Page 16 - University of Pretoria RESEARCH REVIEW 2018

On Imitation Leonhard Praeg, Department of Philosophy
Imitation (2018) is a conscious intertextual dialogue with Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality (1990). At times serious and melancholy but at other times light and playful, it is also an imitation of Kundera’s novel, a replica of its textual floorplan and architectural design.
But the origin of Imitation does not lie in any conscious decision to imitate Immortality or even to engage Kundera in conversation.
When the story of former president Jacob Zuma’s Big Man building project at Nkandla broke, Leonhard Praeg was immediately fascinated. But, he writes, for all the wrong reasons: not by the impunity of excess, not even by the question of how a political party, built on a rhetoric of ‘unity’
and ‘collective responsibility’, would deal with such a flagrant violation
of executive authority, or any of the other mainstream modulations of outrage. His fascination was fuelled by something entirely different: repetition.
Big Man building projects are no stranger to the human imagination. From the Great Pyramids of Giza to the Taj Mahal, from the now deserted and plundered palaces of Mobutu Sese Seko to the highest basilica in all of Christendom, Our Lady of Peace in Yamoussoukro, Côte d’Ivoire (itself an imitation of St Peter’s basilica in the Vatican City), man’s history is in many ways little more than a ruin of failed stabs at immortality. To stay with the metaphor, a basic building block of
all these building projects was – and arguably continues to be – a concep- tion of authority that found its clearest expression in the medieval legitimation of papal authority, namely plenitude potestatis or the plenitude of power.
Such building projects are always shadowed by the longing for the plenitude or fullness of power and the rulers who conceive and
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