Between history and apocalypse: Stumbling

Abstract

Apartheid rested on a division of the senses as much as it did on a reductive politics of racial subjection and its accompanying violence. As an instance of the division of the senses, it produced a condition of stasis in which history and a post-apartheid future were increasingly marked by a politico-religious discourse of apocalypse, and a moral claim formed around family melodrama. In seeking to escape this nightmare, I ask whether we may discover in the dream of the post-apartheid a concept of stasis that does not amount to a dead end. Instead, we might return to a formulation of stasis that for the ancient Greeks approximates something akin to movement at rest. Drawing on the resources of cinema, jazz, soundtrack and memory, I argue that apartheid’s exteriorization of technology proved disastrous both for the critique of apartheid and for elaborating a concept of the post-apartheid. Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church, who have other concerns. It serves no established power. The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy that saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy. It is not useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into something shameful. Its only use is the exposure of all forms of baseness of thought. (Deleuze, 1983: 106).