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xv Preface to the english edition Justice, Deliberation, and the Democratic Public Sphere: Palabre and its Variations Jean Godefroy bidima rhythms and Terminologies Rhythms we never enter a house without crossing a space called the “threshold” and without “bearing tales” about ourselves or others that reveal how we are connected to them and to the world around us. if we may indulge in an association and a comparison, every book has an immediate threshold—such as the preface, the foreword, the introduction, or the note to readers; and also a distant threshold, which is the universe of tales, ambitions , actions, and failures that precondition it. a book is a space—almost a trap. The book does not simply reflect the meaning that it weaves, shows, and conceals—either within the mind’s eye of the author or at the level of the historical events that it recounts—indeed, it claims to exist as a consequence of that meaning. however, sometimes the book is more like a symptom. Not just in the sense of whatever evades easy explication, but in the sense of those complications linking the speaking, acting, suffering subject to the symbols that he or she manipulates and to institutions that either provoke hopelessness or offer him or her excuses for living. as a condensation of time, the book may outstrip the spirit of its age or lag behind events that are still unfolding. Most frequently, the book acts as a counterpoint to what we somewhat naively call current events. a book is always “untimely,” which means one cannot expect its exposition of notions and concepts to be terribly uniform, or even to provide a lucid description and analysis of everything that happens. The book—let’s add this one last consideration—is always written in a serious spirit, because authors worry when they imagine being judged by their readership.1 Tormented by private anxieties, the author nevertheless occasionally gives him- or herself away by building up the threshold with multiple warnings to the reader such as a “preface,” an “introduction” or a “foreword,” a “note to the reader,” or a “reader ’s guide.” Laboring over the “thresholds” of this book’s thesis is actually a “work of mourning” worthy of several preliminary observations.2 first, the author and the reader must get over the desire for univocal comprehension. by univocal comprehension , we mean the practice of reducing the extent of a book’s meaning to the urgency xvi | Preface to the English Edition of current events, often by means of the cruel question: “what good is this book right now?” Second, both would have to work at maintaining a reasonable distance from what the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk describes as a new theology, one proclaimed today “by drawing on the trinity. . . .what is added to the father is ‘money,’ to the Son ‘success,’ and to the holy Spirit ‘prominence.’”3 only after laying these regrets to rest can we note that this book is the result of many texts written at different moments and rhythms. The work on palabre was published in the collection Le Bien Commun [The common Good] with the Paris editor Michalon. it had to fit the required form of a french pocket edition, which means walking a fine, delicate line between academic writing and a broadly popular style. The chapters dealing with media and legal judgment were published in various specialist journals, each with their own distinct politics of expression. The chapter on “strategies for constructing belief” came from a doctoral dissertation on the frankfurt School.4 The text on books in africa was published with the educational mission of uNeSco in the background. Therefore, the reader ought to know that this book tries to play impersonal academic writing, with its tics and manias, against a style that frequently becomes political.5 we often prefer to say that academic writing is objective, dispassionate, or professional—though the seriousness of the subject is mocked by the unforeseeable and ironic nature of reality. but politics is unavoidable, given that the question of the african public sphere has stakes transcending purely philosophical and juridical discourses. Palabre, a “Flexible Law”: Cui Bono? it must be said that these texts dealing with law and justice were written against the cultural backdrop of the Napoleonic civil code, whose tradition is still alive—with modifications and local adaptations—in latter-day francophone africa and in Louisiana .6 however, the problems that appear in these texts surrounding the act of judging, the...

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