#derek hook

It is the free men, the truly free men, who are mad. There is no demand for the petit a, he holds it, it is what he calls his voices, for instance. […] He does not cling to the locus of the Other, the big Other, through the object a, he has it at his disposal. […] Let’s say that he has his cause in his pocket, and that is why he is mad. (Lacan, 1967, p. 10)

[W]hile it is true, as [Christopher] Bollas notes, that the ‘negative hallucination’ of treating the other as invisible is itself an instance of racism, it is nonetheless true that there is typically considerable affective investment by the racist in their object. Never merely apathetic or indifferent, the ‘hate’ of racism always connotes a more active involvement, a far greater imaginative interest. [Sara] Ahmed makes much the same point in her analysis of racism: hate is a form of intimacy which involves powerful negative attachments to others. She cites Holbrook: ‘where there is hate there is obviously an excessive need for the object’. It is for this reason that we need be wary of implying, as is often the case in more intuitive ideas about racism, that the racist maintains a kind of exalted exteriority from their object. [Frantz] Fanon’s idea of the phobogenic object of racism makes this perfectly clear: the target of racism remains criss-crossed not only with relations of disgust, repulsion and denigration, but with potent relations of allure, exoticism and desire. Each such aspect of this ambivalent object-relationship needs to remain in place if we are to understand anything of the volatility of racist affect: the multiple paradoxes of anxiety yet attraction, contempt yet desire, abjection yet sexual curiosity. The anxious, fearful, paranoid and hateful impulses of racism are thus thought to be conditioned by an unregistered attraction which is so unpalatable to the subject in question that it must be fended off at all costs, remaining unconscious in form.

Libidinal economy, for Freud, is a fundamental vector of group identification; the push-pull cohesion of its (symbolic) ego-ideal and (imaginary) ideal-ego investments is precisely what proves constitutive of social bonds. Of course a libidinal economy, like political fantasy itself, permits for a degree of individual variation. Not everyone enthralled by the same fantasy dreams the same dream, just as not everyone in the hold of fantasmatic racist notions is as invested, as passionate in such beliefs. That being said, the fact such an economy remains tied to the Other (of prevailing societal-historical norms, ideological values, etc.) means that a regularity of sorts is nonetheless obtained in such fantasies. Rather than existing in a primary or unmediated form affects always ‘find their feet’ within a symbolic universe that is thoroughly saturated by laws of custom, structure, exchange. [Marshall W.] Alcorn suggests that we need be attentive to the libidinal power of language in ‘its potential for attachments, attraction, organizations, repulsions and bindings that create … stable sites of identification’. This description informs a provisional definition of libidinal economy as a force-field of affects; a set of regular patterns and distributions of libido underwritten by a symbolic frame; which entails relations of passionate attachment and exclusion; that affirms types of group identification and holds certain social formations in place.

[T]he superego, for Lacan, must be seen as inducing, commanding jouissance. The superego can thus be seen as what effectively binds law and enjoyment. It ensures that the Symbolic ego-ideals of a society—of the Other—are effectively implemented and taken up as passionate investments. Consider, for example, the disdain that so often accompanies reports of political corruption in Africa. The fact that such charges may well be justified in no way prevents such a speaking position from channeling racist jouissance. We might consider also the moral outrage that accompanies the many appalling news stories we are daily exposed to (reports of the hubris and greed of Wall Street, of mass-scale environmental pollution, the daily misdemeanors of Donald Trump, etc.). While there is much here rightly deserving of interrogation, it is also true what makes such stories newsworthy is their capacity to induce enjoyment. This, in many instances, is what stirs us into action: the jouissance invoked by such accounts, a jouissance that is combined with less honorable sentiments (hate, the desire to see perpetrators punished, etc.). The gratification of these potent affects underlies our cravings for justice. This profound connection between enjoyment and ego-ideals, and, as importantly, the superego, makes it clear that jouissance, certainly as it occurs within the social field, is never merely a variable of subjectivity or a function of personal identity. The link between enjoyment and the superego also brings to light an aspect of racism that is frequently overlooked. Racism is not merely—as much psychological thinking may have it—a set of affective responses, a collection of inter-subjective relations, or a composite array of attitudes and prejudices. Racism pivots also on a series of ideological values which, crucially, involve a potent “moral” dimension. Such an idea is overlooked in popular impressions of racism as ignorance, unfounded hate, or intolerance. While racism may indeed be all of these things, it is also a type of indignation; it entails the impetus to blame and punish; and it involves a sense of laws, of norms and ideals that have been violated. This is something we can perhaps credit Adorno et al. (1950) for intuiting in their theory of the authoritarian personality: racism often takes the form of a distorted and jouissance-infused (or superegoic) type of “morality.” The other is seen as flaunting traditional or cultural values; as lacking in moral values; as aberrant; as criminal. Stressing the connection between enjoyment and the law helps remind us that in Lacanian terms, the law—society itself—needs jouissance to function. Simply put: racist social structures depend upon the mobilization of jouissance. Racist enjoyment then, like other social modes of jouissance, is not merely elicited or contextualized by social structures; jouissance extends, enforces, drives those very social structures.