Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race

by Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks

Desiring Whiteness provides a compelling new interpretation of how we understand race. Race is often seen to be a social construction. Nevertheless, we continue to deploy race thinking in our everyday life as a way of telling people apart visually.
How do subjects become raced? Is it common sense to read bodies as racially marked? Employing Lacan's theories of the subject and sexual difference, Seshadri-Crooks explores how the discourse of race parallels that of sexual difference in making racial identity a fundamental component of our thinking.
Through close readings of literary and film texts, Seshardi-Crooks also investigates whether race is a system of difference equally determined by Whiteness. She argues that it is in relation to Whiteness that systems of racial classification are organized, endowing it with a power to shape human difference.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Race, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published May 25, 2000

Reviews

[Miguel · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Working through our fantasies will involve the risk of desubjectification that many of us dread. Such dread, such an encounter with our own limit, is the only means of articulating the possibility of an ethics beyond the specious enjoyment promised by Whiteness"

The fundamental argument of this text is twofold: first, that "race a symbolic system sustained by a regime of visibility" and second that the signifier of "Whiteness" as a proper name (or 'rigid designator') papers over the fundamental lack or limit of the subject and thus promises a certain kind of enjoyment to which the subject aspires. This produces white supremacy, racism, racialism, and so forth. As Lacan says in Seminar IX, "I am called Jacques Lacan, but as something that can be missing, for which the name will tend to cover over another lack. The proper name, therefore, is a moveable function."

Seshadri spends a great deal of time in the earlier chapters explicating the anxiety of the fantasy of Whiteness, this fantasy of wholeness or humanness. She puts this formulation at the forefront of her argument to counteract rote social constructionists arguments of racial categorization. Seshadri writes, "There is a hiatus between racial theory and practice that the two can function quite independently of each other. Thus to proceed as if an engagement with racial theory were to undermine the foundations of racial practice is to misrecognize the structure of the discourse of race." Some may take issue with the fact that Seshadri puts "Whiteness" as a signifier at the center of her argument, but this decision comes from both the Lacanian idea of sexual difference and reasoning back from the hegemonic dominance of white supremacy. The signifier of "Whiteness" is that which provides a particular kind of enjoyment at the level of fantasy. Seshadri goes on to write, "we will see that racial anxiety, the unconscious anxiety that is entailed by the sight of racial difference, has its cause not in ideology, but in the structure of race itself, and in the functioning of its master signifier, 'Whiteness.'" She draws out this claim many times in the text, most cleverly in the context of discussing the anxiety of "appropriate" and "inappropriate" racial identifications in news stories and popular conversation. After all, the decision to identify someone's race in a conversational anecdote is fraught with concerns about how such an identification would be perceived.

Seshadri claims that race-identified identity is not imposed by hegemonic white supremacy, but rather emerges in the relation between various signifiers of race in a Lacanian signifying chain, in the same sense of the unconscious functioning like a language. She also makes the audacious claim that, "The fear of miscegenation .... is not allayed by marriage because its threat is always the loss of one's symbolic status. The prohibition of miscegenation should above all be understood as the tenacious refusal to grant legitimacy in order to preserve the possibility of incest." Race, then, is organized on a level that defies ethics in the sense that it attempts to escape the most basic moral prohibition: the incest taboo. Seshadri need not make an account of the endless examples of incestuous rape in the context of North American chattel slavery to cement this point. An illegitimate child which is always the fatherless progeny of the enslaved woman cannot be 'protected' by the incest taboo. This is a striking application of the reading method Seshadri's racial paradigm allows.

So why "Whiteness"? And why psychoanalysis? Seshadri explains in her own words, "I am proposing an adversarial aesthetics that will destabilize racial looking so that racial identity will always be uncertain and unstable. The point of such a practice would be to confront the symbolic constitution of race and racial looking as the investment we make in difference for sameness." She goes on, "One must traverse the fundamental fantasy of singular humanity upon which racial identity is founded. It is a question of resituating oneself in relation to the raced signifier." She explicates this adversarial aesthetics with the examples of the film Suture and Toni Morrison's short story "Recitatif." Seshadri goes on to say of psychoanalysis, "As a praxis, psychoanalysis is the most appropriate discourse for the examination of why we or certain groups may resist such an adversarial aesthetics." This text, then, is a powerful, practical, and mostly theoretically convincing account of the intersection between race and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

[Blaze-Pascal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent... gets very Lacanian after the initial chapters, which means that it is something to come back to, again and again. Very good work.