Abstract
Positing race as the Lacanian object a that binds the subject to a fantasy-self alienated from its subjective drives, this article presents the traversal of race as an ethical responsibility, made increasingly achievable by the recent public focus on repeated incidents of deadly violence against African American men.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For a fuller discussion of this and other parts of my argument, see my forthcoming book, Trauma and Race.
See especially Miller (1994) for more on the concept of extimacy.
I present a more extensive reading of the trauma of slavery in a 2001 issue of this journal (George, 2001).
For more on these versions of the Real, see especially Fink (1997) and Shepherdson (1996).
Popular identification of Zimmerman as “white” has called attention to the violence that such categories encourage; simultaneously, Zimmerman’s self-identification as Hispanic and his descent from a “white” father and Peruvian mother have urged many to complicate the category of whiteness (Gamboa, 2012).
References
Baker, Jr. H.A. (1989) Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Baker, Jr. H.A. (2001) Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T. Durham: Duke University Press.
Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge Press.
Derrida, J. (1978) Writing and Difference. Translated by A. Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dunn, M. (2013) Web extra: Letters written by Michael Dunn from jail. firstcoastnews.com, 20 February. http://www.firstcoastnews.com/story/news/local/michael-dunn-trial/2014/01/24/michael-dunn-jail-letters-jordan-davis/4836401/, accessed 9 September 2014.
Fanon, F. (1967) Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by C.L. Markmann. New York: Grove Press.
Fink, B. (1997) The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Gamboa, S. (2012) Trayvon Martin case: George Zimmerman’s race is a complicated matter. huffingtonpost.com, 29 May, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/29/trayvon-martin-case-georg_n_1387711.html, accessed 9 September 2014.
George, S. (2001) Trauma and the conservation of African-American racial identity. Journal For The Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 6 (1): 58–72.
George, S. (forthcoming) Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African-American Identity. Texas: Baylor University Press.
Ifill, G. (2014) Quoted on “meet the press.” NBCNews.com, 24 August, http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-transcript-august-24-2014-n187871, accessed 9 September 2014.
Lacan, J. (1997) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Translated by D. Porter. New York: WW Norton & Company Press.
Lacan, J. (1998a) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: Encore. Translated by B. Fink. New York: WW Norton & Company Press.
Lacan, J. (1998b) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by A. Sheridan. New York: WW Norton & Company Press.
Lacan, J. (2006a) The instance of the letter in the unconscious. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by B. Fink in collaboration with H. Fink and R. Grigg. New York: WW Norton & Company Press, pp. 412–441.
Lacan, J. (2006b) The signification of the phallus. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by B. Fink in collaboration with H. Fink and R. Grigg. New York: WW Norton & Company Press, pp. 575–584.
Lacan, J. (2013) The Triumph of Religion. Translated by Bruce Fink. MA: Polity Press.
Miller, J.A. (1994) Extimité. In: M. Bracher, M.W. Alcorn, Jr., R.J. Corthell and F. Massardier-Kenney (eds.) Lacanian Theory of Discourse. New York: NYU Press, pp. 74–87.
Seshadri-Crooks, K. (2008) Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race. New York: Routledge.
Sharpton, A. (2014) Rev. Al Sharpton rouses crowd with fiery speech at Michael Brown’s funeral. BlackAmericaWeb.com, 25 August. http://blackamericaweb.com/2014/08/25/thousands-attend-michael-brown-funeral-in-ferguson/2/, accessed 9 September 2014.
Shepherdson, C. (1996) The intimate alterity of the real. Postmodern Culture 6.3, http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.596/shepherdson.596, accessed 9 September 2014.
Spillers, H. (1997) All the things you could be by now, if Sigmund Freud’s wife was your mother: Psychoanalysis and race. In: E. Abel, B. Christian and H. Moglen (eds.) Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 135–158.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
George, S. From alienation to cynicism: Race and the Lacanian unconscious. Psychoanal Cult Soc 19, 360–378 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2014.36
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2014.36