History, the Human, and the World Between 9780822389309

Citation preview

History, the Human, and the World Between

History,

 the Human,

 and the World between

 r. radhakrishnan

Duke University Press

Durham & London

2008

©2008 Duke University Press All rights reserved Designed in Minion by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset by Achorn International Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ¥

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data and republication acknowledgments appear on the last printed page of this book.

 To the city of Madras that I am learning to address as Chennai: its many ragas and talas.

Contents

ack now ledgments ix introduction 1

1 Revisionism and the Subject of History

31

2 Edward Said and the Politics of Secular Humanism 3 Worlding, by Any Other Name notes 249 works cited 267 index 281

183

115

Acknowledgments

it was easy for e. m. forster to have exhorted the human subject to “always connect.” The problem with the gestation and the production of this book was that everything seemed to connect. That, I repeat, was a problem of the highest order. I needed help in sorting out the connections to save the work from the sin of seamlessness. Fortunately, I received several invitations to present aspects and parts of this work in various venues. I am deeply grateful to my hosts and to the audiences who engaged with my work and gave me so much precious and insightful feedback. I wish to thank in particular Prafulla Kar; the Forum for Contemporary Theory (Baroda, India) for requesting that I present my work on Ranajit Guha and historiography; the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati; the dynamic informal reading group in Murray Krieger Hall, University of California, Irvine, organized by Lindon Barrett; Steve Mailloux and the Critical Theory Emphasis at the University of California, Irvine, for inviting me to present my chapter on Edward Said and humanism; Sumathi Ramaswamy and Valerie Traub at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for having me over to present my thoughts on poetry, ontology, and historiography; to Rita

x

Copeland and the vibrant graduate students of comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania for inviting me to present my thoughts about the relationship between intellectual work and disciplinarity; and my good friends and former students from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Prateeti Balal, Jed Murr, Yasser Munif, and Ibish Hussein for their rigorous support and deeply felt and thought responses to my work. I owe immensely to my two readers for their rigorous engagement with the text. The book is that much stronger thanks to their suggestions and critical comments. It has been a pleasure working with Ken Wissoker, my sagacious editor who has kept me honest with his keen, probing questions, and with his editorial assistant Courtney Berger. I thank them both for their high-level humane professionalism. I, the diasporic son, am eternally grateful to my parents as I miss and reproduce them in my own way in my home away from home. I thank my son Surya for his abiding friendship and for keeping me honest with his casual but loaded questions. And to my wife, partner, friend, and guide Asha what I owe is indeed so much that it has turned into an enduring asset.

acknowledgments

Introduction

as i commence this introduction , I feel divided between two impulses: to attempt a direct paraphrase-like introduction, or to initiate a self-reflexive commentary on what makes an introduction before I get into the issue of what the current book is all about. The first impulse seems to emanate from a basic nontheoretical self that is interested in sharing its concerns and priorities with other selves, whereas the other push would seem to originate from a professional self committed obsessively to the task of what Jacques Derrida would call “thinking thought itself ” as a necessary precondition for thinking representationally about anything. Is this second-order thinking necessary at all except as a form of professional compulsion? Does it add anything to the value of the discussion except give it a specialist dimension? How does one decide when and where metacommentaries are useful and illuminating, and when they are self-indulgent and inane? I am reminded of my undergraduate years in India as a debater when many of us would begin our orations with a de rigueur analytical riff on the very propositionality of the proposition that was under discussion. Were we doing it out of some chronic smart-aleckiness, or were we really opening up the debate to a crucial metapropositional dimension of richness and

2

complexity? Were we stalling for time and compensating for not having all that much to say directly and representationally about the proposition, or were we in some radical way including the very form of the issue as a latent content of the discussion to follow? Readers will remember that much of the early discussions of postmodernism and of the radicality of metafiction centered on questions such as the following: Was fiction dead? Was metafiction the inevitable consummation of the literature of ennui? Was postmodernism a shining example of a rebel without a cause until feminists, gay and lesbian theorists, subaltern and thinkers of color gave it one? In our own times, Derrida was the peerless master of the prolegomenon, the autocritical second-order riff that would come close to preempting or obviating the primary context of communication. This book is symptomatic of this tension between the need to address a general readership on such broad issues as history, the world, and the predicament of the human subject caught between the past and the present, between knowing and being, between phenomenology and discursive systems, between nature and anthropocentrism, between a potential universality and a world structured in dominance; and the desire to complicate these themes by subjecting them to the discourse of specialization. Ringing in my ears now is the impassioned advice that Edward Said gave me years ago, “Radha, always find a way to write to a large audience without in any way sacrificing profundity of thought and conceptualization.” Even as I agree with Said, a part of me is willing to entertain the possibility that there is an important connection between the complexity of expression and the profundity of thought. As I argue in my chapter on Said, humanism has to be understood both in pragmatic and commonsensical ways, but also in discursively specific ways. I also suggest that in making his decisive break with theoretical discourse, Said had both to gain and to lose. Said achieves what he calls “worldliness,” but only after disallowing a number of real complications that theory brings into worldliness. The challenge with the evolution of this book has been the following: how to present and discuss themes that matter in the context of appropriate thought models, theories, or schools of thought. If I wanted to talk about history and the present, whom would I go with? If I wanted to focus on the relationship between living and thinking, which philosophy would best deal with introduction

this problem? If the human subject both wants to remember and be benefited by the past and forget the past to avoid incapacitation by it, what are some of the ways of highlighting this problematic? If the human condition hovers somewhere between allegory and history, under what conditions can this betweenness be understood? This book enjoys all the advantages and the disadvantages of a conjunctural piece that works through strategic intersections and juxtapositions, rather than by way of an exhaustive and one-at-a-time analysis of a particular thinker or school of thought. My interest in Friedrich Nietzsche in the first part of the first chapter is necessitated by my interest in Adrienne Rich’s attitude to history and revisionism as expressed in her poem “Diving into the Wreck,” which in turn anticipates my sustained critical appreciation of the theme of the return in Frantz Fanon. It is the theme of the return with its variations in a variety of contexts that keeps the chapter together. A similar rationale holds together the relationship among phenomenology, poststructuralism, and postcoloniality. Whether it is the strategic juxtaposing of systems of thoughts and philosophies, or of individual thinkers, writers, and theorists, my objective is to bring out the complex, contradictory, and unpredictable relationships between the places in which people live and the spaces in which they think. The thinkers, writers, and theorists who figure prominently in this book seek to pose epistemology as an existential question, realize the political as an ethical resolution, dramatize an epistemological challenge of the political and vice versa, and find the moment of balance between the allegorical leap and historical anchorage. Well, who does not know what history is? We are history, part of it, as we make it, receive it, seek it, revile it, feel sometimes enabled and at other times blighted by it. My book begins with the following questions: What are some ways of thinking about history? Which approaches to history affirm life and the history of the present, and which attitudes haunt and paralyze life? What is a usable past and how does the human subject choose and construct it from the debris of dead moments? Will history cease to be if the human subject opts not to look back? What is the relationship between the past and the category we call history? If, as Nietzsche ruefully acknowledges, the human being, unlike the blissfully oblivious animal, is condemned to ruminate, how does the human introduction

3

4

either decide to remember or forget the past? Is there a choice, and how is the choice understood and validated? The term revisionism problematizes any notion we might have that history is objective or just. If history is what is remembered of the past, what about the other pasts that have not been remembered? Has not history for the most part been the version of the victor? How then does the loser rub dominant history against the grain to liberate those other stories that got buried or subjugated? How does the genre called history account for the worlding of the world within its discursive parameters, and how does worlding as phenomenological process bear the burden of objective knowledge and subjective authenticity? These are some of the concerns that occupy me in this book, both as general forms of anxiety about time, temporality, and historicity; and as specialist obsessions. As a specialist I have chosen to complicate or complexify these questions in the following way: I have chosen to locate this agenda in the context of the theory versus history debates. Hard-core advocates of history in this debate would argue that since the famous linguistic turn, theory has become profoundly ahistorical, even posthistorical. Evincing a mercurial dissatisfaction with the givens of actual history, and remaining incapable of dealing with history in empirically accountable ways, theory has taken the easy and frictionless option, thanks to the inflation of language into its own autonomous ontology, of imagining and proposing reality otherwise. Consequently, in theory, problems, contradictions, and challenges are always already sublimated into various fluid and unstable states of “post-ality”: post- this and post- that. Even such grounded and politically committed thinkers as Frantz Fanon and Antonio Gramsci have been thoroughly poststructuralized in alignment with Derridean dissemination or Lacanian theories of the unconscious. In this context, the ongoing collaborations between postcoloniality and poststructuralism have been particularly fraught. To those exponents of history and historiography who would consider poststructuralism to be by far a bad dream, the very term postcoloniality has come to signify a way of dealing with history by really not dealing with it. In the name of a purely epistemological or theoretical coalition, the “after” after colonialism and the “after” after structuralism have come together in what seems to be a rebellion without a cause. The neocolonial is hastily erased; the resistances of the third world are dismantled or depoliticized: all in introduction

the name of a privileged ambivalence that takes the form of a metropolitan double consciousness. Rather than allow issues of the so-called third world to dictate the choice and adoption of cultural, critical, and intellectual methodologies of analysis and exploration, the very formulation of issues and problems follows the avant-garde temporality of theory, which in its deconstructive autocritical mode remains profoundly Western and Eurocentric. The high theorists come back with the readymade response that (1) by raising self-reflexivity to the level of a primary politics and (2) by paying scrupulous and critical attention to the epistemological subject (on the assumption that radical practices in the realm of epistemology automatically trickle down as answers and solutions to the level of politics), they have already taken care of history; and (3) that postcoloniality is not intended as a substitute for Commonwealth or third world or Anglophone or Francophone studies for the simple reason that the temporality of the post- does indeed collocate geopolitics along different lines and axes. For the antitheory folks, history has been highjacked by theory into false forms of identification and recognition. The first misrecognition is brought about by the seduction of theory and theory’s access to infinite discursive proliferation: new terms, jargon, terminologies, and formulations that stake their truth claims as post-representational. To put it simply, theory becomes fashionable and felicitous obfuscation. Is this really true; or are there more productive ways combining the urge for theory with the historical imperative? The other problem has to do with realities of unevenness and asymmetry. When, for example, a postcolonial cultural or literary critic chooses poststructuralism as a theoretical point of entry into the complexities of a Nigerian, Ghanaian, or Indian text, how conscious is she or he of the asymmetrical or the uneven relationship between the two worlds that she or he is seeking to bridge? What makes such a critic decide or assume that poststructuralist ways of reading and interpreting are even relevant in the context of a third world text? Why, for example, does Homi Bhabha privilege the psychoanalytic and Lacanian Fanon over Fanon the political revolutionary who is utterly and uncompromisingly committed to possibilities of Afrocentric nationalism? Here the problem is this: Which recognition precedes which? Does the larger macropolitical recognition of Fanon as a revolutionary come first, or does the micropolitical recognition introduction

5

6

that he is a Lacanian thinker take precedence over the political determination? Which Fanon is the real Fanon, and analogously, which third world is the real third world; and which third world is deluded into false consciousness thanks to the seduction of high theory? Is the postcolonial intellectual deluded by the West by way of the erotics of theory as specialist discourse, or is she or he primarily enticed by the discourse and ergo by possibilities of metropolitan ambivalence? At any rate, this misunderstanding between theory and history brings into focus two related issues: perspectivism and the relationship between the places in which people live and the places in which they think. Said’s work could be read as a rich and layered symptom of the dilemmas and crises that I have been talking about. Indeed, one of the themes he was dealing with throughout his career had to do with the perspectival assumption of history by the human subject, both individually and collectively. Clearly, histories are created, interpreted, repossessed, and produced in response to present perils and threats. History is always contested within a dialectic tension: subjective and objective, perspectival/polemical and omniscient. Dominant, hegemonic, subaltern, feminist, postcolonial, gay and lesbian, Western, non-Western, the master, the slave: all of these are specific locations of pain or pleasure, privilege or privation, hurt, grief, and loss, or of surplus from which histories are constantly revisited, reinterpreted in keeping with whatever the present needs for the historical may be. Even as history is deemed to be objective and empirical and factual, no one approaches history in a nonpolemical, nonpartisan mode. History is precisely what different historiographies contest; and for Said, the history of humanism captures all the ambiguities despite which choices have to be made. Is humanism all good or bad? Is humanism necessarily and unavoidably Eurocentric? Even if humanism has had a negative history, can it still be reclaimed in the name of all humanity? Is humanism possible as a general and nontechnical worldview, or does it have to be considered as an –ism and therefore subjected to a specialist-discursive treatment? How can the individual use humanism in innovative and creative ways so as to escape systemic paralysis and incapacitation? How can humanism be reinvoked to address multihistorical emergencies occurring both within and among the peoples of the world? If Said is raising these questions as a postcolonial cultural critic, Ranajit Guha, the subaltern Inintroduction

dian historiographer, is raising a similar disillusionment within his own discipline, history and academic historiography. Guha, too, is agitated by the betrayal of the everyday by the historical, of existential temporality by official historiography, of poetic ways of dwelling in a world of rich possibilities by the disciplinary apparatus of a colonizing historical narrative. He then turns to poetry and to Rabindranath Tagore for an answer and a solution to a problem that is both existential/ontological and epistemological. It is by way of transgressing the givens of his genre that Guha seeks the real. The concept of the real immediately sets in motion an exciting conversation between phenomenology as a way of life/living or method and phenomenology as a philosophical school of thought. As I make a few basic comments about phenomenology and how it effectively brings together the many flows that constitute the theme of my book, I will also be making way for the second part of my introduction, where I will be laying bare the mechanics of my authorial agenda in terms of the title of the book and with reference to the goings-on within each chapter. Phenomenology in general opens up exciting possibilities of considering the same phenomenon simultaneously from a variety of discrete but interrelated registers: the political, the aesthetic, the ethical, the individual, and the collective. It is deeply committed to the task of reconciling the binary clash between an unsituated and disembodied epistemology of omniscience and a situated and perspectival formulation of being in the world, between the real and the rational, between the world as given and the world as intended, and finally, between the “I am” and the “I think” poles of human subjectivity. As I acknowledge a little later in this introduction, it has not been easy or simple to go back (ah, that going back theme again) to phenomenology after my dense implication in poststructuralism, but I do so in the belief that the return may be of some help to me as I seek, both as a general human and as a discursive intellectual, to understand the many betweens that constitute both my world and your worlds, my readers. Yes indeed, in three massive and prolix chapters, this book claims to be about history, the human subject, and the world between. I sincerely hope the reader notices the intended infelicity of the use of the word between, for it is my objective to dangle the between autonomously, that is, in transgression of its customary obligation to mark a certain introduction

7

8

licit adjacency of some space to some other space. My argument is that the human subject and the concept of the between are mutually constitutive, that is, in thinking itself into a state of reflexive consciousness, the human subject discovers the spatio-temporality of betweenness as both ontological and epistemological. To put it simply, the only place in which the human subject dwells is between. Sure enough, there are several betweens: between ontology and epistemology, between self and other, between the one and the many, between identity and difference, between nature and culture, between the ethical and the political, between subjectivity and objectivity, between the historic and the quotidian, between temporality and historicity, between the anthropocentric and the planetary, between self-subjectivation and alterior interpellation. In other words, take away the cartography of betweenness, and along with it vanishes the human subject. With specific reference to the title of the book, I would like to make two observations: (1) the “world” is indeed sandwiched between “history” and the “human”; and (2) by way of what students of figures of speech would identify as an instance of “the transferred epithet,” the very ontology of the world is rendered between, though the betweenness, properly speaking, characterizes the human and not the world condition. The entire book is symptomatic, in the psychoanalytic sense of the term, of a dialectical tension between phenomenology and a Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian discourse analysis. I would even say that it constitutes an attempt to recover what is still salvageable, persuasive, pleasurable, existential, relevant, and poignant in phenomenology after the acknowledgment that Michel Foucault’s work in particular has rendered uninnocent the very imprimatur in the name of which phenomenology sought to return to things themselves. Foucault has demonstrated tellingly how the phenomenological category of intentionality aestheticizes the relationship of the human to the world and furthermore guarantees to the human its meaning and significance as a natural outcome of its perspectival, but ontological Gestalt with nature. As Foucault puts it with ruthless trenchancy vis-à-vis Maurice MerleauPonty and Jean-Paul Sartre in his essay “Theatrum Philosophicum”: Phenomenology, on the other hand, reoriented the event with respect to meaning: either it placed the bare event before or to the side of meaning—

introduction

the rock of facticity, the mute inertia of occurrences—and then submitted it to the active processes of meaning, to its digging and elaboration; or else it assumed a domain of primal significations, which always existed as a disposition of the world around the self, tracing its paths and privileged locations, indicating in advance where the event might occur and its possible form. Either the cat whose good sense precedes the smile or the common sense of the smile that anticipates the cat. Either Sartre or Merleau-Ponty. For them, meaning never coincides with an event; and from this evolves a logic of signification, a grammar of the first person, and a metaphysics of consciousness.1

Clearly, both Foucault and the phenomenologists would agree that the so-called meaning question is an all-important one. But the question is about the modality of meaning: whether such a meaning is homely or unhomely. Foucault’s impassioned critique of phenomenology à la Merleau-Ponty is that it guarantees meaning in the name of a preexisting complicity between the self and the world. In Foucault’s understanding, phenomenology both as a philosophy and as a method functions primarily on the basis of primal significations that reconcile the world with the self in such a way that the intentionality of the self and the disposition of the world have to be celebrated in perfect philosophical synchrony. And Foucault detects bad faith and bad epistemology in this synchrony. A question that I find myself asking, then, is this: If I am so persuaded by Foucault’s epistemological repudiation of phenomenology, and furthermore, if epistemology is what this book is primarily about, why then am I returning to phenomenology for ontological comfort and sustenance? There is more than one way of responding to this. To start with, Foucault’s own discourse, despite its self-avowed rupture from all projects phenomenological, is still haunted by phenomenological murmurs and whispers. It is not at all surprising to hear Foucault declare in one of his late interviews that he was indeed profoundly influenced by Martin Heidegger, even though there are not all that many references in his work to the earlier thinker. My hypothesis is that no human being, professional thinker or otherwise, who is interested in asking questions and seeking answers from life or existence can afford to bypass the phenomenological measure. One of the perennially enabling virtues of phenomenology has been its insistence that it is a method, a process,

introduction

9

10

and a way of living and thinking; and not an -ism, a philosophy, an ideology, or an apodictic axiology. In the context of phenomenology, it thus becomes possible to perennially play out the drama of the cogito, caught as it is, often haplessly, between living and telling and between existing and cogitating.2 Whatever pedagogical mastery phenomenology may want to claim on its own behalf as a philosophy or as a plenary worldview, it is always already called into question or played with by phenomenology as play, as performativity. Deep questions of existence and ontology are forever alive in phenomenology, often in a nameless and ineffable modality, particularly during times in which the aggressiveness of epistemology—either in the form of instrumental reason or in the name of empiricism, positivism, scientism, or fundamentalism— seeks to enclose the mystery of the infinite and of what is to be known within the juridical and normative procedurality of the cogito and its passion for certitude as philosophical truth. In other words, phenomenology is nothing if not a wandering process open to illumination and mystification, and then again, to mystification and illumination in an ongoing measure of inexhaustibility. As Foucault’s late work on selfsubjectivation would pose it, and this aspect of Foucault’s late thinking is indubitably phenomenological: How does the human subject change itself through processes of ascesis so that it earns the right to dwell in the domain of knowledge that it has brought into existence? How does the human subject take care of itself by way of the ethical imperative of epistemology? In other words, phenomenology exhorts the human subject to constantly think of thinking in terms of living, without at the same time attempting to conflate the two in a movement of unmediated authenticity or spontaneism. The claim of phenomenology on the human subject, I would submit, is both systemic-discursive and nonprofessional/quotidian. It becomes incumbent on the phenomenologically inflected human subject or cogito to raise the issue of its accountability to itself, to existence, and to nature along multiple axes: the epistemological, the ethical, the political, the corporeal, the cognitive, the affective, and the aesthetic. To put it differently, the truly phenomenological thinker functions much like a generalist who in his or her very rigorous awareness of the selfentrenched legitimacy of a variety of different specialized truth claims refuses to be seduced exclusively by any one of them and resists the introduction

temptation to fetishize or reify any one of those claims and anoint it with a representative sovereignty on behalf of life itself. How can the human subject practice ethics epistemologically? How can the cogito think ethically? How is affect to be construed cognitively; and how can thought be experienced as though it were sensible, palpable? How can human accountability, by way of a whole series of self-reflexive processes, be understood both as a specific and as an organic imperative? How are the specialist truths produced within one domain to be subjected to dialogic and dialectical interrogation from other specialized perspectives, as well as from a “lay” human perspective? These questions take on both ontological and epistemological relevance and urgency in the context of phenomenology mainly because phenomenology has the ability to function both as figure and as ground, both as what is in the horizon and as the horizon in a noninvasive and nontotalizing manner. More sensitively and more poignantly than any recent school of thought, phenomenology, particularly after the very necessary critiques it was submitted to by way of Foucault and certain strains of poststructuralist thought, remains capable of entertaining the creative and transformative possibility that there is more to life than can be dreamt of within the confines of any philosophical or scientific method, discourse, or terminology. This solicitude on behalf of the mystery of the knowable also takes certain forms of advocacy: advocacy on behalf of heterological ways of knowing; nonprofessional, nonexpert, noninvasive, naive, dialogic, and other modes of insight that owe as much to listening as they do to speaking or talking. Committed, on the one hand, to the broadly speaking Marxist ethico-politics of knowledge as a willed and agential transformation of reality, and dedicated, on the other hand, to the deep-ecological principle of letting nature be, phenomenology has to position its project of “worlding” judiciously between a pregiven nature and an unavoidable anthropocentrism. Let us take for example the concept of subjectivation as developed by Foucault and that of interpellation as theorized by Louis Althusser. Both of these formulations are indeed subtended by a deeper phenomenological curiosity. What does it mean to think? What is thinking, as Heidegger would put it? What happens to subject-object dualism in the process of thinking? Who calls on the human subject to think? Does this hail come from within or without? What do coordinates like within introduction

11

12

and without mean in the context of thinking that is after all human, too human? Can thinking that is in response to oneself also be realized as a form of accountability to the other and to the without? What is the phenomenological position vis-à-vis binarity? Does binarity found thinking itself, or is it possible to generate a kind of thinking that can transcend the authority of binarity? Though it is undeniable that Foucault and Althusser, as intensely modal thinkers, take us beyond a certain phenomenological naïveté, their concern remains deeply phenomenological for the very simple reason that despite all the secondarity of mediations and the dispositif of discourse, the issues are about life and about living. The return to things themselves or the return to the lived moment as a call or as a manifesto can by very definition never be untimely. To put it briefly, systems matter and thought matters because life matters and living matters, and not the other way around. Foucault more than Althusser, after a whole lifetime of chronicling and archiving the materiality of discourse and the workings of epistemology as disciplinarity, seeks to return to life in a postphenomenologically phenomenological mode. It is in the name of a return to life that Foucault articulates his advocacy of “subjugated knowledges.”3 To me, one of the most bracing aspects of phenomenology is that it allows the human subject to talk about life and living in all their generality. This does not mean that phenomenology is fuzzy, poorly differentiated, or taxonomically recalcitrant. What is enabling about phenomenology is precisely its ability to deal with life both in a bounded and in an infinite way. Merleau-Ponty, as a phenomenologist, was a powerful art critic and aesthetician, and a Marxist and somewhat of a communist. So was Sartre. Thus when one hears the constant repetition of concepts like the self, the other, the body, intentionality, perception, the cogito, the world, and so on in Merleau-Ponty, it is immediately obvious that these concepts operate on a variety of registers that constitute a sometimes contradictory, but always a coherent and a signifying continuum: that sensuous totality of life that Marx was committed to explain and change. It is easy to practice Marxism as a Marxist or be a communist like a communist; but the more complex question is: how does one practice communism as a phenomenologist? Within the overarching horizon of phenomenology, the relative autonomies of the political moment, the existential moment, the ethical moment, and introduction

the aesthetic moment are powerfully persuaded into a dialogue with one another. One of the significant consequences is that it is possible for a politically committed and ideologically partisan phenomenologist to make meaningful differentiations, for example, between temporality and historicity and between prediscursive possibility and discursive or official actuality. A reconfigured phenomenology has a crucial role to play in the ongoing contestations between history and theory, between objectivism and subjectivism. As I attempted to demonstrate in my last book, Theory in an Uneven World, the opposition between history and theory has of late been crudely overdrawn, even caricatured. I even suggested, in response to the cry “always historicize,” a different but related exhortation, “always theorize.”4 These two exhortations are to be articulated together productively only on condition that both history and theory reimagine themselves with respect to each other. It is here that phenomenology, with its philosophical and aesthetic focus on the category of imagination, has much to contribute. Let me develop the theme of a cartographic or worldly imagination some more; and to be able to do this, I go to the novelist Amitav Ghosh and his telling phrase from The Shadow Lines, “imagine with precision.”5 This phrase makes the bold claim that all realities, including the objective facticity of given reality, are nothing but imagined, and at the same time offers the evaluation that it is precisely because reality is imagined that it is valuable and worthy of perspectival contestation. Ghosh also reminds the reader that imagining is not a subjectivist, relativist, or solipsistic binge: there can be no responsible imagining without precision. The precision that is required in the act of imagining the world otherwise has nothing to do with the exactitude of positivism or the monovalent rectitude of facticity or empiricism. The precision is internal to the imagination and takes the form of a figural or aesthetic accountability to the worldliness of the imagination. I take it for granted that the objective of any activity, any discourse, or any project is to perennially overrun itself, to transcend itself toward an absence, toward some place that is as yet not there. Phenomenology would insist that such acts of transcendence would have to occur on the basis of a corporeal and embodied immanent critique that would honor the history of the present, but only with the intention of imagining it otherwise. In other words, both history and introduction

13

14

theory have the obligation not to stay the course and to find the status quo wanting, insufficient, and unacceptable. How then does the human subject imagine a different reality that haunts the history of the present as a powerful absence?6 Should phenomenology produce the other, represent the other, or let the other be? How does the human subject honor the givenness of reality even as it envisions a transcendence of the givenness in the name of the other? Here again, the very givenness of reality has to be inflected on two registers: that of nature and that of human history. Clearly, the human commitment to the deep-ecological givenness of nature has to be very different from its commitment to its own story, and more often than not, bloody and guilty history. To put it in Heideggerian terms, is it the responsibility of the human subject to achieve a symbiotic relationship between “the language of Being” and “the being of language,” and furthermore, make possible a thinking that transcends the binary impasse of first nature and second nature? The terms world, history, human, and subject in this work are intended to be in constant motion among different temporalities, discourses, and regimes of truth: phenomenology, feminism, postcoloniality, humanism and the variations thereof, subaltern history, nature, anthropocentrism, and deep ecology. What is revealing in this shuttle is the fact these terms/concepts take on different meanings and valences depending on their epistemological location. Thus the world to Heidegger, in the context of his poetic and phenomenological elaboration of the Earth-World nexus, means something very different than it does to Said as he critically delineates his vision of worldliness. The meaning of the stable and objective category history becomes radically contingent when we begin to consider that history is the function of certain modes and forms of historicizing; when we begin to talk about the politics of perspectival historicizing, we get into the complexities of different locations and the very different desires, motivations, drives, and resentments that drive the human subject toward historicizing. What is of course significant in all this is that pregiven realities such as the world, the human subject, and history are cathected in different ways in the works of different writers and theorists, each one of whom is invested in the task of semanticizing these pregiven realities in the context of his or her particular projects. In other words, the pregiven world has to undergo a process of didactic “worlding” in the context of a wide introduction

range of human and disciplinary interests and desires. Thus the process of worlding that one encounters in Heidegger is restricted to ontology and committed to a rigorous destruction of humanism, the consequent celebration of nonanthropocentrism, and the opening up of Being to the Other; but at the same time, the Heideggerian project remains blind to its own Eurocentric negation of other histories in the name of its own Dasein (Being-there) that presumes to speak for all humanity. Said’s secular worldly project, on the other hand, is all too secure in its human dimension and is not even interested in the kind of questions that Heidegger (or David Harvey or Murray Bookchin) raises concerning the relationship of the human to the primordiality of Being. My choice of writers and theorists is therefore based on two reasons: (1) and this is obvious: that they have meant a lot to me and my own development as an intellectual in the form of an active dialogue with them; and (2) each of them not only opens up a conjunctural space in which the different elements and variables are made to configure in one particular way and not another but also discloses candidly how and why where she or he “comes from” strongly determines the choices she or he makes toward a particular project of worlding. In other words, these are thinkers to whom epistemology cannot escape or bypass the mark of the existential, which in turn is nothing if not situated and perspectival.

revisionism and the subject of history Thought through in three movements, each of which features an instance of the return motif, this chapter begins with a critical appreciation of the themes of forgetting and remembering in Nietzsche’s The Use and Abuse of History and the Foucauldian notion of countermemory and stages a set of dialectical tensions:7 immanence and transcendence, the history of the present and teleology, the historical impulse as biophilic and biophobic, history as flight and as fulfillment, history as given and history as the outcome of a revisionist return, historicity and temporality, and living and telling.8 Nietzsche was one of the first thinkers to raise the possibility that the impulse toward history could well degenerate into an attitude of biophobia. When does history become an enemy to life and impede and devitalize living in the present?9 What introduction

15

16

indeed are the pedagogical limitations of history as teacher? Reading Nietzsche by way of Gilles Deleuze, this chapter poses the following questions: What is at stake in the Eternal Return? Is ressentiment the only force that fuels historical transformation in the name of justice? Who plays the game, and who transcends the game itself in the name of a superior amor fati, a love of fate? What makes Nietzsche unique as an epistemologist is that he directly addresses his knowledge questions to existential dilemmas and predicaments. It is in the name of life, of existence, and the richly embodied lived moment that Nietzsche imagines the contours of knowledge. In this he is a phenomenologist, but one who is on to the ruse that truth is “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms,”10 and that the will to power is constitutive of the will to truth. His solicitude for living and the human, all too human in fact leads him to postulate the thesis of nature versus nature, an antagonistic formulation in which the human finds a place on either side of the “versus.”11 A relentless deconstructor of agential theories of knowledge and an avid critic of any form of anthropocentrism, Nietzsche is yet constrained to espouse the human as the site of a profound self transcendence: a pure becoming, an eternal return in the name of life and as the return of the repressed. It is precisely because Nietzsche, as a thinker-aristocrat, has no stake in history that he plays the game of history: a game whose internal intransitive logic overwhelms the seduction of winning as the desired outcome. Nietzsche’s Übermensch (superman) is an aesthetic and performing sensibility that would want to play with the game itself and up the ante toward the second order, rather than submit itself to the winner-loser rationale of the game that binds the ordinary human. The second movement of the chapter is an in-depth reading of Rich’s magnificent poem “Diving into the Wreck.”12 The category and the process of returning in Rich’s poem work in ways both similar and dissimilar to Nietzsche’s return. Both Nietzsche and Rich have a passion for the aesthetic, not merely as a modality but as the basis for strong truth claims. The idea of play, with its attendant notion of something being played for, resonates in both. Sometimes intransitive and at other times transitive, at times purposelessly purposive and at other times didactic and politically interested, Rich’s dive into the wreck is a response to a double interpellation: oceanic as well as ideologically partisan. The dive, introduction

motivated by an impulse more complex, more profound, and more generous than mere ressentiment, is at once interested in questions of power, the project of rubbing dominant historiography against the grain, a feminist destabilization of patriarchal meaning leading eventually toward possibilities of androgyny, and in a nonanthropocentric merging with the elemental. Whereas the Nietzschean project of transforming all values or the very value of value and of demonstrating the irony that “truth is nothing but a mobile army of anthropocentric metaphors” dramatizes the theme of nature versus nature in the human, all too human subject, Rich’s revisionism and return seeks to reconcile the human with the oceanic without at the same time foreswearing the ideology of the political. Though intended phenomenologically, politically, aesthetically, and epistemologically at the same time, that is, within the synchrony of a broad and inclusive project, Rich’s poem has the critical nerve to demonstrate the relative autonomy of each of these modes and allow for each mode to interrupt, question, and noncoincide with one another. Equally striking is the differentiation, within the poem, between temporality and historicity. Whereas historicity points toward purpose, an obligatory collectivity, and the all too necessary lexicalization of immanent moments of singularity, temporality seduces the poem toward the discontinuous and an experience of time as the everyday, as the every moment and instant that is always anterior to historicity. In other words, temporality suggests that there is more to time and the human experience of time than is made possible through historicity. Politically programmatic in some ways and abandoned to grammatological jouissance in others, the poem asks the following question: How can an epistemology figurally produced by the aesthetic reconfigure the political? How can the dive into the wreck be simultaneously purposeful and purposeless; be the end and the means to the end at the same time? How can the poem be and keep becoming at the same instant? Allegorical and historical simultaneously, the poem both marks feminist or gendered alienation as a state of being to be rectified and healed through polemical revisionism and signifies alienation as a deeper loss of self and identity to the oceanic, such that the sea is now recognized not as a question of power. In many ways, this session dramatizes feminism’s double session with ontology and epistemology, with memory and countermemory, with affirmation and the deconstructive critique. introduction

17

18

The third movement of the chapter focuses on Fanon, in particular on the theme of the return to the people by the colonized, whitewashed intellectual in The Wretched of the Earth. If a Negro is not “any more than a white man,”13 and if furthermore, binarity and thought are mutually constitutive, how should the native postcolonial intellectual return to the history of his or her people as it pulsated before the colonialist invasion? Fanon’s return is not based on a preexisting promise: in a real sense, the return has to create what it is looking for even as it honors the anteriority of precolonial history. Deeply critical, on the one hand, of essentialist notions of autochthony and of mindless atavisms masquerading as history, and rigorously vigilant of Eurocentrism and neocolonialism, on the other, Fanon seeks to baptize the benighted intellectual in the occult instability of the free moment being given shape to by the people. In a way reminiscent of Gramsci, Fanon is compiling an inventory of the many historical traces that lead up to the present so that certain adjudications may be made among the traces and legitimate histories recognized as such. What is riveting in Fanon’s return to the past is that it is characterized equally by a passion for and a distrust of history. Despite the many problems and flaws in Fanon’s advocacy of a postcolonial nationalism, his gesturing toward a new humanism opens up a tenuous area of being and knowing, collapsible neither exclusively into historicity nor reducible to pure temporality. Fanon has to work his way through the very binarity that shackles him in the first place. Fanon’s critical double consciousness struggles with great rigor and integrity to nominate the principle in the name of which a legitimate postcolonial emergence is to be baptized. The new and unprecedented humanism that his thought points toward is constrained to assume as its point of launch the very legacy of colonial modernity that thwarts possibilities of such a humanism. One cannot also afford to forget that Fanon brings to his venture a doubly coded intellect and sensibility: Fanon the political thinker, revolutionary, and mujahideen, and Fanon the psychoanalytic thinker and analyst of experience. Fanon thus has to play out the self-other thematic on both registers. Like Nietzsche, Fanon, too, is an existential epistemologist; but unlike Nietzsche, Fanon as an intellectual is also a collectivist and a political revolutionary. It is no wonder, then, that Fanon’s commitment is both to temporality and to historicity. Without ever conflating the introduction

two in programmatic haste, Fanon allows his discourse to do justice to both within a perennially shaping dialectics of experience. In Fanon’s theater of thought, the temporality of the lived, existential moment in all its immanence is in a reciprocally transformative dialogue with a politically constructed historicity and its many valences. Fanon’s ethically and existentially inflected epistemology forever seeks to understand the constructed hegemony of the political with reference to the intentional anteriority of the prepolitical. Like Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler, Fanon, from within the white-hot political urgency of postcolonial emergence, deploys the future anterior to temporalize the doubleness of what we now call the measure of post-ality. Fanon’s dedication to the postcolonial symptom comes in the form of a profound double session: as a political revolutionary, he identifies and historicizes the symptom as a specific pathology to be disalienated into legitimate belonging and representative sovereignty; but as a psychoanalytic thinker, he allows himself to dive into the immanent temporality of the symptom as such. He speaks from within the phenomenology of the symptom, enjoying it as it were, even as he envisions the curing of the symptom by way of political interventions and revolutions. Combining bifocally, within one and the same vision, the psychoanalytic understanding that to be symptomatic is the only way to be epistemologically explicit and productive and the political truth that a symptom warrants progressive and teleological remediation, Fanon rigorously suspends human subjectivity between psychological and psychoanalytic duration and politico-historical chronology. Even as he acknowledges the alterity of the symptom on a psychoanalytic register, Fanon will not allow postcolonial subjectivity to be interpellated by the ontology of the symptom. Fanon’s deep and poignant exhortation of a new humanism is ineluctably double-voiced: existentially and ethically independent of the symptom, but politically captive to the very symptom that it seeks to transcend.

edward said and the politics of humanism In this chapter, I return to that much vexed, much probed, and much maligned and celebrated theme of humanism. So what is the verdict on humanism: good or bad, innocent or guilty, relevant or thoroughly introduction

19

20

superannuated? Beginning with Sartre’s question of whether existentialism is a form of humanism, through Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror, Althusser’s structuralist-Marxist repudiation of humanism, and Foucault’s excoriating demystification of humanism as an ideology, many positions have been taken, modified, and recanted with respect to the politics of humanism. Though a smart but lay person on the street would automatically associate humanism with humaneness and humanitarianism and therefore likely give it a generous passing grade, thinkers, philosophers, and academic experts have a much more complex perspective on humanism as a specific ideology of the human. Beginning with a critical appreciative reading of Said’s posthumously published book Humanism and Democratic Criticism,14 this chapter tries to understand the reasons why Said, after the publication of his Orientalism, breaks his loyalties to poststructuralism and high theory and returns to humanism, to secular humanism, in fact, in the name of critical consciousness and worldliness. This chapter pays special attention to the many profound contradictions that constitute Said’s critical-cultural agenda and argues that it is from these contradictions as symptom that Said produces a way “out,” not by simplifying the gravity of the symptom, but by making a number of bold and unambiguous choices. From Orientalism onward, Said functions more as a freewheeling nonprofessional critic dedicated to the culture of worldliness and the worldliness of culture than as an exemplary card-carrying practitioner of any particular -ism or school of thought. It is the agenda of worldliness that matters and not the truth claims of a system of thought. Why does Said find a comrade in Noam Chomsky, and why does he break with Foucault? Why does he return to humanism in spite of being aware of humanism’s many failures and Eurocentric assumptions? Why does his method of contrapuntal reading absolve the culpable aspects of humanism and embrace its redeemable parts? Does Said reconcile his politics with his epistemology? How can a theoretical critic of nationalism be an avid supporter of Palestinian nationalism? Why is it important for Said to celebrate radical oppositionality and not a politics of hegemonic belonging? Why does Said, despite a number of shared goals with Foucault, turn his back on a number of poststructuralist possibilities that are very much in alignment with his own imaginings? introduction

The political, the existential, the literary, and the theoretical: all these registers constitute the oppositional, secular-critical voice of Said. But how are these registers synchronized so that the emerging voice is intelligible as one, and not rendered cacophonous? Where and how does Said identify and celebrate intentionality within this continuum? What is his point of entry into worldliness? Does Said make this choice agentially, or is this choice assigned to him discursively, subject-positionally? Is Said in the world by virtue of being theoretical; or does the givenness of the world dictate and govern his theoretical choices and biases? We can see how Said, in his own historically and discursively specific manner, is revisiting the relationship between the “I am” and the “I think” and submitting the ergo-saying cogito to fundamental interrogation. To borrow usefully here from Raymond Williams, a thinker for whom Said had great respect and affection, from Orientalism onward, Said is interested in developing his own worldly project rather than in submitting to immurement in the discourses of academic formation.15 Said begins to think of himself as an oppositional thinker informed and inspired by a secular, critical consciousness, rather than as a specialist practitioner of a particular discourse. He also becomes impatient, even angry, with theory doing its own thing, as though it were a constituency in and of itself. Theorists and intellectuals of my generation who grew up as students of Said, Paul de Man, William V. Spanos, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Fredric Jameson, and others will recall that the world then used to be divided into two camps: the ones who did theory, and the ones who did not. In Said’s negative characterization of the theoretical imperative, theory comes across as a smugly immanent postrepresentational form of narcissism that could keep multiplying its textual pleasures, aporias, and indeterminacies in an atmosphere of wall-to-wall discourse. In other words, theory had seemed to have found a way of transcending the responsibility of having to be about anything except itself. It is as if theory had found ways to sublate, by way of its own self-reflexivity and autocritique, the very worldliness of the world. Said keeps insisting all through his work, and here he borrows extensively from Giambattista Vico, that the world to him is secular, historical, and human. Intensely aware as he is of the many powerful critiques of humanism that have been launched by deconstructive and introduction

21

22

oppositional thinkers within the Western tradition such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Althusser, and others, Said embraces humanism as a usable body of knowledge and a relevant framework for critical thought. Simply stated, Said does acknowledge that humanism has had both a bad history and a good history, but he is confident that despite humanism’s ambivalent record, there is no need to discard or transcend humanism tout court. Such an exclusively theoretical and epistemological coup, in Said’s view, amounts to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Said maintains that a critique of humanism can be coordinated from within humanism itself. Does Said’s favorable verdict on humanism wrongly exculpate humanism of its constitutive Eurocentrism and trivialize the significance of all the powerful refutations of humanism (structuralist, poststructuralist, phenomenologicalexistentialist, deep-ecological, and postcolonial) that have emerged in the past few decades? In the final analysis, what are the criteria that enable Said to make his choice, given the contradictory valences of humanism? Are his reasons personal, existential, political, literary, ethical, or are they a matter of sensibility and taste, or a matter of location and subject positionality? In other words, given the reality that many different, perspectival, and mutually exclusive adjudications of humanism are possible, on what basis does Said break the impasse and legitimate his choice? Said’s sense of belonging to the West is indeed contradictory: he is both Eurocentric and profoundly anti-Eurocentric. If by centrism one means an arrogant and self-sanctioning attitude that permits the human subject to naturalize and universalize one center at the expense of all other centers, then Said is a passionate critic of Eurocentrism, or of any centrism, for that matter. But if by Eurocentrism one is referring to the reality that indeed Europe could be considered a valuable object of critical study and elaboration, then Said could be read as Eurocentric. But this second form of Eurocentrism is not a card-carrying, parochial, and jingoist affiliation that rules out other belongings, commitments, and affiliations. As we all know, Said had many interests and passions, and Europe and the West are one of the many registers that Said operated on. Both in his perennial critical commentary on Joseph Conrad and in his essay on Sigmund Freud and the non-European, Said makes it clear that the most meaningful and the most inclusive way to read texts introduction

is the contrapuntal way.16 Yes indeed, in some unavoidable ways Conrad’s vision of Africa is unrelievedly anthropological and ethnocentric; and yet Conrad’s fiction is relentlessly deconstructive of the claims of European dominance: a critique that is internal to Eurocentrism. Said finds no contradiction between reading Chinua Achebe affirmatively and appreciating Conrad’s intra-European critique of Eurocentrism. In his reading of Freud, Said makes his peace with the inevitable historical fact that Freud was indeed Eurocentric in some ways (Freud could not have helped it, given his time and place) and goes on to appreciate what is universally sharable and useful in Freud. In other words, as a human subject interpellated by the West, he chooses which West to support and which West to be critical of. Rather than be demoralized by the Benjaminian thesis that there is “no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,”17 Said entertains the hope that every culture can learn from its past mistakes and salvage itself as a just and fair possibility for the future. Convincing enough as this is, it is still not clear why Said does not pay sufficient critical attention to the Heideggerian and a whole range of poststructuralist critiques of humanism and the humanist subject. I can only make the following surmises: (1) These critiques for the most part call for a tout court rejection of humanism on purely theoretical and epistemological grounds; (2) Said still has use for the humanist subject, however flawed it may be; (3) themes such as anthropocentrism and their relationship to humanism are of little or no interest to Said at all. What makes Said’s critical interventions unique despite their flaws and internal contradictions is that they firmly stand for, that is, represent certain choices. In other words, Said finds a way to embody his existential/historical choices as his methods, and correspondingly to animate his methods as ways of living in the world and achieving worldliness in specifically accountable ways. Said’s rejection of high theory is based on his diagnosis that theory actively encourages an ethic of professionalism that is profoundly intramural and occlusive of worldliness. Said’s ultimate advocacy of humanism, despite its problematic record and genealogy, is in fact diagnostic of his immense confidence that by the sheer intensity and density of individual critical consciousness and human agency, systemic, historical, epistemological forms of negative baggage can be divested and shed. As my discussion in this introduction

23

chapter shows, I am not entirely persuaded by Said’s rationale, though I am moved by his resolve to stick with what he thinks really matters and in the process make himself vulnerable to reproof and scholarly correction, even castigation. The chapter concludes with the understanding that what makes Said remarkable is the fact that he does not attempt to make a home of borders; that he has the intellectual and the ethico-political integrity to speak for betweenness rather than force it into the comfort and security of a monologic home; and that he does not try to cover up, by way of some totalizing theoretical gesture, the unsutured relationship in his own thinking between epistemology and politics, between solidarity and critique, and between pure affirmation and perennial oppositionality.

worlding, by an y other name

24

What is the world and what is the human world, and how does worldliness as a kind of becoming connect the two? What does it mean to be human? Is the human ontologically natural, but epistemologically cultural? Is the human subject the painful embodiment of the fateful undecidability between nature and culture? If so, how uncontrollably aporetic is human destiny? Does the human become human in the act of letting the world speak through her or him? Is the phenomenon of the world speaking through the human covalent with the human speaking for him- or herself? Is anthropocentrism inevitable? What is the critical relationship between the language of Being and the being of language? With these questions and problems in mind, the first part of the chapter probes the phenomenological world of Merleau-Ponty who, by way of the phenomenological method, tries to find a way beyond the binary stalemate of extreme objectivism and unbridled subjectivism. Without anchoring phenomenology in the unmediated mystique of primordiality, or claiming that thought is the topos where the world “worlds,” Merleau-Ponty finds in perception a primacy that cofounds the world and the human subject. The world is given to human perception as perspective; and as such rationality is experience before it is thematized as such. And yet, Merleau-Ponty, who is also a Marxist, takes up responsibility for a certain epistemic violence that lies at the heart of returning introduction

to phenomena themselves: a transformative violence that is in keeping with the Marxian dictum that to know something is to transform it. The next section moves from Merleau-Ponty to Heidegger: in particular, to the Earth-World conflictual nexus. In his analysis of the origin of a work of art, Heidegger seeks to find the measure of the Dasein in a manner that will render it a custodian of Being. Heidegger claims that the worlding of the world, which at the same time sustains the darkness and the inexhaustibility of the earth, is made manifest as process in the work of art. Through the critical practice of Gelassenheit (letting be), Heidegger intends to bring into mutual alignment the language of Being and the being of language. Central both to Merleau-Ponty and to Heidegger is the category of intentionality. Who intends: the world, the cogito, the I that is, or the I that thinks? Or is intentionality lodged invasively between the human subject and the world? Despite all his hermeneutic solicitude for the “being of Being,” does not Heidegger’s anti-anthropocentric thought remain mired in the dominance of Eurocentrism? Clearly Being is not exclusively an ontological concern: it is a possibility that is structured in dominance in a world divided into nation-states, hegemonic power groups, and axes of dominance and control. It is Heidegger’s inability to move from ontology to history, from Being to multihistorical beings, from primordial temporality to constituted regimes of historicity that traps his otherwise generous project of Gelassenheit well within the hubris of Eurocentric thought. To put it polemically, Heidegger’s Dasein is very much denominationally German; and it is on the basis of such a nationally inflected authenticity that Heidegger’s Dasein begins, on behalf of all humanity, to establish a proximal relationship with “the be-ing of Being.”18 To put it in more specifically Heideggerian terms, the Dasein has to fall back on a decidedly German/Eurocentric ontics so as to bridge the onticoontological difference on behalf of all humanity. The last movement of the chapter focuses on two thinkers: David Harvey, who enables a dialogue between eco-activists and nature lovers who care only for the spotted owl19 and social realists who take the human as the only viable starting point for thought and action; and Ranajit Guha, the South Asian subaltern historian and theorist who in his most recent work has been carrying on an intense generic quarrel with his own discipline, history. Here too, nature and human nature introduction

25

26

are partially in a relationship of alignment and partially in a dissonant relationship. If nature is the potential awaiting representation by the human, does it automatically mean that the human always already knows, in its heart of hearts as it were, which way lies the correct actualization of nature’s potential, and which way the corrupt version?20 How is the human subject distributed unevenly, within a geopolitical calculus of power, among the different citizen sovereignties that constitute the comity of nations and nation-states? What about the predicament of developing countries and their uneven insertion into the debates about sustainable development and the protection of biological resources? The problem here, too, is unevenly divided between an antianthropocentric deep ecology and reasons of state: between two unevenly realized sovereignties of human representation. Who can speak for nature, and how and why? If the true reality of the human species is the nature of its custodial being, should this custodial being be African, American, European, or Asian: dominant, hegemonic, subaltern, or marginal? In the absence of a full and free actualization of a human universality, which human subject should presume to establish a custodial relationship with nature? Given the reality that humanity as second nature has autonomized itself exclusively on the basis of an invasive, appetitive, colonialist-calculative-instrumentalist orientation toward nature, the attempt by the developed and avant-garde national communities of the world to preach deep ecology and radical environmentalism to those postcolonial communities that have been systematically preyed on and underdeveloped by the developed world thoroughly lacks in ethico-political authority. It seems as though erstwhile superrobbers and predators have miraculously morphed themselves into supercops and superconsciences on behalf of all human peoples. There is another problem here that, as Harvey points out, is both ontological and epistemological. Where is the proof that the New Jersey turnpike is not “natural,” whereas the Grand Canyon is?21 Furthermore, is the loss of human jobs and habitation less poignant a tragedy than the depletion of the population of spotted owls? If human reality is custodial, how is the line to be drawn between a humanly self-interested advocacy of the deep sustainability of nature and its resources, and an other-centered and truly alterior solicitude on behalf of nature?22 The assumption of custodial responsibility is simultaneously ontological introduction

and epistemological; and if that is the case, there is no locus for the irruption of nature as the real except the context of rigorous anthropocentric self-reflexivity and autocritique. Nature and human nature are so mutually imbricated that attempts by radical environmentalists and social realists to discredit each other absolutely carry no real merit, either ontological or epistemological. The real problem here is this: How is the problem to be articulated in the first place? Clearly there is the unfriendly side of nature: Katrina, the tsunamis, infectious diseases, and so on, that cannot be wooed by human subjectivity; and there is nature in the primordial sense of the term that includes within its jurisdiction the human as well. But the problem here is that given the inevitability of human finitude, the human subject can at best pay glorious lip service to primordiality. The human, except through flights of mysticism or other forms of unmediated gnosis, cannot experience primordiality; and therefore, it would be nothing but sanctimony on the part of the human subject to invoke primordiality as the founding rationale of deep ecology. The human is both nature and transnature; and it is only within the aegis of a doubled cogito that the human subject can address both the radical alterity and the organic intimacy of nature. In this context, Murray Bookchin’s work offers some possibilities, not all of them convincing, for the human subject to think beyond the fixity of the first nature–second nature paradigm.23 If Harvey deals with the representation of nature in socialist thought and in ecorealism, Guha, the founding father of the South Asian school of subaltern history, raises in his recent work the problem of “history at the limit of world-history.”24 Guha makes an extrageneric move: out of his disillusionment with the generic-academic practice of historiography and its inability to speak for the real, Guha moves into the poetic mode of perception. He turns to Tagore in whose poetic musings Guha finds more persuasive glimpses of historicality than in the canonical and disciplinary books in history. Guha, too, poses the problem within a triangular grid: the world, representation, and the human subject. It will be recalled that the subaltern school of South Asian historians raised two fundamental problems regarding the legitimacy of historiography. Distancing themselves both from the historiography of colonialism and that of a dominant postcolonial nationalism that continued its epistemological complicity with colonialism, this school looked for history introduction

27

28

within subalternity. The question then became, as has been brilliantly and polemically theorized by Gayatri Spivak, whether the subaltern could speak.25 If, to follow Gramsci’s memorable lead, subaltern histories have indeed existed, phenomenologically and experientially speaking, but existed as episodic fragments—and therefore nonhegemonically— how are they to find effective hegemonic interpellation (the nationstate in this case) without at the same time compromising themselves irrevocably? To be heard, the subaltern has to cease to be itself. It cannot both be and achieve hegemony. The question has to do both with interpellation (can the subaltern interpellate itself without reference to the nation-state?) and with issues of representation (who has the right to speak for the subaltern?). We must also keep in mind that the postcolonial subject as subaltern has a very different understanding of nationalism and the nation-state than did Gramsci’s subaltern; and as Partha Chatterjee has demonstrated with nuanced lucidity, the postcolonial subject has to contend with Eurocentrism very differently than the putatively universal European proletarian subject.26 As Spivak’s work would have it, the only way in which the subaltern subject comes into its own is by problematizing representation as such. To put it briefly, no subaltern historiography exists in which the subaltern subject can make its proper and legitimate appearance. The other aspect of the failure of historiography has to do with its disciplinary structure; and it is this aspect that gets thematized in Guha’s Columbia University lectures. It is interesting to note that what Guha is after in these lectures is not historicity, but rather historicality and an existential temporality. It is almost as though Guha were renegotiating his relationship as a historian to time. His solicitude for the lived moment, the quotidian, and the rich heterogeneity of the ordinary moment is expressed in the form of his radical disenchantment with the discursive being of his discipline. There is something Heideggerian about Guha’s wish that real temporality should happen as the “not-said,” or as a radical absence within his discourse; and it is not coincidental that he turns to poetry as the genre in which true historicality may take place: Friedrich Hölderlin for Heidegger, and Tagore for Guha. Guha’s anxiety here is distinctly phenomenological; and it is precisely this phenomenology of lived life that he finds in abundance in Tagore’s poetic meditations on history. My concern here is with Guha’s extradisintroduction

ciplinary and transgeneric understanding of his own disciplinary genre. What Guha finds in Tagore is that temporality, not available to history and historiography, in which the existential and the epistemological are in intimate dialogue. Guha is but one example. Amartya Sen comes to mind as someone who is attempting to enfranchise as res gestae within the domain of economics the very themes and issues that economics proper considers alien, and I am also thinking of the recently published volume entitled Postcolonialism Meets Economics, in which most of the contributors who are economists are attempting to redefine Homo economicus outside the domain of canonical economics.27 In my terms, the worlding of the world for Guha happens between history and the human subject: precisely in the space that poetry gestures toward as it acknowledges the tenuous and tremulous relationship between the language of Being and the being of language. The fascinating questions are these. When we say “the world,” or “the worlding of the world,” are we referring to the common world that we all share experientially, or, are we gesturing slyly and self-servingly to a particular “naming” of the world that “we” are comfortable and happy with even though “we” are quite aware that in our “naming” some other “we” is excluded and alienated? How do we take up the responsibility for betraying the world in our name? Is such a betrayal inevitable? And, what is a name anyway? Is it anything more than a symptom of our anxiety concerning our own contingent finitude? Surely, the world is, and would be, by any other name, or even namelessly or unnameably; but that world would not be for us, not ours. It is to that “between” that symptomatically aligns our compulsion to name with our deeper but disavowed commitment to namelessness that this book is addressed.

introduction

29

1 

Revisionism and

the Subject of History first, the intr ansigent and r aw immanence of existence that was parsed into temporality that in turn was semanticized into history to be recovered and redeemed as anthropocentric meaning by the human subject: I begin with a series of cognitive neo-Hegelian displacements only to suggest that the emergence of historicity is in fact constituted by an inescapable asynchrony that bequeaths its lag as the affirmation of history. History neither nails time to an exact calendar, nor does it produce historicity as the exemplum of the temporal condition. History as a genre is rather like the legendary Ganesha in Hindu mythology who transcribes into écriture the orality of Vyasa’s tale and in so doing inaugurates the time of the between that articulates the time of the telling to that of the writing in a relationship of epistemological difference.1 Those of us who know that profound tale will remember that Vyasa insists as a precondition that his amanuensis Ganesha has to make sure that he understands what he is writing even as he writes. Not to be outdone, and in a spirit of competitive reciprocity, Ganesha would have Vyasa promise that the dictation be nonstop. This is indeed a magnificent allegory about history, meaning making, and historiography. Even as the two

32

interlocutors commit themselves to their mutual task, they are not willing to let the task dictate itself: in other words, this business of narration and its grammatological rendition is neither all natural nor all artificial. The qualitative condition making that characterizes the transaction makes it clear (1) that just any kind of narration will not do; (2) that just any kind of redaction or transcription will not suffice; and (3) that any attempt to guarantee quality on behalf of either the narration or the transcription can only be undertaken in a spirit of relational autonomy and reciprocal accountability. The pace of the narration is pitted, as in a game, against the temporality of understanding. This joint project is conceived of both symbiotically and agonistically: Vyasa and Ganesha are both contestants and collaborators. Ganesha shrewdly points out to Vyasa that the appropriate temporality for the narrative is that of the perennial flow, whereas Vyasa reminds Ganesha that the temporality of the transcription cannot be legitimated except as a function of cognitive/ hermeneutic reception and understanding. Both the venerable sage and the dynamic note taker are rigorously concerned about the temporality that marks each activity even as they envision the two activities as constitutive of a transcendent horizon perennially in the making. I will just mention in passing that in this tale of voice and écriture, the teller is human whereas the amanuensis is a god. To bring Michel Foucault to the Mahabharatha, what is being enacted here is the perennial drama of the “empirico-transcendental doublet” whose commitment to the reality of immanence can only be registered as the unreachability of meaning as transcendence.2 Conscious of its ontological liminality, history as the representation of the real can at best thematize its exquisitely timed belatedness even as it makes its generic truth claims about what happened, and indeed about the nature of “the about” as the precondition of all representation.3 If the foregoing paragraph is persuasive at all, then it follows that the very notion of revisionist history is a tautology; for, all historicizing is taking a second look at what has already been otherwise. It is in and through that glance toward the “what-has-been-ness” of a moment that seemed so one’s own in the heat of the experience that history emerges as a kind of a “diving into the wreck,” to use Adrienne Rich’s terms: for if moments do not die, then there is no history.4 But on the other hand, moments do not really die except by way of the historical imagination. revisionism

My point is not just that (1) in the flow of time as a river one never touches the same drop again, or (2) that the moment of the touching and the self-reflexive moment that recognizes the moment of touching as such are temporally nonidentical, but rather that the very constitution of historical reality is premised on an undecidable relationship between the immanent objectivity of what is be-ing and the representational truth claims of history with its transcendental will to meaning. (This scenario could be complicated further by the insight that “time as a river” is already a figurative anthropocentrism that has nothing to do with the anterior objectivity of time.) Here is another way of saying it: of all the genres, history, with its representational claims about reality, facticity, and experience, is best oriented as a compensatory discipline that has to both mourn over a loss beyond recuperation and at the same time name that loss perspectivally and contingently.5 It is indeed possible, but also mute and inhuman, not to want to return to that loss presented to the human subject as a wreck of meaning and significance. But the opposite of that possibility is not an unerring or incorrigible remembering; it is an agonized countermnemonic commitment that has to learn to live in the tension between a rigorously historicized anthropocentrism and an ontological critique of anthropocentrism.6 I will return to this theme in the heart of this chapter, where I will be interpreting the multivalent possibilities opened up by Adrienne Rich in her poem “Diving into the Wreck.” Perhaps by now it may be clear why I have chosen to begin with a discussion of temporality rather than of historicity.7 Without in any way rupturing the necessary relationship between the two, I would like to bring a little more thematic focus on temporality so as to raise anthropocentrism and anthropochronism as issues in themselves, that is, before they are justified and legitimated axiomatically in the name of the human subject and human historiography. It is indeed part of my objective also to question the representational adequacy of history and historiography by (1) naming the truths of history as generic truths;8 and (2) insisting that the privilege accorded to history as the bottomline custodian of the truths of reality needs to be renegotiated with the truth claims of other generic imaginings, such as those of theory, literature, and philosophy. Moreover, the rhetoric of temporality has a great deal to contribute to the practice of self-reflexive historicity. The revisionism

33

34

discourse of temporality has built into it a kind of phenomenological solicitude for Being, a kind of Gelassenheit, that historiography would do well to tap into if it intends its self-reflexive practices to be anything more than mere procedural performances or exercises in disciplinary narcissism.9 The invariable question that comes up when any attempt is made to valorize the practice of self-reflexivity is the following: In the name of what is self-reflexivity being invoked? There is thus a dire need for some sort of an outside, an hors-texte, or an ethico-political imperative of the nameless, of that which has not yet spoken or been spoken for; and this need has to be nurtured in the space between the real and the disciplinarization of the real. When one considers how history is actually not history but a bewildering range of power-knowledge– laden regimes such as empiricism, positivism, historicism, materialism, spiritualism, capitalism, messianism, providentialism, evolutionism, developmentalism, and so on, it becomes clear why there is the need to invoke the phenomenological register of temporality: not because temporality is prediscursive or uncontaminated by history or by the knowledge-power nexus, but rather because it performs as a site and a language where the process of the historicization of ontology can be thematized as a process and not naturalized as reality.10 In other words, phenomenological temporality is like that fleeting moment at dawn, that fleeting, inchoate instant of possibility before the traffic of the day and the mechanisms of quotidian instrumentalization take over and the day becomes a historical production. It is that moment of pause that precedes the moment at which we all make lists for the day, along with the strategies and the modalities that will help us realize our objectives for the day. It is even conceivable that if that moment were to be experienced with any intensity, or conviction, it might alter the items in our list, change the way we configure our lists, enable us rethink our priorities, or significantly help us reimagine the ways in which we align the time of our questions to the time of our answers. For my purposes, temporality may also be considered as that space of prerepresentation, of multiple and often contradictory possibilities that get systematically and ruthlessly forgotten when the representational and the highly politicized regimes of history tighten their normative nooses of the “about” around the tenuous pulse of the living moment.11 I will be arguing, later on in the chapter, that the politics of revisionism

a humane, pluriform, and multilateral historiography should empower the perennial irruption of such undecided moments of phenomenological possibility within the flow of normative teleologies and other developmental-instrumental narratologies. Clearly the discussion so far about temporality has had a decidedly allegorical flavor to it, and I certainly do not intend to apologize for it. The challenge, however, is to find ways of articulating the allegorical with the historical: in this case, articulate the allegory of history as a second look with the worldly history of revisionism that has everything to do with ideology, power, and the antagonistic and contestatory politics of resistance.12 How does one cothink the solicitude of the second look as a form of “letting be,” that is, as a form of Keatsian negative capability and as a way of critiquing the anthropochronic will to meaning with the all-too-dire need, in a world structured in dominance, to invest in the humanly historical in the name of justice and ethico-political equity? How should the human subject reconcile the Marxian view of doing knowledge as transformation with the conservative ecosolicitude of listening and letting be?13 In other words, how should the human negotiation with the alterity of nature be mediated and exemplified by the negotiation of human nature with itself? Where indeed does the blueprint of domination, aggression, and colonization take shape: in the human being’s inhumanity to a fellow human being, or in the human’s rapacious and invasive attitude toward nature? How is Captain Ahab’s hubris to be understood: as primarily an act of violation against MobyDick, and ergo against humanity by way of the brutalities of capitalism and its unconscionable modes of surplus production, or the other way around? Are the two effects co- and synchronically causal? Are they effects of concomitancy? Or are they primary and secondary expressions of the same pathology? But, on the other hand, is it not possible to argue that human nature is that dangerous Derridean supplement, that lurking culture as second nature whose very purpose is to show up the finitude of nature as text and thereby deconstruct it from within? If human nature is necessarily characterized—unlike that of the plant, the animal—by a sophisticated consciousness of alienation and secondarity, how is the dualism of the cogito to be explained away except through bad faith? If nature becomes a text only through that second look of the human gaze, then does the intelligibility of the worldly text revisionism

35

36

lie in the world as an inherent property, or is it the function of the cogitating human subject who in textualizing the world also admits to the finitude of anthropomorphism and anthropochronism?14 The hubris of the human subject lies not so much in its domination or colonization of nature, but rather in the assumption that human nature functions as a double measure: both as anthropocentric and as the promise of the transcendence of the anthropocentric in the name of Being or nature. This is indeed a tricky double bind. The historicizing human subject could either take itself and its position for granted in the scheme of things and therefore do the best it can, without any need for selfreflexivity; or the historicizing human subject can assume the burden of anthropocentrism seriously and rigorously and still continue to act and perform on the basis of a self-reflexive and doubled consciousness. Here is the problem however. Once anthropocentrism and anthropochronism are let into the picture, they have to be acknowledged as chronic rather than as “corrigible” problems. The human subject can make a difference by taking one of several attitudes toward anthropocentrism and anthropochronism, but the one thing it cannot do is to escape that mark or that complicity altogether. As even a brief look at the politics of such alterity-oriented thinkers as Martin Heidegger tells us, there is no easy and sure way of negotiating between the human commitment to “the be-ing of Being” and its obligation to human historicity. There are two kinds of epistemological arrogance that need to be taken into account. First, there is the primordial arrogance of the assumption that the human subject can indeed unpack the potentiality of nature in the name of human progress and development. Second, there is the equally alarming assumption, an intrahuman, secular-historical assumption, that there is indeed a universal human subject that can speak for all cultures, histories, and civilizations. Despite Heidegger’s ample hermeneutic generosity, the Dasein remains irreducibly Eurocentric and conceals the genealogy of its own historicity. What then about the Afrocentric, the Indocentric, the Sinocentric, the androcentric, and the gynocentric subjects, and the ongoing strife and contestation among these centrisms, each of which would love to speak for the whole world in the name of its particular worldview and axiology? The problem is one of scale and priority. For there to be any meaningful invocation beyond anthropocentrism, it is a prerequisite revisionism

that the domain of the intrahuman be rid of unevenness, asymmetries, and inequalities. There simply cannot be as many “natures” as there are anthropocentrisms.15 The centrism question is intimately related to the theme of the human, of humanism in general. Is humanism thinkable except as an inevitable expression of one centrism or the other? Is it possible to access human ontology despite and beyond the imbalances of a world structured in dominance? Clearly, Frantz Fanon comes to mind here: the Fanon who sought to combine radical political activism of the here and now with the transcendent vision of deconstructing binarity as such. The same Fanon who was an unequivocal mujahideen could also talk about a certain indeterminacy, “an occult instability” of the psychic kind in the very heat of the battle. The new humanism that he was envisioning as an ontological philosophy had to be launched on the basis of an anticolonial struggle that was political through and through. “The Negro is not, no more than the white man,”16 is a profound articulation that goes beyond the strategic reversal of binarity by gesturing toward a complete and irreversible evisceration of the very form of binarity. The task is this—how to collocate the temporalities of the two struggles: the self-other problem as precipitated by regimes of dominance in human history, and the self-other problem as it pertains to the human-nature relationship. If it is indeed by othering nature in a certain way and constituting itself as a seceding and/or supplemental “second nature” that the human subject inaugurates the discourse of epistemology, then, to use Heidegger’s terminology, the relationship of “being of language” to the “language of being” will forever remain asymptotic.17 It is not coincidental that the negritude movement, from which Fanon distanced himself after an initial endorsement, was structured in binary response to white colonial racism and was intended both philosophically and politically, ontologically and historically. There was a need to assert the African worldview and its cosmology both as a concrete universal and as an enabling historical site for the representation of African political and cultural practices. Why then the need to align African history with an African nature and a corresponding cosmology? It is not surprising that the negritude movement was caught up in what could be called the politics of a reverse essentialism. Essentialism, by its very definition, cannot pertain to history: the only way it is imported into historical revisionism

37

38

discourse is by way of ideological legitimation. Conversely, the very term nature gets coded with the particularity of history. It is as though to a European, nature would make sense only as European nature, and so on. The only other way nature has been used in the context of colonial modernity is with reference to anthropology, which in conflating so-called primitive societies with the temporality of nature flatly disavows the coevalness of multiple histories. The problem here is what Jacques Derrida, in his critique of Claude Lévi-Strauss, had termed the “undecidability” between nature and culture. Let us take for example the fraught contemporary issue of global warming. This phenomenon is occurring in a double temporality: it is something being made to happen to primordial nature by the rapacious misdeeds of human beings who in their very autonomy partake of primordial nature. Even if the example were one that showcased the harmony between the human and the nonhuman or the planetary, say Roy Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome or the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, this harmony itself would have to be seen, unless one were a mystic, not as an a priori condition, but as the result of an act of production in which a certain possibility within primordial nature has been effected and thematized by the human agent. In the face of such a humanly contaminated nature, even the most solicitous attempts of ecoactivists on behalf of nature can only be routed, acknowledged, and valorized as autocritical and self-reflexive human practices. There is no other way of looking back at nature except by way of a certain looking back at the genealogy of the production of human nature. To put it in fancy postmodern jargon, the only reliable path backwards toward the original is by way of a rigorous simulacrum. If human history is both a vigorous assertion of a relative autonomy from the regime of nature and at the same time an acknowledgment of the organic subsumption of that autonomy under nature, then there is something to be learned from simulacral epistemology. Double and doubled by its very constitution, the figure of the simulacrum has the potential to deal with two calendars of temporality and two forms of sovereignty in a mutually relational and interruptive manner. Rather than cede sovereignty to either one domain, the simulacral mode intensifies the theme of undecidability— but not with the intention of fetishizing undecidability as the theme of all themes. The objective rather is to place the onus on the human revisionism

subject and compel and enable it to make a choice and break the undecidability contingently given the nature of each occasion, dilemma, or crisis. The important point to keep in mind here is that the assumption of choice, along with the accountability entailed, does not get rid of the underlying thesis of undecidability. To give a concrete example: whether to save the spotted owl or save human jobs in the timber industry is indeed an undecidable issue, and yet a decision has to be made with the awareness that from a transcendent or long-haul perspective nothing indeed has been decided. Neither the so-called ecoterrorists nor the anthropocentric zealots win the day: if anything, they understand the reciprocal nature of the dilemma. Both parties are persuaded to accept that their choices and policies operate in a simulacral domain in which nature is actually “nature” and the human, “human nature.” These themes, I promise, will surface again and take up center stage in the last section of my final chapter. With that prolix prolegomenon I now return to the theme of looking back and returning to the scene of history from the point of view of the present moment. Broadly speaking these are the issues that I would like to address: How is the subject of history constituted both as the conative and interested agent undertaking the project and as the researcher committed to the objectivity of history? How different is the subject of history from the historicizing subject, and in this context, how is the presentness of the past related to the always already historicality of the present? What is already there to be looked back at, and to what extent are the gaze back and the gazed on mutually constitutive? Is recovering history perspectivally the same thing as valorizing it, and if so, are all valorizations irreducibly perspectival? And finally, how are differentiations to be made between divergently motivated attempts to read history against the grain? I would like to begin with the category “subject of history” so as to differentiate it from “the subject of reality.” If the subject of history is both “that which has been constituted” and given and at the same time also “that which is looking backwards” to ascertain that history is really history, then it seems to me the only way to admit this doubleness without being paralyzed by it is via the claim that it is in the act of being constituted (in that ongoing present moment of history making) that revisionism

39

40

the subject of history is twice born simultaneously. The figure lurking behind this way of conceptualizing historicity is of course the Friedrich Nietzsche of The Use and Abuse of History who, after an initial envious look at the condition of the animal that is completely submerged in nature, goes on to empower the history of the present as a just and meaningful quarrel with “what has been,” particularly if “the what has been” is backed up by theodicy or a teleological imperative embodied as G. W. F. Hegel.18 It could be argued that Nietzsche is really not saying anything new: it is only that his tone is strident. For after all, have not even the most conservative of historians argued for the renewal of history by history in history so that the tradition may remain forever new even as it enjoys its vintage? Does not the same theme figure in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Hans-Georg Gadamer by way of Heidegger, and in T. S. Eliot as well? So what is the difference between a critical and selective conservation of the past within certain permissible boundaries— such as Europe, or the nation-state, or the West—and the Nietzschean valorization of life as perspectivism? But there indeed is a difference: a modal difference that translates into a difference of substance and content as well. Let us hear Nietzsche from The Use and Abuse of History. A historical phenomenon, completely understood and reduced to an item of knowledge, is, in relation to the man who knows it, dead; for he has found out its madness, its injustice, its blind passion, and especially the earthly and darkened horizon that was the source of its power for history. This power has now become, for him who has recognized it, powerless; not yet, perhaps, for him who is alive. History regarded as pure knowledge and allowed to sway the intellect would mean for men the final balancing of the ledger of life. Historical study is only fruitful for the future if it follows a powerful life-giving influence, for example, a new system of culture-only, therefore, if it is guided by a higher force, and does not itself guide and dominate. History, so far as it serves life, serves an unhistorical power, and thus will never become a pure science like mathematics. The question how far life needs such a service is one of the most serious questions affecting the wellbeing of a man, a people, and a culture. For by excess of history life becomes maimed and degenerate, and is followed by the degeneration of history as well.

revisionism

The fact that life does need the service of history must be as clearly grasped as that an excess of history hurts it; this will be proved later. History is necessary to the living man in three ways: in relation to his action and struggle, his conservatism and reverence, his suffering and his desire for deliverance. These three relations answer to the three kinds of history—so far as they can be distinguished—the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical. (11–12)

Nietzsche’s thesis is as profound as it is polemically uncompromising. Nietzsche plays out a range of antagonisms before he announces his position and the nature of his partisanship. His first complaint has to do with the reduction of a history to “complete knowledge.” First of all, history is characterized in terms of a particular phenomenon that is understood as “historical,” which is another way of saying that there is nothing historical until “thinking makes it so.” Historicizing then becomes a matter of perspectival and agential choice, and not a fait accompli or an always already prescribed human condition. Then there is the question of understanding the phenomenon, and this is being posed by Nietzsche along two axes: completion and incompleteness, and the itemized reduction to knowledge and whatever its opposite may be. Nietzsche is suggesting that there should be an oppositional relationship between understanding, which is a verbal and processual practice, and knowledge, which takes the form of a final and nominal embodiment. He is also making a crucial distinction between a complete understanding that itemizes and thereby devitalizes history as a force and a different kind of understanding that is not complicit with the project of annihilating the force of history in the name of knowledge. It is typical of Nietzsche to raise the question of the vitality or the “dead-ness” of the historical phenomenon not in academic, disciplinary, or absolute terms, but rather, “in relation to the man who knows it.” It is in the name of the perspectival interests of the knower in the present that the study of history becomes vital or moribund. Once realized as an item of knowledge, history is dead “in relation to the man who knows it.” So, some unlearning has to be achieved before the phenomenon can be rediscovered as powerful for history and for the project of living. A rich ambiguity dances over Nietzsche’s text at this point. So what is it that “the man who knows it” knows so that the phenomenon in history has become dead to him? Is this recognition that he

revisionism

41

42

knows purely formal, or does it have a specific content, a determinate interiority? Moreover, how does he, in the act of knowing it, make the historical phenomenon relate to him? Clearly, Nietzsche does not mean that such a relationality is sanctioned by some foundational ontology: a primordial theory of Being that has always already aligned phenomena in history with the becoming of man. And this precisely is where Nietzsche’s meditation on history becomes problematic. Is Nietzsche in fact befriending the “madness,” the “injustice,” and the “blind passion” of history, and condemning a way of knowing that has thematized and rendered transparent this madness, injustice, and blind passion? What is the nature of his fascination with “the earthly and darkened horizon that was the source of its power in history?” Is it in the name of his all-out quarrel with Hegelian phenomenology and its mode of totalizing enlightenment that Nietzsche is overpolemicizing his solicitude on behalf of the “earthly and darkened horizon?” Moreover, what does he mean by the power of the phenomenon in history? Where else, for a human being, could any phenomenon be except in history, unless Nietzsche is flirting with the possibility of envisioning and enfranchising the phenomenon from a prehuman and potentially Darwinian model of natural selection, survival, and dominance? We can see Nietzsche playing with two possible ways of going above, or beyond history: one which he is for, and the other against. Says Nietzsche: “If the man of action, in Goethe’s phrase, is without conscience, he is also without knowledge: he forgets most things in order to do one, he is unjust to what is behind him, and only recognizes one law—the law of that which is to be” (Use and Abuse, 9). It is in this sense that the doers in history are profoundly countermnemonic: they act in an atmosphere of creative blindness and injustice toward the past to which they owe no fealty and to whose seductions they are immune. The “historical men,” to Nietzsche, are those whose “vision of the past turns them towards the future, encourages them to persevere with life, and kindles the hope that justice will yet come and happiness is behind the mountain they are climbing.” These men “who believe that the meaning of existence will become ever clearer in the course of its evolution,” in Nietzsche’s analysis, “do not know how unhistorical their thoughts and actions are in spite of all their history, and how their cultivation of history does not serve pure knowledge but life” (Use and revisionism

Abuse, 10). The quarrel he picks with these “historical men” is not with their practice but with the way in which they understand theoretically what they are doing. They think they are historical, whereas in fact their cultivation of history, unbeknownst to them, serves not pure knowledge, but life. They are hapless; they know not what they are doing. It is interesting to observe how Nietzsche goes about establishing his distinction between the historical and the superhistorical men. When asked the question, “whether they would live the last ten or twenty years over again” (Use and Abuse, 10), humans, Nietzsche argues, would respond with a “no,” but here again, Nietzsche insists, that there would be two different reasons behind this answer: one employed by the historical men, and the other mobilized by the superhistorical men. The historical ones will nay-say on the basis of “the consolation that the next twenty will be better.” But the other “no” is that of the “superhistorical man who sees no salvation in evolution, for whom the world is complete and fulfills its aim in every single moment,” for after all, how could “the next ten years teach what the past ten were not able to teach?” (Use and Abuse, 10). It is this latter nay-saying that captures Nietzsche’s historical imagination because this “no” has the fortitude to celebrate history in and as the immanence of the moment, without the solace of teleology, eschatology, or theodicy, and without the ruse of anthropocentrism. But being the astute thinker that Nietzsche is, he does not leave the reader with a happy legitimation of the superhistorical perspective as though such a perspective were quite immaculate in and of itself. In his exhortation to the reader, Nietzsche wishes “to leave the super-historical men to their loathings and their wisdom,” for he would “rather today be joyful in our unwisdom and have a pleasant life as active men who go forward and respect the course of the world” (Use and Abuse, 11). At this point Nietzsche interjects into his rhetoric an intriguing “occidental” inflection (and we know that Eastern thought did play a role both in Nietzsche’s and Arthur Schopenhauer’s thinking) that remains undeveloped in the monograph. Speculating whether the “value we put on the historical may be merely a Western prejudice,” Nietzsche nevertheless calls on himself and his reader to “go forward within this prejudice and not stand still,” meditating wistfully: “If we could only learn better to study history as a means to life!” (Use and Abuse, 11). revisionism

43

44

Nietzsche seems to be celebrating, from one corner of his mouth, the nay-saying of the superhistorical men, even as, from the other corner, he is persuading himself to leave these men behind. On the one hand, he seems to be celebrating the status quo as a plenary immanence or eternal present even as he engages in the task of coordinating into existence a superior point of view from which history as such could be rendered irrelevant for the truly historical people. On the one hand, it would appear that Nietzsche’s project is to seize history powerfully, perspectivally, and agentially in the name of the present; but on the other hand, it is obvious that he is using the present as the privileged site for the eternal return of the same. But the same for which human subject: the master or the slave, the German, the European, the Western, the Eastern, the male or the female, the universal, the dominant, the subaltern, the anthropocentric, or the planetary-cosmic? If the radically antianthropocentric philosopher in Nietzsche scoffs at our all too human and pathetic attempt to domesticate the temporality of pure becoming by way of our teleologies and historicisms, the didactic and anti-Hegelian propagandist in Nietzsche exhorts and persuades the Germanic people to wake up from their Hegel-inspired slumber and besottedness and to do the history of their present with passion and ethnocentric fervor. The question I wish to raise is this: How does Nietzsche reconcile the superhistorical nay-saying with the project of doing critical history whose objective is to “bring the past to the bar of judgment, interrogate it remorselessly, and finally condemn it”? As Nietzsche would have it, in the context of the critical cultivation of history, it is “not justice that sits in judgment here, nor mercy that proclaims the verdict, but only life, the dim, driving force that insatiably desires-itself ” (Use and Abuse, 11). Part of the answer to this question lies in Nietzshe’s assertion that “history, so far as it serves life, serves an unhistorical power, and thus will never become a pure science like mathematics.” Existential temporality and historicity, in Nietzsche’s thought, are far from synonymous. There is only the eternal present that keeps recurring endlessly in utter abeyance of the architectonics of human historicity; and it is only the great men, driven by amor fati, the love of fate, who have the resilience and the epistemological gumption not to be broken down by the eternally nascent monotony of the return. They are the ones who can dwell in that raw temporality that mocks all forms of anthropocentrism. revisionism

To think of “nothing changes” as the ultimately radical and secondorder transvaluation of the human relationship: that is Nietzsche’s real agenda. It is in this sense that he would have history hoisted on its own petard so that it may be rendered heteronomous vis-à-vis a power that is life itself over and above historical calculations, predictions, prophecies, prolepses, and ledger keepings. Elizabeth Grosz, in her book The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely, offers us a useful reading of Nietzsche’s eternal return. Nietzsche is concerned with the “transvaluation of all values,” with the genealogy and valuation of the very question of value itself. In seeking an image of the higher man, the one who has evolved beyond us, the eternal return is that which poses the greatest challenge and promise. For to live beyond the human, the all-too-human, involves the most powerful affirmation, the affirmation of the privacy of one’s own becoming over one’s own being, of one’s unknowable future over one’s own knowable past and present, even given that one’s past and present are carried with their own horrors, accidents, riddles, and infirmities into that future. The indigestible (for the human) formula for this overcoming is amor fati, the love of fate, to affirm as necessary, and choose again, everything one wills and does: “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it-all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it.”19

There is a real difference between the project of reading against the grain and the Nietzschean affirmation of life as countermemory. Whereas the project of brushing history against the grain can be accommodated within what is known as history, Nietzsche’s plan of action calls into question the very category of history; and what is even more interesting, it does so in the name of life.20 The dire and dangerous question that Nietzsche raises is the following: Is it possible to historicize with an underlying assumption that history in the conventional sense of the term is inimical to vital interests, to the interests of life? Is Nietzsche then sanctioning a disavowal of history-as-remembering in the name of dominance, in the name of a social Darwinism, and in the name of a transvaluation of all values in the name of the Übermensch (Overman)? Is it even possible to align Nietzsche’s fundamental quarrel revisionism

45

46

with history with subaltern interests? Within the aegis of Nietzschean remembering-forgetting, how should the collective human subject differentiate between a dominant countermemory and a subaltern countermemory? My objective here is not to determine the right way to use Nietzsche (and we all know he has been instrumentalized by the Right as well as the Left), but rather to tap into two rich thematic strains in his historiographic impulse: (1) the relationship between the so-called objectivity of historical truth and the polemical usability of history under certain conditions; and (2) the politics of looking back and the motivations that underwrite such a need to look back. It is interesting to observe that Nietzsche begins The Use and Abuse of History with a wistful look at the animal condition and its undifferentiated oneness with nature, but then goes on to talk about the human in all its irreducible difference from nature. In other words, the initial reference to nature is never picked up again either in a spirit of aesthetic nostalgia or of epistemological anamnesis: the reference just marks the moment of an irrecuperable separation. All of Nietzsche’s passionate excoriations of anthropocentric history, alas, remain “human, all too human.” Why then does one look back? 21 After dismissing the antiquarian and the traditional modes of doing history, Nietzsche strongly advocates a critical and effective way of doing history as a history of the present: a mode of historicizing that will empower the present moment with its own radical immanence that has been delinked from false and lifedenying theodicies and teleologies. It is a “given” to Nietzsche, under his historical circumstances, that his “present” is abject, weak, thoroughly devitalized, “nihilated” and “emasculated” by false teleologies, metaphysical and other developmental historicisms that have chosen to resign themselves to, and actively acquiesce in the impoverishment of, present history, all in the name of a transcendent phenomenology of the spirit. Nietzsche’s insistence that the act of historicizing be understood as an act prompted by need and desire, rather than as a practice undertaken in dispassionate erudition and with a consummate belief in the objectivity of history, is crucial to an understanding of the meaning of history. The quarrels and the contestations are never over facticity, but about interpretations, perspectival valorizations and legitimations, and historiographic choices that are made to make history usable and intelligible. It would be a platitude to add that given the many perspecrevisionism

tives that have a say in “the same history,” dominant historiographies succeed in naturalizing their perspectivism and in reducing the intelligibility of history to dominant usability. When Derrida, in his epigraph to the section entitled “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing” in Of Grammatology, quotes from Nietzsche, “Socrates, he who does not write,” he is in fact acknowledging the extent to which Nietzsche honed and fine-tuned historicizing as a syntactic modality against the metaphysics of presence.22 A profoundly somatic thinker, Nietzsche enlists the body to do battle with a metaphysics masquerading as history.23 Nietzsche, however, is not interested so much in reading Platonic/idealist/Hegelian/metaphysical history against the grain as he is in announcing a fundamental incommensurability between that history and his history. Nietzsche’s hyperbolic claim against those who accuse him of nihilism is that they, the philosophers who negate life in and through their “nihilistic” philosophies, are indeed the arch nihilists. His project, unlike that of Heideggerian destruction or Derridean deconstruction, is more of a war of maneuver than one of position: an hors-texte is viable and available for Nietzsche not as an antagonistic textual strategy, but as a differently structured and coordinated force field capable of sustaining its own ontology.24 In the act of looking back, Nietzsche announces an epistemological break and thereby ordains for himself not just a different interpretive negotiation with the “original” but rather endows himself with a different epistemological object, and hence, a different ontology. Moreover, by driving a deep wedge between the facticity of history and the production of meaning from history, he makes it possible for the contemporary gaze to see a certain past and see it as a lie. But having relegated all truths to the status of “mobile anthropomorphisms,” including his own version, Nietzsche thematizes the history of history as nothing but a series of dominations whereby the will to power and the will to will take the place of a revisionism that is interested in rendering justice, redressing inequalities, and making an effort to make history an equal playfield for all parties. The interest that motivates Nietzsche the philosopher of history is the will to power, or what after Foucault we could term the will to power-knowledge, and not any ethico-political impulse to redress past wrongs, injuries, or inequities. The rethinker of all values will not identify his critique axiologically; instead, the critique is recognized as pure power play. revisionism

47

48

To thus read Nietzsche anachronistically in a post-Foucauldian vein, we could say that he anticipates the inevitable disciplinarization of history and the discursive-epistemic principle of what Foucault calls dans le vrai (within the true). Nietzsche understands instinctively that when one looks back, one only sees events and happenings, but not history. Events and happenings need to be placed and narrativized in a domain called history before they can take on historical significance. There is, then, the event itself, its immanent temporality in that undecidable stratum between nature and human representation; and then comes the emplotting of that event into historical time, which could be that of the spirit, the nation, or of the zeitgeist however parsed, or man’s or woman’s or proletarian or messianic time. Nietzsche is aware—as are Karl Marx and Valentin Voloshinov and M. M. Bakhtin—that the power struggle is not over the event itself, but rather about the temporalhistorical registers in which the events are to be recorded and redeemed as meaningful. For example, Søren Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, each in his own way, found the Hegelian historiography of the world spirit to be thoroughly reprehensible, for it paid no attention to existential subjectivity (Kierkegaard’s complaint) and was rigorously insensitive to the history of the present (Nietzsche’s thesis). It is Nietzsche’s astute critical perception that time is a regime and that dominant regimes produce their own architectonics of time and temporality as official historicity. It is easy to see how in our own “times,” “national historicity” is the dominant temporality—and along with it certain postnational historicities like transnationalism, globality, and so on. Other “times” such as the ethnic, the indigenous, and the like have to make their negotiations with the dominant historiography to survive. I have perhaps been guilty so far of having conflated the historical with the mnemonic, history with memory. Surely, there are strong semantic overlaps between the two; but the two are not mutually reducible. In what follows, I will try to explain how Nietzsche politicizes remembering and forgetting in the context of a given history. For Nietzsche has been critiqued, among others, by György Lukács, of being an irresponsibly subjectivist philosopher who in letting perspectivism run amok has lost hold of the supposedly object nature of the world, and indeed, of history. It could also be argued that in empowering the politics of remembering and forgetting unilaterally, Nietzsche has made it seem as revisionism

though the historical world were totally at the beck and call of an individual’s or a people’s remembering and forgetting, that is, as though by the sheer performativity of remembering and forgetting history could be occulted into existence or exorcized away. So the question is: how and when does the performance of remembering and forgetting get politicized, or is it always already political? Is it ethically and politically correct or just to forget and remember strategically and polemically, as though history was a matter of free choice and option? What would the implications be of forgetting the Holocaust, the Middle Passage, the infamous pages of patriarchal history, or those of colonialism? Nietzsche makes it very clear that history should be at the service of life, and not the other way around. But what does that requirement mean, both practically and theoretically? Like the Marx who would want to rid human history of the shackles of the past, and like the James Joyce who would want his Ireland to wake up from the nightmare of history, Nietzsche, too, exhorts the human subject not to be paralyzed by history. Unless critically employed, the historical sense to Nietzsche empowers inertia, and he wants action. In my reading, Nietzsche, in his attempt to transvalue the very value of value and to effect nothing short of a total and absolute metahistorical transformation of history, overlooks the doubleness of history, whereby it operates both as a curse and as a blessing, both as the poison and the remedy; or as Derrida would have it, as the pharmakon.25 Just to take two vibrant examples from literature, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior : in both cases, the protagonists who tell the tale remember their past, their particular moment of origination as a mixed and ambivalent moment—part enabling, and part a hex. The unfolding of their respective narratives is neither an absolute remembering nor an absolute forgetting. Instead, it takes the form of a subtle countermnemonic negotiation with the past in which the past as a hex becomes enabling whereas the past as a promise remains under suspicion and is ruthlessly interrogated. Hurt by a certain history, these protagonists feel the obligation to consider their lives as symptomatic of that hurt even as they do all they can to go beyond an ontology that is exclusively and obsessively symptomatic.26 As Derrida argued in the case of apartheid, that very hateful word has to be maintained in erasure, and not just forgotten away.27 revisionism

49

50

There is a double bind to the human condition. In so far as human existence is historical through and through (as a matter of fact, historicity is conatal with the human), the human subject can have no access to life except by way of history. The return to life has to be achieved as the function of a certain countermnemonic tactic of rubbing history against the grain. “Life” is what is hidden in historical forms: in other words, no historicity, no life. At the same time, excessive historicity and historical consciousness prevent the availability of life to the present moment. What Nietzsche astutely reminds the human subject of is the epistemological fait accompli that in making sense of the present qua present automatically valorizes the modality of history. It is only “in having been,” and in being available to the cogito as having been, that the meaning of the present is redeemed as history. The ongoing vitalism of life as becoming is converted into the stuff of life; and this stuff of life is nothing other than a history that quickly turns into a burden and comes in the way between life and humanity. What is most galling to Nietzsche is the cognitive condition that although humans experience life as life, they are constrained to understand it as history by way of historical consciousness. By attempting to drive a rift between the temporality of life as a becoming and historicity as a burden, Nietzsche hopes to enliven the present in all its immanence. I have neither the time here nor do I have the expertise as a Nietzsche scholar to offer a succinct description of the eternal return of the same; nevertheless, I will make an effort. Just as one can neutralize time by traveling at a speed faster than light, Nietzsche offers the imaginary of the eternal return as a way of transcending the binarity of temporal experience, that is, he conceives of time as an infinitive and an a priori and time as the present continuous tense. There is a double movement in the return of the same: the same by virtue of the return will never be the same again. Since the return is eternal, and in that sense presently continuous, it cannot be “tensed” into a finite verb. The eternal itself is caught up aporetically as a pedagogical authority of the a priori even as it remains lastingly vulnerable to the continuous performativity of the return and its perennial and nonidentical doubling of itself as eternally other. We find Foucault, both in his discussion of French grammar as enunciated by the School of the Port Royal and in the passage below, where he is demonstrating (by way of Gilles Deleuze) the poverty of neoposirevisionism

tivism, phenomenology, and the philosophy of history following a verbal movement of thought initiated by Nietzsche.28 Finally, this meaning-event requires a grammar with a different form of organization, since it cannot be situated in a proposition as an attribute (to be dead, to be alive, to be red ) but is fastened to the verb (to die, to live, to redden). The verb, conceived in this fashion, has two principal forms around which the others are distributed: the present tense, which posits an event, and the infinitive, which introduces meaning into language and allows it to circulate as the neutral element to which we refer in discourse. We should not seek the grammar of events in temporal inflections; nor should we seek the grammar of meaning in the fictitious analyses of the type: to live-to be alive. The grammar of the meaning-event revolves around two asymmetrical and insecure poles: the infinitive mode and the present tense. The meaningevent is always both the displacement of the present and the eternal repetition of the infinitive. “To die” is never localized in the density of a given moment, but from its flux it infinitely divided the shortest moment. To die is even smaller than the moment it takes to think it and yet dying is indefinitely repeated on either side of this width-less crack. The eternal present? Only on the condition that we conceive the present as lacking in plenitude and the eternal as lacking unity: the (multiple) eternity of the (displaced) present.29

The eternal return of the same for Nietzsche produces the figurality of life as force, as energy, and a becoming that antiquates teleology by debunking both the origin and the terminus. Nietzsche’s philosophical flirtation with the eternal recurrence by way of the figure of Zarathustra raises an important question about the determinacy of history as meaning. One of the operating categories in the recurrence is that of chance and its semantics when caught up in the syntax of repetition. Here is Deleuze, that most Nietzschean of contemporary philosophers, on Nietzsche’s theme of recurrence. Whereas the thrown dice affirms chance once and for all, the dice which fall back necessarily affirm the number or the destiny which brings the dice back. It is in this sense that the second moment of the game is also the two moments together or the player who equals the whole. The eternal return is the second moment, the result of the dice throw, the affirmation of necessity, and the number which brings together all the parts of chance. But it

revisionism

51

is also the return of the first moment, the repetition of the dice throw, the reproduction and reaffirmation of chance itself. Destiny in the eternal return is also the welcoming of chance, “I cook every chance in my pot. And only when it is quite cooked do I welcome it as my food. And truly, many a chance came imperiously to me; but my will spoke to it even more imperiously, then it went down imploringly on its knees—imploring shelter and love with me, urging in wheedling tones; ‘Just see, O Zarathustra, how a friend comes to a friend!’ ”30

Claiming that Nietzsche turns chance into an affirmation, Deleuze goes on: To know how to affirm chance is to know how to play. But we do not know how to play, “Timid, ashamed, awkward, like a tiger whose leap has failed. But what of that you dice throwers! You have not learned to play and mock as a man ought to play and mock!” (Thus Spake Zarathustra, IV “Of the Higher Man,” 14, p. 303). The bad player counts on several throws of the dice, on a great number of throws. In this way he makes use of causality and

52

probability to produce a combination that he sees as desirable. He posits this combination itself as an end to be obtained, hidden behind causality. This is what Nietzsche means when he speaks of the eternal spider’s web of reason, “A kind of spider of imperative and finality hidden behind the great web, the great net of causality—we could say, with Charles the Bold when he opposed Louis XI, “I fight the universal spider” (The Genealogy of Morals, III 9). To abolish chance by holding it in the grip of causality and finality, to count on the repetition of throws rather than affirming chance, to anticipate a result instead of affirming necessity—these are all the operations of a bad player.31

I juxtapose two Nietzsches: the polemical one who would want to wrest history as perspectivism, and the one who befriends chance as necessity in a move that could be interpreted as an aesthetic acquiescence in the ontology of the status quo. So, what role does chance play in the project of changing and taking charge of history? Does history have a process, and if it does, is such a process aleatory? How can chance be befriended and instrumentalized by human agency? How can the fiercely polemical Nietzsche also be the champion of chance? Or, is Nietzsche, in his antianthropocentric vehemence, adopting advocacy of chance as his transhuman polemic? Nietzsche’s legitimation of chance is simultaneously revisionism

existential and epistemological. His challenge to the human subject is two-pronged. Can you live life as chance? In living life as chance, do you have the courage to accept chance as knowledge? To anticipate my discussion of Adrienne Rich’s aesthetic politics in the next section of this chapter, what is common both to Nietzsche and Rich is their passion for history. The loaded question is this. Is this passion for history interested or disinterested, perspectival or unsituated, didactic or purposeless? Confronting both poetic thinkers, Nietzsche and Rich, is the problem of style and the relationship between style and its ideological or ethical burden. For Rich, it is her commitment to feminism and gender in conjunction with her sensitivity to oceanic nature that leads her to ask if the sea is a question of power or not. Informed and inspired by a double imperative, both human history and deep ecology, Rich’s revisionist dive into the wreck entertains a cause even as it is prepared to submit this cause to a different temporal interrogation. Rich’s style honors a rationale (chance, if you will) that transcends the human, but at the same time insists that the transcendence of the human needs authorization by human signature. It is also important to take note that possibilities of androgyny, albeit differently conceived, play a central role both in Rich’s poem and in Nietzsche’s philosophical oeuvre. It will also be remembered that Derrida and others have associated “woman” and “being and becoming woman” in Nietzsche with the question of style and of the figurality of language: themes that are central to Rich as well.32 Even as I try to elaborate a common ground between Nietzsche and Rich, I also want to insist on a number of fundamental differences that derive from their very different locations and subject positions. Whereas Nietzsche’s critique of history emanates from a philosophical position of dominance and/or hegemony, Rich’s antagonistic negotiation with the meaning of history is fired by a subaltern passion. Whereas Nietzsche, as “a rebel without a cause,” can afford to dally allegorically and philosophically with the necessity of chance, Rich’s interest is in demystifying the ideology of chance and in claiming agency in a limited and determinate fashion. Whereas Nietzsche is prepared to play with chance with the arrogant insouciance of the master, Rich is interested in making specific historical and political alignments between perspective and justice, between loss and recuperation. I will be revisiting this revisionism

53

aspect of the Nietzsche-Rich difference during my analysis of Rich’s poem.

54

The issues that concern me here in the context of revisionism as return are the following: why return, return to what, whose return, and what are the differences among the returns undertaken by different human subjects that occupy different locations and different positionalities? What is the structure of the return as such, and how does a specific return such as the feminist return, the ethnic return, or the like instantiate some of the general principles and imperatives of the return motif? For example, how would the look back at history as ventured by a subaltern location differ from that authorized by a dominant or hegemonic location? Is the return to what has been necrophilic or biophilic in its orientation and motivation? To raise this question and a number of related issues in a textually concrete manner, I go now to that wonderfully nuanced poem by Rich, “Diving into the Wreck”: a poem that brings into tension the political with the aesthetic, the transitive with the intransitive, play with purpose, the instrumentally programmatic with the theoretically open-ended, the forever new with the look back, the humanly historical with the planetary and oceanic, the symbolic with the semiotic à la Kristeva.33 A brief and strategic contextualization is in order before I commence my “dive” into Rich’s poem. Revisionism has indeed been a major concern of a wide range of contemporary feminisms; and Rich’s own trajectory as a critic, poet, activist, and public intellectual has been made, unmade, and remade within the broader context of femnist revisionism vis-à-vis patriarchy both in its broad, generalizable dimension and in its locational variations and differentia. The look back, for feminism, has meant both the resuscitation of possibilities wrecked by the historiography of patriarchy and the discourse of heterosexual normativity and a concerted project of reading the dominant-patriarchal-heteronormative texts against the grain. The project of self-affirmation and the task of oppositional deconstruction have coexisted as two mutually irreducible but complementary dimensions of an organic project. What makes Rich’s feminist politics interesting, and this is true of the poem under consideration as well, is that it falls both within the parameters of Anglo-American and those of Continental/European feminism. It will revisionism

of course be remembered that for a long time the valences of French feminism remained strange and unacceptable to Anglo-American feminists, even as the instrumentalist teleology of Anglo-American feminism was an object of criticism, sometimes even of scorn and contempt, for the French feminists. This mutual misrecognition was more than a matter of mere sensibility. Not only were the goals different but so were the processes and the ideologies that resulted in the articulation of the objectives. Whereas the self-based and egocentric Anglo-American model was aligned to an instrumental positivism, European feminisms were philosophically based and decidedly structuralist and poststructuralist in orientation. Antipositivist and antiessentialist in persuasion, écriture féminine was resolutely post-identitarian in its epistemological impulse even as it envisioned a politics of feminist empowerment. Equally characteristic of the continental mode was its deconstructive stance that necessitated strategies of dismantling the master’s house with the master’s own tools. In all this, language emerged both as a site of empowerment and representation and simultaneously as a site of incorrigible ontological alienation. Deconstructively secure under the epistemological aegis of poststructuralism (Derridean deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis in particular, and to some extent Foucauldian discourse), French feminism could conceive of écriture féminine as a revolutionary intervention into the patriarchal symbolic order. Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clément, and Monique Wittig: each in her own way could nominate, by choice, a male master as her interlocutor and on the basis of that dialogue elaborate the contours of feminist theory and practice. Whatever their internal differences, all these feminists were also poststructuralist philosophers of language to whom (1) language was constitutive of reality; (2) language was no subject’s possession or obedient political instrument; and (3) language bore the symptom of a deep-structure epistemological alienation incorrigible by the political. Rich, though not a card-carrying advocate of écriture féminine, adheres in her philosophical, political, and aesthetic practice to positions and principles that could well be called poststructuralist. As a sensitive poet, Rich refuses to allow any kind of a positivistic hankering after a reachable teleology to interfere with her intransitive and transinstrumentalist implication in language. This creative abandonment to revisionism

55

56

language does not vitiate the activist Rich, who in essay after essay has arraigned patriarchy and excoriated the vicious and invidious rationale of heterosexual normativity. The poem “Diving into the Wreck” is a brilliant and poignant staging of the relationship of the pedagogical to the performative in the context of a revisionist feminist politic and aesthetic. The ethic that drives Rich’s poem is an uncompromising sense of process that is dedicated to finding the political rather than honoring the political as an a priori. And this solicitude for process is registered in and as language. The poem dares to pose the political as an interrogation rather than recuperate it as a pregiven guarantee. Similarly, Rich’s poem submits the very givenness of history as a determinate wreck to the play of a located imagination that can operate only as perspective, and not as the vehicle of a guaranteed knowledge. Rich’s poem also makes room, within its revisionist ethic, for phenomenological rehearsals of human subjectivity that often step beyond the theater of the exclusively political. The poem begins with the assumption that there indeed is a wreck: its ontology is pregiven as an a priori, even though the perceptual reality of the wreck has to be verified a posteriori by the act of diving and finding. In other words, without the assumption of the wreck, the act of diving cannot be undertaken, leave alone justified. Why the return to the wreck in the first place? Why does the persona in the poem want to dive into the wreck? Is the motivation philosophical-academic and disinterested? Is it the spirit of discovery to be shored up in the name of nonpolemical knowledge? What is the nature of the call from the wreck that motivates the dive? Is it aesthetic, antiquarian, monumental, critical, primordial, political, physical, psychic, metaphysical, and elemental? Is the call ontological or epistemological or both? Is the dive undertaken in the name of the wreck or in the name of the dive itself and its will to its own perspectival truth? How is the truthfulness of the dive mediated by the tacit truth of the wreck; and which of the two truths enjoys primacy over the other? The questions multiply endlessly; so I turn now to the body of the poem as it plunges into the deep in search of the wreck. The poem begins thus: First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera,

revisionism

and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Costeau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone.34

The poem makes no bones about presenting the prolegomenon as such in a spirit of theoretical self-reflexivity. A number of themes and contradictions are set afloat in the opening section. First, there is the priority of the “first” and its relationship to the book of myths. For example, is there a first before the book of myths? In a purely formal manner, the first sets in motion the pattern of the return and the logic of endless serialization and of nonidentical repetition that is both the same and not the same at the same time.35 Once this grammar of the return is acknowledged, the truth value of any one determinate return can only be conegotiated with the structural temporality of the return as such. But this by no means eviscerates any particular ordinal dive into the wreck of its own ideological specificity. The dive is no spontaneous lark (and here indeed I am thinking of that sentence, “What a lark!” at the very beginning of Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway: a beginning that both celebrates the phenomenological randomness of every moment and its nonessential ipseity, and acknowledges the political and world-historical gravitas of London right after World War I); it is indeed a premeditated project that acknowledges the different steps of preparation that lead up to the moment of the dive. There is indeed a beginning, which is going to be problematized and called into question by an act of repetition that may or may not uphold the sovereignty of the original.36 Yet the original is needed and invoked as a mere secular point of departure. The first takes the form of a “book of myths,” a phrase that combines critically the belief structure of myths and the writtenness of the book. This phrase highlights the reality that myths are not value-neutral fantasies floating in the void, but are indeed canonized structures that function revisionism

57

58

in the form of normative publications and truth claims. Also, in its writtenness, the myth is made compliant to two logics, two rationales: the natural and the constructed. In other words, even myths need to be textualized as books in historical, secular time. The next few lines anticipate a dialectical tension that animates the entire poem: the tension between spontaneous naturalness and deliberate artificiality. In this poem, the sea is the primordial sea that antedates humanity absolutely and overwhelmingly; but it is also the sea forever “anthropocentered” by the wreck and by human goings-on in general. The camera and the knife-blade and the armor and the flippers point up the constitutive disjunction between human nature and nature; and it is not at all coincidental that the adjective used by the poet is absurd, the very word that Albert Camus turns into a concept as he positions rational human subjectivity in a relationship of chronic alienation with nature.37 Finally, the reason why the persona is undertaking the dive is articulated in the name of a categorical imperative (“having to do this” as a form of the “ought”) that is contrasted immediately with the structure of gratuitous choice that informs Jacques Costeau’s scholarly investigations into the nature of the ocean. The contrasts are clear: Costeau is a professional, well-funded, male explorer of the sea with no particular political or cultural “biases” or motivations. Moreover, he is part of a team whose only motivation is research for the sake of research: a kind of a superior “purposeless purposiveness.”38 Finally, Costeau and his team have not in any way been interpellated by the ocean. They are there by choice: they do not have to be there except as a matter of self-fulfillment or selfindulgence. They, unlike the Rich persona or the allegorically deluded man from the country in Franz Kafka’s The Trial who has been called to wait at the gate, would not have failed themselves and history in any way if they did not perform scientific explorations.39 The question I would like to pose here is the following: How exclusively is the urge for revisionism fueled by a quarrel with history? In other words, would a person, a collectivity, a location even dream of a revisionist project, of rubbing history against the grain if she/they/it had not been hurt and subjugated by history? But for that drive toward justice and redress and that sense of ressentiment would revisionism signify at all? Would a fat-cat millionaire, a traditionally rich old boy, a well-fed, well-empowered subject who has been the beneficiary of genrevisionism

erations of a munificent history ever want to look back and quarrel with history in a spirit of radical antagonism? Would such a person, unless he or she were supremely ethical and deconstructive, want to problematize history through an act of revisionism? To the dominant subject, history has been so “naturally” usable and convenient that a look back would not be purposive at all. Sure enough, Rich claims the revisionist project in the name of a purpose. She makes it abundantly clear, through her detailed physical descriptions of “equipmentality,”40 that her persona, as a gendered subaltern, is in no position to woo an aleatory politics of interpretation, or prematurely launch herself into a critique of instrumental reason and of a politically motivated plumpes Denken.41 It is also at this point that the “I” in the poem turns into a “we,” positing a collective identity as an act of will and as an act of self-recognition. It is interesting to note that throughout the poem, in all the movements between individual subjectivity and collective consciousness, between individual being and a species being, purpose is asserted in the context of a we. Here, on the we level of the political, to know a thing is to use it: theory as knowledge is used up in the act and is not to be enjoyed as excess. To put it in Žižekian psychoanalytic terms, there is no room here to shore up the symptom as excess and enjoy it as a form of intransitive jouissance. But this theme will reappear later in a different section of the poem. No sooner does the poem make a commitment to historical revisionism than it pulls back in a dialectically opposite direction to focus on the phenomenology both of the self and of the circumambient ocean. Stanza two ends with, “I crawl like an insect down the ladder / and there is no one / to tell me when the ocean / will begin.” It is clear that Rich is creating a rich ambiguity between the phenomenological givenness of the ocean and its availability as a site for the human project. The ocean in a sense is always already there, with or without reference to human cognition and acknowledgment; but the ocean that the diver is descending into, layer after watery layer, is the ocean that already accommodates the wreck whose historicity is human and secular. Perhaps it is a bit too obvious, but it does serve to refer here to Derrida’s celebrated “ambiguation” of the nature-culture nexus in the context of incest. For in this poem, too, there is a pervading double consciousness that shuttles between the oceanic and the “oceanic.” revisionism

59

What about the telling resonance of the verb begin? Perhaps it already has begun: but is the beginning ontic or ontological, to avail of Martin Heidegger’s famous and influential distinction?42 There is a precious pattern of not knowing that coexists dialectically with a form of knowing that is tethered to a political will. The mystery of the ocean survives as an authentic interpellation without in any way nullifying the perspectival knowability of the historico-political project of revisionism. Also, in the context of this primordial encounter with the ocean, the we returns to the I in an attitude of what I would call mystified discipleship. To avail of Homi Bhabha’s graceful vocabulary, the relapse into the I marks the transition from a transitive pedagogical certainty to an intransitive performative contingency.43 The very next stanza houses these haunting lines: The sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force

60

in the deep element. (“Diving into the Wreck,” 23)

Before I attempt to do justice to these tantalizing lines, I would like to make a certain connection with Nietzsche in the context of the opening provided by these lines in the poem. So, what is not a question of power (the title of a powerful and poignant novel by Besse Head), and what might it mean to swim without force in the deep element? How do the logic and the structure of the deep element both transcend and underwrite the anthropocentric-historical human will? Is historicity practicable without the burden of anthropocentrism? Can a meaningful turning of the body without force in the deep element be the beginning of a noninvasive relationship both with the nature of history and the history of nature? It is with these thoughts in my mind that I turn to the theme of the undecidability of nature in Nietzsche’s philosophy. For to Nietzsche, too, the human represents the antagonism of nature with itself.44 I would like to broach this problematic by way of chance and the technique of dice throwing. To Nietzsche, as we have already seen, chance is an affirmation of necessity. To get to this truth, Nietzsche doubles the logic of the game of dice. There are two ways of revisionism

assigning human destiny to the play of throwing dice; one of them is shortsighted and self-mystified, whereas the other really “understands.” To Nietzsche, the human being needs to learn to play and mock at the same time. It is the practice of mocking play that rearranges and reunderstands what it means to win: not the determinate winning that is desired so desperately by the human subject under the spell of ressentiment, but a more profound winning that revolutionizes the deep structure of the game itself.45 Sure enough, play is an important motif in the Rich poem as well: play as an end in itself that makes one kind of an investment in the game, and a directed and teleological play that associates winning exclusively with the production of a particular result and therefore remains incapable of a second-order understanding of what the game is all about. Which subject will initiate the gaming of the game: the slave or the master? Who can experience the call of the amor fati: the fate of the Übermensch who can afford to laugh at the pitiful calculus of a life exhausted by mere winning and losing? The question is: Does Nietzsche care in the same way for history as Rich does? Of what use is the claim that chance can be affirmed as necessity to subaltern insurrections and to subjugated knowledges? Is Nietzsche speaking within the dialectic of the master-slave binarity and assuming that the master’s play with chance will automatically deconstruct the entire binary system?46 For after all, we cannot afford to forget the visceral contempt that Nietzsche has for those who are inspired by ressentiment. I really would not like at this stage to concede too much to Nietzsche’s rhetoric and accept the thesis that the hatred that he has for the subjugated is the same as the hatred that the subjugated classes feel for themselves. In fact, they cannot hate themselves as though they were the criminals responsible for their own colonization and enslavement. Nietzsche in a sense criminalizes them much in the way a privatized capitalist epistemology blames the victims. Moreover, Nietzsche is shortsighted in not allowing to the downtrodden any other valence or resonance than that of ressentiment. There is more to subaltern indignation than mere ressentiment. Sure enough, the subalterns want to put an end to their subjugated condition, and such an outcome can only come forth as a function of a revolutionary antagonism that has to be fueled by a sense of outrage. But if it were outrage alone, the subaltern revolution would remain purely local; but the point is that out of the outrage emerges revisionism

61

an ethico-political vision that has something to say to all humanity. But Nietzsche’s thoughts, unlike Antonio Gramsci’s, do not go in that direction. Here again, Deleuze offers us a useful insight into Nietzsche. To abolish chance by holding it in the grip of causality and finality, to count on the repetition of throws rather than affirming chance, to anticipate a result instead of affirming necessity—these are all the operations of a bad player. They have their root in reason, but what is the root of reason? The spirit of revenge, nothing but the spirit of revenge. Ressentiment in the repetition of throws, bad conscience in the belief of a purpose. But, in this way, all that will ever be obtained are more or less probable relative numbers. That the universe has no purpose, that it has no end to hope for any more than it has causes to be known—this is the certainty necessary to play well.47

62

To affirm chance, it would seem, would be to achieve a higher and truer level of agency than that allowed by the merely political. On what basis does Nietzsche make this claim? It is on the basis of his conviction that truth is otherwise than desired by a need to win that is based just on revenge. (Dostoevsky’s underground man, his unreliability as a narrator, and his sadomasochistic sensibility that keeps shifting eccentrically from megalomania to utter abjectness and a total lack of self-esteem come to mind here.) What then happens to justice and the redress of historical wrongs that were certainly not the result of chance? Nietzsche is assured that an anthropocentric Western philosophy has lulled the human subject into the smug belief that the universe has a purpose that can be unpacked in a series of cause-and-effect statements that will eventually culminate in the finality of reason and understanding. In opposition to this, Nietzsche, like the early Dostoevsky, offers us malevolence and ill will.48 Of all the ruses of anthropocentric reason, the most egregious, to Nietzsche, is the category of agency or of the agent that consoles human anxiety by asserting that everything happens and all processes can be understood with reference to a doer. Nietzsche’s fierce espousal of verbality and his utter disdain for nominalism stem from such an attitude. He laughs at a humanity that creates the myth of a meaningful universe so that it can enjoy its own legitimacy as the subject of anthropocentrism and ergo as the knower of the universe. Nietzsche’s demystification of anthropocentrism in the name of a radical contingency of universal becoming is indeed partially welcome. revisionism

But what does it mean to say that the universe has no purpose? Does human historicity do no more than acquiesce in and reproduce that original purposelessness in its own behavior and dispensation? Nietzsche, more than any other philosopher, should know that the very claim that the universe has no purpose is an attribution, anthropocentric or otherwise, of purpose to the universe: perhaps a different kind of purpose, perhaps of the immanent rather than of the transcendent or the teleological kind. Nietzsche’s privileging of a radical epistemology undomesticated by the human need for comfort and answers leaves all of history unexplained; and what is more disturbing, it results in an understanding that the all too real effects of history are nothing but epistemological misnomers. People are masters and slaves for no reason at all; and they become masters and slaves without purpose. In his attempt to demonstrate the poverty that lies at the heart of smug, anthropocentric explanations, Nietzsche abandons the realm of cognitive explanations altogether. There is indeed a great need to forge a relationship of identity-in-difference between the historico-political and the epistemologico-theoretical, but this project is doable only on the basis of a constitutive relationality between the two registers. The very critique of anthropocentrism, however radical, has to be historically mediated and situated; and also, a human meaning and purpose has to be delineated beyond the binarity of the master-slave structuration. Why A is thus the master and B the slave in a purposeless universe has to be diagnosed and remedied with reference to both scales: the humanly historical and the critique of anthropocentrism. Furthermore, the epistemological critique has to be undertaken in the spirit of an antibinary thought to be spoken for by the perspectival findings of the slave yet in the name of all humanity.49 In spite of all these flaws and Nietzsche’s misrecognition that revenge is the only motivation for the desire of the subaltern to prevail, there is something valuable in Nietzsche’s critique of the politics of ressentiment. Nietzsche points out trenchantly that any victory secured, be it in a game or in electoral politics or within any social antagonism, to be real, should go as far as to mock the game itself and call attention to its arbitrariness. For example, in the context of the disastrous results of the 2000 and 2004 elections in the United States, Noam Chomsky was revisionism

63

64

making the point that intelligent people should know better than to allow the passions of electoral politics to consume and speak for their entire ethico-political being. Prior to the election Chomsky was suggesting that it was the obligation of every voter to vote for the lesser of the two evils and to conserve most of his/her energies for the really meaningful task of changing America. Our really meaningful conversation, he was saying, is neither with Bush nor with Kerry. The prize that the eye should be on is a value that is transcendent and transformative of the game on hand. As a matter of fact, one could maintain in a criticalutopian manner that whatever value that the eye should be on is not to be valorized as a prize in the first place; for such a valorization reduces and commodifies the value as a thing to be had by the winners in exclusion in a winner-take-all zero-sum game.50 I will not go as far as saying that Nietzsche advocates a Benjaminian kind of the loser winning, or that he is interested in the task of speaking justice and truth to power on that other wavelength buried in the name of opportunistic politics. If anything, he refuses to give determinate shape to his vision, or to identify the project in the name of any constituency. The cavalier abandon that he advocates as the ideal attitude toward the play is based on a notion of destiny, of an amor fati: a love that is the privilege of the strong who play with life and death with sheer and purposeless insouciance. In Rich’s poem, however, there is little or no trace of revenge or ressentiment; instead, we find strong ethico-political urgency. There is an urge to speak for the wreck from a certain perspective, as well as an urge to claim redress and representation, and an abiding sensitivity to that something that is other and deeper than the political, namely, “the ocean as such,” as it quite fortuitously houses the wreck in its heart and core. Rich’s play with pronouns, her constant semantic shuffles between “what is being said” and “who is saying,” between “speaking” and “speaking for,” her ambivalence of purpose and her “negative capability” vis-à-vis nature that is not annulled by her political will to give truth a name and a perspectival bearing: all of these deliberative strategies are based on a different axiology than Nietzsche’s. Her concern not to reduce the ocean monomaniacally to “a question of power,” and her willingness to go with the flow of the ocean does not result in her valorization of chance as an underlying universal principle that nullifies human signatures. If anything, in the poem the term revisionism

universal resonates differently as it moves as a human imagining that is sometimes some one’s and at other times no one’s. Besides, the human universal in the Rich poem is not allowed to legitimate itself in an autotelic way. It is always staged in a setting that is ecoplanetary and primordial with reference to human historicity. The two impulses, the humanly historical and the ecoplanetary, are experienced in relational simultaneity by the persona in the poem. It is never one or the other.51 Rich is also careful not to inflate her solicitude for nature into an unmediated form of wisdom or communion with nature. The analytic separation between the human and nature is always acknowledged with respect even as the awareness of that separation is not allowed to harden into hubris and insensitivity. The self-other theme swims all through the Rich poem on two levels: the allegorical level, at which the command of the other is absolute and binding on every self-other configuration, and the historical-secular level, on which self-other effects are produced by a world structured in dominance. I came to explore the wreck.

65

The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed. (“Diving into the Wreck,” 23)

These lines are unequivocally didactic and revisionist. They have more in common with the Nietzsche of The Use and Abuse of History who proclaims that effective history has every right to bring any past to justice in the court of the present than with the Nietzsche of the eternal return. It is difficult to see how such a strongly interventionary historical sensibility can be reconciled with the strategy of the good dice player whose only certainty is “that the universe has no purpose, that it has no end to hope for any more than it has causes to be known.”52 The heavy thematic emphasis both in Nietzsche and in the poem is on the category of purpose. Is purpose an ontological property that inheres in reality revisionism

66

that the human subject intuits or represents? Or is purpose a purely anthropocentric epistemological fiction to render life and the universe bearable? To word it differently, how is the logic of an earthquake to be understood with reference to, say, the Schumpeterian law of economic destruction? If indeed there is a purpose, then how is natural purpose as instantiated in the tiger destroying the lamb related to human cultural purpose? Does human purpose reiterate the organic purposiveness found in nature, “the benign indifference of the universe,” as Meurseult in Camus’s The Stranger would have it,53 or does human purpose transcend the purposelessness of the universe in the name of a supplemental orientation that creates its own culture and historicity as a second nature? Is it possible to act purposively and intentionally as human beings and at the same time read human history as an instantiation of a deeper purposelessness that inheres in the universe? Does it make sense, for example, to maintain that projects of anticolonialism are purposive in and of themselves in an immanent sort of way, and not claim that these projects resolve the fundamental purposelessness of the universe? We can see in Nietzsche some of the early tendencies toward postmodernism, toward what we now call “the legitimation crisis.”54 Nietzsche realizes that “there is no truth,” but cannot help shouting it out pseudo-ostensively. Nietzsche is convinced of the futility of transcendence, since there can be no transcendence that is not formally and modally based on anthropocentrism. The good player then becomes the superhuman who laughs and plays without teleological and causal guarantees, whereas the bad player is the weakling who tries to align the politics of ressentiment with universal meaning and purpose. It is precisely by virtue of his randomization of the human historical project in the name of an underlying purposelessness that Nietzsche becomes a dangerous philosopher. He leaves no room in which differentiations can be made between the master’s purposelessness and the slave’s purposelessness, between the purposelessness of those superhistorical men and their amor fati and that of the subaltern with a determinate cause. The Rich poem proposes a different politics, as well as an epistemology of purpose. I see the poem resorting to the representation of traces, both in the Gramscian and the Derridean sense of the term.55 On a strictly political register à la Gramsci, the poem, to understand the meaning of the present, undertakes an inventory of past traces: traces that include revisionism

damages as well as treasures. There is indeed a double consciousness at work, but not a benign and given double consciousness that passively or reactively itemizes treasures and damages. On the contrary, what is at work is an actively transcribed double consciousness that transforms the givenness of history into a project of agential intervention. Though in a sense the treasures and the damages are cohistorical, the lines in the poem make an active distinction between subjugated knowledges and the body of dominant historiography. “The treasures that remain” are a countermnemonic repudiation not of the reality of the damage, but of the influence of the damage on the history of the present. The traces in a Gramscian sense are evidentiary in the context of a revisionist project, but the same traces, when given a Derridean inflection, take off in a slightly different direction: toward, in “Diving into the Wreck,” “the thing I came for: / the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth.” These lines begin with an attempted complicity between ontology and epistemology, between the real and representation, between the noumenal and the phenomenal, the en soi and the pour soi. Let me explain. If in the Gramscian context the traces represent what was in the name of history, the Derridean traces insist that traces can be no more than representations of absence; and that not even the urgency of a political project, with its set of required beliefs and principles and purposes, can suture that grammatological distance between logocentric presence and écriture. It is significant that the lines from the Rich poem operate in a space of legitimation that lies between phonocentrism and grammatology. They partake of phonocentrism in so far as there is an I that claims it has come there with an intention.56 Even though the wreck, with its treasures and damage, would have been real anyway, in this poem the I authenticates both itself and the wreck by proving that “it” has been there. The words that speak emanate from a specific vocal box that belongs to a body located at the scene of the wreck. The speech act here is wedded to a speaking agent who has a purpose. To go back to the Nietzschean question, then, what is the phenomenology of purpose, and where and how is it lodged? Is it intrinsic to personhood and extrinsic to language, or is it intrinsic to language under certain generic and historical conditions in which the user of language can constrain language to bear the burden of a prelinguistic agency? Does the purpose belong to the realm revisionism

67

68

of the a priori that is then appropriately embodied in and as language? In other words, does linguistic intentionality dangle between the pedagogical certitude of the a priori and the performative contingency of the historical articulation? According to the poem, the words are maps, the words are purposes. That is not the same thing as the words having maps and purposes. Here, then, is the Derridean slide. Though the ethico-political authority of the revisionist drive is pregiven in the form of an imperative, the search itself, the process of the search, is linguistic, and constitutively so. It is from within the immanence of language qua language that directions have to be found and purposes recognized. The poem, to use Heidegger loosely, commits “the language of being” to “the being of language,” and not the other way around. The poem establishes a relational but nonidentical connection between the ontology of language and its usability. It is therefore not a guarantee at all that the meaning of the dive will not be purloined, that the diver will reach the wreck.57 As a matter of fact, it is only when the wreck becomes “the wreck” that it becomes the destination of the revisionist dive. Why then does Rich, given the perspectival nature of her revisionist dive, even talk about the thing itself, and not the myth, the wreck and not the story of the wreck? Clearly the wreck cannot speak for itself; nor can any one story of the wreck naturalize itself as the wreck’s intraontological self-predication. There would seem to be a natural sympathy between the revisionist dive and the Nietzschean dictum that “truth is nothing but a mobile army of anthropomorphisms.” Maybe there is a place for a truth of the extramoral kind. The truth of any revisionist vision is double-tongued. The vision knows what the truth is not, even though it cannot affirm what the truth actually is. I will thus assume, given Rich and the range of her preoccupations as a poet, feminist activist, and intellectual, that the wreck is nothing but the body of feminist/ feminine subjugated knowledges. These knowledges were made a wreck of by patriarchy and its many forces. There have been myths and stories about this wreck: stories and myths within the dominant historiography that saw the wreck as a historically justifiable loss, as legitimate debris cast away by the historical process. What the revisionist project will claim, by speaking for the wreck, is that the wreck still lives and is reclaimable, from a certain point of view, as a treasure and as a legacy. This task of reviving the wreck and making it speak to the present is revisionism

a matter both of rubbing dominant historiography (its myths and its stories) against the grain and of telling an other story—along its grain, as it were. The topos where nature and history come together, pretending to be versions of each other, is the site of dominance. For it is the dominant will to meaning that fabricates a story from its perspective, naturalizes that perspective as the perspective of all perspectives, and naturalizes the object of its representation as the transcendent real. The drive in the poem toward “the thing itself ” is not so much an essentialist quest, but rather a de-structive project that envisions the “thing itself ” not as a presence, but as an active absence, or a series of absences in the body of the dominant historiography. The thing itself is then the thing itself of the dominant discourse under erasure, sous rature.58 On a political level, it is imperative for the revisionist perspective to seek the thing itself as an open possibility liberated from the sovereignty of the dominant discourse. But it is not that simple. The question remains: What should happen within the field of open possibility whose very purpose is to let the thing itself be? It is under the aegis of this larger question that androgyny develops in the poem: “We circle silently / about the wreck / we dive into the hold. / I am she: I am he.” It is important to note that the lines do not say, “She is him, and He is her.” The he and she are mutually transgendered not on the basis of an I-thou intersubjectivity, but with reference to a nameless third term in the form of an existential first-person pronoun in all its irreducible specific generality. The finding of the wreck opens up a space of an empathic, solidary, and performative inclusiveness that enables the her and the him not to be fused into one, but to find an emergent space of solidarity in the name of the I: the first-person pronoun. The pronoun is here a performative device, not an ontological straitjacket. Both the he and she can simultaneously cohabit the I: as a matter of fact, this I as topos does not exist except as a function of the transgendering performance.59 The overall movement of the poem is from a specific perspectival revisionism—for example, the feminist perspective that is itself internally heterogenized as heterosexual and lesbian—to an open revisionism that does not shore up its findings as its private treasure, but rather shares it in the name of all humanity.60 It is particularly appropriate that the poem ends not with a text, a body, or a state of being, but with the notion of names. Rich uses all the connotative revisionism

69

power of that word names: representation, official legitimation, partaking with others in the task of creating a document and a point of reference. At the same time, she creates a contrapuntal relationship between the imprimatur of the name and the fluidity of a pronominal identification. She also takes care not to celebrate her state of arrival as the finding of a new name or a new affirmative positivity. The poem ends thus: We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to the scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear. (“Diving into the Wreck,” 24)

70

It is a mark of Rich’s remarkable integrity as an artist, intellectual, and revisionist activist that she does not end the poem on a triumphalist note of arrival or with a gung ho, chest-thumping gesture of rectitude. After the we-you-I dance (with the you both addressing the reader and creating a different zone of address), Rich has the “courage or the cowardice” to include courage or cowardice as potential motivating resources for the revisionist project. Rather than launder revisionism in the name of an always already political correctness, she opens up the diving as a potential object of ambivalence. Her use of the progressive tense (“are carrying”) emphasizes the reality that the highly motivated dive ends as process, which is another way of saying that it does not and cannot end. This is a revisionist politics of ongoing questions, as Foucault would have it, and a “politics of the open end” in Gayatri Spivak’s sense of the term.61 The ending makes the rich and undeniable suggestion that once the logic of repetition is inaugurated, repetitions will never end. Each repetition will both invoke an origin or a beginning that will lose its inaugural status in the process of the dive. There is a symptomatic need to keep returning to the scene of the wreck: a return of the same rendered nonidentical by the performance of the return. The ones who undertake the dives are identified, both ontologically and revisionism

epistemologically, as the ones “who undertake the dive.” The ending of the poem does not do away with the materiality of the search or with all the baggage that constitutes the labor of the trip: the camera, the knife, and even the book “in which our names do not appear” continue their historical existence even after the arrival of the revisionist dive. The book in which our names will appear as a result of the successful achievement of the dive is never mentioned, and the only way names are invoked is in terms of a profound absence or a lack.62 The filling out or the rectification of the lack does not result in the production of a hegemonic name or a constituency as the sovereign filler of the lack. What is preserved perennially is revisionism as perspective, not revisionism as guaranteed truth. What we have here is the rationale of signifying as an ongoing process that defers its own truth with extreme rigor and purposiveness. The semantics of revisionism is necessarily double, and not just in the context of the antagonistic contact zone between subjugated and dominant knowledges, but in a broader theoretical sense as well.63 For example, how are the specific politics of feminist or postcolonial revisionism related to the general nature of revisionism as such? What are the differences between patriarchal dominant historiography as the object of a reading or a brushing against the grain and the historiography of colonialism or that of normative heterosexuality or that of racism subjected to a similar antagonistic reading? What are the specific assumptions about nature, human nature, gender, race and ethnicity, and sexuality that drive the semantics of each revisionist project under the broad syntactic umbrella called revisionism as such? With these questions in mind I turn to Frantz Fanon, in particular to his posthumously published The Wretched of the Earth. What makes Fanon relevant today, despite all the changes in global and postcolonial developments, is the fact that he is interested both in the psychic and the political dimensions of subject formation. His thought acknowledges that psychic duration and political temporality, however much they are interrelated within the organicity of a movement or revolution, cannot be synchronized. Of ongoing importance is the manner in which Fanon connects revisionism with a particular kind of historiography. Solicitous and simultaneously suspicious of history, both mnemonic and countermnemonic, Fanon produces, not represents, the native revisionism

71

intellectual as a national intellectual. Why, for Fanon, is the look back toward the past necessary for the look forward into the future? Which look toward the past, according to Fanon, is legitimate and historical, and which apocryphal and self-deluded? I begin my discussion with a passage in The Wretched of the Earth made famous by Bhabha’s Lacanian poststructuralist reading. It is not enough to try to get back to the people in that past out of which they have already emerged; rather we must join them in that fluctuating movement which they are just giving shape to, and which, as soon as it has started, will be the signal for everything to be called into question. Let there be no mistake about it; it is to this zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come; and it is there that our souls are crystallized and that our perceptions and our lives are transformed with light.64

72

This is truly a multidirectional passage with the flows of energy, empowerment, and temporality going now backward, then forward, and often doing the one to achieve the other. First of all, there are two kinds of “we” to be discerned as collectivities: the we of the people who seem to be in the pedagogical lead, and the we in the text that needs to catch up with the people. The we, the protagonists of the theoretical narrative, need to go back by way of forswearing the false credentials of the now where they are. This is a backward move in history by native intellectuals toward the people who in their very putative backwardness are far ahead of the intellectuals. There are two coeval temporalities in play here. As a result of the false consciousness imposed by colonial modernity, one set of we has gone ahead in a move of meretricious avantgardism; and it is the falseness of this temporality that is forsworn by the backward movement, which actually serves as a corrective.65 The back refers to a previous history identified as the collective ontology of the people. The people have been left behind, and therefore they belong to the past; but this past is not really the past since the prehistoricizing of the people’s present by the native intellectual is not real. Thus when “we” reach the past, the people have already emerged out of that past that has all along been the genuine present of the people. Now the we have to catch up again, as the derrière garde, with the people who are in the tense of the present continuous. Thus the people are recognized revisionism

at last as the doers of the permanent revolution in the tense most appropriate to it. This rhetorical move could be seen as the forerunner of the Foucauldian-Deleuzian decelebration of the intellectual and his or her forwardness. Yet all of these attributions of the people are being made by the we that has now lagged behind. In this sense, then, though the people are the expressive energy of the historical moment of change and revolution, the discourse about the revolution emerges not from the people themselves but from the avant-garde we chastened now into the we of the derrière garde. The speaking voice makes a distinction between “what they are giving shape to” and the moment of starting. Furthermore, the two kinds of we have not achieved union yet: there is an experienced phenomenology by report, and there is the reflexive consciousness that is making the report. It is precisely because the movement is fluctuating, not as a symptom of indecision or of a lack of nerve, that the movement will have called everything into question fundamentally and radically. What I am not sure of here is Fanon’s real, rather than an ideological, attitude to the people. Is he producing the people through a belated act of recognition? Is he instrumentalizing them in the task of decolonization and then toward a postcolonial African nationalism? Is he also guilty of a certain romanticism when he avers that the “people have already emerged” into their own and appropriate temporality? How does he know, that is, how does the persona of the intellectual know or recognize this? Have the people emerged ontologically, historically, culturally, or all of the above? What were the modalities and historical phases of such an emergence? Clearly, Fanon could not be celebrating some sort of an immanent spontaneous, and therefore apodictic, populism? Unlike the colonized native intellectual, were the people somehow immune from the deep-down damage of psychic colonization? Was something going on subterraneously, beneath and beyond the radar of the colonizing regime? If yes, then where and what was the terrain of such an underground antagonism? Is this antagonism different in form, content, and ethico-political persuasion from that other antagonism hatched in an obsessively binary opposition to the colonizer? Had the people quietly and unassumingly found a way to overthrow or neutralize the colonizer by means other than the tools of the colonizing master? The fact that Fanon says that they have emerged out revisionism

73

74

of a certain deleterious past makes it clear that it is both an emergence from and an emergence toward. Also, there is the question of which past. The demonstrative specificity of the that in the “that past” is more rhetorical than cognitive or perceptual. There is another question that to me seems unresolved throughout The Wretched of the Earth: To what extent does the intellectual have to posit the emergence of the people as the precondition of his or her own anabaptism? I am more often than not persuaded that the emergence of the people is the function of the psychic need of the intellectual to believe in something other than his or her wretched white and brainwashed epistemology. Why does Fanon capture this moment as surreal, as a moment of surplus beyond the immediate political need and demand?66 Why the fluctuation and not a solid arrival, and why the magical, suprarational connotation around the instability that otherwise could easily be read as a sign of weakness? Is this the zero instance of the revolution (the hole in the flag that Žižek would talk about) that Fanon is trying to maintain as a perennial becoming?67 What does it mean “to give shape to a fluctuating movement”? There already is an inbuilt tension between the instability of fluctuation and the situatedness of shape. The project of giving shape could be read both as a representational strategy that may or may not fall a victim to the fallacy of mimetic form, or as one that may valorize the fallacy as a fidelity to the fluctuation. This juncture could also be read as the mise-en-scène of the impossibility of representation. It is the moment of the progressive tense as the pure and pristine custodian of the infinitive both flirting with and resisting temporalization and proper conjugation as a verb. The shape, in the context of postcolonial emergence and its future beyond the jouissance of the moment of decolonization, could be read as the historiographic garb in which the historical truth of the fluctuating liberation is to be dressed and identified. Could the historiography be subaltern, or otherwise? Bhabha reads it thus: “The cultural moment of Fanon’s ‘occult instability’ signifies the people in a fluctuating movement which the people are giving shape to, so that postcolonial time questions the teleological traditions of the past and the present, and the polarized historicist sensibility of the archaic and the modern. These are not simply attempts to invert the balance of power within an unchanged order of discourse.”68 While agreeing for the most part with Bhabha’s allegorical reading of revisionism

Fanon, a reading that Fanon’s poetic language certainly invites and permits, I would also say something slightly different. Fanon is making the claim that it is only by seeing that moment as an undecidable embodiment of the infinitive in the present continuous that a secondorder transformation can be effected, that is, that the transformation of the historicity of history, the timeliness of time, and the temporality of temporality can occur. Once the nascent revolution is allowed to settle into its proper temporality, the second-order changes become unthinkable. The second-order transformation can be achieved only during that eternal present of the instability that is destructive of binarity as such. Whichever way one reads Fanon, there is one unavoidable question: Can there be duration without teleology? It is difficult to see Fanon take on a pro-immanentist stance, given his critique of spontaneism and his project of postcolonial nation building.69 What does that moment endure into, and what is the relationship between that time and the temporality in which the people are giving shape to the movement? Fanon is faced here with a difficult choice: either time as being or dwelling, or time as the function of becoming; time as ontological or time as discursive and epistemological. Without doing so explicitly, Fanon is in fact invoking the theory of the verb and its relationship to temporality. How are the people giving shape to the movement without resorting to teleology? If the nature of the people’s project is not to imprison the movement in the shape, they must be practicing the real rather than attempting to represent it. The we who are coming, that is, the intellectuals, are amazed by the ability of the people to dwell in a zone of occult instability. In my reading, Fanon, in using the pseudomystic language of poetic revelation, is actually pointing out that there is an epistemological gap between the people and the collectivity of the intellectual. The people already are in a zone that the intellectuals are barely able to comprehend, leave alone coordinate into reality. Rather than read it in essentialist terms, though I must admit that Fanon’s rhetoric is vulnerable to such a reading, I read the references to “souls” and to “light” as a rhetorical way of indicating that the reality of the people exceeds the rationality of the intellectual collectivity and is well ahead of it. It is in the name of this secure forwardness of the people that Fanon would like to legitimate the new nation and the new humanity. A certain doubt can indeed be cast on this vision. Why are the people not talking, why revisionism

75

are they just giving shape? Do they know that they are giving shape, or is it still the backward intellectual now become native-national who is speaking for the people? What is this coming together of the people and the other we, and why should that be significant for the people if the people are already “there?” In an earlier passage, Fanon articulates the rationale of postcolonial revisionism. The claim to a national culture in the past does not only rehabilitate that nation and serve as a justification for the hope of a future national culture. In the sphere of psycho-affective equilibrium it is responsible for an important change in the native. Perhaps we have not sufficiently demonstrated that colonialism is not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and the future of a dominated country. Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today. (Wretched of the Earth, 210)

76

Continuing in the same vein, says Fanon, “in such a situation the claims of the native intellectual are not a luxury but a necessity in any coherent program. The native intellectual who takes up arms to defend his nation’s legitimacy and who wants to bring proofs to bear out that legitimacy, who is willing to strip himself naked to the history of his body, is obliged to dissect the heart of his people” (Wretched of the Earth, 211). To do some justice to the complex and often contradictory ways in which Fanon invokes history, here is another passage before I commence my analysis. It is true that the attitude of the native intellectual sometimes takes on the aspect of a cult or of a religion. But if we really wish to analyze this attitude correctly we will come to see that it is symptomatic of the intellectual’s realization of the danger that he is running in cutting his last moorings and of breaking adrift from his people. The stated belief in a national culture is in fact an ardent, despairing turn toward anything that will afford him secure anchorage. In order to ensure his salvation and to escape from the supremacy of the white man’s culture the native feels the need to turn backward toward his unknown roots and to lose himself at whatever cost in his own barbarous

revisionism

people. Because he feels he is becoming estranged, that is to say because he feels that he is the living haunt of contradictions which run the risk of becoming insurmountable, the native tears himself away from the swamp that may suck him down and accepts everything, decides to take all for granted and confirms everything even though he may lose body and soul. The native finds that he is expected to answer for everything, and to all comers. He not only turns himself into the defender of his people’s past; he is willing to be counted as one of them, and henceforward he is even capable of laughing at his past cowardice. (Wretched of the Earth, 217–18)

Of all the words in Fanon’s vocabulary, the most troubling, the most problematic, and the least resolved is the term native. If he were a contemporary political theorist, he would have helped us out with the simple device of quotation marks or other qualifiers to help us understand where he means native and where “native.” The native, in places, stands for the given and is therefore to be suspected deeply and rigorously, and at other places the native is an achieved and a historically produced agent who is also a postcolonial national. At times, the word native resounds with a false autochthony, as a mere natal or place name whose ontology has not aspired to produce its own epistemology. In other places, the word suggests a kind of knowledge, as in native knowledge versus neocolonial knowledge. To put it in Cartesian terms, “the native thinks, therefore she or he is,” but the haunting question in the aftermath of colonialist depredation is, “what is thinking?” that is to say, what is right thinking, and what is wrong thinking? And this is a question that cannot even begin to be answered without a correct and authoritative understanding of the past, the precolonial past. Again, the question comes up: Which is the real past, and which is the past that is part of a tradition invented by the colonizer to stifle and paralyze the colonized?70 A way to understand Fanon’s revisionist program is to acknowledge that the teleological drive behind it all is the will to rediscover the native as the postcolonial African national. Fanon understands with remarkable clarity (1) that the way to history is itself historical; and (2) that the historiography of interventionism is neither fully representational nor entirely constitutive of history. As in the case of Rich’s dive into the wreck, here, too, an occult zone of instability opens up between the

revisionism

77

78

body of history and the meaning of history. Neither an absolute given nor entirely a polemical construct, the past as history dangles in that indeterminate area of psychopolitical disequilibrium.71 In the last long passage quoted above, it certainly seems that it is the need to historicize that creates history as home and anchorage; and this need is fearful and paranoid. Can the truth of history be affirmed except at the level of strategic usability? Is Africa’s past true, real, and valuable only because it offers the African subject a point of leverage against the white man’s history? “The Negro is not. Any more than the white man.”72 Does this claim from Black Skin, White Masks concede too much to the historicity of the binary form that is structured in colonial dominance? Is it not conceivable to speak of the Negro without any reference to the white man at all? What is the nature of that reality that will survive the nihilation of binarity, and from what perspective will the value of that survival be registered? Through all these investigations, Fanon is raising yet another fundamental problem, namely, that of the relationship of belief as an a priori system to historical knowledge as a secular a posteriori. One recalls Ernest Renan’s ironic claim that the nation is the function of a daily plebiscite.73 Or, in a frivolous vein, there is that exquisite skit in Monty Python in which an entire tenement building remains stable as long as its inhabitants believe in it; but once even only one of them begins to entertain doubts about its architectural integrity, fissures and fault lines begin to appear on the walls and ceilings. There is the need to believe in a national culture even though such a culture can only be the result of a contingent historical performance. To Fanon, just as for Rich, the revisionist historical project is also coextensively a revisionist look at the relationship between any I and its corresponding we. Unlike the post-1968 deconstructive European intellectuals, who respectfully honor the death of the organic intellectual, Fanon, à la Gramsci, has the need to believe in the solidarity of a bloc that brings the people and the intellectual together in the project of envisioning and constructing the future.74 Without a legitimate I-we coordination and recognition, no political future can be envisioned. As I have already observed, there are two kinds of we to be dealt with here: the we of the people that already inhabits the zone in which the future is being shaped, and the belated we of the intellectuals that has to deschool and reschool itself before it finds the people. It is only within this twin revisionism

context of the politics of neonascent representation that Fanon would want the benighted intellectual “to strip himself naked to the history of his body” (Wretched of the Earth, 211), his body that is part of the people as body: a body that he had disavowed during the phase of false consciousness. This is also the moment of a genuine political cathexis that brings individual and collective consciousness together. The native intellectual who was dressed up and reluctant to face up to his own nakedness is the mystified native intellectual. It has to be noticed that Fanon does not expunge the term native from his vocabulary: what he does instead is to make the mystified native intellectual go through an ordeal of fire so that a legitimate native collectivity may emerge. In the process, Fanon, like Gramsci in the context of Marxism, is also subtly deconstructing two other binary oppositions: mind-body, and intellectualmanual labor. In his benighted state, the native intellectual thinks that his thoughts are transcendent of his color. In this sense, the native intellectual participates in the lie of the timeless universal intellectual fabricated by the dominant colonialist discourse and remains a traitor to his own conditions of production. In addition, he seeks and covets an avant-gardism of intellect that separates him from the physicality of his own people. It is impossible to assert the legitimacy of the nation from the point of view of a split Manichaean consciousness that is ashamed of the past even as it seeks to represent the people. In other words, Fanon is insisting that there can be no political decolonization unless such a project is also a decolonization of the colonial unconscious. Unless the native intellectual has the courage to face up to the past in a state of utter nudity and vulnerability, and until he emancipates himself from the haunting of such a past, he cannot be of the people and therefore cannot lead them as their native intellectual. In these and other declarations Fanon is careful to invoke the body of the colonized intellectual in all its nude and unadorned “colored-ness.” In his attempt to empower the revisionist historical project with the certainty of an objective, Fanon does not simplify or “one-dimensionalize” the complexity of the revisionist project. The native intellectual still has the obligation to dissect the heart of his people. The connotations of dissection are both scientific-epistemological and curative-remedial.75 During this phase, that is, after the intellectual has joined his people, the intellectual takes on a leaderly and diagnostic role à la the Gramscian revisionism

79

80

organic intellectual. The only difference between Gramsci and Fanon is that whereas Gramsci works well within the Eurocentric constraints of Marxism and the axiomatic model of the proletariat, Fanon as a postcolonial thinker problematizes Eurocentrism and extends the meaning of the people beyond the proletarian masses.76 The Fanonian native intellectual learns more from the people than the Gramscian Marxist leader. In the context of the dissection of the heart of the people, I would like to submit that Fanon, like Gramsci, accepts the reality that although all human beings are intellectuals, some of them take on the specialized role of functioning as intellectuals. In other words, Fanon acknowledges an inescapable ambivalence at the very core of his project: the people need no condescension or patronage from the intellectual, but on the other hand, they need the intellectual’s surgical analytic attention and leadership for them to be produced as people. The given ethico-political legitimacy of the people has to be constituted into its own form of knowledge and sovereignty, and this task requires the assistance of the twice-born, or the newly baptized native intellectual. This sounds like a contradiction. After all, if the people are already less benighted than the intellectual, and if it is the intellectual, and not the people, who was in a mystified condition thanks to the false consciousness offered by colonialism, then in what sense is the intellectual equipped to dissect the heart of the people: a people of whom he was ashamed till very recently? My reading is that it all has to do with the doubleness of history: there is a history to be returned to with care and vigilance, and there is an apocryphal and essentialist history that has to be resolutely avoided at all cost. I would like to offer a few general theoretical speculations before I undertake a Fanon-specific dissection of the heart of history. To Fanon, there is no ur-truth just as there is no ur-history: no primordiality, no essentialism. Fanon would also agree with Nietzsche, with some important provisos, that the truth of history is the truth of power and indeed that truth is a mobile army of anthropomorphisms. But Fanon, like Amitav Ghosh in The Shadow Lines, would ask insistently, “which anthropomorphism?”77 In other words, Fanon would not acquiesce in the conflation of the epistemological questioning of truth with the political contestation about the nature of historical truth. Yes, it is important to Fanon that a new humanism is to be imagined ethically, revisionism

philosophically, and epistemologically; but such an imaginary will have to be predicated on the political dismantling of the vicious binary logic of colonialism: “The Negro is not. Any more than the white man.” The dismantling of the very structure of binarity at the metalevel has to go hand in hand with the project of addressing the unequal historical realities brought into existence by binarity. To put it concretely, the very effect of the deconstruction of binarity as such will fall differentially on the master and the slave. The dialectical model looks toward the perennial reproduction of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis in the hope that this binary contestation will eventually find a resolution where all binarities will have withered and, eventually, faded away. The highly controversial discussion within Marxist theory about the nature of agency has had to do with the epistemological status of agency. Is agency immanent or transcendent or both? How does the dialectic carry, within its historical movement, the gesture toward teleology? Is history, to use Louis Althusser’s formulation, “a process without subject or goals?”78 Is class a something in itself, or is it the expression of constantly shifting historical energies and trajectories?79 Is there a guarantee that the truth of the dialectic would produce the truth of Truth, particularly within an epistemological framework that does not allow for the existence of an a priori verity? To put it in less Hegelian and more Marxist terms, how does one know immanently that the proletarian perspective is the perspective most suited for the production of universal freedom? Fanon’s revisionist drive takes shape within a temporality that acknowledges the relevance of binarity without at the same time surrendering the conflictual oppositionality that is required to read the binarity historically, and not just formally. “The Negro is not. Any more than the white man.” But who is saying this, and from where? If the Negro or the white man within the binary structure is saying it, it will only serve to perpetuate the longue durée of colonialism for the simple reason that the articulation continues to represent the legitimacy of binarity.80 But the bind of course is that the statement cannot come from without the structure of binarity, simply because the very fact that such an outside has been found renders the statement redundant. It is only by working from within the binary in a perspectival and antagonistic mode that the Negro can undertake the double task of decolonization from the white man, and decolonization revisionism

81

82

from binarity as such. In other words, the metahistoricity of the binary structure cannot be deconstructed unless and until the historical unevenness brought about by binarity is eliminated in the first place. In Fanon’s terms, the human has to be taken critically beyond the binary playfield that creates positions such as white and black, the colonizer and the colonized, the haves and the have-nots. So, which subject undertakes the project of historical revisionism: the master or the slave, the white man or the Negro, the colonizer or the colonized? How is the preoccupation of the colonized different from the colonizer’s preoccupation, assuming in the first place that history even has a place in the colonizer’s scheme of things? Fanon’s unique insight is that the colonized need to be solicitous and wary of history at the same time. There is a history that is to be legitimated, but such a history does not exist as such until after the legitimation. There is a history to be avoided despite its seductiveness and easy availability.81 Also, like Gramsci who insists that an inventory be made of the many critical traces of the past, Fanon, too, makes differentiations among different histories that have led up to the present. Some histories are unethical, politically incorrect, unjust, and unacceptable; and yet these histories have occurred successfully and hegemonically. One such example is that of colonialism. This history has to be repudiated, and yet no radical repudiation can exorcize the fact that it is indeed a history. In the case of the colonized, colonialist history has become the most immediate sedimentation of history: an invasive history that has dispossessed the natives of their history and forced on them what is alien. What the native intellectual attempts is to repudiate the authority of colonial history, but not its givenness. Consequently, a critical encounter with that history, which is not one’s own, has become part of the revisionist postcolonial national project. As in the case of Rich’s dive into the wreck, the wreck cannot be reached by way of a nonstop journey: pure origin to pure destination. The layered and multimediated path toward the wreck has to adopt the strategy of neti or na iti, that is, a process of negative or “not this” recognitions before it recognizes the wreck. Let us take for example the situation between Israel and Palestine. Despite the eminent ethico-political correctness of the Palestinian stand that the very creation of Israel in 1948 was, and is, illegitimate, such an argument cannot be made to work in quite that way. The illegitimate revisionism

existence of Israel at the place where it exists has to be acknowledged as a historical fact before Palestine can even begin to articulate its claims to nation and statehood. In other words, the recognition of Israel has to become a fundamental part of Palestinian self-recognition, despite the ongoing awareness that the Balfour Declaration consolidated one people at the expense of another. In a sense then, the very mobilization of Palestinian histories and memories has to occur in a reactive mode with reference to the existence of the state of Israel. There is no suprahistorical, transcendental, or originary way of dealing with the history of what has already happened, even though it should not have happened. As a matter of fact, any thing or event becomes historical only by virtue of its having happened. The temporality of the native is similar. But for the invasion of colonialism, the very category of “the native” would not have existed. It is in resistance to the dominance of colonialism that the project as well as the formation of the native takes shape in a temporality that is neither its own proper time nor the improper time of the colonizer. One can see this ambivalence at work when Fanon says that “this stated belief in a national culture is in fact an ardent, despairing turn toward anything that will afford him secure anchorage” (Wretched of the Earth, 217). The history that could have been his or her own in a normal mode is now available only in the form of relief, a haven or an asylum from danger. The native’s natural and nonparanoid inhabitation of his or her space is now converted into an anxiety-laden hankering after anchorage. The native’s orientation is now all need based and need oriented. “In order to ensure his salvation and to escape from the supremacy of the white man’s culture,” Fanon writes in The Wretched of the Earth, “the native feels the need to turn backward toward his unknown roots and to lose himself at whatever cost in his own barbarous people” (217–18; emphasis added). The politics of the native’s self-representation is now deeply embroiled in the anticolonial militarization of identity. What is even more damaging, the self-reflexive mode of knowing oneself is now part of an antagonism that can never become pure affirmation. But for colonialist castration, there would have been no turn backward to his people, and no dedication to the discovery of “his unknown roots.” As Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, the very impulse to historicize, for the native, is not an intrinsic motivation, but a form of extrinsic command.82 revisionism

83

84

Fanon does not quite state it that way; nevertheless, one can see in Fanon certain lines of thought that anticipate the brilliant distinction that Partha Chatterjee makes between the “thematic of nationalism” and “the problematic of nationalism,” between nationalism as political decolonization and an ongoing capitulation to Western epistemology.83 The rationale of the backward turn remains caught up in a chronic ambivalence. It is because he is “the living haunt of contradictions that run the risk of becoming insurmountable” (Wretched of the Earth, 218) that the native is prepared to risk it all. It could be a minor stylistic detail, but it is interesting to note that Fanon does not say that the native is haunted by contradictions: rather the very ontological habitation of the native is a contradiction that if not addressed immediately could become his permanent abode. Fanon has the courage to acknowledge the reality that the native has been thoroughly, though not totally, ontologized by the colonizer. Consequently, in the short run, ontology as such has been defiled for the native. Any attempt at an immediate and spontaneous reontologization (as in the case of the negritude movement and its reversal of Eurocentrism) is only likely to appeal to a theory of being that has been foisted on the native body as an epistemological fait accompli by the colonialist gaze. The purpose of the now reborn native intellectual is to reclaim African ontology both as a phenomenology of Being and as an epistemology of praxis in the context of the anticolonial struggle. The usable past thus cannot be accessed by way of a lazy nostalgia or through an uncritical acceptance of the past in general, but only by way of layered readings that would do justice to the many contradictory and sometimes misleading traces of the past. Just because there is a trace does not automatically mean that there is an objective history that corresponds to the trace. Here, in theory and in practice, is the problem that Fanon has to deal with: If history is available not in some apodictic manner but only by way of traces, and if furthermore traces themselves can be apocryphal, how then can history lead the present? Traumatized and rendered “symptomatic” by the violence of colonialism, on the one hand, and yet ethically and existentially protagonistic enough to be able to envision a new and different humanism, on the other hand, Fanon has the courage and the conscience to use both “history” and “the present” with quotation marks. Which history, and which present? There is the factual reality of a colonialist history and its revisionism

sedimentation as a particular kind of present; and Fanon’s obligation to this history and this present can only take the form of a violent divestment. And then there is the history yet to be born that in its transformative and revolutionary emergence will reread the present and make visible a different temporal and historical possibility that has nothing to do with the ravages and horrors of colonialism. But being a dialectician of experience, Fanon will not allow the new humanism to be born in immaculate transcendence of the colonialist situation. In his book Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience, Ato Sekyi-Otu captures this dramatic aspect of Fanon’s thought. From the beginning, the central question for Fanon was always that of releasing possibilities of human existence and history imprisoned by the colonization of experience and the racialization of consciousness. Accordingly, Fanon’s narrative enterprise will be haunted by this dual exigency: How can one hold in critical tension and relation the “absurd drama” of the colonial condition and the pristine vicissitudes of the human predicament which that “drama” seeks violently to suppress and usurp? How can one keep faith with that which is compellingly eccentric, while all the time remembering and envisaging that which is universally human, all too human? How can one convey the special and specific properties of the colonial world, with all its peculiar institutions of affective, communicative, socioeconomic and political relations, in a manner that recognizes in them signs of an “existential deviation” from human commonalities? By means of what narrative procedures would Fanon be able to bear witness at once to the pressing contingencies of lived history and to those archetypal formations of social being and consciousness forged by what on occasion he calls “History?”84

Sekyi-Otu is making the case that as a dialectician Fanon has to dwell in double consciousness, but dwell in it perspectivally. The holding together of the two in critical tension is not an end in itself, but an absolutely necessary ontological and epistemological precondition for the “release of pristine vicissitudes.” It is precisely because Fanon locates his epistemology in the lived moment that he has to keep faith and to bear witness, but not in a passive way. It is this rigorously ethical and existential manner of marking the untenable absurdity of the moment that will result in a dialectical transformation. But for that to happen, the subject has to dwell totally in the antagonism of the moment, that is, revisionism

85

86

has to embrace antagonism as process. It is quite revealing that Fanon should read the absurdities of colonial relations as signs of existential deviation from human commonalities. The horror of the situation is that the universal human horizon that Fanon is gesturing toward ethically and existentially is just not visible from within the absurd materiality of the colonized and racialized present. The very human commonalities in the name of which the human, the all too human universalism can be invoked are perceptible not as they are and should be, but rather as that undeviated human condition that can only be accessed by way of the existential deviation that the colonial world is all about. The ontology of a universal humanism has to be perceived both as a promise and a possibility in itself and as that possibility that is being denied by the absurd rationale of the colonial world. Why indeed does Sekyi-Otu use the term existential, and not, say, ideological or political in this context? Was Fanon a psychoanalytically oriented existentialist thinker? Yes. Is existentialism compatible with social revolution? Yes and no: depending on how one parses the meaning of existentialism within a larger continuum. The difficulty that thinkers like Fanon face is that of conjunctural articulation. Since they function on different registers and bring to bear on their one undivided project more than one passion and more than one form of expertise, they experience the challenge of enabling an ongoing conversation among the different registers. Are these registers (the existential, the psychoanalytic, the nationalist-humanist, the political revolutionary, the anticolonialist, the indigenous-populist) to be coordinated equally; or should they be operated by way of a hierarchical calculus that will oversee the overlaps and contradictions? Is Fanon primarily an existential thinker and therefore a political revolutionary; or is it the other way around? Unlike Bhabha, who is convinced that the politically programmatic thinker in Fanon short-circuits the radical long haul available to Fanon the psychoanalytic intellectual, Sekyi-Otu makes the case that any evaluation of Fanon’s thought has to take into account the constitutive contradictions that helped formulate Fanon’s agenda. I think that Sekyi-Otu’s reading does justice to the complexity of Fanon’s historico-existential situadedness, whereas Bhabha in his poststructuralization of Fanon delinks Fanon from the immanence of his sociopolitical imbrication in the violent anticolonial struggle and offers Fanon revisionism

a transcendent abode in the theoretical allegory of “pure becoming.” Here is Sekyi-Otu again. For the necessary condition for making a compelling case for Fanon’s originality, it seemed to me, was to secure and insulate the unique properties of the colonial experience from the generic properties of being human; indeed to place the latter in brackets, or rather to erect—irony of ironies—an epistemological apartheid between the two. As if to say that only in the aftermath of racial and national liberation would other stories (generic human stories) of bondage, conflict, injustice, and insurrection become at all possible. The result was a narrative caesura between “colonial history” and “human history,” as opposed to their complex, fugal interconnection.85

This is a brilliant reading for several reasons. First, it serves to decapitalize Existentialism into a historically specific existentialism. In other words, the existential thrust and pulsation of the history of the present would also have to be experienced as the thrust and pulsation of the history of the colonial present. The existential impulse thus cannot grant itself transcendence from its situatedness in the present as colonial. In this reading, the existential gets a double marking: a human possibility that becomes thinkable to the exact extent to which it is suppressed and violated in the present and all too colonial present. This way of proposing the problem makes room for the next and very important move: “irony of ironies—an epistemological apartheid between the two.” Second, Sekyi-Otu astutely recognizes that space of leverage in Fanon’s thinking that inaugurates an adversarial engagement with the colonizercolonized divide that has caused the violation of human possibilities and commonalities. The dispensation of apartheid is now being flung back on the colonizer by the colonized: but this retaliation is informed by a deeper knowledge of the human situation than is possible to the colonizer on the other side of the divide. This is the moment of critical revolutionary epistemological production: the moment at which the colonized subject proclaims to the world that what it knows is more profound, truer, more just, and more ethical than the invasive knowledge that the colonizer is master of. The colonized subject also takes pride in telling the world that despite having been brutalized and impoverished and unhomed by the regime of colonialist apartheid, it has the ethico-political courage and the epistemological brilliance as well revisionism

87

88

as perspectivism to produce a dialectically antagonistic way out of the binary trap and its seeming perpetuity. This is the insurrectionary moment that produces the theoretical and practical knowledge that there is no reciprocity—except in a purely formal or figural sense—between the colonizer and the colonized: there is only antagonism and asymmetry. Third, there is the recognition of the caesura that is not to be allegorized away into the zone of perennial instability. The polemical point of the caesura is to enable an oppositional understanding that the “complex, fugal interconnection” between “colonial history” and “human history” is a form of false consciousness that has to be torn down through revolutionary praxis. It is not that Sekyi-Otu is unaware of Bhabha’s and other postmodern and poststructuralist appropriations of Fanon. The real question is this: What is at stake in our return to Fanon? Is there anything worldly that is at stake, or is the return merely academic-theoretical-intellectual? How much has changed in the world that has taken place since Fanon; and have these diasporan, postnational, and “post-al” transformations really transcended that critical tension that animates Fanon’s thinking? I resolutely think not. Here is Sekyi-Otu again. A consistently postmodernist reading of Fanon would indeed renounce all dreams of restoring the postcolonial subject to some repressed “universality inherent in the human condition.” Life and politics in the postcolonial situation will have to go on, writes this celebrant of shattered ties, unanchored to any “sentimental promise of a humanistic ‘world of the You.’ ” There will have to be new formations of social and civic belonging that cannot be captured by the centralizing, cohering language of the nation and nationalist ideology. Is it not significant that Bhabha reads what Fanon evokes as the occasion of national culture—“this zone of occult instability where the people dwell”—is it not significant that Bhabha takes this constraining condition of transformative action to be the defining and perhaps the ineliminable way of being in the postcolonial world?86

Unlike Bhabha’s Fanon, Sekyi-Otu’s Fanon is one who has “foundational premises from which to rail, yell, and holler,” a Fanon “who has ideals to realize”: indeed a “Fanon in whom the humanist vocabulary was by no means an occasional lapse from the sturdy posture of a sophisticated nihilism; a Fanon for whom the raison d’être of racial and revisionism

national liberation was that it would ‘give back their dignity to all citizens, fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things, and create a prospect that is human because conscious and sovereign persons dwell therein.’ ”87 Here is how Sekyi-Otu reads the significance of the historical process of decolonization as enunciated by Fanon. Is it possible to impute to the story of decolonization a narrative structure: one that recognizes in it an intelligible process endowed with determinate causes and effects bearing the marks of their historicity—“le movement historicisant”—without embracing, through a simple inversion of the standpoint of immediate knowledge, an allegorical reading of postcolonial history as an instantiation of some transcendental history? This is our search for a method: a dialectical genealogy with normative commitments and trained to detect counterfeit and repressive universalisms, but also chastened by the postcolonial experience into a perpetual vigilance against the specious and convenient particularisms of the “national bourgeoise.” On the way to this discourse that is yet to be founded, we may be guided by a reading of The Wretched of the Earth as an exemplary phenomenology of the historical consciousness as it wrestles with the compelling claims of “immediate knowledge” and learns to see more intricate constellations of social and moral “truth.”88

Fanon’s lasting contribution to the movement of decolonization and to postcoloniality in general is his agentially ambivalent endorsement of history. To explain this a little more: his desire for a native and postcolonial agency does not simplify his suspicion of history or his resolve to look toward history as an answer only after he has posed it as a problem. Quite aware that the alignment of agency with history is neither natural nor a given, Fanon attempts ceaselessly to produce that alignment in the name of the people and in the name of the present. This project of alignment brings together the naked body of the native intellectual and the heart of the people. It is only when the project of postcolonial revisionism compels the native intellectual to see the blackness of his body and its irreducible blackness that the native is truly materialized and corporealized in tune with the people.89 Fanon’s deconstruction of the people-intellectual binarity is routed through his destabilization of the body-mind dualism. The native intellectual’s entry into the history of his people has two phases: first the negation, and then the revisionism

89

negation of the negation. Fanon’s struggle with doubleness and his efforts to transcend the doubleness without at the same time underestimating the complexity of the doubleness is quite poignant. It is not coincidental that Fanon’s rhetoric switches constantly between the register of resistance and affirmation, and that of trauma and remediation. While the former takes the form of a political manifesto, the latter sounds like a case study of a determinate pathology: This tearing away, painful and difficult though it may be, is however necessary. If it is not accomplished there will be serious psycho-affective injuries and the result will be individuals without an anchor, without a horizon, colorless, stateless, rootless—a race of angels. It will also be quite normal to hear certain natives declare, “I speak as a Senegalese and as a Frenchman . . .”. I speak as an Algerian and as a Frenchman. . . .”. The intellectual, who is Arab and French, or Nigerian and English, when he comes up against the need to take on two nationalities, chooses, if he wants to remain true to himself, the negation of one of these determinations. But most often, since they cannot or will not make a choice, such intellectuals gather together all the historical

90

determining factors which have conditioned them and take up a fundamentally “universal standpoint.” This is because the native intellectual has thrown himself greedily upon Western culture. Like adopted children who only stop investigating the new family framework at the moment when a minimum nucleus of security crystallizes in their psyche, the native intellectual will try to make European culture his own. He will not be content to get to know Rabelais and Diderot, Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe; he will bind them to his intelligence as closely as possible. (Wretched of the Earth, 218–19)

In all these passages the intellectual bears the brunt of Fanon’s satirical indignation. Is it possible that Fanon is guilty of romanticizing the people and where they are at? Are the people, who in a sense were less “seduced” by the dispositif of colonial modernity (they were merely the object-bodies of that apparatus), in a better position to lead the revolution than the intellectual who is operating in a neocolonial mode? Why is it that the native people have not thrown themselves greedily on Western culture? Fanon understands that it is the intellectual who pretends to operate at the level of culture and of reason and epistemology is more vulnerable to colonialist brainwashing than the supposedly revisionism

backward people. The ambivalence of the intellectual and his or her proclivity to modes of universalization and his or her reluctance to let go of occidental determination for fear of losing out in universal currency: all these are read by Fanon as symptoms that cohere into a pathology, into a syndrome. And yet Fanon is not willing to dispense with the category of the intellectual altogether. The intellectual is submitted to a ruthless revelation: The intellectual who through the medium of culture has filtered into Western civilization, who has managed to become part of the body of European culture—in other words who has exchanged his own culture for another— will come to realize that the cultural matrix, which now he wishes to assume since he is anxious to appear original, can hardly supply any figureheads which will bear comparison with those, so many in number and so great in prestige, of the occupying power’s civilization. History, of course, though nevertheless written by Westerners and to serve their purposes, will be able to evaluate from time to time certain periods of the African past. But, standing face to face with his country at the present time, and observing clearly and objectively the events of today throughout the continent, which he wants to make his own, the intellectual is terrified by the void, the degradation, and the savagery he sees there. Now he feels that he must get away from the white culture. He must seek his culture elsewhere, anywhere at all; and if he fails to find the substance of culture of the same grandeur and scope as displayed by the ruling power, the native intellectual will very often fall back upon emotional attitudes and will develop a psychology which is dominated by exceptional sensitivity and susceptibility. This withdrawal, which is due in the first instance to a begging of the question in his internal behavior mechanism and his own character, brings out, above all, a reflex and contradiction which is muscular. (Wretched of the Earth, 219–20)

The figure we get here of the intellectual is that of a comic-tragic figure on the run: unsure, opportunistic, pretentious, vainglorious, paranoid, and ultimately someone who is so inevitably caught up in the play of appearances and realities that he is incapable of connecting with the criteria that will help in the differentiation of the legitimate from the illegitimate.90 Always reactive, the intellectual runs from one binary extreme to another instrumentalized by a logic that he cannot read diagnostically. In other words, his very black body is nothing but revisionism

91

92

a shuttling symptom between treacherous and seductive sovereignties. He cannot tell if the void and the degradation that he sees are real or if it is a hallucination caused by Western indoctrination. He cannot vouch for an African reality that ought to but does not exist for him. Everything about his behavior is exaggerated, hysterical, and inflated as he moves between a debilitating paranoia and an equally worrisome megalomania. His search for his own culture and his own people is not coded in its own terms of affirmation, but rather in terms of flight and escape.91 Like a patient afflicted by bipolar disorder, he viscerally shuns the colonizer’s culture (the very culture that he had internalized till just now) just as he viscerally wants to belong to his own culture that he cannot yet recognize. Bemused and besotted by the logic of binarity, he remains incapable of articulating his own truth or that of his people except as a pathological and paranoid function of the very binarity that has him in thrall. His search for authenticity and legitimacy is both topic and atopic; any place, some place, no place, anywhere at all. He is literally in need of an identity fix. Tantalized still by the grandeur and the pomp of the very thing that he rejects, the native intellectual dreams omniscience in the name of nescience and vice versa. It is quite characteristic of Fanon that he sums up all of this behavior as “muscular,” that is, as physiological and thus inescapably inscribed in the body as reaction. In other words, this is an unbearably schizophrenic body whose impassioned and vehement mode of existence lacks in a referent: a body drowning in its own chronic immanence, a body in search of a corresponding brain. Fanon literally caricatures the wrong revisionist project that the native intellectual is drawn to: a project “that sets a high value on the customs, traditions, and the appearances of his people.” The intellectual’s “inevitable, painful experience only seems to be a banal search for exoticism” whereby “the sari becomes sacred, and shoes that come from Paris or Italy are left off in favor of pampooties, while suddenly the language of the ruling power is felt to burn your lips.” Fanon goes on to lampoon this entire phase: “Finding your fellow countrymen sometimes means in this phase to will to be a nigger, a Negro cur, just the sort of nigger like all other niggers but a real nigger, a Negro cur, just the sort of nigger that the white man wants you to be” (Wretched of the Earth, 221). We must keep in mind that Fanon, as does Gramsci in the context of revisionism

subalternity, talks about the different phases that postcolonial nationalism has to go through before it arrives legitimately. Having produced an excoriating critique of a meretricious return to the past and to the people, Fanon does present a moment of transformative recognition: the moment at which revisionism cathects with the right narrative. The culture that the intellectual leans toward is often no more than a stock of particularisms. He wishes to attach himself to the people; but instead only catches hold of their outer garments. And these outer garments are merely the reflection of a hidden life, teeming and perpetually in motion. That extremely obvious objectivity which seems to characterize a people is in fact only the inert, already forsaken result of frequent, and not always very coherent, adaptations of a much more fundamental substance which itself is continually being renewed. The man of culture, instead of setting out to find this substance, will let himself be hypnotized by these mummified fragments which because they are static are in fact symbols of negation and outworn contrivances. Culture has never the translucidity of custom; it abhors all simplification. In its essence it is opposed to custom, for custom is always the deterioration of a culture. The desire to attach oneself to tradition or bring abandoned traditions to life again does not only mean going against the current of history but also opposing one’s own people. (Wretched of the Earth, 223–24; emphasis added)

These are powerfully prophetic statements that anticipate the ways in which the native will fetishize rather than love and respect his culture, worship the parts and miss the whole, sacralize fragments rather than live the whole, stereotype his own culture on the surface rather than hear its deeper protean rhythms and flows. What eludes the native intellectual’s erroneously motivated search is the simple yet profound reality that there is an objective African reality that requires neither authentication and worship nor defense and apology. Such an objective African substance that keeps working on itself to produce transformations of itself has very little to do with the delirious gaze of the native intellectual who needs African reality exclusively and possessively as a remedy to his Western blindness. African objective reality demands a different perspective, a different gaze that the native intellectual cannot as yet embody or provide. Right in the middle of the passage quoted above there is a moment of drastic reversal of direction: a change that revisionism

93

94

Fanon does not signal or signpost. Fanon’s mode of writing here is ventriloqual, as though he did not want to differentiate the different voices that are speaking consecutively and in quick succession. Here again I find myself wishing that Fanon would use diacritical marks to differentiate the culture in the phrase “the man of culture” from the culture that functions in the very next sentence. The “man of culture” is the “oreo-cookie” and the “brown babu/saheb,” whereas the other culture is the culture to come: a culture that is forged in the heart of a truly legitimate postcolonial national people. Fanon’s writings make it unequivocally clear that culture constitutes a crucial category in the shaping of a people, and furthermore he has no hesitation in valorizing culture in the name of national consciousness: “If culture is the expression of national consciousness, I will not hesitate to affirm that in the case with which we are dealing it is the national consciousness which is the most elaborate form of culture” (Wretched of the Earth, 247). The question for Fanon is to specify which determines which. Is national consciousness an a priori that prescribes culture, or is national consciousness the organic outgrowth of a people’s culture? I would think that Fanon would opt for the latter. A national culture is not a folklore, nor an abstract populism that believes it can discover the people’s true nature. It is not made up of the inert dregs of gratuitous actions, that is to say actions that are less and less attached to the ever-present reality of the people. A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and praise the action through which that people has created itself in existence. A national culture in underdeveloped countries should therefore take its place at the very heart of the struggle for freedom which these countries are carrying on. (Wretched of the Earth, 233)

Fanon is careful not to conflate tradition with the flow of history or equate the advocacy of tradition with an uncritical affirmation of “one’s own people.” It is important to Fanon that a certain complexity be maintained so that culture may not degenerate into the platitudes of custom and its banal repetitions. Fanon is rigorous in his insistence that the moment of autocritique be incorporated into the phase of populist affirmation. Now that he or she is born again, the native/national intellectual has earned the right to function as a critic of his or her own revisionism

people and establish his or her agency as the “permanent persuader,” to use Gramsci’s terms.92 Like W. E. B. Du Bois and Gramsci, Fanon makes room for the sphere of thought and its relative autonomy. It is within this sphere that the people and the intellectuals make common cause and forge common ground. What is intriguing, however, is the pedagogical and the performative status of the people. As the last passage amply demonstrates, Fanon is no fan of folklore and its modes of authenticity. He is interested in the self-fashioning of a people toward a legitimate postcolonial national consciousness. I would even say that Fanon is not so much interested in the task of authentic representation that would discover the heart and the nature of the people, but rather in the project of producing the people. When the people produce themselves as postcolonial national subjects, they are in fact creating the very subjectivity that they want to be, rather than representing a nature that is already there. The presentness of the people is right on, but this presence has to be elaborated and produced at the level of thought by national culture. Rejecting both spontaneism and an immanent folkloric authenticity, Fanon’s thinking reaches toward a mode of self-reflexive praxis that justifies, celebrates, and legitimates the birth of a decolonized people. Culture becomes the thought of the action, that is, the efforts that decolonized the people and gave them their freedom. Thus the realm of cultural thought is autonomous, but relative to the victory that made such a culture possible. Now the intellectual is no more a “man of culture” who worships a culture not his own, but a practitioner of thought who speaks with the people from the heart of their newly won independent existence. Says Fanon, “The colonized man who writes for his people ought to use the past with the intention of opening the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope” (Wretched of the Earth, 232). This statement triangulates an ethic as the basis for the look back into history: the usability of the past in the name of a future, historicizing as an invitation to action based on hope, and the bringing together of the I with the we: “We must not therefore be content with delving into the past of a people in order to find coherent elements which will counteract colonialism’s attempt to falsify and harm. We must work and fight with the same rhythm as the people to construct the future and to prepare the ground where vigorous shoots are already springing up” (Wretched revisionism

95

96

of the Earth, 233). The delving into the past, which certainly bears a resemblance to the dive into the wreck, has to go beyond a merely symmetrical refutation of colonialism toward a fellow-heartedness with the people and their rhythms. Revisionism has a theoretical or a metafunction in Fanon’s imagination; and this function has to do with preparing the ground, that is, with coordinating a temporality that will be organic with the shoots that are already in emergence. Fanon here is defining temporality along Foucauldian lines as a regime (though I suspect that Foucault may not have preferred the natural organicity of the shoots metaphor) and as a kind of space or habitat that will be conducive for some growths and not for others. It is not enough for the people to have spoken and acted and for the shoots to have sprung. Those declarations and actions and emergences need to theorize into existence the right milieu in which they can develop in their own way. Without such a careful theoretical production, the populist verities of a postcolonial nationalism might find themselves growing in a soil that is still neocolonial; and this tragedy has to be avoided at all costs. As a critic both of spontaneism and essentialism, Fanon sees the need for a relatively autonomous intellectual labor. In other words, the phenomenon of emerging sprouts does not in and of itself guarantee that the right ground has been prepared. Intellectual movement, while in alignment and harmony with the rhythm of the people, cannot afford to get entirely exhausted by the rhythms themselves. It almost sounds, given Fanon’s use of words such as rhythms and muscular, as though he is thinking of legitimate postcolonial nationalisms in psychosomatic terms. The psychic and the somatic elements are identified discretely even as they are seen to work together as a unified project. The mere fact that the psychic has somatic roots does not mean that the psychic is the somatic. In much the same way as a sophisticated post-Gramscian Marxism would acknowledge the connectedness of the superstructure to the base without at the same time disallowing the capacity of the superstructure to translate the base to itself, Fanon’s revolutionary thought locates intellectuality in a double relationship with the rhythms of the people. The origins of the intellectual are in the people, for intellectuals are people too; but again like Gramsci, Fanon would affirm that some of the people will need to function as organic intellectuals to prepare the ground toward the right kind of yield and harvest. revisionism

The declared telos and ethic of Fanon’s revisionism is the nation, a point that is given little or no relevance in Bhabha’s reading. Bhabha privileges the psychoanalytic complexity of Black Skin, White Masks and overlooks the movement of Fanon’s thought into The Wretched of the Earth where all the problems, ambivalences, and crises of psychological subject formation are seen in a relationship of essential tension with the political and cultural movement toward national consciousness. In Bhabha’s hyperbolic poststructuralist reading, Fanon is always already disseminated and split. But I would certainly claim, with Bhabha, that there is cause and room in Fanon’s work for poststructuralist elaborations; yet the question is, at what cost? In this context, Stuart Hall’s reading of Bhabha’s reading of Fanon appears particularly compelling. Bhabha acknowledges that, again and again, Fanon falls back too hastily onto Sartrean and Hegelian ground, is too driven by the demand for “more insurgent answers, more immediate identifications,” too hungry for an “existential humanism.” Bhabha’s real argument is, I believe, more complex. It is that Fanon constantly and implicitly poses issues and raises questions in ways which cannot be adequately addressed within the conceptual framework into which he often seeks to resolve them; and that a more satisfactory and complex “logic” is often implicitly threaded through the interstices of his text, which he does not always follow through, but which we can discover by reading him “against the grain.” In short, Bhabha produces a symptomatic reading of Fanon’s text. The question for us, then, is whether we should limit such a “symptomatic reading”? With what authority, but more significantly, with what effects, do we actively appropriate Fanon’s work against the textual grain?93

Hall, too, valorizes a certain poststructuralization of Fanon; but his reasons for doing so are different from Bhabha’s. Here, my position is closer to Hall’s than to Bhabha’s. The way I would put it is that Fanon is concerned not to simplify the complexity of the symptom in the name of an easy and transparent cure. On the other hand, he is insistent that in some radical and fundamental way the profundity of the symptom should exceed the instrumentalist efficacy of the cure. In Bhabha’s reading, it is the political in Fanon that short-circuits the interminability of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist complexity. Insurgency and immediate fixes are pathologized in Bhabha’s reading as symptoms of revisionism

97

98

a certain lack of patience, even of nerve. The political horizon is the horizon to which Fanon capitulates unfortunately, and in the process underperforms psychoanalytically, epistemologically, and theoretically. The acknowledgment of immediate insurgencies to Bhabha constitutes a hallmark of theoretical weakness, and of the loss of epistemological stamina. In the noncoincident relationship between the historicity of political struggle and that of “analysis terminable,” Bhabha assumes that it is the political that has to do the catching up all the time. Insurgency militates against deeper negotiations, and immediate recognitions create necessity where there is only ongoing contingency. What Bhabha does not do is to invoke a constitutively tensional relationship between politics and epistemology. Rather, he takes the radicality of psychoanalytic, posthumanist thought as a given, that is, he assumes it outside the constraints of dialectical or even differential relationships. Bhabha’s reading also, and this is my symptomatic reading of Bhabha, is immediate and insurgent in its own way, that is, on behalf of the Lacanian-poststructuralist agenda, but such an immediate urgency has now become part of a metatheoretical orthodoxy that is not available for immediate or diagnostic political identification. My point is that what Fanon is asking for is a perennial political revolution in which neither the political nor the epistemological can arrogate to itself the privilege of a deeper radicality. The political becomes the epistemological within an ongoing dialectical transformation. Hall’s reading invokes a different set of terms: the language of questions and issues, answers and resolutions. Fanon raises questions and issues that in their complexity demand a metachange or a revolution of the second order; but perhaps they stop short. Hall’s way of putting it does not predetermine which register will be the question and which the answer. Within the heat of the transformative dialectical movement, it is possible that there will be times at which the answer will be epistemological and the question political, and other conjunctures at which the issue might be epistemological and the resolution political. What the black man wants is a fluid dialectical continuum between the two poles of thought. Hall also raises important questions about the authority of our reading of Fanon against the grain. Why are we reading Fanon now, and what can it mean to read him now? In importing poststructuralism into Fanon’s thought, are we guilty of reading him against the grain? revisionism

But then one could ask whether even a reading with the grain after all is not a reading as well? There are two challenges, posed by Hall as limit questions. In the name of what authority are we allowed to limit the extent of any symptomatic reading? Are we violating Fanon when we read him against the grain? What is the hermeneutic ethic that should be practiced here? Should Fanon be protected from the transgressive historicity of our reading, or should we protect our freedom to interpret from undue interference by Fanon’s originary intentionality? Furthermore, is our project the same as Fanon’s; and should it be?94 These questions, it seems to me, are best raised by way of Fanon’s critical perspective on nationalism. Here again, Hall provides us with an interesting opening. The nation is still a palpable, complex, and contradictory reality. We can’t think about the present conjuncture without thinking a bit more than we have about the question of what constitutes the national in relation to the international. Why is it that Fanon could not let go, subscribe to or celebrate this question unequivocally? What is he arguing with in his passages on Negritude? He’s arguing with Sartre about whether the notion of an empty international humanism is viable any longer when forms of political struggle consistently take the national form. He can’t get past the fact and keeps changing his mind about it. That’s what takes us back to this question of the nature of the socalled international in an era when nations still persist, which seems to have emerged so easily from a negative to a positive register through exactly the ambivalent middle point with which it really engages.95

Hall astutely points out a crucial ambivalence regarding the nation form and its ability to generate an international humanism from within and beyond itself. In a broad way, this anxiety was shared by all international communists who could not be utterly confident that a proletarian internationalism would indeed emerge from nationalism and that nationalism could be dispensed with as a stage en route. Here the relationship of postcolonial emergences to international Marxism and communism is a bit tricky.96 Postcolonial visions, even as they are empowered by international communism and Marxism, do not quite toe the line, simply because they, unlike European left-wing nationalisms, are genuinely concerned about the Eurocentrism that is both separable and not separable from the international Marxist vision.97 To put in overtly literary revisionism

99

100

critical terms: it is a matter of the power relationship between the tenor and the vehicle. In the phrase “international humanism,” which term is the tenor and which the vehicle; which the instrument, which the message; which the philosophical burden and which the here-and-now political/historical mediation; which the vision and which the motor? Can there be other kinds of worldwide humanisms that are not based on or reduced to the valences and registers fostered first by nationalism and then by internationalism? To what extent do the mediations themselves constitute, shape, regiment, and ultimately interpellate the nature and the shape of the humanism to come? There are at least two ways to launch this analysis. One could either think of humanism as an a priori to be produced by way of the nationalist internationalist peregrinations; or one could think of humanism as the transcendent ethic that guides and directs the political immanence of nationalisms and internationalisms.98 As Hall would have it, Fanon is indeed agonizing over the ethico-political agency of a postcolonial nationalism. Will it deliver both in the here and now and in the long haul? Here is Fanon: “This new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for others. It is prefigured in the objectives and methods of the conflict” (Wretched of the Earth, 246). And he goes on thus: And now it is time to denounce certain Pharisees. National claims, it is here and there stated, are a phase that humanity has left behind. It is the day of great concerted actions, and retarded nationalists ought in consequence set their mistakes aright. We however consider that the mistake, which may have very serious consequences, lies in wishing to skip the national period. If culture is the expression of national consciousness, I will not hesitate to affirm that in the case with which we are dealing it is the national consciousness which is the most elaborate form of culture. (Wretched of the Earth, 246–47)

Despite my solicitude for Fanon and despite my concern that my reading should not fall a victim to the hubris of knowing more than somebody from fifty years ago could possibly have known, I must say that I find these claims of Fanon to be gullible and supremely unself-reflexive. In this connection, I must say that I am not persuaded by Neil Lazarus’s distinction between nationalism and nationalitarianism.99 How can I revisionism

not juxtapose the insights of Immanuel Wallerstein’s and Étienne Balibar’s thoroughgoing critique of nationalism, and Partha Chatterjee’s as well, with Fanon’s wide-eyed optimism on behalf of nationalism?100 What we now know historically, as Wallerstein and Balibar point out, and what was intrinsic to nationalism from its very inception, is that nationalism does not function as a way of respecting itself and others. On the contrary, the nationalist ethic is premised on a fierce and implacable us-them mindset that in the very name of a common nationality will other the national claims of another and different people. There is nothing in nationalism, philosophically and politically, that aligns it with anything other than a competition toward dominance. The nation form is inscribed to be the ultimate carrier of a historiography whose very objective is to monumentalize us-them divides. But Fanon is indeed right to tap us on the shoulder and say, “Not so fast, my friends.” Reality today looks exactly the way he saw it then: nationalism is alive and kicking, in fact, more effectively and powerfully in the pulses and vibrations of the developed nations. Fanon’s problem could be stated thus: how to reconcile the bivalence of nationalism? A resistant or decolonizing nationalism cannot afford to acquiesce in the lie propagated by the dominant, metropolitan discourse that nationalism is dead. In a sense, the strategies of postcolonial emergence are “prefigured in the objectives and methods of the conflict.” A nationalism forged thus is successful in the immediate programmatic of political decolonization, but will it go beyond that narrowly defined political teleology? Will it be, to bring on Chatterjee’s discourse, anything but derivative?101 What Fanon perhaps does and does not see is that there is a deeper logic of dominance underwriting the immediate struggle for independence and decolonization that is played out on the terrain of hegemony and hegemonization. Is Fanon really confident that the application of postcolonial agency to the nationalist form will be able to invoke the other humanism? Or is another Fanon lurking underneath, the Fanon who is diagnosed into existence by Bhabha’s reading, the one onto the fact that the nationalist internationalist game can further one and one mentality alone: the dominance of the winner-take-all model? Bhabha is right to focus autonomously on the significance of culture in Fanon’s militant postcolonial nationalism, for Fanon does give revisionism

101

culture pride of place as he develops his theory of the nation. This is not the occasion for me to get into an extended study of the general relationship of culture to political economy, so I will focus on the agency of culture in the context of the emergence of national consciousness. Can culture be a significant expression and index of political being? Or is culture always a realm of submissiveness, docility, domestication, and complicity? What should the scale of culture be: regional, local, national, international, global? What is the optimal scale of viability for culture? If culture is not just folklore, what is it then, both as worldview/epistemology and as the basis for populist praxis and self-understanding? Why is folklore alone not enough? Is folklore to be sublated into national culture; and if so, is such an Aufhebung (sublation) reliable? Finally, which comes first: national awareness or culture? Does culture follow on the footsteps to fulfill and complete the implicit macrology of the political revolution; or does culture, at the symbolic and superstructural level, produce and shape national consciousness? Here again is Fanon on the subject. 102

For culture is the first expression of a nation, the expression of its preferences, of its taboos and patterns. It is at every stage of the whole of society that other taboos, values, and patterns are formed. A national culture is the sum total of these appraisals; it is the result of internal and external tensions exerted over society as a whole and also at every level of that society. In the colonial situation, culture, which is doubly deprived of the support of the nation and the state, falls away and dies. The condition for its existence is therefore national liberation and the renaissance of the state. The nation is not only the condition of culture, its fruitfulness, its continuous renewal, and its deepening. It is also a necessity. It is the fight for national existence which sets culture moving and opens to it the doors of creation. Later on it is the nation, which will ensure the conditions and framework necessary to culture. The nation gathers together the various indispensable elements necessary for the creation of a culture, those elements which alone can give it credibility, validity, life, and creative power. In the same way it is its national character that will make such a culture open to other cultures and which will enable it to influence and permeate other cultures. A nonexistent culture can hardly be expected to have bearing on reality, or to influence reality. The first necessity is the re-establishment of the nation in order

revisionism

to give life to national culture in the strictly biological sense of the phrase. (Wretched of the Earth, 244–45)

Fanon then goes on to put together a string of driving questions. “Is there a suspension of culture during the conflict? Is the national struggle an expression of culture? Finally, ought one to say that the battle for freedom however fertile a posteriori with regard to culture is in itself a negation of culture? In short, is the struggle for liberation a cultural phenomenon or not?” (Wretched of the Earth, 245). What then happens to culture, according to Fanon, when it becomes national? Is culture something like a creeper that requires the scaffolding of the nation form? If that is the case, the nation form cannot be intrinsic to or organic to the heart of culture. It would rather function like a protection from without: in other words, there would be no umbilical, constitutive, or conatal relationship between culture and the morphology of the nation. Or is Fanon suggesting, reminiscent of Gramsci on the relationship of subalternity to history, that culture may well have existed experientially, but that it comes into its own only when it is wedded to the national form? Do the people arrange and sanction such a union? Are the temporal terrains of culture continuous, coterminous, or disjunct, and merely adjacent with respect to the morphology of the nation? Clearly Fanon is not naive enough to suggest that the only difference between the colonial state and the state under postcolonial conditions is that the colonial state did not allow native culture to survive whereas conditions would change drastically with the emergence of the postcolonial state? What then is the connection between the state and popular uprising, or what David Lloyd would call “nationalisms against the state?”102 Furthermore, why should culture rely so exclusively on state support and patronage? Is Fanon of the opinion that without state endorsement and legitimation civil society will forever remain prehegemonic? How is the representation of culture to itself by way of the gaze of the state related to the representative and representational relationship between culture and its people? To put it a little more polemically, is culture the people’s, or are the people the possession of culture? It is indeed curious and even appalling that Fanon makes no distinction between “national liberation” and “the renaissance of the state.” Perhaps I am being harsh to Fanon in not being sufficiently mindful

revisionism

103

104

of his time period. But what could he mean by the renaissance of the state? From a very general semantic perspective, any renaissance would point to a rebirth of something within a history of the same. Thus a renaissance betokens not ruptures and paradigm shifts, but a significant and life-enhancing rebirth that in fact ensures continuity. A number of questions arise here. Were Algeria, India, Kenya, and Nigeria already “nations” even when they were colonized, or is “nationality” something born in the anticolonial struggle? Were the Moguls, the Ibos, the Shona, the Ndebele, and the Yorubas nation builders? Is nation merely a nomenclature that constitutes a cosmetic translation of precolonial realities and repressed realities under colonialism, or, does nation function as a radical and categorical transformation of earlier realities? Where exactly does liberation fit in all this? To what extent is precolonial reality marred, scarred, and forever misrecognized by the colonialist interregnum? Is the birth of the nation the unavoidable result of a forced miscegenation? Does the nation form herald the freedom of the colonized, or does it announce decolonization from the colonizer? Are the two the same? Fanon touches on, but does not develop what it means for the decolonized African peoples to set up their own state. He does not directly identify the agential workings of postcolonial peoples on the state as a form of derivative discourse or as an act of signification that makes something other its own. What then is so wonderful about the renaissance of the state in the name of the people? How different are the valences of this achievement from the joy felt by the slave when he or she occupied the seat of the master? Is this an instance of decolonization fueled exclusively by a ressentiment whose only driving force is the desire to enjoy the symptom of the other as one’s own: of in fact surrendering to the epistemological alterity of the symptom now that the symptom has been depoliticized by the act of liberation? In other words, is Fanon supporting a postcolonial scenario in which the future of the postcolonial state will forever be a symptom of its desire to remain viable and respectable in the gaze of the erstwhile other—but no more “erstwhile” since the now independent Algeria, Nigeria, and India can claim a relationship of equal brotherhood and sisterhood with England and France? I am reminded of the famous and oft-quoted speech made by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, at the moment of inderevisionism

pendence, in which he talks passionately about the tryst that India had made with the world.103 There is a double synchronicity at work here: India is meeting both with itself and with the world at the same time, by the same clock, and on the same calendar. According to Nehru, what had come in the place of India’s free negotiations and dialogues with the rest of the world was the dire fact of its colonization. Now that it is decolonized and a free nation-state, those free conversations can again happen, and its being-for-itself and being-for-the world can now be coordinated as expressions of each other.104 But one of course has to be a nation to enjoy this two-in-one blessing. Fanon makes a very similar, almost identical claim when he states confidently that “it is its national character that will make such a culture open to other cultures and which will enable it to influence and permeate other cultures” (Wretched of the Earth, 245). In other words, Tamil, Ibo, and Yoruba cultures cannot be part of a global conversation unless they are already prefigured as part of Indian or Nigerian culture. To ask a crude question: Is this simultaneous nationalization and internationalization a good thing or a bad thing? Is there the pathos of naïveté in the assumption that the same gaze will be protective of intranational, national, and international interests? Is this moment of the usurpation of the use value of a people to themselves by the exchange value of their international vendibility also a moment that ordains that the postcolonial people’s being for themselves has to be always certified and approved by a blueprint of their being for others in the international continuum that is, needless to say, structured in dominance? One can sense Fanon scratching his head over two interrelated but nonidentical questions: “Who and what should we be?” and “What will work for us?” If the temporality of the national is both the guarantor of an effective history of the present and a desirable futurity, what then has happened to the several traces of the past? Has some sort of a critical inventory been compiled, with relative adjustments, authentications, and adjudications made among the traces? Have all the traces been preserved in their extant forms; or is it the case that only some traces have been sublated toward the present and the future? Have other traces been left behind either because they are unworthy and/or inassimilable with the new national path taken? My question here is twofold: What does Fanon know and what does he believe? The predictable next question revisionism

105

is: How are his knowledge and belief related? If it is the case, whether it is in the context of antipatriarchal, antiracist, or anticolonialist revisionisms, that the reality of the past is both objective and usable, both archival and polemically susceptible, then how does Fanon direct and motivate his historiographic revisionism? What does he need to know so that he can believe in the past as a source for present use and future generation? To what extent will he allow his need to believe to mystify the reality of what is actually there? This is where the postmodern and the postcolonial meet uneasily in Fanon’s theater of thought: the postcolonial political necessity insisting on the need for transcendent legitimation, and the postmodern refusing such a ground.105 Clearly, one of the motivations behind revisionism is to bring a certain repressed past to life and make it present. The objective here is to recreate those traditional continuities that had been disjoined and amputated by the ravages of colonialism and to integrate them with the postcolonial present. To quote Fanon again: The claim to a national culture in the past does not only rehabilitate that na-

106

tion and serve as a justification for the hope of a future national culture. In the sphere of psycho-affective equilibrium it is responsible for an important change in the native. Perhaps we have not sufficiently demonstrated that colonialism is not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and the future of a dominated country. Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today. (Wretched of the Earth, 210)

Having said that, Fanon also gives us concrete historical examples in which a people now retell their old stories within a transformed temporality. On another level, the oral tradition—stories, epics, and songs of the people— which formerly were filed away as set pieces are now beginning to change. The storytellers who used to relate inert episodes now bring them alive and introduce into them modifications which are increasingly fundamental. There is a tendency to bring conflicts up to date and to modernize the kinds of struggle which the stories evoke, together with the names of heroes and

revisionism

the types of weapons. The method of allusion is more and more widely used. The formula “This all happened long ago” is substituted with that of “What we are going to speak of happened somewhere else, but it might well have happened here today, and it might happen tomorrow.” The example of Algeria is significant in this context. From 1952–53 on, the storytellers, who were before that time stereotyped and tedious to listen to, completely overturned their traditional models of storytelling and the contents of their tales. Their public, which was formerly scattered, reappeared: it became an authentic form of entertainment which took on once more a cultural value. Colonialism made no mistake when from 1955 on it proceeded to arrest these storytellers systematically. (Wretched of the Earth, 240–41)

What Fanon is attempting in these passages, literally, is nothing short of a preposterous reading of postcolonial temporality.106 He is literally discovering a past and a form of psycho-historical anteriority to be used in the present.107 He audaciously makes the claim that there was a precultural nationhood in the colonies: not communities, not tribes, not ethnic, folk, or other forms of communitarian culture. He is indeed claiming that there was a sense of national culture in the past. This seems to be as much of a polemical truth claim as it is objective; perhaps more conative than cognitive. It is not clear to me here if national in the precolonial context means, or could mean, the same thing as the national that comes with and after colonialism. What is very clear, however, is that Fanon realizes the irreducible importance of naming and evoking the future in the present by way of recalling and reanimating a certain past. Fanon realizes that without roots in the past, the present makes no sense, and the future becomes unthinkable. It is clear that his nationalism is intended to be organically continuous with the soil and a carefully invoked past. He is also clear-sighted and propagandist enough to appeal to the “sphere of psycho-affective equilibrium”: and how can he not as a freedom fighter who is also a psychoanalytic thinker. It is as though through an act of solicitous didacticism he is taking care of both temporalities: the political and the psychic. At any rate, the native has to be changed, debrained and dewhitewashed, and restored back to his or her condition of faith and understanding of that precolonial “national” culture.108 The rightful contents are now put back in the native’s brain, and the work of the dialectic begins to create anew what was destroyed,

revisionism

107

reidentifies what is redeemable and what is not, and delineates back into life that which was distorted. One can clearly see the connection between Fanon’s dive into the past and that of Adrienne Rich.

108

My interpretation of Fanon is that his use of the term the dialectic is both Hegelian-Sartrean and Marxian. There is a sense in which the psychiatrist in Fanon succumbs to the temporality of the Hegelian dialectic that supposedly moves phenomenologically in tune with the spirit, and therefore does not explicitly raise the issue of how the temporality of the dialectic is antagonistically historicized. It is also well known that Marx, by standing Hegelian dialectic on its head, historicizes its temporality and creates room for conflict and contradiction, as well as for the emergence of class as such and class as agency in the march from necessity to freedom. What is interesting to me is the manner in which Fanon’s invocation of the dialectic as the temporality of the present seeks to have it both ways: a phenomenological temporality and the historicity of agential conflict and struggle. Influenced profoundly at the level of philosophy by the Hegelian thesis of the master-slave relationship, and yet supremely dissatisfied with the master-slave binary when it is applied to the colonial situation, Fanon is in an agonizing dilemma. In Stuart Hall’s words, for “Fanon, it is the fundamental inequality, the lack of all reciprocity inscribed in the positions of master and slave, when read in the colonial relation, which opens the necessity for the slave’s struggle to death—a theme which comes to dominate Fanon’s later work.” Observing that “Fanon explicitly marks his difference from a general Hegelian ontology,” Hall goes on to say that for Fanon, “the Negro ‘slave’ has never struggled to the death with the master, or staked his life. He has been given freedom, which is, in reality, nothing but the freedom to ‘assume the attitude of the master,’ to eat at his table.” “Once again, then,” Hall concludes, “the colonial relation has interposed a specificity which deflects the Hegelian master/slave dialectic (just as, earlier, it inflected the Lacanian ‘mirror phase’) in a new direction.”109 I am suggesting that the difference between a generalized Hegelian ontology and the highly specific colonizer-colonized relation is the difference between temporality and historicity. I would go further than Hall and Judith Butler and Bhabha and claim that even Hegelian onrevisionism

tology works on a specific historical register. But such a functioning is disavowed by a philosophy that will not thematize its worldliness and its rootedness in the politico-historical conditions of its production. In other words, Hegel, despite his philosophical virtuosity, is functioning as a traditional intellectual as he rigorously subserves reasons of state. To put it even more explicitly, there are two binary scenarios in Hegelian ontology: the Master-Slave relationship and the master-slave relationship. The dialectic of phenomenological becoming makes sure that history is always already sublated in the name of the spirit to be. As a result of this Hegelian theodicy, the specificity of a particular master-slave relationship is instantly allegorized; and the immanent contradictions within that specific situation are justified figurally in the name of life and death. Fanon’s reading that within the Hegelian dialectic the master and slave recognize themselves as mutually recognizing each other does not really do much to help us understand the binary colonial relationship that is structured in dominance. The temporality of the Hegelian dialectic presents us the picture of the master-slave as a historical freeze, as a kind of tableau vivant consecrated by philosophical thought. I would argue strongly that the risking of life by which freedom is to be gained is a profound and hapless misrecognition of the desire of the freedom fighter under colonialism. We need to keep in mind that the Hegelian solution that Fanon flirts with, a solution that will supposedly go beyond the abject condition of being conferred freedom by the master, is irrelevant to the project of decolonization. We must remember that Hegel is not saying by any means necessary including violence and the killing of the colonizer. What Hegel is prescribing for the slave is something worse than bondage, that is, an internalization of the master’s noble, hyperbolic, and superordinate contempt for life itself. The slave is expected to transcend his or her historical conditions and assume the master’s contempt for life, that is, a contempt fueled by excessive freedom. The master is so free as not to care for life, whereas the lowly slave is bowed down and obsessed with life. To put it in Žižekian terms, the slave becomes the symptom, that is, he or she is embodied as the symptom, even as he or she cannot speak for it. The symptom is both pathologized and glorified simultaneously by binary thought. The answer must come from the body of the symptom: but the representation of the symptom is constrained to find its voice in the potential revisionism

109

110

freedom as envisioned by the master. It is as though the slave consents to be the symptom on behalf of all humanity even as he or she is disallowed the prerogative to read him- or herself as symptom. The freedom, spoken for by the master, would thus have it both ways: to pathologize the symptom qua symptom and at the same time sublate the symptom as knowledge without the consent of the body that historicizes and instantiates the symptom qua symptom. This is clearly an aristocratization and a spiritualization, and ergo a depoliticization, of the question “What does the slave want?” (certainly not “work” as the path toward freedom). Such a solution achieves a double effect: (1) it depoliticizes and dehistoricizes the reality that the master’s and the slave’s interests are mutually exclusive; and (2) it redeems the temporality of the binary structure while at the same time glorifying death in the name of the master’s freedom. The salvation offered to the slave is the permission to chant, “The Master is dead. Long live the Master.”110 I would also suggest, by way of radicalizing Hall’s reading, that the deflection thesis will just not do. In stating that colonial specificity merely deflects the Hegelian dialectic, Hall still cedes to Hegelian dialectic the pride of place. A deflection is neither originary nor constitutive of its own ideological direction. It functions more like an adolescent act of throwing a wrench into the machinery or of merely calling into question, in a playful kind of way, the intent and purpose of the original direction. To put it differently, within the temporality of the Hegelian dialectic, ontology triumphs over history; philosophical thinking exorcizes the historical reality of contradictions, and most significantly, it conceals its own underpinnings in relations of power and dominance. This is a point that Abdul JanMohamed develops rigorously in his recent book on Richard Wright. To put it tersely, Hegel’s relationship to the Prussian state was neither disinterested nor innocent. Moreover, with the word deflection Hall already concedes to epistemology and philosophy a primacy of place. It is as though the philosopher already has in place a general system of thought as well as an ontology that is then deflected by the specificities of lived history. My argument, along the lines opened up by Gramsci in his critique of philosophy and the traditional intellectual, is that general ontology is constituted by the particularities of history and political power; and furthermore that the only way to read general ontology is symptomatically, that is, with reference revisionism

to its historical conditions of production. This is where a Hegelian dialectical reading of history fails thoroughly. Obsessed with temporality and not with historicity, Hegelian thought stops short of granting the dialectic its freedom to be formed and deformed by historical contradictions, beaten around by unequal and asymmetrical structurations of binarity. This protectionist way of thinking the dialectic by privileging temporality and disavowing its mutually constitutive relationship with historicity results in a highminded ontological thinking that absolves itself of historical connections that are nothing if not political. I see Fanon struggling with the contradiction between the trajectories of his political commitment and the imperatives of his philosophical model. Does he resolve them? Not really, and I do not think he could have, given his proximity to the colonial moment. But what he does, in my reading, is that he projects a great deal on the people: the newly emerging people who are in a position now to play with temporality, and even to construct it in line with the needs of the postcolonial present. It is as if Fanon acknowledges the fact that the people, unlike the intellectual, have had less to do with a philosophical mode of thinking and its complicity with dominance. As I begin the conclusion to this chapter, I would like to revisit the passage quoted a few pages ago in which Fanon either describes what is happening in the new forms of storytelling or is perhaps projecting possibilities and valences to the telling that the tellers themselves may not be fully aware of. It is interesting that in a “generic” move that runs counter to modernism, Fanon turns to oral storytelling without at the same time valorizing it in a folkloric mode. Something revolutionary and transformative is happening to the old oral genre that perhaps in the olden days was not even perceived theoretically as a genre. It is not coincidental that the genre becomes a crucial issue for Fanon in the formation of a new and legitimate culture; for after all, what is genre if not the attempt to align a certain content with the temporality that is most appropriate—a temporality it can call its own, both performatively and theoretically.111 Old contents are brought back but reidentified, and inert episodes are being revivified and revitalized. The “modifications are becoming fundamental.” It is as though Fanon were granting full approval to radical change and metamorphosis. These changes are happening within a certain solidarity and in the context of a past that revisionism

111

112

has now become a fertile resource and ground for meaningful futural elaborations. By no means an enemy of production,112 Fanon still is concerned that the act of transformative production should bear within it the mandate and sovereignty of representation. The most dazzling claim he makes here has to do with temporality and historicity. If temporality belongs to the order of a general ontology, but an order that is always a constructed a priori founded on the historical realities of a determinate present, then, Fanon is literally weaving together a powerful and persuasive temporality of the preposterous. The storytellers go back felicitously and unabashedly so that they can move forward. Occidental generic proprieties are soundly refuted and new norms are established. The going back cannot be confounded with primitivism, atavism, or tribalism, since this going back already has inscribed into it not the desire of nostalgia or antiquarianism, but the awareness of the legitimate presence of the past in the present: an awareness that had been stifled and close to killed by colonialist whitewash. Old contents formerly denied their ability and potential as seeds of the future are now being reparsed into effective history: “What we are going to speak of happened somewhere else, but it might well have happened here today, and it might happen tomorrow.” This is a bold and unequivocal aesthetic manifesto of postcoloniality as a genre, as a vehicle of a new humanism and a new universalism in which the particular and the general, the concrete and the abstract, the spatial and the temporal, the determinate and the indeterminate, the historical and the allegorical, the topic, the a-topic, and the u-topic, the here and the there are all made to dance together within the figurality of a reciprocal relationality and accountability. This manifesto is an attempt to produce a secondorder temporality in harmony with the historicity of decolonization and postcolonial emergence. In a poetic metaphoric way, one can see the aptness of the term occult instability. What is happening within the pulsation of the new storytelling is something more than, deeper than, more hallucinatory than the scenarios of a canonical realism. This is not a given reality, an always already spoken narrative being reproduced in a spirit of apostolic fidelity. This is production sui generis that transcends the authority of the fetish and the stereotype and the coercive normativity of a humanism secured in and by the dominance of colonial modernity. The same revisionism

Fanon who had spoken for the human condition both as the expression of a determinate political structuration and as the symptomatic manifestation of the general law of binarity is articulating here a new generic possibility that works its way through and beyond the sovereignty of binarity. The same Fanon who was attempting to find within the structural synchronicity of the colonizer-colonized structure an agential and partisan way to dislodge and refute the binary stands here with a revolutionary generic formulation that shatters the givens of the past and its ontology of dominance. A Fanon who politicizes general ontology is well aware that the dismantling of binarity is not possible except from the perspective of the colonized native in full revolution. How are we to know that these productions are real interventions in the history of the present and function as the harbingers of postcolonial things to come? The answer is simple. Why else would the colonial authorities imprison these storytellers systematically? The history he presents here actually anticipated what was to happen to Matigari by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o: a novel in which the protagonist was so real that the authorities went all out to arrest him. To conclude, the moment of occult instability in Fanon’s theory need not be read merely as an ineffective gesture toward the perennial revolution, or as an always already interruption of the political by the psychoanalytic; instead, it can be read as a blowing open of the blockage that disconnects the historicity of temporality from the temporality of historicity. If temporality pertains to the general existential human condition and historicity has to do with the ideological instantiation of temporality in such regimes as colonialism, apartheid, racism, heterosexism, and the like, then Fanon’s thought is an attempt to think this disjuncture together so that the proclamation “The Negro is not. Any more than a White Man” may function both as an irreversible indictment of a specific historicity and as an invocation toward another and nonbinary temporality.

revisionism

113

2 

Edward Said and the Politics of Secular Humanism i felt posthumous , and that very moment felt posthumous, when I was buying a copy of Edward Said’s Humanism and Democratic Criticism at a specialist bookstore in Chennai.1 This was the first time I was “buying” Said as a no more alive author. Whatever grief or melancholy I was experiencing was immediately expelled when I saw the cover of the book, with the “Admit All” stub; and then everything felt fine and restored again. The long-lasting significance of Said, of his work, and of what he stood for had triumphed over the mere fact that he had passed away. That book cover sums up Said’s political, aesthetic, and existential ethic with great grace and sophistication. The semiotics of the stub is complex and multilayered: the stub that is part of the ticket suggests that entry is limited, but such a restrictive connotation is instantly deconstructed by the “All” officially stamped on it. And of course, the ticket functions as a bookmark and juts out from the ponderous interiority of a tome. It is as if the ticket nature of the ticket has been called into question and sublimated into a higher and inclusive authority of the “All.” But the textual play here that Said would have appreciated so much is the fact that the admittance of the all cannot be achieved in some mystic, transcendent, or ahistorical mode

116

that would just say “All” and bypass the disciplinary and institutional modality of “Admit.” The mere factual affirmation of the all does not automatically entail the admittance of the all. The worldliness of the all is real only by virtue of an act of transgressive representation. The authority of the ticket that admits some and not others is maintained under erasure to tell us that admittance is being won and secured in the name of all. Moreover, the term admit also points to that threshold at which the real is ushered “in” in the form of representation; and in this sense admittance includes the possibility of legitimation along with the permission to represent. Finally, the imperative mood of the sentence with its implicit subject suggests also a kind of reflexivity. After all, who is saying, “Admit all”: as a command, an imperative, a request, an appeal, or as an exhortation? It is humanity inviting itself, nondenominationally and in a nonparochial and nonsectarian manner, into the world of secular humanism. The exhortation as permission is an immanent critique of a world structured in dominance in which some are admitted so that others may be excluded. There is yet another layer to this simple ticket stub. The admittance motif points up the practice of insides and outsides, of insiders and outsiders: a practice that Said resisted and problematized rigorously even in the heat of political urgency.2 Making a Möbius strip of the politics of belonging, and actively advocating betweenness as a viable ontological and political position as well as location, Said rendered insides and outsides mutually vulnerable.3 But the ticket stub does introduce a further complication: that of specialization and aesthetic sophistication. When one thinks of admittance, one thinks of concert halls, museums, the linguistic and generic complexity of a book, places of special interest that insist that something be paid so that generality and laity may be let in. Here again, Said refused the easy way out: he was never guilty about or apologetic for his refined, elitist, and nuanced pleasures in the realm of literature and music. On the other hand, he did not become a rigid “specific intellectual” or a narcissistic and/or mercenary professional who would feel no compunction in shutting the general world out.4 If the lecture hall, the university, and the concert hall was a version of the “in” then, Said insisted on maintaining the quality of such an inside with reference both to itself and to the world of which it was a necessary part.5 “To profess” to Said meant to hold a certain faith, a belief edward said

or principle, and to hold it rigorously and in complexity, but in love of the world. His indefatigable battles against the little fiefdoms of specialist mastery and the suffocating ambience of wall-to-wall discourses are legendary. Yet one needs to note that at no point Said forgave shoddy thinking, a poor term paper, or a poorly realized concert performance in the name of the transparency of life or of experience. The Saidian critic-intellectual is not to be seduced into taking up residence and citizenship exclusively within the realm of the text; on the contrary, she or he persuades the book out into the open where several adjacencies, contiguities, and simultaneities can all be observed, with the book as one of several points of reference or entry.6 What Said achieved is even more: he instrumentalized the specialized and highly tuned modes of reading, interpretation, and analysis learned through textuality and academic learning in a cause and a commitment that is nothing but extramural and extratextual. To Said, the book, necessary and precious as it was, was also at the same time a very special point of entry into the worldliness of the world. With this preface I would like to begin my analysis of the manner in which Said inhabited the space that he loved to call “secular humanism.” Powerful and persuasive as Said’s uses of these terms are, I have to concede that his spin on them is indeed quite personal, even idiosyncratic. I say this not to question the precision of his usage, but rather to argue that it was precisely by inflecting received terms in a certain pragmatic and opportunistic way that Said was able to recreate them as essential tools in the service of worldliness. With and after the publication of Orientalism, as well as with his public lecture “Secular, Oppositional Humanism,” given during the 1982 summer session of the School of Criticism and Theory at Northwestern University, Said made a very clear choice. No more for him the immanent complexity of erudition for the sake of erudition or the fetishization of specialist discourses in the name of their internal organization and adequacy; and particularly, no more convoluted debates about the dialectical (or otherwise) nature of the relationship between theory and practice. He would thenceforth not call himself a theorist or an exemplary practitioner of any -ism or any epistemological school. He would rather call himself a “critic” in the old-fashioned sense of the term: one who is informed and inspired by “critical consciousness.” We all know how high theorists diagnosed edward said

117

118

Said’s recantation of his early theoretical and somewhat poststructuralist trajectories as a kind of recidivism brought about by too keen a passion for the political. Others would nod their heads in approval and welcome Said back into their conservative “humanist” fold, happy not to have lost so brilliant a one to the life-denying deconstructionists and the Foucauldians. In a very acute and telling way, Said’s “worldly turn” (in contrast to the so-called linguistic turn brought about by structuralism), raises a crucial issue concerning the determination of what is radical and what is conservative. One could say that there are two main axes along which such a determination is made: the truth-content axis or the method-form axis.7 A critic could be identified as radical, truth- or content-wise, when she or he stands for values that are revolutionary, transformative, and in dire avant-garde transgressions of the norm. This would take the form of a macropolitical ideological confrontation with the status quo. On the other hand, a critic could be recognized as radical by virtue of his or her methodology or specialized ways of knowing, or of asking questions that set him or her apart from and ahead of all the canonical practitioners of the field. New historicist or Foucauldian discourse analysts or Derridean deconstructionists could be considered micropolitical radicals, irrespective of the outcome of their specialist practices. A Marxist, a feminist, an existentialist, or a freedom fighter under apartheid or colonialism can be recognized as a macropolitical radical. An interesting question arises here. Is it conceivable that a methodological rebel could indeed be an ideological or axiological conservative, and conversely, is it possible that a certain kind of conservative could be more radical ideologically than a revolutionary specialist whose avantgardism is nothing but professional? Said completely mystifies this neat scheme. Having gone through the radical micrological regimen, and having produced Beginnings (an exemplary work of the specialist even as it opens up possibilities otherwise),8 he breaks from that regime precisely because he finds its formal and theoretical virtuosity an alibi and a camouflage for something else: quietism, critical inertia, and a vicious narcissistic complacency. He then reclaims some of the old humanist “fuddy-duddies” such as Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach, and Matthew Arnold as though they were the radical ones. Needless to say, here, too, Said’s use of these thinkers is idiosyncratic and opportunisedward said

tic, in the good sense of the term. In reading these thinkers selectively and in alignment with his own worldly interests, Said announces his break from a formal and hermetic mode of scholarship. In other words, what holds his criticism together and gives it its coherence is an agenda that is in and of the world. Not encumbered any more by such constraints as, “Can I as a poststructuralist entertain this position?” or “Will my card-carrying Marxism allow me to interpret this situation or text in a certain way?” Said is now free to exercise certain “individual” choices: strange, contradictory, and inconsistent as they may seem to a proper systemic critic. It is precisely because high theory, in an always already mode, credits itself with radicalism that Said finds it suspect. Within high theory one cannot be an agential critic; one can at best be an exemplar of a mode of thinking that in some immaculate a priori, transhistorical, and transempirical way claims to be the embodiment of radicality as such. In other words, such a theory assumes, without any possibilities of verification, that the epistemological forms of theory are in and by themselves practices as well. It is against the current of such orthodoxy that Said reclaims the humanist legacy allowing him space for individual critical creativity, intentionality, and intervention. Before I undertake a critical analysis of what terms like intentionality and agency meant to Said, I would like to offer a brief version of what is at stake in theory and what theory meant a few decades ago. Theory initially meant a certain kind of European contamination. For example, it has almost become a cliché to refer to the “virus” that Jacques Derrida brought with him to that famous and influential Johns Hopkins conference. To the Anglo-American critic, theory stood for philosophical obfuscation, gratuitous interdisciplinarity, an antihumanist obsession with the materiality of language, and the rampant pretextualization of the pristine literary text in the service of extraliterary didacticism. It is not surprising that in this context, reading, intentionality, and textuality used to be triangulated with great polemical verve and intensity. It will also be remembered that Said was among the first, if not the first American literary critic, to make a distinguished contribution to this kind of theory, and here I am thinking of his essay “Abecedarium Culturae,” eventually republished as a chapter in his Beginnings, that originally came out in a collection in which all the contributors but for Said edward said

119

120

were French/European and to whom “theory” was bread and butter. When Said spends some time in that essay on a quality he calls “linguicity,” the direct effect of the linguistic turn, he also asks the question, “Why and how does linguicity become linguicity?”9 In other words, even as he acquiesces and participates in the linguistic turn, he will not allow linguicity to be highjacked in the name of là langue, and he refuses to watch passively while linguicity is fetishized or hypostatized into its own autonomous ontology. It will also be remembered that there were ferocious discussions of that notorious pronouncement by Derrida, in his Of Grammatology, that “there was nothing outside the text.”10 Had Derrida single-handedly occasioned the textual immurement of all reality? Had he gone, by virtue of his philosophic virtuosity, farther than any practical critic à la I. A. Richards, and than any New Critic, toward the ultimate textualization of all reality in the name of the grammatological being of language as such? If anything, was not Derrida’s textual accommodation of reality even more drastic than anything that the practical or the New Critics had envisioned, for the simple reason that Derrida was a philosopher in whose discursive usage “language” was both epistemological and ontological in orientation? In other words, thanks to Derrida, linguistic and intralinguistic claims could now be employed as general measures in our understanding of reality itself. In the wake of poststructuralism, a number of issues, among which I am isolating just three, were significant in the formation of the intellectuals of my generation who were students of Said, Hillis Miller, Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson, William V. Spanos, and Gayatri Spivak: (1) Whose side were you on when it came to the Derrida-Foucault fallout over the Cartesian cogito and the representability of madness in the age of reason? (2) Which of the two following critical-theoretical practices was more radical: Derridean deconstruction or Heideggerian destruction? (3) Had there or had there not occurred an epistemological coupure (break)? As one could see then and can see now, all these questions had to do with reading, intentionality, and textuality. As regards the first question, many of us were of the opinion that Michel Foucault had been unfairly treated by Derrida. How much more self-reflexive could Foucault have been as a philosopher attempting to open up the logos to its much-maligned other? Had not Foucault after all styled his work as “the absence of work?”11 Was it edward said

not always easy for the deconstructive reader to claim virtue and epistemological rectitude in a totally parasitic and retroactive way? As Spivak puts it with characteristic elegance in her preface to her translation of Of Grammatology, does not Derrida’s reading of Descartes deprive the Cartesian text of “its own certitude?” Does not deconstruction inevitably promote the myth/thesis that texts always already deconstruct themselves, and that even oppositional readings that are still to come can be claimed as somehow the original and originary properties of the first text?12 When Foucault angrily dismissed Derrida’s critique as the last traces of bourgeois thinking, he was in fact making the point that deconstruction master-textualized even the extradiscursive historical, and therefore diachronic, effect into the synchronic trace of a “pure reading.” It will be remembered that Derrida criticized Foucault for failing to read the manner in which the Cartesian text performs a hyperbolic self-reflexive dialogue with itself. Derrideans would respond with the counterclaim that Derrida’s readings were aporetic and indeterminate by definition. By the very principle of deconstruction as that “dangerous supplement,” Derrida could not have argued for the plenitude of the first text. If anything, his strategies of reading were forever calling into question the binary structure of the first text and the critical text following it. For both de Man and Derrida, rhetoricity was its own form of historicity: a form that had to be read into existence. In other words, reading was not an act that came by after questions of historicity had been resolved consensually to everyone’s satisfaction. There were distinctions to be made between readings and “readings of.” The question was, who or what intended: language, the genre, the subject position, the persona, or the historical individual speaking in and through language? Did Descartes intend or did the text? If the text did, then Cartesian accountability to its own truth claims was always already blinded and illuminated (to use de Man’s formulation) by the aporetic rhetoricity of the text. These debates about linguistic accountability regarding the speech act, the illocutionary and the perlocutionary, the performative and the constative, are still going on (they took a vicious and ad hominem turn when some of de Man’s writings as a young man on “the Jewish question” came to light, and a whole range of critics started proclaiming that deconstructionists hid behind language to go free as fascists and Nazis). The crux edward said

121

of the debate has to do with two interrelated problems: the localizability of intentionality, and the conscious or the unconscious nature of intentionality. It is no coincidence that many of these discussions and debates have been organized along the broad oppositional spectrum of history versus theory. By and large, the radical pro-theory folks have been invested in the task of valorizing indeterminacy at the expense of discrete historical certitudes, whereas the historically sensitive critics were committed to the project of historicizing theory and its hyperbolic and exorbitant claims.

122

The debates over Heideggerian destruction and Derridean deconstruction were based on a certain concern over the relationship between the language of Being and the being of language. These were debates about the status, both ontological and epistemological, of the ousia (presence) vis-à-vis the status of the gramme. Had the late Martin Heidegger, not the one of Being and Time, succumbed to the lure of the authenticity of Being and therefore compromised his project of radical destruction? Had not Derrida, by virtue of his stronger and uncompromising linguistic orientation, demonstrated more courage and integrity in staying in the gap between ousia and gramme? Had Heidegger, after the (in)famous “turn” (Kehre) prompted by his authentic Sorge (care) for Being, turned his back on the radical hermeneutic and modal thinking he had inaugurated so as to find peace and quiet in primordiality? This debate had to do with intentionality and with how intentionality is lodged in language as a property, a characteristic, a performative possibility, a mode of behavior, an imperative, or a form of accountability. The anguish over the supposed break as real or apocryphal was two pronged: (1) some of us felt there indeed was a need for a theoretical or epistemological break so that new forms—historical, literary, cultural, and aesthetic configurations and emergences—could make their own truth and experiential claims in a “post-al” way (whether it was postmodern, poststructuralist, postcolonial, or any other post-) unencumbered by the tyranny of the earlier episteme. Whatever the nature of the historical verities to come, it was imperative to announce the “post-al” break as a break in theory by way of acknowledging a decisive paradigm shift. Of course there was the danger here of creating a historically undifferentiated condition of the post-al from the priviedward said

leged location of the metropolis. There was also the possibility that this coupure would anoint the temporality of theory with the blessedness of avant-gardism, with the implication that history and everything else would have to follow the lead provided by theory. From a subaltern perspective, this cut both ways. Yes, there was something to be gained in staking so much on theory and epistemology since it is in the name of theory and epistemology that so-called alterities are rendered secondary, unoriginal, derivative, and anthropologized. For that very reason, theory had to be the site of contestation. The anxiety also was over the relative temporalities of history and theory. If whatever came after had the obligation to secede absolutely from the tyranny of what had come before (whether it was racism, or patriarchy, or colonialism), should this practice of secession be announced as primarily theoretical or as historical or as both? On the other hand, an excessive and obsessive preoccupation with theory and epistemology—at the expense of other determinations, overdeterminations, and contradictions—may well turn out to be a form of capitulation to Eurocentrism. Further more, what if the break occurred only in theory and not in history or in reality? Was there not the possibility that in begetting the break as its own product, theory could cultivate a certain blindness to the empirical lack of a break in the real world? Finally, if the break was desirable, would the break be achieved individually, agentially, collectively, systemically, or structurally? As we shall see later on in the chapter, Said was skeptical of theoretical moves that rejected entire paradigms and worldviews tout court. With Orientalism, Said found a way to connect these important questions of change and transformation both with the materiality of the discourse as episteme and with a certain conception of intentionality that refuses to dwell decorously and officially within the regime of the so-called discursive. Intentionality was a concept very much at stake for Said, and not just intentionality: not intentionality in a prepersonal mode à la Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but in the person- and ego-driven sense of the term.13 There are entire pages in Beginnings that are nothing but a tour de force demonstration of intentions, their narrativizations, and their counternarrativizations. Between Orientalism and The World, the Text, and the Critic, Said got more and more convinced (and this is an ethico-political as well as an epistemological conviction) that the term intentionality edward said

123

had no meaning whatsoever if delinked from the adjective human. He was beginning to see that a fully blown poststructuralism was achieving precisely such a delinkage. In Orientalism Said had enacted a symptomatic tussle and tension between the sovereignty of truth and the integrity of method. What indeed should be the disposition of the method toward the truth, or its truth? Should the two be of the same ilk, heritage, or should they be locked in an antagonistic relationship? When the importance of the method is privileged over the significance of the truth, and when the linguistic coding of intentionality is inflated at the expense of what intentionality is about, Said is apprehensive that what is in peril is the very measure of “the human,” humanism itself. Said will not allow the self-sanctioned claims of high theory to trump the all too human and precious stakes of humanism. It is interesting to note that in Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Said recalls the reasons why he found James Clifford’s criticisms of Orientalism so useful: One of the main and most often cited criticisms he (Clifford) made was that

124

there was a serious inconsistency lodged at my book’s heart, the conflict between my avowed and unmistakable humanistic bias and the antihumanism of my subject and my approach toward it. Clifford laments “the relapses into the essentializing modes it (Orientalism) attacks”: and he complains that the book “is ambivalently enmeshed in the totalizing habits of Western humanism.” A little later in his essay (and it’s precisely this sort of observation that made Clifford so useful a critic) he goes on to say that my “complex critical posture,” inconsistencies and all, cannot be dismissed as merely aberrant but is in fact symptomatic of the book’s “unrestful predicament . . . its methodological ambivalences (which, he added) are characteristic of an increasingly global experience.” (8–9)

A little later, in the essay, Said has this to say of thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, and the poststructuralists inspired by them: This group of pioneers showed, in effect, that the existence of systems of thinking and perceiving transcended the powers of individual subjects, individual humans who were inside those systems (systems such as Freud’s “unconscious” or Marx’s “capital”) and therefore had no power over them,

edward said

only the choice either to use or be used by them. This of course flatly contradicts the core of humanistic thought, and hence the individual cogito was displaced, or demoted, to the status of illusory autonomy and fiction.” (9–10)

As I analyze this set of claims I wish to show how Said is indeed “guilty” of a number of epistemological oversimplifications and misrecognitions that nevertheless are necessary for his project. The problem facing Said between Orientalism and The World, the Text, and the Critic is that of choice and the anchoring of choice: ethically, epistemologically, politically; practically, or theoretically; whether to ground it in the will to knowledge, in the will to power, in the will to emancipation, or in the will to will. I agree with Said that Clifford’s critical readings of Orientalism continue to be valuable even now. I also agree with Said that Clifford is right on when he reads Said’s contradictions and inconsistencies in an affirmatively symptomatic manner. Why then does Said want to transcend the inconsistencies and suture the contradictions?14 Why and how is Said convinced that the ultimate right to determine worldliness should be macropolitical and not micropolitical, organic and not specialist, critical but not theoretical? Why does he not entertain any more patience toward a theory that in the act of analyzing a phenomenon actually claims that it gave epistemological birth to the phenomenon? What is most galling to Said in poststructuralism is the indifference with which it denaturalizes and “discursifies” the human subject. Thus the question to pose is the following: Is the human really “human” and no more just human? If the epistemological answer to this question is yes, then there is very little the human subject can do about it. I do understand that epistemological answers and resolutions in the humanities are not as monovocal as they are in the sciences; and yet to concede that something is epistemologically “so” is no trivial matter. Moreover, such a concession entails certain practical effects. For example, no amount of ingenious instrumentalization can bring about a result that has already been disallowed as a theoretical impossibility. But what if the findings of theory are erroneous? And what if there are needs and beliefs and motivations that do not lend themselves to legitimation in and by theory? Does theory demystify experience, or does experience drive theory? Extreme choices, that is, choices that are made on the brink and the outermost edge of a system, after which there is only the abyss, are

edward said

125

126

choices based in faith and belief. Let us assume then that Said, or, for that matter, any thinker, pursues a certain theoretical epistemological path all the way only to find that the path taken does not answer her or his question or address her or his problem. Having identified this mésalliance between the path taken and the task on hand, the thinker is forced to make a choice. Should she or he abandon the theory and look elsewhere? But clearly, there is nothing wrong with the theory per se: the problem is that the theory does not serve the thinker’s purpose. The disagreement has to do not with the intrinsic epistemological status of the theory, but rather with its usability in a certain way and direction. What in the final analysis legitimates and concretizes the choice of a theory by a thinker is not the plenitude or the formal inviolability of the theoretical system, but its project worthiness. The final decision is pragmatic and opportunistic, rather than purely epistemological. What Said then can tell the reader is why he abandons a certain modality, but he cannot really persuade the reader that the reasons underlying Said’s choice are better than those other reasons that could have persuaded a different thinker to abide by poststructuralist theory all the way. To put it differently, no polemical dialogue between the two modes of thought can adjudicate whether being “worldly” is a superior option to being “textually theoretical.” The hard-core theorist (more of this in my discussion of Louis Althusser later in this chapter) would contend that a worldliness earned at the expense of theory is an indefensible worldliness. Said’s pragmatic rejoinder to this claim would be that theory is in no position to certify worldliness for the simple reason that the latter is an objective reality anterior to theoretical formulation. To put it differently, there is a “without” that accommodates theory. To Said, then, the adequacy of the theoretical model is inseparable from its actual practice in a specific set of circumstances. There is nothing, to Said, called theoretical rectitude or adequacy that is always already in excess of its worldly usability. One can see what Said is trying to do here: break down the theory-praxis distinction, as well as the academic fetishization of such a distinction. Said would even maintain that those pure theorists who choose not to contaminate their thinking with the contingencies of worldliness are in fact guilty of a certain politics themselves.15 It is easy to anticipate how radical poststructuralists would instantly question Said’s desire to locate intentionality outside the system.16 Their edward said

argument would be that the very humanist category of intentionality is the function of discursive production. One cannot know or vouch for intentionality in some unmediated or prediscursive manner. In other words, intentionality is a macropolitical potential that is to be produced as a category through micropolitical processes. Thus one intends not nondenominationally, but rather structurally, or poststructurally, or psychoanalytically, or phenomenologically. It is this heady privileging of the thesis of “epistemological constitutedness” that Said is wary of. No wonder then that he turns away from author functions and a depersonalized discourse and returns to the individual, intentionality, agency, and consciousness. To Said, the assumption that intentionality is always already discursive is a bad dream to snap out of. Said acknowledges the reality that every intervention in the world is multiply mediated and that every act, decision, or performance is simultaneously ethical, political, epistemological, theoretical, and practical; but what he resists and refutes is the temptation to claim that the best way to understand the intervention is by way of a theory that in speaking for itself steps out of its dialectical implication with the world of historical circumstances. Even if the author were in fact nothing but “author,” and the subject nothing but a “subject effect,” the reality, Said would insist, is that this very bracketing effect could not have been anything other than theory’s response to its own contradictory and overdetermined situatedness.17 I see two interconnected developments taking place within Said’s intellectual itinerary: one locational, the other subject positional.18 Said is increasingly becoming aware of his own double-conscious location as an Arab-American, and of the reality that because he is not just an Arab or a Palestinian but a hyphenated subject, his role is going to be liminal, ambassadorial, and “borderly.”19 The macropolitical compulsions and imperatives of his Arab-American location persuade him toward a more and more transparent, albeit self-reflexive, critical consciousness. To be macropolitically effective, one cannot waffle on questions of intentionality or assign intentionality away to the transpersonal dispositif of discourse or to the demands of the dominant worldview.20 It is ironic to think how despite all this, Said was always in trouble with his intentionality, that is, he was constantly misread and misrecognized. I remember his telling a number of us that summer of 1982, with extreme edward said

127

128

exasperation and indignation, “Can you believe it? The State Department reads my Orientalism and then has the gall to ask me to speak for the Arab mentality for them to understand.” Leave alone the cia or the State Department, Said was open to such misrecognition even from fellow travelers. Precisely because he had demystified all Orientalist claims about the Orient, he was accused (1) of having totalized both the West and the East; (2) of not really having spoken for the Orient; and (3) for merely having read the East as a form of subjugated knowledge that is a lack within the dominant occidental discourse.21 Here is how the contradiction runs. Said is locationally Arab, and yet he is undertaking a critical study that is thoroughly Western in its subject positionality. There is no organic relationship between the two. To use Walter Mignolo’s useful expression, Said is not able to subordinate “where he thinks” to “where he lives,” or vice versa.22 It is on the basis of his subject-positional expertise and virtuosity that he is able to deconstruct, from within, all Orientalist-colonialist-anthropological productions of Orientalism. But to many non-Westerners, none of this adds up to a locational affirmation of the non-West in terms of its own specialist subject positions. There is a disjunction between the critique and the affirmation. To an Arab it feels like Said’s Foucaldian power-knowledge– based destabilization of Orientalism does not add up to an adequate insiderly representation of the non-West. How can a defender of the Arab right to self-representation speak through an alien subject positionality? The subject position, as famously defined by Foucault, is assigned and never freely chosen. It is this lack of freedom that goes with subject-positional interpellation that comes in the way of a more open embrace of the non-West qua non-West. Said begins to realize how loyalty to the subject position can become a trap, and a hindrance to a freer understanding of location as worldliness. Here is a dilemma that Said reidentifies as a pseudoproblem as he makes his commitment. The imperative imposed by the subject position is the imperative of specialization, whereas the urgency of the location has to do with macropolitical worldliness. And Said’s resolution is obvious: worldliness precedes any other kind of determination or fixation. To put it simply, if theory maintains that representation no longer exists and worldly realities are still run along representational lines, then the choice is clear to Said: abandon the theory since it misreads reality in a post-al fashion. edward said

Said is damned either way, as was Foucault by Derrida for his work on madness.23 He has spoken against the dominance of Orientalism but has not spoken for the Orient. Like a deconstructive thinker, Said assumes that destabilizing the discourse of the dominant discourse automatically turns into an affirmation of subalternity. There is yet another irony here. We all remember the reading on reading effect produced by Jacques Lacan’s seminar on “The Purloined Letter.”24 Finally, Derrida, who philosophically subscribes to the theory of radical incorrigibility, still goes ahead and corrects Lacan’s misreading: critiquing Lacan for triangulating the meaning of the story to suit the truth of psychoanalysis. Derrida would claim that it is the fourth frame of literariness that Lacan fails to attend to. Thus Derrida would use the frame of literature as a nonframe to open up the psychoanalytic framing of meaning perpetrated by Lacan. Here an act of critical or negative correction goes on unattended by the responsibility to produce the right answer. Said’s position is similar. He gets taken to task for having the gall to correct an existing framework of representation without being able to provide the reader with the right picture. This was the Western criticism. In the Arab world, the criticism was that he is incapable of speaking for that world since he is not an insider. Thus Said is left dangling in ambivalence: between his passionate conviction and desire to delink representation from projects of invasion and domination, and his ethically and procedurally charged but politically formal spokespersonship on behalf of the Arab perspective. As a believer in the secular historicity of representation, Said cannot resort to essentialism, insiderism, or a priori modes of cognition that bypass the politics of representation. The Arab has no direct or unmediated ontological access to Arab truth; for to Said, there is no such essentialist truth to begin with. Nor did Said ever maintain that only Arabs could speak for Arabs; he is no identity theorist. Said thus discovers that a certain betweenness haunts his projects; and it is this betweenness that he will claim with great distinction and integrity in his later works.25 Let me now attend briefly to the way in which Said registers his disillusionment with certain poststructuralist givens. What indeed are the givens of poststructuralist theory, and how does Said understand them? Is he correct in his understanding of what poststructuralism is claiming to do from its own position? Is there indeed a normative poststructuralist edward said

129

130

understanding of poststructuralism of which Said is in violation? Should such an entrenched position of self-justification be accorded to any school of thought? It must be noted in this context that from Orientalism onward, Said is thinking of his work as a project and not as a mere academic formation or as an exemplary production or instantiation of an -ism or of a particular theory. Very much a pragmatist (yet still insistent on self-reflexivity), Said begins to find theory and poststructuralism irrelevant, if not injurious, to his project.26 What then is the connection between the availability of poststructuralism to a certain project and its own self-understanding? Is it Said’s obligation, before he goes his way, to demonstrate the limitations and flaws of poststructuralist thought and prove to the reader the legitimacy of his disillusionment with poststructuralism? Is it really the case that poststructuralism in general, and particularly Foucauldian thinking and Derridean deconstruction, are unsuitable for projects of worldliness, or is it more the case that it is only in Said’s misreading that poststructuralism is identified as lacking in such worldliness? There are two issues here. The first issue has to do with the relationship between theory and usability: does any theory have to be usable in the last instance? Does it have to lend itself as a set of practices to the service of worldliness? The second issue goes somewhat like this: Is it possible that the poststructuralist project is worldly in its own way, that is, given its epistemological and methodological premises, and does Said simply refuse to recognize it as such? The choice then would be not between worldliness and a theory that precludes and occludes worldliness, but rather between two constructed and contestable versions of worldliness.27 If worldliness is not just a given, but rather a particular cognitive structure produced modally by a particular way of thinking, then indeed there is no way of separating the reality of the world from the modal theoretical practices that establish a certain relationship to the real. It is within a modality that the world becomes worldly. It is here that Said marks once and for all his difference from poststructuralist theory. In refusing to be a modal thinker and, by extension, in refusing to function as a specific intellectual, Said declares his commitment to a prediscursive, experiential, and phenomenological worldliness. He might well say, “There is more in the world than can be dreamt of in any one philosophy.” Thus, when he criticizes an academic edward said

condition in which there is nothing but wall-to-wall discourse, he is in effect reversing what he would now consider the deleterious effects of the linguistic turn: a turn that ends up valorizing modal narcissism and the utter inflation of the linguistic sign. Said never claims that worldliness is graspable in a direct or unmediated way, either in the name of political rectitude or of epistemological rigor. He is too much of a nuanced aesthete of language to allow that: instead he renders language accountable to the outside. He goes on to make a connection between worldliness and the spaces of “the between.” What he would like to avoid at any cost is the kind of scholarship that equates the world with its own truth. In equal measure, Said is also dedicated to the project of rescuing sociopolitical and cultural value from a suffocatingly filial and umbilical relationship with its origin and conditions of nativity. “Criticism between Culture and System”28 would then begin to delineate a world captive neither to the micropolitical hubris of professional subject positions nor to the orthodoxies and pieties of the macropolitical kind that are rooted in identity politics. Said is not making the point that Marxism, Foucauldian discourse analysis, or Derridean deconstruction are not or cannot be internally consistent. His point is rather that there is something deathly and life-denying about such consistencies. It is indeed quite ironic and amusing that Said’s repositioning of himself draws fire from two camps: from the so-called pure theorists who chide him for having allowed pragmatics to short-circuit the rigorous labor of theory, and from the more overtly political theorists who upbraid him for his attempt to generate a genuine politics from his “metropolitan ambivalence,” and for his maverick and eclectic mode of scholarship that yokes together forces, names, and methodologies that really do not belong together.29 The late Paul de Man, an example of the pure theorist, finds fault with Said for having retrogressed into the world of humanism and fallen into the company of such theoretically unself-reflexive scholars as Auerbach and Arnold. Theorists like Paul de Man would hold that politics cannot be practiced the old-fashioned way now that theory had indeed complicated the very meaning of what it meant to be political. Thus in the famous controversy over Derrida’s statement that there was nothing outside the text, the lines of opposition were drawn in the following manner. There were the so-called traditionalists who accused Derrida of the act of immurement of all edward said

131

132

reality and of having evacuated language and linguistic utterance of all ethico-political accountability, agency, and intentionality. To these folks the textualization of reality represented the depoliticization of the world we live in. The avant-garde theorists—and there is a whole range of positions here, starting with de Man as the least political, Derrida somewhere in the middle, and Spivak at the other extreme end—would argue that Derrida’s statement of the relationship of the text and the hors-texte had been shabbily interpreted by the all too hasty traditionalists.30 According to them, Derrida’s textualization of all reality was not an attempt to make a hermetic book of reality. His point was rather that the world and reality existed in the mode of a text and that it all depended on how one read the text. In this reading, the text does not literally mean “a book,” the way the New Critics would have understood it, but functions rather as an indication of constructedness and un-naturalness. As Spivak develops the insights of deconstruction and poststructuralism in conjuncture with Marxism and the politics of the subaltern, third world woman, the poststructuralist intervention would remain primarily in the register of epistemology, and only by extension, in the domain of politics. Here, then, are two scenarios: The world is real. The world is real in the form of a text. What is the philosophical or cognitive difference between the two positions? More important, what kind of politics would each of these epistemological models enable and empower? Also, is poststructuralism guilty of according the primacy of place to epistemology, rather than to the political? It is in the context of this undecidable relationship between politics and epistemology that the work of a number of contemporary critics and theorists takes on critical importance: and I have in mind Foucault, Partha Chatterjee, Said, Spivak, William Connolly, Judith Butler, and Ashis Nandy, among others. What is to be done when an honest and rigorous thinking delivers the insight that there is a gap or a lag between the epistemological model and the political blueprint? To give a few resonant contemporary examples: How is one to work politically within the temporality of nationalism even as one submits nationalism to a relentless epistemological critique? How is one to practice the politics of representation even after the poverty of representational thought has been thematized persuasively by epistemology? How does one subscribe to the so-called identity effect politiedward said

cally even as one understands the need for an epistemological critique of identity as such? How does one speak truth to power in a humanistic vein after the realization that truth itself is indeed a function of power and that humanism itself is a form of ideology? How can postcolonial forms of sovereignty practice political secularism with conviction and integrity even as postcolonial reason calls secularism into question on the level of epistemology? There are many more such examples that only go to show that this nonsynchronicity of epistemology and politics is more the rule than the exception. Said’s work will continue to be exciting and relevant precisely because, while being symptomatic of this noncoincidence of the political with the epistemological, it also seeks to break the deadlock of the symptom through an act of will.31 What indeed does an act of will mean when it results in a certain choice? How is this act of will to be valorized and validated in a nonimmanent manner, that is, with reference to criteria that are not intrinsic to the will itself? 32 A facetious way of phrasing the same would be in terms of Humpty Dumpty’s wanting a word to mean what he wants it to mean rather than the other way around. Let us take the example of a person who has remained an articulate, coherent, and steadfast atheist most of his or her life; and suddenly, lo and behold! he turns into a devout believer. Clearly, such a person owes nobody any explanation; and yet this conversion is of general intellectual interest. Did he or she convert because of an inner need to take the leap of faith, caused perhaps by some tragic incident in his or her life? Or was it more of an epistemological/ intellectual recantation of the earlier position, that is, a recantation based on an actual demonstration that atheism is “wrong” and theism “correct”? The first volte-face is a need-inspired transformation, whereas the latter is a conversion based on intellectual argumentation. There is the famous example in fiction of Merseault in Albert Camus’s The Stranger in which the protagonist holds onto his theory of the absurd and the indifference of the universe even in the imminence of his execution. In other words, he would rather hold onto what he knows is true than succumb to the anodyne offered by a philosophy that he cannot accept intellectually. There is also the example, from real life, of an aged and aging Bertrand Russell, who while being taken into surgery responded to someone’s question, “Would you like to believe in God now?” with a firm and authoritative “No.” edward said

133

134

The question that came up, sometimes rigorously and at other times disingenuously, right after Said’s “relapse into humanism” was precisely this: after such knowledge, could there be a going back? Having been so profoundly influenced by poststructuralism, and in particular by the thought of Foucault, was it possible for Said to go back to a humanism thoroughly problematized, in theory, by Foucault and others? Some critics were even angry and resentful enough to articulate something like this: Who does Said think he is that he can dramatically divest from those very epistemological practices that have made him what he is and suddenly celebrate his freedom from specialist discourses in the name of a maverick and a free critical consciousness working toward wordliness? There was also a slightly different tack, one best represented by Stanley Fish’s response to a question in a plenary session at a Modern Language Association annual meeting: “I am not a Palestinian-American. I am not Edward Said, and I don’t have a politics.” There are a number of assumptions behind these criticisms and accusations, and these assumptions need to be analyzed carefully. What does it mean to be influenced by a particular epistemology or a school of thought, and how does one evaluate the legitimacy as well as the statute of limitations of any school of thought within the history of ideas? Is there a developmental and an evolutionary or revolutionary logic to the history of ideas whereby an earlier paradigm could be considered to have been once and for all repudiated and disproved such that it cannot enjoy another inning in human history? For example, one would not in any serious sense of the term want to believe in the phlogiston theory of combustion, or the music of the Ptolemaic spheres, or a geocentric universe (though it appears hilarious that the pope just recently actually pardoned Galileo Galilee for his heresy), or hold onto the theory that the world was created in seven days.33 In other words, these knowledges have been definitively superannuated, and one cannot entertain these positions as cognitively viable worldviews. One could perhaps accommodate them in one’s heart or soul for other reasons: poetic, personal, metaphoric, therapeutic, or redemptive. One of course can believe in placebos, or in, as John Lennon once put it, “whatever gets you through the night,” but this posture would be one of belief, which has a different structure than do truth claims. It is also assumed that the temporality of pure theory or thought is half a step faster than the pace of the world and its practices. For exedward said

ample, it could be said, “Aha! So that is how you think humanism actually works; but just a little theoretical thinking will tell you that this is not the case. Even if it works or you think it works, it ought not to work in theory. Or, such a working is harmful and erroneous in the long run, theoretically speaking.” Either pure thought is in an avant-garde relationship with worldly practice or it tends to demystify some of the transparencies of common sense. So where does humanism fit into this discussion? I will elaborate on this question a little later in the chapter, but for now the question that I would like to ask is the following: Does knowledge in the humanities follow the same teleological pattern of the sciences, where insights and their incremental-progressive development ensure that the wheel does not have to be invented over and over again? There are two interesting examples: one, the example of “race” and “race studies,” and the other that of Martin Heidegger. In the case of race, even though the term is a “lie” and there is really nothing called race, it continues being studied critically, antagonistically, deconstructively, oppositionally. Insofar as the effects of race on humanity have been real—that is, despite the fact that race itself is a misnomer and a nonconcept—the history of these all-too-real effects needs to be studied carefully and rigorously. As to Heidegger, with the publication of Being and Time, he scandalized the entire world of logical positivists and mathematical-analytic philosophers by plunging philosophy back into the quagmire and the blindness of the pre-Socratics. If I remember right, Gilbert Ryle said something to the effect that he wished Being and Time had never seen the light of day. But to Heidegger and his followers, Heidegger had gone ahead by going back, had done something remarkably radical not by avoiding or bypassing the circularity of thinking but by engaging with it hermeneutically, and so on. He had returned so that he could go ahead. The ontological going back produces epistemological going ahead.34 One cannot imagine a contemporary physicist going back to Anaxagoras, or Aristotle, or even to Newton to advance the momentum of present-day physics. All I am trying to say is that the model of research in the humanities is structured and oriented very differently from that of the physical and mathematical sciences. To put it broadly, if in the sciences the past and history in general function as a series of erroneous stages to be corrected, refuted, transcended, and left behind, in the humanities, the past and history play a different role. edward said

135

136

There is a dialectical pattern of emerging knowledges that includes both refuting the past and conserving it. As Antonio Gramsci would have it, the present cannot be understood unless an inventory is made of all the past traces that have led up to the present. There are revisionist projects that dive into the past with the intention of rubbing history against the grain; there are other projects that seek to reclaim those pasts that have been quelled and subjugated by a universal-dominant historiography based on a zero-sum, winner-take-all model. In the humanities the presentness of the past and the pastness of the present work together in myriad, heterogeneous, and unpremeditated ways: a very far cry indeed from the scientific model of what Karl Popper would call “conjectures and refutations.”35 So then the very act of Said going back to and reclaiming humanism after his peregrinations in the world of poststructuralism does not constitute a retrogression. But why did he go back so that he could go forward?36 The answer is simple: because poststructuralism did not work for him; if anything, it was at odds with his worldly political project. I do not want to enter the fraught discussion of what constitutes politics, but I will just mention in passing that to Said the demands and imperatives of worldliness are much more urgent, ethically and politically, than the imperatives and demands of proper methodologies and schools of thought. He is also utterly convinced that the world is to be understood not as a function of the efficiency of theoretical models, but despite these models that often constitute themselves, rather than the world, as the venerable object of study. To Said, a theory that is too full of itself begins to celebrate its own immanence and in the process abandons, or at least deprioritizes, its referential and representational accountability to worldliness. The more interesting criticism leveled at Said is that he thinks that by an act of will he can exorcize his poststructuralist past and unlearn, in the name of worldliness, all the erudition and the critical practices he had learned from poststructuralism. This is actually a significant question concerning the historicity of Said’s own intellectual, political, and academic formation. If it is important, as Said would always insist à la Gramsci, that the historical subject of the present ought to make an inventory of the many traces of the past, then what about his own poststructuralist traces? I would like to complicate this issue by asking two edward said

questions: (1) What is the ethic or the purpose of compiling the traces? Is the motivation just plain mnemonic, or is it countermnemonic? Are the traces a form of deterministic containment from which the history of the present can never escape, or is the compilation of the traces only a prolegomenon to the inauguration of change and difference in the future? (2) Are micropolitical, professional, and academic traces as significant and determining and constitutive as macropolitical, historicalexistential, ontological traces? Here I will have to take the risk of speaking for Said in a way he himself avoided all along. For here I am indeed guilty of trying to create a connection of coherent legitimacy between his political choices and the epistemological underpinnings of these choices. As I have already stated, Said with Orientalism radically redefined his accountability as a scholar, critic, and intellectual. I think he would have agreed with Nietzsche that history has to be done in the name of the present and that the purpose of historicizing is not to fetishize the past or to be interpellated by it choicelessly.37 It is also clear that to Said macropolitical traces mean a lot more than those created by professionalization. Said thus honors his commitment to being an Arab or a Palestinian-American, or a universal, cosmopolitan, ethical, and political human being, but not to being a cardcarrying member of something called poststructuralism or Marxism. He would not choose to characterize the professional realm with the adjective worldly. On the contrary, he maintains very clearly that when the domain of the profession arrogates a world unto itself, such a world in fact is a fiefdom rather than a world. But he by no means, in the name of the political, ever abandons his nuanced enjoyment of music, literature, narrative, and the world of philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic abstraction. The only difference is that he accesses them now with his “critical consciousness,” a term that Said often uses by way of connecting humanism with the secular. So let us hear Said on humanism: I should stress again that I am treating this subject not in order to produce a history of humanism, nor an exploration of all its possible meanings, and certainly not a thoroughgoing examination of its metaphysical relationship to a prior Being in the manner of Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism.” What concerns me is humanism as a useable praxis for intellectuals and academics

edward said

137

who want to know what they are doing, what they are committed to as scholars, and who want also to connect these principles to the world in which they live as citizens. This necessarily involves a good deal of contemporary history, some sociopolitical generalization, and above all a sharpened awareness of why humanism is important to this society at this time, more than ten years after the end of the Cold War, as the global economy is going through major transformations, and a new cultural landscape seems to be emerging, almost beyond the precedents of our experiences to date. (Humanism, 6–7)

138

Much is going on in this seemingly simple passage. First of all, Said is deprofessionalizing, de-academizing, and laicising the term humanism. He is seeking more kinship with a nontechnical, nonhumanities person on the street than with a philosopher to whom humanism is actually “humanism.” He is giving himself and the reader a list of what he is not doing with the term: he is engaging with it selectively, strategically, and opportunistically. All that is fine and unproblematic. But the reference to Heidegger and Said’s “correct” understanding of what Heidegger’s “Letter” is all about does pose a problem. If Said agrees, and I think he does, that there is a metaphysical connection between humanism and a “prior Being,” then it follows automatically that secularism is not a form of humanism. Indeed, humanism is ahistorical, primordial, and essentialist. Why then is Said not bothered by this conceptual dissidence? Is it not worthy of concern? Or is it worthy of concern for nitpickers and academic philosophers alone? Has Said, by virtue of having disclosed his reasons for engaging with humanism, succeeded in delimiting and sanitizing it for his purposes? If humanism is theoretically and epistemologically not secular, how is Said so confident that his practical instrumentalization of it will somehow exorcize the metaphysics in humanism? Is it not conceivable that just when he thinks he is utilizing humanism, he is “being had” by humanism? I am not saying that Said is not aware of these questions; my point is just that he is content to find satisfaction in the understanding that humanism is what humanism does. Questions like “Is existentialism a form of humanism?” and “Is Marxism a form of humanism?” would have made urgent sense to him earlier on in his development, but not anymore. What is moving about Said’s invocation of humanism is that it comes in the context of contemporary human tragedy, suffering, injustice, and edward said

peril. He posits humanism as an omnihistorical state of being human that responds to worldly situations in the name of freedom and justice. Knowing that the term humanism and its indeterminacy have been appropriated in several mutually exclusive ways, he is keen on recuperating it in the name of a multilateral and secular humanity that is unfortunately structured in dominance. Let us hear him again: nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, for example, was described as a “humanitarian intervention,” though many of its results struck people as deeply inhumane. A German intellectual is quoted as having called the whole nato episode a new form of “military humanism.” And why was it both “humanistic” and “humanitarian” to intervene there and not, say, in Rwanda or Turkey, where ethnic cleansing and mass killings have occurred on a wide scale? Similarly, according to Dennis Halliday, once the main un official in charge of administering the oil-for-food program in Iraq, the results of the sanctions have been “inhumane and genocidal,” an opinion which caused him to resign from his job in protest. (Humanism, 7)

He then goes on to say something that is part confident affirmation and part self-reflexive interrogation: “And also, as scholars and teachers we believe we are right to call what we do ‘humanistic’ and what we teach ‘the humanities.’ Are these still serviceable phrases, and if so in what way? How then may we view humanism as an activity in light of its past and of its probable future?” (Humanism, 7). A little later in the book, he makes his intentions crystal clear: I believed then, and still believe, that it is possible to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism and that, schooled in its abuses by the experience of Eurocentrism and empire, one could fashion a different kind of humanism that was cosmopolitan and text-and-language bound in ways that absorbed the great lessons of the past from, say Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer and more recently from Richard Poirier, and still remain attuned to the emergent voices and currents of the present, many of them exilic, extraterritorial, and unhoused, as well as uniquely American. (Humanism, 10–11)

Before I begin to read these last three passages carefully, I would like to touch on two themes that do not concern Said at all even though they adjoin much of his discourse and problematic: the issue of instrumental reason and the topic of anthropocentrism. Said is quite comfortable to edward said

139

140

think of worldly practice as a kind of instrumentalization of common human reason in the service of all. Though he refers to Theodor Adorno appreciatively in a different context in a typically Saidian “quote and run” fashion, he is not at all sympathetic to Adorno’s and the Frankfurt School’s ponderous project of resisting the ongoing instrumentalization of reason in the name of usefulness, practicality, and a certain kind of pragmatic transparency. That in Adorno’s hand theorizing is a form of praxis perennially vigilant of the abuse of reason in the name of the commodity, the fetish, and self-evident practice, sounds to Said like a specious claim that only an armchair negative dialectician would make. As for the critique of anthropocentrism that plays such a central role in all of Heidegger’s work, Said does not operate on this register at all. Suffice it for Said to maintain that anthropocentrism is none other than a humanly bounded secularism; and with the mention of secularism, Said’s discourse relaxes and is at peace with itself. Humanism to Said is a longue durée, and any reports of an epistemological break from humanism are irresponsible and apocryphal.38 In a strange way, in this insistence Said resembles Derrida who would aver that there could be no stepping outside the pages of the book called logocentrism.39 What then could constitute a break in the history of humanism? What kind of counterexample of “humanist terror” would persuade Said that it is time to break from humanism? The answer is that nothing will. Said is resolute that an ideal and desirable humanism can be reimagined despite the many horrors perpetrated in its name. There is a good humanism and a bad humanism; it all depends on how humanism is invoked and instrumentalized. When Said maintains that it is possible to critique humanism in the name of humanism, he is in fact operating as a supreme deconstructionist. There is no hors-texte to humanism, or to secularism for that matter. Eurocentrism, the white man’s burden, patriarchy, and a whole series of man-made calamities are deplorable as part of humanist history; and yet there is a way to reengage “innocently” as it were with humanism and claim it in the name of its better half. Like Fredric Jameson who maintains that Marxism is the ultimate horizon that subsumes every other struggle and political practice, Said uses humanism as an inclusive umbrella to cover universal history. It is important for Said to connect the thinkers of the distant and the recent past with contemporary practitioners such as edward said

Poirier within the transcendental affiliation to humanism. One can also notice how Said employs the term to capture the near and the far, the local and the remote, the past and the present; and in the present, the hegemonic and the subaltern, the canonical and the emergent. Humanism thus works conserving the best moments and episodes in history; and it also works across the asymmetry between the ex-colonizer and the ex-colonized and between metropolitan and subjugated peripheral knowledges.40 Humanism, to Said, is the only possible platform that enables generalizations across differences and asymmetries. Said has spoken and written on numerous occasions and with great eloquence to enable a politics across this asymmetry and beyond the mutually reductive game of the politics of blame and the politics of guilt.41 His need to believe in humanism is indeed so intense that often he credits fairly bland statements with rare profundity. Take for example the ecstatic manner in which he makes the following judgment: “A superb sentence by Leo Spitzer, as brilliant a reader of texts as this century has produced and who spent his last years as an American humanist of European origin and training, is singularly apt. ‘The Humanist,’ he says, ‘believes in the power of the human mind of investigating the human mind.’ Note that Spitzer does not say the European mind, or only the western canon. He talks about the human mind tout court ” (Humanism, 26). I must confess in all honesty that if this sentence had not been quoted so contextually by Said, I would have just read it in the Spitzer oeuvre and gone on without comment. This powerful valorization of Spitzer works more as a conative rather than as a cognitive statement. In other words, Said has just willed into existence the claim that Spitzer’s humanism is trustworthy and really means all that it says. It works for him, and therefore he does not have to prove this claim either historically or theoretically. I also find it troubling that the same Said who has problems with theory’s tout court dismissal of humanism has no problem invoking the modality of the tout court in a totally appreciative and uncritical manner in the context of Spitzer and “the human mind.” My understanding is that Said is so disgusted and nauseated by the self-serving proliferation of specialist discourse and jargon that he is prepared to be satisfied with a few transparent hortatory declamations. Elsewhere, almost à la Arnold and his touchstone criticism, Said extols simple declaratory sentences as though simplicity qua simplicity edward said

141

142

is a guarantor of deep sense. Compared to Heidegger’s academically dense critique of humanism, and to Althusser’s and Foucault’s discursively laden refutations of humanism, Spitzer’s statement sounds commonsensically comforting and desirable. Though no scholar of Spitzer, I would like to offer a different reading of that sentence. First of all, and this has nothing to do with Spitzer’s personal authorial intention, it is only natural that the European remains unmarked as the mark of the universal in an utterance that comes from the heart of Eurocentric humanist discourse. But even more important, has it not been the omnihistorical case that every manifesto of freedom, such as “All men are created equal,” functions on the basis of a blindness whereby the “all” does not include the all, but on the contrary functions in accordance with a procedural norm that is violated by its own content? And has it not been the singular insight of Foucault and Derrida that any emancipatory statement, including the ones to come, speaks in ideological but not in real plenitude? It is also interesting to note that Said considers Walter Benjamin’s memorable aphorism about barbarism and civilization as extreme and not representative. It seems as if Said is saying, “Yes indeed, I am aware that every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism, but let us get on with it.” Said chooses to engage with Spitzer in an entirely affirmative manner as a way of reminding himself and his readers that it is indeed crucial that we all invoke humanism in a positive rather than in a negative way. Said is also careful to point out that Spitzer, despite his non–jargon-laden simplicity, is as perspicacious and insightful as any contemporary reader trained in a whole range of hermeneutic, structuralist, and poststructuralist practices. How can we forget that textuality and reading were the two key concepts that secured the elitist superiority of poststructuralism: Derrida, de Man, and Roland Barthes on the text and so on? It is also easy to remember how in his essay “Criticism between Culture and System,” Said begins to develop, by way of his critical readings of Foucault and Derrida, a different relationship between what I would call “the worldliness of the text and the textuality of the world,” on the one hand, and “the language of Being and the being of Language” à la Heidegger, on the other. Said, whether one agrees with his particular evaluation of Spitzer’s interpretive prowess or not, succeeds brilliantly in valorizing the cultural in the political, and vice versa. edward said

I would now like to address a few of Said’s critical adjudications of poststructuralism in Humanism and Democratic Criticism and examine if these judgments function as expressions of the difference of Said’s projects from poststructuralism, or if they serve as actual corrections of errors and flaws in poststructuralist ways of thinking. A statement that Said makes in this work reminds me that even in Beginnings, and particularly in the chapter “Abecedarium Culturae,” there are clear indications of his difference from Derrida and Foucault. Although I was one of the first critics to engage with and discuss French theory in the American university, [James] Clifford correctly saw that I somehow remained unaffected by that theory’s ideological antihumanism, mainly, I think, because I did not (and still do not) see in humanism only the kind of totalizing and essentializing trends that Clifford identified. Nor have I been convinced of the arguments put forward in the wake of structuralist antihumanism by postmodernism or its dismissive attitudes to what JeanFrançois Lyotard famously called the grand narratives of enlightenment and emancipation. On the contrary, as a fair degree of my own political and social activism has assured me, people all over the world can be and are moved by ideals of justice and equality—the South African victory in the liberation struggle is a perfect case in point—and the affiliated notion that humanistic ideals of liberty and learning still supply most disadvantaged people with the energy to resist unjust war and military occupation, for instance, and try to overturn despotism and tyranny, both strike me as ideas that are alive and well. And despite the (in my opinion) shallow but influential ideas of a certain facile type of radical antifoundationalism, with its insistence that real events are at most linguistic effects, and its close relative, the end-of-history thesis, these are so contradicted by the historical impact of human agency and labor as to make a detailed refutation of them here unnecessary. Change is human history, and human history is made by human action and understood accordingly is the very ground of the humanities. (Humanism, 10)

This is indeed vintage Said: the passion, the clarity, and the open and vulnerable eloquence. If I may slide into anecdotal mode for a moment, it was my singular good fortune that I—then a finishing doctoral candidate from suny, Binghamton, working under the supervision of that ever fiery and engaged intellectual William V. Spanos—was a student of Said’s at the 1982 edward said

143

144

summer session of the School of Criticism and Theory at Northwestern University. I had the thrilling opportunity, though I was nervous as hell, of presenting a talk in avid support of Foucault; and this presentation took place after all of us who were his students had discussed, with Said’s guidance, the celebrated discussion between Noam Chomsky and Foucault on Dutch tv about the nature of justice, truth, and the need for progressive action. Despite my total solidarity with Said’s worldly project, I disagreed then as I do now with his reading of Foucault. I thus argued in class that Foucault’s genealogical analysis, which refused to anchor justice and freedom foundationally in something called reason, and his insistence that the very history of the making of reason had been unreasonable offered much more potential for the emancipation for freedom and justice than did Chomsky’s neo-Kantian position. What I remember with great gratitude is the solicitous manner in which Said challenged my stance with serious questions, objections, and criticisms. Perhaps I have failed to learn something crucial from his reasoning, but to this day, despite my other published criticisms of Foucault,42 I remain committed to my conviction that Foucault is more far reaching than Chomsky on freedom and justice precisely because he refuses the coincidence of politics with epistemology and in the process opens up possibilities of a perennial revolution by way of the history of the present and its dire injustices and inequalities. What strikes me as ironic and even poignant is that Said’s project has so much in common with Foucault’s, in particular the desire to produce noncoercive forms of truth, despite their deep modal differences. It is also interesting, and difficult for me to understand how and why, that Said finds the Chomskian blend of political anarchism and epistemological “a priorism” more appealing and persuasive than the Foucauldian blend of relentless archaeology and interventionary genealogy. My guess, and this may sound like pop psychology, is that Said finds in Foucault a mirror image of his very own predicaments and contradictions: a grid that heightens the contradictions between macropolitical obligations and micropolitical imperatives. Chomsky, on the other hand, offers him both the solace of perennial oppositionality and a firm and unshakable anchorage of politics in epistemology. In the passage quoted above, I am not sure what exactly Said’s critical attitude is toward foundationalism and antifoundationalism. Is he arguing for edward said

an epistemological foundationalism, of whatever kind or provenance? Or is he saying that Lyotard’s manner of critiquing foundationalism is precious and pretentious? Or is he suggesting that it has become fashionable to use antifoundationalism as a glib “foundation” for an indeterminate radicalism? What would Said’s foundation be? It could be argued that an oppositional secularism is both antifundamentalist and antifoundationalist. Said’s confident claim that freedom and justice are evacuated from the scheme of things once the human becomes “human” begs the entire question of the postmodernist thesis of the discursive constitutedness of the human subject. Why does the same Said who rigorously problematizes the notion of a singular and capitalized Beginning require the guarantee of a human subject anchored in a transcendental ontology? Said’s own memorable advocacy of secularism makes it abundantly clear that he has no need for transhistorical or primordial inaugurations. And yet he wants to hold on to the idea of the anterior human agent who will not get caught up in the problem of epistemological recursivity. What changes, in Said’s critical world, is history; but what does not change is the human: the human subject and human intentionality remain unilateral authors and sculptors and architects of history. The other problem here is that unlike Partha Chatterjee, Said makes no differentiation between secularism as a political vision and secularism as an epistemological blueprint.43 Unlike a number of South Asian cultural critics who find themselves double-conscious with reference to secularism, Said is entirely happy with secularism and its embeddedness in the good humanism with a truly universal reach. Said is right on the mark when he warns the reader that radical epistemology in and of itself does not a revolution make. As Raymond Williams, too, would argue, theory often comes up with fancy new terms and positions that are purely autotelic and have no referential truth claims whatever.44 But the orthodoxy of this conviction does not allow for two possibilities: (1) that a politics, or a new way of doing politics, can be deduced or produced from a profound change in the structure of epistemology;45 and (2) that the avant-gardism of epistemology may not always be an irresponsible oversight of history, but sometimes can function as a critical-utopian gesture toward the future, much the way in which a literary work points to possibilities and directions disallowed by present history. Theory could well be a way of imagining otherwise, edward said

145

146

of imagining possibilities that do not as yet exist. Theory could well be that floating futural phrase in search of its real meaning or content. Said is quite happy to grant this potential to literature, but not to theory. It is interesting to observe which West Said avoids, and which West he seeks as a partner. It is evident that affirmations—despite flaws, caveats, and qualifications—to Said constitute the political; but not deconstructions. The reality that much of poststructuralist theory is engaged in the task of using the tools of the West to dismantle the occidental house does not seem important or serviceable to Said. He plays his metropolitan ambivalence out in a different way. I for one would argue that when it comes to the politics of location, the immanent politics of speaking, and the transcendent politics of speaking for, his situation is not all that different from that of Foucault. Not being an essentialist, not being an identity theorist, and not being an epistemological nationalist despite his advocacy of Palestinian nationhood, Said’s agency has always been that of the oppositional intellectual, rather than that of the hegemonic intellectual. Orientalism had to do not with the authentic representation of the East, but rather with the explicit problematization of Orientalism as an epistemological project of empire. Like any honest diasporic citizen who takes on the onerous burden of ethnic hyphenation and the charge of a dual responsibility, Said redraws the parameters of cosmopolitan accountability. Even as he is in the cosmopolis, his real constituency is that of the between. He is, to use Abdul JanMohamed’s telling phrase, “a border intellectual” who is also, to avail of Tim Brennan’s insight, “at home in the world” only because he is radically “out of place” in any determinate location.46 So how valid is Said’s claim that the fight against injustice and oppression cannot be based on a theoretical or ideological antihumanism? Does Foucauldian genealogy not allow the human subject any kind of an ethico-political foothold for projects of worldly change?47 Here I disagree with Said quite entirely, and I hold that his reading of Foucault is in error. Unlike Said, I do not see Foucauldian genealogy as precipitating an ascesis of the ethico-political human subject. Foucault’s legitimation of his projects takes a different path than that of Chomsky and Said. His critical attitude to what I call the category of “in the name of ” is as follows. Foucault does not grant a separation between the historicity of emancipatory projects from the historicity of the principles in the name edward said

of which these projects are undertaken. In other words, as a meticulous genealogist, he will not concede to freedom and liberty the categorial status of the a priori. Human nature, to Foucault, is undecided and undecideable, and yet choices need to be made strategically and contingently. As I have already stated, if the very history of the production of reason is an unreasonable history, then it should automatically follow that any project undertaken in the name of reason should be both reasonable and unreasonable (in Dostoevsky’s sense of the term).48 The invocation of reason has to be necessarily double coded. Yes indeed, it is an antifoundationalist project only because it realizes that it is impossible to separate reason from reasons of state and polemical reason; and that the only temporality during which reason can be invoked in all its innocent plenitude is during a dystopic regime that has become fully coextensive with the body of reason: a regime in which all forms of alterity will always already have been taken care of. The essential difference between Foucault and Said is that Foucault refuses to give belief and faith any kind of epistemological credence or basis, whereas Said takes that leap. And yet I feel Said and Foucault are much more akin than they appear in Said’s self-understanding. In Said’s case, let us take his attitude to nationalism. Does Said believe that nationalism is a valid and legitimate affiliation? No. Is he himself a nationalist? No. Given a choice between a cosmopolitan identity and a Palestinian national identity, which would he claim? Clearly the former. Yet rightly and magnificently so, Said fights, campaigns, “throws stones,” and is vilified as “the professor of terror” precisely because he is an indefatigable advocate of Palestinian national rights. In an uneven world structured in dominance, there really is no contradiction between Said’s political espousal of the Palestinian nationalist cause and his intellectual-theoretical repudiation of the claims of nationalism. If that is the case, then, is Said not practicing the very same kind of politics that he finds suspect: an antifoundationalist politics that fights in the name of a certain principle whose legitimacy is not absolute but immanent with the terrain of contestation? How then does Said defend his political project in support of a particular nationalism in the context of his general rejection of nationalism? The fact that he does is what makes him unique and credible as an intellectual. It is precisely because as a critic-intellectual he embraces the worldly task of living and making edward said

147

148

choices in a symptomatic world of contradictions that he commands our admiration and emulation. Rather than pose as a totalizing theorist who will not act except in the name of the purity of his methodology, Said is prepared to “think-tinker” his way through the dilemmas and crises of historical existence. What he does not do, however, is to provide a theoretical justification of how he breaks the impasse of aporias and dilemmas by the exercise of a political and worldly will. I would maintain that Said resolutely resides in the symptom, in the contradiction, even as he imagines a way out. The difference between Foucault and Said here is behavioral and attitudinal. In plunging into macropolitics without any of Foucault’s theory-based fastidiousness, Said allows the world to speak through him. There is also the existential-historical reality that Foucault’s critical subjectivity is not constituted by any structure of double consciousness. Foucault is just French: no ambivalence, no double consciousness, and no in-betweenness whatsoever. Said’s repudiation of the claims of antihumanism (would calling it posthumanism make a difference to Said; perhaps not) is based on a disagreement that is both affective and cognitive. In other words, he disagrees with poststructuralist antihumanists both at the level of sensibility and at the level of thought. Here is his diagnostic reading of the emergence and popularity of antihumanism in academia. Part of the revulsion was the emergence of a resistance movement to racism, imperialism generally, and the dry-as-dust humanities that had for years represented an unpolitical, unworldly, and oblivious (sometimes even manipulative) attitude to the present, all the while adamantly extolling the virtues of the past, the untouchability of the canon, and the superiority of “how we used to do it”—superiority, that is, to the disquieting appearance on the intellectual and academic sense of such things as women’s, ethnic, gay, cultural, and postcolonial studies and, above all I believe, a loss of interest in the vitiation of the core idea of the humanities. The certainty of the great literary texts was now threatened not only by popular culture but also by the heterogeneity of upstart or insurgent philosophy, politics, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. All these factors may have done a great deal to discredit the ideology, if not the committed practice, of humanism. But it is worth insisting, in this as well as other cases, that attacking the abuses of something is not the same thing as dismissing or entirely destroy-

edward said

ing that thing. So, in my opinion, it has been the abuse of humanism that discredits some of humanism’s practitioners without discrediting humanism itself. (Humanism, 12–13)

This passage invites serious commentary and critical reflection. Let me start from the end. To Said it is an a priori conviction that humanism needs to be salvaged from both its detractors and its own aberrations. He is also convinced that these aberrations are not an essential part of humanism. The abuses of humanism have a different etiology from that of the proper and celebrated uses of humanism. Are these valid intellectual assumptions, or are they necessary articles of faith? What then about the humanist American foreign-policy functionary who combines a great learned passion for Western classical music with his or her insistence that America bomb the hell out of a non-Western country?49 What is the relationship between cultural humanism and political humanism? I for one do not at all find it anomalous or scandalous that someone moved by Beethoven could also be a butcher of alien lives. I also know correspondingly of aficionados of Carnatic music who would quiver in response to the Paramatma on the basis of the evocative and allusive power of Carnatic music and at the same time subscribe unflinchingly to Brahminic casteism and an Islam-bashing Hindu fundamentalism: music-minded humanists who are happy racists and casteists.50 Culture never has been and never will be a substitute for political critique, revolution, or reform. If the same humanism authored both colonialism and anticolonialism, both the dominance of the master and the insurrection of the slave, where within this binary structuration is the true nature of humanism to be found and preserved? If the true freedom of the slave is to go beyond her or his desire to occupy the position of the master, can such a freedom be accommodated within the binary logic of humanism? When abuses occur, whose accountability is it: the system’s, that of the discourse, or that of individuals who could have but did not make the difference? Is humanism an ideology that interpellates its subject, or is it a transideological commonsensical philosophy that functions freely without interpellation? I would claim that racism and colonialism and anti-Semitism and patriarchy have all been versions of humanism, although it can be added that these -isms are chapters in the long

edward said

149

150

and unending book called The Historical Progress of Humanism through Civilization and Barbarism. If one accepts Walter Benjamin’s dictum, is it then possible to lay aside the barbaric side as less representative of human nature than the civilizational dimension? Said’s tacit response seems to be that humanism is all we have got, and therefore we would do well to dwell on its positive heritage and strengthen the ability of humanism to perform its own autocritique with probity and a heightened conscience. Said’s point of entry into this problematic is strategic and not theoretical or philosophical. For reasons that make eminent sense, Said refuses either to totalize the humanist subject or think of humanism as a systemic discourse that leaves no room for individual intentionality and agency. He well understands that the systemic level works when it comes to diagnosis, but not when it comes to cure and change. He also understands that when accountability is laid at the feet of a system or structure, there is a real possibility that the system may insist that the symptom itself be enjoyed as the cure. The system that is at fault is rarely capable of imagining strategies for correction and self-improvement. Said here is critically rehearsing the debate between Althusserian structuralists and theorists, historians, and critics such as E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams: a debate that was about the relationship between structure and agency. It is clear whose side Said is on. It is a little unfortunate that in this context Said does not invoke the Janus-faced Foucault who tries to hold on to both his archaeological and his genealogical projects. It will be recalled that in The Archaeology of Knowledge, a book that is indeed wall-to-wall discourse, Foucault describes with hermetic ruthlessness how official discourse functions and establishes the region of the true. The archaeological grid is a deterministic grid that describes après coup how official discourses constitute themselves as bodies of truth. It is a grid or matrix that offers little scope for critical intervention. And then there is the genealogical Foucault who looks for history in all the unofficial places: gossip, rumor, the back of a laundry list, diaries, fragments, and so on. The purpose of Foucauldian genealogy is to make trouble, to rewrite history, and to take history away from historiographies of dominance. When he talks about “subjugated knowledges,” he locates their insurrection in that topos where archaeology and genealogy face up to each other. Not just that, we do find edward said

Foucault giving the privilege of power and agency to genealogy, as in the following passage: “Let us give the term genealogy to the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today.”51 I think that Said, quite rightly, sees how stultifying the archaeology is, and my contention is that even if Said had turned his attention to Foucault’s essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” or Foucault’s powerknowledge formulations, he would not have been persuaded by Foucault or by Foucault’s Nietzsche. According to Said, Foucault in this essay would have gone too far in the other direction: for does Foucault not celebrate Nietzsche for the ultimate challenge that he flings at humanity— the perennial dissolution of the knowing subject in the processes of knowing?52 In Said’s reading, Foucault would have now turned volte-face: from the archaeologist of official discourse to the anarchist epistemologist who is happy to sacrifice the human. Said finds Chomsky’s political anarchism useful and comforting, but anarchism of the epistemological kind is anathema to Said. If I have so far been trying to explain Said’s redemption of humanism from its own bad side, it is time now to look at how Foucault explicates his antihumanist stance in his conversation with his interviewers in “Revolutionary Action: ‘Until Now.’ ” By humanism I mean the totality of the discourse through which Western man is told: “Even though you don’t exercise power, you can still be a ruler. Better yet, the more you deny yourself the exercise of power, the more you submit to those in power, then the more this increases your sovereignty.” Humanism invented a whole series of subjects sovereignties: the soul (ruling the body, but subjected to God), consciousness (sovereign in a contest of judgment, but subjected to the necessities of truth), the individual (titular control of personal rights subjected to the laws of nature and society), basic freedom (sovereign within, but accepting the demands of an outside world and “aligned with destiny”). In short, humanism is everything in Western civilization that restricts the desire for power: it prohibits the desire for power and excludes the possibility of power being seized. The theory of the subject (in the double sense of the word) is at the heart of humanism and this is why our culture has tenaciously rejected anything that would weaken its hold upon us. (Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 221–22)

edward said

151

Here then we have Said envisioning his ideal humanist: It is especially appropriate for the contemporary humanist to cultivate that sense of multiple worlds and complex intersecting traditions, that inevitable combination . . . of belonging and detachment, reception and resistance. The task of the humanist is not just to occupy a position or place, not simply to belong somewhere, but rather to be both insider and outsider to the circulating ideas that are at issue in our society or someone else’s society or the society of the other. (Humanism, 76)

152

It is quite startling how utterly divergent the two versions are: so divergent indeed that they cannot be talking about the same object. What creates this profound dissidence is the difference in polemical orientation. In other words, Said and Foucault each creates his own problematic, and within this problematic that is a combinatory of many elements, humanism constitutes a semantic element. Each of them has textualized humanism in accordance with the finitude and the demands of his location and subject position. To start with, Foucault is talking about humanism, whereas Said is talking about the humanist. What is the big difference, one may be tempted to ask. But the difference is indeed enormous. It is immediately obvious that Foucault reads humanism as a discourse of mystification that is wielded by those in dominance to keep the human subject docile, malleable, and under control. Foucault’s acute diagnosis is that humanism is a virulent ideology that passes itself as a pious and transparent worldview. It has been humanism’s profound ruse, Foucault argues, to create various forms of subjection through the exercise of unilateral sovereign power, and at the same time delude the human subject into the belief that power and the exercise of power are evil. The humanist subject, in Foucault’s understanding, is a benighted being that has been effectively brainwashed into the belief that in its disempowerment lies its salvation. To Foucault, humanism is a form of ideological, discursive, and epistemological subjection, whereas Said is referring to a specific humanist or a group of humanists who are not at all constrained to be mere choiceless interpellants. Said does not believe in the a priorism of the discourse as la langue over the contingent powers and resources of discourse as agential la parole. Here is another major difference: Foucault marks humanism as Western—and well he should, and well he should not. It all depends edward said

on who is saying it. There is no denying the historical circumstance that humanism is Western, but it is not exclusively Western thanks to colonial modernity. Foucault, we know, has never really been interested in matters outside the European center except during the Maoist period of high French theory and during the time of the Iranian revolution. In both contexts, Foucault’s treatment of the non-West has been exotic, and in the case of Iran, just egregiously wrong. But to be fair to Foucault, either way he could be condemned. If he were to say that humanism interpellated the non-West as well, he could be accused of overblowing the jurisdiction of humanism. But when he marks it as Western, as he does here, he could be lambasted for presuming to protect humanism from non-Western and postcolonial appropriations. The connections that Foucault makes among power, sovereignty, humanism, and the human subject create a scenario quite contrary to what Said would like to believe. Foucault is arguing vigorously that humanism literally criminalizes power and the attempts that subaltern subjects might make to seize power. He makes the telling diagnosis that humanism, in the hands of dominant groups, naturalizes itself as a disinterested and power-neutral philosophy or worldview; and moreover, it preaches quietism and an acceptance of the status quo to those dominated and subjugated subjects who have been the dupes and objects of humanism. Humanism has created the illusion that power is bad, that wresting power is lawless, that adversarial violence against the dominant wielders of humanism is illicit. In other words humanism is full of double-talk and double standards. It is precisely in the name of humanism that struggles are depoliticized and defanged; for humanism is a worldview that will not acknowledge that it is indeed a virulent ideological regime deeply committed to the unequal and uneven realization of power. This is exactly why and how Brahmin casteists, slave holders, feudal landlords, and colonial masters have been able to hold on to their humanist credentials even as they have unleashed regimes of terror and oppression. To conflate Foucault and Gramsci, humanist intellectuals are fiercely organic intellectuals who disavow their politics and pretend to be timeless traditional intellectuals. It is not the failure of humanism that results in slaveholding and racism and colonialism; rather, these horrors are the result of a hypocritical humanism that shores up dominance namelessly in an unmarked currency. To Foucault, it is edward said

153

154

incontrovertibly clear that it is in the nature of humanism to be duplicitous about itself, and it is this nature of humanism that has to be dismantled tout court. To Said’s defense that humanism is what humanism does, Foucault’s rejoinder would be—and here I am in complete agreement with Foucault—that the identity of humanism is so fixed essentially speaking that nothing it “does” can ever go against the grain of such an essence. To Said, this entire line of thinking would sound like theoretical obfuscation. To sum up, Foucault produces a “total” theoretical description of the discourse of humanism, whereas Said claims humanist subjecthood freely and intentionally: and this brings up the question of rhetorical address. Who is the intended addressee of humanism, and is there a way to decide this issue? I frame it in the context of address and addressee to invoke that significant earlier moment at which Jean-Paul Sartre in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s impassioned The Wretched of the Earth argues that even though Fanon is addressing Africa, Europe should listen, courageous enough to be transformed by the ethico-political authority of Fanon’s discourse.53 Said would claim that he, too, like the world at large, is the addressee not only of “Western” humanism but also of any body of thought produced anywhere in the world. Said brilliantly recognizes the reality that no philosophy is produced with solipsistic reference just to its provenance and that the concrete universality produced by any system of thought is intended as a negotiating participant in the production of a relational human universality.54 In contrast, in his rigorous efforts at keeping away from macropolitical universals, Foucault in fact opts himself out completely from having any say about universality. There is yet another stark difference between Said and Foucault. Of the two, I would say that Foucault is the provincial Eurocentric intellectual, whereas Said is a multilateral, multivalent, multicultural, and cosmopolitan intellectual. Said is the border intellectual whose work moves among, across, and athwart multiple boundaries and sovereignties, whereas Foucault, despite his archaeological erudition and genealogical intensity, remains a prisoner to the Eurocentric episteme. Foucault’s epistemological mobility and his capacity for transgressive thinking remain micropolitical and ergo, geopolitically speaking, quite provincial. The Saidian possibility of existing simultaneously in multiple worlds, of experiencing windows as mirrors and mirrors as edward said

windows, of perennially transcribing any inside space as a space of the outside, and of dwelling in many betweens as homes and as locations is not even thinkable for Foucault. To Said these liminal possibilities are not just the fancy fabrications of theorizing; they are indeed experiential verities. Perhaps this is putting it too strongly, but I would say that the chronotopes in which Said lives and thinks are far more avantgarde than the location of Foucault’s theory, however magnificent and groundbreaking. A different way of saying this would be: Foucault, the indefatigable critic of representation, ends up in a desiccated and an attenuated macropolitical universe, whereas Said, whose theoretical belief in representation may sound retrogressive compared to Foucault’s, produces work that resonates among multiple geopolitical registers and valences. Said’s macropolitical betweenness saves him from the seductions of centrist orthodoxy, whereas Foucault does not escape the mark of centrism, despite his more thorough and rigorous epistemological vigilance. Contrary to Foucault’s totalizing description of humanism as discourse, in Said’s rhetoric, humanism is a way of doing things, whatever it is that one may be doing. The significance of the task is not exhausted either by the might of the interpellation or by the disciplinary or modal immanence of the activity itself. There is room for critically transcending the terms of the interpellation and for putting the interpellation (which is procedural in nature) to work one way rather than another. To Said humanism is an ethico-political imperative of the second order that gives a certain secular and worldly shape and direction to whatever one is doing. One could be a practicing humanist engineer, a humanist interpreter of texts, a humanist economist, a humanist educator, a humanist government administrator. One has the option of practicing one’s trade or profession in a humanist, ahumanist, antihumanist, or a nonhumanist way.55 This I think is a brilliant reconfiguration of the term, since now the value of humanism is not inherent in disciplinarity or in the specialized discourse of the profession. Humanism is an ethicopolitical stance that tells the intellectual from without how to handle, use, and direct the discourse. What Said has done is to amateurize humanism and in the process endow it with a worldliness that is often foreclosed without compunction in the immanence of wall-to-wall discourses. It is indeed true that in rendering humanism as an orientation, edward said

155

156

Said runs the risk of a certain simplemindedness, as is evident from this quotation from Humanism and Democratic Criticism: “Change is human history, and human history as made by human action and understood accordingly is the very ground of the humanities” (10). What is remarkable is that Said—in the aftermath of an avalanche of specialist -isms, and discourses, and methodologies—finds Giambattista Vico’s articulation of the secular to be quite revolutionary: and all that Vico is saying is that “the historical world is made by men and women, and not by god” (11). This is no earthshaking statement, particularly in our times. Perhaps not; but to Said this becomes a crucial retrieval because it keeps theodicy out and because it also challenges the occlusion of the human by the “human.” Said’s strategy here is relationally critical. He is intervening in professionalism by way of humanism. There are two objectives here, and they are interbraided to form an inclusive worldly project. There is the task of decelebrating professionalism, as well as the work of affirming humanism. Affirming humanism is the main project, but this affirmation requires the critique of professionalism. Here, for example, we find Said extolling the virtues of simplicity. Unfortunately, Adorno’s poetic insights and dialectical genius are in very short supply even among those who try to emulate his style: as Sartre said in another context, Valéry was a petit bourgeois, but not every petit bourgeois is a Valéry. Not every coiner of rebarbative language is Adorno. The risks of specialized jargon for the humanities, inside and outside the university, are obvious: they simply substitute one prepackaged idiom for another. Why not assume instead that the role of the humanistic exposition is to make the demystifications and questionings so central to our enterprise as transparent and efficient as possible ? Why turn “bad writing” into an issue at all, except as a way of falling into the trap of focusing uselessly on how something is said rather than the more important issue of what is said? There are too many available models of intelligible language all around us whose basic graspability and efficiency goes the whole range from difficult to comparatively simple, between the language of, say, Henry James and that of W. E. B. DuBois. There is no need to employ preposterously outré and repellent idioms as a way of showing independence and originality. Humanism should be a form of disclosure, not of secrecy or religious illumination. Expertise as

edward said

a distancing device has gotten out of control, especially in some academic forms of expression, to the extent that they have become antidemocratic and even anti-intellectual. At the heart of what I have been calling the movement of resistance in humanism—the first part of this being reception and reading—is critique, and critique is always restlessly self-clarifying in search of freedom, enlightenment, more agency, and certainly not their opposites. (Humanism, 72–73)

There are several ways of responding to the many arguments and positions in this passage. Just to be the devil’s advocate, one could respond to Said and exclaim, “Not every coiner of simple and transparent language is Edward Said.” This is an enormous question about the exemplarity, emulability, and the representativeness of literary style. Is it easier to write like Ernest Hemingway than it is to write like Virginia Woolf? Is it easier to philosophize à la Derrida or à la Bertrand Russell? The answer has to take into account the conditions under which certain thoughts, ideas, and sensibility take shape and condense into a style: there is no room here for a facile form-content dichotomy. Neither Derrida nor Russell is writing and philosophizing ex nihilo; both Russell and Derrida are undeniable examples and instantiations of specific traditions of thought and écriture. One could write like Hemingway and just be simpleminded and perceptually impoverished; and one could write like Woolf and just be guilty of logorrhea and muddleheadedness. But of course there have not been too many Hemingways or Woolfs. In the heat of his polemic, Said overlooks the fact that style is the felicitous coming together of the form of the content and the content of the form. To dismiss difficulty and complexity easily in terms of the greater importance of what is being said and the lesser importance of how it is being said will just not work as an argument. What then about literature as a genre—or poetry, which Paul Valéry would compare to a dance, whereas he would liken prose to walking—that deals with the way of writing as its fundamental ethic?56 Clearly, Said would not go the Sartre way in making easy distinctions between prose and poetry, or between literature engagée and aesthetic literature?57 Said also overlooks the fact that there are many ways of problematizing common sense and of quarreling with language. A number of philosophers and writers have taken the trouble to imagine new contents through new forms, and of derailing

edward said

157

158

and problematizing transparency (Heidegger comes to mind, and John Cage in composition) to avoid easy orthodoxies and to point out the ponderous constructedness of so-called transparency. Again, not every long-haired dropout is a radical, and not every stuttering, catatonic musical composer is a Cage. But as I have observed already, this argument cuts both ways: the quarrel with language as such is neither always a radical revolution nor always a version of formal narcissism. But there is something taking place here that is much deeper and even more interesting. Said’s restless mind, in playing with language, creates a number of displacements. Students of Said’s work will remember the memorable manner in which he complicated the relationship between what is being said and who is saying it, both in Orientalism and in his essay on Foucault.58 Here, he makes the distinction to make the reader aware of the many modes in which language works. There are several modes or rhetorical positions: the speaker-as-ontological, the speaker-asepistemological/perspectival, and then there is the message; there is the choice of a particular genre or style. It is vintage Said when he does not let language sleep as text or as discourse or as “linguicity,” a term that Said uses in Beginnings; instead he implicates language in movement, in articulation, in the politics of a certain voice and of a perspective. But in invoking language thus, Said bypasses “instrumental reason as a problem.” Though it is clear what Said means by “efficient” in the context of his critique of theories and specialized discourses that wantonly resist intelligibility, we cannot afford to overlook a different resonance of the word efficient: efficient as merely pragmatic, as merely problem solving and utilitarian—and in that sense anti-intellectual and antitheoretical. So, how does he derive his criteria for honoring intellectuality? Simply stated, it should be democratic, and it should reveal or disclose something. An aristocrat of high culture in his own way, Said by democracy does not mean “the masses” in any demotic or populist sense of the term, but rather as a nontechnical laity made up of average human beings. Said’s perspective would be Gramscian in so far as he believes that all human beings are intellectuals, though some perform intellectuality as a chosen, specialized profession. But there is always a representative sanction as well as a connection between the two. In other words, Said is not prepared to question or decelebrate “the intellectual,” or declare that the times of the intellectual are dead and gone, as do Foucault and edward said

Gilles Deleuze. In place of theory and specialized jargon, Said uses the term critical consciousness. That still holds. A theoretically and modally oriented thinker may well fault Said for an unexamined photocentrism when he talks about illumination and disclosure, and I would say that this criticism is not entirely pointless. When we think of Joseph Conrad, a figure to whom Said returns almost predictably and even obsessively, we also think of Conrad’s famous statement about the novelist’s desire to make one see, and of what happens to seeing in The Heart of Darkness where darkness becomes the burden of seeing.59 Said would be right in pointing out that that is no reason for all attempts at enlightenment to be debunked. In this case, the eyes that saw were the eyes of white racism that could see nothing but a terrifying blackness in Africa. But even here, unlike Chinua Achebe, Said would argue that the same Conrad who cannot see anything in Africa is able to powerfully call into question the colonialism of the West. Said’s point would be that Conrad’s fiction dramatizes Eurocentric humanism in disarray: a humanism that is being compelled to call its own bluff and confront its own brutality. But this argument needs to be sharpened some more. Seeing and the gaze are both dependent on who the seer is and at the same time independent of the specificity of a particular seer.60 The gaze can be returned from within the politics of the gaze, but no pure humanism can own the gaze in the form of a totally subservient agency.61 There is also the reality that insight includes blindness, and that enlightenments have their own built-in penumbras.62 The question I raise here briefly, and I will return to it toward the end of this chapter, is the culpability or otherwise of Conrad’s aesthetic and ethico-political imagination. Is he complicit with the brutality of colonial modernity masquerading as universal humanism; or is he deconstructing it from within by virtue of his narratological conscience and literary integrity? How much of Conrad is individual intention, and how much systemic inevitability; and what is the relationship between the two? When Said talks about secular disclosure, he is careful to differentiate between “religious illumination” and “secrecy.” Though disclosure is not synonymous with illumination, it does partake in the rationale of making one see. The difference for Said of course would be that secular humanist disclosure would be historical and not immaculate, and besides, it is a processual phenomenon that constitutes what it sees rather edward said

159

160

than presenting something that is already “there.” As for secrecy, as the “Admit All” motif on the cover of Said’s book proclaims, Said is against all forms of esoteric and mystic knowledges that are based on guilds, selective memberships, and on the exclusion of the many. True to his logic all along, Said does not equate all of humanism with the critique, but rather locates the critique in the heart of humanism as that valuable moment of self-reflexivity and recursiveness. Here in fact, he has much in common with, of all theorists, Derrida. What then is a critique? Derrida and Said would concur, I think, that a critique cannot be proper, and also that it has to be heterogeneous with the sovereignty of its object.63 Where Derrida would emphasize the heterogeneity, Said would come down on the side of a solidary heterogeneity or difference. What is the subject of a critique? Derrida has theorized that a critique as radical process is truly subjectless, and Said—depending on in which lexicon, specialist or lay, one places the word subject—would agree or disagree. Said makes the important proviso that before the critique there should be reception and reading, that is, that the critique cannot be transitive and just of itself, and Derrida may or may not agree depending on how Said chooses to read the figure of “the dangerous supplement.” Both thinkers are keen and indefatigable readers of texts, though reading and the text do not quite mean the same thing to them. Early on, Said dismissed the relevance of Derrida (though the dismissal of Foucault did not prove that easy) based on Said’s own reading of the (in)famous Derridean dictum that there is nothing outside the text. Not only would Said agree with Foucault’s adjudication that Derrida’s deconstructive readings always already locate adversarial meanings in the original text and thereby rob the original of its own determinate intentionality but also that the Derridean text cuts itself off from all worldly practices and flows.64 Yet both thinkers are deeply invested in the perennial revolution, in the ongoing life of difference in the form of readings, possibilities, energies, and interpretations. The critique (it is interesting that here Said uses the term critique and not critical consciousness), while signifying resistance, is also at the heart of its object, or is it? The question that can be asked both of Derrida and Said is: Are critiques axiologically anchored? Is a critique just a critique, or can there be humanist, Islamic, Christian, feminist, or Marxist critiques that stem from a worldview even as they question it? How orphaned, or to use edward said

one of Said’s favorite words, how “exiled” is the critique? And what exiles it: its mode of operation, its mode of belonging, or the orientation of the consciousness that animates it? Who can forget how much Said makes of Auerbach’s exiled positionality as cultural critic and theorist? Is it conceivable that the critical resistance that Said is prizing here is but another name for deconstruction? Is the critique of humanism humanism, or is it its difference from itself? Does humanism prefigure its own antagonisms, and is the critique nothing more than the instrument necessary for such oppositional self-disclosure? The restlessness and the need for constant self-clarification: these pertain both to Derrida and Said, but with some variation. Derrida would be much more finicky than Said in insisting that the moment of affirmation not be separated from the movement of critical negativity, and that forgetting should take the form not of obliteration, but of putting something visibly under erasure, sous rature. To Said, these protocols may sound either precious, or he could argue that the moment of practice automatically takes care of these concerns: hence no need to autonomize them as theoretical issues in themselves. But where a difference will emerge, I think, and here one may perceive a likeness between Foucault and Derrida, is at the level of legitimation. In the name of what does the critique function? Here Said is quick and happy to supply the reasons, or the desired objectives: more agency, enlightenment, and freedom, and not their opposites. This is the Chomskian side of Said that separates, almost categorically, the stuff of what is being sought from the stuff of the process and of the search. In different ways, this separation would be inadmissible both to Foucault and Derrida. I will not belabor this point here since I have dealt with this theme at some length during my triangulated discussion of Said, Foucault, and Chomsky. The only point I want to make here, as I both identify and differentiate Saidian critique from deconstruction and Foucauldian genealogy and subjectivation, is that to Said the “doubling of man” is exclusively political, whereas to Derrida and Foucault, mutatis mutandis, the theme of “man and his doubles” puts humanity itself under epistemological erasure without at the same time disabling it politically.65 The self-reflexive thinking that Said values so much discloses the embeddedness of politics in epistemology, and the embeddedness of epistemology in ontology; but at no point does it contend that ontology edward said

161

162

becomes a mere function of epistemology. Is it possible to endow a proper name to Saidian politics except in terms of oppositionality and resistance? I doubt it, except in the case of the Palestinian struggle; but here, too, Said combines his advocacy of Palestinian nationhood with an abiding critique of nationalism as such.66 Said could be seen as arguing that the critique and the resistance are as typical of humanism as are its abuses and Eurocentric deployments. It is Said’s endeavor to claim humanism in the name of the former while acknowledging historically the contrapuntal relationship of culture to imperialism. In my discussion so far, I have not introduced the dimension of power and its relationship to humanism as practice and theory. If it is the case, and I think it is, that both Foucault and Said are committed to the project of generating noncoercive ways of producing knowledge, what might Said have to say about Foucault’s indictment of humanism as a body of thought that comes in the way of people acquiring power? In the passage I quoted a while ago from Foucault, Foucault identifies the humanist subject as the culprit that cripples and restricts the desire for power. But Foucault himself is quite ambivalent, even confused, here. If, as Foucault always maintains, subjection in a double sense is inevitable, then what is so objectionable about the humanist form of subjection? There must be something content specific about humanism that is disreputable and not just the fact that the human becomes a subject by being subjected. If anything, in the hands of Althusser, this theory of subject formation combining structuralism with Lacanian psychoanalysis calls the bluff of the natural and free humanist subject and insists on the inevitability of interpellation. The object of Althusser’s structuralistmarxist demystification is humanism’s disavowal of its ideological constitution. And as we all know, Althusser gained a great deal of notoriety with his sweeping statement that ideology is “omnihistorical.” It would be worthwhile here to triangulate Said, Foucault, and Althusser in their different readings of humanism. Althusser makes his intentions programmatically clear in the following passage: The examination that I shall proceed to undertake is a purely theoretical one. I do not propose to examine the nature and social function of Humanism as an ideology or to question Humanism’s “right” to exist as an ideology. I simply propose to examine from a theoretical standpoint, the justification that

edward said

the ideologues of Theoretical Humanism (the young Marx, our moderns, etc.) invoke for assigning a theoretical role to ideological notions like Man, the Human Genus, and so on. It is, then, from the theoretical standpoint, and from that standpoint alone, that I shall be treating these notions as so many epistemological obstacles. To make this more precise, I must add two important stipulations. To say obstacle is to suggest a concept that is meaningful only in terms of a theoretical metaphor that can be formulated roughly as follows. Theory has struck out on a path that it must travel in order to attain knowledge of its real object or objects. At some point, this path is blocked by an obstacle that prevents the theory from approaching and attaining its object. Thus the metaphor of the epistemological obstacle signifies two things: (1) the theory comes up against an obstacle that prevents it from advancing; (2) this obstacle blocks a path and hides objects that are in some sense behind it. To eliminate this obstacle is to clear the path and perceive the objects that were hidden by it. Thus there is a twofold relationship between the obstacle and the path (or the objects): on the one hand, a relationship of opposition (contrarite) but also, in a certain way, a relationship of correspondence (affinite) which, albeit hard to define, is unmistakable. It is not just any obstacle that blocks just any path or “hides” just any object. The history of theories shows that there is a certain relationship between the way of handling (eliminating) the obstacle and therefore the nature of the obstacle, on the one hand, and the path it blocks or the objects it “hides” on the other.67

This indeed is quintessential Althusserian discourse: just the kind of discourse that persuaded Said, both epistemologically and ethico-politically, to break once and for all from theory. From a Saidian perspective, the first disagreeable and precious feature about this passage is the use of an italicized theory. In total agreement with E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, Said would have read this rhetorical mannerism as an insidious ruse that inflates and hypostatizes theory as its own cognitive object in usurpation of the worldliness of the world. In other words, just by privileging theory through the use of the italics, Althusser could be seen as removing theory from all traffic and implication with history and experience. In other words, theory enjoys a certain epistemological firstness, as well as a categorical primacy that is not to be questioned by history, experience, or the world. Equally annoying and counterproductive

edward said

163

164

to Said would be the aplomb that characterizes Althusser’s announcement that what he is proposing is a “purely theoretical analysis.” Not only is Althusser asserting magisterially the superior claims of theory but he is also saying openly that a pure practice of theory is both possible and necessary for real objects to be found. What Althusser is practicing here is a kind of latter-day Husserlian bracketing, not to return things themselves through an act of transcendent eidetic reduction, but to cognitively appropriate the world by way of an ultimately scientific and totally self-reflexive epistemology. What to Said would seem an etiolation or a desiccation of reality is to Althusser a theoretical understanding of the worldliness of the world. Althusser is quite happy to bracket the ethico-political and ideological claims of humanism: his objective rather is to discredit theoretically the theoretical status that the humanist ideologues claim on behalf of ideological constructs such as “man” and the like. This is the Althusser who begins associating critical theory with a scientificity that has the potential to get through to the other side of ideology: the same Althusser who gets critiqued by Foucault for setting up the avant-garde of scientific expertise. The point I want to make here is that in exact opposition to Said, Althusser claims that the world or worldliness cannot be vouched for except in and as theory. In a perverse and preposterous manner, to Althusser, the world itself becomes an epistemological obstacle to the production of worldliness as a viable theoretical concept. Whereas Said’s complaint is that the human way to achieving worldliness is blocked by a theory run rampant with its own self-adequating narcissism and hubris, Althusser thinks of theory as a path to the intelligibility of the world: a path blocked by the world’s reality-as-obstacle. Althusser posits a rupture between the facticity of the world and the appropriability of such a world in the realm of theoretical knowledge. Said’s commitment to the world by way of worldliness and Althusser’s dedication to the object of theory point in opposite directions. The primary ethic that to Althusser underwrites all other commitments is toward the enabling of theory to reach its real object. All else follows from this epistemological investment; when theory is blocked and not allowed to reach its real object, what follows is illusion and the proliferation of ideological formulations as theoretical concepts. Behind the obstacle are the real objects of theory: thus terms like man, the human edward said

genus, human nature, and humanism are the obstacles to epistemology that need to be removed so that what is really meant by these terms can be recognized by theoretical thinking. The problem with pretheoretical recognition, according to Althusser, is that it is a misrecognition that does not know so.68 Keeping with the inner or deeper logic of symptomatic reading, Althusser however concedes that these obstacles are a necessary part of theory’s path toward the real objects. It is in this context that Althusser makes the statement that not everything is an obstacle, and more particularly, that not every obstacle has earned the honor of being an epistemological obstacle. Only those formulations and modes of thought that hide real objects behind them can be dignified with the appellation epistemological obstacles: hence both the relationship of opposition and that of correspondence. Let us recall now Pierre Macherey’s Althusserian critique of the Barthesian notion of the simulacrum and its mediation between “the real” and “the intelligible”: the point that he makes against Barthes is that the simulacrum remains a disinterested representation of the real, rather than being an interested and perspectival production and transformation of the real.69 Said, too, would agree that worldliness is no passive acceptance of the world as it is; and furthermore, that the act of understanding the world, as defined by Marx, should indeed change, and not just interpret, the world. But the big difference is that to Said this change does not happen in theory; it happens through the rigorous application of individual intentionality and critical consciousness. If anything, one could easily anticipate Said critiquing Althusserian theory for its disavowed idealism, even accusing it of a certain residual phenomenological behavior: for does not theory, in Althusser’s description, resemble the modality of a-letheia (Un-covering ) in Heideggerian thought? From Said’s perspective, there is no room in Althusser for theory to be demystified by history or by the world or by experience. In spite of merely being on the way, that is, in spite of its not having reached, theory is granted a certain maturity as well as a prescience that has no basis in history or in the world. What then is hidden, and by what sorts of obstacles? One could discern a strong similarity between the way Said formulates the relationship between the world and worldliness and the manner in which Althusser articulates an essential relationship between “the way of handling the obstacle” and “the nature of edward said

165

166

the obstacle.” To Said, the world is an objective given, but a given that calls for secular human engagement and interpretation. In other words, worldliness is not a given. Worldliness has to be actively produced by human beings, both in their lay and specialist capacities. How is this to be achieved? Not through seclusion or reclusive contemplation, or by way of a pure thought that can first understand the world formally or transcendentally before it takes on the impurities or vagaries of lived lives and histories; but, Said would argue, by letting the world in all its protean, untheorized rhythms influence human thought and thinking. Said is never under the impression that the world as a historical and experiential entity is to be demystified by expert or theoretical knowledge. Though Althusser as a Marxist and Said as a secular critic are indeed interested in transforming the world in a certain and not in any which way, they differ radically from each other when it comes to their source of reliability. To Althusser, theory as the domain of specialist knowledge offers reliability, whereas to Said what is reliable is a pragmatic critical consciousness in touch with the world—not intermittently, but perennially. The question that both Said and Foucault, but not Althusser, ask is: What is the difference? What is the consequence of producing a theory and allowing it to remove all the epistemological obstacles in the way so that it can reach the real objects? What worldly difference does it make except celebrate the fact that the world is now available as a symptom or as a contradictory and overdetermined syndrome? What is the program, and what is the plan of action that can be drawn from the symptomatic reading? Althusser is quite satisfied with his conviction that a symptomatic theoretical reading of the world in and of itself constitutes “what is to be done.” Not so Foucault, the post-Marxist genealogist of history who is devoted to the task of valorizing subjugated knowledges as they emerge in opposition both to official historiographies and to the dominance of scientific knowledge. But Foucault raises a different set of issues and questions for Said. For one thing, it is not clear if the object of Foucault’s politico-epistemological indignation is ideology as such or humanist ideology in particular. It would seem that in this passage Foucault is pretty much toeing the classical Marxist line on seizing power. Power, despite being ubiquitous and in that sense not being either anybody’s possession or someone else’s nonpossession, is something that edward said

can be seized in the name of a political struggle and in the name of the people. In the examples Foucault gives of the double nature of subjection, that is, of the putative granting of the power to rule on one level, but immediate subjection on another higher level, the term that he identifies as the enemy is sovereignty. He calls them a whole series of “subject sovereignties.” What Foucault seems to be groping toward is a nonsovereign mode of being and of truth that will set people truly free. The question that Foucault is raising, a question that plays itself out ethically, politically, and epistemologically, is the following: Is human freedom imaginable in conjunction with radical de-subjectification? What would freedom feel and taste like if it is experienced by something other than the human “subject”? What if the human template were not subjecthood or subjectivity, but something radically other? Foucault’s endeavor is nothing short of a dismantling of the following triangulation: sovereignty-subject-power. To put it differently, Foucault is looking to style “the human” otherwise so that it can be free without the travails of subjection to sovereignty. Foucault’s manifesto is on behalf of a style of living free that has no need for sovereignty and its ideological enclosures. It is on this basis that he suggests the following way out. It is interesting to see that the domain that Foucault gestures toward in his emancipatory rhetoric is, guess what, literature: a practice and discourse dear to Edward Said. Here is Foucault again in “Revolutionary Action: ‘Until Now’ ”: But it (the theory of the subject) can be attacked in two ways: either by a “desubjectification” of the will to power (that is, through political struggle in the context of class warfare) or by the destruction of the subject as pseudosovereign (that is, through an attack on “culture”: the suppression of taboos and the limitations imposed upon the sexes; the setting up of communes; the loosening of inhibitions with regard to drugs; the breaking of all the prohibitions that form and guide the development of a normal individual). I am referring to all those experiences which have been rejected by our civilization or which it accepts only within literature. (Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 222)70

There is a clear ambivalence in Foucault’s theoretical position here. Even as he would like to, by way of Marxism and the reference to class warfare, think of power as something to be seized in line with class edward said

167

168

interests and agency, he has to let the other Foucault speak. And this Foucault would point out, and rightly so, that there is more to the theme of power than is envisaged through the “seizing the power for political means” model. The have/have-not model of power and the thesis of the ubiquity of power and its capillary manifestations do not sit well together, at least not all the way. Foucault always insisted throughout his career that the epistemological model of change and revolution should lead the way for the political model. The problematic for him has been to dwell in that asynchrony between politics and epistemology, between instrumentalized ways of thinking that in the name of reform make peace with the possibilities of a given history and a radical breakthrough enabled by thought that has as yet no accredited topos within given history. Foucault’s utopian reference to “what is accepted in literature” but not in reality marks that differential no-space possible to epistemology and literary imagination, but not to political practice. The “desubjectification” strategy that Foucault offers has much in common with the Althusserian category of a “process without subject or goal/s.”71 The other prong of the strategy that deals on the cultural level with the destruction of the pseudosovereign subject is based on the assumption that power is accessible for seizure in a free and untrammeled manner once the subject is dismantled theoretically. One can see the connection between Foucault’s flirtation here with nonsovereign forms of power based on desubjectified desire and his romanticization of people’s justice by way of a heavily exoticized Gallocentric Maoism.72 It is as though Foucault the genealogist wants to break loose from the prison set up by Foucault the archaeologist; and the Foucault of the free desire wants to call into question the Foucault who theorized so brilliantly the thesis of double subjection and of the constituting-constituted nexus. The masked philosopher is neither the mask nor the not-mask, or the face behind the mask. What we have is a performative contradiction and performance as contradiction. I introduced this discussion to point out a thematic similarity between Said and Foucault, even though Said would rather go with the humanist term “the individual” (not the “individual” fetishized by capitalism) and not really care that much for the desubjectification project of Foucault. For Said, that project would be entirely academic and methodological and not all that meaningful, generally speaking, except edward said

in the context of the structuralist-Marxist break from an earlier Marxism. Said’s demand to Foucault would be something like, “Cut out the jargon, and tell me what is your macropolitical vision.” Foucault’s response would possibly be this: “I dream of the intellectual destroyer of evidence and universalities, the one who, in the inertias and constraints of the present, locates and marks the weak points, the openings, the lines of force, who incessantly displaces himself, doesn’t know exactly where he is heading nor what he’ll think tomorrow because he is too attentive to the present.”73 There is much here that is compatible with Said’s restless and everchanging intellectual-critical energy that refuses formulaic remedies and programmatic resolutions. Both Foucault and Said have very little respect for thought, or a way of thinking, that hankers after “home.” But two important questions need to be raised here lest we conflate Said and Foucault a little too felicitously: (1) Who or what is doing the thinking? (2) What is “home” as a construct: is it political or epistemological or both, or is it primarily one and therefore the other? Time and again Foucault has decelebrated the intellectual, whereas Said claims the figure of the intellectual as critical consciousness in those spaces between culture and system. Said is not at all bothered by the potential Foucauldian objection that the Saidian intellectual is posited on the basis of the individual. Rather than worry about the epistemological constitution of the individual and therefore of the intellectual based on that model, Said unmoors the individual from the twin orthodoxies of culture and system and floats the individual into border areas and the liminal zones of the between. This macropolitical deterritorialization of the individual, to Said, is enough to call into question forms of fake, pseudo-, and overdetermined sovereignties that render the world monovalent. To Said the fact that it is the individual who thinks does not entail the conclusion either that the individual is unilaterally in control of the thought process or that the individual will necessarily shore up some form of a reductive and monoloyal sovereignty, or be a hapless victim of capitalist ideology. In Said’s discourse, it is the humanist subject/individual who is doing the talking. Foucault as a posthumanist thinker is quite happy to accept the model of perennial epistemological self-styling, and the model of aimless epistemological wandering in the name of the history of the present. It is not clear, as one reads Foucault, if such a theoretical edward said

169

170

and epistemological engagement with the present is already a political model, or if it will beget a compatible political model. In Said’s case, home and the humanist subject resonate differently. Said lives between home and not home, and his thoughts are those of a subject that straddles politics and epistemology. Though comfortable as an exile, Said understands the need and the significance of home on a political level. As an intellectual exile, he will not and ought not to glorify political exile as a desirable state of being for anyone or any people such as Palestinians and others who have lost their home.74 Even as he privileges exile as an intellectual perspective, he still sees the justice of a people demanding home and their right to speak, narrate, tell their own stories, and represent their points of view. I suggest that to Said the value of home is the value of a resistance and an antagonism rather than a value that is a thing in itself. It is because the world is structured in dominance and several peoples have been dispossessed of home through colonization and occupation that home continues to be a terrain on which battles are fought. The Israeli-Palestinian situation constitutes a particularly tragic case in point where a people decimated by the Holocaust, a people in search of a home they can call their own, do not find it unconscionable that in the process of homing themselves they are ruthlessly unhoming another people: a point that Said makes with moving eloquence in his essay “Zionism from the Point of View of Its Victims.” So why is it that a people in search of their own home find it quite acceptable to trounce someone else’s home and keep building settlements in violation of someone else’s domesticity? This question makes Said ponder if there is something fundamentally wrong and unethical about “homecentric” thinking. Is there something intrinsic to the model, cognitively and epistemologically, that makes the home a fortress with moats and drawbridges, moats filled with crocodiles, tanks, and armies to keep the Other out? The distinction that Said thus makes is between the political need for home and the ethical attitude toward home. It is indeed possible and coherent to argue for a home in the mode of political resistance and redress and at the same time problematize the notion of home as such. It is this double attitude to home and to what is one’s own that marks the brilliant originality of Said’s thinking. To avail myself of Walter Mignolo’s phrase, it is Said’s tireless efforts to build bridges between “the edward said

places where one lives” and “the places where one thinks” that make him so special and so indispensable under our present conditions of world-historical existence.75 Take for example his treatment of Freud vis-à-vis the non-European. In this lecture, Said finds the freedom both to make Freud his own and at the same time historicize Freud in relationship to Eurocentrism. “In any event, I believe,” says Said, “it is true to say that Freud’s was a Eurocentric view of culture—and why should it not be? His world had not yet been touched by the globalization, or rapid travel, or decolonization, that were to make many formerly unknown or repressed cultures available to metropolitan Europe.”76 This is a quintessentially generous Saidian evaluation that leaves room for contrapuntal play and negotiation. Yet it is not generous at the expense of historical or theoretical rigor. Said does not exonerate Freud or his discourse just for the sake of being forgiving and magnanimous: there is both a quarrel and an understanding here. The question he is raising has to do with intentionality and accountability. Of course, Freud was Eurocentric by way of his discourse. Given his times, and this is true for all human endeavors that are conditioned by historical circumstances, Freud cannot be criminalized as an individual. Eurocentric, yes; but that does not mean that that is all there is to Freud. Something could be something-centric and still be valuable in other ways and for other reasons. By contrast, Said’s evaluation of Foucault (who could have been more aware of certain historical happenings but chose not to for whatever reason) is a lot stricter, based on historical circumstantiality: “The most striking of his blind spots was, for example, his insouciance about the discrepancies between his basically limited French evidence and his ostensibly universal conclusions. Moreover, he showed no real interest in the relationships his work had with feminist or postcolonial writers facing problems of exclusion, confinement, and domination. Indeed, his Eurocentrism was almost total, as if ‘history’ itself took place only among a group of French and German thinkers.”77 Said is arguing that there are Eurocentrisms and Eurocentrisms, and marking these differences in a usable way makes more sense than to wage quixotic battles against centrism as such, or to look for pure and unambivalent texts rooted solely in justice and virtue. To go back, then, to the lecture on Freud that explicitly links the non-European to a certain Western humanism, Said makes the affirmation that he is edward said

171

always trying to understand figures from the past whom I admire, even as I point out how bound they were by the perspectives of their own cultural moment as far as their views of other cultures and peoples were concerned. The special point I then try to make is that it is imperative to read them as intrinsically worthwhile for today’s non-European or non-Western reader, who is often either happy to dismiss them altogether as dehumanizing or insufficiently aware of the colonized people (as Chinua Achebe does with Conrad’s portrayal of Africa), or reads them, in a way “above” the historical circumstances of which they were so much a part. My approach tries to see them in their context as accurately as possible, but then—because they are extraordinary writers and thinkers whose work has enabled other, alternative work and readings based on developments of which they could not have been aware—I see them contrapuntally, that is, as figures whose writing travels across temporal, cultural, and ideological boundaries in unforeseen ways to emerge as part of a new ensemble along with later history and subsequent art. . . . The interesting result is that not only that Salih and Naipaul depend so vitally on their reading of Conrad, but that Conrad’s writing is further actualized and animated by emphases and inflections that he was obviously

172

unaware of, but that his writing permits.78

In a way, the admittance of Conrad’s relevance to postcoloniality becomes a test case for the admission of a self-deconstructive Eurocentrism into non-Western emergences and hegemonies. What is making Conrad relevant even now? Is it because, as Said avers, that Conrad despite his ethnocentric biases is a great and complex writer who sets afloat contrapuntal possibilities within his own narrative? Or is it because, and this question will remind readers of those early debates about the temporal-historical agency of the deconstructive insight versus the truth of the original text, Said is a magnificently gifted reader who intuits a counterpoint where there is none? Of course, in the case of Conrad, it is abundantly clear that he, by way of Marlowe, frames and problematizes the sovereignty of his narrative both at the level of being and at the level of knowing. Said is right in arguing that this benefit of the doubt cannot be accorded to every Eurocentric writer who can then be considered to be always already deconstructive of her or his own will to truth and power. Not every modernist writer employs self-reflexivity the way Conrad does, that is, to call into question the very ethicopolitical basis of his own narrative. edward said

Said points out persuasively that there is something about the production and the movement of literary truth that both falls prey to and transgresses the limitations imposed by historicity. No writer can altogether escape the prejudices of his or her time; but at the same time, any worthwhile writer or individual is expected to rise above and beyond the limitations of her or his historical period through self-reflexivity and autocritique, as well as through something known as “style.” Take for example, the cases of Camus and Sartre vis-à-vis Algeria. Both of them were eminent thinkers and writers: one of them, Sartre, was passionately in favor of Algeria’s independence, but Camus was not.79 Said also points out that the task of bringing the past to justice in the tribunal of the history of the present can go overboard and demand accountabilities that the past, despite its self-reflexivity, may not be capable of. For if one believes in the secular production of new truths, values, and realities (as against the belief that all that could be called new is already precontained within a primordial intentionality), then it is inevitable that blindness and insight coexist; that the present moment be defined both by its righteousness and by the absence of principles that are yet to come. In other words, no history of the present in the name of its particular cause can either assume omniscience or willingly embrace blindness as part of its program. Given this broad understanding about the nature of historical development, how does one read Said’s overly magnanimous claim that Conrad is necessary for the elaboration of postcolonial futures? Achebe resolves this problem very differently, as Said himself notices, by taking on Conrad polemically and once and for all, in his Things Fall Apart; but after that necessary showdown, he entirely dismisses Conrad’s relevance. I must confess to being truly ambivalent here. I am in total agreement with Said when he says that Conrad’s narrative is much more complex than Achebe would allow it to be (Achebe, for example, is just not interested in the fact that Conrad is giving Western colonialism hell in his novels even as he remains incapable of seeing reality and history in Africa. But then, why does Achebe write in English, thereby mobilizing a double situatedness that he negates in his outright rejection of Conrad?). On the other hand, I do not agree with Said when he maintains with such calm assurance that Conrad, and by extension writers with his edward said

173

174

level of narratological integrity, automatically become the forerunners of postcolonial narratives. Said comes close to claiming an inaugural status for Conrad’s discourse; and he is this close to affirming that the counterpoint is constitutive of postcoloniality. I think that too much is conceded when Conrad is made part of a postcolonial longue durée. It is just not the case, except in Said’s generous literary imagination, that Conrad’s truths can be thought along with the truths of Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Ndebele, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nuruddin Farah, and others. The category of the counterpoint as an aesthetic device has the ability to force even antagonism into the same musical text. There is a certain aestheticizing of the political here when Said maintains that Conrad’s writing permits the work of Tayib Salih. Achebe or Ngugi might find such a claim quite patronizing or even offensive, for one because they may choose to locate the antagonism as a war of maneuver rather than as one of strategic position, to borrow from Gramsci; and second because they may choose to think that Africa’s self-affirmation and hegemonization does not have to be part of a chronic double consciousness that has to include a certain orientation toward Europe. Though this is too large an issue to discuss, leave alone resolve, in my present context, I would just like to mention that this issue is double layered. There is the very general question that has to do with the presence of the past in the present: the statute of limitations that one extends to the past and how such a statute is critically negotiated. Does all of the past live in the present, and by whose choice? Is the presence of the past in the present a fait accompli, or is it a matter of a usable past that in turn has to do with who is using it, and why and when? There is also the troubled relationship between the past as supposedly objective history and the past as something to be instrumentalized by the present polemically and perspectivally. The second layer has to do with the specific history of colonialism as an instance of the larger problem of memory and countermemory. How is the colonialist instance different from that of patriarchy or that of racism?80 Said’s focus, as he enlarges Conrad’s relevance to matters contemporary and postcolonial, is not on Conrad’s awareness, but on his “writing” that stages an “unconscious or an unthought” that is not available to Conrad’s own cognition.81 This assertion raises an interesting question edward said

about intentionality and the relationship between the writer as historical personage and the historicity of écriture. Some literary texts have a builtin unthought or unconscious that empowers readings in the future that are dissonant with the writer’s active or agential consciousness. Indeed, the unconscious is structured like a language, and vice versa. Is this what Said is saying, is construable as saying? Would Said himself accept such a reading of his words as a reflection or paraphrase of his conscious intentions? My reading is that at a macropolitical level, Said’s position is irreconcilable with de Man’s; with Derrida, however, it is a little trickier. Whereas de Man would insist that a reading qua reading constitutes the political, Said would have none of that. Said’s contrapuntal readings do not fold back into the eminence of the original text the way de Man’s do. Said has specific quarrels and disagreements to articulate and determinate resistances to perform and actualize. In other words, Said, unlike de Man, is not a rebel without a cause or a rebel who rebels intransitively within the printed page. The counterpoint speaks both for real worldly differences and for possibilities of enacting these differences on the same stage, within the same text. Said’s point would be that if each contrapuntal or antagonistic difference went around constructing its own terrain, there could be no quarrel, no contestation over meanings and interpretations. As for the similarity with Derrida, Said’s contrapuntal strategies of reading and understanding could be compared with the Derridean project of never stepping out of but turning the pages of logocentrism in a certain way; but the major difference would be that unlike Derrida whose politics is always gestural and oblique, Said’s interventions, even when literary and aesthetic, are directly representational and make strong cognitive claims. The question I would like to raise, however, is not adequately answered by the strategies of contrapuntal reading. If indeed there is antihumanism, how does humanism deal with this opposition? Is Said claiming that the exclusionary practices that took place in the name of humanism are random episodes that do not in fact compromise and besmirch the ideal historicity of humanism? Is it enough to say, by way of honoring one’s commitment to the principle of the counterpoint, that both humanism and antihumanism are part of the same text? What if the antagonism is a paradigmatic antagonism, and not an antagonism that can be dealt with intra-paradigmatically? If humanism is to be seen edward said

175

176

as an emerging narrative made up of contradictory, uneven, and incommensurable chapters, episodes, and incidents, how then does one determine which of those chapters/incidents/episodes truly capture the essence of humanism, and which ones mis-speak humanism? If all the quarreling centrisms are construed as inevitable members of the joint family called humanism, can they never ever secede from the yoke of the joint family rationale? Said, in his evaluation of humanism’s credentials, prefers an untheoretical case by case approach. He adamantly refuses to acknowledge how the cases, despite their differences, are all articulated by a deeper pathology, that is, the illness of humanism as such, humanism tout court. I would now like to contrast Said’s soft handling of humanism with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s indictment of humanism: an indictment takes place when humanism is in crisis in Europe: politically, ethically, epistemologically. In the historical instance that I invoke, Merleau-Ponty is attempting to understand, historically and theoretically, experientially and discursively, the relationship among humanism, Marxism, communism, western liberalism, and capitalism à la USA. Though no Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, unlike Said, is interested in generating a tout court evaluation of humanism from the CommunistMarxist-liberal-capitalist instances. Though he is as much solicitous of “intentionality” as Said, Merleau-Ponty does not give “intentionality” the benefit of the doubt: to Merleau-Ponty, intentionality is no more and no less than what intentionality does. Here is Merleau-Ponty: To speak of humanism without being on the side of “humanist socialism” in the Anglo-American way, to “understand” the Communists without being a Communist, is to set oneself very high—in any case, way above the crowd. Actually it represents nothing more than a refusal to commit oneself to confusion removed from truth. Is it our fault that Western humanism is warped because it is also a war machine? And what if the Marxist enterprise has only been able to survive by changing its nature? When people demand a “solution,” they imply that the world and human coexistence are comparable to a geometry problem in which there is an unknown but not an indeterminate factor and where what one is looking for is related to the data and their possible relationships in terms of a rule. But the question that we face today is precisely that of knowing whether humanity is simply a problem of that

edward said

sort. We are all aware of what it involves, namely, the recognition of man by man—but also that, until now, men have only recognized one another implicitly, in conflict and the race for power. The constants in the human problem indeed form a system, but a system of conflicts. The question is to know whether they can be overcome.82

Both Merleau-Ponty and Said pose this all-important question: how does the human subject, collective and individual, negotiate and make judgments between the history of intentions and the history of actual performances? Even more significantly, by taking thought and action, how does the subject create a tertiary history of accountability that connects in some meaningfully diagnostic way intentions and performances? There are several threads to be pursued here, both in the context of Merleau-Ponty who is writing as a committed Marxist intellectual in the wake of Stalinism and its purges and gulags, and Said in the aftermath of decolonization and a variety of subaltern movements. For my purposes here, I would just like to focus on the connection between humanism and the West and on how this connection is dealt with by the two men. What is most puzzling is that in Merleau-Ponty’s discourse humanism is marked as Western, whereas Said unmarks that term in his rhetoric. I say puzzling since the opposite is more predictable: that Merleau-Ponty as a Western philosopher would tend to naturalize the location of his philosophy, whereas Said who adopts humanism would immediately genealogize it as occidental. So why does that not happen? Here are a few speculations. It is only natural that Merleau-Ponty as a self-reflexive philosopher of his filial tradition would mark it historically as well as ideologically. But in doing this, is he unconsciously acting in hubris: assuming that there are no other forms of humanism, or that Western humanism cannot be taken over agentially by non-Western subjects, their histories, and their agendas? What then about the manner in which Said has been touched by the West? Is he filially Western, or affiliatively so, and what is the difference? If both Merleau-Ponty and Said have been ineluctably constituted by the West, how is it then that one of them presumes to be able to use it affirmatively, while the other will have none of it? How much of a factor is it (assuming that Said is Western by affiliation that, in other words, the location of the West becomes available to him not natally or ontologically but as an epistemology and a set of

edward said

177

178

critical practices) that Said’s view of the West is in an asymmetrical relationship with the Western view of itself? In other words, is it conceivable that the politics of interpellation by the West has a different meaning for Said than it does for Merleau-Ponty and Foucault, the true and filial sons of Western Enlightenment? The origins of a theory have never really mattered to Said. He sees no need to create a counterhumanism that is nonoccidental or antioccidental. He is much happier producing contrapuntal readings within the musical text called humanism. Humanism to him, intentionally at least, is just humanism, and not Western humanism. This attitude seems both deferential to the West since it seems to exculpate it a little too easily and at the same time transgressively transformative since it takes humanism away from its putative occidental provenance in the name of all humanity. Is this Said’s deconstructive and metamorphic reading of humanism, or has such a possibility always been inherent in Western humanism? Let me now juxtapose two adjudications that Said makes of humanism and examine if they function together or not. I have already worked on the first evaluation that deals with “the heterogeneity of upstart or insurgent philosophy, politics, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and anthropology” and goes on to suggest that all “these factors may have done a great deal to discredit the ideology, if not the committed practice, of humanism.” Here is the other moment: “What [Allan] Bloom and his predecessors shared, in addition to a common dyspepsia of tone, was the feeling that the doors of humanism had been left open to every sort of unruly individualism, disreputable modishness, and uncanonized learning, with the result that true humanism had been violated, if not altogether discredited. This was another way of saying that too many undesirable non-Europeans had suddenly appeared at ‘our’ gates” (Humanism, 18; emphasis added). But for some trained and rigorous reading, it is indeed possible to conflate disastrously Said’s dialogic and inclusive valorization of humanism and Bloom’s paranoid, exclusionary humanism. It would appear that both Said and Bloom are aristocratic defenders of quality against depredations by vulgarity and in-erudition. Both seem to have recourse to a true and/or ideal humanism in opposition to what humanism has degenerated into. Both deploy a symptomatic reading of humanism, which is to say, a reading that has a diagnosis and a cure to offer. It is also easy to see how on the basis of edward said

such glib and erroneous readings Said was, on the one hand, sanitized into a good old humanist, and on the other hand, exiled from the pure air of uncontaminated radicality. I would like to offer a “correct” understanding of what is going on within Said’s humanism. Unlike Bloom and Saul Bellow, Said is not offering the human subject either a supposedly true or an ideal humanism. His is a contrapuntal and secular humanism that will not allow the truth of humanism to shine as a predetermined and transhistorical essence or understand itself as the unfolding of a specific teleology that has place only for a few special subjects and a few chosen narratives. His intention is to pit humanism against itself, deconstructively and contrapuntally, so that it may self-correct in response to principles of a secular and “bounded rationality.”83 His agenda is to open humanism up to its own potential, to let hitherto subjugated knowledges transform humanism in the name of all humanity, and to decolonize humanism as Eurocentric fetish. The Said who defends humanism multilaterally and the Said who tirelessly demonstrates the interimbricatedness of different histories is one and the same. What Said is thinking of is the potential multeity of humanism: its internally heterogeneous interrelatedness. Unlike the vicious Eurocentric gatekeeping of Bloom and Bellow, Said’s rhetoric renders humanism accountable to its Eurocentric past. It is on the basis of such accountability that humanism can begin to measure up to the human. Unlike Achebe, who does not identify with the West except by way of the execrable accident of colonialism, Said is a happy and voluntary citizen of Western thought and literature. In this sense, he is a native son of the West and has no problem taking the West to task for its racism and colonialism. He works here, not unlike Foucault and Derrida and Sartre and Adorno, as a magnificent and powerful insider-antagonist. It is of the utmost importance to Said that the complicity between culture and imperialism be shown up with the utmost rigor and in total accountability. But such a project by definition has to be contrapuntal. It has to acknowledge both the potential for good and the harm done, and the constitutive relationship between the two. It is precisely because he “owns” the West as culture, scholarship, and erudition that Said has a stake in the West and its future unraveling, and also has the confidence that he can read the West against itself, change its course, and use its considerable resources selectively and righteously. edward said

179

180

Said may be seen as engaging in the important task of translating, or shall we say mirroring, the West to itself despite itself. The problem here, as raised trenchantly by JanMohamed, is whether Said, in his task of translating the West back to itself, gets caught in the specular model: a model that makes it often difficult to determine who is in control in the proliferation of the protocols of self-reflexivity. In JanMohamed’s words, “Orientalism is just such a specular performance,” that “mirrors analytically a Western mode of discursive control that Said labels ‘orientalist.’ ” JanMohamed goes on to make the useful diagnosis that Said’s devastating showing up of the ideological investments behind the production of Orientalist knowledges does not automatically make him an organic intellectual. Says JanMohamed, “Said does not speak for any particular organic group outside the West, though many Third World and minority intellectuals have found it sympathetic.” JanMohamed’s conclusion is that “Said’s critique is articulated from the neutrality of the border,” and that Said, as a border intellectual, is “the subject neither of the host culture or the dominant class . . . nor of the ‘home’ culture or the subaltern class.” Consequently, “Said is not motivated to offer an alternate positivity, whether in the guise of a truth or a set of alternative group ‘interests.’ ”84 Perhaps it is Said’s strength as well as his weakness that the between that he inhabits with such conviction will not allow him the solace of alternative positivities, either individual or collective. But what it does offer him is the freedom of movement and a restless sensibility that balks at closure and the possibility of a final determination. It is only appropriate that I conclude this chapter with a quotation from Said’s Freud and the Non-European, a book whose very title is contrapuntal. In this essay that passionately valorizes literary style as a form of concrete thought, Said’s location shuttles between being a nonEuropean filiatively speaking and the subject position of an “affiliative” admirer of Freud who can persuade the Freudian text to yield its border truth contrapuntally. Here, Said is commenting on the late works of Beethoven and Freud. What fascinates Said about these productions is the fact that even though they are composed toward the very end of their respective author’s lives, they exhibit unruliness and a lively and rebellious rejection of closure. Said could well have been writing about himself. edward said

In Beethoven’s case and in Freud’s, as I hope to show, the intellectual trajectory conveyed by the late work is intransigence and a sort of irascible transgressiveness, as if the author was expected to settle down into a harmonious composure, as befits a person at the end of his life, but preferred instead to be difficult, and to bristle with all sorts of new ideas and provocations. . . . Freud and Beethoven present material that is of pressing concern to them with scant regard for satisfying, much less placating, the reader’s need for closure. Other books by Freud were written with a didactic or pedagogic aim in mind: Moses and Monotheism is not. Reading the treatise, we feel that Freud wishes us to understand that there are other issues at stake here—other, more pressing problems to expose than the ones whose solution might be comforting, or provide a sort of resting-place.85

181

edward said

3 

Worlding, by Any Other Name i would like to begin by inter-braiding the three terms that constitute this chapter: worldliness, historical representation, and the human subject. Why indeed do we even need the term worldliness when the world itself is so axiomatic and self-evident in its objective facticity? I guess my response would be that to the human subject, with her or his intentionality, consciousness, ideological interestedness, hermeneutic propensity, and a historical baggage that includes the history of the present, the world is neither purely objective nor incontrovertibly factual. Moreover, the cogito of the human subject refuses either to succumb seamlessly to the primordial anteriority of the given world, or to synchronize problems of its own constitutedness with the temporality of the original world. In the human, the objective world is both repeated and dislodged. Characterized neither by the imprimatur of the a priori nor by a total vulnerability to the subjectivist demands of the human, the world, it would seem, functions as a possibility or a set of possibilities awaiting actualization.1 Furthermore, thematic and modal connections need to be made between the reality of the world and its intelligibility to the inquiring subject. How then is the world to be known and preserved and honored through acts of knowing? If, as

184

Karl Marx would have it, to know anything is also to transform it, is it possible for the human subject to signify the world except as a function of anthropocentric meaning making? What is the relationship between the reality of the world as such and its intelligibility to the human subject?2 How is the human subject both of the world and extrinsic to the world in her or his capacity as the knowing subject? When the human subject thinks, and therefore knows it is (cogito ergo sum), does it also, in the same thought, assert the availability of the world to rationality?3 How inclusive of reality is the rational? Is the project of worldliness a way of claiming or taking up responsibility for the world in a spirit of anthropocentric chivalry, relational generosity, and guardianship? If indeed the human subject is inevitably interpellated to speak and to speak for the world, how can such a subject differentiate between false representations and truthful versions?4 Would it be ethical to think of the reality of the world as a product of the epistemological doubling up of the human cogito? As Maurice Merleau-Ponty would ask: For whom does the world exist? What is the potential of the world, and how does this potential preknow its modes of actualization? When human nature begins to represent nature, or functions as the reflexive component in the project of the actualization of nature to itself, is the human subject caught up in a dilemma: loyalty to itself, or loyalty to the world? Are these two loyalties autonomously coordinated, or are they to be understood and performed hierarchically with one loyalty axiomatically subsuming the other?5 In the name of what principle is anthropocentric representation valorized and legitimated? Is there a qualitative difference between a canonical practice of anthropocentrism and a self-reflexive practice; and who or what sanctions such a difference? In the context of the prior givenness of the world, how is the anthropological centrism of the human subject to be understood with reference to the historical particularities of Eurocentrism, androcentrism, gynocentrism, and Afrocentrism, to name just a few? Finally, how does the human-nature nexus get played out under the aegis of the self-other template of binarity? If indeed worldliness is an a priori human, world, or planetary condition awaiting effective and correct historicization, how is the human subject to determine whether a particular blueprint of worldliness is in honor or in violation of the original nature of the world as an a priori possibility? How should historical and anthropocentric processes conworlding

duct themselves so that they make possible and synchronize the temporality of the a priori with the architectonic temporality of the historical a posteriori? I wish to pose this question within that indeterminate chiasmus between nature and culture that was brilliantly theorized years ago by Jacques Derrida in his critique of Claude Lévi-Strauss.6 When we say “nature,” how do we mean it: as primary, ecological, planetary nature, or as human nature, or both, or as one by virtue of the other? How then is it with nature: immanent or transcendent, historically produced as its own naturalness, or rendered secondary in its very anthropocentric rendition and therefore rendered vulnerable and accountable to a givenness that precedes the temporality of the anthropos?7 As thinkers and seers and philosophers have asked and wondered in the world’s many languages and philosophies, both secular and religious, where does human nature stand both with reference to itself and the intimate alterity of nature? Is the human being condemned, as the reader both of himself or herself and ergo of the world as nature, to a divided temporality neither all natural nor all cultural, neither all primary nor all supplement: an “empirico-transcendental doublet,” to use Michel Foucault’s famous formulation,8 caught between the loyalty to an epistemology of the Heideggerian Gelassenheit that will let being be and the anthropocentric-secular imperative to write nature in the name of the human in all its uneven, asymmetrical, and multihistorical ramifications? Where then is nature to be honored: in the human or in the prehuman? Where then is the human to be honored: in nature or in the perspectival transcendence of nature? I would also like to raise the question of the human both on an ontological and on an epistemological register. When does epistemology become ontology, and under what conditions does ontology perform as epistemology?9 In my attempt to understand and respond to these questions, I will be visiting the following thinkers: Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Ranajit Guha, and David Harvey. Whereas Merleau-Ponty seeks to reconcile a radical interventionist politics with a phenomenology based in the primacy of perception, Heidegger attempts to align the “being of language” with the “language of Being” by way of the ecstatic thrownness of the Dasein. Guha seeks a way out of the constraints of historiography as he imagines world history poetically, along with the visionary and poet Rabindranath Tagore; and Harvey, in his conjunctural worlding

185

186

reading of ecocriticism and sociocriticism, is interested in determining who knows better: the trees or the socialist? What is common to all of them is an acute awareness that to be human is to imagine historical existence both as a symptom of a constitutive contradiction and as a resolve to think through the symptom without in any way imposing on the symptom a cure that belittles the complexity of the pathology, or placates it with a benign placebo.10 Of all the recent movements that have addressed this question of the relationship of the “I think” to the “I am,” phenomenology continues to be the most influential and the most far reaching. Is the I in the “I think” the same as, different from, a subjectivated form of the I in the “I am”? Is the existing I natural in its given ontology, and is the thinking I secondary, constituted, supplemental?11 When under the leadership of Edmund Husserl the phenomenological manifesto was realized as a “return to things themselves,” how exactly was the diagnosis made that systems of thought had betrayed the Lebenswelt that they were supposed to explain and celebrate? Had thought usurped the place of existence; had the model supplanted the original; had a forward-looking temporality deracinated something that should have been honored in its own natural habitat? Had a veil been thrown over something visible in all its natural transparency?12 When Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception holds forth about the importance of seeing the river itself, rather than just being satisfied with the map of the river, what exactly is he bemoaning?13 Has the river been betrayed by a map, by a particular imperialist map, by cartography as such? Is the projected answer: I am, ergo I think? Or is it: I am, despite my thought; but I need to think to realize the significance of the “despite”? Whatever the nature of the desired question, what interests me in the phenomenological formation is the pervasiveness of the motif of the “back to” and the return. What was there in the first place, or in some determinate anteriority that is compelling attention and promising some form of restoration? Why is it “back to” and not “away from,” “beside,” “forward to,” or any other spatio-temporal orientation? Would it matter, and I am not in the slightest bit facetious, if it were “back to things not-themselves,” or “back to not-things themselves,” or any other permutation or combination? In other words, is the return motif invested with an intrinsic mystique that hallows everything it gets attached to? Furthermore, worlding

why is it axiomatic that the rejuvenation of thought or thinking is to be posed in terms of loss and restoration, alienation and recognition, veiling and unveiling? Were we ever “there” in any proximal ontological sense of the term to necessitate a purposive and directed going back? And is that “somewhere” worth getting back to? I ask these questions to frame my own return to phenomenology after Michel Foucault, that relentlessly persuasive demystifier of phenomenology. What indeed does it mean to get back to phenomenology after Foucault? Has Foucault not made it theoretically and epistemologically impossible for thought to return to phenomenology in the name of returning to things themselves? And yet, how is it that the same Foucault has this to say about the theme of the return in one of his lectures on power-knowledge? It is here that we touch upon another feature of these events that has been manifest for some time now: it seems to me that this local criticism has proceeded by means of what one might term “a return to knowledge.” What I mean by that phrase is this: it is a fact that we have repeatedly encountered, at least at a superficial level, in the course of most recent times, an entire thematic to the effect that it is not theory but life that matters, not knowledge but reality, not books but money etc.; but it also seems to me that over and above, and arising out of this thematic, there is something else to which we are witness, and which we might describe as an insurrection of subjugated knowledges.14

I realize that this return is more of a Nietzschean biophilic return posited in terms of the productivity of power rather than a phenomenological return: and yet something is being countervalorized so that something other may be valorized, given its due in thought, by thought. The lines of opposition are clear: not theory but life, not knowledge but reality, and the last bizarre opposition, not books but money. Theory has occluded life just as knowledge has suffocated reality. So that something that has been occluded has to be returned to in the name of a new and different knowledge discovered now as subjugated knowledge. Clearly, this return is also a question of power, and the taking over of power by those knowledges subjugated so far. It is a return to these knowledges, à la Adrienne Rich, that have existed all along, but in a subjugated form; and it is in the name of these knowledges that life is to be worlding

187

188

affirmed. Foucault’s return dovetails happily with Friedrich Nietzsche’s celebration of life’s physicality and with his counterarraignment of all the platonic and metaphysical philosophers who would accuse him of being a nihilist. Nietzsche proudly claims that he is the “aye sayer of life,” whereas the canonical philosophers entomb life in their philosophical systems. Yet what is common to both returns is structured in the form of a solicitude; and the question is, solicitude on behalf of what? In the phenomenological tradition, and I realize that within this tradition there are crucial differences among Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, the solicitude, broadly speaking, is an affect on behalf of the other that has been foreclosed or damaged by the philosophical system. In the Husserlian scheme of thought, particularly in the context of the famous “eidetic reduction,” all attention is focused on a certain kind of bracketing so that “things themselves” may be made available to human consciousness as “things as such.”15 Whereas Husserl is quite satisfied with a transcendental mode of consciousness, Heidegger is not. Heidegger’s theory of the Dasein refuses the epistemological advantage of transcendence and is temporal through and through; and furthermore, Heidegger insists on the reality of a hermeneutic circularity. Merleau-Ponty’s memorable contribution as he builds creatively on the work of Husserl, is the attribution of intentionality to consciousness: not intentionality as something epiphenomenal that is added to a world already out there in the form of irreducible, factual objectivity. The objectivity of the world and the intentionality of the subject are given to each other in the form of a perceptual reciprocity.16 To quote from Merleau-Ponty: Probably the chief gain from phenomenology is to have united extreme subjectivism and extreme objectivism in its notion of the world or of rationality. Rationality is precisely measured by the experiences in which it is disclosed. To say that there exists rationality is to say that perspectives blend, perceptions confirm each other, and a meaning emerges. But it should not be set in a realm apart, transposed into absolute Spirit, or into a world in the realist sense. The phenomenological world is not pure being, but the sense which is revealed where the paths of my various experiences intersect, and also where my own and other people’s intersect and engage each other like gears. It is thus inseparable from subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which find their

worlding

unity when I either take up my past experiences in those of the present, or other people’s in my own. For the first time the philosopher’s thinking is sufficiently conscious not to anticipate itself and endow its own results with reified form in the world.17

Arguing against idealism and G. W. F. Hegel, on the one hand, and against empiricism and positivism on the other, Merleau-Ponty ontologizes rationality, if you will, as something given to the senses, to perceptions, and to experiences. Rationality is the imprimatur of the a priori, or the sanction of transcendence that is applied to the world in a move of epistemological enlightenment. Rationality is immanent in experiences: it is nothing other than the forms of its disclosure in the experiential. This disclosure is not the disclosure of mysticism or of visionary theology either, since in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the disclosure is an instantiation of itself, and not a representation of anything beyond. This is not a prescriptive or a magisterial or a pedagogical rationality whose only task is to separate the existent from the rational. On the contrary, rationality itself exists vulnerably and contingently in the field of experiences and perceptions. It has to be noted that Merleau-Ponty takes care to say that “meaning emerges.” In other words, meaning is not the end product of an invasive assembly-line process commandeered by reason. Meaning emerges in response to and in the same field in which experiences occur. It is of the utmost importance to Merleau-Ponty that meaning as rational not be separated, by way of representational violence, from the very experiences it is supposed to embody. Covalent with this concern is another form of solicitude in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking: solicitude for the past in the present, and for others in the self. The return to things themselves as a form of the return to the past cospatializes the past with the present in a move that is simultaneously spatial and temporal. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological project perceives things themselves as a function in and of time: the historicity of the then that needs to be temporalized with reference to, and in the context of the present.18 This is indeed a horizonal move that insists on a reciprocally constitutive relationship between “the horizon” and “what is within the horizon.” Just as there is a horizonal fusion of the past and the present, there is also the question of “others within the self.”19 In my reading, Merleau-Ponty is attempting to initiate a dialogue

worlding

189

between the self-other relationship historically speaking, and the SelfOther relationship in which the Self is Humanity and the Other is the World or Nature. I will resume this theme in my reading of the EarthWorld nexus in Heidegger’s essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Continuing in the same vein as he proposes a definition of phenomenology as a project, Merleau-Ponty declares that “the opinion of the responsible scholar must be that phenomenology can be practiced and identified as a manner of style or thinking, that it existed as a movement before arriving at complete awareness of itself as a philosophy.”20 Later, in his preface to The Phenomenology of Perception, he has this to say: The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but like art, the act of bringing truth into being. One may well ask how this creation is possible, and if it does not recapture in things a pre-existing Reason. The answer is that the only pre-existent Logos is the world itself, and the philosophy which brings it into visible existence does not begin by being possible; it is actual or real like the world of which it is

190

a part, and no explanatory hypothesis is clearer than the act whereby we take up this unfinished world in an effort to complete and conceive it. Rationality is not a problem. There is behind it no unknown quantity, which has to be determined by deduction, or, beginning with it, demonstrated inductively. We witness every minute the miracle of related experiences, and yet nobody knows better than we do how this miracle is worked, for we are ourselves this network of relationships. The world and reason are not problematical. We may say, if we wish, that they are mysterious, but their mystery defines them: there can be no question of dispelling it by some “solution”; it is on the hither side of all solutions. True philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world, and in this sense a historical account can give meaning to the world quite as “deeply” as a philosophical treatise. We take our fate in our hands, we become responsible for our history through reflection, but equally by a decision on which we take our life, and in both cases what is involved is a violent act, which is validated by being performed. Phenomenology, as a disclosure of the world, rests on itself, or rather provides its own foundation.21

To paraphrase for my purposes here, there is only one world; and that world is given to human consciousness as the phenomenological world: not the “explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down worlding

of being.” Is this an arrogant anthropocentric claim, or a bio-oriented claim, or an anthropocentric claim taking total responsibility for itself ? Like Heidegger in his explication of the work of art, Merleau-Ponty resorts to the aesthetic modality of “bringing truth into being.” To state this in terms of my discussion, the ontology of the phenomenological world is the artistic product of a certain philosophy that “existed as a movement before arriving at complete awareness of itself as a philosophy.” So what does anteriority mean in this context, and why is it important? How is anteriority acknowledged, recognized: ostensively, gesturally, formally, or thematically? Unlike Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty is a practicing procommunist Marxist philosopher and activist who would have to subscribe to an epistemology that changes the world in the act of understanding it. How then does he reconcile such an interventionary and revolutionary epistemology with a phenomenological solicitude for being? The principle of Gelassenheit cannot work for him as it does for Heidegger. Would Merleau-Ponty be happy to concede that there is a split between the perceptual logic of phenomenology and a politics that it is supposed to legitimate? If such a split is real, is he not facing the dire problem of a legitimation crisis?22 Let us begin with the assumption that the objective of phenomenological thinking is to unite extreme subjectivism with extreme objectivism “in its notion of the world or rationality.” Clearly, by “uniting” Merleau-Ponty is not thinking of an average value or a pseudoAristotelian golden mean. Rather, he makes of the world a rational mediation that is reducible neither to the hubris of subjectivism nor to the omniscience of objectivism. Who authors or occults into being such a mediation? The answer of course is: the phenomenological movement that succeeds in the task of the laying down of being. If we juxtapose the evocative phrase, “the laying down of being” with the “violent act which is validated by being performed,” then we get a sense of the contradictory complexity of Merleau-Ponty’s project. The laying down of being, even as an act of returning to things themselves, sounds like a magisterial interpellation of Being by phenomenological thought. It is as though Being were submitted to certain laws and normative ways of knowability. It is as if all of Being is being laid down or legislated with reference to what the phenomenological method lays down as knowable. What happens then to the solicitude that was supposed to drive worlding

191

192

the phenomenological mode of thinking? If to be human is to be normative, and if norms are not inherent in nature, how should phenomenology acquit its double responsibility: to the prenormative reality of Being and the inauguration, within Being, of the human subject as the producer of the normative? Merleau-Ponty’s unwavering commitment not to allow the privilege of status, ontological or epistemological, to a preexisting being necessarily culminates in a return not to being itself, but to a form of reflexivity concerning modes of perception. I will talk more about this in a later part of the chapter where I discuss the relationship between the affirmative assertion of Being and a self-reflexive and destructive engagement with the forms and procedures of anthropocentrism. What concerns me here is the relationship that Merleau-Ponty makes—and this may explain the coexistence in Merleau-Ponty of the aesthetic philosopher with the Marxist intellectual—between the laying down of being and phenomenology providing its own foundation, on the one hand, and that “violent act which is validated by being performed,” on the other. In my reading, Merleau-Ponty is attempting a very delicate and fragile balancing act.23 The Marxist-existentialist in him cannot excuse himself from the task of taking up responsibility for being human; and being human entails performing in ways that violently transform the world in certain humanly/anthropocentrically intended directions, rather than let the world be and disclose its truth in its own given terms. But the Merleau-Ponty who is an aesthetician with much to say about the modality of aesthetic meaning making, about sense and non-sense, about the visible and the invisible, about the immanent and barely perceptible movement of an artist’s hand as it works on a painting, second to microsecond, has to make a different pact with the unfolding of being as truth in the context of history and historiography.24 Is it possible then to found the rationale for political practice on an ontological understanding of the world driven by the aesthetic impulse? How does the task of laying down being apply differentially in the realms of the political and the aesthetic? What is intriguing in Merleau-Ponty’s formulation is the responsible and reflective plunge that humanity makes in a moment of high-stakes daring. In whose name is that plunge made: humanity’s, humanity’s relationship to itself and to Being/Nature in an attitude of custodianship of Nature/Being? How does human being administer worlding

Being, and on the basis of what ethic, or politic, or aesthetic? What does self-reflexivity ensure? Merleau-Ponty seems to have no problem accepting the reality that there is a necessary violence in the phenomenological worlding of the world. Even more intriguing is his claim that the violence is legitimated in being performed. A supremely ethical thinker, Gandhi for example, would say that legitimation and violence are so mutually exclusive that they should not be allowed in the same sentence or thought. A Malcolm X might say, on the other hand, “by any means necessary” in the direness of a certain racist context. But what makes Merleau-Ponty acquiesce in violence and then seek legitimation through performance? What would happen if Being were not laid down? Would Being run rampant and enslave or brutalize the human?25 Would the lawlessness of nature infect our second nature as culture? Or is Being, as that which is to be known, calling out for the human to define itself as the knower and as the measure of all understanding: that is, as a knower who just has to assume the responsibility, with great daring and courage, of wanting to know? (One can see here the common cause between the phenomenological return and Adrienne Rich’s revisionist dive into the wreck.) Does the human subject have to arrogate to itself the privilege of knowing and just assume that it knows what it means to know? Is that the courageous “taking of fate in our hands” that Merleau-Ponty is talking about: the assumption of transcendence from an all too immanent position? For, to him, there is no prior being: no being other than the one that will be revealed in the process of being laid down. Why then does he raise the question of legitimation or validation autonomously as it were, and in the context of performance? To anticipate Judith Butler: perform what on what? Is there a prior temporality or a state of being to be performed on? Is such a performance postrepresentational? To what external criteria can such a performance be held accountable? It appears, then, that the only choice left to the human subject of consciousness and intentionality is to contemplate that act of taking its fate in its hands. The crucial question is: will the subject do it or not? That indeed is what the performative is all about. Merleau-Ponty is laying down the dictum that abstaining from taking that responsibility would be a more heinous crime toward Being than the inevitable violence that accompanies the task of the laying down of Being. worlding

193

It is inevitable, given the register of violence, that the next step in our analysis should be toward the intention or the intentionality behind the violent act. Is intentionality, violent or otherwise, a done deal, a fait accompli for Merleau-Ponty?26 That is what Foucault would have us believe when he shows up the disingenuousness of phenomenology, both of the Sartrean and the Merleau-Pontian kind, in the following diagnosis: Phenomenology, on the other hand, reoriented this event with respect to meaning: either it placed the bare event before or to the side of meaning—the rock of facticity, the mute inertia of occurrences—and then submitted it to the active processes of meaning, to its digging and elaboration; or else it assumed a domain of primal significations, which always existed as a disposition of the world around the self, tracing its path and privileged locations, indicating in advance where the event might occur and its possible form. Either the cat whose good sense precedes the smile or the common sense of the smile that anticipates the cat. Either Sartre or Merleau-Ponty. For them, meaning never coincided with the event; and from this evolves a logic of signification, a grammar of the first person, and a metaphysics of consciousness.27

194

I think Foucault is misleading on two counts. First, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is not really concerned with the event the way in which Foucault and Gilles Deleuze are, particularly with the singularity of the event. Perhaps there is a symbiotic tracing going on between the self and the world, but to the best of my reading, these are neither privileged moments of signification in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology nor an inevitable prolepsis toward the occurrence of events.28 On the contrary, Merleau-Ponty, almost nonjudgmentally and close to descriptively, maintains that the human being is condemned to meaning in a thoroughly quotidian and ubiquitous way. Second, Foucault’s attribution of the grammar of the first person to Merleau-Ponty overlooks the significant point that to Merleau-Ponty the foundational and originary percipient is not the “I” as a personal pronoun, but the prepersonal one implicit, latent, and presumed in each and every “I.” Be that as it may, Foucault, when he talks about primal significations, does help us understand the aesthetic violence in phenomenology. The violence is the violence of the foundational a priori that begins the project of the laying down of being. In Merleau-Ponty’s version of phenomenology, the foundational certitude as well as the authority of the a priori is maintained, worlding

while at the same time the category of the a priori is denied any kind of transcendental status. This “immanentization” of the a priori results in an implosion and a hypostasis: the implosion of being into the human, and a corresponding hypostasis of the human.29 Merleau-Ponty’s struggles with meaning, reality, intentionality, and the intelligibility of the real, foreshadow Roland Barthes’s famous early essay, “The Structuralist Activity,” in which Barthes proposes the category of the simulacrum as the mediator between the real and the intelligible. Both models wrestle over the following question: Should intelligibility be a representation or an interested production? The difference however, is that to Barthes, as to Alain Robbe-Grillet, the heart of the matter is dead, whereas to Merleau-Ponty consciousness (though not a metaphysics of consciousness as Foucault would have it) still plays an intentional-perceptual-originary role in the creation of intelligibility.30 In a way, Merleau-Ponty subscribes to the linguistic turn by validating perception as the originary language in which the world and the human subject are given to each other. The phenomenological method understands and acknowledges the givenness as an a priori and intends to instantiate this givenness in and through the corporeal perceptual experience. This givenness would then seem to operate on a double register: as the violence of the laying down of the a priori that in turn validates a felicitous affirmation of the human-Being nexus. This could be read as an epistemological attempt to honor Being through the category of givenness, and obversely, as a project on behalf of ontology/being/ things themselves to retain the services of epistemology within an abiding solidarity. It is in this context that the connection Merleau-Ponty makes between intention and meaning takes on tremendous significance. Here then are the questions: How constitutive are meaning and intentionality of each other? Or is it a unidirectional relationship, and if so, who is in the driver’s seat: intentionality or meaning? Is meaning the rationale and intentionality the body that demonstrates the rationale by way of instantiation? Is intentionality a performative heuristic in which meaning perennially loses and finds itself ?31 Or, to interject Deleuze into the discussion, are the two phantasmal with reference to each other?32 Would meaning without intentionality be merely descriptive, random, aleatory, and not traceable to any intending agent or consciousness? Conversely, what can one make of an intentionality that worlding

195

does not achieve embodiment or actualization as meaning?33 In the relationship between the two, which category occupies the pole of transcendence, and which the pole of immanence? In this relationship, which of the two speaks for process as the history of the present, and which represents teleology? Does meaning operate in the form of semantic violence or fulfillment; or does intentionality perform itself as a postponement of meaning? Is meaning descriptive in nature or prescriptive, and either way, how does the trajectory of intentionality participate in the unveiling of meaning? Who or what intends? As Nietzsche would have it, are concepts like intentionality and agency pathetic anthropocentric ruses to make existence bearable? As we can see, these concerns are simultaneously ethical, aesthetic, political, and epistemological. To quote at length from the preface to The Phenomenology of Perception: The world is not what I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible. “There is a world,” or rather: “There is the world”; I can never completely account for this ever-reiterated assertion in my life.

196

The facticity of the world is what constitutes the Weltlichkeit der Welt, what causes the world to be the world; just as the facticity of the cogito is not an imperfection in itself, but rather what assures me of my existence. The eidetic method is the method of a phenomenological positivism, which bases the possible on the real. We can now consider the notion of intentionality, too often cited as the main discovery of phenomenology, whereas it is understandable only through the reduction. “All consciousness is consciousness of something”; there is nothing new in that. Kant showed, in the Refutation of Idealism, that inner perception is impossible without outer perception, that the world, as a collection of connected phenomena, is anticipated in the consciousness of my unity, and is the means whereby I come into being as a consciousness. What distinguishes intentionality from the Kantian relation to a possible object is that the unity of the world, before being posited by knowledge in a specific act of identification, is “lived” as ready-made or already there.34

The motif that is insistent both in this passage and the others quoted earlier is that of life and living: that something is already a lived reality before it is acknowledged as such in thought. It is not cogito ergo sum; rather “I have already lived so that I may be reclaimed in and by worlding

thought.” Merleau-Ponty does not proceed quite in the same direction as does Heidegger to whom truth functions as an unveiling of being. Merleau-Ponty’s aim is more modest, and I think, functions on the hither side of anthropocentrism. His polemical objective is not to rescue being from human thought and restore it to the ecological or the planetary, or to the pre- or the transhuman, but to call into question the hubris of the cogito and render it secondary to the experiential or the lived register. Having been convinced somewhat ruefully that anthropocentrism as such is ineluctable, Merleau-Ponty substitutes an arrogant and life-denying cognitive anthropocentrism with an affective or lived/experiential anthropocentrism. What makes this form of anthropocentrism (I would even call it an aesthetic anthropocentrism, for the choice also has to do with the genre in which representations are made, and perceptions validated) more ethical in some sense is that it honors its accountability to life, experience, and livedness, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, to the thinking subject’s being in the world, rather than to its accountability to the rectitude of the cogito. Perhaps in an extreme and uncompromising Levinasian sense of the term ethical, living and experiencing themselves are a form of violence; but at least in being violent, they attempt the rational foundational task of the laying down of being within the realm of experience, rather than set it apart in an autonomous realm of its own. Before I move this chapter in the direction of Heidegger, I would like to take one final critical look at the way intentionality functions in Merleau-Ponty’s version of phenomenology, particularly with reference to anthropocentrism and the critique of anthropocentrism. What does it mean for Merleau-Ponty to maintain that the unity of the world is already lived and out there before it gets taken up by thought? How does intentionality become part of that lived unity, rather than act as a component of thought about the unity? What is the value of the distinction that he makes, within phenomenology, between the movement and the self-conscious philosophy? Finally, is the Being that speaks through phenomenology in the final analysis anthropocentric or not? It is inevitable that the phenomenological thinker in her or his attempt to articulate and valorize the Lebenswelt must initially propose it as a loss, a gap, or a form of the between that can at best be gestured at. The phenomenological thinker acknowledges the problem worlding

197

198

as a dilemma, as Roquentin would have it in Sartre’s Nausea, between “living” and “telling.”35 When one starts telling, one has already abandoned or turned one’s back on the living, or the “dwelling” as Heidegger might have it. But not being a numinous mystic or a monistic transcendentalist, Merleau-Ponty cannot just let the living be either, in the spirit of an unmediated wisdom. The telling has to take place, but in such a way that acknowledges the self-sufficient and yet contingent anteriority of the lived unity. But how does the phenomenological philosopher know, as a philosopher, that such a unity is present as lived reality? Is it just a matter of faith that inaugurates phenomenology as philosophical practice? To play the devil’s advocate, why does Merleau-Ponty have the intellectual itch to philosophize at all? Is the difference between the Cartesian, or for that matter, the Kantian cogito and the cogito of phenomenology a difference in posture and attitude, rather than a difference in kind? In other words, is it feasible for the phenomenological cogito to point to the lived unity as an outside that lies beyond the phenomenological method, that is, as a constitutive outside?36 Can the phenomenological arrest itself at the level of pointing and refuse to philosophize beyond for fear of betraying living by thinking? Marx comes to mind here: the Marx who believed in categories and stages not as ends in themselves, but as contingent means whose ultimate ethic was to celebrate and live and inhabit fully the sensuous totality of lived life. Does human nature then play a necessary double role vis-à-vis Being: both the spoiler and the enabler? As Roquentin would have it in Nausea, the human is de trop, excessive and always in the way. How can an agent who acknowledges that he, she, or it is “in the way” also act with proactive intentionality and change the world in the act of understanding it? In other words, how can Merleau-Ponty have it both ways with anthropocentrism: apologize for it, as it were, on an ethical register, and act unilaterally on its basis at the level of the political? What does Being or the world intend through the human subject, and how does the human subject understand this interpellation? But as we have already observed, Merleau-Ponty does not grant Being any kind of primacy, either epistemological or ontological. Intentionality defined à la Merleau-Ponty is ontogenetic in all its human immanence. The transcendence of Being is meaningful to the phenomenological thinker worlding

not as a reality but as a perpetual possibility perennially enabled by the phenomenological method. Intentionality as an originary category founds the world and the human subject in a relationship of mutual givenness. Within this scheme of things, originary intentionality is intransitive; and as such, it neither has a subject nor an object. In his own way, Merleau-Ponty delegitimates questions such as who intends and who is intended by whom? If in the linguistic turn the author becomes an author function and intentionality becomes a linguistic effect, in the perceptual turn of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, intentionality is neither ontological nor epistemological. It functions as an “inter” category that coconstitutes being with the human subject, knowledge with the knower. Phenomenological thinking functions neither as a representation (if by that we mean that something preexists so that it can be understood through epistemology) nor as an autonomous production (if by that we mean the willed production of something new that uses anteriority as raw material), but as an act of translation. “It translated well” is the memorable and evocative last sentence in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.37 I quote that line here to emphasize the fact that translation is a kind of genre and as such betokens a certain kind of accountability. It is not an original work, nor is it a commentary; and it is not a critical work either. To quote Walter Benjamin, “translation is a mode.”38 The evaluation “it translated well” is based on a relational focus that is neither completely on the source nor on the target. The syntax of the sentence belongs fully neither to the active nor to the passive voice: it is neither exclusively transitive nor intransitive. The evaluation is about translatability in general as much as it is on a particular instance of having been translated.39 It is also, obliquely, about a state of being. The adjudication is also aesthetic: in other words, “well” is not obsessively about adequacy, loyalty, or rectitude. It is about the feel of the translation: its grace and its ability to stand for itself without having to be reduced to the source language or the target language. The kudos in the evaluation does not go either to the source language for being such a flexible and understanding source, nor to the target language for being so smart and efficient; it goes, rather, to a certain overarching condition that founds both the source and the target languages. It is in this originary sense of translation that I suggest that the phenomenology à la Merleau-Ponty be thought of as worlding

199

200

a translation of Being. Translation as a genre takes up responsibility for itself even as it takes into account the anterior claims of the original and the criteria of faithfulness that will bestow honor and integrity on the translation. And indeed, there is a certain constitutive violence involved in the project: a certain laying down of being as simultaneously linguistic, intralinguistic, and interlinguistic. But this violence ensures the cultivation of reciprocal vulnerability among the participating languages. By taking the risk of translation, the translator persuades the original to be born again within the immanence of the project of translation; after this rebirth, in a sense the originality of the original fades out of the picture. All that we have is that original text whose ontology has now been reterritorialized as the source text for a particular act of translation. Since translations are also transcreations, each translation project is somewhere between pure heteronomy and pure autonomy and insists on its prerogative to misread the original so that it can translate well. If we think of the phenomenological philosopher as a translator of Being, here are the consequences: First, the philosopher is under no obligation to claim that he or she is either representing or constituting reality. Second, he or she can think of his or her task as a generic as well as an aesthetic project with all the accountabilities thereof. Third, the phenomenological philosopher as a translator is not a guarantor of any correct or loyal or authentic realization of intentionality; instead his or her very project is the result of a certain originary intentionality that founds Being as a translatable text. Fourth, the philosopher as translator is now bringing into being an articulation that is both new and not new. In other words, the burden of the philosophy has already been lived and is in that sense nothing new, yet is new insofar as it is being articulated on a new register. It is indeed true that to a reader who has perused the text in its source language, the translation is entirely redundant; but such a redundancy cannot be generalized since there are those who rely exclusively on the translation. Finally, translation also acts as a concept metaphor that demonstrates the reality that it is the rationale and the ethic of translatability that validates language as such. The laying down of being is an act that establishes an inviolable relationship between the significance of the text as meaning and its translatability: no translatability, no meaning. As we have seen, this intrinsic translatability is the very burden of intentionality. In other words, the worlding

phenomenological world is the kind of world whose very “essence,” if I may use that term, is its translatability. As we have observed already, translatability performs in the intersubjective space between selves and others, and in the intertemporal space between the past/the then and the present/the now. Not just that: it is in the context of translation and translatability that we can raise a number of issues that are simultaneously inter- and intra- in nature. If a work in English is translatable into, say, Hindi, then it means that in some sense the work is translatable into English in the first place. What I am suggesting is a strong antianthropological move. Before the translator takes on the task of becoming intelligible to the other, she or he has to raise the question of intelligibility to the self, which is by no means axiomatic. It is precisely at that moment when intelligibility is read as a function of translatability that the source language is othered within itself. Without a humble acknowledgment of this reality, all acts of translation degenerate into acts of invasion, or into mere instrumentalist demonstrations of “dominant intelligibility.”40 But once translation is perceived as constitutive of all meaning making, then begins the complex project of mediating rigorously between intratranslations and intertranslations. To put it in the context of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, how does the laying down of being work as a translation: intrahuman, and therefore interontological? Is it conceivable that Foucault’s governmentality is nothing but a bureaucratic instrumentalization of the Merleau-Pontian laying down of being? Does the human, all too human act of taking courage and translating the human self-reflexively into the human also achieve the effect of a transcendence beyond the anthropocentric?41 I have chosen to privilege translation as a genre mainly to insist that all meaning makings are indeed acts of translation; and that the location at which translations lose and acquire their meanings is in the space of the between. If phenomenology is worth returning to after Foucault, it is only because it has a vital interest in the space of the between that is neither fully inhabited by ontology nor definitively spoken for by epistemology: the space of the between that is necessary for the worlding of the world. With that said, I now turn to Heidegger. When we think of Heidegger, we immediately think Being and time, of ontology and epistemology, and of course, of “the ontico-ontological worlding

201

202

difference.”42 Whether it is the early Heidegger or the Heidegger after the famous turn (Kehre), the dominant motif in all his thought is the relationship between the language of Being and the being of language.43 Ontology haunts language as a radical absence, and language accommodates being; and then it all becomes a matter of authentic speaking and authentic speaking for. When we look in particular at some of the formulations regarding the earth and the world in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” it becomes evident that Heidegger’s preoccupations with ontology are the necessary preconditions for his engagement with human, anthropocentric history. Whether the human is synonymous with the anthropocentric makes for too large and daunting a question for me to get into here. Unlike William V. Spanos, who in his memorable and politically progressive recuperation of Heidegger conceptualizes ontology as a historical continuum for the various sites of being such as culture, politics, economics, and so on, Heidegger himself has no qualms about positing ontology as transcendent of human history.44 Perhaps ontology is History with a capital H; but that is about it. Where I find Heidegger’s hermeneutics poignant is in its attempt to legitimate Gelassenheit as a way both of knowing and being. It is in this hermeneutic context that Heidegger is really able to follow through on his promise to situate the questioner within the question. But, alas, here the questioner is the Dasein, the overgeneralized and overallegorized human being who refuses to be marked historically as male, European, colonizer, bourgeois, and so on. It is indeed a philosophical subject that questions and historicizes itself within the domain of philosophy, but will not historicize philosophy as such with reference to its own historical conditions of emergence and constitution.45 To quote at length from Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”: The setting up of a world and the setting forth of the earth are two essential features in the work-being of the work. They belong together, however, in the unity of work-being. This is the unity we seek when we ponder the selfsubsistence of the work and try to express in words this closed, repose of self-support. . . . The world is the self-disclosing openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of a historical people. The earth is the spontaneous forthcoming of that which is continually self-secluding and to

worlding

that extent sheltering and concealing. World and earth are essentially different from one another and yet are never separated. The world grounds itself on the earth and earth juts out through the world. But the relation between world and earth does not wither away into the empty unity of opposites unconcerned with one another. The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there. The opposition of the world and earth is a striving. But we would surely all too easily falsify its nature if we were to confound striving with discord and dispute, and thus see it only as disorder and destruction. In essential striving, rather, the opponents raise each other into the self-assertion of their natures. Self-assertion of nature, however, is never a rigid insistence upon some contingent state, but surrender to the concealed originality of the source of one’s own being. In the struggle, each opponent carries the other beyond itself. Thus the striving becomes ever more intense as striving, and more authentically what it is. The more the struggle overdoes itself on its own part, the more inflexibly do the opponents let themselves go into the intimacy of simple belonging to one another. The earth cannot dispense with the Open of the world if it itself is to appear as earth in the liberated surge of its self-seclusion. The world, again, cannot soar out of the earth’s sight if, as the governing breadth and path of all essential destiny, it is to ground itself on a resolute foundation.46

What is at once most enabling and disconcerting about this passage is the ease with which it invokes the Earth-World nexus within a general economy of Being: enabling since there is indeed the need for such a pointing out toward ontology, and disconcerting since such a gesturing is based on a troublesome and objectionable postulation: “The world is the self-disclosing openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of a historical people.” So who are the historical people, and who are the ahistorical people? Is people meant in the general sense of the species being of the human? Is historicity inherent in a people as an ontological given, or is historicity the prerogative of a certain people? At what point did the temporality of the Earth-World nexus become available as historicity to a certain people? Whose history are we talking about, and the allegorization of whose history into the Earth-World principle? What is the precise ideological and perspectival

worlding

203

204

charge of the word destiny? How does the tableau vivant of the EarthWorld/concealment-disclosure get aligned with a chosen and prescriptive teleology of a certain history of a certain people? What do words like simple and essential denote in this context? Do they adumbrate the historicity of a chosen people with such a profound and elemental transparency that this historicity begins to function as the allegorical index of the story of Being in general? If a particular “we” were not a historical people, will the earth-world nexus not work for such a we? But how can any we not have a history, unless Heidegger means a certain kind of “history”: dominant and not subaltern?47 Is Heidegger suggesting that the Earth-World revelation works only for a certain people who are filial in some authentic way? The problem with this passage is that it invokes the Earth-World relationship on a double register: both primordial and historical. If the invocation of the earth-world dynamic is intended as a transanthropocentric affirmation of Being, then how is it that the possibility of such an affirmation is tied to the historical destiny of a certain people? Why is the destiny of a particular people both historical and essential? Why is the transcendent temporality of the Earth-World structuration anchored to the promised, and therefore a historical, teleology of a people? And what indeed, with or without reference to Nazism and Heidegger’s brief but definitive endorsement of Adolf Hitler, does destiny mean in this context? Could Heidegger be translated thus? The ontological authenticity of the Earth-World nexus is available and intelligible exclusively on the basis of the chosen teleology, that is, on the destiny of a particular historical people. The primordial temporality of the Earth-World dynamic is but the flip side of the developmental logic of a certain dominant historical people in whose worlding lies the secret of the Earth-World interaction. It is in the historical being of a particular chosen people that “the be-ing of Being” figures. In other words, the authentic nonanthropocentric celebration of “the be-ing of Being” is totally dependent on the destructive and self-reflexive acumen of a particular anthropocentrism. The naturalization of the destruction of anthropocentrism within and by the history of a particular people will then automatically result in the creation of an authentic relationship with Being as such. The speaking of the Earth-World will have to be spoken for by the essential destiny of a historical people. This is heady and dangerous rhetoric. worlding

Heidegger’s endorsement of the work of art as a site that houses the shining forth of Being is very much consistent with his overall understanding of the Dasein and its relationship to Being. But man is not only a living creature who possesses language along with other capacities. Rather, language is the house of Being in which man ek-sists by dwelling, in that he belongs to the truth of Being, guarding it. So the point is that in the determination of the humanity of man as eksistence what is essential is not man but Being, as the dimension of the ecstasies of ek-sistence. However, the dimension is not something spatial in the familiar sense. Rather, everything spatial and all space-time occur essentially in the dimensionality, which Being itself is. Thinking attends to these simple relationships. It tries to find the right word for them within the long traditional language and grammar of metaphysics. But does such thinking—granted that there is something in a name—still allow itself to be described as humanism? Certainly not so far as humanism thinks metaphysically. Certainly not if humanism is existentialism and is represented by what Sartre expresses: précisement nous sommes sur un plan où il y a seulement des hommes (we are precisely in a situation where there are only human beings). Thought from Being and Time, this should say instead: précisement nous sommes sur un plan où il y a principalement l’Être (We are precisely in a situation where principally there is Being).48

Another passage from Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” runs thus: To accomplish means to unfold something into the fullness of its essence, to lead it forth into this fullness—producere. Therefore only what is already is can really be accomplished. But what “is” above all is Being. Thinking accomplishes the relation of Being to the essence of man. It does not make or cause the relation. Thinking brings this relation into Being solely as something handed over to it from Being. Such offering consists in the fact that in thinking Being comes to language. Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of Being insofar as they bring the manifestation to language and maintain it in language through their speech.49

When Heidegger asserts that language is the home of Being, and that in its home man dwells, he is in fact enunciating his theory of the equiworlding

205

206

primordiality of Being with the Dasein. He is in fact guilty, if you will, of bringing into existence a new register of temporality in which the advent of Being into language also marks the dwelling of man in the home of Being. With this move, Heidegger “at-homes” the relationship of the human to Being.50 Crucial to Heidegger’s thought is the assumption that human beings are the custodians of this home: hence the assertion that Sorge (care) is part of the structure and the self-understanding of the Dasein. It goes without saying that this guardianship is unilaterally assumed by the Dasein in the name of a constitutive primordiality. Is this assumption arrogant and hubristic, or is it a humble submission of the human to Being? Through his use of the term accomplish, Heidegger honors the anteriority of Being even as he commits the unfolding of Being to its full essence to human thought and language. To recall Aristotle here, what is the relationship between potentiality and actualization? Is the latter precontained in the former as a magisterial promise? Is it possible to accomplish in active violation of the potential? If what is actually anterior is the potential of Being and not its essential plenitude, then how can it be guaranteed that a particular unfolding of Being is indeed the correct or authentic temporalization of Being? As Heidegger would have it, can the temporality of the hermeneutic situation that the Dasein is caught up in also be the potential home of Being; or do the two temporalities stand in a disjunctive relationship? What is the nature of custodial temporality vis-à-vis the unfolding of the a-letheia, the uncovering of Being? Is the custodian a translator, a transcriber, a transliterator, a catalytic agent, an instrument, a medium, a self-arrogating a priori? As David Farrell Krell asks, “But in what sorts of human activities does the character of Dasein most definitively show itself ? How is a phenomenology of existence to differ, say, from a sociology or psychology of man?”51 Heidegger in fact responds to this question in his rewording of Sartre’s formulation. Simply speaking, Heidegger substitutes Being for human beings. This is not a mere innocuous substitution. It is in fact quite an aggressive act of valorization of Being in the name of the “ek-static” ontological condition of the Dasein. The inherent anthropocentrism in the substitution is always already called into question and destabilized by the ek-static deportment of man who is “rather ‘thrown’ from Being itself into the truth of Being, so that ek-sisting in this fashion he might worlding

guard the truth of Being, in order that beings might appear in the light of Being as the beings they are.” As Heidegger would have it, “Man is the shepherd of Being.” It is by rendering ek-static the very ontology of the human that Heidegger seeks to undercut an anthropocentric epistemology. In being the shepherd of Being, the Dasein is not in control; rather, the Dasein merely accomplishes what is inherent in the be-ing of Being. But, who are the ones who create and think with words: any human, all humans, a specific subset of humans? To sharpen Krell’s line of questioning some more: How is the anthropology, sociology/psychology of man to be differentiated from the determinate historicity of, say, the Eurocentric Man? Is Heidegger capable of accounting for the fact that the accomplishment of an ek-static Dasein still results in the production of hegemonic temporalities and regimes such as Eurocentrism and colonialism? To put it in Heidegger-friendly terms: How goes the onticoontological difference go with the European, the African, the Asian, and the subaltern in all its variously marked manifestations? In the case of Heidegger, the problem is quite straightforward. Just as he insists that the hermeneutic circle has to be entered into and thought through with existential rigor, so too, it is only by way of a problematization of anthropocentrism that the being of language can be transformed into that open space where the language of being can be heard. This of course is the model of poetically dwelling: a model that reconciles thinking with being by acquiescing in the evisceration of thought as form by thinking as temporal process. Derrida’s sympathetic but critical reading of the relationship of ousia to gramme in Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics makes the point that in the final analysis Heidegger ontologizes language and delinguifies Being.52 In Heidegger’s philosophy, the allegorical mode is always one up on history thanks to Heidegger’s use of language more as a concept metaphor than as a material-historical agent. The rigorous autonomy of language, in the ultimate analysis, is instrumentalized as a means to the achievement of a numinous condition that when no sooner reached obviates the need for language. To begin with, the two phrases the language of being and the being of language are posited as mutually constitutive within a perennial bind; but as the existential dynamic takes shape, a different ethic is introduced to tip the mutually constitutive bind decisively in favor worlding

207

208

of Being and ontology. The “be-ing” of Being that seemed to require linguistic mediation in the beginning dramatically gains its autonomy and rids itself of its mediatedness. Thus, in his famous analysis of “the jugness of the jug,” Heidegger manages to translate the materiality of the constituted jug as the ethic of “the void that holds authentic Being,” and thereby rereads the jug as the vehicle of Being.53 To translate this in terms of Hindu philosophy, Heidegger is more akin to Sankara, the Advaitic thinker who would argue that to be in language is to be in maya, or illusion. On the other hand, Nagarjuna, the modal thinker, like Derrida would reject the comfort of monism in the name of an austere loyalty to language as method, and continue to dwell in the world of dualistic alienation.54 To put this in the context of my reading of Adrienne Rich’s poem, what does one do with the equipment or the apparatus of thought? Does one discard it as useless once the object of thought has been reached, or does one dwell perennially in a dualistic world necessitated by the rationale of modal thinking? As one analyzes Heidegger’s Dasein analytic, for example, in his treatment of equipmentality in Vincent Van Gogh’s painting of the peasant shoes, what emerges is an aesthetic and not a political modality of engagement. For Heidegger to claim with such cavalier innocence that the real nature of the peasant shoes comes through not in the field in which they labor but in a painting created by an alien and differently positioned subject requires a massive occlusion of historical consciousness by an aesthetically inflected ontological compulsion. It is only by erasing or canceling the historical and agential reality of the peasant shoes that he is able to arrest their equipmental being and facilitate an aesthetic epiphany. Is peasant consciousness incapable of an abstract theorization of its laboring condition, or of critiquing the philosophical impulse that art be autonomized?55 Heidegger, the reader of the painting and therefore the reader of peasant reality, arrogates to himself the privilege of a universal anthropological perspective that cruelly sublates the labor of the peasant and its fetishized representation in a painting and goes on blithely to extract surplus ontological value from the mute immanence of peasant consciousness.56 Says Heidegger: “Truth happens in Van Gogh’s painting. This does not mean that something is correctly portrayed, but rather that in the revelation of the equipmental being of the shoes, that which is a whole—world and earth in worlding

their counterplay—attains to unconcealedness.”57 Heidegger commits worlding and the truth of the world to the law of the genre, in this case, painting. My concern here is with the topos in which truth is disclosed. Rejecting both metaphysical as well as so-called adequation theories of truth, Heidegger claims art (including poetry and painting) as that privileged location in which truth can be seen in the process of becoming itself. The larger question that he is asking is the following: Is Being itself a genre all its own, or is it something profoundly transgeneric that can at best be hinted toward? When Heidegger disconnects truth from positivist and/or empiricist notions of rectitude, he is allowing Being to be disclosed and understood in its own terms and in its ownmost way. It is in this sense that aesthetic truth is entirely transitive and autotelic. It is indeed as art that Being makes sense as the worlding of the world. What Van Gogh the supreme artist is able to demonstrate, by way of the equipmentality of the peasant shoes, is the coming into being of this truth. Whereas the peasant just instrumentalizes the shoes as equipment, it is the artist who thematizes the equipmental being of the shoes. Here is Heidegger again: But perhaps it is only in the picture that we notice all this about the shoes. The peasant woman, on the other hand, simply wears them. If only this simple wearing were so simple. When she takes off her shoes late in the evening, in deep but healthy fatigue, and reaches out to them again in the still dim dawn, or passes them by on the day of rest; she knows all this without noticing or reflecting. The equipmental quality of the equipment consists indeed in its usefulness. But this usefulness itself rests in the abundance of an essential being of the equipment. We call it reliability. By virtue of this reliability the peasant woman is made privy to the silent call of the earth; by virtue of the reliability of the equipment she is sure of the world. World and earth exist for her, and for those who are with her in her mode of being, only thus-in the equipment.58

This is indeed epistemic violence masquerading as benign ontological allegory. This is indeed a feral and predatory pretextualization of some one else’s context and situation for one’s own lofty and didactic purposes. Through the invasive annulment of the materiality of peasant reality, and in the opening provided by such an annulment (in other words, let us get rid of the ugly, laboring, and unself-reflexive peasant worlding

209

210

woman), the truth of Being shines forth. In this passage, the abject peasant woman is completely and choicelessly interpellated by Heidegger’s romantic rhetoric. She is there and not there, at his beck and call. She is both honored and denigrated in the same thought: at one with being and simultaneously unself-reflexive. She is othered as the anthropological primitive proximal with nature so that the philosopher may squeeze an allegorical surplus from her being even as the value of her labor is expropriated by capitalism or feudalism.59 I would submit that the oppression meted out to her by a system that knows that it is exploitative is of a lesser order than the dominance that she is subjected to by the ontologizing allegorical philosopher. Objectionable though this passage is on many counts, it does raise a very important question concerning ontology and epistemology. What does it mean, broadly speaking, for epistemology to be about ontology? What kinds of framing procedures take place in the context of a discourse that is about something else or other?60 If the peasant woman were elaborating a philosophy or a worldview about her own material conditions of existence, would that elaboration also not be about her, rather than be a seamlessly integrated layer of her existence? The logic of the genre provides us with the most comprehensive understanding, (1) of how any experience becomes the subject/object of a discourse; (2) what the tensions are between the imperatives of the experience and the constraints of the discourse; and (3) the nature of interpellation in general by which meanings and values are hailed into existence. I have chosen to submit Heidegger to a fairly lengthy critique precisely because I acknowledge that there is much in his thinking that remains relevant today: particularly Heidegger’s ecosensitive epistemology that dares to cothink the inexhaustibility of the earth along with the inevitability of the worlding of the world. What bothers me in the end, however, is the systematic ease with which Heidegger’s philosophy disavows its political genealogy and constitutedness. It is the unilateral confidence of his analytic that assumes that an unsituated philosophical critique of anthropocentrism is simultaneously also a critique of other forms of centrism—in particular of Eurocentrism, and of centrism as such—that causes anxiety. How indeed are different histories collectivized and subsumed under the grand category of anthropos, and which human subject is guilty of such taxonomic violence? What is the relationship of differworlding

ent regimes of centrism among themselves in the real world? What does it really mean to diagnose and identify Eurocentrism (or Afro- or gynoor androcentrism) as a symptom of an underlying anthropocentrism? Is it even just to use the term anthro in a world-historical context in which the only universality that has been achieved is that of dominance? Is it conscionable to conflate the history of a variety of intrahuman struggles with the history of human relationship to the nonhuman, of the planetary, in short, to nature? Is there then no need to differentiate subaltern centrisms and their will to power from that of dominant centrisms? If the human subject is anthropocentric, is such a subject in all its anthropocentricity, tall or short, male or female, black, brown, yellow, or white, ethnic or national, gay and lesbian or hetero, European, African, or Asian? These are the questions that are really worth asking as we attempt a double reading of the human condition: both in its conflictual human contexts and in its disposition toward nature. Let us take, for example, the heated controversy about biodiversity between subaltern and dominant economies, or the debate as analyzed between those who support the cause of the spotted owl in Oregon and those who are concerned about the loss of human jobs because of the spotted owl. How does one determine and construct the polemical conjuncture at which two goods or evils square off against each other? Just as in the case of human rights—where the category of the human even if intended universally and trans-politically is still coded in national terms—in the case of the debate on biodiversity, too, the whole question of natural resources, albeit planetary in its significance, cannot but be interpreted in the context of national rights. How does the human subject access the putative, acategorical, and universal condition of the human by way of the contingent-immanent regimes of the political such as nationalism, the state, gender rights, ethnic legitimacy, and so on? How should the human subject commit itself simultaneously to ontological as well sovereign modes of thinking? To recapitulate my discussion of sovereignty in my chapter on Edward Said, how should the humanity conduct itself as “subject” and as “being”? Unless one subscribes blindly and, I may add, foolishly, to the theory of sublation and the progressive transcendence by the universal human subject of the historicity of the present, the human remains all too human and worlding

211

212

demands an explanation based not on the phenomenology of the spirit, but rather on the fraught and unequal playing fields of the world as body and the world as history. Furthermore, who or what is the universal subject of history? The problem with an obsessively philosophical commitment to rights as human is that it cruelly forgets the reality that philosophy is well grounded in matters of state and power. It is only within the context of the Foucauldian genealogical insight that the very history of reason has been unreasonable that one can even begin to talk about the potential universality of human rights. It has been a well-demonstrated lesson in world history so far that only those groups, nations, and collectivities that have enjoyed dominance have secured for themselves the right to talk about rights in a universally prescriptive manner. Thus a unilateralist and exceptionalist superpower (the one and only), the United States, can afford to finger-point and talk about the abuse of human rights elsewhere and blame it all on the roguery of those nations that are complicit with the abuse. Only such a power has the gall in the same breath to exonerate itself of its own record in the field of human rights, that is, on the history of the death penalty in Texas, the abuse of minorities by the police, the disproportionate numbers of colored and in particular African American subjects in prison, the random authorization of profiling and the highhanded suspension of civil rights after 9/11 in the name of so-called homeland security, and preach to the world. Only a superpower can claim with unconscionable ease that all the rights that it covets for itself are transparently human and not virulently and ideologically national, or argue with authority that it is okay for American foreign policy to dismantle Iraqi national rights and nation-build on behalf of the Iraqi people: all in the name of human rights as understood and promulgated by American exceptionalism on behalf of all the peoples of the world. So who owns the natural resources of the world: the flora and fauna, including endangered species, and the dwindling ozone layer? Which nation-state will act as the universal vigilante, the robocop, the equalizer, the terminator on behalf of the entire world? Of course, this is no rhetorical question. Though it is true that subaltern regimes and nationalisms are consistently guilty of abuses of power and of anthropocentric violence to ecology, nature, and its resources, the issue of their culpability (just as in the case of the nuclear arms race and nuclear worlding

disarmament) cannot be raised in isolation. Subaltern abuses and violations and dominant abuses and violations ought to be arraigned in the same court and under the same jurisdiction. One cannot argue for a legal arrangement in which the dominant violator-abuser sits unilaterally in judgment over the subaltern violator-abuser in the name of effective deterrence. My point is that there is a significant difference between the conditions in which subaltern anthropocentrisms inflict their violence and the conditions that highlight the havoc caused by dominant anthropocentric regimes. Though the term anthropos is invoked in both cases, this invocation itself is structured in dominance. As a weak and derivative carrier of the charge of anthropocentrism, no doubt the subaltern regimes are guilty, but the original sin lies on the conscience of those dominant regimes that unleashed the savageries of colonization, the molestation of natural resources in the name of development, and the perpetuation of unevenness and asymmetry as marks of the human condition as ontologized by capitalist and colonial modernity. It is blatantly clear, despite all the pious rhetoric to the contrary, that the superpower does not respect nature disinterestedly, but indeed covets it as a valuable resource for the fulfillment of the needs of its subject population. Whether it be the “protection” of the oil fields in Iraq or elsewhere, or the drilling for resources in Alaska so as to avoid dependence on foreign oil, the only way the United States initiates terms of negotiation is with reference to its consumption needs and patterns. The trees may indeed be natural, but it is only when they are read as necessary for human consumption that the universal human subject starts talking about sustainable development. Sustainable for and by whom, now that is another question.61 What if the trees stand on Indian soil and are therefore Indian in terms of ownership and sovereignty? Furthermore, what if the Indian government decides to destroy a certain forest area to accommodate construction projects and create jobs for its people, just as President George W. Bush may well go ahead with drilling and exploration in Alaska to avoid dependence on foreign oil? Which human court anchored in what form of sovereignty should preside over these cases, and what forms of extradition are to be issued to guarantee the alignment of the site with the crime? In spite of all this criticism, I would maintain that we should pay heed to Heidegger’s formulation of the Earth-World nexus. It is the Heidegger worlding

213

214

who asks “why is there something rather than nothing?” who compels our attention. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger drive home the insight over and over again that it is positivistic science that makes a nothing of the nothing; and to this, Heidegger would add his thesis of technology’s brutal conversion of nature to nothing but a standing reserve for human colonization. To conflate Derrida and Heidegger, it is the nothing that is outside the text that determines the finite readability of any text; and furthermore, the very objective of invoking the hors-texte in the guise of a nothingness is to destabilize the cockiness of the dominant text and to infuse a supplemental double consciousness into all readings. But what is disappointing is that the Heideggers of world thought who are so sensitive in their thinking to the human colonization of nature remain blind to the story of the colonization of the human by the human. They remain oblivious to the stark reality that the very ethicopolitical authority on whose basis they exhort the deconstruction of anthropocentrism is itself an ethico-political capital extracted from intrahuman exploitation and domination. The question that Heidegger leaves us with in all its allegorical simplicity and elemental grandeur is: How does it stand with Being, the be-ing of being, and the human being? To subdivide this into more questions: How is the Dasein to recognize what forms of understanding nature are invasive, and which are not? How is the human subject to identify what blueprints nature has for the human, and which human imaginings run counter to the ecological ethic of conservation? If the human being is the site at which, to borrow from Ralph Waldo Emerson, nature becomes available as a script (hieroglyphics), how should the human reading of nature both transform nature (in the Marxian spirit of knowledge being transformative and not merely descriptive) and yet reconcile those transformative trajectories conservatively? And what then about the Blakeian and the Hawthornian perspectives that tell us that nature is not all good, that it indeed awaits humanization.62 And finally, what is the semantic connection between anthropocentrism’s deconstruction of itself and the possibility that Being might shine in and through these deconstructive practices? In other words, within what dispensation is the authority of “in the name of ” secured: in the human, the non- or the transhuman, the planetary? When letting be is practiced agentially, who or what is allowed to be, and who is authorizing the permission? worlding

In a recently published volume collecting lectures delivered at Columbia University, Ranajit Guha, with his characteristic sagacity, raises the issue of history at the end of world history.63 All the lectures are informed by a tough double consciousness: on the one hand, an ongoing critique of Eurocentric historiography, and on the other, a passionate attempt, by way of Rabindranath Tagore, to open up a different and, dare we say, an indigenous perspective on history and historicity, and on the worlding of the world. History, historicity, historicality, the world, world history: these are the terms that resonate with one another throughout these lectures. There is the operating awareness in all these essays that there is indeed a natural world of which human beings and histories form an integral part. On the other hand, however, there is the troubling connection between the world and history. Guha’s objective in these lectures is twofold: first, to realize a different relationship to the world; and second, to conceptualize historicality differently. The task that Dipesh Chakrabarty, too, has attempted recently, is to wean historicality away from its ideological imbrication with dominance.64 The battle or the resistance is played out at the level of historiography. Are there other, non-Eurocentric, non-Western, non-Hegelian modes of writing and doing history: other ways of engaging with the life force of history? Every rhetorical and logical move that Guha makes to envision a different history and thus a different world is immediately caught up in a double logic. Just as Frantz Fanon’s impassioned vision of a new humanism is genealogically caught up in the temporality of colonialism but is independent of the ethico-political sovereignty of colonialism, so, too, with Guha’s vision. The precondition for the launching of a new humanism and a new historiography is a decisive overthrow of the colonialist episteme. Much like the manner in which the term native in Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth resonates ambiguously (sometimes signifying the native as produced by the anthropological discourse of colonialism and therefore to be summarily critiqued, and at other times signifying a native yet to be produced through independent postcolonial practices), in Guha’s discourse history works both as a semantic term within European lexicography and as a decisive point of departure from that lexicon. Guha’s invocation of Tagore in this context is as astute as it is problematic. In Guha’s reading, we find the Bengali-cosmopolitan visionary worlding

215

216

and poet Tagore calling into question the very usefulness of the category called history. There is a Nietzschean dimension to Tagore’s vision, that is, the poetic desire not to become a victim or prey of history: the other’s history, one’s own history, history as such. It is in the name of the poet’s individualism that Tagore interrogates history and its effects of incarceration. Here we need to keep in mind Tagore’s abiding critique of nationalism undertaken in the name of Visvabharathi, that is, of India-as-the world. The Bengali cosmopolitan imagination is seeking an integral and organic, but hyphenated, connection between the discreteness of India and the world at large, of which it should be a worthy microcosm.65 The same principle informs Gandhi’s vision (whatever the differences between Tagore and Gandhi on topics such as culture and nationalism) of India as a space with open windows and doors on all sides to allow the breezes to flow from all over the world, with the caveat that the space called India should not be blown away by the winds.66 In other words, centered transformation is the objective here. In Tagore, cosmopolitanism transcends the pettiness of the nation-state that threatens to come between the world and an untrammeled poetic subjectivity in the name of the political. As a poet Tagore could afford the luxury of envisioning an unmediated communion of the self ’s subjectivity with the world’s soul. It is not just that; for like Nietzsche, it is in the name of life and its protean creative impulses that Tagore critiques history and its many traps and enticements. I will speak more of Tagore and his conception of the poetic soul later in the chapter, where I will try to understand why Guha seeks assistance from Tagore in his project of defending the prose of the world from the claims of a dominant-universal historiography. Guha, in his introduction to History at the Limit of World-History, makes the diagnosis that it is only by “climbing on the back of philosophy” that world history established its putative moral transcendence over affairs that were merely local and political (4). I dwell on this reading by way of opening up a general focus on the role played by philosophy and ontological thinking during different conjunctures in the development of world history. The debate has always gone on regarding the relevance of philosophy to worldly matters and to realpolitik. Philosophy has a way of living on posthumously after the last philosopher thematizes the death of philosophy by reading the penworlding

ultimate philosopher in a certain way. I am myself quite ambivalent in my adjudication of philosophy’s role in matters political and epistemological. I would agree, on the one hand, with Guha in a colonial and postcolonial context and with Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson in a postmodern-feminist context, that philosophy has either played dirty politics without getting its discourse sullied or that it has thrown out the baby along with the bathwater by making theoretical and allegorical claims that overlook history altogether; but on the other hand, I would insist that an obsessively historico-political thought has to be problematized by a philosophical mode of thinking. Guha’s polemical use of the phrase the prose of the world focuses both on the presence of the world and on the re-presentation of this presence in discourse. How and in what language does the world speak, and moreover, in speaking for itself self-reflexively, does it reconcile its historical-political being with its philosophical being? In my critical appreciation of Guha’s project of finding a beyond or an outside to world history as philosophized by Hegel, I will also be highlighting, in an otherwise affirmative reading, a few areas in which Guha runs the risk of overpolemicizing his cause and thereby taking positions that are not persuasive except in their narrowly polemical mode. To start with, no polemical engagement is single or atomistic; it always comes in the form of a braid that weaves together at least two if not more directions and trajectories. The interesting task is to examine how within a common braid the two or more arguments become the tenor and the vehicle to one another to sustain the inclusiveness of the overall polemic. There is always the possibility that within such a relationship of transcoding among the two or more arguments, there could be significant misreadings, misrecognitions, and strategies of erroneous instrumentalization. There are two interrelated issues in Guha’s critique of Hegel: poetry versus prose, and the West versus the non-West. It is of the utmost importance to analyze with rigor the conduct of these two motifs as they begin to spin together in Guha’s discourse. Does poetry become the metonym for the non-East in some unexamined way, and does the West get stereotyped as the will to prose? Is it conceivable that the nonWest might have its own quarrels with the privilege of the poetic mode? Is it conceivable that the same thetic abstraction that Hegel demands of philosophical thought could also be a trait of some non-Western modes worlding

217

218

of thought as well? It is indeed true that Guha inherits the form of the binary: poetry versus philosophy, the concrete versus the abstract, the particular versus the general, Orient versus Occident. To that extent it is only appropriate and wise that Guha’s critique should turn the sovereignty of binarity against itself; but should the crucial imperative to find a beyond be reduced to a function of a mere binary reversal? I find many of Tagore’s formulations on behalf of the individuated poetic consciousness inflated, even clichéd, and at any rate apolitical and ahistorical. I have no problem with Guha’s astute polemicizing of the Tagore example, or for that matter, with his seeking examples of historicality from literature to settle an all-important score with the Hegelian colonialist-statist invasion. But having done that, does he go beyond, or does he become a victim of his own polemical passion? Why, for example, is Guha so utterly confident that Tagore’s noble and highminded advocacy of the individuated poetic consciousness untouched by the vulgarity of history is itself not an ideological effect, that is, an indigenous ideological effect that is as much in need of demystification as any ideological effect produced by the dominant other? For in my not too sympathetic reading, Tagore’s poet, like Emerson’s poet (and unlike the poet persona in Walt Whitman), sounds like an alienated bourgeois or bhadralok intellectual who in the mode of poetry is actually philosophizing the world away. My simple point is that poetry, too, like philosophy, as a genre can be productive of its own mighty and ineffable abstractions and pleasurable mystifications. The lyrical mode often suspends the narrative mode to find a moment of quietness, an island of rapturous stasis; but this moment is neither all concrete nor outside of history: colonialist, indigenous, Bengali, or whatever else. My simple question of Guha is the following: Is this what he really thinks of Tagore as a poet, or is his appreciation contradictorily overdetermined by the relationship of Tagore’s poetry to colonialist historiography? At the very beginning of the lecture entitled, “Historicality and the Prose of the World,” Guha quotes from Aristotle’s definition of limit as “the first thing outside which there is nothing to be found and the first thing inside which everything is found.”67 He then goes on to declare that his purpose is to “try and think World-history in terms of what is unthinkable within its boundaries” (History at the Limit, 6–7). It is in the context of such an endeavor that he invokes Tagore as a worlding

kindred spirit who has already achieved something in that direction. What Guha finds inspiring in Tagore is the “wisdom born of the experience of living dangerously close to the limit of language” (History at the Limit, 6). According to Guha, Tagore is that daring creative writer who could push language to the limit, and the strength of Tagore’s pronouncements on historicality stems from his belief that “the past renews itself creatively in literature, unlike in academic historiography with its insistence on keeping its narratives tied strictly to public affairs” (History at the Limit, 5). Moreover, Tagore’s sagacity as a poet who expresses historicality “owes nothing to the guild that has reduced the study of the past to a blinkered colonialist knowledge” (History at the Limit, 6). Of crucial importance to Guha’s critique of regnant historiographies is the manner in which he invokes the limit category. The limit is like a gatekeeper that both officially celebrates a certain plenitude and at the same time points gesturally but nonostensively toward the outside, toward what Foucault would call “the unthought,” toward its own transgression.68 The limit is neither a fait accompli nor a false frontier to be dismissed and disregarded. The limit is all too there, and the question is how to put it to use. All significant work takes place at the limit, highlighting the limit as well as eviscerating it of its sovereign finitude. Derrida’s supplement and Foucault’s subjugated knowledges come to mind here, as does the cognitive-epistemic status of the horstexte. To me the fraught question that Guha raises so thoughtfully by way of Tagore is the following: Is the attempt to think beyond the limit characterized and motored by a critical double consciousness or by a secessive temporality? Guha gives the reader a response and a nod toward a double consciousness and only then toward the beyond when he declares his intention of “thinking world-history” in the name of the outside. Rather than submit to being interpellated by the authority of world history, here the strategy is to interpellate world history in the name of all those people without history. Guha draws his battle lines definitively against reason as philosophized by Hegel and the state that in Hegelian thought becomes the dominant agent and executor of reason. It is interesting to observe that Guha, the exemplary subaltern, chooses Hegel as the stage on which he wishes to interrogate the state. Elsewhere, Guha the Gramsci-inspired thinker has had to take a different look at the state and worlding

219

220

its potential availability to processes of subaltern hegemonization. After Marx turned the Hegelian dialectic on its head, and after Gramsci’s clear instructions to subaltern classes to rise beyond their discontinuous and episodic histories and establish a hegemonic relationship between their civil society and the state (in other words, the Machiavellian Gramsci has no qualms in wishing a state-centric hegemonization on behalf of the subaltern), it is not possible for any subaltern historian to take an ethically pure attitude of the critique toward the state. The Communist International intention (of course not honored in history) was to participate in the dissolution of the state. The important question during the high noon of international communism was the following: Under what conditions will the state become the legitimate representative of the people? If a nationalism of the people were to be endorsed contingently and strategically on the way toward a radical internationalization of the proletariat, the state had to be a necessary apparatus, but not an essential thematic or semantic element in the Marxian vocabulary. Even in the postcolonial context, say, for example, in Fanon’s careful differentiation of a truly native nationalism of the people from a neocolonial or comprador nationalism, the state continues to exist. The general postcolonial hope is that driven by the agency of postcolonial authority, the state itself will prove to be malleable and become pervious to postcolonial political interest. In other words, there was some optimism that the nationalism of ex-colonized peoples would signify the state in line with the postcolonial political agenda. But subsequent history has proven that the apparatus takes on a life of its own to such an extent that often it has become difficult to separate and protect the vox populi from the sovereignty of the state. Is this a political flaw or a deep-down epistemological malady? Guha’s critique points out that Hegel’s project of realizing history as the history of reason and his ruthless idealization of the state as the political arm of reason constitute two inseparable parts of the same vision. The inescapable immanence and the brute facticity of the state are but the flip practical side of the transcendence of Hegelian reason. There is no strategic separability of the apparatus from the vision and vice versa. As a result, the hope of using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house turns either into a dystopic nightmare, or at best into a naive and inane exercise. More Foucauldian than Chomskian in this context, Guha is worlding

happy to argue that the worlding of the world in terms of reason is not a good idea at all. It is doomed to alienate the people and perpetuate a regime of dominance. So what would a people’s reason look like, and how would it register and empower histories that have been suppressed and trashed in the name of reason and its intimate accomplice, the state? Guha seems to turn, by way of Tagore’s poetic historicality, toward a valorization of history in nonpublic spheres. He is also looking for a processual or generic alternative. How would the worlding of the world fare if it were contemplated through poetry? The significant turn in Guha’s thought has been toward an autonomous consideration of language and its creative possibilities. In a manner not unlike that of Heidegger, Guha is affirmative of the ways in which the worlding of the world might take place through poetry. Like Heidegger, Guha wants to have it both ways: entertain poetry, or the poetic use of language as a genre where the world and its historicality may be embodied in some special and different way, and at the same time think of poetry as a transcendent vision. Is the materiality of the genre constitutive of the vision, or is the transcendence of the vision the driving ethic behind the genre? In my reading, Guha, although from a different geopolitical location, is posing the Heideggerian problematic of the relationship of the language of being to the being of language.69 What is fascinating is that Guha, by way of Tagore and his elucidation of poetic historicality, should be interrogating the poverty of historiography. Where is the common ground between the mandate of historiography and the poetic imperative? If poetry and historiography are to be evaluated comparatively, and here I am reminded of Philip Sidney’s triangulated adjudication of merit among “poesie,” history, and philosophy, what should the criteria of judgment be?70 If each genre is doing its own thing, within its own structural autonomy, how is a comparative evaluation to be put in place? Either one can talk about the objectivity of the world or about the subjective relevance or authenticity of poetry and historiography as ways of knowing. So where is the meeting point between what I would call disciplinary or generic subjectivity and the supposedly given objectivity of the world? This is indeed a monumental Hegelian question: and the Hegelian answer that instantiates the spirit of history in the body of history through a developmental teleology anchored in reason and abetted by the state is worlding

221

222

rightly rejected by Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, and Guha. Nietzsche would rail against a Hegelian theodicy that impoverishes and ruthlessly misreads the history of the present (and hence Nietzsche’s fierce advocacy of perspectivism as meaning); Kierkegaard would criminalize the Hegelian machine for its heartless mowing down of subjectivity; and Guha would do so in the name of the colonized subaltern forced into the sovereignty of colonial reason. If the world “worlds” both in a nontechnical lay manner and within, what Edward Said would term the fiefdoms of specialist discourses, what is the organic connection between these two embodiments? Or to put it in Spivakian terms, where is the “outside” in the teaching machine, and, was the teaching machine ever “inside”?71 Is historiography— or for that matter, poetry—a specialist formation or a general human possibility? Does poetry succeed in summoning to its subjectivity the objectivity of the world? Are the world and its historicality more directly available to poetry than history is to historiography? Is the world an object of knowledge to poetry the same way in which history is to historiography? How, in each epistemological model, is the object of knowledge implicated in a particular way of knowing? How modal is the world: its reality, its historicality? One can hear a Nietzschean groundswell beneath these questions. Why do history and why do poetry?72 I bring these questions up only because Guha’s critique of historiography is multipronged: (1) historiography has been colonialist in form, content, and intention, and even postcolonial nationalist historiographies remain complicit with the colonialist morphology of writing history; (2) historiography as an academic formation functions as a profound misrecognition of a demotic and quotidian historicality; and (3) historiography comes in the way of establishing a creative relationship between the individual and the world, between subjectivity and objectivity, between the random heterogeneity of everyday experience and its worldly, and if you will in an ironic sense, world-historical significance.73 Guha’s poetic turn toward the world’s historicality needs careful attention, for the turn is informed by the frustrations and the disappointments of a radical historiographer who has always attempted to read history against the grain. Any conjuncture when an eminently rigorous practitioner of a discipline expresses profound discontent with his discipline is an extraordinary moment fraught with possibiliworlding

ties. How can this disciplinary disaffection be construed and valorized as an irruption of the real? How can this moment of disciplinary unsuturedness be celebrated as a breakthrough into the real? What are the possibilities, in this case, of realizing worldliness in the spaces of the between? How can this moment of mésalliance between the discipline and its ethic be translated as a temporality for raising some fundamental questions? How is human loyalty to worldliness mediated by its accountability to history? Which of the two loyalties is more basic, more fundamental? Is interpellation by history a means to a more real interpellation, that is, by the world? How does the human subject make sense of history, both immanently and transcendentally, without falling prey to theodicy, even of the secular persuasion? Glossing on Tagore’s hostile estimation of history and its truth claims, Guha says that Tagore “is evidently not interested in taking a stand against history as such but in pleading for a different approach to it” (History at the Limit, 77). Is Tagore’s interrogation of history an interrogation of colonialist historiography only, hence Guha’s claim that Tagore is not interested in a critique of history as such? But a few pages earlier, Guha maintains that Tagore’s essays, when taken together, “stand for an original vision distanced no less from the colonialist historiography propagated by the Raj and the ideologues of imperialism than the narrowly sectarian Hindu view of the past that had been influential in nationalist thought since its formulation by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay in the 1870s” (History at the Limit, 75–76). Here, the plot thickens. Guha is clearly locating Tagore’s uniqueness within a binary structure that is structured in dominance. Complicit neither with the alien nor with the indigenous, Tagore’s poetic vision could be loosely understood as a deconstruction of that binary. Whether Tagore himself would have perceived it that way I do not know; but clearly, Guha positions Tagore’s discourse with reference to that binary. Thinking the unthought would have to be both against the local and against the general economy of historical meaning, against a specific history and against history as such. The question implicit here, one that Guha does not raise in the lectures, is that of Tagore’s own vintage or genealogy as a poet-historian. Is Tagore a Bengali, or an Indian, or a Hindu, or a secular, world, or cosmopolitan poet-historian? All scholars of Tagore would agree that Tagore’s need to transcend nationalism was in the worlding

223

224

name of a global spirit realized variously as internationalism, universalism, one-worldism, cosmopolitanism, or a harmonious planetarism. The problem here is that of the category: in the name of. Even though the world is descriptively and objectively out there, it is still a matter of how and in what genre or modality the human subject accesses the world. In other words, the world would still have to be named before it can be valorized in all its nondenominational generality. What would it mean for a Tagore to be of India and of the world, and for Whitman to be of the United States and of the world? Where and how is the point of transcendence identified, represented, and thematized? My basic point is that the affirmative valence of Tagore’s poetic-historical vision cannot be sundered from its polemical situatedness. Perhaps I have raised more questions than I can answer. I will now shelve these larger theoretical questions and return to a few specific concerns raised by Guha’s reading of Tagore. If history is what historiography does, then it is clear that Tagore has had enough of a certain kind of historiography. Can history be invoked some other way? Can its ethic be put to work in some other direction? This can be phrased differently: How and why is the burden of history given or assigned to it? With characteristic acuity, Guha poses this problem in terms of possibility and actualization. History and worlding are possible only because they are actualizable. Conversely, they are actualizable only in terms of their possibility. Thus there exists between possibility and actualization a relationship of asynchronous synchronicity, that is, within the coimplication of their synchronicity they live out different temporalities, different narratologies. Without the transcendent potential for actualization, the immanence of possibility cannot be redeemed. Likewise, without the immanence of possibility, the actuality of transcendence cannot be narrativized. The vital question that Guha asks is this: what does the term actualization mean? Can actualization be actualized differently from the manner in which it has been axiomatized by Hegel? How should genres such as history and poetry nurture the connection between possibility and actualization? Guha’s is both a metahistorical and a metahistoriographical concern; it is also a transdisciplinary endeavor. Though he does not quite phrase it that way, his question also is this: How does one study history in and through literature, especially when the study of history within history worlding

has turned stale and quite uncreative? Much along the lines of Derrida, who questioned the propriety of genre, Guha is transdisciplinarizing the content of history based on the diagnosis that the genre called historiography has utterly failed in its function: hence the turn to historicality as achieved in literature by language. Here then is a passage from Tagore: the kind of writing that has made such a deep, even epiphanic impression on Guha. What a marvelous sight that was. Even now I remember that day. But in the history of that day there was no other than myself who saw those clouds in quite the same way as I did or was similarly thrilled. Rabindranath Tagore happened to be all by himself in that instance. . . . In the entire history of that day it was Rabindranath alone who witnessed the scene with enchanted eyes. This I know for certain. No one else was instructed by the history of that day in the profound significance of the sight as was Rabindranath. In his own field of creativity Rabindranath has been entirely alone and tied to no public history. Where history was public, he was there merely as a British subject but not as Rabindranath himself. (Tagore, “Historicality in Literature,” in Guha, History at the Limit, 97)

225

When Guha contrasts Tagore’s attempt at historicality by way of autopoesis (Wordsworth’s Prelude as a personal history with its “spots of time” comes to mind, though the “egotistical sublime” in Tagore is not as strident)74 with Hegelian theodicy masquerading as historiography, Guha maintains that Tagore has not abandoned history. When Tagore uses the word suchana with reference to his recollection of his childhood experiences, he is definitely operating on the register of the historical. Suchana after all is “the obscure and yet undisclosed source where those experiences are still coiled in the incipience of sheer possibility” (History at the Limit, 78). Guha gives us a detailed explanation, if not a definition of the incipience of sheer possibility. What does a possibility that is merely incipient amount to? It amounts in this instance to tracing the formation of a creative individuality back to its roots in a region of primal experience. But that experience, however primal, is by no means inert. It has a life of its own and a movement characterized by a certain towardness, although towards what is not yet clear. It is, in short, a tendency, that does not know where it is going. However, in so far as it is

worlding

going somewhere at all, it is a movement in time. It is thus a tendency already informed by historicality. By displacing actuality in favor of possibility and situating the inaugural moment of his life as a poet within a mere tendency of the possible, Tagore is projecting historicality into areas beyond the bounds of historiography. For the latter, with its commitment to the objectifying processes it regards essential for any understanding of experience, must have it represented by facts. (History at the Limit, 78–79)

226

Decidedly phenomenological in its import, this passage invokes Heidegger in so many ways: particularly the gesture toward primal experience, that ontology that we are most proximate with and are yet so alienated from because of our objectifying prepositional logic (Greek roots imperialized by the pax romana), the indeterminate and intransitive towardness of the Dasein, and the confident reference to an always already historicality.75 But it is indeed curious that Guha does not run his itinerary through the Marxian path; for if he had, he would certainly have referred to the category of a “process without subject or goal(s)” by way of Althusser’s reading of Lenin’s motor or engine of history. But in this passage, Guha would seem to prefer a philosophical (close to metaphysical) and/or an ontological mode of towardness to a political mode. The individual takes the place of the class or of the species being. In the going somewhere, temporality takes the place of historicity. The objectification (or the enframing, as Heidegger would have it) is associated not with a particular material mode of production, but more fundamentally, with a mode of thinking itself.76 Finally, this tendency, it is claimed, already has a prior historicality; and it is on behalf of this primal or primary historicality that Guha, à la Heidegger, is generating all his hermeneutic solicitude. I must also mention in passing that in his appreciation of the possibilities opened up by Tagore, Guha never thinks to question the retrospective didacticism inherent in Tagore’s claims regarding that day and that moment. As in the case of Wordsworth’s Prelude, here too, the valorization of a unique historicality of the moment takes place not when that moment is existential, but rather when it is savored retrospectively. It would seem, then, that authentic historicality is a lived experience, but only by virtue of the historicity of recollection. It is the poet’s tendentious reading of his own poetic past, with reference to a few carefully chosen spots of time, that is the worlding

source of the truth claims, and not the performance of the lived moment itself. Now could this solicitude on behalf of Being on a philosophical register be best exemplified by way of a similar concern for subaltern being? For Guha, as well as for all Marxist thinkers, the fundamental problem has been the following: how to generate that particular perspective that in speaking for itself will also have spoken legitimately for the entire species being of humanity. The proletarian class, it was hoped, would succeed through the conflictual and antagonistic process of dialectical materialism in earning this perspective. One of the consequences of Marx’s upending of the Hegelian dialectic was the delegitimation of the universal spirit and its immaculate discovery of its self through theodicy, and the inauguration of class struggle rooted in antagonism and conflict. When the dialectic becomes physical, material, and historical, so, too, does representation. As Gramsci has demonstrated, this act of political representation has to resort to hegemonization as strategy. Unlike the case in political systems of transcendentalist thought, where it is possible to dream, in bad faith, of the harmonious union of the microcosmic with the macrocosmic in spirit, in the realm of history, the utopian desire for noncoercive representation has to be routed through the politics of hegemonic representation. In other words, there is epistemic violence involved when the subaltern voice, in the attempt to historicize itself, has to walk the hegemonic path before it can dream of counterhegemonic possibilities. The political worlding of the world calls the ideological bluff of the philosophical worlding of the world. But in the all too historical world, the sheer experiential and ethical authority of the subaltern will not get her or him anywhere: she or he has to speak by way of representation, that is, by way of hegemonic representation, of hegemony as representation. In his earlier work, Guha follows Gramsci rigorously. Yes indeed, the subaltern classes do have histories, but these histories are episodic and discontinuous, ergo they do not become effective histories. To be heard as legitimate and effective histories, they have to weave themselves into continuity; and this is to be done on a national scale, and in a national syntax with reference to the state. The subaltern classes have to align their eloquence with the apparatus of the state or else they will remain subaltern, that is, real but powerless, replete with experience but lacking worlding

227

228

in history. First, there is the question of hegemonizing subalternity into national valence, and then there is the project of entrusting the ethicopolitical authority to the sovereignty of the state. Assuming that a proletarian nationalism is necessary en route to international communism, what about the apparatus of the state? Will it wither away, or will it obdurately stand in the way? Will the postcolonial nationalisms (here we are also paying critical attention to the postcolonial difference within subalternity by way of avowing the Eurocentrism inherent in Marxism) of the people succeed in actualizing a state that will do them representational justice?77 As we know, much of Guha’s brilliant work has been dedicated to the task of demonstrating how Indian nationalism remains complicit, in its elitism of form and theme, with colonialist historiography. Guha’s advocacy of subaltern self-representation was premised on the possibility that a historiography, complicit neither with vestigial colonialism nor with the elitist postcolonial state, was indeed thinkable. That optimism seems to have disappeared now, or perhaps Guha has come to the understanding that his kind of academic historiography can at best clear the way for subaltern emergence but cannot participate in such an emergence. Guha’s recent turn toward postmodernism, toward the small voices of history, I would argue, is based on his acknowledgment of the Spivakian poststructuralist critique of the implicit positivism in the subaltern project. Of the two disillusionments—the disillusionment with academic historiography and that with the historiography of nationalism and the nation-state—I am not sure which one subsumes or instrumentalizes the other. It also seems likely that Guha has been influenced by Partha Chatterjee’s thesis that the politics of postcolonial nationalism has to be dealt with both at the level of epistemology and at the level of politics, not to mention Gayatri Spivak’s confident claim that the undoing of Eurocentric theory from within has to be an integral part of the subaltern emergence into speech. It occurs to me that Guha in these lectures has taken a decisive turn toward the ethical, the aesthetic, and the figural in response to what he calls “the poverty of historiography,” mind you, not just the dominant or the national or the colonialist but historiography as such. So what dimension does he find in Tagore’s approach to historicality, an approach that allows for the worlding of the world, that is woefully lacking in historiography? The answer is: the principle of creativity. Writes Guha: worlding

The importance of this revision is hard to overestimate. It follows from the logic of a developing critique of historiography. Tagore had already mentioned how essential his childhood experiences were for any understanding of his past as a writer. He did so by citing a number of instances to speak for a facticity he found wanting in the standard histories written about his own work and, by implication, about literature in general. With that done in the first part of the essay, he proceeds to preempt an objection to his argument on the ground that primal experience alone is not enough to refute the claims of those history textbooks. He grants that this could be the case unless the raw materials (upakaran) of experience, primal or otherwise, were worked creatively into literature. So it is only by confronting historiography with creativity, he suggests, that we can hope to grasp what historicality is about. (History at the Limit, 86–87; emphasis added)

It is both germane and irrelevant that in the paragraph just preceding these lines, Guha gives the reader a sense of the unique way in which Tagore reads the nature of the atma (soul) as enunciated in the Upanishads. Guha asserts that Tagore’s novel way of interpreting the Upanishads is free of canonicity and absolved of the weight of tradition. In other words, in terms of my earlier discussion, it is simultaneously a reading, a reading of, and reading as such. The specificity of the text as scriptural-spiritual is germane since it is the contingent occasion for interpretive creativity, but irrelevant since the reading makes a pre-text of that contingency. In his innovative negotiation with the Upanishadic maxim, Tagore wrests the meaning of the text away from the canonicity of Sankara’s commentary and establishes a direct, and dare we say, authentic relationship with the original. As Guha puts it, “doubly decontextualized in plot and rhetoric, the passage is now ready for a new interpretation” (History at the Limit, 86). I should not be accused of hallucinating if here, too, I see the shadow of Heidegger: the Heidegger who through his massive destruction of metaphysics and the ontotheological tradition was articulating a relationship with the be-ing of Being: a relationship within which the Dasman would have been radically transformed as the radiant Dasein. Both Tagore by way of Guha and Heidegger are engaged in the project of reconceptualizing the historicality of history through a poetic way of knowing. It could be called a process of uncovering, of a-letheia. Now we get to understand what worlding

229

the primary historicality is all about: Being’s relationship to itself as revealed to the Dasein during the historiography of poesis. Literature, in particular poetry, is constituted in Tagore’s passage both as the being to be understood and the creative modality through which such an understanding is to be effected. Guha reads Tagore’s poetic attempts as a critique of historiography and ergo as a creative elaboration of historicality. Says Guha: In the article on literature and historicality, therefore, he [Tagore] attributes that inadequacy to the exclusively public (sadharon) stance adopted by historiographic representation. It sees the past only with the public eye and cannot see anything other than what an average seeing would allow. By contrast, everything caught by the creative gaze is seen for the very first time. It is at this point that his recall of those childhood scenes connects with the argument about historicality. And as it happens usually on such occasions when the existential tangles with the epistemological, words tend to slide out of their habitual semantic grooves and are caught up in equivocations that need unraveling. (History at the Limit, 87–88; emphasis added)

230

Here we find Guha romanticizing historiography in the best sense of the term. There is the incessant focus on seeing things fresh, a clear disapproval of the average and the quotidian, and an emphasis on narrativizing the connection between the past and the present in a revelatory manner. And what to me is most thematic is the heavy valorization of those moments when “the existential tangles with the epistemological,” or to put it differently, when the I am and the I think intersect meaningfully, even epiphanically. It is in poetry that existential temporality and epistemological temporality nudge and illuminate each other. One could say in a pseudometaphysical discourse that poetry at its best performs as the mediation of unmediatedness. And quite honestly, in this passage, Guha’s use of the word equivocation is literally poetic. He literally means speaking in two voices: the voice of existence and the voice of epistemology, that of being and that of knowing. This happy intersection of the two is expressive of a new and different historicality not available to historiography. Under the auspices of such a historicality, the worlding of the world is simultaneously ontological and epistemological. It takes place in a time alien to historiography: a time that is neither stranded in immanence nor interpellated by any regime worlding

of transcendence. Much of Guha’s reading has to do with the lag or gap between events and the discourse in which they are forced to find their meaning. According to Tagore the line of demarcation between narrative and event corresponds to what separates the public sphere from the field of creativity (srishtikshetra) as well. What was going on in the public sphere with its public “history” was, in his view, merely a statist game of constitutional adjustment—a direct reference, no doubt, to the petty-politicking of the time. (History at the Limit, 89)

This perhaps is too quick a jump; but I must say that Tagore’s project of rethinking historicality bears a sharp resemblance to the DeleuzianFoucauldian endeavor to liberate the so-called meaning-event from the dominance of the dialectic. Is the advocacy of the meaning-event or of poetic historicality elitist or populist? Is poetry elitist or populist? Is the endorsement of the everyday in itself quotidian or special? Is Tagore politicizing the aesthetic or aestheticizing politics, and what are the criteria for making that differentiation? Guha seems convinced that Tagore’s poesis on behalf of historicality automatically connects with a politics of the people. It is either that, or Guha has abandoned populism altogether. For Tagore as well as for Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, the creative challenge is to make a legitimate connection between the demotic and the aristocratic. The category of the everyday for all these poetic thinkers constitutes an ambivalent category. On the one hand, it represents the authenticity and the down-to-the-earth-ness of an egalitarian politics, but on the other, it stands for mere quantity rather than quality. It is in the context of the everyday that the category of representation is both empowered and decelebrated. Everydayness speaks for itself, but not quite in the way it should: it has the authority of content, but not the creativity of form. The worlding of the everyday is in need of aesthetic rescue and redemption. The everyday and every person need to be poetized into their authentic historicality, and this is where the poet as thinker comes into play as the intimate outsider: à la Wordsworth vis-à-vis “the solitary reaper,” or à la Heidegger with reference to the peasant shoes. For example, there is the definition by Wordsworth of a poet as an ordinary human being blessed with superior sensibility. And worlding

231

232

sure enough, there is the larger-than-life example of Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” on behalf of both selves, both I’s: Whitman and America. In Whitman’s physical celebration of all selves, categories come crumbling down: the sacred and the profane, the proper and the improper mesh, as do quantity and quality. His innumerable listing of America actually points to the ineffability of quality, and his passionate invocation of the poetic self as America is full of partisan politics. In all of these creative efforts, one can see the uneasy alliance between the imperative to describe “as is” and the compulsion to realize knowing as transformation. The sticking point of course has always been how to discern, in a spirit of committed partisanship, those ideal or idealist possibilities in the present moment without succumbing to the violence of transcendence even by the people-friendly Marxian dialectic. The point then of the aesthetic is to render that transformation nonviolent, beautiful, and persuasive. The disillusioned historian in Guha is responding vibrantly and with hope to Tagore’s poetic effort to rethink the very category of history, and alongside it, the category of the political. Underlying this project is the critical awareness that there is a good politics and a petty politics, an authentic historicality and a formulaic, poverty-stricken historiography.78 Also informing this process is the faculty of the imagination that will think the absent into presence with care, precision, and responsibility. The turn to literature and to poetry makes eminent sense since it has always been the role of literature to imagine truths, rather than merely endorse facticity or to provide thoughtless escapism. It is precisely by operating in the between as a critique of what is and an affirmation of what ought to come that literature has performed its pedagogical function pleasurably. The worlding of the world in poetry is different because the poetic creator envisions the openness of reality in the name of the openness of the method. Just as in a different context Merleau-Ponty posited human perspectivism and the objectivity of the world as reciprocal givens in the field of perception, Tagore’s poetic thinking is creative neither in the name of reality nor in the name of the poetic mode, but in the name of the vital relationship between the two. My best interpretation of what Guha means by Tagore’s historicality is: the perennial rediscovery of this relationship through historical poesis. What is not clear, however, is Guha’s attitude to Tagore’s spiritual vision of the one that has worlding

consistently provided the basis for his poesis. Is the creative worlding of the world a decentered and decentering process, or is it a matter of finding the supposedly right center and abandoning all the misguided centrisms? Is there an all-enveloping concentrism that makes possible the play of all the other centers within that synchronicity? Not having been a subaltern Marxist, it would not trouble Tagore to talk about the spirit and the atman in a spirit of aesthetic oneness. But is this a viable politics? Once we introduce the transcendental concept of the atman, we are constrained to invite into our discussion Sankara and the entire school of Advaitic thought. Is it possible to separate out Tagore’s limited engagement with the atman from the history of Hindu metaphysical philosophy?79 It all depends on how representative the poetic self is of society at large. What could be common between a poet’s rapturous experience of sunlight or early morning rain with the everydayness of the masses? I am not for a moment suggesting that the nonpoetic lay individual is incapable of experiencing epiphany in the gentle falling of a pine cone at night. The difference between the poet and the nonpoet is not a question about sensibility and its quality. It is rather about the decision that is made by the individual whether or not to register that moment as a worthy and valuable moment: a moment worthy of linguistic transcription, assuming of course that the person has the requisite gifts and proficiency. I know of several people who do get mystified and enraptured by that random moment of ineffable beauty; but they do not consider it worthwhile beyond the moment. The poet’s difference is that having experienced the moment, she or he chooses to confer value on it despite its seeming randomness and demonstrable uselessness in a utilitarian scheme of things. It is one thing to claim in a spirit of liberal humanist magnanimity that we all are poets, and should have the time to stand and stare to practice a symbolic deroutinization of everyday life; it is quite another to throw a hefty wrench into the flow of an instrumentalist historiography. But only Tagore in all his uniqueness could experience what he did. And at any rate, how would a bunch of unique poets constitute a coherent society? Between the impassioned Shelleyan claim that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the universe” and the wistful confession of W. H. Auden that “poetry makes nothing happen,” poetry has flourished as a private and lyrical genre, except in worlding

233

234

the case of poets like Pablo Neruda, Mahmoud Darwish, and others of that ilk.80 Tagore certainly does not belong in that group. Poets could perhaps function at the limit of any given society as its contrapuntal expression, but no more. I really do not think that Tagore is interested in making the connection between the poetic individual self and the multitudinous identity of the people, between the one outside and the many within, and the one inside and the many without. His way of responding to petty politics and a hackneyed historicality is by retiring from them altogether in favor of a differently conceived historicality. His response is based on a self-conscious elitism that has no problem in asserting that the poetic way of dwelling and knowing is superior to all else. Why is the poetic modality being prescribed for human historicality in general? By valorizing poetic subjectivity both internally and with reference to the historicality of the world, Tagore inscribes the humanworld relationship as an I-thou nexus in which the I and the thou are grounded in a cosmic I or subjectivity. My hunch is that Guha’s disillusionment with the state is so intense that he is prepared to go the poetic way in subversion of the symbolic as such. This predicament or state of mind is not all that difficult to understand. If the move from expression (speaking) to representation (speaking for) demands the institution by consensus of a third term that enjoys only formal-procedural but no experiential reality, and if furthermore the move from the I pole to the we pole necessitates a socius as the space of mediation, then the questions that can be asked of the third dimension can only be posed as public-domain questions that have to do with legitimation. Tagore’s move is to take historicality out of that sphere altogether. As a rigorous subaltern historian and theorist, Guha cannot but be aware that the only form of tertiary/symbolic sovereignty that humanity has come up with in its entire history is the state and its authority. This could well have been otherwise, but, alas, the entire world has been highjacked in the name of Eurocentric dominance. By now it is commonplace knowledge that the state will not wither away, neither under capitalism nor under international communism. It is not surprising, then, that in a variety of movements the world over, the state deservedly has become the enemy. The universal human lesson seems to be that though ideally the state could well have been realized as the executive agent of subaltern needs and desires, in actual history, the worlding

state has been secured in the name of dominance. Given this, it is not at all coincidental that any solicitude on behalf of populism and life in general is expressed in antistate terms. It is in this area of a generalized awareness in which the lifeworld has been betrayed, even trashed, in the name of the political, that an affirmative phenomenological energy joins forces with critiques of the political symbolic. The diagnosis is that there is something fundamentally wrong not just with the conceptualization of the political but with the basic endorsement of politics by philosophy, that is, by reason as envisioned by colonial modernity. Two related issues get braided together in this problematic: The valorization of the individual poetic subjectivity brings attention to the fact that in the name of public history, and what we now call a universalism based on minimal rationality, entire areas of experience and historicality have been overlooked or repressed. The poetic subjectivity thus has both a genealogical, in the Foucauldian sense of the term, and a carnivalesque, in the Bakhtinian sense of the term, role to perform in the indictment of public, official historiography. In this sense, to give Tagore the benefit of the doubt, the appeal to the individual poetic subjectivity could be construed as an exhortation to reformulate the private-public relationship in the context of historiography, rather than as a privatization or as an apotheosis of the individual. The other issue, and this is something I have touched on earlier in the chapter, is that of coding, inter- and transcoding, that is, the issue of how to talk about nature in cultural terms and vice versa within a discourse in which the existential intersects with the epistemological. If ecopolitics and ecohistoricality are to be understood in human-social but nonanthropocentric terms, what would such a platform look like? It is in fact a question about the human hegemon in a planetary context. If anthropocentrism cannot by definition be transcended, except in bad faith, then the next best option is a self-reflexive and deconstructive exercise of anthropocentrism in the name of the human, the nonhuman, and the transhuman. The human becomes the ethico-political hegemon since she or he has to speak for the worlding of the world from an ideological-human perspective with the critical awareness that human actualizations of human blueprints are often in violation of planetary ontology and well-being. In other words, the human hegemon has to function ek-statically, as the instrument of a historicality beyond in all its immanent absence. worlding

235

As I attempt to bring this inordinately long chapter to closure, I seek assistance from David Harvey, who has over the years, with brilliant rigor, attempted to promote a relationship of reciprocal accountability between socialist thought and eco-activism. That he has been able to do this without either kowtowing to the evangelical authority of biocentric theorists or succumbing meekly to the hubris of Marxists and at the same time avow his socialist bias is indeed quite an achievement. Here then is Harvey as he begins his essay “What’s Green and Makes the Environment Go Round?” How to ground a socialist approach to environmental-ecological politics has proven, for a variety of reasons, a peculiarly difficult problem in the history of the Left. In part, this has to do with the way in which the socialist-Marxist movement inherited from capitalism a strongly productivist ethic and a broadly instrumental approach to a supposedly distinct natural world and sought a transformation of social relations on the basis of a further liberation of the productive forces. From this perspective it has proven hard to wean Marxism away from a rather hubristic view of the domination of nature

236

thesis that has, in recent years, come in for strong criticism. In addition, Marxism has shared with much of bourgeois social science a general abhorrence of the idea that “nature” can control, determine, or even limit any kind of human endeavor. But in doing so it has avoided any foundational view of nature or resorted to a rather too simplistic rhetoric about “the humanization of nature” backed by a dialectical and historical materialism that somehow absorbed the problem by appeal to a set of epistemological/ ontological principles.81

Harvey is particularly telling in the distinction that he makes between nature and “nature,” where the former would stand for a reality that is primordial and precedent of human fabrication, while the latter would represent a secondary system in alignment with human production and engineering.82 As a matter of fact, he argues, and I agree with him, that it is vain to talk about nature in a primordial sense of the term unless one has firm roots “in the ‘romantic’ and aesthetic traditions of, say, Wordsworth and Thoreau” (“What’s Green?” 338). And even these traditions, in their time, were a ventriloqual practice of liberal humanist empathy, rather than the articulation of a genuine counterculture. Harvey even goes on to say, with considerable polemical verve, that “there worlding

is in the final analysis nothing unnatural about New York City, Los Angeles, or the New Jersey Turnpike,” and that “sustaining such created ecosystems even in transition entails an inevitable compromise with the forms of social organization and social relations that produced them” (“What’s Green?” 336). Harvey’s objective in making this claim is to “bring back the golden rule that environmental transformations are always transformations of social relations” (“What’s Green?” 334–35). So where does that leave us in terms of deciding which blueprint to follow in the project of worlding the world, or of letting the world do its own worlding? The differences between the biocentric eco-activists and the anthropocentric Marxist-socialists have to do (1) with their understanding of the mechanisms of change; (2) with their philosophical strategies of legitimating their practice; and (3) with the way in which either party uses its knowledge, worldview, or epistemology to legitimate its practices. Harvey calls for a critical dialogue on these matters when he unequivocally announces his epistemological position thus while discussing the application of ecological laws to socialism: “For myself, I hope it would be true that socialists, rather than nature, will know best” (“What’s Green?” 330). Before I get into a critical elaboration of some of the contradictions between premises and conclusions within the ecological rationale, I would like to spend a little time on the claim that “nature knows best.” What does such a claim mean, and how is the human subject to valorize and politicize such a claim within and athwart the regime of an anthropocentrism with a natural face? In other words, how should the human realm think and act transnaturally without abdicating its responsibility both to itself and to its cognitive relationship to the realm of nature? As I attempted to demonstrate in my discussion of Heidegger and the principle of Gelassenheit, the problem is this: In the critical practice of letting nature or Being be, and in the process of listening to Being or nature, should the secondary and supplemental registers of human historicity be eviscerated so that nature and Being may reveal themselves within such an opening, or is the only strategy possible that of a double consciousness that will avow, on the one hand, the constructedness of nature itself, and on the other, acknowledge the vulnerable, contingent, and the all too uninnocent and finite human text with an obligation to the beyond? What is to be done in a specific instance as that of the worlding

237

238

spotted owl and the timber industry in Oregon, ably analyzed by Harvey elsewhere, is not really all that difficult. The priorities need to be weighed conflictually and antagonistically before a decision is made. But the really embarrassing philosophical questions that each party has to face are: “Did you have to murder so many owls to hold on to your petty little human job?” or, “How wonderful and virtuous do you feel impoverishing so many human beings to save your darling owl?” This ethico-political dilemma thematizes the notion of the limit as invoked by Guha by way of Aristotle: “the first thing outside which there is nothing to be found and the first thing inside which everything is found.” Now to apply Derrida to Aristotle, where is the limit: in nature or culture, and what is it the limit of ? Limits are interstitial and incorporeal in so far as they do not partake of any one monologic sovereignty. To be at any limit is to acknowledge a certain kind of extreme locatedness that can see beyond itself toward a nameless location. Even the quotidian expression “I am at my limit” suggests a double cognition: I do not know what I can do anymore, but it is precisely in this ultimate critical positionality of the brink that I can even begin to think about the unthought, not ostensively or denotatively, but gesturally, speculatively, creatively on the plenary basis of my finitude. It is the moment at which I feel that my paradigm is complete and yet insufficient that makes me helpless yet hopeful in the name of the unthought. Harvey’s suggestions by and large fall within the double bind that Derrida has recommended with unfailing rigor. There is no way to break the ethical impasse between the sacredness of the spotted owl’s existence and the dire gravity of human employment: one lives in that tension, perennially marking and remarking limits. At any rate, one does not search for pure solutions that look down on compromises as profane complicity. Such pure ideological attitudes often fall into the trap of the reverse hubris that Harvey warns us of: First, the postulation of a planetary-ecological crisis, the very idea that the planet is somehow “vulnerable” to human action or that we can actually destroy the earth, repeats in negative form the hubristic claims of those who aspire to planetary domination. The subtext is that the earth is somehow fragile and that we need to become caring managers or caring physicians to nurse it back from sickness into health. This leads to Foster’s extraordi-

worlding

nary conclusion that “the conscious and collective organization of the entire planet in the common interest of humanity and the earth has become a necessity if we are to prevent the irreparable despoliation of the earth by forces of institutionalized greed.” Against this, it is crucial to understand that it is materially impossible for us to destroy the planet Earth, that the worst we can do is to engage in material transformations of our environment so as to make life less rather than more comfortable for our own species, while recognizing that what we do also does have ramifications (both positive and negative) for other living species. (“What’s Green?” 328–29)

Clearly, on a quick read, John Bellamy Foster’s grandiloquent exhortation on behalf of planet earth sounds more ethical and virtuous than Harvey’s nonromantic, nonelemental, and doubly conscious strategy. But after closer scrutiny, it turns out that Foster’s rhetoric is so full of itself and the plenitude of its own conviction that it rules itself out. Foster’s ethic would have us believe that nature has a plan and that the human species is privy to it (what about pestilences and epidemics, one feels like asking: nature cure perhaps?) through some ineffable, transparent revelation. This in a way appears quite scary and reminiscent of Emerson’s notions of self-reliance coupled with his belief in transcendence and the ability of the poet and the seer to read the hieroglyphics of nature through the all-seeing eye and thereby get rid of duality altogether.83 This position could well be construed as a belief in American exceptionalism in which the self in self-reliance becomes the American Self protecting the rest of the world from self-destruction. The transcendent, all-seeing eye in Emerson’s politico-philosophical discourse (deservedly contaminated and sullied by Melville and Whitman) substitutes presence for representation, and in the process exonerates the human from the history of its history. Also, it is not clear what Foster means when he refers to humanity and the “we” with such historical innocence that does not into take account the uneven collectivization of peoples into national, regional, ethnic, and other groups. What then about the American species in a unipolar world that has begun to speak for the world entire, and what about all the uneven debates, structured in dominance, about biodiversity? It is only by inflating philosophy absolutely and by claiming such an inflation in the name of nature itself that positions like Foster’s escape the markings of their ideological

worlding

239

240

contamination and claim unimpeded access to a natural universalism. Equally noteworthy is the slick manner in which such politics exempts itself of the onus of self-reflexivity. It is entirely a politics of affirmation, or a politics where even if there are elements of self-reflexivity, these can be reclaimed monistically, that is, nondualistically and nonmodally, in the name of nature. It has become my obsession to entertain the problem of “in the name of ” as a cardinal epistemological-political problem, and I will try to apply it here.84 In general, those activists who see themselves as direct and unmediated interpreters of nature, the ones who claim that they see and read nature the way nature sees itself in terms of potential and actualization, are indeed playing the name game but would have us believe that the name in the name of which they act and perform, that is, nature, is in fact not a name at all. In contrast, Harvey and others, and I would place myself in this group, argue for a plan of action in which the name would be named in the locution in the name of, but contingently and in humble and rigorous acknowledgment of the contingency, finitude, and mutability of the name. In other words, the place of the name would be filled both with reference to the name and what the name cannot nominate. Sure enough, Gandhi comes to mind here: in particular his naming of India’s outcastes and untouchables as harijans, “people of God.” Here is a passage from Gandhi, known famously as his “talisman”: I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [self governance] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubt and your self melting away.85

As I comment on this poignant passage, I will walk with the Mahatma part of the way, parting ways with him just short of his absolute ethical idealism. The problem that Gandhi was wrestling with all his life, both theoretically through his writings and practical experiments, was the reconciliation of the means with the ends, of the political with the ethical, and in his case, the spiritual with the religious. His transcendent goal, of course, was to accomplish a weak victory. In this passage, the worlding

rhetoric is pedagogical, prescriptive, persuasive, and representative and representational. What confronts the you in this passage is a fear that needs protection by way of the talisman, a doubt that seeks illumination, a form of ontological being that comes in the way of ethical disposition, and finally a political form of enslaved being in desperate need of autonomy and collective emancipation. Gandhi’s way is to invoke the category of in the name of in such an inclusively nameless way that the fear will be exorcized, the doubt dispelled, being ethicized, and the ethic realized politically, that is, collectively. The poorest and most abject human being is both a name and the ultimate instance in whose namelessness all of humanity is exhorted into accountability. My concern here, by way of Gandhi, is with the name and the violence of naming. Is all naming violent, or is it possible to adopt naming as a contingent, selfreflexive, and deconstructive process that does not really subscribe to the nomology of the name? To bring Harvey back into the discussion, is Being or nature served better (as in who is most helpless: the laborers who are going to lose their jobs, or the spotted owl that might lose its habitat?) when the human is protected or when the owl’s habitat is conserved? Or is it best served when human action, through a series of compromises, demonstrates that there indeed is no irrefragable first principle in nature to help the human subject resolve this dilemma unequivocally? Harvey is asking us to consider the last scenario with some serious thought. Here he is again: It is precisely through this discursive strategy that links can be found between the environmental justice movement as shaped within the specific conditions of the United States, and the broader movement throughout the world concerning “the environmentalism of the poor.” These movements fundamentally concern either the defense of livelihoods and of communal access to “natural” resources threatened by commodification, state takeovers, and private property arrangements, or more dynamic movements (both in situ and migratory) arising as a response to ecological scarcities, threats to survival, and destruction of long-standing ways of life. But, as with the environmental justice movement, the symbolic dimension, the struggle for empowerment, for recognition and respect, and above all for emancipation from the oppressions of material want and domination by others, inevitably has a powerful

worlding

241

role to play, making the environmentalism of the poor focus upon survivability in all of its senses. (“What’s Green?” 348–49)

242

Harvey in being resolutely human-centric, yet deconstructively so, is trying to avoid the pitfalls of what Angela Davis has termed “the Olympics of the oppressed.”86 In other words, it is one thing to build scalar coalitions among different aggrieved, minoritized, and subaltern locations; and quite something else to calibrate a calculus (by and on what authority, one might ask) by which to quantify suffering and identify the most suffering unit for purposes of essentialization and/or exemplification. Harvey is clearly not insensitive to the eco-logic, but his argument is directed at those pure nature ethicists who disavow their particular form of ideological centrism by “posing matters in terms of the defilement, violation, or even ‘rape’ of a sacred Mother Earth,” and thereby adopt “a nonnegotiable position of intense moral rectitude untouchable by legal, scientific, or other rationalistic discourses” (“What’s Green?” 348). To frame it in the context of my earlier discussion of an abiding solicitude for the earth principle, what is taking place is a fierce alterity politics that refuses, in the name of an absolute ethics, to politicize itself. It acts on the naive, and as a matter of fact, terrifying assumption that alterity can be found at its barest and most naked form and then defended unilaterally and with unquestionable ethical sovereignty. These movements, being religious rather than secular in nature, forget the simple fact that the human construction of alterity has always functioned like a signifying chain in which something or someone is made to stand in for alterity. The most egregious of these instrumentalizations have taken place in the discourses of anthropology and colonialism, where it became convenient to other the historicity of the native/colonized into the primordiality of nature that could then be discoursed about as the ultimate other. In other words, it is only within a power dynamics of substitution, allegorization, and instrumentalization that alterity is politicized and invoked at the same time. The point just made cannot be emphasized enough, for too often movements tend, in the heat of their righteousness and conviction of absolute rectitude, to appeal to first principles that do not actually exist except as constituted primordia, and as a result highjack themselves toward apocryphal horizons.87 Quite rigorously, Harvey brings us back

worlding

to terra firma where the battle is not about nature, but about the shareability of resources and about multilateral justice in the universal dispensation of this shareability. Now we are talking about nation-states and their forms of sovereignty, and not about nature as part of a sacred I-thou relationship untouched by the political symbolic order. In a world made uneven by human greed and colonization, one does not start with a clean slate just because nature is involved. It is nature that is involved, and it is crucial to keep in mind that deindustrialization in the third world in the name of ecosensitivity does not have the same valence as the United States’ decision not to drill oil wells in Alaska. The reason is esay to see: the United States is already a superpower surfeited with its own industrialization and postindustrialization, whereas the third world country is underindustrialized despite having supplied so much capital and raw material to the industrialization undertaken by colonial modernity. In both cases, the debate is about self-sufficiency and nonreliance on foreign sources; and in this context, self and foreign are not benign ontological markers. It would be much more realistic and honest to invite Heidegger back again to step in and through the anthropocentric cycle in a certain way, rather than circumvent the cycle in the name of an unmediated relationship with mother earth. To put it in concrete terms, those who rejoice monologically in the preservation of the spotted owl with not a care or a tear for the loss of human jobs are, in their own way, as immoral and unconscionable as their antagonists. Murray Bookchin’s work is significant in this context. In spite of being a deep ecologist, Bookchin does not dismiss human second nature as a form of fake ontology. Bookchin’s focus, as is exemplified by the passage quoted below, is on the dialectical epistemological nexus of the human and nature: a nexus that leaves room both for nature’s own entelechy and the unavoidable centrality of human agency in nature’s plan for itself. If this tendency or nisus in organic evolution is denied, there is no reason why the human species, like any other species, should not utilize its capacities to serve its own needs or attain its own “self-realization,” to use the language of mystical ecology, certainly at the expense of other life-forms that impede its interests and desires. To cast moral thunderbolts on humanity

worlding

243

for “exploiting” organic nature, “degrading” it, “abusing” it, and behaving “anthropocentrically,” is simply a lefthanded way of acknowledging that “second nature” is the bearer of moral responsibilities that do not exist in the realm of “first nature.” It is to acknowledge that all life-forms have an “intrinsic worth” that should be respected; such an attribution is exclusively the product of human intellectual, moral, and aesthetic qualities—qualities that no other life-form possesses. The “intrinsic worth” of human beings is thus patently exceptional, indeed extraordinary. It is only human beings that can even formulate the concept of “intrinsic worth” and endow it with a sense of moral responsibility that no other life-form is capable of doing.88

244

What I find useful in Bookchin’s rhetoric is its focus on human accountability. Once we rule out mysticism as a viable epistemology from which to derive ethico-political sanction, the only satisfactory conclusion we are left with is that it is only through the category of human accountability or responsibility that nature can be cognized and respected. Human responsibility can take the form of honoring the pact with nature or trashing nature; and the human subject has to make that choice. But the point to remember is that both choices fall well within the domain of the anthropocentric. As Bookchin points out, to accuse anthropocentrism as such as the enemy and predator is a misreading of the human-nature nexus. It is precisely because humanity is second nature that it becomes capable of bringing under ethico-political and epistemological scrutiny its relationship to first nature, and on that basis make human, all too human decisions in the name of nature. No other life-form does it, or is equipped to do it. The only way ontology or nature can be served is by way of epistemology; and sure enough, epistemology is an exclusively human domain, practice, and possibility. What Bookchin calls “dialectical naturalism” asks “which is truly ‘real’—the incomplete, aborted, irrational ‘what is’ or the complete, fully developed, rational ‘what should be.’ ” In Bookchin’s formulation, dialectical naturalism “is wedded to the objective world—a world in which Being is Becoming,” a world where potentials “that are themselves actualizations of a dialectical continuum present the challenge of ethical self-fulfillment—not simply in the privacy of the mind but in the reality of the processual world.”89 Perhaps this way of thinking does not resolve all problems, but it certainly helps the human subject worlding

imagine a more satisfactory way of deriving what is to be done from an epistemology that redefines what is real. Harvey’s essay, whether or not it succeeds in finding a way to bring together socialism with ecocentric thinking, certainly helps us think through the many muddles that constitute the debate. Harvey reminds the human subject that its being is both custodial and autonomous in nature. As the brief instructions that precede any air travel tell us, “Wear your air mask before you help a child or any person who needs help”: the custodial being has to take care of itself well and good before it can take on the task of saving that other being that it is the custodian of. Of course one could engage in esoteric debates about whether the human being is a custodial being and, if so, who made the appointment, and whether it is hubristic or self-effacing to be a custodian. But in effect and a posteriori, we humans are custodians and need a script, a job description that should (1) entertain an a priori that does not at the same time precipitate a fait accompli and thereby preempt anthropocentric instrumentality of its own secondary/supplemental historicity; (2) envision possibilities that are doable by the human subject in its finitude; and (3) honor that finitude in the name of an ongoing relationship between possibility and actualization. To tweak Harvey’s terms a little, this will have to be a practical project that should disallow the piety of “nature knows best” and the hubris of “the socialist knows better/best.” It will have to be a futural project without a priori or idealistic guarantees: a project of contingent process in touch both with nature and culture. Just as the nature-culture binary has to be dealt with critically and transformatively, so, too, does the theory-praxis binary. In all the discussions that Harvey showcases critically in his essay, what is clear is that each program or pragmatic solution, in addition to parading itself as the ideal way out, is equally if not more interested in ethically and epistemologically legitimating itself with reference to an -ism or theoretical position. It is not enough, then, just to claim immanent-practical validity: it is even more important to claim that a particular strategy is a particular theory in action, and that that particular theory is the correct representation of the world’s reality. Now is there a way to get the philosophy or the theory out of the way and “just do it” together coalitionally in the heat of the moment and its urgency, rather than bicker eternally in the name of worldviews? In other words, if some strategy worlding

245

246

can be found that will care practically both for the spotted owl and for human jobs, then does it really matter if the different groups that act in the coalition act out of different ethico-political principles? I am just repeating an earlier question: When does philosophy/theory matter and when does it not? When does it, to paraphrase Marx, create vapid abstractions to substitute concrete realities, and when does it function as a critical theory to demystify the aura of a false concreteness? Yet another lesson to be learned from the Harvey essay, and this is similar to the one learned from all the cacophonous passion that surrounded the debates about The Satanic Verses, is that the real issue is not about what the ecological or the social problem is, but rather about the different languages or discourses in which the problem is received and given shape. In the case of the furor over Salman Rushdie’s text, all the acrimonious debates were metacritical in nature. When the Islamic fundamentalist scholar claims that there is no separation of religion and cultural politics in his tradition that has taught him to read literary texts in a certain way, there is no point in dinning into his ear that secularism lives and dies by such a separation. From the former’s point of view, blasphemy is an a priori condition of transgression, and it is from such a perspective that the mullah disallows the politics of reading altogether and yet arrives at a judgment. To conflate Jean-François Lyotard and Stanley Fish, the debate is meaningful only within each linguistic game or interpretive community; and unless painful efforts are made to elaborate some sort of a common ground and sharable language, no meaningful and persuasive dialogue can take place. A similar statement prevails in the bio-socio controversy as well. If somehow what I will call “the owl concern” and “the job concern” can be thought through together neither within the synchronicity of a grand plan nor as essentially incommensurable concerns, then perhaps a space of compromise could be found at the limit at which the human doubles up toward the unthought. By way of a conclusion I offer two scenarios: (1) If the world is no ideal text, and the human subject no ideal reader, and if furthermore it is the human subject that is tantalized by the distance between what is and what ought to be, then the only readings possible are readings themselves, sometimes redeemable as intentions, and at other times culpable as intentions. And the world dreams on, perhaps, as the huworlding

man hallucinates. (2) In response to the horror unleashed recently by the tsunami in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and South India, one of my friends made this casual but profound remark, “After all, nature is the first terrorist.” This is perhaps not a politically correct comment, yet it is highly thought-provoking and suggestive. I was fascinated with my friend’s use of the adjective first, let alone whatever might follow it: it could well have been the “first benefactor” or the “first gift.” What, then, is the nature of human accountability to the first? How does the first hail the human toward a certain ethico-political and epistemological attitude: reverence or irreverence, celebration or blasphemy, conservation or deconstruction, apprenticeship or transgression, recuperation or dissipation, filial piety or unnatural rebellion? Why should the second even honor the first when thought fully knows that there is no first except by way of reiteration? Is there no way to generate accountability without reference to the primordial, to that which came before? On another level, how can nature be a terrorist when terrorism needs to be informed by intentionality? Clearly, if nature is what nature does, then to impute a design or an intention behind an earthquake or a deluge is to read human pathos into the sheer descriptive indifference of the universe. In this context, both a Malthusian and an anti-Malthusian stance remain trapped within the logic of anthropocentrism. All I am trying to say is that it is crucial to coordinate a critical human position that neither squares off against nature nor succumbs to the religion of nature as though the only way to consecrate, valorize, and dignify the human is through a profound genuflection to nature. Just as it is in the case of history, there is a compelling need both to forget and to remember; here too, in the context of nature, the human response has to be rigorously ambivalent and contradictory. The rapture about nature has to be embodied in the same thought that also accommodates a Freudian suspicion of the ruse of nature: and this contradictory thought has to be parsed in light of the Derridean thesis of undecidability. Anything less complex, more programmatic, or more politically correct can only be an open-eyed invitation to dystopia, both in the name of the human and the in- and the nonhuman. If an eco-activist is so carried away by her or his love of the spotted owl that she or he has no tear for human dislocation through the loss of jobs, there is something wrong. Similarly, if a human social realist casts a cold eye on the mounting toll of animals, worlding

247

big and small, trampled under developmental human traffic, there is something wrong as well. These, unfortunately, are the two intersecting horizons that preside over the human that is both at home and homeless, both custodian and designer, both sacred and secular, both self and other, both the confidence of the thought and the promise as well as the terror of the unthought. So should one say: like human, like nature; or, like nature, like human? Perhaps not: but there is solace in the poetry of the like that launches us into the world of similes: a world in which recognition and affirmation happen somewhere between the tenor and the vehicle. If I compare you to a summer’s day, then I would have to live up both to the innocence of having naturalized my all too human love and my all too human appreciation of your beauty, and to the guilt of having sullied the summer’s day with the taint of my intersubjective but all too human perception.

248

worlding

Notes

introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

12

Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 175. For more on the agonizing and nauseating relationship between living and telling, see Sartre, Nausea. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 81. Radhakrishnan, Introduction, Theory in an Uneven World. Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, 29. For more on the politics of hauntology, see Derrida, Spectres of Marx. Nietzsche, Use and Abuse of History ; Foucault, Language, CounterMemory, Practice. For more on time and articulations of temporality between the history of the human and the history of science, see Grosz, The Nick of Time. David Scott is an exception among postcolonial theorists who has the epistemological courage to pick a serious quarrel with history. See his Refashioning Futures. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies,” in The Portable Nietzsche, 46–47. See Nehamas, Nietzsche ; Heidegger, Nietzsche ; Krell, Infectious Nietzsche ; and Stambaugh, Problem of Time in Nietzsche for more on Nietzsche and the problem of time. See Rich, Diving into the Wreck.

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22

250

23 24 25

26 27

See Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. See Said, Humanism. See Williams, The Politics of Modernism. See Said, Freud and the Non-European. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 256. See Heidegger, Being and Time. For a rigorous and wide-ranging discussion of the many valences of home, dwelling, space, and place, see Harvey, “What Is Green?” See the many transcendentalist essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson such as “Nature,” “The American Scholar,” “The Divinity School Address,” “Self-Reliance,” “The Over-Soul,” “The Poet,” and “Experience” (in Nina Baym et al., Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1:824–960), where Emerson attempts to claim anthropocentrism in the name of the new America capable of writing its own stories rather than remain arrested as a nation of biographers. See Harvey, “What Is Green?” For more on the debates about nature and its sustainability for human reasons and purposes, see Shiva, Staying Alive and The Violence of the Green Revolution; Gupta, Postcolonial Developments. See Bookchin, Philosophy of Social Ecology. See Guha, History at the Limit of World-History. See Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 271–313, and her “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Spivak, In Other Worlds, 197–221, 299–301. See Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World and The Nation and Its Fragments. See Sen, Development as Freedom; Zein-Elabdin and Charusheela, Postcolonialism Meets Economics.

1 . revisionism 1

2 3 4

This theme of the faithful transcription of reality from its origin to the addressee was fraught with polemics in the debates about Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, where the question was the relationship between “what the prophet actually said” and “what was circumstantially transcribed” into textual reality. For a brilliant and extensive treatment of the “empirico-transcendental doublet,” see Foucault, Order of Things, 318–22. For more on the problematization of history as a genre, see Scott, Refashioning Futures; and Guha, History at the limit of World-History. Rich, “Diving into the Wreck,” in Diving into the Wreck: Poems, 1971–72.

notes to chapter 1

5

6 7

8 9 10

11

12

13

14

Some recent work, both in postcolonial theory and in Asian American cultural studies, has begun to theorize the relationship between history and loss and history as loss. Much of this work has been inspired by Sigmund Freud’s work on mourning and melancholy. See, for example, Eng and Kazanjian, Loss; and Gilroy, After Empire. I have in mind here Martin Heidegger and his hermeneutic attempt to align the “being of language” with the “language of being.” Homi Bhabha in his discussion of “disseminated national time” chooses to focus on “temporality” rather than on “history” to avoid the traps of developmental teleology and a teleological historicism. See Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha, 291–322. For more on the rationale of the genre, see Derrida, Gift of Death. I refer here to the practice of Gelassenheit, or letting be, as theorized by Martin Heidegger. The problem here is the following: how to return to life and the Lebenswelt, or life world, after the summary Foucauldian refutation of phenomenology. The path not to be taken, in my opinion, is the one offered by Václav Havel in Václav Havel. For a critique of the Havel position, see my essay, “Representing the Political.” The epiphanic opening pages of Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway mark the phenomenological openness of the moment before subsequent happenings interpellate that moment as part of a determinate post–World War I English history. Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man have contributed immensely to our understanding of the relationship of history to allegory. For a situated literary critical analysis of the relationship of allegory to history, see chapter 5 of my Theory in an Uneven World, where I analyze Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter and its aesthetic politics in the context of apartheid. William Spanos is a unique Heideggerian scholar and critic who has succeeded time and again in connecting, along what he calls “the continuum of Being,” Heidegger’s destruction of Western onto-theology with the political project of calling American dominance into question. See in particular Spanos’s End of Education; Errant Art of Moby-Dick; Heidegger and Criticism; and America’s Shadow. I am thinking here of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose transcendentalist vision conceives of nature as a system of hieroglyphics to be read into meaning by the poet and seer. Scripting and textuality are also a part of Emerson’s secular-national, self-reliant vision of America, especially when he appeals to the American literary imagination to stop writing biographies and start writing its own stories. See Emerson, “Self-Reliance.”

notes to chapter 1

251

15

16 17

18 19 20

21

252

22 23 24

25 26

27

The question here is the following: Is it inevitable, despite the given oneness of the objective world, that the human subject is constrained to be centrist in its attempt to appropriate the world via epistemology? Furthermore, if epistemology is interest driven, how is one to avoid the proliferation of multiple centrisms: Afro-, Euro-, gyno-, andro-, photo-, phono-, logo-, phallogo-, and so on? Derrida’s response would be to question centrism as such as part of any radical ontological thinking. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 31. In the famous example of Biosphere 2, constituted by ecologists and a range of scientists, what is highlighted is the fact that unless there is a simulacral repetition of the original, the original will never be recognized as Biosphere 1. See Nietzsche, Use and Abuse of History. Further references to this edition will be made parenthetically in the text. Grosz, Nick of Time, 151. It is interesting that Foucault in his later work on power, knowledge, and biopolitics talks about “the return to life,” even though his return is not the same as the return to things themselves articulated by the phenomenologists. See Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge, 81. “Looking back” as a temporality of its own has been a part of a number of mythologies, such as that of Orpheus and Eurydice. William Wordsworth looks back at his childhood experiences and reconstitutes them through hindsight; John Osborne looks back in anger; and of course, there is the magnificent reading of the Paul Klee painting Angelus Novus by Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 257–58. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 6. For more on the theme of mind-body dualism, see Voloshinov; Bakhtin; and Vygotskii. It is Antonio Gramsci who, in The Modern Prince, makes the all-important distinction between “wars of maneuver” and “wars of strategy”: this articulation was developed insightfully by Partha Chatterjee in the context of postcoloniality in his work Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. Derrida develops the category of the pharmakon as a poisoned present and as disease and cure in his Dissemination. I am thinking here of the narrators in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, both of whom envision the past as cure and hex, as promise and disillusionment. Both are seeking to escape the past even as they are trying to give it voice. See Derrida, “Racism’s Last Word”; see also the response to Derrida by Rob Nixon and Anne McClintock, and Derrida’s response to them in the next issue of Critical Inquiry 12, no. 2 (1985).

notes to chapter 1

28

29 30

31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45

For more on the theory of the verb in the context of the French language, see Foucault’s discussion of the grammar of the School of the Port Royal in Order of Things, 92–96. Foucault, Theatrum Philosophicum, 174–75. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 27–28. Original Nietzsche quote is from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part III, “Of the Virtue that Makes Small,” 3, p. 191. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 26–27. For more on Nietzsche’s style as a writer, see Derrida, Spurs. There is some overlap between Rich’s signification of the ocean in her poem and Julia Kristeva’s notion of semiosis prior to symbolic oedipalization. Rich, “Diving into the Wreck,” 22. Further references to this poem will be cited parenthetically in the text. For a thorough philosophical analysis of repetition, see Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. For a deep reading of Nietzsche’s eternal return, see Heidegger, Nietzsche. Edward Said’s work Beginnings is a magisterial study of what it means to begin, both phenomenologically and epistemologically. For more on nature, the human, and the absurd, see Camus, Notebooks. I refer here to the Kantian aesthetic category of “purposive purposelessness.” See also Terry Eagleton’s authoritative book Ideology of the Aesthetic. The parable of the man from the country in Franz Kafka’s The Trial is an allegorical representation of this condition. Equipmentality is a term that Martin Heidegger uses with telling hermeneutic effect in his essay “The Origins of a Work of Art.” “plumpes-Denken,” or “crude thinking,” is a term coined by Bertolt Brecht. For more, see Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics. See Heidegger, Being and Time, for a complex exposition of the “onticoontological difference.” Central to Homi Bhabha’s reading of nationalist cognitive failure are his elaborations of “the pedagogical” and “the performative.” See Bhabha, “Dissemination,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha. See also Butler, Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter, and Psychic Life of Power. For a reading of the Nietzschean theme of nature against itself, see Nehemas, Nietzsche, esp. chap. 4. A significant contrast can be made between Nietzsche’s mode of winning that is based on the cultivation of indifference toward the game itself and the notion of weak winning or weak messianism in Walter Benjamin. Mohandas Gandhi of course is the ultimate example of a political leader who insisted on the ethical every step of the way. Both Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore would agree that value is independent of the achievement of a win.

notes to chapter 1

253

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57

254 58

59

60 61 62

63 64

For more on the master-slave relationship, see Butler, Psychic Life of Power and Subjects of Desire. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 27. For more on this, see Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground. For a detailed discussion of the category of “in the name of ” in the context of multiculturalism, see chapter 2 of my Theory in an Uneven World. For a sustained critique of majoritarian democracy, see Guinier, Tyranny of the Majority. See Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 27. Camus, The Stranger, 153–54. See Habermas, Legitimation Crisis ; and his more recent work, Between Facts and Norms. For more on traces and the trace, see Gramsci, Selected Prison Notebooks; and Derrida, Of Grammatology. Samuel Beckett’s existentially attenuated but discursively fraught writings highlight the predicament of the first-person pronoun. See also Foucault, “Discourse on Language.” The fabulous readings by Jacques Lacan, Derrida, and Barbara Johnson of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” dramatize the tension between “corrigible readings” and the thesis of radical incorrigibility. See also Barrett, Blackness and Value, chap. 5. The strategy of putting something under erasure, sous rature, has been used variously both by Martin Heidegger and by Jacques Derrida. The crossing out avoids the hubris of neologism by retaining the prior script but under erasure. A humorous example of the palimpsestic coexistence of two scripts is the numbering of houses in some parts of Chennai, India. The houses have both an old number and a new number, and the correct way to address these houses is by using both. French feminist criticism with its category of écriture feminine and Virginia Woolf have been deeply interested in exploring the connection between writing and gender. See the introduction to Sangari and Vaid, Recasting Women. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Practical Politics of the Open End,” in her Postcolonial Critic, 95–112. The problem of the name and of namelessness receives extensive critical attention in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. See Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 227. Further references to this edition will be made parenthetically in the text.

notes to chapter 1

65

66

67

68 69 70

71 72 73 74

75

76 77 78 79 80

The entire project of postcolonial nationalism both presumes that there is a reality already there to be discovered in the past and that such a reality has to be a produced in the present in the name of the future. See Nehru, Discovery of India; and Nkrumah, Autobiography. The whole question of how to transcend the poverty of realism in the name of something other that is richer and more imaginative is both historical and stylistic/generic. Kafka’s fiction, Tony Morrison’s and Maxine Hong Kingston’s use of ghosts, the surreal sense in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Derrida’s “hauntology” come to mind. See also Cheah, Spectral Nationality. See Slavoj Žižek’s analysis in his Tarrying with the Negative of the “whole in the flag” that represents the revolutionary jouissance of the moment before it is taken over by the hegemon. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 153. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s return to immanence in Empire and Multitude is deeply problematic since it trivializes the issue of representation. See the ongoing work of the School of Subaltern Studies Group that in revisiting the past problematizes both colonialist and nationalist historiographies. See Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, for more on duration as both political and psychological. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 231. I refer here to Ernst Renan’s “What Is a Nation?” in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha, 8–22. For critical analyses of the role of the intellectual in the context of the death of representation, see Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”; and R. Radhakrishnan, “Towards an Effective Intellectual: Foucault or Gramsci?” in Robbins, Intellectuals, 57–99. The notion of dissection in Fanon has much in common with the idea of history as a “cutting” in Nietzsche. See also Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, and Practice, 139–64. For a conjunctural critical reading of Marxism and Eurocentrism, see Amin, Eurocentrism. Amitav Ghosh’s richly speculative novel The Shadow Lines has much to say about the politics of naming. See Althusser, “Process without Subject or Goal/s,” in Essays in SelfCriticism. For more on the unsuturedness of class in the context of multiple intersectionalities, see Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. For more on the deconstruction of binarity and its relationship to the politics of multiculturalism, see chapter 2 of my Theory in an Uneven World.

notes to chapter 1

255

81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91

92 93 94

256 95 96 97 98

99 100 101 102 103 104 105

See Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition. See Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe ; and Habitations of Modernity. For more on the thematic and the problematic of nationalism, see Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic, 17–18. Ibid., 19–20. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 104. For more on negritude, see Léopold Senghor and Amílcar Cabral. The protagonist/narrator of Ellison’s Invisible Man constantly questions reality as appearance and appearance as reality, politically as well as philosophically. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are the master theorists of rhizomatics, nomadology, and re- and deterritorialization. See their Kafka: Toward a Minority Literature. See also the work of Rosi Bradiotti: Transcriptions, Metamorphoses, and Nomadic Subjects. Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince and Other Writings. Hall, “After-Life of Frantz-Fanon,” 25. Althusser’s speaking for Marx and Laclau and Mouffe’s speaking for Gramsci pose the question of what it means to speak for an earlier thinker in the very act of producing a differential reading. Hall, “After-Life of Frantz-Fanon,” 42–43. For a gung ho reading of Marxist theory in conjunction with third world politics, see Ahmad, In Theory. See Sprinker, Ghostly Demarcations. Humanism has had multiple contradictory receptions. See Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism; Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror ; Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism.” See Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice. See Balibar and Wallerstein, Rage, Nation, Class. For more on derivative discourse, see Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World; and Radhakrishnan, Theory in an Uneven World, chap. 4. See Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State. Nehru’s “India’s tryst with destiny” speech. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is a critical comment on Nehru. For more on the predicament of nationalism vis-à-vis globalization, see Leiwei Li, Globalization and the Humanities. For more on the complex interrelationship among the various “posts,” see Bhabha, Location of Culture ; Appiah, “Is the ‘Post ’ ”; and Radhakrishnan, “Postmodernism and the Rest of the World.”

notes to chapter 1

106

107 108

109 110 111 112

For an epistemological elaboration of preposterousness in the context of ethnicity, see Radhakrishnan, “Ethnic Identity and Poststructuralist Difference.” See Lloyd, Anomalous States, for a thoughtful elaboration of psychic anteriority and the legitimation of nationalism. As agonized by epidermalization as Fanon is the protagonist in Ellison’s Invisible Man, who comments with acidic virulence on the whitewashedness of America. Hall, “After-Life of Frantz Fanon,” 29. Donald Barthelme’s postmodern fiction The Dead Father deals with this issue of internalized authority. For more on the relationship of narrative to genre, see Bhabha, Nation and Narration. Bertolt Brecht uses the phrase “enemies of production” to refer to Marxist realists such as György Lukács who would not admit to modernist fragmentation. See Jameson, Aesthetics and Politics, 68–85.

2 . edward said 1 2 3 4

5 6

7 8 9 10

Said, Humanism. All further references to this edition will be made parenthetically in the text. See Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered.” For more on the Möbius strip–like figurality of diasporic subjectivity, see the introduction to Radhakrishnan, Diasporic Mediations, xxiii–xxvi. I refer here to the prolonged discussion about the nature of professionalism in the pages of Critical Inquiry 10, no. 2 (December 1983), and in particular, to the contributions of Catherine Gallagher, Stanley Fish, Bruce Robbins, Edward Said, and Gerald Graff. What also comes to mind is Said’s use of the Benjamin Disraeli statement, “The East is a profession” as an epigraph to one of his chapters in Orientalism. For more on insides and outsides in the context of education and literacy, see Williams, Politics of Modernism. For a mordantly humorous critique of the figure of the self-educating humanist, refer to the character of the autodidact as developed by Jean-Paul Sartre in his Nausea. For a definitive philosophical statement about the truth-method relationship, see Gadamer, Truth and Method. See Said, Beginnings. Ibid., 336–40. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158.

notes to chapter 2

257

11 12 13

14 15 16

17 18 19 20

258

21

22 23

24 25 26

27

28 29

Foucault, “Madness, the Absence of Work,” 97–104. Spivak, translator’s preface, in Derrida, Of Grammatology, ix–lxxxviii. See Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, for an elaborate philosophical exposition of the category of intentionality both as prepersonal and as personal. For more on the suture and contradiction, see Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. I am reminded here of Sartre’s famous warning that not choosing is itself a form of choice. For more on intentionality after the linguistic turn, see J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words ; John Searle’s work on speech-act theory in Expression and Meaning ; Derrida, Limited Inc.; and the many debates surrounding speech-act theory. For more on contradiction and overdetermination, see Althusser, For Marx ; and Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital. See Rich, “Notes towards a Politics of Location.” See also chap. 5 of my Theory in an Uneven World. See JanMohamed, “Worldliness-without-World.” See Said’s essay, “Foucault and the Imagination of Power,” in Hoy, Foucault, 149–55. Michel Foucault, in one of his power-knowledge lectures identifies “subjugated knowledges” as lacks or absences within the body of the dominant discourse or historiography. See Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs. See Derrida’s critique in Writing and Difference of Foucault’s work on madness, and Foucault’s response to it in “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” later followed by Derrida’s essay “ ‘To Do Justice to Freud.’ ” See Johnson, Critical Difference. See Said, “Criticism between Culture and System,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic, 178–225. See Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, for a powerful but a nonselfreflexive theorization of pragmatism. See also West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, for more on the evasion of theory and philosophy in pragmatism. Arjun Appadurai develops the category of the constructed primordial in his essay on global disjuncture, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Said, “Criticism between Culture and System.” Aijaz Ahmad severely takes Said to task for his metropolitan ambivalence and for wanting to have it all in his In Theory, 159–219, 333–37. See also the special issue of Public Culture (vol. 6, no. 1 [1993]) devoted to a discussion of In Theory.

notes to chapter 2

30 31

32 33 34 35

36 37 38

39 40

41 42 43

44

45

See Spivak, translator’s preface. See Nietzsche, The Will to Power and The Genealogy of Morals for a powerfully antimetaphysical reading of the relationship between the will to power and the will to knowledge. I am thinking here of Arthur Schopenhauer and his conceptualization of the world as will and idea. Today’s debates about creationism sustain the atmosphere of the Scopes trial immortalized in the film Inherit the Wind (dir. Stanley Kramer, 1960). See Heidegger, Being and Time. For a memorable statement concerning the presence of the past in the present, see Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Sacred Wood. On the nature of the production of truth in the discourse of science, see Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations. Akhil Gupta makes the point that in the Western world, too, fashions and trends return, as though in cyclical time. See Gupta, Postcolonial Developments. See Nietzsche, Use and Abuse of History. It is interesting that Said often invokes Nietzsche the philologist, but never The Use and Abuse of History. For more on the “epistemological break,” see Bachelard, Dialectic of Duration; Althusser, The Humanist Controversy ; and Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. See also Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Essential Tension. See Derrida, Positions. Frantz Fanon’s anticolonial humanism is an attempt to embody historical perspectivism in the name of a new humanist and universal objectivity in the making. See Said, “Intellectuals in the Post-colonial World.” See Radhakrishnan, “Towards an Effective Intellectual,” in Intellectuals, ed. Bruce Robbins, 57–99. For more on the ongoing debates about secularism, see Talal Asad, William Connolly, R. Radhakrishnan, Rustum Bharucha, Partha Chatterjee, and Ashis Nandy. See also “Critical Secularism,” the special issue of boundary 2 (vol. 31, no. 2 [2004]), edited by Aamir Mufti. Raymond Williams’s blurb in the Guardian on Said’s The World, the Text, and the Critic makes the distinction between declaring an intention theoretically and actually demonstrating that intention through practice: “It is a pleasure to read someone who not only has studied and thought so carefully but is also beginning to substantiate, as distinct from announcing, a genuinely emergent way of thinking.” Guardian, 8 March 1984, 10. Postmodernism has indeed been appropriated in all manner of ways by feminists, ethnics, and theorists of popular culture. See Nicholson and Seidman, Social Postmodernisms.

notes to chapter 2

259

46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

260

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73

See JanMohamed, “Worldliness-without-World”; Brennan, At Home in the World; and Said, Out of Place. For a variety of critical positions on Foucault, see Hoy, Foucault. See Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground. See Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, chap. 1. The problem here has to do with culture and complicity. Culture often functions as that refined site where sins and crimes are laundered in the name of superior civilizational virtues. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 83. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Foucault, Language, CounterMemory, Practice, 139–64. See Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction to Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 7–31. For more on concrete universals, see Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. For an analogous reading of the place of the ethical in Spivak, see Radhakrishnan, Theory in an Uneven World, chap. 5. See Valéry, Art of Poetry, in Selected Writings. See Sartre, What Is Literature? See Said, “Michel Foucault, 1927–1984,” 187–97, and “Foucault and the Imagination of Power,” 239–45, in his Reflections on Exile. See Conrad, Heart of Darkness. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous image of the all-seeing eyeball seeks to transcend mediatedness altogether by fusing the eye with what it sees. See Himani Bannerji, Returning the Gaze. See De Man, Blindness and Insight. See Derrida, “Principle of Reason.” See Spivak, Translator’s Preface, for a brilliant critical paraphrase of what was at stake in the Foucault-Derrida fallout. See Foucault, “Man and His Doubles,” in Order of Things, 303–43. Edward Said was as much a critic of Yasser Arafat and his corrupt and sycophantic regime as he was of the Israeli occupation, so much indeed that Arafat banned Said’s books. Althusser, Humanist Controversy, 271–72. Althusser appropriates the notion of misrecognition from Jacques Lacan and politicizes it in alignment with structuralist-Marxism. See Macherey, Theory of Literary Production. Foucault, “Revolutionary Action: ‘Until Now,’ ” in Language, CounterMemory, Practice, 222. Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism. See Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, for a spirited critique of Foucault’s theory of power and sovereignty. Foucault, Foucault Alive, back cover.

notes to chapter 2

74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

See Said, After the Last Sky. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs. Said, Freud and the Non-European, 16. See Said’s essay on Foucault in Reflections on Exile, 196. Said, Freud and the Non-European, 23–25. For more on Camus’s imperial geography, see Said, Culture and Imperialism. I discuss this issue at great length in chapter 1 of the present volume. Said, “Conrad: The Presentation of Narrative,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic, 90. Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, 185–86; emphasis added. I refer here to the theory of “bounded rationality” as enunciated by Herbert Simon in Models of My Life. JanMohamed, “Worldliness-without-World,” 105. Said, Freud and the Non-European, 29–30.

3 . worlding 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10

For more on potential and actuality, see Aristotle, Metaphysics. See Barthes, “Structuralist Activity,” for more on the real, the intelligible and the interested simulacrum. For a reading of Barthes, see Radhakrishnan, “The Changing Subject and the Politics of Theory,” 126–52. For more on the intelligibility of the world and the phenomenological givenness of rationality, see Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. For memorable fictional elucidation of the relationship between truths and versions, see Ghosh, Shadow Lines ; and Gordimer, Burger’s Daughter. See the chapter entitled “The Prose of the World,” in Foucault, Order of Things. See Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, 278–93. W. H. Auden’s mordantly satirical poem “Anthropos Apteros” brings out the mystified condition of the human caught up in its own mediations. See Foucault’s magisterial treatment of “the empirico-transcendental doublet” in Order of Things, 318–22. See Radhakrishnan, Theory in an Uneven World, chap. 5, for more on location and subject position and the interchangeability, or otherwise, between ontology and epistemology. See Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom; and Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, for their fundamental critique of the Oedipus as both symptom and cure.

notes to chapter 3

261

11

12

13

14 15 16 17 18

262

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30

See Matilal, Epistemology, Logic, and Grammar ; Matilal, Logic, Language, and Reality ; Mohanty, Explorations in Philosophy ; Mohanty, Self and Its Other ; Mohanty, Phenomenology and Ontology ; and Mohanty et al., Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy, for more on the connection between phenomenology and Indian philosophy. For an intensely political reading of the map in the context of postcolonial gender and sexuality, see Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled”; Mowitt, “Algerian Nation”; and Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies. The veil plays an important role in W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk as well as in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. For powerful fictional representations of maps and mapping, see Ghosh, Shadow Lines; and Farah, Maps. The colonial map in the early pages of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness also comes to mind here. Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge, 81. See Husserl on “eidetic reduction” in The Crisis of European Sciences. For more on the phenomenological in the context of the use and abuse of multiculturalism, see Radhakrishnan, Theory in an Uneven World, chap. 2. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xxii. See Wolin, Presence of the Past ; and Radhakrishnan, “When Is Democracy Political?” For more on the fusion of hermeneutic horizons, see Gadamer, Truth and Method; and Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, viii. Ibid., xx–xxi. See Habermas, Legitimation Crisis. See Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror. See Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, Signs, and The Visible and the Invisible. For a moving and persuasive Heideggerian critique of ontological violence, see Spanos, Errant Art of Moby-Dick ; and Spanos, America’s Shadow. For more on the vicissitudes of intentionality in the context of poststructuralism, see J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words ; John Searle, Expression and Meaning ; Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., and Judith Butler, Excitable Speech. Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” 175. For more on privileged and perfect moments brought about by art and on idealized perceptions, see Sartre, Nausea. See Foucault, “The Analytic of Finitude,” in Foucault, Order of Things, 312–18. Both Roland Barthes and Alain Robbe-Grillet declared, against the pathos of humanism, that “the heart of the matter is dead” and that henceforth

notes to chapter 3

31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39

40 41

42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50

51

meaning would be of the order of the exterior. See Robbe-Grillet, Notes towards the New Novel. For more on intentionality and the performative, see Butler, Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter. See Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, for more on the phantasm. See also Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum.” The literary tradition has always celebrated the mot juste for bringing about the perfect and flawless actualization of intentionality. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xvi–xvii. For more on the dilemma of living or telling, see Sartre, Nausea. The need for the outside is partly acknowledged and partly problematized by Derrida’s words, “There is nothing outside the text.” See Derrida, Of Grammatology. Kingston, Woman Warrior, 209. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, 70. See Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 69–82. See also the contributions of Lawrence Venuti, Barbara Johnson, Tejaswini Niranjana, Jorge Luis Borges, and Gayatri Spivak. See my essay “Translatability in an Uneven World,” in Rethinking Modernity. For more on Nietzsche on the theme of anthropocentrism, see, among others, “Why Nietzsche Now?” the special issue of boundary 2 edited by Daniel O’Hara (9, no. 3 [spring 1981]). See Heidegger, Being and Time. See David Farrell Krell’s introduction to Heidegger, Basic Writings, 3–35. See Spanos, End of Education. See Linda Nicholson’s and Nancy Fraser’s essay, “Social Criticism without Philosophy,” in the collection Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson, for more on the relationship between philosophy and politics. See also the collection Social Postmodernisms, ed. Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, 48–49. For more on the difference between subaltern and dominant historiographies, see Guha, “Dominance without Hegemony.” Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, 213–14. Ibid., 193. For more on “home” and “not at home” in thinking, see Derrida, “Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time,” in Margins of Philosophy, 29–67. See also Fynsk, Heidegger, Thought, and Historicity and Claim for Language. Krell, introduction, 20.

notes to chapter 3

263

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65

264 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76

See Derrida, “Ousia and Gramme.” See Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 165–82. See the writings of B. K. Matilal, Robert Magliola, and J. N. Mohanty. See Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic. See Fredric Jameson’s critique of Heidegger, and my essay, “Aesthetic Truth: Production or Letting Be.” Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 143–206. Ibid., 34. In this passage, Heidegger could be seen as denying the reality of coevalness among different histories. For coevalness, see Fabian, Time and the Other. For more on the frame as parergon, see Derrida, Truth in Painting. See the works of Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive and The Violence of the Green Revolution; and Gupta, Postcolonial Developments. See William Blake, “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” in Collected Poems ; and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” in The Complete Novels and Selected Tales. Guha, History at the Limit of World-History. Further references to this edition will be cited parenthetically in the text. See Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe and Habitations of Modernity. There is a deep connection between Tagore’s poetic internationalism and the relational cosmopolitanism imagined by the character Tridib in Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Shadow Lines. For more on the Gandhi-Tagore exchanges on nationalism, swaraj, and noncooperation, see Bhattacharya, Mahatma and the Poet ; and my forthcoming essay, “The Pragmatics of Reason: Gandhi and Tagore.” Aristotle, Metaphysics, 54. For more on the cogito and the unthought, see Foucault, Order of Things. See Heidegger, On the Way to Language. Philip Sidney, “An Apologie for Poetrie,” in Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy. See Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine. See Nietzsche, Use and Abuse of History. See de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life. John Keats used the phrase the “egotistical sublime” to register his dislike of the didacticism in Wordsworth’s Prelude. For brilliant interpretations of Heidegger’s reading of the relationship of official Roman thought to Greek thinking, see William Spanos’s forthcoming book, The Legacy of Edward Said: A Dialogue, particularly chaps. 2 and 3. For more on technology and enframing, see Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, 283–317.

notes to chapter 3

77 78

79 80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

See Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought. The term politics is so badly compromised and contaminated in the context of contemporary India that it is never ever used in a positive or affirmative sense. When I used the term politics of resistance at a recent conference in Bombay, I was requested to keep the word resistance but to expunge the word politics. For more on Advaita, see the works of J. N. Mohanty and B. K. Matilal. I refer here to Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry”; W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”; Neruda’s many volumes of political poetry; and the poems of Mahmoud Darwish. Harvey, “What’s Green?” 327. Further references to this title will be made parenthetically in the text. For more on the ontological and the epistemological status of man in Marxism, see Althusser, Humanist Controversy. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” in Baym et al., The Norton Anthology of American Literature. See Radhakrishnan, Theory in an Uneven World, chaps. 2 and 5, for more on the category of “in the name of.” Gandhi quote in Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase, 2:65. Davis, The Angela Y. Davis Reader. For more on the constructed or constituted primordial, see Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Bookchin, Philosophy of Social Ecology, 44–45. Ibid., 17, 24.

notes to chapter 3

265

Works Cited

Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, . Althusser, Louis. Essays in Self-Criticism. Trans. Grahame Lock. London: CA7, . ———. Essays on Ideology. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso, . ———. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Pantheon, . ———. The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings. Ed. François Matheron. Trans. G. M. Goshgarian. London: Verso, . Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso, . Amin, Samir. Eurocentrism. Trans. Russell Moore. New York: Monthly Review Press, . Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” In The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins, –. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, . ———. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, . Appiah, Anthony K. “Is the ‘Post’ in Postcoloniality the Same as the ‘Post’ in Postmodernism?” Critical Inquiry, no.  (): –. Aristotle, Metaphysics. Trans. Christopher Kirwan. Oxford: Clarendon, . Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, .



Bachelard, Gaston. Dialectic of Duration. Trans. and annotated Mary McAllester. Manchester: Clinamen, . ———. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas Jones. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, . Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, . ———. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, . Balibar, Etienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. Trans. Chris Turner. New York: Verso, . Bannerji, Himani, ed. Returning the Gaze. Toronto: Sister Vision Press, . Barrett, Lindon. Blackness and Value: Seeing Double. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . ———. “Mercantilism, U.S. Federalism, and the Market within Reason: The ‘People’ and the Conceptual Impossibility of Racial Blackness.” In Accelerating Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood, ed. Bill Maurer and Gabriele Schwab. New York: Columbia University Press, . Barthelme, Donald. The Dead Father. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, . Barthes, Roland. “The Structuralist Activity.” In Critical Theory since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams. New York: Harcourt, . Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: Norton, . Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, . Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, . ———, ed. Nation and Narration. New York: Routledge, . Bharucha, Rustum. Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin. New Delhi, Oxford University Press, . ———. In the Name of the Secular: Contemporary Cultural Activism in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, . Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi, comp. and ed. The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore, –. New Delhi: National Book Trust, India, . Blake, William. Collected Poems. Ed. W. B. Yeats. London: Routledge, . Bloch, Ernst, et al. Aesthetics and Politics. Ed. and trans. Ronald Taylor. London: Verso, . Bookchin, Murray. The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism. Montreal: Black Rose Books, . Bradotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Oxford, U.K.: Polity Press, .

LDG@H8>I:9

———. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, . ———. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, . Brennan, Timothy. At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, . ———. Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right. New York: Columbia University Press, . Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, . ———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, . ———. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, . ———. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, . ———. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, . ———. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France. New York: Columbia University Press, . Cabral, Amílcar. “National Liberation and Culture.” . In African Literature, ed. Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, . Camus, Albert. Notebooks: –. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Knopf, . ———. The Stranger. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Vintage, . Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . ———. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, . Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, . ———. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, . Cheah, Pheng. Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to PostColonial Literatures of Liberation. New York: Columbia University Press, . Cheah, Pheng, and Bruce Robbins, eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, . Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin, . Davis, Angela. The Angela Y. Davis Reader, Ed. Joy James. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, . de Certeau, Michele. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, .

LDG@H8>I:9





Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, . ———. Kafka: Toward a Minority Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, . ———. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. London: Athlone Press, . Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. New York: Viking, . De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press, . ———. Blindness and Insight. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, . Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . ———. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . ———. Limited Inc. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, . ———. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . ———. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . ———. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . ———. “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eye of Its Pupils.” Diacritics (): –. ———. “Racism’s Last Word.” Critical Inquiry , no.  (): –. ———. The Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, . ———. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Trans. Barbara Harlow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . ———. “‘To Do Justice to Freud’: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis.” In Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I. Davidson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . ———. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . ———. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground, Poor People, Friend of the Family:  Short Novels. New York: Dell, . Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Oxford University Press, . Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Cambridge: Blackwell, .

LDG@H8>I:9

Elders, Fons, ed. Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind. London: Souvenir, . Eliot, T. S. Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen, . Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, . Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson on Transcendentalism. Ed. Edward Ericson. New York: Ungar, . Eng, David L., and David Kazanjian, eds. Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Berkeley: University of California Press, . Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, . Fanon, Frantz. “Algeria Unveiled.” In A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove, . ———. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove, . ———. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, . Farah, Nuruddin. Maps. London: Pan Books, . Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge, and the Discourse on Language. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, . ———. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, . ———. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, . ———. Foucault Alive: Collected Interviews, –. . Ed. Sylvere Lotringer. Trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston. Reprint, New York: Semiotexte, . ———. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, . ———. “Madness, the Absence of Work.” Trans. Peter Stastny and Deniz Sengel. In Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, –. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, . ———. “My Body, This Paper, This Fire.” Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Oxford Literary Review  (autumn ). ———. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, –. ———. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, . ———. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings: –. Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Colin Gordon et al. New York: Pantheon, .

LDG@H8>I:9

 



———. “Revolutionary Action: ‘Until Now.’ ” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, –. ———. “Theatrum Philosophicum.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, –. Fynsk, Christopher. The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, . ———. Heidegger, Thought, and Historicity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, . Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Trans. David E. Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press, . ———. Truth and Method. Ed. and trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming. New York: Seabury, . Gandhi, Mohandas K. The Collected Works. Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, . Ghosh, Amitav. The Shadow Lines. London: Bloomsbury, . Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture. London: Routledge, . ———. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, . ———. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, . Gordimer, Nadine. Burger’s Daughter. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, . ———. The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics, and Places. Ed. Stephen Clingman. New York: Knopf, . Gramsci, Antonio. The Modern Prince and Other Writings. Trans. Louis Marks. New York; International Publishers, . ———. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, . Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, . Guha, Ranajit. “Dominance without Hegemony and Its Historiography.” In Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Guha. Delhi: Oxford University Press, . ———. History at the Limit of World-History. New York: Columbia University Press, . Guinier, Lani. The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy. New York: Free Press, . Gupta, Akhil. Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, . Habermas, Jürgen. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Trans. William Rehg. Cambridge, Mass.: B>I Press, .

LDG@H8>I:9

———. Knowledge and Human Interests. Trans. Jeremy Shapiro. Boston: Beacon, . ———. Legitimation Crisis. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon, . Hall, Stuart. “The After-Life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?” In The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read. Seattle: Bay, . Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, . ———. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, . Harvey, David. Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, . ———. “What’s Green and Makes the Environment Go Round?” In The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, . Havel, Václav. Václav Havel; or, Living in Truth. London: Faber, . Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: Modern Library, . Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper, . ———. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper, . ———. “Letter on Humanism.” In Basic Writings, –. ———. Nietzsche. Trans. Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, and Frank Capuzzi. San Francisco: Harper, . ———. On the Way to Language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. San Francisco: Harper and Row, . ———. “The Origins of the Work of Art.” In Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, . Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Hoy, David Couzens, ed. Foucault: A Critical Reader. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, . Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. David Carr. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University, . Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, . JanMohamed, Abdul. The Death-Bound Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, . ———. “Worldliness-without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Towards a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual.” In Edward Said:

LDG@H8>I:9





A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker, –. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, . Johnson, Barbara. The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Knopf, . Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. New York: Knopf, . Kramer, Stanley, dir. Inherit the Wind. BI:9

———. Signs. Trans. Richard McCleary. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, . ———. The Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge, . ———. The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Writer’s Notes. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, . Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, . Mohanty, J. N. Between Two Worlds: East and West. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, . ———. The Concept of Intentionality. St. Louis: W. H. Green, . ———. Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Meaning. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, . ———. Explorations in Philosophy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, . ———. Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, . ———. Phenomenology and Ontology. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, . ———. The Self and Its Other: Philosophical Essays. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, . Mowitt, John. “Algerian Nation: Fanon’s Fetish.” Cultural Critique, fall , –. Mufti, Aamir R., ed. “Critical Secularism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times.” Special issue. boundary  , no.  (summer ): –. Nandy, Ashis. Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, . Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, . Nehru, Jawaharlal. An Autobiography. London: Bodley Head, . ———. The Discovery of India. New York: J. Day, . Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: J. Currey, . ———. Matigari. Trans. Wangui wa Goro. Oxford: Heinemann, . Nicholson, Linda, ed. Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, . Nicholson, Linda, and Steven Seidman, eds. Social Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Trans. Marion Faber, with S. Lehmann. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, . ———. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, .

LDG@H8>I:9





———. The Portable Nietzsche. Selected and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking, . ———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, . ———. The Use and Abuse of History. Trans. Adrian Collins. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, . ———. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, . Nkrumah, Kwame. The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah. London: Nelson, . Popper, Karl. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. th ed. London: Routledge, . Poulantzas, Nicos. State, Power, Socialism. London: Verso, . Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel, Writing and Transculturalism. London: Routledge, . Pyarelal. Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase.  vols. Ahmadabad: Navajivan Publishing, –. Radhakrishnan, R. “Aesthetic Truth: Production or ‘Letting Be.’ ” In Maps and Mirrors: Topologies of Art and Politics, ed. Steve Martinot, –. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, . ———. “The Changing Subject and the Politics of Theory.” differences , no.  (summer ): –. ———. Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, . ———. “Edward Said’s Literary Humanism.” Cultural Critique, no.  (fall ): –. ———. “Ethnic Identity and Post-structuralist Difference.” Cultural Critique, no.  (spring ): –. ———. “Globality Is Not Worldliness.” Gramma , no.  (): –. ———. “Postmodernism and the Rest of the World.” In The Pre-occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, –. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, . ———. “Rethinking the Political.” Rethinking Marxism , no.  (summer ): –. ———. Theory in an Uneven World. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, . ———. “When Is Democracy Political?” boundary  , no.  (fall ): –. Renan, Ernest. “What Is a Nation?” In Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha, –. New York: Routledge, . Rich, Adrienne. Diving into the Wreck: Poems, –. New York: Norton, . ———. “Notes towards a Politics of Location.” In Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, –. New York: Norton, .

LDG@H8>I:9

Robbins, Bruce. Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress. New York: New York University Press, . ———, ed. Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, . Rorty, Richard. Consequences of Pragmatism: –. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, . Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children: A Novel. New York: Knopf, . ———. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, . Said, Edward W. After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives. Photographs by Jean Mohr. New York: Pantheon, . ———. Beginnings. New York: Columbia University Press, . ———. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, . ———. Freud and the Non-European. London: Verso, . ———. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, . ———. “Intellectuals in the Post-colonial World.” Salmagundi, nos. – (): –. ———. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, . ———. “Orientalism Reconsidered.” Cultural Critique, no.  (): –. ———. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Knopf, . ———. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, . ———. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, . ———. “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” Social Text  (winter ). Sangari, Kumkum, and Sudesh Vaid, eds. Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, . Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. Trans. Alexander Lloyd. New York: New Directions, . ———. “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, . Scott, David. Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, . Searle, John R. Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Sekyi-Otu, Ato. Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, . Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. New York: Knopf, . Senghor, Léopold. “Négritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century.” . In The African Reader: Independent Africa, ed. Wilfrid Cartey and Martin Kilson. New York: Vintage, .

LDG@H8>I:9





Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. Delhi: Kali for Women, . ———. The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology, and Politics. London: Zed Books, . Sidney, Philip Sir. Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy. Ed. Lewis Soens. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, . Simon, Herbert. Models of My Life. New York: Basic Books, . Spanos, William V. America’s Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, . ———. The End of Education: Toward Post-humanism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, . ———. The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, . ———. Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, . Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, . ———. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen, . ———. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, . ———. The Post-colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Ed. Sarah Harasym. New York: Routledge, . Sprinker, Michael, ed. Edward Said: A Critical Reader. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, . ———, ed. Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s “Spectres of Marx.” London: Verso, . Stambaugh, Joan. The Problem of Time in Nietzsche. Trans. John H. Humphrey. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, . Tagore, Rabindranath. “Historicality in Literature.” In History at the Limit of World-History, by Ranajit Guha, –. New York: Columbia University Press, . ———. Nationalism. San Francisco: Book Club of California, . Trinh T. Minh-ha. Woman, Native, Other. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. . Valery, Paul. Selected Writings. New York: New Directions, . Volosinov, V. N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. New York: Seminar Press, . Vygotskii, L. S. The Vygotsky Reader. Ed. Rene Van Der Veer and Jaan Valsinov. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, .

LDG@H8>I:9

West, Cornel. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, . Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism. London: Verso, . Wolin, Sheldon S. The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . Yegenoglu, Meyda. Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Zein-Elabdin, Eiman O., and S. Charusheela, eds. Postcolonialism Meets Economics. New York: Routledge, . Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. London and New York: Routledge, . ———. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, .



LDG@H8>I:9

Index

Achebe, Chinua, 159, 173, 174, 179 Adorno, Theodor, 140, 156, 179 aesthetic truth, 209 affiliation, 177, 180 afrocentrism, 183 Ahmad, Aijaz, 258 n.29 a-letheia, 165, 206, 229 alienation, 17, 35, 187 allegory, 31, 35 Althusser, Louis, 126, 162, 165–166 ambivalence, of the intellectual, 91, 131 amor fati, 44, 61 androcentrism, 183 antagonism, 73, 81, 83, 161, 174–175 anthropocentrism, 2, 33, 62–63, 184, 197, 204, 211 antihumanism in academia, 148 Appadurai, Arjun, 265 n.87 Appiah, Anthony, 256 n.105 Aristotle, 238 Auden, W. H., 233

Balibar, Etienne, 101 Barthes, Roland, 195 Beginnings, 118, 119, 158 Being, 25, 191–193, 195, 198, 200, 204, 207, 237 being of language, 14, 37, 68, 142, 207, 221 Benjamin, Walter, 23, 250 n.17, 252 n.21, 253 n.45 betweenness, 7, 24, 29, 129, 131; cartography of, 8 Bhabha, Homi K., 74, 86, 88, 97 binarity, 37, 63, 81, 218 Black Skin, White Masks, 78, 97 body, 76, 89, 91 Bookchin, Murray, 243–244 Brennan, Tim, 146 Butler, Judith, 19, 108, 132, 193 Camus, Albert, 58, 133, 173 cartography, of betweenness, 8 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 83, 215

chance, 60–62 Chatterjee, Partha, 84, 132 Chomsky, Noam, 144, 151, 161 civil society, 103 Clifford, James, 124 colonialism, 85, 95, 96, 104, 123, 215 colonial modernity, 18, 90, 112, 153 communism, 99 Connolly, William, 132 Conrad, Joseph, 159, 172, 173 contrapuntal reading, 20, 162, 179 countermemory, 46, 174 counterpoint, 174–175 coupure, epistemological, 120 critique, 160–161; deconstructive, 17 culture, 93–95, 102, 103, 193

282

dans le vrai, 48 Dasein, 25, 185, 188, 205, 207, 229 Davis, Angela, 242 decolonization, 81, 101, 109 deconstruction, 89, 161, 223; Derridean, 120–122 Deleuze, Gilles, 51–52, 62, 193 de Man, Paul, 120–121, 131 Derrida, Jacques, 12, 119–121, 129, 142, 160, 175, 179, 185, 238 de-subjectification, 168 dialectic, Hegelian, 109–111 dialectical naturalism, in Bookchin, 244 discourse, 8, 12, 38, 150, 152 “Diving into the Wreck,” 56–60, 65, 70 dominant historiography, 68, 136 double consciousness, 36, 174, 214 double session, 17, 19 Du Bois, W. E. B., 95 Earth-World, in Heidegger, 14, 25, 190, 203–204, 213 ecocentric thinking, 235, 236–237, 238–239, 242–246

index

ecology, 53 écriture, 31–32, 55, 67, 157, 175 Ellison, Ralph, 49 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 214, 218, 231, 239 “empirico-transcendental doublet,” 32, 185 epistemic violence, 209 epistemology, 8, 84, 98, 123, 132, 143, 144–145, 168, 170, 177, 185, 195, 201, 237, 244–245; coupure, 120 essentialism, 37, 80, 96 Eternal Return, 16, 51 Eurocentrism, 80, 99, 123, 171–172, 183, 210, 228 existentialism, 87, 138 experience, 125, 163, 210 Fanon, Frantz, 18, 37, 71, 72, 74–84, 89–97, 101–113; reading of, 98–100 feminine écriture, 55 feminism, 54–56 Foucault, Michel, 8, 12, 120–121, 132, 129, 134, 142, 144, 146, 150, 152, 153, 161, 166–168, 176, 188, 193, 219 freedom, 144, 167 Freud, Sigmund, 171, 180 Freud and the Non-European, 180 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, 193, 240, 216 Ganesha, 31–32 Gelassenheit, 25, 34, 185, 191, 202, 237 genealogy, 151 Ghosh, Amitav, 13, 80 Gordimer, Nadine, 174 governmentality, 201 Gramsci, Antonio, 28, 79–80, 82, 95–96, 13, 110, 136, 153, 227 Grosz, Elizabeth, 45 Guha, Ranajit, 7, 185, 215, 219, 223–224, 226–232 gynocentrism, 183

Hall, Stuart, 98–100, 108 Harvey, David, 185, 236–238, 240, 241 Havel, Vaclav, 251 n. 10 Hegel, G. W. F., 217, 219, 224 hegemony, 53, 101 Heidegger, Martin, 15, 20, 25, 124, 135, 185, 191, 202–210, 214, 221, 226, 237 historicality, 215, 221, 222 historicity, 18, 108, 121, 173, 203, 215, 222, 224 historiography, 33, 71, 222–224, 235; academic, 7, 228; dominant, 17, 68, 69, 136 history, 2–3, 14, 31, 80, 84, 103, 123, 177, 215, 223; of the present, 222 History at the Limit of World-History, 216, 223 home, 169–170, 206 hors-texte, 34 humanism, 2, 6, 20, 79, 84, 124, 133, 134, 136–143, 149, 152, 154, 161, 162, 175–179; secular, 116–117, 159 Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 20, 115, 124, 143, 156 Humanism and Terror, 20 humanities, 135–136, 139 human nature, 35, 147, 198 human rights, 212 human subject, 145, 183, 211 Husserl, Edmund, 188 identity, 83, 92, 147 identity politics, 131 ideology, 133, 149, 152, 166 immanence, in Fanon, 86 intellectual, 73, 78, 90–92, 96, 169; border, 46, 180; native, 79–80, 82, 89, 93–94 intentionality, 9, 25, 119, 123–124, 126–127, 132, 144, 194, 195–196, 199 internationalism, 100 “in the name of,” 18, 214, 224, 240 Invisible Man, 49

Jameson, Fredric, 140 JanMohamed, Abdul, 110, 146, 180 jouissance, 17, 59, 74 justice, 144 Kafka, Franz, 58, 253 n.39 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 49, 199 knowledge, 41–42, 68, 78, 134; subjugated, 150, 187; theoretical, 166 Krell, David Farrell, 206 Lacan, Jacques, 19, 129 language of being, 14, 37, 68, 142, 207, 221 Lazarus, Neil, 100 “Letter on Humanism,” 25 limit, 99; in Guha critique, 218–219 “linguicity,” in Edward Said, 120 literature, 116, 129, 137, 145–146, 157, 167–168, 179, 232 Lloyd, David, 103 looking back, 46–47 Marx, Karl, 246 Marxism, 79, 96, 99, 132, 137, 167, 169, 228 master-slave relationship, 104, 108–110 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 8, 20, 24, 176–177, 184–185, 188–194, 197, 232 metafiction, 2 metaphysics, in humanism, 138 mind-body dualism, 79, 89 Mrs. Dalloway, 57, 251 n.11 Nandy, Ashish, 132 narrative, 32, 172–173 national consciousness, 94, 97, 102 national culture, 94, 107 nationalism, 84, 99–101, 132, 147, 211; against the state, 103; postcolonial, 93, 96 native, 77, 83, 107, 215 native intellectual, 79–80, 82, 89, 93–94

index

283

nature, 2, 26, 38, 65, 185, 190, 192, 193, 211, 214, 237 nature-culture connection, 59, 245 Nausea, 198 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 104–105 new humanism, 37, 85, 100, 112, 215 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 174 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 40–53, 61, 65, 70, 124, 188, 196, 214 non-West, 153, 217

284

poststructuralism, 3–4, 120, 125, 129–130, 136–137 power, 17, 47, 153, 168, 187 primordiality, 27 professionalism, 156 “prose of the world,” 217 psychoanalysis, 162

“occult instability,” in Fanon, 112–113 ontological thinking, 111 ontology, 8, 10, 112–113, 161, 210 oppositional thinkers, 21–22 Orientalism, 20, 117, 123, 125 “Origin of the Work of Art, The,” 190, 202

rationality, 189, 191; bounded, 17 reason, 120, 133, 144, 147; instrumental, 139–140 recognition, 93, 165, 187 renaissance of the state, 103–104 representation, 5, 32, 48, 116, 128, 146, 155, 183 return, 18, 54, 189 revisionism, 4, 31, 69, 71, 93, 96, 106 Rich, Adrienne, 3, 16, 54–60, 65, 193, 208

paranoia, in context of colonialism, 92 pathology, in context of colonialism, 91 people, 72, 74–75, 78, 80, 90, 94, 96, 104, 203 perspectivism, 47–48 pharmakon, 49 phenomenology, 2–3, 7, 10, 13, 84, 187, 193, 197, 199, 201, 212 Phenomenology of Perception, 186, 196 philosophy, 200, 202, 216, 239; and masked philosopher, 168 poetry, 222, 230, 232–234 politics, 98, 144, 168, 170 politics of location, 146 politics of representation, 129, 132 Popper, Karl, 136 post-ality, 4, 122 postcolonial agency, 89, 101 postcoloniality, 3–4, 112 postcolonial nationalism, 93, 96 postcolonial revisionism, 89 postmodernism, 2, 228; and the postcolonial, 106

Said, Edward W., 2, 6, 115–119, 123–132, 135, 161–180 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 8, 154, 173, 179 Scott, David, 249 n.9 second-order thinking, 1, 61 secular humanism, 116–117, 159 secularism, 140, 145 Sekyi-Otu, Ato, 85–89 self-reflexivity, 5, 27, 57, 173, 180 Shadow Lines, The, 13, 80 simulacrum, 38, 165, 195 sovereignty, 213, 218, 220 Spanos, William V., 21, 120, 143. 202 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 28, 70, 120, 132, 228 state, 103, 211 style, politics of, 157 subalternity, 94, 103 subject: of history, 39; human, 10, 26, 33; of reality, 39 subject-object dualism, 11 subject position, 128 subjugated knowledges, 150, 187 suchana, 225

index

symptom, of the political, 19, 59, 104, 91–92, 109, 211 system, 126, 131, 149–150 Tagore, Rabindranath, 185, 216, 219, 223, 225, 228, 233 talisman of Gandhi, 240–241 temporality, 18, 34, 72, 105, 108, 111, 204 text, 131–132, 142, 160, 200 theoretical knowledge, 166 theory, 5, 120, 123, 125, 126, 131, 128, 134, 163–164 tout court, use of, 22, 141 traces, Derridean and Gramscian, 136–137 transcendence, of the human, 53 translatability, 201 translation, 201 truth, 190, 191, 192, 197, 205, 206, 208–210, 223, 227, 232 Übermensch, 16, 61 Use and Abuse of History, The, 15, 40, 43

Vico, Giambattista, 156 violence, epistemic, 175, 209 Visvabharati, 216 Vyasa, 31–32 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 101 West, 177–79, 217–218 Williams, Raymond, 145 winning and losing, 61 Woman Warrior, The, 49, 199 Wordsworth, William, 231 world, 14, 117, 183, 190, 215, 246 World, the Text, and the Critic, The, 123, 125 world history, 215, 216 worlding of the world, 14, 29, 183, 230 worldliness, 2, 14, 117, 128, 130, 164–165, 183, 183, 223 Wretched of the Earth, The, 18, 71–72, 74, 76–77, 83, 91–92, 97, 100, 102–103, 106–107, 215 Žižek, Slavoj, 74, 109

index

285

The chapter entitled “Revisionism and the Subject of History” is a much longer version of my essay that appears in a collection edited by John Hawley and Revathi Krishnaswamy, The Postcolonial and the Global (2007). I would like to thank them, Jeff Moen, and the University of Minnesota Press for granting me permission to reprint. I owe similar thanks to the University of California Press and to Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, my editors, for permitting me to use an essay I wrote for their collection, Edward Said: Emancipation and Representation (2007), as part of my Said chapter in this book.

r. r adhakrishnan is a professor of English, Asian American studies, and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Theory in an Uneven World (2003) and Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location (1996). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Radhakrishnan, R. (Rajagopalan) History, the human, and the world between / R. Radhakrishnan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-8223-3954-0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-13: 978-0-8223-3965-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Phenomenological sociology. 2. Poststructuralism. 3. Humanism. 4. Identity (Psychology). 5. Nature and nurture. I. Title. hm494.r33 2008 301—dc22 2007044863