We Hear an Angel
Oedipal empire, rematriation, and land back
Wayne Wapeemukwa
Angel and I had just put the finishing touches on her debut screenplay, a screenplay based on her life story as a sex worker and drug user in Vancouver’s infamous Downtown Eastside. We had known each other for years and made many films together, such as my debut feature Luk’Luk’I (2017) and the celebrated short Balmoral Hotel (2016). However, this new film would be our first with Angel as writer and director. Like our previous works, Angel’s directorial debut clashed Vancouver’s glib façade against its miserable underbelly. Many esteem Vancouver as one of the “world’s most livable cities,” while it includes one of “Canada’s poorest postal codes.” To emphasize this Janus face, Angel set her film at the intersection of Hastings and Main, a crossing known colloquially as the corner of “wastings and pain.” Angel knew that outsiders allotted the Downtown Eastside this reputation because of its high levels of drug use, homelessness, poverty, crime, mental illness, and sex work. Recent catastrophes—such as the early-2000s Pickton murders and the 2011 Stanley Cup Riots—exacerbated her community’s reputation internationally. Yet Angel believed that the Downtown Eastside was defined not by tragedy but by community. Accordingly, she sought to rehabilitate its image with a film whose moral was that “we survive here by relying on each other.”
Angel’s movie was going to be the very first of its kind: one not only about the Downtown Eastside, but by those who live there. In it, Angel and her two friends—Illiano and Ashtray—buy opioids, test them, and safely inject. They care for each other and watch out for one another. These are not your stereotypical drug users. They are a community. One day, however, a social worker denies Angel’s friends building entry under pretext of a COVID-19 lockdown. Although this dismissal may seem relatively innocuous to us, to Angel, and to literally hundreds of others, it was absolutely lethal. Because they were turned away and separated, Angel and her friends shot up individually. Shooting up alone is very dangerous as you risk nodding off without someone there to inject you with life-saving naloxone. This is especially dangerous due to the proliferation of fentanyl in the drug supply. Indeed, this is exactly what happens in Angel’s movie. The morning after they were separated, Angel discovers her best friend, Illiano, dead by overdose. In the movie’s final act, Angel takes the microphone at his funeral and cries out: “There are people that are going to die today that could’ve been saved, if only they had the chance.” Then, in large spaghetti-Western font, the film’s title ominously fades in as the credits slowly crawl: “Downtown Eastside, Fighting for our Lives.”
Throughout her life, Angel championed Downtown Eastside residents and supported Indigenous land defenders in their mutual fights against dispossession and their demands for Land Back. For Angel, Land Back meant much more than rent-controlled apartments and land acknowledgments. Ultimately it entailed a prolonged period of repair and healing, as facilitated by a completely transformed relationship to land. Healing with land was so important for Angel because she personally experienced how settler colonialism harmed—and continues to harm––Indigenous women through changing their relations. When the first settlers came, they imported not only men, women, and children, but also the social relations that organized them. These social relations were shot through with values totally foreign to Indigenous Peoples, such as private property and patriarchy. Indeed, patriarchy was instrumental because it allowed settlers to doubly dispossess Indigenous Peoples: first of their lands, then of the maternal social relations that comprised those lands. Settler colonialism did not merely take the land away, but also invented entirely new social relations to impose upon it. Today, this means that our decolonizing projects must aim to do more than simply repossess the land: they must also seek to heal and rematriate it.
These issues were at the top of Angel’s mind as she wrote her “medicine-movie.” Though it is brutal in subject matter, she envisioned her film as a personal and social remedy. As we completed her script, Angel remarked that she’d lost count of how many friends had died from fentanyl overdoses. In fact, she stopped counting at seventy-five—over two years ago. Since then, Angel has routinely attended funerals, wakes, and similar ceremonies. Thus, her movie also took on a mnemonic role, commemorating the lives that were lost because of the mutually reinforcing calamities of COVID-19 and fentanyl.
“Healing with land was so important for Angel because she personally experienced how settler colonialism harmed—and continues to harm––Indigenous women through changing their relations”
Yet her film also served an important public function. Drawing upon her Haida culture, Angel––whose traditional name is Gyuu Tsi’iga Jaad, or Strong-Minded Woman—saw her personal medicine-movie as critical storytelling. She explained that storytelling was so important for her Indigenous culture because stories are how traditions are passed down to future generations, generations to whom the present remains accountable. Accountability was at the top of Angel’s mind because, for years, concerned outsiders trumpeted chilling stories about missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG). Woefully, this atrocity persisted because no one in power listened. As a Downtown Eastside resident since she was eleven years old, Sixties Scoop survivor, and former street sex worker, Angel was uniquely positioned to recognize and criticize the links between fentanyl, COVID-19, and Indigenous femicide. Angel’s story exemplifies that thinking from the margins is absolutely necessary for grasping the systematic connection of ostensibly unrelated phenomena. Insiders are often unable to coordinate these facts in a way that renders them critically significant, or simply believable. With her sepulchral medicine-movie, Angel would pass down her knowledge and experience not only to those in power who could change the narrative, but also to those without who may be tempted to relive it.
But Angel never made her movie: she overdosed on September 3, 2022. I weep as I write this because, to be honest, Angel had me totally convinced that she was above the very problems her film so powerfully exposed. I suppose that she even fooled herself. But what pains me the most is that, like so many others, Angel died a preventable death. Her obituary highlights a viral clip from a CBC town hall in 2019, where she insists on the need for more safe injection sites. “I deserve to live,” she said. “I’m a good person.”
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Unfortunately, Angel’s biography is not unique. Since 2016, more than 10,000 lives have been lost to overdoses in British Columbia alone. In 2022, the number of people who died due to illicit drug toxicity was 2,272—the second-largest number ever recorded in a year, after 2021, when there were 2,306 suspected illicit drug toxicity deaths. None of those deaths were recorded at safe consumption sites. Officials blame this “epidemic” on austerity policies left over from the 1970s, such as the deinstitutionalization of Riverview Psychiatric Hospital. The official story is that the Downtown Eastside continued declining, even though universal exhibitions such as Expo ’86 and the 2010 Winter Olympics promised opulent trickle-down dividends. Of course, for the most vulnerable, there were no dividends––only displacements. Today, as Vancouver’s real estate continues to boom, so too do the rates of homelessness and all the social ills it subtends. Those in power feign ignorance as they jack up the rent and cash the checks. Indeed, dispossession is now a ubiquitous experience in Vancouver, where locutions like “revitalization” and “urban regeneration” obscure the city’s history of displacement, a history that has been ongoing since the first non-Indigenous settlers arrived.
No progress has been made to resolve these social issues in spite of the fact that Downtown Eastside services swelled to $360 million per year in the last decade. Officials have proposed myriad solutions to heal the city’s broken yet beating heart, such as expanding social housing, increasing capacity for people with addictions and mental illnesses, and distributing services more evenly across the city. The money and ideas surge, but flow nowhere. Inexorably, these policies atrophy because of a lack of agreement between municipal, provincial, and federal governments. There is lack of agreement not only about proposed solutions, but about historical causes. To put it simply, politicians are coming up with the wrong solutions because they are using the wrong histories. Indeed, as I mentioned above, the Downtown Eastside’s official story blames its contemporary emergency on twentieth-century neoliberal austerity. While this is certainly true in part, it is also highly selective. In fact, as Angel herself believed, a much broader scope is necessary to grasp the specific ways in which contemporary dispossession is shaped by a history of settler colonialism.
We must consider this history of settler colonialism in our analyses of the Downtown Eastside because of its high population of Indigenous Peoples, who are disproportionately affected by its social problems. Today figures estimate that Indigenous Peoples represent anywhere between 10 – 70 percent of the Downtown Eastside, which is much higher than the city average of 2 percent. More importantly, this urban Indigenous population is overrepresented in the number of street sex workers; Angel was one of them.
“We must view the history of settler-Indigenous relations through this psychoanalytic theory, as a variation of an oedipalized relationship.”
To understand this we must begin with the Doctrine of Discovery, an expansionist program first promulgated by the Vatican in the fifteenth century. At the time, it was widely believed that non-Christian lands were torrid and uninhabited because they were outside God’s redemptive grace. Although Christians believed that God gave the world to “man” in common, they also believed that God gave it to him to improve. Providence was designed for man to subject fallow and uncultivated land to industry and piety. It was not good enough to passively worship God: Christians had to actively submit chaos to order––which they did by “discovering” non-Christian lands. Thus, the Doctrine of Discovery authorized loyal Catholic empires to explore, conquer, and subsume non-Christian lands with military force and Christian faith. For example, Pope Nicholas V, in the bull Romanus Pontifex (January 8, 1455), commands Christians “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit.”
Although the Vatican apologized for this very recently, the longer history proves that this papal doctrine authorized genocide. We should be suspicious of apologetic histories whose putative drivers are systems of ideas––in fact, sweeping changes in European social and economic relations precipitated the Doctrine of Discovery.
The Doctrine of Discovery is an ideology that conformed Christianity with new and modern economies based on specie and slavery. These economies surged in the fifteenth century, after the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople in 1453 and largely blocked access to the Black Sea the same year. Southern European powers that relied on access to Asia, such as Genoa and Venice, fell, while Western powers that plundered Africa, such as Portugal and Spain, rose. The Ottoman blockade actually empowered the Portuguese slave trade, which had been ongoing since its landing in Senegal in 1441. Sylvia Wynter writes that the Portuguese landing was “the necessary and indispensable prelude, not only to Columbus’s own voyage but also to the specific pattern of relations […] between Christian Europe and the non-Christian peoples.” In 1482, King João II dispatched a fleet accompanied by Christopher Columbus to establish the first prefabricated building of European origin in Sub-Saharan Africa. Evidently, Columbus was not alone: he led an emergent post-Medieval and proto-bourgeois class whose millenarian certainty in the imminent Second Coming of Christ and mercantile proclivity for slaves and specie birthed the nascent state apparatuses of Europe. From the fifteenth century on, European empires were driven by the mercantile potential of turning non-Christian peoples into slaves and their lands into profit.
Problematically, such lands were far from vacant, and thus unavailable for “discovery,” as they were populated by vast Indigenous civilizations—civilizations that challenged Christian expansion. Thus a new pretext was invented to dispossess resistant Indigenous populations: terra nullius. Terra nullius effectively denied Indigenous Peoples’ occupancy claims by relegating them to a subhuman, irrational, and sinful state of nature. Christians argued that Indigenous Peoples’ lands were “vacant” and available for “discovery” because they were underused by erratic occupants, where “use” was narrowly defined in terms of European-style agriculture. The absence of agriculture implied an absence of reason, faith, and, therefore, sovereignty. Christians gave themselves the duty to impose a new anthropological hierarchy tied to industry and piety. They believed that God did not provide the land so that they could waste it: fences needed to be erected, and fences are how you know the land is stolen.
Today, many deem the Downtown Eastside terra nullius. In 2022, landlords evicted one of Canada’s only safe drug inhalation sites––a move that affected hundreds of daily users amid a deepening crisis. Overdose Prevention Society (OPS) ran the site, which was located on a parking lot owned by a private operator, Impark. In February 2022, Impark alerted OPS that it would not renew its lease on March 31. Instead they would solicit more lucrative leases from the film industry, abandoning invaluable lives for marginal rents. Today’s terra nullius mutually affects Indigenous Peoples who have been resisting since the fifteenth century and desperate drug users who are just trying to survive the twenty-first.
Historically, the Downtown Eastside was—and remains—intimately connected to the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish First Nations. Before the first settlers arrived on the south shore of the Burrard Inlet, these nations, and others, hunted, fished, and lived there since time immemorial. In many ways, they were inseparable from the land—they were the land. In the nineteenth century, settlers displaced Indigenous Peoples and converted their homes into a residential area for loggers and fishermen. Extractive industries sent settlers north for months, until they returned with heavy pockets. This ebb and flow of capital spawned a colony of bars, hotels, and services. As in the fifteenth century, men got rich by dispossessing Indigenous Peoples and subjecting their lands to “rational” occupation, becoming conquerors in every aspect of their lives. A new form of white masculinity emerged out of this society of dispossession and the economy of extraction.
Indigenous scholars argue that there is a specifically gendered dimension to this history because patriarchy is a European import. European settlers conflicted with Indigenous Peoples because women occupied positions of authority and power in our matriarchal societies. Indigenous women retained spiritual, economic, and political power based on the principle that they were not men’s property. Because of this, Indigenous women were particularly threatening to the new settler society, a society predicated on the values of Victorian fraternity, British civility, and Oedipal patriarchy. Thus settlers enacted a series of patriarchal legislations that aimed to replace Indigenous matriarchy with male oversight, definitively linking leadership with ownership. For example, patriarchal clauses in the Indian Act (1876) tied Indian status to fathers and, in so doing, made community belonging contingent upon property owning. By tying Indian status and proprietorship to paternity, the Indian Act also overwrote Indigenous matrilineal clan structures. Settlers devalued Indigenous women by excavating their social, political, and economic qualifications. This legacy of gender-based settler colonialism continues today as evidenced by the persistence of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
Dispossession precipitated an irreducibly gendered process in which Indigenous women descended from sovereign matriarchs to fungible commodities. They were bought and sold to satisfy not only settlers’ desires, but their profits, too. This process invariably transported Indigenous women away from their families and homelands, where they became more vulnerable and targetable. In the words of Sarah Deer, “colonizers and colonizing institutions use tactics that are no different from those of sexual perpetrators,” such as manipulation and humiliation. Removing Indigenous women from their lands not only deprived them of personal liberty but hollowed out the alternative forms of life that they literally embodied. Audra Simpson theorizes that the settler state “is a man” who “requires the death and so called ‘disappearance’ of Indigenous women in order to secure its sovereignty.” Simpson calls this the settler state’s “sovereign death drive.”
The question now is whether increasing social services or expanding human rights will ameliorate this legacy of systematic sexual violence. In recent years, the federal government has acknowledged wrongdoing and offered terms of compensation. In 2017, it reached a settlement to compensate survivors of the infamous Sixties Scoop, an operation that took place between 1965 and 1984 where child welfare authorities forcibly removed thousands of Indigenous children from their families and communities to place them in non-Indigenous adoptive care. To repair this, the government of Canada began issuing reparation checks to compensate survivors for their loss of identity and culture. Angel was still waiting for her check to arrive when she died.
Indigenous women and Downtown Eastside residents are being held responsible for their own suffering and dispossession—rather than colonial governments, private landlords, and rich elites. This suffering persists because powerful actors, such as Lululemon founder and billionaire Chip Wilson, nullify its urgency and distort its history with well-funded ideology. Instead of the Doctrine of Discovery, today’s settler ideologies consist of “neighborhood renewal.” As in the fifteenth century, securing the ideological landscape allows the landed and rich to maintain physical territory and financial luxury. Today, such ideologies function by shifting the blame for dispossession away from its perpetrators and toward its victims. But the rich and landed must continuously refuel this propaganda, like a car on gasoline, because Indigenous women and Downtown Eastside residents continue to resist. Additionally, the rich and powerful use such propaganda to invent and construct pretexts for dispossession, such as a “drug epidemic”—a term that makes the problem sound biological and short-term rather than man-made and institutional. This ideology convinces the public that those who suffer should be blamed for their own suffering, rather than the rich and landed who dispossess for profit. To destroy and dispossess, settlers first invent and construct.
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In my published work, I develop a theory to explain this nexus of private property, Oedipal family, and Indigenous fungibility. My theory departs from the intuition that settlers imported not only men, women, and children, but the social relations that aggregated, organized, and hierarchized them into salient ‘families’; families shot through with values totally foreign to Indigenous Peoples. Imposing these values on Indigenous women and their kinship networks allowed settlers to convert Indigenous homelands into private properties. In concrete terms, settlers oedipalized Indigenous Peoples primarily in three ways: by infantilizing them in law, such as with Cherokee Nation v. Georgia and the case’s designation of the Indigenous nation as “that of a ward to his guardian”; obliterating their autochthonous unconscious through linguistic and cultural genocide facilitated by Indian boarding and residential schools; and, finally, by asserting settler authority over who counts as “Indian,” such as with apartheid legislation and blood quantum. My thesis is that we must view the history of settler-Indigenous relations through this psychoanalytic theory, as a variation of an oedipalized relationship.
Doing so poses critical challenges to clinicians and theorists regarding their effectiveness under settler colonialism, but sometimes my theories have been misinterpreted as dismissing psychoanalysis wholesale. For example, Ahmad Fuad Rahmat misreads my thesis as an “inaccurate” rejection of Lacan. But he only does so by collapsing my argument into a version of David Marriott’s, and by ignoring my claim about the Oedipus complex’s colonial context.
I reject the association of my theory with Marriott’s, because I also reject the way in which he, and similar Afro-pessimists, ontologize race—a tendency I name race Realism. Unfortunately, many Lacanians succumb to race Realism when they mistake race’s historical and contextual processes as ontological and psychological results of some noumenal realm. I call this brand of psychoanalysis and Afro-pessimism race Realism because its diviners empty race of biological content[1] only to replenish it with ontological substance. And they do so with shibboleths like “the Real,” “jouissance,” or, more egregiously, “the un-thought.” Race Realism is so pernicious because it removes race—as well as psychoanalysis—from its actual and historical contexts, substituting serious and scientific investigation for ontological speculation and imaginative interpretation. While these approaches effectively show how sexuality subtends racism, they do so at the cost of capitulating to those who insist on the reality of race. In this way, and perhaps others, Afro-pessimists, Lacanians, and racists all agree: race is “Real.” Clinicians and theorists neglect the colonial context of the Oedipus complex and, in so doing, continue the work of Oedipal Empire.
My analysis and critique are not a matter of speculating about “coloniality” or “ontology,” or other metaphysical concepts; rather, I look to the actual history of the Oedipus complex and especially its uptake by G. Stanley Hall, a “pioneer” (!) psychologist from the United States who invited Freud to Clark University in 1909. Building on Amy Allen and Shari Huhndorf, I have argued that Freud embraced Hall’s “recapitulation thesis,” according to which ontogeny (individual development) recapitulates phylogeny (species development). This thesis posits that individual children recapitulate the history of “the race.” Extrapolated as a social theory of evolution, it argues that Indigenous Peoples hail from an earlier stage of human development. Since they hailed from a pre-Oedipal stage, Indigenous Peoples were presumed to lack civilization and therefore require oversight.
This prejudice is not new to those who study Indigenous history, but its influence on Freud and psychoanalysis remains neglected. While Lacan may have deliberately (or negligently—depending on your point of view) chosen “to remain silent” on colonialism (according to Rahmat), his Freudian predecessors certainly did not. Indeed, many, like Hall, championed the Oedipus complex for its purportedly civilizing effects. Lacanians ought to recognize that this troubling fact will continue to return so long as they continue to repress it. My qualm is neither with psychoanalysis nor with Lacan, but with those who insist on ontologizing race and racism, as well as those who desist from challenging Oedipus and empire.
At its core, my thesis merely echoes Fanon’s: there is no psychoanalytic cure for settler colonialism because “decolonization is not a metaphor”; decolonization consists of a literal transfer of land—or, as Indigenous Peoples describe it, Land Back. But Land Back means much more than mere repossession. This is because settler colonialism dispossesses Indigenous Peoples of their physical land as well as of the social relations that comprise it. “In settler-colonial societies,” Mike Gouldhawke writes, “land appears as an immense accumulation of property titles. To traditionalist Indigenous Peoples, in contrast, land is not a thing in itself but a social relationship between all living and non-living beings.”
On this view, Indigenous Peoples relate to the land as a normatively laden relationship of identity, morality, and spirituality. This is not merely a matter of perspective, but the transformative and ameliorative potential of Indigenous forms of life, forms that transform and heal the land because they respect, honor, and steward human and nonhuman, sentient and nonsentient, ancestral and nonancestral entities. For example, my Indigenous Peoples—the Michif—understand land as a relation through the protocol “wahkotowin.” Michif elder Maria Campbell explains:
“There is a word in my language that speaks to these issues: “wahkotowin.” Today it is translated to mean kinship, relationship, and family as in human family. But at one time, from our place it meant the whole of creation. And our teachings taught us that all of creation is related and inter-connected to all things within it. Wahkotowin meant honoring and respecting those relationships. They are our stories, songs, ceremonies, and dances that taught us from birth to death our responsibilities and reciprocal obligations to each other. Human to human, human to plants, human to animals, to the water and especially to the earth. And in turn all of creation had responsibilities and reciprocal obligations to us.”
In this sense, land can be reduced neither to the soil or ground, nor to bordered territory; it is a capacious social relation predicated on sharing life, care, struggle––what Gerald Vizenor elsewhere calls “survivance.” Living on and with land as a relation is one dimension of a much deeper social transformation.
Yet this understanding of land as a relationship should not be interpreted to mean that all Indigenous Peoples relate in exactly the same way. Indigenous identities and cosmologies differ according to the land, its creatures, and nonsentient entities. As Vine Deloria Jr. sardonically puts it, Indigenous Peoples “do not embrace all trees or love all rivers and mountains. What is important is the relationship you have with a particular tree or a particular mountain.” Although Indigenous relationships to land are always specific, there are some generalities. For instance, many Indigenous Peoples relate to the land not merely as a material provider for their economies, but also as a maternal relation to whom they owe fiduciary responsibilities. In “Land Is a Feeling,” Robert Bunge describes this thusly:
What does one call a living breathing person who is the source of one’s own life but mother? In the white view this extends only to a mother of the flesh. The Indian view extends the concept to the mother of earth—the source of all flesh. Nor is it merely fanciful, poetic, mystical or mythical in the sense of false or untrue. The Indian view can be established as factual by criteria acceptable to the most scientifically minded white man. Any soil engineer knows the earth breathes. And any scientist will acknowledge that the earth is the condition and source of life as we know it.
Oedipal Empire theorizes how this Indigenous-maternal relationship to land conflicts with patriarchal proprietorship. According to my theory, settlers oedipalize Indigenous governments, families, and identities. In addition, I now propose that settlers also oedipalize the land herself, ossifying fluid relationships of environmental accountability and maternal responsibility into extractive and speculative economies of private property and money.
Settlers oedipalize the land not only when they extract and violate it without consent, but also with their environmental policy. Though well-intentioned, such policy oedipalizes the land by excavating its agency and shoveling the culpability of our capitalist economy. Instead of looking to the land herself for lessons and solutions to climate change, oedipalized environmentalism frames the land as a damsel in distress who can be saved only by innovators and policy makers. Such oedipalization directly affects Indigenous women, whose historical and cultural association with land now renders them penetrable and fungible. The mutual oedipalization of Indigenous land and women turns them both, in Simpson’s words, into “matter to be extracted from, used, sullied, taken from, over and over again, something that is already violated and violatable in a great march to accumulate surplus.”
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“Decolonization cannot be a mere transfer of land between settlers and Indigenous Peoples; it entails a much longer process of repairing Indigenous social relations to land.”
Angel started writing her movie after an experience of oedipalization. Housing staff patronized Angel by banning her chosen family from visiting during the COVID-19 and fentanyl ‘epidemics.’ Angel did not abide this oedipalization, however. In response, she took agency and began to write a film that could create change and repair the damage done. Ultimately, Angel never made her healing film. But she lives on today in our previous collaborations and her work as an actress. Angel will live forever, on screen. In an interview from 2018, she described her film roles: “They’re always parts that I find important and that I think will help people to keep talking about the Downtown Eastside. People forget that working girls are still going missing. Every single day, we’re averaging two to three people dying from this opioid crisis. I still live here. My life matters. Everybody’s life down here is precious.” Angel understood better than anyone that meaningful solutions to the so-called epidemics of COVID-19, fentanyl, and femicide necessitate decolonial and ameliorative politics.
Decolonization cannot be a mere transfer of land between settlers and Indigenous Peoples; it entails a much longer process of repairing Indigenous social relations to land. Responses to settler colonialism must not merely seek to repossess land as a fungible object, but take the even more challenging step of healing relationships to land as an ethical subject of decolonization. Because Indigenous Peoples generally see this relationship as maternal, Indigenous women and two-spirit peoples must be placed at the absolute center of our decolonizing projects and ameliorative politics. Without taking this step, our struggles will merely reify the very structures and processes of dispossession, patriarchal proprietorship, and Oedipal Empire that they ostensibly oppose. Land Back is an ameliorative politics of territorial rematriation.
[1] Such as when Jacques Alain Miller discusses a “charming biologist” who ineffectively disproves the existence of race because it persists as a “mode of jouissance.” Later, Miller ontologizes “sex” along similar lines by arguing that, at the level of the unconscious, men and women are “two races.”