Now that Zambia Airways flight Q08 has finally taken off from Lusaka to
New York, the separation I need from South Africa to begin this reflection is
starting to impose itself. It is a strong impulse that tells me to write a letter, not
an essay - even if it contains an argument, references to sources, footnotes.
Writing it as a letter stresses my subjectivity, the strong feelings behind my
intervention, the personal character of my impressions, their limitations to this
individual and to his particular experience. And it reminds us that I do not write
as an expert on South Africa. Above all, it allows me to shape this argument as
I feel it, as an'urgent appeal, on behalf of commitments I share with those to
whom I write. After all, it is as an intellectual of the Left, a philosopher who
has spent most of his energies thinking and acting in the tradition of Marx,
Marcuse, and Sartre and towards the kind of social transformation we have
always identified with the name of socialism, that I was invited to South Africa.
I have visited out of a commitment to doing in South Africa what I have always
tried to do at home, using theory to clarify action and action to test, clarify, alter
and expand theory. A letter reminds us all that I am writing in the first instance
to specific people, friends with whom I have had the several parts of this
dialogue whose larger curves I am now able to present. And I am writing to
those I have and have not met, comrades and colleagues who stretch across a
broad but clearly defined political space.

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