The Afrikaans Language and Afrikaans Literature

What would it mean to claim that a language, any language, is singular, in the sense I have sketched in earlier chapters? The singularity of any language would be evinced not by a unique lexicon and set of phonological, morphological and syntactic rules that set fixed boundaries but by the practice of a group of language users in a particular historical, geopolitical and social context, a practice that is constantly changing as that context changes. Singularity in this sense implies not resistance to translation but openness to translation: since the language has no unchanging essence and no fixed boundaries, it invites translation – and is in fact always implicated in translation, from dialect to dialect, idiolect to idiolect, old forms to new forms, indigenous terms to borrowed terms, and so on.

The language I am focusing on in this chapter is Afrikaans. Afrikaans is spoken as a first language by just under seven million people in South Africa, and a small number elsewhere (principally Namibia). The larger proportion of these Afrikaans-speakers would have been classified under apartheid legislation as ‘Coloured,’ that is, so-called ‘mixed race’ peoples, living mostly in the Western and Northern Cape. Somewhat less than half speakers of Afrikaans are ‘white’ Afrikaners, for the most part descendants of early Dutch settlers with an admixture of later German and French immigrants. A small number of indigenous Africans speak Afrikaans as a first language. This makes Afrikaans the third most common mother tongue in the country, after the indigenous languages isiZulu and isiXhosa, but ahead of English – though English is spoken as a second or third language by a very large number and is the dominant lingua franca in urban areas.

These figures alone might suggest a fairly significant reading public for literary works in Afrikaans. But a large segment of the Afrikaans-speaking population lives in considerable poverty and suffers from inadequate education; the number who read fiction is small, and the number who read ‘literary’ fiction even smaller.

This excellent volume edited by Niklas Bremberg and Ludvig Norman seeks to foster debate about the trade-offs and dilemmas policymakers face in trying to build a democratic European Union (EU) and the challenges that scholars face in trying to assess the EU's democratic credentials. The contributors examine a number of key dilemmas of European democracy – including legitimate representation in the absence of a shared identity (Lord), the potential for citizen participation and deliberative democracy in the EU (Cengiz), the importance of enhancing contestation over EU policies (Lacey), the tensions between market logics and democracy (McNamara), the challenges of sustaining democracy as the territorial scale at which collective action is needed shifts (Keating) and the content of democratic citizenship (Seubert). The erudite contributions deliver on the editors’ aim, which was not to provide a conclusive set of answers to Europe's democratic dilemmas but rather to offer ‘fresh insights into EU democracy [and highlight] new ways to understand the tensions and trade-offs inherent in the application of democratic concepts to the European political order’.

In offering my reflections, I will explore some cross cutting issues concerning the democratic dimensions of Europe's political order that have implications for themes that come up across the contributions to the volume. My modus operandi is, following McNamara's advice in her chapter, to ‘[situate] the EU case within the broader history of comparative political development’ – specifically through comparisons with the development and functioning of democratic polities. Debates over the democratic dilemmas of European Union politics have long suffered from a lack of comparative and historical perspective. The EU is often judged against a kind of platonic ideal of democracy and found wanting. But the EU might be assessed much more sympathetically if compared to the flawed democratic federations of the real world. Likewise, the development of EU democracy is often treated ahistorically and atemporally, without appreciating what a new polity the EU is and how long it took many real, existing democracies to develop crucial democratic institutions. This lack of perspective has led many analysts to misjudge EU democracy – to convict it of crimes it did not commit, while ignoring those of which it is actually guilty.

INTRODUCTION

Under the 1947 Act it was the duty of every planning authority to carry out a survey of their area and, within three years of 1 July 1948, the date the Act came into force, prepare a development plan based on the survey and submit it for the approval of the SoS. Planning authorities were also under an obligation to review their development plans at five-yearly intervals and could put forward amendments for approval by the SoS at any time. The Midlothian County Development Plan, which included the Gala Water valley north of Bowland incorporating the villages of Stow, Fountainhall and Heriot, an area that would be included in the Borders Region in 1975, was submitted to the SoS in 1952, the first to be produced in Scotland, and approved in May 1955. The Selkirk County Development Plan was approved by the SoS in April 1955 and the Peeblesshire County Development Plan in December 1955 but it would be February 1965 before the county development plans for Berwickshire and Roxburghshire received his approval. Other than the Quinquennial Review of the Selkirk County Development Plan, approved in January 1968, which excluded Galashiels Burgh, there would be no other attempts to review the approved development plans; they would be modified as required by formal amendment to enable major developments not in accordance with the approved development plan to take place.

The 1947 Act stipulated that the development plan should indicate the manner in which the authority proposed that land in their area should be used and the stages by which any development should be carried out. Development plans had to include a survey report, a written statement summarising the authority's proposals, and a basic map defining the sites of proposed roads, public buildings and so on and allocating or ‘zoning’ areas of land for particular uses such as residential development, industry and open space. Regulations stipulated a wide range of details, from the contents of the survey report to the number and type of accompanying plans and the colours to be used to depict the different land uses.

The Philosophy of Judith Butler

If there is any need to offer a more precise description of the philosophy Judith Butler produces, we may provisionally call it ‘queer’. The use of mischievous vocabulary, concepts such as ‘sex’, ‘jettisoned life’ or ‘parody’, together with an emphatic, almost deliberate disrespect for strict boundaries between disciplines, their proper objects and language, fits well with the idea of queering. Butler weaves the ecstatic and improper movement of thought, to the point of sometimes questioning the standards of coherence, clarity and unity of text. Her writing is a performance in language, frequently spilling over into activist practices, which unintended ecstatic afterlife then gets woven back into the fold of following texts.

To write about Butler – to impose a sense of unity or coherence to her oeuvre – is to accept to write against the performativity of her thought. One can attempt to do a kind of bio-bibliographical inquiry, to collect data and trace textual trails that reveal the causal chains and intellectual influences on certain ideas. Any endeavour seeking to present large portions of an oeuvre must do precisely this kind of mining work, an excavation that of necessity straightens many of its curves. It seems that this straightening becomes particularly emphatic when the task is to present two transversal, deeply entangled sides of her thought: one belonging to philosophy, the other to politics. This chapter begins with a bold statement – Butler is a philosopher – and with an acknowledgement that some of the queerness in her philosophy must be lost in this process of mining and honing. Despite this, I hope to have preserved a double movement of philosophy and politics, organised as a two-step and sustained throughout the book – and specifically in this chapter, which is supposed to provide a kind of glossary of terms to help us move through the continual shifting of demands to think and act differently.

To insist on Butler's doing philosophy is also to go against her own somewhat ambivalent relationship towards it, which she has voiced on numerous occasions, but perhaps most prominently in a text with the suggestive title, ‘Can the “Other” of Philosophy Speak?’ (Undoing Gender, 2004b [hereafter UG]: 232–50) – where the ‘Other of philosophy’ seems to stand in for the subaltern.

By the time hostilities broke out across Europe, E. M. Forster had stopped writing. In the preceding decade, four novels had appeared under his name in almost as many years. However, by the summer of 1914, Forster had just finished a novel that proved unpublishable, Maurice, and had been stuck for some time on another, his last, which would only see the light of day ten years later as A Passage to India. ‘Civilisation as it topples carries my brain with it,’ the novelist jotted down in his diary on 1 August 1914. A few months later: ‘I find it even less possible to finish novels since the war than before it.’ By the end of the conflict, Forster would quietly admit to Siegfried Sassoon that he still suffered from writer's block. His unfinished ‘Inferior’, a short story about two officers handing out cigarettes in a military hospital, was itself ‘an inferior story’, the novelist confessed to the poet. ‘It's not that I’m off writing, but I can't any more put words between inverted commas and join them together with “said” and an imaginary proper name.’ Instead, Forster dedicated his first war year to work of a more practical nature, cataloguing paintings two days each week at the National Gallery in London and serving as one of its night-time watchmen on the look-out for air raid fires.

Just like E. M. Forster, many other modernists recorded a struggle to write during, and about, the First World War. Ford Madox Ford felt himself unable to ‘evoke pictures of the Somme […] as for putting them – into words! No: the mind stops dead.’ In 1917, Margaret Anderson left a page of the Little Review blank to represent the conflict; Henry James had likewise admitted two years earlier, in an interview with the New York Times, that he found it ‘as hard to apply one's words as to endure one's thoughts’, famously adding that ‘the war has used up words’. Taken together, the doubts Forster, Ford, Anderson and James articulated are consistent with a larger moment of epistemological crisis prompted by the conflict. Across divides of class, gender and nationality, from the trenches in No Man's Land to the home front, contemporaries grappled with the question of how to put the war into words.

Politics and Ethics of Nonviolence

A long paragraph towards the end of the first chapter of Undoing Gender gathers together several important political conclusions of the first phase of Butler's work:

Nearly all key notions are here: life in relation to power, in relation to others, liveable life as human life, conditions of liveability (liveable world), unknowingness, the political in medias res, futurity, radical democracy and cultural translation. To be sure, some hesitation is also discernible, chiefly in regard to the nature of the ‘new’ that opens when we act in concert and in plurality, but these seem to belong to all collective struggles starting with equality. Missing from this note on political performativity is an answer to the question: on what ground is equality maintained within the agonistic, plural and embodied voices that demand translation and, through translation, access to the universal and its limitless extension?

Writing on Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones, Sinéad Moynihan identifies the novel as an example of ‘literary recycling’, suggesting that Ward engages in a ‘politically engaged model of rewriting’ as a mode of resistance (Moynihan 2015, 551). While Moynihan focuses on Ward's relationship to the white canon, specifically William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, this chapter adopts her model of recycling in order to consider the ways in which Ward's writing addresses a lineage of Black literary foremothers. The protagonist of Salvage the Bones, Esch, recalls a long line of pregnant Black girls, from Toni Morrison's Pecola in The Bluest Eye (1971) to Ursa in Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975), Celie in Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982) and Precious in Sapphire's Push (1996), and in each of these texts, recurring themes of troubled pregnancy and motherhood provide a fertile vein for the exploration of bodily and racial abjection. This chapter argues that Ward ‘recycles’ this motif: where, in these earlier texts, pregnancy has been traditionally marred by tragedy, Ward's work continually resists this narrative of Black teenage motherhood as necessarily destructive. By refusing to dismiss Black teenage mothers as ‘waste’, she offers the potential of ‘a redemptive horizon’, while simultaneously remaining critically engaged with state neglect and abandonment (Moynihan 2015, 551; Hartnell 2016, 205–18). Expanding on the arguments set forth in Moynihan's article by applying them specifically to a tradition of Black women writers, this chapter looks to explore the ways in which Ward both draws upon this heritage and subverts it. Additionally, I will argue that the most notable aspect of Ward's rewriting is in her depiction of men: while the girls of these previous texts are isolated in their attempts to resist abjectification, Ward surrounds Esch with multiple Black men who support her demands for agency. By considering her work through the lens of abject theory, alongside contemporary criticism on race and class, this chapter investigates Ward's intertextual evolution of canonical Black women's writing, and positions her as a vital addition to this lineage.

Multilingualism and Minor Languages

In writing Finnegans Wake Joyce exploited to the full the possibilities of multilingualism. No writer after him has drawn so extensively on the world's languages, but some have found a resource in the freedom to move between one language and another. Sometimes this switching occurs without comment, as in Cormac McCarthy's use of Spanish in many of his novels or the occurrence of Dutch and English in some Afrikaans novels (to be discussed in the following chapter), but occasionally it becomes part of the thematic point of the work. One such novel is W. F. Hermans’ 1966 novel Nooit meer slapen, one of the best-known Dutch novels of the second half of the twentieth century, a staple in Dutch classrooms and a work that has been widely translated. The English translation, under the title Beyond Sleep, is by Ina Rilke.

The conceptualisation of singularity that I have sketched in earlier chapters is a response to the distinctiveness among all human productions of the making and receiving of art, and to its non-instrumental relation to human actions. But unlike most versions of the autonomy of the artwork, an emphasis on singularity recognises the inseparability of the work of art from its contexts of production and reception, and the freedom it implies is not a freedom from the constraints of economics, politics, culture, or society but rather an ability to exploit those constraints as resources to enable what they occlude to be heard and seen.

One of the most important contexts within which the singular work is constituted is language: the particular language a writer uses brings with it a host of resonances and implications, including its ethical and political resonances and the implications arising from its role in the power relations that necessarily operate in relation to other languages (and, behind languages, cultures). This fact alone prevents the literary work from having impermeable boundaries; it's always engaged, overtly or covertly, with the larger world of linguistic relations. A work in a minor language may seem to ignore the major languages of the world, but in so doing makes a claim about the relationship between them; and if the work is translated into a major language (with or without the author's involvement) the relationship becomes all the more evident.

The ‘speaking well of God [that] already proceeds from God’ has a name: Scripture. Scripture is the already-there of a phrase ‘of which the singularity would have to remain irreducible and its reference indispensable in a given idiom’. With these thoughts, Derrida evokes the question that will be addressed in this chapter: why every historical–political epoch has confronted the particular texts we call Scriptures as a figure of the divine.

Sacred Scriptures are not only the most read and studied scriptures, but also the most translated, and the most transformed into different practices. Literature, art, philosophy, morality and politics have all been significantly ‘steeped’ in biblical imaginaries. God is the unsayable, nobody can reach Him discursively; except Himself. Scripture is not a book about God, but God's speech that has been written down. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God says John at the beginning of his Gospel. We encounter that Word written down in the form of sacred Scriptures. The Scriptures are unique because they speak of God and at the same time claim that it is God who speaks. Other ‘scriptures’, which we find in every political community, such as contracts, covenants, constitutions, core literary texts of every civilisation can be interpreted, in a theological–political transposition, as figures of that trace. In fact, as Derrida asserts, ‘the very idea of institution – hence of the arbitrariness of the sign – is unthinkable before the possibility of writing and outside of its horizon’.

Just as Brutus's house stood for his memory, Macbeth's castle stands for his conscience. The play's foregrounding of fateful entrances and doorways, as in Lady Macbeth's ‘hoarse raven’ speech and in the porter scene, has led critics such as David Wiles and Jennifer C. Vaught to point out parallels between Shakespeare's Scottish play and such medieval morality plays as The Castle of Perseverance, where the castle stands for the soul's protection against the temptation of evil, its gates functioning both as vulnerable points of entry and strategic bulwarks. The parallels lie in great part in a moralised use of stage space, which allows characters’ movements to be read as spiritual progresses. On the medieval stage, for example, ‘the movement from left to right […] leads to hell’. Yet it does not lead there irrevocably, because of the pre-Reformation assumption that the soul is free. Macbeth, however, is a tragedy. Its movements, both physical and mental, are one-directional. In this chapter, I will argue that the play constitutes the murderous thane's castle as a tragic allegory of his mind through a poetics of thresholds. In Macbeth, doorways are powerful signifiers of irreversibility, the allegorical counterparts of a mind committed to evil. Though Macbeth can work in all kinds of venues, the following discussion will assume a seventeenth-century Globe performance, as the allegorical model I will be developing is rooted in the Globe theatre's architecture, in classical, medieval and Renaissance castle metaphors, and in the cultural moment defined by the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. These contextual elements come together in one thick knot, resulting in a vibrant ‘objective correlative’ of Macbeth's mind surrendering to evil. This chapter thus explores the ‘grounded’ dimension of Macbeth's castle allegory, arguing that its sinister vitality derives from the process of adaptation, the epistemological context, and the ritual power of the staged oath. I will begin, as Shakespeare did, with the Holinshed source.

Staging Holinshed: Vanishing, Tracking and Blending

It can safely be assumed that sometime in the early years of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare could be found poring over Raphael Holinshed's ‘Chronicles of Scotland’, with a view to adapting the story of Macbeth, the treacherous thane, for the stage.

Toward an Alternative Ethical Vocabulary

Contemporary ethical theory needs to speak to globalisation and coloniality. Globalisation has generated social relations in which lifestyles and values are somewhat shared. Across the world, from the beginning of European colonial rule to the present, a combination of legal, economic, educational, as well as military and police forces have imposed, promoted and maintained some forms of life, such as the heterosexual, patriarchal family, at the expense of alternative ways of life. A key question for decolonial ethics is how to relate to others in a way that affirms cultural rights in response to these standardising impositions. In this chapter, I argue that Édouard Glissant's framing of an ethical relation as emerging from ‘contacts’ with others, defending the ‘opacity’ of others and ultimately standing in solidarity with others, is more fruitful for decolonial pursuits than Emmanuel Levinas's framing of an ‘encounter’ with a single Other, whose difference is understood in terms of ‘alterity’, and who is ultimately served through reverence. I start from Levinas because the philosophy of liberation, decolonial ethics and decolonial political theology continue to use his vocabulary: difference is framed in terms of alterity, and the ethical relation is exemplified in bearing witness. Calling into question Levinas's ethical vocabulary also shows the limitations of contemporary ethical theory that relies on his terms.

Levinas's concept for difference is ‘alterity’, ‘the radical heterogeneity of the other’ such that this other is ‘absolutely other’. He reserves the term ‘religion’ for the face-to-face ‘ethical relation’, ‘a relation without relation’ in which ‘the encounter with the Other opens the infinite’. He asserts: ‘The Other remains infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign; his face in which his epiphany is produced and which appeals to me breaks with the world that can be common to us.’ The Other is a rupture, breaking the possibility for a shared world of relation and communication. The language Levinas uses to describe the ethical relation is not compassion or care, but extreme and hyperbolic terms such as obsession, persecution, trauma and substitution. He insists further that the Other is not different with only ‘a relative alterity’ and in doing so avoids considerations of cultural difference.

The Troubling of Place

Joyce, in spite of his own peripatetic existence, set his first three works of fiction solidly in Dublin, even naming his short story collection after the inhabitants of the city; there are repeated intimations of lives lived in other places, but the distinction between ‘here’ and ‘there’ is consistently maintained. Although other modernist writers registered the experience of travelling to a foreign environment – Richardson's Pilgrimage, a work about England if there ever was one, begins in Germany and moves to the Swiss Alps in the volume Oberland, for example – geographical rootedness remains a common feature of their fiction, as it had been for their Victorian predecessors. This strong concern with location is inherited by the South African-Scottish writer Zoe Wicomb, but she complicates it by exploring the ways in which spaces can overlap or collide in the consciousnesses of those whose existence has a global dimension.

Mercia Murray, the Namaqualand-born central character of Wicomb's 2014 novel October, is on the train back to Glasgow after a rather unsuccessful trip to Edinburgh when she passes through the small town of Falkirk. Seeing the name on the station signs she reflects, ‘No escape from home there’. An explanation of this unlikely association between provincial Scotland and provincial South Africa follows: ‘Falkirk was the name stamped in relief on the three-legged cast-iron pots at home, pots manufactured for the colony, for Africans to cook their staple mealiepap over an open fire’ (112). This is no mere verbal coincidence of the sort Joyce exploited to the limit in Finnegans Wake, but has a basis in the real world: Falkirk Foundry (later Falkirk Iron Company) was established in 1810 and grew to be a leading supplier of cast-iron goods to the Empire; by 1914 it had 1500 employees, and it stayed in business until 1981. Falkirk pots were successfully marketed in South Africa to the indigenous population to replace the clay pots that had traditionally been used for cooking.

INTRODUCTION

Following the reorganisation of local government in 1975, the development planning system was composed of National Planning Guidelines, regional reports and structure and local plans. The impetus for the establishment of guidance from central government came from the environmental problems emerging as a result of the demand for sites for oil-platform construction yards in the north and west of Scotland. The Coastal Planning Guidelines, published in 1974, were followed by National Planning Guidelines (NPG) on a diverse range of develop-ment circumstances and types, including agricultural land, housing land, nature conservation, rural planning priorities and forestry, guidelines of much more relevance to the Scottish Borders (see Appendix 4). NPGs were widely acknowledged as an innovative and helpful mechanism to planning authorities in defining national interests in selected topics. However, according to Begg and Pollock, ‘they tended to be rather bland and fall far short of representing a comprehensive compendium of government policy interests or in providing a national framework for land-use planning’.

The requirement for regional reports stemmed from the government's desire to establish a regional framework for policymaking and for determining resource priorities as quickly as possible following reorganisation. The foresight of the constituent counties of the Borders Region meant that a regional report for the Borders Region was prepared within the stipulated time of one year. Although regional reports had the potential to be a vehicle for corporate planning, they were intended primarily as a physical planning document. The SoS only offered observations on the submitted regional report; formal approval was not required. The production of regional reports was the subject of debate and controversy and there followed considerable speculation on their future. In 1982, the SDD informed all regional and island councils that there would be no requirement to review regional reports in view of the progress on structure plans; the range of other policy documents that had been developed, such as Housing Plans and Transport Policies and Programmes; and because of the increasing financial and manpower constraints under which central and local government was operating. According to many, an opportunity had been lost to continue the co-ordinated working within authorities that the process of preparing regional reports had encouraged.

COUNTY PLANNING IN THE SCOTTISH BORDERS

The first planning legislation, the 1909 Housing and Town Planning Act arose from the campaign for higher quality living environments, led by the Garden City Movement. Urban sprawl and ribbon development during the inter-war period created new challenges, and the need for large-scale reconstruction after the Second World War led to a number of studies on land utilisation and the future control of development, resulting in the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1947. This Act, combined with the New Towns Act 1946 and the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, created a system designed to fulfil the social, economic and environmental objectives of reconstruction and provide a long-term basis for land management. In Scotland, regional planning was pioneered by Patrick Geddes and taken up by the likes of Robert Matthew and Frank Mears. Mears's Regional Plan for Central and South-East Scotland, published in 1948, was the first study to highlight the plight of the Scottish Borders, with its dependence on the textile industry and agriculture and its problems of rural depopulation, which contrasted starkly with the problems of urban sprawl and suburban expansion in the urban areas, which were the driving forces behind the British town planning movement.

The four county planning authorities in the Scottish Borders, established after the Second World War, were under-staffed and under-resourced. Planning committees were advised by the county clerk, assisted by the county surveyor or county architect. The lack of qualified planning staff restricted their ability to produce the development plans required under the 1947 Act and consultants were appointed to undertake this work. It would be 1965 before there was total development plan coverage of the Scottish Borders. Throughout the 1950s, planning activity was centred on development control with emerging issues related to the growth in car ownership and leisure time. The county development plans, updated by formal amendments and augmented by non-statutory studies and reports would provide the framework for development decisions until 1975 and the reorganisation of local government. Development plans were based on the optimistic assump-tion that the continued loss of population in the landward areas would be offset by growth in the textile industry in the burghs supported by an expanded programme of local authority housing for incoming workers. However, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the population of the region continued to decline; by over 10,000 people between 1951 and 1971 to below 100,000 people.

Feasibility

So far this study has argued for a shift in the vocabulary of decolonial ethics: from alterity to opacity, from exile to errancy, from root identity to relational identity (‘expansive belonging’), and from hospitality to solidarity – where solidarity allows a reconsideration of politics, as Nitzan Lebovic puts it, ‘not as a binary relation between friend and enemy, but as a network … united against abuse and coercive power’. In arguing for this shift, this study has advanced a politicised sense of responsibility that works to demand opacity against state and market forces as well as to break from familiar identifications, such as one's nation and class. The promise of re-description is that it re-presents ‘responsibility’, suggesting different associations with the term, different ways of hearing it and thinking about it. An alternative understanding leads to aberrant actions. In other words, the promise of our shift in linguistic practices lies in our non-linguistic practices, our bearings of engagement with the world. If this is right, then it would be instructive to elaborate on what makes possible relational politics as well as to describe already ongoing practices that exemplify such relational work. Such an elaboration is the task of this chapter.

Among the francophone Left of his generation, Glissant was famous for saying we must ‘put the poetic back into the heart of the political’. To some this sounds like a superficial aesthetic statement, a fundamental misunderstanding of materialist politics, or perhaps, at best, a call for richer language in slogans and speeches. Even if these were the only ways to hear Glissant's point, it should not be underestimated. As Martin Puchner's scholarship shows, Marx's Manifesto was successful as a political provocation in part because of its reinvention of a genre. Of course, there are other ways to hear Glissant's saying. As Loichot has commented, ‘Poetry, for Glissant, is not just the art of accommodating words in a lyrical mode by the use of sound, rhythm, or metaphorical language.’ ‘Poetry also means “making” in a material way’, she continues: ‘Poétrie, the seeming neologism that Glissant uses in French, evokes simultaneously the poem, inhabited by the English word “poetry”, and the verb pétrir, to knead dough or to give shape to clay.’

The theopolitical reasons for legitimate power are associated with the figure of charisma. In fact, charisma is one of those terms derived from charis, which, while being scarcely used in the ancient world, was appropriated by the Christian language, particularly by Paul of Tarsus. It was only much later that it was transferred into the language of politics, chiefly, but not only, by Max Weber. Clifford Geertz describes charisma as a manifestation of ‘the inherent sacredness of sovereign power’ and makes particular mention of the inherently theopolitical character of political power that is apparent in charisma.

Indeed, the theopolitical character of power has been compromised in the discursive journey of the word charisma. Many different aspects related to the sacredness of power are indicated within the meaning of a word, which is far from ever being fixed. In what follows, I will pursue those meanings and in particular the theopolitical transferences of meanings between the theological and the political discursive registers. In the semantic trajectory of the signifier charisma, if Paul marked a first point of inflection by appropriating it to Christian discourse, Weber marked a second and, so far, almost definitive point of inflection by appropriating it to the field of political theory and sociology. The aim of these pages, after briefly tracing the genealogy of the meaning of charisma, is to reinscribe the political idea of charisma in its theological locus, that is, to discover the political charisma as a figure of the divine.

The Genealogy of Charisma: A Crooked Line of Meaning

The word charis was already present in Greek literature and mythology. It can be found in Homer's Iliad (18, 382–8), where it is used to describe both a personification of grace and beauty and the wife of Hephaestus. Also in the Iliad (Il. 14.269), Pasiphae, who is destined to be the wife of Sleep, is called one of the younger charites. The plural charites occurs several times in the Homeric poems (Od. 18.194). Hesiod (Hes. Th. 945) for his part, in the Theogony names Aglaia as the wife of Hephaestus, and describes her as the youngest of the charites.

It is not very often that reading a book leaves us with a feeling that something in us has changed. Yet, there are many testimonies to this experience when it comes to reading Judith Butler. Butler's texts seem to have the power to challenge us profoundly and coax us into thinking differently. The seemingly simple question that hovers over the pages of this book is: how is this possible? What do Butler's texts do to their readers? What do they perform on us? Moreover, what is it about these texts that incites us into thinking that there is something about the world that needs to be remade, done differently?

Given that Butler's thought is shaped by the registers, questions and frames largely taken from philosophy, its inherent political impetus is a continual source of puzzlement. All comprehensive studies of her work show full awareness of its entanglement with the political. Situating Butler's thought at the crossroads of gender and queer theory, Sara Salih (2002), Vicki Kirby (2006), Moya Lloyd (2007) and Gill Jagger (2008) all put strong emphasis on the political power of the performative. Elena Loizidou (2007) was the first to discuss Butler's work in the triad of ethics, politics and law, Samuel Chambers and Terrell Carver (2008) present Butler as a significant political thinker, while Birgit Schippers (2014) defines her work as belonging to an emerging field of international political philosophy. Butler, however, complicates straightforward definitions. She has adamantly claimed that she has not produced a specific conception of the political: ‘I am sure I do not have “a conception of the politi-cal”. I am not sure one needs to have such a conception in order to think about politics or even to engage politically’ (Ingala 2017: 26). In addition, on many occasions she has insisted on important differences between theory and politics.

Taking these cues into account, this book aims to capture an almost paradoxical dynamic of philosophy and politics that gives shape to Butler's thought. Urging us to question even the most basic experiences, philosophy interrupts business as usual, arrests us mid-stream, forces us to stop and question, and to sometimes remain in question.