Racism as Abjection: A Psychoanalytic Conceptualisation for a Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Treating the analysis of racism as a key critical imperative of South African psychology, this article questions the adequacy of many of the social constructionist or discursive ap proaches to racism that have proved influential in critical South African social psychology of . While such approaches have much to recommend them as means of apprehending institutional, historical, representational and textual forms of racism, and while they offer a vital critique of de-politicising, individualis ing treatments of racism which reduce it to an internal psychology of sorts (a function of personality variables, perceptions, attributions, attitudes, cognitions, traits, authoritarianism, prejudice, etc.) (see for

Racial embodiment and the affectivity of racism in young people’s film

“…First, the affective ambivalence in this encounter, revealing both disgust and some attraction, may be conceptualized as "abjection" (Kristeva, 1982;Hook, 2004;Tyler, 2006Tyler, , 2013. Abjection is-at the level of the individual-concerned with the borders of the subject, the boundaries of one's identity and how such boundary lines are disrupted, unsettled and made disturbingly permeable.…”

“…The abject is a threat to the coherence of the symbolic of race relations (that is, larger social and linguistic structuring systems of laws, symbols, prohibitions and meanings) (Hook, 2004), and abjection is that which "the symbolic must reject, cover over and contain" (Gross, 1990: 89). Thus, abjection in the racist encounter in Racism may be seen as a manifestation of the publicly unacknowledged "obscene" supplement of the Danish ideology of equality-as-sameness.…”

“…It is symptomatic of fundamental discrepancies in the reality of racial relations beyond the inconsistencies that we may be able to represent and mould symbolically and discursively. In other words, answering the "hows" and "whys" of symptomatic racism cannot be done by looking at discursive dynamics at play, but must be done by looking at dynamics that operate in the ontological domain that precedes-and exists in opposition to-the realm of language and the "symbolic" (Oliver, 1993in Hook, 2004. Here, we may find the publicly unacknowledged "obscene" supplement-the affective underside-of our Danish race ideology of equality-as-sameness.…”

“…To unfold the dynamics of racial embodiment and affective racism, and the ideological and fantasmatic qualities of such racism, I watch the film through Slavoj Žižek's ideology critical and psychoanalytical perspective (Žižek, 1989, 1992, 1997, 1998, 2006). In exploring dynamics of bodily and affective inclusion and exclusion in racial encounters, I apply the concepts of disgust and abjection (Kristeva, 1982;Ahmed, 2004;Hook, 2004) and social abjection (Tyler, 2013).…”

The repugnant appeal of the abject: cityscape and cinematic corporality inDistrict 9

“…What does not respect borders, positions, rules' (ibid: 4). Concurring with Kristeva, certain critics state that the concept of the boundary is central to the construction of the abject, and that that which crosses or threatens to cross the 'border' is abject (Chanter 2006(Chanter , 2008Creed 1993;Hook 2004Hook , 2006Olivier 2007a). Hook (2006: 17) even goes so far as to postulate that abjection can be labelled 'border-anxiety'.…”