The Empire of Denial

ABSTRACT By reconsidering the supposedly failed encounter between the French psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni and the race critic and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, this article readdresses the Freudian concept of denial and the way it can be used as a powerful analyzer of the persistence of racism. Supporting both the libidinal fixation through the making up of a fetish, and the ego splitting between knowledge and belief, denial reveals itself to be one of the consistent means by which imperialism maintains itself after the loss of an Empire. Preventing political and subjective decolonization by sustaining jouissance (enjoyment), the paradoxical way conceived by Lacan to theorize how the subject tries to encounter and escape his/her own ontological fragility, denial is here considered itself as an Empire, insofar as it allows the subject of the unconscious to remain alienated to colonial ideals and to benefit from that, even if in ambiguous ways.