“[The] uncanny foreignness is within us: we are our own foreigners, we are divided”

                    — Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves

One of the crucial insights of psychoanalysis is that the dead, or the forgotten past, have a claim on us— their presence can often be felt more viscerally than the undead—that which is alive and presents itself to us directly in physical and psychical reality. This is an observation unnerving as it is profound, as it unsettles, indeed disfigures, the supposedly rationalistic ethos constitutive of modernity. Psychoanalytic theory is especially well-suited in dealing with the spectral since its very condition of possibility is grounded in its oblique confrontation with that which otherwise might be dismissed as mere fantasy. Moreover, the fundamental theoretical object of psychoanalysis— the unconscious— possesses this spectral, phantom-like quality. In my essay, I will be working with the definition of phantom offered by Nicolas Abraham in “Notes on the Phantom” — precisely because he locates the origin of the phantom within the unconscious— in which he theorizes that “the phantom is a formation of the unconscious that has never been conscious… it works like a ventriloquist, like a stranger within the subject’s own mental topography” (Abraham 290).

Is not the phantom, then, the uncanny par excellence? The phantom is representative of the excesses of subjectivity, as Dimitris Vardoulakis argues, it “undoes any explication of subjectivity in terms of sharp demarcations” (Vardoulakis 101). It’s emergence relies on some form of familial transmission, it is informed by a “psycho-genetic heritage”, to use Durban’s terminology, yet it is not reducible to this transmission and thus evades ones straight-forward identification with it— one cannot make sense of it through reference to an established “system of relationships” since its primary task is to undo, render unintelligible systems of meaning. I will attend specifically to the role a phantom might have in the formation of the subjective constitution of colonized peoples, or, more specifically, the relationship between the unconscious and (colonial) subjectivity. At the heart of any discussion of the subjectivity of the oppressed is the possibility of its determinate negation, that is, the emancipation of the colonized subject from the discursive framework which assigns to him this subject position in the first place.

This is not only a matter of determining the best political action to achieve this emancipation, but also necessitates a theory, or concept of the subject since every political project presupposes one. An urgent question that must be asked, then, is: what is the defining characteristic of colonial subjectivity? One may argue that it possesses a positive, substantial quality— Blackness, for example, can be imagined as a concrete category with strict demarcations. The idea of emancipation that follows from this interpretation of subjectivity is one that privileges recognition; the phenomenon of racism will disappear once Black people are recognized not as the obscene Other of European civilization, but as equal to white people. However, I will argue that Blackness should instead be conceptualized as the site of a radical negativity, what Fanon calls the “zone of non-being” — an interpretation that emphasizes the spectral, phantom-like quality of subjectivity. This understanding of the colonial subject does not lead to an impotent political project, but is rather guided by the insight that the desire for recognition from the Master can only arise within the context of colonial relations. To actualize the paradigmatic shift from the “world of being” to the “world of meaning” that Fanon outlines, I will argue that the colonial subject must work through the contradictions of the socio-symbolic order of colonialism (Fanon).

Alain Badiou, praising Freud’s discovery of the fundamental structure of desire in his book The Century, writes, “By 1918, as we can see, Freud had already clearly identified a ploy that has been operative ever since, which consists in preferring the articulation of desire and its object back to a meaning that is pre-constituted in culture, mythology, or religion… this is the hermeneutic ploy, and Freud immediately saw it as an insidious negation of his discovery” (Badiou 115). Badiou touches on an issue that is of central importance to my paper— he clearly articulates the impasse, the “hermeneutic ploy” that one encounters when speaking of something as elusive as desire. In short, the question that Badiou poses, which had been asked by Freud before him is: how can one even begin to speak of something that resists symbolization? The phantom can be thought of as a concept that is conjured precisely in order to grasp this question. And while Badiou here is referring to Freud’s explication of sexual desire, the same question can be asked of the desire to know, or represent, a racialized Other (in this case it is the racialized Other that resists symbolization). One should not understand Abraham’s use of the word “phantom”, however, as an effort to symbolize the unsymbolizable; he does not attempt to prematurely overcome this impasse or pretend to untangle the psychoanalytic knot. The phantom exists as a “metapsychological fact” not because it can be identified with an object in phenomenal experience, nor even the loss or lack of this object; instead, it is founded on a lack of lack, the break-down of symbolic reality as such. (Abraham 171). The phantom exists only as the “gaps” — the unsymbolizable par excellence— “left within us by the secrets of others” (Abraham 171).

The phantom, then, is capable of denaturalizing subjectivity because it reveals these gaps; it disrupts the fantasy of an identity prior to a socially specific signifying process. This is a fantasy that is foundational to the racist, colonial socio-symbolic order since whiteness is conceived as a master-signifier within it. Durban’s discussion of “shadows, ghosts, and chimaeras” is similar to Abraham’s “phantom” in that it too problematizes this idea of subjectivity as a pre-given, natural category. Recounting a patient’s extraordinary psychic development, Durban writes, “At first there was a white hole… White was in white…Then I was in the black hole, screaming and screaming but no one heard” (Durban). One may be quick to dismiss this account as an instantiation of psychic pathology, but what it actually does is provide a model for subjective development. Subjectivation is a violent process; trauma is constitutive of subjectivity. Durban argues that one confronts trauma retroactively. This confrontation takes the form of appropriating an inapprobiable event, i.e., what is commonly referred to as “making sense” of one’s trauma. There is always an excess that cannot be contained, however, and so trauma, or the “phantom” carries out its return, when words, stripped of their “libidinal grounding” are uttered (Abraham 174). This should not be understood in the sense that the mere utterance of these words has a magical effect on those who hear it. Language, or words, here denotes not only verbal speech but rather “any signifying system that is based upon differential relations” (Ghosh 1). Recall Lacan in Seminar XX: “the notion of discourse should be taken as a social link (lien social), founded on language, and thus seems not unrelated to what is specified in linguistics as grammar” (Lacan 17). What Abraham calls “phantasmogenic words” have not only a communicative purpose, but also an impact on the chain of signification (Abraham 176). It is also by understanding language in this way that we can arrive at an adequate concept of “haunting”; this obstinate, persistent presence of the phantom and its generational transmission. Subjective traumas of the past, the destruction of a collective identity vis a vis a devastating event, can indeed influence, even determine, the subjective constitution of later generations. In Moses and Monotheism for example, Freud grapples with a question of great existential significance— what is it that makes the Jewish people so resilient? Moses, as the archetypal “father-leader” (killed only to come back to haunt his assailants) is elevated to the dignity of the Thing—that unsymbolizable force that nonetheless ties Jewish identity together—whether the Jews are consciously aware of it or not (Frosh 248).

What are the subjective repercussions of this rupture, the emergence of the phantom? The existence of the phantom impels us to think of subjectivity as, paradoxically, that which is removed from itself and is never self-identical to itself. Abraham writes, “The phantom is summoned therefore, at the opportune moment, when it is recognized that a gap was transmitted to the subject with the result of barring him or her from the specific introjections he or she would seek at present” (Abraham 174). Of crucial importance here is the “barring” of the subject, yet another reference to Lacan, who represents the barred subject with the matheme “$”. Only when we have this concept of the barred subject can we explicate the relationship between subjectivity and the unconscious, or the phantom which is a formation of the unconscious. Joan Copjec, in her essay “Vampire, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety, writes “… it is necessary to say that the real is absented, to declare its impossibility…[t]he real that is to be negated cannot be represented by a signifier, since the real is, by definition, that which has no adequate signifier” (Copjec 55). Copjec’s insight is crucial for understanding Fanon’s suspicion of the existence of a truly authentic and concrete Black identity. Moreover, Copjec’s analysis of the relationship between subjectivity and the unconscious can also be applied to the relationship between subjectivity and the socio- symbolic order— if Copjec is arguing that the subject differs from itself, then the very same thing can be said of the socio-symbolic order. Indeed, Fanon’s critical intervention is directed precisely at this relationship. He does not interpret Blackness as merely an Imaginary (in the sense Lacan uses the word) identity grounded in a coherent Symbolic discourse, but rather, Blackness for Fanon represents the “Real of the colony” — it is that which the colonial socio-symbolic order must safeguard itself from, the “phantom trace which haunts the Symbolic but cannot be adequately approximated by the function of the signifier” (Thakur 631). It is for this reason that Fanon writes that the colonial subject traverses “the crossroads between Nothingness [le Néant] and Infinity [l’Infini]”; the Black subject specifically is the personification of non-being (Fanon 119; Thakur 641). For Fanon, this “non-negated negativity” arises principally from the impossible situation Black people find themselves in: they can either futilely attempt to “become white” or try to reconnect to an imagined, mythic past (Thakur 612).

Notice how Copjec, when discussing the real, uses the words “say” and “declare”, essentially tethering it to the domain of language. This might appear counter-intuitive, perhaps even counterproductive— is not the whole aim of Fanon’s critical project to step outside the colonial socio-symbolic order and disavow its language? And how can we speak of the real if we can only pass over it in silence? Herein lies the importance of immanent critique: the truly radical act is not to reject in toto colonial language, but rather work through its contradictions and limitations. This is particularly important since one cannot merely strip away one’s identity, or literally “step outside” the world that defines one’s social being. Fanon himself assigns to language a great value— the very first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks starts with the following statement: “I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. That is why I find it necessary to begin with this subject, which should provide us with one of the elements in the colored man’s comprehension of the dimension of the other” (Fanon 17).

What might this immanent critique look like and can the concept of the phantom be invoked when constructing an emancipatory political project? Homi Bhabha, in his influential essay “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” argues that the zone of nonbeing theorized by Fanon allows us to rethink identity and its sedimentation— identity no longer needs as its foundation the transcendent, self-identical Idea but is rather developed in an immanent and differential field. If repetition in the colonial socio-symbolic order serves the purpose of sedimenting subjectivity (I act a certain way because I saw my parents doing the same thing) and reproducing social hierarchies; in the zone of non-being, repetition produces phantoms. While for Fanon, imitating or mimicking the colonizer is ultimately unproductive— “when I tried to claim my negritude intellectual as a concept, they snaatched it away from me” — Bhabha argues that mimicry is marked by a carnivalesque quality that parodies the dominant colonial socio-symbolic order; it is a “mode of representation, that marginalizes the monumentality of history, quite simply mocks its power to be a model, that power which supposedly makes it imitable” (Fanon 111; Bhabha 128). Bhabha argues that mimicry necessarily produces excess and slippage, or in other words, a phantom. Once the phantom emerges, it perpetuates this cycle of repetition, as Abraham reminds us, “[f]inally it gives rise to endless repetition and, more often than not eludes rationalization” (Abraham 175). The phantom produced by mimicry refuses colonial representation and concurrently haunts the colonizer.

And yet, the phantom also haunts the colonized— the subject bears the weight of historical injustices on her shoulders. How does one go about exorcizing these phantoms of which we cannot speak? Abraham is almost silent on this matter, ending the essay with the remark that one ought to place “the effects of the phantom in the social realm” (Abraham). It seems as though we have come full circle, running up against the same impasse that we had attempted to overcome: once again, the colonial subject is forced to confront, perhaps even stay within the colonial socio-symbolic order because, as Copjec argues, the subject is the “failure that sustains the symbolic order” (Copjec 54). The subject is this failure precisely because she can never apprehend the real. How can the symbolic order accommodate this excess, its disavowed phantoms? My essay has largely been a meditation on this question but still (unsurprisingly) one cannot even hope for a definitive answer. But, this, of course, is not a cause for despair. It is precisely the constitutive incapacity of the symbolic order to accommodate all its referents that creates a “constant gradient of desire, a perpetual reaching out for the pure reality behind representation” (Kirshner). The subject will ultimately search in vain for this “pure” reality— as Hegel reminds us, there is nothing behind the curtain of appearance except for what we put there.

Works Cited

Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” October, vol. 28, 1984, pp. 125–33, https://doi.org/10.2307/778467. Accessed 17 May 2022.

Dimitris Vardoulakis. “The Return of Negation: The Doppelgänger in Freud’s ‘The “Uncanny.”’” SubStance, vol. 35, no. 2, 2006, pp. 100–16, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4152886. Accessed 17 May 2022.

FROSH, STEPHEN. “Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmission.” American Imago, vol. 69, no. 2, 2012, pp. 241–64, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26305019. Accessed 17 May 2022.

Joshua Durban (2011) Shadows, ghosts and chimaeras: On some early modes of handling psycho‐genetic heritage1, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 92:4, 903-924, DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-8315.2011.00410.x

Fanon, F. (2020). Black Skin, White Masks. Penguin Classics.

Univ. of Chicago Press. (1994). The shell and the kernel.

Ghosh, Elisa. LACAN: THE UNCONSCIOUS IS STRUCTURED LIKE A LANGUAGE.

George, S., & Hook, D. (2022). Lacan and Race: Racism, identity, and psychoanalytic theory. Routledge, Taylor et Francis Group.

Copjec, J. (2005). The horror reader. Routledge.