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Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory publicizes the results of a theoretical experiment. In this laboratory, Lacan’s metapsychology has been tested under the condition of having to speak on, about, and through race. Not since Christopher Lane’s edited volume The Psychoanalysis of Race (1998) has there been such a concerted investigation into this topic; and if Sheldon George’s and Derek Hook’s collection trades the eclectic mix of analytic traditions deployed in its forebear for a technically narrower remit—the Lacanian field—we experience no attending loss in its diversity of approaches (e.g., comparative theory, intellectual history) and subjects (e.g., white power manifestoes, documentary film), and gain instead a more exact rendering of some of the touchstones and disagreements that are beginning to frame the Lacanian analysis of racism. Indeed, a critical mass seems to be gathering, with this volume bridging a microburst of Lacanian analyses of race in the early 2000s to countless articles in the last years, which will now also join David Marriott’s contemporaneous Lacan Noir (2021). Kalpana Seshadri, author of one of those pioneering studies (2000), appropriately highlights the actual and unrealized value of Lacanian theory to a critique of race in the afterword to the present collection.
This book’s exploration of the specific conjunction of “Lacan and race,” and from so many different angles, is no doubt the source of its novelty, but its real virtue lies elsewhere. Although plenty of airtime is devoted to noting that Lacan mostly kept silent about race, the main focus here is on proceeding anyway by letting the signifier of race (and its cognate terms) put the entire Lacanian edifice to work, transforming its silences into a cavernous hall for theoretical maneuvering. That is to say that race, as a master signifier, acts here in the position of the agent that addresses the “other” of Lacanianism—not as a body of knowledge, but as a