Repetition or Retrieval and Transformation? Derek Hook’s (Post)Apartheid Conditions – Psychoanalysis and Social Formation

Abstract

In (Post)Apartheid Conditions (2013) – the title of which turns out to be richly ambiguous – psychoanalytical theorist Derek Hook, of Birkbeck College, University of London, addresses what might be called the temporal kernel of the question concerning psycho-social change. Not surprisingly, this is predicated on the enduring possibility of the pathological repetition of past social and political formations that have given rise to endemic suffering and/or violence in concrete terms. Not that Hook’s argument proceeds from the contemplation of possibility alone; on the contrary, his point of departure is located in the sphere of actuality, manifested very concretely in the recent eruption of xenophobia in South Africa, as well as what must henceforth stand as the paradigm of post-apartheid events that chillingly resembles certain happenings under apartheid conditions, namely the Marikana massacre of August 2012. Alluding to these events constitutes what Hook calls historical contextualization which, he emphatically points out, is not sufficient to come to grips with the resurgence of phenomena that appear to be pathological repetitions of socio-political aberrations (such as apartheid) and the violence it gave rise to. His determination to probe deeper into the very structure of the psychic temporalities that underlie such historical events is what drives his argument in this book. In order to understand Hook’s project, it is important to note that he starts with a reference to the outbreak of xenophobic violence in South Africa in May 2008, which elicited the question from many commentators about how such violence, reminiscent of the worst township brutality during apartheid, could occur in a ‘post-reconciliation’ nation (p. 1). Their emphasis, in other words, was on the temporal dimension, on ‘when’ this happened, namely 15 years after the demise of apartheid. Small wonder that the language used to phrase these comments is one of ‘temporal dislocation’ – reminding one of Hamlet’s remark that ‘the time is out of joint’ – with the use of terms such as ‘reversion’, or a ‘failure’ to rid oneself of apartheid history. Some also alluded to the likelihood that one might ‘anticipate’ more such disruptive events in the future. The Marikana massacre, referred to earlier, therefore seemed to confirm these expectations and, simultaneously, to add a reminder that the historical legacy of apartheid was indeed generating more complex effects than anticipated.