ABSTRACT
In her Vice-Chancellor’s Open Lecture titled The Legacy , Jacqueline Rose attempts to shed light on the student protests that erupted across the South African higher education landscape in 2015 and 2016. Drawing chiefly on a psychoanalytic register, her focus on the historical past is conspicuous. Rose’s emphasis on the not-now is necessary in the world of classical psychoanalysis. But other sociological tools and psychoanalytic orientations enable quite different readings of the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) and Fees Must Fall (FMF) movements. Operating inside this psychosocial matrix of shame and resentment, structural violence in South Africa has begotten a “common-sense of violence” that has now been normalized in a country manifestly at war with itself. Habib writes about a phenomenon he calls “the politics of spectacle”: disingenuous, stage-managed attempts by minority groups to take control of the political discourse on campus.
