A Psychoanalytic Approach to Identity Politics

I intend to analyze the prevailing discursive formation of identity politics through the frames of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalyses. In particular, I will support three claims. First, identity politics possesses two competing forces, intersubjectivity and intersectionality, which nicely instantiate respectively the Lacanian registers of the Symbolic and the Real. Second, previous psychoanalytic approaches have failed to capture the unconscious death drive within identity politics (i.e., intersectionality); that is, contemporary scholars of psychoanalysis, such as Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Juliet Flower MacCannell, Howard Schwartz, and Slavoj Žižek, neglect the destabilizing force of intersectionality. Finally, intersectionality represents the novel mechanism by which the symbolic order of whiteness, in its attempt to preserve itself, appropriates the Real. As psychoanalysis seeks to extend itself into diverse realms of sociopolitical conversation, I contend that it is imperative for a psychoanalytic comprehension of identity politics to be front and center within any treatment of the subject matter