A Psychoanalytic Approach to Identity Politics

Abstract

I intend to analyze the prevailing discursive formation of identity politics through the frames of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalyses. In particular, I will support three claims. First, identity politics possesses two competing forces, intersubjectivity and intersectionality, which nicely instantiate respectively the Lacanian registers of the Symbolic and the Real. Second, previous psychoanalytic approaches have failed to capture the unconscious death drive within identity politics (i.e., intersectionality); that is, contemporary scholars of psychoanalysis, such as Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Juliet Flower MacCannell, Howard Schwartz, and Slavoj Žižek, neglect the destabilizing force of intersectionality. Finally, intersectionality represents the novel mechanism by which the symbolic order of whiteness, in its attempt to preserve itself, appropriates the Real. As psychoanalysis seeks to extend itself into diverse realms of sociopolitical conversation, I contend that it is imperative for a psychoanalytic comprehension of identity politics to be front and center within any treatment of the subject matter.

1. Introduction

Two approaches have recently emerged in the psychoanalysis of “identity politics”: on one hand, a series of indictments have been leveraged against identity politics through the avenues of Freudian [1] and Lacano-Marxist analyses [2], and, on the other hand, a series of segmented, fractured forays have facilitated the analysis of identity categories through psychoanalytic constructs [3, 4]. The former undermines the validity of identity politics as a sociopolitical enterprise for comprehending oppression, and the latter renders the phrase “X is a social construct” intelligible in piecemeal psychoanalytic fashion, addressing each identity category (e.g., race, gender, ability, sexual orientation, nationality, and so on) without necessarily considering the intersection of these categories. Neither pathway for theorizing identity politics encounters the Real: the ungraspable, elusive, and traumatic center resisted by identity-based discourse but around which it fundamentally revolves. Through a Derridean-inspired deconstruction, I have developed an “aporia of identity” within which two forces ineluctably conflict with one another for determining the content of marginalized identities, namely intersubjectivity and intersectionality. The Real of identity politics resides here: the irresolvable, unsymbolizable clash between the push-and-pull of identification and disidentification with the symbolic register.

“Identity politics” refers to the progressive Leftist discursive formation that foregrounds the political experience of peripheral subject positions. It forges a binarized system for responding to the fundamental question of identity-based movements: “What does it mean to be X (e.g., black, a woman, disabled/differently-abled, and so on)?” The first type of response submits the individual’s identity to an agreed-upon signifier for collective organization against oppressive apparatuses; that is, individuals identify as “being-black” and “being-a-woman” through intersubjective engagement with political groups. These groups, however, inexorably cultivate a particular image, ideal, or paradigm of being-black and being-a-woman, such that individuals who might not “fit the description” cannot completely or sufficiently identify with the group’s implicit representation of being-X. In the case of “being-a-woman,” the politically-crafted image of womanness often assumes the positionality of white feminists, which, in the mid-to-late twentieth century, implied the positionality of being confined to (re)productive labor within their own homes. Women of color, conversely, labored outside their domiciles for decades, if not centuries, before white feminists demanded the capacity to leave the home for professional reasons [5]. The demands of white feminists in political organizations, thus, neglected the marginalized location of black women, introducing another type of response to the meaning of being-a-woman: intersectionality.

Intersectionality, as the second type of response, emerges at the crossing of the individual’s various marginalized identities, taking into account someone’s situatedness at the intersection of being-black, being-a-woman, being-impoverished, and so on [6]. In order to understand the meaning of being-X, we must also understand the meaning of being-A, being-B, being-C, etc. The aforementioned example of white feminists monopolizing the signification of “woman” demonstrates the necessity of interrogating such a signifier from a multitude of standpoints, including race and class. Even within the available categories of identification, individuals vary along further experiential axes: phenotypic expressions of color, gendered expressions of masculinity/femininity, and economic expressions of affluence/pennilessness to name a few. Discovering the intersection from which an individual’s political experience can be (re)constructed, traced, and investigated, therefore, does not guarantee the capacity to adequately signify the individual’s political experience in the social order. The meaning of being-X within the intersectional refusal of signification reveals the antinomic pole, movement, and determination of identity in the context of political engagement. The first type of response (i.e., submission to the signifier) firmly positions the individual as a political subject with respect to an established symbolic identification, and the second type of response (i.e., resistance to the signifier) loosely positions the individual as a political subject with respect to established symbolic identifications. To be clear, the intersectional inclination to constantly revise signification does not completely dissociate the individual from subjectification; rather, the intersectional push away from identity always corresponds to an intersubjective pull toward identification with additional signifiers.

The Derridean [7, 8] formulation of the “aporia of identity” appears as follows: the conditions for the possibility of being-X are simultaneously the conditions for the impossibility of being-X. The conditions for (im)possibility nominalize the action of identifying with political signifiers, which illuminate the individual’s political experience in the social order while also obscuring it. Invoking signifiers to describe one’s marginalized position, if the aim of identity politics has been accurately formulated, will never suffice: the individual always-already exceeds semiotic circumscription in the symbolic order. There is a remainder, a leftover, a stain evading assimilation into extant identity categories; indeed, the escaping excess should not be condemned, loathed, or castigated because, after all, it fuels the discursive formation of identity politics. Imagine the culmination of identity politics; that is, through a series of hard-nosed, social scientific decisions, we accurately determine the political experience of each and every subject position. In turn, the social order could clearly and distinctly designate individuals as “being-black” or “being-a-woman,” arriving at a definitive framework for assessing whether, for instance, Rachel Dolezal is black or Caitlyn Jenner is a woman. Spelling doom for identity politics, the definitive establishment of meaning for categorical designations inspires a teleological paradox: on the surface, identity politics strives for its dissolution through the clearcut determination of individual experience, but, at its core, identity politics conceals its underlying drive for incompletion, indeterminacy, and gappiness.

The surface-level desire communicates a Sisyphean task: following the establishment of definitions for identity categories, the objectively-excluded remainders will subjectively identify with “improper” categories, re-creating the zero-point of identity politics. The discursive formation of identity politics explicates the political experience of the excluded, those pushed to the periphery by bias, prejudice, and discrimination. Any hard-and-fast categorical demarcation of the excluded, thus, requires the conceptual distinction between extensional (i.e., those falling underneath the signifier/category) and non-extensional content (i.e., those falling outside the signifier/category), perpetually creating an excluded set of people. Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), for example, determine the boundaries of “being-a-woman” on the basis of innate physiological characteristics for womanness, informed by the primary and secondary sexual characteristics usually attributed to “biological” women. The exclusion concomitant with the biological significance of “woman” represents the form of violence contested by identity politics, which appears at the juncture of every definition for any identity category. The completion of identity politics, in turn, is impossible: the conceptual distinctions required to neatly demarcate political experience would only perpetuate further pockets of exclusion, mandating more conceptual distinctions and categorical designations ad infinitum. What, then, is the goal of identity politics? How can we understand the progression of identity politics in relation to the oppressive organization of the social order? Psychoanalytic allusions to “the Real,” as put forth in Lacanian contexts, offer conceptual resources for pinpointing the positionality and teleology of identity politics with respect to the symbolic register.

2. The real(ity) of identity politics

The progressive deconstruction of identity categories (network of signifiers) through the invocation of individual experience (the Real) mostly occurs at the precipice of identification with marginalized groups. Consider the following excerpt from Rebecca Tuvel’s “In Defense of Transracialism” (2017) [9]: “[A]s MSNBC contributor Touré put it, [Rachel] Dolezal doesn’t share in ‘the one thing that binds black people,’ namely ‘the experience of racism’” (270). Even though Dolezal appeared to be black through her phenotypic presentation and organizational involvement in the NAACP, those who abhor her racial masquerading often cite a lack of oppression as the reason for her inability to don the signifier “black.” Yet, the chain of signification cascading from “black” encompasses more than “an experience of racism,” especially when non-black racial minorities also confront the oppressive reality of the social order. Other semiotic sources for justifying one’s placement within a racial category might include: self-awareness of ancestry, public awareness of ancestry, self-identification, and culture (ibid). Beyond these indicators for belonging to a particular racial group, the experiential element referenced by the aforementioned MSNBC contributor explodes into an unbounded multiplicity at the intersection of racism with ableism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and so on. There seem to be endless possibilities for exploring the meaning of being-black in the various contexts of racism tinged with other forms of oppression, including, potentially, Dolezal’s invention of “being-trans-black” as an excluded category against which discrimination runs rampant [10]. The inexhaustible plenitude of signifiers attributed to any singular identity category raises the following question: within the discursive formation of identity politics, is there any discernible limit to the signification of being-X?

If identity politics maintains its sincere acknowledgement of intersectional modes of oppression, the answer must be “no.” Individual experience, although constrained by the existing order of signifiers for describing marginalized political experience, always-already pushes the prevailing field of signifiers to the Real’s ineffability. Therein resides the (unconscious) death drive of identity politics, continuously overlooked and neglected by previous psychoanalytic forays into the discursive formation; that is, identity politics collides with the Real in its movement toward a fundamental Lacanian doctrine: there is no Other of the Other [11]. Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks [4], in Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, nicely demonstrates the inversion of the death drive concomitant with identity politics through her (psycho)analysis of “whiteness,” a master signifier for organizing the racial configuration of differential relations. As a master signifier, whiteness measures the signified of each racial signifier (e.g., “Asian,” “black,” “Hispanic,” “biracial,” etc.) against the privileged, desired image of humanity implicit within the representation of being-white. In turn, each non-white signified fails to satisfy, fulfill, or complete the image of whiteness, requiring assimilation into an impartial, objective, and neutral humanistic culture and annihilation of partial, subjective, and provocative non-humanistic cultures. Seshadri-Crooks, in particular, questions the endurance of racial discourse when the biological, sociological, and anthropological metrics for assessing racial distinctions have failed to proffer an “objective” (i.e., non-symbolic) ground. Threatened by the gaps of the Real, whiteness attempts to construct a holistic, all-encompassing, and omniscient symbolic order in which racial distinctions carry the status of objectivity while, in reality, masking a logic of domination.

The unconscious desire of whiteness, thus, discloses the inclination for racial discourse to legitimize oppression in the disguise of non-symbolic, Real distinctions, which Seshadri-Crooks captures with her analysis of phenotypic designations (i.e., hair color, hair texture, facial features, bone structure, etc.) (59). Through the history of racial classification, disparate grounds have been offered for differentiating one race from another: blood (i.e., kinship), phrenology (i.e., skull size/shape), genetics, culture, and physiognomy. The objective foundation of race, in other words, has steadily shifted in its discursive manifestation, and Seshadri-Crooks locates the prevailing justification for racial categorization in phenotypic characteristics. The symbolic identities of “white,” “black,” “Asian,” etc. only maintain their legitimacy if they are perceived to carve nature at its joints, demarcating the Real within the symbolic order. By contrast, if racial categories are purely symbolic (i.e., a network of signifiers assigned to groups on the basis of pre-existing symbolic distinctions), the thin veneer concealing the classification of non-white groups for the sake of oppression would be exposed. Underneath the supposedly, naturally-existing physiological differences, therefore, is the assumed and presupposed superiority of whiteness; that is, Western standards for humanity are revealed as being predicated on the prescription of domineering white comportments (i.e., societal injunctions to write, speak, behave, and think in bourgeois modalities) [4]. Whiteness, ultimately, strives for a wholeness, completeness, and coherency that forecloses the possibility of disruption by the Real: the unconscious drive of whiteness implies the death of the subject (i.e., the site of shifting, changing, and fluctuating signification).

As mentioned earlier, the unconscious desire of whiteness inverts the death drive associated with identity politics. I offer a two-level differentiation of “death drive,” namely in the contexts of accessing jouissance, on one hand, through transgressing an established organization of signification and, on the other hand, through the replication of loss (at the inception of subjectivity) within the drive itself. The inversion between whiteness and identity politics, to invoke the aforementioned schema, occurs at the level of “disorderly conduct” in the symbolic order, as whiteness transgresses the incompleteness of the racial order (e.g., a belief in respecting each and every culture, such as multiculturalism) and identity politics transgresses the completeness of the sociopolitical order. Instead of effacing differences by adhering to a universal regime of (white) humanity, identity politics affirms the fundamental indeterminacy of the social order, or the impossibility of the social order to complete, fulfill, or satisfy itself. No sense-making apparatus can cohesively and coherently package the social order into a unitary entity; rather, a remainder will always-already slip through the cracks, saturate the boundary, and overflow the cup. Intersectionality, as the unlimited, inexhaustible reservoir for individual political experience, continually problematizes the extensionality of the extant field of signifiers, perpetuating the discursive mandate to consider the “inclusivity” of categories for various marginalized groups. To be clear, though, intersectionality remains inextricably tied to the intersubjective regime of sociopolitical signifiers, establishing long-lasting anchoring points in the symbolic order.

3. The insufficiency of existing psychoanalytic approaches to identity politics

Two notable psychoanalytic interrogations of identity politics, however, dispute the existence of its intersubjective dimension: Howard Schwartz’s Political Correctness and the Destruction of Social Order (2016) and Žižek’s The Ticklish Subject [2]. Schwartz and Žižek indict the intersectional, individualistic tendency for marginalized subjects to position their particular struggles at the forefront of politics, detracting from the rational, universal character of the political. Let us begin with Schwartz, who has published a litany of acerbic critiques against identity politics for the past two decades (beginning with his original intervention entitled “Psychodynamics of Political Correctness,” 1997 [12]). Schwartz presents a Freudian critique of political correctness and identity politics along the following lines: these ideological systems dissociate the individual from the post-Oedipal symbolic order (paternal) in order to align the individual with pre-Oedipal primary narcissism (maternal). In the former psychoanalytic construct, individuals subjugate themselves to the social order for the sake of earning mother’s love, affection, and care through an introjection and identification with father’s societal position (e.g., the breadwinner); conversely, with respect to the latter psychoanalytic construct, the individual refuses the Oedipal injunction and maintains his original relationship with mother, wherein the individual is ultimately accepted for no other reason than being himself: the unique, irreplaceable, special self (i.e., “a snowflake”). Primary narcissism, to put otherwise, substitutes the molly-coddled, unaltered, infallible self for the paternal ego ideal that separates child from mother; that is, for the paternal injunction, if the child wants to commune with mother, he will have to go through father (i.e., simultaneously foregrounding the castration complex and positioning the father as an intermediary—a becoming—for the child).

Schwartz [1], in short, disagrees with the anti-Oedipal (non-)logic of political correctness and identity politics: “What the paternal function accomplishes, the creation of social order based on mutual comprehensibility … the doctrine of microaggression, playing out the anti-Oedipal dynamics of political correctness, undoes” (55). In the process of eschewing the comprehensible structure of intersubjective reality, so the thinking goes, identity politics enables and justifies individualistic determinations of meaning based on marginalized subject positions: microaggressions, implicit biases, hidden prejudices, etc. The meaning of language is displaced from explicit linguistic content to implicit linguistic suggestions, such that an attribution of “articulateness” and “intelligence” to a person of color is interpreted as offensive rather than complimentary. Marginalized individuals determine the meaning of expressions, imputing and definitively establishing a particular interpretation of language based on background presuppositions. As a result, the individual becomes the fount of meaning, truth, and reality, recalling the pre-Oedipal position of primary narcissism: “The imaginary is presided over by the primitive mother, whose love validates us in our individuality” [1]. If the marginalized individual perceives, experiences, confronts, or encounters intersubjective reality in a specific manner, the individual’s interpretation trumps any contrasting intersubjective interpretation (i.e., esse est. percipi). As Schwartz notes, “Political correctness is a bid for hegemony in the name of this primitive mother, expelling the father and undermining the paternal function. As such, it is a bid for the destruction of the symbolic” (ibid).

In particular, Schwartz rejects the arbitrary, individualized re-signification of “man” and “woman” for transgender identity. He refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of Caitlyn Jenner’s status as a (trans-)woman: “Consider the case of Bruce Jenner, who now declares that he wants to be called Catelyn [sic] … He is a woman in a man’s body, he says … What can it mean to say that a body is a woman’s body if the person with that body can be a man? … It seems that the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ have lost their meaning” (37-38). The tension within the intersectional, experiential disruption of established, intersubjective signification appears in the aforementioned case; that is, Caitlyn Jenner asserts her feeling of being-a-woman in contrast to her subjectification by the signifier “man,” which diametrically opposes the identification with womanness in the Western binary of gender. Schwartz detests the intersectional modification of signifiers in the symbolic order because the undisturbed, prevailing organization of signification makes meaning, identification, and intelligibility possible in general. If children are not presented with clear-cut, defined gender roles for emulation, they will inevitably lack a sense of self and situatedness within the world: “Am I a boy or girl, the child wants to know, and the answer to this helps him to build a sense of himself in relation to the world, and an idea of what he is supposed to do in it” (38). Unfortunately for Schwartz, his idealistic conception of the post-Oedipal symbolic order closely resembles his psychoanalytic caricature of identity politics as a replication of pre-Oedipal primary narcissism.

First and foremost, though, Schwartz downplays the intersubjective “pull” implicit within the intersectional “push” of identity politics discourse. Even if Schwartz cannot coherently envision a “man” identifying as a “woman,” he poses a false dichotomy for the meaning of signifiers, namely signifiers are either meaningful (i.e., retain the original signified) or meaningless (i.e., retain no durable, long-lasting signified). He simply excludes any semiotic process of garnering newfound meaning for signifiers. Instead of making the signifiers of “man” and “woman” meaningless, the identity category of transgender adds and subtracts a series of significations originally residing within the overarching chain of gender binarization, which conceals the discursive mandate that someone is either a man or a woman for the duration of his or her life, and these dichotomous positions cannot be exchanged with one another. The intersectional modification of gender, thus, is merely a re-signification, involving the maintenance of extant terms for describing gender while altering their linguistic content. Schwartz overlooks the intersubjective dimension baked into the intersectional process of resignification itself. Second, as mentioned above, Schwartz idealizes the post-Oedipal symbolic order in such a manner that mimics the alleged pre-Oedipal primary narcissism attributed to identity politics discourse. Both resist the destabilizing register of the Real, such that Schwartz staticizes the social order to the same degree that the narcissistic child idealizes the primordial mother.

Why does Schwartz imagine the social order, prior to the introduction of political correctness and identity politics, as a synchronized, harmonious, and infallible system? In this sense, political correctness and identity politics represent the only obstacle to society’s smooth functionality. This cannot possibly be true. There are plenty of institutional factors that prevent the smooth functionality of society (e.g., bureaucratic red tape, corruption, miscommunication, etc.), but Schwartz has latched onto the factor (i.e., political correctness and identity politics) that most acutely threatens his access to the primordial mother, the institutional legitimacy associated with his academic accolades. Schwartz reveals his personal stake in the project of discrediting and dismantling identity-based discourse: his strategy for attaining mother’s love (i.e., identification with the post-Oedipal father) is invalidated by political correctness and identity politics. If the academy is fraught with white privilege and racism, Schwartz’s accomplishments suddenly become impugned, which, in turn, calls into question his entire career. This should explain, for the most part, why Schwartz’s first scholarly foray into political correctness studied its impact on the university [12]. Just as Seshadri-Crooks’s [4] account of whiteness demonstrates its unconscious desire for achieving wholeness through a particular image of humanity, Schwartz unconsciously desires a complete symbolic order that denies the existence of Reality (i.e., the destabilizing, disruptive force of jouissance) and ensures the death of the subject (i.e., the lack of a lack or a missing signifier). In general, he violently assimilates the remainder of subjectivity into the extant identity categories of the symbolic order, foreclosing the possibility of the subject’s engagement in the political from her individual standpoint.

Albeit not advocating for the preservation of the extant social order, Žižek [2]takes issue with the “individual standpoint” of identity-based discourse from which demands are made upon the political. In The Ticklish Subject, Žižek depicts the political as a breeding ground for the universalization of particular stances, including anti-authoritarian proposals that transcend the plight of any specific group of people. For instance, Žižek invokes the example of “four journalists [being] arrested and brought to trial by the Yugoslav Army in Slovenia in 1988”; indeed, he expresses dismay at the literal interpretation of the resulting slogan “Justice for the four accused!” because it minimized and trivialized the political struggle to nothing more than a legal dispute between several journalists and a state apparatus (207–208). Conversely, Žižek highlights the universal implications of the slogan, placing the interests of free speech, free press, and a fair trial at the forefront of political decision-making. This universalization of the particular accorded to the normal progression of politics by Žižek stands in stark contrast to the particularization of the universal by identity-based discourse: “This is politics proper: the moment in which a particular demand … starts to function as the metaphoric condensation of the global restructuring of the entire social space … [which diametrically opposes] postmodern ‘identity politics’ … that is, the assertion of one’s particular identity, of one’s proper place within the social structure” (208). Žižek, however, overlooks the importance of intersectionality in the construction of identity within the political and the unconscious desire resting at the center of identity politics, namely the non-existence of the Other’s Other.

Žižek, thus, neglects the unconscious desire residing within the discursive formation of identity politics, involving the exposure of the social order’s incompleteness (in contrast to suturing – that is, attempting to complete, finalize, or totally and definitively determine – the social order in a manner that resembles the discursive formation of whiteness). Even though identity-based discourse presupposes the pervasiveness and ubiquitous nature of oppression experienced by marginalized groups (i.e., enabling its identification of transnational forms of marginalization), intersectionality routinely usurps the intersubjective agreement underlying individuals’ identifications with existing categorization schemas. In turn, identity politics undercuts itself through the destabilization of agreed-upon narratives concerning oppression, such that racism, xenophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc. function in a similar fashion across disparate contexts but differ in functionality at the intersection of individual political experience. To put otherwise, the extimate aspect of the Real belonging to identity politics, at its zero-point, structures the semiotic field of differential relations while also, at the same level, representing the discursive point at which the semiotic field loses coherency.

The neologism of “extimacy” signifies the most intimate aspect of a discursive formation, organizing and managing the semiotic relations between each term’s signified and the master signifier, and the excluded middle from the core of a discursive formation, representing the Thing around which a discourse revolves and from which a discourse requires the greatest amount of distance to maintain the fantasy of consistency. Žižek [13], in Metastases of Enjoyment, describes the “ex-timate” as the “inherent decentrement of the field of signification” (29). A confrontation with the center paradoxically results in a decentering of itself. In the case of identity politics, marginalized subjects strive for a clear and distinct perception into the underlying structure of the social order, rendering the patterns of oppression intelligible. The discursive formation of identity politics, in short, assumes the existence of an Other to the Other, an undergirding, discernible rhyme, reason, or pattern to comprehending the social order in its totality. In order to completely chart the experience of oppression by each and every marginalized subject, however, the individual must understand the intersection of oppressive apparatuses (and associated identity categories) for constructing her experience of the political. Intersectionality, though, irrevocably obfuscates the machinations of the social order writ large, perpetually complicating the vision of oppression to, in some cases, incomprehensibility (i.e., similar to Schwartz’s [1] criticism of political correctness, even though the intersubjective dimension renders individual experience comprehensible once again). Intersectionality exposes the incompleteness of the social order; that is, it does not simply shuffle the puzzle pieces before the puzzle has almost been completed, but rather, it illuminates the inexorable absence of puzzle pieces that dooms the project of “completing the puzzle.”

Intersectionality introduces an aleatory element into the discursive formation of identity politics, unknowingly yet always residing in the background of signification (i.e., the unconscious). Žižek’s imputation of sterility to identity politics, then, misses the death drive lurking underneath the facade of a tranquil exterior. It is not the case that identity politics merely leaves things as they are; instead, it contains a disruptive force (i.e., intersectionality) that impugns the field of signification within the extant social order. For a similar reason, the piecemeal approach that filters identity categories (e.g., race and gender) through existing psychoanalytic concepts excludes the extimacy of identity politics, or the intersectional indeterminacy of meaning according to individual experience. Seshadri-Crooks’s [4] psychoanalytic intervention into the concept of “race,” albeit instructive and facilitative for expressing the extimacy of whiteness, emblematizes the problematic character of the gradual approach to psychoanalyzing identity politics, such that Seshadri-Crooks reveals the purely symbolic character of racial distinctions in a vacuum (i.e., abstracted from other forms of identification that constitute the meaning of racial distinctions). Her (dis)closure of racial signification within the social order denies the complexity associated with the Real of intersectionality. Furthermore, her analysis of “whiteness” unwittingly reproduces its unconscious desire by obscuring the Real(ity) of identity politics; that is, after exposing the lack of the Real at the heart of whiteness (i.e., the unfounded character of phenotypic distinctions between racial groups), Seshadri-Crooks does not necessarily produce an “anxious” reaction in its adherents (i.e., an encounter with the lack of a lack) because the Real of identity politics remains a feasible option for whiteness to legitimize itself.

In turn, a more comprehensive psychoanalysis of the relationship between systems of oppression, including whiteness, and the dimensions of identity politics, including intersectionality, must be conducted. Even though Seshadri-Crooks and others (e.g., Juliet Flower MacCannell [3], Joan Copjec [14], etc.) have blazed the trail for the psychoanalysis of identity-based discourse, intersectionality offers a novel pathway for understanding its intricacies while also, unfortunately, providing a dangerous source of justification for oppressive apparatuses. For instance, the analyses of race and gender undertaken by psychoanalysts illuminate the heinous characters of whiteness, patriarchy, and neoliberalism, but the intersectional analysis of “being-black,” “being-a-man,” and “being-impoverished,” for instance, has inspired a rational calculus for coding and assessing the likelihood of an individual’s deviance from the mandates of the social order. To put otherwise, the Real of identity politics enables resistance against oppressive apparatuses by tracing patterns of marginalization, but it also enables the smooth functionality of these apparatuses by isolating and identifying potential “threats” to its reproduction. As Seshadri-Crooks [4] notes, whiteness appropriates the Real for the sake of fortifying its logic of domination, and the discursive element of intersectionality represents another avenue for co-opting the Real in order to bolster itself (59). I will pursue a contemporary pathway to make sense of the aforementioned phenomenon: a (psycho)analysis of racism in American public discourse with respect to the murder of an unarmed black man.

4. Psychoanalyzing the public response to Ahmaud Arbery’s death

A series of questions are asked by the American public when a police officer kills an unarmed black citizen. Each of these questions reveals a network of signifiers within which the prevailing ideological apparatus makes sense of the killing; that is, these questions disclose an underlying layer of assumptions pertaining to the (wrongful) actions of the deceased. The field of signification, in short, is always-already predisposed to attribute blame, guilt, and fault to the “suspect” as opposed to the law enforcer. In particular, I will analyze the case of Ahmaud Arbery, who was killed by an ex-police officer and his son while jogging through a suburban neighborhood in Brunswick, Georgia. Due to spatial constraints, I will only address one of the questions normally asked by the American public in the aftermath of a provocative civilian/law enforcement interaction. This question, however, most centrally relates to the aforementioned problem of the symbolic appropriation of the Real, namely the ways in which the master signifier claims the Real for itself and its logic of domination.

After the lethal encounter between law enforcers and unarmed black citizens, some might ask: could the deceased have avoided the encounter with law enforcement? Instead of exhibiting a pattern of racial animus, as the thinking goes, the policing apparatus coincidentally kills unarmed black citizens. It is merely a case of being “at the wrong place at the wrong time.” If Arbery had not jogged through that particular residential area on that particular day, according to the modal assumptions underlying the question, he would not have been killed. This mode of rationalizing the death of Arbery, however, fails to pierce the veil of contingency that conceals the necessity of policing in its targeting and racial profiling of black citizens. In other words, the chain of signification linking “black” with “criminality” makes the racist attributions of “dangerous,” “aggressive,” and “unreasonable” possible across every context within which a law enforcer interacts with black citizens. The motivation for the shooters pursuing Arbery after spotting him in their neighborhood, after all, was the universal instantiation of blackness in the particular body of Ahmaud Arbery. The irrelevant spatiotemporal particularity obscures the relevant particularity of Arbery’s embodiment; that is, the relevant particular is mediated by the universal and vice versa. Arbery’s exhibition of blackness sufficiently incited the shooters’ mobilization and persecution without consideration for his particular manifestation of blackness. Indeed, one of the shooters was accused of using racial epithets while standing over Arbery’s deceased body, indicating his general racial animus in contrast to a specific concern for Arbery’s presence in the neighborhood [15].

As particularity serves as an ideological conduit for universality, contingency serves as an ideological conduit for necessity. The former case demonstrates the intimate connection between the universal property of “blackness” and the particular subject who happens to bear the universal property, such that the latter becomes the central locus for explicating the authority of law enforcement and the former becomes a secondary, coincidental concern. Similarly, as Žižek [13] notes, the contingent and necessary co-constitute one another in a dialectical fashion, but the pinnacle of necessity presents itself as contingency: “the acme of the dialectic of necessity and contingency arrives in the assertion of the contingent character of necessity as such” (36). By making sense of Arbery’s death through the “wrong place, wrong time” explanation, the invocation of contingency masks the underlying necessity associated with the semiotics of policing. Neither the place nor the time captures the fatal confluence of events leading to Arbery’s death; rather, an explanation beginning from the standpoint of Arbery’s particular manifestation of the universal property of “blackness” more accurately pinpoints the causal chain of events culminating in Arbery’s death. Additionally, the dialectical interaction between necessity and contingency appears in the context of, what I call, “statistical intersectionality.” At the conclusion of the previous section, I discussed the ways in which the Real often becomes coopted by the symbolic order for the sake of fortifying itself against dissension. Seshadri-Crooks [4], for instance, identified the appropriation of phenotypic differences between races in order to validate the persistence of racial classifications in naturalistic discourse. The symbolic, in short, shapes the Real to justify its supremacy, and the Real of identity politics (i.e., intersectionality) is no different.

With the advent of intersectional analyses of oppression, the assailed symbolic order has incorporated the categorical designations of intersectionality into statistical descriptions of criminality, violence, and aggression. “Black-on-black crime” is a striking example of the symbolic appropriation of intersectionality by whiteness [16]. Intersectionality, to reiterate, foregrounds an analysis of identity-based oppression at the crossing-point of marginalized signifiers; in turn, black-on-black crime (which also carries the assumption of male-on-male violence) adopts the perspective of intersectionality (through a concerted effort to understand the political situation of black identity in America) in order to demonstrate the extraordinary violence within black communities, absolving whiteness of any historical or contemporary role. Racial injustice is not the problem, as black-on-black crime indicates; instead, the black community sows the seeds of its own destruction. There is a litany of issues with the signifier at issue, but I would like to focus on the position of black-on-black crime within the dialectic of necessity and contingency. In Lacanian terms, “contingency” represents the saturation point, remainder, and leftover component of “necessity” as an ideological narrative, an implicit extension of Žižek’s Hegelian analysis. Necessity disguises itself through the semblance of contingency: black-on-black crime highlights the violence emanating from within the black community, an internal chain of cause and effect wholly unaffected by external factors (i.e., racism, over-policing, poverty, etc.). Black communities, to fully present the racist presupposition underneath the signifier at hand, are said to ultimately introduce, choose, and foster criminality within their neighborhoods, selecting a non-necessary, contingent formation of social organization.

Historical forces that constitute the overwhelming influence of “necessity” on the formation of black communities (e.g., slavery, redlining, segregation, etc.) become blurred by the rationalization of black-on-black crime as a “contingent” explication of troublesome conditions in black communities. As contingency entirely supplants necessity, black communities (in accordance with the aforementioned narrative) could have constructed themselves in a different fashion, but they simply chose to be violent, dangerous, and crime-ridden. Black-on-black crime, in effect, effaces the historical discrimination preceding and currently surrounding the construction of black communities, localizing criminality within the black body itself and again completing the chain of signification linking those signifiers. Arbery’s case does not stray from the demonstrated play of necessity and contingency. The fantastical motto of “wrong place, wrong time” shifts blame from a racially-motivated law enforcement system (necessity) to a black man jogging through a neighborhood (contingency), such that citizens can inquire into the contingency of Arbery’s actions while, in the background, hinting at the necessity of his vulnerability: “what was he even doing there?,” “why didn’t he jog in his own neighborhood?,” “couldn’t he have jogged elsewhere?”

5. Conclusion

I have briefly indicated the subtle manner through which the symbolic order of whiteness weaponizes the Real for its own justification (i.e., statistical intersectionality). This analysis only arises from the presuppositions presented at the beginning of my investigation. First, identity politics taps into the Real through its dialectic of intersubjectivity and intersectionality, as the latter represents the death drive of the former. Second, recent psychoanalytic forays into the discursive formation of identity politics have proven woefully insufficient for capturing its unconscious machinations: a surface-level affirmation to discern the meaning of being-X with, simultaneously, the undermining, subterranean negation of any discernible meaning for being-X. Those who deny the validity of identity politics (Schwartz and Žižek) overlook its destabilizing tendencies, and those who embrace the validity of identity politics (Seshadri-Crooks and MacCannell) overlook the importance of intersectionality in determining (and making indeterminate) the meaning of identity in the political. Finally, the Real of identity politics has become the instrument for legitimizing the symbolic order: through intersectional analyses of violence (e.g., black-on-black crime), a series of oppressive apparatuses, such as over-policing, have been thoroughly legitimized. Future psychoanalytic investigations should adopt a similar methodological approach, namely through a recognition of identity politics as a destabilizing force in relation to the symbolic order and, resultantly, an acknowledgement of the symbolic order’s manipulation of identity politics.