Untitled

“‘Lacan” and “race” seem two totally disparate notions: obscure French
theory, brutal social struggles… However, this book provides an explosive

mixture of the two—after reading it, neither Lacanian theory nor racism and
anti-racist struggles will appear the same to you. George and Hook
demonstrate that authentic theory is needed today more than ever. An
instant classic!’
Slavoj Žižek, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
‘Lacan and Race arrives at a very significant and urgent historical moment, one
that symbolically and existentially speaks to the logics of racism as
necropolitical, consumptive, phantasmatic, and a problematic pleasurable
perversity. Given the unabashed reemergence of white racism within the
context of a greater neo-fascist threat, its analysis is critically needed.’
George Yancy, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor
of Philosophy at Emory University, USA
‘This groundbreaking volume, edited by Sheldon George and Derek Hook, turns
conventional notions of race and racism on their head, delivering compelling
Lacanian perspectives from leading scholars in the field. Including thought-
provoking ideas such as racism as enjoyment and race as an object of the
drive—as well as covering a breadth of forms of contemporary racism—this book
will undoubtedly inspire future scholarship and conversations about race alike!
With Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory, George and Hook
have brought us what will undoubtedly serve as the central text on the subject for
many years to come.’
Stephanie Swales, University of Dallas, USA,
co-author of Psychoanalysing Ambivalence with
Freud and Lacan: On and Off the Couch
‘Written at a time of heightened polarization, xenophobia, and ethno-

nationalism, the essays in this collection detail various ways to alter the
structures of hatred and otherness that make racism seem immovable and
inevitable. Probing and incisive, the essays draw on a range of insights from
Lacanian psychoanalysis concerning race transference and unconscious
fantasy, the enjoyment of the Other, and the forms of jouissance that continue
to propel and underwrite racism today. Insightful, rigorous, and strongly
recommended.’
Christopher Lane, editor of The Psychoanalysis of Race
‘Of late, Lacanian theory has come to play an increasingly important role in
critical analyses of gender and sexuality. This sterling collection presents the
strongest case to date for extending such analysis to the category of race. In
powerful, wide-ranging essays, the contributors demonstrate time and again
that psychoanalytic concepts such as fantasy, fetishism, jouissance, and
disavowal aren’t merely applicable to the phenomena of racial identification
and racism, but are absolutely integral to grasping how such phenomena
function in the first place. A must read—not only for those still laboring under
the (mis)belief that Lacan was an obscurantist whose work has little to
contribute to social theory, but especially for those committed to exploring the
socio-political purchase of psychoanalysis.’
Russell Sbriglia, Seton Hall University, USA
‘No doubt race and racism are dynamically back on the agenda, both in the
US and internationally. Recent events demand a rigorous attempt to clarify
what is at stake beyond the obvious: what keeps returning, what seems to resist
understanding and intervention. Focusing on the “other scene” animating the
multiplicity of drives, identifications, enjoyments and fantasies involved,
psychoanalysis can help considerably in this process. This rigorous and timely
collection put together by George and Hook is bound to unsettle and reorient
our energies, intellectual and affective, by brilliantly orchestrating an
impressive Lacan-inspired re-appraisal of our ongoing predicament.’
Professor Yannis Stavrakakis, Aristotle University
of Thessaloniki, Greece, author of Lacan and the Political and
The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics
‘In a time like ours, when otherness and singularity are universally
commodified, nothing like Lacanian psychoanalysis can throw light on the
tension between One and Other. In the early 1970s Lacan indeed predicted
the explosion of racism in conjunction with “capitalist progress.” This
wonderful book explores and contextualizes racism by taking seriously
Lacan’s insight that its proliferation and tenacity has less to do with what
we know about the other than with what we don’t know about ourselves.’
Fabio Vighi, Cardiff University, UK,
and author of Zizek’s Dialectics
Lacan and Race
This edited volume draws upon Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to examine

the conscious and unconscious forces underlying race as a social formation,
conceptualizing race, racial identity, and racism in ways that go beyond
traditional modes of psychoanalytic thought.
Featuring contributions by Lacanian scholars from diverse geographical
and disciplinary contexts, chapters span a wide breadth of topics, including
white nationalism and contemporary debates over confederate monuments;
emergent theories of race rooted in Afropessimism and postcolonialism;
analyses of racism in apartheid and American slavery; clinical reflections on
Latinx and other racialized patients; and applications of Lacan’s concepts of
the lamella, drive, and sexuation to processes of racialization. The collection
both reorients readers’ understandings of race through its deployment of
Lacanian theory and redefines the Lacanian subject through its theorizing of
subjectivity in relation to race, racism, and racial identification.
Lacan and Race will be a definitive text for psychoanalytic theorists and
contemporary scholars of race, appealing to readers across the fields of
psychology, cultural studies, humanities, politics, and sociology.
Sheldon George is professor and chair of English at Simmons University,

USA. He is the author of Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American
Racial Identity.
Derek Hook is an associate professor of Psychology at Duquesne University,

USA, and an extraordinary professor of Psychology at the University of
Pretoria, South Africa. He is the author of Six Moments in Lacan.
The Psychology and The Other Book Series
Series Editor
David M. Goodman
Associate Editors
Brian W. Becker, Donna M. Orange, Eric R. Severson
The Psychology and the Other Book Series highlights creative work at the intersections
between psychology and the vast array of disciplines relevant to the human psyche.
The interdisciplinary focus of this series brings psychology into conversation with
continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, religious studies, anthropology, sociology,
and social/critical theory. The cross-fertilization of theory and practice, encom-
passing such a range of perspectives, encourages the exploration of alternative
paradigms and newly articulated vocabularies that speak to human identity,
freedom, and suffering. Thus, we are encouraged to reimagine our encounters with
difference, our notions of the “other,” and what constitutes therapeutic modalities.
The study and practices of mental health practitioners, psychoanalysts, and
scholars in the humanities will be sharpened, enhanced, and illuminated by
these vibrant conversations, representing pluralistic methods of inquiry, in-
cluding those typically identified as psychoanalytic, humanistic, qualitative,
phenomenological, or existential.
Series Titles
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Self and Other in an Age of Uncertain Meaning

Communication and the Marriage of Minds
by Timothy D. Stephen
For a full list of titles in the series, please visit the Routledge website at: https://
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Lacan and Race
Racism, Identity, and
Psychoanalytic Theory
Edited by
Sheldon George
and Derek Hook
First published 2022
by Routledge
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And by Routledge
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© 2022 Taylor & Francis
The right of Sheldon George and Derek Hook to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: George, Sheldon, 1973- editor. | Hook, Derek, editor.
Title: Lacan and race: racism, identity and psychoanalytic theory /
edited by Sheldon George and Derek Hook.
Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2022. | Series: Psychology
and the other | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2021001245 (print) | LCCN 2021001246 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367341923 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367345976 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780429326790 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981. | Psychoanalysis and
racism. | Racism‐‐Psychological aspects. | Race‐‐Psychological
aspects. | Race awareness.
Classification: LCC BF175.4.R34 L33 2022 (print) | LCC
BF175.4.R34 (ebook) | DDC 155.8/2‐‐dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001245
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001246
ISBN: 978-0-367-34192-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-34597-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-32679-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Baskerville
by MPS Limited, Dehradun
Contents
List of Contributors x
Introduction: theorizing race, racism, and racial

identification 1
S HE LDON G E O R GE A ND DE R E K H O O K
PART I
Reading racism through Lacan 17
1 The bedlam of the lynch mob: racism and enjoying

through the other 19
TODD MC GO WA N
2 Pilfered pleasure: on racism as “the theft of enjoyment” 35

DEREK HOOK
3 Confederate signifiers in Vermont: fetish objects and

racist enjoyment 51
HILARY NE R O NI
4 The function and field of speech and language in white

nationalist manifestoes 65
E. CHEBR OLU
5 Oedipal Empire: psychoanalysis, Indigenous Peoples,

and the Oedipus Complex in colonial context 83
W AYN E W A PEE MU KW A
viii Contents
PART II
Racial identification and the subversion of race 103
6 In medium race: traversing the fantasy of post-race

discourse 105
JENN IFER FR IE DL A NDE R
7 The object of apartheid desire: a Lacanian approach to

racism and ideology 121
DEREK HOOK
8 Raced group pathologies and cultural sublimation 146

MOLLY ANN E R O T HENB ER G
PART III
Race and the clinic 163
9 Race, perversion, and jouissance in Portrait of Jason 165

S HE ILA L. C AV A NA G H
10 The lost souls of the barrio: Lacanian psychoanalysis in

the Ghetto 183
P ATR ICIA G HE R O V IC I
11 Dereliction: Afropessimism, anti-Blackness, and

Lacanian psychoanalysis 205
KAR EEN M AL O NE AN D TI AR A J A C K SO N
12 Japanese inter-signifier subjects: jouissance in the locus of

the character 223
KAZU S HIGE S HIN GU
PART IV
Theorizing the racialized Lacanian subject 239
13 The Lacanian subject of race: sexuation, the drive, and

racial subjectivity 241
S HE LDON G E O R GE
Contents ix
14 Skin-things, fleshy matters, and phantasies of race:
Lacan’s myth of the lamella 263
MIC HELLE ST EP HE NS
15 Fanon’s “zone of nonbeing”: Blackness and the politics

of the Real 284
G AU TAM B ASU T HAK U R
Afterword: there is only one race… 299

KALP AN A R . S ES HAD R I
Index 305
Contributors
Gautam Basu Thakur is associate professor of English and director of the

Critical Theory Minor at Boise State University. He is the author of
Postcolonial Theory and Avatar (Bloomsbury 2015) and Postcolonial Lack: Identity,
Culture, Surplus (SUNY 2020), and co-editor of Lacan and Nonhuman (2018)
and Reading Lacan’s Seminar VII: Transference (2020), both from the Palgrave
Lacan Series.
Sheila L. Cavanagh is a professor at York University, Toronto, Canada.
She teaches courses on gender, sexuality, race, and psychoanalytic
sociology. She edited a special double issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly
on psychoanalysis (2017) and co-edited Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis
(2013). Her scholarship appears in a wide range of psychoanalytic
journals and book chapters. Cavanagh is co-editing a special issue of
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society on the psychoanalysis of Bracha L. Ettinger.
She is also completing her third book monograph titled Transgender and the
Other Sexual Difference: an Ettingerian Approach.
E. Chebrolu is a scholar in the field of communication and rhetoric whose
research primarily focuses on white nationalist rhetoric on digital
platforms. Chebrolu’s previous work on the manifesto of Dylann Roof
appears in the publication Review of Communication (January, 2020). A piece
on antisemitism, the desire for free speech, and anti-blackness is published
in First Amendment Studies (March, 2021).
Jennifer Friedlander is the Edgar E. and Elizabeth S. Pankey Professor of
Media Studies at Pomona College. She is the author of Feminine Look:
Sexuation, Spectatorship, and Subversion (State University of New York Press,
2008); and Real Deceptions: The Contemporary Reinvention of Realism (Oxford
University Press, 2017). She has published articles in Discourse: Journal for
Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture; CiNéMAS: Journal of Film Studies;
Subjectivity; (Re)-turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies; Journal for Psychoanalysis of
Culture and Society; Subjectivity; and International Journal of Žižek Studies and in
several edited volumes. She is the 2021 Fulbright-Freud Visiting Scholar at
the Freud Museum Vienna.
Contributors xi
Sheldon George is professor and chair of English at Simmons University,
Boston, Massachusetts. Prior publications intersecting Lacan and race include
two coedited special issues of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society: “African
Americans and Inequality” (Dec. 2014) and “Lacanian Psychoanalysis:
Interventions into Culture and Politics” (Sept. 2018). George is coeditor of
Reading Contemporary African American and Black British Women Writers: Race, Ethics,
Narrative Form (Routledge 2020) and author of Trauma and Race: A Lacanian
Study of African American Racial Identity (Baylor UP 2016).
Patricia Gherovici is a psychoanalyst, supervisor, and recipient of the
Sigourney Award. She is the author of more than 70 articles and book
chapters. Her books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (2003, Gradiva
Award and Boyer Prize); Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on
Sexual Difference (2017), and, with Chris Christian, Psychoanalysis in the Barrios:
Race, Class, and the Unconscious (2019, Gradiva Award and American Board
and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize.).
Derek Hook is an associate professor of Psychology at Duquesne University
in Pittsburgh, and an extraordinary professor of Psychology at the
University of Pretoria, South Africa. He has taught at a number of
institutions, including the London School of Economics and Birkbeck
College (University of London). He is the author of Six Moments in Lacan
(2017, Routledge) and A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial (2011,
Routledge), in addition to being – alongside Calum Neill—a coeditor of
the Lacan Palgrave Series. He is also (with Stijn Vanheule and Calum
Neill) one of three editors on the landmark Reading Lacan’s Ecrits series.
Tiara Jackson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative
Literature at Emory University. Her scholarly work alongside her art
practice employs Black Feminist Thought against the grain of
psychoanalysis to think through Black Death, its repetitions, and
contemporary Black art as sublimation.
Kareen Malone is an Analysand in Formation with Après Coup
Psychoanalytic Association (New York), professor Emerita of Psychology
(University of West Georgia), and fellow, American Psychological
Association. Author of numerous chapters and articles, she co-edited three
books on Lacanian psychoanalysis and co-authored Science as psychology, an
APA William James Award recipient. She is in clinical practice in Atlanta
and adjunct faculty at the Emory University Institute of Psychoanalysis.
Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. He
is the author of Universality and Identity Politics, Emancipation After Hegel, Only a
Joke Can Save Us, Capitalism and Desire, and other works. He is the coeditor of
the Diaeresis series at Northwestern University Press with Slavoj Žižek and
Adrian Johnston and the editor of the Film Theory in Practice series at
Bloomsbury.
xii Contributors
Hilary Neroni is professor of Film and Television Studies at the University
of Vermont, USA. She is the author of Feminist Film Theory and Cléo from 5 to
7 (2016), The Subject of Torture (2015) and The Violent Woman (2005), and has
also published numerous essays on culture, media, and psychoanalysis.
Molly Anne Rothenberg is professor of English at Tulane University and
Training and Supervising Analyst at the New Orleans-Birmingham
Psychoanalytic Center. Her work explores the contribution of
psychoanalysis to theories of group formation and social change.
Kalpana R. Seshadri is professor of English at Boston College where she
teaches courses in Anglophone literature, mainly South Asia and Africa, and
contemporary theory, focusing on issues of race and global relations of
power. She is the author of Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race
(Routledge, 2000), HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language (University of Minnesota
Press, 2012), and co-editor of The Pre-Occupation of Post-Colonial Studies (Duke
UP, 2000). She is currently completing a manuscript on the global economy
and post-humanist thought entitled Post-Human Economics: Race, Earth, Ethics.
Kazushige Shingu is a psychiatrist and professor emeritus of Nara University.
He is the author of many books and papers on clinical psychiatry and
psychoanalysis, including Being Irrational: Lacan, the Objet a and the Golden Mean
(translated and edited by Michael Radich, Gakuju Shoin, 2004).
Michelle Stephens, professor of English and Latino and Caribbean
Studies, is a licensed psychoanalyst and the founding executive director
of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University.
She is the author of Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and The Black Male Performer
(Duke 2014); three co-edited collections in archipelagic American and
Caribbean studies; and recent essays on race and psychoanalysis in Journal
of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA), Studies in Gender and Sexuality,
Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, and Contemporary Psychoanalysis.
Wayne Wapeemukwa is a Métis and Canadian filmmaker and philosopher
from Vancouver, Canada (Unceded Coast Salish Territories). His debut
feature film, Luk’Luk’I, won the Best First Feature Prize at the Toronto
International Film Festival 2017. Currently, he is a doctoral candidate in
philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University where he is researching
the Métis national liberation struggle and indigenous anticapitalism.
This project was supported by a grant from the Simmons University Fund for
Research.
Introduction: theorizing race,
racism, and racial identification
Sheldon George and Derek Hook
Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory has enjoyed extensive growth as a form

of social critique. Over the four decades since his passing, scholars have en-
gaged Lacan’s work within numerous traditions: from discourse analysis to
feminism and feminist philosophy; from ideology critique, Marxism, and ra-
dical political theory to postcolonial and decolonial criticism; from queer and
transgender theory to the ends of various forms of progressive politics.1
However, this generative expansion of Lacanian theory into the domain of
social critique has not strongly featured the urgent social issues of race, racial
identification, and racism. Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity and Psychoanalytic
Theory seeks to reorient Lacanian scholarship toward a centralized focus on
race. It aims both to bring the tools of psychoanalysis to the study of race and
to bring race to Lacanian understandings of the subject.
We turn to Lacanian theory in this study of race because it provides a
unique and refined conceptual frame of ideas and concepts that are vital to
renewed understanding of various psychical, political, and social instantiations
of race. The ethical dimensions of Lacanian theory—its grounding in clinical
practice and its dedication to treatment—along with the ambition of its
conceptualizations, which stretch from Sigmund Freud’s thought in the late
1890s to present iterations of Lacanian social theory, mean that it brings with
it an extraordinary array of inventive critical perspectives and concepts. In the
crucial era of Black Lives Matter, there is a crowded marketplace of ideas that
attempt to circumscribe race and racism within, by now, familiar rubrics of
white fragility, privilege theory, the struggle for social or mutual recognition,
the need for tolerance and empathy, investigations of implicit and un-
conscious forms of bias, and Foucaultian analyses of power and biopolitics.2
The complex, intricate, and often unconscious motivations that catalyze
racism, racial identification, and illusory notions of race require more
sophisticated articulations of the subject and racialized subjectivity.
We embrace Lacanian theory with full recognition that Lacan himself
avoided such complex articulations of race. Though Lacan confidently
prophesized—a bit belatedly in the early 1970s—an impending rise in racism
in years to come, Lacan held no true interest in race, either before or after this
prediction (1990: 36). Lacan rooted his psychoanalytic work in the thinking of
2 Sheldon George and Derek Hook
Sigmund Freud, who had problematically suggested that the less developed
psychic lives of “savages” offered a window into the regressive maladies and
neuroses conflicting modern Viennese subjects.3 Though Lacan directly
refuted the developmentalism at the heart of Freud’s thinking, notably calling
Freud’s mythic narrative of civilization’s emergence from the death of the
(savage) father of the primordial horde nothing but “Darwinian buffoonery”
(2007: 112), and though Lacan would even assert that Darwinian evolutionary
thinking “sanctioned” for Freud’s “Victorian society” the “social devastation
that it initiated on a planetary scale” (2006: 98), Lacan’s overt resistance was
to a psychoanalysis based on theories of developmental growth, not to the
racism of such theories.4
This traditional disregard for race in the psychoanalytic thinking of both
Lacan and Freud helped delay, until the turn of the current century, an
emergent body of scholarship that urgently insisted upon reading race
through the interpretive apparatus of psychoanalysis. All arriving around the
year 2000, works like Christopher Lane’s The Psychoanalysis of Race (1998),
Elizabeth Abel’s Female Subjects in Black and White (1998) and Anne Cheng’s
The Melancholy of Race (2000) seemed to mark a turning point. Specifically in
the field of Lacanian studies, Kalpana Seshadri-Crook’s Desiring Whiteness
(2000) promised to pave the way to new modes of inquiry that tied racial
whiteness to core Lacanian concepts of lack and sexual difference. With few
exceptions, however, later Lacanian scholarship—like Lacan himself—has
not attempted to integrate race into its core theorizing of the subject and
subjectivity.5 The goal of Lacan and Race, therefore, is both to reimagine race
through Lacanian theory and to reconceptualize the Lacanian psycho-
analytic subject through the largely ignored categories of race, racism, and
racial identification.
A singular but prevailing Lacanian reading of racism has already emerged
from the work of Slavoj Žižek in the combined areas of psychoanalysis,
ideology, and politics.6 Žižek has often promoted a reading of racism as tied to
the Lacanian concept of jouissance, or libidinal enjoyment.7 This focus on
jouissance arrives, in part, from Lacan’s brief mention of racism in Television as
bound to the other’s jouissance, a reading that Jacques-Alain Miller has also
popularized.8 Lacan and Race extends and critically reassesses such readings while
grappling with facets of race, racism, and racial identification that existent
theoretical standpoints either do not identify or do not adequately analyze.
Our aim is not merely to historicize race and racism, or to isolate the jouissance-
filled excesses of affect, desire, and fantasy that explain particular instantia-
tions of racism. Rather, it is, ultimately, to approach new understandings of
the formative functions played by racial identification and racism in the
psyches of contemporary subjects confronted by a Symbolic structured by
race. We concur with the assessment of a scholar like Louis Sass when he
asserts that Lacanian psychoanalysis possibly represents “the most sophisti-
cated general theoretical vision of the human condition [that is] currently on
offer” (412). Our task remains throughout, however, to bring Lacanian
Introduction 3
psychoanalysis to bear upon topics of race that have not been germane to
Lacanian theory’s vision of either the human condition or the human subject.
To bridge the divide between studies rooted in the divergent fields of
Lacan and race, we have carefully selected contributors who rely upon so-
phisticated Lacanian theory but privilege stylistic clarity in careful, nuanced
exegeses of the complexities of race. We have organized Lacan and Race as a
collection of essays by fourteen contemporary Lacanian scholars and prac-
titioners who theorize race either from within the frame of their clinical
practices or through various interdisciplinary fields that have engaged
Lacanian thought, including literature, sociology, psychology, visual arts,
and cultural studies. Through the diverse expert-areas of our contributors,
we span a wide breadth of issues and approaches congruent to race: from
Lacanian readings of racial identification to consideration of newly emer-
ging interpretations of blackness within theories of Afropessimism; from
conjunctions of Frantz Fanon’s and Jacques Lacan’s thought to the im-
portance of multidimensional postcolonial understandings of Indigenous
subjects; from clinical applications of Lacanian theory in treatment of Latinx
and Japanese patients to Lacanian readings of white nationalist manifestoes,
the South African system of apartheid and the tearing down of Confederate
American statues; from filmic analyses of perversion and queer gender
performance to rereadings—through the specific context of race—of both
core Lacanian concepts like sexuation and more transient, experimental
ones like Lacan’s lamella. Through such capacious theorical engagement,
Lacan and Race deploys, recontextualizes, and reimagines Lacanian theory
to produce a rigorous, nuanced understanding of the psychic and social
mechanisms at work in race, racism, and racial identification.
Reading racism through Lacan

We have divided the collection into four sections focused, respectively, on
racism, racial identification, clinical considerations, and rereadings of the
Lacanian subject as a subject of race. While the theorizing in our contributors’
chapters extend beyond the broad focus of the sections into which we have
placed them, the sections themselves serve as useful tools for structuring
our investigation into the complex issues of race. The first section, described
immediately below, is the largest of the four and demonstrates how Lacanian
theory can facilitate incisive reconceptions of racism.
Let us consider the idea of implicit or unconscious bias that is popularly
applied to readings of racism. At first glance, this idea appears to have been
usefully informed by psychoanalysis. The goal of its conceptualizing is to al-
leviate racism by making us conscious of our biases. Yet, as Todd McGowan
makes clear in his chapter, “The bedlam of the lynch mob: racism and en-
joying through the other,” such a conceptualization stops short of the properly
psychoanalytic realization that racism is not a problem of knowing
—if it were, it could be summarily corrected and eliminated—but rather a
problem of enjoying. This idea of a contradiction between what we know
consciously and how we enjoy unconsciously is something that commonsense
struggles with because it involves imagining two deeply conflicting states ex-
isting in a type of perennial disjunction. A Lacanian stance, on the other
hand, foregrounds precisely this conflictual dimension; psychoanalysis is, after
all—perhaps first and foremost—a theory of the divisions that make the
subject. Such instances of enjoyment are organized by collective forms of
fantasy that are rooted in the unconscious and that remain tenaciously in
place despite our best efforts at educating away society’s racism. Shared racist
fantasies—fueled by the idea that racial others are enjoying illicitly at our own
expense (indulging in their toxic music, food, religious or cultural beliefs, and
so on)—provide a profound social bond that holds society together. It is for
this reason that McGowan argues that the primary manifestation of racism is
the racist fantasy, which depicts the racial other as the obstacle to the en-
joyment of the racist subject. And yet, as McGowan insightfully notes, what is
perceived as an obstacle—the racial other—is actually the vehicle through
which the racist enjoys. Counterintuitively then, the racist, in fact, enjoys the
racial other, the same racial other he targets and hates as the obstacle to
his enjoyment.
This conviction that there are certain (racial, cultural, religious) others who
have access to a type of transgressive enjoyment that should, rightfully, be
ours means that we can speak of racism, psychoanalytically, as a type of theft of
enjoyment. One advantage of such a conceptualization, as Derek Hook’s
chapter, “Pilfered pleasure: on racism as the ‘theft of enjoyment,’” explains, is
that it doesn’t understand racism simply as a set of socio-historical or dis-
cursive constructions, but rather approaches it through its affective, embo-
died, sensuous and fantasmatic aspects. Nevertheless, despite the merits
of such a conceptualization, which highlights for us how there may be
paradoxical forms of negative-pleasure precisely in hating, Hook cautions
against reducing the idea of racism as the theft of enjoyment to a one-size-fits-
all formula. A series of psychoanalytic notions (fantasy, object petit a, the drive,
superego) should necessarily accompany any rigorous analytical application of
the notion of enjoyment to the social field; and, additionally, enjoyment and
racism must be read within their specific historical contexts.
Our suggestion, throughout this collection, is that Lacanian theory is
critically pertinent to understanding manifestations of violence and racism as
they have insistently surfaced both in the past and in our contemporary
historical moment. One finds in the theory generative concepts that lend
themselves usefully to reapplication within readings of racism. Essays in the
collection take up specific and grounded instances of racism and deploy
Lacanian terminology to the task of applied analysis. Hilary Neroni’s chapter,
“Confederate signifiers in Vermont: fetish objects and racist enjoyment,” is a
case in point. Recent ongoing efforts to tear down Confederate monuments
and change culturally insensitive names of mascots—like Rebels and
Reds—have manifested the fundamental contestations over identity and social
Introduction 5
justice that define our epoch. Reading struggles over these monuments and
racial signifiers in one contemporary Vermont town through the context of
both the Jim Crow and the Civil Rights eras in which most of the monuments
were erected, Neroni turns to the concept of the fetish to explain the lasting
psychic investments these objects of the past generate. The battles themselves,
their aftermath, and their media coverage reveal, argues Neroni, that the
Confederate monuments and racist names function as fetish objects, objects
that, as Jacques Lacan insists, enable subjects to disavow their own status as
lacking while simultaneously establishing their form of enjoyment. The en-
joyment itself urges disavowal of the fact that the symbols represent slavery,
white nationalism, and contemporary racism. Neroni’s use of Freud and
Lacan allows her to illustrate that taking the Confederate signs and the racist
names as fetish objects enables people to disavow racism while still repeating
racism’s psychic investments.
Turning similarly to core psychoanalytic notions and texts in its reading of
race, E. Chebrolu’s contribution, “The function and field of speech and
language in white nationalist manifestoes,” draws on Lacan’s landmark work
within Écrits. Chebrolu’s subject is the white nationalist manifestoes of
Brenton Tarrant, Patrick Crusius, and John Earnest, shooters whose wanton
spectacles of racist murder are anchored, for Chebrolu, in a self-gratifying
identification with the familiar trope of the vigilante. Here, trope expresses
fantasy and roots identity. This trope imagines racial identity within what
Lacan allows us to see as the future anterior of the racist act: what I, as
shooter, will have always been in the past if I commit this act today, the
whiteness I will have fully achieved retroactively. Offering a counterintuitive
understanding that rejects simplistic, and even psychological, readings of ra-
cism as caused by failed familial structures and solved by rehabilitation of
lonesome, misguided shooters, Chebrolu deploys Lacanian theory to reduce
white supremacist violence to its core motivation: white racism. He positions
the white nationalist shooter within historical practices dating back to colonial
America, in which the white subject was deputized as the police or the slave
catcher. As an extra-legal actor, this subject secured the law with racial vio-
lence, particularly when this law is perceived to be in crisis due to the ap-
parent incapacity of legal officials to contain racialized law-breakers. The law
imagined to be in crisis is, significantly, the law of anti-miscegenation, the law
of the white father that seeks to preserve and protect besieged contemporary,
white communities. The self-authorization of this law functions, for Chebrolu,
as a form of crisis management that maintains and rejuvenates investment in
the racism of anti-blackness.
Reading racism in its historical context, as many pieces in the collection do,
pressures the theory toward reconception of not only racism but also psycho-
analysis’ key concepts. Wayne Wapeemukwa’s chapter, “Oedipal Empire:
psychoanalysis, Indigenous Peoples, and the Oedipal Complex in the colonial
context,” demonstrates the simultaneous value and limitations of the notion of
the Oedipal complex developed by Freud and engaged by Lacan. The chapter
advances a psychoanalytic critique of the racism embedded in the (so-called)
“Indian legislations” of the Canadian settler-state. From a psychoanalytic
perspective, such legislations can be viewed as entrenching an oedipalized
relationship in which the settler-state ossifies Indigenous Peoples as children or
wards in need of civilizational development. Wapeemukwa integrates insights
from Frantz Fanon’s polemic against ethno-psychiatry, Jacques Lacan’s late
seminar on James Joyce, and Achille Mbembe’s recent work on the “phalloc-
racy” in order to suggest the utility of reading colonialism, most broadly, as an
oedipalizing endeavor. But he shows, also, that the infantilizing notions of
Indigenous Peoples as stagnated at a less civilized state of development are as
present in Freud as they are in colonialism. Wapeemukwa’s blending of psy-
choanalysis with critical resources rooted in postcolonial thinkers like Fanon
and Mbembe allows him an insightful psychoanalytic frame for interrogating
timely questions of colonialism, indigeneity, and the oedipalizing foundations of
psychoanalysis itself.
Racial identification and the subversion of race

Having foregrounded the centrality of fantasy and enjoyment to racism, and
even fantasy’s centrality in previous psychoanalytic engagement with racialized
others, we might ask: how are we to be liberated from such fantasies of race?
Lacanian perspectives on race and racism would be of limited value to us,
surely, if they did not broach this difficult question. Jennifer Friedlander’s
chapter, “In medium race: traversing the fantasy of post-race discourse,”
provides a prospective answer to how such a liberation might occur. Drawing
on contemporary scholarship that recognizes race as an illusion, Friedlander
highlights how identification with the illusory object of race is tied to race’s
promise to serve as a “medium” through which to decipher the truths of the
racist social reality this illusion itself helps generate. Friedlander questions
the knowledge we seem to arrive at through this illusory medium. She urges
“disavowal” of race through a Lacanian process of separation from the sig-
nifiers of race, which, she argues, secure formidable bonds of racial identifi-
cation within post-racial discourse precisely through the fantasy of having seen
past race and its illusions. The Lacanian concepts of the objet a and the
Act may, she hopes, be harnessed to disrupt the binding structure of race,
destabilizing race’s grip by pressing on—and identifying with—precisely its
negativity. Friedlander argues that we should expose the incompleteness of
the Symbolic order—the signifier’s inability to generate any finalized meta-
truth about our racial reality—alongside its inability to ever fully ground any
subjective identity. To subvert such attempted grounding of identity, however,
our contributors suggest that one must work from a clear understanding of the
mechanisms at play in racial identification. This latter task is embraced most
directly by the chapters of this section.
One of the most egregious historical sites of global white supremacy was
apartheid South Africa, a site of mass identification with the myth of racial
Introduction 7
whiteness. Derek Hook’s chapter “The object of apartheid desire: A Lacanian
approach to racism and ideology” returns us to this site, drawing on the
novelist J.M. Coetzee’s conceptualization of “the mind of apartheid”
as a means of foregrounding a series of paradoxes underlying the racist
ideology of this political system. How, for example, might we separate his-
torical from subjective agency when accounting for the persistence of apart-
heid? Who, moreover, might be said to be the author of such racist ideologies
when apartheid’s ideologues seem themselves subject to its parasitic spread of
ideas? Taking as his starting point Coetzee’s suggestion that apartheid
ideology was sustained by the promise of various “phantasmatic rewards,”
Hook goes on to deploy a set of Lacanian concepts (the desire of the Other,
objet petit a, the processes of alienation and separation) to advance a fulsome
account of racist fantasy. Without an appreciation of racism as an ongoing
transaction between the perceived desire of the Other and the subject’s
own fantasmatic response to that desire (in the form of object a), says Hook,
we fail to grasp how racism is simultaneously a subjective and a social for-
mation; and, moreover, we fail to account for the insistent momentum and
gratifications of racism and racial identification.
Molly Rothenberg’s chapter “Raced Group Pathologies and Cultural
Sublimation” is likewise concerned with the pathological dimension of raced
group identification. Rothenberg focuses her analysis of identification on the
production of a fantasm, that is, the embodiment of a common attribute
of identification that overwrites the values of a given cultural ego-ideal and
obstructs the development of individual desires. She explores desire and racial
group identification in light of Lacanian structures of perversion and neurosis.
Nella Larsen’s novel Quicksand serves as a crucial point of reference for
Rothenberg, dramatizing as it does the effects on desire of fantasmatic raced
identifications. It is in Lacan’s theorization of Atè, the ultimate object of desire
veiling the death drive, that Rothenberg finds a prospective answer to what
might counter and disrupt such pathologically perverse and neurotic raced
identifications. Lacan regards Atè within the context of Sophocles’ Antigone,
designating Antigone herself as Atè, as a new kind of imaged signifier (Un seul)
that, drained of jouissance, stands for difference as such. For Rothenberg, the
cathartic effect of Sophocles’ play depends on its production of just such a new
kind of signifier that offers a model of cultural sublimation that could subvert
pathological raced identifications.
Race and the clinic

A crucial factor enabling us to move beyond the parameters of much con-
temporary theorizing about race and racism concerns the clinic, and, more
directly, the vocabulary that emerges from the realm of Lacanian clinical
practice. One of Lacan’s most important contributions in this respect takes the
form of his structural categories of diagnosis, namely, neurosis, psychosis, and
perversion. Sheila Cavanagh makes figurative reference to the last of these in
her chapter, “Race, perversion and jouissance in Portrait of Jason.” She explores
Shirley Clarke’s (1967) documentary film on Jason Holliday—the first gay
African American man to appear solo on screen—in which Holliday presents
himself as a provocative and loquacious hustler. The film, for Cavanagh,
resembles an unorthodox psychoanalytic scene where the intention is not to
cure, but rather to expose a perverse truth about Holliday. His stories of anti-
black racism are, she says, as erotic and titillating as they are harrowing and
unbelievable, inviting uncertainty with respect to the difference between fact
and fiction, reality and the Real. Holliday becomes the object cause of the
Other’s (Clarke’s) jouissance in the tradition of the Lacanian pervert, his per-
verse performative discourse foregrounding the psychic traumatism of racism
in an utterly distinct way.
At the heart of clinical vocabulary is, of course, the term psychoanalysis
itself. Patricia Gherovici’s contribution, “The lost souls of the barrio:
Lacanian psychoanalysis in the Ghetto,” reminds us that in promoting this
term, psychoanalysis, Freud put the accent on the first of its two conjoined
parts, with “psyche” being the Greek word for soul. This is important, says
Gherovici, inasmuch as nearly all of Freud’s references to the soul (die Seele)
have been removed from English translations and replaced with “mind.”
Gherovici links Freud’s emphasis on the soul to the legacy of Bartolomé de las
Casas, a 16th-century Spanish historian, social reformer and theologian who
denounced the atrocities committed against Indigenous Peoples considered to
be soulless animals. For de las Casas, to emphasize that Indigenous Peoples
had souls was a way of advocating for a more humane policy of colonization.
This historical juxtaposition frames Gherovici’s meditation on contemporary
forms of racism, which she bases on her ongoing clinical work with inner-city
Latinx analysands living in Philadelphia’s barrios. Gherovici’s Lacanian
psychoanalytic perspective aims at establishing the right of barrio patients to
own their “souls.” This means, she says, that they have the right to be con-
sidered as appropriate candidates for a psychoanalytic treatment, and to avail
themselves of the emancipatory potential of the unconscious.
Gherovici’s chapter stresses a need for both redefinitions of psychoanalysis
and reconceptualization of its curative impact upon subjects of race. As
Kareen Malone and Tiara Jackson similarly assert in their chapter,
“Dereliction: Afropessimism, anti-Blackness and Lacanian psychoanalysis,”
the work of the clinic itself must be reenvisioned to account for race. For
such accounting, in the clinic and beyond, Malone and Jackson turn to
Afropessimism, one of the most formidable and challenging critical per-
spectives on white supremacy and global racism to have emerged in recent
years. They stage a conversation between Lacanian psychoanalysis and
Afropessimism to think through anti-blackness and its relationship to the
Lacanian registers of the Symbolic, the Real and the Imaginary. Moving
between the fields of psychoanalysis and Afropessimism—both of which,
significantly, are invested in questions of subjective formation or the lack
thereof—Malone and Jackson invite us to consider the liminal space
Introduction 9
between being and nonbeing as a paradigm for thinking antiblack racism
and violence. Taking up the effects of the history of enslavement and
blackness as a category of nonbeing, they examine Black being/nonbeing in
the “afterlives” of this history so as to situate black subjects in the context of
both Lacan’s clinical frame and that of black social life. Their chapter closes
with an examination of Christina Sharpe’s “wake work” as a modality of
sublimation for blacks living within the perils of anti-blackness.
While Malone and Jackson reconsider the relation of Lacanian theory
specifically to anti-blackness, it remains important to explore, especially
from a clinical perspective, how Lacanian theory might illuminate issues of
cultural and racial identification that exist beyond blackness as a, perhaps,
dominant frame of reference. Kazushige Shingu’s chapter, “Japanese inter-
signifier subjects: jouissance in the locus of the character,” expands this frame
by engaging head-on Lacan’s scandalous suggestion in the preface to the
Japanese translation of his Écrits that psychoanalysis is neither necessary nor
possible for Japanese subjects. Shingu notes how the Japanese writing system
allows most characters (kanji) to be read in two ways, a fact which, for Lacan,
grants the Japanese subject a fundamentally different relation to
the signifier. Although this subject—like any other—remains divided by the
signifier, Lacan suggests that there is no masking the repressed for the
Japanese subject because the repressed can find expression in the shifting
significations of the letter in kanji. But kanji, for Shingu, more properly ex-
presses a Lacanian notion of the littoral, or the boundary space that posi-
tions the Japanese subject between on-yomi and kun-yomi, that is, between
China and Japan, the two cultural sources that coalesce in Japanese writing
as kanji. This littoral is expressed in Japanese culture through folktales, origin
myths, and stories that emphasize oppositions—including the opposition of
life and death—and that situate the unconscious of the Japanese subject at
the littoral between such extremes. Through case studies from his own
practice, Shingu demonstrates that this unconscious mediates the cultural
and personal fantasies that establish a patient’s relation to life and death.
Residing in the littoral between polysemic meanings, it does not reveal but
mask itself in the signifiers of kanji.
Theorizing the racialized Lacanian subject

While many of Lacan’s early contributions to psychoanalysis have by now
become standard reference points in critical and cultural theory—such as the
Imaginary, the mirror-stage, the role of the signifier in unconscious life, the
Symbolic Order, the big Other, and even, increasingly, ideas pertaining to
jouissance—Lacanian scholars in this collection are exploring facets of Lacan’s
work that have hitherto been only inadequately utilized in reference to race
and racism. This new theorizing insists upon recontextualizing Lacanian
concepts in ways that allow for new readings of the Lacanian subject as a
racialized subject.
Sheldon George’s contribution, for example, “The Lacanian subject of
race: sexuation, the drive and racial subjectivity,” presents Lacanian theory as
an exploration of human subjectivity that is left incomplete by its inability to
account for race. Where this theory highlights the agency of the Symbolic in
providing answers to the subject’s existential questions about sex and being,
George argues that race too, surely, lies at the core of such queries. George’s
chapter takes up the concepts of drive and sexuation that have proved
foundational to psychoanalysis, but he rethinks them for their relation to
contemporary formations of race. Given subjectivity’s constitution through
lack—wherein both the signifier and physical embodiment strike being and
sexual libido from the subject—race emerges, says George, precisely as a
promised recuperation of loss. Through analyses of the lasting legacy of
slavery and Jim Crow era racism, George’s chapter presents race as a fantasy
object a, an illusory object that fuels racial desire while also agitating the drive
in its pursuit of jouissance. Through a reading of Lacan’s graph of sexuation,
the chapter presents race as a signifier that aids in the process of structuring
the unconscious around jouissance. Race, George argues, is an object of the
drive that helps sexuate and racialize the body around gapped zones of en-
joyment, tying enjoyment by the body and the psyche to histories of racism.
It is not only core Lacanian concepts like sexuation that may allow re-
definition of the Lacanian subject. In the decades-long process of refining his
theories of the subject, Lacan introduced and abandoned multiple concepts
that the authors of this section suggest are useful to the theorizing of race that
Lacan himself did not conduct. Consider Lacan’s puzzling notion of the la-
mella, presented in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis as a mythical
organ of the body, one that gives substance to Freud’s concept of libido and
provides a means of thinking the operations of the libido in the subject’s
formation. In her chapter, “Skin-things, fleshy matters and phantasies of race:
Lacan’s myth of the lamella,” Michelle Stephens takes up this intriguing
mythical notion to suggest that the drive, and the lamella specifically, become
sites for the appearance of corporeality as psychic phenomenon in Lacan’s
work. For Stephens, Lacan’s myth of the lamella is the catalyst for
imagining—alongside our common tropes of skin as signifier—an alternative
gesture to a fleshy libido-body that exceeds the remit of language and social
construction. Highlighting how racialized skin might itself operate as lamella,
Stephens shows that fantasies of race cannot be reduced to the idea of skin as
the desired object of difference. It is instead the case that fantasies of the flesh
of the racialized body point to disavowed aspects of corporeality that exceed
current discursive constructions and social meanings of blackness.
One of the most challenging and yet also most analytically promising
concepts in Lacanian psychoanalysis is the notion of the Real. This domain,
which exceeds containment by both the Symbolic order (of language and law)
and the Imaginary order (of imaged representation), provides a crucial means
of understanding racism’s effective “de-ontologization” of racialized subjects.
Gautum Basu Thakur’s “Fanon’s ‘zone of nonbeing’: Blackness and the
Introduction 11
politics of the Real” develops this idea. By embracing a postcolonial strategy
of rereading texts for their foreclosed signifiers and disavowed meanings, Basu
Thakur reconvenes a dialogue between Fanon and Lacanian theory, reading
Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks against the grain to theoretically explicate
Fanon’s concepts of “zone of nonbeing” and “Blackness” precisely in relation
to Lacan’s theory of the Real. For Basu Thakur, a focused examination of
Black Skin, White Masks unravels Fanon’s most important contribution to the
study of colonialism, namely that colonialism may be conceived less in terms
of social justice—as a question of economic and/or political inequality—and
more in relation to ontology. Properly revived, the idea of the zone of non-
being posits blackness as negativity, highlighting the need for a shift in focus
from conceiving colonialism in terms of Symbolic politics (the rehabilitation of
stifled voices and identities) to an understanding of colonialism in terms of
ontological absence and the Real. But it is precisely through its negativity that
Basu Thakur imagines a new possible agency for the colonial subject. What
Basu Thakur finds in Fanon is, ultimately, the theory of a new subject. Fanon
imagines, says Basu Thakur, a “New Man” able to achieve his own dis-
alienation from the identities generated by racism in the colonial Symbolic,
paradoxically, through dwelling within the negativity of his own lack: this new
subject, most radically, abandons identity for lack.
Conclusion
Our core agenda in this collection is simple enough. It is to reimagine race
through Lacan and rethink Lacan through race. We have engaged this task
by foregrounding a repertoire of analytical concepts and a variety of stra-
tegic interventions allowed for by Lacanian psychoanalysis. These concepts
and interventions are as pertinent to scholars of Lacan as they are to scholars
of race. They include the analytics of jouissance, which might, for example,
trace the vicissitudes of racism through disavowed racist enjoyment, the
engendering of fantasy and the delegation of jouissance to the hated other.
They intervene upon race through a potential subversion of the subject of
racial identification, a subversion imagined variously through negativity, the
incompleteness of the Symbolic, or a signifier drained of jouissance and
capable of disrupting the binding structures and fantasms of race. Extending
our theoretical reconception of both race and psychoanalysis, significant
elements of our engagement are rooted in the application of clinical sensi-
bilities to the everyday realities of race, racial identification, and racism. We
are able to highlight, for instance, the role of perverse and neurotic struc-
tures in relation to racism; but we also urge a critical engagement by the
Lacanian clinic with racialized subjects previously deemed soulless, childlike,
or otherwise differentiated from the race-free subject envisioned by this
theory. We seek a reevaluation of raced subjects previously excluded from
sustained theoretical consideration, and thereby from psychoanalytic clinical
intervention.
What we have called for, finally, though, is a core rethinking of the
Lacanian psychoanalytic subject, a reconceptualization that recognizes this
subject’s ensnarement, at levels both psychic and social, in modern yet abiding
processes of racialization. Our analysis takes up fundamental Lacanian cat-
egories of sexuation and sexual difference through the mechanisms of race,
rereads centering psychoanalytic concepts like libido in light of the racialized
materiality of skin, and rethinks blackness and nonbeing in relation to onto-
logical absence. Through such analyses, we suggest the capacity for Lacanian
theory to explore new domains of theorizing that both foreground race’s
relevance to social reality and imagine the psychic conditions that may help
disentangle the subject from race’s ensnarement.
One test of the critical utility of our efforts to highlight new avenues of
analysis and theorization for both Lacanian theory and race is how effectively
they might be put to use in a variety of historical contexts. The scope of the
contributions gathered here—inclusive of Japanese, South African, Canadian,
and various (post)colonial sites of application—is testimony to just such a
critical utility. None of this is to insulate psychoanalysis from critique. Many of
the most adventurous of the foregoing chapters interweave Lacanian theory
with other critical vernaculars (Afropessimism, Fanonian perspectives, post-
colonial criticism), simultaneously questioning and deploying psychoanalytic
ideas to the ends of a self-radicalizing mode of Lacanian inspired critique.
Lacanian theory at its best—much like Lacan himself—exhibits a cease-
less and often iconoclastic drive for new concepts, for new forms of theo-
rization, new formulations, indeed, for disruptive—and thereby potentially
transformative—analytical perspectives. We bring this theory to bear upon
racialized Symbolic and psychic realities that remain insistently resistant to
transformative change, simultaneously resilient in their social manifestations
and elusive to incisive theoretical reconception. The insistent dynamism of
Lacanian theory, its continual remaking of itself through its expansion from
the clinic into the social realities of its afflicted subjects, betokens, we believe,
an ethical desire engrained in the theory itself, an unsatisfied, ever pro-
gressive movement toward new and revivifying conceptions of the subject
and its reality. It is perhaps more than anything else this ethical aim in
Lacanian theory, this generative remaking of both itself and the psycho-
analytic subject, that can best inspire future Lacanian contributions in the
areas of race, racism, and racial identification.
Notes
1 See the following: Discourse (Bracher et al., 1994; Parker and Pavon-Cuellar 2012),
feminist (Carusi 2020; Copjec 1994, 2004; MacCannell 2000; Rose 1982), ideology
(Žižek 1989, 1994, 2005), Marxism (Tomšič 2015; Vighi 2010; Žižek 2013, 2015),
postcolonial (Beshara 2019; Basu Thakur 2020; Bhabha 1994; Khanna 2003), ra-
dical (Laclau 1996, 2004; Stavrakakis 1999, 2007), queer and transgender
(Cavanagh 2018; Edelman 2004; Ruti 2017; Gherovici 2017), and progressive
Introduction 13
(Butler et al., 2011; Dean 2018; McGowan 2004, 2013; Rothenberg 2010; Tomšič
and Zevnik 2016).
2 See the following: Fragility (DiAngelo 2018), privilege (Kimmel and Ferber 2016;
McIntosh 2019), recognition (Benjamin 1990; Butler 2000; Honneth 2018), toler-
ance (Hinshelwood 2007), empathy (Givens 2021), bias (Eberhardt 2019; Banaji and
Greenwald 2013), and Foucault-inspired (Foucault 2003; Rasmussen 2011;
Taylor 2018).
3 See, for instance, Totem and Taboo.
4 In Seminar XI, Lacan states, “the very originality of psycho-analysis lies in the fact
that it does not centre psychological ontogenesis on supposed stages” (63).
5 Exceptions include Stephens, Basu Thakur, George, Hook, and Viego. Significantly,
each of these authors takes up an interdisciplinary approach, developing themes of
race, racial identification and racism in a Lacanian way, yet from outside of the
institutional parameters of Lacanian psychoanalysis itself.
6 See, most usefully, Zalloua.
7 See Žižek (1992, 1998, 2016).
8 See Miller’s “Extimité.” Others working on race in the Millerian tradition include
Laurent and Khan. See also Swales and Owen’s deployment of Laurent and
Derrida in their Lacanian reading of race and ambivalence.
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Introduction 15
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Part I
Reading racism through

Lacan
1 The bedlam of the lynch
mob: racism and enjoying
through the other
Todd McGowan
University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont
Where is the other?

The contemporary proliferation of racism in spite of our knowledge about its
wrongs suggests that we have an unconscious investment in racism that
continues and multiplies. Armed with education and a belief in racism’s
fundamental immorality, people today should have no problem leaving racist
ideas and practices behind. But education and morality are not enough. They
are powerless in the face of an unconscious investment, which provides the
foundation for racism’s continuing appeal for those who indulge in it. The
unconscious investment is the central pillar of racism’s intransigence. Unless
one takes the unconscious as the starting point for making sense of racism’s
appeal, the mystery of the enduring power of racism is almost impossible to
decipher. Today, there is a proliferation of historical accounts of all the
various manifestations of racism. These accounts make clear the extent of the
problem, but they do not help us to resolve it because they never attack racism
at the point where it has a hold over us. The struggle against racism requires
an engagement with the unconscious, but deciphering the unconscious appeal
of racism places us on the difficult terrain of psychoanalytic interpretation.1
When we look at the terminology deployed in the contemporary combat
against racism, one might mistakenly assume that the combatants have already
taken the unconscious into account. The predominance of the term unconscious bias
specifically names this aspect of the psyche. But this apparent nod to psycho-
analytic thought is ultimately misleading. Although the term unconscious bias has
become a regular part of the anti-racist lexicon, the analysis of the unconscious has
not. In fact, the proponents of the term often take pains to distinguish their
thought from Freud’s. In Blindspot, their leading work on unconscious bias,
Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald assure us that “an understanding of the
unconscious workings of the mind has changed greatly in the century since Freud’s
pathbreaking observations.”2 According to Banaji and Greenwald, Freud’s un-
scientific conception of the unconscious has given way to a scientifically verifiable
one: we have now collectively moved beyond Freud’s failure to be scientific en-
ough.3 But in the process of this shift, what has been lost is Freud’s insistence on
the radical otherness of the unconscious in relation to consciousness.
20 Todd McGowan
The problem manifests itself in the second part of the term unconscious bias.
Bias suggests a distortion of knowing and suggests that the problem is con-
fined to how we know. This term indicates the belief that racism represents a
failure to know accurately. But once one begins with the premise that the
problem of racism is a problem of knowing, one necessarily misses the ra-
dicality of the problem. Armed with this understanding, to correct our
unconscious bias, we just need a little diversity training that teaches us that
our biases are unfounded. All we need to do, in short, is to fill in the gaps of
our knowledge.
But if racism is unconscious, this means that it is not simply a problem of
knowing but a problem of enjoying.4 We enjoy at odds with how we know.
That is to say, we enjoy not in spite of knowing better but because we know
better. Our unconscious investment in racism delivers an enjoyment that
comes at the expense of what we know, when we transgress the norms that we
know we should obey. No matter how much we know better, this enjoyment
will find a way to manifest itself. Instruction alone cannot alter how we enjoy.
The interchangeability of the term unconscious bias with implicit bias makes clear
the problem. The reference to the unconscious is superficial and does not have
anything to do with the unconscious that psychoanalysis theorizes. The type
of theorizing about racism that sees it in terms of unconscious bias implicitly
categorizes racism as an epistemological problem.
Unconscious bias denotes racism that persons have without knowledge, not the
part of racism that resists knowledge, which is the effect of the unconscious. The
unconscious isn’t simply a lack of knowledge. It is what one does without being
able to know it prior to acting. The unconscious acts ahead of our knowledge.
Taking this understanding of the unconscious as our point of departure,
we must reverse the relationship between racism and knowledge. Racism is not
the result of a bias in our knowing, but rather we have a bias in our knowing
because of racism. To find the root of racism we must look not at mistakes in
knowing but at successes in enjoying. These successes occur through fantasy.
An analysis of racism that focuses on the unconscious must take fantasy as its
starting point.5 While not every society relies on a foundational racist fantasy,
every society that has structural racism does.
Fantasy organizes enjoyment in a way that highlights threats to this en-
joyment, which is why it provides a foundation for obfuscating social in-
equalities.6 Racism manifests itself first and foremost not through an
exclusionary legal or social apparatus that gives one race an elevated social
position that it denies to others. The primary manifestation of racism is the
racist fantasy. The racist fantasy serves as the foundation for the legal and
social apparatus of discrimination that arises around it. It has primacy because
it provides a way of organizing enjoyment for the members of a society that
enables them to sustain the image of an unlimited and complete satisfaction.
This fantasy becomes especially necessary in the capitalist universe. Without
the racist fantasy, people in capitalist society would lose faith in this image of
The bedlam of the lynch mob 21
total satisfaction. Racism keeps the image of an unlimited satisfaction alive by
erecting the racial other as a barrier to it.
In order to confront racism, it is not enough to make reference to what is
not conscious, to our implicit biases. We must recognize the unconscious
fantasy that sustains racism and resists efforts at education or consciousness
raising. This fantasy remains despite the efforts at educating away the society’s
racism. Without broaching the fundamental role that the racist fantasy plays
in the formation and perpetuation of racism, we will have no chance at ad-
dressing the racism that resists enlightenment and awareness. This combat has
to involve itself in the enjoyment that the racist fantasy produces.7
Although there are purely individual fantasies, there are also collective ones
that enable societies to cohere around them. The racist fantasy is the primary
example of a collective fantasy.8 It establishes a bond between members of the
society by separating those who belong from those who don’t belong through
their mode of enjoying themselves. The irony is that the enjoyment of those
who belong depends on their identification with the enjoyment of those who
don’t. This identification occurs through the racist fantasy.
The racist fantasy creates an avenue for members of the society to find
enjoyment in a direction that doesn’t threaten the structure of the society but
instead affirms it. The danger that enjoyment poses to the social order lessens
when it occurs through the organizing principle of the racist fantasy, which
channels it in socially innocuous ways. Even though we imagine that racism
has deleterious effects on our bond with each other, that it harms the social
order, the racist fantasy nonetheless can provide a social glue that holds a
society together. Through the shared enjoyment that comes from a mutual
investment in this fantasy, members of the society have a clear connection to
each other. Those who don’t share in the fantasy, however, exist outside of the
bond and are inherently suspect as members of the society. They are members
of the society but don’t belong.9
Although those invested in it have some conscious knowledge of the racist
fantasy, the way that the fantasy organizes enjoyment is unconscious. It is thus
impervious to knowledge. The fact that the racist fantasy is responsible for
much of the deployment of enjoyment in contemporary society means that
efforts at correcting our knowledge about racism will come to nothing. The
racist fantasy organizes the society’s enjoyment around racist resentment. We
can learn about the wrongs of racism, but we need something more to un-
dermine the racist fantasy that underwrites racism’s staying power.
Fantasies are resistant to greater knowledge because they concern how
people enjoy rather than how they know. Racism is a fantasy problem, not a
knowledge problem. Racism sticks around in our era of increased knowledge
about its wrongheadedness because we are psychically invested as a society in a
fundamental racist fantasy. Although people may consciously want to put ra-
cism behind them, their unconscious desire clings to it as a source of enjoyment.
The path to this enjoyment runs through the underlying racist fantasy.
22 Todd McGowan
The structure of the fantasy
The racist fantasy is a structure that operates regardless of the actual identity
of those occupying the various positions within the fantasy. It is a shared social
structure rather than the product of a certain individuals. Although in-
dividuals are necessary to sustain the fantasy, it is a part of the basic social
structure that forms individual existence within the society. In this sense, while
it is possible for individuals to opt out of or reject the racist fantasy, these
individual victories are insignificant as long as the fantasy remains founda-
tional for the society.
To say that a society is racist is to say that a racist fantasy underlies its social
order. Fantasy provides a structure through which subjects can envision a path
to obtaining the fantasy object, whatever that object is. The fantasy object
might be a particular commodity, a lifestyle, or even a type of social status. But
whatever it is, it promises unrestrained enjoyment for the subject. For the
fantasizing subject, the object appears to have the utmost importance. It seems
as if it is the nodal point of the fantasy. But despite this belief, the actual fantasy
object can be anything at all. The specific object is insignificant. What is im-
portant is the position that this object has in the fantasy, not what the object is.
In order to be a fantasy object, the object need only be unattainable. The
unattainability of the object is the source of its value. Because it is unattainable,
the fantasy object appears to hold within it the secret of a perfect enjoyment. If
one could attain it, one would quickly recognize that it is an object like any
other and cannot provide the enjoyment that it promises insofar as it remains
unattainable. It is with the object that the fantasy performs its magic for the
subject’s prospects of enjoyment. Fantasy has the effect of rendering an in-
herently unattainable object attainable and thereby making an unrestrained
enjoyment seem possible. Even if the fantasy shows the subject deprived of the
object, it nonetheless depicts the object as possible. Outside the fantasy struc-
ture, the subject simply confronts the traumatic impossibility of its desire.10
Fantasy doesn’t just make the impossible possible. It does so, ironically, by
placing a barrier between the subject and its object. The fantasy object is
possible only insofar as something blocks the subject’s access to it. By pro-
hibiting the impossible object, fantasy creates the illusion that the object is
attainable but for the prohibition. This barrier enables the subject to avoid
encountering the disappointment of actually obtaining the object and thus
plays the pivotal role in the fantasy. As the fantasy stages it, if the subject were
to attain this object, it would achieve an enjoyment without any restriction. As
a result, the fantasy must place an obstacle in the way of the object. The
obstacle, not the object, is the crucial ingredient.
The fundamental task of fantasy is to transform an impossible satisfaction
that no one could attain into a prohibited satisfaction that becomes un-
attainable due to the fantasized obstacle that prevents the subject from having
its object. There is no such thing as complete satisfaction. But complete sa-
tisfaction comes to appear possible through the erection of an obstacle to it.
This operation enables subjects to believe that if they eliminate the obstacle
they can attain the impossible and overcome their status as lacking subjects.
Fantasy allows one to imagine an enjoyment without lack, but it does so only
by creating an obstacle who bears responsibility for the failure to attain this
enjoyment.
In the racist fantasy, as in any fantasy, the object is unimportant. The only
significance that the object of the racist fantasy has is that it is unattainable.
The object can be any unattainable object. But what characterizes the racist
fantasy and differentiates it from other forms of fantasy is that the obstacle
to the object—what bars the subject’s access to unrestrained enjoyment—is
the racial other. The fantasy’s key player is the racial other because this figure
makes the object unattainable. As the obstacle to complete enjoyment, the
racial other is responsible for all the subject’s—and the society’s—failures.11
This figure gives the racist fantasy its racist hue. The fantasy defines the
subject through the racial other that threatens it, which gives the subject a
wholly secondary and insignificant status within the structure. The racial
other bars the subject from enjoying the object by monopolizing the object for
itself. The illegitimate enjoyment of the racial other occurs at the expense of
the fantasy’s subject.
This other enjoys in the subject’s stead, triggering resentment for the racial
other. The racist fantasy produces a different and privileged relationship to
enjoyment in the racial other that provides the basis for what we see as racial
difference. It is not that racial difference first exists and then brings with it
different relationships to enjoyment. Instead, we establish racial difference on
the basis of how we distribute the relationships to enjoyment.12 In Trauma and
Race, Sheldon George notes the primacy that enjoyment or jouissance has in
establishing racial difference. He claims, “it is ultimately jouissance that grounds
difference, establishing this difference through its circumscription of the fan-
tasy object.”13 The fantasy always depicts the racial other’s enjoyment as il-
legitimate, as a violation of the law, of morality, or of social mores. The racial
other becomes enshrined as racial as a result of the position of obstacle that
this figure has in the racist fantasy.
In the American version of the racist fantasy, the racial other is often a
black man who enjoys white women at the expense of white men. The black
man’s superior sexual prowess renders him more able to please white women.
The fantasy produces this figure of blackness, as Frantz Fanon has theorized
in Black Skin, White Masks.14 Against such a challenger, the white man has no
chance to measure up. In this sense, the racist fantasy does not clearly and
simply establish the white man’s superiority in all domains. As a sexual being,
the black man, the racial other, thoroughly dominates the white man, which is
why he is an unsurmountable obstacle to the white man’s complete enjoyment
of white women. The fantasy is racist insofar as it grants the black man an
inherent sexual superiority that leads to the victory over white men with white
women. The racist fantasy attributes absolute enjoyment to the racial other in
order to give the subject an obstacle that makes its own full satisfaction seem
24 Todd McGowan
hindered rather than impossible. The white man’s failures with women thus
become the fault of the black man, not the white man. The racial other,
not the very structure of subjectivity, is the bar preventing the subject from
enjoying the way it imagines it might.
The racial other always has an enjoyment advantage deriving from its
fantasized racial inheritance. It is a genetic gift, like athletic ability or in-
telligence. But what makes possible its victory over the subject in the fantasy is
not just this inheritance but also the other’s willingness to bypass the Symbolic
restrictions that the subject observes. In other words, on the terrain of sex, the
racial other cheats. The figure does not obey the constraints of civilized so-
ciety that the subject abides by. The racial other uses seduction and ultimately
has recourse to violence in order to enjoy the object in a way that the subject
cannot. According to the fantasy, he is savage and unrestrained by civilization
in the way that the white man is not.
This fantasy produces the belief in black criminality in the American cul-
tural imagination. The association of blackness with illicit sexual enjoyment
provides the lens through which black men appear as inherently criminal.
This criminality then helps to explain how the black man bests the white man
in the competition for white women. Without resorting to his inherent
criminality, the black man would not be able to beat out the white man on the
terrain of sexual competition. In the fantasy, sexual prowess alone is usually
not enough. Criminality often comes in support.15
The inherent criminality of the racial other points to an additional figure in
the fantasy. The third party in the fantasy is the figure of authority that the
racial other dupes in order to enjoy the object. The racial other gets around
the barrier that the authority poses in a way that the subject cannot by
breaking the law or using subterfuge to evade the constraints that govern
everyone else. The ability of the racial other to evade the restrictions of the
law has a direct link to this figure’s lack of morality. Even though the fantasy
portrays the racial other as lacking the intelligence of the subject, this figure
nonetheless has superior skills in manipulation. Within the fantasy, the feck-
lessness of legal authority against the racial other’s stratagems require extra-
ordinary measures.
This is the justification in American society for the intervention of an ex-
tralegal force to contain the racial other. Entities such as the Ku Klux Klan
arise directly from this fantasy formation as a response to the image of a black
evasion of traditional social authority. The bungling white sheriff cannot
prevent the black man from surreptitiously absconding with white women.
The Klan sees itself as a necessary expedient for disciplining black enjoyment
that the white legal structure cannot succeed in disciplining. Law is never
enough for the excess that black enjoyment represents. Within the American
version of the racist fantasy, legitimate authority cannot successfully police
illicit black enjoyment.16
Only the supplemental army of whites that come together as the Ku Klux
Klan can bring this excess back into the confines of the social order through
their disciplining mechanisms, including the extraordinary measure of
lynching. The Klan is a supplementary police force that targets unrestrained
black enjoyment. The inadequacy of the traditional authority figures speaks to
the vast difference that separates white and black in the racist fantasy.
Traditional authority effectively contains white enjoyment because it operates
within the socially defined limits, but the extreme sexuality and criminality of
blackness places it beyond the reach of the normal functioning of this au-
thority. The extraordinary status of a group like the Klan testifies to the ex-
traordinary nature of black enjoyment. But this enjoyment exists only within a
racist fantasy that posits its existence. Without this underlying racist fantasy
and the outsized part that it grants to black enjoyment, the Klan would be
unimaginable.
The aim of the fantasy is the production of enjoyment, which it accom-
plishes through its vision of the racial other. The racist fantasy locates en-
joyment in the figure of the racial other that both accesses the fantasy object
and blocks the subject’s path to this object. Thus, despite reviling this racial
other, the racist subject must unconsciously identify with this figure in order to
access the enjoyment that it hoards for itself. The supreme irony of racism is
that the only enjoyment available to the racist subject derives from the racial
other whom this subject reviles. The racist enjoys through the target of the
racism, an action that is only possible through the mechanism of fantasy.
The primacy of the fantasy in relation to the legal and social forms of
racism becomes apparent when we take stock of the effectiveness of trying to
ameliorate racism by changing the legal apparatus. The emancipation of
slaves in the United States at the end of the American Civil War didn’t lead to
the gradual elimination of racism but paved the way for the racist separatism
of Jim Crow laws that lasted until the 1960s. The Civil Rights laws of the
1960s finally did away with the legal discrimination of Jim Crow but left the
racist fantasy fully intact. Despite these measures and those that followed after
the 1960s, racism remained ensconced in social practices, workplace oppor-
tunities, policing methods, housing allotments, and overall cultural attitudes.
The waning of legalized racism had the effect of sustaining or even exacer-
bating racism in these extralegal channels.
The persistence of racism depends on an intractable underlying fantasy.
Racism endures because the fantasy endures, not because we have failed to
come up with the proper legal remedy or the most enlightened educational
methods. The racist fantasy remains the same while the legal and social
structure changes. Even proposals like slave reparations, which seem like a
radical remedy to racism, do not threaten the fantasy and actually risk
strengthening it by solidifying the image of the racial other who illegitimately
enjoys in the stead of the nonracial subject. The fight against racism must
target the enjoyment that racism provides by disrupting the racist fantasy
structure. As long as the fantasy endures, racism will remain insoluble.
Responding to racism requires first understanding how the fantasy relates to
desire and enjoyment.
26 Todd McGowan
The otherness of our own enjoyment
Both desire and enjoyment are transitive, but they are transitive in funda-
mentally different ways. To put it briefly: our desire is the desire of the Other,
but our enjoyment is the enjoyment of the other. We learn how to desire
through our interpretation of what the Other or Symbolic authority desires.
We discover our mode of enjoyment through an identification not with the
social authority but with the figure of social ostracism—the other. Enjoyment
takes its clue from the social exile rather than the social authority, from an
other rather than the Other. The way that enjoyment is transitive causes it to
appear as intransitive because it models itself on what doesn’t fit within the
social order. This is why some theorists claim that enjoyment has nothing to
do with the other.17 This contrasting relationship to otherness informs how
desire and enjoyment touch on racism. The racist fantasy brings together how
we desire and how we enjoy in a specific calculus. It is an attempt to use the
racial other’s enjoyment as the solution to the problem of the Other’s desire.
To see how this works, we must first look at the structure of desire. All
speaking beings are desiring beings. The speaking being is divided from itself
through what it says, leaving it constantly missing something no matter how
much satisfaction it experiences. The satisfaction of the speaking being operates
through this self-division rather than eliminating it. Existing as a speaking being
divides one from oneself and leaves one always seeking something else that
would solve the problem of this divide. But the divide is constitutive. Every
attempt to eliminate it leaves the speaking subject in the position of continuing
to desire, which is itself an indication of the persistence of the divide.
Desire is insatiable because it is never just my desire but the desire of the
Other. As Jacques Lacan often repeats, our desire is the desire of the Other.18
There are two related senses to this aphorism: our desire aims to capture the
Other’s desire while also modeling itself on the desire of the Other. We are
constantly trying to arouse the Other’s desire by making ourselves appealing
at the same time as we desire like the Other desires. To make sense of the
relationship of desire, we must recognize that this Other is not the other
person with whom we interact but the figure of social authority. Desire op-
erates in relation to a social authority, even though the figure of this authority
changes throughout the existence of the individual. It might begin as the
parent, then become other children at school, and finally be popular opinion
within society or colleagues at work. Who the Other is remains in flux, but at
all points, some figure or groups of figures operates in this role for the subject.
We learn to desire by trying to figure out what these figures of authority
themselves desire. Desire is nothing but this quest to solve the problem of the
Other’s desire that leaves us in a state of perpetual lack. There is no solution
to this problem because there is no object that would realize desire and
provide complete satisfaction.
Every subject confronts the insoluble problem of the Other’s desire. But the
racist fantasy intervenes to provide a solution, although this solution can only
exist as a fantasy and can never be realized. In response to the question of
what the social authority desires, the racist fantasy introduces the racial
other’s enjoyment. In the racist fantasy, the racial other’s enjoyment is the
realization of the desire of the Other. This fantasized enjoyment exists beyond
the social authority, in the figure of the other that exists beyond all social
constraint. The unrecognized other is the site of enjoyment in fantasy.
Because the racial other is located beyond the limits of the social order in the
fantasy, it has access to an enjoyment that no one within the social order can
access. This structural position within the fantasy enables the racial other to
function as the solution to the problem of the desire of the Other.
When one engages in the racist fantasy, one enjoys not through the Other
as a social authority but through the racial other. This racial other does not
have the sanction of the social authority. It is outside the confines of the social
order. But this positioning gives it a privileged relationship to enjoyment that
one can access through fantasy.
Enjoyment has a different relation to otherness than desire. It doesn’t
concern the Other as a figure of social authority but the other excluded by this
authority, the figure ostracized by the social order. The social authority or
Other is the figure that orients desire, but it does not harbor any enjoyment.
For this reason, the Other alone is not enough to keep the subject in line.
Confronted with the Other and its demand, the subject’s desire can easily
become wayward and challenge the constraints of the social order. This is
where the racist fantasy intervenes. By providing the image of enjoyment in
the figure of the racial other, the fantasy offers the subject a solution to the
problem of desire and gives the subject a reward of enjoyment for its be-
longing. This solution both quiets the potential disruptiveness of desire and
give the subject a taste of enjoyment to make the confines of the social order
seem less barren.
The racist fantasy places the racial other in the position of one who enjoys.
From this position, the racial other acts as a source of enjoyment for the racist
subject. The supreme irony of racism is that it enables the racist to enjoy
through the racial other, even while it keeps this other in a position of non-
recognition. The absence of recognition for the racial other is not a barrier to
enjoyment but its sine qua non. By withholding recognition from the racial
other, racist society keeps this other in a marginal position, but more im-
portantly creates an image of impossible enjoyment. Enjoyment appears at
the point of social ostracism, the point beyond social constraint. In Imagine
There’s No Woman, Joan Copjec notes that “jouissance flourishes only there
where it is not validated by the Other.”19 Even the enjoyment that sustains the
social order occurs beyond the constraints of this order. The racist act pro-
duces the site of enjoyment at the limit of society that fuels the racist fantasy,
which allows those within the society to access this enjoyment. Racist society
survives on the enjoyment of those it refuses to acknowledge.
Although racism denigrates and demeans the racial other, it locates en-
joyment in this figure. The denigration creates an otherness in relation to the
28 Todd McGowan
social authority that opens up the possibility of enjoyment. Unlike the rest of
society that exists under the social authority’s demand, the racial other has an
external relation to this demand. To be the racial other is to exist in the
position of nonbelonging to the society. This position, falling outside of the
social demand, is one of enjoyment.
As a result of the social order’s racist structures of recognition, the racial
other is part of the society but does not belong to it. The denial of recognition
comes with racialization. But the denial of recognition also opens up the
positive possibility of enjoyment. This is why the racist fantasy employs the
racial other. The subject of this fantasy experiences this racial other as a
dangerous figure of enjoyment who has access to what the subject does not. In
the racist fantasy, the racial other threatens to swallow the nonracial subject in
its teeming enjoyment. But the threat is at once a possibility for enjoyment
that the nonracial subject would otherwise not have. By encountering this
threat, the subject can experience the fantasized enjoyment that is inaccessible
for it outside the fantasy.
The practice of lynching is perhaps the most extreme response to this
fantasy figure. Lynching was an extralegal practice, occurring primarily in the
American South in the seventy years following the Civil War, that functioned
as a compensation for the inadequacy of legal authorities in the face of the
threat of black enjoyment. According to the logic of the racist fantasy, the
black man, as a form of the racial other, had an ability to enjoy that official
law and authorized policing cannot contain. Lynching most often targeted
black men who engaged with white women in some measure of sexual
relationship—from acts as innocent as a desiring glance to accusations of
rape.20 Whenever black enjoyment was at work, the official law was in-
adequate. The law was not able to punish black enjoyment that expressed
itself in an ogling look, despite the danger manifested in this look. And even
though rape was illegal and punishable by death, this punishment did not
come swift enough or was not thorough enough, given the magnitude of the
threat in the racist fantasy. Both extremes of black enjoyment, the innocent
and the violent, required lynching to come to the aid of the official authorities
in order to snuff it out and discourage any further manifestations of it through
recourse to brutal ends, such as castrating black victims and burning them
alive. The emergence of the extralegal practice of lynching testifies to the
measure of the threat that the American version of the racist fantasy attributes
to blackness.
But lynching did not just eliminate the threat of black enjoyment. At the same
time that it destroyed the black man’s capacity for sexual enjoyment (through
castration and murder), lynching provided a means through which the perpe-
tuators could themselves partake of this illicit enjoyment. Although we imagine
lynching as a hidden activity done under cover of the night by masked men, it
was first and foremost a quasi-public ritual whereby racist white society partook
of the black enjoyment that threatened it. In the American racist fantasy, black
enjoyment hindered any realization of white desire. The fantasy envisioned the
black man doing what the white men refrained from doing—enjoying women
without the constraints of marriage or propriety. The black man enjoyed in the
stead of the white man and did so in a way that the white man himself could not.
But this black enjoyment was also the means through which the fantasy pro-
duced enjoyment for whites. While lynching is an act of barbaric violence, it
reveals how the racial other’s enjoyment served as the source of enjoyment for
those invested in the racist fantasy. The perpetuators of lynching themselves fed
on the enjoyment of the racial other that lynching attempts to destroy.
In terms of their ability to deliver enjoyment, lynching parties were genuine
parties. They provided enjoyment through an identification with the enjoy-
ment of the figure that they destroyed. The violence of lynching called to
mind the actions of the black man being punished for those involved in it. The
lynching enabled the perpetuators and spectators to access this sexual en-
joyment through their act of violent destruction. Despite the vast difference
between sexuality and violence, they come together in the act of lynching,
which translates sexual enjoyment into a form of violence.
The role that castration plays in lynching is revelatory on this count.
Castration is even more important than death in the ritual. It reveals that
the point is not just punishing a criminal or sending a warning to other
potential criminals. Instead, lynching aims at destroying the sexual enjoy-
ment of the black man and cutting off his ability to please white women. The
act of castration takes aim at a fantasized sexual superior, but in the act of
destroying this enhanced capacity for sexual enjoyment, lynching allows the
lynching party to touch and view the source of unrestrained enjoyment—the
black man’s sexual organ.
The festive celebrations that often surrounded a lynching manifests the
enjoyment of the victim. The violence didn’t dampen the atmosphere of the
lynching but actually created it, as perhaps the most gruesome lynching in
American history attests. The lynching of James Washington in Waco, Texas,
in 1916, occurred after his conviction for the rape and murder of a white
woman.21 A lynch mob cut off Washington’s fingers and castrated him before
burning him to death over a period of two hours. During this time, a crowd
that included 10,000 participated in the event and drew on the enjoyment
that the racist fantasy attributed to Washington. Although it is not clear
whether or not Washington committed the crime, the extremity of the event
reveals that the racist fantasy, not a concern for justice, drove the participants
to act. The duration of the event testifies to the enjoyment that it provided for
those involved, as do the souvenir charred body parts that many kept and the
picture postcards that commemorated the day for the white crowd.
Although no one saves lynching picture postcards today, the racist fantasy
that led to such a practice has not, unfortunately, undergone any change
whatsoever. The public acceptance of racism has diminished, but the un-
conscious power of the racist fantasy has not. One of the leading indicators of
the continued profound racism of American society is the association of
blackness with enjoyment, which has not abated since the time of lynchings.
30 Todd McGowan
The outsized role that black popular musicians and black athletes have tes-
tifies to the structuring power of a fundamental racist fantasy that privileges
black enjoyment. Although American society’s racist structures largely keep
black individuals out of top business and political positions, top positions in
entertainment and sports are available because these positions, unlike the
leadership of a massive company, fit into the prevailing racist fantasy.
The clearest example of the association of the racial other with enjoyment is
the reception of contemporary hip hop music. Hip hop music is the dominant
musical genre among American teens, no matter where their ethnicity or
geographic location. The dominance of this predominantly black genre
among white teens indicates how well it speaks to the underlying societal
fantasy. The popular success of any musical genre depends on its ability to fit
what fantasy requires. Suburban white teens find an enjoyment in hip hop
music that the drudgery of suburban American existence lacks. Hip hop al-
lows them to indulge in the logic of the racist fantasy with a clear conscience
about their absence of racism. They can know that they aren’t racist because
they appreciate black musicians, but it is precisely this appreciation that
indicates their investment in American society’s racist fantasy.
We can see the enjoyment at work in hip hop by looking at a popular
example, the remix version of “Da Real Hoodbabies” by Lil Gotit. The lyrics
drip with an enjoyment that completely defies the social norms of con-
temporary American society. In the first verse, the song proclaims a violent
sexual enjoyment: “Hit it from the front, then I grab her by the neck/Nutted
on her face, yeah, Gotit left a mess/Then she let the shit drip down to her
chest.” The second verse compounds the violence, contending, “If she don’t
give me head, I’ma cut off her neck.” The song transgresses social norms
about brutal misogyny, norms that are the heart of the contemporary social
demand. It posits an enjoyment at the precise point where the social order
restrains it. The extreme nature of the transgression that the song envisions
corresponds with the status of the hip hop musician. This musician sings from
the position of nonbelonging that enables him to violate social norms with
impunity. The song plays into the fantasy of an enjoyment that is not subject
to the restrictions that govern the society as a whole, an enjoyment made
possible by the position that the hip hop musician occupies as a racial other.
Songs such as “Da Real Hoodbabies” are popular among American teens
because they enable them to access a fantasized enjoyment that would
otherwise remain off-limits to them. They can fantasize about this enjoyment
without ever living it. The popularity of these songs stems from their place
within the underlying racist fantasy structure that locates transgressive en-
joyment of nonbelonging with blackness. The fact that what the song portrays
is not really enjoyable is not significant. If no one really enjoys grabbing
women by the neck or ejaculating on their faces, this does not detract from the
power of the fantasy. The song works because it fits. Teens listen to it and take
part in this extreme enjoyment because the song aligns so perfectly with the
society’s underlying racist fantasy. One can listen and enjoy this fantasy
without ever for a moment considering oneself a racist. This is what makes the
racist fantasy so much more appealing than open displays of racism. Even
though listening to hip hop music is a less toxic form of enjoyment than
participating in a lynching, it is nonetheless involved in the same pathology
because it relies on the same racist fantasy.
Anti-racism does not demand that we stop listening to hip hop, just that we
abandon the association of this music with the unrestrained enjoyment of the
racial other. The power of the racist fantasy derives from the enjoyment that
associated with this figure. Until this association breaks down and the en-
joyment that it embodies loses its uncastrated quality, racism will continue to
have a structuring role in the social order and black men will remain in
danger from the contemporary version of lynching parties.
Breaking the hold of the fantasized figure of the racial other requires dis-
tinguishing between the Real enjoyment that derives from nonbelonging—an
enjoyment available to everyone, since no one truly belongs—and the image
of enjoyment that fantasy attributes to this position. The Real enjoyment of
nonbelonging is the enjoyment of lack, what emerges when one embraces
one’s status as lacking and recognizes it as the condition of possibility for one’s
enjoyment and not a barrier to it. Rather than attempting to overcome lack
by obtaining the object, Real enjoyment achieves satisfaction through the way
that it relates to lack. It is an enjoyment that takes lack as its point of reference
rather than the object that would fill the lack. This form of enjoyment is Real
because it doesn’t try to overcome lack and solve the problem of desire by
succumbing to the promises of the racist fantasy.
The Real enjoyment of nonbelonging is available to everyone. It is only in
the racist fantasy that racial others have a monopoly on nonbelonging. In fact,
even those whom the social authority designates as belonging can refuse this
path and accept their nonbelonging. This is the choice of lack and the ac-
ceptance of enjoyment through lack rather than through overcoming it, which
is what recognition promises. Nonbelonging carries with it a castrated en-
joyment that anyone can access since everyone is a castrated subject. The
embrace of castrated enjoyment is the basis of a non-racist existence because it
doesn’t depend on positing an other who avoids castration.
The enjoyment that fantasy delivers emanates from the position of non-
belonging. But it imagines nonbelonging as a site replete with fullness, as if
nonbelonging were the same as noncastration. The fantasy gains its energy
from the position of lack, but it doesn’t content itself with this lack. It sees in
nonbelonging the promise of the realization of desire rather than the possi-
bility for the enjoyment of lack. In this sense, the basic social fantasy betrays
the position of nonbelonging that it accesses. The fantasy transforms the Real
enjoyment associated with nonbelonging—the enjoyment that emerges
through embracing the fact of castration and thereby breaking from the hold
of the Other—into an image of noncastration that completely misses this
enjoyment. In shooting for full enjoyment, the racist fantasy misses the pos-
sibility that resides in nonbelonging. Despite the damage that it has done, the
32 Todd McGowan
racist fantasy actually looks for enjoyment in the right place. Its fundamental
error is looking in the wrong way.
Notes
1 The notable exceptions to the prevailing historicist treatment of racism are
Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (2000), and Sheldon George (2016), to name two of the
few attempts at understanding racism by foregrounding the unconscious.
2 Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald (2013: 6).
3 For the most thorough attack on Freud for his failure to be properly scientific, see
the work of ex-Freudian Frederick Crews (2017).
4 Sheldon George is clear that what is at stake in racism is the enjoyment of the
racist. This enjoyment ties the target of racism to the trauma that derives from
being the object of enjoyment. He writes, “the white subject’s jouissance becomes the
instrument of African Americans’ confrontation with trauma.” Sheldon George
(2016: 8). American racism, as George theorizes it, creates an indissociable link
between white enjoyment and black trauma.
5 Although the content of the racist fantasy is different in different times and places,
the form nonetheless remains the same, even if some other form of difference
becomes substituted for racial difference, as is the case with the ancient Greeks,
who distinguished themselves from barbarians but did not see this as a racial
distinction.
6 In his Seminar XVIII, Jacques Lacan states, “You only enjoy your fantasies. This is
what gives birth to idealism, which no one, by the way, despite the fact that it is
incontestable, takes seriously. What is important is that your fantasies enjoy you.”
Jacques Lacan (2011: 113). Fantasy is the site of an enjoyment that both captures
the subject and that enjoys at the expense of the subject, which is what Lacan
stresses in the final line.
7 Because she sees the structuring power of fantasy for the social order, Molly
Rothenberg claims, “the politics of social change is irremediably fantasmatic.”
Molly Anne Rothenberg (2010: 206). Political acts must intervene on the level of
fantasy if they are to introduce a substantive change.
8 As Derek Hook points out, “There is no such thing as a stand-alone (or purely
affective) instance of racist jouissance. There are only distributions, patterns, ar-
rangements of racist enjoyment that are structured by fantasy.” Derek Hook (2019:
280–81).
9 This is why membership in a community depends not on an official process of
initiation but on adopting the fundamental fantasy frame. As Slavoj Žižek states,
“One becomes a full member of a community not simply by identifying with its
explicit Symbolic tradition, but when one also assumes the spectral dimension that
sustains this tradition: the undead ghosts that haunt the living, the secret history of
traumatic fantasies transmitted ‘between the lines,’ through its lacks and distor-
tions.” Slavoj Žižek (2000: 64).
10 As Juan-David Nasio puts it in Le Fantasme, “The function of the fantasy is to
substitute for an impossible real satisfaction a possible fantasized satisfaction.”
Juan-David Nasio (2005: 13).
11 Jacques Lacan’s term for the fantasy object, objet a, refers not to the object of desire
but the object that causes desire, which is the obstacle in the fantasy. Without this
object, the object of desire loses its desirability.
12 There is nothing necessary in the role that race plays in the organization of en-
joyment. We might just as easily use religion or sexual orientation as the foun-
dational fantasy for contemporary society’s distribution of enjoyment. Race plays
the leading role for contingent reasons, although there are parts of the world where
religion predominates and has the decisive role in the fantasy.
13 Sheldon George (2016: 4).
14 Fanon points out, “the Negro has a hallucinating sexual power. That’s the right
word for it, since this power has to be hallucinating.” Frantz Fanon (2008: 136).
Fanon insists again and again on the fantasmatic status of black sexuality and the
necessary role that it plays in the white psyche.
15 The mass incarceration of black men in the United States has its legal origins in
inegalitarian laws and racist policing practices. But its psychic origin lies in the
racist fantasy and the image of black male criminality that this fantasy requires.
16 For a thorough account of the significant role that lynching played in disciplining
blackness, see Philip Dray (2002).
17 This is what Lee Edelman is getting at in No Future when he claims that “jouissance
can only fuck up the very logic of reproduction.” Lee Edelman (2004: 60).
18 See, for instance, Jacques Lacan (1978: 38).
19 Joan Copjec (2002: 167).
20 Many of the rape accusations that occasioned lynchings were false. For a thorough
account of the relationship the complicated role that Southern women played in
the practice of lynching, see Crystal M. Feinster (2011).
21 Historians have reached no definitive conclusions about the guilt or innocence of
Washington, although his guilt has nothing at all to do with the act of lynching.
Given the position of black enjoyment in the racist fantasy, every black man was
already guilty of the same crime, no matter what he actually did.
References
Banaji, Mahzarin, and Anthony Greenwald. Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.
New York: Random House, 2013.
Copjec, Joan. Imagine There’s No Woman. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.
Crews, Frederick. Freud: The Making of an Illusion. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017.
Dray, Philip. At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. New York:
Random House, 2002.
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2004.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove
Press, 2008.
Feinster, Crystal M. Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Hook, Derek. “Racism.” Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory. Ed. Yannis
Stravrakakis. London: Routledge, 2019. 272–284.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York:
Norton, 1978.
Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, livre XIX: … ou pire, 1971–1972. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller.
Paris: Seuil, 2011.
Nasio, Juan-David. Le Fantasme: Le plasir de lire Lacan. Paris: Petite Bibliothèque
Payot, 2005.
34 Todd McGowan
Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change. Malden,
MA: Polity, 2010.
Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana. Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race. New York:
Routledge, 2000.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Fragile Absolute, or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? New
York: Verso, 2000.
2 Pilfered pleasure: on racism
as “the theft of enjoyment”
Derek Hook
Duquesne University and University of Pretoria
Introduction
In a 1973 interview, subsequently published as Television (1990), Jacques-Alain
Miller asked Lacan why he was predicting a rise in racism in the years to
come. Lacan responded, elliptically as ever, by remarking that:
With our jouissance going off the track, only the Other is able to mark its
position, but only insofar as we are separated from this Other … Leaving
this Other to his own mode of jouissance, that would only be possible by not
imposing our own on him … [There is also] the precariousness of our own
mode, which from now on takes its bearings from the ideal of an over-
coming [excess of coming/enjoying] [plus-de-jouir] (Lacan 1990: 32–33).
Six years earlier, in his Proposition of 9 October 1967, Lacan made a similar
prediction, warning that Europe’s “future as common markets will be ba-
lanced by an increasingly hard-line extension of the process of segregation”
(Lacan 1995: 12).
Given the current circumstances of Britain’s exit from the European Union,
and the evident rise of racism and xenophobia both in Europe and the United
States, it is hard not to read these comments as somewhat prescient. The
nationalistic, exclusionary and often explicitly racist impulses apparent in
Britain’s Brexit vote and the recent Trump Administration in the United
States, appear to vindicate Lacan’s predictions. An increasingly globalized
and networked world, with historically unprecedented levels of immigration,
has resulted not in increased tolerance, as one may have anticipated, but—so
it appears—in a renewed passion for segregation.
What is it, from a Lacanian perspective that fuels such political passions
and ignites racial and cultural hate? Slavoj Žižek (2016) offers a ready re-
sponse: the fact of different modes of libidinal enjoyment (jouissance), or, more
specifically yet, the perception that my own precious mode of enjoyment has
been stolen by others in possession of an illicit or malignant enjoyment. In
what follows I explore this basic tenet of Lacanian social theory, namely that
racism involves a series of relations to jouissance. The most popular version of
36 Derek Hook
this thesis—which I aim to rework and qualify here—is Slavoj Žižek’s dis-
cussion of the idea of racism as the theft of enjoyment (1992, 1993, 2005), a
notion he derives from Jacques Alain-Miller (1994), who is himself clearly
indebted to Lacan’s (1990, 1995) own formulations in this regard. I want both
to expand upon Žižek’s argument, and to contextualize it with reference to a
series of foregoing Lacanian conceptualizations of racism.
While my objectives here are largely expository, they are also critical.
Despite the unique analytical pertinence of this multifaceted notion (racism as
jouissance, as reaction to the perceived theft of enjoyment), there are a number
of problems that undermine its use as a tool of analysis. After a brief illus-
trative introduction to the concept as applied in Žižek’s work, I list and then
discuss these problems, making reference to the most important formulations
regards racism and enjoyment in the Lacanian literature (George 2014, 2016;
Glynos 2001; Stavrakis 1999, 2007). In both evaluating and, ultimately, ar-
guing for the analytical value of the concept of jouissance, I will assert that
certain of the above criticisms are more justified than others. I also argue that
a series of distinctions and qualifications prove essential in applying the idea of
racism as enjoyment with the analytical precision that it deserves.
The “theft of enjoyment” thesis

In a recent (2016) text, Žižek revisits a favorite theme, namely the role of
jouissance in the politics of racial/cultural division:
What, then, is the factor that renders different cultures (or, rather, ways of
life in the rich complexity of their daily practices) incompatible, what is
the obstacle that prevents their fusion or, at least, their harmoniously
indifferent co-existence? The psychoanalytic answer is jouissance … [D]
ifferent modes of jouissance are incongruous with each other, without a
common measure … [In inter-cultural contact,] the subject projects … its
jouissance onto an [other], attributing to this [other] full access to a
consistent jouissance. Such a constellation cannot but give rise to jealousy:
in jealousy, the subject creates or imagines a paradise (a utopia of full
jouissance) from which he is excluded (2016: 75).
This brief account can be usefully juxtaposed with an extract from Jacques
Alain-Miller’s 1985–1986 seminar, Extimité:
Jouissance is precisely what grounds the alterity of the Other … It is in its

relation to jouissance that the Other really is Other … Racism … is
precisely a question of the relation to an Other as such, conceived in its
difference … [R]acism calls into play a hatred that is directed … toward
what grounds the Other’s alterity … [their] jouissance … It is not simply a
matter of an … aggressivity that … is directed at fellow beings. Racism is
founded on what one imagines about the Other’s jouissance; it is hatred of
Pilfered pleasure 37
the particular way, of the Other’s own way, of experiencing jouissance …
what is really at stake is that he takes his jouissance in a way different from
ours … the Other’s proximity exacerbates racism: as soon as there is
closeness, there is a confrontation of incompatible modes of jouissance …
(Miller 1994: 79–80).
What is immediately striking in these extracts is the role played by affect, or

more accurately yet, by the “pained stimulation” of the aroused passions of
enjoyment. What both authors highlight—and this speaks to the analytical
value of the concept—is that forms of excess stimulation (the “negative
pleasure” of jouissance) underlie and propel Symbolic and political construc-
tions of otherness. Different cultural modes of enjoyment are, furthermore,
fundamentally discordant. We have then not so much a “Clash of
Civilizations”—to reference the Samuel Huntington’s (1997) much cited
thesis—as a clash of enjoyments.
Moreover, the difficulty that we have in realizing “full” enjoyment—something
that is impossible in Lacanian theory for “castrated” speaking beings—is dealt
with by imagining the supposedly unimpaired and inevitably disturbing enjoy-
ment possessed by cultural/racial/sexual others. In short, the fact that we cannot
attain the jouissance we feel we deserve results in perceptions of an unhindered,
illegitimate, and undeserved enjoyment on the part of others. As Sheldon George
notes: “the other’s jouissance, or enjoyment, [is] … the very core around which …
otherness articulates itself” (2016: 3). Political jealousy, as Žižek calls it, is thus (at
least in part) the result of incompatibilities and more importantly yet, perceived
sacrifices of jouissance.
Jouissance: unserviceable tool of political analysis?

Despite having offered only a brief introduction to the above Lacanian ideas,
we should pause here for a moment to voice a number of prospective
methodological and conceptual problems implied by the racism as (theft of )
enjoyment thesis. Doing so will help us focus the expository comments to
follow, and indeed, to highlight the potential analytical advantages the thesis
may have to offer.
The first critique, which applies to a wide historical range of psychoanalytic
theories of racism (see Cohen, 2002; Frosh 1989; Stavrakis 1999), is that of
psychological reductionism. Simply put: the complexity of the various his-
torical, discursive, and socioeconomic causes of racism are invariably de-
prioritized and accorded a peripheral explanatory role once the domain of the
psychological is privileged. Accounts of the psychological factors underlying
various instances of racism are thus not only de-historicizing and hopelessly
generalizing; they are also invariably depoliticizing.
A second critique: is jouissance not a hopelessly open-ended concept?
Virtually any cultural behaviour, bodily intensity or libidinal activity can, it
seems, be considered to be an instance of jouissance. In view of racism, for
38 Derek Hook
example, the other’s enjoyment can refer to everything from their in-
comprehensible cultural customs and/or religious beliefs (epitomized, for
example, in odd food and dress restrictions), to perceived aspects of their
distinctive physicality/sensuality (their food, the way they dance, the sound of
their music), to attributions of superabundant vitality (they are excessively
promiscuous, religious, lazy, etc.)? The concept of jouissance seems thus to be
both underdifferentiated and overly inclusive, applying to a potentially endless
array of behaviors and experiences. Without a clearer sense of how to
differentiate what qualifies as enjoyment and what does not, the concept loses
analytical value.
A third line of critique: different modes of enjoyment are implied within the
literature, without being properly distinguished. In Žižek’s descriptions of
racism and jouissance, for example, jouissance is used broadly to refer to: visceral
or passionate modes of experience (the “thrill of hate”); an array of enviable
possessions (our “libidinal treasures”) perceived as under threat by cultural
others; and a type of noxious “surplus vitality” possessed by such others. So,
whose enjoyment are we most fundamentally concerned with in these notions
of racism as jouissance, the other’s, or our own? What is the relationship be-
tween these two types of jouissance? And how are they related to a third mode,
namely the “negative pleasure” of making—experiencing—such troubling
attributions in the first place?
Fourth, there is ever-present problem of de-contextualization in “short-
hand” applications of the term. This leads to a situation in which enjoyment
itself is treated as a causative force beyond adequate consideration of a series
of accompanying concepts (the frame of fantasy, the operation of the signifier,
the role of the law, the “object a” as cause of desire) that necessarily accompany
its proper psychoanalytic application. What auxiliary terms must thus be
utilized alongside the concept if it is to serve us as a viable analytical tool?
Critique 1: the notion of enjoyment as

psychologically reductionist
There is a crucial passage that is repeated in a number of Žižek’s earlier books
(1992, 1993, 2005) and that serves as perhaps his most direct exposition of
racism as the theft of enjoyment:
What is at stake in ethnic tensions is always [a kind of ] possession: the

“other” wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our “way of life”) and/
or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. In short, what gets
on our nerves, what really bothers us about the “other” is the peculiar
way he organizes his enjoyment (the smell of his food, his “noisy” songs
and dances, his strange manners, his attitudes to work—in the racist
perspective, the “other” is either a workaholic stealing our jobs or an idler
living on our labour)” (1992: 165).
While this seems, in many ways, a gripping account, from a sociologist or
historian’s perspective, the degree of reductionism is staggering. The multiple
complex sociological, economic, and socio-historical variables underlying
distinctive historical forms of racism are brushed aside in favor of a gen-
eralizing psychoanalytic formula. Racism = reaction to perception that the
(perversely enjoying) other has stolen our enjoyment. This reduction of racism
to an affective equation is evident also in Žižek’s precursor in this conceptual
domain, Jacques-Alain Miller:
Why does the Other remain Other? What is the cause for our hatred of
him, for our hatred of him in his very being? It is hatred of the enjoyment
in the Other. This would be the most general formula for the modern
racism we are witnessing today: a hatred of a particular way the Other
enjoys … The question of tolerance or intolerance is … located on the level
of tolerance or intolerance toward the enjoyment of the Other, the Other
who essentially steals my own enjoyment (Miller, cited in Žižek 1993: 203).
The depoliticization (indeed, the implicit psychologization) inherent in such a

conceptual move is surprising inasmuch it is something that Žižek has proved
critical of elsewhere. In a 1998 text, for example, Žižek outlines the charge of
psychological reductionism against standard psychoanalytic explanations of
racism, which offer
a way of explaining racism that ignore … not only racism’s socio-

economic conditions but the sociosymbolic context of cultural values and
identifications that generate reactions to the experience of ethnic
otherness (1988: 154).
Surely this also applies to the racism as theft of enjoyment formula outlined
above? Explanations of racism as jouissance are surely prone to psychological
reductionism inasmuch as they often appear to privilege a series of psycho-
analytic assumptions (drive, fantasy, libido, projection, etc.) as existing prior
to—or independently of—considerations of economic, historical, political,
and socio-symbolic context?
Critique 2: enjoyment as an undifferentiated, overly-

inclusive concept
How best to address the claim that jouissance is an overly inclusive or under-
differentiated concept? Well, by insisting on a crucial Freudian qualification,
namely that jouissance is fundamentally libidinal (which is to say: sexualized ). This
itself demands further explanation. How are we to understand the breadth of
what is implied by this nebulous term? In psychoanalytic terminology, libido is
typically described as the sexual energy of the drive. Stepping aside from this
technical language we may understand libido as what underlies a diverse
40 Derek Hook
variety of passionate attachments. It is the “bonding agent” through which
subjects, in both their own unique ways and via more conventionalized group
forms, become affixed to particular practices, objects and/or experiences.
So, to concede a critical point made above: yes, jouissance can refer to vir-
tually any object or activity—so long as it has taken on a libidinal value. The
concept is in this sense open, and potentially over inclusive, yet for a good and
anti-essentialist reason: any facet of human behaviour can, conceivably, take
on an erotic charge. It helps to add here that jouissance should not be con-
ceptualized within the psychological parameters of affect and emotion, but
rather in relation to the drive. Drive (trieb), as we know from Freud, is a
“frontier concept,” one that can be reduced neither to biology nor culture. We
can think of it as an impulse, a craving, which although bodily at an initial
level, is transformed from the merely natural via the historical contingencies
and experiences of the subject. The resultant level of pressure—thoroughly
modulated by culture and unique to the subject—amounts to an insatiable
psychical drive for stimulation.
We are able to appreciate then that the subject’s attempts at (sexual)
gratification jouissance are not limited to merely instinctual, healthy or life-
sustaining practices. Jouissance as the mode of arousal sought by the drive as
opposed to instincts occurs beyond the pleasure principle. Jouissance results from the
drive’s relentless push for gratification; it is not as such an affect, a desire, or a
mode of pleasure. It is, by contrast, a kind of suffering; it maintains a proximal
relation to pain, to what is excessive, traumatic. More succinctly: jouissance is a
type of painful arousal inflected with the death-drive, by the erotic appeal of
overstepping a boundary (of health, pleasure, of moral or societal norms).
Not only is jouissance by its nature excessive but it is also inherently trans-
gressive. The erotic appeal of excess, we might say, is matched only by the
thrill of doing what we shouldn’t. Enjoyment as such maintains a parasitic
relation precisely upon the set of laws or moral/social norms that it trans-
gresses. So, although jouissance is never fully encapsulated by the signifier (that
is, the Symbolic), it takes form relative to the Symbolic coordinates defined by
laws and societal ideals.
The foregoing qualifications point to certain of the analytical and con-
ceptual strengths of the notion of jouissance. They enable us to grasp how the
aggressiveness of racism can be sexualized, can become “erotically” charged,
even ( perhaps particularly) in ostensibly tolerant societies where the voicing of
such attitudes is explicitly prohibited. One understands also why such en-
joyments become so habituated, so resistant to change. Jouissance is a precious
currency; thrilling, narcissistically gratifying, rooted in fantasy, and “morally”
satisfying (as I will go on to argue), such modes of enjoyment are not easily
surrendered.
So, although the “racism as theft of enjoyment” thesis initially strikes one as
inattentive to socioeconomic and historical detail, it now becomes evident that
the formulaic nature of the thesis is, presumably, deliberate. This is a hallmark
of Lacan’s “formalism”: a given formula must remain void of positive content
if it is to accommodate the empirical texture of diverse contexts. As an applied
concept, a variable of social analysis, enjoyment must remain empty of any
essential contents precisely because of the malleability of what different
(groups of) people “get off ” on. The theft of enjoyment thesis should not
therefore be seen as a total explanation—presumably neither Miller nor Žižek
would claim that this is the case (even if their descriptions often give the
opposite impression). This thesis, by contrast, is—or should—best be used as a
heuristic device that focuses our attentions on those facets of the analytical field
that have been disproportionately invested with enjoyment.
Critique 3: a conflation of different modes…?

We can now move onto the third of our critiques and ask: how are the various
modes of enjoyment to be separated? As outlined above, there are at least
three such modes of enjoyment in respect of racism. There is jouissance in the
form of: (1) passionate, embodied mode of experience (the “thrill of hate”); (2)
a type of cultural possession (a “libidinal treasure”) that the subject perceives
both as deservedly theirs and as constantly threatened by thieving/obstructing
others; and (3) the noxious and offensive “surplus vitality” possessed by others.
An example of racism as embodied mode of illicit/intense experience can
be found in hate-speech. Here we intersect with a broader argument, namely:
a rationalist account that does not consider racism as itself a kind of passion (or
enjoyment), will ultimately fail to grasp the force of racist hate-speech. This is a
psychoanalytic argument that we can make against Steven Pinker (2007). In
his examination of profanity Pinker (2007) considers several different theories
regarding what makes profane speech offensive. The offensiveness of such
words, he argues, is not triggered by what they refer to, their connotations, or
by the sound of the words in question. A more viable explanation seems—for
Pinker—to concern the fact that profanity, and by extension racist speech, is
possessed of a potent emotional charge. Psychoanalytically however, something
crucial remains missing from such explanations.
In instances of racist speech a given signifier has become infused with an
offensive charge of enjoyment. The word has ceased to function as a neutral
signifier; it has come to exude a dirtying excess. There is, moreover, a
certain relish on the part of the speaker in the profane qualities of the words
they are using. The deliberate transgression of polite social norms entails a
kind of reflexive appreciation of its own offensiveness. This points to the
subjective component of the jouissance in question: the racist enjoys using this
speech; it stimulates them, provides a frisson of hate. This factor of libidinal
enjoyment is something that Pinker’s (2007) conceptualization misses.
Without grasping the sexualized dimension of such speech—the libidinal
rewards it involves—one fails to understand why such speech proves so
enduring, so resistant to change.
42 Derek Hook
Libidinal treasures…
Having provided an example of racism as enjoyment (the experiential in-
tensity of the “thrill of hate”), let us now discuss jouissance as type of property.
This idea takes two different (although linked) forms in the literature. There is,
first, the narcissistic libidinal treasure that we believe defines us, that precious
object or type of enjoyment that remains ours and ours alone, and that warrants
zealous protection (significantly, in French “jouissance” connotes both orgasm
and ownership). On the other there is the elusive je ne sais quoi quality of the
other and which seems to underline, to distil their essential difference. Let us
tackle the idea of the “lost” libidinal possession first.
The factor of the libidinal possession is not difficult to identify within racist talk.
This libidinal object can take myriad forms. It is invariably afforded the highest
value by the racist subject who, moreover, asserts it as their distinctive, identifying
attribute (the achievements of one’s ancestors, the prized history or cultural
productions of a given national identity, etc.) This prized possession, furthermore,
exists under a constant state of threat. The libidinal treasure—whatever it may
be—is never merely objective; it is defined by a degree of irrationality, at least in
the sense that it has been elevated to the status of a fantasy object. Such libidinal
objects are also deeply imbued with narcissistic value: they encapsulate what (we
feel) is most special about us; they bolster our Imaginary identities; they, more
than anything else, set us apart, make us who we feel we essentially are.
This fantasmatic aspect perhaps goes someway to explaining why the li-
bidinal treasures of other cultures so often strike us as inexplicable. Other
nationalities or cultures have apparently disproportionate investments in
certain objects or practices that we, as outsiders, struggle to comprehend. We
could cite numerous examples of such investments: the right to bear arms for
America’s National Rifle Association; the conservative Christian beliefs un-
derlying Pro-life anti-abortion discourse; or—to swing to the other side of the
political spectrum—the value of notions of scientific rationality, tolerance and
secularism for many Western Liberals; etc. So highly valued are such objects
(such investments)—both as a medium of enjoyment and as props of Symbolic
and narcissistic identity—that their anticipated loss cannot but be imagined as
catastrophic, as a kind of extinction of being.
While such libidinal treasure are thus exemplary instances of Lacan’s no-
tion of the object a (the object-cause of desire), it nonetheless helps to stress that
these objects are also importantly phallic inasmuch as they are: (1) emblems of
potency and value; (2) signifiers of desire; (3) sources of narcissistic pleasure;
and (4) under constant threat of by castration.
…and the excessive feature(s) of the other

Let us turn now to the troubling je ne sais quoi feature of the other, the
“something in them more than them.” This feature is often manifest in dis-
tinctive forms of material practice never to be completely removed from the
register of the physical. The paradox underlying this libidinal property is that
it presents in a number of concrete behaviors and attributes—and yet it also
proves impossible to definitively localize. This is something that can be ver-
ified at the level of everyday experience: what is irritating about someone we
dislike seems simultaneously to be epitomized in certain discrete features (the
grating sound of their voice, etc.) and yet also to migrate from one feature to
another, to eventually encompass everything about them.
We have seen how our own libidinal treasures are exemplary instances of
Lacan’s object a. The same holds for this troubling and excessive feature of the
other, although rather than incurring a type of narcissistic phallic jouissance,
this incarnation of object a inspires a far more overtly aggressive mode of en-
joyment. Žižek offers an instructive passage where he describes the object a in
respect of xenophobia and racism:
What does our “intolerance” towards foreigners feed on? … Although we

can usually enumerate a series of features about “them” that annoy us …
these features function as indicators of a more radical strangeness … One
day, after a financial transaction with … [an] old Jewish woman, my
mother said to me: “What a nice lady, but did you notice the strange way
she counted the money?” In my mother’s eyes, this feature … functioned
… like the mysterious feature from the science-fiction novels … which
enable us to identify aliens who are otherwise indistinguishable from
ourselves … Our relationship to this unfathomable traumatic element that
“bothers us” in the Other is structured in fantasties … [T]his paradoxical
uncanny object that stands for what in the perceived positive, empirical
object necessarily eludes my gaze and as such serves as the driving force of
my desiring … [is] objet petit a, the object cause of desire…[Racist] violence
is precisely an endeavour to strike a blow at this unbearable surplus-
enjoyment contained in the Other (Žižek 2005: 290–291).
Once we have grasped the notion of the object a, we can no longer maintain
the belief—as the racist subject does—that it is the other that is the cause of all
our problems. The object a is not an object at all; it is what we might call “the
convexity of the subject’s lack.” That is, object a is the subject’s own lack as it is
positivized, materialized in an external attribute possessed by an other. We
can refer back to Miller and Žižek to stress that object a is fundamentally rooted
in the perceiving subject:
We know, of course, that the fundamental status of the object is to be

always already snatched away by the Other … [T]his theft of enjoyment
… is apparently unsolvable as the Other is the Other of my interior. The
root of racism is thus hatred of my own enjoyment. There is no ...
enjoyment but my own. If the Other is in me, occupying the place of
extimacy, then the hatred is also my own (Miller, cited in Žižek 1993: 203).
44 Derek Hook
This may, upon first reading, sound all too “psychological,” certainly so in-
asmuch as it invokes the idea of racism as projection, an idea that Žižek (1997)
has criticized precisely as remaining too much within the locus of individual
subjectivity. Then again, this assertion of object a as the subject’s own lack
given external—and typically excessive—form in the figure of the other, can
be given a different explanation. What is in question is perhaps less an in-
stance of psychological projection than a structural incapacity/impasse that
has been converted into an attribution of the other’s inherent blameworthiness:
the other’s jouissance is insupportable for us because (and insofar as) we

cannot find a proper way to relate to our own jouissance, which forever
remains an ex-timate intruder. It is to resolve this deadlock that the
subject projects the core of its jouissance onto an Other, attributing to this
Other full access to a consistent jouissance. Such a constellation cannot but
give rise to jealousy (Žižek 2016: 75).
Racism then, following Žižek’s Lacanian critique, is not most fundamentally

about psychological rivalries, or about the need to displace onto the other what
one disavows about one’s self. Racism is instead to be understood as a response
to the “real” of enjoyment—be it at an individual level (in respect of finding a
way to relate to one’s own “stolen” jouissance) or at the societal level (as an
attempt to account for the multiple contingencies, conflicts and deadlocks of a
given society). This Lacanian perspective thus ventures a reconceptualization of
the familiar psychodynamic idea of racism-as-projection. In the Lacanian ac-
count, structural incapacity is transformed into the certainty that some trou-
bling substance of enjoyment has been illicitly procured by the other.
We have established then that enjoyment is often experienced in an oddly
inverted way, in the exaggerated attributions made of the enjoyments experienced by others.
This helps us explain how racism can be understood both as an experience of
jouissance (“the thrill of hate”) and as type of possession (in the form of our libi-
dinal treasures or in the malignant, “illegal” enjoyments of others). Upon re-
flection, it becomes apparent that these two aspects of enjoyment—“our”
libidinal treasures and what fundamentally embodies “their” otherness—are two
sides of the same coin, two inflections of the same fantasy. There is, on the one
hand, the narcissistic jouissance of the appealing fantasy object that (we believe)
encapsulates what is most precious about us. And then there is the vexing feature
of the other—typically something super-abundant and exaggerated—which
positivizes my own lack in a threatening feature possessed by them. This is why
Lacan (1990) remarked (in the passage cited earlier) that “With our jouissance
going off the track, only the Other is able to mark its position,” why he stressed
“the precariousness of our own mode [of jouissance], which … now takes its
bearings from the ideal of an over-coming [excess of coming/enjoying] [plus-de-
jouir] (Lacan 1990: 32–33). More succinctly put: “the objet petit a—the surplus
enjoyment [of the other]—arises at the very place of [one’s own] castration”
(Žižek 1997: 58).
Critique 4: a lack of adequate conceptual
contextualization
We have by now introduced a series of psychoanalytic concepts (the drive,
fantasy, libido, object a, the phallus) that should necessarily accompany any
rigorous analytical application of the notion of jouissance to the social field. To
an extent then we have already responded to the fourth of the critiques voiced
above, the contention that shorthand applications of the concept of jouissance
remain conceptually decontextualized, and thus risk viewing enjoyment as
itself a causative force. Nevertheless, there is one further topic along with an
associated psychoanalytic concept, that must be addressed at this point,
namely: the law, and the superego.
For Lacanian psychoanalysis, the relationship between law and enjoyment is
more complex—and more paradoxical—than it may at first appear. Law,
simply put, relies upon jouissance. The law requires that enjoyment be constantly
generated if it, the law, is to be successfully enforced. This seems counter-
intuitive: jouissance, as I have suggested, invariably involves transgression as a
condition of possibility—this is the perverse dimension of enjoyment. Jouissance
thus seems necessarily antithetical to the Symbolic order of law. Then again, we
need to consider that the implementation of law invariably entails a libidinal
reward, a type of “jouissance payment,” which amounts to a kind of subterranean
support of the Symbolic law. This point is worth stressing, inasmuch as it tells us
something about the close relationship between enjoyment and social structure:
jouissance invariably occurs in proximity to the law.
There is a reoccurring scene in Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s (2006) auto-
biographical account of growing up during the time of the Iranian Islamic
revolution. The young Marjane—who had grown up attending a non-religious,
“westernized” French school—routinely finds herself in trouble with the re-
ligious authorities (most typically the “Guardians of the Revolution”) for falling
afoul of new regime’s Islamic codes of dress and behaviour. In reading Persepolis,
it is hard not to ask: how could so many Iranians who had lived significant
periods of their life in pre-revolutionary, non-fundamentalist Iran become such
fervent supporters of the new regime? A Lacanian answer to this dilemma is
that any number of activities that enforce the new laws—scrutiny of dress codes,
informing on one’s neighbor, participation in public spectacles of punishment,
the hateful admonishment of the less than devout, etc.—all became loaded with
jouissance. Playing the role of the over-zealous guardian of the revolution clearly
generates enjoyment, be it in the sadistic thrills of persecuting former collea-
gues, the righteous indignation of constantly denouncing others, or the frisson of
having the license to terrorize under the guise of Islamic law.
It is for this reason that the superego, for Lacan, must be seen as inducing,
commanding jouissance. The superego can thus be seen as what effectively binds
law and enjoyment. It ensures that the Symbolic ego-ideals of a society—of the
Other—are effectively implemented and taken up as passionate investments.
Consider, for example, the disdain that so often accompanies reports of political
46 Derek Hook
corruption in Africa. The fact that such charges may well be justified in no way
prevents such a speaking position from channeling racist jouissance. We might
consider also the moral outrage that accompanies the many appalling news
stories we are daily exposed to (reports of the hubris and greed of Wall Street, of
mass-scale environmental pollution, and, until recently, the daily misdemeanors
of Donald Trump, etc.). While there is much here rightly deserving of inter-
rogation, it is also true what makes such stories newsworthy is their capacity to
induce enjoyment. This, in many instances, is what stirs us into action: the
jouissance invoked by such accounts, a jouissance that is combined with less
honorable sentiments (hate, the desire to see perpetrators punished, etc.). The
gratification of these potent affects underlies our cravings for justice.
This profound connection between enjoyment and ego-ideals, and, as
importantly, the superego, makes it clear that jouissance, certainly as it occurs
within the social field, is never merely a variable of subjectivity or a function of
personal identity. The link between enjoyment and the superego also brings to
light an aspect of racism that is frequently overlooked. Racism is not
merely—as much psychological thinking may have it—a set of affective re-
sponses, a collection of inter-subjective relations, or a composite array of at-
titudes and prejudices. Racism pivots also on a series of ideological values
which, crucially, involve a potent “moral” dimension. Such an idea is over-
looked in popular impressions of racism as ignorance, unfounded hate, or
intolerance. While racism may indeed be all of these things, it is also a type of
indignation; it entails the impetus to blame and punish; and it involves a sense
of laws, of norms and ideals that have been violated.
This is something we can perhaps credit Adorno et al (1950) for intuiting in
their theory of the authoritarian personality: racism often takes the form of a
distorted and jouissance-infused (or superegoic) type of “morality.” The other is
seen as flaunting traditional or cultural values; as lacking in moral values; as
aberrant; as criminal.
Stressing the connection between enjoyment and the law helps remind us
that in Lacanian terms, the law—society itself—needs jouissance to function.
Simply put: racist social structures depend upon the mobilization of jouissance.
Racist enjoyment then, like other social modes of jouissance, is not merely
elicited or contextualized by social structures; jouissance extends, enforces, drives
those very social structures.
We have then a response to charge of psychological reductionism. Enjoyment
is, in effect, a sociological rather than a fundamentally psychological notion in-
asmuch as it is always thoroughly embedded within a social field. Jouissance is, by
the same token, necessarily historical. It is necessarily located in specific Symbolic
and historical co-ordinates, given that it emerges alongside—or as the apparent
underside of—social norms, moral values and Symbolic ideals. We can say then
that jouissance is an inherently Symbolic concept in the qualified sense that any
such intensity of libidinal experience will of necessity be tied to a historically
determined representations. As we might put it in “Lacanese”: enjoyment arises
from the field of the signifier.
Conclusion
What have we gained in our assessment of the Lacanian idea of racism as
enjoyment? Well, we have been able to offer a series of responses to the four
basic critiques highlighted in the opening sections of this paper.
In respect of the first critique (of psychological reductionism), we have, I
hope, taken a series of decisive steps away from thinking jouissance within the
domain of the psychological. I have asserted that in its varying social for-
mations jouissance is—paradoxically enough—more a sociological than a psy-
chological concept. Once we grasp that enjoyment does not float free of the
socio-historical context and that it is necessarily grounded in a particular
socio-Symbolic matrix of laws and social ideals, then we have to reject the
idea that enjoyment is reducible to a psychological dynamic of resentment.
Any viable analytical reference to the notion of jouissance should then of ne-
cessity be tied to the Symbolic domain from within which it has arisen.
It is however true that the “racism as theft of enjoyment” thesis is often
deployed in ways (this is typical of Žižek’s work) that are glaringly inattentive
to socio-economic and historical detail. This much I concede: such illustrative
descriptions of the concept should entail more by way of nuance and em-
pirical texture. Analytical application should particularize these concepts,
investigate how they might appear in highly distinctive fields of analysis, ra-
ther than summarily generalize across empirical contexts. That being said, I
have nevertheless suggested that the “formalist” quality of this Lacanian thesis
may in fact be viewed an analytical asset. After all, as a variable of a social
analysis, enjoyment must surely remain empty of essential contents precisely
because of the malleability of jouissance in differing historical and cultural
contexts?
Indeed, this was one of the responses to the second of the critiques offered
above (enjoyment as conceptually under-differentiated, over-inclusive): yes,
jouissance can refer to virtually any object or activity, so long as it has taken on
libidinal value. We can argue that this apparent over-inclusiveness proves a
crucial anti-essentialist dimension of the concept of jouissance. The racism as
(theft of) enjoyment thesis should, accordingly, be used as an empty thesis that
must of necessity be anchored in empirical detail. So, rather than operating as
an all-subsuming, “one size fits all” trans-historical formula, the idea of racism
as (the theft of) enjoyment should be treated precisely as hypothetical, as an
exploratory device that focuses our attentions on specific facets of the ana-
lytical field. One prospective use of the thesis is precisely as a heuristic device,
a provisional analytical frame that challenges the analyst of racism to identify
the various interconnected components of a prospective libidinal economy
(the superegoic functioning of law, the narrative frame of ideological fantasy,
various instantiations of object petit a such as the threatened libidinal treasure,
the presumed “thief of jouissance,” etc.).
Moving on to the third of my critiques, I have distinguished between dif-
ferent modes of enjoyment (jouissance as bodily intensity, libidinal treasure, and
48 Derek Hook
surplus vitality of the other) and explained, via the concept of object petit a, how
jouissance can at once refer to presumed narcissistic (and, indeed, phallic)
possession and to a fantasy of dispossession by a thieving other.
Responding to the fourth critique noted above (that jouissance is often used
in a conceptually decontextualized manner) I have linked the idea of jouissance
to a set of related psychoanalytic concepts (the drive, fantasy, castration, the
phallus, object a), placing it thus on a conceptual horizon that allows us to apply
the term in a way that is more rigorous—and arguably more nuanced—than
is often the case. A number of associated qualifications (such as that enjoy-
ment must be conceived in relation to the law/superego, that jouissance arises
from the signifier) have, furthermore, lent definition to the concept of jouissance
as an analytical tool.
For many of course, analytical problems persist. Some would claim that
even such an empty and ostensibly “de-essentialized” exploratory thesis pre-
sumes too much. We can anticipate the argument: the pattern of libidinal
dynamics implied by this thesis (the resented thief of jouissance, the precious
stolen object, the robbed subject, etc.) inevitably impedes the work of a more
textured sociological analysis. Such is the position of Engelken-Jorge (2010)
who argues that Lacanian theories of enjoyment involve a recurring “psy-
chologistic bias that impoverishes the sociological imagination” (69). While I
have tried to show that this need not necessarily be the case, I nonetheless
appreciate Engelken-Jorge’s point. This line of critiques suggest that Lacanian
theorizations of enjoyment may not suffice without additional methodological
and theoretical resources, without greater sociohistorical and empirical con-
textualization. True enough. Let me add just this: if it is the case that libidinal
enjoyment is what most powerfully binds subjects to a given ideology (Dean
2006; Stavrakakis, 2007; Žižek 2002)—then to neglect this variable in favor of
apparently more detailed and contextualized historical or socio-economic
analyses is to make a serious error of omission. More bluntly put, to omit
analytical attentions to jouissance is to risk not having understood the psychical
and historical tenacity of racism.
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3 Confederate signifiers in
Vermont: fetish objects and
racist enjoyment
Hilary Neroni
University of Vermont
A school changing its name from Rebels to Wolves or a city tearing down
Confederate monuments appears trivial compared to the grave political and
humanitarian disasters of our current historical moment. But changing mascots
or tearing down monuments intervenes in the fundamental questions that de-
fine our epoch, including how does America interpret equality and freedom in
our current political landscape. Recent battles over monuments and mascots
are notable especially for their extremely emotional components. It’s not un-
common for both sides to feel that everything is at stake over removing or
keeping a monument or school mascot. The battles themselves, their aftermath,
and the media coverage reveal that clinging to Confederate monuments and
school names function as fetish objects, objects that enable subjects to disavow
their own status as lacking while simultaneously establishing their form of en-
joyment. Understanding the monuments and names as fetish objects reveals the
role that fetishistic disavowal plays in the perpetuation of racism.
The example I will turn to will be one town’s battle over its mascot in South
Burlington, Vermont (my home town). But first it is important to consider that
how these signifiers were initially employed reveals something about their
lasting meaning, since the erection of monuments and mascots paying ho-
mage to the Confederate cause curiously appear in waves throughout
American history beginning shortly after the Civil War in 1865. Instead of
signs of the Confederacy being pulled down after their defeat, monuments
celebrating the Confederate cause began to creep into the public landscape
after the war, suggesting that a new kind of war—a war over the meaning of
the Civil War and its aftermath—began to be waged in these ceremonial and
commemorative gestures. A report from the Southern Poverty Law Center
suggests that there are possibly up to 1000 Confederate monuments and
statues scattered across the country in 31 states, though the majority are
located in Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina. And this does not include,
schools, cities, counties, or holidays that honor the Confederacy in some way.
There were two periods in US history that saw the most significant spikes
of Confederate monument placements, use of the Confederate flag, and
52 Hilary Neroni
name dedications.1 The first was around 1900–1920 when Jim Crow laws
began to disenfranchise African Americans and re-segregate spaces that had
begun to integrate. This was also the time of a strong revival of the KKK. The
second period was during the modern civil rights movement from the mid-
1950s into the 1960s. Discussing these historical trends and voicing a trenchant
reading of the appearance of the monuments, political journalist David
Graham argues, “In other words, the erection of Confederate monuments has
been a way to perform cultural resistance to black equality.”2 That is to say,
these monuments and name dedications were reactions against the move to-
ward equality and were meant to symbolically resist the mandate to end
structural oppression, individual violence, and widespread racism.
The most common signs and symbols of the Confederacy being fought over
today are the monuments erected to Confederate heroes, the Confederate
flag, the nickname “Rebels,” the mascots Johnny Rebel or Captain Reb, and
“Dixie” as a theme song. In South Burlington, Vermont, the school name
being fought over was the name Rebels, which as I’ll explain later was at-
tached to the Confederate flag and the song Dixie. Not only are people
around the nation fighting over whether these can be displayed and where,
but they are also fighting over what they mean. In fact, one of the aspects that
every one of these local and sometimes national battles share is the endless
debate over the signified attached to the signifier. Long sections of the South
Burlington public school board meetings were, for example, occupied by local
community members debating about what exactly the word “Rebel” means.
But historical research shows less ambiguity about the initial meaning of post
war uses of these signifiers. For example, about the Confederate flag, jour-
nalist Yoni Appelbaum points out that in 1948, in response to Harry Truman
desegregating the armed forces and supporting anti-lynching laws, nine
southern states backed Georgia’s senator (Richard Russell) over Truman at
the democratic convention by parading around the convention led by a
Confederate flag and playing the song Dixie. He then explains, “Sales of
Confederate flags, long moribund, exploded. Stores could not keep them in
stock. The battle flag became the symbol of segregation.”3 The continued
emotion attached to these symbols and names reveals a self-perpetuating
underlying social and psychical structure.
While this essay will look at the highly contested meaning behind a school
mascot, often declared by the adopters as nonpolitical and nonracist, other
adoptions of these symbols have certainly been overtly about race and in the
service of racism. Alabama’s governor George Wallace, for example, raised the
Confederate flag above the state capital in 1963 on the morning before Robert
Kennedy was coming to see him to convince him to support desegregation. He
raised the flag and proclaimed “segregation forever,” using the flag to fire the
first shot in his fight against Kennedy’s policies and integration in general.
When the Alabama State capital flag was finally taken down in 2015, it was also
a Symbolic gesture but this time toward combating racism and acknowledging
the damaging nature of the Confederate flag, and it took a long political battle
Confederate signifiers in Vermont 53
4
to achieve this outcome. Local political battles surround every one of these
decisions and often outline the current political and psychical terrain.
The evolution of a racist signifier

Ideas of race arise out of historical moments, and in America, these ideas are
tied to slavery and its dependence on hatred and racism. Racial oppression
was built into every aspect of life in the South. It was built into how people
could greet one another, how the public space was navigated, and literally
built into the architecture of private homes. Houses were often constructed
with separate and unequal spaces for its black and white inhabitants, in-
cluding separate staircases and doors. Each of these physical aspects (doors,
staircases, bathrooms, types of clothing) became signifiers in their own right.
Social laws were built into physical objects, which in turn performed as part of
a complicated web of social oppression. Even after slavery was dismantled,
Jim Crow laws ensured that material objects and public and private
spaces—such as drinking fountains, restaurants, and bathrooms—kept racism
at the forefront of people’s minds and modes of behavior. It was at this time
also that the Confederate monuments and flag began to be prominently in-
serted into the cultural landscape. Once Jim Crow laws were dismantled, the
flag, monuments, and school mascots carried on these ideas of white su-
premacy. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965
finally tore down these laws once and for all. As society moved away from
slavery, and even as it dismantled Jim Crow and pushed for better civil rights,
many of these barriers and signifiers (drinking fountains, restaurants, stair-
cases) were drained of their significatory and material power. But of course,
the racism was still present in the way people were treated and in the symbols
that represented these social relations.
People did not interact with these social signifiers (from physical structures
to people’s behavior to signs and images) in planned conscious, unemotional
ways. All of them were adopted and enacted through each individual’s
emotional involvement with them and the material consequences of this
adoption. The emotional experience of enacting and experiencing this op-
pression was intense; and importantly, the emotion displayed was not just
anger or hatred, as we might imagine the engine for racism might be. Instead,
the emotion often fueling the intense allegiance to the Confederate flag,
monuments, and mascots was tinged with enjoyment.
Today, those for keeping the monuments, Rebel name, and the
Confederate flag often admit to the history of slavery and racial oppression.
But they add that these structures don’t exist anymore and thus the symbols
no longer carry the same meaning. Despite such denial of the symbols’ sig-
nificatory meaning, however, it’s important to investigate this emotional
component and try to understand what role these signifiers might play for the
psyche. The key to such understanding is the Lacanian conception of the split
subject and its relation to lack.
54 Hilary Neroni
The importance of lack
Psychoanalysis theorizes the subject as a split subject. The split nature of the
subject refers to a divide between the unconscious and the conscious that
arises out of our relationship to the signifier. We make sense of the world
through the signifier, but it is that very signifier that also bars us from un-
derstanding the totality of ourselves. In other words, the signifier is the birth of
the subject, but it is also the cause of its opacity. It was Jacques Lacan who
introduced the signifier into the theory of the subject. His introduction of
thinking about the birth of the subject through signification allowed for a
deeper way of understanding our relationship to language. But he saw this as
simply an extension of Freud’s theory of the subject. Of course, Freud’s in-
novation was his idea of the unconscious itself. For Freud, the unconscious is
created by repression of thoughts and feelings that don’t fit into the social. For
Lacan, however, the primordial repression is that of the missing signified.
That is to say that, when we come into language, we must repress the way in
which the meaning making system in fact is not closed and is impossible to
finish. We repress this missing signified, this impossibility of complete
knowledge, and this is the first repressed material that creates the unconscious
and thus the subject. This is why our relationship to signifiers (language and
images) is linked to the very heart of our subjectivity. Both Freud and Lacan
believed that this split between the conscious and the unconscious creates a
feeling of lack. This lack is therefore built into the constitutive nature of the
subject. We feel a sense of lack because of what we can’t know about our-
selves, and because of the very structure of our psyche and of language. In
response, we are constantly trying to fill this lack.
There are two key ways of dealing with lack that are important to this essay,
and thus to understanding the enormous attachment people have to
Confederate signifiers. They are desire and fetishistic disavowal. My argument
is that this enormous attachment to Confederate signifiers is in fact driven by
fetishistic disavowal. The difference between these possible responses to lack is
actually simple: desire acknowledges lack and attempts to engage it, while fe-
tishistic disavowal sees lack as something that can be permanently erased. When
we desire, in other words, we try to address the lack. The key to the way desire
operates lies in its basic acknowledgment that lack can never be fully satisfied,
but that it is our plight to constantly try. The intrinsic nature of desire then is
that it is in constant motion. In this motion, change and new possibilities arise.
The constant movement of desire allows us not to get stuck in one iteration of a
response to lack. We chase after an object of our desire with the hope that the
object we desire addresses lack, but when it doesn’t, we find another object to
pursue. Even if we desire similar objects, it is the movement itself that is im-
portant. That is to say, desire is the turn from one object to another, rather than
the object itself. The object becomes inconsequential.
In fetishistic disavowal, however, the object takes on a mythical status as it
portends to be the object that can finally do away with lack once and for all.
In light of this, one important psychical response becomes apparent in the
case of racism, especially deep-seated racism that has long been within a
community, namely that the fetish object proliferates and becomes en-
trenched as a way to rigidly disavow lack throughout the community. In this
way, fetishistic disavowal plays a key role in the perpetuation of racism in
America through the adoption of and fidelity to Confederate monuments,
nicknames, and so on. The Confederate flag, the term “Rebel,” and the song
Dixie all function as linked fetish objects that deny the lack in the other and
thus in ourselves by creating an Imaginary and nostalgic whole identity
wrapped around the idea of the Confederacy as a lost site of plenitude.
Counterintuitively, these fetish objects seem to proliferate in America when
the law of the land has shifted away from supporting racism. Thus, they
appear when the shifting Symbolic demands make the individual’s lack all the
more apparent. It’s common to hear from white southerners that we are
taking away their “way of life” when laws change or cultural expectations
begin to demand equal treatment for all people. We might translate that to
mean: we are making their lack all too apparent. The fetish object emerges,
then, to plug up this lack while keeping ties to racist social laws.
Curiously, enjoyment plays an important role in this process, as it is linked to
the deployment of the fetish object. Enjoyment, in psychoanalytic terms, de-
scribes not a sense of pleasure but rather a pleasure bound up in pain, an
enjoyment that is not about culmination but rather about repetition. Enjoyment
can erupt where Symbolic fictions fail, or through attempts to plug up the holes
in the Symbolic fiction. A fetish object involves enjoyment because it stands in
the place of lack, or rather it defends our consciousness from the horror of lack.
Specific, however, to the social structures of American society, the enjoyment of
these symbols allows people to disavow that the symbols represent slavery, white
nationalism, and contemporary racism, while at the same time being steeped in
and invested in those traditions. Inherent in the structure of slavery was ob-
viously multiple layers of psychic machinations, which marshalled enjoyment
especially through fetishistic disavowal that allowed people to commit such
cruelty. Some of these structures were dismantled as slavery came to an end.
But clearly, many of them were redeployed in new ways, which Michelle
Alexander has coined the New Jim Crow, that create and reinforce the con-
tinued individual racism and structural oppression that exist today in school
systems, prison systems, and policing.5
In his Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity,
Sheldon George argues that racial identity in America is formed in relation to
slavery and is deeply connected to our relationship to fantasy and enjoyment.
He states that “whiteness ultimately functioned to designate an ascendant
state of plenitude and completion that was available to the master only
through a fantasy relation to the slave.”6 George’s point allows us to consider
the fetishistic disavowal of slavery as it has emerged in the emotion sur-
rounding the Confederate flag and other signs as motivated by the original
horror during the time of slavery, which utilized the slave to overcome
56 Hilary Neroni
personal lack. Dealing with this lack, which expresses the split nature of our
conscious and its relation to our unconscious as well as the impossible relation
we have to the signifier, is always traumatic. Prejudices, hatreds, and self-
deception often arise at this point of denying lack. People create a complicated
web of disavowal and fantasy in order to deny the subjectivity of those per-
ceived as the other while also securing their own sense of wholeness.
As George has argued, white racism stems largely from a fantasy of the
enjoyment of black subjects. George explains that “the other’s jouissance,
bound to fantasy, actively oscillates between subjective imaginings that des-
ignate it alternately as alien and as excessive.”7 While the slave was often seen
as lacking so that masters could claim superiority, African Americans today
are often read in terms of an excess of enjoyment. When we perceive the other
as immersed in a complete jouissance, a complete enjoyment, we are dis-
avowing the other’s subjective lack, and thus their very subjectivity.
Therefore, if the white nationalist’s hatred is constituted by the enjoyment
they fantasize in the black other, to expose this other as lacking, as just a
normal subject, shakes the core of the structure of their fantasy and destroys
their form of enjoyment.
Taking the Confederate signs and names as fetish objects is a response to lack
that allows people to disavow slavery while still repeating its psychic investment.
Of these two responses to lack—desire and fetishistic disavowal—the post-Civil
War contemporary fetishizing of the signifiers of the Confederacy has provided
a rigid way to disavow that lack and perpetuate the racist fantasy. The local
battle over the school mascot in South Burlington, Vermont exemplifies not
only this fetishistic disavowal but also how it might be possible to turn toward
the less rigid motion of desire, which does not disavow lack.
South Burlington Rebels

In the Spring of 2017, a political battle over the nickname of the South
Burlington, Vermont school system gripped my home town. The school has
been called the Rebels since 1961, the Confederate flag was seen in all their
sporting events and celebrations in the 1960s and 1970s, and Dixie was played
during sports games (to which their mascot, Captain Reb, would dance). In
the late 1950s, Burlington had supposedly grown too big, so a new city was
created, which they called South Burlington, not because it was south of
Burlington since only a portion of it is actually south, but because it was
metaphorically seceding from Burlington, which itself brings up questions
about historical awareness and emotional investment. Apparently, the naming
of the school mascot was spearheaded by a few individuals but supported by
the town and students—though there were others who were critical of the
name. Even at its inception, then, there was already public critique of the
Rebel name, but that critique did not win the day.8 In fact, every decade small
groups of students or community members tried to raise awareness and get
the name changed.
Certainly, this illustrates that fetishistic disavowal can exist in communities
where these monuments and mascots are embraced by all or in communities
where there is mixed acceptance and even resistance. Many of the schools
that adopted Confederate imagery seemed aware of the meaning behind the
name, especially in the South, while others claimed (like many people in
South Burlington, Vermont) that they had no idea the Confederate flag, nor
the name “Rebel,” had anything to do with slavery. Considering the Southern
Poverty Law Center’s historical overview of when the monuments were put
up and the mascots adopted in the South and around the nation, it’s im-
portant to note that these adoptions of Confederate names and imagery oc-
curred in reaction to the Civil Rights movement whether people consciously
understood that or not.
The impact of slavery on contemporary racism in all of America, even in
the North, becomes more apparent in the fact that fetishistic disavowal as a
response to lack operated even when the populations were spatially removed
from slavery and later from Jim Crow laws. Additionally, South Burlington
and Vermont in general, until recently, has had a largely white population, so
one might be able to claim that in that homogeneous community racism, the
meaning of the Confederacy, and the legacy of slavery was simply an
anathema. And yet, when looking into the history of race in Vermont, it is
quite clear that struggles with racism were apparent and reported on in the
public realm.9 For example, a local newspaper article looking into this history
during the Rebel name debate details that the interracial Civil Rights activists’
clash with white Southerners during the Freedom Rides were front page news
in the Burlington Free Press. And locally in 1957, an article in the paper
reported “a black University of Vermont student was refused service at a
South Burlington motel. UVM students marched, and Civil Rights activists
helped push through in April an antidiscrimination bill in the Legislature.”10
Even with this bill in place in Vermont, more reports through the 1960s show
housing discrimination, such as black airmen being denied housing, and other
black residents not being allowed to purchase homes in a particular neigh-
borhood in South Burlington. All of these publicized incidents of racism oc-
curred right around the time that the town chose its mascot and the students
brought in and embraced the Confederate flag, the mascot Captain Reb, and
the nick name rebels. Along with the larger national trend, it is no coincidence
that these signifiers and imagery were adopted right when fighting racism
(such as the specific racism by individuals in South Burlington, hotel owners
and so on) became public. It became public because the newspaper reported
on it and because the legislature adopted an anti-discrimination bill. In other
words, it both became apparent in the public media and through the law of
the land that racism was no longer going to be an acceptable mode of be-
havior. In this sense, South Burlington’s adoption of the mascot and imagery
of the Confederacy can be interpreted as a backlash against the movement to
dissolve racism within the Symbolic realm of this local community. In other
words, calling out and fighting against racism also exposed the way that
58 Hilary Neroni
racism was employed. It revealed the way racism responded to the lack in the
other. When the desubjectifying fantasy of the others’ enjoyment was ripped
away and lack was revealed, the response was to immediately fill it with the
Confederate signifier as a fetish object.
The idea that members of the school and the community had no idea that
there could be a connection to the Confederacy and to slavery—as some
suggested during the school board meetings—is simply impossible. In 1971,
for example, a group of community members from the NAACP presented to
the high school their personal encounters with racism, and there was an in-
depth discussion of how the Confederate flag was representative of racism as
such.11 This response, then, that community members had no idea of the
connection and just simply embraced the word Rebel as its dictionary
meaning and embraced the Confederate flag and the song Dixie as emotional
symbols ripped from history and drained of its meaning, seems truly im-
plausible. Instead, this complete amnesia in the face of the meaning of this
imagery has to be understood as the disavowal employed to continually in-
stantiate these signifiers as fetish objects.
Disavowal is a powerful psychic response, where the subject sees something
but unconsciously chooses to pretend they did not. It allows the individual to
turn away from knowledge and instead embrace psychic symptoms that re-
quire knowledge be disavowed. In this case, the public and Symbolic rejec-
tions of racism shook up the way many people (though not all, as evidenced by
the continuous protests) structured their identity and their enjoyment. At the
high school, the word Rebel and all the Confederate imagery that came with
it became fetish objects used to stop-up that sense of lack and create a false
sense of wholeness. At sports games and other community events, people felt
bonded over the chanting of the mascot name, the playing of Dixie, and the
displaying of the Confederate flag. They felt a positive sense of emotional
togetherness and saw their hard work (in sports and academia) represented by
this feeling of community pride that was glued together by these racist sig-
nifiers. Of course, these are not random choices, as shown before. In a
country still reeling from the impacts of slavery and Jim Crow laws, America
was a nation trying to change but continually coming up against ingrained
racism that was tied to people’s psychic investment in racism. But the very
public civil rights fight shook up the stability of these structures and began to
not only change the landscape but point out the inadequacy of those who
clung to past ideas about racial inferiority. As each individual in this time of
fighting for civil rights began to grapple with what this might say about their
own modes of desiring and enjoying, and about their ways of understanding
other people as inferior, the name Rebel, the Confederate flag, the song Dixie,
and the mascot Captain Rebel began to proliferate across the land as if trying
to stop the struggle and stop up the exposed lack. And indeed, this is exactly
what a fetish object works to do; it is psychically employed to stop any re-
velations and to prevent the subject from seeing the other’s lack and thereby
confronting their own lack.
What is remarkable about this history is that it is entirely unremarkable.
Over 200 public schools have names referencing Confederate leaders or
themes in America.12 Nearly every state has at least one high school with the
nickname Rebels and its accompanying Confederate imagery, such as
Willoughby South High School and John Adams High School in Ohio, five
high schools in Iowa, seven high schools in Kentucky, South Albany
Highschool in Oregon, and the University of Nevada in Las Vegas.13 They all
came about in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Many of these towns have since
gone through similar political battles over the name. Some have chosen to
keep the name and imagery, others have chosen to change it all, and still
others have chosen to change the imagery but not the name. This wide spread
adoption of these signifiers as well as the similar recent political battles over
changing the name certainly indicate that the national civil rights struggle has
happened very locally as well and that the local battles completely mirror the
national struggles.
Dislodging the racist fetish object

The resistance to these monikers was effectively trying to dislodge the fetish
objects. In the North, in states where slavery was never legal, it might seem it
would be easy to do this, but often it turns out that many rituals, especially in
sports, emanated from the power of these fetish objects. Often, there were
other rituals and practices attached to these objects. South Burlington High
School, for example, also had a slave day during homecoming in the 1960s,
where they auctioned each other off for charity. Some of the more overt
signifiers, images, and practices in South Burlington—and around the
nation—were dropped by the 1980s, and the vocal minority against the name
that was there in the beginning grew in size every decade. But it wasn’t until
2017, when a group of students at the high school protested and rallied the
town around them, that the name changed and the students successfully
dislodged the final fetish object. Not surprisingly, the negative response to
exposing the function of the fetish object was often extremely emotional.
There was much very vocal opposition by graduates who formed a group
calling themselves the Rebel Alliance. Eventually, after a year of being edu-
cated by the protesting students, the school board itself ruled that the name
should change. The fight, however, continued in the media, in court, and in
getting the school budget passed. In previous years, the school budget always
passed, but this time it took three separate votes until it passed. It was clear
that the Rebel Alliance (and others opposed to the name change) was holding
the school budget hostage to protest the name change.14 A lot of the rhetoric
from the Rebel Alliance that occurred in school board meetings and on their
Facebook page was at best racially ignorant and at worst racially incendiary,
but all of it was charged with emotion, what seemed like anxiety and fear.
What was certainly on display during this local political battle was that
people who wanted to keep the name Rebel felt that they were protecting
60 Hilary Neroni
their identity. They felt they were protecting their sense of wholeness. They
expressed that giving up the name would eliminate the uniqueness of the local
school. It would invalidate their past pride of the school’s history (that was
often especially attached to sports traditions). The rhetoric certainly reveals
the way that the nickname and imagery was tied to an unconscious psychic
response to lack through fetishistic disavowal. At one of the 2017 school board
meetings, for example, a former state legislator stood up and declared, “It’s
time to stop seeing the ‘Rebels’ as a bonding force, because it’s not…We are
much more than that name.”15 His wording is crucial, as he hits on several
key aspects of the word “Rebel.” In particular, referring to the mascot name
as a bonding force, he communicates the role that Rebel as the placeholder
has had. Rather than embracing a heterogeneous community, that place-
holder acted as a stop gap—a shared fetish object—whose power lay in the
emotional embrace of racial inequality as the community glue. But the
common reason given by community members for keeping the name was that
they never knew the connection it had to the Confederacy and, if they did, it
was certainly in the past and no longer part of the current meaning. For
example, one South Burlington graduate against the change said, “I don’t
think it’s racist. You look at the word ‘rebel.’ The country was built on re-
bels.”16 Many against changing the name suggested that the word “rebel,” as
a word in and of itself, didn’t have any objectionable meaning and thus it
could be used in whatever way they wanted to.
In fact, in a bold but often used rhetorical move, those in favor of keeping
the name would invoke well known activists of color—such as Martin Luther
King or Ghandi—as the ultimate examples of rebels, which in their minds
proved that the word rebel was not tied to racism. Of course, they used this
rhetorical strategy to also prove that they themselves could in no way be tied
to racism. But the emotional charge that the word incurred is easily docu-
mented. One graduate present during the initial mascot choice in 1961 said,
“It was simply that they wanted a mascot with emotional appeal.”17 Here
again the word choice prompts us to ask why the word Rebel is indeed an
emotional choice if it is not because of its tie to slavery, racial violence, and
inequality. If it is not because it acts as a powerful fetish object. He then goes
on, however, to suggest that the students who chose the Rebel name “had
little understanding of race or politics.”18 Even if they had little conscious
understanding of race or politics, which seems unlikely, but even if true,
clearly their unconscious relation to their country’s racial inequalities and
violence was acute and deeply emotional.
And yet, these ties were often ideological and emotional rather than conscious
and analytical. A local newspaper’s investigation into the history of the mascot
choice gave as an example of the students relation to the mascot name that “In
1961, student Cathryn Towne told the Burlington Free Press that the Rebel was
picked over Titans, Rams, Blue Lancers and Blue Panthers because the town was
south of Burlington, the school colors were blue and gray and the school opened
during the Civil War centennial year. ‘And we are fighters,’ Towne said.”19 The
inability to see the political ramifications of their choice and instead to see it
simply as coincidence of location, school colors, and the Civil War centennial
year is also tied with the comment that they are fighters. Historically, this
doesn’t make a lot of sense since the Confederacy lost the fight.
This does point, however, to the national debate that still occurs about the
name Rebel and the way in which the irrational choice is often what marks
the fetish object. The word Rebel as a nickname has lasted so long most likely
because of the varied meanings that can be attached to it. The word is one
that performs a cut—one rebels against something else—but that also ex-
presses unity. We are drawn to paradoxical signifiers like “rebel” because they
perform this double function of separating us from others and allowing us to
believe that we are all in solidarity. We could say that these symbols plug up a
hole in the Symbolic so that we can’t see the inadequacies of the Symbolic
fictions surrounding race in America: the fiction, for example, that we are all
equal in America, which we see failing on a daily basis in the injustices of
systematic racism. Or maybe more accurately, these symbols create a fantasy
screen upon which people’s enjoyment can play while disavowing the pain
and oppression that their beliefs are enabling. A quick search on the internet
reveals thousands of comments and rhetorical battles over what the word
Rebel, when invoked as a nickname, really means. The debates often revolve
around how the dictionary definition of the word relates to its historical im-
portance as mostly the nickname of the Confederate army.
Winning the local battle

In our local battle what turned the tide, got the name removed, and united
people to eventually pass the budget 2 to 1 was actually when the fetish object
(the Rebel name) had been dislodged by the School Board (a representative of
the law) and a new landscape of desire was allowed to take hold. The name
had been changed, but the budget was being held hostage. The shift occurred
over the three months it took to roll out and perform three separate votes for
the school budget. Many in the community began to feel a renewed sense of
desire and curiosity in regards to creating a community afresh based on so-
lidarity and working toward the goal of racial justice after the dislodging of
this fetish object. While, on the one hand, this shift was effected by en-
lightening people in the town about what was happening, what the history
was, and the prejudices and racism that did exist in the school system, on the
other hand, one peculiar aspect seemed to tip the battle. Each time the budget
went up for a vote there was a flurry of articles on both sides in the local
newspapers and an attempt to get local media to publish their point of view.
But what seemed to really get people’s attention was the lawn sign wars.
Before each vote, hundreds of lawn signs were put out by both sides. The
group in favor of the budget and the name change put out signs asking the
community to Vote Yes. The group against the name change who was
holding the budget hostage flooded the town with signs that said, “Be a Rebel,
62 Hilary Neroni
Vote No.” Clearly, this sign had many connotations because it references the
old name and attempts to reemploy it as a fetish object. It wasn’t until a
number of people from the “Vote Yes” to the budget group started putting
out endless handmade lawn signs with children and balloons and slogans that
the tide started to turn. These handmade signs had many themes, from in-
formation about the budget, to general support for the school system, to
image allusions to the new wolf mascot (that the students chose through a vote
after the Rebel mascot was retired). One hand drawn picture of a wolf had the
slogan “Howl Yes!,” while another hand lettered and colorful sign said,
“Please Vote Yes!,” with a different kid holding each hand drawn letter. The
multiple slogans and choices of imagery suggested a broad landscape of desire
rather than a rigid fetish object.
The Vote Yes group did not focus on one slogan or one image, unlike the
Rebel Alliance, who just put out printed signs that said “Be a Rebel, Vote
No.” Eventually, the Rebel Alliance actually sent around trucks to take down
and destroy the handmade lawn signs put out by those in favor of the name
change and passing the budget, but people from the Vote Yes camp just as
quickly made new ones and put even more out. They began having popup
lawn sign making parties to quickly churn out more signs. In this way, the left
marshaled a different kind of response, one fueled by the movement of desire
as opposed to the stagnation of the fetish object. The movement of desire
opened up the possibility for dealing with opposition and coming together to
consider new ways to face the issues of racism. The numbers of community
members clearly in favor of passing the budget grew each week, as people
started to get involved and tentatively investigate their ideas and their roles in
the community as it related to these symbols of racism. Besides coming to-
gether to make lawn signs, many community members sought each other out
and came together on several separate occasions to talk about race and racism
that occurred both locally and nationally. During these sessions, community
members dared to admit difficult truths, such as being afraid to discuss race
for fear of being called a racist or their bleak outlook on the possibilities of
justice and equality in this country. But these discussions (both on Facebook
and in several face to face meetings), sign-making parties, political canvassing,
and op-ed essays in the local paper were expressions of a new orientation of
the fantasy screen and of a freeing of desire as it investigated lack that was no
longer held prisoner by the fetish object that had been Symbolically defining
the community. This suggests that rather than being a motivator for fear and
uncertainty, experiencing our own lack can inspire collective political struggle,
which can oppose the often-entrenched politics of disavowal.
This local example has been replayed in numerous communities around
the nation, and it sheds light on how the social fabric can be defined by the
community’s response to lack and the individual’s willingness to confront their
attachment to signifiers of slavery. Confronting the role of the fetish object
may cause uncertainty, but it can also create the potential for a new terrain of
desire beyond the spell of racist enjoyment.
Notes
1 For a detailed report done by the Southern Poverty Law Center with a graph and
access to their updated data set, please see https://www.splcenter.org/20190201/
whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy.
2 David Graham (2016).
3 He further points out, “Over the next two decades, the flag was waved at Klan
rallies, at White Citizens’ Council meetings, and by those committing horrifying
acts of violence. And despite the growing range of its meanings in pop culture, as a
political symbol, it offered little ambiguity.” Yoni Appelbaum (2015).
4 The opposition to removing the flag was very vocal and continued to protest its re-
moval after it was gone. The South Carolina Secessionist Party, for example, orga-
nized a group to raise the Confederate flag every year in front of the state house on the
anniversary of its removal. The group brought a plethora of large Confederate flags,
wore t-shirts with the flag on them, and intended to keep the pressure on the state
government to bring the flag back. Though this group eventually disbanded, others
like it continue such Symbolic acts throughout the country and are emblematic of the
intense emotional investment that many have in the flag itself.
5 Michelle Alexander (2020).
8 One local newspaper wrote that “In that year, Bill Schneider’s mother in South
Burlington wrote to urge the superintendent to choose another name because of its
association with the Confederacy.” Additionally, a few years later in 1964, in-
dividual students forced the school to reconsider the use of the name, as they felt it
was insulting. The students voted to keep the name, 64 percent in favor of it and of
the Confederate flag. Significantly, this does show that there certainly wasn’t 100%
agreement on adopting the flag and the name, and it continued to come under fire
every decade. Nicole Higgins Desmet (2017).
9 In her investigation into black farmers in Vermont, historian Elise Guyette argues
that even the idea that Vermont was an all-white state was a myth developed after
the civil war in reaction to new circulating ideas about race, blood lines, and
power. She explains, “This historical myth of white, slave-free Vermont grew out
of the desire to save white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture and identity in the face
of large migrations to the North before and after the Civil War.” Elise Guyette
(2010: 5).
10 Nicole Higgins Desmet (2017).
11 Nicole Higgins Desmet (2017).
12 See Rebecca Klein (2015) and James Shockley (2016: 45.1).
13 See Emily Bamforth (2017), “Five Iowa High Schools with ‘Rebels’ mascot part of
Confederate symbol debate” (2015), Josh Moore (2015) and “South Albany High
School drops Rebel mascot” (2018).
14 The new nickname, chosen by student voting, is the “Wolves.” Certainly, it would be
worth also analyzing the new mascot, but suffice it to say that the school has chosen
to emphasize community through such slogans as “Welcome to the Wolfpack” and
“Where there is unity, There is always victory.” The Rebel Alliance immediately
criticized this new mascot as aggressive and the wrong message, but it was clear that
their unexpected flurry of semiotic readings of the new mascot was simply to try to
invalidate the change itself.
15 Quoted in Molly Walsh (2017: 18–19).
16 Quoted in Molly Walsh (2017).
17 Quoted in Nicole Higgins (2017).
64 Hilary Neroni
References
“Five Iowa high schools with ‘Rebels’ mascot part of Confederate symbol debate.”
USA Today. 23 July 2015, https://usatodayhss.com/2015/five-iowa-high-schools-
with-rebels-mascot-part-of-confederate-symbol-debate.
“South Albany High School drops Rebel mascot.” Oregonlive.com. 24 April 2018,
https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2018/04/south_albany_
high_school_drops.html.
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New
York: The New Press, 2020.
Appelbaum, Yoni. “Why is the flag still there?: After 150 years, there may finally be
enough support in South Carolina to consign the Confederate banner to the past.”
The Atlantic. 21 June 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/
06/why-is-the-flag-still-there/396431/.
Bamforth, Emily. “Willoughby South High School drops rebel mascot, keeps name.”
Cleavland.com. 17 August 2017, https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2017/08/
willoughby_south_high_school_d.html.
Desmet, Nicole Higgins. “South Burlington’s Rebel debate goes back decades.”
Burlington Free Press, 28 April 2017, http://bfpne.ws/2pe223C.
Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2016.
Klein, Rebecca. “Thousands of black students attend schools honoring racist leaders.”
HUFFPOST. 1 July 2015, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/schools-named-for-
confederates_n_7697488.
Graham, David. “The Stubborn persistence of confederate monuments.” The Atlantic. 26
April 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/the-stubborn-
persistence-of-confederate-monuments/479751/.
Guyette, Elise. Discovering black Vermont: African American farmers in Hinesburgh, 1790–1890.
Burlington, VT: University of Vermont Press, 2010.
Moore, Josh. “For some Kentucky high schools, Rebels nickname OK for now.”
Lexington Heralad Leader. 28 June 2015, https://www.kentucky.com/sports/high-
school/prep-basketball/article44607279.html.
Shockley, James. “Farewell to Dixie: California’s Attempt to Eliminate the
Confederacy from Public Schools.” Journal of Law and Education, Winter 2016.
Walsh, Molly. “‘Rebels’ yell: protests build over south Burlington’s mascot change.”
Seven Days. Burlington, Vermont, 19 April 2017.
4 The function and field of
speech and language in white
nationalist manifestoes
E. Chebrolu
Scholar of Communication
Introduction
On March 15, 2019, Brenton Tarrant massacred 51 people at a mosque in
Christchurch, New Zealand. Tarrant posted a manifesto titled “The Great
Replacement” alongside a link to a Facebook livestream of his actions on the
imageboard platform 8chan. Tarrant’s violence, circulated via digital copies
of the livestream and manifesto, led to his canonization by white nationalist
digital communities as “Saint Tarrant,” an icon ritualistically venerated
alongside white nationalist mass murderers such as Dylann Roof and Anders
Breivik. In the manifesto, Tarrant advocates for “accelerationism,” originally
an academic term referring to an embrace of the acceleration of capitalism
that some white nationalists have taken up to describe attempts to hasten an
apocalyptic race war. His call for accelerationist tactics that attempt to de-
stabilize civil society through violence has been taken up across the globe, with
several shooters explicitly citing Tarrant’s manifesto as an inspiration for their
own violence.
In this chapter, I turn to Jacques Lacan’s “The Function and Field of
Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” from the Écrits, to analyze “The
Great Replacement” and two other manifestoes from 2019 inspired by
it—El Paso shooter Patrick Crusius’s “The Inconvenient Truth” and
Poway Synagogue shooter John Earnest’s “An Open Letter.” “Function
and Field,” also referred to as the Rome Discourse, is useful for such an
analysis because it lays out Lacan’s critique of the tendency to emphasize
the ego, understood here as an imagined conception of the self, as the
central focus of clinical treatment. Against a focus on strengths and
weaknesses of the ego, Lacan argues for a psychoanalysis that starts with
the unconscious, found in the gaps and slippages of the analysand’s
speech. Lacan’s critique is relevant for analysis of white nationalist
rhetoric because the common assumption that explanations of individual
motivation should start with the frustrations of the ego is alive and well in
discourse about white nationalism.
White nationalism is often portrayed by its liberal critics as a virus that
spreads on social media through the weaknesses of a young white man’s ego,
66 E. Chebrolu
such as this following quote in a US News article from Erwin Staub, a
psychology professor who researches peace and violence:
Why would people join groups like that? It usually involves them finding no
other socially acceptable and meaningful ways to fulfill important needs—the need
for identity; the need for a feeling of effectiveness; the need for a feeling of
connection … Often, these are people who don’t feel like they’ve
succeeded or had a chance to succeed across normal channels of success
in society. They may come from families that are problematic or families
where they’re exposed to this kind of extreme views of white superiority
and nationalism. If you don’t feel you have much influence and power in
the world, you get a sense of power from being part of a community and
especially a rather militant community. (emphasis mine; Jayson and
Kaiser Health News 2017).
Staub’s explanation reflects many of the major themes and concerns within the
last four years of popular discourse about white nationalism. “Alienation,” “iso-
lation,” “overcompensation,” “insecurity,” and “unhappy childhood experiences”
are used to paint the picture of who is most susceptible to “radicalization.” This
figure is commonly imagined as a pathetic, basement-dwelling loser who does not
have the self-esteem to resist indoctrination. Racism is rendered an individual
pathology, a sickness of the soul that can be fixed through proper forms of so-
cialization: either prevented all together by a liberal humanist upbringing or
undone through deradicalization, which involves education and therapy aimed at
providing a path to comfortable assimilation as healthy, productive, and well-
adjusted citizens of civil society.
In emphasizing the needs of the ego, such approaches decouple the white
nationalist from whiteness. By contrast, my reading focuses on how white
nationalism is tied to the Symbolic function of whiteness as a kinship bond
that constitutes community through violence. Whiteness did not appear ex
nihilo in the manifestos as a salve for frustration. Rather, the signifier “white”
can operate as a symbol that binds subjects together in community because
of the anti-black violence of racial slavery that anchors the modern world.
Racial whiteness, as an unconsciously overrepresented metaphor for mas-
tery/capacity/humanness, defines community in contradistinction to racial
blackness as a symbol of slaveness/incapacity (Wilderson 2010; Sexton
2008; Wynter 2003). Following Frank B. Wilderson III, my analysis begins
from the presumption that “white people are not simply ‘protected’ by the
police, they are—in their very corporeality—the police” (Wilderson III 2003:
20). To say that white people are the police is to name a structural re-
lationship between whiteness, violence, and anti-blackness, one that un-
consciously configures the Symbolic resources drawn upon to imagine the
needs of the white ego. This chapter seeks to understand the rhetorical
mechanics of whiteness by refracting the problematic of white nationalism
through the lens of the Rome Discourse.
The function and field of speech and language 67
The central argument of this essay is that the manifestoes of Brenton
Tarrant, Patrick Crusius, and John Earnest are oriented through identifica-
tion with the trope of the vigilante. The vigilante is one manifestation of the
white subject deputized as the police, as the vigilante is an extra-legal actor
willing to secure the law with racial violence when the law is perceived to be in
crisis. The law in crisis is the Symbolic Law of the white father, what Jared
Sexton calls “the law of antimiscegnation,” which attempts to ensure the
persistence of whiteness as a signifier with stable meaning that can be “passed
down” to future generations through “the reactive quest for racial being,
which is to say the performative reiteration of racial whiteness itself ” (Sexton
2008: 198, 222). Whiteness here functions as a symbol of the kinship bond (the
name-of-the-father) that speaks through the white nationalist subject, who is
compelled by identification with whiteness to preserve the Symbolic integrity
of the white community through the desire to secure a white future from
contingent, racialized threats. In these spectacles of racial violence, white
nationalists target groups that are not reducible to race and are contingently
racialized: “Muslim” and “Jew” are religious categories, “Hispanic” is a
linguistic and regional category, and all three arecut across by racial differ-
entiation(s) and thus also ‘internally’ structured by racial hierarchies. White
nationalists incorrectly presume these to be stable racialized categories con-
sistently distinct from whiteness, which is not the case, as there are white
people who identify with being Jewish, Muslim, and Hispanic. The non-black
people in these groups are not policed like black people or as a stand-in for
blackness, but the fantasies of imagined transgressions ascribed to these
groups used to justify vigilante violence are unconsciously shaped by anxieties
about miscegenation and the insecurity of whiteness grounded in “a culture of
antiblackness” (Wilderson 2010: 68; Sexton 2008: 220).
The manifesto is a rhetorical act of becoming-vigilante, akin to Lacan’s full
speech, that moment of freedom found in the psychoanalytic clinic wherein
the subject’s speech leads to a restructuring of their relationship to the
Symbolic.1 In that moment, “what is at stake is not reality, but truth, because
the effect of full speech is to reorder past contingencies by conferring on them the sense of
necessities to come, such as they are constituted by the scant freedom through
which the subject makes them present” (emphasis mine; Lacan 2006: 213).
Engaging with Wilderson’s argument that full speech can function “as a
strategy which fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of civil society,” I am
using full speech here as an analytic concept to consider the white nationalist
manifesto as an attempt to secure the bounds of civil society in a moment of
subjective transformation tied to violence (Wilderson 2010: 79). The white
nationalist subject reveals the “truth” of the relation between whiteness and
violence in an attempt to sacrifice their personhood to the Symbolic laws that
hold together the anti-black world. By committing a vigilante act of violence,
they hope to incite a race war that is fantasized as a path for returning
the white nation to a state of wholeness. The imagined crises that compel the
vigilante to action do not pose true threats to racial hierarchy; instead, they
68 E. Chebrolu
evince the self-authorization of the Law of the white father as a form of crisis
management that maintains and rejuvenates investment in the unconscious
grammars of anti-blackness (Sugino 2020).
I make this argument in four steps. First, I situate my analysis of the
manifesto in Lacan’s explication of rhetoric and the analysand’s speech in
“Function and Field.” I then articulate how the white nationalist shooter
draws from vigilantism. Next, I analyze how the symbolic laws of kinship ties
operate in the manifestoes, and then move to the construction of crisis in
the law. I conclude with some brief notes regarding the implications of my
argument and lines of inquiry for future scholarship.
The manifesto
Lacan’s theorization of speech in the clinic is instructive in the analysis of
manifestoes, as both are mediations of how subjects imagine their relationship
to the world. The reduction of white nationalism to a problem of the ego’s
needs makes it easy to not listen to what the white nationalist is actually saying
in the manifesto, in the same manner the American analysts Lacan critiques
only listen to the analysand’s speech in terms of “adaptation of the individual
to the social environment, the search for behavior patterns, and all the ob-
jectification implied in the notion of ‘human relations’” (Lacan 2006: 204).
Instead of such a focus, Lacan orients us to analyzing how white nationalism
works in “a field of language,” which I interpret as the Symbolic terrain of
political discourse and racial signification that suffuses civil society. This or-
ientation takes the manifestos as rhetorical acts “ordered in relation to the
function of speech” (Lacan 2006: 205). Manifestoes draw their Symbolic
resources from the field of civil society but seek to reconstitute that field
through the function of speech.
The Rome Discourse encourages a consideration of the manifesto as an
enunciation of desire “spoken” in the future anterior tense: as Lacan writes,
“I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it as an object.
What is realized in my history is … the future anterior as what I will have
been, given what I am in the process of becoming” (Lacan 2006: 247). The
manifesto is written before the massacre, yet in the manifesto the shooter
rhetorically identifies with the symbol of what they will have been after the
violence and what they want racial violence to do in the reconstitution of the
white nation’s consciousness. They announce their desire and say what that
desire drives them to do: here, as in analysis, where subjectivity unfolds
through the analysand’s recounting of his history, the unconscious comes to
structure the manifestos’ articulation of the events their authors imagine to be
significant in their life story.
Following Christian Lundberg, I consider “Function and Field” to be sig-
nificant because Lacan emphasizes the rhetoric of the analysand’s speech as
central to the project of psychoanalysis (Lundberg 2012: 70). Lacan highlights
Freud’s attention to the rhetoric deployed in the telling of dream, listing off
tropes that might structure an analysand’s speech: syntactical displacements,
like ellipsis and apposition, and semantic condensations, like metaphor and
metonymy (Lacan 2006: 221–22). Lacan claims that “Freud teaches us to read
in them the intentions—whether ostentatious or demonstrative, dissimulating
or persuasive, retaliatory or seductive—with which the subject modulates his
oneiric discourse” (Lacan 2006: 222). Lacan is pushing analysts to closely
listen to how the analysand talks through their dreams and situates their
contents, attempting to sift through twists and turns of their language that
obscure a subjective orientation to objects of desire. “Function and Field”
emphasizes the temporality of subjective experience evinced in the analy-
sand’s rhetoric. In so doing, Lacan points analysis toward the very mechan-
isms by which the shooter draws Symbolic resources from the unconscious in
their explication of how they came to their present desire for violence.
Speech announces desire to an audience, articulating what one believes
oneself to be and how that imagined self has come to be: “I was this only in
order to become what I can be” (Lacan 2006: 209). The I in that statement,
which Lacan ascribes to the analysand, is the representation of the self that
operates as the ego. Lacan displaces this I as not the bearer of frustration, but
“frustration in its very essence. Not frustration of one of the subject’s desires,
but frustration of an object in which his desire is alienated; and the more
developed this object [this I as ego] becomes, the more profoundly the subject
becomes alienated from his jouissance” (Lacan 2006: 208). The ego is frustra-
tion because the ego functions as an object through which the subject ima-
gines desire. The ego is built through Symbolic resources, an imagined version
of selfhood mobilized by speaking white subjects in their repeated attempts to
figure out their desires and pursue the objects and others that appear in
fantasy. For Lacan, desire is “alienated” in the ego because it is a re-
presentation in fantasy, which mediates desire via the Symbolic. The ego is
born of the compromise made with mediation: language is implicitly always in
use when white subjects imagine their relations to others, as they must draw
from language to make sense of identity. White identity is a set of fictions
embedded in signifiers; these signifiers materially circulate through the global
circuits of racial capitalism and produce libidinal attachments that are un-
consciously drawn from when white subjects try to figure out who they are
and what they want.
White nationalist shooters write manifestos to represent who they think
they really are, and what it means to desire as that kind of person. The
manifesto is thus a site of exchange between the white nationalist’s ego and
their imagined audience. In the rhetoric of the manifesto, the author is im-
plicitly telling the reader of the manifesto what kind of person they want to be
addressing. “Speech, even when almost completely worn out, retains its value
as a tessera,” says Lacan, a tessera being an ancient Roman token of exchange
whose value is derived from what it can be exchanged for, not the material
constitution of the token (bronze, glass, bone, etc.) (Lacan 2006: 209). Speech
presupposes an other with whom words are exchanged: not only does “the
70 E. Chebrolu
subject’s act of addressing [allocution] bring with it an addressee [allocutaire],”
the addressee affirms the white subject’s subjectivity through recognition, as
“nowhere does it appear more clearly that man’s desire finds its meaning in
the other’s desire, not so much because the other holds the keys to the desired
object, as because his first object(ive) is to be recognized by the other” (Lacan
2006: 214, 222). Speech is an articulation of desire fundamentally bound to
the other who can interpret and recognize the subject’s desire. The manifesto
is both a call that demands a response from the other and a response to the
call of the Symbolic, as the subject who identifies with the symbol of whiteness
is compelled by a sense of obligation.
The unconscious operation of whiteness in the manifesto lies in the pre-
sumed linguistic coordinates shared between the white nationalist rhetors and
the various audiences that they expect a response from. Their manifestoes are
public declarations of desire: because this is what the world has been, this is what we
must do to make the world what it should be. They demand recognition. The three
manifestoes this paper analyzes presume an audience who is looking for an
explanation of what brought the shooter to the violence. Patrick Crusius takes
on a more simple format of explaining his rationale through “political rea-
sons,” “economic reasons,” and so on, while Brenton Tarrant and John
Earnest anticipate the circulation of their writing and adopt a question/an-
swer format as if they were being interviewed by a mainstream media outlet
that is hostile to their beliefs (Tarrant 2019; Crusius 2019; Earnest 2019).
Their explanations are written alongside sections where they speak directly to
the white nationalist digital community, invoking various in-jokes to signal
what part of the Internet they come from along with providing instructions for
how other normal, everyday white nationalists can become like them. The
symbol that holds together these various manifestoes is whiteness, designating
the structural position of enunciation from which Tarrant, Earnest, and
Crusius speak as that of the white man who stands in for the white nation.
The white nationalist shooters thus want to share their future violence in a
Symbolic form with the audience they presume is listening. The language they
use to justify their commitment to violence is where the unconscious speaks in
the manifestos. Lacan defines the unconscious as “that part of concrete dis-
course qua transindividual, which is not at the subject’s disposal in re-
establishing the continuity of his conscious discourse” (Lacan 2006: 214). In
writing the manifestos, the shooters rely unconsciously upon a Symbolic
structure of racialization that they are not aware they are drawing upon, even
if they are conscious of their own conception of racial ideology. The mani-
festos presume a net of signifiers, shared by the writer of the manifesto and
their imagined audience, that will make sense of racial identity and the ob-
ligations such identities come with. The task for a structural analysis of the
white nationalist manifesto is therefore to identify what is unconsciously
invoked and transferred about this relationship to the Symbolic in speech.
Lacan further describes the unconscious as “the chapter of my history
that is marked by a blank or occupied by a lie: it is the censored chapter”
(Lacan 2006: 215). But Lacan also asserts that “the truth can be refound; most
often it has already been written elsewhere” (Lacan 2006: 215). This
elsewhere is constituted by the following list: “monuments,” “archival
documents,” “semantic evolution, “traditions,” and “traces that are inevitably
preserved in … distortions” (Lacan 2006: 215). Most significant for our
purposes is “traditions.” The manifestoes emerge as what we can call after
Lacan “legends which, in a heroicized form, convey my history.” The next
section moves to understand what the white nationalist is rhetorically doing
through his manifesto by centering the trope of heroism unconsciously
invoked by the manifesto authors in constructing their relationship to crisis
(Lacan 2006: 215).
The vigilante
The heroic form white nationalist shooters invoke to convey their history is
the vigilante. “Vigilante” entered the English lexicon from Spanish, where
it was derived from the Latin “vigil,” meaning “watchful, awake” (Saffire
1985). The original connotation of the vigilante is as the watchman, the
one who stays awake through the night to protect the community from
threats (Saffire 1985). Vigilantes remain vigilant because they know what is
necessary to maintain the security of those they love, an ever-watching eye
that seeks to find the signs of danger, and then commits to a violence that
innocents cannot engage in without sullying their hands. The true vigilante
does not commit to violence because of a personal vendetta, but because
he knows that for every happy neighborhood, there is somebody who
must live with blood on their hands; their violence is an obligation they
must fulfill:
“I did not want to have to kill Jews. But they have given us no other
option.” (Earnest 2019).
“My motives for this attack are not personal. Actually the Hispanic
community was not my target until I read The Great Replacement.”
(Crusius 2019).
“Did/do you personally hate foreigners/other cultures? No, I spent many
years travelling through many, many nations … I wish the different
peoples of their world all the best regardless of their ethnicity, race,
culture or faith … But if those same people seek to come to my peoples
lands, replace my people, subjugate my people, make war upon my
people,,hen [sic] I shall be forced to fight them, and hold nothing in
reserve.” (Tarrant 2019).
Vigilantism invokes impersonal obligation in the white nationalist Imaginary

because of its foundational relationship to modern citizenship. As Christine
Nobiss writes, in colonial America,
72 E. Chebrolu
… extreme violence was a God-given right and an obligation of the
average “citizen” that took on the singular role of a vigilante and that
formed into small groups that cleared the way for the rise of the
American government. The average citizen was a raider, a ranger, a
frontiersman, a marauder, a pirate, and the average colony was a settler
militia, an armed household, and a slave patrol (Nobiss 2018).
The vigilante is a heroic form of the citizen, encased in the fantasy of violence
as a defense of the sovereignty and law of the settler colony slave society.
Emerging primarily in the seventeenth century, slave patrols were legally
sanctioned forms of deputizing “average citizens” that preceded the modern
institution of policing, and settler militias relied on the logic of “self-defense”
to justify genocidal violence on the frontier (Reichel 1988, 57; Dunbar-Ortiz
2018). Following Ersula Ore, the lynching of black people, a primary mode of
vigilante violence, is a “constitutive performance of American civic identity
since the eighteenth century” (Ore 2019: 11). Lynching is an enactment of
democratic citizenship that defined the “terms of belonging” (Ore 2019: 50).
To be clear, there is a distinction between the contingent moments of vigilante
violence against non-black racialized groups (such as the lynching of Leo
Frank or the Chinese massacre of 1871), which are preceded by a sense of
crisis tied to an (often imagined) transgression, and anti-black vigilante vio-
lence. The latter requires no construction of contingent crisis (although this
can occur retroactively) as black existence itself is figured as a crisis for
humanity: it is a gratuitous violence (Wilderson 2010). As Linette Park in-
dicates, such gratuity is evinced by the fact that anti-lynching laws initially
came about not to protect black life from the white lynch mob, but rather to
define state violence, and not “frontier justice,” as the primary mode by which
blackness is rendered captive (Park 2019).
Such repetitions of violence are culturally circulated in romanticized form.
In Aryan Cowboys, Evelyn Schlatter demonstrates that vigilantism, popularized
through literary and cinematic fantasies of the settlement of the American
West in the nineteenth century, is a site of deep attachment for many late
twentieth century white nationalist groups, especially those in the Pacific
Northwest like Posse Comitatus (Schlatter 2006: 16–17). The vigilante-hero of
the Western circulated globally across white populations from the late nine-
teenth century on; for example, Adolf Hitler was partially inspired by his
shelves full of the romantic Westerns written by the German novelist Karl
May, citing indigenous genocide as a precedent for Lebensraum (violent terri-
torial expansion for the sake of “living space”) (Wood 1990; Ross 2018). The
vigilante is a site for such attachments in part because the trope temporally
situates violence. Vigilantes take up the mantle of embodying the law’s ra-
cialized violence when the law breaks down: when the cops and business
owners can’t be racist enough, somebody has to do the job of putting down
the racial threat. The vigilante must watch for a time when violence is
necessary, a role that must be played in the “dramas … in which a nation
today learns to read the symbols of a destiny on the march” (Lacan 2006:
212). The vigilante’s intervention is preceded by a crisis in the law, a time for
action, a time for change, when decisions must be made.
The law
To understand how the white nationalist vigilante is called to action by a
contingent crisis in law, we must initially think through the two somewhat
distinct yet converging senses of law operating here: the first being the jur-
idical codes imposed by government legislation, and the second, the Lacanian
Law of the Symbolic that governs kinship ties. In the manifestoes, the law that
must be protected is what Lacan calls “the primordial Law … which in
regulating marriage ties, superimposes the reign of culture over the reign of
nature, the latter being subject to the law of mating” (Lacan 2006: 229). The
Law Lacan is referring to is the symbol of the father’s name that is meant to
make sense of sexuality. The Symbolic link of marriage ensures the passing
down of the father’s name to the child, a fundamental Symbolic process in
maintaining the integrity of the (Western European cisheteropatriarchal) so-
ciety. “It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the basis of the
symbolic function which … has identified [man’s] person with the figure of
the law” (Lacan 2006: 230). Lacan is not making a prescriptive claim about
the desirability of cisheteropatriarchal marriage bonds, nor a universal claim
that his analysis of European social bonds maps onto all social structures and
kinship bonds. Rather, what I draw from Lacan is that subjects are socialized
by learning how to desire through the signifiers that govern kinship bonds
within the social realm, giving the individual a “goal” of the good life that can
be reached through a mode of desire that would bring their life in line with
the Symbolic codes of what it means to be a person.
The Symbolic aspect of race can, in part, be understood as a chain of
signifiers, anchored by the abjection of blackness, that saturates the fields of
violence and sexuality, operating as if it were “the primordial Law” that
governs kinship bonds. In the context of whiteness, racialization is a seizure of
time/the future, a process of socialization that dictates what the future
portends, namely, a wholeness found in assuming a position within the
community constituted by the kinship bond of whiteness. For the white
masculine subject, the symbol of whiteness designates the coordinates of
the “right” future to be attained through success in racial capitalism. For
example, an iteration of the promise of a “good life” it can offer is assumed by
training oneself to get a good middle-class job with an income that could
support a nuclear family in the suburbs, with the hope being that such a life
could ensure the passing of whiteness as a signifier from father to child. These
laws of racial kinship operate in the unconscious, such that “it is perhaps only
our unawareness of their permanence that allows us to believe in the freedom
of choice in the so-called complex structures of marriage ties under whose law
we live” (Lacan 2006: 229). The unconscious imperative to choose the correct
74 E. Chebrolu
sexual partner produces standards for acceptable (and seemingly transgressive)
expressions of desire in the social arena of the white bourgeoisie, what Sylvia
Wynter calls the “ethnoclass” formed around homo economicus as model subject
that stands in for what it means to be fully human (Wynter 2003: 260).
The manifestoes indicate that the white nationalist vigilante sees the effects
of the sedimentation of this Symbolic law as its enforcement adapts to the
contexts of different eras of politics while maintaining a certain consistency
and, in reaction, attempt to make sense of those operations in terms of their
own life story. Each shooter’s attachment to whiteness is translated in terms of
what he could achieve for his nation through his sacrifice of the potential for
the good life. As Brenton Tarrant writes, “I am just a regular White man,
from a regular family. Who decided to take a stand to ensure a future for my
people” (Tarrant 2019). Racialization orients how the subject imagines his
past to place himself in the future of the world. Following Lacan’s statement
that “Man thus speaks, but it is because the symbol has made him man,” the
manifestoes announce the white nationalist’s rejection of the imperative to live
the good life in favor of ensuring the symbol could promise such a life for
other white people (Lacan 2006: 229).
The beginning of John Earnest’s manifesto particularly bears out the
rhetorical assumption of this imagined relationship to whiteness: “My
name is John Earnest and I am a man of European ancestry” (Earnest
2019). The name that begins this section of the manifesto is a metaphor for
the writer: “Earnest.” The initial metaphor of the last name is then held in
equivalence with what Earnest believes is another metaphor it could be
substituted for: “a man of European ancestry.” He follows this by
recounting the history of his glorious blood, metonymically extending the
metaphor of whiteness through “the English, Nordic, and Irish men of
old,” the “original colonists of Roanoke,” “the “very wealthy Yankees
“who were “intelligent, resourceful, uncompromising,” and the “poor
Southern farmers” who were “intelligent, musically gifted, self-sufficient”
(Earnest 2019). The name Earnest is imbued with the power of sedimented
whiteness that retroactively resolves the reality of historical conflicts such as
the English colonization of Ireland, the Civil War between Yankees and
Southerners, and the class struggles between poor whites and the white
bourgeoisie. Whiteness occupies a position in Earnest’s psyche as corollary
to the soul: “a part of my ancestors lives within me in this very moment.
They are the reason I am who I am” (Earnest 2019). Identification is felt as
an incursion of the ancestor who brings Earnest to the moment of decision
in the face of the law, and he is inspired to action because “their acts of
bravery, ingenuity, and righteousness live on through me” (Earnest 2019).
Whiteness organizes the rhetoric of the manifesto, spreading through the
capillaries of metonymy to various acts and adjectives that crystallize in the
name of the father, Earnest; violence is understood as the logical conclu-
sion of the claim that he is “blessed by God for such a magnificent [white]
bloodline” (Earnest 2019).
Vigilantes are driven by their attachment to the law despite their rejection
of the life that it offers, identifying with the supplementary violence necessary
for its maintenance. Lacan argues that symbols structure how subjects in-
terpret what it means to live and die: “symbols … envelop the life of man with
a network total … that they bring to his birth … the shape of his destiny … so
total that through them his end finds its meaning in the last judgment, where
the Word absolves his being or condemns it” (2006: 231). In its law-like op-
eration, the symbol of whiteness calls white subjects into a moment of the
judgment of absolution or condemnation of their being, but that does not
entail that those relations are mediated the same way for all white people. For
many “color-blind” conservatives and “anti-racist” liberals, race is a neutral
marker of difference that can be overcome through an acceptance of the
universality of the modern Human, which Wynter demonstrates is anchored
by whiteness as an overrepresented referent (Wynter 2003: 260). The white
nationalist vigilante is only distinct insofar that he presumes that overcoming
difference through the universal values of modernity is impossible, instead
seeking to affirm the particularity of whiteness that liberal democracy must
structurally disavow.
The white nationalist answers to the last judgment through the sacrificial
offering of a promise of the good life. The next paragraph in Earnest’s
manifesto begins to take on the genre of a letter more strongly, using the
question/answer form to write of his sacrifices to those close to him:
To my family and friends. I can already hear your voices. “How could
you throw your life away? You had everything! You had a loving family.
You had great friends. You had a church. You were doing well in
nursing school. You could have gone so far in your field of study. You
could have made so much money and started a happy family of your
own.” I understand why you would ask this. But I pose a question to you
now. What value does my life have compared to the entirety of the
European race? … I willingly sacrifice my future—the future of having
a fulfilling job, a loving wife, and amazing kids. I sacrifice this for the
sake of my people. OUR people. I would die a thousand times over to
prevent the doomed fate that the Jews have planned for my race.
(Earnest 2019).
The manifesto establishes the subsequent shooting as an exchange with the

big Other: a future for a future. Although Earnest could have lived a
“normal” life, he instead chose to answer the call of the Symbolic/Other.
Similarly, Patrick Crusius claims that “My whole life I have been preparing
for a future that does not exist” because of automation of potential jobs and
“Hispanic” takeover of his Texas (Crusius 2019). The law’s promise of the
good life is denied by an invasive force that perverts the Symbolic by replacing
the future with a “doomed fate” ensured by the existence of the racial other in
proximity to the white nationalist subject.
76 E. Chebrolu
Crisis
For the white nationalist subject, the function of the Symbolic Law of the white
father is mediated through the fantasy of a crisis in racial sexual relations. By
crisis, I follow Wendy Chun’s articulation of new media as primarily fueled by
crises, understood as moments for sovereign decisions: times when the subject
must make a choice in regards to a problem which has come to a head (Chun
2016: 24–25). In all three manifestoes, the marital alliance symbolized by the
persistence of the signifier of whiteness has broken down and the time for de-
cision approaches. Tarrant’s manifesto begins with the mantra, “It’s the
birthrates. It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates. If there is one thing I want you
to remember from these writings, its [sic] that the birthrates must change”
(Tarrant 2019). The birthrates in question are the births of white babies, the
sign of successful modes of white kinship. The crisis of the white signifier is quite
dire, as “even if we were to deport all Non-Europeans from our lands to-
morrow, the European people would still be spiraling into decay and eventual
death …. In the end we must return to replacement fertility levels, or it will kill
us” (Tarrant 2019). But although Tarrant claims that the birthrates would still
be a problem if people of color did not exist in spaces of white sovereignty, he
finds another crisis that coincides with the birthrates to make his subsequent
actions necessary: “This crisis of mass immigration and sub-replacement fertility is
an assault on the European people that, if not combated, will ultimately result
in the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people”
(emphasis mine; Tarrant 2019). Here Tarrant is citing a common conspiracy
theory among white nationalists and their fellow travelers that goes by the same
name as the title of Tarrant’s manifesto: “The Great Replacement.” The theory
posits generally that immigrants of color from the Global South (often epito-
mized in the figure of the black Muslim refugee) are being let into white-
majority countries by the globalist elite (usually, but not always, thought to be
part of a Jewish conspiracy) to replace and breed out the white population.
Tarrant’s introduction relies on an explanation of the white genocide/
Great Replacement theory in order to explain why he had to kill Muslims
now, and in this way, rather than choose other paths typical for most
Islamophobic racists in predominantly white settler colonial nations, such as
joining the military to be sent over to the Middle East. Although he believes
that white people “must inevitably correct the disaster of hedonistic, nihilistic
individualism,” he also thinks that “Due to mass immigration we lack the time
scale required to enact the civilizational paradigm shift we need to undertake
to return to health and prosperity” (emphasis mine; Tarrant 2019). Tarrant,
an Australian immigrant in New Zealand, theorizes that “fertility rates are
innately tied to race,” and that they are “cultural,” which justifies killing
Muslim refugees as, in Tarrant’s fantasy of crisis, their culture incentivizes
high fertility rates. Higher fertility rates indexes Muslims as a unique threat in
Tarrant’s biopolitical impulse to render the world’s problems as those of
population control, which entails that the invaders must be killed.
Anxiety about race and fertility is also evidenced in Patrick Crusius’s
manifesto, although directed this time at “Hispanics” rather than Muslims.
Crusius emphasizes miscegenation more than Tarrant in his expression of the
precarious future of the white marital alliance, stating that he is “against race
mixing because it destroys genetic diversity and creates identity problems”
(Crusius 2019). He further adds a heightened sense of urgency to this crisis by
following this statement with the fact that “2nd and 3rd generation Hispanics
form interracial unions at much higher rates than average,” meaning that the
“native” Texan white population will slowly be bred out of existence (Crusius
2019). Earnest is perhaps a little less explicitly obsessed with sex, but as I have
shown in his previous attachment to his “magnificent bloodline,” he is quite
invested in the white marital alliance, and he explicitly factors in “race-
mixing” and “feminism” in his list of crimes that the Jew must be slaughtered
for perpetuating (Earnest 2019).
In all three of the manifestoes, the subsequent shootings are motivated by
an impulse to secure the Law of the white father from the crisis that the
targeted population brings. As Jared Sexton argues in Amalgamation Schemes,
the white nationalist investment in the law of antimiscegnation is only one
dimension of “the politics of interracial sexuality,” as the flipside to the
politics of multiracialism, in which the heterosexual interracial couple is
fetishized as a means to realize the promise of multiracial national wholeness
achieved through a distancing from blackness as a singular point of differ-
ence (Sexton 2008: 39). Both the discourses of antimiscegenation and
anti-antimiscegenation/multiracialism share an investment in imagining
racial mixture as a threat to racial hierarchy (Sexton 2008: 221). Such sta-
gings of miscegenation as a crisis in law function to stabilize the masquerade
of Symbolic racial categories as biological essences. As Sexton writes, “the
projected and reified racial difference supposed to be mortally threatened
(for better or worse) by the prospect of subsequent interracial sex acts is itself
produced, need we say performatively, in and through the apprehension of
miscegenation” (Sexton 2008: 218). Thus, “miscegenation is the outside of
racialization,” as an indeterminate, unrepresentable event that is pre-
supposed, displaced, and deferred in fantasies of interracial contact (Sexton
2008: 220). Consider the impossibility of nailing down precisely when racial
mixture is meant to have occurred in white nationalist rhetorics that render
integration, intermarriage, interracial sexual reproduction, and representa-
tions of mixed-race peoples as equivalent signs of an apocalyptic destruction
of racial whiteness (Sexton 2008: 216). In “the paranoid fantasy of white
genocide,” multiracialism is iterated as a “death sign”; “race mixture sig-
nifies a process that tears the white racial corpus apart, exploding it from
within by insinuation,” as the possibility of miscegenation must be logically
presupposed for whiteness to function as an imagined property of the body
that could be polluted and lost (Sexton 208; Ferber; Daniels).2 As such, the
white nationalist vigilante is compelled to act in self-defense of white futurity
to prevent the degradation of whiteness, an impossible act because the
78 E. Chebrolu
insecurity of whiteness was embedded within its invention as a symbol (and a
racially impure whiteness is not an annihilation of whiteness) (Sexton 2008:
224–25). Two senses of law converge here: there is a failure of the literal law
(the legal codes that regulate the border) to protect the white nations the law
was crafted to preserve, which then creates a crisis in the more fundamental
law that governs racial sexuality. The crisis of mass immigration compounds
the crisis in the cultural ideal of the white nuclear family, thus necessitating
that the vigilante step in.
The proposed course of action through the crisis is where the unconscious
speaks in the manifestoes, as it is where whiteness begins to articulate how to
return force to the law. In speech, the white nationalists historicize the events
of their lives, the “page of shame that one forgets or undoes” and the “page of
glory that obliges,” such that “what is forgotten is recalled in acts, and the
undoing of what has been done contradicts what is said elsewhere, just as
obligation perpetuates in symbols the very mirage in which the subject found
himself trapped” (Lacan 2006: 217). Symbols set the coordinates of the white
nationalists’ fantasies of what must be done to live up to their ego-ideal, the
agent of the ego that sets up obligations through the network of associations
between tropes of race. Whiteness is a symbol that is fundamentally grounded
in violence, a fact that is rendered unconscious in the articulation of white self-
defense that the white nationalist is most attached to. The foundational vio-
lence necessary to create whiteness thus reappears as the object that the white
ego’s destiny is alienated within, a mode of enjoyment that could fix the
precarity of the Law.
The manifestoes are an objectification of racial violence through a ren-
dering of the future event in text. Lacan describes the operation of language in
relation to action as such: “the symbolic function presents itself as a twofold
movement in the subject: man makes his own action into an object, but only
to return its foundational place to it in due time. In this equivocation, oper-
ating at every instant, lies the whole progress of a function in which action and
knowledge … alternate” (2006: 236). The symbol here acts as a switch point
between action and knowledge. Knowledge compels action, and action pushes
forward knowledge; theory leads to praxis, and praxis transforms theory.
Lacan further offers the example of the worker: “in phase one, a man who
works at the level of production in our society considers himself to belong to
the ranks of the proletariat; in phase two, in the name of belonging to it, he
joins in a general strike” (2006: 236). To raise consciousness is to learn a way
to interpret the world and identify oneself within it through the signifier, but
that same signifier also obligates one to the implications of that knowledge.
The white nationalists announce their identification with whiteness, and
subsequently articulate what whiteness “tells” them to do.
The white nationalist vigilantes write their action into the Symbolic, pro-
ducing their violence as an object, an absent presence, that imparts the
knowledge necessary to explain why the vigilante must produce the event.
The violence is produced through the “law of language” as a gift, an object of
Symbolic exchange that the shooters know will not literally resolve the crisis
(Lacan 2006: 225). Rather, the gift is the knowledge contained in the mani-
festo that transformed the white nationalist into the vigilante; in a sense, the
white nationalist gives the white nation the vigilante as a figure to be taken up
as a form of self-defense. A crucial moment in Tarrant’s manifesto is the
repetition of the thought that went through his mind before he committed to
violence: “WHY WON’T SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING?” that trans-
forms into “WHY DON’T I DO SOMETHING?” (Tarrant 2019). Both
Earnest and Crusius’s manifestoes evidence a similar rhetorical iteration of the
imperative that drives their violence: Earnest directly cites the line as
inspiration, and Crusius invokes the same tone when he declares that
“INACTION IS A CHOICE” (Earnest 2019; Crusius 2019).
Tarrant articulates his arrival to this turning point in his answer to the
question “Was there a particular event or reason you decided to commit to a
violent attack?” (Tarrant 2019). His answer identifies “a series of events”
that “revealed the truth of the Wests [sic] current situation,” namely the
Stockholm terror attack which occurred while he was traveling Europe and
the 2017 French Election (Tarrant 2019). He especially latches onto the
name of a white Swedish girl, Ebba Akerlund, who died in the Stockholm
attack and represented the white child who would become a white woman
who could be instrumentalized to pass on the name of the white father, and
then writes about how he wandered through a France full of “invaders,”
finally ending up in a cemetery of “French and other European soldiers lost
in the Wars that crippled Europe” (Tarrant 2019). These events are put into
the future anterior tense: I will have been a lost soul, but then I traumatically
encountered the crisis of whiteness, and I am about to be saved by the
violence I will commit by becoming the vigilante.
As the flipside (not analogous, but parasitically linked) to the Fanonian
subject of Black Skin, White Masks, who experiences the failure of assimilation
on French shores as a traumatic collision with a colonial past made present,
Tarrant arrives in France and is confronted with the failure of the promise
of sovereignty imbued in the symbol of whiteness (Fanon 1967; Marriott
2011: 64–66). “My despair turned to shame, my shame to guilt, my guilt to
anger and my anger to rage … It was there I decided to do something, it
was there I decided to take action, to commit to force. To commit to vio-
lence. To take the fight to the invaders myself ” (Tarrant 2019). The despair
and anxiety of the white subject confronted with the failure of whiteness, the
inability for the signifier to secure the sovereignty of the white subject, is
symbolically translated into a duty to commit racial violence. Earnest and
Crusius cite Tarrant’s shooting as a similar moment, an incursion in the
Symbolic that jolts them into consciousness of what they must do to secure
the law from its own fragility. The white nationalist vigilante circulates
the manifesto as a vehicle to draw in other white subjects to take up duties
of violence.
80 E. Chebrolu
Conclusion
In this essay, I have used Lacan’s “Function and Field” to critique approaches
to white nationalism that focus too heavily on the needs of the ego by offering a
structural analysis of the function of the manifesto as white nationalist full
speech. The manifestoes I analyzed demonstrate an attachment to the figure of
the vigilante as an extra-legal actor who accepts the duty to commit violence to
save the law of white kinship from crisis. As I articulated in the introduction,
this attachment to the vigilante is an effect of the structuring of the field of racial
signification by anti-blackness. My work here is an attempt to pick apart the
Symbolic process by which white subjects deputize themselves as enforcers of
the law, tracing how the law of antimiscegenation can operate as a site of crisis
management/production that rejuvenates investment in the world held to-
gether by anti-blackness. My hope is that others who are interested in the in-
tersection of race, psychoanalysis, and violence will take up analysis of white
nationalist rhetoric, perhaps focusing on how the contingent specificities of, for
example, eco-fascist, Islamophobic, antisemitic, and/or nativist white nation-
alist rhetoric(s) are stabilized by the grammars of anti-blackness and settler
colonialism. Further analysis could also investigate how non-black Asian people
take up the call for anti-black vigilante violence, such as the “rooftop Koreans”
(as they are affectionately referred to in contemporary white nationalist
memes) of the LA uprisings and in mob violence against black African im-
migrants in India and China (BBC News 2017; Robertson 2020).
This lack of a structural analysis has direct impacts on the political work done
to combat white nationalism; as I have referenced in the introduction, research
on white nationalism that centers the individual suffering of the white man leads
activists to try to either fold the white nationalist back into liberal democratic civil
society or purify civil society of the white nationalist’s presence. A central im-
plication of my argument is that such a strategy is akin to playing a game of
whack-a-mole, as it relies on short-term stop-gap measures which can be ne-
cessary but are insufficient to end white nationalism. Ultimately, such strategies
do not prevent the emergence of future white nationalist shooters, because the
problem is not the white nationalist as a purveyor of a viral hatred that subverts
liberal democracy, but the laws of an anti-black world that the white nationalist is
working to secure/defend. Further, I want to be clear that, following Sexton, to
fail whiteness (to transgress against the law of antimiscegnation, to not live up to
the standards of the white father) is not to fail anti-blackness. The repetition of a
structural analysis of white nationalist rhetoric will not result in the end of white
nationalism, but perhaps it can take on the function of clarifying that ending
white nationalism would require the end of the world from which it arises.
Notes
1 Wilderson has troubled an easy application of “Function and Field” to race, arguing
that the concept of full speech as a moment of liberation the subject can find in the
psychoanalytic clinical encounter relies on a disavowal of the white subject’s relation
to anti-black violence (2010: 85). I agree with this argument and retain full speech as
a conceptual tool for analysis. However, this essay is neither an Afropessimist nor a
Lacanian text, but a particular analysis informed by an engagement with
Afropessimist scholarship, Sylvia Wynter’s analysis of coloniality, and Lacan’s texts
to understand the psycho-dynamics of white nationalism.
2 Sexton draws upon the work of Abby Ferber and Jessie Daniels on white nation-
alism and anxieties of miscegenation. My reading of the law of antimiscegenation
and the insecurity of whiteness highlights the relationship between the Symbolic and
speech, given the focus of this essay on “Function and Field;” I would suggest
turning to Sexton for an account of the Real in terms of the (impossibility) of the
interracial sexual relation (2008: 153–189).
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5 Oedipal Empire:
psychoanalysis, Indigenous
Peoples, and the Oedipus
Complex in colonial context
Wayne Wapeemukwa
The Pennsylvania State University
Introduction: Oedipalized wards

Though Indigenous Peoples have criticized how (so-called) “Indian legisla-
tion” codifies them as “wards” in need of civilizational development
(cf., Coulthard 2014a),1 few critics, if any, have asked why settler-states seek to
entrench themselves as fathers over “their” Indigenous “children.” With re-
spect to the Métis context, Brenda Macdougall (2005, 2010), Chris Andersen
(2013), and Sylvia Van Kirk (1980) have demonstrated how settler-colonialism
sought to replace preexisting Indigenous kinship structures with Victorian
marriage rites and British models of civility. Dene philosopher Glen
Coulthard (2014) and Cree writer and academic Billy-Ray Belcourt (2015)
show how this initially destructive program later serves to produce forms of life
that naturalize settler-colonial domination through a process referred to by
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang as settler “homemaking” (5). My proposal in
this chapter is to view settler-homemaking through a psychoanalytic lens as a
variation of an “Oedipalized” relationship: For Indigenous Peoples, the
settler-state is heir to the throne of Labdacus.
Here I bring Native studies, Black studies, and psychoanalysis into con-
versation by putting the Oedipus Complex in colonial context. In contrast to
the Lacanian scholars who analyze racism as a form of jouissance (Hook 2018;
George 2014, 2016; Glynos 2001; Stavrakakis 1999, 2007; Žižek 1992, 1993), I
instead align with those who situate and define psychoanalytic concepts as
functions of colonialism (Derrida 2007; Keller 2007; Khan 2019; Khanna 2003;
Lane 1998; Mbembe 2019). My thesis is that the settler-state creates a home for
itself by Oedipalizing its relations with Indigenous Peoples. Such Oedipalization
works primarily through three registers: The infantilization of Indigenous
Peoples, the obliteration of their autochthonous-unconsciousness, and the
insertion of settler-authority over who counts as “Indian.” I begin with settler-
colonialism’s debt to Sigmund Freud by revealing the racist developmentalism
linking his early “discovery” of the Oedipus Complex and late speculative
anthropology. I next show how situating Freud within colonialism explains
84 Wayne Wapeemukwa
Frantz Fanon’s invective that “the Oedipus Complex is not a Black complex”
(2008: 130). However, as I will suggest, Fanon makes a critical error by inferring
that colonized peoples necessarily avert castration by expelling colonists. On the
heels of this criticism, I argue that Lacan’s analysis of James Joyce’s castration
by a non-autochthonous (British) Symbolic opens new horizons for conceiving
castration as contextually specific and, therefore, modified by colonial relations
of domination. Yet, Lacan’s analysis ends before he considers what it means to
be castrated not by the language of your father but your colonizer. I position
Achille Mbembe’s (2019) “phallocracy” as a corrective to this gap by applying it
to the 1985 dispute over Indigenous membership between the Mohawk Council
of Kahnawà:ke and settler-state of Canada where, I argue, Canada attempted
to Oedipalize Kahnawa’kehró:non.2
But, before beginning, I must first address the wide-ranging connections I
make between colonial contexts—from Algeria, to Ireland, to Turtle
Island3—which, at first glance, may seem to conflate the experiences of all
colonized subjects. By speaking to the psychic aspects of colonialism, my turn to
Fanon may be confusing for those familiar with his work—especially con-
sidering how, in The Wretched of the Earth, for example, Fanon decries coloni-
alism as an unrelenting and punishing form of physical violence.4 To put it
baldly: What can figures like Fanon and Mbembe—writing to the experiences
of the Indigenous Peoples of Africa—say about the Indigenous Peoples of
Turtle Island? Lots, actually: I invite readers to see my remarks as a gen-
eralized analysis of colonialism which, although rooted in Turtle Island,
borrows from other colonial contexts as a way to analogize different settler-
colonial formations. Whether you are in Turtle Island, Africa, or Ireland,
Empire is always Oedipal.
Freud: the imperishability of “the primitive mind”

Following Amy Allen (2020), I situate Freud’s concept of the Oedipus Complex
within colonialism through his recapitulation thesis—namely, that ontogeny (in-
dividual development) recapitulates phylogeny (species development).
Extrapolated as a social theory, this thesis posits that the maturation of children
recapitulates the history of “the race” (Brickman 45). In no uncertain terms,
Freud writes that surmounting the Oedipus Complex is “a victory of the race
over the individual,” that is, of phylogeny over ontogeny (SE19: 257, emphasis mine).
While Allen attributes Freud’s reception of this thesis to Ernst Haeckel, a
nineteenth-century German zoologist and popularizer of Darwin (293), I claim
that Freud was equally inspired by G. Stanley Hall, an early fan and eugenicist
who, in fact, invited Freud to the storied conference at Clark University in 1909
(Koelsch 1984). In two related 1903 publications—“Civilization and Savagery”
and “The White Man’s Burden”—Hall extols the recapitulation thesis when he
claims that “low races” are “essentially children” (1903: 11) and that “Indians”
should be “studied, as we study children” (1903a: 83). Unlike Haeckel, Hall’s
version of this thesis is grounded in Western expansion and manifest destiny.5
Oedipal Empire 85
Freud uncritically recycles this colonial viewpoint in his anthropological works
when he claims that individuals mature along the same patterns by which
civilizations shed atavism since, according to him, the Oedipus Complex is
necessary and universal for the development of both.
Infamously, Freud’s anthropology seeks clues about the “modern” neu-
rotic in the “archaic” mental state of the “savage” (SE13: 17). Since con-
temporary “savages” are heirs of “primitive man,” a comparison of their
psychology by anthropology and that of “neurotics” by psychoanalysis
benefits both sciences by supposedly revealing the pre-history of civilization
itself (Allen 2020: 294). Freud rejects Westermarck and Frazer’s conjecture
of an “innate aversion to incest” among Indigenous Peoples (SE13: 123–24);
after all, the Oedipus Complex posits the opposite. For Freud, the horror of
incest among “primitives” is “essentially an infantile feature” that “reveals a
striking agreement with the mental life of the neurotic” (SE14: 17). Freud
baldly displays his infantilizing phylogeny in his opening to Totem and Taboo,
which I quote in full:
Prehistoric man, in the various stages of his development, is known to us

through the inanimate monuments and implements which he has left
behind, through the information about his art, his religion and his
attitude towards life which has come to us either directly or by way of
tradition handed down in legends, myths and fairy tales, and through the
relics of his mode of thought which survive in our own manners and
customs. But apart from this, in a certain sense he is still our
contemporary. There are men still living who, as we believe, stand
very near to primitive man, far nearer than we do, and whom we
therefore regard as his direct heirs and representatives. Such is our view
of those whom we describe as savages or half-savages; and their mental
life must have a peculiar interest for us if we are right in seeing in it a well-
preserved picture of an early stage of our own development (S14: 1).
By comparing the taboos of “primitives” and obsessional neurotics, “who

obey [taboos] just as strictly as savages,” Freud hopes to disclose the
workings of regression (SE14: 26). This leads him to explain the birth of
civilization by musing upon a Darwin-inspired chronicle of a “primal horde”
(SE13: 125). The brothers of the horde, so the story goes, sought to share in
their father’s sexual exploits by murdering him. But “[w]hat had up to then
been prevented by [the father’s] actual existence was thenceforward pro-
hibited by the sons themselves” (SE13: 143). The patricidal kin replaced
their father with the “law against incest,” a fate which, according to the
recapitulation thesis, is repeated by each of us. In children and civilization
alike, law supersedes the father.
Because civilizations and individuals develop according to the same pat-
tern, Freud programmatically claims in Group Psychology that psychoanalysis
can analyze societies with the same meta-psychological concepts as individuals
86 Wayne Wapeemukwa
(SE18: 69; cf., Bird-Pollan 67). Fascist rabbles, for example, group-identify by
harnessing repressed primitive libido.6 Fascism proves why “the primitive
mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable” (SE14: 286).7
Atavism is as indestructible as racism and incest.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud theorizes that individuals only over-
come the destructive antinomy between incest and civilization by con-
quering the Oedipus Complex (SE4: 262). In late 1897, mere months before
he “discovered” the Oedipus Complex, Freud shared the following with
Wilhelm Fleiss: “The horror of incest,” he writes, is that “the members of a
family hold together permanently and become incapable of contact with
strangers. Thus incest is antisocial” (SE1: 257). Freud’s paradoxical thesis
posits that incest is consciously horrifying because it is unconsciously desired.
Freud hypothesizes that, in their nascent stage of Oedipal development,
boys discover that not all bodies have penises and girls find out that only
some bodies do (Hook 2006: 49).8 For now, the child identifies with his
mother, wishing to be her object of affection by becoming the phallus (Hook
2006: 55). This comprises the child’s incestuous Oedipal fantasy that he
must forgo in order to advance his “race.”
The phallus enters into this account of ontogeny by playing two antipodal
roles: as the exit which allows children to escape the Oedipal drama by sub-
suming a male or female sexual identity (Mitchell and Rose 1982: 13); and as
entry for the imposition of social law into an otherwise self-contained, Oedipal,
infant-mother dyad (Hook 2006: 57). The paternal castration threat socializes
the child, inaugurating him into civilization (SE19: 257), by threatening his
phallus (SE19: 176). Boys reckon with this fate by integrating their poly-
morphous libido under the “primacy of the phallus,” subscribing to the
Castration Complex, and thereby escaping the Oedipal triangle (SE19: 142).
Only by heeding the prohibition against Oedipal desire can man “thus take
up into himself the moral precepts which expressly exclude from his object-
choice, as being blood-relations, the persons whom he has loved in his
childhood” (SE7: 225). Castration leaves the Oedipal fantasy “literally
smashed to pieces” (SE19: 257), advancing the child beyond atavism by
relegating his inner “primitive” to the unconscious.
Joel Whitebook (2017) reads this theory of onto- and phylo-genesis as “a
more or less unilineal process in which each ‘more advanced’ stage supersedes
and eliminates the more ‘primitive’ one” (419, emphasis mine). And, according
to Freud, so too with civilization: Indigenous Peoples must be in want of an
Oedipus Complex if they are to share in the spoils of “advanced” civilization.
In his Future of an Illusion, however, Freud slips into an uncharacteristic mo-
ment of reflection when he reminisces on the “impression that civilization is
something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which
understood how to obtain possession of the means to power” (SE21: 7).
Indeed, this formula very well describes the colonial context from which
Fanon indicts Freud.
Oedipal Empire 87
Fanon: colonization is not a metaphor
Fanon draws the opposite conclusion to Freud regarding the Oedipus
Complex’s role in development. Instead of facilitating the formation of a
subject, the Oedipus Complex, in colonial context, ossifies peoples into things. In
his notorious reading of Michel Cournot in Black Skin, White Masks, for
example, Fanon writes that “No longer do we see the black man … he has
been occulted. He has been turned into a penis. He is a penis” (2008: 147).
Here I explore Fanon’s polemic against Freudian ethno-psychiatry to track
the vicissitudes of castration in different colonial contexts while also sketching
certain Oedipal parallels that are shared between colonial regimes ranging
from Africa to Turtle Island.
A good place to begin is with Emmanuel Hansen’s (1974) supposition that
Fanon’s 1957 resignation from the Hôpital Blida-Joinville was a literal resig-
nation from psychoanalysis (32–33; cf., Khanna 2003 167). Hansen is part right
and part wrong: Ironically, I would say that Fanon’s departure in fact began six
years prior in Lyon when he qualified as a doctor of medicine. As Jean Khalfa
(2015) notes, Fanon’s thesis used a hereditary neurodegenerative disease to
contest the efficacy of organic neurological cures for psychological disorders.
Even at this early stage Fanon commits that mental illnesses are determined “by
‘external’ institutional and social forces” (Khalfa 2015: 56). This reading con-
firms François Vèrges’s (1996) observation that Fanon—like Freud—recognizes
how “individual alienation and political alienation are related” (49). But what is
determining for Fanon is the “social, political, and cultural” rather than the
psychical (49). Fanon “believed that the internalization, or epidermalisation, of
inferiority was born of sociogenic factors: a product of a temporal cultural
situation, a point that Freud was not able to make” (Georgis 2019: 106). Yet,
Fanon does not fully realize the incommensurability of psychoanalysis and
decolonization until he confronts Octave Mannoni’s ethno-psychiatry.
Lending himself to the racist developmentalism latent in Freud’s re-
capitulation thesis, Mannoni seeks to heal his colonized patients by working
through their stalled Oedipus Complexes. Infamously, he analyzes two dreams
which, according to him, were “typical” for “thousands of Malagasies” (1990:
89): the first consists of a gun which he interprets along Oedipal lines as a
phallic metaphor (59); the second manifests two men as latent stand-in fathers
(93). Fanon demurs that “the two black men are not the two fathers” and “the
Senegalese soldier’s rifle is not a penis, but a genuine Lebel” (2008: 86).
Mannoni’s methodology is mistaken, according to Fanon, since the Black man
cannot “unconsciousnessize” anything: his pathologies are sociogenic—not onto-
genetic (2008: 86, emphasis mine).9 As Sartre wrote in his preface to Wretched of
the Earth, “the native cures himself,” not on the couch, but, “by thrusting out the
settler through force of arms” (1963: 18). Mannoni’s ethno-psychiatry treats
colonization as though it were a metaphor to be undone on a divan more so
than a literal threat to be met with by force of arms in the street. Colonization is
not a metaphor.
88 Wayne Wapeemukwa
Despite this disagreement, Fanon remains vexed by Mannoni’s take on the
colonial “miscegenation taboo” (Bergner 1995). Indeed, Fanon starts his own
investigation with the exact same question Mannoni poses: Why does the
Black son-in-law differ from the white one (Mannoni 1990: 111n1; Fanon
2008: 142)? Because “the white family is the guardian of a certain structure,”
Fanon surmises (2008: 127). The Black son-in-law differs insofar as he
threatens whiteness, whereas the white son-in-law ensconces it (Hook 2006: 53).
It helps here to recall how Freud distinguished “savage” from “civilized” with
respect to the conscious or unconscious barring of incest (SE13: 17); Freud
further maintained that “[c]ivilization” necessitates a “progressive renuncia-
tion” of incestuous libido (SE1: 257). Fanon picks up on this but writes
“gender through race,” as bell hooks (1996) says: In colonial contexts, it is not
incest but miscegenation which is progressively renounced. Here, it is not the
“savage” who consciously erects prohibitive sexual barriers but the colonist.
The colony flips Freud on his head.
In A Dying Colonialism, Fanon (1965) marks out another reversal of Freud
when he lists the quasi-Sadean library of tortures colonists administered upon
transgressors of the miscegenation taboo.10 Fanon finds that it is the
colonist—not the Native—who hails from the primal horde, resurrecting
those repressed Oedipal desires that foment fascism (Thomas 2007: 225):
“The white civilized man retains an irrational nostalgia for the extraordinary
times of sexual licentiousness, orgies, unpunished rapes, and unrepressed in-
cest” (Fanon 2008: 142–43). The irony is that, from the colonist’s vantage, it is
the Black man who represents the primal father, embodying that “genital
power out of reach of morals and taboos” (Fanon 2008: 154). In white eyes,
the Black man incarnates those incestuous desires against which Freud
warned society needs to “defend itself” (SE7: 225). The Black man is feared
due to a presumed sexual potency which is, in truth, a reflection of the co-
lonist’s own repressed Oedipal libido (Hook 2004: 131). “In contexts of racial
domination and thus of social minoritization,” Mbembe contributes, “the
Negro phallus is above all perceived as an enormous power of affirmation. It is
the name of an at once totally affirmative and transgressive force that no
prohibition holds in check” (2019: 136). As phallus, the Black man is petrified
“at the genital level” (Fanon 2008: 135, 137).11 Perversely, the colonist sees
himself as being forced to wield this threat of castration, lest the Black man
unleash his “biological danger” (2008: 143). In truth, however, the colonist’s
paternal castration threat is suicidal, since the Black phallus is nothing but a
shibboleth of repressed white jouissance.
Fanon pivots to Gershon Legman’s analysis of the “Bad Injun” in U.S.
media to flesh out further racialized dynamics of the Oedipus Complex in
colonial context. Fanon’s thesis is that such stereotypes absolve settler-guilt by
projecting inferiority upon the native: “the punishment that we deserve can be
averted only by denying responsibility for wrong and throwing the blame on
the victim” (ctd. in Fanon 2008: 125–26).12 The settler makes the native into
an “archetype of inferior values,” a void into which he, at a tolerable distance,
Oedipal Empire 89
gazes upon the “base instincts” of his own “dark side of the soul” (Fanon
2008: 166–67). Translating this into Lacanian jargon, I could say that the
Black phallus is the terrifying yet no less luring das Ding of white desire, that is,
the lost object of Oedipal jouissance; or, alternatively, that the signification of
the Black phallus resounds the same terrifying instincts animating Freud’s
primal horde.
Speaking about dreams of freedom, Fanon writes that “the colonized
subject frees himself night after night between nine in the evening and six in
the morning” (2004: 15). Yet, he denies the capacity of psychoanalysis to flip
this dream into reality. As he said prior to his flight from Blida:
If psychiatry is the medical technique that aims to enable man to no

longer be a stranger to his environment, I owe it to myself to affirm that
the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state of
absolute depersonalization (1969: 52–53).
Fanon’s mistake here is to assume that the settler can be vanquished merely
through force of arms since, even after decolonization, the Black man may still
find his sleep interrupted by nightmares of colonial violence bygone. The rub
is that, even if the Black man obliterates his colonially imposed Oedipus
Complex, he will still find himself reckoning with castration.
Lacan: the settler-colonial return of the repressed

In his twenty-third seminar, Lacan analyzes how Joyce’s castration persisted
despite his removal from colonial domination. Similar to how Fanon de-
scribed his patients, Lacan claims that Joyce was “unsubscribed from the un-
conscious” (S23: 166, emphasis mine). Yet Lacan goes one critical step further
than Fanon when he suggests that Joyce was castrated by a Symbolic order
“of some invaders, oppressors” (S23: 166). My thesis here is that, by differ-
entiating contextually specific castrators, Lacan advances Fanon’s theses on
colonialism and castration: Castration may be universal for speaking beings,
but the Symbolic order is contextually specific and the language of your
castrator matters—especially in colonial contexts.
In order to fully grasp the importance of Lacan’s analysis of Joyce I must
first begin with his account of castration. “Whereas castration refers to a
primordial loss,” Bruce Fink explains, “the phallus is the signifier of that loss”
(1995: 102). The phallus is the culturally-contextualized signifier of the lack of
an incestuous Oedipal relationship, “the place of jouissance” (Écrits 822).13
Differentiating his formulation from Freud’s study of Little Hans, Lacan
writes in seminar fourteen that “What is at stake [in castration] is that [the
subject] cannot take his jouissance inside himself” (12 April 1967). Note here
that, for Lacan, castration means that the subject has swapped jouissance for
language: The subject is castrated through being a host to language, host to a
Symbolic which is “extimate”14 to him. The closest that the castrated subject
90 Wayne Wapeemukwa
can actually come to Oedipal jouissance is the signifier. Fink describes this
relationship between the Symbolic and jouissance in reference to Joyce’s
writings,
When one reads Finnegans Wake, one has the sense of the jouissance packed
in the signifier, in the Other as language. The concatenations of letters,
and the linguistic “finds,” seemingly just waiting in the language to be
exploited, suggest a life of language independent of our own. Strictly
speaking, language obviously does not get off on itself, but it is insofar as
the Other as language is “in” us that we can derive a certain jouissance
therefrom (1995: 99).
Becoming a speaking being—a parlêtre—necessarily entails loss, and the

phallus is the signifier of this loss (McGowan 2019: 15). Simply put, castration
is subscription to language.
This “Symbolicized” rendering of the Castration Complex provides Lacan
with a framework capacious enough to psychoanalyze colonized analysands
who are bereft of Oedipus Complexes. In seminar one, for example, Lacan
recounts a Muslim man whose hand paralysis was left unresolved by a
“classically” trained analyst (S1: 197–98). The Freudian failed because he
assumed that the Oedipal structure was universal; what he failed to see was
that the Muslim man’s “history is unified by the law, by his symbolic universe,
which is not the same for everyone. Tradition and language diversify the
reference to the subject” (S1: 197). Azeen Khan (2019) explains “that the key
to [this] analysis lay in understanding the way in which the symbolic law, the
Koranic Law, structures the subject’s jouissance” (194). Lacan expands on this
context-specificity of castration in his seminar seventeen discussion of three
Togolese analysands (S17: 91). Despite growing up in Togoland—which
suffered under French colonial oppression from 1922 to 1960—Lacan claims
to have been “unable, in their analysis, to find any trace of their tribal customs
and beliefs.” This omission led Lacan to believe that their unconscious “had
been sold to them along with the laws of colonization.” This was an invasive
unconscious,15 imposed by way of an “exotic, regressive form of the master’s
discourse, in the face of the capitalism called imperialism.” Instead of living
their Indigenous way of life, their “childhood was retroactively lived out in our
famil-lial categories” (S17: 92). It is contact with the white world that
Oedipalizes the Togolese.16
From a Lacanian perspective, colonialism can be understood as involving a
process by which an Indigenous Symbolic is supplanted by one which is non-
autochthonous. I am currently writing this sentence mere miles from the
Carlisle Industrial Indian School (CIS) in rural Pennsylvania: the genocidal
institution to which the moniker “Kill the Indian, save the man,” was
coined.17 The CIS was a prototype for other American-Indian boarding
schools (known as Residential Schools in Canada). Though the boarding
schools are now (recently) closed—the last Canadian school did not close until
Oedipal Empire 91
the 1990s—their legacy lives on in the minds, bodies, and souls of former
students, as well as in the relations who did not attend, through inter-
generational trauma. As Lipan Apache author and poet Margo Tamez re-
minds us in “Necropolitics, Carlisle Indian School, and Ndé Memory,” such
“schools” were “site[s] of reindoctrination” intentionally inflicting “soul
wounds” on Indigenous children (239). Speaking to the ways in which
Indigenous Peoples continue to reckon these intergenerational traumas,
Tamez chillingly echoes that “[t]he mission of [the CIS] to destroy Native
cultures has not ended” (252). Settler-Colonialism, as Patrick Wolfe (2006)
reminds, is as an ongoing project, a “structure rather than an event” (402). I
pick up here on how Wolfe explicitly invokes psychoanalytic language when he
further claims that settler-colonial logics of elimination mark “a return whereby
the native repressed continues to structure settler-colonial society” (390, em-
phasis mine). Wolfe’s emphasis echoes Lacan’s adage that “the repressed and
the return of the repressed are the same thing” (S1: 191): The CIS returns to
haunt Indigenous Peoples today despite being repressed. Forced to adapt to the
ways and languages of their oppressors, colonized subjects—from Togoland
to Ireland to Turtle Island—remain “soul wounded” by colonial castration
(Duran 2006).
Lacan explains Joyce’s colonial castration by solving an apparent contra-
diction between his assertion, on the one hand, that the “unconscious is
structured like a language” and, on the other, that Joyce was an author who
was “unsubscribed to the unconscious.” Lacan explains,
I have said that the unconscious is structured like a language. Isn’t it

strange that I can also say of someone who strictly plays on language that
he is unsubscribed from the unconscious [désabonné de l’inconscient] although he
uses a language, among others, which is not his own—since his is
precisely that language effaced from the page, namely, Gaelic, of which
he knew some small things, enough to orient himself, but not much
more—not that of his own therefore, but that of some invaders,
oppressors” (S23: 166, translation mine).
Lacan makes explicit here what was only hinted in his remarks on the Togolese
and Muslim analysands. As a colonized subject under English domination,18
Joyce is unsubscribed [désabonné] from his autochthonous—Irish—unconscious.
His “effaced,” that is, “repressed,” native Gaelic “returns” to structure his
English—the language of his “oppressors.” Christine von Boheemen (1999)
renders Joyce’s confluence of language, castration, and colonialism perspicuous
by observing that Stephen Dedalus—Joyce’s everyman protagonist—routinely
describes himself as an outsider to language. In one telling episode from A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dedalus erupts in an uncharacteristic moment
of Irish nationalism when confronting his English dean of studies. The dean
hesitates over his use of the word “tundish,” assuming it is Gaelic, to which
Dedalus exclaims:
92 Wayne Wapeemukwa
His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an
acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds
them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language (Joyce 203–204).
In Boheemen’s words, this passage “alerts us to the splitting and redoubling

within the colonial symbolic which Joyce incorporates” (76). Boheemen
charges Lacan with ignoring how the Symbolic changes under such colonial
contexts: “What may have stared Lacan in the face without his conscious
realization,” she writes, “is the anamorphic effect of Joyce’s textuality on the
truth of his own discipline.” Joyce’s status as a colonized subject shifts his
relation to the Symbolic and, by extension, the unconscious:
If the unconscious, or its effects, may originate within discourse, the

unconscious is historical, a product of history. This would mean that the
Oedipus Complex need not be universal…If it is the history of colonial
rule which produced the death-in-life of Joyce’s trauma, is the uncon-
scious perhaps the effect of the trauma of history? (Booheemen 170–71).
But this critique is misguided given Lacan’s elaborations on colonized ana-

lysands which, as I have shown, culminate in an understudied yet no less
systematic development in his thought concerning the place of psychoanalysis
in colonialism. In fact, Lacan and Fanon would agree here—pace Freud—that
the Oedipus Complex is not universal.19 Lacan may disagree with Fanon only
insofar as Fanon remained, oddly, too Freudian in his dismissal of post-colonial
castration and biologization of the phallus.
“Castration means that the phallus transmits itself from father to son” (S23:
85). But in Joyce’s case, notably, it is not the father but the colonizer who per-
forms this function of transmission—a detail Lacan leaves in abeyance.
Instead, Lacan proposes that Joyce’s writings performed the phallic function
as his “sinthome” (S23: 164).20 Perhaps this is why Joyce routinely references
the phallus in his works, such as when Buck Mulligan rehearses the mirror
stage, narcissistically captivated in “the cracked lookingglass of a servant”
while demanding that Dedalus “hellenize” Ireland (Ulysses 1.147–178).
Speaking about this connection between the phallus and colonialism in
Ulysses, Seamus Deane (1990) observes how Buck Mulligan’s “omphallic”
search for Ireland’s supposedly lost Hellenic origins reflect the aesthetic
yearnings of the Irish revival while remaining complicit with English im-
perialism (48). Mediated through Mulligan’s Hellenic “omphalos,” Joyce
“analyzes the psychology of subjection in his people by showing the paralysis
which has overtaken them in their endless futile quest for an origin” (49).
Portraying Mulligan as W.B. Yeats’s idealized phallic poet, Joyce advances
Lacan avant la lettre by caricaturing how colonial castration seeps into an au-
tochthonous unconscious. The colonial castrator is not the unconscious but
Empire.
Oedipal Empire 93
Mbembe: the settler-state as phallocracy
The settler-state performs the phallic function for colonized subjects. In “The
Society of Enmity,” Mbembe observes how liberal democracies take this role
upon themselves by window-dressing xenophobic Muslim veil bans with calls
for gender equality. Such regulations coalesce envy with voyeurism, con-
cealing the true rule of the phallus at home, by dominating the racialized
Other in the street (Mbembe 2019: 60). “This power is phallus, and the
phallus is the ultimate name of prohibition” (Mbembe 2019: 136). Here, at
the fulcrum of this perverse racist fantasy, where “we find the Black phallus,”
so too do we find “the problem of incest which thrives in all racist con-
sciousness” (2013: 167). Aside from signifying the antinomy between mas-
culine and feminine sexuation (Barnard and Fink 10), the phallus, in colonial
contexts, signifies an additional antinomy between settler and native: The settler-
phallus entwines race and gender.
Phallocracies decorate apartheid legislation in the discursive garb of gender
equality. For example, in April 1985, the Canadian settler-state passed Bill C-
31 with the supposed intention of rectifying patriarchal clauses in the Indian
Act, 1876. Indigenous women entitled to membership but not already enrolled
as members of the First Nation of Kahnawà:ke were now “given permission”
by Canada to join their ancestral community—a community which, in the
aftermath of Bill C-31, denied their inclusion. From the inverted perspective
of the settler, this may manifest as sexist and discriminatory, but, as
Kanien’kehá:ka anthropologist Audra Simpson (2014a) chronicles in Mohawk
Interruptus, this dismissal can only be seen correctly within a wider colonial
context.
Early Kahnawà:ke can be conceptualized as a “refugee community,”
amalgamated from an originally “heterogenous composition” of Iroquois,
Christian Indians, white-prisoners and other uprooted peoples, including non-
natives (Simpson 2014: 46–47). But what is essential to highlight here is that
the Indigenous clan structure of Kahnawà:ke made it possible for all those
people to become Mohawk (Simpson 2014: 48). This kinship structure pro-
foundly contrasted with the settler-state’s imposition of patrilineal “Indian
status” in the Indian Act. Under the Oedipal model of kinship encoded within
the act, an Indigenous woman’s “Indian status” was legally conditional on the
status of her husband. Unlike the miscegenation taboo germane to Fanon’s
colonial context, the Indian Act was undergirded by a “logic of assimilation”
that aimed to subsume Indigenous Peoples into the settler population (Wolfe
2006). By overwriting Indigenous clan structures, “'Indian’ women who
married ‘non-Indian’ men lost ‘Indian status.”21 “Status” must therefore be
understood as a form of apartheid legislation designed to Oedipalize
Indigenous Peoples, turning them into “wards” who would become the fiscal
responsibility of Canadian fatherly “benevolence.”
In contrast to status, band “membership” means that a First Nation, like
Kahnawà:ke, recognizes someone as part of their community who may or
94 Wayne Wapeemukwa
may not be, but usually is, a “status Indian.” Bill C-31 was introduced in
response to the unsurprising, predictable, and, I say, intended, hardship by
which many Indigenous women who would otherwise have had membership
were denied due to the patriarchal and exclusionary clauses within the Indian
Act. Leading up to Bill C-31, groups such as Equal Rights for Indian Women
and the Native Women’s Association of Canada, brought the Canadian
government to court for inherent gender bias in the Indian Act, yet they lost. In
1982, the UN Human Rights Commission found Canada in violation of the
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Following this, Canada amended the
Indian Act with Bill C-31, legislation proposing to address gender discrimina-
tion by restoring “Indian status” to those who had been forcibly enfranchised
and allow bands to control their own membership as a step towards self-
government.
For some, Bill C-31 was seen as a way to mend the fabric of Indigenous
societies torn apart. In Kahnawà:ke, though, “the complex of
factors—Canada’s bestowal of the right to determine membership after a
hundred years of living under the Indian Act, and Canada’s reinstatement of
the women on a federal registry—led, in part, to the development of a blood-
quantum code” (Simpson 2014: 57). Now vested with the authority to de-
termine membership, the Mohawk Council of Kahnawà:ke devised a 50%
blood-quantum code in 1984 to dissuade “marrying-out.” This code rejected
the disenfranchisement of certain Mohawk women not necessarily on the
basis of gender and was, at least in principle, “‘objective’ and gender neutral”
(Simpson 2014: 57). The ensuing legal conflict between the Mohawk Council
of Kahnawà:ke and Canada solicited itself as an issue of gender discrimination
but more fundamentally was a fight over potential losses of land. The problem
was this: If white men who were married to Indigenous women acquired
“Indian status” via Bill C-31 they, as neophyte “status Indians,” could sell
land, get elected to band council, and vote against the interests of Kahnawà:ke
(Simpson 2014: 60). Kahnawa’kehró:non seemed sexist and hostile when they
were, in fact, resisting the Oedipal relation Canada sought to impose (Simpson
2007). In “the contemporary era, women were now held responsible for their
own predicament of disenfranchisement, rather than the system of ideas that
governed race and gender-based exclusions by the state” (Simpson 2014: 61).
Though Bill C-31 was sold as a corrective to the patriarchal clauses of the
Indian Act, it was merely another phallocratic attempt at undermining
Indigenous self-determination. In this respect, Bill C-31 epitomizes the third
register of Oedipalization I mentioned in my introduction—namely, the in-
sertion of settler-authority over who counts as “Indian.” The conflict that fol-
lowed became a dilemma in which Indigenous Peoples on either horn could
only lose: Either Indigenous women entitled to membership (by Canada) but
denied (by the Mohawk Council of Kahnawà:ke) would remain ostracized or
Kahnawà:ke would cede self-determination, bow to Oedipal Empire, and
register a multitude of new members that it could not support. This meagre
choice presupposes the settler state as legitimate in mediating the affairs of
Oedipal Empire 95
Indigenous peoples and, in this instance, made the settler-state seem the nat-
ural, uncontested, and, phallic, arbiter over the struggle of Kahnawa’kehró:non.
Though Bill C-31 made Canada seem like a benevolent father, it was, in co-
lonial context, the means by which the Canadian settler-phallocracy sought to
Oedipalize more of “its” Indigenous Peoples and inscribe a home for itself upon
Indigenous land.
Conclusion: Oedipus as “colonization pursued by

other means”
From a psychoanalytic perspective, settler-colonialism can be seen as a pro-
cess in which settler-Indigenous relations are Oedipalized.22 I proposed that
we can only begin to understand this from a position that places the Oedipus
Complex in colonial context, integrating insights from Black and Native
studies that analogize experiences with colonialism. In reading these materials
side-by-side, my aim was not to conflate the diversity of Indigenous and Black
experience, but, rather, to make sense of how such experiences nonetheless
share an underlying, Oedipal, foe. Understanding the settler-state as a phal-
locratic institution allows us to interrogate timely questions of Indigeneity,
Blackness, and, indeed, the foundation of psychoanalysis itself.
Neither Lacan nor Freud can be counted as allies in decolonization. While
I elsewhere evaluate Lacan’s status vis-à-vis decolonization (Wapeemukwa
2020), I would here like to conclude by briefly returning to Freud. I take cues
from Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1991) when he problematizes “Freud’s pessi-
mistic vision of ‘analysis interminable’” as “refer[ring] us to a process of de-
colonization interminable” (466–67). Considering that the Oedipus Complex
and incest taboo are, for Freud, inextricable from civilization, it seems as though
Freud is further committed to the view that racism is equally inextricable. But
there is a further, even more damning, consequence of this viewpoint: If ra-
cism is necessarily endemic to civilization, it follows that decolonization and
the eradication of racism would only come at the high price of civilizational
annihilation. But this is only true given Freud’s initial premise—namely, that
all civilization is founded upon the Oedipus Complex. Indigenous Peoples
know this to be untrue. What remains beyond Freud and psychoanalysis is the
death of Oedipal Empire and life of Indigenous kinship relations.
Decolonization is not the death of civilization but its rebirth.
Acknowledgment
This article initially arose as a collaborative effort with my dear friend,
comrade, and colleague, Jerome Clarke, whom I would like to acknowledge
here for his indelible support. All errors and omissions are my own. I also
received extensive feedback from my mentors at Penn State, Amy Allen, and
Ted Toadvine as well as my peers Ben Randolph and Paul Guernsey. I would
also like to thank the Vancouver Lacan Salon, and especially Hilda
96 Wayne Wapeemukwa
Fernandez, for introducing me to these very important concepts. This re-
search is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council.
Notes
1 Such legislation always frames Indigenous Peoples as children in need of societal
development and can be found across settler-states: Canada has the Indian Act,
1876; Australia has the Aborigines Act, 1905; and the United States has Cherokee
Nation v. Georgia (1831). In the latter, for example, The Cherokee Nation is labelled
a dependent nation, with a relationship to the United States like that of a “ward to
its guardian” (30 U.S. (5 Pet.) 1 (1831).
2 “Kahnawa’kehró:non” is the name by which the people of Kahnawá:ke refer to
themselves.
3 Turtle Island is the name Indigenous Peoples have for the (so-called) “Americas.”
4 I am thinking in particular of Fanon’s early aside that “colonial regions” use “pure
violence” (2005: 4).
5 In Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination, Shari H. Huhndorf picks
up on this “recapitulation theory” by linking Hall’s developmental theories with
the baleful and pseudo-scientific racism of the day found in Lewis H. Morgan’s and
Frederick Jackson Turner’s theories of racial progress, western expansion, and the,
so-called, “frontier thesis” of development (cf., Huhndorf 2001: 74–75).
6 But “[p]sychological dispositions do not actually cause fascism,” Freud avers,
“rather, fascism defines a psychological area which can be successfully exploited by
the forces which promote it for entirely nonpsychological reasons of self-interest”
(SE18: 151).
7 Allen (2020) observes an entire litany of similarities between Freud’s descriptors of
the child and “savage mind” in Totem and Taboo and the “group mind” in Group
Psychology. The “group mind” and “mental life of primitive people and of children”
are likened insofar as the group mind is “impulsive, changeable and irritable”; “led
almost exclusively by the unconscious”; “imperious”; “incapable of perseverance”;
“credulous and open to influence”; “has no critical faculty”; “thinks in images”;
“goes directly to extremes”; “is as intolerant as it is obedient to authority”; “re-
spects force”; and, most troublingly, “wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its
masters” (SE18: 77–79, emphasis mine).
8 Horney (1967), Millett (1969), and Grosz (1990) deservedly critique Freud’s in-
evitable recourse to the penis as the fulcrum of human identification but, strictly
speaking, overlook that sexual difference does not take root until the Castration
Complex forces children to make an unconscious choice between masculinity or
femininity.
9 In a related work (Wapeemukwa 2020), I examine Fanon’s concept of “sociogeny”
in more detail vis-à-vis anti-Indigenous environmental racism. I would also point
readers to Romy Opperman’s (2019) excellent overview.
10 Mbembe adds that “the colonial enterprise was driven by a mixture of sadism and
masochism” (2019: 45). Greg Thomas (2007) notes Fanon’s attention to the
jouissance that violent colonists exude throughout his corpus. In The Wretched of the
Earth Fanon recalls electrodes which were placed on the genitals of the native
(1963: 58). In Toward the African Revolution, he claims that “Torture is inherent in the
whole colonialist configuration” (1988: 64). “Every Frenchman in Algeria must
behave like a torturer” (1988: 71). Colonial society “rests on the necessity of tor-
turing, raping and committing massacres” (1988: 72).
Oedipal Empire 97
11 Fanon presages Lacan on the Other’s “petrification” (S11: 207). Anthony Peter
Spanakos calls this “genitalization” (1998: 150) and George (2014) makes a similar
point, seeing Jean Veneuse as “petrified under the racial signifier” (368).
12 I link this with a point Chickasaw critical theorist Jodi Byrd (2011) makes in her
groundbreaking Transit of Empire, where she writes that empire “take[s] as its point
of entry the constellating discourses that juridically, culturally, and constitutionally
produce “Indians’ as an operational site within U.S. expansionism” (221). Reading
Byrd with Fanon, I claim that, in addition to “Indians,” Oedipal Empire also
operationalizes “Negroes” as sites of colonial conquest via their petrification as
Black phalluses.
13 The phallus serves a variety of other functions: wedging signifier from signified
(S20: 75), nurseling from mOther (S17: 129), and “man” from “woman” (Écrits
583). Most consequential, though, the phallus is a highly valued and individualized
“libidinal treasure” with a special social status (Hook 2018: 255). Freud also em-
phasized Symbolic equivalences the phallus shares with stand-ins, such as faeces or
gifts (SE10: 5–147). Lacan extricates the phallus from this biologism, inserting it
into the culturally-contextualized Symbolic: The phallus is valued because it is
what the Other desires. Fink specifies that the phallus must therefore be “an-
thropological” (1995: 102). Stephane Swales (2012) further suggests that “some
other signifier—such as one associated with female genitalia,” may serve as phallus
(57). Hook notes that in racist contexts, “whiteness” may even be phallic
(2006a: 53).
14 “Extimacy” is a new “topology of subjectivity” Lacan develops in seminar seven
(S7: 40). This topology joins outer-and-inner, alloying the prefix “ex-“ (from ex-
terieur) to the adjective “intimacy” (intimate). Viewing racism as “extimate,” then,
may require situating racial antipathy at the interstices of the “the real in the
symbolic” (Miller 1994: 75), that is, the kernel of enjoyment-as-suffering at the core
of a society of enmity. For more see Paul Kingsbury’s (2007) excellent excursus of
the concept as well as my take (Wapeemukwa 2020).
15 This passage strikes me because it abductively implies an unconscious which is not
Other. Indeed, this would fly in the face of Lacan’s oft repeated insistence that the
unconscious is the discourse of the Other (Écrits 16). Alterity is constitutive of
the unconscious—full stop. So why does Lacan insist that his Togolese analysands’
unconscious were “sold” through colonization? Isn’t the unconscious always “sold”
in a one-way transaction with the Other? Lacan elsewhere says that the subjective
status of parlêtre, “presupposes the subjectivity of the Other” (Écrits 616). The (big)
Other alienates all speaking subjects. So while I agree with Lacan’s earlier ad-
monition from seminar one that the Symbolic is contextually specific I worry as to
the inconsistency between this and his insistence that the Symbolic is, by definition,
Other. As Lacan says, “there is no Other of the Other” (Écrits 311); there is no
Symbolic which could “tell the truth about truth” (Écrits 867–68). In what way,
then, can a “colonial Symbolic” be “Other” differently than an “Indigenous” one?
A possible answer to this line of questioning can be found in Hook’s (2008) “The
‘real’ of racializing embodiment.” Hook suggests that there may be two connected
types of Otherness involved here: There is an Otherness that is engendered and
exacerbated by racism which, in turn, provides a way of managing the Otherness
of language, which Lacan speaks of. In this light, all that is disconcerting about
“my” unconscious may be projected upon racialized Others. Racial others thus
become, in a sense, blameworthy for the facts of the white settler’s unconscious.
16 I owe this critical insight to my friend Jerome Clarke.
17 History Matters (2017) “Kill the Indian, and Save the Man: Capt. Richard H.
Pratt on the Education of Native Americans.” Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual
Conference of Charities and Correction (1892), 46–59. Reprinted in Richard H. Pratt,
98 Wayne Wapeemukwa
“The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” Americanizing the American
Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian” 1880–1900 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1973), 260–71. American Social History Productions.
18 As Stephen Dedalus describes it in Ulysses, “I am a servant of two masters…an
English and an Italian … And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd
jobs” (1.638–644).
19 In Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry, and Politics, Nigel Gibson and Roberto Beneduce (43–44)
bring it to our attention that Fanon actually quotes Lacan in his doctoral thesis
precisely to make this point. The quote Fanon takes is from a paper Lacan de-
livered at the Bonneval Clinic in 1946, where he admitted taking “a stand against
the hazardous manner in which Freud sociologically interpreted the Oedipus
complex…I think that the Oedipus complex did not appear with the origin of
man…but at the threshold of history, of ‘historical’ history, at the limit of ‘eth-
nographic’” (2006: 150). I owe Derek Hook for bringing this to my attention.
20 While this sheds light on the contextual specificity of colonial castration, it equally
demonstrates the inefficacy of the sinthome as a decolonial tactic. As Jacques-Alain
Miller reminds (1987), the sinthome does not respond to interpretation. The sin-
thome is not a call to the Other but a pure jouissance addressed to no one (11). I say,
therefore, that the sinthome is an untenable and undesirable strategy for decolo-
nization insofar as it is predicated on individual retreat instead of collective
emancipation. The psychoanalytic act can only be revolutionary at the level of the individual.
21 But Indigenous Peoples could lose status through myriad other avenues, such as
marrying an Indigenous Person with status but from a different band, earning a
university degree, becoming a priest, voluntarily giving it up, or ‘enfranchising’ so
as to vote in Canadian elections.
22 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari sum this up nicely when they write that
“Oedipus is always colonization pursued by other means; it is the interior
colony” (200).
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Part II
Racial identification
and the subversion
of race
6 In medium race: traversing
the fantasy of post-race
discourse
Jennifer Friedlander
Edgar E. and Elizabeth S. Pankey Professor of Media Studies, Pomona
College
Introduction
How can we overcome the fantasy of race? Recent scholarship in Lacanian
theory offers a way forward. Antonio Viego’s Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of
Loss in Latino Studies sounds a powerful call to scholars of race. It urges en-
gagement with Lacanian theory to undermine the fantasy of race by offering a
corrective to dominant currents of thought that position the racialized subject
in terms of subjective wholeness. For Viego, “the undisturbed dream of ego-
mastery, [and] wholeness is … what provides racist discourse with one of its
most generative principles: the undivided, obscenely full, and complete ethnic-
racialized subject, transparent to itself and others” (Viego 2007: 6). He con-
tends that, by questioning the notion of subjective wholeness, “Lacanian
theory … lends itself to an anti-racist critique … and provides an intervention
into racist discourse” (4).
In developing his account, Viego takes up Joan Copjec’s assertion that
Lacan’s understanding of the subject as an effect of the signifier “is the only
guarantee we have against racism” (Viego 2007: 5–6). Copjec clarifies this
claim by arguing that the Lacanian subject “coincide[s] not with the signifier,
but rather with its ‘misfire’” (Viego 2007: 5–6). It follows that the subject is
constituted not by the signifier’s success, but rather by its failure to confer a
complete identity. This alienation of the subject by the signifier is necessary
for the formation of the subject, but this does not mean that the subject is
doomed to remain in a perpetually alienated state. After establishing the
constitutive nature of alienation, Lacan emphatically insists that there is more
to the story: “Does it mean, as I seem to be saying, that the subject is con-
demned to seeing himself emerge, in initio, only in the field of the Other [qua
the system of signifiers]? Could it be that? Well, it isn’t. Not at all—not at all”
(Lacan 210). The subject, Lacan contends, can accede from alienation to what
he calls separation. In separation, the subject comes to recognize that the
Other—the very Symbolic system to which the subject appeals for its
identity—is itself lacking. Accepting that the Other is incapable of grounding
the subject’s identity enables the subject to “assume” her own position in the
106 Jennifer Friedlander
Symbolic. This is the sense in which Lacan links the word “separation” to se
parere via its French and Latin roots “to be engendered…to put into the world” (214).
Viego and Copjec build upon this Lacanian account of the relationship of
the subject to the signifier in order to propose a path to free the subject from
the fantasy of race. In this paper, I draw upon their scholarship in promoting
a Lacanian inflected, anti-racist project, inspired by but revising the work of
W.J.T. Mitchell (Seeing) and Sheldon George (Trauma), who develop ostensibly
opposed arguments. Mitchell argues for an uncompromising commitment to
sustaining the notion of race as a means to counter the disingenuousness of
“post-race” rhetoric. Since race, no matter how compellingly we expose its
artifice, shows no sign of diminishing influence we must, he insists, take it on
fully as the “medium” through which reality is structured. Unless we preserve
race and attend to its structuring role, we risk losing the cipher for under-
standing and intervening into the “disease” of racism.
George shares with Mitchell a concern for moving beyond “the familiar
phrase, ‘race is a social construct’” (George 2014: 360). But whereas Mitchell
counters this platitude by insisting that we take seriously race’s intractability,
George maintains instead that we must “transcend both race and the funda-
mental fantasy it supports” (George 2016: 141). George argues for seeing race in
the position of the objet a, an intervention that leads us to understand how, within
the racist American Symbolic, race’s structuring negativity not only impedes the
African American subject’s ability to inhabit the subjectifying fantasy of whole-
ness, but also, paradoxically, may propel the subject to undertake the liberating
path to separation. Thus, George and Mitchell, in their different ways, seem to
offer productive elaborations of the potential Viego signals, for a Lacanian ac-
count of the subject as a resource for anti-racist scholarship.
My ultimate aim is to show that, although Mitchell’s and George’s accounts
(in conversation with their interlocutors, both real and imagined) help point
towards possibilities for facilitating the subject’s liberation from the fantasy of
race, their positions ultimately fall short of fully realizing this potential. In
particular, I claim that Mitchell’s work can be seen to unwittingly support the
existence of metalanguage, the illusion that meaning can be grounded from
outside of the Symbolic system, and thus risks naturalizing racial meanings.
Even so, his work proves valuable in indicating the importance of under-
standing how seeing race as a fiction fundamentally shapes the reality of race.
George’s work, on the other hand, offers a compelling account of how race, as
objet a, seduces the subject to pin its hopes on race as a means to achieving
subjective wholeness. Yet, I propose that George’s advocacy of a turn to
“cynicism” reinforces the very distance of the subject to the Other that fuels,
rather than undermines, the power of disavowal to bind us to the Symbolic
fiction of race. In what follows, I identify the work of “disavowing” race as the
most formidable obstacle to the subject’s separation from the Other’s signifiers
of race within the current moment of “post-racial” discourse. I conclude by
suggesting that the Lacanian concepts of the objet a and the Act may be
harnessed to intervene in the binding structure of disavowal.
In medium race 107
In medium race: the trap of “seeing through”
Examination of the relationship between Mitchell’s and George’s positions
help point us toward a response to the question of how we can best contend
against the fantasy of race. Despite their contrasting stances on whether race
should be preserved or contested, both Mitchell and George agree on the
importance of seeing race as a “medium.” Mitchell calls for understanding
race “itself as a medium, and not merely a content to be mediated” (Mitchell
2011: 405). Race, he contends, must be apprehended as a way of seeing (or, to
use Rancière’s terminology, a technique of the aesthetic distribution of the
sensible) rather than as an object within the schema of the visible. George
takes this recognition further, arguing that race not only mediates our fra-
mework for assembling reality but also mediates our relation to the Real of
jouissance. In this sense, for George, race functions as “a tool for masking the
central lack of subjectivity” (George 2014: 360). Race, he explains, offers
subjects the “illusion of being,” which has been stripped away by the signifer’s
imposition of meaning. In particular, it provides subjects with the fantasy
necessary to modulate their relation to constitutive lack.
Mitchell takes a different tack. Central to his proposal for seeing race as a
medium is—as the title of his book indicates—a reworking of the idea of “seeing
through.” He espouses a position in line with Slavoj Žižek’s view that “seeing
through” a fiction not only fails to free a subject from its ideological grip but
also entrenches a subject more deeply in its hold. In particular, Mitchell argues
that not only has our recognition of race’s illusory status failed to make “ra-
cism…go away” but it has also contributed to our false confidence that, by
“knowing better,” we are not implicated in the problem. Mitchell proposes
instead that we “see through” race in a different sense, as “something we see
through, like a frame, a window, a screen, or a lens, rather than something we look
at” (xii). Thus for Mitchell, as for Žižek, “seeing through” race must not be
thought of as a mode to getting to the other side of race—breaking free from its
fiction and entering into the reality. Instead, “seeing through” race involves
donning the lens it offers as a way of entering into its structuring fiction, making
visible and palpable its constitutive role in governing our reality. Yet, although
his project to “see race as a medium” appears to be built explicitly around
avoiding the problem of how “seeing through” the ideological illusion binds one
to its maintenance, Mitchell, I argue, falls prey to this very trap about which he
warns. As we will see, his own reflections on his use of Lacan’s work help to
identify and untangle the problem.
Mitchell’s 2010 keynote address to the Visual Cultural Studies Conference
(based upon the project of Seeing Through Race) met with a critical response by
Scott Loren and Jörg Metelmann in The Journal of Visual Culture. Primarily,
they take issue with how Mitchell’s call for the preservation of the concept of
race flirts dangerously with “a new fixing of racial ‘realities’…with all of their
hatred and pain” (Loren and Metelmann 2011: 405). In his defense, Mitchell
blames the problems on his mistake of “bring[ing] Lacan into my essay”
(Mitchell 2011: 407). “The trouble comes,” he explains in his reply to his
critics, “when I turn to the Lacanian triad…Lacanian terminology is pretty
much incidental to the theoretical framework of my argument. I was warned
repeatedly not to bring Lacan into my essay…, and perhaps I should have
listened to that advice…My heart is evidently in the right place; it is just that I
have entered the Lacanian universe, a place where angels fear to tread, and
where my incautious steps have lead me into an abyss” (405, 407).
Mitchell’s overwrought expression of regret is noteworthy not only for its
juxtaposition of extravagant hyperbole and minimizing defensiveness. It is
also remarkable for how it functions as a symptom of the central tension in
Mitchell’s account. In particular, by dismissing Lacanian thought as a merely
superfluous overlay distorting his true (good at heart) message, Mitchell un-
wittingly undermines his own appeal to take seriously how the medium of
expression enters into the meaning of the content itself. Mitchell’s defense
ignores how the act of enunciation is never external to, but rather is im-
bricated within the enunciated content. To put the point in Lacan’s succinct
terms, “there is no metalanguage”—no neutral place outside the system of
language from which meaning can be adjudicated. In particular, what
Mitchell’s account overlooks is how the very fact of saying something can
work to undermine the ostensible meaning of what is said. Specifically, in
aiming to counter the central enunciated utterance of post-racial discourse,
“race doesn’t matter,” Mitchell neglects the crucial dimension of its enun-
ciation (“the fact that this is being said at all”) (Pfaller 1998: 227, italics original).
For example, in saying “race no longer matters,” the very attestation functions
to negate the validity of the statement—if race really did not matter anymore
then there would be no need to make the enunciation.
A turn to Paul Gilroy allows us to see this point from another perspective.
In his well-known polemic, Against Race, Gilroy develops an approach to post-
racial discourse that, by contrast with Mitchell, accounts for how enunciated
content is influenced by the fact of its enunciation. Gilroy undertakes the (self-
declared) “utopian” project of calling for the complete renunciation of the
concept of race, provocatively insisting that we must “demand liberation not
from white supremacy alone, but from all racializing and raciological
thought” (Gilroy 2001: 40). This position stands in stark contrast to Mitchell’s
call for the wholesale maintenance of the “concept of race”—an unequivocal
commitment to the position that “everything [of the concept of race] must be
conserved,” not only at the level of the enunciated but also in his form of
enunciation (Mitchell 2012: 32). Mitchell, for example, refuses to put race “in
scare quotes,” thereby resiling from the usual way of “demonstrat[ing] that we
are at every moment aware that it is ‘nothing but a social construction’” (26).
In this way, Mitchell seeks to undercut the protection subjects glean from the
illusion of metalanguage, arguing that scare quotes, “signal [for the writer/
speaker] …that he is not using the word, only mentioning it while disavowing
responsibility for or contamination by it” (26, 44). But, ironically, this position
is at odds with Mitchell’s own attempt to disavow responsibility for engaging
In medium race 109
with Lacanian thought. (He intended merely to “mention” Lacanian con-
cepts, after all, and regrets that his argument has been inadvertently “con-
taminated” by them.) I suggest that we read this irony as indicative of a
tension immanent to his account.
In particular, despite Mitchell’s rhetoric to the contrary, his project holds
open the possibility of metalanguage and thus remains locked to the ideolo-
gical fantasy of completeness. This fantasy, George contends, is precisely what
binds subjects to the damaging seduction of race. It is also the central target of
Viego’s criticism of the prevailing scholarship on race—a problem that
Lacanian thought should resolve rather than commit.
Against and post race

I suggest taking this argument further by elaborating the comparison of
Mitchell’s work to Gilroy’s. Although they put forth antithetical positions,
both of their accounts function as responses to the same problem—namely,
the proliferation of “post-racial” discourse, which works to minimize or ob-
scure the ways in which the concept of race continues to stratify the world.
Race, Gilroy concludes, is a category generated by racism and thus is beyond
salvation in the service of anti-racism. Like Gilroy, Mitchell acknowledges that
race is “inevitably contaminated by racism” and so is, as he puts it, “a pro-
duct, not a cause of racism” (19, 32). But this recognition leads Mitchell not to
renounce race, but rather to insist that we hold on to race as “the set of
symptoms or signs—the diagnostic tool—that provides access to the disease
known as racism” (17). If we do away with race, he argues, we might lose sight
of how race structures—“mediates”—our thoughts, experiences, and our
sense of humanity, that race is “an operational concept…that reduces peoples
to…‘bare life’” (32).
Gilroy not only advocates for a different conclusion about the role of race
but also employs a distinct approach in intervening in post-racial discourse.
Rather than straightforwardly aiming to discredit “post-racial” discourse,
Gilroy’s project leverages the instability between the enunciated content of
post-racial discourse and the act of its enunciation. Gilroy then exploits this
instability in order to call for the complete demolition of race and to push
toward a future built around what he calls a “planetary humanism”-to-
come—a way of imagining collective formations which do not depend upon
identity. In arguing for this, Gilroy seizes the disruptive opportunity already
contained in the negation of the utterance by the act of saying it.
Here, Gilroy makes strategic use of the tension within “post-race” rhetoric
that Mitchell recognizes. In Žižek’s sense, Gilroy purposefully commits to an
“over-literal” interpretation of the content of the central utterance of “post-
racial” discourse—“race no longer matters.” In particular, he willfully ignores
the open secret that the very fact of its enunciation compromises its validity.
Whereas Mitchell seeks to undermine the duplicity of post-racial discourse
through external negation (by denying its truthfulness), Gilroy recognizes that
negation is already contained within the gap between the statement and the
fact that it needs to be said (if race really did not matter, there would be no
point in continuing to declare that it does not matter). Gilroy’s intervention
aims to exploit the Symbolic efficacy of the artifice. Mitchell, by contrast,
earnestly undertakes the project of calling out the truth of the open secret that
when we say “race does not matter,” it really must matter.
This injunction to pull the veil off post-racial discourse seems in conflict with
Mitchell’s own framing of his project. In endeavoring to hold on to race, rather
than to abandon it, Mitchell mounts an argument that resonates with the
Lacanian view of what is involved in “traversing the fantasy,” namely, not to
overcome fantasy (or illusion) by dismissing it, but rather to take seriously the
way in which, by organizing disturbances of the Real into accessible “reality,”
the fantasy is paramount in how we make sense of the world. As Mitchell puts
it, “Fantasy or imagination is not in some kind of simple antithesis to reality but,
in fact, is the necessary framework in which any kind of reality testing could
take place” (Mitchell 2012: 16). If the fiction itself performs the ideological
work, then any attempt to set aside or see through the fiction misses the crucial
point—an insight upon which Gilroy generatively seizes.
Disavowal of race
This recognition of the inadequacy of “seeing through” the fiction as a me-
chanism for change appears at the crux of Mitchell’s motivating question:
“why race still matters when it has repeatedly been exposed as a pseudo-
scientific illusion and an ideological mystification” (38)? Or, to put Mitchell’s
question in other words, why, when we have thoroughly “seen through” race,
do we continue to live within its margins? His answer flirts with a psycho-
analytic diagnosis: that race functions via disavowal. We know very well that
race does not really exist, but even so, we act in ways that reveal its primacy.
As Derek Hook, in his incisive account of “racist disavowal” explains, “the
racist subject may be divided, between a (genuinely) professed view of racial
tolerance, on the one hand, and undeniably racist behavior and ideation, on
the other, both of which exists on a rational and conscious level of func-
tioning” (Hook 2005: 18).
Given his critical engagement with the problem of “seeing through,”
Mitchell’s wager seems surprising. In order to combat our disavowal of race’s
structuring role, he seems to say that we need to make palpable its role as the
medium through which social reality is assembled. In effect, Mitchell’s project
appears as one of denaturalization—an attempt to make perceptible the im-
plicit framework through which reality is formed (with its structuring hier-
archy of values) in order to undermine its grasp. But, as Hook emphasizes,
disavowal cannot be undermined through the revelation of how things “really
are.” The subject caught in disavowal is already acutely aware of how things
really are; it is the very starkness of this recognition that necessitates disavowal
as a mechanism for coping. In Hook’s words, “one can repeatedly challenge
In medium race 111
the racist with proof of racial equality…without making the slightest dent on
their racist perceptions, because after all, they have already acknowledged
that race makes no difference, they just opt to act as if it did, anyway” (19).
For these reasons, “racist disavowal,” as Hook acknowledges, “is very difficult
to eradicate” (18). I return to consideration of this problem in the conclusion.
Hook’s account offers a valuable twist to Mitchell’s view. Whereas Mitchell
insists on the importance of our recognition of race’s “reality” so that it no
longer functions as an invisible, structuring phantasm, Hook contends that it is
race’s very emptiness—its position as lack—that must be emphasized. It is
precisely because race emerges as/at the site of lack, that it finds itself caught
in the fetishistic logic of disavowal, which functions as a defense against lack.
As Hook puts it, “fantasy…works to conceal the equivalent of castration, the
loss, in other words of [an] ‘originary’ or pure racial identity” that can only
manifest as a fantasmatic construct (24). In order to intervene in this forma-
tion of fetishistic disavowal, it is necessary to acknowledge the crucial role of
lack. In elaborating this point, I begin by following George’s Lacanian ap-
proach, which proposes that the subject’s eventual confrontation with the
structuring lack is vital to the “ethical stance” of “imagin[ing] an agency
beyond the Symbolic” (George 2016: 19).
The lack, which racial identity both marks and attempts to cover, also
creates ripe conditions for stereotypes to seize hold. Hook, drawing upon
Homi Bhabha’s work, emphasizes how stereotypes work to fill the lack with an
accessible, but rigid, set of meanings. “The stereotype,” Bhabha explains,
“impedes the circulation and articulation of the signifier of ‘race’ as anything
other than its fixity as racism” (Bhabha in Hook 29). For Bhabha, and many
scholars influenced by post-structuralist criticism, this problem calls for a
strategy of resignification.
George criticizes such post-structuralist approaches as limited by “their
allegiance to conceptions of discourse, race, and agency” (George 2016: 14).
For George (as well as for Gilroy), an anti-racist politics based on “re-
signification” cannot avoid reinforcing the significance of race as a grounding
identity. In particular, George argues that by conceptualizing the Symbolic
“as a closed system,” post-structuralist thinking presumes that we are con-
demned to “forg[e] a future from resources inevitably impure” (George 2016:
17). George, by contrast, proposes that we reject reaching for Symbolic fillers
for psychic lack (the pursuit of desire), and accept, instead, that psychic lack
itself presents the subject with an emptiness within which she or he can build a
new and unique relationship to fantasy (a possibility propelled by the drive).
The enticement of wholeness, which race beckons, helps explain why race
is a difficult concept to give up, both for those “on top of the racial hierarchy,”
and “those who have been subordinated by it” (Bhasin 2000: 1147). As Neeta
Bhasin highlights in her review of Gilroy’s Against Race, those most oppressed
by the concept of race are often the ones most deeply committed to it. In
Gilroy’s words, “For many racialized populations, ‘Race’ and the hard-won,
oppositional identities it supports are not to be lightly…given up” (Gilroy
2001: 12). This is why Gilroy argues that we need “a deliberate and conscious
renunciation of ‘race’ as the basis for solidarity and community” (1147).
George, in a similar vein, starkly illuminates what he identifies as a
“paradox” in African Americans’ relation to race. As he explains, “reference
to race is the central means through which discrimination of African
Americans has been justified in America,“ yet “African Americans most often
embrace the concept of their racial identity” (George 2014: 361). George’s
account strikes directly at the psychic dimensions of the identity-binding role
of race and, in particular, the ways in which attachment to race, for African
American subjects, inhibits accession from desire to drive. Race, he argues,
“remains for African Americans an illusory object of attachment that binds
them to the unbearable past” (George 2016: 15). The possibility of shifting its
meaning, therefore, has been “essential to African American theoretical
conceptions of agency” (14).
“Agency beyond the Symbolic:” cause and negativity

Following Lacan, George, as indicated earlier, proposes an alternative route
to “agency beyond the Symbolic” (19). In developing this position, George
draws upon Lacan’s disagreement with Saussure on the nature of the signifier
as “not arbitrary…but contingent upon causation that is external to the
Symbolic” (16). “Cause,” for Lacan, refers to the constitutive exclusions to the
Symbolic order—the unassimilable points of failure and trauma, around
which signifiers weave a protective net. Thus, within a Lacanian framework,
any account of the Symbolic heft of race must take into account the way race
functions not only as a lure for “being” within the Symbolic but also as a
formative Symbolic exclusion. Rather than envision the field of signifiers as
random and open to manipulation (and resignification), the notion of “Cause”
reminds us that the Symbolic is organized through the incessant haunting of
negativity. As Richard Boothby appositely describes, “The confrontation with
this recalcitrant remainder delivers the subject over to a sense of a negative
‘space,’ the sense not of what appears but precisely what doesn’t appear—a
shadow of das Ding1” (Boothby 2019: 24). What resignifying projects neglect,
George argues, is this unintegrated negativity—the symbolic’s cause. George
calls for recognition of this unintegrated negativity as the “jouissance of slavery,
a psychic experience of trauma that emerges from the past and repeats itself in
the present through the agency of the signifier” (George 2016: 16). “It is the
signifier,” George underscores, “that establishes the link through which this
traumatic cause, germane to the slave’s experience and not to that of his or
her descendants, intrusively establishes its place in the internal lives of African
Americans” (16).
This attending to the “beyond of the Symbolic” in no way necessitates
abandoning the Symbolic, but rather requires highlighting the decisive role of
the signifier’s hidden cause as a nodal point for the subject’s psychic con-
stitution. In George’s work, this requires that the trauma of slavery and its
In medium race 113
enduring afterlife be “dislodged from the Real through the trauma’s entrance
into symbolization” (73). Loren and Metelmann, like George, strongly object
to locating racism in the Real (as Mitchell suggests), fearing that it risks
“making racism immovable” (Loren and Metelmann 2011: 400). For them,
race, not racism, belongs in the Real (as the point of “lack”); racism belongs in
the Symbolic (“as one possible attempt at articulating this lack”) (400). In
addition, Loren and Metelmann argue that Mitchell’s account misses the
mechanism for fixing a meaning to lack, a function they cede to the “point de
capiton”—the figure which operates to stabilize meaning by anchoring a sig-
nifier to a secure place within the signifying chain. (401). Thus, race, they
contend, functions on two levels, both as lack (Real) and as an attempt to hold
in place a fixed representation of lack (point de capiton).
“Agency beyond the Symbolic:” race as objet a and

medium of jouissance
This intervention inches closer towards George’s understanding of how race
functions as a Master Signifier (S1) in binding the raced subject to the
Symbolic, attaching her/him to the chain of signifiers (S2) in search of
wholeness. For George, as we will see, the ethical response requires that the
subject come to release the chain of signifiers from its tie to the Master sig-
nifier of race. This move involves the vital recognition that the Other, within
which the subject seeks identity, is also lacking and thus incapable of con-
ferring the subject’s completion. But whereas Loren and Metelmann focus on
how race functions as a point de capiton, George makes the crucial intervention
of also recognizing race’s role as objet a, a move which enables us to attend to
the critical part jouissance plays in understanding race and racism. Thus, where
Loren and Metelmann emphasize the point de capiton, with its function of fixing
meaning (to keep it “in its place,” as Jacques-Alain Miller puts it), George
concentrates on how race, as objet a, works to keep jouissance in its place by
fueling the impossible fantasy of a return to the lost jouissance of subjective
wholeness, which subjects sacrifice in their accession to the signifier. This
fantasy, however, is impeded for “racialized subjects [who] often struggle
more than is usual to maintain their safe distance from the traumatic jouissance
of lack” (George Trauma 21). In particular, George argues, race “functions as a
precarious source of jouissance…for African Americans…that binds them to an
unbearable past” (15). But, as we will see, the objet a’s mediation of the sub-
ject’s relationship to traumatic lack can spark confrontation not only with
subjective lack but also with Symbolic lack. In this way, I will argue, the objet a
should also be considered for its potential to propel the subject to traverse the
fantasy of a return to subjective wholeness. As Rex Butler suggests, the objet a
can be thought of as an “act that would break or suspend the symbolic order
of the master signifier” (Butler 6).
George’s formulation helps us appreciate this possibility by highlighting the
key relationship of the master signifier (in the function of “point de capiton”—the
“quilting point”—for temporarily holding meaning in place) to the objet a
(George 2016: 22). I suggest we should supplement this point by recognizing
that, as Butler puts it, the objet a is always “behind the master signifier,” from
where it can either conspire with the master signifier in plugging the hole in
the Symbolic or disrupt the master signifier’s masking function by exposing its
emptiness (Butler 2005: 6). Butler develops this disruptive potential of the objet
a via Žižek’s consideration of the “gap between utterance [the enunciated]
and its enunciation: at the level of utterance you are saying this, but what do
you want to tell me with it, through it” (Žižek Sublime 111 in Butler 2005: 19).
This “mismatch” between the enunciation and the enunciated, Butler points
out, marks the impossibility “to speak literally, to occupy the Symbolic
without remainder, to have the empty place and what occupies it fit perfectly”
(18–19). As we saw earlier, Gilroy strategically ignores this “mismatch” (by
overinvesting in the enunciated and discounting the enunciation) in at-
tempting to secure the authority of the statement that “race does not matter.”
Butler, however, highlights how prodding this mismatch works to destabilize
the master signifier’s success in “sutur[ing] an ideological field” (6). I extend
this point by arguing that focusing on how the objet a functions as the necessary
trigger and supplement for the master-signifier illuminates how “the same
element that closes off the system also opens it up…[thereby]…reveal[ing] the
‘emptiness’ at the heart of the Symbolic only by filling it out” (20, 21).
This recognition of the lack in the Other is necessary for impelling the
subject to move beyond the constraints of the desire of the Other in the
pursuit of completion, spuriously offered by the objet a. As such, rather than
chasing the elusive objet a, the subject may come to embrace the objet a’s
perpetual failure to confer subjective completion. Thus, traversal of the fan-
tasy of subjective wholeness moves the subject to position itself in the place of
lack, the position previously occupied by the objet a. Furthermore, in coming to
assume responsibility for being the cause of its own desire, the subject comes
to recognize itself as a locus of symbolic emptiness around which a new form
of subjectivity takes shape. As Molly Anne Rothenberg explains, in moving
beyond symbolic designations, the “neosubject” of the drive “acts creatively”
to “reveal the possibility of newness” (Rothenberg 2010: 181). In this sense,
the traversal of the fantasy entails a “form of freedom, or,…emancipation
from the given” (182). Unlike poststructuralist accounts of resignification as
the only path toward change, however, the Lacanian formulation demon-
strates how newness and agency can emerge “beyond the symbolic.”
Traversing the fantasy of race: subjectification over

distance
George’s account considers how, for African American subjects, race as objet a
not only impedes the subject’s move from desire to drive but also “uniquely
position[s]” African American subjects to, as mentioned earlier, “embrace this
very daunting task of transcending both race and the fundamental fantasy it
In medium race 115
supports” (George 2016: 141). Here we can more clearly appreciate the im-
portance of Lacan’s notion of “seeing through” the fantasy. Rather than seek to
access a reality outside of the fantasy, some degree of freedom emerges through
inhabiting the “subjectfiying function of fantasy” (21). This procedure is neatly
exemplified in what appears at first to be a tension within George’s account.
One the one hand, George argues that slavery and racism “inhibit the
subjectifying function of fantasy, aiming to confront African Americans with
the very lack that is necessarily masked in the Lacanian subject” (21). Here he
draws upon Kalpana Seshadri-Crook’s account of “whiteness” as the “master
signifier” of race, which impedes “the construction of…fantasies of whole-
ness” for African American subjects. George thus takes seriously the necessary
role of fantasy in drawing upon the resources of the Symbolic to protect the
subject from encountering devastating lack. When access to fantasy is hin-
dered, subjects suffer from an unregulated or over-proximate relation to lack.
Race, in “encourag[ing]…[a] substitution of desire for drive” traps the subject
in an incessant, yet futile search to recapture an imagined wholeness, en-
snaring him/her within an impossible fantasy of completion (George
2014: 372).
On the other hand, George argues that the racist Symbolic, which denies
the fantasy of grounded identity to African American subjects, may also
propel the raced subject toward “not just a transcendence of race but a
transcendence of the fundamental fantasy of a recoverable loss” (George
2016: 141). In this sense, the raced subject can be seen as exceptionally
primed to recognize the lack in the Other, the acceptance upon which se-
paration depends. Here, then, we encounter an apparent contradiction: ra-
cism makes African American subjects not only more prone to entrapment by
desire and alienation but also especially inclined to accede to drive and se-
paration by continually putting the Other’s signifiers in question. George
demonstrates that these two positions are reconciled by understanding that
the fantasy is both “illusory” and “necessary” in the subject’s formation (Neill
61). The subject’s illusion of potential wholeness is constitutive (not incidental)
to their ultimate acceptance of lack, and the eventual embrace of the drive
through which the subject comes to enjoy the failure of the fantasy of com-
pletion. It is around the contours of this void that the subject comes to erect a
new relationship to the signifier, without attachment to the “jouissance of race”
(George 2016: 137).
But, and here is my main point of departure from George, rather than
framing this possibility in terms of an identification with the lack of the Other,
George suggests that it emerges from the raced subject’s “cynical” distance
from the Other’s signifiers. As he puts it, African American subjects’ “alie-
nation” often foments a “cynicism toward the Symbolic,” which “establishes a
liberating distance…from the alienating desire of the Symbolic Other” (135,
139). In making this point, George emphasizes the importance of creating
critical “distance between the conflated desires of the subject and the Other,
allowing for the emergence of something more properly subjective and
personal to the subject” (139). I argue, by contrast, that the liberating effects of
separation emerge not from distancing the Other, but rather from the con-
vergence of the subject’s lack with the lack in the Other.
Although George advocates for the importance of understanding separa-
tion as “a move toward recognition of the desire/lack both of the subject and
of the mOther,” his emphasis on cynicism as the mode through which se-
paration takes shape is in tension with the following Lacanian insight (2014:
369). For Lacan, separation of the subject from the totalizing signifiers and
unfathomable desire of the Other is forged, paradoxically not by division but
rather by “intersection”—via the recognition that lack (non-meaning) is an
overlapping element for the subject, and the Other as well (Lacan 213). This
intersection of the lack in the subject with the lack in the Other allows the
subject to experience freedom by taking on a Symbolic position of its
own—one that is not controlled by the meanings set in place by the Other.
For Lacan, this possibility of liberation through separation emerges only when
the subject encounters her own desire (as lack) “superimposed upon the
other”—when a “link” (rather than a gap) is created “between the desire of
the subject and the desire of the Other” (215). Paul Verhaeghe makes this
point by emphasizing that separation “takes the shape of a peculiar form of identi-
fication,” leading him to expand the term “separation” to “identification/se-
paration” (Verhaeghe 2019: 378). That is, for separation to occur, it is not
sufficient to recognize the Other’s lack; the subject must also identify with it.
Žižek makes the similar point: “Fully assuming the Other’s lack and incon-
sistency means that the Other is no longer a complete mechanism that con-
trols me: I can exploit its inconsistencies, play the Other against itself” (Žižek
2017: 234).
In sum, George’s proposal incisively sets up the conditions and stakes for
thinking the subject’s agency “beyond the Symbolic.” But rather than (as
George suggests) “cynicism” acting as the motor for separation, I contend that
cynicism functions as an impediment. To be specific, cynicism entices us with
the lure of “knowing better,“ of “seeing through” the illusion to the underlying
reality. In my view, it is essential to resist this lure, and instead opt for what
Lacan calls an “ethic of skepticism,” which, I argue, he explicitly distinguishes
from cynicism (Lacan 224).Whereas cynicism involves a mistrust that what
others say they know corresponds to what they take to be true, skepticism
involves a general mistrust of all claims to knowledge. To be specific, I agree
with George that by creating the conditions for separation, “rooting sub-
jectivity in ‘scepticism’ [i]s what Lacan called ‘a mode of sustaining man in
life’” (2014: 368). But I disagree with George’s adjoining claim that “Lacanian
theory ties the reversal of alienation to a ‘cynic[ism]’ by which the subject
questions the desire of the Other who grants the signifier” (368). For Lacan, it
is skepticism, not cynicism, that leads to “the one exit” from alienation—“the
way of desire” (Lacan 224). Specifically, using Rene Descartes’ approach as
exemplary of the ethic of skepticism, Lacan contends that Descartes’ “desire
for certainty led…only to doubt,” enabling him to “operate a rather strange
In medium race 117
separation” (224). Skepticism, understood in this Cartesian context, paves a
path toward separation not by leading the subject toward knowledge but by
placing knowledge itself “in radical suspension” (224).
The cynic, by contrast, is hampered by her own investment in knowledge.
We see this in the passage from Lacan, which George cites, that presents
Casanova as emblematic of the cynic. In recounting a tale of “one of
Casanova’s misadventures,” Lacan describes a time when Casanova became
the victim of his own “practical joke” (238). In “pursuing a cynical ad-
venture,” in which Casanova tried to seduce a girl by pretending to perform
wizardry, a violent storm began to rage. As Slavoj Žižek explicates the tale,
“Despite knowing very well that [the storm] was a natural phenomenon, he
believed all the same that the celestial forces were punishing him for his
profane playing with magic—and what did he do but step quickly into his own
[magic] paper circle, where he felt completely safe!” (Žižek 2008: 248).
Casanova, as this example reveals, is not protected by knowing how things
really are, but rather by the efficacy of the illusion. In short, the cynic makes
the mistake of the “non-duped:” thinking that reality is structured by the way
‘things really are,’ rather than by the fiction that props up reality. Here we
witness, too, the way that cynicism also fuels the structure of disavowal—a
formation which, as we saw, holds together post-racial discourse. As Žižek
points out, Casanova knew very well that he did not perform magic, and that
the paper square could not protect him, but even so, he sought comfort in its
refuge. This example also supports Hook’s contention that “knowing better”
risks facilitating rather than hampering, the grip of disavowal.
Where, then, should we turn for a disruptive response to disavowal that may
enable separation? I suggest that we follow Žižek in turning to what Lacan calls
the “Act”—a role that Butler suggests can be played by a close encounter with
the objet a. As Sheila Kunkle puts it: an “Act does even more than change what
counts as reality, because it further exposes how reality itself is not totally on-
tologically complete” (Kunkle 2015: 2). The Act itself emerges from within the
Symbolic, not from its positive content, but rather from its negative cause, its
“inherent impossibility…which is its hidden, disavowed structuring principle”
(Kunkle 2015: 2). The Act should be understood neither as a plea for re-
installing Symbolic authority nor as a total rejection of Symbolic existence, since
both of these options fail to accept the binding power of the Symbolic fiction.
Instead, I argue that the Act be seen as a potentially transformative engagement
aimed at identifying with the very point at which the Symbolic fiction of race
begins to unfurl and threatens to give way to the Real—thus undercutting the
Symbolic ground for conferring identity. It follows that, rather than distancing or
releasing the subject from the Other’s enigmatic signifiers, the Act performs the
ethical task of facilitating an impossible identification with both the Symbolic
fiction and intrusions of the meaningless Real. Such a position resists re-
incorporation into the fantasy of Symbolic closure.
Spike Lee’s 2018 film, BlacKkKlansman, offers a glimpse of this possibility.
The title itself enunciates a Symbolic impossibility, which in the film (as in the
real-life story upon which it is based) is realized by Ron Stallworth (John
David Washington), a black undercover police officer who infiltrates a
Colorado branch of the KKK. Over the phone, Stallworth successfully con-
vinces a Klan official and David Duke himself (Topher Grace) that he is a
“pure white,” “non-Jewish American citizen.” Another officer, Flip
Zimmerman (Adam Driver), poses as Stallworth for in-person meetings with
Klan members. Zimmerman, we learn, is Jewish; he wears a star of David
necklace but, as he tells Stallworth, he always thought of himself as “just
another white kid.” The film, I argue, shows that the very success of
Stallworth’s and Zimmerman’s passing as an impossible embodiment of the
fantasy whiteness works to undermine the fantasy of whiteness itself. In short,
their very success indicates the impossibility of what has been achieved—a
claim to racial wholeness as a cover for lack.
Zimmerman’s relationship to his Jewish identity can be considered in terms
of disavowal. Some critics have read Zimmerman’s character in terms of his
coming to identify with his previously disavowed Jewish identity. At first glance,
this reading seems sustained by Zimmerman’s confession to Stallworth that
before posing as a KKK member, he used to never think about being Jewish
but since becoming accepted by the KKK he finds himself thinking about it “all
the time.” I suggest, however, that the film points us to consider this change in
Zimmerman not as an embrace of (Jewish) identity, but rather as a rejection of
the possibility of whiteness. To be specific, rather than read Zimmerman as
having previously disavowed his Jewish identity, I suggest we frame his initial
disavowal in opposite terms—namely as a disavowal of “whiteness,” which as
we saw earlier, is for Seshadri-Crook, the “master signifier” of race.
Zimmerman’s disavowal of whiteness is apparent insofar as whiteness appears
initially to him as an innocent default category—one that enables him to wear a
Star of David and bear a Jewish surname, and still be “just another white kid.”
It is only after he successfully passes as white in the eyes of the KKK that
“whiteness” itself becomes for him a marked and racist concept—the unin-
habitable “master signifier” of race. As A.O. Scott puts it in a trenchant review
of the film: “‘Just another white kid’ is an all-purpose alibi, and public discourse
abounds in code words and dog-whistles that allow bigots to pass as concerned
citizens without a racist bone in their bodies” (Scott).2
In response to Zimmerman’s seeming lack of personal investment in their
mission, Stallworth presses him to internalize the stakes: “You’re Jewish. Why
you acting like you ain’t got skin in the game?” Rather than function as a mere
figure of speech, this expression of having “skin” in the game becomes brutally
apt for Zimmerman. One KKK member, suspecting that Zimmerman may be
Jewish, threatens to strip him in order to see if he is circumcised. Here the
polysemy of the signifier “skin” condenses the way lack itself becomes the site of
binding investment—to put it crudely, it is precisely Zimmerman’s lack of skin
that gives him skin in the game. The significance of this coincidence is illu-
minated by Lacan’s point that circumcision functions as a site of “some per-
manent relation to the lost object as such,” and this highlights the essential role
In medium race 119
lack plays as a condition of subjectivity (Lacan 2016: 213). I suggest that it is via
the Act of inhabiting lack that Zimmerman comes to recognize the unavoid-
ability of lack in place of the pursuit of completion.
Rather than aim to dismantle the virulent racism of the Klan from the
outside by chipping away the illusion of race from which it spews, Stallworth
and Zimmerman take what we may see as a Lacanian path. They insert
themselves squarely into the illusion—both identifying with and embodying its
lack—and disturb the fantasy from within. Here we encounter an Act in
which the Symbolic cause (the internal negativity around which the Symbolic
forms and seeks to mask) enters into the Symbolic itself, disrupting the ability
of the fantasy of race to function as a claim to completion—as a cover for lack.
George’s insight that race holds the place of the objet a enables us to ap-
preciate how, by such an Act, we might destabilize race’s grip by pressing
on—and identifying with—its negativity as a way of exposing the in-
completeness of the Symbolic order and thus its impossibility to ground any
subjective identity. But, such pressure, I claim, must come from entering into
the meaninglessness of the Other’s signifiers and desire, rather than, as
George claims, distancing ourselves from them.
Notes
1 Das Ding can be roughly understood as an anxiety-provoking, unrepresentable
fragment of the Real. For a terrific account of das Ding in relation to Cause, please
see Richard Boothby.
2 The rhetoric of “just another white kid” works to sustain an investment in the
exnomination of whiteness. As bell hooks cautions, the notion of whiteness as in-
visible denies the way “whiteness makes its presence felt in black life, most often as
terrorizing imposition, a power that wounds, hurts, tortures” (hooks 1992: 241).
References
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Line Callaloo.” vol. 23, no. 3, Summer 2000, pp. 1147–1151.
Boothby, Richard. “On Psychoanalysis and Freedom: Lacan v. Heidegger.” Crisis &
Critique: Jacques Lacan: Psychoanalysis, Politics, Philosophy. vol. 6, no. 1, 2019, pp. 10–27.
Butler, Rex. Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory. New York: Continuum, 2005.
George, Sheldon. “From Alienation to Cynicism: Race and the Lacanian Unconscious.”
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society. vol. 19, no. 4, December 2014, pp 360–378.
Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.
Hook, Derek. “The Racial Stereotype, Colonial Discourse, Fetishism, and Racism.”
PINS, vol. 31, 2005, pp. 701–734
hooks, bell. Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Kunkle, Sheila. “Act.” The Dictionary. Ed.Butler, Rex. London: Routledge, 2015.
Lacan, Jacques. Seminar X. Anxiety. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Adrian Price.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016.
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Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.
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Culture, vol. 10, no. 3, 2011, pp. 397–405.
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no. 3, 2011, pp. 405–409.
Mitchell, W.J.T. Seeing Through Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
Pfaller, Robert. “Negation and Its Reliabilities An Empty Subject for Ideology?” Cogito
and the Unconscious. Ed. Žižek, Slavoj. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998,
pp. 225–246.
Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change. Cambridge;
Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010.
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MIT Press, 2017.
7 The object of apartheid
desire: a Lacanian approach
to racism and ideology
Derek Hook
Duquesne University & University of Pretoria
The ultimate racism in the world

South Africa’s system of apartheid (1948–1994) remains perhaps the most
egregious historical site of institutionalized white supremacist racism available
to living memory. While the term “apartheid” is frequently invoked—being
synonymous as it is, today, with any form of racial segregation—the perva-
siveness and scale of South Africa’s legalized system of racial oppression is
often underestimated. Given Jacques Derrida’s (1985) characterization of
apartheid as “the ultimate racism in the world” (291) and historian Saul
Dubow’s (2014) assertion that “Nowhere else in the post-war world was racial
rule justified and entrenched with such systematic thoroughness” (293), we
can conclude that there is still much to be learned from apartheid, particularly
so, perhaps, for those interested in the psychical dimensions of racism. An
indication of the extensiveness of this structural apparatus can be gleaned
from the account offered by one of apartheid’s fiercest critics, the journalist
Benjamin Pogrund. Describing the multiple ramifications of apartheid’s
Population Registration Act of 1950, Pogrund notes that
every South African was put into a defined racial pigeonhole. Each person
was given an identity number … [designating] a racial classification. [This
classification was] intended to, and did, affect life from birth to death, with
every detail specified and fixed by law: in which hospital you could be
born; in which suburb you could live; which house you could buy; which
nursery school and school you could attend and which university or
technical college; … which buses, rain compartments and taxis you could
travel in; which bus stops, railways, pedestrian bridges and platforms you
could use … which park bench you could sit on; … which jobs you could
hold and how much you could earn; … who you could legally have sex
with and who you could marry; how easily you could get a passport for
travel abroad; how much your old age pension, disability or war veteran’s
pension would be; … whether you could vote; which hospital you could go
to if you fell ill and which doctors and nurses would attend to you; … and
in which graveyard you would be buried (Pogrund 1990: 79).
122 Derek Hook
Reading this account from a psychoanalytic standpoint, one is forced to ask:
what psychical mechanisms held this obsessional system of segregation in
place for so long? In respect of apartheid’s white beneficiaries, one wants to
ask: what libidinal gains or unconscious rewards sustained their investment in
such an obviously iniquitous system? More directly yet—anticipating the
Lacanian conceptualization to follow—what was the relation between
apartheid ideology and the desire of those who benefitted from it? There is
little written on this topic and virtually nothing addressing it from a Lacanian
perspective. This being said, there is one remarkable yet neglected paper
which takes up questions pertaining to the psychical dimensions of apartheid
ideology—and apartheid desire—from a psychoanalytic perspective. I have in
mind novelist and literary critic J.M. Coetzee’s (1991) “The mind of apart-
heid.” Coetzee’s paper, written in the closing years of apartheid (1990–1991),
draws on the resources of Freudian theory so as to respond to a series of
conceptual dead-ends apparent within (then) existing historiographic accounts
of apartheid. It was the obduracy of apartheid, its all-pervading nature, the
fact that it seemed so obviously to exceed available intellectual accounts, that
forced Coetzee to think differently about agency, desire, and ideology in the
South African context. Indeed, the opening premise of “The mind of apart-
heid” is that the available accounts of ideology are fundamentally ill-equipped
to explain not only the virus-like spread but the recalcitrance, and, perhaps
more significantly yet, the subjective hold, of apartheid racism.
Coetzee’s approach is of interest to us not only because he conceived of
racism as ideology—a view that has almost completely disappeared from
contemporary theorizations of racism—but, even more crucially, because he
views racist ideology as itself a mode of desire. His historical critique of then-
existing (Marxist, Structuralist) theories of racism is of seminal importance
inasmuch as it highlights how apartheid ideology, precisely as a formation of
desire, was sustained by types of libidinal rewards that exceeded considera-
tions of financial or material gain. Fascinatingly, Coetzee arrives at the in-
tuition that apartheid necessarily entailed an exchange of sorts, “a
phantasmatic transaction” (Coetzee, 1991: 29), that is, an interchange of
desire, that occurred between apartheid as belief system and its ideological
subjects. This intriguing insight—offered in the very closing pages of
Coetzee’s essay—remains, regrettably, little more than a hunch, a prospective
breakthrough in need of further elaboration. My aim here, once having
highlighted the key dilemmas outlined by Coetzee, is to pick up the argument
where he leaves off and to utilize Lacanian psychoanalytic theory—more
precisely, Lacan’s notion of the subject’s alienation in and separation from the
big Other—to provide a distinctive reading of the multiple paradoxes and
ambiguities of apartheid ideology.
Foregrounding the notion of apartheid as desire leads to a series of fun-
damental changes in how we conceptualize agency within racist ideology. It
enables us to offer an incisive response to two important questions. First, who
should be accorded the preeminent agentic role—structure or subjects?—in
The object of apartheid desire 123
the making and prolongation of apartheid? Second, how might we understand
the nature of the relationship—an exchange, a transaction?—between subject
and structure within ideologies of racism? It is only via Lacanian theory, so I
wager, that we can adequately develop Coetzee’s insights and thereby
properly conceptualize the role of fantasy and, indeed, of agency and sub-
jectivization, in apartheid ideology and racism more generally. The method
that I adopt here is essentially a type of intertextuality. I convene a dialogue,
utilizing Coetzee’s critique as a means of posing questions about racist
ideology and then invoking Lacan’s (1979) ideas in Seminar XI on fantasy,
alienation and separation by way of response, in the second.1 The chapter is,
correspondingly, divided into two sections. In the first, I argue that desire is
the key to understanding the nature and the hold of the racist ideology of
apartheid. In the second, I develop a distinctive Lacanian account of the
complex and ambiguous agency of structure and subjects within apartheid,
arguing, furthermore, that racist ideology needs to be understood precisely as
a negotiated transaction of desire between the subject and the Other.
I. Racism as desire
Coetzee’s dilemmas: reading “the mind of apartheid”

While Coetzee was not the first to point to the role of desire within
racism—Frantz Fanon (1986) had already insisted that questions of desire and
sexuality were crucial in understanding colonial racism—he was the first to
argue that apartheid ideology might be approached as a formation of desire.
One implication of such a move is that Coetzee is able to offer a compelling
respond to the question of whether apartheid was tantamount to a period of
historical madness. The obsessionality underlying its myriad segregations sug-
gests that apartheid was, indeed, a psychopathological system, a system—as we
will go on to see—that was built on multiple displacements, denials and ret-
rojections of desire. Apartheid, in other words, entailed a fraught neurotic li-
bidinal economy in much the same way as religion did for Freud—one recalls
here the argument that religion is tantamount to a “universal obsessional
neurosis” (Freud 1959: 126). This is the first argument that Coetzee (1991)
advances against existing historiographies of apartheid: inasmuch as they rely
on rationalistic modes of ideology, they are unable to grasp how political
ideologies themselves succumb to systematic forms of irrationality.
This is a commonplace of apartheid historiography—and, one might add, of
a great many accounts of ideology not informed by psychoanalysis—namely,
the assumption that a system like apartheid can be understood as a rational—if
extreme—response to various threats to white/class privilege. Of course, to
assume the basic rationality of social actors and social systems is, psycho-
analytically speaking, too much of a presumption to make, particularly so given
that one can claim that it is precisely desire—and desire as managed via the
objects and orientations of fantasy—that gives consistency and stability to any
124 Derek Hook
particular view of the world. It helps here to note that fantasy, in Lacanian
terms, operates as the compass that orients the subject in respect of their desire,
and that of others, in an otherwise confusing Symbolic network; fantasy tells me
what I desire, what the Other desires, and what makes me desirable (Žižek
1997). We can agree then with Coetzee when he opposes the idea that
apartheid was merely a distorted form of rationality, and, accordingly, adopts a
very different critical strategy: that of exploring the vicissitudes of desire un-
derlying the governmental rationality of apartheid. Desire is thus key to un-
derstanding the nature and the hold of the racist ideology of apartheid and also
to conceptualizing the complex and ambiguous agency of subjects and ideo-
logues within racist ideological systems.
Several of Coetzee’s further critiques of apartheid historiography now come
into view. While Coetzee doesn’t offer much by way of a theorization of
fantasy, he nonetheless quite rightly contends that Marxist/Structuralist ac-
counts of ideology are subject to two important critiques. (Coetzee includes an
array of scholars and approaches in his critique. He has in mind here both
Marxist historical scholarship—such as O’Meara (1983)—and historians
working in the Althusserian Structuralist tradition—such as Johnstone (1976)).
Such Marxist/Structuralist accounts fail to grasp not only the fantasmatic
dimension of apartheid ideology but also the fact that this ideology might
entail certain potent non-material rewards for its beneficiaries. This is a vital
consideration, for, as psychoanalytically-minded readers will note, such (libi-
dinal, narcissistic or fantasmatic) rewards may well play an essential role in
driving and maintaining an ideological system. Coetzee contends, further-
more, that existing historiographic accounts are unable to effectively distin-
guish between the historical (or structural) and the subjective forms of agency
at work within apartheid ideology. Lastly—a point of particular fascination
for Coetzee as literary scholar and author—historiographical approaches are
unable to unravel the paradox of ideologues who both self-consciously write
ideology and yet are nevertheless over-written or “possessed” by it.
The method that Coetzee adopts as a means of pursuing these questions is
literary: a painstakingly close reading of the writings of a single—although
prolific—apartheid ideologue, the Afrikaner intellectual Geoffrey Cronjé.
Cronjé’s project, advanced via the production of multiple volumes on the
sociology of segregation (Cronjé 1945, 1946, 1948, 1958) helped provide an
intellectual justification for apartheid. Cronjé scholarship is described by
Dubow (2014) as indicating
the wish to amalgamate Christian-National and romantic nationalist

traditions with a strong emphasis on contemporary social reality. Cronjé’s
writings on apartheid are suffused with visceral fears of racial mixing and
contamination prompted by the dangers of whites and blacks living
adjacent to each other. Cronjé … [evinces an] obsessive preoccupation
with blood purity and [a] horror of mixture and contagion (25).
While there are many texts Coetzee could have selected in his engagement
with the mind of apartheid via a literary lens, this choice is particularly apt,
considering Cronjé’s role as a vanguard intellectual tasked with developing
justifications for apartheid. As Marks and Trapido (1987) note, not only did
Cronjé’s historical writings provide “the most comprehensive theoretical
statement” of apartheid ideology (19), his policy suggestions in fact became
part of apartheid’s statutory regulations. After immersing himself in Cronjé’s
corpus, Coetzee makes reference to Freud’s diagnostic system, describing
Cronjé as “technically” an obsessive. Such a diagnostic assertion should be
seen in relation to Coetzee’s broader anchoring theme of desire. It helps here
to note that obsessionality in Lacanian theory—like hysteria—is always a
(structural) relation to the desire of the Other. Importantly however, the desire
that is evident in Cronjé’s writings is not of the most obvious sort. It is desire
as enacted in relations of repudiation and avoidance—desire, that is, as
modulated by the dynamics of repression—an unconscious form of desire
most often realized as counter-desire. This desire is made apparent in Cronjé’s
“inability to face the desire of black for white or white for black,” and it
“manifests itself in motions of evasion … revulsion and denial” (Coetzee: 11).
Cronjé’s obsessiveness is more immediately evident in a compulsive con-
cern with the perils of mixture—his concern, for example, with degenerate
inter-racial living conditions (deurmekaarwonery) and racial blood-mixing (rasse-
mengelmoes)—which pervade his texts:
What Cronjé … repudiates at every turn, is a desire for mixture. Around

mixture his mind obsessively turns … mixture in its endlessly attractive
and endlessly repulsive allure … It is mixture and the desire for mixture
that is the secret enemy of apartheid … the baffling force that must be
thwarted, imprisoned, shut away (Coetzee 1991: 3).
One is reminded here of how the obsessional’s near infinite list of prohibitions
ultimately functions: to keep a traumatic—yet alluring—jouissance at bay.
Cronjé’s own writings never, of course, address the issue of the (unconscious)
desire that played its part in the production of apartheid ideology. The question
of desire is important to Cronjé, however, even though—as Coetzee (1991)
observes—he raises it in an odd sort of way. The question Cronjé asks of many
whites is why they do not experience a more forceful desire to separate from other
races. In other words, he questions the very lack of “apartheidsgevoel” (the feeling
or drive for racial separation), the absence, in other words, of what he takes to be
a “natural” tendency to segregation within “die Afrikanervolk” (the white
Afrikaner people). As Coetzee (1991) emphasizes, Cronjé’s question thus takes
the defended form of a double negative, “why not the desire not to?” In moments
such as this, Cronjé’s texts open up into the reverse of their intended meaning,
implying, beyond Cronjé’s intention, that there exists in fact none of the instinctual
impulse toward racial segregation that he wishes to find. The same is true of Cronjé’s
incessant declaration that as the distance between whites and non-whites
126 Derek Hook
diminishes, so—here it is worth citing him directly—“Unconsciously a gradual
process of feeling equal (gelykvoeling) … begins to take place” which results in “a
condition of being exposed to blood-mixing” (Cronjé 1945: 58). Coetzee alerts
us to the fact that such a statement can quite easily be read as an argument that
interracial tensions can be in fact reduced by social mixing. The unintended
implications—that is, the unconscious aspect—of Cronjé’s text seems here to
speak louder than his intended message.
Another apparent absence of desire that Cronjé highlights is the void he
takes to exist at the place where Afrikaner men might desire black women.
This is a lack in which Coetzee reads the force of a particular presence, and a
particular defensiveness: “the true force here,” he remarks, “is desire, and its
counterforce, the denial of desire” (1991: 14). Desire may also be said to lie at
the heart of the problem that apartheid endeavors to solve, namely the need
voiced by Cronjé to avoid the degenerative slide into a “mishmash-race”
(mengelmoesras) (Cronjé 1948: 27), an imperative which foregrounds the need to
consistently separate “the white man from the daily view of the black man,” to
thus “ensure that an essentially unattainable white culture and lifestyle do not
become the object of his envious desire” (Coetzee 1948: 15). Coetzee sub-
versively paraphrases Cronjé’s rationale here, interjecting his own suspicions
of Cronjé’s reasoning: segregation will “remove the black man (the black
woman?) from the view of the white man and thus ensure that he (she?) does
not become the object of white desire” (15).
The challenge of apartheid governance for Coetzee, then, is less the control
of dissent than the control of desire. Cronjé’s version of apartheid, Coetzee
suggests, develops precisely as a counterattack upon desire. Coetzee is quick to add
the necessary proviso: one should not ignore apartheid’s origins in greed, just
as one should not elide the complexities of a multifaceted structural history of
oppression. Nonetheless,
the text of apartheid deserves to have restored to it that chapter that has
been all too smoothly glossed over … removed: a denial and a
displacement and retrojection of desire re-enacted in further huge
displaced projects of displacements: the redrawing of the maps of cities,
the re-division of the countryside, the removal and resettling of popula-
tions (1991: 18).
We start to see how productive such a reading of apartheid as desire might be.
As already noted, Fanon proceeds us here, maintaining in Black Skin White
Masks, that for the white man, “the Negro … become[s] the mainstay of his
preoccupations and desires” (1983: 170). This means that the libidinal dyna-
mism of colonial racism cannot be reduced to categorical rejection—or
negation—of the other. Such forms of racism always represent a more com-
plex braiding of envy, desire, and libidinal investment. Stuart Hall’s com-
mentary on Black Skin White Masks (cited in Julien 1995) makes this idea more
evident yet: the psychic dimension of colonial racism—despite its undeniable
brutality and dehumanizing facets—entails always the factor of desire.
What then are the implications of Coetzee’s (1991) analytical insight? Well,
understanding racist ideology as a mode of desire helps us to comprehend the
historical resilience of its related phenomena, and to better understand—referring
here back to the conceptual challenges noted at the beginning of this chapter—the
spread, the recalcitrance and the subjective hold of racism more generally. At a
more technical level, to approach racism via the modalities of desire would be to
highlight how desire, counter-desire, and various associated neurotic operations
(denial, displacement, rejection, condensation and so on) are not merely psychical
in nature but are identifiable also in multiple material and social relations of
segregation.
Racism, I have argued, operates like desire, and desire is always self-
renewing and contagious. It is endlessly generative. It is, furthermore, capable
of structuring our lives. How is this the case? Well, a desire, once sated, leads
to the desire for another associated object—hence Lacan’s notion of the
metonymic operation of desire (and the above characterization of desire as
self-renewing and contagious). As subject to repression, furthermore, desire is
generative inasmuch as it needs to take multiple disguised routes of expression
(as in Freud’s understanding of the dreamwork). It likewise needs to adopt
multiple variant forms (disgust, denial, displacement, counter-desire, etc.).
Crucially, also, desire is expressed in fantasies, both in those fantasies we share
with others and in the more highly particularized form of our own individual
fantasies. Such fantasies, moreover, play a crucial role in conditioning—and,
following Lacanian theory, structuring—our sense of social reality. The
Lacanian concepts of the big Other, alienation, separation and object a will
enable us to extend this theorization of racism as desire in the sections that
follow. First, though, we need to consider the issue of agency for—and
within—apartheid racism.
II. Fantasmatic transactions: exchanges of desire

between subject and Other
Phantom agency
There are at least three regrettable prospective outcomes of the attempt, on
behalf of Marxist/Structuralist theories of ideology, to bracket the con-
sideration of psychical factors (desire, fantasy, libidinal investment, etc.) when
conducting an analysis of ideology. Firstly, we end up with an impoverished
category of the subject. Secondly, we are unable to develop a theoretical
account which does justice to the complex relationship between subjects and
structures (between subjects and the Symbolic Other). Thirdly, it becomes
difficult to bring the distinctive agency of subjects into view, inasmuch as the
agency of the subject is typically collapsed into the agency of structures.
Importantly, these three criticisms apply also to post-structural accounts,
128 Derek Hook
which, as a general rule, exclude psychological/psychoanalytic considerations
from their analyses.2 Building on the foregoing discussion of racism as desire,
this section of the chapter takes up these three crucial issues, referring once
again to Coetzee (1991) and the writings of Cronjé as a means of grounding
our discussion in the apartheid context.
As we have already noted, a central inadequacy that characterizes much
apartheid historiography—and many theorizations of racist ideology—is the
exclusively conscious and rational role that historians have accorded to those
who benefitted from apartheid. This may at first seem a minor point, yet given
a moment’s reflection it seems obvious that apartheid’s beneficiaries were also
subjects of the unconscious whose involvement in apartheid ideology exceeded the
effects of conscious registration. There is, as such, something insufficient about
how agency is construed in traditional accounts of apartheid-as-ideology:
If the ideologist as [conscious] subject writing the text of ideology is one

commonplace, the man in the street as the object upon whom the text is
written, the one made ready to be written on by his subjection to fears
and prejudices that sweep over communities like infections, is another
(Coetzee 1991: 28).
Questions of the authorship of apartheid ideology—much like questions of the

authorship of fantasy—would seem to require a different elaboration of
agency to what one is able to find in structuralist theorizations of ideology.
The analysis of ideology, Coetzee (1991: 28) argues, aims at deciphering, un-
masking, “But who did the original ciphering, the original masking?” Indeed:
Does ideology cipher itself, mask itself, unconsciously, or … is ideology

the creation of a group of people … who appropriate more or less
inchoate popular notions, put them together in a pseudo-system, flesh
them out with the appropriate rhetoric, and use them to further [their]
interests? (28).
Is apartheid ideology a “free-floating, parasitic idea-system running the minds

of its hosts” (Coetzee 1991: 30), or is it an idea system consciously constructed
by apartheid intellectuals? If we respond by affirming that apartheid ideology
is simultaneously both of these, then we are presented with a further question,
namely: how are we to understand the bridging of these two (historical/so-
cietal and subjective) realms of ideology? Furthermore: which of these two
poles should we treat as the preeminent category? A series of inter-related
questions come to the fore at this point, two of which are particularly de-
serving of systematic treatment. Firstly, the question of the primary authorship of
apartheid ideology, a question which leads us to consider the extraordinary type
of authority, the “supra-agency,” that would have to underwrite this au-
thorship. Secondly, a question that seems to particularly vex Coetzee: how
might we conceive of the ostensibly “extra-ideological” position that the
authors of apartheid aspired to in the process of scripting apartheid ideology?
In this respect, we are not concerned so much with a level of agency above that
of the subject—with structures, in other words, that “over-write” the
subject—as with the manoeuvring of ideologues who attempt to temporarily step
outside of everyday ideological discourse so as to better tinker with and amend
its constructions.
These may seem ill-conceived questions. There is, surely, no “extra-
ideological” position from which to write ideology. One cannot escape Žižek’s
(1989) oft-repeated refrain here: any imagined stepping outside of ideology is
ideology at its purest. In much the same vein, Lacanian theory tells us: “There
is no metalanguage, no Other of the Other.” Nonetheless we could ask: is
such an external status not presumed—or at least aspired to—in the fash-
ioning of propaganda? Does such a task not require that one maintain a
minimal degree of reflexive distance from one’s own ideological productions?
(An interesting implication comes to the fore: if such subjects were responding
to apartheid’s need to reproduce a systematic ideological justification, then
surely the greatest truth of this system is its own apparent untruth, the fact of
its very need for ideologization?) This was Cronjé’s mandate after all: the
sustained development of ideological notions that would, in due course, be-
come the spontaneous everyday beliefs for the Afrikanervolk. The implication
here is that such authors are themselves caught up in the spell of the ideology that they are
conjuring. The predictable (post)structuralist riposte to this situation of “step-
ping outside of ideology” is that we have over-stated the agency of the subject
tasked with crafting ideology. We should start our analysis—following this line
of critique—with neither the intention of the author nor the assumption that
they are able to transcend the ideological system. We might have then, as
more viable working assumption, something akin to a self-perpetuating system
that proliferates simply for the purpose of extending itself, the situation of a
discourse whose predominant goal, to quote Edward Said, is “to maintain
itself … to manufacture its material continually” (1983: 216). Is this what we
need to apprehend, the equivalent of an ideological virus, a parasite that
attaches itself to a society of subjects, certain of whom, for a limited time, act
as its privileged points of articulation? This is not an idea that can be sum-
marily dismissed: the combined momentum of historical, institutional and
material relations of force proves a pivotal consideration in understanding the
persistence of apartheid ideology.
Lacanian theory appears to have a ready answer to Coetzee’s (1991) di-
lemma concerning the authorship of apartheid and the “supra-agency” such
an authorship would necessarily seem to entail. The Lacanian big Other,
whether approached as the battery of signifiers (Lacan 1993), as the “locus of
Speech … [and] Truth’s witness,” (Lacan 2006: 683) or the transference-
inducing “subject supposed to know” (Lacan 1979: 267) (to cite just a few of
Lacan’s many descriptions of the idea) seems precisely the concept that
Coetzee’s (1991) analysis calls for. This Other is, after all, the trans-subjective
postulate that exists a level above individual subjects and that plays the part of
130 Derek Hook
coordinating their everyday ideological interactions and presumptions. What
better conceptualization can we find of the supra-agency that Coetzee’s cri-
tique invokes? There are certainly moments in which Cronjé’s work—in fact,
in which Cronjé himself as a subject—seems to operate precisely as a conduit
for the desire of the apartheid big Other. Utilizing this big Other concept
helps us to reformulate Coetzee’s related question regards the manoeuvring of
ideologues. What, we can ask, would be required to determine the contents
the big Other’s beliefs? Or—a further psychoanalytic inflection—what would
be required for one to assume the task of scripting social fantasies?
Though the notion of the big Other will be a crucial explanatory component
in what follows, it yet seems clear—even, one presumes, for Lacanians—that
there is something unsatisfactory about positing the Other as the primary au-
thor of racist ideology. Such a suggestion might be read as implying that it is
most fundamentally the big Other who is racist, that racism as ideology exists
principally at this “overdetermining” level. In short: too much of a focus on the
agency of the big Other risks collapsing subjective accountability into this
analytical category. It helps here to recall that this is precisely one of the
concerns that motivated Coetzee’s critique—and his project of a detailed
reading of a singular apartheid ideologue—in the first place: structuralist ac-
counts of racist ideology seem unable to grasp the subjective investments that in-
dividuals have in their own versions of a given racist fantasy. Such accounts of
structural agency seem curiously devoid of human passions. The risk taken in
pursuing such a line of analysis is that the factors of desire, irrationality and
enjoyment are elided within such accounts of historical change. Removing
passionate human subjects from the equation leads us to ask a naïve question:
why would the Other—in and of itself—continue to insist on racist ideology? It
is worth noting that these questions regards the limitations of Structuralist
theories of ideology in accounting for the agency of the subject are fore-
shadowed in Lacanian theory itself.
The foregoing discussion enables us to reframe the conceptual task ahead.
We need to understand the interchange, or, as I prefer, the transaction, between
these (subjective/structural) levels of ideological activity. We must grasp how
subjects—like Cronjé himself—are active as agents in an authorial ideological
process which nonetheless at times effectively overdetermines them. This
switch-back effect between moments when the subject is spoken by the Other,
and when the subject voices their own distinctive fantasmatic articulations of
ideology (as in Cronjé’s idiosyncratic apartheid visions), is not a process that
has been adequately explained by existing accounts of apartheid ideology. We
are better placed now to appreciate the degree of complexity that will be
required in addressing questions of ideological agency and authorship, espe-
cially so in situations where subject and Other are not clearly distinct. Such a
state of affairs, most evident in apparent oscillations between subjective and
structural agency, indicates the need to consider the role of the unconscious,
and the unconscious understood in the precise Lacanian sense of the subjective
locus of the Other. This lies at the forefront of what a Lacanian perspective brings
to these dilemmas of ideology: an attention to the joint imbrication of the
subject within the Other, and, correspondingly, of the Other within the
subject. Lacanian theory helps us understand the complexity of the mutual
enmeshment of the trans-subjective socio-historical “substance” of the big
Other and the unconscious of the individual subject of ideology. Coetzee’s
critique of ideological accounts of racism sounds more Lacanian by the mo-
ment: not only must desire be factored into historical analyses of apartheid, so
must the issue of the subject-Other relation. This is a relation, furthermore,
which has a crucial unconscious dimension, which involves the subject’s
(transferential) positing of what it is the Other wants.
Lacan as theorist of apartheid ideology

We have then, to recap, theorized apartheid as a problem of desire, as an
ideological system necessarily involving some as of yet unspecified exchange
between subjective and structural elements. The suitability of Lacanian psy-
choanalysis to the task at hand seems evident. A Lacanian standpoint is clearly
not one that doubts the centrality of desire in subjectivity; it certainly does not
shy away from the complexities and ambiguities of the subject-Other relation.
It proves helpful here, in grounding our concerns with apartheid ideology,
to cite a section from Cronjé’s writings in which the question of desire—both
his own, and that of the Afrikaner nation-community—seems clearly fore-
grounded:
There are whites, born in this country, who have degenerated to such an
extent in respect of morality, self-respect and racial pride that they feel no
objection against blood-mixing … Whites must protect themselves
against these conscienceless and criminal blood-mixers by … making
all blood-mixing (illegal intercourse) punishable. The individual is responsible
to his community for all his activities. The nation-community (volksgemeenskap) is
entitled to call to the dock everyone who acts in conflict with its highest
interest … For the interest of the nation (volksbelang) always outweighs
personal interest (eiebelang) (Cronjé’s emphasis, 1945: 47).
In the closing pages of Seminar XI Lacan reminds us that desire, for Spinoza “is
the essence of man” (1979: 275). For Lacan—in this respect much like
Spinoza—desire is linked to questions of being, and it retains always a relation
to that which the subject is lacking. Desire, which is, significantly, always
mediated by the desire of others, by the big Other of the Symbolic Order,
“constitutes the alienated, “extimate” … (“externally intimate”) … essence of
our reality” (Stavrakakis 2007: 47). We can relate this issue of desire—which is
always sustained and shaped by fantasy, for fantasy effectively tells me what it
is that I desire—to a reoccurring question: “What does the Other want?”
Despite that there will be countless variations of this question—which, to
clarify, is never so much an intellectual question as an orientation of being—the
132 Derek Hook
same basic type of appeal and the same addressee (the big Other, broadly
construed) is involved.
We can make illustrative reference to early childhood as a way of dra-
matizing this idea. “What does she (the mOther) want?” provides us with the
elementary form of this question, which can, of course, be realized in multiple
variants (“How can I be what she wants?,” “What does she most desire?,”
“How might I epitomize this desire?”). Something like a riddle of desire
emerges here: I desire to be that which she desires, and in this way I myself
effectively come to be a desiring being. Fink puts this well: “in the child’s
attempt to grasp what remains essentially indecipherable in the Other’s desire
… the child’s own desire is founded; the Other’s desire begins to function as
the cause of the child’s desire” (1995: 59).
We have arrived thus at the Lacanian formula according to which “Desire
is the desire of the Other.” Three implications of this relation to the Other’s
desire are worth reiterating. The Other’s desire ignites my desire, sets it in
motion, causing me to desire what they desire, firstly. This desire becomes
what I want to be, inasmuch as I desire to be their object of desire, secondly.
Furthermore, I come to desire not just the same things, but in the same way—as
this desiring Other; I take on their “perspective of desire” and am thereby
similarly located in the social field of desires, thirdly. Clearly then, the sub-
ject’s relation to (the Other’s) desire—such a crucial factor in the various
problems of ideology broached above—is of considerable complexity.
Bearing in mind the risks of an overly literal or reductive interpretation, we can
already identify a series of crucial elements of desire within the above cited extract
from Cronjé. There is a crisis—indeed, a lack—that he responds to, namely a
relative absence of white racial pride, or, to use his chosen signifier, of “apar-
theidsgevoel” (apartheid-feeling) amongst his fellow Afrikaners. The lack of this
desired quality is aligned to the horrors of racial blood-mixing (rasse-mengelmoes),
and it is a lack, furthermore, which the Other—in this instance, the nation-
community (volksgemeenskap)—suffers from. Bearing in mind that “Desire is always
the desire of the Other,” we can assume: (1) that Cronjé’s own desire is ignited by
this lack within the volksgemeenskap, that is, by what the volksgemeenskap is imagined to
desire by way of response to lack, (2) that Cronjé will attempt to be—to enact in
his being as subject—what the volksgemeenskap is presumed to desire, and (3) that
he will assume the same desiring position as the volksgemeenskap, that he will desire
in the same way as this instantiation of the big Other.
Our exposition of Lacanian theory is not yet complete, however. Returning
to the childhood scenario introduced above: the child’s eventual realization is
that the goal of ever fully embodying the mOther’s desire is futile. The
mOther’s desire is neither static nor unchanging; it proves always to exceed
what the child is capable of incarnating within themselves. The child must
thus come to understand themselves as lacking (the destiny of all neurotic
subjects), that is, as inadequate to the task of ever completely personifying this
desire. Moreover—and this is the moment which heralds the possibility of a
type of separation from the Other—the child glimpses that the mOther herself
is fundamentally characterized by incompletion, is ontologically lacking, and not
merely in a contingent, object-reliant way that might be remedied by the child
themselves. This is what is means to be an essentially desiring being: to be
necessarily incomplete, to be defined more by one’s lack than one’s (apparent)
substantiality; it is to be lack subjectivized. It is structurally impossible for the
child to ever fully incarnate the mOther’s desire, both because this desire
cannot be satisfied by any object and because the mOther is never fully sure
what she herself wants. We have two types of lack then, and a situation in which
what is essential to the subject—the question of their desire—is set in motion,
made to move along this circuit of questioning (“What does the Other want?,”
“What do I want?,” “Well, what does the Other want?”) that joins two barred
positions. It is this circuit of questioning that underlies the production of
unconscious fantasy. My argument is that it is just this exchange—this
transaction—that will enable us to think the relation between subjectivity and
structure in apartheid ideology.
By making reference back to Cronjé, we can see that the situation is not so
simple as a single transaction in which he, Cronjé, the apartheid intellectual,
intuits the lack/desire of the Other, makes it his own, and attempts to provide
what the Other desires. True enough, the initial steps of the process can be
described this way. After all, Cronjé’s vocation as vanguard apartheid in-
tellectual does suggest that he did attempt to be—to enact in his being as a
subject—that which would remedy the lack in the Other.3 Nonetheless, as
Lacan explains, this process—much like desire itself—is ongoing, unending,
and always characterized by uncertainty. This much seems evident inasmuch as
Cronjé’s many scholarly “solutions” to the related crises of apartheidsgevoel and
miscegenation retain an open-ended, never-finished aspect. For Cronjé, one
senses, there is always more to be said on these topics; these are abiding pre-
occupations which remain, in an important sense, unsatisfied and—drawing
here on the descriptions of desire offered above—self-renewing, endlessly
generative. An unceasing circularity of movement is produced in this interac-
tion between subject and the Other, a circularity of movement which never
gives way to stasis or completion.
Not only is this subject-Other exchange unending, it is also importantly
unbalanced. Lacan stresses that it would be a mistake to assume that there is a
parity between the lacks that exist in the exchange between subject and
Other. There are two different levels of lack in question, hence Lacan’s
qualification: “The relation of the subject to the Other is entirely produced in
a process of gap” (1979: 206). The questioning engagement between the
subject and Other is circular, yet it is so in a very particular sense. This
circularity does not imply a two-way process; it is, says Lacan, “circular, but, of
its nature, without reciprocity … it is dissymmetrical (1979: 207). So, im-
portantly, while there is an exchange of sorts between lacks, the two lacks in
question are of different orders, and they do not attain a relation of equiva-
lence; this is not akin to a dialogue between equals. It is interesting in this
respect to note just how pronounced the lack in the Other appears to be for
134 Derek Hook
Cronjé. He is called upon not only to denounce the “criminal blood-mixers”
but also to affirm that the interests of the Other (the volksgemeenskap) “always
outweigh … personal interest” (Cronjé 1945: 47). This lack in the Other is
clearly compelling for him—and for the Afrikanervolk, more generally.
Alienation in the Symbolic Other

Importantly, not only is the question of my desire entangled in the Other, so too
is the question of identification, of my social being, of my Symbolic location, of what
I am to others. The desire of the Other—that is, in other words, of the trans-subjective
Symbolic order itself—is crucial in any attempt to ground an identity within the
socio-historical coordinates in which I find myself. This is a crucial point regards
our agenda of better understanding apartheid ideology and the blurring of
structural and subjective agency. The desire of the Other does more than incur
my own desire; it is foundational for the very possibility of Symbolic identifica-
tion. There is, in a very significant sense, no viable Symbolic identification
available to me without assuming a position relative to this desire of the Other.
This was why I emphasized that one implication of Lacan’s “Desire is the desire
of the Other” is that the subject assumes the Other’s “perspective of desire” and is, as
such, similarly located in the Other’s field of desires. This is not best understood
as a constrictive or limiting state of affairs—such a field of desires allows for a
multitude of variations and vicissitudes. It does mean, however, that once the
subject is Symbolically identified with the Other’s desire, their own subjective
desire can effectively function as a conduit for the Other’s. The prospect of such
seamless continuity between the Other’s desire and the subject’s calls to mind the
continuous undifferentiated surface of the moebius strip, which, of course, allows
for undisturbed movement from one side of the strip to the other.
This theorization of Symbolic identification via—and indeed, with—the
desire of the Other helps us grasp the situation in which subjects seem to be
simultaneously overdetermined by ideology and yet nonetheless possessed of
agency enough to impress their own subjectivity upon that ideology. What I
referred to as the fundamental overlap and/or ambiguity between structure
and subjectivity now seems easier to grasp. The idea of a circuit of questioning
between the subject and the desire of the Other gives us a basis with which to
theorize the “switch-back effect” of ideology by means of which the subject is
both spoken by the Other yet nonetheless still capable of voicing their own
fantasmatic articulations of the Other’s desire. And should we have any doubt
about the latter assertion, it is worth emphasizing that in a very significant
sense Cronje’s fantasies—particularly in respect of the horror of blood-
mixing—became apartheid’s fantasies.
Separation: an overlapping of lacks

When, in Seminar XI, Lacan asserts that “The Other is the locus in which is
situated the chain of the signifier that governs whatever may be made … of
the subject” (1979: 203), he is stressing the inescapability of Symbolic alie-
nation for the subject. As inescapable as this alienation is, it does not account
for the entirety of the subject’s relation to the Other. This relation is also one
characterized by separation:
Alienation and separation are linked … they install the subject in a never
ending pulsating process of appearing and disappearing. Alienation takes
the subject away from being, in the direction of the Other. Separation is
the opposite process, inasmuch as it redirects the subject towards its
being, thus opening a possibility of escape from all-determining aliena-
tion, and even a possibility of choice, albeit a precarious one (Verhaeghe
1999: 180).
If the Other were no more than a closed structure, then the subject’s destiny
would be one of inescapable alienation.4 In this respect we may refer back to
the infant-relationship: there must here be some possibility of differentiation
from the mOther, a strict identity cannot be maintained between mOther’s
and child’s desire. A gap of sorts must open, otherwise unbearable
anxiety—or the prospect of psychosis—will result. As discussed above, there is
a point of realization in which the subject grasps that the Other, like them-
selves, is also characterized by lack. The moment of respite represented by
separation provides the subject an opportunity; “it enables [the subject] … to
avoid total alienation in the signifier not by filling out his lack but by allowing
him to identify himself, his own lack, with the lack in the Other” (Žižek
1989: 122).
This means that there are two dimensions to the Other. The Other is not only
the treasury of signifiers; it is also lacking, a site characterized by a certain desire. It
is this additional dimension to the Other that makes separation possible. Soler
(1995) clarifies that in separation we are dealing with “another aspect of the
Other, not the Other full of signifiers [as evident in alienation] but … the Other
in which something is lacking” (49). A fundamental facet of separation is a co-
incidence of lacks, and furthermore—again a sense of circularity—the fact that the
subject attempts to offer an answer to the lack of the Other, responding to it with
his or her own lack. The desire of the Other, as we have seen, presents a
question—“What does s/he want?”—a question inevitably
countered by another question—do I possess what he wants? What is it in

me that could possibly satisfy this desire? So the subject is ultimately put
in a position of offering not only what s/he has, but essentially what s/he
doesn’t possess—and this is precisely Lacan’s definition of love … “to give
what one doesn’t have (Dolar 1998: 24).
This response of the lacking subject in a circular, non-reciprocal pattern of

questioning, is nicely captured by Verhaeghe (1999). He stresses that the in-
consistency of the Other “is answered by a presentation of the lack at the
136 Derek Hook
anterior level,” that of the subject’s own disappearance, “[h]ence the non-
reciprocity and dissymmetry, by which the process topples over into the di-
rection of alienation again (1999: 181). We have a corrective then to the idea
that separation simply transcends, overcomes the everyday dialectics of alie-
nation. Important also is an emphasis on the fleeting nature of this moment, of
the void which opens up between subject and Object. This moment allows the
possibility of an escape from the determinism of the signifying chain even
though it invariably collapses back into a state of alienation. So, by contrast to
the process of alienation, separation does give rise to a viable form of being.
This form of being is, however, of a profoundly transient and elusive sort, as
implied by Fink’s (1995) descriptions of the subject as a pulse-like movement
or a momentary flash between being and meaning. And isn’t this
description—of a pulse-like movement—a perfect way of conceptualizing the
constant exchange between agency of the Other and the agency of the subject
that is so pronounced in apartheid racism? What this conceptualization
means, furthermore, is that Cronjé’s varied apartheid rationalizations (1945,
1946, 1948), like the many signifiers he accordingly deploys (such as, for
example, that of the Afrikaner volksgemeenskap (nation-community) as it is
threatened by deurmekaarwonery (senseless racially-undivided living conditions)
and rasse-mengelmoes (mishmashes of race) (see Coetzee 1991) are not simply
determined in a top-down fashion but are, in a significant sense, his own,
offerings of his lack.
The sublime object (a) of apartheid ideology

What emerges from the situation of separation is the object of fantasy, the object-
cause of desire, the Lacanian object a. Object a for Fink (1995) is the remainder
of the hypothetical mOther-child (subject-Other) unity, the last trace and
reminder of this posited overlap of desires:
By cleaving to this rem(a)inder, the split subject, though expulsed from

the Other, can sustain the illusion of wholeness; by clinging to [object a],
the subject is able to ignore his or her division (Fink 1995: 59).
Object a, the object-cause of desire, is generated in response to the double lack of

subject and Other. It is the result of the subject’s attempt to retrieve a scrap of an
illusory subject-Other wholeness. This object a, forever fascinating, arousing, will
sustain the subject in being, as a being of desire. With the object a we are dealing with
what Žižek (2000) terms the subject’s “objectal counterpart,” which is put to work
as means of covering the lack in the Other. Its paradoxical status is thus already
clear: it belongs wholly neither to the subject nor the Other. It is, as we might put
it, the convexity of the subject’s lack, but given that it functions to paper-over the
Other’s lack—and so to fantasmatically restore them—it may equally be said to
be the convexity of the Other’s lack, that which grants it a degree of consistency,
lends it a semblance of wholeness, completeness.
So, to add to our earlier theorization, what is involved in the subject-Other
exchange is not just a circuit of questioning in which the vital question of
desire rebounds off an ultimately inconsistent or not-whole Other. There is
also, in addition to this, a return-effect of this questioning -object a- which, when
posed in the form of fantasy, holds the promise of an answer to both the desire
of the Other and to the split, “out of jointness” of the subject. This impossible
object is assumed to hold the key both to the enigma concerning the subject’s
place within the Symbolic order and to the question of what would harmonize
the otherwise incomplete and/or divided social order. It is for this reason that
we may think of this circuit of desire—this particular type of questioning and
its posited fantasy-object outcome—as a fantasmatic transaction. The a is the
very object of this transaction, the fantasmatic object that roots racism as
ideology. Any instance of ideology critique should, as such, absolutely prior-
itize the identification of object a. Any ideology—or narrative of racism—pivots
on this point of lack with the promise of how both the lacking subject and the
lacking Other might be restored (hence, to cite a recent (unavoidable) ex-
ample, Donald Trump’s claim to “Make America great again”).
Where do we see this in Cronjé’s writings? What is the ideological fantasy
object a that emerges in the apartheid subject’s separation from the Other, and
that serves both to cover over lack and to sustain desire? We do well here to
look to Cronjé’s ceaseless generation of signifiers by way of response to the
Other’s lack. Perhaps the most crucial example in this respect is Cronjé’s
constant compaction of nouns with the prefix Afrikaner, so that we have, for
example: Afrikanerbloed (Afrikaner-blood), Afrikanermoeder (Afrikaner-mother),
Afrikanergesin (Afrikaner-family), Afrikanerplaas (Afrikaner-farm). Cronjé’s lin-
guistic inventiveness is occasioned—as we have seen—by concerns with the
racial degeneracy of those whites who “feel no objection to blood-mixing”
(1945: 47). This grammatical operation, says Coetzee (1991),
carries a heavy ideological freight, both conscious and unconscious …

Unconsciously it is a morphological figure of introversion, exclusion,
enclosure, embrace. It looks forward to a time when there will be literally
thousands of nouns starting Afrikaner (p. 7).
The prefix Afrikaner-, functions as “a morphological and lexical metaphor for

Afrikanereie, the uniqueness of Afrikanerness” (Coetzee 1991: 7). This, I would
argue, is the sublime object of apartheid ideology, the signifier “Afrikanereie,”
the singular and non-replaceable quality of the Afrikaner people, who, to
again cite Dubow (2014), saw themselves as “white African, torchbearers of
Christian civilization drawn together by a unique culture and calling” (17).
Afrikanereie is the libidinal treasure (in Lacan’s earlier work, the agalma), the
fantasmatic object a of the Afrikanervolk which sustains desire and enables the
illusion of wholeness; it is that which, to use a Lacanian turn of phrase, is in
them more than them.
138 Derek Hook
Is the big Other racist?
We understand now that the big Other was not wholly responsible for the
racism of apartheid. The Other, differently put, was a necessary but not a
sufficient condition for the machinery of apartheid ideology to be set in motion.
True, this Other, as the trans-subjective embodiment of white colonial values,
was, indeed, deeply racist. Yet here, as elsewhere, it is imperative to reiterate
that the Other retains the transferential status of presumption. As Žižek (1997)
reminds us, the Other is posited, “virtualized” by subjects precisely as a means
of making sense of an opaque set of social relations. We are not, to reiterate,
dealing with the big Other as the apparent objectivity of social structure or as
an aggregated set of social facts, but with the Other as a vector of transfer-
ence, as “the subject supposed to know” (Lacan 1979: 267). The apartheid
Other cannot, as such, be divorced from the subjects who transmitted and
replicated its values, subjects who remained thoroughly implicated in the ideological
universe thus engendered.
Structure, we might say, is never just structure in Lacanian theory but is
always subject to transference, infused with and elaborated by the libidinal
productions of subjective fantasy. By the same token: the virus-like re-
production of ideologies that function in a way that seems removed from the
authorial agency of individuals is never completely “extra-subjective” but
remains charged with the jouissance of its participating subjects. In respect of
apartheid ideology we can concede a type of supra-agency (the trans-
subjectivity of the historical big Other) as a paramount consideration—one
which at times certainly does over-write or determine the utterances/actions
of the subject—without accepting that it wholly exhausts their subjectivity. It is striking
to note in this respect the degree to which Cronjé was the faithful
mouthpiece—or, in more Lacanian terms, the point of enunciation—of
apartheid ideology. He gave fresh and emboldened articulations to long-
standing notions of Afrikaner Nationalism, to the folk-ethology of the Boereras
(race of the Boers/Afrikaner) and to the mythical idea of the Afrikanervolk. In
this respect Cronjé’s role was essentially that of conduit for the desire of the
Other. And yet it is equally striking how Cronjé’s (1945) obsessional concerns
regards the threat of miscegenation came to be replicated in subsequent
apartheid legislation that so clearly mirrored his own anxieties. The infamous
Immorality Act of 1950, which banned any form of inter-racial sexual
contact—an Act which was in many ways the direct statutory outcome of
Cronjé’s fantasmatic preoccupations—was one of the first legislative acts of
the apartheid government.
Two qualifications need to be made here as a means of expanding our
understanding of the role of fantasy and desire, and indeed, of accountability
and subjectivization. The first involves the notion of jouissance. To be sure, the
idea of alienation discussed above makes it clear that the subject is the result of
the Other (determined by the chain of signifiers, etc.). Nevertheless—and here
we have a clinical pragmatic insisted upon already by Freud—the subject remains
utterly responsible for their jouissance. Zupančič (2000) makes a useful adjoining
point: despite Lacan’s de-psychologizing of the subject, that is, his repeated
emphasis on the alienation of the signifier, he nevertheless insists on an ir-
reducible element of jouissance as the proof of the subject’s existence. What this
means then, is that apartheid’s white subjects remain accountable for each
element of transgressive enjoyment they experienced, be it by means of the
pleasures of racist hatred or by means of the narcissistic superiority of
Afrikanervolk identifications. (Interestingly, Cronjé’s very use of the term
“apartheidsgevoel” (apartheid-feeling) appears to betray this fact, that apartheid
ideology required not just a set of obvious libidinal investments, but a certain
operation of jouissance, a particular ordering of enjoyment).
A second qualification concerns the difference between the desire of the
Other and the “individuated” status of the subject’s fantasy. This is a dis-
tinction which returns us to the earlier differentiation between the alienated
reproduction of signifiers within the field of the Other, and the fantasy pro-
ductions enabled by separation and supported by given modes of jouissance.
This is the paradoxical aspect of fantasy that psychoanalysis helps us under-
stand: fantasy is both that which lies at the very core of our subjectivity—it is
that which more than anything else constitutes what is irreducible about
us—despite that it cannot be absolutely detached from the field of the Other.
How do we make sense of this paradox? By making it clear that fantasy is
always dependent on the Other, inasmuch as fantasy is an answer, in the form
of the subject’s lack, to the enigma of the Other’s desire.
And yet fantasy is, nonetheless, in a very significant sense, singular, au-
tonomous. Fantasy is the invention of the subject; it is their unconscious response
offered by way of an answer to the lack of the Other. Fantasy cannot as such
be reduced to the Other; it is of the subject. The Other does not generate
fantasies, as Salecl (1998) insists, any more than it enjoys, partakes of jouissance.
Taking into account both of these considerations—that the subject remains
accountable for their jouissance and the status of fantasy as the singular invention of
the subject—we can assert that the subject does possess agency in the ostensibly
over-determining force of ideology. This is further evidence then that racism
cannot be the sole preserve of the Other, that it must, by contrast, be viewed
as a negotiated transaction of desire between the subject and the Other.
The rewards of fantasy

Let us recap as we move toward a conclusion. My argument thus far has been
that it is via the complexities of the alienation/separation, subject-Other re-
lation (inclusive of the object a thus produced) that we may better understand
the ambiguities and paradoxes of ideological agency in apartheid. The twin
processes of alienation and separation offer an answer as to whether ideolo-
gues are able to stand outside the frame of their ideological world. The an-
swer, to simplify matters somewhat, is both “yes” and “no.” It is “no”
inasmuch as such subjects are thoroughly alienated within the big Other,
140 Derek Hook
alienated that is, within the trans-subjective network of ideological beliefs and
values that they, as subjects, play such an essential role in reiterating and
extending. It is “yes” inasmuch as separation allows them a degree of sus-
pension from alienation, even if their individual fantasies are nonetheless
fashioned as responses to the Other’s lack. Crucially, the result of any
separation—the coincidence of the lack of subject and Other—is the sublime
object a of ideology, that libidinal treasure (be it, in Cronjé’s writings, the
Afrikanervolk as torchbearers of civilization, the racial purity of the Boereras, or,
as I have argued, the factor of Afrikanereire), which fires the imagination—and
the jouissance—of the ideological subject’s own particularized fantasmatic in-
vestments in the ideology.
With this Lacanian framework of ideas in place, let us return now to the
provisional answer that Coetzee (1991) himself develops in response to his
suspicion that apartheid ideology required some order of rewards to function.
Coetzee, to recall, suggests that we should consider the possibility of certain
intangible rewards—or, as we might add, modes of enjoyment—that not only
eclipse the terms of clear-cut financial or material gain, but that exceed
common sense notions of benefit. One response to the question of what
continued to propel the ideological system of apartheid—aside from the ob-
vious incentives of capital—is the rewards of ideology itself. We see this suggestion
in Marks & Trapido’s (1987) speculation regarding the gains of certain
“ideological rewards.” At first glance we—like Coetzee—might treat this
answer with a degree of scepticism; surely the notion of an ideological reward
is a contradiction in terms, especially so if “reward” must ultimately be traced
back to a material incentive? Then again, the idea that ideology is not just a
means to an end but is itself capable of generating nonmaterial rewards,
makes a good deal of sense psychoanalytically. (We might cite Octave
Mannoni (1990) here: “The ‘colonial’ is not looking for profit only … he is
greedy for other—psychological—satisfactions” (1990: 32–33). More directly
yet, we can point to the narcissistic gain implied by the racist’s reiteration of
their own supposed racial superiority or to the masturbatory jouissance entailed
in elevating one’s own culture or history to the imagined position of ultimate
(phallic) desirability. And then there is the gratification of hate itself, which, as
Jaqueline Rose (2007) remarks, is one of our most satisfying passions, even
more so, we might add, once institutionally affirmed as a basic principle of
governance.
We are approaching here Coetzee’s insight that the ideological rewards of
apartheid were not those of material gain alone but entailed also those of a
very different type of possession: particular fantasmatic possessions. This is the
closest he feels he comes to a satisfying answer regards the nonmaterial re-
wards of ideology—namely, that apartheid entailed a type of “phantasmatic
reward” (1991: 29). This intriguing thesis is, regrettably, left undeveloped.
Coetzee, moreover, seems less than convinced with the examples he supplies,
the notion, for instance, that the idea of racial purity was itself a “phantas-
matic reward” (1991: 29), as was the prohibition against inter-racial sex
implemented by apartheid’s aforementioned Immorality Act of 1950. While it
is unfortunate that Coetzee doesn’t elaborate any further on these ideas, it
should be clear from the above discussion that what he calls a fantasmatic
reward is precisely Lacan’s object a. In short, the spread, the recalcitrance, and
the subjective hold of apartheid had much to do with the fact that the ex-
change between apartheid’s (white) ideological subjects and the apartheid big
Other engendered a series of fantasmatic objects. It is in this way,
presumably,—Coetzee does not spell out this facet of the argument—that the
image of the pure Boereras (race of Boers/Afrikaners) is affirmed, the political
ideals of the Afrikanervolk are consolidated, and the value of the object a of
Afrikanereie is enshrined.
The guarding of such fantasmatic possessions is painfully apparent in
Cronjé’s writing, virtually all of which—as we have seen—is concerned with
the shoring-up of the mythical identity of the Afrikanevolk. This, for him, is a
fantasmatic entity more precious than any material cost incurred in its pro-
tection. What is equally apparent here is the extent to which such fantasmatic
properties—or, indeed, modes of enjoyment—are typically posed alongside
equally fantasmatic threats. Cronjé’s sublime object of the Afrikanereire always
exists alongside multiple perils, be they those of uitbastering (bastardization),
mengelmoes-samelewing (the degenerative effects of races living amongst one
another), or the catastrophic scenario invoked by the title of his (1945) book,
‘n Tuiste vir die Nageslag, which can be translated as “our descendants will cease
to exist as whites” (Coetzee 1991: 8). Interestingly, Cronjé seems just as—if
not more—inventive when it comes to conceptualizing threats to the
Afrikanervolk as he does is respect of coining signifiers for the object a of the
apartheid Other. We have thus a confirmation of the Lacanian thesis ac-
cording to which fantasy not only veils but also stages castration. Or, to adopt
the corresponding conceptualization offered by Žižek (1997) apropos political
ideology: fantasy is always divided between its beatific, stabilizing aspect
(Fantasy 1), and its vexing, radically destabilizing aspect, which forms the basis
of exaggerated threats (Fantasy 2). For Cronjé, these two facets of fantasy are
represented by the uniqueness and treasured racial superiority of the
Afrikaner race, first (Fantasy 1), and the harrowing promise of racial degen-
eration, the catastrophic future where the descendants of Afrikaners will no
longer be white (Fantasy 2). The dynamic interplay of these aspects should not
be lost on us: the beatific dimension of fantasy functions to mask a structural
impossibility (the prospects of a pure racially homogenous Afrikaner nation
existing in an isolated state within the Southern Africa subcontinent), whereas
the second dimension provides the reason—and typically also the
scapegoat—for why such an inherent impossibility could not be realized, the
degenerative slide into a “mishmash-race” (mengelmoesras) resulting from racial
blood-mixing (rasse-mengelmoes) perpetrated by “conscienceless and criminal
blood-mixers” (Cronjé 1945: 47).
There is one further facet of Coetzee’s argument worth noting. He queries
whether Marks and Trapido (1978), who supplied the notion of the “ideological
142 Derek Hook
rewards,” might not be read as suggesting that the electorate and the legislators alike
of the crucial 1948 election that ushered in the apartheid era were caught in a
“phantasmatic transaction” (1991: 29). Once again, he veers off from the intri-
guing psychoanalytic implications such an answer affords, although he does
approvingly suggest that in this depiction “no rigid line is drawn between the
constructors of the ideology, and those who misperceive the world through the
lens it provides” (1991: 29). Despite that Coetzee’s intuition can be critiqued for
being reducible to a single crucial event—as we have seen, any fantasmatic
transaction is ongoing, effectively endless—his insight is sound. It is then precisely
by means of the concept of fantasy as an exchange between levels of ideological agency that
Coetzee (1991) attempts to answer his own question—the question we have
answered via Lacanian theory—in respect of whether apartheid ideology was a
parasitic idea-system or the conscious construction of apartheid ideologues.
Coetzee’s intuition (“no rigid line is drawn”) is correct, although he is ultimately
unable to substantiate it or shed any light on the psychical processes which un-
derlie such a transaction. For this we need turn to Lacanian theory, which—at
the risk of repetition—tells us that apartheid is a parasitic idea-system that is
embodied in the Other and that overdetermines its ideologues (within the process
of alienation). However, apartheid is also an idea-system constructed by its
ideologues inasmuch as it is a fantasmatic response to the Other’s lack (the
process of separation). We see in this respect how the white subjects of apartheid
ideology assume a role of agency: by virtue of their fantasmatic transactions with
the Other, and more specifically yet, their production—and, we might add,
enjoyment—of particularized objects a (fantasmatic rewards) that they have offered in
response to the Other’s perceived lack. Such fantasmatic objects occur at the level
of social discourse—being developed and refined precisely by ideologues such as
Cronjé—and yet they also retain a distinctive and particularized unconscious
form for each individual subject. This particularized object a is the invention of the
subject. It is a function of their agency, and they remain responsible both for it
and for the enjoyment associated with it.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have built upon several of the most intriguing critiques and
conceptualizations advanced in Coetzee’s (1991) paper, “The mind of
apartheid.” Doing this, with the aid of Lacanian psychoanalysis—and Lacan’s
notions of alienation and separation more particularly—has opened up a
series of interesting perspectives not only on the tenacious hold of “mad”
ideological systems and the ties that bind subjects to the Other but also on the
complicated patterns of authorship, agency and causality involved. While
there is a growing literature dealing with Lacanian approaches to race and
racial identity, very little of this work foregrounds the notion of racism as
ideology; setting up a dialogue of sorts between Coetzee’s analysis and
Lacanian social theory has hopefully highlighted the importance of factoring
the critique of ideology into this growing tradition.
Moving between Coetzee’s account and Lacanian theory has enabled us to
underscore the force of desire in the production of racist ideology and to
highlight the need to trace desire as a key analytical consideration in the
analysis of racist beliefs. It has, moreover, enabled us to foreground the un-
conscious dimension of ideological processes and to emphasize the vacillating
and often ambiguous relation between subject and the Other in the pro-
duction of racism. While there are convergences and similarities between
Coetzee’s thoughts on ideology and those developed within Lacanian social
theory (Žižek 1989), there is one area of conceptualization that clearly goes
beyond Coetzee’s speculative formulations. This involves the notion of object a,
as the jouissance-infused cause of desire. Arguably, we cannot adequately un-
derstand the tenacity of racist ideology without grasping this idea, and more
particularly, the associated fact that there remains something irreducibly
singular about the individualized contents and details of racist fantasies de-
spite that they take shape within the remit of the Other (within given socio-
historical parameters, in other words).
This is crucial in grappling with Cronjé’s writings and his role as ideologue,
and a point worth reiterating: the fantasy object a can be understood as the
“return-effect” resulting from the attempted separation of the subject from the
Other. So, the fantasies that Cronjé is concerned with are in a significant
sense original, his own, composed of distinctive arrangements and contents,
despite that they remain the outcome of the coincidence of lacks between
subject and Other. Generic, stereotypical parameters of racist fantasy coexist
here alongside the individualized details and texture of its particularized
realization, indeed, alongside the particular modes of its subjectivized enjoyment
in unique subjects. With this Lacanian theory of desire, the Other, and fan-
tasy, we have an account that includes both a nonreductive conceptualization
of subjectivity and—paradoxically—one which grasps the role of an over-
determining Symbolic Other. Both such facets prove essential if we are to
grasp the peculiar economy of fantasy as it functions within racist ideology
and within the mind of apartheid.
Notes
1 As those more familiar with Lacanian social theory will have surmized, the “van-
ishing mediator” between these two approaches (Coetzee and Lacan) is the work
Slavoj Žižek. His contributions to Lacanian ideology critique (1989, 1992, 2005,
2012)—many of which were, interestingly, developed at around the same time
Coetzee was working on his essay—are what makes this piece of intertextuality
viable.
2 Coetzee’s (1991) critique of Structuralist theories of ideology, more specifically, is
primarily concerned with the Althusserian tradition as exemplified in the work of
Johnstone (1976) and O’Meara (1983). Coetzee is, of course, aware of the
Althusserian notion of interpellation (how ideology transforms individuals as the
bearers of objective structures into subjects), but finds it of limited use inasmuch as
he is interested particularly in how apartheid ideologues who “were themselves
144 Derek Hook
uninterpellated … were not mere’bearers of objective structures,’ but subjects un-
constituted by ideology” (29).
3 A differentiation between neurosis (hysteria/obsessionality) and perversion might
prove useful here. Both the obsessional and the hysteric take up a subjective position
in relation to the desire/lack of the Other. The hysteric “seeks to divine the Other’s
desire and to become the particular object that, when missing, makes the Other
desire” (Fink 1997: 120). The obsessional, by contrast, positions themselves in
fantasy as being able to restore wholeness and unity; they strive to complete
themselves as subject by way of response to the desire of the Other (Fink 1997).
Perversion is paradigmatically different; the pervert derives their orientation not
fundamentally from the desire but from the jouissance of the Other, hence the
Lacanian formula: the pervert situates themselves as the instrument of the Other’s
jouissance. My reading aligns both Cronjé and Apartheid ideology with a kind of
neurosis.
4 As I hope is obvious, Lacan’s theory of the processes of alienation/separation is not
to be confused with Marxist or existentialist notions of alienation or indeed with any
psychological theories of separation (developmental theories, notions of separation-
anxiety, attachment, etc.). By contrast, we are here concerned with an unconscious
dimension of subject-Other relationship, with one aspect of how the trans-subjective socio-
historical substance of the Other and unconscious are jointly imbricated.
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8 Raced group pathologies and
cultural sublimation
Molly Anne Rothenberg
Professor of English Tulane University New Orleans, LA 70118
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud famously regrets his failure
to invent a means of mass treatment to address the pathologies of groups
(1959: 91).1 In earlier work, he explores the dynamics of group pathology,
distinguishing a particular kind of group, which he calls the “primary mass,”
as producing a state of regression deriving from the individuals “who have put
one and the same object in the place of their ego-ideal and have consequently
identified themselves with each other in their egos” (1959: 116). Throughout
this discussion, Freud highlights the complex tensions between the group and
the individual, delineating a field of conflicting forces that, in his view, make
“civilization” possible. While acknowledging that groups enable coordinated
action, Freud focuses his attention on the destructiveness of the “regression”
attending the “group mind,” the dynamics of rivalry, aggression, and violence
that necessarily accompany group formation and the inevitable conflict be-
tween the group and its individual members (1959: 117, 95).
Lacan shares Freud’s concerns about the pathological dynamics of group
identification, and like Freud, he questions whether psychoanalysis has the
resources to remediate them. Reversing the terms of Freud’s title into “Ich-
Psychologie und Massenanalyse,” he describes groups as having “effectively de-
veloped under the form of a certain number of mirages” (1960: 318). His
goal—one he admits he did not achieve—is to produce a nonpathological
group, distinct from the pathological or “consolidated group” or “Church”
that, in his view, Freud permitted (1990: 130). Gabriel Tupinambá sums up
the challenge for Lacan: “How to identify and group together the set of those
whose only shared property is to dissolve group identifications?” (2015: 166).
Applying a psychoanalytic approach to white and African American ra-
cialized identities, Sheldon George argues that the pernicious effects of group
identification are not simply unwanted by-products of the “civilizing” group
dynamics, as Freud has it, but rather essential to what we conceive as civili-
zation. He makes the elegant case that the destructive group dynamics in-
augurated by slavery are the key to the structure of American society,
negatively affecting individuals identifying with either African American and
white groups as well as the society at large. As a way of explaining these
Race pathologies & cultural sublimation 147
pernicious effects on African American individuals, he argues that the raced
group fantasy “continually steer[s] African Americans off what Lacan identifies
as the path in which a subject may ‘recognize the topology of [his own] desire’”
(2018: 282). I follow up on George’s Lacanian analysis of white-identified and
African American groups, whether or not they are formed by introjection
of a leader, to show how racial identifications destabilize the ego-ideal’s
function of protecting the unity of the ego, thereby galvanizing pathological
defenses—different for each of the two groups. These defenses generate fan-
tasies of a raced substance, a fantasm that parasitizes individual desire.
Psychoanalytic treatment might enable any given individual to rejoin the
path of its own desire, but even so the mechanisms of group pathology would
continue to operate in the society. What is needed is some way to jam up
those mechanisms in the culture at large. Lacan’s later seminars offer sug-
gestive clues as to how such an object could generate a group “whose only
shared property is to dissolve group identifications.” I conceive of the theo-
retical possibility for a cultural therapeutics, raised first in the Ethics seminar,
by linking the operations of the unary trait, the production of the fantasm, and
the meaning of a “new signifier” proposed in Lacan’s Seminar XXIV. As
George’s insight that destructive raced group dynamics structure American
society suggests, this link and its therapeutic promise become visible when we
focus on the psychodynamics of raced groups.
The paradoxes and pathologies of identification

The groups that concern Freud in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego have
“a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in place of their
ego-ideal and had consequently identified themselves with one another in their
ego” (1959: 48). Lacan gives us a vocabulary for these two forms of identifica-
tion, which are implicated in the dynamics of all subject formation: Symbolic
identification with the ego-ideal and Imaginary identification with the ideal-ego.
As Žižek explains in his discussion of Lacan’s famous “graph of desire,”
to put it simply, imaginary identification is identification with the image

in which we appear likeable to ourselves, with the image representing
“what we would like to be,” and symbolic identification, identification
with the very place from where we are being observed, from where we look at
ourselves so that we appear to ourselves likeable, worthy of love.2
(1989: 105)
Or, to put it in Lacanian terms, the ideal-ego is the image of the subject as
nonlacking or possessing objet a, and the ego-ideal is the introjected version of
the entity supposed to supply the ego with objet a. In group formation,
members identify with the ego-ideal and, through that identification, identify
with one another as ideal-egos, mirrors of each other in their nonlacking image.
Lacan’s graph of desire displays two types of identification with the ego-
148 Molly Anne Rothenberg
ideal in subject formation, both of which are fantasies and both of which are
necessary to counteract the “constituted rivalry” of the Imaginary axis of
identification (2006: 685). Understanding these two kinds of identification
with the ego-ideal will help us distinguish between two types of raced groups.
The two forms of identification with the ego-ideal can be elucidated in a
relatively straightforward way by reference to a paradox in the way the Other
functions for the subject.3 On the one hand, while the process of sub-
jectification produces the subject as lacking, the Other is imagined to have the
power to remediate that lack (that is, provide objet a). Given that the subject
comes into being by way of the action of the signifier, this power is conceived
as the ability to stabilize the sliding of signifiers by fixing them to their
signifieds—and by extension to provide the subject with its ultimate
meaning—which would constitute “the completeness of the signifying battery”
(2006: 683–84).4 Such an Other could only serve in this capacity if it were
omnipotent and universal, which is to say nonlacking. I refer to this nonlacking
Other as the absolute Other. However, because subjective lack cannot be re-
mediated, the subject must somehow explain its inability to access objet a.
One possibility is that the Other does not care to provide objet a, consigning the
subject to drifting in the sea of signifiers, the very condition that motivates
the fantasy of the absolute Other. The absolute Other, that is, displays
indifference to the subject’s lack, an unwelcome but plausible conclusion.
The second explanation for the subject’s lack would be that the Other
simply does not have the power to provide objet a. Such an Other itself would
be lacking rather than absolute. Disadvantageous as that may seem, as lacking
Other it has the virtue of being able to desire. The subject therefore generates
the fantasy that the Other has a desire specific to the subject, a desire to provide
objet a. The problem, of course, is that its power to supply objet a would be in
question.5 I refer to this Other as the desiring Other.
Both versions of the Other are fantasies. The absolute Other, which op-
erates without regard to the individual, serves as the guarantor of the “ab-
soluteness” of the Symbolic system, its ability to confer objet a and deliver
stable signifier/signified relations; only the absolute Other could provide the
subject with a link to universality, albeit at the cost of its singularity. By
contrast, the desiring Other supplies the subject with the sense of being singled
out and given a special value among the welter of signifiers; only the desiring
Other provides the subject with its link to singularity (the singularity of its
desire, which is the desire of the Other). In other words, the individual must
be able to simultaneously identify and disidentify with each.6
However incompatible, the fantasy of noncastration and full enjoyment
afforded by the absolute Other also requires the fantasy of the desiring
Other’s interest in the individual member, singling out the member for special
recognition. Obviously, the individual may be “special” in two ways, that is,
due to possession of objet a or due to a failure to obtain objet a. To defend
against the negative form of specialness, the individual identifies via the
Imaginary register with others who serve as mirrors of subjective plenitude,
that is, as ideal-egos in possession of objet a. The Imaginary register produces a
narcissistic relationship among the members of the group, a basis for their
equivalence and the assurance to each member that it deserves to be re-
cognized as partaking of the group’s sublimity. Yet this Imaginary identifi-
cation with others in the group necessarily involves rivalry and aggression; the
specularity of the relationship means that any member can be seen as able to
take the place of any other. So, this axis of identification produces its own
psychic paradox: the individual relies on the recognition of the other mem-
bers, as signs of the Other’s regard, to sustain its own sense of belonging, but
its dependence on these others directly challenges its fantasy of belonging to
the group by reason of possession of objet a.7
The pathologies of groups result from the psychic conflicts generated by
these paradoxes. Broadly speaking, two types of groups develop from these
dynamics. In the first case, when identification with the absolute Other pre-
dominates, the group is imagined to guarantee its members access to objet a,
the state of noncastration or full enjoyment. In fact, for the individual
members, joining the group magically confirms that they inherently possess
objet a, even if they were unaware of it before being anointed by the group.
Members fantasize that they are carriers of a sublimity that belongs to the
group as such—the sublime, capital-G Group—of which they are only the
visible dimension. At the same time, Imaginary identification with others in
the group comes into play to disavow the universal condition of subjective
lack. Identifying with other members who serve as mirrors of subjective ple-
nitude (ideal-egos) allows each member to defend against its own lack. But
every Imaginary identification situates each member in a narcissistic relation
to the others, producing rivals and requiring a second line of defense that
projects lack to those outside the group. Therefore, the group’s boundaries
must be policed, and rules guaranteeing conformity have to be enforced. In
other words, this type of group forms by imagining that all of its members
partake of the powers of the absolute Other in order to defend against sub-
jective lack, the actual inevitability of which is always disavowed.
Unfortunately, surveillance and punishment, while deployed in order to sta-
bilize group cohesion and secure the perimeter of the group, fosters continual
internal strife, since no member can perfectly conform. Because exclusionary
boundaries are essential to this group, it sanctions violence both inside and
outside the group in order to police the distinction between insiders and
outsiders. The group’s disavowal and projection of castration, the sine qua non
of perversion, conduces to masochism and sadism.
Members of the first type join their group in order to confirm their own
nonlacking status, which they believe to be theirs by right. By contrast,
members of the second type band together because they are targeted as
lacking on account of some particular trait or condition that functions as a
substantialization of lack. Their experience bespeaks the indifference of the
absolute Other and reinforces the need for the desiring Other to notice them
as deserving of acquiring objet a. At the same time, Imaginary identifications
make members appear as ideal-egos to each other: while the trait serving as a
sign and substance of lack is common to every member, positive differences
among members function as supplements, materializations of objet a, fantasied
as capable of remediating the lack. So, from the point of view of any in-
dividual member, other members both embody lack and make visible the
possibility that lack can be remediated. Instead of excluding and policing its
boundaries, this type of group looks to enlarge its membership, which mul-
tiplies the signs of possible access to objet a while, unfortunately, also increasing
the opportunities for encountering lack. Every attempt to square the circle of
the paradoxes of identification necessitates a new defensive strategy, which is
why the fantasy of a temporal delay (lack now, remediation later) takes hold.
Lack is not disavowed, as it is in the first group, so perversion is an unlikely
outcome. Rather, the group develops behaviors characteristic of neurosis,
such as obsessional conformity to the presumed demands of the desiring
Other, envy and rivalry for status based on possession of this or that trait, and
hysterical acting out of its dissatisfaction with the absolute Other.
While every group contains a range of physical and psychological char-
acteristics, George’s discussion of American raced groups suggests that white
supremacist groups tend toward the first type, and African Americans tend
toward the second. In his analysis, whites and blacks during and after slavery
rely on raced group identities to manage jouissance. Whites disavow their
constitutive lack by assigning it wholly to slaves as objet a, “the fantasy object
that promises to return the subject to a jouissance-filled state of wholeness … in
order to make present the lost jouissance and being of the master” (George 2018:
275). In response, African Americans invent a culture that links them in their
“perseverance against suffering” by means of a fantasy of jouissance to come
(George 2018: 280). In effect, slaves accepted their status as lacking subjects in
order to establish a sense of group unity and value through a fantasy of a future
wholeness, specifically through the construction of a fantasy object, a “soul as
object a that gave substance to a notion of the group’s essential difference”
(George 2018: 282). Despite the white assault on their subjectivity, slaves, freed
slaves, and their descendants nonetheless had and have recourse to fantasies
that, like the fantasies of all subjects, promise the availability of objet a. The
white group disavows castration through exclusion; the African American
group seeks remediation of lack through inclusion. Race then became the
central identification for both groups, their fantasied means for compensating
for the constitutive lack of being that inheres in every subject.
We could say that, in a white supremacist group, a “white” complexion
functions as the sign that the absolute (nonlacking) Other guarantees their su-
perior status as a natural fact. Each white individual, no matter its overt alle-
giances, is fantasied to belong to the sublime group, which is why, for white
supremacists, white people who make common cause with African Americans
are “race traitors.” Race-as-white-skin-color became the central identification
for white supremacists, for whom it is a (fantasied) guarantee of noncastration.
In the African American group, a “dark” complexion functions as the sign that
the desiring (lacking) Other notices them as lacking, not in order to fault them
but to single them out to remediate their lack. Race-as-dark-skin-color then
became the central identification for African Americans, for whom it is also a
(fantasied) means of compensating for their lack. While both groups have re-
course to pathological solutions to their psychic conflicts, the psychodynamics of
the white supremacist group displays a more pernicious set of defenses: violent,
perverse tendencies are more recalcitrant to treatment than neurotic structures.
For that reason, the African American racial fantasy and the group identifi-
cations on which it relies offer the more promising avenue for theorizing a new
kind of group identification, a promise to which I now turn.
The unary trait and the raced fantasm

Both Freud and Lacan argue that identification with the ego-ideal in groups
leads to pathology. By understanding how the ego-ideal functions for in-
dividual subjects, it becomes easier to see how this group pathology arises. The
ego-ideal is generated as a solution to a psychic problem that derives from the
difference between the ego and the constitutive lack of the subject. The pur-
pose of the ego is to provide a psychic boundary between inside and outside:
the ego has to be unified. Yet, the subject precisely is not unified: it is constituted
by lack (the something “other” in me that is nonetheless essential to me).
Because “lack”—what is “other in me”—is essential to the subject, the ego’s
unity requires buttressing. Something must be available to the psyche to
produce and support the ego’s boundary, which is continually threatened
from the inside by lack:
The ego-ideal is precisely the name of this operation of partition which,

perpetually disturbed by what is irreducibly other in me, continually leads
to the [internal] distinction between myself … and what emerges as other
to me, thereby mediating the relation between desire and the representa-
tion of objects of desire. (Tupinambá 2020: 165, my emphases)
The unity of the ego depends upon the ego-ideal’s maintenance of this par-
tition. The “disturbance” by “what is other in me” galvanizes the ego-ideal’s
operation: its purpose is to unify the ego by making it seem that an object
exists which could remediate the subject’s constitutive lack, an object that
seems to belong outside the boundary of the ego, as “other to me.” It is ne-
cessary that the “other to me” appear as non-lacking, that is, in possession of
the object of desire, for a lacking other would be like “me,” and the possibility
of an accessible object of desire would disappear. The boundary between the
ego and the other would collapse; the ego would dissolve. The pathologies of
groups derive from defenses against this result.
Following Freud, Lacan uses the term unary trait to refer to the element
which founds the ego-ideal in its capacity as boundary-maker and ego-unifier.8
The unary trait is a special kind of psychic phenomenon: it solves a problem
for the psyche, which is that external reality, an irreducibly heterogeneous
multiplicity, cannot be represented qua heterogeneous multiplicity except as a
unity in its represented state. But since external reality is not unified, such a
representation fails to deliver external reality. External reality, we could say,
lacks representability. There is always a gap between external reality (as a
limit to thought, since we cannot represent it as it is) and the space of psychic
representation: how can we represent something that is lacking in re-
presentation?
The unary trait solves this problem by functioning as “set-ness”: elements of
a set are held together as heterogeneous (the irreducible multiplicity of reality)
without supposing any common attribute that would unify them. The unary
trait has the same operation as the “empty set” which belongs to all sets
precisely as a negation of “attribute-ness,” a negation of any and all positive
ontic properties that could be used to gather elements together. This negation,
this lack, crosses out all of the positive traits of the elements of the set; negation
is the sole way that the elements are grouped together. Thus, the only
“common” attribute for every element is its lack of a common attribute. The
unary trait, then, enables the representation of the lack of representability; it is
the mode, so to speak, by which the psychic space of representation makes a
place for external reality as unrepresentable.
The unary trait distinguishes “but it does not unify anything”: it makes
external reality discernible but not unified (Tupinambá 2020: 166). It serves as
a mark of the difference between external reality and psychic space without
offering a representation of external reality. In this respect, it has something of
the signifier about it (the capacity to distinguish) without actually signifying; it
suggests that something could be signified without doing so. That is, the unary
trait is the way that difference as such becomes available to the psyche.9
In the next section, I explain how this “difference as such” could serve as
the basis for a new kind of group formation, but first it is helpful to understand
what happens when groups form by identifying with the same attribute or
property as a substitute for the unary trait. Freud remarks that one of the
functions of the ego-ideal is “the business of testing the reality of things … the
ego takes a perception for real if its reality is vouched for” by the ego-ideal
(Freud 1959: 46). The partition operated by the ego-ideal, as we have seen, is
unstable by virtue of the constitutive lack of the ego. The use of an attribute
rather than the unary trait (that is, the substitution of a particular difference for
difference as such) further destabilizes this partition. When the individual’s egoic
boundaries depend upon its group membership, the unary trait’s operation is
overwritten by identification with a particular attribute. The representation of
an attribute (rather than the representation of the lack of representability)
creates the impression that the external object, the object in external reality,
can be accessed directly qua externality, thereby assaulting the ego’s sense of
reality. In contrast to the lack of representability of external reality serving as
the basis for the unary trait—and therefore as the means by which the actual
relationship between external and internal is supported (since the external
object is not actually a part of the internal psyche)—the representation of the
external object makes it seem as though external reality as such is within the
psyche’s ken. The psyche thus produces a fantasm of external reality, which
threatens to displace reality itself and destabilize the ego. Group identification
with the fantasm, however, helps to counter this effect.
By means of the unary trait, the ego-ideal supports the unity of the ego (the
boundary between ego and alterity) and the uniqueness of the ego (its distinc-
tiveness). We can think of these two aspects of the partition in terms of
the paradoxical ego-ideal: the absolute ego-ideal guarantees the ego’s unity
while the desiring ego-ideal guarantees its uniqueness. At the individual level,
the fantasm’s displacement of the unary trait undermines both the unity and
the uniqueness of the ego supported by the ego-ideal, with characteristic
outcomes for the two different types of raced group.
The central threat to the individual subject in a white group is the collapse
of the boundary between ipseity and alterity. But the reliance on a “white”
fantasm destabilizes the individual ego’s sense of unity, which means that
group identity takes over the stabilizing function. The primary purpose of
such a group is not just to collect white people together, although that is its
effect, but to ensure that each individual, by imagining that it embodies the
white fantasm, regards itself as nonlacking, possessing no opening by which
otherness could penetrate. Imaginary identification with others whose
“whiteness” serves as a visible guarantee of their non-lacking status makes
individual members believe in the fantasy of their own imperviousness, their
bulwark against otherness. The group, then, serves as the substitute boundary
of each ego as it tries to defend against otherness and support its ego unity.
When African Americans band together in reaction to their abjection by
whites, members have to counter their relegation to embodying lack itself.
While the unary trait makes the lack of representability of external reality
available to the psyche as “difference as such,” identification with a (fantasied)
black (nonlacking) substance—the black fantasm—overwrites this lack of re-
presentability. As a result, it can seem that adding members to the group, each
of whom embodies this black substantialization of lack as a positivity, will di-
minish the lack of each. So, the pressure to belong to a group formed by
identification with a black fantasm will be difficult to resist, even though such a
fantasm also attacks the singularity of each member of the group, by desta-
bilizing the partition’s ability to guarantee the ego’s uniqueness. The fantasm
affects the Imaginary axis along which members of the group identify with
one another: each individual will have the uncanny experience of finding itself
outside itself, that is, in semblables who share the crucial attribute of blackness.
Consequently, members not only have to work against their reduction to lack,
they also have to find a way to support their individual distinctiveness, their
unique ego. In defense, individuals will try to highlight and stabilize the
meaning of their particular individual attributes as singular versions of a
positivized black substance (as evinced in the tremendous creativity focused on
naming, personal style, art works, dance and music, linguistic invention
among African Americans).10 At the same time, the apparent actuality and
substance of such attributes (in contrast to the representability of lack made
available by the unary trait) derails the experience of subjective lack: the
fantasm depresses individual desire.
Furthermore, African American identification with the black fantasm
brings the individual into psychic contact with historical and present-day
traumas of their racialized existence. We commonly think of trauma as an
unwanted catastrophic intrusion from external reality. But from a psycho-
analytic perspective, psychic structure depends on an internal and unavoid-
able traumatic dimension at the limits of the Symbolic order. The dynamics of
subjectivity arise from the desire for an impossible full enjoyment; desire is the
means by which the subject sustains its connection to and distance from objet a.
Enjoyment is the antithesis of the Symbolic and subjectivity, so when desire
launches the subject toward the domain of enjoyment or the Real, it is aiming
for the traumatic death of the subject. In his Ethics seminar, Lacan gives the
name Atè to this place, the threshold of the void by which desire orients itself,
and he makes explicit that it is linked to trauma. As he remarks of Antigone,
“one does or does not approach Atè, and when one approaches it, it is because
of something that is linked to a beginning and a chain of events, namely, that
of the misfortune of the Labdacides family” (Lacan 1992: 264). George has
pointed out that African Americans have their own misfortune, binding them
to a raced Atè that seals them to their traumatic history. We can find traces of
the raced Atè in Nella Larsen’s first novel Quicksand, which offers an ex-
ploration of the fantasm’s hijacking of individual desire.
Desire and Atè in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

There is a slippage in the way that Atè is used by Lacanians: it refers both to
the place of the void around which the drive circulates and to the imagined
substantialization of that void as objet a, which lures desire precisely because it
seems to be something attainable. Atè stands, so to speak, in front of the void,
as its threshold—as both lure and barrier to the Real, the “beyond” toward
which desire is oriented.
Although Nella Larsen’s first novel Quicksand confirms George’s insight that
African American culture records struggles between individual desire and
raced group identity, I argue that this novel also helps us see the functioning of
a raced Atè. What is more, Larsen’s diagnosis of group pathologies illuminates
the operations of the ego-ideal as partition between the ego and subjective
lack and as support to the ego’s unity and uniqueness. Even though the novel
never directly represents it, the presence of a raced Atè is discernible in key
moments when the struggle between the protagonist’s individual desire and
her racial group identity overwhelm her. In the process, Larsen expressly
refuses to make the restoration of singular desire the solution to the pathol-
ogies of group identification.11 Instead, Larsen’s work will bring us back to the
question of how to dissolve the fantasies of pathological group formation in
the culture at large.
Larsen’s protagonist Helga Crane is an illegitimate mixed-race woman of
intelligence, beauty, discernment, and self-possession. Helga both identifies
with “her people” as black and cannot find a way to be content with that
identification. While one might be tempted to conceive of Helga as belonging
to neither white nor African American communities, the novel doesn’t sup-
port this claim, despite its epigraph from Langston Hughes (“I wonder where
I’m gonna die/being neither white nor black?”). Wherever Helga goes, she is
neither ostracized nor made to feel unwelcome; she initially feels at home,
even admired and desired. Nor does she have to try to pass as all-black or all-
white in order to belong. In part because her white stepfather was a racist,
Helga identifies wholly with African Americans, as she repeatedly states, while
acknowledging that her father was black and her mother white.
Helga’s problems stem from a recurring dissatisfaction that she connects
with the tension between her racial identity and her individuality. For ex-
ample, despite her initial excitement and pleasure at teaching at Naxos, an
African American private school, Helga attributes her decision to leave her
position to the school’s insistence on its “suppression of individuality,” its
“hypocrisy” in its imposition of both white standards and the then-fashionable
concept of racial uplift, as well as its “malicious hunting for the weaknesses of
others” (Larsen 1998: 20, 19). She realizes that there is no way for her to
maintain her individuality at Naxos: “she could neither conform, nor be
happy in her unconformity” (7). Her objections both diagnose and exemplify
the neurotic symptoms of group identification.
Each time her discontent—her desire—wells up, Helga finds that she is
aiming for something she herself cannot comprehend: mere “things … hadn’t
been, weren’t, enough for her. She’d have to have something else besides”
(Larsen 1998: 116). This dissatisfaction arises repeatedly in her experiences of
the limitations of black group identity. For example, Helga initially feels at
home in Harlem, not because everyone is black but because everyone is black
in a different way from everyone else. She sees that she belongs to the “fantastic
motley” of “gradations” that she finds in Harlem (Larsen 1998: 59). However,
she loses her pleasure in this belonging, having become “blind to its charm”
(Larsen 1998: 59). The consolations of identifying as one shade of black
among many others—the pleasures of experiencing her uniqueness—do not
compensate for the loss of individuality she feels as a member of a race, as she
reflects when she leaves on the ship to Denmark: she was “glad to be at last
alone … [she felt] that blessed sense of belonging to herself and not to a race”
(Larsen 1998: 63–4).12
This pattern recurs throughout the novel. Even the Danes’ most positive
interest in her derives from her race: “And they hadn’t despised it. No, they had
admired it, rated it as a precious thing, a thing to be enhanced, preserved.
Why?” (Larsen 1998: 83). She is not upset by the value that is placed on her (she
is perturbed equally by admiration and abuse) but by the costs of being grouped
by the attribute of race. That is, her experience recapitulates the effects of group
identifications that displace the unary trait with a black fantasm.
As Larsen portrays her, Helga’s singular desire is blocked by her links to a
raced Atè throughout the novel. One striking incident exemplifies the intrusion
of this raced Atè into her struggle to stabilize the partition between the unified
ego and the alterity of lack. Helga goes to a Harlem jazz club where she
dances “oblivious” to the reality around her: “She was drugged, lifted, sus-
tained, by the extraordinary music, blown out, ripped out, beaten out, by the
joyous, wild, murky orchestra … the essence of life” (Larsen 1998: 59).
Immediately thereafter, however, the “shameful certainty that not only had
she been in the jungle, but that she had enjoyed it, began to taunt her. She
hardened her determination to get away. She wasn’t, she told herself, a jungle
creature” (Larsen 1998: 59). As Helga approaches full enjoyment (the re-
mediation of her lack), she experiences a loss of ego unity. In order to re-
establish the boundary of her ego, she resorts to signifiers that repeat or chime
with the racist abjection of African Americans—“jungle … bursts of syncopated
jangle … strangled by savage strains of music” (Larsen 1998: 59, my emphases).
That is, Helga seeks to re-establish the boundary of her ego, and therefore the
psychodynamics of desire dependent on the unavailability of objet a, which has
been subverted by her own enjoyment, through signifiers tethering her to the
traumatic history of African Americans’ experience of racism. Like all sub-
jects, her desire lures her toward the threshold of the Real. But in her case, we
can discern her attraction to a figure of the jouissance of racialized sadism—the
raced Atè—standing there.
Each time Helga’s dissatisfaction (desire) is aroused, it is configured in re-
lation to the unconsciously charged signifiers of the afflictions of African
Americans from slavery to the present day—separation from their families,
abjection, exoticization and eroticization, backbreaking toil and soul-crushing
persecution—in short, the sadism they have had to endure. It is impossible for
her to desire anything without becoming lured toward the Atè of race. Try as
she might to reinforce her singularity, Helga finds that she is irrevocably a
member of a group made to suffer for its constitutive lack and yet, like Sade’s
victims, somehow indestructible.
In this way, Larsen rejects individualized desire as the solution to the
magnetic effect of race on psychic structure; she highlights the entanglement
of individual desire with a raced Ate. Clues like the jouissance-charged racist
discourse or the crucifixion invoked near the end of the novel help the reader
perceive the sadism congealed into the Atè of race. The novel doesn’t go so far
as to offer an alternative group formation or indicate how the encounter with
Atè might have a therapeutic effect at the social level. Nonetheless, it gives us a
means for discerning the raced fantasm that cleaves Helga to race as the sole
(if deeply flawed) means she has of maintaining her desire.
Toward a new kind of group
Lacan reads Sophocles’ Antigone in a similar vein—as offering its audience an
encounter with Atè as lure and barrier. The play, Lacan argues, confronts the
audience with an image of the fact that desire always seeks to go beyond its own
limit. This confrontation, he argues, purifies the spectators of the Imaginary
fantasies in which they take themselves to be the masters of their desire:
Antigone reveals to us the line of sight that defines desire … This line of
sight focuses on an image … at the center of tragedy … the fascinating
image of Antigone herself … She has a quality that both attracts us and
startles us, in the sense of intimidates us … It is in connection with this
power of attraction that we should look for the true sense, … the true
significance of tragedy—in particular, with the singular emotions that are
fear and pity, since it is through their intervention … that we are purged,
purified of everything of that order … properly speaking the order of the
imaginary. And we are purged of it through the intervention of one image
among others. And it is here that a question arises. How do we explain
the power of this central image relative to all the others? (1992: 247–48)
Antigone is the figure who offers the audience an image of Atè, an image of
desire seeking its encounter with the void. By providing the audience with an
image of desire’s constant pressure to go beyond the limit that constitutes it,
the play offers an opportunity for a cultural catharsis.
Contrary to much commentary on this seminar, the ethical dimension of
the play is not to be found in Antigone herself, the one who refuses to “giv[e]
ground relative to her desire” (Lacan 1992: 319). Antigone is not an example
to be followed but merely the image of desire’s truth. For Lacan, “not giving
ground relative to one’s desire” is not an ethical maxim by which to live one’s
life, no matter what some Lacanians have suggested. Lacan’s comment ap-
plies solely to the analytic situation in which analyst and analysand track
desire’s fluctuations: when the analysand “gives ground,” the analyst can help
her recognize where her desire is operating unconsciously.13
The encounter with the constitutive limit of desire—where, if reached, the
subject would disappear—can only be accessed in a brief glimpse. Antigone
herself is the image of an encounter with that limit, an image of the effects of
the lure of Atè, and the play is the means by which that image is constructed
for our contemplation and catharsis, permitting us to see desire’s topology
without having to go to the limit ourselves. So, the play—not Antigone
herself—functions as an object of sublimation, a cultural object “elevated to
the dignity” of what lies at the “heart of the libidinal economy” (Lacan 1992:
112). As sublimation, the play dissolves the Imaginary fantasies in which we
imagine ourselves to gain the upper hand over jouissance. This dissolution takes
place “through the intervention of one image [Antigone] among others” (Lacan
1992: 248; qtd. in De Kesel 242, my emphasis). By means of this intervention
“we are purged, purified of everything … of the order of the imaginary”
(Lacan 1992: 248).
Lacan asks how we can explain this “dissipatory power of this central image
[Antigone] relative to all others?” (Lacan 1992: 248). The answer is appar-
ently contradictory. Lacan conceives of Antigone as both a signifier and an
image. As he explains, Antigone is situated between two deaths as a signifier.
There she has “an explicitly symbolic status” (De Kesel, 2009: 242):
She can expose the pure signifier that she has become … only as an
image, as an imaginary figure that arrests the logic of the sliding signifiers
at the moment this logic [of the structural lack of the law and the whole
symbolic order] is about to complete its circle. There, a “Gestalt” stops
the moving signifiers and shows a glimpse of what is beyond. A paralyzing
fascinating image shows that no signifier is able to reconcile or to sublate
(in the strict sense of “aufheben”) the finitude or the lack of the subject’s
desire (De Kesel 2009: 243).
Lacan is trying to develop a way to maintain the radical openness of desire: at

the end of Seminar VI, Desire and Its Interpretation, he essayed a definition of the
ultimate object of desire as a pure signifier only to find that he had to sup-
plement it with the Real to avoid resolving the lack in itself (De Kesel 2009:
244). This supplemented signifier operates in an Imaginary way. In Seminar VII,
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, which emphasizes the Real, Lacan then reevaluates
the Imaginary for the same reason. The example of anamorphosis shows how
Lacan uses the Imaginary to make visible the fictive status of the signifier, which
then grants us a glimpse of the beyond of Atè.14 Antigone is just this special
“imaged signifier”—a signifier that has no links to other signifiers and as a
result cannot be the bearer of jouissance. Rather than referring us to something
else (the way a signifier does), it keeps us under the spell of what it displays.
“Her appearance thus functions as the ‘epiphany’ of a ‘pure’ and (therefore)
explicitly symbolic desire, but it does so, Lacan explains, as an imaginary image”
(De Kesel 2009: 242).
For Lacan, Sophocles allows the beyond of Atè—the void—to be glimpsed
through the use of Antigone as this special kind of signifier. If Antigone were
to function as just one signifier among others, we would be caught in the
infinite deferrals and metonymies of desire, coming nowhere near its limit. But
as the image of a signifier, a fascinating image, Antigone reveals the lack in the
Symbolic order, that is, its need for some (missing) element to freeze its sliding.
This image does not offer us any knowledge other than the realization that the
subject will disappear if it follows desire to its limit. But that realization is
enough to prevent us from elevating desire into a law or from taking refuge in
the perverse fantasy that we can access the domain of the Thing—full jouis-
sance—and remain subjects at the same time.
Of course, Lacan’s thinking develops beyond the Ethics seminar on which I
have been relying. Twelve years later, he returns to this idea of a different
kind of signifier in his theory of the end of an analysis: Lacan proposes that the
analyst and analysand together create a “model of neurosis” which, by re-
peating the pathways of the neurosis, “robs it of its dose of enjoyment” (Lacan
2018: 130–31; qtd. in Zupančič 2017: 126). This process, he explains, can
produce a “new signifier” which can only arise when the enjoyment which
links signifiers into the preferred routes of the circuit of the drive has been
dissolved.15 Given that all signifiers are linked to one another by their con-
stitutive lack (the failure of any signifier to simply be itself) and therefore by
what is not-a-signifier (enjoyment), this “new signifier” cannot be just another
signifier. It must be a new kind of signifier, what Lacan refers to as the “One-
alone” or “Y a de l’Un”: as opposed to the signifiers—“ones”—that are ne-
cessarily linked by enjoyment, the “One-alone” is a signifier minus jouissance,
having no signifying function other than to mark difference as such (Lacan
2018: 131)16:
The One at stake … which the subject produces, so to say, at the ideal
point of analysis, is, differently from the One at stake in repetition, the
One as One alone [Un seul]. It is the one so far as, whatever the difference
that exists, of all the differences that exist and that all have the same
value, there is only one, and that is the difference (Lacan 2018, qtd in
Zupančič 125, my emphasis).
Lacan here refers explicitly to the same characteristics as the unary

trait—“thanks to the function of the [empty] set … there is One that is distinct
from what unifies a class as an attribute” (Lacan 2018: 167).
The problem with raced group identifications, as we have seen, is that the
group’s common attribute replaces the unary trait, the signifier of difference as
such (the empty set), with a raced fantasm of the object which reifies differences
between signifiers. The production of the One-alone (new kind of) signifier
restores “difference as such” to its place in psychic functioning, reestablishing
a more stable boundary between ipseity and alterity. The restoration of the
operation of an ego-ideal grounded on the unary trait rather than a common
group would support that boundary in a nonpathological way.
The special kind of signifier is produced in the analytic situation from a
model of the neurosis: the model drains from the signifiers used to satisfy the
drive the glue of jouissance enchaining them. Since the drive is indifferent to the
particular signifiers that form the circuit which satisfies it (indifferent to which
“object” is used to lure desire), any signifiers will do to form this new circuit.
Standing at the threshold of the void, attracting desire and protecting the
subject from jouissance, this new kind of signifier would make possible the
sublimation that can generate new circuits of the drive.
In the Ethics seminar, Lacan is arguing that a new kind of signifier—supported
by the Imaginary, devoid of jouissance, and unattached to any other
signifiers—can be made available for the audience in certain sublimated objects:
such objects of sublimation, like the Greek tragedies, operate culturally rather
than individually. His later theory suggests that were we to produce models of
raced group pathologies and images of the raced Atè in order to generate the
“One-alone,” we could glimpse the trajectory of desire as the death drive—that
is, as aiming at the point where the subject disappears—in a sublimated form.
The collective works of our African American writers and artists, if understood
as George proposes, have set us on this path.17 But we do not yet have enough of
those models, including those that undertake the difficult work of addressing the
perverse imperatives of white-identified groups. We need the concerted efforts of
our artists and commentators to do so. Perhaps then, eventually, we could un-
dergo a cultural catharsis that would release us from our raced fantasms and
create a new kind of group from difference as such.
Notes
1 I am grateful to Sheldon George, Derek Hook, Hilary Neroni, and Todd
McGowan for their helpful comments.
2 Lacan elaborates on these forms of identification in Écrits, “The Subversion of the
Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” the version of the graph to which I will refer.
3 Lacan’s discussion of the second graph of desire reminds us that when he is
speaking of identification with the ego-ideal, he is invoking the role that the Other
plays in subject formation (Écrits 685). The Other’s role is designated in the graph
by a capital A for Autre in the original graph but translated as O for Other in most
English versions.
4 Lacan locates this Other on the upper right side of graph 2 (Écrits 684).
5 The dynamics of desire involving this lacking Other are represented in the top
portion of the complete graph (Écrits 692).
6 For an indispensable discussion of the necessity of identifying and disidentifying
with the ego-ideal, see Alenka Zupančič’s (2008: 598).
7 Derek Hook puts these dynamics succinctly: “The imaginary content of the ego is
always-already derived from the other, which means that any attempt to assert the
status of my existence or my desire as primary necessitates the elimination of this
other. Of course, to eradicate the other means that one loses the basis of one’s own
identifications, and along with it, the possibility of the recognition that this other
provides” (2018: 37).
8 In speaking of this relationship, Lacan writes “the unary trait which—filling in the
invisible mark the subject receives from the signifier—alienates this subject in the
first identification that forms the ego-ideal” (Écrits 684).
9 In his Seminar XIX, Lacan points out the “difference between the One of difference
and the One [of] attribute” (167). In my conclusion, I refer to Lacan’s definition of
the One of difference, but suffice it to say here that Lacan will explain that there is
a One (Y a de l’un) that is difference as such, which is a useful way to think about the
unary trait as empty set.
10 Obviously, creativity is not the prerogative of one group or another. The point
here, however, is that white supremacist groups tend to deploy the same symbols
and styles as signs of belonging, whereas African American group identification
tends to promote a concern with singularity.
11 The counterexample of a novel focused on restored singular desire would be Zora
Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, as interpreted by Sheldon George in
his “Jouissance and Discontent.”
12 Although her approach is not psychoanalytic, Johanna Wagner argues in “(Be)
Longing in Quicksand ” that Helga is exploring the vexed relationship between
group identification and desire.
13 De Kesel explains that even though “it is true that Lacan talks about ‘having given
ground relative to one’s desire’ as something of which the analysand can be guilty
… nowhere does he explicitly formulate this thought as an injunction. Hence,
anyone who cites “‘do not cede on your desire’ as the new ethical ground-rule
Lacan proposes as an alternative to the old ethics has ventured seriously far from
the Lacanian text … Lacan does not have in mind a moral law that enables me to
test my action and then adjust it to ensure that I remain in line with my desire. This
reference is valid solely in the specific situation of an analytic cure whose goal it is
to direct the analyst’s and analysand’s attention to desire. Such a reference is
necessary precisely because in the normal order of things desire as such cannot be
but repressed and ignored.” (De Kesel 2009: 262)
14 In the anamorphotic image, the fact that images are illusory appears visibly at the
surface of the mirrored cylinder out of the “chaotic play of color (signifiers),” so
that we can see “the fictive status” of images as a signifier. See De Kesel
(2009: 245ff).
15 Lacan’s discussions of the possibility of a new kind of signifier in 1977 were
published as “Vers Un Signifiant Nouveau” in Ornicar? in 1979 and appear in the
last sessions of Seminar XXIV L’insu que sait … See especially the May 17 session,
Lacan says “Why would we not invent a new signifier? … A signifier for example
which would not have, like the Real, any kind of sense.”
16 See Alenka Zupančič’s illuminating discussion of the “One-alone” in What is Sex?
(2017: 125–28).
17 George’s reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved as Atè in his Trauma and Race is such a
model.
References
De Kesel, Marc. Eros and Ethics: Reading Lacan’s Seminar VII. Trans. Sigi Jöttkandt.
Albany, NY: Suny Press, 2009.
Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVIII (1920–1922). Trans. James
Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1959.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York:
W. W. Norton, 1961.
George, Sheldon. “Jouissance and Discontent: A Meeting of Psychoanalysis, Race, and
American Slavery.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, vol. 23, no. 3, 2018, pp. 267–289.
George, Sheldon. Trauma and Race. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016.
Hook, Derek. Six Moments in Lacan. London and New York: Routledge, 2018.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,
1959–60. Trans. Dennis Porter. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1992.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VIII: Transference, 1960–61. Trans.
Cormac Gallagher.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIX: … or Worse, 1971–1972. Trans.
Adrian Price. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIV: L’insu que sait … , 1976-77.
Trans. Cormac Gallagher.
Lacan, Jacques. Television. Ed. Joan Copjec. New York and London: W. W.
Norton, 1990.
Larsen. Quicksand and Passing. Ed. Deborah E. McDowell, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
Tupinambá, Gabriel. “‘Vers un Signifiant Nouveau’: Our Task after Lacan.” Repeating
Žižek. Ed. Agon Hamza. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
Tupinambá, Gabriel. The Desire of Psychoanalysis. Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 2020.
Wagner, Johanna M. “(Be)Longing in Quicksand: Framing Kinship and Desire More
Queerly.” College Literature, vol. 39, no. 3, 2012, pp. 129–159.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The MIT
Press, 2006.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York: Verso, 1989.
Zupančič, Alenka. The Odd One In. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The MIT
Press, 2008.
Zupančič, Alenka. What is Sex? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017.
Part III
Race and the clinic

9 Race, perversion, and
jouissance in Portrait
of Jason
Sheila L. Cavanagh
York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
Shirley Clarke’s documentary, Portrait of Jason, features the first gay, African
American man to appear solo on screen. The film premiered at the Fifth New
York Film Festival at the Lincoln Center in 1967. It received a twenty-minute
standing ovation by the 3,000 people in attendance.1 During a sneak-preview
at the Museum of Modern Art ( July 9, 1967), Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee,
Thomas Hoving, Robert Frank, Elia Kazan, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller,
Geraldine Page, Terry Southern Rip Torn, Amos Vogel, Andy Warhol, and
Tennessee Williams, among other prominent people in New York’s art and
culture scene, were in attendance (milestonefilms.com).2 The film features
Jason Holliday (1924–1998), a provocative and loquacious hustler who gives
us a perverse window onto New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco’s
bohemian underground scenes. Holliday’s stories are erotic and titillating,
devastating, and unbelievable. He tells us, “People love to see you suffer, and
believe me, I’ve suffered.” Holliday also says that his suffering is fraudulent,
that it is a way to get welfare. He says, “I told them I was a sick queen,” and
laughs. There seems to be a story in a story, a truth in a lie that reveals itself
by omission, farce, and cunning. Holliday’s “gimmick,” as he puts it, is the
hustle, and he is not ashamed of it. As he explains: “I have more than one
‘hustle,’ I’ll come on as a maid, a butler, a flunky, anything to keep from
punching the nine to five … I am scared of responsibility and I am scared of
myself because I’m a pretty frightening cat … Like I don’t mean any harm,
but the harm is done.”
Although the film has never escaped criticism and some—like American
academic, filmmaker and LGBTQ activist, Sarah Schulman—have called it
racist (Gustafson 2011), others contend that it says “more about race, class,
and sexuality than just about any movie before or since” (Anderson 2018).
Clarke takes significant representational risks in filming Holliday because he is
not only impetuous and intemperate but also a con artist. His discourse is
provocative and perverse by any measure. Using Jacques Lacan’s formulation
of the pervert’s discourse, along with Holliday’s performative illustration of
it, I consider what the notorious hustler has to tell us about his life and the
cinematic screen. Holliday’s discourse is often read as racist, along with the
film itself. Although I do not wish to sideline questions about how anti-black
166 Sheila L. Cavanagh
racism functions in the making, production and circulation of the film, I am
concerned about how the allegation of racism functions to negate the psy-
choanalytic significance of Holliday’s discourse. My contention is that
Holliday offers a perverse response to anti-black racism that can be under-
stood in relation to Lacan’s theorization of the pervert’s discourse.
My Lacanian reading of the film considers how Holliday offers a perverse
comedic response to anti-black racism and to the homophobia he is subject to.
I do not mean to suggest that racism and homophobia are, ultimately, funny
or to be laughed away! The psychic injuries Holliday narrates are all too real
and sobering. The point of my analysis is to interpret a uniquely perverse
comedic response to the tyranny of the Other. What animates my analytic
interest in the film is a conceptual resonance between Lacan’s teachings, his
discourse and polemics, and the Harlem jive central to Holliday’s speech acts.
Both materialize in the 1950s and are well attuned to the desire and jouissance
of the Other. While Lacan’s formulation of the Other is developed without
attention to race, Holliday’s Other is racially inflected. What happens in the
prolonged performance is ripe for analysis because questions of race, gender,
sexuality, and representation permeate the cinematic portrait.
Perversion: a Lacanian formulation

In 2015, Portrait of Jason was selected by the United States Library of Congress
for preservation in the National Film Registry, an honor given to films of
cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance. Given the impact and significance
of Clarke’s film, and the commentary Holliday offers on anti-black racism,
homophobia, male effeminacy, prostitution, and the hustle, the film is un-
derstudied. Holliday’s stories span the time of the Christopher Street bar
raids, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Los Angeles race riots. The Martin
Luther King Jr. March on Washington predates the film by four years, and
the Stonewall riots post-date the film by two years. Filmmakers, scholars, and
critics have all commented on the historical significance of the film and the
originality of Holliday’s discourse. Ingmar Bergman referred to Portrait of Jason
as “the most extraordinary film I’ve seen in my life.”3 Richard Brody of
The New Yorker refers to Holliday as a “monologuist of mercurial, Falstaffian
genius” (Brody: 2013). Gilles Deleuze developed his conceptualization of
fabulation, in part, through his engagement with Holliday’s discourse.
One of the reasons these theorists, film-critics, and audiences are all cap-
tivated by the film is because Holliday’s discourse reveals obscene pleasures in
unlawful bonds with tyrannical Others. Few people are this honest. Holliday’s
stories fit the discourse of the pervert as Lacan defines it. Here I do not suggest
that Jason Holliday is a pervert, but rather that his discourse is perverse. I also
do not employ this reading of his discourse (and performance) as perverse
because Holliday is a gay, black, effeminate hustler. I am critical of the way
African American gay male sexualities have been pathologized by psychia-
trists and criminalized by law enforcement agents, all in the name of
Race, perversion, and jouissance in Portrait of Jason 167
perversity. Perversion, in the Lacanian frame, has (almost) nothing to do with
actions, roles, identities, or sexual proclivities. It is a psychic structure invol-
ving a specific orientation to the Other, whereby a subject has undergone
alienation by language (castration) but not separation from the Other. In
other words, perverts lack a level of subjective individuation, and Holliday
animates this lack by angering, provoking, and exciting the Other. While the
Other (capital O) is a Symbolic term in Lacan’s discourse, there are actual
others, like Clarke, Carl Lee (Clarke’s lover), and audience members, who are
all effected by Holliday.
Clarke and Holliday tarry with the negative in ways that can be read as
racist. But the effects are less regressive (that is racist) than they are analyti-
cally provocative. It might strike readers as offensive to read Holliday’s dis-
course as perverse in this way. But in Lacanian terms perversion is not a
pathology. It is a legitimate way of being in response to the jouissance of the
Other. The structure of perversion (real or performative) is in need of re-
clamation, as queer theorists drawing upon Lacan have argued (Feher-
Gurewich; Nobus and Downing; Penney). Perversion involves a logic and
sophistication that has, unfortunately, been side lined or dismissed out-of-
hand because its agentic complexities have been reduced to psychiatric di-
agnosis. There is a difference between the designation “perversion” as insult
and pathology and perversion as a genuine psychic structure in the Lacanian
frame. The first involves a power-knowledge maneuver well theorized by
French philosopher Michel Foucault4; the second is a viable, albeit challen-
ging, way to live and be in relation to the jouissance of the Other. In fact, some
have argued that perverts, in Lacanian terms, strengthen the social link
(Feher-Gurewich). As Lacanian theorists of perversion generally agree, we
know proportionately little about the discourse of the pervert because com-
pared to the discourse of the neurotic (a very common structure), it is rare.
Although Lacan’s conceptualization of the Other changes over time, I am
provisionally defining the Other in this paper as inclusive of language, the law,
and the Symbolic order. Unlike neurotic and psychotic subjects (the two other
psychic structures theorized by Lacan), the perverse subject does not ex-
perience a cut or limit to the “jouissance” of the Other. Jouissance, a French
word, is often translated into English as a painful pleasure. It involves the
tyranny of the Other and the subject’s submission to it. Because the pervert
has not undergone separation from the Other (only castration), they are
always trying to detach themselves from the Other. Perverts try to separate
themselves from the Other by tirelessly evoking the rage of actual others who
occupy the Symbolic position of the Other. As James Baldwin notes in his
own experience of having watched the film, the process is exhausting.5
Portrait of Jason
Portrait of Jason is based on disturbing vignettes taken from an interview Clarke
conducted with Holliday in her Hotel Chelsea penthouse apartment.
Although the total running time is 105 minutes, the film took twelve hours to
film: from 9 o’clock p.m. on Saturday, December 3, 1966, until 9 o’clock the
next morning. A tussle between filmmaker (Clarke) and cinematic subject
(Holliday) emerges over the course of the extended performance. Clarke
wants Holliday to tell the truth about his life, but he will not stop fibbing.
In her essay “Don’t Tell Them Everything: Portrait of Jason (Shirley Clarke,
1967),” Rachel Brown writes, “[b]eing already familiar with Holliday’s an-
ecdotes, Clarke wanted to locate a deeper truth, and throughout the film she is
heard persistently asking him to tell the truth.”6 But Holliday continues to tease
us with, and evade, the truth. Fantasy, fact, and fiction blur in his alcohol-
induced decline. In one instance, he says, “I’ll never tell” and then, in another,
he says: “One more drink, I’ll tell all,” and then laughs. He then admits to
deception. In circuitous prose he says: “I’m a truth-teller now, and there’s
not a lie in me. I think I’m losing my mind. But nevertheless, it’s serving a
purpose.”
While equivocating, Holliday wears a white Oxford dress shirt with the
collar overlaying a lapel from a dark double-breasted blazer. Despite having
no money, Holliday portrays himself in the film as a cat who can pass
seamlessly between a gay bohemian underground and upper-class white so-
ciety. As he says, he likes money and knows how to dress. At one point in the
film, Holliday dons a picture hat, a hat, he specifies, “worn by a lady, and my
favorite lady from Hollywood is Mae West.” As we listen with Lacanian ears,
we note that Holliday’s discourse does not abide by categorizations of sexual
(or generational) difference. Most of his relationships, intimate and economic,
are inter-racial. Holliday frequently worked as a “house-boy” for wealthy
older white women, and as a prostitute. He is not only a “man,” but a “boy,”
not only masculine, but feminine, not only street-active (and transient), but
glamourous.
Holliday is economically bound to Others as a servant (black “houseboy”)
and as a sex worker. As he says in the film, he has been “balling from Maine
to Mexico. [But] I haven’t got a dollar to show for it.” He relays multiple
stories of pickups on the East Fifties, a prosperous neighborhood in NYC.
Holliday speaks of drag queens selling stolen wears on Fourteenth Street and
Third Avenue. He shares vignettes about his participation in orgies at twelve
years of age, being a college drop-out, hustling, heroin addiction, his in-
voluntary institutionalization at Bellevue Hospital, his imprisonment on
Riker’s Island, and more. Holliday’s life is a queer historians’ gold mine.
But there is a catch. Although Holliday’s stories are consistent with what
we know about the medicalization of homosexuality and the criminalization
of black men and sex workers in the 1960s, he is an unreliable witness.
Audiences are engrossed by his devastating first-person accounts of police
entrapment and psychiatric diagnosis. But then he laughs. Viewers wonder if
they are being played. The question of documentary testimony is further
complicated by Holliday’s lack of sobriety. Holliday gets intoxicated over the
course of filming, drinking single malt scotch and smoking cigarettes, and at
least one joint. Clarke’s choice of cinéma vérité, a cinematic style that prompts
the audience to question reality and cinematic representation, is apropos.
The truth is subjective and, as animated over the course of the grueling
performance, impassioned. Clarke and Carl Lee both appear on set and ask
provocative questions—sometimes goading, sometimes aggressively—behind
the scenes. Lee is, in the latter hours of filming, exasperated. He says, “Be
honest motherfucker, stop that acting!” But Holliday refuses to acquiesce to
his demand. The film is a test of personalities, and the stakes are high. In
Lacanian terms, the desire and aggressivity of the Other is at stake. Holliday
says to Lee and Clarke, who orchestrate the scene: “I’m the bitch. You
amateur cunts take notice.”
Part of the mystery enshrouding the film is about what Holliday did to
Clarke and Lee in real life. Each has been victim to Holliday’s antics in real
time. Audiences do not know what went down off screen, but we know it was
bad. Clarke acknowledges that she began the evening with hatred: “there
was a part of me that was out to do him in, get back at him, kill him.” But over
the course of the night something happens. Clarke says in a post-screening
interview that she came to love Holliday as the evening progressed. Love and
hate change places in the film. The film set is affectively charged; everyone
seems to go through something psychically significant. The mix of emotions,
conscious and unconscious, destructive, and antidotal, are accentuated by
a psychoanalytically inflected set-design. Clarke’s apartment/set features a
prominent white, semi-ornate fireplace, a daybed (calling to mind the
Freudian couch), a skull on the mantel (calling to mind Hans Holbein’s
painting “The Ambassadors,” which becomes more prominent as the film
progresses), elegant flowers, and a soft (one could say feminine) aesthetic. The
film set is not only death-like but also psychoanalytic. It has a clandestine and
analytic feel.
Much like how clients disappear (failing to return to sessions) and reappear
(when their troubles return), Holliday, like the film, disappears and reappears.
The film’s circulation, like Holliday’s transient existence, is like the Fort/da
game Sigmund Freud played with his grandson, animating tension and then
relieving anxiety about where the Other (as object) is: Gone! There! In 1967,
the film was “There!” but it did not get widespread distribution. It was screened
in private theaters and colleges, often with Clarke, as speaker, present at the
latter. Shortly thereafter, the film was lost, and its whereabouts were unknown
for decades. According to the Milestone Films press kit, the film was hard to
find because it looked like outtakes, as opposed to an actual finished film.
“Because Shirley Clarke had created a film that was meant to look unedited .…
It was lost by its very nature.”7 After an exhaustive search, Portrait of Jason
turned up in the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research archives.
Surprisingly, the film was found in a dream. As the story goes, the co-owner of
Milestone Films, Dennis Doros “woke up with a mathematical equation in his
head… [which] proved to be the footage count found on the inspection report
of the original outtakes at Wisconsin.”8 After checking again, they found that
the film reels labeled outtakes were, in fact, the actual film footage.
Who is Jason Holliday?

In order to interpret the film, we must consider the way the gaze, the screen,
and the cinematic frame triangulates Holliday. Holliday is, notably, posi-
tioned between Clarke and Lee. Despite Lee’s explicit homophobia,
Holliday is in love with him, the only other black man in the Chelsea
apartment that night. Clarke originally met Holliday through Lee, who has
also starred in one of Clarke’s films.9 The film maker is a white Polish-
American Jew who has taken a special interest in those she refers to as
“outsiders.” After the premiere, Clarke says: “When I saw the rushes I knew
the real story of what happened that night in my living room had to include
all of us, and so our question-reaction probes, our irritations and angers, as
well as our laughter remain part of the film, essential to the reality of one
winter’s night in 1967” (qtd.in Powers).
While Clarke focuses on the triad on set, Holliday focuses on an internal
triplicate. Specifically, he wonders whether he can convince audiences that he
has three sexual orientations. He says in a post-screening interview: “I won-
dered if people [the audience] would think I was a homosexual, bisexual or
heterosexual. I wondered if I was great enough [as an actor] to convince them
I was all three. The three-sided figure makes a triangular—trisexual … dig
it?” (Mekas 1967: 31). Holliday knows more about the triangulation of desire,
the screen, the gaze, and the frame than most filmmakers. In fact, Holliday’s
discourse revolves around the operation of the gaze, the frame, and the ci-
nematic screen. He plays, linguistically, with the words “seen” and “scene,”
“reel” and “Real,” “gaze” and “gays.” His very being in the film is “out of
sight.” In fact, the film begins with a blurry image of Holliday, and we hear
his voice. He does not say “testing, one, two, three …” He says: “My name is
Jason Holliday”; and then says it again, “My name is Jason Holliday.” Then
he laughs and says “My name is Aaron Payne.” His image then comes into
focus. We know, almost immediately, that his identity is not only in question
but arresting. We see Holliday through black, thick framed glasses resembling
handcuffs. When we see his eyes, they appear through what approximates
heavy base shot glasses. The lenses are so thick they mask and obscure his
eyes. Much like his face blurs and comes in and out of focus, in-between reels
his eyes are similarly weighted down by heavy lids. Every time a film cata-
logue is changed, Holliday’s face blurs, and disappears, only to return-again.
Audiences witness something akin to what Lacan calls “the lethal gap in the
mirror stage” (“Treatment of Psychosis” 476). Each time a film catalogue is
changed we lose sight of Holliday and then he appears, again, through
Clarke’s camera (the gaze of the Other). While Lacan theorizes a psychic gap
in the mirror stage central to subjectification, Holliday’s life is saturated by a
socio-Symbolic gap that is objectifying. We know that he is a gay, African
American, effeminate, street-active hustler who enjoys playing the part of a
woman (as he says), but we do not know how these demographic and iden-
tarian “facts” square (or jive) with who he is structurally, that is psychically.
Something Real (beyond signification) is unaccounted for, undocumented,
despite Clarke’s best efforts to expose the truth.
Is identity a hustle?
Most documentary-style films featuring prominent people are circumscribed
by questions about identity. But Holliday’s discourse seems to trouble
identity. He cannot or will not tell us who he is. Due in no small measure to
Clarke’s cinematic genius, indeterminacy comes into focus, while any fixed
representation of Holliday’s life is subject to question. The question of being
(as identity) that concerns Clarke, Lee, and audiences is of no apparent
interest or consequence to Holliday. I suggest that what Holliday conveys
through his performative discourse is less about identity and more about
how he does not exist as a separate subject in Lacanian terms. If this is the
case, his discourse is of great psychoanalytic significance. In my inter-
pretation, his identity matters less to him than the more compelling wish
to re-enact the perverse way he is tethered to others. In Lacanian terms,
Holliday makes himself the object cause of the Other’s jouissance. Holliday
suffers from anti-black racism and homophobia in real time, but he also
suffers through the various ways he is bound to the others he hurts and
excites. The two axes of suffering cannot be separated.
The film seems to be a painful repetition of this double-edged suffering, but
Holliday is determined to punctuate the portrait with a perverse twist. He will
not be “milked” by Clarke. As evident in published interviews with Holliday
after the film release, Holliday opposed the idea that he was exploited in the
film. In a 1967 interview, he says: “I’m being told by some people that Miss
Clarke has used me. I think the chick and me are even, dig it?” (1967: 31).
The exploitation thesis developed by Schulman and others allows us to un-
derstand the way anti-black racism functions in the making and viewing of the
film (as, indeed, we must). But in branding the film racist we are in danger of
reducing Holliday, and his performative response to anti-black racism, to a
pitiful caricature. Holliday has negotiated anti-black racism his entire life and
is no dupe. He has not only adopted survival strategies but has also developed
uniquely perverse insight into the operation of anti-black racism.
My supposition is that Holliday plays perversely with his positioning as a
racialized subject to beget and fashion a voice. His performative response to
anti-black racism and homophobia is not widely acknowledged by queer
theorists, not even by queer theorists of color. Holliday’s performative inter-
vention, and Clarke’s skillful editing of the avant-guard film, predates Judith
Butler’s theorization of queer performativity (1990) by over two decades. But
the pioneering contribution Holliday, and Clarke, have made to the field
of queer theory has been largely ignored. If we take Holliday at his word, he
wants to send the world a message. He says, like a drag-queen in campy, but
unmistakable, defiance: “Thanks to Miss Shirley Clarke and Mr. Carl Lee.
World you’re gonna hear from me.”10
The question of identity is not neutral with respect to cinematic re-
presentation. Holliday knows it, and Clarke knows it. While Clarke wants
Holliday to be honest about who he is, Holliday’s objective is to play with the
indeterminate space between who he is, or might be, and the Other’s fantasy.
Holliday twists fact and fiction to enact what Clarke’s original interest in truth
obscures. There is, in Lacanian terms, a Real gap in being. What others see by
way of identity (a black gay man, for example) does not reflect what is most
significant to Holliday’s performance of an indentured relation to the Other.
For Holliday, there is a link between who he is, as a gay, black, effeminate
man and the jouissance of the Other (who is, in Holliday’s stories, often white).
Holliday’s performative discourse says something specific about his being
that is irreducible to questions of identity and demographics but is, never-
theless, shaped by them. Holliday’s antics, his lies and attempts to undermine
others, are infuriating, but they are also analytically productive. He articulates
a problem of being in excess of identity. But audiences are not all hip to his
game. Like people in Holliday’s everyday life, viewers get tired and, in-
creasingly, angry. Based on film-reviewer commentary in 1967, along with
my own observation of audiences at the second release of the film at the IFC
center in 2013,11 people sit soberly, stewing in their theatre seats, while
Holliday is inebriated and refuses the terms of recognition on offer. The
question of Holliday’s identity, central to the film (which calls itself, albeit
critically, a portrait), is of ongoing concern to audiences, regardless of period.
The film is over fifty years old, but Holliday’s perverse play with the terms of
identity and recognition is queerly subversive and timeless.
Paradoxically, Holliday achieves some level of recognition by refusing to
let the audience know who he is. He refuses to tell us anything real or au-
thentic about his identity. Holliday knows his image is at stake. He says in a
post-production interview: “I was aware filmwise of what I was doing. I never
got too far beyond my image. But what is my image? Other than a well
dressed, well liked swinging cat? I also play many roles in life. I was also hip
enough to do it on the screen—dig it?” (1967: 31).
While the filmmaker is responsible for the shoot and cinematic cuts, Holliday
plays with the narrative structure of documentary truth. In effect, he refuses to
tell the truth. In so doing he reveals a more psychoanalytically significant truth
about the way he is tethered to the Other. Holliday’s stories narrate a painful
repetition whereby he is exploited by older, white (often female) employers.
Each story of exploitation Holliday narrates involves a painful (and exhaustive)
repetition. Clarke says, “The result, I’m convinced is a portrait of a guy who is
both a genius and a bore.” I do not think Clarke is meaning to criticize Holliday
by calling him boring. Nor does she misunderstand the operation of anti-black
racism and economic exploitation. What she notes, by way of conclusion, is a
performative repetition in his life and discourse where there is, in Lacanian
terms, an inability to act or make a cut. Anti-black racism, coupled with sex
worker recrimination and condemnation, efface elements of his being. This
cannot be in doubt. But the more difficult truth is to be seen in the way
Holliday’s persona (what he calls his image) does not exist without these effa-
cements. The tyranny of the Other is, for Holliday, a persistent component of
his being, and he suffers for it. But he also seems to dig it or, at the very least, to
find humor and satire in suffering.
This perverse response to anti-black racism angers audiences who do not
find perverse pleasure in the history of anti-black racism in the United States.
Holliday’s performance is not only an act for the camera, but an “acting out”
of the pervert’s foundational problem: how to be when one is “hung-up” (on
the Other). As indicated in his discourse, Holliday suffers not only from anti-
black racism but also from Real (extra linguistic) tyrannical bonds in every
scene he narrates. Holliday’s discourse and performance is un-cut. He re-
mains tied to Clarke, Lee, his father who beats him, the white women who
employ him, the police officer who arrests him, and the psychiatrist who sends
him to the asylum, etc. There is no moral injunction or interdiction. The
aggression of the Other is unbarred in his discourse. Every clandestine story,
every narrative line, fades into another. No character in Holliday’s life-story
stands-out. They are pawns in the larger play of his life. When Lee asks
Holliday about love, he says: “I’ve been in love once, many times.” The other
does not exist in their particularity because the Other persists. Holliday never
ceases to de-robe (or rob) the other (of material possessions, often money), but
the Other continues to exist. The Other tormenting him is an arresting fiction,
an object of his Imaginary. But no matter what he does to actual others he
cannot rid himself of the tyrannical Other in his mind’s eye. As a hustler,
Holliday is always on the watch, casing joints and people. His livelihood
depends upon it. He banks upon reading situations and people. Holliday
explains: “… some people like museums and they spend all day looking at the
pictures. I spend all day looking at people. It’s the same form of art … really.
It’s just a little more strenuous.”
The function of the pervert

What often bothers audiences of color and anti-racist activists about the film
is that Holliday does not seem to care, or get upset, about racial injustice.
He willfully enacts and embodies multiple racist stereotypes. There is nothing
revolutionary in Holliday’s discourse. He witnesses what he calls “organiza-
tion” (gay activism) in San Francisco. Despite acknowledging the importance
of getting “organized,” which he euphemistically refers to as “Get[ting] your
buns together,” he did not take part. When he saw things being organized,
he “decided it was time to “pick up my gay buns and swish outta here
[San Francisco].” He is also not interested in same-sex marriage. Holliday
says: “Why get married?” “Some people dig it./But … I am never going
to get hung up on one of them boy-boy marriages.”
Holliday’s disinterest in “boy-boy marriages” is matched by his disin-
terest in black civil rights, assimilation and integration. Unlike the in-
tegrationist messages and uses of psychoanalysis in the early 1920s and
1930s by black scholars in Harlem highlighted by Badia Sahar Ahad
(2010), Holliday opts for disintegration and obscurity. He does not forge a
positive identification with blackness and is not a role model for aspiring
black actors. He is no Sidney Poitier, a Bahamian-American film-director
and actor, who directed and acted in 1960s films about racial injustice.
(Ironically, Portrait of Jason premiered the same year as Guess Who’s Coming to
Dinner starring Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier and Katherine Hepburn.
Richard Brody of The New Yorker wrote that “if there were any justice in the
world of awards, Holliday would have won that year’s Oscar for Best
Original Screenplay, not William Rose” for his film about interracial
marriage in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.) While Sidney Poitier was the first
African American man to win an Academy Award, along with a Golden
Globe, for his acting and was, as James Baldwin dared to say, a sex-symbol,
he was, unlike Holliday, respectable and heterosexual.
In asking Holliday to star in her 1967 film, Clarke gave American audi-
ences an anti-celebrity, a counter to the Poitier-portrait. No one brings
Holliday home to dinner to meet their parents! He will never be the doctor/
professor Poitier plays. No engagements with beautiful white women are
forthcoming. So Holliday plays the part of Katherine Hepburn in Clarke’s
film. He also sings “The Music That Makes Me Dance” and impersonates
Scarlett O’Hara and her black maid, Prissy, played by Thelma “Butterfly”
McQueen in the epic romance Gone with the Wind.
Those who feel compassion for Holliday (and this is certainly not ev-
eryone who knows him and watches the film), are torn between wanting to
save him from the harrowing experiences he narrates, and from an un-
settling knowledge that his being is bound-up with those whom he hurts and
is hurt by. One of Lacan’s original observations is that desire is always the
desire of the Other. As he famously writes, “I is an other” (“Aggressiveness
in Psychoanalysis” 96). Holliday performs this psychic truth but in a per-
verse way. Not only is he “un-cut” (and thus “hung-up”), but he cannot be
without the Other’s destructive jouissance (notably coded as white in his
stories). Much like Hegel’s slave is bound to the master, Holliday’s subjective
reality is indistinguishable from the destitution he mocks and pokes fun at.
The master is, like audiences who shift uncomfortably in their seats as they
listen to Holliday, cinched to the slave. We can dismiss the portrait of
subjective destitution Holliday narrates (along with Clarke’s film) as racist,
but we will, in the process of dismissal, fail to analyze the psychic under-
pinnings of relevance to the discourse of the actor.
Psychoanalysis, like serious anti-racist work, involves an honest engagement
with our passionate attachments to things that hurt us. We are not supposed
to like and desire people, events, and things that hurt us: it makes for bad
politics. Attachments to harm unsettle the moralism upon which progressive
political movements are based. The vast majority of us, who are neurotic in
Lacanian-structural terms, will complain and protest and oppose tyranny, but
perverts are more likely to play with the very terms of tyranny because they
know they cannot be without it-- at least not fully. They are tethered to the
Other’s jouissance. For the Lacanian pervert, the Law has not enabled a cut in
being. This cut is functional in Lacanian terms because it constitutes the
subject in their particularity. The cut produces a loss that enables the subject
to desire. Without a cut the subject is bound to the jouissance of the Other and
does not desire as a neurotic (castrated subject) does. This should be under-
stood as a psychic-structural difference as opposed to a problem per se.
The way Holliday suffers must be understood in relation to homophobia
and anti-black racism, but his experience is compounded and complexified by
the perverse structure he dramatizes. The pervert is bound to the tyrannical
jouissance of the Other. It follows that Holliday’s performative discourse is a
response to the way he is bound by a racially specific knotting of Symbolic,
Imaginary, and Real psychic coordinates. This is what he calls his “hang-up.”
Racism and psychoanalysis: the “hang-up”

We may try to depict and deconstruct racism, but there will always be a
painful excess, a surplus beyond the word/image. This insufferable excess is
Real. The Real excess of anti-black racism reverberates in Holliday’s dis-
course. We feel it in Holliday’s stories. Like Lacan’s signifiers, racism, in
Holliday’s discourse, slides and is in excess of anything that can actually be
said or seen. James Baldwin wrote something similar in The Devil Finds Work:
racism is “more resounding than real” (6). By this, Baldwin is referring to
something more sonorous and encasing than mundane reality. Toward the
end of the film Holliday hits high, sad, and melancholic notes. Racism be-
comes a devastating echo. It returns and reverberates, does not stand still.
This is why Holliday performs, but cannot tell, the truth about his life. Life is,
as Holliday says, “a gas,” and he digs it.
Psychoanalysts “dig” (metaphorically speaking) to get to the truth of their
patient’s being. But the psychoanalytic clinic has not been affordable or ac-
cessible to many African Americans. Holliday, cunningly, appropriates the
cinematic space to explore his life-drama in psychoanalytically significant
ways. This is his moment. The film-set becomes Holliday’s own personal
psychoanalytic couch-space. He grandstands while leaning against the fire-
place mantel, lies on the couch, falls to his knees. He sings, tells stories and
free-associates. In fact, the only rule Holliday abides by is the psychoanalytic
rule that says one must speak. He flaunts the rule and tells the audience:
I “can say whatever I goddamn please.”
Although Holliday “acts out” (to and for the Other), he freely admits to
being “hung-up.” In other words, he wants to talk about the way he is “hung-
up” on the Other. Holliday says he got “hung-up” on being a houseboy. He
was also “hung-up” on the men he hustled for money. Money, Holliday says,
“has always been a … big hang-up with me. I have never really had any, but
I’ve always managed to … I get enough to survive.” Holliday also refers to
San Francisco as a “hang up town.” Sex is, he says, one of his main hang-ups.
Holliday says: “Well sex is the thing I’m trying to forget! Because I’ve spent so
much of my life being sexy … as you can see, that I haven’t gotten anything
else done … But I had a swell time, you understand?” In point of fact,
Holliday anticipates Lacan’s now famous phrase, “Your money or your life”
(1998: 212) by six years. The Parisian psychoanalyst explains in terms that
resemble Holliday’s life story/discourse: “If I choose the money, I lose both. If
I choose life, I have life without the money, namely, a life deprived of
something. I think I have made myself clear” (212). The question of Holliday’s
life, torn as it is between money and his existence causes hang-ups. The actor
explains, “That’s the story of peoples’ lives. That’s the reason you don’t get
anything done. You’re hung-up, you know, and everybody wants what isn’t
good for him.” Holliday also refers to hanging in the East 50s, which he
describes as “groovy … A nice place to live. Of course, rent is high there …
and that makes the clientele a little more refined.” But he then realizes after a
cop grabbed him that he had to “ … get the hell outta here!” “I found out not
to hang around there anymore.”
Holliday’s “hang-up” is a tripartite structure involving money, dispossession
and jouissance. In fact, his discourse is all about threes. As he explains in the
post-screening interview quoted above, he is a trisexual. As such, he is a
“three-sided figure” who will “try anything as long as there is money in it, dig
it?” (1967: 31). While Holliday’s “hang-up” is personal, it must also resonate,
on some unconscious level, with the horrific history of lynching and hangings
in the American south. While impersonating actors from the Cameron Jones
musical, Holliday references a scene where the character Joe says: “String me
high to a tree.” His sardonic laugh accompanying the reference is unsettling.
Holliday also says, “I spent a lot of time in parties and gardens … I became a
garden queen. I was hoe-ing … and digging it.” He then laughs.
The reference to “hoe” (which is a euphemism for prostitute), metonymically
associated with “garden spade” (an image-sign hung on racially “colored”
bathroom doors during the Jim Crow era), is an intertextual reference to the
legacy of anti-black racism in the American South.
Holliday’s discourse is peppered with psychoanalytically inflected ideas
and wordplays. He refers to San Francisco’s Aquatic Park as “Neurotic
Park” and explains how he hung with the “dope fiends” (not the faggots or
the muscle men) in the park. Holliday explains that he is a “nervous” duster,
breaking valuable China adored by his housemistresses by accident and
sometimes, he admits, on purpose. After the housemistress scolds him for
breaking a vase Holliday laughs, explaining he just “went hysterical.”
Referring to his nightclub act and his friend’s advice regarding cuteness on
stage, Holliday says: “Give me some money/and then you can watch me act
funny.” Several moments later he explains how he has suffered and slips:
“Oh. I’ve suffered expensively … I mean extensively.” Holliday will not
punch the 9 to 5 timecard. “I made more money, turned more tricks, got
so high and had more fun than I ever knew you could have in this world.
Such a ball!”
White supremacy, homophobia and capitalism are all, for Holliday, a
laugh. But they also give him trouble, and his discourse is all about excess and
suffering. He says:
Yes, I think as a houseboy, I really suffered. But this all hasn’t been a
waste, because these people are fascinating, you know? I mean, they think
you’re just a dumb, stupid little colored boy and you’re trying to get a few
dollars and they’re gonna use you as a joke. And it gets to be a joke
sometimes as to who’s using who, you know. So I figured, as long as they
pay enough, you know, whatever they say do, I’ll do.
Holliday says he will do anything for money. Like the Lacanian pervert, the
actor seems to enjoy without end. But the manifest enjoyment masks a Real
struggle with money that involves suffering. Tension on the film-set climaxes
because Clarke and Lee do not believe that Holliday suffers. Clarke says
to Holliday at the beginning of the film: “You’re not suffering.” Like most
neurotics (who have, in Lacanian terms, separated from the Other), she be-
lieves the pervert, as enacted by Holliday, does not suffer or, rather, that he
does not suffer enough. The aggressiveness through which Clarke (and Lee)
want to “break” Holliday, see him suffer, is palpable. Clarke issues questions
or, rather, demands in the form of questions: “Hey Jase, tell that cop story …
do the ‘I’ll never tell’ bit.”; “No, again …”; “Do one that makes you cry …”;
“what else you got?”
The film has the feel of an extended psychoanalytic session. But Clarke’s
intention is not curative. Rather, it is about holding Holliday to account.
While analysts are supposed to hold their counter-transferences in check,
Clarke, and later Lee, are unreserved in their interrogation. Early into the
morning hours, Holliday confesses: “I spent so much time being a nervous
wreck, I guess I never really had any fun at all.” This revelation marks a shift
in his performative discourse. Holliday seems to notice that there is a differ-
ence between jouissance (suffering) and fun. The insight paves the way for him
to notice that the life he performs for the camera is bound to Others. If he is
going to have fun before the camera Holliday must free himself from the
desire of the Other (in this case, Clarke and Lee, who are making a film about
him). The character Holliday performs needs the law to act—not to curb,
but to enable his desire.
The law
Like the Lacanian pervert who flouts the law (only appearing to have fun),
Holliday says he never “had any fun at all.” This is a curious admission
for a hustler who is not only excessive in his sexual exploits, but hedonistic.
Another layer of confusion sets in because audiences do not know if the ad-
mission is real or performative. The perverse performance and the actor-as-
person begin to coincide. It is not possible to distinguish the person from
the actor. We may think we are witnessing a truth about Holliday and his
undoing. The actor says before the camera that he no longer wants to be a
“nervous wreck.” In other words, he does not want to be “hung-up” on the
(big) Other anymore. But audiences do not know if the alcohol-induced re-
velation is authentic (relating to the person) or performative (relating to the
portrait). Holliday is, as they know, a compulsive liar, a hustler and knows
“filmwise” what he is doing. It must be tiring (in real life and in film) to be sexy
all the time and to have one’s survival dependent on it. This could be true of
both the actor and the person. The truth may be in the confusion between the
two: the image (as portrait) and something Real specific to Holliday’s being
that cannot be said or seen.
Being the object cause of the Other’s jouissance is painful and leads to suf-
fering. Unlike a (neurotic) masochist who orchestrates a scene from beginning
to end with a safe-word in place, Holliday will not stop or play it safe. This
horrifies viewers, particularly those who understand the psychical effects of
anti-black racism. There is no cut in Holliday’s discourse, no limit to his
destructive shenanigans. In Lacanian terms, Holliday’s discourse demands a
severance. While we cannot be sure about who appears before the camera,
the actor or the person, it is fair to say that Holliday’s performative-discourse
demands a cut. The actor needs the law to act so he does not have to be
“hung-up” on the Other.
In Lacanian theory, perverts need the law and seek it out through their
antics. Holliday’s performance gives shape to a character who exploits and
gambles on the law (which he sees as a joke). In so doing, Holliday reveals the
law to be not only racist but fraudulent. Holliday is performing a service in a
perverse way, allowing us to see that the law has sadistic effects. Unlike the
neurotic who regards the law as prohibitive, the pervert sees the law as ex-
cessive and unbarred. Holliday’s stories not only reveal the way he, allegedly,
contravenes the law but the way the law is ineffectual. Certainly, the law did
not hold his father’s tyrannical abuse in check. Holliday was subject to the
excessive (punishing) law of his father (nicknamed “Brother Tough”) and to
the law of the land, which did not mitigate but enable anti-black racism and
homophobic persecution in his adult life.
Holliday first tries to free himself from the law of his father. He changes his
given name from “Aaron” (which is onomastically linked to one who abides
by a code of honor and is a martyr) to “Jason” (which, in ancient Greek, refers
to one who “cures” or “heals”). He also changes his surname from “Payne” to
“Holliday.” He chooses a surname that signifies a vacation and leaves behind
a word that sounds like its homonym, “pain.” The first thing Holliday says
on film is his chosen name, twice, and then he laughs, revealing his given
name, Aaron. Audiences learn that Holliday has a contested relationship to
his familial lineage and to the law in the opening segment.
Let us remember that Clarke, a white woman, and her lover Carl Lee, a
black man (a successful actor in his own rite), are both on the cinematic set.
They resemble Holliday’s parents. Clarke and Lee try to discipline him.
They want Holliday to behave and tell the truth, but Holliday, always the
problem child, acts out. Clarke (as substitute mother) provides the cinematic
holding space (the screen), but Holliday looks to Lee (a homoerotic love
interest) to enact the law. He says to Lee, “Teach me! Tell me where to stop
Carl!” I “always forget where to draw the line.” In other words, Holliday
asks Lee to impose a psychic cut, to draw a line where he cannot. The life-
drama (as portrait) is no longer about Holliday, or even Clarke and
Holliday, but Holliday, Clarke and Lee (a ménage à trois). Holliday wants Lee
to hear and acknowledge the love he, Holliday, professes to have for him.
Instead, Lee becomes explosive (like Holliday’s father) and accuses him of
“blowing” the bread (money). (Interestingly Holliday’s father was a gambler
and a bootlegger.) The two men are bound in orgasmic-hate:
[Lee] You’re blowing your own thing, Jason.

[Lee] You hear me, bitch?
[Lee] You’re blowing your only thing, a lot of fucking bread.
[Lee]—You ain’t gonna get another chance.
[Holliday]—Tell me where to stop, Carl!
[Lee] It goes around one time, man …
[Holliday] I felt it.
[Lee] Watch it, man.
[Holliday] Nobody’s business now but my own.
[Lee] You can’t cut it.
[Holliday] No more to say.
[Lee] You had nothing to say to begin with.
[Holliday] That’s the drag.
[Lee] That’s the truth.
[Holliday] That’s the beautiful truth,
[Holliday] but still, it’s the truth, Carl.
[Lee]—Your game.
[Holliday]—and that’s the basis of something.
[Lee]—Your game, baby.
[Holliday] Stick with me, Carl.
[Lee] Shit! Fuck you!
[Holliday] Oh, you do! Oh, thanks a lot!
[Holliday] Oh, all I need now is to have an orgasm (Milestone Films)
Lee says “Fuck you” and Holliday wants to have an orgasm. Lee experiences
a homophobic rage that Lacan might call hainamoration (hate-love). Not de-
spite but because of this hate–love the two actors cannot separate. Lee will
not acknowledge the homoerotic currents in their aggressive exchange,
and Clarke enables Lee’s verbal abuse to go unabated for quite some time.
But the film maker does enable a repetition with a difference. Clarke in-
terrupts the dyadic altercation and, at the twelve-hour mark, says: “The end,
the end, the end, the end. The end. That’s it. It’s over. The end.”
Conclusion
With the skill and technique of a Lacanian analyst, Clarke enables a cut in
Holliday’s discourse. She effectively severs him from Lee. Despite her in-
tention to film the proverbial truth about Holliday (including the “dirty
rotten letters” the hustler, allegedly, wrote about Lee when he was “laying in
the Bowery as a bum”), Clarke makes a cinematic cut. There is no truth
about Jason Holliday to film. There is no resolution or soul laid bare. The
truth cannot be said or seen. Portrait of Jason is interminable and Real (be-
yond signification). But when Clarke turns the camera off, she enables a
scansion. She imposes a life limit in real time. Clarke scans Holliday’s dis-
course cinematically. After the shoot Clarke labors to edit the film footage.
She makes the film, but Holliday takes possession of it as his portrait. He will
not be “cut-out” of the game. Clarke paid Holliday royalties from the film
(10% gross profit) and, as she says in an interview, he always knew when to
collect. Holliday would also “occasionally show up at screenings of Portrait of
Jason, greeting the audience, performing monologues, and laughing along
during the screening” (Gustafson 2011: 8). By all accounts, Holliday loves
the film. He calls it a thing of beauty. Of the film, Holliday says: “No matter
how many more times I may be good or be ridiculous, I will have one
beautiful something that’s my own, you know, that I really, for once in my
life, was together, and this is the result of it.”
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Milestone Films for sending me a transcript of the film. I also
acknowledge the generous support of the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada through Partnership Development Grant
890-2014-0026.
Notes
1 The documentary was originally released by Filmmakers’ Distribution Center. The
first sneak preview (by invitation only) was July 9, 1967, at the Museum of Modern
Art in NYC. The theatrical premiere was on October 7, 1967, at the New Cinema
Playhouse in NYC.
2 It cost $21,500 to make the film. It ran for almost three months and generated
approximately $1700 per week at the box office. The revenue generated did not
offset the theatre overhead and advertising expenses. Thus, Portrait of Jason did not
have a national release.
3 See https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0150/7896/files/PortraitOfJasonPressKit
Optimized.pdf?130.
4 See Foucault’s (1980) lectures on power knowledge for a discussion of psychiatry
and the technologies of diagnosis.
5 Elvis Mitchell (2013) said that in 1980 James Baldwin came to see Portrait of Jason
in Detroit and said: “It’s exhausting. I don’t know if I can stand watching it, but
I couldn’t take my eyes off of it” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QdjKHSyb2E).
6 See www.sensesofcinema.com.
7 See www.projectshirley.com/press/portraitofjason.pdf.
8 See http://projectshirley.com/press/portraitofjason.pdf.
9 Clark Lee (1926–1986) starred in Clarke’s first feature film The Connection.
10 Holliday takes this line “You’re going to hear from me” from the Audré Preven
song featured in the film Inside Daisy Clover (1965). In the film, Natalie Wood plays
a masculine young girl who longs to be famous. She sings: “On top of the world,
I’ll meet you, I swear/I’m stakin’ my claim, so remember my name.” (The line
about remembering my name also appears in the Irene Cara song “Fame”
featured in the movie (1980) and television series (1982) of the same name.).
11 The film also enjoyed a second world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in 2013.
Sarah Schulman released a controversial adaptation of the film in 2015 at MOMA
titled Jason and Shirley.
References
Ahad, Badia Sahar. Freud Upside Down: African American Literature and Psychoanalytic
Culture. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010.
Anderson, Melissa. “60s Verité.” 4Columns. 19 January 2018, www.4columns.org/
anderson-melissa/60s-verite. Accessed 30December2019.
Baldwin, James. The Devil Finds Work. 1976. New York: Vintage, 2011.
Brody, Richard. “Portrait of Jason and the Life of Movies.” The New Yorker. 15 April
2013, www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/portrait-of-jason-and-the-life-
of-movies. Accessed 31 July 2019.
Brown, Rachel. “Don’t tell them everything: Portrait of Jason (Shirley Clarke, 1967).”
Senses of Cinema, vol. 82, 17 March 2017, http://sensesofcinema.com/2017/1967/
portrait-of-jason/. Accessed 31 July 2019.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London:
Routledge, 1990.
Butt, Gavin. “Stop that acting!: Performance and authenticity in Shirley Clarke’s
Portrait of Jason.” Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures. Annotating Art’s Histories. Ed. Kobena
Mercer. London: MIT Press, 2007, pp. 36–55.
Cara, Irene. “Fame.” Fame Soundtrack, RSO, 1980.
Clarke, Shirley Director. Portrait of Jason. Milestone Films, 1967.
Clarke, Shirley, Director. The Cool World. Wiseman Film Productions, 1963.
Clarke, Shirley, Director. The Connection. Milestone Films, 1961.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta.
Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
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94–103.
Fleming, Victor. Gone With the Wind. Beverly Hills: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1933.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1978.
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977.
New York: Vintage, 1980.
Gore, Christopher, Creator. Fame. Eilenna Productions and MGM Television, 1982.
Gustafson, Irene. “Putting Things to the Test: Reconsidering Portrait of Jason.” Camera
Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, 77, 2011, pp. 1–31.
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York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, [1973] 1998.
Mekas, Jonas. “Movie Journal.” The Village Voice, 28 September 1967, p. 31.
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on Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books, 2006.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QdjKHSyb2E.
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New York: SUNY Press, 2012.
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portraitofjason.pdf. Accessed 31July2019.
Powers, John. (2013 May 2) Peeling Away The layers in a ‘Portrait of Jason. Fresh Air,
PR. Conversation with Illeana Douglas After Broadcast of Portrait of Jason, Turner
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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation
of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Champaign: University of
Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 271–313.
10 The lost souls of the barrio:
Lacanian psychoanalysis in
the Ghetto
Patricia Gherovici
When we hear the word “psychoanalysis,” we take the first part of the word
for granted, forgetting that in Greek “psyche” means “soul.” Bruno
Bettelheim (1983), the Austrian-born psychologist, scholar, public in-
tellectual, and author of The Uses of Enchantment, among other titles, was the
first to stress this idea when he observed that “soul” is “a term of the
richest meaning endowed with emotion, comprehensively human and un-
scientific.”1 He opposed it to “analysis,” a word that implies taking apart,
dissecting, breaking down into smaller units. However, it is clear in the
German pronunciation of the word Psychanalyse that Sigmund Freud, despite
his disdain for religious doctrine and ideology, was putting the accent on
the first syllable, psyche—hence, emphasizing the soul.
In an early 1890 text that predates the first use of the word “psychoanalysis”
by six years,2 published in English as “Psychical (or Mental) Treatment” but
titled in German “Psychische Behandlung (Seelenbehandlung),” that is, “Psychic
Treatment (Soul Treatment),” Freud makes explicit that “soul” is the best
rendition of “psyche.”3 He goes on to explain that “pathological disorders of
the body and the soul can be eliminated by ‘mere’ words,” foregrounding the
power of speech, of speaking and being listened to, in the treatment.
The emphasis on reaching the soul with words is what made Freud’s
method different from other approaches like hypnosis. However, Freud’s
explicit references to the soul and to matters pertaining to it have all been
removed in the English translations of his writings. In the Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, a 24-volume series
edited by James Strachey, the German “die Seele,” which means “the soul,” is
consistently translated as “mind.” The reduction of the soul to mere intellect
contradicts Freud’s intention of establishing a “science of the soul.” As Eli
Zaretsky writes in Secrets of the Soul, early psychoanalysis had attempted to
mimic the narrow frame of medicine and in so doing produced “a degraded
profession, a pseudoscience whose survival is now very much in doubt.”4
However, psychoanalysis will remain “a great force for human emancipation”
insofar as it maintains its distance from empirical science.
In “The Question of Lay Analysis,” Freud noted that “we do not consider
it at all desirable for psychoanalysis to be swallowed up by medicine”
184 Partricia Gherovici
(Freud 1926: 248)5. In fact, medical education is the polar opposite of what
one needs in order to work effectively with the unconscious. For Bettelheim,
what made psychoanalysis unique was its emphasis on the soul, an aspect that
he felt had been downplayed by subsequent theoreticians of psychoanalysis,
though this was a most important factor for Freud. Bettelheim would thus
argue that psychoanalysis had lost its soul in translation. It was also the fate
of other disciplines using the word “psyche” in their compound names, dis-
ciplines that aim at acquiring the serious stamp of science by neglecting the
“soul”: for example, psychology and psychiatry.
Emphasis upon the soul is significant for understandings of not only
psychoanalysis but also race. Another person for whom the soul was of
great importance preceded Freud by several centuries—the Bishop Friar
Bartolomé de las Casas, a 16th-century Spanish historian, social reformer,
theologian and Dominican friar. Las Casas helps initiate debates over the
soul of racialized others that remain pertinent to psychoanalysis’ relation
to race. His most famous texts, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies and
Historia de Las Indias, chronicle the first decades of colonization of the West
Indies and focus on the atrocities committed against indigenous peoples by
colonizers. Las Casas became a controversial figure for trying to convince
the Spanish court to adopt a more humane policy of colonization. Above all,
Las Casas is known for his participation in the famous Valladolid Debate
(1550–1551) held in Spain’s Colegio de San Gregorio. In what became the
first moral debate in European history about the treatment of the natives
in the Spanish colonies, the discussion was whether indigenous people of
the Americas were God’s creatures endowed with souls. Were they to be
considered equally human as imperial subjects, or beings deprived of a soul,
hence eligible to be enslaved? Citing the Bible and canon law, Las Casas
stated that “All the World is Human!” concluding that despite their practice
of human sacrifices and other objectionable customs, the Amerindians were
equal beings.
Opposing this view were a number of scholars and priests, including hu-
manist scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who argued that the natives’ human
sacrifices, their cannibalism, and other such “crimes against nature” were
unacceptable practices that should be suppressed by any means possible, in-
cluding war. Challenging Las Casas, Sepúlveda contended that the natives
were barbarians without souls. Interestingly, Sepúlveda took a more secular
approach than Las Casas, for he based his arguments on Aristotle to assert
that the Amerindians were naturally predisposed to slavery, and that they
could be subjected to bondage by war if necessary.
Sepúlveda argued that it was the responsibility of the Spaniards to act as
the natives’ masters in order to prevent them from engaging in cannibalism
and human sacrifice. Slavery was seen as an effective method of converting
them to Christianity and saving them from themselves, as they needed to be
ruled by Spanish masters for their own good. Las Casas objected to this,
arguing that Aristotle’s definition of the “barbarian” as a natural slave did
Lacanian psychoanalysis in the Ghetto 185
not apply to the natives who were fully capable of reason. Instead, he
wanted to bring the Amerindians to Christianity without force or coercion,
that is, he believed that they could be willingly converted.
Despite the moral and theological emphasis of this debate, there was a
major economic issue at stake—the legitimacy of the encomienda system. The
encomienda was a form of forced labor; it granted to a colonizer a number of
natives from a specific community who would provide tributes in the form of
labor and products. In the Americas and the Philippines, the Spanish colo-
nizers divided up the natives, forcing them into hard labor and subjecting
them to extreme punishments, including death, if they resisted. The en-
comenderos (or the entrusted colonizers, from Spanish encomendar, “to entrust”)
were responsible for the natives’ conversion to the Christian faith, their
education in religion, and their acquisition of the Spanish language, as well as
their protection.
To complicate matters, Queen Isabella of Castile had forbidden slavery,
since she declared the indigenous people “free vassals of the crown,” equal to
Spanish Castilians. While the encomienda was similar to a feudal relationship in
which military protection was provided in exchange for tributes or work, the
encomienda was based on the encomendado’s (or entrusted natives’) tribal identity
and race. For instance, mixed-race Mestizo individuals could not by law be
subjected to the encomienda. Many argue that this system contributed to the
colonial invention of racialized slavery and a loss of tribal identity. It is im-
portant to note that to challenge the fairness of the encomienda system was
to challenge the legitimacy and justice of colonial power. Tellingly, in this
debate, the existence of the native’s soul was key.
Offering evidence of how natives were being slaughtered without having
been converted, Las Casas sought to protect the souls of the natives as well as
those of the Spanish with its brutal conquistadores. Las Casas feared divine
retribution for the destruction of indigenous populations and tried to generate
moral indignation while invoking international law protecting the innocent
from being treated unjustly. He cited Saint Augustine and Saint John
Chrysostom, both of whom had opposed the use of force to punish crimes
against nature. Indeed, human sacrifice was wrong, but it was better to avoid
war by any means possible. The natives had to be converted to Christianity
without resorting to force.
As a result of the Valladolid Debate, Spain issued several laws attempting to
regulate the encomienda system and protect native populations. These were
not enforced—the subjugation of the native populations was already an ac-
cepted fact. Nonetheless, through his self-proclaimed goal of bearing witness
to the savagery of Europeans against the civility of indigenous peoples, Las
Casas became characterized as the conscience of Spanish conquest. If the
immediate impact of his work was marginal, the long-term influence would
be substantial. As for the Valladolid Debate, many scholars have argued that
the discussion of a colonial conception of the human provided the basis for a
Modern conception of alterity.6
Soul searching
How does someone become a racialized other? This is a question that Toni
Morrison posed in a thought-provoking series of lectures given at Harvard
University on race, fear, borders, mass movement of peoples, and desire
for belonging, published in The Origin of Others (2017).7 Morrison’s nuanced
meditation is not about racial difference but hatred, because she believes
that there is only one race—we are all humans. “Race is the classification of a
species, and we are the human race, period” (15).
Morrison’s observation evokes the humanism and universalism of Las
Casas that several centuries earlier challenged the horrors of the Spanish
colonial system. The long-lasting psychic consequences of the overarching
structure of coloniality can still be observed in today’s US barrio enclaves,
affecting the minds of both those in the position of racial oppressor and those
in that of racialized colonized other.
Differences between people might be constructed tangentially on genes and
biological taxonomy but are mostly about projective fantasy. Morrison dis-
cusses the fetishization of skin color in our era of mass migration, pondering
why human beings invent and reinforce categories of otherness that are de-
humanizing. As the character Booker, in the last of Morrison’s novels, God
Help the Child, says to Bride, the woman he loves and the novel’s protagonist,
“scientifically there’s no such thing as race, Bride, so racism without race is a
choice. Taught, of course, by those who need it, but still a choice. Folks who
practice it would be nothing without it” (Morrison 2016: 143).8 In her analysis
of racism, Morrison’s originality is to turn the tables, showing that racism not
only objectifies its victims, who are stripped of their humanity, and even of
their souls, but that racism also dehumanizes the racists themselves, who
“would be nothing without it.”
Today, nobody will say that Native Americans do not have a soul.
However, in my practice in Philadelphia’s barrio, I was confronted with a
prejudice similar to that racist attitude underlying the Las Casas-Sepúlveda
debate from the 16th century. Whenever I talked about my experience
conducting psychoanalytic cures with poor Puerto Ricans and other Latinos,
many of whom were of native American origin, I was met with doubt. The
idea of working psychoanalytically with minorities, people of color, was reg-
ularly dismissed. It was as if poor people could not have an unconscious,
which is not far from denying them a soul. Lurking behind these dismissive
responses was an echo of the arguments that Las Casas challenged. Especially
relevant here is my work on ataques de nervios, the so-called Puerto Rican
Syndrome (considered in the DSM as a “conversion” disorder), which I argue
is a curious return of the repressed racism of certain psychiatric practices
in the barrio.9
Since 1995, I have been pushing for a socially responsible practice of
psychoanalysis, one that does not forget that the origins of this profession
were quite radical.10 As Elizabeth Danto (2005) has shown, as early as 1918,
having witnessed the devastation of World War I—and fully aware of the
magnitude of its destructive impact on underprivileged social classes—Freud
appealed to the “soul” of society when he stated the obvious: the poor
have as much a right as the rich to benefit from the help provided by psy-
choanalysis.11 Freud envisioned a “psychotherapy for the people” whose
structure and composition would follow the model of “strict and un-
tendentious psycho-analysis.”12 When he gave this soulful call for social
justice, Freud was stating something that should have been obvious: both
poor and rich have the right to psychoanalysis.
Freud’s social activism and his commitment to the treatment of the working
class have been erased not just from the collective memory but also, most
importantly, from psychoanalytic history. In the years between the two world
wars, many analysts made psychoanalysis widely available. Helen Deutsch
described these times as ones influenced with a “spirit of reform” (Danto
2005: 3). Max Eitington, who in 1920 made possible the establishment of the
Berlin Poliklinik, the first free psychoanalytic clinic, considered Freud’s idea of
treatment being available regardless of income “half as prophecy and half as
challenge” (Danto 2005: 3). About 20 “free” clinics opened all over Europe,
from Vienna to London, from Zaghreb to Trieste and Paris. The treatment
was free of charge, like the public schools and universities of Europe. Analysts
at the time saw themselves as brokers of change, on the level both of society
and of the individual.
This radical Freudian initiative found an equivalent in New York City in
1946 when “an interracial trio of intellectuals” (Doyle 2009: 753)—psychiatrist
Fredric Wertham, director of the mental hygiene clinic at Queens General
Hospital, prominent novelist Richard Wright, and Earl Brown, a staff writer for
Life magazine—opened a psychoanalytically influenced clinic in the basement
of Harlem’s St. Philip’s Episcopal Church. Committed to social justice, they
supported a “race-blind universalist” belief that there was no difference between
the psyche of a black and a white person and challenged widespread prejudice,
putting in practice the idea that proper treatment was a necessity and not
a luxury, because disadvantaged and underserved populations needed psy-
chotherapy the most.13 Wertham insisted that Harlem needed the creation of a
clinic with urgency because “this is where the need is the greatest.” Failure to
provide adequate mental health services to black Harlemites “was equivalent
to deny[ing] them full recognition of their humanity.” (Doyle: 2009: 754). The
Clinic was named Lafargue Clinic to pay homage to a Latino figure, the
Afro-Cuban physician and philosopher Paul Lafargue, who was “proudest of
his Negro extraction,” as he said when asked about his origins (Derfler 1991:
15). He was also Karl Marx’s son-in-law and the author of the notorious essay
“The Right to Be Lazy” (1883).14
One important contribution made by the Lafargue Clinic was compiling
clinical studies showing that children interpreted school segregation as a
punishment, which led to mental health problems. The Lafargue study was
used as evidence in court, prompting the judges to decide that African
American children had to be admitted to two Delaware schools that were not
previously integrated. These findings were eventually incorporated into the
landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that abolished school seg-
regation in the United States. Unhappily, in 1958, despite having a full
waiting list, the Harlem clinic was forced to close amidst McCarthyist witch-
hunting.15 Some of the services relocated to another place, but they were
pressured to minimize their Marxist influences.
With uncompromising psychoanalysis as “an essential frame and method”
(Mendes 2015: 103) clinics like Lafargue challenged in their practice the racism
of psychiatric services that failed to take into account the psychic consequences
of oppression in the assessment and treatment of poor African-Americans. One
of the founders of the Lafargue Clinic, Fredric Wertham, was a German Jewish
émigré who was close to Marxism and advocated for a socially conscious and
uncompromising practice of psychoanalysis. In Paris, cofounder Richard
Wright had been influenced by the work of Franz Fanon, the notable psy-
choanalyst and psychiatrist who wrote on colonized subjectivity, and James
Baldwin, a writer and essayist on black and white relations (Zaretsky 2015: 74).
Wright and Wertham shared Fanon’s radical revolutionary position about
the emancipatory power of the unconscious (Mendes 2015: 16, 155–157).16
Wright believed that, in the United States, psychoanalytic treatment could
counteract the negative effects of segregation (Garcia, 2012: 49–74, 105–135;
Mendes 2015: 35–37, 40–44). Wright’s Lafargue clinic project was a defacto
sweeping revision of classical Freudian psychoanalytic practice in the United
States in the 1940s and 1950s. He was aware that to address the specific
suffering of racialized subjects was not simply taking distance from normal-
izing, elitist modalities of the cure that postwar American psychoanalysis
proposed. It was, as he put it, “the turning of Freud upside down” (Wright
quoted by Ahad 2010: 84.)17 The impact of psychoanalysis was not just ex-
pected to be palliative: Wright believed in the potential of psychoanalysis to
rethink race and to usher in new strategies of academic enquiry so as to give
birth to an antiracist clinical approach that could overcome segregation
(Garcia, 2012).18
Barrio’s souls
Unhappily this project remained incomplete, urging us toward a pressing
question: Can psychoanalysis undo the effects of racism today? This is a
question that raises both possibilities and responsibilities. In order to explore
the point at issue, I will use four clinical vignettes that I will call “barrio
stories.” The first one is about Ramona, a woman from the Dominican
Republic who once came to therapy complaining that “dirty Blacks” had
moved to her block. Even though she had dark brown skin, she did not
identify as Black because she spoke Spanish. Assuming herself to be a part of
the amorphous Hispanic crowd, she identified with the Other’s discourse and
thus used its language in order to point out racial difference.
Unmindful that she was supporting a racist discourse that also segregated
her, she herself became a victim of such disparaging remarks. As we know,
“Hispanic” refers to a language and not a skin color. What is the race of
Hispanics? Even the U.S. Census Bureau admits that Hispanics “may be of
any race.” Many of my barrio patients often identify themselves as belonging
to “the Puerto Rican race” or to “La Raza” rather than as Hispanic or Latino.
Even if we may call them, more politically correctly, “Latinx,” those subjects
and their experiences of oppression, like other populations belonging to so-
called minorities, will continue to be negated and viewed as part of a crowd, a
single undifferentiated body. Hispanics or Latinx are presented by main-
stream discursive practices as a host of frozen images in which any trace of
individuality, class, culture, and gender differences is erased. This oppression
is perpetuated in the notion of “race” that has shaped Latinx identities.
Because racism was Ramona’s symptom, I had to deal with it without
immediately combating it or reducing it. Ramona herself offered the royal
path to overcome her stereotyping, prejudice, and bias. The hatred she
needed in order to prop herself up, because she “would be nothing without
it,” could be released when her new neighbors started appearing in her
dreams. Jacques Lacan takes the dream as a metaphor of desire, that is, that
dreams are also a compromise formation, a substitute satisfaction of an
unconscious desire. Like her symptom of racism, Ramona’s dreams were
granting a form of displaced satisfaction. Putting her dreams to work,
reading them like a text, as a cryptic message she was sending to herself,
Ramona became aware of her unconscious investment in the neighbors that
she hated as much as she hated herself. A simple word association to a
dream (she was at a party at the despised neighbor’s house) proved re-
velatory. She first thought about the saying “mi casa es su casa,” (my house is
your house) or “what’s mine is yours.” Surprised that the disliked neighbors
were in her dream, and welcomed her to their home, she exclaimed “¡Ay,
bendito!,” “Oh blessed!,” an expression equivalent to “Sweet Jesus!” in some
Latin American countries. The homophony of “Ay” was, she told me later
in her associations, an echo of the pronunciation of Haiti in Spanish (ay-tee).
Another racialized other that she did not like had appeared, and it was one
that exposed the prejudice, the selective interpretation of history, and the
nationalism of the Dominican Republic, which were expressed in systemic
xenophobia against darker-skin Haitians.
Indeed, in the Dominican Republic, Ramona’s birth country, Haitians are
not just second-class citizens; they are considered the “eternal enemies of the
Dominican people.” There, “students are, quite literally, educated to hate”
Haitians, which is called antihaitianismo (Hall 2017).19 In the past, Haitians
have been victims of mass slaughters. One took place in 1937 under the orders
of Dictator Rafael Trujillo, who by the way was known to wear makeup to
lighten his skin. Between 17,000 and 35,000 Haitians were killed during what
was known as the “Parsley Massacre” (Wucker 2000: 51).20 This came from
the fact that Haitians could not pronounce the word perejil, Spanish for
“parsley,” and could be identified as foreigners. The word worked as a
shibboleth, and victims were discriminated against based on their accent.
Because of her skin color, on several occasions Ramona herself had been
discriminated against because she was suspected of being Haitian. Under
threat of being deported, she had had to prove her Dominican citizenship
to the authorities. So she never left her house (casa) without her cédula
(an identification document detailing ethnicity, race, and immigration status.)
Ramona also acknowledged that she secretly felt like an impostor, and that
she believed that all true Dominicans had light skin; in fact, she suspected that
she was of Haitian descent. As a child, she would hear an occasional joke
mocking her father, which brought up questions about his paternity—her
parents and grandparents on both sides had lighter skin than Ramona. This
biological quirk, the pigment of an unknown darker skin ancestor, made it
difficult for her to grow up in a society based on race and prejudice.
Her work in the treatment centered on what Sigmund Freud (1930) has
called the narcissism of minor differences: the human proclivity for aggression
intertwined with the desire for distinct identity.21 When Freud used the ex-
pression narcissism of minor differences, he wanted to highlight that it is
precisely minimal differences that generate clashes between people who are
otherwise quite alike; this is the root of a perception of strangeness leading to
hostility between them. To see one’s neighbor reflect and mirror oneself
too much threatens a person’s unique sense of self. As Pierre Bourdieu (1984)
proposes in Distinction, social identity is constructed on differences created by
what is the closest to one and it represents the greatest threat; differences are
exacerbated to create an illusion of superiority.22 In Ramona’s hatred of her
new Philadelphia neighbors, she was replicating the racism of which she had
been a victim while trying to assert an identity that denied the fact that it was
built on similarities disguised as difference. In the end, Ramona became
aware of this repetition; she understood that the hatred projected onto the
neighbors was unconsciously expressed in “what’s mine is yours.” A new
meaning arose for the old saying that appeared in her dream, “Mi casa es su
casa”; it could then be taken more literally as a repressed notion of uni-
versalism beyond skin color and nationality that brings to mind Las Casas’
arguments. One day, I risked a bad joke that she probably did not get (but one
never knows): Mi casa es Las Casas.
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud (1930) noted how complicated it is for
human beings to follow the biblical injunction to love their neighbor as them-
selves, given a fundamental human inclination to aggression and mutual hostility.
Indeed, the neighbor is seen, as Freud observes, not just as a stranger but very
likely as someone who is unworthy of love, not deserving any hospitality. Thus, in
order to continue thinking through the problem of the other, I will discuss the
case of Mercedes, an undocumented college educated middle-aged woman from
Mexico in her 50s who was at the time employed as a house cleaner and came
explaining that she could not go to her favorite exercise classes because she
suspected that the other women in attendance were all Jewish.
These Jews had taken over the class, which had spoiled her enjoyment.23 In
a session where she appeared more animated than usual, she announced that
she was happy: she had found a new activity—yoga lessons taught in a
beautiful studio, where the teacher could not be better. There was, however, a
small problem. Her favorite class was also attended by a group of women in
their 60s; una ganga de gordas, as she called them, a gang of fat ladies.
This well-off, bourgeois group had been practicing at the studio for years.
Despite her enthusiasm for yoga, my analysand felt that, because of one woman
in particular, she could no longer enjoy the yoga classes. This woman, my
analysand suspected, was Jewish. “I did not know there were so many Jews in this
part of town,” Mercedes told me. “I noticed they were telling each other, ‘Happy
New Year,’ for the Jewish holiday, and I understood. And then, just before the
yoga practice was about to start, this woman put her yoga mat exactly where I
wanted to be—diagonally placed, just behind the instructor. The lady wanted to
be in front of the mirror, and very rudely told me: ‘Excuse me, this is my spot.’
She was very unpleasant and made me feel I can no longer go to that yoga class
as long as she is going to be there. I came home very upset and told my husband,
who said, ‘Yes, that’s how Jews are, very selfish.’ It looks like the yoga studio is full
of Jews; I can no longer go there.” She regretted this. The studio “is just a nice
place, clean, beautiful, peaceful, relaxing … the yoga class was so nice.”
Initially, I was put off by Mercedes’ bigotry. Then I wondered: what was
Mercedes really talking about? I found it helpful to engage with Slavoj
Žižek’s analysis of racism to make better sense of Mercedes’ predicament.24
As she said, in her yoga class, there was a Jewish woman who wanted to steal
her place. This woman, seen as the “Other,” wanted to rob Mercedes of her
newfound pleasure, the wonderful yoga class.
How did Mercedes react? She went home and discussed the events with her
husband. Together they furthered the construction of an “ethnic other” re-
sponsible for the theft of her pleasure. Mercedes and her husband agreed that all
Jews are selfish. In other words, they thought that Jews have access
to some strange jouissance. “They”—the Jews—do not do things like “us”—the
non-Jews. Not only did the Jews seem to enjoy themselves in some alien and
unfamiliar manner, but in doing so, they also spoiled Mercedes’ fun. Remember,
my analysand feels as though she could no longer attend her favorite yoga class.
Here is how I intervened. First, I identified the fundamental problem at
work: Mercedes created a racist fantasy in which an absolute “Other’s” en-
joyment was inversely proportional to her own. The Jewish lady had a better
position; she placed her yoga mat in front of Mercedes’ mat. The yoga in-
structor would now notice the Jewish lady more during the practice. This was
all very clear to a paranoid Mercedes.
It is important to note that Mercedes initially believed she could not
become a member of this particular yoga studio. Mercedes told me that
she had walked by the yoga studio several times before eventually joining.
During those walks, she could not imagine that it would be a friendly, wel-
coming studio. Surely, she would not belong in a place that looked so pretty.
As such, she was overwhelmed by the intensity of the pleasure associated with
practice at this yoga studio.
When she finally joined, Mercedes’ enduring fear of not fitting in was
experienced as a threat—a threat she then projected onto the Jewish
woman. Mercedes held onto the idea that she did not belong in the yoga
studio. The Jewish woman became a manifestation of this threat, and now
she could no longer take the class she loved. Mercedes felt that she was
enjoying “too much” (yoga, acceptance, etc.). This disruptive excess soon
became regulated by the Jewish woman, an “Other,” who took pleasure in
excluding Mercedes from the fun. Mercedes’ racist projection was a fantasy
that allowed her to regulate her jouissance by reinstating balance in a situation
that was experienced as overwhelming.
Fantasy, for psychoanalysis, is a construction with a void at its center.
Mercedes’ racist fantasy was a screen to cover over this constitutional abyss.
Since there was nothing behind it, and it was only a matter of time before
she would arrive at the root of her true problem, and facing this kernel of
nothing, Mercedes deflected her anxiety by detecting imperfections in the
yoga studio. This pursuit of perfection—marked by the impossible confla-
tion of a comparative and a superlative—is destined to create dissatisfaction.
And this had already encouraged her to employ similar strategies of deferral
in the past. She had found the instructors of a spinning class to be “generally
cold, not very friendly, and with an attitude.” In another instance, she had
found a new job utterly miserable after initially raving about it. Insofar as
Mercedes was able to fantasize that the Jewish lady was stealing her en-
joyment, she could protect this place as an ideal space. The yoga studio
could be preserved at a distance as her favorite studio, the most beautiful
one, but from which she is excluded.
“If only the ‘others’ weren’t here,” she thought, “everything would be
perfect, and society would become harmonious again.” “If only the Jewish
lady would settle elsewhere in the studio, I could finally enjoy myself.” This
inner dialogue draws from the same well of stale water from which ultimately
all forms of racism are drawn. From this well emerges the illusion of a perfect
society, which is obviously impossible. The logic of exclusion requires a
problematic “other,” an embodiment of imperfection. Mercedes identified the
“other,” the rude Jewish woman, in order to maintain the fantasy of a perfect
situation of an ideal yoga studio, a fantasy that was predicated on her ex-
clusion from it. With this fantasy intact, Mercedes could avoid the upheaval
that jouissance entailed for her.
My gamble with this analysand was to address the unbearable guilty
pleasure she experienced and face jouissance in all its threatening plenitude. I
wanted to introduce Mercedes to a tolerance of imperfection so that she could
enter a world in which satisfaction is scarce and there could not be a complete
something. A perfect yoga studio would not be open for membership, to her
or to the Jewish lady, or to anyone else. For Mercedes, to practice yoga at this
imperfect studio was to simultaneously accept a measure of dissatisfaction
without her racist fantasy in place.
Rather than using the usual strategy of finding a “hole,” a defect (the classes
were too long, the studio wasn’t so clean) to make it tolerable, Mercedes
became the hole itself and projected it onto the persecutory “other” (the
Jewish lady). In her racist fantasy, the “other” excludes her from her enjoy-
ment. “If not for the Jewish lady, this yoga studio would be perfect.” I wanted
Mercedes to recognize that the excess she projected onto the “other” con-
cealed the truth of her own failed enjoyment. It was only when she accepted
this inconvenient and limiting dynamic that she could achieve some agency.
Through treatment, she finally achieved a modicum of freedom from this
symptom. In this case, I managed to make her laugh. The distance created by
laughter was sufficient to uncover the fragile construction supporting her
racism. An eruption of laughter during a session had lifted the racist paranoia,
pointing to the fact that her hatred would hide and reveal at the same time the
minor differences that are exacerbated into major hurdles to create a sense of
identity. It also reminded her that when you laugh you can see your own
rigidities and introduce subjective flexibility. My joke had played on the
phonetic proximity of the word “horde” in Spanish (horda) and gorda (fat lady).
Ironically, my bad pun sent her to Freud’s myth of the murder of the father of
the primal horde, a myth that he presents as the root of human culture. The
minimal slippage of the signifier suddenly evoked a mythical murder that
would not usher in unlimited jouissance (this was the killed father’s prerogative)
but, on the contrary, a shared prohibition. (Freud, 1913)25 When this pun
triggered her laughter, this spontaneous response made her capable of freeing
herself from the horde identification; one could even say that just by agreeing
to laugh, she was ready to accept a law that would open the possibility of an
alliance and a solidarity between siblings.
Humor was also the way that change was achieved for Ramona. The space
that laughter opened for Ramona allowed her to separate from her own racist
prejudices. In the process of making of a joke rather than searching for meaning,
Ramona was in fact making meaning. Rather than exacerbating minor differ-
ences, she was eventually able to sympathize with the strangers who moved to
her block, the neighbors that she had previously racialized and dehumanized,
and overcome the fear she had of becoming a stranger herself, a dark skin
foreigner, a Haitian who could in turn be racialized and dehumanized.
The third example of how otherness can haunt someone is that of Hera, a
Puerto Rican transwoman of color.26 After having watched a television pro-
gram on transsexualism in children, which presented young “trans kids” (aged
6 to 16) as being born in the wrong body and caught up in a basic “birth
defect,” she quoted this film’s slogan when she told me that the worst birth
defect for a woman was to be born with a penis and a pair of testicles. Hera
added that she “did not ask to be born that way,” as she was pondering
whether one could ask how one “is born.” Since childhood, Hera had had a
feminine identification, and all her life she had felt other to the male gender
she was assigned at birth. She knew all along that her round body shape and
the fact that she looked exactly like her mother confirmed her feeling that she
was not a boy but a girl, and that eventually she would become a woman like
her mother.
Hera’s given first name was also her mother’s, a gender-neutral name.
Raised as a boy, Hera dutifully followed the family’s expectations by going to
military school, graduating with honors, and marrying her high school
sweetheart, Lisette. They had three children. During their 7-year marriage,
Lisette tolerated Hera’s increasing crossdressing because Lisette knew that a
majority of cross-dressers are heterosexual. Hera would say that in their
sexual relations, she imagined that she was the woman being penetrated, or
she imagined them as two lesbian lovers. Lisette and Hera separated because
Hera felt trapped in a lie and wanted to “take the whole package,” by which
she meant living as woman full time and starting the process of “complete”
transformation to female.
During the divorce from her wife, a bitter dispute over child support
payments ensued, and Hera was questioned in her role “as father of the
children.” She admitted that the children had lost their father but argued that
they now had two mothers, an argument that Lisette found infuriating. Prior
to the divorce, Hera had found in her wife’s femininity a soothing mirror
image. But, her wife’s demands concerning Hera’s role as provider became a
sore point. They finally divorced. Soon after their separation, two policemen
holding a court order unexpectedly showed up at her job, and Hera was taken
to the police station for a few hours to clarify a dispute over unpaid child
support, an event that precipitated a psychotic breakdown in the midst of her
process of gender transition.
This encounter with representatives of the Law at the police station had
catastrophic psychic effects for Hera. She felt rejected by society as a whole, left
her job, moved back to her parents’ home, and literally went underground,
living in a basement where she remained in constant fear, believing that she
would be killed if she went out. Her parents brought her in for treatment. Even
though she had lived as a woman for over a decade, she was hesitant about
gender reassignment surgery, as revealed in a slip of the tongue when she once
said, “I want to make it happy,” while she had intended to say, “I want to make
it happen.” Although Hera had other very pressing problems—health pro-
blems, unemployment, estrangement from friends and family—she focused
only on her gender reassignment as her unique and overreaching problem. Her
transition had the force of necessity, as it would allow her to find a more livable
embodiment. For Hera, transitioning was a matter of life and death. This
transition was not without losses, as she felt nostalgic for “the person I used
to be before I was ashamed at my job, taken unjustly to jail for unpaid
child support. I have never been the same ever since.” Although the issue was
clarified eventually, the experience was devastating: “That day I stopped
thinking about life, I started thinking about death.”
While Hera’s demand in the treatment was tainted by a certain duplicity,
since she felt that she had to convince me of her right to become a woman
(as a “mental health” practitioner, I could write the letter required for sur-
gery), she managed to create a space where she could talk freely about the
disjunction between her feminine soul and her male assigned body. She knew
that she was different; she had always felt different, and she needed to see this
difference acknowledged. It was a strategy for survival—her soul was suf-
fering, trapped in a body that contradicted it. Her body morphology was the
reason why on occasion she was misgendered, but it was also used by others as
a basis for racial and gender discrimination. Hera would be terrified of en-
counters with the police, felt vulnerable to physical violence or harassment for
being Black and visibly gender-nonconforming.
The body in psychoanalysis has a special status. When Freud abandoned
hypnosis to teach himself a new language, psychoanalysis, in order to listen to
the unconscious in the original dialect of hysteria, he worked under the as-
sumption that the body spoke by way of symptoms. Freud touched the body
only with the mediation of speech, limiting the treatment to an invitation to
the analysand to say whatever came to mind. He came up against resistance
while using transference to push the analysis forward. Transference helped
make the symptoms intelligible and evoke in the analysand a desire to sepa-
rate from their symptoms. Even if an analysis starts by looking for a cure that
would be reached just by talking to an analyst who is supposed to know about
the analysand’s ailments, the dynamics implied leads the analysand to be
moved further by a desire to know. In the process, the analyst will sooner or
later fall from the role of holder of knowledge and a new desire will emerge, a
desire for difference. Insofar as psychoanalysis offered Hera a place where she
was not an object but a subject, it gave her the space for transformation, a
space with emancipatory potential, a space that not only “tolerates” difference
but desires it.
In my progression so far, I have explored how psychoanalysis can help us
understand the role of racism in the construction of identity. I am trying to
comprehend why we choose to hate, why so many patients fear the theft of
their enjoyment, why trauma recreates the violence that had generated it
earlier, all of which structures the subjectivity of an oppressed other. In order
to tackle these points, I will give a fourth and last vignette. This is, the story of
a patient I will call Alma, who came to treatment stunned, in state of shock,
but unable to identify any symptom, a survivor of a violent attack that took
place in a racialized inner-city neighborhood.27 Racialized communities suffer
extreme levels of poverty and are often afflicted by higher levels of violence.
How did this racialized violence dehumanized Alma? She had been the victim
of violent crime in the Hispanic ghetto of North Philadelphia and had almost
died as a result of that experience.
Alma was 24 years old when she came to her first appointment, referred by her
primary physician after having been attacked six months prior. One night, just as
the Laundromat where she worked was going to close, she was with her young
son and her older brother. Three men stormed into the store, ordering everyone
to lie on the ground. Alma’s son was scared and screamed, so she covered him
with her body to muffle the sound. When the attackers were leaving with the
money, they shot at the people lying on the floor. Only one person was
hit—Alma, who was shot through the head.
Alma survived by miracle, with parts of her brain gone. After three months
in the hospital, she had recovered physically. A few splinters were left in her
skull; she had lost part of her vision and hearing. Alma told me during the first
appointment that she had recurrent nightmares, was unable to sleep, and was
afraid of strangers. The request for treatment was somehow imposed on her:
she felt very grateful to the doctor that treated her at the hospital and had
suggested that she talked to someone. At first, she did not present a complaint
that suggested where her subjectivity was anchored in this traumatic event.
However, a clue lied in her shame over the huge scar on her scalp. She
explained that “if somebody sees the scar they will think something bad of me,
like that I deserve it.” Her articulation of shame and guilt pointed to sub-
jective implication, as if the trace of the wound represented her. I could not
stop thinking about the etymology of the word trauma: wound.
In order to conceal her scar, she wore a very visible head accessory: a scarf
of a vibrant color, elaborately wrapped around her head. It looked like a small
turban; it called up both an adornment and a bandage. I found it interesting
because while it hid what she wanted to conceal, it also called attention to the
area. Alma seemed to want to both hide and expose her scar. I also thought
about the scarf around her head as creative playfulness, an expression of
feminine masquerade, a decorative, gendered, protective mask. What’s more,
there was an uncanny echo between “scar” and “scarf.”28 Alma, significantly,
spoke and thought in English. The elaborate head arrangement signaled an
absence while trying to veil the scar: it designated the lack while trying to fill
its gap. Indeed, her having come so close to the Real had left her deeply
marked, with scars more or less visible.
What was unbearable for her was that she had got shot for no reason: it was
a random event that was horribly painful and almost took her life. More than
the physical problems it imposed, what was intolerable for her was the painful
arbitrariness, the absurd contingency of senseless events. Alma spent her first
sessions crying inconsolably. Alma cried but she also spoke. I listened to her to
help her hear what truth was produced in her own words about that in-
coherent realm that Lacan calls the Real.
Alma talked about the terrible events with an understatement, only alluding
to “what happened.” In a first stage of her treatment, she described how
difficult her life had become after “what happened.” Her almost miraculous
survival made her feel guilty, as if she had “walked” away from the grasp of
death. Exploring the permutations around the signifier “walk” allowed her
fears to diminish, and she was able to come to the clinic on her own—walking.
What I found startling was Alma’s insistence on her feelings of shame and
guilt. She was ashamed of the scar: it was ugly and visible. Her shame in-
dicated not only that the events were represented in her fantasy but also that
she felt represented by them—she concealed the scar by exposing it, with the
idea that it exposed events that were “bad.” Above all, this showed that she
was “bad” for having caused them. Her inextricable enmeshing in the be-
wildering sequence of traumatic events seemed to define her. Could Alma’s
guilt speak of an unconscious complicity in the traumatic scene? Or were her
self-reproaches in fact addressed to someone else? Here, I had to refrain from
using the usual American spiel, which would have consisted of reinforcing her
ego by telling her that she had saved her son, and that we could therefore all
feel “proud of her.” I had, on the contrary, the idea that this curious shame
was the site of articulation between what she “said” and something that she
was “saying” unconsciously.
Her discomfort diminished when she started talking about her fantasies. This
elaboration took place during a stage in the treatment at which Alma was
looking for someone who could be found guilty. In searching for a guilty party,
she was really searching for a reason for what happened. She felt guilty for
working in a Laundromat late at night. She also thought that her boyfriend was
guilty because he was unemployed and did not bring any money home, which
forced her to accept a bad job. Or it was her son’s fault because he started
screaming? Or it was the Laundromat store’s fault because they did not have a
better security system? Why was Alma shot and not the person at her side? Why
was she shot at all? Alma was trying to produce meaning, and in doing so, she
reproached herself or accused others by trying to find a “reason” in arbitrary
events that had occurred without necessity or clear explanation.
Eventually, Alma was able to drop the idea of a guilty party and stopped
blaming the event on someone, as if it was “somebody’s fault.” She could then
talk about her separation from her boyfriend, her conflicts with her son, and
her relationship with her mother. Shortly before she started her treatment,
Alma had just separated from her boyfriend, whom she described as “abu-
sive.” The horrid circumstances of the robbery also had an impact on her
relationship with her mother. Alma’s grandmother raised her. Her mother
had left for another city when she was just a few months old and remained
distant during her childhood and adolescence. Alma was totally estranged
from her at the time of the shooting. Alma’s mother was deeply touched by
the event: it allowed her for the first time to relate to her daughter. As soon as
she heard the news, Alma’s mother moved back to Philadelphia and devoted
herself to the care of her daughter. She sat beside her every day at the hospital
ardently praying. After that, they became inseparable. The highly traumatic
occurrence had allowed mother and daughter to re-establish a relation, albeit
a precarious one.
As a child, Alma’s mother would only be contacted when something really
“bad” had happened. When she was sick, which happened often, her mother
would talk to her over the phone and occasionally visit. As one might expect,
recurrent asthma attacks, bronchitis, digestive problems, inexplicable fevers,
and eczema became the means to connect with her mother. It was as if her
mother could only recognize Alma as a sick child ready to die. Thus Alma was
reborn for her mother after having almost died.
A psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy offered Alma a space in which
she spoke. It did not matter what knowledge she produced about the trauma;
it was the pure effect of speech that offered her a place that she wanted to
inhabit. Speaking always entails speaking to someone, and since one always
receives one’s own message from the Other in an inverted form, by ques-
tioning the Other’s desire she asked what it was that she wanted from herself.
Previously, Alma had been integrated in a world of signifiers: she was able to
work and love. Neither these signifiers nor the law shielded her from the
violent attack. Alma then broke free from the jouissance of the Other and es-
caped the trauma’s domination when she let herself be guided by the
knowledge that she inferred from the wound. By becoming able to say the
unspeakable, she could put distance between herself and the trauma.
Therefore, Alma went from being someone in a state of shock unable to
speak, to inhabiting what Lacan calls the “neurotic’s individual myth,”
creating a structure that reordered and framed the events she experienced.
This structure, unlike racism or random acts of violence, gave her a place not
just as an object but as a subject with agency, not just an other but also an I.
The determining shift took place when Alma started talking about “when I
was shot.” The phrase retained in its passive voice a fragment of the Real, but
included a subject who could articulate itself in the first person singular. This
subjectivity inscribed a hitherto “impossible” accident that had generated a
symptom (the colorful scarf hiding and showing the shameful wound). It was
precisely because of its connection with the Real, because of the tuché it re-
presented while it functioned as a mark of and for death, that the scar started
to heal just at that point in the treatment. Alma decided to stop hiding it, and
it somehow seemed less conspicuous: she had accepted it as a mark of the
inevitable. She no longer had recurring nightmares, and now took delight in
talking about her dreams, which up to this point she could never recall.
Out of this psychotherapy that lasted a year and a half, I would like to un-
derline one element: Alma was trying to make sense of the impossible and thus
transformed an actual trauma into a fantasy. Such a fantasy is a sentence with its
own grammar. Ultimately, the new grammar of fantasy that we elaborated
together provided an answer to her traumatic experience, which is an experience
that no human being is spared: a too early encounter with the desire of the
Other (not the shooter, but an earlier one, namely her m(O)ther or another
main care-taker). This “shocking” encounter with the Other’s desire was “re-
pressed” but then returns in the compulsion to repeat the trauma. Trauma
ultimately refers to the encounter with the inaccessible that has been processed
with the fabrication of a traumatic scene—a fantasy that enacts a relation be-
tween the subject and the Other. The subject is completely defenseless in regards
to the Other who can affirm, disavow, racialize, objectify, or reject her. The
trauma simultaneously realizes and designates a place occupied by the subject in
the fantasy of the Other; it spells out some form of jouissance.
The treatment allowed Alma to finally reach what I would like to call an
ethical stage. She went from a paradoxical feeling of shame for something for
which she had no responsibility—and hence no agency about—to reemerge
with a soul as a grammatical, ethical, and finally libidinal subject, who could
take some distance from the Other, so that she could assert simply: “Once I
was shot, and now I can dream.”
I hope that these brief clinical vignettes prove that it is possible to open up a
space where prejudice, racism, and discrimination can be transformed by
psychoanalysis into treatable symptoms. Contrary to the common belief that
poor people are so consumed with the pressures of everyday living that they
can only benefit from symptom-focused and concrete interventions, I believe
that psychoanalysis facilitates a productive exploration of the unconscious
realm that underpins symptomatic behavior. Expanding psychoanalytic
practice to populations often considered outside its reach is not just a chari-
table or humanitarian gesture of respect and concern for the other, but a
project supported by an ethical stance that aims at enabling agency, imagi-
nation, responsibility, and empowerment even in the face of challenging
material and social circumstances. Poverty is too often taken as an essential
feature of some racialized groups, rather than as the result of relations of
production (capitalism) that are historical and therefore can be changed.
Furthermore, poverty is not considered a contingent circumstance but a
causal ascription, as if poor people would be essentially different, therefore less
analyzable than someone from a more affluent social class. The model I
advocate for is not utilitarian, and thus differs from the kinds of standardized
behavioral therapies mechanically reproduced in many US mental health
centers that ultimately function as centers of social control, failing to recognize
and engage with the subjectivity of those who may be culturally “other.”
Listening to the unconscious means above all restoring to “othered” persons
their dignity as subjects. My experience conducting psychoanalytic cures with
people from the barrio showed that psychoanalytic principles can be applied
with beneficial results to clinical work with Latino patients who are affected by
poverty. This statement defines an ethical position that has a liberating and
emancipatory potential.
When psychoanalysis lost it social conscience, it also lost its soul. Historically,
in the United States, the practice of psychoanalysis has self-segregated by
making itself available only to those who could afford it. This context is very
different from that of other countries where psychoanalysis is not exclusive to
the upper and middle classes: there are free or low-cost psychoanalytic clinics
all over the world, from London to Mexico City, from Paris to New York and
Buenos Aires,29 and in my private practice, I take distance from Freud’s pes-
simism that “the necessities of our existence limit our work to the well-to-do
classes.”30
I strongly believe that psychoanalysts have a responsibility to alleviate the
“vast amount of neurotic misery there is in the world, and perhaps need not to
be”31 and can reduce inequality by offering psychoanalysis to anyone who
might be interested in pursuing treatment. Psychoanalysis is a practice of
hospitality: even in a private practice, one can offer an unconditional welcome
to people of all socioeconomic backgrounds, bringing, as it were, the “barrio”
back into psychoanalysis. Nobody is too poor to be able to afford an un-
conscious. Building a more class-inclusive practice that combines patients who
pay full fees and others whose fee is tailored to what they are able to afford,
one can democraticize one’s private office. Because I speak Spanish and
Portuguese, I am currently working in my private office with several Mexican
and Brazilian analysands who are construction workers or house cleaners.
Besides offering a flexible fee, I also welcome analysands that have not tra-
ditionally been considered “good” candidates for psychoanalysis.
Lacan recommended that psychoanalysts avoid the temptation of con-
formity and adaptation that would transform them into useless “engineers of
the soul” (Lacan 2006: 356),32, that is, technicians who treat people like
malfunctioning machines. In a very different vein, the goal of psychoanalysis
was beautifully summarized by the poet H.D., who wrote about her treatment
with Freud, calling him a “midwife to the soul.”33 Here, rather than a
technocrat fixing a broken engine, a psychoanalyst appears as someone as-
sisting in the birthing process of a more enabled subject.
As we have seen, Ramona recovered a little humanity, a little of her soul,
by questioning her “othering” strategies. She no longer appealed to contempt
to construct the difference she projected on her neighbors; she did not need an
outsider to define herself. Mercedes was better able to tolerate her pleasure
without imagining an “other” that would take it away from her. Hera was
able to assert her difference and let her female soul find a more livable em-
bodiment. And Alma, who had lost her soul after experiencing the traumatic
event of being the victim of a shooting, reclaimed it by way of psychoanalysis
and started again to dream.
Conclusion: lay curers of souls

In “The Question of Lay Analysis,” Freud engages in an imaginary dialogue
with a skeptical interlocutor (1926).34 In a surprising passage which was
somewhat prophetic, considering that after the Second World War the emer-
ging field of social work introduced a watered-down psychoanalysis into mental
health centers, Freud speculates that “an American may hit on the idea of
spending a little money to get the ‘social workers’ of his country trained ana-
lytically and to turn them into a band of helpers for combating the neuroses of
civilization.” Freud’s interlocutor interjects: “Aha! a new kind of Salvation
Army!” (250). Freud does not object, and he replies, “Why not?” (250).
Such a psychoanalytically trained “Salvation Army” would not only save
psychoanalysis from itself by making it more widely available, but would op-
erate as a quasi-militant organization of deliverance or redemption. If the term
“salvation” may suggest religious redemption, in a 1927 postscript, Freud
reiterates this populist, if belligerent, project, but the religious overtones appear
somewhat tempered when he suggests that the psychoanalyst works in relation
“to the public” like a “secular pastoral worker” (1927: 255). He emphasizes the
“secular” aspect because, as we know, for Freud, religion was a psycho-
pathology created by culture, both a “lost cause” and a “childhood neurosis.”
In a letter to his friend, the pastor Oskar Pfister, Freud concedes that he
was in fact anticipating “a profession which does not yet exist, a profession of
lay curers of souls who need not to be doctors and should not be priests”
(Meng and Freud 1963: 126).35 Along with his suspicion of religion, Freud
believed that medical professionals had “a false and detrimental attitude”
(1926, 231), that is, that doctors were trained to believe that psychic suffering
was not real. Thus, Freud’s “lay curers of souls” are neither doctors nor
priests, as the soul cannot be reached by brain mapping nor by religious
catechism. Psychoanalysts reach the soul differently.
In a text originally written as an introduction to the works of Freud in
Japanese translation, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy observes that psycho-
analysis provides the only consistent atheistic discourse of the twentieth cen-
tury. Here is the gist of Nancy’s argument: Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis
cannot be restricted to knowledge, as psychoanalysis is also a clinical practice,
and as such its operative concepts rely on (and relay) the singularity of each
case. He adds: “[T]he Freudian invention is the most clearly and resolutely
unreligious of modern inventions. It is also for this reason that it cannot even
believe in itself.”36 If psychoanalysis cannot believe in God and cannot believe
in itself, at least, as we have seen, it can—and it must—believe in the soul.
Notes
1 Bettelheim (1983).
2 Freud used the word psychanalyse (in French) in 1896. Gay (1988).
3 Psyche ist ein griechisches Wort und lautet in deutscher Übersetzung Seele. Psychische Behandlung
heißt demnach Seelenbehandlung. Man könnte also meinen, daß darunter verstanden wird:
Behandlung der krankhaften Erscheinungen des Seelenlebens. Dies ist aber nicht die Bedeutung
dieses Wortes. Psychische Behandlung will vielmehr besagen: Behandlung von der Seele aus,
Behandlung—seelischer oder körperlicher Störungen—mit Mitteln, welche zunächst und un-
mittelbar auf das Seelische des Menschen einwirken. (“Psyche” is a Greek word which may
be translated as “soul.” Thus “psychical treatment” means “soul treatment.” The
term might accordingly be supposed to signify “treatment of the pathological
phenomena of soul life.” This, however, is not its meaning. “Psychical treatment”
denotes, rather, treatment taking its start in the soul, treatment (whether of soul or
physical disorders) by measures which operate in the first instance and immediately
upon the human soul. Freud (1890).
4 Zaretski (2005).
5 Freud (1926).
6 See Blanco, and Teixera Delgado, (2019) and Brunstetter (2010).
7 Morrison (2017).
8 Morrison (2016).
9 Gherovici (2003).
10 Gherovici (1995–1996; 1996)
11 Danto (2005).
12 Danto (2005)
13 Doyle (2009; see also Addin, Mariah (1950).
14 Lafargue claimed that the “right to be lazy” could be a form of resistance to the
capitalist imperative to produce, and he hoped that industrialization would
eventually free us from work. Against the protestant work ethics, he praised the
liberating value of well-spent idleness; laziness was a way to eliminate the service
class and oppose conspicuous consumerism.
15 Doyle (2009).
16 Mendes (2015).
17 Ahad (2010).
18 Garcia (2012).
19 See Hall (2017).
20 Wucker (2000).
21 Freud (1930).
22 Bourdieu, (1984).
23 An earlier version of this clinical example appeared in Gherovici (2016).
24 See Žižek’s construction of a “convenient” other (1989) and his interpretation of
racism as the theft of enjoyment (1992, 1993, and 2005).
25 Freud (1913).
26 For another discussion of this case, see Gherovici (2010).
27 An earlier version of this case under a different pseudonym was discussed in
Gherovici (2003).
28 I am grateful to Elissa Marder for noticing this eerie resonance.
29 For more on how psychoanalytic principles can be applied successfully in disen-
franchised populations, refuting the misguided idea that psychoanalysis is an
expensive luxury only for the wealthy, see Gherovici and Christian (2019).
30 Freud (1919).
31 Freud (1919)
32 Lacan (2006).
33 Doolittle (2002).
34 Freud (1926).
35 Meng and Freud (1963).
36 Nancy, (2010).
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11 Dereliction: Afropessimism,
anti-blackness, and Lacanian
psychoanalysis
Kareen Malone1 and Tiara Jackson2
1
University of West Georgia/Après Coup: Psychoanalytic Association,
Emory University, Atlanta, USA
2
Emory University, Comparative Literature, Ph.D. Candidate,
Atlanta, USA
Introduction
This chapter both facilitates and illuminates an encounter between
Afropessimism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Both confluent and contested,
the two fields themselves guide the manner in which the chapter is written
and its contents. There is no absorption of one field into the other. Each field
aims toward what cannot be spoken, residing in exile within the heart of
subjective structuration. Shared questions arise, such as how does one reach
the abjected and exiled from within the constitution of Symbolic life? The
aim of both fields is to find the embodied residue subtending the social link,
the residue from which that link parasitically feeds at an unconscious level;
this is what binds the two fields. Afropessimism and psychoanalysis trace
subjectivity up to and through the limits of its (non)creation.
For Afropessimism, antiblackness means more than a lack of access to a
Symbolic enfranchisement. Antiblackness is, radically, the negation found
at the emergence of the Symbolic’s possibility. Afropessimism tracks the
genesis of the enslaved black body through its incarnations in the experi-
ential and institutional history of black men and women in North America.
In the recounting of current instantiations of antiblackness, it articulates a
desubjectivized core of nonbeing within the Black experience. This core
implies a different positionality (Hartman and Wilderson 2003: 182), within
an essential rather than contingent relationship to violence (Wilderson, 54).
Afropessimism disputes the humanistic foundations of Western ontology. It
locates a category of nonbeing that exists within the production of Western
subjectivity in its condition of possibility, confronting the reader politically
and culturally, and pointing to an ontogenesis of the subject that is defined
by a relationship to what Orlando Patterson calls “social death,1” which is
the lot of the Black person produced and reproduced in and through
chattel slavery.
206 Tiara Jackson and Kareen Malone
This precarity of the subject, its liability to repetition, its proximity to its
own destitution and the death drive, are recognized horizons of Lacanian
work. Lacan’s understanding of the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary suggests
that they are not indicative of a breakdown of a constituted total subject.
These fundamental concepts orient psychoanalysis in its encounter with the
unconscious as nonbeing (1978: especially, 29–42). One cannot separate this
abjection from the question of the Other as the site of this traumatic hole in
being, and the void so intimately contiguous to being (Didier-Weill 2017).
Psychoanalysis and Afropessimism are joined at this interstice between life
and death, the traumatic hole in being in its historical genesis, its embodied
effects, and the reversals between inside and outside implicating the subject in
a Symbolic structured through antiblackness.
Section 1: epistemology and ontology

Afropessimism and psychoanalysis are suspicious of traditional foundations of
ontology and the manner of determining truth. Is there not a repressed di-
mension that is more essential to the truth than accepted narratives? This
derelict structuration of the subject is foundational in Lacan’s work. The
Lacanian frame in conjunction with Afropessimism makes it possible to ad-
dress the malevolent power of the white gaze as it touches upon the Real of
the black body. It articulates the genesis of human being in relation to the
Other—the Other’s inherent capacity for violence, which Afropessimism at-
tempts to articulate in its most radical fashion. The absolute possibility of
nonbeing is political in the social link generally, and in the endemic violence
towards blackness in that link. Psychoanalysis speaks to antiblackness from the
most elemental moments of the superego, to the vicissitudes of the Other, and
to new ways of using Lacan’s ideas on sublimation.
There are certainly suspicions regarding psychoanalysis voiced by Frank
B. Wilderson III, Hortense Spillers, and others who engage with the field of
Afropessimism. Nonetheless, there is a recognized insistence on structure,
effects of language, and on style that the two endeavors share. For Spillers
psychoanalysis is a modality to pose questions, to make arguments and
counter arguments, to illustrate the overdetermined nominal properties as-
signed to blackness and black bodies, and to evaluate the relevance of the
split/divided subject of psychanalysis. Wilderson’s reservations regarding
psychoanalysis challenge claims of “universality” by psychoanalysis, claims
which obscure histories and ontological implications of differences between
Western men and women and black men and women.
The universal claims of psychoanalysis are tempered by the inter-
dependence of the particular and universal in the generation of its knowledge.
Written within the tradition of psychoanalysis itself, Betty Fuks’ Freud and the
Invention of Jewishness, for example, acknowledges that Freud’s ethnicity es-
tablished how psychoanalysis was structurally extracted from singular re-
ligious, cultural, and historical positions. Her analysis emerges from Freud’s
Dereliction 207
experience of being Jewish and the social position of the Jewish people.
Freud’s subjective assumption of these elements created the radicalism of psycho-
analysis. His biographical experience and education translate into a theory of
subjectivity. In psychoanalysis, as in Jewish experience historically, one is not
the Master of one’s house (a good metaphor for the unconscious over con-
sciousness). Self-division and self-exile are fundamental. Freud’s structural
theoretic extraction from life contrasts with more historicist methods.
Jared Sexton relates a similar approach of Afropessimism:
[Afropessimism] … critically supplements the paradigm of critical ethnic

studies …… by moving conceptually from the empirical to the structural
or more precisely from the experiential to the political ontological,
especially insofar as the question of differential racialization—or the
question of racial hierarchy—makes recourse to a comparative history
and social science.
(“Afropessimism: The Unclear Word”).
Psychoanalysis and Afropessimism generate fundamental terms, e.g. agency,

in a movement from a historical, represented, and lived context to a for-
malized destructuring/restructuring of assumed certainties about what it
means to be human. In Afropessimism, this meaning is tied to histories of
slavery and colonization, everyday lived experiences, cultural representations,
and past and current positions of black persons as the “dereliction” supporting
white subjective positioning. It is a social death produced and reproduced
(Patterson 1982). These instantiations of violence and subjection define a
nonontological status denoted by Afropessimism as antiblackness, the black
person as nonbeing (Terrefe 2016).
The alternative building blocks of subjectivity explored by these two dis-
ciplines indeed refer to contingent narratives/events but are decoded as
theorization and writings that overturn, in different ways, assumptions about
human nature (albeit dissimilar starting points in being Jewish or being black).
In his Écrits, Lacan states,
Let whomever cannot meet at its horizon the subjectivity of his time give
it up … For how could he who knows nothing of the dialectic that
engages him in a symbolic movement with so many lives …… make his
being the axes of those lives? Let him be well acquainted with the whorl
into which his era draws him …… and let him be aware of his function as
the interpreter in the strife of languages.
(“The Function and Field” 264)
There is no clearer clarion call for psychoanalysis to think analytically about

the social realm and about antiblackness. Antiblackness resides in the strife of
the Symbolic and demands the impossibility of a rereading of the writing on
the wall: the history of Western violence against black bodies.
Similar to Freud, Afropessimism demonstrates an onto-epistemological
excavation of antiblackness (Sexton) from within the history, cultural re-
presentations, and life worlds of those who are located by color within the story
of slavery itself. Frank Wilderson points out in an interview on “Antiblackness
and Police Violence” (2014) that antiblackness is about the policing of black
bodies, and what is at stake historically and presently is the well-being of all
those who can distinguish themselves from the black. Drawing on current and
past policing, he states:
Policing—policing Blackness—is what keeps everyone else sane .… [W]e

start to see the policing and the mutilation and the aggressivity towards
Blackness not as a form of discrimination, but as being a form of psychic
health and well-being for the rest of the world … (7)
Wilderson’s remarks align with Spillers’: “My country needs me, and if I were
not here, I would have to be invented” (203).
In “First Questions: The mission of Africana Studies: An Interview with
Hortense Spillers.” Spillers remarks that Afropessimism finds its ground as it
“constructs” what it is to be a black person in a certain field of effects. These
effects subvert the constitution of black subjectivity, a subjectivity that is ty-
pically attributed to all oppressed groups as their aspirational or foundational
state, leading to an emancipation and agency. By contrast, antiblackness
brings forth the questions of subjective ontogenesis through the lens of a brutal
interpellation of the body, a body whose destiny is to be expendable. This
leaves us to perceive the amplification of the essential traumas of existence
that are twisted into the regimen of enslavement. Blackness exists more fully in
the Real. The misfires of a libidinal body becoming a human body are woven
into the view of Afropessimism, indicating parallels in Lacanian thinking.
Section 2: antiblackness: the other and the superego

Afropessimism pulls psychoanalytic understanding of psychic structure to an
interstitial point almost beyond itself—being/nonbeing and subject/non-
subject. Antiblackness is originary objectification, an abjection entailing an
enduring malediction upon one’s sense of embodied being and upon “inter-
subjectivity.” Contrary to notions of racial marginalization as “othering,”
antiblackness suggests that racialization with respect to black persons is the
annihilation of black bodies and the black persons’ alterity, and thus black
subjectivity, by society. This is inscribed not at the Symbolic level, as un-
derstood as the world of signifiers per se, or even as a matter simply of
Symbolic castration, but rather in the inscription of the body at points where
its induction into language produces Real effects. These effects of the Real are
related to the limits of language rather than to its social and linguistic func-
tions. These points implicate the status of the Other at the cusp of the Real
and the Symbolic and are the places that generate the excessive jouissance that
Dereliction 209
unconsciously and necessarily infuse social relations; this is where jouissance
trumps speech.
This trumping of speech by jouissance is elucidated in Frank Wilderson’s
recounting of his childhood poem that depicts his own abjection and rage,
evoking Real effects in living in and under antiblackness, i.e. his face as
nightmare. Wilderson writes, “for Halloween I washed my/face ……/went
door to/door as a nightmare” (17). His poem points to a melancholy that is
indicated by Jacques Hassoun’s characterization of a violence of the Other
and its after-effects in the sense of subjectivity/objectivity. Am I a being who
exists as an object of horror, inexplicably and invasively endowed with an
excess in oneself and for others? Wilderson’s characterization of his visage is
part of his narration of a dawning recognition of this horrific social and in-
timate legacy of antiblackness marking his body and being (Wilderson, 2020).
Even before his most recent book, Afropessimism, Wilderson was intellectually
pressing beyond more obvious Symbolic coordinates to configure effects on
(human) being that border on the possibility of nonbeing, of its horror.
Lacanians frame this border in terms of being an object of jouissance for the
Other and the Real’s aftermath in the inauguration of speech. This is an
operation of signifiers before such signifiers are integrated into and buffered
by the shared world of signifiers (S1 to S2). In Red, White and Black, Wilderson
turns to what he calls the “grammar of suffering.” This grammar refers to a
“structure through which the labor of speech is possible” (5). It operates in the
penumbra of speech, and is more proximate to the Real as the starting place
in relation to the registers of the Symbolic and Imaginary. Wilderson’s interest
in the abjection of the black body, its use by an Other as accumulated and
fungible object, as well as his articulation of the grammar of suffering as
underlying such psychic violence (2010: 5, 55), interlock with Lacanian no-
tions of the elemental structuring of subjectivity. These elemental structures
outline the level of being/nonbeing that are implicated in Wilderson’s re-
flections. The interfaces between the Symbolic and other registers are the
psychic axes where one locates the “grammar of suffering” and the “pre-
logical” nature of violence experienced by the black body (Wilderson, 2020).
Wilderson characterizes the grammar of suffering as that which makes the
“labor of speech” (5) and human “capacity for … transformation” possible
(340) (2010). Antiblackness is thus a precondition of the Symbolic in its
function as the social link and resides within the libidinal penumbra of speech.
Regarding this shadowy area of the Symbolic, slavery and its legacy of anti-
blackness produce black bodies as accumulated and fungible objects, objects
of exchange and jouissance, abutting the Symbolic as its limit and instantiating
its complicated alliance with jouissance.
According to Lacan, the subject unfolds as an object becoming sub-
jectivized in relation to a primary Other. This is partially the structuring
function of Lacan’s famous petite object a (in a manner framed by Jacques
Hassoun below). At a different level, Alain Didier-Weill illuminates the form
of the superegoic command, wherein one finds a reservoir of the Real within
the advent of speech itself. This reservoir of the Real sustains the superego’s
relation to its power to abrogate the subject’s desires and subverts the social
function of speech as dialectical or as testimony. Didier-Weill’s Lacanian
approach suggests that, although the movement from S1 (master signifier) to
S2 (all other signifiers) creates a subject, there is always an outside of speech, a
backwash of the Real, equally essential to the divided subject of the un-
conscious. Following some implications of Wilderson’s articulation of the
grammar of suffering, this section elaborates, firstly, the function of the sub-
ject’s origins as object and, secondly, the embodied power of the superegoic
insistence of the Other. At these points, primordial elements of subject-
creation intersect with the experience and conceptualization of antiblackness.
In Red, White, and Black, Wilderson argues that antiblackness challenges
usual meanings of oppression: blackness entails a subjection that is violently
inscribed and repeated with ontological effects on being human. Wilderson
notes that what defines the inauguration of the black “race” is slavery. It is a
merciless baptism as slave and black. The allegorical and literal place of the
Middle Passage is defined by the Symbolic place of the ship’s hold. The hold
demonstrates the Symbolic murder of an African as birth of a slave. It creates
a modality of subjection and disorientation, punctuated by casual murder and
indifference to black life. The assessment of bodies by standardized calcula-
tions of size involves the deliberate erasure of gender and kinship ties and
transforms embodiment. One’s bodily reduction to cargo implies the con-
scription of black bodies and Africans as “fungible and accumulated objects,”
(Hartman quoted in Wilderson, p. 39) rather than conscripted human subjects
(italics added.) The Middle Passage is thus the transition to another modality of
existence. An inaugural Symbolic erasure is infused by violence to the Real of
bodies that become the instruments of a jouissance of the Other (rendering
fungibility). In Afropessimism, Wilderson similarly links slavery and antiblack-
ness to a jouissance of the Other (92). For both Wilderson and Lacan, jouissance
indicates more than sexual pleasure, but refers to an “absolute” right to en-
joyment. Without the Symbolic barrier, one instrumentalizes the other as an
object of enjoyment, dictated by caprice or will (Wilderson, 2020, 92–93).
Within slave society, the murder and torture of a slave or a black man or
woman went (goes) unpunished, recognized simply as the result of the white
man or woman’s will, fantasy, or demand (Patterson 1982, Hartman). Slavery
and the cargo of black bodies in the hold of the ship continue in what Saidiya
Hartman calls the afterlife of slavery: “skewed life chances, limited access to
health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment”
(2007, 6.) This violence of the Other is in principle gratuitous and is perceived
as such (Douglas, 24). This excision from what Wilderson calls a social re-
lationality, that would suppose any accountability for this violence towards a
human body, represents a sanctioned abdication of the mediation of the
Symbolic Order as a barricade against the infliction of a Real enjoyment.
To begin at this impossible place of violence that upends the social link is to
begin at the place wherein a world becomes a libidinized correlate of the
Dereliction 211
subject—the primary Other and the object a. In this inaugural relationship, a
libidinalized world comes into formation in contrast to the precarity in which
many black persons live and die. Hassoun, a Lacanian clinician, speaks of
moments of structuration, the vicissitudes of which would serve as a psychic
setting of a libidinalized, beckoning world. The prelude of precarity is a
disorientation out of which emerges a violence of the theft of being and world,
as well as the corollary “‘theft’ of jouissance” about which Afro-pessimists have
written (e.g. Hartman and Wilderson 2003). How would Hassoun see this
absence of a place in the world? Referring to inaugural relations with the
Other, Hassoun writes:
Confronted with the enigma that the Other’s violence poses, the
subject—here brought to subjection—finds himself somehow confronted
with an absence of otherness .… This loss of moorings –and the
disconnection it creates—stems from the fierceness the other takes on,
striking the subject like some painful memory, the indefinable feeling of
loss that plummets him into suffering. (7)
Hassoun’s point of analysis in The Cruelty of Depression resides within the in-
frastructure of the Symbolic, not at the level of what is usually understood in
terms of the Symbolic Order. It is the place of the Symbolic in its intimate
encounter with the Real—with body and (Imaginary) object as effects.
Hassoun’s interest is the particular status of the “object” in depression and
melancholy, but his analysis ranges much further to propose a way in which
the body’s relationship to the Other can be altered to function as object a in
limbo. As such, insofar as object a is the lost object generating desire, it is
intertwined with the most primordial body/Other relationship. The absence
of a place for the child’s otherness as the prelude for a separation from the
Other, coupled with or as an effect of violence, displaces the libidinal situation
of the body. What Hassoun describes clinically implicates the being in-
stantiated by the aftershocks of the ship’s hold (as history and ontology). It
subtends the vigilance which haunts the experienced world within which
one’s body is under attack by the white Other. Hassoun further refines his
argument:
Let me take this hypothesis a little further by recalling that if for Lacan
the transitional object, “this little bit wrested from something,” is …
invested by the objet petit a—the desire causing object—it is still necessary
for this object to have been established as a “transferable” object, that is,
one that can be given up. (26)
This is a fascinating twist on the fate of the object a, which is usually understood
as falling out of the primary (M)Other and infant exchange, imbuing jouissance
to both. A lot could be said regarding Hassoun’s observation of the disruption
qua violence involved in that amalgamated jouissance “object” being aborted in
its transfer to the child. It certainly is relevant to the history of slavery in its
cruel destruction of mother/child relations, through rape and separating
children from mothers for profit and punishment. This legacy continues in
reproductive care of black women and infants to this day (Grier and Price
1968). The effects can be seen more generally through the keen eye of
James Baldwin.
Baldwin refers to his life as one in which he has nothing to lose while the
white boy has something to save—which Baldwin acutely denotes as white
innocence (Baldwin 1998: 270). Seemingly Freudian, Baldwin remarks that
white innocence is nostalgia, like longing for the mother’s breast. As the
essay progresses, his remarks become more cutting: As a black man, one has
to make oneself up as one goes along, collective racism and “nothing to
lose” becomes a matter of “no place for you” as a black man. If the world
had its way, “no place would ever exist” for the black man. For black
persons this erasure of place is ignored at the peril of death (277). While the
white world sets out to assure Baldwin’s blackness as the forced encounter
with his non-world/existence, a white man can desire and believe in a
world. The “no place for you” in Baldwin is akin to Hassoun’s posit of
disorientation, i.e. no moorings in this world. Further combining the
thoughts of Hassoun and Baldwin suggests something is always already
stolen for black persons. The aim of enslavement is to make sure that the
object that is to be lost (creating desire and the sense of jouissance) is never
quite possessed. The violence of the Other relinquishes nothing, the alterity
of the subject is extinguished, and its libidinal world is made precarious.
The lack in the (M)Other and the correlative loss/lack in the subject are
iterated retroactively by the refusal to surrender the jouissance of the black
body by the white other, denying the alterity to which love responds and
civility attends. This is not Symbolic erasure. It is a matter of an absorption
at this place/structure before language as narrative of which both Hassoun
and Baldwin speak (albeit differently).
This moment of structuration in Lacanian thought tied to the interrogation
that is Afropessimism can be moved further. Hortense Spillers’ remark is
recalled, “My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be
invented (203). What is this placeholder? The gratuitous violence and absolute
impunity of those who exact white violence on the black body suggest a
parallel with the harsh superego, a moment in subjective constitution (and
experience) wherein again the Other is not Symbolically barred. We are not
writing of the command itself: “you are black; you are expendable; you are
dangerous or worse.” We are analyzing primary and Real effects from which
the superego draws its cruel power, its residue in its object. Above, we ex-
amined the object a as a kind of buoy, the fantasy which sustains the alterity
of a subject; here we look at another point where the Real has sway over
being/nonbeing.
The superego is the part of the ego set against the other and functions as a
judge.2 But its creation harkens to the genesis of Language. In Seminar XI,
Dereliction 213
Lacan defines “a signifier as that which represents a subject for another sig-
nifier” (207). The emphasis is on the operation from S1 to S2 (S1→S2), as
defining a subject. The movement S1 to S2 introduces the law of language
and the collective exchange. Alain Didier-Weill posits a conjunction between
the creation of a fierce superego and the subject’s fundamental baptism in
speech, that is the instantiation of S1 in its autonomous effects. Didier–Weill
suggests this originary function within language operates to explain the
absoluteness of the superego. Speaking clinically, he notes that the elemental
superego is characterized by the command, “Not A Word” (Think of a
parental chastisement, “How dare you talk to me like that?” Ancillary to this
silence is the attribution of a crushing S1: “You are that” (dumb, unworthy of
speech, ugly). What weight of jouissance enforces these imperatives from
the Other? Alain Didier-Weill answers that there is a leftover of the Real in
the installation of S1 which can snag one in moving from S1 to S2. This is the
eruption of the Real. “… [T]he power of the superego is …… the fact that it
embodies absolute knowledge over those aspects of the subject that are real
[and] elude the reign of the signifier insofar as [the signifier] allow[s] the
question of [the subject’s] truth to be posed” (41).
Drawing upon a Jewish reading of Genesis, Didier Weill demarcates an
abyss and a void as that “domain” before God demarcates day and night. The
demarcation is a Symbolic trace or inscription that marks difference. The
instantiation of the most absolute and primordial difference is essential but
fragile … just symbolic; the abyss, walled off by the S1 as a root of symbo-
lization (distinguishing day and night), is surrounded by silence, a silence that
echoes that which preceded the emergence of the Symbolic from the Real.
When the Other’s words sear so deeply that one feels oneself inserted into a
disoriented abyss, it is that un-symbolized background, which is not fully
sealed off. The superego thus brings the jouissance upon the subject as a
malediction. Its gaze or words evoke an abysmal encounter not with a saying
(which one may contest or ironize). Instead it intimates a Real, before the
Symbolic “light” of difference, as a place which cannot be contested.
Didier-Weill writes:
… [T]he power of the fascinating gaze consists …… in showing [its

recipient] the other side of the symbolic: the world of abjection … not
governed by the law of speech. In this waste …… of the world, there
reigns .… not the human silence that the world of speech can lead to
hear, but …… the inhuman silence …… found in this “depth of depths”
where speech is unable to reach … (43–44).
Didier–Weill articulates this central power of the superego’s imperatives by

viewing them clinically, but his insights are relevant to the form of ravage set
upon the black subject.3
In Red, White & Black, Wilderson observes, “Jews went into Auschwitz and
came out as Jews. Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks” (38).
Black as a social/human category begins within a disoriented abyss—noted in
the above ideas of Didier Weill, and equally conveyed in descriptions of the
impossible hole (of the ship/of being). The Master signifier, “You are that
(and only that),” is literally outside any light of difference and implicates an
elemental power, with the S1 being inextricable from the obliterating excess
of the superego.
What makes the white child’s racist gaze on the train so striking in Frantz
Fanon’s Black Skin, White Mask is that the violence is sustained (the child looks
to the mother to point out Fanon’s skin color). This violence renders Fanon’s
black body transparent to the other’s regard, “unable to discover the feverish
coordinates of [his] world” (92). This situation recalls what Didier–Weill
captures through his notion of the elemental superego and the gaze.
Didier–Weill touches upon the shadow of the Real in the link between
language and the superego. It is the effect of the jouissance of the cruel white
Master in history which is now examined as a vector of antiblackness within
Afropessimism. In both Hassoun and Didier–Weill, the cusp between the
Symbolic, Real, and Imaginary as that point or knot of subjective formation
is undermined.
Section 3: the Lacanian Real as an approach to an

afropessimist reading of antiblackness
Lacan describes the Real as “that which always comes back to the same
place” (42, 1981). In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1981), he
points out that the Real “governs our activities more than any other” (60). In
the “Seminar on the Purloined Letter” he states: “the real, whatever up-
heaval we subject it to is always and in every case is in its place. It carries its
place stuck to the sole of its shoe, there being nothing that can exile it from
it” (17). Trying to conceptualize this implacable return that resists imagi-
nation and symbolization, Hassoun speaks of the Real, in its earliest in-
carnation, as the void. To write the Void, and think through it, is an
impossible task, precisely because it resists symbolization, yet it is always
present. This Void is not dissimilar to the Hold of the slave ship—the belly
that the African falls into.
The Void that resists symbolization but also returns to itself is doubly re-
miniscent of the weather that Christina Sharpe dedicates a chapter to in In the
Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016). The weather, as described by Sharpe,
“comes, breaks, changes quickly …” (104).
The weather is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total
climate; and the climate is antiblack. And while the air of freedom might
linger around the ship, it does not reach into the hold, or attend the bodies in
the hold. (104)
The climate, as Sharpe argues, is antiblack and to that end can be read as
analogous to the Lacanian Real that “governs our activities more than any
other” (1978, 60). “Weather (antiblackness as total climate) …” (Sharpe 2016:
Dereliction 215
105) governs a universal “our,” but this governing has little to no limits as it
concerns the black body and black being.
Over the course of his writings, Lacan’s definition of the Real shifts, dis-
posing of some aspects, detailing, and incorporating others. Colette Soler
writes the following on Lacan’s notion of the Real as being tied to an endless
process of writing:
[Lacan] indicates that analysis not only explores what we might believe to
be already there, but produces something new that can now write itself.
What “does not stop not writing itself” in psychoanalysis is the impossible
which occupies the place of the real. (19)
To enter into Afropessimism is to enter into a particular mode of analysis that

seeks to interrogate and investigate that which ceases to never stop writing
itself—the fact of antiblackness and black being occupying the “position of the
unthought” (Hartman and Wilderson 2003: 3). Psychoanalysis allows for
another mode of thinking through “the position of the unthought,” when
linked both with the unconscious read analogously through the weather and
with that which is deemed impossible—black existing in social death.
Soler states: “What “stops not writing itself” is the definition of con-
tingency” (19). One can also turn to further definitions of contingency:
future event or circumstance which is possible but cannot be predicted
with certainty; a provision for a possible event or circumstance; an in-
cidental expense; the absence of certainty in events; the absence of ne-
cessity; the fact of being so without having to be so.” (Oxford English
Dictionary). In each of these definitions, oft contradictory, precarity and
quotidian can be found—the quotidian experience of living precariously in
the “afterlives of slavery” (Hartman). Linked together, precarious and
quotidian seem to be at odds with one another, the former suggesting
uncertainty and unpredictability, while the latter is concerned with cer-
tainty and the everyday, yet this paradox is precisely what Christina
Sharpe is grappling with in In the Wake (2016). Sharpe turns to conflicting
definitions of “the wake” to illuminate this absence of certainty in
events—an absence of certainty in timing, but nevertheless the precarity
and deathly repetitions persists, always present, antiblackness never
ceasing to write itself. Alike, the Real imposes itself in (that fantasy we call)
reality, a reality that has antiblackness as a condition we are all living
under.4 Just as contingency is that which is necessary, antiblackness is a
necessary contingency.
In “The Vengeance of Vertigo,” Wilderson writes the following:
… the sensation that one is not simply spinning in an otherwise stable

environment, that one’s environment is perpetually unhinged stems from
a relationship to violence that cannot be analogized. (3)
Living under the conditions of antiblackness is an experience of and re-
lationship to violence that has no analogy. Wilderson writes that this leads
to a life “constituted by disorientation rather than … interrupted by dis-
orientation” (3). If we can tentatively replace disorientation with discontinuity
as both being effects of traces of the Real in reality, then a turn to Lacan again
links antiblackness with the Lacanian Real. Lacan writes the following in The
Four Fundamental Concepts: “[I]f this discontinuity has this absolute, inaugural
character, in the development of Freud’s discovery, must we place
it … against the background of a totality …? Is the one anterior to dis-
continuity? I do not think so” (Lacan, 25–26).
Put differently, “[b]efore any sense of subjectivity, we find the objects of
the drive” (Mieli 2017, 25). The relationship of the fungible accumulated
object as the non-ontology of the black body aligns with the operations of
the drives. The drives, rather than being biological, represent the inter-
vention between human need and the demand of the Other. This dialectic
between need and demand introduces a Real of discontinuity that inter-
rupts the reality that mirrors the ego. The claims of Afropessimists
presume that the social linkage, including the impasses of language pro-
ductive of a subject, are different from within the history of slavery.
We start near the discontinuities and fissures, showing what has not yet
stopped being written. In an interview with Saidiya Hartman, Frank
Wilderson notes:
But what is most intriguing about your [Hartman’s] argument is the

way …… you demonstrate how not only is the slave’s performance
(dance, music, etc), the property of white enjoyment, but so is-and this is
really key- the slave’s own enjoyment of his/her performance that too
belongs to white people. (“Position”)
Although not a text in the Afro-pessimistic vein, in Bad Faith and AntiBlack
Racism, Lewis Gordon writes “the black body is absence” (100) and “[h]is
presence is a form of absence” (99), so that the black body’s presence must be
justified. This theft of the body justifies the presence of the black body for the
Other. Black face is the rendering of blackness by theft; the violent
offences—by police or white citizens—reacts by usurpation to any separate
enjoyment of Black persons (Hartman, 44). Racialization, itself, is caught in
the terms of a dialectic of fantasy and enjoyment rather than in terms of
desire, law, or castration (George 2014: 373–374).
The racist cruelty of the theft marks the excess of jouissance, situating the
black person as an object of enjoyment, either as commodity or property.
How is one position, the imputed free man supposedly limited in enjoyment,
and the other, nonfree or slave, primarily his necessary object, constituted?
For this latter object, there is no recourse to the law. Denise Ferreira da Silva
remarks, “blackness’ disruptive force … [discloses] what lies at the limit of
justice” (1). Justice, read as the law, does not account to or for blackness
Dereliction 217
precisely because “in the modern Western Imagination blackness has no
value; it is nothing” (Ferreira da Silva 9).
Section 4: clinical reflections

The Lacanian clinic can be conceived as a movement between the living and
the dead. One of Lacan’s renderings of the dead is found in several forms: the
“dead letter” in the “Seminar on the Purloined Letter,” le mort (the dummy
in the game of Bridge, the dead father, as a locus of the Symbolic, and the
death drive, as repetition in the Real). One can hear the echo of the dead in
Lacan and in Afropessimism. The dead lay on and infuse the Real, the Real as
that which is not represented or subjectivized. A patient, for examples, has
anxiety nightmares of corpses and of murder. The unconscious cannot yet
decipher this place of the dead.
Traces of the Real, as inscribed in the unconscious, do not lead to any
immediate sense of being. In fact, the analyst may well introduce discontinuity
into the narrative reality created by the analysand in order to produce the
S1(s), the representatives ruling discourse and pre-empting desire. The frame
of listening and intervening allows an S1 to emerge in speech, acts, and in
between analyst and analysand. Then something new may be reborn in re-
lation to the world of signifiers as possibility.
The intrusion of the Real and superego, both intimate to the effects of an-
tiblackness, while a kernel of horror for all humans, is deeply embedded in the
history and lives of black persons—the weather as Sharpe puts it. Given this, it
is rather amazing that this horizon of socially sanctioned misdistribution of
jouissance is not more often thought about in psychoanalytic research and its
clinic. For it is not a matter of the skin color of the analyst (in the main) but
rather the agony of the recognition of the havoc of antiblackness on black
bodies, on living as black, on desire within the social link. The impasse is not an
add-on but a fundamental dimension. What comes up in the clinic is what
comes up, but this does not dictate the limits of what the analyst should know as
the “revolutions” of his or her culture. The blindness to antiblackness in the
clinic is a limitation with black patients. It is also the maintenance of whiteness.
Section 5: art and sublimation, or an insistence on

living in the “shadow of social death”5
A Vignette: In 1969, Roosevelt Watson was killed by San Francisco. Headline
reads, “Youth, 18, Killed Fleeing Police.” Police gave this account:
Patrolmen John Madden, 26, and Thomas Lang, 29, a rookie, were cruising
when they saw two men … As the officers approached the pair
to question them about a rash of burglaries on Telegraph Hill recently,
the […]6 with the box dropped it and ran, with Lang in pursuit. Madden
stopped the other […], Watson, who came up with a gun after being
ordered to put his hands against a wall. Madden, a policeman of three years,
took shelter behind a parked car and again ordered Watson to raise his
hands. Watson instead pointed his gun at Madden, then broke and ran. Both
officers fired warning shots, but police said, Watson continued to run. The
fatal shots were fired from a distance of almost a block away, police said.
Death certificate reads: homicide. Gunshot wound to the heart and the lung.
The above vignette is the only trace of Roosevelt’s living, a trace left in the
scraps that mark his death. This death riddles and fractures. What is not ac-
counted for is that Roosevelt Watson has a son of just a few months old, who
would beget a daughter, who would come to find tucked away in her grand-
mother’s proverbial chest of secrets 50 years later the death certificate that the son
had never seen, undoing all that the 16-year-old girl from San Francisco who
beget the son of the murdered “youth, 18, killed [by] the police,” had sought to
bury. This brief personal account rupturing this chapter undergirds the whole of
the coming to Afropessimism and Psychoanalysis: to make sense of this not
singular event, to make sense of a warning-shot that resounds in the present, that
continues to hold, imposes an impossibility of breath for one particular black
body existing in the afterlives of slavery. This isn’t a contestation or affirmation of
two’s guilt but rather a face towards the Black Death that “does not stop not
writing itself” by way of its intrusion in the quotidian.
The numbers of deaths, threats of death, and insisting to exist despite both
are countless. It is the quotidian, it is a reminder that the warning shot that
killed Roosevelt also was a threat to Kenneth Nash, the youth that was with
him. One can imagine that, as the warning shot pierced the heart and lung
of Roosevelt, Nash too lost his breath, being held by the cop that appre-
hended him. To encounter this warning shot, 50 years later, in a brief ac-
count on page five of the San Francisco Examiner, 20 October 1969, is to
experience après-coup, that which precedes and exceeds this chapter. It
would be remiss for us to not mention that at the time of this writing we are
living under a pandemic, a virus that attacks the respiratory system, and that
black folks in the United States are dying at disproportionate rates. People
have been told that it is unsafe to hold wakes for their dead, for fear
of transmission. Despite the pandemic, Black Death is still spectacle. And
“I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t
breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe7” rings like fatal warning shots that pierce the
heart and the lung. Homicide.
The brief personal account alongside another recount of the deathly en-
counter provided above are instantiations of what Christina Sharpe calls “the
wake.” Sharpe’s In the Wake presents the following:
Wakes are processes; through them we think about the dead and about
our relationship to them; they are ritual through which we enact grief and
memory. Wakes allow those among the living to mourn the passing of the
Dereliction 219
dead through ritual; they are the watching of relatives and friends beside
the body of the deceased from death to burial and the accompanying
drinking, feasting, and other observances … But wakes are also the
“tracks left on the water’s surface by a ship; the disturbance caused by a
body swimming, or one that is moved, in water, the air currents behind a
body in flight; a region of disturbed flow; in the line of sight of (an
observed object); and (something) in the line of recoil of (a gun)”; finally,
wake means being awake and, also, consciousness. (21)
If antiblackness is the total climate, as Sharpe argues, then antiblackness, like

the air we breathe and the water we drink, touches each of us, shapes each of
us, thereby antiblackness produces its own wake time and time again.
A field of Afropessimism contends that Black people cannot escape this
condition of being produced and reproduced as nonbeing in a global
climate of antiblackness8 but rather exist within it. In his essay “Ante-
Antiblackness: Afterthoughts,” in response to Fred Moten’s “Case of
Blackness,” Jared Sexton makes explicit that there is a tension between
“formulations of “Afropessimism” and “black optimism” (2). In this ten-
sion, he highlights that black optimists insist on black agency and freedom
as a possibility, while it is believed that Afro-pessimists are only concerned
with the longue durée9 of slavery and social death. In his reflection on a
2006 symposium organized at UC Irvine, Sexton notes: “in that venue, it
became clear that any claim about the contemporary persistence of black
social death for the analysis of the afterlife of slavery would have to con-
tend with the insistence of black social life, and vice versa” (3). In this
analysis, one must recognize that “inhabiting blackness [is to live] a black
social life under the shadow of social death” (8). This inhabiting of
blackness is, he insists, not an “accommodation to the dictates of the anti-
black world” (8); rather, we contend, this is what it means to be living in
“the wake.”
So how does one inhabit blackness knowing that living is always under this
shadow of death in all its iterations? Sharpe offers “wake work” as a possi-
bility, which entails mourning and honoring the dead and attending to the
living (this is the wake as ritual). “Wake Work,” as outlined by Sharpe, is
comprised of Aspiration (breathing life back into the dead and dying), Black
Annotation and Black Redaction (“new modes of writing [and] “new modes
of making sensible”) (218). In turning back to Lacan, we venture to put this in
conversation with Lacan’s understanding of sublimation. In the Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, Lacan writes, “Note that no correct evaluation of sublimation in
art is possible if we overlook the fact that all artistic production, including
especially that of the fine arts, is historically situated” (295). Rather than focus
on sublimation as a substitute satisfaction,10 Black art as sublimation is a drive
away from death under the conditions of an anti-black world. Like Lacan, one
can turn to literary art and cultural production, of the black diaspora, to
illustrate this point.
Following the Charleston massacre, where nine black members of a black
church were murdered, poet Claudia Rankine published “The Condition of
Black Life is one of Mourning.” Rankine marks mourning as a state of being
while other theorists have associated racial grief with Freud’s outlining of
melancholia.11 Both views suggest a symptom brought on by living under
particular conditions. Sharpe makes clear that her “wake work” is not the
work of Freud’s mourning and melancholia (19). “Wake work” troubles the
work of mourning and melancholia because “wake work” begins with un-
derstanding that black people are produced as nonbeing, so there is not a fully
formed object to be lost, somewhat contrary to Freud’s mourning and mel-
ancholia. Nonetheless, “wake work” entails a withdrawal of libido from the
anti-black world to turn instead to the intramural. This withdrawal from the
former and turn toward the latter is an act of sublimation necessary for social
life under the shadow of social death.
Each of the components of Sharpe’s “wake work:” aspiration, annotation,
and redaction bear witness to the unbearable. Following the 2010, 7.0
earthquake in Haiti, which produced an innumerable amount of deaths,
Edwidge Danticat wrote an essay titled “Our Guernica” (2010). The title is
taken from Pablo Picasso’s painting, “Guernica” (1937), which is painted in
response to the Spanish civil war. In the painting, there is complete dis-
memberment, monstrosity, without demarcation between humans and ani-
mals. In a corner of the painting, there is a disfigured woman wailing over her
child. Danticat conjures this image in her essay. She “annotates” the women
holding vigil for the dead while also attending to the living. In narrative form,
she assembles these dismembered bodies; this can be read as another form of
aspiration—breathing life into the dead and dying and reassembling them so
that the wake as ritual, even if figuratively, can be performed. Black social life
and art remain, and this is “the precarious dance of survival in which we
long to honor the dead while still harboring the fear of joining them …”
(Danticat, 177).
Notes
1 Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death chronicles the history of slavery showing
the many faces of the slave’s social death, including control of parental rights,
reproduction, the erasure of one’s ancestry, and original community and char-
acterization as outside either the ‘human’ community or the particular community
that defines the Master.
2 See The Language of Psychoanalysis by J. LaPlanche and J.-B Pontalis, 1973.
3 His diegesis derives from an invited talk he gave at one of Lacan’s seminars in 1979
(Didier-Weill 2017: 33)
4 Lewis Gordon writes in Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism that we are living under the
conditions of antiblack racism.
5 This reference to “shadow of social death” comes from Jared Sexton’s “Ante
Antiblackness: Afterthoughts” 2012.
6 The ellipsis used in brackets is a refusal to call the two “suspects” when the officers
have not been called “murderers.”
Dereliction 221
7 In 2014, Eric Garner repeated “I can’t breathe” eleven times while NYPD had
him in a chokehold. Six years later, George Floyd repeats the same as a
Minneapolis officer keeps his knee on his neck for 9 minutes and 30 seconds, at
least minutes after his final breath.
8 In in the Wake, Christina Sharpe theorizes a total climate of antiblackness that
implicates the world’s participatory upkeep of antiblackness.
9 This is phrasing used by Frank B. Wilderson III.
10 Freud’s sublimation is a form of substitute satisfaction in Civilization and its
Discontents. Lacan engages with Freud’s theory of sublimation while making im-
portant changes.
11 See Anne Analin Cheng’s Melancholy of Race (2000).
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Morrison. New York: Penguin Random House, 1998, 269–285.
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12 Japanese inter-signifier
subjects: jouissance in the
locus of the character
Kazushige Shingu
Nara University, Nara, Japan
Introduction
In 1971, Jacques Lacan visited Japan for the second time to meet with the
Japanese translators of Écrits and deliver a lecture in Tokyo.1 Prior to his visit,
a Japanese woman who may have been making his travel arrangements re-
acted with shock on learning that he had called his collected essays Écrits
(writings, written things), a title suited to a sacred work. Lacan’s uneasiness at
her reaction was reconfirmed on his visit to her native country, and his dis-
comfort following his immersion into the Japanese linguistic environment was
such that the experience had a considerable after-effect, requiring a certain
amount of effort to overcome even after he had returned to France. He
touches on the experience in the post-face to the Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis (1973):
This calls to mind the impudence that was imputed to me on account of

one of those écrits, for having taken my measure from the word. One
Japanese woman was quite put out by this, which rather astonished me.
Because I did not know even though I was propelled, by the care she took
right to where her language is dwelt in, that I was merely dipping my toe
into it. Only since then have I understood what tangible experience incurs
from this writing, which from on yomi to kun yomi passes on the signifier to
the point that it is torn from it by so many refractions, which any old
newspaper, like any old crossroads sign, accommodate and impress.2
On returning to France, Lacan made much of the fact that the person who
had been most scandalized by his seeming appropriation to himself of the
status of the author of a sacred work was Japanese, commenting, “It is very
curious that the person that this literally threw into convulsions was a
Japanese woman,”3 and noting that no one present at his lecture had reacted
as strongly. This story shows both that the Japanese treat writings as if
they—the characters—are something sacred, and that the perceptive Lacan
was able to discern this. At the same time, perhaps he felt that he himself had
been psychoanalyzed because the misunderstanding served as a fairly good
224 Kazushige Shingu
interpretation in a Freudian sense. Lacan may indeed have wanted to make
his book look sacred: The Holy Écrits. And why not? Every Lacanian psy-
choanalyst would have Écrits in their study and might even feel the need to
carry this heavy book with them on their travels.
Of course, the idea that characters (the letter) have a sacred status for the
Japanese appealed to Lacan and served as the basis for speculations about the
difference between the Japanese speaking subject, or subject of psycho-
analysis, and the European subject. Moreover, Lacan developed the idea that
the nature of the Japanese writing system itself, in which most characters
(kanji) can be read in one of two ways (on-yomi or kun-yomi, a topic that will be
elaborated on below), means that the Japanese subject has a fundamentally
different relationship to the signifier. Although Lacan believed that the
Japanese subject was divided by language like everyone else, he also thought
that in Japanese the repressed can find its lodging in the letter. Because this
repressed more freely expresses itself through the multiple meanings of kanji,
Lacan suggests, there is no masking the repressed for the Japanese subject.
That is to say, in Japanese, the repressed is “written” and can be easily “read.”
What Lacan seems to suggest is that this reading of the repressed is not a
psychoanalytic “interpretation,” since the repressed itself is already ready to
be read in the letter, but is instead a conventional “translation” between two
ways of reading kanji. Lacan drew from the Japanese use of kanji the im-
plication that psychoanalysis was neither necessary nor possible in Japan: as
he declares in the preface to the Japanese edition of Écrits, “no one who
inhabits this language has any need to be psychoanalyzed”4; he thus invites
the Japanese reader of the volume to close it as soon as they finish reading the
preface. The Japanese reader of Lacan is, however, unlikely to follow this
instruction because they understand that kanji are more than a simple tool of
translation between the two languages. If they were just a tool, they would be
a very inadequate one—instead, they are what is incessantly cultivating the
Japanese unconscious. In fact, as shown by the case presentation in the fourth
section of this chapter, they can transport the subject to the fundamental
splitting between life and death during psychoanalysis.
This chapter will explore Lacan’s thoughts about Japan and the Japanese
and examine their implications. The first section deals with Lacan’s under-
standing of the Japanese writing system and the implications of the dual system
of signification—on-yomi and kun-yomi—for the Japanese subject’s relationship to
language. The second section takes as its point of departure Lacan’s comments
after returning from Japan on the idea of the “littoral” as a boundary zone
between binary opposites that can serve as a site of generation, and explores the
larger relevance of this concept to the Japanese psyche by examining the
creation myths surrounding Amaterasu, the sun goddess and mythical ancestor
of the Japanese imperial family. The third section examines how Buddhism in
Japan—a religion that was transmitted from India through China and Korea to
Japan and whose reception in Japan is closely bound up with the transmission
of written language from China to Japan—can also be understood as a
Japanese inter-signifier subjects 225
“littoral” phenomenon. The fourth section discusses whether the contemporary
Japanese identity can still be conceived of in terms of the littoral and presents a
study from the author’s clinical practice illustrating the interplay between on-
yomi and kun-yomi in a case of transference along the lines suggested by Lacan.
Thus, our aim is to clarify the cultural path of the mythological Japan in order
to designate the place where the Japanese subject dwells by way of Lacanian
structural thinking. In his later seminars, namely, volumes XI, XVII, and
XVIII, Lacan refined his structuralism, and discovered, especially in the vo-
lumes XVII and XVIII, the topology of the littoral, a boundary structure of
water and land, wherein the Japanese psychoanalytic subject finds themselves.
I The Japanese speaking subject—between on-yomi

and kun-yomi
Lacan is correct in thinking that kanji, or characters, have a sacred quality for
the Japanese. However, it is difficult to say precisely why they should be
considered so; the fact that they are not native to Japan, but were transmitted
in ancient times from China, only further compounds this mystery. In
thinking about the characters’ sacred value in Japan, it may be helpful to
consider the psychoanalytic process. When people undergo psychoanalysis,
they learn to relativize the subjective relationship with the sacred agency, such
as a God or a King. In other words, they come to dismiss or lose what Lacan
calls their master signifier. This dismissal of the master signifier is what we see
in Japan’s use of kanji.
We have some notion of ancient Japanese civilization prior to the en-
counter with the more advanced civilization of ancient China from the ex-
istence of clusters of large tombs or mounds known as tumuli. However,
because these tumuli date from the period before the introduction of written
language, there is no written documentation of the civilization that produced
them, although many buried treasure objects suggest a strong influence from
China. When Chinese characters were brought to Japan, the Japanese people
knew it would be impossible to write the Japanese language with them without
completely converting the Japanese language into Chinese. This is because
each Chinese character has both a sound and a meaning; unlike a letter in a
Western alphabet, a Chinese character cannot be deprived of its meaning.
Almost all Chinese characters are bound to morphemes or words—and are,
therefore, called logograms—as well as to sounds. So, if they had simply
applied Chinese characters to the Japanese language, they would have lost the
Japanese language as a whole.
Notwithstanding this difficulty, how could they apply Chinese characters to
the Japanese language? As the author of the Kojiki (an early Japanese chronicle
compiled in 712) noted, “If expressed completely in ideographic writing, the
words will not correspond exactly with the meaning, and if written entirely
phonetically, the account will be much longer. For this reason, at times
ideographic and phonetic writing have been used in combination in the same
phrase, and at times the whole matter has been recorded ideographically.”5
On the one hand, they applied Chinese characters to Japanese words and
read them with Japanese sounds and meanings, eliminating the accompanying
Chinese sounds. However, in doing so, they did not exclude the possibility of
using the same Chinese characters with the original sounds in different con-
junctures. On the other hand, they applied Chinese characters to Japanese
syllables that had similar sounds. They did this by neglecting the original
Chinese meanings. However, in doing so, they did not exclude the possibility
of using the same Chinese characters with the original meanings in different
conjunctures. Thus, through this ingenious system for dealing with the cir-
cumstances, two ways of pronunciation—Japanese and quasi-Chinese—were
allocated to a considerable number of Chinese characters. Hence, there are
two streams of pronunciation: one representing a Japanese word―kun-
yomi―and the other representing creole Chinese―on-yomi―.
These two streams have been active throughout the history of the Japanese
language up to the present. To illustrate this point, the family name of the
author of the current chapter is sometimes misread by his compatriots as
“Niimiya” rather than “Shingu.” This misreading is made possible by reading
the characters 新宮 according to their Japanese kun-yomi instead of their creole
Chinese on-yomi pronunciations. If these characters 新宮 were to appear in a
Chinese text, they would be valid as authentic Chinese characters, meaning
“new” and “shrine or palace” respectively, and would be pronounced [xīn]
and [gōng], but since they appear as kanji now, they are pronounced ac-
cording to creole Chinese on-yomi, as [shin] and [gū] respectively. It is evident
that the on-yomi readings [shin] and [gū] are akin to the Chinese readings [xīn]
and [gōng], and can thus be considered creole Chinese. Meanwhile, the
Japanese kun-yomi reading gives the same kanji 新宮 the possibility of being
pronounced as “nii” and “miya” respectively, with each character having the
same respective meaning as above, “new” and “shrine or palace.” Kun-yomi,
therefore, is understood as referring to the indigenous, traditional Japanese
language. The kun-yomi may have been a practical translation of the old
Chinese characters into Japanese in ancient days. This is how Niimiya is a
possible, variant reading of the kanji 新宮, which should be read as Shingu,
although conventionally this can be said to be a misreading of a proper noun.
In correcting this misreading, the author may seem to be preferring to be
Chinese over being Japanese by insisting on the creole “Chinese” pro-
nunciation, but in fact he identifies with a Chinese signifier in a creole way
and with a Japanese one in a repressed way at the same time—his identity
resides in these two kanji 新宮. Characteristic of this functioning of kanji is that
a kanji itself only serves as a support for the transfer from Chinese to Japanese,
or vice versa, and never constitutes a proper relationship between the two
languages. One of the most famous Buddhist texts, the “Heart Sutra” (Prajñā-
pāramitā-hṛdaya in Sanskrit), serves as an interesting example of the use of
on-yomi: in its Japanese version (Hannya Shin-gyo), the characters are identical
to those in the Chinese original but are read with their Japanese
on-yomi pronunciations rather than their Chinese ones. This sutra contains the
idea of nirvana. In this sutra, kanji are not only a support, but also a trans-
porter of the Buddhist meaning shared by both the Japanese and Chinese
people, in that they transpose the meaning of the sutra from the Chinese
language into spoken Japanese. The Japanese are not in need of the kun-yomi
version of this sutra when they recite it.
When Chinese characters were brought to Japan, the Chinese language could
have become the master signifier for the Japanese people, but this did not occur.
While being pinched by two pronunciations—Japanese and creole—the Chinese
character ceased to be a Chinese character and became something else. Kanji
thus emerged instead of Chinese characters. Psychoanalytically speaking, the
Japanese people dropped the master signifier that was the Chinese language.
This represented a certain loss, but then, instead of this master signifier, they
obtained a new object: kanji. Kanji are indeed a derivative of Chinese characters
from the Han dynasty, but they are now a Japanese product. What is important
here is that the Japanese subjects were able to identify themselves with this
object. In that sense, kanji are a vast set of Japanese objets petit a.6 Through this
object, the Japanese subject can come and go between Japan and China.
It can now be seen why kanji could appear as something sacred to the
Japanese woman who may have made the arrangements for Lacan’s visit, and
even to Lacan himself. This is because kanji can be a support for the Japanese
to be identified with the history of their nation, and can be consecrated in
certain circumstances. This identity is, as Lacanians would say, a subjective
fantasme, that is, a fundamental fantasy in which the subject believes itself to be
identical with the master signifier as well as with the void that is none other
than itself. Should it then be deconstructed or reconstructed by psycho-
analysis? Which is more therapeutic: to be emancipated from kanji, or to be
able to hold on to them? A tentative answer is already known because, if kanji
is an objet petit a, it must give rise to a pulsation in so far as it forms a rhythmic
gap and/or bridge between Japanese and Chinese. Sometimes it is with us,
and sometimes we are separated from it; this is what the unconscious
movement is like, according to Lacan’s Seminar XI.7 At one moment, kanji
lets the Japanese subject feel unified in it, and at the other, it divides the
subject between the lost master signifier and the fantasized pure auto-
chthonous Japanese meaning. In this sense, in the oscillation between the
Japanese archipelago and the Chinese continent, on the littoral between
mountain and sea, and between on-yomi and kun-yomi, the Japanese people’s
daily life is in a state of unconscious pulsation over the littoral structure.
II Between the mountains and the sea—the

importance of the littoral in the Japanese
imagination
Lacan’s essay Lituraterre, written shortly after his return from Japan, plays on
the association between the letter and the littoral (the generative boundary
between opposites): “Isn’t the letter ... more specifically littoral, that is, in
figuring how an entire domain forms a frontier for the other, by dint of their
being foreign to each other, to the extent of not being reciprocal?”8 It is no
coincidence that Lacan devotes much of this essay to Japanese calligraphy. In
calligraphy, the artist uses a suzuri inkstone to produce the ink for writing. The
suzuri is said to be composed of land (called a “hill”) and sea. The artist pours a
small amount of water into this sea and applies a piece of solid carbon to
prepare a certain amount of solution (ink) on the border between “sea” and
“land.” In calligraphy, characters originate from this small littoral. When the
names of Japanese subjects are written in Japanese ink, they are, thus, pro-
ducts of the littoral.
The Japanese kanji meaning “character” or “letter” (字) is composed of two
parts: the upper part denotes the roof of a house and the lower part a child, as
if this character as a whole is illustrating a childbirth in a family. This birth,
indicated by the character, is the birth of the subject of language. It may be
recalled that Freud qualified his famous saying about the purpose of psy-
choanalysis, “Where id was, there ego shall be,” by comparing the task to
“draining the Zuiderzee.”9 The subject of speech is not born as a matter of
natural course but constructed as a littoral structure, characterized by its
ephemerality rather than solidity. This is why Lacan (2006) states in Écrits,
“Where it was just now, where it was for a short while, between an extinction
that is still glowing and an opening up that stumbles, I can come into being by
disappearing from my statement.” In fact, the Japanese “I” is always stum-
bling between on-yomi and kun-yomi in reading kanji.
In this section, we will follow the mythological formation of the littoral in
the Japanese imagination, and in doing so, remain in Freudian territory, in
that our description will observe the structural, psychoanalytic method pro-
posed by Lévi-Strauss and Lacan. The littoral structure, because of its hybrid
nature, can represent a synthesis of the binary opposition, as well as its irre-
concilability. If anything like the origin of the Japanese language should exist,
it may be its existence before the introduction of Chinese characters.
However, when this existence comes to be represented, it will be done
through kanji, the origin of which is Chinese. The Japanese subject can come
into being on this conflictual device. Meanwhile, in the structural anthro-
pology of Lévi-Strauss, this conflictual state of things is a characteristic of the
structure of myth.
Lacan depicts how the Japanese experience in its proper sense manifests
itself between the two ways of pronunciation of a character in the form of the
beams emanating from Amaterasu (the sun goddess who is the mythological
root of the Japanese imperial family) (Post-face to the Seminar XI, 1973). He
explains in Lituraterre “that the [Japanese] subject takes support” from a regal
“You [Tu10],” from a “constellated sky, and not merely from the unary trait.”
Where his Western subject roots its identification in a singular characteristic of
the Other (a unary trait), the Japanese subject supports its “fundamental
identification” in the light of words that come into this world through
Amaterasu, and what enables this constellated streaming is nothing other than
kanji, and the “grammatical forms with which the slightest statement is varied
by the relations of politeness it implies”11 (2001: 19). The Japanese subject, in
so far as it is immersed in its mythological life, believes in its origin in
Amaterasu through the Japanese imperial family as the “You,” a coalescing of
“beams” from Amaterasu.
Kanji may be no less a mythological structure than the littoral, which con-
serves and transmits the repeated binary oppositions: life and death; man and
woman; or mountains and sea. The idea of the littoral as a site of generation is
found in the mythology surrounding Amaterasu. The earliest Japanese origin
myths are concerned with the struggle of love and death between the male deity
Izanagi and the female deity Izanami, who gave birth to many of the Japanese
islands and local deities until Izanami gave birth to a fire deity and was herself
burned to death in the process. The binary opposition between male and fe-
male gave way to that between life and death as Izanagi crossed over into the
realm of the dead (yomi) to bring back his bride. However, while Izanami was
negotiating a release from the realm of the dead with the god of yomi, Izanagi
violated a taboo imposed on him by Izanami herself against looking at her in
the underworld. He was terrified by the sight of the dead Izanami, and began to
flee, incurring her fury; in her anger, Izanami made a great chase after her
spouse to a certain sharp slope, the boundary of yomi and the world. Izanagi
brought a high shield of rock there to separate them, and they decided to
divorce. The irreconcilable opposition, woman–man, is superimposed by and
momentarily transformed into the opposition death–life. As Lévi-Strauss (1958)
pointed out and Russell Grigg (2008) clarified psychoanalytically, such binary
oppositions are characteristic of the repetitive structure of myth. “The repeti-
tion,” according to Lévi-Strauss, “has a proper function of rendering the
structure of the myth manifest.”
This repetition pointed out by Lévi-Strauss stems from myth’s function as a
way of treating impossibilities. In this respect, Darian Leader (2003) states,
“He [Lévi-Strauss] argued that myth responds to the initial situation of im-
possibility or contradiction not with a solution but by finding new ways of
formulating it logically. One contradiction replies, as it were, to another.” Or
more formally, “A myth takes an initial contradiction between A and B and
shows that a further contradiction between C and D is contradictory in a
similar way” (39). Contradiction and opposition are thus structured into a
repeated pattern.
What is stressed in the later events of this Japanese origin-story is a kind of
compromise between opposites that seems particularly Lacanian. The quasi-
parthenogenic children of Izanagi after his separation from Izanami were
Amaterasu (the sun goddess), Tsukuyomi (the moon god) and Susanoo
(a candidate to be god of the oceans). As Japan was wracked by a great variety
of wars, battles, and disorder, Amaterasu decided to send her grandson,
Ninigi, to earth to reign over it. On descending from the celestial world,
Ninigi met a beautiful girl, Konohana-sakuya, a daughter of the mountain
deity. The mountain deity, knowing Ninigi was an authentic deity from the
celestial world, gave him his two daughters, Konohana-sakuya and Iwanaga.
At that time, Ninigi accepted Konohana-sakuya but declined Iwanaga be-
cause she was not considered beautiful. The mountain deity declared, “The
reason I offered both my daughters together was this: with Konohana-sakuya,
your children will reign and prosper, while with Iwanaga, their reign would
have continued eternally. Now you declined Iwanaga, your descendants will
reign over this earthly world with a shorter life than you would have had in
the celestial world” (1968: 145). Here a plausible compromise can be seen
between the celestial and terrestrial worlds. The former inherited the pros-
perity from the latter, yet it lost eternity and accepted a shorter life span. The
descendants of the couple made of a celestial man and terrestrial woman
would only have a limited life because of the father’s discriminatory pro-
creative act. As noted in the Kojiki, “For this reason, until this day, the em-
perors have not been long-lived” (145). This type of compromise formation
can be found in the Lacanian concept of the birth of the speaking subject.
When a living subject is confronted with the signifying chain, this subject will
be reborn as a speaking subject through an alienating aphanisis, with the loss of
its primary total life. A Lacanian model for this confrontation is formulated:
Your Money or your Life? wherein the subject is obliged to choose a reduced
life at the expense of an inexhaustible purse (Lacan 1973).
Clearly, Ninigi, and Konohana-sakuya reflect the binary opposition between
the heaven and the earth. They gave birth to two sons, Umisachi (the bounty of
the sea) and Yamasachi (the bounty of the mountains), representing another
repetition of binary oppositions. Following a conflict between the two brothers,
Yamasachi took a bride from the realm of the sea, Toyotama. When Yamasachi
returned to his land, his marine wife, Toyotama, soon followed. She said:
“I have been bearing a child for some time, and now the time of delivery is near.
I thought that it would not be fitting for the child of the heavenly deities to be
born in the ocean. Therefore, I have come forth” (156). Then, on the beach
(littoral), a parturition hut was built. When she entered the hut, she said that, in
giving birth, she would revert to her original, ancestral form, because this was
the custom of her people. She asked her husband not to look at her, but he failed
to respect her wish and viewed her original form as she was in the process of
being transformed into a large crocodile creeping around the floor. Ashamed
and furious, she returned to the marine realm of her birth, leaving a baby boy on
the seashore. Although she was enraged, her love endured, and she sent her
husband poetry and dispatched her younger sister, Tamayori, to take care of the
baby. The baby grew up and married Tamayori, his aunt. From this marriage,
four children were born. Among them, the youngest was Kamuyamato-
iwarebiko, who would later be the first emperor of Japan, renamed Jinmu.
After repeating several binary oppositions, the repetition came to a standstill
through the opposition of land and sea, with children born on the seashore
(littoral). Looking back to the beginning of the Kojiki, the first binary opposition
between man and woman is seen, and this opposition, as something capable of
reproduction, had always been present beneath all the oppositions that fol-
lowed, including life and death. Here it can be said that, according to Kojiki, as
well as another principal chronicle of ancient Japan, the Nihongi (1972) (also
known as the Nihonshoki, and completed only slightly later than the Kojiki), a
series of mythical binary oppositions determined the beginning of Japanese
history. Among them, the most important are man and woman, life and death,
heaven and earth, and mountain and sea. The last, mountain and sea, is the
most profound because it determined the inception of the Japanese royal fa-
mily’s genealogy. Moreover, these mythical binary oppositions are, by being
superimposed on each other, emancipated from their natural conditions to
constitute a fundamental structural pair of signifiers. Above all, attention should
be paid to the position of the littoral between mountain and sea, where the
original family of the first emperor was born. This is why the littoral is thought
to be the archaic locus from which the Japanese people’s identity is derived. As
an intermediate place between mountain and sea, it has an ephemeral quality,
but this ephemerality is an essential feature that characterizes the littoral, which
is a limit rather than a substance.
III Kanji and Buddhism producing subjects of

speech between sea and mountain
In the opening of Lituraterre, Lacan invokes the slippage between “letter” and
“litter” found in Joyce.12 For Lacan, lituraterre means, so to speak, “litter on the
earth,” much like drift from the sea. The Buddhist conception of the living
being on the seashore is similar to this: Buddha is someone who came over
from the world beyond the sea, and who settled on the littoral as an object,
like litter. This is why kanji characters join this litter: they are litter because
they are pinched between on-yomi and kun-yomi, losing their original life as a
representation. The Japanese people generally think the most systematic in-
troduction of Chinese characters was made in connection with the acceptance
of Buddhist sutras translated into Chinese from the Indian-language originals.
This is why, as mentioned above, the sutra Hannya Shin-gyo is read aloud only
in on-yomi, not translated into Japanese kun-yomi. The Japanese people, thus,
respect the status of this sutra, as drift from China, the world beyond the sea,
and wish to listen to the quasi-Chinese sound of the text.
Buddhism came to Japan in 538 A.D. from India via China and Korea.
Thus, for the Japanese, Buddhism was something that came to the archipelago
from the sea, like driftage washed ashore. If Buddhism was then to be ac-
commodated in the structural binary determination in Japanese myths, it might
have been located on the side of the sea deity, as opposed to that of the land. It
might also have been designated on the side of death, rather than life. As is well
known, Buddhism has a doctrine of nothingness, and a theory of human pain
and suffering. As Lacan explains in his Seminar X (Lacan 2004), Buddhism
interprets desire as an illusion. It is this illusion that causes the fundamental
human pain, hence the basic observation of Buddhism: life is suffering.
Buddha is someone who had freed himself from this illusion and, thus, from
any human suffering. As far as every commonplace being takes this illusion as
real, they are supposed to be alive. Buddha is the antipode of this: something
that knows itself as dead, and thus lives in real truth. Buddhism, as can be seen
here, was accommodated in a strict way into the binary structure of Japanese
mythology. Buddhism is a doctrine that tries to integrate life and death (more
specifically, being born, aging, ailing, and dying) into the encompassing suf-
fering of life. At the starting point, it has an oppositional pair of life and death,
but in the end, it attains a communication between the two. Buddhism has
many words that express this genre of communication. The most popular
expression is “to become Buddha,” the commonplace meaning of which is
simply “to die.” The original meaning, however, is “to attain a state of en-
lightenment after death.” The ideal state of becoming Buddha is to attain
enlightenment (satori) during one’s lifetime. A Zen monk in the 17th century
thus composed a poem: “Being a complete corpse but still in life, and doing
things as I want, so nice is this act of mine.” In the mythological scenery of the
littoral in Japanese myths came the bimodal functioning of kanji. With this
driftage, the representations of Buddhist communication between life and
death were introduced into Japanese culture.
For the mythological history of Japan, the littoral was the place where the
opposition of two sides produced the living being. However, at the same time,
this living being was determined to be ephemeral and transitory. In the first
scene in the myth of Izanagi and Izanami, the realm of life was clean, and the
realm of death was dirty. Yet now, after the introduction of Buddhism, the
realm of life was naturally productive and the realm of death was, so to speak,
sublime with Buddha. This is a new dichotomy of life and death, in which the
two extremes can be interchangeable in the Shakespearian sense of “fair is
foul, foul is fair.”
Generally speaking, any religion that comes to one place from abroad tends
to come into conflict with the autochthonous religions. In fact, when
Buddhism came to Japan, conflicts arose within the royal court, and a local
civil war occurred. It was, however, soon calmed. After that, when the Heijo
capital was constructed in Nara in 710 A.D., Buddhism provided the state of
Japan with a ruling spiritual principle. The hybridization of Shintoism13 and
Buddhism then developed, and the two streams would coexist in Japan until
the Meiji era (1868–1912), when a governmental iconoclastic and destructive
movement rose up against Buddhism.
This brief history of Japanese religious movements may give an under-
standing of how Japanese spiritual identity has been formed. Upon the
structural repetition of mythological binary oppositions, Buddhism came to
articulate itself, specifically by creating a junction in the littoral, where an
image of reproduction was closely associated with that of death. The original
Buddhist doctrine of the communication of death with life facilitated this joint
formation. What Buddhism brought from China to the original Japanese
inhabitants was, it may be said, a sublimation of death on the littoral; that is,
the advent of the speaking subject in the locus of the kanji character. The
ephemerality of the littoral, pointed out above, can correspond to the three
main Buddhist tenets: impermanence, non-self, and the silence of nirvana.
These three tenets are apt to appear in the littoral. Buddhism was thus able to
accommodate itself to the Japanese littoral with this recognition of death as
the truth of life. This incorporation of death into life characterizes Japanese
identity. It is an identity in a letter–litter (kanji) on the littoral. This conception
of identity may be extended to a vague idea of the Japanese race, if such can
be said to exist, which would be a hybrid of a cultural identity grounded in
kanji and an amorphous sense of being autochthons of the littoral climate.
However, the grounding of identity in kanji characters is connected more to
the subject’s jouissance than to a race, because it is consistent with the Lacanian
definitions of jouissance and surplus-jouissance in that it incorporates death into
life. Lacan says in his Seminar XVII (Lacan 1991), “In fact it is only in this
effect of entropy, in this wastage, that jouissance takes on its status, that it makes
itself known. […] It is only the dimension of entropy that gives body to the
fact that there is a surplus-jouissance to be recovered” (Seminar on January 14,
1970: 56). Note that this “entropy” refers to Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure
Principle,” namely, to the fact that we are approaching nirvana without in-
terruption. Moreover, this concept of entropy reminds us of the shortening of
the life of the emperors by the discriminatory choice of bride by Ninigi de-
scribed above.
A question may then arise as to whether the Japanese people have retained
this style of littoral identity since ancient days, and if they still maintain it now.
I would venture that the littoral origin in the royal genealogy has been
maintained together with the Buddhist doctrine of ephemerality.
IV A littoral transference and the inter-signifier

identity in the locus of the character
The enduring power of the littoral in the Japanese psyche is suggested by the
popularity of the short poem “A Big Catch,” written in 1926 by the female
poet Kaneko (2016). The first scene in this poem is on a beach where people,
just like at a festival, are enjoying a large catch of sardines. In the second
scene, the reader’s vision is suddenly pulled to the depths of the sea, where the
poet presents us with the image of a funeral for the tens of thousands of
sardines who have died. In this poem, the poet leaves the beach for the depths
of the sea, where she identifies herself with the lives beneath the sea. Her
gesture reminds us of Toyotama from the realm of the sea deity, especially
when she returned to the sea, leaving a child on the shore. In reality, the poet
herself divorced, then committed suicide, leaving a child in this world. As the
popularity of the poem demonstrates, the dichotomy between sea and land is
a fundamental structuring element in Japanese subjectivity.
In my own clinical practice, a deeply thoughtful subject produced the
following poem while still in high school, entitled “A Seascape”:
On the water of the sea, he was floating,

with his face all pale and swollen,
On the way of decomposing, he was remembering
the life he had had in the mother’s womb.
Time to time it was fish who came to pick at him,
and at every pick he went back into the water.
For he knew that it was the place where he originally was,
while the water was licking calmly with the tip of its tongue.
Ah, the collapse is near at hand...
This subject, then a university student, was depressed and underwent psy-
choanalysis. They reported a dream: in the first scene, the corpse of a kid-
napped child was abandoned on the seashore. There was a small notebook
attached to the corpse that appeared to be the same as the notebook the
dreamer had used as a dietary journal. In the second scene, a poet named
Niimura Shin died, leaving a book entitled Migiwa (Littoral14), in which he
had written 260 short poems describing American sex workers and the sky-
scrapers of Manhattan by night. In the third scene, the dreamer was abducted
along with someone else and taken to a music laboratory where they were
experimented on with music through headphones spliced directly into the
brain. One of the experimenters seemed to be a member of the Yellow Magic
Orchestra (a Japanese electronic music band). As the music proceeded, the
movement of sound was perceived in the brain, but then a white dot on a
monitor appeared and moved, and at that time, the movement in the brain
stopped being perceived.
Regarding Niimura Shin, the dead poet in the second scene, the surname
Niimura is composed of two kanji characters, and the given name Shin has one
kanji. The first kanji of the surname could be read in Japanese kun-yomi as Nii,
or in creole Chinese on-yomi as Shin; in the dream, it was read as Nii, although
it could also have been read as Shin. The kanji of the given name was read as
Shin, but this reading was the dreamer’s invention. In reality, this kanji could
also be read in two ways: kun-yomi Izuru or on-yomi Shutsu. Therefore, the full
name could have been read as Shinmura Izuru. Read in this way, this name
would have been that of a great scholar of the Japanese language and the
author of the standard Japanese dictionary Kojien. This dictionary is so well
known that almost every Japanese person would have read the dreamer’s
Niimura Shin in kanji as Shinmura Izuru.
Far from Lacan’s suggestion that kanji does not well support repression, the
dreamer was able to read the poet’s name in their own innovative and
complex way precisely through use of kanji. Comparing the dream name
Niimura Shin with the real name Shinmura Izuru shows that the on-yomi Shin
for the first kanji of the real name had been repressed. Then the sound of the
given name Izuru was replaced by the repressed on-yomi Shin, which had
moved to here. The dead poet’s name in the dream was written in kanji that
would have been read Shinmura Izuru in conventional Japanese but were,
thus, read as Niimura Shin. The attentive reader will recall that shin is also the
first syllable of the family name of the analyst: Shingu. This sound, shin, made
itself manifest by excluding the real given name of the dictionary author. This
phenomenon might be called a “return of the repressed,” to use the Freudian
term. Additionally, the meaning of the Japanese word izuru is “to come out.”
In fact, the place of this kanji is a very proper place for the psychoanalytic
return of the repressed because the Japanese meaning of kun-yomi Izuru sug-
gests an invitation for the repressed to reappear.
This type of invention can be considered a means for making a transference
less manifest than it really is. It is clear that the analysand made an intense
identification between the analyst and the image of the corpse of the poet.
Thus, the dictionary author was called upon to represent the analyst’s name,
and the sound shin was then repressed, but this sound came back again to the
fore. This was what happened in a Japanese analyst–analysand relationship as a
transference. Remember as well, the corpse of the child who bore the dreamer’s
dietary journal: this corpse also represents the dreamer’s body. Additionally, the
corpse floating in the sea in the dreamer’s poem, written as a high school
student, may be seen as a precursor of the two corpses in the dream. In this
identification transference, both parties were supposed to be dead. The third
scene thus contained an experiment to resuscitate the dreamer with music. This
image of the dead body was projected onto the therapist through this ingenious
manipulation of names. The process was carried out by virtue of the common
sound in names between the dead poet and the living therapist. In other words,
the therapist became the vessel of the subject’s dead body.
This dead body did not fail to be resuscitated. The new energy was provoked
by experimental music, and then the energy was projected onto a monitor. The
small notebook attached to the dead body of the kidnapped child now turned
out to be the document of the subject’s body and brain. The notebook was,
thus, similar to the monitor. The musical sounds mediated the resuscitation
process. These sounds may consist of the repression and the return of the sound
shin—the meaning of this sound in on-yomi for the kanji for shin is, in fact, “new.”
Thus, the new life was being designed in the form of spoken musical language.
When this subject was reborn from a corpse in analysis, they could find a way of
emerging through a play of the twofold reading of the kanji, which is a creole
notation of the characters from the Han dynasty. On-yomi conserves traces of the
pronunciation during the Han dynasty, while kun-yomi corresponds to tradi-
tional Japanese life.
As Lacan (2001) sarcastically suggests in the preface to the Japanese edition
of Écrits (Avis au lecteur japonais), Japanese subjects are interpreters, “born like
waffles” pinched between two ways of reading (Autres écrits, p. 498). However,
kanji also enables resuscitation from the deadly identification. Simultaneously,
kanji themselves subsist as something substantial under the play of the dual
sounds. This subsistence of characters may offer a container for the state of joy,
or rather Lacanian jouissance, for the Japanese people. It enables them to ex-
perience a seemingly genuine identity as a linguistic family, but always side by
side with the creole identity in relation to the Chinese language.
V Conclusion
A series of binary oppositions in the Japanese myth—female and male, death
and life, earthly and heavenly—led to the most familiar opposition of sea and
mountain, and it was this opposition that gave rise to the Japanese royal
genealogy through the marriage of two extremes. This product, however, did
not become the Japanese identity, as it was, because the Japanese people came
to know that the boundary between sea and mountain, or the Lacanian lit-
toral, was where a corpse also appears as driftage. Reproduction was to be
coupled with the Buddhist signifier of death or nothingness. Here on the
littoral, the Chinese and Japanese signifiers were connected to each other.
The Chinese characters used to represent this junction were disjointed from
the Chinese language. They became kanji, or a transporter for the Japanese
speaking subject between on-yomi and kun-yomi, China and Japan. The
Japanese subject of speech was thus formed between death and life, in so far as
death was sublimated into the Buddha. Such a history of the Japanese subject
can now be reflected in the poems and dreams of a psychoanalyzed subject,
whose unconscious can be unveiled by on-yomi and kun-yomi in transference.
Acknowledgment
An early manuscript of this paper was read at the summer university of
Eötvös-Loránd University, Budapest 2019. The author specially thanks Dr.
Krisztián Indries, Ph.D. for his kind arrangements of the summer university.
Thanks also go to David Mulrooney, Ph.D., from Edanz Group (https://en-
author-services.edanzgroup.com/) for editing a draft of this manuscript.
Notes
1 He had already visited Japan once before, in 1963, when he visited Nara and
Kamakura in order to investigate the relationship between Buddhism and psy-
choanalysis (during his Seminar X, “Anxiety”). His second visit was during his
Seminar XVIII, “D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant.” It took place
between the sixth and seventh lectures in this seminar (on March 17 and May 12,
respectively). The lecture in Tokyo was delivered on April 21.
2 This afterword was not translated into English in the authorized translation of the
Four Fundamental Concepts. A translation by Adrian Price was published in Hurly-
Burly: The International Lacanian Journal of Psychoanalysis (issue No. 7, January 2012,
pp. 17–12). This translation is also available on the website Freud2Lacan: https://
www.freud2lacan.com/docs/Postface-bilingual-final.pdf.
3 From Lacan (2006: 62, Lecture 4, on February 17, translation by Cormac
Gallagher).
4 From “Avis au lecteur japonais” (translated by W. Stone), (preface to the Japanese
edition of the Écrits), published in La lettre mensuelle de l’École de la cause freudienne,
October 1981, no. 3, p. 2. Also in Lacan (2001).
5 Kojiki (1968: 43).
6 In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the objet petit a refers to the unattainable object-cause
of desire.
7 Lacan, J.: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Sheridan, A., p. 207.
8 I am using the translation by Beatrice Khiara-Foxton and Adrian Price made
available on the Freud2Lacan website.
9 In the New Introductory Lectures; the point of the comparison is that the ego will take
the place of the id in the same manner as the land will take the place of the sea in
the land reclamation project then underway in the Zuidersee in the northwest of
the Netherlands.
10 Tu is the French second person singular, as Lacan uses it here. When the kanji
meaning “big you” are written in Japanese (in on-yomi, taikun; in kun-yomi, ookimi),
they can occasionally mean “Your Majesty.”
11 Not only the usage of kanji but also many a phonetic, declensional (grammatical)
form can coordinate the interpersonal relationship of politeness in Japanese social
contexts. This is not to say that Japanese people lack the unary trait, in so far as this
trait is “something by which man marks himself on this world” (Shingu, 2010).
12 The reference is said to be to Finnegan’s Wake.
13 The term Shintoism refers to the set of religious beliefs and practices that existed in
Japan before the arrival of Buddhism and is characterized by the belief in multiple
deities known as kami.
14 The Japanese word Migiwa is composed of mizu (water) and kiwa (limit), thus
meaning waterfront, and therefore, littoral.
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Miller. Paris: Seuil, 2006.
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Yorkː Norton, 2006. p. 678.
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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 35–49.
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Aston. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1972
Shingu, Kazushige. “Freud, Lacan and Japan.” Perversion and Modern Japan:
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Part IV
Theorizing the racialized

Lacanian subject
13 The Lacanian subject of race:
sexuation, the drive, and
racial subjectivity
Sheldon George
Race structures human subjectivity in ways largely ignored by Jacques Lacan

in his psychoanalytic reading of the subject. Lacan sought to build upon the
work of Sigmund Freud, whom Lacan once likened to a “good archaeologist”
(1998: 182): in “breaking new ground,” Lacan observes, Freud leaves “the
work of the dig in place” for further excavation (182). In this chapter, rather
than seeking out new, uncharted sites of exploration into racialized sub
jectivity, I attempt to excavate and reconsider, through race, understandings
of the subject already laid bare by Lacanian theory. This chapter directs its
attention to the fundamental question that, for Lacan, centers the existence
of the subject, structuring not just conscious and unconscious activity but
also the psyche as a whole: “What am I there?” (2006: 459). Lacan divides this
question into two components. It is, for Lacan, a question both about the
subject’s sex (classically unveiled in the hysteric’s uncertainty of her desires as
a woman or a man) and a question about the subject’s “contingency of being”
(459), his relation to death and existence (memorably uttered in Hamlet’s
obsessional lamentation, “To be or not to be?”1). But what role may race play
in such psychic deliberations? Seeking to orient race in relation to existential
inquiries about being and sex, this chapter argues that the answer to the core
question of human subjectivity is often most forcibly supplied by race.
Lacan specifies that the question at issue is a query “about” the Other, both
a question asked of the Other by the subject—What am I?—and one de
pendent upon the subject’s understanding of the Other’s desire—What should
I be for you? or Who do you want me to be? (2006: 689). Significantly, Lacan
uses this term Other to refer multiply to the subject’s own unconscious, to the
external Symbolic world of meaning and law that is putatively represented by
the father, and to the mOther who functions as the original embodied Other
for the emerging subject. These multiple meanings of the term Other convey
an intertwining of the inquisitive, blossoming unconscious with the external
world that grants the subject access to meaning. Such meaning is negotiated
by the unconscious but also arrives to the subject through a “discourse” that is
inclusive of race, one animated by what Lacan calls a subjective relation to
“the whole ancestral history of real others” (2006: 461). The answers supplied
by the Other—by the unconscious that interprets the desires and meanings of
242 Sheldon George
the Symbolic and embodied Others around the subject—not only situate the
emergent-subject in regards to a “there” (What am I there?), granting the
subject a place in the Symbolic world of meaning, but also help to establish
the psychic contours of subjectivity.
Through the Other’s answers, says Lacan, “the question of his existence
envelops the subject, props him up, invades him, and even tears him apart
from every angle” (2006: 459). This propping up, by meanings that yet sunder
one’s being, is what the subject attains through fantasies like race. Lacan’s
formula for fantasy is $◊a: barred subject, losange, object a. Race is a fantasy
object, an object a produced by the signifiers of the Symbolic. It takes part in
the signifier’s scripting of a barred subjectivity ($) that elides being and sex,
producing them as a vacuous gap in the subject (◊). This scripting binds
meaning to the Other’s discourses as vital answers to the existential queries of
subjectivity. But the elisions of the signifier also produce the drive, which
insists as a meaningless subjectivity relegated to the unconscious. Racism, I
will suggest, expresses this drive. Through constantly circling race as a fantasy
drive-object, racism contributes to an organizing of subjectivity around un
conscious forms of enjoyment. It establishes modes of enjoyment unrelated to
meaning. Refusing meaning, racism grants the unconscious both structure
and the agency of a subjectivity that escapes Symbolization.
My contention is that race and racism are pivotal to the psyches of
American subjects. Through attentive discussion of early racist practices like
blackface minstrelsy, I will present slavery and the Jim Crow postbellum era as
formative of both subjectifying discourses of race and extra-Symbolic surges
of jouissance—or libidinal enjoyment—that repeat themselves across time in
drive-level expressions of racism. Lacan’s understanding of the subject’s
fundamental relation to questions of being and sex will guide my analysis,
facilitating a reading of race and racism as structuring subjectivity by me-
diating libidial enjoyment. But, as Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks has noted in her
pioneering study Desiring Whiteness, “the richest aspect of Lacan’s theory” for
analyses of race is sexual difference (3). By working through Lacan’s graph
of sexuation, which schematizes the divergent relationships to jouissance that
establish the factors of being and sex within subjectivity, I will present race
and racism as fundamentally intertwined in our American Symbolic with all
subjective relations to enjoyment charted by Lacan. Race, I contend, is wholly
structured by the Symbolic, but yet, I will show, race fuels desire and agitates
the drive, urging the sexuated subject of race toward acts of racism aimed
at fantastical excesses of jouissance.
The two expressive modes of Lacanian subjectivity

and the subject’s two lacks
Lacan’s graph of sexuation, as he presents it in Seminar XX, Encore, pro
vides a reading of subjectivity and jouissance that can richly enhance our
understanding of the raced subject (Figure 13.1). The graph depicts the
The Lacanian subject of race 243
Figure 13.1 Lacan’s Graph of Sexuation
limited ways in which a subject may relate to jouissance upon entry into the
Symbolic world of the Other. Sexuation involves investing the psyche and
the sexed body with modes of enjoyment arrived at through unconscious
choices about how jouissance is achieved in the face of lack. What I will argue
is that race, as an object of the Symbolic, proscribes preexisting modes
of enjoyment through which the unconscious seeks to establish a subjective
relation to sex and being. The two left portions of Lacan’s graph chart
relationships to enjoyment that he associates with “Man,” and the right two
display enjoyment from the perspective of “Woman.” My purpose will not
be to engage directly with Lacan’s bifurcation of the graph into zones as
sociate with “Man” and “Woman,” but rather to demonstrate how each
relation to enjoyment depicted in the graph lends itself to mediation through
fantasies and signifiers of race.
Below I provide a key for the Greek symbols Lacan uses in the graph,
followed by a notation of how the symbols will be read in this chapter2
(Figure 13.2). The two formulas on the top left side of the graph can be
interpreted as saying that while all of man’s jouissances are insufficient to
satisfy him because they are phallic, or based in fantasy and language, man
yet imagines that there exists a form of jouissance that is not phallic that will
bring full satisfaction. The formulas on the right indicate that, though all
subjects experience phallic jouissance, some also access a jouissance that doesn’t
exist in any Symbolic system of meaning, a jouissance that Ex-sists (both exists
and insists from) beyond the Symbolic. The graph suggests that subjects
situated “under the banner” of Woman not only exceed the Symbolic
meanings pinned to them but also may access “a supplementary jouissance”
that is non-phallic and extra-Symbolic (1998: 72). I will discuss each of the
four formulas individually, but first it is necessary to engage more directly
with the concept of jouissance itself.
244 Sheldon George
Figure 13.2 Key to Greek Symbols
Jouissance, which I have simplified so far as enjoyment, is more precisely the

being and sex lost to the subject through the process of subject formation, a
process that grounds subjectivity in lack. Race, I will show, attempts to mediate
our relation to this lack. But it is important to recognize that lack—or the
subject’s deprivation of jouissance—is instituted in two distinct ways, and that
subjectivity thus acquires two (intersecting) expressive modes through which to
manifest itself in each Lacanian subject. These expressive modes are tied to
desire and the drive. In one mode, subjectivity manifests as a consciousness
rooted in desire and split from its unconscious by the signifier of the Other. The
split itself is constitutive, emerging from the signifier to generate what we may
call a subject of desire, a subject who accesses meaning that simultaneously
produces a gap in being. This gap, emerging as the unconscious
in its overlapping with what Lacan calls the Real, escapes expression by the
signifier but fuels desire in its aim at filling lack.
In this desiring mode of subjectivity, it is the signifier itself that institutes
lack, barring both being and sex by restricting any signified meanings that
may express subjectivity. Lacan demonstrates this restriction upon subjective
meaning in “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious” by revising the
work of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. In ways that are significant to an
understanding of lack’s relation to both desire and the drive, Lacan rejects
any notion implied by Saussure in the left image below that signifiers (like
TREE) “represent” (416) some signified object present in the real world or in
our minds (Figure 13.3). Instead, Lacan insists that any signified mental
image of the real world is populated with meaning through the dominance
of the signifier. By emphasizing the similarity in the doors he presents as
signifieds in his revised representation on the right, Lacan illustrates that
what distinguishes and defines signifieds are signifiers, here GENTLEMEN
and LADIES. He implicates these signifiers in establishing the “two
(a) (b)
TREE GENTLEMEN LADIES
Figure 13.3 Barred Meaning
homelands” subjects will begin to embrace as expressive of their sexuality

and being as they enter into the Symbolic (417). Following Freud, Lacan
reads the subject’s sexuality as “essentially polymorphous,” unrestricted to
any particular object choice (1998: 176); but here he conveys how the sig
nifiers of gender institute lack by barring the polymorphous subject of desire
from full expression of what we may call sexual libido.
For Lacan, libido is the true driver of subjectivity, constituting what he refers
to as a “headless subject” of the drive (1998: 181). This second, drive expression
of subjectivity is headless because it lacks the conscious self-determination fa
cilitated by the signifier. Instead, it manifests as an insistence of the subject’s
being and sex beyond their barring by language. This subjectivity did not
originate with, but instead predates, the barring instituted by the signifier. In his
myth of the lamella (or the hommelette, the man-egg), Lacan likens libido to
the membranes of an egg, or to the placenta, indicating through the libido a lost
part of the self that separates off at birth (197). Here, libidinous pleasure is
lost to the polymorphous subject through the very process of its embodiment.
Before the emergence of the signifier, the libido was established “as a pure life
instinct,” something “irrepressible,” that is divided from the subject to occasion
an other volition, a headless subjectivity that drives the subject’s activities be
yond conscious recognition (198). Mutually constituted through a deprivation
of libidinal jouissance, both the subject of desire and this headless subject of the
drive find new mediated expression through race and racism.
∀x Φx: The object a, identification and

the racialized body
Let us focus specifically on race. Here I will show that the fantasy object of
race mediates expression of libido and answers subjective questions of being
246 Sheldon George
and sex by intersecting, first, with desire to produce racial identification, and
second, with the drive to constitute the body as a sexuated, racialized body.
If we begin our reading of Lacan’s graph with the second of the two formulas
on the left side, ∀x Φx, we encounter the notion that all jouissance is phallic
jouissance. This implies that true jouissance is lost to the subject and is replaced
by phallic jouissance. Here we can read the lost jouissance as the libido struck
from the subject at birth and then again barred by the signifier. This libido
binds sex to being and death (or loss), finding expression in subjectivity only
as partial drives, in a reduced form, as that “part of sexuality that passes” into
“the networks of the signifier” (1998: 177). It is therefore through the signifier
and the objects of the Other that the subject attains access to lost jouissance,
which is experienced as phallic jouissance.
But what Lacan emphasizes is the failure of phallic jouissance to recuperate lost
libido. Phallic jouissance compensates for loss through signifiers and objects of
the Symbolic that support fantasies of wholeness and sexual complementarity.
Within Western discourse, the phallus often emerges as a signifier that promises
pleasure and wholeness through the complementarity of a sexual mate. Lacan,
however, ties the phallus to nightmares of loss and fantasies of parts of the body
falling off (2006: 697). Psychic loss produces discourse as failed attempts to write
the sexual relation, or complementarity, that does not exist between man and
woman (1998: 35). What “doesn’t stop not being written” in discourse, what has
to be missed and insistently repeated especially in racial discourse, is the lost
jouissance of the subject (59). Such discourses, and the objects they privilege,
always fail to satisfy the subject, and thus must return for a compulsory encore
(as the title of Lacan’s seminar conveys) because their very status as substitutes
for lost jouissance only serves to mark the place of lack that they seek to cover.
This radical insistence of lack beyond the failures of phallic jouissance,
I argue, conditions racial identification as a variant expression of com
plementarity. The sexual relation fails to produce wholeness because it is to
the object a that the subject relates, not to a mate. Though the a is nothing but
the presence of a hollow in the subject, a void that can be occupied by any
object, its illusory manifestation as a love object in the mate and as the fantasy
object of race in the racial other generates psychic identification at an un
conscious level (1998: 180). Lacan describes the a as a fantasy object that
is always either “pre-subjective, or the foundation of an identification of the
subject, or the foundation of an identification disavowed by the subject” (186).
This description suggests how the fantasy of race can function as the a.
Lacan’s thinking on identification gains new significance for race when read
alongside of Freud, who stipulated that racial groups emerge if their members
“put one and the same object in place of their ego-ideal and have conse
quently identified themselves with one another in their ego” (1989: 61). Freud
described a process whereby the ego-ideal, which is responsible for reality
testing (59) and comprises the conscience (52), falls under the influence of
an external object fantastically associate with the group’s leader. The singular
object is invested with narcissistic libido by the group’s members, thus
constituting of it an external object that extends the ego’s narcissistic self-love
to all members of the group, who seem to share possession of this same fantasy
object. Clarifying Freud through Lacan, we can specify that what is loved here
is the fantasy object a of race.
In Encore, Lacan calls the process of loving the fantasy object in the other
“souloving” (84). It is souloving that constitutes racial groups, who bond at
the fantasy level of their internal souls. Members of the group find in each
other the same ego object needed to fill the hollow of their being, the fantasy
object that carves out in the ego an ego-ideal that will structure their view of
reality and police the actions they perform in moralistic, or even destructive,
obeisance to the group. Racial identification takes part in a broader ob
jectification characteristic of subjectivity. Lacan describes subjectification as
a process of self-mutilation tied to the object a (1998: 62). He designates the
a as something that the subject has to separate off from the self in order
to constitute the self (103). Similar to the members of Freud’s group, a de
veloping child identifies with the object in the Symbolic, or in the father,
that divides the mOther’s attention. The child wishes to become this object
in order to fill the lack in the mOther (2006: 463). This identification casts
out the lost part of the self as an object to be refound in the Symbolic Other,
who will now occupy a space in the alienated ego as ego-ideal, as a fantasy
self, or a soul, that elides the being and sex of the subject with illusory scripts
supplied by the Symbolic.
This transformative identification can also be understood in relation to
the drive. Through the drive, I suggest, race as object a contributes both to
sexuation, by mapping the physical body around gapped zones of pleasure,
and to the psyche’s construction of an ego image that defies lack. In the self-
mutilation that produces subjectivity, desire and the drive both emerge as
attempted answers to the core existential question: What am I there? The
subject constitutes the self on the basis of messages received from the Other,
most particularly from the mOther or primary caregiver; but these messages
are always communicated in demands that are enigmatic to the subject
(2006: 683). The mOther’s demands seem “whimsical” and “omnipotent,”
and the child attempts to manage the anxiety they create through an act of
identification with the father, or the Symbolic, that aims, ultimately, at se
paration from the mOther (689). This separation establishes subjectivity
through an identification in which the subject’s desire mirrors the desire of the
Other and the subject’s ego embraces the Other as its ideal. But separation
also occasions rewritings and exclusions of unarticulated portions of the self
that insist in the psyche as a libido that fuels the drive.
The drive, Lacan explains, is what remains after the mutilated subject
disappears, after libido is parsed off (2006: 692). It is a “grammatical arti
fact” that manifests as a remnant of libido, or as a partial drive that is
marked by the cut made in the psyche by the Other’s signifiers and enig
matic demands (692). Lacan’s formula for the drive is $◊D. It indicates that
the barred subject navigates its emptiness of being by circling a rimmed
248 Sheldon George
losange that situates the subject in relation to the demand (D) of the Other.
This demand emerges both through the Other’s signifiers and through the
Other’s perceived pleasures, or apparent recuperations of jouissance. The
child identifies with the way the Symbolic Other enjoys, and learns in this
manner how to find its own reduced, phallic forms of enjoyment in the
Symbolic: it learns how to use the Other’s objects to enjoy in the modes the
Other communicates enigmatically. The Other’s jouissance and signifiers
thus leave their mark as a subjective drive that circles the objects that seem
to produce enjoyment for the Other. Such circling is what I represent below
by modifying the similar illustration of the drive Lacan provides in Seminar
XI (178). By presenting race as a version of the a that the drive circles in
search of the subject’s lost being and sex, I indicate that the fantasy of race
structures subjective modes of enjoyment, organizing the drive’s inscription
of the body as a racialized body (Figure 13.4).
Lacan depicts the drive as an arrow shooting out of a rim that is meant to
represent the orifices of the body. He subdivides the drive into the oral drive,
emanating from the rim of the mouth, the scopic drive, associated with the
eyes and their sockets, the anal drive, rimmed by the anus, and the in
vocatory drive, associated with the ears. The rims are where the libido of
the polymorphous body is restrictively localized as partial drives bound, by
the signifier and embodiment, to the erogenous zones. They mark the points
of intersection between the subject and the external Symbolic world of
meaning. Each erogenous zone is associated with lost and recoverable ob
jects. Most illustratively, the anus, as erogenous zone, is a point from which
a portion of the subjective-self seems to mysteriously extrude, thus localizing
the psychic condition of loss that engendered the subject. What emanates
from the rim is an irrepressible energy, a drive with the goal of death itself.
The libidinous energy shoots out to circle the object of the Symbolic—the
a
Aim
Race
Rim
Goal
Figure 13.4 The Drive and the Rim

child seeks the breast as an already lost object that may fill its appetite—but
the drive is nourished only by lack: its goal is the lost portion of the self
that can be substituted by no object, and so its final aim is to circumvent
its circled a.
The Other’s object is repeatedly circled and missed precisely because it
represents the lost part of the self, the part that has “no specular image, no
alterity,” and that thus becomes the very loss to which the Symbolic Other
lends an image in fantasies like race (2006: 693). The subject takes himself
as the terminus of the drive (1998: 183), and in the drive’s return into its
rim, what is produced through circumnavigation of the Other’s object is
the sexuated subject of race, a subject physically gapped and psychically
filled by the a. Lacan compares the returning structure of the drive to a
sort of self-flagellation, whereby the subject mutilates his own body as an
exhibition for some imagined Other “looking at him” (183). This self-
mutilation is what is involved in the drive’s circling of race, which con
stitutes the body as what Lacan calls an “a-notomy” (1998: 94) that is
finally “based” on the souloved fantasy a (110). The drive’s return into its
rim produces a “insertion” of race as this illusory object a that penetrates
“one’s own body,” carving out an internal place for itself in the ego,
mapping the gaps of the body around the Other’s modes of enjoyment
and inscribing onto the body a specular image that makes of this body a
racialized body (1998: 183).
Lacan presents the scopic drive as the drive that most efficiently cir
cumvents the lack it insistently circles (1998: 78). The scopic drive is about
seeing and being seen (195); it is about establishing oneself as a specular
mirrored-image of the Other, whose Symbolic constitutes a picture in
which the emerging-subject must take up a subjectifying place. What the
subject gains through the Other is an ego, which Lacan defines as a bodily-
image that holds the status of a stain or scotoma in the picture, a dark spot
that covers over a hollow (96–97). Lacan himself seems to approach a racial
reading of the subject by aligning the bodily-ego with a defensive process of
“coloration” found in the animal kingdom: as a way of “defending” itself
(98), a creature embraces coloration as a process of “mimicry” in which the
animal “becomes a stain, it becomes a picture, it is inscribed in the picture”
(99). Lacan chooses not to pursue this line of thought to a full reading of the
coloration involved in racialized self-identification, but here we may re
cognize racial coloration as what Lacan calls an “adaptation” inscribed
unto the psyche and sexuated body once the drive accesses the object a
of race. In order to be seen in the racial Symbolic, subjects take on, or
mimic, racial identities—white, black—that “mottle,” to use Lacan’s term,
their being and sex (99). Against the mottled background of a Symbolic that
sees in subjects colors that they do not truly embody—for who has ever seen
a person who is literally white or black?—subjects become mottled, spotted,
stained with a coloration that allows them to mimic a preexisting, racial
Symbolic reality.
250 Sheldon George
¯¯¯¯¯
∃xΦx : Race and the other jouissance that
shouldn’t be
It is necessary in theorizing race to actively root theory in historical reality.
Having posited race as an object of the drive, I will here analyze racist beliefs
and practices in slavery to begin to account for race’s ahistorical insistence, race’s
prevalence as an extra-Symbolic a that ever emerges to organize enjoyment,
script the body and structure group and personal identification. I want to situate
the a in relation to the next formula of the graph by first directly suggesting the
a’s consist presence in shifting discourses of race. Early conceptions of race ex
plicitly rooted themselves in the a through what Anthony Appiah calls racialism,
the belief “that there are heritable characteristics, possessed by members of our
species, which allow us to divide them into a small set of races” (13). In the late
eighteenth century, the fantasy a coalesced into illusive racial characteristics that
seemed recognizable to European craniology scientists (or phrenologists), who
described a measurably miniscule cranial capacity in blacks that impeded their
morality and intellect (Gates 2019: 60). Around the same time, doctors in
antebellum America isolated diseases that, owing to some unspecified heritable
factor of biology, affected only African Americans, diseases like Drapetomania,
which caused blacks to forget their station in life and unreasonably run away
from enslavement, or Dysaethesia Aethiopica, a race-specific disease capable of
afflicting blacks with “stupidness of mind and insensibility of the nerves” (2019:
61). These pseudo-medical conceptions of race seem dated by their implication
of a racial essence that produces measurable biological and moral characteristics,
but what always roots racial difference, accounting for race beyond any biolo
gical or scientific racism tied to the body, is the a.
The object a, which arises as the source of group identification in the sou
loving I mention above, is also the basis for any alterity found in the racial
other. This other, whose soul is different from mine and from that of my
group, has an exclusionary core being, a distinctive, differentiating racial es
sence that, most significantly, remains inapprehensible and extra-biological.
Lacan states that the a is a “semblance” of the being or libido the subject loses
at birth and through the signifier (1998: 99). The a masquerades as this lost
being, inserting itself into the subject and the other as not only the source of
racial alterity but also the root of all notions of being. This fundamental
function of the a as an inapprehensible representative of being allows us to
understand Lacan’s next formula, ∃x x , there exists a jouissance that is not
phallic jouissance. As fantasy object, the a can never be isolated in the embodied
other, and so it is ascertained through the other’s apparent jouissances: visible
enjoyment indicates one has the fantasy a. And having this a grants the other
access to what Lacan calls “another jouissance” that is not phallic jouissance, a
jouissance that catalyzes hate (59).3
Racial hatred is bound to an enjoyment that Lacan interchangeably
labels “invidia” (1998: 116) and “jealouissance,” the jealousy that springs forth
from the subject upon confrontation with an other who seems to access this
other jouissance, who seems to achieve an absolute bliss, denied to the subject,
through “having” the a (1998: 100). In a complex reciprocity, the fantasy that
the other enjoys instead of the subject manifests in the subject a hatred that is
productive of a new form of jouissance. Though the subject is deprived of
jouissance, Lacan suggests that one experiences a second-order jouissance, rooted
in fantasy, through hatred. This jouissance is the “first substitute jouissance”
to arise for the subject (100): invidia, or jealouissance, is a jouissance of hate
produced in response to the fantastical reification by which the true lost object
is manifested as the a in the other’s possession.4 Lacan links this jouissance to
the envious child described by Saint Augustine, who turns pale with hatred at
seeing another infant’s lips hanging at the nipple of the mOther’s breast (100).
This child’s only access to pleasure is the substitute jouissance, or jealouissance, he
achieves through hatred of the other jouissance he imagines to be sucked through
the lips of his rival from the fantasy a of the breast.
Lacan’s example of jealouissance, or invidia, resonates in significant ways
with both the structures of child care that characterized American slavery
and the lasting modes of jouissance slavery has produced in the racialized
American Symbolic. During slavery, it was common practice to utilize
enslaved women as wet nurses to white infants. Though nineteenth-century
Americans had “grown increasingly concerned about the power of bodily
fluids and a child’s ability to imbibe moral or racial essences through a
woman’s breast milk” (Jones-Rogers 103), antebellum women turned their
children over to slave women for aesthetic reasons—so their breasts
wouldn’t “drop” (105)—and to find freedom from a motherhood that in
volved birthing, on average, five to twelve living children (106). Lacanian
theory suggests the psychic impact upon white children who learn to feed
from the black women they will later claim as property.
Here emerged a dynamic in which the black mOther is holder of an object a
around which the child’s oral drive comes to circle in a paradoxical manner as
subjectivity develops. Taking in this object implies, in the discourse of the period,
taking in the racial essence of the black mOther, here imbibed in the milk.
However, the white child must come to reject this essence and abject
the slave mOther, who will often become the object of the grown child’s fla
gellation. In keeping with Lacan’s definition of the a, though the object a was once
the source of an identification with the slave mOther who agitated the white
child’s drive, the flagellation must rescript infantile libidinous investment through
transforming it into a source of dis-identification. It is only in the terminus of its
returned path, as the child’s drive circumnavigates the abjected slave as holder of
the a, that the white child attains full self-identification. This identification, as
white, roots itself in hatred as the invidia or substitute jouissance that compensates for
the loss of the a: it makes masochistic mutilation of the black mOther-figure the
core of one’s insistent pursuit of wholeness, and it helps establish rivalry over the a
as a central, lasting vector of American race relations.
Such slavery practices complicated any simplistic relation to possession and
property. They granted what seemed like eternal possession of the object
252 Sheldon George
through ownership of the slave mOther, but they also emphasized, through
abjection, a dispossession of the object that already seemed the rightful property
of another, the object belonging to the slave child whose claim to the mOther
positions him perpetually as the racial rival of an emerging white subjectivity.
Similar racial rivalry between black and white Americans persists today
because such rivalry aims at an ahistorical other jouissance that American racism
insists must be, must exist somewhere as the possession of the racial other. But
Lacan specifies that this other jouissance that must be is also a jouissance that
shouldn’t be because our fantasies of its existence impoverish all the pleasures
we do achieve (1998: 51). It is precisely because race always falls short
of the absolute bliss it promises, and the infantile drive it agitates, that race
insistently repeats as the discourse that is called upon to fail to write the
relation to jouissance the subject endlessly pursues.
The unconscious insistence of race: the God face and

hainamoration
I have suggested that race is a discursive element of the Symbolic. Though
capable of shaping desire and directing the aim of the drive, race is distinct from
sex and being, which uniquely occupy the status of that which cannot be written.
What singular characteristics, then, differentiate race from other discourses to
privilege it as that which insistently fails to write subjective lack? Addressing this
question requires a focus on the processes by which racial discourses come to
mediate lack, which can be approached through attention to the bottom por
tion of Lacan’s graph (Figure 13.5). The ahistorical insistence of race, I suggest,
is related to Lacan’s reading of “The Woman,” who Lacan indicates “does not
exist” by crossing her out in the graph below (1998: Encore 7). A similar non-
existence of race fuels its ahistorical insistence. While extending my discussion of
race through readings of slavery and the historical practice of blackface min
strelsy, I will here present race as an ahistorical insistence that constitutes racism
as a headless subjectivity manifested in the unconscious itself.
Significant to our understanding of race is Lacan’s interpretation of
Woman as exactly an element of discourse (I will later address another in
terpretation). In our Western discourse, Woman has represented an
Figure 13.5 The Graph’s Lower Half

impossible ideal, an abstraction that Lacan highlights through frequent use of
an added article, The Woman. This discursive Woman, Lacan shows, is a
version of “the God face” (1998: 77), a fantasy representation of “the uni
versals: the Good, Truth, and Beauty,” that subjects associate with an abso
lute other jouissance that must exist (53). Woman does not exist because she
functions as what Lacan calls the signifier of the barred Other, S(Ⱥ), the
signifier of the unconscious Other that is, like the mOther, given up with entry
into the Symbolic (28). As signifier, she marks a point of coalescence between
this Other and the a (84). Both expressing and mending the subject’s shattered
being, Woman manifests the fantasy object a that externalizes loss and exalts
illusory complementarity and recoverable wholeness.
In Seminar VII, Lacan introduces the relevant concept of the Atè. This Atè
is an object that has been “raised to the dignity of the Thing,” to the dignity of
the lost object we would worship as though it were some divinity (1997: 112).
The Atè is aligned with Lacan’s object a. Where the a is a semblance of being,
the Atè positions us in relation to absolute being, to the divine being that,
in the Judeo-Christian tradition, granted us our souls. Lacan emphasizes
within the Greek term Atè the root word “atrocious” (263). He presents as
Atè the image of Jesus Christ on the cross, finding in this image a lure that
attracts us toward a souloving of the divine while still standing as a distancing
barrier to this beyond. In her function as the a that is exalted toward a
coalescence with the God face, Woman, Lacan’s work suggests, holds a
similar but divergent relation to absolute being.
The Symbolic position of Woman, who does not exist, parallels the
Symbolic position of race, which also does not exist (Figure 13.6): both
Woman and race function as a God face that promises access to being as
the lost libido that has been shot-off into the beyond.5 But where Woman
is idealized, most often, as an “inacessible” fantasy object that does not “take
us in[to]” this beyond, race inspires racist atrocities that breach the limit of Atè
(1997: 151, 239). Race, which the subject souloves as a semblance of divine
being, stands as an Atè or gateway unto the beyond. Race can embody such an
Atè in the racialized black figure, who, for example, must be lynched and
castrated for raping white women (as was often the charge). Here black em
bodiment is situated as both a manifestation of an impossible jouissance of
Figure 13.6 Revision of the Graph’s Lower Half

254 Sheldon George
being—like some omnipotent face of the divine, the black rapist lacks nothing
because he has the white woman as a—and as a barrier, or a gateway onto a
jouissance that a crucifying whiteness can access once the black impediment is
atrociously removed from the path onto divine bliss. Where Lacan indicates
that “Christianity naturally ended up inventing a God such that he is the
one who gets off” in the place of man (1998: 76), such that his enjoyment may
lend support to the fantasy of an other jouissance capable of finally filling man’s
lack, what centuries of racist invidia have encouraged is the notion that the
black man enjoys instead of the white man. Paradoxically, because of his
torical associations of blackness with savagery and unrepressed desires, the
black body is raised to the dignity of a Thing saturated with jouissance.
But what matters in racism is not the embodied other. Racial meaning is
inherently erratic because what reigns in racism is jouissance. While today
blacks are most often associated with an excess of jouissance, slaves functioned
as the object a by signaling that it is the master who enjoys, and indeed has legal
possession of the a6: it is the master who fantastically accesses an absolute
other jouissance, a whiteness that signifies the supremacy of his being. What the
slave allowed was for whiteness to function as the God face. And white
women—who we can say, in a Lacanian sense, did not exist in this patriarchal
society—also pursued jouissance through the slave. Despite the coverture laws
of antebellum America, which granted ownership of all a woman’s possessions
to her husband, many white women were gifted slaves on birthdays and
weddings. Their slave-holding fathers secured the stability of their futures
against the financial exploits of potentially reckless husbands by enforcing
antenuptial and postnuptial contracts (akin to today’s prenuptials) that pre
vented the husband’s control of white women’s slaves-as-property ( Jones-
Rogers 2019: 31–35). In this way, white women gained ownership of an object
a that guaranteed them an otherwise unavailable semblance of being,
freedom, and independence in their sexist antebellum society.
What we find in race’s oscillation in meaning is, ultimately, what Freud
calls ambivalence, which Lacan renames hainamoration, or hate-loving (1998:
90). We saw this hainamoration vividly in the little white boy’s relation to the
abjected black mOther: one hate-loves the racial other, precisely because it is
one’s love of the object this Other fantastically possesses or blocks that stirs
one to hatred. A core example of such hate-loving is blackface minstrelsy, a
practice of what one scholar calls “love and theft” that involved near-white
men mottling their bodies with black charcoal so as to facilitate their full entry
into the racist Symbolic (Lott 1993: 6). Popular mostly in the antebellum
north (35) and performed most often by working-class Irish men (39), min
strelsy functioned to (among other things) help grant the Irish a white
American identity. In a time when the “not-yet-white” Irish lived in the same
poor communities as blacks—so close to blacks that blacks could be called
“smoked Irishmen” and the “simian” or “savage” Irishman could be referred
to as a black man turned “inside out” (Roediger 1994: 184)—Irish minstrel
performers distinguished themselves from blacks by blackening their faces
to emphasize the buffoonery of blackness. Their intimate exposure to African
Americans created a love for black culture as the possession of the other that
can be pilfered to reconstitute the self as white.
What minstrelsy allows us to isolate is the function of the signifier in
granting racial identity to the subject, a process that involves, I suggest, or
ganizing the subject’s unconscious emotions around the drive’s encounter
with the Other’s habitual modes of enjoyment. Here again we see the circular
movement of the drive, the terminus of which is a new white man who stands
in opposition to the blackness he embodies on stage. This movement was
characterized by an ambivalent hainamoration that could only be stabilized in
its constant oscillations through the function of the racial signifier. Scholars
of minstrelsy have argued that these performances “brought to public form
racialized elements of thought and feeling, tone and impulse, residing at the
very edge of sematic availability, which Americans only dimly realized they
felt, let alone understood” (Lott 1993: 6). For the Irish, these feelings spurred
love of blackness through “a common culture of jokes, games and dances”
(47); even in deriding blackness, Irish minstrels sang “songs of lost land and
exile” that expressed their own ambivalent emotional responses to their status
as not-yet-white immigrants (Roediger 1994: 188). These emotions are what
oscillate in the deeper levels of subjectivity. They form what Lacan calls the
amorphous mass of the signified (1997: 261).
As in Lacan’s diagram of the two bathroom doors, the amorphous signified is
what slides below the signifier. It shifts metonymically from meaning to meaning,
from emotion to emotion: from love to hate. What finally stops the sliding of the
signified is the process of metaphor, wherein the signifier jumps the bar separating
it from the signified to infuse the signified with its meaning: subjective ambiva
lence is redefined through the agency of the signifier whiteness, which aims to
represent metaphorically what remains unSymbolized in the subject. Lacan ex
plains that the unSymbolized signified, in the end, can only present itself as a mass
of signifiers, and what happens in this jumping of the bar is that two signifiers,
entirely dissimilar from each other and separated by a bar, come into alignment.
Here, whiteness functions as a master signifier, a signifier with no possible sig
nified, that yet still organizes around itself the amorphous, sliding signifieds of the
Irish subject, granting the subject both a white identity and a stabilized emotional
relation equally to this identity and to the blackness upon which it relies.7
Minstrelsy unveils a process by which racial jouissance and the signifiers of race
organize the unconscious. Jouissance emerges in such racist practices as a re
peatable mode of enjoyment structured by discourses that establish race as object
a. Where this a stands as an object of the drive, libido is what links the un
conscious to the drive (1998: 200). The unconscious, Lacan suggests, is like a
“bladder” that fills the gap of a rim, and is subject to inflation by the rhythmic
thrusts of the partial drives in their headless pursuit of lost libido (1998: 187–88).
The pulsative opening and closing of the unconscious coordinates with the
outward and return movement of the drive, granting the unconscious a kind of
“knowledge” that defies Symbolization (1998: 139). Through encountering and
256 Sheldon George
circling the a, the subject acquires, most specially, an unconscious knowledge
about his enjoyments that goes “much further than what the speaking being
sustains by way of annunciated knowledge” (139). Lacan ties this unconscious
knowledge to llanguage, or “our so-called mother’s tongue” (138).
Racism articulates itself as a headless expression of llanguage. Beyond any
conscious, rational motivation, racism evinces an unconscious knowledge about
how the subject enjoys, a knowledge that answers the central subjectifying
question—What am I there?—through modes of enjoyment foregrounded in
the mOther’s demands and the discourses of the mOther’s tongue. Lacan’s use
of the double l’s at the start of the word llanguage emphasizes a repetition in
sounds as a means of communicating both the kind of metonymic linking of
signifieds that takes place at the level of the unconscious and the ways that
unconscious meaning writes itself, through metaphor, from the script of the
mOther tongue. From this vantage point, racism is expressed as an inter-dit, or a
sort of slip of the tongue, an utterance of an “impossible knowledge” that must
be said “between the words” because it is censored or forbidden” (1998: 119).
This knowledge is forbidden by the Symbolic itself—though not for moralistic
reasons, but rather because it escapes Symbolization: it resides in the un
conscious as a mass of signifiers organized by race as master signifier, and it
emerges into the Symbolic as an eruptive libidinous force that finds its co
ordinates through circling the object of race. Race is thus a fantasy object of the
Symbolic, but it organizes unconscious knowledge while catalyzing racism as a
radical drive-expression of the subject’s enjoyments.
¯¯¯¯¯ ¯¯¯¯¯
∃x Φx : Racism and ahistorical, unSymbolized
jouissance
My positioning of racism as the inter-dit that makes manifest the unconscious’s
knowledge of enjoyment, its llanguage, emphasizes the psychic resilience of race,
which far outsteps race’s status as mere linguistic signifier. Language and dis
course function for the subject as what Lacan calls “knowledge’s harebrained
lucubration about llanguage,” as the unconscious’s botched efforts to con
template its own losses through the paltry pleasures and miscalculating-signifiers
offered by the Symbolic (1998: 138). Racism as inter-dit is how the unconscious
speaks its biases. The popular term “unconscious bias” can be granted a un
iquely Lacanian reading as an unconscious binding of the signifier to jouissance,
such that the jouissance built into the mOther tongue by a history of racist dis
courses structures the unconscious that is structured like a language. In this
process, race becomes a social construct that may cathect the same signifiers in
broadly similar ways for all subjects of the American Symbolic. Racist asso
ciations with blackness may imbed themselves equally in the unconscious of
white and African Americans. The ahistorical jouissance is transmitted in lan
guage, but it also escapes language to manifest as ¯¯¯¯¯
∃xΦx ¯¯¯¯¯
: the jouissance that does
not exist and also is not phallic jouissance.
This jouissance does not exist, but rather ex-sists, in the sense of existing in and
insisting from a place beyond language and meaning (1998: 74). Lacan aligns
this jouissance with the pleasure mystics and monks achieve in their meditations,
a pleasure they cannot name. The pleasures of racism, I suggest, similarly ex-sist
beyond the phallic jouissance and discursive utterances of the Symbolic. We can
witness them by turning again to blackface minstrelsy, which I suggest has
significantly set the stage for America’s drive-level relations to racial pleasure.
The figure of the minstrel aimed at a jouissance pursued through multiple drives.
Accentuating the drive’s erogenous zones, what performers embodied on stage
was an image of blacks that emphasized “huge noses,” vast “bustles” that covered
grandiose buttocks, and “fat lips” and “gaping mouths” ready to “suck[]
on the sugarcane” (Lott 1993: 145). Minstrelsy demonstrates how race pro
duces extra-Symbolic effects that exceed its discursive limitations, specifically
through its capacity to activate each partial drive in due course. Beyond an
obvious reliance on the scopic drive, minstrelsy placed particular importance
on the oral and invocatory drives, as the songs minstrels sang were not rooted
primarily in narrative storytelling (140), but were rather “exaggerations or
distortions of [black] dialect” (119) that reduced language to little more than
guttural “nonsense” or “nonlinguistic modes of thinking and speaking” that
can exude a jouissance beyond the signifier and its significations (143).
It is precisely because this ex-sistent jouissance is unSymbolized that it insists
headlessly across time. The unspoken pleasures of minstrelsy linger, for ex
ample, within the modern-day cartoons watched by children. As one scholar
notes, Mickey Mouse, with his “white gloves, wide mouth and eyes, and
tricksterish behaviors” (Sammond 2015: 1), “isn’t like a minstrel; he is a min
strel” (5). The same can be said of Bugs Bunny and his friends, whose fantastic
“ability to twist and deform their bodies” recall the “sheer pleasures of the act[s]”
in which minstrels would ‘Jump Jim Crow’ (28).8 These pleasures, like the
oversized clothing worn by minstrels, identify the black body as childlike,
unrestrained by the conventions of civilized society. Such cartoons present
the image of a (black) body that exudes eruptive jouissance, one that rejects the
partitioning of the body into partial drives through a nimble elasticity and
boisterous exuberance—indeed, through a vibrant animation—that defies the true
conditions of human subjectivity and embodiment. In keeping with the minstrel
tradition, these cartoons aim at representing the bliss of an unrestrained cor
porality capable of accessing an impossible, absolute other jouissance. Through the
cartoons, one experiences the vestigial traces of a racism yet capable of generating
for viewers the pleasures of a fantasized non-corporality.
¯¯¯¯
∀x Φx: Trauma, a jouissance that is not phallic
jouissance
For some viewers aware of the historical basis of such cartoons, however, a
more traumatic relation to vestigial racist forms of jouissance may arise. Here
258 Sheldon George
¯¯¯¯¯
I wish to present trauma as a version of Lacan’s “not all”: ∀x Φx, not all
jouissance is phallic jouissance. Woman, Lacan suggests, occupies a unique po
sition in the Symbolic. She is fully subjected to the phallic signifier, but not all
of her jouissances are phallic jouissances. By virtue of her Symbolic liminality as a
subject who does not exist in the Symbolic, she experiences an additional,
supplementary jouissance: not merely the other jouissance that is bound to lan
guage and fantasy but also an Other jouissance about which she can say nothing
(1998: 87). This reading of a jouissance beyond the Symbolic aligns with
trauma, which can be defined as a breakdown in the Symbolic world of
meaning.9 Involved in trauma is the subject’s confrontation with a point one
can approach only by dividing oneself into a number of agencies (1998: 51).
Trauma splits the psyche, jettisoning the signifiers associated with the trauma
into the void of the Real and the unconscious, and producing new Symbolic
articulations around the opened gap in meaning. What may prove psychically
traumatic about such cartoons, and about the long history of racist re
presentations to which they contribute, is their attempt at shattering the
spectral images that unify a psychic bodily ego for African Americans.
Lacan describes the body as always alien to the subject. He explains that one
has a body; one is not one’s own body (2016: 129). Alienated through a sex
uation that not only elides being and sex but rewrites pleasure, the body must
be introjected into the psyche as a bodily image; it must come to serve as a
container, a unified form that belies the inherently traumatic condition of
psychic fragmentation that defines the subject. Involved here is not just an ego-
ideal, or a Symbolic Other who models an image of the self, but also an ideal-
ego, a gratifying self-image that makes one lovable to one’s self (1998: 257).
Identification with the body demands narcissistic investment in the body image,
which is achieved through a cleaning of the body, a reconstitution of the body
psychically as a self-image that is soulovable and pleasure-inducing (2016: 52 &
224). For African Americans, this identification with the bodily image, rooted as
it is in ego-idealic identification with the a of race, is challenged by a Symbolic
that promotes self-gratification through whiteness as a perfected ideal-ego.
A central source of the racial trauma suffered both physically and psychically
by blacks in the American Symbolic is a sullying of the black body that allows for
a cleaning of the subjective white self, a cleaning that makes a comfortable space
in the Symbolic only for a purified whiteness. Accordingly, efforts at narcissistic
investment in the body image have predominated in the Civil Rights activities
through which African Americans have attempted to counter the legacies of
slavery and Jim Crow racism. Where search for such comfortable space in the
Symbolic has been accompanied in the twenty-first century by chants like “I can’t
breathe!,” what has remained central, from the “black is beautiful” proclamations
of the mid-twentieth century to the more recent insistences that “Black Lives
Matter,” is a reevaluation and cleaning of the sullied black body.
The sullying of blackness has rooted American racial identity in unspeakable
states of jouissance. It incites an experience of the “not all” that too frequently
aims at shattering the physical and psychic lives of African Americans while
making violent pleasure bountiful for numbers of white Americans. If race
organizes the unconscious and dominates emotions in the ways I have sug
gested, we can say that a central pathology of whiteness is its impeding of
subjects’ empathetic responses to others. It is such pathology that allows a police
officer in July of 2014 to asphyxiate a black man in a fatal choke-hold for
illegally selling loose cigarettes, and this same pathological lack of
emotional empathy is what allows an officer in May of 2020 to kneel on the
neck of a black man for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, causing his death by suf
focation.10 But beyond the destructive callousness of these actions, do we not
also sense an unSymbolized jouissance accessed by the officers? Can we not say
that they get off from their callousness—that they are, in some atrocious
manner, cumming as they are killing? Able to uniquely extend the excessive
jouissance of their enjoyment beyond any conventional Symbolic limits, grabbing
insistently unto the racial other until this other asphyxiates in their arms, the
officers achieve, in place of empathy, an unspeakable jouissance that overrides all
else, a destructive pleasure aimed at a bliss attainable only through the drive’s
insistence on its core function as death drive. Through the death of black others,
the drive compensates the officers for their own internal death with a vivifying
exuberance of jouissance achieved through a fatal object-a-ification of black men.
Through such racist drives, the officers, like many Americans, remain bound
to what we must recognize as historical contingencies that produce race as a
subjective object of jouissance. But trauma, as a “not all,” designates a non
contingent infinitude that escapes the Symbolic, and that through evading the
Symbolic holds the potential of rewriting it. This infinite element of the beyond
is the only hope for stopping the insistent nonwriting in the Symbolic of what it
means to the subject to have suffered the internal death of subjectivity.
Disrupting the discourses of the Symbolic, psychoanalysis aims at a new
linguistic production that Lacan calls the analysist’s discourse. In Encore, Lacan
ties this discourse to the infinite lack of subjectivity. Displayed in the below
formula (Figure 13.7), this discourse positions the analyst (a) as the Other
through whom the barred subject ($) encounters the impossibility that is his
subjective loss. Through the intervention of the analyst, the subject names this
loss, positioning it as a new master signifier (S1) that articulates for the first time
in the Symbolic the subject’s unconscious knowledge (S2) about the subjective
death that both went into his making and persistently defines the forms of
jouissances he pursues in efforts to recuperate his losses. But the traumatic sullying
of blackness masks the subject’s true knowledge of self. Knowledge is replaced
by what we may see as a certain anality that roots whiteness in cleanliness.
Figure 13.7 The Analyst’s Discourse

260 Sheldon George
Lacanian theory suggests that, if the object a that exudes from the anal orifice of
the drive is a lost part of the self, we must recognize that it is not the object-a-ified
other but the subject himself who truly occupies the place of the turd in his own
fantasies (2006: 693). The raced subject—both white and, through displacement,
black—is this turd around which the drive circles endlessly in American fantasies
of race. Lacan observes that we “get our colours” from “shit,” and it is with this
shit that we “paint” our world (1998: 117). This kind of painting of the world,
and of the other, is what we see in an American President Donald John Trump
who, in 2019, calls racialized segments of the globe “shithole countries” (Dawsey:
2018). In analysis, one confronts the shit from which one is constituted as a
subject, the unSymbolized jouissances and lost objects that root one in subjective
(and projective) relation to the Symbolic. What is finally salubrious in an
American Symbolic historically structured by fantasies of white cleanliness and
ideals of white supremacy is an altered vision of whiteness: racial whiteness must
be recognized as nothing but the lavatory paper with which the white subject has
sought to clean himself of the scat he deposits into the world.
Conclusion
In Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Lacan makes a rare reference to
racialized subjects. He momentarily describes three patients of his from West
Africa, three “courageous little doctors who were trying to insert themselves into
the medical hierarchy of the metropolis” and whose “unconscious functioned ac
cording to the good old rules of Oedipus” with no trace of their “tribal customs and
beliefs” (91–92). Though lamenting that “this was the unconscious that had been
sold to them” by his French homeland “along with the laws of colonization,” Lacan
does not stop to contemplate the place of race in these Africans’ unconscious or the
particular psychic machinations through which their culture seems, at least to
Lacan, to have erased itself from their psyches (92). Here, as elsewhere in Lacan,
racial subjectivity goes unanalyzed, and is even dismissed. Decisively asserting to his
audience of future analysts that psychoanalysis cannot “be used to conduct an
ethnographic inquiry,” Lacan effectively preempts psychoanalytic consideration of
race’s unconscious functions (92).11 Lacan actively disregards the unconscious role
race plays equally for the colonizing French and for the apparently deracinated
Africans seeking entry into the Symbolic of a racialized metropolis (92).
In this chapter, however, I have inserted race into Lacanian conceptualizations
of subjectivity. I have shown race to be a signifier in the Symbolic that produces
extra-Symbolic effects, granting meaning to unconscious emotions and mani
festing the fantasy a that both roots racial identification and agitates the drive in its
headless pursuit of ahistorical jouissance. The drive has been of particular im
portance to my reading because its compulsive revolutions around the object a of
race bind our American Symbolic to a protracted history of racism that is to the
detriment of both the Other and the subject. If the subject is rooted in a core
existential question—What am I there?—race and racism mark the subject’s
failure to answer this question through proper nomination of the S1 of the subject’s
lack. Functioning as Atè, race designates while masking the place of this lack. I
have presented race as a limit beyond which the subject, in endless pursuit of
jouissance, aims blindly to trek. But race also marks the entryway unto a path that
psychoanalysis, and particularly Lacanian psychoanalysis, too frequently refuses to
travel. It is along the path of race, I suggest, that psychoanalysis must yet guide the
contemporary subject toward a salutary understanding of self. There, beyond this
Atè, psychoanalysis may not only excavate a racial subjectivity it has left in the dark
caverns of its theorizings but also begin to dust the subject of the sedimented
accretions that mottle one’s being and sex with race.
Notes
1 See Lacan’s Seminar VI.
2 My reading of the graph draws from Bruce Fink’s “Knowledge and Jouissance.”
3 Throughout, I also refer to this “another jouissance” as an “other jouissance.” This other
jouissance is distinct from the “Other jouissance” or “feminine jouissance” that Lacan
suggests Woman may access.
4 Lacan’s interchangeable use of the terms invidia and jealouissance perhaps stems
from jealouissance’s suggestion of this second-order jouissance, combined with Lacan’s
sense that what is truly at work here is not jealousy but envy over something that
is not “at all necessarily what [the subject] might want” (Fundamental 116).
5 Lacan does not explicitly discuss Atè in relation to sexuation, since he drops the
term Atè before his work in Encore. Throughout this chapter, I read across different
periods in Lacan and, on occasion, rely on concepts less stressed by Lacan (spe
cifically lamella and Atè) to aid in imaging what Lacanian theory may look like if it
accounts for the racialized subjectivity it has excluded.
6 In rereading the Hegelian dialectic in Seminar XII, Lacan stipulates that it is
the slave, not the master, who enjoys (258). I would suggest that the history of
American slavery disproves this proposed exclusivity in enjoyment. Lacan himself
states years later in Seminar XVII that, through the slave, lost jouissance “comes
back within the master’s reach” (107).
7 For more on whiteness as a master signifier, see Desiring Whiteness.
8 A reference to the song and dance that were both named “Jump Jim Crow.”
9 See my Trauma and Race for a fuller reading of trauma.
10 References to the deaths, respectively, of Eric Garner and George Floyd. While
initial reports suggested Floyd was suffocated for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, court
documents in the trial for his murder revised this time to 9 minutes and 29 seconds.
11 Recall the seemingly scandalized response of Lacan’s most prized student, Jacques-
Alain Miller, when Lacan again mentions race five years later in Television: “What
gives you the confidence to prophesy the rise of racism? And why the devil do you
have to speak of it?” (36).
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Lott, Eric. Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York:
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McElya, Micki. Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America.
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14 Skin-things, fleshy matters,
and phantasies of race:
Lacan’s myth of the lamella
Michelle Stephens
Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Figure 14.1 Ilustration in Juan Valverde de Amusco’s Historia de la composicion del

cuerpo humano (Valverde de Amusco: 1560). Public domain. https://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Valverde_p64.jpg.
In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, in the final chapter of his

discussion of “The Transference and the Drive,” Lacan introduces an odd
entity by means of a myth. Prior to this myth, he had already established
that the key psychoanalytic term “libido” represented something more com
plex than simply the “sex drive” or “sexual desire,” as in common parlance.
264 Michelle Stephens
Rather, for Lacan libido was constituted by something both more funda
mental and intangible in the human subject. One could describe this as a
desire writ large, “something lacunary” (185) or a gap in the subject that then
constitutes their unconscious relationship to an enigmatic lost object, the
objet a.1 The objet a organizes a subject’s desire in relationship to the funda
mental lack at the heart of their subjectivity that can never be known in and of
itself. Rather, this lack expresses itself through the subject’s signifiers in the
language of the unconscious, and instantiates itself through the drive. Hence
also Lacan’s description of libido as “not substance”; it either appears through
the mediated forms of certain unconscious signifiers, or more directly, through
the pressure of an internal urge that manifests in an “instant,” as Colette Soler
describes: “The temporal structure of the drive’s satisfaction is the instant. It is
a glimpse. In a glimpse the subject wants something that allows him or her to
obtain a specific satisfaction” (1995: 52). The libidinal cause or source of
desire remains ephemeral and inaccessible to the subject in conscious thought
and everyday experience. And yet, at the start of chapter fifteen, Lacan makes
an odd, seemingly contradictory, but definitive statement: “The libido is to be
conceived as an organ, in both senses of the term, as organ-part of the or
ganism and as organ-instrument” (187). He includes in the published text a
diagram that offers a visualization of this libido-organ (187) (see Figure 14.2).
And a few pages later, he provides a myth as the source of its name: the
“lamella” (187; 197).
The concept of the libido-organ, the diagram accompanying the concept,
and the “myth” of the lamella from which Lacan derives this entity’s name, all
three appear to give the libido substance and shape, literally, as an organ of
the body. The idea of the lamella seems to substantiate the libido in a manner
argued vociferously against thus far throughout Four Fundamental Concepts. In
the next paragraph, Lacan adds: “Let us not forget that it is usual to represent
the unconscious as a cellar, even as a cave, by way of allusion to Plato’s cave.
But it is not a good comparison. The unconscious is much more like the
bladder, and this bladder can be seen only if one places a little light inside it”
(188). This is a far cry from the earlier assertion, “the unconscious is always
manifested as that which vacillates in a split in the subject” (28), and has
different connotations than the signature Lacanian phrase, “the unconscious is
structured like a language” (20). The difference can be characterized in a more
precise way. The lamella, as a name for and conceptualization of libido as a
physical organ on and of the body, adds a material, corporeal dimension to
the Lacanian psyche that would be anathema to many analytic thinkers’
understanding of Lacan’s system of psychoanalytic thought.
The lamella itself is an odd, fleeting, and relatively insignificant construct in
Lacan’s writing. As such, it is easily and justifiably dismissed as tangential to
his primary formulations. One could think of it as a brief thought experiment,
little more than a metaphor Lacan offers his listeners and readers to think
with, as he further elucidates the operations of libido in the subject’s forma
tion. Nevertheless, the myth raises an intriguing question that serves as a
catalyst for the preoccupations of this chapter. Precisely what is the work that
the lamella is doing for Lacan? In other words, given how antithetical such a
seemingly concrete, bodily notion of the libido is to the main principles of
Lacan’s broader oeuvre, why offer it in the first place? What is the lamella
allowing Lacan to think about? How is it useful, and how useful is it, for us to
think with? Let me suggest that the broader question of the materiality of the
embodied psyche, as “matter” and as “reality,” is one of the lacunas in
Lacan’s psychoanalytic schema of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real.
The drive generally, and the lamella specifically, become sites for the brief
appearance of corporeality (and corporal reality), to be schematized as psychic
phenomenon.
To pause on reflecting on those questions for a bit, let me also suggest that
the broader question of the materiality of the embodied psyche is one of the
main stumbling blocks for thinking with Lacan about race. It is fair to say that
the problematics of race and racism as understood in an American context
were of little to no interest to Lacan. Or, to say it more precisely, “race” as
such was not a topic he knew to think about. “Race” was not an immediate
aspect of his experience, not immediately relevant to his life and subjective
formation as a mid-twentieth century French psychoanalyst. Understanding
why that was the case, for reasons of culture, history, and the development of
psychoanalytic thinking and practice across Europe, and then to the
Americas, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a topic for
another essay.2 “Race,” as understood in postcolonial and American settings
and its relevance to psychoanalytic thinking more generally, regardless of
school, is itself both theoretically and clinically challenging—hence the
complexity of the charge taken on by the co-editors of this collection.
It is this broader observation regarding the relevance of race for psycho
analysis, and vice versa, that sets the context for taking up the myth of the
lamella as a moment of engagement, even if brief, with some of the challenges
of bodily materiality in Lacanian thought. Thinking with Lacan about race,
however, requires reading Lacan somewhat against the grain of his own
formulations; reading more associatively than scientifically, poetically than
analytically. Race, as we have inherited it in its modern forms as a social,
cultural, historical, and subjective formation, developed over five centuries of
colonial history in the Americas as a legacy of the afterlives of transatlantic
imperialism and slavery, requires an engagement with materialist approaches
to subjectivity and the embodied psyche. To think with Lacan about race,
then, is to think with Lacan about the place of the body in the formation of
the subject.
Race, in a psychoanalytic sense, is not simply a social or discursive, cog
nitive or conscious, construction. In its most unconscious, uncanny dimen
sions race, like the lamella, is also a phantasy of the material body. I mean
phantasy very specifically here—not imaginary escape- and wish-narratives in
a more general sense (fantasies) but the specific organizing phantasies, the
deeply held beliefs that structure our libidinal, psychic reality.3 For Lacan,
these suture or help to veil the recognition of internal lack. In the first section
of this discussion, the myth of the lamella becomes the occasion for revisiting
and re-reading Lacan’s erogenous body as an example of living being and
bodily materiality. This sets the stage in the second section for thinking with
him about the dynamic relationship between the epidermal signifier of ra
cialized skin, and phantasies of an uncanny, race-less skin-thing that could
represent subjective incorporeality. In the third section, I suggest that the
myth of the lamella may offer us a new phantasy of race, one that focuses on
the flesh rather than on epidermal difference or incorporeality. Pointing
briefly to the emergence of this new phantasy of the flesh in black aesthetics
and cultural studies, I conclude by suggesting that the implication for analytic
theory and practice is the emergence of new cultural narratives of race. These
can offer fleshed out alternatives to deeply embedded phantasies of the racial
psyche as either incorporeal or a signifier for difference.
The erogeneous body of the drive

The linkage of the lamella with bodily materiality finds its grounding in
Lacan’s discussion of libido’s relationship to the erogenous zones and the
drive. In the diagram, he provides at the start of his chapter discussing the
lamella, Lacan includes three zones (187) (see Figure 14.2).
The
erogenous
zons
The subject The unconscious

(nothing ) (field of the Other )
Figure 14.2 Illustration based on diagram accompanying Jacques Lacan’s discussion of

“the myth of the lamella” in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
First, a straight vertical line is drawn down the page, intersected in its
middle section by a bolus-like or balloon-like rounded area, protruding and
pushing out toward the left of the page. Within that rounded space Lacan
positions “The subject (nothing),” indicating the area in the subject constituted as
a gap. Across from the subject he positions “The unconscious (field of the Other).”
This is the area more commonly foregrounded in Lacanian thinking, the field
of relevance for the signifying subject who, faced with an internal lack, takes
his or her direction from an Other who becomes the internalized source of
one’s desire. Describing their relationship to each other—the gap in the
subject, the signifying order of the Other—Lacan states further, “The gap of
the unconscious may be said to be pre-ontological ” (32). Being proper begins at
the moment of the signifying cut, that is, the moment when the subject enters
language and engages in processes of identification in relation to the Other.
The ontological nature of Being, therefore, is the cut itself: “what is ontic is the
split” (32). However, between the two, resting on the very line or split that
separates them, and close to the entryway of the line’s bladder-like protu
berance, Lacan also positions, “The erogenous zone.”
The erogenous zones are quite literally the bodily sources for the operations
of the drive. On Lacan’s diagram they sit as alternative, mediating points
between the subject and the Other. As Soler also describes:
Libido is linked with the subject of speech, but is nevertheless something

else altogether. If you prefer, “jouissance” can serve as a Lacanian
translation of the Freudian term “libido.” The answer to the question
“what is the subject beyond the signifier?” is the drive. Thus the
interval, intersection, or void between subject and Other is not as empty
as all that, but it is an emptiness into which something comes. It is object
a, insofar as object a is not always a logical, but also a bodily
consistency. (52)
In Lacan’s discussion, the erogenous zones are the site of the drive’s
“bodily consistency.” The brief instances or glimpses of the drive’s
appearance in bodily erogeneity represent a different manifestation or
location of the objet a, and a different expression of the subject, beyond
signification. For Lacan the aim of the drive is its circuit, its circular motion
that constitutes the constant, looping motion of desire back and forth
between partial objects and nothingness or lack. These bodily organs, the
erogenous zones themselves, are the sources (sites, locations, manifesta
tions) of desire on the body. As zones, sources, organs of the drive, they
also mirror desire’s looping, semi-circular, balloon-like motion and are
structured like “rims”:
Why? Why are the so-called erogenous zones recognized only in those
points that are differentiated for us by their rim-like structure? Why does
one speak of the mouth and not of the oesophagus, or the stomach? They
participate just as much in the oral function. But at the erogenous level
we speak of the mouth, of the lips and the teeth, of what Homer calls the
enclosure of the teeth…The same goes for the anal drive…. The rim of
the anus, which is however, specifically what, for us too, is defined as the
source and departure of a certain drive. (169)
For Lacan, these erogeneous zones of the drive—which are also the rim-
organs of the mouth, the anus, the eye—are themselves substitute, partial
objects for the lamella as the libido-organ. With the lamella Lacan therefore
creates an “ur-object,” one that relates to each of the partial objects in a
particular way:
The lamella has a rim, it inserts itself into the erogenous zone, that is to
say, in one of the orifices of the body, in so far as these orifices—all our
experience shows this—are linked to the opening/closing of the gap of
the unconscious.
The erogenous zones are linked to the unconscious because it is there that
the presence of the living being becomes fixed. We have discovered that it
is precisely the organ of the libido, the lamella, which links to the
unconscious the so-called oral and anal drives, to which I would add the
scopic drive and what one ought almost to call the invocatory drive. (200)
Lacan mobilizes the lamella as an abstraction of the libido, the latter

moving almost like an animation. It becomes an entity that acts, as it
“inserts itself ” into “orifices” and forms, almost literally, the rim or circular
backdrop against which other object-organs—the phallus, the breast—serve
as its replacement objects.
The erogenous body in its organic totality, as a figure for libido or jouissance
writ large, is a slippery psychic space in Lacan’s account. In his diagram of the
lamella, the lack that constitutes the subject (the pre-ontological space of “the
subject (nothing)”) is submerged within and emerges out of rim-like erogenous
zones that are themselves the lining of that very space of lack. In turn, the
signifiers and partial objects that come to fill that space of desire and lack are
themselves organs of the erogenous, libido-body. The slipperiness of the la
mella lies in its very movement, within Lacan’s thought, back and forth be
tween libido, organ, and objet a.
As a pulsating psychic space of desire, the pre-ontological space of noth
ingness in Lacan’s diagram of the subject has one manifestation in the sub
ject’s relationship to the Other in the field of signification. It has another in a
bodily manifestation, the drive, which originates from the rims of erogenous
organs on the body, seeking for and aiming toward substitute, replacement,
partial objects. The subject uses those substitute objects to fill up, fill in, a gap
that can never be fully known—“it is neither being, nor non-being, but the
unrealized” (30). These two aspects of lack, one in the realm of signification
and the other in the bodily realm of the drive, constitute the fully formed
subject and define its relationship to its objects.
In one aspect of lack, the barred subject experiences Being only after the
signifying cut, that is, after entrance into language and the Symbolic, social
order, when meaning is attributed to Being from the signifying Other. The
subject then develops based on a series of identifications with external signifiers
provided by the Other and structured into the language of the unconscious.
These significations are petrifying, imposed from the outside, constraining; they
alienate the subject even further from a sense of vitalism, living being, “sexual
being,” libido or jouissance—that is, the sense of life’s fundamental essence lost at
the moment of the signifying cut. The subject identifies with a signifier that
comes from the Other, and it becomes a “master signifier” that “serves the
subject as a guideline his whole life long” (Laurent 1995: 24).
The subject’s impulse or inclination for identifying with that signifier, how
ever, is also because it appeases some personal fantasy. Here the signifier itself
functions like a partial object, such that in the identification with a particular
signifier the subject also holds out the hope that they will find the lost (libido-)
organ of their jouissance, that is, the internal sense of their living, sexual being
undetermined by the prescriptions of the Other, the social order. This lost
(libido-) organ is phantasmatic, meaning both that it is illusory and that it is
unsymbolizable. And yet, it becomes the source of an unconscious, organizing
phantasy about one’s lost libido and how one will regain it. Both the subject’s
lost libido (drive) and the lost objet a (as the source of a phantasy of wholeness
organizing and directing the drive) are then displaced onto partial objects (and
signifiers). The desire for these objects (oral, anal) is also tied to partial organs of
the libido (phallus, anus, breast) that inhabit the erogenous zone.
So the task of an analysis is two-fold: to make visible the subject’s signifying
identifications, which can have a petrifying effect; but also, to find the subject’s
personal fantasies and internal objects as they are linked to an unconscious,
organizing, internal phantasy and lost organ-object. “The fantasy that brings
him some jouissance [and] the object—oral, anal, scopic, or invocatory—at
stake in fantasy that brings [the subject] jouissance” have an underside, so to
speak, a lost object-organ phantasmatically attached to, and simultaneously,
constitutive of, the libidinal drive (Laurent 1995: 25).4
In making these distinctions, this chapter, as I say above, offers a more
poetic and associative reading of Lacan rather than a scientific or analytical
one. One might even say that I am reading the myth of the lamella as if it
were Lacan’s own, personal phantasy of the material body. In other words,
while Lacan the psychoanalyst could be seen as simply offering the lamella as a
fantasy of a libidinal body/organ played out in the human psyche, I am also
suggesting that Lacan the writer’s creation of the metaphor of the lamella itself
is an act of phantasizing the libidinal body into existence and locating it in the
erogenous zones. The lamella as myth becomes his, as much as our, metaphor
for living being as an organic, material source of our psychic phantasies and
the erogeneity inhabiting zones of the body. By reading Lacan creatively I also
mean to suggest, then, that his subject position shifts back and forth between
that of the scientific analyst and that of the myth-teller.
As a phantasy, the lamella sits on that line of the erogenous zone between
pre-ontological nothingness and the signifying subject. Here, I aim to deploy
it further to demonstrate the dual nature of a racialized object with striking
similarities to the lamella—fleshy, epidermal skin. Racializing discourse and
sensibilities—embedded and virtually intractable features of the psyche after
over five centuries of colonialism and its legacies—reflect both the subject’s
identification with the skin as a partial object and signifier of difference, and
an organizing, narcissistic phantasy of the racializing subject’s incorporeality
or epidermal skinlessness, that is, freedom from the constraints of the material
realities of the body. In this phantasy of incorporeality, an estranged, in
visible, uncanny, skin-thing becomes the objet a, a missing skin or absent
presence that becomes our phantasy of living being—what it means to be
“human.” This skin-thing, the objet a as a phantasmatic missing skin figured
in the incorporeality of the human, is precisely the (lost) organ the color-
blind subject desperately desires to (un-)see. Lacan’s myth of the lamella
serves as a catalyst for my reflections on the signifying and libidinal mean
ings of racialized skin—that is, the subject’s multiple relationships to and
with the skin—because, as a profoundly organic metaphor for the object-
organ of desire, it carries within it the traces of a powerful, even if fleeting,
phantasy of the embodied subject as a living being located in the real.
The psychic dilemma the lamella helps to resolve is that, while each in
dividual erogenous zone instantiates a partial drive that then finds temporary
satisfaction in a partial object-organ, there is no bodily organ or erogenous
zone that represents “the totality of the sexual drive” (188), that is, libido,
understood in the broadest sense as jouissance. At best, what the erogenous
zones seem to share instead is their “rim-like structure” (171), a kind of portal
to jouissance around which the drive continually circles. It is this very dilemma
or representational lacuna, that can be read more associatively as expressing
the Lacanian wish to identify a figure for living being in the total erogeneity
of the body.
What makes the myth of the lamella useful for a discussion of Lacan and
race is its manifold associations with the skin, be it the skin as an epidermal
signifier of racial difference, the skin-thing as the unconscious phantasy of a lost,
missing, erased, epidermal corporeality, or as I will also discuss, the fleshiness
of the skin as an interface to the interior of the body. Ironically, a clue for
linking the figure of the erogenous body—the “totality of the sexual
drive”—with the skin, was already present in Freud’s discussion of the drive,
upon which Lacan’s account depends (188). In Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality, in addition to the well-known erogenous zones of psychoanalytic
thinking, the oral, anal and genital, Freud also mentions the eye and the skin
as bodily sites for the eroticized activities of looking and touching (2018:
32–34; 44; 24). Freud highlights the skin more generally as the common
bodily feature all the erogenous zones share: “an erogenous zone…. [i]s a
portion of skin or mucous membrane in which the stimuli produce a feeling of
pleasure of definite quality” (44). If for Freud all erogenous zones are skin,
then one could say that the skin is the bodily figure for erogeneity writ large.
It is precisely this missing or lost figure of the erogenous body as skin that
serves as the lacuna in Lacan’s account, corporeality itself as the unrealized
object that requires Lacan, instead, to conjure the “myth of the lamella” as
a phantasy of the material body.
Throughout Four Fundamental Concepts, then, Lacan’s engagement with and
elaboration of the Freudian drive represents precisely those moments when a
more materialist apprehension of the body comes into view. The subject
becomes visible as inhabiting a body of rimmed erogenous zones, all sus
ceptible to the pulsations of the drive, of signifying being, and of pre-
ontologial lack. What Lacan recognizes his schema lacks, however, is a way of
representing the more total, rather than partial or fragmented, experience of
the subject as an embodied psyche, as inhabiting an erogenous body.5 This
is precisely the gap the lamella fills. What is also key here, thinking both from
within Lacan’s formulations and against the grain of his logic, is that the desire
to experience the materiality of the body—its corpo-reality—its drives, urges
and intensities, in a more total way—is also a desire to experience “the real”
without mediation. In Lacan’s schema this is impossible for the subject in
actuality. Rather, the subject finds it in phantasy, as Lacan states: “The real
supports the phantasy, the phantasy protects the real” (30). The point here is,
by understanding the myth of the lamella as Lacan’s phantasy of the material
body, I am arguing that it also represents his drive to find a figure for the body
of the subject that sits outside of the signifying field of the Other. And it is this
very desire that creates an opening for thinking with Lacan about race. For in
the same way the subject is constituted by two aspects of lack—signifiers that
are petrifying and alienate the subject from living being and objects that
ground the subject’s own personal phantasy of jouissance, and are withheld
from the Other—similarly, for the racialized subject, the skin serves as both
the signifier that traps you in the desire of the Other, and the source on the
body for a dream of fleshy relations that could move racialized subjects be
yond both the master signifier of race as difference, and the organizing
phantasy of the human as incorporeal and deracinated.
The epidermalized body as signifier and the

phantasy of incorporeality
Thinking with Lacan about race requires a certain definitional precision. Key
psychoanalytic concepts require translation; but every translation is also an
interpretation, even a reinterpretation, as is the case with much of the theo
retical translation being performed here. So far, I have defined the notions of
libido and jouissance—more than sexual desire, this involves the yearning desire
to find an unknowable internal object, the loss of which profoundly organizes
the subject; the drive—as a bodily instantiation of the desire to fill this gap left
in the subject, which circulates somatically on the rim of the erogenous zones;
and phantasy—as the wishful desire to protect the drive, libido, with a sym
bolization of the embodied subject that can also escape the discursive field of
the Other. These definitions and translations build toward a discussion of the
relationships between the myth of the lamella, the erogeneity of the skin, and
the materiality of the racialized body. Two other terms are useful here: the
“object”—which has two meanings in Lacan, both the objet a, the more en
igmatic, pre-ontological lost object that serves as a cause for desire, and the
partial object that serves as a substitute, a replacement, for the objet a; and
the “signifier,” which represents the interpellation of the subject offered by the
Other, the former always existing in relation to a chain of signifiers.
It is in the terrain of the signifier that psychoanalytic thinking and the study
of race have shared common ground. It is a commonplace in the study of
race, and of blackness in particular, to view the skin as a signifier of race. This
was first articulated in psychoanalytic terms by the psychiatrist and antic
olonial thinker Frantz Fanon. Arrested by the voice of a child hailing him,
what emanates toward him from her cry, “Look, a Negro!,” is a way of being
seen and known that comes to him from the outside, and yet, is catalyzed by
something on his inside—his own skin (1967: 109). What develops from this
encounter is Fanon’s moving self-dissection as he tries to understand his own
“epidermalization,” that is, what it means to be seen as his skin. In Against
Race, Paul Gilroy defines epidermalization more fully:
The critical notion of “epidermalization” bequeathed to our time by

Frantz Fanon is valuable here…. It refers to a historically specific system
for making bodies meaningful by endowing them with qualities of
“color.” It suggests a perceptual regime in which the racialized body is
bounded and protected by its enclosing skin. The observer’s gaze does
not penetrate that membrane but rests upon it and, in doing so, receives
the truths of racial difference from the other body. (2001: 46)
As in signification by the Other, epidermalization endows the racialized

subject’s skin with meanings that come from the outside. Gilroy focuses our
attention on the thick, historical nature of racialized looking as a structure of
seeing. Describing “raciology” as the various “discursive regimes that pro
duced the truth of “race” and repeatedly discovered it lodged in and on the
body,” Gilroy emphasizes the historical structure of perception such a form of
looking represents: “[T]his race-producing activity required a synthesis of
logos with icon … something visual and aesthetic … Together they resulted in
a specific relationship to, and mode of observing, the body” (35). As a signifier,
black skin becomes a sedimented amalgamation of a variety of looks and gazes
representing the desire of the Other, and shaped by past imperial and colonial
racial regimes.
The signifier of the epidermalized body contains two aspects of lack,
however, just as is the case with the Lacanian subject. On the one hand, in a
racialized signifying order epidermalization is a useful name for the petrifying
effects of a process of subjectification in which the (black) subject is inter
pellated as and through his skin.6 On the other hand, the power of the (skin as)
signifier rests on a racial phantasy that finds its source in the realm of the
drives or, more broadly, jouissance.7 Each of these forms of lack has their
particular features and effects on the black subject, but their combined effect is
precisely the essentializing belief that skin “colored” black somehow “means”
a fundamental ontological quality of difference. Hence, Gilroy’s insight that
the epidermalizing gaze—the signifying act of endowing the skin’s color and
surface with meaning—undergirds a more profound racial phantasy—the
drawing of “the truths of racial difference from the other body.” It is this
desire for difference that foregrounds “black, colored” skin as the primary
protagonist in a cultural phantasy. As a partial substitute for the objet a, the
black subject’s epidermalized body confirms the racializing subject’s whole
ness, their existence as a form of idealized, noncorporeal being (since it is only
the raced subject that has a “body” that needs to be reckoned with), and
therefore access to a fantasy of jouissance (that is, the subject’s living being
beyond the signifier).
There is a level of fear and anxiety in racism that occupies itself by ob
sessively gazing upon, working on, the skin as a signifier of difference. Deleuze
and Guattari shed some light on this in a description parallel to my own of
what it means to interact with the material body as an “organism.” Instead of
a body, the organism is “a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and
sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor [from it, one] imposes
upon [this body as organism] forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hier
archized organizations, organized transcendences” (1987: 159). We see this
treatment of the human, epidermalized body as an “organism” in Fanon’s
description of the racist behavior of a group of scientists:
For several years certain laboratories have been trying to produce a

serum for “denegrification”; with all the earnestness in the world,
laboratories have sterilized their test tubes, checked their scales, and
embarked on researches that might make it possible for the miserable
Negro to whiten himself and thus to throw off the burden of that
corporeal malediction. (111)
Epidermalization as a Symbolic process represents a mode of making

meaning from the skin as signifier. The scientists’ obsession with “dene
grification” reflects a further engagement with the body as “organism,” that is,
as a partial object, an object of the drive. Their very actions reveal the acti
vation of the drive—a circling of the rim of the skin, and the skin as rim,
under the cover of scientific protocols and measurements. Their efforts to
devise an escape from bodily materiality, to “throw off the burden” of the skin
as a “corporeal malediction,” rests on the fabulation that the skin signifies
“difference.” Their jouissance, however, derives from the self-organizing power
of the phantasy that to throw off racialized skin, to succeed in “denegrifying” a
human, throws off the malediction of the corporeal itself as a constraining,
limiting container of the human. In their renunciation of epidermal skin,
seemingly on behalf of the black, “negrified” subject, Fanon’s scientists act in
a manner similar to that of God. As Deleuze and Guattari elaborate: “He who
makes an organism, an organization of organs called the organism, because
He cannot bear the [body] … He pursues it and rips it apart so He can be
first, and have the organism be first. The organism is already that, the jud
gement of God, from which medical doctors benefit and on which they base
their power” (159). Controlling the racialized, epidermalized body, acting on
it as an entity separate from oneself, supports the medical doctors’ omnipotent
phantasy that they are subjects who have transcended the body, thrown off
corporeality itself as a malediction, so they can relate to a body now pushed
outside the subject, as a partial organism-object.
It is this body of skin—which carries both the visible, signifying, epidermal
feature of difference and the incorporeal phantasy of modern subjectivity as a
missing, invisible, skin-thing (the libidinal as organless)—that Slavoj Žižek
evokes in his interpretation of the place of the objet a within racist psychic
structures. Those the subject designates as other seem to hold an “alien,
traumatic kernel” that catches the eye: “a tiny detail that betrays their true
nature (a strange glint in their eyes; too much skin between their fingers or
between their ears and heads)” (Žižek 2007: 43, 67). “This detail is the
Lacanian objet petit a,” Žižek continues, “a tiny feature whose presence ma
gically transubstantiates its bearer into an alien” (Žižek 2007: 67). What is
unspoken here, in Žižek’s account, is that the “alien, traumatic kernel” that
catches the eye derives its meaning from the observer’s phantasy of his or her
own missing, alien kernel—the lesser, lighter, skin they have on their fingers
or heads. The eye of the subject see(k)s an organic feature of the other that,
yes, in that brief glimpse seems to be the bearer of a specific kind of material,
organic, feature of difference, but also, in that same instant (the temporality of
the drive), seems to confirm the viewer’s incorporeal phantasy that they do not
possess such a feature. Žižek continues: “Are we not dealing with the same in our
everyday racism? … There is some detail that bothers us [and] this tiny
feature renders them aliens, no matter how they try to behave like us” (67).
This aspect or kernel of the skin, of one’s surface, epidermal appearance,
becomes even more than a signifier. It turns into an odd, uncanny partial
organ-object that floats on the surface or rim of the racialized body and
consolidates for the gazer seeking an object of difference. The gazer then
misses alternative meanings and experiences of the corporeality of the ra
cialized subject. And the gazer remains unaware of the foundation of their
own subjectivity in a phantasy of their own incorporeality, their own, dera
cinated, subject location.
It is in this movement between the living body as signifier and as bearer of
phantasies of incorporeality that we see the slide back and forth between the
skin as mere signifier to the arena of Lacan’s lamella, that is, to the phantasm
of the subject’s lost skin which I have named here the skin-thing. This is the
arena in which the skin reveals its uncanny relationship to the lost objet a of
the drive. Here, the appeal is less to the desire of the signifying Other than to
the scopic drive of a subject who protects their racism with phantasies of black
difference and deracinated whiteness, emanating from their own embodied
subject position, from the libidinal, epidermal body as the portal to their own
jouissance. This mode of looking at the skin, or some other partial feature on
the body, recognizes racialized skin as a substitute object for an ephemeral
phantasy of the racializing subject’s freedom from the constraints of cor
poreality. This is the deeper impact of epidermalization. A regime of looking
structures desire, organizing our desires in ways that instantiate themselves
in the drives, and we look at racialized others in a quest for a fundamental
phantasy of difference. The eye, the organ of a scopic drive, in a Symbolic
regime structured by the epidermalizing gaze, aggressively seeks the signifier
of the skin as validation of a desire (for racial difference). Beyond the signifier
of difference lies a phantasy of an epidermalized black body as organism,
and a noncorporeal, nonracialized body. If one negative psychosocial con
sequence is the (white) subject’s phantasy of a nonracialized incorporeality,
the other is the lack of Symbolic or Imaginary representation—the inability
to signify or imagine—any other type of experience with black corporeality as
something other than, or beyond, racialized skin.
When Gilroy describes epidermalization, his focus is on the skin as the
signifier of difference produced by the racializing gaze of the other. Here I go
a bit further, focusing our psychoanalytic attention less on the skin as an
epidermal signifier petrifying and alienating the black subject in a fantasy of
difference, and more on the skin-thing as the object-organ of a phantasy of
racial jouissance that aims to free the self from those pesky organic and ero
genous features that would draw attention to the subject as psychically bound
within a body. The discourse of color-blindness and a world without race
merely supports that fantasy of an incorporeal subject, and protects the (lost,
cut away) skin-thing as a phantasmatic object.
An alternative, however, would be to focus in precisely on the skin as the
libidinal edge of a body that sits between the subject and the signifying Other.
This is an experience of the body-with-skin as a phantasy of corporeality
withheld from the Other, still holding onto some aspect of the racialized, and
racializing, subject’s lost living being. In other words, this is not “dene
grification” as a throwing off of the body, but rather, the libidinal creation of
alternative, organizing phantasies of bodily materiality.
Fanon’s pre-occupation at the start of his famous fifth chapter of Black Skin,
White Masks is precisely with the racialized subject’s doubled experience of
lack—being petrified and alienated from his living being by the signifier; being
split off from an alternative internal sense of his corporeality as the source of
his living being, his jouissance. On the one hand, the racial identifications and
significations of the Other fall on him like a mantle: “My body was given back
to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning” (113). This is one
form of lack, whereby epidermalization (as one form of embodiment, de
termined by the signifying Other) replaces his sense of his own living, cor
poreal, being. In that moment, something is simultaneously being added to his
body as something else is being split off, cut off or taken away: “A slow
composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal
world” (111). Fanon’s lost object is not the incorporeal body, the skin-thing of
a skinless body the subject yearns to return to as a figure for black living being.
His loss is of a sense of his own “physiological self ” in a phenomenological
dialectic with the world.8 It is this alternative phantasy, I would argue, that is
evident in emergent discourses of the body as flesh. And their phantasmatic
potential—not as flights from epidermal skin but rather as a deeper immer
sion in the skin as flesh—is, ironically, also prefigured in Lacan’s odd little
mythic entity of the lamella.
The fleshy body: reattaching the skin-thing

In the figure that opens this chapter, a man stands in the conventional pre
sentation of the écorché9 (see Figure 14.1). Holding a knife in his left hand, the
suggestion is that he has applied it to his own skin in order to flay himself,
producing the object he now holds in his right hand, his flayed skin. Taken in
its entirety, the image evokes aspects of the racialized subject’s experience of
the skin under the regime of epidermalization. First and foremost, there is the
uncanny apprehension of a part of oneself, an organ of one’s body, one’s skin,
as separate and apart. Fanon references a related clinical term, “heauto
scopy,” which his translator defines as “the vivid psychological awareness and
examination of one’s own internal organs as if they were outside oneself—an
extreme hypochondria” (164). It is as if your own epidermal skin suddenly
reveals itself to you as signifier, as something separate from yourself, an un
canny double you have heretofore kept hidden or out of sight (unheimlich).10 It
stands before you like an unrecognizable shadow, discontinuous with your
ideal-ego. It dwells in a shamed and uncomfortable body that has been pu
shed completely outside of the subject. When Fanon tells us that his experi
ence of the eye’s epidermalizing look is like an amputation, he is describing
not simply racialization but also, in more interpersonal terms, the collision
with an unexpected apprehension of the racial self reflecting back to you from
an other (112).
The imagery of the écorché resonates when thinking about the racist, and
the well-meaning, colorblind subject as well, for whom the alternative to
epidermalization is no body at all. Instead, a spectral self located nowhere
casts off the organic, material body like a shriveled up and wrinkled skin-
thing, sliding from the body into a figure held aloft and apart with its own
ghostly facial features. Gilroy’s critique of epidermalization, however, in
cludes another wishful phantasy of race, an alternative to the desire for
difference, and a different kind of engagement with the organic and ma
terial body. He calls for a gaze that could “penetrate” the membrane of the
skin: “When the body becomes absolutely penetrable, and is refigured as
the transient, epiphenomenon of coded visible information, that aesthetic,
that gaze, and that regime of power are irrecoverably over” (47). He goes
further, asserting that such a day is here if we choose to recognize it
as such:
Today skin is no longer privileged as the threshold of either identity or

particularity. There are good reasons to suppose that the line between
inside and out now falls elsewhere. The boundaries of “race” have
moved across the threshold of the skin. They are cellular and molecular,
not dermal. If “race” is to endure, it will be in a new form, estranged
from the scales respectively associated with political anatomy and
epidermalization.
However, we are far from a psychic phantasy of the body as an “epipheno

menon of coded visible information” expunged of racial and gendered sig
nifiers. Recent discussions of the biases built into algorithms, for example,
reveal the ways in which embodied fantasies, and governing, racialized
phantasies undergirding how we inhabit our bodies, travel easily from the
subject to the new “codes” and signifiers of our data driven world.11 More
prognostication than prediction, Gilroy’s vision raises instead the question of
whether a new phantasy of race could emerge from this desire to go “beneath
the skin.” What would it mean to get under our skins in order to locate
different meanings for the material, racialized body?
It would mean bringing the skin-thing even more closely into view, flaying
the signifier to see, quite literally, the flesh. It would mean laying bare, for
aesthetic, poetic, and associative scrutiny, the figure of the flesh as the foun
dation for alternative phantasies of the (racialized and racializing) subject. In
Juan Valverde de Amusco’s illustration (Figure 14.1), standing alongside the
stripped skin is the écorché itself, the human figure as a fleshy, flayed subject.
The écorché serves as an evocative figure for these fleshy aspects of the racia
lized subject’s embodied experience, beyond epidermalization but also in
opposition to incorporeality. The écorché offers a figure for the flesh, that is, for
the subject’s exposure to and immersion in the skin as a sensational, dermal,
and subcutaneous layer of the body. Fleshy phantasies of blackness emanate
from the rimmed space between the incorporeal, uncanny, skin-thing, and the
flayed subject. The revelation of these layers, lacking in the epidermal sig
nifier, formulates alternative, material dimensions of the skin as flesh. In this
new racial phantasy, once one has stripped the black skin of the signifier, the
subject that emerges is a subject of the flesh.
Whether in verbal or visual metaphors, imagining this fleshy subject—a
subject of desires, sensations, affects and consensualities—has become the
provenance of contemporary poets and visual artists and of some cultural
critics and scholars.12 If the late twentieth century saw an effort in black
studies to deconstruct the black signifier, the contemporary challenge of the
early twenty-first century, both in black cultural studies and in psycho
analysis, is to think about black skin in terms of the flesh. For contemporary
black visual artists, wrestling with the body of race presents just such an
occasion for imagining encounters with and envisioning alternative phan
tasies of the disavowed, fleshed black subject. Often this means an aesthetics
of cutting into and rearranging the signifiers of the skin. We see this artistic
method of epidermal rearrangement in such works by contemporary African
diaspora artists as Patricia Kaersenhout’s Invisible Men (2009),13 Nathaniel
Mary Quinn’s portraits in the 2019 exhibit Hollow and Cut,14 Wangechi
Mutu’s entire oeuvre, but as one example, the 13 collages of Family Tree,15
Nick Cave’s sound suits,16 and Amoako Boafo’s portraits,17 to name a
few. These black artists provide depth to the experience of racialized flesh,
conjuring and helping us to imagine a new “poetics of flesh,” as Mayra
Rivera has described. They produce images of a stripped, skinned, and
layered black body.
What is the myth of the lamella, then, if not also Lacan’s frightening
phantasy image of fleshiness? If much of contemporary Lacanian theory has
focused on the signifier, in the lamella Lacan as myth-teller—as artist,
storyteller—also invokes a mythopoeic figure for lack’s psychosomatic form, a
fleshy skin-thing that, while nonepidermal and incorporeal, still somehow
manages to spread itself over the entirety of the erogenous body. As Lacan
describes:
Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its
way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that
something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a
man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella. (197)
Rather than the skin as signifier, this membranous lamella captures uncanny,
frightening elements of bodiliness that lie beyond signification. “Extra-flat”
(197), it is like a “large crêpe … that would not feel good dripping down your
face” (Lacan 1995: 273). And yet, in contrast with the incorporeal skin-thing,
it can still “come[ ] and envelop[ ] your face while you are quietly asleep”
(197). The lamella evokes the mucous membrane lining of the fleshy skin and
mimics its properties, as it “moves like the amoeba, so utterly flat that it can
slip under doors” (1995: 273).
Lacan’s lamella-organ keeps the skin-thing semi-attached to the “creepy”
fleshiness of the material body. As with the erogenous zones in his diagram
of the lamella, it lies on the edge of the signifying cut, a fragment, a re
mainder, a surplus, of the Symbolic and Imaginary self, not irrevocably cut
away from the libidinal and material reality of the body. The lamella and the
epidermal offer very different metaphors of the body-with-skin in con
temporary, racialized, cultures. The lamella is attached to Lacan’s orifice-
filled libido-body, constituted by the “rheumy rim” (170) of eyes that seek to
be looked at and ears that “are the only orifice that cannot be closed” (195).
One could say that the lamella lies on the underside of epidermalized skin,
in the interface, on the invaginated body-lining underneath the epidermal
surface. It anticipates French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu’s notion of a skin-
ego—a psychic attunement to the self as “a surface which has both an inner
and an outer face, in other words an interface, permitting a distinction
between inside and outside, and an encompassing volume in which [the
subject] feels himself bathed, the surface and volume affording him the
experience of a container” (1989: 37). The “interface” could be seen as a
conceptualization that parallel’s Lacan’s rim. In such a container, far from a
fantasy of the incorporeal, the subject’s experience of the libidinal body is as
a rim with internal volume, external surface, and layers in-between. It is
from such a rim-like psychic structure that the subject’s drives and desires
emerge.
For Lacan, from within the framework of his well-developed psycho
analytic schema of internal lack, such a phantasy could only signal the ap
pearance of the death-drive, signifying the frightening wish to be immortal
flesh. To be mortal is to be fully subjectified by the signifying Other. Hence
Žižek’s interpretation of the Lacanian Real as skinless flesh resembling
raw meat:
Let us recall the uncanniness, and even disgust, we experience when we

endeavor to imagine what goes on just under the surface of a beautiful
naked body—muscles, glands, veins, etc. In short, our relating to the
body implies the suspension of what lies beneath the surface, and this
suspension is an effect of the symbolic order—it can occur only insofar as
bodily reality is structured by language. In the symbolic order, we are not
really naked even when we are without clothes, since skin itself functions
as the “dress of the flesh.” (1995: 208)
For Žižek, this suspension of the Symbolic order is impossible at best,

cripplingly frightening at the worst. There is no room here for a myth of the
flesh to express a different aspect of the subject’s libidinal experience of
corporeality. Instead, for Žižek the lamella as “the flayed, skinned body” and
as the “raw, skinless flesh” of the Real can only signify as the frightening skin-
thing, the raw mortal meat of corporeality which deracination and phantasies
of incorporeality seek to evade. In such a scenario, we are left with the very
opposite of Gilroy’s vision of a penetrating gaze and a penetrable skin.
Instead, Žižek’s dispiriting conclusion leaves us only with an epidermal “dress
of the flesh”—the skin-signifier as a material substrate of racism that feels
virtually impossible to remove.
The reading offered here instead finds in Lacan’s myth of the lamella the
catalyst for imagining—alongside our common tropes of the skin as signifier,
and our disavowed desire for the human to be incorporeal and without
skin—an alternative gesture to a fleshy, even if dissociated, libido-body that
exceeds the signifier. Within this libido-body erogenous skin serves as both
fleshy boundary and unsymbolizable remainder. As a possible new phantasy
of race, the lamella moves us away, psychically, from the skin as the desired
object of difference. Instead, phantasies of the flesh of the racialized body
point to disavowed aspects of corporeality that exceed current discursive
constructions and social meanings of blackness.
To flay and turn the skin of race inside out may represent a kind of
Symbolic death, one that can appear grotesque, as Žižek describes. However,
there is also the rich possibility that the word can be made flesh; that is, that
newly creative, Symbolic acts—both in the analytic session and in the black
visual arts—can create new partial objects for the fleshiness and materiality of
the black subject. When the black artists mentioned here turn the signifier of
epidermal skin inside out, they also cut into the skin of our incorporeal
phantasies, providing a different object for the gaze and a different revelation
of contemporary blackness.
Conclusion: phantasms of race

Why engage in this dangerous enterprise of thinking with Lacan’s lamella as a
phantasy of the corporeality of the (racial) body, as the lost object of the flesh? My
goal has been to acknowledge and model the necessary acts of translation, across
discourses and fields of study, required to think interdisciplinarily with Lacanian
psychoanalysis—in this instance, about race as an aspect of the embodied psyche
tethered in challenging ways to the materialism of the body. Gilroy describes this
tethering or re-attachment to the racialized body as a strategic “anti-anti-
essentialism,” that is, as a wrestling and reckoning with the materiality of the
embodied experience of the racialized subject as it shapes and constrains psychic
and subjective formation (102). For black cultural studies, phantasies of the
material, eroticized, erogenous, and racialized body of flesh are emerging as an
alternative mode for thinking about the black cultural and psychic experience. I
am suggesting that as psychoanalytic theorists we expand our notions of the flesh
as a category of psychic analysis to include thinking about racialized subjects in
relation to the body of the drives. Providing this psychic depth, one that goes well
beyond signifiers of race to the phantasies that may lie beneath them, seems like a
particularly fruitful reason for thinking with Lacan about race.
Notes
1 For a more thorough discussion of the objet petit a as both “the cause of desire and
the object of desire” (67), and as related specifically to Lacan’s lamella, see chapter
four of Slavoj Žižek’s (2007: 61–78).
2 Since the publication of Christopher Lane’s 1998 edited collection, The
Psychoanalysis of Race, a number of scholars have continued to engage the question of
the relevance, or irrelevance, of race in the history of psychoanalytic thinking and
practice (see Khanna 2003; Altman 1995/2010; Brickman 2018; Gherovici 2019).
Works specifically linking Lacanian theory and race include: Seshadri-Crooks’
Desiring Whiteness (2000) and Sheldon George’s Trauma and Race (2016).
3 See also, in their introduction to Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis (2013), the editors’
helpful note distinguishing unconscious phantasy (“a mental representation that is
unconsciously formed…and then projected onto other objects”) from conscious
fantasy (“a product of the conscious imagination that represents a wish-fulfillment”)
(13, footnote #4). Much of my discussion here understands both Lacan’s lamella
and ‘race’ as deeply unconscious, phantasmatic forms shaping more conscious
fantasies of human subjectivity and difference.
4 Here I specifically use the ph spelling to mark this as a reference not to fantasies in
general, but a specific, foundational phantasy linked to the subject’s lost object. See
David Marriott’s Whither Fanon? (2018) for an extended discussion of the “irre
ducible phantasmatic racialism” of subjects—both colonizer and colonized—and
the “perversity of difference” (19–20; 24).
5 There is an intentional slipperiness here between the idea of the myth of the la
mella as expressing Lacan’s wishes and the idea that it merely describes our wishes.
I believe Lacan is as susceptible to this mythopoeic wish for a lamella as we are, for
it expresses core psychic features of modern, racialized subjectivity in relation to
the skin.
6 See Marriott, Whither Fanon?, for more on “petrifaction” and “epidermalization” as
corporeal forms of “negrophobia that have arisen out of antiblackness” in the
colony (xv).
7 See Sheldon George, Trauma and Race, for a more specific discussion of the ways in
which jouissance is bound to fantasies of race that structure both racism and African
American identity (1–12).
8 The body, his corporal reality, echoes as the lost object-cause of his desire in
Fanon’s closing lament, literally the last line of Black Skin, White Masks: “My final
prayer:…O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” (232). Elsewhere I
have schematized these two relationships to the skin as epidermalization on the one
hand and corporeality on the other (see Stephens 2014).
9 Écorché are classic anatomical drawings or paintings of human figures with their
skins removed to display musculature.
10 Referencing Freud’s 1919 essay on the uncanny as a reference point for this most
severe and alienating experience of the self as a racial, and racist, subject (2001:
217–256).
11 See recent discussions by Clare Garvie and Jonathan Frankle (2016, accessed June
6, 2020) and by Megan Garcia (2016/2017: 111–117).
12 For recent works in black cultural studies oriented in this direction see: Fleetwood
(2011), Musser (2014) and (2018), and Weheliye (2014); and my own work Skin Acts.
In cultural studies more broadly also see: Massumi (2002), Segal (2009), Silverman
(2009) and Rivera (2015).
13 Invisible Men https://issuu.com/eindeloos-publishers/docs/invisible_men3
14 https://salon94.com/artists/nathaniel-mary-quinn
15 http://www.artnet.com/artists/wangechi-mutu/
16 https://art21.org/artist/nick-cave/
17 https://fashionweekdaily.com/amoako-boafo-art-basel/
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15 Fanon’s “zone of nonbeing”:
Blackness and the politics of
the Real
Gautam Basu Thakur
Boise State University, U.S.A.
Appearing early in the “Introduction” of Black Skin, White Masks, a poetically

cryptic passage has long puzzled Fanon’s readers. Here it is in full:
Il y a une zone de non-être, une région extraordinairement stérile et

aride, une rampe essentiellement dépouillée, d’où un authentique
surgissement peut prendre naissance. Dans la majorité des cas, le Noir
n’a pas le bénéfice de réaliser cette descente aux véritables Enfers.
Peau noire, masques blancs (1952: 6)
There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an

incline stripped bare of every essential from which a genuine new departure can emerge.
In most cases, the black man lacks the advantage of being able to
accomplish this descent into a real hell.
Black Skin, White Masks (2008: xii) [emphasis added]1
What is this zone of nonbeing? What relation does it have with the book’s
primary focus on examining psychological effects of colonialism on the co-
lonized? And, what does Fanon mean by “a genuine new departure can emerge”
from this stripped space if only the black man or the colonized were to tra-
verse its hellish depths?
This chapter attempts to give some clarity to this notion of nonbeing in relation
to Fanon’s psychoanalytic critique of colonialism, racism, and decolonial politics.
Though I stake here an approach that is no longer in vogue in Fanon studies, i.e.
examining Fanon’s analysis of colonialism and racism via psychoanalytic theory, I
claim this to be useful for correcting the widely granted belief in the existence
“two Fanons”—an early psychoanalytic Fanon and a later Marxist Fanon—, and
for underscoring what I consider to be Fanon’s most significant contribution to
the study of colonialism, namely, conceiving colonialism less in terms of social
justice—as exclusively a matter of economic and/or political inequality—and
more in relation to ontology or the lack that constitutes us as speaking beings.2
It is important to note here that this essay does not strive after the real
meaning(s) of Fanon’s text and/or concepts, but, rather, pursues what Stuart
Hall terms symptomatic reading:
Blackness and the politics of the Real 285
Fanon constantly and implicitly poses issues and raises questions in ways
which cannot be adequately addressed within the conceptual framework
into which he seeks often to resolve them; and a more satisfactory and
complex “logic” is often implicitly threaded through the interstices of his
text, which he does not always follow through but which we can discover
by reading him “against the grain” [that is through] a symptomatic reading.
(Hall 1996: 25)
As such, this chapter admits to strategically misreading Fanon with the aim of
opening up his text for its repressed or disavowed ideational contents, which
otherwise remain obscured by his reliance on existential humanism.3
What remains truly “unspoken” in Black Skin, White Masks (hereafter,
BSWM) is a theoretically disjointed, hence undeveloped, argument regarding
the relation of ontology as negativity to colonialism and colonial social rela-
tions, and what this relation implies for the political project of subjective and
national decolonialization. It is for this reason that a theoretically imaginative
reengagement between Fanon and psychoanalytic theory is necessary today.
But this exercise is not intended as a psychoanalytic or Lacanian study of
Fanon. I am not interested in how Fanon “anticipates” Lacan or to what
degree he “misses” Lacan. I certainly do not seek a black Lacan (le Lacan noir).
Instead, my aim is to quarry the interstices of Fanon’s text, to read Fanon
against the grain, in order to unravel the form and scope of his psychoanalytic
analyses of colonialism and racism in colonial societies. Properly revived, the
ideas of the zone of nonbeing and Blackness as insufferable negativity, as I
show below, explain the need to shift focus from conceiving colonialism in
terms of Symbolic politics, i.e. restoration and rehabilitation of stifled voices
and identities, to understanding colonialism in terms of the Real, or the ra-
dical antagonism constitutive of the colony and social relations within colo-
nialism. This shift from the Symbolic to the Real does not sideline colonialism
as a system of political and economic inequality but, rather, secures these to
the problematic of negativity or antagonism as constitutive of the colonial
socio-symbolic.
The zone of nonbeing as radical negativity

Let me begin with some broad observations. I understand the zone of non-
being as a peculiar paradox: it is an inarticulable space within the colonial
socio-symbolic. That is, it exists in the Symbolic but cannot be symbolized or
rendered present in and through discourse. As the inside–outside of the
Symbolic, the zone cannot be formalized yet it is always present as a deep
“haunting” (Marriott 2005: 147). The colonized experiences this traumatic
condition of being through being trapped between what she is supposed to
desire, i.e. to become White, and how she is perceived by the colonizer, i.e.
not White but Black. Caught between an impossible desire (to be White) and
an identity that does not exist (Black), the colonized is the figure of radical
286 Gautam Basu Thakur
negativity constitutive of the colony and social relations within the colony: the
negativity is “figured most positively” through the colonized (Hudson
2013: 264).
There is yet another reason why I characterize the zone as paradox.
Namely, the zone results from the colonizer’s efforts to symbolize the colony
and its natives into a singular homogenous Other. But, somewhat counter-
productively, this effort ends up creating a “liminal reality” ultimately dis-
ruptive of colonial authority (Bhabha 1986: xxx). Bhabha underlines this well
when he writes,
The image [of the colonized] is at once a metaphoric substitution, an

illusion of presence and by that same token a metonym, a sign of its
absence and loss. It is precisely from this edge of meaning and being,
from this shifting boundary of otherness within identity, that Fanon asks:
“What does the black man want?” (Bhabha 1986)
The colonized is the absent–present or the positive ontologized figuration of

the deontologized negativity that is the “zone of nonbeing.” By embodying
this ontologically irreducible space, of realizing the Real in the Symbolic, the
colonized appears as the true measure of the colonial deadlock: Colonial
societies are inherently non-relational and antagonistic—“an unresolved ensemble
of antagonistic interlocutions” (Bhabha 1986: xxxvi).
We must be cautious moving forward. To designate the colonizer-colonized
nonrelation as the fundamental condition of colonialism is not to repeat
Kipling’s maxim about the impossibility of communication between the East
and the West. This does not mean that the colonizer and the colonized are so
different from each other that communication is untenable. For this would
imply, from the colonizer’s perspective, the necessity for rescuing the colo-
nized from their position as lacking in order to recreate or reform them into
the image of the colonizer—a historically violent and oppressive process. The
absence of communication when understood as resulting from the colonized’s
lack of voice-consciousness, her inability to self-represent, only recycles the
colonial doctrine that the colonized lacks the tools for participating in pro-
gressive societies but once she learns how to do so the colonized will accede to
the level of the colonizer. Till then the colonized is expected to remain sub-
ordinate to their colonial masters.
The irreducible antagonism between the colonizer and the colonized,
therefore, neither explains nor justifies colonialism as a project for re-
habilitating the colonized to the center of Enlightenment Europe. It does not
suggest that once the colonized “learns” to speak or write back, she will be
able to reclaim and/or accommodate her particular identity against an
Enlightenment universalism. Instead, I will argue that for Fanon the problem
of social and racial inequality in colonialism is not simply a matter that can be
resolved through the restoration of the colonized’s rights, voice and identity,
but it is a symptom of the impossible deadlock or antagonism structuring
colonial social relations. This impasse is the inherent nonlogic structuring colonial
society and colonial politics. And for this reason, it is not enough that the
colonized defy or escape her racially and socially inferior position to the co-
lonizer: the colonized must recognize her being as irrevocably divided be-
tween negations—what it is not (black) and what it cannot be (white). Fanon’s
brilliance lies in this identification of the colonized as (ontological) void:
Man is not merely the possibility of recapture or of negation. […]

Uprooted, baffled, doomed to watch the dissolution of the truths he has
worked out for himself […] he has to give up projecting onto the world
an antinomy that coexists with him.
(Fanon 1967: 10)
Seeking to “express existence,” the colonized only finds “the nonexistent”—a

referent that cannot be dialectacized (Fanon 1967: 137).4 The colonized is
(constitutively) not!
I stake this as the signature point of BSWM. In order to understand
Fanon’s analysis of colonialism and racism one must chart a course through
the notion of the colonized as nonbeing or obstinate negativity. And, this
status of the colonized as “not” is critical for understanding the connection
between BSWM and Fanon’s later thinking on decolonial liberation.
From nonbeing to Blackness

Two sentences are not enough for fully developing any theory on the zone of
nonbeing.5 Thankfully, further substantiation can be gleaned from the fifth
chapter of BSWM, titled “The Fact of Blackness.” Interestingly, Fanon admits
the outlier character of this chapter in the context of the book by noting in the
“Introduction” that while the majority of chapters in BSWM focus on the
colonized’s relationship to a promised, albeit impossible, (white) identity and
their struggles encountering the emptiness of this desired object, with the last
two chapters specifically attempting a “psychopathological and philosophical
explanation of the state of being a Negro,” this fifth chapter is fundamentally
different from the rest insofar as it departs from examining the colonized’s
“wish to be white” to investigate the colonized’s frantic efforts at discovering
her true identity over and beyond what has been imprinted on her by the
colonizer (Fanon 1967: 15–16). As I read it, this chapter shifts focus from
examining the colonial socio-symbolic—the Imaginary identities and
Symbolic discourses retaining these identities—to the Real of the colony; or,
the impossible negativity existing between (being) white and (remaining) black,
a paradox of which the colonized is a positive figuration.
Fanon hammers home the point: there’s no path out of this endgame. The
colonized is a “prisoner of a vicious cycle” (Fanon 2008: 96); destined to a life
of constant denial, rejection, disillusionment and “overdetermination [from
the outside],” her lived experience cannot be reasoned (Fanon 2008: 95). For as
long as she is caught in the Other’s desire, she burns relentlessly in the
crosshairs of the white gaze—“whiteness burns me to a cinder” (Fanon 2008:
94). She cannot be white, but she cannot be black either. If wanting to be
white was a “joke,” then “want[ing] to be typically black […] was out of the
question” (Fanon 2008: 111). The latter especially so because Fanon un-
equivocally rejects the premise of an authentic black identity. Underlining the
fictitious nature of such identities, he writes, “The discovery of the existence of
a Negro civilization in the fifteenth century confers no patent of humanity on
me. Like it or not, the past can in no way guide me in the present moment”
(Fanon 1967: 225). Revivalism or “rediscovering [a black] tradition” is only a
“defense mechanism” (Fanon 1967a: 42). It substitutes one imaginary with
another. Neither mourning nor celebrating pasts when the colonized were
kings, philosophers, and inventors reserves the force to correct discourses of
white privilege. Nor can these rescue genuine black heritages without suc-
cumbing to the dominant discourse of the West. For the colonized’s effort to
reclaim her real subjectivity only remains circumscribed by the colonizer’s
Master discourse. Questing after a lost past for becoming whole (again) is
embedded in that triptych of Reason, Dialectic, and categorical imperative
that compose the trinity of secular Enlightenment ideology. And not only does
this quest mean nothing in terms of rejecting the tyranny of the West, it also
does little to alleviate the suffering of the colonized:
I am convinced that it would be of the greatest interest to be able to have

contact with a Negro literature or architecture of the third century before
Christ. I should be very happy to know that a correspondence had
flourished between some Negro philosopher and Plato. But I can
absolutely not see how this fact would change anything in the lives of
the eight-year-old children who labor in the cane fields of Martinique or
Guadeloupe.
(Fanon 1967: 230)
Additionally, such efforts always get hijacked by the colonizer. As in the case
with the negritude movement. For, Fanon explains, “when I tried to claim my
negritude intellectually as a concept, they snatched it away from me. They
proved to me that my reasoning was nothing but a phase in the dialectic” (2008:
111). Her intellectual agency reduced to a phase or a stage in the universal
apparatus of History and her lived experience thus inscribed as knowable within
European episteme, the colonized seeking her lost pasts is an unknowing victim
of what Gayatri Spivak dubs the terrorism of Reason, Dialectic, and the “ca-
tegorical imperative” (1985: 248). Without a past and a future and alienated
from her visceral experiences of living as a black body, the colonized is left to
occupy “the crossroads between Nothingness [le Néant] and Infinity [l’Infini]”
(Fanon 1967: 119).6 The colonized can either remain trapped in the fantasies of
becoming white and/or reclaiming a lost black past or she can acknowledge her
existence as pure negativity. The colonized is a specter wandering between two
worlds, one dead and the other powerless to be born; and, with nowhere to rest,
she is a forlorn, impossible figure of nonbeing.7
Expectedly, perhaps, the chapter ends on a note of resignation, “I began to
weep” (je me mis à pleurer). But is this due to Fanon feeling utterly hopeless
about the colonized’s irreparable abjection or is this an expression of dis-
appointment over how the colonized’s lived experience of the black body
always gets hijacked and translated by European episteme? It can be both.
But I want to move beyond this wrinkle in Fanon’s thought in order to focus
on the radical implications of his assertion that the colonized is not. For we
cannot overlook Fanon’s insistence on reading the colonized as a rupture or a
gap in the colonial socio-symbolic. The colonized, Fanon reminds us, “does
not hold itself out as lack,” or as lacking, but, instead, is the lack (Fanon 1967:
135). Existing between a black identity as nothing (reduced both in value and
as intellectual discourse) and the inaccessible futurity of whiteness, the colo-
nized is a “non-negated negativity” (Marriott 2018: 223).
It is critical that we not make the mistake of reading this negativity as
descriptive of the colonized’s depreciative position in society. Negativity, in
this case, is not tied to a Master Signifier organizing social relations through
the logic of plenitude versus insufficiency. Rather this negativity is outside any
logic underwriting the socio-symbolic, especially the logic of identity and
desire.
In this context, another distinction needs to be made, that between black-
as-identity and Blackness-as-negativity. While black-as-identity is established
by its difference from another identity, i.e. white, for “not only must the black
man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man” (Fanon 1967:
110), Blackness as Fanon conceives it is not reducible to an identity; or, it is
irreverent to Symbolic inscription. As radical antagonism, Blackness exists
logically prior to the composition of the social and social relations, and, being
thus, defies the authority of the Master by regularly confounding him with the
problem of the onto-phenomenological. The Master’s discourse fails to an-
swer the question: what is Blackness? As David Marriott notes,
[B]lackness, as against the being that is black, is essentially constituted as

the no-thing that is not […] this n’est pas is the mark of a negativity that
cannot be phenomenalized as the work of negation in the sense in which
Hegel gives it, [therefore] what is profoundly unsettling about blackness is
[…] that its mode of appearing has no phenomenological certitude, that
it cannot be placed or be made actually present as such. (2018: 121)
Blackness is the Real in the colonial socio-symbolic.
Blackness as the Real

The Real is commonly understood as an impediment to meaning, a subver-
sion of the place of meaning caused by the intrusion of something external to
the Symbolic order. In L’etourdit (1973), however, Lacan not only assigns a
new name for the Real—ab-sense (ab-sens)—but, also, clearly establishes the
Real as inseparable from the Symbolic. The Real does not belong to a domain
outside the Symbolic order; nor is it “a sublime and utterly withdrawn
transcendence” that is impossible to formalize in language. Instead, it “subsists
immanently with respect to the accessible planes of articulable knowledge”
(Johnston 2010: 151). Žižek explains this well:
the real operates and is accessible only through the symbolic [but is not]
immanent to the symbolic: the real is precisely that which resists and
eludes the grasp of the symbolic and, consequently, that which is only
detectable within the symbolic under the guise of its disturbances. In
short, the real is the absent cause which perturbs the causality of symbolic
law. [But in order to] become effective, it must hook onto, find an echo
in, some present deadlock. (1994: 101)
The inside–outside character of the Real, its expression through an impasse

and its subject eviscerating force, shows its conceptual connection to
Blackness. For Blackness too is “something other than life” which transposes
the colonized out of the Other’s desire, that is, frees the colonized from being
“sealed into thingness” to becoming the Thing in-itself—the Thing from
“somewhere else” as “something else” (Fanon 1967: 112; 218). Blackness, as
not—as the nothing—“names” the excessive/surplus negative core of the
colony. Without a “locatable referent or unequivocal name, [it] is something
that escapes all [symbolic] attributes” but is always present, excessive to so-
ciety and desire, and eternally lingering in the socio-symbolic (Marriott 2018:
224–25). Akin to queerness, Blackness too is a “negativity opposed to every
form of social viability” (Edelman 2004: 9). In this sense, Blackness is the plus
of and not the egress of excess; or, it is that phantom trace which haunts the
Symbolic but cannot be adequately approximated by the function of the
signifier.
Estranged from her body and desire, the colonized awakens to the potential
of its sheer negativity; a new emergence of political and subjective freedom arises
through the colonized’s realization of her essential condition as the nothing
(Bhabha 1986: xxiv–v). For only a realization of (being) this negativity and
building a political project around negativity frees the colonized from desires
of legitimacy and puts her on a path toward a politics of the Real, that is, a
politics that does not seek to ignore or overwrite the antagonism but, instead,
posits it as the political problem (Zupančič 2017: 36).
To readers accustomed to the idea of politics as the eradication of social
antagonism and its replacement with equitable relations between all members
of society irrespective of class, gender, race, caste, disability, sexuality, etc.,
this might appear as a rich theoretical premise but nothing more. This can be
the reason why Fanon, concerned about the immediacy of decolonization and
creation of a nonhierarchical society, underplays this aspect in his analysis of
colonialism. But BSWM is not really about “political oppression as the vio-
lation of a human essence” and how the colonized must reclaim her violated
self (Bhabha 1986: xxv). It is rather about how true decolonization requires
the dissolution of all identities in the night of the absolute and the need for de-
veloping an ontology-based politics.
This is the goal of Fanonian revolution, and at the heart of this revolution is
violence (Fanon 1967: 133; Ciccariello-Maher 2010: 14). The role of violence,
I think, is inseparable from Fanon’s thinking about nonbeing, Blackness, and
negativity. It is conceived both as an outward tool for razing the citadels of
colonial power and exploitation and also as a tool directed inwards, toward
the self, for purging the colonized from the fantasmatic illusions structuring
their social reality. And while this two-stage revolutionary process finds most
succinct expression in the Wretched of the Earth (1961 [hereafter, WOE]), the
initial sparks are already present in BSWM.
Blackness and the question of violence

There are two types of violence in BSWM. First, the Symbolic violence ex-
perienced by the colonized at the point of the colonizer’s index finger: “‘Dirty
nigger!’ Or, simply, ‘Look, a Negro!’” (1967: 109). The second is the violence
of Blackness, that is, the colonized experiencing her being as nonbeing or
dissipated between the black body and the white mask. When Fanon writes
that “since it was impossible […] to get away from an inborn complex [I decided]
to assert myself as a BLACK MAN,” he is not simply speaking about reacting
against the Symbolic violence of the colonial regime by embracing some
authentic (lost or erased) black identity and escaping the lure of becoming
white (1967: 115). Rather, it is my opinion that, Fanon here is speaking about
entering the subject eviscerating zone of nonbeing, of foregrounding the Real
via embracing the deontologized radical negativity of Blackness, as the only
correct form of response to the systemic violence that reduces her to an
identity defined by another. But becoming Blackness (but not black) means
experiencing a violent divorce from the Symbolic. Being unmade through
Blackness entails a liberation that shreds one’s being of identity and desire.
Fanon is adamant, “freedom requires [this] effort at disalienation”; it de-
mands a sacrifice—its pound of flesh (1967: 231).
In essays written around the same time as BSWM and just after, Fanon
continues to emphasize how colonialism alienates the colonized from her
being by instilling a sense of inferiority and a corresponding desire to become
white. Disalienation is intended as a corrective to both. In “The North
African Syndrome” (1952) and “Racism and Culture” (1956), for instance, he
argues that the colonized’s struggle for disalienation must be total and ab-
solute; because it is a struggle against thingification, against being made into
an object (See, 1967a: 43; 1967b: 14). As Fanon was to realize in Paris, the
colonizer’s gift of a white mask, a gift which beguiles the colonized with
promises of identity, History, civilization, and phallic plenitude, fails to hold
up when the colonized enters the white man’s world.8 For no matter how
hard the colonized tries to wear her mask, to blend into that society as one of
them, she still remains a monstrous negro: “Mama, see the Negro! I’m
frightened!” (Fanon 1967: 112). The colonized always remains overdetermined
from without by “tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism [sic],
racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Sho’ good eatin”
(Fanon 1967). This means the colonized must stay invisible, as “there is no
room [for the colonized] to appear nonviolently”:
Acceptable being is nonexistence, nonappearance, or submergence. To

change things is to appear, but to appear is to be violent since that
group’s appearance is illegitimate. Violence, in this sense, need not be a
physical imposition. It need not be a consequence of guns and other
weapons of destruction. It need simply be appearance.
(Gordon 2007: 12)
The paradox is palpable. In order to appear outside the regime of colonial

Symbolic violence, the colonized must dis-/reappear through an act that is
violent “both for its ontological implications and for its inevitable reception”
(Gordon 2007). The colonized must disappear into that “hellish zone of
nonbeing” and reappear freed from desire, freed from dependency complex,
freed from desiring to be white, in order to be a subject unmade through her
violent experience of traversing the zone of nonbeing. That is, the colonized
must be freed through accepting Blackness as her only and real condition of
existence.
More specifically, the colonized’s illegitimate and threatening dis-/
reappearance in the Symbolic is an act announcing her excessive jouissance.
Excessive jouissance makes her an other who cannot be Symbolized and/or who
remains outside of and as a strain to the onto-phenomenological. There is no way
to Symbolize the other’s jouissance—there is no answer to the question “what does
the other/colonized want?” In that moment of impasse, a moment when the
colonized finally manages to express its lived experience to the world, the (big)
Other is gripped for the first time with its own ontological anxiety. Faced with the
impossibility of ontologizing the other’s radical negativity, i.e., symbolizing the
other’s desire, the (big) Other experiences a detumescence of its authority.
What makes this encounter truly traumatic and incredibly violent is that the
colonized’s “appearance” does not address the (big) Other or seek recognition
from the (big) Other. While the colonizer expects the other’s appearance to ar-
ticulate a desire (for identity, mercy, accommodation), it only finds a primal ne-
gation that cannot be translated into a comprehensible narrative about the other’s
subject/subjectivity. In this moment, the colonized is outside all “representative
narratives of Western personhood”: the colonized is irrecuperable to the “terms of
the liberal-humanist,” which seek to resolve the colonial question through the
proclamation of the universal “Rights of Man,” insofar as the colonized defies the
Enlightenment concept of Man as a rational subject constituted by (the Spirit of)
History (Bhabha 1986: xxiv–vi). The lived experience of the colonized cannot be
dialectized; it will always remain outside of Symbolic inscription—a “fugitive even
to the concept of fugitivity” (Marriott 2018: 215).
In fact, Fanon is convinced that the antagonism in colonial social relations
cannot be understood in terms of the Hegelian dialectic. In a footnote in
BSWM, he illustrates how the colonizer–colonized relationship is different
from Hegel’s description of the Master-slave relationship:
For Hegel there is reciprocity; here [in the colony] the master laughs at
the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not
recognition but work. In the same way, the slave here is in no way
identifiable with the slave who loses himself in the object and finds in his
work the source of liberation. The Negro wants to be like the master.
Therefore he is less independent than the Hegelian slave. In Hegel the
slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object. Here the
slave turns toward the master and abandons the object. (1967: 220 fn8)9
The colonized receives no reciprocation from the Master because the Master
is interested only in extracting work or labor from the slave. Effectively, the
colonized’s existence is doubly negated: first, for not being white and, second,
in the process of being labor (a potential that can be abstracted only after
negating the particularity of the colonized’s body), this labor comes into ex-
istence by negating the colonized’s body. Her body exists only as a potential
for unrealized labor, therefore, it is only by transforming that body or bodily
potential into labor can the colonized find or seek accommodation in the
colonial socio-symbolic. But in the absence of reciprocity, the colonized is the
not. She remains an impasse or excess in the Symbolic until she accepts
complete subjugation within that Symbolic.
Freedom from subjugation resides in fully becoming the impasse—the
negativity—that is the real condition of freedom for the colonized. Only by
challenging the normalized humanity of the colonized as not-white and po-
tential labor can the colonized embark on a path toward emancipation. As
Fanon forcefully puts it in “Decolonization and Independence” (1958), an
“authentic national liberation exists only to the precise degree to which the
individual has irreversibly begun his own liberation” (1967c: 103). But is such
a freedom even possible? Is this not a dangerous freedom? I will return to this
question in the conclusion of this chapter. Before that I wish to briefly turn to
WOE, where the revolutionary violence we have been discussing finds a more
structured elaboration.
Written nine years after BSWM and from within the context of segregated
French Algeria, the stakes in WOE are very different. French Algeria is a
military occupation where the colonized live as bare lives and in a con-
tinuous state of siege. Therefore, the demolition of the blatant structural and
material divisions between the colonized and the colonizer must be ac-
complished before the subject-(un)making process of the decolonized masses
can be possible. But this second step is essential for the “substantive lib-
eration of the colony from economic and psychic neocolonialism”
(Ciccariello-Maher 2010: 14). It is only through both these two stages of
violence, one external and the other internal, it is possible to create a society
where the conundrum of nonrelationality can be ethically addressed and a
politics of social relation formulated around, and not in spite of, the an-
tagonism. The goal is to free society from all fantasies of sovereign identity
and destroy all bogus social and cultural institutions responsible for sus-
taining a reality of identity politics. Violence, in this sense, is a “detoxifying
and destructive, creative and reinventive” force (Marriott 2018: 72). Akin to
Coleridgean daemonic imagination, Fanonian violence is a magical and
synthetic force which recreates men and society by bringing the discordant
inherent to the social into focus. Fanonian violence seeks “the veritable
creation of new men”—free from desire, identity, and Symbolic belonging
(Fanon 1968: 35).
The New Man: a cut instead of a conclusion

The notion of the New Man is yet another theoretical experiment on the part
of Fanon—an exercise in abstraction, another effort trying to define the
asignificative (negativity) for a politics of the Real. Conceptually, it is related to
and an expansion on the notions of nonbeing and Blackness. Like these, the
New Man, too, is an impossibility that is positively unrealizable at the level of
the Symbolic, since it is impossible to conceive man sans desire. Also akin to
these, the New Man disrupts the principle of exchange that is foundational to
the colonial regime. Insofar as both the creation of social relations around the
exploitation of the colonized as labor and the constitution of the colonized as
subjects desiring Whiteness are grounded in the logic of exchange, the New
Man, theoretically speaking, has the potential to challenge the colonial script.
An in-depth discussion of the concept will require an entire chapter, so here I
will restrict my observations to the relation between the New Man, violence,
and the Real, and to how the concept of the New Man aligns with the concept
of nonbeing in Fanon.
The New Man emerges by being violently unmade or stripped from de-
lusions of being, desire, and sovereignty—the “colonized becom[ing] a man
during the same process by which it frees itself ” (Fanon 1968: 36). But this is
not a freedom that sets up the colonized for a socially equal life, that is, a
freedom premised on the notion of justice or equal rights for every human in
society. Rather, Fanon indulges here in thinking about freedom that is phi-
losophical but with consequences for real politics. It is a thinking about
equality before real material conditions for living equally can be accom-
plished. In the philosophical sense of being free, therefore, the idea of the New
Man attempts to reinstate the body as pure negativity back into the Symbolic.
Hence, the New Man in the Symbolic is nothing but a potential corpse. Or, a
corpse that speaks! But, importantly, neither can this body be marked by the
Signifier nor can its speech be recognized in terms of articulating desire. The
New Man is both present in and absent from the Symbolic. Unregimented by
desire, the New Man is not “of-lack,” not “in-the-lack” but just “lack”—the
insupportable not-all existing in but gesturing to a beyond of the Symbolic
order. Disrobed of epidermal (in)security, this New Man is truly disalienated
from the flesh—it is a body devoid of the skin as dress of the Symbolic; as
such, it is the drive incarnate. It is a speaking subject without a misrecognized
body, therefore, a Thing, or, a voice, and nothing more. The New Man is, con-
sequently, a paradox: Signifier of a non-significative vacuity, it is the death-
drive sticking to and ticking through the Symbolic.
The colonized’s transition from a pre-revolutionary to a post-revolutionary
subject(ivity) involves shifting from desiring (to become White) to becoming
the negativity (that eviscerates the fictions of Whiteness): that is, from being
crossed out in the Symbolic to reappearing in the Symbolic as the apparition
of the Real. As the Real, the New Man returns, remains, but cannot be (un)
seen. But this is not the “I” becoming the “We” of the Third World op-
pressed; rather, this “I” expresses the radical particularity (en moi) standing in
for the Universal and, thereby, demonstrates true Universality not in a
common positive but in a shared excluded, i.e. the lack as foundational to
being. It is by passing through the subject eviscerating “real hell”—the zone of
nonbeing—that a new Man can come to “exist absolutely” without confine-
ment in History or desire. And with the “density of History determin[ing]
none of [its] acts,” this New Man is not trapped in the dialectic of becoming,
but, rather, by remaining in “permanent tension” with the (im)possibility of
achieving freedom outside the dialectic, the New Man is a unique possibility
for imagining a social politics for a universal of negated subjects (Fanon
2008: 205–6).
But this is a dangerous freedom. It requires being without the support of
desire and the guarantees of a (big) Other. What’s worse is that this notion
of freedom is irreconcilable with our habitual understanding of politics,
and, therefore, questions might arise regarding whether it is at all possible
to conceive politics without wholesome ideas, defined identities, and clear-
cut horizons of action demarcated by desire? Indeed, can ontology-based
politics replace the grind of the politics of representation? Does the im-
possibility of living as persistent, determinate negativity—without desire
and without identity—not problematize or capsize politics altogether?
Sadly, Fanon does not address these issues; in fact, he seems only to bring
them up in the gaps or interstices of his writing. Unfortunately, I too
cannot expand upon this without moving beyond Fanon and lengthening
this chapter considerably. Therefore, in lieu of a conclusion, I will end this
essay abruptly, at this point, raising more questions than answers. My hope
is that a cut here will only encourage further conversations about Fanon’s
ontology-based politics of social (non-)relation. Continuing these con-
versations are crucial not only for a serious reevaluation of Fanon but also
for understanding how Fanon shows the way for non-Europeans to occupy
psychoanalysis.
Notes
1 Charles Markham translates this passage a little differently: “There is a zone of
nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity
where an authentic upheaval can be born. In most cases, the black man lacks the
advantage of being able to accomplish this descent into a real hell” (1967: 10).
2 For an overview on the tendency to divide Fanon into later, mature and Marxist
Fanon versus an early, petit-bourgeois Fanon, see Hall (1996: especially 14–17). My
examination of Fanon’s critique of colonialism, racism, and decolonization in re-
lation to ontology draws from the writings of Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Peter
Hudson, David Marriott, and Lewis Gordon.
3 The postcolonial politics of reading involves strategic rereading, forced reading,
misreading, and reading as translation. It attempts to reverse, displace, and seize a
text’s program of meaning-making by giving articulation to disavowed signifiers or
foreclosed moments and points of views that unravel texts for hitherto unexplored
perspectives. For more, see Spivak (1999).
4 Lest we forget: “Man” or “mankind” for Fanon is his “colored brothers.” He writes in
the “Introduction”: “Nos frères de couleur…/Je crois en toi, Homme…” (“Our co-
lored brothers…/Mankind, I believe in you…”). See Fanon (1967: 9). The colonizer,
incapable of recognizing his ontological condition as naught, does not even qualify as
the human. For being human is to be driven by an ontological uncertainty.
5 Fanon does not use the phrase “zone of nonbeing” except for that one time in the
Introduction. In fact, the word “nonbeing” is only used sparingly, for a total of just
three times in the entire book. The second instance is in the fifth chapter and the last
appears in the sixth. See (1967: 109 and 185).
6 For a similar reading, see Bernasconi’s discussion of Fanon’s reading of Sartre’s
“Orphée noir” (2005).
7 This sentence draws from Mathew Arnold’s “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreus”
(circa 1850).
8 I capitalize “History” in order to distinguish it from “history” or chronological time.
History here refers to Hegel’s discourse of history. But Hegel’s “History” is not a
chronology of events but an “epistemograph;” or, “a graduated diagram of the
coming-into-being” of the West as Subject via the inscription of the colony as either
untouched by and/or now divorced from the uplifting touch of the Spirit of History
(Spivak 1999: 41). History is a “world-historical metonym”—it is part of the
Enlightenment tradition of subject constitution and can stand in for the entire
tradition (Spivak 1999: 47).
9 It is possible to argue that, by underlining impasse over recognition, Fanon was in
effect correcting the Kojevean reading of Hegel that was influential in France during
1940s and 1950s. Fanon understood Hegel through his experiences of colonialism
and racism, experiences that were vastly different from white French men in Paris.
But Fanon, it must be noted, does not reject Hegel tout court as a European,
Eurocentric philosopher. Instead, he employs Hegel to re-read Hegel, and most
possibly arrives at a more authentic understanding of Hegel than his white French
colleagues. In this Fanon was already anticipating the French feminists of the 70s
and 80s, who used Lacan to revise Lacan in contexts of the feminine question, and
Spivak, whose relation to European thinkers is fundamentally the same as Fanon’s
to Hegel, that is, not a rejection but an occupation of European thought. In this
respect, it should also be noted that, while Lacan remained somewhat wedded to
Kojeve’s reading by privileging in his early Seminars the role of recognition in
intersubjective relations, especially desire, by the early 50’s Fanon was already able
to abstract himself from the dominant university discourse regarding Hegel. For a
brief discussion of this, see Macey (2012: 161).
References
Bernasconi, Robert. “The European Knows and Does Not Know: Fanon’s Response
to Sartre.” Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks: New Interdisciplinary Essays. Ed. Max
Silverman. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
Bhabha, Homi. “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition.”
Foreword to the 1986 Edition of Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam
Markham. Chicago: Pluto Press, 1986.
Ciccariello-Maher, George. “Jumpstarting the Decolonial Engine: Symbolic Violence
from Fanon to Chávez.” Theory & Event, vol. 13, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1–28.
Edelman, Lee. No Future. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
Fanon, Franz. Peau Noire, Masques Blancs. Paris: Seuil, 1952.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Trans. Charles Lam Markham. New
York: Grove Press, 1967.
Fanon, Frantz. “Racism and Culture (1956).” Toward the African Revolution. Trans.
Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press, 1967a. pp. 29–44.
Fanon, Frantz. “The ‘North African Syndrome’ (1952).” Toward the African Revolution.
Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press, 1967b. pp. 3–16.
Fanon, Frantz. “Decolonization and Independence (1958).” Toward the African
Revolution. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press, 1967c. pp. 99–105.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Trans. Constance Farrington. New
York: Grove Press, 1968.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Tans. Richard Philcox. New York:
Grove Press, 2004.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove
Press, 2008.
Gordon, Lewis. “Through the Hellish Zone of Nonbeing: Thinking through Fanon,
Disaster, and the Damned of the Earth.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of
Self- Knowledge, vol. 5, no. 3, “Reflections on Fanon.” 2007, pp. 5–11.
Hall, Stuart. “The After-Life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black
Skin, White Masks?” The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. Ed. Alan
Read. Toronto: Bay Press, 1996: 13–37.
Hudson, Peter. “The State and the Colonial Unconscious.” Social Dynamics, vol. 39, no.
2, 2013, pp. 263–277.
Johnston, Adrian. “This Philosophy Which Is Not One: Jean-Claude Milner, Alain
Badiou, and Lacanian Antiphilosophy.” S: Journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle for Lacanian
Ideology Critique, vol. 3, 2010, pp. 137–158.
Lacan, Jacques. L’etourdit (1973). Trans. Cormac Gallagher. The Letter, vol. 41, 2009,
pp. 31–80.
Macey, David. Frantz Fanon: A Biography. London: Verso, 2012.
Marriott, David. “En Moi: Frantz Fanon and René Maran.” Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin,
White Masks: New Interdisciplinary Essays. Ed. Max Silverman. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2005.
Marriott, David. Whither Fanon? Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Women’s Text.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1,
“Race, Writing, and Difference.” Autumn, 1985, pp. 243–261.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Žižek, Slavoj. “Is There a Object Cause of the Subject.” Supposing the Subject. Ed. Joan
Copjec. London: Verso, 1994.
Zupančič, Alenka. What Is Sex? Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017.
Afterword: there is only
one race…
Kalpana R. Seshadri
Department of English, Boston College
I am grateful to the editors of this volume, Sheldon George and Derek Hook, for
inviting me to write an “afterword” on the topic of “Race and Psychoanalysis” 20
years after the publication of Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race. The
genre of the afterword, its relation to the text proper is mingled with two ideas: a
closing statement; as well as something that is added after the text has been
defined as complete. In a sense, an afterword both closes and opens texts.
Perhaps, it serves to record our ambivalence about the final word. It is rather a
word as an after-thought, that comes after-wards, a directional adverb, that marks
a sub-sequent time after the main event.
I have long been fond of these supplementary genres—the foreword,
afterword, preface, prologue, etc.—if only because they are somewhat in-
essential and unnecessary. In a sense, they seem like simulacra of psycho-
analytic discourses, which are more often than not a little too much too late. I
am thinking here not of professional psychoanalysis as practiced in the clinic
per se, but of those psychoanalytically inflected theories that are produced
within universities as a subset of what is broadly called “cultural theory” or
“critical theory.” What does it mean to deploy psychoanalysis as a theory,
rather than an encounter, to analyze sociopolitical phenomena mediated by
concepts such as race, class, cultural community, etc. How do these dis-
courses, that do not require training in psychoanalysis, or the subject positions
of analyst and analysand, gain legitimacy as knowledge?
I raise this issue not to disparage the work of cultural theory, but simply to
remark that unlike other inter-disciplinary endeavors that partner across
university disciplines, psychoanalytic theory is more “out on a limb,” in a sort
of supplementary relation to the main archives and methods of knowledge
production. Where race is concerned, we observe that in the face of historical
trauma, state mandated violence, terror, and inhumanity, psychoanalytic
theory arrives as an afterword to historical research, economic data, socio-
logical analysis, and public policy. It comes after the bloodshed, after the
protest marches, the funerals and the tears to explain that race is a sympto-
matic discourse, a discourse that speaks the collective psychosis of a society. In
other words, the afterword of psychoanalysis can only pick up the pieces,
300 Kalpana R. Seshadri
sweep out the debris, collect the garbage, and help a little with rebuilding. It
cannot prevent, lead, or even influence the course of historical action.
Though psychoanalytic theory has recently gained entrance into some phi-
losophy departments (that tolerate continental styles of thought), it has done so
only at the behest of its most unconventional members. Psychoanalytic theory is
never properly philosophy, if only because it is a hybrid of psychoanalytic
practice and philosophical anthropology. By and large, it has remained in its
self-assigned place by taking as its focal point the sexual subject and his/her
psychical structure. But I think, this place was considerably reconfigured with
Lacan’s consequential introduction of linguistic theory into psychoanalysis and
his proposition that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” This pro-
position has precipitated a decisive turn to the political and the ethical within
psychoanalysis. By identifying linguistic structure as forming the basis of the
psychical, Lacan effectively dismantled the opposition between the so-called
“individual” subject and society. Instead of treating society as an analysand, or
constructing reductive analogies between individual symptoms and social
phenomena, Lacanian psychoanalysis appears to authorize cultural theorists to
read the relation between discourse and politics or the political as structurally
symptomatic. This approach is neither Freudian meta-psychology in the style of
his The Ego and the Id (1923) nor social psychology in the manner practiced by
Erich Fromm, which are both methods predicated on the problematic oppo-
sition between the individual subject and society. By focusing on the subject’s
accession to language and signification as the organizing principle of the psyche,
Lacanian theory situates the subject in the slippage between the material sig-
nifier and the ideational signified. Insofar as this slippage is consigned to the
obscene other side of meaning, it is the unconscious that largely shapes the
Symbolic subject.
While sexual difference has traditionally played a defining role in the analysis
of the split subject due to the overweening presence of familial and care-giving
relations in the origination of desire, race could be safely ignored given its status
as a mere social construct. But though, from the scientific point of view, race is
trivialized as a false epistemology of human difference, it nevertheless has
powerful social and ontological effects.1 In the scientifically advanced western
world, race not only drives politics, but as many of the contributors to this
volume attest (George, Hook, McGowan, Rothenberg, Chebrolu) it markedly
invests identity and shapes the psyche’s fundamental fantasy. Thus, the fact that
it has been ignored for so long within psychoanalysis, as well as in philosophical
anthropology, is itself a symptom of how deeply buried and intricately im-
bricated it is in the constitution of the western subject.
In what follows, I would like to put forward a proposition that hyperbolizes
the argument I made in Desiring Whiteness: If race is inherently racist, what
would it mean to assert that “there is only one race … and it is White”?
In Desiring Whiteness, I suggested that race is a culturally inculcated regime of
reading bodily signs in order to sustain the subject’s unconscious attachment to
racial identity. The question that interested me was the violence of this
Afterword: There is only one race… 301
attachment, i.e. why subjects (in the west) cathected their racial identities so
deeply despite its lack of scientific credibility. I suggested that “we make such an
investment because the unconscious signifier Whiteness, which founds the logic
of racial difference, promises wholeness. (This is what it means to desire
Whiteness: not a desire to become Caucasian [!] … Whiteness attempts to
signify being, or that aspect of the subject which escapes language)” (21). This
unconscious master signifier that organizes the signifying system of racial dif-
ference (white vs non-whites) stands for a sovereign humanness unmarred by
lack. Insofar as “white” refers to an ideal rather than an empirical biological
attribute, and organizes human difference in terms of an opposition between
white and people of color, it discloses a discriminatory logic at its kernel.
The value of Lacanian theory in serving to unpack our unconscious at-
tachment to race identity as a will to wholeness derives from its unique analysis
of sexual difference. Importantly, psychoanalysis enables us to escape the trap of
analogizing race and sex. Understanding sexual difference in Lacanian terms,
as the failure of signification is essential in order to grapple with Whiteness as a
supplementary or compensating signifier. Setting aside the technical details of
the theory of how race articulates itself with sex to form a fundamental fantasy
of wholeness and sovereign purity,2 I here wish to simply reaffirm what other
critical race theorists have also argued, that the discourse of race is always
already inherently and irremediably racist. Given this discriminatory and power
laden logic that fabricates a way of looking (regime of visibility) and imposes
identity on the basis of arbitrary markers, it comes as no surprise that the
discourse of race matters, and is of urgent concern only to the raced, for whom
it is utterly and thoroughly political. Those who are raced invariably take
ownership of race discourse as something that matters to them existentially and
politically. On the other hand, for those who identify with and as “white” race is
of no concern. (As is well known, it is normative to associate all issues of race
with people of color.) What I want to note here is the rich irony of this entire
spectrum of meaning, matter, and affect.
First of all, as is now common knowledge, in certain discourses where the
reference is to “the human race” as a single species that is sociologically race-
neutral, the model of neutrality is invariably Caucasian. That white passes for
neutral or racially unmarked is well known, but there is no corresponding
acknowledgment of the fact that if there is only one human “race” it is re-
presented as possessing whiteness. Race discourse is always only about being
fully human, i.e. an overcoming of lack and having a mastery over norma-
tivity, i.e. whiteness. While ethnicity, culture, class, even caste have diverse
manifestations that have relative and contextually shifting stratifications, that
can essentially pluralize the definition of being human, race has only one
modality of expression: sovereign humanness. And full, proper humanness is
signified by whiteness. In psychoanalytic terms, the proximity to whiteness (i.e.
white identified groups) serves a constitutive function in subject formation.
Whereas for so-called people of color, i.e. non-white people who find them-
selves engaged in a struggle for whiteness, the rule of this signifier is far from
being unconscious or constitutive. It takes on significance only in relation to
degrees of dehumanization or animalization.
My hyperbolic interjection that “there is only one race … and it is white”
pertains to this nonchalance and lack of concern as a symptom. We may recall
Lacan’s famous statement on the nature of the fundamental fantasy in
Seminar XX: the analysand “wants to know nothing more about it.” I will
add that means “know nothing about it at all” (Lacan, 105).3 This is because
the fundamental fantasy that is a source of satisfaction or jouissance is in-
herently unbearable. It is too much—reprehensible and forbidden. Where
“whiteness” is concerned, it is also deeply anxiety producing, as it is a signifier
of wholeness and subverts the moral law.4 My hyperbolic proposition then
pertains to those “white” identified subjects for whom race is of no concern or
an embarrassment at most. Insofar as their willed ignorance hints at the
presence of a fundamental fantasy of whiteness/wholeness, it follows that race
discourse has a predominance and amplitude in structuring their un-
conscious.5 Race or whiteness predominates in the unconscious in ways that it
obviously does not for those to whom race matters. On the contrary, there is
no resistance to knowledge: they want to know (or do know) all about it. What
I am suggesting here is that in order to properly have and be a race, it is
necessary that the discourse be inscribed at a fundamental level of subject
constitution. There is a marked absence of evidence that race is an un-
conscious attachment, a fundamental fantasy for groups that are placed at a
remove from whiteness. For non-white groups, race is not a metaphysical
truth or an unconscious cause. It is an ideological imposition that first and
foremost enforces a monolithic definition of humanness.
Furthermore, for cultures that exist outside the matrix of whiteness and the
race system, it is a complete negation of their experiences of being human, which
may well include hitherto undeciphered ways of being in community with other
animals, plants, and the non-human environment. There are more ways of being
human than belonging to the (neutral) human race. My sense is that political
struggle must learn to redefine race not only as a white supremacist discourse but
also a human supremacist one. For the planetary imperative is that we can only
be partially and improperly human. On the other hand, challenging the white-
ness of a white identifying subject will prove the opposite—it threatens their
humanity. In making this hyperbolic statement about white-identified groups, I
may appear to contradict the orientation of Desiring Whiteness, which was to refute
and reject racial group identification as a given or an unquestionable point of
departure for analysis. My intent in the book was not to presume that races exist,
but to discover through psychoanalysis the production of racial group attachment
as a historical and psychological construct that nevertheless generates powerful
effects of biological embodiment.
But as this piece is an afterword or an afterthought, it is incumbent on me to
ask: how do we account for “white” people? How did they come to exist? It is
necessary to turn around Du Bois’ question: “how does it feel to be a problem?”
We must ask these questions because race/racism is a whiteness problem.
Afterword: There is only one race… 303
I am not suggesting that so-called white people are the sole perpetrators of
racist violence. Rather, that whiteness is a hegemonic and powerful system of
social organization that is a fundamental fantasy for those in power. And power
is always correlated with whiteness in western societies. To address the problem
of having whiteness, we must call into question the normativity of being white.
In psychoanalytic terms, it means raising the issue of “traversing that funda-
mental fantasy.” In what ways can cultural discourse induce a gradual and
collective traversing of the fundamental fantasy of whiteness? It is only by in-
terrogating whiteness head on that we can begin to truly confront the racism
of race.
What does “traversing the fantasy” of whiteness mean? This is a question
that merits a more sustained analysis. But here we can simply recall what
Lacan means by this phrase. According to Bruce Fink (1995), “traversing”
refers to subjectifying the cause of desire, putting oneself in the place of the
object cause—the Other’s desire as cause. It is a “‘crossing over’ of positions
within the fundamental fantasy whereby the divided subject assumes the place
of the cause, in other words, subjectifies the traumatic cause of his or her own
advent as subject, coming to be in that place where the Other’s desire—a
foreign alien desire—had been” (62).6 If whiteness as absolute neutral,
monolithic, sovereign humanness is the fundamental fantasy in question,
subjectifying it here would necessarily entail an encounter with the historicity
of race. Many of the contributors to this volume (Thakur, Gherovici, Malone
and Jackson, Cavanaugh, Shingu and Wapeemukwa) aim at just such an
encounter. Other essays in this volume (Stephens, Friedlander, Neroni,
McGowan, Hook, and George) engage with the structural aspects of race as a
constitutive construction that has ontological effects. It would be an under-
statement to say that this volume of essays on Race and Lacan is way overdue.
The work of theorizing the role of race in the constitution of the subject has
only just begun. The essays in this volume raise questions and outline critical
methodologies that may well open avenues for research into matters that
psychoanalysis has traditionally avoided.
In my view, the urgent theoretical task facing critical race studies is to
fearlessly interrogate the traditional forms of humanism that pervade both
psychoanalysis and anti-racist discourses. It is not enough to combat racism,
or analyze race as a discourse, or even unpack the kernel of white supremacy
in the organization of social differences. Our options are not confined to ei-
ther an assertion of basic human dignity, or the respect for human difference.
We must set our sights on the human itself as a singular and supreme species.7
This may well entail taking up the humanist fantasy of transcending animality
and what Michael Marder calls vegetality8 as a strategy of abdicating re-
sponsibility and relationality.
There are numerous questions that confront us now in this era of Black Lives
Matter and Global Warming, such as: Is psychoanalytic theory equipped to
grapple with the color blindness of humanism? Can it theorize the relation
between racism and speciesism? How human is the unconscious? Can we
imagine a psychoanalysis that is not only anti-humanist but also post-humanist?
Can Lacanian theory be extended into the bedrock of scientific inquiry and
philosophical investigation—into ideas such as “life,” plasticity, and complexity?
And can it do so as a formidable force that forbids the forgetting of race in any
enterprise of knowledge production?
Notes
1 For an excellent historical analysis of how the fiction of race continues to dominate
contemporary culture, see Karen E. Fields and Baraba J. Fields (2014).
2 See Seshadri-Crooks (2000).
3 Jacques Lacan (1998).
4 See Seshadri-Crooks (2000: 40–44) for a discussion of how the master signifier
whiteness suspends the incest taboo.
5 The “embarrassment” that race produces for whiteness can be heard in Lacan’s
own discourse in the passage that Sheldon George quotes from Seminar 17, where
Lacan speaks of the “courageous little African doctors.”
6 Bruce Fink (1995).
7 I have explored the issue of race and dehumanization in HumAnimal: Race, Law,
Language (Seshadri-Crooks: 2012).
8 See for instance Michael Marder and Luce Irigaray (2016).
References
Fields, Karen E. and Fields, Baraba J. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life.
London: Verso, 2014.
Lacan, Jacques. Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller.
Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 1998.
Marder, Michael and Irigaray, Luce. Through Vegetal Being. Columbia: Columbia
Seshadri-Crooks, K. “Deciphering Whiteness.” Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of
Race. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Seshadri-Crooks, K. HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language. Minneapolis: Minnesota
Index
absolute Other 148–150; see also Other 123–127; exchanges of desire between
accelerationism 65 subject and Other 127–142;
the Act 6, 106, 117 historiography 123–124; ideological
Adorno Theodor, W. 46 rewards 139–142; Lacan and
African Americans 52, 55–56, 112, apartheid ideology 131–134; object a
114–115, 146–147, 150–151, 136–137; phantom agency 127–131;
153–156, 165, 175, 188, 250, 255, 256, racist ideology of 121–123; separation,
258–259 situation of 134–136; beneficiaries
Afrikaner 124–126, 131, 137–138, 141 of 128
Afropessimism 3, 8, 205; antiblackness Aryan Cowboys (Evelyn Schlatter) 72
and 205, 208–214; art and sublimation Atè 7, 154–158, 160, 253, 261;
217–220; clinical reflections 217; see also “desire and Atè in quicksand”
epistemology and ontology 206–208;
Lacanian Real 214–217; other and the Bad Faith and AntiBlack Racism (Lewis
superego 208–214; and psychoanalysis Gordon) 216
205–220 Baldwin, James 167, 188, 212
Afropessimism (Frank Wilderson) 209, 210 Belcourt, Billy-Ray 83
Against Race (Paul Gilroy) 108, 111 Bettelheim, Bruno 183, 184
Alexander, Michelle 55; see also New Bhabha, Homi 111, 286, 290; and,
Jim Crow antagonistic interlocutions 286;
alienation 7, 66, 87, 105, 115–116, 122, “liminal reality” 286
127, 134–136, 138–140, 144n4; Bhasin, Neeta 111
see also separation and identification bias 1, 3, 20, 256; implicit 20, 21;
Allen, Amy 84 unconscious 19–20, 256
Amalgamation Schemes (Jared Sexton) 77 big Other 75, 130; see also Other
Amerindians 184–185 Bill C-31 93–95
anal drive 248–249; see also drive birthrates 76
anamorphosis 158 black-as-identity vs blackness 289
Andersen, Chris 83 black criminality 24
another jouissance 250; see also jouissance Black Death 218
antiblackness 5, 8–9, 205, 207–214; blackface 242, 252, 254, 257;
see also afropessimism see also minstrelsy
anti-black racism 166, 171–173, 175, black fantasm 153–154
176, 178 BlacKkKlansman (film) 117–119
Antigone (Sophocles play) 157–158 Black Lives Matter 1, 258
Apache, Lipan 91 blackness 10–11; and negativity 291; and
aphanisis 230 the Real 289–291; and violence
apartheid: alienation in Symbolic Other 291–294
134; big Other and 138–139; desire in Black phallus 88–89; see also phallus
306 Index
Black Skin, White Masks (Frantz Fanon) 11, Cronjé, Geoffrey 124–126, 129–131, 133
23, 79, 87, 126, 214; see also Fanon, The Cruelty of Depression (Jacques
Frantz Hassoun) 211
Black studies 83–84 Crusius, Patrick 65, 67, 70, 71, 75
Blida-Joinville 87 cultural catharsis 160
Blindspot (Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony cynicism 116; see also skepticism and
Greenwald) 19 Casanova
blood-quantum 94
Boothby, Richard 112 Das Ding 89
Brenton Tarrant 5, 65 Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in
Brexit 35 Latino Studies (Antonio Viego) 105
Brown, Rachel 168 Deane, Seamus 92
Brown v. Board of Education 188 death drive 7, 40, 160, 206, 217, 259;
Buddhism, in Japan 231–233 see also drive
Bugs Bunny 257 Dedalus, Stephen 91
Butler, Rex 113–114 Derrida, Jacques 13n8, 121
desire 2, 7, 22, 25, 42, 54, 56, 62, 69–70,
Carlisle Industrial Indian School 73; and Atè in Quicksand 154–156;
(CIS) 90–91 Other’s desire 26–27, 174; role of, in
Casanova 117; see also cynicism and racism 123–127; structure of 26–27
skepticism desiring Other 148; see also Other
castration 29, 89–92 The Devil Finds Work (James Baldwin) 175
Castration Complex 86, 90 Didier-Weill, Alain 209–210, 213–214
Cause, notion of 112 disavowal of race 110–112
Chinese characters, in Japan 7, 224–227; discourse of the pervert 166–167;
see also kanji see also pervert and perversion
Chun, Wendy 76 Dolar, Mladen 135
Ciccariello-Maher, George 291, 294 drag-queen 172
cinéma vérité 169 Drapetomania 250
Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud) drive 4, 10, 39, 40, 45, 111, 114–115,
146, 190 154; anal 248; death 7, 40, 160, 206,
Civil Rights Act of 1964 53 217, 259; headless subject of 245;
Civil Rights laws, 1960s 25 invocatory 248, 257; oral 248, 251;
Clarke, Shirley 165–180 partial 246–248, 255, 257; scopic 248,
clash of enjoyments 37; see also enjoyment 249, 257; trieb 40
Coetzee, J.M. 122–127, 137 Dubow, Saul 121
colonialism 6, 11, 80, 83–84, 90–92, 95 A Dying Colonialism (Frantz Fanon) 88
Confederate flag 51–53 Dysaethesia Aethiopica 250
Confederate monument
placements 51–53 Earnest, John 65, 67, 70, 71, 74, 75, 77
Confederate signifiers 51–53; desire and Écrits (Jacques Lacan) 207, 223, 224
object 54; enormous attachment to Edelman, Lee 290
54–55; evolution of 53; fetishistic ego 68–69, 146, 147, 149–150, 246–247;
disavowal and 54–55; fetish objects, and body 249, 258
dislodging 59–61; Lacanian ego-ideal 7, 45, 46, 78, 146, 258;
conception of split subject 54; lack, identification with 147–151,
importance of 54–56; South 246–247, 258
Burlington Rebels 56–59; winning encomienda system 185
local battle 61–62 Encore 242–243, 247, 252, 259–260
Copjec, Joan 105–106 Engelken-Jorge, Marcos 48
Coulthard, Glen 83 enjoyment: black 28–30; fetish object and
crisis of mass immigration 76, 78 55; law and 45, 46; racial other’s 27,
crisis of the white signifier 76 30; racist fantasy and 20–21, 23–25,
Index 307
27–28, 55–56; Real enjoyment of function of pervert 173–175;
nonbelonging 31; and superego 45–46 see also pervert
Enlightenment: and, triptych of Reason, future anterior 5, 68, 79
Dialectic, and categorical imperative Future of an Illusion (Freud) 86
288; and, universalism 289
erogenous zones 248, 257; see also orifice Garner, Eric 221, 261
Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan) 158, 219 gaze 170, 206, 213–214
ethnoclass 74 George, Sheldon 10, 13n5, 23, 32, 36,
Ethno-psychiatry 87 37, 55–56, 83, 97n11, 106, 107, 109,
existential humanism 285 111–119, 146, 147, 150, 154, 160,
ex-sist 243, 257 160n1, 161n17, 216, 241–261, 281n2,
excessive jouissance 292–294; 281n7, 299, 300, 303, 304n5; Trauma
see also jouissance and Race: A Lacanian Study of African
external reality 152–153 American Racial Identity 23, 55, 161n17,
extimacy 97; extimate 89, 97, 131 261n9, 281n2, 281n7
Extimité (Jacques Alain-Miller) 36; Gilroy, Paul 108–112
see also Miller, Jacques Alain God face 252–256
God Help the Child (novel) 186;
Fanon, Frantz 3, 6, 11, 84, 87–89, 123, see also Morrison, Toni
188; Black Skin, White Masks 11, 23, 79, Gone with the Wind 174
87, 126, 214; A Dying Colonialism 88; Gordon, Lewis 292
“The Fact of Blackness” 287–289; The Graham, David 52
Wretched of the Earth 84, 87 grammar of suffering 209
fantasmatic possessions 140–141 “Great Replacement theory” 65, 71, 76
fantasy 2, 4–7, 20–21, 31–32, 93, 139, group identification 146–147, 153–155,
192–193; collective 21; disavowal and 159, 246–247
56; and enjoyment 20–21, 23–25, group pathology 146–147; forms of
55–56; hip hop music and 30–31; identification and 147–151; unary trait
object 22–23; in racist society 22; site and raced fantasm 151–154
of enjoyment in 27; structure of 22–25; Group Psychology (Freud) 85–86, 147
unconscious 21 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner 174
feminine jouissance 261; see also jouissance
and Other jouissance Haeckel, Ernst 84
Ferreira da Silva, Denise 216–217 hainamoration 179, 252–256
fetishistic disavowal; see also disavowal of Hall, Stanley G. 84–85
race; and Confederate signifiers 54–55; Hall, Stuart 126
role in racism 54–55; of slavery 55–56; Hamlet 241
South Burlington Rebels 56–59 hang-up 175–177
Fink, Bruce 89–90 Hansen, Emmanuel 87
flagellation 251 Hartman, Saidiya 210
Floyd, George 221, 261 hate-speech, racist 41
Fort/da game 169 headless subject/headless subjectivity
Foucault, Michel 167 245, 252; see also racism as headless
The Four Fundamental Concepts of subjectivity
Psychoanalysis (Lacan) 214, 216, 223 Hispanics 189; see also Latin/Latino
Freud and the Invention of Jewishness (Betty Historia de Las Indias (Friar Bartolomé de
Fuks) 206 las Casas) 184
Freud, Sigmund 2, 5, 6, 8, 83–86, 146, Holliday, Jason 165, 170–171;
183–184, 187, 190, 200–201, 241; see also Portrait of Jason
Freud’s theory of the subject 54 hommelette 245; see also lamella
full speech 67–68 homophobia 166, 170, 171, 175, 177
308 Index
Hook, Derek 4, 7, 13n5, 32n8, 35–48, 83, jouissance 37–38, 83, 138–139, 167, 198,
86, 88, 97n13, 97n15, 97n19, 98, 209–212, 250; see also another jouissance;
110–111, 117, 121–145, 160n1, see also excessive jouissance; and
160n7, 299, 300, 303 excessive feature(s) of the other 42–44;
Hudson, Peter 286 feminine 261n3; libidinal treasure 42;
Huntington, Samuel 37 modes of 41–44; Other, 258; other,
hustler 8, 165, 166, 171, 173, 177–178 250–254, 257, 258; Other’s 177–178,
198; payment 45; as psychologically
ideal-ego 147, 149–150, 258; ideal-egos reductionist 38–39; race and 113–114;
147–151 role of, in politics of racial/cultural
identification 21, 26, 29, 67, 74, 78, division 36; substitute 251–252; thrill
115–117, 134, 137, 146–156, 159, 174, of hate 41; as undifferentiated, overly
228–229, 235, 245–247, 250–251; inclusive concept 39–41; use in
see also racial identification, conceptually decontextualized
alienation and separation manner 45–46
ideological rewards of apartheid Joyce, James 84, 89, 92
139–142; see also apartheid
imaged signifier 158 Kahnawà:ke 83, 93–94
Imagine There’s No Woman (Joan Copjec) 27 Kahnawa’kehró:non 84, 94–95
Immorality Act of 1950 138, 141 kanji 9, 224–227, 229, 231–233;
implicit bias 20, 21; see also bias and see also Japanese writing system
unconscious bias Khalfa, Jean 87
“The Inconvenient Truth,” 65 Khan, Azeen 13n8, 90
Indian Act, 1876 93–94 kinship bond 66, 67, 73
Indian status 93–94 Kojiki 225
Indigeneity 95 Ku Klux Klan 24–25, 52
Indigenous Peoples 83–84 Kunkle, Sheila 117
Instinct 89
inter-dit 256 Lacan, Jacques 26, 35, 54, 65, 68, 89–92,
The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud) 86 105–106, 116, 146, 223, 241–242,
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being 244–247, 260–261, 300, 302–304 and,
(Christina Sharpe) 214, 215, 218–219 desire 285; see also Television; The Real
invasive unconscious 90 289–291; The Symbolic 285–286, 290
invidia 250–251, 254; see also substitute Lacan’s graph of desire 147–148
jouissance and jealouissance lack, importance of 54–56
invocatory drive 248, 257; see also drive lack in the Other 115–116
Irish 74, 91, 92, 254–255 Lafargue Clinic 187
Lafargue, Paul 187
Japan and Japanese subject 224, lamella 3, 10, 245, 263–283;
228–229; Kanji and Buddhism see also hommelette
231–233; littoral in Japanese Larsen, Nella 7, 154–156;
imagination 227–231; littoral see also Quicksand (novel)
transference and the inter-signifier Las Casas, Bartolomé de 184–185
identity 233–236; between on-yomi and Latin/Latino 186, 187, 189, 199;
kun-yomi 225–227 see also Hispanic
Japanese writing system 224; on-yomi and “the law of antimiscegenation” 67
kun-yomi 225–227; see also kanji law of language 78–79
jealouissance 250–251; see also substitute laws of racial kinship 73–74
jouissance and invidia lay curers of souls 201
Jim crow 5, 10, 55, 176, 258 Lee, Carl 169, 170
Jim Crow laws 25, 52, 53, 57, 58 Legman, Gershon 88
Johnston, Adrian 124, 290 libidinal treasure 42
Index 309
libido 39–40, 263–264, 267 multiracialism 77
littoral in Japanese imagination 227–231;
see also Japan and Japanese subject name of the father 73, 74; see also the law
Lituraterre (Lacan’s essay) 227–228, 231 Nancy, Jean-Luc 201
llanguage 256; see also racism narcissism 190, 246–247, 258; of minor
losange 242, 248 differences 190
Lundberg, Christian 68 National Rifle Association 42
lynching 28, 72, 176, 253; black negativity: and, the Real 289–291; as,
enjoyment and 28–30; castration, role antagonism 285; as, asignificative
of 29; racist fantasy and 29–30; sexual 294–296; as, deadlock 286–287, 290
enjoyment and violence in 29 neurotic’s individual myth 198
New Jim Crow 55; see also Alexander,
Macdougall, Brenda 83 Michelle
manifesto 67, 78–79; in Lacan’s Nobiss, Christine 71–72
explication of rhetoric and analysand’s
speech 68–71; laws of racial kinship object a 7, 42–45, 48, 127, 136–137,
73–74; Patrick Crusius’s 75, 77; 140–143, 150, 211, 212, 242, 245–251,
Tarrant’s 65, 76, 79; unconscious 253–255, 260; see also race as
whiteness in 70, 78–79; white Oedipus Complex, in colonial context
nationalist shooters and 69–73 83–89; Fanon on 87–89; Freud on
Mannoni, Octave 87–88 84–86; Lacan on 89–92; Mbembe
marital alliance 76–77 on 93–95
Marxist/Structuralist accounts of One-alone, signifier 159
ideology 124 Ontology: as deadlock 286–290; as lack
masochist 178 116; as radical negativity 285–287
master’s discourse 90, 289 oral drive 248, 251; see also drive
master signifier 113–115, 118, 210, 225, orifice 248, 260; see also erogenous zones
227, 255, 256, 259; see also S1 the Other 7, 19–21, 26–27, 31, 42–44,
Mbembe, Achille 84, 88, 93–95 55, 56, 70, 105–106, 113–116,
metalanguage 108, 109 123–125, 126, 129–139, 142–143, 148,
metaphor 66, 69, 74, 87, 137, 189, 207, 151, 166–167, 169, 172–175, 178, 190,
255, 256 198–199, 206, 208–213, 208–214, 216,
metonymy 69, 74, 256 228, 241, 247, 250–251;
Mickey Mouse 257 see also mOther
midwife to the soul 200 the other 19–21, 26, 27, 42–44, 55, 56,
Migiwa (Niimura Shin) 234 70, 116, 126, 151, 190, 199, 208–214,
Milestone Films 169–170, 179 247, 250–251
Miller, Jacques-Alain 2, 13n8, 35, 36, 39, Other jouissance 258, 261n3;
241–242, 261n11 see also feminine jouissance
minstrelsy 242, 252, 254–255, 257; other jouissance 250–254, 257, 258;
see also blackface see also jouissance
mirror stage 9, 92, 170 Other’s desire 133, 134
miscegenation 77, 88; miscegenation
taboo 88 Park, Linette 72
Mitchell, W.J.T. 106–110 partial drive 246–248, 255, 257;
model of neurosis 159 see also drive
Mohawk Interruptus (Audra Simpson) 93 Patterson, Orlando 205
Morrison, Toni 186; see also God Help the Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi) 45
Child (novel) perversion 3, 7, 149, 150, 166–167
the mOther 116, 132–133, 135, 241, 247, pervert: discourse of 166–167; function of
251–253, 256; see also the Other 173–175; and law 177–180
mottle 249, 261 phallocracy 84, 93–95
Mulligan, Buck 92 phallus 45, 86, 88–89, 90, 92, 93, 246
310 Index
phantasmatic reward 140 society and 29–30; as desire 123–127;
phrenology 250 desire and enjoyment and 26; as
Pinker, Steven 41 headless subjectivity 252; as jouissance
planetary humanism 109 ( see jouissance); and knowledge 20; as
plus-de-jouir 35 llanguage, 256; and psychoanalysis
Pogrund, Benjamin 121 175–177; and racist fantasy 20–21, 25;
point de capiton 113 as theft of enjoyment 35–48;
Poitier, Sidney 174 unconscious in 19–20
police/policing 5, 24–25, 28, 55, 66–67, racist disavowal 110–111;
72, 168, 194–195, 208, 216, 218, 247 see also disavowal of race
polymorphous 86, 245, 248 racist fantasy; see fantasy
poor people, and psychoanalysis 199–200 racist signifier, evolution of 53
Portrait of Jason 165–180 racist speech 41
post-racial discourse 109–110 radicalization 66
post-structuralist approach 111 Rankine, Claudia 220
Proposition of 9 October 1967 (Jacques Real enjoyment of nonbelonging 31
Lacan) 35 recapitulation thesis 84, 87
psychoanalysis 183, 199–201, 259–261; Red, White and Black (Frank Wilderson)
afropessimism and 205–220; body in 209, 210, 213–214
195; clinical vignettes (barrio stories) repetition 55, 142, 172, 206, 229–230
188–200; poor people and 199–200; Rome Discourse 65, 68
role of racism in construction of Rothenberg, Molly Anne 32n7, 114
identity 188–195; souls and 183–188;
traumatic experience and 195–199; S1 113, 209, 210, 213–214, 217, 259,
universal claims of 206 260; see also master signifier
psychoanalytic theory 122, 261, S2 113, 209, 210, 213, 259
284–285, 299 Said, Edward 129
psychoanalytic treatment 188 Salecl, Renata 139
psychological reductionism 37, 38–39 Saussure, Ferdinand de 112, 244
Puerto Rican Syndrome 186 school mascot in South Burlington, battle
over 56; fetish objects, dislodging
Quicksand (novel) 154–156; see also Larsen, 59–61; South Burlington Rebels
Nella 56–59; winning local battle 61–62
school segregation 187–188
race: agency beyond the Symbolic Schulman, Sarah 165
112–114; disavowal of 110–112; as scopic drive 248, 249, 257; see also drive
medium 107–109; as object a 247, 255; screen 61, 62, 107, 192
as object a and medium of jouissance Secrets of the Soul (Eli Zaretsky) 183
113–114; and racism 109; traversing Seminar VI, Desire and Its Interpretation 158
fantasy of 114–119 Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
race-blind universalist belief 187 158–160, 219, 253
racial identification 6–7, 245–249; separation 6, 7, 105–106, 115–117,
see also identification 122–123, 134–136, 139–140, 156, 167,
racial inheritance 24 211, 247; see also identification and
racial mixture 77 alienation
racial oppression 53 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de 184
racial other 4, 21, 23–25, 27–31, 75, 246, Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana 2, 32n1, 115,
250, 252, 254, 259 118, 242
racial violence 67, 68 settler “homemaking” 6, 83
racial whiteness 2, 66, 67, 77, 260 settler-state 6, 83–84; as
racism 1–11, 19–21, 27, 29–31, 35, 53, phallocracy 93–95
55–58, 66, 95, 106, 109, 113, 121–123, Sexton, Jared 67, 77–78, 207, 219
130–131; see also apartheid; American sexual difference 2, 12, 242
Index 311
sexuation 3, 10, 12, 242–243, 247, 258 “The Fact of Blackness” 287–289;
sex worker 168, 173 see also Fanon, Frantz
Sharpe, Christina 9, 214–215, 219–220 Television (Lacan) 2, 35, 261n11;
shit 260 see also Lacan, Jacques
Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies The colonized: and, Master’s
(Friar Bartolomé de las Casas) 184 discourse 289
signifier 51, 112; Confederate theft of enjoyment thesis 4, 36–41, 47,
( see Confederate signifiers ); crisis of the 191, 195, 211
white signifier 76; imaged 158; master the law 73–75; see also name of the father
113–115, 118, 210, 225, 227, 255, 256, The zone of nonbeing 10–11; as,
259; One-alone 159; racist 53; subject paradox 292
and 105–106 Totem and Taboo (Freud) 85
signifier of the barred Other 253 Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African
sinthome 92 American Racial Identity (Sheldon
skepticism 116–117; see also cynicism and George) 23, 55, 161n17, 261n9,
Casanova 281n2, 281n7; see also George, Sheldon
skin 10, 11, 118–119, 190, 263–283 trieb 40; see also drive
slave 25, 55–56, 72, 174, 184, 210, 216, trisexual 170, 176
251–252, 254; see also slavery Trump Administration 35
slavery 5, 10, 53, 55, 57–60, 62, 112–113, Trump, Donald John 46, 137, 260
115, 146, 156, 184, 185, 205, 207–209, Tuck, Eve 83
216, 250–252; see also slave; afterlife of Tupinambá, Gabriel 146
210, 215, 218, 219; and antiblackness Turtle Island 84, 87, 91
210; fetishistic disavowal of 55–56; and
racism 115 Ulysses (James Joyce) 92
social death 205, 207 unary trait 147, 151–154, 156, 159,
Soler, Colette 215 160n8, 228, 237n11
soulove 247, 250, 253 unconscious bias 3, 19–20, 256;
South Burlington, Vermont 51–52 see also bias, implicit bias
Southern Poverty Law Center 51, 57 unconscious investment, in racism 19–20;
speech 69–70 see also racism
Spillers, Hortense 206, 208 The Uses of Enchantment (Bruno
split subject 53, 54, 136, 300 Bettelheim) 183
Staub, Erwin 66
stereotypes, working of 111 Valladolid Debate 184–185
subject, and signifier 105–106 Van Kirk, Sylvia 83
subject-Other relation 136–137 Verhaeghe, Paul 116
sublimation 7, 9, 159, 217–220, 233 Viego, Antonio 105–106
substitute jouissance 251–252; see also invidia vigilante 67, 71–73; violence 67, 72;
and jealouissance white nationalist 74–75, 77–79
superego 208–214 vigilantism 71–73
supra-agency 128–130 violence, vigilante act of 67, 72
Symbolic identification 134 von Boheemen, Christine 91–92
Symbolic Law of the white father Voting Rights Act of 1965 53
67–68, 76–77
symptomatic reading: as strategic
misreading 284–285 wake work 9, 219–220; see also Sharpe,
Christina
Wertham, Fredric 187, 188
Taboo 85–86, 88 Whitebook, Joel 86
Tamez, Margo 91 white identity 69
Tarrant, Brenton 65, 67, 70, 71, 74, 79 white marital alliance 76–77
312 Index
white nationalism 65–66, 68–71 Wright, Richard 187, 188
white nationalist shooters 69–71, 74; Wynter, Sylvia 74, 75
see also vigilante
whiteness 2, 5, 66–67, 70, 73–80, 115, xenophobia 35, 43, 189
118, 153, 217, 254–255, 258–260
white racism 56 Yang, K. Wayne 83
Wilderson, Frank 206, 208, 209,
215–216
Wolfe, Patrick 91, 91 Zižek, Slavoj 35–46, 107, 117, 191
Woman 253; The Woman 252 Zupancic, Alenka 139, 159
The Wretched of the Earth (Frantz Fanon)
84, 87; see also Fanon, Frantz

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“‘Lacan” and “race” seem two totally disparate notions: obscure French

theory, brutal social struggles… However, this book provides an explosive

‘Written at a time of heightened polarization, xenophobia, and ethno-

This edited volume draws upon Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to examine

Sheldon George is professor and chair of English at Simmons University,

Derek Hook is an associate professor of Psychology at Duquesne University,

Trust and Trauma

Self and Other in an Age of Uncertain Meaning

ISBN: 978-0-367-34192-3 (hbk)

Introduction: theorizing race, racism, and racial

1 The bedlam of the lynch mob: racism and enjoying

2 Pilfered pleasure: on racism as “the theft of enjoyment” 35

3 Confederate signifiers in Vermont: fetish objects and

4 The function and field of speech and language in white

5 Oedipal Empire: psychoanalysis, Indigenous Peoples,

6 In medium race: traversing the fantasy of post-race

7 The object of apartheid desire: a Lacanian approach to

8 Raced group pathologies and cultural sublimation 146

9 Race, perversion, and jouissance in Portrait of Jason 165

10 The lost souls of the barrio: Lacanian psychoanalysis in

11 Dereliction: Afropessimism, anti-Blackness, and

12 Japanese inter-signifier subjects: jouissance in the locus of

13 The Lacanian subject of race: sexuation, the drive, and

15 Fanon’s “zone of nonbeing”: Blackness and the politics

Afterword: there is only one race… 299

Gautam Basu Thakur is associate professor of English and director of the

Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory has enjoyed extensive growth as a form

Reading racism through Lacan

Racial identification and the subversion of race

Race and the clinic

Theorizing the racialized Lacanian subject

Reading racism through

Where is the other?

The “theft of enjoyment” thesis

Jouissance is precisely what grounds the alterity of the Other … It is in its

What is immediately striking in these extracts is the role played by affect, or

Jouissance: unserviceable tool of political analysis?

Critique 1: the notion of enjoyment as

What is at stake in ethnic tensions is always [a kind of ] possession: the

The depoliticization (indeed, the implicit psychologization) inherent in such a

a way of explaining racism that ignore … not only racism’s socio-

Critique 2: enjoyment as an undifferentiated, overly-

Critique 3: a conflation of different modes…?

…and the excessive feature(s) of the other

What does our “intolerance” towards foreigners feed on? … Although we

We know, of course, that the fundamental status of the object is to be

the other’s jouissance is insupportable for us because (and insofar as) we

Racism then, following Žižek’s Lacanian critique, is not most fundamentally

The evolution of a racist signifier

South Burlington Rebels

Dislodging the racist fetish object

Winning the local battle

Vigilantism invokes impersonal obligation in the white nationalist Imaginary

The manifesto establishes the subsequent shooting as an exchange with the

Introduction: Oedipalized wards

Freud: the imperishability of “the primitive mind”

Prehistoric man, in the various stages of his development, is known to us

By comparing the taboos of “primitives” and obsessional neurotics, “who

If psychiatry is the medical technique that aims to enable man to no