My premise is that debates pertaining to racial theory rarely have an impact on racial practice, which is fundamentally a regime of looking. I suggest that Lacan's theory of sexual difference, provides us with theoretical landmarks by which to identify the subject of race.

My method is not to work an analogy between sex and race, but to discover the ways in which race articulates itself with sex to gain access to desire or lack, the paradoxical guarantee of the subject's sovereignty beyond symbolic determination. Lacan's analysis of the unconscious as structured like a language provides a precise system to delineate the process of acquiring racial identities.

I argue that the inaugural signifier of race, which I term "Whiteness," implicates us all equally in a logic of difference. Insofar as whiteness dissimulates the object of desire, any encounter with the historicity, the purely symbolic origin of the signifier inevitably produces anxiety. The object cause of such anxiety is then racial visibility, the so called pre-discursive marks on the body, (hair, skin, bone) which serve as the desiderata of "race." To put it colloquially: the bodily mark, which (like sex) seems to be more than symbolic, serves as a powerful prophylactic against the anxiety of race as a discursive construction. We seem to need such asylum in order to preserve the investment we make in the signifier of whiteness.

My purpose is to undermine the notion of racial embodiment through the exploration of an adversarial aesthetics. This book is not an argument against racism, and racist practices, but rather, promotes the confounding of race itself as bodily reference.