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- ItemREMAINS OF THE SOCIAL DESIRING THE POSTAPARTHEID(Wits University Press, 2017-02-01) van Bever Donker, Maurits; Truscott, Ross; Minkley, Gary; Lalu, Premesh; Hook, Derek; Ruti, Mari; Barnard-Naudé, Jaco; Lawless, Annemarie; Erasmus, Aidan; Pohlandt-McCormick, HelenaREMAINS OF THE SOCIAL progress in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. Indeed, what is explored here, in various ways, is the notion that the very question of loss, as Zita Nunes has argued, might be read not only as constitutive of, or constituted by, the social – the social produced through loss, the grave as its first commemorative sign, or the social apportioning life and death and designating its grievability – but rather as a masking of that which enables the constitution of the social: the remainder, which we propose against conceptions of mourning and its failures, melancholia and nostalgia, which one finds more frequently in studies on the social. There is an echo here, as we discuss in the introductory chapter, of Fanon’s critique in Black Skin, White Masks of the social as it is constituted through the concept of Man, an echo that brings with it not only the urgent task of posing questions of racial formations, but also a need to turn attentively to modes of narration that enable an encounter with these remainders as resistant: to read this resistance back into the social as a demand that orders a future which is, as Fanon puts it in his opening lines, always too soon and too late, out of time. Such a demand is what threads the ethical weight that the chapters in this volume bring to the question of the social.