Reading for hope: a conversation about texts and method

Abstract

In a conversation about their shared interests, the authors discuss methodology, reading strategies, and comparative historiographies relating to the recuperation of residues of hope that linger in the wake of failed revolutionary projects. The conversation draws connections between people power (poder popular) in Chile during the Allende era and ideals of participatory democracy circulating in South Africa concurrently (during the so-called Durban moment), discusses in detail the work of Nadine Gordimer, considers the politics of contemporary South African activism, and weighs the usefulness of the insights of thinkers from Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin to David Scott and Achille Mbembe.

Keywords:

• Revolution
• hope
• disappointment
• reading
• South Africa
• Chile

Notes

¹ Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia.”

² The years between 1970 and 1974 in Durban constitute what Tony Morphet in retrospect would name “the Durban moment”; the period saw Turner’s writing of The Eye of the Needle, Steve Biko’s formulation of Black Consciousness, Dunbar Moodie’s investigation of Afrikaner power, and Mike Kirkwood’s reinterpretation of South African literature, together with the unexpected and “revelatory” 1973 Durban strikes. Morphet, “Brushing history against the grain,” 209 ff.

³ Del Fierro, El Complejo: Territorio liberado; José Bravo quoted in Baca, Liberating Forestry, 85.

⁴ See Plaice, “Translators’ Introduction,” xxvii.

⁵ Benjamin, “On the Concept,” 395. In Zohn’s 1968 translation, “time filled by the presence of the now” (Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 252–53). The translations credited to Zohn in Illuminations (“Theses”) and in the authoritative Selected Writings (“On the Concept”) differ in a number of respects.

⁶ Benjamin, “On the Concept,” 397.

⁷ Ibid., 389, 390.

⁸ Ibid., 395, 396; see also “Paralipomena,” 403.

⁹ Benjamin, “On the Concept,” 402, 396.

¹⁰ Benjamin, “Theses,” 254; Benjamin, “On the Concept,” 396.

¹¹ Bloch, “On the Present in Literature,” 130.

¹² Gordimer, “Living in the Interregnum,” 262.

¹³ Gordimer, No Time Like the Present, 72.

¹⁴ Van der Vlies, Present Imperfect, 5–6.

¹⁵ Ibid., 5.

¹⁶ See Nzimande, “What is the National Democratic Revolution?”

¹⁷ Benjamin, “Paralipomena,” 402.

¹⁸ Bloch, “On the Present in Literature,” 133. I should note here that although few South African scholars of the literary have, to my knowledge, engaged with Bloch, the exceptions are Russell Samolsky in Apocalyptic Futures, and Jennifer Wenzel in Bulletproof.

¹⁹ Gordimer, “Where Do Whites,” 34.

²⁰ Gordimer, The Lying Days, 258.

²¹ For instance, in Gordimer, “What Being a South African Means to Me,” 227.

²² In an interview, Gordimer states: “I used to regard myself as a liberal, but now I regard myself as a radical.” Cassere, “Diamonds Are Polished—So Is Nadine,” 55.

²³ Gordimer, Occasion for Loving, 321.

²⁴ Gordimer, “Speak out: the Necessity for Protest,” 97.

²⁵ Gordimer “What Being a South African Means to Me,” 279. By superseding her position, I mean in a purely dialectical (as Aufhebung) manner: her position in 1959 is fused and informed by her later stance in 1971, making her return to seemingly similar conclusions as in 1959, yet with another, altered problem at hand.

²⁶ Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian,” 37.

²⁷ Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”, 395. See Comay’s Benjaminian reading of Hegel in Mourning Sickness. Gordimer’s notion of a “second birth” could arguably be paralleled to Hegel’s notion of the present as birth-time: “The gradual crumbling of that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world” (142).

²⁸ For his description of Klee’s Angelus Novus, see the ninth thesis in Benjamin, “On the Concept,” 392.

²⁹ “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.” Gramsci, Selections from the Prison, 276.

³⁰ On Cronin’s engagement with Benjamin, see Van der Vlies, “An Interview with Jeremy Cronin,” 526–27. See also Van der Vlies, Present Imperfect, 6–7.

³¹ Benjamin, “Paralipomena,” 404.

³² David Scott, Refashioning Futures, 18.

³³ Ibid., 17.

³⁴ The concurrent emergence of the Coloniality/Modernity-collective’s writing from a Latin American horizon might be seen as yet another answer to the question of what comes after postcoloniality. And perhaps, more daringly, the terrorist attack on 9/11 2001 (which in effect would obliterate the old war on terrorism, rooted in 9/11 1973 with the coup in Chile and the imposition and trial of a new neoliberal order).

³⁵ Scott, Omens of Adversity, 5.

³⁶ Ibid., 2.

³⁷ Ibid., 5.

³⁸ Ibid., 2. See Williams, Modern Tragedy, 76, 82. For more detailed engagement with Scott, see Van der Vlies, Present Imperfect, 15–19, 47–49.

³⁹ Mbembe, “African Modes of Self-Writing,” 243.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 251; Scott, Omens, 3.

⁴¹ Scott, Omens of Adversity, 13.

⁴² Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory From the South, 152.

⁴³ Mbembe, “Achille Mbembe on The State of South African Political Life,” online.

⁴⁴ Gqola, “The difficult task of normalizing freedom,” 62. See further Van der Vlies, Present Imperfect, 154–6.

⁴⁵ See Nuttall, Entanglement; see Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 14–15.

⁴⁶ Wenzel, Bulletproof, 189. See Van der Vlies, Present Imperfect, 170–71.

⁴⁷ Van der Vlies, Present Imperfect, 151–72.

⁴⁸ Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” 247–48.

⁴⁹ Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 3, quoting from Benjamin’s Gesammelte Briefe, 182.

⁵⁰ Marx, “A Contribution,” 248.

⁵¹ Khatib, “The Messianic Without Messianism”, 3.

⁵² Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 91.

⁵³ White, Metahistory, 286.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 282.

⁵⁵ Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment”, 21. The date of this fragment is disputed, either around 1920–1921 (Scholem’s view) or 1937–1938 (Adorno’s view). Today, it is believed that it was written around 1920, that is, before Benjamin’s engagement with Marx.

⁵⁶ Benjamin, “N, on the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress,” [N5a,2], 467.

⁵⁷ Ibid., [N8,1], 471.