The Politics of the Heart: A Critique of Sovereignty After Apartheid—South Africa

This chapter borrows from Mohlomi, southern Africa’s eighteenth-century thinker of governance, in order to develop what it calls the politics of the heart. It uses the politics of the heart to critique the production, after apartheid, of a wretched and superfluous population. It extends its deployment of the politics of the heart into a critique of the hegemonic understanding of hospitality that the production of this superfluous population assumes. The argument it makes is that both the production of a wretched and superfluous population and the accompanying version of hospitality rest on the epistemic exclusion of nature. This exclusion of nature does not only permit the violent work of the production of this superfluous population but constitutes this population as strangers. These strangers are produced by the boundaries brought about by the interface of class and citizenship. By deploying the politics of the heart, this chapter tries not only to offer a critique of sovereignty and the accompanying version of hospitality but seeks, also, to offer an intellectual infrastructure for the possible imagining of collective life built around the socialisation of nature.