No longer even aware of his body through third-person consciousness, Fanon now experiences himself, his body, solely from the perspective of the white man's gaze. Literally the object of the gaze of the other, Fanon can only live his embodiment as a flattened, one-dimensional racial epidermal schema:
In the train, it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person. In the train, I was given not one but two, three places. I had already stopped being amused. It was not that I was finding febrile coordinates in the world. I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the other ... and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea ... (112)
One can hardly imagine a stronger expression of the fact, the historicoracial reality, that black bodies do not live in the same space as other, white bodies; they are, quite simply, barred from the intercorporeity that is, as we have seen, the very payoff of having a body schema on Merleau-Ponty's account.
In her commentary on Fanon, Gail Weiss astutely grasps the depth at which racial alienation occurs, stressing that:
Social objectification should not be viewed as a subsequent influence upon the construction of an individual body image (i.e., coming into play only in the development of the ego-ideal or body image ideal), but is always already operative, and for those societally designated as "racial minorities," the internalization of this racial epidermal schema (whose inscriptive force penetrates the psyche through the skin) results in a (psychophysical) inferiority complex that no body image ideal, however positive, can ever completely overcome. (27–28)
Not only is objectification “always already operative"within the process of body image construction, but it also similarly contaminates the constitution of a body schema, which forms, as we have seen, the background for the construction of any body image, coherent or otherwise. Accordingly, the disturbance Fanon calls "corporeal malediction" is much more than a mere contamination of the black self's body image by racial stereotypes and the objectification they render unavoidable; it is a disturbance in the bodily schema, in the process that would make possible the construction of a body image in the first place, that would accord black selves the agency to perform such a construction.
DIGITIZING THE RACIALIZED BODY
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