Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S.

Antagonisms
1
Chapter Two
The Narc i s s i s ti c Sl ave

A Culture of Politics
In the Introduction and the preceding chapter, we have seen how the aporia between
Black being and political ontology has existed since Arab and European enslavement of
Africans, and how the need to craft an ensemble of questions through which to arrive at an
unflinching paradigmatic analysis of political ontology is repeatedly thwarted in its attempts
to find a language that can express the violence of slave-making, a violence that is both
structural and performative. Humanist discourse, the discourse whose epistemological
machinations provide our conceptual frameworks for thinking political ontology, is diverse
and contrary. But for all its diversity and contrariness it is sutured by an implicit rhetorical
consensus that violence accrues to the Human body as a result of transgressions, whether
real or imagined, within the Symbolic Order. That is to say, Humanist discourse can only
think a subjects relation to violence as a contingency and not as a matrix that positions the
subject. Put another way, Humanism has no theory of the slave because it imagines a subject
who has been either alienated in language (Lacan) and/or alienated from his/her
cartographic and temporal capacities (Marx). It cannot imagine an object who has been
positioned by gratuitous violence and who has no cartographic and temporal capacities to
losea sentient being for whom recognition and incorporation is impossible. In short,
political ontology, as imagined through Humanism, can only produce discourse that has as
its foundation alienation and exploitation as a grammar of suffering, when what is needed
(for the Black, who is always already a slave) is an ensemble of ontological questions that has
as its foundation accumulation and fungibility as a grammar of suffering (Hartman).
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The violence of the Middle Passage and the slave estate (Spillers), technologies of
accumulation and fungibility, recompose and reenact their horrors upon each succeeding
generation of Blacks. This violence is both gratuitous, that is, it is not contingent upon
transgressions against the hegemony of civil society; and structural, in that it positions Blacks
ontologically outside of humanity and civil society. Simultaneously, it renders the ontological
status of humanity (life itself) wholly dependent on civil societys repetition compulsion: the
frenzied and fragmented machinations through which civil society reenacts gratuitous
violence upon the Blackthat civil society might know itself as the domain of humans
generation after generation.
Again, we need a new language of abstraction to explain this horror. The explanatory
power of Humanist discourse is bankrupt in the face of the Black. It is inadequate and
inessential to, as well as parasitic on, the ensemble of questions which the dead but sentient
thing, the Black, struggles to articulate in a world of living subjects. My work on film, cultural
theory, and political ontology marks my attempt to contribute to this often fragmented and
constantly assaulted quest to forge a language of abstraction with explanatory powers
emphatic enough to embrace the Black, an accumulated and fungible object, in a human
world of exploited and alienated subjects.
The imposition of Humanisms assumptive logic has encumbered Black film studies
to the extent that it is underwritten by the assumptive logic of White or non-Black film
studies. This is a problem of Cultural Studies writ large. In this chapter, I want to offer a
brief illustration of how we might attempt to break the theoretical impasse between, on the
one hand, the assumptive logic of Cultural Studies and, on the other hand, the theoretical
aphasia to which Cultural Studies is reduced when it encounters the (non)ontological status
of the Black. I will do so not by launching a frontal attack against White film theory, in
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
3
particular, or even Cultural Studies broadly speaking, but by interrogating Jacques Lacan
because Lacanian psychoanalysis is one of the twin pillars that shoulders film theory and
Cultural Studies.
i

My problem with Cultural Studies is that when it theorizes the interface between
Blacks and Humans it is hobbled in its attempts to (a) expose power relationships and (b)
examine how relations of power influence and shape cultural practice. Cultural Studies insists
upon a grammar of suffering which assumes that we are all positioned essentially by way of the
Symbolic Order, what Lacan calls the wall of languageand as such our potential for stasis
or change (our capacity for being oppressed or free) is overdetermined by our universal
ability or inability to seize and wield discursive weapons. This idea corrupts the explanatory
power of most socially engaged films and even the most radical line of political action
because it produces a cinema and a politics that cannot account for the grammar of suffering
of the Blackthe Slave. To put it bluntly, the imaginative labor (Jared Sexton 2003) of cinema,
political action, and Cultural Studies are all afflicted with the same theoretical aphasia. They
are speechless in the face of gratuitous violence.
This theoretical aphasia is symptomatic of a debilitated ensemble of questions
regarding political ontology. At its heart are two registers of imaginative labor. The first
register is that of description, the rhetorical labor aimed at explaining the way relations of
power are named, categorized, and explored. The second register can be characterized as
prescription, the rhetorical labor predicated on the notion that everyone can be emancipated
through some form of discursive, or symbolic, intervention.
But emancipation through some form of discursive or symbolic intervention is
wanting in the face of a subject position that is not a subject positionwhat Marx calls a
speaking implement or what Ronald Judy calls an interdiction against subjectivity. In
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
4
other words, the Black has sentient capacity but no relational capacity. As an accumulated and
fungible object, rather than an exploited and alienated subject, the Black is openly vulnerable
to the whims of the world; and so is his/her cultural production. What does it mean
what are the stakeswhen the world can whimsically transpose ones cultural gestures, the
stuff of symbolic intervention, onto another worldly good, a commodity of style? Fanon
echoes this question when he writes, I came into the world imbued with the will to find a
meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and
then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects (BSWM 109). Fanon clarifies
this assertion and alerts us to the stakes which the optimistic assumptions of Film Studies
and Cultural Studies, the counter-hegemonic promise of alternative cinema, and the
emancipatory project of coalition politics cannot account for, when he writes: Ontology
once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the waysidedoes not permit us to
understand the being of the black (110).
This presents a challenge to film production and to film studies given their
cultivation and elaboration by the imaginative labor of Cultural Studies, underwritten by the
assumptive logic of Humanism; because if everyone does not possess the DNA of culture,
that is, (a) time and space transformative capacity, (b) a relational status with other Humans
through which ones time and space transformative capacity is recognized and incorporated,
and (c) a relation to violence that is contingent and not gratuitous, then how do we theorize
a sentient being who is positioned not by the DNA culture but by the structure of gratuitous
violence? How do we think outside of the conceptual framework of subalternitythat is,
outside of the explanatory power of Cultural Studiesand think beyond the pale of
emancipatory agency by way of symbolic intervention?
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I am calling for a different conceptual framework, predicated not on the subject-
effect of cultural performance but on the structure of political ontology; one that allows us
to substitute a politics of culture for a culture of politics. The value in this rests not simply in the
way it would help us re-think cinema and performance, but in the way it can help us theorize
what is at present only intuitive and anecdotal: the unbridgeable gap between Black being
and Human life. To put a finer point on it, such a framework might enhance the explanatory
power of theory, art, and politics by destroying and perhaps restructuring, the ethical range
of our current ensemble of questions. This has profound implications for non-Black film
studies, Black film studies, and African American Studies writ large because they are
currently entangled in a multicultural paradigm that takes an interest in an insufficiently
critical comparative analysisthat is, a comparative analysis which is in pursuit of a coalition
politics (if not in practice then at least as an theorizing metaphor) which, by its very nature,
crowds out and forecloses the Slaves grammar of suffering.

The Dilemmas of Black Film Studies
In the wake of the post-Civil Rights, post-Black Power backlash a small but growing
coterie of Black theorists have returned to Fanons astonishing claim that ontologyonce
it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the waysidedoes not permit us to understand
the being of the black man [sic]. For not only must the black man be black; but he must be
black in relation to the white man [sic] (BSWM 110). Though they do not form anything as
ostentatious as a school of thought, and though their attitude toward and acknowledgment
of Fanon does not make for an easy consensus, the moniker Afro-Pessimists neither
infringes upon their individual differences nor exaggerates their fidelity to a shared set of
assumptions. It should be noted that of the Afro-PessimistsHortense Spillers, Ronald
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Judy, David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Achille Mbembe, Frantz Fanon, Kara Keeling, Jared
Sexton, Joy James, Lewis Gordon, George Yancey, and Orlando Pattersononly Yancey
and Patterson are social scientists. The rest come out of the Humanities. Fanon, of course,
was a doctor of psychiatry. Reading them, and connecting the dots at the level of shared
assumptions, rather than the content of their work or their prescriptive gestures (if any) it
becomes clear that though their work holds the intellectual protocols of unconscious
identification accountable to structural positionality, it does so in a way that enriches, rather
than impoverishes, how we are able to theorize unconscious identification. That is to say
that though meditations on unconscious identifications and preconscious interests may be
their starting point (i.e., how to cure hallucinatory whitening [Fanon], and how to think
about the Black/non-Black divide that is rapidly replacing the Black/White divide [Yancey])
they are, in the first instance, theorists of structural positionality.
ii

The Afro-Pessimists are theorists of Black positionality who share Fanons insistence
that, though Blacks are indeed sentient beings, the structure of the entire worlds semantic
fieldregardless of cultural and national discrepanciesleaving as Fanon would say,
existence by the waysideis sutured by anti-Black solidarity. Unlike the solution-oriented,
interest-based, or hybridity-dependent scholarship so fashionable today, Afro-Pessimism
explores the meaning of Blackness notin the first instanceas a variously and
unconsciously interpellated identity or as a conscious social actor, but as a structural position
of non-communicability in the face of all other positions; this meaning is non-communicable
because, again, as a position, Blackness is predicated on modalities of accumulation and
fungibility, not exploitation and alienation. Unfortunately, neither Black nor White Film
Theory seems to have made this shift from exploitation and alienation as that which
positions Film Theorys universal cinematic subject to genocide, accumulation, and
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
7
fungibility as modalities of gratuitous violence which positions the Slave. In this respect, Film
Theory mystifies structural antagonisms and acts as an accomplice to social and political stability. Even the
bulk of Black Film Theory is predicated on an assumptive logic of exploitation and
alienation, rather than accumulation and fungibility, when regarding the ontological status of
the Black.
Film Theory, as concerns Black American cinema between 1967 and the present, is
marked by several characteristics. Nearly all of the books and articles are underwritten by a
sense of urgency regarding the tragic history and bleak future of a group of people marked
by slavery in the Western Hemisphere; this, they would all agree, is the constitutive element
of the word Black. To this end, most are concerned with how cinematic representation
hastens that bleak future or intervenes against it. Cinema then, has pedagogic value, or,
perhaps more precisely, pedagogic potential. Broadly speaking, Black film theory hinges on
these questions: What does cinema teach Blacks about Blacks? What does cinema teach
Whites (and others) about Blacks? Are those lessons dialogic with Black liberation or with
our further, and rapidly repetitive, demise?
Given the period under consideration, the writing of Black film theorists tends to
share a common anxiety as regards the status of the filmic text and the nature of its
coherence. But lets keep in mind a point that Ill expand upon below: the ground of that
anxiety has to do with the films hegemonic valueas though there are representations that
will make Black people safe, representations which will put us in danger, representations
which will make us ideologically aware and those which will give us false consciousness. For
many, a good deal of emphasis is put on the interpellative power of the film itself.
In Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video, Valerie Smith notes two dominant
trends: the first impulse reads authentic as synonymous with positive and seeks to
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8
supplant representations of Black lasciviousness and irresponsibility with respectable
ones. To this end, she notes Gordon Parks The Learning Tree (1968) and Michael Schulzs
Cooley High (1975). But she adds that one can also find this impulse manifest in the films of
certain White directors: Stanley Kramers Home of the Brave (1949) and Guess Whos Coming to
Dinner (1967), Norman Jewisons In the Heat of the Night (1967), and John Sayles Passion Fish
(1992). The second impulse is unconcerned with demonstrating the extent to which Black
characters can conform to received, class-coded notions of respectability. Rather, it equates
authenticity either with the freedom to seize and reanimate types previously coded as
negative (i.e. the criminal or the buffoon) or with the presence of cultural practices rooted
in Black vernacular experience (jazz, gospel, rootworking, religion, etc.). Duke Ellingtons
Black and Tan (1929) is an early example; thenafter the two Great Migrationsthe urban-
as-authentic Blaxploitation films of the late 60s and the 1970s and finally the new jack
pictures of the 1990s: New Jack City (1991) and Menace II Society (1993).
She claims that not only has Black filmmaking been preoccupied with a response to
negative visual representation but that this preoccupation has overdetermined criticism of
Black film, as well: i.e., identifying and critiquing the recurrence of stereotyped
representations in Hollywood films, Bogles Toms, Coons, Mulattoes and Cripps work
inventoried the reproduction of certain types of Black characters in visual media. Smith
calls these texts groundbreaking but says, they also legitimated a binarism in the discourse
around strategies of Black representation that has outlived its usefulness. Furthermore, she
elaborates:
Granted, despite their constructedness, media representations of members of
historically disenfranchised communities reflect and, in turn, affect the lived
circumstances of real people. But the relationship between media
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representations and real life is nothing if not complex and discontinuous;
to posit a one-to-one correspondence between the inescapability of certain
images and the uneven distribution of recourse within culture is to deny the
elaborate ways in which power is maintained and deployed (3).
The problem with the positive/negative debate, as Smith and a Second Wave (my
shorthand) of Black film theorists like bell hooks, James Snead, and Manthia Diawara see it,
is first that the debate focuses critical scrutiny on the ways in which Blacks have been
represented in Hollywood films at the expense of analytical, theoretical, and/or historical
work on the history of Black-directed cinema. Second, it presupposes consensus about what
a positive or negative (or authentic) image actually is. Hardworking, middle-class,
heterosexual Blacks may be positive to some Black viewers but reprehensible (if only for the
fact that they are totalizing) to the Black gay and lesbian community. Third, it focuses
viewer attention on the existence of certain types and not on the more significant questions
around what kind of narrative or ideological work that type is meant to perform (3).
Donald Bogles Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of
Blacks in American Films reveals the way in which the image of Blacks in American movies has
changed and also the (he would say shocking) way in which it has remained the same. In
1973, Bogles study was the first history of Black performers in American film. Bogle notes
that only one other formal piece of work had been written before his, the Englishman
Peter Nobles The Negro in Films, written in the 1940s. Bogle doesnt say whether this is an
article or a book (the impression one gets is that it is an article) and goes on to dismiss it as
so much the typical, unintentionally patronizing, white liberal tasteful approach (27). By
his own admission Toms, Coons is as much a history of the contributions of Black
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10
performers in American film as it is a statement of his own evolving aesthetic and
perspective.
Bogles book is acknowledged by many as a classic and definitive study of Black
images in Hollywood. I would prefer classic and exhaustiveleaving the adjective
definitive for James Sneads three-times-shorter White Screens, Black Images. Bogles tome is
more of a historical inventory (and were all grateful to him for it) than a history or a
historiography. If there was a Black person who had a speaking role in a Hollywood film,
s/he is more than likely inventoried in Bogles book. Prior to this inventory, not only was
there not a published cinematic record of so many of the Black stars in the first seventy years
of the 20
th
century, but for many of them, as Bogle points out in the first half of his book,
there was no public record of them as people: [T]he lives of early Black performersusually
ended up so tragically, or so desperately unfulfilled, with Hollywood often contributing to
their tragedies.One important Black actor ended his days as a redcap. Another became a
notorious Harlem pool-shark. Some became hustlers of all sorts. At least two vivacious
leading ladies ended up as domestic workers. Other Black luminaries drifted into alcoholism,
drugs, suicide, or bitter self-recrimination (42).
Bogles Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks, Thomas Crippss well known Black
Film as Genre, and Gladstone L. Yearwoods Black Film as a Signifying Practice: Cinema, Narration
and the African-American Aesthetic Tradition are three early examples of what I call First Wave
Black film theory (with the notable exception of Yearwood who began writing almost thirty
years after Bogle and Cripps) and decidedly emphatic voices that theorize the
emancipatory/pedagogic value of Black cinema from the text to the spectator. They stress
the need for more positive roles, types, and portrayals, while pointing out the intractable
presence of negative stereotypes in the film industrys depiction of Blacks (Snead). Here,
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however (again with the notable exception of Yearwood) semiotic, post-structuralist,
feminist, and psychoanalytic tools of the Political Modernists were neglected in their hunt
for the negative or positive image. Yearwoods work is an exception in that he in fact
utilizes the anti-essentialist tools of semiotics and post-structuralism in an effort to call for
an Afro-Centric, essentialist aesthetic.
Yearwood argues that Black film criticism is best understood as a 20
th
-century
development in the history of Black aesthetic thought. He maintains that Black filmmakers
use expressive forms and systems of signification that reflect the cultural and historical
priorities of the Black experience. In this way, the book resonates with much of what is
advanced in Diawaras volume of edited essays Black American Cinema. However, the Afro-
centrism of Yearwoods book, at times, seems to try to isolate the Black films narrational
processes from Black filmmakers positionality under the despotism of White supremacy.
Part One of Yearwoods book presents an overview of Black film and an
introduction to Black film culture. It surveys the emergence of the Black independent film
movement from the perspective of the Black cultural tradition. This marks a shift away from
much of what takes place in Diawaras Black American Cinema, which locates the emergence
of Black independent film in relation to certain political texts (like Frantz Fanons The
Wretched of the Earth) and domestic and international struggles for liberation and self-
determination. Yearwoods book gives a close reading of films at the level of the diegesis,
but it also betrays a kind of conceptual anxiety with respect to the historical object of
studyin other words, it clings, anxiously, to the film-as-text-as-legitimate object of Black
cinema. Yearwood writes:
The term Black cinema describes a specific body of films produced in the
African Diaspora which shares a common problematicA primary
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12
assumption is that Black culture is syncretic in nature and reflects hybridized
forms that are unique to the Americas. This process of creolization, which is
evident in African American classical music (Jazz), represents the forging of a
new ontology and epistemology. It is the product of cultural practices that
have developed from the experience of slavery, the struggle for freedom
from oppression and the recognition that interdependence is the key to our
survival. (5)
Later he notes:
As an expression that emanates from the heart of the African American
community, good Black film can represent that which is most unique and
best in Black culture. A good Black film can provide an intellectual challenge
and engage our cognitive faculties. It can often present incisive commentary
on social realities. (70)
These two quotes are emblematic of just how vague the aesthetic foundation of Yearwoods
attempt to construct a canon can be. Whats great about the book is its synthesis of so much
of the literature on Black film which precedes it (including Diawaras work). But in trying to
show how Black filmmakers differ from White filmmakers and how the Black film as text is
a standalone object, Yearwood reverts to conclusions general enough to apply to almost any
filmography and, furthermore, his claims are underwritten by the philosophical, and
semiotic, treatises of European (not African) theoreticians.
James Snead, Jacqueline Bobo, bell hooks, Valerie Smith, and Manthia Diawara
belong to what I call the Second Wave of Black film theorists who complicated the field
through the use of methodologies which (a) examine the film as a text, a discourse, and (b)
bring into this examination an exploration of cinemas subject-effects on implied spectators.
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The emphasis here should be on implied, for, in most cases, these books and articles are not
grounded in overt theories and methodologies of spectatorship. The advance, if you will, of
this body of work over that of Cripps and Bogle is twofold. First, these works challenged the
binarism of good/bad, positive/negative images of cinema. Thus, they opened the space for
the iconography of third positions like un-wed Black women, gangsters, gays, and lesbians to
enter into the Black cinematic family. Secondly, by way of sophisticated textual analyses,
they were able to show how Black images can be degraded and White images can be
monumentalized and made mythic, rather than simply making proclamations (good/bad)
based on uninterrogated values (i.e. nuclear family values, upward mobility values,
heterosexual values) already in the room. To put it plainly, they replaced social values as the
basis of cinematic interpretation with semiotic codes, and in so doing made central the
question of ideologymuch as White Political Modernists were doing on the heels of Lacan.
In A No-Theory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema, Tommy Lott reflects on
the paradoxes inherent in the very category of Black film. His claim: the essentialist criteria
by which a Black film is understood to be one directed by a person of African American
descent too frequently allows biological categories to stand in for ideological ones.
Conversely, aesthetically grounded definitions of Black film risk privileging independent
productions uncritically. With this direct political challenge to both Yearwood and Bogle, he
suggests that the notion of Third Cinema could be appropriated for Blacks. (Such
appropriation resembles how White film theorists developed the concept of counter-cinema
through their translations of Lacans writings on the psychoanalytic cure of full speech.)
Here is Lotts appropriation of Third Cinema for Black Americanshis response to the
identity politics of Bogle and Yearwood:
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What makes Third Cinema third (i.e., a viable alternative to Western cinema)
is not exclusively the racial makeup of a filmmaker, a films aesthetic
character, or a films intended audience, but rather a films political
orientation within the hegemonic structures of postcolonialism. When a film
contributes ideologically to the advancement of Black people, within a
context of systematic denial, the achievement of this political objective ought
to count as a criterion of evaluation on a par with any essentialist criterion.
(92)
Second Wave Black film theorists such as Snead, Lott, Smith, Diawara, and hooks
were able to bring a dimension to Black film theory that stemmed from their willingness to
interrogate not just the narrative in relation to time-worn tropes of Black upward mobility,
but also from their desire to interrogate cinematic formalism as well (i.e., mise-en-scene,
acoustics, editing strategies, lighting); in other words, cinema as an apparatus/institution in
relation to the derelict institutional status of Black people. But their drawback was in
perceiving Blackness as having either some institutional status or having the potential for
institutional status. They were not inclined to meditate on the archaic persistence of two key
ontological qualities of the legacy of slavery, namely, the condition of absolute captivity and
the state of virtual non-communication within official culture. Similarly, I take the recent
celebration of superstars Halle Berry and Denzel Washington in both the Black press and
the White critical establishment as symptomatic of a refusal or inability to countenance the
long shadow of slavery insofar as it writes a history of the present. That is, the heralding of
Black stardom, now disavowing its relation to long-standing cinematic stereotypes, is
founded upon a belief in not only the possibility of redress under White supremacy, but also
its relative ease. Central to this belief is an historical reduction of slavery to the relation of
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15
chattel and a formulation of Black emancipation and enfranchisement limited to the most
nominal dimensions of civil rights and liberties.
Embracing Black people's agency as subjects of the law (i.e., subjects of rights and
liberties), and even their potential to act as or partner with enforcers of the law (i.e., Denzel
Washington in Training Day), presents itself as an acting out of the historic paradox of Black
non-existence (i.e., the mutable continuity of social death). Here, Black "achievement" in
popular culture and the commercial arts requires the bracketing out of that non-existence in
hopes of telling a tale of loss that is intelligible within the national imagination (Hartman,
Position187). The insistence on Black personhood (rather than a radical questioning of the
terror embedded in that very notion) operates most poignantly in the examples discussed
through the problematic coding of gender and domesticity.
In perceiving Black folk as being alive, or at least having the potential to live in the
world, the same potential that any subaltern might have, the politics of Black film theorists
aesthetic methodology and desire disavowed the fact that:
[Black folk] are always already dead wherever you find them. The nurturing
haven of black culture which assured memory and provided a home beyond
the ravishing growth of capitalism is no longer. There cannot be any cultural
authenticity in resistance to capitalism. The illusion of immaterial purity is no
longer possible. It is no longer possible to be black against the system.
Black folk are dead, killed by their own faith in willfully being beyond, and in
spite of, power. (Ronald Judy, On the Question of Nigga Authenticity 212)
In short, a besetting hobble of the theorization itself is one which the theory shares
with many of the Black films it scrutinizes: both the films and the theory tend to posit a
possibility of, and a desire for, Black existence, instead of taking cognizance of the
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
16
ontological claim of the so-called Afro-Pessimists that Blackness is both that outside which
makes it possible for White and non-White (i.e., Asians and Latinos) positions to exist and,
simultaneously, contest existence. As such, not only is Blackness (slaveness) outside the
terrain of the White (the master) but it is outside the terrain of the subaltern. Unfortunately,
almost to a person, the film theorists in question see (i.e., their assumptive logic takes as
given) themselves as subjectsdominated, oppressed, downtrodden, reduced to subaltern
status, but subjects nonethelessin a world of other subjects.
iii

The assumptions that Black academics are subalterns within the academy (rather
than the slaves of their colleagues), slavery was a historical event long ended rather than
the ongoing paradigm of Black (non)existence, and that Black film theory can harness the
rhetorical strategy of simile are most prominent in the work of Second Wave Black film
theorists, who simply cant bear to live in the impasse of being an object and so turn to
hyper-coherent articulations of Third Cinema in order to propose a politics for cinematic
interpretation. Lott, for example, short-circuits what could otherwise be a profoundly
iconoclastic intervention, i.e., the proposal that the Third World can fight against domination
and for the return of their land as people with a narrative of repair, whereas slaves can only
fight against slaverythe for-something-else can only be theorized, if at all, in the process and
at the end of the requisite violence against the Settler/Master, not before (Fanon, Wretched
35-45). Despite having ventured into the first unfortunate movea need to communicate
with other groups of people through the positing of, and anxiety over, Black coherence
Lotts work does make brilliant interventions. Im saying, however, that not only does the
drive toward a presentation of a Black film canon show a desire to participate in the
institutionality of cinema, but the work itself shows a desire to participate in the
institutionality of academia. And participation is a register unavailable to slaves. Black film
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
17
theory, as an intervention, would have a more destructive impact if it foregrounded the
impossibility of a Black film, the impossibility of a Black film theory, the impossibility of a
Black film theorist, and the impossibility of a Black person except, and this is key, under
cleansing (Fanon) conditions of violence. Once real violence is coupled with
representational monstrosity (Spillers notion of a Black embrace of absolute vulnerability,
2003: 229), then and only then is there a possibility for Blacks to move from the status of
things to the status ofof what, well just have to wait and see.
In thinking the Black spectator as exploited rather than accumulated, the Second
Wave of Black film theorists failed to realize that slaves are not subalterns, because
subalterns are dominated, in the ontological first instance, by the machinations of hegemony
(of which cinema is a vital machine) and then, after some symbolic transgression, in other
words in the second instance, by violence. Blackness is constituted by violence in the
ontological first instance. This, Hortense Spillers reminds us, is the essence of Black being:
being for the captor (Spillers )the very antithesis of cultural expression or performative
agency.

Lacans Corrective
What is the essential arrangement of the subjects condition of un-freedom? Every
film theorist seems to have an answer (stated or implied) to this question. Though they
perceive the field of these answers to be of a wide variety (which they are at the level of
content) we could say that the structure of the subjects condition of un-freedom is imagined
along one or two shared vectors: the dispossession and stagnation within political economy
(Marx) and the dispossession and stagnation within libidinal economy (Lacan)sometimes a
combination thereof, but rarely are both weighted equally). This is the rebar of the
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
18
conceptual framework of film studies; and I would not be surprised if it was the same for
other theorizations that seek to (a) theorize dispossession and (b) theorize specific cultural
practices (i.e., counter-cinema or performance art) as modes of accompaniment for the
redress of said dispossession.
Jared Sexton describes libidinal economy as the economy, or distribution and
arrangement, of desire and identification (their condensation and displacement), and the
complex relationship between sexuality and the unconscious. Needless to say, libidinal
economy functions variously across scales and is as objective as political economy.
Importantly, it is linked not only to forms of attraction, affection and alliance, but also to
aggression, destruction, and the violence of lethal consumption. He emphasizes that it is
the whole structure of psychic and EMOTIONAL LIFE, something more than, but
inclusive of or traversed by, what Gramsci and other marxists call a STRUCTURE OF
FEELING; it is a dispensation of energies, concerns, points of attention, anxieties,
pleasures, appetites, revulsions, and phobias capable of both great mobility and tenacious
fixation.
iv

The remainder of this chapter interrogates the efficacy of aesthetic gestures in their
role as accompaniments to notions of emancipation within the libidinal economy (as
opposed to Gramscian emphasis on political economy). This is a high-stakes interrogation
because so much film theory (White, or, non-BlackHumanfilm theory) is in fee to
Lacan and his underlying thesis on subjectivity and psychic liberation. It does not seek to
disprove Lacans underlying theory of how the subject comes into subjectivity via alienation
within the Imaginary and the Symbolic; nor does it seek to disprove his understanding of
psychic stagnation (described as egoic monumentalization) as that condition from which the
subject (and by extension, the socius) must be liberated. Rather than attempt to disprove
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
19
Lacans (and, by extension non-Black film theorys) evidence and assumptive logic I seek to
show how, in aspiring to a paradigmatic explanation of relations, his assumptive logic
mystifies rather than clarifies a paradigmatic explanation of relations, for it has a vivid
account of the conflicts between genders, or, more broadly, between narcissistic
contemporaries and contemporaries who have learned to live in a deconstructive relation to
the egothat is to say, it offers a reliable toolbox for rigorously examining intra-Human
conflicts (and for proposing the aesthetic gestures, i.e., types of filmic practices, which either
exacerbate [Hollywood films] or redress [counter-cinema] these conflicts) but it has no
capacity to give a paradigmatic explanation of the structure of antagonisms between Blacks
and Humans. I argue that the claims and conclusions which Lacanian psychoanalysis (and by
extension non-Black film theory) makes regarding dispossession and suffering are (a)
insufficient to the task of delineating Black dispossession and suffering, and (b) parasitic on
that very Black dispossession and suffering for which it has no words.

In The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (Ecrits),
Lacan illustrates what remains to this day one of the most brilliant and comprehensive
scenarios for attaining what some believe to be the only bit of freedom we will ever know
(Silverman, World Spectators). Lacans value to psychoanalysis in particular and critical theory
in general was that he removed fear and loathing from the word alienation. Alienation, for
Lacan, is what literally makes subjectivity possible. Unlike Brecht, who saw alienation (some
prefer distancing) as the ideological effect of false consciousness, Lacan saw alienation as
the necessary context, the grid which makes human relations possible and divides the world
between those with sociability (subjects) and those without it (infanschildren, say, prior to
eighteen months of age). But on the grid of sociability, however, it is possible to imagine that
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
20
one exists in relation to signification as though words were windows on the worldor,
worse yet, the very things they signify. These, of course are the speech acts through which
the subject monumentalizes his/her presence in disavowal of the very loss of presence (lack)
which alienation has imposed upon him/her in exchange for a world with others. This is the
meaning of empty speech,
which Lacan consistently defines in opposition to full speech. [Empty
speech] is predicated upon the belief that we can be spatially and temporally
present to ourselves, and that language is a tool for effecting this self-
possession. But instead of leading to self-possession, empty speech is the
agency of an ever-growing dispossession. When we speak empty speech,
we lift ourselves out of time, and freeze ourselves into an object or statue
(Ibid. 43). We thereby undo ourselves as subjects. (Silverman, World Spectators
65-66)
Silverman goes on to explain empty speechs refusal of symbolization in a second sense [as]
what the analysand literally or metaphorically utters when he responds to the figural forms
through which the past returns as if their value and meaning were immanent within them
(66). In short, the analysand collapses the signifier with that which is signified and in so
doing seeks to entify or fill up the signifierto make it identical with itself (66). This
entification (or monumentalization) is the subjects refusal to surrender to temporality, the
fact that every psychically important event depends for its value and meaning upon reference
to an earlier or a later one. The analysand also fails to see that with his object-choices and
other libidinal acts he is speaking a language of desire. Empty speech is what the analysand
classically utters during the early stages of analysis (66).
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
21
But just as language, on the grid of alienation, can be assumed as the method
through which signifiers are entified and egos are monumentalized, so that the subject is
shielded from the fact of alienation, so language can also be that agency through which the
subject learns to live in a deconstructive relation to this alienationlearns to live with lack.
Rather than monumentalizing the image of a present and unified self, the subject can learn
instead to comprehend the symbolic relation that has positioned him/her.
The later stages of the analysis ideally bring the subject to full speech. The
analysand engages in full speech when he understands that his literal and
metaphoric words are in fact signifiersneither equivalent to things, nor
capable of saying what they are, but rather a retroaction to an anticipation
of other signifiers. Full speech is also speech in which the analysand
recognizes within what he has previously taken to be the here and now the
operations of a very personal system of significationthe operations, that is,
of what Lacan calls his primary language. (66)
As a description of suffering and a prescription for emancipation from suffering, the Lacanian notion
of full speech was a brake on what, in the 1950s, was becoming psychoanalysiss slippery
slope toward idealism and essentialism. Lacan cited three basic problems with the
psychoanalysis of the 1950s: object relations,
v
the role of counter transference, and the place
of fantasy (Jonathan Lee 32-33). In all of them, he noted the temptation for the analyst to
abandon the foundation of speech, and this precisely in areas where, because they border on
the ineffable, its use would seem to require a more than usually close examination (Ecrits
36).
The wall of language is a wall that, for Lacan, cannot be penetrated by the
analysand except in his/her a-subjective state, that is, either as an infans (that state of being
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
22
prior to alienation in the Symbolic) or as a corpse (that state of being after alienation
Death). Within the analytic context, there is nothing meaningful on the other side of
language. Beyond this wall, there is nothing for us but outer darkness. Does this mean that
we are entirely masters of the situation? Certainly not, and on this point Freud has
bequeathed us his testament on the negative therapeutic reaction (Ecrits 101). The analysand
jettisons his/her projected and imaginary relation to the analyst and comes to understand
where s/he is finally in relation to the analyst (which is outside of her/himself) and from the
place of the analyst (a stand-in for the Symbolic Order); s/he comes to hear his/her own
language and becomes an auditor in relation to his/her own speech. The analysis consists
of getting him to become conscious of his relations, not with the ego of the analyst, but with
all these Others who are his true interlocutors, whom he hasnt recognized. All these
Others are none other than the Lacanian contemporaries or, in the vernacular most salient to
the slave, Whites and their junior partners in civil societyHumans positioned by the
Symbolic Order. It is a matter of the subject progressively discovering which Other he is
truly addressing, without knowing it, and of him progressively assuming the relations of
transference at the place where he is, and where at first he didnt know he was (Lacan,
Seminar II 246). Again, there is no locating of subjectivity within oneself. Lacan is clear: one
cannot have a relationship with oneself. Instead, one comes to understand ones existence,
ones place outside of oneself, and it is in coming to understand ones place outside of
oneself that one can hear oneself and assume ones speechin other words, assume ones
desire.
Finally, Lacan was alarmed at how psychoanalysis was becoming more and more
concerned with exploring the analysands fantasiesa practice which, again, subordinated
exploration of the Symbolic to exploration of the Imaginary (Lee 33-34). The Imaginary
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
23
relation puts the analysand in an identificatory relation to the other, whether that other be
his/her own image, an external representation, or an outside other. This relation is one in
which the analysand allows the other to have only a fraction of otherness: the analysand
can barely apprehend the otherness of the other, because the psyche says, thats me. But
this is the worse kind of ruse and induces feelings of disarray and insufficiency, putting the
analysand in an aggressive relation of rivalry to the other, for this (imaginary) other occupies
the place the analysand wants to occupy. Through such processes, analysis intensifies rather
than diminishes the analysands narcissism.
Given that so many psychoanalysts in England and America extolled the virtues of
an analysand/analyst encounter which culminated in an emboldened ego that fortified the
monument of a strengthened psyche able, as these claims would have it, to brace itself
against the very onslaughts which had produced its crippling frustration; and given the
rhetorical scaffolding of common sense and, so it seemed, empirical evidence of cured
analysands, what made Lacan so steadfast in his conviction to the contrary?
This ego, whose strength our theorists now define by its strength to bear
frustration, is frustration in its essence. Not frustration of a desire of the
subject, but frustration by an object in which his desire is alienated and which
the more it is elaborated, the more profound the alienation from his jouissance
becomes for the subject (Ecrits 42)[T]o identify the ego with the discipline
of the subject is to confuse imaginary isolation with the mastery of the
instincts. This lays open to error of judgment in the conduct of the
treatment: such as trying to reinforce the ego in many neuroses caused by its
over forceful structureand that is a dead end. (Ecrits 106)
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
24
The process of full speech, then, is a process that catalyzes disorder and
deconstruction, rather than order and unity, the monumental construct of [the analysands]
narcissism (Ecrits 40). To Ego Psychologys practice of fortifying the ego in an effort to end
the frustration of neurosis, Lacan proposed a revolutionary analytic encounter in which the
analysand becomes:
engaged in an ever growing dispossession of that being of his, concerning
whichby dint of sincere portraits which leave its idea no less incoherent, of
rectifications that do not succeed in freeing its essence, of stays and defenses
that do not prevent his statue from tottering, of narcissistic embraces that
become like a puff of air in animating ithe ends up by recognizing that this
being has never been anything more than his construct in the imaginary and
that this construct disappoints all certainties For in this labor which he
undertakes to reconstruct for another, he rediscovers the fundamental alienation
[my emphasis] which made him construct it like another, and which has
always destined it [the ego] to be taken from him by another. (42)
This notion of labor which the analysand undertakes to reconstruct for another
and thereby rediscovers the fundamental alienation which made him construct it like
another, and which has always destined it [the ego] to be taken from him by another returns
us to the thorny issue of contemporaries. Now we must take it up, not in a context of
universal, unraced subjects (Whites) nor in a culturally modified context of specific identities
(dark Whites and non-Blacks), but rather in a context of positional polarity which
structures civil society and its nether regionnamely, the polarity of Human and Black, the
context of masters and slaves.
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
25
The analytic schema of Jacques Lacans breakthrough known as full speech posits
a subject whose suffering is produced by alienation in the image of the other, or captation
within Imaginary, and whose freedom must be produced by alienation in the language of the
other, or interpellation within the Symbolic. The subject is constituted as subject proper only
through a relation to the other. For Lacan, alienation, either in the Imaginary or in the
Symbolic, is the modality productive of subjectivity for all sentient beings. In other words,
subjectivity is a discursive, or signifying, process of becoming.
Psychic disorder, by way of the death drive, is that mechanism in Lacanian analysis
that brings the analysand to his/her understanding of him/herself as a void. For Lacan, the
problems of speech and the death drive are related; the relationship presents the irony of
two contrary terms: instinct in its most comprehensive acceptation being the law that
governs in its succession a cycle of behavior whose goal is the accomplishment of a vital
function; and death appearing first of all as the destruction of life (Ecrits 101). But Lacan is
clear that though death is implied, it is life through language which is the aim of analysis.
(This too bears heavily on what, I argue below, is the poverty of full speechs political or
emancipatory promise.) Only by being alienated within the Big A, language, or the Symbolic
Order, does the moi, small a or ego, come to be the je, the subject of lack, the subject of a
void. Prior to the analysands realizing full speech, s/he projects onto the analyst all of the
fantasms which constitute his/her ego. The emancipatory process of Lacans psychoanalytic
encounter is one in which the analysand passes from positing the analyst as the small a, to
one in which the analyst occupies, for the analysand, the position of the Big A, a position
synonymous with language itself. For Lacan, these two moves complement each other. It
bears repeating that this intersubjectivity, alienation in the other, exists whether the subject
grasps it or not, whether or not s/he is the subject of full speech or empty speech. But we
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
26
are still left with alienation as the structuring modality for subjectivity. Whether, by way of
description, we posit the analysand as being either alienated in the Imaginary (ego, small a) or
as being alienated in the Symbolic (language as structure, as the unconscious of the Other)
or even if, in addition, we recognize the fact that full speech as prescription demands alienation
within the Symbolicwe remain left with the fact that, where becoming is concerned,
alienation is subjectivitys essential modality of existence. Alienation is, for Lacan, an
essential grammar of political ontology.
As I stated above, I am not arguing that the unconscious does not exist. Nor am I
claiming that sentient beings, whether Human or Black, are not indeed alienated in the
Imaginary and the Symbolic. I am arguing that whereas alienation is an essential grammar
underpinning Human relationality, it is an important but ultimately inessential grammar
when one attempts to think the structural interdiction against Black recognition and
incorporation
vi
. In other words, alienation is a grammar underwriting all manner of
relationality, whether narcissistic (egoic, empty speech) or liberated (full speech). But it is not
a grammar that underwrites, much less explains, the absence of relationality.

Fanon and Full Speech
Jacques Lacan and Frantz Fanon grappled with the question what does it mean to be free?
and its corollary what does it mean to suffer? at the same moment in history. To say that they
both appeared at the same time is to say that they both have, as their intellectual condition of
possibility, Frances brutal occupation of Algeria. It is not my intention to dwell on Lacans
lack of political activism or to roll out Fanons revolutionary war record. My intention is to
interrogate the breadth of full speechs descriptive universality and the depth of its prescriptive
cureto interrogate its foundation by staging an encounter between, on the one hand,
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
27
Lacan and his interlocutors and, on the other hand, Fanon and his interlocutors. To this end
alone do I note the two mens relation to French colonialism, as the force of that relation is
felt in their texts.
Frantz Fanons psychoanalytic description of Black neurosis, hallucinatory
whitening, and his prescriptions for a cure, decolonization and the end of the world
(BSWM 96) resonate with Lacans categories of empty speech and full speech. There is a
monumental disavowal of emptiness involved in hallucinatory whitening, and disorder and
death certainly characterize decolonization. For Fanon the trauma of Blackness lies in its
absolute Otherness in relation to Whites. That is, White people make Black people by
recognizing only their skin color. Fanons Black patient is overwhelmedby the wish to be
white (BSWM 100). But unlike Lacans diagnosis of the analysand, Fanon makes a direct
and self-conscious connection between his patients hallucinatory whitening and the stability
of White society. If Fanons texts ratchet violently and unpredictably between the body of
the subject and the body of the socius, it is because Fanon understands that outside [his]
psychoanalytic office, [he must] incorporate [his] conclusions into the context of the world.
The room is too small to contain the encounter. As a psychoanalyst, I should help my
patient to become conscious of his unconscious and abandon his attempts at a hallucinatory
whitening Here we have a dismantling of all the fantasms that constitute the patients ego
and which s/he projects onto the analyst that resonates with the process of attaining what
Lacan calls full speech. But Fanon takes this a step further, for not only does he want the
analysand to surrender to the void of language, but also to act in the direction of a
changewith respect to the real source of the conflictthat is, toward the social structures
(BSWM 100).
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
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As a psychoanalyst, Fanon does not dispute Lacans claim that suffering and freedom
are produced and attained, respectively, in the realm of Symbolic; but this, for Fanon, is only
half of the modality of existence. The other half of suffering and freedom is violence. By the
time Fanon has woven the description of his patients condition (i.e., his own life as a Black
doctor in France) into the prescription of a cure (his commitment to armed struggle in
Algeria), he has extended the logic of disorder and death from the Symbolic into the Real.
Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is,
obviously, a program of complete disorder[I]t is the meeting of two forces,
opposed to each other by their very natureTheir first encounter was
marked by violence and their existence togetherwas carried on by dint of a
great array of bayonets and cannons[T]his narrow world, strewn with
prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence. (The
Wretched of the Earth 36-37)
This is because the structural, or absolute, violence or what Loic Wacquant calls the
carceral continuum, is not a Black experience but a condition of Black life. It remains
constant, paradigmatically, despite changes in its performance over timeslave ship,
Middle Passage, slave estate, Jim Crow, the ghetto, the prison industrial complex.
vii
There is
an uncanny connection between Fanons absolute violence and Lacans Real. Thus, by
extension, the grammar of suffering of the Black itself is on the level of the Real. In this
emblematic passage, Fanon does for violence what Lacan does for alienation: namely, he
removes the negative stigma such a term would otherwise incur in the hands of theorists and
practitioners who seek coherence and stability. He also raises within Lacans schema of
suffering and freedom a contradiction between the idea of universal un-raced
contemporaries and two forces opposed to each other, whose first encounter and existence
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
29
together is marked by violence. In short, he divides the world not between cured
contemporaries and uncured contemporaries, but between contemporaries of all sorts and
slaves. He lays the groundwork for a theory of antagonism over and above a theory of
conflict.
If Lacans full speech is not, in essence, a cure but a process promoting psychic
disorder, through which the subject comes to know her/himself, not as a stable relation to a
true selfthe Imaginarybut as a void constituted only by language, a becoming toward
death in relation to the Otherthe Symbolicthen we will see how this symbolic self-
cancellation (Silverman, Male Subjectivity63-65, 126-128) is possible only when the subject
and his contemporaries (Lacan, Ecrits 47) are White or Human.
viii
The process of full
speech rests on a tremendous disavowal which re-monumentalizes the (White) ego because it
sutures, rather than cancels, formal stagnation by fortifying and extending the interlocutory
life of intra-Human discussions.
I am arguing that (1) civil society, the terrain upon which the analysand performs full
speech, is always already a formally stagnated monument; and (2) the process by which full
speech is performed brokers simultaneously two relations for the analysand, one new and
one old, respectively. The process by which full speech is performed brokers a (new)
deconstructive relationship between the analysand and his/her formal stagnation within civil
society and a (pre-existing or) reconstructive relationship between the analysand and the formal
stagnation that constitutes civil society.
Whereas Lacan was aware of how language precedes and exceeds us (Silverman
2000: 157), he did not have Fanons awareness of how violence also precedes and exceeds
Blacks. An awareness of this would have disturbed the coherence of the taxonomy implied
by the personal pronoun us. The trajectory of Lacans full speech therefore is only able to
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
30
make sense of violence as contingent phenomena, the effects of transgressions (acts of
rebellion or refusal) within a Symbolic Order. Here, violence, at least in the first instance, is
neither sense-less (gratuitous) nor is it a matrix of human (im)possibility: it is what happens
after some form of breach occurs in the realm of signification. That is to say, it is contingent.
Implied in this gesture toward Lacans trajectory on violence are several questions
regarding full-speech. First, can Lacanian full-speech, so wedded as it is to the notion that
there is no world to apprehend beyond the realm of signification, adequately theorize those
bodies that emerge from direct relations of force? Which is to ask, is the logic of full speech
too imbricated in the institutionality of anti-Blackness to be descriptively or prescriptively
adequate for thinking Black positionality? In trying to read Human suffering and its effects
(what Lacan calls empty speech) as well as Human freedom and its effects (what he calls full
speech) through the figure of a Blackened position can one simply assume that, despite
relations of pure force which distinguish one epidermal schema (BSWM 112) from
another, relations of signification have the power to cast webs of analogy between such
disparate positions, webs of analogy strong enough to circumscribe relations of pure force,
so that all sentient beings can be seen as each others contemporaries? Put another way: is
full speech for the master full speech for the slave? What would it mean for a master to live
in a deconstructive relation to his moi? Is liberated master an oxymoron or, worse yet,
simply redundant? Through what agency (volition? will?) does a slave entify the signifier?
Which is to ask, can there be such a thing as a narcissistic slave? Or, what is full speech for a
slave? Lacan seems to take for granted the universal relevance of (1) the analytic encounter,
(2) the centrality of signification, and (3) the possibility of contemporaries. But can a
Blackened position take up these coordinates with merely a few culturally specific
modifications, or is to blacken these coordinates precipitous of crises writ large?
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
31
I contend that the web of analogy cast between the subject of analysis and her
contemporaries, in the process of full speech, is rent asunder by insertion of the Black
position, who is less a site of subjectification and more a site of desubjectificationa
species (Fanon; Hartman) of absolute dereliction (Fanon), a hybrid of person and
property (Hartman), and a body that magnetizes bullets (Martinot and Sexton). I intend to
scale upward (to the socius) the implications of Lacanian full speech to illustrate its place as a
strategy which fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of civil society, and scale downward
(to the body) the implications of Fanonian decolonization to illustrate the
incommensurability between the Black flesh and the body of the analysand. Full speech is a
strategy of psychic disorder, within Human limits, and decolonization is a strategy of
complete disorder, without any limits.
ix
The implications of this dilemma are extremely high,
for it suggests that Lacanian full speechlike Film Theory, so much of which stands on its
shouldersis an accomplice to social stability, despite its claims to the contrary.
At the crux of this critique is (a) the unbridgeable gap between the ethical stance of
Lacanian full speech and the ethical stance of Fanonian decolonizationin other words, the
method by which Lacanian full speech intensifies a disavowal of a violence-structuring
matrixand (b) the question of the analysands contemporaries, the language of which,
according to Lacan, the analysand speaks when s/he shatters the monuments of the egos
formal stagnation. To what extent can the analysand become the slaves contemporary as
the latter seeks to shatters civil society? To which call to arms would the analysand be
compelled to respond?
What constitutes the ground on which the analysand is able to do the deconstructive
work of full speech? My contention is that prior to, and contemporaneous with, the analytic
encounter, the Black body labors as an enslaved hybridity of person and property
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
32
(Hartman) so that the analysand may labor as a liberated subject. Furthermore, it is the
matrix of violence which divides the enslaved from the unenslaved, just as the matrix of
alienation divides the infans from the subject: violence zones the Black whereas alienation
zones the Human. But whereas becoming towards death, which results from the Lacanian
analytic encounter, allows the analysand to deconstruct his/her monumentalized presence in
the face of alienation and a life papered over by language, analysis additionally allows the
analysand to take for granted (be oblivious to) the matrix of violence which zoned his terrain
of generalized trust (Barrett), that terrain euphemistically referred to as civil society.
Generalized trust (racialized Whiteness), along with relative stability, are the preconditions
for the analytic encounter, or any other civil encounter. Fanon makes clear how some are
zoned, a priori, beyond the borders of generalized trust:
This world divided into compartments, this world cut in two is
inhabited by two different speciesWhen you examine at close quarters the
colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with
the fact of belonging to a given race, a given species [my emphasis]. In the
colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the
consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you
are rich. (39-40)
When I say that the analysand can take for granted the matrix of violence which
zoned his terrain of generalized trust, I mean that unless the world is parceled outunless
there are two speciess/he cannot commence the work of becoming toward deathnor
could Lacan have theorized the work. In short, violencethe species division, the zoning,
of the enslaved and the unenslavedis the condition of possibility upon which subjectivity (empty-,
full speech paradigm: the Imaginary vs. Symbolic dialectic) can be theorized (i.e., the writing
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
33
of Ecrits) and performed (the analytic encounter). But this theorization and performance, by ignoring
its relation to the species zoning which labors for its condition of possibility, deconstructs the monuments of
the analysands ego, while simultaneously fortifying and extending the ramparts of civil society which
circumscribed those monuments. In short, the trajectory of disorder toward full speech deconstructs that which
prohibits relations between the analysand and his contemporaries while simultaneously entifying and
unifying that which prohibits relations between species (between masters and slaves). Despite Lacans
radical interventions against the practical limitations of Object Relations and the ideological
pitfalls of Ego Psychology, the process of full speech is nonetheless foundational to the
vertical integration of anti-Blackness.
I said above that I wanted to scale upward the implications of Lacanian full speech
to illustrate its place as a strategy which fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of civil
society, and scale downward the implications of Fanonian decolonization to the level of the
body to illustrate the incommensurability between Black flesh and the body of the
analysandhow those two positions subtend each other but, like a plane to an angle,
mutually construct their triangulated context. Before unpacking, at the level of the body,
what this relationship makes (im)possible, I am compelled to extend the cartography of this
very intimate encounter, that is, to ratchet the scale up from the body to the sociuswhere
civil society subtends its nether region.

Civil Society and Its Discontents
As noted above, before the healthy rancor and repartee that represent the
cornerstone of civil society (be it in the boardroom, at the polling booth, in the bedroom, or
on the analysts couch) can get underway, civil society must be relatively stable. But how is
this stability to be achieved, and for whom? For Black people, civic stability is a state of
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34
emergency. Frantz Fanon (Wretched) and Martinot and Sexton (The Avant-garde of White
Supremacy) explain why the stability of civil society is a state of emergency for Blacks.
Fanon writes of zones. For our purposes, we want to bear in mind the following: the zone of
the Human (or non-Blacknotwithstanding the fact that Fanon is a little to loose and liberal
with his language when he calls it the zone of the [postcolonial native]) has rules within
the zone that allow for existence of Humanist interactioni.e., Lacans psychoanalytic
encounter and/or Gramscis proletarian struggle. This stems from the different paradigms of
zoning mentioned earlier in terms of Black zones (void of Humanist interaction) and White
zones (the quintessence of Humanist interaction).
x

The zone where the native lives is not complementary to the zone
inhabited by the settler. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of
higher unity. Obedient to the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, they both
follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible, for
of the two terms, one is superfluousThe settlers town is a town of white
people, of foreigners. (Wretched 38-39)
This is the basis of his assertion that two zones produce two different species. The phrase
not in service of higher unity dismisses any kind of dialectical optimism for a future
synthesis. Fanons specific context does not share the same historical or national context of
Martinot and Sexton, but the settler/native dynamic, the differential zoning and the gratuity
(as opposed to contingency) of violence which accrue to the blackened position, are shared
by the two texts.
Martinot and Sexton assert the primacy of Fanons Manichean zones (without the
promise of higher unity) even when faced with the facticity of American integration:
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
35
The dichotomy between white ethics [the discourse of civil society] and its
irrelevance to the violence of police profiling is not dialectical; the two are
incommensurable whenever one attempts to speak about the paradigm of
policing, one is forced back into a discussion of particular eventshigh
profile homicides and their related courtroom battles, for instance [emphasis
mine]. (Martinot and Sexton 6)
It makes no difference that in the USA the casbah and the European zone are
laid one on top of the other, because what is being asserted here is the schematic
interchangeability between Fanons settler society and Sexton and Martinots policing
paradigm. (Whites in America are now so settled they no longer call themselves settlers.) For
Fanon, it is the policeman and soldier (not the discursive, or the hegemonic agents) of
colonialism that make one town White and the other Black. For Martinot and Sexton, this
Manichean delirium manifests itself by way of the US paradigm of policing which
(re)produces, repetitively, the inside/outside, the civil society/Black void, by virtue of the
difference between those bodies that dont magnetize bullets and those bodies that do.
Police impunity serves to distinguish between the racial itself and the elsewhere that
mandates itthe distinction between those whose human being is put permanently in
question and those for whom it goes without saying (Martinot and Sexton 8). In such a
paradigm White people are, ipso facto, deputized in the face of Black people, whether they
know it (consciously) or not.
Until the recent tapering off of weekly lynching in the 1960s, Whites were called
upon as individuals to perform this deputation.
xi
The 1914 Ph.D. dissertation of H. M.
Henry (a scholar in no way hostile to slavery), The Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina,
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
36
reveals how vital this performance was in the construction of Whiteness for the Settlers of
the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s, as well as for the Settler-scholar (Henry himself) of the 1900s:
The evolution of the patrol system is interesting. The need of keeping the
slaves from roving was felt from the very first. Among the earliest of the
colonial acts in 1686 is one that gave any person the right to apprehend,
properly chastise, and send home any slave who might be found off his
masters plantation without a ticket. This plan was not altogether effective,
and in 1690 it was made the duty of all persons under penalty of forty
shillings to arrest and chastise any slave [found] out of his home plantation
without a proper ticket. This plan of making it everybodys business to
punish wandering slaves seems to have been sufficient at least for a time. (28-
29)
But today this process of species division does not turn Blacks into species and produce
Whites with the existential potential of fully realized subjectivity in the same spectacular
fashion as the spectacle of violence that Henry wrote of in South Carolina and that Fanon
was accustomed to Algeria. In fact, Martinot and Sexton maintain that attention to the
spectacle causes us to think of violence as contingent upon symbolic transgressions rather
than thinking of it as a matrix for the simultaneous production of Black death and White
civil society:
The spectacular event camouflages the operation of police law as contempt,
police law is the fact that there is no recourse to the disruption of [Black] peoples
lives by these activities. (6)
By no recourse the authors are suggesting that Black people themselves serve a vital
function as the living markers of gratuitous violence. And the spectacular event is a scene
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
37
that draws attention away from the paradigm of violence. It functions as a crowding out
scenario. Crowding out our understanding that, where violence is concerned, to be Black is
to be beyond the limit of contingency. This thereby gives the bodies of the rest of society
(Humans) some form of coherence (a contingent rather than gratuitous relationship to
violence):
In fact, to focus on the spectacular event of police violence is to deploy (and
thereby affirm) the logic of police profiling itself. Yet, we cant avoid this logic
once we submit to the demand to provide examples or images of the paradigm [once we
submit to signifying practices]. As a result, the attempt to articulate the paradigm of
policing renders itself non-paradigmatic, reaffirms the logic of police profiling and thereby
reduces itself to the fraudulent ethic by which white civil society rationalizes its existence
[emphasis mine]. (6-7)
The fraudulent ethic by which white civil society rationalizes its existence endures
in articulations between that species with actual recourse to the disruption of life (by the
policing paradigm) and another member of the same species, such as the dialogue between
news reporter and a reader, between a voter and a candidate, or between an analysand and
his/her contemporaries. Recourse to the disruption of life is the first condition upon
which a conflict between entified signification and a true language of desire, a non-egoic
language of contemporaries, full speech, can be staged: one must first be on the policing side,
rather than the policed side, of that division made possible by the violence matrix. In other
words, where violence is concerned, one must stay on this side of the wall of contingency
(just as one must stay on this side of the wall of language by operating within the
Symbolic) to enable full speech. Both matrixes, violence and alienation, precede and
anticipate the species.
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
38
Whiteness, then, and by extension civil societys junior partners, cannot be solely
represented as some monumentalized coherence of phallic signifiers but must, in the first
ontological instance, be understood as a formation of contemporaries who do not
magnetize bullets. This is the essence of their construction through an asignifying absence;
their signifying presence is manifest in the fact that they are, if only by default, deputized
against those who do magnetize bullets: in short, White people are not simply protected
by the police, they are the police.
Martinot and Sexton claim that the White subject-effects of todays policing
paradigm are more banal than the White subject-effects of Fanons settler paradigm. For
Martinot and Sexton, they cannot be explained by recourse to the spectacle of violence.
Police spectacle is not the effect of the racial uniform; rather, it is the police uniform that is
producing re-racialization (Martinot and Sexton 8). This re-racialization echoes Fanons
assertion that the cause is the consequence. You are rich because you are white, you are
white because you are rich (Fanon Wretched40). Whereas in Fanons settler paradigm this
White/rich/rich/White circularity manifests itself in the automatic accrual of life producing
potential, in Martinot and Sextons paradigm of policing it manifests itself in the automatic
accrual of life itself. It marks the difference between those who are alive, the subjects of civil
society, and those who are fatally alive (Marriott 16), or socially dead (Patterson), the
species of absolute dereliction (Fanon, Wretched).
Again, the subject of civil society is the species that does not magnetize bullets,
though s/he does not necessarily perform any advocacy of police practices or of the policing
paradigm the way s/he had to in the H.M. Henrys 19
th
century South Carolina. As Martinot
and Sexton argue, the civic stability of the 21
st
century U.S. slave estate is no longer every
White persons duty to perform. In fact, many Whites on the Left actually perform
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
39
progressive opposition to the police, but each performance of progressive opposition
encounters what Martinot and Sexton call
a certain internal limitation. The supposed secrets of white supremacy
get sleuthed in its spectacular displays, in pathology and instrumentality, or
pawned off on the figure of the rogue cop. Each approach to race
subordinates it to something that is not race, as if to continue the noble
epistemological endeavor of getting to know it better. But what each ends up
talking about is that other thing. In the face of this, the lefts anti-racism
becomes its passion. But its passion gives it away. It signifies the passive
acceptance of the idea that race, considered to be either a real property of a
person or an imaginary projection, is not essential to the social structure, a
system of social meanings and categorizations. It is the same passive
apparatus of whiteness that in its mainstream guise actively forgets [in a way
in which settlers of the first three centuries simply could not] that it owes its
existence to the killing and terrorizing of those it racializes for the purpose,
expelling them from the human fold in the same gesture of forgetting. It is
the passivity of bad faith that tacitly accepts as what goes without saying
the postulates of white supremacy. And it must do so passionately since
what goes without saying is empty and can be held as truth only through
an obsessiveness. The truth is that the truth is on the surface, flat and
repetitive, just as the law is made by the uniform. (7-9)
A truth without depth, flat, repetitive, on the surface? This unrepresentable subject-effect is
more complex than H.M. Henrys early Settler performances of communal solidarity in part
because:
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
40
The gratuitousness of its repetition bestows upon white supremacy
an inherent discontinuity. It stops and starts self-referentially, at whim. To
theorize some political, economic, or psychological necessity for its
repetition, its unending return to violence, its need to kill is to lose a grasp on
that gratuitousness by thinking its performance is representable. Its acts of
repetition are its access to unrepresentability; they dissolve its excessiveness into
invisibility as simply daily occurrence. Whatever mythic content it pretends to
claim is a priori empty. Its secret is that it has no depth. There is no dark corner that,
once brought to the light of reason, will unravel its system[I]ts truth lies in the rituals
that sustain its circuitous contentless logic; it is, in fact, nothing but its very
practices [emphasis mine]. (10)
To claim that the paradigm of policing has no mythic content, that its performance
is unrepresentable, and that there is no political, economic, or psychological necessity for
its repletion is to say something more profound than merely civil society exists in an
inverse relation to its own claims. It is to say something more than what the authors say
outright: that this inversion translates today in the police making claims and demands on the
institutionality of civil society and not the other way around. The extended implication of
Sexton and Martinots claim is much more devastating. For this claim, with its emphasis on
the gratuitousness of violencea violence that cannot be represented but which positions
species nonethelessrearticulates Fanons notion that, for Blacks, violence is a matrix of
(im)possibility, a paradigm of ontology as opposed to a performance that is contingent upon
symbolic transgressions.
Alienation, however, that Lacanian matrix of symbolic and imaginary castration, on
which codes are made and broken and full (or empty) speech is possible, comes to appear, by
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
41
way of the psychoanalytic encounter, as the essential matrix of existence. We are in our place,
Lacan insists, on this side of the wall of language. (Ecrits 101) It is the grid on which the
analysand can short circuit somatic compliance with hysterical symptoms and bring to a halt,
however temporarily, the egoic monumentalization of empty speech. Thus, the
psychoanalytic encounter in general, and Lacanian full speech in particular, work to crowd
out the White subjects realization of his/her positionality by way of violence. It is this
crowding-out scenario that allows the analysand of full speech to remain White, but cured
(a liberated master?). And, in addition, the scenario itself weighs in as one more of civil
societys enabling accompaniments (like voting, coalition building, and interracial love) for
the production of the slavethat entity:
insensible to ethics; he [sic] represents not only the absence of values, but
also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values,
and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element,
destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring
all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of maleficent
powers, the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces (Fanon, Wretched
41)
Unlike Fanons base-line Black, situated a priori in absolute dereliction, Lacans base-
line analysand is situated a priori in personhood and circumscribed by contemporaries who
are also persons. Lacans body of subjectification is not of the same species as Fanons body
of desubjectification. I am not suggesting that Black peoples psyches are free from
machinations of the moi and therefore have no impediments in a process of becoming
towards death. What I am asking is: how are we to trust a Lacanian assessment of Black
narcissism? Half of this contradiction could be solved if we simply re-named full-speech
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
42
White speech (or Human speech) and attached to the analysts shingle Blacks need not apply.
They may not need apply but they are still essential in positing difference.
xii
But coupled
with this gesture of full-disclosure regarding full-speech, we would have to acknowledge that
even in the White analysands becoming toward death, that is to say, even after the stays and
defenses that heretofore had kept his/her ego from tottering are all stripped away, yes, even
after the narcissistic embraces of formal stagnation are hewn into kindling, and even after
the labor through which the analysand has rediscovered his/her fundamental alienation,
there will still be a nigger in the woodpile.

What Masters Rediscover in Slaves
The difference between Jesus and Buddha is that, though some people may
become Christ-like, the church does not take kindly to the idea of Jesus being mass-
produced. There is only one Jesus. He came once. One day, so goes the legend, he will come
again. Amen. In the meantime we will just have to wait. A psychoanalysis modeled on
Christianity would have a hard row to hoe. But by becoming toward death in a most
unflinching manner anyone can become a Buddha. Small wonder Lacans prescription for the
analytic encounter looks toward this (non)religion with neither a church nor a god. Toward
the end of The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, Lacan
acknowledges the debt full speech owes to Buddhism, but he adds, curiously, that
psychoanalysis must not
go to the extremes to which [Buddhism] is carried, since they would be
contrary to certain limitations imposed by [our technique], a discreet application of its basic
principle in analysis seems much more acceptable to mein so far as [our]
technique does not in itself entail any danger of the subjects alienation.
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
43
For [our] technique only breaks the discourse in order to deliver speech.
(Ecrits 100-101)
Unlike ego psychology, and more like Buddhism, Lacan embraced the death drive as the
agency that could deconstruct discourse in order to deliver speech and thereby disrupt the
corporeal integrity, presence, coherencethe egoic monumentalizationof stagnated
subjectivity (or empty speech, a belief in oneself as occupying a position of mastery in the
Imaginary rather than a position of nothingness in the Symbolic). Many White film theorists
and White feminists, such as Mary Ann Doane, Constance Penley, Kaja Silverman,
Jacqueline Rose, Janet Begstrom, and Luce Iigaray, embrace the utility of the death drive as
well, for it is only through an embrace of the death drive that normative male subjectivity,
the bane of womens liberation, can free itself from the idiopathic as opposed to
heteropathic identifications of formal stagnation. As Silverman points out, psychic death or
self-cancellation is no small matter. Her description of the process as a kind of ecstasy of
pain is noteworthy:
Masochistic ecstasyimplies a sublation of sorts, a lifting of the psyche up
and out of the body into other sites of suffering and hence a self-
estrangement. It turnsupon a narcissistic deferral and so works against the
consolidation of the isolated ego [emphasis mine]. (Male Subjectivity 275)
For Silverman, the emancipatory agency of this kind of psychic death enables a kind
of heteropathic chain-reaction [as] the [subject] inhabits multiple sites of suffering. Thus
the exteriorization of one psyche never functions to exalt another and identity is stripped of
all presence (266).
This exteriorization of the White male psyche in a quest to inhabit multiple sites of
suffering, i.e. White women, has its costs. The political costs to White men stripped of all
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
44
presence in relation to White women are death-like but not deadly. Nor do most White
feminists wish it to be deadly. Silvermans caution, I in no way mean to propose
catastrophe as the antidote to a mass meconnaissance (64), diverges dramatically from Fanons
demand that morality is very concrete; it is to silence the settlers defiance, to break his
flaunting violencein a word, to put him out of the picture (Wretched 44). The same settler
wont weather both storms in quite the same way. Fanons brand of full speech makes this
clear: The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial worldwill be claimed and
taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person,
he surges into the forbidden quarters (40). For feminists like Silverman, full speech is that
process through which the analysand has claimed and taken over the alienation which
rules over the ordering of her world. The analysand comes to hear and assume her speech, in
other words, as she assumes her desire. This is not simply a quest for personal liberation but
instead the assumptive logic that underwrites two (imbricated) revolutionary projects: the
political project of (for Silverman et al) institutional, or paradigmatic, change; coupled with
an aesthetic project (i.e., counter-cinema) that accompanies the political projectthe two,
then, work in relay with each other, a mutually enabling dialectic. In The Acoustic Mirror: The
Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Silverman underscores the vulnerability in the armor
of the Oedipal paradigm (that point most vulnerable to attack in what for her is a world
ordering paradigm). Her close reading of Freuds Ego and the Id reminds us that there are
two versions of the Oedipus complex, one whichworks to align the subject smoothly
with heterosexuality and the dominant values of the symbolic order, and the other which
is culturally disavowed and organizes subjectivity in fundamentally perverse: and
homosexual ways (120). Oedipus, therefore, can be claimed and taken over for a revolutionary
feminist agenda.
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
45
Fanon, however, demonstrates how the tools of species division are claimed and
taken over by that species of absolute dereliction; how violence is turned to the natives
advantage. This notion of embodying history in his own person can be likened to a subject
becoming lost in language (recognition of the void). But its important not to lose sight of
the difference between the Fanonian implications of species and the Lacanian implications
of subjects because history, for Fanon, is in excess of signification. In addition, for the
Lacanian subject, the grid of alienation holds out the possibility of some sort of
communication between subjectsa higher unity of contemporaries. Whereas for Fanon:
To break up the colonial world does not mean that after the frontiers
have been abolished lines of communication will be set up between the two
zones. The destruction of the colonial world is no more and no less than the
abolition of one zone, its burial in the depths of the earth. (40-41)
To say, as Silverman does, I in no way mean to propose catastrophe as the antidote
to a mass meconnaissance is, I contend, to say that the two antagonists are of the same
speciesthey have been zoned not apart but together. So, they are not really antagonists. To
be precise, violence as it pertains to and structures gender relations between White men and
White women (and it does!) is of a contingent nature: White women who transgress their
positionality in the Symbolic order run the risk of attack. But as Saidiya Hartman (and
Fanon) makes clear, contingency is not what structures violence between White men and
Black women, White women and Black women, White women and Black men, or White
men and Black men. These White on Black relations share, as their constituent element, an
absence of contingency where violence is concerned. The absence of contingency eliminates
the necessity of transgression which is a pre-condition of intra-settler (White men to White
women) violence.
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
46
More is at work here than the monumentalization of White supremacy through the
imposition of cultural signifiers. Important questions emerge regarding the possibility of full
speech, the possibility of an analysand speaking in the language of his contemporaries
when the field is made up of Whites and Blacks. Put another way, how does one defer the
narcissism of a Real relation? How can speech alone strip Whites of all presence in the face
of Blacks? What is the real danger entailed in lifting the White psyche up and out of the body
into Black sites of suffering? In short, what kind of performance would that be? We have
come up against Lacans caution not to take Buddhist techniques beyond certain limitations
imposed by [psychoanalysis], the limitations of speech.
In examining the spectacles of the slave coffle, plantation slave parties, the musical
performances of slaves for masters, and the scenes of intimacy and seduction between
Black women and White men, Saidiya Hartman illustrates how no discursive act by Blacks
towards Whites or by Whites towards Blacks, from the mundane and quotidian, to the
horrifying and outlandish can be disentangled from the gratuitousness of violence that
structures Black suffering. This structural suffering, which undergirds the spectrum of Black
life, from tender words of love spoken between slave women and White men to screaming
at the whipping post, is imbricated in the fungibility of the captive body (Hartman 19).
Black fungibility is a violence-effect that marks the difference between Black positionality
and White positionality and, as Hartman makes clear, this difference in positionality marks a
difference between capacities of speech.
The violence-induced fungibility of Blackness allows for its appropriation by White
psyches as property of enjoyment (23-25). Whats more remarkable is that Black
fungibility is also that property which inaugurates White empathy toward Black suffering (23-
25). We might say Black fungibility catalyzes a heteropathic chain-reaction that allows a
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
47
White subject to inhabit multiple sites of suffering. But, again, does the exteriorization of
one psyche (Silverman 266), enabled by Blackness, successfully strip White identity of all
presence? Hartman poses this question in her critique of a Northern White mans fantasy
that replaces the body of slaves with the bodies of himself and his family, as the slaves are
being beaten:
[B]y exporting the vulnerability of the captive body as a vessel for the uses,
thoughts, and feelings of others, the humanity extended to the slave
inadvertently confirms the expectations and desires definitive of the relations
of chattel slavery. In other words, the case of Rankins empathetic
identification is as much due to his good intentions and heartfelt opposition
to slavery as to the fungibility of the captive body In the fantasy of being
beatenRankin becomes a proxy and the others pain is acknowledged to
the degree that it can be imagined, yet by virtue of this substitution the object
of identification threatens to disappear. (19)
Hartman calls into question the emancipatory claims (for both the individual psyche
and the socius) of heteropathic identification and masochistic self-cancellation (loss of self in
the other, a process germane to full speech) when these claims are not circumscribed by a
White social formationwhen they claim to be more than intra-Human discussions. For no
web of analogy can be spun between, on the one hand, the free body that mounts fungible
flesh on an emancipatory journey toward self-cancellation and, on the other hand, that
fungible being that has just been mounted. The two positions are structurally irreconcilable,
which is to say they are not contemporaries. Hartman puts a finer point on it:
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
48
the effort to counteract the commonplace callousness to black suffering
requires that the white body be positioned in the place of the black body in
order to make this suffering visible and intelligible. Yet, if this violence can
become palpable and indignation can be fully aroused only through the
masochistic fantasy, then it becomes clear that empathy is double-edged, for
in making the others suffering ones own, this suffering is occluded by the
others obliteration. (19)
Its worth repeating the lessons of cultural historians: that the Black experience is a
phenomena without analog (Genovese); that natal alienation is a constituent element of
slavery (Patterson; Hartman); that Black people are socially dead; and natal alienation
endows the species with a past but not a heritage (Patterson). Therefore, even if, through the
iconoclasm of becoming toward death, the analysand dismantles his monuments, even if he
deconstructs his heritage, he will still exist in a relation to heritage, however deconstructed,
and it is the possibility of heritage itself, a life of not magnetizing bullets (Martinot and Sexton), a
life of contingent (rather than gratuitous) violence, which divides his species from those
with a life of gratuitous violence. By sifting through the object choices of his meaning-full
heritage, rather than a Black and sense-less past, he comes to assume his desire where he is
(the goal of full speech). But though where he is may not be where he began in his
relationship (before heteropathic identification with Blackness) to his contemporaries, it is
indeed even more intensely where he began in his relationship to Blacks.

Conclusion
Anti-Blackness manifests as the monumentalization and fortification of civil society against
social death. Narcissism can be deconstructed in pursuit of subjectivity but civil society
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
49
remains strengthened.
xiii
Whereas Lacans analytic encounter, the process of full speech, is
deconstructive of narcissism internal to civil society, it is one in a wide range of encounters
(from voting to coalition building to innocent filial encounters) is re-constitutive of civil
societys fortification against social death. If, on the other hand, White supremacys
foundations were built solely on a grid of alienation, where entified signification wards off
the encroachment of deconstructive signification, then full speech would hold out the
revolutionary promise of White supremacys demise much the way many White film
theorists and feminists have demonstrated full speech can hasten the demise of intra-Human
patriarchy. But, as Fanon so vividly warns, White supremacys and Humanisms foundations
are also built on a grid of violence, where positions of contingent violence are divided from
positions of gratuitous violence (from the slave position). Here two kinds of species are
produced and zoned beyond the pale of speech. The social distinction between Whites (or
Humans) and Blacks can be neither assessed nor redressed by way of signifying practices
alone because the social distinction between life and death cannot be spoken. It is
impossible to fully redress this pained condition without the occurrence of an event of epic
and revolutionary proportions the destruction of a racist social order [my emphasis] (Hartman
77). In life, identification is limited only by the play of endless analogies, but death is like
nothing at all. Perhaps psychoanalysis and the promise of full speech are not ready for the
end of the world.

i
The other pillar is Gramscian Marxism.
ii
Thanks to Saidiya Hartman who suggested the moniker of Afro-Pessimism to me.
iii
For an expos on how anti-Blackness is foundational to the libidinal economy of multicultural political
formations see Jared Sextons Amalgamation Schemes. Minneapolis: University of MN Press, 2008. For an analysis
of how anti-Blackness is manifest in the political/social economy of multicultural political formations see
George Yanceys Who is White? Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide.
iv
Email correspondence.
v
Melanie Kleins emphasis on a normative progress of libidinal object choices ran counter to an emphasis on
the analysands speech, an emphasis which Lacan believed should guide the course of analysis. He took Melanie
Klein to task for her promotion of a psychoanalytic cure which centralized the interplay of reality and fantasy
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
50

in the subjects choice of sexual objects, otherwise known as Object Relations Theory. Secondly, new
attention was being paid to the role of counter transference in the psychoanalytic encounter and thus to the
importance, in training, of dealing with its typical manifestations (Lee 33-34). Through what Lacan considered
to be a second theoretical wrong turn the ego (or Imaginary) of the analyst ran the risk of becoming
entangled with the ego (or Imaginary) of the analysand, leading the psychoanalytic encounter through a
perpetual hall of mirrorsempty or egoic reflections speaking to similarly empty, egoic, reflections, a process
that could fortify and extend the interlocutory life of what Lacan called empty speech. This is why,
Throughout the course of the analysis, on the sole condition that the ego of the analyst does agree not to be
there, on the sole condition that the analyst is not a living mirror, but an empty mirror, what happens happens
between the ego of the subjectand the others (Lacan, Seminar II 246). The others are what Lacan calls the
analysands contemporaries (Ecrits 47). Or Lacan, the analytic encounter must bring the analysand to a place
where s/he is able to see what s/he is depositing at the place of the analyst. If the analysts ego is present, if the
analyst is not an empty mirror, then the analysand will not come to understand where s/he is in relation to the
analyst. The place of the analyst will not become what, for Lacan, it should become, the Symbolic Other
through which the analysand can hear his/her own language. For this to happen, the analyst must become a
headless, or asephalic, subject; a subject that mirrors nothing other than a void. In this way, and in this way
only, will the analysand come to understand him/herself as a void papered over by language.

vi
Here I am thinking alienation as a grammar psychoanalytically, that is through the framework of libidinal
economy. In The Ruse of Analogy I think alienation through the framework of political economy.
vii
See Loic Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration.
viii
Meaning Whites and their junior partners in civil society.
ix
I am tweaking Fanons notion of decolonization to meet the needs of the post-emancipation subject (the
slave) as opposed to the post-colonial subject (the native). I think Fanon himself does this in Black Skin, White
Masks. When he writes The Wretched of the Earth, I would argue that he is often times ventriloquizing on behalf
of the post-colonial subject. His letters to his brother seem to suggest how (if not why) he cannot be a
contemporary of the Arab, even though they fight in the same guerrilla army against an enemy in common:
France.
x
Special thanks to Donovan Sherman, for helping me clarify this. Email correspondence, March 13, 2008.
xi
Between the years 1882 and 1968, lynching claimed, on average, at leas one life a week. Almost 5,000 black
men were lynched. In addition, black women, Jews, White cattle rustlers and a few white women became its
objects. The practice began long before the Civil War but peaked during the backlash to Reconstruction,
particularly during the decade just prior to World War I. [According to Leon Litwack]the violence
inflictedwas often selective, aimed at educated and successful Blacks, those in positions of leadership, those
determined to improve themselves, those who owned farms and stores, those suspected of having saved their
earnings, those who had just made a cropthat is, black men and women perceived by whites as have stepped
out of their place, trying to be white. Lynchings ranged, geographically, from the San Jose, CA. to St. Paul, MN
to Dixie. See Patricia J. Williams, Without Sanctuary. The Nation. February 14, 2000.
xii
Donovan Sherman. Email correspondence. March 13, 2008.
xiii
Donovan Sherman. Email Correspondence, March 13, 2008.