There is a clear religious reference in the title of Rick Turner's The Eye of the Needle. There is also a secondary, more obvious, meaning to the title. I believe this secondary meaning goes against much of what is written in the text itself. What is at stake in this apparent contradiction is the definite article in the title, which leads to a paradox between the seemingly idealist or open-ended praxes implied in the book and the idea of a single ‘eye’ to be threaded through political practice. Much of the current volume is concerned with the tension between philosophical realism and idealism (see the Introduction, chapter 6 and chapter 11). Some have explicitly or implicitly chosen a side, probably revealing an imprecision in The Eye of the Needle, which was written in only a few days and consequently can serve as a type of Rorschach blot for those engaging with Turner's work. I will not attempt to escape the implications of this observation. That would be foolish.

Instead, I too will ‘project’ my own ontology onto this text, by bringing Turner into conversation with the poststructuralism that continued to develop from the time of his banning and after his untimely death. By drawing on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's (2013) theory of poststructural hegemony, this contribution continues the scant attempts to demonstrate how Turner, read from a more idealist vantage point, like Sartre, apparently gained a greater appreciation for the limits to human choice. Poststructuralist views on choice typically still assume that the continuously reiterated social realm is filled with dynamic constraints, while by the same token, creative opportunities for progressive praxes continuously arise. Thus, to highlight the praxes potentiated by Turner and later interpretations of Sartre (Fox 2003; Hudson 2017), which by implication places both Sartre and Turner closer to poststructuralism than they were initially viewed as being, I continue along the path initiated by Peter Hudson (2017), who argued that Turner anticipated this ‘new Sartre’. Laclau and Mouffe are used as relevant interlocutors, after the fact, so to speak, based on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Poststructural hegemony as theorised by Laclau and Mouffe – and Turner, it would appear – may help shed light on the contemporary South African problem of crime and the often problematic responses to it, often in the name of the now more diverse category of the privileged.