Premesh Lalu

(University of the Western Cape)

Petty Apartheid, Gestalt Psychology and the Becoming Technical of the Human

Rather than succumb to the terms of its own political sophistry, this lecture asks what it might mean to set to work on Undoing Apartheid by rephrasing the problem of race at the heart of its emergence. I am especially interested in how it functioned to delink sense and perception in the interests of a permanent race war. Beyond the familiar narratives of political subjectivity to which South Africa bears testimony, I wish to explore the concept of race that came to cohere around the minor discourse of petty apartheid. Petty apartheid, I suggest, attests to a protracted gestation of the idea of race in debates about the becoming technical of the human that resulted from the consequences of the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century and the debates between Berlin and Leipzig traditions of Gestalt in the first part of the twentieth century.

The talk was held in English.

You can find the video recording of this event here.