Racism, Or … Worse: On the end of Lacan’s Seminar XIX

Racism, Or … Worse: On the end of Lacan’s Seminar XIX David Sigler (bio) Jacques lacan ended Seminar XIX (1971–72), … Or Worse, with an unexpected warning: “Since, nevertheless, it’s not just about painting a rose-tinted future, you should know that what is on the rise, the ultimate consequences of which we have still not seen, and which is rooted in the body, in the fraternity of bodies, is racism. You have not heard the last of this.” The audience had, however, heard the last of this. Seminar XIX was suddenly over, and Lacan did not return to the topic in later seminars. He would, though, make a couple of further comments on racism over the following six months, first in the enigmatic essay “L’étourdit” and then as part of his television special of January 1973, the text of which would eventually be published as Television. It is hard to pinpoint the tone of the concluding remark. The two sentences seem to serve all at once as a warning, threat, aside, mic drop, and cliffhanger. It was a bit of a non sequitur, as Seminar XIX had not led anyone to expect a warning about racism. Lacan had made no mention of racism up to that point, and it had not often been among his preoccupations, although he had at times over the years spoken out against segregation (Khan 149–50). Lacan began the final session by signaling that he would be taking a new direction that day: “summing myself up, as they [End Page 177] say, is absolutely out of the question” (Seminar XIX 197). … Or Worse had mainly explored set theory as a logic problem, theorizing, in quite abstract terms, what it means for something to be counted as part of a set, and how counting and numbers cut against and through a unified One, and what happens when a zero gets added to a set of integers. The mathematical reflections developed in Seminar XIX take on new significance when considered retroactively in relation to Lacan’s parting words that year. In this essay, I argue that the final remark of Seminar XIX serves as a quilting point that ties the seminar’s mathematical reflections to the social problem of ascendent racism. The warning recontextualizes the discussion of bodies, fraternity, belonging, and social inclusion that Lacan had been exploring in the latter part of the seminar, allowing us to discern the contours of an implicitly anti-racist strategy. Lacan’s parting comment, if read not as a prediction but as a quilting point that retroactively reframes … Or Worse, may indicate a new or supplemental direction for Lacanian conversations about racism and anti-racism. In recent years, Lacanian scholars such as Azeen Khan, Derek Hook, Sheldon George, Gautam Basu Thakur, Zahi Zalloua, Slavoj Žižek, and Éric Laurent have studied the ideologies that sustain racism. The conclusion of Seminar XIX has been part of those discussions but has not been analyzed in much detail. Laurent analyzes the passage most thoroughly, discussing it for nearly a page before turning to the follow-up remark from Television (1–2). George and Hook acknowledge the passage at the beginning of their introduction to Lacan and Race but quickly move past it, maintaining that “Lacan held no true interest in race” (1); even in a volume specifically focused on the topic, Lacan’s comment does not come up further. Khan quotes the passage but does not much discuss it, introducing the quotation merely with “although I do not expand on this here” (156). I will suggest that Seminar XIX should and could become more important to this theoretical conversation. Generally, a Lacanian theory of racism will understand the phenomenon either as its own form of cruel enjoyment, the envy of another person’s enjoyment, or the fear of having one’s enjoyment stolen. Hook has done the most to outline the problems inherent in a jouissance-focused approach to racism, which include psychological reductionism, open-endedness, failure to differentiate between modes, and de-contextualization (37–42). Although Hook very insightfully responds to each of those critiques, convincingly defending a jouissance-based approach, it may also be worthwhile to develop...

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