ABSTRACT
Like Freud, Lacan attributes the Imaginary and pathological nature of group formation to identification with a common ego-ideal. This essay connects group pathology to the production of a fantasm (the embodiment of a common attribute of identification) that overwrites the unary trait (Lacan’s foundation of the ego-ideal), thereby undermining individual reality testing. Following Sheldon George’s analysis of raced groups, I ascribe the pathology of white supremacist and African American groups to identification with these fantasms that obstruct individual desire and conduce to sadism and neurosis. Nella Larsen’s Quicksand delineates the effects on desire of fantasmatic raced identification and offers glimpses of Atè, the ultimate object of desire veiling the death drive. In Seminar VII, Lacan regards Atè’s display of desire’s death trajectory in Antigone as a new kind of imaged signifier (Un seul) which he links to the therapeutic efficacy of psychoanalysis. Drained of jouissance, this signifier stands for difference as such, precisely the status of the unary trait. Thus, the cathartic effect of Sophocles’ play depends on its production of a new kind of signifier capable of restoring the functioning of the unary trait: it offers a model of cultural sublimation that could subvert pathological raced identifications.
