Lacan Noir

“Lacan Noir is an intellectual masterpiece. David Marriott successfully exceeds psychoanalytic application by offering, instead, a rigorous black critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis—revealing the concealed ‘(anti)black unconscious’ determining psychoanalytic limits, rupturing discursive formations, and engendering possibilities.  With remarkable precision and indefatigable rigor, Marriott rethinks Lacan’s theory of signification, questions the racial axiology undergirding signs, and considers the ‘negrophobic occupation’ of the sign itself … Lacan Noir is much more than a book—it is a theoretical event.”  
- Calvin Warren, Associate Professor, African American Studies, Emory University, USA

“Only David Marriott could have written this book and every serious scholar of contemporary thought will be grateful that he did. His project, pursued with extraordinary rigor and a scrupulous intellectual honesty, proposes nothing less than a “speculative wager” that the “n’est pas,” the nothingness that Blackness speaks, is “the only chance for black affirmation in a world of negation.” Lacan Noir disrupts received ideas about Lacan, Fanon, psychoanalysis, and Blackness and changes forever the possibilities of thinking them together. It is a major theoretical accomplishment.”
-Lee Edelman, Fletcher Professor of English Literature, Tufts University, USA

This book explores how Jacques Lacan has influenced Black Studies from the 1950s to the present day, and in turn how a Black Studies framework challenges the topographies of Lacanianism in its understanding of race. David Marriott examines how a contemporary Black Studies perspective might respond to the psychoanalysis of race by taking advantage of the recent revitalization of Lacanianism in its speculative, metaphysical form. While the philosophical side of the debate makes a plea for a new universalism, this book proposes a Lacanian reassessment of the notion of race, a notion distinct from culture, language, religion, and identity. It argues that it is possible to re-establish the theoretical relation between capitalism, anti-blackness, and colonialism, by reassessing the links between Lacanian psychoanalysis and three main domains of black inquiry: mastery, knowledge, and embodiment. The book offers a strikingly original rereading of the place of Lacan in both Fanon Studies and Afro-pessimism. It will appeal to students and scholars of Black Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Theory and Philosophy.
David S. Marriott is Liberal Arts Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, USA.