**2. The real(ity) of identity politics**

The progressive deconstruction of identity categories (network of signifiers) through the invocation of individual experience (the Real) mostly occurs at the precipice of identification with marginalized groups. Consider the following excerpt from Rebecca Tuvel's "In Defense of Transracialism" (2017) [9]: "[A]s MSNBC contributor Touré put it, [Rachel] Dolezal doesn't share in 'the one thing that binds black people,' namely 'the experience of racism'" (270). Even though Dolezal appeared to be black through her phenotypic presentation and organizational involvement in the NAACP, those who abhor her racial masquerading often cite a lack of oppression as the reason for her inability to don the signifier "black." Yet, the chain of signification cascading

from "black" encompasses more than "an experience of racism," especially when nonblack racial minorities also confront the oppressive reality of the social order. Other semiotic sources for justifying one's placement within a racial category might include: self-awareness of ancestry, public awareness of ancestry, self-identification, and culture (ibid). Beyond these indicators for belonging to a particular racial group, the experiential element referenced by the aforementioned MSNBC contributor explodes into an unbounded multiplicity at the intersection of racism with ableism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and so on. There seem to be endless possibilities for exploring the meaning of being-black in the various contexts of racism tinged with other forms of oppression, including, potentially, Dolezal's invention of "beingtrans-black" as an excluded category against which discrimination runs rampant [10]. The inexhaustible plenitude of signifiers attributed to any singular identity category raises the following question: within the discursive formation of identity politics, is there any discernible limit to the signification of being-X?

If identity politics maintains its sincere acknowledgement of intersectional modes of oppression, the answer must be "no." Individual experience, although constrained by the existing order of signifiers for describing marginalized political experience, always-already pushes the prevailing field of signifiers to the Real's ineffability. Therein resides the (unconscious) death drive of identity politics, continuously overlooked and neglected by previous psychoanalytic forays into the discursive formation; that is, identity politics collides with the Real in its movement toward a fundamental Lacanian doctrine: there is no Other of the Other [11]. Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks [4], in *Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race*, nicely demonstrates the inversion of the death drive concomitant with identity politics through her (psycho)analysis of "whiteness," a master signifier for organizing the racial configuration of differential relations. As a master signifier, whiteness measures the signified of each racial signifier (e.g., "Asian," "black," "Hispanic," "biracial," etc.) against the privileged, desired image of humanity implicit within the representation of being-white. In turn, each non-white signified fails to satisfy, fulfill, or complete the image of whiteness, requiring assimilation into an impartial, objective, and neutral humanistic culture and annihilation of partial, subjective, and provocative non-humanistic cultures. Seshadri-Crooks, in particular, questions the endurance of racial discourse when the biological, sociological, and anthropological metrics for assessing racial distinctions have failed to proffer an "objective" (i.e., non-symbolic) ground. Threatened by the gaps of the Real, whiteness attempts to construct a holistic, all-encompassing, and omniscient symbolic order in which racial distinctions carry the status of objectivity while, in reality, masking a logic of domination.

The unconscious desire of whiteness, thus, discloses the inclination for racial discourse to legitimize oppression in the disguise of non-symbolic, Real distinctions, which Seshadri-Crooks captures with her analysis of phenotypic designations (i.e., hair color, hair texture, facial features, bone structure, etc.) (59). Through the history of racial classification, disparate grounds have been offered for differentiating one race from another: blood (i.e., kinship), phrenology (i.e., skull size/shape), genetics, culture, and physiognomy. The objective foundation of race, in other words, has steadily shifted in its discursive manifestation, and Seshadri-Crooks locates the prevailing justification for racial categorization in phenotypic characteristics. The symbolic identities of "white," "black," "Asian," etc. only maintain their legitimacy if they are perceived to carve nature at its joints, demarcating the Real within the symbolic order. By contrast, if racial categories are purely symbolic (i.e., a network of signifiers assigned to groups on the basis of pre-existing symbolic distinctions), the thin veneer concealing
