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Blackness is the ‘other scene’ of psychoanalysis. Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory, edited by Sheldon George and Derek Hook, ultimately compels us to insist on this ‘other scene’ from which to read against the grain of Jacques Lacan’s ‘return’ to Freud. Indeed, this return transposed Freud from the biological domain into the domain of language. It is a return that Lacan condenses with his oft-cited assertion that ‘the unconscious is the Other’s discourse’ (2006, p. 10), which has profound implications for how to theorize the entanglements of racial discourse, racial violence, and identitarian attachments to racial difference. Lacan and Race elaborates on these implications by tracing the various ways race operates not only at the at the level of the unconscious but also as a mode of enjoyment.
As the contributors to Lacan and Race variously outline, race is a psychic reality that mediates both social relations and access to a sense of being through and against bodily flesh. The editors organize these tracings into four sections. Part I, ‘Reading Racism Through Lacan,’ is the heftiest of the sections: it re-operationalizes Lacanian concepts alongside critical and cultural theory to trace the libidinal economy of racism, thereby laying the exegetical foundation for the subsequent sections. The contributors of Part I advance their critiques by focusing on modern-day lynching (McGowan), global segregation (Hook), confederate monuments (Neroni), white nationalism (Chebrolu), and settler colonialism (Wapeemukwa). Part II, ‘Racial Identification and the Subversion of Race,’ constellates lines of flight of separation from the fantasies of race by examining post-race discourse (Fiedlander), South African apartheid (Hook), and colorism (Rothenberg). Part III, ‘Race and the Clinic, ‘gnaws away at the epistemic limits of the psychoanalytic ‘clinic’ by reframing it as a psychopolitical agon between the body and the Other through which the analysand emer