Racialization

Racialization, as deployed in this passage, names the structural-ideological mechanism by which certain others are expelled from the category of the human — stripped of singularity and reduced to subhuman status through socially and politically organized processes of othering. It is not a matter of individual prejudice or misrecognition but a systemic operation that works through what the passage calls the "modern western" performance of humanity: a norm that constitutes itself by excluding those it marks as racially other. In this sense racialization is a specifically material, historical form of what Lacan theorizes as the foreclosure of the Neighbour — but here the protective "distance" maintained from the Other is not merely psychic; it is institutionalized, legalized, and encoded in structures of violence.

The concept is introduced precisely as a corrective to Levinasian face-to-face ethics. The theoretical move is to show that the substantialized ethical encounter with the Other's face — which promises to make every singular Other absolutely obligating — is ideologically neutralized when racialization is operating. Racialized subjects are excluded from the very face-encounter that Levinas posits as universal: if the other has already been constituted as subhuman, the face-to-face relation cannot obtain. This means that any emancipatory ethics that limits itself to the dyadic phenomenological encounter fails to address — and thereby reproduces — the structural violence that decides in advance who counts as a face-bearing Other. The Žižekian wager is that "objective violence" and structural analysis must supplement or even precede the ethics of singularity.

This concept appears in todd-mcgowan-dominik-finkelde-eds-zizek-responds-bloomsbury-2022 (p. 190) as part of a critique of Levinasian ethics and its limits in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict. It sits at the intersection of several canonical concepts in the corpus. Most directly, it functions as a specification of Ideology: racialization is a concrete historical instantiation of ideology's structural operation — it is not false belief but a socially constitutive mechanism that produces and polices the boundary of the human, working below the level of individual conscious assent, exactly as the ideology synthesis describes. Like ideology more broadly, it depends on the subject's non-knowledge of the structural violence that underwrites their social reality.

Racialization also puts pressure on the concept of the Neighbour from a different angle. Where Lacanian theory identifies the Neighbour as the bearer of an uncanny jouissance that provokes anxiety and demands a "proper distance," racialization names the specific historical and political technology by which that distance is institutionalized and made lethal — the wall against the Neighbour-Thing is here enforced not just by language and law in the abstract but by racial categorization and its attendant structures of exclusion. Similarly, the concept intervenes in the debate between Ethics of Psychoanalysis and Phenomenology: the passage implies that phenomenological ethics (Levinas's face as the site of singular ethical obligation) is structurally blind to racialization because it presupposes the universality of the face-to-face encounter, whereas a properly Lacanian/Žižekian emancipatory ethics must pass through structural analysis — attending to "the other's others" — rather than remaining within the dyadic phenomenological frame.

Žižek Responds!Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · 2022 (p.190)

Racialization, as the transformation of others into subhuman inferiors, has been and remains a key social and political mechanism by which neighbors are excluded from 'the category of the human as it is performed in the modern west'

The phrase "the category of the human as it is performed in the modern west" is theoretically loaded because it frames humanity not as a natural given but as a discursive and ideological performance — a norm that is actively produced and enforced — which means racialization is not an aberration but constitutive of the very structure that claims to be universal; the word "neighbors" is equally significant, as it directly connects racialization to the Lacanian-Freudian problematic of the Neighbour, showing that what is at stake is precisely the mechanism that decides who is permitted to occupy the position of the proximate Other.