This contribution offers a careful but critical reading of Johan van der Walt’s theory of post-apartheid law as sacrifice and social struggle. By placing a theoretical emphasis on the inevitability of violence and the impossibility of love, Van der Walt’s thesis risks denying the possibility of thinking the world in a different, way. In order to reconceive the terms of community and horizontality in post-apartheid South Africa, there is a need to move beyond thinking the world as constructed according to tension, conflict and self-preservation at the expense of understanding and compassion. In developing a critique of law as sacrifice, I utilise Panu Minkkinen’s call for justice as the beyond of law that goes beyond the mere battle for recognition. I also address his view that the unappeasable desire of metaphysics entails the recognition that there is hope for the future and the recovering of transcendence as otherness. Secondly, I use Louis Wolcher’s work on Zen Buddhism to argue that any obsession with conceptual purity, as is glimpsed in Van der Walt’s work, ignores the impossibility of setting down the immutable and universal truth for all time. In other words, however attractive a theory of law as sacrifice may be, it is only one perspective amongst many others. Lastly, I contrast Van der Walt’s work with that of Luce Irigaray, and in particular her formulation of ‘horizontal transcendence’ that makes possible relations ‘between two’.
目次
Abstract 253 Keywords 253 INTRODUCTION: SACRIFICE AND DISGRACE 254 A CAREFUL READING OF VAN DER WALT’S POST-APARTHEID THEORY OF LAW 258 THINKING IT OTHERWISE 265 THE POSSIBILITY OF HORIZONTAL TRANSCENDENCE 267 BEYOND A THEORY OF SACRIFICE 270
