We had the honour of hosting Professor Jacqueline Rose and welcoming Professor Vasti Roodt, the newly appointed Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, to a conversation that wrestled with the emotional, political and philosophical challenges of our time. Moderated by Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and in dialogue with Professor Jaco Barnard-Naudé, the discussion unfolded as a textured meditation on moral responsibility, the dangers of thoughtlessness, and the fragile possibility of repair.
The Continuing Relevance of Arendt
Opening the conversation, Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela rooted the dialogue in the troubling realities of our time; gender-based violence, state and global violence, and the persistent legacy of apartheid. Prof Pumla positioned Hannah Arendt as a critical voice for understanding the moral crises we now face: “the violence that we’ve seen against women’s bodies is just at the scale that we have never witnessed before… and the fact that it’s happening daily, repeatedly. It’s indescribable.” She reminded the audience that the conversation was part of a longer arc of inquiry, beginning with the “Bearing Witness” gathering the previous year, and that Arendt’s work, especially her writing on the banality of evil, remains a potent tool for confronting both past and present injustices.
Thinking Without Banisters: Solitude, Danger and Political Responsibility
Professor Vasti Roodt opened the panel by challenging the use of Arendt as a source of ready-made answers. “We shouldn’t use theorists… as a kind of an authority to whom we turn to justify what we want to say,” she argued. Instead, she invited the audience to take up Arendt’s method of “thinking without banisters” a metaphor for thinking without the comfort of received truths. For Roodt, Arendt’s model of thinking involves an inner dialogue, a solitary process in which the thinker is “both the questioner and the one who proposes a provisional answer.” This kind of thought, she insisted, is dangerous: it has no natural stopping point… it doesn’t leave you with certainty, mastery, or finality.” She warned against overgeneralised uses of conceptual categories like “violence” which, if uncritically applied, “can become a kind of a conceptual banister or a handrail that we use unthinking\[ly]… where we end up with a tendency to define very different actions, institutions, practices as false clients, which has a consequence of us understanding less rather than more of the world specificity.” Instead, political thinking must be animated by a care for the world that lies ‘between us,’ rather than for individual needs.
Forgiveness, Punishment and the Spectacular Banality of Evil
Professor Jaco Barnard-Naudé offered a compelling extension of Arendt’s reflections, beginning with her 1948 preface to ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’: “the essential structure of all civilizations is at the breaking point. It can no way provide the guidance to the possibilities of the century or an adequate response to its horror.” From this, he traced how the concept of the “banality of evil,” originating in Arendt’s witnessing of the Eichmann trial has evolved under the conditions of contemporary global violence. He proposed that evil is no longer banal because it is ‘non-spectacular,’ but rather that “the banal has been unrelentingly dressing itself in the finery of spectacle for decades now.” Barnard-Naudé refers to this condition the “spectacular banality of evil,” where the line between ordinary and extraordinary violence has been obliterated.
Barnard-Naudé then turned to forgiveness, drawing from Arendt’s ‘The Human Condition’ to argue that radical evil may be “neither humanly punishable or humanly forgivable, strictly a matter for the gods.” Yet, recognising that ‘the gods are dead,’ he proposed a “gracious unbinding of forgiveness from the secular limit of the ability to punish,” suggesting that forgiveness must be reimagined as a political act, one that does not replace justice but insists on ethical responsibility beyond retribution.
Impotent Bigness and the Apocalyptic Imaginary
Professor Jacqueline Rose’s reflections moved the conversation into the realms of psychoanalysis, Zionism and affect. She began by expressing her discomfort with linking forgiveness to images of Gaza, stating, “I can’t get the idea of forgiveness and the images of Gaza onto the same part of my mind”. Rose drew on Arendt’s critique of Zionist mysticism and nationalism, quoting Arendt’s insight that “behind this furious optimism lurks a despair of everything and a genuine readiness for suicide.”
She introduced Arendt’s notion of ‘impotent bigness’ as a way to understand contemporary displays of power that mask a deep existential fragility: “power is exerted when it knows it’s fraudulent and has no control over itself.” Rose argued that this dynamic plays out not only in war but in neoliberal obsessions with growth, citing political rhetoric in the UK as emblematic of this desperation. Throughout her reflections, Rose returned to the vulnerability of thought, drawing from Arendt’s distinction between ‘verstand’ (intellect) and ‘vernunft’ (reason), where the latter never takes control of its object and resists false mastery.
Witnessing, Memory, and the Role of Scholars
The audience responded with thoughtful and challenging questions. AVReQ MA Fellow, Thabolwethu Maphosa, asked about the poetic as a critical mode of witnessing, suggesting it could be used to see into the obscene. Barnard-Naudé affirmed this, noting the poetic as “a creative intervention… fundamentally signifying” and capable of disrupting the current “distribution of what matters.” Dr Veeran Naicker commented how Western civilisation continues to respond to nihilism by turning to theological certainty and totalising concepts like race and nation. In response to Naicker’s remarks, Roodt responded by contextualising the current moment as part of a longer historical arc: “we are in a time of crisis. That’s not wrong. We are. But we are not in a unique time of crisis.” Roodt concluded by offering memory as an act of resistance: “the spectacle is often without memory… one way of resisting is to remember. That’s what thinkers in society do.”
This rich, multi-layered conversation reminded us that thought, when undertaken seriously, is a political and ethical act. The insights offered by Professors Roodt, Barnard-Naudé, Rose, and Gobodo-Madikizela foregrounded the difficulty, necessity, and urgency of thinking through and with, in dark times. As we continue to face global crises and local injustices, gathering like these calls us to engage critically, speak courageously, and imagine ethically.