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The Psychosis of Race: A Lacanian Approach to Racism and Racialization

Author(s) : Jack Black

Reviews and Endorsements

The Psychosis of Race usefully intervenes upon contemporary theories of race and racism. By drawing attention to a psychotic structure that underlies the anxieties, delusions, and fantasies that spur racial violence in our present historical moment, this study takes Lacanian psychoanalysis in directions it has not fully explored.
Sheldon George, author of Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of Race

In arguing that our relationship to race is organized by the psychic structure of psychosis, Jack Black both aptly diagnoses our contemporary moment and puts forward an “ethical sensibility” for overcoming race and racism’s psychic hold. Specifically, through an accessible exposition of key Lacanian concepts and original analyses of popular cultural artifacts, The Psychosis of Race sets us on the path to forging creative and agentic possibilities for overcoming our attachment to race as a futile attempt to secure our place within an unreliable socio-symbolic field.
Jennifer Friedlander, author of Real Deceptions: The Contemporary Reinvention of Realism

In this truly invigorating and critical analysis, Jack Black utilizes the vocabulary of terms developed by Jacques Lacan for the treatment and conceptualization of psychosis and applies them, in a distinctive cultural mode, to the psychical life of racialization, racism, and racial identity. In so doing, he moves us beyond the “post race” consensus and the shortcomings of equal representation as adequate responses to racist social structure. He highlights the distinctive analytical potential of thinking our psychical entanglements with race in terms that are uniquely illuminating.
Derek Hook, author of Six Moments in Lacan and co-editor of Lacan on Depression and Melancholia