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Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 8.2 (2003) 347-349



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Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana. Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race. London: Routledge, 2000.

Seshadri-Crooks's Desiring Whiteness makes an important contribution into three areas of inquiry: psychoanalysis, critical race studies, and modern aesthetics. The book first of all develops a highly original psychoanalytic theory of the specificity of the symbolic structure of race in its similarity and distinction from other types of differences: class, gender, nationality, on the one hand, and sexuality, the traditional object of psychoanalysis, on the other. By approaching racism as a historical system of oppression which nonetheless disavows its historicity and produces extradiscursive bodily effects, the book subsequently demonstrates how its psychoanalytic account can intervene into critical race studies. In their most polarized versions, represented for instance by Appiah's and Goldberg's positions, 1 the current discussions of race either reject the very category of race on the grounds of its unavoidable, explicit or implicit, reference to biologism (Appiah) or retrieve its emancipatory potential on the basis of its exclusive culturalist interpretation as marker of belonging and a crucial determinant of group formation (Goldberg). By taking into account the affective and the "naturalizing" force of race, in particular, in the sphere of embodiment and visibility, the book not only contests the purely culturalist approach but also argues that the disqualification of the scientific validity of race is not sufficient to undermine its seeming biologism, since the resilience of racialized thinking depends as much on its paradoxes and disavowals as on its ability to combine with other normative structures of inheritance, such as family and kinship. As Seshadri-Crooks powerfully argues, "Exploring the structure of race requires a toleration of paradox, an appreciation of the fact that it is an inherently contradictory discourse, and a willingness to see beyond relations of power in order to mine the depth of subjective investment in it" (9). And finally, through the close readings of literary texts, analysis of film, and the discussion of Orwell's essays on his experiences in colonial territories, Desiring Whiteness explores the possibilities and limitations of "adversarial aesthetics," which calls into question racial fantasies and "the gestalt of racial looking."

Although its contributions to literary and critical race studies are important, I want to focus primarily on the book's most original aspect, namely, on its psychoanalytic account of race and racism. In this respect, Desiring Whiteness presents a welcome and much needed intervention into discussions of the psychoanalysis of race, initiated by such important studies as Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, Hortense J. Spillers' "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Claudia Tate's Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race, Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helen Moglen's ground breaking anthology, Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism, or Christopher Lane's recent collection, The Psychoanalysis of Race. Attempting to compensate for the lack of the explicit analysis of race in Freud's or Lacan's texts, most of these studies either show the shortcomings of classical psychoanalysis with respect to the formation of black subjectivity while exposing a tacit reliance on the unexamined racial categories in Freud's texts and his feminist critics, 2 attempt to develop the specificity [End Page 347] of the black desire, adopt psychoanalytical categories, such as trauma, enjoyment, paranoia, and phobia to analyze the libidinal economy and psychic effects of racism, 3 or simply point out the incompatibility between the sexual difference, the traditional provenance of psychoanalysis, and the racial difference, which is thereby handed over to historicism. 4 Like many critics before her, Seshadri-Crooks asks what kind of insights psychoanalysis can offer for the study of racial subjectivities and embodiment. Yet, the originality of her answers lies in the fact that she presents the first coherent and comprehensive elaboration, or perhaps invention would be a more appropriate word here, of the missing psychoanalytical apparatus to confront the specificity and the paradoxical character of the symbolic...

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