ABSTRACT
This chapter draws upon Jacques Lacan’s “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” to analyze white nationalist manifestoes. The chapter argues that the manifestoes of Brenton Tarrant, Patrick Crusius, and John Earnest are oriented through unconscious identification with the trope of the vigilante, or the white subject deputized as the police. This subject is an extra-legal actor willing to secure the law with racial violence when the law is perceived to be in crisis. What seems to stand in crisis is the law of antimiscegenation, the law of the white father that seeks to preserve white community. The chapter asserts that the self-authorization of this law by white nationalist vigilantism functions as a form of crisis management that maintains and rejuvenates investment in anti-blackness.
