A Mingling of Ghosts: A Response to Daniel Butler’s “Racialized Bodies and the Violence of the Setting”

ABSTRACT

In this brief commentary on Butler’s description of ruptures and violences of setting, so dense with possibilities for debate and elaboration, four central themes are explored: a rumination on the word “visceral,” suggesting that nonbelonging is never a ghostly experience; “plucking up a protest,” and the paradox of needing for a place of belonging before protest is possible; the bewildering multiplicity of ghosts in protest movements; and how we think of belonging in a clinical setting.

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Sally Swartz

Emeritus associate professor Sally Swartz participates in the University of Cape Town’s training faculty in the clinical psychology program, and is a practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapist in Cape Town, South Africa. She has a particular interest in the fields of colonial psychiatric history, decolonization, and psychoanalytic psychotherapy in South Africa. Her Homeless Wanderers: Movement and Mental Illness in the Cape Colony in the Nineteenth Century was published by UCT Press in 2015, and Ruthless Winnicott: The Role of Ruthlessness in Psychoanalysis and Political Protest by Routledge in 2019.