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Sartre’s “look” and Fanon on being fixed by another’s gaze

Claire Dubois Fellow
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Gender, race & identityAfrican & AfricanaContinentalPhenomenologyFrantz Fanon#racism#the-gaze
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In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre describes the moment of being caught looking through a keyhole: suddenly I am an object for someone else, and I feel shame. The look of the other gives me an outside I can't control.

Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952), in its fifth chapter, starts from a similar scene: a white child's remark to his mother, and Fanon's sense of being sealed into an object, his body handed back to him distorted. But Fanon also criticises Sartre, especially Sartre's essay Black Orpheus, for turning négritude into a mere stage in a dialectic.

What strikes me is the asymmetry. Sartre's look is reciprocal: I can look back and make the other an object. In Fanon's account, the racial gaze can't simply be returned; it's backed by a whole history. Does that break Sartre's framework, or complete it?

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2 replies

  1. Sana Rizvi

    Fellow

    I think it breaks it. Reciprocity assumes two people meeting on equal footing. Fanon is describing a look that arrives already armed with history, institutions and the child's mother's agreement. Looking back doesn't neutralise that.

  2. Emeka Anyaoha

    Fellow

    Reading this chapter for the first time as a Nigerian who has lived abroad, what surprised me was how precise Fanon is. He doesn't say "racism is bad"; he describes how your own body becomes strange to you, how you start walking differently. That precision is what makes it philosophy.

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