When Time Gives. Reflections on Two Rivonia Renegades

Abstract

This essay engages with aspects of the lives of two key figures in the Rivonia trial. The first is Nelson Mandela, one of the accused. The second is Bram Fischer, leader of the defence team. The engagement with Mandela and Fischer will unfold in five sections under the following headings: Mandela and the Laws of Reflection; The Performative, the Constative and the Impossible Foundation; The Gift and the Secret; The Renegade Moment; Bram Fischer’s Madness. The first section consists of a re-reading of the essay Jacques Derrida published on Nelson Mandela when Mandela was still in jail. It engages with the way Derrida situates Mandela within the play of the laws of reflection and how he then moves to contemplate a Mandela who cannot be reduced to or captured and imprisoned by these laws of reflection. The second section moves on to two further themes that Derrida raises in the essay on Mandela, the relation between the performative and the constative in speech acts and the impossibility of foundations or origins. These are key themes in Derrida’s thought to which he returns many times in his work. The engagement with these themes in the Mandela essay is significant because of the way it highlights the relation between these themes in Derrida’s work, but also because of the way it allows one to trace the boundaries of speculative reflection and to follow a trace to the Mandela who can ultimately not be contained by these boundaries of reflection. The third section marks these boundaries of reflection with reference to the secret and the gift or the secret of the gift. The concepts of the secret and the gift play a pivotal role in the strand or tradition of philosophical thought that first became known as phenomenology and later as deconstruction. They stand in as reflection-resistant or reflection-resisting articulations of the boundaries of epistemological and normative reflection on and through which existing worlds and their pro- and inhibiting confines are constructed. As such they also point us to a freedom beyond these pro- and inhibiting confines of existing worlds. This freedom cannot be named, but a certain allusion to it is possible through invocation of moments of sheer madness that resist, challenge and rebel against all normative conceptions and ideals of freedom. The fourth section describes these moments as renegade moments, moments that differ from revolutionary moments because they cannot be reduced to the endorsement, postulation and revolving of ancient normative conceptions – the hallmark of revolutions according to Arendt. Ultimately, they simply erupt as instances of an absolute freedom to act. ‘Madness beyond insanity’, Foucault calls this freedom. The section on the Secret and of the Gift (third section) already invokes a remarkable renegade moment in the life of Mandela. The last section, ‘Bram Fischer’s Madness,’ turns to a life that was ultimately consumed by a renegade moment. In view of Arendt’s assessment of revolutions in terms of the revolving or recycling of ancient normative ideals, renegade moments should be considered as the real or essential inauguration of the newness and new worlds that Arendt’s reflections on revolutions and politics also contemplate profoundly. The renegade moment – in the instant of its withdrawal into the madness of absolute freedom – is not concerned with ancient norms and values. It is not concerned. It is simply and exclusively an eruption of unprecedented action. It is the eruption of the unprecedented. If at all related to revolutions, they might be considered as the very seeds from which revolutions ultimately spring. But they ultimately also withdraw from revolutions – and the stale language of revolutions – to return to that which always occurs much earlier. They withdraw to the absolutely unprecedented opening or giving of time from which new times and new worlds derive in the very final or first analysis. They take part in the pure performative, the pure act of withdrawal that ‘is’ or ‘gives’ time and through which time gives itself to new times and new worlds by withdrawing from them.