Disease as a Politics of the Human

Abstract

In Chapters 2 and 3, I demonstrated how the positions of the two major actors in the South African HIV conflict were seemingly polarised. The Treatment Action Campaign’s (TAC’s) position focused on the patent wrongs of the government position and turned to science to provide the answers to South Africa’s growing epidemic. By contrast, Mbeki and his supporters endorsed an AIDS dissident account that emphasised the role of poverty and other so-called social factors in shaping the disease in Africa. Drawing attention to the material effects of the debate’s presumed polarisation and to the shared ground it belied, the preceding chapters explored the performative role of binary oppositions — e.g. science/pseudo-science, biology/society, science/politics, agents/victims — in making the disease and its subjects. This chapter continues the deconstructive work of the book by examining another key phenomenon bound up with the politics of HIV in South Africa, the ‘human’. It explores the debate’s mobilisation of the human/nonhuman binary in terms of how it makes the disease of HIV and its ‘human’ subjects. Extending the argument made in previous chapters that the government’s and TAC’s positions were not as starkly split as most reports suggest, I identify another important commonality in their statements on HIV, namely their reliance on a Western liberal humanist conception of the human. I begin by exploring the Mbeki government’s resistance to the perceived dehumanisation of Africans in orthodox scientific discourses on HIV and its efforts to include Africans in the liberal humanist category of the human.