ABSTRACT
This chapter is a conversation between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Afropessimism. It thinks through anti-blackness and its relationship to the Lacanian registers of the Symbolic, the Real and, to a lesser degree, the Imaginary. Through a reading of the ravaging of the black body in the encounter with the Other, it explores the theft of this body as a question of jouissance and the Other’s desire. Moving between the aims of the two fields, both of which are invested in subjective formation and the lack thereof, we arrive at the liminal space between being and non being. Taking up the effects of the history of enslavement and blackness as a category of nonbeing, we examine Black being/nonbeing in the “afterlives” of this history to situate Black life in the context of Lacan’s clinical frame and in contemporary Black social life. This project tilts our psychoanalytic perspective in the direction of the Real. We turn to Christina Sharpe’s “wake work” as a modality of sublimation for a Black living that persists despite and within the perils of anti-blackness.
