More than fifty years after his death, Frantz Fanon still ignites violent passions. This “outlaw thinker,” as Lewis Gordon calls him, has become an object either of worship or a mixture of hatred and fear, especially in France, where he is not yet completely accepted as an author legitimately to be read and discussed in academic circles. Leftists do quote him or, more often, mention his name, but they rarely do so with any proper knowledge of his works. In their minds he plays the role of a francophone Che Guevara, an antiracist, anticolonialist advocate of an old-fashioned third-worldist and...

Raising the question of what a thinker said invites critics, in near knee-jerk reaction, to ask if one’s portrait is of what was “really” said and then to offer the challenge of what could have been “said otherwise.” What someone has said, especially where those words are published, calls for reading the woman or the man. But even in such cases, as we know, what is said is not always what is meant, and to explain the latter often requires those difficult acts of interpretation and the presentation of evidence of a writer’s words and their contextual meaning. To say...

Think of the body in motion. Dancing. Then think of it standing still. Perhaps leaned back. Consider the body in question or, perhaps, indifferent. Fanon’s body, a troubled, frenetic body that was simultaneously elegant, rhythmic (he did, in spite of his protestations, dance the beguine), and beautiful, is a subtext of all his writings. It gropes at reality, shivers, and quakes. It is at times frozen, often hot with anger while constrained by reflection and realization; a black surface; prodigious; handsome; dangerous, prurient, lustful; strong one moment, lame another; funny, yet often also sad; and, above all—searching.

The body...

Fanon was an ironic writer who was struggling with the complex question of paradoxical reason and history. The modern collapse of “Reason” and “History” into all things European represented afailureof reason and history that required self-deception regarding Europe’s scope. Put differently: Europe sought to become ontological; it sought to become what dialecticians call “Absolute Being.” Such Being stood in the way of human being or a human way of being. It thus presented itself as a theodicy. Theodicy (fromtheos, meaning god, anddikē, meaning justice) is the branch of inquiry that attempts to account for the compatibility...

The title of the fifth chapter ofBlack Skin, White Masks, “L’expérience vécue du Noir” (“The Lived Experience of the Black”), is a riff on the second volume of Simone de Beauvoir’sThe Second Sex,whose subtitle isL’expérience vécue(“Lived Experience”). Whereas Beauvoir offers a Richard Wright–inspired existential anthropology across the development of what it means to become a woman from childhood to old age, narcissism to mysticism, and the question of independence, Fanon’s strategy is a more radically personal series of movements. Thus, although an initial meeting of these two great thinkers is evoked in title and...

Black Skin, White Maskswas not the only work of Fanon’s that came to print immediately after his completion of his doctorate. Composed while he was a medical student, “Le syndrome nord africain” (“The North African Syndrome”), which was published, as we saw, in the February 1952 issue ofL’Esprit, is an extraordinary fusion of Fanon’s expertise in forensic and clinical psychiatry. The essay is an investigation through which he unveils what are by now familiar Fanonian themes:

It is often said that man is constantly questioning himself, and were he to pretend he were no longer so, he would...

In 1960, Fanon, the thirty-five-year-old psychiatrist and veteran of World War II, twice decorated for valor, was appointed ambassador to Ghana for the GPRA (Gouvernement provisoire de la République algérienne). He had devoted the previous six years of his life to the struggle for independence and had, among many efforts at articulating the GPRA’s international image, composedYear V of the Algerian Revolution. The world had changed much by then; it was clear that Algeria was on the eve of national independence, and in Fanon’s native Caribbean, the revolutionary spirit had begun to take hold. The Cuban Revolution (1959) raised...

As his body deteriorated from his illness, Fanon’s comrades urged him to take the advice of the Soviet doctors and seek treatment in the United States. He finally agreed. He faced, however, another problem. How was he to get there when it was clear, given the U.S. government’s increased involvement in Vietnam, that it was a staunch ally of France? It had to be done with secrecy and with the aid of the reconnaissance division of the government he often criticized. Peter Geismar related the situation:

The black doctor was a nice catch for the intelligence services…. Washington would be...

Lewis Gordon is unquestionably one of the most important readers and critics of the work of Frantz Fanon. In this book, he breaks new ground. Particularly with his reexamination of two of the most controversial chapters inBlack Skin, White Maskswhich grapple with interracial relationships, told first by a woman of color and then by a black man. But to give background to Gordon’s analysis of these chapters, I want to review some of the central ideas in Fanon’s work, as Gordon underscores them. The first is, as Gordon powerfully argues, that blacks are forced into a condition of...