The sublimation of race: From the courtly lady to the derelict white body

In his Ethics seminar, Jacques Lacan famously ties the figure of the Lady in courtly love to a cultural process of sublimation that defines societal manners and sensibilities for centuries to come. But Lacan ignores that the courtly lover, the knight who pursues the Lady through endless tasks and insurmountable challenges aimed at proving his love, was often a soldier of the Crusades, which pitted Christians against the darker peoples of the Middle East. This chapter traces the historical emergence of race as a category of difference developed in the Crusades while also tying the Lady to the culture of manners and gentility that emerged in the antebellum American South. The Lady is read as the key figure facilitating a sublimation of libidinal drives that find their expression through culturally accepted atrocities of racism. Such atrocities aim at a recuperation of the derelict white body that is denied access to das Ding, or the Lacanian Thing. Focusing finally on the practices of lynching black men that plagued especially the postbellum South, the chapter ties the charred body of the black lynch victim to efforts to manifest for white postbellum subjects the Thing of the Real that the courtly lover and the racist lyncher equally pursue through sublimation of the (white) Lady.