ABSTRACT
This chapter draws upon Lacanian theory for thinking the possibility of the subject’s liberation from the fantasy of race. Focusing primarily on Sheldon George’s and W.J.T. Mitchell’s differing arguments for the importance of seeing race as a “medium,” it identifies the work of “disavowing” race as the most formidable obstacle to the subject’s separation from the Other’s signifiers of race within “post-racial” discourse. Ultimately, it suggests that the Lacanian concepts of the objet a and the Act may be harnessed to intervene in the binding structure of disavowal. In particular, it argues that we might destabilize race’s grip by pressing on—and identifying with—its negativity as a way of exposing the incompleteness of the Symbolic order and thus its impossibility to ground any subjective identity.
