The other country: why recognition is not (Good) enough

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the scholar Paul Gilroy questioned the utility of the concept of “race.” Historicizing “raciological” drives in European concepts of nationality, Gilroy called for a change of scale from ethnos to species being. Unexpectedly, Sigmund Freud provided such a scale in his 1915 handwritten essay, “A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the Transference Neuroses.” In parsing the differences between “real” and “libidinal” anxiety, Freud’s speculative narrative provides an intriguing starting point for thinking about processes of racialization, large group identification, and notions of the subject organized around the distinction between self and other.