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Abstract: Drawing upon Barthes’ S/Z and the passing narrative, this essay examines the problem of determinacy and verification as it emerges differently in racial and sexual paradigms. Considering both the racialist and sexualist problems of conjugating surface and essence, it attends to how the difference between race and sex as objects of knowledge is an effect of their co-constitution, with each paradigm offering a partial resolution to the problem posed by the other’s limit. The problem suffered by racialism as a knowledge regime—the lack of a verificatory object or explanatory mechanism—is a problem of its doubled falseness and political necessity, a doubling that requires that sexualism’s imperfect verificatory object be treated as a definition, and one interior to race and sex alike.