**4. Psychoanalyzing the public response to Ahmaud Arbery's death**

A series of questions are asked by the American public when a police officer kills an unarmed black citizen. Each of these questions reveals a network of signifiers within which the prevailing ideological apparatus makes sense of the killing; that is, these questions disclose an underlying layer of assumptions pertaining to the (wrongful) actions of the deceased. The field of signification, in short, is alwaysalready predisposed to attribute blame, guilt, and fault to the "suspect" as opposed to the law enforcer. In particular, I will analyze the case of Ahmaud Arbery, who was killed by an ex-police officer and his son while jogging through a suburban neighborhood in Brunswick, Georgia. Due to spatial constraints, I will only address one of the questions normally asked by the American public in the aftermath of a provocative civilian/law enforcement interaction. This question, however, most centrally relates to the aforementioned problem of the symbolic appropriation of the Real, namely the ways in which the master signifier claims the Real for itself and its logic of domination.

After the lethal encounter between law enforcers and unarmed black citizens, some might ask: could the deceased have avoided the encounter with law enforcement? Instead of exhibiting a pattern of racial animus, as the thinking goes, the policing apparatus coincidentally kills unarmed black citizens. It is merely a case of being "at the wrong place at the wrong time." If Arbery had not jogged through that particular residential area on that particular day, according to the modal assumptions underlying the question, he would not have been killed. This mode of rationalizing the death of Arbery, however, fails to pierce the veil of contingency that conceals the necessity of policing in its targeting and racial profiling of black citizens. In other words, the chain of signification linking "black" with "criminality" makes the racist attributions of "dangerous," "aggressive," and "unreasonable" possible across every context within which a law enforcer interacts with black citizens. The motivation for the shooters pursuing Arbery after spotting him in their neighborhood, after all, was the universal instantiation of blackness in the particular body of Ahmaud Arbery. The irrelevant spatiotemporal particularity obscures the relevant particularity of Arbery's embodiment; that is, the relevant particular is mediated by the universal and vice versa. Arbery's exhibition of blackness sufficiently incited the shooters' mobilization and persecution without consideration for his particular manifestation of blackness. Indeed, one of the shooters was accused of using racial epithets while standing over Arbery's deceased body, indicating his general racial animus in contrast to a specific concern for Arbery's presence in the neighborhood [15].

As particularity serves as an ideological conduit for universality, contingency serves as an ideological conduit for necessity. The former case demonstrates the intimate connection between the universal property of "blackness" and the particular subject who happens to bear the universal property, such that the latter becomes the central locus for explicating the authority of law enforcement and the former becomes a secondary, coincidental concern. Similarly, as Žižek [13] notes, the contingent and necessary co-constitute one another in a dialectical fashion, but the pinnacle of necessity presents itself as contingency: "the acme of the dialectic of necessity and contingency arrives in the assertion of the contingent character of necessity as such" (36). By making sense of Arbery's death through the "wrong place, wrong time" explanation, the invocation of contingency masks the underlying necessity associated with the semiotics of policing. Neither the place nor the time captures the fatal confluence of events leading to Arbery's death; rather, an explanation beginning from the
