Slavery, Hatred of the Other, and Lacanian Jouissance

Our political and social moment seems destabilized by an increased emphasis on racial difference. Freud, upon witnessing the horrors of World War I, first recognized within human subjects a drive toward aggression that he argued must be repressed for the sustainability of civilization. But, ending only a few decades before Freud’s writings, slavery fully manifested this psychic drive toward aggression belatedly recognized by Freud; and what’s more, slavery emerged as a stabilizing foundation for central aspects of American society. Through recourse to Lacanian theory, this talk argues that race and racism function as sources of psychic pleasure, or what Lacan calls jouissance. This jouissance is a mode of enjoyment that lures the subject to perilous transgressions that stabilize American society into its consistently oppressive racial configuration. Moving through an analysis of American slave masters’ efforts to establish slavery as a mask for what we can describe after Lacan as the psychic lack of the subject—a mask that refuted lack with racial superiority—the talk will turn to the writings of Zora Neale Hurston to describe religion and race as mechanisms through which African Americans themselves contend against social unveilings of psychic lack. Ending with a reading of the role played by pleasure in contemporary incidents of police violence, the talk presents race and racism as apparatuses that mediates subjective lack. Race, it argues, binds contemporary American civilization to sustained modes of psychic pleasure and discontent that grew out of the atrocity of slavery.