A Mask on a Man, a Man in a Mask

Burroughs and Fanon turned out to present interest contrasts to Derrida's ideas of language. Most notably, those penetrating alterities that liberated language from strict context in "Signature Event Context" proved to be weapons of outright warfare in Burroughs' text, usable by both the oppressor and the oppressed. What Derrida didn't want to call the "viral" and "corrupting" moments of language become precisely that; it is really remarkable how Burroughs keeps denying any "positive" effects of the virus. In other words, the alterity inside of us/our language is no longer liberating but confining, quarantining as in biological warfare.

Fanon also sees the more violent side of fragmenting language. Both he and Burroughs speak of the body being penetrated, violated by some oppressing force. But this is a dual attack: for Fanon, the black man is also covered up with a mask even as his body is invaded, dismantled, "scientified;" for Burroughs, the virus has its external component (the screen, the collage) as well as its internal one (the virus already incorporated into us, sometimes latent). For both writers, there is an ambiguity, a slippage between inside and outside in which everything seems to turn inside out, or at least reveals a dual layer: the "Negro" in Europe becomes the European in the Antilles.

There's an odd sense in which putting on the mask of whiteness is the same process, from an inverted perspective, as the other penetrating the same; he is inside the mask and thus gains the power of subversion in the same stroke that he is oppressed. Derrida approaches the language problem from inside of, dare I say it, the dominant discourse. Thus, his solution is a kind of exposure, an opening up of an insular context to a third, external term. Fanon, who approaches from the margins, perhaps even feels thinkers like Derrida co-opting his space, using his alterity to pierce the social membrane or to expose an otherness already within the mask.

The doctor who speaks to the black man in pidgin (the language of the other) traps the other as the other within society. Similarly, "well-meaning" whites, like Sartre, seem to have the same effect when they speak of using the language of the other to liberate all of society. When the other is "brought in" as an external, internalizing force, he is "overdetermined from the outside." What of his own inside, then? The black man needs space, breath, a reprieve from being forced into the political arena.