Necessary Disruptions: A Discussion of Daniel Butler’s “Racialized Bodies and the Violence of the Setting”

ABSTRACT

This discussion of Daniel Butler’s article “Racialized Bodies and the Violence of the Setting” takes up the importance of the concept of place, largely through the lens of Frantz Fanon. It argues that being is best understood as being placed, emphasizing the necessity of material and historical setting for any ontological formation. Very tentatively, it advances a fragile hope that Whiteness is currently being placed in a way that can no longer be regarded as something universalized and invisible.

Notes

¹ For an excellent study of the use of the term “primitive” in psychoanalytic thinking, which exemplifies the unconscious structuring and historical freight carried within our theoretical apparatus, see Brickman (2003).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francisco J. González

Francisco J. González, M.D., is a personal/supervising analyst and faculty member at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, where he is also co-chair of the Community Psychoanalysis Committee. He is on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality.