‘An Answer to the Question: What is [ubuntu]?'

Abstract

First circumscriptionAn abstract, like the introduction, stands in a problematic relationship to the text. Written last but read first, it seeks to capture the essence of a text or at least, to draw the reader’s attention to main and supportive arguments. But arguments don’t necessarily unfold in terms of premises and conclusions, supportive and main arguments. When they don’t, the idea of prefacing a text with an abstract and introduction becomes problematic. There is nothing new in this. Many philosophers, Hegel and Derrida to name but two, have written extensively on this question. That said, it gains renewed actuality for a paper that argues, among many other things of equal importance, for a distinction between the work of ubuntu and the discourse on ubuntu. The former is irreducible to the latter in the sense that, given the discursive invention of Africa, it will always remain heterogenous to our attempts to name it. We can at best circumscribe this difference and all the attempts we have historically made, and must in future continue to make, at framing the debate in order to speak of ubuntu. What is to be ‘abstracted’ from such an argument is at best the pure, self-conscious logic of circumscription - of which the ‘abstract’ will be but the first frame, the epigraph inscribed at the beginning the second, and so forth.