Abstract
This paper offers a reading of Sharon Sliwinski’s Mandela’s Dark Years: A Political Theory of Dreaming. Sliwinski reflects on Nelson Mandela’s dream-life while he was incarcerated on Robben Island, and the ways in which his dreams, which staged for him the affect of racial oppression, may have contributed to his judgment of apartheid and his concept of freedom. While acknowledging the productivity of this framing of Mandela’s dream-life—it should interest anyone concerned with political subjectivity, sovereignty, and modes of resistance—the paper develops two lines of critique. The first underlines the political implications of two Kantian concepts Sliwinski utilises to characterise Mandela’s intellectual contribution to the world: the sublime and enlarged thought, both of which are part of a discourse on disinterested reflection and aesthetic judgment. The second offers a psychoanalytic formulation of Mandela’s dreams different to the one Sliwinski proposes, placing childhood wishes, the death drive, and the postal system more centrally than they are in Mandela’s Dark Years. Linking these two lines, the objectives here are: to reconsider a certain Kantianism within psychoanalysis, and to abide by what in Mandela’s thought might trouble disinterested reflection and implicate it, as well as any psychoanalytic approach to dreams of freedom, in the very violence against which Mandela fought. Ultimately, it is an argument for a postcolonial psychoanalysis that might learn from Mandela’s example.
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Notes
In his speech from the dock in the Rivonia Trial, for example, Mandela states: “I have been influenced in my thinking by both West and East. All this has led me to feel that in my search for a political formula, I should be absolutely impartial and objective” (Mandela 1964, emphasis added).
It is significant that Mandela himself resisted being cast as an adult child, that he resisted being made to wear short pants in prison, for example (Mandela 1995, p. 396).
The kinship between Freud and Kant is usually dealt with by referring to Freud’s own comments. “Kant’s Categorical Imperative,” Freud (1924) writes in “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” “is the direct heir of the Oedipus Complex” (p. 422). Much ink has been spilled on the way the categorical imperative begins, read psychoanalytically, to assume a sadistic aspect. Almost none, to my knowledge, has been devoted to Kant’s third Critique and Freud’s dream book.
Hook has already posed a variation of the question I am asking here, but without attending to the Kantian elements of the sublime: “What are the shortcomings of seeing Mandela as the encapsulation of all that is good in South Africa’s history, as the sublime embodiment of the nation?” (2017, p. 42).
See Arendt’s (2018) Thinking Without a Banister.
For Gilroy, the one distinguishing trait of today’s cosmopolitans is a capacity “to bear active witness to distant suffering” (2004, p. 79, emphasis added). It is not clear how activity—imaginative participation substituted by bodily participation—alters the discriminatory social function of judgment.
While some would define this as empathy, it is worth avoiding that conflation. A thinker as rigorous as Adorno has referred to Kant’s enlarged thought as “empathy … or however we wish to describe it” (2001, p. 171), but Arendt, on whom Sliwinski relies, is explicit that Kant’s critical thought “does not consist in an enormously enlarged empathy through which one can know what actually goes on in the mind of all others” (1992, p. 43). If empathy should, like enlarged thought, be questioned, if it is also implicated in colonial discourse, it is a related but different kind of relation to others. To pursue the difference between enlarged thought and empathy one would have to consider Kant’s dismissal of Herder, whose philosophy of history is the source of Einfühlung, the word that would be translated into English as empathy.
It was D grade prisoners who were allowed to write and receive only one letter of 500 words every six months. Mandela was a D grade prisoner for 10 years, from 1963, before being upgraded and allowed to write and receive letters more frequently (Mandela 1995).
While this is a persistent issue in Mandela’s prison letters, the specific moment Derrida is dealing with concerns Mandela having made representations through constitutional paths and, having received no response, or even acknowledgment, was left with little choice but to organise an illegal strike, inciting “African workers to strike during the three-day stay-at-home in May 1961” (Mandela 1995, p. 950). The term “non-civilized” is Mandela’s.
This should be understood within a general struggle of Robben Island prisoners to communicate with one another: messages sent through the underground post, as Mandela recounts, were written in milk, becoming legible once sprayed with disinfectant, written on squares of toilet paper, wrapped in plastic and taped on the inside of a toilet bowl (Mandela 1995).
As in Herodotus’ account in the Histories, where a message is written on a “writing-tablet” beneath the wax layer, containing “the king’s decision on the bare wood of the tablet” (2014, p. 534). In a scene more familiar to us today, Freud notes of a dream recorded by a Frau Dr. von Hug-Hellmuh, their distortion’s utilised methods akin to those employed by the postal system: “The postal censorship makes such passages unreadable by blacking them out; the dream censorship replaced them by an incomprehensible mumble” (1900, n. 2, p. 167). This is not an isolated incident. Indeed, sitting at the head of Freud’s specimen dream is a letter that has, through a “circuitous route,” reached its destination: “A large hall—numerous guests, whom we were receiving.—Among them was Irma. I at once took her on one side, as though to answer her letter [ihren Brief zubeantworten]” (131). Although this letter escapes Freud’s line by line analysis, and has subsequently gone largely unremarked in the mountainous literature on this founding dream of psychoanalysis (cf. Anzieu 1986), it is a precise representation of Freud’s theory of dreaming (see Truscott 2020).
Sliwinski does not note as much, but Arendt’s reading of Kant might support her position. If Kant inherits a concept of contemplation from the ancient Greeks, specifically from Plato, he reworks it, as Arendt argues, by lodging contemplation in the body, making bodily sensation not what must be purified as the condition of reflection, but, rather, what must be primed for it.
I am influenced here by Jean Laplanche’s reading of a dream Freud reports of an inn. Laplanche offers a critique of Freud’s analysis—the dream does not, for Laplanche, simply have its fiat in infantile wishes—but he is far nearer to Freud than is Sliwinski. For Freud—and he is his own patient here, he is the dreamer—this dream recalls his wet nurse’s breasts, and what is received is a memory trace of a forgotten infantile experience of his first lodging, accompanied by anxieties over the security of his place there. Laplanche introduces into his rereading of the dream what Freud does not consider, “the nurse and her own sexuality,” and thus the ways in which something will have been “passed to the child from the adult,” namely, “the nurse’s message to the child” (1992, pp. 221–222, emphasis added). This is what arrives, later, the “message of the other,” that has not been assimilated, “which is then afterwards retranslated and reinterpreted” (222).
That a biography argues that the scene of Mandela’s father’s rebellion is contradicted by archival records (Smith 2010) should neither discount its psychic reality for his son, nor accept that the archives bear the truth of the event.
There is, of course, a problem with this formulation, at least from a Freudian perspective, for although, for Freud, a dream is always a wish fulfilment, there is, for him, nothing in dreams like the enjoyment of censorship, as in neurosis. The mark of the censor can be everywhere detected in a dream, but the censor is not a disguise under which dream-wishes, aggressive or libidinal, are satisfied. Given how censorship was such a central part of Mandela’s daily lived experience, this has to be ignored.
In relating this to Mandela, readers of Fanon will recall his dismissal of dancing to relieve a tension lodged in the body of the colonised. As for jazz, he writes, “it is not unrealistic to think that in fifty years or so the type of jazz lament hiccuped by a poor, miserable ‘Negro’ will be defended by only those whites believing in a frozen image of a certain type of relationship and a certain form of negritude” (1961, p. 176). Jazz, for Moten, is something entirely different, so many improvisatory attempts to exceed, transcend, a state of objecthood. We might say about Mandela’s dream that if jive can be taken loosely as a branch of African jazz, Mandela selects a form of music in which his dream stages dance quite acceptable to the censors, selects it precisely because there is embedded in it a critical message that is registered in the bodies it moves. The source of “infiba” as a form of dance or music I have not been able to locate, despite an extensive search and conversations with scholars of South African music of that period. There seems every reason to believe it is a coded message to his addressee.
Once more this runs contrary to Fanon: “The discovery that a black civilization existed in the fifteenth century does not earn me a certificate of humanity. Whether you like it or not, the past can in no way be my guide in the actual state of things” (1952, pp. 199–200). One could, however, posit an agreement with Derrida’s reading of Mandela when Fanon observes that Negritude draws its sustenance from a “virtually substantial absoluity” (p. 113).
It would be impossible to adequately get into the details of “the lace of murderous, mournful, jealous, and guilty identifications which entrap speculation, infinitely” (Derrida 1980, p. 336), but they concern, in Derrida’s reading of Freud, the death of the boy’s mother and Freud’s daughter, Sophie, the death of the boy’s brother, Freud’s other grandson, and the way, through identification—through thinking speculatively from the child’s perspective—his daughter is also his mother, and the lost grandson, who dies at the same age as Freud’s brother died, his rival.
There are a series of common themes explored in Derrida’s reading of Freud and Mandela. As Derrida parses Freud’s speculative thesis, which could just as easily have been said of Mandela’s reflection on and of the law: “There is something older than the law within the law” (1980, p. 350). In Freud’s account, it may also be Ernst’s father “on the front”—or thrown “to the fwont”—that he is missing (see Khanna 2003). Makgatho, Mandela’s second son, was, of course, considerably older than Ernst in Mandela’s dream. While Mandela and Freud are not speculating on the same thing and in the same way, they are also not unrelated experiences.
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Truscott, R. Dreaming from the perspective of everyone. Subjectivity 13, 315–336 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-020-00110-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-020-00110-z