Remains of the Social

Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, Aidan Erasmus, Annemarie Lawless, Jaco Barnard-Naude, Mari Ruti, Derek Hook, Gary Minkley, Premesh Premesh Lalu, Ross Truscott, Maurits Bever Donker

Description

Indexed in Clarivate Analytics Book Citation Index (Web of Science Core Collection)
Preface

Gary Minkley

Introduction - Traversing the Social - Maurits van Bever Donker, Ross Truscott, Gary Minkley and Premesh Lalu

Chapter 1 - The Mandela Imaginary: Reflections on Post-Reconciliation Libidinal Economy - Derek Hook

Chapter 2 - The Return of Empathy: Postapartheid Fellow Feeling - Ross Truscott

Chapter 3 - The Ethics of Precarity: Judith Butler’s Reluctant Universalism - Mari Ruti

Chapter 4 - Hannah Arendt’s Work of Mourning: The Politics of Loss, ‘the Rise of the Social’ and the Ends of Apartheid - Jaco Barnard-Naudé

Chapter 5 - Souvenir - Annemarie Lawless

Chapter 6 - Re-Cover: Afrikaans Rock, Apartheid’s Children and the Work of the Cover - Aidan Erasmus

Chapter 7 - The Graves of Dimbaza: Temporal Remains - Gary Minkley and Helena Pohlandt-McCormick

Chapter 8 - The Principle of Insufficiency: Ethics and Community at the Edge of the Social - Maurits van Bever Donker

Chapter 9 - The Trojan Horse and the ‘Becoming Technical of the Human’ - Premesh Lalu

Sujets

• Social Science
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Philosophy
• Cultural studies
• Anthropology
• Social
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776140329
• Langue: English

Extrait

REMAINS OF THE SOCIAL

 
 
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg, 2001
www.witspress.co.za
 
 
Compilation © Editors 2017
Chapters © Individual contributors 2017
Published edition © Wits University Press 2017
Artworks and Photographs © Copyright holders. See image captions.
Music lyrics © Copyright holders.
First published 2017
978-1-77614-030-5 (print)
978-1-77614-031-2 (PDF)
978-1-77614-032-9 (EPUB North & South America, China)
978-1-77614-033-6 (EPUB Rest of World)
This book is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/ .

An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN for this book is 978-1-77614-038-1 . More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org .
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
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Cover artwork: ‘Life and Death’ by Dathini Mzayiya, artist in residence in the Centre for Humanities Research, Factory of the Arts
Editor: Russell Martin
Proofreader: Alison Lockhart
Indexer: Marlene Burger
Typesetting: Integra
Print and bound by: Pinetown Printers, South Africa
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Preface
Gary Minkley
Chapter 1
Traversing the Social
Maurits van Bever Donker, Ross Truscott, Gary Minkley and Premesh Lalu
Chapter 2
The Mandela Imaginary: Reflections on Post-Reconciliation Libidinal Economy
Derek Hook
Chapter 3
The Return of Empathy: Postapartheid Fellow Feeling
Ross Truscott
Chapter 4
The Ethics of Precarity: Judith Butler’s Reluctant Universalism
Mari Ruti
Chapter 5
Hannah Arendt’s Work of Mourning: The Politics of Loss, ‘The Rise of the Social’ and The Ends of Apartheid
Jaco Barnard-Naudé
Chapter 6
Souvenir
Annemarie Lawless
Chapter 7
Re-Cover: Afrikaans Rock, Apartheid’s Children and The Work of the Cover
Aidan Erasmus
Chapter 8
The Graves of Dimbaza: Temporal Remains
Gary Minkley and Helena Pohlandt-McCormick
Chapter 9
The Principle of Insufficiency: Ethics and Community at the Edge of the Social
Maurits van Bever Donker
Chapter 10
The Trojan Horse and the ‘Becoming Technical of the Human’
Premesh Lalu
About the Contributors
List of Figures
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In early 2011, the South African Research Chair Initiative (SARChI) Chair in Social Change at the University of Fort Hare and the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape, now the home of the Department of Science and Technology and the National Research Foundation (DST-NRF) Flagship on Critical Thought in African Humanities, began a long-term collaboration, a research and pedagogical experiment that took the form of a Winter School for doctoral and master’s students. The chapters collected here have emerged largely out of this collaboration. Together, they constitute an intervention into the concept of the social as such. There is much more to be said of this collaboration between two universities that were produced by apartheid thought and legislation as precisely not capable of such an intervention. We would, however, simply like to acknowledge these two projects – and there have been other important partners, most notably the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change at the University of Minnesota – for providing the space in which this intervention was able to take shape.
This volume would, of course, not have been possible without the investment and collaboration of all our contributors. Each one of the contributors has been, at some point in the past few years, a participant in the projects convened by the CHR and the SARChI Chair, whether as students, postdoctoral fellows, visiting faculty or participants in the various seminars and colloquiums that have taken place over the years. The contributors to the volume have been patient over a very long process, always responsive and positive, and have produced what are quite clearly in their own right outstanding interventions into the social.
The project has benefited from the intellectual friendship and direction offered by many who are associated with the CHR and SARChI Chair. For the care with which this volume has been read, critiqued and encouraged, we would like to thank John Mowitt, Brian Raftopoulus, Adam Sitze, Qadri Ismail, Cesare Casarino, Jane Taylor, Sanil V, Arunima G, Patricia Hayes, as well as our reviewers from the Press. We would also like to extend our sincere thanks to Wits University Press for the care and patience with which they have handled the publication of this book.
We thank the Estate of Stephen Spender for kind permission to reprint his 1964 poem titled ‘An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum’ from New Collected Poems by Stephen Spender © 2004.
Ross Truscott’s chapter is derived in part from an article published in Safundi on 5 May 2016. Thanks are due to Taylor and Francis for permission to reprint it here. The original article is available online: www.tandfonline.com/ dx.doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2016.1172825 . He would also like to thank the Stevenson Gallery and Nandipha Mntambo for permission to reproduce images from The Encounter .
The editors thank the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for research grants that supported this project and for intellectual input along the way.
PREFACE
Gary Minkley
Remains of the Social is, as we note in our acknowledgements, a product of a critical engagement between the SARChI Chair in Social Change at the University of Fort Hare, the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, and their respective research partners. As such, this volume, read as a coherent project in itself, might also be read alongside wider collaborations and developments, and in anticipation of subsequent volumes that broaden, deepen and extend the discussions around the social into areas that might seem absent from this volume.
Most studies on the social as it comes to bear on the postapartheid – and studies of social cohesion could be included here – take the social as an ideal that must either be vigorously defended or triumphantly declared. Remains of the Social offers another perspective. Pressuring assumptions of rational progress for society and the subject, we begin by putting the social into question, asking after the ways in which, and the ends to which, it is invoked and given its itineraries, attending to the epistemological grounds of the social. In doing so, the volume inquires into that which is remaindered in the production of the social. In other words, Remains treats the social as a problematic, one from which it is difficult to emerge unscarred.
The interventions collected here ask after what is rendered unliveable as a condition of possibility of the social. This unliveability most readily recalls Judith Butler’s concept of precarity – the ungrievability of certain lives that engenders their unliveablility, a theme taken up by several contributors here – but it recalls, also, and importantly, the rupture that, for Walter Benjamin, clears the ground for his critique of time and progress in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. Indeed, what is explored here, in various ways, is the notion that the very question of loss, as Zita Nunes has argued, might be read not only as constitutive of, or constituted by, the social – the social produced through loss, the grave as its first commemorative sign, or the social apportioning life and death and designating its grievability – but rather as a masking of that which enables the constitution of the social: the remainder, which we propose against conceptions of mourning and its failures, melancholia and nostalgia, which one finds more frequently in studies on the social.
There is an echo here, as we discuss in the introductory chapter, of Fanon’s critique in Black Skin, White Masks of the social as it is constituted through the concept of Man, an echo that brings with it not only the urgent task of posing questions of racial formations, but also a need to turn attentively to modes of narration that enable an encounter with these remainders as resistant: to read this resistance back into the social as a demand that orders a future which is, as Fanon puts it in his opening lines, always too soon and too late, out of time. Such a demand is what threads the ethical weight that the chapters in this volume bring to the question of the social.
REFERENCES

Benjamin, Walter. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History.’ Illuminations: Walter Benjamin Essays and Reflections , edited and translated by Hannah Arendt, Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 253–264.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks . Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2008 [1952].
Nunes, Zita. Cannibal Democracy: Race and Representation in the Literature of the Americas . U of Minnesota P, 2008.
CHAPTER 1
TRAVERSING THE SOCIAL
Maurits van Bever Donker, Ross Truscott, Gary Minkley and Premesh Lalu
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