Thus, the corporeal malediction created by the imposition on black selves of a “racial epidermal schema” involves a reduction of the bodily schema to the image; this reduction, moreover, is distinct from, and far more fundamental than, for instance, Paul Schilder's (or, for that matter, Elizabeth Grosz's) conflation of body schema and body image. Here, what is at issue is a wholesale displacement of the physiological corporeal schema—the embodied basis for agency as such—by a racial epidermal schema whose content is stereotyped images of the black body imposed by white society. (This difference is marked by Fanon's differentiation between the "third person" and the “triple person." The former names a situation in which the self's bodily schema is impeded by the body image, i.e., the image of his or her own body; the latter describes a situation in which the self has lost its schema entirely—that is, any contact whatsoever with his or her embodiment—and consequently exists only as the bare living of a set of images imposed on his or her body from the outside.) What this means, ultimately, is that racism, on Fanon's account, occurs through the “expropriation" of the corporeal schema of black men and women, which is simply replaced by a set of contents, tertiary memories, and racial images permitting only the most hollow, automatic forms of agency.
However, what is at stake in Fanon's conceptualization of "corporeal malediction" is more than just an account of racism; indeed, with his firm insistence that racial difference concerns how racial difference is actually lived, his analysis has significant consequences for how we think identification as such. By demonstrating that racism operates fundamentally at the level of the bodily schema—as an impairment of the embodiment, of the corporeal agency, of certain bodies—Fanon's analysis advances an important claim about identification in general: namely, identification not only crucially involves subrepresentational processes of bodily life, but these latter—insofar as they comprise the processes through which the effects of differences are actually lived or felt—are what makes differences matter!
This stress on how difference is lived may in fact be the crucial difference between processes of racial and gender identification-if, for example, we think the latter with Judith Butler and view it fundamentally as a performative problematic involving the attempt to secure "a certain possibility for social existence," as she puts it in Excitable Speech.8 Butler's nuanced analyses of the illocutionary force of linguistic utterances notwithstanding, it remains the case that the subject materialized through performative interpellation, even if it is produced in the act of its materialization, is from the moment of its materialization always already possessed of an intact, coherent bodily schema.
BODIES IN CODE
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