On the psychical technology of monuments

This paper provides a psychoanalytic engagement with the ‘space—power—identity relation’, a relation that I argue may be conceptualized not simply as effect of discourse, but rather, following psychoanalysis, as an embodied, ‘figure-to-figure’ route of identification. The challenge thus posed is that of thinking both the power and the interpellative properties of the imagined subjectivity of place, psychoanalytically, and, furthermore, the ideological affects of a subject-place ‘intersubjectivity’. A narrative drawn from the history of the Strijdom Square Monument — a site of real and symbolic violence, where identity, power, and space intersected in precisely uncanny ways — serves to ground the argument, focusing it on the uncanny affects of monumental space.