ABSTRACT
Jacques Lacan presents human subjectivity as bound to a central question: “What am I there?“ This query, posited by the unconscious, is answered for the subject through the agency of the Symbolic. For Lacan, the Symbolic ties these answers to notions of sex and being, but this chapter suggests that race supplies core answers to the psyche’s existential queries into subjectivity.
Where the subject is constituted through lack, as both the signifier and physical embodiment strike being and sexual libido from the subject, race emerges as a promised recuperation of loss. Through analyses of the lasting legacy of slavery and Jim Crow era racism, this chapter presents race as a fantasy object a that roots racial identification in notions of complementarity and wholeness. This fantasy object fuels racial desire while also agitating the drive in its pursuit of libidinous enjoyment, or jouissance.
Through a reading of Lacan’s graph of sexuation, with its delineation of the restricted forms of jouissance available to the subject, the chapter presents race as a signifier that helps structure the unconscious around jouissance. It simultaneously presents race as an object of the drive that helps sexuate and racialize the body around gapped zones of enjoyment, tying enjoyment by the body and the psyche to histories of racism.
