The panel's aim is to interrogate the (im)possibility of a Black psychoanalysis. Since the “discovery” of psychoanalysis, thinkers of race (creative, intellectual, political, and clinical) have contemplated whether psychoanalytic discourses can contemplate—let alone contend—with the question of Blackness. The range of figures includes thinkers who were focused on the clinical imperative, such as Frantz Fanon, to those who more implicitly yet just as critically have inquired about the psychic life of anti-Black racism (Richard Wright, Patricia Williams, Toni Morrison, etc.). This panel seeks to outline this intellectual history of critical black thought that brings into sharp focus the tensions between psychoanalyses and race while also remarking on current interventions in the state of the field.

The first paper, "Black Textuality and the Force of Desire" (Jordan Taliha McDonald) examines Claudia Tate's 1998 book, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. Black American literary critic Claudia Tate diagnosed Black literary scholarship with a desire problem. As Tate asserted, “the racial protocol for African American canon formation has marginalized desire as a critical category of black textuality.” Tate’s analysis proves most contiguous with the contemporary development of Afropessimist psychoanalytic thought where the problem of desire is understood to have a conscious and pre-conscious inuence on Blackness's grammatical and rhetorical condition. Her critique that Black literary canon formation betrays a “fetish of agency” that eclipses the range of desire examined therein is particularly resonant with Afropessimist lm and media scholar Jared Sexton’s assertion that “we shouldn’t presume that there is a desire for freedom or only a desire for freedom.” Tensions between the two thinkers (or respective schools of thought) are perhaps most evident in Tate’s belief that one must “decenter racial oppression” to locate desire’s activity in Black literature. While this perspective is rooted in Tate’s assessment of the canonical investment in the protest novel and its predecessor, the slave narrative, Afropessimist thought shows us that Black psychoanalytic thought would be remiss not to stage “a rethinking of the normal, social workings of political struggle in the public sphere (the vaunted sexuality of the heights) and the shadowy realm of its obscene, perverse underside (the disavowed sexuality of the depths), between social desire and ‘true’ desire.”

The second paper (Dylan Lackey) raises the question of Blackness in the work of Jacques Lacan by turning to his reading of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. There, Lacan’s foremost example of lalangue; of creative confrontation with the sinthome—are introduced to the Blackness of the character Shem (widely considered Joyce’s textual avatar) in Chapter 7, written from the perspective of Shem’s brother, Shaun, an organized, mathematical individual contrasted with Shem’s wildness. Here, Shaun “barrages Shem with... racist language” (Brivic), exposing Shem’s racialized connection to his mother, Anna (earlier in the text described as Black), and his disconnection from his pale-skinned father and brother. Beyond his use of slurs, Shaun also attributes to Shem a series of violently anti-Black conventions. While Brivic concludes his analysis of Shem’s Blackness positively by nodding to the agency achieved in attending to rather than shying from racialized abjection, Lackey is more interested in: firstly, the way that Joyce’s desires as an artist are reflected in writing Shem as an explicitly Black version of himself, and, secondly, what this reading of Joyce does to alter Lacan’s interpretation of both lalangue and sinthome as fundamentally creative responses to the psychoanalytic problem.

This final paper, "Blackness, Repetition, and Non-Philosophy" (Anthony Farley), considers the spectacle of slavery that is death, and death only which continually persists as slavery-to-segregation-to-neosegregation or otherwise understood as a system of white-over-black. By observing a paradox that is the motionless movement of death perfecting itself, the paper argues that law makes death sovereign. The paper pursues this line of inquiry by considering a. capitalism as a system of spectacular relationships. And b. law as a structure analogous to the unconscious since it exists outside of time. In placing these two concerns together, it considers a sort of magical thinking of law—a make-believe realm in which rules appear to somehow govern themselves and an “us” that seemingly masks over and absolves the system of white-over-black. Such banishment is by that act repatriated to and given sovereignty over the world of the real, the world of historical time.