Browsing by Author "van Bever Donker, Maurits"

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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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    Being and neoliberalism: A conceptual history of the subject
    (University of the Western Cape, 2022) Naidoo, Kiasha; van Bever Donker, Maurits
    The idea of neoliberalism, as both a guiding principle for economic policy decisions and a governing rationality, is a pertinent issue of our time. The concept itself is often used to describe the contemporary mode of political economy but when we look closer, it is notoriously elusive. Scholars such as Michel Foucault and Wendy Brown seek to conceptualize neoliberalism as a governing rationality. What these scholars share is a reading of neoliberal governmentality in terms of the subject. In social and political philosophical critiques of neoliberalism which inherit from this Foucauldian line of thought, the subject is a central figure. However, thinking on the subject did not begin with a consideration of neoliberalism, it has a long philosophical history. I discuss this through a conceptual history of the subject and in doing so, understand the neoliberal subject as another iteration of subjectivity.
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    The �Rough edge of deterritorialisation�: Contemplation
    (Taylor & Francis, 2016) van Bever Donker, Maurits
    To frame this paper, which given its focus on the installation Red should ostensibly deal with a question of aesthetics and technology, with an epigraph that situates the contemplative capacity of a cow alongside the echo of the damned, is perhaps a little strange. It is this haunting echo, however, that asks for a re-working of contemplation and that finds a resonance in the effect evoked through �Red�, an effect that draws out the rumbling of the non-Western in the frame of Western philosophy.2 Rather than approach this strangeness as something to be resisted in order to assert the apparent clarity of what appears to us, a resistance that would allow an articulation of an instance of clear aesthetic judgment, thereby affirming a sense of subjective certainty, in what follows I seek to abide by its unsettling effect. This unsettling encounter with a work of art, an encounter that provokes a Kierkegaardian trembling and exceeds the scripts in which it becomes legible, opens, in my reading, toward a re-working of contemplation away from judgment and towards what Nietzsche calls �life�.3 Contemplation, in this instance, is offered both as an action and as a capacity, a capacity that is not peculiarly human and that begins to posit the subject as a question for thought. As Derrida suggests in his critique of both Lacan�s and Levinas� production, in keeping with a certain Cartesianism, of a distinction between the human and that which it is not, namely the machine or the animal (what he terms the �animot�), the human, the animal, and the machine are all similarly responsive to the coding of language. It is the claim to subjective certainty that deploys the distinction as part of its conceptual scaffolding.4 Red, through its desire to inhabit the dislocated space of a gift that, in its own narrative, carried a weight akin to the task of post-apartheid reconciliation, offers itself as a peculiar instantiation of this unsettling effect.