What is the public sphere like in South Africa today? In what way is it public? And what might it mean to speak of "reconstituting religion" in this public sphere? In order to answer these questions with some intelligence, we need to understand how the public sphere is currently constructed. The essay describes such a construction in terms of a shift to: a postcolonial situation; a postmodern situation; a post-resistance situation; the reality of globalization with the falling of the walls which were erected from within by apartheid and reinforced from without by international sanctions; the trouble in which resistance discourse finds itself since 1994; and the rise of a more nuanced understanding of resistance (hidden or coded "arts of resistance"). Related to these shifts, we pay attention the way in which identity and difference are implicated in each other in this context. This leads to a final, critical question, an ontological one: Who? Who is our prime interlocutor in determining our view of reality, our sense of what it means to live as a human being in this society? Who sets the agenda, frames the questions, offers the key categories for our understanding or our condition? Who benefits from the way in which transitional processes are conducted and new social arrangements are put in place? Who does not benefit, who suffers the consequences? More pertinently, who does so systematically, that is, not merely arbitrarily?
