Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. Benjamin Franklin

Friday, December 27, 2013

Between/Beyond Derrida and Mandela: Reading our fractured societies

The ‘meeting’ of Derrida and Mandela is intersection of two events, two sides of our political reflection; this ‘meeting’ is a meeting of experience and reflection in all possible sense….

By Musab Iqbal

World Bulletin - 27 December 2013

In just less then ten year’s time Nelson Mandela left this world, after Jacques Derrida. Derrida met Mandela in 1998, eight years after his release from the prison but Derrida’s interest in him was from his prison days. Derrida edited a volume with Mustapha Tlili entitled ‘For Nelson Mandela’, and he pays tribute in the chapter “The laws of reflection: Nelson Mandela, in admiration” raising some important question and reflecting on the nature of Mandela’s politics and it’s importance in our time, in 1986.

In this very moment when we see the world with grief paying homage to great leader of liberation; from America to Syria, from Ukraine to Bangladesh we see societies struggling within for their liberation and freedom. In times of extreme crisis we see our societies divided like never before, violent towards their other, lacking sheer sense of hospitality, devoid of forgiveness. This is in this very time Mandela’s death remind us of our lost cause, his ‘meeting’ (meeting of two streams) with Derrida forces us to think on some fundamental question of otherness, violence, law, forgiveness, hospitality.

Derrida was impossibly obscure, complex in his arguments, a philosopher of other side of reason and a laborious thinker while Nelson Mandela was a lawyer, political activist, man of action, social visionary. The ‘meeting’ of Derrida and Mandela is intersection of two events, two sides of our political reflection; this ‘meeting’ is a meeting of experience and reflection in all possible sense.

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