RACE/WAR: Race, War, and the Division of Jouissance in Freud and Adorno

With our jouissance going off the track, only the Other is able to mark its position, but only insofar as we are separated from this Other. Whence certain fantasies unheard of before the melting pot. Leaving this Other to his own mode of jouissance, that would only be possible by not imposing our own on him, by not thinking of him as underdeveloped.

Racialization remains a deep current in the politics of inequality. It has generated severe historical contradictions to the point of crisis for the liberal nation-state, which must reconcile racial logic with the universal aspirations of enlightenment ideology.

The “real” of race is invisible to the naked eye, consisting of microscopic blood factors such as those examined to death in the O. J. Simpson trial. Even these are not sure-fire indicators of race, but statistical correlates. Although, physiologically, races can be said to exist as identifiable breeding populations (or micro-races) with genetic markers, even those markers are mutable with time, geographical mobility, and changes in the breeding pool.2 Persistence of a biological race through time depends on the vagaries of reproductive success. There is no original racial essence. No more than any individual does a “race” have a fixed point of identification.

Yet, psychically and politically, individuals and races alike do have such identifying points: there where they are alienated (“castrated”) in and by a signifier which represents them to other signifiers—signifiers which assign them a place in a symbolic order, and leave out something of their being. Race is, however, a special case of identification. (In English, race has links to words for root, for a sharp hook as well as an erasure. [Oxford Universal Dictionary ]). What better example of a Lacanian “point de capiton,” the source of a secondary identification? [Zizek 16 ff.])

The Political Nature of Race

What distinguishes the alienated identification