- The Nocturnal Letter: Blackness, Enjoyment, and the Slave(ry) of Discourse
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Introduction
Job compares the flesh to raiment
Which we put on like a garment
That the body not be seen
—Pierre De Nesson
The Nocturnal Letter results from a certain undying exhaustion forged into a resolute elegy written and rewritten from a position that concedes to the following: the institution of chattel Slavery constitutes the grammars of enjoyment today. Black suffering continues to decorate, if not fundamentally occasion, civil society’s (anti)social bonds. The afterlife of Slavery brandishes discourse and fortifies its renewed demands for a perennial seductive quality or an infinite reservoir of delectable cargo upon the cruel myth of Black emancipation. Discourse is a risk, the immortal parlay for truth whereby every bet in the chain is certainly lost. The Subject must be given an irresistible incentive for dawning this implacable debt of Being: the assurance that there is a surface where it is free to discharge the erotic frustration this indestructible bargain inspires. The subject of discourse then assumes, with pleasure, the indelible role of purveyor of this surface, this property, the Slave—what Saidiya Hartman clarifies as the property of (the Master’s) enjoyment.
Afro-pessimism is uniquely suited to broach the difficulty of this position precisely because it is the only framework prepared to demonstrate how. The coffle lurks about enjoyment’s endless modern manifestations, appearing in the form of corporate deregulation, a vacation to the Caribbean, or the flue of hanging dust lit by the projector’s throw. “Slavery is here and now,” writes Jared Sexton, and I suggest that if left prohibited by discourse, that is to say, if we remain too afraid to broach the whole character of Black suffering, it shall lurk about in the grammar of discourse forever and always. The afterlife of Slavery, treated here as a libidinal dynamic irreducible to a set of historical-material relations assigned to a “former” moment “in” time, comes to designate, to paraphrase Sexton, the practice of transcendence’s foreclosure. This is certainly dismissed when speaking about Blackness today when the transcendence we speak of is the (fantasmatic) transcendence from the relational dynamics of the plantation, a transcendence many believe to be living now–the natural consequence of our neoliberal landscapes of agency and their undeniable allure. “Afro-Pessimism is, among other things,” writes Sexton, “an attempt to formulate an account of such suffering, to establish the rules of its grammar, ‘to think again about the position of the ex-slave,’ as Bryan Wagner puts it in his Disturbing the Peace, ‘without recourse to the consolation of transcendence.’ The difficulty [had with Afro-pessimism] has to do with the special force that the consolation of transcendence—be it cultural, economic, geographical, historical, political, psychological, sexual, social, or symbolic—brings to bear on the activity of thinking, no less of speaking and writing, about those whose transcendence is foreclosed in and for the modern world.”(Sexton, 2016) The cardinal position of this work is that we have transcended nothing, if only the material conditions…and even then, the coffle finds a way. If one hopes to find a consolatory gesture in this work, turn back now.
I borrow the title’s form from Jacques Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” from his Écrits. For Lacan, the signifier (or the letter) “is a unique unit of being which, by its very nature, is the symbol of but an absence.”(Lacan, 1999) It is, therefore, none of our concern what the signifier claims to signify (if any answer would be nothing more than a consolation) but rather what is done with or just outside of that which it displaces: an absence, a nothingness, an abyss. I transpose “Purloined” with “Nocturnal” to further invoke the darkness or the Blackness of that which is deferred, or, as Lacan remarks, “[the] letter which has been detoured, one whose trajectory has been prolonged…” (Lacan, 1999). In other words, I mean to lay stress upon the racial current of this postponement: the foreclosure of the letter’s transcendence from its nocturnal abyss, from its plantation. Although one locates an irony, which is decidedly a fixation of psychoanalysis, that is the positive exchange of something which has not yet appeared. The letter is known to the Subject, but only after the fact and splintered; only after the signified has been obliterated. In the case of the nocturnal emission, one wakes up to a gradation of shame, disgust, disappointment, and, most notably, an enthralling curiosity. The effect appears before the cause insofar as the latter is subsumed by the former. The inspiration for such a mess remains captive to the psychical nocturn of the Subject’s sleep. One might invoke Lacan’s remark in Seminar XVII: “Desire, if you take my word on this, [the master] can easily do without, since the slave satisfies him even before he himself knows what he might desire.” (Lacan, 2007)
I am interested in, following psychoanalysis, the domain, and fidelity of satisfaction. What part of the Master is satisfied? Or rather, in what way is the Master satisfied by the Slave? In Slavoj Žižek’s meditation of Rodolphe Gasche’s The Tain of the Mirror, he writes that “the tain of the mirror, [is] the part where the reflecting surface is scraped, so that we see the dark rear…Reflection–the mirroring of the subject in the object, the reappropriation of the object by means of the subject recognizing in it itself, its own product–encounters the ‘tain of the mirror’; in the points where, instead of returning to the viewer his own image, the mirror confronts him with a meaningless dark spot.” (Žižek, 2008) And further, “The spot of the mirror-picture is thus strictly constitutive of the subject; the subject qua subject of the look ‘is’ only in so far as the mirror–picture he is looking at is inherently ‘incomplete’–in so far, that is, as it contains a ‘pathological’ stain–the subject is correlative to this stain.”(Žižek, 2008) Satisfaction is, therefore, not reducible to an instance of nourishment or the intermittent gratification of circumstantial needs. Instead, it should be thought of primarily as the paradigmatic staging of the subject’s (partial) mastery of its representation through the meaningless dark spot internal to the mirror’s structure. The subject’s most archaic differentiation event (the mirror stage) is contingent upon the tain’s (negative) presence or, instead, its becoming-ineffable property. The Master finds their antediluvian satisfaction in the promise of the tain, of its useless, dark, and bounded status, precisely because it occasions the (fractured) whole of its will to symbolic power. In other words, so long as I have a Slave (to enjoy), says the Master, the immense frustration of desire’s debt or the extortionate cost of knowledge shall be an exquisite thing to endure. In turn, if the Slave knows anything, its contingent emergence certainly shapes it with the understanding of the Master’s desire in advance of the Master’s recognition of it precisely because the Slave is what the master desires. This is its obliterating charge. The Master speaks after the Slave’s meaningless response (when the tain splits the reflection). And yet, once this ineffable knowledge “arrives” (that is, in pieces, dismembered), the Master backdates this registration and appropriates its arrival as an effect of its own “predestined” freedom.
Simply put, when the Slave groans in pain, the Master knows he is free. When the Subject wakes to the consequence of a nocturnal emission, it knows the erotic passions of the plantation (or its unconscious) are hard at work. This is, following Afro-pessimism, what I take to be the very structure of discourse. However, what we cannot neglect is Lacan’s formulation that “The subject of discourse does not know himself as the subject holding discourse.” This would suggest that the requirement for the Slave remains hidden. This constitutes a curious problem.
In The Labour of Enjoyment, Samo Tomšič confirms that “… the Master’s discourse does not hide what it is or what it wants. What does remain hidden is…the reproduction of the relations of domination by means of the production of enjoyment.”(Tomšič, 2021) However, in the paradigm of Negrophobia, one might have a few questions for Tomšič: How might we reconcile the public enjoyment of Black death with the alleged secrecy of its vestibularity? Can the Subject (who is a product of the Master’s discourse) indeed remain oblivious to that which constitutes its relations of (racial) domination? Can we still afford to grant the Subject (or our canonical frameworks for theorizing the various consequences of Subjectivity) such a cluelessness under the defense of ‘for they know not what they do’? Or rather, what about the Slave is unthought when its institution remorselessly perfects itself in the open? Perhaps it goes without explicit nominal mention at the dinner table, at the academic conference, but if we take up Lacan’s assertion, “[that], the unconscious is only [known] on the basis of what is said (il n’y a de l’inconscient que du dit)”(Lacan, 2016) then the Subject who is only a Subject, because it speaks, has no issue pointing us in the direction of its barracoon through a kind of benthic parapraxis. It can always be found without much work; thirty minutes into the studio visit; within the first act of the film; within the first line of the legislation; within the first chapter of a work of continental philosophy, and so on and so forth. To commandeer Žižek, the law of Negrophobia itself “needs its obscene supplement, it is sustained by it.” (Žižek, n.d.) I suggest we are better off conceding that the community of Subjects, the society of (Human) masters, agreed amongst themselves long ago that they intend on enjoying the fruits of Black suffering til Gabriel sounds his trumpet. In other words, there is no negotiating with a paradigm of Subjectivity that remains uninterested in depriving itself of such an immense gift (so as to free the Slave). From police budgets of $1.9 billion to the state-sanctioned execution of white prison guards to squander a Black prison rebellion, anti-Blackness spares no expense in the affirmation of this fact. In this way, I suggest that anti-Blackness operates through the paradigm of sadistic disavowal, that is, through the clinical structure of perversion toward the repudiation of masochistic suffering. In other words, I suggest that one speaks perversely when speaking within a paradigm of antiBlackness. One speaks with the sexual excitation found in the foreclosure of its captive’s transcendence. We might, then, extend the popular psychoanalytic turn of phrase which captures the Subject’s disavowal: “je sais bien, mais quand meme…” (I know very well but still) and unveil its dreadful addendums: I know very well that Slavery is here and now but it is precisely in its re-production that I find enjoyment.
Toward an Immanence of the Groan
In the opening lines of her seminal work Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe, Hortense Spillers famously remarks that if the negative grammatical function of the captive (or the Slave) were not there, “it would have to be invented.” To my mind, this is a necessarily devastating rejoinder to Lacan’s assertion that “Even if memories of familial repression weren’t true, they would have to be invented, and that is certainly done.”(Lacan, 1990) This displacement of the familial with, what we might term the barracoonal, prompts us to ask: Do the grammatical afterlives of racial Slavery’s unspeakable practices transpire as a consequence of Oedipalized speech? Could we argue that the nocturnal darkness of familial repression appropriates its alleged unthought-ness from (racial) Blackness, which Sara-Maria Sorentino characterizes as the “appearance of nonappearance; the capacitation of incapacity”? (Sorentino, 2023) I argue that the boundary and content of the unconscious, which oversees the repression of the Subject’s most archaic and therefore forgotten libidinal investment, is situated by this fabricated darkness, this Blackness, which cannot be remembered. It is a blackness that cannot be incorporated but can always be had insofar as it is invented because it is spoken on the condition that its totality must be debased by representative activity. To repeat this quote of Lacan’s, if “the unconscious is only [known] on the basis of what is said (il n’y a de l’inconscient que du dit),” (Lacan, 2016) then there is indeed a possessive invention of this immanent and “nocturnal” difference which results as an effect of discourse. It is the property of a sadistic will to speak (or lacerate) this abyss into attenuated being. That is, into a being for the enjoyment of its captor.
If we are to speak on matters of enjoyment, I suggest that we underscore the psyche’s bondage of and not to the unconscious that discourse occasions. And if we are to broach the peculiar function of bondage from which the psyche sources its vital distortions and representatives of its lost object, we must not be reluctant to know the (anti) Blackness of this nominal (but no less costly) bondage when it is precisely through (anti) Blackness that the Subject comes to know itself as such. “Enjoyment names,” as Marc De Kesel defines, “the experience that enables the libidinal being to imagine that its lack is entirely overcome.”(Kesel, 2010) But what about this definition of enjoyment, or jouissance, entreats a paradigm of bondage? And what is the (non)ontology of this lack? I remain uninterested in or unconvinced by the Lacanian paradigm of an enslavement to language to which all libidinal beings endure by virtue of its enforced generality. If it is indeed that language exhibits an enforcement, felt in the compulsion to speak or the paradigm of a Lacanian J’ ai à dire (I ought to tell) , I ask: to what does the psychical being attribute this compulsion? Lacan accompanies this consideration of J’ ai à dire with the question, “does one possess a memory? Might it be said that we do more in saying that we have one than in imagining that we have one, that we have one at our disposal?” (Lacan, 2016) With regards to J’ ai à dire, Lacan offers that “one can accentuate the verb in such a way as to be able to say I do make.” (Lacan, 2016) We find here our most crucial heuristic: the bonds of compulsion, possession, fashioning, and memory. Emerging as a succession of coercive corollaries, each necessarily occasion the other in every instance of speech. If one is compelled to speak or enjoy, then it is precisely because one has been called to search for or fashion a signifying relation for another signifier (an imbrication which results in the formation of the Subject). And if one has been compelled to answer the call to invent a memory (which is to say a sign), it is precisely because one is driven to desire the possession of that which discursive power alleges to overcome: the Nothingness which, as Adrian Johnston writes, “remains eternally condemned to the nocturnal darkness of repression.”(Johnston, 2005)
“I’m insisting, all told, on the fact that through this making,” Lacan clarifies, “there is nothing but fashioning.”(Lacan, 2016) Akin to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s declaration that “there is nothing but signs” (Lyotard, 1993) insofar as the psychical being’s fashioning is performed assuming that it will embody (which is to say forget) its having-been-fashioned (or signified) ahead and productive of its seduction into and by discourse. That in order for the psychical being to speak, so the story goes, it had to first lose the Thing, the unsayable cause of its endless desire, and do so routinely precisely by re-finding representative objects, which, over time, calcify this structural amnesia and only give the impression of its most archaic darkness exposed at last. “… being is nothing other than forgetting.”(Lacan, 2007)
What do we make of this psychical being? Why would that not apply to all of “us”? If we take Lacan’s insistence in Seminar XVII at its word, through an Afro-pessimist positionality, that the “subject, who is called human, no doubt because he is the humus of language,”(Lacan, 2007) then we must contend with its most assumptive logic, the Human, which indeed relies upon an abyssal and forgotten différance. Lacan sets up a Hegelian reorientation certainly amenable to our analysis a few sentences later: the knowledge which the subject possesses, insofar as it only owns half of it, [has] its initial status in the Master’s discourse “on the side of the slave.”(Lacan, 2007) And further, “[truth] cannot be said completely, for the reason that beyond this half, there is nothing to say.” (Lacan, 2007) We are, of course, invested in (or annihilated by) the non-event of the nothing which cannot be said and which lies not on the “other side” of language but rather in the abyssal crevices internal to it. It is the nothing which signified knowledge (a redundancy) fashions just as the Subject speaks it. It owns it—and this is key—precisely by destroying it.
Indebted to David S. Marriott’s indispensable work of Lacan Noir, we refuse to let Lacan off the hook, so to speak, for his use of the “slave” in (non)relation to the “human” as a formula which, until recently, eludes sustained interrogation. The arrangement which places the slave at (if not buried by) the differential mark, which institutes the Subject’s knowledge as partial, is inextricable from the grammars of racial Slavery that precede its proper formulation. Put another way, the “slave” cannot be afforded any such symbolic relief upon the general when there is in fact, something like and in excess of a correlate, a semblance, through which this term undeniably receives its (a)signifying charge: the flesh of the Slave. From this point on, we will use this term interchangeably with Negro and Black. The Human thus arises paradoxically (or perhaps harmoniously) as a tautological singularity within its generality, ordained with a capacity—as the exceptional humus—for (half) speech simply by virtue of being a Subject that is not only signifiable as Human but that Human and Subject appear to collapse into a chiasmus: there is no Subject which is not a Human and there is no Human which would not be a Subject. Without the space for a (Sylvia) Wynterian analysis on the historical co-constitution of these categories, we shall develop this syllogism through this brief, but no less, imperative remark of Lacan’s. Further, just as Lacan refuses to reiterate for us that the Subject is Human (precisely because, for him, this would certainly be pedantic), we shall do the same. These terms will also, therefore, remain interchangeable. Where does all of this leave the Slave?
“We can observe,” Lacan advances, “that historically the master has slowly defrauded the slave of [its] knowledge and turned it into the master’s knowledge.”(Lacan, 2007) To paraphrase Sorentino, what results is the need for the discursive incapacity of the Slave, a reservoir of negativity’s immanence which must remain uniquely amenable to the libertine violations of the Human’s (Master’s) desire to know. And there is something crucial afforded to us in Lacan’s use of “defrauded.” It is not simply a desire to know but a desire to deceive what the Subject of psychoanalysis has at its disposal: a veiled memory which must be passionately forgotten each time something is spoken (about it). The character of deception plays an essential role in the discursive dramaturgy of racialized capacity, of knowledge production (which is always its bisection). The capacity of the Slave, if we are to briefly entertain the idea of one, would only be a capacity to be gruesomely conned out of something which it never had in the first instance: capacity as such, the ability to dawn the accoutrements of discourse which might grant it protection from the brutality of everyday semiotic annihilation; the capacity to be something which was not a being for the promise of its own implacable and ineffable suffering. The Slave’s capacity is to be found in the black(ened) half, the Nothingness, beyond* what is said (what is tortured) by the Master. As Frank Wilderson III famously contends, “[The Human] is parasitic because it monumentalizes its subjective capacity, its lush cartography, in direct proportion to the wasteland of Black incapacity.”(Wilderson, 2010) In other words, this direct proportionality is less a comparative maneuver than it is one of dependence and habituation which occurs at the level of libidinalized ontology. This “wasteland of Black incapacity” qua the nocturnal, ineffable, and forgotten property of Being indexes the world-historical processes which have fashioned the African into the Negro or the most exquisite semblance of the seductive terror (Nothingness) harvested from the primordial Thing of the Subject’s enjoyment.
Afro-pessimism, always on time, arrives to offer its most indispensable clarification of and rejoinder to this antagonism: the Slave cannot be and never was Human. The Human, therefore—partially following Sylvia Wynter’s groundbreaking analysis of the narratively constituted metonymy of Man/homo economicus with the Western European—will be treated as a category which belongs to the White Planter and houses, what Wilderson terms its non-Black junior partners. And one might feel compelled to qualify this category of the Human as an ‘ontological’ one so as to concede to or not entirely foreclose the anatomical resemblance of the Negro to any other human (body). However, as Calvin Warren situates for us with unrelenting clarity (via Lindon Barrett), “modernity produces ‘anthropomorphic uncertainty’ by which ‘racial blackness overwhelmingly disappoints the modern resemblance of the human, signaling instead the unleashing of the inhuman that specifies the ‘human’ population of the modern state.’ The biological and visual resemblance does not render the Negro a human being — these are nothing more than ontic illusions. Ontologically and metaphysically, the Negro is anything but Human.”(Warren, 2018) To paraphrase Spillers, the human body becomes a metonymic compression for “an entire repertoire”(Spillers, 1987) of Human sociality from which the Slave has been prohibited. We might reconfigure the popular Lacanian turn of phrase towards this racialized failure of resemblance: if the unconscious is structured like a language or is comprised of nocturnal objects which cannot be apprehended without the senescent mediation of language, then the Slave is structured like the anthropoid but remains disavowed by the category of Human. It is precisely for this reason, this imposed discordance, that the Slave is subject to the full force of this category’s neurotic and sadistic will to apprehend that which it cannot but nevertheless has at its beck and call: a barracoonal abyss. If it is a question of knowledge or what lies beyond (or immanent to) the half which could be said, then the Slave can never be known or, rather, it is known as the property of the half which the Human possesses through discourse or, more accurately, enjoyment (as much as the sail of the ship possesses or uses the wind). The Human of psychoanalysis exists on the side of knowledge, on the side of what is spoken (the only side), insofar as its knowledge arrives on account of its enjoyment of the Slave.
We shall approach the Negro as psychical flesh, not as psychical being, in that it is primordial stuff about which the drives of the Subject infinitely turn. To follow Spillers, the flesh (of the Slave) differs from the body of the (Human) Subject. As she famously writes, “before the ‘body,’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography.”(Spillers, 1987) Spillers invites us to complicate our relationship to being in her damning proviso that the “captive body reduces to a thing, becoming a being for the captor.”(Spillers, 1987) Analogous to our previous mention of Sorentino’s capacitation of incapacity, Spillers qualifies the captive’s being with the preposition of for. It is a certain ek-sistence which emerges on the condition that it remains a recording surface for the “undecipherable markings” written by the whip.
Further, if we are to take Spillers’ use of ‘before’ to be analogous or captive to Lacan’s ‘nothing’ which lies beyond* the half that it said, then we ought to reorient their diachronic registers toward, as we have been interested in thus far, an immanent (non)relation. That is to say, internal to the formation of the body, lies the flesh; internal to the half that is said is the différance which can never be known completely. Spillers situates the flesh as the primary narrative; the seared, divided, and ripped-apart caro (whose Latin and Germanic meanings we might combine to signify something like the ‘beloved meat’) whose function as the unthought vestibule of meaning makes discursive activity legible as such. R.A. Judy expounds upon the implications of this intervention for semiotics/linguistics in his interdisciplinary work, Sentient Flesh. “[In] stating that the flesh does not escape concealment by the brush of discourse is to remark,” writes Judy, “its being inevitably implicated with discourse as an essential element of signification.”(Judy, 2020) The requisite character, or the implicated condition of the flesh, must not be taken to mean a kind of intelligible involvement (and let us stay away from the S-word: sovereignty) but rather as its complete foreclosure. Its elemental status renders it barred from or primal contraband in the production of meaning. Blackness is meaningless to the extent that it is vestibular to meaning’s coherence. Spillers articulates a captivity to meaning (and its memory) in and as inevitability that extends to the level of the writing itself: “I might as well add that the familiarity of this narrative does nothing to appease the hunger of recorded memory, nor does the persistence of the repeated rob these well-known, oft-told events of their power, even now, to startle. In a very real sense, every writing as revision makes the ‘discovery’ all over again.” This notion of re-discovery will become more significant in Part 2 but I find this use of “the hunger of recorded memory”(Spillers, 1987) to be a sufficient indictment of our earlier citation of Lacan. The possession of a memory is radicalized here as the racialized hunger for meaning. Its recorded-ness, which is to say its compliance before discourse, is never satisfactory and also never fails to impose the terror of its reminder: that the Slave is without meaningful referent, nothing protects it from the passions of the Master. In other words, what Spillers brandishes for us is that discourse demands the repetition of the Negro’s exposure to its own gruesome incapacity. No amount of repetition causes the serrated edge of this fact to erode into blunt, bearable form. The depth of this suffering slices through with terrible ease each time but the groan has been transposed into a sentence much like this one. Discourse needs us and if we are not there, we would have to be invented; the primal sacrifice which can never be sacrificed enough.
I experiment with an assertion that the symbolic permutations of anti-Blackness “postemancipation” expose the way in which the psychical being (or the Human) has become less bounded to the “ought” of language and has instead accentuated the “ought’s” invention such that it can have, spend, or annihilate, if only fantasmatically, its ineffable object-cause of desire, its property of enjoyment: the flesh of the Slave.
Under these circumstances, how else might we think of the cost and character of the Slave’s “emancipation” through this para-Lacanian positionality? Freedom is most certainly relevant to psychoanalysis inasmuch as it asks: what is it that we* are free to do as speaking/psychical beings? One of its answers may be: you are free to enjoy. This is the freedom to repeat endlessly toward a satisfaction through discursive means alone. Which means this is a structurally impossible and necessarily deferred satisfaction precisely because something is always in excess of language: the object-cause of its desire to signify, to represent without affliction. The Human (who is the) Subject is free to be found wanting before the demand to speak the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Indeed, this failure is what the Subject registers as freedom inasmuch as it ironically affords one access to the symbolic, or to the economic, legal, and social relations of the libidinal everyday. Moreover, this freedom is, according to psychoanalysis, an alienation from the pre-subjective melange (before the Great Split) that yields the production and accumulation of (deferred) meaning. This deferral allows for the psychical being to participate in Subjectivity, to be in the company of Others, precisely because one only makes sense to the Other if one knows how to signify via the deferral of differentiation: a process which is identical to the little sacrifice of the Thing in the banal activity of signification. It is from the neurosis of this possessive repetition that the Subject sources the semblant of its freedom which must also be the condemnation of an ineffable Blackness to an oblivion of no origin.
I argue that this repetition of deferral is less an imprisonment of the speaking Subject than it is an abrupt, but no less amenable, inhabitation through which the possession of the Subject’s abyss is learned and exercised. This abrupt inhabitation is the index which confirms that Subject indeed has a Slave in its possession or rather that it has just sacrificed one. This compulsion to speak is proof of a successful (but necessarily incomplete) conning of the Black out of its undecipherable wailing. Its dreadful pitch grants the Master the urge and fetish to know in-half, to speak meaningfully, to employ the exploits of meaning toward more efficient (or neurotic) methods for apprehending Nothing. The thrill of failure is undeniable for the Subject and he or she must make a life out of a perpetual hunt for the rush of prohibition’s enforcement. The deferral of the whole Slave is exquisite and miserable, endlessly inviting. The sadistic repetition begins in search of this abyss in its totality, of Blackness in toto.
If we are to imply that the Slave is in the place of this abyss of Subjectivity (a product of signification) and that this sadistic Subjectivity is where the speaking Subject sources the sense of its freedom, then I argue that the Slave’s unfreedom will remain indestructible so long as a semblant for the lost, primordial reservoir is required—a reservoir against and from which the Subject (which is also to say discursive activity) results. The Slave’s emancipation marks its freedom to behold as every inch of this World, of its imago, of its flesh transforms into a metaphor of the plantation (the nocturnal darkness) from which it thought it had been liberated. It is a freedom to witness the repetition of its death, of its utility as Nothing, as the accursed share of speech. As Warren states, “it made little difference whether one was born free, received the “gift” of freedom from a master, purchased freedom, resided in the North or South; the ontological question, the Negro Question, remained.”(Warren, 2018)
How is it that the libidinal-material geographies of anti-Black terror radicalize the generality of psychoanalytic nomenclatures for the (prohibited) enjoyment constitutive of discourse? How might we, say, reconcile a civil society composed of discourse’s Planters who cannot be, according to psychoanalysis, discursive masters of their own spoken plantations? What is it for the Slave to be captive to a World wherein they are bound to the libidinalmaterialities of a Master discourse which yields no definitive subject of mastery? Only Human subjects who can never attain full dominion over speech. To be sure, we will say that it is precisely in this failure to be a complete subject of mastery, in the (deferred) satisfaction of owning, insofar as it must be a gruesome sacrifice, that the Planter in fact comes to Know and fashion a World whereby there is something indeed lost to speech but no less transferrable in a libidinal economy of property rights: the enjoyment sourced in the torture of Black flesh by which the Planter-Subject declares (in the style of the Other, who is in fact still Human) an irrefutable jurisdiction over this property, an absolute desire spoken ex cathedra, and is therefore granted access to the erotics of (divided) knowledge.
I own it in that I enjoy it to the extent that I must annihilate it—until the remains of it are ready for my necromantic desire.
The Black continues to endure the proliferation of Slavery’s metaphors or the discursive permutations of its unfreedom as Slave. As Sorentino reissues, “slavery is (nothing but) metaphor.”(Sorentino, 2020) Racial Slavery and its libidinal afterlife becomes the semblant of the Subject’s freedom—the freedom to will the Slave into annihilated presence—insofar as Blackness has become the semblant of the Nothingness which the Subject longs to re-possess. The Human Subject of psychoanalysis continues to erect the immortality of its enjoyment, their freedom, upon the desire to pervert the “language” of the abyss internal to the Subject’s very becoming. The meaning-less and involuntary groan of the Slave is destined for invention and the terror of transubstantiation into the Word(s) of its Master who has inherited this status precisely through his alienation from discursive mastery. Make no mistake, the materialities of property’s possession cannot be entirely ephemeralized but it is possession’s paradigmatic dissonance with what the psychical being actually* desires to have (as if they could Know this for certain, which is to say as if they could speak it totally) that endues the non-event of jouissance with the power to imagine and prohibit a way out of the Nothingness internal to Subjective constitution.
In other words, I would agree that none are spared by the compulsion toward antiBlackness, insofar as one’s Subjectivization is contingent upon the unfreedom of a racialized abyss. If we take this seriously, then what does it mean to abandon the concept of freedom (conditioned by the discourse of/that is the Human) if its utterance and its object-cause emanates from the real which has become a semblant for the barracoon?
What lurks here is a question of need. What does the Planter need in order to speak into being his or her sense of freedom? Put sweetly, and to paraphrase Wilderson, one might want to revisit the structure of the lesson we as Black “children” are given.(Wilderson, 2023) We do not say that the officer may let us go if we do as he says but rather that what he says, which is to say what he must know through language, insists upon our deaths in one fashion or another; upon our relegation to the realm of social death whether we are “there” or not. The officer, or the Human, rehearses this half-knowing precisely by seeing his or her bullets withdraw into the Black. It is in the grim opening that is left, the nocturnal letter, the hieroglyphic of the flesh, where the Subject re-learns (precisely by forgetting) its first word: the very thunder of the bulletladen carapace of the Slave as it hits the earth—the semblant for “I am free”.
On Jouissance
Jouissance, which will be used interchangeably with enjoyment, remains peculiar in its historical evasion of a singular definition which is perhaps a symptom of the non-event it signifies, or rather what Lacan calls “the negative instance”. Simultaneously a reward, a punishment, a hidden motive, a prohibition, a transgression, an interference and a maintenance tool (or all of the above), jouissance is invariably ineffable and provisional. Only for a moment, it satisfies the tongue precisely by attenuating the libidinal force which appears to issue from the lacuna of the psyche or the organs of the body when it is in fact an imposition from the outside. The libidinal ought announces the enforcement of the Other’s reason, the command for the I to bitterly caress (and fashion) the discursive contours of itself along the threshold of symbolic law or perhaps along the desperation for the glory of its transgression. The ought, experienced as a libidinal tempest, appears to beg for discharge but is prohibited from finding emancipatory congruity with any translation the symbolic order could afford at the precise moment of “translation” or compromise; a translation in and as a whole mutilation. The psychical being purports to “find itself coerced” into possession of a deficient sign, into the use of a partial representative, a semblant in preference to the unbearable real which it substitutes. The semblant emerges precisely as the wish to find something which would not be an adulteration of the repressed abyssal surplus (impossible). Before we arrive at how it is we mean to position jouissance in relation to Slavery, we must first chart out the strange nature of jouissance proper according to Lacanian psychoanalysis.
To follow Néstor Braunstein, “jouissance becomes unacceptable, unbearable, unspeakable, and impossible to be said in articulate discourse.”(Braunstein, 2021) Jouissance is erected in the economic and jurisprudential ruin of the drives, or the necessarily bankrupt attempt to speak into being the primordial object of enjoyment which has been lost. It therefore invites the singularities of rage and joy, torment and felicity, or pain and satisfaction which articulate themselves as exquisite frustrations, glorious debts, or collectively within what might be analogous to a Derridean différance. Enjoyment is known only through the proliferation of deferrals which one attains (with exciting discontent) and has not only accepted but has made the subject of a burdened infatuation. In light of these affective coalitions, I refer to Darian Leader who asserts that jouissance expresses the fundamental hybridity of the libido. The cleave of signification which means to reduce the tension brought upon by the undecidability of these fusions by selecting a signifier or a representative object “free” of this confusion, although material and quantifiable in its effects, is reliant upon the fruition (or failure) of fantasy. jouissance or what Leader refers to as, the “‘strange satisfaction’ is a result of a rather complicated process, starting from frustration, moving through fantasy and ending in the construction of symptoms, construed as a form of sexual activity that includes the very forces that work against such activity.”(Leader, 2022) However, it is this metamorphosis through fantasy which accounts for a fundamental and prepositional dehiscence which perhaps makes itself known through the ordinary question of ‘what is it that you fantasize about?’ The vestibule of fantasy between about and it, articulates itself as a channel of mutilating disruptions, of dislocating translations. The object of it is subordinate to the gravitational will of about which pulls and processes it through the gory labyrinth of those previously named libidinal fusions which it both attracts and is constituted by. These fusions must be cast off through the Good (work) of signification whereby the it becomes something other than itself, something speakable and sensible to the Other to the extent that it must be paradigmatically unlike its repressed, untranslatable cause—how (wonderfully) disappointing, the Subject will say. The ineffable Thing can only be known through the melodrama of substitution or the immanent tragedy of failure with which every object-choice is afflicted. It is, therefore, imperative we emphasize the discordant dynamic which precipitates the frustration that (sexual) translation both soothes and works against. “The transaction,” writes Braunstein, “is never acceptable…one does not know if the price paid corresponds to the value of what has been received in return and must resign oneself to the loss implied in surrendering something real for symbolic compensation….” (Braunstein, 2021) And as Johnston reissues for us, “[Lacan] speaks of an irreconcilable tension between the object sought after by the drives and the object that actually offers itself to the drives—‘There is always an essential division, fundamentally conflictual, in the re-found object, and, in the very act of its re-finding, there is therefore always a discordance in the re-found object in relation to the object sought after’.”(Johnston, 2005) Discordancy emerges precisely because jouissance, whose evidence may be found in the semblant, does not satisfy the necessity of the vital functions (belonging to the exigency of the oral and anal drives, the “tit for tat of milk and shit”(Braunstein, 2021)), on the contrary it provokes the stubbornness of the libidinal drives which remain sleepless and full of conflictual hybrids whose collective aim is precisely its own inhibition. “The drive is not satisfied: it insists, repeats, and always misses the mark, ‘though with no prospect of bringing the process to a conclusion or of being able to reach the goal’.” (Braunstein, 2021)
The debt (in knowing what one cannot) is a relation which only satisfies insofar as it cathects or acquiesces to the repetition and dispersal of its own devastation. One is served the balance of ek-sistence at the dawn of Subject formation and is recursively compelled to invest blindly into the symbolic—reimbursed with nothing but perpetual notices of accumulating debt in the form of substitutive objects which always arrive empty and corrupted. In other words, the continuous and prohibitive character of jouissance makes it such that the veracity of a sign remains painfully or exquisitely in abeyance until veracity or precise translation (between sign and stimuli) is no longer the pursuit of the drive. Instead–and this is key–one develops the insatiable taste for the manifold methods for rubbing against the hopelessness of absolute translation. If one wishes to survive, the Subject must not only accept but delight in the balance which can never be paid in full; one must learn rotate its lacerating drives around an archaic fixation or the ineffable thing-in-itself. Enjoyment of this nocturnal object, the incessant disappointment of its articulation, is not only vital but ethical. The orbit of the drive institutes itself as a Saturnian ring of substitutions, the particulate matter of failed object-choices which turn about a primordial Thing which is only known precisely through the mediation of those failures which it (the Thing) is compelled to seduce into eternal rotation. “Thus, the drives aim not at satisfaction per se,” Johnston remarks, “but at a thwarted, inaccessible form of enjoyment.”(Johnston, 2005) The Lacanian symbolic therefore affords the legal right/mandate to enjoy, to bring the Subject to the limits of fantasy via its substitutive (or elevated) objects until it knows the forbidden pleasure of knowing as such. Enjoyment sutures the community of Subjects to the law, polluting its libidinal reservoir with a tain, a “guilt”, that it cannot imagine life without. Simplified into a maxim-couplet: on the one hand, only that which is forbidden can be enjoyed and on the other, it is precisely through this guilt, at the level of structure, that the Subject is compelled to obey the symbolic; a negative instance which occurs when the Subject fails to transgress this most central of laws: you must (never) enjoy! This guilt is, of course, a misdirection which we will return to in a moment.
Jouissance, to return to De Kesel’s definition, only imagines the satisfaction of the libido. One may only ever stage the successful transaction whereby the invested affect is linguistically compensated in toto. And it is, of course, not enough for the psychical body to incur this economic failure, this structural deficiency, just once. It is precisely that this doom or its cost precedes and induces the psychical body’s invitation/demand to represent itself and that its first entrapments with the debt collector of representation happen too soon that one forgets and recursively associates a general subsistence with this structural indebtedness. That with each acquisition, each partial possession of the re-discovered object, “we find anew that there’s no point asking which of these repetitions was the first to have been learned.”(Lacan, 1999) In other words, debt is the first lesson of the libidinal being, or for being libidinal inasmuch as it might as well be the first time each time it is exercised. I invoke here Lyotard’s figure of the labyrinth which I find to be analogous to the unrelenting character of the drive’s harmonious antagonism with enjoyment:
The beast expelled from the dark shelter, where it was kept, runs in all directions, an almost imperceptible silver thread, terrified. It never learns this labyrinth. The terror in the labyrinth is such that it precludes the observations and notation of identities. This is why the labyrinth is not a permanent architectural construction, but is immediately formed in the place, and at the moment (on what map, according to what calendar?) where there is terror. The labyrinth, then, does not exist, but there are as many labyrinths ‘in it’ as terrifying emotions, whether or not they are felt. Each encounter gives rise to a frantic voyage towards an outside of suffering. The suppression of this could only result in an identical repetition of the encounter. One flees perhaps to learn, to rediscover the encountered property because through repeating it one hopes to be able to localize it, to set up its situation, to inscribe it in a time. But since this terror produces its own singular, labyrinth, there are other corridors, other corners than those which the flight, and the fleer, are able to delineate; that is why the beast [set free* to learn* the labyrinth] learns nothing, it multiplies incomparable labyrinths. (Lyotard, 1993)
And Lyotard would certainly agree, and goes on to argue, that “the beast”, or the Subject, enjoys or looks forward to each emergence of the labyrinth, each time it realizes it has forgotten yields another libidinal infinity by which to re-discover another useless (and therefore perfect) substitution. Enjoyment is an economic relation whose trades and investments only yield economic crisis or psychical neurosis which is precisely what the psychical being takes to be, perhaps through a mode of perversion, that which provides pleasurable stasis and defense from total disintegration in such proximity to the abyss. As Lacan remarks in Seminar XX, “The subject results from the fact that this knowledge must be learned and even have a price put on it—in other words, it is its cost that values it, not as exchange but as use. Knowledge is worth just as much as it costs, a pretty penny, in that it takes elbow grease and that its difficult. Difficult to what? Less to acquire than to enjoy it.”(Lacan, 1999) Most ironic, for us, is that in the footnote for the translation of ‘elbow grease’, Fink includes that “the French here, qu’il faille y metre de sa peau, could also be translated as ‘one must pay with one’s hide (or skin)’ or ‘one must pay in blood.’” (Lacan, 1999) With respect to our meditations on the flesh à la Spillers, the obvious question seems to be: with whose flesh is knowledge paid for? One way to answer this may be found in Nesson’s epigraph. The perceived reversal of appearance or positionality (from the immanence we have advocated for thus far) of the poem elaborates a dimension of expropriation jouissance is certainly concerned with insofar as jouissance is linked to the dimension of the Other. Nesson’s poem, briefly mentioned in Philippe Aries’ The Hour of Our Death, is pulled from a selection of poems of the Late Middle Ages which are preoccupied with the terror of decomposition after death and the real of the body’s contents beginning to articulate themselves as the flesh breaks down. As Aries prefaces Nesson’s poem with, “The solids and liquids of corruption are concealed beneath the skin.”(Aries, 2008) Death might be figured here as the foreclosure of enjoyment’s expropriation but nothing about this explicitly assumes a posthumous character—and what exactly about death ceases the production of enjoyment? Nesson’s poem possess an ambivalence we ought to take advantage of. The donning of the flesh proposes an inversion that circles back to our introductory accusation of a certain everyday demonstration of libertine ethics. An immanence of the flesh, as a condition of Subjectivity, is no longer hidden as much as it is an expropriated surface which is maimed into a semblance, a raiment, for the real of the body. Simply put, the cost of knowledge is the flesh of the pscyhe’s primordial darkness. Moreover, it is this maiming which follows the assumptive yoke of pain and pleasure to be found in the flesh. Saidiya Hartman seemingly condenses this entire theory into a single passage from Scenes of Subjection:
For those forced to “step it up lively,” the festivity of the trade and the pageantry of the coffle were intended to shroud the violence of the market and deny the sorrow of those sold and their families. These extravagant displays elided the distinction between submission and willfulness in the purposive denial of pain. The disavowal of a captives’ pain operates on a number of levels, from simple denial of pain to the stipulation of an excessive enjoyment. The terms of this disavowal, or something like: no, the slave is not in pain. Pain isn’t really pain for the enslaved, because of their limited sentience, tendency to forget, and easily consolable grief. Lastly, the slave is happy and, in fact, his happiness exceeds our own. As a consequence of this operation, the initial revulsion and horror induced by the site of shackled and manacled bodies gives way to reassurances about black pleasure (Hartman, 1997).
Hartman appears to do much more (in 1997) for the racial implications of jouissance than most of contemporary psychoanalysis. Enjoyment unfolds across two successive fronts: through expropriation and the expropriation of the Other. “One can only legitimately enjoy,” Braunstein remarks, “what one possesses, and in order to do so fully, it is necessary for the other to relinquish his claim to that object.”(Braunstein, 2021) To translate this for our purposes, we simply say that the Master only enjoys his freedom on the condition that it renders the perfect unfreedom of the slave. Moreover, there is no one who is constituted as a Subject that does not have access to this expropriated surface. Unfreedom is consolidated in the flesh: the font of antiBlack, libertine jurisprudence which produces, at the whim and will of its shareholders, the fantasy of excess enjoyment in the Slave. Knowledge, as an effect of the cruel routines of Slavery, can be found everywhere without much work. The difficulty is to be found in the acquisition of enjoyment. However, the challenge of acquisition is nothing more than another invention. In this way, the theory of jouissance proper is correct to the extent that its doctrine of prohibition, or the paradigmatic attenuation of its satisfaction, induces a tautology of disappointment and delight following the re-discovery of substitutions for the Subject’s nocturnal captive. However, I mean to pull out the political implications of this attenuation—more precisely, the consequences of its theatricality, its inventedness. Psychoanalysis does not disagree with this point. However, it seems to grant Subjectivity a particular benightedness in relation to this imposition. The Subject is allegedly unaware of the auto-apportionment of inhibitions which shield it from the abyssal totality of knowledge, from the full enjoyment of its object-cause. However, Hartman’s analysis of pleasure’s/leisure’s enforcement on the plantation offers a different approach.
As Lacan attends to, jouissance emerges elsewhere within discourses of law. Possessionwhich is to say the production—of enjoyment finds itself articulated through and as usufruct: the right to enjoy the fruits of the property being used and more precisely, the right to use and enjoy the property of another. There is, of course, a limit: “When you have usufruct of an inheritance, you can enjoy the inheritance (en jouir) as long as you don’t use up too much of it.”(Lacan, 1999) Sacrifice becomes essential to the management of jouissance; prohibition connotes a contract, that one has given up their access to jouissance, to those unbound excitaitons of force, so as to participate within normative modes of exchange and ethical activity. The principle of inhibition is relevant to to us insofar as it situates the demand for an obstruction which would stop the Subject from enjoying to the point of death or foreclosure. However, how does this principle shift when the ethical activity of the everyday is invested in, if not predicated entirely upon, Black suffering? How does the Subject engender these practices of restraint? And if restraint is less a restraint of one’s own enjoyment but a restraint imposed upon the expropriated surface to which the (fractured) whole of enjoyment is attributed, then how exactly is this achieved? How does the Subject keep the property of enjoyment from running away or from exacting its abyssal price? In other words, how does sadistic enjoyment, if it is an unbound access to enjoyment, reproduce its own transgressive character? What enclosures does it provide itself with such that it might yield the recursive thrill of their detonation?
To answer this, I suggest that Hartman’s analysis of the allowance of entertainment and the harnessing of “pleasure as a productive force” on the plantation is a necessary rejoinder. The mitigation and alleviation of unrest was practiced through the transformation of leisure (dancing, music, and other rituals of recreation) into a procedure. The encouragement—which, of course, could not be distinguished from the coercion—of entertainment was predicated upon the logic that it “added to the enjoyment and fitness of the slave.” It was in the enforcement of frolic and joy that the Master successfully enfolded recreation into the paradigm of domination. “In this case,” Hartman writes, “the slave’s good times were at the same time a performance for the slaveholder.” (Hartman, 1997) The effect of avocation’s allowance/enforcement was two-fold with regard to the jouissance of racial mastery. The first could be found in the presence of the gaze, which, in itself, doubled as a surveillant move and a means of this expropriation. The coerced merriment of the dominated further demonstrated to the Master that the Slave, in spite of its attempts to resist this condition, would and did find joy in the condition of its own suffering. The projection of excess enjoyment in these displays provided the Master with ample libidinal currency to usurp as his own (precisely because this, too, belonged to him) which will be the justification when next he exacts his cruelty upon the flesh (they enjoy the whole of their torment and remain discontent with only a portion). The second is that the imposition of recreation is perhaps the Master’s strategy for effectuating the terms of his usufruct to the flesh, that is, his prevention of total exhaustion. Pleasure’s “encouragement” disguised the singularity of domination as a force capable of vicissitudes, as something with the capacity to disburden its captives of their pain from time to time. But most notably, it yielded a libidinal barrier, a relational dynamic against which the slaveholder could measure its force. In other words, recreation, or the excess enjoyment of the Slave, provided the slaveholder with a continuous boundary to breach. What might this yield in terms of a concern with discursive activity/ involvement? I suggest that Hartman’s analysis accentuates the anti-Black dimensions of discourse formation that is dependent upon enjoyment’s prohibition–or its fabrication. In another way, the sadistic structure of anti-Blackness necessarily overdetermines Lacanian speech. One invents substitutions for or a “weakened” form domination over its object-cause of desire (its nocturnal letter) as a mere ruse or perhaps a perversion of masochistic woe. The guilt characteristic of enjoyment’s inauguration is only such that it appropriates the fashioned guilt of the Slave–who is ontologically guilty before the law–to justify the repetition, the incompleteness, of its satisfaction. The repetition and enforcement of spirited play, encoded by the threat of the alternative, is assumed to correspond to the alleged anxiety found in the object-choice. However, I suggest that there is no anxiety on the part of the slaveholder in this enforcement at the level of psychical investment. The threat of sedition against the sadistic slaveholder is perhaps his greatest wish inasmuch as it would invite the total judgment of slave law to descend upon the flesh. These substitutions for domination are ruses precisely because the slaveholder has absolute authority over the flesh. There is always something in excess of economic concern for the productivity of the plantation. The ephemeral and imposed contract of recreation could be broken at any time if the Master so wished. Therefore, I argue that those who are considered subjects of discourse, and have necessarily inherited the grammars of Slavery’s relational dynamics, do not produce symbolic substitutions out of anxious necessity–they are not defending themselves against Nothing, instead, they are taunting its incapacity to contest. This fabrication and its repetition are superfluous precisely because the Subject already has wanton access to the semblant for the primordial object of enjoyment: Blackness. The sacrifice of jouissance does not occur or, worse, is itself staged so as to convince the Slave of a kindness found in restraint and recreation’s permission. This invites a grim line of inquiry: Is there anything Blackness could do which would not contribute to the stockpile of enjoyment for the Master? A stockpile which transforms into ammunition. And if there is nothing beyond the purview of the Master’s libidinal expropriation (or the distribution of its cruelty), then what does that mean for our libidinal investments in terms such as capacity, sovereignty, and agency? The jouissance of racial mastery is therefore sourced not only in the repetition of enforcement but in the fashioning of boundaries which authenticate its transgression in the form of pleasure in and as domination.
The Veil of Enchanted Relations
Could it stand to reason that the inheritances of Slavery within the grammars of psychoanalysis call for the dislodging of the clinical and theoretical primacy afforded to psychical masochism, that is, of a so-called general captivity to language? Instead, I suggest we further punctuate how the psychical being learns to have, torment, or enjoy the useless Thing which erects every sign thereafter with proper use (value). To be sure, I speak in terms of fetishism. I propose we reissue the possession characteristic of the ancestral verb form jouir: to have and possess some thing or to have pleasure. Most take comfort in imagining that they are the normative obsessive of psychoanalysis, the classic neurotic, who surrenders their enjoyment (their wish to transgress the morality of symbolic law to overcome a lack) “in the hope of gaining esteem, recognition, and approval…[they give] up the [imaginary phallus for the] phallus as signifier, as the socially recognized signifier of value and desire.”(Fink, 2003) However, what cost might we pay for conceding to this performance? I ask bluntly: how does one achieve this symbolic esteem, recognition and value without putting the Slave to work, so to speak? I argue that participation in the Master’s discourse, under anti-Blackness, makes any who conspire with its demands an indelible child of an antebellum Sade. What the (sadistic) Subject desires out of language is not knowledge as such but the torment which emanates from that abyssal jouissance it usurps at the precise moment it is imposed. To reiterate, with the aid of Bruce Fink, we cannot speak of the Slave as lacking until it is said to be wanting in some regard. And it is precisely in the Subject’s fanaticism to speak this paradigm into (negated) being that we not only perform the diagnosis of its sadism but the cunning of its vicissitudes; the capacity for it to appear as an episodic phenomena (the police shootings of Black people*, which we will not call “extrajudicial,” or the murders of Black trans sex workers, etc.) and not as constitutive of everyday symbolic exchange.
There is a question of what is had or what exactly is in possession of the fetishist such that it can participate in this economy of flesh? Before we answer this, let us settle the nomenclature of disavowal. The fetishist disavows the experience that would otherwise induce the necessary splitting of the ego or the event wherein they must surrender their (perverse) pleasure to the law of its prohibition. This is to say, contradictory thoughts of the libido are set free to walk the perverse psyche side by side in the form of “I know very well, but all the same…”(Fink, 2003). In the case of the neoliberal obsessive/neurotic, something like “I want to generate Black suffering” is repressed and lingers in the unconscious, whereas “I don’t want to see Black people endure such suffering” is what becomes conscious and speakable (appropriating Fink’s formulation). However, those who are perversely oriented toward sadism do not obey the demand to relegate the former utterance to the law’s censorship or even come to produce a libidinal investment in the latter. And if the latter is uttered, are we so eager to believe this? In short, this renunciation of the prohibition of the sadist is achieved by aligning itself completely with the paternal aggressivity of the superego: the despotic enforcer of symbolic law in one’s own psyche. As Deleuze defines, “The sadist has no other ego than that of his victims; he is thus monstrously reduced to a pure superego which exercises its cruelty to the fullest extent and instantaneously recovers its full sexuality as soon as it diverts its power outward.” (Deleuze, 1991) This corresponds to if not accelerates Lacan’s formulation on the Master defrauding the slave of its “knowledge” insofar as the sadist only constitutes its imago and its speech through the bricolage of that flesh which it takes by force. We will return to this point in the next section. Furthermore, if the Master’s discourse is sadistically structured, how does this complicate a language of waiting with regard to the postponement of meaning? “Masochism,” Deleuze remarks, “is a state of pure waiting…Pure waiting divides naturally into two simultaneous currents, the first representing what is awaited, something essentially tardy, always late and always postponed, the second representing something that is expected and on which depends the speeding up of the awaited object.”(Deleuze, 1991) This appears to be a sufficient characterization of the neurotic’s paradigm, that is, of the Master’s discourse which we accuse here of a certain deceptive enrobing. It evades this indictment of sadism precisely by exhibiting a capacity to be, at times, humiliated.
We ought to refer to Hartman’s articulation of weakness to demystify the effect of this humiliation. In her seminal chapter, Seduction and the Ruses of Power (from Scenes of Subjection), Hartman offers one of the more devastating formulations in the path-breaking book regarding the plantation’s economy of seduction and its legalities. Seduction, or the bonds of affection between Master and Slave were, according to the law, internal regulators in the distribution of disciplinary violence. That is to say, the court would displace the verdict to the private affairs of the Master and slave. Or, more specifically, “the brutal dominion guaranteed by the law was to be regulated by the influence of the enslaved–their pull on the heartstrings of the master…the wedding of intimacy and violent domination as regulatory norms exemplifies the logic through which violence is displaced as mutual and reciprocal desire.” (Hartman, 1997) Citing the proslavery ideologue, George Fitzhugh (author of Cannibals All! Or, Slaves without Masters), Hartman’s analysis demonstrates the institution’s libidinal investment in the “strength of weakness” or its threat to the plantation, or more precisely, the (slaveholding) family. In other words, the discourse of seduction sought to establish a commensurability of force which characterized the affect of the slave’s obsequity as nothing but a conspiratorial performance to con the Master–and, by extension, the institution of Slavery–out of its domination. The Slave would be rendered blameworthy “because of her purported ability to render the powerful weak.” (Hartman, 1997) This picture of the sycophantic Negro is, according to all who found Fitzhugh’s literature meaningful, just as powerful as the libertine displays of the Master’s title. However, as Hartman illuminates, this panic does not anticipate a legitimate eschatology of the plantation but instead yields an infernal harmony.
The bonds of affection within the slaveholding family circle permitted the tyranny of weakness and supplanted the stranglehold of the ruling father. Ironically, the family circle remained intact as much because of the bonds of affection as because of the tyranny of the weak. Literally, the forces of affection bound the interests of the Master and those of the slave in a delicate state of equilibrium, as one form of strength modified the other. Thus we are to believe that the exercise of control by the weak softens universal despotism, subdues the power of the father by commanding his care, and guarantees the harmony of slave relations. (Hartman, 1997)
Put differently, slave law attempted to mitigate the brutality against, or rather, the depreciation of its property by outsourcing the power of the court to a discourse of a (narratively-constituted) libidinal investment “shared” between both slave and Master. “The rights of ownership, even temporary rights of possession, permitted any and all means necessary to render perfect submission; however, it was hoped that the use of excessive force was unnecessary because of the reciprocal benevolence of master-Slave relations.”(Hartman, 1997) And in the event (which was, of course, routine) that excessive force was used and the value of slave property was attenuated, the jurisprudence of the plantation made it such that it could not be prosecutable. Therefore, even if the Master elected to engender a relation of enchantment, of “mutual” humiliation, the entire repertoire of mutilating procedures would remain indelibly available to him. To be sure, the purportedly non-violent relation of enchantment was not outside of this repertoire but deeply internal to it; it was another mode by which to render the Slave an object of enjoyment. The entire legal formation of the period (if we are so eager to appeal to a chronology) was built upon a malleability which made every relation amenable to this paradigmatic sadism.
The weakness of the Master, in the presence of the Slave’s seduction, only returns to further inscribe the Slave’s incapacity and transmutes this relational dynamic into an allegory for the entire structure of sadistic Subjectivization. If we are to agree with Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s assertion that “slave labor [should] be principally understood…as an essential enabling condition of the modern grammar of the Subject,”(Jackson, 2020) then we must work toward the full scope of its implications. If the modern Subject has indeed inherited the amenities of this libertine law, then we would only be further conceding to the Lacanian formulation of the neurotic’s normativity which shields the Subjectivity from this indictment. This is perhaps exactly what it wishes for endless obscurity such that its ostensibly veiled sadism goes undisturbed. The sadist, then, need not wait for anything if only for the law to remind him of this fact. Spillers tells us, via William Goddell’s study of North American slave codes, that “‘The smack of the whip is all day long in the ears of those who are on the plantation, or in the vicinity.” (Spillers, 1987) In other words, there was a certain automation of enjoyment on the plantation, a condensation of time, to the extent that any Master or overseer need only listen for the inevitable blare of the whip from the comfort of their station to find satisfaction. The sensoria of suffering was outsourced and exchanged, like the maintenance of an ethics which is achieved through an economy of flesh. That terrible lightning is never late, never postponed–what remains deferred is the transcendence of the Slave toward the redress of its pain.
Humiliation at the level of discourse and the production of meaning appears to us in psychoanalysis as a particular kind of failure in the form of enjoyment–a failure which is also a sacrifice and psychoanalysis is not shy about this latter terminology. As Braunstein puts it, jouissance captures the condition of a Subjectivity that is “subjugated to what it sought to subjugate, a slave to the enslaved. The traumatizing agent is no longer the Other, but rather the memory of seduction that now always attacks from the inside, from its prison.”(Braunstein, 2021) Jouissance “commands the incessant return of untamed excitations”(Braunstein, 2021). This immanent abyss is granted a power which purports to render the subject weak; it is helpless in the face of the nocturnal letter’s coerced demand: Enjoy me. Seduction, within the framing of this analysis comes to denote two functions. The first is the psychoanalytic primal scene of seduction, that is, à la Jean Laplanche, the vehement caresses of the erotogenically determined mother which implant sexual(ized) signifiers for later translation, an après-coup, an afterwardness of meaning’s sexualization. The second, our Hartmanian use of the term, finds strange alignment with Laplanche insofar as their (primal) scenes of seduction are constituted as fictions which provide stable ground upon which to build the institution of (troubled) mastery. We are reminded of Lacan’s assertion of the mandate to invent memories of familial repression; one must justify the sexualization of symbolic exchange, their alleged eroticized weakness before the compulsion of the symptom through a mutual enslavement of which the abyss is primarily to blame. According to the Subject, it is the fault of the nocturnal letter that it must endure the carceral wrath of its warden (the Subject) or that its transcendence must be thwarted through the whip of discourse. The court’s investment in the libidinal corrective of affection between Master and slave cloaks the status of sexual abuse with the discursive silk of intimacy’s restorative function. In other words, the Subject learns to love its Slave insofar as the Slave is vestibular to the production of meaningful speech contingent upon a desire for primal scene of sexual violation. This is the nihilism of sadistic invention, of discourse as such: the justification for its barbarism, some primordial trauma, is entirely fictional and likely does not exist. In every sense of the phrase, the Subject torments the Slave for Nothing; for the love of Nothing; for the love of being seduced by Nothing.
“The love of truth,” writes Lacan, “is the love of this weakness whose veil we have lifted, it’s the love of what truth hides, which is called castration.”(Lacan, 1999) Hartman’s analysis of weakness brandishes the explicitly racial implications of Lacan’s remark: the love of weakness does not engender a condition of weakness but, on the contrary, it reinscribes the terms of domination; to love the weakness which surges forth from the attenuated property of enjoyment, the Nothingness of the Slave, does not concede to a certain equivalency of power but instead throws the capacity of the Slave to contest the debasement of its condition into question entirely. Hartman proposes a devastating corollary to this point: “If, as Fitzhugh insists, the greatest slave is the master of the household, and the enslaved rule by virtue of the ‘strength of weakness’ then, in effect, the slave is made the Master of her subjection.”(Hartman, 1997)
Consent of the Slave is therefore, and as Hartman advances, incinerated by the demand for enjoyment. Lacan, in his first Seminar, claims that the sadistic relation “can only be sustained insofar as the other is on the verge of still remaining a subject. If he is no longer anything more than reacting flesh, a kind of mollusk whose edges one titillates and which palpitates, the sadistic relation no longer exists. The sadistic subject will stop there, suddenly encountering a void, a gap, a hollow. The sadistic relation implies, in fact, the partner’s consent has been secured — his freedom, his confession, his humiliation.”(Lacan, 2016) Hartman’s analysis would agree to this assertion but only on the condition that consent is acknowledged as a fiction, an imposed production. To this end, Hartman’s use of “insinuation” is operative to this polemic. “The insinuation,” she writes, “that the dominated were mutually invested in their subjugation recast violence in the ambiguous guise of affection…”(Hartman, 1997). The doctrine of willful submission yielded the perversion of consent—the fetish of its impossibility is indistinguishable from the law of its anticipated appearance. The sadist, whose desire is constituted by a slavery in and as knowledge production, insinuates, that is, invents the Slave’s complicity and excess enjoyment allegedly sourced in sexual abuse as a means of authenticating the presence of consent. Hartman puts it simply and unflinchingly: “Rape disappeared through the invention of psychoanalysis as a particular kind of failure in the form of enjoyment–a failure which is also a sacrifice and psychoanalysis is not shy about this latter terminology. As Braunstein puts it, jouissance captures the condition of a Subjectivity that is “subjugated to what it sought to subjugate, a slave to the enslaved. The traumatizing agent is no longer the Other, but rather the memory of seduction that now always attacks from the inside, from its prison.”(Braunstein, 2021) Jouissance “commands the incessant return of untamed excitations”(Braunstein, 2021). This immanent abyss is granted a power which purports to render the subject weak; it is helpless in the face of the nocturnal letter’s coerced demand: Enjoy me. Seduction, within the framing of this analysis comes to denote two functions. The first is the psychoanalytic primal scene of seduction, that is, à la Jean Laplanche, the vehement caresses of the erotogenically determined mother which implant sexual(ized) signifiers for later translation, an après-coup, an afterwardness of meaning’s sexualization. The second, our Hartmanian use of the term, finds strange alignment with Laplanche insofar as their (primal) scenes of seduction are constituted as fictions which provide stable ground upon which to build the institution of (troubled) mastery. We are reminded of Lacan’s assertion of the mandate to invent memories of familial repression; one must justify the sexualization of symbolic exchange, their alleged eroticized weakness before the compulsion of the symptom through a mutual enslavement of which the abyss is primarily to blame. According to the Subject, it is the fault of the nocturnal letter that it must endure the carceral wrath of its warden (the Subject) or that its transcendence must be thwarted through the whip of discourse. The court’s investment in the libidinal corrective of affection between Master and slave cloaks the status of sexual abuse with the discursive silk of intimacy’s restorative function. In other words, the Subject learns to love its Slave insofar as the Slave is vestibular to the production of meaningful speech contingent upon a desire for primal scene of sexual violation. This is the nihilism of sadistic invention, of discourse as such: the justification for its barbarism, some primordial trauma, is entirely fictional and likely does not exist. In every sense of the phrase, the Subject torments the Slave for Nothing; for the love of Nothing; for the love of being seduced by Nothing.
“The love of truth,” writes Lacan, “is the love of this weakness whose veil we have lifted, it’s the love of what truth hides, which is called castration.”(Lacan, 1999) Hartman’s analysis of weakness brandishes the explicitly racial implications of Lacan’s remark: the love of weakness does not engender a condition of weakness but, on the contrary, it reinscribes the terms of domination; to love the weakness which surges forth from the attenuated property of enjoyment, the Nothingness of the Slave, does not concede to a certain equivalency of power but instead throws the capacity of the Slave to contest the debasement of its condition into question entirely. Hartman proposes a devastating corollary to this point: “If, as Fitzhugh insists, the greatest slave is the master of the household, and the enslaved rule by virtue of the ‘strength of weakness’ then, in effect, the slave is made the Master of her subjection.”(Hartman, 1997)
Consent of the Slave is therefore, and as Hartman advances, incinerated by the demand for enjoyment. Lacan, in his first Seminar, claims that the sadistic relation “can only be sustained insofar as the other is on the verge of still remaining a subject. If he is no longer anything more than reacting flesh, a kind of mollusk whose edges one titillates and which palpitates, the sadistic relation no longer exists. The sadistic subject will stop there, suddenly encountering a void, a gap, a hollow. The sadistic relation implies, in fact, the partner’s consent has been secured — his freedom, his confession, his humiliation.”(Lacan, 2016) Hartman’s analysis would agree to this assertion but only on the condition that consent is acknowledged as a fiction, an imposed production. To this end, Hartman’s use of “insinuation” is operative to this polemic. “The insinuation,” she writes, “that the dominated were mutually invested in their subjugation recast violence in the ambiguous guise of affection…”(Hartman, 1997). The doctrine of willful submission yielded the perversion of consent—the fetish of its impossibility is indistinguishable from the law of its anticipated appearance. The sadist, whose desire is constituted by a slavery in and as knowledge production, insinuates, that is, invents the Slave’s complicity and excess enjoyment allegedly sourced in sexual abuse as a means of authenticating the presence of consent. Hartman puts it simply and unflinchingly: “Rape disappeared through the invention of seduction…”(Hartman, 1997). In this sense, Lacan’s analysis falters once more with regard to the presupposition of a foundational intersubjectivity. It is precisely in the Slave’s reduction to flesh that the Master finds satisfaction. Enjoyment is entirely dependent upon the constitution of Blackness/Slaveness as “will-less, abject, insatiate, and pained…”(Hartman, 1997). Put simply, it is precisely because the Slave is the semblant of death that its reactivity is not a condition of the legibility of its suffering. It is precisely in its life-less-ness, its undead (non)constitution, that its suffering is rendered limitless via the apathy constitutive of sadism’s creed.
Coda
I am reminded everyday of what I have attempted to address here. And in many ways, there is an impulse to say everything but, if what we have articulated is true, there is no way to say it all. I can only ever give you half, and there is perhaps no way for me to speak from the half from which I derive: the ineffable immanence, the nocturnal letter. I cannot presume to know, if the arguments I have put forth regarding the psychical investments of (slaveholder) Subjectivity are true, what this means and where this leaves us or where we ought to go. I mean only to accentuate the intensities of suffering without the consolatory gesture such that we might articulate rigorous analyses of our antagonisms. If the project is, for Afro-pessimism, to end the World (to end the World that is predicated upon Slavery), then what I attempt to contribute to is a certain critical reluctance; to not arrive at any conclusions without first asking: would I still be a Slave (at the level of ontology) if I accept whatever consolation I have been afforded? What is the nature of my transcendence if Blackness remains the property of the World’s enjoyment? To what have I transcended if my writing emerges still from the cemetery of thought? Or from the barracoon of the real? Put another way, the realm of the living is foreclosed and I cannot presume to anticipate what is in excess of life and beyond the torment of being for death that I might hope to know or be captive to.
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