ABSTRACT
This chapter deploys Abraham and Torok’s notion of intergenerational trauma to provide a socio-diagnostic analysis of racial subjectivity and political violence during the South African student protests (2015–2017). The University of Cape Town is interpreted as a psychic site of historically constituted phantoms, the inheritance of apartheid and colonial traumas. The chapter demonstrates how tropes of alienation, trauma and the neurosis of victimization are reflected in the discourses of the Rhodes Must Fall black student movement, arguing that the material conditions for these traumas were constituted by land dispossession, slavery and forced removals – a system of necropolitical rationality. It is suggested that through an uncritical appropriation of Nativist and Pan-Africanist discourses, the students internalized a ressentiment-driven victimization complex, which on occasion was manifested in acts of racism, militancy and misogyny. A discussion of the political and psychic limitations of victimization and ressentiment discourses follows and in conclusion, it is argued that in settler societies, the problem of psychic healing or therapy cannot be divorced from the imperatives for material redress and an ethical responsibility towards alterity.
