Abstract
Anxiety and hysteria proliferate in contemporary postcolonial, post-apartheid South Africa, where it is always intimately related to the question of the Law and, specifically ‘the Constitution’. I begin by tracing Freud’s discussions of the co-occurrence of anxiety with hysteria, after which I consider Lacan’s unique account of anxiety as the ‘lack of the support of the lack’. I continue to offer a re-interpretation of the Master’s discourse (here, of liberal authority), namely as a discourse that in its very structure exposes the (postcolonial) subject to the production of the object of anxiety. I then consider two possible ways in which anxiety may affect the discourse of the Hysteric: acting out and the passage à l’acte. I conclude that Lacan’s shorthand for the relationship between the Hysteric and the Master is also an accurate description of the present moment in the postcolony: ‘she reigns and he does not govern’.
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Notes
The first prominent wave of post-apartheid student protests occurred in March 2015 at the University of Cape Town with students agitating for the removal of a statue of Cecil John Rhodes that, at the time, was located at a focal point on the university’s campus (Roelf 2015). The initial demand for the removal of the statue quickly escalated into a general demand for the ‘decolonization’ of the university as such—a demand that covered everything from course content, to artworks publically on display at the university’s campuses, to names of buildings, to bureaucratic processes, to the glaring lack of transformation in the racial composition of the university’s academic staff, to high tuition fees, etc. (Pather 2015). For a comprehensive account of this first wave of student protests, which eventually culminated in a nationwide protest in October 2016 under the banner #FeesMustFall, see generally Booysen (2016) and, in particular, Chapter 24 and 25 in Ray (2016, pp. 352–374).
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Acknowledgements
This article would have remained impossible to write without the exchanges that I have been privileged to have, over the past few months, with Pierre de Vos, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Deborah Posel, Juliet Rogers, Jacqueline Rose, Mark Solms, and Karin van Marle. I gratefully acknowledge financial assistance from the South African National Research Foundation, the University of Cape Town Research Committee and the University of Cape Town Faculty of Law Research Committee. André Barnard-Naudé has been my unwavering source of support in these anxious times.
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Barnard-Naudé, J. ‘She Reigns and He Does Not Govern’: The Discourse of the Anxious Hysteric in Post-apartheid South Africa. Law Critique 28, 267–287 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-017-9214-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-017-9214-7