Laplanche and the anti-racist unconscious, rewriting seduction, listening to the noise

Abstract

This article proposes the idea of an anti-racist unconscious to respond to problems raised by Jean Laplanche’s conceptualisation of ‘enigmatic messages’. In reversing the dynamic between the seducer and the seduced, I ask: What if a racialised person produces messages that will disturb a legacy of slavery and its history of violence? In drawing on an intersectional analytic inspired by queer theory, post-socialist theory, critical race studies and Roma studies, this article suggests that Laplanche’s enigmatic messages (‘noises’) can function as epistemological interventions seeking to decolonise a Euro-American imagination. Given that the unconscious has been conceptualised according to modes of storytelling that speak from the standpoint of institutions of white domination, I show that the unconscious can function as an anti-racist epistemological site. I focus my analysis on a Soviet film (The Fiddlers, Loteanu, 1971) to identify how enigmatic messages lead to Roma tactics such as the counterfeit and the curse, which respond to racialised violence either by terrifying the oppressors or by taking back resources from them.