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Trauma and Race invites African Americans to take on the daunting task of transcending race (p. 141), and all of its readers, irrespective of their racial background, to delve into the complex psychic structures that support past and present racial formations. Sheldon George explores how this may be accomplished via a Lacanian perspective.
For Lacan, all human beings are creatures of lack (manque à être). How we inhabit, veil, ignore, try to recuperate or encounter lack is determined by our (dis)position in(to) the Other, the nexus of structured and organised symbolic relations, language and the imaginary investment of others. Lack engenders desire, the various ways in which we make our way into the Other, living, as it were, in alienation, divided and fragmented, and deprived of our mythic, fantasmatic oneness (jouissance). Sometimes, the other, fellow human being appears to hold the answer to lack. In falling in love, for instance, the other becomes ‘it’ (object petit a in Lacan) – an ‘it’ that carries the promise of addressing lost jouissance (enjoyment). The same might apply to a vital concept like race. Race can become the ‘it’ of identity and being, the pleasure that would emerge from an impossible wholeness. This is exactly the case for race in American history, argues George. Race serves as a basis of being, isolating an imaginary core self that holds the image of the racial body together. Thus, the racist can imagine that the other (black man) deprives him of his jouissance, when, for instance, the latter turns into a threat to ‘his’ white superiority or an incursion into ‘his’ space. By the same token, American history binds African Americans discursively to the excess of jouissance, systematically exposing them to a psychic trauma that issues from the racial past and repeats itself in the present. This, argues George, is the trauma of slavery, a continual assault on African Americans’ fantasies of being. Trauma and Race focuses on slavery as the traumatic