Anti-Blackness is not exclusively libidinal.

What is immediately striking in these extracts is the role played by affect, or more accurately yet, by the “pained stimulation” of the aroused passions of enjoyment. What both authors highlight—and this speaks to the analytical value of the concept—is that forms of excess stimulation (the “negative pleasure” of jouissance) underlie and propel Symbolic and political constructions of otherness. Different cultural modes of enjoyment are, furthermore, fundamentally discordant. We have then not so much a “Clash of Civilizations”—to reference the Samuel Huntington’s (1997) much cited thesis—as a clash of enjoyments.

Moreover, the difficulty that we have in realizing “full” enjoyment—something that is impossible in Lacanian theory for “castrated” speaking beings—is dealt with by imagining the supposedly unimpaired and inevitably disturbing enjoyment possessed by cultural/racial/sexual others. In short, the fact that we cannot attain the jouissance we feel we deserve results in perceptions of an unhindered, illegitimate, and undeserved enjoyment on the part of others. As Sheldon George notes: “the other’s jouissance, or enjoyment, [is] … the very core around which … otherness articulates itself” (2016: 3). Political jealousy, as Žižek calls it, is thus (at least in part) the result of incompatibilities and more importantly yet, perceived sacrifices of jouissance.

Jouissance: unserviceable tool of political analysis?

Despite having offered only a brief introduction to the above Lacanian ideas, we should pause here for a moment to voice a number of prospective methodological and conceptual problems implied by the racism as (theft of) enjoyment thesis. Doing so will help us focus the expository comments to follow, and indeed, to highlight the potential analytical advantages the thesis may have to offer.

The first critique, which applies to a wide historical range of psychoanalytic theories of racism (see Cohen, 2002; Frosh 1989; Stavrakis 1999), is that of psychological reductionism. Simply put: the complexity of the various historical, discursive, and socioeconomic causes of racism are invariably deprioritized and accorded a peripheral explanatory role once the domain of the psychological is privileged. Accounts of the psychological factors underlying various instances of racism are thus not only de-historicizing and hopelessly generalizing; they are also invariably depoliticizing.

A second critique: is jouissance not a hopelessly open-ended concept? Virtually any cultural behaviour, bodily intensity or libidinal activity can, it seems, be considered to be an instance of jouissance. In view of racism, for example, the other’s enjoyment can refer to everything from their incomprehensible cultural customs and/or religious beliefs (epitomized, for example, in odd food and dress restrictions), to perceived aspects of their distinctive physicality/sensuality (their food, the way they dance, the sound of their music), to attributions of superabundant vitality (they are excessively promiscuous, religious, lazy, etc.)? The concept of jouissance seems thus to be both underdifferentiated and overly inclusive, applying to a potentially endless array of behaviors and experiences. Without a clearer sense of how to differentiate what qualifies as enjoyment and what does not, the concept loses analytical value.

A third line of critique: different modes of enjoyment are implied within the literature, without being properly distinguished. In Žižek’s descriptions of racism and jouissance, for example, jouissance is used broadly to refer to: visceral or passionate modes of experience (the “thrill of hate”); an array of enviable possessions (our “libidinal treasures”) perceived as under threat by cultural others; and a type of noxious “surplus vitality” possessed by such others. So, whose enjoyment are we most fundamentally concerned with in these notions of racism as jouissance, the other’s, or our own? What is the relationship between these two types of jouissance? And how are they related to a third mode, namely the “negative pleasure” of making—experiencing—such troubling attributions in the first place?

Fourth, there is ever-present problem of de-contextualization in “shorthand” applications of the term. This leads to a situation in which enjoyment itself is treated as a causative force beyond adequate consideration of a series of accompanying concepts (the frame of fantasy, the operation of the signifier, the role of the law, the “object a” as cause of desire) that necessarily accompany its proper psychoanalytic application. What auxiliary terms must thus be utilized alongside the concept if it is to serve us as a viable analytical tool?

Critique 1: the notion of enjoyment as psychologically reductionist

There is a crucial passage that is repeated in a number of Žižek’s earlier books (1992, 1993, 2005) and that serves as perhaps his most direct exposition of racism as the theft of enjoyment:

What is at stake in ethnic tensions is always [a kind of ] possession: the “other” wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our “way of life”) and/ or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. In short, what gets on our nerves, what really bothers us about the “other” is the peculiar way he organizes his enjoyment (the smell of his food, his “noisy” songs and dances, his strange manners, his attitudes to work—in the racist perspective, the “other” is either a workaholic stealing our jobs or an idler living on our labour)” (1992: 165).

While this seems, in many ways, a gripping account, from a sociologist or historian’s perspective, the degree of reductionism is staggering. The multiple complex sociological, economic, and socio-historical variables underlying distinctive historical forms of racism are brushed aside in favor of a generalizing psychoanalytic formula. Racism = reaction to perception that the (perversely enjoying) other has stolen our enjoyment. This reduction of racism to an affective equation is evident also in Žižek’s precursor in this conceptual domain, Jacques-Alain Miller:

Why does the Other remain Other? What is the cause for our hatred of him, for our hatred of him in his very being? It is hatred of the enjoyment in the Other. This would be the most general formula for the modern racism we are witnessing today: a hatred of a particular way the Other enjoys … The question of tolerance or intolerance is … located on the level of tolerance or intolerance toward the enjoyment of the Other, the Other who essentially steals my own enjoyment (Miller, cited in Žižek 1993: 203).

The depoliticization (indeed, the implicit psychologization) inherent in such a conceptual move is surprising inasmuch it is something that Žižek has proved critical of elsewhere. In a 1998 text, for example, Žižek outlines the charge of psychological reductionism against standard psychoanalytic explanations of racism, which offer

a way of explaining racism that ignore … not only racism’s socioeconomic conditions but the sociosymbolic context of cultural values and identifications that generate reactions to the experience of ethnic otherness (1988: 154).

Surely this also applies to the racism as theft of enjoyment formula outlined above? Explanations of racism as jouissance are surely prone to psychological reductionism inasmuch as they often appear to privilege a series of psychoanalytic assumptions (drive, fantasy, libido, projection, etc.) as existing prior to—or independently of—considerations of economic, historical, political, and socio-symbolic context?