is playing the symphony. Language [la langue] is the totality of permanent principles. Speech [la parole] is the totality of what people say, the initiatives of all those who speak the language in question. There is an interdependence between language and speech, which can be studied synchronically – at a particular time or period. But again one must be wary of studying language as a reality-in-itself. Because there is a multiplicity of speaking subjects, language must envelop each one. Language is a means which is offered to each subject – so that both will understand. (Silverman 1979: 176)
14Consider now how Fanon revises Saussure’s semiology (interpreted in a phenomenological vein) from the lens of a colonized Black subject speaking the French language in a metropolitan context. Here the langue-parole distinction maps onto one between the official colonial language, on the one hand, and the colonized speaking subject who is assumed to be speaking pidgin (petit-nègre) and is routinely addressed as such, on the other. Contrary to Merleau-Ponty’s metaphysical morality of intersubjective sharing and oneness, there is a steep hierarchy between cultural insiders deemed to have a rightful access to the French language, and the outsiders who are marked by presumed linguistic and cultural inferiority. Similarly, diachrony is “on the side of” the colonial language, with its recognized and valued national history, literary civilization and culture, while the colonized arrivals from a French “department” in the metropole seem bereft of their own long historical past and a comparable indigenous civilization and culture – their temporal and cultural standpoint is a synchrony without diachrony, an orality without patrimony.
15Fanon writes that, “To speak means being able to use a certain syntax and possessing the morphology of such and such a language, but it means above all assuming a culture and bearing the weight of a civilization” (1991: 1-2). From a Black colonized subject’s perspective, the French language (la langue) is not interdependent with one’s speech (la parole), and one’s speech is not simply a contemporaneous expression of its linguistic and cultural history by one of its many equal subjects. The French language (la langue) is assumed by a colonized subject as a passport to (the French) culture and civilization, to which the speaking (la parole) of French Creole is a separate if not opposed act. (French Creole, spoken informally in the Antilles, is an amalgam of French, English, Spanish and African languages; while heavily influenced by the French, it tends to be looked down upon in a colonial context as its bastardized and incorrect version; the Creole speaking practice (la parole) is therefore not considered to be interdependent with the recognized French language (la langue) but solely derivative). Fanon observes that upon arrival in France, the colonized have their «local cultural originality […] committed to the grave»; due to a devaluation of indigenous customs, ways of life, style of dress (for example, the colorful Antillean headscarf, madras), cuisine, and speech, they “position themselves in relation to the language of the civilizing nation: i.e., of the metropolitan culture” (Fanon 1991: 2; translation revised). A Black colonized subject does not speak French to deploy linguistic initiative in relation to a hospitable and innovative medium, but to “escape the bush” (Fanon 1991: 2). Speaking proper French for a Black colonized subject means acceding, as if for the first time, to culture and thereby “appropriating the white world” (Fanon 1991: 19). Understandably, the Antillean is very fond of speaking good French (Fanon 1991: 10) – “it is the key to open doors which only fifty years ago remained closed to him” (Fanon 1991: 21).
16Yet as Fanon demonstrates, the acquisition of “good French” by a colonized Black subject is a deeply fraught and alienating process. A case in point is that of Black subjects being routinely and obstinately addressed in pidgin (petit-nègre) by white French speakers, regardless of their own customary expression and preference. Fanon analyzes this ordinary everyday linguistic interaction through the following lens: 1) linguistic paternalism/infantilism: “A white man talking to a person of color behaves exactly like a grown up with a kid, simpering, murmuring, fussing, and coddling” (1991: 14); 2) linguistic primitivism: “To speak petit-nègre to a Black (à un nègre) is insulting, for it means he is the-one-who-speaks-petit-nègre (celui-qui-parle- petit-nègre). [...] [I]t is precisely this offhand manner, this casualness, the ease with which they classify him, imprison him, primitivize him, anti-civilize him, that is insulting” (Fanon 1991: 15; translation revised).
17Importantly, Fanon documents an obstinate imposition of pidgin (petit-nègre) by white French speakers when addressing Black subjects, even when a Black subject manifestly speaks “good French”. He recounts the following anecdote to illustrate it:
You’re traveling by train and ask:
— Excuse me, could you please tell me where the restaurant car is?
— Yes, sonny boy, you go corridor, you go straight, go one car… you there. (Fanon 1991: 18)
18The insistence to speak pidgin to a Black subject indicates a social function of superiority and exclusion enacted by a white speaker. Ultimately the latter communicates this message: “You, stay where you are” (Fanon 1991; 17). Speaking the “inferior” language to Black subjects is an attempt of “tying him [a Black subject] to an image, snaring him (l’engluer), imprisoning him” (Fanon 1991: 18). Speaking pidgin “means trapping (enfermer) the Black subject” in a conflictual and toxic relation with whites (Fanon 1991: 18; translation revised).
19Black directed pidgin works to impose and police the border between the colonial language (la langue), which is hypervalued, and the colonized speech (la parole) of pidgin, which is both devalued and enforced on Black speakers by the dominant white class. The pursued separation between la langue and la parole thus serves to maintain social hierarchies between the colonizing and the colonized cultures; if the Black Francophone subject can remain linguistically imprisoned, he will be positioned culturally, socially and economically at the margins of the French metropolis. His dialectal speech will remain a mere orality that does not penetrate the patrimony of the French language and culture; French will be always a second language for the colonized Martinican subject, without there being a (recognizable) first one.
20Consider now a reverse scenario:
When I meet a German or a Russian speaking bad French I try to indicate through gestures the information he is asking for, but in doing so I am careful not to forget that he has a language of his own (une langue propre), a country, and that perhaps he is a lawyer or an engineer back home. Whatever the case, he is a foreigner with different norms. (Fanon 1991: 17; translation revised)
21Fanon’s own orientation to a foreigner embodies the moral recognition of “a similarity in their most intimate nature” highlighted by Merleau-Ponty (1964: 89). It is an expression of a cardinal belief that others, like me, may have advanced degrees, professional careers, and a mastery of their own language/s. Their difficulties with the French language do not undermine this basic belief in a shared humanity. This belief is withheld from a subject who looks like him: “There is nothing comparable when it comes to the Black man. He has no culture, no civilization, and no ‘long historical past’ (long passé d’histoire)” (Fanon 1991: 17; 1952: 31).
22The denial of civilization and culture to a Black colonized subject is coupled with a denial of history, which includes history in a linguistic sense. The colonized linguistic diachrony does not show up to a colonial perspective, due arguably to an absence of a great literature in the French Creole, or due to its dismissal as great literature, or due to the dismissal of Creole as being capable of carrying out great literature. The colonial linguistic diachrony is elevated to the status of a cultural “universal,” while the colonized synchrony is trapped in the present of an individual life. Instead of a seamless interdependence between synchrony and diachrony, the living present and the “long historical past,” the colonized speaking subject must make a case for the existence of a Black civilization – an important endeavor of the Negritude movement.
23In sum, Fanon’s phenomenology rooted in the perspective of the Black colonized speaking subject is an intervention that performs, among others, an immanent critique of Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Saussure’s semiology. The Black subject experiences a disjunction between the expected practice of speaking French Creole and the sole recognition of standard French as official language; this disjunction enforces the social hierarchy of the colonizing and colonized groups, and it re-entrenches the inferiority complex that colonized people experience as a result of their subjection to a “civilizing” process (Fanon 1991: 2). Fanon documents that the inferiorization of the colonized is, partly, a linguistic process that interrupts the usual seamless transition between language (la langue) and speech (la parole). Importantly, linguistic interactions between the colonial and the colonized speakers, such as the imposition of pidgin, contribute to the inferiorizing process; the latter is therefore not solely a state-sponsored, top-down imposition, but an element of everyday life. Similarly, the Black colonized subject experiences a disjunction of synchrony and diachrony due to a denial of indigenous culture, civilization, and a long historical past. This denial plays out in daily linguistic interactions, for example, in the contrast between a respectful address to a white European visitor struggling with French, and the paternalism directed at a Black subject who is “talked down to” like a child – as if their first language was a playful babble and their life an extended period of linguistic infancy. The disjunction between speech and language, synchrony and diachrony, does not mean that the Black speaking subject described by Fanon is reminiscent of classical phenomenology where subjectivity is “the only reality.” Rather, this disjunction animates a critique of the linguistic alienation that this subject is likely to experience by the colonial imposition of official language and history by the other who continually denies the similarity in our intimate nature.
24Phenomenology of Perception, especially the chapter “The Body as Expression, and Speech” contains a more detailed presentation of Merleau-Ponty’s views on language in its relation to subjectivity. This account of language offers an ontogenetic, phenomenological approach from the position of the individual speaking subject. While Merleau-Ponty does not overly espouse colonialism, his ideas about language fit seamlessly into the French colonial situation. What we will call “the coloniality of language” is a theoretical position that resonates with the experience and situated knowledge of a colonial subject rather than a colonized one. The ontogenic approach tacitly assumes a continuity between the subject, the family, and the state that the sociogenic account of language provided by Fanon does not take for granted. The subject in Merleau-Ponty’s account is recognized by others as a speaker endowed with a birthright to the official language, whereas the colonized others are not expected/permitted to speak it with authority and hence are not allowed to reap the benefits of power and prestige that come with it.
25As discussed above, Merleau-Ponty critiques semiology for treating language in a vulgar realist manner as an object or a representation. Instead, Merleau-Ponty adopts the perspective of a speaking subject for whom language is the manifestation of thought. He writes, “For the speaker [...] speech does not translate a ready-made thought; rather, speech accomplishes thought […] the person listening receives the thought from the speech itself” (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 183-184). No need for a private thought-process to precede a public vocal expression, since speech accomplishes thought; that is “why the thinking subject himself is in a sort of ignorance of his thoughts so long as he has not formulated them for himself” (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 183). The speaking subject materializes their thoughts through language, and language cannot be adequately considered outside of its expressive use by subjects. Speech as the accomplishment of thought “contains its own sense”; speech does not “designat[e] the object or the thought” rather it “become[s] the presence of this thought in the sensible world” (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 187, 189).
26Additionally, Merleau-Ponty describes language in similar ways to the body schema – or what we will call the language schema. By beginning from the experience of the speaking subject, Merleau-Ponty highlights that language is gestural and akin to facial and bodily expression; he states, “speech is a genuine gesture and, just like all gestures, speech too contains its own sense” (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 189). Just as the subject does not need to rely upon a representation of the external world and a representation of one’s own body in order to move through the world, the subject does not need a representation of language in order to speak it. Rather, Merleau-Ponty argues that “it is enough that I possess [the word’s] articulatory and sonorous essence as one of the modulations or one of the possible uses of my body. I relate to the word just as my hand reaches for the place on my body being stung. The word has a certain place in my linguistic world, it is part of my equipment” (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 186). Speaking a language is therefore grounded in a language-schema that, just like the body-schema involved in the motricity and spatiality of the body-subject navigating the environment, provides the speaker with an intuitive non-representational capacity that underlies habitual expression of linguistic sense. Note that assumed in this account is a linguistic transparency – linguistic sense appears seamless and unobtrusive, even natural.
27Furthermore, language is akin to facial and bodily expression as manifest by the shared gestures from historic and cultural contexts. As Merleau-Ponty suggests, there are shared conventional expressions of emotion within particular milieus; for example, “When angry, the Japanese person smiles, whereas the Westerner turns red and stamps his foot, or even turns pale and speaks with a shrill voice” (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 195). These particular emotive gestures have culturally and historically formed meanings. Thus, the body-schema and the language-schema are culturally and historically contextual, drawing from shared, intersubjective understandings of meanings of bodily modalities. Importantly just as language manifests sense, the bodily gestures are not representations of anger, but are expressions of anger itself.
28Merleau-Ponty largely follows the classical phenomenological understanding of how sense or meaning emerges – the subject constitutes sense outward, into the world. As regards expression in language, he describes it as “in itself secreting a ‘sense’ that does not come from nowhere, projecting this sense upon its material surroundings, and communicating it to other embodied subjects” (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 203). The subject appears therefore to be in full possession of sense before it is communicated to others; communication of one’s linguistic intention to the other should follow as a natural next step to its expression.
29Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language tacitly assumes that the subject, the family, and the state are situated on a continuum. As Fanon observes (in a distinct but related context of psychoanalytic approaches to neurosis): “In Europe, and in every so-called civilized or civilizing country the family represents a piece of the nation […] There is no disproportion between family life and the life of the nation” (Fanon 1991: 121). Importantly, the continuity between familial and national structures applies to social laws, principles and values (for example, parental authority is a model of state authority), as well as language (language spoken at home is the national language) (Fanon 1991: 191-192). Specifically, it dictates what we will describe as a monolingualism of the maternal language, that is, 1) an assumption that the speaking subject possesses one language proper, 2) this language is the maternal language acquired and spoken in the family, as well as the official language of the nation-state, deployed in the educational system and state institutions.
30The monolingualism of the maternal is assumed in Phenomenology of Perception, as well as the Lyon lectures on Language and Communication. Merleau-Ponty states: “We can speak several languages, but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order to fully assimilate a language, it would be necessary to take up the world it expresses, and we never belong to two worlds at the same time” (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 193). The monolingual subject cannot travel between worlds; this subject can acquire a second (or a third) language – for example the French-speaking subject might learn German to ease travelling to a neighboring country, but they would remain situated linguistically and culturally in the French home-world and need to translate foreign words and values into the familiar “native” idiom.
31As Fanon’s study of language in Black Skin, White Masks reveals, for the Martinican subject colonized by the French empire, there are (at least) two language-worlds at work. The colonial French language-world is imposed onto the colonized by the state, the educational system, and the intersubjective world. The imposed language-world is inconsistent with the maternal and familial language world of Creole. Merleau-Ponty’s linguistic theory does not acknowledge the power dynamics of the colonial encounter wherein an imperial language-world is imposed, and the speaking subject subjected to a foreign national language different from the maternal language of the home. In the latter case, the national linguistic structure does not reflect the family structure, and the speaking subject is at home in two worlds.
32The monolingualism assumed by Merleau-Ponty reflects the familial and national positioning of the speaking subject as a first-class citizen of the French metropolitan state, rather than as a member of the colonized people who are divided between the native home world of the Caribbean and the world of the colonizing French state. Colonial subjection means that the mother/child dyad and the state do not speak the same language. As a result of this discontinuity between familial and national worlds, the colonized do not enjoy a birthright to the French language – even if they master it. From the standpoint of the colonized speaking subject, the colonial language is not fully “one’s own,” that is, it is not included as a part of the mineness that Merleau-Ponty assumes via Husserl. In Fanon’s account, the colonial language is an alienating, dispossessing structure rather than an indication of ownership and originary oneness.
33Monolingualism of the maternal language is assumed in the Lyon lectures as well. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that “even if I speak a foreign language, I retain my maternal language. We are not subjected to any language” (Silverman 1979: 177). The unexamined assumption here is that colonial subjects who as a matter of fact are not subjected to a language provide the template for the “we” of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of language and subjectivity. This “we” is non-inclusive since it excludes the colonized who are in fact subjected to the “civilizing” language of the colonizer. The colonial speaking subjects retain their maternal language in the greater social world, in agreement with the continuum between familial and national structures. The colonized speaking subjects are looked down upon when speaking their familial language, which is consistently inferiorized as pidgin in relation to the dominant French. The former is therefore at risk of becoming extinct. We will address Fanon’s account of this process in more detail next.
34Fanon opens chapter one, “The Black Man and Language” by stating:
We attach a fundamental importance to the phenomenon of language (phénomène du langage) and consequently consider the study of language necessary for providing us elements in understanding the Black man’s dimension of being for others (la dimension pour-autrui de l’homme de couleur). To speak is to exist absolutely for the other. (Fanon 1991: 1)
35Fanon is in agreement with Merleau-Ponty that language is a phenomenon, and as such necessitates recourse to speaking subjectivity. In difference from Merleau-Ponty’s classical phenomenological framing of speech as a signifying process in the first-person singular mode of subjective expression, Fanon explains that for a Black colonized subject, speaking exists always already in an intersubjective register. Furthermore, speaking is not a simply a mode of communicating ready-made subjective intention to the other, but, contrary to Merleau-Ponty, it is a way of finding oneself subjected to the language of the other, the sole mode of speaking recognized as a language proper (rather than a mere dialect). Language is therefore situated in the world of colonial subjection from the start.
36Recall that the Black Antillean subjects “position themselves in relation to the civilizing language: i.e. the metropolitan culture” (Fanon 1991: 2). They are subjected to the French language, which brings with it a culture, a world, “the weight of a civilization” (Fanon 1991: 2). Subjection to the French language is therefore part of a colonial imposition of the French worldview, for example in the educational system and the state-run institutions. However, the imposition of the “official” state colonial language extends to their own familial, maternal and intimate language for the colonized, especially the middle class. The French Creole is devalued in public spaces as well as at home, and the French language is hypervalued across the board (Fanon 1991: 10). Fanon observes that, “In the French Antilles the bourgeoisie does not use Creole, except when speaking to servants. At school the young Martinican is taught to treat the dialect with contempt (mépriser le patois). One speaks of Creolisms. Some families forbid speaking Creole at home, and mothers call their children little ragamuffins (tibandes) for using it” (Fanon 1991: 4; translation revised).
37In the lived experience of a Martinican subject, the familial language of the French Creole and the official language of the state are at odds – there is not one maternal/national language but at least two. Furthermore, the language of the home is situated at the bottom of a hierarchy in relation to the “civilizing” language, French. This so much the case that mothers may chastise their children for using the “maternal” language, especially if they aspire toward upward class mobility. In the words of the French Guianese poet Léon-Gontran Damas, the French Caribbean mother issues an interdiction to her child:
Shut up I told you you have to speak French
The French from France
The Frenchman’s French
French French (Damas 1972: 24; cited in Fanon 1991: 4)
38This internalized indictment of the French Creole as being socially, economically, and linguistically inferior to “French French” suggests that it is on a path toward eventual extinction. Fanon is agreement with Michel Leiris that “Creole seems destined sooner or later to become a relic of the past” (Fanon 1991: 11).
39Fanon’s devalorization of Creole may be surprising considering that the imposition of the “civilizing” French language is an instrument of the inferiorization of the colonized (Fanon 1991: 2). It is likely that his own experience being socialized in the colonial educational system in Martinique inflects this account. As a biographer David Macey writes, “At primary school, Fanon had made good progress but he had done so at a price. Like any other child, he was discouraged from speaking the Creole that is in effect the first language of any Martinican” (Macey 2000: 74). Fanon concurs: “Elementary-school teachers keep a close eye on their pupils to make sure they are not speaking Creole” (Fanon 1991: 11). Fanon’s experience as a subject of a colonial regime thus reinforced the divide between familial and national structures: “the family does [not] represent a piece of the nation” (Fanon 1991: 121). This ban was deeply racialized, as Macey contends: “In Martinique, the ban on speaking Creole resulted in a conflation of linguistic and racial problems” (Macey 2000: 74). Fanon “had been taught that [Creole] was not a language, but a patois that was midway between petit-nègre (literally ‘little-negro’, this is the French equivalent to pidgin English) and French” (Macey 2000: 74). The maternal patois was therefore to be outgrown when school child becomes adult; it is of note that Fanon himself refers to Creole as a “dialect” and to French as a language in Black Skin, White Masks.
40In the later work, Fanon’s views changed somewhat and he embraced Creole as an “expression of Antillean consciousness.” Specifically, in “The Caribbean, the Birth of a Nation?”, he observes that a cultural renaissance is “manifesting itself on the intellectual level in Haiti, the French Antilles and the British West Indies, where precisely a common language ‘Creole’ (a mixture of French, English, Spanish, and African dialects) is a link and a better means of expressing the Caribbean consciousness” (Fanon 2018: 586). One could lament that contrary to his compatriot, Edouard Glissant (1997), Fanon expresses no faith in Creolisms in the highly influential Black Skin, White Masks. He merely diagnoses the symptoms associated with assuming the white mask of French coloniality and wielding the dominant language as “an extraordinary power”, a “key to open doors” to French society (Fanon 1991: 2, 21). While the Antillean subjects have the choice of rejecting Europe and holding on to the Martinican Umwelt, Fanon states that it is “with the help of French” that they are able to “aim at a certain degree of universalism in their conclusions” (Fanon 1991: 20). Yet the language that opens doors and aspires to the universal is simultaneously a cause of alienation for the colonized Black subjects who are denied a birthright to the civilizing language in an anti-Black society. Their lived experience of speaking is therefore a dispossession by the other, not an originary ownness. Insofar as Fanon describes the lived experience of colonial subjection via language, his fatalistic framing of French Creole makes sense within the colonial framework that is the colonized subject’s own.
41Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of intersubjectivity in Phenomenology of Perception and the Lyon lectures is predicated on a harmonious reciprocity between subjects. Successful communication and mutual understanding are achieved when subjects reciprocate one another’s intentions. In this reciprocated encounter, each subject confirms the other. Merleau-Ponty states: “Communication or the understanding of gestures is achieved through the reciprocity between my intentions and the other person’s gestures, and between my gestures and the intentions which can be read in the other person’s body. […] I confirm the other person, and the other person confirms me” (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 190-191). Similarly, Merleau-Ponty observes in the Lyon lectures: “We take up and silently reaccomplish the intentions of the person who speaks” (Silverman 1979: 177). Understanding the other’s language use when listening to them requires following the intention of the other’s linguistic gesture, and, if one is speaking, requires the other’s willingness to follow one’s own gestures in turn. Implied in this account is a mutual mirroring that enables effective intersubjective communication.
42The Lyon lectures largely follow this enunciation of the intersubjective but are informed by insights from Saussure’s semiology. While Merleau-Ponty continues to emphasize that “Language is carried by intersubjectivity,” it is also important to note that, following Saussure, “To speak does not mean that one makes use of a sum of discrete words” (Silverman 1976: 176). Language is a system of non-separable signs, and it defies the earlier nomenclature theory that regards linguistic units as nomen, that is, as self-standing names signifying a simple idea (for example, of a horse or a tree) in an arbitrary or unmotivated manner. Saussure argued that in addition to arbitrary linguistic signification, “Language is a creation of linguistic values” (Silverman 1979: 177); linguistic values indicate a non-arbitrary manner in which a language maps signification, and it resists complete translation from one language to another. Following Saussure’s linguistics, communication does not reduce to conveying signifying intention from one speaker to another by using signs; what is communicated far exceeds subjective intention and it includes properties of the language system itself. Linguistic communication is therefore situated at the intersection of phenomenology and structuralism/post-structuralism. Fanon expands this intersectional understanding by noting that linguistic communication exceeds subjective intention, and it “communicates” race relations and colonial subjection of inferiorized social groups (“You stay where you are”) (Fanon 1991: 17; cited above). Linguistic communication is therefore situated at the intersection of intersubjectivity and social relations of power.
43Merleau-Ponty largely inherits his account of intersubjectivity from Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation, wherein Husserl emphasizes the mineness/ownership of experience, or an epoché of all that is alien to the subject, leaving behind, intact, what is one’s own (Husserl 1960: 95, 100; Silverman 1979: 177). Through this formulation of subjectivity – all that is mine or all that is not alien – intersubjectivity is reached through a kind of “pairing” or coupling of subjectivities that recognize the other as an “animate bodily organism”. (Husserl 1960: 113, 124). This intersubjective encounter depends upon both subjectivities’ recognition of the other as an origin of another mineness, one that is inaccessible to the self; further, through this pairing, the subject recognizes the other as co-constituting one’s world. Husserl argues against a solipsistic construal of phenomenology by emphasizing that the world is always already intersubjective and subjects encounter each other as that-which-is-not-mine (Husserl 1960: 89-91). The Lyon lectures largely follow Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity (Silverman 1979: 177). This can be seen in Merleau-Ponty’s comments that subjects couple or mirror each other in linguistic communication; pairing is in fact exemplary of intersubjective communication in language. Silverman writes, “The behavior of others allows a coupling […] Similarly, my speech couples itself to the language of others” (Silverman 1979: 177).
44Merleau-Ponty’s Husserlian account of intersubjectivity assumes a fundamental equality between subjects and an open willingness to reciprocate and to be reciprocated by the other. The subject and the other are both willing to recognize each other as subjects co-constituting the world. As such, these subjects share an experience through a closed circuit of co-constituted experience. This construal is troubled by Fanon’s account of intersubjectivity which highlights that encounters in a colonial context are rife with a lack of reciprocity and a refusal of recognition by the other. Colonial subjects largely do not reciprocate but rather inferiorize the colonized subject in interpersonal encounters; previously discussed insistence to address the colonized in the “inferior” language (petit-nègre) provides an example of such a refusal of reciprocity. Instead of reciprocating the manifest intention to converse in “good French”, the colonial subject may use truncated expressions from the French Creole to “communicate” incredulity or a denial that the colonized could ever master the language of the empire. Rather than listening to the communicate intention of a subject who asks directions to the restaurant car and mirror the request by providing relevant information in a seamless exchange, the colonial subject foregrounds the racialized visual appearance of the speaker and mockingly “mirrors” their presumed concomitant linguistic inferiority (Fanon 1991: 18). The exchange is an attempt of “imprisoning the Black man and perpetuating a conflictual situation” (Fanon 1991: 18); the speaker is being interrogated and caricatured by the other without pairing.
45Similarly, Fanon demonstrates the lack of reciprocity in the exchanges between the French subject who adopts a paternalistic and inferiorizing attitude towards the Black speaking subject. “A white man talking to a person of color behaves exactly like a grown-up with a kid, simpering, murmuring, fussing, and coddling” (Fanon 1991: 18). This manner of speech is “an attempt to reach down to [the Black subject],” and it is insulting because it echoes the colonial construction of the “the Black man as the missing link in the slow evolution from ape to man” (Fanon 1991: 1); this compulsory casual way of speaking down to the Black subject is “imprison[ing] him at an uncivilized and primitive level” (Fanon 1991: 15). Rather than speaking subjects reflecting each other’s language use in a reciprocal way, the exchange serves as an opportunity for the colonial subject to uphold racist representations of the colonized that provide ideological justification for colonial projects.
46Fanon observes that when a Black subject speaks French correctly, “he has put himself on an equal footing […] he is a pure replica (réplique) of the white man” (Fanon 1991: 19). In other words, the Black subject successfully replicates or mirrors the manner in which the latter communicates and is therefore on a footing of communicative reciprocity. The white subject denies such reciprocity in a way that classical phenomenology of intersubjectivity cannot explain, since “being equal and alike” is an assumed but nonthematized precondition of intersubjective mirroring, while being “hierarchal and opposed” is the operative framework within a colonial society. We can conceptualize this situation by applying Fanon’s analysis of the colonial racializing of the gaze from the best-known chapter from Black Skin, White Masks on “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” (L’expérience vécue de l’homme noir) to language.
47Similarly to linguistic experience, the lived experience of the colonized Black subject at the level of movement and perception exists in the mode of being for the other from the start (Fanon 1991: 89). According to Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of embodiment from Phenomenology, the body schema is a subjective orientation of the body proper as it navigates the spatial and temporal world – for example, its implicit knowledge how to reach for an instrument to execute a practical task. The body schema in this case is “not imposed on me (il ne s’impose pas à moi); it is rather a definitive structuring of myself and the world” (Fanon 1991: 91). For a colonized Black subject, however, the body schema is not a subjective expression of agency, but rather a subjection to myths and stereotypes that lead to a collapse of bodily agency. Fanon writes:
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” but by the Other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories. (Fanon 1991: 91)
48Instead of constructing a physiological self that can localize sensations and generate the coordinates of spatiality for moving freely in the world, the body schema is a historical construction woven out of racializing legends, stories, and visual images. The most significant of the images is a grinning caricatured face of a Black man’s face that was widely featured on the packaging and advertisements for a French chocolate cereal drink, Banania (Fanon 1991: 92). This image replaced an earlier representation of an Antillean woman during the time of the first world war when Senegalese and other West African infantrymen were conscripted to fight with the Allied forces against Germany. Following their arrival in Europe, French popular culture actively sought to change the image of an African from a “savage” to a loyal and courageous soldier, a non-threat to French citizenry. The result is the production of a grand enfant, a naïve and childlike figure with a winning grin who nonetheless could be a disciplined soldier in war. His image was softened to create a harmless character within the French society, always ready to flash a broad smile (Likosky 2017).
49The cultural production of a grand enfant figure shapes the perception of the Black body in postwar France. Blackness becomes a potent symbol indicating backwardness, imbecility, and a host of other racial stigmas (Fanon 1991: 92). “[D]ense and undeniable,” Blackness becomes living “proof” that “Negroes are savages, morons, and illiterates (des abrutis, des analphabètes)” (Fanon 1991: 96). A historical-racial body schema constituted by visual and narrative myths thus morphs into an epidermal racial one – the epidermis absorbs and exudes racialized legends about Black Africans in Europe (Fanon 1991: 92). A white person’s encounter with a Black body is filtered through a thick cultural prism and a white person’s address to a Black subject will be paternalistic, as if to a big child, if it follows this cultural script.
50Recall Fanon’s analysis of white subjects’ compulsion to speak pidgin to a Black person – regardless of whether or not it was their own linguistic preference. Fanon explains that this tendency is “tying [a Black subject] to an image, snaring him (l’engluer), imprisoning him as the eternal victim of his own essence, of visible appearance (d’un apparaître) for which he is not responsible” (Fanon 1991: 18; emphasis in original). We can now appreciate that the Black subject’s captivity to visible appearance is a result of historical and cultural production of controlling images such as the grinning, infantile Banania caricature invoked by Fanon in relation to racializing perception as well as language (Fanon 1991: 92, 17). This captivity to appearance accounts for the unfreedom of the Black subject at all levels of embodied experience: movement in spatial environment (focus of chapter five), as well as linguistic expression (chapter one). Contrary to the implicit freedom assumed in Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body schema, the colonized Black subject is imprisoned by historical racial schemas that are projected upon their epidermis as if upon a screen, by the colonial other. Being addressed in pidgin is one of linguistic manifestations of colonial subjection: one is being spoken to as if the image of a grand enfant captured one’s essence, as if one really was as backward and imbecile as the image indicates. The paternalism and primitivism of compulsory pidgin cannot be deciphered by an individual speaking subject’s signifying intention without taking this historical-racial context into account; compulsory pidgin “communicates” the mythology of Blackness that fits with colonial interests and justifies “civilizing” missions.
51“Speaking while Black” becomes an onerous task for subjects arriving in this already-constituted world; one’s “language schema” is an imposed historical-racial-epidermal schema, and one cannot communicate one’s signifying intention freely, without being reminded of what one looks and sounds like to a white audience. Within the colonial world, speaking patois confirms presumed linguistic inferiority, while speaking “French French” can elicit surprise, scrutiny, mockery, and backward compliments. Furthermore, speaking is a deeply embodied practice on a continuum with gesture and appearance – and racialization cuts across this continuum. For example, Fanon observes an “absolute, definitive mutation” that affects the manner of walking, greeting, and the sonority of a Caribbean subject adopting the French language (Fanon 1991: 3-4); the new idiom includes a host of mannerisms including interpersonal communication and clothing (Fanon 1991: 9). That is why mythologies about Blackness negatively affect the entire expressive subject and can lead to an imprisonment in the racialized language schema comparable to the one Fanon describes in relation to the lived body. As he writes, “Disoriented, incapable of confronting the Other, the white man, who had no scruples about imprisoning me, I transported myself on that particular day far, very far, from myself, and gave myself up as an object” (Fanon 1991: 92).
52We have shown that Fanon foregrounds the colonized Black speaking subject’s lived experience and situated knowledge of language to challenge the presumptive universality of Merleau-Ponty’s crypto-colonial phenomenology of language. Fanon’s sociodiagnosis of harms resulting from colonial subjection is not limited to the neurotic “complexes” affecting the psychic life of the colonized (main focus in Black Skin, White Masks), but includes, unsurprisingly, language. Language is a site of relations to others, to history and culture. Coloniality exploits this site to reinforce social hierarchies and cultural exclusions that become woven into the intimate texture of lived experience for many speaking subjects. A sociogenic account of language developed by Fanon gives voice to these minoritized experiences in an immanent critique of a universalist phenomenology.
53First, Fanon complicates the assumed universal interdependency between synchrony and diachrony, and speech (parole) and language (langue), within Merleau-Ponty’s semiologically informed phenomenology of language. The French language is recognized as a language of importance, and it is therefore considered in a diachronic as well as a synchronic manner; its history, literary significance, and cultural import are unquestioned, and they enrich the language spoken contemporaneously. On the other hand, Creole is regarded as a mere “dialect” and is relegated to a synchrony without diachrony, as its history, literary significance, and cultural import are denied and erased. Creole is inferiorized in comparison to French which is glorified; this colonial linguistic hierarchy is routinely played out in intersubjective encounters between colonial and colonized speaking subjects.
54Second, Fanon re-examines Merleau-Ponty’s claims about speaking subjectivity and intersubjectivity through a sociogenic lens. Merleau-Ponty assumes that the maternal language spoken at home is the same as that of the nation-state, resulting in a monolingualism of the speaking subject who possesses one’s own language-world without being subjected to any. Fanon’s account demonstrates that one’s maternal, familial language is not necessarily the language of the nation-state, and that some subjects navigate at least two language-worlds and negotiate their discrepancies and power differentials. Furthermore, Merleau-Ponty’s theory of intersubjectivity (based on Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations) is predicated on a condition of harmonious reciprocity between akin and equal subjects. Fanon’s account of intersubjectivity demonstrates that the Black colonized subject is constructed as a being-for-others from the start. Even if the Black subject mirrors or reciprocates e.g. a colonial subjects’ French language use, the latter does not necessarily reciprocate back and routinely responds with inferiorization and paternalism. We developed the notion of a language-schema to capture the idea that speech is an intuitive, non-representational capacity through which subjects habitually express linguistic sense, akin to the body-schema involved in the embodied subjects’ navigating their spatial environment. Fanon’s phenomenology diagnoses the racialization of both the language and the body schema, the Black colonized subject’s “being for others” objectifying the subjectivity of the expressive, visible body (Fanon 1991: 1, 89).
55Fanon’s sociogenic account, contextualized in a particular socioeconomic, historic, and political milieu, can address power discrepancies in subject positions that were left undetermined in Merleau-Ponty’s classical phenomenological account. It articulates the potency of controlling images and constructed mythologies about Blackness that operate to imprison Black subjects linguistically and materially – a complex cultural process that is overlooked in work reflective of a dominant subject position. Fanon’s account of language from the perspective of a Black speaking subject subjected to French colonialism offers a powerful immanent critique of Merleau-Ponty’s ontogenetic linguistic phenomenology.
56Fanon’s sociogenic phenomenology of language, situated as it is in a particular milieu, suggests a potential methodology for the development of critical phenomenologies of language. His method is inclusive of the political, cultural, and economic situation of the speaking subject; his account is sensitive to the role that social position and geographical location play in linguistic intersubjectivity; he is also aware that one’s speech may or may not be recognized as having authority within a nation-state. Fanon deliberately situates his phenomenology of language in the perspective of the colonized Black speaking subjects from the French Antillean colony of Martinique in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In doing so, he intentionally avoids a universalist account of language and instead invites critical phenomenologies that address language use in other milieus, issuing from different social positionalities, and in relation to different language practices. Rather than suggesting that his account provides the definitive end-all conclusion, we propose that Fanon welcomes difference and opens opportunities for multiplicitous critical phenomenologies of language.
- 2 We wish to thank our anonymous reviewer for very helpful comments, which helped to refine especiall (...)
57Our focus on phenomenology of language does not imply that Fanon’s writings can be reduced to a classical academic project. While our focus has been on the “deliberative” chapters one and five from Black Skin, White Masks, we wish to acknowledge the poetic-prophetic tone found in especially the Introduction and By Way of a Conclusion – as well as throughout the book. Importantly, Fanon’s first major work engages in a poetics of experimental essaying in the interstices between the existing theoretical, scientific, theatrical, and poetic regimes of language. For example, chapter five probes the performance of racist interpellation (“Look, a Negro!”) by staging it four times as an affectively charged scene that demands an interpretation. Furthermore, the book’s goal to disalienate the Black subject from the cultural habits of coloniality is realized by inventing a new voice and a writing style that joyfully transgress disciplinary divides and specialized genres of philosophy, natural science, theater, and poetry. We recognize that the force of Fanon’s decolonial critique resides to an important degree in its plurivocal resonance, which always opened it to non-academic and activist appropriations. We believe that Fanon also has a place in contemporary scholarship of language broadly understood, and that his unique methodology opens new directions for future research in this field.2