Thought Amidst Waste
Conjunctural Notes on the Democratic Project in South Africa

Paper for the Wits Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities, WISER, University of the Witwatersrand, 28 May 2012

by Richard Pithouse, Department of Politics & International Relations, Rhodes University, Grahamstown

the existence of suffering human beings, who think, and thinking human beings, who are oppressed, must inevitably become unpalatable and indigestible to the animal world of philistinism.
-Karl Marx, Cologne, 1843

In a recent essay Achille Mbembe argues that the rendering of human beings as waste by the interface of racism and capitalism in South Africa means that “for the democratic project to have any future at all, it should necessarily take the form of a conscious attempt to retrieve life and ‘the human’ from a history of waste”. He adds that “the concepts of ‘the human’, or of ‘humanism’, inherited from the West will not suffice. We will have to take seriously the anthropological embeddedness of such terms in long histories of “the human” as waste.”