Derek Hook - Fanon, White Masochism, and the Embodied Negation of Blackness

There is a good deal of attention, in Lacanian social theory, to racism as the theft of jouissance. But what if this is an inadequate formula? Presumably, more work needs to be done to refine and qualify this thesis. Unexpectedly, perhaps, an answer of sorts is to be found in the work of Frantz Fanon, who offers a series of speculative thoughts on the masochist drive underlying particular forms of white racism. This talk will explore this particular (masochistic) modality of white racist jouissance. It will focus, particularly, on how a form of defensive projection - the white woman being seen as desiring the Black man as a means of obscuring denying the same order of desire on behalf of the white man - plays an instrumental role here. A careful attention to the mechanisms of defensive displacement and condensation here yields interesting results, not only in respect of how a matrix of white heterosexuality is supported and affirmed, but also in terms of Blackness is produced as an instance of embodied negation. 

Derek Hook is an associate professor in psychology and a clinical supervisor at Duquesne University. He is one of the editors of the Palgrave Lacan Series and also of the four-volume 'Reading Lacan's Ecrits' series. Along with Sheldon George he edited the recent collection 'Lacan on Race'. He began his analytical training in London, at the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research. He is also the author of 'Six Moments in Lacan', in addition to many papers on various facets of the clinical and cultural dimensions of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. He runs a YouTube channel with many lectures on Lacanian Psychoanalysis.