Acta Juridica

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• Hic sunt leones reloaded: Elements for a critique of disciplinary self-(af)filiation within professional white philosophy in South Africa

  The recent institutional consolidation of feminist philosophy, African and Africana philosophies, sociology of knowledge and decolonial theory have brought professional philosophers face-to-face with the repressed side of Western philosophy. This essay, drawing on the theoretical framework developed in my previous article 'Hic sunt leones', investigates the role played by professional narcissism and resistance to history in the philosopher's self-image and imaginary, with a particular focus on professional white philosophy in South Africa. The pedagogical aspects of philosophical apprenticeship will be examined psychoanalytically, and explored in their transferential components. Such a psychoanalytic reading will also engage with current conflicts within the South African philosophical field, promoting a shared space for negotiations. However, without adequate introjection of, and progressive identification with, African philosophers and their work, professional white philosophers in South Africa run the twofold risk of replicating regressive forms of disciplinary parenthood while institutionalising neocolonial forms of academic (af)filiations.

• Messianic hopes at the moral carnival – The [rhetorical] question of advocating for the humanities, for now

  Why must the humanities be defended? What is to be said in their name? This inquiry does not seek to make a case for the humanities. It is rather concerned with what happens in contemporary advocacy that contends for the value of the humanities, the myriad arguments that take on the responsibility of speaking for the humanities and expressing the good for which the humanities are thought responsible. In all of this work, in so many efforts to argue the humanities, what remains uncomprehended, and indeed what is regularly set aside as simply incomprehensible, is the work of rhetorical-argument itself, the contingent conditions, dynamics and power of a response, the response-ability on which a comprehension of the humanities may yet depend.

• South African Amnesty 2.0: Incomprehensible?

  The South African democracy faces a crisis of legitimacy and identity that locks it into a state of inertia. The state is proving unable to critically advance the constitutional ends of transformative democracy. It lacks the strategic concepts and arguments to do so and has subsequently become embroiled in an existential battle for the soul of the country. As a critical contribution, this essay evokes the need for politically expedient approaches and arguments. It reflects on the past, on the methodologies employed to bring about the unitary, democratic state, and on the need to look at purposeful, albeit incomprehensible, strategies that will allow transcendence beyond the current impasse.By and large, South Africa sets an example. It is a laboratory for democracy, and for that very reason, much like Athens, it will long remain an oddity, not only in Africa (as the Afro pessimists' simplistic litany would like to have us believe) but also in global politics. South Africa is a test case for global democracy; it is a test case for rhetoric; and it is a test case for the relevance of rhetoric studies in a postmodern democracy.[fn1] footnote 1: Ph-J Salazar An African Athens: Rhetoric and the Shaping of Democracy in South Africa (2002) at xix.

• The self-image of intelligence agents in an archive of state repression in Argentina

  This article examines, from a rhetorical-discursive perspective, the self-image or êthos of intelligence agents in an archive of state repression in Argentina. The archive, which has been open to the public since 2009, once belonged to the Information Service of the North Atlantic Naval Prefecture (SIPNA). The article describes some of the problems related to opening this type of archive, such as disagreements about its current purpose and the historical actors and memory processes involved. It then describes two of the predominant self-images that characterise the intelligence agents who compiled it: that of repressors and that of political experts or analysts. The corpus is composed of documents produced on the occasion of the visit of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to Argentina in 1979. This visit was in response to international complaints about human rights violations by the military government of the time.

• On some ‘long-forgotten propositions’: Reflections on the ‘Epilogue’ to Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem

  This contribution focuses on the last pages of the Epilogue of Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt, but it concerns a question that runs through Arendt's work practically in its entirety, which can be put as follows: How can we judge when we can no longer rely on the certainties of tradition, when – with the emergence of totalitarianism – the categories and concepts with which we used to judge no longer help us to account for the horrifying reality of crimes of an unknown nature and of criminals who do not comply with the notion of criminals that we used to consider? The text aims to dwell on these somewhat strange final pages of Arendt's chronicle of Eichmann's trial to try to see how they nourish our reflection on how to confront an unknown evil of a new kind.

• Piercing incomprehensible power

  Demonstrating the inherent indiscernibility of political power, particularly in our post-tellurian, celestial epoch (Schmitt) of 'post-democracy' (Rancière), a focus on spaces and sites of power – in its dual characteristic of dominating, controlling as well as enabling force – illuminates historic changes that produced today's technologically and pecuniary propelled 'governance' (Morozov). Dispensed by idola of the 'marketplace and the theatre' (Bacon) coursing through cyberspace, the muted demos is coaxed into accepting Silicon Valley's promise of utopia unless forensic rhetoric pierces the broken connection between having power and exercising it deliberatively. That depends on the extent to which concealed places of power can be made comprehensible for the demos to withstand celestial seduction and regain her politically informed voice.

• An incomprehensible rhetoric

  In his pioneering essays on the role of rhetoric in political discourse in South Africa, and in particular within the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Philippe-Joseph Salazar has emphasised the 'postmodernist' overtones of these debates. But he has clearly distinguished an Aristotelian line in the use of rhetoric in politics, according to which it ought to promote truth in order to convince, and a Protagorean line, according to which truth is relative and useless. Some commentators on these issues, such as Barbara Cassin, have – without a blink – espoused the postmodernist and Protagorean line. I take their view to be incomprehensible and incoherent. Rhetoric should not be used as a tool to bury truth, but to praise it. So, I prefer to see Salazar more as an Aristotelian than as a Protagorean.

• A rhetoric of terror and of the terrified

  This paper draws on Philippe-Joseph Salazar's work in Words are Weapons: Inside ISIS's Rhetoric of Terror (2017) on ISIS's persuasive self-presentation on social and traditional media, to consider the rhetoric of the terrified Farmers evident in the framing discourse of selected South African television news reports on Farm attacks. Scholars who study ISIS's use of media have noted the efficacy with which this group has been able to harness the capabilities of media platforms to speak directly to audiences and construct its image. Likewise, the communicative strategies employed in the framing discourse of South African media around the victimhood of Farmers have been effective and have spread to audiences worldwide. Using Salazar's examination of ISIS's rhetoric, expressed through its use of words and images in the media, this paper discusses similarities between ISIS's self-presentation in audio-visual media and the news media discourse that articulates a sense of self-othering by Farmers through these platforms.

• For Philippe: Sharing questions of unintelligibility, security and diversity — from Babel to Pentecost

  And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinär; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language that they may not understand one another's language. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. (Genesis 11, 1–9).

• The ongoing necessity of suffrage Jessica Enoch rhetorics (or ‘suffragism’): On the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution

  This contribution analyses feminist scholarship on women's suffrage – women's fight for the right to vote in the United States. The 100-year anniversary of the passing of the 19th Amendment – the suffrage amendment – serves as exigence for considering how feminist scholarship dedicated to suffrage addresses our contemporary contexts and concerns. To that end, we bring together scholarship that troubles dominant white suffrage narratives in order to amplify the rhetorics of suffragists of colour, that engages the racism that inflected the suffrage movement, that explores possibilities for coalitions and alliances, and that continues to consider how suffrage rhetorics, at the turn of the twentieth century, might connect to and inform restrictions on voting rights for people living various intersectional realities in the twenty-first century.

Featured documents

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• From Heteronormativity to Full Sexual Citizenship?: Equality and Sexual Freedom in Laurie Ackermann’s Constitutional Jurisprudence
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