Interrupting the Human: Shuffling

Abstract

What does it mean to be adequate to a conjuncture? What, if anything, can such a project, and the failure thereof, teach us with regard to the work of freedom, and its time? In this paper, I suggest that “inaugurating postcolonial difference lodges difference not as a marker of identity … It is, instead, an ethics of response … [It] is, ultimately a possibility of reading.” It is Sylvia Wynter, throughout her oeuvre but most explicitly in her conversations with Katherine McKittrick, who posits a sense of the human that grasps it as a blending of “mythoi” and “bios”, of story and genetics. In this crucial framing for my intervention, being adequate means to always interrupt the narrative of the human: where one starts matters. The human functions as a ground for the articulation of, and claims to, particular rights. It is the human that claims freedom, and it is in the name of the human that the limits of these claims are also set out. As such, the paper offers “reading”, specifically a form of slow reading named as “shuffling”, which is gleaned from different scenes – among them the preambles and post-ambles of founding texts in South Africa’s transition from apartheid, and Biko’s court case – each of which add a new aspect to the “shuffle” by which a reading happens, as a method for exodus.