In “The Position of the Un-Thought as Universal Particular,” University of Chicago Professor James Bliss offers a Zizekian analysis of the ways in which Blackness exceeds conceptions of positionality as such – somewhat reminiscent of Cornel West’s description of the American Negro as the ‘Sacrificial Lamb’ – or the suture to the wound of White Pathology:

The Black position, beckoning from somewhere on the other side of the pleasure principle, imbricated with the death drive, also invokes the Derridean neologism, ‘hauntology,’ as a ‘category [that is] irreducible, and first of all to everything it makes possible.’18 That is, as a spectral form of non-being that is the condition of possibility for Human being. It opens up a space for a politics that does not privilege the Human as a universal or pre-political category, but which marks the Human as precisely the category that must be the object of an emancipatory politics. A Black hauntology, finally, offers the promise of the Lacanian ‘second death’: ‘not the death of the so-called “real object” in its symbol, but the obliteration of the signifying network itself.’19 Insofar as the Black is a wellspring of negative meaning, is that against which all conceptions of the Human are aligned, it is also the subject position which offers the most radical destabilization of meaning as such