*A Psychoanalytic Approach to Identity Politics DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105402*

the classification of non-white groups for the sake of oppression would be exposed. Underneath the supposedly, naturally-existing physiological differences, therefore, is the assumed and presupposed superiority of whiteness; that is, Western standards for humanity are revealed as being predicated on the prescription of domineering white comportments (i.e., societal injunctions to write, speak, behave, and think in bourgeois modalities) [4]. Whiteness, ultimately, strives for a wholeness, completeness, and coherency that forecloses the possibility of disruption by the Real: the unconscious drive of whiteness implies the death of the subject (i.e., the site of shifting, changing, and fluctuating signification).

As mentioned earlier, the unconscious desire of whiteness inverts the death drive associated with identity politics. I offer a two-level differentiation of "death drive," namely in the contexts of accessing jouissance, on one hand, through transgressing an established organization of signification and, on the other hand, through the replication of loss (at the inception of subjectivity) within the drive itself. The inversion between whiteness and identity politics, to invoke the aforementioned schema, occurs at the level of "disorderly conduct" in the symbolic order, as whiteness transgresses the incompleteness of the racial order (e.g., a belief in respecting each and every culture, such as multiculturalism) and identity politics transgresses the completeness of the sociopolitical order. Instead of effacing differences by adhering to a universal regime of (white) humanity, identity politics affirms the fundamental indeterminacy of the social order, or the impossibility of the social order to complete, fulfill, or satisfy itself. No sense-making apparatus can cohesively and coherently package the social order into a unitary entity; rather, a remainder will always-already slip through the cracks, saturate the boundary, and overflow the cup. Intersectionality, as the unlimited, inexhaustible reservoir for individual political experience, continually problematizes the extensionality of the extant field of signifiers, perpetuating the discursive mandate to consider the "inclusivity" of categories for various marginalized groups. To be clear, though, intersectionality remains inextricably tied to the intersubjective regime of sociopolitical signifiers, establishing long-lasting anchoring points in the symbolic order.
