We might legitimately ask, then, if the becoming-object that Fanon describes is an interpellation at all. It is undeniable, as Diana Fuss argues, that “colonialism works in part by policing the boundaries of cultural intelligibility"9; however, the exclusion of the black man (and the black woman), as Fanon depicts it, is so categorical—he or she is “denied entry into the alterity that underwrites subjectivity" (which is the sense of Fanon's conception of the “triple person")—that any capacity to respond to the call of the other would seem to be vitiated from the get-go. The singularity of the black man (or woman) on Fanon's account stems from this last reality. Deprived of any capacity to respond, of any “self" that could be produced in responding to the call of the other, the black man (or woman) simply cannot be the subject of any interpellation, even one brought into being through the “violence of racial interpellation." Thus, in Fanon's reckoning, when the black man (or woman) hears the call of the other—"Dirty nigger!" or "Look, a Negro!"—he or she cannot even purchase some compromised social standing through identification with the racial slur. Instead, he or she spirals away along the perverted, empty dialectic of crushing objecthood, becoming the mute, impotent object of the system of racism.
As a contribution to the thinking of identification, Fanon's work thus provides a negative archaeology of the infrastructural embodiment necessary for a "politics of the performative" not only to succeed, but simply to be possible in the first place. If his work thereby underscores an important difference between racial and gender identification, it is because of his personal and historical demonstration that racial difference, indeed racism, is lived at a deeper level than gender difference (at least as contemporary feminists tend to conceptualize it); it does not concern cultural intelligibility, but rather the embodied preconditions for acquiring such intelligibility in the first place, the capacity to sustain, to live, to give body to, the subjectifications imposed upon it.xvi In sum, the “corporeal malediction" generated by racism yields the dispossession not only of the meaning of the body but also of the body itself, as Fanon's experience makes unbearably clear: "My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly ..." (113, emphasis added).
DIGITIZING THE RACIALIZED BODY
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