ABSTRACT
South Africa’s system of apartheid represents perhaps the most egregious historical site of institutionalized white supremacist racism still available to living memory. This chapter develops a Lacanian account of the racist ideology of apartheid, utilizing novelist J.M. Coetzee’s psychoanalytically inflected conceptualization of “the mind of apartheid” as a way of foregrounding the idea of racism as a mode of desire. Coetzee’s work provides a means of highlighting a series of paradoxes underlying the ideology of apartheid. How, for example, might we separate historical from subjective agency when accounting for the persistence of apartheid? Who, moreover, might be said to be the author of such racist ideologies when apartheid’s ideologues seem themselves subject to its parasitic spread of ideas? Taking as its starting point Coetzee’s suggestion that apartheid ideology was sustained by the promise of various “phantasmatic rewards,” this chapter goes on to deploy a set of Lacanian concepts (the desire of the Other, objet petit a, the processes of alienation and separation) to advance a fulsome account of racist fantasy. Without an appreciation of racism as an ongoing transaction between the perceived desire of the Other and the subject’s own fantasmatic response to that desire (in the form of object a), we fail to grasp how racism is simultaneously a subjective and a social formation; and, moreover, we fail to account for the insistent momentum and gratifications of racism.
