Petrified life

Abstract

How might we read temporality, that is, the psychical and social experience of time, as an index of the prevailing political and intersubjective impasses of the apartheid and post-apartheid eras? This paper explores three perspectives on this broad problematic. Achille Mbembe’s thoughts on repetition and nostalgia provide, firstly, a means of understanding one characteristically post-apartheid mode of temporality: that of suspended history. Crapanzano’s notion of waiting, elaborated as a means of grasping the white anxiety of the late apartheid period, allows us, secondly, to conceptualise the de-realised experience of a muted or deadened time. A third source, an unpublished text contributed to the Apartheid Archive concerning a fantasised scene of violence, enables us to sketch a third form of temporal experience common to apartheid and post-apartheid experiences alike, namely that of imagined retribution. These ostensibly separate and distinct modes of temporality can be read as interlocking forms of “petrified life,” a term I use to link temporalities of immobilisation characterised by suspension, stasis and fear.