Abstract
A critical interrogation of who we are in this particular present has always been a crucial and inherent part of philosophical discourse. This contribution reflects upon the (post-)colonial South African present from a genealogical and psychoanalytic point of view. It sets out from the Nietzschean assertion that historical memory should first and foremost serve life. Hence the importance of a certain measure of forgetfulness in relation to the past, especially the traumatic past. Apart from conscious forgetfulness, Freud comprehensively theorized the impact of unconsciously repressed trauma on the present. It was also Freud who made dreams into the mirror and meaning of the unconscious. For him, dreams were specifically the fulfilment of desire. For Foucault and Lacan, it is much more complex than that for as the former argues, the presence of meaning in the dream is not meaning making itself fully evident – it offers meaning while ephemeralizing it (Foucault 1954 in Foucault and Binswanger 1994). Drawing on genealogy and psychoanalysis as diagnostic toolkits, I will attempt to understand what trauma is to the future as a means to theorize subject formation in this strange place that is the (post-)colonial, post-apartheid South African present.
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Hofmeyr, A.B.(. (2019). The (Post-)colonial South African Present and the Meaning of Trauma for the Future. In: Imafidon, E. (eds) Handbook of African Philosophy of Difference. Handbooks in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04941-6_21-1
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