"In the previous modes of certainty what is true for consciousness is something other than itself... immediate presentation of the object is superseded in experience: certainty gives place to truth." -Hegel, 'The Truth of Self Certainty'

"And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man's eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is soley a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty" (p. 64).

It is hard to interpret 'the Fact of Blackness,' or any of Fanon's theory, outside of the direct influence Hegel had on Fanon. Hegel explains thoroughly in 'The Truth of Self-Certainty' that we come to understand our consciousness, that is to say self-consciousness, as "the return from the otherness." Our bodily essence, or as Fanon refers to as "bodily schema," is only given truth in its relation to "the other." The "difference" from the other that seperates our own self from that of "the other." Fanon comes to understand himself as seen through the eyes of the white man, just as we all development our self-consciousness from understanding that we are at one time "for ourselves" and "for an other," both existing "in unity" but also being distinguished differently in "shape" than "the other."

This brief analysis of Hegel, allows Fanon's essay to unfold as a lens of interpretation through which we come to understand ourselves and the world. It is only from the subjection to racial prejudice that Fanon "discovered his blackness" (p. 65). This is true not only of the black man who endures racial prejudice, but to every person as we come to understand ourselves as we encounter reactions and responses that others have toward and because of us.

The unparalleled strife Fanon addresses, that of "blackness," is due to at once the black man's understanding of himself as other from the white man, but also as the white man's understanding of himself as other from the black man. It is in the white man's insecurity that he must effectively distinguish himself from any black man, because there was no unity, and only difference. Although Fanon realizes that the struggle of the black man, or that of "blackness," is unique due to the "outward manifestation of race" (p. 67), he becomes humanized and joins "the Jew" (p. 70). This struggle of understanding self-consciousness in relation to the other is as Fanon has come to realize, universal, not just the burden on "blackness."

Is it this moment of realization that can be recognized as the apocalyptic moment in which his interpretation of himself, the world, and others, dramatically changes? This moment is followed by a rampant overflow of apocalyptic rhetoric which might help to alienate and answer that question. "This is how rhythm affects what is least intellectual in us, tyrannically, to make us penetrate to the spirituality of the object; and that character of abandon which is ours is itself 'rhythmic'" (p. 70). Later, "from the opposite end of the white world a magical Negro culture was hailing me... I had rationalized the world and the world had rejected me on the basis of color prejudice" (p. 70). "But they abandon themselves, possessed, to the essence of all things, knowing nothing of externals but possessed by the movement of all things"... "spark of the sacred fire of the World/ flech of the flech of the world, throbbing with the very movement of the world!"..."Bloob! Blood!... Birth! Ecstacy of becoming!... convulsed, torn away, uprooted" (p. 71). Fanon refers to this prose, but what is the movement that he is emphasizing? "Sacrifice was a middle point between creation and myself" (72). This experience, this fire, all that "floods" over him, the continuous play with fire and water: "Sheets of water threaten my soul on fire" (72). His experience of "blackness" in a "white world" of water that persistently attempts to extinguish his fire. "It is an abandon that becomes need, an active state of communion, indeed of identification, however negligible the action" (73).

In an apocalyptic realization, Fanon attempts to diverge from Hegel's theory and explains that "in terms of consciousness, the black consciousness is held out as an absolute density, as filled with itself, a stage preceding any invasion, any abolition of the ego by desire" (77)... "This struggle, this new decline had to take on an aspect of completeness" (77). In this discovery, Fanon is reborn as not a self defined by the other, but as a self defined by one's own essence and existence. "I defined myself as an absolute intensity of beginning" (79). This new beginning can be seen to exist in the post-apocalyptic world, from which emerges this new self.

Through this critique that Fanon explores and exposes for the reader, the terms by which we understand ourselves are in a pre-apocalyptic state, the Hegelian experience of coming into consciousness. In what sense can we expect to break free in our own worlds? If the "fact of blackness" is just a label of the ignorance of any prejudice and assumptuous disposition, as we might say what is so "fact" about "blackness," but just what is assuming onto it, in what ways do we succumb to being "fact" to something? Is there an apocalypse in our own midst, if not already discovered, what will the next apocalypse bring to our own world,as it is now? Will "the fact of blackness" or that of "otherness" ever cease?