ABSTRACT
Тhis chapter examines the relationship between race, Eurocentrism and colonialism as an early manifestation of capitalistic globalization, based on a vision of humankind and history which places white masculinity at the apex of evolution. I will explain the philosophical basis of the relationship between language and political philosophy, drawing on Agamben’s work, and show how the normative aspects of power are embedded in our language and so condition the categories used by psychoanalysis and its attempts at archaeological reconstruction. I will then discuss how underestimation of this link has favoured the emergence of a racially biased concept of primitivity, which was embedded in the language of psychoanalysis from its inception and which potentially influences its present-day conceptualizations. I will touch on the implicit social-evolutionary aspects of various lines of psychoanalytical thought. Finally, I will try to show how the relational paradigmatic shift may be part of a more wide-ranging change in the humanities, which necessitates an ethical reappraisal of the configuration of otherness involved in the psychoanalytic construction of subjectivity. In this process, however, ontological considerations drawn from philosophy can confer added value on issues of mutuality and recognition.]
