On Animal Mediators and Psychoanalytic Reading Practice

Abstract

One of the unintended consequences of apartheid’s massive injustices of social division and inequality was, paradoxically, the production of relations of racial proximity. This pinpoints, in fact, one of apartheid’s internal contradictions: as its white beneficiaries came increasingly to rely on the domestic labour provided by an oppressed black population, so a series of intimate white spheres — the site of the home, and more particularly, the care of children — were effectively opened up to ‘interracial’ contact. It is for this reason that, psychoanalytically, the literature discussing the relationship between white children and black child-minders (‘nannies’) (Ally, 2009; Cock, 1980, 2011; Motsei, 1990) is so crucial to an understanding of the libidinal economy of apartheid. This literature speaks to the presence of intimacy within structures of power, to the factor of affective attachments, sexual and familial alike, occurring across seemingly impassable divisions of race.