Treating Life Literally

Sitze, Adam

doi:10.1007/s10978-006-9009-8

Cited by 3 publications

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“…As Adam Sitze illustrates, the state's defence of its unreasonable valorisation of an inconsistent idea of reason prevented the law from signifying and disregarded anyone whose version of reason did not match its own: 'Colonial law's desire to maintain its jurisdiction forced it to violate the very principle of reason that presumably conferred upon it its imperial supremacy and sovereign right.' 32 The judge in that case, Etienne de Villiers, stated that only 'one standard of reasonableness' could exist, and it was not one that could permit belief in African spirits; and, even more notably, that the notion of magic divorced from religion was inconceivable. 33 This has an uncanny pre-echo of Judge Williamson in the Orso case, and it is not unlikely that he would have been aware of the comparison: Rex v. Mbombela has been cited as a precedent at appellate level more than 40 times in South African legal history.…”

Section: The 'Satanist Murder'mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Satan has come to Rietfontein’: Race in South Africa's Satanic Panic

Falkof¹

2012

Journal of Southern African Studies

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In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the apartheid system was falling apart, white South Africa was gripped by a powerful moral panic that played out, often hysterically, in the newspapers and magazines of the time. This Satanism scare revolved around fears of a largescale conspiracy of evil that mostly involved white youth, and that threatened the spiritual health and even the continued existence of white South Africa. Rape, murder, cannibalism and all manner of atrocities involving virgins, animals and babies were commonly said to be part of Satanist rituals that occurred across the country. Satanists, South Africans were told, were everywhere, and were as great a threat to their nation as communists. This paper uses contemporary press material to examine three isolated yet related incidents within the scare: the Orso murder trial in 1992, when a teenager and her boyfriend claimed satanic possession as the motivation for the murder of her mother; the case of the 'Rietfontein slasher', also in 1992, when a group of white schoolgirls was apparently tormented by a supernatural force; and a single article about the alleged possession of a large number of black students in a school in the Atteridgeville township in 1989. It uses these three episodes to reveal how the Satanism scare was violently racialised, how the possibility of magic was both legally and culturally reserved for whites and how many white South Africans' literal fear of the devil fed into recurrent discursive narratives about black pathology and white responsibility.

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Section: The 'Satanist Murder'mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Satan has come to Rietfontein’: Race in South Africa's Satanic Panic

Falkof¹

2012

Journal of Southern African Studies

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Black Hamlet: A Script in Search of a Stage

Wright

2022

English Studies in Africa

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The Question of Law Analysis

Sitze¹

2007

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This paper is an inquiry into one of the juridical forms that is implied within psychoanalysis as a condition for the genesis of its theory and practice. It argues that, to the extent psychoanalysis leaves the problem of tyranny in silence, it also will misrecognize the juridical conditions for its own object of knowledge, namely, humanity as exemplified by Oedipus. It concludes by suggesting that the same theoretical problematic that enables psychoanalysis to resist fantasies of sovereign mastery also inhibits its capacity to expose the ontological structure of sovereign power to questioning.

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Treating Life Literally

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

‘Satan has come to Rietfontein’: Race in South Africa's Satanic Panic

‘Satan has come to Rietfontein’: Race in South Africa's Satanic Panic

Black Hamlet: A Script in Search of a Stage

The Question of Law Analysis

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