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RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS 2024-2025

I received my third consequtive rating from the National Research Foundation (South Africa) for excellence in research (2024-2029). 

Outcome: All of the reviewers are firmly convinced that the applicant is an established researcher as described and who, on the basis of the high quality and impact of his/her recent research is regarded by: (1) some reviewers as already enjoying considerable international recognition;OR (2) the overriding majority of reviewers as being a scholar who has attained a sound/solid international standing in their field, but not yet considerable international recognition.

See the peer review assessment of my research here. 

 

 

I published “Nie die einde van die wêreld nie: Eskatologie en tyd in Levinas” [“Not the End of the World: Eschatology and Time in Levinas. In Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe. 64(2): 165-177.

ABSTRACT:

Levinas mainly deals with the notion of eschatology in the preface of Totalité et infini (1961). There it appers in the context of his agreement with an entire tradition of philosophers claiming that the very nature of being is one of violence and war, which becomes manifest in the pervasive waging of political battles and wars. He futher contends that a conception of morality based on the ”pure subjectivism of the I” is powerless to shield humankind against such violence. The alternative he offers to such an impotent morality is an ethics of alterity. Eschatology is Levinas’s answer to how such an ethics of alterity would be capable of insulating humankind against calculative reason and the pressures of politics and war. To understand how eschatology succeeds in doing so and how Levinas fills in the notion, I argue that it should be understood within the context of his conceptualization of time.

Levinas offers novel analyses of the forms and the work of time. Time, in Levinas, is the very inner structure of an existent’s movement of existing – that I call the inherent chronological inconsistency of the human condition. In Levinas’s ethical metaphysics this inherent chronological inconsistency is theorized  as the other (autre) within the self, an affective infection that dates back to a past that has never been present – it hails from the diachronic time of the Other – and is opened to the future, ”to the newness of the unknown”. While this past is impossible to grasp, it nevertheless concerns me. I cannot remain unaffected in relation to it; it has left a trace. This alterity within the self becomes manifest as an inherent Desire for time, time that can only be given by the other person, which for Levinas is the Other (l’Autrui). This means that the singular time of my being is not yet time, does not yet have time, but the singular I bears an inherent Desire for time within. This Desire for time, then, emanates from the inherent chronological inconsistency which typifies the existent being “out of sync” with itself, a diastasis or a “standing apart from itself”. To be sure, this Desire is not a need to be filled, but as Desire, it is essentially insatiable. This Desire conquers the ecstatic time of need and satisfaction and the inevitable return to the self, the collapse back upon oneself that follows when needs are satiated, and the return of the unbearable heaviness of being that it signals. The early Levinas (De l’évasion, 1935) was looking for an escape from this irremediable Being. Only four decades later in Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (1974) will Levinas come to fully plot out “a new path out of being,” a temporal path that he started to chart in Le temps et l’ autre (1948), which forges a fundamental link between time and ethics. The time that the future brings is not merely the recurrence of the present instant or its continuation, but the possibility of another instant or a new beginning. How can an existent in the instant recommence otherwise? The coming of the future announces another original instant that cannot be approached but that comes; that cannot be assumed, since it appears as an epiphany. The existent is able to welcome the absolutely strangeness of the epiphany of the future because of the inherent susceptibility to fraternity and sociality, which is made possible by time. This, however, is not time that the existent has like a possession but a capacity to welcome time that springs from an existential chronological inconsistency – a being temporally out of joint. To further specify, this “capacity” is not a power that the individual instant is endowed with. Quite to the contrary, faced with the radical strangeness of the future, with the alterity of the face of the Other, the existent is reduced to a “radical passivity.” Passivity is the radix or root of ethical agency. The capacity that time gives, is the capacity for generosity, the power to be able to give of the riches accumulated. This is not to turn away from one’s egotistical selfish life once and for all, but a being turned to be able to welcome the Other without being obliterated in the face of an absolute Mystery.

The instant as an interruption announces the possibility of a new beginning, which is not the effacement of the past, but the pardon that purifies the past and the injustices committed. Pardon consists in a retroactive action that inverts the natural temporal order of things and implies the “reversibility of time”. Now the past instant has not passed but can be lived again, differently.

In Levinas we find a non-teleological conception of time. Truth, Levinas contends, requires both an infinite time and a completed time conceived as “messianic time.” Messianic time, more precisely, may be conceived as the “extreme vigilance of the messianic consciousness”, since it is only such vigilant consciousness that can protect us against the revenge of evil – which infinite time cannot do. This notion of “messianic consciousness” is encapsulated in Levinas’s conceptualization of eschatology, which is the infinity beyond totality or beyond history, without denying history. The eschatological is not realized at the end of time but rather in each instant in which our responsibility vis-à-vis the Other is realized. If this responsibility exempts us from the jurisdiction of history and the future, salvation is not to be found at the end of history but remains at each moment possible.

When Levinas speaks of eschatology in Totalité et Infini he does not refer to a doctrine but to a vision: ”the eschatological vision” that consummates moral experience. It is not a spiritual relationship; it leads to action. To see (envision) is already to act. This action is evoked in feeling responsible in the face of the future one hopes for others. The future one hopes for others – a better future – is the eschatological vision realized in the eruption of the present as a purified past.

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I published “A Critical Consideration of Foucault’s Conceptualisation of Morality”. In Verbum et Ecclesia 45(1): a2830

ABSTRACT: The background of this research is the status and significance of an ethics of care of the self in the history of morality. I followed the following methodology: I attempted to come to nuanced, critical understanding of the Foucault’s conceptualisation of morality in Volumes II and III of The History of Sexuality. In the ‘Ancients’, Foucault uncovered an ‘ethics-oriented’ as opposed to a ‘code-oriented’ morality in which the emphasis shifted to how an individual was supposed to constitute himself as an ethical subject of his own action without denying the importance of either the moral code or the actual behaviour of people. The main question was whether care of the self-sufficiently regulated an individual’s conduct towards others to prevent the self from lapsing into narcissism, substituting a generous responsiveness towards the other for a means-end rationale. I put this line of critique to test by confronting Foucault’s care of the self with Levinas’s primordial responsibility towards the other and put forward a case for the indispensability of aesthetics for ethics. In conclusion, I defended the claim that care of the self does indeed foster other responsiveness.

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 I published “The Challenge that War Poses to Levinas’s Thought”. In Philosophia: International Journal of Philosophy 25(1): 26-44.

ABSTRACT: A critical consideration of Levinas’s thought on war raises a series of “hard questions” that Levinas’s ethical relation of for-the-Other somehow must account for. First, the pivotal question of the Preface of TI: does not war render ethics ineffectual since it not merely opposes this relation but suspends it? The second question concerns the possibility of a just war: if war is indeed a suspension of morality on what normative basis can there be something such as a just war? In the third instance, the judgment involved in the possibility of a just war means that the pre-reflective, pre-rational ethical relation of two that precedes ontology and epistemology cannot remain insulated from politics. How are we to understand this impossible relation between ethics and politics in Levinas’s thought or the seemingly unbridgeable gap between ethics and justice in his philosophy? This paper seeks to critically unpack these questions in order to address the challenge posed by war to Levinas’s thought.

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Narrating the Neoliberal Agenda Symposium: Tales of Democracies, Communities, and Public Spaces, The Ideal Spaces Foundation, Karlsruhe, Germany

 6-7 September 2024

Paper presentation: Parasites of Innovation: The Dual Model of Urban Creativity

Download the programme here. 

Download the post-event press release here. 

ABSTRACT: This critical interrogation of the neoliberal agenda pivots around its usurpation of creativity as crystalized in the creative city and related urban politics in the global North. Cities being the engines of the economy (Jane Jacobs and Peter Hall), Florida and Landry advocate the creative city as the real motor force of the neoliberal economy – a kind of creativity that has little to do with spontaneous imaginative bottom-up urban regeneration but rather the fostering of a factitious or cultivated creativity through the top-down implementation of specific policy interventions. It is theorized that this artificially created creativity is incarnated in a direct and indirect model respectively that function differently to foster economic growth. While the direct model is glaringly invasive and overtly top-down, the indirect model is more insidious because more subtle and unobtrusive by utilizing negative planning measures to let the informal creative margins and interstices flourish “organically” – the latter serving as breeding ground upon which the former parasitizes. Together the direct and indirect models permeate the entire register of power operative in the creative city from macropolitical urban interventions to the microphysics of the individual creaworker. In this contribution I will critically unpack the dual models of neoliberal urban creativity and conclude by briefly touching upon the crucial question of resistance.

 

South African Society of Environmental Philosophy Inaugural Conference, Kruger National Park, South Africa

22-24 April 2024

Paper presentation: The Tragedy of the Commons Revisited: Ostrom Meets Hardin

 

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS 2022-2023

South African Society for Critical Theory 5th Annual Conference, University of the Free State

16-18 November 2023

 Conference theme: Critical Theory and Nature in the 21st Century

 Paper presentation: The Tragedy of the Commons Revisited

 ABSTRACT:

Hardin’s seminal 1968 essay, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ has generally been interpreted as advocating the enclosure or privatization of the commons as the only means of conserving it. It will be argued that this line of interpretation with its exclusive emphasis on ‘the commons’ fails to address what is actually at stake for Hardin – ‘the tragedy’ of the recalcitrant belief in limitless economic growth, or what Bourdieu would describe as the unchallenged unanimity of the dominant neoliberal discourse. In this paper, I will revisit Hardin’s essay and its critical reception in an effort to refocus our attention on its actual object of critique: the limitless growth incentive. I will attempt to reconnect the notions of ‘the commons’ and of ‘tragedy’ by taking a look at the neoliberalization of nature in Africa as case in point. In conclusion, I will consider possible alternatives to Hardin’s binary proposal of avoiding the tragedy by either the total privatization of the commons or total government control. While Occam’s razor may account for the appeal of Hardin’s solution, Nobel Laureate in Economics, Elinor Ostrom’s research disproves Hardin’s draconian pessimism by uncovering how some communities had been deftly avoiding the tragedy of the commons for centuries. She studied collaborative management systems developed by cattle herders in Switzerland, forest dwellers in Japan, and irrigators in the Philippines, amongst other communities that have found ways of preserving a shared resource – pasture, trees, water – and providing their members with a living. 

The 21st Annual Meeting of the Foucault Circle

Kansas City, MO, USA

21-23 April 2023

Paper presentation: Foucault and Governmentality. Living to Work in the Age of Control

Download the programme here. 

ABSTRACT:

In this paper, I undertake a philosophical anthropological interrogation with a distinctive sociological slant to grapple with the following question: what are we – as knowledge workers – today in relation to our present understood as the globalizing neoliberal governmentality in which life is reduced to constant work under conditions of stealth control?

 This critical issue goes to the very heart of philosophical anthropological reflections on what constitutes subjectivity in the contemporary era. I contend that the consequences of the reconceptualization of the working subject as entrepreneurial ‘project’ (Han 2017) is in urgent need of critical debate. This given the fact that the knowledge economy in the networked-techno era has become a decisive force in determining the human condition in the developed as well as in growing parts of the developing world, which are aggressively targeted by mobile device manufacturers. In fact, research predicts that in the Internet age, the existential condition of being a knowledge worker conceived as human capital will come to represent one of the quintessential determinants of the human condition.

To put it succinctly, how is the neoliberal inter-networked mediation of working existence compelling us to come to a reconceived understanding of human subjectivity?

This question may be approached by breaking it down into what I consider to be its three component parts: the first part analyses the government(-ality) of control in our present network society by firstly specifying what I understand under “neoliberalism”. I then turn to Foucault’s analyses of neoliberal governmentality, which draws on a more comprehensive understanding of ‘government’ dating back to the 16th C, which is not limited to political structures. Based on his contention that there is no power without knowledge, he introduces the notion of “governmentality”, which conjoins government to a certain mentalité conceived as an economic rationality. The first part concludes by analysing how “governmentality” may serve as a critique of neoliberalism. The question of Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism is a much-debated issue among Foucault scholars and I advance the view that, whatever Foucault’s attitudes to neoliberalism may have been, there remains considerable critical potential in the study of neoliberal governmentality.

The second part of my argument turns to the ‘culture’, ‘ethos’ or ‘spiritedness’ of work under and in relation to conditions of control within the sphere of knowledge work in the age of the neoliberal network society. I contend that the knowledge worker is overinvested in work, an overinvestment that appears to be disproportionate to absolute necessity or correlative gain in terms of wealth (increased financial incentives or material gain), mental, emotional, and physical well-being or overall quality of life. This part concludes by attributing this overinvestment to an ambiguous ‘ambition’, which I conceive as thumotic satisfaction.

The third and final part attempts to come to a critical understanding of the ‘hinge’ conjoining neoliberal governmentality to the ancient spiritedness. In other words, how does neoliberal capitalism succeed in tapping into the ancient spiritedness to generate the competitive entrepreneurial spirit, which is the latter’s driving force? It was specifically from US economist, Gary Becker’s work (The Economic Approach to Human Behaviour, 1976) that Foucault in his lectures deciphers the rationale of neoliberal governmentality in its clearest form, distilling its nucleus as the figure of the enterprising self. Foucault notes that the neoliberals were quick to realize that the optimization of the self’s entrepreneurial or enterprising capacities requires investment. Hence the now familiar economic injunction: invest in human capital! Whenever previous economic theories have tried to account for labour, they reduced it to time or wages paid, disavowing it as concrete labour with qualitative human variables. It was reduced to a commodity, to the effects of value produced. The neoliberals, on the other hand, discovered that key to the science of economics is something that precisely cannot neatly be quantified and accounted for, i.e., human behaviour or the internal ‘rationality’ or ‘strategic’ programming of individuals’ activities.

The neoliberal foregrounding of human capital as most decisive for optimizing productivity and increasing profit, then, provides the answer to how neoliberal governmentality succeeds in colonizing the psychic spiritedness to generate the competitive entrepreneurial spirit. To sustain this inherently exploitative cycle of production, a finely calibrated balance needs to be struck between destructive exploitation and constructive gratification to keep the pendulum in virtually perpetual motion. Only a critical awareness on the part of the knowledge worker of the exploitative machinations of the techno-capitalist order in which it is inscribed, can enable the worker to extricate him/herself to some extent from the ultimately ruinous cycle of self-exploitation and re-establish some semblance of that elusive work-life balance.

Conference on Violence and Agency: An African Philosophical Approach

Department of Philosophy, University of Pretoria

21-23 June 2023

Paper presented: Towards a More Nuanced Understanding of Violence in Fanon

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ABSTRACT:

Dubbed the “apostle of violence”, Fanon has been lauded and critiqued for his insistence that violence is a necessary condition for the attainment of anti-colonial freedom. Statements such as “[t]he colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence” in The Wretched of the Earth (1963: 86) is read as unambivalent testimony to his wholesale advocation of violence. Roberts (2004) defends the view that Fanon considers violence to be intrinsically valuable in the anti-colonial struggle for freedom. His argument hinges on the differentiation between two concepts of violence: instrumental violence and intrinsic violence. Instrumental violence is enacted as a means to an end. Violent measures are taken solely to achieve a particular result. Intrinsic violence, on the other hand, is “a metaphysical concept in which the act of either random irrational or calculated violence itself contains inherent value”, according to Roberts (2004: 146). Intrinsic violence is valued in and of itself irrespective of the outcome at a specific moment of implementation. What is at stake in intrinsic violence is the reclamation of agency and identity by the colonized. In the Preface of The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre maintains that for Fanon intrinsic or what he (Sartre) calls “irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effects of resentment: it is man recreating himself” (WE, 21). The fact of the matter, he continues, is that only violence can efface the marks of violence. This accounts for the appeal of Fanon’s advocation of violence to the colonized – the broken, the traumatized, the dehumanized.

 I pit this reading of violence in Fanon against Oranli (2021)’s contention that such readings fall into the trap of approaching Fanon through Hannah Arendt’s framing of violence, i.e., through a binary paradigm of instrumental versus non-instrumental violence. It is argued that this is in fact a false dichotomy since violence in Fanon can be construed as having both constructive and instrumental aspects. In On Violence (1970), Arendt conceives of violence in instrumental terms, while she claims that for Fanon violence is non-instrumental. With her focus on the macro-violence of regimes, she fails to account for the structural/everyday violence that Fanon is concerned with – the micro-effects of violence on the victims of colonial violence, what it does to the subjectivity of the person engulfed in a violent world. This failure on Arendt’s part stems from her hard distinction between the social sphere (i.e. the sphere of hierarchy, necessity, and coercion) and the political sphere (i.e. the sphere of equality and freedom), which leaves her analysis devoid of any reference to the inequalities and violence inherent in the social sphere and how it inevitably contaminates the political sphere.

 From a critical comparison of these two interpretations of violence in Fanon a more nuanced understanding emerges that avoids the trap of the Arendtian binary scheme. Ascribing intrinsic value to violence in Fanon decontextualizes violence, which cannot be understood outside of the end it serves in the struggle for decolonization. The intrinsic necessity of violence in colonial contexts is wrongly conflated with the intrinsic value of violence beyond instrumentality. The necessity of violence upon which Fanon insists is not an unqualified advocation of violence or a call for violence ex nihilo. Instead, he is urging the colonized to make productive use of the violence that is already given to them. The violence that constitutes the colonized’s subjectivity, and which eventually causes  the colonized to resort to violence, originates form colonialism itself. Violence in Fanon, it will be argued, is not merely instrumental and reactive, but is also creative and constructive.

I published an article, “Knowledge Work Compulsion: The Neoliberal Mediation of Working Existence in the Network Society”. In South African Journal of Philosophy 42(4): 287-300.

 Download it here.

ABSTRACT: This contribution seeks to understand the pervasive phenomenon of work compulsion among knowledge workers in our present network society. Knowledge workers not only have to work all the time from anywhere, but they also appear to want to. This study argues that this curious phenomenon may be attributed to the thumotic satisfaction that knowledge work generates. What is more, the neoliberal theory of human capital has found a way to harness thumotic satisfaction to the profit incentive, and has created arguably the most productive working subject to date. The argument is divided into four parts: First, the paper analyses the government(- ality) of control operative in the network society by defining “neoliberalism”. It then focuses on Foucault’s examinations of German and American neoliberalism in the 20th century, treating them as instances of governmentality. The aim is to assess whether employing a governmentality lens is a valid approach for critically analysing present-day neoliberalism. If it proves justifiable, which I argue it does, the study explores the potential valuable insights gained from examining contemporary neoliberalism through this particular analytical framework. Second, the study turns to the “spiritedness” of knowledge workers under the conditions of stealth control that typify the neoliberal network society. Curiously, these highly engaged workers have reportedly experienced increased overall well-being. However, their overinvestment in work appears to be disproportionate to absolute necessity, increased earnings or improved overall quality of life. This paper contends that work compulsion generates and is in turn fuelled by thumotic satisfaction. Third, the study tries to ascertain the connection between neoliberal governmentality and thumos. Neoliberal governmentality appears to have found a way to appropriate thumotic satisfaction to produce and sustain the competitive entrepreneurial spirit. The fourth part of the study considers how the knowledge worker might resist the compulsion to work incessantly.

I published an article, “Van aktiwiteit na radikale passiwiteit: die ontplooiing van etiese agentskap in Levinas”. In Litnet Akademies 19(2).

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ABSTRACT: 

From activity to radical passivity: the unfolding of ethical agency in Levinas

The aim of this contribution is to critically trace the evolution of ethical subjectivity and the concomitant notion of ethical agency in the major works of Levinas spanning a period of more than four decades to cast some light on certain questions it raises. Levinas announces his trans-phenomenological quest in an early programmatic essay titled De l’évasion (1935), but truly succeeds in thinking “otherwise than Being or beyond essence” only in his second magnum opus bearing the same name, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence published in 1974. In the course of this journey he moves from the self to the Other, from the activity of economic “auto-personification” to the radical passivity of the Other-invoked ethical subject. He moves from the enjoyment of living of/from provisional alterity in the world to the traumatisation of the ethical encounter with absolute Alterity, the trace of Infinity inscribed in the finite.

The major themes recur again and again. and in the iterability of that repetition subjectivity is pushed ever further from the unity of apperception and intentionality as the Other is inscribed in a proximity so close it succeeds in altering the very immanence of the subject in her innermost identity. Here responsibility becomes a traumatisation of the ego in which the subject is cored out as if enucleated, deposed from its kingdom of identity and substance. It is here that Levinas introduces the radically passive ethical agent as opposed to the free, rational, autonomous “I think”. It is precisely in the excess of passivity that ethical agency becomes possible, the passivity of a trauma through which the idea of the Infinite will-always-already-have-been placed in the finite.

Accordingly, in my retracing of the development of Levinas’s thinking I proceed by way of a problematisation of a pivotal transition in Levinas’s thought: from the ethical priority and import Levinas accords to the self and her existential practices of self-concern in his first three major works to the subsequent ethical devaluation of the self and complete disqualification of any existential base in the world in Autrement qu’être (AE). It is a disqualification that entails the thoroughgoing deposition of the self as “individuated”, “auto-personified”, and “substantialized” – the self that is self-formed in the happiness of enjoyment (cf. TI, 147/120). The jouissance and joie de vivre of Totalité et Infini (TI) dissolve in the face of the devastatingly traumatic encounter with the Other in AE. The self’s ethical conversion announces “accusation”, “persecution”, “obsession” and “substitution” for the Other – the taking on of responsibility even for her debt. How are we to understand Levinas’s relational ethics here with the self “delivered over to stoning and insults” (AE, 192/110)?

Importantly, in Levinas’s early works up to and including TI, the existent’s “auto-personification” or self-formation, the immanent process of individuation, is postulated as a necessary condition for the possibility of establishing an ethical relation with the other person: You cannot receive the Other with empty hands, without the riches of self-sufficiency. You cannot give selflessly if you are not self-sufficient. You cannot give to the needy if you are in need yourself. Being independent is not a sufficient condition, however. Without an intervention by the Other, without a leap of faith, Levinas’s self-created, “atheist” self will remain self-occupied and oblivious to its ethical responsibility towards others. In its self-sufficiency the self therefore “needs” the Other to make it aware of its murderous egotistical nature.

On the face of things, Levinas’s scheme threatens to collapse into the binary opposition of a before and after: “Before” the Other’s intervention the existent appears to be doomed to fully actualising its “atheist” potential. It is ethically stunted and inept, incapable of initiating any semblance of a generous gesture towards others. This “before” is, however, not unethical but a-ethical, i.e., lacking an ethical sense or incapable of being concerned with the rightness or wrongness of its egoism. The gravitational pull of its egoism is all-consuming, leaving it not only incapable of relating in any other way to the not-self, but, importantly, necessarily impelled to be concerned primarily with its own continued existence. Everything other-than-the-self figures only as a means to the own existence. The question of Being – to exist – is being-for-oneself. “After” the Other’s intervention, on the other hand, or, put more precisely, dia-chronically, i.e., through-time or through the Other, the subject is rendered radically passive. With the introduction to time the subject is no longer capable of not being-for-the-Other even before being-for-itself. Levinas fully articulates the radical (trans-)ontological consequence of this Other-orientation only in AE.

The “before” of an apparently passive participation in a hopeless amorality now makes way for an always-already inherent infection or affectedness by the Other to which the consciousness of an autonomous rationally responsible ego always comes too late. It is only with the introduction of time, in this “instant”, in this “now”, which signals a radical incapacitation of the compulsion of connatus essendi, the urge to persist in self-preservation, that individuals can be expected to “take on” responsibility for the Other in need. This “taking on” is not, however, an autonomous action proceeding from a rational consciousness, but a transferential “being able” that precedes rational reflective consciousness. It is activity or ethical capacitation following from passivity: radical passivity as the radix or root of ethical agency.

From the perspective of a tradition of Western subjectivity, conceptualised first as the Cartesian cogito and subsequently as the Kantian autonomous transcendental Subject, Levinas presents us with a rather contentious conceptualisation of subjectivity which starts out ethically inept and ends up passively delivered over to the Other’s tutelage. It could easily be construed as a notion of subjectivity that ultimately exempts the self from assuming any responsibility, ceding it to the Other. Levinas appears not only to caricature human ethical ineptitude (by portraying the existent as a “hungry stomach without ears” (TI, 134/107)), but also renders the ethical subject, which comes into being by virtue of the Other’s invocation, radically passive. It could be argued, therefore, that the worrisome consequence of this conception of subjectivity is that responsibility becomes the Other’s responsibility, since of its own accord the self is incapable of taking any ethical initiative.

A close reading of Levinas’s early work, then, uncovers what appears to be a binary scheme: On the one hand, Levinas constructs an “ethically challenged” subject that is incapable of saving itself by itself. After intervention by the Other, on the other hand, it is stripped of its egoism and rendered radically passive. It is now for-the-Other despite itself and because of the Other-in-the-self which predisposes it towards alterity.

This apparent binary scheme is interrogated by plotting Levinas’s phenomenological analyses of the self’s a-ethical, economic existence during which the existent exists by enjoying the provisional alterity of the world in the works up to and including TI. Here Levinas sketches the radical independent existence of the existent as the condition of possibility of his/her ethical conversion in the face of the Other. The self can answer the ethical call of the needy Other only as a self-sufficient being. This is the gist of Levinas’s position in his first three works. One of the questions that come to mind in this context is why the self would make itself accessible to the Other and sacrifice its happiness and independence to the Other that imposes an unbearable responsibility.

As we have seen, a transition takes place in Levinas’s second magnum opus, Autrement qu’être, from the self to the Other: He moves from the enjoyment of the existent’s worldly existence to the traumatisation of the ethical encounter with the absolutely Other. In this second major work there is no further mention of the necessity of the existent’s economic existence. The question that confronts us here is: What is the nature of the ethical relation if it is inherently no relation in the true sense? The self is stripped of his/her egotistical core and confronted with an Other within the self. Levinas describes ethics not as a community of generosity, but as a traumatic crushing of the egotistical I by the Other.

In the final instance, Levinas maintains that ethics is not vested in the rational weighing of options. According to him it is precisely such rational reflection on responsibility, which implies total freedom of choice, that is responsible for Cain’s sober, calculated coldness. For Levinas, responsibility must be vested in something more fundamental than the freedom of the subject. 

I published an article, “Knowledge Work in the Age of Control. In Acta Academica 54(1): 40-68.

Download it here. 

ABSTRACT: The main claim that I aim to substantiate in this article is that power in the form of control is exerted in a more insidious manner now that knowledge work has become ‘networked’. To this end, I first describe societal control in the current epoch. Given the fact that my focus is on knowledge work, I next revisit the human capital literature with the aim of coming to a more precise understanding of what knowledge work is. The literature on “leveraging human capital” (Burud and Tumolo 2004) evidences how human capital theory draws on the conditions of free-floating control to optimally capitalise on knowledge workers. Models of overt management have come to be replaced by more expansive and insidious models of control that extend beyond the sphere of work into the intimate recesses of private life. Control operative at the societal level (Castells 1996) extends beyond the macro-level (neoliberal), to the meso-level (organisational), and the micro-level (self-governance). Next, I critically consider the implications of these conditions of control for the (self-)governance of the knowledge worker by drawing on Han’s (2017) further specification of control as “smart power”. I come to the conclusion that under the conditions of apparently greater autonomy and discretion that is so pervasive in the management literature discussing knowledge workers, governance as “control” induces constant work erasing the boundaries between work and private life. Neoliberalism with its mantra of investment in human capital has succeeded in producing an optimally efficient, ever-working subject. Throughout my analyses are informed by Foucault’s (2008) concept of “governmentality”, which fuses the presiding rationality (knowledge) with governance (power as control) to throw light on how human conduct is being conducted (orchestrated) for optimal efficiency.

I published a chapter, “Levinas on Time. The Ethical Import of Our Existential Chronological Inconsistency” in Gilbert, B. & Elgabsi, N. (Eds.) Ethics and Time in the Philosophy of History. A Cross-cultural Approach.  London: Bloomsbury, pp. 210-224. ISBN 9781350279094 

 Buy the book here.

Download the chapter here.

EXTRACT: The human condition is fundamentally temporal: everything comes to an end; time waits for no one. Although inherently diachronic (literally through time or broadly construed as a changing or evolving over time), the human condition is typified by a being “out of time,” that is, it is never quite in sync, as if human experience is structured by a chronological inconsistency. The fundamental temporality of the human condition serves as a “transitory a priori,” if you will, that is, as both a transcendental condition of being (we are all irremediably conditioned and structured by our temporality), yet for each of us it precisely remains our temporality. How I experience time is radically singularizing. I am in a unique relation to my past, present, and future, and as such what they signify and imply for me is different from—even incomparable to—what they mean for someone else. The unique way in which we undergo being fundamentally out of joint with time makes us who we are.

How may we understand this chronological inconsistency? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that we are simultaneously beings conditioned by our past that never quite seems to pass into oblivion but has a recalcitrant way of usurping our present, pulling us backward by conditioning the possibilities at our disposal in the present and, as such, in the future. This operation of the past in the present is not teleological, however, and does not map out a fated outcome. At the same time, we are projected into a future that announces the radically unknown and thereby constantly disrupts any sense of equilibrium in the present. The human existential condition is therefore split: split between an “always-too-lateness” for recovering the past that inevitably slips away from the present but which nevertheless conditions the possibilities at our disposal in the present; and “an-always-too-earliness” for anticipating the future that cannot be evaded or predicted, a future that unsettles the present since it is somehow not capable of remaining the “wholly-still-to-come.” 



Philosophy Panel: Ethics in an Epoch of Catastrophes

Direct URL: https://www.runtheworld.today/app/speaker-promotion/659038-90738-41328


RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS 2020-2021

Paper presentation: The Place of Eschatology in Levinas's Conceptualization of Time

Conference: Annual conference of South African Society of Phenomenology

Conference theme: Philosophy & Eschatology

Dates: 19-20 November 2021

Abstract: 

Reflection on eschatology – the last things for humankind, the end of the world, the final moment of history – at this particular historical juncture is undoubtedly apt, if unwittingly so. Oddly enough it is not the possibility of imminent nuclear armageddon, ecological collapse or five million children starving that brought humanity to a grinding halt, but a viral pandemic the likes of which we have not seen since the Spanish flu in 1918 that killed more than 50 million people around the world in just over a year. In fact,  given the aforementioned pre-existing crises, we did not need  a novel coronavirus to justify critical reflection on the eventual collapse of the world. The end has been imminent for quite some time. By its very definition eschatology is that paradoxical attempt to offer a way of thinking about that which is unthinkable.  Hence, there are countless different styles of eschatologies. For Levinas in Totality and Infinity [TI], as the conference call points out, eschatology provides the subject with the standpoint of justice beyond history. How should this “beyond history” be understood? In the preface to TI Levinas explains this as follows:

This ‘beyond’ the totality and objective experience is, however, not to be described in a purely negative fashion. It is reflected within experience. The eschatological, as the ‘beyond’ of history, draws beings out of the jurisdication of history and the future; it arouses them in and calls them forth to their full responsibility (TeI, xi; TI, 23).

For Levinas, this “full” responsibility – a responsibility even for the Other’s responsibility – is sustained by eschatology. It can perform this role only insofar as the eschatological, which Levinas describes as beyond the totality or beyond history, does not remain only history. “Eschatology “is a relationship with a surplus exterior to the totality, as though the objective totality did not fill out the true measure of being” (TeI, xi; TI, 22). The “beyond history” refers not to a Hinterwelt, but to that which interrupts history. It is that which history cannot recoup. Eschatology in Levinas is not a question of the future, but a disturbance or interruption of the present. Hence, Levinas expressly distinguishes what he calls “the eschatology of messianic peace” from teleology (TeI, x; TI, 22).

To extend “a reality beyond the sentence pronounced by history” into infinite time, Levinas appeals to “the fecundity of subjectivity by which the I survives itself” (TeI, 225; TI, 247), which leads into the discussion of paternity in the fourth section of TI. Levinas formulates the point more neutrally in “The Trace of the Other” (1974) when he evokes an “eschatology without hope for the self or without liberation in my time”. In “Violence and Metaphysics” (1964), Derrida takes Levinas’s phrase to mean an “eschatology which awaits nothing” and as such is “infinitely hopeless”, as if lack of hope for the self can be equated with hopelessness (Ed, 141; WD, 95). This obscures Levinas’s point, however. Levinas is concerned with what he calls a “time without me”, a “time beyond the horizon of my time” (EDE, 192; TO, 349). In other words, Levinas challenges Heidegger’s being towards death with the possibility of a passage to the time of the Other. Levinas says that before the accomplishment of history, there is “still time”, specifying later that this is “to still have time, to be against death” and to have “time to be for the Other, and this time of recover meaning despite death” (TeI, 212-213; TI, 235-236). 

In this contribution, I seek to critically interrogate the place of eschatology in Levinas’s conception of time . I contend that one cannot understand Levinas’s emphatic insistence in Totality and Infinity (1961), that eschatology sustains ethical responsibility independently from his conceptualization of time. What would be the take away of Levinas’s “eschatological vision” (TI, 23) for us today in the face of COVID-19?

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

ALBERT LITHULI CELEBRATION DAY 20 NOV 2021

Paper presentation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Legacy of Albert Lithuli with specific reference to his charismatic leadership style as theorized by Max Weber. 

Published here.

Abstract: 

In this contribution on this occasion in which we paid homage to Albert Lithuli, I offered some philosophical reflections on leadership inspired by Max Weber’s notion of charisma. I propose that this notion offers a heuristic lens through which we might gain some insight into Lithuli’s charismatic and bold traditional leadership style that captured the imagination of the disenfranchised African people of South Africa during the 1930s through to the 1960s. This was a period in South African history during which the African people were radically disempowered and they were led by a man – indeed in the thrall of a leader - to which they largely had no access. They had no access to their leader on account of successive bans imposed over many years on Lithuli by the then government designed to keep him away from larger South African centres and from all public meetings aimed at minimizing his influence and effectiveness as a leader.  What then accounts for the enigmatic influence of the leader, Chief Albert Lithuli?

>>> Click on the images above for more details and the full programme <<<


  

I published 'Neoliberal Governmentality, Knowledge Work and Thumos' in the Journal of Philosophical Economics. Download it here. 

Research has shown that the knowledge worker, the decisive driver of the knowledge economy, works increasingly longer hours. In fact, it would appear that instead of working to live, they live to work. There appears to be three reasons for this living-to-work development. First, the knowledge worker ‘has to’ on account of the pressure to become ever more efficient. Such pressure translates into internalized coercion in the case of the self-responsible knowledge worker. Secondly, working is constant, because the Internet and smart technologies and mobile devices have made it ‘possible’. It gives the worker the capacity and management omnipotent control. In the final instance, the neoliberal knowledge worker works all the time because s/he paradoxically ‘wants to’. It is a curious phenomenon, because this compulsive working is concomitant with a rise of a host of physical, emotional, and psychological disorders as well as the erosion of social bonds. The paradox is exacerbated by the fact that the knowledge worker does not derive any of the usual utilities or satisfactions associated with hard work. Elsewhere I have ascribed this apparent contradiction at the heart of the living-to-work phenomenon to the invisible thumotic satisfaction generated by knowledge work. In the present article, I argue that neoliberal governmentality has found a way to tether thumos directly to the profit incentive. I draw on Foucault’s 1978-1979 Collége de France lecture course in which he analysed neoliberal governmentality with specific emphasis on the work of the neoliberal theorist of human capital, Gary Becker.

 

I published 'The Feasibility of Resistance in the Workplace. A Critical Investigation' in The Indo-Pacific  Journal of Phenomenology. Download it here.

In this article, I undertake a critical interrogation of the complex relations of control operating in the contemporary workplace of the knowledge worker by drawing on Foucault’s theorisation of power and resistance. I plot the risks to which the knowledge worker are exposed, the conditions of possibility as well as the challenges that complicate productive resistance in the workplace. In the process, I make use of an array of existing scholarly research that utilises the Foucauldian framework of the relationality of power and develops some Foucauldian concepts further and applies them to our present context. 

 

 

I presented a paper at the International Conference, A Call for the Desuperiorization of Philosophy and the Foundation of Superaltern Studies.

11-13 August

Title of paper: "Whence the Western Superiority Complex?"

Download the programme here.

Click on the image below to read my abstract.

 

I published "The Relation Between Work and Thumos. A Critical Interrogation of the Motivation Behind Knowledge Work Compulsion" in Filosofija. Sociologija 32(3): 250-258. Download it here. 

In this brief paper, I attempt to come to a critical understanding of an intriguing phenomenon at the heart of a broader question, i.e. what are we today – as knowledge workers – in relation to our present understood as the globalizing neoliberal governmentality in which life is reduced to constant work under conditions of comprehensive control? Previous attempts to interrogate the nature of knowledge work and the knowledge worker have led me to conclude that these workers do not work to live, but live to work. An important reason seems to be that the neoliberal knowledge worker works all the times because s/he paradoxically wants to. This presents a paradox since the overinvestment in knowledge work does not appear to generate proportionate gains for the working subject. In my attempt to arrive at some kind of provisional explication for this phenomenon of compulsive work, I critically interrogate Fukuyama’s contention that work has a thumotic origin. To this end, I briefly discuss Plato’s conceptualization of thumos and Hegel’s understanding of the significance of labour.

 

I published "An Untimely Meditation on a Time 'Out of Sync'" in an edited volume (ed. Jaco Bernard-Naudé) titled, Decolonising the Neoliberal University. Law, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Student Protest (2021) (Routledge), pp. 111-121. Download it here. 

EXTRACT: Almost all of South Africa’s peoples came from elsewhere; almost none are left that can rightfully claim to be autochthonous. All of its peoples descended from the north either by land or by sea – all of them have blood on their hands, the colonialists’ hands undoubtedly the bloodiest. The first white settlers found the native hunter-gatherers and tribespeople under threat from the southwardly migrating Bantu peoples. In the subsequent colonial and apartheid pasts the hands of lighter hues were far bloodier than others, whereas in the more recent and immediate pasts, hands of all complexions have become indistinguishable in the dirt and disgrace that stain them. Mzansi[i] is not Graceland,[ii] to be sure; Mzansi is the place of incessant disgrace whose perpetrators belong to all races, all colours, all socio-economic positionalities.[iii] It is a place and time of pervasive civil disgruntlement with persistent inequality and injustice, a time of direct and structural violence, of stagnating social, political and economic developments, of irrational politics and the fragmentation of society.

[i] isiXhosa for the country of South Africa (literally meaning ‘south’). The isiZulu variation is Mzansti.

[ii] Paul Simon’s 1986 LP, Graceland was recorded in Johannesburg with local musicians during the time of the international anti-apartheid boycott. His hope was that art could transcend politics at the risk of undermining the anti-apartheid cause. The lyrics portray Graceland as a place of hospitality and of good will.

[iii] As poignantly depicted by J. M. Coetzee in his 1999 novel, Disgrace, which won the Booker Prize. The author was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature four years later.

 

On Friday 6 July 2021 I appeared on DSTV's programme on KYKNET titled, SPREEKKAMER upon invitation to speak about the role and place of Philosophy in the life of the individual today.

EXTRACT: Ons lewe in vreemde tye. In die tyd voor die pandemie was daar al ‘n grootskaalse fragmentering van betekenisgewende verwysingsraamwerke en waardestelsels wat as kompas in die lewens van individue gedien het. Dit gepaardgaande met die sekularisasie van groot dele van die bevolking veral jonger generasies asook die verwarring en die trauma wat die pandemie meegebring het, beteken dat meeste mense sonder soek na BETEKENIS of SIN. Godsdiens is nie meer die bron van rigting en betekenis waartoe meeste hulle wend nie. En daar buite vind ‘n mens ‘n proliferasie van autoriteite – waarseêrs, samesweringstoerieë, die teenstrydige insigte van sogenaamde kenners, om net ‘n paar voorbeelde te noem – wat net verwarring saai en meer vrae as antwoorde ontlok. Hoe maak ʼn mens nou eintlik sin van die sinnelose geweld, die irrasionele politiek, en die verbrokkeling van ons samelewing wat so kenmerkend is van ons tyd? Ek sou sê dit verklaar die vergrype van die fundamentalisme en populisme in groot dele van die wêreld vandag.

 To view the contribution click here.

 

On Friday 5 June 2021 I spoke to clinical psychologist, Dr Eugene Viljoen about "What happened to us since the start of the pandemic?" (in Afrikaans). It was hosted by the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns. The talk and the question and answer session is available on the SAAW&K's Facebook page (Videos). 

Dr Viljoen is ‘n praktiserende kliniese sielkundige met 30 jaar ervaring. Sy spreekkamer ervaringe het ‘n rykdom van insige opgelewer ten opsige van hoe die pandemie een en almal affekteer. L          uister saam na sy ondervindings in Hoë Sorg in hospitale waar hy berading voorsien het aan die personeel asook sy ervarings met mense soos ons – werkende mense wat die onsekerheid wat met die pandemie gepaard gaan  die hoof moet bied.

To view Dr Viljoen's, click here. 
I published the article, "Foucault's Analysis of Neoliberal Governmentality. Past Investigations and Present Applications" in Etica e Politica. Download it here.
This essay seeks to elucidate if and to what extent Foucault’s analyses of governmentality and neoliberalism as a form of governmentality in his 1978-1979 Collège de France lecture series can justifiably be used to come to a critical understanding of present-day neoliberalism(s). This has been a hotly debated issue among Foucault scholars based on what they consider to be ambiguities related to the normative status as well as the methodology of these lectures. In an attempt to contribute to this debate and to settle some of these concerns, I start by explicating how neoliberalism has variously been interpreted and specify what I understand “neoliberalism” to mean. Foucault’s notion of “governmentality” and his analyses of the mid-20th C versions of German and American neoliberal governmentalities presented in these lectures are contextualized in terms of his general thinking in the late 70s and early 80s specifically his insistence on the critical attitude as virtue and his methodological specifications of philosophical-historical research. I contend that although Foucault’s neoliberal governmentality lectures might be value-neutral, methodologically they remain a strategics of power/knowledge configurations imbued with the “critical attitude” that asserts the right not to be governed like that. It is therefore both justifiable and instructive to critically engage contemporary neoliberalisms through the lens of governmentality.
Interested in how I would summarize my research of 2020? Here I speak to my research for the annual University of Pretoria Research report.

On 7 October 2020 I presented “Lojale verset: Gedateerd of aktueel? NP van Wyk Louw in gesprek met Foucault” in an online symposium on NP van Wyk Louw 50 jaar na sy dood* which was organised by Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns 

*LINK takes you to the recording of the symposium.

See https://www.facebook.com/saakademie/

 

 

Together with Anusharani Sewchurran (DUT) I  presented “Archive Alive: The impact of Digitization” at the 14thNational Conference of the South African Journal of Art History [DIGITAL CONFERENCE: 25-27 September 2020]

 

“…if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’” (Orwell, 1984). Archiving is an age-old practice. Current possibilities afforded by digital humanities have been generative, as digitization is easier given user-friendly software and enhanced digital storage capacities. In the main, South African digital archivists focus on addressing historical invisibilities (Fourie and Green 2013; Du Plessis 2012-2014; Stellenbosch hidden year’s music project and UWC Mayibuye archives). Developing contextual archives is extremely important in South Africa, as it allows some measure of offsetting local epistemicide-type (Grosfoguel 2013) erasure that occurred during the colonial and apartheid eras. Our paper theorizes the node where Bakhtin’s heteroglossia (1981) meets Afrofuturism (Dery 1994), because we argue that memory (history/archiving) needs disruption, a war of counter-memory that can simultaneously leap forward and backward in time. Although heteroglossia was originally used to explore literature, it has become very useful as a means of creating multivocality. We look at how contextual archives may be created, using practices from museum theatre within a digital space

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Hofmeyr, A. B. 2020. “Faithful Defiance: Dated or Pertinent? N. P. van Wyk Louw in conversation with Foucault” (in Afrikaans). In Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe. 60(2): 322-336.*

In this essay, I argue that NP van Wyk Louw’s 1939 concept of “loyal resistance”, although a construct mobilised in the name of Afrikaner nationalism, retains critical significance for our time if read through the lens of Michel Foucault’s notion of “transgression”. Both “loyal resistance” and “transgression” announce a field of fruitful tension which promises the possibility of empowered action even in a time of utter impotence. Now is a time of power movements that engulf the globe and of corrupt local machinations of power. I contend that even at this historical juncture and in this “strange place”, it is possible to live “highly” if one lives in the spirit of continuous resistance.

Louw’s own time was a time of conflicting tensions. In the 1920s and 1930s he fought for the consolidation and ennoblement of Afrikaans (during this time his volume of essays, Lojale verset, [“loyal resistance”] was written); the 1950s were a period of political self-complacency, and the 1960s a seemingly unassailable hegemony. Lojale verset, like Liberale nasionalisme (“liberal nationalism”), is an expression of Louw’s central concern with the question of the continued existence of the Afrikaner people and is therefore inherently Afrikaner-centric. He was unequivocally an apartheid intellectual. In his time, Afrikaner identity was still in the making and Afrikaner nationalism not yet fully established. The 1930s were a time of unrest, white poverty and painful memories of defeat in the Anglo-Boer War. His thought is coloured by a political vacillation between, on the one hand, an unambivalent loyalty to his people and the unwavering belief in the separation of the races and, on the other hand, his resolve to tell the truth to the powers-that-be, his standing up for those wronged by the state and, on occasion, his defending segments of the broader black population. He was constantly caught in the double bind of “loyal” and “resistance”.

Against this backdrop, I attempt to place his notion of “loyal resistance” in critical dialogue with Foucault’s understanding of the Bataillian concept of “transgression” – a concept that likewise derives its critical force from the field of tension between limit and vio­ lation or taboo and transgression.

Both thinkers’ primary and undisputed source of inspiration was Nietzsche. Despite their divergent historical situatedness, both were critical of critique, and both embraced the promise of the Aufklärung, as conceived by Kant, as a “critical ontology of ourselves”. Both rejected self-complacency in favour of self-overcoming. I therefore contend that the two thinkers can justifiably be brought into dialogue without resorting to selective and misleading reading strategies.

For Foucault, transgression is inherently about resistance to stifling limits imposed by power structures without exceeding those limits. To exceed limits would be to end existence, existence that is in itself finite. Transgression is therefore an admission that defiance would be impossible without a measure of loyalty to that which one resists. His entire intellectual, political and ethical project is devoted to finding ways in which the limits to which individuals are subjected can be resisted; to transform critique levelled in the form of an inevitable limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression.

Louw and Foucault find common ground in the undeniably Nietzschean belief in the empowering force of dangerous, destructive thought or critique; “thought of the limit” that saves humanity from perhaps the greatest danger to spiritual life – the snare of self-complacency and self-assured intolerance. According to Louw, “great critique” of this kind is a condemnation of one’s own complicity in the sins of one’s people, it is an atonement and a cleansing. Both Louw and Foucault held the conviction that although the individual is an intrinsic part of his or her own community and history, he or she has the ability to change his or her mode of belonging to that community and history.

A critical ontology is therefore an analysis of the limits of one’s being, not in the sense of an essential, unchanging being, but contingent, multiple and fluid ways of being human subjects. It entails a limit attitude or a historico­critical attitude that is experimental, local and specific.

If we therefore reconsider “loyal resistance” from the perspective of “transgression”, it appears that resistance is indubitably connected to loyalty, perhaps even impossible without it.

 

Hofmeyr, A. B. 2020. “The Meaning of Trauma for the Future. Reflections from a (Post-)Colonial Present”. In Imafidon, E. (Ed.) Handbook of African Philosophy of Difference. Cham: Springer, pp. 1-14.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04941-6_21-1

 A critical interrogation of who we are in this particular present has always been a crucial and inherent part of philosophical discourse. This contribution reflects upon the (post-)colonial South African present from a genealogical and psychoanalytic point of view. It sets out from the Nietzschean assertion that historical memory should first and foremost serve life. Hence the importance of a certain measure of forgetfulness in relation to the past, especially the traumatic past. Apart from conscious forgetfulness, Freud comprehensively theorized the impact of unconsciously repressed trauma on the present. It was also Freud who made dreams into the mirror and meaning of the unconscious. For him, dreams were specifically the fulfilment of desire. For Foucault and Lacan, it is much more complex than that for, as the former argues, the presence of meaning in the dream is not meaning making itself fully evident – it offers meaning while ephemeralizing it (Foucault 1954). Drawing on genealogy and psychoanalysis as diagnostic toolkits, I will attempt to understand what trauma is to the future as a means to theorize subject-formation in this strange place that is the (post-)colonial, post-apartheid South African present.

Visit the Springer website here to order a copy.

 

 

Hofmeyr, A. B. 2021. “The Strange Face & Form of the Stranger in Levinas”. In Bartlett, C. (Ed.) Rethinking the Notion of the Stranger. Boston, MA: Brill, pp. 309-333. Download it here.

 

 

What does the notion of the ‘stranger’ signify in Emmanuel Levinas’s thought? Elsewhere I have argued that one finds an opposition between the alterity of transcendence and the alterity of strangers in his thought. The alterity of ‘strangers’ referred to in that context denotes the concrete worldly stranger that the self does not identify with – be it on account of race, gender, sexual orientation, religious or political conviction, and the like. However, in Levinas’s work one also finds that the ‘stranger’ signifies a conceptually complex and multi-dimensional construct that exceeds and supplements its signfication as ‘not one of us’. 

The opposition between the alterity of transcendence and the alterity of horizontality may be unpacked by recasting it in the mould of the antithetical couplet of the ‘face’ and the ‘form’ of the stranger in Levinas. In other words, the notion of the stranger appears in different guises in Levinas’s work, different guises that imply divergent obligations as well as rights. Paradoxically, as is well-known, for Levinas, the ‘face’ of the stranger is faceless, without features, not flesh, but the absolute alterity of transcendence, that is, the Other. The form of the stranger, on the other hand, is precisely endowed with an incarnated recognizable face that belongs to the mundane historical world, revealed in being horizontally. This apparent opposition is further complicated by the fact that the face cannot be separated from its form. The Stranger as Other is the Stranger as another person that is ‘not one of us’. The absolute Other addresses us through the incarnated other person. As we shall see, on occasion Levinas himself gets caught in this double-bind, a snare that raises questions about the status of his ethical metaphysics. In the following contribution, I endeavour to excavate what exactly the notion of the stranger signifies in Levinas’s thought, first as face and then as form. In the fourth conclusive part of the essay, I critically reflect on the implications of the fact that the face and the form of the stranger are in fact inseparable.  First, however, I want to take a step back from Levinas’s own analyses of the complex relationship between the stranger and the O/other and consider several models of this relationship that will enable us to situate Levinas’s own analyses more precisely.

 

 

Hofmeyr, A. B. & Sewchurran, A. 2020. “A Critical Reflection in Digital Disruption in Journalism and Journalism Education”, In Acta Academica: Critical Views on Society, Culture and Politics 52(2): 181-203. 

In this essay, we critically reflect on digital disruption in journalism and journalism education with specific focus on the South African context. After contextualising the problematics in terms of what Castells terms the “information technology revolution”, we define data visualisation and survey the existing literature on the subject. The history of journalism education in South Africa is briefly revisited before assessing the current state of the profession in the country. The dangers posed by digital visualisation to the core ethos and function of journalism as a vehicle in the service of contributing to a resilient democracy is thrown into relief by utilising critical concepts from the work of Foucault, Habermas and Fuchs. We subsequently cite a few examples of the undisclosed bias inherent in data visualisation. In conclusion, we consider the feasibility and potential effects of the necessity to adopt data visualisation techniques on journalism in South Africa.

 

 

Research Highlights 2017-2019

 

- Publication of special theme issue of the Journal of Humanities (Volume 57, No. 1), celebrating the career of retired colleague, Marinus Schoeman.

Theme: Philosophy as Analysis of the Present. The Diagnostic and Critical Function of Philosophy

Guest Editor: Benda Hofmeyr

Contributors: Philippe van Haute, Paul van Tongeren, Marieke Borren, Matthias Pauwels, Catherine Botha, Marinus Schoeman, et al.

 

 

- Paper presentation at the 4th Annual International Conference of the Centre for Phenomenology in South Africa, 24-26 March 2017, Cintsa, SA

Theme: Justice and the Other

 

- Co-presentation of First Bilateral Summer School at the University of Konstanz, Germany with Prof Albrecht Korschorke (Konstanz) and Prof Stephan Mühr (Pretoria)

The Summer School took place 5-12 June 2017 and seven students from the University of Pretoria participated. Their countries of origin are diverse including Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia, Nigeria, and of course South Africa. For many it was their very first visit to Europe. The theme of the Summer School was 'Myths of Origin'. The Summer School was organized under the auspices of the collaboration between the MA African European Cultural Relations Programme (UP) and the Masterstudiengang Kulturelle Grundlagen Europas.

 

 

 

 

A Second bi-lateral Summer School (9-14 April 2018) on “Narratives of Origin and Founding Myths” were hosted at the University of Pretoria as part of the ongoing cooperation between the MA programme “Cultural Foundations of Europe” at the University of Konstanz and the MA programme “African-European Cultural Relations” at the University of Pretoria.

Both schools were organised and led by Prof. Albrecht Koschorke (University of Konstanz), Prof. Stephan Mühr (UP) and Prof Benda Hofmeyr (UP). The participants included 10 students (which included doctoral students) from the University of Konstanz and 11 students and doctoral candidates from the University of Pretoria. Travel expenses were borne by the International Office of the University of Konstanz and the Erasmus+ programme, and the costs of room and board and a field trip for the students from the University of Konstanz were covered by the University of Pretoria. 

 

 


- Paper presentation at the Humanities for the Environment Conference, an international conference hosted by the University of Pretoria from 4-8 August 2017

- Theme: EARTHKEEPING

- Paper presented: The Tragedy of the Commons Revisited

Find the Call and the Programme here 

 

 - In 2018, Benda was elected to serve as member of the Expert Panel Pool of the Flaamse Wetenschappelijk Onderzoeksraad (VWO), which is the Belgian equivalent of the (South African) National Research Foundation. Since 2020, she serves on the Expert Panel Ethics & Philosophy as one of 12 international members considered to be experts in their field. 

 

- Benda received her second consequtive NRF (National Research Foundation) rating (2018-2023).

 



 

 

- In 2018, Benda secured a contract for a monograph from Rowman & Littlefield International academic publishers. The scheduled date for publication is end of 2021. The title of the book is Foucault & Governmentality. Living to Work in the Age of Control. 

 

Benda has had a number of opportunities to present her ideas on this topic and related arguments at the University of Pretoria, the University of Johannesburg and the University of Kwazulu Natal as an invited speaker at the latter's Philosophy colloquium series.

 

 

 

 

- Paper presentation at the 6th Annual International Conference of the Centre for Phenomenology in South Africa, Cintsa, South Africa held on 13-14 June 2019, titled “Understanding Laughter in Ernest from a Philosophical Perspective”.

- Theme: Philosophy of Laughter

- Call

-About the Centre for Phenomenology in South Africa

- Title of presentation: 

Understanding Laughter in Earnest with the Help of Few Philosophers

What makes something as serious as Earnest so hilariously funny? Oscar Wilde’s ‘Trivial Comedy for Serious People’, titled, The Importance of Being Earnest continues to surprise the present-day reader with its rib-tickling buffoonery. Even the contemporary reader – hardened by slapstick of the most atrociously canned variety and the side-splitting stand-up tricks of  the Trevor Noahs –  cannot help but burst into involuntary laughter in response to this superbly executed little play.

At around the same date of its original publication, at the end of the 19th C, Henri Bergson tackled the serious task of a philosophical analysis of laughter, in particular the laughter caused by the comic. Put differently, he wanted to study what makes something so funny that one cannot help but burst out laughing.

In this paper, I put Bergson’s theory, which he considered to be  quite a novel approach to the study of laughter in the history of Western philosophy since the Ancients, to the test by using it as a heuristic tool to understand how Wilde’s characters manage so effortlessly to be so delightfully funny. Pitting Bergson’s analytical prowess against Wilde’s comic genius yields, as it turns out, surprising insights into the paradoxical machinations of the comic. Bataille argues that when we laugh, we laugh at being. This is precisely what Wilde’s play illustrates performatively and Bergson’s analyses attempts to unravel theoretically. Although Bataille was not very amused by Bergson’s theorization of the comic, both share the conviction that laughter cannot be understood reductively as it is inherently a thing of human life (Bergson) and death (Bataille). ‘When you laugh’, writes Bataille, ‘you perceive yourself to be the accomplice of a destruction of what you are‘ (Inner Experience, 192). Similarly, the play’s punning title neatly captures ‘life’ and ‘destroys’ it by exploding the dominant Victorian moral principle that sincerity is its own reward, for in the end, it becomes clear that all of the protagonists maintain fictitious personae to escape the burdensome social obligations that accompany upper-class life in London.

 

 

Publications

Books

 2013 (Ed. with Paul Hendrikse). Inventory of Possible Narrations. Amsterdam, NL: Onomatopee. PAGES: 180. ISBN: 978-90-78454-48-9 

More information about this volume can be found on my News page

2009  (Ed.) Radical Passivity. Rethinking Ethical Agency in Levinas. Dordrecht, NL: Springer. Book Series: Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy. PAGES: 166. ISBN: 978-1-4020-9346-3

Download Introduction • Download Chapter 1

 2008 (Ed.) The Wal-Mart Phenomenon. Resisting Neo-Liberal Power through Art, Design & Theory. Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie Press. PAGES: 160. ISBN: 978-907207629-8. Download

 2005 Ethics and Aesthetics in Foucault and Levinas. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen (Print Partners Ipskamp). PAGES: 278. ISBN: 90-9019341-3

Chapters in books

2021. “Subjectivity in Need of Reconceptualization? The Neoliberal Mediation of Working Existence in the Network Society”. In Olivier, G. (Ed.) Online Civilization. Leiden: Brill, page numbers not yet available. Download.

2021. “An Untimely Meditation on a Time ‘Out of Sync’”. In Naude, J. & Rose, J. (Eds.) The South African Legacy. London: Polity Press, page numbers not yet available. Download.

2020 “The Strange Face & Form of the Stranger in Levinas”. In Bartlett, C. (Ed.) Rethinking the Notion of the Stranger. Boston MA: Brill, page numbers not yet available. Download

2020 (contribution to book). "The Meaning of Trauma for the Future. Reflections from a (Post-)Colonial Present". In Imafidon, E. (Ed.) Handbook of African Philosophy of Difference: The Othering of the Other. Springer (forthcoming) Download 

2018 (contribution to book) “Levinas and the Possibility of Dialogue with Strangers'". In Winkler, R. (Ed.) Identity & Difference. London: Routledge, pp.85-101. Download

2015 (contribution to book) “Levinas and the (Post-)Colonial”.  In Imafidon, E. (Ed.) The Ethics of Subjectivity. Perspectives Since the Dawn of Modernity USA: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 280-295.

2015 (contribution to book) “The Ethics and Politics of Self-Formation in Foucault”. In Imafidon, E. (Ed.) The Ethics of Subjectivity. Perspectives Since the Dawn of Modernity. USA: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 126-143 (reprinted upon request and with permission from the journal).

2009 (contribution to book)  “Introduction: ‘Passivity as Necessary Condition for Ethical Agency?’”. In Hofmeyr, A. B. (Ed.) Radical Passivity. Rethinking Ethical Agency in Levinas. Dordrecht, NL: Springer. Book Series: Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, pp. 1-11.

2009 (contribution to book) “Chapter I: ‘Radical Passivity: Ethical Problem or Solution?’”. In Hofmeyr, A. B. (Ed.) Radical Passivity. Rethinking Ethical Agency in Levinas. Dordrecht, NL: Springer. Book Series: Library of Ethics and Applied, pp. 15-30.

 2009 (contribution to book) “The Future that Death/Other gives: The Functioning of the Veil in Levinas”. In What does the Veil Know?  Eds. Eva Meyer & Vivian Liska. Zürich: Edition Voldemeer. Vienna: Springer (pp. 71-82). Download

2008 (contribution to book)  “Introduction: ‘Save Money. Live Better?’”. In Hofmeyr, A. B. (Ed.) The Wal-Mart Phenomenon. Resisting Neo-Liberal Power through Art, Design & Theory. Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie Press, pp. 11-30.

2008 (contribution to book) “Chapter III: ‘The Wal-mart Phenomenon: Power /Knowledge/ Resistance’”. In Hofmeyr, A. B. (Ed.) The Wal-Mart Phenomenon. Resisting Neo-Liberal Power through Art, Design & Theory. Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie Press, pp. 65-106.

2008 (contribution to book)   “The Dystopian Reality of the Neo-Liberal Utopia” (Dutch translation). In Liberticide, eds. Robin Brouwer. Amsterdam: Ijzer, pp. 138-159. Download

 2007 (contribution to book)  “Artistic Over-Identification: Overrated or Underestimated. A Philosophical Revaluation”. In Cultural Activism Today: Strategies of Over-Identification. (Eds.). Gideon Boie & Matthias Pauwels. Rotterdam: Episode.

 2007  (contribution to book)   “The Art of Revolution”. In Revolution is Not a Garden Party. (Eds.) Maya and Reuben Fowkes. Manchester: Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design (MIRIAD), Manchester Metropolitan University, pp. 66-71. Download

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