ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on aspects of the psychoanalytic backdrop to South African protest and, specifically, to the student protests that erupted from 2015 onwards. This psychoanalytic backdrop provides one frame amongst many through which it is possible to read contemporary student protest, Rose’s lecture and the responses that are contained in this collection. The author argues that the psychoanalytic frame is indispensable in so far as it concerns itself with the dark heart of colonial power. The chapter concerns the place of melancholia in the psycho-affective world of the South African nation and, particularly, in the psycho-affective world of what the author calls the subject “supposed to protest.” The essential difference between Hamletist subjectivity and protest subjectivity is the way in which that subjectivity’s relation to a traumatic past unfolds and informs its orientation to present and future time.
