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commission them are quite literally full of themselves. This is what fascinated Praeg about Nkandla: the possibility of writing a genealogy of plenitude potestatis; of tracing the history of its emergence through the vicissitudes of its pre-articulations and earlier embodiments which no doubt reached its most absurd apotheosis in that monument to imitation, Our Lady of Peace Basilica, which was consecrated by Pope John Paul II
in the same year that Immortality appeared in print. But the writing of such an history would require more than one lifetime to complete. It was simply too big for one mere mortal. And so, the idea emerged of exploring what fascinated him in novelistic form.
As a genre, the novel allows the
writer to be sweeping; to present an impressionistic sketch of what would otherwise require the patient scholar- ship of many lives. The project was guided by two further imperatives: on the one hand, as Kundera repeatedly states, the novel has to do what only the novel can do. It shouldn’t attempt to do history or philosophy. On the other hand, such a novel would need to do what philosophy cannot do, and that is to take a broad sweep at por- traying the lived experience of some of the little human beings who get caught up in the drama that is the Big Man’s quest for immortality. Rooted
in a sense of impossibility, Imitation slowly emerged as no more than a gesture and an intimation of mortality.
Leonhard Praeg is Professor and head of the Department of Philosophy at UP.
Thinking Africa
What has since been established as the scholarly imprint of UKZN Press, published in association with the Department of Philosophy at UP, started out as a series dedicated
to publishing the research outputs of the research-led teaching project, Thinking Africa – research produced through postgraduate courses that culminated in an annual conference in which students and scholars, both national and international, participated.
Since the publication of its first volume in 2012, the series has given priority to studies that offer a sustained interrogation not only of the themes of memory, alterity, African humanism, and violence but also of Western modernity itself. The volumes would be of interest to scholars who are intrigued by the possibility, and imperative, to think Africa from a position that is at once post-Area Studies and transdisciplinary. The most recent volumes are Afrikaner Identity: Dysfunction and Grief, by Yves Vanderhaegen (2018), and Philosophy on the Border: Decoloniality and the Shudder of the Origin, edited by Leonhard Praeg (2019).
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