In this paper the place of psychoanalysis in thinking about postcolonial subjectivities is considered, and reference is made to the contemporary South African situation. The paper is divided into two sections. First, it is shown that, with its attention to the unconscious, to the past and its disguised repetition, psychoanalysis is especially attuned to the displaced routes of colonial desire after the end of official colonial (or apartheid) rule. The second section then considers Frantz Fanon's strategic deployment of psychoanalysis, focussing on the way Fanon reworked key psychoanalytic concepts in Black Skin, White Masks, emphasizing what he referred to as 'sociogeny,' the way colonial neuroses are produced out of an internalization -or 'epidermalization' in Fanon's terms -of racist social structure. The argument made is that psychoanalysis must, if it is to be a part of a critical frame for postcolonial subjectivities, be rendered not only instrument but also object of analysis, a part of the very social structure towards which Fanon shifted his attention. Psychoanalysis is adept at throwing into relief repetitions of the colonial past. Nonetheless, psychoanalytic thinking, pervasive in a postapartheid context -i.e. not simply at the isolated level of clinical or scholarly practice, but as a discursive lens for engagements with the South African national past, as exemplified in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission -emerges as itself a particular kind of acting out the colonial past at an epistemological level.
This paper considers post-apartheid South African Whiteness from a psychoanalytic perspective. A point of focus is Samantha Vice's controversial and much debated recent article on the ethical quandaries of post-apartheid White privilege, "How Do I Live in this Strange Place?", which is read alongside J.M. Coetzee's essay, "The Mind of Apartheid", written in the early 1990s on the brink of South Africa's transition. Coetzee used a Freudian framework of obsessional neurosis to highlight what he saw as the libidinal economy of apartheid, suggesting that apartheid policies were not only or even primarily aimed at consolidating White material privilege; they were, rather, in Coetzee's view, a set of measures designed to preserve the purity of the White social body from contamination. What the juxtaposition of Coetzee and Vice suggests is that, while the stain of South African Whiteness has shifted or been displaced, post-apartheid White antiracism, exemplified in the critical discourse Vice elaborates, remains as obsessional, as concerned with keeping the White social body clean, pure, as apartheid thinking. The paper then concludes by considering the usefulness, but also, crucially, the limits of psychoanalysis as a critical frame for interrogating the continuities between apartheid and the new South Africa.
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