Lacan Noir: Lacan and Afro-pessimism 9783030749774, 9783030749781

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THE PALGRAVE LACAN SERIES SERIES EDITORS: CALUM NEILL · DEREK HOOK

Lacan Noir Lacan and Afro-pessimism david s. marriott

Abracadabra Abracadabr Abracadab Abracada Abracad Abraca Abrac Abra Abr AB A

The Palgrave Lacan Series

Series Editors Calum Neill Edinburgh Napier University Edinburgh, UK Derek Hook Duquesne University Pittsburgh, USA

Jacques Lacan is one of the most important and influential thinkers of the 20th century. The reach of this influence continues to grow as we settle into the 21st century, the resonance of Lacan’s thought arguably only beginning now to be properly felt, both in terms of its application to clinical matters and in its application to a range of human activities and interests. The Palgrave Lacan Series is a book series for the best new writing in the Lacanian field, giving voice to the leading writers of a new generation of Lacanian thought. The series will comprise original monographs and thematic, multi-authored collections. The books in the series will explore aspects of Lacan’s theory from new perspectives and with original insights. There will be books focused on particular areas of or issues in clinical work. There will be books focused on applying Lacanian theory to areas and issues beyond the clinic, to matters of society, politics, the arts and culture. Each book, whatever its particular concern, will work to expand our understanding of Lacan’s theory and its value in the 21st century. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15116

David S Marriott

Lacan Noir Lacan and Afro-pessimism

David S Marriott Philosophy Pennsylvania State University State College, PA, USA

The Palgrave Lacan Series ISBN 978-3-030-74977-4    ISBN 978-3-030-74978-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74978-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: ‘Abracadabra’ Pyramid (from Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year, 1664) This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Black is neither in the object nor in the World —François Laruelle, “On the Black Universe” The real is not of this world. —Lacan, La Troisième

Summary

This book is in three parts. Each part takes a differing position with respect to Lacan’s theory of the signifier. Part 1. Taking as my example Lacan’s theory of the signifier, we will consider (i) what it means to be signified by a signifier, (ii) who is the subject, (iii) what is hidden/revealed by its representation, and (iv) what is the meaning of its blackness. I want to show not only Lacan’s theory of signification, but the theory of meaning and value that subtends it and in which a racial rhetoric can be discerned. We will thereby see, in Part 2, in Fanon’s highly nuanced response to Lacan, how blackness can be rhetorically read and/or conceived as a figure that is no more than an x, a speculative speck when compared to the vast orbit of the signified, the signifier, but one that offers us profound insight into the racial limits of psychoanalytic interpretation, in whose oedipal immensity blackness often goes unnoticed; and precisely because it is often seen to be the tiniest point in which symbolic reality finds itself lodged. Anyone who considers this farfetched should consider how little curiosity there seems to be in the psychic life of black objects. Because Fanon is one of the first black readers of Lacan, he will be our guide as we follow him through this selva obscura. Part 3. Lacan’s abiding interest was in the quod rather than the quid; or with what words do rather than what they are. But his subversion of the sign teaches us very little about race, or at least that is yet to be proven. It vii

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is all very well to say that the signifier refers to ‘the immeasurable power of ideological warfare’, a power that makes it impossible for us to reach agreement on the homeland—of the signified—but what if these signifiers (of sex, race, and nation, say), in their usage and their history, are always already occupied by a negrophobic ideology, what then? (E, 417). Would this not therefore mean being able to think about the question of difference as value, or what we are given to understand as the thought of value in linguistics, in terms of the value of a black difference in ideology, in politics? To answer these and related questions, my focus in Part 3 will be on a single work and discourse. In the history of Black Studies the work of Afro-pessimism has a place apart, an extreme, audacious place. Frank Wilderson’s Red, White & Black (2010) in particular, and Afro-pessimism in general, will be my focus here, and not only because of its ontological nihilism and its attempt to think blackness in terms other than property, alienation, and reappropriation. Indeed, Afro-pessimism allows me to rediscover the most exacting question: what, then, is blackness? With what concept can it be thought in order to realise it; what are its politics and its ethics? And can one answer the question without thinking about the social death of the slave? In other words, without revealing the speculative work of freedom as nihilism, it is difficult in fact not to accept blackness as anything more than alienation. This is one of the most important senses in which Wilderson both accepts Lacan’s topology of the real and rejects his linguisterie and theory of full speech. But does Afro-pessimism do anything else but mark blackness as the end, the limit, the outside of being?

Praise for Lacan Noir “Lacan Noir is an intellectual masterpiece. David Marriott successfully exceeds psychoanalytic application by offering, instead, a rigorous black critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis—revealing the concealed ‘(anti)black unconscious’ determining psychoanalytic limits, rupturing discursive formations, and engendering possibilities. With remarkable precision and indefatigable rigor, Marriott rethinks Lacan’s theory of signification, questions the racial axiology undergirding signs, and considers the ‘negrophobic occupation’ of the sign itself—requiring a protocol of interpretation beyond classical Lacanian (and Freudian) hermeneutical practices. Rather than inserting blackness into Lacanian subjectivity, Lacan Noir proffers an object-oriented psychoanalysis, one tracking the psychic life of black objects and the symptoms peculiar to this objecthood. Even more, Marriott provides, perhaps, the first sustained psychoanalytic engagement with Afro-pessimism. By exhausting the distinction between slave incapacity (non-ontology) and human capacity (ontology), this displacement constitutes the emergence of a black existence yet ‘unthought’ psychoanalytically (ne’pas). Lacan Noir is much more than a book—it is also a theoretical event.” —Calvin Warren, Assistant Professor, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Emory University, USA “A remarkable piece of work that exists at a different level to the vast majority both of Lacan scholarship and Lacanian-oriented engagements with Fanon. Whereas much of that work focusses simply on explaining or applying Lacan (or Fanon), tracing moments of intersection and resonances between their respective forms of theorizing, Lacan Noir fundamentally reshapes the field. In Marriott’s hands one has the sense that the conceptual and political materials – Lacanian psychoanalysis, Blackness, racism and Afropessimism  – are being thought, worked over and through, at a more challenging level than has hitherto been attempted. Neither Lacanian psychoanalysis nor Afropessimism remain unchanged after his timely and typically brilliant intervention.” —Derek Hook author of Six Moments in Lacan

Contents

Part 1: Slave and Signifier  1 Part 2: The X of X 51 Part 3: Tell It Like It Is119 Index175

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Abbreviations1

SDC

Fanon, Frantz. Studies in A Dying Colonialism. Trans. H. Chevalier. New York: Grove Press, 1989. WE Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967. AE Lacan, Jacques. Autres écrits. Paris: Seuil, 2001. BS Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. E Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2006. Ea Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1977. LB Lacan, Jacques: “Yale University: Lecture on the Body.” Trans. A. Price and R. Grigg. In J.-A. Miller & M. Jaanus, eds. Culture/Clinic 1. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2013, 5–7. LCF Lacan, Jacques. “Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu”. Trans. C. Gallagher. 1989. L’étourdit Lacan, Jacques. Trans. J.W. Stone (unofficial). 1972. LS Lacan, Jacques. “Columbia University: Lecture on the Symptom.” Trans. A. Price and R. Grigg. In J.-A. Miller & M. Jaanus, eds. Culture/Clinic 1. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2013, 8–16. Radiophonie Lacan, Jacques. Trans. J.W. Stone (unofficial). 1970.

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RWB SIII SV SVI SVII SX SXI SXIII SXIV SXIX SXVII SXX SXXII SXXIII SDC T

Wilderson, Frank. Red, White & Black. Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Psychoses. New York: Norton, 1997. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Formations of The Unconscious. New York: Norton, 2017. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Desire and Its Interpretation. New York: Norton, 2019. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60. New York: Norton, 1992. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Anxiety, 1962–1963. Trans. A. Price. Cambridge: Polity, 2014. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Object of Psychoanalysis, 1965–1966. Trans. C. Gallagher. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton, 1994. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Logic of Fantasy, 1966–1967. Trans. C. Gallagher. Unofficial. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Ou Pire…, 1971–1972. Trans. C. Gallagher. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1969–1970. New York: Norton, 2008. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Encore, 1972–1973. New York: Norton, 1998. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: RSI, 1974–1975. Trans. J.W. Stone. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Sinthome, 1975–1976. Trans. A. Price. Cambridge: Polity, 2016. Fanon, Frantz. Studies in a Dying Colonialism. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. London: Earthscan. 1989. Lacan, Jacques. Television. A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson. New York: WWW. Norton, 1990.

 Abbreviations 

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Notes 1. References to Lacan, Fanon, and Wilderson give the following abbreviations followed by page no.

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The Project

To whom does Lacan speak? The story of the Séminaire—at Sainte-Anne, at the École Normale, at the Faculté de Droit—has often been told.1 As far as this story goes, it is the story of a man speaking…but to whom? To the audience, other analysts, to psychoanalysis? But nowhere does Lacan ever indicate that he is speaking to black people. So did he pay no heed to blackness? If you look for blackness in his work, you will not find it. So why try and think blackness through Lacan? Should one not be indifferent to this indifference? Perhaps. This book, however, is an attempt to speak to this indifference in its presumed whiteness. It is written out of curiosity, but at the same time it is designed to probe a certain ignorance (namely Lacan’s). All that follows is an attempt to explain why. Perhaps Lacan fascinates us because he knows how we—this black we?—are compelled, or are forced to confront this fascinare like flags held aloft on a field of battle. We must be careful, however, not to confuse indifference with disinterest, or the form of an idea with its consequences.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. S. Marriott, Lacan Noir, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74978-1_1

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Lacan’s most general project was to introduce into psychoanalysis the notion that the unconscious is “structured like a language” (SIII, 167). This discovery led him to question the peculiarity of psychoanalysis as a teaching and training institution.2 And the same thing with the unconscious (as a pedagogy).3 Lacan’s formula for training was ‘the analyst’s authorisation derives from her or himself alone’. But in order to situate the question of the unconscious in its truth, the analyst is he who “recognises in his own knowledge the symptom of his ignorance”, Lacan tells us (E, 297). As such, the enigma, the x, by which analysis ‘happens’ is never a question of what the analyst knows—of himself or of others—but is derived from the fact that he knows he doesn’t. For it is not clear to whom the x is addressed, nor the truth of what it says, for it is the unfolding of a pure exteriority in meaning (S). So how does analytic speech achieve its authority? By virtue of the desire of the analyst (but not the desire to be an analyst), and everything that follows from it. The institutionalization of autonomy is therefore based on each training member taking responsibility for their own ignorance. An authorization that cannot be professed as anything but the effect—the praxis—of a nonknowledge, exemplifying a ‘truth’ that cannot be equated with skill, mastery, eloquence, bureaucracy, power, or imitation. But all the same a ‘trained’ speech in which the unconscious (in its classical rhetoric) is affirmed. Whence Lacan’s principled point that the praxis of this truth is necessarily “mobile, disappointing, slippery” (T, 95). It is clear that modern psychoanalysis had to have a response to Lacan. But not perhaps in the way he would have wished.4 If we consider Lacan’s greatness, his originality, his obscurity, his death, the way he founded his school, and then dissolved it, we shall see that the challenge of Lacanian discourse is of the same order as the challenge of Lacan’s praxis to the psychoanalytic establishment. Lacan made no secret of the fact that the subject as signifier had to be a critique. One of the principal motifs of Lacan’s work is that Freud had not carried out a true critique because he was not able to pose the problem of the subject in terms of the signifier. And what has happened in modern psychoanalysis is that the theory of the subject has given rise to a new practical formalism and new theoretical orthodoxy. Even the international institutes have contributed to placing the Lacanian inspiration, which is often present in other discourses,

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at the service of a modern conformism. But, with Lacan, we must begin from the fact that the psychoanalysis of the signifier as envisaged and established by him is the true realization of critique and the only way in which a total critique may be realized, the only way Freud’s technique and his discovery of the unconscious can be taken further. In fact, the notion of the subject as a signifier implies a critical reversal. On the one hand, the signifier appears or is given as a principle of a new “theoretical formalisation”: and psychoanalysis presupposes that the subject is that which the signifier represents (E, 270). But, on the other hand and more profoundly, it is the signifier which presupposes the subject, from whose subversion the subject is derived. The problem of the signifier is that of the unconscious, of the subversion from which its representation arises, thus the problem of its institution as an analysis. Psychoanalysis is defined as the institution of a corresponding subversion, a didactic technique— and one might say a promise that is part mythology, part rhetoric—which is impossibly “instituted in and by the signifier”.5 This is the crucial point; slave and master, worker and producer, man and woman are not just values but represent the differential element from which the labour of the signifier derives its praxis as institutional therapy (E, 414). Lacanian psychoanalysis has two inseparable moments: the passe, wherein analytic training is referred back to the symptom as a signifier, but also the referring back of these signifiers to something which is, as it were, their origin and determines their value, the institutionalization of the experience of analysis. This is Lacan’s twofold struggle: against those who reduce signification to meaning (subversion to institutional epistêmê), contenting themselves with producing inventories of existing symbols; but also against those who reify, or idealize, psychoanalytic techniques by deriving them from the authority of psychoanalysis, from so-called orthodoxies of treatment (the cost and the length of treatments, etc.). In both cases psychoanalysis moves into the indifferent element of a juridical formalism that is presumed to be valuable in itself or valuable for all. Lacan attacks both the conformist idea of foundation which leaves treatment indifferent to its own origin (as a praxis) and the idea of a simple causal derivation of technique which suggests an indifferent origin for both being and time. Lacan creates the new concept of analysis as a

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missed—failed, impossible—encounter. The psychoanalyst is a dialectician rather than a judge or a lawgiver. He is both deceived and deceiver, both liar and the one who always speaks the truth. Thus he or she is also a great witness to the truly (false) agonies and heroisms of the ego. Lacan substitutes the pathos of a lack or a not-all (the differential element) for both the principle of a healthy ego and adaptation dear to ego psychology. How do you “recognize bad psychoanalysts”? he asks. “[B]y the word they use to deprecate all research on technique and theory that furthers the Freudian experience in its authentic direction” (E, 435). Good or authentic psychoanalysis means both the subject as signifier and the signifier as subject. Good psychoanalysis is as opposed to a sociology of values as it is to pragmatist or utilitarian approaches. Good psychoanalysis signifies the differential element of the unconscious from which the value of the good itself derives. Good psychoanalysis thus means structure or topology, but also jouissance or speech at the origin. Good psychoanalysis also means knowing that we are all “slave[s] [serf] of language”, and that representation is the “illusion” which the signifier serves [répond à]—these are truly foundational and critical elements (E, 414). But, understood in this way, good or authentic psychoanalysis also means that we are all irredeemably enslaved as speaking subjects. But why assume that being human pertains to universal enslavement, and why presume that the signifier is joined to slavery? (E, 416) What knowledge or ignorance is encoded in such rhetorical figures? And what does this say of psychoanalysis as the institution that puts slavery to work, to borrow a metaphor from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, as the form of testimony? And what possible remedy (aside from becoming an analyst) could there be to a slavery that begins from the moment it (ça) speaks? Hence Lacan’s emphasis on the constant slippage of speech, its failure, as against its imaginary fullness. And hence the theory of the analytic institution that subtends it: as neither a church nor faith, with a doctrine ruling over both of them, but an I that founds itself as an act of pure sacrifice, and one that thereby destroys all law and authority. However, an act that claims to see with the eyes of faith and to know—with absolute conviction or knowledge—belief from unbelief is all the more enslaved for doing so. For the knowledge of illusion does not thereby free you from

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illusory knowledge. And doubting the existence of one’s chains does not automatically lead one to mastery or wisdom. Hence the controversy over Lacan’s substitution of the authorization of the analyst for that of the institution. That Lacan’s dissolution of his own school in 1980 has been criticized as an attempt to kill all heirs, and in a purely authoritarian manner should perhaps not be surprising. A power that absolute, it has been said, could only see its fulfilment in absolute servitude.6 But what then does it mean to still bear witness to Lacanianism as a training in, and a theory of, authorization? And what did the dissolution accomplish if not further proof of the ante-legum power of the master-signifier? Lacan contrasts mastery with knowledge, slavery, or the signifier with the imaginary (in its illusory servitude). The tendency will be towards ever greater formalization, and the bias towards ignorance-as-testimony will see the beginning of “ab-sens”, that is the analysis of what cannot be spoken, though it can still be signified. The algorithm will therefore soon be followed by mathemes and by knots; but the slavery of which reason knows nothing will remain “ab-sens”, and our illusory commitment to knowledge, in whose allegiance we declare our freedom, will harden into a knot that binds us ever tighter to chains (of signification). The word chain takes us back to slavery, but a slavery without black people. The links of the chain are compared to necklaces, not to iron collars or bits; Borromean knots not to nooses. But regardless of the rhetoric used, slavery is at the heart of what Lacan perceives to be our identifications. This is also what analysis is: the authorization through testimony of our slavery by the signifier. To confuse liberation with “ab-sens”; this is what Lacan feels as one of the continuous temptations held out to us by representation. Psychoanalysis is not a re-presentation of what we do not yet know but the active expression of what is missing from symbolization; darstellung and not vorstellung, the presentation of an “ab-sens”, of a lack without which neither sense, nor object or subject could be imagined. This way of presenting is that of the Lacanian analyst precisely because he or she wields the signifier’s differential element as critic and creator and therefore as a real encounter. But once again the experience of “ab-sens” is assumed to be universal, formal. And white. Lacan says that his adversaries confuse transference with the imaginary vicissitudes of the ego.

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Lacan has high expectations of this conception of the signifier as subject: a new organization of the clinic, a new organization of technique, a new determination of psychoanalytic truth and knowledge. But what remains unsaid—unthought—is the very whiteness of this thought. For why does the ça appear here as both a slavish fiction (of a reason forever deprived of its sovereignty) and a rhetorical apostrophe to slavery as the only knowledge of what it means to be human? It is from this little dungeon that I would like to see blackness emerge. That is to say: emerge insofar as we are able to distinguish slavery from a certain conformity of thought by which psychoanalysis expresses difference, and to that end challenge the way it conceives of blackness and at the same time excludes it. More, I believe that Lacan’s work allows us to investigate these exclusions and precisely because he does not look at them (do we see only what we know?) because they are devoid of meaning. Since we in our turn do not want to put blackness to work as a particular form of being or identity, we share this limitation although we would also like to know what is being concealed by it and what is being obscured by its failed psychoanalysis. Thus the ultimate question: why is blackness so much harder to see and can it be seen without being hidden? Indeed, that is how black studies is being conceived in this book, the better to understand why this indifference of psychoanalysis—in its absolute ignorance—is its most symptomatic expression. This book is written, then, out of a certain distrustful love of Lacan. It should therefore be read as a work that tries to grasp—without ever reaching—that which slips away, or that which does not seem to exist beyond its indifference. Limited in every respect but aware of its limitations: perhaps there is an origin and image here of a certain black reading?

2

The Segregated Signifier

What does a “psychoanalysis of the signifier mean”? Not, primarily, a Saussurean theory of the sign, a grammatology, nor a rhetoric of tropes. Lacan, at the beginning of the Seminar, thus introduces the following algorithm (of the signifier (S)):

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S s

not to think representation or writing; but to conceive of an entirely new topology; of the signifier as the crossing (of a bar) which also bars any access to its signified (s).7 But this also implies that the bar is the differential principle of resistance. Conversely, only resistance can decline the signifier, and makes its difference an object of jouis-sens (‘enjoy-meant’) and misrecognition. This is what the signifier is; the genetic element that reveals how difference is subjected to value. But the subject, even when it submits to the bar, limits active resistance, imposes limitations and partial restrictions on it and is already controlled by the x that (the signifier) represents. For the subject is merely represented in the set of signifiers. I say merely because the signifier is always a false witness to what the Other asks of me, for it is not really there. What the bar makes thinkable as resistant is nothing more than the restoration, without consolation, of a mirage (of a difference synonymous with the segregation of S1 from S2) to which the Other bears witness. With this in mind imagine the following illustration: This is not meant to be a parody of Lacan’s famous “image of two twin [toilet] doors”, but is a reflection on what is at stake (E, 417). When discussing the image of the twin doors, and their identical appearance, Lacan is of the opinion that the segregation of the twin nouns (“man” and “woman”) is purely nominal, or arbitrary. To conceive of these signs as a naïve nominalism which confuses the signifier with the this, that, here, now of a recognition—like a Hegelian child pointing at the ruins of spirit—does not allow us to enter into gender, insofar it is permissible to write above either door with the appropriate modesty of symbolic law. As if gender had only one referential concept and one representation and all one had to do is choose the right door for its corresponding recognition to take place. But this is what the knowledge of difference is: an imaginary freedom to choose or reject what one believes to be different. This is why Lacan refers to an imperative which is the signifier’s greatest achievement, but also its conquest as hoax, in its teleology and normative renunciation of failure and non-meaning. For the evaluation of this law, the delicate weighing of each signifier in its pure differentiation, Lacan says it depends

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on a subjugation and a segregation which the West shares with supposedly “primitive communities” (E, 417). To interpret the algorithmic function of the signifier is always to weigh that which segregates. (But how are we meant to read the logic by which the primitive is used—that is, segregated—as an illustration of segregation? How are we to read the presumed equality of a universal equivalence? That we are all duped by the need for a fundamental difference whose sign gender is? But such a notion already presumes a universal desire for difference that the signifier represents as sex’s representative and the universal’s represented. But what would it mean to say that the signifier “goes” in the same way as that of gender? That it, too, is subject to the same arbitration, same atavism?) The notion of (racial) hierarchy does not simply appear here but takes on a rhetorical significance, for not every subjugation has the same value of segregation or of referential difference. What is the relation, then, between subjection and segregation? Are they synonymous? If segregation operates as a law, that is, as something forcibly enjoined on the speaking subject, are there differences in how different subjects take possession of it and are subjugated by it? There are seemingly forces which can only get a grip on something by giving it a segregated sense and a negative value. Consider the mania over choosing the right door or restroom. If it is a direct product of arbitrariness, why does choosing the wrong door signify the worst, recognized or not? But here again, who can conceive of the signifier as simply the acquisition of formally assignable values? Blackness, on the other hand, will be defined as that one, among all the senses of a right choice, which gives the being of what is said the form with which it has a segregating value. Of therefore being the wrong choice in general. Thus, segregare, meaning to set apart, isolate, divide; a word that shifts from a religious to a racist meaning in 1908 suggests an obvious difference in how modern subjects are subjected to the signifier; it also gives rise not only to the enigmatic question of arbitrary difference as such, but also of the racist historicity of such ordering. But which order has the maximum affinity with the symbolic? Which is the one where we can no longer know who subjugates, since it is subjugated by the force that segregates it? For all things this is a question of weighing, the delicate but rigorous art of knowing the imaginary object of blackness from the ab-sens by which it is necessarily taken away, cast down, served gall rather than the meat of a universal equivalent. Indeed, segregation shows how racial difference is

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inscribed (Lacan uses the word enters) across the two spaces, but also how the segregation of linguistic values that we find in the illustration is made to symbolize (Lacan uses the words complement, reinforce) racial difference in “the lived experience of truth” (E, 417). Does the image above allow a better understanding of what is being presupposed? Everything about that illustration that, from the very beginning, was taken up with a linguistic explanation of the signifier, with Saussure, with signification, suggests that its importance resides solely in how difference is inscribed in language. And yet. Even if we think that the placing of race here is a precarious pursuit, the sign of an inability to read properly, and one that risks being tripped up by the purely formal question of difference—nevertheless, the form in which signifiers are symbolically subjugated does suggest that there is something more going on here than how subjects are placed in language. Why? In the perspective of Lacan’s original reading, the signifier’s autonomy is equally caught between what it metaphorically affirms and at the same time metonymically denies, an ambiguous ambiguity in relation to which all linguistic values are deemed arbitrary. This is why Lacan is so fond of saying that the signifier reveals a hole in meaning. It is not that the signifier makes these holes appear, or that it reveals actual gaps: the signifier veils over a more primordial lack out of which meaning is woven and then draped over being like some discarded pelt. What people want from the signifier is thus what allows them to know without knowing, those pleasures and adventures that allow us to take our minds away from the fact that the signifier signifies nothing but what it lacks. Even if we remain enslaved or chained to the ways in which the signifier insists—and consists—in the signification of the lack of this lack, meaning offers us nothing else other than the lure of its capture. What language teaches us, then, is how our being is burdened by sense and by its expectation. What meaning offers us, in short, is neither truth nor consolation, but a desire for a certain mastery in which blackness is once again figured as something enslaved, dominated by its appearance. That is why its symbol is that of the non-moi, for what it connotes is so fearful as to be inexpressible, like a Jabberwock, or the insatiable savage nature of some mythical beast. This great fearful thought has often served to show certain truths and thus to prove the symbolic efficacity of blackness. But at the same time it

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is impossible to gain access to it, to prove absolutely that it exists, since its sense always seems to be less than its differential value. For what is at stake is not knowledge, or seeing, but the thought that makes blackness itself into a state of terror or wretchedness. It is therefore not surprising to come across the following curious sentence in Lacan’s meditation on the signifier: “[T]he phenomenon is no different, which – making her appear, with the sole postponement of a “but,” as comely as the Shulammite, as honest as a virtuous maiden – adorns and readies the Negress for the wedding and the poor woman for the auction block” (E, 419). Let us recall that famous but in classical translations of The Song of Songs, in which the Vulgate’s Nigra sum sed Formosa (“I am black, but comely”) substitutes sed (but) for the original et (and), thereby underscoring the opposition between the bride’s blackness and her beauty.8 If we are drawn closer to her because of this but, not further away, that is because it makes her beauty appear out of her blackness. Lacan not only repeats this classical denigation, but he makes this but into a prosopopoeia of enslavement, the signification by which she is auctioned off and presumably sold into a meaning that enslaves her. It is blackness that thus enslaves us to sense, and that weds us to meaning. There is undoubtedly a racial troping of type and value in such an argument and one that seems to be based on an analogy between knowledge and slavery. (What is gained by adding blackness to this enslavement by the signifier?) The word race is thus not needed to be pinned onto what is known to be black: what better means to make the signifier of blackness function as a but without propriety or ownership? How could one ignore this caesura that humiliates and subjects without reference or subject? These pursuits of knowledge are diverting because they often end in wretchedness. The signifier eludes the system; it cannot be anchored in some plantation or estate (the signified) without being sent out to meet the needs of our unhappy servitude. The enslavement by sense without which we could never be happy, and the lack by which, as African slave-brides, we are offered up to the auction block because we know ourselves to be separated from any kind of spiritual perfection, which we can only learn from God. I can see why Lacan insists that there are such anchoring points, otherwise how could we contemplate such miserable amusements? Perhaps this is why, for the mind preoccupied with its enslavement, these points

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de capitons are described as mythical in both their meaning and their contemplation, “for no one has been able to pin a signification onto a signifier” (SV, 33). Rather like Eeyore’s tail, “one can pin a signifier onto a signifier and see what happens”. Again, put this to the test; one will never have an empty moment, but only endless sport and pleasure, because even Eeyore knows that the pin, though its locus is always uncertain, will be like putting on a “new signification”, but even that is scant support for the misery surrounding the game itself (SV, 33). Perhaps having a shirttail pinned to one’s rear is enough to confirm that one is still nègre? In all this what I am trying to point to are the ways in which racial rhetoric operates in ways that cannot be known by the subject, and especially when we sincerely seek to pin down the signifier to a signified. In other words, let us say that the pin itself anchors what the signifier (of segregation) represents, and that the subject is always already weighed down by the burden of a racial calculus that is both mythical and prescriptive. This is not the way that Lacan is usually read, because so many read his writings without any reference to blackness. However, it will be our argument that blackness can be seen in the Lacanian text from the start even if it is not seen by those who seek in him for answers to the ontology of desire. Racial symbolism—so fleetingly revealed in the light of etymology— reveals the complexity by which the signifier knots the subject to its identifications and first of all by rhetorically putting on the fetish mask which is already in the possession of the object. The mask is analytic rhetoric and therefore something more than mere ornament or trick. To begin with let us say that Lacan’s formulae of metaphor or metonymy are being imitated by his own rhetoric. A metaphor would not be a metaphor if it did not substitute a word for another. Thus the analyst can only interpret metaphor by contemplating the desire lodged in it, or by knowing how the desire that subjects the subject appears. The fact that we are burdened by our desires not only shows what an ignorant image psychoanalysis has (in its fetish of blackness) but also that psychoanalysis itself does not throw much light on its own masking: in a way it must believe in this mask, it can only perform its universalism by masking the sense in which psychoanalysis finally expresses but disavows radical difference. And there are so many telling examples. We will later discuss one or two of them.

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We will see that the art of interpreting must also be an art of piercing masks, of discovering the theory that masks itself, why it does so and the point of keeping up the mask while it is being shaped. But what of the phantasm of unmasking by which psychoanalysis masks itself? That is to say that we risk serious misunderstanding if we look for the imaginary only in its unveiling. The difference in the signifier does not appear as difference—except perhaps to a particularly practised eye, the eye which sees from afar, the eye of the far-sighted Lacanian analyst. But perhaps only black analysts have good enough eyesight? And so can know why analysis sometimes feels like wearing a fetish mask? Only when psychoanalysis has blinded itself can it grasp its essence or its genealogy and distinguish it from everything that it had originally had too great a stake in misrecognizing. The problem is one of misrecognition but misrecognition conceived as recognition can only be determined in relation to racial blindness (as Fanon was one of the first to point out). Lacan says that there is no need to see the image of the twin doors to know that the signifier owes its value to difference. In the sense that its only value lies in being different. Psychoanalysis thinks difference insofar as it is in the unconscious that it finds its meaning for the first time, that it first shows its true force and its aim—these are not the same as those signifiers of labour whose symptom Marx makes use of. Psychoanalysis does not mean an act of resolving surplus meaning but of loosing or releasing, dissolving. But “analysis” must be interpreted in a strange way: to analyse, says Lacan, is always to pass between the I who comes to the limit of its knowledge and is overcome by its truth as the limit of fantasy. The analyst is he or she who comes to the pass, who knows the uncertainty of their own conversion, but in the way that the I is found in its absence without which it could not know its division, the one who makes use of division for new, therapeutic and analytic ends—ends which are, in fact, hardly wise at all. Lacan wants the analyst to overcome itself and to be overcome in its truth. The desire of the analyst is certainly not always wrong: they have a foreboding of failure, of transference as the essence of anti-wisdom, of an agonistic conception of the direction of treatment. Humiliation, poverty, race, class—we can guess the sense that these values take on when they are encountered in psychoanalysis, by a signifier in its antithetical truth. But these are always missed encounters.

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Thus Lacan reads segregare as if it were “naturally” rooted in a phantasm (of meaning) that we are all enslaved by, but only because we already know ourselves to be segregated from the infinite black abysses of the signifier that we recognize as the sign of our own irreducible lack. But why present this phantasm as a universal one, as if the signified were nègre, and we are all slaves in our relation to difference? But here again, who is this we? And why does it feel so symptomatic? In other words, the signifier in its difference from other signifiers, which is to say the field it punctuates, is never a question of whether we value difference, recognized or not; to be subjected by a racist signifier is to be subjected by the effects not of what it represents, for the signifier has no value in itself; but by the ideologies that produce it, including those images and symbols that feel like pushing a needle through the eyeball until it skewers the mind. But, you will say, where is psychoanalysis in all this? Where is its meaning or topology? Perhaps this is a question that the short-sighted are able to ask better than anyone else. Likewise the question of access or entry to the concept of difference is now a question not of being but of what is being veiled by its disunity, the values of prohibition, humiliation, punishment, and so on, that we are enjoined to witness as if they were part of some soluble problem of decipherment. So as not to be misunderstood: the only ambiguity in the image of the twin doors above concerns the meaning of the imperative which one would be foolish to misconstrue, and which brings ever-present dangers into play, an ambiguity that one could say afterwards that it symbolized a natural link between the racial imperative of signification as such, and its spacing across whiteness and blackness. This is why the illustration shows what causes racism to be seen, but only insofar as it cannot show itself as an is but as the vanishing point of what is, of what is hidden, barred, by the adverbial article. (Some would seek the meaning of the bar in the unconscious, but we should be careful not to forget how whiteness and blackness are also possessed by ideology, in terms of both what we lack and also what we seemingly enjoy.) If the meaning of division does not exhaust itself as a question of observation, then what does it mean to know or not to know it, given that for Lacan “one would have to be half-blind [it’s the appropriate image here] to be confused as to the respective places of the signifier and

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the signified” in the schema? (E, 417) But while it is conceivable that the “signifier sends forth its light into the darkness of incomplete significations”, it is not often clear that what is being shone on here (in the doors example): is it the always possible confusion of signification for value, or what it means to keep oneself from being so confused, so preserving the radically dissimilar places of identification occupied by whiteness and blackness? (E, 417) The reality that has to be deciphered before one can enter the ‘right’ door is thus one’s place in the racial symbolic, although that place offers us absolutely no guarantee of self-knowledge or satisfaction. If the chosen ones are able to embrace either door as their destiny, the grosser ones know that it is phantasy that situates the object and so they can “go” anywhere, willy nilly. Here we discover why we need the sign to relieve us of the referent, and why we need to be relieved of the other who is set up as evil from the outset. Going one step further, let us suppose that, with the help of Fanon, there is no clear or conclusive relation between the bar and what it segregates. That each time a choice is made to enter the ‘right’ door it must be a decision not to confuse one’s difference with that which one rejects as the signifier’s “black” referential consequence. That is to say: the difference between the two doors is already the result of racial metaphor, in which what is contrary must be seen to be the plain and manifest evidence of a signifier obscured, not so much by meaning, but by a selection that imposes a certain condition—that one can only enter the right door on the condition that one symbolically embodies  the truth of such racist understanding, and that such conformity produces whiteness and blackness as segregations in the world. It might be argued that this situation is reversible and not determining. But the adverb (only) clearly indicates the contrary; one’s knowledge of difference cannot be given up without giving into the wrong that blackness represents. The signifier that segregates must arouse (by forbidding) this desire for (and fear of ) segregation, and on the basis of which a boundless war is engaged over the black abyss (or, if one prefers, the black differential mark) by which the (white) signifier daubs itself as a pure privilege while knowing itself to be empty, and therefore racially lacking.

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That is why this schema, which is so concerned about the ways in which the signifier is oppressed and oppresses, was invoked, not to contradict Lacan’s emphasis on the bar but to confirm its law as a spacing (of difference and one) marked by the angers, fears, desires, passions by which it is created. Do not be surprised: this emphasis on how (racist) signifiers function (Lacan’s key emphasis) has nothing to do with confusions of perception but with the purity of the impure designation—the whiteness shadowed by its difference from—that only the signifier can cross without fears of contamination (the absorbing passion of a division, without which there is neither enjoyment nor joy, only the empty formalism of a transfer). Without law (of segregation) there is no transgression, and without transgression the signifier cannot function as what reveals the dangerous possibility of entering the wrong door. That is what constitutes its ideology and its affect. But also its parsing of knowledge as difference—the risky and sacrificial act by which it rejects the wrong interpretation and establishes the mastery of a racial truth. Make no mistake about it. What else does the right door mean, but its position as place, in place, the wrong or right place which localizes nothing except place as symbolically segregated in the world (a segregation in relation to which both whites and blacks are sent off to discover what they lack vis-à-vis the other, a discovery that infallibly becomes either triumph or dejection depending on how one feels placed by what is signified by the signifier?). By not entering the ‘right’ door, one would still need to unveil oneself and think about what one is, in terms of what exceeds you, and how one is understood in the division of one’s racial truth (S/). This is why the twinned doors cannot afford to be occupied by notions of adequacy, appropriateness or inappropriateness, for they offer no access to reality but simply work to reveal the segregated truth of who one is, so as to keep the referentially pure from the meaning that marks or stains it as no longer one, but irredeemably other. This is why the (theory of the) signifier is, in one sense, reactive in the Nietzschean sense; seen from the side of reaction the differential and segregated element is allotted a place that cannot be resisted and an illusion by which one is unfailingly seduced. Once this is clearly understood, the difference cannot be negated, but is infinitely removed from the work of negation. This is what Fanon calls, in his later work, a hallucinated

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cathexis of the other. In the perspective of these symbolizations, the word difference must be understood not only as a signifying relation but also as a relation of force that violently inscribes what it segregates, and inverts what it mirrors. Because the violent effects of racial difference, alongside the cultural-political work of segregation, situate the subject as the locus and origin of an originary violence, signification itself becomes an act of violence. Consequently, the drawing of a line between being and diversity does violence to the irreducible ambiguities that subvert the subject’s very possibility of determining the limits of what she or he means or is as difference. Thus it is characteristic of these illusions to be reactive and to deny, from the start, the hatred which constitutes them from the start, to invert the differential element from which they derive and to give a deformed image of knowledge, mastery, and truth. There is nothing unusual in this except that it seems to turn negrophobia against the bar— as a formal mark or locus of division—rather than seeing language as a sovereign difference and accepting the differences by which it deceives us, and that leads us to confuse the symbolism of value for its veiling by the real. What else does this veiling proclaim than the fact that the signifier can never satisfy us, to assuage our desire for an ultimate and continuous meaning, without pause or change, mockery or ignorance? This amounts to saying that we know that signifiers are pernicious because we have learned to read their imperatives in terms of what we are (not), where we are (not) from, and where we are (forbidden, prohibited from) going. It is easier to think about the signifier as an algorithmic operation when one is not thinking about the symbolic limit that brands it with signs of enslavement or subjugation.

3

Black Infinity

“A signifier”, Lacan tells us, “is what represents a subject to another signifier” (SXX, 49). What is this signifier, this subject? Depending on where you place the emphasis, on representation as the figure that joins subject and signifier, or on the signifier as that which divides the subject from its representations still further, this definition comes down to saying that the signifier acts like a subject because it is situated in discourse. But it only

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does so because what it represents is found to be without end or respite, lost in an infinite abyss of substitutions beyond the reach of meaning (sens). A signifier represents a subject, then, because the subject can only return to itself as the abyssal form of that thought; and is only representable metaphorically as the non-sens that falls between signifiers, a fall whose true place is nowhere. But the subject does not only infinitely fall, it also comes to a halt in its own infinite falling. Why? Because signifier and subject are nothing but symptoms caught in a “closed loop” of words (paroles), a way of being spoken that is no less mediated by the desire of the other conceived of in Hegelian terms (E, 293). Up to now we have presented things as if the signifier is without predicate and the subject is successively possessed as a signifier opposed to meaning. As if the signifier and subject were a diremption that proceeds by their opposition to meaning. But the subject itself is the halting force, the expression of a void within meaning. This is why there is more or less an  affinity between the movement that represents the subject and the break [écart, Unterbrechung] which takes possession of it.9 As Lacan indicates: “I am where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think” (Ea, 166). Moreover, anyone can say this. Anyone can bear witness to this division of the subject. Here the I has no access to being, for division is inscribed at its core. This gap is what introduces a void into the subject’s mastery. And, since the subject cannot represent itself except as slavish mastery, it maintains itself through the impasse that Hegel described. There is no subject which is not already dispossessed since in itself it is not self-certainty but the errant principle by which meaning is maintained. Every signifier is thus essentially related to another signifier as its signified (but only if we understand their relation as the locus of an indivisible division at which speech divides us still further from the inner truth of division). Perhaps this is why some have argued that division operates to confirm the subject in the “certainty of its noincoincidence to itself ” (TL, 121). That is to say, as a Hegelian dialectic. In a way, this insight is perspicacious. For after all, a split unity is still a unity where being and thought intersect. A moment ago we referred to Hegel’s word, Unterbrechung, taken from his account of atomism. He tells us that there is a break that is on the other side of atoms, which exposes a void inherent to the movement of thought itself (“thought is in man precisely what

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atoms and the void are in things”).10 There is a void—a black emptiness—that links thought to being but which is itself impossible to know outside of the interruption it consists in, that constitutes thought as the rift of being. To understand thought therefore one must know why its movement comes to be thus related, not to space and time, but to a void that it can never fill. Or as Hegel writes in the Logic: “The view that the cause of movement lies in the void contains the deeper thought that the cause of becoming pertains to the negative” (cited in Dolar, 15). Against Hegel, however, desire [Begierde] for Lacan is also an abyss where the signifier is being ever propelled and is only conceivable in its incompleteness. The subject of the signifier is desire’s metonym; it would be absolutely absurd to think about the signifier without desire. Desire is subjected by the force of the signifier but is also the object on which subjugation is exercised. In the child’s symbolization of the absent mother, for example, in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the game of fort/da not only symbolizes presence and absence. It also symbolizes the principle of their movement in which is seen a single principle, a single end— that absence is in fact how being is propelled and presence is expelled; their relation is the means by which the void enters the visible world; and in which can be found a nothingness beyond reach and a thread in whose downward fall absence swerves back into view as an is (not), in whose return there is the enjoyment and play of difference. The object has to be symbolized as an absence, absence being the differential element included in each desiring subject and by which each is segregated from need—this is the principle of Lacan’s economy of desire. But a spool should not be compared to a signifier, for if the latter infinitely falls between being and nothing, that fall is imperceptible and is beyond imagining. And the gap it opens up in the unconscious is always veiled, inverted, and displaced. The critique of atomism must be understood in terms of this principle. It consists in showing that atomism attempts to impart to the fall within being an essential meaning which only belongs to signification. Only a signifier can represent another signifier. (As Althusser suggests when he interprets the philosophy of the encounter as atoms falling in a void.11 But the question is, can the swerve of an atom accommodate the essential dialectical relation which is appended to it? The swerve only becomes coherent if one thinks of void instead of atom. For the notion of atom cannot in itself contain the

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difference necessary for the affirmation of such non-relation, the nothing in which absence resides, and is itself negated according to the void. Thus atomism would be a mask for an incipient dialectics. And especially when the fall is being thought as ontological indifference (Dolar, 17). This is of a quite different order to that of the signifier whose ‘fall’ cannot be deflected by whatever events and encounters it may bear witness to or suffer.) And this is indeed the point: Lacan’s concept of signification is not that of a childish fiction that we arbitrarily dream up, but nor is it the representation of a signified, for what it represents—and this is much harder to see—is the clinamen that is always present, and whose swerve, or rather, becoming, is like the curvature of a möbius strip that resists and compels (the ontology of ) manifestation: this decline is infinite, precisely as the retroactive elision of an infinite division between desire and its object. The signifier (the écart that is both imperceptible and without end) is “not perhaps nothing, but not nothing” (SXI, 64). A new conception of the unconscious as manque-à-être [a “lack-of-being”] follows from this (SXI, 29). For the unconscious is not realizable as ontology, still less is it a deception necessarily knowable as such. The real problem is not that of the relation of being to the irréalisable but rather of the relation of desire to the limit that it obeys—obeys to a greater or lesser extent as an ien (as a not nothing, or less than nothing; and so less than a rien).12 But what is being thought in the perspective of the less than (ien) and from the standpoint of “othing”: is this still not fundamentally Hegelian? A phantasm of being as thought?13 Strangely enough this lack-of-being is also how Fanon thinks blackness in the form of its unconscious deception: faced with the irréalisable the colonisé, insofar as he wills himself white, can only recognize himself as less than nothing caught between nothingness and infinity. Blackness is called into non-being not because it negates being—but insofar as it introduces a subtractive negativity into being, a n’est pas which is operating through nothing, and as nothing, and whose avatar is the non-moi.14 Thus, if the signifier-as-nègre—a not having that is disconnected from any referent and whose representation is censored as something in the world—finds its immediate corroboration in another signifier, and that signifier leads to another, what emerges is an infinite division of being and non-being that is irreducible and incommensurable and without end. And Fanon’s break with Lacan rests on one precise point; it is a matter of knowing whether non-being is that which

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veils division or that which dwells between nothingness and infinity. Everything else flows from this. Indeed, if Lacan is led to manque-à-être it is primarily because he believes in a logic of subtraction albeit one removed from negation. Because the signifier infinitely slides or swerves away from meaning, according to Lacan, deception is essentially the signified of the signifier, and the subject comes to understand that it is one with the division that it depends on but never allows finality. Such is the truth of the Lacanian signifier. It hides from us the knowledge that the sign has an identity and leads the subject to deny division itself, regardless of how much we desire to escape it, and regardless of our ability to count it as singular or multiple, which impairs our ability for thought. Fanon discovers what seems to him the Lacanian mystification; not everyone posits the infinite as the unity, or identity of the object, and not everyone shares the presumption by which infinite division is the true meaning of deception, and one that leads the subject to repudiate the signified of these infinites. In brief, lack for some is upsetting precisely because it makes real a certain being in the world. With respect to the black subject, in short, manque-à-être means repudiating the flaw that makes blackness one with its own infinite incommensurability to the world. For to be black is to live the truth of one’s own monstrous disunity without alibi. To put one’s hopes in the amputated necessity of such disunity is to be returned, as it were, not to the world, but to the nonreferential reality of martyrdom and massacre—a reality, moreover, from which one is repeatedly cut and nothing can be done to stop this severing. Fanon denounces the “irreal”, the ego, as the last refuges of an engraved flaw on being. The impurity or flaw is where both thought and being emerge but without founding identity or ontology: “In the weltanschauung of a colonized people, there is an impurity or flaw that prohibits any ontological explanation”, he tells us (BS, 90). When Fanon invokes the imaginary it is always in an ironic or polemical way, against the pleasures, against the virtues of misrecognition. But in fact the imaginary also raises the question of the racial signifier and its place in reality. In order for there to be an imaginary it is necessary for there to be an ego as the retroactive effect of disunity. What directs us towards the origin of the ego is the fact that the child sees an image which it relates to but is unable finally to

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WHITES ONLY

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BLACKS ONLY

Fig. 1  An amended image of Lacan’s theory of the sign

encounter, whether in the order of a demand or wish. The origin of the ego is this difference between what I see and am, but difference in the colony is also hierarchy, that is to say the relation of a subjugation to a segregating force, of an affirmation that also prohibits as well as mortifies. The inseparability of hierarchy and segregation (as in the illustration above, Fig. 1) is what Fanon calls negrophobic imposition. It is precisely this infinite fall within difference that has neither the appearance of an ien nor any other universal equivalent that leads Fanon to question the Hegelian dialectic. Let us put this to the test: if the signifier is conceived as a racist function (a fiction, a grammar), which it also represents, and regardless of what it affirms or prohibits, that is because it gives rise to a negrophobia whose (racist) meaning is presupposed. Negrophobia is the originary bar, the identity of difference and origin. We will see later why the problem of negrophobia is precisely that of a bar that resists (a black) signification while paradoxically centring whiteness as meaning. This test ought to convince us that we are incapable of comprehending any signifier in its differential autonomy if the emphasis is exclusively on our conventional associations. Be that as it may, we can note the progression from sense to value, from the quod to the quid as twinned tasks for Fanon. The sense of something is its relation to the force which takes possession of it, the value of something is the hierarchy of forces which are expressed in it as a complex cleft in being.

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Atoms perpetually in transformation, endlessly falling in zones at once singular and multiple, if one is prepared to admit the existence of multiplicities referring to no unity. Black infinites that persist forever: but as something entirely other to the world and being.

4

There Exists a (White) X

“the only teaching is mathematical, the rest is a joke” Lacan, …or Worse (SXIX, 17 t.m.) I call an affirmation and a negation contradictory opposites when what one signifies universally the other signifies not universally, e.g. every man is white – not every man is white, no man is white – some is white. But I call the universal affirmation and the universal negation contrary opposites, e.g. every man is just – no man is just. So these cannot be true together, but there opposites may both be true with respect to the same thing, e.g. not every man is white – some man is white. (Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume One)

Lacan’s formulae of sexuation, after explaining it’s ‘logic’. Before going into Lacan’s analysis of the logic of the pas-tout or not-all, I find it necessary to point out how Lacan begins his 1971–2 seminar … or Worse, by suggesting that logic is itself instituted “through a sort of fiction”, and that it is hopelessly embroiled in “creat[ing] the fiction of a metalanguage”; a claim that makes it impossible to know whether this sentence is itself an example of a “language that becomes meta” or a meta that creates its own fiction (SXIX, 10, 4). And so it remains decidedly unclear in these opening pages whether the forcefulness of—“There is no such thing as meta language” or “The not-all is not a denied universal. The not-all is not none”— refers to logic or a fiction about what can necessarily only be said imperfectly, or in general, about a singularity whose sense (rather than meaning) cannot, we are told, be designated by generality? (SXIX, 4, 6) Indeed, Lacan takes great pleasure in telling us that we should not expect anything from the seminar but foolishness and knavery, and saying it moreover knowing that the frontier between logic and fiction cannot be drawn, or that it can only be drawn from the side of naivety and error, or

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from the side of “not to be able to”, as it were, a logic of impossibility where all sense and reference is cast adrift in shipwreck and obscurity (SXIX, 6, 13). Is this then something to be said about what it means “to catch hold of something by means of language”? (SXIX, 4) Is it not on the contrary something to be said impossibly, as being the most impossible thing to do by way of language? Is this why Lacan proposes to account for sexed being by writing down its logic? As if mathematics was the only way of teaching psychoanalysts to shake off the yoke of symbolic differences, and doing so moreover in the hope that they might be able to, or be able not to be able to go beyond the “limit on language in its apprehension of the real”? (SXIX, 11). These things will be understood more clearly from what we said in the previous section, namely that the ot-one cannot be conceived under the attribute of ontology or negation, but as an aporia, and one that is no longer knowable in universal terms. This is why Lacan’s turn to logic and mathematics is often conceived as an attempt to write aporia in non-­ Aristotelian terms, and consequently to go beyond dialectic. But insofar as he continues to believe that there is a logic capable of rendering the language of the unconscious, and conversely that there is a formula for the not-all (∃x), and henceforth for what it designates, Lacan’s arguments become hopelessly embroiled in increasingly improbable distinctions, which logic cannot resolve, and which commit him to repeat Aristotle’s ‘naïve’ attempt to think whiteness and being, existence and essence aporetically together. If we take seriously Lacan’s claim—about sex as logic—it might seem to some that this belief is so misguided, so contrary to good sense, so opposed to what the body is, so remote in every way from the way in which analysts speak, who are more likely to rely on intuitive insight than on principles of logic. And, indeed, Lacan’s turn to the matheme as the pivot, the hinge of “all teaching”, is written as a series of puns—hi-han appât for y en a pas, for example—that, far from opposing logic to semantics, complicates them still further, and, to the extent to which people attach different senses to what they hear, these intricate puns make the pathway to reference undecidable as both sense and reference: for is the hee-haw (hi-han) the lure (appât) of deixis, or is its ostensive definition (y en a pas) the bait that haws by means of deixis? Moreover, haws or lures

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according to how the y en a pas is variously pronounced, written down, or heard? But what is it that links a purely diacritical homonym to an indexical reference if not “the fact of language”, of which Lacan says discourse tries to “fill in everything that has been left gaping wide” by language? (SXIX, 17, 19). A filling in that must be said, that cannot be said, for it is necessarily said by being censured and inter-dicted by way of language? (SXIX, 19) Either way, it would be wise not to draw false conclusions from these mathemes; that is, even though they are short on persuasion for some, but treated as a religion by others, who seek to apply these formulae to all matters requiring analysis, it is evident that the lessons taught by them bring to light an unavoidable obliquity in Lacan’s analysis, an uncertainty that consequently confounds what he says about logic, ontology, and language.15 Those who pretend to read the formulae of ∀x Φx as analytical truth would indeed be unhappy to learn that they did so out of a certain doltishness (SXIX, 17). If they are vexed at the accusation, they should know that this is precisely the word that Lacan uses to describe Aristotle’s attempt in the Metaphysics—an attempt which he shares—to separate “essentiality” from “oneness” (SXIX, 20). For those who pretend to own the truth of the matheme: such doltishness would be contrary to Lacan’s admission that meaning always fails, including that of the matheme. After all, there is no shame in accepting the fact that mathematics is not ontology. And there is no surer weakness of Lacanianism than the failure to recognize that principles of mathematics cannot be simply handled as logic when it comes to drawing conclusions about the unconscious. But let us leave the point here and return to that dolt, Aristotle. Again, is it foolish to propose that the property ‘man’ be logically derived from his whiteness? Or that the intuition of whiteness as essence (supported by the strictest logic) should consequently discover, due to the universalizing fictions of the mind (or, in Lacan’s terms, the signifier) that the individuality of individuals is unknowable except in universal terms, and so introducing an aporia into what it means to be a man, a white man? As if the very thing that makes whiteness white is the thought (the value) that whitens it, and that makes it identifiable as both species and genus? It is this noetic aporia between genera and species which leads Lacan to call Aristotle a dolt because he can’t see how certain individuals (namely

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women) are pas-tout and so do not pretend to own the truth of the universal, and precisely because they very aptly cannot be grouped in the same set as what would include them in their universality and individuality at the same time. But if that is the case, does it matter that not every woman is white—only some are white? This may seem an odd question, but it brings us back to the question of the pas-tout and indeed to the value for Lacan of the gap which remains in all logical attempts to derive essence from existence, and that he explicitly suggests is a consequence of the limit (a word we shall come back to) of philosophical logic vis-à-vis the disutilities of language. And although this is a defensible position at the level of method, it leaves the question open of whether the pas-tout can ever be pas-tout to the logic that presents it, and to which it owes its (white, non-universalizable) existence, which remains undetermined, aporetic. I hope to show in what follows that, even though the pas-tout does not belong to the set (of philosophical logic), it cannot be grasped without reference to the logic and fiction of a certain (philosophical) whiteness. In the suggestive analogy of sex with logic, Lacan follows Aristotle’s analogy of particular whitenesses with the presence of ‘colour’. But instead of Aristotle’s emphasis on congruence, in which ‘colour’ is completely coincident with every particular colour, Lacan turns to logic to make the contrary point: that there exists a group of singularities for which there is no possibility of bringing them together with universal principles. In consequence, there is no universal of the pas-tout in its ontological rectitude. And yet. Insofar as the pas-tout is the object of his discourse is Lacan not making it knowable in precisely Aristotle’s sense of a universal, for example if the formula ‘there is an x which is pas-tout’ is always singular in its real articulation, and a symbol secondarily, what ought to be the most singular ends up being the most general, for the sentence (‘there is a pas-tout that is also a non-universal exception’) cannot but be the sense and reference of a ‘there is an x’ that precedes it and allows its singularity to be uttered and written down infinitely, doltishly, without exception. Now if it makes no sense to ask: what is it that makes whiteness white?—because the question abstractly separates what is most difficult to be kept apart—then why does it make sense to write the non-­ universality of castration as ∀x Φx? That is, it is not clear to me why, in

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his attempt to rethink Freud’s primal horde myth as logic, Lacan demands that we approach myth as a mathematical “form of writing”?16 (SXIX, 85) To understand what is at stake here, we obviously need to understand what Lacan means by ‘writing’. What is its relation, for example, to topology or speech? The problem, however, is that Lacan’s concept of writing (and his endless references to the act of writing things on a blackboard) is never defined beyond this act of writing things down, to deixis, and a number of complicated consequences proceed from this. “It’s when I am writing that I find something”, he tells us; and “My idea of the written…is the return of the repressed” (SXIX, 15, 16). What is one to make, then, of the need to consider sexuation as an act of writing on the one hand, and on the other deducing the logical formulae of what it represses and that we may take to be a symptom of Lacanian discourse? By introducing topology into logic, a discovery which must itself be written, and which changes propositions into functions, sex into formalism, it follows that sexuation cannot itself be written “into the terms of a propositional logic” (SXIX, 86). For what is being stated is neither true nor false, but the formula of what lacks being, or that is pas-tout. The not-all, in brief, is a formula for that which is concealed (repressed?) by sexual being. For what it presents is no longer graspable by the myth or fiction of sexed being. And the proof is before our eyes: literally written on the blackboard, and in the gender deictics of natural languages, and “simply because [less we forget] woman cannot be castrated” (SXIX, 86). Thus what is being written is nothing less than the aporia of a beinglessness without essence, a negation that cannot be negated, and a subjection (to the phallic function Φx) to which woman, being pas-toute, is not entirely subject (except in mythic fiction). What is written, in other words, is a deixis incompatible with its own concept of deixis, which it points to and confounds, and which is pursued as an x without place or ground, assurance or reference. We shall come back to this point shortly. Here though, it feels as if we are in the realm of Humpty Dumpty’s logic, whereby “what I have called one true, the other false, may also be one false, the other true”, and one has to point out that reference is not the same thing as a jouissance of mastery indifferent to sense or meaning (SXIX, 87). What is called writing is thus that which goes to the limit of what one knows and, conversely, the act that indicates, without fully realizing, the

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consequences of being so exposed. For even when Lacan says: “I have no idea what castration is”, it is precisely the impossibility of knowing it to which his writing bears witness, and in accordance with the enigmatic signification of there is no sexual relation, that is a universal that indexes its own exception (SXIX, 22). But when Lacan discusses Aristotle on negation it is not sex but the race-colour syllogism that is mentioned. About whether “saying the man is not white is indeed the contrary of the man is white” (and not, as many believed, the man is not-white). “It’s absolutely not the same thing”, Lacan declares (SXIX, 24). Why? Because it overlooks the quantifier of the at-­ least-­one who would be neither white nor castrated and who is the exception that proves the rule. Here we can recognize how logic separates sex from myth: there is no x that is not subject to (Lacan uses the word, slave to) the phallic function Φx (existential negative). But at the same time there is an x that is not-all (i.e., not slave, negative universal quantifier). Because, for women, there is no figure who is an exception to castration (unlike the primal father for boys); there is no founding figure able to organize the set of ‘woman’. There is no master to enslave her. As such, there is something missing from the set of ‘woman’ and the formula of woman becomes: woman does not exist. Or: without slavery, no symbolic existence. This is what I see and what troubles me. Does this ‘logic’ not reproduce (if not in a strictly equivalent way) the affirmation of phallic jouissance as mythic power? But it is not only sex that presents this dual asymmetry. The Black too is divided in its jouissance. Lacking the white signifier that organizes the set of the human, on the one hand, refusing to be represented as the nègre on the other, for whom whiteness bars the ‘the’ (the human set), blackness refers to a signifier without being (a n’est pas or negative existential particular). Fanon’s name for this not-all, as we shall see, is the nègre: the contrary of the man who is not white is not the man who is black, but the nègre. The consequences of this there is an ∃x … for raced sexual relations will be taken up in Part 2. Before we can make any progress, however, we need to get a better sense of the Lacanian formulae. What needs to be considered is not the (Fregean) logic that Lacan applies to predicates and propositions, but the trouble that would result if, to use the Humpty Dumpty test, the same word could mean one thing and its absolute contrary at the same time. A

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word can be a promise, a contract, a surety, that may be approached with sincerity and truth, in the hope that this x (the signifier in all of its functions) will be satisfied, and convince us by the proofs of some rational principle that language depends solely on the need to be understood. It follows from this that when people say something or another that they, and we, know what they are talking about. But in the experience of analysis the mind’s decision as to what it is thinking is often not capable of being spoken, and the force of certain words is received like a law, a subjugation rather than a contract, a sense that is without grammar or reference. “The question is”, said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all”. And if you don’t know what this word means, that is because it depends solely upon the will of the Other. So let me tell you. But as regards this particular word, please do not ask me to teach you the contrary for not everything that is not true is false, and all that is not false is not necessarily true. Sometimes we do not know what is true or false, nor whether sense, if it exists, can be joined to reference. The rest is fiction or mastery. Every time we speak then, we give voice to our enslavement. But as this trope obliges us to return to the question of language, as long as this is a question of analysis, I have neither faith nor scepticism whether, in his turn to mathematics and logical formalism, Lacan was stricken by some blindness as to the racial implications of Aristotle’s logic, and so we must do for this logic what we did for early Lacan, and appeal beyond the matheme as a form of racialized writing, while not falling prey to it as the fiction of a white meta-language. This brief foray, however, is not meant to be definitive, but to touch once more on what gets lost—the real, mythic truth of whiteness, following on from these formulae about sexual difference. The difference between the all ( ∀ x) and the at least one (∃x). In one sense this principle is obvious, but the use of whiteness (as analogy) to illustrate the principle is often rarely seen or commented on (and not even by Lacan); and it would be a thoroughly blind mind that draws the conclusion that race is not so patently part of this aporia between the universal and the particular that it can hardly be missed. But, with the language of colourism, and its philosophical vignette, the racial usage of logic is there for all to see. There is no need to say that

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whiteness is the conditio sine qua non of Aristotelian logic; for the relations between whiteness and aporia are so intricate and numerous that it is almost impossible not to miss how blackness falls outside the square. Indeed, it is literally pitched. Now the omission of blackness does not lead to error, and so one needs very clear sight to see how it is not part of the deixis by which the principles of essence and existence are made known as logical principles. But the conclusion can hardly be missed—blackness is not part of these principles and not simply because of a refusal to look, but because it does not exist for philosophical logic and ontology. A conclusion which, it seems to me, also confirms the point that blackness cannot be contained within Lacan’s (non-Aristotelian) deixis. I do not have the space here to go into the details of these Aristotelean proofs but let’s say: Lacan, contrary to Aristotle, tries to “found a new universal on the exception that objects to it”.17 Let us consider this initial hypothesis by Guy Le Gaufey. What Lacan calls pas-tout is an aporia that goes to the limit of deixis for what it affirms and negates cannot be decided on as deixis. The universal cannot be affirmed without the exception that denies it, and the exception cannot be denied without affirming the universal that excludes it. This is why Le Gaufey says Lacan’s exception is logically obscure, “mysterious”, and remains in “half-darkness”.18 But does not this undecidability, in its own way, go to the limit of logic? If there is a limit “proper to deixis” (Le Gaufey’s words), why assume that the writing down of it supports that limit, in an unequivocal way, as a logic? Is this not to fill the gap that language always empties? This point recalls Lacan’s objection to those who confuse semblance with what is distinct from it, the jouissance that, by going to the limit, is always surplus to what it presents. Now, Lacan perceives intuitively rather than philosophically, that there is a speculative ambiguity here, and it is with a kind of intricate difficulty that he communicates this exception as neither a negation nor not nothing. Indeed the words he actually uses to define the at-least-one are despair and assurance. Nothing is more important to his praxis than to confound the imaginary assurances by which essence is confused for existence; nothing more fearful than the idea that a real discordance might itself be the most imaginary assurance (a new psychoanalytic myth forever under the incomprehensible spell of the exception

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that itself invents; or a new mastery forever enslaved by its own thought of enslavement). It is intriguing to note that when faced with dialectic, Fanon also goes back to Aristotle to present blackness from the position of contrariety (some men are not white), but as a contrary that has no (white) universal, and consequently feels repelled and disgusted by the universal. The logic of contrariety is thus a clearly defined principle of hierarchical non-­ equivalence. In the same way that we can understand racial envy, massacre, and disgust as principles “of reciprocal exclusivity” (WE, 38–9). But for Lacan the question of jouissance is never simply political but refers more to how difference can be seen in experience as both the same and as incommensurable. In other words, the x in Lacan becomes the speculative form or function of difference as being and thought. Let’s consider this from different points of view. To think division beyond negation. (“There does not exist an x to satisfy a negated Φx” (SXIX, 196).) The there is not in Lacan’s formulae is not merely a product of negation therefore insofar as it negates everything that is predicated of it either as definition or principle, otherwise its exception would be unsound and intolerable, because he reasons that exception has a different status or value when it is written as negation and when it is spoken. It is the difference between writing the sentence (“everything that is said is true [and necessarily untrue]”) and “this fact of saying [it]” (SXIX, 205). If we presume that every logical proposition is dialectizable on the one hand and takes the form of contradiction on the other, it is well to remember that deictics have no meaning beyond the event of their utterance. What amazes me most is to see Lacan extend deixis, not only to writing, but to the signifying bar, since its place is not capable of being sublated into the signified. However, I would argue that a universal founded on an exception can still be read as a Hegelian speculative proposition. If this sounds counterintuitive it is intended to go back to the first principles of Hegel’s speculative reason and its imagining of negation outside of the limits of immediate experience. For one could argue that the contradiction of a universal exception is itself a dialectic of sense and values. That said, there is something revealing in Lacan’s attempt to no longer derive difference from negation, but from impossibility as such. In place

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of sublation we have an impossible difference which is affirmed by its deictic expression which is, just to be clear, no more than the event of its being said. It is the place of division itself which changes sense here, for there is no longer any place for negation beyond its function Φx. The function of value changes place as the difference between the sexes changes its binary principle and the whole of oedipal analysis changes its character from repression to function, from a repressed tertiary (dad, mom, me) to a quaternary (dad, mom, me, function) (SXIX, 38). The negative becomes the power of affirming the not-all: it is no longer subordinated to truth but passes into the service of that which is not (the beyond of truth). Negation is no longer the form under which spirit conserves all that is reactive in itself (Hegel), but is, on the contrary, the act by which analytical discourse sacrifices all its reactive forms of meaning. In the analyst who wants to know what s/he does not know, the analyst who wants to say: “I say nothing”, negation changes sense, it becomes a power of affirming, a speculative means of affirming the affirmative (but as an emptiness, an aporia, a non-negated difference), a logical sign and a zealous servant of affirmation as such. But why then does Lacan present affirmation as inseparable from a negative affirmation and also from the side of a proximate negative consequence? There is no contradiction at this point in Lacan’s thought. Every sign of plenitude in the Seminar: unian, agalma, whiteness, the One, semblance, the imaginary, offers only a partial glimpse of the truth, of absolute knowledge. We know well enough that the part object is, in fact, the “pivot, centre, key of human desire” (SVIII, 1 Feb 1961). But, in fact, I should say to this what I have already said: the part a is not meant to be seen as part of a dialectic of totalization but represents an element that is always the trace of an incomplete negation that surrounds it. It is not a question here of a more primary force (libidinal cathexis) prompting the object in its partialization: it is a question of the part that has no part, and that informs our all (for it is expelled from the constellation of our imaginary being; from our judgement, faith, fidelity), and nothing can become real beyond its circuit. In order to think the atomism of the signifier (the ot-one), I made every effort to offer, by way of a counter-example to that of the one, but without

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linguistic certitude, the existence of a black letter that is indivisible (as a unity) and that wasn’t mortified by the narcissistic look of the subject, for its circuit always went beyond the object: infinitely, for as a letter the unconscious tends towards itself, but this towards is also the beginning of all disorder, in memory, politics, finitude, and desire, for man’s representation by the signifier can never be reached outside of a fantasy of arrival. All our actions and thoughts must follow its circuitous path, according to whether there is satisfaction or not, and that the only possible way of encountering it in analysis is via this act of being uttered, but in ways beyond truth, justice, or knowledge, which are never the ultimate objects of analysis. In the movement from the ens rationis to the nihil negativum Lacan seeks, contrary to philosophy, not enlightenment but a kind of absolute nothing between signifier and object (a nothing that I have called a kind of ultimate solicitude, and which, sparing no effort to escape or capture it, makes the search for it in transference a kind of speculative aporia). What then to make of the Father’s No! which grounds being and existence, and makes all of us “sons of discourse” (SXIX, 210)? We’ll come back to this paternal no in Part 2. Here I’m interested in the negative universal—all whites are not black—that also takes the form of a positive universal for the One who is without exception, the One that does not find its limit in the black infinite that negates it, but rather in its speculative sublation, for example if I were a nègre I would kill myself, for death would be preferable to such non-existence. Is this not also an example of a universal that anxiously seeks to affirm itself as an exception, but can only find itself (again, impossibly) in Black speaking being? There can be redeemer for the black (barred) (S); for not even death can negate it. We can therefore see what Lacan is driving at and what he is opposed to. He is opposed to the classical sense of negation which sees in the nihil the privation or decline or being, of what is. He is opposed to all dialectical thought which sees in being the negative essence (ens) of the One, which makes use of negation as a motor, a power, a quantity, or quality of being. Just as he is opposed to a reading of the nihil which reduces it to a phantom or spectre, the negative premiss of a presumed positivity, and so making it the principle of philosophical ontology. But Lacan still wants to affirm the thought—the logic—of a mode of being that is not-all, and solely because it cannot find within itself either

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causa or essence, and which makes all philosophical modes of negation seem merely credulous, or obscure in their fidelity to the nothing as the most solid and unshakeable foundation of being: as for whiteness, does it matter that it is both an analogy for and a category of the not-all? Does it matter that it is always the presumed predicate of being even in Lacan’s own formulation of aporia? I am not speaking of the Aristotelean text, but of the analogy as it appears in …or Worse, and which is used to persuade us of the truthfulness of Lacan’s deixis. Others may object to this comparison, but I take it as an example of what seems to me to be quite monstrous still: this negative aggression that still sees whiteness as the enlightened principle of logic and reason, but as a rule that analysis follows blindly. And logic thereby becomes racial eloquence, and racial eloquence logic. In other words the writing of whiteness is not random but the way in which sexuation is being thought as language, or, more precisely, as the sayable limit of language. Now it is quite possible to have one without the other, for a mind as logical as Lacan’s the choice is not random. But for me, for whom the philosophical trope of blackness goes with its unsayability, just as its sayability goes with its unthinkability, the limit of what I can say about it does not fall to the lot of what I am able to think, logically, mathematically, about this impassability. Lacan asks us to think about a limit (Φx) that not-all possess, and to reassure us that no x possesses it except God or the Urvater (the exception to the symbolic exception). Lacan appears to say that there are exceptions which it would be foolish to confuse with their functions, and functions that paradoxically can only be known as exceptions to the set that would include them. I am not trying to be awkward in saying that this is still a Hegelian conception of the limit. I readily consent to being put in my place by Lacan’s many statements in …or Worse that the pas-tout is not Hegel’s nothing, but I am not convinced. Why? Because at bottom, or its end, the x that is not-all remains absolute, it is only conceivable as absolute negation, albeit without that determinate set that can only be infinitely grasped as the finite in the set of its movement. For all that Lacan is doing here is inverting Hegel’s point about the identity of difference to say that there is an x of non-identity that is indifferent to difference and is all the more different for being so. Identity requires difference to be,

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and it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-­ certainty. To say that the word pas-tout is repeated as a limit of what can be thought and that the limit is trying to correct the assumption that at least one ( ∃ x) is not, does not mean: (1) that the not-all changes the speculative limit of being per se, or (2) that it changes the sign by which existence expresses negation: such formulae could easily be read as just another example of Lacan’s Hegelianism. For Hegel too contested the form of the syllogism as having too little substance and not enough speculative dialectical nourishment. And this is why the pas-tout is not simply the sign of yet another speculative proposition, but the indication of the blind envy of its working, of its desire to realize and negate existence, not as a deficit, but to present the pas-tout as a general rule and precisely because the x, and its function Φx, appears to enjoy the authority of a modern faith that accomplishes nothing but a blind cultural allegiance to (white) being and existence. Thus the exception functions as a limit that speculatively grasps itself as limit. To read the (white) x as limit does not mean going outside or beyond it, but rather to keep reading it within its finite end as a racial deixis (and in a way that alters the course of both its meaning and decidability). Even the best readers of Lacan’s logic, such as Le Gaufey, try to arrange the formulae as asymptotes without touching on their limits as racial analogies. I have spent the vast majority of this book so far arguing that if there was such a thing as an exception to whiteness, it is not psychoanalysis that one would turn to reveal it. But I would like to say that, although this suspicion is not wrong, I would like to nuance this to say that psychoanalysis reveals what it means to understand and judge the exception as a deficit, but what it also blindly confirms is an inability to think blackness as other than less than, and whose x is not certain, for its opposition is not whiteness but the universally affirmed whiteness of being, for which there is assumed to be no non-white equivalent. Just as there is no exception to the exception, so there is no one to say that whiteness is not the not-all of exception. All I can say is that there exists a world that falls forever into the nothingness of the not-white and into the hands of a wrathful discordance, but I do not know which of

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these two statuses can act as the universal of my black exception. Such is my status (as a black man), full of weakness and uncertainty, and yet also master of any thought that would seek an answer to my infinitely black exception. And here we return to the question of blindness. And to the act of writing on blackboards, which seems so disproportionate to what is at stake. It is not that the pas-tout can never be written as a pas-tout that concerns me, but whether its writing can justify the claim of being an exception to what can be said of truth in general. I do not intend to list all the ways that Lacan uses to express this pas-tout in the Seminar. But consider this example: “sa femme” becomes “s’affemait”—a pun that alludes to how Xanthippe, lamenting her husband Socrates’ impending death, is excluded by him from the rule—the place and reason—of philosophy (SXIX, 84). Barbara Johnson, commenting on this scene, sees something essential in the role being played here by ‘woman’: “To feel sympathy for the loss felt by those who share something that excludes you, that is the role of women”.19 This elegant definition of the not-all, worth many pages in itself, allows us to see just how conventional the relation is between sex, deixis, and exception; a relation that begins, in fact, with woman’s exclusion. “She is taken out not for bringing into the cell the other of philosophy, but for seeing and saying that the other of philosophy is already there”.20 So who does not see or hear her, apart from those philosophers who cannot find the truth without blinding themselves to what she says and points out? But this would make her exclusion also necessary for the final end of philosophy, whose transcendental status can only be thought by making that exclusion, of woman from the deictic “I” of philosophy, exemplary. It follows, according to the above pun, that writing ‘woman’ as a verb that says all (s’affirmer) or nothing (s’effamer) means that ‘woman’ no longer functions strictly as a deictic at all, but as a bogus proper name for that which is both inescapable and appalling and that reflects a kind of quasi-transcendental anxiety of philosophy, a calamity that begins and threatens philosophy at every moment and that must be excluded from its foundation. Only in her absence, in brief, can the pas-tout be said openly, for it bespeaks the absence of ‘woman’ as a speaking subject, and a more direct way of saying this is that ‘woman’ can only perform this ‘logic’ that allows philosophy to point to

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itself as a transcendental subject, and one that it chooses to write as absence, while it serenely waits for its death. What then to make of Lacan’s (white) x? According to Barbara Cassin, Lacan’s writing of homonymy allows us to see what is being said, “which is the surest way of hearing it”.21 But why does the writing of eloquence, its manner of speaking, have need for people to see it to hear it all the more? And why is hearing a question of having good sight? (I’m reminded of Lacan’s mention of the need for very clear sight before the two toilet doors so as to avoid, not error, but nominalism!) Only nominalists cannot see what is directly in front of them. Why? Because they are so used to things being clearly seen, either in agreement or in contradiction, otherwise they lose their way, and it is with endless difficulty that they can be put back on the right road regarding sense and non-sense, the real and reference. And it makes no difference whether what they hear is ridiculous or authoritarian, eloquent or just; or whether what they see is sign or object. In brief, if Lacan has recourse to homonymy when writing pas-­ tout, must we able to see it because what we hear is necessarily deceptive, or because we do not quite know what he is referring to as the object of his discourse? But this would mean that the act of writing the pas-tout is never seen except as false semblance, or mere supplement, or insecure possession. It is like looking at pictures and seeing only the frame. Without writing, in short, the not-all (that defines ‘woman’) remains stricken, and knows neither God, law, time, or nature, for it embodies the inmost shame of a nuda vita to the point of not being part of, of being the outside of spirit, and so incapable of receiving grace or enlightenment, for blindness is its only form of light. But as the exception that proves the rule of geist or logos, writing (of woman, as woman) also gives birth to the rule that, stricken by such bypaths, gives rise to this first exception that it maintains, with absolute sincerity and real desire, and uses to constitute its rule as truth, a truth that metaphysics is convinced is absolute, universal, and sovereign. The consequences seem undeniable. Such writing, it seems to me, can only write racial-sexual difference as the exception that is ab-sent. But is writing on a blackboard really all that different from writing on sand? And for those of us who never heard Lacan speak, and who never

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saw him write down formulae, how will it be decided that we have grasped his words with any surety? Such a doubt never covers one with glory, but only with shame, of being less-than.

5

The Reading of the Trait

Imagine. The algorithm as récit.22 In it we will see Lacan conjure up a little allegory of the signifier as something that moves us to terror, like a man transported to a terrifying desert island, who wakes up to discover a single footprint that belongs to another, a marvel whose imprint we survey without knowing who put it there, and whose proximity threatens the belief in our own authority, leaving us feeling humiliated and afraid. I see a number of recurring themes here: the failure to ever finally know the truth about everything, the message that comes from the Other, the threat that comes with the neighbour, the conflict that invariably comes with the other’s desire, the symbolization that turns on the object as absence, and so on. But what carries most weight is the blackness of all these themes, and solely because it causes us to walk in the footsteps of a trait in relation to which a choice has to be made for the whole universe is changed by it. It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen on the sand. I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition. ...I went to it again to see if there were any more, and to observe if it might not be my fancy; but there was no room for that, for there was exactly the print of a foot – toes, heel, and every part of a foot. How it came thither I knew not, nor could I in the least imagine; but after innumerable fluttering thoughts, like a man perfectly confused and out of myself, I came home to my fortification, not feeling, as we say, the ground I went on, but terrified to the last degree, looking behind me at every two or three steps, mistaking every bush and tree, and fancying every stump at a distance to be a man. (Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Ch. XIV)

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Why is the footprint a trait? Lacan emphasizes the fact that the trait has a dialectical relation to the signifier, whose negation it depends on. But it is important to see how that dialectic enters into a relation with an essential disappearance whose manifestation is ineradicable. And so in his various readings of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel, Robinson Crusoe (a text which is inseparable from the highly charged context of European imperialism), I am interested in what appears to be dialectical—but also what is effaced as its most ferocious enemy, its only unsullied enemy. This is why we must take seriously the resolutely dialectical character of Lacan’s psychoanalysis. It has been said that Lacan does not read literature as literature. In the sense that he does not know its literariness well.23 On the other hand, we believe that the trait is where he locates—but also effaces—the question of the literary. So what? All that is comprehended by the word reading will be at stake in what follows. As will the difficulty in a ‘black’ reading of Lacan. Like Marx, Lacan finds in Robinson Crusoe a certain dialectics.24 If we do not discover blackness there that is because the whole of Lacan’s psychoanalysis of the signifier remains abstract and barely comprehensible without it. The question of the trait will receive several replies in the Seminar: in The Formations of the Unconscious (1957–8) and Desire and Its Interpretation (1958–9). But a particularly important reading occurs in the Psychoses (1955–6) and is directed against an idea of nature as something always clothed with a metaphysical significance that is in the end made comprehensible as an enigma to be appropriated or suppressed as the sign of our (but whose?) alienation. Here is the passage, which I cite at some length: Then there is the trace, the footprint in the sand, the sign about which Robinson Crusoe makes no mistake. Here sign and object separate. The trace, in its negative aspect, draws the natural sign to a limit at which it becomes evanescent. The distinction between sign and object is quite clear here, since the trace is precisely what the object leaves behind once it has gone off somewhere else. Objectively there is no need for any subject to recognise a sign for it to be there – a trace exists even if there is nobody to look at it. When have we passed over into the order of the signifier? The signifier may extend over many of the elements within the domain of the

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sign. But the signifier is a sign that doesn’t refer to any object, not even to one in the form of a trace, even though the trace nevertheless heralds the signifier’s essential feature. It, too, is the sign of an absence. But insofar as it forms part of language, the signifier is a sign which refers to another sign, which is as such structured to signify the absence of another sign, in other words, to be opposed to it in a couple. (SIII, 167, my emphases)

Without attempting here to reconstruct the rather intricate account Lacan goes on to give of the sign in that seminar, which would be worth comparing in some detail both with Fanon’s discussion of language in Black Skin, White Masks, in which both langue and parole are racially hallucinated (a reading of hallucination which is in complex dialogue with both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, texts with which Lacan also has an oblique relation), we might extract from it Lacan’s insistence—along with Defoe—that the trace is the locus of an effacement that is also constitutive: I spoke to you about Robinson Crusoe and about the footstep, the trace of Friday’s footprint, and we dwelt a little while on the following: is this already the signifier, and I told you that the signifier begins, not with the trace, but with whatever effaces the trace, and it is not the effaced trace which constitutes the signifier, it is something which poses itself as being able to be effaced, which inaugurates the signifier. In other words, Robinson Crusoe effaces the trace of Friday’s footprint, but what does he put in its place? If he wants to preserve the place of Friday’s footprint, he needs at least a cross, namely a bar and another bar across it. This is the specific signifier. The specific signifier is something which presents itself as being itself able to be effaced and which subsists precisely in this operation of effacing as such. I mean that the effaced signifier already presents itself as such with the properties proper to the unsaid. In so far as I cancel the signifier with the bar, I perpetuate it as such indefinitely, I inaugurate the dimension of the signifier as such. (SVI, 3)

At the beginning, once again, the signifier is that which sublates and that which presents itself as the work, the labour of effacement. The trait runs through this account like a black thread. We can already feel it in the theory that presents an absence that can never be absolutely effaced but is at least always on the way to dialectic.

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In Lacan the essential relation of a signifier to its trait is conceived of as a negation that crosses the bar of negation as its essence. In its relation with the other the signifier which makes the other absent does not deny the other or that which it is not, it affirms its own difference and enjoys this difference as a suturation that is perpetual. This paradox (which I will be suggesting in a moment is one that torments Fanon himself ) is then generalized as the operation of signification, or at least shows how the bar between signifier and the unsaid, in Jacques Alain-Miller’s words, “summons and rejects” what it already produces as the dialectics of subjugation.25 This point in fact is also described by Lacan in Desire and Its Interpretation as the signifier’s “melting pot” (and once again, I want to say that the wording here is deeply symptomatic). As Lacan puts it: In fact there again what we rediscover, is that just as after it is effaced, what remains, if there is a text, namely if this signifier is inscribed among other signifiers, what remains, is the place where it has been effaced, and it is indeed this place also which sustains the transmission, which is this essential thing thanks to which that which succeeds it in the passage takes on the consistency of something that can be trusted. One sees in effect that if here the signifier is a melting pot in so far as it bears witness to a presence that is past, and that inversely in what is signifying, there is always in the fully developed signifier which the word is, there is always a passage, namely something which is beyond each one of the elements which are articulated, and which are of their nature fleeting, vanishing, that is the passage from one to the other which constitutes the essential of what we call the signifying chain, and that this passage qua vanishing, is this very thing which can be trusted. (SV, 8–10)

The signifier is not present in its presence but is the result of a sublation, of the negation and the affirmation of its difference as passage. The signifier is a product of a melting pot: the transmission that is necessarily linked to an active suppression, the aggression of a white affirmation. As far as this is a dialectics (that is to say, negation as that which retroactively produces its own positivity) the signifier “is something which presents itself as being itself able to be effaced and which subsists precisely in this operation of effacing as such”. This insight, whereby the signifier bears witness to an absence and one that remains as the sign of its effacement,

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goes along with a constant sense in Lacan that signification is structured by division through and through. But in this speculative element of negation, Lacan substitutes psychoanalysis for literature, and difference for the sense of fear, vertigo, crisis, and terror provoked by the footprint. It is in this sense that he effaces, and seemingly dialectically, Defoe’s racist allegory. The question which Lacan constantly repeats, ‘how is the signifier inaugurated, what does it refer to or is structured by?’, must not be understood as the search for Friday’s dark obscurity, whose trait represents a crisis for the white cogito. What Crusoe wants is to affirm his sovereign difference. In his essential relation to the trait of the other racial difference is that which remains unknown, an object of terrible fascination. The knowledge of the signifier in its difference is not one of trust but of danger; this is the new, aggressive, and incredulous element that the novel allegorically substitutes for the dialectics of sovereignty and above all, as a dialectic, for the labour of negativity. It is sufficient to say that dialectic is a black labour and whiteness its enjoyment. And who says that there is more ‘trust’ in sovereign enjoyment than in the labour that serves it? Lacan’s signifier is not opposed to blackness; nor, as the figure of dialectical negation, is it simply effaced; it allows difference to be more effectively thought as sovereign enjoyment. Furthermore, we must ask whether blackness has a structure in all this? It is enumerated. It has a trait. But is it articulated? For Defoe it is a denigated sign and therefore a void interdicting both lack and enjoyment, interrupting the logic by which the subject grasps the field of its truth—only as such does it foreground the negative element in its relation to being and thought. Such abs-sens denies all that it is not for it is the not of the all, lack is its own essence and the principle of its non-existence. “How it [the footprint] came thither I knew not, nor could I in the least imagine; but after innumerable fluttering thoughts, like a man perfectly confused and out of myself, I came home to my fortification, not feeling, as we say, the ground I went on, but terrified to the last degree”. While the (white) cogito knows what is ‘outside’, what is ‘different’, what is ‘not itself ’, it can find no form that is adequate to the trait, no foundation that is not already vain, deluded, and no spirit that, internally, could abolish the trace of this imprint. If the trace connotes a limit to thought, in the sense of that which cannot be thought, or

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confounds being-thought, that is, a being-ness that is not thinkable, then it must be a limit to dialectics. Perhaps this is why Lacan presents the signifier as a kind of speculative capital, “the operation of effacing as such”, as a way of thinking dialectics as mastery: the abstract thought that prevails over blackness as the materia or res of difference, concept over affect, revenge, and ressentiment in the place of imperial aggression. And, conversely, Lacan shows that what is negative in the master-signifier is always a secondary and derivative product of the subject’s desire for the absolute. Moreover, the relation of master (signifier) and slave (trait) is not, in itself, dialectical. What is glimpsed as dialectics is not so much sublation but its fluctuating eclipses in which the cogito has no foothold. It is the slave, the slave’s perspective, the way of thinking belonging to the slave’s perspective that traces the link between alterity and terror, the incomprehensible and the monstrous, racism and enlightenment. The master-slave relationship depends on the fact that power is conceived not as recognition but as the representation of an effacing power, the effacement of the object, the power that gives sight back to the mind in its blindness: “Objectively there is no need for any subject to recognise a sign for it to be there – a trace exists even if there is nobody to look at it”. What the signifier in Lacan achieves is not to have its power recognized, to represent its power, but to make clear its power of subjugation. According to Lacan we have a clear—rather than a blind or deluded— conception of the difference between sign and object. This is not the trait’s slavish conception. The trait only conceives of power as the object of a recognition, the content of a representation, the stake in a competition, and therefore makes it depend, at the end of signification, on a simple attribution of linguistic values. If the signifier-trait relationship can easily take on a dialectical form, to the point where it has become an archetype for every young Lacanian Hegelian, it is because the portrait of the master-signifier that Lacan offers us is, from the start, a portrait which represents the slavish trait, at least as it refers to an object, as at best that which cannibalizes the domains of law, sign, meaning, and truth. Underneath the Hegelian image of the signifier, we always find the black deformation of the trait.

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Let us briefly sum up this first part. Any commentary on the Lacanian signifier must, above all, come to terms with it as a dialectics. It is one in which thought retroactively grasps itself in the enigma of a void that, once grasped, vanishes. But what does Lacan really mean by “vanishes”? The fact that the enigma of the footprint is never revealed, which serves as the basis of racial anxiety in the novel, is thus made negatively explicit by Lacan’s dialectical reading of the trait. For in spite of the absence of meaning, there is no lack of the effects of its absence. Because the trait does not function as a signified but as that which produces certain effects (a signifier), Lacan reads the trait as an allegory of the signifier as subject. The subject acts like a signifier to the extent that its meaning is not revealed: we do not need to know what the trait means to know that it has an effect in its vanishing. But Lacan remains blind to the racial power of the signifier in the text of the allegory; or, what disappears here is its veiled significance, sublated by the Hegelian movement of the signifier. Accordingly, the politics of racial mastery is pinned onto that of signification. Lacan opposes a sovereign vision of the world to that of the slave’s: the former grasps its identity in division, and as a division; the trait is always the veiled meaning of representation, whose phenomenal truth cannot, by definition, be true to nature. Or rather, more accurately, it is always subsumable in that desire. It is passive rather than productive, and is unrecognized by the signifier that effaces it. Lacan insists on this fundamentally onto-theological character of the dialectic and on the incapacity of the black to be anything but the trace that is always fungible-­ graspable as such. It is not the trace that discovers itself as lack, but the signifier that interprets it in its dialectical movement. The order and connection of ideas on display here consequently raises further questions about the understanding of dialectics. The appearance of the trait is, I believe, not of the same order as the “long series of miracles” attending Crusoe’s life on the island. Nor, I would add, does it form part of that series of allegorical readings—by Marx and Engels—by which Crusoe’s plantation ‘estate’ exemplifies a certain mercantile ideology. For, as Crusoe himself notes, the appearance of the footprint does not concern work or phenomena, knowledge or discourse, but concerns the ‘innumerable fluttering thoughts’ by which the subject is confounded.

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The dialectic proposes that the signifier is the conception of division, linking it to the negative, to sublation and preservation; but in Defoe it is the trait that puts into question the logic of the infinite, of spirit as the idea and universal movement of contradiction and its resolution—this is how blackness is represented. Now, if one looks at The Psychoses, it is quite clear that Lacan wrote it not as a structuralist but as a dialectician. We must also remember that Hegel himself did not value language as letter but as spirit. And yet, in his early seminars, the schema that Lacan offers us under Hegel’s influence is only distinguishable from the dialectic by the way in which work and labour are conceived. This is what allows Lacan to say, in The Formations of the Unconscious, that the signifier is not a couple. For the signifier is the one whose element is missing, and where presence and absence intersect in this split. Consequently, it only “arrives to imprint its mark” (to borrow a phrase from Althusser26) on being; one sees here an antithesis between the (black) senseless mark of an unsaid and the (white) meaning essentially transforming it into a signification. We must follow the movement of this difficult imprint in order to understand how Lacan will later establish a new conception of reality as the real: 1. blackness enlightens. Its obscurity shows us the bar that resists and crosses intelligibility; only by offering enough light to condemn it and deprive it of autonomy. The contradiction between Defoe and Lacan is between how the signifier bears witness to that obscurity as terror and logic, appearance and effacement. This contradiction bears witness to a psychoanalysis developed as a dialectic; imperial literature as the redemption and reconciliation of its own allegory. 2. signifier = slavish mastery? The contradiction is reflected in the opposition of labour and knowledge. Labour is the identifying movement from trace to signifier. Defoe constructs that movement as the singular imprint of a misrecognized trait; Lacan as what obliterates the object. Lacan, on the contrary, returns to the primitive signifier; he shatters its archaic origin and absorbs it into a universal being. Thus he reproduces the contradiction as a signifying structure rather than as a pain of individuation but resolves it as the signifier’s participation in its own sovereign movement. The antithesis of signifier and trait must therefore be resolved, transformed into an Aufhebung.

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To see why let us move onto another text which makes manifest this dialectics and which has arguably become one of the most important reference points for contemporary black studies: Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), which will be the main focus of Part 2.

6

Ethics of the Primitive

Before then let us sum up. In this first part we discussed the link between Lacanian theory and its rhetorical mode of argument. Like Freud Lacan’s habitual use of primitive metaphor emerges as a dialectics between universal life and another kind of life. Lacan’s ethnographies of difference in the Seminar (and many other works) must not be allowed to go unchallenged, nor should we be unaware of how Fanon challenges the racial allegories defining such discourse. What does Lacan mean by the primitive? Whenever the primitive is involved it is in terms of a secret withheld, an unbridled jouissance, a prohibition that leaves its mark on what we are and do. The primitive is a dialectical principle between nature and culture, drive and desire. In “Les complexes familiaux” (1938), primitive rites of sexual initiation are said to “regulate the individual’s sexuality in a more positive manner” than modern culture (LCF, 147). Why? It is because of the totem—in its role as ego-ideal—that “primitive societies give a less fragile reinforcement to the sexual formation of the subject” (LCF, 150). Are these not themselves stereotypical formulations, just as the idea of a less inhibited, less fragile primitive libido is itself a well-known philosophical allegory? A more telling example can be found in the hypothesis of a primitive signifier (already evoked), and its differentiation from that of a trait. The primitivism in question here is not ideological, but structural. So if the first says: the primitive is lesser, not yet but also less alienated or repressed. The second says: in all men there is a primordial structure or trait in the sense of a deficiency or lack that we fall short of but secretly hanker after. Why, then, insist that in the primitive mythos man was closer to these primitive signifiers and “modern man is perhaps less well off”, more distant to the archaic realm of meanings? (SIII, 200).

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It’s no coincidence that Lacan cites the work of Marcel Griault here (in The Psychoses), of which it could be said he typifies a certain approach to the other, the black other, that is occupied with its supposed racial metaphysics, its esoteric knowledge, similar to that of Placide Tempels on the Bantu, et al. Such exaltation of a secret knowledge somehow lost to modern man is greeted with a sceptical derision in Fanon’s corpus. He derides what he sees as the ontology of such arguments, to say nothing of the metaphysical principles by which the other, the primitive, is adjudged to be closer to some natural intuition of being, force, or some other vital impulse. In opposition to the natural intuition of a secret essence of being, Fanon presents the convincing proof of symbolic apartheid, the real of political violence, and so on. There is no black ontology, apart from the deluded belief that there is a black secret to be revealed, and no metaphysical origin that is not already the retrospective myth of ethnographic interpretation. On this Fanon is very clear. But as to his opinion on the notion of a primordial signifier in the European unconscious, we will need to go further. Moreover, it is not yet clear, apart from his critique of vitalism, whether he is sceptical as regards a black dasein or the conviction of its secret ontology. If the former remains the dream of a repressed European culture, the latter is a dream on which an entire symbolism has been grafted, and from which philosophy has yet to awake. In all of these vain phantoms and delusions in which blackness is felt to be the measure of something lost or lacking, do we not also see a certain fetishism, on which a primordial meaning is grafted as the repressed truth of modern dreams? There are several points to be made here, to say nothing of several arguments about dasein, logos, and being, which Fanon’s scepticism overturns and also confirms as a speculative element in Western dogmas of reason. We only have to take another brief look at his reading of Lacan to see how sufficiently unpersuaded he is by psychoanalytic accounts of evolution, and the genealogy upon which this primordiality is based. But let us first pause at what Lacan himself says is at work in the primordial significance of the trait for what it says about man’s nature ever since the world began. “Then there is the trace…” “Here sign and object

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separate”. The object leaves behind the trace in its passage to the signifier, and from those who mistake the sign for the object (the white philosopher who colonizes nature as absence?), their thought must be diverted to stop them thinking about themselves because, white though they are, they too will become unhappy as soon as they think about nature as a black language of signs. But isn’t this simply because, in our desire, we have little knowledge of our place in nature? And that human life is the negation of nature as a concept? “Objectively there is no need for any subject to recognise a sign for it to be there”, writes Lacan, “a trace exists even if there is nobody to look at it”. But what if that nobody is presumed to be less than nothing; an ien that allows the subject to be affirmed as a sovereign difference within nature, an affirmation that is also inseparable from dialectical negation? The lure itself would not save us from thinking about this nothing that distracts us, and that ultimately echoes a primordial (b)lack within ourselves. Telling a man that a trait exists is not the same as telling him that it exists without ‘human’ witnesses. It means advising him as to its corporeity, its phenomenology which he can contemplate at his leisure. It does not mean that he is able to tell apart delusion from reality. He who shuns delusion is not of the same mindset as he who is disturbed by what he seeks, or searches for in vain and precisely because he doesn’t understand its real nature (its essence or existence). Robinson Crusoe reproaches himself for his fears, and for pursuing so eagerly that which rends him, but that is because, if he really thought it, he simply cannot imagine blackness as anything more than a violent and inhuman occupation of his mind and property. Accordingly, he is not so much enslaved by the trait in its difference as by his own imaginary terror of dissolution. As Fanon rightly points out, there is no symbolic pact here between ego and other, trait and signifier (slave and its envied master). Both are rivals tangled in hatred and death. But only one confuses imaginary and real violence, self-alienation with what is outside itself. Only one confuses a dialectics of recognition for the slave’s perspective. And we are all still living with the consequences of such a colonizing, delusory desire—its ressentiments, the forces that dominate it and that it raises to a ‘slavishly masterful’ principle of existence.

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Notes 1. See Elizabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 2. On Lacan’s “excommunication” from the IPA in 1963, see Jacques Lacan, Television. A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson. New  York: WWW. Norton, 1990; and “Excommunication” (SXI). 3. See Moustapha Safouan, Jacques Lacan and the Question of Psychoanalytic Training. Trans. Jacqueline Rose. London: Macmillan, 2000. 4. See Jacques Lacan, “Proposition of 9 October on the Psychoanalyst of the School”. Trans. Russel Grigg. Analysis (1995): 14–27. 5. J.-L. Nancy and P. Lacoue-Labarthe, The Title of the Letter: a Reading of Lacan. Trans. D. Pettigrew a and F. Raffoul. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1973: 70. Hereafter TL plus page no. 6. See Alain Badiou and Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan: Past and Present. A Dialogue. Trans. J.E.  Smith. New  York: Columbia UP, 2012, 59–60. 7. Aside from Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s The Title of the Letter, see also J.-L.  Lyotard, “The Dream-Work Does Not Think”. Oxford Literary Review. July, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1983), 3–34. 8. See Marvin Pope, Song of Songs: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Garden City: New York, 1977. 9. See Mladen Dolar, “The Atom and the Void  – from Democritus to Lacan”. Filozofski Vestnik, Vol. XXXIV, No. 2 (2013), 11–26. Hereafter Dolar plus page no. 10. G.W.F.  Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Vol. 1. Trans. E.S. Haldane. Nebraska, 1995, 19. 11. Louis Althusser, “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter”. In Philosophy of the Encounter. Later Writings, 1978–1987. Trans. G.M. Goshgarian. London: Verso, 2006, 163–208. 12. See Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin. There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship. Two Lessons on Lacan. Trans. Susan Spitzer and Kenneth Reinhard. New York: Columbia UP, 2017, 34. 13. The suspicion is perhaps confirmed by Barbara Cassin, when she writes: “Lacan has Democritus say “Nothing, perhaps? – not perhaps nothing, but not nothing.” I would love to make him say: Not nothing, but less than nothing—ot-one, since hihanappât”. There’s No Such Thing as a

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Sexual Relationship, 35. It would thus seem that to make Lacan say “ot-­ one” would be to remove the surreptitious relation between nothing and negation. For a contrary view, see Dolar, “The Atom and the Void”, op. cit., 23, 25–26. 14. For a detailed exposition of these figures, see David Marriott, “Blackness: N’est Pas?” Propter Nos 4 (Fall, 2020), 27–52. 15. For two contrasting positions on the matheme, see Alain Badiou and Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan: Past and Present. A Dialogue. Trans. J.E. Smith. New York: Columbia UP, 2012. 16. See Sigmund Freud. Totem and Taboo. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 13. Trans. L. Strachey. London: Vintage, 2001. 17. Guy Le Gaufey. Lacan and the Formulae of Sexuation. Exploring Logical Consistency and Clinical Consequences. Trans. C.  Gallagher. London: Routledge, 2020, 54. 18. Guaffey, Lacan and the Formulae of Sexuation, 55. 19. Barbara Johnson. The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness. M. Feuerstein, et al. eds. Durham: Duke UP, 2014, 159. 20. Barbara Johnson. The Barbara Johnson Reader, ibid.: my emphases. 21. See Cassin, There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship, 10. 22. This section could be read as a commentary on Lacan’s much-discussed graph of desire and its conception of order, confusion, and constraint (E, 681). The pathway that sees the movement from S to S′ crossed by the vector that retroactively ‘quilts’ the barred subject (S) will be read, however, not as a moment of recognition where ignorance is eliminated but where it is preserved, not only in its bewilderment but also as what upholds and protects the authority of the white subject:

23. See Jacques Derrida, “To Speculate  – on ‘Freud,’” in The Post Card. Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 257–409. And for a commentary, see Barbara Johnson, “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida.” Yale French Studies 55/56 (1978): 457–505.

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24. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 1.Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books, 1982, 169. 25. Jacques-Alain Miller, “Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier).” In Peter Hallward and Knox Peden, eds. Concept and Form. Key Texts from the Cahiers Pour L’Analyse. Vol 1. London: Verso, 2012, 99. 26. Louis Althusser, et al. Reading Capital: The Complete Edition. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso, 2006, 188–189.

Works Cited Dolar, Mladen. “The Atom and the Void – from Democritus to Lacan”. Filozofski Vestnik, Vol. XXXIV, No. 2 (2013), 11–26. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Le Gaufey, Guy. Lacan and the Formulae of Sexuation. Exploring Logical Consistency and Clinical Consequences. Trans. C.  Gallagher. London: Routledge, 2020 Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2006. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1977. Lacan, Jacques. “L’étourdit.” Trans. J.W. Stone (unofficial). 1972. Lacan, Jacques. “Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu”. Trans. C. Gallagher. 1989. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Psychoses. New  York: Norton, 1997. Lacan, Jacques. Television. A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson. New  York: WWW. Norton, 1990. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Formations of The Unconscious. New York: Norton, 2017. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Object of Psychoanalysis, 1965–1966. Trans. C. Gallagher. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Encore, 1972–1973. New York: Norton, 1998. J.-L. Nancy and P. Lacoue-Labarthe, The Title of the Letter: a Reading of Lacan. Trans. D. Pettigrew and F. Raffoul. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1973: 70.

Part 2: The X of X

1

Bodies Without Flesh

I pass on now to explain the consequences that follow on from this sublation and the differing meanings that Lacan and Fanon assign it at the intersections of knowledge, truth, and the real. How does one read Fanon on Lacan? Are we forced to read backwards in order to go forwards? If we are to follow him as he considers how “the world presents itself to the child”, it seems that we too must return to Lacan’s early work on the family (BS, 141). “[L]et us proceed by going backward”, Fanon advises us (BS, 143). We might perhaps think that, given the great chapter on “The Negro and Psychopathology”, where he proposes a psychoanalytic interpretation of the myth of the nègre, Fanon turns to psychoanalysis in order to examine black lived experience. But the first thing he says is that the facts “are much more complicated”, and on the contrary that those facts negate not only the ubiquity of oedipal neuroses but the very process of psychoanalytical analysis itself (BS, 151). It is as though Fanon, distrusting the way psychoanalysis has been “applied” in America and knowing that Freud, Jung, and Adler, “did not think of blacks in the course of their © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. S. Marriott, Lacan Noir, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74978-1_2

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researches”, turns to Lacan to further demystify this critical blindness to the fact of blackness (BS, 152 tm). Fanon’s critique of psychoanalysis thus reads backwards from what seems “abnormal”, “perverse”, “imaginary”, or “paralogical”, in order to show that “every neurosis [and psychosis] has its origins in a specific Erlebnisse”, and that the starting point of sociogeny (as he defines it) is not an (individual) imaginary but a (racial-cultural) symbolization, usually blind to itself (BS, 143, 144). On the one hand, it is a shift in perspective which literally makes the imaginary into a psychopolitical construct, in which we see the effects of a symbolic-real and what follows on from them in the colony; namely, that there is no sexual relation in the colony that is not traversed by the real fantasy of race. Once this ‘secret’ is grasped, it is impossible not to see it. On the other hand, we also know that Black Skin, White Masks was composed backwards, that it refers to a truth that was too fervid to be spoken three years before the work was actually begun—that the verbal dictation of the book is a precise consequence of, or is structured by (commences with the effect of ), a repression. Critique engenders its own repression of sense—and because, not in spite of, what it leaves unsaid. Arguably, Fanon’s role in the early history of Lacanian psychoanalysis and what it makes representable is also something of a riddle that has yet to be understood. I want to revisit that representation, not simply as history, but in terms of the affect that it has on Fanon’s work, and the critique it foretells, and that makes us understand, for example, how a black thought, a black writing of nachträglich can itself be nachträglich for psychoanalysis; a theory that is originary because its significance comes afterwards [après-coup]. As a result, Fanon’s reading of Lacan is difficult, even untimely, precisely because of the blackness that subtends it. The most obvious place to start is Fanon’s response to an article that Lacan wrote for the Encyclopédie française in 1938, entitled “Les complexes familiaux”. Contrary to J.A. Miller, who argues that this text can only be read “retrospectively” as a precursor to the teaching of Lacan (i.e., as a text that has gone astray and that cannot be reconciled with the Séminaire), we believe that this text to be something of a milestone, and not only because of Fanon’s reading.1 This text does not only contain one of the earliest formulations of the mirror stage; it is indeed a precursor

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insofar as it points the way to some of Lacan’s later preoccupations, and even though fundamental concepts such as the signifier or the small a or the practice of psychoanalysis are missing from it, absent. So what induces Fanon to read so much into this early text of Lacan? Is it because of its distinction between ego and subject? Or because here one can find—before the structuralism, the linguistics, the anthropology—the question of the father as the symbolic failure rather than the support of desire and identification? Fanon will reply: structure, but not the structure of speech and language, but structure as a form of antagonism defining our earliest attachments. Then he will in turn say that antagonism—according to its meaning as rivalry, envy, destruction, and so on—also makes representable a certain self-relation in the colony. A self-relation that is invariably mediated by intruding phantasms and hallucinations. A self-relation that also puts the notion of adaptation in question, and articulates another story about Oedipus, letting his fate be sealed not by a sexual relation but by the nègre (BS, 149). In this way Fanon asks questions of colonial family life to which the expected answer is not desire, but the neurotic fear in which the nègre appears as a vengeful, humiliating, illicit drive (the point where cultural life is literally read backwards to an unrightful anticipation whose bad luck is repeatedly foretold in the form of black dereliction). It can never be sufficiently emphasized that psychoanalysis sets as its task the understanding of given behavior patterns – within the specific group represented by the family. When the problem is a neurosis experienced by an adult, the analyst’s task is to uncover in the new psychic structure an analogy with certain infantile elements, a repetition, a duplication of conflicts that owe their origin to the essence of the family constellation. In every case the analyst clings to the concept of the family as a “psychic circumstance and object” [these words are taken from “Les complexes familiaux”]. Here, however, the evidence is going to be particularly complicated. In Europe…There are close connections between the structure of the family and the structure of the nation …. But – and this is a most important point – we observe the inverse in the man of color. A normal black child, having grown up within a normal family, will become abnormal on the slightest contact with the white world. (BS, 141, 143)

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There is a lot going on here. A little bit of everything. Before debating about what this passage means, I would like to make a few clarifying points about Fanon’s reading of “Les complexes familiaux”. Structure  What is structure? And what does it mean to say that it has a topology of surfaces—a transition that forms a knot? How is blackness a symptom? Because Fanon refers to Lacan’s notion, his own formulation has not often been attended to. Thus what follows is a kind of speculative synthesis of the two. In “Les complexes familiaux” the structure of intrusion (a key word for Fanon) becomes an allegory of the socius. The relation between the family and the socius will be shown to be corrupted, perverted, by racial difference. We know that the nègre implies a paralogism crisscrossed by the imaginary and the real, and that it is a sign of a division, a knot, that changes its sense and value depending on who speaks it. As such it is more than a name: it is the paralogism of a force separated from that of the signifier, that cannot be easily put into words, but that makes comprehensible – visible – the imaginary revenge of culture vis-à-vis the other. Imago  The socius shows the work of culture as a perverse genealogy. Culture reworks instinct or nature into a hierarchy of differences. The former has an antinomic structure, the latter does not. Or at least not in the same way. Moreover, racial hierarchy is essentially understood as a vindication of spirit, geist, elan. Here whiteness refers to the deepest mystification of morality and knowledge. Here we are dealing with fictions and anecdotes made real. This is the detour that puts Fanon on the track of what Lacan means by complex, but also imago. The imago is a primordial structure which makes us say yes, that is me, and no, that is not me. But in the colony, the not-me [le non-moi] also refers to how the subject is suspended between phantasm and knowledge. We may note, in general, how Fanon underlines this antimony as a border between psyche and culture. In the imago meanings coalesce into incontrovertible representations (vorstellungen, or word and thing representations). The basis of all of them lies in the relation between complex and structure. But that relation also reveals blackness to be a certain kind of inassimilable object.

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Anthropology  Miller is undoubtedly right to point out that “Les complexes familiaux” precedes Lacan’s engagement with structural anthropology. But Lacan’s notion of the complex is one of the first to show that kinship is not contrary to Otherness, but that authority, the laws of transmission, lineage and succession, are shot through with ethnographic ideas of otherness. The ‘primitive’ family, in other words, allows us to understand the anthropology of others. Anthropology is the promise that otherness can be known as such (rather than the deluded acting out of a self-relation). For Fanon, the black cannot represent himself in this mimetic model for his likeness is always unlike; it has no similitude, and no belonging. Lacan’s use of ethnography is obedient to a pseudo-universalizing anthropology. But Fanon rejects the anthropos, by saying that the complex is already a symptom in the European history of the family. Miller says: “what is called cultural [in Lacan’s essay] is in fact an ersatz symbolic” because the concept of the symbolic is not being named as such (Miller, 2). But this is a misreading of both ersatz—a word that we will be coming back to—and the symbolic. Perhaps the later version repeats what this earlier version expresses? That is, an anthropological explanation of diversity and reproduction, of difference and repetition. What Fanon calls ersatz, however, cannot be thought by anthropology. The symbolic is ersatz because racial difference is so little recognized by it; what is remarkable about Fanon’s reading is that he makes this point sound so obvious. Complex  It is antithetical to that of trieb, and so to Freud who conceived of the two together. It has three definitions: it is a structure, just as it is a form, an activity. It represents, by a fixed form, a certain reality of development at the level of experiences, behaviours, etc. If we look at how Fanon reads it immediately after invoking it, we see that the emphasis is not on reality but on its hallucinated effect; what is mis-recognized (a key emphasis) is both form and experience; and what gets fixed, in the complex, is not reality as it is represented, but that which gets to be hallucinated as both a missing object and a “state of objectification” (LCF, 21).

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As such, the complex makes difference a matter of both symbolic consensus and resistance. Contact  In the passage cited above one can see how blackness is both known and censored for what it represents. That this is what blackness is: a defence against what is hidden by its appearance and the bad conscience and aversive effect of what is exposed by its resistance. Contact has a double meaning, of which one is clear and one which is hidden. It refers to how the racist message of culture is both sent and received; and how the narcissistic genesis of the ego is already traversed by an otherness that makes the question of origin and destination undecidable, or at least ambiguous in their effects. It is like looking out into a night in which all the cows are black and all objects are removed from the rules of perspective. The x that emerges thus cannot be decided as to its existence, which is either too near or far away. So, Fanon implies a more difficult, elusive relation between ego and object, desire and language. The former refers to a certain paralysis at the level of psyche and culture. In contrast to Lacan, who presents reality as a sequence of objectifying relations that either console or fall into crisis. The narrative here can be seen as yet another example of their contrasting Hegelianisms. These crises are accompanied by various symbolizations that force us to recognize racial-sexual differences in their misrecognition. And, as symbols, which acquire the reality of habit, they derive their form as a knowledge gained through conflict, hence as a kind of dialectical index. The complex thus becomes knowledge, which is founded on an ill-foundation, rather than on adaptation. (Note: Lacan’s animus towards American adaptation theory is once again in evidence here—a bias shared by Fanon.) It is not the unconscious dimension of the complex that Lacan is diverting us to here; the complex has conscious and unconscious elements that constitute our experience of the world. It is the same with Fanon, who asks us to consider the complex as an affirmation that is disavowed. It is as a hyperbaton that he reads “Les complexes familiaux”; family life in the colony is the inverse of European

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culture because it has nothing developmental about it but an imaginary ambiguity and no reality that is not already racially hallucinated. So, what does all this have to do with the fact of blackness? Or the colony? What amazes me most is to see these questions posed by Fanon’s radical early reading of Lacan. We need to take them seriously, if we are to appreciate Fanon’s originality re the mirror stage, not because it is a necessary thing to do, in accordance with correcting the historical record, but simply because everyone assumes that they know what blackness is: in its so-called fugitivity, its waywardness, its rebelliousness, its jouissance, and so on. We are constantly disappointed by this indexing but not by the skill by which such notions are wielded. But it is a good thing for the reputation of Fanon’s thought that not all of his readers are black, to show that these notions are extravagant in their claims to know what blackness is, since they are incapable of believing in the very same breath that blackness is always contrary to what is thinkable, representable, analogical, and so on. Nothing strengthens the case of Fanon as an astute reader of Lacan more than the fact that his reading of the mirror stage (his treatment of the white and black child before the mirror) has yet to be fully understood. The Mirror Stage  It is ordinarily read as a precipitation of a certain narcissistic genesis that is marked by both enmity and triumph. It is a reading of the narcissistic genesis of the ego that makes the ego the echoing point of a reflective surface that moves it, articulates it, but which ultimately it is incapable of knowing, or escaping. Though Lacan’s earlier version of 1936 was not published, we can see, in “Les complexes familiaux”, Lacan’s formulation of this concept. That is, here we see a subject divided, irreconcilably so, between his narcissism and his death drive. Here the ego comes into being as the figure of a division—it is where it is not, and is addicted and attached to something that doesn’t exist, but which it sees as having left primordial traces of himself. In loving the image – the Urbild – the ego loses itself, because it has no being except in the image, through the image, and before which it becomes split in the “mirage of mastery” (E, 286). But the image is given to the ego as an image of the other – that is to say, the prestige that certainty gives to existence also offers the ego a resemblance in the form of an effigy.

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Anyone who has read Black Skin, White Masks, and does not see how that division is racialized, will not grasp Fanon’s key emphases. The ego is propped up by the mirror image without seeing it, since, in the first place, it is not the reflecting image that leaves the subject intolerably wretched, frustrated, and elated, but the mirror that frames seeing itself as a kind of loss, even death, but also as a means of escape. But this is not the finding of being as a lost object. A petit a. It is the mirror as object; it does not give him an image, and in it he cannot find his truth, but only a racist fiction veiling his truth. His signifying mastery thus takes its fill of an image that enslaves him and that he dies for in the longing of it. For the image—and this is fundamental—is more excited, and diverted, by its resemblance to what the ego is not, that is the imago for which there is no original. The imago opens up an opaque infinity in the image. Or, opacity is the form by which it convenes, displays the image as representative to he or she who would receive it, but who are then made to see themselves joined by what divides them (S/). The mirror image is raceless. I worship it not because it looks like me but rather the opposite: I love the mirror because of what it censors, the simulacrum that is more real to me because of what it expels: nigrum absconditus; by expelling the nègre it expels that which I do not want to know: the infinite and indivisible nothing that is blackness. Blackness has no aura because it has no semblance. It is all imago. But it has no image that is not already the symbolic determination of a humiliating cipher, since ‘knowing’ it repeats as if by chance its own otherness to itself as the hateful message of culture. The black is precipitated into being as the retroactive mark of a renunciation (-). It has no being except in the body, but it is unable to see the body to which it belongs, except as a moribund and wasting incertitude. A depository whose imaginary form is imposed. And this form is none other than an enigma, an x. An incipit whose recitation is both unfair and depraved. Hallucination  It is a dominant feature in the colony, its symbolism, its artifice, its institutions, etc., all the more so for not being an objectification; the imago is invariably structured by an hallucinatory racial cathexis. Since, however, it is usually misrecognized, it gives no indication of its reality, setting the same deceptiveness as false and true alike.

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The imago is also not a figure of speech by which the subject receives the message from the Other, but part of the complexes by which culture speaks through the subject. Race may not be an object, but it can fix the object into a complex. Its meaning intrudes. It makes us believe, doubt, deny reason; it makes us see, but it also blinds; it has a force, a power, and nothing defines it more than to see it present itself as a reason for certain fixations. Is this a “deficiency” that is far more to do with a situation than a structure? Miller is confident that the notion of the complex looks forward to—anticipates?—the later notion of structure. The deficiency that is also revealed in the mirror stage is taken up by Fanon as a point where a racial imaginary is similarly evoked, but across Lacan’s three registers. What is deficient can take the form of what the object knows, its affect, and as the shock of the real; the first makes truth a form of misrecognition, the second results in wretchedness, and the third is to do with shame, guilt, and indebtedness. Who sees the imago? Who makes us respect it, to identify with it, to long for it? Who but the imaginary, the real, the symbolic? Fanon conceives of the colony as a structure dominated by real fantasy whose authority is akin to that of a magistrate who is ruled by a pure, sublime perversity, and who judges blackness as an x, without paying heed to the mythical circumstances by which it accrues meaning (Miller, 2). In this sense, Fanon is right to say that representation in Lacan should be better read as fixation and repetition, because of the activity of the complexity by which certain fixations are strengthened by repetition and are sutured by a certain ardour, or passion, by which the structure itself makes possible or graspable the exemplary nature or zeal by which blackness is both seen and condemned to invisibility. This insight is of great importance for the history of black philosophy; for, it runs counter not only to rationalist readings of race, but also to the whole Marxian notion of ideology, to which it is opposed. If, when the nègre appears, what also appears with it turns out to be a mask that has no face, but that happens to be a body without flesh, or a corpse that cannot keep a straight face (and whose meaning is decided for us) for it cannot stand the thought of a black reflecting surface, or the truths that such a mirror might announce as one’s ontological deficiency—in all these instances, ideology does not so much reproduce structure, as hide what is missing from it.

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Indeed, this is why Fanon insists that the black can only discover his “real face” [“veritable visage”] in the imago of the nègre whom he masks (BS, 153). But the encounter that reveals these things to him also expresses, very often in a repressed way, a failure to recognize how the nègre is also masked by real fantasies. If the colonisé see each other in imaginary terms, that is to say in terms of their own inverted narcissism, the object can only be revealed as an unrevealed truth, as a mutilated truth that suddenly appears as reality. This is a truth that is thus masked by its own unveiling. I do not intend to list all of the effects of the colonial mirror stage. Everyone knows that its experience is not ersatz, or something missing, but something imposed as an excrescence, or as something that alters the grammar of one’s being leaving one unhinged and therefore out of kilter. Less than nothing. For Fanon, unlike Lacan, deficiency is not just one’s developmental fate. The brother who intrudes (the sembable) is not a developmental aberration, but denotes an imago that punctuates one’s narcissism, or, better put, one’s ability to see one’s ideal reflection which, as in the myth, sees the projection jolted by its own imagining, and that depends on an amputation, a severing, a haemorrhaging in which one ceases to be, and for whose sake alone everything exists. Indeed, what intrudes, in Fanon’s reading, is a principle that proves oneself to be deluded, and deluded not by the reflection as object, but by the white ideal ego that one has oneself invented and which one recognizes as imaginary but is no less real for that, and precisely because it is haunted by what one is not and what one endures as the impression of one’s deficiency vis-à-vis the world. Here is one of the most important differences between Fanon and Lacan, but not the only one. It is not so much the way a complex is lived that determines the symptom (Lacan), but the way that the imago overcomes one’s meaning and signification as a subject (Fanon). If the black equals a subject marked by the trait that constitutes it, that signifies it, that annihilates it, that is because its narcissism is already intruded upon by the judgements condemning it before its truth can occupy reality as representation. The signifier here shows itself to be a racial law not because of the legal robes it wears, but because what it articulates, or puts on display, is a

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blackness that is disembowelled, dismembered, cut into pieces. These are all Fanon’s words. Like Klein, then, like early Lacan, the imaginary is a device that reworks the fantasy of castration as a masquerade in which the violence of the ego (in response to the trait) itself disguises a mortifying self-relation whose reality and pathology is more essential. The intrusion complex shows you what you are, that one is escorted by the scars that one self-inflicts as if they were the deceptive effects of self-love, rather than the traces left by the armed troops of the cultural imago. In either case one is obliged to humiliate yourself by comparing yourself to what it means to be seen and judged as nègre. To say that this is “purely developmental” as Miller does is to misread both Lacan and Fanon (Miller, 6). The complex decides everything: it defines drive as culture, structure, and topology, which is the surface of the ego as reflected by the imago. I should also like to point out, of which the x is the most obvious metaphor, the death drive makes itself felt here as a principle of errancy: there are many examples of blackness as a principle of detournement. A detournement here means what misleads because it precedes any economy of what can be found and thereby lost (even at the level of fantasy). Because the imago reveals itself in death (of judgement and sense), the desire not to look should not be too quickly read as remedy. The surest way to lose oneself is not to look when the other gets too close. But to reach out to the image directly is also foolhardy. So what is to be done? Lacan’s interest in the imago touches on it as a point of oedipal contact. The imago, then, as part of the constitution of the triangle—deficiency-­ prohibition-­identification. But the object-imago has another, doubled aspect in Fanon: errancy-deception-death. Here the most negative aspects of Lacan’s formulation of the mirror stage are emphasized. Here everything deceives for everything—the imaginary other, the subject, the reflector—is engaged in mutual deception. I don’t think that this more radical notion of deception is present in Lacan’s imaginary schema or in his concept of the symbolic L schema, or at least not in the same way: in Fanon, trickery is the form through which everything that appears as deception takes its revenge on the artifices of reason, and are tricked in turn. They both narcissistically compete in lies and deception (but only in the black, the colonisé, is deception the lived experience of a rather

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painful truth—that blackness is the cause and effect of the war between subject and imago.) The Paternal Imago  One of the most interesting things that Fanon takes from Lacan’s 1938 essay, is the crisis of paternity in modern culture. Instead of symbolic consistence, the very name of paternity is now marked by a symbolic deficiency (and with it goes the authority of Oedipus, Freud’s “myth” (LCF, 104).). Accordingly, the “social decline of the paternal imago” is now intimately linked to “the great neurosis of our time” (LCF, 51, 52). What does this insight lead to in the colony? A symbolic unidealization or a cultural reality in which oedipal judgements no longer make as much sense as they once did? Or the realization of a gaping contradiction between real and symbolic paternity, to the extent that function is a necessary consequence of structure, as can be seen in the following hypothesis. Fathers are never enough. They are never enough to generate a future or a past; we anticipate this failure because we are trying to imagine their superiority, or we recall “the mastery of the body” (Lacan) as if it were theirs to give. We are so unwise that we pretend to see, hidden behind these mannequins, dolls, a function on which our being depended, a metaphor for what it means to know and love ourselves, knowing that without it we will be ‘left in the lurch’ (liegen lassen), cut off from everything except shame, or regret, and don’t think that the fantasy of fragmentation is also one of suppletion [suppléance], and is the price we pay for an assured paternal imago, for the integrated image that we think is the only pathway to maturity; but the thing is, in this we are all the same (SIII, SXIII). For Lacan, in brief, the perverse paternal signifier not only cuts us off from the law, it cuts itself in the name of law, for its cultural role is to submissively let itself be repeatedly severed to the point of becoming a metaphor, of an historic suppletion, for whose sake we are willing to endure. But what concerns Fanon (and not so much Lacan) is that castration touches the body in various ways, and what distresses is not so much the touch but the body that has to bear it, as if the paternal imago was feasible (enjoyable?) for everyone. In the colony, paternity is part of the more general culture of uncertainty: am I white enough, pure enough, worthy enough, to be sure of a non-castrating phallic love? Which is somewhat of a non sequitur. The black almost never thinks of

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itself except as a body in pieces, as an imaginary body without flesh, and if we think of this fleshless corporeality, it is only to see what light it throws on identification and desire. The object that one desires to be seen by, the white subject that is forever our end, is also proof that the only reality that we profess as desirable is the one that confirms our symbolic falsehoods. The proof of this can be seen in the way Fanon uses Lacan to say that, in the colony, the paternal metaphor is joined to a kind of primary verwofen, but this is a set in which all racial members are prevented from joining. A prohibited, closed set in which all are one (S(O)), because everyone is missing. The imago of the father is therefore suppletive (which is the same thing as being doubled): because he reminds us of what it means to live, or to hope to live, as something more than a socially dead mannequin, even though it is inevitable that he cannot represent our desire as desire, because our ideal identification with his (imaginary) whiteness puts the jouissance of (an impossible) recognition in the place of desire. Let us discuss one more point before we close this glossary. Family Structure  In psychoanalysis the relation between neuroses and family structure are often defined not in terms of structure but in terms of analogy and/or repetition that relies on a circumstantial account. But Fanon queries Lacan’s notion that the family simply represents the authority or milieu of the culture or nation; this model will not explain the inverted role of the family in the colony. It should therefore be understood that although he agrees with Lacan that the “complex is dominated by cultural factors”, the idea that the complex “represents an object” (in the deficiency of its form) is decidedly more complex (LCF, 21). The family complex is not defined in terms of reference but in terms of an inversion, or inversive doubling. In the colony, the family complex is not the same as that of European culture; the family does not repeat culture, nor is it analogous to the life of the nation, for the place it is allotted is one of abnormality (or detournement). This implies that the imago, as the unconscious representation of the complex, occupies a designified relation to the family as psychical object. I take this to mean the following: if “family sentiments are the inverted [inversée] image of unconscious

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complexes” in Europe, in the colony this inversion is inverted in turn (LCF, 26). By what? If the complex does not represent an object of reality we need to understand that what it presents and reproduces is a simulacrum or Erlebnisse that is real but repressed. What causes this inversion of representation is the realization that the black family does not represent the realization of culture, together with its failure to realize this truth that will lead to a psychical crisis in the lived experience of blackness. Why is this? Because blackness cannot be represented as a psychical object in a way that will serve as the narcissistic basis for later experiences. And, since this knowledge is itself nachträglich, the subject cannot exist without believing in this knowledge as a prophecy, a belief which alters both knowing and the desire to know this truth. The colonisé cannot even doubt that his birth is the sign of an elaborate game or evil trick. Indeed, when he contemplates his existence in the mother’s lofty but stern majesty, he is told to turn his gaze away from the lowly black objects around him, and to stop speaking or acting nègre. His place in the desire and fantasy of the mother is thus one of critique. Moreover, he must will and make himself conform to this idealization ruled over by force and symbolic law. He must love himself as white and exclude the body which belongs to blackness alone. And if his eyes do linger there, his imagination sees further; the nègre is a signifier that he should not go near, for if he does he will lose himself, he will be cast out, sent to live in an unimaginable other place that is the illustration here of a mother love possessed by negrophobia, and for which there is no mediation or black third term.2

2

The Black Imago

Lacan often advises us to read him à la lettre (E, 413). But the literal in his writings is often the most ambiguous ambiguity. For example, in his theory of the signifier, whose falsehoods are also an indication of its truth, Lacan shifts what we know of language and of how the unconscious is expressed in it. The signifier is not a phenomenon or the apparition of a sign, but a symptom which finds its meaning in an arbitrary fixation. The whole philosophy of language is a symptomatology and tropological

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system. All signs are acts of appropriation, domination, exploitation of an imaginary quantity of reality. Even perception, in its diverse aspects, is the expression of imaginary desire which appropriates reality. That is to say that the imaginary itself has a history. The history of the object, in general, is the successive attempt to find it, to find again its meaning, to take possession of it, and to co-exist with a struggle over its absence and nothingness. The same object, the same imaginary phenomenon, changes sense depending on the signifier which appropriates it. History is the variation of absences, that is to say the symbolization of the object as absence, for the moment it is spoken it is lost. The imaginary is therefore a complex notion; there is always a plurality of images and symbols, a complex of losses and hallucinations but also of repetitions and impossibilities which stand-in for the object. “If what I am saying necessitates not, as is said, a model, but the task of articulating topologically the discourse [of psychoanalysis] itself, this springs from the lack [default] in the universe, with the condition that what I say does not in turn offer to repair it [le suppléer]” (“L’étourdit”, op. cit., 33–34). Lacan’s psychoanalysis cannot be understood without taking this essential lack into account. And, in fact, lack (otherwise known as objet a) is almost indistinguishable from an imperceptible fold or stutter in the real. Lack is a dialectical way of thinking, the one invented by Hegel; the only guarantor of being in its impossibility, the only principle of a violent ontology. We find the object in the mirror but we discover it is only an image, and after being captured by it we realize it was only a lure, and that recognition is a fantasy that divides us in two. And this primal splitting of the object, which the child knows to be the only myth, is itself symbolized; the grasp and loss of the object is an event with a multiple sense. This is why Lacan does not believe in the imaginary as a model for recognition, but as the egoic misrecognition in which a primordial signifier always refers to the event of its loss. There is no event, no phenomenon, word, or thought which does not have an imaginary sense. An object is sometimes imaginary, sometimes sublimated, sometimes something more than figure or writing—depending on the symbolizations (the signifiers) of the division which take possession of it. But perhaps this game is also a logic of attraction-absorption? Let us then examine what Lacan says about “the being who absorbs [and who]

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is completely absorbed [absorbé]” (LCF, 33). Now he wants to say that the infans—in its primitive archaism—does not yet have an ego, and no narcissistic image, and in the matters of the organism he has little or no control. These “primordial discontents” find other paths to satisfaction— including the il y a of the mirror image. Fanon does not deny any of this as we know. But if there is one thing which separates him from Lacan in his account of the family it is most certainly the idea that the imago, that is so imprinted during the first formative stages of existence, does not preserve the child from fears of abandonment so much as hand him over body and all. The whole visible world offers neither lure nor alibi, just a hatred that is equally astounding, and exhausts all the powers of the imagination. Let us see then where this penetrating and powerful insight takes him, and whether he and Lacan are in disagreement. Lacan says anxiety begins with life itself (i.e., with the mother), Fanon says the mother (as the gatekeeper of culture) is the first sentiment of a highly singular cultural anxiety; namely, I dare not let her see me as nègre, for she is the judge by whom the appearance of the nègre, and its discourse, is condemned. As such, she divides him still further. She opens a new abyss by showing how being is enclosed by the anti-black signifier. The nègre by which he terrifies himself and contemplates in silence. But she is also the means by which a racial sublimation is integrated into the psyche as the belief that the only way to be loved and to find happiness is to be non-black, as compared to that nothingness, the black abyss between himself and culture. What else can he do, then, but abandon this semblance, knowing that to do so is the only way he can gain the love of his mother, whose love is a universal no! forever suspended in the judgement of culture. Equally incapable of being loved as white and of escaping the anti-­ black hatred by which family life is engulfed, the black condemns himself to incertitude but makes no effort to escape it. Because of his universal assumption—that before the mirror we are all the same—Lacan is prevented from seeing how something that is assumed to be primordial (he often uses the phrase primary repression) is already an allegory, a fiction, a fabula that already includes the racial presumption of culture. A fiction that searches and finds its own symbolization in the primitive as archê, with the mother conceived as the archaic metaphor of

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this theory of the subject. A fiction that consists of nothing but disfavour, of an irreconcilable opposition between the I and the it, and without a mediating third term. Anyone who considers this symbolic repression the ur-object of psychoanalysis will therefore not be surprised to see it appear in “Les complexes familiaux”, which suggests that this version of the mirror stage was inconceivable without such presumption. Fanon is having none of it. Black Skin, White Masks is a sustained critique of such ethnographic fictions (in psychoanalysis, in philosophy)—for their ignorance, their psychical assurance, their hermeneutic tautologies. So we must see whether this reading in its conclusions has anything to say about the colonial family in the wake of these fictions. Lacan cites Hegel, who says: “that the individual who does not struggle to be recognized outside the family group goes to his death without having achieved a personality. The psychological meaning of this thesis will appear in the course of our study” (LCF, 19). What does Fanon say in response? That the subject who is black must go unrecognized by the family in order to achieve a cultural personality that stands for social death. Racial misrecognition is the success of colonial culture. This is the formula of black ressentiment in the colony, wherein a cruelty without conceals a slavish complicity within. We also recognize here the development of Fanon’s inversion of Kant. By making wretchedness the true achievement of a subject that denies itself, the moral law is no longer certain, known, or felt, that is to say, it is no longer knowable as the sensible or super-sensible essence of will (BS, 227). Could it be then that the black has no ethical self-relation, or he is too enfeebled for such understanding? Could one not say that what Fanon discovers to be blackness also involves, in the family, an accursed atè or limit which the subject is forbidden from going near to, but a limit to which the imago (which is where blackness discovers itself to be monstrous, atrocious) brings him so that he can locate his resentments and entitlements? These allusions to Lacan’s later reading of Antigone (in SVII), which forms part of a larger debate on ethics, will allow us to observe some continuities between his and Fanon’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, and especially those pages where Hegel discusses the relation between the family and the political life of culture.

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One can glimpse Hegel in Lacan’s point that the imago, as a model of mental life, “is a perfect assimilation of totality to being”, a point that he observes is also a “metaphysical mirage” (LCF, 44). Fanon shares this distrust of ontology. But he also extends it to Lacan’s representational model of the complex. Let us consider this in relation to Fanon’s reading of Lacan’s “intrusion complex”. We will then be able to judge their differing relation to Hegel (and to Kant). In “Les complexes familiaux” the family in its totality is thus defined as a complex, a dialectical relation (between its form and the real world), and the cultural expression of this dialectic. It is the characteristic of family sentiments that they are often the “inverted image of unconscious complexes” and their libidinal representatives—the oral (or weaning) stage, which reproduces but doesn’t resolve the “primary ambivalence” of “acceptance or refusal” in the child’s earliest attachments and affective interest in the maternal imago; to resolve it by reproducing it; to resolve it on an archaic basis (LCF, 29). “We shall not speak here as Freud did of auto-eroticism, since the ego is not yet constituted, nor of narcissism, since there is not yet any image of the ego” (LCF, 15). But even in this early work Lacan makes us sense that the relation between imago and complex is dialectical. From the outset the imago is insistently presented as the dialectical process of social sublimation. He is not content with resolving this process in a higher dialectic but rather he affirms it and turns it into a Hegelian schema of misrecognition. This is why Lacan characterizes the imago transformed by sublimation as “a perfect assimilation of totality to being”, rather than being dissolved in an original “nostalgia” for a paradise lost or reabsorbed into a “mystical abyss” (LCF, 20). He affirms the pains of separation in the intrusion complex rather than reproducing the sufferings of individuation. The recognition of the other as object, for whom the subject feels rivalry, seems to be “linked to the structure of one’s own body [‘by a certain objective similarity’]” (LCF, 22). But what prevents this hatred of the image of the rival from being overwhelming is the ambiguity that “confuses within itself identification and love” (LCF, 23). There is, for example, a sense that in the fort/da game the child sublimates the loss of the object by “actively reproducing” that loss and his triumph over it as both judgement and ab-sens; but this resurrection is also interpreted as both a desire for death and a kind of

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primary masochism (LCF, 24). It is here that Lacan turns to the “affective value” of the mirror image which is conceived in terms of a resolution of the sufferings of prematurity and of an ambiguous pleasure in which perception is at the service of the drive (LCF, 26). This is what the mirror image offers the subject: “what he recognizes in it is the ideal of the imago of the double. What he acclaims in it is the triumph of a salutary tendency” (LCF, 27). The object (Gegenstand) which confronts the subject as a duplication of the specular image thus corresponds to an imaginary unity. What does the subject seek in this unity? A clear sighting of the plain and manifest evidence of its existence. When, at the end of his passage, Lacan also refers to the image as “add[ing] the temporary [narcissistic] intrusion of an alien tendency” he recognizes two essential innovations in the formation of the ego: the confusion of ego with the image which forms it, but also subjects it to a “primordial alienation” (LCF, 28). The first is precisely the jealous rivalry with the other (typically a younger sibling); the second shows that “the ego is a dissonance introduced into this specular satisfaction” which only then “discovers both the other person and the object as socialized phenomena” (LCF, 29). For, in this version of the mirror stage, the true opposition is not the wholly typical one between ego and subject but the deeper one between object and ego. It is not the image who is supposed to be the model of the archaic ego, it is the sibling: and it is “the primary imago of the double on which the ego models itself ” (LCF, 30). The imaginary is thus defined by a strange discordance, it becomes critically linked to cases of “délires à deux” (LCF, 31). That is to say, a delusion that has two meanings; and that is doubled by aggression and sublimation. When Lacan turns to the aggressivity and rivalry of the Oedipus complex in the modern family, what interests him is thus the structural rather than dynamic relation between reality and object loss (Ojektverlust). He opposes a structural idea of the complex to Freud’s developmental one; he judges the latter’s dynamic view “erroneous”, and he posits the castration phantasy as something of a defence against primordial loss, reproduced via the structure that the subject “has acquired, that is to say, in an imaginary localisation of the tendency” (LCF, 40, 41). “[W]e have to recognise the phantasy of castration as the imaginary game that conditions it and the mother as the object that determines it” (LCF, 41).

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In this reading what is written is thus the scene of an original seduction, its anoedipal solution and the cultural expression of its law. It is characteristic of modern culture and its familial representatives—complex, imago, (super) ego-ideal—to reproduce an irresolvable contradiction, to reconcile it by not reproducing it, to resolve it on the basis of its irreconcilability. But once again there is something preventing this second theme from developing freely. For the dialectic of complex and culture to gain its full importance, for it really to become the dialectic of sublimation and suppression, it was first of all necessary for the “genesis of the object” to reveal “a series of forms marked by arrests [delusions]”, exposed in their enigmatic meanings and the narcissistic forms of their objects (LCF, 54). Once on this road Lacan will no longer be able to stop. The feelings of being spied upon, unmasked, or exposed, ghosted by the hallucinatory psychosis, the imago of the double, are all forms the object takes in family complexes. Finally, the true opposition itself will have to change. It can no longer be content with regression as its typical nosology, for the importance of the family in delusions is too important, a little too affirmative at the outset because of the ego, a little too mad in the end, not to be causally determining. Lacan does not yet give the signifier its full force; the origin of psychosis has yet to be found in a signifying foreclosure. It will therefore be necessary for the analyst, to discover “the biological flaw in the libido” as the place where a family group “that is too closed in on itself ” carries it out in a true, definitive, and essential manner (LCF, 59). Lacan rigorously realizes this biological deficit which corroborates the role of the family complex. For Fanon it is precisely the role of delusions in family groups—whether they take the form of délires à deux, hallucinatory paranoias, or negophobias—that is transposed into the colony; for les nègres, the blacks, it is necessary to understand where race is substituted for the sexual relation: for it is in the family that this symptom is produced. Fanon notes that “Les complexes familiaux” remains silent about race; it has not identified the colonial family complex. And it is that complex which is neither oedipal nor unconscious; that negates blackness as value, the only values recognized by Black Skin, White Masks; where the nègre as symbol of the ultimate limit of the oedipal schema is attained (BS, 151–2).

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In Black Skin, White Masks the imaginary forms of the ego and object loss are the same, the desire to see oneself as other than one is and the self-mutilating mimicry of object loss is the same. It is the same phenomenon but in two opposed senses. On the one hand, the ego that justifies its differentiation from the nègre affirms itself as an imaginary white object; on the other hand, the wretchedness that accuses blackness, that testifies against it (“X is black, but misery is blacker”), that makes black life into bad luck, tries repeatedly to “turn white but also to avoid slipping back” into the “pit of niggerhood” (BS, 47, 54). For Lacan the fact of imaginary disorders in life means primarily “the family’s causal role in these neuroses”, that it is even essentially the family’s fault, by making blameworthy what the individual suffers (LCF, 73). The result of this is that life must be justified, that is to say, redeemed of “the most hidden meaning of parental behavior” (LCF, 75). Saved by that suffering which a little while ago accused it: the subject must also suffer since it is blameworthy. These two aspects of Lacan’s imaginary form what Fanon calls affective erethism or the négro-phobogénèse of psyche pain (BS, 151). They define truly imaginary neuroses, that is to say the way in which blacks deny black life; on the one side, the way in which what is undesirable becomes a machine for manufacturing guilt, and on the other, when what is idealized becomes the dark workshop that makes a white mask out of black skin. Even when blacks sing the praises of black love and life what curses these idealizations are the spectres of hatred hidden beneath these representations. Those who love black life seek to either convert it or condemn it. They love this life like the mutilated love their excised limbs: tender, mutilated, and dying. That these “self-punishing” neuroses are the antithesis of the conjugal family, that they repudiate the family— this is a celebrated discovery dear to Lacan’s dialectic (LCF, 75). This is also the way in which racist imaginary illnesses refute the libido—that is to say, in an entirely fictional manner. “Hate is not inborn; it has to be constantly cultivated, to be brought into being, in conflict with more or less recognized guilt complexes. Hate demands existence, and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behavior; in a sense, he has to become hate” (BS, 53). Black self-hatred is the pleasure in resolving pain in this way, jouissance is internalized, offered to a white ideal, carried to an almost religious ideal, the paradox of a blackly white

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idealism that is devoted to an unimaginable negrophobic cruelty; this is truly an anti-black mania, a mania which is already wholly dialectical. How different this is from Lacan’s oedipal imaginary! The imaginary of “Les complexes familiaux” still ‘resolves’ Oedipus, the “hidden existence” that he spies “beneath the masculine ideal of the feminine principle” that is the masquerade of a “masculine protest” and also of bearing this protest as “the ultimate consequence of the Oedipus complex” (LCF, 80). But now Lacan has seized the sense and value of these transformations; they are the result of a culture for whom a masculine hierarchy of values does not have to be justified, for whom “the very weight of these superstructures may eventually overturn the base”, and for whom the family neuroses reflect their psychic inversion (LCF, 80). We must be clear, the imaginary discordances of inversion do not themselves resolve the “impasse of sexual polarization” by internalizing them; it affirms them as the defining element “of a social antimony” (LCF, 80). And, from this, the opposition of complex and object is developed point by point as that of the affirmation of life (its cultural valuation) and the negation of life (its extreme depreciation). In Fanon, however, “the need to earn the admiration or the love of others” which erects a “value-making superstructure on my whole vision of the world” is opposed to this oedipal reading; and precisely because the polarization of masculine and feminine is intoxicated with whiteness as the sign of cultural and psychic maturity; here blackness is reduced to the genital, to a metaphor of sexuation that links the nègre to a neurosis of destiny, a jouissance that is wholly base (BS, 41). For there are two kinds of suffering and sufferers. Those black men and women who suffer the superabundance of racial anxiety make suffering an affirmation in the same way as they make obsession an activity; in the laceration of the black object they recognize the extreme form of a white affirmation, with no possibility of subtraction, exception, or choice because for them there is no black sexual relation. Those who suffer in their blackness, on the contrary, from the impoverishment of black family life make white obsession a convulsion, a numbness; they make negrophobic suffering a means of accusing life, of resolving the contradiction. All this in fact goes into the idea of a saviour; there is no more beautiful saviour than the one who would be simultaneously executioner, victim, and comforter, who saves the race by

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whitening it in a wonderful dream of bad conscience. From the point of view of a saviour, life must be the path which leads to the triumph of whiteness. From the point of view of Martinican culture, “it is in fact customary in Martinique to dream of a form of salvation that consists in magically turning white” (BS, 44). Negrophobic laceration is the immediate symbol of a multiple affirmation; white love, white signifier, white skin, is the image of contradiction and its solution, as black life submits to the labour of censorship. By not entering into a black sexual relation, one not only avoids the need to think about who or what one is, in terms of what exceeds you, one also avoids understanding one’s racial truth. This is why imaginary relations to the nègre cannot afford to be occupied by oedipal notions of adequacy, appropriateness, or inappropriateness, for they offer no access to reality but simply work to reveal the segregated truth of who one is, so as to keep the referentially pure from the meaning that marks or stains it. All these notions are foreign to Lacan, whose concept of the imaginary, though cultural, remains too psychoanalytically orthodox. The opposition of Fanon to Lacan is not a dialectical opposition, but opposition to the dialectic itself: anoedipal affirmation against dialectical negation, anasemic irresolution against oedipal resolution as the normative triumph of culture. Nothing is further from the Lacanian interpretation of the sexual relation than that presented by Fanon: there is no sexual relation, not because of hierarchy or logic, but because of a racial drama that precedes it: But in Dédée’s case [a character from Abdoulaye Sadji’s novel, Nini] the ego does not have to defend itself, since its claims have been officially recognized: She is marrying a white man. Every coin, however, has two sides; whole families have been made fools of. Three or four mulatto girls had acquired mulatto admirers, while all their friends had white men. “This was looked on particularly as an insult to the family as a whole; an offense, moreover, that required amends.” For these families had been humiliated in their most legitimate ambitions; the mutilation that they had suffered affected the very movement of their lives, the rhythm of their existence…. In response to a profound desire they sought to change, to “evolve.” This right was denied them. At any rate, it was challenged. …

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Whether one is dealing with Mayotte Capécia of Martinique or with Nini of Saint-Louis, the same process is to be observed. A bilateral process [processus, a medical process or structure], an attempt to recover – by internalising – values that were originally prohibited [interdites]. It is because the negress feels inferior that she aspires to gain admittance into the white world. In this endeavor she will seek the help of a phenomenon that we shall call affective erethism. (BS, 59–60, translation modified)

I have said that there is no racial-sexual relation. What I actually mean is: there is no nigger sexual relation. Or no sexual relation that is nègre. Niggers can be fucked, mutilated, cast aside, but they cannot be made symbolically recognizable as an idealized representation. For they affirm all that appears mauvais, they are the representative of all that is mauvais, and all that is made to appear mauvais in culture. Multiple and serially excluded—the nègre’s carnality is the essence of wickedness. His is a regression that, similarly, can only be recognized as social humiliation and symbolic death. Conversely, the nègre is also the image of an unfettered power and drive, a transgressive willing to will that is measured against ego, desire, aspiration. In this way the nègre essentially does not aspire, it does not desire, and above all it does not bestow recognition. This becomes clearer if we consider the difficulties of making the nègre into an object of sexual relation. The lover loves the object, the beloved, inasmuch as it reflects his or her ego as he or she would like it to be. In the colony this means that the subject is taught to love itself insofar as it is not black, sick, unhappy, and sinful, for only whiteness can deliver, enlighten, sanctify, and heal what is mauvais; in this narcissistic substitution, the hope is that by being loved by a white object the black can replace these feelings of inferiority and of lack. In such expressions we see how the black libido can only go one way—to a white fulfilment—in order to return the ego to its narcissism; here imaginary object choice literally rends the veil and reveals the white perfection enclosed within. The intrapsychic feeling of lack—in which the enemy are those passions, gestures, signifiers judged nègre—is the precipitation of the black body image. What the anti-black lover wants to obtain from whiteness is the redeemed object, which it can only name by metaphor, as the object he or she lacks, the agalma which it glorifies,

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exalts, pays honour to, and by which the black miroir is hidden, so that even one’s enemies (those born mauvais) can see something other appear. But the beloved cannot give the lover this other thing, all he can give her or him is its semblance, for the object itself is imaginary and so already castrated. For the Other [A] as Lacan rightly notes, “cannot in any way be taken as a One” (SXX, 47). The agalma is only appearance; the white will to recognition—the will to not be insulted, humiliated, mutilated as nègre—cannot be recognized in what is willed without losing itself in appearance. The lover wants whiteness to be the signifier of his or her desire (the contractual or symbolic liaison which is the only thing that can make blackness bearable, liveable). Without this inauguration, the desire that has chosen to suffer, to humiliate everything nègre, to endure the true sacrifice by which black flesh perishes, but precisely as that which does not perish in the base of the pit, will have to endure a world in which it sees itself reflected as something denied and that denies itself. The distinction of the agalma is not only the ultimate end of negrophobia; it is both the origin and figure of a desire in which the opposition between object love and narcissism no longer pertains. Here the distinction itself is an example of affective erethism, that is, a white affirmation or black self-laceration. When anguish and disgust appear in Fanon it is always at this point, the point at which anti-black desire is able to reconcile the contradictory messages of culture by two comings: that is, one that seeks only oblivion in the imaginary carnal greatness of the nègre, and one that finds in it a jouissance that reconciles a sublimation, a purging, a compensation, with a resignation or a reconciliation. Fanon can attack these figurations for failing to recognize the closed cultural milieu that produces these meanings. The nègre is the cultural figure that has no symbolic meaning except as the crossing of the bar, the cut that centres it as pathological and prohibited, and which means that it cannot be an oedipal phrase or a moral solution to pain, fear, or disgust. It is an imago to which only the negrophobe can be reconciled. But this means that the interracial sexual relation is impossible, that interracial desire calls forth—prohibits—the fear and obsession of the nègre, the pathological and moralizing force of its sexuation to ensure the proper functioning of moral sublimations and racist purgings. In this way blackness is felt to be unbearable, unliveable, a cruel illusion of love,

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and will. If the subject sacrifices itself to this mutilating truth, that is because it already conceives of life through negrophobia. If the white pursues the nègre as object a, that is because it signifies a castration that can be enjoyed in the form of a law that is prefigured by negrophobia and itself prefigures libidinal racism, that is, as a phobia that is lawful and that asks for nothing in return. And indeed, this non-relationship is needed in order to liberate negrophobia from all the fear and disgust of those who repress and disavow it in the mediocre form of a bad conscience. The imaginary and anti-symbolic liaison which writes nègre onto the face of the real suggests a logic of castration that operates interracially and therefore a logic of mutilation and corresponding ethics of desire. Negrophobia is not founded on an imaginary relation to sexuation but on the essential relation of sexual difference and a racial hierarchy of values, without, however, ever concealing this imago of the nègre in its seeming access to jouissance. Are these fantasies of the nègre meant to be taken literally? No. Are they all meant figuratively? No, but either figuratively or literally the nègre is always veiled in its cultural significance, precisely for the sake of hiding the lack of any raced sexual relation in the colony. This clarifies Fanon’s argument, which is not that negrophobia is a fantasy, but rather the opposite: it reveals that there are men and women who can only come together by renouncing what can never be escaped, and desiring what can never be possessed for this very reason, for to do otherwise would be to suffer a painful humiliation. In the same way Fanon argues that the nègre also gives expression to what can never be written or formalized, which is to say that blackness has no adequate symbolic articulation that is not already stereotypically sexual, insofar as it is raised (Aufgehoben) to the function of jouissance, its signified, rather than its phallic signifier. “[W]hen one abandons oneself to the movement of its images—one is no longer aware of the nigger but only of the penis: the nigger is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis. He is a penis” (BS, 169–170, tm). It is the nègre’s task to make us enjoy the object of desire without ab-sens, to teach us how to fuck, to give us back the signifier of our jouissance (and so purge it of any black sensory significance). Even a psychoanalyst hostile or indifferent to Fanon’s critique recognizes this cipher whose meaning is as veiled as it is obscure and through which we are reconciled with the real in its impossibility. Is this why its phallic

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meaning has to be hidden, eclipsed? The black significance of an impossible attestation? It is the nègre who allows men and women to escape from what Fanon calls the real fantasy of their inferiority. It is he who fucks and transforms them, who is called the “mauvais genie”, master of a thousand joys and impossibilities (BS, 148).

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Oedipus Nègre

“Like it or not, the Oedipus complex is far from coming into being among niggers [les nègres]” (BS, 152). And in a footnote, Fanon adds: On this point psychoanalysts will be reluctant to share my view. Dr. Lacan, for instance, talks of the “abundance” of the Oedipus complex. But even if the young boy has to kill [tuer] his father, it is still necessary for the father to accept being killed. I am reminded of what Hegel said: “The cradle of the child is the tomb of the parents”. (BS, 152)

This is where Fanon’s reading of Lacan brings us. If it concerns the place of Oedipus in the colony, that is because he is nowhere to be seen, and if he is absent, that is because he has been humiliated by the real, corpsed by a paternal refusal that he can neither accept nor believe; in either case he misses his rendezvous at the crossroads. In this the father recognizes his own worship, insofar as he is able to picture it, as the perverse cruelty of a universal being who destroys in the name of a desire to kill by being killed. The complex also involves a certain reading of Hegel. Let’s recall Lacan’s earlier mention of Hegel, who says: “that the individual who does not struggle to be recognized outside the family group goes to his death without having achieved a personality” (cited in LCF, 19). Fanon’s commentary underlines the opposite: as long as the black is among his own, he will not encounter negrophobic misrecognition, but the moment he goes outside the familial-cultural group he discovers his social death. In this emphasis, what makes the role of the family within colonial cultural life distinct is not life but death; for the child makes explicit not only the subject’s outward movement but also the return of that outward

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movement itself to social death; blackness not only withdraws from culture; it also gives birth to its own social death as the moment of cultural recognition. Hence the enigmatic meaning of Fanon’s nègre. The nègre does not have an Oedipus complex. He is not driven by the desire to know, but by the desire to act. He bursts, thrusts, opposes, ruptures, tortures; he is not an antinomic principle of whiteness but exists as its active reversal (BS, 189, 218–219). For he transgresses law in his very being. Compare Lacan who says: Oedipus is “the hero of the desire to know” (SXIII, 15/6/66). If the signifier comes to stand in for the ways in which we are all castrated, alienated from our bodies by language, underlined by Lacan as a logic of sexuation, then the nègre represents a signifying position which can be read as the exception that embodies the mythical belief in a jouissance that is uncastrated and that enjoys without limit. But unlike the Freudian myth, in which the master-father is himself an exception to castration, and who enjoys unfettered access to a jouissance before the law (of castration); the nègre is the subject who is imagined to be uncastrated because he is castrated not by law but by the real. (But what kind of subject can possess such knowledge?) In Freud’s reading desire and law are opposed; desire transgresses law. But this is a reading of sens, not structure. For Lacan, the myth needs to be reread, encore, desire and law “are but one and the same barrier to bar our access to the Thing” (SX, 81) Here law is written into the very structure of desire; in which the movement from signifier to signifier is the consolidation of law. This is the same discovery as the earlier one that psychoanalysis fails to grasp—that in colonial culture blackness represents (through negrophobia) a jouissance that says no to oedipal castration. Consequently, the nègre has no gender, no object choice, and no relation to sexuation. For all these reasons Fanon can say: the nègre is the biological, the genital. This image has gained such a hold on imaginings that Western metaphysics, psychology, history, and above all morality bear its imprint. Anyone who has thought about the nègre— or even beheld it—can attest to the trauma of its real impossibility. Indeed, there is no place from which one can remain unaffected by it. For the nègre represents a knowledge that brings one up against one’s limits, and a potency that is hallucinating, that “must be hallucinating” (BS, 157). “I shudder at the mere thought of it” (BS, 167). A fact which also

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explains why any revenge against the nègre involves literal castration and/ or ritualized sexual mutilation. And precisely for the sake of a white ressentiment regarding the inability to have full access to such jouissance. Telling the story of a woman who “sought furiously” to discover the nègre’s “secret” in its traumatizing ineffability, Fanon remarks: “One must recognize that what she wanted was the destruction, the dissolution, of her being on a sexual level” (BS, 171). Or, as Lacan says in …Ou Pire: “There is no other attestation of the real…. What we have to be suspicious of in all reality is that it might be fantasmatic” (SXIX, 174). Fanon’s struggle to understand this typology—its psychology, history, metaphysics—led him to question Oedipus and its various forms. The nègre is not a myth of the symbolic, but of the real. Let us say—borrowing a phrase from Lacan—his is “the only case where the real is stronger than the true. Let’s say that the real, too, can be mythical” (LS, 10). Lacan adds, “It’s very worrying that there is a real that is mythical” (ibid.). My argument is that the nègre is a fundamental truth by which the real becomes mythical. Becomes mythical as structure, not as sense. Or as what Lee Edelman calls “the fantasy, precisely, of form as such”.3 There is no Oedipus among nègres thus means: the nègre has no symbolic formula, which is precisely why it allows us the delusion of a non-racial love, and thus the deluded belief that an authentic racial-sexual relationship is attainable. The Oedipus complex in general is the effect of drives whose frustration forms its core. The object of this frustration is the father (in the classical version) but, in the colony, it is the father’s absence which is the object of frustration. The rivalry that defines the complex is thus a rivalry with that which is not, that which does not prohibit or refuse recognition as much as unveil a hole that cannot be filled. So whereas in the classical version (Freud) the complex persists as a resolution or compromise in which desire and identification coincide, in Fanon’s version the object that suppresses is the effect of the power that sublimates. So there is no completion of the crisis, indeed Oedipus is dishonoured—even humiliated—in the colony as both ego ideal and ideal ego. For there can be no oedipal conception of the nègre, and identification is not the final truth of his dialectic: the problem of his existence is the work of a certain symbolic impossibility and not the labour of the negative.

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It is really remarkable that Fanon argues that this is because the complex is not the effect of an unconscious repression but of a disavowed comparison. Both he and Lacan agree that disturbances in Oedipus represent a dispute in the way the family communicates the authority of culture, but Fanon refuses to define the complex as a sexual destiny alone (and one which privileges both the having and the being of the boy). It is ridiculous to him that people don’t see that Oedipus has gone missing in the colony, and that what people are identifying with is not a castration, but the satisfaction of not being a nègre—a necessity that defines all interpretation and evaluation, and which Fanon can say without exaggeration that the whole work of culture is an effort to understand and justify. The nègre is needed to interpret existence. It is necessary to condemn it (from the standpoint of a ressentiment) in order to redeem it as the way out of the pit that is black life, or, better put, the denial of black life that is felt to be both real and inexorable. The nègre, in brief, is the base imaginary of false resemblance and coherence, a real (or, in Lacan’s wording—a fundamental) fantasy that shields both colon and colonisé from a disturbance in the racial symbolic order. The oedipal suppression of the being that is not (the terror of the n’est pas which appears as the figure of a non-­ existence) is thus a refusal to recognize the being who is always found to be beyond castration and by something that is seen to be more palpably, indisputably black. Indeed, the complex appears to be split, not only between (black) desire and (white) identification but, on the contrary, between a desire surprised by its own weakness, and the fragility of a paternal power which renounces both object and desire. What is thereby posthumously consecrated is suffering rather than desire, refusal rather than remorse, denial rather than guilty submission. Again, while Lacan moves towards a similar position that allows him to say the imago, in its relation to the complex, is subject to cultural variation, the role of sexuality remains crucial to the story he wants to tell, and as such his narrative is still too pious concerning the formation of the complex in lived experience. It is not until he turns to the impact of delusion, of fantasy, and of object loss on the complex that he turns to deeper questions. It is not until he pays attention to affective crises that he draws closer to Fanon.

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It is true to say that Lacan’s insistence that we should consider the complex in relation to the mother whose suppression takes the form of counterdrives, and that form the archaic kernel of the superego, means that he is able to go beyond the complex as simply a narcissistic problem for the ego. Here, what Fanon calls a sociodiagnostics is used to complicate the familiar narrative. Fanon’s point is more trenchant: in the back and forth between ego and imago, blackness is assimilated as an excluded object; moreover, that introjection is imposed by a twofold exclusion: of blackness as ego-ideal and as an unconscious representation. This latter point has struck some as thoroughly wrong and intellectually unsound.4 It is not blackness that is repressed but its recognition. Anti-blackness shows how the imago appears in the form of a misrecognition, for the object has to be kept at a distance as a means of showing the object as a crime, an excess, but also as the expiration of a cultural judgement—for black existence is ien, less than nothing; and the sum of its being, which falls into a n’est pas, is the penance it pays for its original fault. The black object cannot be seen to be for so many reasons, but mainly because it is the dark and secret term of the symbolic. Its political law employs the same terms as that of the real—that is to say, the pathway by which the signifier declines into an untranslatable symptom. And for that the black has to become more blind than Oedipus—the latter loses his sight in the wake of knowledge, the colonisé loses his sight because he does not want to know, and because everything is subject to narcissistic misrecognition. Fanon writes that: in the colony “the specular hallucination is always neutral”. And in relation to such deception, itself the sign of a prior seduction, “I always ask the same question: ‘What color were you?’ Invariably they reply: ‘I had no color’” (BS, 162). How is it that the complex is blinding? Because the colonisé misrecognizes its abnormality as a seduction, or because he is not sure whether the imago is disabling or living? But for knowledge to occur he would have to give up his narcissistic integrity as white. And that would bring reality to a halt. Fanon goes much further when he asks: how does one know one is wearing a mask if the mask is the only thing that is real to us? Consequently, since the only thing masked is the truth that the imago makes available

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to us, we hesitate and are taken aback when our true face becomes available not in reality but its opposite: a monstrously deformed real. The reason for that is in the racial stereotype of Oedipus. It is always the black who is limping, he limps not because he has been left exposed, but because of what he is obliged to keep hidden—the phantasm that masks the madly negative and moralizing judgements of so many others— the terrible secret that he carries with him and that he believes has lamed him: the infernal seduction that makes the black father and mother (and their siblings) party to an impossible choice, and that Fanon calls a moral law that turns sublimation into the opposite of ideal and love. The black is so made that if he is told often enough that he is behaving like a nègre he believes it. By telling himself so often enough he convinces himself because when he is alone he carries on an inner dialogue with himself in which the mother, as both superego and ego-ideal, tells him to keep his inner nègre under proper control. Good manners are not nègre. Society is not nègre. He must thus begin by stringing him up. There is no other way of restoring honour to the family (along with thought, language, being). ‘It is your fault,’ says the mother, whose role in Black Skin, White Masks seems to be one of accusation, of making him responsible, ‘your fault if I don’t have a better son, more respectful of his mother and more conscious of his crime.’ He must obey the mother as much as he can and only talk and play in ways that are not nègre, whom he knows to be the worse, the most mendacious and sinful, the cruellest response of the real; and thus convince himself that he will be eaten up if he so much as whispers a word in petit-nègre. So who is Oedipus? In the colony he is expressly linked to the promise of whiteness and the denial of blackness. They are not the same thing; the black who sacrifices himself to culture (who then am I?), already knows that it is not in his power to answer with any authority, and he is therefore wrong to conclude that he knows what black existence is…he does not see that ressentiment (it’s your fault) and bad conscience (it’s my fault) is the simple psychological lesson of colonial culture. Again, he mutilates himself in order to prevent knowledge. Unlike Oedipus who finally finds what must be found in order to return it to its proper place—the place of castration. But in this classical conception what goes missing is the idea

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that one sees what one never knows (and vice versa) no matter how innocent or guilty that looking/knowing can be. What, then, do black people think of blackness in the colony? Let us say, for the sake of clarity, four things: crisis, delusion, idealism, and ressentiment. 1. In choosing alienation and preferring the image of desire over that of reality, that is taking whiteness as the ideal, the act that is triumphantly used to keep the nègre at a distance is, but for a narcissistic reason that the subject cannot grasp, a failure to resolve a crisis of identification. 2. In deluding himself by becoming the image of what he sees reflected back the subject masks what the mask shows, that is, an unlikeness— “the effect of a signification” (AE, 459)—to which he remains bound as a subject. 3. In taking an offence at the nègre or being so eager to condemn it, he makes the nègre both more desirable and transgressive, or more desirous because of its transgression. A man who shows no resentment at being called a nègre is assumed to be overwhelmed by pity and insults and is brutally forced to confess his affectation. Such irresponsibility cannot be given a positive sense as, say, refusal or revenge. It can only be a bad omen, and so must be exorcised to limit its affect; expelled as blameworthy, and/or met with the gaiety of ressentiment. Is it only cannibals who are awed by such a large gaping mouth? At any rate, he is ridiculed for his pretences; and he has a new name: the king of delusion. Is Fanon right then to call this an impasse of both signification and will? 4. In expelling the imago of the nègre, however, such laughter also betrays a great fear. Am, I, too, unconsciously a nègre? In my way of thinking, my morality, my sense—could this not be my most impossible and ineffable secret? The consequences of all this can be summarized as follows: The White Imaginary  In jealousy the other is a rival. We usually say that rivalry among children is transitive; in other words, our earliest self-­ relations are mediated by an imaginary, and bespeak a pleasure-servitude

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that confuses love and identification. In our jealous obsession with the image of the other we thereby betray our own obsessive identification with the other who is also me. Identification means: “the recognition by the subject of his image” (LCF, 55). The image may be illusory, but it captivates us. Because it amounts to saying: that is me, but in being reflected I not only recognize “the ideal of the imago of the double”, I also experience the “triumph of a salutary tendency” (LC, 60). If this triumph is narcissistic—in which I am the image, in which I acquire a firm footing, a lasting base as image— it also serves to distinguish the fact that the image is also not-me, a distinction which Lacan describes as “the temporary intrusion of an alien tendency” (LC, 61). The image forms but it also deforms. But in the colony, what is condemned is both symbolic and real. The Black Imaginary  But for the colonisé something else intrudes and what is reproduced allows us to witness a scopophilic doubling for which he is made responsible. How is that? Because it is the mirror that sees, and the black imago that is traumatically glimpsed, in respect of which the ego is not represented (by a specular satisfaction), but is invited to bear witness to a limit, an até, by which the fate of its reality is played out. As such, Fanon is nuancing what Lacan is saying here about perception by adding the notion of the gaze that anticipates Lacan’s later elaboration. For what is seen by the infans is an ego conceptualized by a hatred that is traumatizing because it appears to echo its own primordial masochism and aggressivity. The maternal prohibition that gives form to the imago is thus the thread that runs through the attainment of narcissism and this upset by which both ego and object despise and are despised in their turn as the price of their entry into being.

4

A Black Imaginary?

As we have seen Lacan’s imaginary suggested a new direction for psychoanalysis and philosophy. What Fanon himself said in answer to it was— provocatively—a new cultural understanding of the effects of racism and the invention of a new concept—that of negro-phobogenesis—which

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justifies all that it affirms, including jealousy, intrusion, guilt, the fault, hallucinatory whiteness, bodies without flesh. When Fanon spoke of the lack of a raced sexual relation in the colony, he thought it was because the nègre was a more blameworthy object than the perverse nature of white phallic jouissance. This is the great difference between his interpretation of the decline of the paternal imago and Lacan’s interpretation of the European family. This is the reason why, in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon believed that the rival in the colony is always racial, since the subject is forced to concede itself as the reason for why it is all that is bad and calamitous or, conversely, all that is good and noble, or nobler than guilt, ressentiment, bad conscience. In general terms we could say that the mirror stage in the colony is the result of a “discordant identification of the ego”, because the rival on which it models itself is a despised form, but that hatred cannot be named as such. For its signifier is barred, repressed, and not only because “fantasms cannot bear the revelation of speech”, but because to name the ego as such would be to destroy it, to expose it to a kind of symbolic death (in the later sense given it by Lacan, in whose opinion to be without a name, without recognition, is to undergo a second death) (SVII, 80). Such a being conceals from itself the knowledge of what it is not, which arises from what it is, and the blackness of its being which hides reality from its sight. Now this discordance could be read in terms of what Lacan calls a “delusional transmutation” of the body (LCF, 67). But Fanon’s point is more far-reaching: hatred is the cultural reality of the mirror; hatred confers a certain reality on the illusory pleasures of the image that captivates. This discordant thread leads to the puzzle of an x that cannot be symbolized, or in other words, something that cannot be reduced to the logic of the signifier (which is also the story of an x that cannot be known in itself because its only function is to be a figure of a veiled or elided division, that is, the differentiating element of difference itself ). As we have seen the signifier was evoked by Lacan as a way of proving a difference that is different at each instance of its representation. At the same time, a signifier has an identity that is identical only in its opposition to all the other elements in the signifying chain. It differs only according to the bar that mediates it and the signified that tries to locate it. In the Fanonian x what

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is also discovered is an x that is the trap or the end, the expiation and excess of the signifier in the real imaginary truth of its vanishing. According to Fanon’s long footnote on the mirror stage in Black Skin, White Masks this x is the way the colonisé makes its own way to an unequivocal meaning, but that this unequivocality is, paradoxically, where no stable meaning can exist. It’s all very well to say that the signifier is mythical here (which is indeed what Fanon says), but it is precisely because nothing can be pinned to it, or, again, it has no capping point (in the sense in which Lacan uses the term). Here are the key passages in question: It would be interesting, certainly, using the Lacanian notion of the mirror stage, to ask to what extent the imago of his counterpart [sembable] built up in the white youngster at the usual age would be subjected to [ne subirait pas] an imaginary aggression with the apparition of the Black Man [du Noir]. When the process [processus] described by Lacan is understood, there can be no more doubt that the true Other of the White Man [Autrui du Blanc] is and remains the Black Man [le Noir]. And vice versa. Only, for the White Man, the Other is perceived on the plane of the corporeal image, as absolutely not-me [comme le non-moi], which means the non-identifiable, the non-assimilable. For the Black Man, we have shown that historical and economic realities are to be taken into account…. Perhaps it will be objected that if for the White Man [le Blanc] there is an elaboration of the imago of the counterpart, an analogous phenomenon must take place in the Antilleans, visual perception being the basic structure [le canevas] of that elaboration. But to say this is to forget that in the Antilles perception is always situated on the imaginary plane [l’imaginaire]. It is in terms of the White Man [de Blanc], that the counterpart is perceived there [in the Antilles]. It is said of someone, for example, that he is ‘very black’; in a family, there is nothing surprising in hearing a mother announce: ‘X…is the blackest of my children’. Which is to say, the least white…I can only repeat the remark made by a European friend to whom I’ve spoken about this: on the human plane, it is a true mystification. Let’s say it once more, it is with reference to the essence of the White Man that every Antillean is destined [est appelé] to be perceived by his fellow [congénère]…. As regards the father [of a family who are ‘very black, but they are all nice’] who every day at nightfall would walk along his balcony, after a certain time of day, it was said, you could no longer see him. (BS, 162–164, tm)

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What does the “x” refer to? And why does the mother utter it? This eclipse of the subject as an infinite interval? When Fanon denounces negrophobia for accusing, for seeking out those who have to be made responsible for being very, or even fatefully, black, he bases this critique on five grounds. The first of these is that ‘what is perceived cannot be seen’. But the last and deepest is that ‘x is the blackest because it is the least white’: and in it one sees a double meaning understood by all, for while the other only sees a non-me, a non-assimilable counterpart, the black sees a figure—a metaphor—woven through and through by a prescription that operates as a kind of subtractive abolition, by which the entire universe is split in two and/or abolished. The x is the appearance of a mythical event. It appears where people openly disappear or are openly shunned, amused, damned but also lovingly appreciated. Everything becomes a metaphor of it; every feeling of love and luck, and of being affirmed or judged from which it is inseparable. It is this way of being referred, of affirming and being affirmed, of denying and being denied, which is particularly mystical. Whatever does not let itself be interpreted by this x or evaluated by its Other will not be capable of evaluating it, nor will it be capable of understanding why it is so tragic. But if one prefers to say that the x is a hallucinated signifier because it corresponds to the voice of the Other, but not the other, one could say that it shows clearly enough that it is imaginary and deluded in its mystical meaning. But Fanon goes on to say that the x, in its grotesque representation of black family life, cannot be separated from certain historical and economic realities because it also concerns value, or how blackness manifests precisely the value that is violently excluded from reality. It splits the world in two, inventing a neutral colourless subject endowed with a subtractive essence to which it sacrifices its capacity to act and to refrain from action. Its situation in relation to existence is such that it cannot even recognize its own ressentiment, nor the act capable of transforming existence. For it denies existence itself, replaces identification with denigration, and invents depreciation as a way of avoiding its wretchedness. Why, given this desire not to be, this submission that disaggregates the will, this ruse of servitude, should the colonisé be so haunted by the x and everything it manifests? If the x is a cipher, what it shows is the structure and process by which blackness is both hidden and imprinted at the heart of the symbolic.

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Fanon is amused to tears by this x. But he is also in awe of it; it frightens him. The problem of wretchedness runs through his entire work. The x defines the one for whom life is precarious, ceaselessly exposed. It functions as a paradigmatic repressed object by which happiness and esteem are measured by humiliation and approbation. To say that the x is a judgement is perhaps also to say that it makes existence an aesthetic of damnation rather than a secret repression or sublimation. Thus Fanon opposes what is non-identifiable, non-assimilable, that is to say, the decathexis of the non-me to the more obscure anti-cathexis that attaches to the (b)lackest x. Thus it is that the x has a certain evanescence (we shall come back to this word), and what it refers to: a syntagma of appearance or illusions, but also the essential disappearance of a certain non-­becoming that fades away even as we look at it, and by which we remain fixated in both our drives and our desires. What we are trying to describe then is how Fanon and Lacan conceive of these meshes in which the signifier—the x in its abs-sens—gets caught. Later, we will turn to the question of psychosis. But for now, let’s deal with Fanon’s claim that these meshes are those of imagoes anchored in delusions (in the sense of anchoring [ancrage] as taken from Merleau-­ Ponty’s writings on hallucination).5 At this point it is worth recalling a remark made by Fanon in the course of a series of reflections on the vicissitudes of the other for the one who is black as presented in Césaire’s Retour (BS, 92). There is, he writes after the iconic “tiens” passages—another evocation of the other; it occurs after Fanon’s famous introduction of the “schema épidermique racial” (BS, 90), “I approached the other [l’autre]…and the other evanescent, hostile but not opaque, transparent, absent, disappeared. Nausea” (BS, 92, tm). The other—like a fiction, like a disappearing reflection— becomes another figure of vanishment in Fanon’s writings. As the evanescent trace of the other (with a small o), the White Man [le Blanc] “had no scruples about imprisoning me”, which is the reason why the I is far away from itself and deconstitutes itself as an object (BS, 92). It is, intriguingly, this inner schism that leads Fanon to present a new “thematization” of the black body and ego, and to ask what did this internal haemorrhaging (of cogito or ego into stereotypical schema) mean to me? The x is the form of that which haemorrhages. The x is the being that haemorrhages itself, the

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being which is manifested as dissolution. This emptying out, this lessening: the terms converge on the concept of absence in ways that remain to be understood, and that will force us to revise our understanding of Fanon’s relation to Lacan. It follows that in the above series of anecdotes, of which countless other examples could be given, Fanon seems to pose additional questions to Lacan’s mirror stage. He goes as far as proclaiming that there is an incompatible (but not necessarily contradictory) relation between imago and signifier, visibility and absence, the blackest and the least white; between an x of which no totalization or representation is even possible, and a mystification that is always lived as a vanishing of the real. The above passage also indicates, in a less obvious manner perhaps, how the x of Fanonism is not that of Marx or Lacan. It is possible, indeed, to retell the story of the blackest—least white—x from a point of view that allows us to demonstrate this precisely. In these anecdotes the blackest x literally either disappears in its truth and/or is reproduced as a dangerous excess: in either instance, it induces a feverish immediacy, for it crosses the bar between affect and reason in a somewhat uncanny manner and one that has no illumination or concept. Indeed, its interpretation seems to encourage both the masking of blackness and the wearing of blackness as a mask. Needless to say, this is why the key term for Fanon is méconnaissance rather than reconnaissance or connaissance of some unseen system of representation. (This is also why one shouldn’t be too quick to read the blackest x as a sign of a political or para ontology.) Because the x, from the start, is always a perverse path from ideology to the unconscious needs of a racial class, the task of a Fanonian critique is to think the impure designation of this x, as an inscription—a trace or tabula rasa—that disappears as soon as it appears: as if the night were driven, so to speak, to recede into its own essence; or as if the truly, absolutely black was like a threshold opening onto a still darker night. To investigate the abyssal opening by the light of this x, it seems that one should proceed as follows: 1. People tend to read this now iconic passage on du stade du mirroir as if it were just a sociological reading of Lacan; but even in his commentary on l’imago du sembable, Fanon never allows us to forget that for the Black Man [Le Noir] what appears as Other [l’Autrui]*[A]  – as

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both image and illusory structure – is not just the object of a gaze that I am narcissistically captivated-captured by and in which I identify both lure and loss, but, less familiar perhaps, the “historical and economic realities” by which blackness makes visible its ideological vicissitudes (161, tm). If I have wondered why this sentence has gone virtually unnoticed, what strikes me, above all, as a decidedly complex question, is the relation between these realities and the ‘false image’ of the ego: or, how do mode and epoch come to be inscribed or imprinted upon this process [processus, meaning also the progress of a disease] of an alienating encounter with an x – whose imago produces both a me (a subject) and a not-me (le non-moi) that is racially Autrui? Or, less cautiously: does Marxism – or phenomenology – allow us to see how race intrudes (as a specular intrusion – a word that Fanon also takes from Lacan’s “Les complexes familiaux”) on what appears (or is believed to appear) as the “non-identifiable, the non-assimilable” (BS, 161, tm)? *Let us also note that Fanon uses the word Autrui (the personal other, the you) to designate in 1952 what Lacan will come to name (after 1955) L’Autre; meaning: an otherness that transcends the illusory otherness of the imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification but represents a destructuring negation of the ego. However, whereas Lacan will come to identify L’Autre with language and law, Fanon writes (again in 1952): “to speak is to exist absolutely for the other” [l’autre] (1, Philcox). Although these distinctions are often overlooked in English translations of Peau noire, masque blancs, it matters that Fanon understands the stereotype of the Other [L’Autrui] as what sustains the subject both in its radical alterity or unassimilable uniqueness and its spoken relation to the economic-historical realities of racist culture. 2. Let us say: in Fanon’s account of the imaginary there is, to begin with, an irruption, a trauma; namely, the imago of the sembable can only be the result of a shock as the non-me pierces the moi and disturbs the feeling that one has an imaginary body (the collusion of subject and racial signifieds) with certain deliria [délires]. But these “hallucinatory or interpretive deleria” are accompanied by a sort of coloured-­ colourless fabrication by which I am dyed in – or bleached by – repre-

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sentation. These deleria are by necessity corrosive. We are dealing with an ego that tries, without success, to shield itself from the Autrui that intrudes; an attempt that produces various hallucinations  – hyphagogic, heautoscopic, and salvinisational. Understood structurally, the colonial body is thus multiply fragmented in its affect and its sense. Indeed, Fanon sees clearly how anatomical difference is overwritten by race. We should add, though, that in the colonial mirror the x is therefore doubled. The x is the link between the blackest and least white, but, as any signifier, it cannot be literally located; for, in the last analysis, in order to see it, and to have an idea of it, is to witness a neutralization that captivates, a lack that comes out of the void. This void of value and sense also derives from a new conception of being and drive. The Fanonian idea of the imago, what it signifies or masks, bears witness to a reflection which is comparable, at least apparently, to an apparition that is the outcome and justification of an anti-black world. Fanon writes of the colonial mirror image: in the colony what appears with the Other is not just a complex of narcissistic triumph and aggression but a racial misrecognition; in which the moi has imprinted upon it a fatal and surreal signification through which it accedes to itself, sacrifices itself, and submits to the command to not be nègre (a command that also signifies the greatest danger). What is deemed nègre is essentially the effect of an imago that is also the correlate of a symbolic law [l’Autrui]. Our experience of reality intrinsically installs within us a false semblant that informs every desire and decision, along with a certain kind of guilt that fixes on one thing and one thing only: the blackest x that allows the nègre to be presented and at the same time disavowed as the truest thought of one’s racial being. Fanon conceives of this x as a real fantasy in such a way that the real and fantasy are no longer opposed terms, for the least white cannot be told apart from the very black without crisis, and the most-black can only grasp the whiteness of its essence as a colourless, disavowed ambition. The least and the most can only succeed if the x is annulled, but the x is precisely what allows the ego to will itself nonnègre. Hence the encounter with an x that reproduces the cultural command of a “sacrificial dedication” that also cannot be symbolized. But this is a sacrifice that conserves what one is most ashamed and

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frightened of. This is why the mirror image in which we notice the x must be denied as the purest idea of the most impure essence. Finally, what disappears is less the product of a misrecognition than the crossing of a limit or bar into another world. From a Fanonian perspective these two aspects are inseparable and constitute a certain nihilism, that is to say, the way in which black life is accused, judged, and condemned. Everything else flows from this: the narcissism of a ressentiment, the frigid latencies of a racial epidermal schema, the negrophobia that denies black life, and a becoming which presupposes failure and impotence. 3. But now we notice the strangest thing of all about the colonial mirror stage, about this imaginary méconnaissance de sa qualitié de nègre and the various vorstellungen through which it is produced and displaced (BS, 132). On the one hand, the subject’s lack of colour is the differential element from which its signification derives, just as its negative value is referred to the differential element from which the x is derived. This x which is always present, but also always implicit and hidden introduces a second dimension of sense and values. It is that which exists as the effect of a castration through which black non-existence is expressed. On the other hand, Fanon does not subvert this dramaturgy but he does add another element: precipitation or capture is not the role he assigns to vorstellungen but subtraction or abolition. The alienated black does not even know its alienation, ressentiment, bad conscience. According to Fanon the colonial mirror is seductive because it conceals our most delicate, most subtle cunning; this wish to be hidden from our own eyes, to see ourselves masked, if you will, belatedly produces our most haunted mirror image. And yet this cunning is also the occasion of our greatest imbecility, because we cannot see how the mirror makes visible how abject we really are and how incapable we are of grasping what is truly unbearable about the colonial encounter. The colonial mirror stage is tragic because it affirms blindness and the necessity of not seeing; because it affirms a fantasy of reality (especially to those who are ignorant of it) that is responsible for a relation to representation that is stricken, mortified, and even denied and repressed. As a result, it would be erroneous to conclude

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that the colonial mirror stage simply reflects an ideological apparatus whose mode is racially reproduced, and, consequently, involves an imaginary relation to one’s lived existence to such an extent that the subject offers oneself to a negrophobic dedication (a relation that can be read as a relation of imposition). But this is only half the story. Alongside this dedication (which is never simply responsible or erroneous), Fanon presents a subject whose appearance is structured by an unconscious decalage or rupture that is the effect of a command coming from the imago of the Other. The Other is the non-me that I resist and the non-me that I secretly want to be, and that can only diminish or suppress the fantasy that is me and that I enjoy reflexively – libidinally –via a kind of extravagant rumination which, to repeat the point, I take pleasure in suppressing and, at the same time, mastering, trapped as I am in these shameful-murderous acts of recognition-­ obliteration that are the real of my fantasy. As such, I enjoy the triumph of my own negrophobic dependencies, but I cannot destroy the x that commands this feeling of pleasure and that adds to it feelings of precarity, malice, and mystification. Le non-moi c’est moi: but this is not the effect of representation as the necessity of its continuous (b) lack displacement. 4. It is also evident from Black Skin, White Masks that dissimulation plays a critical role in these encounters. In the famous ‘Hey, a nègre!’ episode the moi/ego is compelled to identify itself with how it is identified at the level of both Autrui and autre as it links and transitions from one to the other. And that identification begins with the failure to keep apart what it reveals from what it veils. Equally, the imposition of a physiological value on blackness within the framework of culture and the economy is a constant focus in Fanon: a physiology understood as the concise sign of a historicaleconomic dereliction, however, still seems enigmatic to the account of ideology at the ontological level of its differentiation. This is why in the colonial mirror stage there is also the pathos of a certain distance that is itself a consequence of a certain racial class ideology: people are not called forth, so to speak, by their real relation to racial capital rather it is the discourse of racial capital that allows them to enjoy the structures of antagonism as an inner division between the least white

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and the very black (structures that are always overdetermined by a secret wish or hidden meaning that is also their truest aspiration). 5. Because, as Fanon suggests, the colonial imaginary produces not a subject but the illusion of its truth, its misrecognition is not ontological but deliriously, stereotypically enacted (a superimposition that retroactively gives it its meaning). There is no position to be taken on here: the very black, like the least white, expresses an unconscious command that attaches itself to an essence and mystification, or to the essence of a mystification  – its grammar or indices: this is the very definition of colonial desire according to Fanon (see the ways through which it is expressed in Black Skin, White Masks: where the symbolic affinities between Le Noir and Le Blanc share similar qualities as cultural codes, as distinguished from the language of others [autres] which represent the ontological possibilities of interpreting-­ experiencing the world – and where the concept of the subject is stereotypically  – philosophically  – read as racially innocent). Hence, Fanon’s sense of an unceasing overdetermination in which the black colonial subject is, one might say, destined to be guilty for not being; it’s a guiltiness that is not the same as the ideological guilt of the subject who, in order to be recognized as a subject, must first subject him or herself, a subjection that logically precedes its consent. On the contrary, the cultural logic of blackness, whose affect is libidinal hatred, is, first of all, the effect of a self-obliteration; a n’est pas that pits being a subject against the Other [Autrui] who is black. We must understand the shift in Fanon’s interpretation of the Lacanian imaginary: metonymy here becomes a décalage within the black subject, for the mirror itself becomes metonymic of everything the colonisé is not. Not triumph but guilt, not reawoken aggression to be expiated but the ­condemnation of an irredeemable n’est pas; not becoming but vanishing, an abolition that is as difficult to sustain as it is to renounce, or escape. 6. Since wretchedness and jubilation can be concluded to stem from the mirror stage, some people have been inclined to say that Fanon commits an error for having used the mirror stage notion without reference to Oedipus, while others have all the more cogently concluded

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that here a theoretical challenge is taking place to the very oedipal basis of the psychoneuroses.6 Everything that could be said by one side as proof of a certain sacrilege has only served as an argument for the others to conclude that Fanon departs from psychoanalysis at this point, since the further one reads in the footnote the more distant from Lacan Fanon seems to be. One seems to follow the other in an endless circle, for it is certain that in Fanon’s various anecdotes one finds both oedipal dramas and a certain psychoanalysis of race that combines, in a stunningly original manner, what Lacan will later refer to as the derive by which the drive is both driven by, and away from, culture. Thus at one point Fanon refers to himself as a thirteen-year-old boy who is in “raptures” by the spectacle, occasioned by his father, of two Senegalese soldiers—their uniforms, their Africanness, and imaginary physical superiority. What these soldiers give to be known is a rapture that is wretched because it is so, but not because it is reconcilable with a social validation. The affective fixation on the soldiers sees blackness raised to the level of a thing in which the drive not to be black is embedded in the object of a narcissistic libido and the various signifiers by which it is sublimated. In Africa the Antillean is pleasurably able to find an imaginary object that reveals/hides his own symbolic vicissitude. It is through this “great black mirage” (imaginary, narcissistic) that one may approach the black object and for which the problem of sublimation is situated for both Fanon and Lacan. Blackness is neither imaginary nor symbolic but a certain symbolic regression by which the real reappears, not as a lost thing, but as an object that is magically conjured into being. Here the object is elevated not by its dignité but by its drivenness which is as pitiless as it is unerring. But whence too its rapturous, stereotypical impression which signifies nothing but a terrifying ordure empty of sense and of meaning. It is not the uniforms themselves that have such significance, but the black thing that subsists in them and that gives us terrifying raptures and pleasures. It would be remiss to say that this example of the tirailleurs Sénégalais meant the same thing for Fanon as does, say, Prevert’s matchboxes do for Lacan. It is also dangerous to make too

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much of the thing in its difference from that of the object. It is still more dangerous to suggest that Fanon’s and Lacan’s views on sublimation represent the same approach to social values. 7. After showing how the nègre is isolated, annulled, suppressed, as a somatic form or projection, Fanon shows us what is at stake in these “mirror hallucinations” (BS, 162). “The Antillean misrecognizes the fact of his being a nègre” (BS, 162 tm), for there is within him something that is no good; but that the only reason to love him is to pour scorn on this vileness within himself. The Antillean secretly despises himself because this moral anxiety remains irresolvable; but that is no reason for him to give up on the hallucinatory structure by which he identifies with – sacrifices himself to – the punishing demands of his superego. Let him then both love and hate himself; he has within him the capacity for knowing truth and being happy, but he possesses no truth of blackness whether abiding or satisfactory. So who arouses the spectre of the nègre within? For Fanon the imago is the stereotypical knowledge by which the Antillean finds his truth and his passion for whiteness; wherever the stereotype occurs, what is found in it are a thousand anecdotes, fables, stories in which one’s triumphant narcissism is hallucinated in the form of autoscopic character traits in the cultural milieu in which one has been raised. It is clear that the phantasm that blinds him is also what hinders the choice between what he has chosen to become and what he is seen to be. The structure of the is not, by the self that proclaims it, betrays a certain relation to desire that is both imaginary and impossible. What is left gaping in the hole opened up by the desire to not be (n’est pas) is the vanity and pleasure of a certain sublimation. In “Les complexes familiaux”, Lacan uses this term to define the relation between anxiety and ego.7 In Black Skin, White Masks the concept is used to explain the prohibitions informing the delusion, the vileness that the nègre stands for, and the knowing ignorance by which the self-image flees from it, suppresses it, but only to see it return, as if he had all the time been running towards it: this x which he cannot escape because everything he does belies and confirms it.

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As Lacan writes: “It is to this very ambiguity of his imago, as the incarnation of repression and the catalyst of an essential access to reality” that is at stake here (LCF, 162). The Antillean must not give access to the reality of the nègre—its transgressions, its jouissance—nor must he be unaware of this law either, for he must know both. Indeed, like Oedipus, he is predestined [predestine], a word used by Fanon and Lacan, to encounter the nègre as the thing that prohibits and catalyses desire. From this I think it is clear why Fanon finds it necessary to read such scenes as economic-historical examples of an obligation to keep something hidden in order to abolish the “non-identifiable” or “non-­ assimilable”, rather than just narratives about the apparatuses of racial ideology. From what we have just shown it very plainly follows that anyone who reads this footnote on the mirror stage has to understand the historical-economic realities of such imaginary dependency (as both mask and lure) and consequently the rupture or decalage through it appears. We should add, though, that the point of these autobiographical anecdotes, and the social-moral prejudices that they demonstrate, is to indicate the disavowal that these inferences, the effects of a certain scrutiny and jouissance, convey. These scenes invite two commentaries. Commentaries that will allow us to restate our purpose, that is, to show the differences between Fanonism and Lacanianism, sociogeny and psychoanalysis. The first is the feelings provoked by the very black which are at the heart of this scrutiny that the blackest x represents; now, this x is the figure of both guilt and debt (Schuld): debt, because the blackest x is forced to mirror its least white scrutiny, and so confirm the surplus-jouissance of its production as the least white; further, it is to be noted that those who are the very black are always indebted due to the impoverished relation they have to the social value of whiteness; and guilt, because the least black also know that they are symbolically poor, and to an even greater extent, insofar as their reciprocal dependence on the very black and least white itself derives from the imperious effects of hatred, envy, greed, and ressentiment, for example a fundamentally perverse economy of drive and desire. On the other hand, the opposition to everything that is nègre returns us to the affirmation of a formula of existence in which blackness

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cannot be and has not to be judged, for it receives its law from elsewhere, and is never possessed by itself—a situation that makes the x, in Fanon’s reading, the subject of an aporetic, rather than a dialectical, critique. The second commentary establishes why blackness is indebted to a white commodity form whose production is linked, by definition, to the establishing of blackness as an indebted, negative differential. Having written on this elsewhere, we do not need to elaborate on these feelings of indebtedness here.8 But suffice it to say that indebtedness has to be understood as a failure to recognize the master who is absent: not-whole (pas-tout). All references to the x in the text put this much in evidence. We need therefore to be mindful of this interpretation in order to clearly and distinctly perceive what is at stake here.

5

The Colonial Thing

When we want to compare Fanon with Lacan on the symptom as signifier, we must not forget their emphases on the psychoses. We must take account of their changing conceptions of this concept. It is not sufficient to ask: ‘Is negro-phobogenesis comparable to a psychosis?’ Rather we must ask: ‘How does psychosis manifest itself as negrophobia? And how much of the signifier remains in this thought?’ Lacan knew, with genius, how psychosis reversed meaning, was ensnared in ressentiment, and in ways opposed to morality, to reason. Here the signifier is immersed in a mystical body in which it takes its root, an interiority that is foreclosed. In order to psychoanalyse the signifier that has gone missing, one needs all the resources and guiding threads. It is not necessary to be a subject-­ supposed-­to-know, Lacan says, to work out that psychosis is “supported” by the real (SXXII). From Lacan to Fanon the analyst knows when to speak and when to listen. For there can be no doubt that people know when the real is upon them and that it is not upon those others who maliciously accuse and doubt them. But these are not the exercises of belief or unbelief: they are the convictions by which the signifier is truly inspired by a judgement that is certain, beyond falsity or doubt, and that can be proved in its absolute nature and infinite power.

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It is not until we read those sections of “Les complexes familiaux”, namely those on the psychoses, that we see the true influence of Lacan on Fanon. Are people made mad by racism, or does racism allow them to express their madness? In Black Skin, White Masks, madness takes on many forms. In the famous footnote on the mirror stage, for example, we see a series of mortifying symptoms. In The Wretched of the Earth, however, we also see evidence of self-punishing paranoias arising from what Fanon calls the atmosphere of total war. Paranoias are where delusion combines the extreme punishing effects of a superego and maddening projections of the dead, the tortured. We must therefore consider Fanon’s work on the madness by which the self finds itself possessed by delusions, delusions that are racially persecutory in form and character. The status of the object in psychosis is open to dispute, but it might be more easily recognized (according to Lacan) in an “atmosphere [la lumière] of astonishment [l’étonnement]”, in which the object is transformed by an “ineffable strangeness” that is enigmatically full of meaning (LCF, 119). Therefore, it is the subject’s response to these enigmas, and their effect, that one can see how the object is formed as a kind of malefic, vindictive delusion. In Black Skin, White Masks, these delusions occur as an attack and a deformation of the body. In brief, these delusions are thus of a narcissistic nature. Every time the subject sees his image and recognises it, it is always in some way ‘the mental oneness which is inherent in him’ that he acclaims. In mental pathology, for instance, when one examines delirious hallucinations or interpretations, one always finds that self-image [image de soi] is respected. In other words, there is a certain structural harmony, a sum of the individual and of the constructions through which he goes, at every stage of the psychotic behavior. Aside from the fact that this fidelity might be attributed to affective content, there still remains the evidence that it would be unscientific to misconstrue. Whenever there is a psychotic belief there is a reproduction of the self. It is especially in the period of anxiety and suspicion described by Dide and Guirard that the other [l’autre] intervenes. (BS, 161 tm)

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Moreover, he adds, the suddenness by which these deliria appear (zooscopy, autoscopy, etc) is “extremely curious”. These inordinately strange enigmas show the narcissistic effects of paranoias, hallucinations, in which the narcissistic structure of the self is disturbed, besieged, fragmented, torn apart by the imagoes of the black other. The nègre. It doesn’t seem to matter whether these delusions are responses to “real threats or imaginary intrusions” (Lacan), for what they reveal, ultimately, are the effects of a persecutory atmosphere on the archaic structure of the ego. Here is another example from The Wretched of the Earth (1961) concerning “marked anxiety psychosis”. I left the town where I had been a student to join the Maquis…. I learnt that my mother has been killed point-blank by a French soldier and two of my sisters had been taken to the soldiers’ quarters… One day we went to an estate belonging to settlers…. Only his wife was at home….But as far as I was concerned, when I looked at those women I thought of my mother…. A moment after she was dead; I’d killed her with my knife…. After that this woman started coming every night and asking for my blood. But my mother’s blood—where’s that? (WE, 211–212)

Fanon tells us that every night the young man’s dreams are invaded by women, which he recognizes as the “same woman” and in respect of which they all bear the same wound (WE, 212). These women are bloodless, pale, and terribly thin. “They tormented the young patient and insisted that he should give them back their spilt blood” (WE, 212). It is only after the room is drenched in the patient’s blood that these women— the same woman—get their colour back, and their wounds begin to close up. To these kinds of persecutory paranoia (which are unquestionably the cause of the breakdown), there are added feelings of being spied upon, unmasked, exposed, which Fanon insists is also fundamental to the feeling of these hallucinatory psychoses. It is crucial here that the imago masks something altogether more obscure and that appears with these revenants. It is odd that the woman who returns is identified as both the murdered victim and his mother whose blood cannot be given back or exchanged. We assume that in both the patient’s thoughts and in the

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auditory form of his verbal and visual hallucinations, he cannot conceive of the mother’s blood, and that these ghostly reflections are the emissaries of a suicidal demand that he should pay off the blood-debt owed to her. I see indeed why this case history echoes Lacan’s point that the way in which the world is incorporated in the dreamwork sees the body as composed of the most precious materials that sustains the order and existence of the universe. In each of these paraphrenias the same word is used to express what is hallucinated, each of them saying that the body that has bled can save the world. What does Fanon say of these delusions? In those blacks provoked to deny the reality of their colour, what is hallucinated shows a conformity of denial in which the influence of an imaginary object provides evidence of a racist presumption and conformity of thought, but one that lacks the absolute force of a total conviction. The delusion of colourlessness is thus taken to mean “It is not I as a Negro who acts, thinks, and is praised to the skies” (BS, 162). Here the persecutory familial object feeds delusions whose horizons are indeed clouded by the imago that appears there, and that the paranoiac secretly believes is the revenge of culture. This is enough to say that these delusions, in their very identity, although they do not completely extinguish the self-image, that image either goes missing or undergoes a psychotic ambiguity, from which it escapes into an affective repetition of certain paraphrenias that are every bit as ghostly as the dawn that dispels their darkness. The least that can be said of these delusions is that the family remains both the vehicle and ground of a “certain misgiving [that] persisted, a sort of uneasiness that he [the patient] did not understand” (WE, 220). We know that these delusional convictions arise from an identification of the ego with a family object which brings the persecutory paranoia too close to the subject’s self-image. An example of this can be seen in another case history—that of a young Algerian who is twenty-two years old and is suffering from the accusatory delirium that his parents consider him a traitor. “After a few days this fleeting impression become blunted but at the back of his mind a certain misgiving persisted, a sort of uneasiness that he couldn’t understand” (WE, 220). Fanon continues:

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On account of this, he decided to eat his meals quickly, shrinking from the family circle, and shut himself into his room. He avoided all contacts. It was in these conditions that catastrophe intervened. One day, in the middle of the street at about half-past twelve he distinctly heard a voice calling him a coward. He turned around, but saw nobody…. During the night the crisis came on. For three hours he heard all sorts of insults coming from out of the night and resounding in his head: ‘Traitor, traitor, coward…. all your brothers who are dying…. traitor, traitor.’ (WE, 220)

Uncertainty, uneasiness, and an indescribable anxiety: it is through these affects that an increasing egoic uncertainty comes about and that the patient tries in vain to refute. The voices seem to come from the family, and they work to confirm the parental accusation. His cowardice is something that has to be known, everyone is talking about it; even when he hides himself, the voices are witnesses to the fact that he is now suspect, so why not reveal himself? The patient knows that he is not dreaming when he takes to the streets and is looked at suspiciously by other Algerians, who are being searched with their hands behind their necks, while the French soldiers pay him no heed even though he has no papers. He knows that he is not dreaming, but, however he is able to prove this rationally, his ability to prove it actually  proves nothing but the complicity of others (both those who are arrested and those arresting them), and not the uncertainty of the patient’s knowledge, the grief and despair of their accusations. Told in this way the story of his accusation leads to the same conclusion: the betrayal of truth is the same thing as the truth of betrayal. For wherever he goes, the same voices pursue him ‘traitor, traitor’, and these words are resoundingly heard again and again in the dark, at night, or during the day, in the streets. More, he is always the last one to hear them: it is better to have no will at all, better to be a traitor, than to think or hear such thoughts. For the reality of truth is too much of a burden. Everyone wants to accuse him, everyone pretends to know his truth. What is more, his demand for the accusation to be heard always goes unheard to be replaced by a complicitous world. It is beyond doubt that the accusations are false and will be found to be false in the course of time. The patient feels that these delusions are the expressions of a false reality rather than a persecutory intention, and these suspicions are doubled and redoubled by the hallucinatory paranoia. The people’s mistake is not in following a

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falsehood but in failing to follow his truth. And it is simply not true that he is hiding from others the truth of his cowardice. If he is so unworthy, why does he attempt to remove all ambiguity? Suspicions, hostilities felt, the accusation proved, and both with the certainty of a suicidal conduct. Like a ‘madness’, the patient throws himself at a group of French soldiers trying to grab one of their machine guns. He is overpowered, tortured, but not killed. “I was glad to be struck, for that showed me that they considered that I too was their enemy” (WE, 221). But the fact that he is struck but not killed (and despite his secret wish to be killed: “All I wanted to do”, he says, “was to die”) suggests that it is pointless or absurd for him to demand that he not be judged as a traitor, for everything he thinks and does seems to confirm it, and so any proof of the opposite as demonstrated by reason becomes further proof of his perfidy and his moral deficiency. “I am not a coward. I am not a woman. I am not a traitor” (WE, 221). His inability to persuade the world of all these things serves only to unman him, and to confirm that the voices are the true judges of his being, even though their obscurity cannot be confuted with any certainty. What does not change and does not disappear is the accusation that governs his reality from beginning to end and from which all these voices (and their threat of exposure) arise. As if betrayal was the only way to dispel his persecution; and what passes for truth is falsehood and corruption. There is no certainty, apart from the accusation, as to whether he is a coward, a woman, or just a traitor, and so it is a matter of doubt, depending on who is accusing him, whether his betrayal is true, false, or uncertain. Moreover, nor can he be sure that God, to whom he prays, will bear witness to his inner purity, his feeling, and instinct. For God too has refused him his blessing and has instead closed his ears to his prayers; this is why he takes to the streets like a madman, wearing neither a coat nor a tie. That is why Fanon describes this case as one of an accusatory delirium, and feels convinced in doing so, insofar as it reveals a narcissistic deficiency in the ego, and one determined by hallucinatory beliefs. There is something unspeakable, radically alien about this betrayal, about the innocence that lacks any proof while all opposition is very solidly proved (the decision not to be a coward or woman—and the decision to betray the falsity of such truths; to expose his own need for exposure). And so when the patient, when trying to grab the machine gun of a French soldier also shouts at him, “I am an Algerian”, it is not clear to whom he speaks or

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from where, since he doesn’t know if he is acting out a suicidal demand or performing retribution on behalf of the other who accuses, or acting precisely to deceive everyone over what precisely is being betrayed (by being exposed) here: the illusion (of his betrayal) or the certainty of its truth. Who indeed would think himself unhappy not to be discovered by his own false betrayal? Did any of these soldiers or Algerians think that the patient was unhappy not to be so accused? Did his parents not suspect that his betrayal was something that everyone must have already known so that, first, he could prove them false, and secondly, silence any more doubts about him? On the contrary, everyone thought he was happy to have been so accused, because the accusation was not meant to be taken literally but as the fidelity to a certain truth. But those who saw him so unhappy at finding himself to be no longer traitorous or no longer so exposed, because that was meant for the mad European pretending to be him, they were surprised that he could go on living to the extent that he was guilty, guilty of being unworthy, and guilty because of this need to accuse himself. Who would think himself unhappy if he had only to receive the blows and humiliations that ensured that he was a good son, a good Algerian if his whole life were not already a grandiose falsification? It had probably not occurred to anyone who witnessed his arrest and saw his distress in not being recognized as a traitor, that he was nonetheless inconsolable in this fidelity to the most cowardly depravity and precisely because of his cowardice which he failed to persuade them of, an unworthiness that could only be concealed by being revealed. How could he convince these unbelievers, as well as himself, that the true proof was hidden, whose semblance it was easier for them to not know and so maintain in the existing state of their ignorance? And despite the fact that he had made the most strenuous endeavour to explain and declare his betrayal to the very letter of the law? And so overcome the very undecidability between femininity and cowardice, between those telling falsehoods and those (wrongly) accusing him of not knowing fidelity from betrayal? In his comments on sublimation in “Les complexes familiaux” and throughout his work, Lacan derives a few remarkable insights and makes of it an image of what he later calls das ding (a term—a concept—in which the fate of the object is still being worked out within the environs

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of the family). These factors are isolation of the object, causal disconnection of facts, and retrospective annulation of events. What is the relation between object and thing? For Lacan, there is therefore a dialectic here between that which is forbidden, which everyone is obliged to bear witness to, either as the Mother, or with her imago as das Ding, and what is desired, pleasurably and socially so. For Fanon, blackness is recognized before it is perceived for it is disclosed by what the child imagines to be a primal prohibition introduced by the mother (her fantasy is also the fantasy of culture). This prohibition has to take place for the object—the locus of narcissistic libido—to emerge, or to be represented as such. Anyone who is not black will experience this as an internal obligation that is oedipally resolved by a primordial form of judgement that being is white insofar as it is good; for the subject who is black, however, the feeling of not being good, or of not having, has no oedipal resolution, and therefore remains as a Ding, a chose, that cannot be elevated (via sublimation) but only suspended, crossed out, at the level of being. What then is the black subject to do in this state of affairs? He tries to take his distance from the thing by whitening it, and by rendering its imperfections—and its various representations—by refinding the path to pleasure. But he already unconsciously knows that what is prohibited (and what he takes his distance from as a kind of excluded interior) is the colonial thing, and that it is formed as a void or gap in his desire, or a knot that is too dense to unravel. To go back to the story of the accusation: the desire to contest it, to contest by becoming it, cannot tolerate any other outcome but its truth, for it cannot bear the impiety that the “I” maintains, in its identifications and objects, and which takes its betrayal literally, for it is indeed impossible to imagine (without doubting its existence) this desire of betrayal that compels and yet remains forever hard to grasp. This is the ‘thing’ in the sense defined by Lacan: as the form that gives shape to absence, like a coffin lid, or a courtroom where everyone is sworn to lie. For Lacan the problem of sublimation is situated in this kind of impossibility, but for Fanon there is no ontology of blackness in the colony. For the thing that goes astray is not blackness but its beingness. Here the concern is not so much lack, but the object falsified by its own impossibility.

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What sort of drive then defines the colonial thing? Is it always monstrous, chaotic, paradoxical, and prodigious in both its cruelty and jouissance? This is certainly a difficult question to answer. When Fanon describes our archaic relation to blackness, he refers to that which is not (n’est pas), to non-being, and the imponderable, to that which lies beyond the pleasure principle and is unattainable, unearthly, to be known only in so far as the primordial signifier is pleased to reveal it (BS, 185). Let us consider the metaphors by which the true nature of the thing is represented in the text. The language used is invariably one of fracture, despoilation, or absorption; of dyes, teeth, cannibalism, and amputation. For Lacan, too, the task of sublimation is to remove the thing without killing it, for the hole that it opens up in being is necessary to avoid being absorbed by its proximity. And so he writes: “in every form of sublimation, emptiness is determinative” (SVII, 130). But listen to the following key passage; in which we hear about a colonial relation to the thing: At the level of sublimation the object is inseparable from imaginary and especially cultural elaborations. It is not just that the collectivity recognizes in them useful objects; it finds rather a space of relaxation where it may in a way delude itself on the subject of das Ding, colonize [coloniser] the field of das Ding with imaginary schemes. (SVII, 99)

It is not clear if colonization incarnates a cultural truth or an imaginary one? The point is that if culture were to colonize das Ding, it would, in its imaginary elaboration, have no idea of reality aside from these colonizing fantasms. But unlikely as this is (and we should be wary here of taking Lacan’s wording too literally) what is being evoked here is the failure of such colonization, for we cannot attain it except as an imaginary elaboration. Moreover, with this reference to colonization we obtain a slightly different understanding of sublimation as the organization of space around a missing object. We perceive the other as a thing and possess nothing but a desire to annihilate him, being equally fearful of his jouissance and his knowledge of our own deficiency; but is it not also obvious that some get to enjoy these murderous colonizations to the degree that others are unhappily the object to be colonized?

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Let us try and conceive Fanon’s response to Lacan’s metaphor. Let us imagine it, not just with respect to Lacan but to a text that he cites repeatedly, albeit allusively in his seminars: Melanie Klein’s “Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse” (1929).9 In his lesson of 27 January 1960, Lacan discusses this essay, itself based on a reading of a case study by Karin Michaëlis about a patient suffering from a melancholic depression. This patient, a woman, became depressed after she had given back a borrowed painting (add to this es gibt [‘this is what is given’] which is prior, posterior to the crisis, the feeling of being wiped out by the ‘destining’ that comes in the wake of it). “The blank space on the wall”, writes Klein, “caused her to forget her beautiful home, her happiness, her friend, everything”. “The empty space grinned hideously down at her”, and so on (Klein, 232–233). To remedy the loss the patient decides to put something in its place, to create for herself a painting that would deliver her from these feelings of emptiness. So she paints over the space. With what? With “the life-sized figure of a naked negress”—and in response to which the patient felt herself “on fire, devoured by ardour within” (Klein, 233, 234). It is, however, astounding that neither Klein nor Lacan attend to the raced figure, that this figure is not at the heart of what follows, that these strokes of black chalk, which we are told were made at random, should be something without which we cannot picture the work of sublimation as a racist interpretation of art, with blackness giving white femininity, white narcissism, the assurance of being in its salvation? Without doubt nothing is more obscure here than the ways in which blackness becomes implicated in a story about white desire and identification and where, in response to the question: “Do you think it at all possible?—the patient Ruth Kjär (and Heidegger’s jar is still echoing in Lacan’s seminar, albeit as a witness to the name as a symptom, as homonym) asks. We could say that the imponderable, impossible object precisely reveals blackness as a disguise that mirrors a racial delusion precisely to conceal it in the aesthetic interpretive camouflage of psychoanalysis! This open secret does not seem merely imponderable to us, but indeed deeply symptomatic. What could be more contrary to Fanon’s hypothesis that the rules of culture are there to whiten the eternal damnation of a

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black void, in whose emptiness the subject is incapable of finding itself except in a beyond, an identification in which the void has so little part that it can be actually enjoyed as a fall from inexistence into a salvific power that is infinite and perfect? Certainly nothing is more stereotypical than this mysterious emptiness, and the incomprehensible image of the other it calls forth, a delusion which allows us to remain incomprehensible to ourselves so long as the other pays the price of the fallen object. The knot of this imaginary is thus twisted and turned into the abyss of our own being, so that it is harder to conceive of blackness than for us to conceive of a blackness of being without this mystery defining it as imponderably full of an emptiness devouring both it and us. These fundamental differences, established on the inviolable authority of the archaic-primordial metaphors of psychoanalysis, teach us that there are in fact two equally constant truths. One is that man in the state of his archaic deficiency, or in the state of primal narcissism, is exalted above his objects (oral, anal, genital, etc.), which precipitate him into being, insofar as they allow, or prevent, any approach to the ding which he primordially lacks. The other is that in the archaic state of the ego and the drives there is a form of emptiness which is formed by racial-sexual prohibitions and enjoyments. Indeed, that the feeling of emptiness can only be made sense of in the wake of these prohibitions and enjoyments. These two propositions are equally firm and certain about the primordial fate of absence as an endless journey that enables human being to find the true cognition of things, and especially when all that needs to be done is to show blackness as the means, the object cause of desire. Yet they differ as to the ontology—the primal form of that emptiness. Fanon openly declares that when he says in certain places: blackness has no resistance, the black object is hallucinated, while saying in others: the nègre is not—but this is not is full of its own emptiness—emptiness itself is an imaginary elaboration concerning the place of blackness in culture, this plantation estate, this apartheid state of the real. Whence it is clearly evident that the random lines of chalk do not need to rely on any likeness other than a typical similarity, and without the missing object being treated as a devouring similitude or metaphor (an illusion) that becomes real.

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Coming back to psychosis. If the neurotic preserves a secret reality, which he cannot confront, and the more he is diverted from the happier he will be, the psychotic has no such diversion, for him a hole opens up for the fantasm to fill. It is not because the hole comes from the world, from the outside, but that the world opens as a hole in psychical reality, which inevitably results in acute distress (SIII, 45). What has been rejected from the symbolic reappears in the real is the key relation or logic concerning what the subject knows and what he is unable to think about, or represent, but it is what reappears in the delusion that causes so much wretchedness and affliction. The man who feels himself persecuted by delusion cannot help thinking that his true thoughts have returned from without, in the form of an irresistible judgement. In this symbolization, in which thought returns as the real, what cannot be thought (or negated) is the more archaic form of judgement that precedes the mechanism of negation (Verneinung, Bejahung), and which, for Lacan, is always already foreclosed. Who is speaking? In the hallucination it is always reality that speaks. I feel that it is possible that reality can say you have never existed and not, as Lacan says, I recognize you inasmuch as I am recognized, for there are some for whom the signifier consists, not in reciprocity but in exclusion; therefore what I know is not the Other but the irreducible flaw, gap, hole, that brings me to life as he who sees the truth, however much the I is opposed to it. The I therefore has no symbol, and no symbolic function beyond that of a flaw whose essence is infinitely black, and spoken from the void in the beyond of its imagining. Sometimes Lacan talks of the paranoiac fear that one is a puppet, and one’s quarrel and trouble is solely caused by the Other whose hand is in the glove. Let’s say this expresses the fear that the Other is not so much excluded but hidden in an inverted form, and that every signifier is also besieged by imaginary meanings. There’s no doubt that Fanon also speaks of psychotic paranoias. A man who is wealthy enough to pass as white may still fear that he owes his existence to a secret system of meaning that is protecting his gestures, his voice, or his libidinal choices. But what is it that he really hears in those who racially insult him? At first he dismisses it as ignorant talk. But after closer thought, and looking for the reason of their misrecognition, he finds one very cogent reason why these fellow

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whites abuse him, their speech is so manifestly unreal, they cannot see what everyone else does, that God is testing him. Why is God testing him? Because he is so unhappily fallen in his being. And to be fallen is to be irredeemably black. Imagine any other scenario you like, all add up to the various ways in which anti-blackness speaks through the defiles of the signifier as the worst thing in the world; yet if you imagine a speech that speaks of all the beauty of blackness, by means of its nobility and rank, are we not left to ponder and reflect on the meaning of this inversion, this nobility which will not stop its own servility from recurring as speech; a beauty that is bound by all the threats facing you, as well as the revolts, and finally of the inevitable precarity and fatality that is also the destiny of the signifier, which will afflict even the humblest, and the most deserving subjects, as well as those who are the most impure, and the most mendacious of subjects, who can only enjoy the transgressive promise of being nègre in the face of God, world, subject, and state. To understand both of these things, do we not have to first concede the reality of persecution whether in the form of refuge or return, certainty or unknowing? If the letter always arrives at its destination, the psychotic knows that, within the field of the signifier, it would be delusional to believe in the violence that structures the fantasm; access to which relies on the firm belief that God is white or black. If psychotics love their delusion like they love themselves, the only good for the black psychotic to do is to forget what they are, or by some novel and agreeable passion which makes them whiter, like wealth or culture, to sacrifice themselves to the beliefs that damn them so as to get closer to God by faith and learning. This is why the black philosopher, who is on his way to continue his studies in France, and is about to disembark at Le Havre, so matters to Fanon (he comes into the text after Fanon’s derisive response to the white ontology of a primordial blackness). It is not that this philosopher cannot think transcendence, nor that he imagines his salvation as a form of radical immanence, a black durée and its vital impulse; no, what disarms him are the delusions that reappear in the verbal slaps he receives, which allow him to think of his unhappy condition, but not without the suspicion that the agitation they provoke lies elsewhere, and which thereby makes

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the insult more fearful and incomprehensible as a punishment. Fanon is remarkably clear on this. If the lure precedes the capture, what happens when one misrecognizes the first and doesn’t know the latter? Or at least, if the thing to be revealed has no name, symbol, or signifier, and no locus, structure, or form, what could it mean to procure it, deduce it, or punish it, as a defence against something worse? These questions will be taken up in Part 3, but here is a clinical example of Fanon’s thinking. In the final chapter of the Wretched of the Earth, Fanon presents the following case history: Case 1. The murder by two young Algerians thirteen and fourteen years old respectively of their European playmate. We had been asked to give expert medical advice in a legal matter. Two young Algerians thirteen and fourteen years old, pupils in a primary school, were accused of having killed one of their European schoolmates. They admitted having done it. The crime was reconstructed, and photos were added to the record. Here one of the children could be seen holding the victim while the other struck at him with a knife. The little defendants did not go back on their declarations. We had long conversations with them. We here reproduce the most characteristic of their remarks. (WE, 217)

As Fanon presents the various statements of the boys, and their reasons for killing, he is already perturbed by what he sees as the effects of what he calls the “atmosphere of total war” on the children. They admit to the crime but offer neither remorse nor guilt. Their guiding thread is the reciprocal sacrifice of the other. The thirteen-year-old refers repeatedly to the French boy’s father—“he wanted to be a man like his father”; “His father is in the Militia”—which suggests that the choice of victim was neither arbitrary nor facetious (WE, 217–218). The fourteen-year-old also references the Rivet massacre and the loss of two members of his family. You have to say that the choice of victim is part of a reciprocal violence which it thereby reveals. And that a certain paternal violence unleashes the violence that kills the son, for it amounts to a sense—in the two boys—that the French can do no wrong, and that they can constantly murder (Algerians) without punishment. “So why are only Algerians found in the prisons? Can you explain that to me?” (WE, 218).

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Anyone who is French, in brief, can kill, but only Algerians are killed with impunity (and are punished for being dead). This case history reveals a rivalry over who has the right to kill with impunity, and the oddly enigmatic reasons for doing so: “But why did you pick on him?” asks Fanon. “Because he used to play with us” (WE, 218). To play at murder is also the play of murder. Murder consists in the attempt to restore equality of punishment, but not so as to prohibit it or expel it, but to extend the violence of all to the weak and the young, and the blameless (“We weren’t a bit cross with him” [WE, 217]). In the various violences in play here—that of victims, that of the militias—what must be sacrificed is the idea of sacrifice as a universal measure. However, the questions, the enigmatic reasons, for avoiding answering them, suggest that there is something being concealed here, and what is revealed is not simply disavowed knowledge. Oedipus  From a strictly legal perspective, the boys are guilty. But of what? Of acting out a debt (of reciprocity) that must be paid? “One day we decided to kill him, because the Europeans want to kill all the Arabs” (WE, 217). Violence has to pay the dues for a different kind of violent innocence, for that is the game; the child (as victim or perpetuator) must be sacrificed because of the murderous desires and acts of the father whose malevolence is everywhere and is to blame. But these arguments are false and unethical: the son must be killed because he also wants to be like his father; in the same way, the boys kill because they want to be unlike Arabs who are killed, or who die unavenged by law or fate. The European boy is killed, then, not because they dislike, or don’t love him as their friend, but because they do love him. He is killed in order to bring other victims to light, so he is sacrificed as a son in the name of the father, and his corpse is left on the hillside so that others will know precisely what has been put into play by this fratricide. When it comes to deciding whether they have any knowledge of murder, of what it means to kill, it is not as a therapist that Fanon speaks, or as an impartial third party or witness (like those conducting the reconstruction, taking photographs, etc.), but as someone who knows the precise meaning of this violence against the paternal imago. We are reminded of that footnote in which he says, with reference to Oedipus and Lacan:

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“But even if the young boy has to kill [tuer] his father, it is still necessary for the father to accept being killed. I am reminded of what Hegel said: ‘The cradle of the child is the tomb of the parents’” (BS, 152). Fanon knows what it means to be the inheritor of such violence; a violence that is bestowed but not yet identified with; and that is enough to render the moral conscience incapable of deciding what is right from wrong. If you want these two boys to admit the truth, then one must be able to find the truth of this aphanisis paralysing both reason and the moral law that rules over both law and ethics. You murder who is closest, says the thirteen-year-old, he who is most like you (in age and appearance) and he who likes you (the friend), and who qualifies as the most trusted double. Only he who is closest can be asked to go off, to climb the hill, to play at the mystery of sacrifice. Such a pastime is only right for the friend or brother; for only the friend or brother would be ignorant enough, and knowledgeable enough (even though unseeing), to trust those close to him when roused to violence. The unknown knowns that led Oedipus to the oracle suggest that the ignorance that damned him was precisely what made him the most eligible—the most sacrificial?—victim. Fanon is perplexed. Not by what the boys have done, but by the oedipal accusations—against the French paternal imago—that corroborate the murder. For whose benefit did you kill him? For the French so that they can become knowing of what it means to kill. But why did you kill him? Because, in effect, he was too unlike us and because he was not yet an ‘innocent’ enemy or murderer, since only the French kill arbitrarily, innocent of any knowledge of the victim. Fanon is then forced to say: “But you are children, and he was your brother, your friend”, and so on. Or: you killed him in your innocence, without knowing why (like Oedipus, then, your malevolence was innocent; or you acted in good faith because you didn’t know). When it comes to deciding who is guilty or innocent here, it is clear that the idea of a blood feud, or of vengeance, of the play that is also an act of murder, is not enough. In fact, the oedipal economy that makes desire murderous relies on the fact that the ‘hero’ (is this even the right word here?) doesn’t know who

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he is, and he doesn’t know what he has done: all he knows is that he is a man from a certain country, and the dead other is from another. True equity would here make reason the equal of identity, but in this brief case history, it is hard to tell apart neighbour from enemy, victim from friend, family life from collective violence, empathy from murder. Desire to know thereby defines the most murderous forms of social attachment. Consequently, the law is judged to be a farce (not of law) but of a murderous indifference; in which the only victims are Arabs, for whom justice is suspended on the one hand, and for whom the law offers no witness. The law knows it is violence, though it presents itself as impartial. It is this pseudo-knowledge which allows crimes to be committed, and, because this pseudology is also at the heart of the family, familial love is also arbitrary in what it witnesses and knows to be crimes against the other. The result of this confusion is that the boys say that the essence of Frenchness is the ability to get away with murder, and that the essence of Arabness is precarity, for the law makes it impossible to classify anti-Arab murder as a crime. Implicitly, then, the murder of the friend is the attempt to get the law to just be itself, or to be just in its decrees and covenants. To murder the friend is also to reveal that anyone who obeys the imaginary justice of law, not as the essence of law but as its truth, is also incapable of seeing how law suspends justice by race. The art of violence, of its revolutionary play, is thus to dislodge the customs by which law preserves its secret origin in the authority of race. There must, the boys say, be a way of being able to account for the Arab dead, an obligation which is seen as prior to primitive or moral forms of innocence and guilt. There is no surer way to be guilty; the innocence of murderous knowing is no defence against the knowing violence of innocently killing, which every child knows. Yet adults pretend to know the meaning of violence and transgression, they act as if love is not violent rather than recognize its shameful, tribal murderousness, and so take the first opportunity to condemn the violence that they hand down in the command to look like me, to have faith as a rival, but disqualifying likeness from the ultimate purview of an ardent, identifying, life-affirming love.

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That is why Fanon seems so perturbed by the answers to his questions. When he asks about knowledge (about ethics, desire or will), he receives an account of a reciprocal logic, wherein violence is the means by which justice is restored to ethical life, and the freedom to kill is itself the price of political community in its legitimacy. The truth about these answers can thus not be made apparent; it invokes the belief that the community can be represented as ethical through the paternal violence of its love. We must see in this a violence of law and out of law the family as the essence of and most inconsistent witness, and whose most essential moment is Oedipus on the hillside, just before he begins his malevolent descent.

Notes 1. Jacques-Alain Miller, “A Critical Reading of Jacques Lacan’s Les complexes familiaux.” Trans. Thomas Svolos. Https://www.lacan.com/jamfam.htm, 1. Hereafter Miller plus page no. 2. In this Fanon offers a somewhat pessimistic response to the hope, later expressed by Hortense Spillers, that the decline of the paternal imago might lead to the new affect of being touched by the black mother. Indeed, even if that touch is born of the deepest love it might also show the most loving negrophobia. 3. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke UP, 2004, 7. 4. See Lewis Gordon, “Sartrean Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism.” The Prism of the Self: Essays in Honor of Maurice Natanson. Ed. Steven Crowell. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995. 5. See M.  Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. 6. Compare Stuart Hall, “The After-Life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?” Alan Read, Ed. The Fact of Blackness. ICA: Bay Press, 1996; to my Whither Fanon: Studies in the Blackness of Being. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2018. 7. In the late, incomplete seminar, The Names-of-the-Father, the object a is said to be what falls from the subject in anxiety (T, 82).

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8. See David Marriott, Whither Fanon: Studies in the Blackness of Being. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2018, Ch. 5 “Historicity and Guilt”. 9. Melanie Klein, “Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse” (1929). Contributions to Psycho-analysis, 1921–1945. London: Hogarth Press, 1948. Hereafter Klein plus page no.

Works Cited Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967. Klein, Melanie. “Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse” (1929). Contributions to Psycho-analysis, 1921–1945. London: Hogarth Press, 1948. Lacan, Jacques. Autres écrits. Paris: Seuil, 2001. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2006. Lacan, Jacques. “L’étourdit.” Trans. J.W. Stone (unofficial). 1972. Lacan, Jacques. “Columbia University: Lecture on the Symptom.” Trans. A. Price and R. Grigg. In J.-A. Miller & M. Jaanus, eds. Culture/Clinic 1. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2013, 8–16. Lacan, Jacques. “Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu”. Trans. C. Gallagher. 1989. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Psychoses. New  York: Norton, 1997. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Formations of The Unconscious. New York: Norton, 2017. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60. New York: Norton, 1992. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton, 1994. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Anxiety, 1962–1963. Trans. A. Price. Cambridge: Polity, 2014. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Encore, 1972–1973. New York: Norton, 1998.

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Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Ou Pire…, 1971–1972. Trans. C. Gallagher. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: RSI, 1974–1975. Trans. J.W. Stone. Jacques-Alain Miller, “A Critical Reading of Jacques Lacan’s Les complexes familiaux.” Trans. Thomas Svolos. https://www.lacan.com/jamfam.htm.

Part 3: Tell It Like It Is

Preface Most of those who have written about Lacan and blackness give the impression that they are discussing terms whose meaning follows a common lexicon and way of thinking. They then apply those terms as if they were already self-determining, and very often without questioning whether those terms can be abstracted from their analytical contexts. As a result Lacan’s eloquence and ingenuity become just another metalanguage, a guidance for reasoning rather than a radical questioning. But there have also been some authors (to whose labour and insight we owe a great deal), who have approached Lacan as a touchstone and have interrogated his work with a rigorous prudence. These texts show how Lacan can be read and understood as opposed to merely used and applied; accordingly, they reveal what it means to be immersed in Lacanianism as a resource or guiding thread rather than the last will and testament of an extreme servitude. In this final Part, I will consider one work—Frank Wilderson’s celebrated Red, White & Black. Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms—and one discourse: that of Afro-pessimism. As we will

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see: Wilderson’s attempt to go beyond Lacan, to put into question his supposed humanism, will allow us to reinterrogate Lacan’s strange mix of ontology, anthropology, geometry, and linguistics, while at the same time pointing the path to a new consideration of blackness. And although this reappropriation takes me furthest from the reading of Lacan proposed in Part 1, it leads me most directly to the continued importance of Fanon’s work in contemporary Black Studies.

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Afro-pessimism

Afro-pessimism suggests a new direction for black critical theory and philosophy. As a body of thought it tells us that we do not even know what blackness is, we talk about inequality and human rights and chatter on about it all, but we do not know why blackness has no analogy, what forces a priori belong to it, or what is its ontology. Frank Wilderson calls for “a new language of abstraction” to explain blackness (RWB, 55). It is worth pondering why the word “abstraction” should retain such interrogatory force here. On at least two occasions, Wilderson tells us that blackness constitutes a fundamental experience situated outside of ontic-­ ontological, historic or historial discourse and to which the human or whiteness serves as a metaphor, or metonym. To the extent that through it (and through metaphor) the human is manifested, blackness exposes a being that is disqualified, refractory, invisible; that it can only refer to itself as an exception, without origin, meaning, or author. Thus, the importance to some of the notion of a being—a being that cannot be disclosed as appearance, science, or knowledge.1 The call for abstraction—and this is difficult—is not, then, the pursuit of a black historial ontology, or an ontological argument about a black historical a priori, but an effort to rid blackness of the residual whiff of an anthropology, in whose formalism blackness remains always already excluded, or enslaved by, the vicissitudes of a logos on which, nevertheless, its appearance and disappearance are presumed to rely. How then can we gain access to a being who has no relation to the human, and that is deemed irremediably outside? Perhaps through a form of thought that stands outside blackness, setting its limits as though from without, articulating its end, making its abyssal ab-sens shine forth; and that at the same time grasps its stricture,

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the knot or noose that constrains it, and the abstraction in which its immediacy and knowledge is always the thought of the void. But from where can such a reading take place if it is always simultaneously out of place and beyond place, simultaneously that which is outside and that which becomes the thought of what is out-of-place to time, law, order, race, sex, and power?  Moreover,  how can blackness be both an outside and the outside of this outside, an outside that is always identical itself, whose out-of-placeness can never be eradicated as such?2 Certainly the call—for a new language of blackness—is needed, not because blackness is incomprehensible, or not abstract enough, but because it remains incomprehensible to the forms and categories of humanism’s “assumptive logic” vis-à-vis the Black (RWB, 55). It will also be necessary therefore to retrace this logic, to find out where it comes from and what is its meaning and concept. One might assume that blackness was born of the metaphysical thinking of race in Western reason, a discourse whose values and systems of representation have been in existence for a millennium. Yet Wilderson’s genealogy is more restricted, specific: the experience of the outside—and the nothingness of a being beyond being and language—is ultimately that of racial slavery. To remind us that the Black is “always already a Slave”, it is necessary to take humanism for what it is: a symptom, a genealogy, a particular disavowal; nothing but the symptom of a deeper political ontology and of the activities of an entirely anti-black world (RWB, 55). What is political ontology? The founding division between humans and blacks. Like Lacan, Wilderson thinks that there is a discourse of mastery and one that has been constituted by the modern world. However, mastery is defined less in relation to discourse (the practices of rendering the other) than in relation to racial superiority (force and values). This distinction is essential to a general conception of Afro-pessimistic analysis and critique. In Wilderson political ontology speaks well of justice and equality but is deaf to the ethical consciousness of the other and the lawless violence by which the non-white subject is globally “used and abused” (RWB, 2). It is not the master’s consciousness/truth but the slave’s unconscious/truth in relation to a violence that is not itself ethical or conscious that concerns him. “What are we to make of a world that responds to the most lucid enunciation of ethics with violence?...Why are these questions so scandalous…unless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by

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accident?” (RWB, 2) This is the servility of neoliberal truth; it merely testifies to “a dream of unfettered ethics” which no amount of pessimism can overcome (RWB, 4). As such, Wilderson equally condemns those who praise man (as universal spirit), and those who condemn man (with the artifices of cynical reason). What is Afro-pessimist ethics? We do not define it by saying that “the United States itself, and not merely its policies and practices, is unethical”, a notion that restricts ethics to that of the nation-state (RWB, 4–5). For in fact there is no nation, no policy or praxis that has not been affected by anti-blackness. There is no concept of modern reality that escapes it, for all reality is the legacy of slavery. There are nothing but “unspoken grammars” and “symptoms of [un]awareness” (RWB, 5, 4). Every grammar—ways of speaking and of being spoken—is related to this violence against others that it either obeys or commands. What defines a grammar is this relation between dominant and dominated forms of violence. Every relationship of violence constitutes a ‘grammar’—whether it is psychical, structural, social, or political. Any two violences, being unequal, constitute a grammar as soon as they enter into a relationship. This is why the grammar is always the product of a structural antagonism, in Wilderson’s sense, and appears as the most “gratuitous” thing, much more gratuitous, in fact, than political conflict and dispute. But contingency, the relation of violence with violence, is also the essence of antiblack violence. The tension between “structure” and “accident” is not therefore surprising since blackness is both excluded and imperiously demanded by Western reason; but what is seemingly contingent is also the arbitrary product of the mythic violence of which it is composed. Being composed of a plurality of irreducible antagonisms, each ‘grammar’ presents a multiple phenomenon, its unity is that of multiple political ontologies, wherein “structures of ontological suffering stand in antagonistic, rather than conflictual, relation” (RWB, 5). In each grammar the superior or dominant structures are known as capacity and the inferior or dominated structures are known as incapacity (RWB, 8). (By “capacity”, Wilderson means something “more comprehensible than ‘the event’” and something “more indeterminate than ‘agency’” ((RWB, 45)) Capacity and incapacity are precisely the original qualities which express the relation of having and lack. Because beings which enter into relation

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do not have existence without each of them having, at the same time, the quality corresponding to their difference in capacity as such. This difference between beings qualified according to their capacity as living or their incapacity as dead will be called antagonism.

2

The Distinction of Antagonisms

Blacks do not, by obeying, cease to be beings distinct from those which command. Slavery is a quality of incapacity as such and relates to power just as much as mastery does: but if, for the slave, a “devastating embrace of Human capacity” reveals “that which the Slave lacks”, there is also the admission that the absolute power of the master (the white or human antagonist) has not been vanquished, incorporated, disintegrated by its own lack or fantasm (RWB, 8). Slavery and mastery are structures of antagonism. Black beings are defined as dominated, incapacitated; they lack something “infinitely more severe than exploitation”, or alienation; blacks are enslaved so as to secure the coherence of the human world, by fulfilling the conditions of dishonourable life and the functions and tasks of non-recognition, of accumulation and fungibility (RWB, 9). This is the point of departure for a concept whose importance in Wilderson will be seen below, the concept of ontology: accumulation and fungibility operate as the slave’s “ontological foundation”, the symbolic values which express all the power of inferior and dominated beings (RWB, 15). Here we must note the ignorance of modern thought for this ontological aspect of the slave. We always think that we have done enough when we understand sovereign power in terms of its domination. The nature of sovereign power and its pleasures fascinates us. The sovereign good, as Lacan defines it, “is the birth of power”. To “exercise one’s rights over one’s goods is to have the right to deprive others of them” (SVII, 229). The good is thus coterminous with the slave whose res thus comes to define a dialectics of relation with sovereignty. This is why we oppose political means to final ends in the theory of slave life; but these two interpretations are only valid for humanistic ontologies themselves. It is true that we understand the slave in terms of violence. But it is also true that we can only grasp enslaving forces for what they are, that is as arbitrary violence and not as

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strategic means or final ends, if we relate them to what dominates them but that is not itself inherently violent. “It would be reassuring to say that Europeans rigorously debated the ethical implications of forcing the social death of slavery on Africans before they went ahead with it; but…it would be more accurate to say that African slavery did not present an ethical dilemma for global civil society. The ethical dilemmas were unthought” (RWB, 17). It is no doubt more difficult to characterize slavery as unethical for, by nature, the slave was deemed non-human, or ‘anti-human’. The slave merely expresses the relation of certain symbolic values to the active forces which dominate them. Slavery is essentially non-being; this is why we do not know what it means for it to be lacking, or what capacity it ‘has’ or is capable of. Even if slavery is defined less in relation to domination (i.e., the real) than in relation to freedom (in terms of values), it cannot be incorporated in the latter without aporia. If the slave represents a rift in language and nature, by laying bare the relation between res and speech, it also reveals an aporia in socio-political thought because its alienation cannot be erased, and its domination cannot be humanized. And what is said of slavery must also be said of blackness and anti-blackness. Furthermore we must also say of it of white law, civil society, national life, and culture. These are repressive functions, anti-black specializations, expressions of particular negrophobic antagonisms (RWB, chs 1 and 2). It is inevitable that humanist consciousness sees the slave from its own point of view and understands it in its own way; that is to say, reactively. What happens is that the human and social sciences follow the paths of humanism, relying entirely on the enslaved other as a symptom; the other is always seen from the whiter side, as it were, from the side of its reactive incapacity. The problem of the slave, according to Wilderson, is not an issue between domination and vitalism. What is the value of vitalism as long as it claims to discover the specificity of life in the same reactive incapacities that can be interpreted in another way? The real problem is the discovery of active antagonisms without which the relations themselves would not be capacities. What makes the human superior to all relations, particularly that relation of the ego that is called consciousness or will, is the capacity to represent necessarily unconscious-conscious forms as socially recognizable capacities. “But African, or more precisely

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Blackness, refers to an individual who is by definition always already void of relationality…[and who] stand as socially dead in relation to the rest of the world” (RWB, 18). The subject’s relational capacity makes it a self and defines the self as being-in-the world. The only true human and social science is that of human activity as capacity, but the science of capacity is also the science of what remains necessarily racially unconscious. The idea that science must follow in the footsteps of consciousness, in the same directions as blackness, is absurd. We can sense the moral piety in this idea. Humanism is not wilfully blind to its other, but is unable to grasp the slave as the non-definition defining the human as such. In fact there can only be science where there is no black consciousness, where there can be no consciousness simply defined as incapacity. Afro-pessimism is thus concerned with the unconscious incapacity of capacity itself. And how that incapacity is appropriated, possessed, subjugated, dominated—these are the characteristics of humanist violence. “Without the Negro, capacity itself is incoherent, uncertain at best” (RWB, 45). To appropriate means to impose forms, to create forms by exploiting circumstances. Wilderson criticizes Lacan’s early work for interpreting mastery and slavery in an entirely relational way as a shared capacity for speech. He admires Fanon because Fanon foretold the existence of a truly black non-being, primarily in relation to ontology: a non-­ being of capacity in relation to law, desire, and punishment. For Wilderson, as for Fanon, the capacity to transform oneself is called ‘recognition’. The power of transformation, the Hegelian slave’s power, is the primary definition of political activity of the oppressed. But each time we point out that the slave’s action and its superiority to the master’s reaction in this way, we must not forget that reaction also designates a type of enjoyment, a libidinal economy. Fanon’s discovery that all of racial metaphysics is tied not only to a grammar, but to an imperious hold over the right to speak; becomes in Wilderson a violence of thought, a suffering of flesh, and a rendering of the black as subject. It is not simply that the master’s impasse cannot be grasped or philosophically understood as enjoyment if it is not related to a shared capacity to transform—the slave’s enjoyment is of another type. The Hegelian slave is a primordial quality of angst but one which can only be interpreted as such in relation to and on the basis of a shared fear of death. But this death is not social death.

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For Fanon (and Afro-pessimism), the chattel slave is enjoyed as a non-­ recognized thing, a res who can be used, put to work, killed and fucked as such (i.e., without any possibility of subjectivity or transformation). Afro-pessimism is perhaps more than just another witness to this thought. It seeks to show what is manifested by mastery and slavery—as two topologies of the real.

3

Slavery and Mastery

Masters have freedom, but they also have the capacity which corresponds to their difference in freedom: the capacity is called freedom from and freedom to. And what of the slave? We can see that the problem of measuring negative and positive forms of freedom are irrelevant to the being of the slave because this measure already presumes freedom to be the ontological capacity of the human. The problem is as follows: 1) Wilderson always suggests that freedom for the slave has to be defined ontologically, rather than experientially: “There is no philosophically credible way to attach an experiential, a contingent, rider onto the notion of freedom when one considers the Black” (RWB, 23). The attempt should be made to see whether a freedom from can be applied to that to which freedom from or to is never a question of consent, will, choice, or necessity, but, and contrary to Wilderson—to the extent that he relies on the from—a ceaseless encounter with the void. The same with freedom as the promise of law. To remain faithful to it, while still oppressed by the real of captivity, is to live without certainty and without hope. All other values are merely political prejudices, platitudes, and misunderstandings of the being of the slave. Lacan is equally problematic here when he writes: all revolutions ultimately entail “a return to the master” (“Radiophonie”, 16). Structurally therefore every turn of the wheel that transgresses the master-signifier is a revolution that re-turns to it and via a repetition that, in Seminar XVII, is afflicted by an impasse, an impossibility, that defines the relation between jouissance and signification as such. Neither the master nor the slave can

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attain this narcissistic mirroring between the world and the subject, he argues. In “L’Étourdit”, Lacan criticizes the universal supposition of an I that applies to all, or can speak the all, which he suggests is a “surface-­ fiction with which the structure is clothed” and precisely because it conceals the real structuring being (“L’Étourdit”, 14). But is there not something of an assumption here that all desire is a desire for mastery? And that we all desire mastery in exactly the same way? Lacan opposes lack to mastery, he judges truth in terms of this idea, he posits the slave as something which should be judged and interpreted as a topology (of the real). “A slave is defined by the fact that someone has power over his or her body. Geometry is the same thing; it has a lot to do with bodies” (LB, 5). With this analogy, he asks us to imagine how even an enslaved body, crushed by the weight of the symbolic, is still bound and structured by topology. We are all enslaved, it seems, by the geometric knot of the signifier, whether it binds us to the imaginary or loosens our attempt to fix the real. The same with freedom as the promise of this law. We are all held in the real of its captivity; for, “between the body insofar as it is imagined and what binds it”, topology makes loosening and binding “strictly equal to one another” and so indistinguishable (LB, 6). But what this notion of equivalence itself misses about the (b)lack that is lacking is its relation to a field of forces, forces that are not opposed to the signifier but compose it in its subordination. More precisely, what this analogy neglects are the incommensurable differences in how the enslaved body is experienced in itself, but also how it is enunciated as a topology via chains, whips, spikes, nooses, and dogs. 2) However Wilderson is no less certain that a purely “gratuitous freedom has never been a trajectory of Humanist thought” which is why humanism qua the being of the slave remains abstract, incomplete, and ambiguous (RWB, 23). The art of measuring freedom raises the whole question of interpreting and evaluating values as quantities and qualities. Freedom from: here slavery is nothing but a metaphor that is used to negatively affirm the value of freedom while denying the real of captivity. Freedom to therefore comes to describe the processes and limits of sovereignty, including the freedom to enslave. The relation between from and to symbolizes the slave as value: the slave is nothing

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but its accumulated fungibility; but its value is to be found in the way the slave establishes “both flesh and metaphor” (RWB, 21). Flesh is to be understood here as the symbolic exception that is always already embodied by a particular black mytheme (Hortense Spillers, from whom Wilderson borrows the term, uses the word breach to suggest a body transgressed, held in suspense, but also how a black relation to law and capital is made flesh by the fact of its enslavement.3 In brief, flesh is already a metaphor of an engendering that, paradoxically, is also a kind of radical ungendering. Wilderson’s two conceptions of flesh and metaphor could thus come together in an idea of the slave as the metaphor of metaphor, or as a black mythology.) Humanistic theory can therefore only analogize slavery, not explain it, and its non-­ relation to freedom is what allows it to be expressed as both a quality and metaphor qua freedom. But if the slave amounts to a kind of unsayable real for the human—that is to say, a hole or void that is ex-­ istent—can this quality be reduced to a structural antagonism? Is the only true opposite to humanism something like a black topology? Is there a contradiction between these two kinds of thinking? If a value is inseparable from its quality, it is no more separable from the other capacities which it relates to. Slavery itself is therefore inseparable from its difference to mastery (even if the knot that conjoins them is “irreconcilable” (RWB, 37)). Difference in capacity is the essence of slavery and of the relation of slavery to mastery. To dream of two irreconcilable grammars of suffering, even if they are said to be of opposite senses is still an ideal and approximate dream, an analogical dream in which slavery is put to work in the dream-work of black critical mastery. We should therefore not see slavery as the opposite of capacity: rather we should view slavery as the différance of capacity and incapacity, a contagion that is no longer subsumable by mastery and no longer produces a dialectics nameable as such. What Wilderson calls incapacity is therefore no more than a dialectical metaphor, that is to say, a negative conclusion of what is otherwise being ostensibly affirmed. Each time that Wilderson criticizes the concept of mastery we must take it to mean that mastery is an abstract concept that always and essentially tends towards a metaphoric identification (with the slave), an ontological “scale” or measure that forms it as the

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annulment of incapacity in this unity (RWB, 37). Wilderson’s reproach to every purely analogical determination of blackness as quality is that it annuls, equalizes, or compensates for differences in life and death. On the other hand, each time he criticizes the value (of fungibility), we should take it to mean that blackness is nothing but the corresponding difference in quantity between forces of exploitation and production whose ontology is presupposed. In short, Wilderson is never interested in the irreducibility of slavery to metaphor; or rather, he is only interested in it secondarily and as a symptom. What interests him primarily, from the standpoint of ontology itself, is the fact that differences in quality cannot be reduced to equality. Slavery is distinct from mastery but only because it is that aspect of being that cannot be analogically equalized, that cannot be equalized out in the difference between ontologies. Difference in capacity is therefore, in one sense, the irreducible element of mastery and in another sense the element which is irreducible to slavery itself. Slavery is nothing but the difference in incapacity and corresponds to it each time blackness enters into a relation (that rhetorically it always fails to navigate qua the human). “The Black as a void of historical movement is without analog in the suffering dynamics of the ontologically alive”; “Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks” (RWB, 38). But the void is still being thought dialectically as a metaphor of negation even if it is also understood to be infinite and indeterminate. The remaining anthropomorphism in this text should be corrected by the Fanonian principle that there is an abyssal blackness in the universe which is no longer anthropomorphic but caught between infinity and nothingness. Caught in the infinite distance between being and nothingness and the infinitely more infinite distance between slavery and metaphor, blackness is something fundamentally distinct from ontology, namely it has a quality which can no longer be reduced to topology or metaphor. To reduce slavery to the other of ontology is still ontology. By affirming chance, accident, gratuity, Afro-pessimism affirms the non-relationality of blackness. And, of course, to affirm non-relation all at once is to want to affirm a non-relation to the world. But not all blacknesses enter into relations all at once on their own account. Their respective power is, in fact, fulfilled by relating to a profound disarticulation of signifying chains. Accident or chance is the opposite of a continuum (the

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basis of historical movement). The encounters of slaves with various masteries (ontological, political, socio-economic) are therefore the material events of chance, the disarticulate parts of chance and, as such, alien to every law; between the Africans who went into the ships and the Blacks who came out perhaps there is not only a relational or historical movement, but a difference that is not quantifiable between the two terms, and does not qualify the logic that links them, and is itself a disarticulate metaphor. But, in this encounter, each subject receives the quality (as slave) which corresponds to its quantity (as fungible), that is to say that blackness is the metaphor which actually fulfils its metaphor. Wilderson can thus say, in an obscure passage, that Black Studies presupposes a narrative of resistance, but that the genesis of resistance itself presupposes an (ontological) slave-subject as the genesis of resistance (RWB, 39–40). The fact that the two geneses are inseparable means that we cannot abstractly calculate a resistance to slavery that is not already slavish. In each case we have to concretely evaluate their respective slavish resistance as the metaphor of this resistance to slavery.

4

Wilderson on Analogy

The problem of the black/slave’s relations to analogy has been badly put (and misunderstood). It is claimed that these relations depend on the theory of exploitation and alienation—as if the slave could only be thought insofar as it is compared to a worker, or a subaltern, and then only vaguely, and insofar as it is an oppressed element of civil society who has no political interest in it. This is not the case and the origin of Wilderson’s critical position in relation to analogy must be sought in an entirely different direction, although this direction does open up a new viewpoint on Lacan. It is true that Wilderson has little interest in psychoanalysis as a therapy. But what sets him apart from cultural studies is a propensity, a way of thinking. Rightly or wrongly Wilderson believes that cultural studies, in the way it handles black enslavement, always tend to analogize it, to make up for its incapacity. Wilderson, as a critic of cultural studies, never invokes the civil rights of blacks against their enslavement; he invokes the

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ontological incapacity of the slave/black against civil society; of the ethics of the incapacitated against the capacity of the sovereign subject. Wilderson imagines an “a priori violence” that is always already anti-­ black, but one in which the divisions are not multiples or factors of one another. What he attacks in Lacanian cultural studies is precisely the mania for seeking universal formula, the ruse of an analogy that “erroneously” seeks to locate “Blacks in the world” (RWB, 37). This is why his whole critique operates on three levels; against logical identity, against humanistic equality, and against political contingency. Against the three forms of analogy (these three forms have an essential place in anti-­blackness in Red, White & Black and Afro-pessimism more generally). According to Wilderson, cultural studies will fall short of and endanger the true theory of the always already black. What is the significance of this always already tendency to reduce analogical differences? In the first place, it expresses the way in which cultural studies is part of the nihilism of modern thought. The attempt to deny black ontological difference is part of a more general enterprise of denying ethical life, depreciating the existence of black social death (in its lived experience) where the human is “parasitic” on the being who lacks. Wilderson accuses the Lacanian concepts of full and empty speech of being, in the final analysis, concepts of relation, principles of a self-­ sovereignty positioned by way of a symbolic order. It is in this sense that Wilderson shows that Lacanian cultural studies is part of humanistic social science and serves it in its own way. But we must also look for the instrument of analogical thought in Lacan himself. The answer is that full speech, by inclination, understands articulation in terms of the symbolic and interprets it from this standpoint. And yet in his later work symbolic speech is addressed, not from the point of view of meaning, of the ego, but from the point of the real. The analogy between speech and ego is the triumph (the ruse) of capacious representability. The real, however, is unsayable. And the matheme is the figural form of the unsaid. This is why the slave is not a symbolic metaphor but the real of speech. Speech and meaning pass it by, for they can only return blackness to the identical. But if the slave does not end in being or nothing, it can only fall as the infinitely finite form of the non-identical. This is why the slave has no grammar, for this fall makes it impossible to distinguish between its

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figural and referential meanings; and here the very opposition between historical slavery and ontological slavery is dissolved, for it is impossible to think the history of the slave without analogy to the being of its enslavement, whose meaning is thereby always already presupposed. But what prevents that meaning from being truly known is the fact that it is impossible to deduce enslavement from the words pouring out of one’s mouth, from the very act of speaking, without these signs and signifiers being read in turn as referential symbols of enslavement. This notion— which in itself goes beyond both grammar and sens—is what I would posit as the structural relation between the slave who is not (¬Φx) and the human function that is assumed to be the all (Φx) of identity. Afro-pessimism tends to read the all as a whitely violent identity; anti-­ blackness is thus seen from the side of a gratuitous-structural violence, from the side of a violence that is repeatedly performed but disavowed. Such violence is the instrument of a mythical symbolic disciplining of blackness. This is also the principle behind Wilderson’s critique of Lacanian film theory: humanism has no theory of the slave because it imagines a subject either alienated in language or alienated from capacity; it cannot imagine a subject positioned by gratuitous-structural violence and who is not a subject of political ontology. It cannot imagine a Black who is always already a Slave (RWB, 55). It is extremely difficult to find a language faithful to blackness that doesn’t then run the risk of depicting its outside as the true location of this unthought. To think this unthought Wilderson thus turns, not to cultural studies, but to Lacan. This shows two things: the aphasia of cultural studies is due to its Lacanianism; and the logic which makes it harder for cultural studies to conceive of the black is based on a certain reading of Lacan. Wilderson’s main critique can be simply stated: 1) Cultural studies “assumes that we are all positioned essentially by way of the symbolic order, or what Lacan calls the wall of language”, an assumption which makes the grammar of enslavement, the suffering of its existence, unintelligible (RWB, 56). 2) As such, cultural studies is “speechless in the face of gratuitous violence” (ibid.).

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3) This knot of aphasic logic both affirms and denies the ontology of anti-black violence—why?—because the black subject position is “not that of a subject position”. 4) For the black has sentient capacity but no relational capacity (RWB, 56). If the black is accumulated and fungible (and so not simply alienated in the ways assumed by Marx or Lacan), then what is equally firm and certain is that it cannot really be thought by the logic of capital or that of the symbolic. Whence it is clearly evident that these logics—in their abstraction— cannot speak (articulate, represent?) blackness. But why insist that cultural studies and Lacan only have something in common? What of their differences? And from which standpoint can blackness be spoken? The other question I have is why aphasia is being understood here as a matter of speechlessness, say, rather than a principle of disruption, denegation, or foreclosure? In short, in his critique of the cultural studies version of Lacan, which he takes as his primary target, is Wilderson able to see how Lacan could himself contribute to this need for a new language of abstraction? What of Lacan’s late work and the attempt to formalize difference as a logic of impossibility? Wilderson’s fundamental point is that we need to focus on the structure of political ontology, “a framework that allows us to substitute a culture of politics for a politics of culture”, in order to understand the unbridgeable gulf between black being and human life. The call is for a new ethics and a new language of politics. But how should we go about it? We must attend to the language of film, it seems, for Red, White & Black is, first and foremost, a work in film studies. But why is the film-work singled out in this way rather than, say, the language of philosophy? Wilderson’s invocation of Fanon is, I think, meant to bolster the latter but I’m not entirely convinced as to why the language of film seems to play such a pivotal role in studying the ‘grammar’ of ontology, the differences between contingency and event, say, or the relation between blackness and the cultures of politics in Afro-­ pessimism more generally. We shall return to the question of film in a moment, but for now let us return to what Wilderson calls the black grammar of suffering.

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According to Wilderson Afro-pessimism is in no sense a thought of the identical but rather a thought of symbolic exception, a thought of the absolutely different that blackness is and which calls for a new principle outside humanism. This principle is that of the reproduction of black non-being as such, of the repetition of its (non)ontological difference; the opposite of “dit-mension” (literally the sphere of what is said, dit). And indeed, if cultural studies “assumes that we are all positioned essentially by way of the symbolic order”, we will fail to understand Afro-pessimism if we make its pursuit of a black symbolic exception the consequence of a search for a new cultural identity (RWB, 56). We fail to understand Afro-­ pessimism if we do not oppose it to identity in a particular way. Afro-­ pessimism is not a call for a new symbolic intervention, the political claim for a new counterhegemonic resting place of the identical. It is not a plea for blacks to be the ‘same as’ or to have a shared ‘capacity’ but a return to a black ethics of the real which ought to make blackness both impossible and the exception to that from which it differs. But whereas I would place the emphasis on the former, Afro-pessimism tends to insist on the latter. For a pure outside is no more a thought of blackness, than it is a logic of negation. (But if humanism cannot see the nigger in the woodpile, if full speech is just white or human speech, does the Afropessimist call for blackness as the absolute outside, mean a night of abstraction in which all the cows are black?) Sometimes merely by virtue of looking too hard, we risk confusing the form of existence for the ineffable presence of its ground. Hence the necessity of looking carefully before one leaps. And the need to consent, too, to the possibility that one might come undone in being so bound to the outward.

5

The Vel of Structure4

Afro-pessimism explores the meaning of Blackness “as a structural position of noncommunicability in the face of all other positions” (RWB, 58). Wilderson’s account of Afro-pessimism presupposes a critique of communication or its representation. Wilderson says that if the world is “sutured by anti-Black solidarity”, if the slave has no end or telos in being,

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one of the legacies of slavery “is a state of virtual noncommunication” in which “Blackness is that outside which makes it possible for White and non-White (i.e., Asians and Latinos) positions to exist and, simultaneously, contest existence” (RWB, 58, 64, 65). But why is blackness the symbolic exception, the included outside, that is necessary for other positions to exist and to persist as existents? By virtue of what Wilderson calls the infinity of a lack that precedes being, world, existence. The infinity of slave time—“the ongoing paradigm of Black (non)existence”—means that black becoming cannot ever become, that it is not something that has become, and so is virtual, non-existent, non-communicable (RWB, 66). But, not being something that has become cannot be a becoming enslaved. Not having become, it would already be what is becoming—if it were always already enslaved. That is to say, slave time being infinite, black becoming would have attained its slave state if it had one. And, indeed, saying that becoming black is to have always already attained its enslaved state is the same as saying that it always was a slave. If becoming becomes enslaved why has it not finished becoming a slave long ago? If it was a slave which has become black, then how could blackness have started to become without first being enslaved in its becoming? And why is this figural-referential statement not also an ontological analogy? If slavery is ongoing—and so lies beyond both becoming and resistance— then black becoming in the strict sense no longer has anything to do with becoming, but with a logic that reduces it to virtual slavery. This is the view that Wilderson claims to have found in humanism—but does he reproduce it? Fanon said that if violence cannot be avoided in decolonial struggle that was because the colonial power, in its becoming, was inherently violent towards the colonisé in its real being and in the process of its antagonistic becoming. Violence—however Wilderson is thinking it in Fanon plays a decidedly different role in Red, White & Black. “Blackness is constituted by violence in the ontological first instance” (RWB, 67, my emphasis). The “essence of Black being”, Wilderson comments, is “being for the captor” (ibid.). By persisting with how an essential violence essentially becomes, Afro-pessimism loses sight of why Fanon poses violence as a fact of structure, a structural operator (Φ) that is not so much circular, or a logic of repetition, but a tabula rasa (Φx) invoking a real that has yet to be written for it is always being written,5 but this is a writing which has

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no essence for no signifier can signify it as an exception without it already being misconstrued, ablated. I don’t think Wilderson has grasped the opportunity opened up by this thought, at least not in Red, White & Black, his first book.6 That violence is not a moment of being or of transvaluation in the sense of effectively annulling the sens of blackness, that it is an ontological essence, forces us to think of black becoming, but to think of it precisely as what could not have started, and cannot finish, becoming except as the enslaved ‘outside’. However, such localization remains the ruse of the imaginary for it cannot face up to the Fanonian real that we examined in Part 1. How does the thought of becoming serve as a foundation for Wilderson’s reading of Lacan? The question being broached is “how the subject comes into subjectivity” as distinct from how the subject must be liberated from its imaginary fixations (RWB, 67). What is the being of that which becomes, of a being that becomes through imaginary misrecognition? How can that becoming be liberated from the narcissism that also dispossesses it? This problem of becoming as misrecognition becomes, in Wilderson, a meditation on Lacan’s notion of psychic freedom (i.e., to be free of one’s symptom). This problem of freedom is then formulated as a false or forced choice—a vel—between an empty speech, a speech that seeks to ‘entify’ the signifier, to make it self-identical to itself, emptied of temporality; and a full speech that recognizes the gap between signifier and referent, lack and ego. How can the subject pass from empty to full speech? In analysis the subject learns to pass from the misrecognition that is its point of departure and yet always waylays it, to the object that it had to give up of its own accord, and which it had to wait for as the bar (the signifier of castration) that constitutes it in language, and via a particular present—a satisfaction that is simultaneously always awaited and never arrives—that can never be passed but must always be passed on (and for the sake of recognition in existence). The subject must coexist with itself as manque-à-être [a ‘lack-of-being’] and a becoming yet to become. “Analysands jettison their projected and imaginary relation to the analyst and come to understand where they are finally in relation to the analyst (which is outside of themselves) and from the place of the analyst (a stand-in for the symbolic order” (RWB, 70)). The goal is not to make audible a repressed or silent speech but to pinpoint the lack that cannot

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be represented because it is in its absence that speech is possible. Accordingly, the work of analysis is to attend to those gaps and silences that expose the imaginary forces at work in it. It is not myself that speaks, but from where does it [ça] speak? And, of course, because the subject is the effect of the signifier. The opposition between empty and full speech is thus an answer to the problem of passage (but is not to be confused with the notion of the passe). And in this sense it must not be interpreted as the return of something that is, that is known or represented. We misinterpret the expression ‘full speech’ if we understand it as knowledge. It is not being that returns but rather the returning itself that constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed as the becoming of that which divides—the Spaltung—and of that which is the figure of division. In other words, identity qua division does not describe the being of that which returns but, on the contrary, the fact of returning for that which differs, which must differ. This is why becoming must be thought as a metonymy of desire; a metonymy of displacement and division, a division of the ego in its drive dimensions, a division of being and its representation, a division of becoming and the being which is affirmed as lacking in its becoming, a division of alienation and frustration. Thus the analysand ends up “by recognizing that this being has never been anything more than his construct in the imaginary and that this construct disappoints all certainties” (the words are Lacan’s, cited RWB, 72). Why then do these notions lead Wilderson to criticize Lacan? Because white film theory is not only “in fee” to Lacan’s theory of language and “gender”, it also shares his universalist presumption (RWB, 67). Because Lacanian psychoanalysis is insufficient and parasitic on “Black dispossession and suffering for which it has no words”, it cannot address “the poverty of full speech’s political or emancipatory promise” (RWB, 68, 73). This would suggest, in the light of Wilderson’s wider argument, that Lacanianism is yet another example of empty speech. That is, speech which disavows its own lack rather than exposes its imaginary identifications. This final charge is held to be identical to the core emphasis on alienation and, to this extent, it is concluded that Lacanian psychoanalysis is unable to account for a becoming that passes through not alienation but “the absence of relationality” (RWB, 73). This crucial hypothesis, so heavily criticized and misunderstood, however, does not conceive

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blackness as the ab-sent that has no being or sens, but arises as the topographical outside. Because we cannot understand how this outside can possibly leave the state of its enslavement, re-emerge from its heterotopy, or pass through psychoanalysis and yet not even have the power to pass once through the difference that is its outside, it is difficult to imagine what its emancipation would be. The outside hypothesis is incapable of accounting for two things—the event that not only closes the set but puts it into crisis and, above all, the existence of diverse multiples within the outside itself. The outside becomes the point that should not be there, that is impossible to occupy, inaccessible to sens by definition but is concealed by imaginary representations. But if we cannot enter into relations with the outside, as such, and insofar as the human is opposed to blackness, this does not mean that blackness has no relation to it. By outside we are meant to understand blackness as both a predicate and metaphor of violence. This is why we can only understand black freedom as the expression of a principle which serves as an explanation of an encounter and the real of its violence, of blackness as the infinitely finite repetition of violence. Wilderson presents this principle as an “uncanny connection between Fanon’s absolute violence and Lacan’s real” (RWB, 75). He presents it as the characteristic of what cannot be thought as symbolic conflict without thinking away this black disorder itself. As such, the real remains merely a metaphor of what is ceaselessly outside of itself, but not as what frees us in our destitution, but as a contestation that endlessly effaces the enslavement that has always already begun (on and on in its virtual becoming).

6

Suture

One of the most important concepts which Wilderson uses to explain what he understands by Lacanian psychoanalysis is the following: “The process of full speech rests on a tremendous disavowal which remonumentalizes the (White) ego because it sutures, rather than cancels” (RWB, 75–76). Would whiteness perish were it to annul otherness rather than suture it? Does this mean to suture is a necessity, as regards that which cannot be racially tolerated or practised? And that it acts as a kind of

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compromise that is ideologically needed? In Lacanian psychoanalysis, suture refers to a demand for security, but this is not strictly speaking preservation, more a kind of disavowal that restores continuity, and which allows the ego to endure in speech, to speak from the place in which it [ça] is spoken. Suture is thus ascribed to the imaginary, but in a very special way: it is both a complement of the ego and something internal to it. It is not ascribed to it as a defence. Indeed, if we pose the question ‘who sutures’, we cannot say that the ego is what sutures. The imaginary ego in its whiteness is what sutures, and it does not let itself be delegated or alienated by another signifier, or subject; on the contrary, whiteness here stands-in for and takes the place of lack; it sutures the gap opened up by the signifier. But how then can it be ‘monumentalized’? We must remember that suture has an essential relation to lack, that its function is to suture the absence by which we are subjected to the signifier in the form of a misrecognition and that this misrecognition is expressed as an imaginary quality. Now, whiteness, understood in this way, necessarily disavows the differential element that it lacks—which is also the racial element of its suturing structure. This is what the suture is: the circling around a lack, a concealment that is both differential and genetic. To suture is the element from which whiteness derives both its difference and the structure that disavows difference in its relation to otherness. Suture here reveals the nature of whiteness as the ideological principle of concealment. In this concealment—which relates to the structure that manifests it but which is necessarily absent—the ego hides its difference in the way diversity is reproduced and denied. The concealment is one which monumentalizes; whiteness is consequently the principle which has as its imaginary fulfilment suture. We should not be surprised by the word ‘suture’; in white film theory (which is Wilderson’s target here) suture is said to establish the spectator as a subject of filmic discourse by determining it in the feigned fiction of its representational truth. Suture is what allows the subject to enjoy its submission and conformity to the film-work. But how should the term ‘subject’ be understood? Wilderson always attacks film theory for being too general in relation to subjectivity, for always having too broad a mesh in relation to what it claims to capture or regulate as the ideological function of film. He likes to oppose suture to Fanonian violence, if only

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because of the extreme transformative power of the latter. If, on the contrary, suture is a principle of the signifier, if it reconciles the ego with structured reality, this is because it is an essentially symbolic principle that is no wider than what it structures, that only changes with changes in the structure and is determined in each case along with the discourse it utters and is spoken by. Suture is, indeed, never separable from particular determined structures, for which it represents, and stands in for. Fanonian violence, on the other hand, not only decentres the subject, it determines the relation between forces, and functions as a strategy of complete disorder without stand-ins or alibis. Disorder does not mean displacement. Suture cannot be separated from disavowal without falling into ideological crisis. But to confuse representation and ego is even more risky. Representation is no longer understood as force and falls back into misrecognition—forgetting the difference between signifiers which constitutes their movement and remaining ignorant of the structuring elements from which the ego’s reciprocal genesis derives. Suture is what reconciles, violence is what deforms. What does this distinction mean? The sentence quoted above invites comment on every word. The concept of suture is, by nature, monumental because the relation of suture to ego, understood conceptually, is one of conversion: when two signifiers are related it is the gap between them that is sutured, however imperceptible the gap may be in this case. (The suture, in short, is a monument to that absence or gap.) Nevertheless, this monumental concept needs a complement and this complement is internal, it refers to how the subject is ‘inserted’ into structures (be they antagonisms, or the absence of relations). It could not be sutured without such an insertion. This is because symbolic structures remain indeterminate unless a subject which is capable of articulating them from a double point of view is added to the structure itself. Structuring structures reflect a simultaneous double genesis: the reciprocal genesis of their difference in reality and the absolutely unknown genesis of their respective effects on subjects. Those ‘effects’ establish the repressed truth of subjects but are necessarily unknown to them. Suture is thus added to structure, but as the differential and genetic element of a

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subject, as the internal element of its production and denial. It is in no way anthropomorphic or experiential. More precisely, the signifier is added to suture as the internal principle of the quantitative determination of this imaginary relation itself and as the internal principle of the quantitative determination of this relation to an unrepresentable absence. Its logic is that of a zero that always presupposes the nature of one. For the zero, as absence, must be converted into the ‘utopic’ point of a one that is both without division and without the number of division. Suture, in Lacanian theory, must be described as the genealogical element of signification and of egoic thought. Thus it is always through suture that the subject prevails over others and dominates or commands them on the basis that it has (self-mastery), or that it is (white). Moreover it is also suture which makes a subject obey within a relation; it is through suture that it enjoys subjection. We have already encountered the relationship between absence and suture, but we have neither elucidated nor analysed its relation to violence (Wilderson also uses the word force). Suture is both the effect of structural violence and the principle of violent synthesis. That synthesis is neither gratuitous nor contingent but structured by the signifier. But we are not yet able to understand how this synthesis forms a circle around lack, how that movement necessarily reproduces a signifier in conformity with its principle. In Jacques-Alain Miller’s seminal reading it is always a specific lack that is sutured. On the other hand, the existence of this place-holder reveals a historically important aspect of Wilderson’s intervention; suture’s complex relation to blackness. Blackness takes the place of lack—of castration—for the white concept of suture which represents it. Now, we know that the concept of suture in Afro-pessimism is markedly undeveloped, and from two points of view: from the point of view of the principle which opposes violence to synthesis and from the point of view of the reproduction of ideological objects in the synthesis itself. Afro-pessimists demand a principle which explains the singularity of blackness in relation to ideological objects but which they also want to claim is also truly productive (as a transformative difference or invention). They have condemned the survival, in cultural studies, of

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miraculous harmonies between terms that should be opposed to one another (such as blackness and civil society, blackness and humanism, and so on). With regard to such a principle of transformative difference or determination, Afro-pessimism has turned to the work of Fanon not only for the concept of violence but for the reproduction of blackness as a principle of radical antithesis as such. If Fanonism belongs to this history of interpretation, it is because of the original way it deals with these concerns. Fanon turned Hegelian ontology into a misrecognized racial synthesis—for, if we fail to see misrecognition in this way, we fail to recognize its sense, nature, and purpose. He understood blackness as structured by delusion and thus found the reproduction of whiteness at the heart of black suture. He established the principle of the black imaginary, the will to have no image and determined this as the differential and genetic element of blackness itself as a scopic object a. Although these suppositions have already been discussed there is, in Wilderson, not only another idea of blackness, but Fanon’s idea of a hidden, disavowed, internal rivalry goes missing. Wilderson does not have the same position in relation to suture as Fanon did for, unlike Fanon, he does not attempt an interpretation which refuses to separate blackness from the gratuitous violence of its own unconscious. This is because, for Wilderson, this violence does not come from the inside but is primarily caused by structures whose effect blackness is. Wilderson seems to have sought (and to have found in “suture” and “violence”) a convergence between Fanon and Lacan (on the real), which can only be expressed as an opposition as he conceives it (between signification and violence), a resumption that prevents a re-­invention of both the imaginary and the real as a critical black project. In this sense, the most interesting questions that arise from his reading of Lacan: “what is full speech for a Slave?” “how does one defer the narcissism of a real relation?” are betrayed by the opposition—between violence and signification—which forgets the deathly violence of the imaginary itself. Again, if violence, for Fanon, “is in excess of signification”, then how does one explain the figure by which it is written in its disorder, that is, that of the tabula rasa? (RWB, 77, 88). A figure which is neither the effect of an absent cause, nor a sign of a zero for the number that maintains it, and that takes its place.

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Slavery as Metaphor

We must now address some specific points in our analyses even if this leads to further obscurities. Lacan is well known for saying the unconscious is structured like a language. And just as symptom is metaphor, desire metonymy, he also tells us that the unconscious has nothing to do with figure or meaning (SVII; E, 304). These analogies and equivalences are of the greatest importance and are always to be found at the centre of Lacan’s psychoanalysis. There is a deep affinity, a complicity, but never a confusion, between trope and libido, between subject and enunciation. Moreover, the determination of these analogies brings the structure of the unconscious into view. On the one hand, it is clear that these tropes produce different “effet de signifié” (meaning effects) depending on their combination or selection. This is the problem of psychoanalytic interpretation: to estimate not the grammar that gives meaning to these effects, to their relation, but to measure the “real-of-the-structure” that sustains them in the unsayable, unnamable knot of madness (SXXII, 17/12/74). We must not forget that, in every case, interpretation comes up against all kinds of delicate problems and difficulties; and interpreting without hope (of attaining any final point) is necessary here, of the kind that knows that the order of unconscious significance is of a different kind to that of metaphysics or rhetoric. After all, the unconscious always arises as a manner of speaking that is not immediately obvious as to its meaning or reference, and these fluent, primordial, and seminal signifying elements must not be confused with the semantic concepts of linguistics or rhetoric. It is therefore essential to insist on the terms used by Lacan; lalange and knot designate a new relation between signifier and trope but one in which linguistics is no longer the determining principle of the relation. Topology expresses the relationality of RSI (real, symbolic, imaginary) as active and reactive combinations and dissolutions. On the one hand, it is clear that topology provides more consistency and certainty to psychoanalysis. But on the other hand, the tying and untying of pieces of string are more like means, means or instruments of clinical illustration, just as metaphor and metonymy are instruments of analogy. And again, the real needs

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illustration and analogy, not because it is something which goes beyond meaning but because there is no signified of the real becoming itself. It is as if the real-of-the-structure is both immanent and transcendent in relation to the knot of its becoming; out of the web of signifiers, it makes up the chain of a real becoming. The Borromean knot is knotted [se nouer] in such a way that it is impossible to undo one of the three intersecting rings without undoing the other two rings.7 The moment of untying, which is also the moment of analysis, is the advent of the real as such. If the real is an il y a without content, the symbolic and the imaginary posit the one or the same. And if only a topologist can discover what sort of structure this is by finding its expression in knots of string, what sort of becoming the real is, that is because he knows how to handle these knots as a kind of analytic metaphor and analogy: he is the master of their unconscious truth insofar as they reveal the (feigned) truth of mastery. The notion that topology frees the unconscious from analogy thus forgets what is most notable about these knots, that is, that they actually depend on analogy as the differential element between the three registers of the imaginary, symbolic, and the real. In fact Lacan uses very precise analogies—of mastery and slavery—for very precise new concepts of unconscious symptoms, as we have seen. Like Lacan’s analogy between symptom and metaphor—a maxim that presumably is not itself metaphorical—“the ruse of this servitude” by which figure takes the place of meaning or signified shows a type of thought which has too much at stake to hide its own mastery—as if the value of analysis derives its sense and meaning from serving as a refuge for the dissolution of all that is imaginary in the notion of a signifier enslaved by truth (TL, op.  cit., 76). Lacan, creator of the topology of the real, came to see, in his final seminars, that his most critical notion of mastery could itself be turned into the most insipid and base ideological conformism in the training of analysts; but perhaps the problem here was not so much the transfer of mastery into ressentiment, anti-philosophy into a doxa of the established order, but a failure to think the genealogy of mastery as taken up by slaves themselves—those wretched of the earth who have never been the dupes of humanistic whiteness?

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For all these reasons one can say that the Afro-pessimist evaluation of early Lacan could also be applied to the topology of mastery. The main charge against Lacanianism is that it relies on a paradigmatic analogy which cannot account for the being of the black. Although Wilderson determines this analogy as one of spoken alienation, I think that the analogy between slavery and language has more significance and value. It is what we were talking about, without reference to analogy, in Part 1. The significance of slavery as metaphor consists in the way it is expressed in a thing and an object: is the slave’s value subtractive (insofar as it founds but is not part of the human-white set) or that of a negation (the base material of what Lacan calls truth, knowledge, and mastery, and sometimes trait and sometimes primitive)? This difference becomes even more complicated as problems of interpretation and evaluation refer back to and extend one another without actually encountering. What Lacan calls slavery, or mastery, has a philosophical or metaphysical genealogy which only has an elusive relation to blackness. What Wilderson calls the anti-­ human, the a priori outside and enslaved is sometimes a reaction to psychoanalysis and sometimes an affirmation of a Fanonian-Lacanian reading. We have already addressed why he uses these terms. But while an anti-black relation is secretly resurrected in Lacan’s manner of speaking, and in his rhetoric, we must be careful not to reduce the it (ça) that speaks and the slave metaphor through which it speaks to an equivalence. The slave has a philosophical genealogy in Lacan which we are invited to believe can only be felt, thought, and understood as an ontology beyond any racial analogy, but on which it depends. For the Afro-pessimist, only an anti-analogical conception can discover the sort of baseness and suffering through which the slave expresses its value, and mastery affirms another, and because the slave occupies the differential element of the human. The Afro-pessimist notion of slave value loses all meaning if values are not seen as fungibilities to be exchanged, but as analogies to be deciphered. This is the genealogy taken up by Afro-pessimists—the topology of analogies, the topology of comparisons. The consequences of this argument are far-reaching. All the rigour of Afro-pessimism depends upon it. The black, for reasons we will come back to, does not share the same relation to object, narcissism, or fantasy as the white. But after closer scrutiny, the particular reason for Wilderson’s

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critique of Lacan is to do with what he calls Lacan’s notion of “alienation”. Alienation is, for Wilderson, an essential grammar of political ontology. The entire reading of Lacan therefore hinges on this point because it is based on a human relationality otherwise denied the black. What alienation does not explain is the “absence of [black] relationality”, Wilderson suggests (RWB, 73). But what has happened to the Lacanian “real”? Is it not also opposed to meaning as relationality; is it not the impossibility of relation as such? On rereading this now, the difficulties seem overwhelming. It is wrong to limit Lacanianism to that of empty or full speech; the model of communication implied by such notions—the notion of access to a sens, with analysis understood as the means by which such symbolic understanding takes place—undergoes a shift in the later work. Here analysis is no longer the same as a successful mediation. On the contrary, it is concerned with introducing the analysand to a fundamental division. It means exposure to a réel which is no longer merely a question of knowledge or understanding, but to this inescapable division by which each signifier is both situated and the means by which this division is persistently disavowed. Hence Lacan’s focus on the fantasized forms by which subjects preserve themselves, or continue to think that they are successful, happy, white, free from all the dangers besetting them, the black threats of being facing them, with the result that language becomes a screen that is neither empty nor full, but the suppression, the symbolic abolition of division, and difference. The social diversions by which they avoid common unhappiness—the very ideology of whiteness—can be openly enjoyed as if they were happy, complete, and wholly white in their thoughts and in their desires. This is why the notions of empty and full speech had to be put in question. The very idea that one could be brought to a full understanding, to have the bliss of such possession, tied analysis to the politics of the imaginary, that is, as the inversive work of diversion. In the later work, Lacan sees the fantasy of restoration within language as a making sense that seeks to divert the subject from the lack in language against which all subjects make sense of themselves. What people want is not the resolution of a formerly repressed speech, a resolution which allows them to think of their unhappy condition as simply a burden of

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non-­communication, nor do they want to be freed from the fantasy of that resolution, but, above all, what they don’t want is the agitation that forces the mind to encounter the real of an unbearable vacancy. That is to say we prefer the webs of the symbolic chain to the senseless ruin of the real. Meaning can only be described as white by not taking the limits of meaning into account, for meaning in itself operates as the whited-out horizon of its own failing, or, better put, what is whited out is its constant failing from which we are constantly diverted by our symbolic fears and punishments. This is because the pleasures of white redoubt, without which the pleasures of anti-blackness are incomprehensible, pursues a meaning which attempts to supplement or conceal blackness by procuring us every kind of signifying value or pleasure. Everything we do therefore signifies a lexicon of racial signifieds by which we suture those black gaps in meaning and so stop thinking about them. I therefore agree with Wilderson that language locates a racialization of the symbolic, but not because language is itself full or empty, but because blackness is the effect by which its emptiness vanishes, and we stop thinking about it. Think of racial ideology as a white hare that disappears from our thinking the moment we reflect on it in our strenuous striving of a white perfectibility in language. It does seem to me that Wilderson’s focus on early Lacan (the Lacan of 1970s film theory) could be questioned in terms of this development— from identification to desire, the symbolic to the real—but so could his reading of Fanon in the light of the same movement. And in saying this perhaps we can come up with a slightly different genealogy of slavery. Arguably, the idea that alienation is a travail from which we (meaning white) are all strenuously trying to flee perhaps misses the more fundamental point articulated by both men; it is not so much that we would do anything to avoid misrecognition, but shun nothing so much as the price of what it would mean to live a truly ethical life in the way Wilderson construes it. It means not misunderstanding our desire, but blaming others—those deemed irreparably different—for the distress caused by those desires. This is what justifies our point in saying that we suffer not because we are alienated, but because we are alienated from our desires, in which we imagine a violent and vigorous onslaught by the Other’s jouissance that repeatedly offends us, but which we choose to believe entices and

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seduces us in their ardent, but always difficult, pursuit. That is why the task of analysis is not to cure, as if chasing the hare could distract us from the miseries pursuing us, or the gratuitous violence by which we enjoy the hunt rather than the capture. That is why Fanon’s belief that decolonization could itself be a cure, or a moment of full speech, but only if it is a moment of absolute disorder, is incisive, because if the former is imagined as a means of restoration, the latter (what Wilderson calls “the end of the world”) endlessly destroys any notion of fulfilment (RWB, 74). Thus the black is overwhelmed not by who he is but by his desire, his wish to be white. This is one of Fanon’s key insights. In fact Fanon does not read this simply as hysteria, or neurotic alienation, but uses this to explain the absence of racial-sexual relations in the colony. This is also why Wilderson is right to say that Fanon’s clinics were set up to dismantle all the fantasms that constitute the patient’s ego and which she or he projects onto the analyst, but perhaps wrong to say that this is the equivalent to Lacan’s full speech (RWB, 74). Wilderson distinguishes Lacan from Fanon in terms of the latter’s psychopolitics, which sees the development of psychoanalysis as an unceasingly radical engagement with the world. Or, more crucially, the Fanonian clinic challenges the preoccupation of psychoanalysis with neurotic delusion and not on how the violence of the world, the white world, is a desired pleasure for the white psyche. This is a key point for Wilderson. That is, Fanon “extended the logic of disorder and death from the symbolic to the real” (RWB, 75). Wilderson rightly says that this condition of structural, or absolute violence, remains a condition of black life—which is why he insists on the connection between Fanon’s absolute violence and Lacan’s real. This connection is the result of a constant sense of wretchedness which for Fanon, and I would also argue Lacan, relates to how the scopic or invocatory drives, for example, reveal nothing but a structure characterized by an ongoing displacement. For Fanon, however, that origin does not lie in the structure of a lack, which is presumed to be ontological in nature, but from the socio-political realities in which deprivation is lived differently by the colon and the colonisé. These two contrary emphases give rise to the ‘grammatical’ distinction between the other who is judged to be the same as, the other of Lacan, in brief, and the other who is slave, and who, as such, cannot be welcomed into the house of being and

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precisely because he is not a fetishistic or narcissistic symbol but an intolerable limit to (white and black) desire. Although he does not frame it this way, we think that this must follow from what Wilderson says about analogy. But here a paradox emerges: 1) If, in late Lacan, imaginary captation gives way to an emphasis on a subject caught between illusion and the void constituted by language, and the simultaneous wish to avoid the real, for Wilderson that voiding is possible only when the subject is “White or Human” (RWB, 75). 2) The white subject is at once the void that it is itself produced by, and the subject that sutures its own monumentalization as an ego. On the one hand, within Lacanian theory, the debate about the object is posed as a universal structure which is taken as both the model and meaning of the human per se. What is this object that we are assumed to all lack, and what is its relation to difference? The clichéd answer of psychoanalysis is sexual difference as mediated by Oedipus or the phallic function. On the other hand, as a corrective to these tendencies (the problem of oedipal desire, the myth of the conjugal family, etc.) and to the reductive ways in which Oedipus continues to be thought, Fanon is suggesting that psychoanalysis has systematically ignored those prohibitions imposed on black subjects, which are equally primary but not necessarily oedipal in nature. This is all the more striking for, as Wilderson tells us, if there is no speech that is not already full of anti-blackness, what matters to Fanon is what it means to speak as a black subject. My concern here is not whether Wilderson’s reading is accurate, but the conclusions drawn. The first question which needs to be asked is what is at stake in Wilderson’s insistence that blackness has no analogy for what defines it is force rather than signification. If analogy serves to draw together what is disparate—sentience and language, the human and its ontology, black lived experience and the violence of civil society—blackness challenges any optics based on a desire for recognition. This leads Wilderson to ask whether the introduction of the imaginary into the metapsychology of film and attendant concepts (the spectator, suture, the mirror image, etc.) can comprehend blackness. “[C]an there be such a thing as a narcissistic

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Slave?” if the world offers the slave neither image nor recognition? (RWB, 77) That is to say, what if one’s capture by the image offers no promise of capture, but shows one’s “absolute dereliction”? (Fanon’s words) By confining his reading of Lacan to that of full speech, Wilderson is thereby able to say that Lacanian analysis is the institutionalization of a certain ontology (of whiteness), so that what is seen to be at work as transgression or prohibition is always limited, despite its conceptual richness, by a normative (i.e., white) understanding of the respective limits of desire and law. The unveiling of a universal ab-sent, however, is not what Fanon is trying to do, because he already knows that lack is not the issue for blacks. On the contrary, what concern him are the disavowals by which whiteness violently lives out its desire, but on the condition that desire is able to avoid the anxiety of its own nothingness. Fanon, in brief, is a more dialectical thinker than Wilderson takes him to be insofar as the telling opposition is not between violence and alienation (of desire), but between a violence that conceals itself as a desire (for reality), and a desire that has to discover and complete itself because it is nothing but an analogy (Fanon says the black is nothing but an imaginary comparison) to a law that is unveiled by violence. It might be argued that what makes blackness into a signifier (of desire and law, of desire as law) is its positional difference within a set of differences without which it strictly has no meaning. To be black then is to be subjected, not by who one is, but by what one is not and never can become but which one must have, must assume, or delude oneself into imagining, namely, a being who is infinitely more than being because it is expelled. Being thus unable to grasp the happiness of being nothing, blackness can only resent the nothing which enjoins it to being while at the same time it is overwhelmed by the despair of never having been, a never-having that makes difference recognisable, irremediable, and manifest. For the n’est pas is not a choice, it is a humiliation that one submits to, it is the poison that exposes spirit to letter, error, misery, death and sin. The black is targeted by the reality of gratuitous violence, therefore, because this never having been arouses envy, desire, anger, fear, for it is imagined to be a liberation from any object (or its difference is taken to be a monstrous  indifference to any real object), and so is likened to a child who takes fright at the unreality of their image because they have daubed themselves with a blackened brush.

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This is why the essential distinction is not between an imagined versus real inferiority as Wilderson suggests, in response to the algebra, the topology of Lacan, which he contrasts to Fanon’s zones of non-being (an argument which seems itself to be deeply analogical in its understanding of both the psyche and of politics)—no, the real opposition is not between some racial norm which psychoanalysis confirms, but the thought that also prohibits any analogical relation to the object (and its vicissitudes in identity). This more deconstructive approach is central to Fanon’s belief that blackness does not simply begin as a primordial mirror of identification, for it is the effect of how it is seen in the imagoes of culture that renders it (in the sense of obligation and creation) non-being. Make no mistake about it. What else does it mean to say that to be black is to enter into a zone of non-being, to cross over into the part that has no part, that has no guarantor or status even though it introduces a panic into all civic structure, the panic and confusion produced by an identification played out against and within a social hierarchy of differences (with whiteness acting as the safeguard against any confusion or panic and precisely because it is irredeemably exposed to both at the level of need and desire). Again, when Fanon says that no consideration is possible there seems, indeed, to be a direct challenge to the dialectics of recognition proposed by Lacan. It is, in fact, what follows from the belief that blackness is not an oedipal difference, but the in-difference that grounds difference in our familiar images of community and being and, ipso facto, what is recognizable and what is zoned out by the dejected form of a more primordial difference. Is not black non-being a difference without a negative form for it is simply the socially coded thing of the different? (Hence even fetishism cannot describe it or retrieve it). This is the question asked by Fanon: what is the fetish of that which comes out of nothing, or is the nothing defining difference as such? The danger of such questions is obvious. They can easily be read (or perhaps misread) as ontological figures; but such readings are unable to see that what makes whiteness white is not ontology but the diversions, the entitlements, by which private miseries can be safeguarded as properties that demand social respect. The aim is to understand why desire (as law) is white, or why whiteness has the property of desire and law. What more satisfying object could the mind be offered than the idea, the image, that one is not only recognized but is always recognizable and regardless of

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one’s moral turpitude, viciousness, and perversity. Or that the ego’s majestic glory is the dasein that has the value of care, is always attended (even when ignored), and whose wretchedness is always contingent, and never the focus for a gratuitous oppression, murder, torture and surveillance. Finally we need to ask what does Fanon and Wilderson mean by violence? Put to the test: white violence is ontology, a political ontology, that is, Wilderson suggests, what unifies desire and identification; whereas in psychoanalysis, alienation is the matrix by which people experience themselves as subjects, acquire the knowledge of themselves in history, and keep company with who they imagine themselves to be and who must be carefully avoided in order for certain thoughts about oneself to be possible, to think or form certain concepts of representation (ipseity, transcendence, phenomenality). But is this notion of violence as structural antagonism the same as that of Fanon’s? There is no simple answer. But what is crucial to Fanon is that the black is the depository of maleficent powers, of all immorality, or, in Wilderson’s words, “the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind powers”, it is the problem of the other with which he is concerned (RWB, 85). This other, however, is not that of the imaginary (small o) or the symbolic (big O), but the other who obliterates the field of vision and of desire, and what seems to be posited between the ego and the imago, between the fantasm and the real. In all this I am speaking of a signifier sans symbolization that supervenes on language as the unthought, as the tain (the imaginary for whites) that despoils, disfigures, the very ability to think about myself, to reflect oneself, in terms of either property or honour, for its politics is that of a form without property or honour, and that only needs to be touched for it to strip away all security and all happiness and enjoyment from that moment onwards. Posing the differences in these terms—the problem of violence as desire, the problem of whiteness as unconscious property—is the logical outcome of Wilderson’s decision to critique Lacanian film theory. To say that this is a limited reading of what Lacan and Fanon mean by the real can, however, be made clearer by taking another look at what Wilderson means by suture. And to show how the attempt to explain it in analogical terms simply overlooks the very problem that I have tried to outline.

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The Film-Work Is Not Black

Afro-pessimism can be read as an extended study of film.8 But what is its concept of the film-work? Let us consider this question with an illustrative example from Lacanian film theory. If a little girl follows a black man (a Schwartzmann) who murders her, what would it mean to detach this “narrative” from the “film it controls”?9 (K, 39) This question: in Thiery Kuntzel’s seminal essay on the film-work, which is worked out via a reading of Fritz Lang’s M (1931), implies that this story of the black man is only indirectly related to what follows, that it “intervene[s]” marginally even though it situates the film-­ work in “an exemplary manner, giving it at the same time its presuppositions and its future developments” (K, 39). Let me be clear: if this indirection is the beginning of reading, is crucial to the sens, the meaning or syntagm of M, at what point is it decided, and from what point of view, that the black man is not essential, disturbingly so, to the figuration of the film-work? Kuntzel’s shot by shot analysis, in its exemplary detail, only wants to talk about the structuration of film, but does not want to think how blackness structures in turn the spectacle and signifying process of M, up to including the white letter m chalked on multiple surfaces and in relation to which the black man is always a metaphor of those self-same presuppositions and future developments. The misrecognition of blackness as film-work, as metaphor, suggests an obvious limit to Lacanian film theory: for example, being unable to even raise the question, Kuntzel decides to read blackness as something that only intervenes marginally or indirectly in the “grammars of cinema” (K, 44). Would it be precipitate to say that the Schwartzmann complicates Kuntzel’s language of semiosis and linguistics—the two meta-­ discourses of Kuntzel’s notion of the film-work? (K, 45) In the first place, the repetitive refrain that announces his coming—sung by a gaggle of white children—signals a being whose coming is never innocent (a word that Kuntzel self-consciously uses to invoke the child who is about to become the victim of the black man). Moreover, the playful activities that give rise to him, that daringly evoke him, rhymes that so often are the sole

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cause of the fear that they themselves so knowingly provoke, precisely perform the racialized fear that is the materia out of which the filmic signifier is composed. So, no, these childish rhymes are never innocent; but the black man they seek is always a myth to be enjoyed as such, he is the mauvais whom the film originally takes from the mouth of children before, at its end, putting it back in the mouth of mourning mothers, who are then able to utter and condemn its evil sens. The black man serves as the leitmotif of a code that everyone knows: a murderous mauvais that is black by nature. Imagine any situation you like, include a circle of white children or adults, as soon as the Schwartzmann appears, one is not so left to ponder and reflect on who he is, but on the real relations by which whiteness defines him, in all his threats, including the integral relation between death and anxiety, and that appears as a knot of jouissance that will be undone the moment he reveals himself. The only good thing to be said about this rhyme is not how it saturates the diegesis with racially complex meanings without the need for additional imagistic figuration. All we need to see are white children playing, enjoying the game in which they are hunted (by black words and meanings), for us to experience the film-work itself as the source of an ominous diversion from which we cannot be diverted, for the moment the black man is sung, and we ‘know’ who he is, the film-work turns racial anxiety into symbolic profit. That is how race also comes into view; it does not need to be attached to a specific filmic element to have an effect, we do not have to see it to think about it, and we do not have to be visibly hunted by an image to know, to imagine, this other scene by which the black man holds in his arms countless murdered white children. That, in fact, is how I would read the significance of the black shadow cast by the Schwartzmann—the agitation that greets its enigma—in contrast to Kuntzel, who reads it as a generic sign of menace or as a symbolic code, defined here as a series of distressing doubles (in reflected mirrors, in windows). Thus when the black man turns out to be a white murderer, his blackness is itself displaced as a shadowy double to the racial figure that founds it (and one that sees a Jewish figuration blackened via this association with child murder).

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Thus there is contamination but not as Kuntzel imagines it, that is the breakages and confusions put into play by the sequence of shots. I am talking instead about the disfiguration of diegesis by a disturbing reference to racial difference as a symptomatology that can only cause death, mutilation, and the unprecedented murder of aryan children by the Schwarzmann (here unmasked as an ardent sexual perversion that the ideology of the film unmasks as a ‘black’ Jewish child-man). The implications of this oversight for the theory of the film-work are far-reaching. Indeed, Kuntzel’s silence re the racial implications of this typology remains at odds with the political implications of the film-work, since it evaluates the Schwartzmann from the point of view of rhetorical tropes, and maintains its significance as a metaphorical, rather than a genealogical, relation to the film-work. This is not meant to be a reproach but to signify a certain limitation in how Kuntzel is conceiving the relation between signification and figuration, or how what is unmasked as repressed (the sexual violence that is repeated, in displaced fashion, by shot and dialogue) both masks and reveals meanings and motifs that perform this specific racial work of film. If Kuntzel is genuinely right to say that there is figurative meaning hidden by the cinematic text, why, in this insatiable curiosity with the language of film, does he not realize that race has always been part of the conditions of cinema’s representability? Given that he sincerely believes in this Bilderschrift—this kind of archi-writing hidden beneath, but also driving, the meaning and movement of film—why can’t he see that blackness too is buried in the depths even though it often hides in plain sight? Again, what we seek to read is not what is manifest, but the figure of an “absent term”, a “signified in flight” (K, 55). Why must Lacanian film theory flee in turn the figure that is absent because of the intolerable menace it produces? Why must we flee the black figure, here in the guise of the Schwarzmann while craving (disavowing) its excitement? Even if we are threatened by it as some kind of dangerous game? It might be argued that the film-work is a kind of dream-work, but these are dreams that we delude ourselves into imagining reflect primary processes rather than the dream-work of culture, without which the fears and passions aroused by the black man are scarcely conceivable.

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The whiteness of film as value therefore has only one defining principle: the language of the film only ‘means’ something insofar as the film-­ work unconsciously performs whiteness by not interpreting it; and one rule: treating blackness as a metaphor, placing it as the indirect expression of a white spectatorial desire. It’s all very well to say this but does Afro-­ pessimism, in its own reading of film, offer a viable alternative? Does it offer us a black reading of the film-work; and first of all, as an alternative reading of Lacan?

9

Cinema and the Name-of-Ungendering

Wilderson often takes white film to task for its claims to be ethical, engaged, and inclusive, for seeing itself as culturally racially diverse. As “metacommentaries”, this cinema disavows our miseries and prevents us from thinking about ourselves, and is unable to phrase the slavish incapacity that always appears as the symbol of black suffering. And Wilderson never stops saying that, although incapacity cannot simply mean black life, US narrative cinema sets itself up as a diversion, as a distraction, that brings us imperceptibly to the knowledge that “Blacks [cannot be cast] as other than Black”, and so the “story” of black social death cannot be told (RWB, 27). But we must question why cinema is given such importance: the opposition between black life and social death and the operation by which cinema makes itself both arbiter and judge of that relation are symptoms, symptoms of a cultural disavowal. Social death is opposed to life, but because it expresses a life which contradicts life, an incapacious life which we only know as life and death through cinema, what would it mean to grasp the meaning of black life and death, and so the meaning of ourselves, as cinema? (Thus if we can only know capacity as inseparable from cinema, from its diegesis, does this mean that cinema keeps us from knowing, or forbids us from grasping, the presentation of incapacity, and before the question of a cinema of black incapacity can be raised? But this cinema that measures, limits, and disavows black life is itself entirely modelled on the “oxymoron” that black life is the limit of capacity.) It is not therefore surprising that Wilderson confines his reading of American narrative cinema to what it is unable to present, or imagine, that it actively

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represses or disavows. There is no such thing as a cinema of incapacity because cinema cannot put incapacity at the service of black knowledge but, on the contrary, puts black life in the service of a racist ideological condensation. But is this a limit of film or of Afro-pessimistic interpretation in its desire for a certain kind of figurability? Can film show blackness, in other words, without censoring it or displacing it, or staging it via the referential authority of race? The claim of Red, White & Black is that violence is the idiom of power, but that film theory sutures over this fact in its appeal to a we, a subject that is assumed to be universely the same. When Wilderson uses the word “suture” this must be understood as a metaphor for the social civic life of cinema which, in this way, obscures the true meaning of black social death. But when he makes suture—which is, by the way, a key term from film theory—part of what he understands to be the absence, the symbolic inarticulacy of cinema, which then becomes the model for cinematic thought itself, he risks reducing suture to a measure of meaning rather than the unconscious work of structure. And the conflict between cinematic structure and meaning is thereby further reduced if we are sensitive to the difference between the oxymoronic and that which cannot be presented. (Once again, is there not a confusion here in how the cinematic symptom is being read—as what is being obscurely repressed and what sets out from the effect of that repression? Moreover, can one think suture without causing something to be sutured? There may be some contradiction in using a term from film theory to call into question that theory, because one cannot think the concept without doing what it asks, that is, as is the case here, one is content with what the word designates and the meaning to which it attests.) When cinema seems to know nothing of blackness is this because it knows nothing else, or because blackness is always already subjected by cinema? But this ‘knowledge’ is already deemed to be cinema’s ressentiment and bad conscience qua what it whitely forbids. The work of interpretation in cinema is thus sutured by the nonrepresentative status of blackness. Blackness is incapacious thought itself, but a thought that is subject to cinema and to all that it bears witness. What Wilderson wants from cinema is therefore a new thought, but a thought that can capture black insentience. He asks, “Can film tell the story of a sentient being

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whose story can be neither recognized nor incorporated into Human civil society” (RWB, 96)? I’m not sure why narrative should set the limits to cinematic thought, nor why black incapacity should be subject to narrative and at the same time not be subject to human life. But let us consider a key example in Red, White & Black concerning how narrative intervenes on black social death, and where the figure of its (oxymoronic) impossibility corresponds to that of woman (as the infinite measure of an annihilated truth and the tragic masquerade of truth as instituted in and through the filmic signifier). Of course, for Wilderson, black gender relations also express incapacity, but what is understood as ungendering does not let itself be recognized by cinema in the same way, or at least shows the limits of cinema as a life-work in a way that is neither oxymoronic nor narrated. A black woman who would affirm life instead of opposing black life to social death, must go in a different direction from that of incapacity to capacity. That affirmation would be the active force of ungendered thought, a thought that would be the affirmative power of ungendering in the sense, as Hortense Spillers puts it, of not stopping at gender but “get[ting] to go somewhere else”.10 Insofar as the unrepresentability of blackness as gender means discovering, inventing, new possibilities of black life beyond the limits of gender, then this is a life that cannot be told for its capacity-in-incapacity has the same relation to gender as the Black does to slavery: its inarticulacy occupies the most distant and perilous domain of life while being outside of life at the same time. What is surprising in Wilderson’s reading of Monster’s Ball, in the final chapter of his book, is that womanliness seems to pull in the opposite direction to blackness, and seems to be forced to walk under the same yoke as whiteness: the life that leads to the knowledge of social death is constantly constrained to abandon its desire for death, and the whiteness that appears to rediscover social life must mask itself as a version of black social death, which is why the black woman, in her desire, ends up being the force, the libido, that leads to death and finds in death a new place to establish itself in life, but it is impossible to tell apart that life from its concealed ressentiment. In other words, this affirmation of life goes beyond the limits that racist knowledge fixes for it, but gender cannot go beyond the limits that death fixes for it. Blackness ceases to be a ratio (of a truth that is beyond mercy and justice; a freedom that must be masked as bad

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conscience in order to survive), and black life ceases to be the effect of its subtraction: racial life makes the infinite active as what happens when two becomes one (via the emerging love of the interracial couple), but we do not know whether that number is subtractive (because of the deaths that determine it), or because there has been something added to it as a test of sense and value (the couple who come to know sexuation as the law of a mutual exclusion, as a shared incapacity of the not-all, the ab-­ sent). This irresolution is then read or interpreted in two different ways: (1) as a fetish and (2) as value. The slave is excluded from fetishism and value alike, for it has no labour only work and has no human value (as either weak or strong, learned, healthy or sick, young or old) that is respected. But what Wilderson wants to really convince us of is that the Black is masked by neither concept, for what “gets masked is the matrix of violence that makes Black relationality an oxymoron” (RWB, 25). This oxymoron teaches us very little about the slave as number—is it even or odd? And insofar as it is linked to non-relationality, what could it possibly mean to say that non-relation is the authentic figure or force of slavery, which is why the interracial couple cannot embody it? Finally, what does all this have to do with cinema? In Wilderson’s reading of Monster’s Ball form is replaced with polemics. So, while cinematic form is read as narrative, the reading is continually aiming to employ diegesis to explore the ultimate meaning of inter and intra-racial violence. But within the diegetic space of the film Wilderson leads us to consider the complex relay between sound and image, since it is as sound that the voice of law comes into the frame and also exceeds it by deceiving us (since its voicing is non-synchronous and because that voice comes across as a hallucinated object in the space-time of the image). The voiceover is used to accompany the death-walk of blackness (which we literally see die as image), but it is also the ultimate and eternal climax of white craving, suffering, and helplessness, a displacement and condensation which leaves black social death empty of the (engendered) knowledge that composes it. This Wilderson argues is where form becomes violence and violence form, seeing in these multiple walks a withering away of both law and ethics in which we see how whites, who hitherto were mired in the darkness of racism, learn to envision the light of redemption through black destruction (but on the condition that

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whiteness is not subject to social death and the miseries that afflict black suffering). Only whites can withdraw from racism but blacks can only be equal to the rapture of that election by being objects literally abandoned to death. The flickering remains of such death is what lights the way to knowledge and happiness. For Afro-pessimism, in brief, the white film-­ work is always a death-work. That is why Wilderson argues that “the Slave remains unthought” by film theory (RWB, 263). Indeed, to be “able to think film as Black” remains a most difficult task (RWB, 264). Just to be clear, Monster’s Ball is not a black film, and its formal banality cannot stifle its ideological complicity with white supremacy. And yet. And yet. Why does Wilderson spend so much time on this film—a film which suggests that the desire of a white murdering racist is the equivalent of a black woman’s grief and misery? Or worse: that the man’s giving up of racism is equal to her loss of a husband and a son? Wilderson’s reading, by giving us to understand that such questions are the relevant ones to be asked, doesn’t tell us how redemption is figured by the film-work, nor does he show us how the execution sequence induces us to see how black knowledge and truth redoubles that death as an affirmation, an affirmation that suggests race has no value as life unless perhaps in a new sense: that black life is always lived against its time, that it only accrues value as an atè whose limit can only be crossed in death, and as death. As a critique of the present world, that life is always untimely. In Lacan, the name of that splendour is woman. And the faith by which she endures existence to the limit of both life and death is also what allows her to grasp her nature as a kind of ungendering that is at once monstrous and ethical. The name of ungendering can be summarized in three essential theses which I shall elaborate by combining the work of Spillers and Lacan: 1) The theory of ungendered being occupies a decisive place in Afro-­ pessimism. The elements which make up this theory are law, language, kinship, value, naming, and chattel slavery. Now, through this diversity of terms, we quickly discover what the ambivalence of ungendered being consists in: a mothering performed by a no-longer-woman, but also a paternity that has no name. The ungendered is the image in which property represents kinship, and, better still, reifies its value. At

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the same time, the no-longer-woman is the image in which the product of the womb (as a commodity) or racial-species activity appears to define the epoch of modernity. The product is the property of a great winnowing, is representative of a legal subtraction, the belonging of the no-longer-woman and who is fathered by the man-without-­ paternity. The product of the slave womb, without any paternal metaphor, is a symbol fragmented by mastery and law. In so many countless ways, such offspring is contrary to both common sense and human nature, for it reproduces descent as monstration and chaos. The ungendered is severed from generation, and yet reproduces itself as the cut that severs; but every child it brings into the world seems to it stillborn, symbolically dead, and yet alive in its death. Chattel slavery invents a new sense for gender, betrays its teleology and meaning, and removes it from historical existence. Here the least paternal of men represents the most patriarchal, and the purest patriarchy has turned its ressentiment against the truth of woman as always untimely, but infinitely owned. That being so, white patriarchy becomes the philosophical exercise of producing mothers who are no longer women, and fathers whose offspring is fatherless. The ungendered reveals that gender is a symptom of what Lacan calls the good: to “exercise one’s rights over one’s goods is to have the right to deprive others of them” (SVII, 229). Or to possess gender is to possess the rights over someone else’s insufficiency. But the ungendered also come to embody the enigma of a name that is denied the name of the father. 2) The ungendered has many names (all foreign to it) that fall across the three registers (RSI). Lacan centres his Borromean topology on the function of the proper name. It is the nomination that provides the fourth term required to make the Borromean knot hold together, as Lacan concluded at the end of the seminar RSI in 1975. “The Oedipus complex, as such, is a symptom”, he tells us in the seminar of 18 November 1975, before linking this to the father’s place as “father of the name” (SXXIII, A.F.I. text, 21). The slave has no symbolic name and is merely the effect, in thought and culture as such, of a subtraction that diverts life from its telos or path in descent, kinship, and

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reproduction. The ongoing uncertainty—that blackness has no symbolic name—becomes the science of racist culture. Whence the certainty: blackness is a life that cannot make promises, cannot give its consent, or keep its word, and cannot show that it is not without sense (for all depend on the symbolic pact of sexuation with the signifier). 3) Finally, the ungendered cannot then know who or what it is. Only a knowledge of whiteness can secure itself as symbolic property, blackness is thus forced to think of itself as a techne without knowledge, because it can only identify itself with reproduction as a method and surrender itself to relations of terroristic production. Knowledge is productive life against the unreproducible life, the life which cuts blackness from life, but only because whiteness is presupposed to be the most valued reproducible life, for it alone is knowledge. (The importance of such documents as the Moynihan report in raced gender theories will also be recalled here.) The alliance of gender and race is undoubtedly where ungendering acquires its most active, ­pessimistic value. It is also where blackness shadows reproductive futurism through the whole of modern history: where we see a paternal nothingness, the whole negative nihilism of mothers who are no-longer-­ women and the replacement of family by symbolic property relations. The ungendered subject not only gets to go somewhere else, from species activity to symbolic subtraction, discontinuity to multiple dereliction. But it raises the question of whether the ungendered can ever seek in gender, in the whiteness of its concept, a recompense for the cultural activity of such radical subtraction? So how can the ungendered be represented in black critical theory; as a void, as a less than nothing? Or something else again, queerness or radical feminism? But the ungendered is no more to be found among object choices than among sexual difference: everywhere there is the ungendered, there is no sexual relation. The ungendered subject is the end of gender itself, species activity, sexual culture, and its movement. The meaning of the ungendered subject is the minus phi of the phallic function (Φx), but only insofar as it loses its product and its principle to a nonrelation that is absolute. The no-longer-woman and the fatherless father are not guardians of species activity, their offspring are not the products of science, or futurity, the last slave to be born is not the sign of

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enlightenment or religion; the ungendered subject, beyond science and religion, does not want to know what the adequate gender product of this activity is; the ungendered is this contemptuous activity itself insofar as it reveals its violent aim and its principle. The most curious thing about this image of the ungendered in Spillers’ work is the way in which she still conceives of it as the possible work of a symbolic affirmation. That is, as a real form for thought, for a thought that no longer presupposes gender as thought. Or as the wager of incapacity. I don’t think Afro-pessimism, at least in Wilderson, has realized the value of this wager and its untimely affirmation, and for which black social death, as a concept, is entirely undetermined (or undermined?).11 This is not to say that Wilderson ignores the issue, or that he doesn’t know how the film-work sutures itself to sexual difference. Only that his focus on the time of redemption is not the same as the time of film. We should note here that Wilderson seeks to distinguish the event of film from that of the narrative which frames it and makes it eventful. But the apparatus question is only followed insofar as it allows him to say, and via analogy, that the apparatus cannot enable us to know the Black for the black cannot be subsumed by the ontology of film. This means that what we see as black is always masked by the ontology of film, since blackness cannot be known or figured by ontology, or the various figurations by which that ontology is communicated to us by film. There is thus undoubtedly an important presumption in such arguments, although they seem to be based on representation, which is about reference or its very similitude, the belief is that blackness—which is here conceived as an abstract universal, as an identity rather than a phantasy of difference— can only be figured insofar as it is crossed out, or in exile from the historicity of narrative cinema. It is therefore somewhat incomprehensible to me why Wilderson, in his discussion of the ‘mulatta’, should himself risk confusing anatomical difference with sexual-racial difference. Would the argument have been made if the black female character was played by someone other than Halle Berry? This consideration is derived solely from realizing how this discussion of the mulatto, if one wants to use this somewhat raciological

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term, follows from the perception of how black women are made to appear, or are allowed to appear, as black, or how the mulatto appears as an object of desire precisely because she is less than black. But could she not also signify an absence, a signifier of that which is missing, the traumatic perception of which is then masked as an anatomy that itself deceives and deludes us as a disavowal (of blackness) or identification (with whiteness)? (This could be yet another example of where a negative theory of analogy returns as the unveiling of a lack which is still being thought in terms of analogy, and one which continues to think racial difference as analogical privilege). When the question of sexual difference is simply related to an act of perception, are we really duped by the mulatta because of what we see, or what we imagine we are incapable of knowing as her racial desire? This is important because of Wilderson’s argument, which seems to imply that we can see the mulatta because we already know her, in her submissive complicity, and that what she sees is only what the ideological apparatus of white cinema allows her to see and that has made her visible precisely in the form of an anti-black disavowal. Now given this argument, why do the concepts of analogy reappear with such remarkable conformity when the issue is that of the racial legitimacy of a black woman’s desire which is simply the projection of an imaginary identity? The problem is all the more striking in that the mulatta appears to be analogy, or the effect of ontology. This can be seen in the way Wilderson argues that black women have incapacity, and the mulatta has “presumed capacity” (RWB, 307). In brief, if interracial desire masks and disavows the negrophobia of cinema, a process written into the apparatus itself, why should the political question of white cinema find its place in our ability to see and so identify with the sexual in the form of anatomical difference, and via an identification with a camera that is always racialized by white privilege and the reassuring imbecilities and presumptions of heteronormativity? Can these contradictions be reconciled? The point is not that there is anything wrong with refusing the reading of gender passing as performativity, when we know that black sexuality is always bound to anatomical difference; rather, it is that the notion that blackness is only “captive and fungible” as an identity is too obstinate a position when we already know that blackness, in its concupiscence,

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demands a very different notion of masquerade in the way that sexual difference and identification are performed (RWB, 313). Does Lacan’s notion of sexuation, which offers up a gender identity split across multiple positions, and that is no longer ideally expressed in the name (of man or woman), allow us to raise the question of blackness as invention, a question that we cannot fail to recognize suggests a figure without a locus, but one absolutely capable of being the sign of a sincerely held desire (i.e., one neither alienated nor gratuitously violent) but capable of an affirmation beyond any gender position? This question is one that brings us back to Wilderson and his reading of Lacan. At its simplest, it goes as follows: on film, blackness is the dogmatic image of a thought that conceals the vel of its existence: for one must choose, capacity or incapacity? Wilderson’s strange diremption is not then a reading of film, but of its cultural symptom. Yes, but what of the black woman’s wager mentioned above? If every choice is a forced choice, what does it mean to be still committed to an ethics? What does it mean to choose blackness as an Afro-pessimist? The idea of symptomatic concealment suggests that a choice has already been made, a choice not to reveal the truth of blackness which is always already condemned, excluded. But if so how does one choose the lesser violence? And who’s to say that the decision to pursue one’s inalienable desire—beyond reason or will, beyond knowledge or happiness—is something that necessarily has to be avoided? Since the black woman must choose, it makes no sense to be affronted that she chooses capacity (regardless of faith, object, happiness, and politics) over what she already is: the anti-subject of dialectical incapacity. This then would involve weighing up what Lacan, in the case of Antigone, suggests is a true ethics of the real. That is to say, an ethics where tails I win and you lose everything. Yes, this is the black woman’s wager, in which what is wagered can never be equalled by what is gained. But so what? One must still wager, one must still necessarily play the game, and enter the dance for the chance to win what one always already loses in the monster’s ball. And if one decides to dance, and yet cannot do so, that is because one’s feet are held fast and one is no longer free. But at least then you can be cured of the unbelief that you were never free to do so.

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The Project (in Its Truth)

I pass finally to the concluding part of this book, which is also a return to its beginning. Here I shall discuss the question of truth and ethics, and above all by what sort of sovereignty is the truth of (Lacanian) analysis impelled. “When does truth begin?” Lacan asks. “It begins when you start to use sentences. A sentence is an act of saying [un dire]. And this act of saying is one of saying the truth” (LS, 9). This truth, which “is founded by the fact it speaks”, thus depends solely on speech, and on no other thing that might be designated (E, 868). The identification of truth with speech itself, without referentiality or address, and in particular to the exclusion of any metalanguage, that is to say of any meaning of meaning. It is at this point that Lacan could be said to be the last of the sophists: he questions the value of truth as a fiction, a “myth”, that “can only be half said”. Who speaks the truth? In other words: can one speak a truth that’s general, that’s valid for everyone? Lacan says no. This truth, which LacoueLabarthe and Nancy rightly say, “decisively breaks with truth as adequation”, does not indicate a sender or addressee, and does not speak of anything but what it says (without being adequate to what is said), namely, that there is a truth, but a truth that ‘presents’ its own in-­ adequation to meaning (TL, 68). Truth happens in sentences, but “the whole truth cannot be said” (ibid.). In this respect the reasons for our subjection to it lies in the fact that it cannot be known by the subject. This truth thus indicates the place of the subject in a signifying structure, but what its speech reveals is the unconscious effect of its truth on desire. Arguably, Lacan ends where he begins: with a radical questioning of the symptom as the sens or master key—to self, language, culture. Whence the final shift to the sinthome: which is impossible to pin down, pin onto what is but which nonetheless is the central element of the entire structure, the very principle of its cohesion. It is as if law were governed by an act of ex-scription, a general pattern determined by a singular instance, an infinite system founded on a finite declension, a game that obligates one to act wrongly, to refuse the stake by which the dyad is always marked

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by a third term, and where the three registers of psychical reality are always inscribed by that which has neither place nor name, the sinthome. Throughout this book I have sought to distinguish these structures of chance and their infinite signification from the wager of blackness. The wager that leaves one no choice because the world is unable to give back what is owed it; and whose endless losing lies beyond the sanction of a truth as Lacan conceives it. But the wager that is, nonetheless, the only chance of a black affirmation in a world of negation. The truth of that losing forces one to give up everything, including sense and value. Indeed, speech must itself be obligated to speak the n’est pas that renounces everything in order to speak the nothing by which blackness ceaselessly takes hold of itself as a speculative wager. Moreover, the finite-infinite form of that wager is not dialectics, nor is its truth that of a slave. For its affirmative truthfulness cannot be brought into being, or verified as a figure or subject. More, its unconscious affect is in fact opposed to everything that psychoanalysis considers to be a thing or object. For this is a res that cannot be expressed, by right, nor can it be raised to the dignity of the object. Here there is no affirmation that is not already a condemnation to a non-existence. How does this res relate to the German terms die Sache and das Ding? If “Sache and Wort are thus tightly linked”; we are told das Ding “is situated elsewhere” (SVII, 58). Accordingly, the thing has nothing to do with the object which is situated in the world, temporality and language: the object is not the thing “insofar as it is at the heart of the libidinal economy” (SVII, 138). The thing is thus located outside-the-signified (hors-­ signifié), to which the subject keeps its distance. But the subject is in a relation to the thing nonetheless, that is this nonrelation is constitutive of a primary affect prior to repression. Here again we should be mindful of a difference between Fanon and Lacan. For this is not what Fanon means by an intrusion felt at the origin of the earliest object relations. Here there is an infinite distance between the thing that is not and the signifier: if the thing, in “its specificity is to be absent, foreign”, blackness has no structure of thought as such (SVII, 78). It ex-ists but without the attribution of qualities: it is not a means of self-deception, nor is it a non-sens that finds its corresponding principle in a negative premise, nor is it the phantom affirmation of a universal logic. Neither is it a quid or a this before it

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is a quod or a what. Indeed, if Das Ding emerges as the excluded interior that is excluded inside; or organizes signifying relations insofar as it is excluded; the n’est pas, more profoundly, cannot be translated into the language of order or mastery (imaginary or otherwise), but nor can it be translated into the language of the slave; for it is not a symptom of capacity or incapacity (SVII, 87). Again, this thing that is n’est pas is the way Fanon is thinking of blackness as a dimension of the real, and what is presupposed by it, of the real as fantasy; and in a way that Afro-pessimism is perhaps unable to think the being of the slave except as a symbolic wager that keeps on being lost (as being, as a remedy). That is to say, as a hole or cut in the reality by which the signifier represents the subject who is black (S). It thus names an otherness that cannot be assimilated, an irreducible otherness that eludes symbolization and representation while at the same time structuring it. The n’est pas has—and in this sense perhaps contrary to Lacan—no il y a (there is), and no quidditas. Let us say somewhat paradoxically that it is the ien that allows psychoanalysis to think the less than; but what makes me able to say this, to think it, remains infinitely distant from Lacan’s concept of signifier. The essence of the thing, Lacan says in Encore, “is the ratage”, is what the signifier disguises, what it will not let be defined, and what it disguises as a no-thing, an absence, the real (SXX, 55). But the determination of the ien as a disguise raises the question of whether its nothingness is the rhetorical assertion of an equivalence or that of a comparison? It is impossible in any case to say whether the trope is operating semantically or rhetorically. This is perhaps why, in SIII, Lacan says: “there is no metalanguage” and that truth, in discourse, is “articulated as an enigma” (SIII, 20/4/66). Thus his argument that truth in analysis is a profound disarticulation via the paths of deception (T, 95). Even if the ça ‘says’ one thing, to know what or of what it says, or when or where ‘it’ is saying it, is never simply a question of knowledge. It is precisely because there are nothing but signifiers in the unconscious that the représentant has no representation (SXIV, 220). But philosophers claim that truth can be said, that it has meaning. By disestablishing the bond between thought and truth, by unrelating being and meaning in this way, psychoanalysis avoids relating truth to an origin in reference or representation. Lacan accepts the problem on its own terms; he does not call the will to truth

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into doubt, but he does remind us once again that people in fact do believe that the whole truth can be said and so have to be persuaded otherwise. He asks what truth means in the unconscious, what forces and what transference, qualified in this way, its analytic concept presupposes in general. Lacan does not criticize the desire for truth but truth in itself and as an ideal. According to Lacan’s analytic method, the topological position of truth must be dramatized as incompletion. “It is just that in the way it [truth] presents itself, it presents itself as a whole. And that’s precisely where the difficulty lies – it’s that you have to make the one who is in analysis sense that this truth is not whole, that it’s not true for everyone, that it isn’t – this is an old idea – that it isn’t general, that it’s not valid for everyone” (LS, 9). The concept of truth describes a ‘truthful’ signifying function. Even in science the truth of phenomena forms a ‘desire’ distinct from that of phenomena themselves. But a truthful subject presupposes a truthful man as its centre. Who is this truthful man, what does he want? He wants not to be deceived, not to let himself be deceived, because it is harmful, dangerous, and inauspicious to be deceived. But this hypothesis presupposes the truthfulness of the world itself. For, in a radically false world, it is the will to not let oneself be deceived that becomes inauspicious, dangerous, and harmful. In fact, the will to truth had to be formed in spite of the danger and the uselessness of the truth at any price. There remains another hypothesis: I want the truth means I do not want to deceive, and I do not want to be deceived comprises, as a special case, I do not want to deceive myself. But that means truth impels me because I believe in the necessity of deception, and that everything so wagered is uncertain. “What constitutes pretence is that, in the end, you don’t know whether it’s a pretence or not”, Lacan writes (SIII, 48). The point then is not to diminish truth as faith, certainty, or passion, but to cure oneself of the belief that one knows, or that one should always submit to the subject supposed to know. Throughout this book, the struggle of the subject with issues of mastery and knowledge has revealed the powerlessness of the subject to extricate itself from racist deception, and how that incapacity remains implicit to the demand that the analysand brings to the analyst (and precisely at the point where the racist phantasms of the ego have failed to be addressed by psychoanalytic theory). It is difficult in fact to

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avoid the conclusion that if lie and deception are crucial to analysis, it is the universal pretension of psychoanalysis to not be concerned by the wager of blackness that reconciles it to anti-black ways of existing, loving, and hating. Hence its failure to extricate itself from the symbolic racism that “manifests this truth as intention, though eternally opening it up to the question of knowing how what expresses its particular lie can end up formulating the universal of its truth” (Ea, 166). But precisely because the analyst can say, “I always speak the truth”—it doesn’t seem to matter that truth is a racist fiction, only that we agree that it is; for truth is nothing but speech, and the saying of it is independent of what it says. But what if this saying is also a demand for an anti-black recognition? Can a saying be recognized where truth is not where desire truly appears but only its impossibility, its phantasm? The fact that Lacan is incapable of posing this question in anything but the form of an aporia—to speak it is to not speak it (ça), and so only by not speaking it can we speak it—does not do anything more than preserve the dialectical sanctity of the transference. But the fact that certain speech acts cannot be limited to that of method, or do not correspond solely to that of technique, remains a paramount concern to current black studies. For, as we know, Fanon was opposed to preserving the sphere of analysis from that of politics or culture. In several works, for example, he shows how native wretchedness and alienation and clinical diagnosis and cure differ as two ways of wagering truth and two ways of thinking and evaluating it; for truth is already part of the wider conflict over values and their transvaluation, and it is neither an abstract nor dialectical element, but the thread tying together force and signification, meaning and domination. All of Fanon’s clinical and psychopolitical intentions come together in the perspective of this diremption which stems from the heterogeneity and incommensurability of different genres of truth. What such conflict calls into question is the very possibility of linkage (and in which no arbitration is possible): here something asks to be said and suffers the wrong of not being heard. Truth here is not simply the form of a division but evinces a strange, protracted, manifold disparity in which what is being signified to the subject is not what is said but is the designified trace of an enigmatic aggression, which belongs neither to the ego, the phantasms of its deception, nor to the order of representations, but to the racist fantasy

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of the real. Fanon thus defines therapeutic speech as a judgement in dispute, without the possibility of linkage between the two parties. Again, what he discovers here is not so much a hole in which truth is held and/ or foreclosed, but a kind of nihilistic passability in which (1) the native is accused of fabricating their suffering in order to excite pity, and via a kind of mental contagion; and (2) the European psychiatrist is too lazy to conceal their unbelief and racist resentment as to what is being articulated as the false coup of the signifier (SDC, 126–128). In order to account for the incommensurability of such analysis, Fanon says: what has been verworfen is not so much the real in the form of psychotic hallucinations, but the way in which therapy has become complicit with the racism of the signifying order as such—it is no longer knowledge (of the signifier) but a knowledge (as force) that identifies analysis with the racism of its truth, and surrenders to it. And in relation to which the transference is not so much a confusion of tongues as the affirmation of an irreducible incommensurability. Perhaps this is why we need to pause again before the image of the two doors (of truth and knowledge), knowing that confusion can only diminish the politics of their analysis, for, as we have repeatedly demonstrated, blackness remains the one great obstacle of the signifier for the subject in its truth.

Notes 1. See Calvin Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Durham: Duke UP, 2018. 2. This problem can be formulated in a less obtuse way; how can Black Studies be constituted differently? 3. Hortense Spillers, Black, White, and in Color. Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003, 206–208. 4. This section should be read alongside Jared Sexton’s powerful essay, “The Vel of  Slavery. Tracking the  Figure of  the  Nonsovereign”. Critical Sociology. 2004, 1–15. 5. Compare Encore 87 and the seminar of 17 May 1977, Ornicar? 17/18 (1979): 23.

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6. Of interest in this regard is Wilderson’s turn to the genre of auto-fiction in Afro-pessimism. However, in this work the relation between experience and theory is not so much worked through as cast ceaselessly outside the ability of either to address the dialectical limits of either standpoint. 7. For an excellent reading of the Borromean knot, see Luke Thurston, “Ineluctable Nodalities: On the Borromean Knot.” Dany Nobus, ed. Key Concepts of Lacanian Analysis. New York: Other Press, 1999, 139–164. 8. See Jared Sexton, Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing. London:  Springer, 2017; and Black Men, Black Feminism: Lucifer’s Nocturne. London: Palgrave, 2018. 9. Thierry Kuntzel, “The Film-Work,” Enclitic 2.1 (Spring 1978), 39. Hereafter K plus page no. 10. Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelley Eversley, Jennifer L.  Morgan. “‘Whatcha Gonna Do’  – Revisiting ‘Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’: A Conversation with Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelley Eversley, Jennifer L. Morgan.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 35, no.1 (2007), 304. 11. That said, we know that there are several thinkers for whom this wager has become central. I am thinking of the work of Patrice Douglass, Christina Sharpe, Saidya Hartman, Axelle Karera, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, to name only a few.

Works Cited Fanon, Frantz. Studies in A Dying Colonialism. Trans. H. Chevalier. New York: Grove Press, 1989. Thierry Kuntzel, “The Film-Work,” Enclitic 2.1 (Spring 1978), 38–61. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2006. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1977. Lacan, Jacques. “L’étourdit.” Trans. J.W. Stone (unofficial). 1972. Lacan, Jacques: “Yale University: Lecture on the Body.” Trans. A.  Price and R. Grigg. In J.-A. Miller & M. Jaanus, eds. Culture/Clinic 1. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2013a, 5–7. Lacan, Jacques. “Columbia University: Lecture on the Symptom.” Trans. A. Price and R. Grigg. In J.-A. Miller & M. Jaanus, eds. Culture/Clinic 1. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2013b, 8–16.

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Lacan, Jacques. “Radiophonie.” Trans. J.W. Stone (unofficial). 1970. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Psychoses. New  York: Norton, 1997. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60. New York: Norton, 1992. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Logic of Fantasy, 1966–1967. Trans. C. Gallagher. Unofficial. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Encore, 1972–1973. New York: Norton, 1998. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1969–1970. New York: Norton, 2008. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: RSI, 1974–1975. Trans. J.W. Stone. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Sinthome, 1975–1976. Trans. A. Price. Cambridge: Polity, 2016. Lacan, Jacques. Television. A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson. New  York: WWW. Norton, 1990. J.-L. Nancy and P. Lacoue-Labarthe, The Title of the Letter: a Reading of Lacan. Trans. D. Pettigrew a and F. Raffoul. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1973: 70. Wilderson, Frank. Red, White & Black. Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke UP, 2010.

Index1

A

Ab-sens, 5, 8, 76 Abstraction, 120, 121, 133, 134 Affect, 15, 42, 52, 59, 83, 89, 91, 102, 115n2, 167 Affirmation, 19, 21, 22, 27, 31, 40, 47, 56, 72, 73, 75, 97, 145, 158, 160, 163, 165, 167, 171 Afro-pessimism, viii, 119–123, 125, 126, 129, 131–135, 141, 142, 145, 153, 156, 160, 163, 168, 172n6 Agalma, 31, 74, 75 Alienation, viii, 38, 69, 83, 92, 123, 124, 130, 137, 145–148, 150, 152, 170 Althusser, Louis, 18, 44

Analogy, 10, 28, 33, 34, 53, 63, 120, 127, 130–135, 143–145, 149, 150, 163, 164 Analysis, 2, 3, 5, 12, 28, 32, 33, 51, 91, 121, 131, 136, 137, 143, 144, 146, 148, 150, 153, 166, 168–171 Antagonism, 53, 93, 122–126, 128, 140, 152 Anthropology, 53, 55, 120 Antigone, 165 Anxiety, 35, 43, 66, 72, 96, 100, 102, 115n7, 150, 154 Appearance, 9, 21, 56, 66, 75, 87, 113, 120 Aristotle, 22–25, 27–30

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. S. Marriott, Lacan Noir, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74978-1

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176 Index

Até and blackness, 67 and philosophy (see Antigone; Limit; Woman) and woman, 160 Atomism, 17–19, 31

Conversion, 12, 140 Critique, 2, 3, 52, 76, 89, 98, 121, 131–134, 146, 152, 160 Culture, 45, 46, 54, 56–59, 61–64, 66, 67, 70, 72–75, 78, 80, 82, 90, 93, 95, 101, 105–108, 110, 124, 133, 151, 155, 161, 162, 166, 170

B

Badiou, Alain, see Mathematics Becoming, 18, 19, 62, 83, 92, 135–138, 144 Being, see Ontology Blackness, vii, viii, 1, 6, 8–11, 13, 14, 19, 20, 27, 29, 30, 33, 34, 37, 38, 41, 42, 44, 46, 47, 52, 54, 56–59, 61, 62, 64, 67, 70–72, 75, 76, 78, 81–83, 85, 87, 89, 90, 93–98, 105–108, 110, 119–122, 124, 125, 129–136, 138, 141, 142, 145, 147, 149–151, 153–159, 162–165, 167, 168, 170, 171 Body, 51–64, 66, 68, 88, 90, 91, 98, 99, 127, 128 Borromean, see Knot C

Ça, 4, 6, 137, 139, 145, 168, 170 Capacity, see Incapacity Cinema, 153, 155–165 Complex, 39, 53–56, 59–65, 68–72, 77–84, 91, 94, 97, 112, 113, 115, 141, 149, 154, 159, 161 Consciousness, 121, 124, 125 Contact, 53, 56, 61 Contradiction, 30, 36, 44, 70, 72, 73, 128, 157, 164

D

das Ding, 22, 23, 26, 27, 40, 54, 78, 81, 83, 95–115, 126, 127, 132, 145, 151, 167, 168 Death, viii, 2, 36, 47, 57, 58, 61, 67, 68, 74, 77, 78, 85, 124, 125, 129, 131, 148, 154–161, 163 Deixis, 23, 26, 29, 30, 33–35 Desire, 2, 9, 11, 12, 18, 19, 31, 37, 42, 43, 45, 47, 49n22, 53, 63, 68, 73–76, 78–80, 83, 94, 97, 108, 113–115, 125, 127, 137, 143, 147, 149–152, 157, 158, 165, 166, 169, 170 Dialectic difference and, 21, 41 Fanon and, 21, 30, 45, 73, 98, 150, 151 Lacan and, 23, 38, 41, 43–45, 68, 71, 73, 105, 151 and ressentiment, 42 slavery and, 128 Die Sache, 167 Disavowal, 97, 121, 138–140, 150, 156, 164 Displacement, 93, 137, 140, 148, 159 Dit-mension, 134

 Index 

Dream-work, 101, 128, 155 Drive, 45, 53, 57, 61, 69, 74, 79, 88, 91, 95, 97, 106, 108, 137, 148 E

Edelman, Lee, 79 Ego, 4, 5, 20, 21, 47, 53, 56–58, 60, 61, 66, 68–71, 73, 74, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 88, 90, 91, 93, 96, 100, 101, 103, 108, 124, 131, 136–140, 148, 149, 152, 169, 170 Erethism, 71, 74, 75 Essence, 12, 23–26, 29, 32, 33, 40, 41, 46, 47, 53, 67, 86, 87, 89, 92, 94, 115, 122, 128, 135, 136, 168 Ethics, viii, 45–47, 67, 76, 113, 115, 121, 122, 131, 133, 134, 159, 165, 166 Event, 30, 31, 65, 122, 130, 133, 138, 163 F

Family, the, 51, 53–56, 63, 64, 66–73, 77, 80, 82, 85–87, 101, 102, 105, 111, 114, 115, 149, 162 Fanon, Frantz, vii, 12, 14, 15, 19–21, 27, 30, 39, 40, 45–47, 51–63, 66–68, 70–73, 75–103, 105–113, 115, 115n2, 120, 125, 126, 133, 135, 138, 142, 147–152, 167, 168, 170, 171 and Afro-pessimism, 126, 133, 135, 142, 168 and anthropology, 53 and anxiety, 66, 150

177

and colonial culture, 67 and the dialectic, 21, 30, 45, 73, 98, 150, 151 and Freud, 51 and the imaginary, 20, 52, 59, 61, 90, 94, 95, 101, 150 and the imago, 54, 60, 67, 81, 88, 90, 93, 96, 113, 115n2, 151 and Lacan, vii, 19, 39, 45, 51–54, 56, 57, 59–63, 68, 71, 73, 77, 84, 88–90, 95–99, 107, 120, 138, 142, 148, 151, 152, 167 and psychoanalysis, 51, 52, 95, 148, 149 and psychosis, 52, 98 and sexuation, 72, 78 and Wilderson, 125, 133, 135, 138, 142, 148, 150, 152 Fanonism, 89, 97, 142 Fetishism, 46, 151, 159 Fiction, 6, 19, 21, 22, 24–26, 28, 54, 58, 66, 67, 139, 166, 170 Film-work, 133, 139, 153–156, 160, 163 Force, 8, 16, 31, 46, 54, 59, 75, 89, 120, 121, 123, 124, 127, 129, 136, 140, 141, 149, 158, 159, 167, 170, 171 Foreclosure, see Verwofen Fort/da, 18, 68 Freedom, viii, 5, 7, 115, 124, 126–128, 136, 138, 158 Freud, Sigmund, 2–4, 18, 26, 45, 51, 55, 62, 68, 69, 78, 79 Function, vii, 2, 7, 8, 15, 21–37, 43, 51–115, 123, 124, 132, 139, 149, 161, 162, 169 Fungibility, 123, 128, 129, 145

178 Index G

Game, 18, 64, 68, 69, 112, 154, 155, 165, 166 Gender, 7, 8, 26, 78, 137, 158, 161–165 Genealogy, 12, 46, 54, 121, 144, 145, 147 Genesis, 57, 70, 130, 140 Geometry, 120, 127 Goods, 4, 82, 110, 123, 161 Griault, Marcel, 46

Immanence, 110 Incapacity, 43, 87, 96, 122–126, 128–134, 156–159, 163–165, 168, 169 Innocence, 103, 112–114 Interpretation, vii, 73, 80, 85, 89, 123, 142, 143, 145, 157 Intrusion, 54, 61, 68, 69, 84, 85, 90, 100, 167 Invention, 84, 141, 165 J

H

Hallucination and the imaginary, 57, 101, 108 and psychosis, 70 Hegel, G. F. W., 17, 18, 30, 31, 33, 34, 44, 65, 67, 68, 77, 113 Heidegger, Martin, 107 Homonymy, 36, 107 Humanism, 120, 121, 124, 125, 127, 128, 132, 134, 135, 142 I

Ideal, 60, 63, 69, 72, 79, 82–84, 128, 169 Identity, 6, 20, 33, 43, 85, 114, 131, 132, 134, 137, 163–165 Ideology, 13, 15, 43, 59, 89, 93, 97, 146, 147, 155 Imaginary, vii, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 20, 22–37, 47, 51–115, 127, 136–139, 141, 142, 144, 146, 149, 150, 152, 164, 168 Imago, 54, 58–77, 80, 81, 83–86, 88–91, 93, 96, 97, 100, 101, 105, 112, 113, 115n2, 151, 152

Johnson, Barbara, 35 Jouissance, 4, 26, 27, 29, 30, 45, 57, 63, 71, 72, 75, 76, 78, 79, 85, 97, 106, 126, 147, 154 Jung, C.G., 51 K

Kant, Immanuel, 67, 68 Klein, Melanie, 61, 107 Knot, 5, 11, 54, 108, 121, 127, 128, 133, 143, 144, 154, 161 Knowledge, 2, 5, 6, 10, 12, 20, 31, 32, 41, 44, 51, 54, 56, 78, 82, 106, 112, 113, 115, 120, 121, 137, 145, 146, 152, 156–160, 162, 165, 168, 169, 171 Kuntzel, Thierry, 153–155 L

Lacan, Jacques, vii, viii, 1, 24, 51, 78, 119 and anthropology, 53, 55, 120 and blackness, vii, 1, 6, 11, 29, 38, 41, 44, 52, 119, 120, 165

 Index 

and critique, 2, 3, 133, 146 and culture, 45, 62, 63, 72, 73, 80, 95, 166 and literature, 38, 41, 44 and mathematics, 23, 24, 28 and structure, 44, 143, 148 and topology, viii, 7, 26, 61, 127, 144, 145, 151, 161 and training, 2, 3, 5, 144 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 166 Law, 7, 8, 15, 28, 36, 42, 60, 62, 64, 67, 70, 76, 78, 82, 90, 91, 97, 98, 104, 112–115, 121, 124–128, 130, 150, 151, 159–161, 166 Le Gaufey, Guy, 29, 34 Life, vii, 45, 47, 53, 56, 66, 67, 71, 72, 80, 87, 114, 115, 123, 124, 129, 131, 133, 147, 148, 156–162 Limit, viii, 19, 23, 25, 26, 29, 33, 34, 38, 67, 70, 84, 92, 147, 150, 153, 156, 160, 172n6 Linguistics, viii, 9, 53, 120, 143, 153 Logic, 20, 22–30, 32–35, 76, 78, 109, 115, 121, 130, 132–135, 141, 167 M

Marx, Karl, 12, 38, 43, 89, 133 Mask, see Masquerade Masquerade, 11, 12, 19, 59–61, 71, 72, 81–83, 89, 91, 97, 100, 155, 158, 164, 165 Mastery, 130 Afro-pessimism and, 121, 126, 129 analysis and, 144 and interpretation, 125

179

and knowledge, 5, 169 and truth, 15, 144 Mathematics, 23, 24, 28 Meaning, see Sens Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 39, 88 Metaphor, 11, 14, 45, 61–63, 66, 72, 74, 87, 106–108, 120, 127–131, 138, 143–153, 156, 161 Method, 162, 169, 170 Metonymy, 11, 94, 137, 143 Mirror stage, the, 52, 57, 59–61, 67, 69, 85, 86, 89, 92–94, 97, 99 Misrecognition, 12, 42, 47, 49n22, 63, 65, 68, 74, 75, 78, 79, 81, 84, 85, 125, 136, 149–151, 153, 170 See also Recognition Mothering, see Negrophobia Multiplicity, 22 Myth, 26, 27, 29, 46, 51, 60, 62, 65, 78, 79, 149, 154, 166 and blackness, 132 and logic, 26 N

Nachträglichkeit, 52, 64 Name, 27, 85, 112, 160–162, 165, 167, 168, 172n11 Nancy, J.-L., 166 Negation, see Verneinung Nègre, the, 11, 13, 27, 32, 51, 53, 54, 58–61, 64, 66, 70–77, 85, 91, 96, 97, 100, 108, 110 Negrophobia, 16, 21, 64, 75, 76, 78, 87, 92, 98, 115n2, 160, 164 N’est pas, 19, 27, 80, 81, 94, 96, 106, 167, 168

180 Index

Neurosis, 52, 53, 62, 72 Nihilism, viii, 92, 131, 162 Non-moi, le, 54, 90 Not-all, see Pas-tout Number, 141, 159

Philosophy, 18, 32, 35, 46, 59, 64, 67, 84, 120, 133 Power, 5, 27, 32, 42, 66, 74, 79, 80, 82, 98, 121, 123, 125, 127, 129, 135, 140 Primitivism, 45 Project, 1–6, 142, 148, 166–171

O

Objet a, 58, 65, 115n7 Oedipus, see Complex Ontology, viii, 3, 6, 9–13, 16–27, 29–34, 36, 39–41, 44, 46, 58, 62, 65, 66, 68, 77, 78, 80–82, 84, 86, 88, 89, 91, 94–96, 102, 104, 105, 108, 110, 112, 114, 115n2, 120–123, 125–127, 129, 131–138, 142, 145, 146, 148–153, 157, 158, 160, 163–168, 170, 171 Other, 7, 28, 33, 37, 59, 75, 86, 87, 89–91, 93, 94, 109, 147 Outside Afro-pessimism and, viii, 134 topology and (see Logic; Mathematics) P

Pain, 68, 71 Passe, 3, 137 Pas-tout, 4, 22, 23, 26, 27, 31–36, 159 See also Logic; Not-all Phallus, 26, 27, 62, 76, 85, 149, 162 Phantasm, 12, 13, 19, 53, 54, 82, 96, 169, 170 Phenomenology, 47, 67, 90

Q

Quality, 32, 94, 122, 123, 125, 127–130, 139, 167 Quantity, 32, 65, 127, 129, 130 R

Real fantasy, 52, 59, 77, 91 Real, the, viii, 5, 16, 25, 28, 29, 36, 44, 46, 51, 54, 59, 60, 62, 65, 76–82, 84, 91, 93, 95, 98, 100, 108, 109, 124, 126–128, 131, 134–136, 138, 142–144, 146–149, 152, 154, 165, 168, 171 Reason, 5, 30, 33, 35, 59, 78, 85, 88, 89, 96, 112–114, 121, 122, 145, 165, 166 Recognition, 7, 12, 20, 56, 59, 65, 67, 68, 77, 81, 91, 92, 94, 109, 136, 139, 140, 142, 147 See also Misrecognition Repetition, 53, 55, 59, 63, 65, 101, 126, 134, 135, 138 Representation, vii, 3–5, 7, 16, 19, 42, 43, 54, 59, 60, 63, 64, 71, 74, 81, 85, 87, 89, 92, 93, 121, 134, 137, 138, 140, 152, 163, 168, 170

 Index 

Repression, 31, 52, 67, 80, 88, 97, 157, 167 Ressentiment, 42, 47, 67, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85, 87, 92, 97, 98, 144, 157, 158, 161 Robinson Crusoe, 38, 39, 41, 43, 47 S

Segregation, 7–9, 11, 14–16, 21 Self, 99, 125 Sembable, 60, 86, 90 Semiotics, 153 Sens, 3, 9, 10, 13, 17, 18, 20–22, 24, 26, 42, 43, 59, 65, 69, 77, 78, 94, 95, 99, 109, 110, 131, 132, 134, 136, 138, 143, 144, 146, 147, 150, 153, 154, 156, 166, 168, 170 Sexuation, 26, 33, 72, 75, 76, 78, 159, 162, 165 Sign, vii, 6, 7, 13, 14, 20, 21, 31, 34, 36, 38–40, 42, 47, 64, 65, 89, 132, 142, 154, 162, 165 Signifier, vii, viii, 1–47, 51–115, 127, 132, 136, 137, 139–141, 143, 144, 146, 150, 154, 158, 162, 164, 167, 168, 171 Slave, viii, 1–47, 123–128, 130–132, 134, 135, 142, 144, 145, 148, 150, 159, 161, 162, 167, 168 Sociogeny, 52, 97 Socrates, 35 Spillers, Hortense, 115n2, 128, 158, 160, 163 Subject, 2–4, 6, 11, 16–18, 20, 36, 38, 42, 43, 47, 49n22, 53, 62, 67–69, 76–78, 80, 83–85, 87,

181

92, 94, 98, 99, 108, 110, 115n7, 125, 127, 130–133, 136, 137, 139–141, 143, 146, 152, 158, 162, 163, 166–171 Symptom, 12, 17, 26, 54, 55, 60, 64, 70, 81, 98, 107, 121, 122, 124, 129, 136, 143, 144, 156, 157, 161, 165, 166, 168 Synthesis, 54, 141, 142 T

Thing, see Das Ding Time, 3, 12, 18, 36, 62, 91, 93, 120, 121, 125, 128, 129, 135, 153, 160, 168 Topology, viii, 4, 7, 13, 26, 54, 61, 126–129, 143–145, 151, 161 Trait, the, 37–47, 60, 61, 145 Transcendence, 110, 152 Transference, 5, 12, 32, 169–171 Transvaluation, 136, 170 Truth, 2, 4, 6, 9, 12, 20, 24, 28, 31, 32, 35, 36, 42, 43, 46, 51, 52, 58, 59, 64, 73, 79, 81, 86, 89, 96, 102–104, 106, 113–115, 121, 127, 139, 144, 145, 158, 160, 161, 165–171 Typology, 79, 155 U

Unconscious, 2–4, 12, 13, 18, 19, 23, 24, 32, 46, 56, 63, 64, 68, 70, 80, 81, 89, 93, 94, 121, 125, 142–144, 152, 157, 166–169 Ungendering, 128, 158, 160, 162 Universal-particular, 28

182 Index

Unthought, the, 124, 132, 152, 160 Afro-pessimism and (see Afro-pessimism) Untimeliness, see Fanonism; Nachträglichkeit V

Value, vii, viii, 3, 4, 7–10, 12–14, 16, 21, 24, 30, 31, 42, 44, 54, 69, 70, 72, 74, 76, 87, 91, 92, 96, 97, 121, 123, 124, 126–129, 144, 145, 147, 152, 156, 159, 160, 162, 163, 166, 167, 170 Vel, 134–138, 165 Verneinung, 15, 20, 22, 23, 26, 27, 29–34, 38, 40, 41, 47, 49n13, 72, 73, 109, 129, 134, 145, 167 Verwofen, 63, 70, 133 Violence, 16, 46, 61, 110–115, 121–123, 125, 131–133, 135, 136, 138–142, 148–150, 152, 155, 157, 159, 165 W

Whiteness, 1, 6, 13–15, 21, 23–25, 27–29, 31, 33, 34, 41, 54, 63, 72–75, 78, 82, 83, 85, 91, 96,

97, 120, 138, 139, 142, 144, 146, 150–152, 154, 156, 158, 160, 162, 164 Wilderson, Frank, viii, 119–139, 141, 142, 145–152, 156–160, 163–165, 172n6 and cinema, 156–159, 164 and ethics, viii, 121, 122, 131, 133, 159, 165 and Fanon, 125, 133, 135, 138, 142, 147–152 and humanism, 120, 121, 127, 132, 134, 135 and ungendering, 128, 158 and violence, 121, 131, 135, 138, 142, 148, 150, 152, 159 See also Analogy; Antagonism Will, 67, 74–76, 83, 87, 105, 115, 119, 123, 124, 126, 165, 168, 169 Woman and Afro-pessimism, 165 and sexuation, 165 Wretchedness, 10, 59, 67, 71, 87, 88, 94, 109, 148, 152, 170 Writing, 23, 26, 35, 36