Melancholia of Freedom: Social Life in an Indian Township in South Africa

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. The discussion of the gaze in Merleau-Ponty is explicitly indebted to Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage as constitutive of the ego. For Merleau-Ponty, both the “mirror” (= gaze of the other) and the ego remain strongly social and embedded in embodied convention, while Sartre, in his discussion of “The Look,” interprets the gaze as coming from an imagined onlooker who comes to stand in for both the inscrutable other and an already interiorized split notion between an ideal self and an actual self (1965, 188–208). 2. See Merleau-Ponty 1995, 273, for this formulation, and Sjöholm 2001 for a good discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s view of corporeality as an exterior life of the body. 3. See Simmel 1959a, 276–82 and Frisby 1994, 132–42. 4. Crossley argues that Foucault’s attribution of social efficacy to the panoptic gaze presupposes the existence of a subject that can inhabit this “anxious awareness.” He argues that one must go to Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the effects of the gaze on the embodied self to properly fathom and limit this assumed efficacy (Crossley 1993). 5. This equation is at the heart of contemporary liberal Hegelianism, such as Charles Taylor’s assertion of a continuity of self-expression from Rousseau’s celebration of the free will to current desires for recognition by cultural and social minorities (1994), or Axel Honneth’s linkage of the possibility of proper ethical and social life to the socialization and recognition of individuals (1995). 6. When truly free, Kant writes at the end of the Critique of Practical Reason, “The heart is, after all, freed and relieved of a burden which always secretly weighs upon it—when in pure moral decisions . . . there is uncovered to the human being an inner ability not quite familiar otherwise even to him, the inner freedom to detach himself from the vehement obtrusiveness of their inclinations to such an extent that none at all, not even the one that we care about most, shall have an influence on a decision for which we are now to employ our reason” (2002, 201). 7. Authors as different as Lionel Trilling (1972), Michel Foucault (esp. 1984), Charles Taylor (1989 and 1992), and Lynn Hunt (2007) all explore the historical construction of interiority and the education of the senses that went into making modern selves. I have recently explored dimensions of this problem in some detail (Hansen 2009). 298 • Notes to Introduction 8. Complicity thus became a complicated issue in a system where white intellectuals were free to criticize and ridicule power both in Parliament and beyond, and free to travel abroad and to read a wide variety of literature that was ideologically opposed to apartheid. None of this mattered as long as one refrained from acting in an effective manner on one’s convictions and as long as one at least officially observed the strictures on sociality and sexuality across the color bar. Complicity was actively encouraged by the state in its microoperations of censorship and selective policing (Sanders 2002). 9. The literature on the structure of apartheid and the apartheid state is considerable . Some of the best overviews and syntheses can be found in Posel 1991 and Norval 1996. For the cultural dimensions of how apartheid was publicly constructed and enacted, see Witz 2003. 10. This stance on race is expressed most succinctly in the Freedom Charter adopted by ANC in 1955, and throughout the antiapartheid struggle it was retained as a fundamental statement on a vision of a future inclusive and colorblind South Africa. 11. The power of these diverse energies have come together in a song, which became the signature of Zuma’s significant following and was performed at mass meetings and by Zuma himself onstage. The style of the song, and Zuma ’s slow dance movements along with it, are in the style of traditional Zulu war songs and dances. The words, however, refer to the militancy of the 1980s, particularly the chorus “awuleth umshini wami” (bring me my machine gun) (Gunner 2008). 12. The importance of the young Hegel to generations of thinkers and strategists of liberation from DuBois to Fanon and Cabral is well known. The imprint of Hegelian thought in anthropology and social sciences has largely been indirect and mostly mediated through Marx, Bataille, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. The clearest and most sustained engagement with Hegelian models of thought in scholarship on postcolonial situations has been coming out of South...