Fight for Democracy

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Glenda Daniels. Fight for Democracy

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Fight for Democracy

The ANC and the Media in South Africa

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One of the most significant Žižekean concepts is the question that causes hysteria: Che Vuoi (1989: 87), meaning ‘what do you want?’ More than this, it means ‘what are you really aiming at?’ ‘You’re telling me that, but what do you want with it, what are you aiming at?’ It is experienced by the subject as an unbearable anxiety. In this book, both the media as subject, and the ANC as the subject of the media, experience anxiety. There is a split between demand and desire and this is what defines the hysterical subject (op cit: 111). This application is pertinent for the ANC’s hailing of the media as ‘hysterical’. Hence, the psychoanalytical theoretical works and analyses of Žižek have been important. Interrogating the Real (2006a) provided some of the key concepts I have used in my analysis, such as the Master-Signifier, object, subject and social fantasy. Similarly, The Ticklish Subject (2000) gives examples of what ‘surplus’ and ‘excess’ mean, which is pertinent to my analysis of the ANC’s reaction to the Sunday Times exposé of the former minister of health and the chapter on the discourse of the ANC on the media. By ‘surplus’, Žižek means what is attached to the object, more than the object itself. Herein lies the fantasy. Žižek is a devout Lacanian. For Lacan, himself a devout believer in psychoanalysis and a Freudian, the fantasy is a sort of magnet which will attract those memories to itself which suit it. According to Leader and Groves (1995: 128), ‘If you have only a few memories from your childhood you could ask yourself why you remember only those elements and not others’.

According to Kay (2003: 163), by fantasy, Žižek does not mean that which is opposed to reality: ‘on the contrary, it is what structures that which we call reality, and determines the contours of desire. Likewise it is not escapist; rather it is shot through with the traumatic enjoyment which it helps to repress; thus fantasy shields us from the Real and transmits it.’ Two other Žižekean concepts used in this book are that of ‘the rigid designator’ and ‘the gaze’. In explaining the rigid designator, Žižek says it aims at what the object represents and when this becomes exaggerated it produces a signifying operation.

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