PONDERING POSSIBILITIES OF THE BIBLICAL CRITIC AS PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL, PART ONE: PROBLEMATISING THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL AND THE IDENTITY OF THE BIBLICAL SCHOLAR

• Johannes N Vorster University of South Africa

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7833/115-0-1292

Abstract

 Is there a possibility to critically interrogate the hegemony of the type of historical approaches to the academic study of the Bible currently governing and regulating Biblical Studies? Against the background of inquiring how Biblical Studies can be effectively transformed, the biblical critic as public intellectual is submitted. The notion of public intellectual, however, is by no means an uncontested category and could replicate what its deployment would endeavour to subvert. The objective of this article is therefore primarily to problematise the notion of the public intellectual within a logic of representationalism with identity as organising principle. It is instead argued that the public intellectual be seen as a subjectivity engendered by an ethos of discursive practices emerging from difference. Utilising projects that theorise the critical rhetor and the public intellectual, I probe the possibility that the biblical critic likewise be seen as public intellectual, engendered by a peculiar ethos produced by its dispersion through discursive practices. This article constitutes a first part specifically problematising and theorising the notion of public intellectual and problematising the current identity of the biblical scholar.