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Theory & Psychology, Vol. 18, No. 2, 269-283 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0959354307087886

Postcolonial Psychoanalysis

Derek Hook

LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE, D.W.Hook{at}lse.ac.uk

J.M. Coetzee's undervalued paper `The Mind of Apartheid' provides a novel means of identifying the preoccupations of a `postcolonial psychoanalysis'. Such an approach to critique offers a tentative psychical-political diagnostics which pertains not only to the affective and discursive dynamics of the colonial sphere as a whole, but also to the subject-/desire-positioning enforced by the pathological colonial relation. Not reducible to the level of textual reading practices, this style of critique makes reference to a series of psychoanalytic concepts (anxiety, fantasy, ambivalence, disavowal) which are never merely figurative and which remain necessarily related to the frame of individual psychical functioning. Ultimately a postcolonial psychoanalysis offers a political analytics of desire that proves useful in engaging both the contents (racial/sexual fantasy) and the dynamics (affective economies, relational subject-positioning) of the psychic life of colonial power. It allows us to identify potential subversions (slippages of colonial authority and identity, the `return effect' of colonial desire) and to bring into focus those process elements (metaphoric condensation, metonymic displacement) that spread and sustain racist ideology and thereby much of the underlying rationality of (post)colonial power.

Key Words: apartheid • desiring-position • positionality • postcolonial • psychoanalysis • racism


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Psychoanalysis in the Shadow of Post-Apartheid Reconstruction
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