Clarkson - Drawing the Line: Toward an Aesthetics of Transitional Justice

DRAWING THE LINE

just ideas

transformative ideals of justice in ethical and political thought

series editors

Drucilla Cornell

Roger Berkowitz

DRAWING THE LINE

TOWARD AN AESTHETICS OF TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

Carrol Clarkson

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW YORK
2014

Copyright 2014 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clarkson, Carrol, 1968

Drawing the line : toward an aesthetics of transitional justice / Carrol Clarkson.

page cm. (Just ideas)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-5415-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8232-5416-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Justice in literature. 2. Law and aesthetics. 3. Law and ethics. 4. Transitional justiceSouth Africa. 5. Authors, South AfricanAesthetics. I. Title.

PN56.L33C58 2014

809.933554dc23

2013009209

Printed in the United States of America

16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

In memory of my father, Robert Cox, who always drew the line,
and my mother, Marguerite, who always encouraged me to draw

Contents

Acknowledgments

My first thanks go to Peter Fitzpatrick and Drucilla Cornell: At Peters generous invitation I presented a paper at a Critical Legal Studies Conference in Johannesburg in 2003. My disciplinary base is in English literature, but in preparing for this conference, new lines of enquiry were suddenly open to me, and I realized that I could participate in different kinds of conversationconversations to cherish for a lifetime. It is thanks to Drucilla Cornells revelatory suggestion that I could see my way clear to integrating a few articles I had written into a larger book project. Drucilla has been a continual source of encouragement and inspiration to me, often at critical moments.

My heartfelt thanks go out to those with whom I have had life-enhancing conversations while writing this book: Emilios Christodoulidis, Scott Veitch, Johan van der Walt, Oren Ben-Dor, Hans Lindahl, Bert van Roermund, Natalie Pollard, Louis Blond, and Willem Boshoff. The artwork on the cover of this book is by Willem Boshoff. Thank you to Franois du Bois and Antje du Bois-Pedain, who invited me to write a chapter for their book Justice and Reconciliation in Post-Apartheid South Africa: This is the essay in which I first started thinking about the concept of drawing the line. Special thanks, too, to Kjetil Enstad, who invited me to present a keynote address at the conference Crossing Boundaries, which was hosted by the School of Advanced Study at the University of London in September 2009. I received invaluable input from Kjetil and other participants at this conference and would especially like to thank Hillis Miller for memorable conversations about drawing lines, about Thomas Hardy, and about the lifelines and deadlines of scholarly writing.

In April 2012 I had the privilege of visiting the University of Stockholm for a month. In the seminar series I presented I had the opportunity to speak about the ideas in this book; I benefited enormously from conversations with colleagues and students who attended the seminars. My special thanks go to Claudia Egerer for her extraordinary hospitality and generous intellectual engagement, to Stefan Helgesson, and to Richard Begam, who was visiting the University of Stockholm at the time.

Alex dAngelo, subject librarian at the University of Cape Town, helped me to track references and sources that I was beginning to think had no material existence in this world. I would also like to thank Daniella Cadiz Bedinimy research assistant at the University of Cape Town and the first person to read the manuscript in its entirety. My sincere thanks go out to the readers at Fordham University Press. Their generous, insightful, and expansive engagement with my work remains a source of inspiration to me.

Stephen, Jacob, and Christopher Clarkson have read and commented on parts of this manuscript in truthful, thought-provoking, imaginative, incisive, and entertaining ways. Im more appreciative of this, and of so much else besides, than I know how to say.

Throughout this book the discussions are based on somewhat different, in some cases shorter, versions of essays that have been published elsewhere. I thank the editors and publishers for permission to draw on this material for the present project:

2005. Embodying You: Levinas and a Question of the Second Person. Journal of Literary Semantics 34: 95105.

2005. Visible and Invisible: What Surfaces in Recent Johannesburg Novels? Moving Worlds 5 (1): 8497.

2007. The Time of Address. In Law and the Politics of Reconciliation, edited by Scott Veitch, 22940. Aldershot: Ashgate.

2007. Who Are We? Dont Make Me Laugh. Law and Critique 18 (3): 36174.

2008. Drawing the Line: Justice and the Art of Reconciliation. In Justice and Reconciliation in Post-Apartheid South Africa, edited by Franois du Bois and Antje du Bois-Pedain, 26788. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2008. Ancient Antagonisms. English Academy Review 25 (2): 10110.

2008. Locating Identity in Phaswane Mpes Welcome to Our Hillbrow. In Connecting Cultures, edited by Emma Bainbridge, 6573. Abingdon: Routledge.

2009. Photo Essay: Welcome to Our Hillbrow. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 19 (2): 21522.

2010. Fences. In Current Writing: Text and Reception in South Africa. Special issue, Law and South African Literature 22 (2): 83100.

2012. The Obliging Etymology of Nomos: Peter Fitzpatrick and the Aesthetics of Law. In Reading Modern Law: Critical Methodologies and Sovereign Formations, edited by Ruth Buchanan, Stewart Motha, and Sundhya Pahuja, 16577. New York: Routledge.

The work on the cover of this book is by Willem Boshoff, 2003: Neves I, etching on paper, 52 64 cm. My thanks to Willem for granting permission to use this work.

DRAWING THE LINE

Introduction

I

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere, G. K. Chesterton wrote in 1928, insisting on the necessityif also the contingencyof marking a limit in the act of making an ethical decision (Chesterton 1928, 780). Yet the act of drawing this line is an art as much as it is a question of morality. A line drawn reconfigures space: It divides yet juxtaposes two entities; it connects two distant points. Figuratively, it includes some and excludes others; it marks a boundary between standing for and standing against, or it traces a path along which places are invested with significance, words are understood, and lives are lived. All of these lines could have been drawn somewhere else.

In this book I am interested in the way in which lines of thought are materialized in the world of sensory perception: in the visual arts, literature, and other forms of cultural production. At the same time, lines of thoughtand in Drawing the Line I am preoccupied with thoughts of transitional justiceseem to be generated by what is depicted, uttered, or written, and (facing the other way now) by what is seen, heard, and read. In the relations that arise between artist and viewer, speaker and listener, writer and reader, this book explores the different ways in which cultural, political, and legal lines are imagined, drawn, crossed, erased, and redrawn in postapartheid South Africa.