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[Expositions 7.2 (2013) 41–51]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 
 

Interview: Drucilla Cornell, Rutgers University 

HEATHER COLETTI 
Immaculata University 
 
 
Drucilla Cornell is a Professor of Political Science, Women’s Studies, and Comparative 
Literature at Rutgers University. She has taught previously at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School 
of Law in New York City and the Rutgers School of Law in Newark. A major voice in the world 
of feminist legal and ethical theory, she is perhaps best known as one of the organizers of the 
conference on deconstruction and the law at Cardozo, resulting in the landmark collection 
Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (1992)1. As this interview indicates, her work has 
taken a new direction with her discovery of uBuntu, a system of relational ethics practiced in 
South Africa. I spoke with Dr. Cornell about uBuntu and other matters in May of 2013. Below is 
a transcript of that conversation.  

  

 

Coletti: The question I would just start with – and you can go in any direction you want with this 
– is, Why South Africa? 

Cornell: I think that’s a really good question. I’m not sure that I can answer it except by being 
rather personal. I went to South Africa in 2001. I had been getting invitations as an academic 
since the election of Nelson Mandela. People were interested in the Imaginary Domain, and how 
to think about gay and lesbian rights, and “multicultural rights,” to use a commonplace phrase. I 
was invited to give some named lectures at the University of Stellenbosch, and to give some 
lectures in the Western Cape of South Africa, and at the Witwatersrand University in 
Johannesburg.  

It’s after 1989, the Berlin Wall has fallen, the mood which affects the academy in the United 
States – which continues – is post-revolutionary, post-Marxism, and I am neither a post-
revolutionary nor a post-Marxist, because I don’t think there’s any way to be post-Marxist, or 
post-revolutionary. And why don’t I? Because I think that the devastation of the problems that 
the species is facing are primarily the result of living under a capitalist system. And that would 
go for all of what we call nature. That we are destroying the earth and have the capacity to do it 
is unquestionable. Nor am I someone who says, “Well, we’re just a bad parasite; let the earth 
correct itself and throw us off.” I think the death of billions of people and most of the animals 
with us would be not the solution to this problem. The end of capitalism, however, is, and we 
have to try to figure out how to end it.  



Interview: Drucilla Cornell  42 
 

So I went to South Africa at a time when Mandela was released from prison and stated he was 
still committed to socialism. And of course he moved way away from that position, and there are 
a number of wonderful books on this. For example by Patrick Bond, called Elite Transition,2 and 
Sampie Terreblanche’s Inequality in South Africa.3 But there was something in South Africa, and 
it’s still there, and that is revolutionary hope. People in South Africa have lived through one 
revolution and they are still alive. So the idea that we’re post-revolutionary, the la-dee-dah, 
sophisticated cynicism of the United States – although you certainly have it, particularly among 
white academics – it is not, if you want to use the more Heidegger and philosophical concept, the 
“mood” [of South Africa]. And I was swept up, if you will, in being in a place where everybody 
talked about socialism: what it was, what it might mean, and we’re going to need a second 
revolution. They were leading these incredible campaigns, like the treatment action campaign 
and the shack-dwellers’ movements. So I decided that I wanted to come back, but differently, 
and at the time I was making this decision, the University of Stellenbosch set up the Stellenbosch 
Institute for Advanced Study, and they asked me if I wanted to be one of the founding fellows. I 
said, “Great, but I want to do something about South Africa.” And so I went up to Khayamandi 
to attend some high school classes, and decided I would do something on uBuntu.  

You might look at a book by Jean Genet called Prisoner of Love.4 He spent years of his life 
living in Palestine. It’s the closest I can describe is to how I was completely drawn in to the 
struggle to try to think through what the substantive revolution in South Africa. It was not a 
conventional, procedural revolution. It was what’s called a substantive revolution. That doesn’t 
mean there wasn’t an armed struggle; there was. It just means that, basically, the ruling party 
voted itself legally out of power; and, secondly, that at the time of the negotiations, the laws that 
were in existence were not wiped off the books. Everybody who was in the government wasn’t 
fired, so it was a different form of transition. [South Africa is] probably the only country in the 
world that’s had this kind of transition.  

So in a certain way I think I felt drawn to do what I could for the South African revolution. 
That’s the honest answer. 

Coletti: Did you go with a particular research agenda or a set of interests for the work that you 
knew you wanted to do there? And did you end up following an expected path with that research 
or with that work, or did it end up morphing into something that took on its own life that 
surprised you when you look back? 

Cornell: At the time I began the work I didn’t know anything about uBuntu, except from what I 
learned from attending a high school class. It was very controversial; I knew that. And it was 
used all the time by the different political groups in South Africa, both on the right and on the 
left. I didn’t speak Xhosa; later, I would spend years trying to learn it. So I just came up with a 
proposal, and Stellenbosch gave me a very small stipend for myself and my daughter. I decided 
that we would do research into the role of indigenous values, ideals, and rituals in the struggle 



43  Colletti 
 

itself and for the transformation of the new dispensation, though I had none of the tools really to 
do any of that. 

So I went to South Africa in the summer of 2003 and there frankly wasn’t much interest, if any, 
in this project amongst the white academics who I approached. There was great cynicism. Now 
the project is very high profile and supported, so it’s in a whole different world in 2013 than it 
was in 2003. But it was very controversial then. I was traveling with my daughter and a young 
black man who was my daughter’s math tutor at the time – a family friend, basically. We went to 
the Mug and Bean, a coffee chain in South Africa; I was feeling pretty discouraged because I 
couldn’t generate any interest. And these three young women who lived in Khayamandi, which 
is the township right outside of Stellenbosch, came up and said they know a lot about uBuntu. 
And they could set me up in Khayamandi to do interviews about uBuntu. So I went with it. 

Coletti: Can you describe for people who might not be familiar with the term, What is uBuntu? 
Does it have a special meaning? Why did you pick it as the title of your project? 

Cornell: uBuntu is hard to define. It’s a relational ethic of obligation which begins at birth, 
through the ritual of the burial of the umbilical cord. So indigenous values and indigenous rituals 
are completely integrated. And why does it begin there? Because the burial of the umbilical cord 
is when you technically, ritually, begin your own process of individuation from the mother. So 
it’s both a ceremony to celebrate the mother’s labor and to recognize that you are now separated 
from her, in a different way than you were in her womb. 

It’s a worldview, almost. It’s an ethical worldview which understands human beings to be 
completely connected to one another. And there are ethical obligations that we inherit at birth 
that are not what you would call reciprocal-to-rights obligations. These obligations go way 
beyond what we think of as the obligations in rights. So, for instance, if you wanted to give a 
legal example: in living customary law, there’s a very hefty duty to rescue another person. In 
Anglo-American law, and Roman-Dutch law, there is no duty to rescue, unless it’s an immediate 
family member. But to walk by somebody who’s drowning and not save them would be to 
condemn yourself to complete marginalization in the community under uBuntu. So the idea of 
individualism is completely rejected by uBuntu, but not individuation. And individuation is 
always a relational project. There’s no individual who becomes him or herself without 
community support, and the rituals are both a reminder of and a provision for a support system 
so that the people can make the transitions from one stage to another in their lives. 

Coletti: This sounds very similar to care ethics, but the word that I feel might be keeping these 
two theories separate is the word “obligation.” 

Cornell: Care ethics is an Anglo-American concept. I think we need to be wary of making those 
kinds of comparisons because the parameters of Anglo-American political philosophy are care 
versus justice, with the other side of the care argument are people like John Rawls who 
supposedly defends justice over care. So your question is very much within a particular Anglo-



Interview: Drucilla Cornell  44 
 

American context. Since uBuntu is all about justice, it’s all about what justice demands, which is 
why uBuntu underwrites dignity for a lot of the people who appeal to it. So uBuntu should not be 
framed as care versus justice; instead, uBuntu is a way in which justice is conceived. What you 
owe to the community and what you are owed back is constantly thought through but it’s not 
really captured by the care-justice debate. One thing I learned immediately in this work is, Don’t 
translate into a very particularized debate because the terms may be so different. In fact, uBuntu 
ethics captures justice and care in a way that would be important for people in that debate 
because it might be a richer way to think about what they’re trying to get at. 

Coletti: That’s why this sounds so interesting to me because it always frustrated me when I was 
in graduate school how in conversations about care ethics I felt that if I tried to put one foot in 
each camp, care and justice, I would immediately be shot down because, “Oh, you can’t do that, 
this is an either-or discussion.” 

Cornell: I think the posing of either-ors in this way blocks thinking. I have spent my entire life 
avoiding either-ors. It’s foundational for the way I think. So I also would have had one foot in 
both camps. To a certain extent, somebody like Seyla Benhabib tried to do that in a lot of her 
work about the particular and generalized other. But even there, it doesn’t capture what uBuntu 
is about because it’s not like there’s a particular other that you owe something to. [In uBuntu,] 
you are obligated to every human being to rescue them, end of discussion. So in a certain sense, 
there are obligations based on something like the recognition of human being-ness that goes way 
beyond whether you’re Zulu or you’re Xhosa. So it’s seen at the level of the human in a 
particular way. It’s universalizable in a sense, but it’s also very particular.  

That’s one thing that I’ve thing that I’ve always found frustrating in the U.S. academy: the 
debates are so narrow. It’s among a hundred people who keep debating each other and attacking 
each other and changing their minds and saying, “He did this,” or “he did that,” and, as you said, 
how can you say, “It’s either care or it’s justice.” Already that has to be a mistake. 

Coletti: If you are in a professional academic setting, say, if you go to a conference and you 
have a conversation with other academics and you’re talking about this ethical worldview – 
what, typically, when you’re talking to people who aren’t familiar with this, what is the reaction 
that they tend to give you? “Wait a minute, obligated to every human being? That’s ridiculous! 
That’s impossible!” Is that a reaction that you get very often, because when I talk about care 
ethics with other people, that’s the reaction that I get from them. So I wonder if you face a 
similar problem. 

Cornell: Well, yes and no, because I work a lot in South Africa. So certainly the project has 
undergone both research into and advocacy for respect for indigenous ideals and rituals. So in a 
sense the whole point of the project is to not just talk to academics, but also to talk to people who 
are in Parliament, or in the courts, and also talk to counter-hegemonic movements like the shack-
dwellers. In the shack-dwellers movement, a concept of revolutionary uBuntu is used, which has 



45  Colletti 
 

now spread through the whole umbrella organization of mass movements which they helped to 
form. When I talk to people in the shack-dwellers movement, they don’t ask, “Well, what is this 
obligation?” since they’re part of the struggle for the meaning and significance of indigenous 
ideas in a revolutionary context. In this way it’s a contextualized universal.  

There’s a Xhosa word, and there’s a similar word in Zulu, “serati,” which means that people 
actually have an energy force between them. This is actually very accepted in neuroscience. I 
hate to use these machine words, but the brain is actually viewed like an electric factory: it’s 
sending electronic impulses throughout your body all the time. Chinese acupuncture understood 
this 5,000 years ago, so it’s nothing new. Those electric impulses that go through your spine 
basically are the commands that are constantly being given out, such as, “raise your hand.” All 
the things we do are basically energy impulses. If that’s the case – and Einstein said telepathy is 
clearly possible – you don’t read somebody’s mind; you’re reading somebody but the mind is not 
something separate from the body or embodied in one individual. You’re in a field with others 
and you are sensing that field. And African philosophy has understood that. We didn’t need 
neuroscience to teach them that, but it’s good for those who are looking at the science now. 

Serati gets at that. It’s about this idea that we’re actually in a force field. So if you and I were 
sitting in a restaurant, and somebody hit somebody else in the back of the restaurant and 
everybody just sat there, the entire energy field that connects us would be affected. There was a 
murder right outside my apartment the other night and most people ran towards the victim which 
is a sign of understanding that at the level of what I’m calling the “electrical energy” that exists 
between people. And what’s interesting is that now that’s what neuroscience is coming to. 
Neuroscience isn’t against agency; it doesn’t say that the brain is the soul or the mind because of 
all of this electrical nerve processing that’s going on constantly. So, for example, my daughter 
was buying a cookie around the block [during the murder] and she said, “Everything changed.” 
And she didn’t even know what had happened, because people are sending out electrical 
impulses, a panic, an “Oh my God, I have to do something,” all that is being signaled before a 
word gets spoken. This means that when someone says, “So what is this obligation to every 
human being? You’re not in physical contact with every human being!” they are not noticing 
their daily contact with all sorts of human beings, and that is the point, you have to notice. So if 
you walk by someone who is begging and you don’t give money, and you don’t say anything, 
then you have not noticed that there is another human being who is suffering and that this will 
affect every other relationship around you, not just the person who didn’t get the money. 

There’s a wonderful book coming out in Fordham Press by a very good friend of mine, Carrol 
Clarkson, which describes this notion of Serati.5 In South Africa, second by second you are 
asked to give money or buy this magazine called The Big Issue, and you’re constantly 
bombarded with “Can you help? Can you help? Can you help? Can you help?” And every time 
you don’t help, that’s a decision that you’ve made but it’s also part of what I’m calling this 
electrical field which is captured in African Xhosa philosophy with the word “serati.”  



Interview: Drucilla Cornell  46 
 

Coletti: Listening to you talk about this, I’m reminded of the work of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. She 
wrote a book called My Stroke of Insight6 and she describes in deep detail what it was like to go 
through a major, debilitating stroke. For many weeks, perhaps many months, the only 
functioning portion of her brain, I believe, was the right side of her brain because the left side of 
her brain had been severely traumatized. She found that as she recovered and could do more for 
herself, she had to inform people who were spending time around her that they were responsible 
for the energy they brought to her room. Because when people came and went – and I’m trying 
to think of a way to connect it very directly with what you were just offering me – that the 
energy that they came and went with, it would either replenish her or it would suck her dry. And 
she couldn’t figure out a way to convey to people that this mattered and it was real. 

Cornell: I would love to read this because that is very much to the point. What you do is always 
part of the environment you’re in. I was just at an academic conference where somebody was 
speaking about how everything is hopeless and revolution is impossible, and you could just see 
the crowd sinking. Many just got up and left, and it wasn’t just [because of] the words. See, 
that’s the whole serati point. It’s about the whole energy that’s being put out into the world. 

Coletti: This is fascinating to me and I’ve done a lot of reading – not with uBuntu ethics, but 
very much aligned with everything that you’re discussing right now – and many times I’ve 
wanted to talk about this with people or just see what they think, and I just know based on certain 
professional experiences that I’ve had that I think I might get laughed out of a room if I try to 
show how philosophy is relevant to, for example, Jill Bolte Taylor’s work. And thus I’ve been 
very quiet about it. I guess this is a question about courage. How do you just go out there and 
describe these things to people and not care if their reaction happens to be, “I don’t know, I think 
that sounds ridiculous.” What do you do? 

Cornell: uBuntu is seen as completely ridiculous by white academics in South Africa. My 
uBuntu Project was laughed out of the room both in the United States and in South Africa. What 
you do is persist. If you think that you are on to something that is important, you persist and you 
re-educate yourself. I have an example of a famous academic in the United States saying to a 
constitutional judge in South Africa, “Well, I really admire the work of the uBuntu Project, but 
uBuntu can never be a constitutional principle.” And the judge said, “The project already won its 
battle. uBuntu has been re-constitutionalized. It’s now used constantly.” So the question of 
whether or not uBuntu can be a constitutional principle is moot, obviously, because it has 
become one. And most of the justices on the constitutional court have taken it as such. I think 
one organization you should look into is the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Jane Gordon 
is now the president, and there is a woman as the vice-president as well. And these ideas can 
actually be discussed there.  

Coletti: Yes, that’s been my experience, too. 



47  Colletti 
 

Cornell: I am hoping that we will build a truly comparative perspective that doesn’t just begin 
with the European canon and then move to include others.  

Coletti: Thinking of this discussion we’ve been having about how you very deeply perceive how 
people can change, for better or worse, the connection, the energy that exists between people… 
Do you enjoy teaching, when you do teach, and if so, why? 

Cornell: Yes, I enjoy teaching because I think mentoring young people reflects our obligations 
to pass on the mantle of critical theory.  

Coletti: How does this impact how you choose to lead a classroom? 

Cornell: I’m sure my idea of mentoring has a huge impact on it, as does my commitment to 
alternative, democratic, pedagogical ways of approaching students in the classroom. The uBuntu 
project is a research project, but it is not only that, at least in a conventional sense. I’ve organized 
something called the uBuntu Township Project. It took up where we did interviews in the 
townships. The people from the project who lived in the township took responsibility for all the 
interviews. If you view things this way, from the perspective of serati, then the most important 
thing you can do in a classroom is create a positive energy, if you want to put it [that way], and a 
support system that allows people to do their best work, which goes exactly against the cynical 
idea that the way people learn to work in this world is they have to get the shit kicked out of 
them. 

Coletti: Yes, I’ve never understood that either. I think it’s so disturbing, to some extent. 

Cornell: I think it’s very disturbing, too. It was very present at the time when I was a law 
professor. I just ignored it. I ignored it and I got a lot of shit for it! So when I tell you to just 
ignore things, I’m not doing it lightly, because you’re going to take a lot of knocks because 
we’re supposed to do things a certain way and march to a certain drum. Being an academic is a 
very confining lifestyle unless you find homes like the Caribbean Philosophical Association 
which allow you to be much, much more daring than in other arenas of academic life. 

Coletti: Do you find that you very often feel yourself gravitating toward that home on some 
days? I like how you used the word “home.” That idea of – you’re out there, you’re getting your 
work done, you’re encountering people who are open to your ideas, people who are not open to 
your ideas – how often do you find yourself thinking, “I have to gravitate towards my academic 
home, so to speak, for an escape”? 

Cornell: Not very often. 

Coletti: Well, that’s good. 

Cornell: I have lived a very independent life. Now, I’ve also taken a lot of knocks for it. On the 
other hand, I’m the most senior woman professor in my department, and I’m the highest paid 



Interview: Drucilla Cornell  48 
 

woman in my department by far, so I’ve taken a lot of knocks but I’ve gotten up again. I think 
the biggest price that I’ve probably paid, to be honest, is that I do feel isolated a lot of the time. 
But over the years I have developed some former students, and have met some mentors, people 
like John and Jean Comaroff, so I have developed a kind of academic community that I rely on 
very much to guide me when I do something like move to South Africa and start doing 
something completely new. Because I know that I need that community to stay grounded. The 
other thing is that I’ve also had a life as a playwright. I was a law professor so I could work as a 
lawyer. I’ve never been a hundred percent in the academy at any time in my life. In the uBuntu 
project I’ve produced a documentary film and I’m now working on a fiction film project. So the 
other way I’ve kept everything going is I’ve kind of kept a lot of different projects going at once, 
and I found that necessary for me. 

Coletti: Can you tell me a little bit about your plays? How did you become interested in writing 
plays? If someone charged me with that task, I can’t imagine accomplishing it let alone doing it 
in a way that I’d be pleased with. How did you come to have this interest? Does it cross over 
with your academic work or do you use it as an escape to take a break from your academic 
work? 

Cornell: I think it’s kind of the reverse. I never intended to be an academic. I intended to be a 
playwright or a poet, which is what I first published in. And perhaps after that, if I needed a day 
job and I went to law school, I would do labor law or something like that. I was a union 
organizer. I was a hardcore activist in my teens and twenties. I joined Marxist-Leninist groups 
and I thought that my life was going to be a life as a Communist, which is a different life than the 
life of an academic. Even if there wasn’t going to be a revolution in my lifetime, I would find a 
way to live a kind of revolutionary life by being in some kind of organization and continuing to 
work in factories and be a union organizer.  

I lost a huge battle with the Teamsters Union. I was organizing for United Electrical Workers. 
When I lost that battle I had to do a re-evaluation of where I was in a lot of aspects of my life. So 
I took some classes in advanced math and almost pursued a Ph.D. in mathematics. I’ve always 
had this interest in math and science. I got into a great program – this was in 1977 – and I just 
chickened out. And then I went to law school but I didn’t intend to be an academic. I intended to 
be some kind of left-wing playwright and I was dreaming dreams of Bertolt Brecht and I 
continue to see my work as, mainly, that of transforming the world. So then I went to law school 
at a time when critical legal studies was really happening and I ended up getting a job as a 
professor. It was kind of happenstance if you want to put it that way. 

Coletti: Did you like it? 

Cornell: I’m asked that question a lot by younger people. “Like” is, maybe, too strong a word. I 
love teaching and I love reading and I love ideas, let’s put it that way. It has been an incredible 
day job. I’m a single mother; I have a daughter. I don’t think I could have raised her on my own 



49  Colletti 
 

with my initial idea of being a part-time labor lawyer and a poet or a playwright, because, though 
I’ve had a number of produced plays, I certainly never made any money off them. So it has 
provided me with a very decent day job. Are there things I don’t like about it? Yes. I don’t like 
the way things seem to turn in on each other constantly, in a way that I find very unproductive. 

Coletti: What do you mean by “turning in”? 

Cornell: The way that debates get defined. Like, you gave the example of the care-justice 
debate. So it’s turning in on itself, without really questioning, “Why are we using these terms, 
exactly? What do these terms tell us? How do they help us? Are there ways that they don’t help 
us? Do we need to think in different terms?” 

Coletti: This is a very selfish question but I’m going to ask it anyway. My sister just graduated 
from law school last Friday. What advice – if you could give advice to anybody graduating from 
law school in 2013 – what would you hope that they would listen to if you gave them one 
message? 

Cornell: My god-daughter just graduated from law school. 

Coletti: Congratulations! 

Cornell: So I’ve been obsessing on this question. She wants to do work with refugees. Very 
important, very far-reaching work, and it’s very difficult to get a job, and she’ll always be very 
poorly paid. In my time, when I graduated from law school, we had all these Ford Foundation 
public interest law firms which paid fairly well and there’s still one or two left, but very few left, 
so it’s very, very, very competitive to get in a public interest job. Not impossible. I really want 
my god-daughter to land on her feet and get a good job. The other problem, of course, as you 
know, is the problem with loans. And people come out of law school heavily indebted. There’s 
still loan forgiveness for people who go into a certain kind of work, and that’s all for the good. If 
you’re a political activist and you’ve graduated from law school, it’s going to be difficult but 
don’t give up on the idea that there’s something that can be done, for you to get a job that 
furthers the politics that you want to practice. 

Coletti: I can’t even imagine the road that all of these graduates have ahead of them. Well, I 
guess in other fields it’s just as challenging, too. I know you have a special affinity for the law 
since you also have a J.D. 

Cornell: Yeah, absolutely. And there were more opportunities when I got out of law school. 
Like I said, I kind of fell into being a law professor because critical legal studies had opened up a 
space to do critical theory. I’m not sure I would ever be hired as a law professor now. Academic 
politics shift and change; there’s more space sometimes and less space other times. 



Interview: Drucilla Cornell  50 
 

Coletti: We can wrap up with this. One of the other things I’m wondering is: Where do you hope 
to go next? You described your current research and what you’re working on. Is there a certain 
trajectory or a certain direction you want to move in with your current research? 

Cornell: I’m wrapping up my work in South Africa with a number of books: The Dignity 
Jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, which is appearing in two volumes; 
my own book, Law and Revolution: uBuntu Dignity and Constitutional Transformation; and, a 
third book entitled Albie Sachs and the Transformation of South Africa: from Revolutionary 
Activist to Constitutional Justice which is coming out from myself, Albie Sachs, and Karin Van-
Marle. So now I’m going to undertake a very big book on law – understood in a very broad way 
– and revolution. Ideas of law and revolution got de-coupled under notions of the dictatorship of 
the proletariat; I am interested in what this de-coupling meant for Islamic revolutionary thought, 
for example. I taught a class on Islam in Africa and spent the last ten months trying to educate 
myself about Islam in the 20th century. I am teaching some of that work at Birkbeck for the 
Critical Theory Summer School. So that’s my next big project. I’m also probably going to write 
a review of Lee Smolin’s book on Time Reborn, which is a book about physics and time, and 
some of this work I’ve been doing on reading neuroscience to challenge, again, some of the 
negative, quote-unquote, thinking that comes out of some of that work. Because it’s not coming 
out of neuroscience; it’s coming out of other places. I’m actually going to write something I’ve 
been working for a couple of years on challenging Alain Badiou’s math in set theory and I want 
to take that up now through some of Lee’s work in physics to talk about the physical universe. If 
anything, my work takes us away from some of the kinds of pessimism that dominate certain 
members in the U.S. academy. My work is consistently about revolution and transformation. 

Coletti: You’re saying all this to a girl who cried her way through calculus and physics many 
years ago, so all of this is very impressive to me because I can’t imagine revisiting those topics 
after my personal track record with them. 

Cornell: This is probably a kind of important return for me personally because I was in a group 
on philosophy and science and I absolutely love math, and I felt that there was something really 
the matter with Badiou’s whole notion in Being and Event, his mathematicized Platonic notion of 
the multiplicity of being. So I went back and really sat down again with Cantor, and then worked 
with some great mathematicians and physicists like Lee. Again, having intellectual comrades I 
trust is how I’ve avoided isolation. I have great comrades and friends in the academy, in many 
different fields, who don’t ask the easy questions and go against hegemonic trends. 

Coletti: Very helpful alliances and friendships.  

Cornell: Yes, it keeps my energy up. 

Coletti: I think it’s so interesting how you described how you have your hands in several things 
at once. For someone like me it’s fascinating and amazing to see how you tie them all together in 



51  Colletti 
 

a way that is not just relevant for you personally but because of the connection you draw 
between these various projects. It can speak to more people on a more influential level. 

Cornell: It’s very interesting. In 1995 when I wrote The Imaginary Domain,7 I began this 
practice of reading everything I wrote out loud. I had a great editor named Maureen MacGrogan 
who always did that with me and she’s certainly part of my intellectual community. I tried as 
hard as I could to get away from jargon or this internal language that is being generated by a 
narrow academic debate. Not easy to do, by the way. 

Coletti: I would think so. I’m so glad to hear you say that, that you insist on reading your own 
work out loud, because I am constantly telling my students to do that and I don’t think that many 
of them do, despite my insistence. But it makes such a difference in how you end up putting your 
words on the page. Many people don’t believe me when I tell them that. 

Cornell: It does, it makes a huge difference. It’s very, very important. 

Coletti: I can’t thank you enough for talking with me today.  

Cornell: It’s great to talk to you, too. And I also go to the CPA and I really think organizations 
like that are so important to keeping your spirits up and your mind open.   

 

Notes 
 

1. Cornell, Drucilla, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, eds. 1992. 
Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. New York: Routledge.  

2. Bond, Patrick. 2000. The Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South 
Africa. London: Pluto Press. 

3. Terreblanche, Sampie. 2002. A History of Inequality in South Africa, 1652–2002. 
Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. 

4. Genet, Jean. 2003. Prisoner of Love. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: New York 
Review Books. 

5. Clarkson, Carrol. 2013. Drawing the Line: Toward an Aesthetics of Transitional 
Justice. New York: Fordham University Press. 

6. Taylor, Jill Bolte. 2008. My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey. 
New York: Viking. 

7. Cornell, Drucilla. 1995. The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography, and Sexual 
Harassment. New York: Routledge. 

 


