I. The Murder of the Father and the Rise of the Global Metropole
When the father dies, his name is either doubled down upon, his absence is denied, or he is replaced by another. The Eurocentric familial master’s discourse is a leftover from modernity or, more accurately, is constitutive of the global world order. The creation of the metropoles of Paris, Lisbon, and London—global centres of Bourdieuan capital—also signalled the murder of the father through parallel attacks on the real via both science and capitalism (Miller, 2008).
This absence of power leads to complete psychological breakdown, psychosis, or perversion. The collective psyche, careering towards a reinstated power, a sinthomme, or a denial that the master is gone, takes the Abrahamic, Judeo-Christian God of the Old Testament and, through resurrection, holds Europe (albeit a goddess) as a ubiquitous metric. The discourse of capital mistakes demand for desire; financial success trumps any moral argument, and the sources of challenge (offered by Lacanian hysterics) become further traps that feed Europe right back to the throne.
II. The Geography of Reason and the Urtext of Whiteness
When Reynaldo Anderson talks of the geography of reason, he positions epistemic reason—or, in my reading through Lacan, ‘the father’—as white, male, hetero, cis, classed, and Christian as normative (or European) as you can imagine. The master lends the differential power required to build a world. That power kills the ‘thing’ and coterminously grants the Saussurean signifier the power of the ontic.
In the beginning there was the word…
The noun Christian in that list matters; a vast body of work here centres God as the remnant of the dead father. There are arguments to say that whiteness has infiltrated every hagiographical nook of the church, and that the Bible is invariably read through the language of the white supremacist father’s metric.
What if we delocate and delink the geography of reason to Africa and Asia when thinking about Judeo-Christianity? After all, there was certainly Christianity in those theological metropoles long before Europe. Could European Christian hegemony be challenged by logic? What of the image of Christ through bronzed Asian and African feet? Does that mean Indian Christians practice their faith more authentically? Is there any doubt that St. Thomas was there, and that he took that gospel to the Asian subcontinent?
Those questions throw doubt retroactively on Europe as a whole. To the reader who looks to retire into comfort: I am sure many of you will defend your master through university discourse and retroactively respond to this hysterical text, because the father needs to build a totalising episteme, and the various plugs that fill those holes become the basis for an ecumenical rewriting of the urtext. This constant sublimation is necessary for the creation of all epistemes.
III. Topology, Signifiers, and the Psychosis of Race
The process of challenging discourse to university discourse, and then reaffirming the name of the father, is a continuous cycle that may be explained through language’s topological constraints. The language I would cite as most hegemonic in its reasoning is logic, and behind that, mathematics. If 2 + 2 = 4, then that is sacrosanct. Yet, in many branches of being, we question the language’s basis and the signifier itself.
Two humans plus two humans equals… but what and who is classified as a whole human? I know those whose hysterical discourse is taking over are shouting at the screen, claiming that interrogating the codifying signifier is a fault of primary language. In Lacan’s famous example of a sign above a door turning a room into a men’s or women’s toilet through the power of the signifier, the door is also to blame, as its apathy lets the codification take hold; it provides the physical canvas upon which the ontic is written.
The need to fill the master’s absence is met either by the university, which reinforces his word through more knowledge, or by the hysteric, who reads his absence as a sign of his flaw, thereby creating knowledge that reaffirms his reign. The psychoanalytic approach investigates what the lack of the father does to the human, drawing on Lacan’s work, Jacques-Alain Miller’s extensions, and, of course, Frantz Fanon, who stands tall here.
What happens when the dead father and master are accepted as lost? Linguistically, the psychotic rejects language and its rules wholesale. There is a psychological breakdown, sending the Borromean loops into tangential directions, and the only thing that holds them together is a glue that Lacan refers to as a sinthomme. Race is that psychotic metric.
IV. Candomblé, Negritude, and the Trap of the Master’s Pantheon
Consider Aimé Césaire or Léopold Sédar Senghor’s ‘Negritude’, it challenges Europe’s right to the episteme by attempting to bifurcate it, centring rationality as Greek and emotion as African. In a counter to the hegemonic dominion left over by the looting Middle Passage, this framework positions Europe as the god of knowledge while aiming to create an Orisha of emotion, such as Oshun or Yemoja. Yet this pantheon can at best lead to a Candomblé, a syncretic mixing of white hegemony with the pull of the ancestors. It cuts with the same knife, leaving the Greeks as the ultimate arbiters of what the episteme must look like. Giving the Europeans any god at all is an act of acquiescence. In delocating the arbiter of knowledge, we must first challenge the language that pulls truth into the frame of the master.
We know that the name of the father must exist for language to exist. The disavowal of his name causes neurotics to move from relatively safe spaces into psychosis or perversion. Before capitalism and science, the real stood safe from the absence of the Father (Miller, 2008): Thou shalt not have any other gods before me. This meant all aberrations from logic were attributed to God’s will, and jouissance was deferred to the afterlife.
Now, society operates in a mode where that loneliness without the father is no longer attributed to a divine time of ultimate glory. That loneliness and loss of jouissance exists at the exact same dialectical system level as the Other. For the melanated human, the impact on the Other is an invitation to engage in the regressive master’s discourse and use a metric that serves him. Those gymnastics do more than disavow the ancestors; they trap you in a system that promises rigged outcomes before you even start. Every engagement with meritocracy forces a divorce from what we are allowed to want, like, value, and dream. That systemic dissonance forces us to search for a metric that fills the holes of the system, holes that are always filled by the Other or the self, never the master.
For the Other, with no real master to attack, the internalised narrative of “I didn’t work hard enough” is reinforced. Where the psychotic delusion is firmly set on whiteness, the structural failure is inverted into personal failure. These are the twin traps for the racialised subject: to serve the master through the university and back up his claim of white superiority, or to serve through self-flagellation by upholding his meritocratic metric.
V. The Master’s Incompleteness and the Hidden Gods
For the European, the sinthomme, his symptom, is maintained through the illusion of monotheism. The father/master is positioned as exclusively his, fashioned in his own image, while he remains blissfully unaware that other gods exist in a direct dichotomy, forged precisely in response to his father’s dominion. Those hidden gods are reactions to his master’s ubiquitous, totalising lie.
The liberation of People of Colour is through a creation of gods and metrics which exist through the ancestral line. Through the active disavowal of Europe and her deifications. In the hope that the sinthomme moves to a place more authentic and isn’t based on a positivist frame, but rather a dealing with the void not through his lies but as an Indigenous community.
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