1.5 CEs for New York State psychologists, social workers, licensed mental health counselors and psychoanalysts.

*Derek Hook's biography → on the "Speaker Series" page*

There is a good deal of attention, in Lacanian social theory, to racism as the theft of jouissance. But what if this is an inadequate formula? Presumably, more work needs to be done to refine and qualify this thesis. Unexpectedly, perhaps, an answer of sorts is to be found in the work of Frantz Fanon, who offers a series of speculative thoughts on the masochist drive underlying particular forms of white racism. This talk will explore this particular (masochistic) modality of white racist jouissance. It will focus, particularly, on how a form of defensive projection - the white woman being seen as desiring the Black man as a means of obscuring denying the same order of desire on behalf of the white man - plays an instrumental role here. A careful attention to the mechanisms of defensive displacement and condensation here yields interesting results, not only in respect of how a matrix of white heterosexuality is supported and affirmed, but also in terms of Blackness is produced as an instance of embodied negation.