The Sixth Sense: Race as Psychoanalysis' Interruption

• In Event: Hauntings

Abstract

Drawing on Gordon’s (1997) naming of haunting as a social force, alongside a range of conversations across psychoanalysis and Black social thought, this presentation explores haunting and its embodied impacts, arguing that this social force plays out on racialized bodies as a sixth sense. To do this, we 1) explore the sensory genealogies of exploring the deep resonances of haunting that are not only lingering but, arguably, ever-present in bodies, and 2) pinpoint the unique interruption of Black social thought that shifts the intimacies of power toward the permanent nature of haunting. This paper takes a particular theoretical breathing room in Lacanian conversations of desire, jouissance, and death drive, rupturing not only the power that haunts, but the cycles of subjectivity, subjugation, and embodied possibilities. Haunting, we argue, is written on the body as a sensory reality for many social theorists and psychoanalysts, inscribed on bodies. However, how do we account for racialized subjects and their encounters with haunting, and when does haunting do different work to racialized bodies? In his conversations on jouissance, Lacan and his readers come to name the racialized other as the barrier to the subject’s experience of full jouissance, an obstacle blocking attainment of the object of desire, while at the same time, remaining as continued objects of desire themselves, as Spillers (1987) argues. Thus enters a problematic driving that which assists in shaping racialized bodies, where desire and jouissance propel violence, mapping onto racialized bodies through haunting; this, arguably, has detrimental, experimental, affective, and sensual implications for racialized bodies. Framing haunting as a sixth sense examines a particular sociological investment in studies on Black embodiment and sensory study that tell us that the Black body – as barrier – experiences a socialization that circles and draws from violence.

Authors

• Endia Hayes, The University of Texas at San Antonio

• Seth Robinson, The University of Texas at San Antonio