In 1843 Karl Marx came up with a phrase that turned out to be one of the most enduring in all Marxist thought: religion is the opium of the masses. With this phrase, Marx attempted to convey his belief that religion was invented by man to provide him with some consolation for his suffering and […]
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 inNews/Politics
What the frack?
The word gives me the creeps. Starting with its eerie “fr” alliteration (like the hiss of a dangerous beast), leading through to its flat “a”, which sounds like something is stuck in your throat, ending in a hideous “ck” sound as if trying to spit out, but something is in the way, blocking the deposit […]
Posted inGeneral
The heteronormative observer — the Concourt in Le Roux v Dey
Is it defamatory, and therefore illegal, to publish an image depicting a person who claims that he is heterosexual, as gay? This week the Constitutional Court apparently answered the above question in the negative. The facts before the court were as follows: two schoolboys published a computer-created image in which the faces of the deputy […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Notes on the revolution
It is intriguing that in the debates surrounding the ongoing revolutions in the Arab world, commentators have by and large ignored one of the most controversial post-war works on revolution: Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution published in 1963. Arendt opens the book stating that wars and revolutions determined the physiognomy of the twentieth century and constituted […]
Posted inGeneral
Postmodernism and legal education
In 1997 a man by the name of Dennis Arrow published an assemblage of more than 200 pages of text in the Michigan Law Review under the title “Pomobabble: Postmodern Newspeak and Constitutional ‘Meaning’ for the Uninitiated”. Although the text claimed to be defining postmodernism and legal postmodernist jargon, it did everything but that. Instead, […]
Posted inNews/Politics
What is ideology?
The recent press coverage of my colleague, professor Pierre de Vos’s critique of a speech by advocate Jeremy Gauntlett, made me think about the question of ideology again. In his critique, De Vos writes: “For me what would be interesting and worthwhile would be to have a conversation (or even a heated argument) about the […]
Posted inGeneral
Living reconciliation II
In the latter half of 2006 former chief justice Pius Langa delivered an address titled “Transformative Constitutionalism” at the University of Stellenbosch law faculty. In this address he described a link between transformation and reconciliation, stating: “Transformation is not something that occurs only in courtrooms, parliaments and governmental departments. Social transformation is indispensable to our […]
Posted inGeneral
Living reconciliation
“The face of the other: Human dialogue at Solms Delta and the meaning of moral imagination” was the title of Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Cape Town on November 11 2010. Gobodo-Madikizela is best known for her book A human being died that night: a story of forgiveness, in which […]