Melancholia and Explosions

In her “Melancholy of Race,” Cheng discussed how the constructions of reality in literature and philosophy may help us to understand how subjectivities and social relations are (trans)formed in real life. Through legislative and juridical processes, the profound impact of race and racism has scarred the public and private subjectivities of those living in abject positions in white American society, who are already undergoing Freud’s process of melancholia, or grievance. America’s past and its present state of reconciling with its contradictory and inhumane past engenders this melancholia; America has reached the apex of “swallowing the object” and “living in the shadow of the object.” This object of the racialized past has already integrated with America’s ego, and the ego has developed, but it has caused America to live in a state of denial, rejection and exclusion of the other because of its inability to come to terms with its past. However, if, in melancholia, there is no way to already possess an existing ego before the action of swallowing takes place, which is something Freud does not explain, then there is no way of subverting the process of this swallowing without destroying the ego. So, how will this anticipate Fanon’s explosion? Will this explosion occur in the ego, ridding the subject of its haunting past? Or will this explosion come from the dissolution of the ego? Perhaps, Cheng’s elaborating of Freud’s melancholy, which Freud used to engage in the development of a more universalized ego, will show the importance of the nexus of race and gender, as well as political economy, in pioneering the new discourses of race/racism/heteronormativism/and classism.