Derrida and the Limit of the Human/non-Human Other in African Indigenous Beliefs

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Published: Dec 31, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/syn.44011
Keywords:
Derrida Limitrophy Ubuntu Ukama African Indigenous beliefs Human/non-human boundary Postcolonial Theory San peoples Animal/human ontology Indigenous art and storytelling Deconstruction Deconstruction at Large Anthropocentrism Personhood Ontology Epistemology Relational Ethics
Georgia Mandelou
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
https://orcid.org/0009-0002-7382-3123
Abstract

The article examines the ways African indigenous ideologies, belief systems, and mythologies, as these are expressed in native art and storytelling, challenge dominant frames of conceptualizing and perceiving the human and rearticulate the being-with with the non-human Other, through Derrida’s limitrophic understanding of the dividing line between human and animal. Derrida’s pliable neologism of limitrophy expresses the disobedience towards the rigidly drawn limits between the human and the non-human Other. The article discusses the African indigenous beliefs of ubuntu and ukama and their formulation of human/animal connections in conjunction with the Derridean limitrophic approach to the division between human/non-human Other. It then proceeds to consider the manifestation of these beliefs in indigenous art and storytelling of the San peoples of southern Africa, discussing the ties of affinity between Derrida’s reflections on the limits of the animal/human binary in Western thought as these are expressed in his intellectual ruminations on the nature of the division between the beast and the sovereign, and the cultural expressions of the San that manifest the animal/human ontological convergence.

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Author Biography
Georgia Mandelou, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Georgia Mandelou is a Doctoral Researcher at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA). After completing her BA in English Language and Literature at NKUA, she earned an MA in 20th–21st Century Literature at the University of Southampton. She is currently completing her dissertation titled Topologies of Rule and the Citizen/Subject in the Contemporary African Novel, which examines the literary representations of the individual’s migration from the urban core to rural, peripheral regions, as this is depicted in several anglophone novels produced in sub-Saharan African countries in late colonial and early postcolonial years, as well as in the present-day. Her conference presentations include ‘Limitrophy and the other-than-human Animal in Indigenous African Ethics’ (8th Derrida Today Conference, 2024), ‘Petrofiction and Female Resistance: Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010) and Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021)’ (ESSE Conference, 2024), and ‘Sympoiesis as Becoming-with’ (Post?racial Transmodernities: Afro-European relations, Mediterranean Trajectories & Intercultural Reciprocities Workshop, 2022). Her latest publication, “On the Politics of Making Life in the Ruins of Empire: Helon Habila’s ‘Oil on Water’ and Chigozie Obioma’s ‘An Orchestra of Minorities,” appeared in Scrutiny2 in 2024.

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