Racist foundation myths disavow lack and thereby split citizenship from identity politics

Evidence

For him the foundation myths of race and nation are premised on a primordial act of disavowal: they assert that nothing can be lacking in the reality guaranteed by their written or unwritten constitutions of the sovereign subject. It is precisely this foreclosure that in Zizek’s view underwrites a constitutive split between the universal categories of citizenship and the particularism of identitarian politics based on race or ethnicity. At the same time it founds a powerful principle of racist or ethnicist reiteration - the compulsion to repeat (or somatize, or act out) what is unrepresentable about desire. For what is repeated, across all the banal insults and slurs, slogans, graffiti, and jokes that make up the everyday rhetorics and pragmatics of racism, is a degree zero of representation - an “x marks the spot that is not y.” It is this inscription which draws a fatal line under the feet of those whom the body politic will assign to the side of life or death and which also triggers performatively the passage to acts of gratuitous racial violence, through its equivalence with the real (Butler, 1990, 1993). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1400

Categorization

• XREF: The split between universal citizenship and particularist identity politics connects to my earlier reading on how universalist claims mask exclusions. — connects to: Regimes suppress group identity when it contradicts founding legitimation myths. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 188