…

… [r]ather than respecting the gap in signification as the placeholder for the missing signifier, we should recognize that nothing exists in the gap and that nothing really is, for us, something. The gap marks the point at which senselessness itself is included in the world of signification. Nothing or senselessness is not a specter that haunts the system but the very basis of the symbolic system…

Instead, there remains an ontological impossibility (a limit) that is achieved in encountering one’s lack (or what Thakur refers to as ‘the anamorphic blot’ [2020, 189]). Importantly, this encounter is ‘not about reversing the self-other hierarchy, … neither [is it] about the death of the subject (I know I am not) nor about recuperating the subject after (I know I lack therefore I am)’). ‘Rather’, for Thakur, ‘the blot as lack must be assumed as the irrevocable condition of being—I, the subject, am lack’.

A Lacanian Approach to Racism and Racialization
Jack Black

First published 2024
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN