Passing, Natural Selection, and Love's Failure: Ethics of Survival from Chang-rae Lee to Jacques Lacan

Abstract

Camouflage is the blending of the animal into the pattern, the environment; it is a search for invisibility. . . .With men too, invisibility is an ever recurring desire. Roger Caillois, The Mask of Medusa The trope of invisibility has provided a central motif in the literary representations of racial minorities. From Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), the metaphor of invisibility has come to symbolize the consequences of racial blindness; it is thus designed to alert us to the repercussions of social and legal exclusion in US history. Yet the nature of racial blindness—and its antidote, social visibility—has never been as simple as the binary terms imply. Involving a restless and often vexing interplay between perception and projection, recognition and disavowal, the values of racial visibility and invisibility can only emerge in relation to one another even as such appearance of meaning almost always immediately problematizes the signification against which it has defined itself. “White visibility,” for instance, relies on the invisibility and assumed normality of whiteness, while “black invisibility” acquires its shape precisely through its very visibility as difference. As I argue in “Ralph Ellison and the Politics of Melancholia,” the central conceit of invisibility in Invisible Man embodies not the opposition between seeing and not-seeing but a symptom of the dynamic of mutual projection structuring race relations in this country. Thus the rhetoric of “becoming visible” that has energized so much of progressive racial politics often elides the contradictions underpinning social visibility and remains ineffective in the face of the phenomenological, social, and psychic paradoxes inhering in what it means to be visible.