Queering Freedom

2. Is the Mirror Racist? Interrogating the space of Whiteness

58 2 Is the Mirror Racist? Interrogating the Space of Whiteness That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a particular disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. —RALPH ELLISON, Invisible Man In “Love Thy Neighbor? No, Thanks!” Slavoj Žižek (1998) begins with some general musings on the bad press that psychoanalytic approaches to racism enjoy these days. Arguing against these critiques of “psychological reductionism” and an “abstract-psychologistic approach,” Žižek persuades us in his everentertaining ways that the psychoanalytic frame is exactly the lens that can diagnose the machinations of racism in northern-western cultures and, by exposing their internal inconsistencies, presumably help us to disrupt them. I agree with Žižek and much of the recent work in the intersections of psychoanalysis and race1 that the dynamics of psychoanalysis have much to offer to readings of race and racism in contemporary settings of Eurocentric cultures—particularly the dead-end, circular readings of social constructionism.2 However, I also suggest that these lenses of psychoanalysis have much to tell us about white inhabitants of these cultural symbolics of phallicized whiteness and, more particularly , some of the silent assumptions 59 Is the Mirror Racist? about space and embodiment which constitute that whiteness. Psychoanalysis may be an appropriate lens for diagnosing our cultural racism exactly because it enacts some of the central dynamics which sediment that racism. Of course, in carving out a space that I refer to as ‘our cultural symbolic,’ I am already at odds with most Lacanians’ understandings of ‘the symbolic.’ While I understand that Lacan was attempting to unravel the structures of signification and dynamics of subjectivation that occur within the symbolic, I wish to speak of this symbolic as a historicized and particular phenomenon. Referring to ‘our cultural symbolic,’ I am referring more specifically to the symbolic that dominates cultures of phallicized whiteness and structures signi fiers in a way that gives disproportionate and abusive power to some persons —some bodies—over others. Following out Lacanian dynamics of signi fication and subjectivation, I am reading ‘our cultural symbolic’ as a process that signifies some bodies as more powerful, more valuable, and more meaningful than others—namely, those white male straight Christian propertied bodies that we have already encountered in the emergence of the neutral liberal individual. In reading race through psychoanalysis, therefore, I wish to follow not only Žižek’s suggestions, but also those of Frantz Fanon. Fanon reads his place as a black man in a white world fundamentally through psychoanalysis, which he frames as dominating the western psyche, both culturally and individually . As Fanon describes his experiences and those of his fellow colonized Antilleans, he shows how “the racial drama” (1967, 150) that occurs when the black man comes into contact with white culture is due, in part, to a clash of psychic developments. For example, Fanon claims that the black familial constellation cannot be mapped through the Oedipal complex; therefore, when the black man comes into contact with white culture, where authority can be read through the Oedipal drama, a neurosis and conflict over authority occurs in the black psyche.3 He thus reads psychoanalytic models as both describing and constituting western (Eurocentric) symbolics. And he gains his critical distance from these models, a distance that is vital to his survival and his sanity, through recognizing them as specific to historical and cultural formations. If we wish to interrupt the logics of racism that are embedded in our cultural symbolic of phallicized whiteness, perhaps we should follow Fanon’s insights and begin interrogating that very model of psychic development. That is, if the psychoanalytic model dominates our cultural notions of authority , law, language, and subjectivity, then perhaps an interrogation of some of its logics will expose some of the conceptions and dynamics endemic to 60 Demarcating the Space of Domination forms of racism in our culture. Specifically, an interrogation of Lacan’s accounts of ego-formation may expose some of the latent logics about space and embodiment that undergird forms of white supremacist racism within our culture—logics that are reducible to a logic of the limit, written here in the registers of boundaries and containment. Interrogating Optics To begin, I...