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At the Thresholds of the "Human": Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Replication of Imperial Memory

Brian Carr

Deckard: Shakes? Me too. I get 'em bad. Part of the Business. Rachel: I'm not in the Business. I am the Business. -Blade Runner Freud could not "see" his own connection to the "race"/culture orbit, or could not theorize it, because the place of their elision marked the vantage point from which he spoke.... Perhaps we could argue that the "race" matrix was the fundamental interdictionwithin the enabling discourse of founding psychoanalytic theory and practice itself. -Hortense Spillers, "Allthe Things" 89 Tf, as Spillers suggests above, psychoanalysis is founded through the structural interdiction of a thing called "race," by what means does "race" become intelligible in psychoanalysis? To frame this somewhat differently, if "race" constitutes a fundamental repression in the inaugural gestures of psychoanalytic theory, how can we read the symptomatic presence of race in psychoanalysis?
? 1998 Oxford University Press.

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Can we not learn to "see" race in psychoanalysis, despite its eclipsed and coded status? This article broaches the already solidifying question of race and psychoanalysis through the latter's most overdetermined production, that figure whose tropic status is so foundationally occluded: the "human." Where psychoanalysis offers us an elaborate narrative of the human subject's developmental "becoming"-what we might call its humanization-this article turns to this same narrative to find a more ghastly underside: the story of the racialized subject's dehumanization. Critical theorists have been telling the story of humanism's demise for some time now, highlighting particularly the displaced epistemological security of the human subject's claim to knowledge and identity.' However, in the often celebratory rendering of the "post"-human, we have been seduced by a peculiar amnesia, one which seems incapable of theorizing the figure of the dehumanized. It is precisely this figure-that racialized non-subject whose access to the representational status of the "human" subject is fundamentally halted-which seems so routinely evacuated in the governing logic of the posthuman's liberatory promise.2 Indeed, we might argue, via Spillers, that the first-order erasure of "race"from psychoanalysis and its attendant story of the human's emergence persists in contemporary formulations of the post- or anti-human. The obsession with the "post" of the human, while invoking a language of chronology, evacuates any kind of inquiry into the historicity of how the human is categorically accessed, who enters its circuits of symbolization and desire, and who is barred from it. Never able to engage the historicity of the human in its heterogeneity, the rhetoric of the posthuman and its specific rendering of antihumanism opts instead to envision the "post"-ing of the human from the vantage of the human subject, not from the position of the historically dehumanized. What I want to ask is this: If psychoanalytic narratives of subjectivity provide a useful model for understanding the formation of the human subject, do they not also harbor a tale of that subject's de-formation? Do they not, that is, explain something of the mechanics of a subject's symbolic designification? It is my contention that psychoanalysis not only tells the story of how the gendered white bourgeois subject is "made," but also cannot help but provide a model for theorizing how it is that iacialized/colonized subjects are representationally and symbolically "unmade." Beginning from what Jean Laplanche calls the

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"obvious fact that we are living beings before we are human beings" (21), I plan to theorize how racialized meaning inheres in the psychoanalytic temporalities of Laplanche's "living being" and "human being," establishing a border between the pre-subject/prehuman and the human subject in which nonwhite persons are relegated to the domain of the infantile not-yet-subject while white subjects are figured as the central players in the field of the human. I maintain that it is this racialized allegory of development that plagues any conversation we might have about the promises and limits of engaging the question of "race and psychoanalysis." For psychoanalysis, history is thinkable only as the history of the human subject in the developmental sense. It is thus impossible to engage, from within psychoanalysis alone, the historicity of the human as a privileged categorical creation which has never been totally accessible to all "living beings." Engaging the question of history on at least two levels-at the level of subjective memory (as in psychoanalysis) and at the level of collective memory and historical time- we can begin to see how psychoanalysis has refused to engage critically the historicity of the subject as a politically exclusionary category, thinking the symbolic only through a fictive telos of human subjecthood. My project is to theorize how psychoanalysis only apprehends the historicity of "race" through a profoundly dehistoricized narrative of individual subject formation. I stage this tension between the developmental history of the subject which psychoanalysis offers and the historicity of the "subject" as an exclusionary sociosymbolic category around the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner, precisely because the film and critical appraisals of it dramatize the "becoming" of the human subject in its psychic dimensions. Blade Runner is crucial to my conversation about the developmental/temporal/historical confusions in which the race and psychoanalysis question has been engaged since it frames a discourse of the posthuman within a concern about the racially coded nonhuman "replicant." But where psychoanalysis stops at the history of the subject's development, Blade Runner offers us another register of the historical: it imagines a futuristic moment which, as we will see, looks suspiciously like the neocolonial "post" of U.S. chattel slavery. Where Blade Runner frames the "human" at once in the relays of racial history and the symbolic possibilities for individual memory, it provides an occasion to link the history of the subject as figured

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in psychoanalysis to the narratives of a specifically U.S. neocolonial history. For many commentators on Blade Runner, the film's progressive thread inheres in its concern to simultaneously stage and undermine its driving ontological distinction: that between humans and manufactured replicants (see Shapiro; Zizek; Silverman). Kaja Silverman is perhaps most emphatic on this point, claiming that Blade Runner "suggests that there can be no subjectivity which is not structured in relation to an irrecoverable lack.... It does not hesitate for a moment, moreover, to impute this conditionality to its android characters" (9-10). However, although Blade Runner persists, as Silverman suggests, in its efforts to expose the human/ replicant distinction as an "ideological fabrication," Rachel's claim in the opening quote that she is "not in the business" but rather is the "business" designates a diegetic moment in which the politics of such methodological exposures is startlingly questioned. Rachel, a replicant who has been "implanted" with memories and initially believes herself to be human, refuses the interpellative sweep that Deckard makes when he claims that her nervous "shakes" are part of "being in the business." This "being in the business" points both toward the "business" of replicant killing, or being a cop in 2019 Los Angeles, but also toward the "business" as the domain of the human (figured as non-replicant) itself. Crucially, Deckard (Harrison Ford), the film's protagonist "blade runner" or replicant killer, only extends to Rachel (Sean Young) the insider category of the "human" after Rachel kills a replicant in order to save Deckard's life. But Rachel refuses such terms of humanity, reminding Deckard that she still exists under the threat of murder-all replicants are to be killed on detection-regardless of his capacity to read her as human. Movement into the human, for Rachel, is no simple rhetorical gesture: its boundary is, under historical configurations of colonialism, both impossible to maintain and impossible to transgress. Indeed, Rachel's comments serve to refocus Silverman's claims about the film, turning our critical attention away from how the film undermines the human/replicant classification and toward a more firm interrogation of how those categories maintain in their constitutive force and what the cost of their elision might be. Though Silverman claims that Blade Runner "suggests that the far-

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ther we travel into the future the more profoundly we encounter the past" (9), it may be that the category of the human conceals an exclusionary historicity whose past and future movements remain unaccounted for under a psychoanalytic notion of history as memory. What plagues Silverman's rehearsal of the psychoanalytics of "screen memories" and their relationship to the human in Blade Runner is the historical category of the slave to which the replicants are both diegetically and visually linked. In its delineation of an exclusion which is not merely the generalized "lack" on which all subjectivity rides, Blade Runner's invocation of a specifically U.S. colonial history, namely chattel slavery, demands a rethinking of the points of stress on which the category of the human is fashioned both within and outside of the film.3 However, in turning to the question of how Blade Runner engages a legacy of U.S. colonialism and imperial fantasy, we will have to remain skeptical of a psychoanalytic explanatory model, of either classical or feminist dimensions, which tautologically rehearses the psychic themes of the film without learning to read more complexly the historical and colonial possibilities for symbolic articulation. Blade Runner is a film acutely aware of the psychoanalytic tropologies of "screen memories," and thus, it is not enough, as I hope to show, simply to reinvent such tropes as the horizon of critical possibility. Such a methodological bind is, in part, the effect of psychoanalytic feminist film theory's disciplinary history, where film noiror, in Blade Runner'scase, neo-noir-has always been a crucial site for feminist film theory's theoretical investments.4 The historical intimacy of film noir with the popularization of psychoanalysis in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s should make us somewhat suspicious about feminism's critical leverage when the study of film noir is done solely from the vantage of psychoanalytic theory. Where Spillers suggested at the beginning of this article that the foundation of psychoanalysis prohibited Freud from "seeing" race, we might ask more about the extent to which feminist psychoanalytic film theory has also been mired in the same epistemic "blindness." We must learn to visit the codes of noir with a suspicion about its deployment of psychoanalytic categories as they function, more often than not, to apprehend social crisis only as an individual psychic failure. Indeed, in moving toward the con-

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text of neocolonial history and the futures it may disjunctively plot, we will have to linger longer on Rachel's insistence that inclusion into the "human" has a cost for the historically dehumanized which remains irreducible to the developmental traumas of which psychoanalysis speaks.

On Sexual Difference, Race, and the Human

Many critics are skeptical of the methodological deployment of psychoanalysis in a racial frame, claiming that inasmuch as psychoanalysis takes sexual difference as the primary figuration of any and all difference it remains unequipped to theorize race.5 In part, such a claim is absolutely true. After all, it is Freud who says the "contrast" between "masculine" and "feminine" "dispositions" "has a more decisive influence than any other upon the shaping of human life" (ThreeEssays 85). But it is the historicity of Freud's designation "human life" which are my concern as I theorize the relations between a psychoanalytic machinery of sexual difference (through which the bourgeois human is supposedly made) and the systematically dehumanized un-subject. As Freud's gesture betrays, psychoanalysis is concerned with the "shaping of human life," not with the colonial projects by which bodies are systematically dehumanized. And though many critics would defend psychoanalysis that psychoanalysis is for its antihumanist tendencies-claiming of the human at all inasmuch as it, particunot about the primacy larly in its Lacanian register, refuses to grant the subject its unfettered autonomy-we might do well to question how it is that an antihumanist project systematically refuses to think the historically dehumanized.6 This tension between an amnesiac antihumanism and the racially dehumanized marks a set of internal fractures within psychoanalysis itself, exposing an exclusionary formulation of racial difference at the center of a psychoanalytic explanatory logic. If psychoanalysis theorizes sexual difference as constitutive of the human, my concern is how to think of the symbolic debarment from sexual difference as the motor of symbolic dehumanization. Here, we might read Freud's symptomatic linking of the human to the terrain of sexual difference against Donna Haraway's claim

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that "[t]he human is the category that makes a luminous promise to transcend the rending trauma of the particular, especially that particular nonthing and haint called race" (Modest Witness 214). Haraway's focus on race and the human serves to qualify and reorient Freud's implicit axiom that sexual difference is "proper" to the human, suggesting that preclusion from a supposedly universal human and its syntax of sexual difference is precisely the historical condition of racial encoding. Thus, sexual difference stands to guard a racialized boundary between the "ungendered" nonhuman (historically racialized/colonized) and the human whose circulation in a symbolics of (hetero)sexual difference constitutes its very definitional contours. Where Freud says, by implication, that there can be no ungendered human, Haraway reminds him that the human is a site of categorical entrance often blocked by the historical production of "race"-a production which Hortense Spillers suggests signals gender's sociosymbolic unmaking.7 Race, thus, stands at the vanishing point of a psychoanalytic framework, where sexual difference and the human resolve into the "ungendered" figure of dehumanized racial "flesh." In putting into play the categories of the human, race, and sexual difference, we can mark a radical historicization of the psychoanalytic premise that the symbolic "assumption" of a sex is coterminous with the constitution of the human, and that such an act of "assuming" a sexed positionality exacts an irretrievable foreclosure for all livable subjects. Perhaps the question here should be focused most on the notion of livability,in part because a certain strand of psychoanalytic theory suggests the unqualified impossibility of life prior to or beyond the "bar"of symbolic sexual difference. For Judith Butler, "we can never tell a story about how it is that a body comes to be marked by the category of sex, for the body before the mark is constituted as signifiable only through the mark," and thus, there can be no body as such prior to the phallic assumption of sexual difference (98). However, her claim is only directly applicable to those bodies which historically are made available to the mark of sex as a normativizing condensation (what Foucault calls the "fictive unity of sex") in the first place, bodies whose final trajectory is that of subjects.8 Though it may well be the case that a categorical loss is exacted at the expense of sexed human subject formation, it is also true that, historically, the mechan-

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ics of subject formation do not work to elide so easily all livable persons with the category of the bourgeois sexually differentiated human. We must be more nuanced here about the conditions of livability: exclusion from the scene of subjecthood is not always on the order of death proper. Symbolic designification has more regularly, in its more historical and colonial dimensions, installed a condition of what Orlando Patterson, referring to African American slaves in the U.S., calls "social death." Patterson's paradoxical framing of the "socially dead" allows us to think more critically in the context of psychoanalysis, specifically about how "death" operates within the social and how excluded bodies are rendered dead at the level of sociosymbolic signification. Here, evacuation from a symbolics of bourgeois subjecthood (and its attendant logic of sexual difference) marks a "condition" not analogous to an always nostalgic story about the imaginary "stuff" of a presymbolic subjector a body prior to the enjoining governance of phallic differentiation. That is, bodies excluded from subjecthood in the context of colonial rule should not be conflated with the psychoanalytic notion of the sexually undifferentiated pre-subject, ones whose (pre)history can never be rescued. It is the conflation of these two types of exclusion-and the temporal/historical logics they each marshal-which has rendered the question of race and psychoanalysis so seemingly impossible. As told from a dehistoricized psychoanalysis, sexual difference qualifies the bourgeois human for life and failure to be successfully interpellated within its logic of differentiation results in a certain kind of impossibility for linguistic and social survival. However, the historicity of the human is a weighty factor, one that violently harbors a set of derelictions whose ability for survival has not always been governed directly on the order of sexual difference. Here, the exclusion of the subaltern from the domain of the human-a process which, as Spillers suggests, necessitates an "ungendering" at the level of bodily integrity-is not the same as the foreclosure within the human subject of which psychoanalytic theory speaks. We have a different question of degree or order here. At the site of the first type of exclusion, there exists a life, regardless of its systematic erasure as a subject, whereas at the other we have the presymbolic "nothingness" accessed only from the vantage of a

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particular subject alreadymadeand for which, as Butler rightly suggests, we can have no accurate account. To live the categorical domain of an always politically produced site of symbolic unlivability is to occupy in social time and place that supposed slot of unimaginable and impossible existence whose foundational "lack" is not on the same order as that of "the"subject. Where psychoanalysis has met its failure in thinking about race has been precisely with respect to the subaltern as that subject whose very erasure constitutes its only access to elite cultural intelligibility. The subaltern in the United States-in this case the African American captive under slavery-is a body systematically designified within the sociosymbolic structure of sexual difference and, thus, a body converted and convertible to captive "flesh." It becomes almost impossible here to speak of a condition of subalternity without speaking as if one is designating a human subject in its sexually differentiated terms, precisely because the register of the subject is only directly legible as sexed. Joining the notion of the Subaltern Studies model of the subaltern with that of Spillers's notion of a captive "ungendering," we confront the paradox of linguistic subjecthood at its social limit in U.S. history: how to speak of a "body,"a "subject,"or a "human" when these are all categorically destroyed in/as the condition of the slave's "degendered" subalternity? Readers versed in psychoanalytic theory, particularly its feminist manifestations, know that if sexual difference is the primary category of the subject's viability within language, it is also true that the dissolution of a sexually differentiated corporeal schema threatens to destroy the subject's sociolinguistic livelihood. Elizabeth Grosz rehearses this narrative when she says, following Lacan, that a sexually differentiated imaginary body "is the precondition and raw material of a stable, that is, symbolic, identity which the child acquires as a result of the resolution of the Oedipus complex. Its reorganization or decomposition witnesses psychotic breakdown" (44). In Grosz's psychoanalytic rehearsal of how the dissolution of sexual difference and its attendant disintegration of a unified corporeal schema "risks throwing the subject into the preimaginary real, the domain inhabited by the psychotic" (44), she remains committed to a singular construal of the relationship between linguistic and social viability and the unmaking of sexual

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difference. Though Grosz's theorization of sexual difference as an imaginary bodily mapping may work successfully to narrate a certain trajectory of the sexing and constitution of the bourgeois subject, it offers little in the way of theorizing the status of the subaltern precisely because it begins from the position of the already made (if fragile) subject not the summarily unmade (though not therefore categorically psychotic) subaltern. We might ask more about how the notion of the real here works along a sedimented logic where all foreclosure has the same content and where "loss"is always a singular category. In a colonial context in which the interpellation of subjects remains profoundly asymmetrical-where, in fact, that very interpellating move constitutes a domain of social unviability that is nevertheless lived-can we still speak of the "loss" on which the subject is founded as a given content whose threat to the non-subject is always and forever the same? In putting pressure on Lacan's designation of the real as an approachable yet impossible domain which "resists symbolization absolutely," I am suggesting, then, that the categorical loss on which the human bourgeois subject is founded may occlude the historically racialized exclusion operative within the symbolic (Lacan, The SeminarI 66). It may be that such a commitment to total foreclosure in the real and the attendant dehistoricizing move to figure all "living beings" within the binary inscription of the psychotic/subject has rendered it virtually impossible to think the subject in its historically racialized dimensions within a psychoanalytic theoretical frame

Foreclosure, Impossibility, and the Condition of Subalternity

In order to produce a more nuanced analytic between psychoanalysis and the disciplinary object race, we must first look to those categories, figures, and tropes which have invested both the languages of psychoanalytic and critical race/postcolonial theory already. Indeed, it may just be that psychoanalysis harbors within its own terms a racialized repression which, like all repressions, pulls two ways and threatens to expose its own modality.9 Following Anne McClintock's provocative lead, we must investigate the "disavowed relations between psychoanalysis and social history," press-

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ing on how "the disciplinary quarantine of psychoanalysis from history was germane to imperial modernity itself" (184, 8). Thus, the project will not be solely one of taking psychoanalysis and the question of race and thinking them together-a methodological pursuit which would retain psychoanalysis as a discrete epistemological framework-but rather one of asking how it is that psychoanalysis appearsto have nothing to say about race. This last declaration suggests that, in fact, psychoanalysis speaks volumes about race and racialized sexuality, particularly on that register of racial meaning which pivots on a human/nonhuman division. It is not that race is successfullyprohibited, or what Spillers terms "interdicted," by the foundational moves of psychoanalysis. Like the tracking of any prohibition or founding exclusion, the move to think about race in a psychoanalytic frame marks a methodological shift where psychoanalysis's elaborate theorization of the human is troubled from the inside, where the constitution of an othered and racialized un-subject is repeatedly invoked and erased-or more precisely, invoked through erasure. Thus, in tracking the internal machinery of what makes "the human" for psychoanalysis we witness a set of externalized abjections, ones which, in this case, are rendered beyond the "business" of the human. 10 In moving to a methodological investigation of how psychoanalysis "invokes through erasure," we return again to the figure of the subaltern whose elision as subject is its only access to representation. The subaltern non-subject elaborated within postcolonial theory, as I have already hinted, shares a peculiar rhetorical positionality with psychoanalytic notions of foreclosure/repudiation and repression. However, one must interject quickly here, as many readers will protest that the categories of foreclosure and repression are not the same thing and point toward different degrees of what we might call exclusion.1' Though there are certainly ways in which foreclosure and repression signal differential locales and modes of exclusion, the crucial point for me is that subaltern marks the place of neither insofar as it not foreclosed in/as psychosis nor is its "reality" simply repressed and thus able to be accessed through the historiographer's (the analyst's) symptomatic reading. Indeed, as Gayatri Spivak explains, the subaltern stands neither at the site of total impossibility (foreclosed) nor as a symptom waiting

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to be accurately read, but instead it marks a more dynamic coordination between possibility and impossibility where "its own conditions of impossibility [are] the conditions of its possibility" ("Can the Subaltern Speak?" 285). From the vantage of Spivak's claims, as well as those of the Subaltern Studies group, the category of the subaltern cannotand for political reasons should not-be considered foreclosed in the strict psychoanalytic sense. To conflate the mechanics of symbolic exclusion with total foreclosure serves, as Judith Butler suggests, to elide the ways in which "the excluded [might] return, not as psychosis or the figure of the psychotic within politics, but as that which has been rendered mute, foreclosed from the domain of political signification" (189). Butler further notes that there exists a certain ambiguity in Lacan's frequently cited designation of the real-"what is refused in the symbolic order returns in the real."12 For her: "'[W]hat is refused in the symbolic order' suggests that there are a set of signifiers 'in' the symbolic order in the mode of refusal or, indeed, refuse. The French makes it clearer, for it is not what is refused to that order, but what in that order is refused[.] If what is refused reappears (resurgit[22] or reparait[21]) in the real (dans le reel), then it appears first to have appeared in the symbolic prior to its refusal and reappearance in the real" (204). What Butler's provocative unraveling of the spatialization of the category of the "foreclosed" enables is precisely what, in another context, the Subaltern Studies project calls for: a mapping of how it is that subjects are not so much essentially unsymbolizable from the beginning as they are strategically desymbolized within a politics of symbolic intelligibility. Further, the construal of all forms of exclusion under the impossible domain of the psychotic-a move which Butler attempts to resist-exposes psychoanalysis as a disciplinary apparatus bound by the singularity of its categorical formulations and exposes how psychoanalysis has remained unnuanced to the varieties and degrees of symbolic existence.13 The subaltern is precisely not psychotic. Though the above counter-allegation may seem obvious and somewhat bizarre-inasmuch as no one is explicitly claiming that the subaltern stands in the space of psychosis-it is not at all clear that psychoanalytic theory has offered another way to conceptualize symbolic exclusion (that is, one beyond the twin registers of

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repression and foreclosure). And though repression, foreclosure, and the subaltern are all categories marked by their (un)accessibility to speech, the question of degree is critical. For the inquiry into the speech of the subaltern-and Spivak's question of whether or not she can speak at all-is more an interrogation into the conditions of possibility for reception on the part of the disciplinary historian.14 The focus on reception, on the possibility for hearing the subaltern, refuses to situate her speech as an effect whereas, in psychoanalysis, the psychotic (as that which occupies foreclosure) is total effect-it is itself the traumatic effect, the remainder even, of symbolization. What Spivak's theorization of the "speech" of subaltern offers a politically invested psychoanalytic critical practice, then, is a way in which to theorize a muting within the symbolic, but one which is not therefore totally and for all time unintelligible. Indeed, the question of politics resides in what we might call the counterinsurgent symbolic as itself the registering effect of the subaltern's erasure. The subaltern is not the effect of the counter-insurgent text, for the elite symbolics of colonial rule are, as Spivak suggests, "no more than an effect of the subaltern subject-effect" ("Subaltern Studies" 204). That is, the insurgent subaltern is not the remainder of colonial rule as such, but is only situated as its exterior-a mechanics of exclusion which both exposes and disavows that the counter-insurgent text can only take shape through what Ranajit Guja regards as the erasure of the "will"of the subaltern.15 From this vantage, it becomes clear that critical focus must shift away from a terminal discussion of how psychoanalysis cannot theorize race-or can only do it through analogy to sexual difference-to a better appraisal of the very modalities by which psychoanalysis has attempted to ward off the threat of its own racialization.

Blade Runner, Colonial Time, and Manufactured Subjects

I turn to Blade Runner now precisely because it foregrounds the disciplinary and conceptual crisis delineated above-namely, how to figure the relations of a psychoanalytics of "humanness" alongside a historicity of the human which harbors within its terms

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the figure of the dehumanized. Of primary interest here is the ways in which psychoanalytic feminist film theory has been deployed in the examination of Blade Runner, in part because it so routinely attaches to the film's overt rehearsal of certain psychoanalytic tropes but rarely or only peripherally takes up the film's representation of colonial history, nonorganic manufactured slave labor in the form of replicants, and links to U.S. slavery, captivity, and dehumanization. I take Kaja Silverman's essay on Blade Runner,"Back to the Future," as a testing ground for the ways in which feminist psychoanalysis marks its own conditions of possibility for considering the relations between race and sexual difference both within and outside of the film. I work primarily around Silverman's piece because it, more than most, attempts to theorize Blade Runner's staging of the history of race at the same time that it works on a psychoanalytic epistemological axis. Despite the quarantined criticism of this film where the psychoanalytic is disengaged from the pressures of social history, Blade Runner persists to offer a crucial site at which to examine the conceptual limits of psychoanalysis in a decidedly colonial frame. If Silverman is right that Blade Runner turns to the past in order to think the future, she nevertheless can only propose the question of history in terms of subjective memory where the "past" (or what we think to be the "authentic" past) developmentally conditions the subject's future. For both Silverman and Slavoj Zizek, the question of history is only tracked in Blade Runner through the history of the subject (as in psychoanalysis) or through the film's logic of pastiche which recycles the visual codes of 1940s and 1950s films noirs.16However, as I suggested in the opening of this article, Blade Runner is also concerned with another dimension of historical relay, one in which the question of individual pasts and collective futures is framed within the colonial projects of subject formation. Indeed, the film refuses to go "back to the future" only in terms of personal memories, for to make such a mistake is to confuse the limits of subjective memory with the limits of the domain of symbolic and political signification. What is lost within the subject or barred from "its" consciousness is not necessarily what is muted in the symbolic. It is precisely this methodological tie to history as subjective memory which allows Silverman to celebrate "just how prototypi-

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cal is the subjectivity imputed to the android characters" in Blade Runner (114). For Silverman, Rachel, though a replicant, is offered up in the film as prototypically human. Inasmuch as she has been "implanted" with memories that are not her own but rather those of (the corporate "father" and manufacturer of the replicants) Tyrell's niece, she reveals the ways in which all memories are more or less always "screened," fictitious but not therefore less effective for providing what Tyrell calls a "cushion or pillow" for the replicants' unexpected propensity for emotions. Thus, the figure of Rachel functions for Silverman to demonstrate that "no one's childhood memories may be any more accurate an index of the past than are Rachel's. Radically falsified 'recollections' may be the only ones to which we have access" (119). Though Silverman's deployment of Freud's "screen memories" certainly makes sense in Blade Runner-and it is very much a psychical operation the film is concerned to trope-it nevertheless loses sight of the historical constitution of Rachel's significatory "humanness": claiming, as it does, that her ability to signify "human" is reducible to her own sense of "being" through a personal memorial past. That is, for Silverman, operating within a certain psychoanalytic notion of memory and history, Rachel's "humanness" is traceable to a dehistoricized claiming of (oedipal) personal history. And though Silverman attempts to think about the ideological status of personal memories-remarking that the film moves away from "memory as private ... to one based upon group fantasies and collective structures . .. which span the human/replicant divide"-such a claim merely works, in this context, to misread the hegemonic status of these "collective" fantasies (121). After all, these "group fantasies" do not simply "span the human/ replicant divide" as much as the domain of the "human," and its circumscription of oedipal history as the only historythereis works to delineate exclusionary paths of human and historical intelligibility. Further, the film foregrounds that these memories are "implanted" as a mechanism of control, a kind of disciplinary project akin to what Foucault calls "normalization."'7 If Blade Runner exposes anything about the psychic ordering of the human, it is the imperative-one which is virtually synonymous with that of psychoanalysis-of an oedipalized subjectivity, even if fictitious, for the signification of humanness.

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The compulsory oedipalization of Rachel occurs both at the level of her "fake" memories, which Silverman quite rightly reads as installing an oedipal trajectory,18 and also at the level of Rachel's relationship with Deckard. For David Harvey, an otherwise not-sopsychoanalytic critic, the emerging romantic relationship between Rachel and Deckard demands psychoanalytic consideration: "In killing the replicant Leon as he is about to kill Deckard, [Rachel] provides the ultimate evidence of the capacity to act as Deckard's woman. She escapes the schizoid world of replicant time and intensity to enter the symbolic world of Freud."19However, Blade Runner is not only concerned with the movement from schizoid time to a psychoanalytic symbolics but with the transformation from a body convertible to and produced as laboring property to a body signifiable within a discourse of human (hetero)sexual differentiation and romance. Though Harvey reads Rachel's inauguration into an oedipalized symbolic as a question of time-"the difference between the replicant and the human becomes so unrecognizable that they can indeed fall in love (once both get on the same time scale)" (313)-I wish to invert the chronology of his claim. It is precisely the "act"of "falling in love" and the (hetero)narrative trajectory it marshals which exacts Rachel's ability to signify "human," thus rendering the dissolution of the human/replicant distinction that Harvey flags. It is not that Rachel first signifies "human" and then she can enter into sexual normativity. Rather, what the film makes clear is that sexual normativity constitutes the hegemonic field of the human's intelligibility as such. What Rachel's interruption ("I'm not in the Business, I am the Business") allows us to mark is a different relation to Harvey's notion of time where the neocolonial future is exposed for its rehearsal of a U.S. colonial past, namely chattel slavery. Indeed, the convertibility of Rachel's significatory "condition"-from a property relation to a purportedly "self-possessed" human-has as its historical analogue the bodily condition which has historically attended African Americans under U.S. slavery. Though Rachel attempts to halt the (hetero)gendered terms of her interpellation into the "human," she nevertheless encounters the problematic of how to signify (indeed to survive) without those terms. As Robyn Wiegman demonstrates in thinking about the transformation from property to "humanity" in the context of post-U.S. slavery, the

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"slave's struggle to prove humanity necessarily involved a highly refined rhetoric of sexual difference" (69). That is, movement from what Spillers calls an "ungendered" bodily condition (property) to human would necessarily involve the potentially liberating prospect of (re)coding the slave's body as a decidedly gendered one. Rachel's transformation from replicant to "human" works on the same logic that Wiegman and Spillers delineate at the same time that the film condenses the duration of historical time in which such a shift attending the sociosymbolic articulation of African Americans was wrought. In the transformative scene where Rachel and Deckard have their first heterosexually invested romantic encounter, we witness precisely the convertibility of Rachel's replicant status. In this scene, the romantic narrative trajectory which was initiated at the point at which Rachel kills the replicant Leon to defend Deckard culminates in Deckard's attempt to kiss Rachel. However, Rachel refuses to engage and begins to move toward the door to leave. In a rather disturbing sequence which vacillates between violence and desire (or effectively conflates them), Deckard slams the door, refusing to allow Rachel to leave, and instead throws her against the wall and begins to kiss her. During this sequence, we witness a verbal exchange that reads as a kind of instructional crash course on heterosexual desire which Deckard seems intent on giving Rachel, who supposedly cannot tap into her desire for him. Their verbal exchange is as follows: Rachel:"I can'trely on ..." Deckard:"Say'kissme."' Rachel:"Kissme."[Deckardkisses her] Deckard:"I want you." Rachel:"I want you." Deckard:"Again." Rachel:"I want you. Put your hands on me." This exchange renders absolutely explicit the relationship between normative sexuality and human signification, as Rachel's assumption of a sexed linguistic position is marked as coterminous with her ability to mobilize language. Where Deckard has, until now, regarded Rachel as an "it,"her gendered possessiveness and

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her submission to the protocols of romantic possession have now officially rendered her within the bounds of human desire and symbolization. In its conflation of heterosexual desire with human agency, Rachel's "put your hands on me" signals a resolution of her prior nonhumanness into that of the sexually differentiated human. Such an exchange articulates the possibility of heterosexual desire as constitutive of the human, suggesting, as does Frantz Fanon: "Assoon as I desire I am asking to be considered. I am not merely here-and-now, sealed into thingness" (218).20 For Fanon, the desiring relation is itself the terrain of the human, functioning under the laws of reciprocity in which "things" become mobile, agentive, nonproperty. However, the "thingness" that is Rachel's nonhuman status does not therefore dissolve, for her ability to be converted into the human through desire also reveals the "convertibility" of her very "condition." Indeed, her status as possession is only transmuted into/as heterosexual romantic possession, one to which she is literally made to concede. Here, we see that Rachel's "condition" vacillates between a twinned logic of possession, of a having whose poles station her as either possessed property or as an object of romantic possession. Crucially, these two nodes of possession cannot be disengaged, for their dualed logic haunts her very condition. If Rachel's rhetorical elaboration in/as the human harks back to a host of discursive inductions through which the African American body historically became signifiable within the bounds of a decidedly bourgeois humanism governed by the bodily integrity of sexual difference, we see that perhaps the futurity implied by 2019 Los Angeles operates ritualistically through the past, particularly in the representational nexus of slavery, inhumanity, and the discursive possibilities by which the boundaries of the "human" are imaginable. Where the transformation from property to human worked, for the African American in the United States, on what Wiegman calls a "highly refined rhetoric of sexual difference," so does the significatory movement from nonhuman property to human in this futuristic context. It is also worth noting here a scene in Blade Runner where Deckard is first administering the VoightKampff test (which tests one's replicant/human status) to Rachel. When Deckard asks her a question about a hypothetical male sex-

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ual partner, Rachel returns with: "Is this testing whether I'm a replicant or a lesbian, Mr. Deckard?" Such a question exposes the heteronormative symbolics of the Voight-Kampff test itself, revealing further the ways in which "humanness" is gauged on the order of normative sexed positionalities. Though Deckard never formally answers Rachel's question of whether it is a replicant or a lesbian which the Voight-Kampff test seeks to expose, we can only conclude that it must be both or either. The conditions of representability for humanity are, despite a post-humanist landscape of nonoriginary life in 2019, still imaginable only on the order of a bourgeois logic of (hetero)sexual difference. But if Blade Runner so consistently tropes a specific history of African Americans under slavery in the United States, where are the African Americans in the film? Though many critics have responded to the relationship between the film's working-class, "third-world" earthly inhabitants and the whiteness of Deckard and Tyrell, rarely has Blade Runner been examined for its rehearsal and future imaginings of racial and colonial history on a "black/ white" axis in the United States. Of course, part of what prevents an analysis of the operation of racial meaning as it has been historically tied to African Americans is the film's rather symptomatic refusal to depict them in its otherwise multiracial/ethnic sweep. I call such a refusal symptomatic because we might question whether the film's narrative trajectory would still hold if its fashioning of the "slave" was attached to those racialized African American bodies which are its real historical referent in the United States. Not only are the replicants not African American, they are decidedly white: from Pris's whitewashed painted face and bleached blond hair to Roy's blue-eyed, blond-haired, Aryan body. For Silverman, one of the few critics who attempts to think about Blade Runner as working through a history of U.S. chattel slavery, the replicants' hyperbolic whiteness "most dramatically denaturalizes the category of 'slave'-the category which our culture still manages, in an attenuated way, to rhyme with negritude" (115). Further, the whiteness of the replicants "obliges the white spectator to understand the relation between that position [enslaved] and those who are slotted into it as absolutely arbitrary, and absolutely brutal" (115). Though Silverman is working here from a notion of "arbitrary"that attempts to denaturalize the category of

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the slave, the commitment to an "absolutely arbitrary" relationship between an epistemology of skin color and the categorically dehumanized, especially in the U.S. context, is a gesture that too easily elides the regimes of racial coding which have governed the production of "whiteness" and "blackness" in a visual field.21 When the police chief Bryant designates the replicants as "skin jobs," he reveals that racial meaning is still about skin. What has not been rendered "absolutely arbitrary" is the figuration of the body and its epidermic significations as the locus of racial meaning. I would suggest, contrary to Silverman, that the hyperbolic whiteness of the replicants serves both to lodge a discourse of race and slavery at the site of the bodyas a visual production, at the same time that such an overt whiteness safeguards the film's generic sci-fi plot, which, as some have argued, substitutes speciesism for racism (see Barr; Shapiro). But part of what Blade Runner seems intent to unravel is the very facility of such a substitution. Indeed, it does not make much sense to talk about speciesism and racism as though one is exchanged for the other. In the context of chattel slavery, the history of race science, and many of the ongoing discourses of white supremacy, it is precisely the convergence of a speciesist and racist rhetoric where "blackness" is figured as nonhuman which has characterized the racist material and metaphorical production of "blackness."22The whiteness of the replicants in Blade Runner strikes me as operating on the model of fetishism, though not in a strictly psychoanalytic model where a (dis)belief is suspended under the threat of castration. The visual density that is whiteness on the figure of the replicant exposes an epistemology of skin as one of the most powerful codifications of "race" at the same time that white bodies persist as the absence of explicitly racial encoding or difference: white bodies are not, the film suggests, inhabited as sites of racial difference but as a (potential) difference in species which remains virtually illegible, on the white body, as a discourse of race. Though the replicants are to be understood, at least tentatively, as a difference in kind, the otherwise conflation of "kind" and "race" in U.S. racist discourse is momentarily disarticulated as this difference in kind is lodged at the site of white skin. These conditions of representability for whiteness reveal that the film cannot figure a colonized whiteness where white bodies

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are produced as nonhuman in/through the structure of race. This is precisely because whiteness is not marked by a convergence of speciesist and racist encoding, as is the history of African Americans in the United States, and it is thus apparent why many critics see the film as plausibly substituting speciesism for (the more supposedly past?) racism. That is, white bodies are not imaginable as nonhuman becauseof their race, their whiteness does not have the linguistic gravity of animality, primitivity, or property. The very function of the Voight-Kampff test evinces that the whiteness of the replicants is not enough to detect them, it is not "in and of itself" a differential mark. Even though the very practice and preoccupation with any kind of detection is always linked to a crisis in the visual, it may be that the visual registering of whiteness in the film-a move which is so often read as inherently progressiveworks to occlude that register of colonial difference in which the purported "truth" of "color" stands as the difference of human and nonhuman. For Homi K. Bhabha, race as visual production marshals a fetishistic logic not wholly analogous to a more classically Freudian model of fetishism. Where Freud's fetishism turns on a process of (dis)belief-on "the woman's (mother's) phallus which the little boy once believed in and does not wish to forgo" ("Fetishism" 205)Bhabha's delineation of racial fetishism notes that "[s]kin, as the key signifier of cultural and racial difference in the stereotype, is the most visible of fetishes" (78). However, in Blade Runner,we witness a categorical collapse of both kinds of fetishism inasmuch as Rachel is marked both by a stereotypical white femininity and by the racialized "condition" of the nonhuman. But, as I have been suggesting, the "racial" condition to which she is aligned early in the film is tenuously exchanged for her sexed "assumption" acquired through the structure of a heterosexualizing symbolic accession. In this process of symbolic accession, where Rachel "overcomes" the racial/colonial difference by which she is differentially constituted and enters instead into a discourse of bourgeois sexual relations, we see more fully the historical problematic in which a psychoanalytic disciplinarity is waged. For psychoanalysis, there is nothing prior to an oedipal trajectory of sexual difference, and thus, no way to claim a truthful history of preoedipal subjectivity.

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But to remain hinged to a model which already takes the subject as the vantage from which the narration of its history occurs is to render completely illegible non-subjects who do not, historically, enter into the circuits of oedipal narration. Thus, this "prior" to oedipalization is radically complicated when it is wrenched from its developmental context to consider links between "degendering" and subalternity.23As Rachel's situation in Blade Runner-and its historical analogue under U.S. slavery-suggest, there is most certainly a counter-history of subjects who live under a regime of their own symbolic exclusion, subjects who do not occupy the space of preoedipality in the standard temporal psychoanalytic sense but are barred from an oedipalized symbolic whose entrance is not, as Rachel makes clear, therefore to be cast wholly as freedom. Rachel's condition inverts the priority of sexual difference in a psychoanalytic frame, suggesting that the modality of sexual fetishism and the regime of lack in which the female body is coded is not so much the "true" origin of Rachel's difference as much as it is a compensatory effectof a racialized negotiation. When Deckard moves from calling Rachel an "it" in Blade Runner'searly scenesasking "how can it not know what it is?"-to a full recognition of her as worthy of the gendered pronoun, he reveals that the shift to a gendered recognition is a negotiation of a prior racialized difference in which she was figured as a degendered thing. Such an inversion of the priority of the "ground" of sexual difference registers more fully the vexed position of white femininity in both classical psychoanalysis as well as its feminist appropriations where the difference of white femininity is routinely cast in terms of tenuously graphed racial difference. In thinking about feminist psychoanalytic approaches to the study of white femininity in film noir, Manthia Diawara notes that "feminist criticism exposes film noir's attempt to paint white women 'black' in order to limit or control their independent agency, their self-fashioning" (262). However, the fact of "painting" white women "black"in film noir (whether visually or diegetically), or registering their supposed "lack" through the binary structure of race, links white women with "blackness"in the same move that it exposes that very linking or painting as evidence of a difference-that white women are not "black."What Rachel's situation reveals is both the tropological status of racial difference as a mode of representing white

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femininity's difference at the same time that it exposes the difference between these two modalities of symbolic exclusion. Insofar as Rachel's racial difference is retroactively erased through her assumption of a (hetero)sexed positionality vis-a-vis Deckard's desire, insofar as she is no longer (or at least differently) an "it," we see that racial difference is not so much analogous to sexual difference as it is a tropological category through which white femininity is configured by it but not reduced to it. In working these two poles of difference and exclusion, we meet again the limits of a psychoanalytic confrontation with racial difference. When Freud (as well as much of feminist psychoanalytic theory) calls white femininity a "dark continent" as a way to invoke the epistemological limit that white femininity poses for psychoanalysis, he both exposes and levels off what are two different modalities of exclusion.24 For Mary Ann Doane, the "dark continent" trope shows up the "crucial difference that white women constitute an internal enigma ... while 'primitive' races constitute an external enigma" for the epistemological guarantees of psychoanalysis (212). The difference Doane flags between an "internal" and "external" "enigma" is precisely the difference of colonial difference-being situated as internal to bourgeois rational modes of human difference is not the same thing as being installed at the limits of rational order where bourgeois (sexual) difference dissolves into the categorically nonhuman site of racialized embodiment. Thus, white femininity may be troped as racial difference in psychoanalysis and feminist film theory as a way to register its difference, but the mechanics of that troping is itself evidence of the difference between what Rachel calls "being in the Business" (or Doane's "internal" difference) and being situated at the very threshold of the human. For Rachel, inauguration into a bodily logic of sexual difference is precisely that modality by which entrance to the human is made possible-it is the bourgeois line of symbolic intelligibility-and it is no accident that she is the only replicant who lives. What is at stake in thinking about the transmutation of Rachel's racialized condition as non-subject to (hetero)sexed subject is a rethinking of the symbolic as a formation which is not totalizing in its reach, but hegemonic in its imperatives. Perhaps the most forceful articulation of the hegemonic status of psychoanalysis's ex-

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planatory logic has been made by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their infamous methodological attack, Anti-Oedipus:Capitalism For Deleuze and Guattari: and Schizophrenia. [I]t is not at the weakestpoint-the primitives-that Oedipus must be attacked,but at the strongestpoint, at the level of the strongest link, by revealing the degree of disfigurationit implies and brings to bear on desiring-production,on the syntheses of the unconscious, and on the libidinalinvestmentsin our cultural socialmilieu.Not that Oedipus counts for nothing and in our society: we have said repeatedly that Oedipus is demanded, and demanded again and again; and even an attempt as profound as Lacan'sat shaking loose from the yoke of Oedipus has been interpreted as an unhoped-for means of making it heavier still and of resecuringit on the baby and the schizo. (175) In Deleuze and Guattari's suggestion that Oedipus be "attacked at the strongest point," they turn the critical energy away from how a psychoanalytic paradigm (and its figuration of the oedipal scene) hits its explanatory limit at the sight of the racialized body-what they call the "primitive"-and more toward an investigation of how the limits of Oedipus inheres in the fact that it is "demanded again and again." By situating oedipalization as a demand, they refuse to read it nonhegemonically, asking instead how it functions as a "disfiguralizing" imperative located fully within "our cultural and social milieu."25As I have been suggesting, this is precisely the kind of "demand" to which Rachel must respond. The desiring exchange between her and Deckard involves an interpellating call which, made fully within a scene of extracted consent, reveals the very hegemonic nature of sexed symbolic signification. As Rachel's interruption ("I'm not in the Business") momentarily announces, we must not fall prey to the amnesia-inducing gendered terms of her symbolic entrance-terms that render any claim to history not registered in their name barely legible. Those replicant off-world slave bodies that fail to circulate as human invariably die in Blade Runner: they inhabit, after all, impossible sites of embodiment. However, in their return to earth, the other replicants besides Rachel (Pris, Zora, Roy, and Leon) attempt to lay claim to a specific history, one that pivots on, as Roy says in one of

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the final scenes, "what it means to be a slave."And though this is a history that can never be summarily rescued, a politically invested critical practice cannot suffice to leave it or the subaltern nonsubject in the space of a theoretically foreclosed real, insultingly lamenting it as a hapless loss on which the symbolic must be founded. Such a position only fetishizes the symbolic itself, remaining hinged to a symptomatics of unilateral intelligibility where what appears unrepresentable is forever and essentially so. Indeed, the very positing of the unrepresentable, its very "appearance," is itself a political production, one that cannot simply be chalked up to the unfortunate "reality" of symbolic intelligibility. It is, after all-and I say this realizing the risk in such a designation-our responsibility to think the symbolic differently, refusing at every turn its supposedly immutable and a priori codes.

Notes
My thanks to Eva Cherniavsky and Kyle Stephan for their brilliant engagement with the problems of this article. 1. The theoretical legacies of antihumanism are too profound to list here, and it is more my interest to interrogate the presentist rhetorics of the "posthuman." Though posthuman signals a variety of referents and registers, from the field of philosophical ethics as in Lyotard's The Inhuman to critical depictions of science fiction film and literature, what remains consistent is its elision of the category of race as one of the most powerful factors in the exclusionary historicity of the human. The term has circulated mostly not in the domain of philosophy, where we might be more familiar with "antihumanism," but rather in the context of virtuality where the posthuman is the result of a supposedly "post-body" situation. See especially Kroker and Kroker, where the body is hailed as "disappearing" in the wake of new and emergent technologies. For three quite different and refreshingly more cautious takes on the possibilities for "post-ing" the human, see Fuss's introduction to Human, All TooHuman; Foster; Haraway, 213-65. 2. In an article that turns so much on a skepticism of current ways of designating the degrees, locales, and forms of signification and designification, I want to be as clear as possible about my own deployment of certain terms. Where I use the word "human," I mean to mark the rhetoricity or figurality of one of the most taken-for-granted categories in linguistic circulation. This article will be concerned particularly with how the category of the human is rendered coterminous with that of the subject and how in that fusion there inheres an exclusionary logic, one that renders historical non-subjects also figurally nonhuman. By non-subject or un-subject, I am signaling the specific elision of the African American slave under U.S. slavery, where one of the defining features of the slave's public articulation was a systematic evacuation of his/her psychic interiority and "humanity." Thus, the nonhuman and the non-subject invoke the African American slave's

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legal construction as property, as a body soluble in capital. I do not mean, and this is crucial, to speak to the "reality" of the slave's interiority and therefore do not rescue or deny the "truth" of his/her psychological composition. Instead, following the model of Subaltern Studies, I am concerned with the possibilities for the subaltern U.S. slave's dominant intelligibility, and further how it is that his/her subjectivity is systematically deleted as such from official discursivity. Though the focus on the hegemonic frame through which the slave's subjectivity becomes legible necessarily risks the reinscription of white supremacist regimes of meaning, I nevertheless maintain that, under historical configurations of colonialism like U.S. slavery, we must learn to apprehend better the exclusions internal to the history and legacy of a white public sphere. For a methodological turn to think about the possibilities for the Subaltern Studies project in the U.S. context, see Cherniavsky. 3. Blade Runner harks back to a representational logic of race, gender, and sexuality as figured within U.S. chattel slavery in many ways. Among a few of the more obvious moments are: Rachel's asking Deckard whether or not someone (a blade runner) will come after her if she "goes north," the film's prologue where categories of slavery and slave revolt are routinely noted, and Deckard's voiceover claim: "Skin jobs-that's what [the police chief] Bryant called replicants. In history books, he's the kind of cop who used to call black men 'niggers."' It is specifically with reference to this history that I attempt to theorize the status of "race" in psychoanalysis. Where I generalize toward other historical configurations of colonialism, I mean only to leave provocatively open any fixed relation between how different forms of racial exclusions might take shape in and against psychoanalytic theory. I am asking, after all, why it is that psychoanalytic theory has been so bankrupt in its ability to engage directly the specific legacy of U.S. slavery and its technologies of dehumanization. 4. For a contemporary conversation about the psychic themes of film noir and their potential use for feminism, see Kaplan 99-131. In a brief moment in "White Privilege and Looking Relations," Jane Gaines anticipates the methodological questions of this paper. For her, the problem in thinking about race from the perspective of feminist film theory is the "stubbornness" of feminist psychoanalytic and poststructuralist lexicons, "which [have] not been able to deal, for instance, with what it has meant historically to be designated as not-human," where black women's bodies were "legally not their own" (186). My thanks here to Eva Cherniavsky for her encouraging conversations about what she calls the "complicitous" relation between Hollywood film and certain modalities of feminist film theory. See also Krutnik on the historical links between the emergence of film noir and Hollywood's circulation of what he calls "pop-Freud." 5. For a variety of takes on the relationship between race and psychoanalysis, see Doane; Edelman, "The Part for the (W)Hole"; Spillers, "Allthe Things"; Wallace. On the presence of psychoanalysis within postcolonial critical projects, see McClintock 181-203; Stoler 165-95. For a general overview of these and other takes on the question of race for psychoanalytic feminism, see Walton. 6. Lacan suggests in Seminar,BookIII: The Psychoses: "Psychoanalysis . . . shows you that nothing is more stupid than human destiny, that is, that one is always being fooled. Even when one does do something successfully, it is precisely not what one wanted to do" (82). In her "Introduction II" to Lacan's FeminineSexuality, Jacqueline Rose reiterates such a claim in terms of sexual difference, suggesting that Lacan most breaks with a humanist conception of subjectivity through his committal to the "unconscious" as that which "undermines the sub-

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ject from any position of certainty, from any relation of knowledge to his or her psychic processes and history, and simultaneously reveals the fictional nature of the sexual category to which every human subject is none the less assigned" (29). Though I do not disagree here, it will be the project of this article to draw out the elision Rose makes of the human with sexual difference as well as to interrogate how an antihumanist project uncritically retains the human as its fetishized disciplinary object. 7. See Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," for her discussion of the African (American) slave's "ungendering." For Spillers, the African American "body" under domination-as-captivity slides into a logic of racialized "flesh" in which "the respective subject-positions of 'female' and 'male' adhere to no symbolic integrity" (66). Thus, under racializing/colonial projects "marked [by] a theftof the body ... we lose at least gender difference in the outcome,and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific" (67). 8. Indeed, a certain strain of Foucault's History of Sexuality might be seen to converge with the psychoanalytic theorization of sexed positionality here when he suggests that "it is through sex-in fact, an imaginary point determined by the deployment of sexuality-that each individual has to pass in order to have access to his own intelligibility" (155). See JanMohammed for a further articulation of the relationship between historically racialized sexuality and Foucault's theorization of bourgeois sexuality as codified within elite juridical and medical structures. 9. In Freud's discussion of hysterical amnesia in ThreeEssays on the Theoryof Sexuality,he remarks that repression is not just pure refusal of something which is exterior to the subject. Instead, it works on a logic of "push and pull" where "the subject is already in possession of a store of memory-traces which have been withdrawn from conscious disposal, and which are now, by an associative link, attracting to themselves the material which the forces of repression are engaged in repelling from consciousness" (41-42). It is in repression's seemingly contradictory movement that the threat of its exposure persists. 10. "Abjection"here, and "dereliction" elsewhere are terms which already have a familiarity in psychoanalysis, particularly the feminist psychoanalysis of Kristeva and Irigaray respectively. These words, useful as they are as ways of designating the positionality of an exteriorized other, nevertheless remain haunted by the argument of this article: there is a bankruptcy of terms for theorizing different degrees and modes of exclusion. 11. See, for instance, the entry for "Foreclosure" in Laplanche and Pontalis. Here, foreclosure is made critically distinct from repression, where what is foreclosed marks the space of psychosis (and thus irretrievable) and what is repressed is subject to a quite plausible return. Lacan reiterates such a distinction in his "On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis," remarking to that Freud used the German Verwerfung designate "a function of the unconscious that is distinct from the repressed," where Verwerfung denotes the '"foreclosure of the signifier" (200-201). 12. Lacan designates the real in this way in several places, the most forceful of which occurs in Seminar,BookIII: The Psychoses12-13. 13. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick comments similarly in her Epistemology the Closet of on the explanatory singularity of psychoanalysis when she says: "Psychoanalytic theory ... seemed to promise to introduce a certain becoming amplitude into discussions of what different people are like-only to turn, in its streamlined

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trajectory across so many institutional boundaries, into the sveltest of metatheoretical disciplines, sleeked down to such elegant operation entities as the mother, the father, the preoedipal, the oedipal, the other or Other" (23, 24). 14. In the interview "Subaltern Talk," Spivak suggests that many of her critics who claim that she has "not recognized that the subaltern does speak" have conflated her use of "speak" with that of "talk."Spivak is clear here that surely the subaltern does talk, but "she is not able to be heard, and speaking and hearing complete the speech act. That's what it had meant, and anguish marked the spot" (292). 15. See Guha for a discussion of how the counter-insurgent text harbors and exposes the "will"of the subaltern rebel as its cause. 16. In "'The Thing That Thinks': The Kantian Background of the Noir Subject," Zizek is centrally concerned with "those [1980s] films which attempt to resuscitate the noir universe by combining it with another genre, as iffilm noir were today a vampire-like entity which, in order to be kept alive, needed an influx of fresh blood from other sources" (199). Though Zizek reads this "influx of fresh blood" in terms of genres which have been combined with noir to produce the 1980s noir strain, the absence of race in his discussion of his two primary examples, Blade Runner and (Alan Parker's) Angel Heart, seems more than suspect. Indeed, it may be that the metaphorical reading of "fresh blood" covers over both of these films' rather overt figuration of racial difference, especially Angel Heart, whose "darkness" is explicitly marked by the representation of a racially othered and exoticized "voodoo" culture. See Diawara for a brief discussion of what the de-metaphorization of noir looks like in contemporary appropriations of film noir by African American filmmakers. 17. Though we might read the implantation of memories in the replicants as a normalizing project, such a project simultaneously shows up the limits of a Foucauldian understanding of modern regimes of power. For Partha Chatterjee, regimes of colonial power differ from those of a supposedly generalizable modern regime insofar as the colonialist project can be coded as a "modern regime of power destined never to fulfill its normalizing mission because the premise of its power [is] the preservation of the alienness of the ruling group" (18). Chatterjee also claims that the visual production of "race" stands, under colonialism, as the very "rule of colonial difference"-one which refuses to render colonized and colonizer indistinguishable categories. Such an observation is interesting in the context of the replicants, whom Tryell says are "more human than human,"' precisely because the hyperbolic "more human" is still a designation which, as Chatterjee says, "reproduce[s], within the framework of a universal knowledge, the truth of colonial difference" (20). Thus, the implantation of human memories both incorporates the replicants into the bourgeois boundary of subjecthood at the same time that it denies them full access to it. See Chatterjee 14-34. Bhabha makes a similar argument when he says that "colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite" (86). Bhabha also takes his prior claim to its racialized conclusion where the colonized subject is "[a]lmost the same, but not white" (89). 18. Silverman suggests that the "implanted" memories that Rachel misrecognizes as her own, teamed with the photograph of her mother that Rachel has, serve to provide her with a decidedly oedipalized past. In this, Silverman says that "these memory implants do not work so much to control as to constitute Rachel" (121). Though this is precisely what I am pointing toward as well, Sil-

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verman nevertheless undermines the sociosymbolic stakes in such a constitution, reading as she does the content of Rachel's memories as "proof" of a psychoanalytic understanding of the human without displacing the hegemonic frame through which such a "constitution" is guaranteed. 19. Note here as well the way in which Harvey stages the subaltern/psychotic conflation I have been concerned to track. Indeed, his use of "schizoid" operates on precisely this tropology of the racialized and dehumanized figure as the figure for psychotic breakdown (312). 20. Abdul JanMohammed makes a similar argument in his "Sexuality on/of the Racial Border" about the relationship between a significatory humanness and the structure of desire in the context of African American female slaves and their white masters. For him, the desire of the white master for the female slave "implicitly admits the slave's humanity, . . . undermin[ing] the foundation of the border-the supposed inhumanity of the black other, her putative ontological alterity" (104). 21. See Wiegman (particularly 21-42) for a deft discussion of how race has been and continues to be crafted in/under an epistemology of visual "truth." 22. See Haraway (213-65) for an illuminating discussion of the ways in which technologies of signification, from biology to morphing, have apprehended the relationship between "race" and the "human." 23. In her ComeAs YouAre:Narrativeand Sexuality,Judith Roof locates a peculiar narrative tautology in the story of Oedipus: "Oedipus is a suspicious story, not only because it seems to anchor a gendered binary heteroideology in the reproductive, familial triangle but also because it seems to situate origins as both the story's cause and the locus of the answer to its questions.... explaining narrative via its oedipal 'origin' is to try to account for narrative via narrative" (67). This is a useful way to think about the problem of narrating the subaltern's claim to history precisely because Roof registers the ways in which the oedipal narrative is thought to be both cause and effect of narrative itself. Thus, anything structurally outside its terms-a problematic I have suggested forces a rethinking of the psychoanalytic notion of a "prior" to the oedipal-appears to be nonnarratable. 24. For a fuller articulation of how the trope of the dark continent has been deployed in linking (white) femininity to a metaphorically "dark" side of knowledge, see Doane; Kaplan 99-131; Shohat. 25. Though I deploy Deleuze and Guattari's methodological rethinking of psychoanalysis here, they rely too heavily on a notion of desire as presocial in their suggestion that what a critical practice needs to do is to "reveal the degree of disfiguration [Oedipus] implies and brings to bear on desiring-production." Where they seem to understand desiring prior to its figuration-as the prior flow which figuration then "disfigures"-it is more my concern here to interrogate the modes of figuration as the site of political and symbolic rearticulation, not to install an always phantasmatic "true" or "pure" desire prior to its oedipalization.

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