Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission 9781503626522

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AMBIGUITIES OF WITNESSING

MERIDIAN

Crossing Aesthetics

Werner Hamacher

Editor

Stanford University Press

Stanford California 2007

AMBIGUITIES OF WITNESSING

Law and Literature in the Time ofa Truth Commission

Mark Sanders

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2007 by the Board ofTrustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No parr of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sanders, Mark, 1968Ambiguities of witnessing : law and literature in the time of a truth commission I Mark Sanders. p. cm. -- (Meridian : Crossing Aesthetics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-o-8047-5615-0 (cloth : alk. paper) r. Political crimes and offenses--South Africa. 2. South Africa.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 3· Truth commissions-South Africa. 4· Human rights--South Africa. 5· Amnesty-South Africa. 6. Reconciliation--Political aspects--South Africa. 7· South Africa--Politics and governmem--r989-1994· 8. South Africa--Politics and government--1994- I. Title. KTL44r5.S26 2007 345.68'o231--dc22 2007025909 Typeset at Stanford University Press in ro.9fr3 Garamond and Lithos display

Contents

Preface

IX

Prologue

§I

Truth Commission Journal and Notes

15

§2

Remembering Apartheid

34

§3

Hearing Women

59

§4

Forgiveness

87

§5

Reparation

II4

§6

Literature and Testimony

147

Epilogue

r86

Notes

193

Bibliography

229

Index

253

Preface

In William Kentridge's film Ubu Tells the Truth (1997), a network of telecommunication operates as a network of violence. In its eight minutes Ubu Tells the Truth bears witness to how the apartheid state, in its convulsive death throes, sowed destruction far and wide. Telephonic, electronic, and phonographic recording and transmission technologies, benign and felicitous in ordinary use, tortured and killed. When police wound up old field telephones to generate current, their trademark for electrical torture was Motorola. With the death of Bheki Mlangeni, his head blown apart by explosives put in a pair of headphones meant for someone else, his assassins had made Walkman their brand of choice. Kentridge's film flashes us iconic reminders of those and other nodes in these violent networks. Telephones, microphones, and megaphones proliferate, a prisoner is shocked by electric current, a parcel bomb makes its way through the postal system, and, starting out as the tyrant Ubu's line-drawn eye, a camera on a tripod mutates through the artist's animation drawings into a helicopter, a radiogram, and then a gun. Played over television images of the militarization of the South African state as it lashed back against opposition to apartheid, Warrick Sony's sound track recalls the discordant pastiche of radio music, political speeches, and other found sounds of his fringe band, the Kalahari Surfers, from the eighties-as well as the doubling, in the musician's pseudonym, of the police assassin's weapon with the ready-to-hand recording device that he would sometimes use. Telecommunications systems and devices are ubiquitous in Kentridge's films, but in none are they as dangerous as in Ubu Tells the Truth. The technology animated in the film is at once lethal and liberatory. When Kentridge's

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chalk and charcoal images and Sony's music join forces with the uncanny manipulations of the Handspring Puppet Company in Ubu and the Truth Commission, a play written by Jane Taylor, there is once again an inevitable emphasis on the volatile duality, duplicity even, of technologies of electronic recording and transmission. This time it falls on the simultaneous translators employed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission at its public hearings, who rendered the words of witnesses for those who speak other tongues (the South Mrican constitution recognizes eleven official languages). While an actor playing the interpreter occupies a closed Plexiglas booth, the wooden puppets representing witnesses disclose ambiguity and equivocality-a voicing of testimony but also the possibility of mistranslation and therefore of ventriloquism-of semic and thus of wider cultural violence, which may, against the best will in the world, compound the violations to which a witness testifies. From the film, the music, and the play with its puppetry we perceive how an inauguration of voice may also be an inauguration or repetition of violence. It is now more than ten years since the Truth Commission held its first hearings, and the responses to it that persistently resonate for me are the work of Kentridge and his collaborators-and, of course, that of the poet Antjie Krog, whose searing and luminous Country ofMy Skull (1998) showed what could be done with words, as it retraced the part she played in the broadcasting of the hearings over South Mrican radio. With them I humbly declare an affinity. Without the operation of the telecommunicative network to which their work attests, and in which Krog was a material participant, my book could never have been written. In that sense it is a testing of the wager entered into by the Truth Commission-that the transmission of words, the relay of a witness's voice across distance, awaiting a response, would do: something. My encounter with the Truth Commission took place, at first, through an electronic relay that began with the recording, translation, and audiovisual transmission of witnesses' words from its public hearings: Max du Preez's Truth Commission Special Report, of which I watched as many installments as I could lay my hands on. That initial encounter led me, when finally I had the opportunity, to travel to South Africa to attend hearings of the commission in person. This book is about witnessing and its ambiguities. It is also a witnessing of that witnessing-that is to say, an impossible essay in the elucidation of its own conditions of possibility.

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Xl

Many people have contributed to the realization of this volume. The first was Nigel Gibson, who invited me to speak about Truth Commission testimony at the African Studies Institute at Columbia University in September 1997. Subsequent speaking invitations that led to key departures came from Rita Barnard at the University of Pennsylvania and Penny Pether at American University Law School. An invitation from Anupama Rao to write an afterward to a special issue of Interventions gave me the invaluable opportunity to develop my thoughts on founding violence in dialogue with a group of talented historians. My book benefited greatly from the critical thoughts, especially on early versions of Chapter 2, of fellow scholars at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University during 1999-2000. Dominick LaCapra and Kobena Mercer were particularly generous with their help. A Mazer Award for Research in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Creative Arts from Brandeis University allowed me to perform crucial archival research in South Mrica in 2002, and a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 2003-2004 gave me the time that I needed to complete the writing. Special thanks go to Robert Burt and Renee De Mateo of Yale Law School for allowing me to borrow the school's videotapes of Truth Commission Special Report, and to Sias Scott at the South Mrican Broadcasting Corporation for making available to me a copy of the unedited video tape of the testimony of Lephina Zondo. The Marian Goodman Gallery in New York City kindly arranged the viewing ofWilliam Kentridge's Ubu Tells the Truth that refreshed my memory of the film. In South Mrica, I am, above all, indebted to Bongani Mabaso of the National Archives of South Mrica, and to Mark Kaplan for discussing with me his films and the circumstances in which they were made. I thank Loes Nas for sending me a copy of a videotape of Jacques Derrida's lecture at the University of the Western Cape, as well as a dossier of press clippings on his visit to South Mrica. My interlocutors on topics relating to this book, I am pleased to say, have been numerous. In addition to those already mentioned, they have, at different times, included Penny Andrews, Derek Attridge, David Attwell, Mary Campbell, William Flesch, Michael Gilmore, Peter Goodrich, Heidi Grunebaum, Ron Krabill, Antjie Krog, Neil Levi, Stephanie Marlin-Curiel, Martha Minow, Tony O'Brien, Fiona Ross, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Kendall Thomas, and Howard Varney.

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For their capable research assistance, I am most grateful to Lillian Atteridge and Michiel Bot. It would be hard, if not impossible, for me to thank Louise Kuhn enough for her loving presence during the years taken up with this project.

Chapters or sections of chapters first appeared in the following sources, from which permission to reprint is gratefully acknowledged. Parts of Chapter I appeared as "lnterdisciplinarity as Reading: Truth Commission Journal and Notes" in Law Text Culture 5.2 (2001) and, in different form, as "Reading Lessons" in Diacritics 29.3 (1999), © Johns Hopkins University Press. Chapter 2 appeared as "Remembering Apartheid" in Diacritics 32.3-4 (2002), © Johns Hopkins University Press. Sections of Chapter 3 appeared in earlier form as ''Ambiguities of Mourning: Law, Custom, and Testimony of Women before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission" in Loss: The Politics ofMourning, edited by David Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), copyright © 2002 Regents of the University of California, University of California Press; and "Extraordinary Violence" in Interventions: The International journal of Post-Colonial Studies 3.2 (2001), © Taylor and Francis (www.tandf.co.uk). Part of Chapter 4 was first published as "Renegotiating Responsibility after Apartheid: Listening to Perpetrator Testimony" in American University journal of Gender, Social Policy, and the Law 10.2 (2002). Parts of Chapter 6 appeared in their original form as "Truth, Telling, Questioning: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Antjie Krog's Country ofMy Skul4 and Literature after Apartheid" in Modern Fiction Studies 46.1 (2ooo), © Purdue Research Foundation, reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press, and as "Disgrace" in Interventions: The International journal ofPost-Colonial Studies 4·3 (2002), © Taylor and Francis (www.tandf.co.uk). The English version of the poem by Antjie Krog in Chapter 5 appears by permission of the author and Random House South Africa. The Afrikaans version of the same poem appears by permission of Antjie Krog and Kwela Boeke. New York City Summer 2006

AMBIGUITIES OF WITNESSING

Prologue

In response to a questioner, a witness speaks. Between 1996 and 2001, a truth and reconciliation commission held public hearings across South Africa. These hearings were designed to assist the commission in the "investigation and the establishment of as complete a picture as possible of the nature, causes and extent of gross violations of human rights" committed at the height of the apartheid era and in its immediate aftermath, as the commission had been mandated to do by the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995. The public hearings made the work of the seventeen men and women appointed by President Nelson Mandela and led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu unique in the history of truth commissions. In this relatively recent lineage, in which the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission's most notable precursors investigated political crimes in El Salvador, Argentina, and Chile, witnesses seldom testified openly. 1 The South African hearings were aired on radio and television, often being broadcast live, and the commission made transcripts of most of the testimony available on the World Wide Web. 2 This wealth of publicity and documentation, added to by several films about the commission and books by a number of its members, 3 allows one to track how narrative solicited by a quasi-legal body reflects as well as influences political and historical transition. Although many elements of this process are specific to the South African transition from apartheid and a colonial history to an ambiguous position in capitalist globalization, such a tracking shows, more generally, how law, by admitting testimony under certain specific constraints that it cannot comprehensively impose, shapes transition but also makes for a transformation of its own anticipated ends. I

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Prologue

For thinkers on transitional justice, 4 a truth commission is a quasijuridical body designed to establish the truth about an era of political wrong in ways that promote peace, democracy, and a culture of human rights in the country concerned. 5 Usually an alternative or complement to criminal trials of perpetrators of gross human rights violations, truth commissions are, as a rule, born out of political compromise. The proposal for a South Mrican truth commission originally came from the Mrican National Congress. Meeting in October 1993 to discuss the findings of an internal inquiry into torture and killing in its military camps, the ANC national executive committee took up an idea that Kader Asmal, a respected jurist and senior member of the organization, had put forward in a lecture at the University of the Western Cape a year before. 6 The final shape of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, however, emerged from the negotiated settlement to end apartheid between the state and the Mrican National Congress, whereby provision was made for amnesty for members of the state security forces. Gruesome details had begun to emerge about clandestine death squads deployed by the state against political activists in the 1980s. And, in the early 1990s, there was increasing evidence of orchestrated "third force" activities aimed at provoking war between supporters of the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party. South Mrica's first nonracial election, planned for April 1994, was being jeopardized by continuing violence. When the security forces threatened to remain passive as the Mrikaner right wing and the Pan-Mricanist Congress sought to derail the peaceful transition, a clause stating that "amnesty shall be granted in respect of acts, omissions and offences associated with political objectives committed in the course of the conflicts of the past" was inserted into the postscript of the interim constitution agreed upon in December 1993.? In the end, the amnesty would also apply to those who had fought against the apartheid state, and their human rights violations would be investigated and made known. Although the Mrican National Congress had set a precedent by investigating abuses in its camps, there would be some murmuring from the liberation movements against the idea that acts of resistance to the regime could be legally equated with acts in its defense-which, in an extraordinary change of heart, eventually led the ANC to take the commission to court in 1998 in an effort to prevent it from releasing its report. 8 With a general amnesty having been rejected, all of those involved in the "conflicts of the past" would be eligible for amnesty from criminal and civil prosecution

Prologue

3

for politically motivated acts, on condition that those acts were proportionate to the political objective in question, and that a full disclosure was made by their perpetrators. 9 As Alex Boraine, deputy chairperson of the commission, writes, "amnesty was exchanged for truth" (283). It was, however, judged unfair, and legally questionable, to offer an amnesty to perpetrators that would erase the right of victims to enter into criminal and civil suits without offering those victims something in return. 10 Thus reparation joined fact-finding and amnesty, becoming the third element of the commission's mandate. As conceived by the act, this component of the mandate would include working out a policy of monetary reparations, an issue that remains contentious, as well as "restoring the human and civil dignity of such victims by granting them an opportunity to relate their own accounts of the violations of which they are the victims" (South Mrica, Promotion 3[1] [c]). The testimony of victims thus played a dual role, combining evidence-gathering and reparation in an uneasy pairing that the commission endeavored to palliate by distinguishing "factual or forensic truth" from "personal and narrative truth," "social truth," and "healing and restorative truth'' (Truth Commission Report 1:III-n4). 11 Under Archbishop Tutu's guidance, the commission adopted a victim-centered approach in which, as he put it, "[t]his Commission is said to listen to everyone" (Truth Commission Reporti:n2). Accordingly, the human rights violation hearings, at which the testimony of victims was heard from April 1996 until August 1997, 12 came to define the commission's work. Of the more than 2o,ooo people who made statements to the commission about human rights violations against them, about 2,000 testified publicly. Mter a preliminary screening to determine whether they qualified, amnesty applicants were usually required to testify publicly; in addition, a number of hearings on particular entities or activities were convenedfor example, on the submissions of the political parties and the armed forces, the state chemical weapons program, the activities of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and the Mandela United Football Club; on the role under apartheid of the prisons, the legal and medical professions, and the faith community; on the particular violations experienced by women. The last of these hearings took place in August 1998. Amnesty hearings continued, with less and less fanfare, into 2001. 13 Thanks to intensive coverage by the media, 14 the hearings, at least those of its first two years, more than the commission's seven-volume report, are what will likely

4

Prologue

remain most strongly impressed in the imaginations and memories of people inside the country as well as abroad.'5 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been the subject of important scholarship and reflection on human rights, transitional justice, and the relationship between law and religion. 16 Although overlapping to a greater or lesser extent with these areas of inquiry, the emphasis of my book is different. It is, in the first place, cross-disciplinary. The forms taken by the testimony at the hearings make the Truth and Reconciliation Commission a singular occasion for thinking about the relationship between law and literature. In post-apartheid South Mrica local cultural formations interact with more widely shared juridical codes such as human rights to produce new kinds of legal, political, and ethical concepts and practices. Literature is at the heart of these developments-as testimonial narrative operates both as a conveyor of evidence and as a switch for directing legal proceedings toward goals not anticipated by the framers of the laws that instituted them. The conditions of possibility for this dual operation are instated by the law itself. The Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act assembled a heterogeneous and complex set of provisions. The Truth Commission was, in the first instance, bound by the act to collect evidence of the gross violation of human rights. Its mandate also led it to invite claims for reparation from the victims of apartheid who testified before it (see Boraine 334). The victims were thus at liberty not just to testifY to a specific set of rights violations dating from the thirty-four-year period under investigation but also to claim redress for a more vast and persistent history of wrong. They were, in practice, sometimes able to state demands in terms other than those anticipated in the vocabulary of universal human rights. Tracing specific claims made by and on behalf of witnesses, I make two main arguments. The first is that when testimony at the commission's hearings transformed its agenda it did so not in spite of the law but because of it. The ambiguity set to work at the hearings was systematic. This contention is grounded in an account of what took place at the hearings that I develop in critical dialogue with what the commission says in its report about its concepts, principles, and practices. This work of interpretive description prepares the way for my second claim. Reaching beyond the peculiarities of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the South Mrican transition, I argue that the ambiguity in all language that, in the most traditional of terms, designates the literary, abides at the very

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5

nub of forensic procedure. I take "ambiguity" in a literal sense. Etymologically, the word derives from Latin, and combines amb-, meaning "both ways," and agere, "to drive." Agere is also the root of the verb "to act," and the nouns "agent" and "agency." ''Ambiguity" may thus be taken to mean an acting on both sides (amb- comes from the Greek amphi). Its implications would then be not purely semantic but also pragmatic. William Empson exploits this etymology when he writes of ambiguity, in poetry, as being "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language" (1). Understood in terms of action and reaction, ambiguity is the general condition of word and act, of word as act. The title of my book, Ambiguities of Witnessing-which might also be heard as Ambiguities: OfWitnessing-exploits the mobility of the genitive preposition "of." It means to say that, while the words of a witness can themselves be ambiguous in meaning and effect, any such ambiguities are underwritten by an ambiguity in law itself that comes into play when it solicits and elicits testimony. These ambiguities can be explicated through reference to the account of testimonial evidence presented by John Henry Wigmore in his classic treatise Evidence in Trials at Common Law (1904): When a witness' statement is offered as the basis of an evidential inference to the truth of his statement-for example, the statement of A that B struck X-it is plain that at least three distinct elements are present; or, put in another way, that there are three processes, in the absence of any one of which we cannot conceive of testimony: First, the witness must know something, i.e., must have observed the affray and received some impressions on the question whether B struck X; to this element may be given the generic term observation; Second, the witness must have a recollection of these impressions, the result of his observation; this may be termed recollection; Third, he must communicate this recollection to the tribunal; that is, there must be communication, or narration, or relation (for there is no single term entirely appropriate). (Wigmore § 478, 2:636) If we deconstruct Wigmore's tripartite hierarchy, in which perception and recollection underlie narration, we can see that, in any actual train of verification, the first two items are tertiary and secondary to the story that is heard. When a footnote in Wigmore acknowledges the difficulty of determining whether or not a witness is lying(§ 478, 2:640), we have an

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example in which the causal thread connecting testimony to recollection and perception is broken. It is the same contingency of truth that allows for an exploitation of the ambiguities of language to produce claims different from those anticipated by the tribunal in question. The very possibility, as Binder and Weisberg put it in Literary Criticisms ofLaw, of "law [being] an arena for the performance and contestation of representations of self and ... an influence on the roles and identities available to groups and individuals in portraying themselves" (463) is granted by the law itself.17 The opening comes from the law as it entertains narrations the veracity of which is unknown. When a narration is given credence, without its (yet) being verified by being set into the causal chain as analyzed by Wigmore, it is to all intents and purposes a fiction. The idea may be intensified if fiction is, as Jacques Derrida points out in Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, the condition of possibility of truthful testimony (42). If literature is, by definition, the unverifiable, 18 in law we have the constant diffirance of fiction and truth. In thinking the specificity of law, this diffirance must not be forgotten. It would be wrong, not only in the context of a truth commission, to conceive of law as if the moment of verification were irrelevant. At the same time, the moment of fictionality can, I would maintain, never be perfectly reduced through the procedures of verification and falsification that the law employs. Although, from the point of view of law, testimony is to be verified, it is, strictly speaking, unverifiable at the moment that it is elicited. This moment of unverifiability establishes the dependence of law on literature. It does not, however, follow that law, because it ultimately attempts to verify testimonial evidence by establishing causal relations between observation and narration, is repressive of the literary. In fact, I would argue that what we call the literary actually depends on the law suspending its procedures of verification in order to hear the narration of the witness. In forensic practice, this can be a complicated affair. When a court, through its officers (prosecution and defense), elicits evidence through questioning, it calls forth a story. The questioner may think that he or she knows the answer in advance, but since nobody knows what the witness will in fact say, he or she is structurally in a position of ignorance. This may be thought of, in a complex way, in terms of Socratic irony. Eironeia is, in classical terms, a feigning of ignorance. When Socrates declares in Plato's Apology that "this is the first time I have come before the court ... I am therefore an utter foreigner to the manner of speech here [atechnos oun xenos echo tes enthade lexeos]"

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(qd), 19 we do not take it to mean that he is ignorant of its procedures. He seeks from the court an account of itself, the truth and consistency of which he will test through questioning. "Socrates' questioning," writes Kierkegaard in The Concept ofIrony, "was aimed at the knowing subject for the purpose of showing that when all was said and done they knew nothing whatever" (37). 20 Irony is doubled in Plato's text, since questioning is, of course, the way in which the court proceeds when it examines a witness. It goes beyond the scope of my book to demonstrate it historically, but it may follow logically that the literary is unthinkable without reference to the verificationary procedures of law. The very fact that we use the term "unverifiable" suggests that it is being defined in opposition or difference to a truth or item of knowledge obtained by procedures of verification. If such procedures are at the heart of law (as much as, say, science), then it is quite possible that when, in a fiction, Socrates declares himself a stranger to the idiom of the court-the gesture of irony par excellence-we have a figure for the origins of the literary. The literary is an essential aspect of the law in its functioning, when its verificationary procedures are in abeyance. The idea that literature exists apart from the law, a notion that has had its own historical development, betrays the integral relationship between the politics of democracy and the privilege of the literary as irony. As Derrida asks and answers, "is it not also democracy that gives the right to irony in the public space? Yes, for democracy opens public space, the publicity of public space, by granting the right to a change of tone ( Wechsel der Tone), 21 to irony as well as to fiction, the simulacrum, the secret, literature, and so on" (Rogues 91-92). 22 Concentrating on the limits as well as the openings of law, my approach to testimonial narrative before the Truth Commission is different in emphasis from much of the work that has appeared on the subject to date. The dominant tendency among scholars interpreting Truth Commission testimony has been to point to the inadequacy of the commission's procedures in allowing stories to be told, or to its facilitating only certain kinds of stories. 23 Sometimes this charge is based on a theoretical commitment to a notion of the unsayable or unrepresentable, or a silence that may have been brought on by a traumatic psychical event. 24 When this is the case, it becomes less clear to what extent a legal demand for narration produces the silence-since, to recall Wigmore's terminology, it is, strictly speaking, between observation and recollection that trauma irrevocably shatters the chain of testimony. This greatly complicates the

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interpretation of particular testimonies, but also suggests that the problem may not always lie solely with the legal body and its rules and procedures. Although it is clear enough in traumatic cases that a quasi-juridical hearing may do nothing to mend the break between recollection and observation, either for the witness or for the inquiry, it is not obvious that it will fail to do so because of its demand for particular evidence. I am therefore more convinced by the picture of the law that comes from work on slave narrative and testimonio, in which it is argued that stories are shaped in particular ways when they are told in order to make cases at law. This is palpable with The History ofMary Prince (1831), which was published by the Anti-Slavery Society in the cause of abolition but can also be read as the impeachment of a slaveholder's testimony in a libel suit against Thomas Pringle, secretary of the society-and, more recently, with L Rigoberta Menchu (1983), which documents human rights abuses against the Mayan Quiche and peasant movements in Guatemala. 25 In the United States, station-house confessions are, as Peter Brooks argues in Troubling Confissions, all too often predetermined by the case to be made by the police, who then in various ways coerce the suspect into making incriminating statements. In each of these cases, the ones giving testimony are viewed as having had a story imposed upon them. The prevailing sentiment has thus been to see law as utterly repressive, or, alternately, to seek out resistance, silences, even secrets and lies on the part of the witness. 26 The portrait of law presented by these critics is, as I regularly acknowledge in my own analyses, not always a caricature. Yet the fact that the law-in its various guises-calls forth and helps to shape a story that is to be verified should, at least, make it possible to see it as facilitating both a narrative and a counternarrative. This is another sign of the effect generated by law that I term ambiguity-or amb-iguity-of witnessing. That such a doubled narrative may, as with the genres of slave narrative and testimonio, develop in turn into subgenres of narrative fiction, appears to reinforce this view, 27 as does the fact that these sub genres may, in turn, influence and shape legal and quasi-legal procedures. 28 Because it must open to the unverifiable, and thus to ambiguities of witnessing, the law, in particular instantiations, makes possible the testimony that, in some instances, questions and transforms what it had set out to accomplish. My first chapter attends to dispropriation oflaw. A term I take up from a discussion of Levinas and Derrida by Thomas Keenan, "dispropriation" refers to an entity's not being proper, or identical, to itself. Law is never

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simply law, but is constantly doubled and inhabited by its others. Taking the Truth Commission's hearings as a lesson in the ethics of reading, Ambiguities ofWitnessing is interdisciplinary. Law's relation to literature, it contends, is one not of opposition but of interdependence. In order to be law, law engages, and engages with, cultural explanation, linguistic idiom, and even literary form. Translation, however, may be the paradigm of how the law makes and remakes itself in response to its others. Recognizing the right of witnesses to testify in the language of their choosing, the Truth Commission employed a technics of simultaneous translation. This technics was underwritten, in turn, by a declared hospitality to victim witnesses informed by the Mrican ethos of reciprocity known as ubuntu: a person is a person through other people. In South Mrica, ubuntu supplements human rights with an ethics of responsibility, and it guided the commission's openness to testimony. An analysis of the links between ubuntu and the leading of testimony brings me to one of the key arguments of my book-that, faced with the reality that perpetrators would not come forward en masse to make good for what they had done, the Truth Commission generalized responsibility across the body politic by making itself a proxy for the perpetrator vis-a-vis victims whose testimony it solicited. The proxy would, of course, demonstrate unequivocally its willingness to make good the wrongs of the one it represented. By extending this substitution to listeners to the simultaneous translation, and to those tuned in to the radio and television broadcasts, a phantasmatic perpetratorship became available, in principle, to anyone. So did a phantasmatic agency of reparation. Such possibilities of responsible substitution are a key instance of the amb-iguity systematically produced by the Truth Commission when it entertained the testimony of apartheid's victims. Although it is a facet of its work for which it did not fully account,29 perceiving how the commission generalized perpetratorship and reparative agency is crucial to understanding what it did, and what it fell short of achieving. The next three chapters follow closely ways in which the Truth Commission altered its course in response to testimony that it led. The conditions of possibility for this reside, most immediately, in the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act. There, as I have noted, factfinding joined with the reparative goal of restoring the dignity of victims by allowing them to tell their own stories. In the interests of pursuing this goal, although the questioner might attempt to prompt a witness to

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disclose facts about particular human rights violations to which his or her preliminary deposition had referred, the testimony of victims was in principle unhemmed by typical courtroom strictures of cross-examination and rulings on relevance. Witnesses testifYing as victims were ceded considerable leeway to tell their stories as they chose. When, in accordance with its mandate of reparation, the commission solicited requests for assistance from victims, it made for a further expansion of the scope of testimony to include what witnesses felt themselves to have lost. I devote especial attention in the first two of these chapters to calls for funeral rites for the dead and disappeared-the requests made before the commission by witnesses for bodies and body parts, for information about the site of burial of a relative, or for exhumation and proper reburial. These were, as I understand it, an invitation to the commission and its audience-those present at the hearings, as well as those following them on television and radio, or reading the transcripts after the fact-to enter into mourning and condolence. Although its initial mandate did not classifY the abuse of corpses as a gross violation of human rights, the commission was led to perform exhumations, a project not covered in its original budget. By seeking the commission's help in laying their next of kin to rest, witnesses in effect testified that apartheid was a formation that denied the right to mourn and proscribed condolence. They therefore added to the account of racist legislation and its social, political, and economic effects a profound sense of how apartheid affected one's way of being. I turn in the second of these chapters to how petitions for funeral rites and testimony on behalf of the dead established a specific pattern in the testimony of women. Sometimes the claims for funeral rites were made in the name of "tradition" and "custom"; although this mourning could take highly specific local forms (such as the Zulu ukubuyisa, or bringing back the spirit), I argue, what is most significant is that it was people from marginal communities, mainly black women, who were the ones making claims in a forum firmly grounded in legal modernity. This, among other things, implicitly challenged the subordination of black women under colonial and apartheid customary law. I proceed to analyze how the observation by feminist social scientists that women-particularly those demanding funeral rites for male relatives-were not testifYing to violations done to themselves led the commission to plan and convene special women's hearings. A considerable number of the women testifYing had

Prologue

II

been activists in their own right and had been detained and tortured by the police. Although, as I argue, the social scientists' critique did not fully register the implications of the ubiquitous demand for funeral rites, what it did was enable women to testify not only to offenses by the state but also to abuses within the liberation movements. Prominent female members of the movements testified, if not to sexual assault and harassment in ANC training camps, then to not having the courage to speak about them. Again, the mandate of the commission was challenged to adapt itself, and it did so. Yet, in this case, it met with a silencing that was all the more resistant for being a self-silencing. In broader terms, the continued marginalization of women can be linked to the structural political and economic violence of apartheid-to which the commission keeps drawing attention in its report, only to state, controversially, that it had no mandate to enter into it. Through the testimony of women, apartheid is remembered in terms more far-reaching than the categories and subcategories of gross human rights violation. Just as in claims for funeral rites and invitations to mourn, apartheid had emerged as a foreclosure of mourning and condolence, in the advocacy of feminist legal academics, the experiences to which women testify are not unique to women but exemplary of the structural and founding violence of apartheid, the legacy of which stubbornly endures. A risk of advocacy, however, is that the woman may become merely an exemplary figure-as happened in the case of the Mrikaner-nationalist ideology of the volksmoeder (mother of the nation). This problem, as I discuss, is the subject of two contemporary novels, by Zoe Wicomb and Njabulo Ndebele, respectively. The third of these chapters includes my sole analysis of the testimony of a perpetrator. Despite the more formal procedures governing amnesty hearings, on a few occasions the rules were radically renegotiated when victims were given leave to question an amnesty applicant. Reflecting on a hearing at which a succession of torture victims confronted their torturer, I explain how forgiveness, which, like victim-centeredness and ubuntu, became a key concept for the commission under Desmond Tutu's leadership, may have been redefined in such (more or less) unmediated transactions between victims and perpetrators. At its amnesty hearings the commission did not assume the symbolic place of the perpetratorwho-makes-good, as it did in relation to victims at human rights violation hearings. But by offering perpetrators the chance to make good on their

12

Prologue

own behalf, the commission, in the exceptional cases when the chance was taken, created a sense that perpetrators may have acted as proxy for, and thus performatively separated themselves from, a former violator-self. At the same time, although the substitutive technics operating testimony set in motion a process that is open to destinerrance through the actions of witnesses seeking amnesty-lying, selective testimony, manipulation of amnesty conditions and rules of examination and cross-examination-and therefore not all alteration was felicitous, 30 there never resulted from this the same wholesale shift in direction by the commission as in response to victims' testimony-except perhaps when victims themselves intervened in the process, as they did at the hearing that I analyze. I juxtapose my analysis of the amnesty testimony in this chapter with a lecture given by Jacques Derrida in August 1998 at the University of the Western Cape, a few months before the commission presented the first five volumes of its report to President Nelson Mandela. In his lecture, Derrida carefully set out a series of aporias of forgiveness but avoided making more than the most minimal reference to South Africa and the Truth Commission. I ask whether Derrida's aporias may not be explicated differently through a detailed analysis of the amnesty hearing along with certain remarks made by Tutu in his book No Future without Forgiveness (1999) that link forgiveness to ubuntu. Collectively, these three chapters show how, by being open to witnesses and their stories, and to their exploitation of the ambiguity of the word "violation" in order to reinscribe it in ways not anticipated by the act, the Truth Commission revealed more than expected. In addition to the picture that its report presented of the political conflicts of the past, its hearings conveyed how the country's history of wrong was understood by its people and how they envisaged that wrong being made good. The testimony of victims-and, sometimes, that of perpetrators-supplied additional layers to the understanding of apartheid. It also gestured at how, through a symbolic as well as practical instantiation of responsibility, mourning, and forgiveness, both actual and substitutive, it might be possible to repair what had been broken. My penultimate chapter engages the complex question of reparationmaterial as well as symbolic. In March 2003 the Truth Commission formally ended its work by handing the last two volumes of its report over to President Thabo Mbeki. Although the commission's own work had ceased, its recommendations had still to be put into effect. The most con-

Prologue

13

tentious of these were proposals for reparation. The continued wrangling about reparations between the government and victim groups-a struggle that has crossed the waters to be fought out in courtrooms in New York City-represents a fascinating if painful collision of affect, law, and the politicai economy of neoliberalism. Turning to the psychoanalytic writings of Melanie Klein, I set out an aporia of reparation, showing how the Truth Commission's notion of "symbolic reparations" implies at once an economic and a literary response to what, in a deliberate oxymoron, one might call the enduring violence of the past. The dynamics of responsible substitution are vividly set to work in a poem by Antjie Krog that stands as the epigraph to the final volume of the commission's report. It is with Krog's poem that the amb-iguity of law that generalizes reparation is seen to open the possibility for singular responses, which, in turn, bring us full circle before the literary at the heart of the law. The chapter on reparation forms a bridge between those on the hearings and my final chapter, which I devote to two remarkable works written in response to the commission. Antjie Krog's Country ofMy Skull (1998) and J. M. C:oetzee's Disgrace (1999) reveal, in different ways, possibilities and problems inhering in the particular conjuncture ofliterature and law that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set to work. Here I consider, as in more than one of my chapters, how it is the figure of irony that stands for the literary; and what that means for understanding the place of the literary in law as well as in politics. If in Socrates we have a figure for the origins of the literary in diffirance with law, the key traits are a questioning and a setting to work of a fiction in order to test claims to knowledge and truth. This is something that particular witnesses before the Truth Commission appear to do too. When Gayatri C:hakravorty Spivak draws on Paul de Man's reading of Friedrich Schlegel's version of irony as permanem parabasis of an allegory, it is in order to suggest a speaking- and reading-otherwise that might effect practical transformation irreducible to the workings of an informational calculus (Critique 156n, 430). We can use these various articulations of irony to explore Hegel's notion in Phenomenology of Spirit of woman as "eternal irony of the community." A second figure of irony, Antigone, accompanies Socrates in this book. Read against the grain of Hegel, by exposing the rift between custom and law, Sophocles' Antigone brings the Hegelian "community" into question. This was certainly the case when women testified before the Truth Commission, leading it along unanticipated paths. Literary works set

I4

Prologue

such amb-iguities of witnessing to work in singular ways, even as they comment on, and test for soundness, the concepts and operations of the commission. In Antjie Krog we discover poetry, insofar as it gives itself over to the word of the other, to be the condition of possibility for testimony, and thus also of law. Like Krog, J. M. Coetzee brings all the resources of literature to bear on what it might mean to make good for a history of wrong in which one's own acts and desires may, whether one likes it or not, be episodes and motive forces. Coetzee gestures toward the very elements of language, as song and music work within and against prose to imply, among other things, a critique of the instrumentalization of language as "communication," something that the Truth Commission, despite its openings in invention, may have risked.

§r Truth Commission Journal and Notes I think I have shown that it is impossible for the South African courts to mete out substantial justice without the aid of good interpreters. -Sol T. Plaatje, "The Essential Interpreter"

5 August 1998: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is holding an amnesty hearing at the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg. The hearing is a continuation of one held in May, concerning the events now remembered as the Shell House incident. 1 In March 1994, security guards from the Mrican National Congress headquarters at Shell House, an office building in the middle of Johannesburg, fired their guns at a large contingent of Zulu marchers, some armed with "traditional weapons": cowhide shields, sticks, clubs, spears. 2 Eight marchers died, and the guards have applied for amnesty. A witness, one of the marchers, is being quizzed on what happened. Mr. Mhlaba, in dark trousers and a bright blue team jacket, wearing glasses with gold trim, is being questioned as to the meaning of the chant amandla! ngawethu! uSuthu! uSuthu!, which he is asked to utter, with accompanying gestures, before the members of the amnesty committee. Since official record keeping is in the form of a transcript, the chairman, Justice Hassen Mall, must summarize what he has witnessed: let it be noted that the witness chanted with raised fist, taking two steps forward and then one step back for each chant. The fist will have held a stick or a spear: ubhoko, umkhonto. The lawyer crossexamining Mhlaba on behalf of the guards has several questions in this regard. Isn't this a war chant? No, it is not a war chant; as he has said, it is the praise uttered, according to tradition, when you are going to see a king or a chief; the word uSuthu is part of the name Mangosuthu. The chant amandla! ngawethu! comes from Zulu tradition. It means powerto us. The lawyer, who professes to know nothing about Zulu culture or tradition, insists: isn't uSuthu! a cry of warriors going into battle? Mhlaba

IS

16

Truth Commission journal and Notes

tries another tack: I have never heard of warriors going into war chanting. When you go into war you do not make a noise. If you make a noise, the enemy will know where you are coming from. The lawyer returns several times to the same line of questioning, as if to confirm a prearranged passage of reasoning: Zulu therefore warrior therefore killer therefore ANC guards acted in self-defense. The right cultural explanation will be his first premise. As "native informant," Mhlaba has only to provide it in order to vindicate the guards and implicate himself. I sit in a cold pew, earphones on, hearing both Mhlaba's testimony, which is in Zulu, and the simultaneous translation into English. There are a few others in the church, mostly black, most also wearing earphones. Also sitting there are two black policemen, who, in spite of their regulation blue caps and jackets, are visibly cold. It is a relief afterward to reemerge into the warm winter sunlight. I. This is an entry, adapted somewhat, from the journal I kept on a visit to South Africa. Let it serve as a convenient shortcut to some notes on law and literature, and on "ethics of reading" emerging from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 3 The reading-or listening-practices at the commission's hearings show how reading and listening involve a basic dispropriation: the parties involved are put out, put out of themselves, the identity of each conditioned by a response to, and for, the other. This dispropriation in responsibility is, as Thomas Keenan argues in Fables ofResponsibility, integral to ethics, if ethics is to be thought of as more than simply an application of rules. 4 Before I am, I encounter myself in response to the address of the other. To talk about myself as subject or person, with responsibilities in relation to the other, is to presuppose this dispropriative structure of responsibility as condition of possibility for my responsibilities in the narrow sense. This can be expressed as a substitution, in which, since I respond to, and for, the other, I always already occupy the place of the other. If, in a broad sense, the practice of interdisciplinary study involves the ethical-relating to the other-and this, in turn, is linked to the practice of reading, what takes place at the Truth Commission, and in post-apartheid South Africa more generally, gives us a chance to reflect upon dispropriation in reading and interdisciplinary study as a matter for ethics. As instances themselves of "interdisciplinary reading," the hearings set to work a complex conversation of literary and juridico-legal codes and practices. These codes and practices are unstable; I regularly find myself adding the prefix "quasi":

Truth Commission Journal and Notes

17

quasi-literary, quasi-juridical, and so on. An attention to the hearings can radicalize our thinking of reading. Such attention also can lead toward a more thoroughgoing crossing of disciplines. It would, instead of allowing existing disciplines to endure untouched, constantly produce new objects of study; as Roland Barthes once wrote, "[i]nterdisciplinary study consists in creating a new object, which belongs to no one" (72). In literary studies this would generalize the literary beyond literature in the narrow sense. One way of doing so would be to shift our attention beyond poems and novels, as traditional disciplinary objects, to the activity of reading and its ethical and political implications. 5 2. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been unusually sensitive to the literary, and to how it relates to its declared project of letting previously silenced voices be heard. Its final report records how it recognized several different types of truth. Because they make a differential pair, the two most important are "forensic" truth and "narrative" truth (Truth Commission Report 1:110). The commission recognized that its reparative quasi-therapeutic mandate of restoring the human dignity of "victims" by allowing them to give their own accounts of what was done to them could not be carried out unless the "personal" and "subjective" truth of those accounts was accepted. They were not to be cross-examined, as this would compromise their integrity-that is, their honesty, but also the healed wholeness of personhood assumed to follow from having one's story officially sanctioned. But the mandate of restoring the dignity of victims by granting them the opportunity to tell their stories competed with the commission's primary task: compiling an accurate picture of gross violations of human rights. In spite of its declared openness to "narrative truth," for the commission the stories of victims were, like any other statement made before a legal or quasi-legal body, subject to verification or falsification. Narrative accounts could be treated, ultimately, as forensic truth claims. This happened, of course, when the commission drew upon victims' testimony in its report in order to illustrate a pattern of human rights violations. Forensic criteria were, however, also applied when, at certain human rights violation hearings, testimony was ruled to be irrelevant. "Reading" was in such cases appropriative rather than dispropriative, asserting the questioner's assumptions and excluding matters not confirming or conforming to them. Appropriative reading was at odds with the responsibility to listen, without contradicting, to the testimony proffered by victims. When, on the other hand, the truth-value of

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Truth Commission journal and Notes

victims' public testimony was effectively set at zero by its disqualification as a basis for findings-a move disavowing the irreducible contamination of narrative and forensic truth, of fiction and testimony-this is less an appropriation than a foreclosure. 6 The forensic appropriation of narrative was, on the whole, more typical of the amnesty hearings, at which amnesty seekers and all other witnesses could be examined and crossexamined. An abiding by formal procedures would not, however, have meant that the dispropriative dynamics conditioning the process were always perfectly reduced (aufgehoben) in a terminal appropriative movement. In the commission's report, "narrative truth" is connected to "oral tradition," in which, it says, storytelling is "particularly important" (Truth Commission Report 1:112). This inchoate idea-the drafters of the report were not literary scholars or theorists-can be linked to the questioning of Mr. Mhlaba regarding Zulu "tradition," and its implications for reading, responsibility, appropriation, and dispropriation may be explored. I make use of the transcript, subsequently made available on the World Wide Web, to refresh my memory: MR DORFLING [for the objectors to the amnesty application]: You were brought up in the Zulu culture, is that correct? MR MHLABA: Yes. MR DORFLING: What is the significance of this movement [which he has just demonstrated for the amnesty committee] and these utterances Mr Mhlaba? What does it mean? MR MHLABA: It means that we, according to the Zulu tradition, when we are happy or celebrating [and going] to a function, it's always our tradition that we should do it step by step while shouting the praises?

The others of the law in this case are literature and culture, specifically elements of Zulu orality and cultural explanation: the praise-word uSuthu and its meaning. Literature and culture may stand as keywords for a more basic, less easily nameable dispropriation at work at the commission, as it calls forth testimony, testimony that may ultimately not be verifiable. · Given that the commission is juridico-legal in character, even if quasijuridical and quasi-legal, can it be said that such dispropriation is exemplary for the law? 3· What takes place between witness and questioner is reproduced for, and in, the one attending the hearing. One is given a headset, puts it on,

Truth Commission journal and Notes

19

turns to the appropriate translation channel, and can hear the witness, and the questioner, speaking in a language not his or her own. Although one hears the echo, in the background, of the witness's actual words, the process of simultaneous translation means a radical dispropriation for each party: the witness speaks in Zulu, yet, as I hear him, he speaks in English. On another channel he might have been speaking Sotho or Afrikaans. Were I to have appeared before the commission, I could have been heard to speak several languages that I do not understand. This speaking in tongues, in languages one does not or may not understand, is hazardous. One's voice has been taken from one and given to another in a tongue not one's own. This risky dispropriation is enabled by a technics of translation prone to vicissitudes of its own: "INTERPRETER: Excuse me, there are some technical problems" (Mhlaba 3). However achieved, submission to this process remains integral to the operations of the Truth Commission. The goal of human rights violation hearings was to let victims speak, to grant them a hearing, to hear them, in their own languages (Truth Commission Report I:no, II2-II3, 146-147; 5:4-5, 7-8). The dispropriations involved are also at the heart of the day-to-day transactions of a country transforming itself after apartheid. Even if it is only to sing "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika," as Antjie Krog suggests in Country ofMy Skull (216-217), committing oneself to speak in a language not one's own, the language of another, a language one does not know, is part of the transformation. The commission's translation apparatus works in a way analogous to its hospitality, as a quasi-juridical body, to storytelling and "oral tradition." In both instances, setting to work a responsibility in which the other is acknowledged as other rather than assimilated to the "self," as for instance in the "appropriation" of narrative truth as verifiable or falsifiable forensic truth, the commission agrees provisionally to hear, and speak, the language of the other. 4· Taking the place of the other-in Levinasian terms, taking on the responsibility for the responsibility of the other for the other (Levinas, Otherwise 117; cf. Keenan 22)-was basic to the operations of the Truth Commission. One aspect of this is to assume, as it did, the unacknowledged responsibility of the perpetrator for the deeds of the past. The commission functioned as a national clearinghouse between victims and perpetrators, even if it did not often arrange actual meetings between them. As a system it had to be able to function in the absence of actual perpetrators. Set to work in this system, responsibility therefore depended on

20

Truth Commission journal and Notes

the possibility of substitution. But the recognition of"narrative truth'' and "oral tradition" puts responsibility for the responsibility of the other for the other into a "cultural" register. Human rights dialogues with ubuntu on a national scale. Each transforms the other. At the Central Methodist Church hearing, things occur on a smaller scale but present some of the same issues. The law encounters culture, and does not quite know what to do with it. Its habits of reading come up against the "literary," and it undergoes its own dispropriation. It has to come out of itself, insofar as it declares itself ignorant of Zulu custom, and ask to be instructed: MR TIPP [for the amnesty applicants]: Mr Mhlaba I am regrettably not very well versed in Zulu tradition and Zulu culture, but perhaps you can tell us, "amandla aweto" [sic], are you saying that that forms part of a Zulu traditional praise song or praise chant? MR MHLABA: I would say, put it clearly, any person, they don't have to be a Zulu-speaking person, people normally shout "amandla aweto," meaning power to us. This has originated from the Zulu tradition, so I would say that's the reason why we were shouting "power to us" and "we will win as one." MR TIPP: And the cry or the chant "usotho" [sic] is, as I understand it, typically a battle-cry, is that correct? MR MHLABA: That's not true. "Usotho" goes to explain that we are the Zulu nation. As you know, there is "mangosotho" [sic], it's a tradition that we are following as Zulu people. MR TIPP: Mr Mhlaba, isn't it so that when traditionally and historically that when Zulu warriors went to war, that the typical battle-cry that accompanies them as an expression of their pride and their military prowess, was "usotho"? MR MHLABA: I did not understand your word, you're talking about the soldiers ofKwa-Zulu, or the warriors ofKwa-Zulu? MR TIPP: I'm speaking as best I can in historical and traditional terms of Zulu warriors, and that when Zulu warriors went to war, "usotho" would be their principal chant expressing their pride and their military strength as they attacked. (Mhlaba 19-20)

The law's questions call forth a story, one told for the commission by a succession ofiterable signs-songs, chants, elements of dance-the meaning of which is radically altered by context (just as the Central Methodist Church is altered by the presence of the commission). If the goal of the exchange is to produce evidentiary closure-the Zulu marchers were marching as to war-a verified fact that can be brought to the decision in

Truth Commission journal and Notes

21

the amnesty case of the ANC security guards, what actually emerges from it is something unverifiable. The questions from the lawyer not only feign ignorance and incite a story-or cultural explanation-but bring forth a counter-story: we make no noise when we go to war. Or, as the transcript of the simultaneous translation records it: MR MHLABA: I never heard that when going to war the warriors would be singing songs or chanting slogans. I know that people prepare for the war and nobody will instruct them to be singing when going to war, because that would show the directions as to where they are from [to] their opponents if they start singing. MR TIPP: We'll move on Mr Mhlaba from that. (Mhlaba 20)

There is more than one way of reading this exchange. One can read/hear the lawyer's questions as simply pursuing an interested agenda based on a hypothesis with cultural-essentialist overtones. One knows this badgering, the willful misconstrual and motivated mistranslation, from the courts of colonialism and apartheid. Yet, on reflection, and with the transcript to revise the constructions of memory, one can bear witness to a less onesided negotiation of conditions of dispropriation. In a complex performance of forensic irony, the lawyer begs that his ignorance be remedied. Despite the power at the body's disposal, to subpoena and to question, and the power of its officers and representatives (at amnesty hearings) to rule out counter-questions-"MR TIPP: Mr Mhlaba ... I'm not asking you to ask questions, I'm asking you to answer them" (Mhlaba 23)-in the moment of eliciting a story, that body is vulnerable. However energetically that vulnerability is disavowed, and however swift it is to recover its footing-"[w]e'll move on ... from that"-it has gone out of itself and asked for the word that can transform it. This reading approaches national allegory: the ANC rules, but Zulu is the emerging dominant; as Njabulo Ndebele wryly observes, "the Xhosas are running the country and the Zulu language is running amok'' (Ndebele, "Of Lions" 149). In this new democracy, sovereign is hostage to subject, subject host to sovereign. But danger comes with dispropriation, and violence can ensue. In 1994, sensing their House under threat, the ANC guards open fire. The Truth Commission's hearing commemorates, and attempts to renegotiate, a ruined occasion for hospitality. 5· Let us attend again to the law. Thus far, I have written as if the law were parasitic upon literature, as if at its nub were an unacknowledged

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unverifiability called storytelling. But what if that were not the case? Or not simply the case? The law undoubtedly has its own reading practices, which involve the unverifiable, and hospitality, if provisional, to the unverifiable. This is one starting point for interdisciplinary critical legal studies; as Peter Goodrich writes, "[l]aw is a literature which denies its literary qualities" (Law n2). But what if what we understand as the "literary'' were, in fact, also parasitic upon forensic practices ofreading? What if irony is not simply a "literary" challenge to the law, or even a challenge at all, but the way in which the law itself negotiates and renegotiates the violence of dispropriation (not only that involved in the nameable crimes of killing, theft, rape, and so on but also a more nebulous threat to its own self-possession)? There is, as Goodrich observes, some evidence for this in the shared history of law and rhetoric: Ironically, the second classification of the legal genre [the first being confession, as a means of invoking the spiritual, of mediating the human relation to the divine] is, historically, that of dissimulation, of pretending not to have what one has. According to the barrister and scholar of rhetoric, Puttenham, the legal genre is to be defined also in terms of allegory, or of"the Courtly figure of allegoria." Citing a classical maxim, qui nescit dissimulare nescit regnare, he who knows how to dissimulate knows how to rule, Puttenham classifies the figures and tropes of secular law as belonging primarily to the art of deception. (Law 127-128)

In classical terms, dissimulation is eironeia. What Goodrich, taking up Puttenham, describes as allegory can thus also be designated irony (a designation to which Goodrich's "[i]ronically" can be heard as cryptically alluding). The irony in question is, more precisely, Socratic irony: dissembled ignorance, pretending not to have the knowledge one has-rather than sheer deception (unless the party questioned has no idea that a pretense is being mounted). 8 Reminding us of a difficult passage in Paul de Man's Allegories ofReading, where allegory is associated with irony as "permanent parabasis," Spivak has characterized deconstruction as "permanent parabasis or sustained interruption from a source relating 'otherwise' (allegorein = speaking otherwise) to the continuing unfolding of the main system of meaning" (Critique 430). Spivak writes here of resistance within complicity. But, if ironic speaking-otherwise is the way in which law itself negotiates violence, and "knows how to rule" despite threats to its own unfolding, signs can be found, in the basic structure of forensic

Truth Commission journal and Notes

23

questioning, not only of a subversive challenge to the law from within but also of a vulnerability in reading and hearing necessary for a thoroughgoing crossing of disciplines basic to its functioning as law. If irony as speaking-otherwise is integral to the law, and what animates forensic space, it is also true that the capacity to set it to work is not evenly distributed. Although, in principle, all parties may speak otherwise, in practice not all have an equal opportunity to do so. Nevertheless, before the Truth Commission, Mhlaba (and other witnesses) can on occasion be heard to respond with irony to questions by lawyers, even to the extent of framing counter-questions. This fact is perhaps not an exception to, but a sign and function of, its quasi-juridical character. If the commission is exceptional, it is also exemplary. The point made by Goodrich and others who appeal for interdisciplinary legal studies is that the law does not acknowledge the self-othering, be it spiritual or rhetorical, that is integral to its functioning.9 "The interdisciplinary study of law," Goodrich writes, "is aimed at breaking down the closure of legal discourse and at critically articulating the internal relationships it constructs with other discourses" (Legal Discourse 212). Interdisciplinarity in jurisprudence is the project of acknowledging and articulating, theoretically and practically, law's own alterity: "the initial problem for jurisprudence, and for justice, is to recognize and lay out a space of the other within the law" (Goodrich, Oedipus Lex 241). From the vantage of literary studies, however, it is just as essential to underline the fact that the self-othering that can be termed "literary" (allegory, irony, for instance) does take place within the operations oflaw, that it is not separate from it. Literature has no rescue mission to perform. The literary is to be generalized ifliterary studies in the narrow sense is not to sit in smug judgment of law as that which, a grotesque caricature of the forbidding father, represses or negates literature, ruling sternly: No storytelling hereP 0 An attention to the Truth Commission's complex everyday reading and listening practices, which, in setting responsibility to work, demand that each party depart from him- or herself, may be a way toward actively disrupting, in the name of the "empirical," the unfolding of the system of meaning that generates the binary of law and literature. One can take the headphones off, and nod one's head, feigning listening, even as one hears nothing; or one can keep them on and submit to an apparatus that allows one to be at once host, guest, and hostage to the other. 11 6. How, when testimony is heard, do existing cultural formations and their concepts and practices articulate with human rights in order to

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produce the dispropriation and possibility of substitution necessary for the Truth Commission to function as a systematic setting to work of responsibility? This is a question deserving of further reflection. The commission's hearings were, as I am describing them, a concrete enactment and realization of a founding concept of the 1993 interim constitution, the basis of the act providing for a truth commission-which, as part of its outline for national reconciliation, identified "a need for ubuntu but not for victimization." 12 Ubuntu, variously determined as a theological, moral, political, and juridico-legal concept, also informs the thinking of those who promoted the idea of a truth commission ( Truth Commission Report 1:125-128; c£ Krog, Country no, 263). Ubuntu can be understood, provisionally, as a notion of reciprocity: a human being is a human being through other human beings. One is, it follows, responsible for the other, in a way that, according to constitutional jurists, regulates and limits the rights of the individual in favor of the collective (Langa ~ 224). The public hearings represented ubuntu as responsibility, and reciprocity as a scene of hearing, of "reading" in a general sense, though they did so in a more radical way than the jurists who have deployed it in their decisions. Even before a witness departs from the questioner's script to make unanticipated claims-for the exhumation of a body, for instance-the staging of their exchange sets to work ubuntu as hearing in a way that, so to speak, removes the parties from themselves. At the Shell House hearing, as at numerous others, witness and questioner alike are heard in a tongue not their own. Response, responsiveness, responsibility-all appear, paradoxically, to require this apparatus of removal or displacement from self The commission's report, in contrast to its hearings, does not assume the task of restoring human dignity to victims by facilitating their speaking, but sets out instead to establish a full picture of human rights violations. Written in the third person, its genre is history. Although it reproduces extensive extracts from the testimony of witnesses (see esp. 5:350-435), it does not re-create the fractured 1-you reciprocity of the hearings, the uncanny identifications, and the movement of self-displacement tacit in ubuntu as its "founding" concept. Its method of reading remains a formulaic processing of testimony, 13 a reduction of the 1-you exchange to the third person. Our reading does not end with the book. We endeavor to enter the difficult public verbal space at the hearings, in the exchange between witness and questioner, between reading and hearing, between responsibility and rights. As a responsibility, this reading, like the hearings,

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has a diurnal rhythm; it is, in other words, a "journal," or also a journal, and so runs all of journalism's risks. 14 7· The widespread emergence of ubuntu as a guiding concept in public discourse in post-apartheid South Africa calls for a response. Itself regarded as a model of responsibility, ubuntu demands to be read in each of its various pragmatic inscriptions. Long recognized in the space of contact between Mricans and Christian missionaries, 15 in the immediate post-apartheid period ubuntu stood out not only as a political keyword and a new buzzword in participatory business management, 16 but, under the leadership of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 17 supplied a unique ethical foundation for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 8. According to its final report, the commission interpreted its task of '"restoring the human and civil dignity of victims"' in terms of "restorative justice." The report stresses that among the "traditions" it drew from, "such as the Judaeo-Christian tradition and Mrican traditional values .... As far as traditional Mrican values are concerned, the fundamental importance of ubuntumust be highlighted" (Truth Commission Reportr:127). The constitutional provision for "a need for ubuntu but not for victimization," though ostensibly written to allay perpetrators' fear of prosecution, is given a more capacious interpretation by the commission's report. In order to explain the meaning of ubuntu, the report refers to a decision of the Constitutional Court declaring the death penalty unconstitutional, in breach of the fundamental human rights guaranteed by the constitution. While all of the concurring judgments made reference to human rights, several of them also invoked ubuntu. The commission's report draws its basic definition from the judgment of Judge Yvonne Mokgoro: "[u}buntu, generally translated as 'humaneness,' expresses itself metaphorically in umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu---'people are people through other people"' (Truth Commission Report 1:127). 18 Mokgoro's exact words were: "[g]enerally, ubuntu translates as humaneness. In its most fundamental sense, it translates as personhood and morality. Metaphorically, it expresses itself in umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, describing the significance of group solidarity on survival issues so central to the survival of communities" (~ 308). Mokgoro, who has written on the ambiguities for women of "traditional leadership" and "customary law" (Mokgoro, "Traditional Authority''), attempts to delineate several senses of ubuntu. The first two are ready translations into English and provide the kind of definitions one might find in a dictionary. With their agentless "translates as," these renderings give little room for

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analysis, apart from the genealogy of humaneness, humanity, and morality to which the English language in South Mrica attaches. 9· The third sense given by Mokgoro does not render ubuntu into English. To say that "[m]etaphorically, ubuntu expresses itself in umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu" is less to provide a translation than to introduce a problem not eliminated simply by providing, as she does, the communitarian gloss of "group solidarity." We will translate the idiom more slowly than the judges, and more carefully than the Truth Commission, whose rendering, though not useless, is inexact, and whose citation of the phrase, like Mokgoro's, is unmotivated when it should be more reserved. The formulation given by Mokgoro is in Zulu, establishing the Zulu idiom for ubuntu as exemplary when Zulu is not the only language in which ubuntu finds expression. The example from Zulu finds its way from her judgment into the commission's report without it being asked what it means for Zulu to be exemplary in a report on national reconciliation after apartheid, and what it means for the Zulu idiom to be cited as exemplary in an official document drafted in English. Not only would such questions enter into the politics of language, ethnicity, national identity, and regional autonomy, and the extent of the role of ubuntu in it, but they would have to delve into the more basic dynamics of hospitality and translation that are implied but silenced in its official emergence at the Constitutional Court and in the Truth Commission's report. As an analysis of the phrase will show, citation of the Zulu idiom in the report, and at the hearings, can itself be read as a setting to work of ubuntu. The translation involved in this setting to work is not a rendering of one language into another but a learning to speak another language, another's language, without, in any accepted sense, understanding it. Citing ubuntu, as a setting of it to work, displaces from him- or herself the one who cites it, promising a becoming of another self without being able to conduct one there. When translation is the issue, all positions are less stable than is typically assumed. The overdetermined scene represented at the Truth Commission pinpoints linguistic and "cultural" translation as exemplary of reading. Engaging in a process of this kind that has one speak the language of another, without ever understanding it, making it one's own but never rendering it into one's own language, performs a dispropriation that never quite reaches the point of appropriation. In a kind of mise en abyme, the commission's final report asks a Zulu idiom, ubuntu, an idiom for hospitality, for hospitality to what it reports in English. It petitions it for ubuntu. Although

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the seven volumes of the official text are in English, Zulu, in this tiny citation, is called upon to be host to what appears to be host to it. If one were to track responsibility here, as (a way of) reading and (of) listening, one would have to attend as much to the technics of translation as to the tropic mobility of ubuntu. 10. The Zulu phrase umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu has, in its tropic movement, an economy of singular and plural not captured in the banal "people are people through other people." 19 Umuntu is the singular form of -ntu, or human being. The prefix -ngu is copulative. Nga- is a noun prefix for forming instrumental adverbs and combines with abantu, the plural of -ntu, to form ngabantu. A preliminary translation might thus be: a human being is a human being through human beings; or the beinghuman of a human being is realized through his or her being (human) through human beings. The ontological figure of ubuntu is commonly converted into an example and imperative for human conduct, as when, as Mokgoro notes, it "translates as humaneness . .. [or] morality." Converting ubuntu as ontology into an imperative for a subject of responsibility-to "respect ... human dignity," and so forth-conceals the dispropriation at the root of the concept. It is this movement that Mokgoro tries to manage by characterizing it as "metaphorical." If there is a metaphorical shift, it is not incidental to the concept. Ubuntu depends on it, if it is not simply to be a prescription of the precedence of the collective; already, ubuntu is, as Judge Pius Langa's judgment seems to say, typically regarded as antithetical to individual rights(' 224). Beginning with umuntu, ubuntu, if it is an imperative, demands that responsibility begin with singularity. If we preserve that moment of singularity we do not simply reduce ubuntu to group solidarity and loyalty (management's "organization man" or "woman"). 20 The kind of dispropriation figured by ubuntu implies that being human, in an ethico-political sense, means that one does not enter the public sphere with ready-made rights and duties-any rights and duties have to be claimed and exercised. 21 Making the claim to a right transforms the claimant and the one upon whom the claim is made. Both parties are exiled from their "proper" selves. Once one engages ubuntu, there is no going back to a more "fundamental sense," which would ground the subject of rights and responsibilities in prescribed duties and responsibilities, let alone do so within a predetermined communal hierarchy. 22 Ubuntu implies radical dispropriation-that is why it has the transformative potential that all these writers sense and seek to appropriate and manage. 23

28

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n. It is not clear what sense of metaphor Mokgoro entertains when she writes that "[m]etaphorically, ubuntu expresses itself in umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu." The syntax of the phrase figures the essence (ngumuntu) of umuntu as a synecdoche of abantu. Yet the syntax posits or promises umuntu apart from or prior to abantu, although, as the phrase constates, umuntu has no "proper" sense until it has made the tropic passage by way of abantu. Ubuntu thus does not simply state that human individuality depends on membership of a collective, even if it is inscribed by a communalist interpreter. The collectivity of abantu is contingent-historical, so to speak-and, unlike the statement umuntu ngumuntu, can claim no authority of identity or essence. If umuntu awaits a propriety delivered to it as a synecdoche of abantu, abantu itself, being the contingency of umuntu's dispropriation, has no authority apart from being posited or promised by ubuntu phrased as umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. A related logic comes to light when, as Langa observes to be commonplace, "distraught members of society decry the loss of ubuntu" (~ 225; quoted in Truth Commission Report1:127). Ubuntu takes the place of something absent, something that may never have existed, that lacks a proper name yet is promised by being posited. A distrait trace, phrased as a cry for something lost that may never have been, ubuntu could itself stand in for a "distraught member ... of society." This foundationless basis for "reconciliation" may be what the hearings confirm for us, as they set to work responsibility in a technics of substitution. 12. The human rights violation hearing, at the same time as being an occasion for collecting data on violations, is, in contrast to the amnesty hearing at which Mr. Mhlaba gives evidence, deliberately staged as an enactment of ubuntu as responsibility. Miming abantu-to-come, as the return to a state when humanity-and, anachronistically, human rights-was respected, the hearing works as an exemplification of ubuntu as umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. Concluding its account of ubuntu, the commission's report cites testimony by Susan van der Merwe, whose husband disappeared without a trace from their farm in 1978, apparently abducted and killed by Umkhonto weSizwe guerrillas. TestifYing in Mrikaans, she offers a Tswana version of ubuntu (or botho) and sets out its moral implications for South Mrica: "The Tswanas have an idiom which I learned from my husband which goes 'a person is a person by other people, a person is only a person with other people.' We do have this duty to each other. The survival of our people in this country depends on our co-operation with

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each other" (Truth Commission Report r:n8). What the report does not tell us, in addition to the fact that Van der Merwe testifies in Mrikaans, is that Archbishop Tutu, who chairs the hearing, responds at the end of her testimony by countersigning what she says: "Here you come along and I believe that it is something wonderful for our country, to be able to experience and accept the fact that we are all but human, Black or White, we all feel the same pain, we all feel the same anguish. When you said here that a person can only be a person by other people, for all the people here [in the audience] to hear that, they are all standing with you" (Van der Merwe q). Tutu is a well-known proponent of ubuntu, and is even credited with an "ubuntu theology" in terms of which the humanity of the other is premised on the belief that every human being is created in the image of God (Battle). Here he recognizes Van der Merwe's invocation of ubuntu, by reiterating it, and by noting a reciprocity in those who hear it. To hear this invocation, and to recognize it, is itself an enactment of ubuntu; indeed, the hearing functions, according to its norm, as a ritual instantiation of ubuntu not only as responsiveness to the witness but through the rapid relay of exemplarity, as responsibility itself. 13. This is not all there is to the hearing. The English transcript of the proceedings, although largely concealing the process of mediation, reveals that each party is, as he or she speaks, effectively displaced from him- or herself. The microphones, upon which hearing physically depends, 24 are not always switched on at the right time, and something goes wrong with the transmission of the Mrikaans translation when Commissioner Fazel Randera, who speaks in English, takes over the questioning: MRS VAN OER MERWE:

I do understand Mrikaans, but I can't hear it all the

time. Shall I repeat what I said? Please put it in English. OR RANOERA: Mrikaans is on [translation channel] one. MRS VAN OER MERWE: I do understand English, it did not come through very clearly. OR RANOERA: Did you hear me, ma' am? MRS VAN OER MERWE: Yes. (Van der Merwe 15) OR RANOERA:

MRS VAN OER MERWE:

The process of reciprocal recognition stage-managed by Tutu depends on a highly mediated relay of speech. Members of the audience may hear the testimony in Van der Merwe's Mrikaans or, having utilized the earphones

30

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provided, hear her formulation of ubuntu in Tswana or Sotho. She may thus, in effect, be heard as speaking in one of those languages, a witness testifying not only to an idiom in a language not her own but in a language not her own. Given this mediation, her citation of ubuntu would be one in which use and mention are inseparable. The problematic of ubuntu is utterly inextricable, as set to work at the Truth Commission from this being-heard in a language not one's own; even when witness and questioner speak the "same" language, it must be possible for them to be heard in languages not their own. 14. Historically, Susan van der Merwe's invocation of ubuntu can be heard as laying claim to an Mricanness. As she testifies, the Van der Merwes farmed in neighboring Botswana for many years, and Mr. van der Merwe, who spoke fluent Tswana, was given the Tswana name of RaseTswana (father of the Tswana) by people he helped, losing his proper name to gain a name. Her plea is for hospitality, an acknowledgment of hospitality, and a plea for an acknowledgment of hospitality; she is guest and host. Analyzing the transcript reveals that her plea, and the reiteration of her words by Tutu, along with his speaking for the collective response of the audience-"for all the people here to hear that, they are all standing with you" -implies a much more complex system of mediation than the final report captures, and a more delicate reading than it undertakes. Technics, in the form of a translation apparatus made in Belgium and simultaneous translators recruited locally (Truth Commission Report 1:298-299), outruns the archbishop's understanding of what is going on as a sharing of pain and anguish. The technical apparatus "knows" that what Tutu stage-manages could not take place without a radical dispropriation in which witnesses in effect speak in tongues other than their own, and hear questions in tongues foreign to the questioner. One of the hazards of being a translator is the inevitable identification with, and assumption of the place of, the witness who is testifying: "[w]hat really gets to you, say the translators, is that you are always talking in the first person .... If a Zulu-speaking victim says 'they connected the electrodes to my private parts and turned on the current,' then that is what the translator says in English, Mrikaans, or Tswana. His private parts become your private parts. His pain is yours. 'If you are saying "I" ... then your brain is telling you it is you"' (Laufer 88). Assuming the place of the witness means not only saying "I" in an identification with him or her but also undergoing a self-division in which one is compelled to address

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oneself as an other. The "I" of the translator is held hostage: "your brain is telling you it is you." As the switching point for the process, the translator undergoes a concentrated version of what each hearing demands of witness and questioner alike in order to stage ubuntu as empathetic reciprocity and "national reconciliation." More than an "example" from history for white dispropriation as becoming-African-a repetition with a difference of earlier appropriative self-namings, ''Afrikaner" and ''Afrikaans" (see Brink 76)-Susan van der Merwe's testimony brings to light the iterable structure of dispropriation underlying the Truth Commission as a listening- and response-generating machine. 15. Replying to the questioner, the witness appears not only to address him or her as another but to address an other, or others, in the questioner. Two aspects of the victim hearings are interlinked and relate fundamentally to this dispropriation of, and within, the addressee. The commission acts, so to speak, as an engine of "transference." In assuming responsibility, not for anything it may itself have done but for the responsibility of others, the Truth Commission generalizes responsibility. In the "transference" engaged in relation to the victim, the commission, through the questioner, assumes responsibility not only for what a perpetrator has done but, in certain cases, also for the responsibility of the witness for one who has died. Then it is a bringer and transmitter of condolence. It serves, in other words, as a proxy for both sides. Susan van der Merwe was only one of many witnesses to express the desire to provide the proper funeral rites for the victim on behalf of whom she is testifying: "My story, Mr Chairperson and Commissioners, is but a story of a woman who could not bury her husband because there was no corpse .... I have accepted [his death], but I would love to receive any of his remains, just to be able to say I have buried him" (Van der Merwe n-u). This is where "transference" is linked, in complex ways, to the ability of the commission to transform itself and its mandate in response to representations made to it. From its inception, the commission was inundated with requests from witnesses to help provide proper funeral rites and to join, materially and affectively, in their work of mourning. The commission allowed itself to be transformed by the appeals of witnesses, some phrased in terms of African "custom," into assuming one responsibility more: 25 the responsibility of the witness for the one who died. 16. Petitions for funeral rites led the commission to transform itself in another way. Researchers found that during the first five weeks of

Truth Commission journal and Notes the hearings in 1996, the majority of witnesses who came forward were women testifYing to gross human rights violations to husbands, sons, or brothers (Truth Commission Report 4:289). Women who approached the commission for the remains of the deceased tended not to testifY to violations to themselves. The response of the commission was to modifY its questionnaire and to hold special women's hearings in 1996 and 1997, at which women testified to gender-specific abuses, such as sexual torture, rape, and threats of harm to their children. Whereas the hearings remedied somewhat the "loss of ubuntu" of women in relation to themselves, individually and collectively, the commission's final report presents as exemplary of ubuntu the woman who wants her husband's body back. 26 To assess the implications of this discrepancy will mean showing how, if, as exemplary, the structure of responsibility as a supplementary "one ... more" is before the dead, the feminist challenge both preserves and alters what it means to be possessed by responsibility for the other as one who has died. This nexus I elaborate in the next two chapters. 27 In several testimonies, women described their experiences in terms of death, and separation from the body. Thandi Shezi, who has acted in plays by the survivor group Khulumani (Let Us Speak Out!), endured being raped by police while in detention by splitting herself off from her body: "I divorced myself from that body which was being violated.... I had to remove my soul and my spirit and put it at the corner.... I wish to go back to collect my soul. For the real Thandi is still there at the corner, the Thandi that is talking and moving is not the real Thandi" (Facing the Truth). 28 Announcing an attempt to reunite soul and body, the testimony of Shezi, along with that of several others, prompts us to reinterpret the ethical exemplarity of responsibility before the dead. The body, figured as dead, can also be a living body. It may be its being split off, lost, dead to the one speaking, rather than dead in the narrow sense, that entails the supplementary splitting and doubling that makes the responsibility assumed by the questioner one responsibility more. q. At the hearing the questioner might, then, not be the one ultimately addressed by the witness. It might be the dead one, it might be the perpetrator, or it might be the body of the witness herself. In acceptance of responsibility for such others, responsibility may ultimately mean recognizing that I may not be the one, or the only one, addressed. To read responsibly may then be to acknowledge that if I am the one reading, the one who responds, I am not the one, or the only one, to whom what I

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read is addressed. This is another version of how the law, because it abides in the dijfirance of truth and fiction, is open to alteration. The scene I have been describing shows such aporias of responsibility in public acts of "reading," in the bare bones of the Truth Commission hearings, and in the commission's attempt, with the aid of its translation apparatus, to enact responsibility as ubuntu, an iterable structure realized historically. The syntax of ubuntu as umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu sets in motion a process of tropic displacement reflected in the positional substitution palpable at the hearings and in the resultant dispropriation of the parties in the assumption of responsibility for the other, and the responsibility of the other. Translated hearing, facilitated by this apparatus, expands the bounds of "reading" and allows one to see how it is that literature resides at the heart of law as a dispropriation and substitution in responsibility, and what that means for the transformation under way in South Mrica. Its wager was that, by operating as a system of amb-iguity, it could, through making possible transference and substitution, make reparation to victims on behalf of, and in the absence of, perpetrators either unwilling or unable to do so in person. It is in response to its operations that writers of poetry and fiction, relaying this ambiguity, iterate in various ways the mournful and reparative dynamics set to work at the hearings. In doing so, they pose questions, setting an example for what it might mean for the day-to-day decisions of theory to do justice to those events.

§2 Remembering Apartheid

What was apartheid? How is it being remembered? Two questions. The first of them, almost at once, encourages a third: what is apartheid? An answer to the first question will be an answer to the third. Knowing what apartheid was, it is implied, we will know what apartheid is. We will know what it is in essence. But if the answer supplied to the first question is the same as that to the second, the question has been begged. This affects not only what we understand apartheid to have been. The essence of what apartheid is has been derived from an activity of remembering that is historically contingent. Is there a way out of this circle? A path to a place where essence will in no way be trammeled by any historical excrescence-where apartheid, stamped with -heid, the Afrikaans suffix for -ness, stands forth intact, unique-where, in a final victory, apartheid's phantasy of separateness will have perfected itself in truth? Supposing that responsibility involves the unstable articulation of essence and contingency, and consequent decision in the "night of non-knowledge," 1 would it be responsible to seek such a way out? Is it possible, on the other hand, not to embark upon, or to want to embark upon, such a search? The tide "Remembering Apartheid" is to be understood as shorthand for this aporia of certain knowing. It refers in the first place to ways of remembering bound up, in South Mrica, with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. These have involved not only the collection of facts anchored in recollection, a classically forensic project, but also the admission of acts of grieving and the invitation for others to participate in these acts-a participation to which I will refer, employing the word in the general sense of a mourning-with, as condolence. The word "remembrance" (echoing the 34

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German Gedachtnis, with its folding in of denken) might more closely approach the inextricable interlinking, before the commission, of epistemic and mournful practice. Yet, in traversing the aporia provisionally without eliminating it, the tide of my chapter lays claim to knowledge. It announces: this is apartheid, for this is what apartheid was. It thereby also seeks to acknowledge that just as forensic evidence assembled by the commission may be bound up with the grieving of witnesses, no claim about the nature of apartheid can be untouched by the affective demands of those who bear the burden of remembering. The legacy of apartheid of which they speak is of undiscovered bodies, of bodies denied a proper burial. They seek the help of the commission in rectifYing this state of affairs. What we hear when we listen to those witnesses is this: apartheid was a proscription on mourning, specifically of the other. Can we then not say: apartheid is, at least for those who remember the worst deeds committed under it, and who attach to them a particular affect, a proscription on mourning the other? Viewed from a purely forensic point of view, it is far from clear that we possess evidence to impeach this testimony. Apartheid was/is, in the most general terms, an interdict against the development of a social formation. Although Mrikaner-nationalist politicians and intellectuals sometimes frightened the volkwith images ofbeing swamped by the vast black Mrican mass or of being ploughed under as a people (see Louw 1:505), the nature of that social formation was never outlined in precise terms. Versions of racial degeneration and bastardy were proffered by apartheid theorists such as Geoffrey Cronje, but what the ideology of race purity and the power that hid behind it really entailed was a foreclosure of the other, and thus of any historical possibility of another social formation-of what Breyten Breytenbach, alluding in Dog Heart (69) to the novelist Jan Rabie, calls "other-making" (andersmaak). In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Sigmund Freud offers an account of the social formation that, although standing on the shoulders of conservative nineteenth-century writers such as Gustave le Bon, does not depend upon racial, cultural, linguistic, or other characteristics that, singularly or together, formed the core of all post-Romantic European nationalist ideology, that of Mrikaner nationalism included. Like aspects of Benedict Anderson's more recent thoughts on nationalism in Imagined Communities, Freud's account is open-ended, generalizable to the formation of social groups, and thus also to the paths of their proscription or destruction. 2 As is well known, Freud's account involves love: the

Remembering Apartheid cohesion of a group depends on the love for a leader that mediates an identification of members of the group with one another. But because, in terms of his theory, the loved object is lost and substituted, it follows that Freud's account also involves mourning and condolence. Just as psychoanalytically informed commentators on apartheid have concentrated on desire and the counterattack against it found in apartheid thinking rather than on proscriptions on mourning, the centrality of loss and mourning in Group Psychology is less typically remarked by readers of Freud than the libidinal ties they presuppose. I treat Freud's essay in detail in the penultimate section of this chapter, where I consider its use by theorists in post-World War 11 Germany. Before doing so, I explore the Truth Commission's notions of apartheid and its ideas about fostering memory, and analyze a single testimony that, offering a complicated convergence of memory and mournful commemoration, begins to make apparent a remembering in which apartheid lingers on as a proscription on mourning. Given the opening offered by the law as it elicits her testimony, the witness's words may be heard to alter the commission's sense of what it was after when it set out to find out the truth about the wrongs of the past, and what it and others thought that they might do to set them right. In so doing, her testimony makes it apparent, for a wider audience, how an ethics of responsibility set to work in condolence underwrites the social and political bond.

The Truth Commission and Apartheid The task of the Truth Commission, before anything else, was to foster and repair what its report refers to variously as "national memory," "public memory," and "social memory'' (Truth Commission Report 1:n3, 374; 5:227). This project had been anticipated by the interim constitution of 1993, which "provides a historic bridge between the past of a deeply divided society ... and a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence for all South Mricans" (South Africa, Promotion, preamble). The making of memory was at the head of a threefold mandate for addressing the divisions and "conflicts of the past." 3 The Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act empowered the Truth Commission to formulate means for the reparation and rehabilitation of "victims"-a clause providing for the restoring of victims' human and civil dignity by allowing them to testifY in their own words. It also gave the commission the authority-a controversial one-to recom-

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mend amnesty for "perpetrators" who made full disclosure of violations of human rights committed by them. Before entering into these matters, the act bound the commission to establish ... as complete a picture as possible of the causes, nature and extent of the gross violations of human rights which were committed during the period from I March 1960 to the cut-off date [w May 1994], including the antecedents, circumstances, factors and context of such violations, as well as the perspectives of the victims and the motives and perspectives of the persons responsible for the commission of the violations, by conducting investigations and holding hearings. (South Africa, Promotion 3[1] [a]) The "picture" established by the commission and reproduced in its report was first made public in October 1998. In that picture, the image of apartheid occupies a central place, despite a generic phrasing of the act-"conflicts of the past," "gross violations of human rights"-that entirely avoids the word. Apartheid is, in a word, repressed. In his foreword to the report, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who chaired the commission, underlines the idea that "we cannot hope properly to understand the history of the period ... unless we give apartheid and racism their rightful place as the defining features of the period" ( Truth Commission Report 1:15). 4 Taking care to note that "the Commission was restricted to examining only a fraction of the totality of human rights violations that emanated from the policy of apartheid," and stating that "[c]onceptually, the policy of apartheid was itself a human rights violation'' (Truth Commission Report1:29), the commission sets out its working conception of apartheid. This takes the form of a capsule history that simultaneously traces its descent to colonial and postcolonial (post-19m) policies of racial segregation and discrimination, and establishes its exceptionality: "the apartheid system was of a qualitatively different type" (Truth Commission Report 1:29). What made apartheid different, according to the report, was that whereas a relatively uncoordinated succession of practices and administrative measures had made racial segregation and discrimination (particularly in the franchise, labor, and land ownership) a fact of colonial and postcolonial South Mrican life, the state under the National Party made itself the agent in intensifying and systematizing the medley of laws and institutions it had inherited. It took on "social engineering" (Truth Commission Report 1:26) as a deliberate task: "No longer content to tolerate a de facto pattern of segregation in which 'grey' areas of social mixing remained-such as in

Remembering Apartheid

urban residential patterns and inter-racial personal contacts and relationships, including marriage-from 1948, the new government set out to segregate every aspect of political, economic, cultural, sporting and social life, using established legal antecedents where they existed and creating them where they did not" (Truth Commission Report1:29-30). While useful, this historico-political account of apartheid is by no means original, nor is it uncontested. 5 Aside from the interpretation that it explicitly rejects, that apartheid is continuous with colonialism, and other interpretations-apartheid as "racial-capitalism"-that have an equally marginal place in the report (Truth Commission Report 4:19), what such an account asks the readers of the report to do is to remember apartheid as a system of which the main architect and builder was the state, whose main instruments and tools were an array of laws. With its investigations and report restricted to the "gross violation" of human rights, this characterization of apartheid, although central to the picture, is like a ghost in it and cannot be a fully acknowledged operative presence in its account. 6 It is certainly there, the commissioners appear to say, and it haunts our every word, but we have no mandate to deal with it. A few chapters later there is a call, echoing the wording of the act, for "a deeper analysis of the underlying nature, cause and extent of apartheid" (Truth Commission Report 1:132). Yet, apart from a textbook definition of racism as "a systematic ideological doctrine which creates the 'other' as essentially different .... [and which provided] the rhetorical basis for apartheid and 'separate development'" (Truth Commission Report 5:282), the report supplies no evidence of a "deeper analysis" of what apartheid's "underlying nature" was, or of how the Truth Commission's work might have made it possible to develop one.l Foreclosure of the "other" is, however, examined in one of the most far-reaching critical explorations of apartheid thinking, J. M. Coetzee's essay "The Mind of Apartheid: Geoffrey Cronje (1907-)." In a reading of the rhetoric of the works of Cronje, one of the most influential apartheid thinkers, Coetzee points out that, in its obsession with blood-mixing, "Cronje's apartheid-and, to the extent that Cronje's apartheid was realized in legislation, real apartheid-develops as a counterattack upon desire" ("Mind of Apartheid" 18/ Giving 0./fense q8). Coetzee's work on censorship in Giving 0./fense: Essays on Censorship (1996), of which his essay has become part, is informed by Rene Girard's account of mimetic desire-in terms of which the desire of a subject for an object is modeled

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on that of another for the object. This triangular structure leads, according to Girard, to rivalry and violence. At key moments in his texts, as Coetzee explicates them, the desire feared by Cronje is modeled upon, or is the model for, the desire of the other: "separation (apartheid) will remove the white man from the daily view of the black man and thus ensure that an essentially unattainable white culture and lifestyle do not become the object of his envious desire. It will also remove the black man (the black woman?) from the view of the white man and thus ensure that he (she?) does not become the object of white desire" ("Mind of Apartheid" 15/ Giving Offinse 176). To this extent, Cronje's counterattack can be analyzed in terms of mimetic rivalry. The attack upon desire that Coetzee's psychoanalytically informed reading tracks in Cronje's apartheid thinking can be explicated in terms of Freud's group psychology: by imposing a ban on the mutual (rival) desire for a specific object-White for Black, Black for White-apartheid attacks the conditions of possibility for a social formation including Blacks and Whites as equal partners.8 Without elaborating (as I will shortly) on the complex position of mourning in Group Psychology, we can observe, in simple terms, that mourning, as the giving up of a loved object, presupposes desire for that object. It is therefore logical that apartheid and its precursors would also have included a bar against the mourning of the other. Such a prohibition was indeed concretely enacted under apartheid in a range of measures such as the segregation of places of burial and religious worship. What the calls for condolence at the Truth Commission appear to try to do, then, is to restore the conditions of possibility for desire, undo the prohibition of desire, and end the counterattack upon desire. If, in its report, the commission supplies an account of apartheid restricted by its mandate to produce a "picture" of historico-juridical scope, mine is a minor endeavor to inquire into its "underlying nature," seeking to deepen what it means to remember apartheid by concentrating on its mandate to make reparation. To do so is to move from the commission's report to its hearings, from a chronicling depiction to the day-to-day exchanges designed to restore the dignity of those testifying. When their testimony includes calls for reparation, it registers what apartheid is understood, or felt, to have taken away. When such calls involve mourning and condolence, memory inevitably shades into acts of commemoration. 9 Addressing what it repressed, disavowed, or foreclosed, they inevitably produce signs of what apartheid was or, more strictly speaking, will have been. 10

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Mourning and Condolence For the first few months of the Truth Commission's hearings in 1996, a succession of witnesses came before it in order to ask its assistance in according proper funeral rites to the dead. The formula employed by the member of the commission who was leading the testimony-welcome, short biography, brief account of violations done to oneself or witnessed, request to the commission-made it possible for witnesses not only to tell their stories but also to petition the commission for help in supplying components necessary for completion of those rites. The requests of these witnesses varied in content: details of how someone was killed; information about the location of a grave or remains; return of a body or body parts to next of kin; exhumation and reburial; issuing of a death certificate; and so forth. The print and electronic media remarked on the tendency at the time, with journalist Max du Preez's weekly Truth Commission Special Report airing two substantial features on it, 11 but as is often the case, the Truth Commission's own report does not do justice to what was taking place at the hearings. Although the witnesses were testifying as "victims," in the report "violating a corpse after death'' is classified as an "associated violation" (Truth Commission Report p6). It is supplementary to the event. The complicated affect of mourning-what Max du Preez refers to as "our basic emotions"-and its disruption have no place in the report's history of apartheid, its memory of apartheid. This despite the fact that, in its actual practices, the commission altered its initial course by responding to these appeals. Although not having provided for it, it found money to pay for several exhumations. The social and cultural significance of "symbolic re burial" was discussed in depth at workshops held by the reparation and rehabilitation committee (''Annexure A"). With the question of funeral rites, material and psychic economies converge. When a witness makes a request of the commission, he or she asks it to join materially and affectively in the work of mourning. This enlistment instantaneously multiplies through dynamics of substitution and transference-to the extent that the commission represents the national public, an assortment of victims, bystanders, and beneficiaries-and indeed stands in as proxy for the perpetrator who refuses to come forward and make good for the violations he or she has committed. Testifying on behalf of the deceased "victim," the witness before the commission invites condolence. On radio talk shows and in letters to the editor, people

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referred to the Kleenex Commission, or, less sympathetically, to the Snoten-Trane Kommissie (Snot-and-Tears Commission). In a terrifying but unavoidable complication, we glimpse, at an extreme of the continuum of those invited to condole, the figure of the "perpetrator." The limit, largely accepted by the Truth Commission, that it would act as proxy for the perpetrator is in this instance approached and probed. The remarkable testimony of Joyce N. Mtimkhulu from 26 June 1996, will be my example. The matter to which she testifies is, to summarize in preliminary fashion, the disappearance and believed murder of her son, Siphiwo Mtimkhulu, in April 1982. 12 A twenty-two-year-old activist in the Congress of South Mrican Students (COSAS) in Port Elizabeth, Siphiwo Mtimkhulu had been detained and tortured by the security police a number of times, beginning in 1980. 13 Mter being released from custody for the last time, he was unable to walk and his hair was falling out in clumps. At Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, the diagnosis was poisoning by thallium, an ingredient in rat poison. The subsequent press coverage, both local and international, put the police in a bad light. When Mtimkhulu instituted civil proceedings against the police for his treatment in detention, the police faced exposure and embarrassment. On his way back from Livingstone Hospital in Port Elizabeth, Mtimkhulu disappeared, along with fellow activist Topsy Madaka, who was driving him home in his car. Planting Madaka's car near the Lesotho border, the police concocted the story that he and Mtimkhulu, despite his being an invalid, had fled the country to undergo guerrilla training. In the years that followed, the police kept up a pretense of helping the Mtimkhulu family to find their son. It was only in early 1990, when police captain Dirk Coetzee made disclosures about the covert activities originating from the base at Vlakplaas, near Pretoria, that the family gained an inkling about what had actually taken place. Siphiwo Mtimkhulu and Topsy Madaka had allegedly been drugged and shot, and their bodies burned to ash on a pyre of wood and old tires. As her testimony makes clear, Joyce Mtimkhulu speaks out in order to bring the matter into the open. At the same time, she seeks to take the steps required to complete the process of mourning and to enlist the aid of the Truth Commission, and ultimately the killers of her son, in so doing. From the outset, Joyce Mtimkhulu's appearance before the commission allies the telling of a story with the production of grieving affect. An activation of memory is bound up with mournful commemoration. As the opening words of deputy chairperson Alex Boraine stipulate, the

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investigative body will endeavor to facilitate this convergence by declaring and displaying an attitude of sympathetic attentiveness: "I would on behalf of the Commission like to welcome you very warmly to this special hearing .... We care about every witness, young and old, Black and White, men and women, it makes no difference" (Mtimkhulu 1). Although part of the standard welcome accorded to "victims" when they come to testifY, in this case Boraine's assurances have an added weight, being made in the shadow of legal injunctions sought by policemen Jan du Preez, Nick van Rensburg, and Gideon Nieuwoudt, who were to be named in her testimony. For two months the courts had prevented Joyce Mtimkhulu from speaking before the commission (Boraine III-II4), thereby helping her son's killers deprive her of the opportunity to testifY, to mourn, and to invite condolence. As Boraine acknowledges: You travelled to East London, you and your husband were excited, at last you were going to have a chance to talk to a Presidential Commission, to the nation at large about Siphiwo. This was denied you, you had no chance. We met with you and you very graciously agreed that you will come to the Port Elizabeth hearing and you came, you sat over there and we waited once again, you were muzzled, you couldn't speak. All of us were angry and very upset, but you were remarkable. You too were upset, but you understood, because you knew that one day you would have an opportunity, and today is that day. (Mtimkhulu r-2) Not only will Joyce Mtimkhulu be able to testifY, but her story, told before the Truth Commission and disseminated by the media, will be made known, and the pain associated with it parceled out, across the nation. Accordingly, Boraine's repetitions establish a shared and reciprocal investment in what is to be told: "So it is very special for you and it is very special for us, it is very special for all the people from New Brighton, from Port Elizabeth and so many others who will be listening on the radio and watching and reading about you and your son and the suffering and pain that you've endured. We are so glad that you are here. My colleague Dumisa Ntsebeza is going to lead you as you tell your story'' (Mtimkhulu 2). Joyce Mtimkhulu will testifY in Xhosa, her mother tongue, and that ofTruth Commissioner Ntsebeza. Those present who do not understand Xhosa (a minority) will be able to listen on headphones to a simultaneous translation of the proceedings, which will also be broadcast nationally on radio and television. The technical apparatus for a widespread sharing of

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information and engagement of condolence is in place. That apparatus has the capacity not only to include a general public but also to make it possible in principle for the killer or killers to join in the process. Angrily alluding to their interdicts several times, Joyce Mtimkhulu's narrative activation of memory and her forensic performance are marked by a limit that only the participation of the "perpetrator" (or the figure of the perpetrator) will allow it to pass. Minimal as that participation is, it is what will carry her testimony beyond an account of facts and presentation of evidence to human rights violation. It is what will give it the potential to contribute to an according of proper funeral rites to her son, and thus, by fulfilling one of its material and social components, to the success of the work of mourning as a whole. Immaculate in red and white, also the colors of the church uniform she wears in her interview with Bill Moyers in his television documentary Facing the Truth (1999), Joyce Mtimkhulu holds aloft, for the commissioners to see, a fistful of her son's hair. Instantly one of the defining images of the Truth Commission, this is the moment in her testimony that is always replayed-the moment edited for Truth Commission Special Reports weekly coverage, and as part of Moyers's segment on the Mtimkhulu case. When Jillian Edelstein subsequently photographs Joyce Mtimkhulu in black and white in the same pose, crafting an inescapable allusion to Paul Weinberg's 1985 photograph of a comrade with raised fist at the funeral of Victoria Mxenge, the image gains for itself a place in the history of committed South African photography. 14 The image is, as it was, impossible to avoid. But televisual editing and photographic re-creation have pared from it the surrounding testimony that gives it an ambivalence. Although these are key traits, once that testimony is considered, it is no longer simply an image of accusation or an iconic moment of identification between mother and dead struggle-hero son. When the transcript of her testimony is consulted, and the ambivalent situation of this moment restored, these traits assume their place at the conjunction of narrative and graphic presentation of evidence, and the painfullabor of mourning. The poison secreted into his food by the police was what caused Siphiwo Mtimkhulu's hair to fall out. For those who remember the case, this proposition has, ever since he underwent toxicological tests at Groote Schuur Hospital in 1981, enjoyed the status of a well-established fact. What remains is for it to be given official and public acknowledgmentfor the authorities to cease saying that those who know it for a fact are

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liars. This is why it remains, fourteen years later, a matter of forensic urgency for his mother to display for the commission the clump of her son's hair as evidence: He continued to lose his hair, I would like to show you his hair. Really we have to bring evidence and exhibitions so that if you make your investigations, you should have a clear picture of what happened. This is Siphiwo's hair, this is the scalp, attached to the hair. That person is not at home, we all know that if you cut a person's hair, you don't cut the scalp, but I want you today to see Commission, that we have his hair together with his scalp attached to the hair. I want the Commission to witness what I've brought here today so that they should know the effect of the poison which was used on my son . . . . I don't know why did I keep this hair, I do not [know] why I could keep it for quite a long time, but I said to myself, let me keep this so that one day something might happen so that I can be able to show this to the people. That is why I am grateful today. (Mtimkhulu 15-16)

As the simultaneous translator renders it, Joyce Mtimkhulu's display, which takes place midway through her chronicle of human rights violations done to her son, the third part of the formula for questioning, corresponds to the script laid down by the commission. The words that accompany her drawing of Siphiwo's hair from the plastic bag in which she stores it-"we have to bring evidence and exhibitions so that if you make your investigations, you should have a clear picture of what happened"-allude to the commission's mandate to establish "as complete a picture as possible" of gross violations of human rights. A look at the hair will assist the commission in establishing that picture. Reminding one of what Mikhail Bakhtin, reading Dostoevsky's novels, calls hidden contestatory dialogue, we can almost hear her, implicitly addressing not only the commissioners but also the imagined advocates for the perpetrators, conduct a brief cross-examination of herself: With respect, Mrs. Mtimkhulu, how do we know that the hair you are showing us fell from your son's head? Could you not have shorn it from his head yourself? How do we know that you are supplying us with a true picture? "This is Siphiwo's hair, this is the scalp, attached to the hair. That person is not at home, we all know that if you cut a person's hair, you don't cut the scalp, but I want you today to see Commission, that we have his hair together with his scalp attached to the hair. I want the Commission to

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witness what I've brought here today so that they should know the effect of the poison which was used on my son." "Poison" operates as a "switch-word" in Joyce Mtimkhulu's testimony, marking an ambivalence in relation to her son and his politics. With its first appearance, the word "poison" conveys censure and accusation of the kind, noted by Freud in "Mourning and Melancholia," directed at the one who has died. When she tells Dumisa Ntsebeza about the consequences of Siphiwo's political activities as a high school pupil, he has to ask her to clarify what she has said. Verbal ambiguity is removed for an instant, only for it to reenter to cloud and complicate the matter: MRS MTIMKHULU: . . . Whilst continuing his education at Jabavu [high school], he was expelled because of this poison [which I regard as his political activities]. MR NTSEBEZA: There is a lot of poison that we are going to discuss about here. It is the other one that killed him. Which poison are you talking about now? MRS MTIMKHULU: Thank you very much, I am glad that you've corrected me. What I mean is the political involvement. Siphiwo was very much involved, he was a staunch member of the organisation, we realized that we couldn't do anything, he seemed to be addicted. (Mtimkhulu 4) 15

More than once from Joyce Mtimkhulu's testimony we learn that she and her husband had been unsympathetic toward the political activism of their son (Mtimkhulu 3, 6, 9, 13). Ntsebeza's attempt to have her disaggregate the "lot of poison that we are going to discuss about here" and distinguish clearly between "this poison [which I regard as his political activities]," and "the other one that killed him," only leaves matters more confused. Having apparently made a coherent distinction between two kinds of poison (ityheju), in response to Ntsebeza, whom she says has "corrected" her, she in effect says: "What I mean is the political involvement." The reasonable answer to Ntsebeza's observation and question, "It is the other one that killed him. Which poison are you talking about now?" might be: I do not know. But this is the realm of fact-finding, and it is necessary to establish what matter is under discussion. If we apply the either/or logic of forensic inquiry-or rather accept that in the psychic domain touched by that inquiry it could be both/and-and take Joyce Mtimkhulu's reply as it stands, her exhibition of her son's hair a few minutes later, "so that [the Commission] should know the effect of the poison which was used

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on my son," fails to demonstrate unequivocally that the sole poisoners were the police. To her mind, politics was also poison. It, ultimately, made Siphiwo's hair fall out. The videotape is never edited to tell this particular story. Jillian Edelstein's photograph, however, makes it possible to see her holding up of his hair as a reparative symbolic gesture. Miming the comrade's raised fist, the raised fist that Siphiwo would have made each time he sang "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika," she strives to make the loved object whole, and to undo the damage she has done to it in her grie£ Remembering hinges on commemorati-on. Deciding what happened depends on mourning, which can generate ambivalence, and thus equivocation at the level of what the commission terms "forensic truth" (Truth Commission Reporti:In). To the extent that mourning requires the assistance of others, decision about the past also depends upon condolence. When she holds up her son's hair for the commissioners, Joyce Mtimkhulu says that she does not know why she has kept it-kept it, as she says, for "quite a long time." Her explanation, or reconstruction, is: "I said to myself, let me keep this so that one day something might happen so that I can be able to show this to the people." She emphasizes the involvement of others in exhibition and evidence. But if the process is also one of reparation in aid of mourning, it would indeed make sense to have kept the hair so as eventually to add it to the rest of Siphiwo's remains for burial. This is exactly what she implies when it comes to the final stage of her testimony-her request to the commission, as solicited. With the commission as proxy, her address to it is inevitably also an address to the figure of the perpetrator or perpetrators, even when she is not mentioning their names. When she is giving an account of violations, the assistance needed is evidentiary: "Dirk [Coetzee] knows a lot about the poisoning. I would really like him to be subpoenaed so that he can come and give evidence" (Mtimkhulu 27). Then Dumisa Ntsebeza asks her: "What would you like the Commission to assist you with?" (Mtimkhulu 28). Having requested financial help for the education of Siphiwo's two children, she in effect attempts to enlist the help of the perpetrators and their accomplices-one of whom she refers to several times by first name-in at least materially completing the required funeral rites: MRS MTIMKHULU: . . • The last thing I would like to say is Dirk Coetzee and [Security Policeman Joe] Mamasela who are both perpetrators and evils, if they can just show us the bones of my child I would be grateful. Where did they leave the bones of my child? Where did they take him

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from Port Elizabeth, who handed him over to them? Where did they take him to? What did they do to him? How? I hope you are writing what I am saying, because I want it to be scribbled as I am saying it. Is it being written? MR NTSEBEZA: Yes, it is. MRS MTIMKHULU: Is it what you are writing now? MR NTSEBEZA[:] Yes, it is what I am writing now. MRS MTIMKHULU: All right. I'd like to speak directly to you then [addressing Archbishop Tutu, who is seated beside Ntsebeza and Boraine]. I'd like what I have said to be stated as I have mentioned. Who handed him over to them, what did they do to him, and where did they leave him? Because I could realise that they were so cruel and mean and scrupulous [sic] that they shot him, they were not satisfied they poisoned him, they were not satisfied again, they didn't get satisfied Archbishop, about the poisoning. Although they have already killed him, physically and mentally, they have done a lot to my child. They were so mean, but I would like them Mamasela or Dirk or whoever, Nieuwoudt and all his team, I don't know because now he is a prisoner, I'd like them to bring Siphiwo's remains, or they can just go and direct me to where they have buried his bones. I nearly buried his hair, I thought I would make a burial of my son through the hair. I tried to do something as a ceremony, but this didn't succeed very well because I didn't know what I was doing. I just wanted to make a memorial to show that I was mourning for my child .... I was just about to bury my son's hair, but by God's will I didn't, as if I knew that I would be here today. I think I have said enough. (Mtimkhulu 31-33)

It becomes apparent that Joyce Mtimkhulu knows, probably from Dirk Coetzee's revelations, some of the details of what happened-that Siphiwo was shot to death, for instance-and that the main point is not to confirm that, but to establish the whereabouts of his remains. That is what is repeated: "if they can just show us the bones of my child I would be grateful. Where did they leave the bones of my child? ... I'd like them to bring Siphiwo's remains, or they can just go and direct me to where they have buried his bones." Signaled again by a not knowing-"! didn't know what I was doing" -a reason other than evidence emerges for her having kept the hair. It is what could have been buried in order to effect funeral rites. A part of his body, it would have stood in for her missing son: "I nearly buried his hair, I thought I would make a burial of my son through the hair.... I just wanted to make a memorial to show that I was

Remembering Apartheid mourning for my child." Whereas when "I tried to do something as a ceremony, but this didn't succeed very well because I didn't know what I was doing," being directed to his bones, to where the rest of his remains are, will, she implies, make possible the work of mourning. It cannot succeed, however, without the aid of Gideon Nieuwoudt and the other perpetrators. Thus far, they have tried to silence her, "to prohibit him and sent an interdict that we shouldn't mention his name" (Mtimkhulu w), at once preventing her from mourning Siphiwo and summoning them by name as bringers, however minimally, of condolence. As Alex Boraine writes in A Country Unmasked, his reflections on the Truth Commission, the same ruling that allowed for the Nieuwoudt interdict would later permit the Mrican National Congress and the National Party to go to court to try to prevent the release of the final report (Boraine IIJ). (The National Party was successful: the blocks of black ink that conceal the commission's finding on F. W de Klerk and the National Party in the fifth volume of its report are the result. 16) Some months later, Gideon Nieuwoudt applied with the others for amnesty for the abduction and killing of Siphiwo Mtimkhulu and Topsy Madaka, and later provided an account of their actions at a public hearingY Although their version was a crucial public acknowledgment of what victims were saying, it was not credible in detail to all who heard it. Nieuwoudt had also applied for amnesty, with three other policemen, for the assault and killing of Steve Biko in detention in 1977. As with the 1997-1998 testimony in regard to Biko, widely perceived to have been evasive and incomplete, had that credibility been present, it may have been more than simply a contribution of dubious quality to establishing the "forensic truth" of what happened. Had the witnesses supplied a version of how and where Siphiwo Mtimkhulu died, although his bones could not be produced, their testimony might have been a contribution to the performance of funeral rites. It may have been an act of condolence. In this case, credibility being absent, the necessary condolence could not be made, let alone accepted. The question remains whether, in a case such as this, the commission's systematic substitution of itself for the perpetrator will be accepted as a default. What, then, was apartheid? How is it being remembered? The petitions for funeral rites heard at the Truth Commission's hearings, especially those calling for their proper completion, tell us that apartheid brought with it not only an attempt to disrupt the work of mourning through restrictions

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on political funerals and attacks on mourners, but, in so doing, effectively also entailed a refusal to join with survivors in the work of mourning. Going one better than the vengeful decrees of Creon that Antigone defied, 18 apartheid was, in other words, a systematic prohibition on mourning and a withholding of condolence. According to its most familiar traits, apartheid was a stratified system of ethno-racial domination and capitalist exploitation that, for complex historical reasons, involved legally enforced social separation as its distinguishing feature. The hearings of the commission show that this separation was engineered and confirmed not only by laws applying to one's place of residence and work, and one's sexual relations (the deeper implications of which have been explored by several writers, from I. D. MacCrone to]. M. Coetzee), but by measures that, blocking the conventional activity of grieving, entailed a massive refusal to mourn the dead of the other. When love is effected retrospectively, in principle the result is social cohesion. Though by no means adequately understood by the commission or its commentators and critics, the implication was clear: in order to overcome the divisions of the past, in order to make reparation for the violations of the apartheid era, an equally massive joining in mourning would have to take place. Mourning would make good for the violations of the apartheid era. As a system of social separation, apartheid would be undone through condolence.

Group Psychology The assumption that mourning brings about social cohesion, and can do so even when there is a history of division and wrong, underlies The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (1967fr975), Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich's classic psychoanalytic account of attitudes toward the Nazi past in postwar West Germany. According to Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich, Germans ("we" in the German, "they'' in the American translation) fail to assume the "moral duty to share in mourning for the victims of their ideological aims" because of an "inability to mourn the loss of the Fiihrer" (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 24, 23). This inability to mourn, they explain, with the aid of Freud's group psychology and account of the relationship between mourning and melancholia, is the result of an intensive defense against guilt, shame, and anxiety, a defense which was achieved by the withdrawal of previously powerful libidinal

Remembering Apartheid cathexes. The Nazi past was de-realized, i.e., emptied of reality. The occasion for mourning was not only the death of Adolf Hitler as a real person, but above all his disappearance as the representation of the collective ego-ideaL He was the object on which Germans depended, to which they transferred responsibility, and he was thus an internal object. As such, he represented and revived the ideas of omnipotence that we all cherish about ourselves from infancy; his death, and his devaluation by the victors, also implied the loss of a narcissistic object and, accordingly, an ego- or self-impoverishment and devaluation. (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 23-24) The latter are, in Freudian terms, conditions for melancholia. Germans, however, manage to ward off the expected "mass melancholia" occasioned by the loss of Hitler as ego ideal by "breaking all affective bridges to the immediate past" (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 25-26). This leads to a quantitative explanation. "De-realization" or "denial of the past" consumes so much energy that "little attention is paid to the victims, either to those on one's own side or to those on the other.... Now there is only feeling enough for the cathexis of one's own person, hardly for any kind of sympathy with others" (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 25). For this reason, "the moral duty to share in mourning for the victims ... could, at that time, be only of superficial psychic importance for most Germans" (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 24). In other words, not coming to terms with the collapse of an earlier social formation prevents the development of a new one in which the social bond is achieved not through identification with the Fiihrer but through a "work of mourning ... for the masses of fellow men slain through their doing" (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 24). Although they imply a link between amnesia and the inability to mourn, Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich never explain how this work of mourning will effect a new social bond. The closest they come is a distinction, arising from that between mourning and melancholia, between identification and empathy: "Mourning arises when the lost object was loved for its own sake .... Mourning can occur only when one individual is capable of empathy with another. This other person enriched me through his otherness, as man and woman can enrich each other by experiencing their difference" (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 27). They thus seek to detach their account of mourning from Freud's group psychology, in which dynamics of identification play a key role and, as they note, also involve mourning the loss of the object (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 23n). Identifying these dynamics as the problem, they use Freud only

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in critique. The group psychology is unavailable for theorizing what it would mean for Germans to mourn the victims. This leads them back to "Mourning and Melancholia," where, although he distinguishes the two terms, Freud never sets them in opposition and, although identifYing it as the source of melancholia, never implies that narcissistic object choice actually precludes mourning. In effect, what they do not explicitly note is that Freud's group psychology offers not only the basis for a political critique 19 but also a positive psychoanalytic theory of the social and thus, by implication, its potential lines of fissure. 20 Their employment, faithful to Freud's presentation in some of its overtones, and consonant with Adorno's "Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda," is restricted to a negative critique of"mass psychology'' and its formation of the subject. For this reason, although insisting upon its importance, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich are unable precisely to articulate why, although they see it as a "moral duty," mourning the victims of the world war will bring about social or national reconciliation. Illuminating neglected areas of Freud's group psychology, an analysis of what has taken place at the hearings of the Truth Commission helps us to discover why mourning for the other can be thought to contribute not only to an end to apartheid but also to an end to the dehumanization of the victims ("vermin," and so forth) identified by Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich as a condition of possibility for the Final Solution. The calls for condolence at the hearings suggest, I propose, that although Freud's group psychology is commonly received as a critique of authoritarianism (or criticized for being unable to produce a social theory free of authoritarianism), it can be generalized so that authoritarianism is one among several possible outcomes. In order to pursue this line of investigation, it will be necessary to return to the letter of Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis ofthe Ego (1921). Taking up thoughts from the papers on narcissism, "Mourning and Melancholia," and Totem and Taboo, and anticipating the topography elaborated in The Ego and the Id, Freud reformulates in psychoanalytic terms Le Bon's psychology of the crowd in order to address three questions: "What ... ·is a 'group'? How does it acquire the capacity for exercising such a decisive influence over the mental life of the individual? And what is the nature of the mental change which it forces upon the individual?" (Freud, Group Psychology 72). The main concern of my discussion will be Freud's treatment of the first of these questions (those ofMitscherlich and

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Mitscherlich and of Adorno are the second and third), specifically the dynamics of loss and mourning that, although part of its basic scaffolding, are neither fully elaborated by the work nor assimilated in its reception. It has been observed how prescient the work is of Nazi political manipulation; as Adorno writes, "It is not an overstatement if we say that Freud, although he was hardly interested in the political phase of the problem, clearly foresaw the rise and nature of fascist mass movements in purely psychological categories" (Adorno, "Freudian Theory" no). As Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich imply by employing Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud also "foresaw" in his categories the problem of rebuilding the social formation in the aftermath of fascism. When, adding to their analysis, the pivotal role of mourning in the work is taken into account, Freud's categories make it possible not only to understand how typical Germans bound themselves to an authoritarian leader but also how it was that the resulting social bond did not include, for instance, Jews, Gypsies, or homosexuals. The conditions of possibility for the Nazi genocide or for apartheid cannot be explained by a critique of authoritarianism alone (or by appending to it the sociological binary of in-group/ out-group). Making investigations other than such a critique possible, Freud's Group Psychology allows us to view the dynamics of social cohesion and dissolution on a less grand scale. To this extent, the investigation into the violations of apartheid taking place at the Truth Commission, and the requests made by witnesses for their reparation through aid with funeral rites, help to make imaginable a group psychology more responsive to the implications of Freud's formulations. Summing up his findings on "What is a group?" Freud is "in a position to give the formula for the libidinal constitution of groups [einer Masse], or at least of such groups ... that have a leader [Fuhrer] and have not been able by means of too much 'organization' to acquire secondarily the characteristics of an individual" (Freud, Group Psychology n6). The formula Freud gives is the following: "A primary group ofthis kind is a num-

ber ofindividuals who have put one and the same object in the place oftheir ego ideal [des lchideals] and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego [Ich]" (Freud, Group Psychology n6). Appended to this formula is a diagram representing the relationship. It renders graphically the distinction between the leader as "external object" and as "object" put in the place of the ego ideal. Broken lines link the former with the latter, whereas solid directional lines indicate the placement of object

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for ego ideal. In terms of Freud's discussion, "[i] n the case of identification the object has been lost or given up; it is then set up again inside the ego, and the ego makes a partial alteration in itself after the model of the lost object" (Freud, Group Psychology n4). The loss of the object, and its being given up, is precisely what is managed and accomplished by mourning. As he reminds us (Freud, Group Psychology 109), in "Mourning and Melancholia'' (1917), Freud had explained why the melancholic, who otherwise exhibits the same behavior as the one who mourns, engages in self-reproach. The answer lies, Freud writes, in the implications of "an identification of the ego [des Ichs] with the abandoned object [mit dem aufgegebenen Objekt]" (Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia'' 249). "In this way," Freud writes, "an object-loss [ Objektverlust] was transformed into an ego-loss [Ichverlust]" (Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia'' 249). This turn Freud interprets in terms of a "narcissistic identification with the object" that replaces the "erotic cathexis" (Liebesbesetzung), whereby the ego wishes to "incorporate" (einverleiben) the "loved object" (Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia" 249). This is what distinguishes "normal mourning," in which affect is gradually withdrawn from the lost object and transferred to another, from "pathological mourning" (Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia'' 250), which finds ways to not give up the lost loved object. In the chapter "Identification" in Group Psychology and the Analysis ofthe Ego, melancholia is cited as one instance among others of identification with the lost object. In the chapter that follows, "Being in Love and Hypnosis," which concludes with the formula and graphic for group formation, the dynamics of identification in loss, and substitution of lost object for ego or ego ideal, define states of being in love and hypnosis. Although Freud is careful to distinguish these states in some of their traits, they function textually as instances of the basic dynamics of loss and identification. If melancholia is, in all rigor, a mode of mourning in which the response to loss is a splitting of the ego and a substitution of the object for the ego ideal, and melancholia cannot be opposed to mourning (Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia'' 250), it becomes clear that, although melancholia is not as centrally placed in Freud's group psychology as being in love and hypnosis, the formula for group formation rests upon an elaboration of the concept of identification in terms of a generalized response to the loss of the object-that is to say, a generalized mourning. "Leader" or "Fiihrer" would be only one name for this object that takes the place of the ego ideal. 21

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Occupying the place that the Group Psychology reserves for the "leader," the object mourned may vary. Group formation can thus be said to reduplicate dynamics of mourning, disseminating it among multiple egos. Mourning is of a loved, or ambivalently cathected, object. Although proceeding along libidinal lines, Freud does not draw this conclusion. Nor do Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, or Theodor Adorno. If, for the individual ego, the process in question is one of mourning, for the group it amounts to condolence. In terms of what took place at the early hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, one can go further: the group itself is constituted through condolence, through a mutual joining in in the work of mourning. Part of a historically contingent effort at remembering apartheid, the requests made by witnesses that the commission assist them with funeral rites call, more broadly, for a revisiting of Freudian group psychology. When apartheid emerges, from these appeals to make good, as a blocking of mourning and condolence, we are in a position to generalize. Freud gives us an account not just for a critique of Fascist propaganda but of the social formation in general and its lines of fissure. 22 When the central place of mourning in that explanation is recognized, we have a clue to the formative dynamics that, missing or eroded, provide, as Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich half glimpse, the conditions of possibility for apartheid or for genocide. The dead one-not necessarily the "father"-can occupy the place of the ego ideal. Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich indeed imply, denouncing the transfer by Germans of responsibility onto Adolf Hitler as "internal object" (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 23), the necessity of assuming responsibility for and before the dead one. Apart from according with descriptions of African social formations in terms of "animism"-what Wole Soyinka refers to in The Burden ofMemory, The Muse ofForgiveness as "that unique spirituality of the African that establishes a continuum between the worlds of the living, of the ancestor and the unborn" (171)-in which the ancestor may or may not be a "leader" in any grand way but could be a community activist like Siphiwo Mtimkhulu, what this suggests is the makings of a minor group psychology or general psychoanalytic theory of social formation. Freud's more benign examples already indicate the possibility. This theory, although placing dynamics of mourning in a general sense at its heart, would not preclude the development of political authoritarianism, mass manipulation, and the cult of personality. But it would, as Freud seems to have realized, also explain far

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less disastrous developments, which a denial of mourning and withholding of condolence rule out, restrict, or cut short. Such a theory would help to make sense of why public requests for reparation after apartheid have widely assumed the form of appeals for funeral rites. It would allow us to see why such rites are thought to make good for the violations of apartheid-and, finally, in so doing, make possible "a deeper analysis of the underlying nature, cause and extent of apartheid."

Remembrance Neither the testimony ofJoyce Mtimkhulu, nor that of her son's killers, was the end of the story. There is a coda. It is possible to see a reciprocity, when the testimony of victim/ survivor is met by that of the perpetrators who seek amnesty-even if that reciprocity is fractured when the perpetrators are not believed. There is even an inviting of, and an entering into, condolence, when Joyce Mtimkhulu asks them to lead her to her son's remains, and they tell her of the fate of his remains (leaving the clump of hair as his only remnant). But does that mean that there is cohesion, that retrospective "love" joins the parties-or cements, through substitution, the social bond of South Africans? The latter would be difficult to verify. But the tale of the Mtimkhulu family and its dealings with the police has one more episode. And it testifies to the violence latent in Freud's account of the social formation. Where, as in Group Psychology and the Analysis ofthe Ego, there is identification, there will also be the possibility of violence. This is the conclusion of Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen in his reading of Freud. Like]. M. Coetzee, Borch-Jacobsen takes up Girard's account of mimetic desire, rivalry, and violence, 23 arguing in The Freudian Subject: It is not clear why the Oedipal rivalry [discussed by Freud in the chapter titled "Identification" in Group Psychology] should not go on forever, nor is it clear

by what miracle identification with the father should be spontaneously transformed into tenderness or respect. By the same token, it is not clear, either, why identifications within the group should be exempt from violence. For why should they tend to generate peaceful social relationships, as Freud consistently implies? His own premises ought to have led him to declare just the opposite. If group identification is Oedipal in structure, it is necessarily rivalrous. Therefore pregnant with an at least latent violence. Therefore ill-suited to engender social ties that are positive, harmonious, stable, and so on. (195)

Remembering Apartheid Although the mimetic violence linked to identification is alluded to by Freud in Group Psychology (105), the question is not broached of how, when each member (ego) takes the same loved object (leader, father), this violence relates to mourning and condolence. The relationship between mourning and mimetic violence had, however, been explored by Freud in Totem and Taboo (1913). There the founding social act is the murder and eating of the primal father by his sons: "in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him" (142). Beset by guilt and remorse, the murderous brothers mourn their father. Subsequently, the totem meal repeats and commemorates the founding event: "the totem animal is in reality a substitute for the father; and this tallies with the contradictory fact that ... it is killed and yet mourned" (141). If we bring the two texts toward one another, as Freud does (Group Psychology 122-128), we can see that if in Group Psychology and the Analysis ofthe Ego mourning is a condition of possibility for the social, and presupposes love for an object, in Totem and Taboo that mourning is not only necessary for the social and presupposes love, but also presupposes murder of the loved object. (The Kleinian overtones and implication of these presuppositions will become clear in Chapter 5.) That the love for the object may have been accomplished retrospectively-in Totem and Taboo through the act of mourning the murdered one (see Borch-Jacobsen, Emotional Tie 32)-is a possibility that applies equally in both works of Freud-and provides the raison d'etre for the impulse, felt with the Truth Commission and hinted at by Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich, to a reparation and a rebuilding of the social formation through condolence. At the extreme end of the spectrum stands the killer as bringer of condolence. When Gideon Nieuwoudt visits the Mtimkhulu household, violence ensues. It is now the winter of 1998. He says that he has come to ask for forgiveness. Jillian Edelstein, who writes about going to photograph Joyce Mtimkhulu at her home early the previous year, recalls watching the event on television: 12 February 1997

Mrs Mtimkulu held up her son's hair, which looked as if it was still attached to part of his scalp. Her husband sat in a corner, his head bowed. The front room of a modest township house. It was into this room that Gideon Nieuwoudt would come to ask the family's forgiveness for his role in their son's death, bringing a camera crew to film the proceedings. Siphiwo's son, Sikhumbuzo (which means "remembrance" in Xhosa) did not like Nieuwoudt's advances

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to his family nor did he believe in forgiveness. I watched his arrival on television. He drove right up to the house, armed with a missile, I think it was a brick, maybe a flowerpot. He found his target, took aim, and the camera shook a little as the object flew through the window and connected with the side of Nieuwoudt's head. He reeled. The blood began to gush freely down the side of his face. He looked mortified as he aborted the peacemaking enterprise and left the house. 24 (128)

Can we analyze this, not in terms of Nieuwoudt's chosen vocabulary of forgiveness, but in terms of mourning and condolence? Setting aside Nieuwoudt's vocabulary would be justified if, as Edelstein reports, 25 Sikhumbuzo did not believe in forgiveness. It would mean that the events take place according to another script, one legible perhaps in terms of mourning and condolence. According to testimony at the amnesty hearing, Nieuwoudt was the one who actually disposed of the remains, casting the ashes of Siphiwo Mtimkhulu and Topsy Madaka into the Fish River (Van Rensburg 13). On the one hand, extrapolating from Totem and Taboo, we see a "sacrificial" logic in operation: the "father" has to be killed and mourned in order for love to have its retrospective effect on mutual identification. On the other hand, following the mimetic violence implicit in Group Psychology and the Analysis ofthe Ego, the son will not share the father with the killer. Through his name, he preserves memory and commemoration for himself and his family. The word khumbula means to remember, to recall, to keep in mind. Khumbuza means to make remember, to remind; and khumbuzela, with its relative suffix -ela (for, to, at), means to commemorate. An isikhumbuzo--keepsake, memento, souvenir-is the object through which commemoration is materialized. The name Sikhumbuzo assigns the son a mandate. The policeman is a rival in remembrance, and thus in, and for, love. When he is driven off, he is denied the right to mourn, to condole, to love, to be loved. If this is his punishment, common sense about retributive justice allows us little quarrel with it (or with the letting of some blood from the ex-policeman's head). But it means in effect that the son (who does not like Nieuwoudt's "advances to his family") and the killer cannot be members of the same social formation-at least not through the mediation of the father (or this father). This is one case. There may be other paths-I am arguing for a minor group psychology, where there is no monopoly on leadership and mournful joining can take place in multiple ways. Even if at the extreme of the spectrum, the killer, whose minimal help is needed to locate

Remembering Apartheid remains and to complete the work of mourning, will not be guaranteed hospitality, the process of substitution set to work when the Truth Commission asks victims if it can provide help, which draws the public into the process of reparation, means that others variously positioned (victims, bystanders, beneficiaries, us) join, and may be allowed to join, in condolence. Jillian Edelstein is not hounded from the house when she comes to take the picture that records Joyce Mtimkhulu's act of remembrance. As an extreme instance, the abortive Nieuwoudt visit (one could also say: at least he came) nonetheless indicates that, in the wider process of bringing and accepting condolence, there is the ever-present threat of violence that can destroy the social order. We are back at the root of apartheid as a counterattack on desire: mimetic desire, rivalry, and violence; the resultant interdict against love for a particular object. To remember apartheid is to remember that what made for its conditions of possibility can be repeated in the very acts of remembrance that, by linking epistemic and mournful practice, undertake to give an account of, and make reparation for, apartheid.

§3 Hearing Women

On 28 and 29 July 1997 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission held a special women's hearing in Johannesburg. The hearing, one of three, was organized in response to the observation, made by researchers after the initial weeks of the commission's hearings, that women, despite being in the majority among witnesses, were not testifYing to human rights violations done to themselves (Truth Commission Report 4:283; Ross 17). A number of these women had been activists in their own right and had been detained, assaulted, and tortured by the police. The observation about women's testimony thus made an important intervention, bringing about an adjustment in the work of the commission in order to hear the specific testimony of women. It did not, however, fully measure the significance of the fact that women were testifYing on behalf of others; when, as was often the case, women petitioned for funeral rites, as I detailed in Chapter 2, it effected a significant change in direction by the commission. Another element was the fact that these claims were sometimes in the name of tradition or custom. When that was the case, a convergence occurred between a democratization of the public sphere achieved by affording women a hearing and the critique of the structural and founding violence of apartheid that emerged in feminist advocacy around the commission. Adding another dimension to the picture of apartheid that coalesced from the testimony of victims, the claims brought up for question the peculiar status of customary law in South Africa. Although the women's hearing was convened as a special space for women to testifY, the testimony of women, and the advocacy relating to it, ultimately revealed the commission's reluctance to interpret its

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mandate expansively by making findings about the structural violence of apartheid and its everyday effects on people. Mahmood Mamdani's criticisms of the Truth Commission's narrow interpretation of its mandatean unjustified omission of findings on forced removals and detentions, as well as on the system of customary law (''Amnesty or Impunity?")-can be sharpened by concentrating on the hearings at which women testified and on the advocacy concerning them. When witnesses at the special hearing held in Johannesburg broached abuses of women within the liberation movements in exile, they both suggested an unfinished critique of gender ideology and touched the very limits of advocacy.

Ambiguities of Mourning: Women between Law and Custom No justice-let us not say no law and once again we are not speaking here oflaws-seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism. -Jacques Derrida, Specters ofMarx

Speaking as a witness before the commission implied being enjoined to frame one's testimony according to the demands of universal human rights. As a perpetrator or a victim, one testified to a transgression of human rights: either one has violated those of another, or one's own have been violated. Soliciting testimony in this way revealed ambiguities in cases that did not fit, in an obvious way, into the paradigm of human rights that guided the commission's work. The cases I have in mind involve the interface between universal human rights and assertions in the name of "custom" by witnesses to human rights violations. Appeals for funeral rites, invitations to join in the work of mourning, an index to the deeper nature of apartheid, these cases reveal at once a disjuncture and a conflation of law and custom that stem from apartheid's prehistory. In British-ruled colonial Africa, custom and law were disjoined at the basis of a system of"indirect rule," which operated to exclude colonized people from legal and political universality by confining them to a sphere of rule

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by customary chiefs, where they were denied the rights of members of the colonial civil society. Post-apartheid South Africa shares such a legacy with other African countries once ruled by Britain. The disjuncture of law and custom also meant their conflation in the form of "customary law." This colonial invention holds hostage decolonizing efforts, such as Thabo Mbeki's projected ''African renaissance," at reclaiming an African cultural heritage (Mbeki, ''African Renaissance"). To reclaim "custom'' in sub-Saharan Africa today is thus not to counter the universal calculus of law and rights in the name of cultural difference 1 but rather to negotiate a split within the customary-between custom and "customary law" -which precludes any pure opposition between law and custom, because law itself generates the customary in the form of a system of customary law that contaminates any reclamatory invocation of custom. In a complication exemplary of postcolonial cultural politics in Africa and elsewhere, the "past" to be reclaimed is in part a creature of the colonial formation to be superseded. Concentrating on one of several testimonies laying claim to funeral rites in the name of custom, I show how, exposing the disjuncture and conflation of law and custom, the testimony of black women probes the limits of the commission's machinery of advocacy. Letting someone speak can amount to ventriloquism when the words they use seem to echo the large-scale state projection of a black voice in terms of custom; and customary law, whether invented or not, dictates raced and gendered subordination. Yet, as I shall argue, invoking custom in an arena of human rights, where equal consideration is promised, has the potential to bring the customary to crisis. Implicitly laying claim to legal and political universality, black women render apparent the disjuncture and conflation of custom and law. Above and beyond these particular issues, what an examination of this testimony shows is a responsibility to, and before, the dead or deceased, which is bound into the hearing of another injunction in the law. Although hearkening to something in the law, "custom," when such responsibility is engaged, may be the name of something heterogeneous to any opposition of law and custom. This responsibility may be what makes for another claim, for the very possibility of making other claims. Addressed to a forum of human rights, the demand for funeral rites-for and before the other-evokes, from the law, another "law," perhaps that to which Derrida gives the name "justice." Summoned before the dead, the commission at once takes up and forecloses this responsibility.

Hearing Women THE BODY

Observers of the human rights violation hearings were, as I have noted, struck by the frequency with which witnesses testifYing as victims claimed the restitution of a body or of missing body parts. The survivors sought to accord the dead proper funeral rites and to enlist the aid of the commission in doing so. 2 Although not anticipated by the commission, which had not set aside funds for the task, more than fifty bodies, many those of Mrican National Congress guerrillas, were exhumed between March 1997 and June 1998 from pauper's graves or from unmarked burial on isolated farms. 3 There was some debate about the cultural significance of the demand by witnesses for the bodies of family members. Foreign journalists tended to insist on its racial and ethnic specificity. 4 The domestic media were, however, more cautious. Early in the life of the commission, Truth Commission Special Report ran a feature on what it termed the "symbolic reburial" of bodies (16 June 1996). Although a white psychologist was interviewed for commentary, all of those presented as approaching the commission for "reburial," or just to find information, were black. In a subsequent program, presenter Max du Preez, a respected leftist Mrikaans journalist, sought to dispel the impression that this was "a black cultural thing." Featured was Susan van der Merwe, whose husband, as I related in Chapter I, had disappeared without trace one day from his farm and was later said to have been killed by guerrillas (Truth Commission Special Report, 29 September 1996). A good case can be made for such journalistic balance when white South Mrican mourning practices pass as culturally unmarked. Yet, in this instance, Du Preez's attempt at balance may obscure the significance of the fact that black witnesses, many of them women, have been the ones to bring the issue of funeral rites to general notice. 5 If not culturally unique or specific, their demands were, performatively speaking, quite different. An intriguing instance of testimony, in this respect, is that of Lephina Zondo, mother of Andrew Zondo, an Mrican National Congress guerrilla executed, despite activism on his behalf, for his part in the bombing of a shopping mall in Amanzimtoti, a seaside town in present-day KwazuluNatal, in 1985 (see Meer; Lalu and Harris). The following is an extract from Lephina Zondo's response to questions from Alex Boraine, deputy

Hearing Women chairperson of the Truth Commission and the commissioner designated to lead her testimony: LEPHINA ZONDO:[ . . . ] There was a lawyer, Bheka, [who] represented him. He came back [and] told us that [Andrew had] been sentenced to death five times because of what he did at Amanzimtoti. They took him to Pretoria, they transferred him to Pretoria. We visited him quite often [there .... ] The police arrived at home to tell us that the day has arrived for him to be hanged, and they said we should go and see him. We left as a family ... we stayed there for a weekend. They said we can stay in Pretoria but we'll never see his body. We said: "Yes, that is better. Can you make it possible so that we can see his body?" They said: "No. You will not see his body. You won't be allowed to see his body. You can go and attend the church service but you will never see the body." We felt that if we go and don't see the body because it's our custom, before a person can be buried we have got to look at him and be sure that it is the right person. And thereafter we came back and they buried him. They said that they would bury him at Mamelodi and they said they would give us a death certificate after that, but we never received any death certificate. There was this heavy burden in our hearts. Why didn't they give us a death certificate because they already hanged him. They said no, it's the law, they had to bury him. They said even if we can go we will not see him[ .... ] ALEX BORAINE: Don't ... don't rush. When you are ready then you can continue .... Is that your full story? LEPHINA ZONDO: Yebo [yes]. ALEX BORAINE: Thank you. I won't keep you long because you have carried a very heavy load and you have been very brave. Just one or two short questions[ .... ] Mrs Zondo, the commission is here to share in your pain and your distress. Is there anything that you would like the commission to do if the commission had the power to do that? Is there anything more you want to say? LEPHINA ZONDO: I would request [ ... ] we do not have a death certificate and we cannot go to the place where my son is buried. ALEX BORAINE: Mrs Zondo, we will certainly consider your request and we will very definitely be able to get hold of the death certificate so that you can have it. We will also make enquiries, I'm really not sure what the law is, but we will make enquiries about you[r] son's body and we will come back to you and tell you what we have found out. I hand you now over to the chairperson. LEPHINA ZONDO: Thank you very much. 6

Hearing Women Lephina Zondo's testimony is intriguing to read in the context ofMax du Preez's hesitation over the cultural and racial specificity of codes of mourning. She testifies in Zulu-which is translated for Boraine, who puts his questions in English-that the family was never allowed to see the body of their son: "They said: ' ... You will not see his body. You won't be allowed to see his body."' The Prisons Act of 1959 provides for the "near relatives" of an executed prisoner to arrange his or her burial, under the supervision of the prison authorities. This is a provision implemented at the discretion of the commissioner of prisons. The restitution of the body is, as the act is written, the exception; prisoners' bodies are legally available to medical schools as cadavers.? Andrew Zondo's family did not arrange his burial, and the Reverend Aiken Zondo, Andrew's father, was not permitted to see his body or to attend the burial arranged by the prison (Meer qo). Withholding the corpse, specifically sight of the corpse, represents a disruption of usual funeral rites, of the work of mourning that a family, and community, would customarily carry out. Blocked are the usual affective transactions, what is custom or habit for the family and community to do: "We felt that if we go and don't see the body because it's our custom [umkhuba wethu], before a person can be buried we have got to look at him and be sure that it is the right person." 8 The phrase "because it's our custom" disrupts the syntax of her testimony. It also points beyond the commission's mandated domain of gross human rights violations. At one level, the phrase is an explanation for Boraine, whom she appears to position as someone who is ignorant of custom. Yet even the prison's prohibition appears to acknowledge the custom by prohibiting it. Whites are, in this sense, not outside custom. At another level, though, there is the sense that, when she replies, she responds before another authority. There is no doubt that the hearing is set up to learn of rights violations "done to" her or to her son-judicial executions of political prisoners were classified as gross violations 9-and that the commissioner asking the questions plays his part as if this were so. There is, however, no reason to assume that the witness is being governed by the same script. This is not necessarily a case of subversion. From somewhere in Boraine's questions and prompts comes the call for another response. If Boraine is the other, we could say that this is a call coming from the other of the other. To that other, Lephina Zondo gives the name "custom" and attributes an imperative: "before a person can be buried we have got to look at him and be sure that it is the right person." Audible somewhere

Hearing Women in the eliciting of testimony to human rights violations is the call of custom-here, the imperative to look at the body before its preparation for burial. For this call to be heard and for the response of the witness to be heard as if it had not been heard-that is to say, to be received as testimony only to rights violations-emphasizes, on the one hand, how the commission operates to reveal not just the crimes of apartheid but also the social rifts and fissures left by almost 350 years of colonial and quasicolonial rule. Tensions at the hearings between custom and rights may, on the other hand, repeat an older hearkening to another authority in, and from within, the law. Such a hearkening would not only complicate negotiations with a colonial legacy disjoining and conflating law and custom and raise questions about customary gender inequality and human rights, but it would also broach larger matters of responsibility and the very conditions of possibility for the making of other, not yet anticipated, claims. CUSTOM AND THE LAW

Strictly speaking, violations of custom lie beyond the scope of the commission, whose task it is to investigate "gross violations of human rights" through the "killing, abduction, torture or severe ill-treatment of any person" (South Africa, Promotion r[r] [ix] [a]). The violation in this case-we are not talking about clandestine "disappearance," the issue raised with exhumations-is the "legal" denial of customary funeral rites, of the usual process of laying the dead to rest. Though not strictly a "gross violation'' of rights, such a denial of funeral rites may-at least in "Western" thought 10-be the violation of right par excellence. I am thinking of Antigone and the part played by Sophocles' drama in Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit. The section "The True Spirit. The Ethical Order" (Der wahre Geist. Die Sittlichkeit), in which Hegel relies on an interpretation of Sophocles, can be read as an allegory of the complicated exchanges before the commission between custom and human rights, exchanges involving at least four languages and several discontinuous histories of translation. Let us explore how this is so. In Sophocles, Antigone questions Creon's "proclamation'' (keruchthenta), the "law" (nomos) that prohibits her from burying her brother, Polynices, who has been declared a traitor and punished by being denied the honor of a proper burial. 11 For Antigone,

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Creon's law (nomos) seeks to "override the gods, I the great unwritten, unshakable traditions [nomima]" (Three Theban Plays, ll.504-505 I Antigone, ll.454-455). Although, as we know, nomos, which can be translated as "custom," is typically treated as consistent with "law," Antigone's speech demands that we not simply conflate law and custom, that we not exclaim, all too quickly, that, here, at the navel ofWestern thought, law is actually at one with custom, united in the sphere of what Hegel refers to as "the human law" (das menschliche Gesetz): "the known law, and the prevailing custom" (das bekannte Gesetz und die vorhandene Sitte). 12 Set apart from law (nomos) in Antigone's speech, the word for "traditions" is nomima: customs, usages. In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel, to whom modern communitarian political theory owes the determination oflaw, the family, and the state as moments of the customary-or, as it is usually translated, the "ethical order" or the "ethical life" (Sittlichkeit)-does not oppose law and custom ( Gesetz und . .. Sitte) (Phenomenology 267 I Phanomenologie 329).U Instead he sees a "rift [Zwiespalt] between divine and human law" (Phenomenology 285, translation modified/ Phanomenologie 350). A translation of nomima as "traditions" or "customs," however, allows what Hegel renders as "divine law" (gottliches Gesetz) to shade into the customary. Rereading Hegel through Sophocles thus yields not simply a tension between human law as actualized in the state and divine law, but also a rift between what Hegel takes to be at one: civic law and custom. There is a sense in this speech that Antigone hearkens to the other-or others-of the law proclaimed by Creon: the nomima in the nomos. By responding before that authority, she can hold Creon responsible. Since the unwritten nomima prescribe duties toward the dead (and nomima can be rites accorded the dead), to respond before them is also to respond before the dead. This suggests that, as the law speaks, from somewhere within it there is another call. We could follow Derrida and term this responsibility that the living assume before the nonliving "justice." Without forgetting the differences, we can draw striking parallels between Antigone's challenge to Creon and the testimony of Lephina Zondo-as custom is affirmed, its recognition sought in a forum constituted on the basis of universal human rights. Both a "perpetrator" and a "victim"-to use the parlance of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission-Andrew Zondo is executed for crimes against the state, except that this is a state of which he was, in contrast with the highborn Polynices, in most ways never really a citizen. Having been denied access to the

Hearing Women body of their son, the family explains to the prison authorities that it is their custom (umkhuba wethu) to see the body of the deceased. Nomima, custom and funeral rites, custom as funeral rites, have been blocked by what is proclaimed by penal officialdom as nomos: "They said no, it's the law." The commission implicitly makes itself available to the witness in a kind of "transference." The contestatory dialogue with the prison officials between custom and law is recollected and repeated for the commission, and the demand made of the officials is reiterated in the standard "request" a witness is called upon to make before it. TestifYing to a "legal" denial of funeral rites as a violation of "our custom," our habit of doing things, Lephina Zondo petitions the commission for concrete means of redress: "I would request ... we do not have a death certificate and we cannot go to the place where my son is buried." Enormous differences exist, of course, between what we find in Antigone and in Hegel's reading, on one hand, and the appeal the Truth Commission hears from Lephina Zondo, on the other. To the more obvious differences of geographical, historical, and cultural location, and occasion (quasi-legal hearing, theater), we can add at least two that are more telling. By attending to these differences, we can interrogate Hegel's appropriation of Antigone and Greek antiquity. Africa, passed over by the world spirit in his Philosophy ofHistory as "the land of childhood ... enveloped in the dark mantle of Night" (91), may yet teach Hegel something. First, whereas Lephina Zondo appeals on behalf of her son, Antigone claims funeral rites for her brother, a contingent fact (the parents of Antigone and Polynices are dead) that Hegel transposes into the essential brother-sister relation, making it the basis for his determination of "the feminine" (das Weibliche) as an actualization of "divine law" (Phenomenology 274, 280/ Phanomenologie 336, 343)-and thus, with our retranslation, an actualization of custom. Although ethnography of "traditional" Zulu social formations has revealed women to have the social role of mourners (Ngubane 77-99), we would not be justified in assuming that a woman who testifies in Zulu before the commission, explaining a custom in order to claim a restitution of her son's body, does so for such reasons. 14 If it is true that, in the aftermath of armed conflict, women are often the survivors (one thinks, for instance, of the Argentinean mothers of the "disappeared"), 15 as reportage on the commission and the background to Lephina Zondo's testimony show, men, as fathers, also play a leading part in the process (Ignatieff, "Digging"; Meer 170). We would

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thus be mistaken in identifYing customs of mourning with the social role of women; we do not need to imitate Hegel by essentializing from the outlines of a single case or a limited number of cases. Nevertheless, as I shall propose, in the post-apartheid juncture, Lephina Zondo's testimony brings to light considerable implications specific to women. Second, as I have begun to suggest, Hegel implicitly assumes law and custom to coexist amicably within the realm of"the ethical order" or "ethical life" (Sittlichkeit). It is divine law and human law that are in conflict. Hegel's larger goal, however, is to outline a transition ( Ubergang) from the family to the state, a transition within an ordinarily cohesive "community'' ( Gemeinwesen) composed, in effect, of "blood relation[s]" (Blutsverwandten) (Phenomenology 271, see also 278/ Phanomenologie 333, see also 341). Divine law, in the form of the family, is the motive "element" (Element) of human law and of the state (Phenomenology 288/ Phanomenologie 352); their coexistence is disrupted only by a deed such as that of Antigone, which sets family against state, divine law against human law-in our translation: custom against civic law. What happens, however, when such cohesive relationships do not exist or when ones that do are unacknowledged or suppressed? When ties of blood invite a phobia ultimately legislated as apartheid? When, as in British colonial Africa, colonists enjoy civic law, but the colonized are subject to a codified "customary law," in what Mahmood Mamdani terms a "bifurcated state" (Citizen and Subject 16-23)? Hegel seems not to anticipate such a situation, one that prevailed in equatorial and southern Africa, attaining its most elaborated form in the "ethnic" Bantustans of apartheid. His account of colonization (Kolonisation) in Elements ofthe Philosophy of Right proceeds exclusively from the standpoint of the (English or Spanish) colonist, who, following an emancipation struggle akin to that of slave and master, merely restarts the family-bourgeois society-state teleology on new soil (Elements ofthe Philosophy ofRight269). In his reading of Antigone in Phenomenology ofSpirit, Hegel does not contemplate the possibility of "custom" not being reconcilable with law as actualized in the state. He does not imagine a realm of the "customary," of Sittlichkeit, being a zone of civic and geographic marginalization. If Africa has anything to teach Hegel and Hegelians, the lesson will come from the peculiar place of custom in colonial and postcolonial African modernity. Typically reread in terms of gender, the political dynamics of kinship in Antigone and their place in Hegel can also be read as an allegory of race.

Hearing Women In his assessment of postcolonial Mrica's legacy of late colonialism in Citizen and Subject, Mahmood Mamdani identifies as a problem the deracialization of the upper levels of government without a corresponding democratization at the local level. Mamdani traces this problem back to the structure of European colonial rule in Mrica, which developed into an amalgam of"direct rule" and "indirect rule": Debated as alternative modes of controlling natives in the early colonial period, direct and indirect rule actually evolved into complementary ways of native control. Direct rule was the form of urban civil power. It was about the exclusion of natives from civil freedoms guaranteed to citizens in civil society. Indirect rule, however, signified a rural tribal authority. It was about incorporating natives into a state-enforced customary order. Reformulated, direct and indirect rule are better understood as variants of despotism: the former centralized, the latter decentralized .... Urban power spoke the language of civil society and civil rights, rural power of community and culture. Civil power claimed to protect rights, customary power pledged to enforce tradition. (Citizen and Subject r8) It is clear from this account that, in late colonial Mrica, the application of Hegel's theory of the state meets an obstacle. Whereas, as Hegel tells us, the society of the colonists developed along lines reproducing the dialectic of the modern European state, colonized social formations were incorporated into the colonial state in ways that precluded any dialectical relationship between Mrican custom and the realm of civil society and rights (see also Mamdani, Citizen and Subject 15). Sittlichkeit was torn asunder in colonial Mrica, where a domain of custom was mapped out to exclude Blacks from the civic freedoms and rights enjoyed as a matter of course by Whites. Apartheid was the apotheosis of this bifurcated system. In the bifurcated colonial state, two unequal juridical orders existed: "customary justice was dispensed to natives by chiefs and commissioners, black and white; modern justice to nonnatives by white magistrates" (Mamdani, Citizen and Subject109). The legacy of customary law, when examined historically, is that it is not customary at all, but a subordinate part of the hierarchy of indirect rule. In the same way that Mrican tribes and ethnicity were sometimes "inventions" of missionaries and colonial states, customary law was a brainchild of colonial rule. 16 Like postindependence Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and other Mrican countries, post-apartheid South Mrica has a legacy of"customary

Hearing Women law." First codified in 1878, the body of customary law known as the Natal Code became the law in Zululand in 1887. In 1927, the code became a key part of the blueprint for customary law in the rest of the country, when the Native Administration Act made legal dualism part of a system of territorial segregation and indirect rule on a nationwide scale (Simons 26, 53). Never having been applicable to Whites, customary law remains a juridical remnant of the almost total exclusion of Blacks from the realm of civic rights. Yet customary law continues to enjoy constitutional recognition, and "traditional leaders" still receive state remuneration. WOMEN AND THE CRISIS OF THE CUSTOMARY

If "custom" marked a racialized zone setting citizen apart from subject, then "customary law" as codified by colonial and apartheid rulers caricatured relations between men and women, as it did other aspects of Mrican life. According to Simons, "[T]he code stereotypes a concept of feminine inferiority unknown to the traditional society'' (26). In the years immediately after apartheid, under the still extant "official code," women were still denied proprietary and contractual capacity, and locus standi in judicio (Bennett 86-93). Customary law was thus in conflict with South Mrica's obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and with a constitutional Bill of Rights providing that "[t]he state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth" (South Mrica, Constitution 9[3]). Customary law has not always been applicable, or applied in its "official" form. One can nevertheless observe that when and where it has been so applied, its burdens on black women could be onerous. When Lephina Zondo testified in 1996, in the realm of the customary black women were set apart, even more drastically than black men, and thereby were denied access to the sphere of civic law and human rights, which, in post-apartheid South Mrica, promises to include them. What does the 1996 constitution say about traditional leaders and customary law? How does it affect black women? "The institution, status and role of traditional leadership, according to customary law, are recognised, subject to the Constitution" (South Mrica, Constitution 2n[1]). Implic-

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itly recognized by this clause is a history of legislative codification and amendment and case law, in which Mrican custom is, as it was under colonialism and apartheid, effectively subject to national lawmakers: ''A traditional authority that observes a system of customary law may function subject to any applicable legislation and customs, which includes amendments to, or repeal of, that legislation or those customs" (South Mrica, Constitution 2n[2]). Customary law received constitutional recognition thanks to lobbying by traditional leaders at the multiparty negotiating process, the talks leading to the drafting of a preliminary constitution in 1993. The chiefs attempted to have customary law exempted, as it is from antidiscrimination laws in Zimbabwe (Maboreke 219; Currie 149), from the equality provisions in the Bill of Rights: During the debate on the Bill of Rights in August 1993, a member of one of the traditional leaders' delegations, Chief Nonkonyana, objected to the equality provisions in the Bill of Rights, stating that, as a traditional leader, he did not support equality for women. The Chief's demand that customary law be excluded from the Bill of Rights was linked to a second claim for the recognition of the status and powers of traditional leaders. Both of these claims brought the traditional leaders into conflict with women fighting for the principle of gender equality to be entrenched in the interim Constitution. (Albertyn 57) The Women's National Coalition lobbied to ensure that the equality clause in the Bill of Rights included reference not only to race but also to sex. That put them in direct conflict with the chiefs over customary law. In addition to its equality clause, the Bill of Rights recognizes a right to language and culture: "Everyone has the right to use the language and to participate in the cultural life of their choice, but no one exercising these rights may do so in a manner inconsistent with any provision of the Bill of Rights" (South Mrica, Constitution 30). The clause could, the coalition realized, be interpreted in favor of customary law. Led on this issue by the Rural Women's Movement, the coalition made the demand that "not only should equality apply to all groups but it should trump claims to culture and custom that justified discrimination against women" (Albertyn 59). Although customary law is "subject to the Constitution," and the right to language and culture is subject to the Bill of Rights, the effort by the Women's National Coalition to include an "equality trump" was unsuccessful. Women are left with a constitution that, like the salaried

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traditional leaders who lobby in favor of "customary law," makes no distinction in terms of status between codified and noncodified versions of customary law. Although the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act (1998) established the legal equality of married women, 17 other provisions of customary law are unaltered. As things stand, constitutional review must decide what aspects of those provisions are legitimate. How do the ambiguities for women of the constitutional recognition of custom apply to Lephina Zondo's testimony? What are the parallels with Antigone? One could object that for a witness to invoke "custom" in testimony before the Truth Commission, a panel based on human rights, is simply retrograde; or, conversely, one could criticize, with Lalu and Harris (35-36), a legalism that seems to ignore custom, thereby impeding the urgent process of cultural reclamation. Either way, one would operate within an opposition of law and custom. Read another way, testimony such as hers exposes and, as it were, brings to crisis the customary as a structure of social, political, and economic inequality, because she makes her affirmation of "our custom" (umkhuba wethu) in a forum where a request made in its name is, or ought to be, granted equal consideration. A claim made in such a forum would not deprive the claimant of full citizenship, as it might have done under apartheid, and is thus quite distinct from submitting to customary law. Lephina Zondo's affirmation of custom implies a pragmatics of what, in a different context, Judith Butler describes as a "performative contradiction" (Excitable Speech 89-90)-the claim to equal consideration in "universal" terms to which one has, historically, been denied access. Yet, at the same time, I shall propose, although she testifies to a prohibition that is legal in form, there is a sense in which her affirmation of custom is heterogeneous to the opposition law/custom and to customary law, and thus points at an opening to something other than what can be thought in opposition to the law or, what amounts to the same thing, framed as a claim upon the universality of the law, be it customary or civil. What Lephina Zondo affirms is "our custom" (umkhuba wethu)-our habit, our way of doing things. Contaminated as such affirmations are by a history of manipulation of custom and tradition, hers may have little or nothing to do with customary law. 18 Translated as "tradition" or "custom," the word she uses is not isiko, the synonym usually used when making reference to customary law (umthetho ophathelene namasiko). Provisionally, we can say that, at a political level, those witnesses who

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claim bodies, and body parts, extend, by their testimony, the human rights brief of the Truth Commission. Like Chile's National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, which distributed its report with a letter from the president to the next of kin of each victim, 19 the Truth Commission, even without exhuming bodies, is in effect prepared to join in the work of mourning. This radicalizes our understanding of apartheid and what it might take to undo it-in this case, also exposing its roots in customary law and indirect rule. The claim and response correspond to the "test[ing] out [of] rights which have not been incorporated in it," which Claude Lefort sees as characteristic of the democratic state (258). A consideration of claims for funeral rites shows that an affirmation of custom does not have to be in conflict with the law, as it is in Antigone and in a more mediated form in Hegel, or with full citizenship, as it often was under colonialism and apartheid. Exceeding the task it was assigned, by helping with the work of mourning, the commission brings to light wider tendencies of social change and deeper-running fissures in the postapartheid South Mrican polity, not all of which are entirely a legacy of the apartheid era, let alone of the commission's period of reference. In politics, deracialization will be followed by democratization only if custom, as recognized by the state, is separated fully from customary law and from officially recognized hereditary and patriarchal "traditional leaders" -and only if women are able to affirm custom in ways that do not position them, when they come or are called forth as speaking subjects, as subordinate in systems that deny them full citizenship. It is in this sense that the testimony of Lephina Zondo and others, an assertion of custom at proceedings in which equality of consideration is, or ought to be, operative, can, in this larger context, also be heard as an implicit critique of customary law, in all its forms, and of its specific impact on women. At another level, linking the testimony of Lephina Zondo and other witnesses with the challenge of Antigone are the work of mourning, hearing the other in the law, and the work of mourning as hearing the other in the law. Introducing Antigone, at a tangent to Hegel, we note that the appeal for proper funeral rites does two things: first, it hearkens to an appeal of the other in the other-the other of the law in the law; second, responding to the call of this other-from the place of the deceased-can be read as an instance of responsibility before the dead. This is what Derrida sets forth in Specters ofMarx as a precondition for thinking "justice" (xix).

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From such elements, seldom produced in legal and political analyses of customary law and human rights, we may be able to formulate another reading of law and custom. When the witness addresses the other in the other, bearing witness to the call of another law and the call of that other law from within the law, there is a response to a law: that of the addressee or addressees. 20 Yet there is also a response to the other, or what Levinas calls the "trace of the other," in the addressee. These dynamics recall to us those of certain testimonial writings-collaborative as well as more strictly autobiographical works-addressed not only to a transcriber and/or implied reader but at the same time to a figure who is dead. 21 Such writings are, as it were, works of mourning. As such testimony challenges the law, bringing it to crisis with its claim, we find revealed, in the possibility of such an other address, the condition of possibility of a challenge or transformative claim as such. Having named the addressee as the dead one, we perceive in such testimony-be it oral or written, heard or read-the instantiation of justice as exceeding, in a relation to the nonliving, the calculus of law (in which customary law shares) and rights, and with it determination of custom in opposition to law. In exploring how the testimony of women before the Truth Commission can be read as bringing the customary to crisis, I insisted on the qualification "equality of consideration ought to be operative." It is here that, as the law is provoked and an alterity is broached, the parallels with Antigone are richest. According to Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit, Antigone, as woman, who holds civic law responsible before divine law (which we call nomima), is the "eternal irony of the community" (ewige Ironie des Gemeinwesens) (Phenomenology 288, translation modified/ Phiinomenologie 352). In The Gift of Death, Derrida relates Hegel's pronouncement to the original Greek sense of irony as eironeia and to the eiron, the dissembler, the one who feigns ignorance in order to make the law speak (76-77). And Spivak has recast allegory in terms of parabasis, a disruptive and ironic speaking otherwise: "permanent parabasis or sustained interruption from a source relating 'otherwise' (allegorein = speaking otherwise) to the continuous unfolding of the main system of meaning" (Critique 430). If Antigone is an eiron, perhaps Lephina Zondo and others asking for funeral rites withheld, affirming custom before the law, are too. Hearkening to a source relating otherwise to the law, to nomima and umkhuba as imperatives of the dead, they make the law speak. They wait for the law to make a

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response, or rather, perhaps, for the law to convey a response. They want it to speak otherwise. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's founding assumptions about rights violation and reparation were transformed by the appeals of Lephina Zondo and others for funeral rites. "Transference" will have succeeded, yes provisionally substituted for no. As Alex Boraine promises: "Mrs Zondo, we will certainly consider your request and we will very definitely be able to get hold of the death certificate so that you can have it." Yet when he assures her that the commission "will ... make enquiries" into whether the family can have access to their son's body, he tacitly reinvokes the very system of laws that disrupted the customary work of mourning and, with it, responsibility before the dead, in the first place: ''I'm really not sure what the law is." What will the law say when it speaks?

Extraordinary Violence When the decision was made by the Truth Commission in June 1996 to hold special women's hearings (Ross 23), the law had not spoken on the matter of the body. Nor had it yet addressed the status of women under customary law-as it would, to some extent, in 1998 with the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act. Although, like the statements by researchers about women's testimony from the first weeks of the public hearings, it missed the full significance of what it might have meant to bear witness on behalf of those who could not testify, the influential Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) brief to the Truth Commission addressed the gross violation of human rights in other fundamental ways. If touching only briefly on the effects on women of customary law (Goldblatt and Meintjes 4-5), it guided the commission toward a definition of violation not limited by assaults on "bodily integrity'' (Ross n-u) but extending to the day-to-day violence of apartheid. This violence, in some of its forms, survives the official demise of the system. In so doing, the CALS brief thrust to the fore the very question of violence, and how to conceive it in ethics and politics. This intervention complemented what, in the form of the Truth Commission, may have been the most massive public reckoning with a legacy of political violence in recent times. For those watching its proceedings, at which acts

Hearing Women of extraordinary violence were aired every day, the commission provoked questions about the nature of violence. These questions concerned not only the functions of violence, but, indeed, in the case of extraordinary violence, what it is, and whether its extraordinariness can be conceived in relative terms or demands to be thought as a distinct category. One lingering criticism of the Truth Commission is that its mandate bound it to turn its inquiring ear and recording hand toward extreme instances of violence. 22 The critics in question argue that its attention to the "gross violation of human rights" amounted to an occupation with cases and patterns of extraordinary violence-killing, abduction, torture, severe ill treatment, as defined by the act-and a corresponding neglect of the ordinary violence of apartheid. According to Mahmood Mamdani, its restrictive interpretation of its mandate was political rather than legal (''Amnesty or Impunity?"). The most thought-provoking criticism in this vein came from feminist academics linked to CALS, a research unit of the University of the Witwatersrand. Seeking to project what it "would have required" for the Truth Commission "[t]o integrate gender fully'' in its operations and findings, their May 1996 submission to the commission challenges its mandate on violence with a counterfactuality motivated by gender difference but not restricted to it. Discussed in the chapter of the commission's report on the special hearing for women, the CALS submission proposes woman, specifically the rural black woman, as an exemplary figure for the effects of ordinary violence, thereby making it possible to generalize, beyond any particularity of situation, about the scope and limits of the Truth Commission's mandate: 17 To integrate gender fully ... would have required the Commission to amend its understanding of its mandate and how it defined gross human rights violations .... r8 The CALS submission argued that the definition of "severe ill treatment" should be interpreted to include apartheid abuses such as forced removals, pass law arrests, alienation of land and breaking up of families .... 19 The Commission's relative neglect of the effects of the "ordinary" work-

ings of apartheid has a gender bias, as well as a racial one. A large number of statistics can be produced to substantiate the fact that women were subject to more restrictions and suffered more in economic terms than did men during the apartheid years .... Black women, in particular, are disadvantaged, and black women living in former homeland areas remain the most disadvantaged

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of all. It is also true that this type of abuse affected a far larger number of people, and usually with much longer-term consequences, than the types of violations on which the Commission was mandated to focus its attention. (Truth Commission Report 4:287-288)

Underlying the criticism from CALS is an accusation of legalism, of a narrowness of juridical definition, which effectively stands in the way of justice. It would be just were a broader definition of violence and violation to have been adopted. One is tempted to write: more just. But, although "statistics" are alluded to, and a quantifying rhetoric pervades the discourse-rural black women are the most restricted, exploited, and marginalized; are affected over the longest term; and represent a far larger number of victims-this is not special-interest feminism but a generalizing and universalizing of the law. Making "black women" the instance of a generalizable ordinary violence, the critique shades the empirical into the transcendental. The collective figure of "black women," in the name of whom the law is invoked, is an exemplary figure for the victim of the ravages of ordinary violence. In South Mrica, it is committed history and social research that declare their openness to the phenomenon of ordinary violence; remembering the forced removals, dispossession of land, the mandatory carrying of passes, the effects of the migrant labor system on black family life, these initiatives assume the task of bringing and restoring justice to the operations of the law. Yet this is not a historical or social-scientific submission (although one of its authors is a political scientist), but rather a submission before the law. If there is something of a relationship between the law and the generation of violence as extraordinary ("gross violation"), there is a corresponding appeal here to law in order to have other forms of violence (ordinary or "structural") recognized as a gross violation of human rights. 23 Appeals of this kind have had some success; as the chapter on women tells us, judges ruled that "apartheid was in and of itself a gross violation of human rights" (Truth Commission Report 4:288; c£ 1:60-65), and, as Archbishop Tutu reminds readers of the report in his foreword, apartheid was declared a crime against humanity (for the first time by the United Nations General Assembly in 1973) (Truth Commission Report 1:15, 94-102). Apartheid's day-to-day violence had thus been subject to judgment by national and international bodies. Were the Truth Commission to have taken this to its logical conclusion (and found against

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the apartheid regime as a whole), as some critics insist (see Asmal, Asmal, and Roberts 86-87), justice would have been done. Declaring "ordinary" violence a gross violation would have helped bring to account not only the perpetrators of its worst crimes, but also the architects of apartheid as a political and economic system. In the case of both the commission and its critics, what constitutes violence is conceptually tied to law and to legal judgment. This is a logic well described by Waiter Benjamin, in his essay "Toward a Critique of Violence" (Zur Kritik der Gewalt) (1920), at the beginning of which he writes: "The task of a critique of violence may be circumscribed as the representation of its relation to right and justice. For an as-always efficient cause becomes violence in the precise sense of the word only once it intervenes in ethical relations. The sphere of these relations is designated by the concepts of right and justice" (Benjamin, Reflections 277; translation modified). 24 In terms of a critique-that is, when it is a matter of judging-it makes no sense to speak of an efficient cause in and of itself as violence; it is only in the sphere of ethical relations, when it is a matter of what one does, vis-a-vis the other, that efficient causes can become acts of violence. When violence is understood, in contrast to a merely efficient cause, as engaging the ethical, the critique of violence, correspondingly, circumscribes itself to the relation to right and justice. Within this delimited realm, violence can be ordinary or extraordinary. There can thus be an urge to multiply what can be included within the ambit of violence; that is to say, to show how particular acts and events can be subject to judgment by falling within the scope of the law. The critics of the Truth Commission, and its particular circumscription of violation, point to ordinary violence as what is left out but ought to be included. What is the relationship between this critique of violence and the cataloging of instances of extraordinary violence by the commission itself? A clue to a possible relationship, and differences in that relationship, may be drawn from the exclusion from reckoning, by the Truth Commission and CALS in their respective accounts of apartheid violence, of the fact of universal disenfranchisement of black South Mricans under apartheid. This fact has not been neglected by others, within and outside the commission, who point to the limits of the commission's mandate (Burton So; Truth Commission Reportpr). But its effective omission from both of these accounts of violence makes it more difficult to understand the meaning of violation or violations and to mount a critique that is not

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simply moral condemnation but produces a coherent account of what it means to produce a critique in the name of the law and of justice. Insofar as it identifies the extra-moral conditions of possibility for morality, such an account could be termed ethical. In order to outline the relationship between critiques of ordinary violence and the accounting of deeds of extraordinary violence, I will attempt to link another set of terms to, and thereby submit to questioning, the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary violence thought as simply a matter of degree. AB Jacques Derrida points out in his commentary on "Toward a Critique of Violence" in "Force of Law: 'The Mystical Foundation of Authority"' (1990), Benjamin's essay introduces an opposition between a law-positing (rechtsetzende) violence and a law-upholding (rechtserhaltende) violence. This opposition deconstructs, providing for a critique of violence not limited to a calculative assessment of means and ends, and hence to a quantitative separation of ordinary from extraordinary violence. Attending to foundational violence, that dimension of violence presupposed by the authority of the law and laws, its deconstruction reorients the critique of instrumental violence. Each act of instrumental violence iterates a foundational violenceeven constitutes, through repetition, foundational violence: [B]eyond Benjamin's explicit purpose, I shall propose the interpretation according to which the very violence of the foundation or position oflaw (Rechtsetzende Gewalt) must envelop the violence of conservation (Rechtserhaltende Gewalt) and cannot break with it. It belongs to the structure of fundamental violence that it calls for the repetition of itself and founds what ought to be conserved, conservable, promised to heritage and tradition, to be shared. A foundation is a promise .... Thus it inscribes the possibility of repetition at the heart of the originary. With this, there is no more a pure foundation or pure position of law, and so a pure founding violence, than there is a purely conservative violence. Position is already iterability, a call for self-conserving repetition. Conservation in its turn refounds, so that it can conserve what it claims to found. Thus there can be no rigorous opposition between positioning and conservation, only what I will call (and Benjamin does not name it) a dijfirantielle contamination between the two, with all the paradoxes that this may lead to. (Derrida, "Force of Law" 997)

In terms of Derrida's analysis, the universal disenfranchisement of black South Mricans under apartheid can be conceived as an instance of founding violence, not as instrumental violence. Yet each instrumental act of violence-be it a "gross violation" or an act of "ordinary" violence-

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inscribes and re-inscribes this founding violence. 25 In other words, when one criticizes an attention to extraordinary at the expense of ordinary violence, one needs to take into account the violence of foundation, which gives each instance of violence-whether ordinary or extraordinary in the narrow sense-an "extraordinary'' dimension, because each is also an instance of foundational violence. In other words, as Derrida argues, there is no extraordinary violence, in this general sense of foundation, that can be rigorously opposed to ordinary violence. There is perhaps only a violence that is spectacular in the sense that it reveals the constitutive dimension that contaminates instrumental violence without being reducible to it.

A Women's Hearing If we can infer a structure of founding violence from the acts of instrumental violence that constitute gross violations of human rights, the structure of violence that emerges from the special women's hearing held in Johannesburg in July 1997 is not reducible to the racial founding violence of apartheid. 26 There is a limit to female exemplarity for the violence of apartheid-its disenfranchisement of black Mricans, and its political, social, and economic consequences. One way in which that limit is reached is when women testify to abuse within the liberation movements. The testimony at the women's hearing ranged widely, supplying a vivid picture of imprisonment, torture, rape, and assault. The testimony of Sheila Masote, daughter of Zeph Mothopeng, leader of the Pan-Mricanist Congress, revealed not only how women were marginalized in the organization but also the disintegration of middle-class Soweto family life into a cycle of depression, anger, and child abuseY Since many facets of the testimony given at this hearing have been discussed elsewhere, 28 I restrict my discussion to a single element that I find particularly provocative of further analysis. In a profound irony, a hearing meant to break the silence also bore witness to a self-silencing. Thenjiwe Mtintso, chairperson of the Commission on Gender Equality, and former Umkhonto weSizwe member, concluded her opening address by confiding that "[w]hile writing this speech I realized how unready I am to talk about my experience in South Mrican jails and ANC camps abroad. Even now, despite the general terms in which I have chosen to speak, I feel exposed and distraught" (quoted in Krog, Country 179). When a witness speaks only to say that she is not

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ready to speak, her silence provokes interpretation. Mtintso's is, of course, not a perfect silence. By specifying that it is of "her experience in South African jails and ANC camps abroad" that she will not speak, she guides the commission toward a "body of experience," which is not only her own, that remains beset by silence: I have talked about the experiences at the hands of the security police.... But there is a yet another body of experience which I am not so sure if it is going to come out today. There is still the experience of women in the national liberation struggle itself. There is still the experience of those women in the camps .... I was in those camps, ... but that is an experience that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission will have to find. It will have to be talked about, because it is yet another experience, different from that of the security police, but having its own dynamic of womanhood. (Masote 9-10) Police abuse is well documented, and women before the commission frequently testified to it. But women have been less prepared to discuss publicly abuses within the ranks of the liberation movements. 29 Encounters with the security police, Mtintso testifies, led to rape and sexual abuse, and humiliation of various kinds (Masote 8). Although she is not explicit about what took place in the camps of the liberation struggle, and indicates that it was "different from that of the security police, ... having its own dynamic of womanhood," those who hear her will draw parallels. Sexual exploitation and rape are at issue. 30 "There seems," Antjie Krog writes, "to be a bizarre collusion between the rapist and the raped .... Apparently high-profile women, among them Cabinet ministers, parliamentarians and businesswomen, were raped and sexually abused under the previous dispensation-and not only by the regime, but by their own comrades in the townships and liberation camps. But no one will utter an audible word about it" (Country 182). Clinical psychologist Nomfundo Walaza tells Krog that "some of the rapists hold high political positions today-so if you spoke out you would not only undermine the new Government you fought for, but destroy your possibilities of a future" (Country 182). When former Umkhonto weSizwe soldier Rita Mazibuko testifies to being sexually assaulted and raped by comrades after being accused of spying, and tells the commission that Mpumalanga premier Mathews Phosa has warned her against testifying, "[t]he Truth Commission does not utter a single word in [her] defence.

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Not one of the Commissioners, not one of the feminists agitating for women's rights" (Country 184)_3! Is it necessary to say, or to be able to say: this is what Mtintso, and others, are being silent about? On the one hand, when it comes to rape, most of us would agree that not naming names encourages impunity and reinforces the shame of the victim. On the other hand, not being explicit when the secret is an open secret can be read as a critical gesture-a gesture that brings things to crisis. The fact that Mtintso does not refer by name to the ANC, as Krog records, but to the "national liberation struggle," makes her allusion to "the experience of those women in the camps" heavily ironic (and thus not purely forensic testimony that may be verified or falsified). The liberty of women is compromised in the struggle for liberation. The emergent, and newly dominant, national entity bears within it the secret of violation, as well as the harsh punishment meted out, on occasion, to violators. 32 Women can disclose that secret and seek to have the culprits punished for their crime. Or they can disclose that there is a secret, hinting at its outer edges. Which is the more empowering move? In a quasi-legal forum, such as the Truth Commission, where rape is recognized as a gross violation of human rights, it may be a moral victory to do the latter, suspending accusation against particular parties. There may indeed, as Krog writes, be a "collusion between the rapist and the raped," but is it not possible that, in such a forum, the balance of power is in the hands of the raped? Nobody, it appears, applied to the commission for amnesty for rape (Krog, "Locked into Loss" 207). The stakes of disclosing names are thus very high. And, although their holding their peace risks fostering a sense of impunity, it is the victims who have the power to do so, at any time. But is this what Mtintso is saying? She says, let us recall, that what happened to women in the camps "is an experience that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission will have to find. It will have to be talked about" (Masote ro). To say that something, an experience, has to be talked about need not mean the making of accusations, or making them only. And it need not preclude them. Yet when Mtintso refers to abuse of female comrades in the liberation struggle as "having its own dynamic of womanhood," the way is open for its difference to be explored through interpretative labor. Although much else is analyzed there, such labor was not begun at the hearing. It has, I propose, been initiated in two remarkable recent works of fiction published in South Mrica. Both Zoe Wicomb's David's

Hearing Women Story (2000) and Njabulo Ndebele's The Cry ofWinnie Mandela (2003) take up predicaments of advocative storytelling, with the latter explicitly referring to the Truth Commission. In Wicomb's dense and complex metafiction, David Dirkse, a former underground ANC operative, asks an author to write his story, which he has begun in the form of fragmentary notes. These notes digress into the story of Saartje Baartman, who was notoriously displayed in the early nineteenth century as the "Hottentot Venus," and the history of the Griqua nation, in which he has become interested. It becomes clear that the story is much more than David's. The author, however, fastens onto Dulcie, one of David's comrades, reconstructing and imagining her story from small details that David has offered or let slip. The author wants to explore love in the liberation movements and imagines a love triangle that Dulcie makes with David and his wife, Sally. For David, however, this is bourgeois nonsense. The author imagines a Dulcie who is visited nightly by torturers, the aftershocks of an episode or episodes when she was electrocuted and her back scarred by burns in the shape of coins. Although she does exist independently of the author's imagination, and the author once met her, the actual Dulcie's story is elusive. But finally the phantasmatic Dulcie, who doubles the figure of Baartman, intrudes on the author in the flesh, "her sturdy steatopygous form on the central patch of grass, where she has come to sunbathe in private .... Is this no longer my property? I ask mysel£ I have never thought ofDulcie as a visitor in my garden" (David's Story 212). Her body-or corpse: "[s]he is covered with goggas crawling and buzzing all over her" (David's Story 212)-continues to suggest a story but to resist any simple allegory. The author is possessed, dispropriated, by her visit, her visitation. The story of sexual exploitation is told in Sally's submission to a military instructor in Mozambique (David's Story 123). As Dorothy Driver writes, the book breaks the silence about the torture and killing of suspected spies, as well as "violence against ANC women by ANC men'' (Afterward 236-240). But the torturers who come to Dulcie at night are also her lovers: "one is a recursion, a variant of the other" (David's Story 184). It is important to realize that whatever the force of such constructions, they remain, as metafictional convention reminds us, the constructions of the author whom David has asked to write his story. There are anecdotes about Dulcie, the ones that David tells being rich and moving, but Dulcie's story is not told. Metafiction reminds us of the complicity of the author in making woman the figure

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for something. Wicomb has clearly learned from Coetzee about what it means to profess to give voice to the silenced, and how a work of fiction can do and not do so at once. As in the final pages of Coetzee's Foe, where Friday "speaks" in a watery gush, it is a departure from realism that accomplishes this, puts advocacy under erasure. In a similar way Wicomb gently has Dulcie surprise her author with her presence-which may or may not be a live presence. This development can be placed over against a theme in Wicomb's critical writing, which builds on work by Coetzee and others on apartheid. In apartheid ideology, the Afrikaner woman, in the figure of the volksmoeder (mother of the volk), becomes the guarantor of the original purity of a race I volk that will, as the origin is constructed by the non-origin, never have been pure. In her essay, "Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa'' (1998), Wicomb shows how the politics of Coloured identity have entered into complicity with this sexual nationalism: "the shame [is] invested in those (females) who have mated with the colonizer. Miscegenation, the origins of which lie in the discourse of 'race,' concupiscence, and degeneracy, continues to be bound up with shame, a pervasive shame exploited in apartheid's strategy of the naming of a Coloured race, and recurring in the current attempts by coloureds to establish brownness as a pure category, which is to say a denial of shame" (91-92). As Wicomb acknowledges, she is "writing back at" Sarah Gertrude Millin's classic novel of miscegenation and racial degeneration, God's Step-Children (1924) ("Zoe Wicomb" 147). In Millin's book, the catalyst for the first race-mixing is the Hottentot girl Silla, who "smiled at [the Reverend Andrew Flood] with the impudent little manner which was naturally hers" (Millin 36). 33 An absence of shame (im-pudence) becomes the source of shame. The theme is taken up again by Wicomb in David's Story, where, as David Dirkse delves into a Griqua identity that he thinks to own, Griqua ideology emerges as similar to that of the Afrikaner nationalists. Supposedly more African, in David's mind, it turns out to be mixed at the origin; Abraham le Fleur, father of Griqua leader Andries le Fleur, is of French extraction. In Le Fleur's ideology, the purity of the woman is meant to unmix the origin. It is the figure of the ANC cadre Dulcie, however, that updates the critique of sexual nationalism. Although, as Krog explains, the African National Congress has, by means of quotas and other measures, done vastly more than the Afrikaner nationalists did to ensure that women are an effective presence

Hearing Women in public politics (Krog, "Locked into Loss" 214-215), there is still the little-discussed legacy in the organization of sexual exploitation and rape. The torture of Dulcie is an intensified rape; for her tormenters, rape "will teach her nothing, leave nothing; rape's too good for her kind" (David's Story 178). The identity of the torturers is, as Driver observes (Afterward 240), ambiguous. Finally, her body cannot simply be reduced to a sign of violation, of a secret gendered violence harbored within national liberation. Her mutilated body, insects crawling over it, eludes the inscriptions of the author. Dulcie will not be the sign of anything. In The Cry ofWinnie Mandela (2003), Njabulo Ndebele stages the black African woman as a Penelope, left behind by her husband and expected to preserve her chastity when the man in exile does not. She is admired only for what this does to serve men: "Our Penelope is not necessarily admired in her own right. She is the embodiment of female virtue that gives comfort to men, allaying their fears and pampering their vanities" (Ndebele, Cry 4). Winnie Mandela is the Penelope who does not wait. Although she walked with Nelson Mandela on his release from prison in 1990, their marriage subsequently disintegrated. One of the matters that emerged in the process was Winnie's affair with lawyer Dali Mpofu, in a letter leaked to the press (Cry 43-44). Drawing into itself her testimony before the Truth Commission, Ndebele's novel audaciously stages the voice consciousness ofWinnie Madikizela-Mandela hersel£ That is a voice consciousness that refuses reconciliation, since it would annihilate her (Cry n3). Winnie finds a kind of survival by going on a journey across the country with four of "Penelope's South African descendants," a group of women, all left by their husbands, who meet regularly to talk about the experience they share, and who have decided not to stay at home. In a nonrealist twist, the women stop and pick up a hitchhiker, who turns out to be Penelope herself. By taking up the Odyssey, and staging Penelope as a traveler (and a time traveler), in an attempt to free her from the typecasting of constancy (Cry 120), Ndebele's fable suggests that, for women, the structural violence of the new power structure, although different to be sure from the one it has overthrown, may be no less onerous. Although his portrayal (ventriloquism) of Winnie Mandela is unsparing, he is as critical of the expectations that she had been supposed to meet. 34 Together the two novels suggest that it might be just as problematic to stage woman as a victim of sexual violence as to stage her as a chaste guardian of familial and racial purity. Nationalist gender ideology may

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draw the two stagings into an abyssal complicity. It is this complicity that Njabulo Ndebele attempts to avoid by scripting a Winnie Mandela who, in the company of women, is just a fellow traveler; and what Zoe Wicomb resists by bringing Dulcie, in all her excess of figure and figural excess, into her author's garden. These novels can do far more than I to stage the contingency and potential risks of making woman a sign or example of something. Novels are not theory. Literature is singular and unverifiable. If that is so, then what is the status of my discourse? Of a literary-critical discourse that, as any such discourse inevitably must, undertakes an advocacy of sorts of its own? In tracing more or less explicitly the play of founding and instrumental violence, I have not only presented a specific historical case study but have also staged the engagement of the ethical as response to and for the other. If violence, as Benjamin writes, is effective causality as it intervenes in ethical relations, in relation to the other, the body-which may be a corpse or not-is the node at which that relation is simultaneously broached and foreclosed. That is founding violence. By suggesting a critique of violence along these lines, one reaches the limits of historiography, transgressing it in quasi-legal fashion. When one appeals to the law, even if not in any narrow sense, and at times unwittingly, one assumes a prosecutorial aspect, almost taking upon oneself the task of advocacy. The place where the contingent shades into the transcendental is the place of the law and justice as designations for the ethical. In my book, as is sometimes discernible in the Truth Commission's report, a figure marks the undecidable crossing of transcendental and contingent. Here it is, in effect, the literary that marks the place of the ethical. In the case of the commission, as it incorporates the CALS submission, it is the collective figure of "black women," beyond all possible contingency and quantifiability of violation and suffering, that compels a constant examination and reexamination of the relationship between founding and instrumental violence. Collectively, our writings not only suggest a critique of violence that does not stop at the revelation of atrocities but also hint at the complicity of instrumental and founding violence, and generalize the body as the site of that complicity. Each writing promises, exploiting a logic of counterfactuality, a time when, although the relation between founding and instrumental violence will not have withered away, it would have been set to work in another way.

§4 Forgiveness

ro August 1998: Jacques Derrida has come to the University of the Western Cape, which is awarding him an honorary doctorate, to deliver a public lecture. Entitled "Forgiving the Unforgivable," the lecture will, Derrida states, "systematically avoid the temptation-however strong it may be here-to make any direct reference to the situation in South Mrica ... and to the process of reconciliation, or even of forgiveness-although I will argue that it is not the same thing." 1 This means that, for those hearing the lecture, the slightest reference to the process to which he alludes, beginning with the idea that reconciliation and forgiveness are not equivalent, will carry enormous weight. For the hearer who awaits such a reference, Derrida's views on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission will be defined the moment that he deviates from his policy of systematic avoidance. The suspense in which the hearer is held will not dissipate once a reference has been made; for can a reference made when one says one is systematically avoiding any reference be taken as the definitive word on a subject? The answer must, in all fairness, be no. This does not, however, prevent those listening in the Main Hall from questioning the speaker as if it were his final word, as if he had come to a judgment and passed a verdict on the process of reconciliation in their country. The culmination of an engagement with South Mrica that began in the 1980s with "Racism's Last Word" and "The Laws of Reflection," his luminous essay on Nelson Mandela, who was still in prison then, Derrida's first visit to South Mrica is a momentous one. 2 Coming two months before the Truth Commission submitted the first five volumes of its report, what he says both confirms this engagement and strikes a chord with

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several years of pensive occupation by South Africans with the commission-not least with the questions, doubts, and reservations that it has occasioned. For these reasons I elect it, rather than the voluminous academic literature on forgiveness, human rights, and transitional justice, 3 as a way into the subject. Derrida's references to the Truth Commission come at decisive moments in his discourse. The first, when he speaks of avoiding any direct reference to it, precedes the observation that forgiveness disrupts the usual order of law; the second, joined with the question of whether forgiveness is a human or divine capacity, 4 leads to a major axiom ofDerrida's texts on forgiveness: because the limit of man is not a limit among others, it will affect all forms of conditional forgiveness: excuses, regrets, amnesty, and so forth ("To Forgive" 25-26, 45-46). There is, Derrida explains, a shifting relation between the conditional and the unconditional; they are heterogeneous and indissociable; the contamination of the two orders is not an accident ("To Forgive" 45). As soon as "Pardon" as a speech act is uttered, is there not, Derrida asks, the beginning of a movement, a calculus of redemption, reconciliation, and so forth, that will allow a wrong to be neutralized ("To Forgive" 46)? This question is a complex response to the philosopher Vladimir Jankelevitch (1903-1985), whose writings on forgiveness, which have received less attention in the English-speaking world than they deserve, are the central topic of Derrida's lecture. Derrida will have been heard by his audience as saying that it may not be within human power to forgive, and that any mediation by the law means that there will not, properly speaking, have been forgiveness-and that, therefore, the process of reconciliation in South Africa is not well founded. During the questionand-answer session, Derrida assures his questioners that reconciliation, the work of mourning, and so forth are good things, but insists that they do not amount to forgiveness. When he said that forgiving is heterogeneous to the economy of mourning, and reconciliation, he was not opposing it to those processes; he was just saying that one must not confuse them with one another. 5 Derrida's strict delimitation of forgiveness ("To Forgive" 25) follows Jankelevitch, who, in Forgiveness (Le pardon) (1967), describes forgiveness as rigorously distinct from excusing, reconciliation, mourning, and amnesty-all of which, through invoking either the wear and tear of time (usure tempore/le) or understanding (comprendre), tend to neutralize wrong. 6 For Jankelevitch, forgiveness stands apart from mediation and from an economy of exchange: "True forgiveness ... is

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an event, a gratuitous gift and a personal relation with the other" (Le vrai pardon . . . est un evenement, un don gratuit et un rapport personnel avec !'autre) (34/47); "true forgiveness [is engaged] in an immediate relation with the person opposite from it" (le vrai pardon {est} engage dans une relation immediate avec son vis-a-vis) (68 /92-93). In contrast to excusing (!'excuse), forgiveness is unconditional: "a conditional forgiveness precisely is not forgiveness" (un pardon condition ne! n'est justement pas le pardon) (941I25). Yet in the epilogue to Forgiveness, Jankelevitch appears to impose certain conditions. For forgiveness to have any meaning, there must be repentance, and, above all, there must be an end to the crime, including the accusation of the victims: "The criminal's repentance and in particular his remorse, by themselves alone, give meaning to forgiveness, just as despair alone gives meaning to grace .... Before there can even be a question of forgiveness, it is first necessary that the guilty person, instead of protesting, recognize himself as guilty without pleas or mitigating circumstances, and especially without accusing his victims" (Forgiveness 157 I Pardon 204). Forgiveness must be asked. Jankelevitch stipulates this again in "Pardonner?" (1971), a revised and expanded version of a text originally published in 1965 under the title 'Timprescriptible" in the context of polemics in France surrounding the applicability of the common-law statute of limitations (prescription) to Nazi war crimes. 7 A discussion of this text-which he considers to be a "very violent" one ("To Forgive" 28)-takes up the greater part ofDerrida's lecture. In "Pardonner?" Jankelevitch opposes any statute of limitations on crimes against humanity: they are imprescriptible. Crimes against humanity, Jankelevitch writes, are of a special kind: "crimes against the human essence or, if you will, against the 'hominity' [' hominite'] of human beings in general. ... Racist crimes are an assault [attentat] against the human being as a human being. ... [T]he racist truly aims at the ipseity of being, that is, at the human of human being. Antisemitism is a grave offense against human beings in general. The Jews were persecuted because it was them, and not at all because of their opinions or their faith. It was existence itself that was denied them" ("Should We" 555; translation modified; quoted in "To Forgive" 42). 8 "The extermination of the Jews," according to Jankelevitch, "is the product of pure wickedness [mechancete], of ontological wickedness .... [S]trictly speaking, what happened is inexpiable" ("Should We" 556-558; quoted in "To Forgive" 30, 44). 9 That a crime is

Forgiveness inexpiable-no punishment could be proportional to the crime-does not mean that it is unforgivable; Jankelevitch says over and over that forgiving exceeds excusing. "The inexcusable," he specifies in Forgiveness, "can be forgivable even though it is not excusable" (93/124). The imprescriptible, Derrida notes in his lecture, is not the unforgivable. Nevertheless, Jankelevitch continues, "everything is forgivable for forgiveness [tout est pardonnable pour le pardon], all ... save, of course, the unforgivable [l'impardonnable]" (Forgiveness 93 I Pardon 124; Jankelevitch's ellipses). What Jankelevitch understands by "the unforgivable" is specified in the epilogue to Forgiveness, where he borrows from Schelling's account of evil: "totally wicked freedom .... radical wickedness" (liberte totalement mechante. ... mechancete radicale) (162hro). This he associates with the Nazis. Toward the end of his lecture Derrida, however, proposes a formal, indestructible aporia: there is only forgiveness of the unforgivable ("To Forgive" 48; see also 30). Derrida arrives at this aporia because Jankelevitch embraces two axioms that appear to cancel each other. Specifying, on the one hand, an unforgivable radical, ontological evil, Jankelevitch, on the other hand, continues to insist that forgiveness must be asked for that evil: "Forgiveness! [Le pardon!] But have they ever asked us for forgiveness? It is only the distress or dereliction of the guilty one that would give meaning [sens] and a raison d'etre to forgiveness" ("Should We" 567; translation modified; quoted in "To Forgive" 28). This repeats what was said in the epilogue to Forgiveness (157 ho4), but in "Pardonner?" entry into a polemic gives "pardon" a juridical shading. There remains an irreducible ambiguity, graphically visible in the choice imposed on the translator. The juridico-legal context of Jankelevitch's intervention justifies translating pardon not with "forgiveness," which is Derrida's translation and which I follow, but with the cognate "pardon" (as Ann Hobart does when she translates Jankelevitch's essay as "Should We Pardon Them?"). In "Pardonner?" forgiveness has entered, or has been entered, into a calculus, an exchange of one thing for another: pardon/forgiveness in return for its being asked, in return for repentance. The pardon in this case may be a legal pardon. Although "[f]orgiveness [(l)e pardon] died in the death camps," implying perhaps that no one can forgive on behalf of the dead, Jankelevitch writes: "In order to lay claim to forgiveness one must admit one's guilt, without reservations or adducing attenuating circumstances" ("Should We" 567; translation modified). It thus appears that,

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for Jankelevitch, even radical evil-the unforgivable-can be forgiven if the culprit asks for forgiveness. 10 Derrida questions Jankelevitch's commitment to the idea that forgiveness has to be asked ("To Forgive" 27), by referring to a legacy of thought on forgiveness that contradicts or "deconstructs" itself: Thus, it is clear for Jankelevitch-as it is clear for ... those traditions from which an idea of forgiveness comes to us in effect, but an idea of forgiveness the very legacy of which ... contradicts itself and gets carried away, fired up, I would say more coldly "deconstructs itself" -it is thus clear that for Jankelevitch forgiveness can be granted only if the guilty party mortifies himself, confesses himself, repents, accuses himself by asking for forgiveness, if consequently he expiates and thus identifies, in view of redemption and reconciliation, with the one of whom he asks forgiveness. It is this traditional axiom, which has great force, certainly, and great constancy, which I will be constantly tempted to contest, in the very name of the same legacy, of the semantics of one and the same legacy, namely that there is in forgiveness, in the very meaning of forgiveness a force, a desire, an impetus, a movement, an appeal (call it what you will) that demands that forgiveness be granted, if it can be, even to someone who does not ask for it, who does not repent or confess or improve or redeem himself, beyond, consequently, an entire identificatory, spiritual, whether sublime or not, economy, beyond all expiation even. ("To Forgive" 28)

The tradition therefore legates a contradiction between conditional and unconditional forgiveness." A little later, Derrida observes that "[t]he unconditional and the conditional are, certainly, absolutely heterogeneous, and this forever, on either side of a limit, but they are also indissociable" ("To Forgive" 45; see also "On Forgiveness" 44). By introducing the deconstructive motif of a contamination of heterogeneous conditional and unconditional orders (as he has in his writings on hospitality and on the gift [see "To Forgive" 45]), Derrida in a certain sense retains Jankelevitch's intuition that forgiveness must be asked, together with the idea that this petitioning speech act may be something that can both elude the calculus of the law and must enter into that calculus in order to be effective: "There is in the movement, in the motion of unconditional forgiveness, an inner exigency of becoming-effective, manifest, determined, and, in determining itself, bending to conditionality'' ("To Forgive" 45); "if one wants, and it is necessary, forgiveness to become effective, concrete, historic; if one wants it to arrive, to happen by changing things, it is necessary that this purity

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engage itself in a series of conditions of all kinds (psychosociological, political, etc.). It is between these two poles, irreconcilable but indissociable, that decisions and responsibilities are to be taken" ("On Forgiveness" 44-45). When Jankelevitch asks, "But have they ever asked us for forgiveness?" he appears to impose a condition. Yet, when he said that the crimes in question are inexpiable, there seemed to be no way of setting conditions. Having begun his lecture with the words "Pardon, yes, pardon," Derrida ends: "Pardon, thank you, mercy. In the beginning there will have been the word 'pardon,' 'thank you/mercy [merci]"' ("To Forgive" 21, 50). 12 Derrida is thus not opposing the two orders, but pointing to an aporia-one that, profoundly witnessed in Jankelevitch's writings, is crossed through all the time in practice, by speech acts. Derrida is not against the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the South Mrican process of reconciliation in general. Though not broached by his questioners at the University of the Western Cape, a second point of contact closely aligns Derrida and Jankelevitch with an important strand of criticism of the Truth Commission-namely that forgiveness is not a matter to be mediated by the law, by the state, by a "third,'' but something that can only properly take place between victim and perpetrator face-to-face. As Jankelevitch writes in Forgiveness, "true forgiveness [is engaged] in an immediate relation with the person opposite from it [avec son vis-a-vis]" (68 /92-93; see also Derrida, "To Forgive" 25). In subsequent texts, Derrida recognizes how this idea emerged among victims testifYing before the Truth Commission; he recalls one witness saying: "'A commission or a government cannot forgive. Only I, eventually, could do it. (And I am not ready to forgive.)"' ("On Forgiveness" 42; see also Derrida, "Versohnung' 138-139). One can find other statements in the same vein from witnesses. As a position it is distinct from the outright rejection by some of the commission's amnesty provisions in favor of criminal prosecutions-a stance that, as Derrida notes, need not preclude forgiveness, just as, inversely, after an amnesty it is possible not to forgive ("On Forgiveness" 54-55). However necessary a state may deem it to effect national reconciliation through amnesties and other measures, a state ought not to usurp the power to forgive on behalf of victims ("On Forgiveness" 58-59). A powerful sense of the heterogeneity of forgiveness to law, regularly articulated by South Mricans, is perhaps what leads Derrida to refer broadly to the "process of reconciliation" ("To Forgive" 25) rather than restricting what he has to say to the Truth Commission alone.

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In this chapter I will show that law, in the shape of the Truth Commission, establishes conditions of possibility for forgiveness. In exceptional cases, the amnesty hearings brought victim and perpetrator face-to-face with each other. Although the amnesty provisions did not demand it, this situation sometimes has the force to draw from the perpetrator an apology, even an asking of forgiveness. And victims say, more often than one might expect, that they forgive. At the same time, whether or not anyone says that he or she forgives, we do not know whether there has been forgiveness. There has been much polemic about a duty to forgive being foisted on victims by the commission, 13 and assertions made about the right not to forgive. It is my view that a duty to forgive cannot be imposed on victims (although, undoubtedly, from a Christian point of view-which is not mine-forgiveness is a duty). On the other hand, I do not think that "right" is the correct word for what it means to eschew a supposed, and sometimes imposed, duty to forgive. 14 Forgiveness resides beyond rights and duties: one forgives or one does not; forgiveness takes place or it does not. After entering further into the South African context, in order to clarifY in greater detail the stakes of Derrida's lecture for his questioners, I turn to a remarkable instance of testimony by a perpetrator in response to questions from his victims. In this particular instance, what takes place confirms and complicates my theses about how the Truth Commission acted as a proxy figure to assume responsibility for the perpetrator who would not come forward, and how witnesses turned the commission in unanticipated directions by setting its basic concepts to work in unexpected ways.

Xolela "Forgiveness" may have been the most controversial term in the lexicon of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It is not, however, a term that appears in the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act. When the act sets out conditions for amnesty for perpetrators, it makes no mention of forgiveness. 15 In order to qualifY for amnesty, applicants had to disclose fully their acts of gross violation of human rights-which had to be politically motivated and proportionate to the political goal in question. The act required from perpetrators no apology to victims and demanded from them no expression of remorse. And it certainly did not require victims to forgive perpetrators. 16 Yet, from

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the beginning of the Truth Commission's life, a discourse, and counterdiscourse, on forgiveness surrounded it: there were perpetrators who apologized, and asked for forgiveness, and sometimes victims forgave or said that they were willing to do so under certain conditions; at the same time, there were those who would not ask for forgiveness, ones who were unforgiving, and those who criticized the expectation that victims ought to forgive. How did forgiveness become a defining concept for the commission, despite never having been part of its legal mandate? Many would give a one-word answer: Tutu. The role of Archbishop Desmond Tutu as chairperson of the Truth Commission was instrumental in bringing forgiveness to the center of its operations. I nevertheless wish to suggest that, although the Truth Commission drew on religion, and may have interpellated those who came to it as subjects of worship, 17 its operations cannot be reduced to sacramental ritual. Notwithstanding Tutu's prominent role, and the power of the Christian discourse on forgiveness to which he subscribes, forgiveness is, strictly speaking, irreducible to its Christian inscription. On the one hand, the concept of forgiveness in No Future without Forgiveness (1999), Tutu's book about the Truth Commission, follows conventional Christian lines. Tutu contests the idea, expressed by the president of Rwanda after the genocide of 1994, that there are deeds that are unforgivable, and he appeals to Jewish thinkers to reconsider "for the sake of the world" the argument that one "cannot forgive on behalf of those who suffered and died in the past" (No Futurn6o, 278). Forgiveness is a risk-for the one asking for it and for the one granting it (No Future 268-269). The one asking forgiveness may be spurned, and the one offered forgiveness "may be arrogant, obdurate, or blind; not ready or willing to apologize or to ask for forgiveness. He or she thus cannot appropriate the forgiveness that is offered. Such rejection can jeopardize the whole enterprise" (No Future 269). Tutu's view is subtly different from that of Jankelevitch, who condenses the reciprocity involved in forgiveness into a single question: "But have they ever asked us for forgiveness?" ("Should We" 567). From Tutu's point of view, for forgiveness to be reciprocal between the one asking and the one offering, one also has to ask the question, Have we ever offered them forgiveness? Perhaps the major difference between Tutu's understanding of forgiveness and that of Jankelevitch is that, although the confession of the perpetrator "is a very great help to the one who wants to forgive ... it is not absolutely indispensable." Tutu recalls

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for his readers Jesus on the cross, who "did not wait until those who were nailing him to the cross had asked for forgiveness. He was ready, as they drove in the nails, to pray to his Father to forgive them." Tutu concludes: "If the victim could forgive only when the culprit confessed, then the victim would be locked into the culprit's whim, locked into victimhood, whatever her own attitude or intention. That would be palpably unjust" (No Future 272). For the victim's sake, then, it must be possible for forgiveness to operate unconditionally. Although "it is up to the wrongdoer to appropriate" it, forgiveness remains a "gift" (No Future 273). When it is not appropriated through an acknowledgment of wrongdoing, forgiveness must operate beyond human reciprocity. Then divine grace is sought through prayer. Another strand in No Future without Forgiveness links forgiveness and ubuntu. Having explained how the Truth Commission's amnesty provisions were designed as a "third way" between Nuremberg-style trials and a general amnesty, which would have amounted to "national amnesia," Tutu writes: Let us conclude this chapter by pointing out that ultimately this third way of amnesty was consistent with a central feature of the Mrican Weltsanschauung [sic]-what we know in our languages as ubuntu, in the Nguni group oflanguages, or botho, in the Sotho languages. What is it that constrained so many to choose to forgive rather than to demand retribution, to be so magnanimous and ready to forgive rather than wreak revenge? Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language. It speaks of the very essence of being human. When we want to give high praise to someone, we say, "Yu, u nobuntu"; "Hey, so-and-so has ubuntu." Then you are generous, you are hospitable, you are friendly and caring and compassionate. You share what you have. It is to say, "My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours." We belong in a bundle of life. We say, "A person is a person through other persons." It is not "I think therefore I am." It says rather: "I am human because I belong. I participate, I share." A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are. Harmony, friendliness, community are great goods. Social harmony is for us the summum bonum-the greatest good. Anything that subverts, that undermines this sought-after good, is to be avoided like the plague. Anger,

Forgiveness resentment, lust for revenge, even success through aggressive competitiveness, are corrosive of this good. To forgive is not just to be altruistic. It is the best form of self-interest. What dehumanizes you inexorably dehumanizes me. It gives people resilience, enabling them to survive and emerge still human despite all efforts to dehumanize them. (No Future 31) By associating forgiveness with amnesty, Tutu appears to be introducing an element of calculation-an impression that is reinforced when he observes that " [t] o forgive is not just to be altruistic. It is the best form of self-interest." He appears to be saying that one forgives because one has done one's sums and come up with the result that in order to advance one's self-interest, in a particular case, one must forgive. This could not be further from what Tutu is saying. I have quoted at unusual length in order to try to underline the difference. We need to take seriously what he says about the difficulty of rendering ubuntu into a Western language. The reciprocity of ubuntu is radical. There is, in ubuntu, no opposition, strictly speaking, between altruism-living for the other (autrui)-and self-interest. AB I argued in Chapter r, when ubuntu is phrased, as it is in Zulu (one of the Nguni languages), as umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, both umuntu (human being) and abantu (human beings) undergo a dispropriation. The human-being (ngumuntu) of the singular (umuntu) depends on the plural (abantu), but the plural itself would have no sense apart from the pole of singularity. This, as I argue, makes it possible to read ubuntu against the grain of one-sided communitarian interpretations. The nature of the community depends on what its members do-whether it be acts of mourning and condolence, or of forgiveness or reparation. If there is such a thing as a nation or volk, it is no more than the cumulative outcome of these acts. What does it mean to try to understand forgiveness in these terms? Here things become more difficult. The simplest way of understanding what is going on may be to say: forgiveness, although it remains a key word, has been displaced as a concept; the word no longer means what it had appeared to mean. It is also no longer simply Christian, or even religious. Its meaning will have been underwritten by ubuntu-not simply by a notion of Mrican community, but by the radical reciprocity of ubuntu, and by the profound distress at its loss that Pius Langa registers in his Constitutional Court judgment. If one were to try to make sense of this in terms of Derrida's analysis of Jankelevitch, one might say that what we call "forgiveness" is not simply unconditional or conditional, but the very condition

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of possibility for human-being understood according to ubuntu. Without something like forgiveness there would not be any human-being, or human beings between whom forgiveness could take place. There would be biological entities beset by anger and lust for revenge. There would be aggression and violent conflict, but this would not, in any meaningful sense, be human life. Another element, not quite reaching conceptual elaboration, is, I would suggest, crucial to understanding the force ofTutu's discourse on forgiveness. On numerous occasions in No Future without Forgiveness, Tutu associates, without explication, the terms "forgiveness" and "reconciliation": Mandela embodies "reconciliation and forgiveness," and speaks of "forgiveness and reconciliation" (39); restorative justice entails "healing, ... forgiving, and ... reconciliation" (55); Tutu appeals to Rwandans "to consider choosing forgiveness and reconciliation rather than their opposites" (26o); in Israel there is "deep interest ... in the concept of forgiveness and reconciliation" (268); the perpetrator's acknowledgment of the truth "helps the process of forgiveness and reconciliation immensely" (269); "[f]orgiving and being reconciled are not about pretending that things are other than they are" (270); "we will always need a process of forgiveness and reconciliation to deal with ... breaches in relationships" (273). These are perhaps instances of what Derrida reads as an ambiguity, an "equivocal instability" in Tutu's discourse ("On Forgiveness" 43). In one respect, Derrida is correct: the concept of reconciliation, as it informs the act, relies on a process of amnesty-seeking mediated by the law, and is thus not to be confused with pure forgiveness. Yet when he writes of forgiveness in the same breath as reconciliation, Tutu appears to assimilate forgiveness and amnesty. In that case, then, there is the aporia that Derrida describes in his texts on forgiveness. Perhaps, though, there is another way of reading Tutu's association of the two terms. In Country ofMy Skull, Antjie Krog gathers from Nomfundo Walaza that witnesses before the commission "know that the basic premise is reconciliation and forgiveness .... In Xhosa the word they have chosen for 'reconciliation'-as in 'Truth and Reconciliation'-is 'uxolelwano,' which is much closer in meaning to 'forgiveness"' (160). The verb xolela can mean "to forgive," but also has the senses of "to be appeased toward" and "to be resigned to"-for instance, xolela nokufo translates as "to be willing to die" (McLaren). Grammatically, the abstract noun uxolelwano is formed from the passive, xolelwa.

Forgiveness In approaching an answer to the question of how forgiveness became so central to the Truth Commission when it was not part of its legislated mandate, it is thus necessary to add to an awareness of the Christianization of the process, in which Tutu was instrumental, the understanding that, in setting the law to work, the translation of "reconciliation" by "uxolelwano" accomplishes something more profound. As Walaza's remarks indicate, confirming the association found in Tutu, the word links "reconciliation and forgiveness." Various senses of xolela are combined. One does not want to say, simply, that, in Xhosa, the use of the word xolela means that "reconciliation" and "forgiveness" are interchangeable terms. One can, I think, say that two translations meet. The first is the translation, an old one, of Christian "forgiveness" with a word that can also mean "reconciliation." The second is the rendering of "reconciliation" in the vocabulary of the Truth Commission with a word (xolela) that, traditionally, has translated "forgiveness." There is thus a space of semantic setting to work that, on the one hand, leads reconciliation beyond its juridico-legal sense, demanding more from it; on the other hand, what one finds in this beyond is not simply Christian forgiveness but something that will already have been transformed by being translated by xolela. Forgiveness-reconciliation is a condition of possibility for human being and being with the other. Tutu's account of how forgiveness relates to ubuntu, and his constant linking of forgiveness and reconciliation, are signs that such a process will have been at work-long before the inception of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and long before Tutu (the one-word answer ignores this history). 18 Once again, the vernacular alters the mandate of the commission as it was understood and carried out on the ground. It puts forgiveness at the center of its agenda, but, in scarcely perceptible ways, forgiveness is no longer simply forgiveness, and will always also have been reconciliation. Although the conditions of possibility for making these transformations effective in a national process such as the commission ultimately reside in law, nothing will be understood about the centrality of forgiveness unless one recognizes how the terms of law are appropriated and transformed through translation. When the mothers of the Guguletu Seven meet one of the policemen involved in the entrapment and killing of their sons, an encounter shown in the film Long Night's journey into Day, we hear one of them crying over and over: "ndiyaxolela, ndiyaxolela" ("I forgive, I forgive"). A key question

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would be whether things will work, or work in quite the same way, when the parties involved do not speak, or do not all speak, or speak at the same time, a language in which, as in Xhosa, the idiom underwrites the nexus "forgiveness and reconciliation" in familiar yet historically determinate ways. Without a common idiom, can reconciliation take place? Can forgiveness? Will there be clarity or will there be confusion? Will the setting to work of "forgiveness and reconciliation'' in the context of the commission have sufficient force when the parties concerned are not scripted by the history of translation that I have outlined? Will they allow themselves to be so scripted, in order to begin a new history? The testimony to which I turn raises all of these questions. If forgiveness is conditioned by the law, it is also true, in this case, that it is not the only thing that the law conditions.

Law, Responsibility, Forgiveness At a public hearing in Cape Town on 14 July 1997, the Truth Commission allowed five former Umkhonto weSizwe cadres to question police captain Jeffrey Benzien regarding his application for amnesty for acts of killing and torture. In the late 1980s Captain Benzien had been a member of the Anti-Terrorist Unit of the Security Branch in Cape Town. His questioners-Tony Yengeni, Ashley Forbes, Gary Kruser, Peter Jacobs, and Bongani Jonas-had been tortured by him following arrest and while in police detention. Now they were demanding that Captain Benzien describe, even enact before the commission, the techniques he applied during interrogation. South Africa and the world watched as Jeffrey Benzien simulated the "wet bag" torture method, where a water-soaked bag is placed over the head of the victim to induce suffocation and fear of death. Like a handful of other occasions on which victims or surviving next of kin faced perpetrators, 19 the hearing instantly became a Truth Commission touchstone. As in the other instances, the quasi-juridical-or from another point of view, "legalistic"-conventions governing the hearings were violated.20 Regarding the Benzien case, however, the commentators were more specific about the nature and significance of the transgression. At last the roles were reversed and, as Max du Preez summed up on Special Report on Truth and Reconciliation (20 July 1997), "the torturer ... was confronted by the tortured."

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Other observers regard the events that unfolded at Benzien's hearing in a less favorable light. Antjie Krog, for instance, writes the following about the proceedings: Initially the body language of the tortured was clear: no one else counts, not the Amnesty Committee, not the lawyers, not the audience-what counts today is you and me. And we sit opposite each other, just like ten years ago. Except that I am not at your mercy-you are at mine. And I will ask you the questions that have haunted me ever since. But it isn't that easy. (Country 73)

The voice of Tony Yengeni, a member of Parliament, which "has become known for its tone of confidence-sometimes tinged with arrogance," now "sounds strangely different-his voice somehow choked" (Country 73),2! Then there are the questions that Captain Benzien asks, which have the effect of turning the tables again and putting the victims at the perpetrator's mercy. Having made Benzien demonstrate the "wet bag," Krog observes, "Yengeni has to pay dearly. Back at the table, Benzien quietly turns on him and with one accurate blow shatters Yengeni's political profile right across the country. 'Do you remember, Mr Yengeni, that within thirty minutes you betrayed Jennifer Schreiner? Do you remember pointing out Bongani Jonas to us on the highway?"' (Country 73). 22 Benzien proceeded to testifY about the "special relationship" that he claimed to have shared with Ashley Forbes: "You I can remember especially because I think that the two of us ... really became quite close ... I may be mistaken, but I would say relatively good friends in a way.... Do you remember the time when you saw snow for the first time?" (Krog, Country 73-74)Y As Krog observes, "[a] torturer's success depends on his intimate knowledge of the human psyche. Benzien is a connoisseur. Within the first few minutes he manages to manipulate most of his victims back into the roles of their previous relationship-where he has the power and they the fragility'' (Country 74). Yazir Henry, another Western Cape cadre tortured by the security police, echoes Krog's observations. Henry writes that the decision to grant Jeffrey Benzien amnesty "will remain unpopular and continue to be contested and widely regarded as illegitimate" (171). 24 Not only does "the community" perceive that "[Benzien] did not make full disclosure and [that] his actions were disproportionate to his political motivation," thus

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disqualifying him from amnesty under the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, but [h]e also showed very little remorse and in some ways, because of his attitude, continued to torture Yengeni and Forbes and others in his appearance before the Commission. He asked Yengeni to remember how he gave up not only his arms but also his comrade Bongani Jonas without the security police having to lay a finger on him. He asked Forbes to tell the audience that he (Benzien) had not only brought him ice cream and books but also broke bread with him and played with him in the snow during his detention. I remember asking myself how a process that was supposed to be holding him accountable for his brutal and systematic torture of people could go so horribly wrong. I struggled with my anger and resolved not to participate in any further amnesty proceedings-even though I knew that the people responsible for torturing and nearly killing me would apply for amnesty. I realised that the amnesty process was hampering my own efforts to deal with the trauma of capture, detention and the obligation to watch a comrade and friend die in front of me as a result of the police opening fire with guns and hand grenades. (Henry qr) Common to Antjie Krog's and Yazir Henry's accounts of what happened at the Benzien hearing is the perception that the "process ... [went] horribly wrong." The intuition guiding each of their versions is that the way in which the proceedings unfolded returned Yengeni, Forbes, and the others to the time of the offense for which Benzien was applying for amnesty. As Krog notes, "Within the first few minutes, he manages to manipulate most of his victims back into the roles of their previous relationship-where he has the power and they the fragility." According to Henry, "[H]e ... in some ways ... continued to torture Yengeni and Forbes and others in his appearance before the Commission." For Henry, the exchange with Benzien is not limited to the re-injury of those directly involved. The exchange with Benzien takes him, as a member of the audience, back to when he was detained and tortured, and the complicated events that ensued. There is a sense to be gained from both Krog and Henry, that for the good of the victim, a return to, or a continuation of, the offense ought not to take place. Or, at the very least, not with the perpetrator. But is such a return not what Max du Preez celebrates in his Special Report? Is it not what Du Preez, and Krog, although Krog does not celebrate it, sense that Yengeni and the others seek from Benzien? By reversing roles and asking Benzien questions, are they, in effect, not continuing

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the contest begun ten years before, so that they can wrest control of the situation from Benzien, and retrospectively gain the upper hand? If this is their game, it is a hazardous one. Du Preez declares the questioners the winners, but Krog and Henry dissent. The five confronting Benzien are like assault victims of a professional boxer, entering the ring one by one to get their own back. Common sense tells us that an appearance before the law will deprive the boxer of none of his advantage over his victims. To the extent that one can even speak of victory going to either party, if Benzien, the practiced torturer, won the first bout, what reason do we have to think that he should lose the rematch? Such considerations lay behind the regular conduct of the Truth Commission's public proceedings, which included a separation of the victim's human rights violation hearing from the perpetrator's amnesty hearing. Cross-examination at amnesty hearings was typically restricted to victims' lawyers. 25 A quasi-juridical body, the Truth Commission linked forensic truth-seeking and rehabilitative telling. Accordingly, its provisions for mediation address problems of responsibility shared by law and psychoanalysis. Transference is the mediator in psychoanalysis. Staging the repetition of a past set of experiences, transference is an alternative to direct confrontation with figures linked to traumatic events in an analysand's life. As Freud writes in the postscript to the case history of "Dora": What are transferences? They are new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic for their species, that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician. To put it another way: a whole series of psychological experiences are revived, not as belonging to the past, but as applying to the person of the physician at the present moment. (Fragment n6)

Two aspects of Freud's account are most relevant here: the transposition of figures and the assimilation of temporalities. The process of repetition, acting out, and working through, the components of the therapeutic cure, depends upon this nexus. 26 In a similar way, the Truth Commission makes use of this process, or a part of it, through the conduct of its human rights violation hearings, which are designed to contribute to a "restoring [of] the human and civil dignity of the victims" ( Truth Commission Report r:r12n6). In the absence of perpetrators willing to come forward, this also works as a

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counterbalance to amnesty (Truth Commission Report 5=170-I71): the commission assumes responsibility for the violation(s) of the perpetrator. The perpetrator does not testifY at the human rights violation hearing. Further, amnesty-seekers are typically cross-examined not by the victims themselves but by their legal representatives, and then usually only in cases where the victims are withholding their support for the amnesty application. The process is mediated, as in the therapeutic situation, and the return to the time of the offense is managed by proxy. This is how the law endeavors to contain and limit the inevitable repetition of the offense and escalation of violence and counterviolenceY Let me relate this to the larger argument about dispropriation, substitution, and responsibility that I am making in this book. If, at the human rights violation hearings, the commission takes the place of the perpetrator in order to undertake and generalize reparation or condolence, then at the amnesty hearings it assumes the place of the victim in order to receive reparation and condolence, and on occasion apology, from the perpetrator. A question of immense gravity, however, emerges from a further consideration of the technics of substitution it set to work: is the commission, by offering amnesty to perpetrators, not thereby also forgiving the perpetrator on behalf of the victim? If it were doing so, would it not be usurping a prerogative exclusive to the one wronged? The answer to this second question must surely be yes. But the first is not as easy to answer. It is true, on the one hand, that the legal authority of the commission to grant conditional amnesty was perceived by some as usurping the prerogative of victims to forgive. The commission itself acknowledged that any amnesty it granted would deprive the victim of the right to seek legal remedy in the case in question. Reparation, in its different forms, would be the quid pro quo. In an asymmetrical parallel to its making of reparation in place of the absent perpetrator, the commission would have taken the place of the victim who was reluctant to support amnesty. What if that victim would also have refused to forgive? Would that mean that, by granting amnesty, the commission had also forgiven the perpetrator in the place of the victim? The simple answer is no-since amnesty, being a legal measure, is not equivalent to forgiveness. Amnesty may be given by the unforgiving. And amnesty, in any case, is not the prerogative of victims but of a legally constituted body, and therefore the commission is usurping nothing. There is, however, a more complex answer. In the context of the Truth Commission, the rhetoric of which forgiveness is

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undeniably a part, amnesty takes precautions to avoid presenting itself as a forgiving by proxy (or collective forgiving), 28 or at least to set limits on the possibility of doing so. It therefore does not demand apology or remorse from the perpetrator. Yet, because, as I have explained, the hearings and other public activities set to work a relay of responsibility, an inevitable destinerrance, it is quite possible that amnesty from the commission may translate into forgiveness from the one who views a hearing on television or reads of an amnesty decision in the newspaper. The reverse would, of course, as I have observed, also be imaginable. Although not symmetrical, reparation (or non-reparation) and forgiveness (or nonforgiveness) are, in other words, set to work unpredictably through the substitutive technics of which the commission availed itself in its public hearings but never had more than an imperfect capacity to control. To a certain extent, as an interdisciplinary scholar of law, one wants things to go awry, to "go wrong." When operating boundaries are transgressed and quasi-juridical conventions are renegotiated, other dimensions of responsibility may be broached. Once that takes place, however, one cannot anticipate what will unfold. One would not want to say categorically that a confrontation between the parties themselves is detrimental to the victim or, indeed, to the perpetrator, but the attendant risks are unavoidable. It seems clear that, in the case of Benzien's amnesty hearing, if we accept Yazir Henry's account, the process does "go horribly wrong" because there takes place a direct confrontation. Returning both parties to the time of the offense renders the victim vulnerable again. This is what Yazir Henry senses, although I would not agree that the process "goes horribly wrong" simply "because of [Benzien's] attitude." The attitude of his questioners also takes a hand. More is required to manage the situation, so that the trauma is not simply repeated but is also worked through. Ashley Forbes's comment, on Special Report on Truth and Reconciliation (20 July 1997), that he did not seek counseling is perhaps a revealing one. Forbes, along with Yengeni and the others, not only eschews the commission's safeguards but rejects another available mechanism for reparative telling and listening. The tortured refuse the paths of mediation offered by both psychoanalysis (albeit in the weak sense represented by psychological counseling) and the law. This is what is at stake when we ask whether the "legalities" of the process ought to be abandoned or admit improvised modifications such as Yengeni and the others set in motion, which some have uncritically celebrated-while Yazir Henry walks away from a hear-

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ing that is no longer an amnesty hearing but a human rights violation hearing, except that it is not just tales of the past being told, but new violations that are being committed. Could the critical picture I am presenting be motivated by an unacknowledged impulse to lay down the law in order to disavow an unavoidable risk? Or, worse still, by a compulsion to keep the victim in the position of victim (one famously analyzed by Freud in "'A Child Is Being Beaten"')? How else, though, might one frame an analysis of the Benzien hearing? As interdisciplinary minds attuned and sympathetic to a crossing of boundaries and a transgression of rules, we have, nevertheless, to ask, once quasi-juridical mediation has been given up, whether any other dimension of responsibility has in fact been broached. That remains the criterion. Such an event cannot be anticipated, but may perhaps be isolated and analyzed after all is said and done. If one combs the transcript of the hearing, it may be possible to find, beyond a simple repetition and reversal of roles, an amendment of conduct. The focus of critical commentary has been on the struggle between Benzien and his victims (and whether victory goes to either side), Benzien's attitude, or whether such a contest ought, for the welfare of those involved, to have been staged in the first place. There are elements in Benzien's testimony, however, that not only augment our understanding of the relationship between torturer and tortured and its durability (which I read Krog to have in mind when she writes that "it isn't that easy'') but also suggest something else. Clearly, Yengeni and the others conduct themselves as if they want something from Benzien besides his amnesty application-if not retribution exactly, at least a further set of admissions (to additional acts, and to the complicity of other actors). Beyond that, they want him to submit to them and their interrogation. If this is so, Benzien responds, as Krog observes, by getting back at Yengeni and the others. Once the game is on, generally speaking he will not allow them to get the upper hand. 29 But there are moments of another quality. We witness, first of all, instances when Benzien apologizes, or asks for forgiveness for what he did. Referring to his killing of cadre Ashley Kriel in 1987, for which he is also applying for amnesty, and on which he will be questioned at the hearing, Benzien prefaces his testimony by reading out an apology: Firstly, I apologise [vra om verskoniniJ to any person or persons whom I have harmed and I specifically apologise to the families of Ashley Kriel for the death of their son and brother....

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Further I also apologise to the people whom I assaulted during interrogation, namely Peter Jacobs, Ashley Forbes, Anwar Dramat, Tony Yengeni, Gary Kruse[r], Niclo Pedro and Allan Mamba . . . . Gary Kruse[r] contacted me last week and we talked about reconciliation [versoening]. In the position which I am sitting here today, the persons whose names I have now mentioned, have come to me and have shaken my hand and wished me all the best and I think [sic] Mrs Forbes, I know her as Mina Pandy, I would like to thank her very much for her attitude. It has strengthened me in this difficult position [in] which I find myself. (Benzien 2-3) 30 The unedited SABC videotape of the hearing shows Benzien being greeted by Gary Kruser, Yasmina Pandy, Peter Jacobs, and Ashley Forbes just before the hearing begins. It also shows Tony Yengeni, overcome by emotion; he does not greet Benzien, but during the lunchtime adjournment approaches him at the witness table and they converse for several minutes. 31 That there had been contact prior to the hearing between Benzien and some of the victims is significant. It has, it would appear, led Benzien to believe that they will support-or at least not oppose-his application for amnesry. He even takes what passed between him, Kruser, and the others as amounting to forgiveness: "The fact that Director Kruse[r] is not opposing my application also indicate[s] that they forgive [vergewe] me and accept my version as correct" (Benzien 3). 32 From what ensues, it appears as if Benzien has assumed too much. When advocate Tasmil Papier ends his cross-examination of Benzien on the killing of Ashley Kriel, and a few additional questions have been asked by the committee, Gary Kruser is seen to rise from his seat and whisper something in the ear of Ms. lnthanga, leader of evidence for the committee. She then announces that "the victims of torture by Mr Benzien would like to put some questions to Mr Benzien, if they can be allowed by the Committee?" (Benzien 36). They are so allowed, and a cross-examination by the five, with Tony Yengeni the first, begins that will stretch late into the following day. The request by the victims to cross-examine Benzien appears to have been made on the spot, spurred perhaps by a dissatisfaction with his testimony about the death of Ashley Kriel-and it appears that if the five had planned in advance to bring questions, this was the first that the Truth Commission had heard of it. With few departures, the questioning of Yengeni and the others appears to abide by the juridico-legal script. Benzien's questioners remain

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in the realm of the amnesty conditions. They say that because Benzien has not met the requirement to make a "full disclosure" of violations, they hesitate to support his application for amnesty. Not only is Benzien reluctant to implicate fellow policemen, but he denies or cannot recollect events that his victims remember clearly. His testimony that there are things that he cannot remember-regularly followed by his nonetheless conceding that they happened or could have happened-confounds and even incenses his questioners. Such replies force them to encounter an absence of reciprocity-of memory, of affect associated with that memory, and thus, ultimately, an absence of empathy. Although they had set out for the land of amnesty conditions and forensic truth, and continue to speak as if that is their ultimate destination, their frustration at Benzien's replies takes them on a detour. Having disembarked on the rocky terrain of affect, where they discover a lack of reciprocity, they find themselves in a quandary. Incommensurable prerogatives have been thrown together: the "truth" they are after is no longer simply forensic (and cannot be, since, if we recall Wigmore, the essential element of memory is absent), but a truth of their suffering that they want acknowledged by Benzien. Gary Kruser's remarks sum this up well: "the difficulty I have, you seem to remember very flimsy things like [buying Ashley Forbes] Kentucky [Fried Chicken] and things which I would have thought you had forgotten, but things which stand out more permanently in terms of our interrogation and our experience, you don't seem to remember?" (Benzien 67). For Kruser, who uses a handkerchief to wipe tears from his eyes, this dissymmetry in recollection-and thus of "truth" -stands in the way of forgiveness: "this is my difficulty with finding out whether you are really telling us the truth. Whether you can make it easy for me to forgive you, this is my difficulty'' (Benzien 69). This, the sole reference to forgiveness from the side of the victims, is a retort to Benzien's claim that Kruser was prepared to forgive him (Benzien 3). Likewise, when there is talk of reconciliation from the side of the victims, the word itself is not owned. It is Benzien's words that are reported, and amnesty conditions are nearly always invoked in the same breath. "I think that when you spoke this morning," Tony Yengeni concludes, "you indicated that you have reconciled with us and we have reconciled with you .... But before I and my colleagues can express ourselves on supporting or not supporting your application for amnesty, we should be and must be convinced that you are speaking the truth .... We are prepared to support the amnesty

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application only on the basis of full disclosure and I am not sure that at this stage ... you have made a full disclosure" (Benzien 50). There is thus never an outward verbal reciprocation of Benzien's appeals for reconciliation and profession to speak "in the spirit of reconciliation" (Benzien, passim), his frequent apologies, or his petitions for forgiveness (Benzien 3, 33, n6). His questioners are, literally, without mercy. Although all parties use the same tongue, 33 Benzien and his victims accept two distinct registers. Whereas Benzien speaks of reconciliation, apology, and even forgiveness, they disown this vocabulary. They steer far from any talk of "forgiveness and reconciliation"; the language and conceptuality of xolela and uxolelwano never occur to them. For them, at least as far as the letter of their public testimony goes, the matter at issue is whether they are satisfied that Benzien has made "full disclosure" and, consequently, whether they will support his amnesty application or not. As I have observed, however, their questioning carries them beyond the script, leading them to a place where the stakes, at least for them, are quite different. Talk about "truth" oscillates rapidly between the language of the law and another pole, which, although a language does not yet exist for it, emerges as more powerfully charged with affect. Although their language remains that of the law-and the departure from "legalities" cited by commentators is thus imperfect-their use of it indicates a quest for some other type of remedy that has perhaps become clear only through the confrontation with Benzien. What they appear to realize, to judge by their interviews soon after the hearing with Gail Reagon screened on Special Report on Truth and Reconciliation (20 July 1997), is that Benzien cannot, in the final analysis, help them to resolve matters for themselves. From what Gary Kruser says-"we don't want him to be punished"-it appears that the group will not oppose Benzien's amnesty application. 34 Ashley Forbes-perhaps alluding to the findings of Benzien's psychiatrist, but also to his own memories-accepts that Benzien may have "tried to block out a lot of those incidents" as a psychological "defense mechanism." 35 Standing at the quay on Robben Island, Yasmina Pandy tells Special Report that: This morning I spoke again to Benzien and I said to him .... You know, we'd support his amnesty and that, you know, we'd give it to him on a platter.... All we expected was for him to tell the truth .... And I think he was sincere when he said to me that he honestly can't remember those things ....

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For us ... there is reconciliation but we [are] actually going now through a healing process. For some of the things we just, just out of our own choice preferred not to have spoken about. And now the truth is coming out. Even we have to deal with the truth. Because Benzien cannot remember things that they remember him doing to them, he cannot acknowledge their "truth." This means that some other way of finding acknowledgment has to be pursued. As Yasmina Pandy says, however, ultimately this truth is something that has to be acknowledged by the victims themselves. Any reconciliation with Benzien has to take place with an acceptance of an absence of reciprocity-or at least an absence of perceptible reciprocity from the actual Benzien, since it is possible that matters can be worked out differently in transference. It is also possible to see some kind of reparation as having been made; by taking them to Robben Island, the place of incarceration of Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners, Special Report reconfirms the former cadres as heroes of the anti-apartheid struggle. In turn, they repair Benzien just enough for them to empathize with him. Another exchange at the hearing exceeds for a brief moment the frame of legal contestation around Benzien's amnesty application. Early in his cross-examination, Tony Yengeni asks Benzien a question that he says is not about the politics of the apartheid era that motivated Benzien's acts, or about the threats to his family that followed when allegations about those acts became public. What is at issue, instead, is human being-not only the humanity of Benzien, but the being-human of human being: MR YENGENI: What kind of man that uses a method like this one of the wet bag, to people, to other human beings, repeatedly and listening to those moans and cries and groans and taking each of those people very near to their deaths, what kind of man are you? What kind of man is that, that can do that kind of [a thing], what kind of human being is that Mr Benzien? I want to understand really why, what happened? I am not talking about now the politics or your family, I am talking about the man behind the wet bag? When you do those things, what happens to you as a human being? What goes through your head, your mind? You know, what effect does that torture activity done [sic] to you as a human being? MR BENZIEN: Mr Yengeni, not only you have asked me that question. I, I, Jeff Benzien, have asked myself that question to such an extent that I voluntarily, and it is not easy for me to say this in a full court with a lot of people

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who do not know me, approached [p]sychiatrists to have myself evaluated, to find out what type of person am I. There was a stage when this whole scene was going on, that I thought I was losing my mind. I have subsequently been, and I am now still, under treatment, where I have to take tablets on a regular basis. (Benzien 39) Yengeni's line of questioning may be interpreted as seeking to reestablish for himself what it means to be human. As Yengeni understands it, for Benzien to have done what he did, he must have lost his humanity: "When you do those things, what happens to you as a human being?" Recalling Tutu's discussion in No Future without Forgiveness, one could say that what Yengeni does is lament a loss of ubuntu; and that it is in his interest to reestablish the conditions of possibility for human reciprocity. These will only be restored once he knows how the other perceives the effect on his humanity (and that of the other) of what he has done. As Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela puts it in the film Long Night's journey into Day, "You want to see that they are not monsters after all." 36 What chance does Yengeni's question have? Probably little, yet the risk he takes is rewarded. The question does actually broach a certain reciprocity; Benzien has asked himself the same question, a question that he too considers to fall outside of the scope of the forensic proceedings: "it is not easy for me to say this in a full court." Whereas Yengeni's references to dehumanization are not specific enough to be definitively linked to any philosophy, religion, or branch of therapy (my framing of them in terms of ubuntu is purely heuristic: I might as easily have invoked Coleridge), 37 psychiatry is where Benzien has gone to find an answer. He duly provides a brief and formulaic autobiography to suggest a political motivation for his acts, and then returns to the matter at hand: the "wet bag" was used only in the initial interrogations ofYengeni and the others, not in subsequent sessions of questioning. Benzien does not take the opening for reciprocity offered to him by Yengeni. Instead psychiatry provides him with medication and a set of excuses. The moment, if it was ever there, passes, and does not return. The hearing adjourns for lunch, and, after Yengeni converses with Benzien at his table, a volunteer is found and Yengeni has Benzien demonstrate for him and the Truth Commission how he tortured him. If Benzien stifles the opening to his human-being offered to him by Yengeni, and creates an impression of evasiveness that makes the ques-

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tioners stick to the law and refuse the vocabulary of forgiveness and reconciliation, there are, nevertheless, less perceptible changes that he undergoes. These can be registered in the later parts of his testimony under cross-examination by the five. Another set of remarks from Benzien, relating directly to the scene of interrogation and torture "repeated" at the hearing, might have been more compelling for them than Benzien's overt statements of apology were they to have been registered by the victims at the time. Although Benzien frequently responds to his questioners with questions and statements that render them vulnerable, 38 he also, on at least two occasions reflected by the transcript, desists from this pattern, reining himself in when he is about to launch into an interrogation: ''As a matter of interest, [-] I think I should stop here, and just answer his [Jonas's] question .... Mr Jacobs, I don't know what position you hold in the Security Branch now, but do you-okay you are asking me the questions" (Benzien 121, 139). Benzien's restraint may simply be out of respect for, or deference to, the authority of the court of law. As a police veteran, he has testified many times, and as Judge Ngoepe of the amnesty committee observes, much leeway is being granted to the others, who must be guided in their cross-examination (see Benzien 127). These moments may, however, ultimately elude the framework of the law. When we ask whether there will have been responsibility, we look for a reinvention rather than a mechanical application of rules (see Derrida, "Force of Law" 967). If the first thing we notice about Benzien's hearing is the unanticipated interrogation of Benzien by his victims, perhaps we can, once new rules governing the time of the offense as it is reenacted have been put in place, in turn observe a reinvention on the part of Benzien. Given that what we are witnessing is indeed, as Krog and Henry suspect, a repetition or continuation of the old situation, for Benzien to have responded by becoming the interrogator all over again may have been the least unexpected outcome. Benzien himself keeps saying, with reference to his shooting of cadre Ashley Kriel, that "the tables ... could have been turned [die bordjies . .. anderste gedraai kon gewees het]" (Benzien 12; see also 25). To have responded in any other way would have been exceptional. Yet there are times when he appears to act otherwise, and the pattern of compulsive or compelled behavior is, if not broken, significantly interrupted. Let us assume that Benzien is not simply upholding the rules of conduct governing amnesty hearings, which are progressively relaxed when

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he is cross-examined. It may then be that in those places where he desists from questioning, Benzien is, as much as his questioners, attempting to work things out with the others without the aid of the commission as mediator. As observed, once Yengeni and the others take it upon themselves to question Benzien, they abdicate in certain respects the commission's mediation and its preparedness to appear as their proxy (for the receiving of apology, reparation, condolence, and so forth). Benzien's response is, in general, to turn the tables on them and to become their interrogator once more. When he appeals to the commission's rules in order not to question his questioners, he is, I propose, no longer simply availing himself of the "transference" offered by the commission, but may instead be acting as his own proxy for the old Jeffrey Benzien. It is hardly surprising that these fleeting moments elude the memory of the hearing of the ones questioning. Like Ashley Forbes's excursion to the snows of the hinterland, these moments do not detract from the overall experience of past and renewed violation. It remains, nevertheless, to weigh them, if not for what they are, then for what they could have been. If one thing they might indicate is a mending of ways commonly thought to be a condition of forgiveness, and thus a practical asking by Benzien of forgiveness, in this case, I do not know, and perhaps cannot ultimately know, what they are, even as I sense that they, like the questions posed by his victims, are something other, something more, than a "legalistic" ploy or gesture. Yet they bring no answering word of forgiveness from the victims-none at least that is heard in the commission's chambers in Cape Town.

Mediations of Forgiveness Forgiveness is complicated, not annulled, by the mediation of religion, law, and psychoanalysis. If, on the one hand, we give weight to the classical argument found in Jankelevitch's Forgiveness, that forgiveness is, strictly speaking, a free gift, made in a face-to-face relation, unmediated by a "third," we also observe that, in South Mrica, it is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's quasi-juridical procedures that make forgiveness or something like it possible between the wronged and the offenders. Whereas the commission must, as I have argued, be able to operate in the place of the perpetrator who will not come forward, the one who does apply for amnesty submits to the force of law in traditional fashion. When the scene of amnesty crosses with the goal of rehabilitation

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of victims, the result is unpredictable. The victim may leave feeling violated. When the commission's procedures are explicated, against the grain of its self-understanding, through psychoanalysis, the picture is further complicated. Transference "returns" the victim to the time of the offense, as I have argued. There is another element, where this "return" must be provisional-so that the offender is not locked forever in that time and that identity (see Jankelevitch, Forgiveness 19! Pardon 28). For forgiveness to take place, the victim must undertake the (minimal) "reparation" of the perpetrator. This is what Yengeni might have been doing when he asked Benzien what had happened to his humanity. It is a commonplace in thinking about forgiveness that, even if the act is unforgivable, it is the human being that is forgiven: "forgiveness ... forgives the man insofar as he is a man'' [le pardon . .. pardonne al'homme en tant qu'homme] Qankelevitch, Forgiveness 95 IPardon 127). Although Jankelevitch writes about the "rancor" that is the alternative to forgiveness (Forgiveness 19/ Pardon 28), neither he nor Derrida considers forgiveness from a psychoanalytic perspective. When we analyze the account of forgiveness and ubuntu as set out by Desmond Tutu in No Future without Forgiveness, however, it is possible to do so. Tutu's view of justice is restorative and reparative. It is the humanity of the other that is to be restored. Approaching Kleinian reparation, if this is not exactly forgiveness, it may, as Pumla GobodoMadikizela suggests in A Human Being Died That Night (124), be a condition of its possibility. The hearings of the Truth Commission show that forgiveness is never pure, that it is never even just one thing. Forgiveness is not self-identical, but, as Derrida implies ("To Forgive" 45; "On Forgiveness" 45), is disseminated in various ways. The strictures of Jankelevitch and the aporias of Derrida tell us important things about forgiveness and the law. They are a philosophical safeguard against the abuse of mock apologies and false forgiveness. The reparative dynamics that emerge with the commission suggest, though, that this vigilance is only part of the story. When Tutu links forgiveness to ubuntu, and Tony Yengeni asks Benzien what kind of a man does what he did, we have events that, although fundamentally conditioned by the law, momentarily and imperfectly exceed it.

§5 Reparation Senzeni na? Senzeni na? Senzeni na? lsono sethu bubumnyama lsono sethu bubumnyama -Struggle song is ek slegs aanvaarbar sonder besittings of is besitting van die wit vel die uiteindelik ergste oortreding -Antjie Krog, "ni grand-invasions in Zimbabwe" 1

The Aporia of Reparation On 21 March 2003 Archbishop Desmond Tutu formally brought to an end the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission by handing over the last two volumes of its seven-volume report to President Thabo Mbeki. Volume 6 contains reports by the amnesty committee, the reparation and rehabilitation committee, and the human rights violations committee; an account of the intersection of the work of the human rights violations committee and the amnesty committee; and a tabling of findings and recommendations. Except for the final report of the amnesty committee, much of the same ground was covered in the first five volumes, which had been presented to President Mandela in October 1998. In some cases volume 6 amplifies, corrects, or refines the commission's initial findings and proposals. 2 Volume 7, almost 1,000 pages in extent, lists the name of each victim recognized by the commission, along with a brief account of the human rights violations that he or she suffered. With the presentation of the last two volumes, the commission's activities concluded with a shifting of emphasis and responsibilities. Having fulfilled its task of investigating and describing human rights violations, and of deciding applications for amnesty, the commission put the process of reparation that it had been mandated to initiate into the hands of the South African government. Among the major recommendations of the report is the payment of monetary reparations to

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those who testified before the commission as victims of gross violations of human rights or as the immediate survivors of victims. The commission had been required by law to propose material and symbolic reparations, designed to restore the human and civil dignity of victims. It also recognized a moral duty to provide a quid pro quo to victims whose right to pursue criminal and civil suits against perpetrators had, in principle,3 been abrogated by the limited amnesty offered to perpetrators. The commission was given the power only to recommend; payment of reparations would be the task of the government. Three weeks later, President Mbeki announced before Parliament the government's decision: the state, in addition to continuing with the rehabilitation of specific communities, and with existing medical, educational, and housing programs, would provide a "once-off grant" of 30,000 rand to each individual or surviving family. 4 In its report of 1998, the Truth Commission had recommended payment to each victim of a stipend of up to 23,023 rand annually for a period of six years (Truth Commission Report 6:94; see also 5:184ff). In monetary terms the government had fallen well short of this figure. Although accepting the commission's rejection of a general amnesty for perpetrators, Mbeki's speech opposed suits for reparations filed in the United States by declaring that the government would not be party to any such matters. 5 Mbeki's remarks drew immediate criticism from the Khulumani victim support group, which had entered a lawsuit in New York in November 2002 against Barclays Bank, IBM, and other corporations alleged to have aided and abetted the apartheid government. 6 In short, the critics declared, the money offered by the government was not enough. Would any amount have been enough? The answer, as both the government and its critics appear to recognize, is no. Unless reparation, and the demand for it, is restricted to the cost of specific material assistance (something that may, strictly speaking, be an impossibility), we are faced with an aporia: on the one hand, no monetary price can be attached to the suffering of victims; on the other hand, there must be reparation in acknowledgment of those who have suffered and who continue to suffer. "We are not putting a price tag on our pain," according to victim advocate Ntombi Mosikare. "We only want the country to acknowledge us. What they are giving us is too little" (quoted in Thompson, "South Africa to Pay"); "We [make payment] with some apprehension," Thabo Mbeki says, "for as the TRC itself has underlined, no one can attach

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monetary value to life and suffering" ("Statement to the National Houses of Parliament" 22). The aporia can be intensified: there must be reparation; there can never be (adequate) reparation. Such a situation calls for decision-of the type described by Derrida in "Force of Law," where responsibility lies in deciding in a "night of non-knowledge," and where justice is irreducible to the application of a law, or to any other calculus. The South African government has made a decision: in order to reach the figure that it recommends for individual reparations, the Truth Commission had presented a statistical calculation; when confronting the law, and the prospect of courts ruling the payment of specific sums by business, the government refers to its "responsibility for the well-being of our country." This responsibility it opposes to "adjudicat[ion] in foreign courts." Two oppositions mix: our country versus foreign courts; responsibility versus legal adjudication. Is the government's decision really an instance of just, responsible decision? Or is "responsibility" simply being used as an alibi for asserting national sovereignty aligned with global capital against transnationallegal instruments empowered by precedent to prescribe fair remedy for victims of apartheid? 7 I do not know. Let us, however, not take sides and decide the case in advance, but rather elaborate the aporia of reparation with reference to the Truth Commission's own mandate and findings with regard to reparations, to the claims set out by advocates of reparations for the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in America, and to the concept of reparation elaborated in the psychoanalytic works of Melanie Klein. The last will, I propose, assist us in making a distinction between reparation and reparations of various kinds. This distinction is of major importance since, in the process of remembering apartheid, everything hinges on whether matters of the past can be resolved through specific material acts (reparations) designed to achieve what may be an impossible "symbolic" goal (reparation). It is in this context, I suggest in the last section of this chapter, that volume 7 of the commission's report, with its litany of victims, attempts a different kind of resolution.

Reparations in the Truth Commission's Report The Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995 called upon the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to "draw up a set

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of recommendations to the President with regard to: '(i) the policy which should be followed or measures which should be taken with regard to the granting of reparation to victims or the taking of other measures aimed at rehabilitating and restoring the human and civil dignity of victims; (ii) measures which should be taken to grant urgent interim reparation to victims'" (4[f] [i-ii]; quoted in Truth Commission Report 6:92-93). At the commission's recommendation, by 30 November 2001 the government had paid urgent interim reparations to nearly q,ooo people (Truth Commission Report6:97). Despite the recommendations of the 1998 report, the growing rancor of victim groups in their public protests, 8 and the filing of the reparations lawsuits, the matter of individual reparation grants alluded to in section 4(f)(i) of the act remained unaddressed for four and a half years, until Mbeki's speech to Parliament of April 2003. 9 It is clear from the wording of section 4(f) (i) that the task of the reparation and rehabilitation committee was not limited to making proposals for monetary relie£ As I contended in Chapter 1, the commission's openness to the stories of victims was guided by this element of its mandate (see section 3[1] [c]), a fact that fundamentally influenced the organization of its public proceedings and gave shape to its effects as a historical event. In the present discussion I concentrate on how the reparation and rehabilitation committee's understanding of its mandate raises a basic problem not limited to the South Mrican case but integral to the concept and practice of reparation. The first thing to note is that, although the letter of the act is inconsistent as to whether reparation and other rehabilitative and restorative measures are twin imperatives or alternatives-the preamble to the law links them with the word "and"; section 4 separates them with "or"-the committee treats them as an ensemble. "[W]e must ensure," the report prescribes, "that those whose rights have been violated are acknowledged through access to reparation and rehabilitation" (Truth Commission Report 5:174; my emphasis). ''Acknowledgment," a keyword for the Truth Commission, is thought to be the basis for restoring the dignity of victims (see Du Toit, "Moral Foundations") and will take place not only through the opportunity to tell one's story publicly but also through access to such measures as medical care, counseling, poverty relief, and so forth. With its next sentence, the report crosses through the aporia I have been detailing: "While such measures can never bring back the dead, nor adequately compensate for pain and suffering, they can and must improve the quality

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of life of the victims of human rights violations and/ or their dependents" (Truth Commission Report 5:174). Individual reparation grants will, accordingly, be based on a threefold formula: "an amount to acknowledge the suffiring caused by the gross violation that took place, an amount to enable access to services and facilities and an amount to subsidise daily living costs, based on socio-economic circumstances" (Truth Commission Report p84). Suffering is to be acknowledged through the payment of an actual amount-50 percent of each grant, with 25 percent for each of the other portions (Truth Commission Report 5:185)-even if no amount can adequately compensate. Although not breaking down the "once-off grant" into these three components, Mbeki's speech to Parliament follows the pattern of combining acknowledgment and relief: "[W] e hope that these disbursements will help acknowledge the suffering that these individuals experienced, and offer some relief" (Mbeki, "Statement to the National Houses of Parliament" 22). As we have seen, this amount is widely thought to be too little. Nobody knows what amount is enough to compensate when nothing can adequately compensate. Instead of attempting to decide, I endeavor a "reading" of the predicament. My sense is that when a reparations policy is guided by the imperative to acknowledge suffering or violation, rather than based on, say, a determination of calculable material losses alone (should that be possible), that policy moves toward, and comes to be determined by, what the commission terms "symbolic reparations." 10 These have the aim of "restoring the dignity of victims and survivors of gross human rights violations" and take various forms. In addition to money, among the practical measures requested by those making statements to the commission were the issuing of death certificates; the performing of exhumations, reburials, and ceremonies; the provision of headstones and tombstones; the making of declarations of death; the expunging of criminal records; and the expediting of outstanding legal matters related to the violations; as well as community and national measures such as the renaming of streets and facilities, the construction of memorials and monuments, the holding of culturally appropriate ceremonies, and the institution of a day of remembrance (Truth Commission Report 5:188-190; cf. 6:95, 550-569). The fact that the first four items relate to the deceased suggests that we are entitled to read the commission's statement that its reparative measures "can never bring back the dead" (Truth Commission Report 5=174) in a narrow sense-for what these measures are to do is make the dead present in the

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process of mourning, whether it is to "bring back" the dead as ancestors, as the process of ukubuyisa has it (see "Annexure A" 2; also Krog, Country q), or simply to inscribe their names in stone or on paper for the purposes of remembrance. This is indeed what volume 7 of the report does when, in a perhaps careless turn of phrase, it declares its 900-page roll of victims' names and capsule histories a "living monument to those who sacrificed so much" (Truth Commission Report J:I). Reparation coincides with mournful commemoration (in a general sense, where death is not the sole form ofloss). Money is required to perform the prescribed rites, but no sum is by itself equal to the symbolic process. If reparation, in the last instance, is a relation to the dead, then no sum can ever be enough, no loss ever compensated. The symbol, as understood in rhetoric, is by definition a figure of inadequation; in contrast to a name, a symbol does not represent an object or idea directly. It can thus also fail to match its intended object. The sum of 30,ooo rand can symbolize justice, or generosity, but it can also symbolize insult added to injury. Once a payment of money is "symbolic," or is so perceived, it is unlikely ever to be adequate to its object: either it is excessive or it is derisory. 11 That is perhaps why, as I argue in Chapters 2 and 3, the most striking thing done by the Truth Commission was to agree to assist survivors in the carrying out of funeral rites, or at least to make itself available as the place where mourning could take place publicly, and so enable witnesses to invite and receive condolence on a mass scale. As a "symbolic" process, once set in motion, this is not something that is thought ever to be over (even if ceremonies of various kinds are conventionally held to bring things to term). The idea of a "once-off grant," on the other hand, tells one that a debt has been paid and paid off, that things are and can be over, that one ought to think of them as over-yet it leaves recipients and their advocates with the impression that insufficient has been done. At worst it restarts the cycle of historical wrong. The problem lies at the heart of the conception of restorative justice that informs the commission's "Concepts and Principles" section (Truth Commission Report r:I25-131). If, for instance, the notion of restoring human dignity is linked to ubuntu, as it is in the report, we have an ethics where, because it continually marks and re-marks a loss of humanity, and of human dignity, all acts of responsibility-including mourning and condolence-will fall short, must fall short, of perfectly repairing or restoring it. As an ethical model, restorative justice, as ubuntu or in any

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other form, resides in a perpetual remarking of default. The question then becomes: is it good to hold to an ethics so resistant at its core to juridicolegal notions of final settlement? Or, on the other hand: is it good to hold to an ethics that is not resistant in this way? This is another version of the aporia of reparation. I will attempt to explicate it further by concentrating not on the recipient but on the agent of reparations. Doing so is not designed to make the aporia disappear-even if that were desirable; it may, however, cast some light on the investments of the contending parties.

The Agent of Reparation Calls for reparations typically assume the form of advocacy on behalf of the victim-the one who has received nothing or too little, who remains destitute, and, in short, continues to suffer a loss: of property, income, opportunity, earning ability, dignity, and so forth. The Truth Commission's mandate adheres to this pattern by concentrating on the recipient; reparation, rehabilitation, and the restoration of the human and civil dignity are for the "victims of violations of human rights" (Truth Commission Report 6:92; c£ 6:109). Embracing a consensus in international human rights law, the commission recognizes a "right to reparation" (Truth Commission Report 6:102-104). Remedies, according to a recent United Nations draft document, would have to include restitution-"restore the victim to the original situation before the violations ... occurred"-and compensation "for any economically assessable damage" of a wide range, including "physical or mental harm ... lost opportunities, ... material damages and loss of earnings, including loss of earning potential; harm to reputation and dignity" (Truth Commission Report6:105). The commission advocates a combination of such measures rather than the awarding of a sum of money alone. In its view, the intent of international law "is to provide compensation for loss [and] to make victims whole" (Truth Commission Report6:109). Once the nebulous concept of making the victim whole is added to the agenda, we have, as is consistent with the rest of the report, a course of action unevenly conjoining monetary and "symbolic" elements. If the former will never be enough, the latter are, by definition, always inadequate to their object. This suggests that, in order to make sense of the imperative to make reparation, one has to examine not only the impact of reparations on the recipient-on whose behalf one demands: what use to the victim are derisory payments and feeble symbolic gestures?-but also their meaning for the donor.

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The principal agent in "making good or putting right what is wrong" is the post-apartheid state, which has a moral and legal duty to do so (Truth Commission Report6:109-1II; also see 5:170). That the post-apartheid state was not itself the perpetrator of the violations complicates the matter of reparations; bound by international customary law to assume liability on behalf of the predecessor state, the state functions as proxy. Specifically, it takes on responsibility for state and other perpetrators who will not come forward, or have been offered the possibility of amnesty by the commission. The desideratum that restorative justice involve "full participation of both the victims and the offenders" (Truth Commission Report 6:109) can only be generalized by proxy. By contrast, retributive justice relies on the power to compel known and surviving perpetrators. Since only in exceptional instances is the participation of an offender actual, it must be possible to set joint participation to work in situations in which at least one of the parties is a virtual placeholder. Such virtuality can, rather than being a limit to reparation, be regarded as the condition of possibility for any contingent reparative act by an actual perpetrator. Without it, I propose, there would be no generalizable form of reparation; although the recipient may be an actual victim or survivor who continues to suffer, the agent or agency of reparation must, insofar as it represents the offender, be conceived of as a possibility that is virtual. The state is not deemed by the Truth Commission to be the sole agent of reparation. Business is also responsible and obliged to act: "business benefited substantially during the apartheid era either through commission or omission and has, at the very least, a moral obligation to assist in the reconstruction and development of post-apartheid South Africa through active reparative measures" (Truth Commission Report 6:144). The mining industry, parastatal corporations such as ESCOM, and Swiss banks and other international lenders are sectors that directly benefited from apartheid policies, or helped the apartheid state weather economic sanctions and take measures to repress, with increasing violence, the growing domestic resistance of the 198os. Among the commission's ideas for business reparations are a wealth tax, a levy on corporate or private income, a donation of one percent of market capitalization by each company listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and a retrospective surcharge on corporate profits (Truth Commission Report 6:143). The imposition of such measures has been rejected by the government, which says that it will attempt to secure voluntary contributions from business

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to be distributed through a President's Fund (Mbeki, "Statement to the National Houses of Parliament" 25-26). As in the case of the apartheid state, represented by the commission in the place of the perpetrator, in the case of business, the post-apartheid government-in the figure of the president who disburses from a fund established in his name-takes the place of the offender. Faced with the possibility of corporate recalcitrance, as of unforthcoming political perpetrators, the government functions as a virtual agent of reparation providing the conditions of possibility for any particular reparations project. This substitution appears to be only a special instance of what is understood to constitute social responsibility for business in general. Except for its voluntary nature, it resembles a system of taxation: in principle, the state collects and distributes revenue from all profitable businesses. It is the only entity empowered to operate at this systemic level. Why, then, is the South African government unwilling to impose a reparations tax or levy on business? The answer may lie in the fact that in being asked to accept such a tax or levy, business would be asked to acknowledge a debt, a liability based on having committed or been party to wrong-rather than simply being compelled to participate in a system, beset by loopholes and evasions, of limited social redistribution. From the side of business, the motivations may be legal in nature-avoiding future lawsuits bolstered by a tacit admission of guilt-or, in a vague way, philosophical: companies paid wages and taxes, and the making and private appropriation of profits was not in itself against the law. The legality of private appropriation of profit is, however, at bottom, precisely what claims for reparations from business put into question. Claims founded on the principle of unjust enrichment, as set out in the Truth Commission's report (6:155), raise the matter of the justness, or justice, of private appropriation in general. In claims being made in the United States for reparations for slavery, the legitimacy of private accumulation itself is implicitly questioned. In The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, Randall Robinson figures Blacks, quite simply, as the holders of a debt against America-of unpaid wages plus accumulated compound interest: Let me try to drive the point home here: through keloids of suffering, through coarse veils of damaged self-belief, lost direction, misplaced compass, shitfaced resignation, racial transmutation, black people worked long, hard, killing days, years, centuries-and they were never paid. The value of their labor

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went into others' pockets-plantation owners, northern entrepreneurs, state treasuries, the United States government. Where was the money? Where is the money? There is a debt here. I know of no statute of limitations either legally or morally that would extinguish it. Financial quantities are nearly as indestructible as matter. Take away here, add there, interest compounding annually, over the years, over the whole of the twentieth century. Where is the money? (207)

As Robinson (206) and others (Bittker 8-10; Farmer-Paellman 27-31) point out, this kind of claim is not unprecedented; an early example, a letter written in 1865 by Jourdon Anderson to his former master demanding thirty-two years of back wages at twenty-five dollars per month plus interest, makes the demand concrete (Harper's Magazine 101-102). Although Robinson's simile-"financial quantities are nearly as indestructible as matter" -is questionable, and leads to ethically problematic conclusions, 12 the implications of his claim are profound. Any claim for the unpaid wages of slaves would, in all rigor, entail a retrospective claim for fair wages for all workers. According to Marx (717-719), wages are paid by the capitalist only to reproduce labor. If this is so, capitalism is, in essence, no different from slavery-where the slaveholder, although paying no wages, sees, in principle, to the feeding and housing of his slaves. Claims for unpaid wages akin to those made by the advocates of reparations for slavery can thus consistently be made by the descendants of factory workers against centuries of capitalist accumulation. 13 It is hard to see how any limit could be put on such a debt. Even if compensation for a history of systematically unpaid or unfair wages has not frequently been enforceable legally, it has, for a long time, been the subject of moral claims. Robinson diversifies his claims on slavery accordingly; no statute of limitations applies, either "legally or morally" (Debt 207). And it is such a moral argument that Soyinka, who leaves open exactly what forms reparations for African slavery might take, 14 appears to make when he writes that "[r]eparations ... serve as a cogent critique of history and thus as a potent restraint on its repetition" (Burden ofMemory 83; quoted in Truth Commission Report 6:139). In the case of reparations by capitalist corporations, it is notable that the Truth Commission, although it recognizes "loss of earnings" as a result of human

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rights violations as being subject to reparative measures and identifies the unjust enrichment of corporations as a legal reason for them to contribute to reparations, is cautious and sums up the responsibility of business as "at the very least, a moral obligation" (Truth Commission Report 6:144; my emphasis). Even if there were a legal basis for declaring the payment of poor wages unjust, itself a violation of human rights, the post-apartheid settlement between state and capital effectively rules such a claim out of bounds. 15 When, in June 2003, Minister of Justice Penuell Maduna took the unusual step of writing a letter to the judge in the Khulumani lawsuit stating the South Mrican government's opposition, he argued that "the litigation could have a destabilising effect on the South Mrican economy as investment is not only a driver of growth, but also of unemployment [sic]" (quoted in Christelle Terreblanche, "Nobel Laureate"). 16 And government spokesperson Joel Netshitenzhe has spoken of the lawsuit's "profound implications for the future of the country, for instance for the assessment of the country's risk profile, and for investment and job creation" (quoted in Christelle Terreblanche, "Government"). Capital is to pay not because it acknowledges wrong or debt, 17 but because it is morally bound, having thrived under the old order, to spread its largesse. If business is an agent of reparation, it will act not in its own name but through the mediation of the state. When the state appears as proxy for the perpetrator of gross violations of human rights, it is because, despite provisions for conditional amnesty, the perpetrator will not come forward. In the case of business, the state, in effect, grants a general amnesty to business, without demanding from it-as the Truth Commission did-any reckoning of its role during the apartheid era. When the government defends its decision by saying that all South Mricans-not only the beneficiaries of apartheid-must contribute to the reparations fund (Mbeki, "Statement to the National Houses of Parliament" 26), it may be an instance of responsibility-in-complicity being universalized-in the manner, say, ofJaspers's "metaphysical guilt/debt (Schuld)." Yet, in this context, where it is clearly a declaration born of pragmatism, it forecloses any discussion of the question of the larger systemic debt and responsibility of capitalism. This raises a major question: are all statements about universal responsibility, whether supported by actual state or international actions or not, merely a compromise when the prosecution or holding-responsible of perpetrators is held not to be practicable? Is this the case with "German

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guilt"? Will states always be complicit with capitalism, as with slavery, in the concealment of its systemic wrongs? Seen from a different point of view, is it not better that good be done and things set right by a guiltless party than that nothing be done at all because, even after the authorities have exhausted all avenues (albeit something not even attempted in South Mrica), the offender is not able or prepared to do anything? At another level, this works at the difference between retributive and restorative justice, with the outcome that, despite the stronger recommendations of the Truth Commission, a preference for the latter is shared between it and the government. When considered from the point of view of the scope and limits of restorative justice, moral claims on racial capitalism have an interesting history in South Mrica. In it mining has always been central. One of the most striking claims is in Sol T. Plaatje's prologue to Native Life in South Africa (1916), where, echoing the language of anti-slavery, the "sacrifice" by Mrican miners of "their limbs and their lives" serves as the basis for a call for social justice directed at the British Empire: "a sacrifice that enables the world's richest gold mines ... to maintain the credit of the Empire with a weekly output of f750,ooo worth of raw gold. Surely the appeal of chattels who render service of such great value deserves the attention of the British people" (Native Life 20). Justice would, in the last instance, stem from a commemoration of death-mourning, condolence. Although Plaatje's book describes the ravages of the 1913 Land Act, no compensatory sum is demanded. In the context of the prologue as a whole, the "appeal of chattels" is for political representation. Plaatje was an adherent of Cape liberalism, with its promise of enfranchisement and equality for "civilized men." Capitalism can persist as long as it mourns; British imperialism, in a world economy based on the gold standard, can maintain its credit as long as it cedes its Mrican subjects a greater political stake in it. Even as one calls for amelioration and reparations, a limit obtains-in that every system of accumulation, capitalist or otherwise, kills or harms a certain number of those who sustain it. In other words, it produces losses that cannot be adequately recovered or compensated, and that therefore demand "symbolic" reparation. The structure of "appeal" and "attention'' in Plaatje's prologue is one of responsibility rather than debt; to phrase it in the Truth Commission's terms, he makes a call for the restoration-or affirmation-of the civil dignity of those who, even if slavery no longer

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exists in South Mrica de jure, are, having no civic rights and deprived of land, 18 effectively the "chattels" of the mining companies. Higher wages will not change the basic situation: the racial domination that is the condition of possibility of the particular forms taken by capitalism in South Mrica. Mourning losses that cannot be compensated will, by amplifYing responsibility through a redirection of affect, perhaps alter the condition of possibility. Whatever the case, the conceptual apparatus of the Truth Commission depends on such a wager. By modeling reciprocity upon response to a perception of loss (ultimately of humanity), rather than calling solely for the payment of a debt-this is a subtle but key difference-ubuntu bets heavily on an unstable linkage of "symbolic" and material imperatives and initiatives. A necessary, though not always fully recognized, disconnection abides between demands for money and the notion of "making the victim whole." Although advocacy takes place on behalf of the victim, this disconnection has as profound implications for the agent of reparation as for the recipient. As I have indicated, the Truth Commission's report reflects an unstable joining, at virtually every level, of monetary and symbolic reparations. This is apparent too in advocacy in the United States for reparations for slavery. In The Debt, Robinson's goal is to "set afoot a new and whole black woman and man" (7). "Mak[ing] the victim whole" means repairing "psychic and economic injury" (Debt 9). No amount is adequate to the latter, which is "inestimable" (Debt 231), although payment must be made, on the order of billions of dollars. The former can, however, be addressed through tales about the past: "To be made large and formidable and masterful again-to be whole again-blacks need to know the land of their forebears when its civilizations were verifiably equal to any in the world" (Debt 17). Being whole means being the master, being equal to the master even. This is how things will have been in Mrica, before enslavement. How this is "verifiable" is anybody's guess. Exceeding any de jure restoration of civil dignity-writers of the reparations movement point to the failure of civil rights, and to the inadequacy of affirmative action (Westley 132-134; Robinson, Debt9)-there is a wish to make available to Blacks "some reassuring past," "an idealized past" (Robinson, Debt 27, 56). In this instance, the origin is constituted by the non-origin; one will always already have been equal to the master who enslaved one's ancestors. If ubuntu calls for the restoration of a loss of humanity, and the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act

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for a restoration of human and civil dignity, retrospective construction of an aristocratic and magisterial past, by way of a figure that is unverifiable, sets things well beyond the basic conditions required for social justice. In an interesting comparative move, the idea of making good-German Wiedergutmachung in relation to Jews after World War II-is assimilated in Robinson to this idea of "making ... victims ... whole" (Westley, quoted in Robinson, Debt 223). 19 When making-whole and making-good connect, as in the Truth Commission's report and in The Debt, the language resembles, superficially, that of Melanie Klein. The users of this language-one diluted by decades of popular psychology-do not, however, stop to draw the most important consequence drawn by Klein: that the stories one tells oneself about reparation, as necessary and as effective as they may be, are embedded in phantasy. It is worth attempting, as I will shortly, to pursue this consequence. As the final sentence of Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place so poignantly conveys, it is possible, without forgetting history, to accept that one shapes the past according to phantasies of making-good and making-whole: "Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings" (81). For Robinson, the self is both an agent and a recipient of reparation; advocacy takes place on behalf of many generations other than one's own, and one can help to make or ensure reparations. The victim is a part of the self that has been partially separated-just as, in making such claims, the pattern is for "Blacks" to be separated from ''America." (Should America Pay? is the tide of another recent volume on the subject.) Although the recipient must be unambiguously "Black'' (this is what provokes the critique, by Shelby Steele and others, that reparations claims promote an identity for Blacks as victims), the self as an agent of reparation is split, and must identifY with ''America" in order to repair its damaged part. In South Mrica, the agent of reparation is easier-indeed, too easy-to identifY as other, though, in all rigor, it will not be possible to separate agent from recipient; in the end there is a closed economy of donor and receiver, energized by an endless series of cross-identifications. This becomes visible from the side of the agent. In order to understand more fully the dynamics of reparation, it is thus necessary to examine the effect of reparations on the agent of reparations. What is the effect on the donor? What does it mean that the South Mrican government (or, in a more fraught way, ''America'') is a placeholder for the offender? What are the deeper links,

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already suggested in the Truth Commission's report and in Plaatje's Native Lift in South Aftica, between reparation and mourning? In German, the word translated by Melanie Klein's famous psychoanalytic concept of "reparation" is Wiedergutmachung. The use of the word in the context of German-Jewish reparations bears the weight of its history in legal terminology; 20 in titles of works published in German before 1935 it refers almost exclusively to the reparations exacted from Germany after World War I. It is the effect of reparation on the agent that interests Klein-for, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the object of reparation is part of the agent. When the South Mrican state occupies the place of perpetrators of gross violations of human rights as well as of capital, its making of reparations on behalf of these parties can still satisfY a phantasy of reparation. In making reparations, the agent embraces the recipient-victim-as part of the sel£ This all takes place at a virtual level because the state is a proxy. The virtual maker of reparations provides the conditions of possibility for actual instances of reparations, just as "symbolic" reparation provides them for material reparations. The question is whether, by universalizing the imperative-all South Mricans must contribute-the act of making reparation is transferred across the polity, making the phantasy a shared one. When the virtual maker of reparations provides the conditions of possibility for actual instances of reparations, and "symbolic" reparations those for material reparations, we can make a distinction between reparation in a general sense and a multiplicity of reparations in the narrow sense. The latter may take a variety of forms: payment, legal settlement, rehabilitation, and so forth. At its most general, the structure of reparation set to work by the Truth Commission and the South Mrican state may be outlined in the following way: a perpetrator makes good (for) a violation done by him (rarely by her) to a victim; the perpetrator thereby makes the victim whole. As I showed in Chapter 2, this may take the form of a bringing of condolence. This structure appears to correspond to what the commission terms "restorative justice" and associates with ubuntu: the humanity of both parties will be actualized by this structure. This would then link some of its traits with forgiveness. As I have argued, if "humanity" is understood in terms of ubuntu, this does not imply the development of respective sovereign ''l"s, but rather a radical reciprocity in dispropriation. Setting things out in this way goes beyond the commission's theorizing of what it is doing. In order to explore the implications

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further, let us look at Klein's psychoanalytic account of the dynamics of reparation, which begins with roughly the same structure-and thus gives us a way of developing the concept of reparation in the general sense.

Melanie Klein Melanie Klein began to develop her concept of reparation in the 1930s in her works on child psychoanalysis. In "Love, Guilt and Reparation" (1937), Klein writes, the child's "first love"-for the mother, or rather for the "good breast," which satisfies all of its desires-"is already disturbed at its roots by destructive impulses" (307-308). The child, according to Klein, is beset by destructive phantasies of having bitten up or torn up the mother's body. Reparation, for Klein, is the child's tendency to react to its phantasmatic destruction of the maternal body with phantasies of repairing it: When a baby feels frustrated at the breast, in his phantasies he attacks this breast; but if he is being gratified by the breast, he loves it and has phantasies of a pleasant kind in relation to it. In his aggressive phantasies he wishes to bite up and tear up his mother and her breasts, and to destroy her also in other ways. A most important feature of these destructive phantasies, which are tantamount to death-wishes, is that the baby feels that what he desires in his phantasies has really taken place; that is to say he feels that he has really destroyed the object of his destructive impulses, and is going on destroying it: this has extremely important consequences for the development of his mind. The baby finds support against these fears in omnipotent phantasies of a restoring kind: that too has extremely important consequences for his development. If the baby has, in his aggressive phantasies, injured his mother by biting and tearing her up, he may soon build up phantasies that he is putting the bits together again and repairing her. ("Love, Guilt and Reparation'' 308)

The activity of restoring and repairing is characterized by Klein as an attempt to "undo in retrospect": "in our unconscious phantasy we make good the injuries which we did in phantasy, and for which we still unconsciously feel very guilty. This making reparation is, in my view, a fundamental element in love and in all human relationships" ("Love, Guilt and Reparation" 312-313). Involving feelings of guilt, which are bound up with the development of the superego, reparation constitutes a basic structure of responsibility. In "Freud and the Scene of Writing," Derrida called this

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Klein's "genealogy of morals" (231). More recently, summarizing Klein's account of the human infant, Spivak describes it as "the violent production of the precarious subject of reparation and responsibility" (Death ofa Discipline 14). 21 The dynamics described by Klein represent the makings of ethical agency-and of agency as ethical. Responsibility as reparation arises from a phantasy of having destroyed the object of love. One could even say that if, as Klein writes, making reparation is fundamental in love and human relationships, the existence of love presupposes that violence has been done to the object. Going beyond what Klein states, it is thus also conceivable that by putting the damaged object back together again, love or something like love can be achieved through the making of reparation. This, at least, is the wager entered into by a politics of reparation. Why, though, does Spivak refer to the subject of responsibility as "precarious"? Why might its genesis, if we trace the word's etymology, involve petition, prayer, imprecation? Perhaps because, for a variety of reasons, as I shall explain, the process can misfire. In order to grasp more fully the political implications of Klein's account of reparation, it is necessary to consider her formulations in "Love, Guilt and Reparation" within the complex genealogy of her concepts and their translation. Notice has to be taken of the fact that although the concept of reparation evolved for the most part in her English works after 1932, its beginnings can be traced back to the works she published in German. Although often employing the term "reparation" alone in her later work (Laplanche and Pontalis 389), in The Psycho-Analysis of Children (1932), her last work to be originally published in German, Klein uses two interrelated terms: Wiederherstellungand Wiedergutmachung. 22 In "Love, Guilt and Reparation," they correspond, respectively, to "restoring" and "repairing," and "making good" and "making reparation." 23 In The Psycho-Analysis of Children, the relationship between the terms is as follows: by undertaking the restoration (Wiederherstellung) of an object, the child engages in restitution or reparation (Wiedergutmachung) in relation to that object; this, in turn, permits a restoration of its own body (Psycho-Analysis qo). 24 There the verb wiederherstellen takes an accusative object, while the object of wiedergutmachen is usually dative; the child "make[s] restitution towards his object" (Wiedergutmachung am Objekt) (Psycho-Analysis 191). When she renders wiedergutmachen in English in the accusative-"make good the injuries" ("Love, Guilt and Reparation" 312)-Klein is already on the way to a conceptual synthesis of the two terms under the single word "reparation."

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Understanding the concept fully requires us to analyze both terms in detail. Let us begin with Wiedergutmachung. When Klein began employing the term, the most salient use of the word Wiedergutmachungwould have been to refer to the reparations exacted from Germany after World War I. In German the word bore a highly ambivalent and, by 1933, increasingly negative charge. From the beginning, then, Klein's key concept is ethico-political. If it appears to take sides on an issue of the day-for reparations-it simultaneously states the conditions of possibility for ethics in politics. 25 Regarding these conditions there can be no compromise. A second thing to note is that, with their redundant prefix wieder-, the words wiedergutmachen and Wiedergutmachung appear to be comparatively new in German (although they do predate the Treaty ofVersailles). The oldest uses of the verb gutmachen relate to the payment of debts and the settlement of accounts. With this history Klein's concepts are in accord. The cycle she presents us with is monetary in its metaphorics: beset by feelings of guilt/debt (Schuldgefohle) and fear of retribution ( Vergeltungsangst) (Psycho-Analysis n4n), the child undertakes measures of reparation (Wiedergutmachung). Taking place through the restoration or repair ( WiederherstelluniJ of its damaged objects, reparation entails both an acknowledgment and settlement of debt and, as we shall explore in more detail, an engagement in the activity of making. In the unfolding ofKlein's conceptual apparatus, later terms sometimes bear in them the not fully inventoried traces of earlier ones. "Reparation" is a prime example. In order properly to understand what she means by the term, then, we must take into account the complexity of the word wiederherstellen, one of its major traits. The verb herstellen can mean "restore" (making the wieder- [again-, re-] a redundant intensifier). It can also mean "produce" or "manufacture." Or it can simply mean a putting (stellen) in place, positioning, or even positing, whereas the her- (here, from, whence) is a shifter indicating place relative to an agent. In "The Origin of the Work of Art," Heidegger exploits the last two senses in order to think the "work'' (Werk): "the work-being of the work itself has the character of setting forth [Herstellung]. The work as work, in its presencing, is a setting forth, a making [Das Werk als Werk ist in seinem Wesen herstellend]" (45). If reparation entails a making-good (Wiedergutmachung), restoration (Wiederherstellung) undertaken in its name can thus be understood as uniting responsibility with making and re-making-even, as Klein implies in several of her texts (for example, "Infantile Anxiety-Situations"), with that

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involved in the production of intellectual and artistic works. The cycle of reparation culminates not in monetary payment, as it would in the world of debts and war reparations, but with making and re-making. It is in this respect that works of art and of the intellect set reparation and responsibility to work. It must nevertheless also be true that such works, even if they are "symbolic," may be implicated, willy-nilly, in a systematic acknowledgment and payment of debts in the ordinary sense. In "Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States" (1940), Klein connects reparation with mourning. The objects that have, in phantasy, been destroyed by the child, are experienced as lost, and the child, with "feelings of guilt and loss," holds itself responsible for their loss and what they "stand for in the infant's mind": "All these [love, goodness, and security] are felt by the baby to be lost, and lost as a result of his own uncontrollable greedy and destructive phantasies and impulses against his mother's breasts" ("Mourning" 345). "The sorrow and concern about the feared loss of the 'good' objects, that is to say, the depressive position, is, in my experience, the deepest source of the painful conflicts in the Oedipus situation, as well as in the child's relations to people in general" ("Mourning" 345). The result is that mourning their loss amounts to a making-good-again of the objects that have been attacked, destroyed, damaged. Here is where Klein's technical vocabulary elaborates most dramatically on the monetary metaphorics of guilt-retribution fearreparation-and, like certain formulations in The Psycho-Analysis of Children (312, 347, 350; see also "Infantile Anxiety-Situations" 214), reaches beyond the dative sense of Wiedergutmachung most typically found in her early work. It is, then, at least in part, her own notion of the "goodness" of the object for the infant that supplies the meaning of reparation as making-good-again. Mourning, whether or not it undertakes reparation in relation to the object, a possibility retained by Klein, will make the object "good" again. The parental objects in question are, in Klein's terms, internal ones. Drawing parallels between infantile response to loss and mourning in adulthood, which "revive[s]" this response ("Mourning" 344), Klein writes that "[i]n normal mourning the individual reintrojects and reinstates, as well as the actual lost person, his loved parents who are felt to be his 'good' inner objects. His inner world, the one which he has built up from his earliest days onwards, in his phantasy was destroyed when the actual loss occurred. The rebuilding of this inner world characterizes the successful work of mourning" ("Mourning" 363). One

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could say that from Klein's writings one derives a concept of reparation that is a mourning in a general sense, because the loss (or lost object) it attempts to make good is not restricted to (actual) death (or actual dead people). If there is a Kleinian ethics-of reparation, responsibility-then it is strongly linked to the work of mourning. And, moreover, it is an ethics attached, ultimately, to the mourning of the one whom one has killed, one's "victim." Accordingly, as analyzed in Chapters 3 and 4, mourning and condolence are reparative. This is also the shape of the ambivalence, here of "primaeval man" rather than the infant, described by Freud in "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" (1915), which gives rise to "the earliest ethical commandments": The first and most important prohibition made by the awakening conscience was: "Thou shalt not kill." It was acquired in relation to dead people who were loved, as a reaction against the satisfaction of the hatred hidden behind the grief for them; and it was gradually extended to strangers who were not loved, and finally even to enemies. (295)

Once, however, we see how, in Klein, ethical imperatives stemming from the work of mourning are connected with the labor of making, we encounter a problem: when making-good ( Wiedergutmachung) amounts to making the object "good" (making or re-making it as "good" object), what I have been calling responsibility is irreducibly complicit at its origin not only with violence and a reparative response to it but also with the phantasy that the object is, and will always have been, intact and benevolent even when one has inflicted on it the most destructive violence. Transposed into politics, this would mean that the phantasy serves the agent of reparation without doing anything for the object; the object, having been made good, will be "good," but only for the agent. If this dynamic is, nevertheless, to be regarded as a condition of possibility for reparations in the narrow sense, it is also a sign of a limit between responsibility and its setting to work. The works of literature to which Klein refers in order to illustrate reparation end "well": reparation is made, things are "good" again. This is, as we shall see in the next section, not the case with all works written or performed in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; they tend to present reparation and responsibility as aporias. In South African accounts, the agent of reparation is commonly conceived as perpetrator of the violation; but the agent is also the mourner.

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What is crucial, however, is that this agency-the impulse to make good-depends on a response to a loss that has resulted from a phantasy of destruction. As we have noted, the virtuality of the South Mrican process institutes a phantasmatic element at the basis of its operations, redoubling this phantasmatic element. The implications are far-reaching. On the one hand, we have a critic such as Dan Roodt, who, detecting this dynamic, dismisses the Truth Commission as a product of "guiltpsychosis" and declares that "along with its familiar negative aspects ... apartheid included a considerable number of positive elements" ("Teks"). To claim that Blacks were in some respects better off under apartheid, as Roodt implies, amounts in effect to a retrospective making-good that wards off any acknowledgment of offense by characterizing all criticism of past deeds as pathological. 26 It can, of course, also be read as a sign of phantasized omnipotence: of believing that one has the power to have restored/repaired the object. The object will always have been whole, therefore I am guiltless and declare my un-guilt (onskuld); and, furthermore, the accusing/damaged object is worthy of my contempt, so I attack it over and over. 27 What Klein refers to as "undoing in retrospect" is thus a dynamic that can be violently double-edged. On the other hand, it is possible to argue for an ethics that, for the purposes of generalizing reparation and mourning, relies, as do Klein's and Freud's rather different accounts, upon phantasmatic perpetratorship. This, as I pointed out in Complicities (2-12), has been the nature of the response of the intellectual for a long time. With the Truth Commission, this response is generalized across the social body, the phantasy and the impulse to make good made available to anyone. As long as we remain aware that we are engaging in such a performance-one that satisfies basic impulses of aggression and tendencies to reparation-! see no reason to reject it. It is not a prohibition on finding out the facts; the Wijftrieb is blocked only by a disavowal of one's aggressive and even violent impulses. Whatever the facts, though, someone has to make good; in the system we have, the only way one can is to assume-virtually, phantasmaticallythe place of the perpetrator of the worst misdeeds.

Antjie Krog in Volume 7 As I have noted, it is of vital importance that reparation, in Klein, involves making: Wiedergutmachung involves Wiederherstellung. This takes

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manifold forms, ranging from coitus to the production of works of art and the intellect (see Psycho-Analysis of Children 173, 247-248). It is symbolic. This is readily apparent in the literary and dramatic works produced in response to the Truth Commission. The commission's report notes the performance, by "survivors of human rights violations," of the improvisational play The Story Tm About to Tell (6:156-157). 28 But the commission's most striking acknowledgment of the response of the literary imagination to its work is the reprinting of a poem by Antjie Krog as the epigraph to the seventh volume of its report, the catalog of individual victims and their cases. The untitled poem, subsequently published in English and Afrikaans as part of a cycle titled, respectively, "Country of Grief and Grace" and "Land van genade en verdriet," first appeared at the very end of Country ofMy Skull (1998), Krog's account of her reporting for SABC radio on the work of the Truth Commission. 29 As I discuss in greater detail when I turn to Country ofMy Skull in my final chapter, lyric poetry, by virtue of its form, offers the speaker the opportunity to assume imaginatively the position of another. This, at least, has been the wisdom since Shelley, who wrote in "A Defence of Poetry" that "[a] man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others .... The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause" (488). A meditation on poetry offers Antjie Krog a way of identifYing with the victim and entering into complicity with the perpetrator-the two elements necessary for reparation in terms of my explication ofMelanie Klein. Krog's acknowledged (filial, social, linguistic) proximity to the perpetrator should not blind us to the fact that that proximity is staged, as is the proximity (less easy for some to accept because the filial and social elements are less obvious or admissible) to the victim. because of you this country no longer lies between us but within it breathes becalmed after being wounded in its wondrous throat in the cradle of my skull it sings, it ignites

Reparation my tongue, my inner ear, the cavity of heart shudders towards the outline new in soft intimate clicks and gutturals of my soul the retina learns to expand daily because by a thousand stories I was scorched a new skin.

I am changed for ever. I want to say: forgive me forgive me forgive me You whom I have wronged, please take me with you. (Country ofMy Skull278-279; Truth Commission Report 7=n. p.)

vanwee die verhale van verwondes le die land nie meer tussen ons nie maar binne-in sy haal asem gekalmeer na die litteken aan haar wonderbaarlike keel in die wieg van my skedel sing dit ontbrand dit my tong my binneste oor die gaping van my hart sidder vorentoe na die buitelyn van 'n woordeskat nuut in sag, intieme keelklanke van my sielleer die retina oopgaan daagliks-'n duisend woorde skroei my tot 'n nuwe tong ek is vir altyd verander. Ek wil se vergewe my vergewe my vergewe my

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jy wat ek veronreg het-seblief neem my met jou saam

(Kleur kom nooit alleen nie 42)

Krog's poem begins by addressing a "you" who, by bringing about permanent change in the speaker, has made possible for her a new and different relationship to the country and to the other. At first, the "you" is indefinite, an interlocutor addressed in gratitude, who rapidly gives way, in a shift to the dominant imagery of the cycle, to the figure of a country personified. The changes in the speaker are rooted in the effects of and on language, and it becomes clear that the "you" is the source (or, strictly speaking, the effict) of "stories" that the speaker has heard: "because of you ... because by a thousand stories I I was scorched I a new skin." Beginning with the words "vanwee die verhale van verwondes" (by way of the stories of wounded ones) (Kleur 42), the Mrikaans version of the poem published in 2000 immediately tells us that it is stories (verhale) that have brought about the change ("scorch me to a new tongue" [skroei my tot 'n nuwe tong]), and that the stories are those of ones who have been wounded ( verwondes). Let me begin to translate the first line. "[V] anwee die verhale van verwondes": A succession of soft alliterative f-sounds washes up against harder v-sounds. Because of, thanks to, but literally, by way of, or by the several ways of (wee is the plural of weg, cognate of the German Weg, which is also the root in that language of the corresponding preposition wegen), the retellings of wounded ones. The "ver-" in "verwondes" is a perfective. The wounding has happened, it has been done. Henceforth, one will have been in that state of being one that is wounded. This is what the retellings or recountings-one cannot simply translate "verhale" as "stories"-convey. This is the way along which they convey the speaker. In the context of Country ofMy Skull, and for the editors who placed the poem before the list of victims in volume 7 of the report, the stories are those of witnesses who spoke before the Truth Commission. There is a materiality to the "daagliks"-the transformative daily listening of the journalist-poet. It is the commission that has made it possible for the speaker to undergo a change that, it emerges, also involves an acknowledgment of a hand in the wounding to which they testify. By the penultimate stanza, the addressee has become "You whom I have wronged."

Reparation In the Afrikaans, the "you" in fact emerges for the first time in the corresponding line, with "jy wat ek veronreg het"; wounding is thus implicitly acknowledged as the nature of the onreg (wrong, injustice, privation of right) that links the "I" to the "you." Injury breaks the ethical relation (reg). It un-rights. As in "verwondes," the "ver-" in "veronreg" is perfective. Although the English displaces the condition of "being wounded" from the tellers of stories (whom it never names as "verwondes") to the country, and, initially, the venue of healing is not the "you" but "this country," both versions of the poem are reparative for the speaker in relation to the addressee. The retellings (verhale), which establish for the speaker her culpability in wounding and wrong, are redoubled and retold in Country ofMy Skull and in the poem that ends it. This redoubling transforms the speaker-"! am changed forever"-scorching her a "new skin," or, in the Afrikaans, a "new tongue. "30 It is a reparative process-the speaker is made goodfilled with precious things-a new treasury of words, for instance, a woordeskat (this word, commonly translated as "vocabulary," is, whether deliberately or not, elided in the English version of the poem). We know, from Klein, that reparation in its most basic sense operates for the agent, and for the recipient only insofar as she is an internal object for the agent. Here the agent's reparation is confirmed: she is verander. The "I" is made other, another perfective "ver-" reinforced by "altyd," for all time. The change is irrevocable, registered as her innermost sound-trove is remade: in the cradle of my skull it sings, it ignites my tongue, my inner ear, the cavity of heart shudders towards the outline new in soft intimate clicks and gutturals in die wieg van my skedel sing dit ontbrand dit my tong my binneste oor die gaping van my hart sidder vorentoe na die buitelyn van 'n woordeskat nuut in sag, intieme keelklanke

It sings in her skull. From the soft consonants of the first line onward, the transformation for the poet is registered in the music of the poem. Whereas the poem opening the cycle insists on between-ness, even a cleavage-"between you and me ... this country held bleeding between

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us" (tussen jou en my . .. die land so bloeiende tussen ons) (Down 95/ Kleur 37)-this poem, placed toward the end of the cycle, registers a different relation: because of you this country no longer lies between us but within it breathes becalmed after being wounded in its wondrous throat The "you" has allowed the country not only to breathe but to be transformed from that which divides into that which has been internalized; as with the German Erinnerung, the Mrikaans word herinnering associates memory and commemoration with a making-inward. The Mrikaans rendering of "after being wounded" is "na die litteken," a suggestion that, although a clear trace and memory of wounding remains in the form of a scar (litteken), healing has begun. The elision of the "us" at the end of the first stanza, however, leaves in question whether that internalizing and healing are mutual, or only for the speaker and her internal objects. 31 There is no easy unity of "us." The change takes place for the speaker alone: "I am changed." Bound up in that change is a naming of the relation between the speaker and the other. They have been joined through the wrong done to the "you" by the "I" who has been an agent of wrong. The poem ends with a prayer, an imprecation. It records as "precarious" the coming into being of the "I" of responsibility: wounding-un-righting-restoring of right. The "I" makes atonement, and seeks forgiveness: "I want to say: I forgive me I forgive me I forgive me I You whom I have wronged." The final prayer is to survive by being an object or other for the other: "please/take me/with you." Although the speaker has found herself addressed by the "you"-the "thousand stories"-she remains without the word: of forgiveness, of invitation. In fact, the poet-speaker's prayer may not even have been uttered: "I want to say" I "Ek wil se." What is the modality of the "wil"? Although its modality is in suspense, what is said is said, if only in the frame of the poem, where it is situated indefinitely between a constative about a wish and a subjunctive of hesitation and deference before an addressee. It is ambiguous, in all senses of the word. If the prayer has not been uttered, it has not been answered. Remembrance has

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not turned into reparation, has not been turned into reparation. Culpability for having wounded the other has been owned to, and the wounded object repaired for the speaker, but she awaits its word-which remains withheld, perhaps in the mode of what Derrida, in The Other Heading (69) as well as other works, terms the "to-come" (a-venir). 32 When the poem is returned to its position at the end of Country of My Skul4 where it first appeared, it reinforces the sense, gained from the book as a whole, that the responsibility of the poet, specifically the white Mrikaans poet, is to initiate reparation. Bearing the dedication "for every victim who had an Mrikaner surname on her lips," the book itself stages this symbolically by listening, declaring what one has heard, and awaiting a response in return from those one has heard and whose stories one has relayed. 33 In the poem in Afrikaans, the nominative and possessive pronouns for "country" are feminine (sy, haar). Alluding to Thabo Mbeki's "two nations" speech, 34 in an epilogue to Country ofMy Skull written in 1999, Krog is troubled by the absence of a clear response from the potential recipients of reparation, and the way that complicates any attempt to define the conditions of existence for the one who wishes to make reparation: We of the white nation try to work out the conditions for our remaining here. We are here for better or worse. We want to be here, but we have to accept that we can no longer stay here on our terms. Therefore I prick up my ears and try to hear what the new conditions for my existence are. Taxes. Mbeki mentioned that-the transfer of resources. Is that it? Is he saying: your money will do, but please dear God, spare us your meager little white souls? We are being told who we are, what we have done wrong, but not what we owe. Why this vagueness? (Country ofMy Skull, 2000 paperback ed., 376)

Nomfundo Walaza is again Krog's interlocutor in this supplementary text. Questioned in the second-person plural, she is asked to represent the sentiment of Blacks in general: "Do you only want us to ask forgiveness? ... Do you want all the land back? What is it that people want?" (Country of My Skul4 2000 paperback ed., 376-377). Walaza, however, will not give Krog a definitive answer: "The past is never repaid in one final grand gesture .... This is a country filled with poor people. Every white person can make a difference to the lives interacting with theirs" (Country ofMy Skul4 2000 paperback ed., 377). Krog ends this section with the reflection that "we are trapped." As it is for her when writing poetry itself is

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in question (Country ofMy Skul/237-238), the German-Jewish example is near at hand-'"How can you possibly suggest that this is enough for what they did?' Dead weight in my arms. Why try?"-when she writes: "By not determining precisely what is needed, the whites are exposed to constant reproach. If you give specifics they can be met. And should one not also be willing to be available as a punching bag? Can that be part of the deal?'' (Country ofMy Skul4 2000 paperback ed., 376, 377). The more intensively the writer-intellectual assumes responsibility, seeking to make good, the more the wrong and its consequences for the wrongdoer are magnified. This is another version of the aporia of reparation: something must be done; nothing can ever be enough. The parties are, writes Krog, "trapped in anger and guilt." This is the classic dynamic, if we recall Melanie Klein, of guilt for injury/destruction-fear of retribution (anger as projection)-tendency to restore/make good. 35 There is no way out, apparently, only a flaring up in turn of each of the moments. The more Krog or anyone else pleads to be told what reparative measures will suffice, the more a definitive answer will be withheld, since the attempt at reparation is what defines the damage that has been done, retroactively generating and intensifying the phantasy of violence and counterviolence. As in the poem that comes before the list of victims in volume 7 of the report, it is conceivable that the victim will not countersign the violence that the perpetrator imagines having done to him or her. This may be not only because he or she does not want to be classed as a "victim" but because, to his or her mind, there is little correspondence between what the perpetrator (or the one who has assumed the place of the perpetrator) imagines having done and what the victim feels that he or she has suffered; the question of "symbolic" reparation is broached again. A lack of correspondence does not mean that the victim did not suffer, but it does mean that the perpetrator is left in a situation where she does not know what to do-again, to be responsible, one acts in the night of non-knowledge. In this endless night, the guilt-beset wait in inescapable terror at what might come. Krog's epilogue broaches the phantasmatic escalation of violence and counterviolence with a relatively gentle irony-"should one not also be willing to be available as a punching bag?"-when compared to]. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, which does not censor phantasies of retribution circulating among Whites in South Mrica after apartheid, and that have circulated in the region ever since colonial times (Doris Lessing's The Grass

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Is Singing, published in 1950, remains the locus classicus of their literary treatment). In Coetzee's novel, the literary scholar David Lurie's quibbling about admitting his part in a "long history of exploitation" (Disgrace 53) is followed, and overshadowed, by a violent attack on him and his daughter Lucy. The process of seeking terms in which to understand the attack releases phantasies of retribution and the corresponding wish to make reparation. These are mentioned at first under the sign of negation, displaced by Lurie onto the clinic for animals run by one of Lucy's friends: "if we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we feel guilty or fear retribution .... It sounds like someone trying to make reparation for past misdeeds" (Disgracn4-77). The dynamic is, however, not something he and Lucy are entirely able to evade. Her contemplative questions in the aftermath of being raped capture well the projection involved: What if ... what if that is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it; perhaps that is how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying? Perhaps that is what they tell themselves. (Disgrace 158)

Although earlier in their conversation David encourages Lucy to think of "history speaking through [the rapists] .... A history of wrong," rather than seeing their acts as involving "personal hatred" (Disgrace 156), he now tells her: "I am sure they tell themselves many things. It is in their interest to make up stories that justifY them" (Disgrace 158). These "stories" exist, of course, only within the framework of the story of debt and repayment that Lucy is telling herself; they are, the novel makes clear, not the stories that her attackers tell themselves. If a black response is what the white writer-intellectual more or less secretly wants, and even endeavors to provoke, then one was made in the African National Congress's submission to the Human Rights Commission's 2000 inquiry into "racism in the media." There Disgrace was cited as "represent[ing] as brutally as [Coetzee] can, white people's perception of the post-apartheid black man"-the stereotype of Africans as "immoral and amoral; savage; violent; disrespectful of private property; incapable of refinement through education; and, driven by hereditary dark, satanic impulses" (Tau 181-182). The ANC uses "racism" in a limited way, to describe and to indict these ("subjective") stereotypical images of Blacks and

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Mricans that prop up the ("objective") racial divisions, disparities, notions of superiority, and relations of domination that persist in post-apartheid South Mrica (Tau 180-192). In an interesting turn, the unspecified "white fears" that the ANC under Mandela sought to allay through a politics of "national reconciliation" are said to be based on a belief in the "truth" of these stereotypes (Tau 182-183). The trouble, however, is that if "white fears" are based not on a belief in the truth of such stereotypes but on guilt and fear of retribution, the removal of the stereotypes will only repress the phantasies of violence underlying them. The ANC's submission is so preoccupied with the fact that, in contrast to Mandela's, Thabo Mbeki's media image appears to elevate "white fears" that all it does is declare the stereotypes ultimately informing that image to be false (Tau 185-190). 36 With a little more reflection, it would have been possible for the authors of the submission to have read Coetzee's novel as exploring racism in a way that is not simply accusatory-not only of one's stereotypers but ultimately of oneself, since one's negation of negative stereotypes can imply feelings of guilt, and, in any case, will not supply one with an unambiguously positive "self-image." What Disgrace exposes, and what the ANC response does not wish to discuss openly, is the violence that connects South Africans and divides them raciallyY "One might say," Foucault once wrote, "that two races exist whenever one writes the history of two groups which do not, at least to begin with, have the same language or, in many cases, the same religion. The two groups form a unity and a single polity only as a result of wars, invasions, victories, and defeats, or in other words, acts of violence. The only link between them is the link established by the violence of war" (77). This violence is something that has preoccupied Coetzee for a long time; in Dusklands (1974), his first novel, the character Eugene Dawn reflects on the history of colonial violence: "We brought with us weapons, the gun and its metaphors, the only copulas we knew of between ourselves and our objects" (17). For the author of the submission, however, the violent black man is a stereotype only, and statistics pointing to a rise in violent crime after 1994, including rape, are "false" (Tau 182, 190). There is in the submission a generalized denial of violence, which, if we explore the implications of the ANC's analysis, actually feeds from the structure of "white fears," which, in turn, springs from a repressed memory of colonial crimes. 38 When fear is understood as based in guilt and fear of retributive punishment for an injury done by oneself or one's forefathers, it cannot be proved wrong and thereby allayed

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by a substitution of one image for another. And when that guilt is infectious, occasioning feelings of guilt on the part of the injured party, both parties descend into a cycle of paranoia. In Disgrace, although we have not yet entered such a cycle-Lurie's accusers are not themselves beset by guilt-the novel shows us how racism can be understood in terms of the projection and acting out of guilt-ridden phantasies of violence. 39 Perhaps there is the sense on the part of the ANC (and Nomfundo Walaza in Country ofMy Skull) that any lack of reserve on the matter could open the way to extreme, even genocidal, violence. Whatever the case, what Coetzee's novel leaves us with, in the figure ofLurie, is a character who is unable, despite all his denials of it, to evade the fearful thinking that at the level of phantasy convinces him that he abides, without the reciprocating word that might set him free, in a state of "disgrace ... without term," in which it is not "anger and guilt" (Krog, Country, 2000 paperback ed., 377) that entrap all concerned, but rather his private lot to be "punished and punished" (Disgrace 172). These matters will be taken up in greater detail when I return to Coetzee's novel in Chapter 6. What is most interesting and troubling from the point of view of my argument is that it is the figure of responsibility/reconciliation (Krog, Country, 2000 paperback ed., 377), the writer-intellectual, who makes such an outcome possible. Applying Klein's concept of reparation to what, in Complicities, I term "responsibility-in-complicity," one can say that the imperative to make reparation-to make whole-comes from a phantasy of having violently destroyed the object in question. If responsibility is assumed phantasmatically by the intellectual, and this involves reparation in some sense, can one not ask: are the conditions of possibility for intellectual responsibility not profoundly linked to a phantasy of having done violence to some figure-in particular one's object of advocacy? This appears to go beyond the classical understanding of complicity as allowing or helping a deed to take place; it puts one at the center: one is the perpetrator, and one has always already destroyed/ damaged the victim. The nexus of responsibility, reparation, and destruction is disturbing because, to this way of thinking, what links one to the other in responsibility is violence, that the link is highly invested when one wishes it were neutral, that it is not only love but also hatred ("ambivalence" would be the strictly Freudian term) that establishes the reciprocity that ubuntu and other basic concepts address in order to make sense of what it is to be human and to be a thinking human being. The irony, then, is that it is the

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attempt to make good that has the potential to bring about evil. This does not mean that no attempt to make good or to restore ought to be undertaken. What it does mean, however, is that vigilance has to be maintained when terms and limits are set for actual reparations-though nothing ought to be done to repress phantasies that, as the conditions of possibility for reparations, ought to be acknowledged and made known. Another way of looking at it is that when there is widespread denial (among one's own, and among others), it may be useful to magnifY past wrong simply to make people take notice. This may, of course, bring the defense: we are without guilt; show us what we have actually done. There is some reason in this; for philosophers of global justice, for instance, any consequentialism must be a restricted one (see Pogge). There is a more powerful reason, however, to embark on the course of reparation and responsibility that I have outlined: like mourning and condolence, it may foster bonds of responsibility-in-complicity. Yet, although, like mourning and condolence, this retrospective making-good may bring about a retroactive "love," owning (up to) past misdeeds will also bring with it the irreducible possibility, residing in ambivalence, of violence being repeated in the form of retribution and rivalry. It was perhaps this that prompted Nietzsche, some decades before Freud, to write: "Ultimately 'love of one's neighbour' is always something secondary, in part conventional and arbitrarily illusory, when compared with fear ofone's neighbour' (Beyond Good and Evil 122-123, § 2or). It is interesting, let me observe in conclusion, that it is Krog's poem that appears at the head of volume 7 of the report. It prefaces the litany of victims and their brief case histories. It is the text for reparation. This is significant in at least two respects. First, as I have outlined, Krog's poem, when returned to its original placement in Country ofMy Skul4 is racially and ethnically situated. The clicks and gutturals that the speaker learns mark her as not being a black Mrican, and other elements (seblief, for instance, instead of asseblief) identifY her as the speaker of a colloquial Mrikaans. In a way similar to its making of the Zulu phrasing of ubuntu exemplary for restorative justice and reparation at another juncture, and of Susan van der Merwe its exemplar of ubuntu, the commission appears to make white guilt the figure for reparation here. What does this mean? If it is not simply to convey that Whites are the ones who should be making reparation to black victims, we are faced with a question: if the example is historically situated in such a way, can it serve as an example for all-or

Reparation for anyone else? I do not know the answer to this question-and it is one, in any case, that others will have to answer for themselves. Second, when we delve into the content of the example, we see, as I have outlined, that it involves staging a plea or prayer for a counter-response, and that that imprecation is not met. This illustrates why the subject of responsibility as reparation is "precarious." The word is withheld. Reparations will never be adequate, can never be made, yet they must be made. This is the aporia. We accept it; we cross through it over and over, recklessly. The speaker has to say: I will never know whether the predicament I have explicated will draw forth the countersignature of the other-although it is a fact that the signatures of fifteen of the original seventeen truth commissioners appear opposite Krog's poem in volume 7, as they do opposite the table of contents in each of the other six volumes. 40 That never-knowing is also a condition of existence.

§6

Literature and Testimony

Truth, Telling, Questioning Now listen very carefully, because I'm telling you the story now -Testimony of Lekotse, the shepherd 1

In a conversation near the end of Country of My Skull, Antjie Krog's interlocutor, an academic who has been reading to her from a book of twentieth-century German verse, explains to her that "'[a]fter the Second World War it was said in Germany: it is barbaric to write a poem after Auschwitz."' Without linking the dictum to Theodor Adorno, who is well known as its author, the academic relates to her how Paul Celan, having found his poem "Fugue of Death" "too lyrical" and "too beautiful," asked that it be left out of future editions of anthologies that had included it. This was, it is supposed, his response to Adorno's polemical proscription. 2 For Krog, as a poet, the conversation provokes the question of whether it is not barbaric to write poems after apartheid: "That is precisely why I say that maybe writers in South Mrica should shut up for a while. That one has no right to appropriate a story paid for with a lifetime of pain and destruction. Words come more easily for writers, perhaps. So let the domain rather belong to those who literally paid blood for every faltering word they utter before the Truth Commission'' (237-238/312). Krog's interlocutor meets her proposition with this question: "'Are you saying this because you yourself can't find a form for dealing with your past?"' This, he tells her, was the failure of German writers after World War II. "'No,' she replies, 'I often write pieces down from memory, and when I check the original tape I4J

Literature and Testimony it is always, but always much better than my own effort"' (238/312). Their conversation traverses the terrain between an impulse to leave the domain of words and utterance to those who testified before the Truth Commission and the possibility of finding form, as a writer, specifically as a poet, for a collective memory in which she herself is implicated. Then it departs in another direction. When the poet finds wanting her ability to lend form to testimony she recalls, yet wishes to let the domain of telling belong to the witnesses, whose efforts always outdo hers, a way other than memorial reconstruction has to be found of being host to their words. As formulated by Krog, the question of poetry, or literature, after apartheid concerns less an excess oflyricism or beauty, from which its creator stands back, than the approach of writers to the facilitation of utterance by others. If the question of literature and law after apartheid is a question of advocacy, of its dynamics and its ethics, the commission shares a set of concerns and conditions of possibility with literary works. Interpreting its public hearings as occasions for advocacy reveals that the structures of identification and substitution, on which it relies when it solicits and elicits the testimony of victims, are as integral to its operations as to a literary work. Krog's book makes itself host to testimony in ways that allow us to understand how this is the case, and how even lyric poetry, in a sense ignored by the Adornian proscription, is able to display this joint partaking. Although it relies a great deal on the testimony of numerous individual perpetrators and victims, the report of the Truth Commission draws less on testimony from the hearings than on statements taken down beforehand. Yet the public hearings, which were broadcast nationally on television and radio, are likely to be what South Africans most remember of the Truth Commission. The commission, situated between the hearings and its report, between listening and watching, and reading, is thus a bifurcated event. How does its report deal with this bifurcation, and the resulting disequilibrium between official record and common memory? Does this bifurcation and disequilibrium, and the response of the report to it, have any bearing upon literature after apartheid: not simply, in a restricted sense, in terms of the production of literary and quasi-literary works 3 but also, in a broader sense, in terms of a thinking of literature, or of the literary, and its relation to law? Does a reflection on the literary help us to understand the activities of the commission? Does the response ofliterature to the commission's work, and its engagement with literature, help to elucidate such questions?

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Literature, in a restricted sense, makes the occasional appearance in the report. A poem by Bertolt Brecht, for instance, forms an epigraph to the conclusion of the chapter dealing with the complicity of the health sector in apartheid (Truth Commission Report 4:154). 4 Judging by how seldom literature features in the report, one could be excused for thinking that the Truth Commission considered it to be unimportant, even irrelevant. One would be mistaken. Although the report includes only a single thematic discussion of literature, its placement accords literature an undeniable, if partly disavowed, centrality. Literature is discussed in the chapter "Concepts and Principles," in the section dealing with the concept of truth, one of the two fundamental concepts guiding the commission's work. Truth, for common sense, is that which distinguishes literature from history and from other forms of scholarly and juridico-legal discourse adopting similar methods of verification and criteria for what counts as fact. Although that notion of truth is of vital importance to the commission, on the face of it the report ventures further than common sense when it conceives of truth. One gets the sense that the commission has learned something about the nature of truth and, though it has not yet found a language in which to do so, is eager to impart this knowledge. What it says concerns the relation, in law, of truth and fiction. A tentative dialogue, hinted at in the report's analysis of the concept of truth, between the commission and Antjie Krog, outlines a possible grammar for such a language. Krog, an acclaimed poet in Afrikaans, 5 was among the first to bring her voice to the debate on the setting up of a truth commission. 6 Country ofMy Skull, the first book to be published in English by Krog, is a hybrid work. Written at the edges of reportage, memoir, and metafiction, it can be read to supplement the account of truth in the commission's report. It does this by remarking and reflecting upon how, in the testimony of witnesses at the public hearings, truths are interlaced with acts of telling and questioning, which are, in turn, implicated in intricate dynamics that come into play between questioner and teller. Country ofMy Skull mimes such elements by relating its author's own attempts to find an interlocutor, an addressee, an other for whom her own story will cohere. Written from a position of acknowledged and troubling historical complicity-its dedication reads, "for every victim who had an Afrikaner surname on her lips"-Krog's book does not claim any facile identification with victims who testify. By discreetly miming

Literature and Testimony exchanges before the commission, Country ofMy Skull measures the bearing of the commission on literature after apartheid by setting to work, in its own textual conduct, the basic structures that emerge between questioner and witness. Its hospitality to the words of witnesses makes apparent how literature is able to negotiate the bifurcation between the commission's report and hearings. Country ofMy Skull demonstrates how the literary abides upon the same basic structures as the hearings, and thus how, in the final analysis, the report, as it writes what it terms "the South Mrican story," shares such structures, as conditions of possibility, not just with the hearings but also with literature. In so doing, it points out a way for literature after apartheid that preempts any accusation of "barbarism" by showing how those elements that testimony shares with lyric poetry set to work an ethics of advocacy, the task of giving the domain of words over to the other. TRUTH

The commission's report distinguishes between "four notions of truth: factual or forensic truth; personal or narrative truth; social or 'dialogue' truth and healing and restorative truth" (r:no)_? The first two notions of truth pertain most to individual testimonies, and their handling by the commission. As one would expect from a body of its kind, a prominence, and even privilege, is accorded to "factual or forensic truth": "The familiar legal or scientific notion of bringing to light factual, corroborated evidence, of obtaining accurate information through reliable (impartial, objective) procedures, featured prominently in the Commission's findings process" (r:rn). In accordance with the act that brought it into being, the commission both made findings on an individual level"adopt[ing] an extensive verification and corroboration policy"-and sought to "report on the broader patterns underlying gross human rights violations and to explore the causes of such violations." In order to find global patterns, the commission adopted what it describes as a "social scientist's approach." This implied that before any individual testimony to human rights violation deposited with the commission could contribute to its findings, it would have to be verified and corroborated by its investigators and framed in a socio-historical context established by its research department (see 1:152). 8 The report does the latter extremely well; the reader does get a sense of broader patterns of abuse, and how

Literature and Testimony various "window cases" allow one to survey these patterns with a greater locality and specificity. Although the commission insists that its task was not "to write the history of th[e] country" (5:257), the cumulative effect is of a thorough historical reckoning, albeit one driven by an exposure and cataloging of human rights violations so relentless that it leaves little space for anything other than a history of gross human rights violation.9 It is, as I and others have observed, also weaker on linking gross violations to the structural violence of the apartheid system. The historiographic mode of the report is interrupted briefly in its final chapter, headed "Reconciliation" (5:350-435), which compiles extracts from some of the most striking testimonies. But for the bulk of the report, extracts from testimony are illustrative, first-person attestations to the veracity of the historical narrative, written in the third person, that encloses them. In contrast to the hearings, the report leaves a relatively limited domain of utterance to the witnesses. The second notion of truth outlined in the report explains what weight the commission gave to individual testimonies, capturing the uniqueness of its mandate and mode of operation. Here is where the report-and the work of the commission-bear most on literature. Acknowledging a form of truth that it calls "personal and narrative truth" makes the commission a kind of listening and recording machine. 10 As Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairperson of the commission, said at one of the early hearings, "This Commission is said to listen to everyone ... [E]veryone should be given a chance to say his or her truth as he or she sees it" (1:112). This reciprocal listening and saying fulfilled the commission's legislated mandate to "restore the human and civil dignity of the victims by granting them an opportunity to relate their own accounts of the violations to which they are the victims" (1:112n). How does the duty to give victims the chance to relate their own accounts carry out the commission's primary mandate of establishing a verified and corroborated picture of human rights violations? Given the impossibility of verifying (or of falsifying) all testimony collected, is the project of verification discrete, even disjunct, from the task of listening? On the one hand, as the report tells us, individual witnesses "helped to uncover existing facts about past abuses." On the other hand, they are said to have "assisted in the creation of a 'narrative truth."' This particular kind of "truth" is never quite defined-however unfamiliar it might be to a reader compared, say, to "factual truth." Although prepared to

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listen and record, the commission appears to draw back from assenting, without reservation, to the veracity of the testimony of individual witnesses. Human and civil dignity will be restored to the teller through storytelling, but, as the report implies, what is important is not so much what is told (which has to be verified, and is thus suspect), but rather that telling occurs. "The Commission sought," says the report, "to capture the widest possible record ofpeople's perceptions, stories, myths and experiences" (1:n2; my emphasis). With the phrase "record of," a metalanguage withholds verification; making a record of "perceptions, stories, myths and experiences" but not committing itself to lending credence to what was perceived, told, handed down as myth, and experienced. Although forensic convention makes it possible for a story to coincide with or depart from verifiable facts, and thus conveys the impression that stories are verifiable or falsifiable in the same way that statements are, strictly speaking, "narrative truth," the notion of truth that the report attaches to storytelling, is truth in a sense not opposed to falsehood. It is something other. The report at once welcomes this other and distances itself from it, by treating it as if it were something one could oppose to falsehood; or, worse, by treating it provisionally, in effect, as falsehood. It is in this context that the report refers to literature-or, more precisely, in a way that appears to open to the literary in a sense not restricted to books, to orature: By telling their stories, both victims and perpetrators gave meaning to the multi-layered experiences of the South Mrican story. These personal truths were communicated to the broader public by the media. In the (South) Mrican context, where value continues to be attached to oral tradition, the process of story telling was particularly important. Indeed, this aspect is a distinctive and unique feature of the legislation governing the Commission, setting it apart from the mandates of truth commissions elsewhere. The Act explicitly recognised the healing potential of telling stories. The stories told to the Commission were not presented as arguments or claims in a court of law. Rather, they provided unique insights into the pain of South Mrica's past, often touching the hearts of all that heard them. (r:rn)

Although this passage begins by referring to "both victims and perpetrators," the subsection of the act cited in a footnote refers only to victims and their dignity, providing for a "restoring [of] the human and civil dignity of such victims by granting them an opportunity to relate their

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own accounts of the violations of which they are the victims" (Promotion 3[r] [c]). And, as we observed in Chapter 4, the idea that "[t]he stories told

to the Commission were not presented as arguments or claims in a court oflaw" hardly applies to the highly constrained testimony of perpetrators. However the report gestures at recognizing the "healing potential" of stories for perpetrators, it cannot, even if it wished, speak coherently of the two parties in the same breath. Perpetrators can be cross-examined, their integrity put in doubt. What is said about "personal or narrative truth'' is tacitly and fundamentally informed by a necessarily asymmetrical openness, in its weaving of what it enigmatically calls "the South Mrican story'' (which somehow differs from a history) to stories not of perpetrators but of victims. The commission reserves its hospitality for victims. It does not greet perpetrators with the words "we welcome you here today''-such words typically being the greeting made at hearings to victim witnesses. Yet when its report discusses the stories of victims, it treats them as it would the statements of perpetrators. Although it declares itself hospitable to storytelling, it proves more at ease with statements that can be forensically verified or falsified. 11 There is a larger logic to this, according to which, with uncertain step, South Mrica joins, or rejoins, the continent of Mrica. Most victims testifying are black Mricans; listening to them will restore something that has been lost, or has been taken away: human dignity, or ubuntu. For the builders of the nation after apartheid, a system sometimes understood as "colonialism of a special type," 12 it is also a decolonizing logic, the logic of a desire to no longer be colonized, politically or culturally, 13 but a logic that, as I explained in Chapter 3, at every turn risks repeating what it seeks to reverse: the colonizer's repression or distortion of local social and cultural formations. The stakes are high for the report when it comes to testimony, for it is not simply stories of people who have suffered; it is also the stories of Mricans, Mrican stories, for which the Truth Commission wishes to leave a domain of telling of which it constantly risks dispossessing them. This ambiguous logic plays out in the report in its single thematic discussion ofliterature, which occurs, paradoxically, in the pivotal section on "truth." Let us concentrate on the sentence in which the "South'' in South Mrica is put in parentheses, joined to and disjoined from Mrica: "In the (South) Mrican context, where value continues to be attached to oral tradition, the process of story telling was particularly important." Like the

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notion of "personal and narrative truth," this reference to an "oral tradition" that is Mrican, or (South) Mrican, and the "importan[ce]" of storytelling, is never explained-except in a way that suggests, again, that the report wishes to subordinate stories and literature to discourses of forensic truth, as "the validation of the individual subjective experiences of people who had previously been silenced or voiceless." This characterization of the act of storytelling as "subjective" implicitly sets it in opposition to "factual ... evidence," which the commission will bring to light with the aid of "reliable (impartial, objective) procedures" (r:m), even though a given act of storytelling is not, in itself, either true or false. The commission never attaches itself as agent, as the subject of utterance-not even "subjectively''-to the ethnographic datum that "value continues to be attached to oral tradition." There is repression in its avowal. Mrica, silenced in South Mrica, speaks in the form of"oral tradition," to which the Truth Commission will accommodate, just as legal modernity finds a place for "custom." Yet, just as the constitution maintains ultimate authority by reserving the right to overrule, and even define, "customary law" (§ 2II [r-2]), the commission draws back from attaching "value," in its own voice, to storytelling. Why accept at face value the report's ill-thought-out and ambiguous gesture, by way of an unexplained allusion to "oral tradition," at the resources of South Mrican cultural formations? Are there ways of thinking beyond it? To begin to address more fully what is at work here, we will have to attend to the ways in which the commission's hearings for victims were structured and to how, as occasions for hospitality, albeit not without "conditions" (see Derrida, Adieu 87), they open to a thinking of the literary that holds literature and orature aside from any opposition of truth and falsehood. As kinds of telling, they are equivalent neither to truth nor to falsehood, nor yet opposed to either. By putting them under the heading of"narrative truth," the report runs the risk of exposing literature and orature to procedures of verification and falsification that have a limited bearing on what it is to tell a story and, as we shall see, to ask a question, which, for the presiding commissioner, as for anyone else, is to call forth, and even propose a shape to, a story. This inbuilt amb-iguity is what literature in the narrow sense takes up in response to the commission. In order to explore what it means for a witness to tell a story before the commission, and what the implications could be for literature, we will attend to the mise-en-scene of the hearings, and to the complex interactions

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of questioner and witness. If public acknowledgment of pain, and the achievement of "therapy'' or "catharsis" for the teller (Truth Commission Report1:146; c£ 5:5, 7-8), are compelling goals, as explanations they remain only partial (not to mention wishful) accounts of what has happened at the hearings. 14 The exchanges between questioner and witness set in motion a highly mediated dynamics and technics of advocacy, translation, identification, and, in a sense not restricted to psychoanalysis, transference. 15 Some of these elements are taken up, to varying degrees, in the report. The impulse to advocacy-to create conditions under which the formerly "silenced" could speak and to help them do so-was fundamental to the commission and is invoked throughout the report (1:140 and passim). Advocacy was, as I observed in Chapter 3, an area in which the commission was prepared to make adjustments, altering its questionnaire for victims and providing for special hearings for women. Essentially linked to advocacy, translation was another key element in hospitality, as set to work by the commission. Repeated reference is made to the translation apparatus at the hearings, and to the policy of taking statements in the language chosen by the witness (Truth Commission Report 5:2-8, III; I:146-147, 298-299). The crucial fact that these statements were then "record[ ed] in English" (Truth Commission Report n) is not, however, underlined. 16 I will underline it: the fact that the report and the eleven million pages of transcripts are in English, 17 and the original language less easily accessible on audio- and videotape housed at the National Archives of South Mrica in Pretoria, 18 means, once again, that the decolonizing impulse to restoration and restitution is an equivocal one. Embedded within its machinery of advocacy, and operated by technics of translation, the more complex dynamics of identification and transference, so palpable in the public testimonies, are less well accounted for by the report. There is a brief mention in volume 5 of the effects of taking and interpreting testimony on statement takers and translators. The report records how the effects of testifying were distributed along a continuum of people: "The statement takers ... carried a heavy burden of responsibility and were the front rank of those who gathered the memories of the pain and suffering of the past. They themselves required support as the work took its toll on them, and the Commission made counselling and, if necessary, further therapy available to them" (5:5). As for the translators, "the nature of the work meant that they absorbed a great deal of the pain and anger of the witnesses" (5:8). The translator speaks in the

Literature and Testimony first person, miming a witness's pain in a way that renders him or her psychically vulnerable to it. To this account, we can add the "transference" that occurs between witness and questioner, as he or she figures as, and in place of, the one who violated the victim's rights. Without taking into account the commission's taking upon itself of "responsibility," on behalf of perpetrators, for the misdeeds of the past (c£ 5=170-I7I), we will understand nothing about it, or about how the attendant substitutions relate to ambiguities in hospitality to victims and their storytelling. Finally, without attending to the possibility of such substitution, we will have little sense of how, as a collector of forensic truth, the commission shares its conditions of possibility with the literary. 19 The report never draws attention to the exchanges at the hearings between witness and questioner. Attention to these exchanges is paramount, for the resultant "story"-of the witness, which is to become part of "the South Mrican story''-is wrought through such interactions; by, for instance: the relationship of the two parties, the kinds of question asked, the language(s) spoken, the fact of translation and transcription. One can identifY a continuum of testimonial agency. An awareness of shared conditions of textual production not only aids us in registering, historically and socially, the interdependence of literary, quasi-literary, and forensic narrative codes but enables us to discern, in elements of testimonial collaboration, conditions of possibility shared by fictional literature and testimony. In order to assess the bearing of the Truth Commission on literature and law-in South Africa, in Africa, and globally-we have, for two sets of reasons, to set its report alongside its hearings, at which complex exchanges involving questioner and witness occur. On the one hand, various tendencies in modern fiction have been shown to have emerged historically from testimonial, epistolary, and other quasi-literary genres. As Kenneth Harrow shows in his study of postwar Francophone and Anglophone Mrican writers, the "inception in Europhonic writing" (3) of modern Mrican fiction can be traced to the paradoxical act, for the Mrican writer, of narrating a life in a European language and form. Harrow's name for the writing that emerges as testimony gives way to fiction is "literatures of temoignage'; literature testimonial in character, but also fiction that emerges, under such conditions, from a bearing of witness. 20 The implications of his argument are, on the other hand, not merely literary-historical. Once, as Harrow implies, an "original" autobiography exists only by virtue of being posited imaginatively by a work of fiction,

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which then operates as inaugural repetition, one is close to Derrida's idea that "testimony always goes hand in hand with [a toujours partie liee avec] at least the possibility of fiction, perjury, and lie" (Demeure 27). In a way that resonates with his remarks in Rogues on the right "to irony as well as to fiction" as constitutive of democratic "public space" (92), Derrida links this possibility of fiction to the technological, and to the necessary iterability-if it is to be intelligible-of testimony: What I say for the first time, if it is a testimony, is already a repetition, at least a repeatability; it is already an iterability, more than once at once, more than an instant in one instant, at the same time .... As soon as the sentence is repeatable, that is, from its origin, the instant it is pronounced and becomes intelligible, thus idealizable, it is already instrumentalizable and affected by technology. And virtuality.... And it is perhaps here, with the technological both as ideality and prosthetic iterability, that the possibility of fiction and lie, simulacrum and literature, that of the right to literature insinuates itself, at the very origin of truthful testimony, autobiography in good faith, sincere confession, as their essential compossibility. (Demeure 41-42) The ability to be repeated-which permits testimony to be reinscribed away from its origin, as in the Truth Commission's report; or to be translated with the aid of its simultaneous translation apparatus-is a function of an originary self-division. The commission's hearings encourage us to relate this ability to be repeated to the pragmatics of telling and questioning, and to a structure of address involving, as its possibility, at least two parties. A basic structure of alterity, such duality and partition is also a condition of iterability, and thus of the possibility of differenceY And of fiction. By following the testimony at the hearings, Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull reveals a scene of telling and, more particularly, questioning, which relates to a "counterfactual" truth not reducible to truth as opposed to falsehood. When, as Derrida outlines in another recent text, the scene of questioning is also a scene of hospitality, this resonates with what we find in Krog-and invites a conversation between the two writers. TELLING

Antjie Krog accompanies the Truth Commission on its peripatetic journey about the countryside, where it is hosted, along its way, with varying degrees of hospitality by local inhabitants: "[E]nquiries are made

Literature and Testimony beforehand to see whether the Commission would be welcome. Whether people of all races would be welcome" (207l275). Antjie Krog is away from home, from her husband and children, and relies on hotel and guest-house accommodation. She soon becomes a stranger in her own house and home: "I walk into my home one evening. My family ... seem like a happy, close-knit group .... Everything has become unconnected and unfamiliar. I realize that I don't know where the light switch is .... I enter my house like a stranger" (47l63, 49l65). This turning of the authorial self out of its house, at home and away from home, is integral to Country of My Skull; it performs, spatially, the reversal that makes the country the "country" of Krog's skull (cf. 130II7I, 210l277). It helps her story to mime, almost in silence, without in any way claiming an identity with apartheid's victims, what takes place at the hearings, when witnesses testifY to police or soldiers invading their houses, and to being forced from their homes. 22 This doubling of spatial displacement is part of the phenomenon whereby Truth Commissioners, statement-takers, briefers, translators, data-processors, as well as journalists covering the commission, begin to exhibit behavior copying that of victims. '"You will experience the same symptoms as the victims,"' a counselor sent by the commission tells the journalists. "'You will find yourself powerless-without help, without words.'" 23 Wordlessness and eviction join as Krog's book mimes and allegorizes the testimony of witnesses. This leaves the domain of utterance to their "faltering words" and allows a witness's words to haunt one as a writer even when he or she is not speaking, or represented as speaking. Dramatizing the scene of being host to the words of the other, it outlines how the commission and its work can be taken up in literature after apartheid. The traits of wordlessness and self-dispropriation connect as much to poetry as to the public hearings of the commission. About halfway into Country of My Skull, there is a brief and cryptic reference to a note left with the key to the author's room in the Nelspruit Hotel, and subsequently to an interlocutor who appears to become her lover (14I-143II88-I90), 24 or, better, to take up the place of a "Beloved," whom she addresses in an apostrophe earlier in the book (27l38). If we recall J. M. Coetzee's idea that writing is in a sense possible only when one is free to address the figure of the beloved without having to negotiate the figure of the censor (Giving Offinse 38), this would designate her interlocutor as someone who, like the leader of a witness's testimony, makes it possible for her to speak or to write. The note waiting with her key con-

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rains, is, an excerpt from a poem by Osip Mandelstam: "This life is terrifying ... I One could whistle through life like a starling, I or eat it like your nut cake. I But both of us know it's impossible" (142/r88). 25 Things begin with a letter, and with a lyric poem, which share the basic structure of an implied "I" addressing a "you." Each party depends on this address, but the entire scene of address is haunted by the shadow of impossibility: "both of us know it's impossible." According to the linguist Emile Benveniste, the first- and secondperson pronouns I and you . .. do not constitute a class of reference since there is no "object" definable as I to which these instances can refer in identical fashion .... What then is the "reality" to which I or you refers? It is solely a "reality of discourse," and this is a very strange thing. I cannot be defined except in terms of "locution," not in terms of objects as a nominal sign is. I signifies "the person who is uttering the present instance of the discourse containing I" (218; translation modified)

"I" and "you" refer, then, to nothing beyond the speaker and the addressee, individually or jointly, at the instant of utterance. This basic structure of address is in place in language-and has to be in order to speak or write-before it is a matter of truth or falsehood, fact or fiction. The pronouns "I" and "you," as "referents," a "'reality of discourse,'" are interdependent positions in language that can be taken up by any speaker or writer, and his or her addressee: "I use I only when I am speaking to someone who will be a you in my address. It is this condition of dialogue that is constitutive of person, for it implies that reciprocally I becomes you in the address of the one who in turn designates himself as I" (Benveniste 224-225). This "polarity of persons [which is] the fundamental condition of language" (Benveniste 225) can be read in Derridean terms, as an instance of the necessary self-division and iterability, at its origin, of any utterance. Lyric poems, with their exchange of "I" and "you"-one thinks of the poetry of Sylvia Plath, for instance, and of Krog's own poems-are an exemplary case of how literary and quasi-literary works enable a process of identification and reciprocity but often dramatize the difficulty, in spite of technics, the disruption, or impossibility of discursive reciprocity, exchange, and response: "your ear with the mole is my only telephone" (jou moesie-oor is my enigste telefoon); "i am so sorry mama/ that i am not/what i would dearly want to be for you" (ek is so jammer mamma!dat

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ek nie islwat ek graag vir jou wil wees nie) (Krog, "Ma''). 26 The impossibility of dialogue may be figured in terms of translation. A poet in Mrikaans, who cannot always find words in English (cf. 167!220), Krog meets with an analogous problem when the hotel interlocutor, with whom she wants to discuss the day's Truth Commission hearing, does not understand Mrikaans: "'Maybe you don't understand the Mrikaans, but he sounded really pious .. .'/'Yes,"' he replies, "'I picked it up in the translations"' (142!I89). In one of several passages excluded from the edition of Country ofMy Skull published in the United States, the lover, or figure of the beloved, is explicitly linked to storytelling and to how telling relates to truth. It draws attention to the act of telling and reveals how Country ofMy Skull has been constructed. As it does several times throughout the work with reference to testimony and to radio sound bites (82-89/103-113, 131/q2), exposing fictionality at the heart of the book, a "postmodern" metanarrativity is at work, as Patrick, a colleague, comments on events that have been narrated in the book in which he now appears as a character and is attributed speech: "Hey, Antjie, but this is not quite what happened at the workshop," says Patrick. "Yes, I know.... I'm not reporting or keeping minutes. I'm telling.... I cut and paste the upper layer, in order to get the second layer told, which is actually the story I want to tell. ... " "But then you're not busy with the truth!" "I am busy with the truth ... my truth .... Seen from my perspective, shaped by my state of mind at the time and now also by the audience I'm telling the story to." (qo-qr/225)

At this point, in the South Mrican edition, Patrick asks: "'And the affair that you describe in here. Is that true?'" Her reply links the character of the lover to storytelling: "No, but I had to bring a relationship into the story so that I could verbalize certain personal reactions to the hearings. I had to create a new character who could not only bring in new information but also express the psychological underpinnings of the Commission" (171). Krog invents a character or characters that allow her to disclose a self that reacts affectively to the hearings, and acts that reaction out. What are the "personal reactions" to which Krog alludes? And what "psychological underpinnings of the Commission" does she have in

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mind? At the workshop to which Patrick refers, a psychologist introduces the notion of "two parallel tracks .... [T] he Truth Commission track and ... your personal relationship track." According to him: Instinctively, you do not want the Truth Commission one to "contaminate" the personal one-you want your friends, your family, your beloved to stay pure, to be protected from what you are experiencing. You find it impossible anyway to convey the totality of the impact to anyone. Most people become totally withdrawn from their families. But to stay sane, you create on this Truth Commission track a substitute for your personal life. You recreate your personal relationships in the Commission-you find a father, a mother, a sister, a beloved, a son. Which is fine in itself, so long as you remember that the one track is coming to an end in eight months' time. (qo/224)

Krog takes up, as a structuring device, and as an account for how Country ofMy Skull is written, this idea of defensive splitting of the self, and of the other in the self. The character who assumes the place of the "beloved" functions not only as a conveyor of information but also as a "substitute" for the one who usually occupies that place: her husband (an architect, incidentally), the one who remains in the house with the children, the one who is not displaced from it. Country ofMy Skull allows us to read the word "recreate" in terms of a re-creation both in actuality and in the realm of writing. The book relates both types of re-creative work-"[w]e are becoming a family'' (47/63)-but in this context makes it impossible for us to decide between them. Given that the lover is a substitute-either actual or virtual-what is his ultimate function? What can be conveyed when he is in attendance that might '"contaminate'" the "personal track''? Krog responds to the psychologist with a question: '"Where does violence fit into all of this?' I ask, tasting blood on my lip." What prompts this question? In another of the passages excised from the American edition, there occurs a scene of physical violence involving Krog and her lover: "It is only when he cries out that I realize I've sunk my teeth deep into his left shoulder" (165). I do not know Krog's reasons for silently removing such passages. Whatever they were, the effect is to lessen the impact of what it means for someone to invent a character-for her, a figure of the beloved-in order to be able to articulate something that cannot otherwise be articulated. She has no "framework in which to address" her husband, the one who usually, if indeed conflictually, occupies the place of the beloved.

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When, in another semi-metafictional passage in which a character inside the book appears to be reading it, she tries to explain to her husband how "[w]e make sense of things by fitting them into stories," he tells her to "[s]top talking crap" (r96-197h6r). The process of inventing a proxy figure is precisely what happens when affect-positive and negative-is expressed before, and in a relation of "transference" with, the commission. This is essential not only to the process of establishing conditions under which people can relate their stories, but also to its task, little averred in its report, of assuming responsibility, in the person of the presiding questioner, on behalf of the perpetrator. Its advocacy engages a transference that releases a ripple effect in which statement-taker, questioner, and translator all absorb, as proxies for the perpetrator, the violence of the victim's anger, anguish, or grief. If those close to the commission have to find ways to "recreate [their] personal relationships" in order to protect those relationships from violence, such re-creation shares its basic structure with what the witness acts out. The commission tries to make it possible for the victim to express what otherwise is not, and cannot be, expressed: not only a story but, as a current in that story, affect directed at the perpetrator, who may be absent or unknown; or inaccessible, because of amnesty, to impulses such as revengeY At a small number of hearings, the buffer of "transference" was broken, as victims confronted perpetrators directly. As I related in Chapter 4, the most startling instance was the questioning of police captain Jeffrey Benzien by the former Umkhonto weSizwe operatives he had tortured. The "re-entry" of these victims into the position of the tortured, and the manipulation of the situation by the former torturer, raises the question, posed by psychoanalysis, of whether a reenactment by actual parties can alter the relationship that existed between them in the past. It thus also raises the larger question of whether "reconciliation"-be it individual or national-does not depend upon a mechanism like the commission to remove intersubjective dynamics from a situation where, if reenacted, they would be unlikely to change, and might even breed further violence. This is some of what Country ofMy Skull mimes when it invokes the proxy figure of the beloved. I would thus propose reading these references to a "relationship" as an "allegory'' for the hearings, and what is enacted there between questioner and witness. Country ofMy Skull reproduces and analyzes several testimonies, the most striking being that of Johannes Lekotse, a shepherd from Ladybrand in the Free State, Krog's home province (210-220h78-290). 28

Literature and Testimony The exchange between him and his questioner adds to what Krog has already shown-namely, that testimony depends on an address to an other; to the figure of a beloved, for whom one's story will cohere; to a proxy for the perpetrator, who will absorb violence in his or her place; but also in the form of apostrophic imprecation, as in the national anthem, "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika," which is a prayer, and thus shares a minimal structure of address with the lyric poem (216-217l285). This "other" in the structure of address is what, in a more general way, Krog refers to as her "audience." With her remarks on truth and telling, made to Patrick in a virtual and metafictional zone, Krog dramatizes how the I-you dyad, played out theatrically at the hearings in a quest for truth, is also the iterable structure of address presupposed by fictionality. Even if it is strictly prior to any division between fact and fiction, this fictionality, the invention of an "affair," assumes an affective and effective truth. If this did not happen, there would be no basis, in the practice of psychoanalysis, for transference, and there would be no point in the commission's hearing the direct testimony of victims of human rights violations. The "affair" or "relationship" dramatizes the tenuousness of all "verbaliz[ation] ," and the need for an interlocutor, a "you" who occupies the place of the beloved (here the lover and not the husband), before whom "I" can speak, and before whom "I" can speak my affect. Adding another dimension, the exchange at the Ladybrand hearing between Lekotse and his questioner, Ilan Lax, transports telling, and recognition of the teller's affective truth (with its dynamics of advocacy, identification, and transference) into the realm of questioning. Here the "telling" comes from the side of the agent of truth, whose questions, probing for the truth, enter a vein of counterfactuality as they call forth a story. The literary, in other words, comes from out of the law itself, and is in no sense incidental to it. QUESTIONING

Without reproducing all of Lekotse's remarkable testimony, or all of Krog's provocative analysis of it, I will concentrate on the significance she gives to his questions-or "counter-questions"-to his questioner. Lekotse is able, as Krog observes, to "imaginatively transplant ... himself into several other positions" (2181288). These positions include those of the police, and of Lax as representative of the Truth Commission. Lekotse testifies that police broke into his house and ransacked it, injuring him

Literature and Testimony when they forced him outside while they did so. His testimony carries with it a dimension of transference, specifically "negative" transference. When Lekotse speaks, Lax assumes, in relation to him, the position once occupied by the police. AB Krog observes, he asks Lax questions, just as he had the police. And then, curiously, he calls upon APLA, the armed wing of the Pan-Mricanist Congress, the resistance movement to which his son belongs, to replace the door to his house that the police destroyed (214!282). This fluidity of positions and temporalities, essential to the working of the commission if it is to assume responsibility for the past misdeeds of others who are not prepared to do so, is underplayed in the report but is tangible in the verbatim transcripts from the public hearings. At those hearings, witness and questioner interact in a way only partially scripted by the questioner's formula of getting the witness to say something about him- or herself and his or her family before proceeding to a gathering of facts of human rights violation (217!286). Lekotse does not wait to be welcomed. Turning the tables on the questioner, he, like Mr. Mhlaba at the Shell House hearing, begins to ask questions. In so doing, he opens the possibility of turning the commission and its assumptions in another, unanticipated, direction. I return here to the thematics of decolonization and Mrican cultural reclamation that I took up earlier. As the commission's representative, Lax performs his part in a larger drama of advocacy. One dimension of this advocacy-to let formerly silenced voices be heard-involves making it possible for witnesses to testifY in the language of their choice. At the hearings, an apparatus of simultaneous translation makes feasible what is, in a local and a historical sense, an enactment of hospitality; an enactment of hospitality toward strangers, toward those who have been foreigners in their own country, and foreigners to each other. "Our kindness has been misused and our hospitality turned against us," Steve Biko once wrote. "Whereas whites were mere guests to us on their arrival in this country they have now pushed us out to a 13% corner of the land and are acting as bad hosts in the rest of the country. This we must put right" (86; my emphasis). If it is an exercise in amended hospitality, the commission can, in a sense, be read as the beginning of an attempt (as an adjunct to the Land Commission, which will restitute land) to put things right. This it does, as I have observed, by occupying the place of the perpetrator, and by compensating for his "misuse" of kindness and perversion of hospitality. If things work as they ought, in a transference that "returns" the victim

Literature and Testimony to the time of the abuse, the bad host will improve as his proxy behaves differently, making up for his omissions in what is the paradigm of reparation and condition of possibility for reparations of any kind. This displacement may be one reason why black truth commissioners and leaders of testimony are (if the translation is to be credited), curiously, sometimes given the explanation by witnesses that "[a]s we are Black people, there are certain traditional things that have to be made for that person," in cases where the person in question is deceased or has disappeared. 29 It may, as Krog's book suggests, be for this drama of hospitality, and not merely for "story telling" in the narrow sense, that the commission uses the unexplained shorthand "oral tradition." In that case, "[w]e welcome you here today" would be more than simply a formulaic word of greeting. Opening the fourth in a series of 1996 seminars titled "Foreigner Question" (Question d'etranger), Derrida makes some observations about hospitality, the question, and the foreigner: [B]efore being a question to be dealt with, before designating a concept, a theme, a problem, a program, the question of the foreigner is a question of the foreigner, addressed to the foreigner. As though the foreigner were first of all the one who puts the first question or the one to whom you address the first question .... But also the one who, putting the first question, puts me in question. (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 3) As Derrida observes, "[I]n many of Plato's dialogues, it is often the Foreigner (xenos) who questions .... Sometimes the foreigner is Socrates himself, Socrates the disturbing man of question and irony (which is to say, of question, another meaning of the word 'irony'), the man of the midwifely question. Socrates himself has the characteristics of the foreigner, he represents, he figures the foreigner, he plays the foreigner he is not" (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 5-13). Accordingly, in Plato's Apology, Socrates claims "that he is 'foreign' to the language of the courts ... he doesn't know how to speak this courtroom language, this legal rhetoric of accusation, defense, and pleading; he doesn't have the skill, he is like a foreigner" (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 15). Questions are at the foundation of Socratic irony (eironeia); the questioner is an eiron, one who dissembles ignorance-specifically, the remediable ignorance of the foreigner. Lekotse himself can be read as dissembling ignorance. Whether this is "deliberate" or not is unimportant; the mise-en-scene of the hearing

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positions him in this way. He refers to himself, reporting what Whites called him, as "a kaffer and a dull donkey'' (Krog, Country 219l288). Lax asks him whether it was not his ribs, rather than his shoulder, which he says the police injured; and why he did not report the policemen who assaulted him. His "counter-questions" (Country 219l289), which bring the audience to laughter, are the questions of a "foreigner" who asks that his "ignorance"-ofLax's and the commission's ignorance; of a world in which police hold police accountable-be remedied: ''Are you not aware that I the shoulder is related I to the ribs, sir?" And then: "How can you report policemen to policemen?" (Country 219l289). Derrida's account of hospitality and the question resonates with Krog's interpretation of Lekotse's questions. "This kind of questioning," she writes, "is the foundation of all philosophy." When Lekotse's questions to the police are not answered, "his ability to understand the world around him is taken away" (Country 218l288). The implications for hospitality become clearer when Krog cites "some remarks on the Mrican narrative made by the Zulu poet Mazisi Kunene," who explains how "'When the first white men came ... the elders went to those men and said: tell us about your world"' (Country 219l289). If the exchange between Lekotse and Lax is a repetition of that between Lekotse and the police, both exchanges can be read as acting out a much older script of invasion, and the negotiation of hospitality between parties who are, at "first," foreigners to each other. Irony in the Socratic mode is already a replaying of this exemplary scene of management of violence. It is a hinge between hostility and hospitality. 30 So, perhaps, questioning is not, as Krog's reading tends to suggest, merely epistemological, about "understanding the world," but also pragmatic; about, in this case, regaining property and propriety, or determining the shape of propriety: the extent of the space one can call one's own; the extent to which one is at liberty to open that space-domestic or personal-up to, or close it off from, others. Let us recall, in this respect, how Lekotse repeats the fact that he was turned "outside" by the invaders of his house, and how the innermost part of his house-his wardrobes-was cut open. Country ofMy Skull humbly mimes this violence in its episodes of violence to the body of the self and the beloved, and by drawing a parallel bet}Veen the house and the body (cf. 91ln5). How does this relate to literature? To literature after apartheid? To literature and law? Since hospitality is not ultimately a matter of true or false, but one of questions and of dissembled ignorance, the "world" the

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questioner seeks to understand is a contested realm. One can go further, by analyzing the pragmatics of questioning. A question to an other presupposes foreignness, or dissimulated foreignness, and thus the projection of a possible world, either of the other, or of an alternative to that of the other. Projecting either involves the question in a movement of counterfactuality, or in a movement counter to the facts as presented. Lekotse's "counter-questions" challenge the facts (or world) that Lax's questions appear to imply. Everything before the Truth Commission takes place in the realm of the counterfactual (even questions that elicit facts), and therefore in the realm of fable and fictionality, since bringing to light facts presupposes this counterfactual structure of questioning. The word "counterfactual" may, however, be misleading: the structure I have been describing is prior to fact, or to any fact falsifiable in pursuit of "factual truth," and is, along with the 1-you address structure, a condition of possibility for both fact and fiction (even if the commission's report tacitly assumes that the counterfactuality of "stories" can be opposed to the facts of "forensic truth"). Perhaps we could call it invention-even, to borrow from Derrida's "Psyche," an "invention of the other" (in both senses of the genitive). For it is not the witness alone who sets the scene for counterfactuality, but also the leader of his testimony who asks questions, eliciting a story, as is apparent from the implications ofLekotse's "ironic" counter-questions. "So also the lies," Antjie Krog tells Patrick, when he asks her about her "bus[iness]" with the truth (Country q1h25). We live, and judge, in history. This history is a history of facts, a realm of truth and lies (as Michael Ignatieff implies, when he writes that "[a]ll that a truth commission can achieve is to reduce the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in public discourse" [''Articles of Faith" n3, quoted in Truth Commission Report I:ni]). But facts, and the subsequent division between truth and lies, depend on originating, instituting "lies"-to which we give such names as "telling," and, I would also propose, "questioning." Is that to say that we should not distinguish between truth and lying, or between truth and fabrication? That criteria of forensic truth are suspect and ought not to be employed? No, only that as we live and judge, it may be useful to preserve a sense of what Nietzsche called truth and lying in an "extra-moral sense"; for, by attending to the arbitrary imposition at the foundation of what we hold to be true, we stand guard against lies masquerading as truth in the narrow sense, and against those

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lies making historyY The gap between the Truth Commission's hearings and its final report can be bridged by locating, through attention to the former in particular, their shared conditions of possibility in the literary. This is perhaps what, against the wishes of the bulk of its report, the commission has to tell us about truth and about literature. Telling is not just therapeutic, a restorer of dignity or ubuntu. Along with questioning, it signals an unverifiability that stands watch, at times ironically, over the impulse to verify and to corroborate tales, and so to falsify others, in the interests of fabricating what the report, entering the domain of fable, terms "the South Mrican story." It is in inviting this unverifiability, in seeking to be host to the word of the other, that the eliciting of testimony partakes of and with poetry.

Disgrace [W]ith no mention of the pain he has caused, no mention of the long history of exploitation of which this is part. -].M. Coetzee, Disgrace

If a direct engagement with the everyday work of the Truth Commission brings forth Antjie Krog's plea for how literature, poetry in particular, can, without eliminating the possibility of violence, foster nonviolent human reciprocity, ] . M. Coetzee's response has been more oblique. Although he had explored the representation of torture in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), 32 and the dynamics of testimony in Foe (1987), Coetzee has written nothing about the Truth Commission directly. In Disgrace (1999), though, there is, besides a continued occupation with the problems of "giving voice," a massive allusion to the commission's amnesty process. A facile closure of confession and expiation arguably offered by the commission to perpetrators seeking amnesty for their crimes is resisted by the novel thematically and formally. But when Disgrace takes up historical matters that predate and outlive the thirty-four-year period encompassed by the commission's investigations, it offers more than a critique of the commission's methods for coming to terms with the country's history of wrong. This it does by taking seriously the demandmore seriously perhaps than the character in the novel who makes it, and the one on whom it is made-for viewing one's personal conduct, in particular one's sexual conduct, as historical. Its emphases in this regard

Literature and Testimony are literary-historical, in that, as I observed in the previous chapter, it rewrites the novel of native crime as a genre born of fearful white phantasies of retribution. Here I will elaborate the argument. In accepting that responsibility involves owning to the historicity of one's sexual acts and desires, Coetzee's novel asks us to understand these phantasies as plotting out a sexual history-not only of feared retributive punishment but also, hand in hand with that terror of violation, of the ambiguous and confused impulse to make good that Melanie Klein termed "manic reparation." Disgrace would thus be a daring execution of the serious account of power and desire entertained by Coetzee in response to feminist thinker Catharine MacKinnon in Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (72-73), as well as a renewal of his attempt, in his analysis of Geoffrey Cronje in the same book, to put back into our understanding of history the madness that realized apartheid in law "as a counterattack upon desire" (Giving

Ojfense 163-165, 178). 33 Disgrace is the story of David Lurie, a scholar of literature who, divorced and sensing that he has lost his sexual magnetism, frequents prostitutes until he seduces Melanie Isaacs, one of his students. Mter being brought to book by a university committee for harassment, he leaves his job in Cape Town and retreats to his daughter Lucy's smallholding in the Eastern Cape. He learns to find solace in helping out at a local veterinary clinic run by Lucy's friend Bev Shaw, whom he helps to dispose of the corpses of dogs that have been put down. Mter three men rob the smallholding, raping Lucy and setting Lurie alight, father and daughter face the difficult task of coming to terms with the attack, and what it means to continue to live in South Mrica (although the novel is reticent in naming the race of its protagonists, notably of Melanie, it is evident that Lurie and his daughter are white and the attackers are black). On this matter they can reach no unanimity, and, after an increase of friction between them, Lurie takes up solitary residence in Grahamstown, where he will be closer to the clinic and the incinerator where he takes the corpses. At the same time, he continues to work at a chamber opera on Lord Byron and Teresa Guiccioli that has taken the place of his literary scholarship. Meanwhile Petrus, Lucy's former assistant who has bought a tract of her land, proposes to her a marriage-alliance, which Lucy interprets as an offer of protection in exchange for the rest of her land. Pregnant by the rape, she is prepared to accept this, although, if she is, as Lurie believes, a lesbian, this would compound the resultant compromise of her freedom as a woman.

Literature and Testimony Lurie is also incensed because Petrus shelters one of the rapists-Pollux, a young man who is a member of his extended family. The novel ends without Petrus's proposal actually having been put into effect and with Lurie, who accepts a smaller role in Lucy's life, contemplating the killing and incineration of a three-legged dog to which he has become attached. It is perhaps no accident that this novel of Coetzee, who trained in linguistics at the University ofTexas in the 1960s, plots history by emphasizing language. In Disgrace, the English language has fallen into decrepitude. It, no less than Mrikaans, is haunted by a history of violence, and, in the picture presented in the novel, English has lately been debased by neoliberal policies directed at vocational training instead of teaching and research in the humanities. 34 These developments, which the novel implicitly links to the Truth Commission's assumptions about coming to terms with the past, come into play through the verbal tense that dominates the book. Finally, music and song in the form of Lurie's opera gesture beyond language as a tool for communication. Sound exceeds the letter on the page, even the page of the novel. Like Antjie Krog, who as a lyric poet insists on the transformative musicality of words, J. M. Coetzee demonstrates that to respond to the Truth Commission may, by bringing the writer before the law, lead him or her to reflect upon literature in its basic elements. 35 What is disgrace? What brings an end to disgrace? These questions allow us to hear, at once, the whisper of a common noun and the title of Coetzee's novel. Its title is being mimed by me as I propose an entry into these questions. This doubled hearing, and this miming, is essential to the textual performance of the novel itself. Its title obeying the formal structure governing all titles, a novel under this title not only contains a tale of disgrace but is or does disgrace, or a bit of disgrace, by virtue of being entitled Disgrace. 36 Taking up this script, Disgrace at once narrates the fall from grace of Professor David Lurie of Cape Technical University and, through its syntax, performs disgrace, what it is to be in disgrace, and, perhaps, what it takes to end disgrace. Textual meaning in Disgrace is produced in an intense competition involving genre, narrative sequence, and verbal grammar. From the outset the reader of Disgrace notes that, in general, its thirdperson narration, with Lurie as its focalizer, takes place in the present tense. An analysis of tense on its own does not, however, capture the complexity of the novel's narrative mode and its significance. This signifi-

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cance is not reducible to a politics, although, as I argued in the previous chapter, the novel can be said to have "read" in advance the political script acted out in the African National Congress's presentation before the hearings on racism in the media. In contrast to Country ofMy Skull, Disgrace does not begin as a poet-journalist's response to the Truth Commission. Notwithstanding the African National Congress's view that it "report[s] on" such white stereotypes of black Africans as are found in the papers (Tau 180), Coetzee's novel, without ignoring matters of the day, engages with a historicity different from the day-to-day. Turning to Coetzee's own work in literary stylistics, particularly "Time, Tense, and Aspect in Kafka's The Burrow" (1981), allows us to reflect further on the significance of its narrative style. In his analysis of narrative time in Kafka's tale, Coetzee supplements his account of tense by drawing on Gustave Guillaume's description of verbal aspect. Aspect refers to whether an event or action is in progress (immanent), has been completed (transcendent), or is habitual (iterative). Once its aspect is established, an event or action can be placed in a sequence of events and actions (Coetzee, Doubling the Point 222-223). From another angle, this may be an account of what is required for the temporal logging of sense impressions that Kant, in Critique ofPure Reason, views as fundamental to the structure of consciousness (AI9-49/B33-73). Like the psychoanalysis of Freud, who in Beyond the Pleasure Principle contrasted the "timelessness" of the unconscious with Kant's account of consciousness (28), grammar may refine philosophical reflection by leading one to ask what happens when, in cases in which the aspect of an event or action is unclear or resists transcendence, it cannot be put in temporal sequence-whether the mind will resign itself to the resultant confusion, or perform a narrative ruse in an attempt to reduce the bombardments of immanent experience to a level with which it can live. One of the primary goals of Freud was to order events in the analysand's life in their correct sequence (see Freud, "Dynamics" 108). Trauma would, in these terms, be when no ordering narrative can be forged, and certain events stubbornly remain immanent for the subject, who experiences them over and over. This is what distinguishes the subjective phenomena of trauma from history, and even from what are, as in John Henry Wigmore's disquisitions on forensic testimony, usually referred to as memories. When Lurie faces the university committee appointed to review his conduct after a complaint of harassment is made by Melanie Isaacs, we

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see, to be sure, a confrontation between law and literature. But we also witness a struggle between the provisional narrative ordering or reordering of a life history-what Jacques Lacan called a "resubjectification of the event" ("Function" 48)-and the demand for a reference to history, or rather to a history. Which of the reckonings will succeed in ordering the relevant events? Lurie asks the committee to accept (perhaps with an irony to which it chooses to be deaf) that, on encountering Melanie in the university gardens one afternoon, "I was not myself. I was no longer a fiftyyear-old divorce at a loose end. I became a servant ofEros" (Disgrace 52). The unverifiable archetypal tale, in which Lurie styles himself the most recent in a line of servants of love going back through time immemorial, rouses the ire of committee member Farodia Rassool. "[A]ll of a sudden it is not abuse of a young woman he is confessing to," she exclaims, "just an impulse he could not resist, with no mention of the pain he has caused, no mention of the long history of exploitation of which this is part" (Disgrace 53). Despite the caricature of political correctness cut by Rassool in Lurie's focalization, her demand is intensified by the novel-as the story moves to the Eastern Cape, by Lurie and his daughter Lucy as they try to make sense of the attack in terms of retribution and the collection of debt (see Chapter 5)-but also, if we read back, from the word go. It is as if, reaffirming the idea that "it [would be] morally questionable" to write a novel about colonial crime "from a position that is not historically complicit," as he says of Dusklands in Doubling the Point (343), Coetzee is allowing the "one" that writes (see Doubling the Point30) to assume the task of resubjectification. This is not quite the same as autobiography-the "one" is neither the author nor, for that matter, his character(s)-but it is as close to it as can be. Coetzee has expressed the view that "in a larger sense all writing is autobiography: everything that you write, including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it" (Doubling the Point 17). Fiction can produce the margin at which autobiography shades into history-at which, to put things in another way, it becomes testimony. Let us begin to explore its nexus of grammar, history, and the psyche by reading the first sentence of Disgrace: "For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well" (1). Indicating transcendent aspect, the perfective "has solved" secures thenarrative present. Before its syntax can be completed, however, the perfective is sundered by an aside alerting the reader that the action narrated is not over-that, as the narrator gently intimates, splitting "has solved" in two

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with the words "to his mind," the solution Lurie imagines himself to have found is premature. The verbs in the next two sentences are iterative in aspect-"On Thursday afternoons he drives to Green Point. Punctually at two p.m. he presses the buzzer ... speaks his name, and enters"-and retroactively permit one to read the perfective "has solved" as iterative: indicating habitual action, not the completed action it typically indicates. The novel opens by resisting the perfective that has anchored it, provisionally, at the end point of fifty-two years ofLurie's life, a period punctuated at intervals by such events as Lurie's divorce, and the emergence for him of sex as a problem. The restatement of his age at the hearing-with the notional "fifty-year-old divorce" rather than with calendar accuracy (Disgrace 52)-reminds us that for him the advent of Melanie spells crisis, that his Thursday afternoon routine with Soraya from Discreet Escorts is no durable solution to a "problem" that will return like the repressed. The novel could thus be said to meet Farodia Rassool's demand from its very first sentence. There is something impersonal about the formulation "the problem of sex." It is as if, being the problem, it is not Lurie's problem only. He is having sex with a sex worker; except that, for him, they are not having sex, "they make love" (Disgrace 1). Apart from when he physically imposes himself on her, this is the same expression that occurs to Lurie in his encounters with Melanie (Disgrace 25, 19, 29). From Lurie's point of view, sexual intercourse is, as Klein would have it, a reparative act. As a solution to a "problem," it must be repeated over and over. It is significant that Lurie's object choice is, or has become, the "Exotic"-as Soraya (and her successor of the same nom de commerce) is billed by Discreet Escorts in order to proffer cross-racial opportunity (Disgrace 7). Lurie is solving a problem that is historical. And not only is he solving it, he is solving it "well": he makes good. Like Soraya, Melanie, as any South African reader rapidly detects, is coloured. If in terms of Zoe Wicomb's analysis of Colouredness in "Shame and Identity" (see Chapter 3), Soraya and Melanie could be read by racial conservatives as repeating an originary act of "shame," Lurie's iterative acts make history in a different way. In a fascinating aside in "Love, Guilt and Reparation," Klein writes that, following "ruthless cruelty against native populations," colonial conquerors undertake the restorative work of "repopulating the country with people of their own nationality" (334). This is a useful supplement to Hegel on colonization in Elements ofthe Philosophy ofRight (269), where the founding violence that interests Klein is not mentioned. In South Africa, such

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repopulation took place not only through increase among settlers and their descendants. It also took place between settlers and the remnants of decimated subject populations of the Cape of Good Hope, and between settlers and slaves and servants. Apartheid ideologues, repressing this history, would have branded Lurie a blood-mixer. 37 Wanting to preserve the purity of the volk, they left no place for the manic-reparative historical phantasy described by Klein. After the end of apartheid, what had kept to the shadows emerges into the open, or almost into the open, as phantasy purveyed as commodity by the sex industry. For Lurie, the phantasy culminates with the notion that he is father to Soraya's two sons (Disgrace 6)-that he, instead of her husband, made them, and, in so doing, made good, and made good to, the mother. Narration in the present tense, as Derek Attridge notes ( J M Coetzee 141), is frequently found in Coetzee. In Disgrace the reader is repeatedly apprised of why present-tense narration may be significant for the tale this particular novel tells. To the extent that the novel's preference for the present tense implies an eschewing of the perfective, and of the perfective as a reliable marker of completed action, it may be that verbal aspect rather than tense alone is what is most crucial to the meaning of the novel-that what matters is not so much the successful temporal ordering of events and actions as their lack of completion. This incompletion would, by implication, preclude, or make difficult, their successful ordering. The incompletion, which takes the form of repetition, may be read in terms of the psycho-history I just outlined. Let us examine more closely how this history comes to permeate the very language of the novel. The constant reflections of David Lurie on language and his insistence on correctness of grammar and usage suggest motives for the novel's particular narrative mode-not all of which are fully present to Lurie. Formerly a professor of modern languages at Cape Town University College, Lurie is appointed adjunct professor of communications when the institution is renamed Cape Technical University. His change of status is "part of the great rationalization" (Disgrace 3). Lurie silently resists the instrumentalization of language and learning in communications, the subject he now teaches: Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications IOI handbook, preposterous: "Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other." His own opinion, which he

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does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul. (Disgrace 3-4)

The word "rationalization," an allusion to Max Weber's account of the evolution of modern Western capitalism, signals that the reduction of language to a communication tool takes place, in the final analysis, in the interests of global capital. This echoes Coetzee's concerns when he was an academic at the University of Cape Town (UCT). In recent years, the university has undergone a massive rationalization of its own: the reduction of faculties from ten to six, the amalgamation of departments, the institution of executive deans, the creation of new majors and programs with a greater vocational emphasis (UCT 9-17). Examples of the latter are the major in media and writing, and the film, media, and visual studies program offered now by Coetzee's then home department, English Language and Literature. Coetzee, who publicly criticized aspects of the university's transformation (UCT 36), offers a broader context for his criticisms in a brief response to an essay by political scientist Andre du To it on the responsibility of university intellectuals to confront "the realities of globalisation and the new economic and information world orders" (Du Toit, "Critic and Citizen" 91). Whereas Du Toit had pointed to a legacy of"colonial institutional structures imported from the late 19th century" in the universities, and a "colonisation of consciousness" among mission-educated Mrican intellectuals (Du Toit, "Critic and Citizen" 94), Coetzee identifies the current "intellectual colonisation" as an aspect of United States-centered globalization and neoliberal economic policies rather than as a residue of the British Empire: 38 There is a process of intellectual colonisation going on today that is far more massive and totalising than anything that Victorian England could muster. It originates in the culture factories of the United States, and can be detected in the most intimate corners of our lives, or if not in our own then in our students' lives: their speech, the rhythms of their bodies, their affective behavior including their sexual behaviour, their modes of thinking. This colonising process is the cultural arm of neoliberalism, of the new world order. (Coetzee, "Critic and Citizen" m) David Lurie's resistance to the effects of the rationalization of the university, the shrinking of language study into communications, and the

Literature and Testimony intellectual and affective colonization of his students, takes the form of a strict attention to the finer points of grammar. 39 Echoing Coetzee's discussion of verbal aspect in Kafka, David Lurie takes pains to explain to his students the difference between the perfective, which indicates that an action has been completed, and other inflections of the English verb. Lurie is teaching Wordsworth: "Book 6 of The Prelude, the poet in the Alps": "[W]e also first beheld/Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved/To have a soulless image on the eye/That had usurped upon a living thought/That never more could be." Impatient with his reticent class, Lurie explicates: "If you had [looked it up in a dictionary], you would have found that usurp upon means to intrude or encroach upon. Usurp, to take over entirely, is the perfective of usurp upon; usurping completes the act of usurping upon" (Disgrace 21). We are still held in the gentle irony of the post-apartheid campus satire with which the novel begins (the Wordsworth lesson inadvertently comments upon his seduction of Melanie, who sits in the class, and his second thoughts about it). But even after Lurie leaves Cape Town and his position at the university, following the harassment inquiry, the distinction between completed and uncompleted action continues to haunt him: "Two weeks ago he was in the classroom explaining to the bored youth of the country the distinction between drink and drink up, burned and burnt. The perfective, signifying an action carried through to its conclusion. How far away it all seems! I live, I have lived, I lived" (Disgrace 71). No longer simply a minute point of literary interpretation, a point to introduce into a session of classroom practical criticism, the distinction plots at least three, at moments converging, trajectories. 40 Involving the series burned, burnt, burnt up, the first trajectory concatenates violence, eroticism, and death. "Everything is tender," Lurie thinks after being injured in the attack on the farm, "everything is burned. Burned, burnt" (Disgrace 97). "Burnt up" joins the series when Lurie attempts to explain his attraction to Melanie to Mr. Isaacs: '"It was that kind of flame your daughter kindled in me. Not hot enough to burn me up, but real: real fire.' Burned-burnt-burnt up" (Disgrace r66). The series appears for a third time, at the end of the novel, when Lurie decides to delay no longer the death of the stray dog from the veterinary clinic that has become his companion: "the next day [he will] wheel the bag into the flames and see that it is burnt, burnt up. He will do all that for him when his time comes" (Disgrace 220).

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When Lurie responds to Bev Shaw's question, "'Are you giving him up?"' (Disgrace 220), there is, however, no certainty that his giving the dog up has been completed. His reply is phrased in the present progressive, leaving the aspect of the verb "to give up" undecided, its meaning suspended between an anticipatory affirmation and a statement about action that is under way: '"Yes, I am giving him up'" (Disgrace 220). The grammar lesson that the novel has been teaching us throughout undercuts the final moment in its narrative trajectory, producing an allegory of reading in which the progressive tense suggests that the book's ending may not be an end Another way of reading Lurie's reply is as a performative. Like the old-fashioned words "THE END" or "FINIS" at the end of a book, there being no end, his words put an end to things by uniting action and verb. In the second trajectory, the reader witnesses how the semantics of perfection and its cognates that obsess Lurie assimilate him with the men who raped Lucy. In response, perhaps, to Bev Shaw's idea that "'you weren't there,"' implying that he dare not profess to tell Lucy's story, he has the presentiment that they were" [t]hree fathers in one ... [t]hey were not raping, they were mating ... testicles ... bulging with seed aching to perfect itself" (Disgrace 140, 199). This thought only repeats the offense that had brought Lurie into disgrace in the first place. Though he seems not to register it himself, a train of associations is available to the reader, who recalls how, for Lurie, the penultimate time he and Melanie have sex it is rape under the sign of negation ("Not rape, not quite that"); and how, with Melanie in Lucy's place, he constantly figures as her father (Disgrace 25-27). Although his imagined notion of perfection, which also drives his rivalry with Melanie's boyfriend (Disgrace 194), involves procreation, Lurie's partially acknowledged identification as rapist-father (see Disgrace 160) ties perfection to violence and the threat of death. This version of perfection offers him no way to bring an end to his disgrace. The third trajectory directly allies verbs and concepts of perfection and its lack with the nature of disgrace itsel£ If Lurie's identification with the dog (he replaces Petrus as "dog-man") produces one of the darker verbal jokes of Disgrace-for the students who jostle him as he leaves the university hearing, he is "a strange beast" they "do not know how to finish ... off," for which they cannot give the "coup de grace" that the attackers "do ... not ... bother to administer" when they shoot Lucy's dogs (Disgrace 56, 95)-the novel is explicit in staging disgrace as a temporal predica-

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ment. Disgrace, Lurie suggests to Mr. Isaacs, is a "state of being ... without term," an interminable state, as the repetition helps to emphasize, in which "[o]ne can only be punished and punished" (Disgrace 172). Disgrace, assuming that it can be understood as a withholding of"grace" (admittedly not the usual derivation of "disgrace"), is not simply the denial of perfection in any theological or metaphysical sense. Rather it is, for the novel, a deprivation or restriction of access to the perfective and its resources. Transcendent verbal aspect is proscribed in favor of immanent and iterative aspect. Exploiting grammar and syntax to generate narrative temporality "without term," the language of the novel imposes upon itself a motivated privation. What ultimately might motivate Coetzee's strategy first becomes apparent when the three trajectories I have summarized converge at the university hearing. This episode forms the hinge between the novel's first six chapters, and Lurie's retreat to his daughter's holding and the violent events that ensue. There are clues that the committee is a "Truth Commission" in miniature: the confusion between the legal requirement of perpetrators seeking amnesty to make a full disclosure, and the unlegislated moral pressure to express remorse, make repentance, and even ask forgiveness of victims. Farodia Rassool's demand that Lurie view his acts as historical, and the panel's collective view that he violated the "human rights" of Melanie lsaacs (Disgrace 57), correspond to the fact that amnesty applicants, by testifYing to "gross violations of human rights" in the context of "conflicts of the past" (South Africa, Constitution, postscript), state in juridical terms their role as historical actors. Lurie's response to the members of the committee is in one respect anticipated by some of Coetzee's observations on confession in his 1985 essay "Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky." "Confession," Coetzee writes, "is one component in a sequence of transgression, confession, penitence, and absolution. Absolution means the end of the episode, the closing of the chapter, liberation from the oppression of the memory. Absolution in this sense is therefore the indispensable goal of all confession, sacramental or secular" (Doubling the Point 251252). Authors of secular confessions, according to Coetzee, "confront or evade the problem of how to know the truth about the self without being self-deceived, and of how to bring the confession to an end in the spirit of whatever they take to be the secular equivalent of absolution" (Doubling the Point252). For Coetzee, "Stavrogin's confession in [Dostoevsky's] The

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Possessed raises the question ... of whether secular confession, for which there is an auditor or audience, fictional or real, but no confessor empowered to absolve, can ever lead to that end ofthe chapter whose attainment is the goal of confession'' (Doubling the Point252-253). Another word for absolution, as Coetzee implies in "Confession and Double Thoughts," is grace (Doubling the Point287, 291). Sacramental confession brings, for the one confessing, a return to grace, a relief, one might say, of dis-grace. But secular confession brings only a continual revelation of the truth of the self, a process in which there is either an escalation of shame (it is shameful to be without shame); or further explanation, which, as we know from Paul de Man (Allegories of Reading 278-301), can function as an excuse instead of confession. That confessing may compound the offense is apparent in Disgrace when, paying a surprise visit to the Isaacs family late in the novel, Lurie tells Mr. Isaacs that the trouble for Melanie was that "I lack the lyrical" (171). Although Lurie kneels before Mrs. Isaacs and the Isaacses' other daughter, he is calculating-"Is that enough? he thinks" (Disgrace 173)and there is no making the past past, no liberation from the "oppression of the memory," only an escalating and ambiguous knowledge. In Lurie's case, this "knowledge" is, inter alia, an identification with the men who rape his daughter that, since it patently involves projection, reveals nothing about their motives but everything about the phantasies by which he remains beset. The novel constantly invites its reader to interpret Lurie's acts as historical in the way that Farodia Rassool says that he omits to do (Disgrace 53). As I have observed, this invitation to reading begins on the very first page. Whereas for Lurie, Rassool is a shrill black feminist inquisitress, for the "one" writing the book her fault is that she demands too little. For that "one," mentioning a history, and one's part in it, is by no means enough. One's confession must cut deeper than the one demanding it can imagine. 41 One must confess to violation, and, when one confesses, one must find oneself repeating the violation. One's acts will be found, by readers of one's testimony if not by one's confessors, to be profoundly historical: they will establish, through repetition, one's part in a history of wrong. One's violence may be coded as manic-reparative colonial phantasy: one was not raping, one was mating, one was being a father. Can this reinterpretation, however, avoid solidifying a new archetype? One has indeed been a servant of Eros, but "[f]rom where he stands, from where Lucy stands," claiming to have been the servant of the

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god of love, as Byron must have once, "looks very old-fashioned indeed" (Disgrace 160). To claim, on the other hand, that one has, in the confused way of men of one's race (I echo the title ofKrog's first chapter in Country ofMy Skull because I cannot think of a better word), undertaken symbolic reparation, may be little better if, as in the case of Melanie, it brings nothing but misery to the object of reparation and the subject continues, making a series of what Zoe Wicomb aptly terms "hyperbolic gestures" ("Translations in the Yard" 221), in the belief that, if only he did not "lack the lyrical" he might have "suppl[ied]" the object of his "love" with something of value (Disgrace 171). 42 As Wicomb observes, once we think through the parallels established in Lurie's imagination between himself and the men who rape his daughter, it is possible to see him as transmitting, in a still more virulent form, the psychic conditions of possibility for repeating the history of violation for which, in his hopelessly confused way, he attempts to make good: The parallel descriptions link Lurie with the rapists, and in his desire to penetrate the black female body, [he] is shown to simply re-enact the old colonial appropriation. . . . But conspicuously unnamed as race may be, the mixing of races functions as hermeneutic key to the translation of culture. The colouredness of Melanie will be morphologically repeated in the mixed-race child to whom Lucy will give birth, and so the transition from apartheid, an ideology based on race, to melanisation will be achieved biologically through the violated female body.... But the narrative events are not repeated in a more modest vein; instead the metamorphosis is that of intensification. Lucy's rape is a magnification of her father's seduction of a student, gang rape an intensification of the violation, the blackness of the rapists an intensification of Melanie's colouredness. ("Translations in the Yard" 216-220) When Lurie rejects what he sees as the quasi-sacramental confession the committee demands ofhim-"[r]epentance belongs to another world, to another universe of discourse" (Disgrace 58)-the question then becomes: if disgrace, as a state of being "without term," is a secular state, what is the secular solution? How to end disgrace, thought in this way? Is there any ending of it? The answer-or rather, an interrogation of these very questions-lies in the way tense and aspect propel the narrative of Disgrace itself, resisting the reduction of language to functional communication silently rejected by Coetzee's David Lurie. The instrumentalization of language in question, I propose, includes its use, in confession and other

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acts of disclosure, in coming to terms with the past in ways that render it simply past-as is risked when one's testimony only mentions a "long history'' of which one's acts were part. In other words, the novel resists not only a position of judgment separated in time from the acts and events in question, 43 but, in a more basic way, uses the meaning-making resources available to the novel to deny itself and its reader the capacity to say: these acts and events are over. As Coetzee's essay on Kafka helps us to see, Disgrace demands, stylistically, that an analysis of tense be supplemented by an attention to verbal aspect. Wicomb's reading confirms that, at the level of phantasy and its acting our, there is no facile closing of the book on the past through a mentioning of history. It is, as I suggested in Chapter 5, possible to read Lurie's idea that it is his lot to "be punished and punished" (Disgrace 172) as stubborn attachment to a phantasy of retribution. His resistance to making things past, if such a resistance is in play, may, in the narrow sense, be pathological. The repeated punishment he imagines could be understood as traumatic, of a series with the attack on him and Lucy as well as with other previous and subsequent shocks. 44 The stuff of his nightmares (Disgrace 121), the attack cannot be assimilated by being put into a temporal sequence that would make it be over-because it is in fact, thanks to his reliance on projective identification in order to code it, an iterated autobiographical event in which he is the perpetrator. The character of Lurie is profoundly ambiguous. In terms developed by de Man in Allegories ofReading, we have an "allegory of unreadability," in which performative and cognitive (or constative) dimensions oflanguage generate meaning in mutually disruptive ways (see especially Allegories 275-276). The verbal grammar of the novel directs a reader toward a critique of the easy "closure" offered by the Truth Commission (its total assimilation, in effect, oflaw and literature); yet the eschewal by the novel of the phantasy of perpetual punishment animating Lurie indicates how a reading of genre might undercut what is suggested by its grammar. If the first lesson is a critique of manic reparation, the second is of phantasies of retribution. Can the novel perform both critiques? Without speculating about whether the novel as a work of art ultimately performs genuine reparation-whether it "ends well," 45 which it does if you are fond of morbid cryptic clues: eu-thanasia-let us observe that, in this other reading, genre rewriting tends to disrupt grammar: there is something wrong, in other words, with Lurie's fixation on punishment, just as there is with his iterative "solution" to the problem

Literature and Testimony of sex-"making love"-which at another level reinstitutes manic reparation as symbolic alibi against retributive punishment for colonial crimes, only to have them repeated (by oneself and by others). Grammar disrupts narrative trajectory, only, in turn, to be disrupted by genre. Not once or twice, but over and over. As if its ascesis of tense and aspect were not enough, the novel ultimately points, with the opera Lurie composes, beyond language and narrative in the narrow sense with music and song; we recall that Lurie, partly relying on Rousseau's Essay on the Origin ofLanguages, believes that "the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul" (Disgrace 4). Hinting at a break with his obsession with perfection and its cognates, a decisive turn taken by his chamber opera makes it the place where he might evade the trajectory that keeps him in the position of rapist-father. It is, in some sense, where he can shift position, "be the woman," as "another track"-the singing parts of Teresa and Allegra, Byron's mistress and daughter, respectively-takes over the musical work (Disgrace 160, 181, 186). A way of evading "his" or "one's" destiny as gendered subject, the opera perhaps performs what Spivak has described as the impossible "counterfocalization" that an active reader of Disgrace produces for Lucy and Melanie, and Petrus as well ("Ethics and Politics" 22). Characterizing Lurie's turn to opera in terms of disruptive parabasis, Brent Hayes Edwards explicitly links this usurping (or usurping upon?) to genre: "the music is also clearly a shift in register in a generic sense: an (impossible) attempt in narrative to incorporate or open itself to lyric, to propel prose toward music" (7-9). 46 Disgrace does not make Lurie's opera a resolution. When the narrative comes to an end, we continue to witness a resistance to the perfective. This may be a message that although to Lurie's mind the English language in South Mrica has fallen into decrepitude, the novel as a form-exploiting the grammar of English, but not only of English-can still supplement historyY what has happened, and what will have happened (the perfect subjunctive is also eschewed: "It would have been nice" [Disgrace 214]). This is not only a lesson for Lurie's students of English literature (or, rather, Communications 312), but also a warning that the summary making-past and making-good of crimes that the university inquiry, or even the Truth Commission, appears to invite, leave something out. From this point of view, these quasi-legal bodies employ a ruse of an end, a

Literature and Testimony formal trick of narrative or social closure, when things are far from over. There is a certain truth in the interminable quality of disgrace. A truth of history, perhaps, guarded by literature. The book Disgrace can have an ending, THE END, FINIS, but, it asks its readers to hear, the disgrace it generates syntactically is without term. Although the novel ends with what I read as a hyperbolic suicide by sacrificial proxy, whether we are to read this as a refusal of manic reparation, or of a succumbing to an anxiety-ridden phantasy of retribution is, I believe, impossible to decide. When contemplating this dijfirance of literature and history, we would do well to remember that it is Petrus, Lucy's "hired help" become "neighbour''-"It is hard to say what Petrus is, strictly speaking" (Disgrace n6)who reminds David Lurie, who may have misheard him, of the resources of language; even of the English language. What Petrus has to say may be in a colloquial English; it may even be in an English inflected by Xhosa. (Who knows what it is, in any case, since all we have is what Lurie hears?) What seems certain enough, however, is that it contradicts Lurie's notion that "Petrus's story ... the truth of South Mrica'' cannot be heard in English (Disgrace 117)-which echoes Susan Barton's sense in Foe that "[t]he true story will not be heard till by art we have found a means of giving voice to Friday'' (Coetzee, Foe n8), where there is also the suspicion that she is simply not listening to the black man who, for her, it may be convenient to regard as a "slave," in relation to whom language need be only instrumental. No longer a farm laborer, Petrus turns the tables on Lurie, making him his "handlanger" (Disgrace 136-137). Continuities exist here between Coetzee and Njabulo Ndebele-who, in "The English Language and Social Change" (1986), warned that a reduction oflanguage learning to "functional instruction" could contribute to "the instrumentalisation of people as units of labour" (South Aftican Literature n2, II4) in the interests of transnational capital. For Ndebele, this may be countered by the transformation of English by its Mrican speakers (South Aftican Literature 112). This may or may not be in, or through, the vernacular. Whatever the case, if English will have a part, it will have undergone a change of ownership. We can imagine that, somewhat like witnesses whose words are translated for the Truth Commission, into the mother tongue of those who listen to the proceedings, white English-speakers may find that they are speaking a language that is not (or no longer) their own-or what they think of as being their own. Disgrace performs this open-endedness. There is no term to it, no way

Literature and Testimony to end it. The former owner is in no position to set terms. Having taken notes at Lurie's lessons, we suspect that grammar will, in the end, trump narrative. We suspect that when, in the aftermath of the attack on the farm, Petrus says, "It is finish" (Disgrace 201), and Lurie contradicts him with "It is not finished. On the contrary, it is just beginning" (Disgrace 202), Petrus is not simply saying that "what happened" is over (a sense that his proposal to Lucy of a marriage-alliance may reinforce). It is by registering this difference, this lack of the participial ending "-ed"-which, ironically, David Lurie, ex-professor of modern languages, cannot or will not register-that we can read the novel not merely as a grammar lesson; or a lesson about the instrumentalization of language for global capital in Communications 101 or in all-too-easy rituals of secular absolution; but one, nearer in spirit to Ndebele-and surely also the Truth Commission-about the capacity of language to alter itself and its speakers long after losing articulateness for those who have claimed privileged ownership of it. Perhaps the inflection that Lurie adds to echo and contradict Petrus can be heard as an added cadence. Could he and Petrus be making an awkward music? They do not understand each other perfectly, they are at cross-purposes, but they understand each other enough. Music underwrites prose as much as it disrupts it. This is one of several instances of unreadability generated by Disgrace. One can, the novel tells us, forswear a dubious confessing and more dubious shrift, and mount vigil against the "reparation" that instead of making good inflicts sadistic violence on its objects. This is also the gist of Antjie Krog's poem "Country of Grief and Grace," where transformation, if it occurs at all, occurs in the medium of sound. But an inveterate inveighing against the idea of bringing a chapter to a close may, equally, reveal a guilt-ridden fear of retribution that one would prefer never to have to acknowledge. Yet living with and within a certain level of traumatic repetition nevertheless remains a way of unpicking the fabric of history-writing, and of the case history. It is how human beings wounded in history make their time, in and out of language, and beyond it, despite the relentless march of nations and empires, of conquests, of capital accumulation, of a quasi-juridical reckoning with the "past." Before being monumentalized as victimhood, the violence inflicted on oneself by an other may, if one accepts Waiter Benjamin's distinction between violence and efficient causation, lead to the response that we think of as ethical. This would apply equally to the

Literature and Testimony hyperbolic commemoration of the violence inflicted by one's own. The time of suffering is not one's own, but then, neither does it belong entirely to history appropriated in any of the forms just mentioned. It may, to the extent that literature is authorized by law, and to the extent that works by Coetzee and Krog continue to unfold the systematic ambiguities of witnessing set to work by the commission and exploited by those who testified before it, not belong properly to the literary either. In the final analysis what it is eludes our grasp.

Epilogue Thou art a scholler, speake to it Horatio. -Shakespeare, Hamlet r.i. 53

When I first presented my thoughts on the Truth Commission in September 1997, 1 I prefaced them with the following words: k a scholar, I find it difficult to speak about current events. Yet is that not what the scholar, as an intellectual, is duty-bound to do? It is from this space of tension, contradiction even, that I speak to you today. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission still hears testimony. Its life has been extended.2 It is far from done. What I have to say may be premature. Yet my words will have run this risk-the risk of interpreting what is happening in the light of what has come and gone. The scholar as intellectual, if he or she is not merely a chronicler or journalist, cannot avoid such a transaction with time. I still find it difficult to speak as a scholar about current events. The chapters of my book were written at different times, and for different audiences. I have endeavored to bring them together in an argument about law and literature, presenting events in the light of what has come and gone-but also, I hope, with a view to a future. I therefore find particular resonance in J. M. Coetzee's idea, put forward in "Critic and Citizen: A Response" (2ooo), that "[p]eople function as intellectuals in social discourse insofar as they relate our present and our future to our past. Their discourse, to put it roughly, has a certain historical breadth. More than that, intellectuals tend to see themselves as ultimately answerable to history, that is, to a future from which they will be seen as belonging to the past" (109). When I set out the concept of responsibility-in-complicity in Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (2002), I did so without having fully absorbed the implications of Coetzee's essay. In Complicities, the sense of I86

Epilogue alterity that informed my definition of complicity as folded-together-ness (com-plic-ity) with the other in human-being was, at least implicitly, one of filiation and affiliation. It is clear from Coetzee that one can also think responsibility in terms of the alterity of time. The intellectual introduces another temporality, counter to the time of an event, to the time appropriated by an event. It is through this appropriation that an event, or epoch-making entity, is what it is. This is what Heidegger called Ereignis (enowning) in Contributions to Philosophy, and what Coetzee's Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians sees as the time made by Empire: "Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history'' (133). Just as the Magistrate holds up to Empire the cyclical time of the seasons, the intellectual strives to bring the current event before what has come and gone, and endeavors to find ways of opening it to futurity. I am, of course, instructed here by Derrida's Specters ofMarx (n-12). Writers do so in singular ways. Antjie Krog demands of her journalism in Country ofMy Skull that it answer for the history of the Afrikaner-for the past. She also asks that it be responsible to poetry-of which, in a basic way, the hearings of the Truth Commission partake every day. Poetry is not just another verbal form; the lyric has a special relation to time, and to the otherness of time. The poem that Krog places at the end of her book, and that the Truth Commission inserts in the final volume of its report, opens to a future: "please I take me I with you." The speaker awaits an answer. In Disgrace, Coetzee does something more radical. There is certainly responsibility in Coetzee for a history-in the form of a rewriting of a colonial genre that reveals how fear makes history, just as Geoffrey Cronje's apartheid was a "counterattack on desire"-that struggles with the interminable time of "disgrace" that resists any attempted reparation of it. It is Lurie's opera that, by introducing music, makes it at least imaginable to enter into another time, or another tempo. It complements the novel's preoccupations with verbal tense. Lurie's grammatical musings become the very practice of the text as it unmakes itself Irony as parabasis is not just a going-aside ("parabasis" has this as its literal meaning), if that is understood as maneuver in space. It is also, in a sense other than the pejorative, a marking of time. In a similar way, by beginning my book with a journal, to which I appended notes-first seventeen of them, then five chapters-I have tried

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to show how the day-to-day unfolding of the commission determined and continues to determine time, but is open as well to other temporalities: past and to come. I have attempted to show how law, by being inhabited by the literary, by setting literature to work, entertains such an overture. Amb-iguity can be temporal. Although nearly two of my chapters are devoted to the activity of mourning the dead, there is always, in my analyses, a relation to a future: the social formation that will undo apartheid; gender and justice; forgiveness; reparation. The temporal structure of responsibility-in-complicity becomes clear especially when responsibility is assumed before the dead and the unborn. If it is not easy to be a scholar and an intellectual, it is more difficult to explain how one is implicated, as a human being who entered life at a particular time and in a particular place, in the scholarly work that one does. Time and place are, of course, impoverished markers. One needs more specific details. And there are the intangibles of character and temperament. And, of course, happenstance. At the very least, or very most, one can say that the temporality of the life moves in mysterious ways underneath the time of the scholarly project. If the time of the scholar is bounded at one end by a knowledge of what has come and gone long before one was born and that has been stored in books and other records, and, to follow Coetzee, at the other end by a sensibility of future judgment, the time of the life establishes a different relation to that of the current event-in this case, to the life of the commission. When one responds because of who one "is," and who one "is" is not just a scholar, things are more complicated. Although I have brought together my writings on the commission under the aegis of an argument about literature and law, there may be some instruction in eschewing for a little the sanctuary of a thesis. I gesture toward this when I launch the book as an extended set of notes to my journal. In that journal I make reference to "black policemen," and remark that most of the people at the Truth Commission hearing at the Central Methodist Church were "black." I could, had I wanted, silently have removed these adjectival markers of color. I retained them in order to record the implication of a life, an "1," in history-a history of race and racism, a history of violence. This implication, or complicity-an imperfect and compromised foldedness with the other-is subtle. One does not want to make too much of it, or too little. Short of a tribunal to establish forensic truth and come to a verdict about culpability-as if

Epilogue

that could ever be the end of the story-one attempts a figure, or as Derrida writes of Augustine in Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (27), to make truth, or the truth: foire la viriti. The figure that I have elected, or that has elected me, has never ceased to be that of language. I have put hope in the idea of speaking and being heard in languages that are not one's own. But it is, as Coetzee suggests, music that gives time to words. Antjie Krog shows the affective power of what happens when one engages in song, even when one does not know all the words, or does not speak the language. Song is a beginning. One can learn the words later, and what they mean. The human memory can be extremely accurate; recall how, as Primo Levi relates in The Drowned and the Saved (97-101), his German translator knew nothing of the jargon of the death camps that he so vividly remembered. As long as one has been granted time, one can testify to events that one did not fully comprehend when they happened. It is unlikely that I will ever become a competent speaker ofXhosa or Zulu (let alone any of the score or more other languages of South Africa that I do not speak). Of those two languages I have been an erratic student, as an expatriate, with teachers in New York City and Boston. I have learned enough grammar to read with the aid of a dictionary, and to make out, with help, the words of witnesses before the commission. This has aided me in writing this book. It has even allowed me to play a little-with the tropics of ubuntu, for example. I will always want to have been able to play a little more. I have been fortunate enough, years after the fact, to learn the meanings of the words of freedom songs learned as a student-and, more delectably, to guess at the meaning of a nickname given me as a child. The name I was given at birth was an Afrikaans one. Adopted, a few days later I was given an English one; and, at a celebratory Brith Milah, a Hebrew one, little ever used in later life, that made me the son of my adoptive father. The Xhosa nickname given to me by A.M.M. (or was it M.A.M.?), who helped to look after my sister and me as children, was one I knew long before the first, Afrikaans one, but its meaning was the last to make itself known. This book is also about loss. The church uniform that Joyce Mtimkhulu wears is the same as the one that A.M.M. wears in the only photograph of her that I have. She stands, smiling, before a bare cement-slab wall. For Methodist manyano women, these clothes are symbolic: "black skirts signifying sin, red blouses the saving blood of Christ and white hats the women's resultant purity" (Gaitskell 261). A.M.M. would meet on a

Epilogue Thursday, her day off, with her manyano group. In after years, I heard that she helped the ANC to register voters for the 1994 election. Groote Schuur Hospital, where Siphiwo Mtimkhulu was treated for poisoning, was where my adoptive mother worked for many years as a nursing sister-and where, as I later learned, my natural mother was, in the 1960s, also a sister. I can remember the news reports about Siphiwo Mtimkhulu's poisoning. Would I have remembered them, had Groote Schuur, where Chris Barnard performed the world's first successful heart transplant in 1967, not been where my mother went every day to work at five thirty in the morning? Writing about the Mtimkhulu case has been like remembering the words of a song of which I did not know the meaning when I first heard it. That may be why that case is at the fulcrum of my book, why it stands as the example of the breaches of apartheid and what it might take to mend them. It is the only chapter where the lives of these three women, three mothers, can intersect. It is a work of mourning, for my loss, for theirs. For three women for each of whom I would always already have been lost as a son. But, of course, it is also an act of condolence toward Joyce Mtimkhulu, whose son is dead. It is an attempt to say: your tears are mine-to speak in condolence, and to salute the courage of the fallen. The weeping began the first time I watched video footage of a witness-Lephina Zondo, who also cries for her son. It has not stopped. Had there not been those tears, an inundation to which the word "tears" is unequal-"Tears are not what we call it," Antjie Krog writes (Country ofMy Skull29)-this book would and could never have been written. I claim nothing by these words; they are the testimony of a human being who lived at a place in a time. There are those who come up to one after a talk and say: you are mourning apartheid; if Germans, as Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich write, can mourn Hitler without acknowledging the profundity of the loss, you, a white South African, surely must be mourning the loss of apartheid although (or, rather, because) you do not say so. How does one respond to this? Yes, one can say, how can one not mourn what one has lost? And how can that then not imply that one loved what one mourned? One is perverse: one will have loved apartheid. The reasoning here is only somewhat skewed. Germans may not have loved Adolf Hitler himself, but the identifications that formed them as human beings were in relation to him. Identifications are not readily given up. The same would apply to apartheid: it defined who one was in terms of one's possibilities. Even if self-defeating,

Epilogue the identifications are not easy to let go of, as Archbishop Tutu acknowledges when he reports being bothered by the knowledge that the pilot of a flight that encounters turbulence over Nigeria is black (No Future 252). I would never minimize the evil of apartheid. Nor would I simply dismiss as an affront the all-too-facile equation of apartheid and Hitler by those who never lived under either regime. It is necessary, nevertheless, to be theoretically rigorous, so that it is clear in what sense, although many might undertake the work of mourning it, very few would ever want to bring it back from the grave. It has also been my hope, in proposing a temporality that is not reducible to that of scholarship, or to that of politics, to show that, if one is mourning apartheid, one is mourning not only the system but the possibilities that existed for the duration of its rule yet were foreclosed by it. Having been adopted as a child, I have a flexible idea of parenthood; one adopts one's parents, and has to do so, for their sake as much as for one's own. Although a visit in early 1998 to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., was an important intermediate step, it took me until my adoptive father's death two years later to acknowledge him decisively and publicly by saying Kaddish at his funeral. The gift-giving/receiving of adoption renders parenthood tenuous. Motherhood was made so by the nexus of adoption for my adoptive mother as much as it was for my birth mother. But there was a historical reason why A.M.M. could not have been my mother, or even acknowledged as a mother-figure. It is the same reason why to be white under apartheid was to be not an Mrican. The Xhosa nickname given me by A. is a trace of another possibility of filiation-a memory of a time that never was, although, even if only in a phantasy in which the mutilated mother is mourned and repaired in a book, it might have been. In another version of how the literary is at the heart of the law, apartheid produced the possibility of its own transformation. The trouble is that, in the particular case in which I am a witness, it produced it so late. It took me more than twenty years to begin to understand the meaning of the name I had been given. Will that have been too late?

Notes

Prologue r. For a survey of earlier and subsequent truth commissions, see Hayner. 2. Originally at the evocative address , the Web site, though no longer updated, is presently accessible through a link at the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development's home page: . 3· Films about the commission include Between ]oyce and Remembrance; Gerrie & Louise; Facing the Truth with Bill Moyers; Long Night's journey into Day; Where Truth Lies. Monographs have been published by Commissioners Alex Boraine, Wendy Orr, and Desmond Tutu. Dumisa Ntsebeza collaborated to produce a book with Terry Bell. Human rights violations committee member Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela has published a fascinating reflection on evil and forgiveness inspired by her contacts with Eugene de Kock, a former police colonel serving a life sentence for multiple acts of murder. Dutch Reformed theologian Piet Meiring, who served as a committee member, also wrote a book. Some of the many articles written by commission members can be found in books edited by Doxtader and Villa-Vicencio (Provocations ofAmnesty and To Repair the Irreparable); Van de Vijver and James; Pose! and Simpson; Rotberg and Thompson; and Villa-Vicencio and Verwoerd. 4· According to Ruti Teitel, "the conception of justice in periods of political change is extraordinary and constructivist: It is alternately constituted by, and constitutive of, the transition. The conception of justice that emerges is contextualized and partial: What is deemed just is contingent and informed by prior injustice. Responses to repressive rule inform the meaning of adherence to the rule of law. As a state undergoes political change, legacies of injustice have a bearing on what is deemed transformative. To some extent, the emergence of these legal responses instantiates transition" (6). 5· See also Hayner 24-31. 193

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6. Asmal, "Victims, Survivors"; Boraine II-!2. 7· See Boraine 285. The amnesty provisions superseded indemnity laws passed in 1990 and 1992. On these laws, see Truth Commission Report 1:50-52, as well as Du Plessis. 8. On the ANC's challenge, see Truth Commission Report 6:55-58; Boraine 305-333; Tutu, No Future 208-213. Asmal, Asmal, and Roberts present a critique of the commission's evenhandedness. 9· The amnesty conditions were challenged by a group of victims in the Constitutional Court, which ruled in favor of the commission (Truth Commission Reportr:q5-178; see also Nkosinathi Biko). For a sampling of responses on the question of amnesty, see Doxtader and Villa-Vicencio, Provocations ofAmnesty. A detailed analysis of the South Mrican amnesty process is provided by Sarkin (Carrots and Sticks). 10. Wilson is more suspicious, viewing the soliciting of public testimony from victims as part of a "religious-redemptive" ideology of reconciliation promoted by the commission in order to manage a larger crisis of legitimacy faced by the post-apartheid government, over both amnesty and its interim political agreements: "In the transitional era, reconciliation discourse mitigated the crisis oflegitimacy caused by granting amnesty to torturers and entering into a powersharing arrangement with former apartheid leaders" (109-IIO, 97). n. In her polemic in The Truth about the Truth Commission (1999), Anthea Jeffery writes that the commission's dual mandate presented it with a "profound dilemma'' (35). The most serious charges made by Jeffery-that "[t]oo great a focus on other forms of 'truth' [than 'factual or objective'] may have detracted from the accuracy of its conclusions regarding culpability," and that uncorroborated testimony of victims was used to make individual findings of culpability (69, n8)-are, however, unsupported by the facts. According to Ronald Slye, "[c]ontrary to Jeffery's claim, there is no evidence in the Final Report, and no evidence of which I am aware from other sources, that the Commission used assertions that were uncorroborated or checked only by 'low-level corroboration' to make a perpetrator-finding." 12. See Truth Commission Report 5:24-25. 13. The last public amnesty hearing was held on 23 March 2001. I thank Martin Coetzee for this information. 14. For a detailed account of the commission and the mass media, see Krabill. 15. This is also the conclusion of members of the commission's Research Department: "The reality is that the testimony of a single victim relayed to the country by the media will ultimately have had more of an impact upon the national consciousness than any number of volumes of the report. The enduring memory of the Commission will be the images of pain, grief, and regret

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conveyed relentlessly, week after week, month after month, to a public that generally remained spellbound by what it was witnessing" (Cherry, Daniel, and Fullard 35). 16. On the commission and human rights, see especially Wilson, as well as many of the essays in the edited volumes referred to in note 3 above. On transitional justice, see, in particular, Hayner, Minow, and Teitel. On law and religion, see especially Derrida ("On Forgiveness" and "Versohnung'), Herwitz (1-46), and also Wilson. For a comprehensive bibliography, as of mid-2oor, on all facets of the commission, including comparative perspectives on the process, see Savage, Schmid, and Vermeulen. q. Gewirtz makes an observation, similar to Binder and Weisberg, "that the trial's search for truth always proceeds by way of competing attempts to shape and present narratives for particular audiences, that the form of telling and the setting oflistening affect everything, that telling and listening are complex transactions that jointly create meaning and significance" (136-137)-but without coming to the point that I am making: that verificatory procedures must, of necessiry, be suspended when such competing narratives are entertained. 18. "Notwithstanding all the legalistic efforts of literary criticism, literature remains singular and unverifiable" (Spivak, Critique 175). 19. I am indebted to Derrida's commentary in Of Hospitality (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 13-21). 20. It is important, as Vlastos points out (21-44), not to reduce the pragmatics of irony to either deception or skepticism. 21. The concept of "Wechsel der Tone"-or alteration of tones-comes from Friedrich Holderlin, in whose thought it refers to shifts in poetic register, among three essential tonalities: naive, heroic, and ideal (see Holderlin 259-260). 22. In an interview with Derek Attridge in 1989, Derrida outlined this idea in greater detail: "The space of literature is not only that of an instituted fiction but also a jictive institution which in principle allows one to say everything. To say everything is no doubt to gather, by translating, all figures into one another, to totalize by formalizing, but to say everything is also to break out of [ftanchir] prohibitions. To a./franchise oneself[s'a.ffranchir]-in every field where law can lay down the law. The law of literature tends, in principle, to defY or lift the law. It therefore allows one to think the essence of the law in the experience of this 'everything to say.' It is an institution which tends to overflow the institution .... The institution of literature in the West, in its relatively modern form, is linked to an authorization to say everything, and doubtless too to the coming about of the modern idea of democracy. Not that it depends on a democracy in place, but it seems inseparable to me from what calls forth a democracy, in the most open (and doubtless itself to come) sense of democracy'' (Derrida, "'This Strange Institution'" 36-37).

Notes to Prologue

23. See Grunebaum-Ralph; Lalu and Harris; Ross. Taking a rather different approach, Dirk Klopper draws on Lacan to read the lies and evasions ofWinnie Madikizela-Mandela before the Truth Commission as revealing a larger, symptomatic truth: "The faultline exposed by the Madikizela-Mandela hearing, the split between a modern discourse of the self and an imaginary identification with the tribal family, is evident at many levels of South Mrica's sociopolitical existence" (469-470). 24. The classic work on trauma and testimony remains Felman and Laub's Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. See also LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz and Writing History, Writing Trauma. 25. On Prince, see Ferguson; Sharpe 120-151; on Menchu, see Salazar; Vera Le6n. 26. See Sommer, "No Secrets"; "Las Casas's Lies." It is also worth considering how, as David Stoll has claimed in Rigoberta Menchu and the Story ofAll Poor Guatemalans, Menchu also appears to be engaging in a contest over versions of events relating to a local legal dispute over land ownership. For responses to Stoll, see Arias. 27. An instance is the influence of slave narratives on subsequent fiction in the United States (Olney). Casting one's eye more widely, one may point to the extensive recourse in Dostoevsky's novels, which although the most striking exemplars of this intermixing are not unique in this respect, to conventions of juridical and sacramental confession (see Coetzee, "Confession and Double Thoughts"). 28. See, for instance, Cristina Vatulescu's work on the genre of police files in Romania and the Soviet Union. 29. See, however, the discussion of the "little perpetrator" in Truth Commission Report 1:133. I discuss this in terms of responsibility-in-complicity in Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (3-4). 30. The term destinerrance, which has been translated as "destinerring," comes from Derrida, where it relates to what he calls the iterability of the mark: "The ideal iterability that forms the structure of all marks is that which ... allows them to be released from any context, to be freed from all determined bonds to its origin, its meaning, or its referent, to emigrate in order to play elsewhere, in whole or in part, another role .... This iterability is thus that which allows a mark to be used more than once. It is more than one. It multiplies and divides itself internally. This imprints the capacity for diversion within its very movement. In the destination (Bestimmung) there is thus a principle of indetermination, chance, luck, or of destinerring [destinerrance]" ("My Chances" 16).

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Chapter I r. The full transcripts of the Shell House hearings, n-22 May and 3-4 August 1998, are available at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Web site: and . 2. On "traditional weapons," see Sarkin and Varney. 3· The term "ethics of reading" derives from]. Hillis Miller's book of that title: "The ethical moment in the act of reading, then, if there is one, faces in two directions. On the one hand it is a response to something, responsible to it, responsive to it, respectful of it. In any ethical moment there is an imperative, some 'I must' or !eh kann nichtanders. I mustdo this. I cannot do otherwise .... On the other hand, the ethical moment in reading leads to an act. It enters into the social, institutional, political realms, for example in what the teacher says to the class or in what the critic writes. No doubt the political and the ethical are always intimately intertwined, but an ethical act that is fully determined by political considerations or responsibilities is no longer ethical" (4). See also Keenan 30-31. 4· Emmanuel Levinas is Keenan's touchstone. "Responsibility for another," Levinas writes in Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, "is not an accident that happens to a subject, but precedes essence in it .... The responsibility for another ... requires subjectivity as an irreplaceable hostage" (Levinas, Otherwise n4, 124; quoted in Keenan 20). Existing in, and by virtue of, the address of another, with the other's call preceding its essence, the subject of responsibility is "dis-propriat[ed]" (Keenan 20). For a detailed explication of Keenan's Fables of Responsibility, see my "Reading Lessons" (esp. 5-ro). An interesting elaboration of the ethics ofLevinas, in dialogue with psychoanalysis, is Judith Butler's recent

Giving an Account of Oneself 5. See Keenan r. 6. The starkest picture of the nullification of public testimony is provided by Wilson: "Hearings were not conceptualized as having any input into the production of knowledge-they had no epistemological status at all. I asked Janice Grobbelaar [information manager for the commission in Johannesburg] whether information from the hearings was recycled back into the database, and she replied: 'No.... Hearings have to do with legitimation and recognizing people's experiences'" (41). 7· Mhlaba 2-8. Like most of the transcripts and other documents made available by the Truth Commission on the World Wide Web, the transcript of Mr. Mhlaba's testimony is unpaginated. Where this is the case, I have used the pagination generated by my computer software for printing the document out on 8 Yz- x n -inch paper. Although the pagination generated by other software is likely to differ, employing this method will, by introducing a uniform

Notes to Chapter I numerical sequence, make it easier for the reader to locate a passage in a particular document. 8. In such a case, as Vlastos points out, the pragmatics of the situation would then not, properly speaking, be ironic. 9· Not all writers on the subject see existing legal systems as entertaining this necessary self-othering. One of those is William Conklin. Arguing that "[l]egal discourse hides the social within it," and observing that "a dialogue [that] necessitates one responding to the response of the addressee ... contrasts with juridical recognition as a secondary genre," he calls for the alternative of "[i]nstitutional arrangements" that will bring about "a retrieved dialogic relation'' (237-247). IO. This tendency is summed up by Binder and Weisberg: "The presumed antinomy oflaw and narrative is explicit in recent writing about legal themes in narrative literature. Much of this work assumes that law is mechanical, abstract, rule-bound, and alienating, and that the experience of lawyers and legal actors and the justice of legal decisions would be improved if the abstracted, professional, rationalist voice of law were replaced or complemented by a more human voice" (202). n. On the host, the guest, and the hostage, see Derrida and Dufourmantelle (!23-125). 12. South Mrica, Constitution, postscript; South Mrica, Promotion, preamble. 13. On the Truth Commission's database, see Truth Commission Report 1:140145, as well as Buur, and Wilson (38-48). 14. On "[t]he daily rhythm ... [which] presupposes the widespread distribution of something like a newspaper, a daily [journal]," see Derrida, "Call It a Day for Democracy'' (Other Heading 88). 15. See Friesen 124-134; also see my discussion of A. C. Jordan and Tiyo Soga in Complicities (rr9-130).

r6. See Mbigi and Maree; Prinsloo; Teffo. q. See Tutu, No Future 31-32. On Tutu's theology, see Battle, as well as Krog, Country no, 263. r8. For more on Mokgoro's invocation of ubuntu in this and subsequent judgments, see Cornell and Van Marle. 19. Teffo provides an alternative Zulu version: "umuntu ngumuntu ngabanye (one is a person through others)" (240). 20. Mokgoro relies on Mbigi and Maree, who deploy ubuntu to facilitate participatory management of a tea estate. 21. Cf. Spivak, Thinking Academic Freedom 27. 22. As Daniel Herwitz astutely observes, "as soon as ubuntu is removed from [the traditional] form of life and is rethought as a philosophical concept of modern relevance ... the meaning and force of the concept are no longer evident . . . . To state that ubuntu remains a specifically Mrican concept is to admit that

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we no longer know what African thought is, granted its own entry into the whirl of a modernity not its own and now its own .... To return to ubuntu is to return to it critically ... to render ubuntu into a philosophical signifier and (in the national push) to recast this concept in as many ways as possible is already to have subjected it to an operation of modernity, one that converts moral practice into moral theory and thinks ubuntu comparatively, vis-a-vis various philosophical doctrines about community, justice, decency, and humanity'' (xxv-xxvi). This is also why the learned literature on "Bantu philosophy," although highly instructive, has limited purchase on the specific juridico-political inscriptions of ubuntu in South Africa, in particular those involving the pragmatics of the Truth Commission hearings. A genealogy of this literature would include Tempels, Kagame, and, in a vein critical of Mrican ethno-philosophy generally, Eboussi Boulaga, Hountondji, and Mudimbe. 23. It is therefore insufficient to fall back on ideology critique, as Wilson does when he decisively declares, setting aside genealogical investigation and making no effort to enter into the languages in which ubuntu is formulated, that "[i]n post-apartheid South Mrica, [ubuntu] became the Mricanist wrapping used to sell a reconciliatory version of human rights talk to black South Mricans" (13). 24. Denzil Potgieter, the commissioner questioning Van der Merwe, makes a request that must have been heard at every hearing: "I wonder if you cannot move the microphone a bit closer to you, to enable us to hear, because we can't all hear you very well if you don't speak into the microphone" (Van der Merwe 2). 25. See Levinas, Otherwise rq; quoted in Keenan 21. 26. The majority of women coming forward to ask for the restitution of remains were black. My reading of Van der Merwe's testimony as a complex plea for hospitality hardly begins to approach the multiple ironies of the fact that she, as a white Mrikaans woman, is exemplary in the report for ubuntu. 27. Also see my development of it in Complicities (197-2II). In a fascinating essay, Dorothy Driver discusses ubuntu in the intellectual history of black South Mrican women ("Truth, Reconciliation, Gender"). 28. See also Shezi's testimony at the women's hearing, as well as Pamela Sethunya Dube's "The Story ofThandi Shezi." Compare the account of Zahrah Narkedien, who testified at the special hearing on prisons: "They wanted me to say certain things so they tortured me for these seven days and the only thing that really made me break in the end was when they threatened to go back to my house where my sister was staying with me and kidnap my four year old nephew Christopher, bring him to the 13th floor and drop him out of the window. At that point I really at my weakest because I felt I could risk my life and I could let my body just be handed over to these men to do what they liked but I couldn't hand over someone else's body so at that point I fully cooperated" (2).

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Notes to Chapter 2

Chapter2 I allude to Derrida ("Force of Law" 967), who is alluding to Kierkegaard. 2. For an appeal for the use of Freud's Group Psychology in the historical debate on nationalism, see Pick. 3· For responses, from various disciplines, to this project, see Nuttall and Coetzee. 4· This insistence led to one of the criticisms made by commissioner Wynand Malan in his dissenting minority report: "The Act does not put apartheid on trial" (Truth Commission Report 5:440; cf. 5=449). 5· According to Deborah Posel, an authority on the history of apartheid, "The TRC's 'truth' about the past is neither 'complex' nor particularly 'extensive' (despite its length). With little explanatory and analytical power, the report reads less as a history, more as a moral narrative about the fact of wrongdoing across the political spectrum, spawned by the overriding evil of the apartheid system .... With the exception of the chapter recounting the hearings on business and labour, ... the report ... lacks any explicit engagement with the historiography of apartheid, and therefore with the contestedness of its history'' (148-164). For a qualified disagreement with Posel, however, see Herwitz (26-40). 6. That is, although apartheid itself is named in the report as a "gross violation" (Truth Commission Report 4:288; cf. 1:60-65), and was repeatedly declared a "crime against humanity" (1:15, 94-102), this never fully informs the scope of actual investigations and findings or the definition of who is a victim. For a detailed critique of these shortcomings, see Marndani, "Amnesty or Impunity?" 7· Posel notes the report's inability to explain how racism brought about apartheid: "the report tends to treat racism as an answer, not a question .... Why racism has shaped the South Mrican social order is another of the bigger silences in the TRC's encounter with the past. Racism simply exists; it is 'part of the warp and woof of South Mrican society,' the motor of its history. Overall, there is little sense of the interconnectedness of racism and other divides in the society'' (165-166). 8. The best example of how this is achieved, if we elaborate Freud's account, is the preoccupation of Cronje with the sexual and moral purity of the ideological figure of the volksmoeder (mother of the volk) (see also Coetzee, "Mind of Apartheid" 6-8). Black and White cannot be allowed to desire the same object. As the commission of inquiry into censorship chaired by Cronje in the mid1950s warned, a crisis will ensue for white supremacy when the white woman is "tumbl[ed] ... from her pedestal" (South Mrica, Report 53), be it by the black man or by the example of the White. With desire being mimetic, Cronje's response (and the ultimate consequence of all apartheid thinking) is to prohibit desire wherever he can track it down-that is to say, not only White for Black, or Black for White, but also the desire of White for White (stimulated, I.

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for example, by pornographic and quasi-pornographic reading matter and illustrations), which is inevitably, for Cronje, mimicked by the Black. See also my "Undesirable Publications." A precursor to Coetzee's account of apartheid thinking is the psychoanalytic remarks that conclude I. D. MacCrone's Race Attitudes in South Africa (1937): "This obsession with race purity is, of course, so much rationalization, since its real aim is to keep sexuality in the form of a potentially superior sexual rival at bay. The idea of a white woman in the arms of a black man, especially if she is there of her own free will, is enough to give rise to the most pronounced emotional reactions in the white man" (301-302). Coetzee, however, criticizes MacCrone for displacing desire: "The superior rival is not always a figure of fantasy; what apartheid fears is not always unreal .... Cronje's text occasionally comes alive with the stirrings of desire; desire in MacCrone is always displaced elsewhere" ("Mind of Apartheid" 20). 9· Although the distinction is latent in many contemporary studies in Holocaust memory, the diffirance of memory and mournful commemoration is never, to my knowledge, explicitly articulated. The closest to come to such a distinction and articulation is Yerushalmi when he discusses liturgical history in Zakhor, but mourning is not a dominant element in his account either. ro. The report of Chile's National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation identifies a direct relationship between truth and reparation: "the Commission had to bear in mind that its primary duty was to clarifY the truth, which in itself had undeniable effects in terms of reparation and prevention" (Report 1:23). It can also be said that, in the context of requests for reparation, what counts as the truth is what emerges as lost, absent, or lacking. For instance, a call for the exhumation of a body from clandestine burial, or for information about the whereabouts of remains, not only leads to a better knowledge of what was done to a particular person but also reveals the offense to have been a denial of proper funeral rites; and the latter, as the Chilean report insists, is an offense that extends to survivors (Report 2:777-Soo). In such instances, material reparation might be appropriate as compensation for lost family earnings, and reburial might be an appropriate form of affective (or "symbolic") reparation. Of course, when it is a question of paying undertakers and monumental masons, material and affective reparation are inseparable. Nevertheless, it remains that in cases such as this, the truth of the offense cannot be clarified until a request for reparation, whether solicited or unsolicited, has been made. n. Later installments of the program were aired under the title Special Report on Truth and Reconciliation. 12. The Truth Commission's transcripts and other source materials relating to the case contain several variant spellings of his first name, as well as of the family name: Siphiwe, Sipiwo; Mtimkulu, Mthimkulu, Mthimkhulu. I have followed

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the spelling found in the transcript of Joyce Mtimkhulu's testimony but have not altered other sources where they differ. 13. Joyce Mtimkhulu testifies that Siphiwo was born in 1960 (Mtimkhulu 3). The Truth Commission gives his age as nineteen (Truth Commission Report 7=558). 14. The photographs may be found in Edelstein (129) and Weinberg et al. (121), respectively. 15. With the aid of the unedited videotape of Joyce Mtimkhulu's testimony, I have made two corrections to the transcript. The explanatory phrase "which I regard as his political activities," which was added by the translator, I have retained but inserted in square brackets. The words "[t]here is a lot of poison that we are going to discuss about here. It is the other one that killed him," which the transcript attributes to Joyce Mtimkhulu, I have restored to Dumisa Ntsebeza, who uttered them. 16. One of the two additional volumes made public in 2003 included a finding on De Klerk with regard to the 1988 bombing of Khotso House, which then housed offices of anti-apartheid organizations (Truth Commission Report 6:60-62). 17· The transcripts of the amnesty hearing are available online at: ; ; ; . The decision granting amnesty to the applicants can be found online at: . 18. I elaborate on Antigone in Chapter 3· Reading Antigone, Marc Nichanian makes the argument that since "[m]ourning ... constitutes the human for humans," the interdiction of mourning opens a "gap of inhumanity." Writing of the Armenian genocide, Nichanian continues: "this extreme moment where and when mourning has been forbidden ... is the moment of Catastrophe" (Kazanjian and Nichanian 126). 19. For Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Freud's theory of the social itself, involving ties of subjects to a leader, is intrinsically political in nature, even totalitarian (Freudian Subject 156; Emotional Tie 25-26). 20. This is, however, registered by Adorno in "Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda" (133-134). 21. Placing emphasis upon the einziger Zug (single trait) involved in identification, in order to formulate the concept of" objet a," Lacan indicates another way of generalizing from Group Psychology and the Analysis ofthe Ego (Four Fundamental Concepts 256-257). 22. In a similar way, in her essay "Melancholy Gender I Refused Identification," Judith Butler develops the Freudian account of identification to analyze

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the prohibition on homosexuality: "This is, then, less a refusal to grieve (the Mitscherlich formulation that accents the choice involved) than a preemption of grief performed by the absence of cultural conventions for avowing the loss of homosexual love" (147). 23. See especially Girard, Violence and the Sacred (169-192). 24- An August 1998 editorial in the Weekly Mail and Guardian narrates the visit as follows: "For those who missed the story as told by the South Mrican Press Association, Nieuwoudt-a former security policeman particularly notorious in the Eastern Cape-had gone to the Port Elizabeth home of Siphiwe Mtimkulu, whom he had confessed to murdering, in search of forgiveness. Instead he was belted over the head with a vase by Mtimkulu's son. Nieuwoudt reportedly expected the sort of blessings which Amy Biehl's family had bestowed on her killers" ("Killers Deserve Justice"). 25. I retain Edelstein's account because it puts images into words, some of which are keywords that testifY to a traumatic event; these words are, in some sense, neither true nor false. It is nevertheless important to note that impressions gathered by Edelstein from what she saw on television can be mistaken in detail-no object flies through a window-or incomplete: "bringing a camera crew to film the proceedings" does not capture the context of the meeting, which was arranged at Gideon Nieuwoudt's request by Mark Kaplan, who had been interviewing Nieuwoudt for a documentary film about the Mtimkhulu case and had known the Mtimkhulu family for several years (Kaplan, personal correspondence, 23 September 2002). Kaplan's film, Where Truth Lies, includes footage of the meeting and the assault on Nieuwoudt; a useful transcription and annotation of the relevant scenes are provided by Schalkwyk (20-32). In a subsequent film, Between ]oyce and Remembrance, Kaplan includes scenes of an elaborate funeral procession and ceremony in which Siphiwo's hair is buried in a tiny casket under a tree in the front yard of the Mtimkhulus' house. Under prosecution in cases in which he was refused amnesty, Gideon Nieuwoudt died of cancer in August 2005.

ChapterJ r. In countries subject to indirect rule, where custom and customary law are distorted and even invented, cultural affirmation and retrieval are not faced with a straightforward conflict between indigenous custom and universal human rights. In post-apartheid South Mrica, as in many post-independence Mrican countries, it is not simply a matter of whether to bring local laws and norms into line with international charters (see An-Na'im). Neither is it merely a question of whether to resist the tendencies of globalization in the name of cultural difference in order to minimize inroads into national sovereignty by

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transnational capitalism, which is often heard speaking the language of rights (see, for instance, Sassen 88-98; Cheah). Just as the complicating legacy of its colonial manipulation cannot lead us to reject the customary outright, the fact that capitalist interests hijack human rights agendas should not lead us to abandon rights, particularly when striking affirmations of the principle of rights--of what Hannah Arendt called "the right to rights"-have come from the formerly colonized and the once enslaved. Such affirmations, inscribed today, for instance, in the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights (1981), can be assigned a genealogy dating back at least as far as the San Domingo revolution and Taussaint L0uverture's explosive challenge to the French Revolutionary "Rights of Man and Citizen" (see James; Blackburn). 2. See Rassool, Witz, and Minkley 125-127; Ignatieff, "Digging Up the Dead." 3· Truth Commission Report 2:545-554; Krog, Country ofMy Skull204-205; Daley, "Exhumed Body." The Office of the National Director of Public Prosecutions assumed this task after the Truth Commission ceased to exist, exhuming twenty-two bodies in 2005 (Seekoe, Annexure A:3). The following year, the National Prosecuting Authority, mandated to continue to investigate crimes that had fallen under the mandate of the Truth Commission, exhumed more bodies ofUmkhonto weSizwe cadres ("Remains"). 4· "Nason [Ndwandwe] sits in his garage, drinking beer and brooding over what happened. He says, in a hoarse voice, 'Phila [his daughter] has not been accepted into the fold of the ancestors.' He has talked to the ancestors to seek their advice. They say that the manner in which she died-so far from home, in such barbarous circumstances, among strangers-means that she cannot come home to her resting place among them. 'I must cleanse her,' he says. He must wash the blood from her bones to make her acceptable to the ancestors and plead, 'Please accept her.' Until then, she is wandering alone, above us somewhere, in the humid Durban night" (Ignatieff, "Digging Up the Dead" 87). "In the late afternoon, when the bones [of their son, Bafana Mahlombe] had been placed in a proper coffin, the Mahlombe family said they were finally satisfied. Like many Zulus, they believe that a spirit not put to rest will haunt the family" (Daley, "Exhumed Body"). The cases of Phila Ndwandwe and Bafana Mahlombe are noted in the Truth Commission's report (2:543, 545, 553-554; 6:550-551). 5· This is implicitly acknowledged by Du Preez in his introductory remarks: "Many black mothers and widows have told the Truth Commission that they would only be able to make peace with the loss of their husband or children if they could give them a proper buriaL Many thought this was a black cultural thing. But this week those at the Truth Commission hearings at Klerksdorp were reminded of how similar we are in our basic emotions" (Truth Commission Special Report, 29 September 1996; first emphasis added).

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6. Adapted from the transcript of the translated testimony ofLephina Zondo before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as recorded by the South Mrican Broadcasting Corporation, Durban, ro May 1996; reproduced in Lalu and Harris (30-32; translation modified). A note on the ellipses: The unbracketed ellipses indicate those found in Lalu and Harris; the bracketed ellipses are those made additionally by me. The official transcript, which differs slightly from that in Lalu and Harris, and in which Lephina Zondo is referred to as Lupina Nozipho Zondo, is available at the Truth Commission's Web site. 7· According to the Prisons Act 1959, § 35: (4)(a) The body of an executed person may, in the discretion of the Commissioner, be placed under the control of an inspector of anatomy to be dealt with in accordance with the provisions of the Anatomy Act, 1959 (Act No. 20 ofr959), or be handed over to a medical school which is legally entitled to be in possession of human corpses. (b) If such a body is not disposed of under paragraph (a) it shall in the discretion of the Commissioner be buried in private, either by the authorities of the prison where the execution took place, or by the near relatives of the deceased under the supervision of the said authorities, and in either case the Commissioner may in his discretion permit near relatives of the deceased to be present at the burial. (quoted in Rabie and Strauss 125)

8. I would like to thank Lynette Hlongwane for her assistance with the original Zulu of Lephina Zondo's testimony. I cite here the unedited South Mrican Broadcasting Corporation videotape of the Durban hearing of ro May 1996. The translator renders "umkhuba wethu" as "our tradition," which loses the ordinary, everyday senses of umkhuba as "conduct," "habit," and so on. "Custom" perhaps retains this sense, without doing away with ambiguous connotations-of colonial manipulation and even "invention"-which it shares with "tradition" in the Southern Mrican context. 9· Truth Commission Report 2:169-174. Eugenia Thandiwe Piye, who is the next witness after Lephina Zondo, also testifies to the execution of her son, Lucky Piye. She refers to and corroborates Lephina Zondo's testimony: "We didn't go to the graveyard where he was buried. As Mama has already said they wouldn't let us go. Those people who were with told us that we will not see him-that we will never see them. We asked them even if we couldn't see him in his coffin. We stayed at the hospital at Mamelodi. We used to go to Mamelodi and stay there. We stayed there the whole day and we eventually realised that they had buried them and we had to go back. We never saw their graveyard where they had been buried. We were never even given their death certificate." 10. A useful way to think of the relation of Greece and the "West" is as an appropriation of a hybrid Greek antiquity for the purposes of "Western" cultural, national, and racial self-assertion in Europe and the United States. As debates over Martin Bernal's Black Athena and over Mrican American appropriations of Egypt and Greece have revealed, there are other historical possibilities (Bernal;

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also see Lefkowitz and Rogers). There are ways in which Greek thought can be opened to dialogue rather than proscribed, which is simply a legitimation, by reversal, of its Western appropriation. As A. A. Mazrui writes: "Europe's title to the Greek heritage is fundamentally no different from Europe's title to Christianity. In these later phases of world history Europe has been the most effective bearer of both the Christian message and the Greek heritage. But just as it would be a mistake to let Europe nationalize Christianity, it would be a mistake to let her confiscate the hellenic inheritance. The Greeks must at last be allowed to emerge as what they really are--the fathers not of a European civilization but of a universal modernity" (Mazrui 97, quoted in Ngugi)Sl Penpoints 5). n. I quote in English from Sophocles, Antigone, in Three Theban Plays, ll.496, 498, and in Greek from Antigone, ll.447, 449· 12. When Eteocles, Polynices' brother, is buried, it is according to nomos; there is no conflict to force a disjuncture between custom and law (Three Theban Plays, 11.29-30/Antigone, !.24). 13. In Philosophy of Right, laws are no more than customs written down (241). 14. In an analysis that draws on Mary Douglas, Ngubane argues that the Zulu women about whom she is writing occupy a position of "marginality," between "this world" and "the other world," between the living and the dead. Drawing an analogy among mother, mourner, and diviner, she observes: "The argument ... about the mother and chief mourner being channels through whose bodies spiritual beings cross from the other world and from this world to the other world, applies also to the diviner, who is a point of contact with the spirits who return to this world. Through a woman the transition of spiritual beings is made. This point is crucial in that it explains why diviners are women and why men must become transvestites to be diviners" (86-88). 15. Of course, as Diana Taylor notes, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo mobilized around the demand for the reappearance, alive, of the disappeared: Aparici6n con vida (183). 16. See Ranger, "Invention ofTradition," "Missionaries, Migrants"; Chanock; Marks; Anonymous. 17· "A wife in a customary marriage has, on the basis of equality with her husband and subject to the matrimonial property system governing the marriage, full status and capacity, including the capacity to acquire assets and to dispose of them, to enter into contracts and to litigate, in addition to any rights and powers that she might have at customary law" (South Africa, Recognition, § 6). 18. Writing at a time when the Bantustans were being established, Simons insists on the political necessity, when Whites authorize themselves to speak for Blacks, of a distinction between "'own' customs" and "traditional law": "Today many Whites-politicians, officials, anthropologists, even missionaries-would

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say that Mricans wish to observe their 'own' customs. The answer begs the question, however. The customs of today are often not the same as those that are embodied in the traditional law" (51-52). 19. "The report was published in a book which was sent with a personal letter from the president to every affected family. The letter was another important gesture in that it was addressed to the individuals and pointed out where in the book the details of their loved ones could be found" (Zalaquett 52). 20. Concerning Maurice Blanchot's The Madness of the Day, Derrida writes: "This text also speaks the law, its own and that of the other as reader" ("Law of Genre" 242). 21. See Sanders, Complicities (98-n6), for a discussion, along these lines, of Bloke Modisane's Blame Me on History. Also see the numerous references to ancestors in Menchu. De Man's ''Autobiography as De-facement" remains the key text for thinking autobiography as address to, and by, the dead one. 22. This the commission itself acknowledges (Truth Commission Report 1:133). 23. Asmal insists on taking into account structural violence ("Victims, Survivors" 496). 24. "Die Aufgabe einer Kritik der Gewalt tii~t sich als die Darstellung ihres Verhaltnisses zu Recht und Gerechtigkeit umschreiben. Denn zur Gewalt im pragnanten Sinne des Wortes wird eine wie immer wirksame Ursache erst dann, wenn sie in sitdiche Verhaltnisse eingreift. Die Sphare dieser Verhaltnisse wird durch die Begriffe Recht und Gerechtigkeit bezeichnet" (Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 2.1:179). 25. Derrida in fact briefly anticipates this argument in "The Laws of Reflection" in some remarks on the founding of the South Mrican state: "Here, the violence of the origin must repeat itself indefinitely and act out its rightfulness in a legislative apparatus ... a pathological proliferation of juridical prostheses (laws, acts, amendments) destined to legalize to the slightest detail the most quotidian effects of fundamental racism, of state racism, the unique and the last in the world" (18; translation modified). 26. According to Ross, other women's hearings were held in Cape Town (8 August 1996) and Durban (24 October 1996) (23). Krog describes another "hearing dedicated to women's testimonies" held in Mdantsane, East London, "fifteen months" after the first commission hearing was held there (Country 188-190). The commission does not include a Cape Town hearing for the date given by Ross in its list of human rights violation hearings, and the Durban hearing is not identified as a special women's hearing (Truth Commission Report 5:24-25). Transcripts for the Durban hearing in question are available at the commission's Web site. Transcripts of the testimony of Shirley Gunn, Monica Daniels, and Zubeida Jaffer, whose testimony Ross tables as having been given in Cape Town

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in August 1996 (54-55), can be found online among those for the HelderbergTygerberg hearing (5-7 August 1996). The hearing recalled by Krog was held on 12 June 1997; the transcripts are available online among those for East London (9-13 June 1997). Zubeida Jaffer vividly recounts her experience of testifYing in Our Generation (124-135). 27. Part of Sheila Masote's remarkable testimony is included in Women Writing Aftica: The Southern Region (Daymond et al. 480-484). A shorter, different excerpt appears in Krog, Country 187-188. 28. For a detailed survey of testimony at the hearings, see Ross 51-76. 29. As Brent Harris points out, however, the issue had already emerged before the Truth Commission-in the testimony of Teddy "Mwase" Williams at a hearing in Umtata in June 1996: "Williams recounted ... the sexual abuse experienced by newly arrived female recruits at the hands of senior ANC camp commanders. The 'picture' he presented was not one the Commission wished to 'uncover' at that stage" (177). 30. Mtintso is more explicit in an interview quoted in the CALS submission (Goldblatt and Meintjes 31-34). 31. In a fascinating analysis inspired by Krog's book, Derrida argues that rape in this context is not one violation among others but, insofar as it will have been accompanied by the denial of the woman's role as political activist and the accusation that she is a prostitute, it deprives the victim of her very ability to testify to the violation: "It is at once the condition of testimony, of truth and reconciliation that was assassinated in advance in these acts of violence done to women'' (" Versohnung' 144). 32. The internal Stuart Commission Report (1984) noted that, in ANC camps in Angola, where there was the "widespread complaint that people in administration use their positions to seduce women comrades ... [t]here is a widespread belief that women are sex objects and that they do not develop politically and militarily." The report also noted that "[comrades] rationalise indiscipline, dagga smoking, drinking and rape by the fact of their being for so long in camps under abnormal conditions." Some of the rapes in question may have been committed against Angolans; in its second submission to the Truth Commission (1997), the ANC discloses that "[b]erween 1981 and 1989, four cadres were executed for murder and rape of Angolan women, four for murder, and in 1989, one was executed for rape. (A list of these names has been submitted to the TRC.) Those who were executed for rape and murder were imprisoned for around rwo months whilst the leadership consulted with the Angolan authorities on the manner in which these crimes should be handled. They were publicly executed with fellow-villagers of the murdered women and local government officials present" (African National Congress, Further Submissions, § 3.2).

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33· For a detailed discussion of Millin, see Coetzee, White Writing 136-162. 34· An important companion piece, as well as a possible influence on Nde-

bele, is Mamphela Ramphele's essay "Political Widowhood in South Mrica."

Chapter4 r. This and other remarks relating to South Mrica are, as one would expect, absent from the published English and French versions of the lecture ("To Forgive"; Pardonner), which was given in Krakow, Warsaw, and Athens prior to being delivered in South Mrica. For those remarks, and for my precis of the lecture, I rely primarily on notes that I took at the lecture. I have, however, checked my notes against the published text, and, supplementing them occasionally from it, provide corresponding page numbers. For Derrida's remarks on the Truth Commission and South Mrica, and his responses to questions from members of the audience, I have refreshed my memory and augmented my notes with the aid of a video recording of the lecture. For a copy of the latter I thank Loes Nas, Derrida's host at the University of the Western Cape. 2. Derrida repeated his lecture at Potchefstroom University and the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg, and delivered an address titled "The Politics of Testimony'' at UNISA. He was also the guest in the seminar series "Refiguring the Archive," held at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, which devoted a special session to his book Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. See Derrida, "Archive Fever in South Mrica," as well as the other contributions to the seminar, reprinted in Hamilton et al. For a meditation on Derrida's visit to South Mrica, see Van der Wait. 3· The current philosophical, political-, and legal-philosophical literature on forgiveness is, in general, adversarial-in the sense that discussions on the subject tend to analyze forgiveness versus revenge or retribution. This is far from surprising, for most analyses of the concept take forgiveness to be the overcoming of impulses to take revenge, or of feelings of vindictiveness in response to a wrong committed against oneself (see, for instance, Murphy and Hampton, and Murphy). Nations then become allegories for the self, and it comes to appear self-evident-when it is not-that the nation must be locked in a psychodrama (or spiritual struggle) with its own innate and intractable vengefulness (see, for instance, Minow, Phelps, Wilson). This is not to deny that in a given country vengeful impulses exist and lead to acts of vengeance, that these impulses and acts may be in competition with the impulse or imperative to forgive, and that, unless one simply declares that the one exigency trumps the other, one needs reasonable criteria for weighing the relative merit of punishing or not punishing offenders in particular situations. My point is, rather, that, before one frames matters in adversarial fashion, it may help to ask whether, in a particular

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context, forgiveness is, or only is, opposed to revenge or retribution. The line of questioning opened by Derrida is, to my mind, more productive in interesting us in how forgiveness is mediated with the Truth Commission-and beyond the commission, how forgiveness is translated by specific languages with their own conceptual networks, and takes the form of idiomatic institutional measures. This is particularly important in South Africa, where Christianity, and not least its concept of forgiveness, has been in complex dialogue for a long time with ubuntu. 4· Here Derrida is heard to remark: ''And I think all the debates around the TRC are also debates about the meaning you can give to forgiveness-if it is religious or not." 5· Derrida repeats this in an interview with the South African philosophy journal Fragmente ("Tragiese" 47-48). 6. I quote from Andrew Kelley's recent translation, page numbers from which are followed by those from the original. 7· The 1971 text is reprinted in Jankelevitch, L'imprescriptible. The original essay was published shortly after a unanimous vote in the French parliament against the application to Nazi wat crimes of the common-law twenty-year statute oflimitations; according to Jankelevitch, "Pardonner?" "develops the themes that I defended in 1965 during the debates regarding statutory limitations for Nazi war crimes. In February 1965, under the title Tlmprescriptible,' I pleaded against a pardon in La Revue administrative. ... This article itself had its origin in a letter published in the 'Libres opinions' section of Le Monde on 3 January 1965" Gankelevitch, "Should We Pardon Them?" 552). 8. A similar formulation appears in Forgiveness (49/67). 9· There is a certain correspondence between this inexpiable crime and that attributed by the Nazis to the Jew by virtue of being a Jew: "The crime of being a Jew is inexpiable" ("Should We" 556; quoted in "To Forgive" 44). ro. The Germans, however, have been silent. Asking forgiveness, Jankelevitch adds, lies beyond a making of reparations: "[T]here are no reparations for the irreparable" ("Should We" 571). n. In a subsequent text, "On Forgiveness" (1999), Derrida more explicitly formulates his objection in these terms: "I would be tempted to contest this conditional logic of the exchange, this presupposition ... according to which forgiveness can only be considered on the condition that it be asked .... There is here an economic transaction which, at the same time, confirms and contradicts the Abrahamic tradition [on forgiveness] of which we are speaking. It is important to analyse at its base the tension at the heart of the heritage between, on the one side, the idea which is also a demand for the unconditional, gracious, infinite, aneconomic forgiveness granted to the guilty as guilty, without counterpart, even to those who do not repent or ask forgiveness, and on the other side, as a great

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2II

number of texts testifY through many semantic refinements and difficulties, a conditional forgiveness proportionate to the recognition of the fault, to repentance, to the transformation of the sinner who then explicitly asks forgiveness. And who from that point is no longer guilty through and through, but already another, and better than the guilty one. To this extent, and on this condition, it is no longer the guilty as such who is forgiven" (34-35). For more by Derrida on forgiveness, see his "Versohnung," as well as the Villanova University roundtable on "On Forgiveness" (Kearney et al.). 12. Here I can think of no better expedient than Elizabeth Rottenberg's for rendering the lecture's final word-mercy/ merci-a divided word that, when it was uttered at the University of the Western Cape, was indistinct to the listener between French and Derrida's accented English. 13. This sometimes leads to questionable exaggeration, as when Wilson writes that "[f]or the first six months of the Human Rights Violations hearings around the country, Commissioners specifically pressed those testifYing to forgive the perpetrators there and then. Mter hearing each testimony, they asked as a matter of course, 'Do you forgive the offender"' (n9). Wilson's generalizations about the hearings are challenged by Villa-Vicencio (71). 14. Like Wilson (120), Grunebaum criticizes the Truth Commission's "closure of public and collective spaces to expressions of rage and to refusals to forgive and reconcile" (307). Although, as she observes, it is true that the commission under the leadership of Archbishop Tutu did promote and even prescribe forgiveness and an overcoming of bitterness and resentment (308), this did not in practice close public and collective spaces for victims to refuse forgiveness and reconciliation. Let me observe, without citing numerous examples of such refusal from the hearings and from television and newspaper coverage of the commission, that the discourse of forgiveness and reconciliation immediately produced its counterdiscourse-what Grunebaum calls "nonforgiveness" (308). As is documented by Bozzoli (r89-190), Gallagher (304-305), and Graybill (39-53), there was no point in the life of the commission at which the discourse and its counterdiscourse were not intimately interlocked. My main objection to Grunebaum, however, is to her idea that "not forgiving," or "deferr[ing]" forgiveness, along with the expression of "extreme emotion such as rage and hatred," are part of a victim's "moral right and agency ... a right and agency that are fundamental conditions for self-restitution and for being ... a survivor" (308). I can see how the expression of rage and hatred, and the refusal to reconcile or forgive, can be described in terms of "agency"; the expression of such "emotion" may have actual effects. What is unclear to me, though, is on what basis these become "moral right[s]." Once agency is described as moral, and one defines certain forms of agency as being rights, the relation to the other has to be considered. Although an acting out of rage

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may be effective clinically, for instance, in psychotherapy-where violence is done symbolically, in the transference-in political practice agency cannot at the same time be unilateral in the way that Grunebaum describes, and also be a moral right. 15. Derrida is mistaken that "[t]he statute of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is very ambiguous on this subject" ("On Forgiveness" 42). 16. "The discourse of 'forgiveness' embroidered much of the Commission's work, informing the predominantly Christian religious character of its proceedings and permeating media reports on the public hearings. The onerous expectation was consequently created that reconciliation depended on the victims' ability to forgive. In truth, the TRC was no more about forgiveness on the part of victims than it was about contrition on the part of the perpetrators seeking amnesty" (Simpson, '"Tell No Lies"' 239-240). 17. The strong role of religious ritual in the arrangement of the hearings is noted and analyzed by, among others, Bozzoli (168-171) and Wilson (109-m). 18. When, at a seminar held in Paris after his return from South Africa in 1998, Derrida criticizes the commission's Christianization of forgiveness and reconciliation, he too holds Tutu personally responsible for what, as Derrida in fact implies by his reference to colonialism, is a history that predates Tutu and a legacy that he inherits: "How does Tutu translate ubuntu? ... When Tutu says, in place of ubuntu, 'restorative justice' and when, at least by connotation, he inscribes that expression over the Christian foundation necessary for that determination of redemptive justice, when he gives the example of Christ, that can look like a violence, without doubt the best intentioned in the world, but an acculturative violence, not to say a colonial violence, which does not limit itself to a superficial question of rhetoric, language or semantics" ("Versohnung" 137). Yet, when he proceeds to generalize his colonial thematics, exploring the aporetic structure of asking forgiveness in one's own idiom, Derrida implicitly classes Tutu's intervention among idiomatic contestations of the commission's principles of organization: "Nobody put Tutu in charge of acting, of speaking and of orienting things in Christian, even less in Anglican Christian, terms. His Christian militancy has led to him being reproached, especially from the side of the principal victims of apartheid. These different cultures of forgiveness (but can one call them 'cultures of forgiveness' without already confirming a certain semantic authority of the one over the other?), these different 'ethics,' these different forms of ethos, even before, and in view of settling or discussing their differences [dijferends], will have to reconcile themselves among themselves, indeed to forgive one another [se pardonner] for attempting, inevitably, to impose their own idiom. To say 'forgive one another' ['se pardonner'] is itself to privilege one idiom. The imposition of the idiom remains an inevitable drama. There is no meta-idiom. That absence is

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at the same time a chance and an evil. From the moment someone opens his mouth, he has done so in order to excuse himself [a se faire pardonner], if I dare say so in my idiom, for speaking his own language. That is a condition of address, to be sure, but also the commencement of a colonial aggression or an anticolonial war, in any case a colonial war-before any colonialism. It is a resistance, in all senses of the word. In this history of the TRC, every practice of an idiom, and above all of a non-dominant idiom (neither English nor Afrikaans), already engages, in itself, a contestation of the principle of organization, of the spirit or the letter of this provisional and time-bound institution'' ("Versohnung" 137-138). Although remarkably attuned, despite his lack of knowledge of the relevant languages, to the translation of ubuntu in the discourse of the Truth Commission, when Derrida tells us that "the word abantu [is] sometimes transcribed as ubuntu" ("Versohnung" u5), he is confused. If so, his confusion may stem from his reliance on a gloss of abantu as "fellowship" in Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom (22), and his impression that abantu (rather than ubuntu) is the word that "translates the very mission of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, translates 'reconciliation' itself" ("Versohnung" U5-u6). It is not hard to imagine how Derrida, influenced by a certain nationalist communitarianism in the commission's representation of itself, might have been led, as that representation effectively does, simply to conflate ubuntu and abantu. I discuss the relationship between the two terms in detail in Chapter I. 19. The Saint Jarnes Church and Heidelberg Tavern attackers and the killers of Amy Biehl are other examples. Transcripts of the relevant hearings are available online: http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/arnntrans/ami997·htm. On the Heidelberg case, also see Fourie. The film Long Night's journey into Day presents the Amy Biehl case in detail. 20. In a compilation of SABC radio coverage of the commission released in 2000, the Benzien hearing is presented as follows: "Surviving victims of gross human rights abuses continued to steer the Truth Commission's Amnesty Committee into uncharted territory in mid-July 1997. Until then, the amnesty script was predominantly couched in legalities, with only judges and lawyers jogging the memories of both perpetrator and victim. But all this changed during the amnesty hearing of former Western Cape security policeman Captain Jeff Benzien'' (SABC vol. 3, disc I, track 8). Transcript available at http:/ /www.sabctruth .co.za/worlds.htm (last visited 25 February 2004). Among the commissioners, there was sometimes a discomfort with departures from "judicial" procedure (Boraine 252-253). 21. In 2003 Yengeni was convicted of defrauding Parliament and sentenced to four years in prison in connection with receiving a 47 percent discount on a Mercedes-Benz four-wheel-drive vehicle from a representative of Daimler-Benz

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Aerospace AG, a bidder for part of a multibillion-rand arms contract from the South Mrican government. At the time Yengeni was chair of the Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Defence. 22. Krog adapts and combines three separate statements of Benzien, made at different stages in his testimony. In the transcript Benzien says to Yengeni: "With respect, [I would] sometimes [get information] sooner, but not necessarily longer than 30 minutes"; "I know that after the method was applied, you did take us to the house of Jennifer Schreiner where we took out a lot of limpet mines, handgrenades and firearms" (Benzien 38, 43). The first of these statements in fact precedes Yengeni's request for the demonstration; and the detail about Jonas emerges a day later when Benzien responds to questions from Jonas, and not in a question addressed to Yengeni (Benzien n2). 23. Again, the transcript is different: "I may be mistaken, but I think we became relatively, I wouldn't say good friends, but on a very good rapport .... Can you remember the time that you had seen snow for the first time?" (Benzien 53-54). 24. Benzien was granted amnesty in 1999 for the killing of Ashley Kriel, for the interrogation and torture ofTony Yengeni and six others, and for perjury at the trial of Gary Kruser and at inquest proceedings (Truth and Reconciliation Commission Amnesty Committee AC/99/oo27). 25. As Tutu explains, the commission's precautions against victims having to confront perpetrators at hearings were balanced by its preparedness to arrange voluntary meetings between victims and perpetrators at other venues (No Future 176-178). 26. See Freud, "Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through." 27. Commenting on the meeting between Gideon Nieuwoudt and the Mtimkhulu family (see Chapter 2), David Schalkwyk observes that "the events demonstrate that while we might think that the institutional framework of the Truth Commission made it an inappropriate place for the exchange of confession and forgiveness, private contexts are extremely volatile, even dangerous. What begins in ostensible openness and humility ... ends in extreme violence and bitterness. It may well be that the admittedly limited ambit of public institutions like the Truth Commission is in fact the better place in which to deal with the complex relationship between truth and reconciliation" (32). 28. As Amstutz observes, "Collective forgiveness was not an explicit element of the TRC model. Whereas truth, reparations, and reconciliation were viewed as indispensable to individual and collective reckoning with past wrongs, forgiveness was considered a personal, discretionary act. Nevertheless, the TRC made room for, if not directly encouraged, individual and collective forgiveness through its emphasis on the restoration of relationships through confession, empathy, and amnesty'' (201-202).

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29. There is also the question of the procedures for the amnesty hearing and their basis: if amnesty is a conditional "forgetting," is it just that the perpetrator has to "return" to or "re-enact" a past situation, in which, as Benzien does, he or she might find him or herself committing further violations? 30. My interpolations of Benzien's Afrikaans are derived from the unedited SABC videotape. 31. The words spoken during these exchanges were not recorded. 32. "Director" refers to Kruser's current position as director of ministerial security in the South Mrican Police Service (see Benzien 7). 33. Benzien's prepared apology, and his cross-examination by Papier, were in Mrikaans. Except for occasional questions and interjections by amnesty committee member Chris de Jager and Gustav Cook, Benzien's lawyer, all further testimony and questioning takes place in English. Although Benzien, whose mother tongue is evidently Mrikaans, makes mistakes in English, his English is relatively fluent and idiomatic. It is not evident from the hearing what the mother tongues of the other parties are. 34· The published decision granting amnesty to Benzien records the opposition of the Kriel family to his application in regard to the killing of Ashley Kriel (Truth and Reconciliation Commission Amnesty Committee AC/99/oo27). It does not say whether or not Yengeni and the other torture victims opposed the application in their cases. 35· Advocate Cook had referred at the hearing to Benzien's "mental blockages" (Benzien 93). Dr. Kotze's actual report is read into evidence at a subsequent hearing in October 1997 (Benzien [2]). 36. In her remarkable book A Human Being Died That Night (2003), Gobodo-Madikizela quotes Pearl Faku, who forgave Eugene de Kock for murdering her husband: "The image of the widow reaching out to her husband's murderer struck me as an extraordinary expression-and act-of empathy, to shed tears not only for her loss but also, it seemed, for the loss of de Kock's moral humanity'' (15). Although not employing the word "ubuntu," Gobodo-Madikizela echoes Tutu: "The motivation [to forgive] does not stem only from altruism or high moral principles. The victim in a sense needs forgiveness as part of a process of becoming rehumanized" (128). 37· I allude to "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner": "'0 shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!' /The Hermit crossed his brow. I 'Say quick,' quoth he, 'I bid thee say-/What manner of man art thou?"' (11.574-577). 38. See, for instance, Benzien 24, 25, 36-40, 43, 50, 53-54, 56, 63, 66, 67, 85, 88, 109, II9, 140.

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Chapters I. The lines of the struggle song can be rendered as follows: "What have we done? Our sin is being black." Those from Krog's poem translate as: "am I only acceptable without possessions I or is possession of the white skin the ultimate I worst transgression." 2. For example, in response to the challenge to its findings by the Inkatha Freedom Party (6:673-701). 3· Only a relatively small number of amnesties were in fact granted: 1,167. A further 145 received partial amnesty. The total number of amnesty applicants was also small: 7,115 (Truth Commission Report 6:36). Martin Coetzee, CEO of the commission, however, gives the figure of 7,116 (193). The most detailed interpretation of these figures is provided by Sarkin (Carrots and Sticks 109-148). 4· See Mbeki, "Statement to the National Houses of Parliament." At the time, R3o,ooo was equivalent to about US$3,900 (Thompson, "South Africa to Pay"). 5· "[W]e consider it completely unacceptable that matters that are central to the future of our country should be adjudicated in foreign courts which bear no responsibility for the well-being of our country and the observance of the perspective contained in our constitution of the promotion of national reconciliation" (Mbeki, "Statement to the National Houses of Parliament" 24). Alec Erwin, minister of trade and industry, added that judgments of foreign courts would not be enforced in South Mrica (Thompson, "South Mrica to Pay"). 6. Khulumani et al. v. Barclays National Bank Ltd et aL In 2002, three other lawsuits were filed in the United States: Ntsebeza et al. v. Citigroup Inc. et al 02 Civ 4712. Southern District of New York, 2002; Digwamaje et al. v. Bank ofAmerica et aL 02-CV-6218. Southern District of New York, 2002; Sigqibo Mpendulo et al. v. Union Bank ofSwitzerland, Credit Suisse et aL, Southern District of New York. 7· The basis for Khulumani et al. v. Barclays National Bank Ltd et aL is the Alien Tort Claims Act 28 USC. For a review of this case and others, see Zagaris, and Sarkin, "Pursuing Private Actors" 295-304. The cases were dismissed in November 2004 (Preston), and an appeal filed against this dismissal in January 2006 (Christelle Terreblanche, "TRC Joins Fight"). 8. For a useful survey of these protests, see Graybill 148-156. 9· A range of responses to this decision, and reflections on reparation in South Mrica generally, are collected in the volume edited by Doxtader and VillaVicencio, To Repair the Irreparable. 10. As Hamber observes, "In essence, material reparations are merely another form of symbolic reparation" ("Repairing the Irreparable" 222). 11. In one of the cartoons by Zapiro that appear in volume 6 of the report, a former anti-apartheid activist, now an amputee in a wheelchair living in poverty,

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makes the following statement to a representative of the commission: "Sure, I'll gladly accept symbolic reparations .... When you get my creditors to send me symbolic bills" (Truth Commission Report, unnumbered page following 6:159). The cartoon originally appeared in the Sowetan on 2 March 1999. For further comments on the attitude of victims to symbolic reparations, see Simpson, "'Tell No Lies"' 241-243. 12. What I take to be at stake for Robinson is justice in distribution and redistribution: by definition, profits (I take it that "the value of their labor" refers not only to unpaid wages) from slavery were not shared with slaves; if it is just for profits to have been shared with slaves in the time of slavery, it is just that they be shared with the descendants of slaves today. The question would, however, be: once profits have been distributed, is it accurate to say that the original quantity, which no longer exists, is "indestructible"? Is there a way of tracking down and reconstituting the original sum in order to redivide it fairly? When he refers to "interest compounding annually," however, Robinson's claim appears to go beyond a lien on an original sum, projecting an exponential growth in that sum over many years. Again, once the original sum has been distributed (in a sense, destroyed), what is the relationship between it and subsequent generation of wealth? It is, I would propose, not as simple as Robinson suggests. For instance, it renders the basis for reparations historically contingent: the "value of their labor" comes to depend on favorable future investment; if all the profits had been invested at a loss, and all quantities effectively destroyed, Robinson's claim, stated in its current form, would lose moral force. It is from the massive subsequent wealth of America that such a claim derives its force. Viewed ethically, Robinson's claim cannot depend on such historical contingency. It is undeniable that poverty among black Americans is in part an outcome of the history of slavery. That implies responsibility, particularly from those who greatly benefited from slavery. And that responsibility must involve just distribution: now. Past profits that have been unjustly distributed, to be reinvested at either a profit or a loss, cannot, however, be redistributed-only their proceeds. In this light, Robinson's argument would lead to the conclusion that when there are no proceeds, there is no legitimate claim, which is absurd. 13. An interesting exception in the discourse on Black reparations is James Forman's 1969 "Manifesto to the White Christian Churches and the Jewish Synagogues in the United States of America and All Other Racist Institutions," which rejects capitalism and calls for a socialist society in the United States led by Blacks (Bittker 165). 14. The Dakar declaration (2001) calls for an "International Compensation Scheme ... for victims of the slave trade" (Winbush 351). 15. Just as the chapter on the business sector in volume 4 stops well short of declaring capitalism itself a human rights violation-and never, for instance,

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considers democratic socialism as an alternative. On the post-apartheid government's settlement with capital, its embrace of neoliberalism, and the implications for the Truth Commission, see Marais (especially 300-305) and Sampie Terreblanche (124-132). 16. In a cartoon published in the Sowetan on 4 September 2003, Zapiro has Mad una, with Mbeki at his right, saying: "Yes, multinationals did support apartheid, but we don't want reparation cases to be heard outside our sovereign nation!" In the next panel of the cartoon, Mad una adds: "... besides, it would be bad for business." Mbeki and Maduna are seated on the ground, their postures those of crippled street beggars. A corpulent, cigar-smoking figure representing the multinationals pats Mbeki on the head, while one of a group of "victims for reparations" in the background comments: "Remember when they had a backbone ... " Writing in defense of Khulumani's lawsuit, economist Joseph Stiglitz "said that the South Mrican government's concern has 'no basis"' (quoted in Christelle Terreblanche, "No bel Laureate"). For M. P. Giyose ofJubilee 2000, a reparations advocacy group, "the struggle for reparations is an important component in strengthening the broader struggle against neoliberalism and globalisation'' (quoted in Hamber, "Reparations as Symbol" 264). q. Saki Macazoma of Standard Bank commented in November 2003, "I just want to say this categorically, once ... forget this [dialogue with apartheid victims]. There is no business that will admit a liability indirectly by actually getting into any reparations process" (Christelle Terreblanche, "Business Says 'No"'; quoted in Hamber, "Reparations as Symbol" 267). At a meeting between it and the government, the Business Trust "continued to pledge a further five-year term of support for development in a range of areas. However, the condition ... was that the programme had to be referred to as 'nation-building' and not 'community reparations"' (Christelle Terreblanche, "Business Says 'No"'; quoted in Hamber, "Reparations as Symbol" 267). 18. See Johnson for an account of the Land Commission and its less publicized work. For a linking of land redistribution to reparation, see Lungisile Ntsebeza. 19. In fact Jewish proponents of reparations constantly underlined their sense that German reparations could never repair, or, despite the wishes of Adenauer, atone for, the Nazi crime of genocide (Sagi 2, 56, 66). 20. Interestingly, the two originals of the reparations agreement between the Federal Republic of Germany and Israel signed in 1952 were written up in English (Sagi 229). The preamble to the agreement acknowledges that "unspeakable criminal acts were perpetrated against the Jewish people during the NationalSocialist regime of terror," and, in a clear echo of the word Wiedergutmachung, declares Germany's "determination ... to make good the material damage caused by these acts" (Sagi 212).

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21. For an excellent account of "Kleinian morality," which distinguishes the reparative morality of the depressive position from the talion morality of the paranoid-schizoid position, see Alford 38-40. 22. Although noting that these are "terms that are very close to one another in meaning," Laplanche and Pontalis (389) do not mention this interrelationship. 23. In the revised Alix Strachey translation of The Pyscho-Analysis of Children, the corresponding terms are, typically, "restoration" and "restitution." There is some variation, where, for instance, Wiederherstellungstendenzen is rendered as "constructive tendencies" and wiedergutmachen as "to make restitution." 24. Strachey's translation does not distinguish the two terms in the passage on page qo, rendering both of them as "restoration": '~d now the child's idea that the restoration of its own person depends on the restoration of its objects comes out more and more strongly'' (Psycho-Analysis 170). The German reads: "Die Wiedergutmachung an den Objekten als Bedingung der eigenen Wiederherstellung tritt dann immer starker hervor" (Psychoanalyse 219). 25. Klein's brief remarks on "the Nazi attitude" suggest that it is consistent with a reversal of reparative tendencies: "Here the aggressor and aggression have become loved and admired objects, and the attacked objects have turned into evil and must therefore be exterminated" ("Some Psychological Considerations" 322). 26. Accordingly, in Om die Waarheidskommissie te vergeet Roodt "submits the plea that we ought to forget the Truth Commission, believe in our own innocence (onskuld), and then devote ourselves to a new and creative rewriting of our history without influence of a party or ideology'' (5-6). 27. Robert Meister, to whose Kleinian reading of the Truth Commission I am indebted, relates this tendency to what Hanna Segal, writing in the footsteps of Klein, terms "manic" or "mock reparation": "[T]he object in relation to which the reparation is done must never be experienced as having been damaged by oneself ... [and] must be felt as inferior, dependent, and, at depth contemptible.... Manic reparation can never be completed, because, if it were complete, the object fully restored would again become ... free of the manic person's omnipotent control and contempt" (Segal, Introduction to the W0rk ofMelanie Klein 95-96; quoted in Meister 98). Also see Alford 34· 28. For discussions of this and other commission-related plays, see Shane Graham, Kruger, Marlin-Curie!, and Ukpokodu. 29. The spacing between stanzas and within certain lines is not reproduced in the report. There is also an error in transcription: the phrase "because by a thousand stories" is rendered as "because of a thousand stories." The English translation included in Down to My Last Skin (2000) alters the punctuation, adding spaces instead of commas on occasion, but omits four lines from the middle of the poem; this I take to be an error, rather than a revision of the poem, since the

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Mrikaans version published in the same year in Kleur kom nooit alleen nie (Color Never Comes Alone) includes the corresponding lines. 30. For an elaboration of this theme, see Krog's A Change ofTongue (2003). 31. Among a series of questions in the next poem are: "what does one do with the old I how do you become yourself among others I how do you become whole/ ... how do you make good" (wat doen 'n mens met die oue/hoe word jy jouself tussen ander I hoe word jy heel I ... hoe maak jy goed) (Down roof

Kleur 43). 32. For an interesting response to The Other Headingon the occasion ofDerrida's visit to South Mrica, see Van der Wait. 33· It is this staging that Roodt either ignores or implicitly rejects when, referring to the dedication, he criticizes Krog for colluding in what he sees as the commission's hidden anti-Mrikaans agenda: "One senses that Krog hereby also takes a kind of responsibility on herself for Eugene de Kock and all the other Mrikaner-perpetrators who were pilloried by the Commission, and yet there is something of a fissure or opening that appears in her phrase in the sense that it points to the ethnic nature of the TRC-project. As an Mrikaner, as an Afrikaans poetess, Ms. Krog herself feels impugned by the TRC, malgre lui, in spite of her admiration for Bishop Tutu and the activities of the Commission" ( Om die "Waarheidskommissie te vergeet 51). 34· In his May 1998 speech at the opening of the debate in the National Assembly, "Reconciliation and Nation Building," Mbeki, then vice president, said: "A major component part of the issue of reconciliation and nation building is defined by and derives from the material conditions in our society which have divided our country into two nations, the one black and the other white. We therefore make bold to say that South Mrica is a country of two nations. One of these nations is white, relatively prosperous, regardless of gender or geographic dispersal. It has ready access to a developed economic, physical, educational, communication and other infrastructure. This enables it to argue that, except for the persistence of gender discrimination against women, all members of this nation have the possibility to exercise their right to equal opportunity, the development opportunities to which the Constitution of '93 committed our country. The second and larger nation of South Mrica is black and poor, with the worst affected being women in the rural areas, the black rural population in general and the disabled. This nation lives under conditions of a grossly underdeveloped economic, physical, educational, communication and other infrastructure. It has virtually no possibility to exercise what in reality amounts to a theoretical right to equal opportunity, with that right being equal within this black nation only to the extent that it is equally incapable of realisation. This reality of two nations, underwritten by the perpetuation of the racial, gender and spatial disparities born of a very long period of colonial and apartheid white minority domina-

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tion, constitutes the material base which reinforces the notion that, indeed, we are not one nation, but rwo nations. And neither are we becoming one nation. Consequently, also, the objective of national reconciliation is not being realised. This follows as well that the longer this situation persists, in spite of the gift of hope delivered to the people by the birth of democracy, the more entrenched will be the conviction that the concept of nation building is a mere mirage and that no basis exists, or will ever exist, to enable national reconciliation to take place. Over the 4 years, and this includes the period before the elections of 1994, we have put forward and sustained the position that the creation of the material conditions that would both underpin and represent nation building and reconciliation could only be achieved over a protracted period of time. I would like to reaffirm this position. The abolition of the apartheid legacy will require considerable effort over a considerable period of time. We are neither impressed nor moved by self-serving arguments which seek to suggest that four or five years are long enough to remove from our national life the inheritance of a country of rwo nations which is as old as the arrival of European colonists in our country, almost 350 years ago." 35· In Country of My Skull, Nomfundo Walaza, although not denying the presence of anger among Blacks, is Krog's guide in dissecting white perception of black anger and hatred: "That is pure projection" (Country 160). ''I'm not sure," Walaza adds, "that black people's anger has to be measured by what white people say" (Country 161). 36. The submission is included in a book authored by a collective known as Tau Y Gragramla ("the roaring lion") (Marriage Made in Heaven 179-196), whose members at the time were Sankie Mthembi Mahanyele, Smuts Lulama Ngonyama, Dumisane Mkhaye, and Kgalema Modanthe. According to David Atrwell, "An authoritative figure in the NEC, who would prefer not to be named, is reasonably sure that behind the collective lies the guiding hand of the President, Thabo Mbeki" ("Race in Disgrace" 333). 37· According to Meister, "[T]he project of 'transitional liberalism' in South Mrica is to make th[e] fear [of cruel retributive justice] inexpressible in public political discussion" (93). Disgrace thus radically questions the tenability of a "Human Rights Culture [that] is ... essentially a period ofgrace in which redistributive claims in the name of victims are indefinitely deferred" (Meister 94-95; my emphasis). 38. For a suggestive commentary on the discourse of "black peril" and its links to the ANC's denials, see Lucy Graham. 39· For more on the "history of redress" in Disgrace, see Atrwell, "Race in Disgrace' 337· 40. Mapule Ramashala left the commission to take up the post of vice chancellor of the University of Durban-Westville (Boraine 91-92). Mter submitting

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his resignation when the commission took former president P. W. Botha to court for refusing to appear before it, Chris de Jager agreed to be transferred to the amnesty committee instead ofleaving the commission completely (Krog, Country ofMy Skull, 2000 paperback ed., 377; Boraine 94). It is probably fair to say, though, that volume 7 of the commission's report has not enjoyed the wide circulation and attention that the first five volumes did, and that its epigraph has suffered a commensurate fate (the placement of the poem in the report was news to professors of Mrikaans literature with whom I spoke in Johannesburg in September 2005). The epigraph and its countersignature are thus, in some sense, a secret transaction-cryptic inscriptions over the door of a massive crypt of victims (not all of them dead), the vast majority of whose names are a great deal more likely to be forgotten than remembered.

Chapter6 r. Cited by Antjie Krog in Country ofMy Skull (m/279). In the present chapter, references to the U.S. edition of Country ofMy Skull, which differs in places from the South African edition, follow references to the latter where passages correspond. The Truth Commission's transcript of the hearing refers to the shepherd as Johannes Likotsi. 2. It lies beyond the scope of my book to enter into the literature on Celan's response to Theodor Adorno's pronouncement "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" (Prisms 34). For a critical survey of the appropriation of Adorno's statement, and its contexts in Adorno's own work, see Rothberg. 3· To Krog's book we can add Jane Taylor and William Kentridge's play with puppets, Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997), as well as several other theatrical productions (see Kentridge xiii-xiv). For a useful discussion of Ubu and Country ofMy Skull, see Shane Graham. In addition to Ndebele's The Cry of Winnie Mandela, novels taking up matters directly relating to the Truth Commission include Sindiwe Magona's Mother to Mother (1998), Gillian Slovo's Red Dust(20oo), andAchmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit(2o01). Ingrid de Kok's Terrestrial Things (2002) includes a sequence of poems inspired by the hearings. Films have been made adapting Red Dust (2004) and Country ofMy Skull (as In My Country [2004]). Other fiction films relating to the Truth Commission include Forgiveness (2004) and Ubuntu's Wounds (2004). 4· The hearings, however, sometimes incorporated poetry. For instance, at the women's hearing in Johannesburg on 28 July 1997, poems were performed by Gcina Mhlope. 5· Krog's poetry is collected in: Dogter van jefta (1970), ]anuarie-suite (1972), Beminde Antarktika (1975), Mannin (1975), Otters in bronslaai (1981), ]erusalemgangers (1985), Lady Anne (1989), Gedigte I989-I995 (1995), Kleur kom nooit

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alien nie (20oo), Down to My Last Skin (2000), and Verweerskrij(2oo6), which was simultaneously published in English as Body Bereft. Her poems for children have appeared in Mankepank en ander monsters (1989) and Voels van anderste vere (1992). Krog has also published a novella, Relaas van 'n moord (1995), and a play, \Vttarom is die wat voor toyi-toyi altyd vet? (1999). More recently, she has published Afrikaans translations of Nelson Mandela's Long \Vttlk to Freedom (Lang pad na vryheid [2001]), Henk van Woerden's Een mond vol glas (Domein van glas [20oo]), and poems from ten South African languages, Met woorde soos met kerse (2002). Her renderings of /~m songs and stories from the Bleek archive appeared in English and Afrikaans in 2004 as The Stars Say "Tsau':· /Xam Poetry ofDia!kwain, Kweiten-ta-1/ken, /A!k'unta, /Hankasso and 1/Kabbo and Die sterre se 'hau": !Xam-gedigte van Dia!kwain, Kweiten-ta-1/ken, IA!k'unta, /Hankasso en 1/Kabbo. In 2003, Krog published a second nonfictional prose work, A Change of Tongue. Gerrit Olivier usefully relates Country ofMy Skull to Krog's poetry and to Relaas van 'n moord. 6. Truth Commission Report 1:112-113; also see Krog, "South African Road." Parts of Country ofMy Skull were published initially in the Mail and Guardian newspaper ("Parable"; "Overwhelming"; "Truth"; "Unto"). 7· For a useful critique of this typology, what she calls "a very wobbly, poorly constructed conceptual grid," see Pose! (154-157). 8. See the criticism by Lalu and Harris of the treatment of testimony by the research department, and the response by Verwoerd. Also see Cherry, Daniel, and Fullard for an account of the inner workings of the department. 9· As Jeremy Cronin asks, "Was [the past] peopled only by victims and perpetrators ... ? Was there no active heroism?" and then observes, "The past was not just peopled by victims and perpetrators. There was a struggle, a just struggle. There were strugglers." 10. It is possible that, without actually pursuing the implications of its arguments, the Truth Commission derived the term "narrative truth'' from the title of Donald Spence's book, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (1982). From the point of view of my arguments, the most interesting of these would be that narrative truth, rather than predating the treatment, is produced in the transactions between analyst and analysand, and thus within the transference. 11. Jeffery's complaint that the commission's crediting of narrative truth eroded the legitimacy of its findings (69) thus seems somewhat misplaced. 12. Visser provides a critical analysis of the uses of the concept. 13. In a 1998 speech promoting his projected "African renaissance," Thabo Mbeki, then deputy president, underlines the idea that "[t]o perpetuate their imperial domination over the peoples of Africa, the colonisers sought to enslave the African mind and destroy the African soul" (Mbeki, "African Renaissance").

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14. Essays by Hamber and Hayes provide useful accounts of the achievements and limitations of the commission in the sphere of psychotherapeutic intervention. 15. In "The Dynamics ofTransference," where he distinguishes '"positive"' (affectionate) from "'negative"' (hostile) transference, Freud notes that transferences occur not only in psychoanalysis but "in indifferent forms of treatment (e.g. in institutions)," where, although "they have to be recognized as such [,] [t]he breaking out of a negative transference is actually quite a common event" (105, 106). I see no reason why, when one attends to the dynamics between witness and questioner at the hearings, which the commission's report describes as opportunities for therapeutic catharsis (an "indifferent form of treatment," if ever there was one), one ought to assume the absence of something akin to transference. 16. Nor is the fact that the commission made use of "relay interpreting," whereby the English translation oflanguage X (say, Mrikaans) became the "original" for translations into language Y (say, Zulu) when a trained translator competent in both X and Y was not available (see Wallmach 69). 17. "[O]ver 11 million typed pages" is the estimate given by Martin Coetzee (192). 18. Speaking at a conference in April 2006 commemorating the tenth anniversary of the first hearings of the commission, archivist Verne Harris tended toward the view that "beyond the intentions of its creators and the aims of its commissioners and staff [the commission has become] an instrument of collective forgetting .... [This] view [is] given weight, and symbolised by, the image of the TRC archive currently stagnating in the vaults of the National Archives, only partially processed, largely inaccessible, and little used" (8). 19. As Hayes notes, "[i]n psychoanalytic terms, the profoundly social and historical necessity of reconciliation is being displaced onto the TRC." It is hard to see, however, how he draws the conclusion that "[t]his displacement and abrogation of responsibility removes human agency from the difficult tasks of reconciliation" (33). 20. "[T]he early Mrican text found itself in an impossible set of circumstances: its vehicle for delivery, its language, its genre, were well-established in European codes and models; its sense of identity, of authentic presence, was grounded in relations to parents, family, friends, and extended relatives whose prerogatives and filiations were totally Mrican, totally demanding, totally 'real.' Each emplacement-text and experience-was naturalized and each laid claims to opposing statements concerning the natural, the real. Only the voice that attempted to evoke that ambiguity could claim to speak faithfully to the demand for realism; and the moment such a claim was established, its claimant entered once again into the field of deception by concealing its own naturalizing con-

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vention, the all too familiar act of concealing one's own artifices" (Harrow 46; cf. 65). 21. See Derrida, "Signature Event Context." 22. Country ofMy Skull38l52, 43-44/58-59, p/70, 9I/n4-II5, I30-I3IIqrI72, 2!7-2201287-290. 23. Country ofMy Skull37f5r, r68-qo/22r-225; cf. 29/42, 220l29o. 24. See also 165, r68/22r, qo-qr, I96-197l26r-262. 25. A different rendering of the poem, written by Mandelstam in October 1930, can be found in Clarence Brown and W S. Merwin's translation of Selected Poems (57). I thank Gavriel Shapiro for helping me to locate Mandelstam's poem. 26. A translation of "Ma'' appears in Down to My Last Skin (12). Cf. Plath's "Daddy'': "I never could talk to you"; "The black telephone's off at the root" (54, 56). 27. This applies not only to perpetrators but also to members of the commission and, in certain instances, as Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia'' (248-249) leads us to expect, to the deceased. 28. For more on the Free State, see Krog's A Change ofTongue. 29. One of numerous instances is to be found in the testimony of Xoliswa Ethel Mboya, which was led by truth commissioner Reverend Bongani Finca and by East London committee member Ntsikilelo Sandi: MR SANDI: As we are concluding, as you are here today, do you have any request to this Commission? MISS MBOYA: Yes, I do have a request to this Commission because he was a person who was supporting us at home. As we are Black people, there are certain traditional things that have to be made for that person and up to now, we have no money to do those rituals for him. (Mboya)

30. On hostility and hospitality, see Derrida, Adieu 85f£ 31. As Krog writes, regarding the version of Mrikaner history produced by Mrikaner-nationalist historiography ("South Mrican Road"; see also Truth Commission Reportr:n3). 32. See also Coetzee's essay "Into the Dark Chamber: The Writer and the South Mrican State" (Doubling the Point 361-368). 33· For more on Coetzee and Cronje, see my "Undesirable Publications." 34· Coetzee recently reiterated his criticisms of vocational training at a meeting in Australia (Verity Edwards). 35· In an audacious reading of the novel, Zoe Wicomb relates Disgrace to the Truth Commission in a different way, identifYing an "enigmatic intertext" that the novel shares with Cicero's story of the Art of Memory, in which Simonides recounts the story of Castor and Pollux. Of the three men who rape Lucy, Pollux is the only one who is named. The crux for Wicomb is this: "The history

226

Notes to Chapter 6

of the twins, Castor and Pollux, can be seen as an allegorical condition of postcoloniality: figuration ofhybridity (their twoness within an inseparable unity) is also achieved by the rapists in Disgrace-literally through rape and miscegenation. Thus what the novel also proclaims through the intertext of Pollux and the story of memory is the failure of the project of public memorialising, the naivety and inadequacy of that Christian discourse of remembering, forgiving and healing.... The non-naming of [the] race [in particular of Pollux and the other rapists, but also of Melanie Isaacs], for instance, may seem to constitute an achromatism which reverses apartheid, but that would be [consistent with] a politically naive definition of apartheid as purely prohibition of interracial sex. Such reversal manifestly does not constitute democratic transformation" ("Translations in the Yard" 219-220). 36. On the structure of titles, see Derrida, "Title (to Be Specified)." 37· See Coetzee's analysis of Cronje's discourse on blood-mixing in Giving Ojfense (qo-178). 38. For an account of the post-apartheid South African government's embrace of neoliberalism, see Marais. 39· In another recent South African novel, Ivan VladislaviC's The Restless Supermarket (2001), the protagonist, a retired proofreader disaffected with the political and social transformation that follows the end of apartheid, assimilates an erosion of civility with a decline in standards of linguistic correctness. There is also an interesting resonance between Disgrace and K. Sella Duiker's sprawling novel, The Quiet Violence ofDreams (2001), in which the young protagonist Tshepo drops out of university and works as a male prostitute. Like that of Coetzee, Duiker's portrait of Cape Town after apartheid includes prostitution and sex tourism, a business that expanded there rapidly in the 1990s. Both novels show the linguistic effects of the commodification of race by the sex trade. Like Soraya in Disgrace, who is on the books of Discreet Escorts under "Exotic," Tshepo is billed as a "black stallion" at Steamy Windows, the massage parlor for which he works. Both novels testify to the country's accommodation with globalization. In Duiker's novel, Tshepo's first client is an investment banker who says he has no time to go and vote (240). Steamy Windows also caters to European and American sex tourists' phantasies of violence; Tshepo services a young Norwegian woman who "said that she was only here for a few days and didn't believe that she would have enough time to meet a South African black man. She was very specific about him being black. She also said that she'd read too much about South African men and rape. So she decided that her safest bet was a massage parlour" (332). 40. In a reading different from mine but intersecting with it at key points, Wicomb also views Lurie's preoccupation with the perfective as thematically significant. For her, the verb "usurp" is "connected with the coloniser's illegal

Notes to Epilogue

227

assumption of power" and "[a]s for the central action carried through to its conclusion it is Lurie who articulates the condition of the perfective through interracial sex .... Lurie's brooding over the perfective, 'signifYing an action carried through to its conclusion,' declares the failure of transition as a crossing over to democracy'' ("Translations in the Yard" 215-222; quoting Disgrace 71). 41. As John in Coetzee's Youth (2002) realizes after he has "behaved disgracefully,'' such an intensification may act as an alibi if it takes the place of open censure by others: "Let this be his contract then, with the gods: he will punish himself, and in return will hope the story of his caddish behaviour will not get out .... I am hard enough on myself, he tells himself; I do not need the help ofothers. It is a sophistry he falls back on time and again to block his ears to criticism" (130-132). 42. Something that would, presumably, have matched the "enrich[ment]" that he says he gained from Melanie (Disgrace 56, 192). Also see Attridge, J M. Coetzee 190. 43· As Attridge observes of Boyhood, Coetzee's 1997 memoir, also a narrative in the third person and present tense (J M. Coetzee 143). 44· Jacqueline Rose, who also regards the novel as Coetzee's response to the Truth Commission, links Lurie's trauma to his lifelong indifference. When, after the attack, "he feels his interest in the world draining from him drop by drop,'' Rose comments: "In Disgrace, the psychic consequences of trauma are also being offered as their own cause" (233; quoting Disgrace 107). 45· Words from the final chorus of Oedipus Rexoccur to Lurie on the second page of the novel: "Call no man happy until he is dead" (Disgrace 2). 46. Attridge links Lurie's opera with his "service to the dead animals": "Both [tasks] manifest a dedication to a singularity that exceeds systems and computations: the singularity of every living, and dead, being, the singularity of the truly inventive work of art" (J M Coetzee 188). 47· I allude to Coetzee's lecture "The Novel Today."

Epilogue I. "Testimony and Nation-Building: South Mrica's Truth and Reconciliation Commission,'' seminar paper presented at the Institute of Mrican Studies, Columbia University, 30 September 1997. The talk, which reinterpreted the testimony ofLephina Zondo, later became the basis for "Ambiguities of Mourning,'' which forms the first part of Chapter 3· 2. The commission, which had originally been given until mid-1997 to finish its work, was given more time. As we know, this happened again, until, finally, the amnesty committee had finished its adjudications and the last volumes of the report could be prepared and released in March 2003.

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Testimonies I make reference in the text to the testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the witnesses listed below, transcripts of which are currently available at the Web site of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, http:/ /www.doj.gov.za/trcltrc_frameset.htm. All individual uniform resource locators (URLs), unless otherwise noted, are current as of 24 July 2oo6. In case the transcripts should, at some future time, no longer be available online, I have supplied the information on hearing type, place, and date necessary for locating them in the collection of the National Archives of South Mrica in Pretoria. When I have referred in the text to the unedited South Mrican Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) videotape of a particular hearing, I indicate its availability or provenance. Benzien, Jeffrey T. Amnesty Hearing. Cape Town. 14-16 July 1997. http://www .doj. gov.za/ trc/ amntrans/ capetown/ capetown_benzien.htm. SABC videotape housed at National Archives of South Mrica, Pretoria. Seven numbered VHS videocassettes TRC 276-282. - - - . (2) Amnesty Hearing. Cape Town. 20 October 1997. http://www.doj .gov.za/trc/ amntrans/ capetown/capetown_benzien2.htm. Likotsi, Johannes. Human Rights Violation Hearing. Ladybrand. 25 June 1997. http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans/ladyb/ladyb2.htm. Masote, Sheila. Special Women's Hearing. Johannesburg. 28 July 1997. http:// www.doj .gov.za/trc/ special/women/masote.htm. Mboya, Xoliswa Ethel. Human Rights Violation Hearing. Cradock. IO February 1997. http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans/cradocklmboya.htm. Mhlaba, Bafana Gonzweize. Amnesty Hearing. Johannesburg. 4 August 1998. http:/ /www.doj. gov.za/ trc/ amntrans/1998/98o8o3_jhb_shel112.htm. 229

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- - - . The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus. Trans. Robert Fagles. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. South Mrica, Republic of. Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. Act 200, 1993· Available online: http:/ /www.doj.gov.za/trc/legal/sacon93·htm. - - - . Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act. Act 30, 1995. Available online: http:/ /www.doj .gov.za/trc/legallb3o_95·htm. - - - . Recognition of Customary Marriages Act. Act 120, 1998. Available online: http://www.info.gov.zaldocuments/actsii998.htm. South Mrica, Union of. Report ofthe Commission ofEnquiry in Regard to Undesirable Publications. Pretoria: Government Printer, 1957· Soyinka, Wole. The Burden ofMemory, the Muse ofForgiveness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Special Report on Truth and Reconciliation. Presented by Max du Preez. Johannesburg: South Mrican Broadcasting Corporation Television, 1997. lnstallment broadcast 20 July 1997. Spence, Donald P. Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton, 1982. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique ofPostcolonial Reason: Toward a History ofthe Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. - - - . Death ofa Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. - - - . "Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes ofTeaching." Diacritics 32.3-4 (2002): 17-31. - - - . Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Postcoloniality. Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1992. Stoll, David. Rigoberta Menchu and the Story ofAll Poor Guatemalans. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999. Tau Y Gragramla. A Marriage Made in Heaven; or the White Man's Burden. Johannesburg: Native Book Club/Skotaville, 2001.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor W, r47-48; "Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda," 5I-52, 54· African National Congress (ANC), 2, n, r5-r6, 2r, 48, 62, 80-85, r42-44, I7I, I90 Afrikaans, 28-3r, 34, I39-40, I45, r49, r6o, r7o, r89 Ambiguity, 4-5, r2, 45; as amb-iguity, 8-9, I3, 33, I54 Amnesty, 2-3, 82, 88, 92-97, ro3-4, II5, I2I, r24, r68, r78; committee, r5, n4; hearings, 3, II-I2, I5-2I, 48, 57, 93, 99-n2. See also Forgiveness Anderson, Benedict, 35 Antigone, r3, 49, 65-68, 72-74 Apartheid, r-2, IO-I2, 2I, 34-60, 68-73, 75-80, 84, rr6, I2I-22, I24, I34, I4I, I47-5I, I 53, I 58, I69, I7 4, r8o, r87-9r Asmal, Kader, 2 Attridge, Derek, I74 Baartman, Saartje, 83 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 44 Barnard, Christiaan Neethling, I90 Barthes, Roland, I7 Benjamin, Waiter: "Toward a Critique ofViolence," 78-79, 86, r84

Benveniste, Emile, I59 Benzien, Jeffrey, 99-n3, r62 Biko, Steve, 48, r64 Boraine, Alexander, 3, 4I-42, 48, 62-64,

75 Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel, 55-56 Brecht, Bertolt, I49 Breytenbach, Breyten, 35 Brooks, Peter, 8 Business, 25, n6, r2r-22, 124. See also Capitalism Byron, Lord, r69, r8o, r82 Capitalism, 38, r23-26, r28, 175, r83-84 Celan, Paul, I47 Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS), 75-78, 86 Coetzee, Dirk, 4r, 46-47 Coetzee, J. M.: "Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky," r78-79; "Critic and Citizen: A Response," 175, r86-87; Disgrace, r3-I4, I4I-44, r68-85, r87; Doubling the Point, 172; Foe, 84, r68, r83; Giving Ojfense: Essays on Censorship, r58, r69; "The Mind of Apartheid: Geoffrey Cronje (r907-)," 38-39, 49, 55; "Time, Tense, and Aspect in Kafka's The Burrow," I7I,

253

254

Index

181; Waiting for the Barbarians, 168, !87 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, no

Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid, 134, 144, 186-87 Condolence, 10-n, 31, 34-58, 96, 103, n2, n9, 125, 128, 133, 145, 190. See also Mourning Confession, 8, 94, 157, 168, 178-80 Constitution, of Republic of South Africa, 25, 70-72, 154; Interim, 2, 24, 36, 71, 178 Cronje, Geoffrey, 35, 38-39, 169, 187 Custom, 10, 13, 20, 31, 59-75, 154 Customary law, 10, 25, 59-75, 154; international, 121; women under, 25, 70-75 De Klerk, F. W, 48 de Man, Paul, 13, 22, 179, 181 Derrida, Jacques, 6-9, 12, 61, 66, 73-74, 154, 157, 165-67; Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, 6, 157, 189; "Force of Law," 79-80, Ill, n6; "Forgiving the Unforgivable," 12, 87-90, 96-97, II3; "Freud and the Scene ofWriting," 129-30; OfHospitality, 165; The Other Heading, 140 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 44, 178-79 Dispropriation, 8, 16, 18-33, 96, 103, 128, 158. See also Ubuntu Du Preez, Max, 40, 62, 64, 99, 101-2 Du Toit, Andre, 175 Edelstein, Jillian, 43, 46, 56-58 Edwards, Brent Hayes, 182 Empson, William, 5 English (language), 16, 19, 25-27, 29-30, 64, 130, 135> 138, 149> 155> !60, 170, 175-76, 182-83, !89 Exhumations, 10, 24, 40, 62, 65, n8 Forbes, Ashley, 99-101, 104, 106-8, n2 Forgiveness, n-12, 56-57, 87-II3, 128, 139-40, 178, !88

Freud, Sigmund: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 171; "The Dynamics of Transference," 171; The Ego and the Id, 51; Fragment ofan Analysis ofa Case ofHysteria ("Dora''), 102; Group

Psychology and the Analysis ofthe Ego, 35-36, 39, 49-57; "Mourning and Melancholia," 45, 51, 53; "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," 133; Totem and Taboo, 51, 56 Girard, Rene, 38-39, 55 Globalization, I, 175. See also Neoliberalism Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla, no, II3 Goodrich, Peter, 22-23 Groote Schuur Hospital, 41, 43, 190 Guguletu Seven, 98 Guillaume, Gustave, 171 Harrow, Kenneth W, 156-57 Hearings, public, I, 3-4, 9-12, 15-21, 24, 28-33, 4G--49> 54, 59-60, 62-65, 75, 80-82, 99-II2, 148-51, 153-58, 160, 162-66, q8. See also Amnesty, hearings; Women, testimony of Hegel, G. W F.: Elements ofthe Philosophy ofRight, 67-69, 173; Phenomenology ofSpirit, 13, 65-68, 73-74; Philosophy ofHistory, 67 Heidegger, Martin, 131, 187 Henry, Yazir, 10o--102, 104-5, III Hitler, Adolf, 50, 54, 190 Human rights, 1-4, 9-n, 20, 23-25, 28, 36-38, 6o-62,64-66,70,72-77,8o, 82, 88, 120, 124, 178 Human Rights Commission, 142 Indirect rule, 6o, 69-70, 73· See also Customary law Inkatha Freedom Party, 2 Intellectuals, 35, 134, 141-44, 175-76, 186-88 Irony, 6-7, 13, 21-23, 74, 82, 157, 165-66, !68

Index Jacobs, Peter, 99, ro6, III jankelevitch, Vladimir, 88-92, 94, 96, II2-l3 Jaspers, Karl, 124 Jonas, Bongani, 99-101, III Kafka, Franz, 171, q6, r8r Kant, Immanuel, 171 Keenan, Thomas, 8, r6, 19 Khulumani, 32; lawsuit, u5, 124 Kierkegaard, Soren, 7 Kincaid, Jamaica, 127 Klein, Melanie, 13, 56, II3, u6, 127-35, 138, 141, 144, 169, 173-74; "Love, Guilt and Reparation," 129-30; "Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States," 132-33;

The Psycho-Analysis of Children, 130-31 Kriel, Ashley, 105-6, m Krog, Antjie, 13-14, 19, 81-82, 84-85, 97, I00-102, 105, Ill, II4, 169-70, 187, 189-90; "Country of Grief and Grace," 134-40, 145-46, 184-85; Country ofMy Skul4 13, 135, 140-41, 144, 145, 147-68, 187; "Ma," 159-60 Kruser, Gary, 99, 106-8 Kunene, Mazisi, r66 Lacan, Jacques, 172 Langa, Pius, 24, 27-28, 96 Lax, Ilan, 163-64, r66-67 Le Bon, Gustave, 35, 51 Lekotse, Johannes, 147, 162-67 Lessing, Doris, 141-42 Levi, Prima, 189 Levinas, Emmanuel, 8, 19, 74 Literature, 14, 86, 133, 152; African, 153-54, 156-57; law and, 4-9, 13, r6r8, 21-23, 33, 147-88. See also Irony, Fiction, Truth Long Night's journey into Day, 98, uo MacCrone, I. D., 49 MacKinnon, Catharine, 169

255

Madaka, Tops~ 41, 48, 57 Madikizela-Mandela, Winnie, 3, 85-86 Maduna, Penuell, 124 Mall, Hassen, 15 Mamdani, Mahmood, 6o, 68-69, 76 Mandela, Nelson, I, 12, 85, 87, 97, 109, II4, 143 Mandelstam, Osip, 159 Manyano women, 189 Marx, Karl, 123 Masote, Sheila, So Mazibuko, Rita, 81-82 Mbeki, Thabo, 12, 61, II4-I8, 121-22, 124, 140, 143 Menchu, Rigoberta, 8 Mhlaba, Bafana Gonzweize, 15-21, 23, 28, !64 Millin, Sarah Gertrude, 84 Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete,

The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, 49-54, 56, 190 Mokgoro, Yvonne, 25-28 Mothopeng, Zephania Lekoane, So Mourning, ro-12, 31, 34-36, 39-58, 6o-68, 72-75, 88, 96, uS-19, 125-26, 128, 132-34, 145, r88, 190-91. See also Condolence, Exhumations,

Ukubuyisa Moyers, Bill, Mtimkhulu, Joyce N., 41-48, 55-58, !89-90 Mtimkhulu, Siphiwo, 41-48, 54-58, 190 Mtintso, Thenjiwe, 80-82 Music, 14, 138, qo, r82, 184, 187, 189. See also Songs Mxenge, Victoria, 43 National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (Chile), I, 73 Ndebele, Njabulo, II, 21; The Cry ofWinnie Mandela, 85-86; "The English Language and Social Change in South Africa," 183-84 Neoliberalism, 13, 175 Netshitenzhe, Joel, 124

Index Nietzsche, Friedrich, I45, I67 Nieuwoudt, Gideon, 42, 47-48, 56-58 "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika," I9, 46, I63 Ntsebeza, Dumisa, 45-47 Pan-Mricanist Congress, 2, 8o, I64 Pandy, Yasmina, I06, 108-9 Phosa, Mathews, 8I Plaatje, Solomon T., I5, 125-26, 128 Plath, Sylvia, I59 Plato. See Socrates Prince, Mary, 8 Prisons Act, 64 Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, I, 4, 9, 36-37, 93, n6-q Rabie, ]an, 35 Radio, I, 9-10, 42, I35, I48, I6o Randera, Faze!, 29 Rape, 32, 80-82, 85, I42-43, I77, I79-8o Reagon, Gail, I08 Recognition of Customary Marriages Act, 72,75 Reparation, 3-4, 9-10, I2-I3, 33, 36, 39-40, 46, 49, sz, 56, 58, 96, 103-4, 109, n2-I3, II4-46, I88, I9I; aporia of, n4-I8, I4I, I46; business and, IZI-22, I24-25; German after World War I, 128, I3I; German-Jewish, I27-28; guilt and, I4I-44; manic, I33-34, I69, 181-83; mourning and, 132-34, 145; phantasies of, 9, 129-34, 144-45; proxy structure of, 9, n-12, 40, uz, 121-22, 128, 164-65; slavery and, 122-23, 126-27; symbolic, 13, us, u8-19, 128, 132, I4I, r8o. See also Klein, Melanie Report, Final, ofTruth and Reconciliation Commission. See

Truth and Reconciliation Commission ofSouth Africa Report Responsibility, 9, 12, 16-zo, 23-25, 27-29, 3I-33, 34, 36, 50, 54, 6o-61, 6s-66, 75, 95, 102-105, Ill, u6, II9,

121-22, 124-26, 129-33, 139-41, I4446, 155-56, 162, 164, I69, 175, I86-88 Robben Island, 108-9 Robinson, Randall, 122-23, 126-27 Roodt, Dan, I34 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 182 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 135 Shezi, Thandi, 32 Slave narratives, 8 Socrates, 6-7, 13, 165. See also Irony Songs, 19-21, 46, u4, I63, I89-90. See also Music Sophocles, Antigone. See Antigone Soyinka, Wole, 54, 123

Special Report on Truth and Reconciliation. See Du Preez, Max; Reagon, Gail Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, I3, 22, 74, 130, I82 Steele, Shelby, I27 The Story Tm about to Tell, I35 Substitution, 9, 12-13, 16, 23-24, 28, 33, 40, 48, ss-s8, 75, 103-4, 122, 148, rs6, 16!. See also Reparation, proxy structure of; Responsibility; Transference; Ubuntu Television, I, 9-10, 42-43, s6-s7, 104, 148, Testimonio, 8 Tradition. See Custom Transference, 31, 33, 40, 67, 75, 109, 102, 109, II2-I3, 155-56, 162-65 Transitional justice, 2, 4, 88 Translation, 25-27, 49, 65-68, 90, 9899, 130-31, r6o, r8o; simultaneous, 9, r6, 19, 21, 29-30, 33, 42-43, 155-57, 164 Truth, concepts of, 3, 5-7, 17-19, 33, 46, 107-9, 149-57, 159-60, 163, !67-68, 178-79. See also Irony, Literature

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report. 2-4, u-13, 17-18, 24-26,28-32,36-40,48,76-77,

Index 86-87, II4-24, 126-28, 135, 137, 141, 145, 148-57, r62, 164, r6y-68, 187 Truth Commission Special Report. See Du Preez, Max Tswana, 28-30 Tutu, Desmond Mpilo (archbishop), I, 3' II-!2, 25, 29-30, 37, 94-98, Il3, 151, 191

Ubuntu, 9, n-12, 20, 24-33, 95-98, no, II3, II9-20, 126, !28, 144-45, 153, 189

Ukubuyisa, ro, II9 Umkhonto weSizwe, 28, 62, 80-81, 99, r62 University of Cape Town, 175 University of the Western Cape, 87

257

Walaza, Nomfundo, 8r, 97-98, 140, 144 Weber, Max, 175 Weinberg, Paul, 43 Wicomb, Zoe, n; David's Story, 82-86; "Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Mrica," 84, 173; "Translations in the Yard of Mrica," 180-81 Wigmore, John Henry, 5-7, ray, 171 Women, testimony of, ro-n, 13-14, 32-33, 59-86; under customaty law, 25, 70-75· See also Volksmoeder Women's National Coalition, 71

Yengeni, Tony, 99-101, 104-IIO, n2-13 Van der Merwe, Susan, 28-31, 62, 145 Violence, n, 21-22, 39, 55-58, 75-80, 83-86, 103, !21, 130, 133, 141, 143-45, 151, 161-63, r66, r68, ryo, 173, 17677, 179, 184-85, r88 Volksmoeder, n, 84

Zondo, Aiken, 64 Zondo, Andrew, 62-67 Zondo, Lephina, 62-68, 72-75, 190 Zulu, ro, 15-21, 26-27, 30, 64, 67, 96, 145, 189

MERIDIAN

Crossing Aesthetics

Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures ofthe Thinkable: Crossroads in the Labyrinth VI Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions ofthe Other, Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg

2

volumes, edited by Peggy

Sarah Kofman, The Sarah Kofinan Reader, edited by Thomas Albrecht, with Georgia Albert and Elizabeth Rottenberg Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, edo, Hannah Arendt: Reflections on Literature and

Culture Alan Bass, Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care Jacques Derrida, H C for Life, That Is to Say o o o Ernst Bloch, Traces Elizabeth Rottenberg, Inheriting the Future: Legacies ofKant, Freud, and

Flaubert David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, Gestures ofEthical Life Jacques Derrida, On Touching-]ean-Luc Nancy Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason Peggy Kamuf, Book ofAddresses Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the

Romans Jean-Luc Nancy, Multiple Arts: The Muses I! Alain Badiou, Handbook ofInaesthetics

Jacques Derrida, Eyes ofthe University: Right to Philosophy 2 Maurice Blanchot, Lautreamont and Sade Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal Jean Genet, The Declared Enemy Shoshana Felman, Writing and Madness: (Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis) Jean Genet, Fragments ofthe Artwork Shoshana Felman, The Scandal ofthe Speaking Body: Don juan with J L.

Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages Peter Szondi, Celan Studies Neil Hertz, George Eliot's Pulse Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, Regions ofSorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in

Hannah Arendt and W. H Auden Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, edited by Peggy Kamuf Cornelius Castoriadis, On Plato's 'Statesman' Jacques Derrida, Who's Afraid ofPhilosophy? Right to Philosophy I Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic Peter Fenves, Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin

Jill Robbins, ed., Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas Louis Marin, OfRepresentation

J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature Maurice Blanchot, Faux pas Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural Maurice Blanchot I Jacques Derrida, The Instant ofMy Death I Demeure:

Fiction and Testimony Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System Emmanual Levinas, God, Death, and Time

Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy Ellen S. Burt, Poetry's Appeal: French Nineteenth-Century Lyric and the Political

Space Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas Werner Hamacher, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to

Celan Aris Fioretos, The Gray Book Deborah Esch, In the Event: Reading journalism, Reading Theory Winfried Menninghaus, In Praise ofNonsense: Kant and Bluebeard Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content Giorgio Agamben, The End ofthe Poem: Studies in Poetics Theodor W Adorno, Sound Figures Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience Ernst Bloch, Literary Essays Jacques Derrida, Resistances ofPsychoanalysis Marc Froment-Meurice, That Is to Say: Heidegger's Poetics Francis Ponge, Soap Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Tjpography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time,

I:

The Fault ofEpimetheus

Werner Hamacher, pleroma-Reading in Hegel Serge Leclaire, Psychoanalyzing: On the Order ofthe Unconscious and the Practice

ofthe Letter Serge Leclaire, A Child Is Being Killed: On Primary Narcissism and the Death Drive

Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and Literature Cornelius Castoriadis, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society,

Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination Thomas Keenan, Fables ofResponsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics

and Politics Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names Alexander Garda Dlittmann, At Odds with AIDS: Thinking and Talking about

a Virus Maurice Blanchot, Friendship Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses Massimo Cacciari, Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point David E. Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe's Early Lyric and the

Beginnings ofRomanticism Edmond Jabes, The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion Hans-Jost Prey, Studies in Poetic Discourse: Mallarme, Baudelaire, Rimbaud,

Holder/in Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules ofArt: Genesis and Structure ofthe Literary Field Nicolas Abraham, Rhythms: On the Work, Translation, and Psychoanalysis Jacques Derrida, On the Name David Wills, Prosthesis Maurice Blanchot, The Work ofFire Jacques Derrida, Points . .. :Interviews, I974-I994 ]. Hillis Miller, Topographies Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta (Figures ofWagner) Jacques Derrida, Aporias Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject Jean-Franc;:ois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic ofthe Sublime Peter Fenves, "Chatter": Language and History in Kierkegaard

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience ofFreedom Jean-Joseph Goux, Oedipus, Philosopher Haun Saussy, The Problem ofa Chinese Aesthetic Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence