<i>Ce n’est pas ça</i>: Blackness, Sex, and the Set of Illegibles

Putting the question of legibility raised by theories of ontological exclusion into conversation with the tropology of rhetoric discussed by Paul de Man, this essay thinks Blackness, queerness, and sex as elements of the set of illegibles. Drawing on Lacan’s evocation of set theory to describe a relation not based on analogy but not allergic to comparison, a relation that posits a unity among heterogeneous elements, the author argues that the catachreses that constitute the set of illegibles pertain to what Lacan calls “lalangue,” the pre-Symbolic substrate of the signification whose foreclosure enables the order of meaning to emerge through a logic of difference.