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In his medical dissertation, submitted shortly after completing the manuscript for Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon expresses regret that he did not have the time to write about Jacques Lacan's theory of language (Fanon, 2018, p. 268). Over the course of the next decade, he never returned to this topic in writing. His colleague Alice Cherki recalls that Fanon, towards the end of the 1950s, also declared his intention to finally start his own analysis after the Algerian war of independence was over (Cherki, 2006, p. 22). Fanon died a year before it ended, unanalysed.
Lacan Noir: Lacan and Afro-pessimism responds to Fanon's first wish. David Marriott describes each of the three sections of his monograph as taking a ‘differing position with respect to Lacan's theory of the signifier’ (p. vii).
The first section conducts a symptomatic reading of Lacan's writings and seminars. Psychoanalysis's indifference to (but not lack of interest in) blackness is, according to Marriott, its most symptomatic expression (p. 7). He explores this symptomatic knowing across several instances: there is Lacan's famous example of the sex-divided bathroom, in which Marriott reads the rhetorical significance of racial hierarchy as essential to Lacan's understanding of the signifier's power to segregate, which Marriott contends is coded. ‘The difference between the two doors is already the result of a racial metaphor’ (p. 14). Marriott also argues that Lacan, in the process of distinguishing between object, trace and sign in his reading of Robinson Crusoe, effaces ‘[Daniel] Defoe's racist allegory’ (p. 41) and elides the racial rhetoric on which the formal (and thus white) universalism of Lacan's theory of language and notion of subjectivity rely. Throughout, Marriott most thoroughly interrogates the deracialized use of the notions of mastery and slavery in psychoanalysis, particularly in Lacan's contention that ‘we’ are all slaves to the signifier, or to meaning, or to our identifications,