Minus One, or the Mismeasure of Man

This essay examines Chapter 4 of Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire, “The Sartorial Superego,” in order to advance its critique of racism as a form of perversion that posits the racial other as a superegoic Other believed to harbor an obscene enjoyment or “will to jouissance.” While other chapters of Read My Desire have played a pivotal role in shaping Lacanian theory over the past thirty years—especially Lacanian film theory (“Locked Room/Lonely Room”) and Lacanian sex theory (“Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason”)—“The Sartorial Superego” has yet to receive the attention it deserves for the contribution it makes not only to Lacanian race theory but also to Lacanian ethics more generally. Aiming to redress this oversight, the essay first revisits Copjec’s critique of the perverse “sartorial superegoism” at work in a series of photographs of cloth-donned colonial others taken by the famed French psychologist G. G. de Clérambault, in order to bring this critique into sharper relief. It then applies Copjec’s analysis of Clérambault’s sartorial superegoism to more recent, far more sadistic instances of sartorial superegoic violence perpetrated against postcolonial others in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. In so doing, the essay demonstrates that properly grasping both the prescience of and the urgency behind Read My Desire’s concluding call for “another logic of the superego [to] commence” requires reckoning with “The Sartorial Superego.”