Anti-Racist Racism: Trauma, Traumatism, Traumatophilia

Abstract

A particular epistemology of trauma now wields an outsized hold over psychoanalysis. Trauma, we are trained to think, has destructive effects whose ghostly lingerings can, nevertheless, be durably turned into ancestors. But what if we got this wrong? What if trauma is not a piece of shrapnel to be removed but a cause of becoming? And what if the tenet that trauma may be worked through is but a manifestation of a disciplinary spell? Introduction of the concept of traumatophobia invites readers to rethink the relationship of psychoanalysis to healing or repair, and to become attentive, instead, to what subjects do with trauma ( traumatophilia). Traumatophilia involves a revivification of trauma, and that is easily confused with compulsive repetition or destructiveness. Traumatophilia, however, also courts psychic energies that can be psychically transformative. For transformation to be possible, however, we need to be working with a notion of psychic life that can be transformed. Careful consideration of a controversial sexual fetish (race play) shows how belated efforts of psychoanalysis to attend to racial trauma have generated new forms of racism: treating the Black unconscious not as a transformative and dynamic force but as housing only repressed representational contents. Considering race play instead through traumatophilia allows a race player’s actions to be mined not for unconscious motives or for what past traumata, symbolized or unformulated, those motives carry, but to track their effects. Traumatophilic repetitions, it is argued, deliver traumatisms that may (or may not) be transformational. Questions of ethics are thus central to this paper’s thinking, which is grounded in queer of color critique, Black feminisms, and Laplanchean metapsychology. Because traumatophobia preserves the world order (and thus white logics), readers are urged to consider the metapsychology of traumatophilia.