Decolonising the Neoliberal University

Law, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Student Protest

Jaco Barnard-Naude

• Publisher: Birkbeck Law Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367903725
• eBook ISBN: 9781000427561
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Taking the postcolonial – or, more specifically, the post-apartheid – university as its focus, the book takes the violence and the trauma of the global neoliberal hegemony as its central point of reference.

Following a primarily psychoanalytic line of enquiry, it engages a range of disciplines – law, philosophy, literature, gender studies, cultural studies and political economy – in order better to understand the conditions of possibility of an emancipatory, or decolonised, higher education. And this in the context of both the inter-generational transmission of the trauma of colonialism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the trauma of neoliberal subjectivity in the postcolonial university. Oriented around an important lecture by Jacqueline Rose, the volume contains contributions from world-renowned authors, such as Judith Butler and Achille Mbembe, as well as numerous legal and other theorists who share their concern with interrogating the contemporary crisis in higher education.

This truly interdisciplinary collection will appeal to a wide range of readers right across the humanities, but especially those with substantial interests in the contemporary state of the university, as well as those with theoretical interests in postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, gender studies, cultural studies, jurisprudence and law.

1 Overcoming Hamlet – notes for a future

Jaco Barnard-Naudé

DOI: 10.4324/9781003198581-1

Introduction

If there is one diagnosis on which the contributors to this collection concur, then it is that – to say it with Shakespeare’s Hamlet – “the time is out of joint”. The subject matter of this collection – student protest in the South African postcolony – makes the words that follow Hamlet’s famous diagnostic all the more relevant: “oh, cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right”. For was it not that the student protesters of 2015 and onwards saw themselves as born to set right the time that they had diagnosed as out of joint? Whether or not these protesting students cursed the “spite” that they were born to set it right, they nonetheless positioned themselves as indeed born to do so (which, as Jacqueline Rose indicates in her lecture that opens this collection, meant that they were precisely not the “born free” generation which they had been made out to be).

At the same time as we posit an analogy between Hamlet and the student protestors, we cannot but be aware of the critical limits of such an analogy. Moreover, one cannot but be aware that it borders on the heretical, and is probably contrary to the very spirit of the “decoloniality” advocated by the protests, to suggest a correspondence between, on the one hand, Hamlet as one of the most canonical characters in all of Western literature, and, on the other, student protesters in the postcolony. From the point of view of many in the student movements, Hamlet and indeed the entire Shakespearian legacy decidedly represent, in one or another way, the (colonial) past – and it is against the very presence of this past in the postcolonial now that these protesters revolted.

This critical awareness indeed raises the question of how, despite the commonality that the time is out of joint for both, Hamlet (not simply as character, but as metaphor of a certain Western subjectivity) is different from the subjectivity that fuelled student protesters in the postcolony. My sense is that the longstanding engagement of psychoanalysis with Hamlet sheds a unique light on this difference. In what follows, I want to traverse some of the psychoanalytic reading of Hamlet in order to show how the student protest movements of our time challenge a mode of Western (legal) subjectivity that is pervasive in our contemporary societies. Relying on Jacqueline Rose’s lecture and by way of introducing this collection, I will argue that this subjectivity fundamentally concerns the question of the future in its dimension of the à venir, the incalculable yet necessary “to come” of justice and democracy.

In taking this path in / as introduction, I want to light on aspects of the psychoanalytic backdrop, as I see it, to South African protest and, specifically, to the student protests that erupted from 2015 onwards. This psychoanalytic backdrop provides one frame amongst many through which it is possible to read contemporary student protest, Rose’s lecture and the responses that are contained in this collection. My argument here will be that the psychoanalytic frame is indispensable in so far as it concerns itself with the dark heart of colonial power. Because student protest assembled under the signifier of “decolonisation”, it is worth considering the internal, psychic and often unconscious aspects of colonial-apartheid power if we are interested in the decolonisation of the South African condition.

As we shall see, the psychoanalytic backdrop which I sketch in this introduction fundamentally concerns the place of melancholia in the psycho-affective world of the South African nation and, particularly, in the psycho-affective world of what I call the subject “supposed to protest.” There can be no denial that in South Africa this is the subject racialised as Black – it is, moreover, the subjugated and oppressed Black subject, past and present. Melancholia is, in turn, in the history of psychoanalysis in South Africa, deeply imbricated, as we shall see, with the figure and psychoanalytic epistemology that have turned on readings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a colonial setting – a setting in which, as we will see, Hamlet becomes “Black Hamlet.”

As I conclude in this introduction, it is far from coincidental that this volume, alongside the student protestors, proclaims that the time is out of joint. In taking over this Hamletic credo, this volume and, more importantly the student protests about which it writes, can be understood as responding to a particular framing of Black subjectivity under colonial-apartheid, past and, no doubt, present. In this context, I will argue that it is crucial to distinguish – in strong terms – between the subjectivity of Hamletism and the protest subjectivity that forms the subject matter of Rose’s lecture. A key question that will emerge here concerns how we might understand “the time is out of joint” differently when it is no longer the credo of a Hamlet, but is taken over by protest. In other words, I am interested here in the ways in which student protest can be said to contest and overcome the Hamletic condition. As we shall see, in South Africa the Hamletic condition at the level of the collective is / was not a choice – it is / was an essential component in the psychic subjugation perpetrated by colonial-apartheid power. As such, it was structurally imposed. Hamlet and protest subjectivity have in common the question of how one relates to a traumatic past, a past which possesses for the subject the power to render present time “out of joint”. In this sense, they both carry the burden of a history which is being silenced and/or denied. Protest subjectivity therefore shares with Hamlet the truth of not being “born free” – the category often used to discredit the student protests as inappropriate for a post-apartheid generation. Rose’s lecture can be seen as a sustained critique of such a notion. As she so powerfully contends in her lecture, to be born free is not to be born at all.

The essential difference between Hamletist subjectivity and protest subjectivity is the way in which that subjectivity’s relation to a traumatic past unfolds and informs its orientation to present and future time. Protest subjectivity, I argue, is essentially captured by the phrase on the placard shown in the frontispiece of this collection: “We are not looking for our own struggle. We’re fighting an old one”. To say that “we are not looking for our own struggle” is to say that we have already found our own struggle, our mandate in the Other – what Lacan defines as the pre-existing Symbolic order to which all human subjects belong; and to say that “we’re fighting an old one” is, further, to say that that struggle is located in the past which is now brought into relation with the temporality of both the present (“we’re fighting”) and the future. It is in this way that protest subjectivity distinguishes itself from Hamletism, for Hamletism may also not be looking for its own struggle – it has found it already – but, I will argue, stands for the idea that we are precisely not fighting “an old one”, but rather something that belongs to a very different temporality of historical memory and change. To substantiate this claim, I will now turn to the psychoanalytic readings of Hamlet, beginning with Rose’s own reading.

Hamlet

In an earlier essay on Hamlet, Rose (2005) was primarily concerned with the femininity that structures the play. I want to leave this femininity to one side in order to focus instead on Hamlet’s relationship to death as loss. Before doing so, it is important for our purposes to point out that Rose (2005, 124) begins her reading of Hamlet by noting that it is the play which has “been celebrated as the birth of the modern, post-Renaissance, conception of man” and that Freud described it as an emblem of “‘the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind”’. Further in this regard, Jacques Lacan (2019, 273) makes the point that what gives Hamlet its “highest dramatic value” is that he is “a mode of discourse”.¹ This point of departure indicates to us that what is at stake in Hamlet is not simply one or another character trait, but indeed modern, Western, subjectivity as such. This is why Hamlet is worthy of analysis if we are interested, as I am here, in a problematisation of that subjectivity with a view to outlining a post-modern subjectivity which distinguishes itself from its predominant form in the West.

To proceed, then, to the question of Hamlet’s repression, we can note from Rose’s analysis the description that it is represented in the action of the play as essentially a buffoonery – Hamlet is so overwhelmed by the affect he is experiencing in relation to the events surrounding the death of his father that his only reaction is a buffoonery which “can find no outlet in art” (Rose 2005, 126). Hamlet, then, is a subject incapable of sublimation. Linked to this buffoonery, Rose notes, with reference to Lacan’s essay on Hamlet, that at the heart of the play we find a shamefully inadequate mourning which “is the trigger and then constant refrain of the play” (130). Rose describes mourning in this context as that process by way of which “death is given its symbolic form and enters back into social life” (131).

1 If this essay repeatedly, even predominantly, finds in Lacan an explanatory recourse, it is because it is in Lacan’s work that we so manifestly encounter the two subjectivities at issue in the subject matter of this contribution. First, there is Lacan’s (2019) sustained engagement with Hamlet in Seminar VI (see the discussion of this engagement below). Second, it cannot be denied that Seminar XVII (Lacan 2007) was at least in part formulated as a response to the student protests of 1968 in France. Famously, Lacan (2007, 207) diagnosed the students as hysterics, told them that they were “aspiring” to a Master and added that they would “get one”. Whether or not one agrees with this diagnosis and declaration on Lacan’s part, the fact remains that his work remains highly relevant when it comes to the psychoanalytic understanding of both Hamlet and student protest.

Yet, paradoxically enough, if this mourning is shamefully inadequate in Hamlet – his mother’s “o’er hasty marriage”, his uncle’s rapid ascension to his brother’s throne – Hamlet’s mourning is excessive (he “wears black, stands apart and mourns beyond the natural term” (Rose 2005, 131)). But this mourning fails in its very excessiveness. If mourning as regulator of social life becomes “overstated”, she suggests, it could tip over into its very opposite and begin to look like what it is designed to “hold off”. In the context of mourning, that opposite which mourning is designed to hold off is melancholia and Rose accordingly notes how Freud diagnosed Hamlet as both a melancholic and a hysteric (133).

In his Mourning and Melancholia, Freud (2005) famously argued that melancholia is a response to loss which is opposed to mourning. Whereas mourning releases the cathexis in relation to the lost object, the melancholic is unable to do so, thus erecting a psychic crypt for the lost object within the ego. Later, in The Ego and the Id, Freud will describe this process as the transition from object libido to narcissistic libido. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud (2005) distinguishes between melancholia and mourning by identifying melancholia as a pathology and mourning as a “normal affect” (203). Melancholia and mourning describe psychic responses and/or reactions to the experiences of loss: “of a beloved person or an abstraction taking the place of the person, such as fatherland, freedom, an ideal and so on” (203). Freud thus describes melancholia as “a profoundly painful depression, a loss of interest in the outside world, the loss of the ability to love, the inhibition of any kind of performance and a reduction in the sense of self” (204). Above all, mourning is distinguished from melancholia by one trait, namely that in mourning the “disorder of self-esteem is absent” (204). And this is the case because, as Freud famously puts it: “In mourning, the world has become poor and empty, in melancholia it is the ego that has become so” (206). In melancholia “the shadow of the object” (Freud 1957, 249) falls upon the ego and the ego is henceforth judged “as though it were an object, the forsaken object”. Melancholia, quite simply, represents a loss of the ego, whereas mourning is the loss of the love object.

Taking his cue from Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (1986), Jacques Derrida (1977) takes this argument further. Melancholia, he argues, corresponds with the process of incorporation: I identify with the object lost in reality in such a way that I deny its loss. (Freud (1957, 249) writes of a “substitution of identification for object-love”.) I interiorise the object in such a way that I keep it alive in me, refuse to release my “libidinal” investment in it and, consequently, refuse to mourn the lost object as lost because, for me, it is not “really” lost. The paradox of incorporation is that, by refusing to accept the actual death of the lost love object, I do not keep the dead alive in me. In other words, the tragedy of melancholic incorporation is that the ego refuses to mourn:

I pretend to keep the dead alive, intact, safe (save) inside me, but it is only in order to refuse, in a necessarily equivocal way, to love the dead as a living part of me, dead save in me, through the process of introjection, as happens in so-called ‘normal’ mourning.

(Derrida 1977, 71 (emphasis added))

As Derrida so pointedly remarks: “[I]ncorporation is a kind of theft to reappropriate the pleasure-object” (72).

Melancholic incorporation, then, is failed introjection, introjection proper is associated with mourning, because in introjection, the libidinal investment in the object is withdrawn and the object is interiorised in such a way that it does not become a living dead part of the ego.

Where the process of mourning works through loss and allows us to move on to form new attachments and re-engage with life, melancholia thwarts our re-engagement with life; it leaves us paralysed in the loss, closes off the future and prevents us from moving on.

(Walker 2004, 116)

The melancholic state is accompanied by grief, nostalgia and always “the feeling of loss – a loss of direction ensuing from the collapse of a project or horizon for action” (Arditi 2003, 81).

Hamlet is the quintessential melancholic – a character who is overwhelmed by the losses that he has experienced and who can respond to these losses only in terms of a certain buffoonery, a certain excess of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• 1. Overcoming Hamlet – notes for a future
• 2. The Legacy
• 3. We still have not broken the code
• 4. The university now: What it will have been for what it is becoming
• 5. Within the time of the aftermath
• 6. “Lock your doors!”, or “the beginning of after”
• 7. The queer in decolonial times: Rhodes Must Fall and (im)possibilities in times of uncertainty
• 8. A change in, but not of, the system
• 9. On the materiality of #MustFall protest: Shame, envy, and the politics of spectacle
• 10. An untimely meditation on a time “out of sync”
• 11. Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe
• 12. The afterlife
• 13. Protest, play and the failure of haunting in the land (sometimes) called Australia – a response to Jacqueline Rose
• 14. Afterword
• Index