The Postcolonial Unconscious, Or the White Man's Thing

The good is what keeps us a long way from puissance.

When I was invited to speak about Lacan and postcoloniality I had a single mental and visceral response, which I can best sum up with a slightly incredulous inflection: “Post?colonial?” How hopeful, yet how unsecured that term sounds. Globalized economic systems, run down information superhighways and the “glamorous tentacles of media colonization” (Phillips 13),1 are taking to a higher power Lacan's early image for our latter-day, psychotic pseudo-patriarchy—“la grand'route—étre père.” More intent on acquiring sales than national territories, more focused on conquering corporate, and not mere human, bodies, colonialism has surely only shifted ground where the subject's alienation is concerned. The Disney version of life is about to touch us all. Yet, although its effects are visible to everyone, the way neo-colonialism subjects us remains obscure. We can look for analogies in those compelling, and uncannily familiar, depictions of colonization's psychic ravages offered by early anti-colonial writers, like Fanon and Memmi. However, recognizing that what was once a seemingly restricted human problematic is now the general case requires more analytic power, lest we risk unwittingly reinforcing colonization's most damaging features. In this paper, I explore what I call the “colonial complex.” It is both personal and political. I will describe and specify it. For me, it is an ethical disorder, a complex now ironically re-transplanted to European cultures from the very places to which it had sought to expel and export it.

In my view, if there to be any relationship at all between psychoanalysis and postcolonial analysis, the subject must be the focus: not the poststructural, dispersed subject, or not only that subject, but the classical subject in its three dimensions—as sovereign individual, citizen under law, and person before God (Teshome Gabriel's formulation). Well before poststructuralism, t