Bhabha's point here is that the subjectification of both the European coloniser and the non-European colonised must be reconceptualised in terms of the Lacanian imaginary. The goal in so doing is to call into question the rigidly dialectical Self/other, White/black relationships which for Fanon structure an essentially manichaean colonial situation. Bhabha's view in this regard is undoubtedly stimulated by Fanon's brief allusion to Lacan, to wit, his suggestion that Lacan's notion of the mirror stage might prove useful for analysing the colonial situation. It "would be interesting" (1967a, 161), Fanon writes,

on the basis of Lacan's theory of the mirror period, to investigate the extent to which the imago of his fellow built up in the young white at the usual age would undergo an imaginary aggression with the appearance of the Negro. When one has grasped the mechanism described by Lacan, one can have no further doubt that the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man. And conversely. Only for the white man The Other is perceived on the level of the body image, absolutely as the not-self--that is, the unidentifiable, the unassimilable. (161)

Fanon's allusion, however, betrays a misunderstanding of Lacan which it is Bhabha's duty, seemingly, to rectify.

In "Remembering Fanon," Bhabha seems to want to re-member Fanon in Bhabha's own image in a way that makes a Lacanian out of a man who, Benita Parry (1987) rightly stresses, was in fact something of an Existential Phenomenologist cum Marxist heavily steeped in the rigidity of the dialectic of Self versus other. Bhabha critiques precisely this manichaean tendency in Fanon’s work which it was the major thrust of Lacan's work to undo by emphasising the inherent alterity of the subject. Bhabha seems to suggest that what Fanon would have said if he had fully understood the significance of Lacan's work is that the "ambivalent identification of the racist world . . . turns on the idea of Man as his alienated image, not Self and Other but the 'Otherness' of the self" (116). It is "not the Colonialist Self nor the Colonized Other, but the disturbing distance in between that constitutes the figure of colonial otherness" and thus the "liminal problem of colonial identity" (117). For Bhabha, the colonial subject is in effect not, caught in a no (wo)man's land, being neither self nor other, neither negro nor white, but forever suspended in the gap between.

Bhabha offers, in this regard, a useful summary of the exotopic nature of the split colonial subject in particular and of the subject in general. He points out that the "very place of identification, caught in the tension of demand and desire, is a place of splitting" (117) precisely because "to exist is to be called into relation to an Otherness, its look or locus" (my emphasis; 117). Identity, whether at the imaginary or the symbolic levels, is thus

never an a priori, nor a finished product; it is only ever the problematic process of access to an 'image' of totality. . . . For the image--as point of identification--marks the site of an ambivalence. Its representation is always spatially split--it makes present something that is absent--and temporally deferred. . . . The image is only ever an appurtenance to authority and identity; it must never be read mimetically as the 'appearance' of a 'reality'. The access to the image of identity is only ever possible in the negation of any sense of originality or plenitude, through the principle of displacement and differentiation (absence/presence; representation/ repetition) that always render it a liminal reality. The image is at once a metaphoric substitution, an illusion of presence and by the same token a metonym, a sign of its absence and loss. (118)

Identification, in short, is "always the return of an image of identity which bears the mark of splitting in that 'Other' place from which it comes" (117) that produces a liminal state of "alienation within identity" (116).