Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana. Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race. London:  Routledge, 2000.

Seshadri-Crooks's Desiring Whiteness makes an important contribution into three areas of inquiry: psychoanalysis, critical race studies, and modern aesthetics. The book first of all develops a highly original psychoanalytic theory of the specificity of the symbolic structure of race in its similarity and distinction from other types of differences: class, gender, nationality, on the one hand, and sexuality, the traditional object of psychoanalysis, on the other. By approaching racism as a historical system of oppression which nonetheless disavows its historicity and produces extradiscursive bodily effects, the book subsequently demonstrates how its psychoanalytic account can intervene into critical race studies. In their most polarized versions, represented for instance by Appiah's and Goldberg's positions,1 the current discussions of race either reject the very category of race on the grounds of its unavoidable, explicit or implicit, reference to biologism (Appiah) or retrieve its emancipatory potential on the basis of its exclusive culturalist interpretation as marker of belonging and a crucial determinant of group formation (Goldberg). By taking into account the affective and the “naturalizing” force of race, in particular, in the sphere of embodiment and visibility, the book not only contests the purely culturalist approach but also argues that the disqualification of the scientific validity of race is not sufficient to undermine its seeming biologism, since the resilience of racialized thinking depends as much on its paradoxes and disavowals as on its ability to combine with other normative structures of inheritance, such as family and kinship. As Seshadri-Crooks powerfully argues, “Exploring the structure of race requires a toleration of paradox, an appreciation of the fact that it is an inherently contradictory discourse, and a willingness to see beyond relations of power in order to mine the depth of subjective investment in it” (9). And finally, through the