A peculiar sensation

agonistic
and subject 
to discursive procedures and technologies of power, rather than consti-
tuting an “essential antagonism.”
17
It is less, he explains, “a face-to-face 
confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provoca-
tion.”
18
This implies that the immanence of resistance to power does 
not reside in a subjectivity whose autonomy precedes its articulation by 
the discursive terrain, but in an unmasterable excess produced by the 
totalizing procedures of power that slips through the interstices of its 
articulated binaries. This ambiguity and “complicated interplay”
19
of 
power and resistance that cannot be accommodated by the pendulum of 
the Hegelian dialectic is represented in the novel by the narrator’s abey-
ant differential position in the hierarchies of power and identity that 
belies the binary orthodoxies of racial absolutism and identity politics 
through which his visibility is established. The epiphany of the novel, 
as we shall see, is the epiphany of 
différance
that reveals racialized 
identities in the irst two stages of subject formation as displacements 
of subjectivity’s constitutive multiplicities whose suppression is articu-
lated in the affective experience of racial shame. Subject formation, as 
Rancière argues, taking Foucault a step further, is not the formation of 
“a one” that is a self, “but is the 
relation
of a self to an other.”
20
For 
Rancière, the process of subjectivization is the political, emancipatory 
process of deconstruction, of “disidentiication or declassiication”
21
of 
identities to which we are consigned by the modalities of power. Subject, 
he writes, is
the name of anyone, the name of the outcast: those who do not 
belong to the order of castes, indeed, those who are pleased to undo 
this order (the class that dissolves classes, as Marx said). In this 
way, a process of subjectivization is a process of disidentiication 

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Black and Ashamed 
115
or declassiication. Let me rephrase this: a subject is an outsider or, 
more, an 
in-between 
… between several names, statuses, and identi-
ties… Political subjectivization is the enactment of equality… It is a 
crossing of identities… In sum, the logic of political subjectivization, 
of emancipation, is a heterology, a logic of the other … it is never 
the simple assertion of an identity; it is always, at the same time, the 
denial of an identity given by an other, given by the ruling order of 
policy.
22
Rancière’s emancipatory heterology of subject formation constitutes 
resistance precisely to the extent that it is not simply a refusal of subjec-
tion that articulates political agency but a refusal of the binary orders of 
identiications within which that agency is inscribed. To destabilize the 
strategies of power and its rules of formation, “we could act as political 
subjects in the interval or the gap between two identities, neither of which 
we could assume.”
23
In this active slippage of identiicatory signiiers 
that Rancière refers to as a “demonstration of equality,” the structural 
binarism that determines for social visibility is deeply “intertwined with 
the paratactic logic of a ‘we are 
and
are not,’”
24
which, for Ellison, in 
fact, constitutes the insuperable condition of our democratic existence, 
“our oneness-in-manyness.”
25
The differential excess produced by the process of subjectivization 
that legislates for an unassumable identiication and where “the life of 
political
subjectivization” or resistance “is made out of the
difference
between the voice and the body, the interval between identities”
26
is revealed in Ellison’s novel as a prophetic intervention in the racial 
imaginary of his time, and an exigent call for the transformation of 
political structures that will allow for the emergence of new forms of 
subjectivities and cultural enunciations from the threshold of social visi-
bility. Deconstruction of identity structures, the enactment of equality in 
the rip currents of difference is, however, what renders the narrator truly 
invisible in a regime of truth that reduces all social life to a skein Du 
Bois claims deines our age: “the problem of the color-line.”
27
Ellison’s 
nameless narrator is driven underground not because of his initial ap-
propriation of the racial hierarchies that constitute him as invisible, as “a 
phantom in other people’s minds” (
IM
4), nor because of his subsequent 
fetishization of black identity in essentialisms of racial difference, but i-
nally due to his rejection of both. At the same time, this invisibility, as we 
shall see, opens up a heterotopic space for the narrator with unsuspected 
emancipatory energies that invert the order of truth and detach it from 
the restrictive regimes within which its effects are disseminated. The 
hierarchies of power which regulate the forms within which we are able 
to recognize ourselves as subjects are effectively undermined in Ellison’s 
writing by an inscription of alterity that, as yet, has no political constitu-
ency and cannot be articulated within the oppositions that structure the 

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116
Zlatan Filipovic
terrain of social visibility in the novel. Ellison is thus looking beyond the 
blockages of his present, anticipating alternate forms of enunciation that 
have yet to be realized.