Bodies of Language and Languages of Bodies: South African Puzzles and Opportunities

Abstract

A somewhat esoteric discussion around the question of the relationship between modern subjectivity or its weaker expression of identity, and citizenship and human rights is playing itself out in contemporary social theory circles (see Malabou, 2011). In this discussion, not quite at its heart, is the question of the nature of the unconscious and its ontological anchorings. In one version of this discussion Žižek (1999: 301) takes issue with the important work of Butler (1997) on resistance to imposed ideas of subjectivity and identity. He says that Butler appears to suggest that resistance to ‘disciplinary power mechanisms’, and he is referring to the mechanisms which produce gender, culture and other forms of subjectivity, is grounded in the idea of an ontological ‘pre-existing positive body’. At issue for him is not Butler’s explanation of the constituted nature of subjectivity but the fixity imputed to it ontologically in and through the unconscious. In this brief essay, I do not engage with the specificities of this debate. I retrieve its general substance to suggest that it highlights the significance that South Africa, as a particular place in history and in time, holds for thinking through the puzzles of how language as a resource for imagining and taking upon subjecthood and the active processes of ontological fashioning, or less discursively, identity-making, works.