Burying the superego?

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Apartheid
• jouissance
• melancholia
• mourning
• psychosis
• superego

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The objet petit a varies in status throughout Lacan’s teaching and through these stages, he articulates what I think of as different valences of the objet petit a. But the sense in which the objet a has endured (and the sense in which it is used here) is in Lacan’s teaching that the objet petit a is the object-cause of desire. As an object-cause it is what sets desire in motion, what moves desire. As such it is never any specific and concrete object of desire that can be embodied, but rather a fundamental lack (or, in the context of the drive, a loss) which is generated as the remainder of the operation of signification. As a remainder, it is a surplus at the same time as it is a lack. As leftover of the process of symbolisation, the objet petit a locates itself in the Real. But since the Real is in the Symbolic, the objet petit a is generated by the Other – it is not a wholly external Other (autre) – it is, rather an external-internal or, then, extimate Other, precisely because it belongs to the subject as a libidinal treasure – what Lacan designates by invoking the Greek term agalma.

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Notes on contributors

Jaco Barnard-Naudé

Jaco Barnard-Naudé is Professor of Jurisprudence, Acting Head of Department and Co-director of the Centre for Rhetoric Studies (CRhS) in the Department of Private Law in the Law Faculty at the University of Cape Town. He is a former British Academy Newton Advanced Fellow (2017–2020) and a former Honorary research Fellow in the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London.