ABSTRACT
Rose’s lecture points to precise and located as well as enduring questions about the self and the social, the inside and the outside – not least of the University itself. Questions which in earlier decades were posed about the individual and the collective are now posed in relation to the psychic life of the self within contexts of institutionalized inequality, including structural racism. A related but different argument is that when South African working-class black students in particular enter the university, especially the wealthier liberal universities and most particularly the University of Cape Town, they truly encounter inequality in its distilled sense for the first time, and in a particularly traumatic way. Butler’s argument is useful for making the change from a notion of thinking as disembodied to a notion of a thought process that is based in the experience of the body and its fight for its own conditions of liveability.
