Todd McGowan’s The Racist Fantasy: Unconscious Roots of Hatred puts forward a psychoanalytically informed perspective on the psychic and cultural dynamics that fuel racism in modernity. In conjunction with a recent series of published works that examine racism through a psychoanalytic lens, such as Lacan and Race (George & Hook, 2021), this book centers on the concept of fantasy and its organizing intrapsychic and collective power in the context of racism. McGowan’s book stands out for its accessible and engaging style, effectively offering a beginner’s guide to the world of psychoanalysis. Therefore, it is not a book solely for psychoanalysts or academic experts, but rather welcomes readers who are embarking on their initial exploration of how psychoanalysis can shed light on societal phenomena such as racism. In this review, I will delve into McGowan’s arguments, also addressing the underlying psychoanalytic theory that, while not explicitly stated in the book, is implicitly present throughout.

The book begins by arguing that racism cannot originate from a distortion of knowledge. Situating racism in this way reduces it to an epistemological problem that can be solved by filling up the gaps in our knowledge of racial difference. Today, most people have access to knowledge about the systemic and historical wrongs of racism and, while we see a drastic increase in anti-racist education and integration, we see no drastic decline in racism. On the contrary, racism seems to have developed further and is being implemented in new and sophisticated ways.

According to McGowan, the fact that consciously knowing that racism is bad does not alter racism is evidence to the working of the unconscious. Here McGowan is not talking about the unconscious in the sense of not-knowing—implemented in the study of “unconscious bias” (see, for example, Moule, 2009)—but the Freudian das Unbewusste that resists knowledge. It is the unconscious that Jacques Lacan (1981/1997) spoke of as being “structured like a language” (pp. 11, 167), an unconscious that is an alien discourse that “speaks” beyond what one wants to say (p. 41), which “enjoys” beyond the “Good” of society and the individual (Lacan, 1973/2001, pp. 187–200). Therefore, the perspective developed in The Racist Fantasy engages with racism as a problem of unconscious enjoyment—an excess of enjoyment that racism provides to the racist and becomes visible in the extreme violence and eroticism of racist acts.

McGowan uses the term enjoyment as a direct English translation of Lacan’s widely disputed concept of jouissance (Miller, 2000; Leader, 2021). In Freudian terms, enjoyment could be described as psychic energy that is expressed in relation to objects and the self. Through its investment, it provides different types of satisfaction that are oblivious to their positive or negative pleasure value. When going beyond the limits of the pleasure principle, enjoyment becomes an excessive form of “pleasurable suffering” (Lacan, 1986/1992, p. 184). The term enjoyment thus encapsulates Freud’s (1905/1953) notion of the “primary gain from illness” (p. 43). It refers to the paradoxical psychical benefits that the symptom provides the subject: the unconscious satisfaction that keeps us doing what we are consciously opposed to doing.

According to Lacan (1966–1967, pp. 250–261), the subject gains access to enjoyment through the structure of fantasy. Fantasy provides this through the staging of an unconscious scene that formulates a relationship between the subject and the object of fantasy (Freud, 1908/1959). To this, Lacan (1994/2020) adds that we should picture a fantasy as an image on a cinema screen that freezes just before the depiction of a traumatic event (pp. 119–120).

Therefore, we see that, for Lacan, fantasy plays both a protective function, keeping the subject at a safe distance from a traumatic kernel, and a mediating function, providing the subject with access to enjoyment through the fantasy scene. In short, fantasy provides an unconscious structure that organizes the enjoyment of the fantasizing subject. It does so by providing a scenario through which the subject can safely relate to a desired object.

McGowan’s major argument in the book is that racism occurs through a unique fantasy structure he calls the “racist fantasy” which preserves the capitalist social order while delivering enjoyment to the racist subject. Moreover, he adds that this fantasy structure precedes and conditions racist ideology and the discourse on racial difference. The book itself is an endeavor to elaborate on the structure and dynamics of the racist fantasy. This endeavor is motivated by the idea that the struggle against racism requires an engagement with the unconscious fantasmatic formations that distribute enjoyment both on an intrapsychic and cultural level.

In developing his concept of the racist fantasy, McGowan relies on Lacan’s general formula for fantasy: $◇a. Where the diamond (◇) formalizes the specific relation that the subject ($) maintains with the object cause of desire (a)—objet petit a. McGowan designates the racist subject, in a state of discontent in relation to the social bond, as $. The sublime object of the racist fantasy, be it the myth of the “Lost Cause” or purity of blood, is designated as a. But McGowan pays most attention in his book to the function of the diamond in the formula. This diamond is associated by Lacan with the functions of alienation and separation in Book XI of his Seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1973/2001). McGowan integrates the protective function of alienation and the engendering of the object a in separation in his elaboration of the function of the obstacle in the racist fantasy: what stands in the way of the racist subject to gaining access to the sublime object of the racist fantasy. Drawing from the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, McGowan argues that the fantasy obstacle is both an obstacle and an impetus. It creates a distance between the subject and desired object, but also arouses the subject by opening up a trajectory towards an excess of enjoyment that is associated with an impossible object.

Within the formula of the racist fantasy, McGowan situates, in place of the obstacle, the racial other. This contingent figure of racist ostracism takes center stage and is associated with an excess of enjoyment that puts social authority under subjugation. McGowan argues that it is through an unconscious identification with the racial other that the racist subject gains indirect access to an excess of enjoyment he associates with the former’s position of nonbelonging. In other words, the racist takes part in this excess by destroying the fantasized enjoyment of the latter or by identifying with its eroticized dimension. According to McGowan, “the racist fantasy is a form that can accommodate different contents” (p. 34). He suggests that it is through focusing on the form of racism, expressed in the formula of the racist fantasy, rather than on its content that the enduring appeal of racist enjoyment can be deciphered.

There is much more in the book regarding the dynamics and structure of the racist fantasy that I will leave to the readers to find out. I will only mention that it is made more compelling through many cultural and artistic examples that come to stress McGowan’s perspective on racism. These include themes such as antisemitism, the fetishization of Black masculinity, Orientalism, Islamophobia, immigration, the Rwanda genocide, police brutality in the US, brownface in Bollywood, lynching, as well as racism in art and sport. One particularly subversive argument put forth by McGowan concerns the reception of contemporary hip hop music and suggests that listening to hip hop is not necessarily indicative of a lack of racism. McGowan cites examples of extremely explicit, violent, and misogynistic lyrics expressed in songs that have gained popularity among teenagers, regardless of their ethnicity or geographical location. McGowan argues that while it may seem that these teenagers are anti-racist because they support rap culture, they are, in fact, unconsciously perpetuating the racist fantasy by associating the transgressive enjoyment depicted in the lyrics with Blackness. This roundabout way of indulging in prohibited enjoyment allows them to do so without feeling guilty about being racist. McGowan does not suggest that being anti-racist requires us to stop listening to hip hop entirely. Rather, he suggests that “it requires listening to hip hop without the racist fantasy functioning as the streaming device” (p. 173). In other words, we must listen while acknowledging our own enjoyment and avoiding projecting it onto the racial other.

Also important to stress is the book’s critical approach towards some forms of anti-racism that McGowan calls “racist anti-racism,” meaning, forms of anti-racism that cannot find their way out of the psychic determinants of the racist fantasy. Among these are forms of diversity training, the idea of racial inclusion, nonbinary thinking, implicit bias training, and other kinds of interracial healing proposed as a solution to the problem of racism. The concept of “universal nonbelonging,” developed by McGowan, challenges the notion of “universal belonging” promoted by advocates of racial inclusion. McGowan draws on the work of Giorgio Agamben and Chantal Mouffe, who argue that exclusion is inherent in the formation of any political group. “Inclusion always runs up against a fundamental limit,” he states, “in order for some to belong, others must not belong” (p. 81). The logical necessity described here implies that the pursuit of complete inclusion and belonging is ultimately futile. Instead, McGowan proposes an anti-racism that is grounded in the idea of universal nonbelonging, based on Lacan’s (1981/1997, p. 15) idea that all identifications are rooted in misrecognition. McGowan provides examples of this approach in demonstrations against racist police violence in the US, which align with those who do not fit in rather than advocating for more inclusion (p. 82). I found McGowan’s tactical and strategic suggestions compelling. All the same, I wished that the book had delved further into elaborating these practical calls for action and am looking forward to future works that expand upon this idea.

The Racist Fantasy: Unconscious Roots of Hatred offers a glimpse into a new psychoanalytic understanding of racism. The book does so while providing a rudimentary introduction to the world of psychoanalysis in a pleasant and inviting tone. In this sense, it is not a book strictly written for psychoanalysts or psychoanalytic scholars. By presenting the ABCs of the psychoanalytic understanding of the function of fantasy, it invites a wide audience to immerse itself in the underlying intuitions that condition the complex and sometimes impenetrable teaching of giants such as Freud and Lacan. Through its vast engagement with contemporary instances of racism in politics, literature, and popular media, it provides an introduction into how psychoanalysis can be used to address racism. In doing so, it accompanies a line of contemporary psychoanalytic publications by Lacanian scholars who believe in the importance of disseminating psychoanalytic knowledge to a non-psychoanalytically trained audience. Accordingly, I would particularly recommend it for those who have so far been hesitant to approach the Lacanian tradition of psychoanalysis and are interested in better understanding contemporary forms of racism and their opposing forms of anti-racism.