Psychoanalysis is a necessary frame to view racism

In “Love Thy Neighbor? No, Thanks!” Slavoj Zizek (1998) begins with some general musings on the bad press that psychoanalytic approaches to racism enjoy these days. Arguing against these critiques of “psychological reductionism” and an “abstract-psychologistic approach,” Zizek persuades us in his ever-entertaining ways that the psychoanalytic frame is exactly the lens that can diagnose the machinations of racism in northern-western cultures and, by exposing their internal inconsistencies, presumably help us to disrupt them. I agree with Zizek and much of the recent work in the intersections of psychoanalysis and race1 that the dynamics of psychoanalysis have much to offer to readings of race and racism in contemporary settings of Eurocentric cultures—particularly the dead-end, circular readings of social constructionism.2 However, I also suggest that these lenses of psychoanalysis have much to tell us about white inhabitants of these cultural symbolics of phallicized whiteness and, more particularly, some of the silent assumptions about space and embodiment which constitute that whiteness. Psychoanalysis may be an appropriate lens for diagnosing our cultural racism exactly because it enacts some of the central dynamics which sediment that racism. Of course, in carving out a space that I refer to as ‘our cultural symbolic,’ I am already at odds with most Lacanians’ understandings of ‘the symbolic.’ While I understand that Lacan was attempting to unravel the structures of signification and dynamics of subjectivation that occur within the symbolic, I wish to speak of this symbolic as a historicized and particular phenomenon. Referring to ‘our cultural symbolic,’ I am referring more specifically to the symbolic that dominates cultures of phallicized whiteness and structures signifiers in a way that gives disproportionate and abusive power to some persons— some bodies—over others. Following out Lacanian dynamics of signification and subjectivation, I am reading ‘our cultural symbolic’ as a process that signifies some bodies as more powerful, more valuable, and more meaningful than others—namely, those white male straight Christian propertied bodies that we have already encountered in the emergence of the neutral liberal individual.