Research Articles

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Since its inception in 2006, the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape has emerged as a crucial meeting point for researchers in the Humanities and Social Sciences throughout Southern Africa. The Centre strives to develop unifying and interdisciplinary themes in the humanities that will enable a renewal of its study in Africa.

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Browsing by Subject "Art"

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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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    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.
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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.