Brothers In Misfortune: Blackness, Jewishness, and the Fetish in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks

The question of how religion operates as a key term in Frantz Fanon analysis of the position of the Black subject can be helpfully illustrated with a digression to an interview given by Emmanuel Levinas in 1986. In response to a question about structuralism, Levinas asked: “Can one compare the scientific intellect of Einstein with the ‘savage mind’? (Is it Righteous to Be, 79). This question, purely rhetorical, was aimed at questioning what structural anthropology sought to learn from non-Western cultures. The non-Western world, to this leading philosopher of religion, was not even an epistemological resource to be exploited; it was at best a field on which the superiority of European thought had been demonstrated : “The savage mind a thinking that a European knew to discover, it was not the savage thinkers who discovered our thinking. There is a kind of envelopment of all thinking by the European subject,” (Levinas 1986, 64). Although falling outside the canon of Levinas’s philosophical work, these statements are indicative of a problem in the philosophical study of religion which, however frequently addressed, constantly reappears: “religion” in the West is overdetermined the history of its thinking about the false religion against which the true is defined. That false religion and its role in Western thought can be traced, following William Pietz, through the history of “the fetish,” and its role in consolidating reason as the property of the human, and the human as those who can, in separating true from false religion, transcend the base materiality of the flesh. 

Thirty-five years earlier, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks confronted the “envelopment of all thinking by the European subject” as a philosophical, psychological and material problem. In the central chapter, “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” Fanon famously takes the reader through the impossible situation of Black subjectivity, beginning with his self-recognition as Black in the pejorative force of the slur “Sale nègre!” and moving through attempts to negate Blackness, embrace Négritude, and counter white conceptions of the Black, only to find that reason, subjectivity, and the human are all determined against the Black, who is prevented from inhabiting them. This thought, and the array of scientific, historical, and literary material through which Fanon approaches the thought of Black ontology and the relationship to the white, colonial, and European that meets it at each juncture, has generated decades of study and debate. But it is only in recent years that Fanon’s conception of religion in his formulation of the relationship (or impossibility thereof) between Blackness and the human has become a new avenue for unpacking both the critique and the constructive possibilities that his text offers. 

This paper examines Fanon's comparison between the situations of Blackness and Jewishness, arguing that the tension between them is embedded in an anxiety over the relationship between religion and the fetish, and how these concepts regulate access to humanity.  Drawing Joseph Winters’s analysis of Fanon’s religious rhetoric (Winters 2022), and David Marriott’s work on Blackness and the Black man as a fetishized object in Fanon (Marriott 2022), this paper traces out Fanon’s references to religion and the fetish. In the fifth chapter, Fanon’s embrace of the “that mystic, carnal marriage between man and the cosmos” through Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal is abruptly, though temporarily, chilled by the juxtaposition of a colonial administrator’s “scientific” publication on sexual practices in Africa. In response, Fanon writes “Black magic, primitive mentality, animism and animal eroticism—all this surges toward me. All this typifies people who have not kept pace with the evolution of humanity. Or, if you prefer, they constitute third-rate humanity. Having reached this point, I was long reluctant to commit myself…I had to choose. What am I saying? I had no choice,’ (Fanon, 105-6). The relationship between Black being and the world which Fanon finds in Césaire’s poetry, in which flesh does not oppose spirit, is constantly threatened by this concept of “Black magic,” and its invocation of the material excess of fetish, whose attribution to the non-Western, particularly the Black, played a key role in developing the colonial relations that Fanon both analyzes and resists in his writing. 

Framing Fanon’s discussion of religion, sexuality, and the epidermal overdetermination of the Black subject in terms of religion and fetishism, I follow Marriott in arguing that Fanon critiques the Western conception of the human as having, for its own fetish, the conception of Blackness (Marriot 2010, 218). In the process, I examine how Fanon engages with Jean-Paul Sartre's Anti-Semite and  Jew to delineate the particular anti-Black character of Western reason through the difference in how the fetishized figures of the Black and the Jew are treated, a difference that rests on the materiality of Blackness that locates it outside of a history of Christianity in which the Jew, in Fanon’s telling, still has place. Finally, engaging Sylvia Wynter’s classic essay “Unsettling the Colonially of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” I show how the differentiation between these fetishized figures of the West refuses legitimacy to the conception of religion defined by Christianity and instead posits an alternate conception of religion constructed through the text itself that eludes “the envelopment of all thinking by the European subject,” or at least inscribes resistance to it.