Their rejection of psychoanalytic readings of race is purely symbolic and maintains the structures of racism

Conclusion Though the ethical responsibility of issuing this challenge to the concept of race is ceded through the glorification of the a , this responsibility is established even in the model of poststructuralism that holds such sway over contemporary thinking about social change, wherein the ultimate aim of the theory is not an essentialist but a strategic deployment of identity. In the poststructuralist vision, because the given identity is "never fully owned," it remains open to "urgent and expanding political purposes" that demand shifting allegiances across such lines as race, class and gender (Butler, 1993, p. 228). But while poststructuralism produces this politics driven by a metonymic shift in subjective positionality by assuming a center-less self untethered from all identity, I envision through psychoanalysis the subject's encounter with an excluded center masked by the illusions of this subject's embraced identities. Where belief in race threatens to bind the subject to the fantasies of wholeness secured by the object a , and where true poststructuralist resignification of race forecloses recognition of the deeper drives that guide the identity politics of the individual subject, such a potentially seminal moment in the reconfiguration of race offers the racialized subject a unique opportunity to attempt a Lacanian traversal of race that can ground individual political activity in deeper recognition of the subject's desire. Lacan specified that the object a "plays the role of obturator," inhibiting such recognition by facilitating the "closing of the unconscious" (1998b, p. 144). Aimed at an impossible wholeness, what the object a of race attempts is to fill the constitutive gaps in the subject, the spaces left unoccupied by the subject's absent being. But Lacanian theory stipulates that the "subject who has traversed the radical fantasy [can] experience the drive" that exudes from the space of these gaps (p. 273). Where this drive is an expression of the undirected libido whose "effective presence" is registered only in "desire," it is through the process of reorienting one's desire away from such fantasies as race that the subject may begin the process of experiencing and directing this internal tension of the drive (p. 153). Through the process of "mapping" one's own desire in one's cynical questioning of the object a presented by the Other (p. 273), the subject is placed upon the "track of something that is specifically [her] business," situating herself in relation to a desire and drive that is particularly her own belonging (1997, p. 319). It is perhaps most likely that the recent attention to repeated incidents of deadly violence to black men will not produce sustained social skepticism about the value of race, for "the loop" of the fundamental fantasy, Lacan stressed, "must be run through several times" if the subject is to free himself truly from the illusions of the Other. However, the unconscious gap opened up by this cynical response to race at the national level allows essential space for the initial movements of the individual subject of race along the path of this loop.