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
 The Lacanian subject of race 245

(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
 The Lacanian subject of race 247
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

 The Lacanian subject of race 249
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
 The Lacanian subject of race 251
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

 The Lacanian subject of race 253
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
 The Lacanian subject of race 255
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.
 The Lacanian subject of race 257
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
 The Lacanian subject of race 259
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
 The Lacanian subject of race 261
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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