Apartheid and the unconscious: An introduction

Abstract

This special issue invited contributors to revisit J.M. Coetzee’s “The Mind of Apartheid,” first published in Social Dynamics in 1991. Here, Coetzee asks what it might mean to come to terms with apartheid:It is not inconceivable that in the not too distant future, the era of apartheid will be proclaimed to be over. The unlovely creature will be laid to rest, and joy among nations will be unconfined. But what exactly is it that will be buried? (Coetzee 1991, 1)Responding to his own question, Coetzee reads the texts of sociologist and Broederbond intellectual, Geoffrey Cronjé. Drawing on psychoanalysis, Coetzee diagnoses the version of apartheid Cronjé set out during the period between 1945 and 1948 as an obsessional neurotic “counterattack upon desire” (18). What so disturbed Cronjé, Coetzee argues, was the “blunting [afstomping]” of psychological resistances to “race-mixing” (18). But Cronjé’s texts, as Coetzee reads them, also betray a psychic investment in precisely “the dissolution of difference” against which he set himself, a “fascination” with “the mixed” (21–22). Railing against miscegenation, it was always on Cronjé’s mind.