Not Exactly White: Race as Potential Space

Abstract

Drawing on Lacan and Winnicott, the author explores the idea that racial difference is dynamically reconfigured in interpersonal space, emerging from the flow of desire between two (or more) people. The argument does not deny—indeed, it presupposes—that race is a socially-constructed given, which delimits or constrains the interaction. And yet, interpersonal space can become a potential space through which we rework and refashion such social constraints, turning them into transitional phenomena, terms of playful vitality. How can one become not exactly what one is? How can possibility appear where only oppressive necessities make themselves present?

Keywords:

• racism
• antiracism
• Lacan
• Winnicott
• fantasy
• sexuality

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I’m spelling “mOther” in this peculiar way following Fink (1997). The point is to stress that the infant’s relation to its first caretaker is a prototype for the subject’s position vis-à-vis otherness more broadly.

2 Cf. race as the Lacanian “object a” (Friedland, 2022 & George, 2022).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gal Katz

Gal Katz, Ph.D., is a fourth-year psychoanalytic candidate at the William Alanson White Institute. He teaches philosophy at Columbia University and NYU. His research examines the social and political dimensions of subjective experience, charting the space between psychoanalysis and late modern philosophers such as Rousseau, Hegel, and Nietzsche.