Original Article

From alienation to cynicism: Race and the

Lacanian unconscious
Sheldon George
Simmons College, 300 The Fenway, Boston, MA, 02115 USA.
E-mail: sheldon.george@simmons.edu

Abstract Positing race as the Lacanian object a that binds the subject to a fantasyself alienated from its subjective drives, this article presents the traversal of race as an
ethical responsibility, made increasingly achievable by the recent public focus on repeated incidents of deadly violence against African American men.
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2014) 19, 360378. doi:10.1057/pcs.2014.36;
published online 16 October 2014
Keywords: the unconscious; Ferguson; drive; object a; African Americans; alienation

Introduction
Perhaps best captured in the familiar phrase race is a social construct,
contemporary scholarly thinking about race has been more influenced by
poststructuralist theories of language and social reality than by psychoanalytic
conceptions of the subjective psyche that interacts with this social world
through the semiotics of language. Directed by a sense that psychoanalytic
theory does not sufficiently privilege the social for it to be readily applied to the
study of race, even theorists amiable to psychoanalysis have asserted that
Lacanian theory in particular has no eyes for the grammar and politics of
power (Spillers, 1997, p. 140). What I would like to examine, however, are
the ways in which a Lacanian reading of the unconscious can bridge the social
and the psychic to define race as an apparatus of being, as a tool for masking
the central lack of subjectivity. By reading the unconscious as the gap or
passageway through which lack finds expression in the social sphere, or, as
Jacques Lacan called it, the Symbolic, I will argue that race functions to occlude
the space of this gap and thereby compounds the alienation in the Symbolic that
is experienced by the subject. Through a reading of the drive, which manifests
the loss that eruptively presents itself in the gaps of the unconscious, I will

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describe the process of cynically questioning and mapping ones relation to race, as
a necessary step in what Lacan called a traversal of the fundamental fantasy of
subjective wholeness.
We begin to circumscribe the function of race with regard to this fantasy by
inquiring into the source of the cross-temporal resilience of notions of race in
America. The relation, in particular, of African Americans to race reveals a
noticeable paradox. Though direct or indirect reference to race is the central
means through which discrimination of African Americans has been justified
in America, African Americans most often embrace the concept of their own
racial identity. Emerging from the successes of the Civil Rights Movement, an
identity politics based on unification along racial lines continues to hold sway for
African Americans. Whatever credence they give to the existential value of race,
African Americans frequently argue for races value in a sort of poststructuralist
approach to agency, whereby the subject must seek to appropriate and redefine the
signifiers that define the subject. This is the approach extolled by renowned African
American scholar Houston Baker, who declares that African Americans should
embrace a politics of liberating manipulation and revolutionary renaming
(1989, p. 25) that employs language as a black defense against and revision of
ancient terrors, mistaken identities, dread losses (2001, p. 5). What I suggest,
however, is that race holds such appeal even for African Americans because the
losses against which it defends are not merely social, but also psychic.1 Adherence to
race is directed by an effort to recover what I would call an illusion of being.
Being is what the subject loses of herself through entrance into the world of
language that Lacan called the Symbolic. Forced to exist within this Symbolic, the
subject is alienated from her being, from all aspects of the self that escape
submission to the hermeneutics of the signifier in its ability to define and name the
subjective self that always extends beyond language. This self is what is mourned
through a search for the Lacanian object a, the fantasy object within the
Symbolic, often pinned to the other as mate, that promises the subject completion. But it is also, I suggest, what is pinned to the racial other, as a living medium
through which fantasies of race articulate for the subject an illusory relation to
being. In such fantasies, the racial other can be constituted as comprised of a
being totally different from the subjective self. Lacan made the striking assertion
that a solid hatred is addressed to being (1998a, p. 99). In the American
Symbolic, structured by a history of racism, what urges subjects toward a process
of racial othering through use of ready-made fantasies of race is precisely the
attempt to establish the selfs and the others divergent relations to being.
The subject most effectively establishes the others relation to being by pinning
fantastical meaning to the others perceived jouissance, or mode of enjoyment
the pleasures and actions which may signal to subjects that this other has the a,
the fantasy object that grants completion. Inherent in the racism of today, I argue,
is the recycling of signifiers of the past that incorporate notions of African
Americans relation to a distinctly different jouissance of being. We see this, for
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example, in the recent shooting of Jordan Davis, an African American teenage

boy who was shot at ten times and killed by a white man named Michael Dunn
because Davis and his friends were parked in a gas station playing their rap music
too loud for Dunns liking. Aiming his hatred at their particular form of
jouissance and arguing that this gangster-rap, ghetto talking thug culture that
certain segments of society flock to is intolerable (February 20th), Dunn shot at
the boys because, he says, the way they behaved in response to his request
that they turn down the music was obnoxious, causing him to conclude that
everybody in the car was a thug or a gangster (Trial, Day 5). Admitting to
possibly imagining that the boys had a gun, Dunn grounds his fears of the boys
in fantasies that define their jouissance as other, dangerous: he explains, You
know, you hear enough news stories and you read about these things, they go
through your mind (Trial, Day 5).
The circulation of these things in the minds of Americans is rooted in a
Symbolic that remains bound to signifiers of the past that secured a sense of being
for white Americans. The specific experience of slavery, I argue, produced an
eruptive surplus of illicit jouissance for white Americans, a surplus of pleasure
that flooded this past and still threatens to saturate the present. Where Lacan
defined jouissance as fundamentally evil for its unbending drive toward the
bliss of being, jouissance designates a pleasure beyond the Symbolic, one for
which the subject will destroy both the self and the other who occupy this
Symbolic (1997, p. 184). It is by making jouissance accessible through the
suffering body of the black racial other that slavery produced a particular mode
of enjoyment, a way of accessing pleasure that resounds in the present. At the
heart of this mode of jouissance is the oppression of black others whose supposed
inferiority secures for white Americans a notion of superiority and greater being.
Where the a that signals a relation to being is only imagined, jouissance as a
visible mode of enjoyment that distinguishes self from other, and racial group
from racial group, functions as an index of being. But the fantasy a, this object
that puts itself in the place of what cannot be glimpsed of the other, is the true
source of this others alterity (1998a, p. 63). Through the object a, race functions
as what I would call, after Lacan, the para-being, the being beside, which is
substitute[d]for the being that would take flight (p. 44). This para-being is
what Lacan linked to a notion of the soul. Where in the Western tradition the
association of supreme being with God is expressed in the biblical statement,
I am the one who is, by which God asserts his identity with Being, the subject
only achieves a sense of being through the fantasy object a, the function of which
is precisely to present itself as a semblance of being, as that which give[s] us
the basis of being (p. 95). The object a presents itself as a remainder (p. 6),
a remnant of the lost being, grounding itself as the source of the soul that links
us to God (p. 84). In this manner, we may read race as a form of what Lacan
called soul loving, whereby individuals of the same race love each other as the
same in the Other, love each other as a mirrored self that contains the very same
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object the subject is in pursuit of, the object belonging to the self but absent from
the self (p. 85).
This object, as a missing remnant of the self found in the other of the same race,
constitutes, I suggest, a fundamental essentialism inherent in race. At root, it is the
notion of an essential fantasy sameness, an illusory core-self identifiable in the
other of the same race, that binds the subject to his or her racial partner as
complement. Such sameness, sought in the other, is rooted in what Lacan called
the extimacy of the self, the selfs constitution by the extremity of [an] intimacy
that is at the same time excluded internally (2013, p. 16).2 This internal
exclusion of the subject is what is most fully embodied by the unconscious as an
intimate but external agency structured by the signifiers of the Symbolic. It is thus
the extimate unconscious that we must first isolate in our understanding of the
psychic functions of race.

Race and Psychic Alienation

The extimacy of the unconscious is most properly an effect of the signifier that
grants subjectivity by alienating the subject in its limited meanings. This
alienation, I will argue, is compounded by the signifiers of race, which contribute
to the very structuring of the unconscious. Lacan defined this structure by tying
the psychic to the social in a reading of the unconscious as constituted by the
effects of speech on the subject, effects that cause the unconscious to be itself
structured like a language (1998b, p. 149). Asserting that fifty years before
the linguists (p. 46), Freud reduced everything, as far as the unconscious is
concerned, to the function of pure signifiers (p. 40), Lacan described the
unconscious as comprised of signifiers that form a signifying chain: these
signifiers structure the unconscious like language because they interlink with one
another, because they form links by which a necklace firmly hooks onto a link
of another necklace made of links (p. 418). But it is important to note that these
links are not merely arbitrary or random. Expanding upon the work of linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure, Lacan maintained that, rather than qualifying it as
arbitrary, Saussure would have done better to qualify the signifier with the
category of contingency (1998a, p. 40). For Lacan, it is contingency that grants
the unconscious its structure.
Providing the unconscious a structural organization determined by temporality, contingency is what binds the unconscious to the past in ways that facilitate
the continuation of the jouissance of race in the present. Lacan explained this
contingency by distinguishing between what he called cause which is linked
to impediment, failure, split (1998b, p. 25) and the law of the signifier
(p. 23). It can be argued that what linguists like Saussure identify is this law of the
signifier, whereby signifiers operate through themes of opposition (p. 20) and
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functions of contrast and similitude, to form what Lacan termed a synchrony

that structures the signifiers into their chain-like links (p. 46). As Lacan
explained, however, it is not only a network formed by random and contiguous
associations that is involved in this synchrony, for the signifiers were able to
constitute themselves simultaneously only by virtue of a very defined structure of
constituent diachrony (p. 46). It is this diachronic linking of signifiers,
punctuated across time, that reveals the unconscious to be structured contingently around a cause, around something anti-conceptual, something indefinite (p. 22). What organizes the signifiers is, most broadly, jouissance, the
moments of bliss, defined by a surplus of pleasure and pain, around which
the signifiers rally themselves. I tie this cause in the racist American Symbolic to
the trauma of slavery, defining slavery as a social event of the past that temporally
structures a diachronic relation to jouissance.3 Organizing the Symbolic around
signifiers of race that mediate psychic pleasure, this past produces race as a crosstemporal mode of access to the jouissance of being.
What slavery entailed at both a social and psychic level in the past, and what
racism continues in the present, is a traumatic attack upon subjective fantasies
of being for African Americans, fantasies that African Americans attempt to
reaffirm through a revaluing of their racial identity. However, race itself, I argue,
exacerbates for African Americans the function of barring, the striking out of
another thing that Lacanian theory establishes to be inherent in the subjects
relation to the Others signifier, where the Other is the Symbolic order itself, the
universe of meaning that deprives the subject of a psychic sense of being (1998b,
p. 26). Initially serving to define the slave as chattel, as a mere signifier in a
monetary system of exchange, race contributes to the aphanisis (p. 207) or
fading of the subject, who is forced to attain subjectivity via the signifier of the
Other through a lethal (p. 208) choice Lacan called the vel of alienation
(p. 218). This alienating vel involves a compulsory and fatal choice that each
subject must make between meaning and being. Where meaning emerges through
the signifier and produces subjectivity, being is an illusory autonomy and state of
pleasure that can never fully exist within subjectivity because it requires freedom
from the signifier, and thus from subjectivity. Lacan aligned the subjects choice
with the no-win situation the slave confronts when standing face to face with his
master, your freedom or your life: what the master truly presents the slave with
is a neither one, nor the other option (p. 211), whereby if the slave chooses life,
he loses both, or is granted only a life deprived of something essentially
valuable (p. 212). Because of the subjugation justified by his racial identity, the
slave thus personifies and makes manifest the condition of alienation inherent to
all subjectivity.
This condition, as is exemplified by the slave and schematized in Figure 1
below, is one in which subjectivity, emerging through this vel, condemns the
subject so that while the subject appears on one side as meaning, produced by
the signifier of the Other, he or she appears on the other as aphanisis (p. 210).
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Figure 1: Alienation.
Source: Lacan, 1998b, p. 211.

Because choosing being means the subject disappears completely, or more

precisely, is incapable of accessing that zone of meaning that enables subjectivity,
the subject necessarily chooses meaning (p. 211); but this meaning survives
as subjectivity only while remaining deprived of that part of non-meaning
that constitutes the unconscious (p. 211). The unconscious therefore arises
through an overlapping of being and meaning, as that zone of non-meaning in
which being is written over or stricken out by the signifier (p. 211).
However, the unconscious is also the place where the signifier, and indeed the
racial signifier, overlaps with being to produce through fantasy the non-meaning
of jouissance. In the space of this gap, the signifier, recalling the structures of
pleasure emanating from the past, produces a mode of enjoyment that is
grounded in illogic, irrationality and fantasy. Such recall grants especial importance to the historical binding of the slave not just to social but also psychic
alienation. Where the slave is so fundamentally representative of the subjects
relation to being, both he and his descendants remain open to fantasy-constructs
through which the Symbolic defines the position in relation to being of its varied
occupants. And at the intersection that is the unconscious, the meanings of the
signifier coalesce with the lost being of the Real to produce unconscious,
Imaginary fantasies of the overcoming of subjective lack, fantasies that are, in
this case, grounded in the illusion of race. These illusions presume a fantasy
internal object shared cross-temporally among the varied members of the races,
an exclusionary object that if socially valorized can guarantee for each race an
illusory relation to being and the Real. Thus unconsciously bound to both the
Real and the Symbolic, race as this illusory, impossible possession this
Imaginary object a that is both within and absent from the subject ultimately
directs subjective desire toward the lost being of the Real.
Lacan presented two versions of this Real.4 The first is constructed retroactively as a fantasy state of being, autonomy and wholeness. This is the fantasy
that fuels the Imaginary of the mirror stage, wherein the child conflates him or
herself with the mOther seen in the mirror, forming the gestalt of a single self who
is misapprehended as one whole being. Where it is the onset of language that
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enables the child to distinguish between I and you, mother and child, the time
before this split retroactively arises in the childs psyche as the fantasy of a Real
past of absolute contentment and psychic completion. It is a return to this state
that race promises. But Lacan stresses that this notion of a prior totality (1998b,
p. 25), this false unity thought to exist anterior to the split initiated by language,
is nothing but a mirage (p. 26). It is not the case that this prior totality is now
absent, but rather that rupture, the splitting of the psyche into the conscious and
the unconscious, the stroke of the opening, makes absence emerge (p. 26). As
the figure above conveys, the vel grants meaning and subjectivity while simultaneously producing a Real that defies language; this second Real is represented by the
entire circle titled being in the above figure, a portion of which encircles the
unconscious. As Lacan states, the unconsciousis Real (p. vii). Racial desire thus
aims for a return to an illusory state of completion in which this Real comprising
being and the unconscious is no longer elided; and this desire expresses itself most
clearly in calls for racial unification, which, encroaching upon other more political
motivations, position the other of the same race as the missing partner, the embodied
absence as para-being, that can make the subject whole.
Here we understand the psychic urgencies that drive a perpetual, crosstemporal adherence to the concept of race. This promise to reproduce the
illusory Real of a lost wholeness emerges because the splitting of the subject is
inherently traumatic. Through pursuit of this illusory Real, the final, traumatic
truth avoided by the racial subject is that subjecthood demands both an
enduring condition of lack and a reduction of the subject to the status of a
signifier. By gaining subjectivity through the institution of lack, Lacan asserted,
this subject which, was previously nothing if not a subject coming into being
solidifies into a signifier (1998b, p. 199). Famously arguing that the
signifier is that which represents a subject for another signifier, Lacan
stressed that it is possible for each subject to gain meaning only by inserting
him or herself into a preexisting signifying chain (p. 207). The fact that
language exists prior to each subjects entry into it (2006a, p. 413), makes
the subject the slave of a discourse in which his place is already inscribed at
his birth (p. 414). Indeed, Lacans assertion that the unconscious is the
Others discourse highlights that the subject is granted meaning only through
a conflation of the self with the Other that leads to what Lacan termed the
alienation of the subject (p. 436).
The fundamental relation of alienation to the signifier grants deeper insight
into the racial subjects own alienation within the racist Symbolic. The alienated
subject of the unconscious emerges through language as what Lacan called the
S2, or the binary signifier (1998b, p. 218). This S2 is a composite of the unary
signifier pinned to the subject in the field of the Other and the signifying chain
within the Symbolic that is linked to this unary signifier (p. 218). Lacan called the
unary signifier the S1, or the first signifier, the master signifier that has no
signified (p. 218). This master signifier can be aligned with the abstract identity
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created for the child before its birth, which reduces the child to a S1. An example
of this S1 may be the simple term boy, which as an abstract master signifier
determines numerous levels of the childs identity even before birth. However,
this S1, boy, can only produce meaning for the child through its relation to other
signifiers, such as girl, which then constitute the subject as a binary S2; what
Lacan meant when he said the subject is a signifier for another signifier is
precisely that there can be meaning only when two signifiers are involved, when
we have an S2. The signifier boy, and the subject who is pinned to this signifier,
only attain meaning through those themes of opposition (p. 20) and functions
of contrast and similitude that we have already seen are essential to the
operations of the signifier (p. 46).
This fundamental dependence of the subject upon the signifier for meaning
is what grants the signifying chain of the Other the capacity to alienate and
indeed petrify the subject into a binary signifier (1998b, p. 207). The
process of petrification, by which the subjects identity is solidified in the
signifier of the Other, is in turn fortified and exacerbated by racial identity. If
we shift the S1 that determines our new subject from boy to black boy, we
encounter an identity that threatens to solidify the subject into an S2 that
produces subjective meaning in a chain of signifiers that articulate the
stereotypes of race. This racial identity becomes the ossified surface under
which is subsumed the absence that is the subjects lost being. Lacan asserted
that the binary signifier constitutes the central pointof what, from having
passed into the unconscious, will be, as Freud indicates in his theory, the point
ofattraction, through which all other repressions will be possible (p. 218).
What I suggest is that a central unconscious function of race is to stand as the
signifier facilitating the repression of all aspects of the subjective-self that are
aligned to being. If we turn to Frantz Fanon, one of the first theorists to apply
psychoanalysis to race, we can better understand how this signifier works to
produce racial identity as a central locus of fading and repression for the subject.
In chapter three of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon (1967) focused on Jean
Veneuse, a Negro, who has raised himself through his own intelligence and his
assiduous labors to the level of the thought and culture of Europe, [but] is incapable
of escaping race (p. 67). Veneuse is in love with a white European woman who
reciprocates his love, but he avoids pursuing the relationship by fearfully balancing
his love against stereotypes that say Negroes have only one thought from the
moment they land in Europe: to gratify their appetite for a white woman (p. 69).
What Fanon revealed, however, is that Veneuses fears are not tied directly to race,
but to the fact that, at heart, Jean Veneuse is an abandonment-neurotic, the
essence of whose attitude is not to love in order to avoid being abandoned
(p. 76); Fanon stressed: Jean Veneuse is a neurotic, and his color is only an attempt
to explain his psychic structure. If this objective difference had not existed, he would
have manufactured it out of nothing (p. 7879). What Fanons reading allows us
to see is the way that race emerges as the master signifier toward which all of
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Veneuses neurotic repressions are attracted. Because he embraces the signifiers and
racial identity granted him by the Symbolic Other, Veneuse, the neurotic, is thus
petrified under the racial signifier, incapable of confronting or recognizing his true
psychic structure as neurotic. In Jean Veneuse is proof for Lacans claim that a
whole series of cases of psychic disturbances can be linked to the subjects return to
or stagnation at a state in which there is no interval between S1 and S2 (1998b,
p. 237). Where race perpetuates identification with the Others signifiers, what both
Veneuse and the subject of race are in need of is a separation of the S2 binary chain
that defines them from the S1 master signifier of race.

Separation, Impaired by Race

Figure 2: The Losange.

Source: Lacan, 1998b, p. 209.

Lacan described separation as the significant step through which the subject of
desire truly emerges. As is shown in Figure 2 above, he schematized the alienating
vel through the image of a letter V, above which is placed an inverted V to
represent the reverse process of separation that completes the subjects loop of
development into full subjectivity and binds the subject to a desire that emerges in
the losange of the unconscious. In this separation, what the subject has to free
himself of is the aphanisic effect of the binary signifier (1998b, p. 219). Rooting
subjectivity in scepticism as what Lacan called a mode of sustaining man in
life (p. 224), 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
(p. 238). This cynicism, which Lacan tied to the establishment of a more personal
relation to ones own desire, constitutes what I would call an ethical stance for the
subject of race, one in which this subject comes to interrogate and reject the racial
signifiers that mandate the subjects relation to being and the Other.
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For Lacan, the significant living Other within the Symbolic is both the mOther,
who personifies the site of jouissance that is the illusory Real of wholeness, and
the paternal authority, who represents the Symbolic and its law of desire but also
facilitates alienation by granting access to the signifiers that define identity for the
subject. Not accounting particularly for race as a complicating factor in this
process of separation, Lacanian theory nonetheless shows that in separation the
subject must first move toward recognition of the desire/lack both of the subject
and of the mOther, who functions as a fantasy source of bliss. The goal here is to
shift from a stultifying obsession with being and bliss toward an embrace of the
signifier and fantasy. Lacan explained, [I]t is in so far as his desire is beyond or
falls short of what she says, of what she hints at, of what she brings out in
meaning, it is in so far as his desire is unknown, it is in this point of lack
[recognizable in the desiring mOthers meanings], that the desire of the subject is
constituted (p. 218219). By filling the gaps left in the mOthers discourse with
his own meanings and fantasies, the subject thus constitutes in the losange of his
unconscious a desire that institutes separation from the mOther.
What emerges in this separation produced by desire and fantasy is the desiring
subject whose completion of the loop from alienation to separation Lacan
presented in his formula for fantasy, $a, read as the barred subject in relation
to the fantasy object. But it is precisely a relation to this fantasy object that
complicates matters for the subject of race. Because in the racist American
Symbolic the goal of the signifier is to aggrandize the lost bliss of the Real, the
Symbolic functions actively to impair the raced subjects separation from this
Real while also fortifying this subjects alienation by the signifier. Lacanian
scholar Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks has shown that the Symbolic is structured
around the racial signifier whiteness, which functions as a master signifier by
establishing a structure of relations, a signifying chain that through a process of
inclusions and exclusions constitutes a pattern for organizing human difference
(2008, p. 4). Though securing for only whites the hierarchal fantasy of their
sovereign humanness, whiteness presents itself as the ideal to which all subjects
aspire (p. 55). Despite the subjects alienation from not only the part of the self
constituted as the non-meaning of the unconscious but also the impossible Real,
what this master signifier promises the subject is precisely access to being
(p. 45), thus directing the racial subject toward the very Real from which this
subject must separate.
It is this obsessive pursuit of the Real, thus encouraged by race, that can lead to
the violence and frustration of racism. This frustration arises because whiteness
can never reconstitute being. In truth, whiteness functions only as the object a
that merely promises wholeness by simultaneously masquerading as the phallus,
the castrated object that manifests the illusory site of bliss in the Imaginary form
of the subjective-self. Distinguishing the phallus from the organ (2006b,
p. 579), Lacan associated the phallus with Imaginary fantasies of lack, fantasies
about exclusion[s] from the specular image (p. 697). It is such fantasies of
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bodily parts falling off from the Imaginary self that define the aggressivity, or
sense of psychic fragmentation, that may lead to the aggression that invades race
relations. Whiteness produces such aggressivity because it aims at an impossible
ideal of completion that no living subject not even a white subject can ever
embody. Providing ideals both for the physical human form and for its
fragmented psychic structure that simply are unattainable, the very term white
marks its own discursive and fantasy function by defying the phenotypic reality
of all subjects. With the subject of race remaining incapable of maintaining in
actuality the two central positions in relation to being articulated by Lacanian
theory, those of either being or having the phallus, the best this subject can
do is position himself as having the fantasy object a that functions as referent to
the phallus, the illusory remainder that when positioned within the self leaves
even the white subject always one step removed from the ideal he seeks to
embody (p. 582). There is thus a fundamental frustration, insufficiency and
aggressivity awakened by this ideal called forth by the illusion of whiteness.
The problem with contemporary theoretical and political approaches to the
aggression and racism that still plague race relations today is that their frequent
reliance upon the concept of race precludes engagement with this fundamental
aggressivity produced by the concept itself. While recognizing the destructive
power and persistence of the illusion of race, the attempt made by numbers of
African American scholars is not to destroy this illusion; instead, it is to give the
illusion new mythical meaning by adopting a process of resignification that is
made intelligible by Derridean poststructuralist theory. Tying agency to resignification of existing signifiers, Jacques Derrida, the father of poststructuralism,
described the need to ground what we may call a critical stance toward the Other
in a process modeled by the bricoleur (Derrida, 1978, p. 285). As skeptical
critic, the bricoleur recognizes the necessity of borrowing ones concepts from
the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined (p. 285). His task
is to embrace the received historical discourse while altering its meaning by
putting it to a use for which it had not been especially conceived (p. 285). It is
this approach of the bricoleur that African Americans have often embraced in
accepting the terms of race posited by the racist Symbolic.
This approach is driven by the need to reinforce a sense of being that was
visibly challenged by slavery and continues to be challenged by racism. In
Lacanian terms, the goal here is to alter the fantasy relation to being. This
alteration is addressed most directly at the object a that structures fantasies
of race. Where it is the a that stands as the internal object common to members of
the race the fantasy essence within each African American rearticulation of
African American identity is aimed at revaluing this internal, fantasy self. This
self is what is devalued in the racist Symbolic as the object a of whiteness gains the
discursive dominance that facilitates its masquerade as phallus, as signifier of
being and jouissance. It is thus only through this glorification of the fantasy
object thought to link African Americans intersubjectively that the subject rooted
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in this identity establishes a relation to being, thereby alienating himself in the

signifiers that also liberate him.
This paradoxical path toward freedom through alienation creates what
I would identify as an ambivalent relation to race for African Americans,
whereby they challenge its racist implications by embracing the distinctions of
self and other it promotes. But because the very function of race is to make the self
and other knowable only through fantasy by which the racial other is not only
already defined, but is also often already defined as enemy what I propose is a
traversal of the fantasy of race. This traversal involves separation not only from
the Real represented by the mother, but also from the Symbolic that redirects the
raced subject to this Real through buttressing the fantasy a of race. While racial
identity can petrify the subject into the signifier of his or her race, thus
contributing to the aphanisis of the raced subjects being, I argue that through a
cynical questioning of the mandates and signifiers of the racial Symbolic the raced
subject may attain an obstacle to his fading, one that involves this subject
coming to recognize his racial desire as desire of the Other, as a desire
shaped by a Symbolic structure that precedes and delimits the raced subjects
existence (1998b, p. 235).

The Drive and Traversal of the Racial Fantasy

Most important in this traversal of race is an essential recognition of the lack in
the signifiers of the Other, a recognition that the signifier does not capture the
subjects entire being. Especially apparent in signifiers of race like black boy ,
there is always a left over, a part of the self that cannot emerge fully through the
racial signifiers subjective meanings. It is this very failure of the signifier that is
highlighted in Figure 1, wherein the circle of being designates an entire portion of
the split subject that exists in the Real and is only partially accessible through the
unconscious. The first implication of the fact that being is elided by the signifiers
meaning is that, as we have seen, the subject is thus petrified into a signifier and
simultaneously alienated from that part of the self that can be, but is not, signified
by language, that part situated in the unconscious, where being and signification
overlap to create non-meaning. But more radical than this is the implication that
there is a part of the subject that is not available to the operations of the signifier
but yet may express itself through desire, the part that comprises the rest of
the circle of being. As Lacan argued, desire is the metonymy of our being, and
the channel in which desire is located is not simply that of the modulation of the
signifying chain (1997, p. 321). This desire, I suggest, is what can facilitate an
ethical separation of the S1 and S2, creating critical distance from the signifier
and opening up a space for the subject to access better that of the self which
escapes the signifier.
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If we return to Fanons Jean Veneuse, what we see is exactly a desire for

abandonment that escapes signification and indeed grants structure to the
signifiers that define subjectivity, organizing them by their effort to repress this
desire. The escape of desire from the signifier is possible because the Lacanian
subject is not merely the subject of the signifier, who appears in the field of the
Other, but also the subject in the field of the drive, (1998b, p. 199), where
desire functions as that which is agitated in the drive (p. 243). Characterized by
a constant force, a tension that is at odds with the homeostasis and delayed
gratification promised by the signifier (p. 164), the drive is different from any
stimulation coming from the outside world because it is an internal force
(p. 164). It emerges from the libido as pure life instinct, irrepressible and
indestructible life (p. 198). This libido, manifesting itself most appropriately as
that which the sexed being loses in sexuality (p. 197), is connected to Freuds
notion of the subject as initially polymorphous, aberrant, able to attain pleasure
from all sources, but as subsequently forced to localize pleasure in the erogenous
zones (p. 176). The signifier and the mores of the Symbolic institute a homeostasis
that restricts sexuality, as a manifestation of the force of the libido, into coming
into play only in the form of partial drives (p. 176), so that we deal only with
that part of sexuality that passes into the networks of the signifier (p. 177); but
the force of this immortal libido insistently marks its presence at the site of the
gaps that the distribution of the signifying investments sets up in the subject
(p. 180). We see this insistence, for example, in parapraxis, as something slips
through the network of the signifier, something emerging from the losage ,
from the unconscious as a gap that Lacan places at the centre of any relation
between reality and the subject (p. 181). It is because the force of what emerges
from the unconscious in this movement outward directs the subject to the Other
that the drive holds particular importance to an understanding of race.
What race encourages through the Other is substitution of desire for the drive,
as it petrifies the subject in a stagnant relation to the fantasy object. The
movement of the drive involves a circular path out from the gaps of subjectivity
toward the Other and back to the subject (1998b, p. 178). In the place of the
Other, the drive encounters and closes in on the petit a, which is in fact simply
the presence of a hollow, a void that can be occupied by any object but that
functions as representative of the lost object (p. 180). In the American
Symbolic, I contend, the object a of race, acquired from the Other, binds the
racial subject to this circular path around a hollow that serves as the source of
identity. Unlike the path of desire, which involves a continual metonymic
movement from object to object in search of a source of satisfaction, the drive
endlessly circles its illusive object, attaining its satisfaction without attaining its
aim (p. 179). While failing to attain the racial identity represented by the object
a of race, the subject of race yet still remains bound to the a because the a of race
becomes integral to the drives function not just of making oneself seen, but
more fundamentally of making oneself (p. 195). In encountering the object a
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defined by the Other, the subject acquires in this object, in race, a little mirror,
an illusion of self, to which the subject may accommodate his own image
(p. 159). We can say that in race the subject assumes the role of the object,
embracing the reversal whereby it is the jouissance and demands of the Other that
are privileged (p. 185).
But this static objectification stifles the metonymy of desire. The fantasy object
petrifying the self becomes the master signifier through which a primal
repression of being is achieved, and what is built on the signifier, as we saw
with Vaneuse, is the symptom of the subject, constituted as a scaffolding of
signifiers (1998b, p. 176). It is because of the satisfaction gained from the
symptom, the jouissance and sense of being granted by race as the soul or
remnant of a lost being, that the drive need not reach its aim of hitting the mark
set by race as object a. This satisfaction is sustained as the source of a subjective
self with nothing else ensuring its consistency except the object, as something
that must be circumvented, something both aimed at and missed (p. 181). Lacan
tied the pleasure of the symptom upheld by the drive to a kind of autoeroticism
that he described in the image of a mouth sewn up in certain silences, closed
upon its own satisfaction (p. 179). It is this closing up upon a jouissance
of pain and pleasure, this insertion into the self of the Others signifier, that
I associate with race.
However, Lacanian theory also shows that by snatching at its object, the drive
learns in a sense that this is precisely not the way it will be satisfied (1998b,
p. 167). I suggest that the existing ambivalence about race of both African
Americans and white Americans makes possible increased recognition that race
does not produce the sovereign humanness or supreme satisfaction that binds
subjects to race as a fantasy source of being. Though the extent to which recent
events in America mark a permanent shift in relations to the signifiers of race is
yet to be seen, whiteness itself and the very value of race have been cynically
questioned in the wake of publicized incidents of white-on-black murders
like the shootings of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, and Jordan Davis
by Michael Dunn and police-on- black killings, like the death of Eric Garner
in an illegal chokehold by New York police who alleged he was unlawfully selling
cigarettes.5 In light of active protests in Missouri after 18-year-old Michael
Brown was shot by police in the streets of Ferguson, some have even argued
optimistically that we are bearing witness to a new civil rights movement which
has sprung up (Ifill, 2014). Whether or not this movement comes to full fruition,
it is precisely a process of bearing witness that is key to its development thus far.
What I suggest has occurred in the immediate aftermath of the killing of these
black men is a shift in many Americans scopic relation to the Other.
At issue in this shift is the gaze of the Other, which Lacan stated has the effect
of arresting movement and halting transgression (1998b, p. 118). What
objectifies the subject, as the movement of his or her drive binds the subject to
the jouissance of the a, is subjection to an entirely hidden gaze of the Other,
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which the subject positions as a policing authority for whom the subject performs
his or her identity (p. 182). This disembodied observer and judge constitutes an
extimacy that polices unconscious desires, ensuring that it is in the space of the
Other that [the subject] sees himself and the point from which he looks at himself
is also in that space (p. 144). This space of the capital Other, Lacan said, is the
locus of speech, the Symbolic (p. 129). Where Lacan associated this locus with
the law, the law of the father and the law of desire, it can be said that this hidden
gaze is often given presence by the police. Embodying the arresting gaze that
surprises the subject in his moment of transgression, the police should allow to
arise the conflagration of shame that realigns the subjects desire away from
the pathological object of his or her fixation (p. 182). But while the police of
Ferguson have facilitated an ostensive realignment of Americas subjective
relation to the object of race, they have done so by also largely dispossessing
themselves of the agency of the shaming gaze.
Indeed, after the killing of the unarmed Michael Brown by police on August
18th, 2014, the agency of the shaming gaze was notably transferred to the
community and the larger American and international public in turn. The
community was the first to watch as the body of Michael Brown lay in the streets
for hours. Marking this indignity in his eulogy at Browns funeral, the Reverend
Al Sharpton recalls that for four and a half hours the family couldnt come to
the ropes but were left to watch Dogs sniffin through (2014). Explaining that
it signaled to him how many of us are considered nothing, how we were just
so marginalized and ignored, Sharpton displays his own struggles against
a Symbolic that destroys African Americans fantasies of being (2014): he
emphasizes, it was like Browns life value didnt matter (2014). But Sharptons
rhetoric throughout the eulogy also marks the shift of the public gaze toward the
Ferguson police and America itself. He asks, How do you think we look when
the world can see you cant come up with a police report? which was only
produced with sparse details almost two weeks after the shooting and how do
you think we look when young people march nonviolently asking for the land of
the free and the home of the brave to hear their cry, and you put snipers on the
roof and point guns on them? (2014). Highlighting what many in the media and
the public see as excessive force in the polices response to protestors, Sharpton
exhorts, America, its time to deal with policing (2014).
Sharptons rhetoric echoes a larger national shift whereby the authority of the
police as enforcer of the law and holder of the gaze is cynically challenged. As a
reverend himself, Sharpton transfers the gaze from the earthly agency of the law
to the divine agency of God, asking the mourners, What does the Lord require
of you as response to the killing? (2014). But Sharpton finally pins both
agency and responsibility to the self, arguing that nobody gonna help us if we
dont help ourselves, so weve got to [start] a movement (2014). Throughout, Sharptons rhetoric directs the shaming gaze to the police by positioning
this gaze as the possession alternately of the community, Americans in general,
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the international community that sees an America bound to practices of the

past, and the heavenly authority who is positioned in judgment of all these
participants. The eulogy contributes to and charts the optical shift that, now
making the Ferguson police the object of the shaming gaze, has led not only to
public calls for body cameras to document police activity but also to federal
investigation of the Ferguson police department by the United States Department of Justice. This shifting of the gaze goes some way toward freeing the
subject from the power of the policing Other, whose abuse and even transgressions of the law unveil the inherent racism of the Symbolic itself. With the
Symbolic Others capacity to define the raced African American subject
cynically challenged, the individual African American is positioned to define
more freely his or her own identity.
The possibility opened up here is dual, offering the subject access to an identity
grounded in a reconfigured relation either to the fantasy a or to an individual
desire actuated by the drive. Already emulating the metonymy of desire, the
shifting of the gaze away from the line of sight traced in the vision of the policing
Other and toward perception of the violent excesses this Other embraces because
of race, opens up the object a of race to reevaluation by diverse onlookers.
Through this displacement of the gaze, the violence that emerges from racial
identity can be put to uses for which it was not intended, helping to fortify the
poststructuralist approach of evolving African American identity through the
bricolage of self-redefinition. But it can also, at the more individual level of
the subject who is racialized as African American, issue a challenge to the very
concept of race itself.

Conclusion
Though the ethical responsibility of issuing this challenge to the concept of
race is ceded through the glorification of the a, this responsibility is established
even in the model of poststructuralism that holds such sway over contemporary thinking about social change, wherein the ultimate aim of the theory is not
an essentialist but a strategic deployment of identity. In the poststructuralist
vision, because the given identity is never fully owned, it remains open to
urgent and expanding political purposes that demand shifting allegiances
across such lines as race, class and gender (Butler, 1993, p. 228). But while
poststructuralism produces this politics driven by a metonymic shift in
subjective positionality by assuming a center-less self untethered from all
identity, I envision through psychoanalysis the subjects encounter with an
excluded center masked by the illusions of this subjects embraced identities.
Where belief in race threatens to bind the subject to the fantasies of wholeness
secured by the object a, and where true poststructuralist resignification of race
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forecloses recognition of the deeper drives that guide the identity politics of the
individual subject, such a potentially seminal moment in the reconfiguration of
race offers the racialized subject a unique opportunity to attempt a Lacanian
traversal of race that can ground individual political activity in deeper
recognition of the subjects desire.
Lacan specified that the object a plays the role of obturator, inhibiting such
recognition by facilitating the closing of the unconscious (1998b, p. 144).
Aimed at an impossible wholeness, what the object a of race attempts is to fill the
constitutive gaps in the subject, the spaces left unoccupied by the subjects absent
being. But Lacanian theory stipulates that the subject who has traversed the
radical fantasy [can] experience the drive that exudes from the space of these
gaps (p. 273). Where this drive is an expression of the undirected libido whose
effective presence is registered only in desire, it is through the process of
reorienting ones desire away from such fantasies as race that the subject may
begin the process of experiencing and directing this internal tension of the drive
(p. 153). Through the process of mapping ones own desire in ones cynical
questioning of the object a presented by the Other (p. 273), the subject is placed
upon the track of something that is specifically [her] business, situating herself
in relation to a desire and drive that is particularly her own belonging (1997,
p. 319). It is perhaps most likely that the recent attention to repeated incidents of
deadly violence to black men will not produce sustained social skepticism about
the value of race, for the loop of the fundamental fantasy, Lacan stressed,
must be run through several times if the subject is to free himself truly from the
illusions of the Other. However, the unconscious gap opened up by this cynical
response to race at the national level allows essential space for the initial
movements of the individual subject of race along the path of this loop.

About the Author

Sheldon George is Associate Professor of English at Simmons College in Boston,
Massachusetts. He directs the Graduate English Program and teaches courses in
theory and American literature. His book Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study
of African-American Identity is forthcoming from Baylor University Press.

Notes
1 For a fuller discussion of this and other parts of my argument, see my forthcoming book, Trauma and
Race.
2 See especially Miller (1994) for more on the concept of extimacy.
3 I present a more extensive reading of the trauma of slavery in a 2001 issue of this journal (George,
2001).
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4 For more on these versions of the Real, see especially Fink (1997) and Shepherdson (1996).
5 Popular identification of Zimmerman as white has called attention to the violence that such
categories encourage; simultaneously, Zimmermans self-identification as Hispanic and his descent
from a white father and Peruvian mother have urged many to complicate the category of whiteness
(Gamboa, 2012).

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