Fantasmatic transactions: on the persistence of apartheid ideology

Apartheid ideology presents traditional historiography with a series of conundrums: the difficulty of separating historical from subjective agency; the paradoxical status of ideologues who both author ideology and are nonetheless also subject to the spread of its ideas; the issues of the non-material benefits that appear to drive its ideological system. Taking as its starting point J.M. Coetzee's reflections on these issues, this paper builds on his promising intuition of the notion of "fantasmatic rewards" as a crucial explanatory element in understanding the "mind of apartheid". Crucial in this respect are a number of Lacanian concepts (desire, the Other, fantasy, objet petit a, alienation and separation). Recourse to these notions enables us to provide a series of responses to the above dilemmas of apartheid ideology. Such concepts, moreover, arguably do greater conceptual justice to the inter-implication of the Other and the subject, that is, to the inter-implication of the trans-subjective socio-historical substance and unconscious subjectivity.