The Other and Other Others: Post-colonialism, Psychoanalysis and the South African Question

If the continued influence of an approach as recondite as deconstruction upon cultural studies worldwide is anything to go by, then the growing attention paid to post-colonialism in South Africa should come as no surprise. After all, however sure one may be of better times ahead there is still the lure of South Africa’s awful past which is no less intriguing now that it is apparently over. Besides, those practices of othering that post-colonialism loves to hate show no sign of going away in South Africa, or anywhere else for that matter, and there is no reason to think that those who should perhaps be better employed in the nitty gritty of reconstruction are going to prove immune to the fascination of what’s difficult.

The possibility of some real, local relevance obviously plays an important part in post-colonialism’s growing following in South Africa. But there is little doubt that discovering just where that relevance lies presents adherents with considerable difficulties—even if these problems are of a now familiarly French kind. The reasons for these difficulties are, I think, worth rehearsing at the outset, especially where the relationship between post-colonialism and psychoanalysis is the issue.

While affirming its status as political, and the commitment to a more or less identifiable programme this status traditionally brings, post-colonialism associates itself with that which is most theoretically dense and eclectic in its post-modern partners. One of the more obvious consequences of this connection to post-modernism is the notoriously difficult style adopted by many post-colonial authors. Much post-colonial writing is, as a result, almost impossible to paraphrase, so that both critics and commentators often find themselves hard pressed to extract content from works which, to cast the best possible light on it, could be described as poetic.

This impenetrable style, sometimes defended as strategic, clearly comes from the fact that, like post-modernism, post-colonialism is based on an amalgam of complex, predominantly European theoretical positions—especially those of Lacan, Derrida and Foucault—none of whose work is easily, or elegantly, absorbed.

What is more, post-colonialism seems to me to have become something more like politically-inflected reading practice undertaken with the help of some important theorists, rather than an explicitly theoretical or political project. This hermeneutic aspect adds to the non-literary commentator on post-colonialism’s problems because it is often difficult to generalize on the basis of the insights which particular, sometimes idiosyncratic, readings yield.

Finally, to the extent that it is a reading practice, post-colonialism seems to share with all interpretative enterprises “the problem of an object”—that common difficulty in finding specific, definable content upon which to concentrate. As literary theorists who have all the world’s writing open to them know all too well, it is very difficult to isolate the particular genre, quality or subject matter which any project distinctive enough to acquire a name of its own, needs.

Here, somewhat surprisingly, post-colonialism has the edge on post-modern literary theorists. The term “colonial,” although it does not periodize as it might in social or political history, does help to locate particular kinds of material—especially that concerned with the relationship between colonizers and the colonized. In much the same way the term “post,” although it too is not very helpful as an indicator of period, does suggest an essentially critical position.

The closest answer to the question of post-colonialism’s particular province is, it seems, that which comes from combining three key ingredients—those given by the colonial period, the emphasis on texts and reading, and the essentially critical orientation characteristic of the approach. And the best result, that which unites post-colonialists, is probably that captured in the now well-known phrase which describes post-colonialism as concerned with the “West’s representation of its Other” or better with the “West’s misrepresentations of its Other.”

Expressed in these terms, post-colonialism becomes a fairly specific project, enabling both its relationship to psychoanalysis, and the broader question...