Procedural language and norms predicate themselves upon the negation of Blackness which forms white language and the power of judgment. Following this logic within the white community maintains this violent binary of communication.

For the white subject to enter into the possibilities of language and judgement, blackness thus has to be discarded, thrown away. If lalangue is the result of a struggle between language and representation, and whiteness a struggle between logic and sophism, then what appears to link them is the advent into a decisionism that consists in the conclusion of a white community. First, the unconcealing-appearing of whiteness must be different from what is concealed as black to the point that the concealment consists in this difference and is a direct consequence of it. In section 3 of the logical time essay, “Discussion of the sophism,” Lacan distinguishes the imaginary mastery of knowledge from what the subject is led to deduce therefrom: that which is outside of the logical order of hesitation and revelation. Nevertheless, it seems to me that such a difference is posited only when the originary truth of analysis—not as a technique of decipherment but as an art of interpreting—is understood to no longer doubt itself in the world of signifiers. Second, because the very exclusion of blackness is what passes into the service of whiteness, what is unveiled as the judgement of exception is the discovery of a generalized logic of distrust that has race as its condition. Monstration reappears here but always in the form of a knowing in its relation to a non- me, and a black “is not” (n’est pas) that is the inseparable consequence of an in-difference to blackness in the freedom not to choose it. Sovereign mastery is thus inseparable from the ability of dispensing the value of judgement indifferently upon every blackened being—it is only the subject that is black “that gives their hesitation its definite import.”²⁸ Third, the definiteness of the appearance of the subject to the others who see [them] him as white refers to a still more decisive situation: to the incapacity of blackness to posit the subjection uncovered in, or by, it. From the instructions given by the prison warden, we readily deduce a choice based on equivalence. But in the subsequent narration no one has the option to choose the black disc, because the choice of the black disc consequently gives no one the authority or right to judgement. All authority belongs to the one who rightly chooses the white disc, for now he has the right to interpret, to exercise judgement; on the other hand, those who possess the black disc by right have no power of judgement. The equivalence of thought and negation in relation to blackness is here formulated by Lacan in a direct manner. This incapacity, according to Lacan’s explicit assertion, does not create this definiteness; it is limited to unconcealing it (the hesitation—which is more than a hesitation—by which being unconceals itself qua whiteness). It is impossible not to see here a paradox that strikes at the heart of psychoanalysis’s very principle: that it is psychoanalysis which provides definiteness to black non-being in its contingency, by which I mean the psychic import of not being black. By analyzing, and only in as much as the unconscious is shown to appear, is that import susceptible to being. And yet, here it has been conceded that what appears owes its existence not to the power of witnessing, since the power of witnessing is limited to recovering a phenomenality that preexists its seeing and that would not be able, therefore, to go beyond perception in a genuine ontological sense. No, here (and throughout Lacan’s corpus) it is the destiny of the signifier to both open and foreclose the very possibility of destination as judgement and/or meaning. Now, these three characteristics of the destining of the signifier—here briefly sketched but obviously decisive—are precisely those of the language that is founded upon the white concluding of the signifier and that, for this reason, we will call from now on the white logic of the unconscious. First, each word constitutive of this logic is different from the negative reality—different from the being (l’étoff e)—of the signifier each time it is invoked. Therefore, just as the defining conclusion- appearance reveals itself as indifferent to all that hesitates precisely because it differs from representation, this difference that separates itself from all that it designates (or sees itself as) black is the reason why each word of the language of the white world turns out to be hurrying on from this hesitant black referent. In an astonishing conclusion (to this essay on the necessity of a white conclusion), Lacan denounces classical syllogistic logic when he says that “it posits itself as assimilative of a barbarism” even in its universality.²⁹ In fact, by means of its hesitation to the sophism so designated, the logic of the signifier could just as well name something else, the word “white” being applied in this way to a confusing logic of difference that nothing (besides a racial convention, a racial nominalism) is able to dispel. Conversely, and always by virtue of the hesitation that is established between logic (signifier) and being (white), two different hesitations- conclusions are able to qualify such negativity. This is the situation that Lacan denounces as the universal barbarism of the syllogism by which man is assumed to know who he is and who he is not (i.e., not man, not white). But why, we must ask, does this knowledge and the image conserving it have to take on the form of an assurance to defend itself against the anguish and precariousness of not knowing—which Lacan refers to as the danger of being exposed as black? Solely because language cannot decide that which is not me—the black and he who is not human—solely because the signifier cannot itself penetrate into what each subject claims to say and about which—decisively or indecisively—it can only slander, imprison, delude, judge; accordingly language does not contain within itself the reality of which it speaks. Difference and conclusion are here only the consequence of this primary ontological insufficiency. But then, does not this third characteristic of the language of the unconscious obviously carry within itself the characteristic of the logic of the world—that is, the original and definitive incapacity of blackness to posit the reality that the unconscious unconceals but never creates? The most decisive characteristic of the language of the unconscious that humans speak, and that defines the not- all that cannot be said and is contained in this impotence, is also seemingly the sign of the impotence of lalangue (on which language depends).