Dying Metaphors and Deadly Fantasies: Freud, Baldwin and Race as Intimacy

Abstract

I. A joint exploration of racism and antiSemitism, this article (1) has for its foundation a textual dialogue between Baldwin and Freud. It argues that the imprint left by nineteenth and early twentieth-century racial metaphors on the Freudian construction of gender and sexuality has reproduced the logic of racial differentiation within psychoanalysis. This can be seen, for instance, in the mutual exclusion of identification and desire and the role played by unconscious fantasies. Most present-day analyses on psychoanalysis and race try to assess the alleged universalism of psychoanalysis or assert the pertinence of race as a category for the study of subjectivities. This article argues instead that, as a modern theory of subjectivity based on sex and sexual difference, psychoanalysis has been strongly influenced by the cultural, scientific and religious constructions of race. At the same time, the binary logic of gender and sexuality in psychoanalysis delineates the space where emerges a seemingly self-assertive white consciousness. our genealogy of psychoanalysis crosses racial and sexual perspectives yet refrains from hierarchizing them. It regards subjectivity as a site of multiple identities and identifications, the open space where identity formation is about movement and not arrested development, contrary to most current critical approaches--be they in African American and diasporic studies, gender and LGBTQ studies, or psychoanalytical criticism--our critical standpoint is textual and literary and, as such, aims at examining the unfolding of identity without taking cultural, racial, gender-related or sexual category as its point of departure or an all-determining factor and frame. In Freud, the psychic landscape and the grammar for its exploration freeze the movement of identity formation, though it is nonetheless betrayed by the still discernible racial traces left in the text, more particularly in Freud's 1915 sketch of the fantasy. To recapture this movement and understand how it evolves in the closed space of identity, contributing to the consolidation of a modern conception of race, sex, and gender, we rely on the insights of the African American writer and thinker James Baldwin. What is central in Baldwin and makes him particularly relevant to illuminate Freud's blind spots is that his black subjectivity and writing are not divorced from homosexuality and homoeroticism. His aesthetics of optics consists in showing the hidden articulation of race with the repudiation of homosexuality and the resulting (often lethal) cultural, political and psychological consequences. Between Baldwin, the American Negro, and Freud, the Austrian Jew, both scholars of the Old Testament, the transatlantic dialogue helps to understand how psychoanalysis intertwines the cultural baselines of race, sex, and gender to invent a modern subject psychically defined through their inter-relatedness. At the same time, the importance of sexuality in Freud's conflict between his Jewishness and a white consciousness to which he may have strategically adhered proffers the background to investigate the sexual dimension of American race relations, the matrix of intimacy from which springs the narrative of a white consciousness whose violence leads to madness. II. our method, which subordinates psychoanalytical theories to literature, partakes of an epistemological shift as regards identity, identity formation, the subject and subjectivity. What is fundamentally at stake is to sketch the critique of a modern western subjectivity which conceives the subject as being in a predetermined space that shapes its identities. To philosophical, sociohistorical, psychoanalytical, and cultural variations of this postulate we oppose literature where the double praxis of writing and reading not only creates the space of the text but also defers perpetually its closure. Furthermore, the common interest of Freudian psychoanalysis and literature in one figure of speech in particular--the metaphor--illustrates their strikingly obscure parenthood and the different ways space can be imagined, understood, or made intelligible. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.