ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a seminal anti-apartheid text by the South African author, J.M. Coetzee. Coetzee reflects on the inadequacies of existing theories when it comes to conceptualizing the longevity and the madness of apartheid ideology. Two questions particularly vex Coetzee. Firstly, where should we seek to locate agency in respect of apartheid ideology, on the side of the subject or primarily on the side of structure? Secondly, if we need to appeal both to subject and structure by way of response, then how are we to understand the relation between these two factors in the workings of apartheid ideology? These questions beg a two-tiered response, and as a result, this chapter is composed of two parts. In the first of these I supplement Coetzee's argument according to which the psychoanalytic notion of desire is central to understanding the spread and hold of apartheid ideology (an argument which resonates with Fanonian conceptualizations of racism). In the second part, I elaborate a psychoanalytic understanding of ideological agency which accounts for the relation between subject and structure (or, in Lacanian terms, subject and the big Other) and does so by thinking of apartheid as a transaction of desire between the two.
