6 In medium race: traversing

the fantasy of post-race

discourse
Jennifer Friedlander
Edgar E. and Elizabeth S. Pankey Professor of Media Studies, Pomona
College

Introduction
How can we overcome the fantasy of race? Recent scholarship in Lacanian
theory offers a way forward. Antonio Viego’s Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of
Loss in Latino Studies sounds a powerful call to scholars of race. It urges en-
gagement with Lacanian theory to undermine the fantasy of race by offering a
corrective to dominant currents of thought that position the racialized subject
in terms of subjective wholeness. For Viego, “the undisturbed dream of ego-
mastery, [and] wholeness is … what provides racist discourse with one of its
most generative principles: the undivided, obscenely full, and complete ethnic-
racialized subject, transparent to itself and others” (Viego 2007: 6). He con-
tends that, by questioning the notion of subjective wholeness, “Lacanian
theory … lends itself to an anti-racist critique … and provides an intervention
into racist discourse” (4).
In developing his account, Viego takes up Joan Copjec’s assertion that
Lacan’s understanding of the subject as an effect of the signifier “is the only
guarantee we have against racism” (Viego 2007: 5–6). Copjec clarifies this
claim by arguing that the Lacanian subject “coincide[s] not with the signifier,
but rather with its ‘misfire’” (Viego 2007: 5–6). It follows that the subject is
constituted not by the signifier’s success, but rather by its failure to confer a
complete identity. This alienation of the subject by the signifier is necessary
for the formation of the subject, but this does not mean that the subject is
doomed to remain in a perpetually alienated state. After establishing the
constitutive nature of alienation, Lacan emphatically insists that there is more
to the story: “Does it mean, as I seem to be saying, that the subject is con-
demned to seeing himself emerge, in initio, only in the field of the Other [qua
the system of signifiers]? Could it be that? Well, it isn’t. Not at all—not at all”
(Lacan 210). The subject, Lacan contends, can accede from alienation to what
he calls separation. In separation, the subject comes to recognize that the
Other—the very Symbolic system to which the subject appeals for its
identity—is itself lacking. Accepting that the Other is incapable of grounding
the subject’s identity enables the subject to “assume” her own position in the
106 Jennifer Friedlander
Symbolic. This is the sense in which Lacan links the word “separation” to se
parere via its French and Latin roots “to be engendered…to put into the world” (214).
Viego and Copjec build upon this Lacanian account of the relationship of
the subject to the signifier in order to propose a path to free the subject from
the fantasy of race. In this paper, I draw upon their scholarship in promoting
a Lacanian inflected, anti-racist project, inspired by but revising the work of
W.J.T. Mitchell (Seeing) and Sheldon George (Trauma), who develop ostensibly
opposed arguments. Mitchell argues for an uncompromising commitment to
sustaining the notion of race as a means to counter the disingenuousness of
“post-race” rhetoric. Since race, no matter how compellingly we expose its
artifice, shows no sign of diminishing influence we must, he insists, take it on
fully as the “medium” through which reality is structured. Unless we preserve
race and attend to its structuring role, we risk losing the cipher for under-
standing and intervening into the “disease” of racism.
George shares with Mitchell a concern for moving beyond “the familiar
phrase, ‘race is a social construct’” (George 2014: 360). But whereas Mitchell
counters this platitude by insisting that we take seriously race’s intractability,
George maintains instead that we must “transcend both race and the funda-
mental fantasy it supports” (George 2016: 141). George argues for seeing race in
the position of the objet a, an intervention that leads us to understand how, within
the racist American Symbolic, race’s structuring negativity not only impedes the
African American subject’s ability to inhabit the subjectifying fantasy of whole-
ness, but also, paradoxically, may propel the subject to undertake the liberating
path to separation. Thus, George and Mitchell, in their different ways, seem to
offer productive elaborations of the potential Viego signals, for a Lacanian ac-
count of the subject as a resource for anti-racist scholarship.
My ultimate aim is to show that, although Mitchell’s and George’s accounts
(in conversation with their interlocutors, both real and imagined) help point
towards possibilities for facilitating the subject’s liberation from the fantasy of
race, their positions ultimately fall short of fully realizing this potential. In
particular, I claim that Mitchell’s work can be seen to unwittingly support the
existence of metalanguage, the illusion that meaning can be grounded from
outside of the Symbolic system, and thus risks naturalizing racial meanings.
Even so, his work proves valuable in indicating the importance of under-
standing how seeing race as a fiction fundamentally shapes the reality of race.
George’s work, on the other hand, offers a compelling account of how race, as
objet a, seduces the subject to pin its hopes on race as a means to achieving
subjective wholeness. Yet, I propose that George’s advocacy of a turn to
“cynicism” reinforces the very distance of the subject to the Other that fuels,
rather than undermines, the power of disavowal to bind us to the Symbolic
fiction of race. In what follows, I identify the work of “disavowing” race as the
most formidable obstacle to the subject’s separation from the Other’s signifiers
of race within the current moment of “post-racial” discourse. I conclude by
suggesting that the Lacanian concepts of the objet a and the Act may be
harnessed to intervene in the binding structure of disavowal.
 In medium race 107
In medium race: the trap of “seeing through”
Examination of the relationship between Mitchell’s and George’s positions
help point us toward a response to the question of how we can best contend
against the fantasy of race. Despite their contrasting stances on whether race
should be preserved or contested, both Mitchell and George agree on the
importance of seeing race as a “medium.” Mitchell calls for understanding
race “itself as a medium, and not merely a content to be mediated” (Mitchell
2011: 405). Race, he contends, must be apprehended as a way of seeing (or, to
use Rancière’s terminology, a technique of the aesthetic distribution of the
sensible) rather than as an object within the schema of the visible. George
takes this recognition further, arguing that race not only mediates our fra-
mework for assembling reality but also mediates our relation to the Real of
jouissance. In this sense, for George, race functions as “a tool for masking the
central lack of subjectivity” (George 2014: 360). Race, he explains, offers
subjects the “illusion of being,” which has been stripped away by the signifer’s
imposition of meaning. In particular, it provides subjects with the fantasy
necessary to modulate their relation to constitutive lack.
Mitchell takes a different tack. Central to his proposal for seeing race as a
medium is—as the title of his book indicates—a reworking of the idea of “seeing
through.” He espouses a position in line with Slavoj Žižek’s view that “seeing
through” a fiction not only fails to free a subject from its ideological grip but
also entrenches a subject more deeply in its hold. In particular, Mitchell argues
that not only has our recognition of race’s illusory status failed to make “ra-
cism…go away” but it has also contributed to our false confidence that, by
“knowing better,” we are not implicated in the problem. Mitchell proposes
instead that we “see through” race in a different sense, as “something we see
through, like a frame, a window, a screen, or a lens, rather than something we look
at” (xii). Thus for Mitchell, as for Žižek, “seeing through” race must not be
thought of as a mode to getting to the other side of race—breaking free from its
fiction and entering into the reality. Instead, “seeing through” race involves
donning the lens it offers as a way of entering into its structuring fiction, making
visible and palpable its constitutive role in governing our reality. Yet, although
his project to “see race as a medium” appears to be built explicitly around
avoiding the problem of how “seeing through” the ideological illusion binds one
to its maintenance, Mitchell, I argue, falls prey to this very trap about which he
warns. As we will see, his own reflections on his use of Lacan’s work help to
identify and untangle the problem.
Mitchell’s 2010 keynote address to the Visual Cultural Studies Conference
(based upon the project of Seeing Through Race) met with a critical response by
Scott Loren and Jörg Metelmann in The Journal of Visual Culture. Primarily,
they take issue with how Mitchell’s call for the preservation of the concept of
race flirts dangerously with “a new fixing of racial ‘realities’…with all of their
hatred and pain” (Loren and Metelmann 2011: 405). In his defense, Mitchell
blames the problems on his mistake of “bring[ing] Lacan into my essay”
108 Jennifer Friedlander
(Mitchell 2011: 407). “The trouble comes,” he explains in his reply to his
critics, “when I turn to the Lacanian triad…Lacanian terminology is pretty
much incidental to the theoretical framework of my argument. I was warned
repeatedly not to bring Lacan into my essay…, and perhaps I should have
listened to that advice…My heart is evidently in the right place; it is just that I
have entered the Lacanian universe, a place where angels fear to tread, and
where my incautious steps have lead me into an abyss” (405, 407).
Mitchell’s overwrought expression of regret is noteworthy not only for its
juxtaposition of extravagant hyperbole and minimizing defensiveness. It is
also remarkable for how it functions as a symptom of the central tension in
Mitchell’s account. In particular, by dismissing Lacanian thought as a merely
superfluous overlay distorting his true (good at heart) message, Mitchell un-
wittingly undermines his own appeal to take seriously how the medium of
expression enters into the meaning of the content itself. Mitchell’s defense
ignores how the act of enunciation is never external to, but rather is im-
bricated within the enunciated content. To put the point in Lacan’s succinct
terms, “there is no metalanguage”—no neutral place outside the system of
language from which meaning can be adjudicated. In particular, what
Mitchell’s account overlooks is how the very fact of saying something can
work to undermine the ostensible meaning of what is said. Specifically, in
aiming to counter the central enunciated utterance of post-racial discourse,
“race doesn’t matter,” Mitchell neglects the crucial dimension of its enun-
ciation (“the fact that this is being said at all”) (Pfaller 1998: 227, italics original).
For example, in saying “race no longer matters,” the very attestation functions
to negate the validity of the statement—if race really did not matter anymore
then there would be no need to make the enunciation.
A turn to Paul Gilroy allows us to see this point from another perspective.
In his well-known polemic, Against Race, Gilroy develops an approach to post-
racial discourse that, by contrast with Mitchell, accounts for how enunciated
content is influenced by the fact of its enunciation. Gilroy undertakes the (self-
declared) “utopian” project of calling for the complete renunciation of the
concept of race, provocatively insisting that we must “demand liberation not
from white supremacy alone, but from all racializing and raciological
thought” (Gilroy 2001: 40). This position stands in stark contrast to Mitchell’s
call for the wholesale maintenance of the “concept of race”—an unequivocal
commitment to the position that “everything [of the concept of race] must be
conserved,” not only at the level of the enunciated but also in his form of
enunciation (Mitchell 2012: 32). Mitchell, for example, refuses to put race “in
scare quotes,” thereby resiling from the usual way of “demonstrat[ing] that we
are at every moment aware that it is ‘nothing but a social construction’” (26).
In this way, Mitchell seeks to undercut the protection subjects glean from the
illusion of metalanguage, arguing that scare quotes, “signal [for the writer/
speaker] …that he is not using the word, only mentioning it while disavowing
responsibility for or contamination by it” (26, 44). But, ironically, this position
is at odds with Mitchell’s own attempt to disavow responsibility for engaging
 In medium race 109
with Lacanian thought. (He intended merely to “mention” Lacanian con-
cepts, after all, and regrets that his argument has been inadvertently “con-
taminated” by them.) I suggest that we read this irony as indicative of a
tension immanent to his account.
In particular, despite Mitchell’s rhetoric to the contrary, his project holds
open the possibility of metalanguage and thus remains locked to the ideolo-
gical fantasy of completeness. This fantasy, George contends, is precisely what
binds subjects to the damaging seduction of race. It is also the central target of
Viego’s criticism of the prevailing scholarship on race—a problem that
Lacanian thought should resolve rather than commit.

Against and post race

I suggest taking this argument further by elaborating the comparison of
Mitchell’s work to Gilroy’s. Although they put forth antithetical positions,
both of their accounts function as responses to the same problem—namely,
the proliferation of “post-racial” discourse, which works to minimize or ob-
scure the ways in which the concept of race continues to stratify the world.
Race, Gilroy concludes, is a category generated by racism and thus is beyond
salvation in the service of anti-racism. Like Gilroy, Mitchell acknowledges that
race is “inevitably contaminated by racism” and so is, as he puts it, “a pro-
duct, not a cause of racism” (19, 32). But this recognition leads Mitchell not to
renounce race, but rather to insist that we hold on to race as “the set of
symptoms or signs—the diagnostic tool—that provides access to the disease
known as racism” (17). If we do away with race, he argues, we might lose sight
of how race structures—“mediates”—our thoughts, experiences, and our
sense of humanity, that race is “an operational concept…that reduces peoples
to…‘bare life’” (32).
Gilroy not only advocates for a different conclusion about the role of race
but also employs a distinct approach in intervening in post-racial discourse.
Rather than straightforwardly aiming to discredit “post-racial” discourse,
Gilroy’s project leverages the instability between the enunciated content of
post-racial discourse and the act of its enunciation. Gilroy then exploits this
instability in order to call for the complete demolition of race and to push
toward a future built around what he calls a “planetary humanism”-to-
come—a way of imagining collective formations which do not depend upon
identity. In arguing for this, Gilroy seizes the disruptive opportunity already
contained in the negation of the utterance by the act of saying it.
Here, Gilroy makes strategic use of the tension within “post-race” rhetoric
that Mitchell recognizes. In Žižek’s sense, Gilroy purposefully commits to an
“over-literal” interpretation of the content of the central utterance of “post-
racial” discourse—“race no longer matters.” In particular, he willfully ignores
the open secret that the very fact of its enunciation compromises its validity.
Whereas Mitchell seeks to undermine the duplicity of post-racial discourse
through external negation (by denying its truthfulness), Gilroy recognizes that
110 Jennifer Friedlander
negation is already contained within the gap between the statement and the
fact that it needs to be said (if race really did not matter, there would be no
point in continuing to declare that it does not matter). Gilroy’s intervention
aims to exploit the Symbolic efficacy of the artifice. Mitchell, by contrast,
earnestly undertakes the project of calling out the truth of the open secret that
when we say “race does not matter,” it really must matter.
This injunction to pull the veil off post-racial discourse seems in conflict with
Mitchell’s own framing of his project. In endeavoring to hold on to race, rather
than to abandon it, Mitchell mounts an argument that resonates with the
Lacanian view of what is involved in “traversing the fantasy,” namely, not to
overcome fantasy (or illusion) by dismissing it, but rather to take seriously the
way in which, by organizing disturbances of the Real into accessible “reality,”
the fantasy is paramount in how we make sense of the world. As Mitchell puts
it, “Fantasy or imagination is not in some kind of simple antithesis to reality but,
in fact, is the necessary framework in which any kind of reality testing could
take place” (Mitchell 2012: 16). If the fiction itself performs the ideological
work, then any attempt to set aside or see through the fiction misses the crucial
point—an insight upon which Gilroy generatively seizes.

Disavowal of race
This recognition of the inadequacy of “seeing through” the fiction as a me-
chanism for change appears at the crux of Mitchell’s motivating question:
“why race still matters when it has repeatedly been exposed as a pseudo-
scientific illusion and an ideological mystification” (38)? Or, to put Mitchell’s
question in other words, why, when we have thoroughly “seen through” race,
do we continue to live within its margins? His answer flirts with a psycho-
analytic diagnosis: that race functions via disavowal. We know very well that
race does not really exist, but even so, we act in ways that reveal its primacy.
As Derek Hook, in his incisive account of “racist disavowal” explains, “the
racist subject may be divided, between a (genuinely) professed view of racial
tolerance, on the one hand, and undeniably racist behavior and ideation, on
the other, both of which exists on a rational and conscious level of func-
tioning” (Hook 2005: 18).
Given his critical engagement with the problem of “seeing through,”
Mitchell’s wager seems surprising. In order to combat our disavowal of race’s
structuring role, he seems to say that we need to make palpable its role as the
medium through which social reality is assembled. In effect, Mitchell’s project
appears as one of denaturalization—an attempt to make perceptible the im-
plicit framework through which reality is formed (with its structuring hier-
archy of values) in order to undermine its grasp. But, as Hook emphasizes,
disavowal cannot be undermined through the revelation of how things “really
are.” The subject caught in disavowal is already acutely aware of how things
really are; it is the very starkness of this recognition that necessitates disavowal
as a mechanism for coping. In Hook’s words, “one can repeatedly challenge
 In medium race 111
the racist with proof of racial equality…without making the slightest dent on
their racist perceptions, because after all, they have already acknowledged
that race makes no difference, they just opt to act as if it did, anyway” (19).
For these reasons, “racist disavowal,” as Hook acknowledges, “is very difficult
to eradicate” (18). I return to consideration of this problem in the conclusion.
Hook’s account offers a valuable twist to Mitchell’s view. Whereas Mitchell
insists on the importance of our recognition of race’s “reality” so that it no
longer functions as an invisible, structuring phantasm, Hook contends that it is
race’s very emptiness—its position as lack—that must be emphasized. It is
precisely because race emerges as/at the site of lack, that it finds itself caught
in the fetishistic logic of disavowal, which functions as a defense against lack.
As Hook puts it, “fantasy…works to conceal the equivalent of castration, the
loss, in other words of [an] ‘originary’ or pure racial identity” that can only
manifest as a fantasmatic construct (24). In order to intervene in this forma-
tion of fetishistic disavowal, it is necessary to acknowledge the crucial role of
lack. In elaborating this point, I begin by following George’s Lacanian ap-
proach, which proposes that the subject’s eventual confrontation with the
structuring lack is vital to the “ethical stance” of “imagin[ing] an agency
beyond the Symbolic” (George 2016: 19).
The lack, which racial identity both marks and attempts to cover, also
creates ripe conditions for stereotypes to seize hold. Hook, drawing upon
Homi Bhabha’s work, emphasizes how stereotypes work to fill the lack with an
accessible, but rigid, set of meanings. “The stereotype,” Bhabha explains,
“impedes the circulation and articulation of the signifier of ‘race’ as anything
other than its fixity as racism” (Bhabha in Hook 29). For Bhabha, and many
scholars influenced by post-structuralist criticism, this problem calls for a
strategy of resignification.
George criticizes such post-structuralist approaches as limited by “their
allegiance to conceptions of discourse, race, and agency” (George 2016: 14).
For George (as well as for Gilroy), an anti-racist politics based on “re-
signification” cannot avoid reinforcing the significance of race as a grounding
identity. In particular, George argues that by conceptualizing the Symbolic
“as a closed system,” post-structuralist thinking presumes that we are con-
demned to “forg[e] a future from resources inevitably impure” (George 2016:
17). George, by contrast, proposes that we reject reaching for Symbolic fillers
for psychic lack (the pursuit of desire), and accept, instead, that psychic lack
itself presents the subject with an emptiness within which she or he can build a
new and unique relationship to fantasy (a possibility propelled by the drive).
The enticement of wholeness, which race beckons, helps explain why race
is a difficult concept to give up, both for those “on top of the racial hierarchy,”
and “those who have been subordinated by it” (Bhasin 2000: 1147). As Neeta
Bhasin highlights in her review of Gilroy’s Against Race, those most oppressed
by the concept of race are often the ones most deeply committed to it. In
Gilroy’s words, “For many racialized populations, ‘Race’ and the hard-won,
oppositional identities it supports are not to be lightly…given up” (Gilroy
112 Jennifer Friedlander
2001: 12). This is why Gilroy argues that we need “a deliberate and conscious
renunciation of ‘race’ as the basis for solidarity and community” (1147).
George, in a similar vein, starkly illuminates what he identifies as a
“paradox” in African Americans’ relation to race. As he explains, “reference
to race is the central means through which discrimination of African
Americans has been justified in America,“ yet “African Americans most often
embrace the concept of their racial identity” (George 2014: 361). George’s
account strikes directly at the psychic dimensions of the identity-binding role
of race and, in particular, the ways in which attachment to race, for African
American subjects, inhibits accession from desire to drive. Race, he argues,
“remains for African Americans an illusory object of attachment that binds
them to the unbearable past” (George 2016: 15). The possibility of shifting its
meaning, therefore, has been “essential to African American theoretical
conceptions of agency” (14).

“Agency beyond the Symbolic:” cause and negativity

Following Lacan, George, as indicated earlier, proposes an alternative route
to “agency beyond the Symbolic” (19). In developing this position, George
draws upon Lacan’s disagreement with Saussure on the nature of the signifier
as “not arbitrary…but contingent upon causation that is external to the
Symbolic” (16). “Cause,” for Lacan, refers to the constitutive exclusions to the
Symbolic order—the unassimilable points of failure and trauma, around
which signifiers weave a protective net. Thus, within a Lacanian framework,
any account of the Symbolic heft of race must take into account the way race
functions not only as a lure for “being” within the Symbolic but also as a
formative Symbolic exclusion. Rather than envision the field of signifiers as
random and open to manipulation (and resignification), the notion of “Cause”
reminds us that the Symbolic is organized through the incessant haunting of
negativity. As Richard Boothby appositely describes, “The confrontation with
this recalcitrant remainder delivers the subject over to a sense of a negative
‘space,’ the sense not of what appears but precisely what doesn’t appear—a
shadow of das Ding1” (Boothby 2019: 24). What resignifying projects neglect,
George argues, is this unintegrated negativity—the symbolic’s cause. George
calls for recognition of this unintegrated negativity as the “jouissance of slavery,
a psychic experience of trauma that emerges from the past and repeats itself in
the present through the agency of the signifier” (George 2016: 16). “It is the
signifier,” George underscores, “that establishes the link through which this
traumatic cause, germane to the slave’s experience and not to that of his or
her descendants, intrusively establishes its place in the internal lives of African
Americans” (16).
This attending to the “beyond of the Symbolic” in no way necessitates
abandoning the Symbolic, but rather requires highlighting the decisive role of
the signifier’s hidden cause as a nodal point for the subject’s psychic con-
stitution. In George’s work, this requires that the trauma of slavery and its
 In medium race 113
enduring afterlife be “dislodged from the Real through the trauma’s entrance
into symbolization” (73). Loren and Metelmann, like George, strongly object
to locating racism in the Real (as Mitchell suggests), fearing that it risks
“making racism immovable” (Loren and Metelmann 2011: 400). For them,
race, not racism, belongs in the Real (as the point of “lack”); racism belongs in
the Symbolic (“as one possible attempt at articulating this lack”) (400). In
addition, Loren and Metelmann argue that Mitchell’s account misses the
mechanism for fixing a meaning to lack, a function they cede to the “point de
capiton”—the figure which operates to stabilize meaning by anchoring a sig-
nifier to a secure place within the signifying chain. (401). Thus, race, they
contend, functions on two levels, both as lack (Real) and as an attempt to hold
in place a fixed representation of lack (point de capiton).

“Agency beyond the Symbolic:” race as objet a and

medium of jouissance
This intervention inches closer towards George’s understanding of how race
functions as a Master Signifier (S1) in binding the raced subject to the
Symbolic, attaching her/him to the chain of signifiers (S2) in search of
wholeness. For George, as we will see, the ethical response requires that the
subject come to release the chain of signifiers from its tie to the Master sig-
nifier of race. This move involves the vital recognition that the Other, within
which the subject seeks identity, is also lacking and thus incapable of con-
ferring the subject’s completion. But whereas Loren and Metelmann focus on
how race functions as a point de capiton, George makes the crucial intervention
of also recognizing race’s role as objet a, a move which enables us to attend to
the critical part jouissance plays in understanding race and racism. Thus, where
Loren and Metelmann emphasize the point de capiton, with its function of fixing
meaning (to keep it “in its place,” as Jacques-Alain Miller puts it), George
concentrates on how race, as objet a, works to keep jouissance in its place by
fueling the impossible fantasy of a return to the lost jouissance of subjective
wholeness, which subjects sacrifice in their accession to the signifier. This
fantasy, however, is impeded for “racialized subjects [who] often struggle
more than is usual to maintain their safe distance from the traumatic jouissance
of lack” (George Trauma 21). In particular, George argues, race “functions as a
precarious source of jouissance…for African Americans…that binds them to an
unbearable past” (15). But, as we will see, the objet a’s mediation of the sub-
ject’s relationship to traumatic lack can spark confrontation not only with
subjective lack but also with Symbolic lack. In this way, I will argue, the objet a
should also be considered for its potential to propel the subject to traverse the
fantasy of a return to subjective wholeness. As Rex Butler suggests, the objet a
can be thought of as an “act that would break or suspend the symbolic order
of the master signifier” (Butler 6).
George’s formulation helps us appreciate this possibility by highlighting the
key relationship of the master signifier (in the function of “point de capiton”—the
114 Jennifer Friedlander
“quilting point”—for temporarily holding meaning in place) to the objet a
(George 2016: 22). I suggest we should supplement this point by recognizing
that, as Butler puts it, the objet a is always “behind the master signifier,” from
where it can either conspire with the master signifier in plugging the hole in
the Symbolic or disrupt the master signifier’s masking function by exposing its
emptiness (Butler 2005: 6). Butler develops this disruptive potential of the objet
a via Žižek’s consideration of the “gap between utterance [the enunciated]
and its enunciation: at the level of utterance you are saying this, but what do
you want to tell me with it, through it” (Žižek Sublime 111 in Butler 2005: 19).
This “mismatch” between the enunciation and the enunciated, Butler points
out, marks the impossibility “to speak literally, to occupy the Symbolic
without remainder, to have the empty place and what occupies it fit perfectly”
(18–19). As we saw earlier, Gilroy strategically ignores this “mismatch” (by
overinvesting in the enunciated and discounting the enunciation) in at-
tempting to secure the authority of the statement that “race does not matter.”
Butler, however, highlights how prodding this mismatch works to destabilize
the master signifier’s success in “sutur[ing] an ideological field” (6). I extend
this point by arguing that focusing on how the objet a functions as the necessary
trigger and supplement for the master-signifier illuminates how “the same
element that closes off the system also opens it up…[thereby]…reveal[ing] the
‘emptiness’ at the heart of the Symbolic only by filling it out” (20, 21).
This recognition of the lack in the Other is necessary for impelling the
subject to move beyond the constraints of the desire of the Other in the
pursuit of completion, spuriously offered by the objet a. As such, rather than
chasing the elusive objet a, the subject may come to embrace the objet a’s
perpetual failure to confer subjective completion. Thus, traversal of the fan-
tasy of subjective wholeness moves the subject to position itself in the place of
lack, the position previously occupied by the objet a. Furthermore, in coming to
assume responsibility for being the cause of its own desire, the subject comes
to recognize itself as a locus of symbolic emptiness around which a new form
of subjectivity takes shape. As Molly Anne Rothenberg explains, in moving
beyond symbolic designations, the “neosubject” of the drive “acts creatively”
to “reveal the possibility of newness” (Rothenberg 2010: 181). In this sense,
the traversal of the fantasy entails a “form of freedom, or,…emancipation
from the given” (182). Unlike poststructuralist accounts of resignification as
the only path toward change, however, the Lacanian formulation demon-
strates how newness and agency can emerge “beyond the symbolic.”

Traversing the fantasy of race: subjectification over

distance
George’s account considers how, for African American subjects, race as objet a
not only impedes the subject’s move from desire to drive but also “uniquely
position[s]” African American subjects to, as mentioned earlier, “embrace this
very daunting task of transcending both race and the fundamental fantasy it
 In medium race 115
supports” (George 2016: 141). Here we can more clearly appreciate the im-
portance of Lacan’s notion of “seeing through” the fantasy. Rather than seek to
access a reality outside of the fantasy, some degree of freedom emerges through
inhabiting the “subjectfiying function of fantasy” (21). This procedure is neatly
exemplified in what appears at first to be a tension within George’s account.
One the one hand, George argues that slavery and racism “inhibit the
subjectifying function of fantasy, aiming to confront African Americans with
the very lack that is necessarily masked in the Lacanian subject” (21). Here he
draws upon Kalpana Seshadri-Crook’s account of “whiteness” as the “master
signifier” of race, which impedes “the construction of…fantasies of whole-
ness” for African American subjects. George thus takes seriously the necessary
role of fantasy in drawing upon the resources of the Symbolic to protect the
subject from encountering devastating lack. When access to fantasy is hin-
dered, subjects suffer from an unregulated or over-proximate relation to lack.
Race, in “encourag[ing]…[a] substitution of desire for drive” traps the subject
in an incessant, yet futile search to recapture an imagined wholeness, en-
snaring him/her within an impossible fantasy of completion (George
2014: 372).
On the other hand, George argues that the racist Symbolic, which denies
the fantasy of grounded identity to African American subjects, may also
propel the raced subject toward “not just a transcendence of race but a
transcendence of the fundamental fantasy of a recoverable loss” (George
2016: 141). In this sense, the raced subject can be seen as exceptionally
primed to recognize the lack in the Other, the acceptance upon which se-
paration depends. Here, then, we encounter an apparent contradiction: ra-
cism makes African American subjects not only more prone to entrapment by
desire and alienation but also especially inclined to accede to drive and se-
paration by continually putting the Other’s signifiers in question. George
demonstrates that these two positions are reconciled by understanding that
the fantasy is both “illusory” and “necessary” in the subject’s formation (Neill
61). The subject’s illusion of potential wholeness is constitutive (not incidental)
to their ultimate acceptance of lack, and the eventual embrace of the drive
through which the subject comes to enjoy the failure of the fantasy of com-
pletion. It is around the contours of this void that the subject comes to erect a
new relationship to the signifier, without attachment to the “jouissance of race”
(George 2016: 137).
But, and here is my main point of departure from George, rather than
framing this possibility in terms of an identification with the lack of the Other,
George suggests that it emerges from the raced subject’s “cynical” distance
from the Other’s signifiers. As he puts it, African American subjects’ “alie-
nation” often foments a “cynicism toward the Symbolic,” which “establishes a
liberating distance…from the alienating desire of the Symbolic Other” (135,
139). In making this point, George emphasizes the importance of creating
critical “distance between the conflated desires of the subject and the Other,
allowing for the emergence of something more properly subjective and
116 Jennifer Friedlander
personal to the subject” (139). I argue, by contrast, that the liberating effects of
separation emerge not from distancing the Other, but rather from the con-
vergence of the subject’s lack with the lack in the Other.
Although George advocates for the importance of understanding separa-
tion as “a move toward recognition of the desire/lack both of the subject and
of the mOther,” his emphasis on cynicism as the mode through which se-
paration takes shape is in tension with the following Lacanian insight (2014:
369). For Lacan, separation of the subject from the totalizing signifiers and
unfathomable desire of the Other is forged, paradoxically not by division but
rather by “intersection”—via the recognition that lack (non-meaning) is an
overlapping element for the subject, and the Other as well (Lacan 213). This
intersection of the lack in the subject with the lack in the Other allows the
subject to experience freedom by taking on a Symbolic position of its
own—one that is not controlled by the meanings set in place by the Other.
For Lacan, this possibility of liberation through separation emerges only when
the subject encounters her own desire (as lack) “superimposed upon the
other”—when a “link” (rather than a gap) is created “between the desire of
the subject and the desire of the Other” (215). Paul Verhaeghe makes this
point by emphasizing that separation “takes the shape of a peculiar form of identi-
fication,” leading him to expand the term “separation” to “identification/se-
paration” (Verhaeghe 2019: 378). That is, for separation to occur, it is not
sufficient to recognize the Other’s lack; the subject must also identify with it.
Žižek makes the similar point: “Fully assuming the Other’s lack and incon-
sistency means that the Other is no longer a complete mechanism that con-
trols me: I can exploit its inconsistencies, play the Other against itself” (Žižek
2017: 234).
In sum, George’s proposal incisively sets up the conditions and stakes for
thinking the subject’s agency “beyond the Symbolic.” But rather than (as
George suggests) “cynicism” acting as the motor for separation, I contend that
cynicism functions as an impediment. To be specific, cynicism entices us with
the lure of “knowing better,“ of “seeing through” the illusion to the underlying
reality. In my view, it is essential to resist this lure, and instead opt for what
Lacan calls an “ethic of skepticism,” which, I argue, he explicitly distinguishes
from cynicism (Lacan 224).Whereas cynicism involves a mistrust that what
others say they know corresponds to what they take to be true, skepticism
involves a general mistrust of all claims to knowledge. To be specific, I agree
with George that by creating the conditions for separation, “rooting sub-
jectivity in ‘scepticism’ [i]s what Lacan called ‘a mode of sustaining man in
life’” (2014: 368). But I disagree with George’s adjoining claim that “Lacanian
theory ties the reversal of alienation to a ‘cynic[ism]’ by which the subject
questions the desire of the Other who grants the signifier” (368). For Lacan, it
is skepticism, not cynicism, that leads to “the one exit” from alienation—“the
way of desire” (Lacan 224). Specifically, using Rene Descartes’ approach as
exemplary of the ethic of skepticism, Lacan contends that Descartes’ “desire
for certainty led…only to doubt,” enabling him to “operate a rather strange
 In medium race 117
separation” (224). Skepticism, understood in this Cartesian context, paves a
path toward separation not by leading the subject toward knowledge but by
placing knowledge itself “in radical suspension” (224).
The cynic, by contrast, is hampered by her own investment in knowledge.
We see this in the passage from Lacan, which George cites, that presents
Casanova as emblematic of the cynic. In recounting a tale of “one of
Casanova’s misadventures,” Lacan describes a time when Casanova became
the victim of his own “practical joke” (238). In “pursuing a cynical ad-
venture,” in which Casanova tried to seduce a girl by pretending to perform
wizardry, a violent storm began to rage. As Slavoj Žižek explicates the tale,
“Despite knowing very well that [the storm] was a natural phenomenon, he
believed all the same that the celestial forces were punishing him for his
profane playing with magic—and what did he do but step quickly into his own
[magic] paper circle, where he felt completely safe!” (Žižek 2008: 248).
Casanova, as this example reveals, is not protected by knowing how things
really are, but rather by the efficacy of the illusion. In short, the cynic makes
the mistake of the “non-duped:” thinking that reality is structured by the way
‘things really are,’ rather than by the fiction that props up reality. Here we
witness, too, the way that cynicism also fuels the structure of disavowal—a
formation which, as we saw, holds together post-racial discourse. As Žižek
points out, Casanova knew very well that he did not perform magic, and that
the paper square could not protect him, but even so, he sought comfort in its
refuge. This example also supports Hook’s contention that “knowing better”
risks facilitating rather than hampering, the grip of disavowal.
Where, then, should we turn for a disruptive response to disavowal that may
enable separation? I suggest that we follow Žižek in turning to what Lacan calls
the “Act”—a role that Butler suggests can be played by a close encounter with
the objet a. As Sheila Kunkle puts it: an “Act does even more than change what
counts as reality, because it further exposes how reality itself is not totally on-
tologically complete” (Kunkle 2015: 2). The Act itself emerges from within the
Symbolic, not from its positive content, but rather from its negative cause, its
“inherent impossibility…which is its hidden, disavowed structuring principle”
(Kunkle 2015: 2). The Act should be understood neither as a plea for re-
installing Symbolic authority nor as a total rejection of Symbolic existence, since
both of these options fail to accept the binding power of the Symbolic fiction.
Instead, I argue that the Act be seen as a potentially transformative engagement
aimed at identifying with the very point at which the Symbolic fiction of race
begins to unfurl and threatens to give way to the Real—thus undercutting the
Symbolic ground for conferring identity. It follows that, rather than distancing or
releasing the subject from the Other’s enigmatic signifiers, the Act performs the
ethical task of facilitating an impossible identification with both the Symbolic
fiction and intrusions of the meaningless Real. Such a position resists re-
incorporation into the fantasy of Symbolic closure.
Spike Lee’s 2018 film, BlacKkKlansman, offers a glimpse of this possibility.
The title itself enunciates a Symbolic impossibility, which in the film (as in the
118 Jennifer Friedlander
real-life story upon which it is based) is realized by Ron Stallworth (John
David Washington), a black undercover police officer who infiltrates a
Colorado branch of the KKK. Over the phone, Stallworth successfully con-
vinces a Klan official and David Duke himself (Topher Grace) that he is a
“pure white,” “non-Jewish American citizen.” Another officer, Flip
Zimmerman (Adam Driver), poses as Stallworth for in-person meetings with
Klan members. Zimmerman, we learn, is Jewish; he wears a star of David
necklace but, as he tells Stallworth, he always thought of himself as “just
another white kid.” The film, I argue, shows that the very success of
Stallworth’s and Zimmerman’s passing as an impossible embodiment of the
fantasy whiteness works to undermine the fantasy of whiteness itself. In short,
their very success indicates the impossibility of what has been achieved—a
claim to racial wholeness as a cover for lack.
Zimmerman’s relationship to his Jewish identity can be considered in terms
of disavowal. Some critics have read Zimmerman’s character in terms of his
coming to identify with his previously disavowed Jewish identity. At first glance,
this reading seems sustained by Zimmerman’s confession to Stallworth that
before posing as a KKK member, he used to never think about being Jewish
but since becoming accepted by the KKK he finds himself thinking about it “all
the time.” I suggest, however, that the film points us to consider this change in
Zimmerman not as an embrace of (Jewish) identity, but rather as a rejection of
the possibility of whiteness. To be specific, rather than read Zimmerman as
having previously disavowed his Jewish identity, I suggest we frame his initial
disavowal in opposite terms—namely as a disavowal of “whiteness,” which as
we saw earlier, is for Seshadri-Crook, the “master signifier” of race.
Zimmerman’s disavowal of whiteness is apparent insofar as whiteness appears
initially to him as an innocent default category—one that enables him to wear a
Star of David and bear a Jewish surname, and still be “just another white kid.”
It is only after he successfully passes as white in the eyes of the KKK that
“whiteness” itself becomes for him a marked and racist concept—the unin-
habitable “master signifier” of race. As A.O. Scott puts it in a trenchant review
of the film: “‘Just another white kid’ is an all-purpose alibi, and public discourse
abounds in code words and dog-whistles that allow bigots to pass as concerned
citizens without a racist bone in their bodies” (Scott).2
In response to Zimmerman’s seeming lack of personal investment in their
mission, Stallworth presses him to internalize the stakes: “You’re Jewish. Why
you acting like you ain’t got skin in the game?” Rather than function as a mere
figure of speech, this expression of having “skin” in the game becomes brutally
apt for Zimmerman. One KKK member, suspecting that Zimmerman may be
Jewish, threatens to strip him in order to see if he is circumcised. Here the
polysemy of the signifier “skin” condenses the way lack itself becomes the site of
binding investment—to put it crudely, it is precisely Zimmerman’s lack of skin
that gives him skin in the game. The significance of this coincidence is illu-
minated by Lacan’s point that circumcision functions as a site of “some per-
manent relation to the lost object as such,” and this highlights the essential role
 In medium race 119
lack plays as a condition of subjectivity (Lacan 2016: 213). I suggest that it is via
the Act of inhabiting lack that Zimmerman comes to recognize the unavoid-
ability of lack in place of the pursuit of completion.
Rather than aim to dismantle the virulent racism of the Klan from the
outside by chipping away the illusion of race from which it spews, Stallworth
and Zimmerman take what we may see as a Lacanian path. They insert
themselves squarely into the illusion—both identifying with and embodying its
lack—and disturb the fantasy from within. Here we encounter an Act in
which the Symbolic cause (the internal negativity around which the Symbolic
forms and seeks to mask) enters into the Symbolic itself, disrupting the ability
of the fantasy of race to function as a claim to completion—as a cover for lack.
George’s insight that race holds the place of the objet a enables us to ap-
preciate how, by such an Act, we might destabilize race’s grip by pressing
on—and identifying with—its negativity as a way of exposing the in-
completeness of the Symbolic order and thus its impossibility to ground any
subjective identity. But, such pressure, I claim, must come from entering into
the meaninglessness of the Other’s signifiers and desire, rather than, as
George claims, distancing ourselves from them.

Notes
1 Das Ding can be roughly understood as an anxiety-provoking, unrepresentable
fragment of the Real. For a terrific account of das Ding in relation to Cause, please
see Richard Boothby.
2 The rhetoric of “just another white kid” works to sustain an investment in the
exnomination of whiteness. As bell hooks cautions, the notion of whiteness as in-
visible denies the way “whiteness makes its presence felt in black life, most often as
terrorizing imposition, a power that wounds, hurts, tortures” (hooks 1992: 241).

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