The Crack in the Mask, the Wound in the Flesh: Political Representation as Symptom

Abstract

This article criticises Lawrence Hamilton’s disavowal of more radical political positions on the basis of their ‘unrealistic assumptions’, by putting his concept of ‘real modern freedom’ in conversation with a Lacanian notion of the Real, yet one that invests that Real with the historically differentiated modes of concrete racialised and gendered labour that capitalism obscures in order to create value. Drawing from critical race theory, I argue against the reformist impulse that seeks to improve the representational reach of liberal masks. Instead, my understanding of political representation argues for the crack in the mask as the symptom that reminds us of the Real, the irreducible antagonism at the heart of the social.