Anthropology's Wake: Attending to the End of Culture 9780823290888

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A n t h r o p o l o g y ’ s Wa k e

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Anthropology’s Wake Attending to the End of Culture

Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson

fordham university press New York 2008

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Copyright 䉷 2008 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

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contents

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Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Anthropology’s Wake Scott Michaelsen 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

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Descartes’ Corps David E. Johnson

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Our Sentiments Scott Michaelsen Ex-Cited Dialogue David E. Johnson An Other Voice Scott Michaelsen ‘‘Unworkable Monstrosities’’ David E. Johnson Hybrid Bound Scott Michaelsen Coda: Anthropology’s Present David E. Johnson

58 81 111 134 166 188

Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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preface All ethnography is part philosophy, and a good deal of the rest is confession. —Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

Man is that which is in relation to his end, in the fundamentally equivocal sense of the word. Since always. —Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy

The ‘‘plague village’’ scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail dramatizes quite well the current ‘‘state’’ of anthropology. A cart piled high with corpses is pulled through a medieval village, accompanied by the Cart Master who repeatedly calls out, ‘‘Bring out your dead. . . . Bring out your dead. . . .’’ For nine pence villagers can deposit their dead on the cart to have them hauled off. A man arrives with a body slung over his shoulder. He proffers the nine pence, but the ‘‘corpse’’ objects, ‘‘I’m not dead.’’ There ensues a conversation that goes more or less like this: ‘‘I’m not dead.’’ ‘‘Well, you soon will be.’’ ‘‘I’m feeling better.’’ ‘‘No, you’re not.’’ ‘‘I’m going for a walk.’’ ‘‘You’re not fooling anyone, you know.’’ Finally, the Cart Master hits the not-yet-dead man over the head with a large wooden spoon. He is placed on the cart. It is possible that the only way to have improved on this scene would have been for the corpse to have continued to insist, well after his ‘‘death,’’ that he was not dead yet. The more regal account goes like this: ‘‘Anthropology is dead. Long live anthropology.’’ It seems to us that anthropology has always been susceptible to this double staging, both as farce and as solemn occasion for mourning. Indeed, we contend that the discipline of anthropology has been acting out this funeral drama from its inception. Anthropology’s Wake

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is written in the spaces of this over-wrought sentence: Anthropology is (not) dead (yet). Fueled in large measure by the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), the 1980s crises of anthropology—crises of representation, politics, and the politics of representation—have left many observers, including many anthropologists, if not longing for, then at least anticipating the death of anthropology. In one sense, Anthropology’s Wake addresses this anticipation and even attempts to precipitate anthropology’s demise. Its time has passed. This is one meaning of the wake. At the same time, however, it is also clear to us that anthropology survives. Moreover, in and through its signal idea, the culture concept, death-bed anthropology appears determined to carry on for some time to come, if only in and through other disciplines and other disciplinary formations. Consequently, we write in the wake of anthropology, haunted by it. Anthropology has no future; yet, it remains before us. In the book that follows we query anthropology’s response to its own crises in the aftermath of the publication of such seminal 1980s works as Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other (1983); James Clifford and George E. Marcus’ collection, Writing Culture (1986); and V. Y. Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa (1988). What claims does anthropology make, today, regarding strategies of fieldwork, methods of representation, practices for political intervention? Has anthropology managed in the intervening years to reinvent itself and to emerge onto more defensible terrain? How does anthropology conceive its future? Does it have one? Is it dead yet? Three trends in particular concern us: (1) the revived interest in an anthropology of affect; (2) the technology of ‘‘dialogue’’; and (3) the discovery of the ‘‘hybrid.’’ Each of these methodological techniques or presuppositions informs an anthropological strategy to redetermine the scene and subject of anthropology, thereby answering and mitigating challenges to the ethics and politics of anthropological knowledge: The anthropology of affect attempts to ground the possibility of a multicultural world community in the universality of emotions; the figure of dialogue ostensibly provides for the shift from subject/object to subject/subject relations; the ‘‘hybrid’’ affords anthropology a new ‘‘object’’ that short-circuits colonialism’s ability to ‘‘locate’’ the other. Our interrogation of these three methodological strategies goes to the heart of what is at stake in anthropology, namely, the theory of the human and the relation of the human to culture. In effect, the wake is both of and for the twinned notions of culture and the human as much as it is of and for anthropology.

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Although much of Anthropology’s Wake is devoted to a critical engagement with anthropology’s archive, we do not limit our critique to the critical corpus of the discipline of anthropology. Via the materials that circulate through each chapter, we open post-1980s anthropology to the discipline’s complex pre-history (discovery and travel narratives, for example), to philosophy, to literature in general; in so doing, we expose anthropology to its multiple foundations. In short, we read what might be called the anthropological episteme—the logics and principles of representation— from Plato and Aristotle to the most recent cultural and ethnic studies theorists and practitioners. Anthropology’s Wake is not a narrowly focused critique of anthropological practice. It has broader implications in that it poses a clear and powerful challenge to dominant trends in humanitiesstyle cultural analysis in general. By positing ‘‘anthropology’’ at the heart of the amorphous notion of cultural studies, Anthropology’s Wake provides a key for reading at the intersection of a number of traditional disciplines, including anthropology, history, literature, and philosophy. One possible thesis of this book, then, is that without ‘‘anthropology’’—understood in the broadest possible sense as the logics and principles of representation— there could be no possible interdisciplinarity, hence no possible cultural studies; yet, because there is ‘‘anthropology,’’ interdisciplinarity ultimately makes no difference to disciplinary thinking. Our list of three techniques or methodological presuppositions is not an exhaustive one, and one might easily imagine a variety of other candidates for inclusion: globalization theory, the multisited research agenda, journalistic reportage, the invocation of ‘‘fiction,’’ recent writings on agency, visual anthropology, and the like. To some, our choices will seem too highly discretionary, too idiosyncratic. To that we will only argue: It is not legitimate to critique Anthropology’s Wake from the perspective of what it leaves out or fails to include. Indeed, it has always been the last recourse of a writer in trouble to begin generating a list of items not covered in the work of another writer; that game is interminable, and meaningless. The real question should be: Can a particular technique, not described here, avoid the traps we outline? Can any anthropological method at all, tethered to and working from whatever form of the culture concept, be judged as non-exclusionary? We are certain that this is impossible, undesirable, and, in fact, unthinkable. Anthropology’s Wake is a collaborative, coauthored project. But it would be a mistake to read in the co of collaboration and coauthorship a singleness of purpose or a unity of mind. The book consists of three pairs of chapters, each pair devoted to one of three techniques (affect, dialogue,

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hybridity), with each of us taking up, in turn, each of these strategies from different angles and drawing in different materials from the last 2500 years, but sometimes with the same core materials under investigation. In only one instance, that of the first two chapters and their respective interpretations of Renato Rosaldo’s important Culture and Truth, was any confluence of our reading by design. In every other case, overlap was strictly by chance, a matter of contingency, and thus itself an effect of the archive in which we were reading and writing. After a set of initial conversations, we wrote our chapters independently of each other and we have not modified these chapters so as to respond directly to the other’s conclusions. For each of us, then, the chapters of the other remain to be read. We leave unremarked therefore the many complex interrelationships between the chapter pairs. Do the two of us agree on all matters here? Where are our own, internal disputes located? Here, something of and about singularities will be at stake, and the question of comparatism in general. One always writes with more than one hand and one always reads in more than one voice. If it adds up to a book at all, Anthropology’s Wake will have been written and will have to be read in n Ⳮ 1 hands, n Ⳮ 1 voices. In sum, we will have sought to imagine a text that opens onto (rather than forecloses) readerly responsibilities, on every page.

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acknowledgments

Parts of Anthropology’s Wake have been published previously. We would like to thank those journals and their editors for permission to reproduce those pages, often somewhat revised, in this new context. A slightly different version of Chapter 1 was published in Arizona Quarterly 57.1 (Spring 2001). An earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared in Aztla´n: A Journal of Chicano Studies 23.2 (Fall 1998). The Coda includes pages that appeared, in different form, in Discourse: Journal For Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 23.1 (Winter 2001) and in South Atlantic Quarterly 106.1 (Winter 2007). Jose´ Limo´n invited us to give the earliest versions of the first two chapters as conference presentations at the 1995 annual meeting of the American Ethnological Society in Austin, TX. The warm welcome our papers received at this meeting spurred the idea for the book that follows. We thus thank him and all the auditors and session participants for that memorable occasion. Michaelsen also wishes to thank the following groups for inviting him to read portions of this work and discuss it: the program in Critical Theory and the Department of English at University of California Davis; the Program in Critical and Cultural Studies at Drake University; the English Department at the University of Miami–Ohio; the Race and the TwentyFirst Century Conference at Michigan State University; the Arizona Quarterly Annual Symposium; and the Marxism 2000 conference. Among others who deserve special thanks at these several institutions and events are Scott Cutler Shershow, Patrick O’Donnell, C. Richard King, Edgar A. Dryden, and Theresa Mele´ndez. Johnson thanks Jose´ Buscaglia, Jose´ Antonio Baujı´n, and Rogelio Rodrı´guez Coronel for the invitation to present part of the Coda at the joint University at Buffalo–Universidad de La Habana Caribbean Studies Symposium in Havana. Additionally, he thanks Bill Egginton, Martin Ha¨gglund, Michael J. King, and Thomas Morgan for reading and commenting on the earliest versions of his chapters. During an often-hilarious visit to Havana in December 2006, Shaun Irlam reminded us of Monty Python’s particular importance for any assessment of the current state of anthropology.

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A n t h r o p o l o g y ’ s Wa k e

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introduction

Anthropology’s Wake Scott Michaelsen nothing whatever draws me to ethnogr. studies. —Bronislaw Malinowksi

‘‘Nothing whatever draws me to ethnog[raphic] studies’’: Bronislaw Malinowski, when he writes this remark in his diary on November 29, 1914, may simply be bored, or perhaps distracted by newspapers and by conversation with white acquaintances. If so, this moment is simply one of many bumps on the road to culturalist ethnography—a kind of writer’s block that demonstrates, according to George W. Stocking, Jr., just how difficult was the task Malinowski set for himself as a long-term participantobserver in the field (‘‘Empathy’’ 191). But, at the same time, the remark clearly brings Malinowski to the brink of not studying persons in an ethnographic manner. What precisely will be the conditions for not engaging in the ethnographic? And a more particular question: What does it mean, in the first place, that the ‘‘me’’ in this sentence must be ‘‘drawn to’’ ethnographic study? What, in other words, triggers the ethnographic? Reading this sentence from one angle, it is possible to imagine that the literal ‘‘nothing whatever’’ might be drawing Malinowski to ethnography. Perhaps to stress both the ‘‘nothing’’ and the ‘‘whatever’’ as the lure of anthropology makes some counterintuitive sense. As Stephen Tyler has suggested, cultural anthropology ‘‘describes no objects. . . . It does not describe, for there is nothing it could describe’’ (‘‘Post-Modern Ethnography’’ 137). One might suggest therefore that cultural anthropology is

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drawn to a void, desires to fill a gap, or even responds to a lack. We may be dealing, then, with the politico-psychological figure which Giorgio Agamben has designated the ‘‘quodlibet’’—an indeterminate being of ‘‘whatever’’ potentiality ‘‘who’’ has not yet been interpolated, ‘‘who’’ is in principle limitless, in excess, and ‘‘who,’’ like Herman Melville’s Bartleby, perhaps refuses to be interpellated.1 But cultural anthropology always seeks out this quodlibet; and the ethnographer always is ‘‘guided toward’’ the excessive givenness of the world and its beings (Nancy, Sense 51). One can turn to a moment in Claude Le´vi-Strauss’s magisterial and canonical Tristes Tropiques (1956) for something quite similar and, perhaps, clarifying: The anthropologist is aboard a ship in 1934, on the way to his job in Sa˜o Paulo—on the verge of his fieldwork, the core anthropological experiences that would inform so much of his work in the next six decades: I watched enthralled from the empty deck, as, every day, for the space of a few minutes, in all quarters of a horizon vaster than any I had ever seen before, the rising and the setting of the sun presented the beginning, development and conclusion of supernatural cataclysms. If I could find a language in which to perpetuate those appearances, at once so unstable and so resistant to description, if it were granted to me to be able to communicate to others the phases and sequences of a unique event which would never recur in the same terms, then—so it seemed to me—I should in one go have discovered the deepest secrets of my profession: however strange and peculiar the appearances to which anthropological research might expose me, there would be none whose meaning and importance I could not eventually make clear to everybody. (62)

Here is Le´vi-Strauss expressing the desire of all cultural anthropology, the desire to translate and to make appear that which is singular—‘‘so unstable and so resistant to description,’’ ‘‘a unique event which would never recur in the same terms.’’ The dream of cultural anthropology is to marshal all of the world’s ‘‘nothing whatever’’ singularities into the regime of representation—to force the singular to appear in order to cast it into the arena of the political: to, for example, use the newly and now-made-to-appear ‘‘Caduveo,’’ ‘‘Bororo,’’ ‘‘Nambikwara,’’ and ‘‘Tupi-Kawahib’’ as a critique of modernization, globalization, population expansion, and the like. Such is the simplistic, binary, and ultimately exclusionary thrust of the project of Tristes Tropiques, of all such anthropologies, of the limit of the political strategy that is cultural anthropology. An enormously significant anthropological resolution is made visible in this passage: that ‘‘however strange and peculiar the appearances to which

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anthropological research might expose me, there would be none whose meaning and importance I could not eventually make clear to everybody.’’ The twin poles of this resolution will be between, on the one hand, a certain sort of exposure of oneself to the outside—an exposure to the limit of representation in the shape of what one will have to describe as the sublime (the ‘‘vast’’-ness of ‘‘supernatural cataclysms’’), and where one might invoke a Lyotardian reading of the Kantian sublime (which will prove particularly appropriate for a figure like Le´vi-Strauss, who renders so many of his judgments about culture precisely on the ground of aesthetics); and, on the other hand, a determination of ‘‘significance’’ such that the fragility of singularity collapses under the pressure of being unified and made to signify—that is, made to take up the burden of cultural ‘‘meaning.’’ This passage presents therefore an analogous situation to that described by Agamben, with singularities and an interpellating cultural anthropology locked into an agonistic relation that has not been fundamentally reimagined in the one hundred years or more of professionalization. The ‘‘nothing whatever’’ of the sublime inaugurates anthropology, and anthropology transmutes the sublime (or a certain exposure) into a terminal case of overexposure. Nothing will be risked here beyond the ‘‘nothing’’ that is put at risk, determined, and endlessly put in the service of the production of cultural beings. Cultural anthropology’s others will never be left in a position that promises or permits the unpredictability of a relation to alterity. In anthropology, inevitably, the anthropologist’s ‘‘experience’’ of the other produces a meaning that necessarily misses the chance of others and alterity.2 These are grave consequences: Cultural anthropology’s promise has always been the possibility of something other than ourselves, yet anthropology relentlessly forecloses such a possibility. Anthropology’s promise, then, will only be reimaginable at its gravesite. Anthropology’s stake in a future different from a mere repetition of the past will involve, from here onward, rethinking to the limit both anthropology’s object and the ‘‘subject’’ of anthropology. For indeed, if a certain sort of ‘‘exposure’’ to the singular in Le´vi-Strauss structures in the first place the desire to tame, manifest, and perhaps destroy such singularity, one will have to broach the question of ‘‘who’’ produces culturalist anthropology (and ‘‘who’’ might not). Malinowski’s diaries will provide the beginnings of an answer to this question, but one that will far exceed the scope of every answer previously assayed.

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1. The 1980s were the high-water mark for the movement to end the anthropological—to have done with the ethnography of culture and its relationship to colonialism, objectification, and therefore, and in short, class-racial hierarchies in a world context. Highlights of that moment—a time of maximal flux or ‘‘crisis’’ in anthropology—would include Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other (1983); Derek Freeman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa (1983); Sherry Ortner’s ‘‘Theory In Anthropology Since the Sixties’’ (1984); George E. Marcus and Michael M.J. Fischer’s Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986); Clifford Geertz’s Works and Lives (1988); V.Y. Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa (1988); and James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture (1988); as well as George W. Stocking’s ‘‘History of Anthropology’’ series from the University of Wisconsin Press, which published an annual volume between 1983 and 1988, and George Marcus’ editorship of the journal Cultural Anthropology, which began in 1986. This extremely reflexive and highly energizing and agonizing moment for cultural anthropology was summed up best for those outside the discipline by publication of the Clifford and Marcus collection, Writing Culture, in 1986. It would be claiming too much to suggest that a particular work or idea touched off publication of all of this anthropological soul-searching, but there can be no doubt that the arrival of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 was of great consequence to the 1980s, both within the profession of anthropology and among a wide variety of readers outside of it. Orientalism, like other broadly Foucauldian critiques of anthropology that came later, explicitly sought to end anthropology as such; to the extent that Said sketched out a future for anthropology, it was a future anthropology unlike anything which had come before and that might not merit the name ‘‘anthropology.’’ A generalized break from the past was forecast and prescribed by Said, and another order of knowledge suggested. Said’s introduction to Orientalism, for example, was widely understood as ‘‘totalizing’’ the problem of ‘‘othering’’—that is, no representational practice that anthropology might invent in the present or future could exceed a complicity with strategies of colonialism: exoticism, anteriorization, and devaluation of the ‘‘other.’’ Therefore, when Orientalism was read by anthropologists in relation to the question of cultural anthropology, it seemed to seek a dissolution of the field and its practices in toto. Anthropology’s Wake would never have been written without, broadly, the model of books such as Said’s, but it must be acknowledged that cultural anthropology managed to bring itself back from the dead—disrupted

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anthropology’s wake and funeral—by critiquing the workings of Orientalism. At times, to be sure, anthropology faltered under Said’s assault. Ortner, for example, characterized Said’s all-encompassing critique of ‘‘othering’’ as belonging to a ‘‘mode’’ of ‘‘anger and/or despair rather than pragmatism,’’ and suggests ineffectually: To such a position we can only respond: try. The effort is as important as the results, in terms of both our theories and our practices. (‘‘Theory’’ 143)

Her particular anthropological alternative, which emphasized ‘‘practice’’ (in short, agency and history) over system and theory, does little more than phrase what has always been implicit, for example, within structuralism; she thus does not so much respond to Said as wish him away. Said’s own rejoinder was brief and withering: He called it ‘‘the reductively pragmatic response,’’ ‘‘as if practice were a domain of actuality unencumbered by agents, interests, and contentions, political as well as philosophical’’ (‘‘Representing’’ 211). More productively, Marcus and Fischer’s critique of Said focused on the problem of totality—on the way Said offered ‘‘no alternative form for the adequate representation of other voices or points of view across cultural boundaries, nor does he instill any hope that this might be possible (Anthropology as Cultural Critique 2). But, they argue, Said implicitly believes that ‘‘the world written about is often quite different from that imagined in the writings of disciplines like anthropology,’’ and therefore Orientalism leaves open a space for others ‘‘to rethink and experiment with’’ ‘‘conventional forms of writing’’ (2). The legitimacy of this critique was further underscored by Clifford’s close reading of Orientalism, which suggested that Said implicitly advocates at least two future options that run counter to his broadly Foucauldian analysis: ‘‘the positing of cosmopolitan essences and human common denominators’’ (Predicament 266, 275). Both of these, he notes, are ‘‘Western humanist’’—‘‘Said’s descriptions of Orientalist discourse are frequently sidetracked by humanist fables of suppressed authenticity’’ (270). In essence, then, Said’s discourse is profoundly colonial in that it opens up no space for difference, in that it elides the possibility of difference under a form of universalism that should itself have been subjected to a certain sort of Foucauldian critique—the sort described by Eric R. Wolf as Foucault’s History of Sexuality–era concern with power’s co-implication within ‘‘the structural relations that govern ‘consciousness’ ’’ (Envisioning Power 5).

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Indeed, Said’s conclusion to Orientalism is at least as weak as Clifford suggests, and probably more so. Contra Marcus and Fischer, Said stresses three foundations for future anthropology in the last several pages of his text: the individuality of the anthropologist who asserts the uniqueness of his vision against ‘‘guild’’ mentality; the concreteness of history and the anthropologist’s ability to reflect upon that concreteness; and the certainty of human ‘‘experience’’ in general (Orientalism 325–28).3 Here, Said simply ignores a broad series of already long-standing critiques of individuality, history, factuality, reflection, and even experience itself. And Said forgets that anthropologists have always already rehearsed and repeated these very thematics ad nauseam in crucial remarks about fieldwork methodology, such as Malinowski’s pages on this in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). Said’s replacement, then, for imperialist and Orientalist anthropology is precisely the mainstream of anthropology in the twentieth century, which, following such prescriptions religiously, nevertheless has reduplicated the logic and tropes of Orientalism at every turn. Interestingly, when Said later reflected upon what he had wrought, he described the largest shape of Orientalism’s argument as a form of ‘‘radical skepticism’’ that operated from the assumption of a closed anthropological/imperial ‘‘epoch’’ whose practices could never amount to anything more than a reiteration of the logic of the era, could never exceed the threshold of ‘‘partisan ideology,’’ and could never therefore attain the status of truthful representation. And he characterized himself as possibly ‘‘disabled’’ by the power and reach of such radical skepticism (‘‘Representing’’ 211). Indeed, in these same reflections on the significance of his earlier work for the field of anthropology, Said pulled himself back as far as possible from a limit critique of the field, and reapproached anthropology in surprisingly engaged and even friendly terms. Said ends his revisiting of Orientalism with a plea for a more generally historically based anthropology focused on contact, power, and relationship: Cultures may then be represented as zones of control or of abandonment, of recollection and of forgetting, of force or of dependence, of exclusiveness or of sharing, all taking place in the global history that is our element. Exile, immigration, and the crossing of boundaries are experiences that can therefore provide us with new narrative forms. . . . (‘‘Representing’’ 225)

Said here joins with elements of the critiques of not only Clifford, and Marcus and Fischer, but also Ortner: One-half of Ortner’s prescription regarding practice advocated the return to historically based work (Ortner

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158–59); Marcus and Fischer pleaded in general for an open-ended exploration of new narrative forms; and Clifford had endorsed the revision of the culture concept ‘‘as made in new political-cultural conditions of global relationality’’ (274). One might well argue, therefore, that with publication of Said’s autocritique, the Orientalism debate closed, with anthropology and its interlocutors reunited around a trio of shared anthropological concerns: history, syncretism, and globality as protections from essentialisms. Similar sorts of retreats, or at least equivocations, might be demonstrated regarding the important, related critiques of anthropology written by V.Y. Mudimbe and Johannes Fabian.4 So what went wrong with the highly generalized and broad-reaching critique of anthropology in the 1980s? Why was a perception of the problems of anthropology in general articulated in ways that recuperated crucial building blocks from anthropological theory? At stake are the neoFoucauldian foundations of analysis in Said, Fabian, and Mudimbe—that is, the notion of the episteme and its closed order of knowledge creates fissures in the three arguments as soon as they are deployed.5 To stay with Said: Clifford notes that Said dates Orientalism from the late-seventeenth century, but Said himself cites precursors in the medieval and classical worlds (Predicament, 257). To begin with, then, the episteme is not completely closed on its front end; thus, Said’s crucial insight concerning anthropology’s total link to imperialism—its status as co-extensive and coterminous with imperialism in a near-superstructure/base relation— is thrown in doubt. And on the back end: Said’s description of Clifford Geertz’s methodological and epistemological correctness in Islam Observed (1968) provides equivalent complication: How can Geertz, trained and practicing in the middle of a period of high American empire (and, indeed, of empire in relation to the Middle East), produce fundamentally nonOrientalist work (Orientalism 326)? There is a strange and confounding symmetry at work here: Orientalism, understood as empire’s anthropology, predates empire, and something both anthropological and non-Orientalist has wormed its way into the heart of empire. This is the point at which the most overarching arguments about anthropology tremble, and what Clifford sees as Said’s mistakes are perhaps assured in some form or another from the beginning, because the Foucauldian framework of closed, relativist logic simply does not work when applied to anthropology. The boundaries of the argument are breached from the beginning. The significance of determining a beginning to anthropology, the significance of dating its origin, has everything to do in these commentaries

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with the attempt to construct an ‘‘exit-strategy’’ with respect to anthropology, which is, as Fred Dallmayr reminds, the sticking point for Said’s enterprise (Beyond Orientalism 116). The texts of Said, Mudimbe, and Fabian are all united around the belief that the ‘‘science’’ of anthropology only rises with modern European empire. Thus, Fabian can write that the proper end for anthropology will be the imminent collapse or withdrawal of ‘‘Anglo-American (and Soviet-Russian)’’ colonialisms (Work 261). Their certainty notwithstanding, it has never been clear as to what would constitute such a threshold of origin: Is it the invention of fieldwork? of kinship studies?6 of cultural analysis?7 One, for example, can detect analogous practices and conceits in a broad range of materials written centuries earlier than dates typically assigned for the beginning of the discipline.8 There is, one can easily concede, a threshold moment for the professionalization of the discipline, for the constitution of strictly anthropological studies in a scholarly context, but the question of the intellectual roots of such professionalization has been, to say the least, vexed. A deeply related problem concerns the relationship between anthropology and the anthropological idea of ‘‘race,’’ a concept that perhaps has given rise in recent years to more dating schema than anthropology per se. Again one runs into threshold problems: Is the fundamental feature of racist thought its foundation in a ‘‘biological’’/‘‘natural’’ argument, distinct from othering in its citizen/foreigner mode; and/or in its application in a hierarchical manner; and/or in non-porous, boundary-hardened political praxis? David Theo Goldberg, for one, dates the full concept of ‘‘race’’ to the origins of modernity—generally, the age of discovery and conquest (Racist Culture 24), but he additionally lines up an impressive array of classical and medieval analogues to race thinking. For example, ‘‘The concern in medieval thought with rationally defined categories of inclusion and exclusion seems to mirror later racial classifications’’ (23). But late medieval thought, according to Goldberg, figured the ‘‘savage,’’ for example, as ‘‘the irrational other in us,’’ rather than as a category for representation of the other (23), and ‘‘medieval exclusion and discrimination were religious at root, not racial’’ (24). The issue here will be whether these are differences that make a difference—whether the attempt to disentangle ‘‘racial classification’’ from ‘‘exclusion,’’ to disentangle othering as such from the othering of ourselves—constitutes a critical threshold. One might suggest, too quickly perhaps, that one thing wrong with Goldberg’s approach is that, on the one hand, racial anthropology too always operated to produce a moralization about the self: the racial other, always in danger of contaminating the self through hybridity and proximity, turns on a kind of racial

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Jeremiad concerning racial/moral purity.9 And, on the other, that even anthropology without particular or proximate real-world objects—as in Goldberg’s model of the medieval world—amounts to anthropology just the same, and that the question before us involves not the determination of when anthropology actually ‘‘hurts’’ an actual ‘‘other,’’ but the question of a symbolic violence as well that, one can safely predict, will always eventually locate an object on which to deploy its formulations. Kwame Anthony Appiah, a crucial player in recent discussions of racialisms in anthropology, with publication of In My Father’s House (1992), has likewise suggested that nineteenth-century race is fundamentally different from both a Greek worldview, in which a judgment of the other’s inferiority involved ‘‘no general assumption that this inferiority was incorrigible’’; and from a Hebrew worldview, in which difference is understood only in relation to a ‘‘special relationship to Jehovah’’ (‘‘Race’’ 275): Neither the Greek’s environmentalism nor the Hebrews’ theocentric notion of the significance of being one people are ideas that we should naturally apply in understanding [the nineteenth-century] . . . idea of race. (276)

What Appiah misses here, crucially—and it involves his very definition of the word ‘‘race’’ as ‘‘fundamental, biologically heritable . . . characteristics’’ (276)—is that the theorization of ‘‘race’’ in nineteenth-century America often took precisely the form of an ‘‘environmentalism’’ and the ‘‘theocentric.’’ For example, some of the period’s major thinkers (Louis Henry Morgan, for one) understood ‘‘race’’ as a function of the dispersal of the monogene onto different geographies, and while a somewhat porous boundary was drawn (‘‘Indians’’ could one day perhaps become State of New York citizens), geographic determination was understood in nearly as recalcitrant a fashion as strictly biological ‘‘race.’’10 Indeed, it was a commonplace among anthropological elites in the era to promote an inchoate notion of ‘‘race’’ which precisely did not choose between biological and environmental (that is, polygenetic and monogenetic) accounts of group personhood. ‘‘Race’’ therefore, and ‘‘anthropology,’’ are always too precipitously determined in the literature in terms of their temporal reigns, with the consequence that that which is designated as beyond the threshold of ‘‘race’’ (and therefore amounts to nonracial and less malicious othering) will turn out to undergird ‘‘race’’ in a foundational way, and that which is designated as ‘‘pre-anthropological’’ or even ‘‘post-anthropological’’ will appear, on close examination, as anthropological through and through. In almost all cases, one should note amongst the critics of anthropological

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and racial thought a nearly covert geographical/cultural judgment or decision taking place which marks their texts as involved in the project of othering and anthropology: Said will claim an exclusively ‘‘European’’ origin for anthropology, as will, less explicitly, Appiah and Goldberg (‘‘Representing’’ 211). To locate historically—both temporally and spatially—the ground of anthropology or ‘‘bad’’ anthropology always involves an absolution of certain peoples from anthropological responsibility, and the blaming of others according to a determination of ‘‘culture’’—its intellectual possessions and contents. Hence, for Appiah, foundational figures of ‘‘afrocentrism’’ will turn out to be racialist and not racist (Father’s 13– 17), and Goldberg’s determination of race’s relation to ‘‘modernity’’ will rule out anything like race originating from anyone denominated by a premodern identity. Let us state what may be too obvious, but is constantly ignored: Unlike, say, ‘‘European colonialism’’ or ‘‘capitalism’’—both of which, given sufficient and relatively mild definitional constraints, can be determined historically—‘‘anthropology’’ is as old as representation itself, and indeed is coextensive with the problem of the representation of the self, with the problem of the subject. Even the most extreme recent readings of the ‘‘time’’ of the problem of anthropology will miss the point in this regard: Postmodern anthropologist Jonathan Boyarin, for example, has proposed the dating of anthropology to the invention of Christianity and its elaboration of the ‘‘Jew’’ (Storm 56). But Boyarin has not gone far enough: The Old Testament too is filled with complex and exclusionary forms of othering, as recent works on ethnicity and the Bible have argued,11 and it simply makes no sense to identify a discrete group, or political entity, or even set of groups, or set of political entities, as inaugurating culturalist anthropology.12 Anthropology begins with what Jacques Derrida calls ‘‘metaphysics,’’ begins with representation, begins with the opening of the horizon of thought itself—that is, anthropology necessarily begins once one has crossed the threshold of what Derrida refers to as diffe´rance. Anthropology does not take place within human time; rather, anthropology is coextensive with all understandings of the time of the human—coextensive with the opening of the workings of temporality (a thematic that runs through, for example, Homi Bhabha’s work). This will strike some as a formulation larger in its capriciousness than any attempt to determine anthropology in terms of its proper time and place. But even if one were to agree that there were times and places without anthropology, understood strictly or generally, then one would have to conclude that the practices of professionalized anthropology as such should never have been at issue in the

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debates over anthropology, but rather the structures of thought that anthropology inherits, founds itself upon, systematizes, and elaborates into scientific and post-scientific method.

2. One version of this very general inheritance exposes itself in the famously infamous diaries of Malinowski, published for the first time in 1969.13 Malinowksi’s field diaries have been closely read and commented upon extensively by perhaps the three most prominent figures who in the 1980s attempted reflexive investigation of the condition of anthropology: Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, and George W. Stocking, Jr. Their combined efforts, which amount to yet another rigorous series of defenses of the possibilities of anthropology, can be compared to another possible view of the diary’s significance—and one that might force anthropology to the limit of its possibilities. A brief sketch of the three scholars’ readings of Malinowski is in order: Stocking, a brilliant and learned historian of anthropology, and indeed the dean of the field of the history of anthropology, is Malinowski’s ablest defender. His view is that Malinowski’s diary—filled with references to ‘‘niggers’’ fit for extermination, to sexual violence, to an anger-inducing lack of deference among the ‘‘natives,’’ and to, in short, rather intense forms of loving-and-loathing the alien—amounts to no more than a reflection of the psychological difficulty of carrying out serious fieldwork, and may merely complexly demonstrate a ‘‘passion’’ linked to empathy which in no way impacts an ethnographic project marked by values of ‘‘tolerance, sympathy, and even identification’’ (‘‘Empathy’’ 191, 193).14 Geertz is perhaps Malinowski’s most thoughtful critic: he reads the diary into an overly self-conscious anthropological tradition—a ‘‘diary disease [that] is now endemic’’ and that he associates with prominent, selfreflexive late 1970s texts by Paul Rabinow and Vincent Crapanzano, among others (Works and Lives 90). Clifford, like Geertz, treats the diary as a reflection upon anthropology, but only in the context of a joint reading of it and Argonauts—the book produced from these ‘‘same’’ field experiences. Clifford reads the two texts combined as ‘‘ironic’’ in that they signify a ‘‘multivocal predicament’’ of wresting ethnographic description from the bewildering multiplicity of the field: ‘‘Malinowski pulled himself together . . . by writing ethnography’’ (Clifford, Predicament 103, 104). The ‘‘irony’’ is that all ethnographic description is shown by the evidence

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of the diary to be, at best, a ‘‘partial fiction’’ and that ethnography is thus a ‘‘saving lie’’ or ‘‘saving fiction’’ (99); anthropology cannot speak truth, but it can aspire to ‘‘cultural descriptions’’ which are ‘‘meaningful to specific interpretive communities in limiting historical circumstances’’ (112). Clifford’s remarks come quite close to Geertz in terms of their suspicion of the truth value of anthropology (Geertz seeks not truth but ‘‘art,’’ ‘‘authorial nerve,’’ and ‘‘imagination’’ in order for anthropology to mean something to someone, in order for it to reclaim its ‘‘vitality’’ and permit it to continue to ‘‘analyze, explain, amuse, disconcert, celebrate, edify, excuse, astonish, subvert’’ [Geertz, Works and Lives 139–40, 143–44]). Of these three only Clifford, however, is attuned to the problem that is anthropology, and it should be noted briefly that his attempt to salvage an ironic anthropology—in order to remove the savaging teeth of anthropology—can only take one so far—can only lead, following Rorty, to an anthropologist who ‘‘insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, . . . does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is not in touch with a power not herself’’ (‘‘Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity’’ 73). Rorty correctly diagnoses this strategy as a kind of privatization,15 which therefore situates Clifford in the difficult position of saving anthropology by curing it of its search for both difference and community.16 Thus, according to these three, one should read Malinowski’s diary in order to understand the deep difficulties which came to the fore at the moment of the invention of complex fieldwork (Stocking), in order to banish a false and misplaced self-consciousness in ethnographic art (Geertz), and in order to encounter the origins of a salient postmodern ethic regarding truth and fiction (Clifford). But none of these scholars manages to touch upon what might be most important about the diary from the perspective of the critique of anthropology, though Stocking comes closest in remarks about methodology that suggest that the diary elucidates ‘‘Malinowski’s ultimate ethnographic purpose’’ (‘‘Magic’’ 103).17 Three examples from Malinowski’s second surviving Trobriand diary will clarify the minimal assumption or deduction that Malinowski must make in order to write his ethnography: Monday [November] 26 [1917]. . . . Clarity of metaphysical conception of the world completely dimmed: I cannot endure being with myself, my thoughts pull me down to the surface of the world. I am unable to control things or to be creative in relation to the world. Tendency to read rubbish; I leaf through a magazine. I seek out the company of various people. . . .

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Lecherous thoughts. I tried to chase them away: ‘‘to submerge myself in the deeper, metaphysical stream of life, where you are not swept by undercurrents or tossed about by the waves. There these things don’t exist. There I am myself, I possess myself, and I am free.’’ (Diary 131, 132)

And: Sunday, 11.18[.17.]. . . . I sat on a bench for a while; stars; I thought about objective reality: the stars, the sea, the enormous emptiness of the universe in which man is lost; the moments when you merge with objective reality, when the drama of the universe ceases to be a stage and becomes a performance—these are the moments of true nirvana. (120)

And: Thursday, 5.30.[18.]. . . . I tried to achieve a mood of certainty, security, strength. I wanted to feel alone, and impregnable. (284)

Similar sorts of diary entries are numerous, and they constitute the thematic/methodological core of the work, from which flow all of Malinowski’s complex judgments in the diaries about white and brown women, marriage, career, and the possibilities of anthropology. In sum, Malinowski’s diary is the ‘‘story’’ of a figure attempting to free himself from the confines of everyday life: ‘‘the surface of the world,’’ bad novels, ‘‘lecherous thoughts,’’ and the like. Such freeing is conceived of in spatial terms—as in the exiting of a confining and debilitating structure, into another, ‘‘deeper’’ or transcendental space. The minimal deduction of Malinowskian anthropology, therefore, is that the world is made up of beings who are fully determined by the world, overwhelmed by it, completely influenced by its glittering surfaces, pleasurable temptations, bodies, and erotics, and that the anthropologist must be the figure who stands outside of and beyond such confines, ‘‘alone’’ and ‘‘impregnable.’’ Such a reading of the development of a spacial relation between Malinowski and his objects of study is very much in line with the methodology for anthropology outlined in the opening pages of Argonauts of the Western Pacific: while Malinowski more than once writes that ‘‘preconceived ideas’’ are ‘‘pernicious,’’ that the anthropologist must enact the ‘‘constant interplay of constructive attempts [at theory building] and empirical checking,’’ he also recurrently makes a theoretical assumption regarding his objects of study as ‘‘subject to a strict code of behavior and good manners, to which in comparison the life at the Court of Versailles or Escurial was free and easy’’ (Argonauts 9, 13, 10). ‘‘The natives obey the forces and commands of the tribal code, but they do not comprehend them; exactly as

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they obey their instincts and impulses’’ (11). Natives are ‘‘under the control’’ of kinship systems, ‘‘entangled’’ in a mesh of duties, ‘‘governed’’ by authority, and the like (10). In short, anthropology begins from the study of determinations upon beings, which may amount to the same thing as the ‘‘stereotype’’: We are interested only in what they feel and think qua members of a given community. Now in this capacity, their mental states receive a certain stamp, become stereotyped by the institutions in which they live, by the influence of tradition and folk-lore, by the very vehicle of thought, that is by language. (Argonauts 23)

Such is Malinowski’s project. A reading of the diary in this way sheds different light on a number of the diary’s most recurrent thematics. For example, as both Stocking and Clifford have noted, Malinowski writes about the many novels he reads whenever he does not feel like working; he worries over this novel reading obsessively, constantly trying to wean himself from them. Clifford writes: ‘‘Such readings are desired communions, placed where a coherent subjectivity can be recovered in fictional identification with a whole voice or world’’ (Predicament 109). And Stocking suggests that Malinowski ‘‘could to some extent shut out the native world and retire to his novels when the strain of the very intensive study of a very limited area became too great’’ (‘‘Magic’’ 97). But Clifford and Stocking have placed the stress at the wrong point. Malinowski’s novels, when understood as a group, are a decidedly middle-class-to-mass lot: bestsellers such as Rider Haggard, Cooper’s The Pathfinder (understood by Malinowski as nostalgic reading, a boy’s book [62]), Dumas, W.W. Jacobs (author of the schoolroom favorite, ‘‘The Monkey’s Paw’’), George Barr McCutcheon’s Brewster’s Millions, Stevenson, and, in general, materials that a figure like Malinowski classified as ‘‘trashy novel[s]’’ (241). Only very occasionally, as when Malinowski reads Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, can he write of legitimate literary discovery or moral examination taking place through his reading.18 Malinowski, one can extrapolate, equates the reading of his bad novels—his consumption of sensation and pleasure—with the status of being an object for the anthropological. Malinowski’s mantra regarding a resolution to read no more novels (and well as his attempts to curb his sexual drives, his gossipings, and the like) is precisely commensurate with Malinowski’s general desire to exist without determination (and this, of course, always in order properly to write about determined beings).19 There is a curiously Platonic cast to this question in general—an analogy to Plato, and a Platonic thought—as the diary sometimes indicates:

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Emotional origin of Platonic Ideas.—Came back, sat on the beach. Moonlit night. White sand, over it dark shapes squat, in the distance the expanse of sea and outline of the hills. In the distance, the sea and the profiles of mountains. Combination of moods: Baia di Napoli and Gumawana ‘‘from inside.’’ Thought about how to describe all this for E.R.M. The moon, the sea, the mood. The moon induces a specific, clearly defined mood, I hum ‘‘[Laraisebrue], and then there was Suzanna, pretty, pale, and virtuous.’’ Expressions of feelings, complementary social milieu, imaginary. Suddenly I tumble back into the real milieu with which I am also in contact. Then again suddenly they stop existing in their inner reality, I see them as an incongruous yet artistic and [savage], exotic ⳱ unreal, intangible, floating on the surface of reality, like a multicolored picture on the face of a solid but drab wall. (Diary 235)

Here, the moon, and the vision of a white, ‘‘pale’’ woman, operate on the emotions in order to elevate Malinowski out of the Platonic cave, away from the ‘‘multicolored picture on the face of a solid but drab wall’’— which, interestingly, Malinowski associates with the ‘‘exotic’’ and which he equates with the ‘‘unreal.’’ Malinowskian anthropology, then, will represent a break from writing about the merely ‘‘exotic’’ precisely by elevating himself above the ‘‘natives’’—precisely by being able more ‘‘scientifically’’ to determine the terms and conditions of what previously had been regarded as ‘‘exotic.’’ When Malinowski writes, at the end of the introductory chapter of Argonauts, that the book will provide its readers with ‘‘a feeling of solidarity with the endeavors and ambitions of these natives,’’ it will be to the extent that Malinowski’s proposed middle-class readers will recognize themselves as equivalently determined—with Malinowski removed from both (25). Moving backward from Malinowski, toward the period in the midnineteenth century during which anthropology was beginning its journey to professionalization, one might examine the broad political significance of Malinowski’s fundamental anthropological presupposition with respect to a famed early text by Marx, the so-called ‘‘Theses on Feuerbach.’’ While the ‘‘Theses’’ have energized a number of commentators, and have proved particularly fascinating to those attempting a reading of the nonhumanist, structural Marx, rarely is it suggested that Marx might have something to say directly to the project of anthropology.20 The first paragraph of Thesis III reads: The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change

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circumstances and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. Hence, this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. (Marx and Engels 144)

Marx here can be read back at Malinowski, from approximately seventyfive years before the birth of modern anthropology: Something is wrong with a materialism that ends its investigation by saying, ‘‘men are products of circumstances and upbringing.’’ This kind of materialism, Marx suggests, perforce divides the world into classes—those who, as educators for example, determine circumstances and upbringing, and those who are subjected to them, and who are taught through this doctrine that they are nothing more than upbringing (that training and habit constitutes their limit). Marx suggests here that the thinking of the (positivist) limit of human being and the thinking of agency beyond limits are two sides of the same coin. In a structuralist modality, in Ferdinand de Saussure’s work on structural linguistics, this division is suggested by the two halves of Saussure’s published lectures: one half devoted to an account of structure, and the other to historical transformation of structure. Marx has put his finger upon the limits of structuralism or the thinking of system: that one cannot imagine the structure without an agent (or an agent without a structure). And Marx has registered the stakes of the most minimal determination of the question of ‘‘man,’’ of what man is (a kind of pure ‘‘functionalism,’’ to use the language of anthropology, where man is merely subjected to the function of culture). Marx’s example of ‘‘man,’’ defined as emplacement and training, is a kind of radical social-constructionist presentation of the case, which makes it particularly important in terms of its implications. It is a definition that already has ruled many typical or common ‘‘fuller’’ definitions of man’s nature or faculties or psychological parts. Marx’s point is that even a man undefined by any traditional contents—a man registering as pure ‘‘structure’’—will necessarily by its very definition produce a boundary and inaugurate the work of exclusion. Louis Althusser, we might note in passing, sought a Marx who rejects anthropologism in every form, and this is a prominent instance of such a Marx: This Marx signals a withdrawal from the attempt to determine ‘‘man’’ at all.21 The second and concluding paragraph of the third thesis builds upon the insight of the first, but is more difficult: The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionizing practice. (144)

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The ‘‘only’’ here indicates the ‘‘only’’ way. In other words, such ‘‘coincidence’’ is the only possibility to ‘‘revolutioniz[e] practice.’’ But what is at stake in this possibility? A banal reading might suggest that agency is only possible given opportunity—that what is at stake in the world is the making possible of agency within circumstance and upbringing. But this would leave us precisely in the same position that we were in the first paragraph: We would still be determining the question in such a way as to leave in place the doctrine of ‘‘circumstances and upbringing,’’ and in fact would be entirely determining agency as the result of certain kinds of circumstances and upbringings. The first thing to note, in order to read Marx as radically as possible, is that Marx is not here asking the reader to decide the question on the side of ‘‘agency,’’ which would be, broadly, the cultural studies strategy of the 1980s and 1990s (broadly, the return to agency at the expense of the structure, for which Ortner and others have argued). So what is the ‘‘coincidence’’? It is, in this context, the coinciding of the question of structure and agency, of determination and choice. Marx asks the reader to think at the limit of this junction, knot, or tension—at the relationship, the strange coincidence—of structure (the ontological—abstracted from time and space) and agency (the ontical—operating within the parameters of time and space). Marx importantly here does not seek fusion of the questions or a decision made between them, but a meditation on their coincidence, on their co-implication. ‘‘Revolutionizing practice,’’ then, would depend entirely upon the joint or hinge—the severance and linking—of function and agency, of structure and agency. It would be to suggest that revolutionizing practice would take place precisely at the jointure, not beyond/ within the categories of function and agency.

3. One might summarize the issue in the following way: Any attempt at all to determine ‘‘man’’—any attempt, therefore, to put ‘‘structure’’ and ‘‘agency’’ to work in an anthropology or ethnography—will, in principle, exclude someone, will draw a boundary line between ‘‘haves’’ and ‘‘havenots’’ and will determine external and internal borders for a politics that inherently classifies and deforms singularities. And while there may be important political reasons for suggesting that the concept of ‘‘man’’ or ‘‘human being’’ cannot simply be voided, the same cannot be said for the

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practices of cultural anthropology.22 After all, what can cultural anthropology claim to have accomplished over the course of the last century, and at what harm to those it represents and determines? What would be lost should cultural anthropology simply cease to exist? By turns, cultural anthropology has demonized and romanticized others—made them fit for extermination by or, alternately, promotion above the ‘‘West.’’ Its most general political stance today is multicultural and pluralist, which, as I’ve argued in The Limits of Multiculturalism, cannot avoid problems of universality, the traps of conventional comparatism, and the exclusivity of judgment. Beyond that, however, such a stance never counts the cost of containing ‘‘culture’’ to a countable set of autochthonously formed entities. (One can broadly agree with cultural anthropology that difference is of fundamental importance, yet it must be thought to its infinite limit, and not predetermined by culturalisms.) Twentieth-century anthropology, from Malinowski and Durkheim forward, has always put structure and agency to work in its most minimal formulations—emphasizing, one, or the other, or both at once. In the case of Malinowski, he reads the social world as the first, and anthropology and the anthropologist as the second, in order for the latter to describe, transform, and rethink the former. A line of strong thinkers of structure in the social sciences will necessarily include Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Durkheim, Weber, Le´vi-Strauss, and the like, as well as, in an American modality, notions of cultural determinism as suggested by Kroeber, Boas, Mead, and others. Ortner, as counter-example, will attempt to position everything— anthropological objects of study and anthropologists—on the side of agency, thereby diminishing the power of structure by placing ‘‘greater emphasis’’ on ‘‘the practices of ordinary living’’ (‘‘Theory’’ 154). On this side of the question, one could assemble just as distinguished a list of anthropological/sociological speculations: texts which position contingent ‘‘history’’ against structure, or, more recently, human affect; attempts to write biographical accounts of ‘‘individual’’ others; focus in general on subaltern resistances to system and structure, such as colonialism, globalization, and world-capitalism. And, of course, there are a number of figures who nod in the direction of a synthesis or at least a recognition of the twin poles of structure and agency, including Ortner herself at times, and her model ‘‘agency’’ thinker, Pierre Bourdieu.23 It will not be a question, finally, of being able to make a decision about these strategies, at least for purposes of the question of exclusion. Any anthropology that attempts to put these categories to work—to model the

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social and its possibilities through them—will necessarily recapitulate anthropology as exclusion. To take up only one example, Paul Rabinow, in his celebrated Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1968), written more than forty years after Malinowski and on the threshold of postmodern ethnography, will constantly attempt to maneuver past Malinowski by reading his informants in terms of their latent and/or growing abilities to confront structure as agents through reflection: Of one he writes, ‘‘Ali was more self-reflective about his society and his place than most other Moroccans I knew’’ (73). And concerning Malik, another informant, he writes that at a certain point in their joint work, ‘‘his naive consciousness was altered’’ (119). Indeed, Rabinow writes of his own journey, too, from ‘‘naive consciousness’’ (121), much as Malinowski does in his diaries. Rabinow will explicitly describe ethnography as something made only in the space of the ‘‘intersubjective,’’ such that ethnography becomes a joint project of agential, ‘‘doubled’’ (reflexive) anthropologists and informants (5, 38–39, 119–20, 153–55). And yet one can see from some of Rabinow’s language that the search for agency in the field inevitably involves judging subjects precisely in terms of their greater or lesser concentration of such agency. The anthropologist will still be positioned, even in work as nuanced as Rabinow’s, as a kind of Western truth-teller and revealer, converting the other to a universalized understanding of the problem of structure: Our prodding apparently stimulated some interest. . . . This process of rediscovery of the villagers’ heritage was an interesting one to watch, once I realized what was going on. Here, it was not that people were resisting or hiding something from me, but that they were embarrassed by their own ignorance. . . . The bitter irony of this heathen foreigner stimulating them to ask questions about their own spiritual heritage was not lost on them. (133)

Quickly, one might suggest that Rabinow’s most general framework involves an assumption of dramatic cultural differences between Morocco and California, but a subsumption of those same differences on the terrain of reflection. Lost amid the heavy traffic of figures ‘‘doubling’’ themselves to consciousness will be (1) the importance of permitting difference to remain different, the importance of giving difference its chance; and (2) the problem of dividing the world according to an anthropologist’s judgment of the achievement of agency. Rabinow’s world will be divided into two parts: beings who hear the call of the anthropologist, and in a ‘‘bitter’’ mode, begin reflection on their emplacement within culture; and those who refuse to hear the call, who remain fundamentally ‘‘naive’’ about

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themselves, but without such poignant bitterness. In essence, then, Rabinow’s anthropology amounts to a call for reflection and even judgment of one’s own ‘‘difference,’’ and the results will fail to preserve either difference or equality. A text such as Rabinow’s opens onto a realization that anthropology has traveled very little distance in the twentieth century, and that its most celebrated practitioners share a structure/agency framework, however they might reposition themselves and their objects of study in terms of it. One might take this to be the point of the often-analyzed conclusion of Jacques Derrida’s ‘‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Social Sciences’’ (1966). In an analysis of Le´vi-Strauss and structuralism generally, Derrida suggests that there are two intellectual relationships to ‘‘play’’ in the twentieth century: on the side of Le´vi-Strauss, one that ‘‘dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play,’’ and, on the side of Nietzsche, one that ‘‘affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism’’ (292). One describes a structure, locates its center, and defines its origin; the other attempts to exceed the determinations of structure, center, and origin. Or, more abstractly, one seeks the stasis and ‘‘full presence’’ of being, and the other seeks becoming beyond any simple ‘‘humanism’’ (292). Derrida suggests: ‘‘I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing’’ between these two strategies, thoughts, dreams: instead, ‘‘we must first try to conceive of the common ground, and the diffe´rance of this irreducible difference’’ (293).24 Those who have attempted the move toward agency within the social sciences in the last thirty years initially find themselves on the side of a certain deconstructive move—a move designed to shake the foundations of structuralism. But to emphasize agency, ‘‘activity,’’ ‘‘movement’’—to put these categories to work in a reformed social science—is merely to find oneself once again part of the ‘‘ ‘productive’ movement of differences, the ‘history,’ if that can still be said, of constituted differences’’ (Derrida, ‘‘Original’’ 85). All traditional anthropological moves and strategies seek to untie diffe´rance, seek to separate the ontological and the ontical, being and becoming, structure and agency, in order to utilize these categories as foundations for analysis. It does not matter, finally, how the structure/ agency divide is decided by anthropology: So long as these categories are capitalized upon by anthropology, so long as they become the foundations for a knowledge that might lead us to an understanding of our relations to one another in the world, the result will describe a community founded upon exclusion.

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There is a quarrel, then, between the social sciences and deconstruction. As David Wood describes it, deconstruction involves ‘‘a philosophy of difference rooted in opposition to identity,’’ an attempt to prevent the very thematization of the question of identity from violently burying difference as such under a network of presuppositional differences which exclude and diminish even as they begin to explain (‘‘Introduction’’ ix). Assuming that the politically progressive, twentieth-century wing of anthropology has always begun from the proper premise—that is, the exhaustion of the modes of thought of the ‘‘West,’’ and a recognition of the inability of the ‘‘Enlightenment’’ to produce a non-coercive, nonexclusionary society—deconstruction will have done nothing but attempt to demarcate the conditions for the dream of anthropology (something other than ourselves that is ‘‘missing’’ or excessive, something non-exclusionary that does not determine and dominate difference) without the anthropology. By insisting on a constant vigilance at the foundations of difference—at the jointure of structure and agency, for example— deconstruction will always be ‘‘before’’ anthropology, will always oppose itself to a procedure that ceaselessly insists on identifying its objects in order to exceed the ‘‘West.’’ It will come as no surprise, perhaps, that the social sciences will oppose deconstruction from the moment that Derrida describes diffe´rance: Lucien Goldmann was present at the so-called ‘‘original discussion of ‘diffe´rance’,’’ and understood precisely the double gesture toward structure and agency which Derrida prescribed: Briefly, in order to eliminate the subject, the different contemporary structural theorists . . . have also eliminated praxis. Contrary to them, Derrida retains praxis while at the same time he eliminates the subject. As a sociologist, it seems to me that this gives none of his analyses much operational value in research. However, this does not prevent me from paying tribute to their subtlety and their ingenuity as speculative constructions. (‘‘Original’’ 92)

This is, perhaps, the most generous moment in the recent history of the social sciences toward the problematic of deconstruction: a moment where, for all of deconstruction’s ‘‘subtlety’’ and ‘‘ingenuity,’’ it will be discarded by social science because it cannot meet the test of instrumental reason—it has no ‘‘operational value’’ in the real world. It cannot be capitalized upon, it cannot be fruitfully technologized in order to produce knowledge, and it therefore cannot be legitimated by a progressive political research agenda.

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These will always be the twin critiques of deconstruction: that it has no knowledge-producing value, and that it has no political force. But deconstruction will always have attempted to maneuver its way toward a certain political opportunity—toward the unpredictability of the future, and, indeed, toward a coming ‘‘community’’ without exclusion, ‘‘a community of singularities without time or place, which insists in all institutions of community, without ever taking the form of a specific community’’ (Beardsworth 42). Indeed, Jean-Luc Nancy will go so far as to find the beginning and the limit of what he refers to as ‘‘the inoperative community’’ (la communaute´ de´soeuvre´e: ‘the community which is not a work,’ the community which does no work,’ ‘the community which does not work’) ‘‘in’’ onticoontological difference.25 What Nancy describes as ‘‘being-in-common’’ will be nothing but an understanding that ‘‘man’’ can only be that being whose essence is his existence, whose ‘‘existence itself constitutes essence’’ (Experience 9). The diffe´rance of esse and essentia (empirico-transcendental difference, ontico-ontological difference): Only a recognition of this limit, analogous to the play of agency and structure at the limit of anthropology, can produce beings’ exposure to an alterity which permits a something-incommon (strictly, following Alphonso Lingis, ‘‘nothing’’-in-common) that is not exclusionary, that does not cover over beings’ always-already related singularities with mere difference. Hence, what Nancy forecasts is a community premised on the original sharing and communication of finite beings’ exposure toward absence— rather than on the sharing and communication of our positive similarities and differences, as anthropology has always had and will always have it. This community will not, for example, represent difference, along any lines: The community without exclusion begins from a figure or being ‘‘who is on the border, on the very border of meaning’’—at the limit of ontico-ontological difference (‘‘Cut’’ 123). And such will have been the thrust of a certain Marx all along, and, of course, of Derrida: ‘‘There is doubtless this irrepressible desire for a ‘community’ to form but also for it to know its limit—and for its limit to be its opening’’ (Points 355). This sort of thinking of community, with its critique of the totalizing and even ‘‘totalitarian’’ foundations of all actual instantiations of community—all constitutions of traditional community—has, perhaps not surprisingly, been subject to a far more hostile response from anthropology than Goldmann adopted with respect to Derrida. One major postmodern anthropologist has, in recent years, written about Nancy’s notion of community in highly alarmist ways.26 Jonathan Boyarin, in a piece entitled,

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‘‘Death and the Minyan,’’ primarily accuses Nancy of adopting a ‘‘Hegelian idea of community’’ that participates in precisely the immanent, ontological ‘work’ that he [Nancy] sets out to escape, by crowding out the possibility of critical representation of our poor, fragmentary, and plural communities. (81)

If correct, Nancy has in fact recapitulated a community of exclusion—a community whose universalist phrasing (i.e., the community-withoutexclusion’s possibility resting on only one understanding of being) necessarily reduces and destroys already existing difference which is invested in more positivist conceptions of identity and sharing. One will want to be very clear here: Rather than banally ‘‘Hegelian,’’ with all of its implications of transcending and sublating, Nancy’s community will appear at the edge of the Hegelian system—at a ‘‘moment’’ where alterity or singularity is not yet destroyed or buried under the cover of dialectical synthesis.27 To imagine something ‘‘not-Hegelian’’ (to imagine differences that are not always already in relation, to imagine a world constituted by monad-like cultures whose status is simply to be different as such, which is what Boyarin clearly has in mind) is, to borrow Rodolphe Gasche´’s phrasing, to attempt to think the ‘‘absolutely singular,’’ which ‘‘from the standpoint of thinking is a thoroughly idiosyncratic notion that resists the universalizing bent of thought’’ and which ‘‘does not fit any of the classical definitions of philosophy’’ (Wild Card 266). One will need to conclude, then, that Boyarin’s phrasing of the problem with Nancy involves both a fundamental misreading as well as a gesture toward the unthinkable—toward the absolutely other of thinking, rather than toward the limit of thinking. Nancian community, rather than universalizing and totalizing, rather than attempting stasis or permanence, rather than grounding itself (even provisionally), opens onto an unpredictable future through singularity’s constant ‘‘coming’’: The coming is infinite: it does not get finished with coming; it is finite: it is offered up in the instant. But that which takes place ‘‘in the instant’’—in this distancing of time ‘‘within’’ itself—is neither the stasis nor the stance of the present instant, but its instability, the inconclusiveness of its coming. . . . (Nancy, Sense 35)

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due to finitude’s endless relation to that which is in principle inexhaustible: ‘‘That there are singularities means that the particular can never be articulated as the universal because of the irreducibility of time’’ (Beardsworth 43).28 In this special sense, then, it will be anthropology which can never articulate a future different from the present, for the reason that anthropology, in its search for positive similitude and difference, condemns the world to a repetition without a difference, condemns the world to decisions—such as that between structure and agency—that make no difference, and that also always attempt to obliterate difference-as-singularity. Furthermore, one will need to make clear that the only exclusion from Nancy’s conception of a community without exclusion will be precisely any community that excludes.29 While it is certainly true that the minyan, or Torah prayer group, which Boyarin describes in his text, will never meet the conditions for foundation of a community without exclusion, neither will it necessarily be removed from the earth by Nancy’s formulation. Rather, it may well continue, and/or change, and/or even disappear on its own; it can, in fact, be preserved within Nancy’s conception so long as it does not attempt to turn itself into a significance that might be sociopolitically capitalized upon. Boyarin, citing William Connolly, appears to acknowledge as much regarding his hope for the preservation of Jewish community as a ‘‘reflexive shaping of . . . identity’’ by community members, a ‘‘struggle to ambiguate or overcome this drive [to draw out a comparative significance from group identity] because they think it is ungrounded in any truth they can prove and because they find it ethically compelling to revise their relation to difference in the absence of such a proof’’ (77). Boyarin will also call this strategy one of ‘‘irony,’’ and, to the extent that such constant, ironic vigilance over an identity formed around positive contents remains ever-vigilant, such a community will be a matter of indifference from the perspective of Nancian community. One will have to add, however, that it will also provide no purchase or traction for community beyond its boundaries. On the one hand, a world of always ironized nations, cultures, and ethnicities may well be a world that ‘‘anthropology’’ can no longer divide into classes, but, on the other hand, it will not be a position (indeed, it will exist in multiple, monadistic positions) from which ‘‘something-in-common’’ might be thought. It will be useful to note two other matters in passing regarding the constitution of Boyarin’s minyan community. First, Boyarin often seeks to prove that his minyan is so loosely organized that it cannot be said to be exclusive: Here he introduces the figure of ‘‘Max,’’ a member of the minyan who is ‘‘not quite a ‘street person’,’’ but who constantly ‘‘fails to conform to outward signs of Jewish ethnicity,’’ and crosses the border of

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common sense or shared understanding in his reciting of prayers (interpolating the word ‘‘Egypt’’ into a prayer where the term literally makes no sense) (72). Boyarin believes that the example of ‘‘Max’’ demonstrates that Judaism does not necessarily have an ‘‘essence at all,’’ that it has no center of belief and/or practice that excludes (69). But, in reverse, Boyarin’s example makes one wonder about whether he is talking about community at all to the extent that the minyan can be made up of figures who do not share any particular belief or beliefs in common—to the extent that the minyan can be constituted by those who literally do not communicate one to another.30 ‘‘Max,’’ who resides on the borderline of sense, or perhaps beyond the borderline, shows that Boyarin’s attempt to theorize a community which does not exclude evacuates communication in general—which means, fundamentally, that Boyarin’s example has exceeded the threshold of traditional community, as well as Nancy’s community, which is founded on communication which precedes any individual entity.31 Boyarin constantly threatens to exceed this threshold, as when he wonders whether ‘‘Judaism has an essence at all’’ (69). If Judaism truly did not have an essence or at least a network of typical characteristics shared more-or-less in common, rather than an actual center, if it could never intellectually center itself; it would not be ‘‘Judaism’’ but, rather, ‘‘Judaisms.’’ This radical pluralization of Judaism to the point, logically, of absolute individuation, again risks a formulation of the absolutely singular, rather than alwaysalready related singularities, and again provides no possible ‘‘opening’’ for community. But then again, as a second point in passing, Boyarin’s minyan is a centered, exclusionary, and, at least at one time, non-ironic entity, as he himself is careful enough to note (though without further commentary) regarding the specifics of the activation of the minyan, which must have ten members present in order to begin: In extreme occasions the ‘‘tenth’’ member of the minyan, at Rabbi Singer’s shul, may not be an adult, or even a person [for example, it can be the scroll of the Torah]—though so far it cannot be a woman. (69)

This will be the necessary foundation for minyan community, to the extent that it is a commonplace community: the exclusion of women, the exclusion of the category of ‘‘woman,’’ the exclusion of more than half of all Jews from minyan community. One suspects that Boyarin’s point, through the interjection of the ‘‘so far,’’ is that he imagines the minyan of the future to be composed not only of men, and boys, and scrolls, but women, too; he therefore imagines that this oversight in terms of exclusivity is not

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foundational, that it can be repaired. In principle, the minyan will always have to reach its limit in this manner, even if it only excludes non-Jews in general, even if it only excludes one living person, even if it only excludes the dead.32 If it did not, the minyan would be commensurate with all of humanity, and, as Marc Shell has relentlessly pointed out, universal humanism’s first gesture is always to demarcate some beings as less-thanhuman.33 That is: even the most universal positivist gesture can only ground itself through exclusion.

4. One can broadly agree with Johannes Fabian in his work from the 1990s when he suggests that the non-coercive ‘‘communal life’’ of all of ‘‘us’’ is what has always been at stake in recent reflexive anthropological practice; and when he writes that ‘‘critical anthropology [is a] . . . striving for such a community’’ (Work 262).34 But one will need to break from Fabian when he suggests the particular contours for an all-inclusive community of the future: He notes that the ‘‘highest aims’’ of the generalized critique of ethnographic representations in recent years have been to ‘‘transform ethnography into a praxis capable of making the Other present (rather than making representations predicated on the Other’s absence)’’ (223). Each in their own way, the theorizing of affect, hybridity, and dialogue— analyzed in the pages that follow—seek to bring the other forward, attempt to grant the other a voice, work to register the other as something other than other, and, in general, as something other than object. Each will fail precisely because the other’s absence was always already the key to rethinking the generalized dilemmas of objectivity, of subjectivity, of intersubjectivity, and the like. Anthropology’s Wake, then, will deliver anthropology to its wake, in preparation for its burial. But it will be a wake without mourning, and without the promise of capitalization upon such mourning. It will be a wake, quite simply, that prepares to bury cultural anthropology by marking its limit. And, precisely at that limit—and in strange concert with each and every anthropological gesture toward the local, national, and worldcommunal, and toward the limit of the ‘‘West’’—something will begin to emerge in the wake of anthropology, amid the flotsam and jetsam left in its wake. Anthropology’s Wake sets as its largest task the forecasting of what necessarily comes after anthropology, in order to open up the possibility

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of the future in all of its contingency and fragility. At the limit of anthropology, therefore, will be something other than anthropology—something not already described and proscribed, nor necessarily on the way to description and proscription. Cultural anthropology has been leading a kind of twilight existence for some time now. Following Nancy, who regards the rise and fall of twentieth-century psychoanalysis as a kind of ‘‘necessary catharsis’’ that ‘‘involves us on its own with something other than what it still represents,’’ one can imagine the twilight-time of anthropology in precisely the same manner (Nancy, Sense 46). It was a necessary detour. It has outlived its usefulness. Our only chance lies in its wake.

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chapter 1

Descartes’ Corps David E. Johnson The question of experience can be approached nowadays only with an acknowledgement that it is no longer accessible to us. —Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History

But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

The body haunts us. It molests us wherever we are, whether we imagine ourselves beyond it, transcendental and without place, or whether we dismiss the ruse of such displacement and locate ourselves as positioned subjects. The body remains, disturbing us however we conceive the self. This is the case at both ends of modernity: at the beginning, in the writing of those two who will have turned away from others and toward themselves in a gesture toward knowledge of self that would be sufficient to ground a world, in Montaigne and Descartes; and at modernity’s end, in the anthropological writing of those who turn toward others in order to ground knowledge of themselves, in the writing of, for example, Renato Rosaldo.1 The body troubles these apparently very different projects and necessarily so, for the body will have been the contact zone for any and all relations among others, even among ourselves. Between me and myself the body remains, lies in state, grounding the possibility of anthropos and anthropology.

Time to Feel Montaigne: ‘‘Me voici devenu grammairien . . .’’ (Essais I.xlviii.400; Essays 209); Descartes: ‘‘Mais enfin me voici . . .’’ (Me´ditations 91; Writings 2.22).

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The temporalization of the located subject, the I, in early-modern figures of auto-inspection, inhabits as well late twentieth-century anthropologist Renato Rosaldo’s effort to remake social analysis: ‘‘. . . now I am’’ (Culture and Truth 7). The temporal modifier distances his version of anthropology from an earlier, now-outdated version: Culture and Truth ‘‘argues that a sea change in cultural studies has eroded once-dominant conceptions of truth and objectivity. The truth of objectivism—absolute, universal, and timeless—has lost its monopoly status’’ (21). The introduction of time into anthropology effectively drags along with it notions of particularity and contingency heretofore bracketed in anthropological discourse. In short, Rosaldo’s ‘‘. . . now I am’’ troubles the spatial stasis of the subject-object paradigm of cultural relations by thinking through the fluid dynamism of a subject-subject or self-self relation, thereby putting culture in motion. He ‘‘urges that social analysis recognize how much of life happens in ways that one neither plans nor expects’’ (91). Quoting Ann Landers favorably, Rosaldo remarks that ‘‘time is your best ally’’ and points out that ‘‘when in doubt, people find out about their worlds by living with ambiguity, uncertainty, or simply lack of knowledge until the day, if and when it arrives, that their life experiences clarify matters’’ (92). Rosaldo suggests that no ‘‘here’’ can help us, no spatial modification; only ‘‘now,’’ a temporal index, can save us from the formalist pitfalls of a timeless objectivism. Perhaps this is why Culture and Truth was updated: First published in 1989, it was revised—repositioned—in 1993, appearing in its second edition with a new introduction that precedes both the preface and the introduction to the first edition. Though Rosaldo notes in the preface to the first edition that his ‘‘present understanding of the remaking of social analysis was catalyzed by the ‘Western Culture Controversy’ at Stanford University during 1986–88’’ (xxii), the 1993 introduction considers the anxieties that have manifested themselves since 1988. The 1993 introduction is all about anthropology and change: the changes required, the changes made, and how to live with change. Rosaldo writes that ‘‘A new edition of Culture and Truth prov[i]des me with a dual opportunity, initially to reflect on recent developments in higher education and then to address the role of anthropologists in these changes’’ (ix). He addresses the role of anthropologists with a double gesture: On the one hand, he chastises them for feeling left out; on the other hand, he reminds everyone else that culture has long been anthropology’s intellectual property. Ruth Behar seconds this position, asserting that recently ‘‘anthropology has lost exclusive rights over the culture concept,

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which was its birthright’’ (Vulnerable 163). This loss threatens anthropology in a way that earlier crises have not. Whereas previously anthropology ‘‘always managed to weather the storms and come out stronger, more inclusive, at once more vexed and more sure of itself’’ (162–63), this time ‘‘it may not recover so easily’’ (163). Although Rosaldo acknowledges anthropologists’ objections to the apparent humanist ‘‘monopoly on multiculturalism’’ (Culture and Truth xii), claiming that such ‘‘reactions seem heartfelt’’ (xvi), he nevertheless thinks they are ‘‘strangely off the mark’’ (xvi). He wonders whether anthropologists are mistakenly ‘‘awaiting a formal invitation’’ (xvi) to the multicultural table. Exhorting anthropologists to ‘‘volunteer, get active, take initiative, and work to make anthropology an integral, indispensable part of multiculturalism’’ (xvi), he implies that anthropology’s perceived slight at the hands of the humanists, its exclusion, results from adding more chairs to the table, which has the ancillary effect of leaving anthropology less elbow room. Indeed, there would appear to be an elbow in anthropology’s side, because multiculturalism is something of a pain: ‘‘In part the pain derives from having to share authority more than before. . . . The pain also comes from how closely or distantly students feel connected with the readings. New course readings often tug at their hearts and involve their feelings more deeply and directly than earlier readings did. Classrooms then produce a range of feelings, from intimate to distant, and the feelings have to be addressed’’ (xvi–xvii). The multicultural classroom is all about affect. Feelings will have to be addressed and not just our feelings either, but everyone else’s, because others will be included: ‘‘The vision for change strives for greater inclusion, not an inversion of previous forms of exclusion’’ (xviii). This is Rosaldo’s attempt to address the concerns of those who worry that including other cultures and discourses means excluding the classics. On the contrary, Rosaldo notes, opening the canon does not necessarily imply closing out the classics. It is not a zero-sum game: ‘‘In the humanities, social sciences, and legal studies, canonical lists of classics pose problems, not because of what they include (the books are good), but because of what they exclude (other good books). Critics of bad faith all too often conflate insistence on greater diversity . . . with demeaning or throwing out the classics’’ (xviii). Rosaldo thus promotes educational democracy, which both addresses the need for and answers to the diversification of cultural citizenship. ‘‘One crucial ingredient’’ for such democratization, he claims, ‘‘involves affirmative action for course readings (and for works cited in publications)’’ (xiii). Rosaldo reports that he has ‘‘often left part of the syllabus

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blank so that students can suggest appropriate works previously unknown to [him]’’ (xiii–xiv). Rosaldo describes a democracy of the good (good books supplemented by other good books), of the pertinent and high quality (‘‘teachers . . . seek out pertinent works of high quality’’ [xiii]), and appropriateness. Only the ‘‘good’’—the pertinent, the high quality, and the appropriate—will be included. No doubt someone will take up the side of the not-good—the impertinent, the low quality, the inappropriate—but such an address would in any case recast these cast-outs in terms of the included. They would be comprehended within the same system of values. Rosaldo’s democratization is a normatization and thus a form of terror.2 Such inclusive educational democracy remains dominated by a seemingly transparent principle of identification that would totalize alterity within the same. We could call this the ruse of democracy, but first we would have to decide who we are and then we would have to ask whether democracy has ever been anything but this ruse, whether there is any other chance for democracy. In sum, the 1993 introduction to Culture and Truth repeats, albeit succinctly and with examples that explicitly situate the book within the U.S. culture debates of the 1980s, the first edition’s introduction, ‘‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage.’’ In this first introduction, rather than ask what books should be included and on what criteria we should decide, Rosaldo asks what cultures should be included in a more pluralistic society and on what ground we could argue for tolerance and understanding of cultural others. ‘‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’’ wonders how we can begin to look at others ‘‘as fellow human beings to be engaged in dialogue’’ (xxii). It posits an extreme case as a test of the possibility of tolerance and community: Ilongot headhunters. Initially, there is absolute opacity, no chance for dialogue, perhaps not even for recognition: If you ask an older Ilongot man of northern Luzon, Philippines, why he cuts off human heads, his answer is brief, and one on which no anthropologist can readily elaborate: He says that rage, born of grief, impels him to kill his fellow human beings. . . . Although the anthropologist’s job is to make other cultures intelligible, more questions fail to reveal any further explanation of his pithy statement. To him, grief, rage, and headhunting go together in a self-evident manner. Either you understand it or you don’t. And, in fact, for the longest time I simply did not. (1–2)

Multiculturalism broadly conceived would require us to include headhunters among us; yet, according to Rosaldo, there is no ground for even a

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minimal understanding of them. In the face of apparently absolute cultural difference Rosaldo suggests the translating mechanism that makes possible intercultural understanding: ‘‘In what follows, I want to talk about how to talk about the cultural force of emotions. The emotional force of a death, for example, derives less from an abstract brute fact than from a particular intimate relation’s permanent rupture. It refers to the kinds of feelings one experiences. . . . Rather than speaking of death in general, one must consider the subject’s position within a field of social relations in order to grasp one’s emotional experience’’ (2). ‘‘The cultural force of emotions’’ is the engine that drives Rosaldo’s inclusive multicultural project, which is grounded on the possibility of personal experience: ‘‘One must consider the subject’s position within a field of social relations in order to grasp one’s emotional experience.’’ Pushed to its limit, Rosaldo’s emphasis on the positionality of the subject ostensibly allows no place for universal human experience. Every subject—and every subject’s experience—would be the nexus of a particular constellation of culturally determined social practices and relations. The practices of headhunters are different from ours: They are not (like) us. Whoever we are, we are not headhunters. ‘‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’’ thus opens with a series of related moves. First, cultural incommensurability: a rigid, untransgressable, untranslatable border removes Ilongot headhunters from North American anthropologists. It is as an anthropologist that Rosaldo first approaches the Ilongot; his initial efforts to understand headhunters’ grief are mediated by standard anthropological theory: ‘‘In my efforts to find a ‘deeper’ explanation for headhunting, I explored exchange theory, perhaps because it had informed so many classic ethnographies’’ (3). But anthropology is not the answer; it brings Rosaldo no closer to the other: ‘‘Although the notion of balancing the ledger does have a certain elegant coherence, one wonders how such bookish dogma could inspire any man to take another man’s life at the risk of his own’’ (4). Second, after introducing incommensurability, Rosaldo turns to emotional experience’s place within anthropological expectations of thick description and related metaphors. He remarks that ‘‘the notion of force’’ challenges certain anthropological assumptions and asks, simply, ‘‘Do people always in fact describe most thickly what matters most to them?’’ (2). Third, Rosaldo takes a time-out: ‘‘Let me pause a moment to introduce the Ilongots’’ (2). This suspension of his argument is not, however, a simple hiatus; the caesura allows him to introduce his wife, Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo. This is Renato Rosaldo’s

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first inscription of a social relation that will, he argues, position him closer to headhunters. During this pause Rosaldo introduces the place of emotions within the reconstruction of anthropology. He notes that while conducting research on the Ilongots they often told him ‘‘how the rage in bereavement could impel men to headhunt’’ (3), but he discounted their explanations: ‘‘Probably I naively equated grief with sadness. Certainly no personal experience allowed me to imagine the powerful rage Ilongots claimed to find in bereavement’’ (3). He remarks this lack of personal experience and the consequent inability to understand Ilongot headhunting at least twice more: ‘‘My life experience had not as yet provided the means to imagine the rage that can come with devastating loss’’ (4) and ‘‘During all those years I was not yet in a position to comprehend the force of anger possible in bereavement’’ (7). Understanding other cultures depends on personal experience. Rosaldo says as much when he explains that whereas before he had experienced nothing that would have enabled him to identify with Ilongot headhunters, now he has. Or, to phrase this scene of translation in his language, whereas before he was not in a position to understand the force of Ilongot emotions, Rosaldo writes, ‘‘. . . now I am’’ (7). Rosaldo considers translation from one place to another, from before to now, symptomatic of the ‘‘positioned (and repositioned) subject’’ (7), which is, he claims, ‘‘the key concept’’ (7) of Culture and Truth.3 The translating principle is emotional experience, and in Rosaldo’s case, the emotional experience of loss: ‘‘Only after being repositioned through a devastating loss of my own could I better grasp that Ilongot older men mean precisely what they say when they describe the anger in bereavement as the source of their desire to cut off human heads’’ (3). Kamala Visweswaran notes that the move from opacity to transparency, ‘‘the act of translating one language or culture into another,’’ determines anthropology (Fictions 132). Rosaldo’s personal experience of loss does not, however, mediate or interrupt his relation to Ilongot headhunters. Rather, it opens a vanishing limit between them. Rosaldo is not an Ilongot, but he is close to them; the experience of loss repositions him so close to Ilongots that the distance separating them appears to disappear. Anthropological understanding thus depends on emotional intimacy. Personal experience enables such positioning. Correlatively, a lack of personal experience results in the lack of understanding that generates ‘‘bookish’’ anthropological theories that never come close to the other: ‘‘One should recognize that ethnographic knowledge tends to have the strengths and limitations given by the relative youth

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of field-workers who, for the most part, have not suffered serious losses and could have, for example, no personal knowledge of how devastating the loss of a long-term partner can be for the survivor’’ (Rosaldo 9). The experience of loss translates the youthful anthropologist; it repositions him next to the other. A callow anthropology has principally focused ‘‘on visibly bounded arenas where one can observe formal and repetitive events, such as ceremonies, rituals, and games. Similarly, studies of word play are more likely to focus on jokes as programmed monologues than on less scripted, more free-wheeling improvised interchanges of witty banter’’ (12). Such anthropology never engages the other at the level of experience: ‘‘Most ethnographers prefer to study events that have definite locations in space with marked centers and outer edges. Temporally, they have middles and endings. Historically, they appear to repeat identical structures by seemingly doing things today as they were done yesterday’’ (12). Legible in these observations is a complaint against structural and interpretive anthropology; against Claude Le´vi-Strauss and Clifford Geertz, for example, to name two anthropologists who have pointed the discipline toward, for Rosaldo, a certain lifelessness that is nonetheless not an experience of loss. Rituals share the quality ‘‘of fixed definition’’ that ‘‘liberate[s] such events from the untidiness of everyday life so that they can be ‘read’ like articles, books, or, as we now say, texts’’ (12). Rituals are texts, lifeless in their repetition, dead. They are a kind of corpse, a corpus: ‘‘Ethnographies written in accord with classic norms consider death under the rubric of ritual rather than bereavement. . . . Ritual itself is defined by its formality and routine, under such descriptions, it more nearly resembles a recipe, a fixed program, or a book of etiquette than an open-ended human process’’ (12).4 At stake in Rosaldo’s characterization of the difference between ritual and emotional experience is the time of the human. Rituals are inhuman in their formality, in their repetitious tidiness. Emotional experience is human in its unpredictability and its force, in its immediacy and singularity. Rosaldo argues that William Douglas’s Death in Murelaga concerns ‘‘social structure,’’ not death, and that ‘‘He masks the emotional force of bereavement by reducing funerary ritual to orderly routine’’ (13). Such reduction, Rosaldo suggests, makes possible the distancing of the ethnographer from the ‘‘object’’ of study, which entails a concomitant reduction of humanity to automata. According to Rosaldo, all too often anthropology’s other is objectified. ‘‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’’ specifically and Culture and Truth generally work to write such dehumanization out of anthropology. Rosaldo agrees with Victor Turner: ‘‘ ‘Cartesian dualism,’

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[Turner] says, ‘has insisted on separating subject from object, us from them. It has indeed made voyeurs of Western man, exaggerating sight by macro- and micro-instrumentation, the better to learn the structures of the world with an ‘‘eye’’ to its exploitation’ ’’ (41). Rosaldo concludes that for Turner (and for himself ) ‘‘the ‘eye’ of ethnography’’ is connected to ‘‘the ‘I’ of imperialism’’ (41). The colonial gesture of keeping an eye on the other puts the I in its place. As Enrique Dussel argued in 1492: El encubrimiento del otro, Descartes’ ego cogito inevitably results from the yoconquistador: ‘‘the ‘I-conqueror’ is the proto-history of the constitution of the ego cogito: a decisive moment has arrived in its constitution as subjectivity’’ (59, translation mine). The metropolitan I (the yo) sees itself, its own eye, in its reflection in the eye of the other. The other’s eye, from the point of view of the metropolitan or ethnological I, is filled, fills itself, with the eye of the self, the I of the Cartesian subject. As a consequence, the other becomes the site of ‘‘my’’ reflection, of my humanity. Such would be the stasis, the particular immobility, of the subject-object or selfother relation that Rosaldo seeks to displace. This occlusive circularity describes the circuit of the Cartesian ‘‘mais enfin me voici,’’ the closure of auto-affection in the displacement of the other. The question will be whether or not Rosaldo’s ‘‘. . . now I am’’ reproduces this same circuitry and this same foreclosure of the other. If the Chicano critique of anthropology opened in Culture and Truth does not inaugurate the ethnographical shift from a subject-object or selfother paradigm to a self-self or subject-subject structure of relation, as Behar has suggested, it at least participates in it. Culture and Truth describes the possibility of encountering the other as a self like us. It is the narrative of an interhuman, intersubjective relationship; consequently, just as he remarked in his discussion of the multicultural classroom, Rosaldo points out there will be tension among us: ‘‘Social thinkers must take other people’s narrative analyses nearly as seriously as ‘we’ take our own. This transformation of ‘our’ objects of analysis into analyzing subjects most probably will produce impassioned, oblique challenges to the once-sovereign ethnographer’’ (147). All of us, all of us others, are humans: that is the upshot of Culture and Truth. Across cultural borders or limits, we all share the same structure of emotions. Despite his earlier insistence on cultural constructedness, according to Rosaldo, emotions are universal. Although he warns against ‘‘facile notions of human nature,’’ he nonetheless thinks such warnings can ‘‘be carried too far and harden into the equally pernicious doctrine that, my own group aside, everything human

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is alien to me’’ (10). Rosaldo hopes ‘‘to achieve a balance between recognizing wide-ranging human differences and the modest truism that any two human groups must have certain things in common’’ (10). The subtlety of this phrasing masks Rosaldo’s desire not for what any two cultures may have in common, but for that which all humans share. The emotional experience most properly human, according to Rosaldo, is grief for the loss of a loved one: The experience of the death of another comes to us all, sooner or later. In the case of anthropologists, such experience typically comes later rather than earlier: ‘‘Ethnographic knowledge tends to have the strengths and limitations given by the relative youth of fieldworkers who, for the most part, have not suffered serious losses and could have, for example, no personal knowledge of how devastating the loss of a long-term partner can be for the survivor’’ (9). In other words, because fieldwork determines ethnographic knowledge, ethnography is condemned to a perpetual immaturity. This is unfortunate, Rosaldo thinks, for the force of the emotional experience of loss positions us to understand, to identify with others, even those others of radically different cultures. No matter how different we are, our emotional experience puts us in the same place, brings us close to each other. While the idea that ‘‘emotion stands against estrangement or disengagement’’ (Lutz, Unnatural Emotions 57) is romantic through and through, it nonetheless informs Rosaldo’s understanding of affective experience. Noting that ‘‘[his] former position [was] probably similar to that of many in the discipline’’ who ‘‘have . . . no personal knowledge’’ (Rosaldo 9) of devastating loss, Rosaldo points out that ‘‘now’’ he has: ‘‘In 1981 Michelle Rosaldo and I began field research among the Ifugaos of northern Luzon, Philippines. On October 11 of that year, she was walking along a trail with two Ifugao companions when she lost her footing and fell to her death some 65 feet down a sheer precipice into a swollen river below’’ (9). This is not yet the experience of loss Rosaldo suffers; this is the narrative of an event he will not have witnessed. Rosaldo’s experience comes later: ‘‘Immediately on finding her body I became enraged’’ (9, emphasis added). Although in ‘‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’’ Rosaldo reports a devastating personal loss, the point of the essay is to alchemize this loss into disciplinary gain, for the discovery of the body allows Rosaldo to comprehend Ilongot headhunting through the cultural force of emotions and thus provides the methodological ground for remaking social analysis. Here is anthropology’s habeas corpus, signed and dated:5 The appearance of the body makes evident an experience that situates Rosaldo not in relation to the body, but to Ilongot headhunters. In Rosaldo’s account, the

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body keys an immediate experience of rage that enables identification with others. The body does not get in the way: It is that which makes possible an immediate experience that enables subjective identification with a cultural other, but nevertheless it does not mediate—as an object—either the experience, which is immediate, or the identification with the other, which is intersubjective and thus without room for the intervention of an object. It is the insistence on immediacy that is most troubling, not least because Rosaldo appears committed to the temporalization of cultural analysis. In broad strokes, he subscribes to Johannes Fabian’s investment in coevality with the other. The inscription of immediacy at the heart of this experience complicates the matter, for, on the one hand, immediacy absolves the experience of any temporal determination in that what is immediate is necessarily simple, indivisible, undifferentiated; yet, on the other hand, insofar as the determination of the immediacy of the experience effectively negates difference, it necessarily reinscribes time because time is negation.6 Effectively, if Rosaldo’s emotional experience happens immediately, it could in fact have no relation to any possible provocation, for the provocation would have to be temporal in that it is a causal determination. An immediate emotional experience would have to be entirely divorced from any and all circumstances; such experience could never be contextualized and therefore could never be said to have any effects. In sum, according to the immediacy of his emotional experience, the body Rosaldo encounters could not even be a sign, for signs are necessarily temporal and necessarily mediated; this means the body could never indicate for a subject any possible response, emotional or otherwise. There would be no appropriate relation to the body, which means anthropology could never capitalize on this body, either on its loss or its recovery. Nevertheless, according to Rosaldo, over this body selves come together: Anthropologist and headhunters identify, share their humanity. They find themselves, repositioned, immediately. The self-self or subjectsubject reconstruction of ethnographical discourse does not obviate the need for an object; it simply locates an object that cannot talk back, that cannot intervene in the (impossible) immediate dialogue between subjects. According to Rosaldo, the body guarantees the relation to self that we call personal experience ostensibly without inscribing any trace of itself in that relation.

Subject: To Dream Rosaldo’s dismissal of Cartesian dualism should perhaps be read in the context of Stanford’s culture debates, for Descartes was one of the authors

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‘‘recommended’’ to students in the year-long Western culture course that resulted from the fallout of Stanford’s curriculum reform in the late 1970s.7 Yet, inasmuch as Rosaldo revises cultural anthropology by retracing Michelle Rosaldo’s steps along a slippery trail, he follows the troubled path to right reason along which Descartes stumbled some three centuries earlier. But whereas for Rosaldo this path leads from personal tragedy to methodological certainty, for Descartes it is precisely the path of methodological certainty that threatens to leave him in a watery grave of uncertainty. In the transition from the First Meditation to the Second, Descartes nearly loses his sense of direction and, as a consequence, his footing, too. At the end of the First Meditation Descartes introduces the evil genius who will have corrupted his thought. He explains that he ‘‘shall consider that the heavens, the earth, colours, figure, sound, and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment’’ (Me´ditations 67; Writings 2.15).8 In order to foil the evil genius and the delusions it inspires, Descartes considers himself ‘‘as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses’’ (67; 2.15) and he claims to hold onto the idea of his incorporeality in order at least to have the power to suspend his judgment (69; 2.15). ‘‘But,’’ Descartes complains, ‘‘this is an arduous task’’ (69; 2.15) and he is soon led back into his ordinary life. In short, the path toward certainty, the Cartesian method, leads Descartes nowhere but (back) to where he was, his ordinary and confused life. The evil genius wins out, leads Descartes astray or, rather, leaves him where he is most comfortable. This way is a dead-end for thought; it leads only to delusions and dreams: ‘‘I am like a prisoner [esclave] who is enjoying an imaginary freedom while asleep; as he begins to suspect that he is asleep, he dreads being woken up, and goes along with the pleasant illusion as long as he can. In the same way, I happily slide back into my old opinions and dread being shaken out of them, for fear that my peaceful sleep may be followed by hard labour when I wake’’ (69; 2.15). Descartes never quite gets over this sleep, though he does, the next day and in the next Meditation, return to the path he had apparently stumbled along the day before. This time, however, he will find a way out of his ordinary life: ‘‘So serious are the doubts into which I have been thrown as a result of yesterday’s meditation that I can neither put them out of my mind nor see any way of resolving them. It feels as if [comme si] I have fallen unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool which tumbles me around so that I can neither stand on the bottom nor swim up to the top. Nevertheless I will make an effort and once more attempt the same path which I

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started on yesterday. Anything which admits of the slightest doubt I will set aside just as if [comme si] I had found it to be wholly false’’ (71; 2.16). As Georges Van Den Abbeele points out, ‘‘Descartes’ logic seems to have taken a strange if not illogical twist: the road that is to take one out of the abyss is paradoxically the same as the one that led into it during the previous day’s meditation’’ (43). This is the logic—the delusion—of the slave (esclave) who dreams himself out of his bondage, out of the shackles of his ordinary life. Such would be the dream of a new day, of a way out of the difficulty of the night of reason. Descartes dreams himself awake and everything after the First Meditation is a fantasy, a dream text. The transitional opening paragraph of the Second Meditation thus does the dream work of the slave who dreams himself awake. Descartes supposes ‘‘that everything I see is false; I persuade myself that nothing has ever existed of all that my fallacious memory [ma me´moire remplie de mensonges] represents to me. I think not having any senses [Je pense n’avoir aucun sens]; I believe [je crois] that body, figure, extension, movement and place are but fictions of my mind [de mon esprit]’’ (Me´ditations 71–3; Writings 2.16, translation modified). ‘‘Fallacious’’ translates, more or less, remplie de mensonges, ‘‘full of illusions.’’ The dictionary Robert lists mensonge as a synonym for songe: Between an illusion (mensonge) and a dream (songe), there is perhaps no difference. Memory is illusory, a chimera, no less so than dreams, but unlike dreams, the delusions of memory have a moral connotation: mensonge is also a lie and thus a willful deception. There is, then, the suggestion of a willful self-deception. If memory represents the body as properly my own, Descartes explains, I must doubt it, not simply as if I had only dreamt it, but because my memory—and thus I myself— tries to deceive me.9 Memory and dreams, then, are doubtful; of themselves they compromise the cogito’s equilibrium, threaten its stability. Not unlike the imagination of ordinary life, which always posits the body as proper to the cogito, memory and dreams lead the cogito astray. Descartes explains that to deploy the imagination in search of self-knowledge is tantamount to saying, ‘‘I’ll sleep on it’’: ‘‘Once this point has been grasped, to say ‘I will use my imagination to get to know more distinctly what I am’ would seem to be as silly as saying ‘I am now awake, and see some truth; but since my vision is not yet clear enough, I will deliberately fall asleep so that my dreams may provide a truer and clearer representation’ ’’ (79–81; 2.19). In the Discourse on the Method, Descartes ‘‘resolved to pretend that all the things that had ever entered [his] mind were no more true than the illusions of [his] dreams’’ (Discours 54; Writings 1.127), but he quickly

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moved to separate the cogito from both sleeping and waking chimeras: ‘‘But immediately I noticed that while I was trying thus to think everything false, it was necessary that I, who was thinking this, was something. And remarking that this truth: I think, therefore I am, was so firm and so assured that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were incapable of shaking it’’ (54; 1.127, translation modified). Likewise in the Me´ditations, where, in the process of doubting everything, Descartes realizes the ‘‘I’’ that doubts must ‘‘itself’’ necessarily exist—if only at the moment of the articulation of a subject in doubt: ‘‘If I convinced myself of something [or thought anything at all—French addition] then I certainly existed. . . . So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind’’ (Me´ditations 73; Writings 2.17). In the judgment of the cogito’s certainty everything depends on Descartes’ claim for immediacy, for the aussitoˆt apre`s of the relation between thought and existence. According to Descartes, thinking is being without remainder: the immediacy of thought and being leaves no room for the body, for any corporealization or spatialization. The proximity of this formulation to Rosaldo’s insistence on the immediacy of emotional experience should not go unnoticed. Rosaldo’s turn away from thinking toward emotional experience does not mitigate his latent investment in a certain Cartesian strategy; the determination of immediate experience ultimately leaves Rosaldo in the same place as Descartes, the no-place of a transcendental subject wholly determined in itself. In any case, this is the (impossible) condition of Descartes’ cogito. Thinking, Descartes notes, is an ‘‘attribute’’ that cannot be separated from the ‘‘I.’’ This formulation is misleading insofar as there is no subject, no ‘‘I am’’ or being without or before or after thinking. Thinking, then, is not an attribute of being if ‘‘attribute’’ implies something separable and different in essence from that to which it belongs; thinking is, rather, being as such: ‘‘I am, I exist—that is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking. For it could be that were I totally to cease from thinking, I should totally cease to exist’’ (77; 2.18). The immediacy of the relation between thinking and being—which is another way of saying that Descartes posits the possibility of a pure autoaffection that time does not disturb—means that the cogito does not take place. For Descartes the cogito is neither temporal nor spatial. It does not take time, which is why Descartes stresses the necessary truth of the cogito not simply each time it is pronounced, a condition necessarily marked by temporalization, but in fact in the uninterrupted immediacy of mental conception, ‘‘que je la conc¸ois en mon esprit [that I conceive it in my

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mind]’’ (73; 2.17, translation modified). Here there is the attempt to mark mental conception as purer than speech. It is a question of spirit pure and simple. Nor does the cogito take place. In the Discours Descartes explains, ‘‘From this I knew I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think, and which does not require any place, or depend on any material thing, in order to exist. Accordingly this ‘I’—that is, the soul by which I am what I am—is entirely distinct from the body, and indeed is easier to know than the body, and would not fail to be whatever it is, even if the body did not exist’’ (Discours 54; Writings 127). The condition of possibility of the cogito—its certainty—depends therefore on its absolute immateriality. Yet, Giorgio Agamben notes that such immateriality ‘‘is betrayed by the difficulty Descartes experiences in naming it and identifying it outside the realm of the pure utterance I think, therefore I am’’ (Infancy and History 32). That is, the cogito as pure substance, ousia or actuality in the Aristotelian sense, is nonetheless betrayed by the materiality of enunciation, by the breath. The nontemporal, nonspatial constitution of the cogito as the living spirit of the subject means the cogito is eternal. It is another name for the absolute present and absolute presence, neither of which can be considered to take time or space. As the nunc-stans, the cogito cannot be present in such a way that it would leave a trace of itself behind, in such a way that it would leave any impression. The body would be the name of such a temporal, spatial trace or mark, but in Descartes the body is always already a corpse. The body is dead. From the beginning of Descartes’ metaphysics the body is comprehended as a machine, ‘‘the whole mechanical structure [cette machine] composed of bones and flesh’’ (Me´ditations 75; Writings 2.17, translation modified). The corps first appears as a corpse, ‘‘cadavre’’ (75; 2.17). To the extent the body takes place, it cannot be said to live: Its materiality condemns it to a certain unessentiality and death. Rosaldo’s reanimated anthropology approaches and recovers this body that cannot feel, that has no sympathy for any subject, as the necessary object that does not come between subjects. In short, Rosaldo’s remade anthropology comes close to the body only to dismiss it in its immediate move toward (another, but the same) subjectivity. I exist, I am, Descartes argues, only at the moment I say or express my existence in such a way that I do not take place, in such a way that I am free of corporeality, of the corpus: I exist in thought, and at the moment I cease to think, ‘‘I should totally cease to exist’’ (77; 2.18). Anything that would take place, anything that would

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leave something of itself behind is, de facto, a corporeal substance, a body, a corpse. In recognizing the difference between the cogito’s animation and the body’s inanimation, Descartes determines the possibility of the subject. Rosaldo implicitly agrees: What he finds at the bottom of the cliff is a body—an object—that cannot be mistaken for a subject, because no body can feel. Only the cogito is affected: ‘‘For what can be more internal than pain? And yet I had heard that those who had had a leg or an arm amputated sometimes still seemed to feel pain intermittently in the missing part of the body. So even in my own case it was apparently not quite certain that a particular limb was hurting, even if I felt pain in it’’ (Me´ditations 183; Writings 2.53).10 In sum, Descartes attests that ‘‘many experiences . . . gradually ruined all the faith I had put [ajoute´] in the senses’’ (183; 2.53, translation modified). Pain is an effect of the cogito, prosthetically joined to the body, which is not to say there is no pain, but only that no body mediates the cogito’s immediate experience of pain. Pain never comes from some place—a leg, an arm, the death of another—exterior to the cogito, and the cogito as such, as pure conception, according to Descartes, occupies no place. If there is pain in Descartes it can only be understood as pure thought that comes from nowhere; it is like the phantom pain experienced by the amputee, albeit without the attribution of a corporeal origin. Such pain effectively displaces the body by relegating it to an unlocatable site, that of the imagination; Descartes writes, ‘‘everything relating to the nature of the body . . . could be mere dreams’’ (79; 2.19). The body is the effect of a dream, a nightmare that disturbs the cogito, because in sleep the cogito cannot be sure it exists, it cannot be certain that it pronounces— conceives—itself. Descartes’ is always the sleep of the dead. Sleep troubles the cogito by laying it to rest: it marks the suspension of the pronunciation of the subject. Dreams and chimeras are the only evidence of thought while the cogito sleeps, but dreams and chimeras are themselves operations of the imagination, which Descartes brackets as unruly and doubtful inasmuch as it produces images of the body. In Descartes what happens while the cogito sleeps disturbs the possibility of the cogito while awake, for the dreams that come to the cogito cannot properly be the cogito’s: They must be unessential and dismissed like so much corporeality. While the subject sleeps there is no reliable evidence that it lives. The cogito asleep, in short, is a corpse. More than a century later, against Descartes, Kant will claim that were it not for dreams, there would be no difference

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between being-dead and being-asleep: ‘‘Dreaming seems to belong so necessarily to sleeping that sleeping and dying would be just the same thing, if the dream were not added as a natural, although involuntary, agitation of the inner vital organs by means of the power of imagination’’ (Anthropology 83). The problem of the maintenance of the sleeping cogito threatens Descartes’ implicit dismissal of Montaigne. Van Den Abbeele writes: ‘‘Descartes was as opposed to the writers of utopias, whom he considered seditious . . .. as to skepticism, crystallized in the figure—never named—of Montaigne, the refutation of whose work constitutes the principal driving force behind the Cartesian opus’’ (41).11 In Descartes the experience proper to the cogito is thought, je pense, donc je suis. Thought alone is essential and immediately proper to the subject. Montaigne appears to argue otherwise, claiming instead that the only experience unique to any subject is that of the body, the propriety of which, however, is ultimately troubling for Montaigne. Indeed, in Montaigne the body presents a grave threat to the subject. In ‘‘De l’e´xercitation’’ Montaigne invokes the disturbing experience of sleep: ‘‘Now these passions which touch only the rind of us cannot be called ours, the whole man must be involved; and the pains which the foot or hand feel while we are asleep are not ours’’ (II.vi.66; 271). Sleep effectively divides us from the body, thus putting us at an irreducible distance from ourselves. Such experiences, Agamben explains, ‘‘are the experiences of the inexperiencible’’ that ‘‘constitute the extreme limit against which our experience can press, straining toward death’’ (39). The subject is haunted by these im-proper and a-propriate experiences of the body. How, then, does one come back to oneself after the experience—in its etymological sense of experiri—of sleep? In both Montaigne and Descartes the subject comes back to itself without losing itself in sleep through the invocation of memory, and in both Montaigne and Descartes memory is a writing effect. Memory proves troublesome for Descartes for two reasons. First, because he has dismissed memory as being of the order of dreams and the imagination; second, because it necessarily inscribes the subject or the cogito within temporalization. In Montaigne writing supplies the memory that he otherwise lacks, the memory that saves him from e´tonnement:12 ‘‘For lack of a natural memory I make one of paper, and as some new symptom occurs in my disease, I write it down’’ (III.xiii.386–87; 837–38). Later, when shocked by those ‘‘mouvements inconstant et inconus’’ which are not in themselves legible as experience, ‘‘by glancing through these little notes . . . I never fail to find grounds for comfort in some favorable

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prognostic from my past experience’’ (III.xiii.386–7; 838). Memory is the citation of a corpus, of a corps: it is the structure that produces the possibility of experience. Writing is repetition and prescription; on Montaigne’s account, it sustains the I by evacuating the space of e´tonnement, thus citing the prognosis for the subject in the opening to alterity, which nevertheless would be the suspension of the subject.13 Descartes recurs to the same self-protective strategy. Sleep threatens the immediacy of the experience of the cogito insofar as it suspends the cogito. For Descartes the question is how to stay awake, how to bridge one waking moment and another in such a way that nothing comes between them? What translates the cogito from itself to itself without differentiating itself from itself, hence, in such a way that it effects the (impossible) immediacy of auto-affection? Memory remembers the cogito. Memory enables the distinction between sleep and wakefulness. It thus distinguishes between reason and dream and makes possible Descartes’ calculated dismembering of the exteriority of pain and of sensation in general. The accumulation of experiences, which can only add up in memory, ‘‘ruins’’ the faith the cogito will have had in sensation (Me´ditations 183; Writings 2.53). It is by way of this accumulation of experiences that Descartes hopes to establish the enduring presence—the now—of an I that nonetheless remains the pure and absolute conception of je pense, donc je suis; the cogito endures in the absolute moment and the absolute place, over its ‘‘own’’ dead—sleeping—body. This I remains; but it is troubled, it tosses in its sleep, which is its death, for we have already noted the proximity of illusory and lying memory (me´moire remplie de mensonges) to dream (songe). Memory is perhaps only a certain rational dream (menssonge). Descartes does not explain how experiences compound to ruin the faith that will have been joined to the senses (ajoute´e aux sens [183; 189]), but the possibility is remarked more than once in and as the Me´ditations: But since the habit of holding on to old opinions cannot be set aside so quickly, I should like to stop here and meditate for some time on this new knowledge I have gained, so as to fix it more deeply in my memory. (91; 2.23)

And, later, Descartes repeats: Admittedly, I am aware of a certain weakness in me, in that I am unable to keep my attention fixed on one and the same item of knowledge at all times; but by attentive and repeated meditation I am nevertheless able to make

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myself remember it as often as the need arises, and thus get into the habit [l’habitude] of avoiding error. (151; 2.43)

This habit of mind or memory is, Descartes writes, ‘‘man’s greatest and most important perfection’’ (151; 2.43). Memory is inscription, thus, it is governed by the logic of iteration. Insofar as memory makes possible the ‘‘immediate’’ auto-affection of the cogito, the cogito is necessarily impressionable, impressed. As such, however, it is also dead, lifeless, ‘‘itself’’ the very corpse Descartes has wanted to displace, for writing is corporeal, material. In short, if the cogito is nothing but thought, writing, which is nonetheless necessary to thought as its possibility, corrupts thought: ‘‘Often what seemed true to me when I first conceived it has looked false when I tried to put it on paper’’ (Discours 83–4; Writings 1.145). The necessary materiality of writing contaminates thought—the pure conception of the cogito—from the very thought of writing, which means the thought of writing corrupts thought. Thought is always the chance of inscription, always before ‘‘itself,’’ always repeated in the first place. The experience of thought is mediated by the possibility of the body of writing, by Descartes’ corpus.14 The Me´ditations are the originary repetition of thought that impresses thinking upon the cogito. In its impressionableness memory is a writing scene. The structure of iteration, writing’s being-repetition without origin, makes possible thought’s return to ‘‘itself’’—even as it makes that very possibility impossible. In other words, thought can only return to ‘‘itself’’ at all insofar as it is marked by inscription, the corporeality of thought. But this means that thought or the cogito returns to ‘‘itself’’ immediately only through the mediation of writing—that is, memory, dreams, the imagination. I am—je pense, j’existe—when I sleep because the Me´ditations remember me, remind me of me and that ‘‘I am’’ when I wake. Otherwise, only some-body, some thing, quelque chose—Descartes’ corps, perhaps his cadavre—would be there, as it always will have been, before me. Yet, insofar as it is writing, memory is no less a dream, that which leads me astray, deceives me. In order to save the cogito Descartes will have forgotten memory’s relation to dreams. Paper, wax, corps: these impressionable surfaces without esprit are memory. They are the body without sense, without sensation. The body at rest remains. Memory ostensibly saves the cogito from sleep, that blank space in which, according to Descartes, ‘‘I’’ would be led astray by images of the body and of experiences that will not have happened. Memory preserves our certainty of ourselves: ‘‘Accordingly, I should not have any further

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fears about the falsity of what my senses tell me every day. And I should reject as hyperbolical and ridiculous [comme hyperboliques et ridicules], particularly that general uncertainty regarding sleep, which I was unable to distinguish from being awake. For I now notice that there is a vast difference between the two, in that our memory is never able to link and join our dreams one to the other nor to all the other actions of our life, as it [memory] by custom joins the things that happen to us while we are awake’’ (Me´ditations 209; Writings 2.61, translation modified). Lier et joindre: Memory literally remembers the cogito. In Descartes, memory constellates every particular pronunciation of je pense, donc je suis, thus enabling the translation and survival of the cogito: ‘‘I perceive that I now exist, and remember that I have existed for some time’’ (115; 2.30). Memory cannot, however, remember dreams, cannot bind them one to another to produce a coherent and perduring subject of immediate or absolute conception. The disjointure of dreams threatens the subject: According to Descartes, dreams articulate the cogito in a way that disarticulates its unity. In dreams nothing holds the cogito together. The positioned subject, in Descartes, is always and only the sleeping body, the corps, the corpse. Memory remembers to forget sleep. It is Descartes’ nightlight, his guard against the fantasies, the fictions and phantasms, of slumber. Remembering displaces the body, buries it. This would be the upshot of the Cartesian formation of subjectivity: The cogito never sleeps; it is an I that never closes, that never blinks. Despite this, the cogito is the effect of mediation: memory’s impressionable surface, its constitution as originary writing, as repetition, remarks the Cartesian subject’s immediacy in the auto-enunciation or pure conception of ‘‘je pense, donc je suis’’ as a writing-effect. For there to be any experience of the cogito there must be writing, a corpus: an impressionable surface that informs life precisely by inscribing it within the opening, the founding mark, of death. The subject is ‘‘un spectre ou un fantoˆme’’ (209; 2.62) of repetition, itself only a habit (coutume) of reason. Or, as Gilles Deleuze remarks in the preface to Empiricism and Subjectivity, ‘‘We are habits, nothing but habits—the habit of saying ‘I.’ Perhaps there is no more striking answer to the problem of the self’’ (x). A habit (coutume) is a ritual, a rite, a custom; it is also a costume (habit), a mode of dress. I will know myself by this custom and this costume, by the habit of the habit. Descartes insists on this habit, for only through a certain habit of mind are we able to avoid error. This habit tells me that I am the certain object of my knowledge. By this habit, which is also an address and a dress, I am certain of the object I am. This habit is my proper veˆtement (115; 2.31).

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This habit of mind concerns Descartes from the Discours de la me´thode, from his first setting out on the right path. Indeed, this habit or custom, which amounts to the redress of imagination, secures for Descartes the proper path: ‘‘I resolved one day to undertake studies within myself too and to use all the powers of my mind in choosing the paths I should follow’’ (Discours 30–1; Writings 1.116). Descartes takes his head out of his books and takes himself as the object of his study, relying on himself, his spirit, to guide him (back) to himself, his book of citations. Despite the fear that he might take himself for another object—a fear that, in the end, he will characterize as ‘‘hyperbolical and ridiculous’’—he nonetheless arrives (back) where he started, sure of himself even as the hint of a certain uncertainty moves him toward the same path and the originary repetition of the journey that brought him (back) to himself in the first place, before he ever left: ‘‘If, while I am awake, anyone were suddenly to appear to me and then disappear immediately, as happens in sleep, so that I could not see where he had come from or where he had gone to, it would not be unreasonable for me to judge that he was a ghost, or a vision created in my brain, rather than a real man’’ (Me´ditations 209; Writings 2.61–62). These are not men, these specters, because we know neither whence they come nor whither they go. They are figures of our imagination, dreamscapes doubtlessly to be forgotten at the end of the sixth day and the conclusion of the Me´ditations. Earlier, in much the same circumstances, however, such bodies were not mistaken for phantoms, but were assumed to be men: ‘‘But then if I look out of the window and see men crossing in the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that I see the men themselves, just as I say that I see the wax. Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men’’ (Me´ditations 87–9; Writings 2.21). Hats and coats passing in the street; one can be sure they will pass again and pass away, leaving nothing behind, save the impression of humanity. For in passing, covered from the eye, they will be (mis)taken for men. The appearance of hats and coats in the place of men—vestments that conceal bodies—demonstrates the presence of mens, of l’esprit humaine, and of a habit of mind. Hats and coats, vestments, habits: the remnants of men, passing before us, before Descartes’ I. The presence of men/ mens figured in the dis-appearance of the corps makes apparent the absence of men/mens and the hallucinations (songes/mensonges) of sleep. Between these specters and these men/mens, what is the difference? Only a habit du corps.15 That is, a habit of judgment and a judgment of habit. Both the Discourse and the Meditations attempt to demarcate the

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right use of reason through the institution of Descartes’ method. The method specifically functions to keep us from being led astray. The faculty most susceptible to error is the faculty of judgment: ‘‘the only remaining thoughts where I must be on my guard against making a mistake are judgments’’ (99; 2.26). Because the human being is not perfect, but only perfectible, the human being is necessarily only potential and as such marked by absence or impotentiality. It is because the human being, the cogito, participates in the negative, that it is both capable of judgments in the first place and necessarily incapable of avoiding error. This explains Descartes’ concern for precipitation, on the one hand, and constancy, on the other: ‘‘since in everyday life we must often act without delay, it is a most certain truth that when it is not in our power to discern the truest opinions, we must follow the most probable. . . . By following this maxim I could free myself from all the regrets and remorse which usually trouble the consciences of those weak and faltering spirits who allow themselves to set out on some supposedly good course of action which later, in their inconstancy, they judge to be bad’’ (Discours 47; Writings 1.123). The difficulty, for Descartes, is that the only nonprecipitous judgment would be a judgment that took no time, apodictic judgments. And yet, apodictic judgments are not, strictly speaking, judgments at all, for what is apodictically certain neither requires nor affords the possibility of judgment. All judgments, then, insofar as they are judgments, are precipitous. They always come too soon, too late. No matter how long the judgment is delayed, it comes too soon. The hedge against such precipitation, according to Descartes, is constancy of mind, which is another way of saying habit. In his attempt to limit the possibility of bad judgment, Descartes effectively reduces the scope of judgment to what ‘‘the intellect clearly and distinctly reveals,’’ to what, therefore, the cogito can ‘‘fully understand’’ (Me´ditations 151; Writings 2.43, 2.42). And yet, as Descartes himself observes, the errors of judgment that he makes ‘‘depend on two concurrent causes, namely on the faculty of knowledge which is in me, and on the faculty of choice or freedom of the will; that is, they depend on both the intellect and the will simultaneously’’ (139; 2.39). In other words, in order for the cogito to avoid errors of judgment it would require, first, that its faculty of knowing be perfect, and, second, that it not have a faculty of choice. Error, then, is constitutive of the cogito, for the only ‘‘being’’ that has a perfect intellect and no freedom is God, ‘‘or a being who is supremely perfect’’ (135; 2.38). The upshot of this for Descartes is that the cogito necessarily has a relation to an outside, to a defect that does not come from God and which is

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an effect of its not being infinite: ‘‘Hence my going wrong does not require me to have a faculty specially bestowed on me by God; it simply happens as a result of the fact that the faculty of true judgment which I have from God is in my case not infinite’’ (137; 2.38). Because I am made by the supreme being, there is nothing in me (rien en moi) that can lead me to error; nevertheless, I find myself exposed (je me trouve expose´) to an infinity of lapses, to lack (infinite´ de manquements), but this exposure, although it is not to something in me and thus is not a gift from God, is not to something simply outside me either. The exposure is to the limit, to finitude, which the cogito necessarily touches and which, therefore, also touches the cogito. I am, then, constitutively violated, exposed to and touched by the other. This is the difference between God’s positive infinity, his eternity and perfection, his actuality; and the cogito’s negative infinity, infinite finitude, imperfection and potentiality.16 It is precisely this exposure to the limit that both corrupts judgment, makes it impossible, and is its condition of possibility.

The Body of Writing What we might call the anthropological episteme goes hand-in-hand with the Cartesian distinction between the cogito and all that would be exterior to it. Descartes’ efforts to secure the cogito as a unified and transcendental subject over and against everything that may approach it from ‘‘outside’’ its horizon—including time—is anthropological tout court. Kant invokes this Cartesian security as the rationale for anthropology: ‘‘The fact that the human being can have the ‘I’ in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person, and by virtue of the unity of consciousness through all the changes that happen to him, one and the same person’’ (Anthropology 9). Anthropology’s recent methodological withdrawal from others, from knowledge of others, which figures itself as an increasing proximity to others in search of knowledge of ourselves, is thus the remainder of and return to a certain Cartesianism. The modern discipline of anthropology amounts only to the most logical epistemological development of Descartes’ ego cogito. Rosaldo’s notion of personal experience ultimately reproduces Descartes’ disturbed relation to the body. Both Descartes and Rosaldo, despite attempts to dismiss it, need the body, its mute evidence, to guarantee the experience of the subject. Indeed, the body haunts Rosaldo in his ordinary, everyday life. Writing of his reaction to the appearance of the body, he

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explains: ‘‘This anger, in a number of forms, has swept over me on many occasions since then, lasting hours and even days at a time. Such feelings can be aroused by rituals, but more often they emerge from unexpected reminders’’ (Culture 9). Surprise and then the reassurance of self. Perhaps surprise reassures the self, the unexpected, unscripted, non-rituality of everyday life comes and comes again, every day, to put the self in its place, to maintain it there. In other words, the body always returns, reappears, as a citation that sites the subject. Upon finding the body, Rosaldo writes, ‘‘I tried to cry. I sobbed, but rage blocked the tears’’ (9). Moreover, ‘‘less than a month’’ after the accident, he wrote in his journal: ‘‘ ‘I felt like in a nightmare, the whole world around me expanding and contracting, visually and viscerally heaving. Going down I find a group of men, maybe seven or eight, standing still, silent, and I heave and sob, but no tears’ ’’ (9). In this ‘‘nightmare’’ there is no body, only the community of men. This is an ‘‘immediate’’ personal experience recounted twice, as being ‘‘like’’ a nightmare: doubtful, unreal, but nonetheless troubling the real in its untidiness. But it has already been cleaned up: the body removed from this scene. It is already the inscription of repetition, of citation: sobs without tears, twice. The ‘‘event’’ will have, from the beginning, borne the marks of citation, of the repetition and formalization that mediates the immediacy of the event, that makes it comprehensible: ‘‘An earlier experience, on the fourth anniversary of my brother’s death, had taught me to recognize heaving sobs without tears as a form of anger’’ (9); and, ‘‘My brother’s death in combination with what I learned about anger from Ilongots . . . allowed me immediately to recognize the experience of rage’’ (10). Such would be the structure of immediacy: It will always have been mediated before it can be recognized and thought as such. The immediate experience, in order to be an experience, will have to have happened before, will have to have been learned. Even the first time.17 Otherwise, it does not surprise us; it passes unnoticed. It is not even experienced. Indeed, the risk of any experience is the risk of not being experience. A body double, then: One stands in for the other, one comes before the other in order that there be experience. There is a corporeal supplement at the origin of experience: a blink of the eye, the experience of the one that does not see the other before it. In that instant, that suspension of sight, the blink that closes the eye and thus mediates or blinds sight, opens onto the impossible possibility of immediacy, of an irreducible difference from/of self that passes for self-proximity and that makes possible the impossible approach to the other: A blindness to the other and to oneself closes the distance between

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us.18 Community, if there is any, ‘‘grounds itself’’ on the aporia of ‘‘personal’’ experience. But Rosaldo never gets this far. He stops short at sympathy: Our community, he makes clear, depends on the communicability of immediately personal experiences. We are human because we share in common the possibility of our feeling for—in the place of—others. We—humans— share our feelings, share the same emotional structure. This is the community of the same, the community that, according to Alphonso Lingis, struggles against the murmur of the world and that turns others—those who make no sense, those who do not share our common sense—over to violence. Consequently, Rosaldo is not only close to Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain, who writes that sympathy ‘‘provides the hurt person with worldly self-extension’’ (50), but also to Descartes, for Descartes will have excluded as unreasonable all those who do not share a certain common sense.19 Descartes is written all over Rosaldo’s description of the writing scene. Not until some fifteen months after Michelle’s death was I again able to begin writing anthropology. Writing the initial version of ‘‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’’ was in fact cathartic, though perhaps not in the way one would imagine. Rather than following after the completed composition, the catharsis occurred beforehand. When the initial version of this introduction was most acutely on my mind, during the month before actually beginning to write, I felt diffusely depressed and ill with fever. Then one day an almost literal fog lifted and words began to flow. It seemed less as if I were doing the writing than that the words were writing themselves through me. (11)

Words flow like the tears he will not have shed over the body. Rosaldo remarks his salvation, his return to anthropology not as a rational animal, not as one perhaps too invested in ‘‘bookish dogma’’ (4) and ‘‘trendy amalgams of continental philosophy’’ (7), but as more immediately human for being less rational. ‘‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’’ instances this catharsis: in it Rosaldo comes (back) to himself, to his senses, saving himself and anthropology at the same time.20 Writing thus situates Rosaldo, repositions him closer to himself. Immediately, ‘‘as if’’ he were a mere conduit, not an agent. Immediate writing flows like tears, without rational intervention, without interruption. A fog lifts and there is writing without thought, without reason, a writing that simply flows. No doubt this is a troubling moment for Rosaldo: the invocation of a material technology—itself the name par excellence of mediation, unnaturalness, and culture—that is

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nonetheless immediately expressive of emotional experience. It is this inscription that enables Rosaldo to return to himself, to come back to himself, from out of an isolating fog that threatened to lead him astray. Writing allows Rosaldo to remember himself. Writing names the impossible possibility of auto-affection. Everything Descartes claims about memory’s impressionableness making possible the maintenance of the cogito throughout the dark night without reason is legible in the description of the writing of ‘‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage.’’ With this difference: In Descartes’ account, memory saves the subject from a lack of reason in sleep, whereas in Rosaldo it relieves the subject of a surplus—a literal fog—of reason. But in Descartes and Rosaldo the writing-effect that is memory enables the unified or autoaffected cogito, the anthropological subject, to be in the maintenant, in the now, without suspension. Writing saves the subject from the fate Agamben suggests must be its, and that Descartes feared: the cessation of its existence in the failure to pronounce immediately, to think, je suis, j’existe.

Unsympathetic Readers Contrary to Rosaldo’s theoretical interests, in the description of immediate writing there is no question of cultural constructedness, no question of a positioned subject. Such writing is the expression, the citation, of the experience of transcendentality: A spirit descended upon one that nonetheless arises out of one, the unique spirit that is the same spirit, the human spirit. Recourse to such experience as the ground of subjectivity, of humanity, approximates what Jacques Derrida claims of European cultural identity and of cultural identification in general: ‘‘No cultural identity presents itself as the opaque body of an untranslatable idiom, but always, on the contrary, as the irreplaceable inscription of the universal in the singular, the unique testimony to the human essence and to what is proper to man’’ (The Other Heading 73). In other words, the transcendental experience of loss is the same for Ilongot headhunters as for Chicano anthropologists as for the one who learns ‘‘that the child just run over by a car is one’s own and not a stranger’s’’ (Rosaldo, Culture 2). Universal emotional experience would, in fact, preclude that child ever being a stranger’s: That child will always be our own, will always have been one of us and what we feel for ourselves over the dead body secures the possibility of ‘‘us’’ in the first place.

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Community thus requires death, requires the dead, in order to manifest itself as such. It needs not just the concept of death, but the corpse as the site and citation around and over which ‘‘we’’ come together as a whole. The whole of community grounded on a materially present absence, on a body that makes no difference among us, but that nonetheless must be present. The body no longer comes between us; on the contrary, it enables our proximity to one another. Community is founded upon the human difference from the body that only the (dead) body can expose. This is Cartesian. The incorporated other is insensitive, dead; yet, it produces in us the most intense feelings of ‘‘our’’ humanity. In ‘‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’’ Michelle Rosaldo feels nothing. The body is only the site for the citation of Renato Rosaldo’s humanity. In the same way, ‘‘The tape recording of the dead man’s boast’’ (6)—the boast of a dead companion— moves the Ilongots who remember him to ‘‘powerful feelings of bereavement, particularly rage and the impulse to headhunt’’ (6); the recording, however, clearly has no sense of these emotions. The Ilongot relation to the recording is symmetrical to Renato Rosaldo’s relation to the body. Remarkably, the memory of the dead man does not provoke Ilongot passion; rather, the tape recording of the headhunting celebration in the absence of any such present celebrations evokes their grief—and to such an extent that Michelle Rosaldo will have experienced a certain fear. For Ilongots do not so much miss the dead as they miss headhunting, that is, so much as they miss the exercise of grief. The dead will be with us always. The loss of headhunting and the grief associated with it are recalled most forcefully in the senseless replay of a tape recording, that repetition, that ritual. Although he invokes personal experience as anthropology’s most effective methodological strategy for accessing the cultural other, Rosaldo understands that he nonetheless ‘‘risks easy dismissal’’ (11) in doing so.21 He argues that, ‘‘Unsympathetic readers could reduce this introduction to an act of mourning’’ (11). Unsympathetic readers are not simply the dead nor are they simply automata, tape recordings repeating the same boasts, the same celebrations, the same critique.22 Unsympathetic readers are inhuman: indifferent, insensitive, unmoved, like the tape recording, unincorporable within the oppositionally constituted community of the living and the dead. They are not human; they are certainly not humanists.23 Unsympathetic readers threaten the immediacy and self-certainty of universal personal experience.

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Rosaldo is a doctor in the science—anthropology—that comes to cure the culture of the other. In the name of tolerance, he prescribes the medicine that relieves the other of itself, that tells the other how it feels: ‘‘Lest there be any misunderstanding, bereavement should not be reduced to anger, neither for myself nor for anyone else’’ (Rosaldo, Culture 9). In the prescription of more feeling hides the proscription of headhunting, which, according to Rosaldo, will never be enough to save you. Rosaldo writes of having felt so much more: ‘‘Powerful visceral emotional states swept over me, at times separately and at other times together. I experienced the deep cutting pain of sorrow almost beyond endurance, the cadaverous cold of realizing the finality of death, the trembling beginning in my abdomen and spreading through my body, the mournful keening that started without my willing, and frequent tearful sobbing’’ (9). These are ways Rosaldo’s bereavement differs from Ilongots’. Perhaps because of these additional emotional states, Rosaldo resists the practice that defines headhunters: ‘‘My vivid fantasies, for example, about a life insurance agent who refused to recognize Michelle’s death as job-related did not lead me to kill him, cut off his head, and celebrate afterward’’ (10). Thus, while he identifies with them emotionally, Rosaldo distinguishes himself from Ilongots culturally, marking their definitive cultural practice as inhuman, as having ‘‘human consequences’’ he cannot abide. In short, ‘‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’’ proposes the humanization of others by pluralizing emotional responses in order to vanquish cultural difference. Ilongot headhunters resemble unsympathetic readers: Neither appears to have the proper range of human emotions. Both lack something: Ilongots lack anything but rage in bereavement, unsympathetic readers lack fellow-feeling for Rosaldo. Thus, neither is ‘‘human,’’ neither is sufficiently like us to be recognized and included among us. There is perhaps no ‘‘family resemblance’’ between unsympathetic readers and headhunters, on the one hand, and humans, on the other. Rosaldo describes a multicultural anthropology in service of cultural democratization, a broadly inclusive strategy that would institute—as an effect of a universal humanism grounded on shared emotions—tolerance among us and, at the same time, the rigorous exclusion of everyone, of all others but us. In Archive Fever, Derrida notes that ‘‘the violence of this communal dissymmetry remains at once extraordinary and, precisely, most common. It is the origin of the common, happening each time we address someone, each time we call them while supposing, that is to say while imposing a ‘we’ ’’ (41–2).

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The inhuman—whoever ‘‘we’’ are, wherever ‘‘we’’ happen to be, whether unsympathetic readers or headhunters—do not object to intolerance, which is often necessary, even here, for example, with regard to Rosaldo’s ostensibly ‘‘inclusive’’ and ‘‘tolerant’’ anthropological method.24 ‘‘We’’ object rather to the judgment beforehand, which is to say, to a Cartesian habit of mind that forecloses judgment and results in the prescription of the human that amounts to the intolerant calculation of tolerance. This calculation secures the place of the human even as it jeopardizes any possible community of others. Rosaldo’s multicultural tolerance is shot through with such violence. His humanist tolerance of multiple communities, his multicultural theory of citizenship is, finally, constitutive of one culture, that of the human, which is, according to Werner Hamacher, ‘‘one too many’’ (‘‘One 2 Many’’ 325).

Descartes’ Corps Everything happens, if anything ever does, in view of the body, the bad dream from which, apparently, we cannot awake. From Descartes’ corps, that cadaver; to Montaigne’s improper self supine on the road; to Rosaldo’s body, the corpse of Michelle Rosaldo and the remainder of a head: The body comes before and between subjects. It spaces them; indeed, it spaces us. The body ex-poses and ex-cites our experience of ourselves. It lies there underlying us. Our foundation. In this foundation there is something rotten, something of a necrophilia that passes for self-knowledge and self-love. Descartes opens his unfinished La Description du Corps Humain et de Toutes ses Fonctions (1664) with a call to self-knowledge—’’There is no more fruitful exercise than attempting to know ourselves’’ (Oeuvres 3.821; Writings 1.314)—that quickly displaces attention from the soul to the body. This displacement grants to the body its particular place, its importance, and consequently diminishes the domain and authority of the soul. The body, Descartes argues, does not need the soul, though certainly our error in thinking that the body depends on the soul ‘‘has been confirmed by our belief [de ce que nous avons juge´] that no movement occurs inside a corpse, though it possesses the same organs as a living body, and lacks only a soul’’ (Oeuvres 3.821–2; Writings 1.314, translation modified). But death comes not to us, if we are thinking things, but to the body, not because the soul abandons it, but because one of its principal parts breaks down. Descartes explains in Les Passions de l’Ame (1649): ‘‘So as to avoid this error, let us note that death never occurs through the absence of the

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soul, but only because one of the principal parts of the body decays [se corrompt]’’ (3.955; 1.329). Further, Descartes argues, ‘‘le corps d’un homme vivant’’ differs from the body of a dead man in the same way that a working ‘‘watch or other automaton (that is, a self-moving machine)’’ (3.955; 1.329) differs from the same watch or automaton when it is broken. Living bodies are animated, but animation is not a function of the soul; it derives from the ‘‘animal spirits,’’ which are, Descartes writes, ‘‘merely bodies: they have no property other than that of being extremely small bodies which move very quickly, like the jets of flame that come from a torch’’ (3.959; 1.331–2). Although the soul does not animate the body, it nonetheless humanizes it in the exercise of what Descartes calls ‘‘the internal emotions of the soul,’’ ‘‘which are produced in the soul only by the soul itself’’ (3.1063; 1.381). These ‘‘internal emotions of the soul,’’ produced in and by the soul alone, are unalloyed emotions, which may be related to the passions— either those of the soul or those of the body—but do not have to be. Unlike the passions, these internal emotions are neither produced by nor related to the animal spirits. In the internal emotions the soul exercises itself. This is the scene, then, of the soul’s absolute auto-affection. In these ‘‘internal emotions,’’ our humanity, as opposed to our automaticity, becomes manifest. ‘‘These internal emotions,’’ Descartes explains, ‘‘affect us more intimately, and consequently have much more power over us than the passions which occur with them but are distinct from them’’ (3.1064; 1.381–2). The autonomous intimacy of the internal emotions results in their potency, their power over us and over the passions. The internal emotions domesticate the passions; the soul tames the animal spirits, those small, fast-moving bodies that regulate the corps and make it indistinguishable from le corps, the corpse. Descartes calls this domestication perfection: ‘‘To this extent it is certain that, provided our soul always has the means of happiness within itself, all the troubles coming from elsewhere are powerless to harm it. Such troubles will serve rather to increase its joy; for on seeing that it cannot be harmed by them, it becomes aware of its perfection’’ (3.1064; 1.382). An internal anthropology of the other is legible in these pages of Descartes’ Les Passions de l’Ame: The same gestures of exclusion and invulnerability that mark Descartes’ consideration of the passions also mark Rosaldo’s remaking of anthropological method some three and half centuries later, at the other end of modernity, at its other beginning. Like Descartes’ The Passions of the Soul, Rosaldo’s ‘‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’’ is all about mastering emotions, the emotions of others, in the name of

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the self. It is a work of self-preservation in a Cartesian vein, for Descartes suggests that there are emotions more intimate than the emotions of the body. Which means not only that one does not experience the body of the other (Michelle Rosaldo, for example), but one does not even experience one’s own body: It, too, is cut off. Its removal saves us from ourselves, no doubt, but also and most importantly, from others, but in saving us from others-ourselves, in immunizing ourselves absolutely from every other, it is also our end. Here is Descartes’ example of the operation of these internal emotions that are always already divorced from any other—including the cogito’s own—body or passion: When a husband mourns his dead wife, it sometimes happens that he would be sorry to see her brought to life again. It may be that his heart is torn by the sadness aroused in him by the funeral display and by the absence of a person to whose company he was accustomed. And it may be that some remnants of love or of pity occur in his imagination and draw genuine tears from his eyes. Nevertheless he feels at the same time a secret joy in his innermost soul, and the emotion of this joy has such power that the concomitant sadness and tears can do nothing to diminish its force. (3.1063; 1.381)

This would be unconditional love, the love without the body, without circumstance or affect, which is, finally, indistinguishable from unconditional hate. It is the love of any cogito, of any I, for any other, no matter how close: It is the love of the invulnerable I that perfects itself in the absence of the other, in the absence of the other’s ability to affect it. It is Descartes’ perfect and perfecting love for his daughter, Francine. Stephen Gaukroger begins Descartes: An Intellectual Biography with a disturbing but all-too-familiar story of familial love: It is said that in later life he was always accompanied in his travels by a mechanical life-sized female doll which, we are told by one source, he himself had constructed ‘to show that animals are only machines and have no souls’. He had named the doll after his illegitimate daughter, Francine, and some versions of events have it that she was so lifelike that the two were indistinguishable. Descartes and the doll were evidently inseparable, and he is said to have slept with her encased in a trunk at his side. (Gaukroger 1)

Where did Descartes sleep? Where did he lay his body down? It doesn’t help that in Gaukroger’s text the facing page reproduces the frontispiece to Descartes’ Opuscula Posthuma, published in Amsterdam in 1701. The caption reads: ‘‘Descartes as Faust.’’ He will have sold his soul; or, perhaps, he will have sold his daughter’s, having kept the body to perfect his love.

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chapter 2

Our Sentiments Scott Michaelsen Ogotemmeˆli had nothing against Europeans. He was not even sorry for them. —Marcel Griaule

Of what value are sorrow and tears? How can one put them to use for purposes of political life? In short, how does one derive profit from that which is always associated with loss? These are not strange questions for sociopolitical theory in the nineteenth-century U.S., as recent scholarship has demonstrated, but they seem odd and out of place in the late twentieth century after decades of Freudianisms, functionalisms, structuralisms, and post-structuralisms. Nevertheless, such questions now turn up with some frequency in anthropology (and in allied and intellectually aligned domains of cultural studies, ethnic studies, Chicano and border studies, etc.), and they might best be read as a response, however ill-advised, to the perceived limits of structural analysis.1 In other words, when the description of the ‘‘other’’ is understood as a structural problem, one possible response involves finding a level below structure where differences and solidarities can be conceptualized without danger of ‘‘othering.’’ Anthropology, interestingly, has been through this moment before. Indeed, one might suggest that the strategies that preoccupy anthropology in the wake of Orientalism, Writing Culture, and the like, are all entirely recycled. When under attack, anthropology falls back onto its archive. It bobs, weaves, and retreats, rather than thinks anew. For example, in the

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first half of this century the ‘‘culture historical method’’ of the early twentieth century broke from traditions of both evolutionism and functionalism in sketching out an ethnographic method premised on ‘‘empathy.’’ Wilhelm Schmidt’s The Culture Historical Method of Ethnology (trans. 1939) charts a list of at least potential fellow-travelers in this regard, including Edward Sapir, Clark Wissler, Paul Radin, Clyde Kluckhohn, and, above all, Robert Lowie, and sets them off against a panel of functionalist theorists, including Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict. For Schmidt, anthropology without a foundation in empathy has ‘‘not yet grasped the deepest cultural thoughts, feelings, and strivings of this subject of culture in their very essence’’ (261). Schmidt also refers to empathy as a ‘‘psychological approach’’ (264)—that is, ideally, a ‘‘psychical union between the investigator . . . and his people’’ that can ‘‘grasp the inner development and . . . gain insight into the inmost psychic associations of the culture’’ (314). A relatively late essay by Robert Lowie, ‘‘Empathy: Or ‘Seeing from Within’ ’’ (1960), provides more detailed rationale for this position: Empathy answers vexed questions for which the anthropologist seeks answers, such as ‘‘Why should the Jews cling to their Yiddish?’’ (151) and What does the support of Nazism suggest about ‘‘the Germany national psychology’’? (152). And more importantly for Lowie, perhaps, empathetic anthropologists might prove useful in the realm of ‘‘international affairs,’’ including the ‘‘ ‘Cold War,’’ provided the anthropologist has ‘‘learned the lesson that alien cultures must be approached objectively and empathetically,’’ and that ‘‘the ethnologist worthy of his salt will make a determined effort to rise above the partisan level, to project himself into the minds of others—even if they are his fellow-citizens—and to view his own culture from within’’ (159). In essence, Lowie’s strategy is one of presuming the ‘‘virtues’’ of all others, which only can be empathetically sensed (159). One might summarize Lowie this way: The different-ness of others is sublated at a moment when the anthropologist acknowledges that all groups are affectively rational. For example, to understand the persistence of Yiddish in Jewish communities, one must ‘‘evaluate correctly the emotionalism with which they [the Jews] are surrounded,’’ and then one will comprehend: They are not being merely stubborn and unprogressive; they are setting up standards of major value—of liberty, independence, and the right to individual living. (152)

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Affect, then, is the plane on which the cultural differences of the globe can be joined: In this variant of a rational action theory of human being, all group affects are reasonable and well intentioned. This, one should acknowledge, is an excellent strategy for negotiating difference out of the world—using the technique of empathy to defuse barricaded emotionalisms. Indeed, as a first presupposition of anthropological work that Lowie recommends, all differences are already reduced to shared affective reason and virtue. But what happens when a politics of difference takes up Lowie’s call? Can difference and empathy be thought together? Will difference survive such an encounter?

1. A limit form of the question appears in the most celebrated work on affect of the last generation: Renato Rosaldo’s Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (1989; new ed. 1993). Not coincidentally, Rosaldo had long been associated with the historical method in anthropology. His first book, on the Ilongot headhunters, is an attempt to ‘‘work between the Ilongots’ concept [of history] and ours, both broadly defined, and so try to bring their history into focus’’ (Ilongot 27). Rosaldo renews his investigation of the Ilongot once more in Culture and Truth, and this time to chide those anthropologists who refuse to pay attention to what their informants tell them about their own emotional lives (who insist on interpreting emotion as convention, ritual, custom, and symbol in the name of ‘‘objective truth’’), and particularly when it comes to the experience of ‘‘death and mourning’’ (Culture 55, 53). Works by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Jack Goody, and Claude Le´vi-Strauss are the examples cited in these pages, and each, despite their differences, is guilty of a similar crime: the forgetting of real human beings. To read an object of study’s tears, grief, or mourning as mere ritual is literally not human, according to Rosaldo. It is neither ‘‘humane nor accurate,’’ and it ignores the ‘‘reality’’ of ‘‘forceful emotions’’ (59, 58). Doubting the ‘‘visible agonies’’ of real people—the ‘‘obviously intense emotions’’ associated with ‘‘unique and devastating losses’’—is to write in a ‘‘defamiliarized’’ manner that is, quite simply, ‘‘bizarre’’ (58, 57, 53). So, in order to reduce the bizarre to the comprehendible, Rosaldo begins with ‘‘the modest truism that any two human groups must have certain things in common,’’ whether it is called nature or culture (10).2 And he begins to empathize, following his experience of grief after the death of his wife, Michelle Rosaldo, as documented in the book’s opening

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chapter, ‘‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage.’’ His recapitulation focuses on ‘‘personal experience’’—‘‘my own,’’ he writes (3). It is a study of the ‘‘personal knowledge’’ of ‘‘devastating loss’’ (9). The actual ‘‘experience’’ of loss of a loved one, Michelle Rosaldo, secures for his text the possibility of re-thinking both of their earlier writings on the Ilongot: I was not yet in a position to comprehend the force of anger possible in bereavement, but now I am. (7)

The experience of Michelle Rosaldo’s death, it seems, exposes how limited, how relatively immature, work like theirs was in its fundamental humanity. He argues, more than once, that most fieldwork is done by relatively young anthropologists (like him and Michelle, many years before) who have yet to experience devastating loss, and are therefore ill equipped to judge it.3 His list of qualifications for an anthropologist of death is a short one: ‘‘Has the writer of an ethnography on death suffered a serious personal loss?’’ (69). Her death, finally, provides him with such crucial experience and permits his text to move beyond both her and his own presuppositions and theoretical position. Rosaldo here has attained Lowie’s recommended position of ‘‘seeing from within,’’ and is thereby enabled to properly refigure the Ilongot. And this is where ‘‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’’ takes on political importance.4 The 1993 edition of Culture and Truth is framed by a new introduction on the topic of the politics of multiculturalism, which argues that the modern anthropologist must be committed to providing opportunities for ‘‘renegotiating’’ relations among the different peoples of the U.S. and the world, in order to make this intertwined globe more equitable (xvii, xix). Anthropologists should engage in struggle: Volunteer, get active, take initiative, and work to make anthropology an integral, indispensable part of multiculturalism. (xvi)

Such struggle makes it possible to hear others, through ‘‘careful listening,’’ as part of a ‘‘shared project’’ of ‘‘belonging, inclusion, and full enfranchisement’’ (xvii). The world multicultural gambit of ‘‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’’ involves positing the limit case for inclusion and negotiation— headhunters. What is at stake is whether or not the Ilongot headhunters are enough like other people—like ‘‘us’’—in order to justify their seat at the negotiating table. What is at stake ‘‘revolves around questions of the degree and significance of human differences’’ (224). If the emotions of the Ilongot are fundamentally different from ‘‘ours’’—if a ‘‘headhunter’s

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rage’’ is an affect that cannot be comprehended and folded within the West’s understanding of the proper emotional life of the family of man— then the Ilongot may be too strange and dangerous to receive an invitation to the negotiations. But if even headhunters are just like everyone else, then the case has been made that all peoples merit a voice in the shaping of a new world. Culture and Truth’s strategy of inclusion is empathetic, of course, but finally and classically it is sentimentalist (a kind of subset of traditional empathy), in that it produces politics from the feelings of fraternity and sympathy for others generated over the corpse of a loved one.5 Renato Rosaldo argues that at least two sets of emotions can be produced during grief and bereavement—those associated with ‘‘tears’’ and ‘‘tantrums’’ (15). On the one hand, the experience of personal pain can produce feelings of anger or rage: Immediately on finding her body I became enraged. How could she abandon me? How could she have been so stupid as to fall? I tried to cry. I sobbed, but rage blocked the tears. (Culture 9)

But the tears finally come, as ‘‘sorrow’’ takes over: I experienced the deep cutting pain of sorrow almost beyond endurance, the cadaverous cold of realizing the finality of death, the trembling beginning in my abdomen and spreading through my body, the mournful keening that started without my willing, and frequent tearful sobbing. (9)

And the anger that shifts to sorrow, turns, lastly, to sympathy. Renato Rosaldo comes to understand and empathize with the Ilongot through the experience of these emotions. In his earlier researches, he had dismissed the power of emotional life as fit explanation for headhunting, but he knows now that he is capable of feeling that which the Ilongot feel. He recognizes Ilongot emotions, including their anger, within himself. There may be some small differences here in cultural expression, but the contours of emotional life are the same for everyone. And Renato Rosaldo also notes the tears of the present-day Ilongot, who, as Michelle had noted, cry for the loss of the opportunity to hunt heads. Renato writes: ‘‘The cessation of headhunting called for painful readjustments to other modes of coping with the rage they found in bereavement’’ (6). The experience of the loss of Michelle makes possible an understanding of Ilongot affect that had been denied him many years before. ‘‘Only after being repositioned through a devastating loss of my own could I better grasp that Ilongot older men mean precisely what they say when they

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describe the anger in bereavement as the source of their desire to cut off human heads’’ (3). Loss forges bonds of commonality and sympathy with the seemingly other, as part of ‘‘the invisible community of the bereaved’’ (29). The effect of this ‘‘repositioning’’ through rage-sorrow-sympathy is such that ‘‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’’ is no longer a ‘‘positioned’’ text—no longer a text that speaks with the voice of the anthropologist or his subject-interlocutor.6 Rather, the text emanates from somewhere beyond such subject positioning. It seems to flow from some universal current, like Yeatsian automatic writing: When the initial version of this introduction was most acutely on my mind, during the month before actually beginning to write, I felt diffusely depressed and ill with a fever. Then one day an almost literal fog lifted and words began to flow. It seemed less as if I were doing the writing than that the words were writing themselves through me. (11)

The knowledge produced in ‘‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’’—the knowledge produced over Michelle’s corpse regarding the essential sameness of the world’s emotional life—is something other than the social scientific descriptive regimens analyzed elsewhere in Culture and Truth. Renato Rosaldo says of such discourses that ‘‘no mode of composition is a neutral medium’’ (49), but in ‘‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage,’’ he himself serves as medium for another sort of language—one that ‘‘flows,’’ and where words write themselves outside of the constraints of ‘‘mode of composition.’’ It should be noted here that the epistemological and political value of pain, sorrow, and the recognition of one’s own failings is remarked throughout Culture and Truth, in a manner that makes Rosaldo a modern Nathaniel Hawthorne or Harriet Beecher Stowe. Anthropologist Jean Briggs is praised for her ‘‘sentimental heroics of victimization’’: ‘‘In fieldwork . . . she made mistakes, felt frustrated, broke into tears, had angry outbursts, grew fatigued, and became depressed’’ (177). Rosaldo cites Clifford Geertz approvingly regarding a kind of fieldwork that starts from the anthropologist’s own ‘‘feebleness as a potential source of knowledge’’ (175). And Rosaldo describes his own discussion with an Ilongot man regarding the Vietnam War; the man’s questions and comments resulted in Rosaldo’s own ‘‘loss of innocence’’ and ‘‘lost position of purity,’’ and in such a way as to ‘‘reposition’’ him and his informant ‘‘on more nearly equal ground’’ (64). In ‘‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’’ in particular, a sentimentalist experience guarantees a certain sort of moral truth—that ‘‘we’’ are all the

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same under the veneer of different cultures. This is the difference between ‘‘culture’’ and ‘‘truth’’—and it is the latter term and the latter term only that undergirds the very possibility of a multicultural politics. But focusing on this truth, ‘‘culture,’’ in ‘‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage,’’ gets short shrift, and is not necessarily preserved at the negotiating table. Renato Rosaldo’s emotional politics, his sentimental version of multiculturalism, proves problematic for the maintenance of Ilongot culture. The experience of ‘‘rage’’ in grief is, as already noted, the same for both the Ilongot and Renato Rosaldo. But Rosaldo argues that it is inappropriate to produce rage as the only emotion within an experience of bereavement—and such was the case for the Ilongot, during former times when headhunters still took heads. ‘‘Lest there be any misunderstanding, bereavement should not be reduced to anger, neither for myself nor for anyone else’’ (9). This sentimental argument—sorrow and tears ‘‘should’’ follow rage—issues implicitly a moral-emotional injunction against headhunting, because if the Ilongot either dilute or transform their rage, their headhunting would cease. In other words, empathy, which, in the first place, had produced the possibility of cross-cultural understanding, establishes at the same time a normative account of emotional well-being that judges and criticizes the other’s culture. Sentimentalism enables the crossing over and through another’s culture but, in the process, sentimentalism crosses the other culture out.7 The Ilongot who come to the world’s negotiating table are crying, not enraged. But the tears, in their case, are not sentimental ones, and such tears do not produce moral knowledge. Rather, Ilongot tears count the cost of the loss of a way of being that they had called their own—and Renato Rosaldo writes that such sorts of tears represent ‘‘agonizing’’ and ‘‘painful adjustments’’ to ‘‘a set of cultural practices’’ (6). So that while both Renato Rosaldo and the Ilongot are crying, they cry for different reasons and to different effect, and the Ilongot do not and, indeed, cannot enter worldwide human society on their own terms. The sorrowing yet knowing anthropologist and his pained and agonystricken subjects sit down together to sort out the world’s problems. The former gains from his loss, and the latter, perhaps, are simply losers.

2. Methodologically, something else is at stake here. As already alluded to, the knowledge produced over Michelle Rosaldo’s corpse indirectly engages the important and influential theorizing of the emotions produced

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by Michelle Rosaldo. He does not explicitly refer to her work, and yet his argument implicitly undermines Michelle Rosaldo’s position that, ‘‘there is nothing universal about such things as happiness and anger’’ (M. Rosaldo, ‘‘Toward’’ 142).8 Indeed, Michelle Rosaldo’s largest point is that within a particular culture, affect is a matter of relations rather than differences. Broadly, at the level of gender, Rosaldo notes: ‘‘We will never understand the lives that women lead without relating them to men,’’ and this point runs through her published work like a mantra (M. Rosaldo, ‘‘Use’’ 396). Near the end of Knowledge and Passion (her one full-length work, published in 1980), in a long passage that opens her ‘‘Conclusion,’’ Michelle Rosaldo warns of the danger of a too-quick assumption of emotional sameness: Fitting distinctive contexts and a distinctive form of life, affects in Ilongot terms may well resemble feelings that we know. But precisely because ‘‘meaning’’ is bound up with ‘‘use,’’ affects must be understood as the constructions of a form of life, and ‘‘selfhood’’ as a mode of apprehension mediated by cultural forms and social logics. Or, to cast my point in somewhat different terms, it seems that if we hope to learn how songs, or slights, or killings, can stir human hearts we must inform interpretation with a grasp of the relationship between expressive forms and feelings, which themselves are culture-bound and which derive their significance from their place within the life experiences of particular people in particular societies. (Knowledge 222)

The emphasis here on the ‘‘social’’ and ‘‘society’’—and, elsewhere, on ‘‘social use and situation’’ and ‘‘social process’’—is part of a larger project of reading ‘‘social logics’’ and affect’s ‘‘place within’’ a network of identities and affects. Personhood, for Knowledge and Passion, is that bundle of affects or emotions that makes it possible to recognize oneself in the context of one’s relationship to others. She argues that the Ilongot completely understand this: Emotions for them are not understood as ‘‘interior experience,’’ but rather as a way to comprehend ‘‘social life and public situations’’ (38). ‘‘Ilongots are interested in feelings because affective life has consequences for health, cooperation, daily labor, and political debate’’ (43). And this Ilongot belief mirrors Knowledge and Passion’s own theoretical understanding of emotional life: we must ask not if ‘‘anger’’ and ‘‘lightness’’ are in fact things that a headhunter is apt to ‘‘feel,’’ but rather how such terms inform his recollections

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and accounts and so provide him with a way of understanding the significance of disturbing feats of force for daily interactions. Thus, rather than probe the possible uses of Ilongot terms for illuminating facts of individual psychology, I concentrate on the meanings such words acquire through their association with enduring patterns of social relationship and activity in Ilongot daily life. (27)

Feeling is ‘‘constrained by the relational forms’’ of ‘‘society,’’ which in this case means that the headhunter’s patterns of affect have everything to do with the structuring of relations between peers, male seniors and juniors, and men and women (234). Through the production of feeling, which in turn produces the very sense of ‘‘self,’’ such ‘‘relationships are forged and reproduced’’ (29). The anthropological objects of study known as ‘‘ritual’’ and ‘‘symbol,’’ are, finally, ‘‘vehicles of affectual change and deep emotion’’ (25). And, for Michelle Rosaldo, rituals and symbols are crucial components of social reproduction, designed to produce a world of feeling that establishes positions within a complex field of relations. Thus, there is an extreme exclusivity that accompanies Renato Rosaldo’s capitalization upon sentiment. First, it freezes out traditional, anthropological cultural difference (the Ilongots’ difference), which was precisely what the project attempted to preserve. Second, in this case, sentimentalism has pushed aside the matter of original relationality, as represented in Michelle Rosaldo’s work. No progress on the question of difference is possible down such a road: Sentimentalism begins by arguing that affect is similar among all beings, which means that there finally is only one emotional identity in the world. ‘‘My’’ affect is similar to everyone else’s, and hence everyone else is really ‘‘me.’’ There is no relationality of difference, there is no difference: Here is only the single, global identity that is present to itself, and that, ideally, has no other.

3. The fundamental insight that the traditional conceptualization of affect is differential, and hence saturated by power, is denied by Renato Rosaldo, yet taken up in a new register by yet other theorists, such as Nancy Scheper-Hughes, in Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (1992). Scheper-Hughes writes about the phenomenon of Brazilian underclass women who do not experience sorrow (they do not cry) when their babies die. She suggests that the mothers’ relationship to infant death

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can only be understood in terms of the ‘‘cultural construction of emotions,’’ and, more specifically, a ‘‘political economy of the emotions’’ (341): The practices described here are not autonomously, culturally produced. They have a social history and must be understood within the economic and political context of a larger state and world (moral) order. . . . (22)

In other words, positioned in a world economy so as to be constantly subjected to ‘‘scarcity and death,’’ the mothers respond appropriately (15). No first-world, sentimental perspective can criticize such women’s emotional lives, and, indeed, living among such women for years at a time over a twenty-five-year span acculturated Scheper-Hughes to their perspective: ‘‘I learned, as they did, to ‘conform’ and to tell myself that, after all, perhaps it [infant death] was ‘meant’ to be so’’ (16). The long-term anthropological study of emotional life, then, for Scheper-Hughes, results in a somewhat grudging acceptance that emotional life is not universally shared, and that its ‘‘local’’ variants are tied to larger, base determinants such wealth and poverty. In other words, affect is an intersubjective phenomenon, and based, in the first place, upon relationships of difference; and it is a ‘‘political economy’’ precisely because it involves inequitable exchange as its first foundation. The affect that Scheper-Hughes studies would be nothing were it not produced out of the inter-determination of North and South, first and third worlds. And yet the question of the anthropologist’s response to such a global and large-scale predicament continues to haunt Scheper-Hughes: I have stumbled on a situation in which shantytown mothers appear to have ‘‘suspended the ethical’’—compassion, empathic love, and care—toward some of their weak and sickly infants. . . . How are we to understand their actions, make sense of them, and respond ethically ourselves—that is, with compassion toward the others, Alto women and their vulnerable infants and children? (22)

The answers to her two questions—first, the ethnographical question, and second, the ethical one—are strikingly at odds. Scheper-Hughes insists, on the one hand, that ‘‘mother love’’ is not ‘‘deficient or absent’’ among these mothers (341). To assume this would be to fall prey to a ‘‘sentimentalized maternal ‘poetics,’ ’’ among others things (356). Scheper-Hughes writes from a ‘‘respectful assumption of difference,’’ and ‘‘this means avoiding the temptation of all ‘essentializing’ and ‘universalizing’ discourses, whether they originate in the biomedical and psychological sciences or in philosophical or cultural feminism’’ (355). The trap, therefore,

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would be to interpret Brazilian women’s affect in terms of norms and pathologies, wellness and illness, feminism and non-feminism. Any attempt to chart the significance of such affect would amount to an imposition—a rhetorical act of violence. One should note, however, that this assertion of traditional cultural relativism (the ‘‘respectful assumption of difference’’) should have been already foreclosed by Scheper-Hughes’s political-economic reading of difference. Difference imposed by relation is quite a different thing from difference as such. If Brazilian women’s affective difference is superstructural to the global political-economic, then it is also something does not involve radically different/alterior positions but, instead, interpenetration of positions. Following Scheper-Hughes closely in her political-economic logic, Brazilian women should be more of an ‘‘us’’ (a near relation) than a ‘‘them.’’ Yet another option for reading Brazilian women, however, looms in Scheper-Hughes’s account. Brazil is a ‘‘sad’’ place, she writes several times, and Scheper-Hughes cannot accept the existence of such sadness in the world, even though the mothers themselves do not talk of their relationship to their dead infants as a sad or sorrow-filled one (27). This maneuver, which seems already to amount to a universalizing interpretation of Brazilian women, is accomplished by recourse to an ethicalpolitical imperative positioned outside of the realm of cultural difference. Using the work of Emmanuel Levinas as a guide, she argues that morality, ethics, and the empathy that attends them are necessarily existential: ‘‘Accountability, answerability to ‘the other’—is ‘precultural’ in that human existence always presupposes the presence of another’’ (23). This permits her, she believes, to intervene in the question of these women’s identities at a level before difference: ‘‘Not to look, not to touch, not to record, can be the hostile act, the act of indifference and of turning away’’ (28). But the questions of pre-cultural accountability, on the one hand, and cultural affect, on the other, are strangely interwoven in ScheperHughes’s account. Her concept of ‘‘empathy,’’ for example, moves toward a seeming break with a non-judgmental account of affect: What draws me back to these people are just those small spaces of convergence, recognition, and empathy that we do share. Not everything can be dissolved in the vapor of absolute cultural difference and radical otherness. (29)

In other words, empathy has something to say to cultural relativism: Empathy cuts across and through the ‘‘vapor’’ of alterity that threatens to

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obscure our vision and make us blind to the other. Empathy dispels the fog of an anthropological principle that asserts that difference—affective or otherwise—cannot be judged from the perspective or positioning of the anthropologist. But at this point in Scheper-Hughes’s analysis, empathy will overrun everything, including Brazilian women’s difference. If it can be asserted that the multinational businessmen who operate Brazilian sugar plantations and maintain the world division of labor ‘‘have suspended the ethical in their relations toward these same women,’’ then the Brazilian women, too, are in a similar position, albeit more passive than active (22). Turningaway-from-the-other on any level becomes simply wrong in ScheperHughes’s account. The mothers present a sad spectacle to the world that cannot be tolerated. And no mothers, in the end, should be without feeling for the welfare of their own children. In this way, and despite all of its protections against such a conclusion, Scheper-Hughes’s text come down in the domain of Stowe’s final injunction in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852): ‘‘There is one thing that every individual can do,—they can see to it that they feel right’’ (Stowe 624).

4. The exclusivity of this position is notable in at least one more way, and here one needs to turn to Renato Rosaldo’s text a last time. Rosaldo notes, in attempting to keep open a space for Ilongot difference: Alongside striking similarities, significant differences in tone, cultural form, and human consequences distinguish the ‘‘anger’’ animating our respective ways of grieving. My vivid fantasies, for example, about a life insurance agent who refused to recognize Michelle’s death as job-related did not lead me to kill him, cut off his head, and celebrate afterward. (Culture 10)

Here, Rosaldo hopes to salvage a space for difference, in the distinction between the Ilongot, who would presumably have taken the insurance agent’s head, and himself. But this is a difference without a difference, which instead demonstrates a fundamental point about the capitalization upon sentiment: It needs an ‘‘enemy’’ in order to function, and this enemy must be ‘‘killed’’ either literally or figuratively (it makes no difference) in order for a community premised on sentiment to produce itself and appear.

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The analogy to classic, nineteenth-century sentimentalist politics could not be clearer, and the prior brief references to Stowe can be re-elaborated in terms of their significance. According to commentators such as Philip Fisher and Jane Tompkins, nineteenth-century sentimentalism was a powerfully successful ‘‘romance of the object’’ that formed an ‘‘empathetic emotional bond’’ with social types that included ‘‘prisoners, slaves, madmen, children, and animals’’ (Hard Facts 99, 92).9 As such, it was an extremely successful version of ‘‘liberal humanism,’’ which, for Fisher, was the ‘‘primary radical methodology within culture’’ (100, 92). Tompkins’ enthusiastic reading of ‘‘the import’’ of sentimentalism concludes that it is a ‘‘world-shaking’’ doctrine (Sensational Designs 146): ‘‘If history did not take the course these writers recommended, it is not because they were not political, but because they were insufficiently persuasive’’ (141). While some scholars already have suggested that sentimentalism cannot abide difference in those figures with which it sympathizes,10 it has yet to be observed that sentimental texts also clearly posit an original ‘‘enemy.’’ Sentimentalism operates through a conversion of the sort that Renato Rosaldo documents: a moment or flash of affective insight that brings the figure into affective community. In Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a crucial document for sentimentalist politics and an object of many serious studies in recent years, it appears that everyone is potentially a member of this community. The runaway mulatto slave George Harris, for example, begins the book in ‘‘an improper state of mind’’ (175), and is elsewhere referred to as ‘‘a volcano of bitter feelings’’ (56) and a fellow whose violent and vengeful fantasies ‘‘are bad, George, very bad’’ (185). He threatens revenge against slaveholders at several points, but eventually finds himself transformed by the simple act of breakfast-making in a Quaker household (223–24). At this moment, Harris falls into line with a number of other figures in the book, including Senator Bird, slaveholder St. Clare, ‘‘wild child’’ Topsy, and enslaved collaborators Sambo and Quimbo, none of whom appear to be particularly strong candidates for sentimental re-education. The novel seems a highly efficient machine, churning out affectfriendly figures at the rate of every few chapters. But trouble with sentimental logic occurs in the confrontation between violent slaveholder Simon Legree and his enslaved former mistress, Cassy. Here, sentimentalism’s transformative abilities are suspended, and sentimentalism’s logic alarmingly exfoliates and expands. These chapters have posed problems for a number of scholars of the sentimental, though, typically, Cassy’s final act on the plantation (her plan of escape from Legree)

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and the consequences of this act are contextualized in traditionally sentimental terms.11 As one example, in Gillian Brown’s otherwise exemplary reading of Stowe, she suggests that Cassy ‘‘asserts her motherliness’’ in these chapters in the same manner as all of the other female characters. And Brown further concludes that Legree, and what he represents, is ‘‘overwhelmed’’ by a sentimental possession’’ (a lock of hair, seemingly his mother’s), much as other male characters in the text are transformed by memories or of or surrogates for a mother figure (Domestic Individualism 36, 50). But to read the text in this way is to gloss over problems and contradictions in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.12 Cassy, Stowe repeatedly tells the reader, has nothing of the mother left in her; she drowned one of her own children out of despair over slavery, and her unreciprocated love affair with Simon has emotionally shattered her—left her without the possibility of love. When the reader meets her, she is a pure product of Legree’s plantation. She is ‘‘wild’’ and ruined, as is he (501). Cassy is, in fact, far closer to the ‘‘devil’’ than to mother, as both Legree and she assert. A serpent-like Cassy threatens Legree with something quite distinct from sentimental logic. Cassy has less of the mother-principle left in her than does Legree, and over the course of the next few chapters, Cassy slowly drives Legree mad by playing with the speck of sentiment at his core: Hard and reprobate as the godless man seemed now, there had been a time when he had been rocked on the bosom of a mother,—cradled with prayers and pious hymns,—his now seared brow bedewed with the waters of holy baptism. (529)

‘‘I thought I’d forgot that,’’ cries Legree, when confronted with the reminder of his mother, ‘‘Curse me, if I think there’s any such thing as forgetting anything, any how’’ (529). Cassy wreaks fatal vengeance on Legree—taking advantage of this unforgotten sentiment, using Legree’s sentiment against him as a lethal weapon. David Leverenz notes Cassy’s ‘‘malice’’ and Douglas is close to the truth in describing Cassy’s project as ‘‘tacit terrorism,’’ but it is necessary to mark as well the way that such terrorism is an inversion of the prototypically sentimental (Leverenz 199; Douglas, ‘‘Introduction’’ 19). Earlier in the book, George Harris is prevented from taking any sort of revenge on whites, his character altered before he might do ‘‘improper’’ damage to another. But in these last chapters the book allows an explicitly anti-Christian, no-longer-feminine character to vengefully destroy, and the tonalities of the text are all on Cassy’s side. Uncle Tom’s Cabin suddenly

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is on the side of the witch, the Devil himself. As Legree raves and screams his way to madness and death, shouting, ‘‘Come! come! come!,’’ to his absent mother, it is difficult, if not impossible, for the reader to be suitably appalled (596). Stowe salvages what she can in the remaining pages, containing Cassy’s energies by reconverting her to Christian family life upon her arrival in Canada, but the damage is done. The limits of sympathizing sentimentalism have been spelled out: In the deep South, among the enslaved, sentimental power no longer is transmitted heart to heart. Rather, the book’s most characteristic message concerning right feeling is reversed, as an explicitly wrong feeling rips the heart right out of Legree. And it feels right, too. In Stowe, love easily inverts to hate, patience to immediate demands. A passionate death-machine cohabits with sentimentalism proper at sites where its presumed logic is blocked. The set of emotional dispositions known as sentimentalism cannot exist without its counter-discourse—one that is figured by sentimentalism’s theorists as outside sentimental logic, yet necessarily embedded within it. Seemingly incompatible or ‘‘opposite’’ emotions are so bound together that they bleed through and into each other. Cassy’s project is a necessary structural supplement to sentimentalism, and for the following reason: Sentimentalism always remains a project, or a labor, which must be accomplished. Therefore, sentimentalism necessarily involves judgment of the other, in order to determine whether the other has reached a sufficient level of affective solidarity. Turning this back toward the particularity of Renato Rosaldo’s text, it is important to remember that Rosaldo associates proper sentiment only with those who have reached a certain maturity— only with those who have experienced significant loss. The young and the fortunate are, of course, immediately excluded, but so too are those who operate within a non-sentimental calculus of life and death, such as the insurance agent. Sentimentalism cannot extricate itself from the determination of the ‘‘enemy,’’ not until or unless there were no test for sentiment.

5. Each in their own way, then, the works of Renato Rosaldo and ScheperHughes attempt to negotiate difference and empathy, but with exclusive results. In these texts, the question is: How should the Northern or Western anthropologist feel, in order to produce solidarities with ‘‘different’’

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Southern or non-Western groupings? Marta E. Savigliano attempts to ask another question entirely, from a different perspective, in Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (1995): What can be done with affect by subalterns, on their own, apart from the first-world intellectuals, apart from sociopolitical theory’s attempt to ‘‘theorize, generalize, or totalize’’ (19)? Might a relationally different affect be put to productive work by subalterns? Savigliano begins from the intersubjective, relational groundwork of Michelle Rosaldo and Scheper-Hughes. As her title suggests, Savigliano asserts from the first pages of her text that there is a global, ‘‘trackable trafficking in emotions and affect’’; that ‘‘Passion’’ and the affective pains expressed by tango constitute ‘‘emotional capital’’ in this traffic; and that the exoticized affect of the other exists within a worldwide ‘‘industry that requires distribution and marketing’’ (1, 2, 3). Tango, thought all the way to the bottom of relationality, has no origin as such, but rather is ‘‘rooted in long-lasting conflicts over race, class, and gender supremacy’’ (32). Passion, from the ‘‘beginning,’’ therefore never occupies a single space, such as ‘‘Argentina,’’ but always at least is spread across two spaces: ‘‘Desire generates Passion in a different space, the space of alterity, as it longs for it’’ (10). This differential reading of passion (rather than a reading of the passions of the other as different), means that any strategy that Savigliano might concoct must begin by taking up ‘‘the tools of the colonizer’’ (237), and that her question remains the age-old question: Can the tools of the master be used to dismantle the house of the master? Anthropology, once again, has always been here before, and the results should be seen as cautionary. Early and highly exclusionary proto-anthropology often reads passion differentially. Here, the novels of James Fenimore Cooper (preeminently, the figure of Magua in The Last of the Mohicans [1826]) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick (Magawisca in Hope Leslie [1827]) should be remembered. In these cases, the affect of the other is relational to colonialism, but has been turned sour or ‘‘spoiled’’ by encounter: ‘‘The law of vengeance is written on our hearts,’’ as Magawisca says at the moment the novel’s Amerindians choose to remove themselves from the white world (Sedgwick 330). Relational affect, in other words, is no sure cure for colonial hierarchies. In these texts, it becomes yet another (and perhaps the most important) reason for Indian Removal. And this sort of problem runs deep into the late twentieth century. For example, the so-called Moynihan Report (1965), founded on the thinking of anthropologist Oscar Lewis, among others, reads the ‘‘pathological’’ affect of

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black men in order to enact bio-power rehabilitations. Thus, the assertion of one’s relational difference in order to enact a progressive politics will always have to confront the fact that colonial power long has used the fact of relational difference in order to exclude. Something akin to what Savigliano is trying to suggest appears in the work of Franz Boas, who put to work a positively inflected relational mood, conduct, or affect in Anthropology and Modern Life (1928): the contrast between the social proprieties for the nobility and those for the common people is very striking. Of the common people are expected humbleness, mercy and all those qualities that we consider amiable and humane. . . . On the whole, in societies of this type, the mass of the people consider as their ideal those actions which we should characterize as humane. (192–3)

Here, the connection to Savigliano could not be clearer: The relational dominant produces a subaltern with affective characteristics that it desires, that the subaltern recognizes as its own, and that finally are seen as desirable and/or at least useful (‘‘My power, actively tango’’[16]). Michael Rogin is instructive on this point: In his view, something like U.S. jazz can only emerge ‘‘out of adversity,’’ and thus can be conceptualized according to an inversion of the Benjaminian formulation, in the theses on history, that ‘‘our highest cultural achievements are simultaneously monuments to barbarism’’ (Blackface, White Noise 67–68). Thus, can a relational affect be positively valued apart from dominance? Savigliano appears to suggest at times that this is impossible: In the desiring imagination—informed by a philosophy of conquest and consumption—Passion is a vital resource lost when, driven by the ambitions of civilization, Desire abandons the paradise of wildness. . . . [F]ree of its ontological ties to Desire, Passion becomes empowered, although this freedom, rather than precluding bondage, will justify innumerable violent episodes of conflict and articulation. (10)

In other words, the taking up of Passion by the globally subaltern involves the violence of an identity that is ‘‘irrational, violent, macho, lazy, corrupt’’ (168). And yet an alternative strategy begins to emerge in Savigliano’s text, and it is resolutely plural, avoiding ‘‘any consistent or generalizable approach’’ (17). Operating at times within frameworks examined elsewhere in Anthropology’s Wake, the text advocates open forms of hybridity and dialogue. It frankly advocates everything imaginable in the performing of passion:

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So, pick and choose. Improvise. Hide away. Run after them. Stay still. Move at an astonishing speed. Shut up. Scream a rumor. Turn around. Go back without returning. Upside down. Let your feet do the thinking. Be comfortable in your restlessness. Tango. (17)

Savigliano forecasts a ‘‘hit and run’’ strategy, ‘‘avoiding the encirclement of theoretical commandments’’ (18). She seeks a resolutely non-elite, bottom-up production of farces, parodies, and ironies conducted from within the confines of tango in order to subvert the reigning political economy of affect, and, by analogy, global political economy. While finding summary statements in a text as performative as this one is perilous undertaking, this one might do: Exotic others laboriously cultivate passionate-ness in order to be desired, consumed, and thus recognized in a world increasingly ruled by postmodern standards. Autoexoticism plays an essential part in this regenerative process of identification, performing that value that exudes a surplus without which there is no survival. Autoexotically I return to the tango. It is my only solid resource. Tango is my strategic language, a way of talking about, understanding, and responding to postmodernism from an absurd position. Tango is a practice already ready for struggle. It knows about taking sides and risks. (212)

What can be learned about her project from a statement like this? Despite Savigliano’s hope that, through endless movement and shifting, she can fend off the ‘‘trap’’ of ‘‘bourgeois identities’’ and of ‘‘national identity’’ (167), there is something highly traditional about the project’s stated structure and goals in this passage. First, apparently, what is needed by subalterns is ‘‘identification’’ and ‘‘recognition.’’ Second, this is achieved through (a) identification of a ‘‘resource,’’ (b) ‘‘laboriously cultivat[ion]’’ of this resource, and (c) the production of ‘‘surplus’’ for ‘‘survival.’’ In other words, a liberalist ethos of production undergirds a liberal-bourgeois politics of recognition in this passage. Both themes—identification and production—are linked together in the next paragraph, where Savigliano writes of the necessity of an ‘‘I’’ (‘‘to write tangos, then, is to write in a first person’’) and it is no accident that economic capitalization upon the resources of tango are designed to produce the recognition of capital ‘‘I’’s—whether Argentineans, Spanish-heritage Americans, or simply individual women dancers, who appear in a kind of roll-call at the end of the book (212, 237–38). Seen this way, Savigliano’s text cannot begin to imagine something like ‘‘an outburst of an alternative West’’ (168). It promotes, instead, the

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‘‘West’’ fully recapitulated, with affect nothing but a form of traditional ‘‘capital’’ after all (2). This would mean that emotional capital, like capital in a strictly economic sense, is about measurement, profit, surplus, and rational accumulation, and that what Savigliano advocates is a war of position within economic structure: a short-circuiting of global structure through movement, through rapidity; a rebuilding of the economy of the South around the proliferation of multiple affects for consumption by the North, for final profit-taking by the South. For all the complexity of Savigliano’s text, there is a sense in which it little more than a call for picking oneself up by one’s own bootstraps, and entering into traditional economic development and economic competition, and all this beginning from a highly unenviable entry point into the global economy. And perhaps it further should be argued that it is liberalism’s double ontology of production—the production of commodities derived from nature, and this labor’s production of the full and complete subject who qualifies as a citizen—which provides purchase for exclusivity. The productive, capitalized subject serves as a threshold requirement for liberal political inclusivity, with ‘‘others’’ endlessly read as not meeting a certain standard of subjecthood and its attendant labors. In this way, were Savigliano’s project to prove successful, its final invocation of ‘‘la familia’’ and ‘‘blood ties’’ (constituting a traditional oikos, which is the foundation of racially and nationally exclusive political economy) would prove quite ominous (238).

6. So what can be done with affect? Of what value are sorrow and tears? How can one put them to use for purposes of political life? Tracing the limit of a certain relational logic, the answer would necessarily be a negative one. Indeed, following hints by Michelle Rosaldo, the unequal and inequitable, power-laden structuring of affect among Ilongot men and women might only be alleviated through less feeling, rather than more. Catherine A. Lutz, an anthropological theorist of emotional life, hints in this direction: ‘‘Foucault has made the claim that power creates sexuality and disciplining; similarly, it can said to create emotionality’’ (‘‘Engendered’’ 87). If so, then Foucault’s final prescription in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 may be equally valid. He calls for a ‘‘tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality’’—a move backward, out of the deployment of sexuality toward relatively less determined ‘‘bodies and pleasures’’ (157). Such

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would be the logical alternative to Savigliano’s projected economic war of affect. Yet the problem with affect, as outlined by Michelle Rosaldo, Savigliano, and Lutz, is that affect is directly tied or tethered to (and indeed is the foundation for) subject construction, and it is this fact that recent anthropologies of affect attempt to exploit this for progressive, productive purpose. Philosopher Alphonso Lingis, however, would dissent on every point: Emotions are, strictly, outside the subject; are always necessarily different from themselves; and are fundamentally ‘‘nonteleological’’ (Dangerous 2). In other words, nothing permits the making coherent of emotions; nothing supports the idea that they are purposive; and the problems that are the subject and affect need not be thought together. Indeed, below the subject, one could argue that shared community might begin not from identity and culture, which are always the ground of inclusion and exclusion, but rather from notions of singularity and shared finitude—a community at ‘‘loose ends,’’ as some would have it.13 And Savigliano has already located the hinge for this community when she writes about a ‘‘surplus’’ of affect. One would have to begin differently, though, by thinking about surplus as separate and distinct from production and value, as separate and distinct from work and capitalization. One would have to begin thinking about the surplus of passion that always exceeds and always comes before subjectivity and identity, toward what Jean-Luc Nancy describes as ‘‘the passion—the passivity, the suffering, and the excess—of sharing its [a singular being’s] singularity’’ (Inoperative 32). There will always be an excess of passion for finite beings, an excess constituted at the limit of beings, and shared with all other beings beyond the possibility of appropriation precisely because of its excessiveness and singularity. Relatedly, Marxist futurism, if it is to constitute an alternative to the present, must be premised on an abundance and surplus that obviates the market, as Marx’s ‘‘Critique of the Gotha Program’’ and other similar texts indicate. In this way, if a coming social justice is to prevent a mere reiteration of the past at the level of identity, our sentiments will lead (and without ‘‘us’’ in tow). Two brief examples will suffice to clarify this point, one from the perspective of the dominant ‘‘European,’’ and one from perspective of the subaltern. Claude Le´vi-Strauss, in the celebrated Tristes Tropiques (1955) (‘‘the sadness of the tropics’’), is explicitly concerned with the question of what the anthropologist can do with the sadness he or she feels. Everywhere, the anthropologist finds ways of life passing away before his eyes: Late in the book, for example, the rubber tappers of Amazonia are said to

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be in ‘‘the death-throes of their trade’’ (366). Everywhere in the world, one witnesses either a European- or ‘‘Moslem’’-directed ‘‘cultural steamrolling’’ and a combination of ‘‘political oppression and economic exploitation’’ (406). Everywhere, the anthropologist must confront the fact that ‘‘injustice, poverty and suffering exist’’ (412). And everywhere, the anthropologist acknowledges that his existence is premised in Western Europe’s ‘‘strong feelings of remorse,’’ and that the anthropologist himself ‘‘is the symbol of atonement’’ (389). By the end of Tristes Tropiques, however, the anthropological dream of putting all this sadness to work has faded.14 Indeed, the last chapters of the book are marked by a rejection of what Le´vi-Strauss identifies with a jointly constructed Islamic-European world: a ‘‘legal and formalist rationalism’’ that pays no attention to the actual world, and adopts ‘‘extremely simple (but oversimple) solutions’’ for the world’s problems (405, 402). Through the mechanism of the Crusades, Europe civilization has become entirely like Islamic civilization, infected by ‘‘the same bookish attitude, the same Utopian spirit and the stubborn conviction that it is enough to solve problems on paper to be immediately rid of them’’ (405). Le´viStrauss’s Islamophobia, however, does not necessarily taint his conclusion, which involves a rejection of the current European lifeworld, and which would turn anthropology into ‘‘ ‘entropology’,’’ or ‘‘the study of the highest manifestations’’ of the ‘‘process of disintegration’’ (414). ‘‘What else has man done except blithely break down billions of structures and reduce them to a state in which they are no longer capable of integration?’’ (413). A proper, quasi-Buddhistic posture toward the sadness that anthropology everywhere witnesses means a double rejection of the values of the anthropologist’s home world, and an avoidance of ‘‘giving himself wholeheartedly’’ to the people whom he or she studies (384). In essence, Le´viStraussian entropology involves a double detachment, in order to become distant from one’s own values, and in order to avoid ‘‘destroying’’ the other (392). The entropologist therefore attempts to bring about a moment ‘‘when the spectrum or rainbow of human cultures has finally sunk into the void created by our frenzy’’ through a negative work of ‘‘unhitching’’ from ‘‘savages and explorations,’’ and from further exploration or exploitation of the ‘‘self’’—with the latter understood as ‘‘hateful’’ and having no place in a coming world (414). The ‘‘unreserved acceptance of the human condition’’ necessitates a move ‘‘below the threshold of thought and over and above society’’ (414). Here, something like mere relation appears—a relation set in opposition to a world of difference, of

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the negativization’’ of others, and of the production of impermeable borders (404, 409). The model for this appears in the last line of the book and, perhaps notoriously, is the ‘‘glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness,’’ that ‘‘one can sometimes exchange with a cat’’ (405). Unlike, for example, Renato Rosaldo’s moment of identification with the Ilongot, two do not become one, and no larger project is built upon this mere, bare relationality. Le´vi-Strauss’s figuring of community is here nothing but the sharing of mortality (gravity’s ‘‘heavy’’-ness), or a mutual, infinite obligation to the other (‘‘full of ‘‘forgiveness’’). The similarity to at least part of Scheper-Hughes’s position vis-a-vis Levinas should be noted, but Le´vi-Strauss’s argument does not found itself on an attempt to preserve traditional cultural difference, but rather alterity in general, nor does Le´vi-Strauss posit sorrow as a value, and indeed he suggests that any attempt to produce value from it will only destroy it in another round of disintegration and violence masked as progressive instrumentalism. The final example: There are moments that signal the political ground of affect from a subaltern perspective in Miguel Me´ndez’s novel Pilgrims in Aztla´n (1974). Here, near the end of the novel, Me´ndez forecasts an insurgent community of the disenfranchised that begins precisely where Savigliano will not travel—beyond mere ‘‘survival.’’ Me´ndez’s nearly nameless, choral characters, who had been Mexicans, Indians, and Chicanos, are referred to as ‘‘walking around dead,’’ and the only question in the novel is whether they will lose the sense of value about life, and accept their status as those who are always already at the limit experience and the passion of death (130). Traditional affect, according to Me´ndez, imposes blinders on the disenfranchised, producing feelings of grief in a realm so wholly imaginary that characters in the novel often fantasize that others have died and that they are experiencing mourning: ‘‘It’s not that anybody has died. Your illusion is what has died, son’’ (134). So a community emerges among the walking dead—a community that does not belong to any particular ‘‘family’’ of beings and that does not exclude the overlords of the U.S.–Mexican border: His intimate suffering, which no longer fit in his soul, was now the suffering of everyone, of his friends among his people, the Chicanos. Even of his executioners. (152)

And, because it does not belong to anyone, not even to the life of humanity in general, it is not founded on, nor does it therefore capitalize upon, the death of others: ‘‘We shouted for the echo to give back to us the names and the voices of the departed . . . leaving us empty’’ (178). Such a community would decidedly not determine death as a positive substance, as a

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property, that can be turned to profit by producing a community of like persons, but instead would render death unconceptualizable and absent while at the same time the very possibility of shared singularity. In Me´ndez, the singularities of each being’s intimate yet shared relationship to death forges another sort of revolutionary consciousness among ‘‘those who have been immolated’’ (178). This ‘‘revolution’’ will take place precisely in the name of no one: ‘‘Losing your native tongue, son, is like losing your soul. We have been losing it little by little, burdened down by the work of beasts, as though we were subhuman beings.’’ ‘‘Like the slaves, papa´?’’ ‘‘That’s what we are, my son.’’ ‘‘For how long, daddy?’’ ‘‘Until life no longer means anything to us.’’ (Me´ndez 170)

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chapter 3

Ex-Cited Dialogue David E. Johnson We are in a peculiar position. —Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking

What is sought in the question of being is not completely unfamiliar, although it is at first totally ungraspable. —Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

I let them speak. I carefully abstained from formulating questions that would suggest already determined answers. —Jorge Luis Borges, Discusio´n

Anthropology should be a theory of the woman. —Jacques Derrida, Glas

Dialogue’s Reservation In A Sense for the Other, Marc Auge´ argues that ‘‘the best way to respect a contemporary culture, and to avoid considering it an arbitrary, closed ensemble of direct or indirect propositions, a ‘text,’ such as an archivist might discover, classify, or decipher, is to engage in dialogue with it’’ (75). Auge´ understands dialogue to be the methodological principle that displaces the archive as the governing metaphor of anthropological practice. On the one hand, in the archive, the other never speaks; it lies in state. On the other hand, in dialogue, anthropology, according to Auge´, does not put others on reserve and thus does not locate them within the structure of the reservation or archive. His understanding that the dialogue between cultural others may take place ‘‘either metaphorically or not’’ (75), however, already indicates the way back toward the anthropological reserve, for what would a metaphorical dialogue look like? Who could be said to participate in it? In what way would such a dialogue respect contemporary cultures and thus respect, which is perhaps another metaphor, others? On the other side, is it possible that the only dialogue open to us is a metaphorical dialogue?

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In the introduction to their edited volume, Theorizing the Americanist Tradition, Lisa Philips Valentine and Regna Darnell cite the seven interrelated distinctive features of the Americanist tradition. These include ‘‘the inseparability of language, thought, and reality, culture as a system of symbols, discourse as the basis for both ethnographic and linguistic study, commitment to preserving oral knowledge, the mutability and historicity of culture, and an emphasis on long-term fieldwork that is reflected in the Americanist focus on dialogic research between the researched and those researching’’ (‘‘Introduction: Timely Conversations’’ 6). These seven features are easily comprehended under the heading ‘‘discourse’’ or by the understanding that the Americanist tradition, unlike the structuralist tradition, for instance, focuses on discourse or perhaps parole, rather than language or langue. Likewise, in their ‘‘Introduction’’ to The Dialogic Emergence of Culture, against the Saussurian emphasis on the ‘‘individual actor as the source of parole or speech,’’ Bruce Mannheim and Dennis Tedlock note Jakobson’s conclusion: ‘‘Dialogue is a more fundamental form of speech than monologue’’ (1). They go on to point out that the irony of the belatedness of ‘‘the dialogical opening, is that even when language is actualized as a discourse spoken to no one in particular, it already has first and second persons embedded in it, implicitly present even when only the third person is used for the moment’’ (7). According to Mannheim and D. Tedlock, culture emerges in dialogue: ‘‘Cultures are continuously produced, reproduced, and revised in dialogues among their members’’ (2). Further, they attest that ‘‘Once culture is seen as arising from a dialogical ground, then ethnography itself is revealed as an emergent cultural (or intercultural) phenomenon, produced, reproduced, and revised in dialogues between fieldworkers and natives’’ (2). There are serious problems with this description of the emergence of culture in dialogue, not least of which is the necessary beginning in already determined positions (fieldworker and natives) and the proprietary relation to culture: Culture is produced dialogically by its members. Such membership undoubtedly depends on dialogue’s or discourse’s necessary assumption of a communicative ground secured not in an incalculable plurality, but in the unity of the subject. In The Rhetoric of Failure, Ewa Ziarek notes that ‘‘theories of discursive community and intersubjectivity, even though they present themselves as alternatives to the philosophy of the subject, deploy in fact a traditional notion of communication. . . . Consequently, the notion of intersubjective communication is still articulated according to the main premises of the philosophy of the subject and its privileging of consciousness, presence, and voice’’ (98).

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In dialogical anthropology, this voice is always monological. Although Mannheim and D. Tedlock point out that ‘‘No one can speak or write language, as we know it, without already being situated in the world’’ (7)—a claim seconded by Walter D. Mignolo’s notion of the locus of enunciation1—they nonetheless grant the possibility of ‘‘a single individual, speaking without interruption, to enact a multitude of contrasting voices’’ (3, emphasis added). The possibility of speaking without interruption gives the lie to the understanding that culture emerges dialogically. Underlying this ‘‘dialogue’’ is a unified subject—or, rather, the dream of a unified subject—that does not speak to itself (for this would inevitably afford the chance of interruption) so much as it immediately determines any and every other as itself.2 The philosophy of the subject, then, and under this rubric will be included anthropology, is dialogical only insofar as it admits no failure of communication. Such failure can be circumscribed, however, only if the other never interrupts, only if one always speaks uninterrupted, even by oneself. Mannheim’s and D. Tedlock’s naı¨ve criticism of Derrida notwithstanding, it is clear that the possibility of uninterrupted speaking is always already ruptured from within insofar as it bears the trace of iteration. ‘‘My ‘written communication,’ ’’ Derrida writes, ‘‘must . . . remain legible despite the absolute disappearance of every determined addressee in general for it to function as writing, that is, for it to be legible. It must be repeatable—iterable—in the absolute absence of the addressee or of the empirically determinable set of addressees’’ (Margins 315). This is not just the case for the addressee, either: ‘‘What holds for the addressee holds also . . . for the sender or producer’’ (316). At the same time that it displaces the unified subject, the structure of iteration is also the condition of possibility of anthropology, because the possibility of knowledge (anthropological and any other, if there is any other) is ‘‘governed by a code, . . . it is constituted . . . by its iterability in the absence of whoever, and therefore ultimately in the absence of every empirically determinable subject,’’ which ‘‘implies that there is no code . . . that is structurally secret’’ (315). It should not be necessary to remind everyone that iteration marks not only writing, but spoken language as well.3 There is no code that ‘‘we’’ can’t break, that ‘‘we’’ can’t know. The risk, which is also the possibility, of breaking the code, however, remains the chance of the other, the threat of the irruption of alterity and the possibility—and thus the necessity—that the context will remain undetermined. The irreducible threat to anthropology, which is also the condition of its possibility, is the interruption of its speech by another. Accordingly, in

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order to secure itself against the corruption of the other, anthropology depends on finding a way to speak without interruption and yet without appearing to silence the other. Dialogue provides the necessary methodological metaphor.4

The Interruption of the Other Anthropology’s dream, and not just according to Mannheim and D. Tedlock,5 is to talk (to another) without interruption. It is undoubtedly one of modernity’s founding philosophical-anthropological fantasies. Not far into Descartes’s unfinished dialogue, The Search After Truth,6 which arrives at the same conclusions as the Meditations and Discourse, Eudoxus states, ‘‘in order to establish an order that we can follow to the end, first of all, Polyander, I should like us to have a discussion, just the two of us, about all the things in the world, considering them as they are in themselves. I want Epistemon to interrupt as little as possible’’ (Writings 2.404, emphasis added). This would be the law of dialogue: a conversation between two (Eudoxus and Polyander) uninterrupted by a third (Epistemon) who remains apparently absent. The interest of Descartes’ unfinished dialogue lies in its articulation of the condition of possibility for dialogue: the ‘‘in order to adopt an order.’’ At stake is not the order of dialogue—who goes first, the topics, etc.—but the order of the order of dialogue, the unspoken and noninterruptive episteme (Epistemon) that regulates and makes possible the order of discourse between doctrine (Eudoxus) and the other (Polyander). If dialogue takes place between two or more interlocutors, if that is the order of dialogue, the order of the order of dialogue is the exclusion of another who nevertheless remains among the ‘‘us’’ constituted in its exclusion. In order that there be the order of the dialogue between Eudoxus and Polyander, Epistemon must keep silent. Epistemon thus supplies the necessary lack of the object in any subject-subject encounter. He lies ‘‘in state’’ and is the intestate witness to what passes for dialogue between ‘‘us.’’ A certain modernity is determined in this dialogical gesture and while it would be interesting to pursue this exclusion, to read its figure in Descartes’s concern for automata, for example, and in the repetition of that concern in Kant, say, it is perhaps more important to read the operation of the law of dialogue in the text of one who heralds the end of Cartesian humanism. Martin Heidegger’s ‘‘A Dialogue on Language’’ (On the Way to Language 1–54) records a conversation between an ‘‘Inquirer,’’ whom will we

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call ‘‘Heidegger,’’ and ‘‘a Japanese,’’ whom we will identify as ‘‘Tezuka.’’ This conversation took place, according to Heidegger’s note (On the Way 199), in 1953–54 during Tezuka’s visit to Germany. Additionally, ‘‘A Dialogue on Language’’ makes reference to an earlier dialogue between Heidegger and Count Kuki, which occurred during the Count’s pilgrimage to Germany to study phenomenology with Husserl.7 In a brief text entitled ‘‘An Hour With Heidegger’’ and included in Reinhard May’s Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, Tezuka Tomio subsequently described his March 1954 meeting with Heidegger and made clear that this event only minimally corresponded with Heidegger’s account of it. As Graham Parkes writes in his ‘‘Translator’s Preface’’ to May’s book, ‘‘When one reads [Tezuka Tomio’s] account . . . it becomes immediately clear that Heidegger’s text was ‘occasioned’ in only the most feeble sense by the actual conversation: For the most part, Heidegger’s ‘Conversation’ turns out to be an imaginative reconstruction of his personal experiences over the preceding three decades with a range of Japanese colleagues, correspondence with others, readings of texts in translation, and other encounters with Japanese art and culture’’ (ix). As a consequence, Heidegger’s ‘‘Dialogue’’ perhaps comes under the heading of the metaphorical—the imaginative—dialogue between cultures. Nevertheless, given the constitutive order of the order of dialogue, metaphorical dialogue does not represent a corruption of dialogue so much as its possibility, in that the collapsing of multiple Japanese interlocutors into one ‘‘Japanese’’ obviates the possibility of interruption by a third. Indeed, according to Tezuka’s recounting of the event, such metaphorical dialogue is the only dialogue worthy of the name. Tezuka quotes Heidegger as saying: ‘‘East and West must engage in dialogue at this deep level. It is useless to do interviews that merely deal with one superficial phenomenon after another’’ (‘‘An Hour With Heidegger’’ 62). Despite Heidegger’s assessment of the success of their meeting, Tezuka’s account reveals the tension of any dialogue and, further, it indicates that dialogue, even at the deepest level, always bears the traces of monologue. Reinhard May concurs: ‘‘It is easy to see that the [‘Dialogue’] can be read in large part as a monologue’’ (Hidden Sources 15). Here, however, we will not resort to May’s solution to the problem of the ‘‘Dialogue’’ by referring to it as a ‘‘pseudo-dialogue’’ (18), nor, for that matter, will we refrain from referring to the interlocutors as ‘‘Heidegger’’ and ‘‘Tezuka.’’ Heidegger’s distortions of and deviations from the actual conversation with Tezuka are relevant only if one assumes that a dialogue, in order to be a dialogue, is not always already appropriated as monologue, if it is not always already determined by an idea of dialogue. When Heidegger suggests that the

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Japanese word kotoba (language) could also mean Ding or thing, Tezuka writes, ‘‘There was perhaps an element here of forcing the word into a preconceived idea’’ (60). May’s insistence on the ‘‘actual conversation’’ suggests that there is an authentic way to appropriate the event. Perhaps he will have learned this from Heidegger. The difference between the encounter with Tezuka and the ‘‘Dialogue on Language’’ is fortuitous, however, for the meeting with Tezuka, during which Heidegger took written notes, nonetheless will have taken place in each other’s presence and will have been regulated by speech. It will have been a so-called direct conversation. Heidegger preferred speech to writing. Despite his insistence that ‘‘Saying . . . is not the name for human speaking’’ (On the Way to Language 47), he nevertheless accorded speech a privileged place in the saying of Being. The earlier ‘‘Letter on Humanism’’ (1946–47) suggested this privilege when, in response to Jean Beaufret, Heidegger remarked, ‘‘The questions raised in your letter would have been better answered in direct conversation’’ (Basic Writings 195). Furthermore, in a draft of the ‘‘recapitulation’’ concerning the forgetting or oblivion of Being not included in the Parmenides seminar (1942–43), Heidegger explained that to think primordially means to enter ‘‘into a confrontation and dialogue with the beginning in order to perceive the voice of the disposition and determination of the future’’ (Parmenides 166). Although this voice is not the voice of Dasein, much less that of the Cartesian subject, nevertheless, it is only heard in proximity to Dasein: ‘‘This voice is only heard where experience is. And experience is in essence the suffering in which the essential otherness of beings reveals itself in opposition to the tried and usual. The highest form of suffering is dying one’s death as a sacrifice for the preservation of the truth of Being. This sacrifice is the purest experience of the voice of Being. What if German humanity is that historical humanity that, like the Greek, is called upon to poetize and think, and what if this German humanity must first perceive the voice of Being?’’ (Parmenides 166–7). Perhaps Heidegger was right, in 1942–43, to redraft this recapitulation, and in doing so to elide the suggestion that sacrifice was the possibility for hearing the voice of Being and that German humanity was most efficaciously situated to hear this voice in the experience of death. It comes close to a call to be all you can be for Being and for the Reich. Setting aside the bizarre desire to link German humanity to total sacrifice at the height of World War II, the determination of the voice of Being in relation to the experience of German humanity makes evident Heidegger’s inability to think the saying of Being beyond the earshot of speech.8

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This is not to say that Heidegger had no respect for writing; on the contrary, he notes that written composition exercises a ‘‘wholesome pressure toward deliberate linguistic formulation’’ (Basic Writings 195). Writing nevertheless lacks speech’s flexibility, because it ‘‘consist[s] merely in an artificial, that is, technical-theoretical exactness of concepts’’ (195). The inflexibility and artificiality of writing help explain Heidegger’s reluctance to let his lecture on language appear in print. Heidegger tells Professor Tezuka that ‘‘several times in recent years’’ he has ‘‘ventured some provisional remarks’’ on the nature of language in a lecture entitled ‘‘Language’’ (On the Way 49), but when Tezuka reveals that he has read a transcript of the lecture, Heidegger claims that ‘‘Such transcripts, even if carefully made, remain dubious sources . . . and any transcript of that lecture is . . . a distortion of its saying’’ (49). Heidegger’s concern for distortion is not limited to the dissemination of his lecture on language; on the contrary, distortion preoccupies his thought from at least the publication of Being and Time (1927), most emphatically in the pages on the call of conscience. According to Heidegger, the condition of possibility of an authentic or proper relation to one’s own Dasein depends on the call of conscience. Only through the self-relation of conscience is Dasein capable of pulling itself back out from its entanglement in the They in order to be authentically. Nevertheless, Heidegger remarks, ‘‘The demand for an ‘inductive, empirical proof’ for the ‘factuality’ of conscience and for the legitimacy of its ‘voice’ is based on an ontological distortion of the phenomenon’’ of conscience (Being and Time 249, emphasis added). Initially and for the most part, Dasein is lost to itself in its entanglement in the They; the self of Dasein is the They-self that listens to the They, to its idle chatter, noise: ‘‘Losing itself in the publicness of the [T]hey and its idle talk, [Dasein] fails to hear its own self in listening to the [T]hey-self’’ (250). How is Dasein to come to itself? How is it to hear the call of conscience? Only by not listening to itself (qua They-self ) is Dasein able to hear itself: ‘‘This listening must be stopped, that is, the possibility of another kind of hearing that interrupts that listening must be given by Da-sein itself. The possibility of such a breach lies in being summoned immediately’’ (250, emphasis added). Heidegger here describes the interruption that makes possible a dialogue without interruption: The call of conscience summons Dasein to itself immediately, hence, necessarily without interruption, without mediation. This is an important but problematic claim, for although Dasein’s relation to time, to its finitude in its beingtoward-death, is Dasein’s most primordial ontological determination, the

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very possibility of relating to that possibility—which is nothing but temporality—depends, in Heidegger’s analysis, on the negation of time. Hence Heidegger claims that the call of conscience is constant (252), which means that the call is always present; and that it ‘‘does not need to search gropingly for someone to be summoned, nor does it need a sign showing whether it is he who is meant or not’’ (253, emphasis added). Only the call’s immediacy affords the possibility of such constancy and absolute arrival, without the mediating agency of a sign, to its addressee. It is worth noting that such constancy, which again is only possible insofar as immediacy is possible, defines the authenticity of the self: ‘‘The constancy of the self in the double sense of constancy and steadfastness is the authentic counterpossibility to the lack of constancy of irresolute falling prey’’ (296–97). Yet, as constant, the self has always already come back to itself, for, as Heidegger points out, ‘‘constancy of self means nothing other than anticipatory resoluteness’’ (297). According to Heidegger, however, resoluteness effectively disentangles the self from the They. Christopher Fynsk spells out the implications of such a gesture: ‘‘If Heidegger succeeds in revealing through his analysis of Mitsein one limit of metaphysical thought about the subject, he seems unwilling or unable to work at this limit in a sustained manner; his analysis of Dasein in Being and Time leads back insistently to the solitary self’’ (Heidegger: Thought and Historicity 28). Moreover, the immediacy of the call precludes the possibility that the call arrive distorted: ‘‘What the call discloses is nevertheless unequivocal’’ (Heidegger, Being and Time 253). On the one hand, Dasein is existentially equiprimordially determined in and as discourse, which means ‘‘discourse is constitutive for the existence of Da-sein’’ (151). Furthermore, the call of conscience is figured precisely as a call and as a voice. It goes without saying that in all its manifestations discourse is temporal. On the other hand, according to Heidegger, the call of conscience is immediate, constant, unequivocal, none of which is a possibility of discourse. Heidegger attempts to circumvent the necessary temporality—and thus mediation, inconstancy, and distortion—of discourse by arguing that the call of conscience is the opposite of the idle talk of the They, that it is, in fact, silent: ‘‘The call is lacking any kind of utterance. It does not even come to words, and yet it is not at all obscure and indefinite. Conscience speaks solely and constantly in the mode of silence’’ (252). Later, Heidegger writes: ‘‘Conscience only calls silently, that is, the call comes from the soundlessness of uncanniness and calls Da-sein thus summoned back to the stillness of itself, and calls it to become still’’ (273). The problem, however, is that ‘‘Hearing and keeping silent are possibilities belonging to discoursing

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speech’’ (151). Insofar as hearing and keeping silent are possibilities of speech, they are constitutively temporal, hence, always already open to the corruption of the They. Silence (Stille), in other words, is idle talk, chatter, noise. It is always possible, therefore, that silence—and thus the call of conscience—be distorted. The possibility of an immediate call of conscience, which were it possible would necessarily be constant and undistorted, is troubled in at least two ways by the same problem, namely, repetition. First, the immediacy of the call of conscience means that the call is absolutely private; as such, it must be an idiolect or private language. In the strictest sense, a private language is impossible: It is precisely that discourse to which only I can attest. Only I can hear it, only I can say that I heard it, for were others to say that they, too, shared or heard my private language—the voice of my friend as Heidegger called it (153)—by definition it would no longer be an idiolect. In point of fact, however, not even I can testify to the idiolect, for the very possibility of sharing the idiolect, of telling others not simply that I heard it, but what it said to me, already means that the idiolect is not private but, rather, that its iterability is constitutive of it as language. Telling others includes telling myself: In Heidegger’s account, I cannot even tell myself that I heard the call of conscience, for to tell myself that I heard the call necessarily includes the possibility of repeating the call, but to repeat the call, even if only to myself, to bear witness to the call, even in the ‘‘first’’ instance of my hearing it—means the call is necessarily and constitutively temporal, hence mediated. In sum, an idiolect or private language could only be such were no one capable of hearing it, not even I myself. This would mean the call had missed its mark. Second, the possibility of the constancy of the call, which is only possible on the basis of its immediacy, is problematized by Heidegger’s prior insistence on originary repetition. Fynsk explains, ‘‘Being-toward-death . . . is a repetition that brings Dasein into the very possibility of repetition’’ (Heidegger: Thought and Historicity 40). Such repetition comes up in Heidegger’s discussion of the disclosedness and the critique of truth as adequatio or the statement as innerworldly thing. Dasein is essentially disclosedness: ‘‘But to the disclosedness of Da-sein discourse essentially belongs’’ (Heidegger, Being and Time 205). Discourse is necessarily repeatable. Heidegger is aware of this: The repeatability of discourse, the statement, characterizes the ‘‘knowing’’ of the They. At the same time, however, the They believes itself to be, as Heidegger explains, ‘‘exempt from a primordial repetition of the act of discovering’’ (206). Such an exemption is the effect of the statement as an innerworldly thing at hand.

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But in fact Dasein is in many ways nothing more than the originary repetition of disclosure. Here’s the problem: Repetition is temporalization; there can be repetition only insofar as there is finitude. But finitude necessarily implies mediation, inconstancy, distortion. Yet, the call of conscience is immediate, constant, undistorted. For there to be the originary repetition necessary to the disclosedness of Dasein (and Dasein is nothing less than disclosedness), there must be an irreducible inconstancy or corruption at the heart of constancy. In short, the call must be repeatable, but as repeatable, it must be inconstant. In the mediation of its necessary immediacy is also inscribed the possibility—the necessity—of distortion. In ‘‘A Dialogue on Language,’’ therefore, the charge that transcription necessarily distorts the lecture must include Heidegger’s own transcription of the lecture—and not just the transcription he will have published in 1959, but also the ‘‘transcript’’ that allows for the presentation of the lecture in the first place. That a lecture called ‘‘Language’’ could be delivered on October 7, 1950, and then, as Heidegger says, could be ‘‘repeated’’ on February 14, 1951,9 depends, no less than does the call of conscience, on iterability. Derrida explains that ‘‘What I say for the first time, if it is a testimony, is already a repetition, at least a repeatability; it is already an iterability, more than once at once’’ (Blanchot and Derrida 41).10 Or, as Michael B. Naas remarks, ‘‘Transcripts, testimonies, and memories are thus always ambiguous, always fragmentary, not because representation is always imperfect, but because that which is represented is never singular, never fully present, never itself’’ (‘‘Rashomon’’ 76). Heidegger’s repetition of the ‘‘same’’ lecture at different times and in different places already adds up to the lecture’s transcription, which means that from the lecture’s first presentation, before it is transcribed or copied, it is already marked by the distortion and thus the violence of writing, which is, as we already know from reading Descartes, the constitutive possibility of thought. In That Is to Say: Heidegger’s Poetics Marc Froment-Meurice notes that Heidegger fails to consider the question of transcription when dealing with Ho¨lderlin’s poem ‘‘. . . Poetically Man Dwells’’ in Poetry, Language, Thought. Heidegger claims to have borrowed a line from the poem for the title of his lecture, but he does not say that the poem is only attributed to Ho¨lderlin and that it exists only in a transcription by another hand. FromentMeurice remarks that Heidegger elides the question of transcription in order to move unproblematically toward the problem of the poem’s meaning and, not unimportantly, toward its particular voice, which only Heidegger can hear (Froment-Meurice 81–82). Undoubtedly, the ineluctable introduction of transcription in Heidegger’s project endangers, from the outset, the question of the meaning of Being. The threat transcription

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poses to the self-presence of speech and the possibility of its undistorted saying of Being in and as dialogue, leads Heidegger’s Japanese interlocutor to object that not even Plato’s Dialogues would qualify as dialogue according to Heidegger’s standard. Heidegger demurs: ‘‘I would like to leave that question open’’ (Heidegger, On the Way 52). At stake in this exchange between the Inquirer and the Japanese, between West and East, is less the possibility of dialogue than the impossibility of knowing what is dialogue. At issue is the chance for an experience of Being, an experience that depends, according to the Japanese informant, ‘‘on reaching a corresponding saying of language’’ (52). The Inquirer responds: ‘‘Only a dialogue could be such a saying correspondence’’ (52). To which the Japanese adds, ‘‘But, patently, a dialogue altogether sui generis’’ (52). A dialogue sui generis, however, would be literally unrecognizable as dialogue, for it would be beyond comparison with anything heretofore represented as dialogue. The sui generis dialogue Heidegger invokes would be a dialogue uncontaminated, untouched, by transcription and, consequently, would be unrepeatable. Consequently, in its purity such dialogue would always already have disavowed the very temporality constitutive of the dia of logos. Pure dialogue could never be dialogue. The question of what is or appears to be dialogue should be passed through Heidegger’s brief discussion of phenomenology in the ‘‘Introduction’’ to Being and Time, which both the ‘‘Letter on Humanism’’ and ‘‘A Dialogue on Language’’ interpret. Phenomenology means, according to Heidegger, ‘‘to let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself’’ (Being and Time 30). And this means nothing less than the maxim, ‘‘to the things themselves!’’ (30). Phenomena show themselves from themselves without reference to any other. As such, or in themselves, phenomena are never mediated—interrupted—by signs, nor are they themselves signs. There are, however, other ways for phenomena to appear, one of which Heidegger calls, simply, ‘‘appearance’’: ‘‘Appearance, as the appearance ‘of something,’ thus precisely does not mean that something shows itself; rather, it means that something makes itself known that does not show itself. It makes itself known through something that does show itself’’ (25–26). ‘‘Accordingly,’’ Heidegger writes, ‘‘phenomena are never appearances, but every appearance is dependent upon phenomena’’ (26). Phenomenology thus takes as its object that which ‘‘shows itself only in a distorted way’’ (31). Heidegger’s decision to leave open the question whether or not Plato’s Dialogues constitute dialogues in the strictest sense—as the corresponding saying of language that makes possible the saying of Being—recalls the problem of distinguishing phenomena from

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appearances. Plato’s Dialogues, inasmuch as they already forget and thus conceal the question of Being (and do so ineluctably in their structure of reference), may already be distorted dialogues. Far from being dialogues as such, which is to say, as phenomena, Plato’s Dialogues perhaps only indicate the place of the impossible possibility of dialogue. It is evident that any dialogue that would remain ‘‘originarily,’’ as Heidegger says, ‘‘Appropriated to Saying’’ (On the Way 52), and would thus be undistorted, would also be unrecognizable as dialogue because such uniqueness or univocity—already a problem for dialogue—literally places it beyond citation. At the same time, it is no less apparent that whatever passes for dialogue does so only because it is distorted (i.e., iterable) and, consequently, not the dialogue attuned to the saying of Being. In question for Heidegger is the event (Ereignis) of dialogue and, moreover, what troubles the event, what for Heidegger distorts it, is also what makes it available to inquiry: namely, Dasein, which is, Derrida has written, ‘‘a repetition of the essence of man permitting a return to what is before the metaphysical concepts of humanitas’’ (Margins 127). As the possibility of the saying of Being, dialogue always takes place within the opening of Dasein and, whether Heidegger would agree or not, always runs the risk of being anthropologically determined. One implication of an essentially anthropologically determined Dasein would be the necessary possibility that the saying of Being will be culturally determined, thus irreducibly distorted. Indeed, ‘‘A Dialogue on Language’’ rehearses a scene all too familiar to anyone even minimally aware of the discourse of anthropology. From the distribution of subject positions (the European Inquirer and the culturally other informant, the Japanese) to the account of an encounter complete with festive dress, ‘‘A Dialogue on Language’’ marks out the limit of philosophy and anthropology. Heidegger’s investment in a certain anthropologism already conditions Being and Time, which privileges Dasein’s role in the attempt to think the relation of Being to beings on the ground that Dasein’s being is characterized by its inquiry into its own being: ‘‘In which being is the meaning of Being to be discerned? From which being is the disclosure of being to get its start? Is the starting point arbitrary, or does a certain being have priority in the elaboration of the question of Being? Which is the exemplary being and in what sense does it have priority?’’ (Being and Time 5). Heidegger answers (himself ): ‘‘Regarding, understanding and grasping, choosing, and gaining access to, are constitutive attitudes of inquiry and are thus themselves modes of being of a particular being, of the being we inquirers ourselves in each case are. Thus to work out the

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question of being means to make a being—one who questions— transparent in its being’’ (5–6). Or, as Derrida succinctly put it: ‘‘Dasein, though not man, is nevertheless nothing other than man’’ (Margins 127). Typical of anthropological discourse, ‘‘A Dialogue on Language’’ in large measure devotes itself to the problem of cultural translation. At the dialogue’s outset, in the context of a reference to the Japanese notion of iki and the possibility of its explanation and translation, Professor Tezuka asserts that European concepts are necessary, ‘‘because since the encounter with European thinking, there has come to light a certain incapacity in our language’’ (On the Way 2). The completion or perfection, the telos, of Japanese language—and by extension Japanese culture—comes in its relation to European thinking. Japanese is fulfilled in European thought. Here, obviously, Europe designates not an economic or cultural totality, even less a linguistic one, but the possibility of a certain transnational, transcultural universality. Europe would be the name of a principle of absolute translation. The Japanese thus attend to Europe in order to comprehend what they say and think in Japanese. This is the case according to Heidegger’s Japanese visitor. Heidegger questions such attention and wonders ‘‘whether it is necessary and rightful for Eastasians to chase after European conceptual systems’’ (3). He challenges the assumption of intercultural—if not interlingual—translation. Professor Tezuka is not so sure: ‘‘In the face of modern technicalization and industrialization of every continent, there would seem to be no escape any longer’’ (3) from Europe, from the translation of Europe and its conceptual systems all over the globe. But, under pressure, Tezuka admits that ‘‘The possibility still always remains that seen from the point of view of our Eastasian existence, the technical world which sweeps us along must confine itself to surface matters, and’’—as often happens in ‘‘A Dialogue on Language,’’ Heidegger interrupts the other himself in order to continue speaking without interruption—‘‘that for this reason a true encounter with European existence is still not taking place, in spite of all assimilation and intermixtures’’ (3). On the one hand, given the technicalization of the world, Japanese culture can only encounter itself in and through European conceptual systems. On the other hand, in spite of all the assimilation and intermixing, something Japanese remains just beyond Europe’s global reach. The effects of technicalization are superficial, touching only ‘‘the foreground world of Japan,’’ whereas ‘‘the background world . . . , or better, that world itself’’ remains Japanese. What is Japanese can be ‘‘experience[d] in the No play’’ (17), Tezuka argues, but not in Japanese cinema, for example.11 In

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his account of their conversation, Tezuka observed of Heidegger’s interest in Kurosawa’s Rashomon: ‘‘I felt that the kind of indefiniteness conveyed by this film concerning our knowledge of reality may have intrigued Heidegger as an East Asian phenomenon. It is another question, of course, whether one can regard this work as a pure exemplification of this East Asian characteristic’’ (‘‘An Hour’’ 62). The remainder of a Japanese essence beyond European conceptual domination, all the assimilation and intermixing notwithstanding, proves Heidegger’s point: No ‘‘true encounter’’ has taken place between Europe and Japan; as yet no translation or communication of essences has occurred. Such translation may well be impossible. The maximal effect of this impossibility is the reduction of the anthropological project, for anthropology depends on the possibility of intercultural translation and communication. Anthropology’s primal scene has always been the encounter with the other; yet, in the dialogue between Heidegger and Tezuka, such encounters, even admitting ‘‘successful’’ communication, nevertheless fail to touch upon what is essential to either of the cultures of the exchange, because ‘‘The language of the dialogue constantly destroyed the possibility of saying what the dialogue was about’’ (Heidegger, On the Way 5). Thus, ‘‘Assuming,’’ as Tezuka does, ‘‘that the languages of the two are not merely different but are other in nature, and radically so’’ (5), Heidegger concludes, ‘‘a dialogue from house to house remains nearly impossible’’ (5). Effectively, ‘‘A Dialogue on Language’’ asks the anthropological question: how to talk to the other in our or the other’s language in order to experience the other without distortion? Can we know the other, in our language or in the other’s, without contaminating the alterity of the other, that is to say, without (dis)missing the other altogether? The answers to these questions have broad import for current multicultural and postcolonial research, nearly all of which depends on the hope of intercultural understanding.12 Heidegger responds, however, that such a dialogue is nearly impossible. There is perhaps no half way between houses, no halfway house where anthropology (and perhaps philosophy as well) might be safe and saved. Heidegger was no fan of anthropology: He flatly dismissed it, for instance, in Being and Time,13 and continued to do so regularly in the years after. In Parmenides, for example, in the rejected draft of the recapitulation already cited, Heidegger noted, ‘‘ ‘Anthropology’ . . . is supplanting essential thought. Only when man becomes the subject do non-human beings become objects. Only within the domain of subjectivity can a dispute arise

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over objectivity, over its validity, its profit and loss, and over its advantages and disadvantages in any particular case’’ (Parmenides 165). Again, some years later, in ‘‘Hegel and the Greeks,’’ Heidegger claimed, ‘‘the disintegration of philosophy is becoming manifest; for philosophy is migrating into logistics, psychology, and sociology. These independent areas of research secure for themselves their increasing validity and influence at many levels as devices and instruments for the success of the politicaleconomic world, that is to say, in an essential sense, the technological world’’ (Pathmarks 323).14 Heidegger’s critique of technology is well known.15 Accordingly, insofar as anthropology (or, in what Heidegger calls its Anglo-American determination, ‘‘sociology’’) is thought within the horizon of the technological, Heidegger’s determination that intercultural translation is only nearly impossible amounts to a remarkable equivocation. The opening for this equivocation, however, will have been prepared in advance. At least twice. First, in Being and Time, pinched between two remarks on anthropology’s inadequacy for addressing the question of Dasein’s being, Heidegger explains: ‘‘To orient the analysis of Da-sein towards ‘the life of primitive peoples’ can have positive methodical significance in that ‘primitive phenomena’ are often less hidden and complicated by extensive self-interpretation on the part of the Da-sein in question. Primitive Da-sein often speaks out of a more primordial absorption of ‘phenomena’ (in the prephenomenological sense). The conceptuality which appears to be clumsy and crude to us can be of use positively for a genuine elaboration of the ontological structures of phenomena’’ (Being and Time 47). Not only does Heidegger admit that there are primitive peoples and that it may well be easier to see in them and in the phenomena around them the ‘‘possibility of noneveryday being’’ (47), because their lives are less complicated by self-interpretation, but also and more problematically he admits that there is primitive Dasein. Primitive peoples are coterminus with primitive Dasein. But what would primitive Dasein be? It would be that Dasein that does not get in the way of itself. Primitive Dasein does not complicate itself by self-interpretation, which means that primitive Dasein is the Dasein for which its own being is not a question. Consequently, primitive Dasein makes it possible for us—Dasein pure and simple—to see ourselves more clearly. ‘‘But up until now,’’ Heidegger complains, ‘‘our information about primitive peoples has been provided by ethnology’’ (47). Heidegger’s point is not that primitive peoples are primitive only to the extent ethnology determines them as such, but, rather, that the information we have of primitive peoples is determined by ethnology.16 What does this

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mean? Does it mean that primitive peoples would be better understood were their primitiveness conceived ontologically as an effect of their particular Dasein and therefore ethnology—anthropology, sociology, the human sciences more generally—would be better served to give up its observation of ontically determined cultural differences in order to interrogate ontologically their Dasein? At the moment Heidegger dismisses ethnology (or anthropology, sociology, psychology, the human sciences in general), he re-imports the value of the human sciences in that he maintains the ethnological distinction between primitives and ‘‘us.’’ In doing so he reproduces the most typical anthropological gesture, one repeated at least since Rousseau’s and Kant’s invocation of the timeless Caribbean savage as the figure of simplicity. Heidegger’s remarks are close to those of his contemporary, Margaret Mead, whose Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) is founded upon the same reduction of the other in relation to us. In the strictest sense, however, primitive Dasein is impossible, for Dasein can bear no modification: ‘‘Dasein is a being that does not simply occur among other beings. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its being’’ (Being and Time 10). In short, ‘‘Dasein is its disclosure’’ (125). Ontically, Dasein is that being that has a relation to its own being. Ontologically, Dasein is its disclosure. If this is the case, then the modification of Dasein qua primitive simply complicates matters, for there is neither an ontic nor an ontological difference between so-called primitive Dasein and unqualified Dasein. If Dasein is that being that is always before itself, always already thrown out in front of itself in a way that makes its being always its own question, then there is no primitive Dasein. Dasein is, by definition, always in its own way. Unless primitive Dasein is not thrown, as Heidegger would say, there can be no primitive Dasein. At the level of ontological analysis, then, there can be no value in considering primitive peoples, if there are any. Indeed, at the level of ontological analysis, it would be impossible to draw the line between primitive Dasein and Dasein.17 Second, in ‘‘A Dialogue on Language,’’ which took place some twentyfive years after the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger confesses to Professor Tezuka that on an earlier occasion, with Count Kuki, he had engaged in dialogues that were neither formal nor scholarly events, but that arose spontaneously at Heidegger’s house. Additionally, ‘‘Count Kuki occasionally brought his wife along who then wore festive Japanese garments. They made the Eastasian world more luminously present, and the danger of our dialogues became more clearly visible’’ (On the Way 4).

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There is no indication that Count Kuki’s wife had any role in the dialogues, but her dressed presence, indicated but not addressed, makes the Eastasian world—in all its otherness—luminously present. What does Heidegger see that escapes distortion? Does Heidegger suggest that in the Japanese woman’s presence, in festive attire but in his house, chez Heidegger, no translation takes place and yet somehow the essence of ‘‘Eastasia’’ is communicated, that he comes into contact with and experiences the alterity of what he calls Eastasian existence? Not exactly: In the juxtaposition of his spontaneous dialogue with Count Kuki and the presence of a foreign woman who remains different from what Heidegger knows, he experiences the danger of dialogue. The danger of dialogue is the distortion of dialogue, and this distortion is, as we already know, translation: ‘‘The languages of the dialogue shifted everything into European,’’ even though ‘‘the dialogues tried to say the essential nature of Eastasian art and poetry’’ (4). Even as he sites her, Heidegger has already forgotten, misplaced, in effect, un(ad)dressed, Count Kuki’s wife.18 In Heidegger’s house, in Germany, which no doubt imagines itself the very heart of Europe, the dress of a woman, her being-there (Da-sein) in a certain way, makes the East Asian world clearly present before, perhaps between, two men, two philosophers in search of and in spontaneous dialogue about the essence of the east. They are unable to comprehend her; they are unable to put their arms around her. All Heidegger admits to feeling in the presence of this woman is the danger—the risk, thus the experience, experiri—of dialogue that is dialogue. He seems to assent, if only by a calculated silence, to Tezuka’s remark that dialogue took place between Heidegger and Count Kuki and, moreover, that it must have been ex-citing (5). A me´nage a` trois thus opens the space for a dialogue between two men. It would be a mistake, however, to think that only Heidegger fails to get hold of the luminous presence that is properly East Asian existence; on the contrary, Count Kuki comes to Germany and to the scene of phenomenological inquiry in order to make possible the ordering of his own experience. Effectively, Count Kuki brings his wife to Heidegger in order that between the two of them she might be disciplined, that she might, finally, be ordered to stay in her own house.19 Why does Heidegger insist on the untranslatability between ‘‘houses’’ or radically different cultures, when, on the one hand, he suggests the possibility of such an other world being present to him in the figure of the exotic woman and, on the other hand, he figures translation as both the disabling and enabling technology of thinking? For Heidegger, translation

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marks both the forgetting of the question of Being and the only possibility of experiencing it anew. Metaphysics is born in the translation of the Greek hypokeimenon in the Latin subjectum: ‘‘The rootlessness of Western thought,’’ Heidegger asserts in ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’’ ‘‘begins with this translation’’ (Poetry, Language, Thought 23).20 The responsibility, not of philosophy, but of thinking rests in the re-translation of Greek from Latin, not back to Greek, but into a German that sustains an originary ‘‘Greek’’ experience. ‘‘Beneath the seemingly literal and thus faithful translation [of Greek to Latin],’’ Heidegger complains, ‘‘there is concealed, rather, a translation of Greek experience into a different way of thinking. Roman thought takes over the Greek words without a corresponding, equally authentic experience of what they say, without the Greek word’’ (23). The essays collected in Heidegger’s Early Greek Thinking, for example, take up pre-Socratic fragments in an effort to experience their saying in German translation, which requires Heidegger not to translate Greek into German, but to translate Greek experience in a way that it is experienced originarily as Greek in German. In the Introduction to Early Greek Thinking, David Farrell Krell notes Heidegger’s cautions about translation and implies that Heidegger has succeeded in attaining the essence of Greek thought in German when he remarks that even with ‘‘philological aides of all kinds’’ and ‘‘the unstinting help of learned friends there can be no guarantee that our [Krell et al.] translation thoughtfully brings to the English language what Heidegger contemplates on archaic Greek shores’’ (3). In other words, Greek thought is most appropriately experienced in a German translation that, while it translates Greek into itself, is nonetheless untranslatable.21 In his 1957 lecture ‘‘The Principle of Identity,’’ Heidegger explained, ‘‘The belonging together of man and Being in the manner of mutual challenge drives home to us with startling force that and how man is delivered over to the ownership of Being and Being is appropriate to the essence of man. Within the framework there prevails a strange ownership and a strange appropriation. We must experience simply this owning in which man and Being are delivered over to each other, that is, we must enter into what we call the event of appropriation [Ereignis]’’ (Identity and Difference 36). As a consequence, he notes, ‘‘The words event of appropriation [Das Wort Ereignis] . . . should now speak as a key term in the service of thinking. As such a key term, it can no more be translated than the Greek logos or the Chinese Tao’’ (36). Rodolophe Gasche´ explains that Ereignis ‘‘is a singular linguistic construction, possible only in German, hence untranslatable’’ (Inventions of Difference 5). Marc

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Froment-Meurice agrees, but pushes such untranslatability toward an intractable difficulty for the Heideggerian text: ‘‘But if a word is not translatable by another, it is no longer a word at all. A word, whatever it be, is what it is only in referring to . . . and this structure of referral excludes all propriety from the beginning’’ (That Is to Say 29). Ereignis, however, is not the only untranslatable term; according to Derrida, for Heidegger Geist has the same status: In the context of a reading of Heidegger’s ‘‘Rectorship Address,’’ Derrida observes that ‘‘Heidegger will say of Geist, without which it is impossible to think Evil, that in the first place it is neither pneuma nor spiritus, thus allowing us to conclude that Geist is no more heard in the Greece of the philosophers than in the Greece of the Gospels, to say nothing of Roman deafness: Geist is flame. And this could, apparently, be said, and thus thought, only in German’’ (Of Spirit 31–32).22 The truth of the West is Greece, but the truth of Greece is an originary Greek articulated in an untranslatable German that lets Greek be. Gasche´ notes, ‘‘the Heideggerian return cannot be a return to the Greek mother tongue (and to Greek thought), but to something before the Greek mother tongue, to something already at work in it, cracking it apart, and which it renders only imperfectly. It is a return to a mother tongue that has perhaps never taken place but that is, for Heidegger, the place we already occupy, still without knowing it’’ (‘‘Operator’’ 113). This ‘‘place’’ is German and it is before Greek, already operating in it, even though Heidegger names this place in what for him is an untranslatable Greek word, polis.23 The untranslatable translation of the origin is the secret of ‘‘culture,’’ of Greece as the name of an experience and subsequent forgetting of Being. This is not because Heidegger is nostalgic for Greek culture; on the contrary, Heidegger’s decision that a certain Greek experience is the experience of the possibility of the West hinges on his determination of German singularity, which is at the same time German universality. Greek, in order to be Greek, must be translatable and translated; German, however, which translates Greek into Greek and thus lets Greek be, cannot be translated. Finally, despite Heidegger’s cautions against comprehending East Asian existence within and through European conceptual systems, German maintains the same relation to East Asian experience that it does to Greek. According to Tezuka, in Ereignis echoes ‘‘the nature of language which our word koto ba names’’ (On the Way 53). In Ereignis, then, Japanese existence resounds, hears itself; but koto ba does not translate Ereignis. The dialogue spells out the scene of the approach of East Asian and European

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thinking, each in its own place, each within the horizon of its own conceptual system; yet, German determines the frame of the dialogue and not simply because the dialogue takes place in German. Even were the text translated into Japanese, German would regulate it. Indeed, even were the translation into Japanese capable of opening to Japanese readers an experience of language from within Japanese, German would still orient the experience. Ereignis allows the Japanese interlocutor to think—to hear the echo of—koto ba. Without translating itself per se, the untranslatable and singular German articulation makes possible Japanese thought and experience. At the center of what is Japanese thus resides—in abstentia—Ereignis. On the one hand, there is no translation: Ereignis does not translate koto ba. German and Japanese are neither accommodated nor economized. There is neither assimilation nor intermixing. On the other hand, there is only translation: What is Japanese only is in the translation that leaves everything in its own place. There is Japanese only if there is Ereignis before it and Ereignis can only be before what is Japanese if it is not (in) Japanese. The possibility of the essence of Japanese existence depends on the absent presence of Ereignis in Japanese. The origin of what is Japanese becomes possible in the opening of an impossible translation of that which cannot be said in Japanese, but which nonetheless opens the possibility of any Japanese experience. The origin of the East, accordingly, is very close to that of the West: They both take place in (and in relation to) an untranslatable German. German inhabits both East and West. It is the secret of civilization and of civilizations, both singular and plural. They are always multiples of one: ‘‘Language,’’ Heidegger writes, ‘‘speaks solely with itself alone’’ (On the Way 111). And it does so in German. The security of the singular and untranslatable German Ereignis effectively puts all others on reserve for us; they are ‘‘our’’ excess. The ex-citing dialogue between Count Kuki and Heidegger, which will have taken place in the opening, in the trait d’union, of an exotic me´nage a` trois, gives way to German masturbation: ‘‘We’’ don’t need any other and ‘‘we’’ don’t need them in the presence of the woman in the festive dress. Nameless, without voice, appearance without phenomenality, she indicates, thus cites, the site of the other, of the in order to that makes possible a certain ‘‘European’’ (world) order. This voicelessness, however, is not simply or only, perhaps not even at all, the voicelessness of the subaltern. Here it is not a question— anthropological through and through—of whether or not she can speak.

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Her being-without-voice suggests instead an oracular injunction to be beyond, outside, without, the voice that Heidegger calls the ‘‘voice of the friend’’ that we all carry within us (Being and Time 153).24 She indicates the site and the citation, the repetition, of spacing without the being-with of the voice of the friend, without proximity or presence—even to herself. Although in the ‘‘Letter on Humanism,’’ Heidegger warrants that ‘‘if man is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being he must first learn to exist in the nameless’’ (Basic Writings 199), Derrida correctly notes that Heideggerian hope is characterized by a dream for ‘‘the unique word’’ and ‘‘the finally proper name’’ (Margins 27). If we understand the untranslatability and, thus, the absolute singularity/universality of Ereignis as itself without relation to any other word or name and yet productive of the dissemination of every other word and name as translation-effects, we will have to say that Heidegger has found his unique word and, unsurprisingly, it is German. But he will have lost sight of the unaddressed, dressed woman within (the) cite of whom less Ereignis than something like Ereignis will have perhaps taken place and perhaps something other than it as well. What this other is, dialogue can only ever say, endlessly and in other words. There is no single word, no unique voice, for it.25 What Heidegger cannot think, finally, is the alterity that interdicts the absolutely singular— the once and for all—saying of Being—and that does so precisely as the trait d’union that suspends ‘‘itself’’ in relation.

Talking to Ourselves Will it surprise us to learn that anthropology—no less than philosophy—is an orgy of one and that it comes in the apparent absence of any other? Of course not. All of the gestures that mark Heidegger’s ‘‘A Dialogue on Language’’ also inform, for example, Marcel Griaule’s Dieu d’Eau: Entretiens avec Ogotemmeˆli (Conversations with Ogotemmeˆli), which was published in 1948, conveniently between the delivery of the ‘‘Letter on Humanism’’ and Professor Tezuka’s visit to Heidegger. At issue in Conversations, which becomes possible only after Griaule had been engaged in anthropological research in Africa for some fifteen years, is the possibility of obtaining what at least some African societies call, according to Germaine Dieterlen, ‘‘ ‘deep knowledge’ in contrast with ‘simple knowledge’ which is regarded as ‘only a beginning in the understanding of beliefs and customs’ that people who are not fully instructed in the cosmogony possess’’ (Conversations xiv–xv). Dieterlen attributes African reluctance to discuss the distinction

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between simple and deep knowledge, which is to say their reluctance to let Europeans in on the secret, ‘‘To a natural reserve before strangers’’ and ‘‘the present situation of rapid change in African societies through contact with mechanization and the influence of school teaching’’ (xv). As with ‘‘technicalization’’ in Heidegger, ‘‘mechanization and the influence of school teaching’’ denote European colonialism. ‘‘Deep knowledge’’ has the status of the Japanese No play: an essential otherness that Europeans (strangers) cannot know and that European (foreign) conceptual systems cannot grasp. ‘‘It was,’’ Dieterlen writes, ‘‘by no means easy for minds attached to occidental logic to penetrate systems of thought such as these’’ (xiii). ‘‘Two loose metaphoric structures govern Griaule’s conception of fieldwork,’’ James Clifford avers, ‘‘a documentary system (governed by images of collection, observation, and interrogation) and an initiatory complex (in which dialogical processes of education and exegesis come to the fore)’’ (Predicament 65). Conversations with Ogotemmeˆli marks the shift from the first metaphoric structure to the second: ‘‘Initially, in his ‘documentary’ phase, Griaule used the explications of informants as commentaries on observed behavior and collected artifacts; but this attitude would change, especially after Ogotemmeˆli’’ (72). After Ogotemmeˆli, Griaule no longer needs to observe behavior. He simply listens and reports. Or so it seems. According to V.Y. Mudimbe, Griaule’s complete reliance ‘‘on an atypical informant’’ and the organization of Dieu d’Eau ‘‘around the interwoven monologues’’ accounts for the initial skepticism about the book within anthropology: ‘‘The anthropological establishment decided that Griaule was lying. The conversations were a mystification: Dogons, as primitives, could not possibly conceive such a complex structuring of knowledge that, through myths and rites, unites, orders, and explains astronomical systems, correspondences of worlds, calendrical tables, classification of beings, and social transformations’’ (Invention of Africa 142). Thus, the ‘‘series of unforgettable conversations’’ in which Ogotemmeˆli ‘‘laid bare the framework of a world system, the knowledge of which,’’ Griaule argues, ‘‘will revolutionize all accepted ideas about the mentality of Africans and of primitive peoples in general’’ (Dieu d’Eau 9; Conversations 2), fell on deaf ears. Despite his understanding of the importance of Dieu d’Eau, Griaule anticipated its rejection by the anthropological establishment. He concludes his preface by stating his desire ‘‘to attain two objects’’ (10; 3). First, he seeks to open the anthropological community to others: ‘‘to present to a non-specialist public, and without the usual scientific apparatus, a work

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that would customarily be addressed only to experts’’ (10; 3).26 Conversations with Ogotemmeˆli thus imagines the largest possible audience for itself, one calculated to be interested in what the other, the ‘‘primitive’’ or ‘‘savage,’’ might say. And what does the other say? He says, ‘‘Come.’’ Griaule apparently does not pursue Ogotemmeˆli; rather, Ogotemmeˆli, who ‘‘had quickly appreciated the interest attaching to the ethnological work of the Europeans,’’ ‘‘had been waiting fifteen years for an opportunity to impart [re´ve´ler] his knowledge to them’’ (8; 2). Second, Conversations with Ogotemmeˆli is meant ‘‘to pay a tribute to the first African [Noir] in French West Africa who has revealed [re´ve´le´] to the European world [monde Blanc] a cosmogony as rich as that of Hesiod, poet of a dead world, and a metaphysic that has the advantage of being expressed in a thousand rites and actions in the life of a multitude of living people’’ (10; 3). Griaule banks on Europe’s interest in an African who, on the one hand, recognizes the importance of European anthropological method and, on the other hand, can reveal to Europe a cosmogony as rich as Europe’s own, as rich as the cosmogony that heralds the foundation of the west. Ogotemmeˆli is not just any African: He is ‘‘endowed with exceptional intelligence’’ (8; 2), one sign of which may well be his keen interest in the work of the European anthropologist and his desire to pass on his knowledge to Griaule rather than to another African. ‘‘Ogotemmeˆli wished to pass on to the foreigner, who had first visited the country fifteen years before, and whom he trusted, the instruction that he himself had received from his grandfather and later from his father’’ (20; 13). Griaule writes himself into this genealogy, this legacy: He locates himself as Ogotemmeˆli’s heir. Further, Ogotemmeˆli—or rather his ‘‘thick lips’’—‘‘spoke the purest Sanga language [Les le`vres epaisses parlaient la plus pure langue de Sanga]’’ (19; 12).27 Ogotemmeˆli, then, is an exemplary Dogon, and as such he is both the most and the least typical Dogon: Inasmuch as he speaks the best and purest Sanga, a language Griaule could not understand (Clifford, Predicament 58), he best exemplifies the Dogon, but as the most exemplary Dogon, he is at the same time the worst example of the Dogon.28 As the speaker of the purest Sanga, Ogotemmeˆli would also be the most cultivated or the most cultured: ‘‘Wherever cultivation spread, impurity receded’’ (Dieu d’Eau 56; Conversations 44). The purity of Ogotemmeˆli’s speech is matched in Conversations with Ogotemmeˆli by the purity of Griaule’s desire: Specifically, Griaule has no interest in adding anything to the conversation. All that matters is what the other, the Dogon, says. For example:

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‘In short,’ said the European, ‘it is a case of human and celestial natures indissolubly linked.’ But the European was never greatly interested in his own speculations. (73; 59) He felt also that the ideas and images [representations] revolving in the mind of his remarkable [prestigieux] informant were all that mattered, and that neither his own ideas nor the speculations of Western students were of any interest. (122; 99)

The desire to hear the most Dogon, nevertheless does not silence Griaule’s particular musings, his questions and speculations. At this point an odd reflection occurred to the European. (82; 67) But the stranger was burning to ask a question. (138; 112) These orations, which sometimes led up to matters of importance, were interrupted by a single question on the part of the European. (243; 204)

It is difficult to sit and listen without interrupting—in order to determine the end (telos) of the conversation. Griaule’s impatience becomes legible when he remarks that ‘‘time pressed; it was necessary to follow the main line of the Ogotemmeˆlian philosophy’’ (194; 163). Who was pressed for time? Who decides the main lines of Ogotemmeˆlian philosophy? At times, clearly, Ogotemmeˆli decides: Often Griaule notes that his questions went unacknowledged. Nevertheless, it is clear Griaule dictates the parameters not only of the conversation, but of Ogotemmeˆlian philosophy as well. Everything depends on the question. On the twenty-fifth day, in the chapter devoted to ‘‘Personal Altars,’’ Griaule asks, simply enough, who comes to drink the blood ‘‘offered on altars of the head or the body?’’ (196; 165). He then comments: ‘‘This question, which seemed harmless enough, had been the most difficult question to frame in the whole of his ethnological career [dans toute la carrie` ethnographique de l’Europe´en]. For it is necessary to consider carefully the form of a question if it is to yield the information desired. It was in fact such a simple question that no one had ever thought of asking it’’ (196; 165). For Griaule, the question functions as a litmus test. He writes: ‘‘The first time he [l’etranger] had asked the question, it had simply put his informant to flight. . . . Later it had been more successful, and the investigator [again, Griaule himself] was able to fling it like a firebrand into the jumble of reticences, falsehoods, and concealments presented to him by his informants. This question produced only two responses: flight or the truth’’ (196–97; 165).29

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The apparently harmless and simple question is also the most difficult for the anthropologist to form: How to phrase the question in order to obtain the desired knowledge? The question allows the other to say what we desire to know. The best question, the simplest and most difficult to form, yields one of two possible responses: flight or the truth. Flight, of course, signals only an unwillingness to respond to and thus to correspond with the European. Flight is only a refusal to say anything at all. But for Griaule, flight indicates that the informant is not a willing instructor, not one who knows the value of ethnology, and, thus, not one who speaks the purest Sanga, certainly not one who speaks the purest Sanga in the presence of the European. The truth, undoubtedly, is what one says in the presence of the European. The truth does not flee before the European, but is spoken in response to him. The truth corresponds with and to the European. Ogotemmeˆli does not flee. On the contrary, ‘‘to the willing instructor of the European [d’un Blanc], the question was a perfectly natural one’’ (197; 165). What is the truth that so interests Griaule and that Ogotemmeˆli will have decided to pass on to a European, a stranger, a white man, a Christian, instead of to one of his ‘‘own’’? On the sixteenth day, in the conversation concerning ‘‘Paintings on the Fac¸ade of the Sanctuary,’’ Griaule wonders ‘‘why the different objects in the sanctuary . . . were so scattered that it was impossible to understand their meaning [qu’il e´tait impossible d’en lire le sens]’’ (105). ‘‘ ‘The objects are scattered,’ replied Ogotemmeˆli, ‘in order to conceal their symbolism from those who would like to understand them’ ’’ (129–30; 105). The representations appeared to be ‘‘disconnected scraps of irrelevant information’’ (175).30 The truth of Dogon culture, according to the one who is most capable of saying what Dogon culture is, is secret; it is the secret as the principle of culture. Ogotemmeˆli says that the objects are scattered in order to conceal their symbolism from those who would understand them. These others, Griaule notes, are the uninitiated: ‘‘In short for the uninitiated [les profanes], the interior and the whole structure of the building and its accessories constituted a riddle without an answer [un re´bus inextricable]’’ (130; 105). Who are the uninitiated? Everyone except Ogotemmeˆli: ‘‘But the rule governing the arrangement was known to Ogotemmeˆli’’ (130; 105). As for everyone else, Griaule remarks: ‘‘Owing to the ignorance or inadequate instruction of these people, and for other reasons as well, fancy appears to reign unchecked in the choice of subjects, objects and figures represented’’ (130; 105). Griaule neither steps back from his assessment of their ignorance, nor clarifies the other reasons. It is a problematic assertion, for those who do not know the

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rule draw the figures on the fac¸ades. Consequently, on Griaule’s account, the experience of the rule, if there is one, happens in the way the experience of dialogue happens: without their knowing it. This moment has especial import for how we read the effects of Conversations with Ogotemmeˆli and, indeed, the entirety of dialogical anthropology: Dogon culture is deeply complex and sophisticated, but the Dogon, which is to say the typical Dogon, do not know it. It takes an Ogotemmeˆli (of which there is only one: the purest, the most Dogon, the exemplary Dogon) to say what is Dogon. The rest never notice. Not only do they not notice, but the rule of Dogon culture is such that Dogon culture hides from the Dogon. The principle of Dogon culture is that the Dogon will not understand, will not even see, Dogon culture. For all its sophistication, Dogon culture appears to be no culture at all; it appears meaningless, scattered, without order or rule. Before the seamless opacity of the fac¸ade’s confusion Griaule ‘‘felt himself humiliated’’: ‘‘He was confronted with identifications which no European [Blanc], that is, no average rational European [un bon Blanc moyen raissonant], could admit’’ (133; 107), such as the complementarity of fire and water. Identifications without identity trouble Griaule, yet the fac¸ade—qua meaningless—fails to provide ‘‘any chink or crack through which to apprehend its [Dogon cosmogony’s] meaning’’ (133; 107). Dogon culture hides from the ‘‘typical’’ Dogon, those who do not value European research, and from the average rational European as well. And what is Griaule if not an average rational European, that is, a white European? On the seventeenth day, when the conversation of the previous day continues, Ogotemmeˆli, who is blind, tells Griaule: ‘‘Temples are no longer painted according to the rules [Il n’y a plus de temple peint selon la re`gle]’’ (138; 112). What rules? They were never apparent. Or, perhaps, Ogotemmeˆli refers to the rule or rules governing the confusion of the appearance and thus the rule of the occultation of Dogon culture. In ignoring the rules, the Dogon represent Dogon culture and thus break the rule of Dogon culture. And in breaking this rule, which only Ogotemmeˆli knows, Dogon culture—perhaps in becoming apparent to everyone else—is obscured, hence lost, for Ogotemmeˆli. Were he able to see, and he wishes he were, he would nonetheless remain blind to the representation of Dogon culture. Ignorance accounts at least in part for the apparent failure to follow the rules: ‘‘The priest and his sacrificer may be quite young, and may have had very little instruction in the rites of their own religion. There are many

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who are completely ignorant concerning the symbolism of the painting’’ (138; 112). Although the priests are the initiated, they remain ignorant and incapable of instructing the uninitiated in the proper method of painting the temples. This is one problem. Another is willful disregard for the rules: ‘‘But there are some priests, he added, who, even if they knew the rules, would not follow them’’ (138; 112). Ogotemmeˆli explains this cultural deviation by saying that the pictures on the temple fac¸ade have power ‘‘and the more complete they are, the more powerfully they affect the grain crops’’ (138; 112). Consequently, ‘‘the priest has an interest in not showing too much of them, lest they should be copied by neighboring priests on the watch for anything that could influence or charm celestial powers’’ (138; 112). The decision not to follow the rules, then, is political: There is a competition among priests for celestial and thus for earthly influence. Of course, the priests should know the rules for painting the temple fac¸ades; that a priest would not follow the rules should, in fact, impair his ability to influence celestial powers. But Ogotemmeˆli argues that a priest attempting to distract or mislead the gaze of another, imitative, priest ‘‘makes his temple fac¸ade a sort of riddle for the benefit of the uninitiated, who recognize certain details. As for his fellow priests, they only perceive the usual designs’’ (138–39; 112, emphasis added). Initiation bestows the blindness of sight: The priests see only ‘‘the usual designs’’; they see the same over and over again. The uninitiated, blind to the secret of culture, nonetheless see the difference; they see differences everywhere. What does Griaule see? Where is he located, among the initiated or the uninitiated? In his assertions of Dogon opacity and his inability to find a chink or crack in the fac¸ade of Dogon culture, he would appear to be uninitiated, left out: the European—the Foreigner, the Nazarene, the White man—lost in Africa. In being the chosen, however, the one to whom Ogotemmeˆli leaves his extraordinary endowment of knowledge and his pure speech, he would appear to be the initiated, the disciple. Perhaps he is neither and both: Like the priests, he sees only the usual designs, the same; like the uninitiated, he sees a difference worth copying. The penultimate day, the thirty-second, ties everything up. The last day is all farewell. The zodiac has occurred to Griaule; it has come to him as a surprise: ‘‘The ram with the calabash-sun on its head, alternating with a bull similarly equipped, had first excited his curiosity. Rams with spheres on their heads carved on the rocks of North Africa had caused much ink to flow; some said they came from Egypt, others said it was the other way round’’ (249; 209). Whence do the Dogon come? Are they the sons or the

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fathers of Egypt? Griaule writes: ‘‘The story of the scorpion, the result of excision, perplexed him: it was quite out of the ordinary. Twins! Ram! Bull! Scorpion! He thought of the Zodiac’’ (249; 209). Although Griaule more than once claims that only Ogotemmeˆli’s ideas were of interest, at this moment he notes that the idea of the Zodiac occurred to him first: ‘‘Mais il garda cette ide´e a` part lui’’ (249; 209). Thus, Griaule is here at the limit of initiation: both a part of and apart from Dogon culture, seeing both the differences (the extraordinary) and the same (the Zodiac), except that seeing the same he loses sight of Africa forever. At first Griaule is not sure of the relation: ‘‘Had the Africans their own coherent explanation of the symbol of the Zodiac, whereas the Mediterranean peoples had only the most childish notions about it? (250; 210). But only pages later, he explains, ‘‘Enlightened by these last recapitulations, the European turned his attention to the various images and institutions that provided a key to the Mediterranean system of the Zodiac’’ (254; 213, emphasis added). Finally, ‘‘it would seem, therefore, that the Zodiac of the Mediterranean peoples could be explained from the point of view of Dogon cosmology and metaphysic’’ (258; 215). What is the function of African or Dogon metaphysics in these passages on the Zodiac? Neither more nor less than to explain a Mediterranean system of knowledge or belief. Indeed, a Mediterranean man goes to Africa to have an explanation ‘‘emerge naturally, of itself, from the conversations on the threshold where the master sat,’’ which an ‘‘average, rational European’’ will have forgotten. Africa is nothing more than the full flowering of Mediterranean childhood, of Mediterranean instinct or nonrational understanding. Germaine Dieterlen claims that Griaule applied his ethnographical method ‘‘instinctively from the beginning’’ (xiii). What’s the difference between Mediterranean and African cultures? Nothing more and nothing less than reason. We, Europeans, cannot explain to ourselves the zodiac because we have left our childhood behind. Griaule says we have a childish understanding of it. That would be the case because it remains, in Europe, undeveloped by our reason. It is a hallmark of Nazarenes, Christians, that when they become men they put away childish things.31 The most Dogon, in sum, is the purest expression of the European’s inner-child. The value of Africa lies in the fact that it puts us in touch with ourselves. If Greece is the origin of the West, we get to know that origin in an irrational way in Africa. The upshot of Conversations with Ogotemmeˆli, then, is not that ‘‘we’’ are Africans; far from it. Africans are us—without reason. Or, rather, African

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reason, African philosophy, is incommensurate to European reason; it corresponds to European instinct, to our childishness. Africa is what Europe will have put away. In doing so, in remarking the return to itself of Mediterranean culture through the Dogon, Griaule rehearses, some forty years before him, the thesis of Carl Sagan. In The Invention of Africa, Mudimbe quotes Sagan’s attempt to explain Dogon astronomical knowledge: ‘‘I picture a Gaelic visitor to the Dogon people . . . He may have been a diplomat, an explorer, an adventurer or an early anthropologist’’ (14; from Sagan, Broca’s Brain 88). For Mudimbe, ‘‘Sagan’s hypothesis belongs to nineteenth-century reasoning about ‘primitives’ ’’ (15); it reveals what Mudimbe calls ‘‘epistemological ethnocentrism; namely, the belief that scientifically there is nothing to be learned from ‘them’ unless it is already ‘ours’ or comes from ‘us’ ’’ (15). Griaule, too, fits this description. This circularity is also a sign of Europe’s and Europeans’ madness. In dialogue with another, the European speaks only with himself. And in speaking with himself, the other answers. Europeans hear only their own voice and it is always the voice of another. Which European? Both Ogotemmeˆli and Griaule. ‘But why,’ the European insisted, ‘was the seventh ancestor killed?’ There was no reply. ‘The seventh Nummo,’ went on Ogotemmeˆli as though talking to himself[.] (Dieu d’Eau 42; Conversations 58)

Then, later: ‘Man,’ said the European to himself, in an effort to sort out his ideas. . . . Ogotemmeˆli pondered. . . . ‘When the eight ancestors,’ he said at last. . . . (153; 126–27)

These are dialogical scenes in which neither Ogotemmeˆli nor Griaule talks to the other; yet, the other responds. In both cases the other interrupts, responds, corresponds in and to what is a monologue. Such correspondence—which is also a noncorrespondence of one to oneself in that one addresses oneself and yet never responds but is interrupted by another who is the same—no doubt owes itself to the more fundamental identification that governs Griaule’s text. Europe and Africa are related. Twins of sorts, identical twins separated by European reason, they are always on the same page; they complete each other’s thoughts and sentences. This is madness, a remarkable solecism at the dark center of which lies Africa. Africa names the vanishing limit between two Europes: the childish, unself-conscious Europe and the already enlightened Europe that dismisses Africa as not a part of the world-historical development of spirit.

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Griaule is too close to Hegel: ‘‘Africa proper, as far as History goes back, has remained—for all purposes of connection with the rest of the World— shut up; it is the Gold-land compressed within itself—the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night’’ (Hegel, Philosophy of History 91). Africa comes between—without interrupting—Ogotemmeˆli and Griaule. Perhaps Africa’s name is Koguem, Griaule’s all-but-forgotten African assistant who appears not even to overhear their conversations despite his ‘‘presence.’’32 Griaule mentions him no fewer than eleven times and it is clear that he functions as a kind of mediator, haunting, like a ghost character, the edges—the center—of the conversation. In all likelihood he is Griaule’s translator. Only once, however, does Griaule come close to suggesting as much and only once does he in fact locate Koguem between himself and Ogotemmeˆli. On the fifth day, in the discussion of the granary and its function in Dogon beliefs, Griaule decides, ‘‘that he ought to see one of these constructions’’ and he whispers as much to Koguem, who then ‘‘put the point to the old man’’ (47; 37). Here Koguem comes between Ogotemmeˆli and Griaule without making a difference between them. Typically, however, Griaule uses Koguem in another way. For example, on the twenty-fourth day, Griaule cites Koguem as saying, ‘‘ ‘The uncircumcised . . . think of nothing but disorder and nuisance’ ’’ (184; 155). Griaule comments: ‘‘The thing is quite simple for him, but for Ogotemmeˆli the state of childhood was more complex’’ (184; 155, emphasis added). This is the case because Ogotemmeˆli is talking about ‘‘our’’ childhood. Perhaps it is enough to say that in Griaule’s Conversations with Ogotemmeˆli Koguem makes possible a dialogue that he neither participates in nor understands. Europe is too complex for Africa, but Europe cannot talk to itself outside the vanishing presence of this Africa and this African. It would not know what to say to itself. Africa enables Europe’s speaking to itself; it effects a de-rationalization that allows Europe to explain itself to itself. And speech, the purest speech, no doubt uncontaminated by writing, is the countersign of European reason: ‘‘He felt strongly that the only people who could understand it, the only men who could explain themselves, were precisely those who did not know how to write’’ (157; 130–31).

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chapter 4

An Other Voice Scott Michaelsen I’m Nobody! Who are you Are you–Nobody–Too? —Emily Dickinson

‘‘The crucial feature of human life is its fundamentally dialogical character,’’ writes Charles Taylor, in a celebrated text in defense of an anthropologically grounded multiculturalism founded upon interlocking participant observations, or what he calls an ‘‘intensely studied’’ version of ‘‘comparative cultural study’’ (‘‘The Politics of Recognition’’ 32, 70, 73). Only long, ongoing anthropological dialogue, it seems, can open up possibilities for a ‘‘politics of difference’’ that will prevent the ‘‘cram[ming]’’ of ‘‘others into our categories’’ and will, at the same time, ‘‘displace our horizons in the resulting fusions’’ (71, 73). Dialogue, then, will accomplish two tasks: It will both preserve difference and ‘‘displace’’ it in a ‘‘fusion’’ that permits judgment of difference so that we can see clearly cultural entities that ‘‘deserve . . . our admiration and respect’’ and yet other entities that we will necessarily ‘‘abhor and reject’’ (72–73). Taylor’s text presents severe problems for any politics of difference, beyond doubt, through its emphasis on fusion, which Werner Hamacher among others has judged a ‘‘monocultural’’ telos.1 But the beginning presuppositions of Taylor’s analysis—his interest in the ‘‘dialogical character’’ of life in general—bears some examining, in order to ascertain precisely how Taylor founds the possibility of dialogue. There are actually two sorts of dialogue that ground Taylor’s remarks on human life: ‘‘First, in the

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intimate sphere, where we understand the formation of identity and the self as taking place in a continuing dialogue and struggle with significant others. And then in the public sphere’’ (Taylor 37). While ‘‘our identity [is] always in dialogue,’’ according to Taylor, these two dialogues have very different characters (33). In the first, in the ‘‘intimate sphere,’’ Taylor follows George Herbert Mead in writing that the dialogue takes place among ‘‘significant others,’’ including ‘‘our parents’’ and in general ‘‘those whose love and care shaped us early in life’’ (32, 36). This dialogue determines our identity in a community of those more fundamentally like ourselves—our kin, our friends—rather than unlike, even if the achievement remains a ‘‘struggle.’’ In other words, the first dialogue of life takes place in a space of relative sameness, and it is here that one’s identity is determined. The second dialogue takes place both later and elsewhere—in ‘‘public’’—and involves the encounter of these different, kin-based, community-shaped identities. Here, Taylor asserts, identities now enter a plane ‘‘unshaped by a predefined social script,’’ and the future of these until now relatively secure identities comes into question as culture meets culture (36). But the very fact that, in Taylor’s text, first published in 1992 or precisely five hundred years after the Columbian encounter, we are only at the start of a project of meeting the other and comprehending the other in the Americas is at least reason for pause. We are to embark, says Taylor, on ‘‘intensive study’’ starting today, and in order to do so we must put aside a long history of ‘‘invoking our standards to judge all civilizations and cultures’’ (71). Taylor here is a figure not unlike Bronislaw Malinowski, inaugurating a theory of fieldwork in the 1910s. But it is not now, at the beginning of a new millennium, time for a serious and rigorous anthropology to finally emerge. Rather, it has always been too late for such an approach—too late to conceptualize ourselves as closed to others in the first place, and finally willing to encounter them in the second. There are many ‘‘ur-scenes’’ of dialogue and translation in the Americas, and any one might do to make this fundamental point. In the final chapter of Father Joseph Franc¸ois Lafitau’s monumental, eleven-hundredpage Customs of the American Indians Compared With the Customs of Primitive Times (1724)—a chapter entitled ‘‘Language’’2—Lafitau worries specifically about the problem of dialogue and its relation to the problem of translation, worries about dialogue and translation with reference to two earlier texts: Father Biards’s ‘‘Relation’’ of 16163 and Baron de Lahontan’s Noueaux voyages de M. le Baron de Lahontan deans l’Ame´rique septentrionale

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(1703). Lafitau cites Father Biard at length concerning the scene of translation between ‘‘French’’ and ‘‘savage,’’ and it is worth taking the time to read Biard through Lafitau to comprehend the duration of Biard’s and the other Jesuits’ difficulties: The Jesuits, seeing that the language was absolutely necessary for conversion of the Indians resolved to set themselves to learning it with all diligence but one could not believe the great difficulties which they met in it, by the fact principally that they had no interpreters, or teachers. Mister de Biencouurt and some others knew about it, enough for barter and for common affairs. But when it was a question of talking of God and of religious matters there was the great jump, there was the headland ‘‘No’’.4 Therefore, they were constrained to learn the language by inquiring of the Indians the names for each thing and the task was less painful when the word sought could be touched and shown to the eye, a stone, a river, a house, to strike, to jump, to laugh, to sit down; but for the inner and spiritual actions which cannot be down to the senses, the words which are called abstract and universal, such as to believe, to doubt, to hope, to talk,5 to fear,6 a being,7 a body, a substance, a spirit, vice, virtue, sin, right,8 justice, etc, for, these it was necessary to pant and sweat the missionaries suffered childbirth pains.9 Since they did not know where to take hold10 they made more than a hundred attempts, there was no gesture which expressed their conception sufficiently clearly, and thus they used more than a thousand.11 Our gentlemen, the Indians, however, amused themselves, made great fun of them, always jests12 and, in order that the moquery [mockery] should be still more profitable, if you had your pen and paper to write, it was necessary that they should have their plates filled, and the napkins under them, for the good oracles only come at such a tripod. Enough of that; both Apollo and Mercury failed them,13 then they grew angry and went away, if one wished to retain them a little longer. (qtd. in Lafitau 2:264–5)

Lafitau, in citing Biard, intervenes in a debate of some consequence for the colonial era’s determination of the Amerindian other, and of increasing consequence today; the particular question concerns Lahontan’s ‘‘Dialogues avec un sauvage,’’ the long conclusion to (indeed, the entire third volume of ) his Voyages, which purports to be a philosophical conversation about European/Indian difference between Lahontan and ‘‘the great Leader Adario, whom the French call the Rat’’ (Lahontan 1:149). Lafitau zeroes in on Lahontan: I have quoted at full length the Father’s words to make more intelligible the admirable assurance of Baron La Hontan who, having given us, at the

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conclusion of his memoirs, a Huron dictionary composed of fifty words the greater part of which are mangled, does not hesitate a moment in supposing a great, lengthy dialogue between himself and a Huron on the subject of religion. I doubt that, even after a thirty years’ stay among the Huron, he would have been capable of answering his Indian even had it been true that the Indian was capable of the reasonings which he has him utter which are certainly his own. (2:265)

Lahontan’s Voyages, which had been translated immediately in 1703 into English, and which, in the French, long enjoyed prestige among armchair anthropologists such as Montesquieu, proves a curious target for Lafitau.14 Lafitau makes clear that he is not disputing the truth of the ‘‘Dialogues’’ in order to diminute the Amerindian savage. He goes on, for example, to dispute Father le Jeune’s degree-zero understanding of the (lack of ) sophistication and complexity of Amerindian language: ‘‘This poverty of terms is not nearly so great as this Father says’’ (Lafitau 2:266). Rather, Lafitau wants to assert something about ‘‘the construction of the Indian languages which is very different from that of the European ones’’ (2:266). At this moment in his text, then, Lafitau proposes an extreme AmerIndian alterity, deposited in language, which might be impossible to overcome or bridge through a lifetime of sustained translation: ‘‘Huron and Iroquois have properly only verbs which form their base so that everything is conjugated and nothing is declined’’ (2:268). Lafitau’s text abstains from a demonstration of the ‘‘difficult and thorny’’ problems of Indian translation: ‘‘I cannot treat the subject at length without overwhelming the reader,’’ he concludes. There are commonalities among all world languages, Lafitau asserts (2:267), including the goal ‘‘of all language which consists in such a communication of our thoughts that there is nothing on which we cannot speak and reason’’ (2:268), but this agglomerating ability of language apparently reaches its limit—or at least faces its greatest challenge—at the threshold of another language. Lafitau’s rejection of Lahontan (and ‘‘Adario’’) therefore positions itself against Lahontan’s ease of translation, against Lahontan’s indifference toward ‘‘difficult and thorny’’ difference. Among modern commentators, Tzvetan Todorov sides with Lafitau: ‘‘In [the ‘‘Dialogues’’] we discover not, to be sure, a portrait of others, but a summary of the themes and motifs that are customarily associated with the image of the noble savage’’ (273).15 Adario, then, is merely a stereotype: a rather interesting one, perhaps, positioned as the critic of the West’s generalized corruption, but an auto-critique of Europe rather than another way of thinking.16

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At least one recent commentator, however, has read Lahontan as instead offering an entirely valid portrait of AmerIndian personhood. Georges Sioui suggests the ‘‘fundamental authenticity’’ of Lahontan’s Adario, and accepts Adario’s remarks about everything from government to medicine to religion as crucial and trenchant anthropology (For an Amerindian Autohistory 62): Lahontan’s and Adario’s analysis carried them much beyond a simple trial of the two civilizations: using their knowledge of European society and their discoveries about American society, they produced a new treatise on human nature. Henceforth, it would be impossible to talk about humans as beings who possessed a uniform and universal vision and destiny. The Amerindian Adario and his interpreter, Lahontan, changed the meaning of all the big words: religion, society, man, woman, nature . . . . (67–68)

Rather than decide the question between Lafitau and Lahontan, or between Todorov and Sioui17—because the decision would amount to nothing other than the rejection of fantasy or myth (whoever’s) in the name of games of ‘‘truth’’—one might wonder whether Lafitau and Sioui can be brought together at a certain point; one might wonder whether the risk of their convergence might reveal the limit of their shared ‘‘truth.’’ In order to accomplish this, however, one will need to read Lafitau/Biard’s text against itself: One will need to emphasize both the agony of translation and its endless happening from the moment of contact. Here, one will have to emphasize Lafitau/Biard’s rendering of the Jesuits’ fundamental seriousness of purpose and the Indians’ pranksterism (Lafitau/Biard already comprehends something coherent regarding Amerindian identity, before ‘full’ translation, for example, as well as the immediate and already shared vocabulary of trade and ‘‘common affairs’’). In this sense, Amerindians from the start are fully translated, fully anthropologized. Certainly, at the moment that Father Biard imagines the possibility of translation, after years and even decades of labor, something else has long since taken place. Endless translation, from the beginning, has crossed out the possibility of alterity, leaving only the intersubjective play of similitudes and differences (e.g., their language is totally unlike ours, and their language is very much like ours). From ‘‘here,’’ one must at least acknowledge the possibility of a figure such as Adario, one hundred years after contact, and who claims travel among the French, and who already has been translated by contact. Indeed, Sioui apparently is such a figure in our own moment: a colonial historian asserting his own AmerIndian and who completely recognizes Adario as a cultural brother. Todorov therefore is correct in

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asserting that Adario is a stereotype, but Sioui too is undeniable in laying claim to the reality of Adario. What Charles Taylor forgets, therefore, is that no ‘‘people’’ are constituted autochthonously in the absence of others. On one level, this critique can be understand as a historically based argument about global contact, interaction, interpenetration. On yet another, however, this is a structurally based argument: Dialogue does not take place between separate and distinct entities. Rather, as soon as one can imagine a dialogue, the entities are already necessarily in relation to one another. ‘‘Culture’’ is not inaugurated in a vacuum, in the womb of family and friends—and, indeed, it should be emphasized that these very family and friends who pass on identity to their children have visited places near and far, have engaged already in acts of dialogue and translation, have always heard stories about others ‘‘over there,’’ have always already a determining sense of the other neighborhood, or valley, or village, which serves to secure their own identities. Even a child’s first notion of self-identity, then, is shot through with others. It is always too late to begin Taylor’s project of dialogue among different cultures, because an infinitely receding horizon of earlier relations has stitched all-of-us together-differently. Dennis Tedlock has written that the dialogue between different entities can be protected by making sure that dialogue has ‘‘no goal’’ and no ‘‘end,’’ and that it always hold open ‘‘the possibility of further interpretation’’ (‘‘Interpretation’’ 284). Yet Tedlock too falters in the same way that Taylor does: by arguing that dialogue begins with a coherent ‘‘frontier’’ that can be understood as ‘‘the meeting ground of two worlds’’ (‘‘Analogical’’ 333, 334). Any dialogical project that pre-ordains the coherent, closed identities of its speakers—that determines their differences beforehand, even in so minimal a fashion as ‘‘two’’ figures who meet at the ‘‘frontier’’ of their being—will never preserve difference. It can only reify very old colonial identities that were forged differentially. Anthropological dialogue therefore can only be the endless play of similitudes and differences that betray lines of relation—subjects already constituted by and within intersubjectivity. Traditional dialogue, in this way, always passes over and founds itself on top of singularities. Singularities remain obstinately untranslatable in this sense (though also infinitely translating). Traditional dialogue is merely a set of themes and variations on the monologue—baroque to minimal, romantic to system—composed. There are ‘‘rich’’ relations, power-laden relations, subtle and thick relations, but there are always relations rather than difference as such that might engage in dialogue for the first time. Homi Bhabha famously has

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written that colonial discourse is ‘‘less than one and double,’’ yet this double, properly understood in Bhabha’s work, is already in relation as well. Another sense of the dialogic demands on an entirely different mathematical formula: less than one and more than one. A figure in a dialogue would need to be conceptualized as never sufficient to itself, from the beginning, and always more than itself.

1. Tedlock, avatar of dialogue for anthropological and interdisciplinary audiences, writes: ‘‘Standard anthropological genres’’ always produce a ‘‘suppression of dialog’’ (‘‘Emergence’’ 2).18 Therefore, he argues, one needs to turn back to the work of M.M. (Mikhail) Bakhtin in order to re-theorize dialogue, in order to give the dialogic its chance. But one can briefly return to the most famous pages that Bakhtin wrote on the dialogic, in the 1930s essay ‘‘Discourse in the Novel,’’ to see that Bakhtinian dialogue goes nowhere, is utterly monological, is incapable of producing anything beyond the most hackneyed anthropology. Bakhtin’s discussion of the comic novel utilizes eight examples from Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit for purposes of illustrating what he calls ‘‘hybrid construction,’’ or moments where sentences and passages evidence ‘‘two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two ‘languages,’ two semantic and axiological belief systems’’ (Dialogic 304). These perfectly dialogic moments highlight the ways in which, according to Bakhtin, novelistic discourse is embedded with the ‘‘poly-’’ or even the ‘‘heteroglot’’ of social existence. All of the eight examples operate in such a way as to separate out and highlight the speech of the other—of that which belongs to ‘‘common opinion’’ or ‘‘general opinion’’ and which is fundamentally a ‘‘chorus’’ or ‘‘collective voice’’ (306, 204, 305)—in opposition to speech that is characterized as ‘‘official-ceremonial,’’ or even ‘‘the words of the author himself’’ or ‘‘the language of the author’’ (304, 306, 303). Bakhtin’s first, second, fourth, fifth, and eighth examples all set the ‘‘general opinion’’ of those who are ‘‘common’’ in high relief: ‘‘There is not just another’s speech in the same language—it is another’s utterance in a language that is itself ‘other’ to the author as well’’ (303). That which is ‘‘common’’ can be, for example, in his first example, an ‘‘archaicized language,’’ or in his fifth example, ‘‘epic’’ and ‘‘Homeric’’—entirely and even temporally foreign to the author (303, 306). Any of the eight examples will do for purposes of marking the founding presuppositions and political implications of Bakhtinian dialogue, but the

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eighth is both short and instructive. Here, Dickens is cited, with the other voice highlighted for emphasis by Bakhtin, followed by Bakhtin’s comment: (8) It followed that Mrs. Merdle, as a woman of fashion and good breeding who had been sacrificed to wiles of a vulgar barbarian (for Mr. Merdle was found out from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, the moment he was found out in his pocket), must be actively championed in order for her order’s sake. [book 2, ch. 33] This is an analogous hybrid construction, in which the definition provided by the general opinion of society—‘‘a sacrifice to the wiles of a vulgar barbarian’’—merges with authorial speech, exposing the hypocrisy and greed of common opinion. (307)

Bakhtin writes that the dialogics of this passage involve wedding Dickens’ own voice and that of ‘‘general’’ or ‘‘common’’ opinion within the confines of a single sentence. But this other voice, or other language, is registered by Bakhtin as an utterly simplistic stereotype: The common masses are hypocritical and greedy. Bakhtin writes that ‘‘any stylistics capable of dealing with the distinctiveness of the novel as a genre must be a sociological stylistics’’ (300), and it is important to note, therefore, that a prior sociological assumption always ungirds and therefore comes before the location of the voice of the other in Dickens. In this particular case, but also in every case, the dialogical rests upon an anthropological/sociological supposition (and in this particular case, the supposition rises no higher than the level of gossip regarding who the ‘‘common’’ are in their attitudes and beliefs). In Bakhtinian reading, one must know already, before one begins reading, that there is an entity, distinct from ‘‘Dickens,’’ that is ‘‘common,’’ and that this entity has certain contents. In other words, and to put it more plainly, Bakhtin’s ability to determine the dialogics of this passage depends entirely on pre-existing anthropological, culturalist stereotypes about this or that formation. Bakhtin recognizes something like this when he suggests that Dickens’ bringing together of these different voices generates a ‘‘parodic’’ effect, such that the differences are judged, and the voice of the other clearly is set off in its inferior difference (303, 306). But once one acknowledges this, who is to say that there is any other voice in Dickens’ text? Why not read the passage as containing Dickens’ own rendering of Victorian armchair sociology, for example, in order to typify and denigrate the ‘‘common’’? In the end, it must be emphasized, everything of importance in Bakhtin depends upon being able to secure different ‘‘points of view

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on the world’’ in their ‘‘limitedness and specificity’’ (293, 313). Ju¨rgen Mittelstrass writes, with respect to the tradition of Platonic dialogue: ‘‘What is at stake in philosophical dialogue are not particular opinions or problems but the subjects who are to acquire philosophical language’’ (‘‘On Socratic Dialogue’’ 127). This is precisely what Bakhtinian dialogue will never do: put the subject of dialogue ‘‘at stake,’’ render it as unsecured at the outset. Bakhtin writes, concerning the political goals of dialogic reading: verbal-ideological decentering will occur only when a national culture loses its sealed-off and self-sufficient character, when it becomes conscious of itself as only one among other cultures and languages. (370)

Because of the anthropological foundation of this thought, such decentering will never be radical enough to accomplish what it seeks. Rather, in the Bakhtinian project, national culture re-secures itself by becoming ‘‘one among other,’’ rather than less than one and more than one. For Bakhtin, there is national culture, and then there are other cultures inside the nation as well, but each in itself is coherent unto itself. And, in that coherence, one begins again a round of difference, exclusivity, typology, and hierarchy.

2. A seemingly more complex case of dialogism is found in Marcel Griaule’s classic text, Conversations with Ogotemmeˆli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas (1948), if only because the text is not a Dickens novel, but instead is presented as a record of actual dialogue with an African other. Griaule had already, in the early 1930s, specified the limit of the work of folklorists such as Bakhtin in the pages of Georges Bataille’s journal, Documents, in an article provocatively entitled, ‘‘Gunshot’’: I call folklore the ethnography of pretentious peoples, of those colourless peoples whose habitat lies north of a sea of low tides and weak storms in the Mediterranean; the ethnography of those who fear both words and things, who refuse to be called natives, and whose dictionaries offer Latin explications of unseemly things, so as to reserve small shameful pleasures for their elites. (Bataille et al, Encyclopædia Acephalica 99)

And ethnography proper, which apparently is less classist in its orientation than folklorism, remains, Griaule asserts, a ‘‘white science, and therefore

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tainted with prejudice’’ (98). Ethnography and folklore, originating in ‘‘fear,’’ will thus never be able to bring into being what Fabian calls ‘‘coevalness’’ (Other 156–65). It will always function violently, like a ‘‘gunshot.’’ Conversations implicitly attempts to overcome the limits of ‘‘science’’— the inherent prejudice of white epistemology—through the reportage of a substantial series of conversations with a Dogon sage. In some sense, then, Griaule attempts to outmaneuver ethnography’s inherent positioning by exceeding positions, by crossing the threshold of the other rather than violently gazing at the other,19 by directly representing that which takes place at a threshold called ‘‘conversation.’’ In another remarkable text published by Bataille, this time in the Critical Dictionary, and entitled ‘‘Threshold,’’ Griaule argues that the threshold is a ‘‘zone of danger where invisible but real battles are fought out’’ (Bataille 83–4). And Griaule clarifies precisely what he means by this: The threshold will always be a ‘‘thing of dread’’ ‘‘because there it is necessary to register, forcibly or with levity, the rank one occupies in society’’ (84). Taking Griaule at his word will involve reading a threshold work such as the Conversations in terms of its ability to ‘‘register rank,’’ and, indeed, judged from one perspective, the Conversations—unlike Bakhtin’s work, which hopelessly obscures relational questions of rank and class—will attempt to expose the violence of the threshold itself. Although it is certainly understandable that the Conversations often is read as a massively detailed instantiation of alterity, Griaule’s largest project in the book involves completely breaking down that sense of alterity through a concatenation of bewildering cosmological detail that finally amounts to a stunning conclusion: ‘‘It would seem, therefore, that the Zodiac of the Mediterranean peoples could be explained from the point of view of Dogon cosmology and metaphysic’’ (Conversations 215). Griaule’s point: That which appears almost indescribably different becomes, at the end of a process of encyclopedic cataloguing, an analogue for ‘‘us,’’ a nearto-exact relation—and perhaps a precursor. Addressing the question of Africa’s influence on Europe, Griaule writes: ‘‘ ‘It is not a question . . . of influenced exercised, but of influence received and preserved’ ’’ (216). Thus, in the conversations with Ogotemmeˆli, the threshold between Europe and Africa is exposed as a doorway for ‘‘influence,’’ perhaps millennia old, and at the same time a pure imperial imposition of global class that may not be surmountable by even the most detailed empirical evidence: The European [Griaule] had no illusions about how such an argument was likely to be received by recognized specialists in academic circles. . . . Has

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it not been established once and for all that the African has nothing to give, no contribution to make, that he cannot even reflect ancient forms of the world’s thought? Has he not always been relegated to the level of a slave? ‘Consider the carvings of the great civilizations of antiquity! Where do the Negroes figure in these? Why, in their proper place, among the lesser races!’ (215)

So Griaule will initially earn credit for attempting to rethink the threshold of Africa—to rethink the threshold as the limit of domination, as the imposition of ‘‘rank.’’ But however far Griaule goes in this effort (and he will go so far as to think the anthropological thought of diffusion to the bottom, chiding those who, in a romantic framework, decry any African borrowing from Europe, and those who, in an anti-romantic one, deny the possibility of European borrowing from Africa20), he will continue to think Africa and Europe in terms of their fundamental temporal relations, as he announces on the second page of the Conversations: ‘‘For these people [the Dogon] live by a cosmogony, a metaphysic, and a religion that put them on par with the peoples of antiquity, and that Christian theology might indeed study with profit’’ (2). Thus, rather than attempting to radicalize or problematize the question of the relation between Africa and Europe, the conversations taking place between them will always be determined, in their significance, by a monogenetic recognition of the world’s progress—and of the world’s division into modern and primitive (the latter being a term that Griaule is not at all afraid to deploy).21 Thus, the dialogue taking place between Griaule and Ogotemmeˆli will, in a certain way, continue to replicate the violence of the threshold, even as Griaule can feel satisfied that his text has obliterated one particularly pernicious version of it. And in this case, the dialogue of difference will be precluded even before one begins, with Griaule’s announcement of the deep historical relationship between Africa and Europe already determining a particular, positivist horizon of commonality—a certain shared relationship to general ‘‘progress,’’ for example—that pre-sets the subjects of dialogue. It will have to be acknowledged, before one can go any further with the Conversations text, that the criticism leveled at it by commentators will generally miss the mark because, within anthropology, the critique that has been registered has to do entirely with reading Ogotemmeˆli as a singular being, cut off from any legitimate account of shared culture.22 Walter E. A. van Beek’s rather interesting attempt to dethrone Griaule will insist

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that Ogotemmeˆli’s cosmology is highly anomalous, when compared to creation narratives transcribed in other contiguous parts of Africa, and even when compared to any creation beliefs that other Dogons held or hold: ‘‘African ethnography knows only one Ogotemmeˆli,’’ he claims (‘‘Dogon Restudied’’ 142). His hypothetical answer as to why the Conversations is so singular a document begins by remembering that Griaule and Ogotemmeˆli had interacted for many years before the actual conversations took place, and that therefore Ogotemmeˆli ‘‘knew very well what Griaule wanted to hear’’: ‘‘The product was a Dogon culture geared to the expectations of the principle researcher’’ (155). Van Beek believes that an act of joint creativity took place between Griaule and Ogotemmeˆli such that neither a Dogon nor a French viewpoint emerges. Instead, the Conversations is unique and without a group referent. Griaule’s text, though, will already have suggested and risked as much. The final sentence of the book, for example, reads: ‘‘There will never be anyone with the noble gait, the deep voice, the sad and luminous features of Ogotemmeˆli, the great hunter, of Lower Ogol’’ (Conversations 220). ‘‘There will never be anyone’’: Ogotemmeˆli, Griaule’s interlocutor and initiator into the cosmological secrets of the Dogon, is positioned by Griaule as a singular being, without relation.23 And moving backward the distance of two paragraphs, Griaule makes a less othering, but equally interesting, claim, which van Beek might be willing to endorse: Not that the blind old man was the only one to know the doctrines of his people! Other Dogon notables possess its main principles, and other initiates continue to study them; but he was one of those who best understood the interest and the value of European research. (Conversations 220)

Here Griaule risks the possibility that Ogotemmeˆli was something of a trans-cultural subject—an at least liminal figure who negotiates two cultural spaces. Characterizing Ogotemmeˆli as uniquely interstitial, Griaule risks the possibility that his informant is quite unlike other Dogon subjects. Once more, three pages from the end of Griaule’s text: The young European woman in charge of linguistic research, by-passing informants who were considered authoritative, had discovered that Ogotemmeˆli was recognized as having the purest speech of the people of Upper Sanga, compared with whom the men of Lower Sanga were regarded as boorish peasants. (217)

At this moment Griaule positions Ogotemmeˆli simultaneously as singular and representative—’’the purest’’—though the tensions between such singularity and representativeness goes unremarked. In concert, these three

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remarks position Ogotemmeˆli as an absolutely singular Dogon, as the most European-minded of Dogon, and as the purest Dogon—all at once. Finally, there is every indication from elements that appear deep in the text that the Conversations are taking place not between the different, but rather between parties that already are fundamentally within each other’s sights as anthropological entities. Ogotemmeˆli, for example, conceptualizes Griaule as a ‘‘Nazarene,’’ or Christian (58); Griaule repeatedly positions Ogotemmeˆli as the initiator of the conversations, and apparently because the old man already understood Griaule’s project and wished to actively participate in anthropological data collection (2, 13); and Ogotemmeˆli at one point acknowledges to Griaule that he is not speaking plain, but rather through metaphor and parable, in order to communicate to Griaule in a manner he will understand (58): But Ogotemmeˆli was careful to explain that all this was a manner of speaking, that he was merely trying to explain to the Nazarene the absence of a father. (60)

In other words, everything in Griaule’s text leads one to the inescapable conclusion that Griaule has not located a ‘‘Dogon’’ as such, but rather a figure already deeply transformed, in terms of identity, and torqued toward a fundamental relatedness to Europeanness. So far, this analysis recapitulates and fortifies, using evidence from Griaule’s text, that of van Beek, the most prominent critic of the text in recent years, as well as the thinking of Mary Douglas, who claims that anthropologists have long recognized ‘‘the shortcomings of the Griaule/Dogon world view’’ (van Beek 161).24 Van Beek goes to far as to register the seemingly eccentric production of Griaule and Ogotemmeˆli as the inevitable limit of fieldwork: It has become a commonplace that ethnographies are ‘‘doubly mediated,’’ shaped by the ideas and preconceptions of both ethnographer and informants. (van Beek 139)

But then he (and other commentators, too) will insist in reading the Conversations in terms of the ‘‘truth’’ of the account:25 a restudy may . . . show that an earlier study was flawed. Though this latter possibility is more or less ruled out by the extremes of the postmodernist approach, I am persuaded that some views on a culture can indeed be more productive, insightful, or plausible, in short, ‘‘truer,’’ than others. (van Beek 139)

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In other words, the limit of the critique of Griaule from within anthropology will insist on anthropology’s continued ability to account for the culturally other. Van Beek will judge Griaule harshly, and Stephen Belcher will frame his judgment of Griaule’s ‘‘fictions’’ quite sympathetically, but, in both cases, a recognition of the joint, intersubjective creation of ethnography will mean nothing to anthropology’s dream of greater and greater objectivity. Van Beek’s language, however, is suggestive of a certain problem in this regard: ‘‘more productive, insightful, or plausible.’’ This triple list of proper ethnographic qualities—of proper measures for the analysis of ethnography—is dangerously incoherent, invoking, at one and the same time, standards of pragmatism (‘‘productive’’), accuracy (‘‘insightful’’), and rhetorical force (‘‘plausible’’). This list functions as a kind of protection for van Beek’s subsequent analysis of Griaule: If the reader does not strictly believe the truth value of van Beek’s fieldwork, it might, he suggests, be more useful than Griaule’s, or, finally, more persuasive. Apparently, one can take one’s pick. But it does matter, at the end of the day, whether ethnography in the present is objectively better than its forebears, or more useful, or more rhetorically believable. After all, if ethnography in general is intersubjective, then van Beek’s claims regarding the non-verifiability of Griaule’s work rest too on intersubjective research—rest on the always unverifiable whimsy of the creative, individual subject. When Derek Freeman famously reported that Margaret Mead’s informants hoaxed her, for example, what can rule out the possibility that these same informants, sixty years later, still are hoaxing, or are hoaxing now rather than then?26 And if one is left, therefore, with nothing but standards of utility and believability, then anthropology is indeed in grave trouble. To take an obvious example: Nineteenth-century scientific racism, as evidenced within the emerging discipline of physical anthropology, struck many audiences as highly believable, and, of course, it was an entirely useful doctrine, too, in terms of its relationship to practical politics such as Indian Removal, slavery, Jim Crow, and the like. Finally, one needs to suggest that these are entirely the wrong set of questions and concerns to bring to ethnography, even though a good deal of the thinking about the possibilities of anthropology in a postmodern era turned on them, following James Clifford and Clifford Geertz. Clifford’s notion of the ‘‘saving lie’’ will remain the most interesting variant of this sort of thinking: Though ethnography will never be adequate to its object, though it necessarily is formed as ‘‘improvised, historically contingent fictions,’’ Clifford suggests it nevertheless ‘‘saves’’ something (Predicament 80, 99). But what, or whom? Is it, in the end, the anthropologist

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who is saved (such is the implication of Clifford’s text [98–99])? And from what? From a kind of nihilism and/or from the plenitude of the field that threatens to dissolve the self (again, Clifford suggests this [104–5])? Clifford’s ‘‘saving lie’’ threatens to turn the critique of anthropology on its head, and avoids focusing on the only acceptable standard for future ethnography: the question of exclusion. At most, Clifford’s forecast for anthropology involves anthropology’s necessary ‘‘lying,’’ and then ironically marking the lie (the limits of representational practice). It amounts to an ethnography that, each time, as the sum total of its claims, announces, ‘‘I’m lying.’’ Such an ethnography, if set to work, over and against its ironic tone, will do representation violence; but if merely acknowledged as irony, as Clifford seems to intend—if not set to work, but merely pondered in terms of a certain impossibility for anthropology—then the point of the exercise clearly is to save the subject who produces anthropology. That is, the point of Clifford’s ethnography is to save ‘‘us’’ in an ironic form. But it will not even have begun the task of thinking global community, which frankly all of the anthropological figures that interest Clifford—including Griaule—were attempting to imagine. What sorts of ethnographic description, it needs to be asked, are not complicit with imperialism, domination, and violence in general, and therefore signal a non-exclusive relationship among beings? And if the answer is, ‘‘None,’’ then saving ‘‘us’’ is imperial by design. At this point, one might choose to read Ogotemmeˆli’s cosmological voice in the Conversations in order to suggest the ways that ‘‘his’’ discourse conceptualizes questions of difference, relation, and singularity. In this way, one might locate, at the edges of the Conversations, an exposure of questions of singularities and sharing—an exposure of questions concerning the very possibility of dialogue without exclusion. Griaule/Ogotemmeˆli begin the account of the Dogon world with ‘‘the first breach in the order of the universe,’’ ‘‘the primordial blunder of God’’: God creates earth, desires earth, encounters a ‘‘bar’’ in the form of the earth’s clitoris, performs a cliteridectomy, and impregnates the earth with a being, the ‘‘jackal’’ (or ‘‘pale fox,’’ as it is frequently retranslated) (Griaule 17). This ‘‘single being’’ disorders the world; all subsequent offspring of this God, Amma, will be twins, ‘‘two homogeneous products of God’’ (17, 18). The root of the disorder, it is clear from the text, is the clitoris, and is the clitoris’s challenge to the phallus (17): ‘‘God had further intercourse with his earth-wife, and this time without mishaps of any kind, the excision of the offending member having removed the cause of the former disorder’’ (18). This story, one should mark, deviates from the one

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told by a recent scholar of twins and origins, Hillel Schwartz, who contends: We are conceived as twins and, most of us, born single. We conceive of ourselves, from the start, as twins, then one disappears. Together, the First Twins struggle with forces primeval, opening a space in this world for us to tame horses, plough the land, survive the lightning; then one devours the other. (19)

In Griaule/Ogotemmeˆli, twins are secondary and belated, and this comes with interesting consequences. Twins represent that which is ‘‘perfect and complete’’; they are ‘‘the perfect, the ideal unit’’ and further represent speech and the full ‘‘mastery of words’’ (Griaule 18, 19, 26). The jackal, meanwhile, ‘‘desired to possess speech,’’ defiled mother earth, and thereby disordered the perfect world (21). The world is marked by the ‘‘permanent calamity of single births,’’ and ‘‘humanity’’ ever after ‘‘limped toward its obscure destiny’’ (24). What, precisely, is at stake here? The twins in the text (and the first twins will be multiplied by two, and then two again, to form eight twin beings, or Nummo-spirits) function in the Griaule/Ogotemmeˆli text as an analogue for the goals of Griaule’s anthropology: The closed, systematic, and perfect character of the original four sets of twins who set humanity in motion by ‘‘impos[ing] an organization with a network of rules’’ (30), are later interpreted by the anthropologist, whose task is to demonstrate the existence of such organization, to show that ‘‘in this organism, every institution was integrated; none was outside it; and each in turn, however divergent it might seem and however incompletely understood, was found to fit into a system whose structure revealed itself day by day with increasing clarity and precision’’ (148). With, of course, the exception of the jackal. The jackal is a being so singular that it cannot be systematized; it can only threaten the system with disorder, even though it is, technically, close kin to the Nummo. The jackal must be understood, then, as the limit of the system. And something more: In a text organized around the topic and genre of dialogue, it is interesting to tease out the significance of the twin and the singular for purposes of forecasting dialogue’s possibilities. Griaule/ Ogotemmeˆli’s twins establish multiple sorts of languages (semiotics, one might call them, given that the first of these languages is clothing [20]), and each of these languages, in turn, is less imperfect than the jackal’s language (27, 28). These languages secure the world of communication among both Nummo and men; they make conversation not only possible

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but always successful amongst all of the subsequent spirit-twins and human-twins of the world. They establish the stable preconditions for dialogue. Successful dialogue is associated with twins, perhaps, because all traditional notions of successful and/or useful dialogue necessarily begin with twins—either identical or non-identical. The various theorists of political dialogue among and between ‘‘different’’ cultures, genders, classes, and the like, are always producing their effects through the generation of nonidentical twins—figures who appear to be unrelated but are, in fact, fundamentally related. Bakhtin’s absolutely different classes, and Lahontan’s absolutely different continents, are communicating across an anthropologically/sociologically constructed boundary line that both identifies, and hence both severs (produces a hierarchy) and links the entities in dialogue. When Bakhtin conjures the ‘‘common,’’ and Lahontan the ‘‘savage,’’ they reproduce familiar social boundaries that are necessarily codetermined or ‘‘kind’’: common versus elite, and savage versus civilized. In this way, dialogue in these texts is taking place precisely between kin, precisely between entities that are not different as such from one another, but only ‘‘different’’ according to an original relation of difference. Every attempt by anthropology and cultural studies to produce a dialogue among anthropology’s already determined entities will never preserve difference as such, or the possibility of something different from ‘‘ourselves.’’ Instead, it will always be a dialogue among very near kin, in perfect system and symmetry. To bring back Tedlock: He explicitly refuses to understand this, and argues that ‘‘symmetry’’ and ‘‘symmetrical sociolinguistic positions,’’ for example, is antithetical to anthropology (‘‘Interpretation’’ 282). Anthropologists intervene only where there is a radical ‘‘separateness’’ of (as an example at the level of language) ‘‘English and Hindi, and of the worlds of those two languages’’ (‘‘Interpretation’’ 282)—only when one can talk more generally about ‘‘two worlds’’ coherent and distinct unto themselves as well as their determinable boundary (Tedlock, ‘‘Analogical’’ 323, 333, 334). Without that separateness, Tedlock writes, there would be ‘‘no place for an ethnographer’’ (‘‘Interpretation’’ 282). But one will have to insist that is the determination and imposition of that separateness by the ethnographer—in the first place—that makes possible the ethnographer’s sociopolitical role. And at the moment of the determination of that separateness, relation has already been determined, and will always already guide dialogue among the participants. It will be, contra Tedlock, only ‘‘within’’ language, at the limit of its systemization and symmetry, and without the aid of anthropologists/ethnographers, that something different, unpredictable, or plural might

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occur. It will happen, in Griaule/Ogotemmeˆli’s terms, only with the introduction of the problem of the jackal. The jackal will be the problem of both singular speech and broken speech—speech that is neither ‘‘symmetrical’’ nor ‘‘perfected’’—and that contaminates any and all systems of speech. In other words, the jackal is the figure that cannot be thought as either positioned in symmetry with anthropology, nor separate. The jackal inaugurates, from the moment of the very possibility of dialogue’s beginnings and always before it, the double propositions and problematic formulated by Derrida, which suggests: ‘‘1. We only ever speak one language. 2. We never speak one language’’ (Monolingualism 7). Dialogue is always coming in every utterance—never fully present, but never absent either. Tedlock approaches such a limit formulation when he suggests that one must go much further than Bakhtin’s restriction of dialogue to the form of the novel: Poetry, for example, evidences the dialogic just as typically, and, indeed, following structural linguistics, every word is also always in dialogue ‘‘in an environment of alternate words that could have been used with reference to the same object’’ (‘‘Emergence’’ 7, 10). But anthropology in general will always side, the question of conventional dialogue, with the attempt to banish the jackal, and will always justify itself by claiming that it thereby renders coherent and preserves difference (racial, cultural, sexual, whatever). The jackal will always have been violently excluded from consideration at the moment that a coherent ‘‘Dogon’’ or ‘‘Indian’’ or ‘‘Hindu’’ subject is called forth to take part in dialogue.

3. The absolute limits of conventional dialogue are presented in Martin Heidegger’s ‘‘A Dialogue on Language Between a Japanese and an Inquirer’’ (1953–54), a singular text in the Heidegger corpus that Gianni Vattimo has referred to as, ‘‘the text of Heidegger’s that is most clearly engaged in the effort at trans-cultural understanding, and is thus a sort of anthropological adventure’’ (End 151).27 The text, cast entirely in the form of dialogue between ‘‘I’’ (Heidegger) and ‘‘J’’ (Tezuka), takes up the problematic of cultural-linguistic translation and relation, and revisits the Greeks in a manner entirely relevant to Heidegger’s notorious culture-work of the 1930s.28 J expresses concern, early on, that Japanese philosophy’s attempt to explain Japanese art using the conceptual network of European aesthetics—

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translating ‘‘Western’’ aesthetics into Japanese—signals either an ‘‘incapacity’’ within Japanese language, or a destruction of the essence of Japanese thought: a colonizing of the Japanese mind that will result in being ‘‘led astray’’ from ‘‘what claims are existence’’ (Language 2, 3). I sides with the latter interpretation, arguing that, ‘‘we Europeans presumably dwell in an entirely different house than Eastasian man’’ (5), and I worries, too, about the ‘‘complete Europeanization of the earth and of man’’ (15). Culture, which is here conceptualized as inhabiting particular languages and their foundational conceptual moves, is therefore understood by both interlocutors to be non-translatable, non-portable (or translatable only at the risk of the destruction of the other). No dialogue could be undertaken, then, by different languages; as J notes, the assumption here is ‘‘that the languages of the two are not merely different but are other in nature, and radically so’’ (5). This is a vision of absolute alterity, non-translatability, relationlessness. There will be two non-communicating language realities, or one, if the West succeeds in obliterating the logic of the other, but, either way, no relation between the two radical others is possible. But, strategically, the dialogue is so arranged that this original position is undermined over the course of the text. A first step is J’s description of a certain sensation when undertaking translations of Ho¨lderlin and Kleist into Japanese: ‘‘At moments a radiance shone on me which let me sense that the wellspring of reality from which these two fundamentally different languages arise was the same’’ (24).29 More trouble: When J explains the contours of the ‘‘basic word Iki,’’ a word that would speak the ‘‘essential nature of Eastasian art and poetry’’ (4), I replies: Your experience, then, moves within the difference between a sensuous and supersensuous world. This is the distinction upon which rests what has long been called Western metaphysics. (14)

And yet I calls this recognition an ‘‘inappropriate’’ one, and one that causes him both ‘‘uneasiness’’ and ‘‘fear’’ (14, 15). J continues along these lines, and perhaps even more radically, by insisting that the ‘‘beckoning hint’’ of the Japanese word for language (‘‘Koto ba’’) becomes a ‘‘home’’ for him ‘‘only now through our dialogue. Finally, and most ‘dramatically,’ there is this encounter: J: As far as I am able to follow what you are saying, I sense a deeply concealed kinship with our thinking, precisely because your path of thinking and its language are so wholly other. I: Your admission agitates me in a way which I can control only because we remain in dialogue. (40–41)

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The dialogue is designed to force I to recognize a certain play of difference and sameness: a situation in which the ‘‘wholly other,’’ at the level of thinking and language, is always interlocked with the problematic of close ‘‘kinship.’’ Vattimo will argue, in his reading of the text, that it profoundly reveals the mid-twentieth century ‘‘Westernization’’ of the world, the globalization of everything in Western form (Vattimo, 151–2). But this is to fundamentally miss the point, or, rather, it anthropologizes the text even as the text attempts an interrogation of anthropological dialogue. Reading Heidegger here against anthropology and its attempt to bring ‘‘West’’ and ‘‘East’’ into dialogue involves I’s repeated ‘‘uneasy’’ and ‘‘agitated’’ discomfit with traditional dialogic assumptions that condemn one to the interpenetration of difference and sameness. Heidegger’s text comes closest to another possibility for dialogue in only a single place, when the two men agree that ‘‘man’’ is ‘‘he who walks the boundary of the boundless’’ (41).30 It is only ‘‘here’’ that something else might happen in dialogue: that a certain surprise, as opposed to agitation, might take place at the limit of difference. The strain at this limit is always on display in post–Writing Culture anthropology. Ruth Behar, for example, writes: Inevitably, if you sit facing another woman at the table for long enough, you start to feel like mirrors for one another. To be sure, Esperanza and I were in many ways exaggerated, distorted mirrors of each other. Yet I think we both came to appreciate, in our own manner and in our own voices, something of our mutual multistrandedness. . . . (Translated 302)31

Behar locates her major ethnographic statement on dialogue and translation, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border With Esperanza’s Story (1993), between the ends of the Heideggerian impasse: This feminist ethnography is located at the border between the opposite tendencies to see women as not at all different from one another or as all too different, for to go too far in either direction is to end up indifferent to the lives of women. (Translated 301)

For Behar, though, this means not so much a border-limit as an inhabitable middle space between these tendencies, which can be effectively described and politically capitalized upon. Post–Writing Culture anthropology attempts, then, to avoid the aporia of the Heideggerian dilemma by, as it were, ‘‘splitting the difference.’’ Thus, according to Behar, Esperanza’s story is told in her text in a ‘‘new tongue,’’ ‘‘an odd tongue that is neither English nor Spanish’’ (19). Formally, Translated Woman is said to be written in a ‘‘blurred or mixed genre,’’ and is ‘‘polyglot’’(17).

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And Behar’s friendship with the real ‘‘Esperanza,’’ constructed over many years and many encounters, had in general opened a third space beyond and between original positionings: As I got to know Esperanza, I realized our becoming comadres had allowed us to forge a relationship of mutual caring, reciprocity, and trust. It made it possible for us to transcend, to a certain extent, our positions as gringa and Mexicana. . . . By asking me to become her comadre, Esperanza had opened up a terrain for our exchange. (6–7)

From here, perhaps, one can now reconstruct the modality of Behar’s argumentation concerning mirrored ‘‘multistrandedness,’’ which will prove to be merely and limitedly historical. Dialogue becomes unsettling only over time and only in the context of original monological positions. And the strategy of the book will involve a joint work that will attempt ‘‘to transcend’’ (even if only ‘‘to a certain extent’’) these original positions, into something of a superposition. Behar, for example, will refer to Translated Woman as ‘‘metahistoria’’ (14). In this way, Behar’s text follows precisely the trajectory of all anthropological theories of positionality and dialogue, in its shift from the local to the general, from the part to the whole, from the boundary to the transcendent. What Behar believes she achieves at the level of ‘‘tongue’’ and ‘‘genre,’’ Esperanza will undertake at the level of gender: Esperanza’s struggle to define herself, through gender and in spite of gender, ambiguously gendered rather than passively gendered, points the way to the possibility of true gender transformation. So does her struggle to make herself whole, to be self and other, ‘‘woman’’ and ‘‘man,’’ in the face of the metonymic misrepresentation that would reduce her to the insignificant partness of being only a subjugated female. (296)

For Behar, Esperanza becomes therefore both woman and man, and thereby short-circuits binary divisions; Esperanza’s story reveals a woman attempting to transcend her emplacement as a ‘‘woman’’ by taking on the spirit of Pancho Villa, for example. Here, ‘‘patriarchy is reproduced ironically,’’ and a ‘‘healing’’ of the male/female split takes place (317, 315). Relatedly, Behar affirms her double status as both ‘‘good girl’’ and ‘‘witch,’’ and as both ‘‘gringa’’ and Cubana, in ‘‘The Biography in the Shadow’’ conclusion to her text. She relates her conversion experience to ‘‘halfie’’ status, to become ‘‘another new mestiza.’’ Now, perhaps, one can begin to grasp what animates the text: a intuition regarding original non-differentiation (before male/female, before

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U.S./Mexican); a sense of subsequent and now long-received power relations and social differentiations, so that Behar at times reads the difference between herself and Esperanza not unlike the way Marx reads class;32 and a drive to re-totalize and re-universalize the globe. To put this in simpler terms, Behar says: The world was one, the world became divided, and the world will be made one—or ‘‘multistranded’’—again. In this way, Behar avoids assumptions of original difference, and assumptions of human universality in a currently fragmented world. One could attack this simplistic narrative at any point: at its Edenic foundations, for example, or at its monolithic, totalitarian aims. But what should one make of the fact that Behar’s vision of Esperanza’s entire life is reducible to the pat formulas of Christian confession and feminine melodrama (Translated 11–12)? More specifically, Behar says that it is Esperanza herself who understands her life as ‘‘a progression from suffering to rage to redemption,’’ a formulation that Behar associates with Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), but that also bears strong resemblance to chapter 13 of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), in which Hester’s sorrow leads to a pride that enables her to masculinize herself, to separate off from the ‘‘external regulations of society’’ and ‘‘cast away the fragments of a broken chain’’ that would determine her as a sorrowing woman (Hawthorne 209, 208). Esperanza’s story, then, is sentimentalism in reverse—it is about the power and redemptive/ transcendental qualities of sustaining one’s ‘‘rage’’ in the face of suffering (Translated 12). It should at least cause some concern that transcendence of historical positionalities comes in such a historically concrete generic form: the feminist sentimentalist novel.33 Or, from another perspective, if one is to try to grant Esperanza a register of difference, however relational or historical, how can one do this when, ‘‘from the first time I heard Esperanza tell her story, I thought of her as a woman warrior’’ (Translated 295)? Behar writes that past white feminist ‘‘metanarratives unwittingly erased difference among women and made ethnocentric assumptions about what constitutes female fulfillment’’ (301). But Behar’s text easily can be accused of the same: At each moment of her presumed particularity and positionality (and Behar insists that she will not speak from or about a position that is ‘‘unsituated’’ [339]), Esperanza appears as a universal figure. Heidegger charted this course already; Behar, by contrast, is just confused, grasping at ‘‘new age’’ straws, and finally becoming obfuscatory in her attempt to paper over contradiction. In the end, for all the pages devoted to her, for all the attentiveness to her voice, Esperanza is crushed in Translated Woman, translated into determinate and typical existence.

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To endlessly begin again, one would need recognize that difference and sameness systemically cover over singularities and the plural speech that precedes all traditional dialogue. Maurice Blanchot writes that the relation between ‘‘man and man’’ must be understood as ‘‘infinity’’—‘‘nothing equal in them, and nothing simply unequal either’’ (81, 82). Such a relation breaks from the ‘‘fascination with unity’’ that undergirds the anthropological project of dialogue, ‘‘and this means therefore: not fearing to affirm interruption and rupture,’’ not fearing ‘‘to receive the other as other and the foreign as foreign’’ ‘‘in their irreducible difference, in their infinite strangeness, an empty strangeness, and such that only an essential discontinuity can retain the affirmation proper to it’’ (82). This will demand a notion of the other, not as a positivity, certainly not as a broken or (even potentially) healed unity, not as a presumed Mexican, or woman, or representative figure of global class, and not even as a ‘human being.’34 Behar writes that, for her, ‘‘feminism’’ must be a ‘‘commitment among women to speak to each other about their differences as women, if for nothing else than to find themselves in translation’’ (296–97). In contradistinction, and as a first step, one might recommend in anthropology’s wake that one lose oneself in translation and dialogue. Otherwise, ‘‘at the end all of you are numbering things’’ (Mac Low 18).

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chapter 5

‘‘Unworkable Monstrosities’’ David E. Johnson ‘I am not one of the family’ means: do not consider me ‘one of you’, ‘don’t count me in’, I want to keep my freedom, always: This, for me, is the condition not only for being singular and other, but also for entering into relation with the singularity and alterity of others. When someone is one of the family, not only does he lose himself in the herd, but he loses the others as well; the others become simply places, family functions, or places or functions in the organic totality that constitutes a group, school, nation or community of subjects speaking the same language. —Jacques Derrida, A Taste for the Secret

The monster is also that which appears for the first time and, consequently, is not yet recognized. A monster is a species for which we do not yet have a name. . . . —Jacques Derrida, Points . . . Interviews, 1974–94

In On the Edges of Anthropology, James Clifford asks, ‘‘Where does anthropology begin?’’ (16). His response to this question makes clear that anthropology has always had a troubled relation to its own institutionalization: ‘‘Look at the disciplinary histories. Sometimes they start with Plato and the Greeks. Many begin with the birth of European rationality: some in the Enlightenment, some earlier’’ (16). Regardless of its birth date, or perhaps precisely because anthropology’s origin cannot be determined, Clifford Geertz contends that anthropology has suffered ‘‘a permanent identity crisis’’ insofar as no one ‘‘quite knows exactly what it is’’ (Available Light 89). This is not exactly the position of Geertz’s colleagues. James Peacock, for example, argues that in the 1950s and 1960s, through the rise of structuralism and ethnoscience or cognitive anthropology, ‘‘Anthropology was in danger of selling its birthright for thin porridge’’ (‘‘Geertz’s Concept of Culture’’ 53). And what exactly is anthropology’s birthright? The concept of culture or, as Peacock puts it, ‘‘a great tradition of culture,’’ which Geertz both restored and modified by providing ‘‘a concept of culture and a demonstration of the importance of culture in life as a whole and especially as a way of defining meaning and shaping meaning

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in the midst of action and change’’ (53, 54). Peacock argues that Geertz developed ‘‘a concept of culture, which one might quickly define as logicomeaningfully interrelated ideas, symbols, and values that bestow meaning’’ (54). ‘‘Always,’’ according to Peacock, for Geertz ‘‘there’s meaning, and meaning is bestowed by interrelated symbols, values, and ideas’’ (54). It is worth noting that in this formulation culture is already tautological: ‘‘Logico-meaningfully interrelated symbols, values, and ideas that bestow meaning’’ means, basically, that meaning bestows meaning. Meaning, then, is given, from the outset. Culture is meaningful; moreover, and no less obviously, it is ideational: ‘‘Geertz’s notion follows the Parsonian view of culture as essentially ideational’’ (‘‘Geertz’s Concept’’ 55). What would be the possibility of a non-ideational meaning? Without subscribing to Peacock’s determination of Geertz’s importance for the salvation of anthropology, Clifford nonetheless concurs, ‘‘Anthropology used to have a defining paradigm, ‘culture’ ’’ (Edges 17). Furthermore, Clifford acknowledges that although ‘‘everybody talks about culture . . . it’s hard for anthropology to claim openly what they [i.e., anthropologists] sometimes do informally. ‘We are the ones who properly understand culture, unlike those literary types’ ’’ (17). It would be easy enough to think Clifford here parodies the stereotypical, reactionary anthropologist, not least because his The Predicament of Culture is viewed as promoting the ‘‘literary turn’’ in anthropology, a reading Clifford himself would like to marginalize.1 In fact, far from embracing anthropology’s socalled ‘‘literary turn,’’ he suggests, ‘‘It’s not hard to dismiss literary criticism as superficial’’ (Edges 17). This is so, he explains, because literary criticism does not have ‘‘the depth and complexity that fieldwork gives’’ (17). Despite there being what Clifford characterizes as ‘‘a crisis in the field’’ (15), itself at least partially precipitated by the fact that fieldwork has become ‘‘a rather large can of worms’’ and rather hard to circumscribe, nevertheless, at least in the United States, fieldwork ‘‘remains a critical norm’’ for anthropology (18). Indeed, fieldwork is ‘‘what’s left’’ to anthropology as properly its own; it ‘‘remains,’’ for instance, ‘‘an important border marker vis-a`-vis ‘cultural studies,’ a fluid interdisciplinary formation that potentially shares everything else with socio-cultural anthropology’’ (19). The crisis in the field, which Clifford aptly describes (18–19), has reached the point that anthropologists like Paul Rabinow have begun to explore alternate ways to characterize anthropology’s essential methodological trait (Rabinow, Anthropos Today 84–85). These efforts notwithstanding, Rabinow insists, ‘‘The anthropology that concerns me is one

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that is practically and essentially mediated by a form of actual experience’’ (Anthropos 76). Rabinow does not provide a definition of actual experience. We can be sure, however, that the modifier ‘‘actual’’ intensifies experience by determining it as an effect of presence. We need only recall that from at least one beginning of anthropology, say, in Aristotle, ‘‘actuality’’ means presence and insofar as what is eternal is actual, it also suggests perfection.2 It is precisely this value of presence and the present qua actual that informs the privilege of fieldwork in anthropology. Anthropology is thus circumscribed within the methodological and conceptual horizons of fieldwork and culture. How do you get to know a culture? You go into the field. What do you take with you into the field? Your culture. Available Light makes clear that Geertz never gave up on the methodological necessity of fieldwork, but, unlike Peacock, he is not so sure anthropology has come to terms with the culture concept. Writing of cultural or social anthropology, his particular field, Geertz opines that ‘‘Everyone knows what cultural anthropology is about. . . . The trouble is that no one is quite sure what culture is’’ (Available Light 11). The failure to understand what culture is results in anthropology’s inner-conflict, ‘‘perpetually in search of ways to escape its condition, perpetually failing to find them. Committed, since its beginnings, to a global view of human life . . . it keeps falling into its parts, complaining about the fact, and trying desperately, and unsuccessfully, to project some sort of new unity to replace the unity it imagines itself once to have had, but now, through the faithlessness of present practitioners, to have mindlessly cast away’’ (97). Nevertheless, Geertz believes anthropology survives in and through crisis: ‘‘The wringing of hands [the identity crisis] brings on, and the sense of loss, is considerable, and doubtless heartfelt; but it is very likely misplaced. Anthropology generally, and cultural anthropology in particular, draws the greater part of its vitality from the controversies that animate it. It is not much destined for secured positions and settled issues’’ (98). Over the course of some fifty years of anthropological work and reflection, insistently for the last thirty and with increasingly wide interdisciplinary relevance,3 Geertz has attempted to locate anthropology at the heart of social thought and practice. He has done so by insisting on the importance of the concept of culture and its relation to the human being. In an essay first published in 1966 and later collected in the seminal The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), Geertz notes that anthropology seemingly negotiates two mutually exclusive positions. On the one hand, anthropology understands ‘‘man’’ as ‘‘wholly of a piece with nature’’ (34) and concludes that ‘‘the great, vast variety of differences among men, in beliefs

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and values, in customs and institutions, both over time and from place to place, is essentially without significance in defining his nature’’ (35). On the other hand, anthropology maintains ‘‘that human nature does not exist and men are pure and simple what their culture makes them’’ (36). For both these anthropological positions, culture names the differences for which ‘‘nature’’ cannot account. Geertz explains that It is among such interpretations as these, all unsatisfactory, that anthropology has attempted to find its way to a more viable concept of man, one in which culture, and the variability of culture, would be taken into account rather than written off as caprice and prejudice, and yet, at the same time, one in which the governing principle of the field, ‘‘the basic unity of mankind,’’ would not be turned into an empty phrase. (36)

‘‘The basic unity of mankind’’ is another way of remarking what Le´viStrauss called ‘‘those differences and changes in mankind which have a meaning for all men’’ (Tristes Tropiques 58). For Geertz, the question is how to think the relation between the human and culture, for if the human has an immutable essence, then the study of culture literally makes no difference in the human; but, conversely, if the human is entirely culturally determined, there is no ‘‘governing principle,’’ no ‘‘basic unity of mankind’’ to ground anthropology. Anthropology cannot do without either ‘‘the basic unity of mankind’’ or culture. It needs both the essential and the culturally determined human. This necessity organizes Geertz’s strategy: He decides that ‘‘it may be in the cultural particularities of people—in their oddities—that some of the most instinctive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found’’ (Interpretation 43). Anthropology’s contribution ‘‘to the construction . . . of a concept of man,’’ he concludes, may lie ‘‘in showing us how to find’’ (43) these oddities. Geertz’ retention of the idea of a ‘‘governing principle’’ of anthropology, which can only be located if the ‘‘basic unity of mankind’’ remains meaningful, ineluctably situates him close to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who writes in the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inegalite´ parmi les hommes that ‘‘the human soul modified in society by a thousand ever-recurring causes, by the acquisition of a mass of knowledge and errors, by mutations taking place in the constitution of the body, and by the constant impact of the passions, has changed in appearance to the point of becoming almost unrecognizable [presque me´connaissable]’’ (158/67, translation modified). The point is that the human soul is only ‘‘almost unrecognizable,’’ which means that despite all the vagaries of time, Rousseau discerns,

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though by no means empirically, a perduring human nature. Bernard Stiegler thus argues that for Rousseau, ‘‘There is a full, pure origin, followed by alteration, corruption, impurity, the fall. The nature of man is not in the way he changes. There is, there has to be, a nature of man before change’’ (Technics and Time 160). Although Geertz has no interest in dismissing the ‘‘governing principle’’ of the human, it would be a mistake to think that he posits ‘‘nature’’—where nature would be in opposition to culture—as this principle. On the contrary, for Geertz nature is culture, the nature of the human is to be cultural. Insofar as Australopithecus does not represent ‘‘an aberrant and ill-fated line of development separate from both hominids and pongids’’ (Interpretation 64), it signals the originary development of the human: ‘‘These more-or-less erect, smallbrained hominids, their hands freed from locomotion, manufactured tools and probably hunted small animals’’ (64). Stiegler argues that the possibility of manufacturing tools marks the ‘‘birth’’ of the human in that the faculty of anticipation necessary to conceive the tool indicates a relation to finitude. This means that the organism’s relation to the inorganic, to the tool, determines the possibility of the human. Stiegler calls this the ‘‘inorganic organization of memory’’ (Technics 174), which makes possible both the distention of past, present, and future, and their synthesis in anticipation. If the human is organized, as Stiegler suggests, in its specific relation to time, its orientation toward the future in its capacity to remember and to anticipate, then Australopithecus is already human.4 Geertz, however, is not concerned with the birth of the human; rather, he is interested in articulating the cultural preconditions for the possibility of the human. ‘‘In Australopithecines we seem to have, therefore, an odd sort of ‘man’ who evidently was capable of acquiring some elements of culture . . . but not others. . . . In fact, as the Homo sapiens brain is about three times as large as that of the Australopithecines, the greater part of human cortical expansion has followed, not preceded, the ‘beginning’ of culture, a rather inexplicable circumstance if the capacity for culture is considered to have been the unitary outcome of a quantitatively slight but qualitatively metastatic change of the freezing-of-water sort’’ (Interpretation 64–65). The fact of the brain’s radical development post-incipient culture means biological and cultural developments are mutually implicated. Accordingly, as Geertz argued some forty years ago in ‘‘The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind,’’ ‘‘culture, rather than being added on . . . to a finished or virtually finished animal, was ingredient . . . in the production of that animal itself’’ (Interpretation 47). As a consequence, culture ‘‘is not just an ornament of human existence, but . . . an

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essential condition for it’’ (46). Therefore, Geertz concludes, ‘‘There is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture’’ (49). But if culture is no longer conceivable as ‘‘complexes of concrete behavior patterns’’ (44), how is it to be thought? ‘‘Culture is best seen as a set of control mechanisms’’ (44), without which ‘‘man’s behavior would be virtually ungovernable, a mere chaos of pointless acts and exploding emotions, his experience virtually shapeless’’ (46). Indeed, Geertz writes, without such control mechanisms, without culture, there would not even be human beings. Rather, there ‘‘would be unworkable monstrosities’’ (49). This passes for anthropological high drama and not only in the 1960s and 1970s: As recently as 1999 Geertz reasserted the mutual dependence of biology and culture in a lecture given on the occasion of the inaugural symposium of the Ferdinand de Saussure Foundation: ‘‘At least since the circumstantial description of the incipient, prelinguistic stages of hominization . . . began about a half century ago . . . the fact that brain and culture co-evolved, mutually dependent the one upon the other for their very realization, has made the conception of human mental functioning as an intrinsically determined intracerebral process . . . unsustainable’’ (Available Light 205). To drive home the impossibility of a ‘‘context-independent’’ understanding of the brain and its development, Geertz remarked, ‘‘Our brains are not in a vat, but in our bodies. Our minds are not in our bodies, but in the world. And as for the world, it is not in our brains, our bodies, or our minds: They are, along with gods, verbs, rocks, and politics, in it’’ (205). The co-dependence of biology and culture in the formation and development of the human being matters to Geertz, because without such mutual implication—that is, were human development possible on purely biological grounds and thus independently of culture—the human being would not be an essentially social and meaningful entity. Were our brains in a vat and nonetheless still capable of developing, Geertz would be unable to argue for the importance of culture in our development (this is obvious). Nor would he be able to argue that culture regulates meaning and does so as an integral part of our biological development. Were our brains in a vat, in sum, we would be context-independent, asocial and meaningless. What is culture, finally, for Geertz? From beginning to end it is the condition of possibility for meaningful and thus genuine relations with others. Late in Available Light, in his discussion of liberalism—which he calls ‘‘still our best [guide] for law, government, and public deportment’’ (246)—and the possibility of a politics that ‘‘does not regard ethnic, religious, racial, linguistic, or regional assertiveness as so much irrationality

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. . . to be suppressed or transcended’’ (245), Geertz explains that such a politics depends on a non-stereotypical, non–‘‘cliche´-ridden conception’’ of liberalism and this ‘‘depends on our gaining a better understanding of what culture, the frames of meaning within which people live and form convictions, their selves, and their solidarities, comes to as an ordering force in human affairs’’ (246). The conception, in The Interpretation of Cultures, of culture as ‘‘control mechanisms’’ means, in Available Light, that what culture controls is the possibility of meaning; or, as he attested in 1973, ‘‘man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’’ (Interpretation 5). Geertz takes ‘‘culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore . . . an interpretive [science] in search of meaning’’ (5). That we are suspended in webs of significance is another way of saying that we—our brains, bodies, minds—are in the world, for, as Geertz notes, meaning is socially constituted; it is public and therefore culture necessarily is as well (12). Because culture is thoroughly, perhaps even absolutely in Geertz’s account, public, and because we are suspended in culture, caught in its webs, our sociality is, as Geertz writes, immediate. That is, according to Geertz, ‘‘human thought is basically both social and public’’ (45). The function of anthropology is to help us understand ourselves—to know ourselves—in our ‘‘immediate circumstances’’ (Available Light 218). This is a responsibility we know all too well; it informs philosophy from at least Plato. For Geertz, self-knowledge always comes to us through knowledge of another: ‘‘It is not that we must love one another or die. . . . It is that we must know one another, and live with that knowledge, or end marooned in a Beckett-world of colliding soliloquoy [sic]’’ (84). While Geertz is quite good at detailing the red herring that is the debate between relativists and anti-relativists, he is less adept at avoiding an opposition of his own, that between those who might argue that meaningful or significant contact is impossible and those (including Geertz) who would argue that such contact is the only hope we have. The limit of the opposition is obvious, however, for, insofar as the human is cultural through and through and insofar as culture is necessarily public, socially constituted, the condition of possibility of soliloquy is social intercourse, that is, discourse. His repeated claim, following Husserl and, most often, Wittgenstein, that there is no private language, obviates the threat of nihilistic incommunicability. As Geertz puts it, ‘‘Thinking consists not of ‘happenings in the head’ . . . but of a traffic in what has been called . . . significant symbols’’ (Interpretation 45). If we are constitutively social and

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if our sociality is shot through with meaning, which is itself an effect of sociality, then, wherever they happen and precisely in order to be significant and thus symbols in the first place, our significant symbols are necessarily open to the other. Geertz argues just this point in Available Light when he observes, ‘‘meaning . . . comes to exist only within language games, communities of discourse, intersubjective systems of reference, ways of worldmaking’’; and, he continues, ‘‘it arises within the frame of concrete social interaction in which something is a something for a you and a me, and not in some secret grotto in the head’’ (76). This means that there is no place for soliloquy. The possibility of soliloquy is marked throughout by dialogue or, more precisely and so as not to limit the control mechanism to logos, by the relation to the other. Despite his insistence on the immediacy of circumstance and our being always already social and public, the necessary openness to the other disturbs Geertz. This is so because the exposure to the other is meaningless and thus not cultural at all. Put simply, for Geertz there is exposure to the other only to the extent that there is the possibility of meaningful contact. Thus, the exposure he understands and upon which he insists is always only inter-human, inter-subjective exposure. Because Geertz understands our infinite exposure to the other in terms of an openness only to other humans, the other is already circumscribed, limited; the other is culturally, hence meaningfully, determined. Indeed, this is the nature of culture: Culture circumscribes the human; it encloses the human and closes it off from the other. The other, however, is not to be capitalized, for sure, but nor is it to be determined in advance of its coming, its arrival. For the other to which we are exposed is the future; it is whatever or whoever comes. The other is a monster. We already know, however, that Geertz never encounters a monster. Although Geertz claims that prior to the advent of culture, thus prior to meaning and control, there would have been only ‘‘unworkable monstrosities,’’ in fact, there never was such a time, for even without culture, according to Geertz, we—whatever we might have been—would have been only ‘‘virtually ungovernable,’’ our experience only ‘‘virtually shapeless’’ (Interpretation 46, emphasis added). There is never a moment when we are not governable, when we do not have experience. We are never not human, for a virtually ungovernable human is nevertheless not an unworkable monster; it is a human being as if it were ungovernable. This means ‘‘we’’ are governable, virtually so, through and through, which means ‘‘we’’ are always already significant, one to the other. Without the guarantee of such meaningfulness, ‘‘we’’ could not survive. In her ‘‘Introduction’’ to The Fate of ‘‘Culture,’’ Sherry B. Ortner remarks that in his

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seminal ‘‘Religion as a Cultural System’’ ‘‘Geertz presents a portrait of human beings as vulnerable creatures who need ‘meaning,’ in the sense of order and purpose and reason, in order to survive’’ (‘‘Introduction’’ 9). On this point, Ortner agrees with Geertz: ‘‘The fundamental assumption that people are always trying to make sense of their lives, always weaving fabrics of meaning, however fragile and fragmentary, still holds. The works of anthropologists who study very poor people or victims of overwhelming violence make it clear that the meaning-making process is of the most profound importance in these circumstances—without it there is rage, dissociation, madness’’ (9). No doubt this is true, but there is also rage, dissociation, and madness absent the circumstances of poverty and victimization. Further, it is not simply the case that rage, dissociation and madness are without reason, as if there were a clear distinction between reason and meaning, on the one hand, and madness or emotional trauma, on the other. Such a distinction is untenable on the grounds of Geertz’s argument. Insofar as he contends that the human becomes possible through co-constitutive biological and cultural development, and insofar as he holds that culture is fundamentally meaningful—both webs of meaning and generative of meaning—it is impossible to argue that rage, dissociation, and madness could ever be mitigated culturally. If ‘‘we’’ become human only through the influence of culture and if madness, for example, is human, then madness is an effect of culture. Madness is, therefore, no less rational, no less meaningful, than our reasonable (i.e., meaningful) fictions in that both madness and reason are necessarily cultural effects. In other words, madness does not go away because we find meaning in the world. On the contrary, madness is one possible meaningful determination of the world. This is the upshot, finally, of the tautology of culture. If culture is defined as both the ground for and the generator of meaning, that is, if culture is meaningful symbols that bestow meaning, and if culture is necessary to the possibility of the human, then, simply put, there is no possible outside of culture. In other words, as a control mechanism, culture is absolute. At best, then, or at worst, ‘‘we’’ are only ever virtually ungovernable. There is, therefore, no possible loss of control. But the cost of such cultural absolutism is the foreclosure of the openness to the other or to the future. There is no future for Geertz and anthropology. For the anthropologically determined human being there is no other and this is necessarily the case in order for Geertz to hold onto the possibility, the illusion perhaps, of genuine contact with other humans. In the second chapter of

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Available Light Geertz makes clear the moral stakes of anthropology and the social sciences writ large: ‘‘The impact of the social sciences upon the character of our lives will finally be determined more by what sort of moral experience they turn out to embody than by their merely technical effects or by how much money they are permitted to spend. As thought is conduct, the results of thought inevitably reflect the quality of the kind of human situation in which they were obtained’’ (22). ‘‘An assessment of the moral implications of the scientific study of human life which is going to consist of more than elegant sneers or mindless celebrations must begin with an inspection of social scientific research as a variety of moral experience’’ (23). Instances of such concern for the quality of our moral experience could be multiplied, but ultimately it comes down to Geertz’s faith in the possibility of genuine encounter with the anthropological other: ‘‘I do not wish to be misunderstood here. No more than I feel that significant social progress . . . is impossible do I feel that genuine human contact across cultural barriers is impossible’’ (33). What constitutes ‘‘genuine human contact’’? It is a good question, not least because it is impossible to answer. Inasmuch as ‘‘we,’’ so called human beings, are always already thrown into the world in which our brains, our bodies, and our minds are located, and insofar as this thrownness is futural, always necessarily open to the future, to what comes, it is impossible to determine what ‘‘genuine human contact’’ would be. To determine the genuine once and for all would require that we close off the constitutively deconstituting exposure to the other. Such closure, however, is impossible, which does not mean that disciplinary strategies do not exist that dream of just such a possible foreclosure. Anthropology is one name for this impossible foreclosure. Philosophy is another. In a recent essay devoted to the possibility of what he calls ‘‘fundamental research,’’ Christopher Fynsk proposes that a pedagogy grounded in the humanities can provoke ‘‘a significant transformation in ethicopolitical awareness’’ and ‘‘a richer relation to . . . everyday experience’’; moreover, he argues that fundamental research in the humanities opens us toward a ‘‘susceptibility to genuine encounter at an interhuman level’’ (Claim 74). Geertz and Fynsk approach the problem of the possibility of a genuine encounter with human others from very different positions and theoretical commitments, one of which is Fynsk’s essential relation to Heidegger, whom Geertz lumps, rather indiscriminately, with Wittgenstein, Gramsci, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, and Bakhtin, as one of ‘‘the enormous engines of postmodern self-doubt’’ (Available Light 95). Another is that while

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Geertz argues for a necessarily cultural origin of the human and thus an origin marked by discipline in that culture names ‘‘control mechanisms’’ and thus subjection, Fynsk imagines the possibility of a necessary releasement or Gelassenheit, a letting-be that, he contends, is powerless (Claim 67).5 Despite these apparently fundamental differences, Fynsk and Geertz, philosophy and anthropology, lie down together. In both cases, a genuine encounter or contact with the other is a meaningful or significant engagement. Fynsk insists on the possibility of ‘‘significant transformations,’’ while Geertz, as we already know, understands the human as basically meaningful insofar as it is by nature cultural. Of course, inasmuch as we are cultural and culture is the control mechanism that frames the meaning of our lives, the threat that we might have meaningless encounters with others worries Geertz and anthropology more generally. Importantly, the meaningfulness—and hence the genuineness—of the encounter depends upon fictions, which in Available Light Geertz calls ‘‘partial fictions half seen-through’’: Despite the ‘‘inherent moral asymmetry of the fieldwork situation’’ (33), ‘‘so long as they [i.e., the fictions] remain only partial fictions (thus partial truths) and but half seen-through (thus half-obscured), the relationship [between ethnographer and informant] progresses well enough’’ (34). The partial fiction at the heart of the possibility of a successful anthropological relationship is that the informant and the ethnographer are ‘‘members of the same cultural universe’’ (34). If this fiction—partial as it is to the anthropologist—is fully exposed and thus if the illusion goes up, say, in a cloud of smoke, the informant and the ethnographer ‘‘are shut up once more in their separate, internally coherent, uncommunicating worlds’’ (34). On the one hand, a certain fiction or suspension of disbelief, an illusion, is necessary. This is so because we are not, apparently, part of the same cultural universe, hence the ‘‘moral asymmetry’’ of the ethnographic scene. On the other hand, such illusion corrupts: ‘‘The professional ethic [a certain coldness and dispassion] rests on the personal [a certain concern and commitment] and draws its strength from it; we force ourselves to see out of a conviction that blindness—or illusion—cripples virtue as it cripples people’’ (40). The blind are crippled morally and physically. For anthropology to work there is a necessary illusion, fiction, which Geertz recognizes runs the risk of moral turpitude. In The Interpretation of Cultures he explained that ‘‘anthropological writings are interpretations. . . . They are, thus, fictions; fictions, in the sense that they are ‘something made,’ ‘something fashioned’—the original meaning of fictio—not that they are false, unfactual, or merely ‘as if’ thought experiments’’ (15). Nearly thirty years later

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he reports that it is the ‘‘fiction, not falsehood,’’ ‘‘of a single moral community’’ to which both ethnographer and informant belong, ‘‘that lies at the heart of successful anthropological field research’’ (Available Light 37). The difficulty or burden for anthropology is not that there is an inevitable moral asymmetry in the anthropological encounter; rather, the problem is ‘‘to recognize the moral tension, the ethical ambiguity, implicit in the encounter of anthropologist and informant’’ (37). To be able to discern this tension and ambiguity and to be able, as Geertz writes, ‘‘to dissipate it through one’s actions and one’s attitudes’’ is the condition of possibility for encounter ‘‘to be authentic,’’ that is, ‘‘if it is to actually happen’’ (37). We dissipate the tension by way of the fiction that we share a common moral universe. The palliative fiction, this illusion, which is made, fashioned, but by no means false or made up, however, cannot have any other structure than the one Geertz dismisses as unethical, namely, the structure of an ‘‘as if’’ thought experiment. Without the morally suspect ‘‘as if,’’ anthropology has no future, and Geertz, for one, is sure that we need anthropology now more than ever: ‘‘Resisting the coalescence of the dimensions of political community, keeping the various lines of affinity that turn abstract populations into public actors separate and visible’’—functions of anthropological practice, fieldwork—‘‘seems suddenly, once again, conceptually useful, morally imperative, politically realistic’’ (235). In short, a morally suspicious practice, the necessary ‘‘as if’’ of anthropology, is morally imperative. The ground for an ethical, or in Geertz’s terms, a moral relation to the other is precisely unethical, immoral. This is so because without the ‘‘as if,’’ the illusion or fiction of a shared moral universe, made but not made up (what is the difference here?), we could not make sense of cultures, we could not make sense of ourselves. Without the ‘‘as if’’ structure, culture could not make sense of our existence. There would be no possibility of inter-cultural intercourse. More importantly, there may not be any possibility for meaning or culture as meaningful at all. We already know that even before the human becomes ‘‘fully human’’ according to Geertz, it has access to culture: It manufactures tools, develops hunting techniques, manipulates some signs and has begun to form groups. Despite this cultural development, it is not yet fully human. Why not? Despite being technologically overdetermined, Australopithecus is not yet meaningful. Although Australopithecus had access to ‘‘elemental forms of cultural, or . . . proto-cultural, activity (simple toolmaking, hunting, and so on)’’ (Interpretation 47), for it to become fully human would require a certain perfection and a certain dependence: ‘‘The perfection

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of tools, the adoption of organized hunting and gathering practices, the beginnings of true family organization, the discovery of fire, and, most critically, . . . the increasing reliance upon systems of significant symbols (language, art, myth, ritual) for orientation, communication, and selfcontrol all created for man a new environment to which he was then obliged to adapt’’ (47–48). Of this list, only two items are of any cultural significance for Geertz, because Australopithecus, who is not yet fully human and who is thus not yet culturally determined, already possessed at least some skill in tool-making and hunting techniques. First, the ‘‘increasing reliance upon systems of significant symbols’’ introduces what Geertz calls ‘‘true speech’’ (64), which would have been necessary for the concomitant possibility of ‘‘traffic in . . . significant symbols’’ (45). Symbolization is possible only insofar as some thing, ‘‘anything, in fact, . . . is disengaged from its mere actuality and used to impose meaning upon experience’’ (45). The symbol—and along with it, the human—arises at the moment arbitrariness enters the world, at the moment whatever is, mere actuality in Geertz’s terms, is opened to referral, to difference, and thus to potentiality. The irony of Geertz’s description is difficult to calculate: The idea that the increasing reliance upon significant symbols ultimately fulfills the human, completes him/it/her, depends upon the concomitant assumption that prior to this dependence upon meaningful symbols, things were simply what they were. In other words, in the pre-cultural world of not-yet-fully-human beings the world was simply actual, in itself: There were no signs, no referentiality, no representation. There was, then, no as if. There was neither meaning nor the lack of meaning. Whatever was simply was, fully, absolutely. Geertz thus imagines a pre-cultural, pre-human Aristotelian world of actuality, of perfection (telos). In De Anima, for instance, Aristotle explains, ‘‘Actual knowledge is identical with its object [To d’ auto estin he kat’ energeian episteme to pragmati]’’ (Basic Works 592; 430a). The Metaphysics repeats this absolute identification: ‘‘And thought thinks on itself because it shares the nature of the object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought in coming into contact with and thinking its objects, so that thought and object of thought are the same’’ (880; 1072b). In Geertz, this actuality, which Aristotle calls entelecheia, is the condition of the ‘‘world’’ before arbitrariness intervenes and corrupts the mere actuality of what is. Arbitrariness thus manifests itself as the fall into time, for mediation fractures the unity of being. But this nonetheless necessitates, on Geertz’s account, that there was a ‘‘time,’’ a pre-cultural moment, of plenitude when we were what we were, without however being human; without being able to say—and thus to sign, to

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symbolize, to represent, but also to know—what we were. At that impossible moment the world would have been perfect, absolutely in itself, but it would not have known it and there would have been no need for anthropology, philosophy, or any other human science. In Geertz’s account, the ‘‘true’’ and the ‘‘perfect’’ become possible at the moment the human realizes—actualizes—itself as incomplete, and thus as open to the other, to the future. The perfection of tools and true speech are signs of the human. Indeed, the perfection of tools includes the use of speech, of language as a tool, that is, as a significant symbol and thus as a control mechanism and a communicative device. Because significant symbols are possible only once there is the arbitrariness of the sign, deception also becomes possible as a necessary effect of true speech and of the perfection, the completion and fulfillment, of the human. The human becomes human at the moment it can say ‘‘as if,’’ whether to deceive the other or to deceive itself, to deceive the other itself, and thus to institute itself ‘‘as such.’’ At that moment, the human is made and made up. The human, therefore, is neither more nor less than this fiction. Second, coeval with the fiction of a paradise lost, of a ‘‘time’’ prior to the fall into arbitrariness and the corruption of representation, is the anthropological fiction—the ‘‘as if’’—of the family: ‘‘the beginnings of true family organization’’ (48). Where does Geertz, or anyone, draw the line between family organization and true family organization? The true family organization is strictly symbolic. The true family, the family as such, is a fiction, an illusion. The family has no natural existence, no actuality beyond the ‘‘as if’’; it is man-made and made up. It is perhaps no coincidence that Geertz invokes the true family in the same list in which he notes the increasing reliance upon significant symbols, for the idea of the family indicates a symbolic bond and instances a cultural control mechanism: The idea of the family provides for the possibility of significant or meaningful relations. Because for Geertz meaning enters the world only at the moment arbitrariness becomes possible, at the moment what is no longer simply is, if there ever were such a moment, the family, qua significant relation to and among others, is necessarily arbitrarily determined ‘‘as if’’ it were natural. Consequently, the family is not and yet it binds human beings together. As a cultural control mechanism, the family is strictly normative; thus, it achieves the status of ‘‘nature.’’ In the Preface to Available Light Geertz acknowledges his philosophical apprenticeship to Ludwig Wittgenstein. His commitment to ‘‘ferreting out the singularities of other peoples’ ways-of-life’’ (xi) became easier, he attests, in the aftermath of the appearance of ‘‘the later Wittgenstein’’ (xi),

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‘‘his attack upon the idea of a private language’’ and the related ‘‘notion of a language game’’ (xii). According to Geertz, it was Wittgenstein’s insistence on the details rather than the abstractions that narrowed the gap between philosophy and anthropology. This is most saliently expressed in Wittgenstein’s maxim, ‘‘Back to the rough ground!’’: ‘‘The notion that anthropology . . . is exploring the rough ground on which it is possible for thought . . . to gain traction is for me,’’ Geertz explains, ‘‘not only a compelling idea in itself; it is the idea, unfocused and unformulated, that led me to migrate into the field, in both senses of ‘field’ in the first place’’ (xii). Wittgenstein’s philosophical dedication to the ‘‘rough ground’’ had an obvious attraction to a former student of philosophy who believed, as Geertz still does, ‘‘that the answers to our most general questions . . . are to be found in the fine detail of lived life’’ (xi). ‘‘Back to the rough ground!’’ thus serves as a methodological principle and a rallying cry for the kind of cultural anthropology Geertz practices, but the organizational principle determinative of culture is Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance. Neither Wittgenstein nor ‘‘family resemblance’’ are constant references for Geertz, but it is not unimportant that The Interpretation of Cultures’ introductory essay cites Wittgenstein and Available Light spells out, at both the beginning and the end, Geertz’s debt to his thought. Near the end of this late-career assessment of anthropological practice, in an essay that concludes with Geertz indicating what he considers anthropology’s ‘‘deepest and most central commitment: the moral obligation of hope’’ (Available Light 260), Geertz deploys Wittgenstein in order to think through the possibility of identity in difference: It is not, to adapt Wittgenstein’s famous image of a rope, a single thread which runs all the way through them that defines them and makes them into some kind of a whole. It is the overlappings of differing threads, intersecting, entwined, one taking up where another breaks off, all of them posed in effective tensions with one another to form a composite body, a body locally disparate, globally integral. (227)

Local differences add up to global integrity; here integrity must be understood in the sense of wholeness or completeness and, morally, as free from corruption or division. In difference, sameness: This is anthropology’s moral imperative. The choice of Wittgenstein is not fortuitous, for Wittgenstein’s notion of resemblance is ultimately no less normative and moral than is Geertz’s conception of the origin of the human in the development of the (true) family. In the Philosophical Investigations and, earlier, in The Blue Book, Wittgenstein invoked family resemblance or family likeness to explain the

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unity-in-difference of games in general and of language games particularly: ‘‘Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all,—but that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all ‘language’ ’’ (PI, §65). If, for example, Wittgenstein observes, ‘‘you look’’ at games—at whatever is called a game—’’you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that’’ (§66). Wittgenstein explains the relationship that determines the set of games by invoking family resemblance: ‘‘I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and crisscross in the same way.—And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family’’ (§67). Wittgenstein had already deployed this metaphor in The Blue Book: ‘‘We are inclined to think that there must be something in common to all games, say, and that this common property is the justification for applying the general term ‘game’ to the various games; whereas games form a family the members of which have family likenesses. Some of them have the same nose, others the same eyebrows and others again the same way of walking; and these likenesses overlap’’ (17). Later in the same text he explains, ‘‘If one asks what the different processes of expecting someone to tea have in common, the answer is that there is no single feature in common to all of them, though there are many common features overlapping. These cases of expectation form a family; they have family likenesses which are not clearly defined’’ (20).6 Wittgenstein argues that although we can recognize games or ‘‘expectingsomeone-for-tea’’ in every instance that we encounter similar phenomena, nevertheless no single trait essentially determines these phenomena. They are marked, as Joachim Schulte points out, by the presence not of common characteristics, ‘‘but of incomplete similarities’’ (111). Schulte’s ‘‘incomplete similarities,’’ however, is perhaps an infelicitous phrase in that it suggests the possibility of the completion of such similarities, that ideally the resemblances would be complete or total, but that empirically something is lacking. That these similarities are incomplete, in other words, would be a matter of circumstance or history. This is not the case for Wittgenstein. No less interesting is Wittgenstein’s refusal to identify family resemblances beyond apparent or phenomenal likenesses (build, gestures, features, color of eyes, etc.; even temperament would be understood in terms

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of its manifestation). In the Philosophical Investigations he remarks that although ‘‘we feel as if we had to penetrate phenomena,’’ ‘‘our investigation . . . is directed . . . towards the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena’’ (§90). Wittgenstein is not concerned with the essence of what appears, but with its appearance; this corresponds to his interest not in the essence of language, but in its use. Indeed, he complains of the question of essence, ‘‘we ask: ‘what is language?’, ‘what is a proposition?’ And the answer to these questions is to be given once for all; and independently of any future experience’’ (§92). In other words, the question of essence ignores the possible use, which is itself always open to the future. Wittgenstein thus dismisses the question of essence. In The Blue Book, for example, he writes: ‘‘If we say thinking is essentially operating with signs, the first question you might ask is: ‘what are signs?’—Instead of giving any kind of general answer to this question, I shall propose to you to look closely at particular cases which we should call ‘operating with signs’ ’’ (16). Wittgenstein displaces what he calls our ‘‘craving for generality’’ (17), and thus our craving for the essence, by recourse to a series of examples or particular cases. It is in the context of such exemplarity that, in The Blue Book, he introduces, first, the idea of language games and, second, the notion of family likenesses. The example of family resemblance is introduced as an analogy, as a way to understand language games by means of something that is proportionally related to them. The problem, then, is one of analogy or analogical thinking: Language games are like family resemblances; we can talk about language games and family resemblances as if they were the same. According to the Oxford English Dictionary and to Wittgenstein’s own argument, ‘‘analogy’’ means likeness. It effects the normatization of relation. The rhetorical situation of language games within the horizon of family resemblance already guarantees the likeness, the familiarity of the two. From the beginning, there is the possibility of likeness, resemblance. Before the recognition of likeness, as the possibility of its recognition, there is the ‘‘as,’’ the ‘‘as if.’’ Proportionality is guaranteed beforehand in the possibility of analogical thinking. Further, although Wittgenstein attests that ‘‘words have those meanings we have given them; and we give them meanings by explanations’’ (27), his notion of family in both The Blue Book and Philosophical Investigations depends—in his own examples—on the ‘‘normal’’ sense of family: a group of humans who in one way or another look like one another, without, however, each of them necessarily sharing all the same common features. This means that the family is determined within and by a horizon of expectation, by the possibility of recognition, by the ‘‘as’’ structure. We

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do not want to forget that Geertz will have rejected the ‘‘as if’’ as a falsehood, a deception. It is precisely from the ‘‘as if’’ that Geertz wants to protect anthropology’s moral imperative. Yet, it is the ‘‘as if’’ structure that makes possible recognition of the family and of the family of resemblances, in the first place. Use of the ‘‘normal’’ (Blue Book 33) must be considered, therefore, in the context of Wittgenstein’s attempt to displace the ‘‘craving for generality’’ and ‘‘general rules’’ as the ground upon which to think language and meaning. The ‘‘normal,’’ the ‘‘everyday,’’ the ‘‘usual’’: These are concepts that trouble Wittgenstein’s decision to give us a series of particular cases and to understand them with the notion of family resemblances, for the ‘‘normal’’ sense of a word is not in any way empirically given: It is from the start an abstraction that ostensibly grounds itself upon a calculation of particular uses of words, but which in fact is given from the very beginning as the regulative possibility for the use of the word. The normal, in other words, falls under the criticism that Wittgenstein levels at the general rule: namely, that it seeks to define something once and for all without any relation to future experience. Indeed, far from thinking language in the singularity of its articulation beyond the limits of subjectivity, Wittgenstein’s insistence on ‘‘use’’ rather than rules is already anthropologically determined. As Stiegler notes, ‘‘Use is misleading in that the object is subject to an anthropological logic that remains absolutely foreign to it’’ (Technics 70). In brief, for Wittgenstein there can be no family without resemblance, no possibility of a family that does not look like itself. The members of a family resemble one another—and not just families of language games, but families of people, ethnic groups, races, etc.—however incompletely or partially. With respect to the family, no doubt resemblances are always partial. At bottom, if there is what might be called an anthropological horizon, it rests upon the family as the possibility of both culture and the human. The family, moreover, is always thought in terms of family resemblance. The family as family resemblance operates in Geertz’s idea of a principle of selection that determines the future of society: ‘‘As culture . . . accumulated and developed, a selective advantage was given to those individuals in the population most able to take advantage of it—the effective hunter, the persistent gatherer, the adept toolmaker, the resourceful leader’’ (Interpretation 48). For Geertz, like selects like until the birth of ‘‘fully human Homo sapiens’’ (48). Here Geertz does not fall back on biological determinism; his is a cultural evolution: The better hunters select the better breeders, those who most effectively manipulate symbolic systems self-select,

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and on and on. Such cultural adaptation has its beginning not in Darwin, but in the Greeks, more specifically, in an argument between Plato and Aristotle. Geertz’s affinity for Wittgenstein notwithstanding, his understanding of the true family as a culturally determined control mechanism, which, insofar as culture is human nature for Geertz, effectively naturalizes the family, ought perhaps to be read alongside Hannah Arendt’s remarks on the family in The Human Condition, which begins with a consideration of the Greek conception of the relation of private life, or the household, to public life, or the polis. Arendt contends that ‘‘According to Greek thought, the human capacity for political organization is not only different from but stands in direct opposition to that natural association whose center is the home (oikia) and the family’’ (24). In Arendt’s account of Greek self-understanding, the ‘‘distinctive trait of the household sphere’’ (30), or the natural association of the family, was neither equality nor freedom, but rather ‘‘that in it men lived together because they were driven by their wants and needs. The driving force was life itself . . . which, for its individual maintenance and its survival as the life of the species needs the company of others’’ (30). Pages later she argues, ‘‘The private realm of the household was the sphere where the necessities of life, of individual survival as well as of the continuity of the species, were taken care of and guaranteed’’ (45). It follows, then, that in order to leave the household, or the natural—and thus familial—association behind, one must have mastered necessity, thereby freeing oneself to the ‘‘good life’’: ‘‘It was ‘good’ to the extent that by having mastered the necessities of sheer life, by being freed from labor and work, and by overcoming the innate urge of all living creatures for their own survival, it was no longer bound to the biological life process’’ (37). Yet, in freeing oneself from the natural realm, one ineluctably risks one’s life, for in the public realm biological survival is no longer a matter of interest or concern: ‘‘Whoever entered the political realm had first to be ready to risk his life’’ (36). On the one hand, there is a natural desire to overcome the threat to life posed by nature, that is, by necessity. We associate naturally and thus form households and families in order to guarantee our individual survival, as well as that of the species. At the moment we secure ourselves against necessity, however, we leave the household, the private realm, in order to enter and thus to constitute the public sphere, which in turn necessarily threatens our lives. Despite the threat that the public sphere poses to our lives, it would be a mistake to think it would be best to avoid this risk by

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remaining at home, in our proper place. Arendt writes, ‘‘In ancient feeling the privative trait of privacy, indicated in the word itself, was allimportant; it meant literally a state of being deprived of something, and even of the highest and most human of man’s capacities. A man who lived only a private life . . . was not fully human’’ (38). And, later, ‘‘One of the characteristics of privacy . . . was that man existed in this sphere not as a truly human being but only a specimen of the animal species man-kind. This, precisely, was the ultimate reason for the tremendous contempt held for it by antiquity’’ (45–46). Nevertheless, the clear distinction between the private and public realms is already troubled in that the destruction of the private realm through the determination of the public is compromised by the necessity for the public citizen to have a place to call his own: ‘‘Historically, it is very likely that the rise of the city-state and the public realm occurred at the expense of the private realm of family and household. . . . What prevented the polis from violating the private lives of its citizens and made it hold sacred the boundaries surrounding each property was not respect for private property as we understand it, but the fact that without owning a house a man could not participate in the affairs of the world because he had no location in it which was properly his own’’ (29– 30). The locus of enunciation, therefore, is always private, privative, and necessarily idiosyncratic; yet, what one speaks from this site is necessarily not private and no longer deprived: It is the public speech of the citizen, of an equal, hence, of a fully human being. Arendt recognizes the logical problem this poses, but in her account Plato, for one, did not: ‘‘Even Plato, whose political plans foresaw the abolition of private property and an extension of the public sphere to the point of annihilating private life altogether, still speaks with great reverence of Zeus Herkeios, the protector of border lines, and calls the horoi, the boundaries between one estate and another, divine, without seeing any contradiction’’ (30). Perhaps it is less the case that Plato did not see the contradiction, than that he understood the contradiction was necessary. At the same time that the borders between the public and the private were impossible to maintain, it was no less the case that they were necessarily reinforced. Otherwise, political life would be impossible. Were it possible, in other words, for the political realm to extend itself ‘‘to the point of annihilating private life altogether,’’ as Arendt interprets the upshot of Plato’s project, the political realm no less than the private would be destroyed, for in the absolute annihilation of the household, the polis would also annihilate its own ground, the space that guarantees the survival of the species and thus makes possible the freedom of the polis. The absolution of the polis literally

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absolves the place, the locus of enunciation, of the citizen, for the citizen, according to Arendt’s understanding, can only speak from its own place, from within the confines, as it were, of its own property. Thus the sanctity of the borders, the horoi. Yet, in speaking within these borders, one always speaks without them: The citizen addresses those who are not within the household. This is so because speech is not a trait of the private man; it is of no use at home. Arendt explains: ‘‘It was not just an opinion or theory of Aristotle but a simply historical fact that the foundation of the polis was preceded by the destruction of all organized units resting on kinship, such as the phratria and the phyle. Of all the activities necessary and present in human communities, only two were deemed to be political and to constitute what Aristotle called the bios politikos, namely action (praxis) and speech (lexis), out of which rises the realm of human affairs (ta ton anthropon pragmata, as Plato used to call it) from which everything merely necessary or useful is strictly excluded’’ (24–25). The relation of speech to action is expressed in rhetoric, which has no place in the household because the members of the household are neither equal nor free. The household is a tyranny and is ruled by command, by violence, and, as Arendt argues, ‘‘sheer violence is mute’’ (26). Consequently, ‘‘In Greek self-understanding, to force people by violence, to command rather than persuade, were prepolitical ways to deal with people characteristic of life outside the polis, of home and family life, where the household head ruled with uncontested, despotic powers, or of life in the barbarian empires of Asia, whose despotism was frequently likened to the organization of the household’’ (26–27). Within the household, however, and thus without speech qua the capacity to persuade, we are not yet fully human. At home, in ourselves, we remain animals, simply the species mankind. This is what it means to be prepolitical. Aristotle’s zoon politikon or zoon logon ekhon sets the fully human being in opposition ‘‘to the natural association experienced in household life’’ (27) insofar as the fully human being, and therefore the human being immersed in human affairs, has the faculty of speech. The faculty of speech, however, is not natural: It arises in opposition to the natural order of things, in opposition to necessity and to life. Inasmuch as speech opens the human being to itself in its fullness qua zoon politikon, speech also necessarily threatens the life of the human being in that it takes the human being out of itself, turns it away from itself as the object of its own self-interest and thus jeopardizes itself in the name of the polis, that is, in the name of the political community. The family, then, is natural, but not fully human. Speech takes us out of the family, destroys the

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family qua natural association, and opens us toward political community and our humanity. Nevertheless, it remains essential that the borders of private life—and the privation constitutive of that life—remain protected and enforced, for without the privation of speech, and thus of our humanity, our equality and freedom, that is, without the sphere of mute sovereignty in and over our home, there would be no place, no proper place, in and from which to speak and thus no possibility of the polis, hence of our humanity, freedom and equality. On the one hand, by the law of nature, we cannot speak in the household; speech is by no means necessary or even tolerated there. On the other hand, we cannot not speak from the household and this precisely in order that we might leave the household, become human, that is, free and equal. This is the constitutive aporia of Greek life and perhaps of life in general. Arendt is correct in her assessment that ‘‘absolute, uncontested rule [i.e., the household] and a political realm properly speaking were mutually exclusive’’ (28), but it is no less correct to note that these two realms are also indissociable. Moreover, insofar as the limit between the public and the private is the limit of our humanity, this limit cannot simply be ignored as if it made no difference. On the contrary, it is the anthropological limit par excellence. It is the problem—in the Greek sense of limit or border—of the distinction, in Geertz’s terms, between the family and the true family and, as such, this limit or problem must always be negotiated, in short, trespassed. When Arendt refers to Plato’s maintenance of property boundaries, she refers to the late dialogue Laws, specifically to the following passage concerning agricultural law: ‘‘At their head shall stand a law of the sacred landmark, and it shall run thus. No man shall move his neighbor’s landmark, whether that neighbor be a fellow citizen, or the property lie on the border marches and the neighbor be thus an alien. The act must be held to be a literal ‘moving of the not-to-be-moved,’ and every man must be readier to venture the shifting of the heaviest boulder that marks no boundary than to move the tiny stone, consecrate by oath to heaven, that marks off the land of a friend or a foe. For Zeus the god of common clanship is witness to one of these sanctities, Zeus protector of the stranger to the other’’ (842e–843a; 1407).7 The Greek term for law, nomos, derives from agricultural and husbandry practices, and refers to pasturage, to the division of land and the setting to graze upon it of livestock. It also has the sense of an abode allotted or assigned to one. The law is first, then, the law of earth, its proper possession and regulation, its determination in its

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decision or division and normatization or regulated use. The determination of the land as being properly one’s own and thus inviolable effectively grounds Plato’s conception of the unity of purpose, which in Laws decides the relations amongst citizens: ‘‘A citizen has already a calling which will make full demands on him, in view of the constant practice and wide study it involves, in the preservation and enjoyment of the public social order. . . . But human capacity, we may fairly say, is never equal to the finished exercise of two callings or crafts. Nay more, none of us has the gift of following one craft himself while he superintends another’s practice of a second. Hence we must from the start take this as a principle of our society. No one shall be smith and carpenter at once, and further, no one who is a carpenter shall be permitted to superintend others who are engaged in smithwork, to the neglect of his own craft. . . . Each artisan in the society must have his single craft, and must earn his living by that trade and no other. The urban commissioners must exert themselves to keep this law in force’’ (846d–847a; 1410–1411). At issue for Plato is the policing of the borders for the good of the polis. The strict division of labor brooks no trespass: ‘‘If a native stray from the pursuit of goodness into some trade or craft, they shall correct him by reproach and degradation until he be brought back again into the straight course; if an alien follow two crafts, there shall be correction in the shape of imprisonment, fine, or expulsion from the city to constrain him to play one part, not several’’ (847a–b; 1411). Plato thus grounds the republic on the division of labor, which, by normalizing and regulating everyone’s relation to the state, effectively produces a unity of purpose. Because each citizen does one thing better than other things, in the interest of both the republic’s and the individual person’s wellbeing, he/she should do that one thing and not something else. Put simply, cobblers cobble, but they don’t farm; farmers farm, but they don’t weave; weavers weave, but they don’t defend the republic. In this unity of purpose there is what Socrates calls the ‘‘natural right’’ of each to do that which he or she does best. This ‘‘natural right’’ amounts to ‘‘the original principle and a sort of type of justice’’ at the very ‘‘foundation of the state’’ (Republic 443c; 685). It is just, therefore, that each does that to which he or she is best suited. The concept of ‘‘natural right’’ extends as well to the problem of populating the state. As in Geertz, so in Plato before him: Like are to mate with like. Socrates states, ‘‘the first and chief injunction that the gods lay upon the rulers is that of nothing else are they to be such careful guardians and so intently observant as of the intermixing of these metals in the souls of their offspring’’ (415b; 659).

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The unity of purpose that regulates the production of material goods and civil defense also informs reproduction and prohibits mixing. Yet, in order to secure the state from internal strife, the rule against mixing must be concealed so that civic unity can be maintained. Socrates points out that ‘‘women shall all be common, and that no parent shall know its own offspring nor any child its parent’’ (457d; 696). The prohibition of private habitation with any one woman and the in-commonness of the children make possible, Socrates claims, the ‘‘greater good’’ of the state, for it ‘‘binds’’ the state ‘‘together and makes it one’’ (462b; 701). This unity— itself the effect of the double policy of the ‘‘natural right’’ to unmixed or purity of purpose and the complete in-commonness of women and children such that no one recognizes the ‘‘natural’’ relation of one to another—allows everyone to say ‘‘in unison such words as ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’ ’’ (462c; 701). Timaeus repeats this strategy: ‘‘For all wives and children were to be in common, to the intent that no one should ever know his own child, but they were to imagine that they were all one family [nomiousi de pantes pantas autous homogeneis]’’ (18c; 1154). The imagination of familial unity spells out the cultural overdetermination of the family in Plato, for while all are to imagine that they are one, in fact, ‘‘the chief magistrates, male and female, should contrive secretly [mechanasthai], by use of certain lots, so to arrange the nuptial meeting that the bad of either sex and the good of either sex might pair with their like’’ (18e; 1154). This subterfuge or contrivance, which effectively determines the family as a deception, a fiction, challenges the Republic’s division of labor and interests according to the principle of the good of the whole. The structuring principle of the just state, which requires no one to do that to which he or she is not suited, but rather has everyone do only that which he or she does well, according to Plato’s logic, ought to obviate the problem of having to keep the ‘‘good’’ and the ‘‘bad’’ separate. In other words, there is nothing natural about this family and the principle of selection that governs it. The just state may well be just, but it is also and necessarily unjust insofar as justice depends upon decisions of necessarily interested parties. Plato’s demand that such decisions concerning selection be done in secrecy makes clear the temporal limit of the family, its essential corruptibility. In Plato’s account, then, the family is necessarily imagined in secret ‘‘as if’’ it were natural. In his Politics Aristotle disagreed with Plato on the issue of family recognition, but did so on the grounds of the inevitability of family resemblance.

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The family (oikos, ‘‘house,’’ ‘‘household’’), Aristotle writes, ‘‘is the association established by nature for the supply of men’s everyday wants’’ (1252b; 1128). The family is ‘‘the union of those who cannot exist without each other; namely, of male and female, that the race may continue’’ (1252a; 1127). This union, moreover, ‘‘is formed, not of deliberate purpose, but because, in common with other animals and with plants, mankind have a natural desire to leave behind them an image of themselves’’ (1252a; 1127–1128). Aristotle conceives reproduction in terms of the desire to reproduce images of ourselves: The survival of the race or species is thought in terms of representation. The first appearance of the family is the family portrait. The village is an extended family portrait: ‘‘The most natural form of the village appears to be that of a colony from the family, composed of the children and grandchildren, who are said to be suckled with the same milk’’ (1252b; 1128). Once several villages ‘‘are united in a single complete community,’’ ‘‘the state comes into existence, originating in the bare needs of life’’ (1252b; 1129). Far from being less natural than the family, however, the state is the most natural insofar as it is the end, the telos, of the family and the village, because, according to Aristotle, ‘‘the nature of a thing is its end’’ (1252b; 1129). Consequently, ‘‘the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is clearly prior to the part’’ (1253a; 1129, emphasis added). In this gesture Aristotle determines the relation of part to whole: The whole makes the part recognizable as such in that it determines the essence of the part as belonging to the whole, which is by nature more than the sum of its parts. The possessive is instructive: Only the whole can be said to possess. Parts have a relation to themselves only within the context of the whole. Thus the state, which is the whole, necessarily precedes the parts, because, Aristotle writes, ‘‘if the whole body be destroyed, there will be no foot or hand, except in an equivocal sense [ei me homonumos], as we might speak of a stone hand; for when destroyed the hand will be no better than that’’ (1253a; 1129). The stone hand, in Aristotle’s account, is no part of the whole. Entirely unnatural, hence an artifice or mere representation, it is thus no part of the body. The hand cut off from the unity of the body is only a technical entity that, within Aristotle’s logic, is worthless. Whereas in Plato the unity of the state is the supreme good, Aristotle asks whether ‘‘it is not obvious that a state may at length attain such a degree of unity as to be no longer a state?’’ (Politics 1261a; 1146). He answers: ‘‘the nature of the state is to be a plurality, and in tending to greater unity, from being a state, it becomes a family, and from being a family, an individual; for the family may be said to be more than the state,

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and the individual than the family. So that we ought not to attain this greatest unity even if we could, for it would be the destruction of the state’’ (1261a; 1146–47). How do we read the remainder of the stone hand in this Aristotelian reading of Plato’s dream of unity? The more unified the state becomes, the more it resembles the family; the more unified the family, the more it resembles the individual. This would be the destruction of the state not through its reduction to the constituent parts that cannot exist without the state, which, being their end and nature, necessarily anticipates them, but through its absolute unification or actualization. There is no individual without or outside of the family, no family that is not always already a part of the state. Yet, the more like itself the state becomes, the more it actualizes and thus perfects itself, the closer it comes to its own destruction. In order to survive (itself ), the state must contain within ‘‘itself’’ a relation to that which it is not: That is, the state must only look like ‘‘itself’’ without being absolutely itself. Put simply, in turning into itself, in becoming itself, the state must nonetheless not close off a relation to that which it is not. Thus, the stone hand—the always already destroyed appendage or member that looks like the hand, but is not the hand and therefore is not a part of the body—remains in touch with the body. The stone hand gives the state a hand. The prosthesis is not simply added to the body; rather, the body is prostheticized through its determinate relation to the inorganic prosthesis.8 If the state is the natural end, the telos, of the family, it nonetheless encrypts within ‘‘itself’’ an unnatural prosthesis, a stone hand, useless, dead, always already destroyed, lifeless, but necessary. Aristotle concedes Plato’s contention that it is ‘‘best for the community to have the greatest degree of unity,’’ but he argues that such unity is not necessarily attained ‘‘from the fact ‘of all men saying ‘‘mine’’ and ‘‘not mine’’ at the same time’ ’’ (Politics 1261b; 1148). On the contrary, he claims that common possession results in a troubled state, ‘‘for that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it’’ (1261b; 1148). This would be the result of Plato’s state founded upon the unity of the family. Aristotle indicates that Plato’s family runs aground on the shoals of resemblance: ‘‘nor is there any way of preventing brothers and children and fathers and mothers from sometime recognizing one another; for children are born like their parents, and they will necessarily be finding indications of their relationship to one another’’ (1262a; 1149). He points to ‘‘Upper Libya, where women are common, [but] nevertheless the children who are born are assigned to their respective fathers on the ground of their likeness’’ (1262a; 1149). Aristotle introduces the notion of family

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resemblance as the natural and incontrovertible ground for identification and unity, yet, it is clear that family resemblance is equivocal. Given Aristotle’s dismissal of Plato’s model republic on the basis of a lack of interest, on the one hand, and his understanding of the naturalness of family resemblance, on the other hand, his critique of usury is disturbing. Usury, Aristotle explains, ‘‘makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it’’ (Politics 1258b; 1141). Interest derives from an incestuous relation: ‘‘And the term interest [tokos, offspring], which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money, because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural’’ (1258b; 1141). Of interest in Aristotle’s rebuttal of Plato, and his distinction between economy and chrematistics, is the play of nature: Resemblance is natural and perhaps both inevitable and unmistakable when it comes to human offspring, but unnatural in metals or money.9 Even in the natural realm, Marc Shell observes, ‘‘Aristotle argues that reproduction resulting in nonidentical offspring is typical of ‘creatures which come into being not as a result of copulation of living animals, but of putrescent soil and out of residues’ ’’ (Economy 94n13; Shell quotes from Aristotle, Generation of Animals 71a). The production of nonidentical offspring, while perhaps natural, is an effect of death, decay. It is the work of the dead. Nonidentical offspring, that which bears a relation but perhaps no resemblance to ‘‘us,’’ is itself a remainder, the addition or multiplication of an inorganic residue. Its production is always reproduction and, thus, inhuman. Throughout the long history of anthropology, it will have been a question of the family. In Aristotle, the state conceives itself in the family and to the family it returns: The instant in which the state becomes too much like itself, it dies as state and returns in and as the family. There can be no doubt, moreover, that for Aristotle everything turns on the necessary possibility of resemblance, of appearing to be like itself. Yet, according to a logic that Aristotle cannot acknowledge, such constitutive resemblance ultimately is possible only insofar as it is impossible, only insofar as at the heart of the living family—and as that which brings together all its parts into a whole, into a house or household, and thus on its hearth—rests a stone hand. That which is most natural, most immediately and properly our own, our family, which we know and experience as such because we resemble ourselves qua family and familiar, is unnatural, technological, prosthetic, from the start. Nothing could be more foreign than we are to ourselves. This is the inevitable conclusion of any reading of the family,

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from Aristotle to Geertz.10 And it is precisely this conclusion that makes it necessary to return to Plato, and specifically to Timaeus, in order to reconsider his determination of the family at the origin of the cosmos. Timaeus begins with the suggestion of a lack and its supply without addition or accumulation: Socrates counts, ‘‘One, two, three, but where, my dear Timaeus, is the fourth of those who were yesterday my guests and are to be my entertainers today?’’ (17a; 1153). Upon hearing that the fourth has become ill, Socrates remarks, ‘‘Then . . . you and the two others must supply his place’’ (17a; 1153). Three will supply the place of four. Timaeus begins short-handed and yet nonetheless whole, complete. Lacking one, nothing is lacking. The supply from within the whole of an absence of the whole marks the dialogue throughout. In the first place, the absence of the whole is supplied without the addition of anything except what was already there and already part of the whole. In the second place, the memory of the whole is supplied from without and by the one who despite supplying a certain lack in and of the whole (and precisely by recapitulating the whole), nevertheless cannot be part of the whole, for he is at the same time the addressee of the discourse. Moreover, although Socrates supplies the want of memory in the whole (composed of Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates; the three of whom supply the place of four), the whole determines the adequacy of this memory (19b; 1154). The structure of a doubling or repetition without addition or accumulation continues even after Socrates has recounted the preceding day’s conversation. Indeed, the entire discourse, which is to acquit the whole— Timaeus, Critias, Hermocrates, plus the fourth they add up to—of an obligation to entertain Socrates, begins as a repetition: ‘‘As soon as we arrived yesterday at the guest chamber of Critias . . . we talked the matter over, and he told us an ancient tradition which I wish, Critias, that you would repeat to Socrates’’ (20c; 1155–1156). This repetition derives from others: It is a story that has been ‘‘attested by Solon’’ (20d; 1156); told to Dropides, Critias’s great-grandfather; who told it to Critias, Critias’s grandfather; ‘‘who remembered and repeated it (20e; 1156) to Critias, who will repeat it to Socrates. In this genealogy of the narrative, what has become of the father, of the ‘‘Critias’’ between Critias (grandfather) and Critias (grandson)? Further, is not the name Critias exemplary of all names (and names exemplary of signs in general) in that it is homonymous, that is, one name referring to two different things? Another way to ask this question would be, is not homonymy the condition of possibility of the survival of the species in that the homonym (Critias/Critias) adds up to the perfect reproduction of an image of oneself without parentage, without an origin?

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A bastard reproduction, then, in the name of which genealogy is founded? Does not the necessary fracture of the sign manifest itself in and as the homonym?11 Although the story Critias repeats concerns ‘‘great and marvelous actions of the Athenian city, which have passed into oblivion through lapse of time and the destruction of mankind, and one in particular, greater than all the rest’’ (21a; 1156), its origin is neither Athenian nor Greek. It is Egyptian (21a; 1156). What is most Greek, therefore, is separated from Greece by a ‘‘lapse of time and the destruction of mankind.’’ Solon himself discovers ‘‘that neither he nor any other Hellene knew anything worth mentioning about the times of old’’ (22a; 1157). What is most exemplary of Greece comes to Greece, to Athens, from an other place, from the place of another that, even as it repeats itself, repeats Athens: ‘‘In the Egyptian Delta, at the head of which the river Nile divides, there is a certain district which is called the district of Saı¨s, and the great city of the district is also called Saı¨s, and is the city from which king Amasis came. The Citizens have a deity for their foundress; she is called in the Egyptian tongue Neith, and is asserted by them to be the same whom the Hellenes call Athena. They are lovers of the Athenians and say they are in some way related to them’’ (21e–22a; 1156–57). Cut off from itself, Greece is restored to itself, remembered in a place divided (where the Nile divides), doubled (it names itself Saı¨s twice), and in translation (Nieth is thought to translate Athena). The origin of Greece or of the idea of the greatness of Greece takes place not in Greece, but in the foreign repetition of Greece. Greece comes to think itself in translation, in a translation that ‘‘locates’’—and dislocates—Greece even as it fails to constitute itself as undivided. The addition of this ‘‘Greece’’—the Greece present to Solon—to the Greece of his ancestors, to ‘‘the times of old,’’ to tradition, depends on an other: That relation, which has been severed by a lapse of time and the destruction of mankind, is both foreign and necessary. In general, Timaeus repeats itself to supply a lack internal to itself: The missing one supplied by the three; the lack of memory in the three supplied by the one; the repetition of stories already recounted, more than once, but always elsewhere; the doubling of ‘‘Critias’’ that occludes the absence of the father; the Egyptian narrative of Greek events that obscures a lapse of time and a lack of writing.12 All of this is preliminary to a discussion of the formation of the universe, ‘‘beginning with the generation of the world and going down to the creation of man’’ (27a; 1161), which begins with a discussion of the relation of the copy to the original (29b; 1162) and with mixing and the bond that makes it possible (31c; 1163).

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The doubling that informs Timaeus also inhabits Timaeus’s performance of his share of the obligation to entertain Socrates, for, having explained the origin of the universe and the formation of man, he finds it necessary to begin again. It seems he has forgotten something: ‘‘But if a person will truly tell of the way in which the work was accomplished, he must include the variable cause as well, and explain its influence. Wherefore, we must return again and find another suitable beginning’’ (48a–b; 1175). The new beginning disturbs the symmetry of the binary with which Timaeus began by introducing a third ‘‘term’’: ‘‘One, which we assumed, was a pattern intelligible and always the same, as the second was only the imitation of the pattern, generated and visible. There is also a third kind which we did not distinguish at the time, conceiving that the two would be enough. But now the argument seems to require that we should set forth in words another kind, which is difficult of explanation and dimly seen. What nature [dunamin kata phusin, power according to nature] are we to attribute to this new kind of being? We reply that it is the receptacle [hupodochen], and in a manner the nurse [tithenen], of all generation’’ (49a–b; 1176). First, there is the same, unchanging and unseen; second, there is that which imitates the same, but which nonetheless is not the same. This imitation, however, is visible, sensible; consequently, it is not unchanging. Third, there is the receptacle, which is but ‘‘dimly seen’’ and, according to John Sallis, ‘‘dangerous.’’13 Insofar as it is but dimly seen or, as Sallis translates, hard to catch, this third never demonstrates itself as such: for, in the appearance of the second kind (the copy), the work of the third ‘‘kind’’—‘‘the nurse of all generation’’—disappears. Importantly, in first referring to this third ‘‘kind’’ as the ‘‘nurse of all generation,’’ the dialogue anticipates its later attempt to analogize the relation between the three kinds by reference to the family: ‘‘And we may liken the receiving principle to a mother, and the source or spring to the father, and the intermediate nature to a child, and may remark further that if the model is to take every variety of form, then the matter in which the model is to be fashioned will not be duly prepared unless it is formless and free from the impress of any of those shapes which it is hereafter to receive from without’’ (50d; 1177). Legible in this analogy is the removal of the mother from any scene of family resemblance: The child resembles—is the copy of—the father, who does not appear except in the appearance of the child. The mother leaves nothing of ‘‘herself’’ behind, passes nothing of ‘‘herself’’ to the child. Such absenting of any possible ‘‘herself’’ releases the child in its resemblance to the father who is not present.

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There is khora only in the becoming apparent of the copy. Further, khora does not generate anything ‘‘herself’’14: Khora is only the ‘‘nurse’’ of generation. She safeguards it, protects it, nurtures it. Khora is of the order of neither original nor copy. As Derrida writes, it ‘‘is neither sensible nor intelligible’’ and thus of the order neither of sensibility nor of the understanding: ‘‘There is khora. . . . But what there is, there, is not’’ (On the Name 96).15 Timaeus’s various attempts to clarify khora mislead: Not there even in its singular there is, khora can be said to have neither essence nor attributes. At the same time, however, it is fundamental to the possibility of there being existents and existence at all. The attempt to think khora by analogy to gold in relation to the possible forms of gold or to the mother in relation to father and child are, therefore, wrongheaded, but perhaps inevitable. In Timaeus, then, there is khora, but khora is not that. This is because, insofar as ‘‘mother’’ (metera) translates khora, without, however, khora having yet been said, such a mother can have no ‘‘herself.’’ There is mother, khora, but mother is not that: ‘‘Wherefore the mother and receptacle of all created and visible and in any way sensible things is not to be termed earth or air or fire or water, or any of their compounds, or any of the elements from which these are derived, but is an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligible, and is most incomprehensible’’ (Timaeus 51a–b; 1178). The difficulty of translating the name is palpable: Khora doubles, triples, becoming mother and nurse and receptacle. Yet, the failure of any term to translate khora is clear, for the alternatives ascribe to khora a proprietary relation within the ‘‘family,’’ which would effectively determine the relation of father to son, thereby organizing resemblance as having been conceived within the horizon of the family. Khora does none of this. It neither conceives nor is it conceived. It is not of the order of conception. Timaeus, finally, concerns the question of the proper, of the proprietary relation between what one does and who one is. In this it repeats Plato’s Republic. It concerns the organization of the universe, how it is mixed, and its appropriate proportions. The principle metaphor or paradigm for this discussion is the family: father, mother, child. Perhaps Timaeus is to be read as a treatise on family values, that is, on the value of the family. But if it is to be read thusly, it must also be admitted that the family dissolves in the course of Timaeus. On the one hand, Timaeus pushes the origin of the narrative from Greece (home) to an Egyptian (foreign) city that locates itself in a place divided. The repetition displaces the father: The story passes from Critias (grandfather) to Critias (grandson), thus opening a

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generational gap that troubles Plato’s ideal of father-to-son resemblance. Indeed, such a gap troubles the very possibility of conception. As Derrida concludes, ‘‘From one telling to the next, the author gets further and further away. So the mythic saying resembles a discourse without a legitimate father’’ (On the Name 124). On the other hand, in Timaeus, khora opens the family and all that is proper to it, from the family’s first philosophical nomination, to translation by and in mother-nurse-foster mother, thereby disrupting any nontechnical or natural relation of mother to child. Khora thus upsets the logic of the family and family resemblance. In this family that is not one, in which neither father nor mother can be recognized, there is only the monstrous offspring, a certain doubling and duplicity.16 All that is is born—conceived—this way, in the absence of an impotent father whom the child will represent without knowing, in the place of a mother-nurse-receptacle who could never be said to have conceived anything at all. From the beginning, which is the second beginning of the repeated story of the beginning of the world, Plato locates the family at the heart of philosophy, but it is a family that in resembling itself—in all being able to say ‘‘mine’’ together—abandons (the) itself: What there is, from before the beginning of the family ‘‘itself,’’ is an orphan, a bastard, in name only, that looks only like ‘‘itself,’’ as if it were ‘‘itself.’’ Might this not be the last will and testament of the family? Its last expression, which is philosophy’s and anthropology’s first impression?

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chapter 6

Hybrid Bound Scott Michaelsen His skin and bones though they were of the color of night are transparent and the everlasting stars shine through. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Anthropology was born as hybridity theory, and anthropology will be buried by hybridity theory. This now appears to be the inevitable trajectory of the discipline, though the outlines of this trajectory have been difficult to discern: Tracing such a trajectory has been made doubly difficult because the narrative of anthropology’s rise has effaced its origins in hybridity theory, and because the recent attempts to revive hybridity analysis have convinced a good many scholars across the disciplines that hybridity is, instead, the future of anthropological thought—and even, quite literally, the very possibility of ‘‘the future.’’ But hybridity comes (again) to bury anthropology, not to raise it—and bury it in spite of the best intentions of its modern proponents. A number of types of hybrid theory have arisen since Homi Bhabha re-introduced the term into critical discourse at the turn of the 1990s. In general, hybridity theory has been promoted, in this period, as an alternative to idealist, ahistorical accounts of colonized peoples and their personhoods. Indeed, the explosion in general within cultural studies and postcolonial studies of the concepts of hybridity, traveling, and borders and borderlands all signal a massive attempt to reject such essentialisms. As Homi Bhabha begins his essay, ‘‘The Other Question’’: ‘‘An important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of ‘fixity,’ ’’ one that Bhabha suggests

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permits ‘‘the future’’ to become ‘‘(once again) an open question,’’ one that ‘‘emphasize[s] the importance of the creative heterogeneity of the enunciatory ‘present’ [and] that liberates the discourse of emancipation from binary closures’’ (Location 219, 185). Bhabha cites approvingly the work done on hybridity by important thinkers such as Hortens Spillers, Houston Baker, Henry Louis Gates, Paul Gilroy, Guillermo Gomez-Pen˜a, Thomas Ybarra-Frausto, and many others in the last few years, as part of this general project (6–7, 185, 218–19). Among the options for hybrid theory, one would need to calculate, minimally, the following: a ‘‘material’’ hybridity theory premised on bodies and blood (the premise, for example, of Rey Chow’s work on hybridity); the hybridization of the historical periods of the modern and the premodern (Nestor Garcı´a Canclini); ‘‘Black Atlantic’’ hybridization of Africans with multiple white geographies (Paul Gilroy); the hybridization of multiple ethnic identities (George Lipsitz); the hybridization, within professional discourse, of one’s own local and professional subject positions (Kirin Narayan); the hybridization of ‘‘research area and nativization’’ (Kath Weston); and the hybridization of colonial temporalities (Bhabha himself ). This beginning inventory perhaps poses problems for one who might try to conceptualize hybridity studies as a monolithic entity, because these registrations of hybridity’s power—drawn from anthropology, literary studies, sociology, and mass culture studies—cross seemingly significant lines where race (or the body) divides from culture, where top-down denominated identities divide from bottom-up cultures, where the essence of one’s existence divides from the Western calculus of knowledge. In short, everything teaches one that the types of identity hybridized in the inventory need to be carefully distinguished from one another in order not to collapse and confuse that which, given the proclivities of the various theorists, must be kept separate and distinct. But to state the problem as clearly as possible, what has gone wrong— almost inconceivably wrong—in hybridity studies in general is that these celebrated and often-cited attempts to maneuver the hybrid beyond the reach of essentialism have all, in fact, reiterated the logic of essentialism.1 Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) will serve as a brief example here, in part because so many scholars believe that his text has resolved such problems. Gilroy exposes one link between hybridity and essence at the end of his long chapter on black music’s circulation in Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States: The hybridity which is formally intrinsic to hip hop [music] has not been able to prevent that style from being used as an especially potent sign and symbol of racial authenticity. (107)

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Gilroy’s remark is stated as a strange observation, a quirk or odd complication, rather than an intractable problem for the study of hybridization. Taken as a problem rather than a quirk, though, it may serve here as a warning for the work done under the rubric of hybridity studies. Gilroy, for all of his insistence that his notion of hybridity is in line with an attempt to freeze out origins and to emphasize ‘‘flow,’’ to dismiss both ‘‘idealism’’ and ‘‘essentialism’’ (80), to produce an account of hybrid black cultures beyond an account of African culture as such through a narrative of its fusion with other cultures, and the creation of a new colonial ‘‘slave culture’’—absolutely, and in his own words, generates a model of black culture ‘‘as a changing rather than an unchanging same’’ (101). Everything important to Gilroy is at stake in this formulation of the ‘‘changing same,’’ because what matters for The Black Atlantic is, in a version of the most simplistic of multiculturalisms, that the essence of a positively inflected African aesthetic—defined as ‘‘democratic,’’ ‘‘communitarian,’’ ‘‘nondominating,’’ and dialogic—proliferate itself, disseminate itself, without ever losing itself (79). What matters, finally, is that a communal and dialogic Africa spread itself over the globe, in fertile competition with a presumed European individualism and monologism. For Gilroy, then, the old adage holds true: The more things change, the more they stay the same. And this is precisely the crux of the matter for recent work on hybridity: The more the emphasis is put on the hybrid, the more the logic of a very old anthropology of racial and/or cultural characteristics and possessions is reiterated. In Gilroy’s case, describing him with some degree of specificity would involve situating him in terms of 1920s or 1930s romantic anthropology (Margaret Mead would be a prominent example), in which the ‘‘other’’ possesses something that ‘‘we’’ lack, in which the other will save ‘‘us’’ from ‘‘ourselves.’’ But how can this be, given Bhabha’s insistence that hybridity makes impossible such frameworks of coherent possession? One might begin to wonder about these things in the light of Robert J.C. Young’s Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (1995), which is a quite fascinating but at times uncertain account of the problems of hybridity analysis, with reference to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century attempts to theorize hybridity in the context of racial theory. And one would also want to acknowledge important earlier accounts of the same material, including those of William Stanton (1960), Thomas F. Gossett (1963), Reginald Horsman (1981; 1987), Robert E. Bieder (1986), Jay Schuler (1995), and Lester D. Stephens (2000). Young broadly agrees with figures such as Stanton and Gossett that, ‘‘hybridity . . . is a key term in that wherever it

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emerges it suggests the impossibility of essentialism’’ (Young 27). Hybridity, seemingly championed by monogenist (or single-human-creation) theorists, is said to have done battle with polygenist theorists in nineteenth-century scientific literature on race. And Young recounts the debates over hybridization in the nineteenth century taking place between these monogenists and polygenists, with the former insisting upon the unity of the races based on evidence of fertile hybrids, and the latter arguing for the plurality of races by attacking ‘‘fertility as a test of specificity’’2 as well as highlighting the general ‘‘degeneration of all hybrid races’’ (131). At first, however, Young appears to be staging a break with recent accounts of hybridity’s power. He explicitly is concerned that hybridity’s recent re-introduction in critical conversations amounts to a ‘‘repeating [of] the past’’—an acceptance of a certain colonial phrasing of cultural matters such that the colonial fantasy and fascination with ‘‘interminable, adulterating, aleatory, illicit, inter-racial sex’’ continues, and that the affirmation of hybridity carries with it other problems as well, such as ‘‘an implicit politics of heterosexuality’’ (27, 181, 25). But Young apparently is unwilling to divorce himself from the hybridity concept in general, and in particular from the work of Homi Bhabha and his ‘‘outstanding contribution’’ to postcolonial analysis (Young 161). Young writes approvingly of Bhabha’s notion of hybridity, which Young compares to Derrida’s concept of ‘brisure’: Hybridity thus makes difference into sameness, and sameness into difference, but in a way that makes the same no longer the same, the different no longer simply different. (26)

And Young hands Bhabha the laurels when read against Edward Said, with the latter characterized by Young as producing a notion of colonial discourse at once ‘‘totalizing’’ and ‘‘instrumental’’ (161). Thus, Young on the one hand constantly marks the manner in which a commitment to hybridity merely turns upside down a colonial logic of desire, thereby turning colonialism’s sexual prohibitions into new sorts of pro-sex exclusions; and, at the same time, suggests that hybridity’s position within racial and cultural theorizing always already auto-deconstructs racial and cultural concepts. His text, then, walks a very fine line—too fine, perhaps.

1. Between, roughly, the mid-1840s and the mid-1850s, a large-scale debate broke out in the United States amongst a network of anthropologists and

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animal biologists over the general question of hybridity. Looming over all of this debate is the status in the United States of so-called ‘‘mulattos’’ and ‘‘quadroons’’ and ‘‘octoroons’’—the anxiety over white amalgamation— even though the majority of the discussion involves detailed close readings of the works of famed and obscure biologists who had observed mutations, hybridizations, and distinctions among birds, dogs, wolves, sheep, horses, and mules. The major figures involved in this debate include, on the polygenist side, Samuel Morton, Josiah Nott, George R. Gliddon, and Louis Agassiz, and, on the monogenist side, John Bachman, William T. Hamilton, and Moses Ashley Curtis. This core group (and there are others) produces approximately two-thousand published pages of arguments about the hybrid, sometimes in book form, and sometimes in the pages of prominent medical, scientific, and regional culture journals, such as the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, The Charleston Medical Journal, De Bow’s Review, and the Southern Quarterly Review. Nothing is quite what it should be in this great U.S. hybridity debate. The non-degenerating hybrid theorists operate within a worldview— monogenism—that should preclude the possibility of absolute differences among human bodies, and of therefore the very possibility of heterogeneous elements that might be hybridized. And indeed, contrary to what Young says about hybridity and essentialism, it is precisely the scientific racist polygenists at this moment in the United States who demonstrate, in a thousand ways, the existence of hybrids, and it is the universal-humanist monogenists who argue that no hybrids as such have ever existed.3 Equally strangely, the chief interlocutor for the monogenists, John Bachman, issues his pronouncements from the old slave South, in order to do battle with a Northerner, Samuel Morton, who publishes his great works of scientific racialism in Philadelphia, the supposed home of American liberty.4 At another level of strangeness one might dwell on the fact that it often has been suggested that these debates reach their logical conclusion in the work of Charles Darwin, who, in The Descent of Man (1871), pronounced an end to the monogenist/polygenist controversy: It is almost a matter of indifference whether the so-called races of man are . . . ranked as species or sub-species; but the latter term appears the most appropriate. Finally, we may conclude that when the principles of evolution are generally accepted, as they surely will be before long, the dispute between the monogenists and the polygenists will die a silent and unobserved death. (235)

Evolutionary theory, then, ends the question of hybridity, as understood by race theory, because it ends the debate over origins, the debate over

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creations; as Darwin suggests, historically ‘‘it would be impossible to fix on any definite point when the term ‘man’ ought to be used’’ (Descent 235). But, curiously, if the hybridity debates themselves have an origin it is likely polygenist Josiah Nott’s 1843 article in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, where one finds precisely the same gesture: The space here allowed would not permit, nor does my present purpose require, that I should enter fully into the discussions on the natural history of the human race, or the many definitions which may have been given of the term species. The Caucasian, Ethiopian, Mongol, Malay, and American may have been distinct creations, or may be mere varieties of the same species, produced by external causes acting through many thousand years; but this I do believe, that at the present day the Anglo-Saxon and Negro races are, according to the common acceptance of the terms, distinct species, and that the offspring of the two is a Hybrid. (‘‘Mulatto’’ 254)

Robert Young, when he reads this Nott text, argues that Nott is merely ‘‘circumspect’’ on this point, but Nott, more precisely, is indifferent to the entire monogenist/polygenist complex (Young 127). The strategic indifference to the question of monogenism and polygenism, from the beginning of the hybridity debates, raises questions about nineteenth-century hybridity studies: What precisely is at stake in these debates? What precisely does hybridity resist and/or undergird?5 One might, without summarizing one’s way through these twothousand pages, with all their twists and turns, note several places where the limits of such hybridity theory clearly become marked.6 Bachman and Morton, the chief antagonists, will occupy center stage here. Bachman was minister of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Charleston, South Carolina, for sixty years (1814–74), and friend to, collaborator with, and defender of John James Audubon; Morton was a medical doctor whose fascination with the measurement of human skull size yielded Crania Americana (1839) and Crania Ægyptiaca (1844)—perhaps the two most crucial American texts for the development of a scientific racist perspective. Bachman’s four works from 1850 on hybridity—each produced as a combination of scholarship and personal attack on Morton—prompted a searching investigation on Morton’s part that lasted the whole of the next year, until his death in May of 1851. In some ways, Morton’s case is a weak one once challenged: Bachman constantly reiterates that Morton substantiates his claims by citing works that are ‘‘out of print—out of date, and ought long since to have been restricted to the toy-shop of the antiquarian’’ (‘‘Reply’’ 471). And Morton’s replies to Bachman on the validity of Morton’s sources borders on the bathetically irrelevant.7

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One of the stronger cards that the polygenists played over and over again concerns the problem of incest. If monogenism is correct, they argued, and the world begins with a single pair—Adam and Eve—then the human world is composed of nothing but incestuous relations, which for them was an intolerable conclusion. At a certain moment in the hybridity debates, Nott and Gliddon publish a personal letter from Morton to Nott, from 27 September 1850—a letter that includes a little joke or riddle: For my own part, if I could believe that the human race had its origin in incest, I should think that I had at once got the clue to all ungodliness. Two lines of Catechism would explain more than all the theological discussions since the Christian era. I have put it into rhyme: Q. Whence came that curse we call primeval sin? A. From Adam’s children breeding in and in. (409)

Such is what passes for humor in U.S. hybridity debates, but the publication of this letter infuriates John Bachman. In fact, in general, this thematic causes Bachman more trouble than any other in the ongoing war of words. At the moment when Bachman faces this challenge directly, in 1850, in the fourth of the letters that constitute his direct debate with Morton, he argues, first, that incest does not lead to deterioration of the species (‘‘Second Letter’’ 627); and second, that no incest prohibition was in effect for the generations of Adam, Abraham, and Noah (‘‘Second Letter’’ 628). He might have chosen to leave it at that, but he goes much further, and perhaps because of the commonplace regarding the degenerations of incestuous procreation; later in the same text, for example, he apparently accepts the premises regarding the argument about incest when he writes that rapidly, in Adamic-era history, ‘‘every succeeding generation was a further remove in consanguinity from the former’’ (‘‘Second Letter’’ 640). At the point where he exceeds every commonplace threshold of monogenist hybridity discourse regarding universal kinship, he needs to be cited at length: Nothing is more common than the idea that the same blood is transmitted from parents to their descendants. In a literal sense this is not true. The term therefore requires some explanation. The blood courses rapidly through the veins. It is generally supposed that the time in which the blood makes a circuit through the body and returns to the heart is about three minutes, requiring a longer time however in some individuals. The food taken into the body becomes digested, and by the lacteal and lymphatic vessels contributes to the growth and renovation of the system. The blood that runs in our veins this month will not exist there on the next. In about

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four years, as is supposed by some, in seven by others, the whole body is renewed, and not a particle of the former body is left, hence it is said that a son of the green Isle, who had been in America seven years and three months, maintained that he was a native American. The natural resemblance to one or both of the parents may remain, but the blood is no longer there, and although a diseased or healthy constitution may become hereditary, yet the rule will work both ways, and the germs of a healthy body, as we know, are more liable to be transmitted than those of disease. The materials that compose our bodies like the rivulets that form the streams, are constantly accumulating and as constantly running off. A thousand causes, climate, food and habits of life, contribute to form the constitution, and when that is healthy and vigorous in all its parts, fertility is the natural result. Many changes have occurred in the constitution during the period which intervenes between the time of birth and that of puberty. The constitution is now prepared to obey the procreative laws of nature. How much of the blood or the body which was derived from the parents is left? and, in a physical sense, what relationship is there now between those who have descended from the same parents? If they have been restricted to the same field or neighborhood, and fed on the same kinds of food, there may be a tolerable similarity in constitution, although this may not be more so than that of other individuals similarly restricted, but not so nearly connected by consanguinity. If however these animals that were descended from the same parents had been separated when young, removed to a different neighborhood and climate, and fed on different food, their constitutions would have differed very widely from each other. If the individuals thus differently reared should now again be brought together, would they not to all intents and purposes be as widely different from each other in constitution and in blood, as if there never had been the slightest relationship between them? (‘‘Second Letter’’ 629–30)

Here, in a typically monogenetic account of the significance of geography and climate, the matter of difference and relation is radicalized so as to produce a schematization of what one might call the non-relation of all related kin. In such an account, there will sometimes be ‘‘tolerable similarity’’ among beings, but a being’s difference from every other being, based on the multiplicity of local circumstances, is what drives the account to its conclusion. Backed into a corner,8 Bachman’s argument becomes unhinged from monogenism proper (from an insistence on generalized likeness or sameness), and this anthropology comes to rest in much the same logical place as William Hickling Prescott’s anthropology, which is to say that one particular limit of anthropology is the registering of each being

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as shot through with an indeterminately large number of determinations, to such a degree that what is shared between any few beings, much less the whole human race, is too minimal to take into account.9 Bachman is quite literally on the threshold of conceptualizing persons as radically individuated monads, and this is one of the inner possibilities of any theory of the hybrid. It is, though, we should say, a limit that most hybridity theorists never approach, and precisely because recent hybridity theory is entirely caught up in what one might refer to as a logic of cultural resistance; Bachman’s maneuver threatens to dissolve entirely such a possibility because, in a world of such singular beings, there quite literally would be nothing-in-common against (or with) which one might position oneself. Bachman’s narrative of digestions and run-offs would bring one up to the point of what Alphonso Lingis has referred to as ‘‘the community of those who have nothing in common,’’ with the nothing here understood precisely in terms of the loss or wasting of identity.10 This formulation can only imagine community or kinship as absence—as always already coalescing around ‘‘the blood [that] is no longer there.’’ As countertext, one can compare Bachman’s body, Bachman’s bloodstream, which, ‘‘like the rivulets that form the streams, are constantly accumulating and as constantly running off,’’ with that proposed by the polygenetically inclined Edgar Allan Poe at the end of chapter 18 of his racial tale, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). Here, a group of voyagers to the South Pole, which is inhabited by the blackest of black beings, examine a mysterious river that otherwise goes unremarked in the text and plays no role whatsoever in the narrative, but that in the context of the story rather unmistakably operates as an allegory for polygenism: It was not colorless, nor was it of any one uniform color—presenting to the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple, like the hues of a changeable silk. . . . we perceived that the whole mass of liquid was made up of a number of distinct veins, each of a distinct hue; that these veins did not commingle; and that their cohesion was perfect in regard to their own particles among themselves, and imperfect in regard to neighboring veins. Upon passing the blade of the knife athwart the veins, the water closed over it immediately, as with us, and also, in withdrawing it, all traces of the passage of the knife were instantly obliterated. If, however, the blade was passed down accurately between the two veins, a perfect separation was effected, which the power of cohesion did not immediately rectify. The phenomena of this water formed the first definite link in that vast chain of apparent miracles with which I was destined to be at length encircled. (194)

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This miracle is perhaps the nineteenth-century analogue for the miracle now taking place in postcolonial and cultural studies. It is the miracle of hybridity. Here is the potentially utopian, boundary-shattering figure of the hybrid: That which is a conjunction of the many makes its appearance as a changing flow, as a swirl of shifting color, such that it is neither ‘‘colorless’’ nor ‘‘uniform,’’ such that it embodies ‘‘every possible shade’’ without being any particular shade. And here is the miracle: That which is so conjoined can always be reduced to ‘‘a perfect separation.’’ Each element of the hybrid can be cut ‘‘athwart’’; that is, the ‘‘veins’’ of the multiple elements can be cut open, exposed to one another, as indeed they must have been innumerable times before, and yet the singular veins always maintain their essential characters. And the individual veins can be exposed and analyzed in all of their singularity by simply passing a blade ‘‘between’’ them. Which is to suggest, as Poe’s extended metaphor certainly does, that the appearance or the effect of hybridity is phantasmatic—a trick of light and motion that, finally, is founded upon strands each of which is an unchanging essence. This episode in Pym, then, can be read as a polygenist response to the seemingly incontrovertible, visible fact of racial intermixture. The integrity of the individual strands puts the lie to any claim regarding hybridity. Poe’s brief text, perhaps, should serve as a caution for certain forms of postcolonial criticism concerned with hybridization. The warning takes this complex form: Hybridity cannot really be hybridity—cannot really be a mixture and confusion of categories, types, bodies—if it is still possible, in the end, to identify the individual elements that compose the hybrid. If the hybrid were truly a hybrid, it would subvert the possibility of locating its individual parts, of producing an analytic that might chart the contributions of origin. A hybrid that can be disarticulated, then, is a compound without mixture, is not a hybrid. When recent postcolonial criticism both marks approvingly the existence of hybrids, as a sign of utopian powers and potentialities, and determines the individual elements that make up the hybrid, it is in danger of fully recapitulating the logic of nineteenth century racial studies. It falls, in short, into Poe’s trap. Thus, two rivers runs through the nineteenth-century U.S. hybridity debates, and what is at stake in the dispute between them means everything for hybridity studies. Jose´ David Saldı´var’s account of the powers of hybridity, throughout Border Matters (1997), for example, would be subject to Poe’s immanent critique. ‘‘What changes,’’ Saldı´var asks, ‘‘when culture is understood in terms of material hybridity, not purity?’’ (19). The answer is at least all of the following: A certain ‘‘playfulness of form’’ is evident

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(33); a certain subaltern agency is made possible in the ‘‘shifting and shifty versions of border culture’’ thereby produced (35); a certain sort of ‘‘deconstruction’’ takes place, of the ‘‘monological desire of cultural nationhood’’ (5–6)11; and a certain ‘‘crossing, resistance and circulation’’ takes place such that contestation of power is possible and the ‘‘multiple-voiced’’ or inherently dialogic emerge (xiii, 13–14). These are all commonplaces of recent hybridity analyses. But hybridity in Border Matters cannot be the logic of the ‘‘heterotopic,’’ as Saldı´var would have it (14), and when Saldı´var announces his intention, at the end of his ‘‘Introduction,’’ to in fact ‘‘unify a rhetoric or stylistics of the border’’ (14), one realizes that, against itself, Border Matters turns up the wild card of hybridity only to always already determine, in toto, its character and value, to always already number it, measure its valence against its constituent elements and against other elements with which it has not hybridized. To cite just one example, Tish Hinojosa’s music is described by Saldı´var as a hybrid music: she ‘‘plays an eclectic blend of U.S.–Mexican border styles, mixing elements of corridos, cumbias, folk, rock, and country and western lyrics and lilting melodies’’ (188). Saldı´var’s descriptions of hybridity amount to a taking account of individual cultural elements. To listen to Hinojosa productively is to be able to identify the point of origin of each contribution—to determine where each comes from, culturally, by identifying autochthonous musical markers. Saldı´var writes, in the end, that Hinojosa’s ‘‘simple power’’ lies in her ability to ‘‘disentangle the segregated musical boundaries that divide the mass-mediated music industry,’’ which is a curious formulation (188): But why is it that hybridic desegregation is premised, then, on the act of disentanglement, rather than an entanglement of that which is socially segregated? The answer is that the form of hybrid analysis that is practiced by Border Matters is entirely commensurate with Poe’s river; such hybridity is determined last and first, first and last. In fact, and to be more anthropologically precise, what Border Matters calls ‘‘hybridity’’ has long had another anthropological name— ’’syncretism,’’ or ‘‘a merger of two analogous elements in two different cultures’’ wherein ‘‘each of the elements retains its being’’ (Winick 520). And, in fact, it has perhaps another old anthropological name, ‘‘diffusionism,’’ an interpretive strategy that rests on similar assumptions, and that reached its apex in the United States with publication of Robert H. Lowie’s The History of Ethnological Theory (1937). A recognition of these linkages suggests, perhaps, the dangers of Saldı´var’s approach, which flatly

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rejects anthropology and even cultural analysis in the name of a hybridity studies defined as something other than anthropology.12

2. The texts that the period’s most respected polygenist, Samuel Morton, produced in the midst of his own section of the U.S. hybridity debates, in the last year of his life, are quite fugitive—three essays, hurriedly prepared, as direct responses to Bachman for the Charleston Medical Journal; stray paragraphs toward a more considered response in the pages of the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, for example, and unfinished pages, or what his literary executors calls ‘‘inedited manuscripts,’’ toward a full-scale revision of Crania Americana. What one learns from these pages is, at first, counter-intuitive. What one learns is that Morton, rather than simply rejecting the test of hybridity, or denying hybridity’s ability to produce non-degenerate persons, incorporates hybridity into his account of the races. As a point of comparison, in Crania Americana, Morton defines ‘‘race’’ entirely conventionally in relation to scientific-racial discourse, as an entity ‘‘adapted from the beginning to its peculiar local destination,’’ whose ‘‘physical characteristics,’’ and perhaps others, are ‘‘independent of local causes’’ (Americana 3). But in Bachman’s letter cited at length above—the fourth hybridity debates letter—Bachman interestingly accuses Morton of a certain unwillingness to more fully and scientifically determine the problem of race, and this because of Morton’s double willingness and unwillingness to broach the race/species divide—that is, the willingness to enter into the question of race versus species, but then an unwillingness to define species as anything other than race. Bachman, who if nothing else is an astonishing close reader, chides Morton: after twenty years study of ethnology, with many hundreds of human skulls in your Cabinet, [you] have not condescended to inform us, whether you believe in one or many species. The fact, however, that you have so strenuously insisted on the fertility of hybrids, would indicate that you believe in more than one species. The great objection that I and many others have made to your various writings on these subjects is, that you have never clearly defined your position. All the arguments you have ever produced, that are opposed to the doctrine of the unity of the human race, may be covered by a thumb nail. (‘‘Second Letter’’ 646–47)

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Morton’s crucial moment of redefinition along these lines is signaled immediately thereafter, in the fifth letter of these debates, published in 1850 (‘‘Additional Observations’’ 757–61), and republished in a more concise manner on 10 September 1850, when Morton, as president of the Academy of Natural Sciences, reads a short paper from the chair to those in attendance ‘‘on the value of the word species in Zoology’’ (‘‘Sept. 10’’ 81). Morton clearly perceives the Bachman attack on his lack of definition as absolutely serious, absolutely essential, and he devotes the first section of the fifth hybridity debates letter to a response. He accuses Bachman of bad faith and asks Bachman to go back and re-read his footnote on page two of his original hybridity text from 1847 for the answer. But Morton here is obfuscatory: The 1847 footnote cannot be conflated with the definition Morton produces in 1850, and even though the differences appear at first to be quite subtle, the significance of the shift completely alters the contours of the hybridity debates. Morton’s 1847 footnote reads: What are now termed the five races of men, would be more appropriately called groups; that each of these groups is again divisible into a greater or smaller number of primary races, each of which has expanded from an aboriginal nucleus or centre. Thus I conceive that there were several centres for the America group of races. . . . I may here observe, that whenever I have ventured an opinion on this question, it has been in favor of the doctrine of primeval diversities among men,—an original adaptation of the several races to those varied circumstances of climate and locality, which, while congenial to the one are destructive to the other.13 (Hybridity 4, note)

Morton’s strategy here has everything to do with evading the problem of incest, now situated as a problem for every distinct race, rather than a united human race. Each of the modern races begins from ‘‘several centres,’’ somehow different from one another, but also precisely the same, which amalgamate into one (and perhaps as part of some divine plan). But the Morton of 1850 is actually on shifted ground. First, he now chooses to define ‘‘species’’ as a ‘‘primordial organic form’’ that ‘‘can be traced back into the ‘night of time’,’’ thereby redefining the ‘‘primordial’’ or ‘‘primeval’’ not absolutely as a question of origins, but simply as a matter of the known historical record, prior to which lies black mystery (Morton, ‘‘Sept. 10th.’’ 82). And Morton goes on, clearly influenced by Bachman’s attack, intervening now in the question of black/white hybridity, rather than the question of ‘‘primeval diversities’’ of single races, and he makes things far more interesting:

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What I call a species may be regarded by some naturalists as a primitive variety. . . . (‘‘Sept. 10th.’’ 82).

What does this mean, precisely? Webster’s Unabridged of 1892 tells us that the first definition for ‘‘variety’’ in the late nineteenth century was ‘‘intermixture,’’ and also notes that in the field of natural history, ‘‘variety’’ referred to ‘‘difference’’ as ‘‘not permanent’’ and ‘‘accidental change.’’ In this way, Morton therefore here and elsewhere in 1850 suggests, perhaps astonishingly, that the five races of man are grounded in and emerge from what one might need to call an ‘‘original hybridity,’’ or an ‘‘original intermixture.’’ Morton goes out of his way, in 1850, to claim that nothing has changed, to claim that his definition of race and species has held fast over the past decade or more, and that his definition is clear to all but Bachman.14 He claims that the difference between ‘‘primordial organic form’’ and ‘‘primitive variety’’ ‘‘is only in name, and in no way influences the zoological question,’’ and argues that, ‘‘I can see no ambiguity in this proposition’’ (Morton, ‘‘Additional Observations’’ 761, 758). Bachman, however, when he re-enters the fray after Morton’s death, in an article entitled, ‘‘An Examination of the Characteristics of Genera and Species,’’ from 1855, sees right through Morton’s obfuscations and transformations. Bachman argues that, if correct, Morton has produced an account of the total hybridity of the so-called races—that the logical result of Morton’s definition would be ‘‘that the whole world must by this time be made up of hybrids’’ (‘‘Genera’’ 208).15 And Bachman suggests that Morton’s revised definition has been ‘‘framed to suit the emergencies of [his] own case, which was now in considerable jeopardy’’ (210). Here, in fact, is what Morton has done in 1850: Bachman’s evidence of hybridization among what Morton treats as the five basic races has now been taken into account. The possibility of, say, black-white mixtures in the world does not refute an ‘‘aboriginal’’ racial thesis, but merely demonstrates that at a more ‘‘primitive’’ moment, a much larger and more complex network of ‘‘forms’’ intermingled, producing five distinct races but retaining traces of their interrelationship. Morton therefore does not do battle directly with hybridity, but rather swallows it whole, adopts it as his foundational historical gesture, uses it to undergird a theory of now relatively stable races that can at least be differentiated in terms of talents and possibilities in the last instance, if not prevented from certain sorts of hybridization given primitive ‘‘proximate’’ or ‘‘allied’’ relations (‘‘Sept. 10’’ 82). Indeed, the fecundity of black/white hybridity in the American

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slave South, which Morton never disputes, can only lead one to the conclusion that black and white, Negro and Caucasian, are highly ‘‘proximate’’ beings—related through original hybridizations of unnamed prehistorical entities. (As Morton had written earlier in the debate with Bachman: ‘‘I do not deny that the general law of Nature is opposed to the remoter degrees of hybridity; but the exceptions are so remarkable, even with regard to these, that they invalidate the rule’’ [‘‘Letter’’ 337]). One can, of course, read Morton’s redefinition as an act of desperation, as Bachman does, or of logical confusion—as a misunderstanding of what hybridity threatens in relation to narratives of racial difference. But perhaps one should not move too quickly in adopting this perspective.

3. Homi Bhabha’s work on hybridity is, perhaps, closer to Samuel Morton’s than one might at first imagine. Homi Bhabha freezes out fixity, as noted above—his hybridity is always on the run, as it were. And Bhabha freezes out origins—his hybridity can never speak about parentage and heritage in the tones of a romantic anthropology and its narratives of unalterable cultural contents that persevere. Bhabha provides, in the essays collected in The Location of Culture, a number of possible definitions of hybridity. One might choose to focus, however, on one in particular, on ‘‘Interrogating Identity’’ from 1990, because it reveals a particular philosophical commitment that also runs through his citations of Heidegger and Lacan, for example. That commitment is to a certain Derrideanism, and we have already seen how Robert Young’s more positive remarks about Bhabhaesque hybridity are shaped by his recognition of this.16 In ‘‘Interrogating Identity,’’ Bhabha explicitly links hybridity to Derrida’s notion of diffe´rance—that is, philosophical ontico-ontological difference. He argues: ‘‘The difference of colonial culture is articulated as a hybridity acknowledging that all cultural specificity is belated, different unto itself,’’ and that therefore colonial culture inherently ‘‘erases any essentialist claims for the inherent authenticity or purity of cultures’’ (Location 58). Because of this, Bhabha, throughout his work, absolutely affirms the productive and inherently subversive power of hybridity, affirms it as ‘‘intervention’’ and ‘‘invention,’’ as ‘‘part of the necessity . . . of living’’ on into a future not dominated by the fixities that colonial representation hopes to achieve (7). But Bhabha importantly swerves from—one might say reverses—a Derridean reading of diffe´rance. At the very least, he swerves from a Derrida

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who writes that diffe´rance is the limit and the very possibility of ‘‘different things or differences,’’ and ‘‘the possibility of conceptuality, of a conceptual process and systems in general’’ (Margins 9, 11). Difference, then, and systems and hierarchies, find their groundless ground in the strange relation known as diffe´rance. And to affirm the productive power of diffe´rance is to ultimately and necessarily affirm the production of traditional differences. Derrida’s work, it should be emphasized, attends to the limit that is diffe´rance rather than affirms the systems of differences that might be produced through it, because such is necessary if one is to be ‘‘faithful and attentive to the ineluctable world of the future that proclaims itself as present, beyond the closure of knowledge,’’ as Derrida phrases it in the Grammatology (4). This future, or ‘‘that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality,’’ is the only possibility of a something other than colonial or cultural anthropology and its categories (5). Bhabha, therefore, in contradistinction to Derrida, finds himself in precisely the same position as Samuel Morton, though perhaps unwittingly: grounding systems of differentiation through affirmation of an always already hybridization. Bhabha’s conception of the ‘‘future’’ is that of a ‘‘contingent ‘inbetween’ space,’’ or what he calls the ‘‘past-present’’ (Location 7). The construction of formations of the past-present, however, is precisely the project of colonial representation, as Bhabha acknowledges in his discussion of class identities in ‘‘How Newness Enters the World’’: [The project of class] can articulate ‘other’ subjects of difference and forms of cultural alterity as either mimetically secondary—a paler shade of the authenticity and originality of class relations, now somehow out of place—or temporally anterior or untimely—archaic, anthropomorphic, compensatory realities rather than contemporary social communities. (222–3)

Affirming hybridity, then, involves precisely affirming the structure of colonial thought, its division of the ‘‘self’’ and ‘‘other’’ into present and past. Bhabha emphasizes that his concept of hybridity, then, is a form of ‘‘performative agency’’ within a colonial structure, through a reinscription of the colonial. His assertion that this results in the ‘‘new,’’ in a something other than colonial categorization, is precisely what is at stake here. How is one to read this newness? Gilroy and Saldı´var, for example, constantly affirm the productive and transformative power of the new, but only to fully describe it within the contours of its constituent parts. Toward this kind of hybridity, one might well adopt the attitude of Darwin in On the Origin of Species (1859), where he writes: ‘‘But by crossing we can

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get only forms in some degree intermediate between their parents’’ (19). More relevantly, perhaps, we might want to invoke the Foucauldian distinction, raised in describing two sorts of strategies with respect to sexualidentity domination in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, between a kind of Gramscian war of position and a strategic withdrawal from sexuality. At the end of the text Foucault aligns himself with the latter rather than the former because the former draws its identity strategies precisely from the domain of power relations as already constituted, thereby shifting relationships within the system, but leaving every possible ‘‘new’’ position always already locked into domination and the calcification of dominating relationships. Bhabha, to his credit, never takes Saldı´var and Gilroy’s step, never marshals the hybrid elements—or what he calls in the ‘‘Newness’’ essay the ‘‘stubborn chunks’’ of ‘‘incommensurable elements’’ (219)—into a significance, but he lays the groundwork for such by bringing into view the very idea of, for example, the ‘‘Indianized Gospel,’’ the ‘‘ ‘native’ Bible,’’ and the re-elaboration of Fanon’s concept of ‘‘black skins/white masks,’’ which he routinely explains as a Western form adopted by subalterns in mimicry (118, 120). These very hyphenated or double names beg the question of subaltern contents and significances, and open his project up to elaboration in historico-culturalist terms that rhyme with the race contents of scientific racism. To put it another way: Bhabha’s class temporalities are, by his own admission, anthropological through and through; although Bhabha claims to have sealed off the question of origins, the problem of historically based ground or ‘‘essence’’ goes fundamentally unchallenged via anthropological/colonial identities that are quite easily, perhaps inevitably, converted back to narratives of coherent cultural wholes and that, in any case, cannot rise to the level of surprise or the unprecedented. We might say that Bhabha’s hybridity has not yet gone ‘‘all the way down,’’ to borrow Renato Rosaldo’s phrasing of the problem in his critique of Ne´stor Garcı´a Canclini (‘‘Foreword’’ xv). In Bhabha’s work, a significant and finally determinative remnant of anthropological distinction and hierarchy remains embedded in the discourse. Such is the lesson to be learned from a close reading of Garcı´a Canclini, and, indeed, this is precisely Rosaldo’s leverage in his analysis of Hybrid Cultures. Garcı´a Canclini certainly has learned something from Bhabha, but it appears that what he has learned is that the dividing line of ‘‘modernity’’ is sufficient analogue to colonialism for unpacking the significance of hybridity. In the cases of Bhabha and Garcı´a Canclini, if one wanted to battle sociology with sociology, one could cite the greatest historian of hybridity

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in the twentieth century, J.A. Rogers, from any of his many works on the perdurance of racial mobility and intermixture, published between 1919 and 1952. Hybridity does not begin with the colonial or the modern, concludes Rogers; rather, it is documented for as far back as writing and memory extends.17 Rogers, as if replying to Bhabha and Garcı´a Canclini, writes: ‘‘It is precisely as if we were to find a very old book with nineteenths or more of the first part missing and whole pages here and there in the remainder, and then trying to write the whole of the original story’’ (Sex and Race I 23). It is absolutely illogical and politically deleterious to line up any notion of hybridization with relatively recent sociological-historical periodizations. The result will always be that a remnant of anthropological determination endures, and the ‘‘primitives’’ and ‘‘peasants’’ will again be trotted onto the stage. Rather, one should say: We have never been modern, we have always been modern; we have never been colonial, we have always been colonial; there have never been hybrids, there have been nothing but hybrids. As Nancy argues: ‘‘All forms of organization derive from mixing and me´tissage. And at bottom, pure things are never anything but extracted’’ (qtd. in Gaillot 92). To the extent that Robert Young might be right about Bhabha’s still-too-determining version of hybridity, a commitment to the hybrid condemns one to the endless play of difference and sameness, where ‘‘the same [is] no longer the same, the different no longer simply different’’ (Young, Colonial 26). It condemns one to the endless production of hybrids, each one inaugurating hierarchies and distinctions in very old anthropological shapes, and each one potentially deconstructable. But if that is all that hybridity studies can promise one, it is not very much and, frankly, on the border of nothing at all—and certainly cannot rise to the level of the ‘‘new’’ that progressively challenges the world. To recapitulate: 1850 stages for the first time the great debate between essence and hybridity, produces a concept of hybridity to undermine essence, then locates hybridity as the ground of essence. The very idea of hybridity undergirds, belatedly, but, finally, in the first place, the idea of different entities—guarantees their space, their properties. Its every attempt to calculate original, non-binary relations produces the conditions for impermeable borders, restructures cultural geography in a manner akin to the ‘‘redlining’’ of real estate districts.18 Cultural studies and postcolonial studies, then, are the inheritors not, as Robert Young would have it, of anthropological and colonial discourse in reverse, but, more insidiously, of scientific-racialist anthropology in precisely its original form and logic.

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4. What is being suggested, finally, is that hybridity is not an alternative to pesky essentialisms, but the very ground for the study of such. What would be the other of hybridity, then, as typically understood? If the sense of hybridity signals ‘‘us’’ to gather or unite around the reburial of anthropology, to attend anthropology’s wake, what might appear in anthropology’s wake? If, following the suggestion of anthropologist and hybridity theorist Kath Weston, anthropology were conceptualized as the site for the production of difference, anthropology would consist entirely of historical reflection (see Weston)—an interesting and perhaps appropriate way to reconceptualize what anthropologists as such do with their time, but one that does not hold open a space for the utopian impulse running through so much of post–Writing Culture anthropology and post-Bhabha hybridity studies. Weston’s suggestion would leave one precisely at the wake, neither mourning nor joyful—merely marking a limit. In a hybridity studies context, something else has been proposed by Samira Kawash, who wrenches the word ‘‘hybridity’’ from all of its traditional determinations, and attempts to think it alongside the logic of singularity. Kawash writes: ‘‘Hybridity appears for the racially constituted subject as that which cannot appear’’ (Dislocating the Color Line 217). This other sort of hybridity, which breaks with every practice of hybridity studies in anthropology and cultural studies, would be the sort of hybridity that Rosaldo hints at as ‘‘all the way down’’—where the problematic of hybridized identity prevents any positive determination of the subject. Kawash writes suggestively about figures from U.S. slave narratives such as Harriet Jacob’s well-known and often-analyzed retreat into the garret space, and Henry ‘‘Box’’ Brown, who nailed himself up in a box and mailed himself to freedom, and then spectacularly paraded himself in a sealed box on the lecture circuit (65). Kawash imagines these moments of invisible textual practice as precisely a form of hybridity that breaks with liberaldemocratic politics of recognition, rights, cultural citizenship, and the like.19 One should note, at this juncture, though, that Kawash works against a tradition within subaltern expression—and perhaps, in particular, AfroAmerican writing—which decries the very condition of invisibility. Here we might note W.E.B. Du Bois’s exposition of the psychological burden of invisible ‘‘entombment’’ at the end of his ‘‘Concept of Race’’ chapter in the 1940 Dusk of Dawn (649–51), or, more famously, Ralph Ellison’s riffs on invisibility in Invisible Man (1947). Ellison writes, for example, ‘‘You

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ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world,’’ and invisibility involves ‘‘carry[ing]’’ a ‘‘sickness within you’’ (3, 434). To the extent that there is a political project on the horizon at the end of Ellison’s work, Ellison counterposes invisibility’s attempt to convince him to ‘‘strive toward colorlessness’’ to a project of ‘‘diversity’’ or pluralism (‘‘to become one, and yet many’’) (435). In short, Ellison imagines invisibility as counterpart to the melting pot, and his liberaldemocratic imaginary can think of nothing beyond the making of difference legible, visible. But there is, perhaps, another Ellison lurking in the corner of Invisible Man, a figure that charts the possibilities of invisibility: I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities. (435)

Here Ellison joins Giorgio Agamben’s recent exploration of the ‘‘quodlibet,’’ or ‘‘whatever’’-being—a being of potentiality that remains undetermined and that can go ‘‘whithersoever-which-way.’’ And, here, one needs to underline, is where Agamben, Ellison, and Kawash join forces around a strategic withdrawal from liberal visibilities—a check on the force of desire that ceaselessly drives toward identification, recognition, and, thus, domination. Agamben writes: For the State . . . what is important is never the singularity as such, but only its inclusion in some identity, whatever identity (but the possibility of the whatever itself being taken up without an identity is a threat the State cannot come to terms with). (Coming 85)

The limit, however, of this sort of invisibility-hybridity needs to be specified. It is a complex decision, indeed, to suggest that Harriet Jacobs, selfimprisoned for years in a cramped garret space, or Ellison, sealed off in his room of light-works, figure a coming politics that might be affirmed, and Kawash herself is careful to note this difficulty throughout her discussion. At best, perhaps, one reaches here the limits of an anthropology that begins from an ontology of desire. And, indeed, such a politics locks one into an interminable battle with any authority that seeks to discover that which is invisible. Such is the lesson of the other invisible man of modern literature, H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897). As Wells’s novel opens, the invisible man—who abhors the world and its violence—takes a room at the Coach and Horses Inn. Wells describes the invisible man more than once as ‘‘singular’’: a

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‘‘singular person,’’ for example, who evidences ‘‘a most singular thing’’—a perhaps ‘‘handless arm’’—to the proprietor Hall (11, 12). But that which is singular is abhorred by the world of the Coach and Horses, as Mrs. Hall makes clear when she confronts the invisible man: ‘‘ ‘You got to tell me one or two things I don’t understand, and what nobody don’t understand, and what everybody is very anxious to understand’ ’’ (30). Speculation as to the identity of the invisible man comes to dominate conversation: One school of thought is that the invisible man is a criminal; another, that he is a lunatic. But then there are the bandages, the ‘‘bright, pink, and shiny’’ nose (3), the seeming blackness of his legs, barely discernible when a dog bites him. The most likely solution to the riddle, according to Fearenside,20 the wagon driver, and others, is that: ‘‘That man’s a piebald. . . . Black here and white there—in patches. And he’s ashamed of it. He’s a kind of half-breed, and the colour’s come off patchy instead of mixing. I’ve heard of such things before. And it’s the common way with horses, as any one can see.’’ (16)

The Halls, Fearenside, Silas Durgan, and others stage precisely the situation described by Giorgio Agamben in his analyses of Herman Melville’s ‘‘Bartleby,’’ Glenn Gould, and the protesters at Tiananmen Square (Coming 34–36, 84–86). The result, in this case, of the locals demanding an identity from Well’s invisible man and finding themselves frustrated at that demand, construct an identity for him as a racial hybrid—as a man who is half-white, half-black. One thing that this undoubtedly suggests is that hybridity, understood as the ability to determine the components of a hyphenated identity, is sought by and within the framework of power relations, but, even more compellingly, another sense of hybridity as invisibility and non-determination/potentiality is, too, precisely locked into similar agonistic struggle. At the limit of a being of desire (that is, a being of radical undesire, a being suggested by Bartleby in his famous expression, ‘‘I would prefer not to,’’ a being that adopts a strategy, as Thomas Carl Wall calls it, of ‘‘radical passivity’’), one reaches an impasse in which each singular being struggles with the will to desire, and desire’s always already appropriation by authority. In other words, there is an affirmed and embattled hybrid invisibility that amounts to a kind of sectarianism, and that remains locked in struggle with those forces that require visibility. So long as this condition endures, visibility and invisible are at odds with one another, and hybridity all the way down cannot be given its chance. Professional anthropology was born as hybridity theory, and anthropology will be buried by hybridity theory. Anthropology is necessarily hybrid

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bound. Anthropologist Jean-Loup Amselle writes, at the end of this long journey: Analysis in terms of ‘‘mestizo logics’’ allows one to escape the question of origin and to hypothesize an infinite regression. It is no longer a question of asking which came first, the segmentary or the state, paganism or Islam, the oral or the written, but to postulate an originary syncretism, a mixture whose parts remain indissociable. (161)

And, in perpetual advent—that is, always before the terms of anthropological adventure—a coming postcoloniality that finally breaks from the inherent racialisms of cultural analysis can only be positioned one small but utterly unrepresentable step before traditional hybridity. The absolutely ‘‘indissociable,’’ perhaps, which is always already happening ‘‘before’’ or ‘‘under’’ anthropology, opens out onto something like sociability without essence.

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coda

Anthropology’s Present David E. Johnson The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity. —Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

For there to be a future as such—which means surprise, alterity—one must no longer voir venir, there must not even be a horizon of anticipation, a horizon of waiting. —Jacques Derrida, A Taste for the Secret

At the outset of Oblivion (Les formes d’oubli 1998), Marc Auge´ writes: ‘‘Oblivion is a necessity both to society and to the individual. One must know how to forget in order to taste the full flavor of the present, of the moment, and of expectation, but memory itself needs forgetfulness’’ (3). There is nothing particularly new in this observation. It is at least as old as Augustine and his remarkable meditation on forgetfulness and memory in his Confessions. Auge´’s consideration of oblivion, however, takes its explicit point of departure not from Augustine but from Littre´: ‘‘The Littre´ defines oblivion as ‘the loss of remembrance.’ This definition is less obvious than it appears—or more subtle: what we forget is not the thing itself, the ‘pure and simple’ events as they happened . . . , but the remembrance. The remembrance, what does that mean? Still going by Littre´ . . . , remembrance is an ‘impression’: the impression ‘that remains in the memory.’ As for the impression, it is ‘the effect exterior objects have on the sense organs’ ’’ (16–17). Of interest is not Auge´’s remark that we forget not the thing itself but only the remembrance of an impression. Rather, it is the decision to leave the impression in place as the ground for remembrance. We do not forget the ‘‘thing itself’’ but only the remembrance, which is always and only the memory, the trace, of the impression that an external object leaves upon the senses. In Auge´’s account, the impression is the

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register, the inscription, of presence. The forgetting of remembrances— the traces of impressions—makes memory possible. Oblivion thus marks the corruption, but also, Auge´ argues, the possibility of memory. As Auge´ explains, ‘‘It is quite clear that our memory would be ‘saturated’ rapidly if we had to preserve every image of our childhood, especially those of our earliest childhood. But what is interesting is that which remains. And . . . what remains is the product of an erosion caused by oblivion’’ (20). ‘‘Erosion’’ indicates that remembering remembers the trace of what was fully present, uncorrupted, uncontaminated. Forgetting is necessary, for sure, but forgetting, in Auge´, is itself an effect of a fully present impression. Recourse to Littre´, moreover, facilitates Auge´’s unproblematic understanding of the move from impression to remembrance and forgetting, for despite his suggestion that following the dictionary’s definition makes transparent certain ‘‘thinking traps’’ (17), he nonetheless subscribes to its privileging of the present as the ground for thinking the possibility of memory. In short, following Littre´’s organization of memory and remembrance in relation to sense impressions effectively locates Auge´ on empiricist ground for which sense impressions establish the limit and possibility of thought. The empiricist tradition agrees on at least two points. First, that the idea of time qua succession is derived from the succession of sense impressions. Second, that sense impressions provide the ground for ideas, thus for thought, knowledge, and experience. Hobbes, for instance, contends that all perception is grounded in sense impressions and that such impressions are, from the start, decaying.1 The constitutive decay of sense impressions means that sense impressions are never simply present: they are necessarily always divided in and against themselves. The most radical implication of this Hobbesian definition of sense, an implication, moreover, for which Hobbes himself never accounted, is that the impression is not, it is neither in itself nor as such: as a ground for the possibility of knowledge, for ideas and concepts, the impression is never stable. Because impressions are necessarily temporal and thus never in themselves, never self-identical, they can provide no sure ground, whether of knowledge, of experience, or sense perception itself. It would be possible to read the same problematic of sense in both Locke and Hume.2 In sum, the problem is that if sense impressions are always already decaying, they can provide no secure stand point from which to synthesize time and thus to make conception or thought possible. It should be obvious that this understanding of sense impressions troubles anthropology’s methodological investment in fieldwork, experience,

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and empirical research. In order for anthropology, which is the empirical science of human experience in all its forms and manifestations, to be possible at all, there must be a synthesis of temporality that makes experience possible as an object of cognition. This is not a limitation of anthropology: on the contrary, it is its condition of possibility, for without a synthesis of temporality, there would be no sense impression, no possible recognition and representation of sense, and thus no experience in the first place. Put simply, only a synthesis of temporality makes possible ‘‘the use of time’’ (Auge´, Oblivion 3): ‘‘Memory and oblivion stand together, both are necessary for the full use of time’’ (89). The ‘‘use of time’’ is another way of saying the management of time: ‘‘The memory of the past, the expectation of the future, and the attention to the present ordain most of the great African rites, which thus present themselves before all else as systems intended for thinking and managing time’’ (55). The question, however, is not whether or not time can be used or managed, for if time is not managed, organized, synthesized, no thought would be possible. Rather, the question is from what place or perspective such temporal management takes place. Auge´’s answer is predictable: ‘‘No dimension of time can be thought about by forgetting the others, and rites are exemplary of the tension between memory and expectation that characterizes the present, to the extent that it organizes the passage from a before to an after, of which it is at once the interpreter and the landmark’’ (55). As both interpreter and landmark, the present names both the site of the synthesis of time and the marker of the determination of time’s meaning and use. Yet, were Auge´ to take Littre´ seriously or, for that matter, the long history of empiricism beginning with Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, he would be unable to posit the present as a landmark insofar as the present, given over as it is to sense impression, can never be located in itself. Consequently, it is the site that cannot be experienced as such. It is always decaying, vanishing. Nevertheless, in Oblivion, forgetfulness always serves memory and memory always serves the present: ‘‘Oblivion brings us back to the present, even if it is conjugated in every tense: in the future, to live the beginning; in the present, to live the moment; in the past, to live the return; in every case, in order not to be repeated. We must forget in order to remain present, forget in order not to die, forget in order to remain faithful’’ (89, emphasis added). Auge´ could not be clearer: regardless of the tense (past, present, future), we always come back to and, in fact, we always remain in the present. All conjugations, whether of the past, present, or the future, are determinations of the present: in the future as the beginning, in the present as the moment, in the past as the return.

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According to Auge´, the use of time depends on the marriage—the conjugality—of whatever tense (past, present, future) in and with the present and presence to which we will have remained faithful. Although anthropology has a very long past, one it must forget, it has no future. Despite conjugating, marrying, all tenses with the present, anthropology nevertheless cannot conjugate with the future. To conjugate with the future, rather than to determine it in and as the present, would mean to open the present to that which is not conjugable, to that which cannot be determined and thus assimilated to any other tense. The future is that to which we cannot be joined, because insofar as it comes and insofar as it is nothing but coming, the future can never be present; it can never be presented. As a consequence, the future cannot be conjugated— conjoined, declined, determined, subordinated—in and as the form or figure of the present. Yet, the discipline of anthropology conceives its survival on the ground of the present. All the methodological metaphors or strategies interrogated in the preceding chapters—affect, dialogue, hybridity/family resemblance—betray an investment in the present as the site of the encounter with the other. Johannes Fabian’s important critique of anthropological method, Time and the Other, makes this clear. Fabian draws attention to the anthropological—as opposed to ethnographical—privileging of the present in its ‘‘denial of coevalness,’’ which he defines as ‘‘a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse’’ (31, emphasis in original). Such recognition notwithstanding, by opposing anthropology (the post-fieldwork work product) to ethnography (the fieldwork upon which anthropology depends), he leaves the present intact as the site for encounter with the other: ‘‘If coevalness, sharing of present Time, is a condition of communication, and anthropological knowledge has its sources in ethnography, clearly a kind of communication, then the anthropologist qua ethnographer is not free to ‘grant’ or ‘deny’ coevalness to his interlocutors. Either he submits to the condition of coevalness and produces ethnographic knowledge, or he deludes himself into temporal distance and misses the object of his search’’ (32).3 For Fabian, this ‘‘either . . . or’’ of anthropology is its constitutive aporia: ‘‘To insist on field research as the fundamental source of anthropological knowledge has served as a powerful practical corrective, in fact a contradiction, which, philosophically speaking, makes anthropology on the whole an aporetic enterprise’’ (33). It is aporetic because, on the one hand, in order to produce the ethnographical knowledge necessary to the possibility of anthropological knowledge, the

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ethnographer and the informant must communicate and therefore, in Fabian’s account, they must share the present. On the other hand, anthropological knowledge necessarily denies such coevalness and reinscribes the place of the informant’s culture within the horizon of an atemporal ‘‘present’’ with no relation to the anthropologist’s historical present. To be worthy of its name, however, an aporia must be absolutely impassible. By his own admission, the aporia Fabian identifies does not meet this standard: ‘‘The most interesting finding . . . was one that precludes a simple, overall indictment of our discipline. This was the discovery of an aporetic split between recognition of coevalness in some ethnographic research and denial of coevalness in most anthropological theorizing and writing’’ (35, emphasis added). The awareness of coevalness indicated in ‘‘some’’ ethnographic writing and the denial of coevalness in ‘‘most’’ anthropology means Fabian identifies and frets only an empirically determined aporia, one that may or may not determine the constitution of ethnographic and anthropological knowledge. And this means a way out of the aporia remains possible, imaginable: ‘‘The distance between the West and the Rest on which all classical anthropological theories have been predicated is by now being disputed in regard to almost every conceivable aspect (moral, aesthetic, intellectual, political). Little more than technology and sheer economic exploitation seem to be left over for the purposes of ‘explaining’ Western superiority. It has become foreseeable that even those prerogatives may either disappear or no longer be claimed. There remains ‘only’ the all-pervading denial of coevalness which ultimately is expressive of a cosmological myth of frightening magnitude and persistency. It takes imagination and courage to picture what would happen to the West (and to anthropology) if its temporal fortress were suddenly invaded by the Time of its Other’’ (35). For Fabian, anthropological hope manifests itself in the courageous imagination of the West’s invasion ‘‘by the Time of its Other.’’ Which is to say, anthropology can only avoid the denial of coevalness if it lets its guard down. Yet, despite his consideration that anthropology should cease denying the coevality of the other, Fabian has already determined the other as belonging to anthropology: the other anthropology would admit—that is, the other that threatens to invade anthropology—has already been identified as ‘‘its Other.’’ In this determination, Fabian capitalizes and capitalizes on the ‘‘Other,’’ but in so doing he forecloses the possibility that the other that comes would be a monster. In this anticipation of the other qua its own, its proper other, anthropology effectively welcomes the other as the same. Put simply, although he insists that ‘‘what is interesting (and hope-inspiring) about

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ideological uses of Time is that they have not, or not yet, led our discipline into total self-delusion’’ (33), Fabian nonetheless deludes himself insofar as he imagines that the aporia constitutive of anthropology is soluble by means of anthropological self-consciousness. To the contrary, the aporia anthropology desires to ‘‘solve’’—namely, the invasion of the time of the other or the constitutive violation of temporalization4 —also makes anthropology possible. As a consequence, we cannot say that anthropology is written in opposition to ethnography, as if the ethnographical scene welcomed without borders or conditions the arrival of an absolutely other as other. It is rather the case that anthropology—and here there is no need for the distinction between ethnography and anthropology—is a necessary effect of the threat of this arrival. Because it is always possible that the other as other will arrive unannounced and unbidden, anthropology (or the West, as Fabian has it), whether understood as ethnographical fieldwork or the subsequent anthropological theorization of culture, guards its borders. It does so whether in the field or at home. And it does so for necessary reasons. * * * Auge´’s and Fabian’s insistence on the present as the time and place for a more ethical anthropological knowledge and practice is symptomatic of anthropology writ large. Fabian’s most important and enduring contribution to anthropological theory, his conception of the ‘‘denial of coevalness,’’ anticipated much of what post–Writing Culture anthropological revisionism sought and continues to seek. The co of coeval suggests the mutuality and reciprocity of anthropological knowledge and it does so by emphasizing the horizon of immediacy and simultaneity governing the ethnographical scene, that is, the co-presence of ethnographer and informant, their being-there at the same time, in the same place. The idea of coevalness excludes any temporal or spatial gap between ethnographer and informant. The absolute reduction of time and space in order to institute the co of coevalness and collaboration necessarily forecloses the possibility of the arrival of the other as other. This is legible in Fabian’s understanding that the other that threatens to invade anthropology is nonetheless ‘‘its Other.’’ This means, simply, that the primal scene of anthropological knowledge is governed by the order of the same: the anthropologist recognizes the other as the same insofar as the other belongs to anthropos. The absolute reduction of time and space in coevalness means the anthropological other is always already one of us. And it is only on the basis of such sameness that Fabian imagines an ethical and responsible anthropology.

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This is should come as no surprise. Anthropology is married to the present because without the security of the present, so anthropology thinks, there is neither time nor place for self-sameness; thus there would be no human constant, no human as such, and therefore nothing for anthropology to observe. Indeed, in Technics and Time, Bernard Stiegler argues that it was Rousseau who established the ‘‘principle of ethnology’’ by defining it as ‘‘the search for the human invariant, through the diversity of men, through the cultural variations of human nature’’ (105). It was Rousseau, then, who made the post-Humean turn away from empiricism in order to orient ‘‘us’’—and what would ultimately become institutionalized as anthropology—toward an ideal human, but to do so Rousseau had to abandon any experiential evidence of ‘‘man’’ or the human and posit him a priori (Technics 104–110). It is Kant, however, who most clearly delineates the stakes for an ethical relation to the other of coevalness, and he does so precisely in terms of the possibility of marriage, for in Kant, the rightful relation to the other depends on our coming at the same time and in the same place. In one of his last published works, The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant outlines the grounds for political community. Because a political community is a rightful community only insofar as it guarantees each individual’s rights against others, the ultimate ground of the political community, according to Kant, is rightful self-possession, that is, an inalienable property or properness. Kant calls each individual’s inalienable propriety ‘‘humanity.’’ Importantly, for Kant, such humanity cannot be sensibly determined, which means our humanity is not phenomenal; thus it literally has no place in the world. Were our humanity phenomenally determined, it would necessarily be alienable. The phenomenality of humanity becomes an issue for Kant only at the moment he imagines the possibility of rightful relations between subjects. So long as humans relate to things, which have no humanity in that they have neither rights nor obligations, there is no problem. But the moment human beings begin to interact with each other, which interaction, moreover, is fundamental to the preservation of the species, our humanity literally becomes a problem in that it limits our relation to each other. The problem is that our humanity is such that it precludes a person (a human being with dignity or humanity and thus in absolute possession of him/ herself ) from being used as a mere means to an end, for a person is, according to Kant, an end in itself. Thus, to allow oneself to be used for sex reduces one’s status to that of a thing. Sex necessarily violates the humanity in us: ‘‘For the natural use that one sex makes of the other’s sexual

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organs is enjoyment, for which one gives itself up to the other. In this act a human being makes himself into a thing, which conflicts with the right of humanity in his own person’’ (Metaphysics 62). The only possibility for avoiding the absolute reduction of one’s humanity is if, in giving oneself to the other, the other gives him/herself in turn: ‘‘There is only one condition under which this is possible: that while one person is acquired by the other as if it were a thing, the one who is acquired acquires the other in turn; for in this way each reclaims itself and restores its personality [i.e., humanity]’’ (62). This is the necessary fiction of ethical human intercourse: one uses another as if the other were a thing. But for Kant we are not things and we preserve our dignity and our humanity through reciprocation. Herein lies the problem. According to Kant, the use of another’s sexual attributes is rightful only under the condition of marriage and in Kant’s understanding marriage is a contract: ‘‘A marriage contract is consummated only by conjugal intercourse (copula carnalis)’’ (63). This means the possibility of consummation depends upon the specific temporal limitations of the contract. And for Kant, the problem with every contract is, precisely, the promise of reciprocation or the ‘‘in turn.’’ Of the possibility of the contract, Kant writes: ‘‘But what belongs to the promisor does not pass to the promisee (as acceptant) by the separate will of either but only by the united will of both, and consequently only insofar as both wills are declared simultaneously. But this cannot take place by empirical acts of declaration, which must necessarily follow each other in time and are never simultaneous. . . . The external formalities (solemnia) in concluding a contract (shaking hands or breaking a straw, stipula, held by both persons), and all the confirmations back and forth of the declarations they have made, manifest the perplexity of the contracting parties as to how and in what way they are going to represent their declarations as existing simultaneously, at the same moment, although they can only be successive. They still do not succeed in this since their acts can only follow each other in time, so that when one act is the other is either not yet or is no longer’’ (58). The problem is obvious and intransigent: so long as our wills remain separate, and they can only ever be represented successively and thus as individually determined, the contract can never be secured. It is always possible, as Kant explains, that even ‘‘if I have promised and the other now wants to accept, I can still during the interval (however short it may be) regret having promised, since I am still free before he accepts; and because of this the one who accepts it, for his part, can consider himself as not bound to his counter-declaration after the promise’’ (58). The empirical

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determination of the contract ultimately means the interval between offering and accepting is irreducible; in other words, the ‘‘in turn’’ and ‘‘by turns’’ is constitutive of the promise and the threat of the promise. As a consequence, no interval will ever be short enough to conclude the contract: this is necessarily the case, for without the interval, there would be no promise. Kant’s solution to the problem of the promise signals that in his account time is not constitutive of the promise but rather supervenes in the promise, jeopardizing it from without: ‘‘Only a transcendental deduction of the concept of acquisition by contract can remove all these difficulties. It is true that in an external relation of rights my taking possession of another’s choice (and his taking possession of mine in turn), as the basis for determining it to a deed, is first thought of empirically, by means of a declaration and counter-declaration of the choice of each in time; this is the sensible condition of taking possession, in which both acts required for establishing the right can only follow one upon another. Since, however, that relation (as a rightful relation) is purely intellectual, that possession is represented through the will . . . as intelligible possession (possessio noumenon) in abstraction from those empirical conditions, as what is mine or yours. Here both acts, promise and acceptance, are represented not as following one upon another but . . . as proceeding from a single common will (this is expressed by the word simultaneously); and the object (promissum) is represented, by omitting empirical conditions, as acquired in accordance with a principle of pure practical reason’’ (58). The transcendental deduction of the concept of acquisition effectively obviates any need for the promise or the contract. To the extent contracts are concluded, according to Kant, by a single common will, thus by a unity of mind and a singleness of purpose indicated by the simultaneity of promising and accepting, giving and receiving, the contract is both unnecessary and inviolable. Yet we know they are both necessary and violable. This is clearly the case even for Kant, as can be seen in his definition of marriage as a contract that is consummated in conjugal intercourse, which always takes time—no matter how little—and therefore cannot be abstracted from its empirical conditions. Because, however, there is an irreducible temporality of conjugal intercourse, it is always possible, thus necessary, that one will come before the other, that one will lose interest in the other before the other comes, etc. In sum, the ‘‘in turn’’ is constitutive; because it is, the limits of the relation to the other—whether person, thing, or monster— remain open and undecided. This is another way of saying that coevalness is impossible and undesirable.

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From the beginning, then, if there ever was one, it will have been a question of time. At the outset of the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau, whom Le´vi-Strauss considered the founder of ethnology and to whom he dedicates every page of Tristes Tropiques (81), takes up the challenge of the oracle at Delphi to ‘‘know thyself’’ and asks, ‘‘how can man come to know himself as nature made him once he has undergone all the changes which the succession of time and things must have produced in his original constitution, and so distinguish that which belongs to his own essence from that which circumstances and progress have added to, or altered in, his primitive state?’’ (Rousseau, Discourse 67; Discours 158). On the one hand, temporality affects everything, including the human being. As finite, the human is essentially mutable. On the other hand, in order to posit the human invariant, it is necessary, according to Rousseau, to set time aside. Anthropology is conceived within the compass of this aporia. For Rousseau, the fallen human being’s intransigent temporality becomes manifest in the possibility of death, something savages cannot imagine: ‘‘The savage man, deprived of any sort of enlightenment, experiences passions only of this last kind [i.e., those of ‘‘a simple impulsion of nature’’]; his desires do not go beyond his physical needs; the only good things he knows in the universe are food, a female and repose, and the only evils he fears are pain and hunger. I say pain and not death, because an animal will never know what death is, knowledge of death and its terrors being one of the first acquisitions which man gains on leaving the animal condition’’ (89; 195–96). The savage is an animal because it has no foresight or, rather, because its foresight is limited to the anticipation of pain. Fear of specific sensations upsets the savage, but death qua the coming cessation of any sensation at all, the disappearance of sensation and thus of itself, has yet to occur to the savage—even as a possibility. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt notes that ‘‘the most intense feeling we know of, intense to the point of blotting out all other experiences, namely, the experience of great bodily pain, is at the same time the most private and least communicable of all’’ (50). The absolute privacy of the experience of pain has two implications. First, because it is essentially incommunicable, pain cannot ground a community. Rousseau’s savages, for instance, cannot come together in anticipation of a shared pain or on the basis of such. Second, the incommunicability of pain, the fact that it is ‘‘perhaps the only experience which we are unable to transform into a shape fit for public appearance’’ (51), ultimately means that it ‘‘deprives us of our feeling for reality to such an extent that we can forget it more

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quickly and easily than anything else’’ (51). Pain is what we cannot remember, what we cannot not forget, which means pain is finite, temporal through and through. As such, it challenges our capacity to rise out of biological life by means of our capacity, according to Arendt, to leave ‘‘imperishable traces behind’’ (19). It is worth recalling that for Hobbes, it is not so much the fear of death that leads men to band together as it is the fear of violent death that does so. As Hobbes puts it in Leviathan, men live in ‘‘continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’’ (Leviathan 89). The anticipation of a violent death—and it seems reasonable to translate ‘‘violent’’ by ‘‘pain’’ when considered in relation to anticipation—that we will never be able to remember leads men out of themselves and into the state. Although pain is, according to Arendt, incommunicable as such, nevertheless, the fear of pain, the fear of violent death, leads men to communicate, to form sovereign communities. ‘‘We must therefore resolve,’’ Hobbes writes, ‘‘that the original of all great and lasting societies consisted not in the mutual good will men had towards each other, but in the mutual fear they had of each other’’ (113). Society is founded in the fear of that which leaves no trace or leaves only a perishable trace, the fear of pain or of violent death, in short, the fear of perishing. In Hobbes this fear determines the state of nature, although it is also possible to show, following Werner Hamacher, that the state of nature is the civil state. For Arendt, however, it also marks the distinction between man and animal, which ‘‘runs right through the human species itself’’ (Human 19). The human being becomes ‘‘man’’ at the moment it becomes imperishable, immortal, not biologically, but in terms of the traces it leaves behind: ‘‘By their capacity for the immortal deed, by their ability to leave nonperishable traces behind, men, their individual mortality notwithstanding, attain an immortality of their own and prove themselves to be of a ‘divine’ nature’’ (19). Our divinity, which for Arendt is also the sign of our humanity, as opposed to our animality, depends on the durability of the traces we leave behind. Our humanity depends on our ability to sign in permanent ink, as it were, and thus to leave ourselves—traces of ourselves—behind. Man comes into its own at the moment it represents itself. Rousseau explains that there is no need to recur to ‘‘the uncertain testimony of history’’ to know that the savage’s ‘‘imagination paints no pictures; his heart yearns for nothing; his modest needs are readily supplied at hand; and he is so far from having enough knowledge for him to desire to acquire more knowledge, that he can have neither foresight nor curiosity’’ (Discourse 90; Discours 196).5 Rousseau figures the relation of desire

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and representation to what is present or available ‘‘at hand’’ in terms of anticipation. His example is not surprising: ‘‘Such is, even today, the extent of the foresight of a Caribbean Indian: he sells his cotton bed in the morning, and in the evening comes weeping to buy it back, having failed to foresee that he would need it for the next night’’ (90; 197). It should be obvious that the lack of the faculty of anticipation is impossible even on Rousseau’s terms, for he grants the Caribbean the minimal anticipation necessary for the possibility of selling his bed. Consequently Rousseau allows the savage to engage in an economy of exchange, but denies him anticipation as such. Yet, without a minimal structure of anticipation, the Caribbean would be incapable of recognizing the need for sleep—even up to the very moment he fell asleep—and thus would be incapable of mourning anything at all, including the loss of the bed he could not possibly remember or conceive. Only a decade or so after the publication of Rousseau’s Second Discourse, Kant’s announcement for his lectures for the winter of 1765–1766 included the following statement: ‘‘I shall make clear what method ought to be adopted in the study of man. And by man here I do not only mean man as he is distorted by the mutable form which is conferred upon him by the contingencies of his condition, and who, as such, has nearly always been misunderstood even by philosophers. I rather mean the unchanging nature of man’’ (Theoretical Philosophy 298; 2:312). For Kant, the division between what man ought to be and what man appears to be—which Kant conceives as the difference between man according to his circumstances (time) and man according to his nature (timelessness)—spells out the division between the transcendental project of Critical philosophy and its empirical counterpart, which can be found in Kant’s lectures on physical geography and anthropology. This division notwithstanding, even in the empirical sciences stability is required. As Kant writes: ‘‘The fact that the human being can have the ‘I’ in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person, and by virtue of the unity of consciousness through all the changes that happen to him, one and the same person’’ (Anthropology 15; 127). In his lectures on anthropology, which he began giving as early as 1772–1773 and which were revised and published as Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View in 1798, Kant reminds us of the same savage limitation of which Rousseau had written when he observed, in §35, ‘‘On the Faculty of Foreseeing,’’ that ‘‘To live for the day (without caution and care) does not bring much honor to human understanding; it is like the Caribbean who sells his hammock in the morning and in the evening is

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embarrassed about it because he does not know how he will sleep that night’’ (79; 186). Kant is clear about the importance of the faculty of anticipation: ‘‘To possess this faculty interests us more than any other, because it is the condition of all possible practice and of the ends to which the human being relates the use of his powers. Every desire contains a (doubtful or certain) foresight of what is possible through it’’ (79; 185). For Kant, without the faculty of anticipation, there can be no desire; without desire, there is no possibility for action. Furthermore, the absence of foresight and, as a consequence, of desire, entails a concomitant lack of memory in that ‘‘Recalling the past (remembering) occurs only with the intention of making foresight of the future possible by means of it; generally speaking, we look about us from the standpoint of the present in order to decide something or to be prepared for something’’ (79; 186). But this means the Caribbean literally has no standpoint at all, for the present, according to Kant’s Anthropology, is nothing more than the vanishing limit from which the human being looks out from the past he remembers toward the future he anticipates. This is so because the faculty of foresight is necessarily linked to what Kant calls the facultas signatrix or the faculty of designation (§38): ‘‘The faculty of cognizing the present as the means for connecting the representation of the foreseen with that of the past is the faculty of using signs. –The mental activity of bringing about this connection is signifying (signatio), which is also called signaling, of which the higher degree is called marking’’ (84; 191). In ‘‘Leaps of Imagination’’ Rodolphe Gasche´ points out that the attributive or signaling function of the faculty of designation, which is a function of the pragmatic imagination, necessarily informs the imagination in all its determinations, whether empirical or transcendental. Further, he argues that designation or attribution is an operation of pointing toward something and, therefore, of pointing away from the imagination as such.6 The pointing away from the imagination in the pointing toward another makes possible, in Gasche´’s reading of Kant, the possibility of a temporal relation to the world: without the imagination, one has neither past nor future; yet, insofar as the human has imagination, what he can never have—except as an always already trespassed limit—is a present in which to be (in) itself. In Kant’s account, the lack of foresight is also the lack of memory. This means the Caribbean has neither past nor future and insofar as the present is only the transgressed limit of the exposure of the past to the future, the Caribbean also lacks a present. Rousseau makes the same point. He writes: ‘‘His soul, which nothing disturbs, dwells only in the sensation of its present existence, without any idea of the future, however close that might be,

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and his projects, as limited as his horizons, hardly extend to the end of the day’’ (Discourse 90; Discours 196–97). Of course, Rousseau understood that this Caribbean never existed; it is an ideal construct marking, for him, the civilized man’s absolute fallenness into time. Kant’s difficulty is perhaps a bit different inasmuch as he must inevitably limit the empirical determination of temporality articulated in the Anthropology in order to secure the stability of the present in transcendental apperception and thus to make possible his determination of what man ought to be. Despite Kant’s ultimate Critical determination of an atemporal ground for the synthesis of temporality, in the Anthropology, as in Rousseau’s Second Discourse, the present, whether of the Caribbean or the European human, is constitutively aporetic. On the one hand, the European human, on account of the logic of signaling, is always only no longer or not yet; his present, in its incessant division and displacement, is not. On the other hand, the Caribbean, by virtue of its lack of anticipation, is only here and now, absolutely present; he has neither past nor future, thus he has no duration, no extension; therefore, he is not.7 The important distinction, however, is that according to Kant’s argument, the Caribbean lacks any capacity to act in the world, for practical reason depends on the exposure to the future. In the case of the Caribbean, the aporia of presence results from what Rousseau characterizes as repetition without difference. The Caribbean, Rousseau remarks, suffers an indifference to the natural world precisely ‘‘because it has become familiar. It is always the same pattern, always the same rotation. He has not the intelligence to wonder at the greatest marvels; and we should look in vain to him for the philosophy which a man needs if he is to know how to notice once what he has seen every day’’ (90; 196, emphasis added). For the Caribbean, all is repetition without recognition, without the synthesis necessary to re-member the past. Whatever happens to and in the presence of the Caribbean happens over and over, but because the Caribbean has no foresight and thus has no memory either, there is no possibility of comprehending what happens to him. Everything is always the same for the Caribbean without the Caribbean being able to remember it as such, as the same. That is, in the absolute present, the absolutely different is the absolutely same. The upshot is that the Caribbean could never be said to have experience insofar as experience is an effect of anticipation, and, in Kant’s account, anticipation is an effect of the synthesis of the past. The problem, then, is not that the Caribbean is limited only to empirical and thus particular sensory perceptions; rather, the Caribbean has no capacity to recognize either the particular or the universal. This is because neither particularity nor universality is thinkable

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without the synthesis of temporality. Inasmuch as the Caribbean repeats without recognition he is incapable of the synthetic operation necessary to thought. For the Caribbean, there is neither a first time, nor a last time; there are neither similar events nor different ones. Indeed, insofar as there is no anticipation, nothing ever surprises the Caribbean because, according to the logic of the Caribbean’s absolute presence or absolute present tense, whatever is will have always had to be present. It is not, then, that the Caribbean sees everything coming; it is rather that nothing ever comes. In Kant repetition works to the opposite effect: ‘‘Empirical foresight is the anticipation of similar cases (exspectatio casuum similium) and requires no rational knowledge of causes and effects, but only the remembering of observed events as they commonly follow one another, and repeated experiences produce an aptitude for it’’ (Anthropology 79). Clearly, the Caribbean is excluded from such an empirical relation to the future—for that matter to any empirical relation to events in general—in that the Caribbean, according to Kant, has no desire and thus neither memory nor anticipation. The repetition that defines the Caribbean—the daily giving away of his bed and the nightly concern not only for a place to sleep but how to sleep—is therefore not the repetition of experience, for experience, in order to be thought as such, must be understood within the horizon of the law of causality, on the one hand, and, on the other, must be located within the anticipation of the new. Experience is, therefore, a priori, transcendental. In order to be comprehended as such, experience must be recognizable. Cognition depends, in Kant, on recognition, which means recognition comes before cognition. The Caribbean, however, recognizes nothing at all, for, in Kant, recognition happens only insofar as there is the production or reproduction of representations within the operation of the imagination; yet, it is precisely representations that the savage imagination does not supply: ‘‘His imagination paints no pictures,’’ Rousseau attests.8 There never was such an animal. The Caribbean is a European phantasm. Importantly, the ascribed lack of anticipation makes it impossible for the Caribbean to have or develop any sense of self, in that the self implies duration and self-sameness over time and its projection into the future. According to Rousseau and Kant, the Caribbean will never know what befalls him, because there is no ‘‘him’’ there. The Caribbean is incapable of remembering himself in order to anticipate himself into a future. He vanishes before ‘‘himself’’; he is always already extinct.

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The relation between representation, anthropology, and time becomes transparent in these pages of Rousseau and Kant. Anthropology is the study of the human; the human is the finite being capable of representing itself to itself. There is no anthropology without representation and there is no representation that is not temporally determined and thus that is not the effect of finitude. Nevertheless, although both Rousseau and Kant understand the temporality of the human, neither thinks temporality in its most radical determination as ‘‘infinite finitude,’’ which Martin Ha¨gglund explains is the necessary effect of the ‘‘trace structure of time’’ and the ‘‘irreducible condition for being in general’’ (Radical Atheism, ms. 125, 60). Rather, both Rousseau and Kant posit an atemporal ground for the human, Rousseau in his imagination of the human before the fall into time, Kant in his understanding that the effects of time are nonetheless absolved in the atemporal unity of consciousness, transcendental apperception. This means that representation operates in Rousseau and Kant— and in all anthropologically determined work—to synthesize time phantasmatically, as if it were not temporal. What Stiegler calls anthropology’s investment in the ‘‘human invariant’’ is only possible within the horizon of representation conceived as the atemporal synthesis of temporality.9 Insofar as he is incapable of representing himself, the Caribbean—the European phantasm—is inhuman, but this means only that Europe historically denies its finitude precisely in order to understand itself and thus to posit itself, once and for all. Despite anthropology’s (and philosophy’s) best efforts to mitigate the effects of representation, to locate and identify that which is invariant and thus beyond or before difference, contamination, the effects of time, there is no saving anthropology from representation. Nor should we want there to be. Anthropology’s failure lies not in its necessary relation to representation, but in its dream of locating the invariant truth, beyond representation, of the human: it seeks to present, once and for all, the absolutely human, that which does not change, that which is not temporal or finite. Such a dream reduces the other to a corpse, to an exotic other, to a woman in native dress, say, or to one of the family, and effectively annihilates him/ her/it in the name of the same. Anthropology’s attempt to save the other results in the most brutal attack on the other.

Absolute Translation, or Culture Up in Smoke We should perhaps turn to another anthropological narrative, one that attempts to rethink the importance of the Caribbean and of a certain savage purity. In doing so it provides anthropological discourse with one of

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its most important and enduring theoretical concepts: Fernando Ortiz’s Contrapunteo cubano (Cuban Counterpoint) and his neologism, transculturacio´n.10 According to Ortiz, ‘‘transculturation better expresses the different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which is what the English word acculturation really implies, but the process also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as deculturation. In addition it carries the idea of the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be called neoculturation’’ (Contrapunteo 96; Counterpoint 102–3). The definition of transculturation makes clear that cultures are never static; they are always in movement, growing, dying, mixing. Cultures never remain the same, which means it ought to be essentially impossible to determine in any positive way the limits of culture. It ought to be impossible to describe, in itself or as such, any culture. It is thus worth considering how tobacco, and specifically Cuban tobacco, escapes the effects of transculturation, which is another way to say the effects of time, and therefore how it preserves a certain Cuban purity. Despite his claims that Indian culture, of which tobacco is the veritable glue, was destroyed in Cuba shortly after the arrival of Europeans (211; 191) and that the transculturation of tobacco began shortly thereafter, Ortiz nevertheless insists not only that tobacco ‘‘always aspires to be pure’’ (29; 23, translation modified11), but that ‘‘tobacco is Indian’’ (107; 105). Later, Ortiz locates tobacco at the origin of humanity, along with those ‘‘discoveries’’ that inaugurate the human: fire, tools, dress, agriculture, domestication of animals, the wheel (204–5; 183). This has two consequences: first, humans are Indians at bottom or at birth. Second, the transculturation of tobacco has no apparent effect on tobacco: it remains Indian and Cuban; it remains pure. It does not suffer the effects of time. Ortiz pushes this further when, after citing Malinowski’s contention that among ‘‘primitive peoples’’ religion is ‘‘the cement of their social life’’ (206; 185), he turns to tobacco’s place in Indian life. He claims that ‘‘tobacco linked all the individual life of the Indian to that of his society’’; that ‘‘Tobacco was the inseparable companion of the Indian from birth to death’’; and that ‘‘the Indian lived wrapped [envuelto] in the spirals of tobacco’s smoke’’ (206; 185). In sum, for Ortiz there is no Indianness without tobacco; tobacco binds Indian culture and thus signifies the very possibility of Indianness. From here Ortiz introduces the effects of tobacco in Africa. Remarkably, rather than tobacco becoming African in the wake

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of the destruction of Indian cultures in Cuba and its exportation to Africa, tobacco, according to Ortiz, civilizes Africa. Although he explains that Africans brought with them their diverse cultures, he also claims, ‘‘they brought with their bodies their souls, but not their institutions nor their implements’’; ‘‘They arrived deracinated, wounded, shattered, like the cane of the fields’’ (95, 96; 101). Africans, therefore, arrive in Cuba in the condition of sugar, for, as Ortiz points out, sugar is that which has no cultural specificity; it is the same everywhere. It should be obvious how we are to read the difference between Indians and Africans. Tobacco functions as the cultural determinant for Indians; Indians are bound together through tobacco. Africans, however, are like sugar: they lack any specificity as a people; hence, they are not one. Tobacco arrives in Africa and changes all that: ‘‘Tobacco entered the Dark Continent and fanned out rapidly, not only along the coast, where the white traders had their posts, but all through the interior, the seeds of the plant, along with the habit, passing from tribe to tribe and from witchdoctor to witch-doctor, even before the trader appeared [au´n antes de que apareciera] to introduce the agreeable habit and thus create among the Negroes a new necessity by which he profited. The adoption of tobacco by the Negroes of Africa proceeded so swiftly that the Europeans at the beginning of the seventeenth century considered it something native to the Africans’’ (213–14; 193; emphasis added). Ortiz cites without comment Lord Raglan’s observation that ‘‘from time immemorial [desde tiempo inmemorial]’’ Negro villages of Uganda and the Sudan planted tobacco as their sole crop and, moreover, that ‘‘There is not a single cultural element common to all the territories and peoples of Black Africa with the single exception of tobacco’’ (214; 193, 194). A complicated logic is at work in these sentences. On the one hand, tobacco has always been part of African cultural practices. It has been a part of Africa from ‘‘time immemorial.’’ Tobacco is the name of what does not change in Africa; it is, therefore, what is most African. On the other hand, in Ortiz’s account, Africa becomes Africa only after the arrival of tobacco, which is not native or indigenous to Africa, which is not, therefore, African at all according to Ortiz’s logic. On the contrary, tobacco is Indian. Thus, whereas Africa and the rest of the world are open to the transculturating effects of tobacco, tobacco and, by extension, Cuba and a certain Indigenousness remain ‘‘pure’’— temporally uncontaminated—in their encounters with the world. Tobacco is the civilizing or enculturating agency that nonetheless has no relation to civilization if civilization is understood as a temporal institution.

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Tobacco thus operates as an anthropological metaphor of transculturation, that is, of the principle of cultural formation as grounded in the trans. In principle, the effects of tobacco would be radically inclusive, transforming everything with which it comes into contact. Moreover, as essentially spiritual, as smoke, tobacco knows no boundaries, no limits. Such absolute translatability notwithstanding, however, insofar as culture is defined by the traits of a belonging determined according to a principle of cultural purity, Ortiz’s project remains fundamentally exclusive. Here, for instance, are Ortiz’s almost last words: ‘‘Havana tobacco is the prototype of all other tobaccos, which envy it and strive to imitate it. This opinion is universally held’’ (431, my translation). Such a claim would have no currency were tobacco not to have an already established cultural value. But according to Ortiz it does. Africa becomes the site of African culture only after the arrival of an uneconomic tobacco, a tobacco that arrives—like smoke before fire—before the trader. In Ortiz’s account, tobacco, which is essentially Cuban, is present in Africa before Africa becomes present to itself: tobacco is the present, the gift, of African culture. It is that which presents Africa to itself. Cuban tobacco is the pure agency of translation, that which makes possible all cultural change, that which makes possible culture ‘‘itself,’’ without itself ever changing. At issue is the organization of an always already culturally determined changing same as the condition of possibility and thus the principle of cultural formation. In Contrapunteo cubano, the singularity and multiplicity of cultures depends on a ‘‘transcendental’’ principle of translation that is, nevertheless, culturally specific. In this gesture Contrapunteo cubano bears an affinity to Edmund Husserl’s 1935 essay, ‘‘Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,’’ also known as the ‘‘Vienna Lecture,’’ in which Husserl argues that in Europe ‘‘individual men act in societies of different levels: in families, in tribes, in nations, all being internally, spiritually bound together . . . in the unity of a spiritual shape’’ (Crisis 273). Rodolphe Gasche´ points out that Husserl posits the origin of European identity ‘‘in the absolute idea that marks the birth of European spirit’’ and, moreover, that ‘‘What causes this inborn idea in European humanity to be absolute is that it is concerned not with a geographical, national, ethnic, or religious entity but with humanity’s struggle to understand itself’’ (‘‘Feeling the Debt’’ 125). In Husserl, according to Gasche´, any particular being whose particularity is determined geographically, nationally, ethnically, or religiously will not be European, i.e., universal. Only the European, in his estrangement from a necessary place, is universal. In his 1953–54 thesis, remarking on the impossible empirical determination of Europe, Derrida

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put it a bit differently: ‘‘Starting from geographical political or economical facticity, the eidetic unity of Europe cannot be defined by anything rigorous. To take in Europe, one must begin from an idea, from a pure and a priori meaning’’ (Problem 154). If it is the case, as Derrida observes, that ‘‘The idea of philosophy is not carried or produced by a ‘real’ empirical history’’ and thus that ‘‘European facticity must be put in brackets,’’ then it ought to follow that in its relation to philosophy, ‘‘Europe should be able to be replaced by Asia or by Africa’’ (155). That is, ‘‘in its purity and necessity, one must . . . suppose it rooted in thousands of geographical and historical ways’’ (155). In short, the place of what Husserl calls spiritual Europe’s (Crisis 276) birth must be entirely accidental, contingent, without any necessary ligature (and thus without any necessary legacy) to the geographical horizon of Europe. This must be the case, in fact, because, as Husserl contends, spiritual Europe’s birthplace is ‘‘not a geographical birthplace in one land’’ (276). Husserl’s determination that the birth of spiritual Europe, in all its purity and universality, must be bracketed from any empirical history of Europe means the utopic conception of spiritual Europe is irreducible. Derrida acknowledges that ‘‘Husserl would not dispute that Europe in its empirical facticity has no privileged relation to the idea of philosophy’’ (Problem 155). Yet, despite this, Husserl claims that it has an empirical—factual—origin, a ‘‘spiritual birthplace in a nation or in individual men and human groups of this nation. It is the ancient Greek nation in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.’’ (Crisis 276). In Greece, Husserl sees ‘‘the primal phenomenon of spiritual Europe’’ (Crisis 276). As the primal phenomenon, however, spiritual Europe and with it the idea of philosophy, as Derrida remarks, are ‘‘reduced to a fact’’ (Derrida, Problem 156). In his attempt to specify the predicament facing humanity, Husserl makes clear factical Europe’s spiritual privilege: ‘‘no matter how hostile they may be toward one another, the European nations nevertheless have a particular inner kinship of spirit which runs through them all, transcending national differences. There is something like a sibling relationship, which gives all of us in this sphere the consciousness of homeland. This comes immediately to the fore as soon as we think ourselves into the Indian historical sphere, for example, with its many people and cultural products. In this sphere, too, there exists the unity of a family-like kinship, but one that is alien to us. Indian people, on the other hand, experience us as aliens and only one another as confreres’’ (Crisis 274–75). The anthropological investment of transcendental phenomenology is betrayed in the determination of ‘‘family-like kinship’’ that nevertheless gives way to utter

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alienation. Husserl identifies two fraternities—ours (European) and theirs (Indian)—that have the same basic structure (family-like kinship), yet remain alien one to the other. The fundamental difference, however, is that Indians want to join our family: ‘‘Yet, this essential difference between familiarity and strangeness . . . cannot suffice. Historical mankind does not always divide itself up in the same way in accord with this category. We feel this precisely in our own Europe. There is something unique here that is recognized in us by all other human groups, too, something that, quite apart from all considerations of utility, becomes a motive for them to Europeanize themselves even in their unbroken will to spiritual selfpreservation; whereas we, if we understand ourselves properly, would never Indianize ourselves, for example’’ (275). Indians, and by extension all non-Europeans, struggle for spiritual self-preservation even as they desire to become European, in whom they recognize ‘‘something unique,’’ namely, the possibility of ‘‘universal mankind as such’’ and ‘‘the breakthrough and the development of a new human epoch’’ (274). Husserl understands this to be a recognition beyond any consideration of utility, which means that the alien desire to Europeanize itself is ostensibly unrelated to the effects of colonialism or, for that matter, to any desire for economic development. It is, rather, a purely spiritual desire and one, moreover, that would apparently make no difference (Indians continue to struggle for spiritual self-preservation, Husserl claims) even as it makes all the difference: to Europeanize oneself amounts to a spiritual transformation. But let there be no misunderstanding, there can be no European apostasy. The question of European spirit is linked in Husserl to our selfunderstanding, to the possibility of our knowing ourselves to be what we already are. Knowing what and who we are, we can never want to be anything other than what we are, Europeans. The ‘‘Vienna Lecture’’ amounts to an anthropologized account of the fifth of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, in which he attempts to explain, from within the horizon of transcendental phenomenology, how the transcendental ego encounters the other. Just as the Indians’ desire to Europeanize themselves does not turn them into Europeans, but releases them into their essence, so too in the Cartesian Meditations Husserl explained that the other is always absolutely other: ‘‘Experience is original consciousness; and in fact we generally say, in the case of experiencing a man: the other is himself there before us ‘in person’. On the other hand, this being there in person does not [keep] us from admitting forthwith that, properly speaking, neither the other Ego himself, nor his subjective processes or his appearances themselves, nor anything else belonging to his

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own essence, becomes given in our experience originally. If it were, if what belongs to the other’s own essence were directly accessible, it would be merely a moment of my own essence, and ultimately he himself and I myself would be the same’’ (108–9). Husserl wants to delimit this possibility: The other and myself are not the same; the other is other. And what is it that distinguishes Europeans from non-Europeans? Self-presence: ‘‘I mean that we feel (and in spite of all obscurity this feeling is probably legitimate) that an entelechy is inborn in our European civilization which holds sway throughout all the changing shapes of Europe and accords to them the sense of a development toward an ideal shape of life and being as an eternal pole’’ (Crisis 275, emphasis added). No matter how much Europe and Europeans change, they remain the same. The condition of possibility of historical Europe, then, depends upon this feeling, this universal affectivity which as such cannot be subject to time or change in that it is presence as such, entelecheia. Thus, a certain Europeanization, a certain universalization, affords the possibility of letting Indians—non-Europeans in general—be what they are, non-European, regardless of how much they want to and do become like us, while Europeans remain European no matter how different they are from each other. This is the difference that makes no difference and makes all the difference. It is a universalization that manifests itself anthropologically as the essence of the particular: Husserl lets Indians be Indians, consequently securing their difference from Europeans. Read from the perspective of the ‘‘Vienna Lecture,’’ all of transcendental phenomenology could be said to have been developed in order to ground such particular—hence empirical—differences philosophically, a gesture that would also provide for the philosophical necessity of anthropology, but to do so solely on the basis of the present and the absolute self-presence to itself of Europe and the idea of Europe. Nevertheless, the possibility of determining the other as Indian, or simply as non-self-same, is also what makes anthropology impossible. In ‘‘Violence and Metaphysics,’’ against Levinas’s interpretation of Husserl, Derrida argues in support of ‘‘the most manifest and most massively incontestable meaning of the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations . . . [namely, that] Husserl’s most central affirmation concerns the irreducibly mediate nature of intentionality aiming at the other as other’’ (Writing and Difference 123).12 As Husserl recognized, such irreducible mediation is absolutely necessary, for otherwise the other we would experience would be the same; otherwise, ‘‘if what belongs to the other’s own essence were directly accessible, it would be merely a moment of my own essence, and

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ultimately he himself and I myself would be the same’’ (Cartesian Meditations 109). As a consequence of this necessarily irreducible ‘‘mediacy of intentionality’’ (Cartesian Meditations 109), Derrida argues, ‘‘It is evident, by an essential, absolute and definitive self-evidence that the other as transcendental other . . . can never be given to me in an original way and in person, but only through analogical appresentation’’ (Writing and Difference 123–24). Although the notion of analogical appresentation arises in the Cartesian Meditations in relation to the perception or experience of another man, Derrida suggests, ‘‘analogical appresentation belongs . . . to every perception’’ (124). This is so because whether one perceives another thing or another subject, there is, Derrida explains,, ‘‘something within them . . . always hidden, and is indicated only by anticipation, analogy and appresentation’’ (124). Analogical appresentation, however, does not signify ‘‘an analogical and assimilatory reduction of the other to the same,’’ rather it ‘‘confirms and respects separation, the unsurpassable necessity of . . . mediation’’ (124). The importance of this cannot be overstated. Nevertheless, there is a distinction to be drawn, at least within Husserl, between the perception of things and the perception of someone else. Specifically, the irreducibility of the alterity of the transcendent thing depends on the ‘‘indefinite incompleteness of my original perception’’ (Derrida, Writing and Difference 124). For instance, Husserl offers the example of the house: ‘‘we must distinguish noematically between that part which is genuinely perceived and the rest, which is not strictly perceived and yet is indeed there too. Thus every perception of this type is transcending: it posits more as itself-there than it makes ‘actually’ present at any time. Every external perception belongs here—for example, perception of a house (front—rear)’’ (Cartesian Meditations 122). The point is that the perceiving consciousness, although incomplete, is only indefinitely so in that it can go around the house, thereby making present in turn all of the house’s fac¸ades. Husserl admits, however, that not only external perceptions operate this way; on the contrary, ‘‘at bottom absolutely every perception, indeed every evidence, is thus described in respect of a most general feature’’ (122). Although the perception of the other qua someone other is also marked by this indefinite incompleteness, it also sustains, according to Derrida, ‘‘the radical impossibility of going around to see things from the other side’’ (Writing and Difference 124). ‘‘The stranger,’’ Derrida writes, ‘‘is infinitely other because by his essence no enrichment of his profile can give me the subjective face of his experience from his perspective, such as he has lived it. Never will this experience be given to me originally’’ (124).

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If we admit, with Husserl, that ‘‘at bottom’’ every perception is constitutively incomplete—necessarily so as the condition of possibility of perceiving any other whatsoever—then we will also have to admit that any determination of the other by way of assimilative analogy or anticipation, will be both impossible to avoid and impossible to sustain. Any determination of the other as Indian, for instance, amounts, finally, to the determination of the same: it amounts to a determination of my experience and thus not of the other as other at all. Every other is absolutely other. And we will never know what this means.

Absolutely Other The moment the relation to the other, to any other, depends on analogical appresentation, then every other is absolutely other and the problem becomes one of drawing the line between Europe and its others, between Europeans and non-Europeans, but also and more generally, between anthropos and zoon, between the human and the animal. On what ground will this border be enforced? It is precisely this question that Enrique Dussel’s E´tica de la liberacio´n en la edad de la globalizacio´n y de la exclusio´n (Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion) attempts to answer. Dussel begins, ‘‘We find ourselves before the massive fact of the crisis of a ‘world-system’ which began to gestate 5000 years ago, and which is globalizing itself until it reaches the last corner of the earth, excluding, paradoxically, the majority of humanity. It is a problem of life or death. Human life is not a concept, an idea, nor an abstract horizon, but rather the mode of reality of every concrete human being, the absolute condition of ethics and the demand of all freedom’’ (11).13 We will not comment on all that this introductory gesture opens onto, but we should at the very least indicate the constellation ‘‘world,’’ ‘‘globe,’’ and ‘‘earth’’ that Dussel invokes: a ‘‘world-system’’ that ‘‘globalizes itself’’ until it reaches all the corners of the ‘‘earth.’’ What is the difference between these concepts? What becomes of the ‘‘world-system’’ once it has ‘‘globalize[d] itself’’ to the far corners of the ‘‘earth’’? What becomes of the earth and the globe when the world-system will have exhausted them and itself? Moreover, once this globalizing world-system arrives at the far corners of the earth, what will become of humanity, of human life, the majority of which will have been excluded from the world-system during the process of globalization? What becomes of human life at the moment the world-system absolutizes itself, at the moment it becomes total, co-terminus with the

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globe and the earth? In becoming absolute, will the world-system have absolved itself of any responsibility for others, for the other? Will it have absolved the absolute condition of ethics and thus silenced the ‘‘demand of all freedom’’? What we know, according to Dussel, is that such globalization is already ‘‘a massive fact’’ and it constitutes a near universal threat. It is a matter of life and death and even as the system reaches the farthest limits of the world and thus even as it includes nearly everyone, the majority has been excluded. This double movement of inclusion and exclusion, the totalization of the world coupled with the exclusion of the majority of humanity, gives Dussel his principal figure. Within the epoch of globalization, an epoch that will have begun some 5000 years ago, there is always a victim, someone is always excluded: ‘‘although all the affected always have the (implicit) right to argumentative participation in the real community of communication . . . nevertheless, there is always some type of affectedexcluded’’ (413). This ‘‘always,’’ Dussel maintains, is not theoretical but empirical: he is talking about the concrete reality of living human beings. Moreover, for Dussel, ‘‘Human life is not a concept, an idea, nor an abstract horizon.’’ We should note Dussel understands the excluded other as an ‘‘afectado-excluido’’: an other affected-excluded by globalization; in other words, as one who is in touch with globalization, that is, one who has been touched by the processes of globalization and therefore one who has also been touched by the cultures and civilizations, if there are any, of globalization. It is not a question of insisting on a monoculture or monocivilization of globalization. It is, rather, only to insist that whatever globalization is, if it is anything at all, it does not take place simply outside or beyond cultures and civilizations. Dussel’s E´tica therefore leaves no one out. He writes that victimization, whether as the victim or the victimizer, is the mode of reality of every human being. ‘‘In spite of everything, and against what many opine, it seems that the ancient suspicion of the necessity of an ethics of freedom from the perspective of the ‘victims,’ from the place of the ‘downtrodden’ of the 1960s, from the ‘exteriority’ of their ‘exclusion,’ has been confirmed as pertinent by means of the terror of a frightful misery that annihilates a good part of humanity at the end of the 20th century, along with the uncontainable and destructive ecological pollution of the planet Earth’’ (15). Thus, Dussel claims that E´tica de la liberacio´n is ‘‘an everyday ethics, from the position and in favor of the immense majority of humanity excluded from globalization, in the historical ‘normativity’ presently in force’’ (15). It is an ethics that indicates the conditions for saving ourselves—all of us, both those historically excluded and those who have historically excluded them—from ourselves: ‘‘Ethics become the final

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recourse of a humanity in danger of auto-extinction’’ (568). The threat of auto-extinction, however, means that according to Dussel this ‘‘worldsystem’’ is necessarily auto-immune in that in its totalization, in its necessary globalization, it runs the risk of destroying itself. And this cannot be avoided. It appears, then, that there is no outside to this world-system. It includes everyone, if only through exclusion. It victimizes everyone. At the same time, however, everyone is responsible: ‘‘The Ethics of Liberation is an ethics of the a priori re-sponsibility for the Other, but also a posteriori responsibility . . . for the non-intentional effects of the structures of systems that manifest themselves to the mere everyday consciousness of common sense: the victims’’ (566). We should be clear: Dussel describes a world-system that institutes and globalizes itself through exclusion. The success of the system is also its failure. In becoming total and all-inclusive, the system threatens itself and all those included in it; it thus auto-immunizes itself against itself and victimizes the victimizers. Or, as Dussel remarks, its success instances a ‘‘collective suicide [suicidio colectivo]’’ (568). This totalization of the ‘‘world,’’ this absolute inclusivity of the globe, also opens onto a necessary a priori and a posteriori responsibility for both the other and the victims of totalization. To arrive at the point of such threatening but potentially salutary inclusion/exclusion, however, Dussel has to effect another exclusion, one more fundamental than that between victims and victimizers. ‘‘I wish also to specify clearly that when I refer in this work to ‘the other,’ always and exclusively I will situate myself on the anthropological level. . . . The Other will be the other woman/man: a human being, an ethical subject, the face as epiphany of the living human corporality; it will be a theme of exclusively rational, philosophical/anthropological signification’’ (16). The exclusion, not yet spelled out, is already operative. E´tica de la liberacio´n concerns only those others identifiable by and within the horizon of anthropology. Only a certain humanity will be included—always and exclusively—precisely in order to include everyone. The insistence on an anthropological other grounds the E´tica in lived human reality; yet, despite the invocation of an anthropological other, Dussel will have capitalized (on) the other and thus absolutized it. Dussel claims: ‘‘An ‘absolutely Other’ in this Ethics would be something like an Amazon tribe that were to have had no contact with contemporary civilization [ningu´n contacto con la civilizacio´n actual], today practically nonexistent [pra´cticamente inexistente]’’ (16, emphasis added). Dussel signals the limit of the E´tica with this gesture toward anthropology’s dream of the discovery of an absolute other, the first tribe or the first family, which will have had no contact with any

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civilizacio´n actual, with any contemporary but also with any civilization present in and to itself, presumably not even with its own. Such an absolute other would have no relation not only to rituals or to art, but to any mode of representation whatsoever: not to language, for example, but also not to tools in general. Therefore, as we already know, the absolutely other would have no relation to time. In positing an other that would have no relation to temporality, that is, to the circumstances or contingencies of being in the world, Dussel follows Rousseau and Kant insofar as this absolutely other would have no place in the world, no situation, no site or locus of enunciation: the absolute other lives in an absolute present that is not. Perhaps this explains Dussel’s suggestion that an encounter with the absolute other is impossible only because today such tribes are practically nonexistent. Why today and why practically? No doubt ‘‘today’’ means ‘‘in the late twentieth century and at the incipience of the third millennium,’’ ‘‘now,’’ ‘‘our present reality and actuality.’’ ‘‘Practically nonexistent’’ means ‘‘for all practical purposes such anthropologically determined absolute others no longer exist,’’ which means even if they do exist, they no longer exist in such a way as to be practical for us, useful for us: they might as well not exist any longer. There simply are not enough of them to make any difference, if there are any of them at all. Dussel effectively excludes this absolute other, even though it is anthropologically determined. Perhaps this is a reasonable gesture for an ethics thought from the place of the victim, for the absolutely Other would never have been victimized. The possibility of the existence of this unmarked ‘‘tribe’’ (which, strictly speaking, could not be a tribe because ‘‘tribe’’ indicates civilization) troubles Dussel’s division of the world into victims and victimizers, because ‘‘something like [algo ası´ como] an Amazon tribe’’ untouched and undisturbed by any civilization—even and necessarily its ‘‘own’’—could not be identified as a victim of a globalizing world-system. Dussel’s deployment of an ‘‘absolutely Other’’ as the standard against which all anthropologized victims are implicitly measured is problematic through and through, for the ‘‘relation’’ to such a ‘‘tribe’’ would remain necessarily incalculable, which explains Dussel’s hasty calculation of its practical nonexistence. In other words, even were such a ‘‘tribe’’ to exist, no philosophy or human science could recognize it. Its absolute alterity would remain beyond the reach of anthropology’s representational imagination in general, hence Dussel’s problematic recourse to the ‘‘as if’’ or the ‘‘something like’’—algo ası´ como—of analogy, which ineluctably calculates and thus comprehends

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that other, represents it and thus victimizes it, puts it in touch with civilization. It would lie beyond the limits of Dussel’s conception of the communicative community and its a priori responsibility in particular. There would be no way to respond to the absolutely other, if response is calculated within the frame of the communicative community as an a priori and unconditional response and responsibility of and to victims and victimizers. And it is precisely this responsibility that Dussel seeks to guarantee. On the one hand, Dussel describes a world-system dedicated to the total comprehension of the globe, to absolute inclusion—to the corners of the earth—which is also absolute exclusion in that it instances a collective suicide; on the other hand, he posits, at the limits of the globe and at the limits of the world system, an absolutely other. On the one hand, there is the absolution of any limit whatsoever, and, on the other hand, an absolute alterity that haunts us from the limit, from the necessary limit of the globe. The absolutely other Dussel invokes and provokes haunts anthropology: it is both the dream of anthropology and its nightmare. It is what anthropology projects and pursues to the corners of the earth and that from which anthropology protects and preserves itself, as well it should. Anthropology cannot do without this specter; it cannot live with it either. Indeed, the absolutely other is not an other among others, it is not an other with which or whom we might live, for the moment this other is imagined anthropologically it is destroyed as absolutely other: it is already in contact, in touch, with civilization, already inscribed within the limits of the world. But because the absolutely other always comes to us from the limit of the globe, from beyond the limit of the world-system, we will never be finished with this other. It is both the end of anthropology and of representation in general, insofar as it unconditionally exposes ‘‘anthropology’’ to what cannot be comprehended by or within it; and, at the same time, it opens ‘‘anthropology’’ toward the future, and thus toward the other in the first place. It opens ‘‘anthropology’’ to the impossible possibility of the world.

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introduction: anthropology’s wake Scott Michaelsen 1. See Agamben, The Coming Community, where the ‘‘quodlibet’’ is described throughout. See 34–6 for the use of the figure of Bartleby. 2. Thanks to David E. Johnson for recasting the preceding paragraphs. 3. Here one must part company from a generally interesting commentator on matters postcolonial, Robert J.C. Young, who believes that Said’s book forecasts ‘‘no alternative at all’’ to Orientalism, and that this, under the circumstances, amounts to an ‘‘entirely correct refusal’’ (White 127). This is simply not the case—not true of Orientalism, and not true of Said’s later pronouncements on the subject, as will be made clear here. 4. Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa, for all of its explanatory power, for all of its attempt to freeze out the possibility of anthropology’s uncoupling itself from ‘‘ethnocentrism’’ (Mudimbe, Invention 19), turns itself into an anthropology at key moments. For example, Mudimbe follows Marcel Griaule’s work with the Dogon sage, Ogotemmeˆli, in order to conclude that Dogon science was constituted by thought-‘‘systems’’ with ‘‘radically different postulates and sets of axioms’’ from Western knowledges (15). Fabian has produced, in general, a highly rigorous demonstration of anthropology’s consistent and necessary anteriorizing of the ‘‘other,’’ a theme he reiterated upon reflection in 1985: It bears repeating (and needs to be given much more thought) that distance, spatio-temporal but also developmental, was not the object of explanation; it was a necessary assumption, a conceptual category involved in the constitution of the Other, that is, the object of anthropology. (Work 197)

Fabian is linked to Said (and, indeed, he links himself to Said [Fabian Other xiii]), through a network of shared propositions: Anthropology is co-extensive and coterminous with imperialism, and anthropology, as a kind of superstructure, can only end with the end of its imperial base (Work 261). And, at such an endpoint, something akin to Habermasian communicative rationality, with all of its links to Enlightenment thought, will take place: This future anthropology, which will be different from any anthropology that comes before it,

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will be ‘‘communicative,’’ ‘‘intersubjective,’’ and very generally ‘‘dialogic’’ in character (Other 164; Work 216–19); it will be ‘‘confrontational’’ rather than ‘‘observational’’ (Work 204); it will be reflexive and historical (Other 165). Indeed, in these ways, Fabian finds a great deal of common ground with later Said, with Ortner, and with general trends in anthropology toward historicization and investigation of the dialogic. What is wrong with such an approach? First, much like Habermas’s work, Fabian’s approach leaves no room for difference—indeed, it destroys difference, or at least sublates it in the dialectic, in the process of communicative rationality. (Such, indeed, has been the thrust of a good deal of critique of Habermas’s work on communicative action.) Fabian’s vision of ‘‘frontal’’ or confrontational post-anthropology, then, becomes only about ‘‘us’’—never about the ‘‘reality’’ of ‘‘primitive societies’’ but, rather, ‘‘our praxis.’’ Indeed, the whole question of difference in Fabian is swept into a fairly strict Hegelian dialectic, with the ‘‘Other’’ always at the service of the ‘‘Self’’ (Other 165). But secondly, Fabian apparently departs from Hegel and Habermas over the question of a final dialectical overcoming of the contradiction of Self and Other, and apparently sees the end of the world not as ‘‘undistorted communication, dialogue, communal judgment and rational persuasion,’’ but rather as coeval Self and Other feuding over ‘‘different, perhaps irreconcilable interests’’ (Work 262–63). Fabian’s perspective has the ring of negative theology: ‘‘Critical anthropology’’ strives for true, shared ‘‘community’’ (262), but it can never achieve it. Finally, there are limits for Fabian regarding what discourse can do: Empires and control, interests and empirical facts, are the ‘‘really real’’ in this world, and anthropology, it appears, is simply along for the ride. Fabian writes: Anthropology ‘‘is a discipline that should strive for its own liquidation’’ (262), but it is not clear from the analysis how this might happen. 5. It should go without saying that each of these writers swerves away from the particulars of the Foucauldian notion of the episteme. For instance, Said, Mudimbe, and Fabian all rely on a surprisingly simplistic base-superstructure model for thinking the problem of anthropology. Also, none of the three would follow Foucault’s conclusion in The Order of Things that the end of anthropology must be thought within a Nietzschean horizon. 6. While formalized kinship studies certainly do not constitute such a limit, a brief note on the exclusivity of kinship and kinship studies is in order. Radcliffe-Brown writes, in the most famous twentieth-century statement on the kinship’s significance, that, ‘‘a system of kinship and marriage can be looked at as an arrangement which enables persons to live together and cooperate with one another in an orderly social life’’ (African Systems of Kinship and Marriage 3). One will have to triply note the (relatively late) colonial fantasy of ‘‘order’’ at work in Radcliffe-Brown’s formulation; the focus here only

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on the inner significance of culture (in other words, ‘‘culture,’’ he fails to note, equally determines ‘‘who’’ are relatives and ‘‘who’’ are non-relatives); and, third, the inherently dominating quality of such an idea (the way in which it attempts to impose itself on all beings ‘‘within’’ a culture). In terms of this last point, Abu-Lughod writes, ‘‘Despite its anti-essentialist intent, the culture concept retains some of the tendencies to freeze difference’’ (‘‘Writing Against Culture’’ 144). 7. A brief remark on culture: Following Fredrik Barth, it is impossible not to recognize that culture is secured through both boundary maintenance and interrelation with others across such boundaries (Ethnic Groups and Boundaries 9–10). And, in fact, the boundary is secured in the first place through what Barth calls ‘‘flow’’ (9). In other words, for Barth, culture is an arbitrary, though power-laden, emergence from original mixture. And culture operates analogously to Carl Schmitt’s definition of the political: ‘‘The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy’’ (Concept of the Political 26). A global project of cultural relativism, for example, is simply the hope that the state of war will take the form of truce. Like Barth, there are any number of anthropologists who have tried to read cultures relationally. In an earlier era, for example, Boas’s reading of the values of ‘‘common people’’ comes to mind (Anthropology and Modern Life 192–93), and, more recently than Barth, there is the example of Amselle throughout Mestizo Logics. But what do anthropologists do with relationality, once it is discovered? Very little, based on the available evidence. Indeed, liberal anthropologists rapidly move from this insight to positions of defense of cultural integrity (of shoring-up of present arrangements), as the examples of Boas and Amselle prove. The singular contribution of Fredrik Barth to the deconstruction of the culture concept therefore still remains to be read in anthropology. But we do not expect it to be read within the discipline, at the limit of its critical promise. The very possibility of social scientific knowledge is at stake, and no self-respecting anthropologist will renounce such positivism. Our suggestion is quite simple: Culture is born in complex, asymmetrical relations of power (‘‘difference always smuggle[s] in hierarchy’’ [Abu-Lughod 146]), and therefore it has no future—merely an exclusive past and present. Any further attempt to save and preserve cultures (any culture at all) will have to confront the Benjaminian argument that ‘‘our highest cultural achievements are simultaneously monuments to barbarism’’ (Rogin 67–68). 8. See Hodgen for an example of such analysis, pushing anthropology back into the sixteenth century. 9. See the nineteenth-century network of texts cited in Chapter 2 of Michaelsen’s Multiculturalism..

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10. See, for more on Morgan, Chapter 3 of Michaelsen’s The Limits of Multiculturalism. 11. See Schwartz’s The Curse of Cain, for example, and Meir Steinberg’s Hebrews Between Cultures, as part of a growing body of work concerned with identities and exclusions in Biblical literatures. 12. Derrida: ‘‘I wonder whether something can take the form here of a sole ‘historical marker,’ whether even the question can be posed in this fashion without implying precisely a historiographical axiomatics that ought perhaps to be suspended, since it is too bound up with deconstructible philosophemes. The things we are talking about (‘deconstructions’ if you will) do not happen within what would be recognizably called ‘history’. . . .’’ (Points 358). 13. Stocking, in his review essay, notes the ways in which the diaries have been edited for public consumption. One particularly regrets, for purposes of the following discussion, the elimination of a section of ‘‘notes on sociological theory’’ (Stocking, ‘‘Empathy’’ 194). 14. See Stocking’s two additional readings of the diary, in ‘‘The Ethnographer’s Magic’’ (1983) and ‘‘Anthropology and the Science of the Irrational’’ (1986), in which Stocking argues that the literal creation of the diary reduced Malinowski’s inevitable stresses, rather than reflected his absolute views (‘‘Magic’’ 102–3); that critics have gone too far in concluding that Malinowski hated his objects of study (‘‘Magic’’ 103); and that the diary is more a reflection of Malinowski’s personal identity crisis than a crisis of the anthropologist’s relationship to the other (‘‘Irrational’’ 23–25). 15. See Rorty on Derrida (Rorty 125), which fundamentally misreads Derrida, yet remains a powerful indictment of ironic politics. For clarification on Rorty’s impossible reading of Derrida, it is important to remember that, even as Derrida inaugurates the conversation about diffe´rance, he is accused by Brice Parain of generating a philosophy of ‘‘solitude,’’ which Derrida rejects. See Derrida, ‘‘Original’’ 84–86, including: ‘‘Is not the relation to every other, which is the only opening to a possible solitude, also the only interruption to solitude, etc.?’’ (86). 16. It is, for precisely this reason, an unacceptable position, and will be taken up at greater length at a later point in this introduction, with respect to Jonathan Boyarin. 17. However, Stocking misses what is most fundamental when he suggests that the diary shows Malinowski shifting from diachronic to synchronic inquiry (‘‘Magic’’ 104). 18. With reference to the Hardy: ‘‘I am beginning to find something. The theme of false sexual [appropriation] very strong, but the treatment?’’ (Diary 174). Earlier, another book: ‘‘I also read an idiotic novel in which I found one or two excellent phrases’’ (75).

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19. Visweswaran reads the Malinowski diary as indicating that modern anthropology is born in opposition to novels (Fictions of Feminist Ethnography 4–6). We are in broad agreement, but want to suggest with more precision the dynamics and the structural implications of that opposition. 20. This argument leaves to one side the question of a much later Marx and the creation of the so-called ‘‘Ethnological Notebooks.’’ This latter Marx believes at least in the value of some anthropological knowledges. 21. See Althusser 34–35 for his analytic of Marx’s writings—for his registration of the threshold of Marx’s break from the Feuerbachian ‘‘anthropological.’’ Althusser reads the ‘‘Theses’’ as a key moment in that break—indeed, as one of what he calls the ‘‘Works of the Break’’—and it is possible to follow the Althusserian reading this far and no further. 22. It should be noted that our sights are set, in the chapters that follow, on the question of the culture concept within the field of anthropology, and only here and there on the more general question of the determination of ‘‘man.’’ When we write of the possible and even foreseeable end of the practices of anthropology, we are focused on the cultural concept in ethnography and ethnology. We generally put to one side the vexed question: is it possible to imagine the end of ‘‘man’’ her- or himself? ‘‘Man’’ is a first assumption of almost all work within the discipline of anthropology, and ‘‘man’’ is posited in such work as uncontroversial and ‘‘really real.’’ Too quickly, perhaps, we might suggest that ‘‘the end of man’’ would put an end to all politics—for instance, to all decisions about ‘‘man’’ in relation to animality. And it is the task of the politics-to-come to relentlessly interrogate the border between man and animal, as Derrida has argued. Indeed, this will be an interminable project for political deconstructions. Anthropology’s Wake, therefore, proposes an end to the existing discipline of anthropology, but only in order to open up a more fundamental anthropological problem. We thank Nahum D. Chandler for his remarks on the manuscript in this regard. 23. Lugo has written persuasively about the limits of the shift in thinking that such counter-structuralists inaugurated. 24. As an aside, Norma Alarco´n, a literary/cultural theorist, is a good example of one who misreads these passages from Derrida in order to productively set to work both being and becoming, agency and structure, as she approaches a subaltern practice of what Gayatri Spivak has called ‘‘strategic essentialism’’ (‘‘Conjugating Subjects’’ 132–37). One might briefly note that the politics of an anthropological strategic essentialism, and, indeed, of the anthropological performative in general, pessimistically presumes that our future can never be anything but a repetition of the past: a world best characterized by agonistic, power-infused relation between beings. This may well be a strong reading of Gramsci, and of Foucault on power, but it will have missed entirely the thrust of and the opening made possible by deconstruction.

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25. Thanks to Scott Cutler Shershow for explaining to me the different ways to tease out the multiplicity in Nancy’s title. It should be noted that Nancy’s work comes in the midst of a distinguished debate about ‘‘community,’’ a debate which includes at least the following texts: Luc Ferry’s threevolume work, Political Philosophy, which appears to have at least in part animated Nancy’s work, particularly Chapter 4 of Volume 1: ‘‘The Deduction of Rights as an Area of Intersubjectivity’’ (Ferry, Political 1 102–25, 141–44); Nancy’s The Imperative Community (and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Nancy’s earlier volume, Retreating the Political); Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community; Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community; Alphonso Lingis’s The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common; Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death and The Politics of Friendship; and the Miami Theory Collective’s Community at Loose Ends. 26. Once on his own, and once with his brother, with a certain overlapping of the two arguments. I take up the chapter on Nancy from Jonathan’s Thinking in Jewish in the pages that follow, but the cowritten critique, Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, ‘‘Diaspora,’’ should also be addressed. The logic of the argument is similar, and similarly confused. The Boyarins argue that Nancy seeks a ‘‘community as nonbeing,’’ which is technically incorrect because Nancy’s notion of community is ‘‘located’’ at the border of absence rather than ‘‘within’’ it—a small but highly significant difference (Boyarin and Boyarin 698). 27. See Gasche´, Inventions for an extremely helpful reading of Hegel’s opening toward ‘‘undecidable infrastructural remaining’’ (199–226, 277–80). 28. See also Nancy, ‘‘Surprise’’ on this important point. 29. This will be a different order of the problem, which David E. Johnson and I analyze elsewhere, with regard to Gloria Anzaldu´a’s conception of the borderlands—where hybrid U.S./Mexico border identity are said to be allinclusive, but certain figures, such as ‘‘white’’ people, are pre-determined to have identities that must be removed from community (Johnson and Michaelsen 13). In Anzaldu´a, the attempt to think from a positivist notion of difference toward community will always necessarily exclude. 30. To be clear, this is a separate issue from the question of an unconscious community repeating rituals that the individual members do not understand. Such would be a classic structuralist and modernist account of culture. But Boyarin’s concern involves separating Judaism from repetition—that is, making it endlessly different from itself until the ‘‘itself’’ is put into question. 31. Nancy: ‘‘finitude itself is nothing; it is neither a ground, nor an essence, nor a substance. But it appears, it presents itself, it exposes itself, and thus it exists as communication’’ (Inoperative 28). 32. See Johnson’s analysis of Rosaldo in Chapter 1.

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33. See Shell, Kinship and Children. 34. Such is also the argument that runs through Hymes’s famous text ‘‘The Use of Anthropology.’’ See Hymes 6–15 in particular. chapter 1: descartes’ corps David E. Johnson 1. Rosaldo is not the only example of the current and pervasive anthropological conceit that argues that to observe others in order to describe and comprehend them (their culture) amounts to objectification, to the othering of others. Among other texts, see Stephen A. Tyler, ‘‘Post-Modern Ethnography’’; Marc Auge´, A Sense for the Other; Barbara Tedlock, The Beautiful and the Dangerous; Ruth Behar, Translated Woman and The Vulnerable Observer; Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America. 2. On terror and education, see Michael Taussig, The Nervous System 11–35. 3. Behar supports Rosaldo’s contention that the positioned subject is the key term for a renewed anthropology; see The Vulnerable Observer 169. See as well Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography 135. For a lucid rebuttal of the hope that the ‘‘positioned subject’’ escapes the horizon of the transcendental, see Ernesto Laclau, ‘‘Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity’’ 20. 4. Visweswaran seconds this observation; see Fictions 28. 5. On habeas corpus, see Haverkamp and Vismann, especially 231. 6. See Derrida, ‘‘Ousia and Gramme¯’’ in Margins of Philosophy. 7. See Mary Louise Pratt, ‘‘I, Rigoberta Menchu´ and the ‘Culture Wars’ ’’ 29–48. 8. My reading of Descartes owes much to the work of Agamben, Melehy, and Van Den Abbeele. 9. On the question of the proper self, see Peter Fenves, Arresting Language 174–86. 10. On experience, phantom pain, and identity, see Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Circumfession,’’ esp. 108, 66. On castration and re-membering, see Derrida, Glas 46a. On amputation, prosthesis, and identity, see David Wills, Prosthesis, passim. On the incommunicability of pain that nonetheless finds a voice and lends itself to the creation of a world in the ‘‘as if’’ structure of a sympathetic human community, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, 1–50. 11. On Descartes’ relation to Montaigne, see also Hassan Melehy Writing Cogito 7. 12. Robert: ‘‘Violente e´motion, stupefaction a` la vue d’un spectacle extraordinaire [violent emotion, stupefaction at the sight of an extraordinary spectacle].’’ The example provided in Robert is drawn from Descartes.

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13. On Montaigne’s citational strategy, see Louis Marin, On Representation 64–84. 14. On experience as the experience of the limit, see Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom 84 (and passim). 15. On the question of Descartes’ body, see Warminski, ‘‘Spectre Shapes: ‘The Body of Descartes?’ ’’ 102 and passim. 16. In Chapter 3 of his Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Martin Ha¨gglund explains, ‘‘the thinking of infinite finitude refutes the very Idea of positive infinity by accounting for finitude not as a negative limitation but as constitutive of being in general. Positive infinity is neither an immanent actuality (Hegel) nor a transcendent Idea (Kant); it is self-refuting as such since everything is subjected to a temporal alteration that prevents it from ever being in itself. Alterity is thus irreducible because of the negative infinity of finitude, which undermines any possible totality from the outset’’ (ms. 121). 17. On the impossible possibility of ‘‘unscripted’’ experience, see Derrida, ‘‘Circumfession’’ 53. On the experience of the ethical injunction, ‘‘you must,’’ see Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard and Jean-Loup The´baud, Just Gaming 46. 18. On the blink of the eye and self-presence, see Derrida, Speech and Phenomena 59–65; and Memoirs of the Blind 32. See also Jorge Luis Borges, Siete noches 145. 19. The question of Descartes’ exclusion of the insane, those who do not share our common sense, but who are nonetheless not dead, has been the subject of an exchange between Foucault (‘‘My Body’’ 393–417) and Derrida (Writing and Difference 31–63). For a full discussion of this debate, see Melehy, 25–40. For another way to think affect and its place in the thought of identity, see Derrida, The Other Heading, passim, and Gasche´, ‘‘Feeling the Debt: On Europe,’’ passim. 20. For a near-hagiographical characterization of Rosaldo’s return to self and the salvation of anthropology, see Behar, The Vulnerable Observer 173–74. 21. For an account of how recourse to personal experience threatens to foreclose the work of interpretation, see Scott, ‘‘The Evidence of Experience.’’ On Scott’s objections, see Visweswaran, Fictions 137. 22. For Descartes’ description of automata and what they can say, see Discours 75; Works 1.116. Automata can be taught to say, repeatedly, ‘‘je suis, j’existe,’’ but nothing more. Isn’t this repetition both the possibility and the limit of the cogito? See also Derrida, Archive Fever 62. 23. For an attempt to dismiss the critique of anthropology as humanist, see Behar, The Vulnerable Observer, Chapter 6, passim. See Johnson, ‘‘Anthropology’s Embrace,’’ for a reading of this dismissal. 24. On tolerance, see Derrida and Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret 62–64.

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chapter 2: our sentiments Scott Michaelsen 1. The best single text that recounts the recent history of the anthropology of the emotions is Leavitt. Leavitt outlines all of the most crucial problems in this regard, but sides, in the end, with methodological approaches that begin with ‘‘empathy’’ (‘‘Meaning and Feeling’’ 530–31). The enormous collection of papers assembled by Russell maneuvers similar to those described below. None of this work manages to work through the basic problems that any form of affective comparatism raises, and instead errs on the side of shared human biology, tentative universals, and the like. Russell et al. (1995) reflects recent structural interventions by Michelle Rosaldo, Catherine Lutz, and Lila AbuLughod, among others, on the question of the emotions, but finally much of this work is woefully under-theorized, and performs predictable maneuvers similar to those described below. None of this work manages to work through the basic problems that any form of affective comparatism raises, and instead errs on the side of shared human biology, tentative universals, and the like. 2. To avoid confusion regarding Renato Rosaldo’s categories, it is clear that Rosaldo views ‘‘grief’’ or ‘‘bereavement’’ as a universal category of human experience. ‘‘Anger,’’ he notes, however, is something else—it is ‘‘culture.’’ A footnote on ‘‘anger’’ is revealing: ‘‘Although anger appears so often in bereavement as to be virtually universal, certain notable exceptions do occur’’ (Culture 227). But the line between ‘‘grief’’ and ‘‘anger’’—between the universal and the cultural—in Rosaldo’s text is a wavering one, and is always threatening to collapse, as will be evident in the following discussion. For purposes of maximum clarity, it is best to call Culture and Truth a ‘‘virtually’’ universal humanist text with regard to emotional life, and with regard to cultural life. 3. Scattered throughout Culture and Truth are moments in which Renato Rosaldo confesses specific mistakes that both of them made during their fieldwork (see, for example, 197, 204). At one point he reproduces a portion of Michelle’s diary from 1974 in order to show that, even during their later trips to the Philippines, she imagined ‘‘culture’’ according to the terms he describes as ‘‘imperialist nostalgia’’ (208). 4. Before proceeding further, it might be objected that I have placed too much weight on ‘‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’’—reading the whole of the book’s global prescriptions through this personal introduction. But Renato Rosaldo, in the original version of the paper, which was read at conferences in the 1980s, clearly signals the stakes of his personal narrative: By invoking lived experience as an analytical category, one risks easy dismissal. Unsympathetic readers could reduce this paper to an act of mourning or a

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report on a personal discovery of the anger possible in bereavement. Frankly, this paper is both and more. An act of mourning and a personal report, it simultaneously involves a number of distinguishable processes no one of which cancels out the others. Indeed, in what follows I make precisely this argument about ritual in general and Ilongot headhunting in particular. The paramount claim made here, aside from revising the ethnographic record, concerns the way in which my own mourning and consequent reflection on Ilongot bereavement, rage, and headhunting raise methodological issues of general concern in anthropology. (‘‘Grief’’ 185).

5. The death of Little Eva, for example, in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) inaugurates a process of sorrowing by which the hardened hearts of several characters, including the slavery-rationalizing St. Clare, are softened and sentimentalized, so as to produce sympathy for the plight of the slave. The relationship between Rosaldo and Stowe will be explored in more detail below. See also Johnson 5–13 on the way in which ethnographic knowledge is produced in Culture and Truth over Michelle’s corpse: ‘‘There is ethnography—over her (i.e., my, the one I possess, comprehend, understand; the one over which I sympathize with the other subject) dead body’’ (‘‘Subject’’ 13) 6. Even though Culture and Truth often takes up the limits of objectivity, and the problem of the positioned subject, the text appears to leave the door open to a special or new sort of objectivity: ‘‘In my view, social analysts can rarely, if ever, become detached observers’’ (Culture 169). And, ‘‘one party’s analysis can only rarely be reduced to the terms of the other’’ (207). This formulation of the ‘‘rarely’’ leaves an space, precisely, for the work accomplished in ‘‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage.’’ 7. One might compare this inexplicit transformation of the Ilongot in Culture and Truth’s ‘‘Introduction’’ to another autobiographical moment in Chapter 2, in which he meets the family of his second wife, scholar Mary Louise Pratt. He produces a reading of the family’s culture at their breakfast table, and reports that, ‘‘they said they learned from it because its objectifications made certain patterns of behavior stand out in stark relief—the better to change them’’ (Culture 48). Anthropology always wants to discipline its object, but it is rare to see the pleasure of the task so foregrounded. 8. Michelle Rosaldo calls this a ‘‘parody’’ of her position, but it is an adequate one (‘‘Toward’’ 142). 9. See Barker-Benfield on the on the eighteenth-century roots of sentimentalist readings of the body and its nerves. 10. See the essays collected in Shirley Samuels’s collection, for example. 11. See Yellin, Halttunen, Cole, Yarborough, Donaldson, and Askeland for readings of Cassy that contain her energies within strictly sentimentalist terms, and that in general see no reason to question the limit of Stowe’s logic.

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12. One curious problem involves the fact that Stowe’s A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), intended as proof of the truth of the novel, includes no information about Cassy, even though all of the other major characters are discussed in terms of their realistic depiction. Cassy therefore seems to be a pure imposition within Stowe’s attempt to write a strict documentary fiction. She has a unique status, and must be read with great care in order to perceive the rupture in Stowe’s discourse. 13. See Johnson and Michaelsen 1997, 4–6; Nancy 1991, 21, 27, 29; Miami Theory Collective 1991. 14. See the opening pages of Michaelsen’s Introduction for Le´vi-Strauss’s variant of the dream of anthropology. chapter 3: ex-cited dialogue David E. Johnson 1. See Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance, passim. 2. Mannheim’s and D. Tedlock’s example of a single individual speaking without interruption while enacting multiple, contrasting voices, is drawn from D. Tedlock’s contribution to their edited volume, The Dialogical Emergence of Culture. See D. Tedlock, ‘‘Interpretation, Participation, and the Role of Narrative in Dialogical Anthropology.’’ 3. For an explanation of how the trace or iteration always already marks spoken language, see Derrida, Margins 318. 4. For another assertion of the salutary effects of dialogue and thus the necessity of anthropology, see Tyler, ‘‘Post-Modern Ethnography’’ 126. 5. See the opening pages of Cuban anthropologist Miguel Barnet’s Biografı´a de un cimarro´n, in which Barnet describes a moment of identification that allows him and the informant (Esteban Montejo) to have a ‘‘conversacio´n normal, sin las anteriores interrupciones banales [normal conversation, without the previous banal interruptions]’’ (6). 6. The Search After Truth was first published posthumously, in a Latin translation, in 1701. The complete, but still unfinished, French original has never been found and the version published by Adam and Tannery supplements an incomplete French copy with a translation into French of a Latin translation. 7. On the reception of Heidegger in Japan, see Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity (76–100). 8. In a letter to Marcuse, Heidegger claims that, ‘‘In my lectures and courses from 1933–44 I incorporated a standpoint that was so unequivocal that among those who were my students, none fell victim to Nazi ideology. My works from this period, if they ever appear, will testify to this fact’’ (Wolin,

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The Heidegger Controversy 163). Beatrice Hanssen, however, disagrees; see Walter Benjamin’s Other History 154. At the least, the draft of the recapitulation attests to the intransigence in Heidegger’s thought of a deeply Germanocentric language and thought of Being. On Heidegger and politics or the political, see Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l’amitie; Miguel de Beistegui, Heidegger & the Political; and Reiner Schu¨rmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting. 9. Information about the presentation and publication history of ‘‘Language’’ is from Poetry, Language, Thought xxv. 10. On ‘‘iterability’’ see Derrida, ‘‘Signature Event Context’’ in Margins of Philosophy 307–330. 11. On Japanese cinema, and particularly on the reference to Rashomon in ‘‘A Dialogue on Language,’’ see Michael B. Naas, ‘‘Rashomon and the Sharing of Voices Between East and West.’’ 12. See, as one recent example among many, Doris Sommer, Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 13. See Being and Time 37, 71, 75. 14. See also Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (155) for a dismissal of ethnology and psychological anthropology. 15. See ‘‘The Question Concerning Technology’’ and ‘‘The Age of the World-Picture’’ for two instances of Heidegger’s elaboration of the limits of technology and a certain technical thinking. 16. Heidegger rebuts this notion some years later, see Introduction to Metaphysics 155. 17. In Thinking With Heidegger: Displacements, Miguel de Beistegui argues that despite Heidegger’s concern ‘‘with the fate of the human from the very start . . . in no way and at no stage can Heidegger’s thought be mistaken for a straightforward anthropology’’ (13). No doubt this is correct, but Beistegui never takes up Heidegger’s distribution of Dasein between primitive Dasein and Dasein proper. Moreover, he does not consider Heideger’s epochalization of ‘‘man’’ as a fundamentally anthropological determination. Yet, he asserts that Dasein’s birth ‘‘corresponds to the birth of the West in ancient Greece’’ (14). 18. On Count Kuki’s ‘‘wife,’’ see Gumbrecht. 19. Gumbrecht points to a more entertaining possibility, however; see ‘‘Martin Heidegger and His Japanese Interlocutors.’’ 20. On Heidegger’s suggestion that this translation is definitive for the institutionalization of the modern subject and, more importantly, for an account of the subject as subjectum and subjectus, see Etienne Balibar, ‘‘Citizen Subject.’’ 21. Beatrice Hanssen points out that Adorno felt much the same way; see Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History 113.

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22. See also Derrida, Of Spirit 68–9, 71. 23. Miguel de Beistegui nevertheless remarks that Heidegger does translate the Greek polis (typically ‘‘city’’) in the German Sta¨tte (‘‘place’’); see Beistegui, Heidegger & the Political 114–45, here 121. 24. On the ‘‘voice of the friend,’’ see Derrida, Politics of Friendship 240–67. 25. Heidegger insists, first, on ‘‘the voice of the friend’’ that is both immanent to us (‘‘we’’ all carry it within us) and estranged from us as a call that nonetheless comes to us; and, second, on the unique word that says Being. 26. Elsewhere Griaule refers dismissively to ‘‘sabir europe´en,’’ which has been translated as ‘‘anthropological jargon’’ (Dieu d’Eau 151; Conversations 124). 27. On the purity of Ogotemmeˆli’s speech, see also the conversation of the thirty-third day. 28. Derrida outlines this Aristotelian logic in Monolingualism of the Other, 11. 29. For an example of the deployment of this question, see Dieu d’Eau 243; Conversations 204. 30. This passage is missing from the E´ditions du Cheˆne version of Dieu d’Eau. 31. See Paul, 1 Corinthians 13: 11: ‘‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’’ 32. Generally Ogotemmeˆli is reluctant to speak in the presence of others, particularly in the presence of women, but also of children and other male adults. However, he doesn’t seem to mind Koguem, who appears to make no difference; see, in Conversations, 13, 38, 55, 153, for instances of Ogotemmeˆli’s apprehension before others. chapter 4: an other voice Scott Michaelsen 1. Hamacher 322–24. 2. Lafitau’s modern editors and translators, Fenton and Moore, specifically dislike this final chapter, even as they express their admiration for Lafitau’s text in general: ‘‘This is the most disappointing chapter in the book. It is the more so given that Lafitau had an excellent knowledge of the structure of Iroquoian as well as that of Latin and could have written an enlightening chapter on the subject. Furthermore, he thought that a study of language was very important for the understanding of primitive peoples. Instead of giving us a thorough analysis of ‘his Indians’, he limits himself to generalities, some of which had been stated by earlier writers, and to a few comparisons of proper

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names, based on similarities of spelling, most of which he had given earlier in the book. One can only conclude that he was in haste to complete the book and thought his knowledge of language too technical to interest the general reader’’ (Lafitau 2:253, n.1). But one might conclude, in reverse, that Lafitau’s positioning of this chapter, and his withholding from the reader the pleasure of a glossary, of a quick knowledge of Indian languages, precisely foregrounds the agony of translation. 3. Included in the third volume of Jesuit Relations. 4. In the Jesuit Relations English translation: ‘‘but when there was a question of speaking about God and religious matters, there was the difficulty, there, the ‘not understand’ ’’ (Biard 193). 5. Biard 195: ‘‘to discourse.’’ 6. Biard 195: ‘‘to apprehend.’’ 7. Biard 195: ‘‘an animal.’’ 8. Biard 195: ‘‘reason.’’ 9. Biard 195: ‘‘in these were the pains of travail.’’ 10. Biard 195: ‘‘They did not know by what route to reach them.’’ 11. Biard 195: ‘‘ten thousand.’’ 12. Biard 195: ‘‘always telling them a lot of nonsense.’’ 13. Biard 195: ‘‘without this incentive, both Apollo and Mercury would fail them.’’ 14. On one level, Lahontan is a rather obvious target: a secular figure perceived as an enemy of the Jesuits. Adario’s second sentence in the dialogue: ‘‘If your Belief is the same with that of the Jesuits, ’tis in vain to enter into a Conference; for they have entertain’d me with so many Fabulous and Romantick Stories, that all the credit I can give ’em is to believe, that they have more Sense than to believe themselves’’ (Lahontan 2:517–18). 15. Lafitau, curiously, makes no appearance in Todorov’s lengthy examination of French proto-anthropology. 16. Todorov is frankly enthusiastic, however, about the text’s depiction of a ‘‘(desirable) future for our own society’’ premised on equality, subsistence, and nature (272–77). 17. Yet a third recent commentator, Gordon M. Sayre, writes: ‘‘It is useless to try to divine Lahontan’s text into facts worthy of evidence in history or ethnohistory on the one hand, and fabulations or fictions such as the Dialogues on the other’’ (Sayre 38). Though, curiously, Sayre then spends the next several pages invalidating Lahontan’s report of yet another AmerIndian’s speech, which suggests Sayre’s own inability to separate his text from anthropology or ethnohistory (Sayre 44). 18. This circulating text has never been published. A reworked portion of it eventually appeared as ‘‘Dialogues Between Worlds: Mesoamerica After and

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Before the European Invasion,’’ ed. Lisa Philips Valentine and Regna Darnell, Theorizing the Americanist Tradition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999): 163–80. Unfortunately, the pages on Bahktin have disappeared from this adumbrated version. 19. See Bataille 47–8, for Griaule’s reading of the gaze, in an article entitled, ‘‘Evil Eye’’: ‘‘To look at an object with desire is to appropriate it, to enjoy it. To desire is to pollute; to desire is to take, and the primitive who has noticed a gaze on a possession of his immediately makes a gift of it, as if it were dangerous for him to keep it any longer, as if the gaze had deposited in the object a force ready to come into play against any stranger’’ (Bataille 47). 20. For the former, see Bataille 98, from ‘‘Gunshot.’’ 21. See, for example, Griaule 28. 22. Clifford, too, notes this tradition of counter-reading Griaule, in Predicament 60. 23. And Griaule’s anthropologist daughter, Genevie`ve Calame-Griaule (who has continued for decades after Griaule’s death the work of the so-called Missions of Griaule), will reiterate, in her rejoinder to van Beek, a variant of this logic, arguing that asking the Dogon to replicate Griaule’s stories does not take into account their general ignorance of the subtleties and secrets of the master (Calame-Griaule 575). Seemingly no one knows what Ogotemmeˆli once knew. 24. In addition to this response to van Beek, see also Douglas’s ‘‘If the Dogon . . . ,’’ which implicitly suggests that the Conversations’ account of Dogon cosmology is marked by Griaule’s relationship to surrealism. 25. Belcher is another example of this. 26. Freeman proposed the hoaxing scenario in his first book on Mead. See Freeman, Heretic 289–91. See Freeman, Fateful 2–7 for his more recent elaboration of the evidence. But one most ask Freeman: Why does the critique of cultural anthropology depend for its truth value on a culturalist assumption regarding Samoans? Freeman cannot be sure that the re-interviewed informants are now telling the truth unless he assumes that the ‘‘common practice’’ of swearing an oath is ‘‘the most serious of actions’’ in the Samoan-Christian lifeworld (Fateful 7). 27. Heidegger writes that the text was produced during ‘‘a visit by Professor Tezuka of The Imperial University, Tokyo’’ (Heidegger, Language 199), and Tezuka was a student of Count Shuzo Kuki, who, in turn, was a student of Heidegger’s in the 1920’s, in the years before publication of Being and Time. Detailed examination of the text and its sourcing, however, has intriguingly revealed that the text is a ‘‘pseudo-dialogue’’ and even ‘‘exclusively Heidegger’s own work,’’ rather than a record of an ‘‘actual’’ event (May 16, 13; and see the whole of May’s writing on this subject, 11–20; as well as Tomio).

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28. See the texts collected in Wolin; and see Heidegger, Language 38–39, for moments that resonate with Heidegger’s earlier work on the Greek house of Being. 29. I warns J at this moment that the sensation should not lead to the search for a ‘‘general concept’’ under which both languages ‘‘could be subsumed,’’ and J concurs. 30. Yet I seriously qualifies this formulation in the next instant, around matters of ‘‘voice’’ and ‘‘nature’’ (41). I has not finished, it appears, with what the Rectorship Address had called ‘‘bonds’’ that always subject man to ‘‘the ethnic and national community,’’ ‘‘the destiny of the nation,’’ ‘‘the spiritual mission of the German Volk’’ (qtd. in Wolin 35–36). 31. Later in her corpus, Behar claims that the same encounter revealed the ‘‘dialectic between connection and otherness that is at the center of all forms of historical and cultural representation’’ (Vulnerable 20). 32. See Translated xi, 8, 11; and Vulnerable 166 for variations on this general argument. 33. See Chapter 2 for more on anthropology and sentimentalism. 34. None of this is to say that ‘‘Esperanza,’’ whoever she is, has not lived life in the exclusionary position of the ‘‘Mexican woman,’’ nor to imply that it is not possible for Esperanza to have adopted for herself the subject position of ‘‘woman.’’ It is merely to state the obvious: Esperanza, whoever she is, will always be more than and less than a ‘‘woman,’’ a ‘‘Mexican,’’ a ‘‘peddler.’’ chapter 5: ‘‘unworkable monstrosities’’ David E. Johnson 1. See On the Edges of Anthropology, where, in response to a question concerning the order of appearance of translation of Predicament and Routes in Japan, Clifford remarks, ‘‘I would like to think that after reading Routes it would be more difficult to construe The Predicament of Culture as essentially a book about the ‘literary turn’ in anthropology or as primarily about textualization’’ (105–6). 2. See Aristotle, Metaphysics IX.1049b–1051a, in Basic Works of Aristotle. 3. For two recent assessments of Geertz’s relevance, see Schweder and Good, eds., Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues and Ortner, ed., The Fate of ‘‘Culture’’: Geertz and Beyond. 4. Stiegler writes: ‘‘The whole problem, which thus becomes the distendedness of the past, present, and the future, is caught in a circle in which the tool appears at one and the same time qua the result of anticipation, exteriorization, and qua the condition of all anticipation, anticipation appearing itself qua the interiorization of the originary fact of exteriorization’’ (153). Although

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Stiegler’s point with regard to Rousseau is correct, namely, that the hand necessarily posits the faculty of anticipation, his description of temporal synthesis—as the distension of past, present, and future—is not. Rather, this understanding of temporal synthesis repeats a tired metaphysical gesture. On the ‘‘distention’’ of time, see Augustine, Confessions, book IX, and Martin Heidegger, Being and Time 338–44 and 373–77. In Radical Atheism, Martin Ha¨gglund explains why temporal synthesis cannot operate according to Heidegger’s interpretation of distention and, further, he argues that Derrida’s notion of the trace, which Ha¨gglund analyzes as spacing or the ‘‘trace structure of time’’ (ms. 7, 125, 167, 230), provides for the only possible synthesis of time that does not recur to an atemporal moment, or, as Ha¨gglund writes, ‘‘without positing an instance that is exempt from time’’ (ms. 23). For an analysis of the ‘‘synthesis of the trace,’’ or spacing, see especially chapter 2, ‘‘Arche-Writing: Derrida and Husserl’’ (ms. 65–98). Stiegler’s determination of two stages of diffe´rance, moreover, is troubling. ‘‘Diffe´rance is the history of life in general,’’ Stiegler writes, ‘‘in which an articulation is produced (where art, artifice, the article of the name, and the article of death resonate), which is a stage of diffe´rance, and which had to be specified. The rupture is the passage from a genetic diffe´rance to a nongenetic diffe´rance’’ (Technics, 175). Simply put, this makes no sense in that it posits the work of two, qualitatively different, diffe´rances, and thus suggests an epochalization within the ‘‘history’’ of diffe´rance ‘‘itself.’’ This has two implications. First, it means that diffe´rance would have to be identical to itself such that its periods could be determined. Second, it suggests a beginning of diffe´rance: A nongenetic diffe´rance would begin in the wake of the end of genetic diffe´rance. But the beginning (the origin) and the end (the apocalypse) are effects of diffe´rance. On Derrida’s deconstruction of the idea of apocalypse, see Ha¨gglund, Radical Atheism, ms. 60–63. 5. On Gelassenheit, see Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, passim. 6. See also Wittgenstein, The Brown Book 87. 7. All citations of Plato are from Collected Dialogues. 8. See David Wills, Prosthesis 44; and Bernard Stiegler, Technics, 152–53. The hand has a privileged place in the history of philosophy. Both Hegel and Heidegger locate the hand in relation to the voice and the stylus (in handwriting), thus producing a double prosthesis of the articulation of the human. See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit 189; and Heidegger, Parmenides 80. 9. In The End of Kinship, Shell remarks that ‘‘throughout Measure for Measure—as well as in a tradition extending back to Plato and Aristotle—the product of monetary generation, or use, and the product of sexual generation, or a child, have been compared’’ (29). He points out that ‘‘Aristotle rejects the kind of association between sexual and monetary production that both Pompey and the Duke make, attacking the association as a merely philological connection between tokos as ‘natural offspring’ and tokos as ‘interest’ ’’ (126).

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10. It would be easy enough to demonstrate this, both philosophically and ethnographically. In the case of philosophy, important sites would include, for example, Kant’s The Metaphysics of Morals and Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Marx and Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, but also Husserl’s ‘‘Vienna Lecture’’ (‘‘Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity’’). In ethnography, it would be worth reading the role of the family in the history of conquest, say, in Bernal Dı´az del Castillo’s Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva and Bernardino Sahagu´n’s Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva Espan˜a; in the 19th century, in the work of Lewis Morgan; and in the 20th, in A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, to name just a few. Very recent anthropological work written in the wake of Clifford and Marcus’s important volume, Writing Culture, has looked to the family in order to imagine a way to avoid charges of objectification. See, for instance, Barbara Tedlock’s The Beautiful and the Dangerous. In philosophy, Jorge Gracia deploys Wittgenstein’s trope of family resemblance in order to explain the parameters of Hispanic and Latino identity; see his Hispanic/Latino Identity. 11. On homonymy and the sign, see David E. Johnson, ‘‘As If the Time Were Now: Deconstructing Agamben,’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 106.2 (spring 2007): 265–290. 12. My reading of Timaeus owes much to Derrida’s ‘‘Khora’’ in On the Name, 89–127. See also John Sallis, Chorology. 13. Sallis, Chorology 98. 14. On the gender of khora, see Derrida, On the Name 97. 15. In ‘‘Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality,’’ Giorgio Agamben interprets khora as matter; see Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy 205– 19. According to Sallis such an interpretation of khora has a long history, beginning with Aristotle, but he also makes clear that in Plato’s account the identification of khora and matter is mistaken; see Sallis, Chorology 150–154. 16. See Sallis, Chorology 122. chapter 6: hybrid bound Scott Michaelsen 1. The Gilroy reading below might be supplemented by my remarks on Saldı´var in the brief review-essay, ‘‘Hybrid Bound,’’ and my prolegomenon to The Limits of Multiculturalism, which notes problems in this regard in James Clifford’s work. 2. See Morton, Hybridity 22, for example: this text primarily seeks to prove that ‘‘fertile reproduction has ceased to be evidence of identity of species.’’ 3. Bachman, for example, a key figure in these debates and discussed at length below, will, when pushed to the limit, acknowledge hybrids, but their imperfections—including those in ‘‘sexual organization’’—preclude an ongoing, healthy stock (Bachman, Unity 47).

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4. And Bachman, finally, sided with the South on the question of secession, a week before South Carolina’s official decision to leave the union: ‘‘I must go with my people,’’ he announced from his pulpit, leaving one to wonder precisely who one’s ‘‘people’’ might be in a world of nothing but kin (qtd. in Shuler 216). 5. And Darwin, in the Descent of Man, and therefore simultaneous with his call to end the monogenist/polygenist controversy, intriguingly finds common ground with scientific racialism in its elaboration of racial differences: There is, however, no doubt that the various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other,—as in the texture of the hair, the relative proportion of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even in the convolutions of the brain. But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of structural difference. The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatization, and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual, faculties. Every one who has had the opportunity of comparison, must have been struck with the contrast between the taciturn, even morose, aborigines of S[outh]. America and the light-hearted, talkative negroes. (216)

6. The scholars who have read their way through most of this literature, including Young, produce very cursory readings of the documents—searching for the most general themes. My strategy here will be to highlight a few dense nodes within these debates that previously have gone unremarked. Let me suggest to future scholars of this literature that not all is as it seems, and that the sheer richness and oddness of the materials deserve even further investigation. See the materials listed in the Bibliography under Agassiz, Bachman, Gliddon, Hamilton, Morton, Nott, and Nott and Gliddon. 7. Bachman: ‘‘It is an ungrateful task, because when I venture to doubt the accuracy of these authors, I have, in return, read to me a eulogy on their grey heads and merited honours—a homily on the virtues of goodness and charity, and an admonition to correct our own errors before I venture on censuring others’’ (‘‘Reply’’ 473). 8. This is definitely an odd moment in Bachman’s work. Bachman, it should be acknowledged, unveils constantly the exclusionary work of universalism. He is a ‘‘racist’’ of a universalist sort when left to his own devices. See Bachman, Doctrine 30, 156, 169, 211, 212, 214. 9. Such is the crisis in Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico with respect to his analysis of Montezuma’s character. See my Limits of Multiculturalism, chapter 5. 10. See Lingis, Community. 11. This phrase is Saldı´var citing David Lloyd approvingly.

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12. Interestingly, Saldı´var writes elsewhere in Border Matters about the problem of anthropological cultural analysis in general: Culture in this light is the nimbus perceived by one group when it comes into contact with and observes another one. It is the objectification of everything alien and weird and exotic about the contact group. (166)

This is a rather all-encompassing and generalized critique of anthropology and the anthropological project, and Saldı´var sustains it elsewhere—for example: ‘‘forms of imperial domination have often been concretized in the personas and functions of the traveler, especially the missionary and the anthropologist’’ (139). And yet, of course, Saldı´var’s crucial term of art, hybridity, belongs entirely to the history of colonial anthropology—a fact that goes unremarked in Border Matters. 13. Morton, by the way, goes on to generate citations to pages from Crania Americana and Crania Ægyptiaca to support this definition, and the citations are obfuscatory in the extreme; the pages cited in no way elaborate the definition from the 1947 hybridity text. Morton does, however, in the second letter of the debate with Bachman, restate his 1847 position regarding multiple sites of creation for each particular ‘‘race’’: I believe in a plurality of origin for the human species; that they were created, not in one pair, but in many pairs; and that they were adapted, from the beginning, to those varied circumstances of climate and locality which, while congenial to some, are destructive to others. (‘‘Letter’’ 339)

14. Nott and Gliddon’s publication of Morton’s final, incomplete manuscripts rounds out the picture of this ‘‘new’’ Morton, with a twenty-five-page fragment that revises the opening section of Crania Americana. Morton writes, at the start of this manuscript, more conservatively this time, and much in line with his 1847 footnote: Our species had its origin not in one, but in many creations; these were widely distributed into those localities upon the earth’s surface as were best adapted to their peculiar wants and physical constitutions; and that, in the lapse of time, these races, diverging from their primitive centres, met and amalgamated, and have thus given rise to those intermediate links of organization which now connect the extremes together. In accordance with this view, what are at present termed the five races would be more appropriately called groups. Each of these groups is again divisible into a smaller or greater number of primary races, each of which has itself expanded from a primordial nucleus or centre. To illustrate this proposition, we may suppose that there were several centres for the American groups of races. . . . (Nott and Gliddon 305–6)

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15. One might argue that Morton had earlier foreshadowed this possibility, when he wrote, in the second letter of the hybridity debates, that nature’s general law opposes ‘‘remote’’ hybridity, ‘‘but the exceptions are so remarkable, even with regard to these, that they invalidate the rule’’ (Morton, ‘‘Letter to the Rev.’’ 337). 16. See also Easthope, who argues: ‘‘Bhabha’s hybridity is essentially Derridean difference applied to colonialist texts’’ (343). The analysis below suggests that scholars have moved too quickly in accepting Bhabha’s account of Derrida, and that, in fact, Bhabha’s notion of hybridity operates quite unlike the work of Derrida. 17. See particularly Rogers, Sex and Race, Volume I, as well as the other volumes of Sex and Race, Nature Knows No Color Line, and As Nature Leads. My headnote to this chapter is cited in As Nature Leads 207. Rogers in his own time was regarded as a ‘‘bad’’ sociologist and historian by these professions, but despite and perhaps even because of his relative professional isolation it is tremendously useful, I believe, to fold Rogers’ pursuits onto today’s illconceived work on hybridity. 18. One might here examine another recent and crucial hybridity text: George Lipsitz opens Dangerous Crossroads by demonstrating—seemingly, in contradistinction to his largest claims—that hybridity, in some strange manner, grounds the study of essences. He writes, ‘‘[Musics] circulate freely throughout the world, but they never completely lose the concerns and cultural qualities that give them determinate shape in their place of origin’’ (4). ‘‘Precisely because music travels, it also augments our appreciation of place’’ (3). This, I believe, can be shown to be true of the whole of cultural studies of the hybrid. The study of crossroads, of syncretism, of borders, produces an account of origins, an account of original location, an account, finally, of inherited and disinheritable possessions and their values. What begins as an attempt to think past the idea of race or culture as such—that which attempts to desegregate the economy, or, one might say, to dismantle ‘‘eco-apartheid,’’ returns each of us to our ‘‘oikos’’—the Greek work for ‘‘home’’ or ‘‘household’’ and the ‘‘eco-’’ of the economy—in order to rationally calculate the values of our separate storehouses. 19. Bhabha, interestingly, writes on similar problems of non-appearance or invisibility, and in the same essay where he attempts to dis-locate his hybrid along Derridian lines. Here subaltern invisibility marks the limit of anthropological reflection—marks the limits of anthropology’s Nature/Culture divide and demarcations—and ‘‘leaves a resistant trace, a stain of the subject, a sign of resistance’’ through hybridity (Bhabha, Location 46, 49). Briefly, then, Kawash’s strategy rests with invisibility, while Bhabha not surprisingly attempts to capitalize upon it—exploit its significance in order to produce his ‘‘newness.’’

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20. Perhaps best translated as ‘‘fear inside,’’ highlighting a certain problematic of desire. coda: anthropology’s present David E. Johnson 1. This definition of sense requires a reading of Hobbes that understands the imagination to be always already at work in sense perception. See Hobbes, Leviathan Book 1, chapters 1–3. 2. Locke, for example, argues that all ideas derive from perception and perceptions, whether of things outside us and thus of sensation or of the operations of the mind and thus of reflection, ‘‘pass . . . continually’’ (Locke, An Essay Book 2, chapter 1). For Hume ideas are ‘‘the faint images of’’ impressions and impressions succeed one another (Hume, A Treatise 1.1.1 and 1.2.3). 3. Fabian’s conception of ethnography as a form and scene of communication and thus necessarily determined by the coevality of the interlocutors would have to be reread in the wake of Derrida’s critique of communication and presence in ‘‘Signature Event Context’’ (Margins 307–30). 4. My analysis of Fabian’s aporia owes much to Martin Ha¨gglund’s explanation of unconditional hospitality in Derrida: ‘‘Derrida’s notion of unconditional hospitality designates the exposure to the unpredictable, which can always be violent and to which one cannot know in advance how one should relate. The ‘hospitality’ to otherness is unconditional not because it is ideal or ethical as such, but because one is necessarily susceptible to violent visitations. Even the most conditional hospitality is thus unconditionally hospitable to that which may ruin it. When I open my door for someone else, I open myself to someone who can destroy my home or my life, regardless of what rules I try to enforce upon him or her or it’’ (Radical Atheism, ms. 134). 5. In Technics and Time, 1, Bernard Stiegler argues that Rousseau’s attempt to describe the transition from natural man to civil man, a distinction that moves ‘‘man’’ from a certain inhumanity to humanity, is misguided from the start. Rousseau conceives the savage as one who uses the hand as we do, but for Stiegler the development of the hand is bound to a relation to inorganic matter that effectively organizes the human. The use of the hand, Stiegler points out, requires just what Rousseau says the savage lacks, the faculty of anticipation or a relation to time. 6. See Gasche´, ‘‘Leaps of Imagination’’ 45–46; see also Johnson, ‘‘Kant’s Dog.’’ 7. It should be apparent that I am following the logic of the ‘‘now’’ as Aristotle classically formulates it; see Aristotle, Physics IV in Basic Works. 8. On the European accounting for the savage imagination, see Johnson, ‘‘The Habit of God’s Gift.’’

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9. According to Ha¨gglund ‘‘the trace structure of time’’ accounts for the possibility of a temporal synthesis that avoids the pitfalls of, for example, Rousseau and Kant. He writes: ‘‘The synthesis of the trace follows from the constitution of time. . . . Given that the now only can appear by disappearing, it must be inscribed as a trace in order to be at all. This is the becoming-space of time. The trace is necessarily spatial, since spatiality is characterized by the ability to remain in spite of temporal succession. Spatiality is thus the condition for synthesis, since it enables the tracing of relations between past and future. However, spatiality can never be in itself; it can never be pure simultaneity. Simultaneity is unthinkable without a temporalization that relates one spatial juncture to another. This becoming-time of space is necessary not only in order for the trace to be related to other traces, but also in order for it to be a trace in the first place. A trace can only be read after its inscription and is thus marked by a relation to the future that temporalizes space. This is crucial for Derrida’s deconstruction of the logic of identity. If the spatialization of time makes the synthesis possible, the temporalization of space makes it impossible for the synthesis to be grounded in an indivisible presence. The synthesis is always a trace of the past that is left for the future. Thus, it can never be in itself, but is essentially exposed to that which may erase it’’ (Radical Atheism, ms. 25). 10. For a brief account of the bifold development of the notion of transculturation, see Alberto Moreiras, The Exhaustion of Difference (185–87). 11. Puro also means cigar. The implication, however, is that the leaf of tobacco used to make cigars is the best, the purest; hence, a cigar is a ‘‘puro.’’ 12. For an account of the difference between Derrida and Levinas, see Ha¨gglund, ‘‘The Necessity of Discrimination’’ and Radical Atheism, Chapter 3, ‘‘Arche-Violence.’’ 13. All translations from Dussel’s E´tica are my own. I have taken up these pages from Dussel’s E´tica on two other occasions and in two different contexts. See Johnson, ‘‘The Limits of Community’’ and ‘‘How (Not) To Do Latin American Studies.’’

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Abu-Lughod, Lila, 219n6, 219n7, 225n1 actuality, 5, 6, 41, 49, 136, 146–47, 214. See also presence affect, 18, 26, 30, 57, 60, 62, 65–79 passim, 191, 224n19. See also passion(s); sympathy Africa, 101, 107–10, 120–22, 167–68, 204–7 Agamben, Giorgio, 2, 3, 28, 41, 43, 52, 185, 186, 217n1, 222n25 Agassiz, Louis, 170 Alarco´n, Norma, 221n24 alterity, 3, 22, 23, 31, 44, 68, 73, 79, 83, 94, 101, 114, 115, 120, 129, 134, 181, 188, 210, 214, 215, 224n16 Althusser, Louis, 16, 221n21 Amselle, Jean-Loup, 187, 219n7 analogy, 150, 163, 164, 210–11, 214 animal, 138–40, 153, 154, 158, 160, 197– 98, 202, 211, 221n22 anticipation, 188, 192, 197–202, 210–11; faculty of, 138, 199, 200, 233–34n4, 238n5 Anzaldu´a, Gloria, 222n29 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 9–10 arbitrariness, 146–47 archive, 58, 81 Arendt, Hannah, 152–55, 197–98 Aristotle, 136, 146, 152, 154, 158–61 ‘‘as if,’’ 141, 145–47, 150–51, 155, 158, 165, 214, 223n10 Auge´, Marc, 81, 188–91, 193, 223n1 Augustine, 188, 233n4 Australopithecus, 138, 145, 146 auto-affection, 35, 44, 45, 52, 56 Bachman, John, 170–75, 177–80 Baker, Houston, 167 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 117–19, 127 Barker-Benfield, G. J., 226n9

Barth, Fredrik, 219n7 Bataille, Georges, 119–20, 231n19 Beardsworth, Richard, 24 Behar, Ruth, 29, 35, 130–33, 223n1, 223n3 Belcher, Stephen, 124 Benedict, Ruth, 59 Beistegui, Miguel de, 228n8, 228n17, 229n23 bereavement, 33–34, 53–54, 61–63, 225n2, 225–26n4 Bhabha, Homi, 10, 116–17, 166–69, 180– 84, 237n19 Biard, Father Pierre, 112–13, 115 Bieder, Robert E., 168 Blanchot, Maurice, 133, 222n25 Boas, Franz, 18, 59, 74, 219n7 body, 28, 36–46, 49–57, 62, 104, 113, 137, 148, 158–59, 167, 172–74. See also corpse Borges, Jorge Luis, 81 Bourdieu, Pierre, 18 Boyarin, Jonathan, 10, 22–26, 222n26 Briggs, Jean, 63 Brown, Gillian, 71 Camale-Griaule, Genevie`ve, 231n23 Chow, Rey, 167 Clifford, James, 4–7, 11–12, 14, 34, 63, 102, 103, 124–25, 134–35, 231n22 coevalness, 120, 191, 193, 194, 196; denial of, 191–92 cogito, 35, 39–52 passim, 57 community, 22–26, 53, 55 Connolly, William, 24 conscience, call of, 87–90 control mechanism(s), 139, 140, 142, 144, 147, 152 Cooper, James Fenimore, 73

265

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corpse, 34, 41–42, 45–46, 53, 55–56, 62– 64, 203, 226n5. See also body Crapanzano, Vincent, 11 culture, 18, 29, 81–83, 99, 112, 116, 134–52 passim, 167–68, 203–6, 212, 219n7; concept of, 135–36; Dogon, 105–8, 122; identity and, 77; Ilongot, 64; Indian, 204–5; national, 119; secret of, 99, 107; subject of, 59; and truth, 64 culture concept, 7, 29, 136, 221n22 culture historical method, 58–60 Curtis, Moses Ashley, 170–71 Dallmayr, Fred, 8 Darnell, Regna, 82, 230–31n18 Darwin, Charles, 170, 181–82, 235n5 Dasein, 86–96 passim; primitive, 95–96, 228n17 Deleuze, Gilles, 46 democracy, 30–31 Derrida, Jacques, 10, 20–22, 52, 54, 81, 83, 90, 92, 93, 99, 101, 128, 134, 143, 164, 165, 169, 180–81, 188, 206–7, 209–10, 220n12, 220n15, 221n22 dialogue, 26, 31, 37, 74, 81–87, 91–97, 99–101, 106, 109–12, 114, 116–17, 119, 121, 125–31, 133, 141, 155, 161, 163, 191, 218 Dickens, Charles, 117–18 Dickinson, Emily, 111 Dieterlen, Germaine, 101, 102, 108 diffusionism, 176 Douglas, Ann, 71 Douglas, Mary, 123, 231n24 Du Bois, W. E. B., 184 Durkheim, E´mile, 18 Dussel, Enrique, 35, 211–15 Ellison, Ralph, 184–85 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 166 emotion(s), 15, 33, 35–37, 51, 53, 54, 56– 57, 60–67, 72–73, 77, 139; anthropology of, 225n1; force of, 32, 36 empathy, 59–60 entropology, 78–79 Ereignis, 98–101 ethnography, 11–15 Europe, 78, 93–94, 97, 103, 108–10, 114– 15, 120–21, 167, 203, 206–9, 211 experience, 3, 6, 28, 29, 32, 34, 55, 57, 60–62, 64–66, 72, 79, 86, 91, 93–94, 97–100, 106, 129, 131, 136, 139, 141,

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143, 146, 151, 161, 189–90, 197, 201–2, 207–11; emotional, 32, 34, 36–37, 40, 52; immediate, 37, 40, 42, 44, 50; personal, 32–33, 50–51, 53, 61, 85 Fabian, Johannes, 4, 7, 8, 26, 37, 120, 191–93, 217n4, 218n5 family, 62, 72, 79, 116, 134, 146–55, 157– 61, 163–65, 191, 203, 207–8, 213, 226n7, 234n10 family resemblance, 54, 148–51, 158, 160, 163, 165 Ferry, Luc, 222n25 fiction, 12, 14, 39, 46, 124, 142, 144, 145, 147, 157, 195, 227n12, 230n17 fieldwork, 2, 6, 8, 11, 12, 19, 36, 61, 63, 82, 102, 112, 123, 124, 135–36, 144– 45, 189, 191 finitude, 24, 49, 77, 87, 90, 138, 203, 222n31, 224n16 Fischer, Michael M. J., 4–7 Fisher, Philip, 70 foresight, 197–202. See also anticipation forgetting, 6, 60, 71, 86, 98, 99, 189–90 Foucault, Michel, 5, 76, 143, 182, 218n5, 222n24, 224n19 Freeman, Derek, 4, 124, 231n26 Froment-Meurice, Marc, 90, 99 future, 3–6, 22–27, 86, 112, 138, 141–43, 145, 147, 150–52, 166–67, 180–81, 188, 190–91, 200–2, 215, 217, 219, 230n16, 232n4, 235n6, 239n9 Fynsk, Christopher, 88, 89, 143–44 Garcı´a Canclini, Nestor, 167, 182–83 Gasche´, Rodolphe, 23, 98–99, 200, 206, 222n27 Gates, Henry Louis, 167 Gaukroger, Stephen, 57 globalization, 2, 130, 211–13 Geertz, Clifford, 4, 7, 11–12, 34, 63, 124, 134–49, 151–52, 155, 157, 161 Gilroy, Paul, 167–68, 181–82 Glidden, George R., 170, 172, 236n14 Goldberg, David Theo, 8–9 Goldmann, Lucien, 21 Gomez-Pen˜a, Guillermo, 167 Goody, Jack, 60 Gossett, Thomas F., 168 Greece, 99, 108, 162, 165, 207, 228n17 Greek(s), 9, 86, 98–99, 128, 134, 152, 154–56, 162, 207

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Index Griaule, Marcel, 58, 101–10, 119–28, 217n4 grief, 31–33, 36, 53, 60–62, 64, 79, 225n2. See also affect Habermas, Ju¨rgen, 217n4 Ha¨gglund, Martin, 203, 224n16, 233n4, 238n4 Hamacher, Werner, 55, 111, 198, 229n1 Hamilton, William T., 170 Hanssen, Beatrice, 228n8, 228n21 Haverkamp, Anselm, 223n5 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 63, 132 Hegel, G. W. F., 23, 110, 217n4, 222n17, 233n8, 234n10 Heidegger, Martin, 81, 84–102 passim, 128–30, 132, 143, 180, 231n27, 233nn5, 6, 8 history of anthropology, 7–11 Hobbes, Thomas, 189, 190, 198, 238n1 Hodgen, Margaret T., 219n8 Horsman, Reginald, 168 human, 15–18, 26, 28, 30–37, 48–56, 60–70 passim, 74, 78–80, 84, 86, 91, 92, 94, 96, 101, 104, 111, 115, 126, 127, 132, 133, 136–56 passim, 160, 169, 170–72, 174, 177–78, 190, 194–208 passim, 211–14 Hume, David, 189, 190, 194, 238n2 Husserl, Edmund, 85, 140, 206–11 hybridity, 166–87 Hymes, Dell H., 223n34 identity, 10, 21, 23–24, 52, 66, 74, 75, 77, 98, 106, 112, 115, 116, 123, 134, 136, 148, 167, 174, 180, 182, 184–86, 206, 220n14, 222n29, 223n10, 224n19, 234n10, 234n2, 239n9 imagination, 12, 39, 42–43, 47, 57, 74, 157, 192, 198, 200, 202–3, 214, 238nn1, 8 impression, 41, 45–47, 52, 165, 188–90, 238n2 inscription, 33, 37, 45, 50, 52, 181, 189, 239n9 judgment, 3, 9, 10, 13, 20, 38, 40, 47–49, 55, 68, 72, 111, 124, 217–18n4 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 42, 49, 84, 96, 194– 96, 199–203, 214, 224n16, 234n10 Kawash, Samira, 184

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khora, 164–65, 234n14, 234n15 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 132 Kluckhohn, Clyde, 59 Koguem, 110, 229n32 Krell, David Farrell, 98 Kroeber, Alfred L., 18 Lafitau, Father Joseph Franc¸ois, 112–15 de Lahontan, Baron (Louis Armand), 112–16, 127 Leavitt, John, 225n1 Leverenz, David, 71 Levinas, Emmanuel, 68, 79, 209 Le´vi-Strauss, Claude, 2–3, 34, 60, 77–79 Lewis, Oscar, 73 life, 13, 26, 29, 32, 33, 34, 38, 39, 46, 48– 50, 57, 65, 66, 72, 79, 80, 95, 103, 111– 12, 132, 135, 136, 143, 148, 152–55, 158, 173, 198, 204, 209, 211–12; emotional, 62–63, 67, 76; political, 58, 76 Lingis, Alphonso, 22, 51, 77, 174, 222n25 Lipsitz, George, 167, 237n18 Locke, John, 189, 190, 238n2 Lowie, Robert, 59–60, 176 Lugo, Alejandro, 221n23 Lutz, Catherine, 36, 76, 77, 225n1 Mac Low, Jackson, 133 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 1, 3, 11–16, 18– 19, 112, 204 man, 15–17 Mannheim, Bruce, 82–84, 227n2 Marcus, George, 4–7 Marx, Karl, 15–17, 77, 221n20 May, Reinhard, 85–86, 231n27 Mead, George Herbert, 112 Mead, Margaret, 18, 59, 124, 168 Melehy, Hassan, 223n8, 223n11, 224n19 memory, 39, 43–46, 52–53, 138, 161, 162, 188–90, 200–2 Me´ndez, Miguel, 79–80 Miami Theory Collective, 222n25, 227n13 Mignolo, Walter D., 83, 227n1 monster, 141, 192, 196 Montaigne, Michel de, 28, 43–44, 55, 223n11, 224n13 Moreiras, Alberto, 239n10 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 9 Morton, Samuel, 170–72, 177–80, 181 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 73

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Index

Mudimbe, V. Y., 4, 7, 8, 102, 109, 217n4, 218n5 multiculturalism, 30–31, 61–64, 111, 168 Naas, Michael B., 90, 228n11 Narayan, Kirin, 167 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 22–25, 27, 183, 222n25, 222n28, 222n31 Nott, Josiah, 170–72, 236n14 oblivion, 86, 162, 188–90. See also forgetting Ortiz, Fernando, 204–6, 217n4 Ortner, Sherry B., 4, 5, 6, 17, 18, 142 Parkes, Graham, 85 passion(s), 11, 43, 53, 55–57, 73–74, 77, 79, 137, 197. See also affect; sympathy Peacock, James, 134–36 perception, 189, 201, 210–11, 238n1, 238n2 periodization, 7–11 phenomenology, 85, 91, 207–8 philosophy, 21, 23, 51, 74, 82, 83, 94–95, 98, 101, 104, 109, 128, 134, 140, 143, 147, 148, 165, 199, 201, 203, 207, 214, 220n15, 233n8, 234n10 Plato, 14, 91, 92, 134, 140, 152–61, 164, 165, 233n9 Poe, Edgar Allan, 174–75 polis, 99, 152–56 Pratt, Mary Louise, 226n7 Prescott, William Hickling, 173 presence, 20, 41, 44, 47, 68, 82, 86, 91, 97, 100–1, 105, 110, 136, 189, 191, 193, 201, 202, 209 promise, 26, 195–96 prosthesis, 159, 223n10, 229n28, 233n8 quodlibet, 2, 185 Rabinow, Paul, 11, 19–20, 136 race, 8–10 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 18, 60, 218n6 Radin, Paul, 59 repetition, 3, 24, 34, 44–47, 50, 84, 89– 90, 92, 101, 161–2, 165, 201–2 representation, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 23, 26, 39, 49, 90, 104, 105, 125, 131, 146, 147, 158, 180, 181, 190, 199, 200, 202–3, 214, 215, 232n31

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ritual(s), 34, 46, 50, 53, 60, 66, 146, 214, 222n30, 225–26n4 Rogers, J. A., 183 Rogin, Michael, 219n7 Rorty, Richard, 12, 220n15 Rosaldo, Michelle, 36, 38, 53, 55, 57, 60– 66, 73, 76–77, 225n1, 226n8 Rosaldo, Renato, 28–38, 40–42, 49–57, 60–66, 69–70, 79, 182, 184 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 96, 137–38, 194, 197–203, 214, 233n4, 238n5, 239n9 Russell, J. A., 225n1 Sagan, Carl, 109 Said, Edward, 4–8, 10, 169, 217n4, 218n5 Saldı´var, Jose´ David, 175–77, 181–82 Sallis, John, 163 Samuels, Shirley, 226n10 Sapir, Edward, 59 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 16 savage, 8, 15, 78, 96, 113–14, 127, 197– 99, 202, 238n5 Savigliano, Marta E., 73–76 Sayre, Gordon M., 230n17 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 66–69, 73 Schmidt, Wilhelm, 59 Schmitt, Carl, 219n7 Schuler, Jay, 168 Schulte, Joachim, 149 Schwartz, Hillel, 126 Schwartz, Regina M., 220n11 secret, 2, 57, 83, 99–100, 102, 105, 107, 122, 124, 141, 158, 231n23 Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, 73 sentimentalism, 62, 63, 66, 70–72. See also sympathy Shell, Marc, 26, 160, 223n33, 233n9 singularity, 2 Sioui, Georges, 115–16 social sciences, and deconstruction, 21 Socrates, 156–57, 161, 163 soul, 4, 41, 55–57, 79–80, 137–38, 157, 200, 205 speech, 41, 82, 83, 86, 87, 89, 91, 103, 107, 110, 117, 118, 122, 126, 128, 133, 146, 147, 153–55, 229n27, 230n17 Spillers, Hortense, 167 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 221n24 Stanton, William, 168 Steinberg, Meir, 220n11 Stephens, Lester D., 168 Stiegler, Bernard, 138, 151, 194, 203

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Index Stocking, George W., Jr., 1, 4, 11–12, 14, 220n13, 220n14, 220n17 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 63, 69, 70–72, 226n5 structure and agency, 17–20, 22 symbol, 60, 66, 78, 108, 135, 141, 142, 146–47, 167 sympathy, 11, 41, 51, 62–63, 226n5. See also affect; passion(s); sentimentalism syncretism, 176 Taussig, Michael, 223n2 Taylor, Charles, 111–12, 116 Tedlock, Barbara, 223n1, 234n10 Tedlock, Dennis, 82–83, 116–17, 127–28 Tezuka, Tomio, 85–87, 93–94, 96, 97, 99, 101, 128, 231n27 Todorov, Tzvetan, 114, 115–16, 223n1 Tompkins, Jane, 70 transcription, 90–91 transculturation, 204 translation, 33, 46, 55, 85, 93–95, 97–101, 112–16, 128–29, 133, 162, 165, 203, 206 Turner, Victor, 34, 35 twins, 125–27 Tyler, Stephen A., 1, 223n1, 227n4

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Valentine, Lisa Philips, 82, 230–31n18 van Beek, E. A., 121–24 Van Den Abbeele, Georges, 39, 43, 223n8 Vattimo, Gianni, 128, 130 Vismann, Cornelia, 223n5 Visweswaran, Kamala, 33, 221n19, 223n3, 223n4, 224n21 voice, 5, 14, 26, 62, 63, 79, 82–83, 86–90, 100–1, 109, 117–18, 122, 125, 130, 132, 176 wake, of anthropology, 26–27 Wall, Thomas Carl, 186 Weber, Max, 18 Wells, H. G., 185–86 Weston, Kath, 167, 184 Wissler, Clark, 59 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 140, 143, 148–52 Wolf, Eric R., 5 Wood, David, 21 writing, 43, 44, 52, 87 Ybarra-Frausto, Thomas, 167 Young, Robert J. C., 168–69, 171, 180, 183, 217n3 Ziarek, Ewa, 82 zodiac, 107–8, 120

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