As such, racial difference (and here it again contrasts with gender difference) holds a certain potential for universalization: notwithstanding the fundamental asymmetry that permeates the concrete experience it conditions, racial difference as it structures life in our world today interrupts the dialectic of identification in all cases, albeit differentially. Despite the fact that some bodies (black bodies) are wholly deprived of the chance to acquire a coherent body schema and others (white bodies) are interrupted in their effort to achieve imaginary integration, the violence of both forms of deprivation stems from a common root cause: the imposition of the “racial epidermal schema" on black men and women.
As the process that transforms the black body into an inert image, this imposition is responsible for making the black self into an object just as it is responsible for rendering the black body an anxiety-inducing, phobic image. What this means, then, is that all parties—black and white alike—have an interest in overturning the reduction of the black body to a mere image, even if this interest is asymmetrical. What is at stake here, as Fanon's identification of the black body with the biological makes clear, is the excess of bodily life over any form of identification that would seek to contain it through identification with or explusion as an image.
- FROM NEGROPHOBIA TO NEGROPHILIA
(Re)thinking identification with Fanon requires us to interrogate its racist foundation, which in turn requires us to recognize the universality of its scope without losing sight of the asymmetry of its actual impact. Now, as I have already mentioned, new media technology—as exemplified in the Internet and, specifically, in the generalization of passing in online identity play—prepares the way for such a vigilant recognition. By instancing the potential of new technically facilitated forms of community to suspend, at least within certain parameters, the overdetermination exercised by the (visual) image of the racial other, online identity play creates the possibility for a “zero-degree” of racial identification, a potential universality rooted in the precariousness of any identity as a fixation of embodied individuation.
BODIES IN CODE
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