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UCT RESEARCH REPORT 2012
Professor Jaco Barnard-Naudé
Jaco Barnard-Naudé completed his law studies at the University of Pretoria and also holds a master’s degree in creative
writing from UCT. He is an NRF-rated researcher, an honorary Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute of Humanities, and a
recipient of the UCT Fellows' Award, the Grotius Medal, the Santam Prize for Economics and the Gauteng Law Council
Prize. He completed a doctorate in critical legal theory with specific focus on adjudication in the South African law of
contract in transformation.
Researcher Profile
Professor Barnard-Naudé’s research is primarily
situated at the inter-disciplinary junctures of critical
legal theory, political philosophy, literature and
psychoanalysis. He has a particular interest in sexual
minority freedom and, primarily in collaboration
with Professor Pierre de Vos, has authored a
number of influential journal articles and book chapters
on this topic in the context of both post-apartheid
South Africa and foreign jurisdictions.
In 2012, his published research reflected his interest in
poststructuralist influences on literature, with two articles
on the relationship between philosophy and literature
in the context of the Afrikaans literary tradition. He also
published an article in the
Stellenbosch Law Review
on
the relationship between law and poetry against the
background of protest poetry in the Afrikaans canon.
Professor Barnard-Naudé brought his interest in a
post-apartheid critical jurisprudence for South Africa
specifically to bear on the four chapters he contributed
in 2012 to a new textbook,
Introduction to law and legal
skills
, published by Oxford University Press Southern
Africa. In these contributions he stresses the importance
of understanding the inextricable relationship between
law and politics in the study of the South African
transition to democracy.
2012 also saw Professors Barnard-Naudé and De Vos
shifting their ongoing collaboration to contemporary
politics in South Africa with the publication of an
article on the politics of aesthetics in the context of
the Jacob Zuma
Spear
debacle. In this contribution
they draw on insights from postcolonial and aesthetic
theory to plead for a nuanced understanding of Brett
Murray’s painting as a complex and problematic
work, whilst at the same time arguing the importance
of the constitutional right of freedom of expression for
democracy. Professor Barnard-Naudé concluded his
research outputs for 2012 with the publication in the
South
African Law Journal
of a critical appreciation
of Professor Jacques de Ville’s
Jacques Derrida: Law
as absolute hospitality
(2011). In this book review, he
argues that current work on poststructuralist ethics all
too often loses sight of the political raison d’être of the
postcolonial context, namely that it is a context that calls
for the building and maintenance of an ontologically
post-apartheid, radically horizontal, public sphere,
in which the (constitutional) ideal of equality plays a
fundamental role.