Knotting the psyche

White fantasy and racial violence

Abstract

This article engages core Lacanian concepts to read racial whiteness in relation to the three registers of the psyche. It deploys Lacan’s concept of suture to argue that whiteness stitches together the registers of the psyche, joining the Imaginary and Symbolic as a mask over the Real. This masking of the Real privileges the function of fantasy, such that the Real of the white subject’s lack is veiled by racial discourses of the Symbolic that articulate Imaginary fantasies of wholeness. Through analysis of the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, a reading of creativity in African American culture, and an interpretation of Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise, the article argues that white fantasies of wholeness threaten an unsuturing of the psyches of black subjects. It turns to Lacan’s work on the sinthome to suggest how black subjects knot the registers of the psyche in ways that protect against the traumas that assail them in acts of racism and racial violence.