Abstract
Postapartheid as a wound culture within a pathological public sphere: Mark
Gevisser’s Lost and Found in Johannesburg
In his work on “wound culture” and the “pathological public sphere” Mark Seltzer (1997)
identifies “addictive violence” as “not merely a collective spectacle but one of the crucial
sites where private desire and public space cross” in late modernity (1997:3). For Seltzer
the convening of the public “around scenes of violence” (such as rushing to the scene of
an accident, either an on-the-scene event or a voyeuristically experienced multimedia
happening) is constitutive of so-called wound culture. The latter is the “public fascination...