In the late nineties, Prof Francisco Valdes from the California Western School of Law, set out to address what he saw as a dangerous loophole in American anti-discrimination law. The loophole existed in the context of sexual discrimination laws. At the time, discrimination on the grounds of sex and gender was outlawed, but, as a […]
Jaco Barnard-Naude
Jaco Barnard-Naudé is Professor of Jurisprudence and Co-director of the Centre for Rhetoric Studies in the Department of Private Law at the University of Cape Town. In the United Kingdom, he is the British Academy's Newton Advanced Fellow in the School of Law at Westminster University and Honorary Research Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London. He is a board member of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR) and of the Triangle Project, Cape Town.
Posted inEquality, General, News/Politics
Violence will not do it
Almost three weeks ago, Americans commemorated the fifteenth anniversary of the event that has had a decisive impact on global politics ever since: 9/11. Three years later, in 2004, Judith Butler published a book entitled Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence. I didn’t read this book at the time of its publication. The […]
Posted inEquality, General, News/Politics
In the ‘pitfalls’ of the national democratic revolution
Way back in 1998, American constitutional theorist Prof Karl Klare published a now famous article in which he set out to define South Africa’s post-apartheid constitutional project. He called this ‘transformative constitutionalism’ and defined it as follows: ‘a long-term project of constitutional enactment, interpretation, and enforcement committed (not in isolation, of course, but in a […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
The TRC as biopolitical imperative (Part 2: The ‘Tumult Commission’)
In the previous post, I mentioned that Sitze (2013) argues that the TRC had its jurisprudential origins (or precedents) in “colonial sovereignty and governmentality”. I discussed how Sitze argues that the indemnity convention originated in the theory of parliamentary (political) sovereignty of Dicey’s English constitutional law. I then discussed how the indemnity convention, as an […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
The TRC as biopolitical imperative (Part 1: Indemnity)
Now that 20 years have passed since the TRC undertook the complex task of promoting national unity and reconciliation, it is an opportune moment to reflect on its legacy. In an as yet little known book, The Impossible Machine: a genealogy of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, published in 2013, Adam Sitze targets much […]
Posted inEquality, General, Media, News/Politics
Removing Rhodes’ statue would not ‘erase the past’
“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” writes George Santayana. In the midst of the argument that the #RhodesMustFall campaign is fuelled by a misguided desire to “erase the past”, it seems to me that it is ironically, but precisely, this argument that is hampered by a deeply short-sighted approach […]
Posted inEquality, General, News/Politics
Rhodes, Rancière and the politics of aesthetics
The events surrounding the protests for the removal of the Rhodes statue located at a focal point on the Upper Campus of the University of Cape Town (UCT) has provided me with an opportunity to revisit Jacques Rancière’s influential contemporary argument on the politics of aesthetics. The focus on a statue obviously lends an explicit […]
Posted inEquality, Gender violence, News/Politics
Anti-homosexuality legislation in Africa: The Hart-Devlin debate revisited
The news this week that The Gambia has passed a Bill that further criminalises homosexual conduct and imposes life sentences in cases of “aggravated” homosexuality, along with the continued coverage of the constitutional fate of similar legislation in Uganda, provides an occasion to revisit the most famous debate about the criminalisation of homosexuality in the […]
Posted inGeneral
The refusal of Michel Houellebecq
The title of this post is ambiguous. For instance, is Michel Houellebecq refusing someone or something, or is he the one who is being refused by someone or something? Those readers who are familiar with what the French referred to as “L’affaire Houellebecq”, after the publication of and controversy that ensued from the publication of […]
Posted inEquality, General, Media, News/Politics
Be cruel to be cruel
It is May 1968. Raging in the streets of Paris, the (in)famous student uprisings. On the walls of the Sorbonne a slogan appears: “SOYONS CRUELS!” / “BE CRUEL!” Someone comes up to you and asks: “Have you seen this writing on the wall? What is it telling me to do?” Cruelty, by which I mean […]
Posted inEquality, General, Lifestyle, News/Politics
Yes, but do we live human dignity?
Much has been said, is still being said and will continue to be said about the reconstitution of the South African legal, political and, perhaps most importantly, ethical order on the basis of the ideal of human dignity. This reconstitution of course took place and form by way of the adoption of the post-apartheid Constitutions […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Mandela in reflection: The laws of admiration
In 1986 the French thinker Jacques Derrida published a text in a collection of protest tributes that he co-edited with Mustapha Tlili entitled For Nelson Mandela. The English translation of Derrida’s tribute is titled “The laws of reflection: Nelson Mandela, in admiration”. I have chosen to subvert this title by way of re-ordering its words. […]