Abstract
This article engages Lacanian and Kristevan psychoanalysis to examine lynching photographs and picture postcards that were disseminated throughout the southern United States between 1890 and 1940. I argue that these photographs are not only archival objects intended to incite racial terrorization and propagate white supremacy, but also unstable signifiers that expose the concerted méconnaissance of whiteness as wholeness. Introducing the concept of the abject stain, I indicate how lynching photographs inaugurate an unsettling encounter with the extimate horror of racial alterity, which is experienced as an intimate ethics of witnessing.
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Notes
My use of the term archivization and its relation to signification and temporality is influenced by Derrida’s (1995) Archive Fever, in which he declares that “the question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past… It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow” (p. 36).
An overt example of racial terrorization through the use of language and image may be found in the 1902 picture postcard that, on the front, depicts the charred torso of an unidentified African American male and, on the reverse, bears the following message: “Warning. The answer of the Anglo-Saxon race to black brutes who would attack the womanhood of the South” (Allen, 2000, plates 59 and 60).
In Camera Lucida, Barthes (1980) describes the “subtle moment” when being photographed renders an individual “neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object” (p. 14). Not unlike the existential slippage that occurs underneath the camera’s eye, the lynched corpse, as an object of hatred and anxiety, signifies the fragile borders of subjectivity to the extent that the lifeless body is rendered “neither subject nor object,” but abject, which Kristeva (1980) views as a disturbing threshold of loss at the limits of subjectivity and otherness.
References
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Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the many people who have provided vital suggestions for revision. I extend a special thanks to Dr. Sheldon George for tirelessly advising me on this project during my time as his student. I would also like to acknowledge Simmons College for granting me the Hazel Dick Leonard Research Fellowship, which generously funded my research for this project.
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Stewart, A. Witnessing horror: Psychoanalysis and the abject stain of lynching photography. Psychoanal Cult Soc 19, 413–434 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2014.40
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2014.40