Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory (Psychology and the Other)

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. Lacan and Race Cover -1 Endorsements 2 Half Title 4 Series Page 5 Title Page 6 Copyright Page 7 Contents 8 Contributors 11 Introduction: theorizing race, racism, and racial identification 14 Reading racism through Lacan 16 Racial identification and the subversion of race 19 Race and the clinic 20 Theorizing the racialized Lacanian subject 22 Conclusion 24 Notes 25 References 26 Part I: Reading racism through Lacan 30 1. The bedlam of the lynch mob: racism and enjoying through the other 32 Where is the other? 32 The structure of the fantasy 35 The otherness of our own enjoyment 39 Notes 45 References 46 2. Pilfered pleasure: on racism as "the theft of enjoyment" 48 Introduction 48 The "theft of enjoyment" thesis 49 Jouissance: unserviceable tool of political analysis? 50 Critique 1: the notion of enjoyment as psychologically reductionist 51 Critique 2: enjoyment as an undifferentiated, overly-inclusive concept 52 Critique 3: a conflation of different modes...? 54 Libidinal treasures... 55 ...and the excessive feature(s) of the other 55 Critique 4: a lack of adequate conceptual contextualization 58 Conclusion 60 References 61 3. Confederate signifiers in Vermont: fetish objects and racist enjoyment 64 The evolution of a racist signifier 66 The importance of lack 67 South Burlington Rebels 69 Dislodging the racist fetish object 72 Winning the local battle 74 Notes 76 References 77 4. The function and field of speech and language in white nationalist manifestoes 78 Introduction 78 The manifesto 81 The vigilante 84 The law 86 Crisis 89 Conclusion 93 Notes 93 References 94 5. Oedipal Empire: psychoanalysis, Indigenous Peoples, and the Oedipus Complex in colonial context 96 Introduction: Oedipalized wards 96 Freud: the imperishability of "the primitive mind" 97 Fanon: colonization is not a metaphor 100 Lacan: the settler-colonial return of the repressed 102 Mbembe: the settler-state as phallocracy 106 Conclusion: Oedipus as "colonization pursued by other means" 108 Acknowledgment 108 Notes 109 References 111 Part II: Racial identification and the subversion of race 116 6. In medium race: traversing the fantasy of post-race discourse 118 Introduction 118 In medium race: the trap of "seeing through" 120 Against and post race 122 Disavowal of race 123 "Agency beyond the Symbolic:" cause and negativity 125 "Agency beyond the Symbolic:" race as objet a and medium of jouissance 126 Traversing the fantasy of race: subjectification over distance 127 Notes 132 References 132 7. The object of apartheid desire: a Lacanian approach to racism and ideology 134 The ultimate racism in the world 134 I. Racism as desire 136 Coetzee's dilemmas: reading "the mind of apartheid" 136 II. Fantasmatic transactions: exchanges of desire between subject and Other 140 Phantom agency 140 Lacan as theorist of apartheid ideology 144 Alienation in the Symbolic Other 147 Separation: an overlapping of lacks 147 The sublime object (a) of apartheid ideology 149 Is the big Other racist? 151 The rewards of fantasy 152 Conclusion 155 Notes 156 References 157 8. Raced group pathologies and cultural sublimation 159 The paradoxes and pathologies of identification 160 The unary trait and the raced fantasm 164 Desire and Atè in Nella Larsen's Quicksand 167 Toward a new kind of group 170 Notes 173 References 174 Part III: Race and the clinic 176 9. Race, perversion, and jouissance in Portrait of Jason 178 Perversion: a Lacanian formulation 179 Portrait of Jason 180 Who is Jason Holliday? 183 Is identity a hustle? 184 The function of the pervert 186 Racism and psychoanalysis: the "hang-up" 188 The law 190 Conclusion 193 Acknowledgments 193 Notes 193 References 194 10. The lost souls of the barrio: Lacanian psychoanalysis in the Ghetto 196 Soul searching 199 Barrio's souls 201 Conclusion: lay curers of souls 213 Notes 214 References 215 11. Dereliction: Afropessimism, anti-blackness, and Lacanian psychoanalysis 218 Introduction 218 Section 1: epistemology and ontology 219 Section 2: antiblackness: the other and the superego 221 Section 3: the Lacanian Real as an approach to an afropessimist reading of antiblackness 227 Section 4: clinical reflections 230 Section 5: art and sublimation, or an insistence on living in the "shadow of social death" 230 Notes 233 References 234 12. Japanese inter-signifier subjects: jouissance in the locus of the character 236 Introduction 236 I The Japanese speaking subject—between on-yomi and kun-yomi 238 II Between the mountains and the sea—the importance of the littoral in the Japanese imagination 240 III Kanji and Buddhism producing subjects of speech between sea and mountain 244 IV A littoral transference and the inter-signifier identity in the locus of the character 246 V Conclusion 249 Acknowledgment 249 Notes 249 References 250 Part IV: Theorizing the racialized Lacanian subject 252 13. The Lacanian subject of race: sexuation, the drive, and racial subjectivity 254 The two expressive modes of Lacanian subjectivity and the subject's two lacks 255 ∀x Φx: The object a, identification and the racialized body 258 ∃xΦx ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄: Race and the other jouissance that shouldn't be 263 The unconscious insistence of race: the God face and hainamoration 265 ∃x ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄Φx ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄: Racism and ahistorical, unSymbolized jouissance 269 ∀x ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ Φx: Trauma, a jouissance that is not phallic jouissance 270 Conclusion 273 Notes 274 References 274 14. Skin-things, fleshy matters, and phantasies of race: Lacan's myth of the lamella 276 The erogeneous body of the drive 279 The epidermalized body as signifier and the phantasy of incorporeality 284 The fleshy body: reattaching the skin-thing 289 Conclusion: phantasms of race 293 Notes 293 References 294 15. Fanon's "zone of nonbeing": Blackness and the politics of the Real 297 The zone of nonbeing as radical negativity 298 From nonbeing to Blackness 300 Blackness as the Real 302 Blackness and the question of violence 304 The New Man: a cut instead of a conclusion 307 Notes 309 References 310 Afterword: there is only one race... 312 Notes 317 References 317 Index 318 "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 from 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; Latinx and other racialized groups; apartheid and American slavery; 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 and appeal to readers across the fields of psychology, cultural studies, humanities, politics, and sociology"-- Provided by publisher