Complicities

Abstract

introduction complicity, the intellectual, apartheidEven if all forms of complicity are not equivalent, they are irreducible.-jacques derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question After apartheid, the question of complicity is unavoidable-not simply because it is necessary to know whose resources gave apartheid life, nourished and defended it, but also because apartheid, by its very nature, occasions a questioning of and thinking about complicity itself.As a variegated set of policies and practices, apartheid may have been and may still be, exemplary for provoking a response from the intellectual that could not simply be of opposition.This idea is twofold.If apartheid was a system of enforced social separation, its proponents were never able to realize the essential apartness they proclaimed as their brainchild's archē and télos, its originary law and ultimate end.∞ When, in diverse ways, its opponents a≈rmed an essential human joinedness against apartheid, they thus proclaimed not only the evil of this thinking but also its untruth.At the same time, like its dissenting adherents, opponents found themselves implicated willy-nilly in its thinking and practices and shaped their responsibility accordingly.Thus, beyond its local existence, the obsession of apartheid with separateness may be exemplary for causing the intellectual to emerge as a figure whose re-

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