Arun Saldanha: 'Ontology of race: tensions amidst Deleuze, Lacan, and Darwin'

Title: Ontology of race: tensions amidst Deleuze, Lacan, and Darwin

Abstract: This workshop will trace some theoretical jumps I have made over the last 20-25 years regarding a project of "reontologizing race". Within a public sphere seeing the return of fantasies around technologically enhanced human biologies in the face of environmental collapse, understanding how human populations are hierarchized is essential. Revisiting Lacan's theories of sexuation and the three registers of subjectivity (real, symbolic, imaginary), I take issue with existing psychoanalytically inspired accounts of race, which seem still beholden to social constructionism. My provocation is that instead of the anti-Darwinian orthodoxy in the psychoanalytic tradition, it is possible (and politically necessary) to read Darwin against the reductionism and barely hidden racialism of hegemonic evolutionary psychology, especially his long-suppressed ideas about sexuality and aesthetics. I also point out, however, that there are, certain pitfalls of the vitalist versions of biophilosophy in some post-Deleuzian feminist and decolonial theories.

Bio: Arun Saldanha is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Minnesota. His scholarship focuses on race and addresses questions of environmental justice, climate change, philosophy of biology, Marxism, and political theory. He is author of Space After Deleuze (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) and Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and co-editor (with Hoon Song) of Sexual Difference between Psychoanalysis and Vitalism (Routledge, 2013).