UC Irvine

This dissertation closely reads a set of Civil Rights Era case histories in which analytic practitioners examined the cultural and psychic causes of their patients’ antiblack racism. This case archive provides the basis for a theory of the racial as a material signifier that is in language but empty of meaning—that causes the subject of racism but does not organize a racial identity. An analysis of the formal contradictions and idiosyncratic symptoms that populate the afterlife of slavery follows. Combining insights from the historiography of slavery, literary and critical theory, and contemporary analytic method and technique, “Toward a Subject of Racism” redefines the relationship between psychoanalysis and black studies.

The first part of this project reconstructs an antiracist tradition of psychoanalysis starting in the interwar (1930s) United States to situate Freudian practice as formative to the conceptualization of antiblack animus, particularly in the work of John Dollard and Helen McLean. Second, this study scans secondary readings of nineteenth-century law, philosophy, and social practice to formalize the conjunction of liberal capital and black slavery as a symbolic impasse that produces and administers what Jacques Lacan calls jouissance. Third, the dissertation derives new literary methods from contemporary clinical technique to closely read how this symbolic impasse structures the gendered sexual attachments to racial blackness as described in five psychoanalytic case histories (1947-1971).

It is argued that the subject as analyzed in clinical practice is the linchpin and absent center of racism, that the contemporary dialectic of racism and antiracism mediates the symbolic impasse in liberalism, and that this impasse is inscribed and transmitted by a revolutionary racial signifier. This signifier obtains its decisive historical agency only after the advent of global abolition. Rather than a particular position, practice, or ideology, this dissertation considers racism to be a process that knots the irreducible registers of (symbolic) political structure, (real) libidinal enjoyment, and the (imaginary) dynamics of racialization. This analysis further considers how the universal negation of racism in the post-Civil Rights Era triggers an affective turn within the objective practices of white supremacy that presents a crisis to critical interpretation.