Afterword: there is only one race…

Abstract

The value of Lacanian theory in serving to unpack our unconscious attachment to race identity as a will to wholeness derives from its unique analysis of sexual difference. Importantly, psychoanalysis enables us to escape the trap of analogizing race and sex. Though psychoanalytic theory has recently gained entrance into some philosophy departments (that tolerate continental styles of thought), it has done so only at behest of its most unconventional members. Race discourse is always only about being fully human, i.e. an overcoming of lack and having a mastery over normativity, i.e. whiteness. While ethnicity, culture, class, even caste have diverse manifestations that have relative and contextually shifting stratifications, that can essentially pluralize the definition of being human, race has only one modality of expression: sovereign humanness. Furthermore, for cultures that exist outside matrix of whiteness and race system, it is a complete negation of their experiences of being human, which may well include hitherto undeciphered ways of being in community.