Abstract
This paper considers a performance by South African zef rap group, Die Antwoord, attending to two libidinal currents in its overdetermined stagings of apartheid violence within a postapartheid context. First, it is read as symptomatic of postapartheid melancholia, the failure to have mourned apartheid and the incorporation of lost apartheid objects. Second, it is read as a masochistic beating fantasy acted out, this second turn made possible by locating in melancholia a masochistic element. Moving from Freud on melancholia to Freud on masochism and then dwelling on rereadings of Freud, the paper draws out of the psychoanalytic literature a concept of rhythm in order to think through what is called here the rhythm of postapartheid beating, a perverse rhythm that recalls but also attempts to move beyond the beatings that characterized apartheid and towards a reconfiguration of postapartheid subjectivity.
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Acknowledgements
This article has benefited from numerous readings by and conversations with colleagues and friends. In particular, I would like to thank Maurits Van Bever Donker, Mari Ruti, Aidan Erasmus, Wilton Schereka, John Mowitt, Reza Khota, Gary Minkley, Derek Hook, the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of Subjectivity. All made extremely helpful and sometimes provocative suggestions, to which I have not entirely been able to respond adequately. Thank you. Revisions to the article were made after joining, as Researcher, the DST-NRF Flagship for Critical Thought in African Humanities at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, as lively an intellectual space as one could hope for.
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Truscott, R. Postapartheid rhythm: Beyond apartheid beatings. Subjectivity 9, 290–312 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-016-0004-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-016-0004-8