Browsing by Author "Truscott, Ross"

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    Aftershocks: Psychotechnics in the wake of apartheid
    (Taylor & Francis, 2016) Truscott, Ross; Smith, Michelle
    What we at first found intriguing about Simon Gush�s Red, what the documentary and the installation seemed to mutually conjure, was the Mandela car as a body to be mourned.2 Mourning recurred as a latent theme through the documentary in the interviews with the workers at the Mercedes Benz factory � as Phillip Groom described Mandela�s words on receiving the car, he stressed that its colour �represented the many people that have spilled blood in this country to liberate it, to bring it to liberation�, a notion the workers seemingly anticipated, as at the factory the Mandela car was, as Groom put it, �literally carried�, like a coffin, not simply a �labour of love�, but a work of mourning.3 Attuned to this, the shell of Gush�s reconstruction of the car body installed within the Goethe-Institut gallery in Johannesburg and then outside the Ann Bryant gallery in East London seemed to lie like a cadaver on an autopsy trolley (see image in the editor�s introduction to this issue).
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    Apartheid and the unconscious: An introduction
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2023) Truscott, Ross; van Bever Donker, Maurits; Hook, Derek
    This special issue invited contributors to revisit J.M. Coetzee’s “The Mind of Apartheid,” first published in Social Dynamics in 1991. Here, Coetzee asks what it might mean to come to terms with apartheid: It is not inconceivable that in the not too distant future, the era of apartheid will be proclaimed to be over. The unlovely creature will be laid to rest, and joy among nations will be unconfined. But what exactly is it that will be buried? (Coetzee 1991, 1) Responding to his own question, Coetzee reads the texts of sociologist and Broederbond intellectual, Geoffrey Cronjè. Drawing on psychoanalysis, Coetzee diagnoses the version of apartheid Cronjè set out during the period between 1945 and 1948 as an obsessional neurotic “counterattack upon desire” (18). What so disturbed Cronjè, Coetzee argues, was the “blunting [afstomping]” of psychological resistances to “race-mixing (18)”. But Cronjès texts, as Coetzee reads them, also betray a psychic investment in precisely “the dissolution of difference” against which he set himself, a “fascination” with “the mixed” (21-22). Railing against miscegenation, it was always on Cronjè’s mind.
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    Auditing and the unconscious: Managerialism�s memory traces
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2023) Truscott, Ross
    This paper takes J.M. Coetzee�s �The Mind of Apartheid� as a point of departure in thinking about audits in universities. Using the psychoanalytic framing of apartheid that Coetzee puts in place, audit is likened here to a form of obsessional neurosis. If this is indeed a plausible diagnosis of audits � and this should remain a question for deliberation � then a set of questions emerges for post-apartheid universities, which the paper seeks to develop. By what scenes from the past are audits haunted? What memory traces do audits reactivate? What phantoms do audits seek to exorcise? Can we speak of the demons by which auditing is possessed? And what sort of working through the past would this call for?
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    Empathy�s echo: post-apartheid fellow feeling
    (Taylor & Francis, 2016) Truscott, Ross
    The concept of empathy has been set to work, across a range of fields, to mark a break with the relational patterns of apartheid. Similarly, empathy has been identified, historically, as that which, within apartheid and colonial rule more generally, exceeded or escaped relations of domination. This paper approaches the discourse of empathy from a different angle, taking empathy as a concept embedded in colonial thinking. Given that so many claims to empathy have had recourse to psychoanalysis, the paper focuses on empathy in Freud�s work, specifically Dora�s case and Freud�s analysis of Michelangelo�s Moses, which are read alongside the images and installations of contemporary South African artist, Nandipha Mntambo, in particular her collection of images and installations in The Encounter. Three scenes are conjured wherein empathy confronts its impossibility, but rather than foreclose on empathy as a postapartheid condition, it is through the disclosure of the aporias of empathy that it might be brought into the realm of the ethical through a practice of reinscription and through the figure of Echo.