Way Too Cool: Selling Out Race and Ethics

Queer theory seduced me with one clear argument: the incisive, multifaceted dismantling of identity. While mostly taken up as a sustained critique of identity politics, early queer theorists unraveled sexuality across multiple registers to expose its ontological inability to sustain the construction of a coherent identity—qua identity. Most incisively, those emerging out of psychoanalysis, such as Leo Bersani, extended the fundamentally inchoate character of sexuality to entail the impossibility of a cohesive, singular “sexual identity.” This was, after all, how queer theory broke from gay and lesbian studies in the academy.

For much of that early work, as I have showed in my analysis of the popularity of Gender Trouble, this dismantling of sexuality was articulated primarily along the axis of gender, which was reconceptualized as an effect of sexual norms. Despite the insistence on the racialized limits of this gender-sexuality critique by theorists such as Cathy Cohen and José Muñoz, however, the radical rethinking of identity has not been taken up along the axis of race. While we have much excellent work on the sociological and historical twining of sexuality and race, we have yet to reconsider race as a concept in its endemic relation to the destabilizing, inchoate dynamics of sexuality. We have yet, that is, to reconceptualize race away from, if not without, identity categories and all their political, historical, and sociopsychic baggage. In this final chapter, I attempt to offer a way to do this. By extending my thinking on the limits of ideology, interpellation, and the register of the imaginary for our concepts of race, I argue explicitly how we must move beyond these identity categories if we are to engage an ethically meaningful lexicon in this neoliberal episteme.

To move beyond identity categories in these times of persistent racism is dangerous, to say the least. We in the contemporary United States are deeply, deeply confused, if not verging on a kind of madness, when it comes to matters of race. Whether uttered in mono- or multiracial settings, speech about race and racism sets off all kinds of psychosomatic, historically material, and deeply suppressed dynamics that will spin most conversations into a twisted, carnivalesque funhouse. Despite the pure excess of material evidence that we are living in an extraordinarily racist and violent culture, we seem to have no language for it. And this makes us remarkably anxious.

I have mapped this sputtering as the faltering of classical liberalism’s symbolic and its core fantasies of tolerance and neutrality. Central to that sputtering is the linguistic transition from discourses of antiracism and identity categories (such as “white,” “black,” “Native American,” “Latino,” and so on) to those of color-blindness and diversity. While advocates of the latter two, color-blindness and diversity, may locate themselves on opposite ends of the political spectrum, the move to postracial signifiers sutures them to two sides of the same coin. This move from explicitly calling out racism to the erasure of race from our social vocabularies exemplifies the slide toward fungibility that enables the neoliberal aestheticizing of social difference. While the impulse to insist on a return to the older, identity-based language of “white supremacy” and “antiblack racism” is understandably alluring, it no longer holds the social traction or meaning required to intercede in the sly forms of contemporary racism: it may be necessary, but it is insufficient.¹ By putting pressure on this linguistic transition as a substantial, historically new transformation in our modes of signifying race, I offer some insight into why we—all of us, despite racial identification—are so anxious about race in this contemporary US neoliberal episteme. Moreover, I offer some speculation on what this anxiety might tell us, especially if we read it with Lacan as a signal of the real.

THE SOCIAL ANXIETY ABOUT RACE

The US mainstream culture of the early twenty-first century is riddled with stories of its past that it would simply prefer not to hear. This is, of course, not unusual: a driving force of cohesion in arguably all cultures is the embrace of a positive image and historical narratives to support it. Amid the social landscape of neoliberalism and its cultural moniker of diversity, however, the suppression of systemic histories of violence in the United States is no longer intentional or conscious: the suppression itself is erased. Increasingly naturalized, the cultural amnesia is becoming so deep that we seem more and more unable to remember, unable to reconstitute what Foucault called “counter-memories,” unable to recollect lost and forgotten information and then to rekindle painful, unwanted memories. (If the #BlackLivesMatter movement is to intervene and develop a critically new antiracist lexicon, it must move beyond the localization of police brutality, avoid the temporality of crisis, and recathect these deep, long histories of systemic racist violence that the neoliberal episteme renders so uncool.) As Glenn Ligon puts it, regarding responses to his artwork (specifically a show in Memphis about civil rights in 2008): “I know this focus on the past is all ‘old school’; that we are in a post-civil rights era and, as one art student said to me at the opening, ‘Who wants to think about all of that stuff?’ I suspect he meant to say, “Who wants to think about all of that stuff again?’ ”² The answer is clear: no one.

And so we walk around in states of latent anxiety, avoiding any kind of social contact that might provoke these suppressed histories of violence and systemic disenfranchisement to surface. To be called racist in the contemporary mainstream United States is arguably one of the most shameful of social possibilities. Unlike with the fear of outright guilt for being caught as a racist that might describe “old-style” racism, we now seem just to fear the shame of such a public accusation.³ With the symbolic order sputtering, actual instances of racism fade into ideological debate: the act or thought itself recedes into the hall of mirrors, and the reflection of the mirrors is all that matters.⁴ This is, of course, unnerving. Given the long histories of racism alive and well in a wide variety of institutional apparati and the social habits they instill and reenforce, we all inhabit a deeply racist culture. But we are gripped with fear about being caught in the act, an act that we no longer recognize. Without any language to address the fear, a pervasive anxiety has taken hold.

For the Lacanian analyses I am advancing here, this is unsurprising. In his 1962–63 seminar, Anxiety, Lacan situates anxiety as signaling the real. Describing it as the moment when “the subject is seized, concerned and implicated in his inmost depths,”⁵ Lacan reads anxiety as a signal of the real erupting into a subject’s signifying universe. Having described it as spurred by experiences in which “all words cease and all categories fail” in his 1954–55 seminar, Lacan pursues the intricacies of this “signaling of the real” in exquisite detail in the 1962–63 seminar.⁶ He thereby locates several features of anxiety that shed considerable light on the contemporary US neoliberal inability to speak a meaningful language of race and racism.

First of all, Lacan follows Freud’s linking of anxiety to the uncanny to insist that experiences of anxiety do not pass through signification: we cannot speak them; they do not emerge from a distinct objet a that causes our desire; they do not distinguish us as particular identities. Not signified, however, anxiety is nonetheless framed, and this problematic initiates Lacan’s formal analysis of it. To elaborate the effect of this framing, Lacan uses the same metaphor he had previously used to examine the structure of fantasy, namely, the reorientation that occurs if we place a painting in a window. As Lacan elaborates his use of this metaphor, he emphasizes the formal analysis it affords: “No doubt an absurd technique were it a matter of better seeing what’s in the painting, but that’s not what it’s about. Regardless of the charm of what’s painted on the canvas, it’s about not seeing what stands to be beheld outside the window” (A, 73). The technique retrains the focus of our sight from the content of the painting to the significance of the background—or framing—of where and when we behold the painting. Moreover, it forces one’s “vision” away from the content and toward the formal framing of vision itself, with a particular emphasis on how the frame obscures and reorients the interplay of background and foreground.

Taking this as a heuristic for reading the linguistic transition from explicit antiracist identity categories to the neoliberal postracial language of diversity and color-blindness, I am interested in the transition itself in language about race, not in what is lost or gained in one specific set of signifiers vis-à-vis the other. It is the shift in the frame itself that is stirring anxiety. More specifically, following Lacan’s emphasis on the obscuring effect of this reframing, I argue that it is the blockages that occur in this shift in the frame that are stirring anxiety, namely, the blockage of the long, violent history of racism that generated (and continues to generate, if in a twisted manner) the concept of race. We are, as an entire culture in this neoliberal episteme, losing our old language for and social cathexis to these histories.⁷ For Lacan, this attention to the framing of anxiety affords a formal account of the structure of anxiety, rather than an account driven by the specific contents of the experience. A fundamental requirement for any account involving the real, this formal account of anxiety may also spur important ways to reconceptualize race, which is stirring our anxiety so intensely.

Anxiety, as anyone who experiences it regularly will attest, is perhaps most unnerving because it lacks any distinct object. One cannot diagnose the cause and address it directly: anxiety comes upon us obliquely and is only appeased in the same stealth manner. It thwarts intentionality, unnerving us further. Following Freud with his usual exquisitely concise formulations, Lacan distinguishes anxiety from fear precisely because it lacks any proper objet a. Lacking any proper object such as those that cause one’s desire, however, anxiety “is not without an object” (A, 89). Rather, it lacks the lack that renders desire a subjectifying and individualizing phenomenon. This is partially what renders anxiety an affect that can describe a cultural disposition, rather than a singular emotion experienced individually, such as fear.⁸

This careful formulation that anxiety “is not without an object,” which Lacan literally writes on the blackboard in the seminar, forces us to reconceptualize the kind of object that stirs anxiety. As Dylan Evans puts it, anxiety “involves a different kind of object, an object which cannot be symbolized in the same way as all other objects.”⁹ Because anxiety resists symbolic interpellation, whatever brings anxiety into circulation does not function in the same manner as that which causes desire. Since there is no exact cause of anxiety, the kinds of phenomena that can trigger it are endless: objects, events, memories, unusual odors, particular genres of music, sartorial preferences, strange and amorphous feelings in the gut. Literally anything can stir unconscious associations that then animate latent anxiety. Impossible to map with traditional schemas of causality, the so-called objects or causes of anxiety are always only partial insofar as the claim to locate an object or cause is itself an act of substituting and forcing signification onto that which fundamentally resists it.¹⁰ In the neoliberal social landscape of race and racism, this means that the latent anxiety about racism can be triggered by an endless and amorphous set of possible phenomena that, in turn, cannot be demarcated as the distinct cause of our anxiety. No wonder we are simultaneously so confused and angry about charges of racism. Our language constantly fails to address the anxiety, and so it persists and festers.

Put slightly differently, this also means that the experience of anxiety is depersonalizing. Again reading Freud, Lacan writes: “Anxiety is a rim phenomenon, a signal that is produced at the ego’s limit when it is threatened by something that must not appear” (A, 119). Connecting this in a variety of ways to the real as that which does not lack the lack that marks signification, Lacan specifies this as phenomena that are “unsuitable for egoization” (A, 120). Not passing through the chains of signifiers through which we become subjects, the formal objects that stir anxiety are “designated as phenomena of depersonalization” (A, 119). Related to the uncanny in both Freud’s and Lacan’s texts, anxiety is a deeply unnerving affect because, among other characteristics, it does not fall into the habitual tracks of the ego and its mode of subject formation as an identity.

This offers a profound caution against falling back into identity categories to conceptualize and talk about race. It is not only that the language of identity categories is a throwback to a mode of speech with fading social traction and altered meaning, but also that it repersonalizes that which is not personal. When I argue that race functions as the real in the contemporary US iteration of the neoliberal episteme, I mean that race makes all of us, despite our racialized identities, anxious. Unhinged from its location as the objet a of classical liberalism’s core fantasies of neutrality and tolerance, the long violent history of xenophobia that animates the concept of race is now precisely that which cannot enter signification in the neoliberal episteme. We cannot speak it. We increasingly cannot even recognize it or its absence. It is, to gloss Lacan’s reading of the unconscious alongside Hortense Spillers, the censored chapter of our American grammar.¹¹

ETHICS WITHOUT DIFFERENCE

To turn toward this deep cultural anxiety about race is thereby to turn to the real, where I complete the Lacanian analysis of the fugue of liberalism and neoliberalism that I have been developing across this book. To bring forward the full force of this turn, let me back up and recollect the argument thus far, with apologies for the repetitions.

In chapter 3, I argued that the neoliberal episteme initiates a shift in social authority and subjectivity such that we can very helpfully understand the neoliberal subject of interests as functioning in the drive, where the symbolic function (as well as interpellation) is eclipsed. I then proceeded to argue that the twinned core fantasies of liberalism, tolerance and neutrality, are sputtering. Their respective objet a, utility and xenophobia, are losing traction, respectively, through the neoliberal socioeconomic command to proliferate and maximize interests and the neoliberal cultural mantra of diversity. As social difference, particularly, transforms from a marker of historical xenophobia (however disavowed in the name of neutrality) to the formal metric of fungibility, we are encouraged to cathect with any and all forms of social difference with remarkable coolness. We are, that is, encouraged in this neoliberal episteme to rewire some of our most fundamental modes of social cathexes from xenophobia to coolness. While it appears, as I argued in chapters 4 and 5, that we may be able to do so around particular forms of social difference (gender, sexuality-as-mediated-by-gender, class-as-consumerism), other forms (race and class) remain intransigent. Putting this in the Lacanian heuristic of the symbolic, imaginary, and real, I argued that we can locate those forms which bend to this transformation in social cathexis in the imaginary, while locating those obstinate forms in the real.

When Lacan positions anxiety as an affect that signals the real, it should be of little surprise that neoliberal subjects of interests experience profound anxiety around race. Inculcated with the neoliberal celebration of diversity, we are encouraged, begged, and commanded to approach any and all forms of social difference as aesthetic, fungible units of cool. But the anxiety gives us away. The anxiety around even talking about race—much less encountering differently racialized cultural formations or personal experiences that bring the long, intense, historical force of racism to the surface—belies our cool. With the core fantasies of tolerance and neutrality faltering, we do not know how to respond when confronted with this persistent xenophobia. As Lacan puts it, “The real supports the phantasy, the phantasy protects the real.”¹² In the wake of these fantasies’ faltering, we have no script for racial encounters and are left with nothing but a stammer. When we are confronted with the real, our anxiety blows our cool. But the lack of an object explicitly animating anxiety also opens onto different ways of conceiving these problematics, particularly in a register of ethics.

If race functions as the real, an ethics of the real may still grab a hold of us. Driven by the problem of social cathexes, I want to speculate about a language of ethics that might still find some traction with neoliberal subjects of interests. My aim in this turn to ethics is not, however, recuperative: by no means do I suggest that we ought to reanimate systems of alleged universality, whether religious or secular, that have been central to the nightmare of liberalism’s imperialism and domination under the cloak of idealism. Rather, my turn to the register of ethics is part of an effort to ask how and why the very cathexes of social problems once deemed “ethical” have been domesticated, defanged, and decathected into problems of politics, and even more fundamentally, into problems of economics.

As I put it in “The Queer Thing About Neoliberal Pleasure,” how is it that prolonged ethical dilemmas of our neoliberal times—namely, the structured production of gendered and racialized poverty, complete with horrific human rights violations and environmental destruction—have been retooled into problems of ideologically driven politics and competing versions of sound economic policies? How and when and where did ethics get supplanted by politico-economic rationalities? How and when and where did the very question of values, especially those that might govern our relationships to ourselves and to others, collapse into the neoliberal barometer of success? And, if this is a viable diagnosis of the contemporary moment in the overdeveloped populations of the world, how can we recathect languages of values as a way to a different kind of ethics? As a way to respond to this structural violence that involves us, willingly or consciously or not?

This is not merely a disciplinary turn, although my training in philosophy orients me, generally and loosely, in the direction of ethics. To the contrary, I would argue that the proliferation of ethics centers through the discipline of philosophy has, largely, bastardized the kind of ethics I am trying to speak here into another form of rational calculation and problem solving that is palatable to the neoliberal US academy. By focusing on the transformations in subjective formation underway in neoliberal social rationalities and practices, I have argued at length that ideological critiques of neoliberalism fail to engage the depth and breadth of these sociopsychological transformations. Consequently, we must find our ways out of the language of politics, if we are to interrupt the multiple forms of violence carried out through the smooth, cool neoliberal surface that now passes for subjectivity.

Moreover, the widespread cynicism in the United States about electoral politics indicates the deeply ideological (and subsequently bifurcated) character that politics has assumed in mainstream US culture. For cool neoliberal subjects of interests, the language of politics holds no traction. With the language of morality captive to that ideological political field, we seem to be increasingly left with no meaningful language in which to speak, discuss, critique, or cultivate social evaluations beyond the metric of the market. Ethics is an aporia, formally positioned in the same manner as race and racism are in this neoliberal episteme.

So, what has traction? How to avoid recourse to old-fashioned liberalism or ineffective Marxism and speak in a vocabulary of social evaluation that still connects with and moves the cool neoliberal subject?

As I hope is clear by now, the neoliberal episteme aims to erase social difference. But it does so in the name of coolness, not of sameness. For social theorists drawing upon European intellectual traditions of various stripes, this ushers in an entirely different kind of epistemological, ontological, and sociopsychological set of dynamics, questions, and difficulties. Particularly for what I specify as the post-Hegelian lineage of ethics, the cornerstone of subject formation has been rooted in the encounter with an Other: the fear of an explicit object defines the xenophobia that animates liberalism’s avowal of tolerance and neutrality. Consequently, the struggle with the Other or the problem of difference has absorbed much of twentieth-century social theory. Given the ongoing and flourishing scholarship in feminist, postcolonial, race, and queer theory as well as the burgeoning scholarship in contemporary European philosophy on thematics such as Deleuzian multiplicity, Levinasian alterity, and even the Lacanian real, it appears that the twenty-first century is largely heightening if also complicating this obsession.

But such language and alleged problems of difference and otherness no longer hold the same kind of singular traction with neoliberal subjects of interests. To stay with Hegelian parlance for a moment, in the spirit of the infamous Master/Slave dialectic, we neoliberals are all masters now, unconsciously trained to encounter difference only insofar as we can own it as another cool accoutrement. In the aesthetic language of cool fungibility, difference no longer presents the kind of contrapuntal force that symbolically interpellated subjectivity relies upon for greater and greater self-consciousness and self-actualization. Difference no longer tracks along the logic of noncontradiction that renders it a formative moment of negation in the interpellative account of identity formation. The neoliberal aestheticizing of difference into fungibility retools our conceptions of social difference such that difference no longer arrives with the kind of political force that feminists, antiracists, and anticolonialist theorists have trained us to ferret out. Cannibalized before arrival, difference no longer poses the kind of negativity required by post-Hegelian systems of ethics: it no longer functions, for example, as the inversion of our ego ideals, à la Fanonian or Irigarayan analyses. Rather, evacuated of any historical cathexis, we consume difference as rapidly and repetitively as possible: the more superficial it is, the better and faster we can stuff our mouths! For post-Hegelian traditions of ethics, the neoliberal aestheticizing of difference precludes the emergence of ethics insofar as it precludes the dialectical encounter of negativity. From this angle, neoliberalism appears every bit as nihilist as early critics of postmodernism warned.

By speculating about an ethics of the real as a possible ethics of racial justice in the United States, I attempt to intervene in this presumed nihilism. An ethics of the real offers an epistemology, syntax, and cathexis that do not turn on the central role of authority in traditional ethics.¹³ Given the erosion of authority—or, in Lacanian parlance, the eclipse of the symbolic function—in the neoliberal episteme, forms of traditional ethics that rely on an authority to enforce a law or set of laws find no traction in the neoliberal subject of interests. Whether religiously or secularly articulated and whether externally or internally derived, no ethics of judgment holds cathexis in neoliberal social rationalities and practices: the neoliberal subject of interests will not be found guilty. The neoliberal subject is, however, as I have suggested, still prone to shame and filled with anxiety—affects that have no proper object, no Other. And affects that psychoanalytic social theorists associate with the real.

KANTIAN ETHICS REVISITED

As Alenka Zupančič describes it, Lacan admired Kant because he so poignantly and forcefully captured the impossibility of ethics. Positioning ethics as distinct from morality precisely through disallowing any role for motivation, Kant elegantly articulates the pure form of duty. While critics (to this day, including disgruntled undergraduate students) insist that Kant thereby renders ethics “too ideal” and impossible, Lacan admires him for the discovery of “the essential dimension of ethics,”¹⁴ namely, the existential and epistemic impossibility of the ethical act.

Existentially, given the normative anthropology of Kant’s system, subjects filled with pathos cannot become ethical without giving up their very subjectivity. That is, insofar as a modern, western anthropology with deep roots in Christianity frames Kant’s thinking about ethics, he understands the human condition as animated by desire, which is then cathected by the dance of interdiction and transgression. For this kind of subjectivity, which also constitutes the subjectivity of liberalism, the categorical imperative demands the impossible, namely, the sacrifice of one’s very self as subject. Defined by our desires, feelings, motivations, and cathexes, we modern liberal subjects hear the purely formal character of the ethical act as a sacrifice of our very subjectivity: if we can only act ethically by giving up all recourse to motivation, cathexis, and pathos, then we seem not to be able to act ethically at all without giving up our very subjectivity—or, even more extremely, our very humanity. The purely ethical act is possible only for nonhumans—whether gods, angels, or robots. Kant courageously spells out the impossibility of ethics for humans, that is, for humans understood as animated by desire (and its articulation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the will and intentionality).

Railing against this, liberal modern subjects may take some solace in the twin of this existential impossibility, namely, the impossibility of knowing the true ethical act. Kant articulates this as the fundamentally noumenal character of the true ethical act, which he parses more specifically through the concepts of the pure will and freedom. Existentially impossible, these concepts are also, Kant argues, fundamentally unknowable. Moreover, the unknowable characteristic of one’s motivations to act ethically is precisely what protects the ethical from reduction to mere duty: the ethical act will always align with duty and, thus, our originary motivation to act ethically will forever be obscured by the possibility that it is merely this insufficient motivation of fulfilling one’s duty. The ethical motivation qua ethical can never be distinguished at the level of the act itself, since all ethical acts should also conform perfectly with duty (assuming the cultural law of the duty is itself ethical). This epistemically aporetic character leads most readers of Kant to posit a kind of asymptotic, regulative idealism, whereby the purity of the ethical act and the freedom that attends it become ameliorating ideals. That is, by striving for them, we structure our lives and ways of living in the best manner possible. Rather than emphasizing the endemic failure to attain the ideals, Kant argues that the impossibility of knowing or acting in a purely ethical manner ought to serve as an internal structure for constantly striving to make ourselves better. It is, as I said, a quintessentially modern and liberal system.

But a Lacanian reading of these existential and epistemic impossibilities does not soften the blow quite so readily. Rather than domesticating these aporias into regulative ideals, Alenka Zupančič reads them as articulating a Lacanian ethics of the real. As she elaborates, Kantian ethics is not simply an ethics of asceticism and sacrifice. It involves, rather, a fundamental transformation in the anthropology that undergirds such concerns. As Zupančič elaborates, the paradox of Kantian ethics “is not that pleasure is forbidden to the ethical subject but, rather, that it loses its attractive power for such a subject” (ER, 8). The Kantian ethical subject undergoes an ontological transformation such that the question of pleasure—of motivation, cathexis, and pathos—no longer holds any affective or epistemological force. Again, as Zupančič puts it, “We need have no fear that entry into the realm of the ethical will require us to sacrifice all the pleasures we hold so dear, since this will not even be experienced as a loss or sacrifice—‘we’ will not be the same person as before” (ER, 8). No longer the subject animated by desire and its vortex of ego-centrism, the Kantian ethical subject is no longer attached to her pathos and thus does not fear losing it. The Kantian system of ethics turns on this ontological change in subjectivity.

Strongly echoing the depersonalization Lacan locates in anxiety, this ontological change in subjectivity makes this Lacanian reading of Kantian ethics particularly rich for the neoliberal episteme, as I have developed it. By following out various implications of reading neoliberal subjectivity as circulating in the Lacanian drive, I have articulated the neoliberal subject of interests as a subjectivity no longer animated fully or singularly by desire. On the one hand, this means that the neoliberal subject is not the subject Kant is addressing or the subject hailed by Kantian ethics; paradoxically, on the other hand, this also means that the neoliberal subject may be more obliquely prone to the kind of ethics-without-pathos that Kant articulates. In other words, I want to speculate on the possibility that a Lacanian reading of Kantian ethics—or what I call, following Zupančič, an ethics of the real—may provoke a way back into a language of ethics for neoliberal subjects precisely, albeit ironically, because it shuns motivation and all its personalizing effects. Immune to the dynamics of authoritarian interpellation (whether rationally, internally generated ideals of altruism or religiously, externally enforced mechanisms of guilt), cool, neoliberal subjects are detached and decathected. Without pathos, they already inhabit the scene of the drive, where an ethics of the real erupts.

AN ETHICS OF THE REAL AS AN ETHICS OF RACE

Without desire, without cathexis, without difference, without pathos, cool neoliberal subjects cruise the circuit of the drive, endlessly if uninterrupted. When I speculate that this renders us more prone to an ethics of the real, I do not mean that we can willfully bring such an ethics into being. The real is defined as precisely that which resists all signification: we certainly cannot intentionally bring the real before us. Again, as Zupančič puts it, “The paradox of the real or the event lies in the fact that as soon as we turn it into the direct goal of our action, we lose it” (ER, 237).¹⁵ Undoing the active and passive logic of willful subjects of desire, the real is not subject to causality. Ironically, however, such concerns about bringing the real intentionally into our direct experience belong to the liberal, modern, willful subject—not the cool, detached neoliberal subject of endless interests. Cruising the circuit of the drive, the cool, detached neoliberal subject is prone to an ethics of the real.

While this detachment can make us more susceptible to encounters with the real, the tendency to turn them into spectacle seems to have become the dominant neoliberal response. As Žižek shows in his analysis of 9/11 in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, while we could respond to the planes crashing into the Twin Towers as an eruption of the real, the endless repetition of the image for days and even weeks across media screens defanged it into a spectacle—indeed, an icon—ready for consumption. (By making it a spectacle, it also entered that quintessentially neoliberal temporality of crisis.) The undoing of the active and passive logic of causality does not, therefore, mean we can simply be passive about encountering the real. While we cannot bring it willfully before us, we can attune ourselves to its constant and persistent, if latent, force.¹⁶ Our relation to the real may be oblique, but it is a relation nonetheless. We can remind ourselves vigilantly that the real persists, thereby altering the moments of its eruption from “shock and awe” or speechless surprise into a language of ethics.

Encounters with the real and, consequently, any ethics of the real thereby produce the epistemic conundrum of articulating a noncausal relation. As Zupančič formulates it, the Real is “essentially a by-product of the action (or inaction) of the subject—something the latter produces, but not as ‘hers,’ [not] as a thing in which she would be able to ‘recognize’ herself” (ER, 238). By reading an ethics of the real in the contemporary United States as an ethics of (endemically sexualized) race, I understand this noncausal encounter with the real as articulating the kind of nonagential response to the long, intense history of sexualized racism that makes us vigilant about this violence without ascribing intentionality or the morality of accountability. We were not alive in the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries, and we do not understand ourselves as racists; but this does not mean that we cannot consciously call attention to the harsh realities of these violent histories and their ongoing, persistent repercussions and reinventions. An ethics of the real is not the aim of our actions, but it can still be understood as the effect of our actions. We can attune ourselves to these effects: we can, that is, consciously attend to and reconfigure the long unconscious habits of suppressing these intense histories of somatic xenophobia.

This involves a kind of vigilant reminding that is more visceral than intellectual. We must never forget that the real does not signify; even more so, it resists and even undercuts signification, especially those signifying practices that promise wholeness, fullness, a return to Paradise Lost. As Amy Hollywood articulates in her provocative readings of the Lacanian real alongside Bataille, the real locates a turn to ethics for Lacan precisely as a rejection of the fantasies of wholeness as we find them in historical narratives of progress and salvation. She thereby associates the real “with that in history that is unassimilable to its meaning-giving and salvific narratives.”¹⁷ This recuperative tendency in historical narratives, structured by epistemologies and politics of recognition, becomes a primary obstacle to encountering the ethical, that is, to encountering the sprawling and shattering mess of violence, suffering, anguish, horror, and also joy that Lacan calls jouissance.

Jouissance is that exquisite description Lacan gives of pain so intense that it becomes pleasurable and pleasure so intense that it becomes painful. It marks encounters with the real as they unnerve and decenter us. These encounters are simultaneously alluring and repellant, generative and destructive. We cannot consciously control or want them, lest they become a sadomasochistic power trip bent on suicide. We can, however, talk about these kinds of encounters that litter our racialized and sexualized pasts and presents. And in so doing, we can open ourselves to the ethical transformation that their eruptions bring.

Given the resistance to signification that defines the real, attempts to concretize encounters as moments of possible ethical transformation are tricky, to say the least. I persist, nonetheless, in my speculation that an ethics of the real offers a way—albeit a complex and difficult one—to generate a meaningful language of ethics in the contemporary US neoliberal iteration of the modern episteme. As a visceral attunement to the jouissance of history, I insist that this must be articulated in the United States as an ethics of endemically sexualized race. This means, in short, a sustained and intensified attention—in whatever form or media—to the vast histories of sexualized racism that litter our cultural psyche. This kind of sustained effort both exposes the fantasies of classical liberalism and, perhaps more urgently, interrupts the neoliberal aestheticizing reduction of subjectivity to the drive, even if violently. This kind of raw, unmediated encounter with the real, where the real is the racialized history of liberalism’s relation to difference as a historically violent and threatening phenomenon, may harbor sufficient force to rip through the aestheticizing social dynamics of neoliberal cultures.

As forms of jouissance, these are mostly scenes of violence, but not entirely. The encounters that also stir intensive pleasures are perhaps even more important than those that stir intensive pain. First of all, to limit ourselves to understanding these scenes of racialized jouissance of history as only violent may entrap us in the deep habits of blame and (ultimately narcissistic) guilt and their vapid cycle of apology. Second, the characterization of jouissance as a pleasure so intense that it becomes indistinguishable from pain constitutes a substantially different experience that resists the flattened-out, hyperstimulated, endlessly streaming acts of consumption that neoliberalism sells (quite successfully!) as “pleasure.”

Jouissance cannot be maximized or intensified, tweaked or manipulated: it is not an object of willful choice. As Tim Dean puts it, jouissance indicates that rare experience of pleasure that radically disarms the self, not the identity-confirming, self-enhancing domesticated pleasure that saturates neoliberal cultures.¹⁸ This disarming of the self takes me back, once more, to Lacan’s seminar on anxiety, where he discusses the impossibility of willfully ordering jouissance as an origin of anxiety. Going back to “the God of the Jews” and the text of the Bible, he muses: “God asks me to jouir, to enjoy…. [But] to jouir on order is all the same something about which each of us can sense that, if there’s a wellspring, an origin, of anxiety, then it must be found somewhere there. To the imperative Jouis, I can only reply one thing, and that is J’ouïs, I hear, but naturally I don’t jouir so easily for all that” (A, 80). We cannot will jouissance and yet we are ordered to do so; consequently, we become anxious.

This lacing of anxiety with this impossibility to will jouissance becomes all the more provocative for my reading of race and racism when paired with the habitual ascription of jouissance to the Other.¹⁹ A regular theme in Lacan’s seminars, he again refers to it in the seminar Anxiety in the context of explaining the structure of a nightmare. Lacan explains: “The nightmare’s anxiety is felt, properly speaking, as that of the Other’s jouissance … the creature that bears down on your chest with all its opaque weight of foreign jouissance, which crushes you beneath its jouissance” (A, 61). Continuing my line of thinking that the long, violent, sexualized history of racism is the nightmare of the United States,²⁰ what kind of twisted relation to this jouissance of the Other do we now inhabit in this neoliberal episteme?

Given the neoliberal torsion of race and ethics into concepts wrung dry of their lifeblood, what happens when we speak from the racialized jouissance of history? What happens when we speak from the space of intensified pleasure and pain that no longer has a cultural register? While realizing the thorny problem of articulating that which resists signification, I conclude with an example of the kind of phenomena that stir this deep racialized jouissance of history, namely, a meditation on New Orleans and the remarkable nonevent of the early twenty-first century in the United States: Hurricane Katrina.

NEW ORLEANS: REAL COOL, REAL, NEOLIBERAL COOL

It was the city of sin: “N’Awlins,” as anyone who has ever been there should pronounce it. The place where people went to lose themselves, to unwind a bit, perhaps even unhinge a bit. To take a walk on the wild side—let loose and indulge, or more likely overindulge, in some of those deliciously forbidden pleasures. Full of funk, it was a city that defied the most treasured boundaries of the larger US culture: sexualities ran amok, crossing all racial and gender lines; liquor flowed freely in the streets; exotic and enticing odors spilled out of Creole kitchens; and music of soulful jazz and blues was simply everywhere. Even funerals became street celebrations: the ongoing practice of jazz funerals remains one of the most iconic images of New Orleans. Thoroughly racialized as a black and Creole city, New Orleans functioned as a site of promised jouissance for the country. It was our unconscious. It was real cool. It was the Big Easy.

But, finally, the ease it held out to this nation of good, upstanding citizens with proper jobs and the patriotism to protect them was too much. The ease with which it offered its unbridled pleasures was more than the nation could handle. Unlike in Vegas, where people work their tails off to run fancy hotels, put on extravagant shows, and keep lucrative casinos moving, the denizens of the Big Easy never really worked at all—they just did what they liked to do and made enough to get by.²¹ The ease of their lives was itself too easy, too slack, too indulgent, no proper signs of guilt or even shame. The only viable sign of productivity, the capital generated by this economy of sin, was embezzled by the legendary corruption of the place.

And so when the big storm came, it was something of a psychic discharge for the nation. When that overwhelming mass of turbulent wind and water, engorged by the unusually warm surface water temperatures of the Gulf of Mexico, destroyed this singular site of thoroughly racialized and sexualized jouissance, it was something of a relief. In the days of televisual obsession following August 29, 2005, we were engulfed by images of the storm, the refugees, the looters, the horrors (fantasized and real) unfolding in and around the overwhelmed Super Dome, and the unbelievable, unforeseen, gross inefficiency of national and local relief efforts. Amid all that, a very quiet, muffled, slightly ashamed sigh of relief was audible. It was gone: the true City of Sin—the city of utter indulgence and zero productivity—was gone. When the right-wing nuts proclaimed it “God’s wrath against this City of Sin,” they spoke a kernel of truth that, precisely through disavowing it, provided some catharsis for the upright citizens of the United States. Dismissed as crazy, overzealous talk, it still provided a verbal affirmation that this place of excessive and shameless indulgence was gone: the bigots, once more, spoke the true xenophobia of our long history that the neoliberal language of diversity has stripped from us.

This is hardly the story of Katrina that has been told. The preferred narrative is that of a natural disaster that has been healed by renewed commerce, an exemplary neoliberal twist on the liberal narrative of white benevolence and redemption. Professional organizations of all stripes, including the coolest academic ones, pride themselves on holding conferences in post-Katrina New Orleans, salving their moral conscience by spending dollars. This has become the quintessential neoliberal articulation of the classically liberal theme of helping the downtrodden: we now prefer and are encouraged at every turn to “do good” through clever practices of consumption. Choose the shade-grown coffee at Starbucks, to gloss one of Žižek’s favorite examples, to add a little zip of altruism or generosity or even “ethical activity” to the regular morning java jolt.²² In the case of Katrina, the benevolent, white, middle-and-upward class need only schedule conferences and small vacations in the cleaned-up French Quarter to glide into town, yet again, in the usual shining armor to rescue and redeem the poor black underclass who got wiped out by nature (somehow, again). Or, in an even more enticing and alluring neoliberal twist, the hipsters need only colonize various parts of the city, materially and in media, to enshrine New Orleans as one of the edgiest cities of cool.

The gaping holes of racism in this nice neoliberal fable, however, are glaring: it exemplifies neoliberal racism. Far from ameliorated or erased, structural racism in this region has intensified, sometimes exponentially, as the racist effects of the poststorm economic infrastructure around education, housing, and employment demonstrate. As Vincanne Adams catalogues and argues in painful detail, Katrina became the perfect neoliberal storm, privatizing charity in an abhorrent twist that allows crony capitalism to make profit on the manipulation of the needy into ever needier states. Functioning as a kind of negative to the bright luminosity of the nation-changing, world-changing event of 9/11, however, those few horrific days of August 2005 and the tragedies that continue to ripple out from them are largely forgotten in the United States.

Indeed, the dark illegibility of the lives lost in Katrina to both death and transiency seems only to sharpen the exquisite, ongoing charting of those lives directly affected by 9/11. Unlike the meticulous obituaries in the New York Times of those killed in the Twin Towers, there has never been any meticulous public archiving of the approximately eighteen hundred killed by Katrina. Many dead were likely never logged in any legal record at all. Decayed or waterlogged beyond recognition, many were likely disposed of without any attempt to decipher identity, much less contact any kin. The last eighty-five of such unclaimed bodies were finally entombed by a group of private funeral home owners, taking on responsibilities shirked by the state, in August 2008—three years after the storm.²³

In similar fashion, the diaspora caused by the tragic storm has also fallen off the national radar. Scattered to every corner of the United States and beyond, the former denizens of New Orleans are now largely believed to have resettled into either new locations or a kind of ongoing transiency. It is estimated that Katrina displaced one million people who were resettled into fifty-five hundred cities across the United States. For the African American population, settled in the most far-flung locations, ranging from Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Seattle to Chicago and Boston,²⁴ the return to New Orleans lags considerably behind the general population. Statistics, such as they are, show that New Orleans has returned to 78 percent of its pre-Katrina population, including newcomers to the city. However, it is estimated (and this estimation is much fuzzier) that 32 percent of the African American population has yet to return.²⁵ From the Middle Passage to the Great Migration of the early and mid-twentieth century to Katrina, African Americans continue to live a diasporic existence. But none of this is charted or tracked any longer: it is naturalized into a mere shift, if somewhat unusual, in demographics and populations.

Here is the story I am interested in telling: the transformation of New Orleans from a city of real cool through an overwhelming encounter of the real to a site of neoliberal cool, filled with ever-so-hip, fungible difference that is more ready than ever for the market. That is, I conclude this book with what Foucault might call a countermemory of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina that reads them as exemplifying the kinds of transformations underway, in all kinds of gradations and differentiated articulations, through the neoliberal intensification and transformation of liberalism across the United States. This exemplary status is bestowed not only by the horrible tragedy of the hurricane, which I position as an encounter of the real, but by the location of that human-enabled storm in a site of unmatched racialized jouissance.

Hurricane Katrina was, in so many ways, the Perfect Storm. It was human-enabled in at least two ways: as an effect of carbon-induced climate change produced (at least partially) by the neoliberal intensification of consumerism, the storm landed in a region where the levees were—and remain—grossly neglected.²⁶ But as the site of real cool, the Big Easy was a city where such negligence and its racialized connotations were always already naturalized. The denizens of this site of unmatched racialized jouissance were fully and wholly of the place and thus unable to protect themselves against the ravages of nature. The widely circulated images of post-Katrina black bodies stranded in floodwaters thereby easily fed into the long-standing racist trope of the black body trapped in nature, especially in water. As Kara Walker’s exhibit After the Deluge from 2006 illustrates so clearly, the powerful black body has a long history of being positioned metonymically with the fearsome power of the ocean.²⁷ Consequently, the horror of a massive hurricane wiping out a black population finds easy purchase in this long-standing metonymy.

The idiom of nature thereby readily emerges to carry forward the racist representations and responses to the tragedy, while absolving any upright citizen from any responsibility. Fully “naturalized” both as a freakish storm and as a racialized and thus infantilized city, the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina striking New Orleans aligned remarkable ingredients to become an overwhelming, forceful encounter of the real. But rather than being stripped of language, rather than falling silent in an admission that the real is happening, the machines of racism immediately locked into gear. From the apocryphal but self-fulfilling stories of raping and pillaging at the Superdome to the iconic, blackface images of Aunt Jemima and the Coon, the long-standing reservoir of racism gave us the language we needed to explain and absolve: “savages live in nature and so die of nature.”²⁸

To live out an ethics of the real may require one of the very most difficult things for cultures of classical liberalism and neoliberalism: to fall silent, as an act of ethics. More specifically, it is to fall silent when encountering the suppressed history of racialized jouissance that is the real in these neoliberal times. In the instance of Katrina, this would surely mean to resist all the racist images, tropes, and representations of black savagery and white benevolence. It would mean to resist all these attempts to signify—to make sense of—that which ontologically strips us of language. It would mean to heed one command: stop making sense. These racist tropes function as fetishes, enlivening the memory trace of a vanquished (alleged) threat and thus promising to return us to wholeness.²⁹ But like Paradise Lost, there is no wholeness to which to return: the United States is structured by racism. It tells us all who and where and how and why we are. It is our symbolic, even if sputtering and twisting into much more convoluted concepts and explanations.

In these heady neoliberal times of erasing history and shunning authority, we are incited to fly without that symbolic. And so we might try to make Katrina cool. Or make our embrace of New Orleans hip. But that’s just a mean trick: How could we be hip so quickly in a place that has undergone such profound pain and loss? And how could we be hip so quickly in a place that still reverberates with remarkable, deeply rooted jouissance of creativity and funk? The heightened, intensified superficiality of such a claim to cool in the face of such deep memories and scars makes my head spin. If we are to come to any ethics of justice that can move beyond the ideological hall of mirrors, we must find our ways back through the debris of history—still, again.

An ethics of the real knows this. Honoring it, without making sense of it, an ethics of the real tends to the open wound that is the ongoing, persistent racism in this country. In the example of Hurricane Katrina, it tends to the intensive losses of homes, livelihoods, communities, and meaningful lives that continue to occur in its wake and to the unspoken, even unnoticed erasure of these losses. But not in the name of redemption, salvation, or recuperation to wholeness. Moreover, this is only an example, and an ethics of the real is animated by the vigilance of its repetition. If I and all the social theorists that I have drawn upon capture even part of what is happening in this neoliberal episteme, we are living in times when we will encounter the real with greater and greater repetition. To remain vigilant about this so as to remain attuned to all that might reverberate out of it is to live an ethics of the real.