Hope as a political category

Abstract

This is a lightly edited text of an address given to the graduating class of the University of Cape Town in December 2014. The author points out that the studio has made him. It is, however, ‘a place where the world is taken apart and re-arranged’ and ‘where peripheral thinking is demanded’. Like the studio, contemporary South Africa is a place of contradictions where instability and provisionality are the order of the day, and where a happy ending is not assured. A degree in the Humanities is a ‘blessing’ because it enables a graduate to appreciate that contradictions (and viewing the life from the edge) are the only (real) ways to understand life and the country.