Abstract
Apartheid ideology presents traditional historiography with a series of conundrums: the difficulty of separating historical from subjective agency; the paradoxical status of ideologues who both author ideology and are nonetheless also subject to the spread of its ideas; the issues of the non-material benefits that appear to drive its ideological system. Taking as its starting point J.M. Coetzee's reflections on these issues, this paper builds on his promising intuition of the notion of “fantasmatic rewards” as a crucial explanatory element in understanding the “mind of apartheid”. Crucial in this respect are a number of Lacanian concepts (desire, the Other, fantasy, objet petit a, alienation and separation). Recourse to these notions enables us to provide a series of responses to the above dilemmas of apartheid ideology. Such concepts, moreover, arguably do greater conceptual justice to the inter-implication of the Other and the subject, that is, to the inter-implication of the trans-subjective socio-historical substance and unconscious subjectivity.
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Notes
As I hope is obvious, just as Lacan's theory of the processes of alienation/separation is not to be confused with Marxist or Existentialist notions of alienation, or indeed with any psychological theories of separation (developmental theories, notions of separation-anxiety, attachment, etc.). By contrast, here we are concerned with an unconscious dimension of subject–Other relationship, with one aspect of the inter-implication of the trans-subjective socio-historical substance and unconscious subjectivity.
It is worth mentioning of two attempts to extend Lacan's alienation/separation distinction. Dolar (1998) makes the promising observation that this opposition can be read “as an elaboration of the difference between metaphor and metonymy” (p. 24). Jacques-Alain Miller (2007) speaks of how alienation “foregrounds the subject of the signifier, just as separation foregrounds the subject of jouissance” (p. 61). He also emphasizes the two different modes of identification thus implied: identification by means of representation (alienation), identification with the object (separation). In separation we cannot say that the subject is represented, by contrast: all…we can say of the subject [of separation] is that it is little a. The subject asserts itself as object a. The positivization we have here with little a comes from the use that the subject makes of its own lack as subject of the signifier, by fitting itself to the Other's lack. There is no representation. There is an identity as little a (Miller, 2007, p. 61).
The paradoxical time of separation supports this assertion of the circular time of ideology as manifest in the subject–Other relation, certainly so inasmuch as it involves an overlapping of future and past. Regards the subject's attempt to move beyond the inescapable determination of the symbolic Lacan (1979) makes reference to the “future anterior”, that is, the future past tense of “I will have already been”.
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