The Ethical and Psychological Implications of Fanon's Zone of Non-being

• In Event: Ethics, Trust, Forgiveness, and Punishment

Abstract

This paper investigates the ethical and psychological implications of Fanon’s zone of non-being in Black Skin, White Masks. In the colonial situation, blacks are not structurally regarded as human beings, which Fanon terms the zone of non-being, or the hell of blackness confronted with the dehumanization of antiblack racism. This paper emphasizes Fanon’s sociogenic methodology, which rejects psychological reductionism and instead examines how structural racist domination effects the individual psyche. Each chapter represents a layer of mediation offered to a black protagonist to overcome black alienation by being recognized as human. Correspondingly, this paper analyzes each chapter in the framework of Du Bois' double consciousness, where each layer of mediation represents a different white mask to escape the zone of non-being. However, as the white mask is a sign of alienation, these attempts ultimately fail. For Fanon, this inescapability of the non-being ontology leads to a revolutionary affirmation of black humanity that challenges the false universality of white normativity.
The failure of recognition in the Hegelian Master-Slave Dialectic is identified as a central theme. Whereas the Master-Slave relationship emerges out of a life-and-death struggle of two self-consciousnesses in the Hegelian Dialectic, the colonial Slave is recognized without a struggle, which leads to an inability to establish themselves as an independent self-consciousness. Consequently, blacks struggle to achieve Otherness, which is the precondition for an ethical relationship to emerge. This emphasis on struggle and non-being ontology lays the theoretical foundation for Fanon’s argument on violence in Wretched of the Earth

Author

• Laura Altinsoy, CUNY Graduate Center