Brieﬂy, for Lacan, the subject at the end of analysis is no longer a slave to the demand seen to issue from the Other; the subject learns to assume responsibility for [themselves] by becoming [their] own cause, as it were. For Spillers, the subject who vigorously practices an ‘‘interior intersubjectivity’’ achieves a similar release from the Other insofar as he is no longer a slave to the demand that issues from race as a structure of narrativity and signiﬁcation that attempts to exhaust the meaning of human subjectivity. She writes: The question, then, for this project is not so much why and how ‘‘race’’ makes the difference—the police will see to it—but how it carries over its message onto an interior, how ‘‘race,’’ as a poisonous idea, insinuates itself not only across and between ethnicities but within. What I am positing here is the blankness of ‘‘race’’ where something else ought to be, that emptying out of which I spoke earlier, the evacuation to be restituted and recalled as the discipline of a self-critical inquiry. In calling this process an interior intersubjectivity, I would position it as a sort of power that countervails another by an ethical decision.∞≤ The practice of interior intersubjectivity helps the speaking subject locate the space in which race falsely dwells as a structure of narrativity and signiﬁcation that attempts to explain the nature of the human subject. At the same time, it helps evacuate and restitute that space for other knowledge projects of ‘‘self-critical inquiry’’ that risk precipitating a nontransparent subject who can no longer be wrestled down through the calculus of race. Simply and forcefully, interior intersubjectivity concerns rescuing the blank space that race somehow came to ﬁll in the constitutive work of subjectivity formation in order to reclaim it as a surface of inscription for other interpretative efforts. The homologous critical operations performed in Spillers and Lacan precipitate a kind of subject who is necessarily dispersed, decentralized, and in disarray. In the last paragraph in her essay, Spillers writes, ‘‘My interest in this ethical self-knowing wants to unhook the psychoanalytic hermeneutic from its rigorous curative framework and try to recover it in a free-ﬂoating realm of self-didactic possibility that might decentralize and disperse the knowing one.’’∞≥ Toward the end of Seminar VII, Lacan notes, ‘‘At the end of a training analysis the subject should reach and should know the domain and the level of the experience of absolute disarray. It is a level at which anguish is already a protection, not Abwarten as Erwartung. Anguish develops by letting a danger appear, whereas there is no danger at the level of the ﬁnal experience of Hilﬂosigkeit [helplessness].’’∞∂ Lacan’s notion of disarray is internal to what Spillers calls ‘‘decentralization’’ and ‘‘dispersal.’’ It is this disarray—Spillers’s attempt to decentralize the ego and thus undermine its pretension to mastery as the center of consciousness as well as her attempt to promote the subject’s dispersal into spaces of possibility outside its incarceration in solitary Imaginary conﬁnement—that the ethnic-racialized subject must experience in order to understand that [they are] a subject of the signiﬁer who is incalculable, indeterminate, and always in the process of becoming. Lacan’s and Spillers’s homologous critical approaches to theorizing the dispersed, decentralized subject in disarray are also revealed in the nature of the kind of interpretative labor each thinks must be performed, one that is not curative in nature nor in the service of amplifying the ego. She writes, I have chosen to call this strategy the interior intersubjectivity, which I would, in turn, designate as the locus at which self-interrogation takes place. It is not an arrival but a departure, not a goal but a process, and it conduces toward neither an answer nor a ‘‘cure,’’ because it is not engendered in formulae and prescriptions. More precisely, its operations are torque-like to the extent that they throw certainty and dogma (the static, passive, monumental aim) into doubt. This process situates a content to work on as a discipline, as an askesis, and I would specify it on the interior because it is found in economy but is not exhausted by it. Persistently motivated in inwardness, in-ﬂux, it is the ‘‘mine’’ of social production that arises, in part, from interacting with others, yet it bears the imprint of a particularity.∞∑ What Spillers has in mind is not the working on the subject that would resemble the reconsolidation of the ego’s masterful powers or the restoration of the ego as whole, ‘‘It is not an arrival but a departure, not a goal but a process.’’∞∏ This strategy has to do with frontally challenging the ﬁxity and rigidity that characterizes the ego’s resistance to subjective growth and change: ‘‘its operations are torque-like to the extent that they throw certainty and dogma (the static, passive, monumental aim) into doubt.’’∞π Her speciﬁcation of an interior as that which is ‘‘in economy’’ but not exhausted by it indirectly critiques the more routine approach to ethnic-racialized subjectivity and experience through explications attuned solely to social, cultural, and historical but not psychical analyses. Her use of the term, askesis reminds one of how Lacan characterized psychoanalysis’s species of interpretative labor. In ‘‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,’’ Lacan writes, ‘‘Of all the undertakings that have been proposed in this century, the psychoanalyst’s is perhaps the loftiest, because it mediates in our time between the care-ridden man and the subject of absolute knowledge. This is also why it requires a long subjective ascesis, indeed one that never ends, since the end of training analysis is not separable from the subject’s engagement in his practice.’’∞∫ Although throughout her essay Spillers speaks generally of psychoanalysis, sometimes referring to ‘‘classical psychoanalytic theory’’ and mentioning the names of both Freud and Lacan, I see her model as primarily Lacanian. Spillers wants to pursue the ethnic-racialized subject’s signifying dependence. Understanding the nature of that dependence and the signifying elements that constitute the subject’s symbolic universe are precisely the nature of the interpretative labor that Spillers has in mind: ‘‘The one that I am after, then, must be built up from the ground, so to speak, inasmuch as classical psychoanalytic theory and its aftermath contradictorily point toward it—a subject in its ‘signifying dependence,’ which means that the subject’s profound engagement with, and involvement in, symbolicity is everywhere social.’’∞Ω Now that we have unpacked some of the essential elements that make up Spillers’s psychoanalytic hermeneutic practice of interior intersubjectivity, I want to explore the speciﬁc relation between what Spillers refers to in the passage above as ‘‘a subject in its ‘signifying dependence’’’ and the larger goal announced in the practice of interior intersubjectivity: the ‘‘evacuation,’’ ‘‘that emptying out’’ of race ‘‘where something else ought to be’’ in an effort to compel new modes of ‘‘self-critical inquiry’’ not determined by the calculus of race. There is an exceedingly seductive, utopic charge to the project of emptying the space ﬁlled by race. It implies that the subject’s signifying dependence on race would no longer exist, insofar as race in the position of the Other—to continue mining the similarity between Spillers’s subject and the subject at the end of the Lacanian analysis—whose demand we think we are still called upon to respond to has been evaporated. Seshadri-Crooks sharply describes the stubborn ways in which we continue to hold on to the idea of race: As a system of organizing difference, race is very distinctive in relation to other forms of organization such as caste, ethnicity and nation. It is distinctive as a belief structure and evokes powerful and very particular investments in subjects. Consider the peculiar intensiﬁcation of racial identiﬁcation and racial discourse even as the scientiﬁc untenability of race is ever more insisted upon by scientists and anthropologists. Even though it has now become commonplace to utter rote phrases such as ‘‘race is a construct’’ or ‘‘race does not exist,’’ etc., race itself shows no evidence of disappearing or evaporating in relevance. It is common sense to believe in the existence of race. Why do we hold on to race? What is it about race that is difﬁcult to give up?≤≠ Seshadri-Crooks’s questions appear not to bode well for Spillers’s ultimate goal. The positing of ‘‘the blankness of ‘race’ where something else ought to be’’ might be an impossible task that when actively engaged may in fact serve only to perpetuate the ongoing hallucination of race in new and no less damaging disguises. I want to return to one sentence from Spillers’s essay and read it in a way that would suggest less tension between Seshadri-Crooks’s insight and Spillers’s goal. Again, Spillers writes, ‘‘What I am posting here is the blankness of ‘race’ where something else ought to be, that emptying out of which I spoke earlier, the evacuation to be restituted and recalled as the discipline of a selfcritical inquiry.’’≤∞ If we agree that race may register in any number of ways but ‘‘blankness’’ won’t be one of them, then we could still understand the ‘‘discipline of a self-critical inquiry’’ as an interpretative practice that understands that race won’t disappear any time soon. A scrutinous analysis of its stubborn hold on us and its ongoing role in the constitution of human subjectivity are the ‘‘something else’’ that Spillers is after. She names this discipline ‘‘interior intersubjectivity,’’ a hermeneutic strategy that, although it may not render race blank, will lay bare the processes—psychical, social, economic, and political— that explain to us why race won’t budge, why, to return to Seshadri-Crooks’s words, it ‘‘shows no evidence of disappearing or evaporating in relevance.’’≤≤ Spillers imagines her hermeneutic as a species of psychoanalytics, since race cannot be addressed simply through historicist genealogies that describe its discursive construction. I think Spillers believes, like Seshadri-Crooks, that race makes certain constitutive psychical claims on our existence that don’t simply go away because we describe, ad nauseam, its scientiﬁc untenability, its social constructedness, its variability over time and cultures, and so on. The discussion so far, in focusing on Spillers, was supposed to have broached only the speculative perspective on ethnic-racialized subjectivity in the context of psychoanalysis, as I positioned Spillers as representing the speculative and not the clinical. Yet the reader will surely have noticed how Spillers’s approach has effectively broken down that opposition and even reconﬁgured it.
the subject at the end of analysis is no longer a slave to the demand seen to issue from the Other; the subject learns to assume responsibility for [themselves] by becoming [their] own cause, The practice of interior intersubjectivity helps the speaking subject locate the space in which race falsely dwells as a structure of narrativity and signiﬁcation that attempts to explain the nature of the human subject. , it helps evacuate and restitute that space for other knowledge projects of ‘‘self-critical inquiry’’ that risk precipitating a nontransparent subject who can no longer be wrestled down through the calculus of race. , interior intersubjectivity concerns rescuing the blank space that race somehow came to ﬁll in the constitutive work of subjectivity formation in order to reclaim it as a surface of inscription for other interpretative efforts. The critical operations performed in Spillers and Lacan precipitate a kind of subject who is necessarily dispersed, decentralized, and in disarray. It is disarray—Spillers’s attempt to decentralize the ego and thus undermine its pretension to mastery as the center of consciousness as well as her attempt to promote the subject’s dispersal into spaces of possibility outside its incarceration in solitary Imaginary conﬁnement—that the ethnic-racialized subject must experience in order to understand that [they are] a subject of the signiﬁer who is incalculable, indeterminate, and always in the process of becoming. is not the working on the subject that would resemble the reconsolidation of the ego’s masterful powers or the restoration of the ego as whole This strategy has to do with frontally challenging the ﬁxity and rigidity that characterizes the ego’s resistance to subjective growth and change interior as that which is ‘‘in economy’’ but not exhausted by it indirectly critiques the more routine approach to ethnic-racialized subjectivity and experience through explications attuned solely to social, cultural, and historical but not psychical analyses Spillers wants to pursue the ethnic-racialized subject’s signifying dependence. Understanding the nature of that dependence and the signifying elements that constitute the subject’s symbolic universe are precisely the nature of the interpretative labor There is an exceedingly seductive, utopic charge to the project of emptying the space ﬁlled by race. It implies that the subject’s signifying dependence on race would no longer exist, insofar as race in the position of the Other As a system of organizing difference, race is very distinctive It is distinctive as a belief structure and evokes powerful and very particular investments in subjects. Consider the peculiar intensiﬁcation of racial identiﬁcation and racial discourse even as the scientiﬁc untenability of race is ever more insisted upon by scientists and anthropologists. Even though it has now become commonplace to utter rote phrases such as ‘‘race is a construct’’ or ‘‘race does not exist,’’ etc., race itself shows no evidence of disappearing or evaporating in relevance. It is common sense to believe in the existence of race. Why do we hold on to race? A scrutinous analysis of its stubborn hold on us and its ongoing role in the constitution of human subjectivity are the ‘‘something else’’ that Spillers is after interior intersubjectivity,’’ a hermeneutic strategy that, although it may not render race blank, will lay bare the processes—psychical, social, economic, and political— that explain to us why race won’t budge Spillers imagines her hermeneutic as a species of psychoanalytics, since race cannot be addressed simply through historicist genealogies that describe its discursive construction. race makes certain constitutive psychical claims on our existence that don’t simply go away because we describe, ad nauseam, its scientiﬁc untenability, its social constructedness, its variability over time and cultures, and Spillers’s approach has effectively broken down that opposition and even reconﬁgured it.