IB Philosophy 10.4.2 the Other and the White Gaze Notes

The Concept of the Other in Fanon

1. As discussed in 10.4.1, Frantz Fanon argues that colonialism constructs racialized identities through systems of power. In Black Skin, White Masks, he extends this by examining how the colonized person is constituted as the Other, a figure defined entirely by its opposition to the white European self.
2. The concept of the Other has deep roots in European philosophy, particularly Hegel, Husserl, and Sartre. Each explored how selfhood is constituted through encounters with other consciousnesses.
   1. Fanon draws on and radically transforms this tradition by showing that racial othering operates differently from the philosophical otherness these European accounts describe.
3. For Hegel, the encounter with the Other is necessary for self-consciousness. The master-slave dialectic describes how two consciousnesses struggle for recognition.
   1. Fanon argues that in the colonial context this dialectic is distorted because the white colonizer does not enter into a genuine struggle with the colonized Black person.
4. In Sartre's existentialism, the gaze of the Other threatens freedom by turning the subject into an object. His analysis in Being and Nothingness describes being looked at as an experience that fixes and objectifies.
   1. Fanon adapts this to show that the white gaze does something more specific and damaging than Sartre's general account allows.

The Colonial Other: Asymmetry and Denied Reciprocity

1. Fanon's key innovation is that the racial Other is not simply another consciousness encountered in mutual vulnerability. The Black person under colonialism is constructed as a fixed object within a pre-existing racial schema.
   1. The white world encounters them not as an unknown subject but as a category already loaded with meaning.
2. The colonial Other lacks the reciprocity European philosophers assumed. The colonized person is not recognized as a free consciousness capable of returning the gaze.
   1. Instead, they are seen through racial stereotypes that reduce them to a body, a skin colour, a set of predetermined attributes.
3. The philosophical consequence is that Fanon must revise the European tradition of thinking about selfhood and otherness. Where Hegel and Sartre describe encounters between subjects who are in principle equal, Fanon reveals a situation in which one side has been denied subject status.
   1. The asymmetry of colonial othering is its defining feature.
4. Emmanuel Levinas argues in Totality and Infinity that the Other's face issues an unconditional ethical command ('thou shalt not kill') that precedes any conscious choice and constitutes the foundation of ethics. For Levinas, the Other's face always demands recognition regardless of social category.
   1. Fanon's analysis reveals the limits of this claim: colonial racism neutralises the ethical demand of the face by reducing the Black person from a vulnerable, responsive Other to a racial category. The face-to-face encounter that Levinas treats as universal is, Fanon shows, structurally unavailable to the colonised person under the white gaze.

The White Gaze and the Fixing of Identity

1. The white gaze is Fanon's term for how the colonial world perceives and categorizes the Black person. It is not simply one individual looking at another but an entire perceptual framework shaped by centuries of colonial ideology, racial science, and cultural representation.
2. Fanon's most vivid illustration appears in the train encounter where a child exclaims, "Look, a Negro!" In this moment, Fanon is fixed by the look of the other.