Twenty years after the end of apartheid rule, the claim that democratic South Africa is founded on the `spirit of law’ (nomos) of our shared humanity is questionable, to say the least.

Some would argue that all talk of Ubuntu (or African humanism) should be dismissed as a passing fad of an exhausted nationalism. But a different response to the present is possible, one that proceeds from a temporary suspension (epoché) of the nationalist matrix and all the dead-end questions that have resulted from it, in order to reposition Ubuntu in the more cosmopolitan terms of a critical humanism that must always remain irreducible to the politics of the day. This is a project that has to return to, in order to retrace, the founding claim that a politics premised on our shared humanity is, after all, perhaps possible.