Lacan and Race

Reviews / Votes

'"Lacan" and "race" seem two totally disparate notions: obscure French theory, brutal social struggles... However, this book provides an explosive mixture of the two - after reading it, neither Lacanian theory nor racism and anti-racist struggles will appear the same to you. George and Hook demonstrate that authentic theory is needed today more than ever. An instant classic!

Slavoj Zizek, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

'Lacan and Race arrives at a very significant and urgent historical moment, one that symbolically and existentially speaks to the logics of racism as necropolitical, consumptive, phantasmatic, and a problematic pleasurable perversity. Given the unabashed reemergence of white racism within the context of a greater neo-fascist threat, its analysis is critically needed.'

George Yancy, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, USA

'This groundbreaking volume, edited by Sheldon George and Derek Hook, turns conventional notions of race and racism on their head, delivering compelling Lacanian perspectives from leading scholars in the field. Including thought-provoking ideas such as racism as enjoyment and race as an object of the drive - as well as covering a breadth of forms of contemporary racism - this book will undoubtedly inspire future scholarship and conversations about race alike! With Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity and Psychoanalytic Theory, George and Hook have brought us what will undoubtedly serve as the central text on the subject for many years to come.'

Stephanie Swales, University of Dallas, co-author of Psychoanalysing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan: On and Off the Couch

'Written at a time of heightened polarization, xenophobia, and ethno-nationalism, the essays in this collection detail various ways to alter the structures of hatred and otherness that make racism seem immovable and inevitable. Probing and incisive, the essays draw on a range of insights from Lacanian psychoanalysis concerning race transference and unconscious fantasy, the enjoyment of the Other, and the forms of jouissance that continue to propel and underwrite racism today. Insightful, rigorous, and strongly recommended.'

Christopher Lane, editor of The Psychoanalysis of Race

'Of late, Lacanian theory has come to play an increasingly important role in critical analyses of gender and sexuality. This sterling collection presents the strongest case to date for extending such analysis to the category of race. In powerful, wide-ranging essays, the contributors demonstrate time and again that psychoanalytic concepts such as fantasy, fetishism, jouissance, and disavowal aren't merely applicable to the phenomena of racial identification and racism, but are absolutely integral to grasping how such phenomena function in the first place. A must read - not only for those still laboring under the (mis)belief that Lacan was an obscurantist whose work has little to contribute to social theory, but especially for those committed to exploring the socio-political purchase of psychoanalysis.'

Russell Sbriglia, Seton Hall University, USA

'No doubt race and racism are dynamically back on the agenda, both in the US and internationally. Recent events demand a rigorous attempt to clarify what is at stake beyond the obvious: what keeps returning, what seems to resist understanding and intervention. Focusing on the "other scene" animating the multiplicity of drives, identifications, enjoyments and fantasies involved, psychoanalysis can help considerably in this process. This rigorous and timely collection put together by George and Hook is bound to unsettle and reorient our energies, intellectual and affective, by brilliantly orchestrating an impressive Lacan-inspired re-appraisal of our ongoing predicament.'

Professor Yannis Stavrakakis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, author of Lacan and the Political and The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics

'In a time like ours, when otherness and singularity are universally commodified, nothing like Lacanian psychoanalysis can throw light on the tension between One and Other. In the early 1970s Lacan indeed predicted the explosion of racism in conjunction with "capitalist progress." This wonderful book explores and contextualizes racism by taking seriously Lacan's insight that its proliferation and tenacity has less to do with what we know about the other than with what we don't know about ourselves.'

Fabio Vighi, Cardiff University, UK, and author of Zizek's Dialectics