Racist desire aims to eliminate the Other’s desire, not to assimilate it

Evidence

Perhaps the most radical attempt to outline a theory of racist desire from within a Lacanian perspective comes from the work of Daniel Sibony (1978, 1998). Sibony asks “what do racists want from racism?” and he answers “to eliminate the desire of the other.” It is the enjoyment of being black, the pleasure Jews take in their Jewishness, that is hated because it represents a joy in being alive and in being different. Racist desire then is a form of what Ernest Jones called aphanasis. The aim of racist discourse, especially in its institutionalized forms, is not to impose the State’s own desires on the Other (as in assimilationist strategies), but to expel the Other from the realm of desire, and hence from life itself. In this sense, Sibony says, all racism has a genocidal impulse. In terms of the structure of this desire, Sibony notes that it takes as its preferred object the body that leaves nothing to be desired, a body that is immaculately conceived, pure, phallic, immortal - and dead. The stiff and the statue are the model bodies of the “master race” and as such are juxtaposed to the body of the subject race, a body which is fecund, secretive, excretive, mortal, blemished, impure - and indubitably alive. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1391

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Sibony’s Lacanian theory of racist desire: racism targets the other’s enjoyment, with genocidal impulse as its structural core.
• DEEPTHINKING: The master-race body as immaculate/dead versus subject-race body as fecund/alive is a dense, richly counterintuitive formulation — the racist’s ‘superiority’ is actually a death obsession, a fantasy of sterility.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1391
• XREF: connects to: Racism aims to annihilate the Other’s desire, not merely to assimilate or dominate it — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1391