Burying the superego?

Abstract

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.