Leonhard Praeg

‘An Answer to the Question: What is [ubuntu]?'

First circumscription An abstract, like the introduction, stands in a problematic relationship to the text. Written last but read first, it seeks to capture the essence of a text or at least, to draw the reader’s attention to main and supportive arguments. But arguments don’t necessarily unfold in terms of premises and conclusions, supportive and main arguments. When they don’t, the idea of prefacing a text with an abstract and introduction becomes problematic. There is nothing new in this. Many philosophers, Hegel and Derrida to name but two, have written extensively on this question. That said, it gains renewed actuality for a paper that argues, among many other things of equal importance, for a distinction between the work of ubuntu and the discourse on ubuntu. The former is irreducible to the latter in the sense that, given the discursive invention of Africa, it will always remain heterogenous to our attempts to name it. We can at best circumscribe this difference and all the attempts we have historically made, and must in future continue to make, at framing the debate in order to speak of ubuntu. What is to be ‘abstracted’ from such an argument is at best the pure, self-conscious logic of circumscription - of which the ‘abstract’ will be but the first frame, the epigraph inscribed at the beginning the second, and so forth.

Philosophy, and teaching (as) transformation

Abstract This paper explores a paradox constitutive of transformation discourse in South Africa: the transformation of a fragmented society presupposes the existence of a collective Will; but the creation of a collective will can only result from a process of transformation. While politicians and higher education administrators debate how best to conceive and implement transformation, committed lecturers have to find ways of teaching the reality of that ideal full knowing that it is in part through teaching that this ideal is achieved. The 2010 HE Summit (HES) called on all universities to ‘purposefully address the issue of social cohesion as part of their transformation agenda’ (2010: 20). In this paper the learning encounter is posited as the paradoxical site where the assumption of a national subjectivity (‘social cohesion’) becomes reproductive of that subjectivity. This suggests a degree of ‘bootstrapping’ in the sense that the learning encounter necessarily posits a historical Subject that is paradoxically both cause and effect of transformation. This is an interpretative paper that reflects on what it means to practise philosophy in such a context. Taking Readings’s The University in Ruins (1996) as point of departure it starts with a general, historical reflection on the telos of higher education which is then contextualised with reference to the post-colonial university. Towards the end I briefly consider aspects of my own philosophy teaching praxis in light of that theoretical frame. I engage the ‘bootstrapping’ paradox by suggesting that teaching (as) transformation comprises four moments: making students aware of 1) the fact that they belong to specific socio-epistemic communities; 2) that this sense of community is an historical construct which 3) implies limitations on the possibility of knowing and being that can 4) only be questioned through an encounter with what is other to that socio-epistemic community. In short, it is argued that in a university context the possibility of ‘social cohesion’ is first and foremost a confrontation with the conditions for the possibility of inter-subjective learning.

Africa: Globalisation and the Ethical

Any attempt to understand globalisation from the perspective of post-colonial Africa must necessarily contextualise that understanding with reference to the history of the Africa/West difference. This paper presents that history in terms of a genealogy of three successive “systems of differentiation” (Luhmann) that conceive(d) the Africa/West difference first in spatial terms (the Great Chain of Being), then in temporal terms (19th century evolutionary discourse) and more recently in the spatio-temporal terms of complex dynamical systems. The a priori assumptions of the first two systems are discussed as well as the way they still inform our thinking about Africa’s place in contemporary politics with specific reference to the “failed state” phenomenon. The chapter argues that recent developments in social theory, notably the interface between complexity and post-development theories, suggest a turn towards the ethical that invites us to fundamentally rethink the way questions of justice, ethics and community should inform our thinking about Africa in a globalised future.

Essential building blocks of the Ubuntu debate; or: I write what I must

This article is in part a response to Matolino and Kwindingwi’s “The end of Ubuntu” and Metz’s response “Just the beginning for ubuntu: reply to Matolino and Kwindingwi”, both of which appeared in the South African Journal of Philosophy. My contribution also stands alone as an outline of the basic minimum of conceptual moves any Ubuntu theorist has to make in order for their text to avoid the twin seductions of being either a contemporary variant of an outdated ethnophilosophy, or an ahistorical analysis of Ubuntu that remains oblivious to the historicity of the concept. The obvious fact that Ubuntu has had a complicated history, first as pre-colonial praxis and then as abstract postcolonial philosophical construct, demands of the postcolonial theorist to pay attention to the epistemic shifts that have historically determined how Ubuntu interacted with various hegemonic, that is, Western-dominated, theoretical discourses.

Sexual Violence: Mythology, Infant Rape and the Limits of the Political

In the three decades since French theorist René Girard first published his ‘Violence and the Sacred’ (1977) his insights into the nature of collective violence have made substantial contributions to a number of disciplines, including literary studies, cultural studies, anthropology, psychology, philosophy and political theory. With the exception of a few texts, his theory has not seen many applications in the (post-colonial) African context. This paper explores the contributions his theory can make to the study of extreme forms of male sexual violence in post-apartheid South Africa. Theories about such violence generally favour explanations that emphasize domestic causality (‘cycles of violence’), the apartheid legacy of ‘lawnessness’ or post-apartheid socio-economic conditions. In addition there is also a substantial literature which interprets such violence in the more familiar terms of (a) masculinity (-ies) in crisis. Our aim in this theoretical article is to explore the usefulness of Girards theory for understanding the relationship between such crises in masculine identity and two extreme forms of sexual violence, namely gang rape and infant rape.

Of Evil and Other Figures of the Liminal

Inspired by research on the Rwanda genocide and the decapitation, in July 2008, of a passenger on a Canadian Greyhound bus, this occasional paper explores the shared agitation with which we may respond to two seemingly disparate instances of evil such as these. Arguing against discontinuous claims that distinguish between pre- and post-metaphysical conceptions of evil pivoting around the figure of Kant, the article identifies three logics suggestive of continuity in Western thought on evil: negativity, functionalism and the messianic. Focusing on the theme of negativity, the article argues that the essentially apophatic doctrine of the privation of evil is reconstituted in postmodern thinking as the liminal nature of evil. While acts of evil relate to what is both/either mathematically or qualitatively sublime (Kant), and while this experience may account for our agitation, we nonetheless employ figures like ‘hubris’, the ‘uncanny’ (Freud) and the ‘state of exception’ (Agamben) to traverse the liminal in order to interpret instances of human praxis which, given their liminal nature, will always remain brute fact. The article argues that these figures, in particular the temporal structure implicit in Freud’s account of the uncanny, can usefully be explored to account for the agitation with which we respond to instances of evil as diverse as the two that inspired this article.

Ubuntu and the Emancipation of Law

South Africa’s liberal democratic order was founded on a state of exception, inaugurated through a temporary suspension of the appeal to individual rights. In this chapter, Praeg contends that the communitarian suspension of liberal democracy, the fact that the individualistic axiomatic of a liberal democratic order could only be founded on an appeal to its exact opposite, namely Ubuntu as ontological commitment to our interdependence, reveals the aporia-archē of its constitution as two figures that in their hyphenated combination must be recognized as the principle that founded the democratic order as well as the rule that must be iterated in every constitutional court judgment interpreted as reiteration of that founding.

African Philosophy in a World of Terror

Praeg argues in this chapter that to all the terrorizing subjectivities at war in the various global terrorscapes, including those in Africa, the celebration of the mystical totality of Black Subjectivity—a subjectivity whose self-conception is rooted in the aporetic recognition that our shared humanity historically and conceptually precedes and continues to shadow every political performance of independence and sovereignty—offers a meaningful juxtaposition or counterpoint.