A peculiar sensation

The Unpresupposable Subject: “Man of Parts”
However, the narrator’s repeated questioning of the self-consistency of 
black American experience foreshadows his emerging understanding 
that the legitimacy of black America sought in exclusionary structures of 
racial particularisms is yet another displacement of subjectivity that dis-
ables the multiplicity of subjective positions. Indeed, the internal differ-
ence that cuts across the closures of subject formation is already present 
as the “annoying” question that delates the symbolism of his “birth” as 
a racial subject:
They’re my birthmark… I yam what I yam… What and how much 
had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead 
of what I myself had wished to do? What a waste… But what of 
those things which you actually didn’t like, not because you were 
not supposed to like them, not because to dislike them was consid-
ered a mark of reinement and education—but because you actually 
found them distasteful? The very idea annoyed me. How could you 
know?… I would have to weigh many things carefully … simply 

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124
Zlatan Filipovic
because I had never formed a personal attitude toward so much. 
I had accepted the accepted attitudes and it had made life seem 
simple…
(266–67)
Since racial visibility is “at once a 
point
of identity,” as Bhabha writes, 
and “at the same time a 
problem
for the attempted closure within the 
discourse,”
48
the binarism of racial identiication forces open a space 
of invisibility that gathers the unproductive excess which escapes he-
gemonic articulation altogether. Invisibility in the novel articulates the 
diasporization of racial difference, its slippage across the totalities that 
determine its politics. It anticipates what Hall refers to as “the politics 
of the end of the essential black subject.”
49
For the narrator, who feels 
increasingly trapped in the process of subject formation where visibility 
is determined by the racial schemas of identiication, this space becomes 
a metaphor for freedom and a space for ambivalence and disclosure of 
difference in subject formation.
Abandoning the Brotherhood and narrowly escaping from the na-
tionalist clutch of Ras the Destroyer and his cohorts, the narrator 
inadvertently assumes invisibility through camoulage on the streets 
of Harlem, making others mistake him for one Mr. Rinehart, whose 
ambivalent phenomenology seems to resist oversimpliied strategies of 
identiication. As the signiied repeatedly slips under the signiier in a 
series of displacements where the narrator is assumed to be “Rhine 
the runner and Rhine the gambler and Rhine the briber and Rhine the 
lover and Rinehart the Reverend” (
IM
498), exposing the very move-
ment of supplementarity and deferral of presence, the narrator’s onto-
logical stability is progressively attenuated: “What on earth was hiding 
behind the face of things? If dark glasses and a white hat could blot 
out my identity so quickly, who actually was who?” (493). Having no 
single signiier to represent him in the ossiied schemas of racial dif-
ference, Rinehart’s world of invisibility, as the narrator realizes, was 
one of “possibility,” revealing the rhetorical structure of subjectivizing 
regimes:
It was too much for me. I removed my glasses and tucked the white 
hat … away. Can it be, I thought, can it actually be? … could he 
be all of them: Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the 
briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend?… What is real 
anyway? But… [i]t was true as I was true. His world was possibility 
and he knew it… The world in which we lived was without boundar-
ies. A vast seething, hot world of luidity, and Rine the rascal was at 
home [in it]… It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable 
could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie.
(498)

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