“You don’t say”

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay sets out to read an earlier moment in the history of the encounter between Social Dynamics and apartheid in South Africa. Specifically, it attends to the publication in 1991 on the pages of this journal of J.M. Coetzee’s “The Mind of Apartheid,” a reading of the work of Gregory Cronjé that seeks to tease out distinctly psychoanalytical motifs in an account of apartheid intimately linked to desire and madness. Reading Coetzee to the letter, it attends to his interest in what Cronjé either does not or cannot say, seeking to apprehend in this uneven attention Coetzee’s understanding of the unconscious and, by extension, the role of psychoanalysis in the analysis, critique and transformation of apartheid. Putting such concerns in dialogue with other accounts of what eludes utterance, notably Lawrence Kramer’s concept of “the audiable,” and my own of “the audit,” the essay radicalises the problem of listening and probes the limits of Coetzee’s account of the unconscious as a socio-political phenomenon.