Ubuntu and the Emancipation of Law

South Africa’s liberal democratic order was founded on a state of exception, inaugurated through a temporary suspension of the appeal to individual rights. In this chapter, Praeg contends that the communitarian suspension of liberal democracy, the fact that the individualistic axiomatic of a liberal democratic order could only be founded on an appeal to its exact opposite, namely Ubuntu as ontological commitment to our interdependence, reveals the aporia-archē of its constitution as two figures that in their hyphenated combination must be recognized as the principle that founded the democratic order as well as the rule that must be iterated in every constitutional court judgment interpreted as reiteration of that founding.