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Remembering Apartheid
Abstract
Diacritics 32.3-4 (2002) 60-80
What was apartheid? How is it being remembered? Two questions. The first of them, almost at once, encourages a third: what is apartheid? An answer to the first question will be an answer to the third. Knowing what apartheid was, it is implied, we will know what apartheid is. We will know what it is in essence. But if the answer supplied to the first question is the same as that to the second, the question has been begged. This answer and begged question affect not only what we understand apartheid to have been. The essence of what apartheid is has been derived from an activity of remembering that is historically contingent. Is there a way out of this circle? A path to a place where essence will in no way be trammeled by any historical excrescence—where apartheid, stamped with -heid, the Afrikaans suffix for -ness, stands forth intact, unique—where, in a final victory, apartheid's phantasy of separateness will have perfected itself in truth? Supposing that responsibility involves the unstable articulation of essence and contingency, and consequent decision in the "night of non-knowledge," would it be responsible to seek such a way out? Is it possible, on the other hand, not to embark upon, or want to embark upon, such a search?
The title "Remembering Apartheid" is to be understood as shorthand for this aporia of certain knowing. It refers in the first place to ways of remembering bound up, in South Africa, with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. These have involved not only the collection of facts anchored in recollection, a classically forensic project, but also the admission of acts of grieving and the invitation for others to participate in these acts—a participation to which I will refer, employing the word in the general sense of a mourning-with, as condolence. The word remembrance (echoing the German Gedächtnis, with its folding in of Denken) might more closely approach the inextricable interlinking, before the Commission, of epistemic and mournful practice. Yet, in traversing the aporia provisionally without eliminating it, the title of my essay lays claim to knowledge. It announces: this is apartheid, for this is what apartheid was. It thereby also seeks to acknowledge that, just as forensic evidence assembled by the Commission may be bound up with the grieving of witnesses, no claim about the nature of apartheid can be untouched by the affective demands of those who bear the burden of remembering. The legacy of apartheid of which they speak is of undiscovered bodies, of bodies denied a proper burial. They seek the help of the Commission in rectifying this state of affairs. What we hear when we listen to those witnesses is this: apartheid was a proscription on mourning, specifically of the other. Can we then not say: apartheid is, at least for those who remember the worst deeds committed under it, and who attach to them a particular affect, a proscription on mourning the other? Viewed from a purely forensic point of view, it is far from clear that we possess evidence to impeach this testimony.
Apartheid was/is, in the most general terms, an interdict against the development of a social formation. Although Afrikaner-nationalist politicians and intellectuals sometimes frightened the volk with images of being swamped by the vast black African mass or of being ploughed under as a people [see Louw 1: 505], the nature of that social formation was never outlined in precise terms. Versions of racial degeneration and bastardy were proffered by apartheid theorists, but what the ideology of race purity and the power that hid behind it really entailed was a foreclosure of the other, and thus of any historical possibility of another social formation—of what Breyten Breytenbach, alluding in Dog Heart [69] to the novelist Jan Rabie, calls "other-making" (andersmaak).
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Sigmund Freud offers an account of the social formation that, although standing on the shoulders of conservative nineteenth-century writers such as Gustave le Bon, does not depend upon racial, cultural, linguistic, or other characteristics that, singularly or together, formed the...
An introductory essay for a special issue of Social Dynamics: Journal of African Studies on "Apartheid and the Unconscious."
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This paper takes J.M. Coetzee’s “The Mind of Apartheid” as a point of departure in thinking about audits in universities. Using the psychoanalytic framing of apartheid that Coetzee puts in place, audit is likened here to a form of obsessional neurosis. If this is indeed a plausible diagnosis of audits – and this should remain a question for deliberation – then a set of questions emerges for post-apartheid universities, which the paper seeks to develop. By what scenes from the past are audits haunted? What memory traces do audits reactivate? What phantoms do audits seek to exorcise? Can we speak of the demons by which auditing is possessed? And what sort of working through the past would this call for?
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This essay unfolds in four parts. In the first part I argue that the struggle against apartheid must be understood as a war against war, namely a war that is waged with the superego of apartheid as war itself. In the second part, I consider J.M. Coetzee’s essay on The Mind of Apartheid in the context of the hypothesis put forth by Jacques-Alain Miller and others that racism is the theft of enjoyment. I show that the superego of apartheid is both a threatening and a threatened object and that working to produce the impression that the object of enjoyment is under constant threat is an essential component of the superego’s sadism. In part three I stay with Coetzee’s essay to consider the spatialisation of the superego under apartheid. I argue that this spatialisation should be understood in terms of Carl Schmitt’s concept of the nomos. Finally, in part four I reconsider earlier work on apartheid as enforced melancholia to argue for a burial of the apartheid superego that can release the subject of the postapartheid from enforced psychosis.
El artículo de Mark Sanders, “Introducción: ética e interdisciplinariedad en la filosofía y la teoría literaria” fue publicado originalmente en la revista Diacritics en el año 2002. Sanders parte de la pregunta de si el creciente interés por las discusiones éticas desde la disciplina de los estudios literarios tiene relación con las discusiones sobre ética que se desarrollan en la actualidad en el campo de la filosofía, e indaga si un diálogo interdisciplinario podría resultar útil a ambas disciplinas. El análisis de Sanders muestra de qué manera la discusión ética en los estudios literarios ha seguido un linaje particular. La preocupación por la alteridad, tema central a los estudios literarios dado el carácter de la literatura como “generadora de alteridades”, ha implicado el interés por autores tales como Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Giorgio Agamben y Alain Badiou. Entre tanto, la filosofía contemporánea se ha centrado más en una discusión ligada a la teoría política y la ética aplicada, por lo cual autores tales como Charles Taylor, John Rawls, Will Kymlicka, Iris Young y Seyla Benhabib han ocupado el centro de la discusión.
Esta separación está, para Sanders, ligada a la manera como la filosofía continental ha perdido su lugar en las facultades de filosofía, y en cambio ha encontrado un desarrollo propio en la teoría literaria. Sin embargo, a su juicio existe la posibilidad de un diálogo interdisciplinario. Por otro lado, esta reflexión podría llevar a una reflexión de la teoría literaria misma, y a una indagación acerca de cómo la literatura aporta desde sí misma a la reflexión ética.
En el presente artículo se yuxtapone “verdad” y memoria en el análisis del funcionamiento de la Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación en Sudáfrica (1995-2001). Especialmente se exploran las “verdades” resultantes como producto de un proceso de redeinición de ciudadanía y nación (un proyecto político de construcción-reconstrucción nacional) con cierta particularidad que conviene tener presente para poder pensarlas a la luz de similares experiencias en América Latina.
Appeals to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) haunt most post-1990s institutional attempts to address historical injustice. Comparing Canada and South Africa, Nagy (2012) notes that “loose analogizing” has hampered the application of important lessons from the South African to the Canadian TRC—namely, the discovery that “narrow approaches to truth collude with superficial views of reconciliation that deny continuities of violence.” Taking up her important specification of the Canada-South Africa analogy, we expand Nagy’s recent findings by gendering the continuum of settler colonial violence in both locations and by outlining the implications of these TRCs for Indigenous and Black women in particular. In both the Canadian attempt to grapple with the legacy of residential schools and the South African effort to deal with a history of apartheid, institutional approaches to truth have been both narrow and androcentric. The simultaneous historical bounding and social consolidation of Indigenous experiences of abuse and injustice has thus produced a “double settler denial.”
In its engagement with the relative successes and failures of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace explicitly invokes the concept of human rights only to expose the many limitations of rights as vehicles for approaching social justice. Disgrace first juxtaposes its protagonist’s “rights of desire” with human rights, thereby exposing significant liabilities of rights talk. At the same time, it contemplates a communitarian mode of interpersonal solidarity as an alternative to the rights paradigm. However, in the end, its insistence upon the indeterminate status of justice is paradoxically what enables its ethical and political force.
The article discusses the recently published memoir of South African radio celebrity Redi Tlhabi, Endings and Beginnings (201234.
Tlhabi, Redi. 2012. Endings and Beginnings: A Story of Healing. Johannesburg: Jacana Press.View all references), which is a bestseller in South Africa and recipient of the prestigious Alan Paton non-fiction award for 2013. Following Tlhabi's haunting by the ghosts of her murdered father and her unlikely childhood friend, the Sowetan gangster Mabegzo, the article attempts to trace the meanings of ghostliness in the South African social, and the way in which these meanings are mapped onto township terrains of both hopelessness and possibility. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's seminal exposition in Specters of Marx, it argues that the text's insistence on bringing closure to Mabegzo's narrative denies the spectre its efficacy as a signifier for unease. This uneasiness, it maintains, necessarily jostles and disturbs the certainties of the present.
This qualitative study utilized the method of narrative analysis to explore the counter-learning process of an oppressed Kurdish woman from Turkey. Critical constructivism was utilized to analyze counter-learning; Frankfurt School—based Marcusian critical theory was used to analyze the sociopolitical context and its impact on the oppressed. Key issues for adult education theory and practice are highlighted.
Cinematic treatments of trauma have to confront the challenge that every aesthetic choice is also an ethical one. This challenge poses special problems for questions of truth and the representation of victims and perpetrators. Three documentaries made by Mark Kaplan (1996–2004) explore the history of South African student activist Siphiwo Mtimkulu, tortured and murdered by security policemen in the early 1980s, and the subsequent interaction between Gideon Nieuwoudt, one of the perpetrators, and the Mtimkulu family during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Hearings. Ian Gabriel's fiction film, Forgiveness (2004), uses key aspects of this history in his treatment of a repentant perpetrator seeking forgiveness from his victim's family. In my analysis, I argue that respect for a realist aesthetic – the notion that the camera can and does reveal the world to us – may be combined with self-reflexivity, narrative layering and generic innovation to produce a complex representation of truth, victim and perpetrator. I suggest, further, that the initial choice of subject will determine to some extent the degree of complexity with which issues of truth, on the one hand, and the nature of the victim and the perpetrator, on the other, will be developed.
What are the characteristic features of the colonial intellectual? This essay approaches this question via two paths, historical and contemporary, in order to show the persistence of a legacy that shapes our work. Postapartheid South Africa and the debate around justice and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission are set in the broader context of nineteenth century colonial language studies. With the benefit of hindsight, the animating aspects of the colonial context are traced to a formative ambivalence regarding property and possession. This reading is extended to recent work on ethics and South African restitution and testimony. Hegel’s treatment of Africa and his reading of Antigone form a thread linking past and present.
Diacritics 32.3-4 (2002) 3-16
Two questions—the first calls for information, the second for justification. What points of contact, if any, are there between the current investment in ethics in literary theory, and the elaboration of ethics in contemporary philosophy? In other words, does an interdisciplinarity exist? Second, what reasons might literary theorists have, or have they had, to be aware and take stock of developments in philosophical ethics? That is to say, what might be gained from interdisciplinary work? A third question emanates from the first two: where a cross-disciplinary engagement with philosophy has taken place, has there occurred any transformation of literary theory? I hope to show in what follows that, when we consider ethics in literary theory, no less than in philosophy, it is necessary to attend both to method within each discipline and to the nature of relations between them.
The first of my questions begs the question of what contemporary philosophy is. Literary theorists entering into ethics have tended to draw on the work of Emmanuel Lévinas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Luce Irigaray, and more recently that of Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou. If the last has, in a spirit of polemic, professed to displace the "other" in the name of the "Same," the dominant paradigm, when it comes to ethics, remains one of alterity and difference. There are fundamental reasons why this should be the case: operating in figural language, literature, or the literary, differs from itself in response to an other. To borrow, translate, and adapt an Afrikaans term from the South African poet Breyten Breytenbach, literature engages in a process of andersmaak, of other-making or making-other: in making-other and, in so doing, inventing others, it makes itself other. Literature is an other-maker. It is to this activity that literary theory must attend. That is why it is natural for it to turn to ethics—not only the nexus Lévinas-Derrida and the other thinkers mentioned above, but also, for instance, to psychoanalysis: what may have begun as the teasing out of hidden meanings (the received idea is that this is what psychoanalysis and literary criticism share) has, following Lacan's "return to Freud," evolved into a consideration of the ethics of psychoanalysis in the context of reading and listening [see, for example, Felman and Laub].
Literature may be an other-maker, and reading may be exemplary in the topoi of current theory for responsibility before the other, but it is not clear that literary theorists have been equal to setting this responsibility to work fully when it comes to responding to philosophy. There has been relatively little attention among literary theorists to developments in disciplinary philosophy—where, in recent decades, in North America and the Anglophone world generally, the tendency in ethics has been to bring moral reflection to bear on questions in political theory. The pólis in question is, however, no longer only the nation-state; the politics that engages political thought is transnational and global. Whether or not a given thinker subscribes to the idea of world citizenship, the horizon for thought is cosmopolitan.
Although thinkers have continued to enter into basic questions in ethics, the writings of Charles Taylor, Will Kymlicka, Iris Young, Seyla Benhabib, and others attest to a shift from ethics to politics powerfully influenced by John Rawls (1921-2002)—notably in A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1993)—and the ensuing criticisms of these works. As the weight of the North American debate has moved from liberal multiculturalism and minority rights [see Taylor et al.; Ackerman; Kymlicka; Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference] toward transnationality and globalization, Rawls's more recent critics have come to view his assumption of the nation-state as the basic context of analysis—even in The Law of Peoples (1999), which is devoted to international relations—as a limitation to his thinking of justice. These changes in emphasis are a clear sign of how the effects of globalization have begun to draw a response from political theorists.
Links between ethics and political theory have not always been self-evident. By entering...
This article takes issue with the critical tendency to understand J.M. Coetzee's autobiographical novels Boyhood and Youth as applications of Coetzee's statements on confession and on “autrebiography” in Doubling the Point. I use Coetzee's novel Disgrace to argue that his work resists such a reductive interpretation, and that it correlates such an interpretation with certain pedagogical and poetical positions, which all converge in the figure of William Wordsworth. I then argue, through close readings of Boyhood and Youth, that Coetzee's autobiographical work situates his own writing practice in relation to these positions, and that they formulate a specifically South African response to them that consists in an explicitly “prosaic” form of fiction, which embodies a way of relating experience and recollection that can best be understood in relation to the Wordsworthian program that Boyhood and Youth reconfigure.
Much anthropological research on narrative and violence treats their relationship as immanent and performative, an assumption shared by many media, legal, medical, and other professionals and lay persons. This view is predicated on constructing the production, circulation, and reception of knowledge about violence in particular ways. In this article, I examine newspaper accounts of infanticide in Venezuela, along with interviews with reporters, detectives and legal professionals and focus groups. This analysis suggests that these articles, which receive widespread attention, become stories about stories—specifically narratives that recount how the story of the crime unfolded naturally and automatically from material and corporeal evidence, and the words of relatives, neighbors, doctors, detectives, defendants, and the vox populi. These constructions of discourse about violence create a very limited range of subject positions, generate standardized scripts for persons interpellated in each slot, and make it difficult to advance counternarratives, thereby inscribing the legitimacy of state institutions during a period (the 1990s) when the nation-state project seemed to be collapsing.
Diacritics 29.3 (1999) 3-20
Thomas Keenan. Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicamentsin Ethics and Politics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report. 5 vols. Cape Town: Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1998.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission Website. CD-ROM. http://www.truth.org.za.
In response to a questioner, a witness speaks. The witness's words are translated for the questioner, as were those of the questioner for the witness. Carried out by interpreters in soundproof booths beside the separate tables at which witness and questioner sit, the translation, which the parties receive over earphones, is simultaneous. Many of the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a statutory body charged with establishing the truth about abuses in apartheid South Africa, assumed the form of mediated question and response: of a witness responding to questions; of a responsiveness, in questioning and translation, to the witness and to the mother tongue of the witness. The goal of the human rights violation hearings was to let victims speak, to grant them a hearing, to hear them, in their own languages [Truth 1: 110, 112-13, 146-47; 5: 4-5, 7-8]. A scene of question and response and of responsiveness, the hearing is a serviceable example, or allegory, of responsibility.
The Commission was mandated the task of establishing "as complete a picture as possible of the nature, causes and extent of gross violations of human rights" of apartheid and the struggle against it. Such violations included murder, torture, abduction, and severe ill-treatment. The Commission drew its data from official and unofficial documents and from the testimony of those it termed "perpetrators" and "victims." To take statements from victims, the Commission devised a practical formula designed to render testimony suitable for processing and capture in its database of human rights violations and, eventually, in the narrative of violations presented in its final report [Truth 1: 140 ff.]. As part of its accompanying mandate to "restor[e] the human and civil dignity of such victims by granting them an opportunity to relate their own accounts of the violations of which they are the victims," some victims were asked to testify at public hearings. Pursuant of these twin goals, at these hearings the questioner would adopt a dual approach, first asking witnesses to give a short account of their life, and then soliciting data on violations of their rights [Krog 217].
At another level, the hearings were a concrete enactment and realization of a founding concept of the 1993 interim constitution, the basis of the Act providing for a truth commission, which, as part of its outline for national reconciliation, identified "a need for ubuntu but not for victimization." Variously determined as a theological, moral, political, and juridico-legal concept, ubuntu also informs the thinking of those who promoted the idea of a truth commission, particularly Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission [Truth 1: 125-28; cf. Krog 110, 263]. Ubuntu can be understood as a notion of reciprocity: a human being is a human being through other human beings. One is, it follows, responsible for the other in a way that, according to constitutional jurists, regulates and limits the rights of the individual in favor of the collective [Langa ¶224]. The public hearings, held most weekdays for two years, represent ubuntu as responsibility and reciprocity, as a scene of hearing, of "reading" in a general sense; though, as I will argue, it does so in a more radical way than the jurists who deploy it in their day-to-day decisions. Even before a witness departs from the questioner's script to make unanticipated claims -- for the exhumation of a body, for instance -- its staging sets to work ubuntu as hearing in a way that, so to speak, removes the parties from themselves. In the scene with which I began, witness and questioner alike are heard in a tongue not their own. Response, responsiveness, responsibility -- all appear, paradoxically, to require this apparatus of removal or displacement from self. The Commission's recent report does not assume the task of...
Geoffrey Cronjé was an influential figure in radical Afrikaner Nationalist circles in the 1940s, and a seminal contributor to the theory of apartheid. His published writings of the 1940s display a concern with “race‐mixing” that can properly be called obsessive. Where do obsessions such as Cronjé's come from, and how do they spread themselves through the social body? Is a serious and productive analysis of the madness of apartheid possible, or is “madness” in a socio‐historical context merely a metaphor? In what ways may historiography have to extend the terms of its discourse in order to take account of irrational forces in social life?
Two questions: how should we place Freud's remarkable paper Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) in the history of the representation of crowds, masses and mobs? And how might this work be brought to bear upon nationalism and national identity in particular, politics in general? For whilst uneven and in some ways tantalisingly cursory, Freud's foray into group psychology, I will argue, cannot simply be consigned to the methodological past or explained away as just another example in the eccentric and odiously anti-democratic canon of early crowd 'science'. It poses problems not only of an historical but also of a political and psychological nature. In short its concern with the unconscious in collective experience and with the identity of the group and the individual merit attention and reappraisal. Whilst we may endeavour to situate the work in its formative contexts, we may also need to recognise its power to displace us from our own.