Ethical discourse in an age cognisant of perspective. Reflections on Derrida’s ‘the laws of reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration’

Synopsis

This essay explores the challenge ofarticulating ethical discourse in an age cognisant of perspective, intentionally, through Jacques Derrida’s admiration for Nelson Mandela in ‘The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, In Admiration.’ For Derrida, Mandela affirms anoriginary trace of human dignity, yet performatively reconceived through perspectival testimony and conscience, drawing from heterogeneous headings in Tribal lore and European law. Mandela exemplifies admiration for those legal traditions endorsing human rights and dignity, yet his testimony is a performance of ethical imagination invoking the spectre of ‘justice to come,’ which will always contest legal conventions and implicit circumscriptions of human dignity. Using additional works from Derrida, I propose that the challenge ofarticulating ethical values with traction, while affirming difference within an age cognisant of perspective, has exemplary focus in Derrida’s Mandela, with his spectral reflection of human dignity and difference. This ‘spectral reflection’ is a haunting silhouette of what is yet to come in the law, passing through mandela as through a mirror—from invisibility to visibility and vice versa. In ‘The Laws of Reflection,’Mandela is a metonym for anethicity of ethics (Derrida) that risks imaginative responsibility for an incalculable future, which, in the name of justice, calls into question any legal or ethical convention. This may have particular significance for articulating ethics in theological discourse.