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Review of Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer, by Michelle Ann Stephens. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 296 pp.
It is difficult to think about race without thinking about skin. But psychoanalysis has made it too easy to think about skin without thinking about race. For a start, psychoanalysis hasn't thought enough about race in any way. We all know this is true. It's a travesty. Psychoanalysis also hasn't thought enough about skin. Some of us also know this to be true, even if we've read Didier Anzieu's important book Skin Ego (2016) and have some sense of the important place of skin in the developmental contact of children with parental caregivers. But skin cannot simply be reduced to the question of erotic stimulation when it also serves as a marker of racial difference. Sexual difference and racial difference lean on one another, differences that are focalized together through skin. How are they imbricated together and sexualized, desexualized, or gendered, especially through the medium of skin? We are now twice set back.
It gets worse. In addition, psychoanalysis needs help with the question of the image and impact of images, even as we perpetually theorize and argue about the question of sexual difference and its role in the unconscious. True, we have a lot to say about language and representation, but somehow the conundrums of the image have been better theorized by the academy. It isn't clear why this should be so, but film theory, postcolonial studies, and gender studies have done a better job. We have much to learn from their scholarly work. Now, we are thrice in debt.
To take a hit one last time, psychoanalysis does not theorize action—the work of the body and its skin—well. We do better as analysts with the suspension of action embodied by the analytic process. But action always returns, and we find ourselves in some murky territory, not wanting to be champions of inhibition, nevertheless hating-on various forms of acting