The Methodology of Breakdown as a Standpoint Approach

In this chapter, I layout the methodology of breakdown that Heidegger uses (but doesn’t clearly explain) in Being and Time. When something breaks down (e.g. a piece of equipment, a relationship, a person), you catch a glimpse of the reason for the failure—a condition or the conditions that ought to be met for one to experience something as what it is. A piece of equipment, for example, can fail in many ways—revealing the many conditions that must be met for one to experience equipment as equipment. I then show how Frantz Fanon’s work on the historico-racial schema implicitly deploys this methodology by utilizing his experience of corporeal malediction to revise Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body schema. Corporeal malediction describes experiencing an inhibited body schema due to racist myths and stereotypes. It is a breakdown that is essentially tied to social identity and represents a revision of an already existing phenomenological concept. Fanon’s own status as what Patricia Hill Collins calls an “outsider within” puts him in a position to compare his own insight with those that have issued from the dominant perspective in order to achieve a privileged insight into the phenomenological discipline itself and its flaws and lacunas.