The_postcolonial_sublime_the_politics_of.pdf

The Postcolonial Sublime: the Politics of Excess from Kant to Rushdie

Brett Nicholls BA (Hons) Murdoch University

This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Murdoch University 1999

i

I declare that this thesis is my own account of my research and contains as its main content work which has not previously been submitted for a degree at any tertiary education institution.

Brett Nicholls

ii

Abstract This thesis shows how the discourse of the postcolonial disrupts the processes of Enlightenment Reason. In attempting to establish the authority and the dynamism of reason, the Idealism of Kant and Hegel sets forth the notion that reason, as a faculty of mind, is forged in and through its mastery over the conscious excesses that characterise the sublime. The necessity of the sublime in the process that established the authority of reason, signals that reason is at once the master of its conscious domain, and yet vulnerable, since its mastery is established in the face of the possibility of its collapse. The possibility of reason’s collapse is a crucial moment in the discourse of the postcolonial. I would wish to employ the term, ‘the postcolonial sublime’, to account for the political nuances of this moment. I argue that the discourse of the postcolonial cannot be understood in terms of the postmodern sublime, as read by Lyotard. In reading Kant, Lyotard utilises the sublime as a site of radical indeterminacy that opens up the “possibility of possibility” in itself. His work, as a consequence, fails to account for the authority of reason. In the discourse of the postcolonial, the sublime (which is utilised to establish reason’s authority) is taken up as a conservative form. The adoption of the sublime in its conservative form is in response to a colonial desire for a global authority based upon the principles of reason. For the discourse of the postcolonial, the sublime thus emerges as a critical site upon which the authority of reason is written. To disrupt this authority it is necessary, therefore, to unleash the sublime, its unpresentable excesses, from the shackles of reason’s processes. This strategy of disruption is what is at stake in the postcolonial sublime. I will examine reason’s processes by taking up the Kantian sublime, and situating it in relation to key postcolonial figures such as Fanon, Bhabha, and Rushdie. iii

The politics of these figures is marked in its insistence upon occupying structures of conservative authority in order to exploit reason’s vulnerable moments, to disrupt, to transform the terms of such structures. The ‘postcolonial sublime’ thus emerges as a critical term that marks this process of occupation as one in which the sublime is wrested from its conservative trajectory, and utilised to disrupt colonial desire. The postcolonial sublime interrupts a postmodern politics that fails to adequately account for reason’s processes, and proposes that a more effective political strategy can begin when reason is taken up in terms of the dynamic processes that are crucial for its authoritative construction. In connecting the sublime to the postcolonial, the thesis contributes to critical discussions concerning the postcolonial object (the hegemony of Western reason), and provides a useful frame for understanding the strategies that the discourse of the postcolonial employs in order to exploit the instability that lies at the core of reason’s processes.

iv

Table of Contents ABSTRACT ______________________________________________________________________ III ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ___________________________________________________________ VII PREFACE: READING THE POSTCOLONIAL SUBLIME _____________________________ VIII TITLE __________________________________________________________________________ VIII OBJECT __________________________________________________________________________ IX CONTEXT ________________________________________________________________________ IX PRETEXT _________________________________________________________________________ XI THIS THESIS ______________________________________________________________________ XI AUTHOR ________________________________________________________________________ XIV NOTES _________________________________________________________________________ XIV CHAPTER ONE: THEORISING THE POSTCOLONIAL SUBLIME________________________ 1 POSTCOLONIAL DISPUTES ____________________________________________________________ 4 Subaltern Studies _______________________________________________________________ 11 Edward Said ___________________________________________________________________ 13 Homi Bhabha __________________________________________________________________ 15 Frantz Fanon __________________________________________________________________ 17 THE DISCOURSE OF THE POSTCOLONIAL ________________________________________________ 18 LOCATING THE POSTCOLONIAL SUBLIME _______________________________________________ 24 UNSETTLING KANT ________________________________________________________________ 31 NOTES __________________________________________________________________________ 45 CHAPTER TWO: KANT, THE SUBLIME, AND THE RULE OF REASON _________________ 53 THE EXCESSES OF THE KANTIAN SELF __________________________________________________ 59 THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN: CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT _____________________________________ 71 SUBLIME CONTEXTS: THE BRITISH TRADITION ___________________________________________ 78 Three Sublimes: Empirical, Mystical, Rational ________________________________________ 82 Sublime Art and Culture __________________________________________________________ 85 THE KANTIAN SUBLIME _____________________________________________________________ 92 CONCLUSION: THE COLONIAL SUBLIME ________________________________________________ 98 NOTES _________________________________________________________________________ 105 CHAPTER THREE: FANON AND THE PROBLEM OF HEGEL’S MASTER AND SLAVE __ 113 HEGEL AND KANT ________________________________________________________________ 115 FANON IN FRANCE ________________________________________________________________ 125 HEGEL’S MASTER AND SLAVE _______________________________________________________ 132 FANON AND HEGEL _______________________________________________________________ 139 NIETZSCHE’S MASTER AND SLAVE ___________________________________________________ 148 FANON AND THE DISCOURSE OF THE SUBLIME ___________________________________________ 154 CONCLUSION: THE SUBLIME POSTCOLONIAL BODY ______________________________________ 163 NOTES _________________________________________________________________________ 168 CHAPTER FOUR: INTERROGATING THE LYOTARDIAN SUBLIME __________________ 174 LYOTARD AND KANT ______________________________________________________________ 176 ART: THE AVANT-GARDE AS SUBLIME EVENT __________________________________________ 180 POLITICS: THE DIFFEREND __________________________________________________________ 187 CONCLUSION: LYOTARD AND THE DISCOURSE OF THE POSTCOLONIAL ________________________ 203 NOTES _________________________________________________________________________ 209 CHAPTER FIVE: HOMI BHABHA’S THE LOCATION OF CULTURE ____________________ 215 BHABHA, FANON AND HEGEL _______________________________________________________ 217 THE POSTMODERN QUESTION _______________________________________________________ 220 THE TIME OF POLITICS _____________________________________________________________ 225 BHABHA’S INFRASTRUCTURES _______________________________________________________ 230 CONCLUSION: BHABHA AND THE POSTCOLONIAL SUBLIME _________________________________ 249 NOTES _________________________________________________________________________ 260

v

CHAPTER SIX: RUSHDIE’S POLITICS OF EXCESS __________________________________ 265 RUSHDIECRITICISM ________________________________________________________________ 266 AHMAD AND THE POLITICS OF EXCESS ________________________________________________ 274 MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN AS ESSAY ON THE POSTCOLONIAL SUBLIME _________________________ 283 A Politics of the Spittoon ________________________________________________________ 290 Contaminations, Leakages, Negotiations ____________________________________________ 301 Failures ______________________________________________________________________ 306 Connections, Border Crossings, Possibilities ________________________________________ 310 CONCLUSION: RUSHDIE’S ART _______________________________________________________ 320 NOTES _________________________________________________________________________ 329 CONCLUSION ____________________________________________________________________ 337 NOTES _________________________________________________________________________ 341 BIBLIOGRAPHY _________________________________________________________________ 342

vi

Acknowledgments The debts incurred in the writing of this thesis are immense. Vijay Mishra’s belief in me, and intellectual direction made this project possible. Horst Ruthrof provided the inspiration to read Lyotard, and engaged me in useful discussions concerning his work. Among others who engaged me in the discussions to which the thesis is addressed are David Wellbourne-Wood, Debbie Rodan, Rama Venkataswarmy, Abdollah Zahiri, Lee Kinsella, and Stephanie Donald. I am particularly indebted to my friend and colleague, Vijay Devadas, with whom I have debated throughout my candidature. The ideas of this thesis have been forged in productive discussions with him. I am grateful to the staff at the Rare Book Archive at the University of Western Australia for their assistance in locating eighteenth-century texts. My heartfelt thanks to Jane, who has endured the pain and pleasure of thesis writing with me. And many thanks to Josh, Zach, and Ashleigh. Your complete disregard for the sanctity of scholarly work kept me sane.

vii

Preface Reading the Postcolonial Sublime

... world history appears to me a sublime object. The world, as an historical subject matter, is basically nothing but the conflict of natural forces among themselves and with man’s freedom; history reports to us the outcome of this battle.1 Title In contrast to the Kantian sublime, which establishes the authority of reason, the postcolonial sublime is the unpresentable excess that remains after reason’s unifying teleology has done its work. To establish the authority of reason, the Idealism of Kant (and Hegel) is built upon the notion that reason, as a faculty of mind, is forged in and through its mastery over the conscious excesses that characterise the sublime. The necessity of the sublime in the process that established the authority of reason, signals that reason is at once the master of its conscious domain, and yet vulnerable, since its mastery is established in the face of the possibility of its collapse. There always already remains in the discourse of reason’s processes an unaccounted for excess that opens up the possibility for a politics of disruption and contamination. This extra excess opens up the possibility of the postcolonial sublime. To connect the trope of the sublime to the term postcolonial is to go to work upon both the sublime and the postcolonial, to read one against the other.

The

postcolonial cannot ‘explain’ the sublime as the sublime cannot ‘explain’ the postcolonial. The thesis is not concerned with what is postcolonial about the sublime, if such is possible, but with what the postcolonial does to/with the sublime. The title of the thesis suggests that the sublime can be taken up in a different form, or more

viii

accurately, the Kantian sublime can be pushed beyond the conservative limits that Kant established. Object The sublime is the object and the subject of the discourse of the postcolonial. The discourse of the postcolonial takes the Kantian sublime as a conservative object and pushes it to extremes. Whilst the sublime in Kant establishes reason’s authority, it also marks the excessiveness of consciousness, the experiential plethora upon which reason goes to work. The Kantian sublime thus opens up a vulnerability, a possibility, a question mark: what if reason fails to bring unity to the experiential manifold? The postcolonial sublime reveals what Idealism could not countenance: this failure is an always already condition of reason. Context I write in the shadow of the vastness of postcolonial literature and theory. My aim is to bring a philosophical concern to this vast field. If it is the case, as John Thieme puts it, that postcolonial literatures “exist at the interface of different literary and cultural traditions” which are “hybridized; and ... ultimately trans-cultural”, I would wish to ask: how might we understand his assertion that such a cultural condition/location opens up “the possibility of dismantling previously maintained, hierarchized notions of centrality”?2 In other words, how might the political effects of such a dismantling be understood?

For Thieme and the increasing volumes of

collections of postcolonial literary theory, postcolonial literatures develop in the shadow of empire, and through a process of intermixing and hybridisation transform the English canon, and the English language.3 I do not wish to take issue with this assertion upon the surface. Rather, I would wish to draw out the nuances, the scandalous nature of the transformation of the English canon. What is lacking in postcolonialist accounts of the

ix

process of hybridisation, is that sense of transgression, the pungent political edge that marks the hybrid in the context of (neo)colonialist sensibilities. This thesis seeks to chart this political edge. As publications of collections of postcolonial literature and critical theory continue unabated,4 and signal what Christian Moraru calls “the urgency” of continual “retooling in the wake of [the] socio-cultural and political redeployments of [the] late twentieth-century”,5 this thesis can be understood as a gesture toward the (colonial) moment to which this flurry of publication returns. Such a return is paradoxical. Ultimately the discourse of the postcolonial looks forward by looking back.

Not

convinced that colonialism is dead and buried, it seeks out its vestiges, its ghostly manifestation in the ‘socio-cultural and political redeployments of the late twentiethcentury’. In a political climate that is becoming increasingly conservative, the thesis takes up the central tenets of Idealism as a metaphor for the structure of contemporary politics in the West. Such tenets are the object of Žižek’s indictment of the dominant discourse of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism, Žižek writes, is an “ideal form of ideology”. Whilst it seeks to promote difference and individual interest, it actually becomes the ‘new’ master narrative through which the myth of nation is imagined. In other words, multiculturalism upon the surface promotes the racial and cultural particular, and suggests that cultural ‘roots’ are valid, but is a strategy that subordinates the particular under the universal. Multiculturalism, Žižek tells us, “conceals the fact that the subject is already thoroughly ‘rootless’, that his true position is the void of universality”. As a strategy of concealment, multiculturalism thus diverts attention away from the myth of nation and its Capitalist logic, and focuses upon the issue of cultural difference. As a consequence, Žižek explains, “the basic homogeneity of the capitalist system remains intact”.6

x

If we follow Žižek, it is the case that contemporary conservative politics replays what is a central problem for Idealism: the possibility of subordinating the particular under the universal. The postcolonial sublime takes up this conservatism, the claim to have united the particular as excess under the banner of the universal myth of nation, and reveals the impossibility of this process. As framed by the thesis, the discourse of the postcolonial is thus endowed with a pungent political edge, one that disrupts, contaminates and alters the structure of Western hegemony. Pretext The thesis is the product of an oscillation between two crucial thoughts: Lyotard’s theory of differend and Homi Bhabha’s much used notion of hybridity. In the context that I have imagined, each is concerned with the politics of excess, the too much cultural meaning that resists being subordinated to a single rule. They question the terms in which universalist systems are drawn up. My original plan was to connect Lyotard’s differend with Bhabha’s hybridity, to utilise one in order to explain the other. But I found that Lyotard and Bhabha could not be reduced to the order of the same. I was thus forced to consider each in his own terms in the context of what I perceive is the increasing momentum of a conservative politics in the West. In this thesis I take up Bhabha’s contaminations as opposed to the singularity of Lyotard’s phrase events. The oscillation between them, however, remains far from settled. This Thesis The thesis will examine the philosophical underpinning of Western hegemony by taking up the Kantian sublime and its role in establishing the authority of reason. And, in situating the Kantian sublime in relation to key postcolonial figures such as Fanon, Bhabha, and Rushdie, the thesis will chart the political pungency of the discourse of the postcolonial. What is crucial is that these key postcolonial figures

xi

occupy structures of conservative authority to exploit reason’s vulnerable moments. They thus disrupt and transform the terms of such structures. Structured as a kind of drift, chapter one explores the architecture of the discourse of the postcolonial, and establishes a link between its architecture and the discourse of the sublime.

By drawing upon Christian Moraru’s ‘refiguration’ of

postcoloniality, I argue that the discourse of the postcolonial opens up an incomprehensible and disturbing space within the authority of the metropolitan centre. Chapter two begins the task of mapping the postcolonial sublime. I undertake a reading of Kant’s architectonic system in terms of the location of the sublime within it, and connect the nuances of the Kantian sublime to the European desire for global centrality. The problematic that inhabits Kant coincides with this desire for centrality. Through an engagement with Gordon Bennett’s painting, I argue that the European desire for centrality is the object of postcolonial disruption, and (paradoxically) that the processes utilised to establish this centrality also provides the basis for such disruption. Chapter three outlines the first stage of the terms of such a postcolonial critique. I take up Hegel’s dissatisfaction with Kantian thought, in order to further establish the European desire for centrality, and then turn to Fanon’s complex engagement with Hegel as an important instance of the postcolonial sublime. I show that in Hegel’s critique of Kant, and the philosophical system that he constructs, there emerges a vulnerability that Fanon exploits. The Kantian sublime with its noble intentions is subverted by a base and despised sublimity, the black body. Having located Fanon’s critical position in relation to Idealism, the thesis takes a short detour in Chapter four to consider the postmodern sublime as set forth by Lyotard. This detour serves as a counter-point in my discussion concerning the postcolonial sublime. I argue that the discourse of the postcolonial cannot be understood in terms of the postmodern sublime, as read by Lyotard. In reading Kant, Lyotard utilises the

xii

sublime as a site of radical indeterminacy that opens up the “possibility of possibility” in itself. His work, as a consequence, fails to account for the authority of reason. Chapter five turns back to the postcolonial sublime. I take up the work of Homi Bhabha critically in order to open up the important location of the postcolonial sublime within it. Bhabha’s discursive concerns seek to disrupt the authority of reason by unleashing the sublime from its shackles. In tracing Bhabha’s infrastructures I show how a politics of excess plays a crucial role in the disruptive capacity of the postcolonial.

I also defend Bhabha’s discursive concerns against the charge of

pantextualism. In connecting Bhabha to the material excesses in Fanon, my contention is that his work seeks to open up a transgressive material desire in the discursive domain. Finally the thesis turns to a lengthy exploration of Salman Rushdie’s seminal work, Midnight’s Children, and the critical concerns that have been drawn up around his work generally. I outline what I consider to be an important assumption concerning the social framing of Rushdie’s literature. ‘Rushdiecriticism’ is caught in a Romantic literary model, that either denounces or celebrates his work on the basis of its complicity in the myth of a heroic literature. I contend that his work resists at every turn the romantic model that dominates Rushdiecriticism. I then turn to Aijaz Ahmad’s denouncement of Rushdie as an irresponsible postmodern, as a way ‘into’ Rushdie’s texts. We find in Ahmad’s propensity for a systematic approach a leakage, a moment of excess that exemplifies, perfectly, the strategies employed in Rushdie’s sublime resistance to neat categorisation. In response to Ahmad I then undertake a reading of Midnight’s Children in order to chart the political possibilities that Rushdie opens up. Finally the chapter takes up Rushdie as artist, and with his own statements concerning the public necessity of the artist in mind, I theorise his work and its disturbances in terms of what I have called the postcolonial sublime.

xiii

Author The author is not a philosopher. I don’t pretend to be able to explain the discourse of the postcolonial. It is precisely the inexplicability of the postcolonial that promotes that yet-to-be-decided feeling that has led me to the sublime. The thesis represents an attempt to open up the feeling of incompleteness as a productive site. In terms of my white masculine cultural history — its undeniable conservative inscriptions — incompleteness has been considered an enemy that urgently needs to be done away with. The thesis seeks to interrupt the structures of the necessity of this expulsion, in order to seize its impossibility as an affirmative moment. Notes 1

Friedrich von Schiller, On the Sublime, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1966), 206-207. 2

John Thieme, ed. The Arnold Anthology of Post-colonial Literatures in English (London: Arnold, 1996), 4. 3

For a provocative articulation of this point, see Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 7. 4

See for instance Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Post-colonial Theory, India, and the Mystic (London: Routledge, 1999); Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998); Dennis Walder, Post-colonial Literatures in English: History, Language, Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literatures (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Bruce King, ed. New National and Post-colonial Literatures: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Susan Bassett, Harish Trivedi, ed. Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 1998). 5

Christian Moraru, “Refiguring the Postcolonial: The Transnational Challenges”, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 28, no. 4 (1997), 171. 6

Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism”, New left Review, 225 (1997), 44, 46.

xiv

Chapter One Theorising the Postcolonial Sublime

With what appears to be many entrances and exits, the term ‘postcolonial’ can be considered as an uncanny presence on the contemporary critical scene. To enter this critical terrain is to enter a labyrinthine architecture with endless corridors and staircases, seemingly infinite rooms, and cracked leaky walls. As Omar in Rushdie’s Shakil mansion found the mansion’s seeming infiniteness terrifying — the organisation of its contents did not seem to follow established rules and principles — in many ways ‘postcolonial’ remains elusive and unfamiliar. Indeed one walks into this critical terrain upon an old worn carpet that has been trodden upon by a disparate host of theorists, writers and activists. And with the haunting sounds of the ghosts of the colonial past, the theorist of the postcolonial must struggle in self-conscious spaces that are uncertain, indeterminate, and transgressive. This accent upon unfamiliarity suggests that the referents of ‘postcolonial’ — the condition of postcoloniality, the political strategy of postcolonialism, and the postcolonial self (to tentatively name a few) — remain obscure. As Stephen Slemon astutely puts it, postcolonialism “de-scribes a remarkably heterogeneous set of subject positions, professional fields, and critical enterprises”. The term evokes a sense of confusion, since it has been utilised, Slemon continues,

as a way of ordering a critique of totalising forms of Western historicism; as a portmanteau term for a re-tooled notion of ‘class,’ as a subset of both postmodernism and post-structuralism … as the name for a condition of nativist longing in post-independence national groupings; as a cultural marker of non1

residency for a third-world intellectual cadre; as the inevitable underside of a fractured and ambivalent discourse of colonialist power; as an oppositional form of ‘reading practice’.1

Thus well worn questions concerning the legitimacy of critical discussions that utilise the term, and the ‘reality’ of its referents, always already inhabit such undertakings. The term and its referents are seemingly always in dispute. This is why a critical selfconsciousness always already accompanies the use of this term. Moreover, it is also the case that any employment of ‘postcolonial’ is at once bound up in its specificities, as it is immediately employed, and also a part of much broader theoretical discussions. It is perhaps a condition of contemporary theory that to write is not only to deal with specificities, it is to be drawn into much larger structures of similarity and difference. Contemporary theory obeys the logic of what T. S. Eliot called “tradition”. “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone”, Eliot declares, “you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead”.2 We can add the living too. From this compulsion to contrast and compare there seems to be no escape. The difficulty that I have suggested marks the term can also be attributed to the term’s relative newness on the critical scene.

And without a master text (no

‘Architext’), though clearly there are key figures, ‘postcolonial’ as a critical term appears as a recent arrival upon what is in many respects a well established critical terrain: the interrogations of Idealism and Humanism that began in the works of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. For many critics this ‘lateness’ and lack of a coherent centre is a sign of critical incompleteness, even naivety. Indeed, as Jasper Goss, lending some sagacity to the term, puts it, “postcolonial analysis require[s] a thorough reworking before postcolonialism can be used for radical and progressive projects”. The basis for

2

this assertion lies less with political motivation than with the “theoretical vagaries”, that, as consequence of this overly full signifier, give rise to a “lack of clarity”.3 In the wake of such critiques ‘postcolonial’ can be read as an eager but naive migrant, who has struggled to blend into the adopted landscape. But I would suggest that ‘postcolonial’, precisely because it is such an unsettled term, can be characterised in a much more productive manner. It seems to me that the discussions that it has provoked, and continues to provoke, signal that crucial issues concerning the social and political formations of the late Twentieth Century are being productively contested.

Edward Said’s politically attuned description of Subaltern

Studies serves as an apt exemplar of such productive disputes. He writes:

[Subaltern Studies] is in fact a hybrid, partaking jointly of European and Western streams and of native Asian, Caribbean, Latin American, or African strands. None of the Subaltern Studies scholars is anything less than a critical student of Karl Marx, for example, and all of them have been influenced by many varieties of Western Marxism, Gramsci’s most eminently. In addition, the influence of structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, Roland Barthes and Louis Althusser is evident, along with the influence of British and American thinkers, like E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and others.4

Whilst Goss deplores what for him are ‘theoretical vagaries’, Said locates the exponents of ‘postcolonial’ in a dynamic field of practices and ideas. What is striking is Said’s use of the term ‘influence’. In situating non-Indian thinkers in a dynamic relation with Subaltern Studies, “what we have here”, he contends, “is the sharing of a paradigm, rather than slavish copying”.5 ‘Postcolonial’ can thus be understood as a term upon which several analytical and political strategies and concerns converge. Despite its

3

“astounding built-in heterogeneity”,6 to borrow a phrase from Moraru, the term belongs to a political, cultural, and philosophical engagement in the dismantled colonial empire. It is also utilised, as a consequence of its link to colonialism, in critiques of the intellectual life that defines itself, antagonistic or otherwise, in relation to, what could be called, an imperial consciousness. As such the discourses that employ ‘postcolonial’ are a part of the critique of the West’s critique of metaphysics. Postcolonial Disputes David Spurr advances a succinct understanding of ‘postcolonial’ as a critical term. I would wish to take this up. He explains:

‘Postcolonial’ is a word that engenders even more debate than ‘colonial’, in part because of the ambiguous relation between these two. I shall refer to postcolonial in two ways: as an historical situation marked by the dismantling of traditional institutions of colonial power, and as a search for alternatives to the discourses of the colonial era. The first is an object of empirical knowledge — new flags fly, new political formations come into being. The second is both an intellectual project and a transcultural condition that includes, along with new possibilities, certain crises of identity and representation.7

Two important issues emerge here. The first concerns the initial tide of the political dismantling of the world’s Empires after the second World War. The devastation of the War upon Europe,8 as Hobsbawm contends, “fatally damaged the old colonialists”. In the context of the strong momentum of the independence movements in the colonies, the impact of War signalled “that white men and their states could be defeated, shamefully and dishonourably”.

Despite a demonstration of military strength and

national unity, the victories of the war ironically rendered “the old colonial powers ... 4

too weak ... to restore their old positions”.9 The war revealed an economic and psychic vulnerability, one that the old colonial powers were forced to deal with. Unable to continue along the lines the empire had charted, the old colonial powers altered the political and economic landscape. It is upon this altered landscape that postcolonial theory is (characteristically) written. Clearly the impact of the war altered the destination of Europe. But the question of the power of the West and its relation to the former colonies remains far from settled. It may be that new strategies of advantage have perniciously been called forth. Thus whilst debates concerning the formation of nation-states are drawn up in terms of the necessity of invented spatio-temporal traditions (Gellner, Giddens, Hobsbawm, Anderson)10 that appear to be decidedly European in form and purpose,11 the independent national status of the former colonies, in the light of the changing fortunes of the ‘old colonialists’, remains ambiguous. As Partha Chatterjee contends in his Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, the problem of the nationalisms of the former colonies stems from the alliance of Enlightenment reason, capitalism, and native elites.12 Whilst the native elites successfully contested the West’s assumed authority and its civilising mission (anti-colonialism), they failed to dislodge Western reason’s entanglement with capitalism.

As Nehru marginalised Gandhi’s ruralist and

decentralised modes of organisation (which included Gandhi’s desire for the dismantling of the India Congress after independence) in the name of ‘PostEnlightenment rationalism’, India was catapulted onto the global economic arena. Nehru’s Congress, for Chatterjee, effectively assumed the status of a player upon the scene of global capitalism. Post-colonial nationalism can thus be (re)read as an attempt to negotiate and accommodate global capitalism. Forged in and through a desire to take up the status that global capitalism promises, to adopt, as Chatterjee puts it, “the distinctively modern, or 20th century, way of looking at history and society”,13 there

5

thus remains unresolved tensions between ‘capital’, as represented by the state and its complicity with the West, and ‘the people’ who have been co-opted into this complicity. With capital as the dominating principle of the state (and increasingly so), administered through terms such as ‘development’ and ‘industrialisation’, any form of oppositional community is considered anti-national, and consequently is (violently) suppressed.14 In the light of Chatterjee’s analysis, ‘postcoloniality’ emerges as a condition that is marked by the failure of the nationalist endeavours of the formerly colonised nationstates.15 Rather than deliver the colonies from the tyranny of the West’s power, the former colonies plunged, through the guidance of the native elite, back into the hands of the West. The last decade has been marked by such a disturbing irony. As Goss insightfully writes, it has “demonstrated the failure of those projects of Third World national liberation”. As the “‘flag raising’ reinforced the new states’ position in the world ... their existence as nations … meant their interactions were formed and adjudicated by the same groups they had rejected”.16 The recent Asian currency crises reinforces Goss’ thesis. Asia’s dependence upon the West has become increasingly marked, firstly, through the IMF, and secondly, through the notion that Asian governments are incompetent economic managers.17 This suggests that the national liberation struggle of the native elite in effect was a struggle waged on the coloniser’s terms. ‘Independence’ thus became closely linked to the capacity for self-governance, and as such, served and continues to serve as a basis for, as Chatterjee’s discerning analysis reveals, the West merely retaining its assumed authority over the former colonies, who appear as Western nationalism’s dark side. It would be an understatement to say that writers who utilise ‘postcolonial’ have grappled with the implications that the failure of nationalist independence movements have effected. The issue of failed nationalism is a moot point. It has fuelled the critical interrogation of ‘postcolonial’ as a vagrant term, and perhaps is one of the causes of the

6

disturbing heterogeneity that marks it.18 If prominent thinkers utilise ‘postcoloniality’ in order to foreground nationalism’s ‘inventedness’ and its violence, critical opponents refuse to abandon the political predicament of ‘Third World’ nations. Rather than take up what Ernest Renan calls the “brutality”19 of national unity, Ahmad and others contend that the postcolonial critique of nationalism overlooks the condition of global capitalism as the cause of the failure of national liberation struggles. Among the thinkers that offer a critique of nationalism we find the work of Homi Bhabha, who reads the contemporary global condition in terms of questions of agency, as opposed to the discursive structurations (effects) of nationalist signification (as in Said’s Orientalism). As such he restages native resistance as less a nationalist movement than the seizure of the ambivalent (discursive) effects of localised colonial authority. And Gayatri Spivak discloses the overdetermination of colonial power by evoking race, class, and gender differences, and also in foregrounding the problem of political legitimation, accounts for the irreducible figure of the subaltern woman, who occupies a cultural space that can be neither excluded from, nor represented in the discourse of the nation (Spivak is thus at odds with Bhabha).20 Among the opponents to such a critique we find Aijaz Ahmad.

Contra Bhabha and Spivak, Ahmad contends that the

postmodernist and poststructuralist theoretical positions, that have been taken up in the postcolonial critique of nationalism, in effect mean that the impact of colonialism can never be established. Its subjects — the colonised, colonisers, postcolonials — remain ambiguous. “The fundamental effect of constructing this globalised transhistoricity of colonialism”, he contends, “is one of evacuating the very meaning of the word and dispersing that meaning so wide that we can no longer speak of determinate structures such as that of the postcolonial state, the role of the state in reformulating the compact between the imperialist and the national capitals, the new but nationally differentiated labour regimes, legislations, cultural complexes, etc.”.21 Similarly, Dirlik argues that the

7

current status of both postcolonial theory since the 1980s, and its main protagonists upon the academic scene, are directly related to shifts in the nature of global capitalism. This is a moment in which, he writes, “for the first time in the history of capitalism … the capitalist mode of production [finds itself] divorced from its historically specific origins in Europe. … The narrative of capitalism is [thus] no longer a narrative of the history of Europe; non-European capitalist societies now make their own claims on the history of capitalism”.

This “economic fragmentation” corresponds to a “cultural

fragmentation” that bears more than a casual resemblance to the central premises of postmodernism. The postcolonial, for Dirlik, refuses to consider itself in terms of this global capitalist condition. It thus “is designed to avoid making sense of the current crises and, in the process … cover[s] up … a global capitalism of which … [postcolonial intellectuals] are not so much victims as beneficiaries”.22 These disputes obviously draw upon and engage in what has been a central critical debate between poststructuralism/postmodernism and variants of historical materialism on the academic left for some decades. The critical interrogations of postcoloniality by Ahmad and Dirlik, that I have outlined, draw upon the poststructural/postmodern pejoratively in order to denounce Bhabharian forms of postcolonial analysis.23 As such the tenuous link between the postmodern and the postcolonial continues to be debated,24 and, given the ambiguity of the independence of the nation-states of the former colonies, the issue of the validity of the ‘post’ in postcolonial as designating ‘after’ colonialism has been a contentious issue.25 It is not my intention to deal directly with these debates (though the thesis takes up the possibilities that Bhabha’s work affords). It will suffice to say that Dirlik’s claim concerning the relative autonomy of non-European capitalist societies, in the context of the current Asian economic crises, needs to be significantly rethought. In regard to the question of the ‘post’, I would argue that there is no reason to think that ‘post’, ‘after’,

8

as a temporal moment signifies a new radical freedom for the formerly colonised. The thesis takes as its point of departure the notion that ‘post’, in this context, signifies that there has been an historical shift in the relations of power between the coloniser and the colonised that demands new modes of critical thinking. As Prakash usefully puts it, postcoloniality marks “a new beginning, one in which certain old modes of domination may persist and acquire new forms of sustenance, but one that marks the end of an era”.26 I would wish to locate the scope and aim of this thesis in relation to this shifting terrain. My position on the postcolonial and the postmodern will thus become evident in due course. To move onto Spurr’s second point, in the wake of the dismantling of empire, a condition of transculturation arises. Clearly colonialism, global industrialisation, and emergent nation-states, produced large scale migration. The contemporary world is thus marked by change, movement, what James Clifford calls a “cultural problematic” in which, years of “colonial encounter ... effected a process of pollination and transplanting”.27 I would wish to contend that this problematic, one that increasingly disturbs the efficacy of Western nationalism, is one of the most urgent issues of our time. Clifford continues:

We are seeing signs that the privilege given to natural languages and, as it were, natural cultures, is dissolving. These objects and epistemological grounds are now appearing as constructs, achieved fictions, containing and domesticating heteroglossia. In a world where syncretism and parodic invention are becoming the rule, not the exception, an urban, multinational world of institutional transience — where American clothes made in Korea are worn by young people in Russia, where everyone’s ‘roots’ are in some degree cut — in such a world it

9

becomes increasingly difficult to attach human identity and meaning to a coherent ‘culture’ or ‘language’.28

In the context of the failure of nationalism, and the debates that this has effected, this movement and overlapping of selves complicates what it means to be a citizen in the nation-state. If, as Poole succinctly puts it, “Nationalism comes on the scene when the idea that a people is constituted as a political community through a shared cultural identity enters political discourse, and a large (enough) number of people come to believe that this identity takes priority over others”,29 then clearly the ambiguous nationalism of the former colonies, migrants, and the culturally displaced, in spite of their different political predicaments, complicate the nationalist capacity of nationstates. To continue with Spurr, the postcolonial self emerges in that difficult space between possibility and crises. Rather than an existential problem, this space opens up questions concerning cultural authenticity and political legitimacy.

As the former

colonisers are forced to deal with the First World now appearing in the Third (South Korea, sections of Bombay and Santiago) while the Third World grows in the first (Los Angeles, Brixton and outer Paris),30 the monolithic national myths that hover over the contemporary nation-state are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. Thus far the disputes that draw the muddy term ‘postcolonial’ into their critical orbit, seem, as Spurr’s succinct definition reveals, to employ the term as the political goal to move beyond and outside colonialism. This goal, as Chatterjee shows, has been tainted by the failure of nationalist liberation projects to usher in the new freedoms that their strategies promised.

Conversely, the term also describes the condition of

transculturation, that has been effected by the processes of colonialism. Postcolonial is utilised as both a project and a condition. The former relates, seemingly, to the former colonies and their relationships with the West. The latter relates to the West, or at least

10

to the Western ideals that arise as obstacles to immigrants to the West, and those that have found it difficult to be inscribed into the nationalisms of the former colonies. Central in both undertakings of the term, is the notion that fixity, or the unity that is expressed in monolithic nationalist discourses, is the enemy of political freedom. The political focus of postcoloniality is precisely the fixity of Western nationalism, culture, and philosophy. In order to chart what is at stake in the discourse of the postcolonial, this thesis connects this fixity to the processes of Enlightenment reason. With this emphasis upon what I have called the fixity of Western national, cultural, and philosophical forms in mind, I would wish, at this point, to chart some of the key figures and ideas that have contributed to the formation of ‘postcolonial’ as a prominent critical term. I will begin with the Subaltern Studies group, which placed the question of nationalism firmly upon the agenda of postcolonial dispute. Subaltern Studies By drawing upon Gramsci, and some aspects of poststructuralism, Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others, have critically contested imperialist and nationalist accounts of Indian history. Chakrabarty contends:

nationalist history, in spite of its anti-imperialist stance and substance, shared a deeply embedded meta-narrative with imperialist accounts of British India. This was the meta-narrative of the modern state. If the British plotted Indian pasts in terms of a movement from ‘despotism’ to a British-inspired ‘rule of law’ (instituted by the colonial state), nationalist history-writing portrayed all antiimperialist struggles in India as steps towards a sovereign state, a state that would one day stand on the very foundations that the imperialists themselves had laid. The life of the people was thus subsumed within a hallowed biography ! which is what this history was ! of the (nation-)state.31 11

The central aim of Subaltern Studies is to open up the possibility of transforming the prevailing understandings of the historical location of Subalterns within Indian nationalist discourses. Guha, who could be considered as the intellectual ‘origin’ of Subaltern theory, contends that the “historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism — colonialist elitism and bourgeois nationalist elitism”. This means that Subalterns have been represented (by the elite) as the simple followers of the Indian elite’s nationalist liberation movements. Such elitism, Guha argues, “fails to acknowledge, far less interpret, the contribution made by the people on their own, that is, independently of the elite to the making and development of this nationalism”.32 Crucially this critical undertaking faces an important conceptual difficulty. As Gyan Prakash explains, Subaltern Studies “seeks to undo the Eurocentrism produced by the institution of the West’s trajectory, its appropriation of the other as History”.33 This means that rather than take up, what could be considered, conventional critical tools in order to mount a challenge dialectically, Subaltern Studies seeks a strategy for dislocating the Other from the Eurocentric narrative order in which the Other had already been located. Despite some Subaltern scholars’ scepticism concerning the capacity of postmodern and poststructuralist forms of analysis, the strength of this work lies in its capacity to problematise, and to question the very terms of such a critique of the Eurocentric order.

To unproblematically claim the space of ‘other’, of the

‘Subaltern’ as a fixed subjective space from which to launch an attack, is to merely replay the negative effects of the European and Indian elite’s imagination upon the writing of Subaltern selves. Subaltern consciousness thus emerges as a problematic term, but a problematic that turns out to be critically productive. For Spivak the strength of Subaltern Studies lies precisely in its foregrounding of, what she calls, the ‘problem of Subaltern consciousness’. Whilst she concedes that

12

the group is susceptible to “recovering a consciousness ... within the post-Enlightenment tradition”, she also finds another “force ... which would contradict such a metaphysics”. What Spivak points to, in this regard, is a situated, material notion of consciousness, for “consciousness here”, she continues, “is not consciousness-in-general, but a historicized political species thereof, subaltern consciousness”. Thus by drawing on the poststructuralist language of ‘subject-effect’, Spivak reads “the project to retrieve the subaltern consciousness as the attempt to undo a massive historiographic metalepsis”, since “the texts of counter-insurgency locate ... a ‘will’ [of the people] as the sovereign cause when it is no more than an effect of the subaltern subject-effect”.34 Subaltern Studies thus seeks to disrupt the elitist assumption that the texts of counter-insurgency are effects of the subaltern as subject. It assumes the reverse to be the case. But this reversing gesture does not pave the way for Realism: ‘this is what the will of the Subaltern actually is’. Instead the relationship between the Subaltern and the texts of counter-insurgency can be rewritten, as Spivak contends, in order to “‘situate’ the effect of the subject as subaltern”.35 What becomes crucial is the disjunction between subject and Subaltern that Spivak’s formulation foregrounds. The two are not necessarily synonymous. If ‘Subaltern’ is a discursive formation, then it is possible to locate the Subaltern as an effect whilst at the same time disavowing claims to an authentic Subalternity. There is more to the Subaltern than the discourse on and of the Subaltern can account for. Edward Said Edward Said’s Orientialism presents another important moment in postcolonial theory. Perhaps the most significant reworking of Foucault’s discourse analysis, the work interrogates the category ‘Orient’, specifically the political effects of its discursive construction through Orientalist scholarship. Said contends that rather than objective science, Orientalism (aesthetically) produced and perpetuated the binary opposition, 13

East/West.

The West defined its civility in relation to an orientalist other, who

embodied all that the West was not: irrational, war mongering, devious, lazy, sadistic, oversexed degenerate, slave trader etc. As “an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness”, the outcomes of Oriental scholarship structured interchanges between the West and the West’s perceived others. This structuring of the West’s relation to the Orient allowed for the West’s “flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand”. 36 Said’s important critical contribution can be found in that moment in which he seeks to define and disrupt the structure of the East/West binary. He asserts:

we need not look for correspondence between the language used to depict the Orient and the Orient itself, not so much because the language is inaccurate but because it is not even trying to be accurate. What it is trying to do, as Dante tried to do in the Inferno, is at one and the same time to characterize the Orient as alien and to incorporate it schematically on a theatrical stage whose audience, manager, and actors are for Europe, and only for Europe.37

This formulation foregrounds the discursive effects of imperialism as a pedagogic mechanism that claims to tell its subjects who they are.

Said thus mounts an

epistemological challenge to this assumed pedagogic authority.

As a system of

discursive knowledge of the Orient that is quoted (almost) endlessly from writer to writer, Orientalism emerges as less an exact science in the service of imperialism than a system of tropes repeated constantly until it reaches canonical status and becomes ‘truth’. Orientalist truth is thus a fiction, a forgotten metaphor (Nietzsche).

14

What we are left with as a consequence of Said’s critical epistemology is a more general moment in which the task of writing culture is problematised. The work implies that representations of culture can only be fictions. This means that a self-reflexive writing practice is required.

Perhaps Said is suggesting a foregrounded politics,

whereby the political positioning of the writer in relation to the object of study is critically examined as part of the work, and constantly brought into question. Homi Bhabha The work of Homi Bhabha also occupies another important place in the postcolonial canon.

In working upon Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean

deconstruction (among others), Bhabha’s critical accent can be described in transcendental (Kantian) terms. Rather than a dialectical approach to culture, which would emphasise, for example, class, Bhabha seizes subjectivity in terms of cultural location and psyche in order to alter the destination of discussions on colonial discourse. Bhabha clarifies his critical position in relation to the epistemological effects of imperialism raised by Said:

My shift from the cultural as an epistemological object to culture as an enactive, enunciatory site opens up possibilities for other ‘times’ of cultural meaning (retroactive, prefigurative) and other narrative spaces (fantasmic, metaphorical). My purpose in specifying the enunciative present in the articulation of culture is to provide a process by which objectified others may be turned into subjects of their history and experience. ... Postcolonial and black critiques propose forms of contestatory subjectivities that are empowered in the act of erasing the politics of binary opposition.38

15

This emphasis upon the temporal moment, the instant in which identity is played out, deviates sharply from Said’s politics in Orientalism, which locates identity in Orientalism’s discursive (pedagogic) effects. Whilst recognising the violent impact of pedagogic discourses such as Orientalism, Bhabha seizes moments of ambivalence — in “the production of the nation as narration there is a split between the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative”39 — as expressed through critical terms such as hybridity, mimicry, sly civility, subalternity, translation, and time lag, in order to foreground the complexity of colonial discourse.

As his stated aim reveals, his work draws upon, what is

considered, the (local) location of selves, that is to say the temporal moment in which the performative (the self as agent) puts the pedagogic (the nation’s claim to tell its citizens who they are) into doubt. Thus, with this emphasis upon the temporal and the local as the site in which identity is played out, Bhabha challenges universal notions such as nation and race. Bhabha seems to draw upon postcoloniality as a condition (of being) that is located in and against the colonial, rather than as a project that seeks to formulate the possibility of a condition beyond and outside colonial discourse, as is the case with Said and the Subaltern studies group (for instance, Spivak’s strategic essentialism). Crucially, Bhabha seizes migration as the defining trope of the time, and, unlike Said, seeks to open up the political possibilities that migration gives rise to. Whilst the productive split space of the pedagogic and the performative can be understood in transcendental terms, there is a sense in which this transcendental condition’s most apt occupants, if I can use such terms, are migrants. Since culture and politics are played out in the relationship of the coloniser and the colonised, the nation and the citizen, the pedagogic and the performative, the psychological predicament of migration, for Bhabha, intensifies the ambivalence that characterises that split space between what-

16

was-and-will-be and what-is, and opens up the performative as a politically productive site. Frantz Fanon Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have been incisive texts for thinkers such as Said and Bhabha. Fanon’s struggle with the psychological predicament of the colonial self, through a range of theoretical platforms — Lacan, Marx, and Hegel — have opened up a wide range of critical debates and concerns.40 For Fanon, postcoloniality is at once a psychological and cultural condition and an historical moment that marks a shift, as I have suggested, in the relations of power between the former colonisers and the formerly colonised. The postcolonial moment gives rise to a particular psychological problematic — as Fanon contends, historically, “the Negro steeped in the inessentiality of servitude was set free by his master. He did not fight for his freedom”41 — that opens up a gap between the coloniser’s what-can-be and the colonised what-is. Crucially, in seizing the space of what-is, Fanon reveals the impossibility of the what-can-be, and thus opens up the necessity for finding and articulating new modes of thinking and being that exceed the colonial promise of what-can-be.

This disjunction between what-can-be and its

impossibility demonstrates that colonial discourse, rather than producing an ‘other’ as the same, actually opens up a space of dislocation, of ambivalence. Bhabha in seizing Fanon’s use of Lacan thus contends:

as Fanon attempts such audacious, often impossible transformations of truth and value, the jagged testimony of colonial dislocation, its displacement of time and person, its defilement of culture and territory, refuses the ambition of any ‘total’ theory of colonial oppression.42

17

This emphasis on dislocation is set forth in many sections of Fanon’s work. One example is articulated thus: “the fact that the newly returned Negro adopts a language different from that of the group into which he was born is evidence of a dislocation, a separation”.43 The transformative play here reveals the impossibility of retracing an original state, and demands the task of, in his more humanistic moments, of finding new modes of thinking and being, and in his more critical moments, opening up the political possibilities of the performative in order to disrupt the dialectical basis of the pedagogic apparatus. I will deal specifically with the performative disruptions of Fanon in chapter three. The Discourse of the Postcolonial Despite the differences that can be seen between these key thinkers, this postcolonial archive (of sorts) constitutes the tenuous framework of what could be called the discourse of the postcolonial. Several important consistencies can be found. Firstly, each undertaking attempts a radical critique of Western hegemony in its various forms. In the words of Radhakrishnan, each seizes the notion that:

it is important for postcolonials of the diaspora to reject patronage, containment, and ghettoization and to insist rigorously that their internal perspective is equally an intervention in the general scheme of things.44

Secondly, such interventions call forth crucial questions: How can such a speaking subject be characterised?

How do we think about agency? Political

legitimacy? In what could be called the postcolonial problematic, these questions are less ontological than fluid sites that continually open up possibility. Caught between the possibility of constituting a politically legitimate speaking subject and the necessary disavowal of such a constitution, postcolonial critical strategies inhabit a problematic 18

that entails a productive failure. Against reproducing the representational strategies of colonialism, that are, as Said asserts, “always governed by some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and faute de mieux, for the poor Orient”, postcolonial critical strategies can be situated in a representational problematic in which, as Said goes on to explain, “there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a representation”.45 Thus rather than close down debate in the name of an essential, ‘higher’ truth (Ontology), ‘postcolonial’ comes to the fore through the notion that its object remains always already in dispute. In seizing the object of representation as dispute,

postcolonial

strategies

are

able

to

critically

challenge

hegemonic

representational effects, and produce productive possibilities. Thirdly, the discourses of the postcolonial draw the complex relationship of the former colonisers and formerly colonised world into questions of identity and agency. This is an issue I would wish to pursue at length. Two crucial moments (that contradict each other perfectly) can be charted. The first challenges the notion that colonialism can be understood simply as the imposition of a dominant culture upon an empty native other. As Rattansi usefully puts it:

postcolonialist studies takes as a premise that the cultures and psyches of the colonizer were not already defined, and only waiting, as it were, to be imposed, fully formed, on the hapless victims of the colonial project. ... the postcolonialist contention is that what was involved was an even more complex intertwining of identities-in-formation, in which the Others against whom European identities were played off were not only outside but also inside the nation-states of the centre.46

19

The ‘intertwining’ suggested in Rattansi’s thesis cannot be taken to mean that the coloniser and the (post)colonised are somehow equal contenders on a level field of play. What is at issue here is the political nature of this ‘intertwining’. If colonised selves, from the perspective of the colonisers, can be located in what could be called a space outside-inside Europe, resistance to, and the nature of, colonial dominance must be understood, in its most basic form, through the trope of Hegelian ‘mutual dependence’: the colonial self is defined in relation to the native as a radically different Other. The second possibility can be found in Christian Moraru’s provocative ‘refiguration’ of postcolonial critical strategies. In what can be read as a challenge to Rattansi’s thesis, he writes:

modernity represents a moment of growing demographic circulation and imperial dislocations in multiple directions; while Europe was busy Occidentalizing ‘new worlds,’ the ‘Orient’ was in the process of ‘Orientalizing’ Europe. On different scales and with varying political bearings, the two processes should nonetheless be accounted for in their parallel unfolding (my emphasis).47

Thus rather than the mutual dependence that lies at the core of the ‘intertwined’ former coloniser and former colonised of Rattansi, Moraru contends that this relationship can also be staged as a much more oblique and politically disruptive one.

‘Parallel

discourses’, running as it were in opposite directions, suggests that colonial and postcolonial nationalisms cannot simply be understood in terms of a dialectic of selfconsciousness. In another sense there is also ‘something happening’ that occupies spaces outside and beyond the mutual recognition that is implicit in the ‘intertwined’ metaphor. What Moraru opens up is the possibility of thinking of the colonisers and their relation to the colonies and former colonies through metaphors of

20

incommensurability and agonism, rather than antagonism or consensus.

I would

contend, along with Moraru, who explains that the ‘Orientalising of Europe’ has been staged ‘on different scales and with varying political bearings’, that the possibility of this Orientalisation, precisely because of the inequality of (post)colonial relations, arises as a disturbing threat to the authority of the colonial. Such disturbances are less antagonistic challenges to pedagogic authority, or consensual cultural ‘sharing’, than cultural excesses that disrupt the structural terms of that authority. In this regard, Bhabha’s thought is indispensable. The pedagogic authority of the (former) colonial, expressed through the myth of nationalist unity, thus contends not just with the structural necessities of self-consciousness but also with the possibility of a disturbance to that structure. Incommensurabilities signal the untenability of pedagogic authority. Conversely, Rattansi’s model, which we can read as a strategy that seeks to disrupt the assumed ‘fixity’ of the colonisers, is not as politcally pungent as is claimed. Rattansi assumes that Western reason, which is the bedrock of fixity, always already proceeds from a fixed base, a unified epistemological and moral self, and then proceeds to impose that self upon the native as Other, or at least constructs itself in relation to the native as Other. To disrupt this process is thus to disrupt the possibility of fixity. But Western reason may be much more dynamic than Rattansi presupposes. This is a crucial issue. It seems to me that the unity of Western reason is a process, rather than a pre-given site from which knowledge and social action proceed. I will pursue this issue in chapters that deal with Kantian and Hegelian thought. If as I have suggested the postcolonial cannot look away from the horror of the colonial past, it is necessary to chart what it is that the postcolonial looks at. I would wish to contend that it is in this return to the colonial past that the cogency of the discourse of the postcolonial begins. It is through Moraru’s model that the disruptive possibilities of the postcolonial can be charted. Rather than mutual dependence, which does not seem to be a serious problem

21

for Western reason, Moraru evokes slippages and excesses, points of uncertainty that expose and exploit reason’s vulnerability. How might this vulnerability be thought? I would wish to suggest that in order to engage in this question we need to turn to the discourse of the sublime.

I evoke the sublime as that moment of uncertainty, of

wavering, of the time of politics, as a way of reframing what I would wish to call the affirmative disturbances of the discourses of the postcolonial. This thesis can be located in this difficult problematic. In the parallel relation of the coloniser and the (formerly) colonised migrant the postcolonial sublime can be staged. As a moment in the ebb and flow of global capital, as postcolonial nationalisms menacingly drift across traditional national boundaries, the postcolonial sublime emerges as a threat to the processes of the Western imagination. In what Anderson calls “long-distance nationalism”, the “transnationalization of advanced capital” has effected a situation in which “migration has moved not, as in earlier centuries, outwards to peripheries in the New World or the Antipodes but inwards toward the metropolitan cores”.

This, in addition to the “communications revolution”, he continues, “has

profoundly affected the subjective experience of migration”. I would wish to take up the literary and the political implications of Anderson’s observation. Thus as Anderson interestingly charts this experience from the perspective of the nation-state, rather than in terms of questions of agency and identity, as the formulation suggests, I seek to prise open the figure of the migrant that appears here as both a necessity and a disruption to “the classical nation-state project”. Illustrated through the example of the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, which was supported by “Indians living overseas”48 Anderson, however, pessimistically contends:

22

in general, today’s long-distance nationalism strikes one as a probably menacing portent of the future. First of all, it is the product of capitalism’s remorseless, accelerating transformation of all human societies. Second it creates a serious politics that is at the same time radically unaccountable. ... Third, his politics, unlike those activists for global human rights or environmental causes, are neither intermittent nor serendipitious. They are deeply rooted in a consciousness that his exile is self-chosen and that the nationalism he claims on E-mail is also the ground on which an embattled ethnic identity is to be fashioned in the ethnicized nation-state that he remains determined to inhabit.49

In addition to a lamentable capitalist global order, we can hear what for Anderson is a problem of setting the limits of the migrants’ connection to homeland. The violence that is implicit in the extremist nationalism that Anderson writes about allows us to nod in accord with his conclusions. But at the edges of this thought the figure of the migrant emerges as a problematic figure. The problem of belonging ‘here’ and speaking for ‘elsewhere’, speaking, as it were, free from the limits of accountability, is the center piece of Anderson’s argument. Rather than affirming what is for many a liberating ‘communications revolution’, we find an insistence upon its more sinister possibilities: the contradictory formulation, unaccountable citizens. Of course in the context of the nation-state, for Anderson, with perhaps a Hobbesian accent, unaccountability equates to irresponsibility, and by extension, violence.

In conflating unaccountability and

violence his “Exodus” thus fails to deal adequately with diaspora. As Ghose writing of the space of the Indian diaspora in Britain suggests:

I stir the water with a finger until it tosses waves, until countries appear

23

from its dark bed: the road from Putney Hill runs across oceans into the harbour of Bombay.50

One can only conclude that the free flow of information, as embodied in the figure of the migrant, across national boundaries disrupts the homogeneous national form as set forth in Anderson’s canonical Imagined Communities.51 In the context of the ‘First World’s’ increasing dependence on the economic and figurative status of the ‘Third World’, in its constructions of its own economic and national identities, what Anderson pessimistically opens up are questions concerning the politically disruptive capacity of transculturation. But, crucially, do the pessimistic overtones of Anderson’s argument mean that migrancy always already signals a bleak national future? It is interesting that Anderson’s pessimism concerning the maintenance of myths of the nation, its disruption, is the very thought that prevails in uses of ‘postcolonial’, though in affirmative tones. But what exactly is being disrupted? How does this seeming disruption figure in the context of the Enlightenment thought of which state-hood and the national spirit are a vital part? Locating The Postcolonial Sublime In Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses we find two possibilities concerning the figure of the postcolonial migrant as threat. Saladin Chamcha’s post-fall transformation into a goat represents the first. The image of Gibreel Farishta as migrant conqueror is the second. What is at stake here is the question of the social meaning of the figure of the migrant as monster. I would contend that two different versions emerge. The first is the figure of an essentialised other. The character Saladin Chamcha can be read as an articulation of the relation of the migrant to the host nation. The second is much more disturbing.

The migrant emerges as less an essentialised other than an 24

incomprehensible entity.

Such an incomprehensibility leads us the postcolonial

sublime. I will take up the first migrant image through the work of Franco Morreti, and then I will explore a much more disturbing image of the migrant through the work of Todorov and Kristeva. In my attempt to theorise the political cogency of the discourse of the postcolonial, I would wish to take up Moraru’s parallel model. I contend that such a model suggests that there is ‘something happening’ in the relationship of the coloniser and the colonised that a dialectic of self-consciousness cannot wholly account for. It is this ‘something happening’ that this thesis seeks to explore. As I will show, the ‘something happening’ can be understood in terms of the disturbances of what I would wish to call the postcolonial sublime. The following reframes Ratttansi’s and Moraru’s formulations of the postcolonial, and suggests why Moraru’s model needs to be taken up. In his discussion on the social meaning of the monstrous Other, Franco Morretti draws upon Marx and Freud to interpret Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula as mythical reproductions of economic, social, and sexual fears. We can draw Saladin’s monstrous form into Morretti’s interesting discussion.

Morretti understands the

relationship of Frankenstein and his created monster in terms of the relationship of capitalists and the proletariat. As an object of fear, “born precisely out of terror of split society, and out of the desire to heal it”, Frankenstein’s monster can be read in the same breath as ‘Ford worker’. “Like the proletariat”, Morretti writes, “the monster is denied a name and an individuality ... he belongs wholly to his creator ... he is a collective and artificial creature ... not found in nature, but built”. This desire for the ‘containment’ and dependence of the working class, is thus confronted by the monster’s “reformist/Chartist” demand for individuality, ‘happiness’, and an equally marginalised wife. The possibility of the thriving marginalised community that is implied in the monster’s demand is an unbearable nightmare for the scientist and, by extension, the

25

capitalists. The image of the proletariat as a “‘race of devils’” thus “encapsulates”, Morretti asserts, “one of the most reactionary elements in Mary Shelley’s ideology”. The monster “once transformed into a ‘race’ ... re-enters the immutable realm of Nature”, and becomes an “object of an instinctive, elemental hatred” that is able to counterbalance the “disturbing force unleashed” by the monster’s individualist longings.52 Dracula, on the other hand, represents both the threat of the ‘blood-suckers’ of monopoly capitalism and the fear of the figure of the castrating mother. “In Britain” Morretti explains, “at the end of the nineteenth century, monopolistic concentration was far less developed ... than in other advanced capitalist societies”. Monopoly capital is “something extraneous to British history ... a foreign threat”. Dracula as the figure of monopoly capital is thus thwarted by an ethical (British) version of capital as advantageous for all: “money that refuses to become capital, that wants not to obey the profane economic laws of capitalism but to be used to do good”.53 As a metaphor for monopoly capital Dracula’s defeat transforms the fear of a crushing foreign ideology, and justifies British capitalism. justification operates subtly, on a subliminal level.

For Morretti this

Social consciousness finds it

difficult to admit and face its own fears. Thus the subliminal meanings of Dracula as metaphor are “subordinated to the literal presence of the murderous count. They can be expressed only if they are hidden ... by his black cloak”.54 It is under this sinister cloak that Marx and Freud converge, for ultimately Dracula represents not just monopoly capital but also the repressed Victorian libido that threatens the stability of the bourgeois family unit. Morretti’s thesis concerning the social meaning of the literary monster advances the notion: “it is fear one needs: the process one pays for coming contentedly to terms with a social body based on irrationality and menace”.55 What is striking in this

26

formulation is the ‘contentedness’ of the process of dealing with the objects of social fears. Rather than radical disruptions, the monster for Morretti functions ideologically. Social transformation in this scheme equates to the capitalist seduction of the proletariat. We can thus read Rushdie’s utilisation of the trope of the monstrous as migrant, the narrative tension between the postcolonial migrant and his imagined ‘host’ culture, and the ‘resolution’ of that tension (albeit an open one) — Saladin overcomes his monstrous form through anger, and is able to begin to deal with the homeland from which he was trying to escape — we can read the outworking of this monstrous trope, its foregroundedness, as a critique of the conservative uses of the figure of the monster that Morretti unpacks.

Rushdie’s text performs Morretti’s critical reading of

conservative ideology. In another literary setting, Jameson also explains the social meaning of the monstrous Other. In what is essentially a reworked version of Hegel’s theory of the master and slave relationship, Jameson’s argument concerning the figure of the monstrous Other can be read as a radicalisation of the contented process of social transformation that we find in Morretti. Jameson asserts:

Evil ... continues to characterize whatever is radically different from me, whatever by virtue of precisely that difference seems to constitute a real and urgent threat to my own existence. So from the earliest times, the stranger from another tribe, the ‘barbarian’ who speaks an incomprehensible language and follows ‘outlandish’ customs, but also the woman, whose biological difference stimulates fantasies of castration and devoration, or in our own time, the avenger of accumulated resentments from some oppressed class or race, or else that alien being, Jew or Communist, behind whose apparently human features a malignant and preternatural intelligence is thought to lurk: these are some of the archetypical

27

figures of the Other, about whom the essential point to be made is not so much that he is feared because he is evil; rather he is evil because he is Other, alien, different, strange, unclean, and unfamiliar.56

If we bend this accent upon the radically ‘other’ as evil toward the figure of the monstrous migrant, this radical otherness has a social function that equates to the contented transformations of the economic, social, and sexual fears that we found in Morretti. The figure of the migrant as the incarnation of evil, like Morretti’s monster, is necessary for establishing the boundaries of the psycho-social bond. This means that we can read the situated monstrous Saladin Chamcha as a necessary moment in the construction of British identity. Rushdie’s text bears this out. In that moment in which national identity became an urgent issue, despite his anxious cry to the British police, “‘I’m not one of your fishing-boat-sneakers-in’”, the “proof” of Saladin’s national unbelonging is confirmed by his monstrous body. “‘If it’s proof you’re after”, the police proclaim, “you couldn’t do better than those.’ ... there at his temples, growing longer by the moment, and sharp enough to draw blood, were two new, goaty, unarguable horns”.57 Saladin, the model colonial subject, thus ironically emerges not through the unthinkable, the unspeakable, the unnameable trope of the sublime, but as the essentialised, contained Other, the basis for the you’re-not-one-of-us of the equally essentialised English self. Jameson and Morretti thus present useful literary models for dealing with the social implications of the figure of the monster. But Rushdie’s text does not remain content with such formulations. It demands that we move beyond the dialectics of Morretti and Jameson. Significantly, Chamcha as goat poses no real ‘threat’ to English identity.

His monstrous form remains neatly contained in a self/other dialectic.

Saladin’s “metamorphosis”, the text explains, amounted to nothing particularly

28

threatening or scandalous: “this supernatural imp — was being treated by the others as if it were the most banal and familiar matter they could imagine”.58

Whilst the

monstrous Saladin represents the wholly Other, that self that is drawn into a dialectic of mutual dependence, a far more threatening other, who cannot be reduced to the order of mutual recognition emerges at the edge of the narrative action. As Saladin remonstrated with the police, Gibreel Farishta “came downstairs in a maroon smoking jacket and jodhpurs, chosen from Henry Diamond’s wardrobe. Smelling faintly of mothballs, he stood on the first-floor landing and observed the proceedings without comment”.59 As the scene’s marginal figure, Gibreel represents that ‘other’ more threatening migrant moment. His unnoticed hybridity, his silence and elevated gaze, can be understood only in terms of the possibility of a disturbance that appears to be lacking in Saladin’s dialectical situatedness. I would contend that Gibreel’s disturbing presence at the edge of this scene can be read in terms of what I have called Moraru’s parallel model. Gibreel’s fantastic arrival on the British beach, for instance, is articulated through the trope of the migrant not as monster but as invader:

‘Rise ‘n’ shine! Let’s take this place by storm.’ Turning his back on the sea, blotting out the bad memory in order to make room for the next things, passionate as always for newness, he would have planted (had he owned one) a flag, to claim in the name of whoknowswho this white country, his new-found land.60

Thus instead of the confrontation that is entailed in the figure of the monster as Other, we find the scandal of transculturation, the notion that the postcolonial migrant can be constituted as both an ‘other’ that marks the edge of Western civility, and a threat to the constitution of that civility. How might this threat be understood?

29

The scandal of transculturation as it emerges in the figure of Gibreel can be understood in terms of what Todorov has called the fantastic. He explains the fantastic as follows.

In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without devils, sylphides, or vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of imagination — and laws of the world then remain as they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality — but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us.61

What of the effect of Gibreel’s marginal location in the scene? We find this hesitation that marks the fantastic, that moment in which the self is forced to decide what constitutes reality.

Hisser Moaner Popeye turned eagerly towards Gibreel. ‘And who might this be?’ inquired Inspector Lime. ‘Another sky-diver?’ But the words died on his lips, because at that moment the floodlights were switched off, the order to do so having being given when Chamcha was handcuffed and taken in charge, and in the aftermath of the seven suns it became clear to everyone there that a pale, golden light was emanating from the direction of the man in the smoking jacket, was in fact streaming softly outwards from a point immediately behind his head. Inspector Lime never referred to that light again, and if he had been asked about it would have denied ever seeing such a thing, a halo, in the late twentieth century, pull the other one.62

30

The confused Inspector Lime experiences the momentary hesitation that marks the fantastic in his encounter with the figure of the postcolonial migrant in English garb. It is this crucial momentary uncertainty that is missing from Morretti’s and Jameson’s accounts of the figure of the monster. In similar terms, the mutual dependence that is at the core of Rattansi also lacks Inspector Lime’s hesitation. I would contend that such a hesitation, that momentary lapse of certainty, of disorientation, opens up the possibility of the reverse Orientalisation that Moraru’s parallel model proposes.

Through

momentary hesitation the processes of reason’s stability are able to be brought into question. In the postcolonial context, the opening up of the space of the question is the moment in which a politics begins. The fantastic Todorov explains, “occupies the duration of this uncertainty”. The fantastic exposes the fragility of the limit between matter and mind. It is “that hesitation” that calls an assumed stability into question.63 I would wish to propose, building on Moraru, that postcolonial disruptions necessitate and foreground the fragility of the limits of Western being. In order to account for such a politics it will be necessary to turn to the sublime, that trope that has been utilised to define (Western) being in terms of its rational limits.

It is my

contention that this necessary play upon the limits of (Western) being signals that Western authority, whilst this play is necessary, is always already vulnerable. It is this vulnerability that is crucial. I would wish to explore its structure. In exploiting the sublime and the possibilities that it opens up, the discourse of the postcolonial disrupts the authority of Western reason. Unsettling Kant How might the ‘something happens’, that fantastic moment that I have suggested marks the political cogency of Moraru’s parallel model be theorised? I would suggest that in order to deal with this question, it is necessary to begin with Kant’s influential 31

Critique of Judgement, and his notion of the sublime.64 For Kant the sublime presents itself in that moment in which the imagination — which functions in terms of space and time — is confronted by an object that is too large to express, too overpowering to be adequately represented. This failure of the imagination demands the momentary suspension of Reason, so that the Ideas — Reason’s ultimate faculty — can furnish the mind with a concept that is able to grasp what is essentially ungraspable. I turn to this eighteenth-century formulation of the sublime, because I find that the issue of the myth of nation is a vital part of its processes. In the context of the emerging capitalist expansion of the Eighteenth Century, this capacity of the mind to present the unpresentable was an integral component in the emergence of European nationalisms, and Europe’s assumed authority upon the global stage.

What is essentially a

philosophical problem in Kant — the possibility of the unity of the self — becomes the trope of European elitism. The possibility of the collapse of the self (the failure of the imagination), and the establishment of the capacity of the self to ‘overcome’ that collapse in the sublime moment, is a crucial marker in the European assumption of global superiority. Thus whilst the European self of Kant teeters on the brink of collapse, the capacity to negotiate such a predicament, to achieve the unity of the conscious self, signals what was considered to be the greatness of Europe.

The

European emerges as a tightrope walker, defying the destructive dangers that lurk beneath. What this teetering suggests is that the ‘something happens’ of Moraru’s parallel model is prefigured in the structure of Western thought itself. There is no strength or power without accomplishment, without overcoming a threat of some sort. Western thought is thus at once confident concerning its accomplishments, and fundamentally anxious concerning the foundations for these accomplishments. Moraru’s model draws attention to this anxiousness.

32

The resonances that surround the anxiousness of the self have furnished Europe with the tools to lay a claim to the virtues of national unity. In this typical early twentieth century imperial formulation, James Garvin, apologist for the League of Nations, in pointing out the remarkable achievements of the British Empire, asserts:

[humanity] can only be served through strong nations. ... ‘Humanity’ is nothing but the individual men and women composing it, and the worth of the aggregate is determined by the value of the units. But the soul of a whole people seems to strengthen or decay with that sense of national vitality and national achievement which — like the electric helix, giving energy to what was before the dead weight of a soft iron bar — raises to a higher power the faculties of its component individuals.

‘Humanity’ can do nothing for ‘humanity’, and races do most for

other races by the example they give and the ideals they pursue in the process of their own development.65

Apart from the troubling circular logic here, at the edges of Garvin’s extolling the virtues of national unity, we hear an anxiousness concerning the possibility of the collapse of the ‘I’. Garvin’s argument, which returns to the economic principles of Adam Smith to shore up British colonial supremacy against its economic competitors, amounts to the old yet troublingly familiar cliché: let’s-all-tighten-our-belts-and-worktogether.

It is this anxiousness, crises that can be found in all nationalisms, that

animates the beneficial outcomes of the unifying myth.

Tinged with a British

nationalist spirit, in this instance, the benefits of maintaining national unity amounts to a plug for the necessity of the cultural and economic supremacy of Britain. Thus the confidence and surety that underpins the human benefits of national unity is a confidence only insofar as the object of ‘decay’, which is not really an object, is in place

33

so that it can be overcome. This means that the condition of ‘decay’, as the object of overcoming, in its mythical form is abolished in that moment in which unity is attained. But in order to sustain the necessity of the national illusion, it can never be abolished outright. It occupies that space at the edge of the nation, that always already sublime threat that calls forth the national vigilance that Garvin evokes. In the sustaining myth of the nation, ‘decay’ (read as sublime threat) is thus always already on the inside of the national myth, albeit at the edge, a kind of outside/inside. In addition to what I have called the outside/inside of the sublime in the myth of national unity, Garvin’s early twentieth century work reveals the British desire to be the central character on the global stage. The crises that Garvin evokes in order shore up this position against Britain’s colonial competitors — France, Germany, (and interestingly) USA — for whom, according to Garvin, Britain had paved the way, reveals, in the context of the logic of capital, the desire of the West to dominate the world’s economic affairs. The animation of this desire, or at least the tools that work hand in hand with the logic of capital, and which reveal that colonial desire is both economic and cultural, can be found, as I have suggested, in the sublime moment. The colonial nationalism of Garvin is predicated on the necessity of the sublime moment, and on the necessity of the sublime not taking hold and spinning out of control. The nationalism of Garvin thus evokes a vigilance concerning the disruptive capacity of the sublime, and also a vigilance concerning the necessity of that disruptive capacity. The sublime thus emerges as an always already threat that sustains the necessity of the myth of the nation. Remarkably following the Great War, as British economic stability suffered further blows that even the national tightening of belts could not overcome, what becomes crucial for Garvin is the maintenance of a much broader Western unity. Under the sustaining myth of impending crises, with the heading, “Co-operation or Chaos”,

34

Garvin asserts the necessity of forging a British and American “partnership” through The League of Nations. Such a union would ensure that the world would be able to withstand not just the impact of an historical event, such as war, but also the ever imminent threat of what can be found at the terrifying core of being itself: “the confusion of ideas and desires” that were unleashed “against all that is called control or restraint ... in this outbreak of all the war-repressed impulses of the natural man” (my emphasis).66 Thus a nauseous Garvin teeters at the edge of being’s terrifying abyss, and frantically back-pedals. If we continue with the disturbing ‘something happens’ that Moraru suggests, and which is prefigured in Western thought, the discourse of national unity opens up a crucial vulnerability. In what could be described, to bend Freud a little, as the fort/da or repetition-compulsion of nationalist discourse, in the context of Western rationalism the sublime moment can be described as that necessary and distressing predicament that is an unpleasure for one part of the psyche and a pleasure for another. Indeed the latter Freud of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” found the unpleasures of the repetition-compulsion a serious theoretical problem. Whilst “there exists”, Freud writes, “in the mind a strong tendency towards the pleasure principle” there are “certain other forces or circumstances” that “cannot always be in harmony with the tendency towards pleasure” (my emphases).67 For Freud the pleasure in the unpleasure of these ‘other forces’ suggest a governing principle, or perhaps the lack of a governing principle ‘beyond the pleasure principle’. He thus asks, what can possibly be gained in the repetition of unpleasure? With the dominance of the pleasure principle in doubt, as I read it, Freud promptly set about showing how the repetition-compulsion relates to, and is constantly reinforced by, factors governed by the pleasure principle (whether or not the pleasure principle ultimately remains in tact is a matter of dispute). In the first instance, repetition-compulsion is staged as a function of the ego. In

35

children’s play, repeating “unpleasurable experiences” enables the child to “master” that unpleasure “by being active” rather than “merely experiencing it passively”. In the second instance, however, the repetition-compulsion evokes “an obscure fear ... with its hint of possession of some ‘daemonic’ power”,68 that ultimately signals a new theoretical analysis, the constitutive dualism of the death instincts and the life instincts.69 For my purposes, rather than taken up repetition-compulsion as a neurotic condition, what emerges as crucial is the energy and the sense of mastery that emerges in the compulsion to repeat, in the unpleasures of abjection. Thus as Freud grappled with the theoretical disruptions of the pleasure of unpleasure, Garvin returns from the abyss energised, with a sense of purpose and anxiousness at once. Kristeva’s provocative remarks concerning abjection lend an immediacy to the sublime, and the dynamic fort/da of culture that the discourse of the postcolonial opens up. The abject, Kristeva tells us, as opposed to the subject and object, “has only one quality of the object — that of being opposed to I”. Abjection is that which “disturbs identity, system, order. ... does not respect borders, positions, rules. ... It is death infecting life. ... the place where meaning collapses”.70 Crucially such a place inhabits, for Kristeva, the ‘core’ of social being.

In what can be read as a transcendental

condition after Kant, the abject emerges as both an intimate and necessary threat, that “something rejected from which one does not part”.71

There is nothing like the abjection of the self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded.72

36

The structural necessity of this moment becomes evident, as Kristeva attests, through the figures and acts that can be located on borders of culture, and which, as a consequence of this border condition, draw “attention to the fragility of the law”.73

The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a saviour ... [the exile who asks] ‘Where am I?’ instead of ‘Who am I?’”.74

In foregrounding the fragility of culture’s limits, the abject shares an affinity with the sublime. Neither has a representable object, both ‘permeate’ being, and both negate order, I, borders, and rules. But whereas the abject animates want — which Kristeva locates beyond the unconscious: “if one imagines ... the experience of want itself as logically preliminary to being and object ... then one understands that abjection, and even more so abjection of self, is its only signified”75 — the sublime calls forth action, creativity.

In drawing a distinction between the somatic symptom and

sublimation, she writes:

In the symptom, the abject permeates me, I become abject. Through sublimation, I keep it under control. The abject is edged with the sublime. It is not the same moment on the journey, but the same subject and speech bring them into being.76

The move from the abject to the sublime, is thus a movement from a structural permeation that opens up a recognition of want to a creative shaping of the limitless possibilities that abjection’s disrespect for boundaries opens up. Of course for Kristeva, rather than rationalist possibilities, the sublime opens up the mystical and the aesthetic.

37

The sublime ‘object’ dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory ... the sublime is a something added that expands us, overstrains us, and causes us to be both here, as dejects, and there, as others and sparkling.

A divergence, an

impossible bounding.77

But there is another possibility. Whilst Kristeva celebrates what for Lyotard would be the genuine sentiment of the sublime, novatio, in which the unpresentable form in itself continually opens up new possibilities for thinking and being, Kristeva’s account of the sublime carefully ignores the sublime’s dark side, nostalgia, in which the unpresentable becomes an absent content.78 As the former leads us to the postmodern, the latter leads us, in its most extreme form, to fascism.79 What Lyotard’s distinction thus suggests, and this is an issue that I would wish to take up directly, is that rationalism, and by extension the nationalism of Garvin, can be read as a romantic project. Rationalism in the face of the groundlessness of being emerges as less an ontology than a particular kind of artfulness that gives shape, albeit nostalgically, to what is essentially the formlessness of existence.

The aesthetic

possibilities of formlessness contained in the logical framework of nationalism, for Lyotard equates to totalitarianism. It is interesting, however, that the great theorist of the sublime, Kant and his majestic architectonic system, according to Lyotard, is not guilty of such a charge. The radical incommensurability of the faculties in Kant means that ethics can never be reduced to the aesthetic. The sublime, that abyss between the faculties, attests to the impossibility of such a reduction.

Lyotard’s controversial

reading of Kant thus brackets the sublime, as an aesthetic moment, in order to celebrate, what is perceived as Kant’s failure to reconcile freedom and necessity as the Critique of Judgement intends. The ‘analytic of the sublime’ as an appendix cannot be taken as an integral component in the system. “The ‘mere appendage’ to the critical elaboration of

38

the aesthetic”, Lyotard contends, “by natural finality ... takes a menacing turn. It indicates that another aesthetic can be not only expounded but ‘deduced’ according to the rules of critique”.80 This deduction of the sublime, given its menacing location in Kant’s architectonic system, becomes, for Lyotard, the most apt analogy for (re)opening questions concerning art, justice, and politics.81 In what emerges as Kant’s cognisant failure, the continual opening up of this failure as novatio in art, and differend in politics, radically disrupts the nostalgic core of totalising discourse. The thesis nods in agreement with Lyotard’s call for the disruption of totalitarianism. This is an urgent and necessary project. But the thesis questions the disruptive capacity of the Lyotardian sublime, which assumes, as much postcolonial theory does, that metanarratives are pre-given sites from which epistemological and social being proceeds. I would suggest that Lyotard has overestimated the capacity of metanarratives. The bracketing of the sublime, in order to foreground Kant’s failure to reconcile freedom and necessity in the aesthetic domain, in the context of what I have called postcolonial transculturation is difficult to defend. It suggests that we read Garvin’s nationalist fervour as an invention, a kind of nostalgia, that can, as Lyotard’s insistence upon the productive failure of Kant’s aesthetic, be disrupted in terms of strategies of novatio and bearing witness to

differends.

This means that the

postcolonial critique of Western hegemony can be understood in terms of Lyotard’s bracketed aesthetic — novatio — which calls forth, as I have suggested, a politics of either/or. In the in-between spaces of transculturation, the movements, excesses, and contaminations, I would contend that there are more productive possibilities. What I am suggesting is that the ‘something happens’ of Moraru’s parallel model refuses to read Garvin’s nationalism in essentialist terms. As a politics of either/or, the Lyotardian sublime seems to perpetuate such terms, as I will show in chapter four. In contrast, the discourse of the postcolonial is driven by the necessity of

39

opening up the anxiousness that lies at the core of the national project. It desires to lay hold of the abject in order to unleash its sublime possibilities as the sublime. In other words, rather than attempt to open up new (pure) sites, the discourse of the postcolonial seeks to wrest the sublime from its trajectory, to contaminate its path in the structure of Kantian reason. I take the notion that the sublime is a threatening excess as the key concept for the thesis. For Lyotard this excess presents two possibilities: a contained aesthetic (order, the modern), or a continually open aesthetic (avant-garde, the postmodern). Lyotard assumes that the avant-garde is fascism’s opposite. I would wish to propose another route, one that seeks to wrest the sublime from this either/or logic. I would argue that Lyotard’s insistence upon novatio can surely be read as a gesture no less totalising than the nostalgic demand for order.82 My contention is that if we are to consider what kind of politics the sublime effects, it needs to be situated in the structures of its use. The bracketing of the sublime, as in Lyotard, as an end in itself fails to adequately engage in rationalism’s use of the sublime. To take up the failure of representation as an end itself, as if the incomprehensible somehow beckons the structure of Reason to collapse, is to underestimate Reason’s tenacity. It is to miss Morretti’s provocative recasting of Reason as Dracula, the bloodsucker that feeds upon the image of the monster. Just as Saladin Chamcha poses no threat, the avant-garde as a dialectical other, can be read as an opposition that merely furnishes Reason with the tools to establish the necessity of order. I would wish to take up the sublime as a functional trope. Rather than an end in itself, as in Lyotard’s avant-garde, the sublime is an excess that has been put to use in various ways, for a variety of purposes. In keeping with the tenor of its historical use, I would wish to consider the sublime as it emerges in the service of European Reason. It is my contention, that in order to disrupt reason the discourse of the postcolonial seizes

40

the sublime and pushes it beyond its Kantian limits. My reading of the postcolonial sublime draws upon Kristeva’s provocative formulation of abjection. For whilst she champions novatio, what emerges is a sublime that functions less dialectically than in terms of crossings, movements, connections. In this regard my understanding of the postcolonial sublime is more akin to what we find in Derrida’s reading of Kant in The Truth in Painting. Derrida reads the ‘analytic of the sublime’ as appendix according to the logic of the supplement, rather than the logic of the event (Lyotard), in order to refigure the incommensurability of the faculties. If for Lyotard the faculties remain always already irreducible, for Derrida this irreducibility is dependent upon a paradoxical reducibility, the impossibility of maintaining the purity of the faculties, the frame, the parergon. Thus Kant ‘fails’ to produce a purely aesthetic space to undertake the task of reconciling freedom and necessity. But rather than suggest that this task is always already untenable, Derrida suggests that it is this untenability that enables its cultural workability. The sublime, for instance, as opposed to the beautiful exemplifies this necessary impossibility. Set forth in terms of the absence of the frame — magnitude, great power, “overspilling: it exceeds cise and good measure”83 —

the sublime emerges as that which is

uncontainable, and which negates order. But, as Derrida points out, this absence of frames actually functions as a frame.

This frame can be formulated through the

question: “Why is the large (absolutely) sublime and not the small (absolutely)?”.84 Since the “measure of the sublime has the measure of this unmeasure, of this violent incommensurability”,85 as Derrida puts it, it can be said that the sublime as the limitless thus requires a (quasi)limit. For my purposes, this thesis asks: why is the sublime a noble and not a base trope? And asserts that the sublime as a noble trope is structured by cultural desire. In the context of Derrida’s study of Kant, what this question suggests is precisely the difficulty of taking a position on Kant, especially in relation to

41

the question of art. The aesthetic emerges as less a discrete domain, in the case of the sublime the purely limitless, than a site of contaminations, border crossings, impurities, that are at once transgressions and necessities in the context of Kant’s architecture. Thus in the margins of Derrida’s text, in the question of the difficulty of maintaining a distinction between art and philosophy (the subject of The Truth in Painting), we can hear the cultural resonances that invade Kant, the old cliché: ‘size does matter’, or more specifically, the figure of desire, the anxious phallus. The sublime functions, as I have suggested, in a narrative sense in a fort/da structure.

It arises as a necessary paradox in the formation of Reason’s cultural

authority. To use the language of Kant, Reason demands the possibility of its demise, it exists in a dynamic, even antagonistic relation with the other faculties. This necessarily antagonistic structure suggests that Reason paradoxically remains always already dynamic, rather than fixed and stagnant. The encounter with the limit opens up the possibility that it is not always possible for Reason to re-establish itself in the same terms. It is this vulnerability that opens up, what I would wish to call, the postcolonial sublime. In this space of vulnerability it is possible to speak less of what Lyotard calls the “abyss between heterogeneous phrases”,86 the ‘eventalisation’ of history, than the “abyss of abjection” (Kristeva),87 with its contaminations, border crossings, leakages, movements. The postcolonial sublime arises in that moment in which the boundaries of (Western) being are in the process of (re)formation, or to follow Freud, the disturbing compulsion to repeat. Indeed in Bloom’s work on Freud, which attempts to find literary moments that exceed the infantile repressions of the uncanny, in his turn to the excesses of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” he finds a ‘great shock’ that is akin to what could be called the necessity of the West’s ‘flirt’ with the abyss of the abject. According to Bloom, Freud “verges upon showing ... that to be human is a catastrophic condition”.

42

Freud’s passage into the sublime arises when he writes: “It seems, then, that a drive is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things”, and then, as Bloom notes, “slays his beloved trope of ‘drive’ by disguising it in the armour of his enemy, mythology [Tasso’s romantic epic, Gerusalemme Liberata] in order to assert: “the aim of all life is death”. For Bloom the wounding of “his figuration of ‘drive’”, reveals Freud “in a truly Sublime or ‘uncanny’ fashion”.88 Thus as the great theorist of civilisation and repression in his ‘literary’ moments reveals, ultimately the compulsion to repeat, rather than repress and contain, opens up the disturbing force of the sublime, of the ultimate sublime moment, the abyss of death (the nothing happens), as the most apt ‘site’ upon which social being is forged. Thus the uncanny, which is forged, as Bloom contends, in a theoretical tradition that “is necessarily antithetical to nearly any theory of the imagination”,89 and which offers only a partial psychology of the sublime, appears like the sublime to be a narrative of leave and return, of loss and (re)gain. But unlike the sublime the uncanny arises in an encounter with the unfamiliar, “that class of the terrifying”, Freud tells us, that “leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar”.90 The sublime object (after Kant) is excess, surplus, the uncontainable spillage, the ‘too much’ of phenomenological experience that threatens the stability of Reason, or in the case of Freud, the pleasure principle. The sublime thus cannot be understood as a particular kind of content. It is an object only in the sense that it is a threat to objectivity, an excess that negates, collapses, disrupts. Reason’s movement in what I have called the fort/da of the sublime, whilst upon the surface may attempt to reinstate the familiar, must necessarily open up the disruptive capacity of unpleasure as a signal of its own dynamic capacity.

This means that the ‘return’, or the resolution of the struggle

between Reason and its dissolution in the face of the sublime, may not be the same. The return to order that can be seen in Garvin, though energetic, has been forced to shift

43

its terms. The sublime is pure negation, vertigo, collapse, the disorder and confusion that arises when the libidinal excesses surface and signal that meaning is no longer possible. Such a moment demands shifts, transformations, yet such is necessary in constructing a dynamic culture. This means that ultimately Reason’s grounding in the unified Kantian self is fluid, in process, productive rather than fixed and stagnant. This space of excess and contamination that threatens and reveals authority is the terrain of this thesis. It is my contention that nationalist myths of unity (Renan) are always forged in and against some kind of crises. Whilst it is the case that the object of this threat can be said to play into the hands of the colonial (as in the case of Kant), it can also be said that this opening up of the space that threatens unity always entails the possibility of its disruption. In attempting to define the limits of the nation — through the trope of Us and Them — nationalist discourses bring into being an ‘outside’ that represents the base, the detested, the hybrid, the grotesque, the uncanny. Here we find the figure of the postcolonial, who occupies that dark side of the nation-state that cannot be made to fit into nationalist social norms. Thus at the edges of Western being we find a site that is at once necessary and repulsed. The myth of nation entails within its formulation the possibility of its disturbance. In this regard I follow both Hegel and Derrida, for whom culture is transformed qua culture. I have suggested that Moraru’s parallel model, which evokes slippages and excesses, points of uncertainty that expose and exploit reason’s vulnerability, leads us directly to the discourse of the sublime. Thus, as in all theories of the sublime, I am taking up the problem of its object. What is the object of the postcolonial sublime? I would wish to resist the notion that the sublime is fundamentally a natural condition, a particular conscious mode that applies to all conditions and all times. This is a major problem concerning the Kantian sublime, which, assumes that the sublime is somehow a natural effect. If we were to follow such thinking, the postcolonial sublime would

44

emerge as an effect, of a particular kind of object, that would distinguish the postcolonial sublime from all the other sublimes. But in evoking the postcolonial sublime as a critical term, I would wish at the outset to stress that there actually is no unique sublime object of the postcolonial. There is no postcolonial sublime in the strict sense. Since the discourse of the sublime is entrenched in European art and theory there seems little point in extracting a comparable quid pro quo from the discourse of the postcolonial. Far more interesting, and this is what I would wish to take up, is the notion that the discourse of the postcolonial goes to work upon the discourse of the sublime. As I will show in chapter two, the sublime has been a crucial trope in the discourses of colonial expansion. The sublime thus emerges as a problem for the discourse of the postcolonial. The postcolonial sublime can be defined as a critical problem, in which the processes of Europe’s pretension to order are contested. In attempting to establish the authority and the dynamism of reason, the Idealism of Kant and Hegel sets forth the notion that reason, as a faculty of mind, is forged in and through its mastery over the conscious excesses that characterise the sublime. The necessity of the sublime in the process that established the authority of reason, signals that reason is at once the master of its conscious domain, and yet vulnerable, since its mastery is established in the face of the possibility of its collapse. The possibility of reason’s collapse is a crucial moment in the discourse of the postcolonial. The sublime emerges as a critical site upon which the authority of reason is written. To disrupt this authority it is necessary, therefore, to unleash the sublime, its unpresentable excesses, from the shackles of reason’s processes. This strategy of disruption, of unsettling Kantian confidence, is what is at stake in the postcolonial sublime. Notes

45

1

Stephen Slemon, “The Scramble for Post-colonialism”, in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed., Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995), 45. 2

T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960), 4. 3

Jasper Goss, “Postcolonialism: Subverting Whose Empire?”, Third World Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 2 (1996), 240, 242. Edward Said, “Foreword”, in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed., Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), x. 4

5

Said, “Foreword”, x.

6

Christian Moraru, “Refiguring the Postcolonial: The Transnational Challenges”, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 28, no. 4 (1997), 172. 7

David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 6.

8

I am not suggesting that colonialism suddenly disappeared without a trace after the war. My reference to the post-war period as constitutive of what might be called postcoloniality, is based on the (perhaps Western) notion that the course of the world’s economic and political domains were radically altered after the war. Such a course, with its twists and turns, continues to the current day. What this suggests is that the deviation in the direction of Europe’s empires after the war is a crucial factor in any consideration of the current economic and political landscape. Thus rather than isolated enclaves that suggest that all this talk of postcoloniality is fraudulent, the ‘postwar empires’ such as the former Soviet Union, which continued colonising well into the seventies, should only be understood in terms of their economic and military relation to the postwar global formation. In a theoretical sense, in this regard I draw upon an interesting observation made by Christian Moraru, in his provocative, “Refiguring the Postcolonial: The Transnational Challenges”. Moraru points out that “the last empire to fall apart was the former Soviet Union. … For two decades [60’s and 70’s] this regime did its best to follow through the plans of Soviet imperialism. These plans entailed the whole repertoire of ‘classical’ colonialism”. This obviously means that the postwar period did not signal that colonialism had been dead and buried. Moraru in this light, however, does not call for an abandonment of the postcolonial canon outright. Instead he suggests what I take to be an acknowledgment of the necessity of postwar criticism. “This study”, Moraru explains, “invites first and foremost a radical reassessment of the postcolonial in the new, postcommunist and post-Marxist context. … I am envisioning an updated postcolonial paradigm, able to build on the ‘classical’ postcolonial critique as well as to evolve and address head-on the dynamic of transnational exchanges” (175, 176-177). See also Carol Breckenridge, Peter van der Veer, ed., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 1-3. 9

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (London: Abacus, 1995), 216. 10 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1983), Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge: 46

Cambridge University Press, 1990), Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991). 11

Ross Poole, “How European is Nationalism? A Response to Philip Gerrans”, Political Theory Newsletter, 7 (1995), 60-66. 12

See also Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). 13

Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (London: Zed Press, 1986), 140. 14

See also Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (London: James Currey, 1992). He argues that the nation-state brings an alien set of institutions to Africa, that the legal-constitutional frameworks on which decolonised states were/are based failed to draw traditional structures of authority into modern state structures, leaving people ‘affectless’ in their relationship with bureaucracy. And Nicholas Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). He writes: “Claims about nationality necessitated notions of culture that marked groups off from one another in essential ways, uniting language, race, geography, and history in a single concept. Colonialism encouraged and facilitated new claims of this kind, re-creating Europe and its others through its histories of conquest and rule” (3). 15

Jasbir Jain in Problems of Postcolonial Literatures and other Essays (Jaipur: Printwell, 1991), defends the use of the term ‘postcolonial’, rather than ‘postindependence’ as an adequate description of the current cultural condition in India, but uses the term pejoratively, rather than as a marker of radical independence. For Jain the colonial attitude remains in tact despite political freedom. This is manifest in India’s continuing adherence to the West. Jain writes, “the colonial period not only created a sense of alienation from the native cultural tradition, but also ingrained an attitude of subjection” (3). Subsequently cultural domains, such as literary criticism, continue to look to and embrace Western theory, rather than taking up the challenge to develop modes of interpretation within the Indian framework. Attempts which do seek to develop ‘Indian’ cultural theories usually look back to India’s mythical and utopian golden age as a conceptual model, and fail to address current sociopolitical needs. Jain concludes: “to free ourselves from the postcolonial structures, it is necessary perhaps to overcome nostalgia, and to interpret our reality as it confronts us” (13). 16

Goss, “Postcolonialism: Subverting Whose Empire?”, 243.

17

See Chris Patten, “Of Tigers, Bulls, and Bears: Collusion and Cronyism Cannot be the Basis for Sustained Economic Growth”, Time (2 February, 1998), 60-62. Patten’s colonial disposition also characterises the West’s view of economic failures of the former USSR. 18

It would also be possible to contend that this heterogeneity characterises the demands of contemporary scholarship generally. In something like what Lyotard has called the postmodern condition, it now seems inadequate to not draw upon a wide range of disparate critical concerns. This is exemplified, for instance, in Ali Rattansi, who asserts that a “properly ‘postcolonialist’ analysis … requires the acknowledgement of a 47

set of processes in which cultural formation is dispersed along a number of axes of potentially commensurate importance ! class, certainly, but also sexuality and gender, racism, familial relations, religious discourses, conceptions of childhood and childrearing practices, and requiring therefore also an understanding of underlying processes of psychic development and ‘deformation’” (“Postcolonialism and its Discontents”, Economy and Society, vol. 26, no. 4 (1997), 482). 19

Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?”, trans. Martin Thom, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 11. 20

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur”, in Europe and its Others, ed. Francis Barker, (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985), vol. 1, 128-151; “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson, Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinios Press, 1988), 271-313. 21

Aijaz Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality”, Race & Class, vol. 36, no. 3 (1995), 9. 22

Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism”, Critical Inquiry, 20 (1994), 350, 353. For similar critiques, see: Benita Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse”, The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 9, no. 1-2 (1987), 27-58; Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the term Post-Colonialism”, Social Text, vol. 31. no. 32 (1992), 84-98; Ella Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’”, Social Text, vol. 31, no. 32 (1992), 99-113; and Patrick Williams, “Problems of Post-colonialism”, Paragraph, vol. 16, no. 1 (1993), 91102. 23

See for instance, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Editor’s Introduction: Writing “Race” and the Difference It Makes”, Critical Inquiry, 12 (1985), 1-20; Ania Loomba, “Overworlding the Third World”, Oxford Literary Review, vol. 13, no. 1-2 (1991), 164192; Stan Anson, “The Postcolonial Fiction”, Arena, no. 96 (1991), 64-66. 24

Martina Michel in “Positioning the Subject: Locating Postcolonial Studies”(Ariel, vol. 26, no. 1 (1995), 83-99) argues that the postcolonial makes a significant break with the postmodern (the celebration of the fractured subject as an end in itself). Whilst subjects are constructed through discourse, there is an agency set forth in the negotiation, or awareness of the self’s positionality, in/of the various discourses involved in that construction. This means that the postcolonial, unlike the postmodern, privileges subjectivity and its construction/negotiation. See also Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?”, (Critical Inquiry, 17 (1991), 336-357), which charts a connection on the basis that the post in both theorisations can be read as a “space clearing gesture” that works towards challenging “earlier legitimating narratives” (348, 353); Simon During, “Postmodernism or Postcolonialism Today”, Textual Practice, vol. 1, no. 1 (1987), 32-47. During argues that “the concept postmodernity has been constructed in terms which more or less intentionally wipe out the possibility of post-colonial identity” (33); Arun Mukherjee, “Whose Post-Colonialism and Whose Postmodernism?”, World Literature Written in English, vol. 30, no. 2 (1990), 1-9; Vijay Mishra, and Bob Hodge, “What is Post()colonialism?”, Textual Practice, vol. 5, no. 3 (1991), 399-414; and Linda Hutcheon, “The Post Always Rings Twice: the Postmodern and the Postcolonial”, Textual Practice, vol. 8, no. 3 (1994), 205-238. 48

25

Deepika Bhari, “Once More with Feeling: What is Postcolonialism?” (Ariel, vol. 26, no. 1 (1995), 51-82) in grappling with the meaning of independence contends: “it may be misleading and, worse, unhelpful to think of “postcolonial” issues as only those marked by European imperialism; nor is it always useful to conceive of the “postcolonial” as an adequate descriptor for the diverse experiences of the many nations/cultures thus described. Nor, alas, as Spivak, among others, has observed, is the present moment in these nations “post” the colonial in any genuine, or even cursory, sense, as covert mercantile neo-colonialism, potent successor to modern colonialism, continues its virtually unchallenged march across the face of the earth, ensuring that the wretched will remain so, colluding in, as they did before, but now also embracing, the process of economic and cultural annexation, this time well disguised under the name modernization … The continuing and, in fact, increasing economic and cultural dependence of these nations in the new world order make a mockery of the assumption that, by a certain political rubric, independent status has been achieved … on the basis of a signed document. So, too … do the growing tribalism and sectarianism in the many trouble spots around the world mock the very idea of the nation” (58-59). 26

Gyan Prakash, “Introduction”, in After Colonialism, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), 5. 27

James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 45. 28

Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 95.

29

Poole, “How European is Nationalism? A Response to Philip Gerrans”, 61.

30

Mark Berger, “The End of the Third World”, Third World Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 2 (1994), 267-268. 31

Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Subaltern Studies and Critique of History”, Arena, no. 96 (1991), 110. 32

Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India”, in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 37, 39. 33

Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism”, American Historical Review (December 1994), 1475. 34

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography”, in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 10-11. 35

Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography”, 13.

36

Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1991), 7.

37

Said, Orientalism, 71-72.

49

38

Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 178-179.

39

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 145.

40

Blackwell’s recently published Fanon: A Critical Reader (1996) attests to the richness of Fanon’s work. 41

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Constance Farrington (London: Penguin, 1967), 219. 42

Homi Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition”, in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams, Laura Chrisman (Hemel Hempstead, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 114. 43

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 25.

44

R. Radhakrishnan, Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 178. 45

Said, Orientalism, 21.

46

Rattansi, “Postcolonialism and its Discontents”, 482.

47

Moraru, “Refiguring the Postcolonial”, 178.

48

Benedict Anderson, “Exodus”, Critical Inquiry, 20 (1994), 321, 322, 326.

49

Anderson, “Exodus”, 327.

50

Zulfikar Ghose, “This landscape, These People”, The Loss of India (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1964), 21. 51

Anderson, Imagined Communities, 37-46.

52

Franco Morretti, “Dialectic of Fear”, trans. David Forgacs, Signs Taken for Wonders (London: Verso, 1983), 83, 85, 86. 53

Morretti, “Dialectic of Fear”, 93, 94.

54

Morretti, “Dialectic of Fear”, 105.

55

Morretti, “Dialectic of Fear”, 108.

56

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 115. 57

Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (Dover, Delaware: The Consortium, 1992), 140, 141. 58

Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 158.

50

59

Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 141.

60

Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 131.

61

Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973), 25. 62

Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 141-142.

63

Todorov, The Fantastic, 25.

64

Samuel Monk in his influential study, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), suggests that all theories of the sublime return to Kant (6). 65

James Garvin, “The Maintenance of Empire: A Study in the Economics of Power”, in The Empire and the Century (London: John Murray, 1905), 140. 66

James Garvin, The Economic Foundations of Peace: or World-Partnership as the Truer Basis of the League of Nations (London: Macmillan & Co., 1919), 77. 67

Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, trans. James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVIII (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), 9-10. 68

Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, 35, 36.

69

Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, 53.

70

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Colombia University Press, 1982), 1, 4, 2. 71

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.

72

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 5.

73

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.

74

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4, 8.

75

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 5.

76

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 11.

77

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 12.

78

Jean-François Lyotard, “Answer to the Question: What is the Postmodern?”, in The Postmodern Explained to Children, ed. Julian Pefanis, Morgan Thomas (Sydney: Power Publications, 1992), 23-24. 79

Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey 51

Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 104. 80

Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 53. 81

David Carroll, Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida (London: Routledge, 1987), 173-184. 82

In this regard I follow Meaghan Morris, “Postmodernity and Lyotard’s Sublime”, in The Pirate’s Fiancee: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1988), 223240. See also Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 184-187. 83

Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington, Ian Mcleod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 122. 84

Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 136.

85

Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 129.

86

Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 143. 87

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 209.

88

Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 106-107. 89

Bloom, Agon, 96.

90

Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”, Collected Papers, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), vol. 4, 369-370.

52

Chapter Two Kant, the Sublime, and the Rule of Reason

... even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this.1

Gordon Bennett’s Painting for a New Republic (The Inland Sea)2 locates the colonised self in an oblique relation with the colonial promise of Enlightenment order. Looking out from a swirling, violent, and fractured experiential world that bears no overall organising principle — including: the Union Jack, a colonial boat, skulls and bones, a pyramid, a floating bloodied head, skeletons, Western desert patterns — we see the promise of a golden ordered world, occupied by the text of the great master of Idealism, Kant. The jarring disjunction, radical reversal, of the subjective self and the object here disrupts the Rationalist preoccupation with a priori unity. The pure promise of an Enlightened ordered world does not find its way to this subject, and remains as a consequence an empty illusion, a matter of cultural production, colonial desire. But this disjunction is interrupted by an image (the face) of this internally fractured self in a mirror (that owes less to Kant than to Lacan).

In this space of reflection the

contradictory spaces of Idealism’s promise of an ordered world and the turbulent subjectivity of exile converge. In the words of Ian Mclean, Bennett’s work exposes “the shadows of official ‘history’”, but refuses to situate the confrontation of these selves — Kant and the exile — in a dialectic. Rather than “directly oppose one type of history with another”, in the context of the painting a spatial opposition in which the colonised self, rather than disrupt the coloniser, could be said to actually reproduce the coloniser’s 53

assumptions, Bennett “maps the oblique paths by which these different conceptions of history and their applications to Australia, might cross over”.3 From this space of the ‘cross over’, a sort of in-between, Bennett intervenes in Australia’s conservative racial and ethnic politics. Whilst it would be tempting to argue that this convergence in the space of (self)reflection should be understood in terms of an identity crisis — who am I? — much more disturbing, in the context of Australia’s conservative national history, is the question of (cultural) exile: where am I? (Kristeva). Such a questioning opens up what Bhabha has called the split space of the pedagogic and the performative in the discourse of the nation.4 In the performance of cultural exile, that temporal space caught in-between and outside the remembrance of the past and the forgetfulness of everyday life, the pedagogic in-this-place! is interrupted. The mirror of convergence inserts into Australia’s history (an)other time, a colonial remembering, rather than the (Idealist) European myths of triumph against great odds. This other time in its convergence with the myth of nation arises disturbingly and changes what it means to be a nation. To be a conservative is to attempt to erase what this self in the mirror calls to remembrance. Painting for a New Republic (The Inland Sea) attempts to clear a space (of questioning) in which national myths are always already open to disruption, always already vulnerable to a contested rewriting, the possibility of altered destinations. But there is also another important moment here. Bennett’s refusal to occupy the dialectic of resistance interrupts the notion, of the postcolonial canon generally, that Kantian philosophy (the golden order of Enlightenment), its fixity, is the given of colonial desire. Staged in relation to its opposite, the violent chaos of the figure of cultural exile, the colonial desire for firm epistemological, moral, and social foundations emerges within the postcolonial as a myth of origin. Colonial logic begins at a fixed point, the transcendent Ideal to use the language of the critical Kant, and then proceeds

54

to make this fixed Ideal an actuality. Yet the radical disjunction of the exile and the promise of Kantian order reveals that the chaotic, whilst it appears as order’s opposite, is actually a condition of that order. In other words, what emerges is the notion that Kantian Reason establishes unity, rather than proceeds from a fixed point. Unity is Reason’s goal, never its starting point. Unity is Reason’s teleology. This means that the sublime lack of order of the displaced consciousness, and its political possibilities, need to be re-thought. Rather than a threat, it could be that the displaced, and the hybrid actually serve the purposes of Kantian Reason. As I argued in chapter one, the figure of the monstrous migrant (explored by Rushdie) takes two forms. The first emerges as the essentialised other that the equally essentialised metropolitan centre utilises to define itself. The monstrous Saladin Chamcha is such a figure. His goat-like form merely symbolised what the metropolitan centre was not.

I contended that Rattansi’s

intertwined model exemplifies the Hegelian terms that constitutes such a relation between the metropolitan centre and the postcolonial migrant. Conversely, I contended that the figure of Gibreel Farishta represents a second, much more disturbing image of the postcolonial migrant. His disturbing figure exploits the anxiousness, the underside of the confidence of the metropolitan centre. The figure of the postcolonial migrant thus emerges as an invader of sorts. This thesis seeks to theorise this image of the migrant as (monstrous) invader through the trope of the sublime. My contention is that where there is Western confidence there is also an anxiousness that can be understood in terms of the discourse of the sublime. In its insistence upon disturbing Kantian order, Painting for a New Republic (The Inland Sea) thus also demands that we (re)turn to the work of Kant,5 in order to deal with what I would wish to call the anxious dynamism of Reason’s teleological process. My aim in this chapter will be to re-read the Kantian sublime in the light of Bennett’s incisive painting. I would wish to show that the Kantian sublime (which is

55

utilised to establish reason’s authority) is essentially a conservative trope. For the discourse of the postcolonial, the sublime thus emerges as a critical site upon which the authority of reason is written.

To disrupt this authority, to take up the political

possibilities of the image of the postcolonial migrant as invader, it is necessary, therefore, to consider the sublime, its unpresentable excesses, and its location in relation to reason’s processes. My tactic will be to inhabit the edges of Kant’s thought, in order to draw out the social and political implications of the architecture of the Kantian self. The necessity of Bennett’s intervention from the space of ‘in-between’ is foremost in this undertaking. How is it possible to think this space of intervention, its time, its politics? In order to inhabit the edges of Kant’s thought, I would wish to take up his ‘aesthetic’. Rather than the “science of all principles of a priori sensibility”6 as it appears in Critique of Pure Reason, I take the term in its second usage, as it emerges in Critique of Judgement: as ‘the critique of taste’, or ‘the philosophy of art’. The former accounts for ‘determinate judgement’, the latter introduces another form of judgement, the ‘reflective’. The peculiar principles of ‘reflective judgement’ — the movement from the particular to the universal — have opened up a rich palimpsest of ideas and contestations. As Schopenhauer notes, “we are bound to wonder how Kant, to whom certainly art remained very foreign, and who in all probability had little susceptibility to the beautiful, in fact probably never had the opportunity to see an important work of art, and who seems finally to have no knowledge even of Goethe ... was able to render a great and permanent service to the philosophical consideration of art”.7 Though clearly framed by the principles of pain and pleasure, authentic life, common sense, tradition, and harmony, as well as its remarkable ambition, reflective judgement seems to remain indeterminate. Whilst recent readers foreground what is considered Kant’s failure to unite the theoretical and the practical, liberate the aesthetic from what is considered the tyranny

56

of logical philosophy, and underscore the indeterminate basis for questions of art, politics, and justice (Lyotard, Arendt), my reading will inhabit the edges of the more Romantic Kant (which can be detected in all of the three Critiques). Kant’s remarkable claim in the third Critique is that the working union of knowledge and morality is not possible without art. Bennett’s rejection of the possibilities of the Kantian promise of order is thus all the more compelling. In discourses dealing with the constructedness of the figure of the nation, which is my (postcolonial) concern, Kant’s aesthetic occupies a central place. In critical concepts such as Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’, and Gellner’s and Hobsbawm’s emphasis on the nation as invention,8 the romantic character of reflective judgement is indispensable. The location of the dispossessed self in the spaces of the in-between, can be read as an attempt to problematise Kant’s aesthetic claims. In the light of Reason’s dynamism, as I have suggested, my concern throughout the course of the thesis will be to explore how the discourse of the postcolonial disrupts Reason’s teleological processes. Following Chatterjee, I will link my discussion on Kantian Reason to nationalism’s desire “to represent itself in the image of Enlightenment”.9 I would wish to re-read, what for Chatterjee is the failure of this desire — epistemological unity and moral order — in terms of the dynamic that Bennett opens up, his insertion of the question of exile into the Kantian equation. Whilst Chatterjee stages the Enlightenment in terms of an impossible desire, in which the slippages and contradictions of discourse always already thwart a pretension to order, I would wish to read Kant’s remarkable ambition to unite the theoretical and the practical in terms of a particular dynamic that renders the slippages and contradictions of his discourse as both indispensable and necessary for Reason’s smooth operation. In other words, the notion that Enlightenment culture is always already hampered by an impossible fixity, as it appears in much postcolonial theory, does not take the necessary excesses, movements, and changes that

57

lay at the core of the West’s sense of progress into account. It seems to me that Enlightenment culture is built upon a dynamic of excess and slippage that renders its disruption difficult and complex. What I am suggesting is that the staging of what was and is a colonial consciousness by the West is essentially a process in which excesses and slippages, rather than being an enemy to the cause of its Enlightenment thought outright, are actually structural necessities. This means that if we are to take up the disruptive capacity of the postcolonial, we need to turn to consider the discourse of the sublime and its part in the literary construction of a colonial consciousness. The assumption of the superiority of Western Reason, which marks colonial consciousness, is inseparably linked to that moment, as Weiskel puts it, “implicit in the act of ‘joining’ with the great”,10 and acting in the world of objects as if this is the case. This is not to say that Europe is great, or that transcendental greatness has, or can be attained. Neither is it to suggest that we ought to consider European domination in homogeneous terms as the gathering of the great around a single unifying term. It is to acknowledge that in the working out of a ‘superior’ European consciousness the aesthetic metaphor of the sublime is crucial. It seems to me that Reason, which emerges in Enlightenment thought as the ultimate authority, is able to assume such a status precisely because the metaphor of the sublime, the transcendental dynamic that it opens up, is utilised at that moment in which its legitimation is dramatically called for. This means that rather than a fixed content, which, as a consequence of its impositional inadequacies is doomed to fail, Reason emerges as a dynamic, structural principle that is less content orientated than hegemonic. Without colonial expansion, and the venturesome risks that it affords, Kantian Reason is a hollow emptiness. Without some kind of idea of what constitutes the grand, the great, the powerful, the heroic etc., and some measure of its exploits, the discourse

58

of Reason is a blind tautology. It seems to me that the Kantian self, ruled by Reason, draws into its formulation the character of the coloniser, who, in the form of the heroic discoverer and civiliser goes forth in order to impose its limits upon the ‘objective’ world. It is in this sense that we can locate the work of the sublime. Kant in his endeavour to proclaim the supremacy of Reason, and the possibilities for such a self (Sapere aude!),11 also sought to anchor the authority of Reason in an idea, more accurately a feeling of greatness via the sublime. My aim will be to unpack the nature of this greatness, so that it can be juxtaposed to the interventions of Bennett and the discourse of the postcolonial.

I would wish to contend that the Kantian sublime

emerges in the context of European expansionism. I will begin exploring the Kantian sublime by outlining the philosophical basis of the Kantian self. I will then socially locate this self, in order to underscore the social implications of the Kantian sublime. Foremost in my inquiry is the issue of what I have called Western anxiousness, the underside of Western confidence. As it is articulated through the discourse of the sublime, I would wish to show that this anxiousness is a necessity for reason, and also an instant in which reason’s vulnerability is exposed.

My contention is that the

postcolonial sublime is opened up in the moment in which such a vulnerability is exploited. The Excesses of the Kantian Self We can begin to chart this vulnerability by examining Kant’s theory of the self. The Kantian self begins in the radical reformulation of the relationship of the object of sense to the cognitive faculties. Whilst it is impossible to determine whether ideas inform processes or whether processes inform ideas, the exigency of this radical reformulation of selfhood coincided with Europe’s capitalist and colonialist expansion. The traditional theories of the self, as Joyce Appleby explains, that “begin with the person as a member of society born into a complex of obligations and identities”, 59

clearly lacked the desires that lay at the core of expansionism. Theories of the self thus shift to focus upon the basis for an expansionist desire. As such, Appleby continues, in the context of capitalist expansion, theories of the self stress an individual need that coincides, strangely, with a “common set of needs”.12 For Charles Taylor, the erosion of the socially obligated self can be understood as a process of ‘disenchantment’, whereby theories of the unified natural self, the “ontic logos” as he calls it, have disappeared. In the debates concerning Aufklärung, “theories of ontic logos cease to be meaningful … The world consists of a domain of objects to which we can respond in varying ways”. The “disengagement from cosmic order” meant that “the human agent was no longer to be understood as an element in a larger, meaningful order”. The self’s “paradigm purposes are to be discovered within.”13 In keeping with the revised theories of the self that Appleby and Taylor outline, Kant’s ‘radical reformulation’ of the self arises in response to what he understood as two philosophical dangers. Upon the first, the disturbing spectre of empiricism had attacked the basis of rational reflection. Condillac asserted in his Traité des Sensations, for instance, that reflective possibility is simply a habit that has been formed in time. The mind in the process of learning, and therefore by extension becoming knowledgeable, merely replays what has been derived from sensory experience, the memories of past perceptions. Concerning the (annoying) imaginary statue, utilised throughout the work to show how the senses produced ideas, Condillac contended that “I have formed the habit of certain judgments which refer my sensations where they are not. ... Thus the statue is nothing other than what it has acquired. Why would the same not be true of man?”.14 Upon the second front, the Leibnizian metaphysical tradition, of which Kant was a part, had unleashed a philosophical excess that effectively destabilised the certainty of knowledge. In keeping with the individualism around which debates concerning Aufklärung had gathered, Leibniz argued that every

60

consciousness (‘monad’) in essence requires no need of a world of objects to function. His famous phrase, “the monad is windowless”,15 meant that perceptions can never be brought about by action from outside.16

They must, in some sense, be generated

spontaneously within the monad itself. This means that the relationships between “all created things”, rather than conflictual and effective, are determined by their inner, universal principles.

The “interconnection, relationship ... of all things to each

particular one”, Leibniz writes, “and of each one to all the rest, brings it about that every simple substance has relations which express all the others and that it is consequently a perpetual living mirror of the universe”. The problematic relationship between the mind and the body, perhaps the central philosophical issue of the day, was thus claimed to have been resolved. According to the logic of monadology, the resolution is that there is no relationship, there is merely a coincidence. Leibniz asserts, “the soul follows its own laws, and the body likewise follows its own laws. They are fitted to each other in virtue of the preestablished harmony between all substances, since they are all representations of one and the same universe”.17 Kantian Reason begins in a dynamic atmosphere of philosophical and social debate. His reformulation of the self should be read in the context of the European expansionism of which these philosophical and social debates are a crucial part. Kant’s work establishes the power and authority of Reason, that faculty of mind that, ultimately, marks the individual. It is in and against the notion that the universe is a machine in which human thought and action can be reduced to “how system into system runs”,18 as Pope put it, that Kant writes. In such notions the empirical self is a kind of victim, helpless and absurd. Questions concerning the moral worth of the individual, if we are to follow thinkers such as Condillac, and to certain extent Hume, are essentially meaningless.19 Kant also sought to rescue metaphysics from its dogmatic excesses, its lofty idealism, so that an authoritative account of Reason could be found. In a “realm

61

beyond the world of the senses”, Kant explains, “where experience can yield neither guidance nor correction ... our reason carries on those enquiries [God, Freedom, and Immortality] which owing to their importance we consider to be far more excellent, and in their purpose far more lofty, than all the understanding can learn in the field of appearances”. But the metaphysics that “confidently sets itself to this task” does so, Kant argues, “without any previous examination of the capacity or incapacity of reason for so great an undertaking”.20 Precariously caught between the poles of vertigo and an inexplicable excess, it is significant that Kant set about, as he puts it in the “Preface to the Second Edition” of the first Critique, “discovering the path upon which it [reason] can securely travel”.21 This path is expressed thus. In its theoretical employment:

Reason is never in immediate relation to an object, but only to the understanding; and it is only through the understanding that it has its own [specific] empirical employment. … Reason has … as its sole object, the understanding and its effective application. Just as the understanding unifies the manifold in the object by means of concepts, so reason unifies the manifold of concepts by means of ideas, positing a certain collective unity as the goal of the activities of the understanding.22

This means that the goal of the understanding by means of the concepts (a unified experiential knowledge), as situated by the Ideas of Reason, effectively demolishes the empiricist emphasis upon the self as a clean slate upon which nature writes its immutable laws.23 Moreover, the ‘risky’ Leibnizian practice of separating the Ideas from the conditions that make experience possible, in order to make dogmatic, yet foundationless assertions, is also laid to rest.

62

Rather than replay Kant’s theory of knowledge, I would wish to focus upon what I understand as the exigency of reason’s ‘security’ (sicheren). In what I have called the anxiousness of Western reason, ‘security’ as a metaphor for engendering reason is particularly nuanced. In order to argue that the discourse of the postcolonial seizes the Kantian sublime and pushes it beyond its limits, it will be useful to chart such nuances. The metaphor directly relates to European expansionism, and the European self as an authoritative agent. What does ‘security’ in the context of expansionism mean? Kant argues that the coincidence of reason’s ideas and the thing-it-itself (since they are both part of the same universe, as Leibniz claimed) is simply a (dangerous) mistake. The self’s limited (sensory) view of the world means that it is impossible to know the thing-in-itself absolutely.24 We can never see the world as (a) God. But there is more at stake here than what is clearly Kant’s pious anxiousness concerning the capacity of the self to rise above his or her meek station in life. The possibility of a solid foundation for knowledge is also a crucial issue. If Reason’s unfounded claims can be distinguished from its more secure employment, then it is possible to establish knowledge as a certainty, rather than as empty speculation. It would be possible to confidently know that what is known is dependable.

Such a solid domain, Kant

describes as “an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is the land of truth ... surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean”.25 ‘Security’ is thus inseparably linked to surety, in the context of Reason’s theoretical employment. As the metaphor implies, this demand for a secure knowledge means that the possibility of uncertainty is an ever present danger for theoretical Reason. Kant’s work is built upon an anxiousness that arises in relation to the question of the authority of reason. His important distinction between phenomena and noumena thus attempts to ward off uncertainty, and to establish an authoritative basis for knowledge. Phenomena (‘sensible entities’) as the objects of experience — the system of the world as

63

experience reveals it — are the basis for an empirically based, that is to say, a certain knowledge. Kant argues that the “principles of pure understanding ... contain nothing but what may be called the pure schema of possible experience”. All “concepts, and with them all principles, even as such as are possible a priori, relate to empirical intuitions, that is, to the data for a possible experience. Apart from this relation they have no objective validity”.26

Theoretical reason legitimately employed makes

‘inferences’ that are based upon what the understanding supplies, and this alone.27 The unity of experience is established via the ideas, which work upon the understanding, empirically employed.28 Noumena, on the other hand, can be defined as the objects of thought that have no direct link to the experiential world of the understanding. This is the domain of metaphysics, which, Kant interestingly claims:

is to be looked upon as given; that is to say, metaphysics actually exists, if not as a science, yet still as natural disposition ... For human reason, without being moved merely by idle desire for extent and variety of knowledge, proceeds impetuously, driven on by an inward need, to questions such as cannot be answered by any empirical employment of reason, or by principles thence derived.29

In the constitution of this self, there thus exists an unrestrained desire for what will become the elevation of conscious thought over the immediate world of the senses. But in the domain of knowledge, for Kant such impetuosity, with its excesses and sense of unbridled freedom, almost lawlessness, will never do. Against this ingrained character of reason, in which the transcendental ideas “seduce the understanding by an unavoidable illusion ... which, though deceitful, cannot be restrained within the bounds of experience by any resolution”, the pedagogic Kant sets forth what he describes as a

64

solution. Such a solution is made possible “only by scientific instruction and with much difficulty”.30 Reason’s security thus emerges as a great achievement carried out against what seems like an insurmountable excess. In the context of the debates concerning Aufklärung, Kant’s sober reminder concerning the limits of theoretical knowledge is directed at the rationalist philosophers who made unfounded conclusions concerning the big questions — noumena: God, Immortality, Freedom. As I have stated, noumena do not correspond to appearances, but, like the monads of Leibniz, arise outside and beyond sensibility, all verifiable phenomena. But in the context of this discussion on reason’s ‘security’, which seems to be crucial for the Kantian self, the unbridled capacity of noumena signals that reason is ultimately undetermined, that is to say, free. “For we cannot”, Kant asserts, say “of sensibility that it is the sole possible kind of intuition”. Noumena are, therefore, not dismissed outright by Kant’s deliberations upon knowledge. Instead they serve a useful, albeit negative function, “to curb the pretensions of sensibility”.31 In the light of the ‘dangers’ that surround it here, Reason emerges as a voyager upon an ocean of perils. What is significant concerning Kant’s metaphor, however, is the source of this impending danger. For whilst perilous voyages imply that reason leaves its homeland and ventures away, the dangers that it encounters do not come from a space beyond its borders, but from its own ‘natural’ inclinations. What this suggests is that Reason’s legitimate theoretical employment is always already marked by a capacity that far exceeds that employment. Reason thus in many respects sacrifices its own capacity in order to function legitimately. The excessive possibilities of noumena, whilst always already a danger to reason’s surety concerning its sensible objects, “is not only admissible”, Kant asserts, “but as setting limits to sensibility is ... indispensable”.32 The nature of this sacrificial gesture, the excesses that enable it, and the sense of authority that accompanies it, are crucial. In view of the capacities that it sacrifices,

65

reason’s legitimate theoretical employment can be considered all the more authoritative. The issue of reason’s ‘security’, which has been my concern thus far, directly relates to certainty, and by extension, the capacity of the self to make authoritative claims concerning the state of the world. Security equates to sure authority — the I knows that the known is true. Backed by reason, the Kantian self in the context of colonial expansion thus makes a claim for the authority of his knowledge. For this thesis two crucial issues concerning the security of reason emerge. Firstly, the objective authority of reason is inseparably linked to the irrational. In short, the irrational enables Kant to establish reason’s theoretical limits. Secondly, since reason’s authority is always established in relation to what can be called sublime excesses, excess emerges as a problem for the discourse of the postcolonial. If excess is a necessity, how is it possible to disrupt reason? I would contend that the necessity of the sublime in the process that established the authority of reason, signals that reason is at once the master of its conscious domain, and yet vulnerable, since its mastery is established in the face of the possibility of its collapse. The possibility of reason’s collapse is a crucial moment in the discourse of the postcolonial. It opens up a space for a cogent politics to begin. To disrupt this authority it is necessary, therefore, to unleash the sublime, its unpresentable excesses, from the shackles of the Kantian dialectic. If in Critique of Pure Reason Kant is anxious to ward off the dangerous excesses of Reason, in its practical employment the vulnerability of reason is particularly marked. The ideas which had been kept under check by a sacrificial logic in reason’s theoretical employment become much more tenuous. I draw attention to the ideas in order to underscore both reason’s authority and its vulnerability. As I will show in subsequent chapters, my contention is that the disruptive capacity of the discourse of the postcolonial is built upon a seizure of the vulnerability of reason. Having claimed to have demolished a purely empirical basis for knowledge, and to have dispelled the

66

grand illusions of rationalism, Kant further radicalises his theory of the self in his engagement with the issue of morality. In the Critique of Practical Reason we find pure reason in its practical form refusing to subordinate moral action to sensuality, and to sensual knowledge. The freedom that was a major problem for theoretical reason, as Kant’s concept of noumena revealed, now becomes central. If reason found it necessary to willingly resist the lure of freedom in its theoretical employment, in its practical employment “the possibility ! indeed, the necessity ! of thinking them” opens up the possibility of thinking of the moral law and its relation to freedom. For practical reason, Kant contends, the moral law “does provide a fact absolutely inexplicable from any data of the world of sense or from the whole compass of the theoretical use of reason, and this fact points to a pure intelligible world ! indeed, it defines it positively and enables us to know something of it, namely, a law”.33 In what appears as almost a reverse of the function of the ideas of reason in its theoretical employment, the ideas function without limits in its practical employment. This is crucial, it reveals the disturbing indeterminacy of the ‘grounds’ upon which reason is built, its vulnerability. Functioning in Reason’s ‘pure’ form as heuristic principles,34 the ideas act like objects yet at the same time bear no relation to such. Kant writes, there is “a great difference between something being given to my reason as an object absolutely, or merely as an object in the idea. In the former case our concepts are employed to determine the object; in the latter case there is in fact only a schema for which no object … is directly given”.35 As the rules of the Reason’s legislative powers, the ideas can be considered to be authoritative, that is to say legitimate, simply because they are able to perform the task at hand: to bring unity to the manifold. What this means is that there is no sense in which ideas can be considered legitimate because of the content that they convey. Their legitimacy is understood in performative terms, since they provide the structure that organises the manifold into a totality. The Ideas, in 67

reason’s legitimate theoretical employment, merely work with what the understanding makes available. As such there is still a sense in which the sensory faculty limits knowledge, as it does in empiricism. But since Ideas do not correspond to an object, there is always the possibility that they can exceed the bounds of the understanding in order to operate purely in their own (transcendent) terms. Perhaps this would be madness. Perhaps Leibniz was mad. Yet the possibility of this excess is a crucial component in Kant’s masterful self, as I will show. Significantly this sense of mastery is set forth via a theory of morality, rather than knowledge. Mastery has to do with the acts of the self, which, as Kant explains, “depends upon freedom”. In defending the moral basis of Plato’s Republic, Kant declares, “it is the power of freedom to pass beyond any and every specified limit. … where human reason exhibits genuine causality, and where ideas are operative causes (of actions and their objects), namely, in the moral sphere … Plato rightly discerns clear proofs of an origin from ideas”.36 And again, there “is in man a power of selfdetermination, independently of any coercion through sensuous impulses”.37 But there is also a logic of sacrifice at work here. Though in this case reason sacrifices the senses. It is in the humbling of sensual motives that the possibility of moral action arises. In pietist fashion, the concept of the ‘highest good’, the ideal of moral action, emerges solely from the idea of moral perfection in itself, which Reason formulates a priori, and which is inseparably linked to the concept of freedom, rather than the wayward passions of the body.

In this instance the ideas have been

transformed and put to a different use, namely the relation of Reason to the will, as opposed to the relation of Reason to the object, as in the case of Reason’s theoretical employment. Again the problematic draws upon the supremacy of Reason, which in this instance determines the will in terms of the concept of freedom.

68

If in Reason’s theoretical employment we find certain limits, as tentative as this claim may be, it is only through moral action that Freedom can be set forth. Kant in this regard is an indeterminist. The self is free to act in agreement with its choices, since actions are not determined by sensory data in any shape or form. Whilst I am not concerned here with long standing debates concerning freedom and causality, it will suffice to say that what is crucial for Kant as an indeterminist is the notion that the self is morally dynamic. Hume had argued:

the same motives always produce the same actions; the same events follow from the same causes.

Ambition, avarice, self-love, vanity, friendship, generosity,

public spirit ! these passions, mixed in various degrees and distributed through society, have been, from the beginning of the world, and still are, the source of all of the actions and enterprises which have ever been observed among mankind.38

But action for Kant is considered to be always already moral, since it presupposes a freedom that transcends empirical causes. Kant tells us, “pure reason alone is practical of itself, and it gives (to man) a universal law, which we call the moral law. ... The fact just mentioned is undeniable”. The remarkable thing about the moral law is that it doesn’t exist in isolation as an abstract entity hovering above the deeds of the self. Rather, Kant continues, “the law has the form of an imperative”,39 which is derived from the subject alone. Duty to the moral law thus arises in the relation of action to the autonomy of the will. The practical law and freedom “reciprocally imply each other. … it is the moral law which leads directly to the concept of freedom”.40 The self acts, but in order to act morally such action must be free, since the concept of freedom implies the moral law. If the self acts immorally, say out of sensual pride, or anger, or lust (in Kant’s day irredeemably

69

immoral), such actions imply a determination other than freedom; in the examples cited: sensual appetites perhaps. Actions which are compatible to the autonomy of the will are thus deemed moral, actions which are not, since a determining force other than freedom is in play, cannot be free. The will whose maxims are necessarily in harmony with the condition of freedom is a ‘holy will’, or an absolutely good will.41 In the dutiful action the self enters a relation not to external necessities, but to the freedom of the will, as expressed by the ideas. I have suggested that reason’s authority in both the theoretical and practical sphere emerges in performative, rather than metaphysical terms. For Kant there is no rigid basis for the self, other than the capacity of the self to produce knowledge and to act morally. I have also suggested that the confidence of Kant and his knowing and moral self, is constructed in an ‘atmosphere’ of anxiousness. Kant sought to rescue reason from the dangerous sea of excess, to provide it with a stable homeland, an island from which to establish its authority. We have encountered Kant the philosopher revealing the transcendental principles that provide the conditions of the possibility of the self’s knowledge of the object, and the self’s moral dynamism. It is interesting that the basis for these transcendental principles, however, is not built upon the detailed philosophical critique of Hume that we find in the Prolegomena, which painstakingly qualifies and brackets his “critical idealism”.42 Neither is it the philosopher preoccupied with actualities, the truth. Instead, listen to Kant as the animating principle of the reign of the reasonable self over the object begins to emerge. Remarkably we find Kant simply appealing to what we might consider to be a simple ‘utility’: this is the ‘easier’ way. In the “Introduction” to the Critique of Judgement he writes:

if we were told that a deeper or wider knowledge of nature derived from observation must lead at last to a variety of laws, which no human understanding

70

could reduce to a principle, we should at once acquiesce. But still we more gladly listen to one who offers hope that the more we know nature internally and can compare it with external members now unknown to us, the more simple shall we find it in its principles, and that the further our experience reaches, the more uniform shall we find it amid the apparent heterogeneity of its empirical laws. For it is a mandate of our judgment to proceed according to the principle of the harmony of nature with our cognitive faculty.43

It is crucial to note that Kant is not concerned with refuting, in this instance, the notion that ultimately the understanding always already fails to grasp the object of sense. In fact he is content to agree with this proposition. But at the same time this resignation and perhaps nihilistic pessimism that attends to it, however, is overturned in favour of a possibility that offers hope.

Kant seems unshaken in his confidence

concerning this hope, which has as its object a unified experience. But this confidence, which animates what could be considered Kant’s flirt with the possibility of meaninglessness here, appears, abruptly, without consideration. In this moment the philosophical text ceases and is invaded, contaminated, by cultural desire. What is important for Kant is the possibility of an authoritative, masterful self. The third Critique appeals to the necessity of a conscious unity, despite, what could be, the meaningless state of the actual world. The Jewel in the Crown: Critique of Judgement I have staged Kant’s work in terms of what I have considered to be his preoccupation with constituting an authoritative conception of Reason. My contention is that knowledge and morality are both effected in the self in that crucial moment in which Reason comes into play in order to legislate the experiential manifold and to determine social action.

Each employment derives its authority in and through a 71

relation with another aspect of self-hood, the transcendent ideas and the sensuous desires that arise as a threat to reason’s authoritative employment. Kant claimed to have found a new ground for asserting an autonomous self, a ‘transcendental ego’ equipped to impose its desires upon the random acts of experience. I have shown that the necessity of the Kantian architectonic system is written against a backdrop of crises, what was considered to be the moral vertigo of empiricism, and the excesses of rationalism. Importantly these impending crises were located as parts of the Kantian self, rather than objects that threaten from the ‘outside’. Reason is constituted in its various forms through an antagonistic struggle with its own dark desires, its lofty idealism, its bodily passions. The crowning jewel in the Kantian self thus arrives when Reason’s theoretical authority is established in relation to the possibility of its dissolution. Conversely, this self’s practical dynamism remains impotent without the possibility of the condition of freedom being brought to bear upon the objects of knowledge. In light of the excesses upon which reason is established, and the simple utility that animates the ‘hope’ that the Kantian self offers, I will turn to the question of the sublime. In the following my aim will be to demonstrate the conservative basis of the Kantian sublime, and that such a conservatism is inseparably linked to the European desire for centrality upon the global stage. The sublime as excess arises in order to define reason’s limits. The sublime is the object that reason overcomes in order to establish its authority. It is my contention that it this conservatism that the discourse of the postcolonial works against. In wresting the sublime from its conservative trajectory, the discourse of the postcolonial interrupts the basis for reason’s authority. It is in the sense of a securely knowing and morally accountable self that Critique of Judgement works. At this point we encounter the famous abyss between freedom and necessity. Whilst many have contended with this abyss as a philosophical

72

problem, I would instead wish to consider it a political one. If the Kantian self is to truly soar above empirical experience authoritatively, which as I have suggested is at the core of Kant’s colonial desire, it is necessary to structure consciousness such that freedom and its association with mastery becomes the condition of not only morality but also of the self’s entire being in the world. It is in this sense of moving beyond limitations, in the name of mastery, that the Critique of Judgement attempts to unite the moral self and the knowing self through the judgement (aesthetic and teleological). The philosophical failure, or success, of this attempt is not my concern here.

My

‘habitation’ of Kant’s edge is much more pragmatic. I write in the shadow of over two centuries of Kantian thought. My concern is with the ‘Kant effect’, rather than ‘Kant in itself’. Critique of Judgement sets as its task the problem of carving a space between theoretical and practical Reason, the terrain of the first and second Critiques. Kant tells us, “an immeasurable gulf is fixed between the sensible realm of the concept of nature and the supersensible realm of the concept of freedom, so that no transition is possible from the first to the second”. But this transition is necessary, Kant continues, since the “concept of freedom is meant to actualize in the world of sense the purpose proposed by its laws”44. In other words, the problem of the possibility of practical reason, or more precisely the moral law, to preside over empirical experience, the domain of pure reason, is central in Kant’s critical pursuit here. The necessity of this transition is thus driven by a desire for the ultimate supremacy of practical Reason, as it is attended to by the concept of freedom, over the entire architectonic system. We thus find in Kant’s problematic a language that is preoccupied with hierarchy. Kant’s system situates Reason at the top of the pyramid as a kind of master over the domains of knowledge and moral being.

73

In order to achieve this crowning moment, Kant utilises reflective judgement, the third faculty, that is situated between Pure Reason and Practical Reason, and which functions according to a principle in which only the particular is a given, and the “universal has to be found”.

Reflective judgement begins with the particular, the

immediate, and then “ascends”, as Kant puts it, in order to establish a universal frame. Kant tells us, that this process of ascension (I take note of this terminology) operates in terms of a principle, “the purposiveness of nature”, which is characterised as a “particular concept, a priori, which has its origin solely in the reflective judgement”. 45 As such the reflective judgement has no determined object. Kant explains this as such,

the aesthetical judgment contributes nothing toward the knowledge of its objects, and thus must be reckoned as belonging to the critique of the judging subject and its cognitive faculties only so far as they are susceptible of a priori principles, of whatever other use (theoretical or practical) they may be. This is the propaedeutic of all philosophy.46

We can thus think of reflective judgement as that moment in which the mind turns inward and becomes conscious of its own working. This self-consciousness is the ground upon which Idealism writes itself. Without such there is no world, no self, no art, no philosophy, and certainly no national(ist) spirit. Reflective judgement is divided into two basic operations: the aesthetic and the teleological. I am mainly concerned with the aesthetic, which functions in two distinct, yet interrelated ways, in terms of the beautiful and the sublime. If we recall the basic task of the Critique of Judgement ! to unite theoretical and practical reason ! we find that this is accomplished in a straightforward fashion. Practical Reason is united with Pure Reason via the work of the beautiful and the teleological in relation to the (pliable)

74

Ideas. The feeling of pleasure that is attended to by beautiful forms in art and nature implies an Idea of the similarity of nature and reflective thought. Kant calls this a “subjective purposiveness of nature for our cognitive faculty”.47

Conversely, the

similarity that is implied in the feeling of pleasure also directly relates to the Idea of an objective finality of nature for freedom, which is the object of teleological judgement. The theoretical and the practical are thus united via the relation of the Idea to nature. Kant tells us that the “beautiful arts and the sciences which, by their universally communicable pleasure, and by the polish and refinement of society, make man more civilised, if not morally better.” Since the Idea of nature as subject to the understanding and the Idea of nature as art demands the supremacy of the supersensible concept of freedom, the beautiful and the teleological “win us in large measure from the tyranny of sense propensions, and thus prepare men for a lordship in which reason alone shall have authority”.48 It is significant that the unity of the self is set forth solely in terms of the relation between the Ideas and the beautiful and the teleological. It is here that the logical necessity of Reason’s authority is established. But Kant does not seem to be ultimately satisfied with this authority, since, it could be contended, the beautiful and the teleological establish merely a subjective authority for Reason that ‘prepares men for lordship’. This means that the Kantian self, whilst built upon the principle of strength in unity, remains untried in the world of human affairs. Kant does not seem to be content with the authority of this moment in purely performative terms. Thus, whilst there appears to be no need for the sublime moment in establishing the necessity of a conscious unity ! which leads Lyotard in his Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime to conclude that the sublime thus emerges as a dangerous threat to Reason’s supremacy49 ! I would argue that it is in the sublime moment that Kant’s unified self soars with authority as an actor in the social world. What I would wish to suggest is that from 75

Kant’s social perspective, to borrow a phrase from Schiller, without “the sublime, beauty would make us forget our dignity”.50 It is precisely the possibility of threat that enables Reason to establish its authority, its dignity. Such a proposition is in keeping with myths of unity generally, which are always already established in and against some kind of crises. It is in encountering the sublime, with its disturbing excesses, that the Kantian self is able to be rescued from the clutches of oblivion — unified yet not an actor — and in which Reason is ultimately able reign supreme in the social domain. For embedded in the Ideas is the always already sense in which Reason itself is unlimited, perhaps infinite,51 as the transcendent ideas suggest. Having established the possibility of the impact of supersensible freedom upon knowledge and art via the Ideas, Kant deals with what makes us susceptible to the ideas and their excessive possibilities in the first place.52 This ‘susceptibility’ warrants investigation. The implication is that Ideas don’t simply derive an authority in purely performative terms. Whilst the Ideas function in a limited fashion, the notion arises, since no object can be found, that Ideas are actually unlimited, and that any sense of limitation is self imposed. Thus to glimpse an Idea in its unlimited state is to glimpse what is absolutely great. It means that greatness inhabits the self, who, because of the necessities of life, chooses to live a limited, yet higher, existence. This notion relates directly to the discourse of the sublime, as I will show. Kant’s aesthetic is structured by the division between the beautiful and the sublime.

Such a division is drawn up in terms of the direction of subjective

purposiveness.

If directed toward the understanding the aesthetic judgement is

concerned with the pleasure attended to by judgements of taste. If directed toward Reason itself the judgement’s concern becomes sublime, since it is preoccupied, in this instance, with Reason’s ultimate task, namely to bring unity and freedom to bear upon

76

the experiential manifold. As such the Kantian self is split. Whilst Kant reveals the impossibility of knowledge of the thing-in-itself, in order to function the self is forced on the one hand, to impose its knowledge upon nature, and on the other, to overcome the subjective resistances to this task. In other words if unity is the supreme principle of reason, the self in order to find unity in nature, must at the same time produce a unified subjectivity. Thus we find the necessity of an aesthetic moment which champions the cause of reason. Kant tells us:

Susceptibility to pleasure from reflection upon the forms of things (of nature as well as of art) indicates not only a purposiveness of the objects in relation to the reflective judgment, conformably to the concept of nature in the subject, but also conversely a purposiveness of the subject in respect of the objects according to their form or even their formlessness, in virtue of the concept of freedom. Hence the aesthetical judgment is not only related as a judgment of taste to the beautiful, but is also as springing from a spiritual feeling related to the sublime.53

This susceptibility thus arises through, what could be called, a dissatisfaction with nature. Nature is not necessarily unified in terms of the immutable laws of the divine, it is produced by the self in the subjective world of appearances. Already built into Kant’s architectonic system, is the notion that nature, matter, is hostile to the self. In this revival of Platonic thought, a unified consciousness of the world does not flow ‘naturally’ from sensual experience, it is set forth as a mandate that flows from the feeling of pleasure to the understanding, as it manages, under the auspices of the ideas of Reason to unite the manifold in terms of a single unifying principle. But unity as a logical necessity implies that the condition of chaos is also necessary.

Sensory

experience bursts into consciousness formlessly, and as such there is a sense in which

77

the imagination and the understanding are always in conflict, since the imposition of unity, the sorting out of the manifold by means of the categories and ultimately the ideas of reason, seems to be selective. This means that there is always a sense in which something remains in excess of the understanding, something that only becomes apparent, seemingly, in the mathematical and the dynamical sublime. It is thus possible that both the feeling of pleasure occasioned in the act of bringing unity to bear upon the manifold (the beautiful), and also the feeling of pain and pleasure, as Reason itself becomes conscious of this subjective task (the sublime), are in play simultaneously. Both the sublime and the beautiful are thus crucial moments for the Kantian self. Each moment presupposes the other.

Thus rather than a radical opposition, for

eighteenth-century aesthetic thinkers, of which Kant is no exception, the sublime was considered a species, if not a (pre)condition of the beautiful.54 The sublime as a precondition for the necessity of the beautiful thus directly relates to Reason and its legislative capacity. Just as Reynolds, who, in his pyramidical system of the self, situates sublimity at the “pinnacle, or ultimate point”, of the self, “forming in the imagination the figure of a pyramid”,55 Kant finds in the sublime moment Reason’s ultimate extension as it exercises finally its supremacy over nature. This moment of the self’s reckoning arises only in situations which threaten the existence, perhaps possibility, of the unity of sensory experience. The Kantian self is thus built upon the sublime moment, which is both a necessity and a threat. Sublime Contexts: The British Tradition It will be useful at this point to digress for a moment to consider wider discussions concerning the sublime. This will enable us to contextualise Kant’s work, which is a product of its time, and furnish its utilisation of sublimity with some important details in my argument concerning Reason’s use of the sublime.

I am

particularly interested in the confidence that the sublime threat engenders. I will focus 78

upon the British tradition, since Kant seems to be well acquainted with its ideas. What emerges is the implication of the sublime in what could be called the emergence of British national pride. In taking up the sublime, Kant does not seem to depart from the nobility and sense of dignity that the sublime brings to British national selves. I draw upon this connection between the sublime and the emergence of British nationalism, because I would wish to underscore the conservative nature of the trope of the sublime. In the context of an expanding Europe, the sublime opens up a sense of nobility. Excess for eighteenth-century Europe presented nothing less than lofty possibilities. Following Longinus’ important work on the sublime, eighteenth-century British theorists defined ‘sublime’, in the words of James Beattie, as denoting “literally the circumstance of being raised above the slime, the mud, or the mould, of this world”.56

Such a

circumstance, John Baillie would go on to explain, “raises the mind to fits of greatness, and disposes it to soar above her mother earth; hence arises that exultation and pride which the mind ever feels from the consciousness of its own vastness”.57 The sublime is derived from that sense of the self who seeks to escape and transcend the limits of the body, the imperfection of matter. Despite an empiricist understanding of the self in some instances, the sublime is always already haunted by that stoic self that Plato announced in Phaedo, who “manifests his efforts to release his soul from association with his body to a degree that surpasses that of the rest of mankind”.58 We also find Holbach’s insistence in La Système de la Nature upon the oppositions between sensory fear and rational knowledge, and the savage and civilisation.59 The discourses of elevation that draw upon the sublime are driven by a lack, a discontent, a feeling of limitation, and strive to find meaning above and beyond immediate experience. The sublime opens up the possibility of resisting the nihilistic resignation of the mundane. It is to demand more of the immediate, and the sensory, to live with the constant need to

79

supplement presence with an absence that transforms the meaning of things in themselves, as the self is elevated to a higher purpose. Thus the idea of the sublime is drawn up around the question of the unpresentable. Its function in eighteenth-century Europe, as Beattie and Baillie reveal, directly relates to the capacity of the self to confidently exploit the unpresentable. As opposed to the failures, disruptions, interruptions and indeterminacies of recent discussion on the sublime, eighteenth-century Europe seemed to be preoccupied with the sense of ‘elevation’ that the unpresentable authorised. The capacity to give form to the unpresentable, served as a crucial measure of both the moral and intellectual worth of individuals and, ultimately, the myth of nation. Felton’s early eighteenth-century A Dissertation on the Classics exemplifies what was at stake in discourses on the sublime. He writes:

The noblest Sentiments must be conveyed in the weightiest Words: All Ornaments and Illustrations must be borrowed from the richest Parts of universal Nature; and in Divine Subjects, especially when we attempt to speak of GOD, of His Wisdom, Goodness and Power, of His Mercy and Justice, of His Dispensations and Providence, by all which He is pleased to manifest Himself to the Sons of Men, we must raise our Thoughts, and enlarge our Minds, and Search all the Treasures of Knowledge for every Thing that is great, wonderful and magnificent: We can only express our Thoughts of the Creator in the Works of His Creation; and the brightest of these can only give us some faint Shadows of his Greatness and His Glory. The strongest Figures are too weak, the most exalted Language too low to express His ineffable Excellence. No Hyperbole can be brought to heighten our Thoughts, for in so sublime a Theme nothing can be Hyperbolical.60

80

The sublime theme, as Felton reveals, opens up the issue of the adequacy of prose to be able to represent its object. Indeed in this work which seeks to chart what constitutes a ‘just composition’, Felton’s strained language on the subject of representing the divine, discloses the authoritative legitimacy of discourses on the sublime. On matters as weighty and serious as the divine, language fails. But, crucially, such a failure is able to be marked, as Felton’s ‘rules’ attest, by a certain style of composition. This marked representational failure, precisely because it is a failure, renders such texts culturally and socially valid. The unpresentable is able to be represented formerly. But the content of Felton’s sublime texts, always already exceed such a form. This means that it is the unpresentable excess that marks the text as culturally valid, rather than the text’s formal limits. Ultimately Felton invites readers to take up texts on the divine as inadequate, and incomplete. Felton foregrounds the fragility of formal limits. There is a sense in which the object of the text actually begins beyond the text’s formal frame. Whilst it could be argued that Felton’s insistence upon the formal inadequacy of prose in some respect prefigures contemporary discussions on the sublime — Felton’s reading of the sublime implies that texts on the divine necessitate misreading as reading — in the context of eighteenth-century Europe Felton’s discussion, and development of the ‘rules’ for marking representational failure, opens up the possibility of marking out cultural validity. Thus the discussions derived from Felton’s early eighteenth-century work on representational adequacy61 utilise the sublime, and what amounts to the adequacy of markers of representational failure, in the construction of European superiority. In Edward Young’s influential Conjectures on Original Composition, for instance, what emerges in discussions on adequate representational practices, is the notion that the English poets — Shakespeare, Milton — are greater than the ancients. It is a “compliment to those heroes of antiquity”, Young writes, “to suppose

81

Shakespeare their equal only in dramatic powers ... There is at least as much Genius on the British, as on the Grecian stage”.62 In this comparison with the ancients, an eighteenth-century preoccupation, the figure of Genius, as marked in discourses on the sublime, takes on a national character. Three Sublimes: Empirical, Mystical, Rational It is in light of the formation of a national character, and the capacity of the unpresentable to elevate its subjects, that we can begin to unpack the nuances of the eighteenth-century sublime. My aim at this point will be to briefly show that it is in the rationalist sublime that the issue of the national character of genius is ultimately forged. The sublime object emerges, however, through three distinct understandings of the self: the empirical, the mystical, and the rational. In the first, the self seeks that moment in which nature and art determine the feeling of elevation.63 Richardson exemplifies what is at stake in this way of thinking. In the language of the feminine, the sublime moment, he writes, “Elevates the Soul, gives her a higher Opinion of her Self, and fills her with Joy, and a Noble kind of Pride, as if her self had produc’d what she is Admiring”.64 The sublime moment thus emerges as an illusion for empiricists. It is an ‘as if’, a pretence which ultimately fails to transcend matter, and instead signals the utter dependence of the self upon sensory limitations. Burke’s sublime too, buys into the illusory nature of the moment. Whilst he introduces the idea of ‘terror’ to discussions on the sublime, and with it the pleasures of transgression (pain), his work ultimately reduces the sublime to the sensationalist distinctions between pain and its association with self-preservation, while pleasure “enlists the social passions”.65 Burke contends, that when at a safe distance “the ruling principle of the sublime” produces “an idea of pain and danger”66 such that there is a kind of willing suspension of the power of Reason. The consequent confusion in this liminal moment produces a kind of delight, a sense in which the boundaries of reasonable being have been suspended, or 82

transgressed. But this transgression is never real, in the sense that Reason is afforded the kinds of demands that Kant makes. Reason thus remains, after Burke, untouched. There is a sense in which the Burkean sublime renders the self subject to the unpresentable — in his text, God — rather than empowered. Hume, likewise, conceives of the sublime in direct relation to objects, in the sense in which this “opposition not only enlarges the soul; but the soul, when full of courage and magnanimity, in a manner seeks opposition”, and proceeds to reduce this ‘enlargement’ of the self to a discussion concerning the force of gravity upon matter.67 In contrast to empiricism’s insistence upon the object of sense, as the sublime’s cause, the mystical sublime renders the self an object of a greater power. In one rendering, represented by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, the sublime begins in Nature, but rather than appear as an opposition to be overcome (Hume), it is understood as the manifestation of a greater power. Cooper argues, all “Nature’s wonders serve to excite and perfect this idea of their author … How glorious it is to contemplate him, in this noblest of works apparent to us, the system of the bigger world!”.68 Here nature mystically appears as the manifestation of the infinite divine, which passes over the mortal self, who also occupies this natural space.

In

contemplating this moment, the self, as Needler would put it, “refines and elevates our affections; and inspires us with a certain dignity and virtuous pride, which makes us despise the low pleasures of sense, and raises us above this transitory scene of things”.69 But perhaps the most stark example of the mystical sublime can be found in Usher, who denied the possibility of contemplation upon nature, in favour of a feeling of awe that exceeds the limits of sensory knowing. In championing nature as a supernatural power, Usher writes:

83

In the disorder and confusion of seas in storms, or when lofty woods struggle with high winds, we are struck with an humiliating awe, surprize, and suspense: the mind views the effects of boundless power with still amazement: it recoils upon itself in a passion made up of terror, joy, and rapture, and feels in sentiment these questions: who is the author of this? What is he to me? Is he the object of my eternal curiosity, of my mighty fears and hopes?70

Usher situates the self’s elevation in the space in which the mortal self encounters the passing over of a great yet unknowable power. The self stands in a giant shadow, and, due to its immensity, is unable to determine its cause. A feeling of elevation thus attends to this moment. This unconscious excess signals that the self has been touched by a great object, perhaps the divine himself, as Usher would have it. It is significant that Usher, whilst he uses Christianity’s personal pronoun to signify this supernatural greatness, ultimately declares that such a power is unnamable, and cannot be confined to Christianity alone. As such he defends polytheism: “The imagination found the divine idea rising before it in a variety of circumstances, and worshipped it under the several distinctions in which it appeared”.71 Whilst the empirical and the mystical sublimes sought an external object, upon which the sublime feeling could be staked, the rational sublime fully adopts its Platonic roots, and situates the self as the supreme agent in a world of corrupted matter. I would contend that the sublime doesn’t actually arrive fully until we find it in its rationalist form. Empiricism in its insistence upon the reign of the sensory is ultimately unable to elevate the self above the limits of nature. Likewise the mystical sublime, whilst it makes what could be considered an intermediary step in dislocating the senses, still locates the self as an object of the “intruded influence of a mighty unknown power”,72

84

as Usher put it, an external force. The rationalists, in contrast, attempted to break through all barriers, in order to allow the self to soar to new heights. If Hume had argued that the object presented the self with an opportunity to be an ‘overcomer’, rationalists on the other hand refused to grant the object a status, and instead focussed upon the deeds of the self. It is in this sense that Addison writes, “because the Mind of Man requires something more perfect in Matter, than what it finds there … it is the part of the Poet to humour the Imagination in its own Notions, by mending and perfecting Nature”.73 Rather than an opposition, the object thus emerges as a mere site upon which the autonomous imagination freely writes itself.

The

rationalists thus championed the imagination as the determining force in human affairs: Akinside in awe of “the eloquence and graces of Plato” grappled with the powerful, perhaps dangerously excessive “influence of the imagination on the conduct of life”;74 and Reid considered Homer’s mind sublime, as it “conceived great characters, great actions, and great events”.75 Sublime Art and Culture I have attempted to locate the question of the sublime in the relationship between the subject and the object, mind and matter.

The sublime reaches its

penultimate moment when the subject considers itself a determining force, when the object is subject to the subject. In literary and art criticism this preoccupation with the supremacy of the subject found form in the idea of the boundlessness of the imagination, the poetic life, and the relation of the boundless imagination to the work of art. As such we find characteristics such as novelty, surprise, originality, the new and the uncommon being championed in both art and life.

Critics such as Richard

Blackmore, for instance, valorised epic poetry as the artistic medium in which the imagination’s unlimited powers could be revealed. He writes:

85

novelty … is the Parent of Admiration; and it is for this reason, that the Sentiments in Epick Poetry, which by their Beauty, Strength and Dignity, are rais’d above the Level of vulgar Conceptions, and are always new, either by themselves or the uncommon Turn given to them by the Poet, act powerfully upon the Imagination, and surprize the Soul with pleasing astonishment.76

Jonathan Richardson reveals similar notions in painting. He declares:

a painter should not Please only, but Surprize. … He that would rise to the Sublime must form an Idea of Something beyond all we have yet seen; or which Art or Nature has yet produced … Nor must he stop Here, but Create an Original Idea of Perfection.77

Addison drew these artistic qualities into life in general. He writes:

Every thing that is new or uncommon raises a Pleasure in the Imagination, because it fills the Soul with an agreeable Surprise, gratifies its Curiosity, and gives it an Idea of which it was not before possest.78

Baillie adds:

admiration, a passion always attending the sublime, arises from uncommonness, and constantly decays as the object becomes more familiar.79

These thoughts upon the sublime reveal the eighteenth-century Romantic preoccupation with the possibility of an intellectual moment that exceeds the bounds of

86

past influences and the existing social order. Thus we find that pervasive emphasis upon originality and the new in both art and life.

The sublime emerges as a

transgressive, and creative force. The capacity to present the unpresentable thus plays a crucial role in constituting authentic culture. It is striking to find that in this emphasis upon the possibilities of transgression such a strong confidence in the capacity of the subject to thrive in encounters which would otherwise be strange. In fact it almost seems as if such encounters were considered a prerequisite for what we might think of as an authentic cultural life. Newness for these thinkers affords a mere opportunity for the powers of the imagination to be extended. Culture thus emerges not as a sphere of life to be protected from the threat of the unfamiliar (as it appears presently in some contexts), it is precisely in this ‘threat’ that cultural life is productively forged. As such for the eighteenth-century Romantics culture could never be considered stagnant, timeless, or homogeneous. If authentically in touch with the power of the imagination, culture was to be dynamic, constantly unfolding in its encounters with the new and the strange. In the language of Edward Young the productive power of the strange is usefully staged. He writes:

Our spirits rouze at an Original; that is a perfect stranger, and all throng to learn what news from a foreign land: and tho’ it comes, like an Indian Prince, adorned with feathers only, having little of weight; yet of our attention it will rob the more Solid … if an Original, by being as excellent, as new, adds admiration to surprise, then are we at the Writer’s mercy; on the strong wing of his Imagination, we are snatched from Britain to Italy, from Climate to Climate, from Pleasure to Pleasure; we have no Home, no Thought, of our own; till the Magician drops his

87

Pen: And then falling down into ourselves, we awake to flat Realities, lamenting the change, like the Beggar who dreamt himself a Prince.80

Whilst liminality is explicit in Young’s understanding of the aesthetic experience — art as dreamlike — at the same time, however, in this insistence upon the excessive, unbounded capacity of the imagination we find the trope of homelessness, which in this instance marks authentic aesthetic experience. This valorisation of both formal and cultural excess, of unbelonging gives rise to the sublime in its most pervasive form. This sense of unbelonging finds its own form in the figure of that most Romantic of figures: the Genius. The figure of the Genius emerges as the cultural embodiment of the Eighteenth Century demand for the elevation of the self. The self that is seemingly caught in the trap of sensory limitation, the body in social space, a “flat reality” as Young put it, finds a moment in the imagination of a chosen few an Archimedean point outside the limits of the body, which is able to be expressed, for the benefit of others, in artistic forms. The Genius, Young goes on to explain, “is a Masterworkman” with the power to accomplish “great things without the means generally reputed necessary to that end”. Remarkably the “unexampled Excellence” of genius, lies outside “the Pale of Learning’s Authorities, and Laws”.81 The Genius par excellence, at least according to Thomas Blackwell, is of course the epic poet Homer.82 In Blackwell’s celebration of Homer’s imaginative powers we find, as I have suggested, the Genius located outside, and in excess of, the common nature of the everyday. Blackwell reveals the political cogency of the excesses of genius. In staging Homer as an example of authentic being, he emphasises Homer’s unbelongingness:

88

in Homer’s days: Arms were in Repute, and Force decided Possession. He saw Towns taken and plundered, the Men put to the sword, and the Women made Slaves: He beheld their despairing Faces, and suppliant Postures; heard their Moanings o’er their murdered Husbands, and Prayers for their Infants to the Victor. On the other hand, he might view Cities blessed with Peace, Spirited by Liberty, flourishing in Trade, and increasing in Wealth. He was not engaged in Affairs himself, to draw off his Attention; but he wander’d thro’ the various Scenes, and observed them at leisure.83

Blackwell seeks to reveal the tumultuous disorder of the ancient everyday.

This

disorder means that social being exists in a constant state of change, ruled as it were by the yet-to-be-decided, rather than an imposed social order. Homer’s detachment from this disorder, as observer, enables in the first instance a knowledge of social life that is not afforded to the self that is caught up in the immediacy of events; and in the second instance, this knowledge confronts the poet and demands the imposition of an order that comes only by way of invention, the exercise of the imagination. Of course the epic form for Blackwell is the upshot of Homer’s unique thought, which is able to be on the one hand, detached, that is free from social determination, and on the other hand, is able to rise above the tumultuous disorder to exert the imagination in order to describe and define the wanton object. We thus hear echoes of Kristeva’s ‘abject edged with the sublime’. Significantly Blackwell sets the trope of the Genius, as set forth in his work upon Homer, against the European civil state. It seems the state, in imposing civil order has at the same time denied the possibility of the new and the creative. Blackwell contends:

89

The Marvellous and Wonderful is the Nerve of the Epic strain: But what marvellous Things happen in a well-ordered State? We can hardly be surprized; We know the Springs and Method of acting; Every thing happens in Order, and according to Custom or Law.

But in a wide Country, not under a regular

Government, or split into many … the Manners are simple, and Accidents will happen every day: Exposition and loss of Infants, Encounters, Escapes, Rescues, and every other thing that can inflame the human passions while acting, or awake them when described, and recalled by Imitation. THESE are not be found in a well-governed State, except it be in a Civil War.84

Blackwell implicitly champions a kind of social anarchy, or at least insists upon the suspension of the ‘tried and true’ — the “well-governed” — as necessitated in moments of crises, since such moments demand the extension of the Genius’ imaginative powers. This is perhaps Genius in its most extreme form. As such Blackwell’s implicit anarchy bears a close resemblance to Nietzschean tragedy.

But Blackwell’s Genius in its

extremity, is still representative of the Genius in general, as discussed in eighteenthcentury aesthetics. The crucial thing about the Genius is that this is a unique self, “the enviable … chosen few”85, as Kierkegaard put it, who is able to invent, experiment, to search for a form that is able to accommodate nature’s chaos in a new and compelling manner. For the Genius nothing is a given, and it truly takes a special kind of mind to break through existing forms, in order to map contingent meanings. Such a mind, in its excesses and refusal to be bound, acquires a status on the basis of the sublime, which ultimately, since any law giving body seems to be antagonistic to the power of the Romantic imagination, emerges as a law unto itself. I have dwelt upon the figure of the Genius in order to show the lawlessness and the contingency that lies at the core of this understanding of the self. But the Genius

90

emerges as a kind of paradox: on the one hand this self is a rebel, and yet at the same time this rebel commands a reverence. In this rebellion and remapping of the real there is therefore a political power.

Sublimity in this context is thus in many ways a

politically driven concept. But it is not a political power whose form imitates the state, rather the Genius emerges as a kind of social misfit, almost victim to the forces within that drive the capacity to invent, who, because of this trope of the misfit, commands a reverence that parallels any priesthood, and exercises exclusive rights over the creative power of the imagination. But it is also crucial to note that it is this kind of social misfit that lies at the core of the West’s myth of progress, and which is fully realised in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. I will take up this issue in subsequent chapters. For the moment what I would wish to suggest, is that the figure of the eighteenth-century Genius emerges in, what could be described as, a split and ambivalent space. The Genius is a rebel that is utilised in the service of Reason, and ultimately the myth of the West’s superiority. I would thus suggest that what the Genius signals is less radical transgression as an end in itself, than the notion that art and the artist in the capacity to engage the unpresentable open up sites for what I have called the fort/da of the myths of nation. In other words, what the eighteenth-century Genius becomes is that abject other upon which the nation is able to write itself. The accommodation of such a figure marks the myth of Western progress and democracy. What Kant does is to take this figure as a model for the Western self in general. Having established the social location of the discourse of the sublime, I will turn to the Kantian sublime. As I suggested, Kant takes up the sublime as a noble trope. My overall purpose in drawing attention to the dignity that the eighteenth-century sublime engenders, is to show that a postcolonial sublime must be considered in relation to the

91

sublime as it emerged in Europe. The sublime is both the object of the discourse of the postcolonial and a site which opens up the possibility for a cogent politics. The Kantian Sublime Kant tells us that the sublime cannot be deduced from an object,86 it is a state of consciousness that concerns the ideas of reason and their relation to the experiential manifold. Kant writes:

no sensible form can contain the sublime properly so-called. This concerns only ideas of the reason which, although no adequate presentation is possible for them, by this inadequateness that admits of sensible presentation are aroused and summoned into the mind. Thus the wide ocean, disturbed by the storm, cannot be called sublime. Its aspect is horrible; and the mind must be already filled with manifold ideas if it is to be determined by such an intuition to a feeling itself sublime, as it is incited to abandon sensibility and to busy itself with ideas that involve higher purposiveness.87

Following his British rationalist brothers, Kant declares:

We call that sublime which is absolutely great … great beyond all comparison. … if we call anything … absolutely great in every point of view (great beyond all comparison) … we soon see that it is not permissible to seek for an adequate standard of this outside itself, but merely in itself. … It follows hence that the sublime is not to be sought in the things of nature, but only in our ideas.88

The sublime moment proceeds from the conflict between the imagination and reason. In the case of the mathematical sublime this conflict is set forth via the problem 92

of the infinite. The infinite number exceeds the limits of the understanding — it is ungraspable — and as such becomes a problem for reason, since reason’s task is to make, as Kant tells us, a claim for “absolute totality”.89 The infinite emerges as a problem because it poses a threat to the capacity of Reason, and in doing so raises the notion that nature is actually more powerful than the self. In this moment the possibility of the total breakdown of Reason is effected. Pascal’s boast, which opens this chapter, collapses. But in contrast to the mystical sublime, which insists that in this breakdown itself there is a feeling of elevation, Kant rather than being crushed, defeated, and given over to what he would perceive as blind superstition, or what Holbach called the “savage … just like the dog who gnaws the stone … without recurring to the hand by which it was thrown … unaccustomed to reason with precision”,90 embraces this pain and finds in it the possibility of the final elevation of the self over the senses. He triumphantly announces:

there is in our imagination a striving toward infinite progress and in our reason a claim for absolute totality, regarded as a real idea, therefore this very inadequateness for that idea in our faculty for estimating the magnitude of things of sense excites in us the feeling of a supersensible faculty.91

The possibility of this sense of excitement in the face of the possibility of a miserable defeat, arises in that moment in which Reason is able to be aesthetically employed in order to furnish the understanding with an idea of the infinite. In other words, where the senses fail Reason is able to triumphantly demonstrate its great power. Kant declares that the sublime reveals:

93

the mere ability to think which shows a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of sense.92

For Kant there is thus a faculty of mind that is comparable to the infinite. In Kant’s Christian context, with its insistence upon the finiteness of the self, and the overcoming power of the mystical, this celebration of the infinite capacity of the ideas is radically subversive.

But in the context of the development of a national

consciousness, however, the subversive capacity of the Kantian self is put to a different use: namely, as its logic implies, the supremacy of the European self. The feeling of the sublime is thus constituted by both the feeling of pain, “arising from the want of accordance between the aesthetical estimation of magnitude formed by the imagination and the estimation of the same formed by reason”, and, in the same instant, a feeling of “pleasure … arising from the correspondence with rational ideas of this very judgement of the inadequacy of our greatest faculty of sense”. 93 The upshot of this seeming crises merely affords the self’s recognition of its own grand status in relation to the objects of sense. Remarkably the failure of the imagination, which I have suggested is always a possibility since sensory experience is in itself formless, simply occasions Reason’s aesthetic employment, in order to ‘mend’ the imagination’s weakness. We hear echoes of the sublime as it was celebrated in Britain. Reason elevates the self above the mud and the slime of this world. It relishes in its encounter with the excessive, since such moments merely occasion the unlimited capacity of the Ideas of Reason. As such, Kant tellingly continues:

it is a law for us to strive after these ideas. In fact it is for us a law (of reason) and belongs to our destination to estimate as small, in comparison with ideas of reason, everything which nature, regarded as an object of sense, contains that is

94

great for us; and that which arouses in us the feeling of this supersensible destination agrees with that law.94

The failure of the imagination thus serves a useful, perhaps necessary, purpose. Reason reveals its remarkable power in, and only in, those moments in which its own capacity to function is threatened. Reason’s aesthetical employment emerges when there is a challenge. Having set forth the mathematical sublime in order to underscore the infinite capacity of the ideas, Kant then turns to the dynamical sublime, which emerges not just as a threat to knowledge, as in the mathematical, but to the freedom of the self. In the dynamical sublime nature is regarded as might, as an object of fear which poses a threat to the self. Kant locates the sublime moment in the possibility of resisting the fear that nature as might effects upon the experiential manifold. Rather than flee the danger, Kant argues that it is possible to “regard an object as fearful without being afraid of it”. This possibility again concerns Reason’s capacity to exceed the objects of sense. To overcome fear, which is the task of the dynamical sublime, it is necessary not to physically resist, but to think resistance. The example furnished by Kant involves, what he calls the virtuous man, who “fears God without being afraid of Him, because to wish to resist Him and His commandments he thinks is a case that he need not apprehend”.95 What is at stake then is the idea of freedom, which arises in the capacity of Reason to be dutiful to the moral law, as an exulted disposition, since the self in relation to the divine is able to resist this obligation. But as Kant puts the issue of freedom on the line, which is threatened by nature as might, the possibility that nature has dominion over the self produces a language which becomes increasingly preoccupied not with the idea of the Romantic artist, but with the idea of the heroic conqueror. Of course I must point out before we proceed any

95

further, that this sense of the conqueror, strictly speaking, relates in Kant to the ability of the self to conquer the fear that is furnished by the senses in the face of a fearful object. But having made this necessary qualification, it is important to consider what these fearful objects of consciousness might be. It is in this sense that we find the language of the colonial. I suggested earlier that the necessity of the sublime in Kant’s architectonic system is drawn up around what makes the self susceptible to the Ideas. I would thus contend that this susceptibility arises in that moment in which Reason is faced with an obstacle, a threat that demands to be overcome. Without the possibility of the failure of the imagination, and a threat to freedom, Reason merely functions as a sleeping giant. The Kantian self without the sublime would be like Plato’s Republic without the cave, and that sense of elevation that underpins the notion of the state as the apogee of human civilisation:

It is for us then as founders of a commonwealth, to bring compulsion to bear on the noblest natures. They must be made to climb the ascent to the vision of Goodness, which we called the highest object of knowledge.96

It is thus significant that in the threat posed upon the self by an excessive might, Kant speaks of “resistance”, “courage”, and the “superiority” of the self in relation to the immensity of the object.97 Here we find the heroic figure, “the man who shrinks from nothing, who fears nothing, and therefore does not yield to danger, but rather goes to face it vigorously with the most complete deliberation”, as Kant put it. Significantly it is the soldier that embodies this quality, more so than the “statesman”, since “his mind is unsubdued by danger”.98 We thus find in Kant a disturbing insistence upon war, crises, and the possibility of the suspension of civil order, as an indispensable moment

96

in the formation of Reason’s authority. Without such, Kant concludes, the reasonable self begins to be ruled by a “cowardice, and effeminacy” that “debases the disposition of the people”.99 In addition this valorisation of the man of war, Kant qualifies this quality, and contends that in this capacity to overcome danger, we find the bedrock of civilisation. Culture, understood in that old fashion Arnoldian sense as the best that can be thought and known, arises in the development of moral ideas. Without moral ideas, Kant contends, “that which we, prepared by culture, call sublime presents itself to the uneducated man merely as terrible”.100 The sublime thus emerges as a marker of a civil sensibility. It clears a space for society to be able to consider itself free from the threatening determinations of its enemies, and able to be reasonably defended. A certain nobility is thus afforded in the sublime moment. It is worth quoting Kant at length. He writes:

The idea of the good conjoined with [strong] affection is called enthusiasm. This state of mind seems to be sublime, to the extent that we commonly assert that nothing great could be done without it. … aesthetically, enthusiasm is sublime, because it is a tension of forces produced by ideas, which give an impulse to the mind that operates far more powerfully and lastingly than the impulse arising from sensible representations. But (which seems strange) the absence of affection … in a mind that vigorously follows its unalterable principles is sublime, and in a far preferable way, because it has also on its side the satisfaction of pure reason. A mental state of this kind is alone called noble; and this expression is subsequently applied to things, e.g. a building, a garment, literary style, bodily presence, etc., when these do not so much arouse astonishment … and this is the

97

case when ideas agree in their presentation undesignedly and artlessly with the aesthetical satisfaction.101

I have contended that the sublime is built upon, after Longinus, that need for the self to feel more purposeful than the objects employed in daily existence. The capacity to present the unpresentable in literature signals that a ‘higher’ purpose has been attained. In its extreme the pain and pleasure of the sublime enables an understanding of the mind as the determining force of the actions of the self, rather than the lifeless matter in which the self dwells and of which the self consists.

Crucially the

boundlessness of the aesthetic imagination, with its ability to call forth, in a divine-like fashion, the new, to be creative, emerges as that moment in which sublime possibilities are opened up. These possibilities are realised in the figure of the Genius, who, in embracing a poetic life, possesses an original, irreducible, universally valid quality of mind. But the aesthetic imagination cannot be confined to art alone. To confine the poetic life to art is to miss what has been central in discussions concerning the sublime since its inauguration, and its political cogency for a thinker such as Kant. For not only does the aesthetic concern art, it also, and in most instances without distinction, refers to the capacity of the self to rise above danger and overcome threats. The sublime can thus be heard in celebrations concerning war and acts of empire. Conclusion: The Colonial Sublime After the French revolution Kant dominates thinking upon the Romantic endeavour to carve out a specific social space for Art.102 “It was not until Kant that the realm of aesthetics assumed its own rights,” Ernst Behler points out. The romantic self set forth by Kant, “brought about a new appreciation of artistic creation — a glorification of creative imagination — and made of the artist a spokesman for the godhead, an orphic seer, and prophetic priest”.103 For M. H. Abrams the ‘Kantian 98

revolution’ involved a change from a mimetic theory of art to a Romantic theory of art as self-expression. Rather than being a ‘mirror’ reflection of nature, art became a ‘lamp’ which illuminated the ‘dark world’ of experience. Instead of attempting to represent nature, the artist attempts to give an outward form to the self’s inner life.104 But whilst the Romantic self that was set forth in the Eighteenth Century is celebrated — as Samuel Monk in his important The Sublime: a Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England105 argues: eighteenth-century British aesthetics, in seizing Kant’s insistence upon the disinterested nature of reflective judgement, paved the way for ‘Kantian autonomy’ and the Romantic revolution in art — what Bennett points to is that other dark metaphor that lurks within the corridors of thinking on the sublime imagination. This is, as I have suggested in my engagement with Kant, the reality of the eighteenth-century sublime as a violent, colonial metaphor. One of the most striking things about discourses on the sublime is that at every turn they abound with salutary images of: “the clash of numerous Armies, and the voice of War”;106 the hero “travelling through a Country uninhabited”;107 “the spirit of travellers and adventurers; gallantry, war, heroism”;108 the “pursuit of conquest … Power and fame”;109 “riches … noble superiority to things external … patriotism … universal benevolence”;110 “the war-horse, ‘whose neck is clothed with thunder’”;111 and “military glory”.112 In locating discussions concerning the sublime in terms of questions of consciousness, I have attempted to show how the sublime’s emergence is inseparably linked to a problematic that attempted to open up a particular way of defining reason’s authority. This much has been said concerning Romantic art (Coleridge, Arnold), but it can also be stated in the context of European capitalist and colonial expansion. The sublime insistence upon the sacrificial willingness of Reason effectively establishes the European self as a legitimate political and economic conqueror.

99

The remarkable

assurance that accompanies the images of war and the heroic conqueror suggests that this is the case. There does not seem to be any question that the violence that is implicit in these images of sublime thoughts and deeds are in any sense defective, or unjust. In the problem of the relation between virtue and power, as in John Baillie’s influential “An Essay on the Sublime”, the sublime merely emerges as all the more powerful, since Baillie asserts that “sublime passions, when virtuous, are so by association and accident”.113 This means that truth and virtue do not necessarily correspond. Whilst there is the possibility that power can be abused, as in the case of Caligula “commanding armies to fill their helmets with cockle-shells”, and “Alexander laying level towns, depopulating countries, and ravaging the whole world”, a truly sublime power, for Baillie, emerges in and through what could be considered power in itself, the subtext being, the establishment of an Empire. He asserts, “the absolute authority of a master over his slaves, is a power nothing grand, yet at the same time authority in a prince is sublime”, since the prince’s authority extends “to multitudes, and from nations bowing to his commands”.114 The eighteenth-century sublime is thus as much a colonial apologetic as it is the state of the mind of the artistic Genius. One wonders why Baillie is so careful to avoid conflating power and virtue. Given the colonial self that haunts discussion on the sublime, I would suggest that this careful avoidance arises simply because the conflation of power and virtue robs the sublime of its most important ingredient: a boundlessness which is paradoxically framed by European expansionism. Yet at the same time, to impose a willing limit, such as virtue, is to be even more sublime than abject expressions of unlimited power. As such the virtuous prince, who exercises what seems like unlimited power over the nations, in being a creature of virtue, of benevolence, is only all the more sublime. Kantian freedom, which emerges via duty to the moral law, is sublime precisely because there is always the possibility that this duty

100

can be subverted, not in terms of a sensory determination, but in terms of the unlimited capacity of ideas themselves. We find this moment of self-control powerfully set forth in James Beattie’s Dissertations Moral and Critical. Here the figure of Ulysses, the prince, embodies Baillie’s valorisation of Empire, and ultimately, by extension, provides a useful metaphor for thinking through what is at stake in Kant’s conservative use of the sublime. Beattie writes:

Ulysses, who in the hands of Polypheme was nothing, is incomparably more sublime, when, in walking into the palace, disguised like a beggar, he is insulted, and even kicked, by one of his own slaves, who was in the service of those rebels that were tempting his queen, plundering his household, and alienating the affections of his people. Homer tells us, that the hero stood firm, without being moved from his place by the stroke; that he deliberated for a moment, whether he should at one blow fell the traitor to the earth; but that patience and prudential thoughts restrained him. The brutal force of the Cyclops is not near so striking as this picture.115

Ulysses possesses what seems like a limitless power, at least in this context. Disguised as something that he clearly is not he must be content, if he is to reign upon the throne that belongs to him, to bide his time. The Kantian self with its sensory limitations possesses a faculty of mind that is not determined by that body, with its visceral demands, its finiteness. Reason stands firm, refusing to be moved by that finiteness, yet, whilst disguised as a beggar, willingly works upon those limits. It is in this sacrificial sense that the sublime becomes a crucial moment in the structuring of the European self’s assumption of global supremacy. The European is a

101

human with a body, yet not simply that. The colonial self is ‘powerful’, yet a reluctant servant. Whilst the subtle movements of thought in Kant are set forth via a language built upon a problematic whose major aim is to draw up a chain of command, to find an authoritative space for the reign of Reason in human affairs, Reason ultimately utilises sublimity to engender its authority over the senses, danger, and the strange and unfamiliar. As such the Kantian self coincides with the emergence of European’s understanding of itself as the most significant figure of humanity on the global scene. As difficult as it may be to determine whether ideas form the process, or whether the process determines the ideas that would justify it, it is the case that capitalism coincided with the emergence of the sublime self that Kant championed. Armed with reason’s sublime ideas, the Kantian self was staged in the context of eighteenth-century Europe searching for foreign markets. It is thus a timely self in the sense that it provides an impetus for Europe to reign supreme in what was, essentially, the beginnings of a rapidly changing world. It is in this sense that it is possible to conceive of the sublime, despite its seeming revolutionary fervour against authority, as a reactionary metaphor. In Kant’s day we find, as Harry Magdoff explains, Europe’s desire to overcome the object: “penetrating the interior of foreign continents” in order to create markets “through the breaking up and restructuring [of] noncapitalist societies”; and creating “plantation colonies”, and “white-settler colonies” in order to boost “demand for manufacturers to meet the needs of the settlers in both”. Magdoff continues:

At the heart of this wave of expansion was the slave trade. The prosperity of the extremely profitable sugar plantations was based on the import of African slaves … In sum, the Industrial Revolution germinated in this period — in the boom of

102

export markets and the trade in merchandise and slaves, under monopoly conditions secured through war, control of the seas, and political domination.116

In this light, Kant’s critical problematic occupies the contrapuntal convergence of the autonomous self and European capitalist expansion.117 If empiricists grappled with (hankered after?) finding a moment in which it was possible to overcome the object, Kant takes all of the issues that emerged in these discussions, disconnects the aesthetic from the object, and opens the door for Reason’s artful domination of not only consciousness, but the acts of the self in the world. The empirical hero attempted to overcome the world, the Kantian hero creates one. There is lurking within discourses on the sublime a certain logic, which demands that encounters with difference are encounters in which Reason is afforded an opportunity to assert its supremacy and to establish its laws. I began with what I understood as Gordon Bennett’s interruption to Kant’s judgement upon a disordered subjectivity. This interruption, as I suggested, functioned in two ways: on the one hand, the mirror opened up a space for questioning the figure of the nation, on the other, the mirror can be understood as an insertion of the question of exile into the process of Reason’s grapple with what it considers its dark side. I have taken the latter path and inhabited Kant’s edges in order to draw out the pragmatic excesses of his logical philosophy. I would thus wish to hold up this pragmatic excess as a problematic object for the postcolonial. Kant, whilst obviously not the only key figure in the emergence of the European Enlightenment, stands in for a particular mode of thought that is preoccupied with structures of authority, hierarchies, pyramids. The most scathing critique of such thinking in Bennett’s Painting for a New Republic (The Inland Sea) emerges inside the subjectivity of the dispossessed self. Residing over carefully laid out skulls and bones — the horror of genocide — we see the pyramid of

103

logical thought, its violence laid bare. Thus what Bennett calls forth is a re-reading of Kantian thought as a violent social force. But this violence emerges as less a fixed disposition than a dynamic process, in which slippages and excesses, reason’s dark side, are a vital part. The in-between mirror of the dispossessed self can be read, in terms of its questioning capacity, as a search for a space from which to speak. It is significant that Bennett looks upon both the space of Kant’s dynamic, in which the figure of the exile emerges as an object of sublimity, and the confused space of dispossession, as insufficient for this purpose. The identity of this dispossessed self emerges in the inbetween space of convergence, the space of questioning. What we have is a question inserted into the Kantian equation. As Kant establishes the moral and epistemological authority of Reason, the dispossessed self is able to confront Reason’s inner preoccupations with its own dark side. What basis for a secure authority is this? The excesses that Reason seeks to overcome, in such a question, emerge as less natural residues of the Enlightenment self — the rationalism that teeters on the brink of madness and the bodily desire that reason sacrifices (which nevertheless remain as important markers of what reason is not) — than the products of reason’s own process. In other words, rather than a golden order (culture) established in relation to a hostile and confusing nature, Kantian thought emerges as a violent force itself. Bennett’s refusal to contend with Reason as a fixity, and focus upon the conscious obstacles to reason’s legitimate employment, its excesses, means that these excesses are not the products of nature, but the products of reason’s discourse itself. Here an interesting possibility emerges in our discussion on the postcolonial sublime. Bennett effectively wrests the sublime from its natural status in the Eighteenth Century, and makes it a social issue that belongs to today. It will now be necessary to move on to consider the postcolonial in relation to what I have called Kant’s conservative sublime. In order to

104

undertake this task, I will turn to the work of Frantz Fanon, specifically his complex engagement with Hegel. Notes 1

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1966), 95.

2

Gordon Bennett, Painting for a New Republic (The Inland Sea), (Perth: Art Gallery of Western Australia, 1994). 3

Ian Mclean, and Gordon Bennett, The Art of Gordon Bennett (Roseville, East, NSW: Craftsman House, 1996), 71. 4

Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (London: Routledge, 1994), 145.

5

In my research I also considered the work of Conrad as a ‘way into’ the texts of Kant. He certainly relies upon the centrality of Idealism in his attack upon European civility. Ultimately, however, such a critique remains flawed. His evoking of the centrality of unpresentable moment (the sublime), cannot be separated from what preoccupied eighteenth-century literary theory. As I will show in chapter two, the capacity to present the unpresentable through various formal strategies was central in the construction of the national character of Genius. It is difficult to find a moment in “Heart of Darkness” that contests this notion. One of the difficulties with Conrad is that his work foregrounds and reinforces the necessity of conservative aesthetic constructions. At the edges of the novella there is a nagging Kantian aesthetic, that would render the social world an aesthetic rather than a material problem. It could be that ultimately Conrad is ‘more Kantian than Kant’ in his insistence upon the power of the imagination. For further discussion on the difficulty of Conrad, compare: Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa”, Research in African Literatures, vol. 9, no. 1 (1978), 115; Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers (Houndsmill: The Macmillan Press, 1983); Sarah Cole, “Conradian Alienation and Imperial Intimacy”, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 44, no. 2 (1998), 251281; Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso, 1976), 135; Hunt Hawkins, “Conrad and the Psychology of Colonialism”, in Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, ed. Ross Murfin (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 86; Ezekiel Mphahlele, The African Image (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 125; and D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke, Developing Countries in British Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1977), 1. 6

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1933), 66. 7

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 529. 8

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 56; Eric Hobsbawm, and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 7. 105

9

Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Press, 1986), 17. 10

Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 11. 11

Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’”, trans. H. B. Nisbet, in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54. 12

Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 36. 13

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 187, 193. 14

Etienne Bonnot Abbé de Condillac, “A Treatise on the Sensations”, trans. Franklin Philip, Philosophical Writings of Etienne Bonnot Abbé de Condillac (Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1982), 332, 339. 15

Gottfried Wilhelm Von Leibniz, Monadology, trans. George R. Montgomery (La Salle, Illinois: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1902), §7. 16

Leibniz, Monadology, §17.

17

Leibniz, Monadology, § 56, § 78.

18

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen & Co, 1954), vol. 3, part 1, 61. 19

See Kant’s controversial Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyte H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), in which he insists that the moral nature of the self should be derived via “the subjective ground of the exercise (under objective moral laws) of man’s freedom in general”. This insistence upon freedom is driven by the failure of empiricism to provide a basis for moral accountability. Kant argues, that the subjective ground which determines moral action “must itself always be an expression of freedom (for otherwise the use or abuse of man’s power of choice in respect of the moral law could not be imputed to him nor could the good or bad in him be called moral)” (16-17). 20

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 45-46.

21

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 17.

22

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 532-533.

23

See John Locke’s foundational An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2. vols. (New York: Dover Publishers, 1959). This ‘inquiry into the original certainty and extent of human knowledge’, sets forth what could be considered the law of the formation of human ideas. The work begins by rejecting Descartes’ suggestion that 106

ideas are innate “characters, as it were, stamped upon the mind of man, which the soul receives in its very first being; and brings into the world with it ” (vol. 1, 37). Instead he proposes that ideas arise either as the direct product of sense impressions - as a photographic film responds to light - or as the reflection of the mind on such evidence as the senses provided. The former is deemed the ‘sensory’ faculty of the mind, the “senses [that] ... convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things”(vol. 1, 122), whilst the latter is deemed the ‘reflective’, “the perceptions of the operation of our own mind’s within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got”(vol. 1, 123). For Locke, “these ... contain our whole stock of ideas ... we have nothing in our minds which did not come in one of these two ways”(vol. 1, 124-125). Locke thus presents the mind as a blank slate which contains no a priori structures. Human subjects, as Claude Helvetius concurs, are considered to be “born without ideas, without passions, and without other wants than those of hunger and thirst, and consequently without character” (Claude Adrien Helvetius, “Men are Reasonable”, in The Portable Age of Reason Reader, ed. Crane Brinton (New York: The Viking Press, 1969), 262). 24

I follow Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978) on this point. For Williams Descartes’ assumption concerning knowledge’s foundation in his own mind leads him into an unreliable subjectivity. To establish knowledge as a certainty it was thus necessary for him to rise above sensory experience (I note the sublime at work here) in order to find a standpoint from which to deal with the thing-in-itself as it actually is. This sense of elevation can be understood as the ‘absolute’ perspective, which only the faculty of Reason can provide. For Williams this is the ‘hidden’ meaning of Descartes doctrine of ‘clear and distinct’ ideas as it appears in Principles of Philosophy (particularly the first part). Descartes assumes that the thing-in-itself is actually as it appears to reason. Kant takes issue with this doctrine. 25

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 257.

26

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 258, 259.

27

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 176.

28

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 472.

29

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 56.

30

Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics that can Qualify as a Science, trans. Paul Carus (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1902), 98. 31

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 271, 272.

32

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 272.

33

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1993), 44. 34

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 545-546.

107

35

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 550.

36

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 312-313.

37

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 465.

38

David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), ed. Charles W. Hendel (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1955), 92-93. 39

Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 32.

40

Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 29.

41

Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 32-33.

42

Kant, Prolegomena, 49.

43

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), 24-25. 44

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 12.

45

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 15, 16,17.

46

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 31.

47

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 191.

48

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 284.

49

Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenburg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 50-56. 50

Friedrich von Schiller, On the Sublime, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Ungar Publishing Co., 1966), 211. 51

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 98.

52

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 104.

53

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 28-29.

54

See for instance Hugh Blair’s, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (1756, reprint. New York: Garland, 1970), 120. 55

Frances Reynolds, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste and of the Origin of Our Ideas of Beauty (1785, reprint; New York: Garland Publishing, 1972), 5. 56

James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783, reprint; New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), 606. 108

57

John Baillie, “An Essay on the Sublime”, in The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth- Century Aesthetic Theory, ed. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 88. 58

Plato, Phaedo, trans. R. Hackworth, in Greek Philosophy: Thales to Aristotle, ed. Reginald E. Allen (New York: The Free Press 1991), 162. 59

Paul Henry Theiry Baron d’ Holbach, The System of Nature; or the Laws of the Moral and Physical World, trans. M. De Mirabaud (London: R. Helder, 1821), vol 2. 6-116. 60

Henry Felton, A Dissertation on Reading the Classics and Forming a Just Style (London: Jonah Bowyer, 1713), 125-126. 61

See also John Constable, Reflections upon Accuracy of Style, (London: Henry Lintot, 1731); John Mason, Essay on the Power of Numbers (1749, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1970); and William Kenrick, Introduction to the School of Shakespeare (1749, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1970). 62

Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759, reprint. Leeds: The Scolar Press, 1966), 79. 63

Eighteenth-century empiricists had set themselves the task of finding what object corresponded to, and gave rise to the sublime feeling. In the wake of Longinus’ influential work on the sublime, which fails, as John Dennis laments, to “directly tell us, what the sublime is”, and instead “takes a great deal of pains to set before us, the effects which it produces in the minds of Men” (John Dennis, The Advancement of Modern Poetry: A Critical Discourse (1704, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), 47) the empiricists produced a mass of writing preoccupied with what constitutes sublime objects. As such, natural formations such as, mountains, the ocean, the vastness of the night sky, and the formal qualities of epic poetry and prose, were championed. Kant’s response, however, to what he understood as empiricism’s failure, namely the impossibility of both the elevation of the self that is attended to by the sublime and its natural determination, was not to reject its effect, it was to allow the feeling of elevation, as Longinus had proclaimed (See Longinus, “On the Sublime”, in Classical Literary Criticism, trans. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 100) to soar to new heights. Kant takes this problem concerning consciousness of the object, and merely recasts the sublime moment, in Idealist fashion, as a problem concerning the subtle movements of consciousness itself. 64

Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting (1725, reprint. Menston: Scolar Press, 1971), 256. 65

Graig Howes, “Burke, Poe, and ‘Usher’: The Sublime and Rising Woman”, Emerson Society Quarterly, no. 31 (1985), 174. 66

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and The Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), 58, 51.

109

67

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), 434-435. 68

Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “Characteristics”, in The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth- Century Aesthetic Theory, eds. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 74-75. 69

Henry Needler, “On the excellency of Divine Contemplation”, in The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth- Century Aesthetic Theory, ed. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 81. 70

James Usher, Clio; or, a Discourse on Taste (1769, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1970), 111-112. 71

Usher, Clio; or, a Discourse on Taste, 122.

72

Usher, Clio; or, a Discourse on Taste, 113.

73

Joseph Addison, The Spectator (No. 418, Monday, June 30, 1712), (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), vol. 3, 569. 74

Mark Akinside, The Pleasures of the Imagination: A Poem (London: R. Dodsley, 1744), 102-104n. 75

Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), 732. 76

Sir Richard Blackmore, Essays Upon Several Subjects (1716, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), 36-37. 77

Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting, 257, 259-260, 261.

78

Addison, The Spectator (No. 412, Monday, June 23, 1712), vol. 3, 541.

79

Baillie, “An Essay on the Sublime”, 91.

80

Edward Young, Conjectures on the Original Composition (1759, reprint. Menston: The Scolar Press, 1966), 12-13. 81

Young, Conjectures on the Original Composition, 25-28. See also Usher’s Clio; or, a Discourse on Taste, 105-106 , in which Usher employs the trope of the Genius, who finds “little satisfaction in the philosophy of colleges and schools” to legitimate his work upon, what I have called, the mystical sublime. 82

See also William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (1767, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), 150-179. 83

Thomas Blackwell, An Inquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735, reprint. New York: Garland, 1970), 23. 84

Blackwell, An Inquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer, 26-27. 110

85

Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, ed. trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 326. 86

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 83.

87

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 83-84.

88

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 86, 88.

89

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 88.

90

Holbach, The System of Nature, vol 2. 96.

91

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 88.

92

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 89.

93

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 96.

94

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 96.

95

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 100.

96

Plato, The Republic, trans. F. M. Cornford, in Greek Philosophy: Thales to Aristotle, ed. Reginald E. Allen, (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 228. 97

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 100-101.

98

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 102.

99

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 102.

100

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 105.

101

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 112-113.

102

See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, ed. James Engwell, and W. Jackson Bate (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), part 2, 13; and Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”, in Prose of the Victorian Period, ed. William Buckler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), 425, 429, 433, 440-441. 103

Ernst Behler, German Romantic Criticism, ed. A. Leslie Willson (New York: Continuum, 1882), viii-ix 104

See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1953). 105

See Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (Ann Abor: University of Michigan Press, 1960). 111

106

Hildebrand Jacob, The Works of Hildebrand Jacob (London: R. Dodsley, 1735), 425.

107

Joseph Addison, The Spectator (no. 417, Saturday, June 28, 1712), vol. 3, 564.

108

Cooper, “Characteristics”, 77.

109

Baillie, “An Essay on the Sublime”, 19.

110

Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (1759, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1970), 15. 111

Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and belles lettres (1785, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1970), vol. 1, 148. 112

Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 600.

113

Baillie, “An Essay on the Sublime”, 26.

114

Baillie, “An Essay on the Sublime”, 20, 21.

115

Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical, 628.

116

Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 103-104. It must be pointed out that Magdoff’s historical survey of this period of capitalist expansion, whilst useful, ignores the indentured labourers taken from India, to work in the sugar plantations of Fiji and the West Indies. 117

Kant’s text attests to this. In the Critique of Judgement we read what appears to be an innocent anecdote that seeks to exemplify the subjective cause of laughter. Kant writes: “if a wag … describes very circumstantially the grief of the merchant returning from India to Europe with all his wealth in merchandise who was forced to throw it overboard in a heavy storm, and who grieved thereat so much that his wig turned grey the same night, we laugh and it gives us gratification” (Kant, Critique of Judgement, 178). What we find here is a direct reference to Europe’s capitalist expansion, that remains, in the context of the work a mere, innocent, exemplification of a philosophical point, precisely because Europe’s emergence as a dominating power is taken as a given. This social structure must be in place for Kant’s example to work in this instance, and it so unquestionably.

112

Chapter Three Fanon and the Problem of Hegel’s Master and Slave

As long as we have what satisfies the will or only promises satisfaction, we never reach the production of works of genius … Only when desires and hopes come to nothing, unchangeable privation shows itself, and the will has to remain unsatisfied, do we ask ourselves: “what is the world?” … Suffering is the condition for the effectiveness of genius.214

The previous chapter on Kant and the sublime demonstrated that reason is not a fixed entity with a specific content but can be considered a dynamic process that is directed toward a certain end. I maintained that the capacity of reason to establish a subjective unity in the face of the sublime engenders its authoritative status. In the context of an excess of sensory experience and the lofty susceptibility of the Ideas, Kant’s claim to have established subjective unity as a basis for epistemological and moral certainty equates to authoritative being. I also maintained that this authority coincided with the rise of European individualism and colonial desire. This means that the trope of the sublime emerges as a conservative discourse in the service of reason. At this point in the thesis it will be necessary, therefore, to continue mapping reason’s outworking. It is my contention that a postcolonial critique of Western reason demands to be understood in terms of the dynamic that the sublime brings to the establishment of its authority. In the terms that I set forth in chapter one, a postcolonial critique must take reason’s processes as its object, rather than reason in-itself. In a critical climate in which the sublime has been taken up as a crucial moment in constructing postmodern critical strategies (as I will show in the following 113

chapter), I would wish to question such strategies. The notion that the sublime is a vital moment in establishing reason’s authority suggests that the postmodern fails to account for the political nuances of reason. I would contend that within the orbit of postcolonial discourse an alternative politics can be found. In order to map this politics it will be necessary to turn to the work of Fanon, specifically his work on Hegel. What Gordon Bennett’s work underscores so strongly is the notion that Kant’s use of the sublime is part of a logic that does not seem to be able to distinguish between effects and processes.

It seems that Kant has taken reason’s violent effects as a pre-given

condition, as that which precedes reason. But as Bennett shows, rather than a logical necessity, such an assumption actually obscures Kant’s cultural inscription.

The

sublime emerges in the context of cultural desire, one directly implicated in Europe’s colonial expansion. The discourse of the sublime thus does not end with Kant, since it opens up the possibility for the assumption of European superiority on the global stage.

It is

significant that Kant’s formulation of the authoritative reasonable self was subject to a constant reworking. Despite charting the limits of the knowing self and the dignity of the moral self, Kant’s work in its use of the sublime also opens up the anxiousness that I have suggested occupies the core of Western confidence.

Such an anxiousness

concerning the authority of the Western self is nowhere more apparent than in Hegel. In his work the aesthetic of the sublime and its relation to reason takes a dramatic turn, and attempts to prop up the Kantian self, to establish the social authority of this self. I would contend that Hegel’s discontent with Kant is animated by a desire for European superiority. And since such a desire is driven by what I have called an anxiousness, Hegel’s work also reveals the vulnerability of the Western imagination. As a critique of Kant, Hegel’s work presents crucial possibilities for the discourse of the postcolonial, specifically for what I would wish to call the postcolonial sublime. Through Fanon’s

114

critique of Hegel’s critique of Kant the postcolonial sublime begins to emerge. Fanon is particularly pivotal in this regard. His engagement with Hegelian thought opens up a complex critical formation that exceeds the formulations of Idealism. In contrast to the quiet confidence of Kant’s use of the sublime and Hegel’s anxiousness, the excesses that Fanon evokes can be understood in terms of Moraru’s parallel model as the postcolonial sublime. If Kant’s thought seems to be unsuitable for articulating what is at stake in liberation struggles, Hegel, as I will show, will be much more profitable. But rather than take up Hegel as a theoretical framework that provides a basis for political thinking, I would wish to trace, what can be considered, Fanon’s ambivalent relation to Hegel. The famous master and slave relationship, to which I will turn, appears as a crucial formulation of the dynamism that marks reason’s outworking. Here Fanon’s direct engagement in Hegel provides a useful basis for marking out what is at stake in the discourse of the postcolonial, its grapple with Western reason. Fanon works through and problematises the metaphor of the Hegelian slave. In this chapter I would wish to draw out the sublime as it appears in Hegel’s work, the cultural and social nuances that surround it, and then turn to Fanon’s complex and provocative engagement in it. Whilst Hegel continues the task of Idealism to establish an undertaking of a dynamic reason that is in keeping with European individualism and colonial expansion, there emerges a vulnerability, a site, a problematic that is utilised by Fanon, and which is crucial in thinking through what is at stake in a postcolonial sublime. Hegel and Kant Before turning directly to the master and slave relationship, the site upon which this construction of the postcolonial sublime will begin, I will foreshadow my reading with a general consideration of Hegel’s basic philosophical aim. I will then turn to consider Hegelian desire, and the conflict of the self that was crucial for Fanon. In the 115

context of the thesis ! mapping the postcolonial sublime ! Hegel’s reformulation of Kant can be considered as a re-situation of the sublime. If in Kant the sublime relates to the problem of conscious unity, in Hegel, as I would wish to show, the sublime is a social problem. Rather than radically depart from Kantian thought, Hegel’s sublime can be seen to be a reformulation of Idealism’s central aims. As Žižek astutely argues, “Hegel’s position is in fact ‘more Kantian than Kant himself’ — it adds nothing to the Kantian notion of the sublime; it merely takes it more literally than Kant himself”.215 Concerning Kantian thought in general, Hegel declares:

This philosophy ... made a start at letting reason itself exhibit its own determinations.

But this attempt, because it proceeded from a subjective

standpoint, could not be brought to a successful conclusion. ...

The critical

philosophy ... was overawed by the object, and so the logical determinations were given an essentially subjective significance with the result that these philosophies remained burdened with the object they had avoided and were left with the residue of a thing-in-itself, an infinite obstacle, as a beyond.216

For Hegel, Kant is fundamentally a formalist. In the concern with the a priori structures of thought, from Hegel’s perspective Kant had produced the situation in which the thing-in-itself was actually alienated from the thought of the self. This means that reason’s authority, whilst it is subjectively valid, remains in some respects stunted. In the context of European individualism and expansionism, Kant’s subjective authority, based as it is upon the world of appearances alone, and the work of the aesthetic judgement, does not seem to account for the outworking of reason in the social world. Hegel thus asks: how is it that reason is able to produce political, epistemological, and moral systems? In extending subjective unity, Hegel is interested in articulating how

116

such an (obvious) unity is made manifest in the social world. In such a manifestation reason emerges not just as a legislator of consciousness, but as a power that is able to transform the world. It is clear that Hegel has Europe’s ‘great’ cultural and political attainments in mind here. The necessity of reformulating Kant is animated by Hegel’s desire to ‘keep up’, as it were, with the pace of Western progress. He writes, Kant “considers logic ... to be fortunate in having attained so early a completion before any other sciences; since Aristotle, it has not lost any ground, but neither has it gained any”. But in embracing what was considered the advanced state of European Reason in comparison to the ancients (a thinking strategy that was crucial, as I showed in chapter two, in the construction of British national pride) Hegel declares, “if logic has not undergone any change since Aristotle ... then surely the conclusion which should be drawn is that it is all the more in need of a total reconstruction; for spirit, after its labours over two thousand years, must have attained to a higher consciousness”.217 In order to undertake mapping the great attainments of reason, Hegel challenges Kant’s insistence upon the distinction between the thing-in-itself and the world of appearances. He asserts that the two worlds are inseparable. Thus rather than two distinct spheres that have no direct relation, as it appears in Kant, Hegel argues that the thing-in-itself and thought on the thing-in-itself constitute a complete whole. If Kant had sought to limit the capacity of the Ideas (they work merely upon the concepts of the understanding), for Hegel the “Idea is what is true in and for itself, the absolute unity of Concept and Objectivity”. Rather than an abstract entity teetering, as Kant thought, on the brink of madness, “the Idea”, Hegel asserts, “is essentially concrete, because it is the free Concept that determines itself and in doing so makes itself real”. This means the Hegelian self is caught up in its materiality, its body, its desire for the object. Escaping this materiality into a bodiless world of lofty and esoteric thought is an impossibility. The problem of the self for Hegel is, therefore, less a problem of impending madness

117

than a problem that concerns the body, and the possibility of bringing the body into the unity of thought. The ideas accomplish such a task. Therein lies their authority, their truth as truth. As Hegel puts it, the “Idea can be grasped as reason ... and further as the Subject-Object, as the unity of the ideal and the real, of the finite and the infinite, of the soul and the body, as the possibility that has its actuality in itself”.218 Thought thus cannot exist without the thing-in-itself, and vice versa. Like two sides of a coin, thought is the thing-in-itself and the thing-in-itself is thought. This means that consciousness is constituted in terms of a dialectic. Thought is always at odds with the thing-in-itself as it is presented to thought. This is a conflict that the Ideas, as I have shown, seek to bring to unity. Hegel writes:

For consciousness is, on the one hand, consciousness of the object, and on the other, consciousness of itself; consciousness of what for it is the True, and consciousness of its knowledge of the truth.

Since both are for the same

consciousness, this consciousness is itself their comparison; it is for this same consciousness to know whether its knowledge of the object corresponds to the object or not.219

This comparison, disjunction of the thought upon the object and the object of thought, produces a condition of conflict, which consciousness, as far as Hegel is concerned, must somehow resolve. As Kant refused the possibility of knowing the thing-in-itself, Hegel seized the notion that consciousness is fundamentally conflictual. Interestingly, the conflictual nature of consciousness as set forth in Kant’s antinomies, is one of the redeeming features of Kant’s architectonics.220 The condition of conflict means that resolution is both necessary and immanent. Built upon what could be considered Idealism’s central tenet, the notion, in the words of Friedrich Schlegel, that there is an

118

“intrinsic dualism and duplicity … so deeply … rooted in our consciousness, that even when we are … alone, we still think as two, and are constrained as it were to recognise our inmost profoundest being as essentially dramatic”,

221

Hegel’s Idealism unfolds in

the dramatic conflicts that constitute consciousness. Such conflicts enable a theory of consciousness built upon the dramatic as a kind of dynamic structure that produces a powerful image of reason as a great human attainment. Having located Kant’s architectonic system in a cultural problematic preoccupied with the possibility of the autonomy and the authority of the European self, it can be seen that Hegel works toward the same end. engagement with Hegel is particularly useful.

This means that Fanon’s

In the context of my discussion

concerning the postcolonial sublime, Fanon’s work seizes the vulnerability that I have suggested is at the core of Western reason, and disrupts the basis for its ‘great attainments’. As I will show, Fanon wrests the sublime from its conservative trajectory in Hegel and puts it to a disturbing use. For Hegel the condition of conflict means that selfhood is not stagnant, but marked by transformation, change, progress. Hegel writes:

If the comparison shows that these two moments do not correspond to one another, it would seem that consciousness must alter its knowledge to make it conform to the object. But, in fact, in the alteration of the knowledge, the object alters for it too, for the knowledge that was present was essentially a knowledge of the object: as the knowledge changes, so too does the object, for it essentially belonged to this knowledge.222

In the slippage between knowledge and the object, consciousness through time is able to reach higher stages of development.

The Kantian a priori, which is confined to

119

proceed, if it is to function legitimately, in a legislative fashion, in Hegel has been given over to a transformative dynamic in which the concepts are flexible. This dynamic process, however, culminates when Reason arrives as the final resolution, that historic moment in which the object and knowledge of the object form a perfect unity. “Reason is the certainty of being all reality”, Hegel writes, it “is the first positivity in which selfconsciousness is in its own self explicitly for itself, and ‘I’ is therefore only the pure essentiality of the existent”.223 Herein lies Hegel’s concern. Kant’s subjectivism does not seem to be able to account for historical transformation, for Spirit’s (Geist) great attainments through time. In the context of an expanding European desire, it is clear that Hegel’s thought equates to a valorisation of the superiority of European thought and culture. Dissatisfied with the Kant’s subjectivism, Hegel asserts that “the liberation from the opposition of consciousness ... lifts the determinations of thought above this timid, incomplete standpoint and demands that they be considered not with any such limitation and reference but as they are in their own proper character, as logic, as pure reason”.224 The celebratory tone at work here signals that Hegel is concerned with the possibility of the liberation of thought from the fetters of Kant’s caution concerning the limits of knowledge. For Hegel, Kant had failed to overcome the vertigo that lies at the core of empiricism. In The Encyclopaedia Logic he contends:

Critical Philosophy has in common with Empiricism that it accepts experience as the only basis for our cognitions; but it will not let them count as truths, but only as cognitions of appearances.225

120

As a consequence Kantian thought emerges as stagnant, and inadequate to detail, what Hegel considered, the process of reason’s progress to great heights upon the global stage. The importance of Hegelian thought in the context of Europe’s colonial expansion, and, therefore, for the discourse of the postcolonial, with its emphasis upon conflict, liberation, is immediately apparent. Hegel takes Kant’s legislative accents and transforms reason’s dynamism, via its conflicts, into a social force. Hegel’s theory of the self is drawn up around one basic problematic. Proceeding from the assumption that Absolute Spirit (unity) is greater than the individual self, it becomes the task of the self to overcome the unknown darkness within, in order to be at one with the Absolute. Whilst Kant argued that the Absolute perspective is impossible, and remained content to locate reason’s dynamism in relation to reason’s dark side, for Hegel the absolute perspective is as necessary as it is indispensable in reason’s historical teleology. This history marks the progressive movement of human consciousness from darkness to light, from the obscure to the axiomatic, from slavery to mastery. For Heidegger it is a conscious movement analogous to the possession and conquest of the land. “That land”, he declares, “is the self-certainty of mental representations in respect of itself and what it represents. To take complete possession of this land means to know the selfcertainty of self-consciousness in its unconditional nature”.226

As such self-

consciousness emerges as a vital link in this unfolding process. It is, as Heidegger reminds us, “a passage way” between “consciousness and reason, which, when developed as spirit, is the true absolute”.227 One of the most striking things about this passage from the individual to the universal is that it is, as I have suggested, extremely conflictual, and as a consequence is essentially painful and difficult. The self in Hegel’s economy is torn between its own immediate experience and knowledge of the object and the possibility of subordinating

121

that immediacy to a universal perspective, the Absolute. Yet as is characteristic of Hegel’s thought, within this difficult division lies the possibility of movement and change, the progress of Spirit. At the core of this painful conflict is the figure of desire. For Fanon the struggle of desire, its toil in a sense, animates his intervention in the black consciousness that seeks a unity through the idea of whiteness. I will turn to this in due course. If for Kant the unity of consciousness is established through the aesthetic structuring of the faculty of Judgement, for Hegel the unity of consciousness is established in and through the struggle of desire. Hegel writes, “this unity must become essential to self-consciousness, i.e. self-consciousness is Desire in general”.228 Desire, as a structure of apperception, is the feeling that drives, animates, and structures the struggle to overcome the divided self in order to establish an identity (‘true essence’). The figure of the desiring ‘I’ is, as Alexandre Kojève insightfully puts it, “an emptiness, greedy for content.”229 Desire in this context is thus a bodily metaphor. It is that visceral aspect of being — hunger, thirst, sexuality — that initially enables the self to be aware of self, that there is something present that is not the object outside. Selfhood in Hegel begins with the sensations, the feeling body. This body will become crucial for Fanon, and the discourse of the postcolonial. Hegel’s philosophy seeks to chart the progress of Geist from a simple bodily experience of the object to the detached absolute knowledge of the object. The process is one in which the body, its baseness in this economy, is gradually overcome by reason, its objective power.

As a crucial

postcolonial thinker, Fanon seizes the body in order to disrupt Hegel’s philosophical system. I would wish to contend that Fanon’s seizure of the body is an important instance of the postcolonial sublime. In Hegel the outworking of the struggle of Desire is manifest toward the outward object. This manifestation he calls “Life”. He tells us, through “this reflection

122

into itself the object has become Life”. Life is defined as “the pure movement of axial rotation … the simple essence of Time which, … has the stable shape of Space.”230 The desire for life is thus the desire to be filled with, to be satisfied in the fluxes and flows that is being alive. To have Life is to actively dominate the objects of nature, in this scheme. It is to find a bodily satisfaction in our acts upon objects. In other words, desire is satisfied when the fluidity of the world’s objects are made to fit the form of that desire. The action that desire produces negates the material world. “By negating it”, as Kojève explains, “modifying it, [and] making it its own, the animal raises itself above this given. … and reveals its superiority.”231 It can be seen that the discourse of the sublime, the concern of this thesis, inhabits Hegel. In Hegel the sublime emerges initially in that most basic aspect of the living self, the biological drives. The Hegelian self at its core, if we can use such language for the purposes of illustration, is fundamentally born into a process of sublimation. At the most basic level, what Kant called a natural disposition remains in Hegel, in whom the self emerges in stages via the capacity for elevation above the thing-in-itself, the slime and the mud of this world. But for Hegel the sublime is much more fundamental than Kant would allow. If Kant isolated the possibility of sublimity, as we found in chapter two, and opened it to a select few — Genius, the morally purposeful, the educated, and the Cultured — Hegel effectively intensifies this elitism, and puts it to work at the most basic level of being. In Hegel sublimity lies at the core of existence itself. To take up what might be called a postcolonial sublime it will be necessary to overcome the social implications of the Kantian sublime, in order to take up what is much more fundamental to being, the bodily desire of Hegel. It is crucial to note that Hegel is concerned with social formations, and this is why he proceeds to theorise the social in terms of the problem of the bodily desire. In terms of the question of social transformation, Hegelian thought can be seen to be more productive than

123

Kantian subjectivism. Fanon’s intellectual context, as I will show, bears this assertion out. The individual desire, which is crucial for self-certainty, effects the problematic that establishes the possibility of culture and society. Desire opens up possibility, but desire as pure possibility is a problem that demands to be overcome.

Desire doesn’t

seem to be able to distinguish the difference between people and objects. This desire is thus essentially violent in nature. It can be characterised as pure sublimity, a boundless necessity. If left to a life merely driven by this desire, and nothing else, Hobbes’ nightmare would take on epic proportions. An unchecked sublime energy needs to be tamed. This taming is reason’s task. As such this boundless violent energy remains a vital component in establishing reason’s authority. In Hegel desire functions in its relation to reason, much like the failure of the imagination in Kant. Hegel’s reworking of Kant takes the sublime in the same manner as Kant, as a violent yet natural force, and puts it to work. Reason soars once again upon the wings of the sublime. The most dramatic and crucial moment in establishing this lofty status takes place in a social setting, in the encounter of desiring selves. For the desiring self in its pure sublime form in encountering other desiring selves has a major problem to overcome. I will turn to this in due course. For the moment, however, it will be necessary to take stock, before turning to the work of Fanon. Several crucial issues have emerged in my account of Hegel’s reformulation of Kant. Firstly, the sublime object in Hegel can be understood, in simple terms, as the body, its seemingly boundless desire for the object. For Hegel the body in-itself is a seething mass of violent desire. It is destructive; yet it opens up possibility. The body as pure desire is the object that consciousness must overcome if reason is to be established. Secondly, what this notion of reason as an overcoming consciousness reveals, as I have maintained throughout, is that reason is forged in a dynamic process.

124

The sublime is a crucial component in this process. It is the despised darkness within that establishes the necessity of reason, and marks its accomplishments. Thirdly, since desire as the sublime object functions in Hegel in the service of reason, this presents the discourse of the postcolonial with a complex problem. How useful are the conflictual and transformative aspects of Hegel’s thought? With this in mind it will be useful to introduce Fanon. Fanon in France In a recent foreword to Frantz Fanon’s path breaking Black Skin, White Masks Homi Bhabha contends that “as Fanon attempts such audacious, often impossible, transformations of truth and value, the jagged testimony of colonial dislocation, its displacement of time and person, its defilement of culture and territory, refuses the ambition of any ‘total’ theory of colonial oppression”.232 It is significant, however, that having located the fragmentary and unresolved tensions that characterise Fanon’s texts — for Bhabha “the emergence of a truly radical thought … never dawns without casting an uncertain dark”233 — Bhabha nevertheless manages to find a privileged moment. He contends, “it is through image and fantasy — those orders that figure transgressively on the borders of history and the unconscious — that Fanon most profoundly evokes the colonial condition”.234 Whilst this insight into the productive difficulties of Fanon is very useful, ultimately, however, to privilege the split structures of psychic identification and desire over other critical moments, as Bhabha does, is to render those other moments null and void. In fact Bhabha, in order to keep his reading of Fanon ‘pure’ in a sense, goes to great lengths to ward off the contaminating influences of Fanon’s more humanistic moments. For Bhabha this humanism is simply discarded as a ‘lapse’, an ‘overcompensation’ that unfortunately emerges “despite Fanon’s insight into the dark side of Man”.235

This desire for an uncontaminated Fanon obscures his

complex struggle with thinkers who have had a profound effect upon critical thought, 125

such as Hegel. Despite rightly pointing out that Fanon ultimately refuses the “Hegelian dream for a human reality in itself-for-itself”,236 Bhabha’s purity passes over the nuances of this moment, and as such misses Fanon’s important philosophical contribution. At the opposite end of the scale, Renate Zahar’s important Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and Alienation approaches Fanon’s work from the standpoint of critical Marxism. Zahar critically unpacks Fanon’s emphasis upon violent liberation in terms of Marx’s concept of alienation. For Marx the inner intimacy that marks Idealism’s dualistic self gives way in the modern world to a radically divided self. The self in being denied the possibility of being at one with his or her work, “in the very act of production” estranges “himself from himself”.237 Thus as Zahar weaves what turns out to be a tortuous path from Marx’s alienation, which is economically driven, to the condition of colonial oppression, Fanon’s insistence via Hegel’s notion of recognition upon the violent emancipation of the consciousness of the colonised actually falls short of the Marxist mark. For Zahar it turns out that Fanon, if he is anything at all, is far too Hegelian in his insistence upon the transformative powers of violence. Zahar thus anxiously suggests that Fanon’s Hegelian fervour be toned down: “violence as such merely furnishes the basis for achieving emancipation; emancipation itself can only be the result of a socio-economic process”.238 Zahar’s rigid approach, which usefully teases out a model of colonial oppression in terms of alienation, ultimately conceals a lament: Fanon fails as a Marxist. This reading of Fanon is thus marked by its complete failure to deal with Fanon’s complex critical engagement with Hegel. I would contend that Fanon’s contribution to critical thought can be found in his disturbing insistence upon the juxtaposition of the psychoanalytic and the ontological, and in his refusal to remain committed to a sense of finality in terms of the latter. Working as a psychiatrist during the Algerian revolution against French colonialism in

126

the fifties, and experiencing life as a black man in postwar France, Fanon used and abused (in the active sense) all of the available critical tools in order to establish the possibility for the radical liberation of the oppressed. In terms of the ontological moments in Fanon’s oeuvre, which are my concern here, it is crucial to note that Fanon wrote in an intellectual climate that was essentially preoccupied with Hegel. Michael Kelly’s useful study, Hegel in France, underscores this preoccupation. Hegel’s impact upon “existentialist and phenomenological currents of thought”, Kelly contends, “caught the attention and imagination of the postwar Parisian intelligentsia and the international intellectual community after it.”239 In the decade after the second world war, in which Fanon’s Peau Noire, Masques Blancs appeared (1952), publications dedicated directly to Hegel by far outweigh the number of publications from the previous forty four years.240 Fanon wrote in an intellectual context that was grappling with the possibility of a liberated self, and at the same time France’s own colonialist chauvinism in Algeria.241 This (French) search for self-liberation is nowhere more apparent than in the work of the influential Russian emigrè Alexandre Kojève.242 Kojève’s work can be understood in terms of Hegel’s reworking of the Kantian sublime. In many respects Fanon’s engagement in Hegel is an engagement in Kojève’s Hegel. Kojève’s influence in France in Fanon’s day (and upon current critical trends) cannot be understated. As Shadia Drury’s insightful The Roots of Postmodern Politics argues, Kojève’s reading of Hegel — with its influence upon the contemporary French criticism of Foucault (“Folie”), Queneau (“Heroics”), and Bataille (“Revolt”), and the American criticism of Leo Strauss, Allen Bloom, and Francis Fukuyma — is crucial in the development of what she calls postmodern irrationalism. In indicting the violence that marks this irrationalism, Drury contends that it is in Kojève’s utilisation of Hegel’s central premise concerning the supremacy of Reason over human affairs, that postmodern thinking

127

begins to emerge. In order to overcome the rationalist instrumentality at the core of Reason, and as a consequence the estrangement of social being, Kojève sought modes of thinking and being that would disrupt Reason’s supremacy. As such, Kojève’s critical endeavour can be described as a romanticism that seeks to bring forth an experiential excess, the scandalous aspects of the self that occupy the edges of thought that Reason banishes: passion, instinct, disorder, madness, etc. Kojève’s romanticism thus effects a thinking that is preoccupied with what Reason has banished. And it is this preoccupation, for Drury, underpinned by the notion that Reason disarms the fluid, creative, artful self, that gives rise to postmodern thought. Fanon takes up Kojèvean modes of thought and reveals that the privileging of class as the basis for social analysis, as Kojève does, remains difficult for the discourse of the postcolonial. Kojève brackets Hegel’s master and slave, since, according to his thought, this relationship embodies what is at stake in human existence. For Kojève the master and slave relationship is as essentially a hierarchy of dependence that structures the way the self thinks and acts in the social world. This structure is inescapable. The self is established in and through the interplay of this dialectic of domination at every turn.

A Marxist dialectician, Kojève bracketed what he considered the most

commanding moment in Hegel, and romantically celebrated slavery as the most apt site from which to transform a reason governed world. He argued that Hegel’s slave is analogous to the proletariat. The proletariat inhabit a condition of oppression that contains the means to break free from reason’s authority, to transform the social world. Kojève’s rendering of the Hegelian slave is at once revolutionary in its intent, and romantic in its assumptions. Hegel’s bracketed slave exceeds, for Kojève, Hegel’s system.

As opposed to the master, who Kojève contends is unable to “change,

progress”, the slave who “did not want to be a Slave. … is ready for change”, since “in his very being, he is change, transcendence, transformation, ‘education’; he is historical

128

becoming at his origin, in his essence, in his very existence”.243 Kojève’s celebration of slavery is driven by a vision for a dynamic self that is based upon an unleashed bodily desire, the sublime core of the self. The slave’s power occurs in that moment in which the sublime is able to be unleashed in order to disrupt reason, and to affirm the value of Life. The possibility of the sublime essentially separates the master and the slave. The slave unlike the master is able to seize the sublime as disruptive since it is reason’s task to tame its violence. Herein lies Kojève’s important contribution to French thought. In bracketing Hegel’s slave he declares:

the Slave has every reason to cease to be a Slave. … the experience of the fight that made him a Slave predisposes him to that act of self-overcoming, of negation of himself. … laborious Slavery … is the source of all human, social, historical progress. History is the history of the working slave.244

As in all discussions concerning the sublime, the feeling of terror in the face of a great power that threatens the self’s existence, or the self’s reasonable faculties, is central. Whilst Kant and his British precursors established a theory of the sublime in terms of the opposition of the subjective and the natural, nature being the source of terror, Kojève implies that the sublime is essentially a class based question. Masters are the source of the terror. The task of the subjected self is, in face of this social terror, to overcome, to transcend the limits that such terror imposes within. The remarkable thing concerning Hegel’s theorisation of the master and slave relationship is that it at once rejects Kant’s musing’s concerning sublime mastery, the subject of chapter two of the thesis, and legitimates the struggle of the oppressed. The space of the slave emerges as the most apt site from which to transform the world. Clearly the Kojèvean sublime lends itself to a revolutionary politics.

129

Kojève’s formulations find their way into Fanon’s texts.

In Peau Noire,

Masques Blancs, for instance, Fanon writes, “The black is a black man; that is, as a result of a series of aberrations of affect, he is rooted at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated. The problem is important. I propose nothing short of the liberation of the man of color from himself”.245 L’An Cinq de la Rèvolution Algérienne likewise proposes the radical restructuring of the self in terms distinctly Kojèvean. Fanon contends that the revolution, as an act of agency, necessitates a confrontation with cultural tradition that radically restructures social being. “This trial of strength”, he writes, “remodels the consciousness that man has of himself”. Since the revolution began, Algeria “is no longer the product of hazy and fantasy-ridden imaginations. … There is a new kind of Algerian man, a new dimension to his existence”.246 Similarly in Les dammés de la terre, which outlines powerfully the economic and psychological discomposure of the oppressed,247 and finds in the violent fight for freedom the possibility of overcoming this discomposure, we find explicit suggestions concerning the possibility of a liberated self as radically ‘new’. Fanon writes:

Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men. But this creation owes nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power; the ‘thing’ which has been colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself. … The native knows … that he is not an animal; and it is precisely at the moment he realizes his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure its victory.248

The subtext of Kojève becomes immediately apparent. But I would contend that this subtext, and its (misdirected) Hegelian fervour, remains far from settled in Fanon. It seems to me that Fanon’s engagement in Hegel, whilst the liberatory celebrations of

130

Kojève loom large, ultimately refused to bracket the master and slave off from Hegel’s whole system. This means that Fanon seems to be ambivalent toward Hegel. Whilst a revolutionary potential is evident, he seems to be working in a political context that cannot be reduced to the issue of class alone. As chapter one revealed, the discourse of the postcolonial is embroiled in a mass of social configurations ! gender, class, race, nationalism, to name a few ! and a disparate host of theories and ideas to deal with colonialism and its effects upon the contemporary world. Indeed the doubleness that I suggested attends to the term ‘postcolonial’ in chapter one, with its unsettled architecture, its gaps and irreducible conflicts, reveals the resistance to systemisation that marks Fanon’s work. Such a resistance, I would contend, leads us directly to the sublime. In charting a postcolonial sublime, as the thesis intends, Fanon’s ambivalence toward Hegel is a crucial moment. It will be useful, therefore, at this point to turn directly to Hegel’s theorisation of the master and the slave relationship, before making our way to Fanon’s productive engagement in it. My aim, as in the case of Kant, will be to inhabit the edges of Hegel’s architectonic system. I thus resist the temptation, unlike Kojève, to bracket the master and the slave relationship, to disconnect its function from the system as a whole.249 A reading of Hegel, in the context of my argument, is directed toward the notion that Fanon is primarily concerned with the sublime desire of Hegel. Rather than the class based Kojèvean sublime, and its revolutionary implications, in the ambivalence of Fanon the sublime emerges through the figure of the desiring body, the terror within that consciousness must overcome. The master and the slave are set forth in Hegel in order to open up the possibility of transforming pure desire, its conflict, in order to produce a social world governed by reason.

131

Hegel’s Master and Slave My reading of Hegel is directed toward tracing the use of the sublime through the figure of the slave.

As in the more formal consideration of the sublime in

Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, I would contend that the sublime is most persuasively played out in Hegel through the figure of the slave, as it appears in The Phenomenology of Spirit.

In this regard I follow an interesting observation from Paul de Man’s

Aesthetic Ideology. In finding in the Aesthetics an underlying and unacknowledged analogy between the order of the human and the divine that puts into play the fundamental aims of the Hegelian system, de Man connects the sublime to the figure of the slave.

Drawing upon Hegel’s reading of Aesop, the “misshapen humpbacked

slave”, Hegel writes, in which “prose begins”,250 de Man contends that “Hegel’s Aesthetics, an essentially prosaic discourse on art, is a discourse of the slave”. Crucially for de Man the result, of what appears upon the surface to be a performative oversight on the part of Hegel, is that the work becomes “politically legitimate and effective as the undoer of usurped authority. The enslaved place and condition of the section on the sublime in the Aesthetics, and the enslaved place of the Aesthetics within the corpus of Hegel’s complete works, are the symptoms of their strength”.251 I would wish to interrogate this discourse on the slave. For the thesis the discourse of the slave is crucial. Through my engagement with Kant I have opened up the notion that the sublime is essentially a conservative trope. Its noble formulation belongs to what can be described as an elite basis for Culture, civility, and the myth of the nation. Hegel’s intervention relocates the sublime, and gives its work over to the oppressed, the slavish underling.

The liberatory

implications that lay at the core of this relocation become immediately apparent. But I would wish to suggest that we need to be wary of the liberatory possibilities that Hegel opens up.

This is because, as Fanon reveals, Hegel remains fundamentally 132

conservative. What he opens up is the basis for the conservative myth of progress. The postcolonial sublime thus hinges upon the conservatism that lies at the core of the Hegelian slave. As I will show, Fanon’s difficulty in taking up the Hegelian slave as a model for (post)colonial oppression suggests that he has a different understanding of the sublime in mind, or at least, if we are to take the postcolonial sublime in the context of Fanon’s thought, the conservative sublime must be disrupted. Fanon’s work wrests the sublime from its conservative trajectory and puts it to a more disruptive use. This thesis seeks to chart the disruptive capacity of such a sublime. I will turn now to that famous section in the Phenomenology of Spirit to draw out Hegel’s conservatism. The theorisation of the master and slave relationship can be considered a transitional stage (the establishment of determinate being) that lies between Being (sensory knowledge) and Being-for-self (reason). Reason is able to take flight upon the wings of the master and slave. In the shifting relationship between consciousness and the object, Hegel’s concern, the master and slave mark the transition from a simple knowledge of the object of sense to reason’s reign over the objects of sense. If in Kant the judgement performed a bridging task, in Hegel the master and the slave serve such a purpose. I would contend that it is no less an aesthetic moment. The theorisation of the master and the slave begins when the desiring self meets another self. The desiring self, as I have shown, with its boundless appetite finds an awareness of self in the consumption of objects (Being). But as soon as this has taken place a problem arises. The act of consumption, in whatever form, does exactly what it sets out to do, it consumes the object. As banal as it sounds, if desire is the basis for self-hood the consumed object no longer exists, and the self no longer has the means for locating self-certainty.

For Hegel this means that the only way that the self can

ultimately exist with a reasonable self-certainty is if the object of desire somehow resists being consumed. For self-certainty to be possible the object that resists must be

133

able to assert a desire comparable to the consuming self. The only object that is capable of such an assertion is another self.

As such Hegel breaks through that radical

subjectivism and relativism that marked Kant, and situates reason’s dynamic processes in a social context. Through Hegel reason thus enters the social domain. Since, as I outlined above, selfhood is structured by the principle of desire (the bodily satisfaction that emerges in overcoming the object) the meeting of two selves produces a problem. Both selves seek from the other the necessary fulfilment that a violent desire demands. In Hobbesian terms, as a consequence of this violent desire the encounter between selves is essentially conflictual. Hegel then asks: how is social order possible?

The basis for self-certainty — the intermediate step in establishing a

reasonable order — must, therefore, be established by overcoming the sublime desire to negate the object. The possibility of the social emerges only when this being-for-itself is able to be transformed into an independent consciousness, being-in-itself. In the terms set forth by Jean Hyppolite’s existential reading of Hegel, this is a transformation that frees the subject “from the only slavery possible, enslavement to life.”252 The passage from the individual to the universal can be understood in terms of the eighteenth-century preoccupation with the sublime, as the demand for overcoming the natural, the bodily, the biological in the name of a greater power, a greater self. Of course that greater self is a reasonable one. For it is Reason that emerges in that moment in which the self overcomes the mundane consumption of objects, overcomes bodily desire. The most undeniable and compelling test of this moment comes in the face of death, the possibility of the complete annihilation of the body. The willingness to face death, to risk losing the capacity to desire, shows that there is a being, a human essence, a will, that exists above and beyond material desire. It is the sublime moment par excellence: the self must overcome his or her inner fears in the face of that great and

134

unknown power, death. Interesting and disturbing is Hegel’s passing over of Kant’s subjective use of the sublime, his insistence that it is this sublimity that informs and structures the social. The relationship between people, desiring selves, is at its base, for Hegel, a battle to overcome the fear of that ultimate marker of the sublime, the greatest of threats, death. The willingness to risk life, the object of desire, in this way opens up the possibility for an independent consciousness that is not bound by life’s physical constraints, the world of a simple sensory knowledge. Hegel writes:

it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won; only thus is it proved that for self-consciousness, its essential being is not [just] being, not the immediate form in which it appears, nor in its submergence in the expanse of life, but rather that there is nothing present in it that could not be regarded as a vanishing moment, that it is only pure being-for-self. The individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.253

But this sublime moment takes an interesting turn. For the possibilities of desire do not leave us without problems. It seems that desire cannot be done away with that easily, and the problem that we encountered through the consumption of objects emerges again. The survivor of the battle to the death is left with no basis upon which to establish a sense of self, in the same way that the consumption of objects leaves the self with nothing to satisfy desire for life. Combat to the death destroys the condition of reciprocity, of mutual recognition, which has been set forth as the necessary condition for self-certainty. The only way that this can be resolved is for the combatants to

135

survive the battle. This means that there is someone left to recognise the self, despite the fact that the basis for this relationship is a conflictual and violent one initially. There are winners and losers in battle. Thus two paths to the absolute emerge. Here we find the master and the slave. In this equation the master is the one who is able to risk life, and thus establish an independent consciousness. The slave, on the other hand, is unwilling to risk life, and is bound by both the material condition of Life (desire), and the master, who has seemingly transcended this condition. In their outworking the master and the slave thus face very different kinds of problems. The master, who is the proven subject, rules by means of this transcendent state. In other words the master is in the position of certainty, surety, and therefore able to reasonably rule. The slave is the object of this rule, and thus, according to the necessity of mutual recognition as the basis for self-certainty, the master gets recognition from the slave as the slave obeys. But at this point the Phenomenology makes an interesting turn. After having valorised the capacity of mastery to overcome desire, Hegel rejects mastery as a legitimate basis for reason. The master, who seemed to overcome the sublime and thus earned the right to rule, ultimately does not get satisfaction, or in other words, an adequate return in the recognition stakes from the slave because inequality prevents it. The obedience of the slave does not provide adequate recognition for the master, who thus emerges as the figure of the unfulfilled ruler, an extreme embodiment of the cliche, ‘it’s lonely at the top’. The master faces the problem that we have encountered in several different forms previously. That is, if there is no return from the other then the self loses the basis for self’s existence. Mastery thus becomes, as Kojève puts it, “an existential impasse.”254 The master in winning the right to rule paradoxically embarks upon the road to no where, as far as self-consciousness is concerned. The slave, however, embodies that sense of the self upon which Reason is able to assert its authority. This is something that Nietzsche

136

would later invert, rejecting ‘slave morality’ in favour of ‘master morality’, in order to set forth ‘the will to power’ as the marker of authentic human experience. For Hegel, however, it is the slave, the one unwilling to risk life, who is finally able to overcome desire and transform the condition of inequality that was effected by the fear of death. The slave opens up the possibility for an autonomous sense of self, and thus establishes a path to a free self-consciousness. In producing goods for the master, which are consumed only by the master, the slave is able to project him or herself onto a concrete other. This means that the fear of death and the constraints that come with it are overcome, albeit through (an)other path. In short, and this is a matter that would become crucial for Marx, the slave discovers him or herself through work. Hegel writes, through “service he rids himself of his attachment to natural existence in every single detail; and gets rid of it by working on it.” This means that the slave is able to become “conscious of what he truly is.” For “consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence”.255 The master in the equation thus functions not as the site for progress, but merely as the means for effecting a condition of injustice that would produce the necessity of the slave working upon the object in order to overcome desire. The slave whilst oppressed has an advantage in the consciousness stakes, and ultimately in working transcends the desire for the object.

Subsequently, the eighteenth-century

preoccupation with Genius, that revered Archimedean point outside and in excess of the social, and occupied by a select few, is overturned by a gritty sublimity that inhabits, and seeks to transform, the social world. It takes work to overcome the sublime, work upon what initially appeared a harsh and hostile environment. This necessity marks the legitimacy established in that age old notion: that it is from conditions of adversity that the triumph of the human Spirit rises, from which this chapter begins. It is the slave who must find an explanation for the unequal conditions of life. It is the slave who

137

appears to be in touch with the reality of being, and as such emerges as the voice of legitimacy, the marker of authentic being. Such a task, despite Kojève’s Marxism, lies at the core of conservative traditions, which are built upon the triumph of Spirit, reason’s historic dynamism in establishing the nation-state. The conservative aims of the master and slave relationship are nowhere more apparent than in Hegel’s Berlin Phenomenology. As he puts it:

The servant ... works off the singularity and egoism of his will in the service of the master, sublates the inner immediacy of desire, and in this privation and fear of the Lord makes, — and it is the beginning of wisdom, — the transition to universal self-consciousness.256

Thus far I have argued that rather than a problem of consciousness, as in Kant, the Hegelian sublime draws upon an image of the body, its boundless desire for the object. This body takes on the character of the sublime object in Hegel. I have also drawn a distinction between the Kojèvean sublime, its revolutionary implications, and the Hegelian sublime, which renders the master and slave relation as less revolutionary than conservative. In insisting upon valorising the great labour of reason, the master and slave are utilised to underscore the legitimacy of reason’s just authority. I would suggest that Fanon’s work can be located in this gap between the sublime as a revolutionary force, and the sublime as the basis for conservative myths of progress. Such a division marks recent theory, as we shall see when I turn to consider the work of Lyotard in the following chapter. I would suggest that Fanon is fully cognisant of this division. It lies at the core of his ambivalence toward the thought of Hegel. In the context of this thesis, Fanon’s engagement in Hegel can be read as a powerful statement concerning what is at stake in the discourse of the postcolonial. With Western reason in

138

its critical sites, what assumptions concerning the self will enable the target to be hit with precision? It will be useful to turn, at this point, to Fanon for a tentative response. Fanon and Hegel It is in the final moments of Peau Noire, Masques Blancs that we find Fanon dealing directly with Hegel. The work, as Fanon explains, in examining “the blackwhite relation” seeks to open up the possibility for “the liberation of the man of color from himself”. Working from the basic premises (‘facts’ as Fanon puts it) that “White men consider themselves superior to black men” and “Black men want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect”, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs with its interruptions and conflicts radically disrupts the painful consequence of colonialism: “For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white”.257 The section entitled “The Negro and Hegel”, which is a subset of the chapter entitled “The Negro and Recognition”, emerges as the final moment in this critical examination of the black-white relation. Here Fanon wears a philosophical hat.258 The section begins with Hegel’s famous assertion in The Phenomenology of Spirit:

Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it also exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.259

The possibility of this moment — “human worth and reality” are constituted through, and only through, “that other being”260 — in keeping with Hegel’s emphasis upon the social nature of being, arises in and through the conflict of desire and the necessity of maintaining the object of desire. This is Hegel’s great contribution to critical theory, and it is this contribution that marks Fanon’s lament concerning the plight of black consciousness in France.

For Fanon it is precisely the lack of conflict, the short 139

circuiting of the possibility of struggle, that has issued the fatal blow upon black consciousness. In order to articulate the tormented nature of black consciousness, it is significant that Fanon draws the struggle of desire, against which reason’s great labour is staged, into a discussion concerning the master and slave relationship. He argues:

Historically, the Negro steeped in the inessentiality of servitude was set free by his master. He did not fight for his freedom. Out of slavery the Negro burst into the lists where his masters stood. Like those servants who are allowed once every year to dance in the drawing room, the Negro is looking for a prop. The Negro has not become a master. When there are no longer slaves, there are no longer masters. The Negro is a slave who has been allowed to assume the attitude of a master. The white man is a master who has allowed his slaves to eat at his table.261

A post-colonial condition, in the complete sense of the term as a total historical break, for Fanon hasn’t actually arrived. Whilst in that moment in which, as Eric Hobsbawm contends, faced with the decline in the possibility of a masterful sublimity “the old colonial powers were patently too weak, even after a victorious war, to restore their old positions”262 (as I discussed in chapter one), Europe gradually relaxed its colonial status and granted what could loosely be called a political freedom to its colonies. The granting of this emancipation, however, at least in Fanon’s context (the situation is different for the black struggle in the USA), was set forth as an act of mastery. Rather than a toppled empire, besieged, unable to ward off the resistance of its subjects (this is not to say that there was no resistance), and finally overcome, the empire hasn’t actually ceased playing the game of mastery, it has merely changed the rules of the game. As such, for Fanon, the emancipation of the colonised peoples, set

140

forth in the guise of simply abolishing the master/slave dialectic, merely writes them out of an equation that in some sense provided an opportunity to confront the injustice of colonialism. In having their status as slaves removed there is now no longer a position from which the formerly colonised is able to legitimately speak, since such a category from the perspective of the former empire no longer exists. For the colonised it is as if the rug that provides a speaking position has been pulled-out-from-under-their-feet. In being granted a freedom that effectively erased a history of colonial injustice, colonised peoples lost the basis for carving out an independent sense of identity. As Fanon tells us, the “upheaval did not make a difference in the Negro. He went from one way of life to another, but not from one life to another”.263 Upon the surface it appears as if Fanon attempts to deal with this problem in Hegelian terms. At its core is the problem of self-consciousness, as it is attended to by questions concerning freedom and independent being. He points out that the formerly colonised, caught up in the frustration of this imperialist rug-pulling tactic, “needs a challenge to his humanity, he wants conflict, a riot”,264 the possibility of forging a selfhood upon that conflictual terrain of human desire that preoccupied Hegel, and Kojève after him. Despite what appears upon the surface to be freedom from slavery, there is a sense in which the former slave still desires to speak as a slave in a dialectic of domination. Hegel’s presence in Fanon thus marks at its most basic level the problem of finding a legitimate space from which to speak. Fanon’s world is marked in its incapacity to clearly define, to categorise, and to label social spaces. He thus poses a crucial question: is the impossibility of the clearly defined an empowering moment for the oppressed? It is in this sense that the pervasiveness of Hegel’s theorisation of the master and slave relationship can’t be ignored as a critical lapse (Bhabha). The slave metaphor emerges in the political struggle against colonialism as an empowering moment, a

141

position from which to speak. Thus the figure of the slave turns up in these terms in Julie Dowling’s painting. Her scandalous Julie Clampett seizes the figure of the slave as a legitimate space from which to claim some kind of social justice. In text at the edges of the image of aboriginal woman we read:

Our Black, Ancestor, Women Were Really only SLAVES265

Such a claim signals that colonial imposition has erased its injustices by erasing the figure of the aboriginal as slave from its history. Thus to claim such a figure is to confront the colonial West with what it has produced yet denies, its violent exploitations. What Dowling rightly recognises is that the issue of slavery has been a moot point in the outworking of Enlightenment thought. Indeed the British parliament prided itself, as opposed to the practice of “barbarous countries”, on its active rejection of slavery and the slave-trade. The slave issue provoked a brutal civil war in America, and produced a racist apologetics that would never be realised in Britain. D.W. Griffith’s influential film, The Birth of a Nation: or The Clansmen (1919), is a case in point. Britain’s active involvement in anti-slavery campaigns served as a measure for its own ‘civility’. To evoke the figure of the slave, as Dowling does, is thus to evoke this ‘civil’ conscience, one that would work its way into European thought generally.266 The 1837 “Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines”, for instance, declares:

GREAT BRITAIN has, in former times, countenanced evils of great magnitude, — slavery and the slave-trade; but for these she has made some atonement, for the latter, by abandoning the traffic; for the former, by the sacrifice of 20 millions of money.267

142

In order to make a claim for justice in the Australian context, Dowling’s utilisation of the slave metaphor emerges as particularly pointed because the issue of slavery in the British parliament was essentially an African one, or at least related specifically to ‘other’ cultures that had not attained the civility of the British. To suggest that the British produced slaves is to suggest that Britain’s ‘civility’ is inconsistent, false. On the edges of Julie Clampett we can hear the brutal disparities of civility: “this state was founded by Invaders, not Settlers! And ... to this very day Aboriginal people still cry Injustice. Every Family had a baby taken”. It will be useful to turn back to Hegel to explore the structure of this political empowerment. It is in this grapple with Hegel that Fanon’s postcolonial politics begins to emerge. Interestingly it is in Hegel’s The Philosophy of History, in the text that disturbingly excludes the African from world history, that the problematic of the slave is initially set forth. In Hegel’s expulsion of the African from world history, he announces the hope that is opened up as a consequence of the slave trade. I will quote three sections from The Philosophy of History that appear in the introduction in order to reveal Hegel’s hope.

Negroes are enslaved by Europeans and sold to America. Bad as this may be, their lot in their land is even worse, since there a slavery quite as absolute exists; for it is the essential principle of slavery, that man has not yet attained a consciousness of his freedom, and consequently sinks down to a mere Thing … Through the pervading influence of slavery all those bonds of moral regard which we cherish towards each other disappear, and it does not occur to the Negro mind to expect from others what we are enabled to claim.

143

The only essential connection that has existed and continued between the Negroes and the Europeans is that of slavery. In this the Negroes see nothing unbecoming them, and the English who have done most for abolishing the slave-trade and slavery, are treated by the Negroes as enemies. … we may conclude slavery to have been the occasion of the increase of human feeling among the Negroes.

[Slavery] is itself a phase of advance from the merely isolated sensual existence … a mode of becoming participant in a higher morality and the culture connected with it. Slavery is in and for itself injustice, for the essence of humanity is Freedom; but for this man must be matured. The gradual abolition of slavery is therefore wiser and more equitable than its sudden removal.268

Obviously the notion that slavery, from the perspective of that well worn and still widely accepted European cliche, ‘did the natives a favour’, is profoundly racist. Yet there is a sense, as Fanon in his complex engagement in Hegel reveals, that cogent possibilities are opened up in that moment that this metaphor is reinscribed into a postcolonial politics. The metaphor of the slave thus becomes a position from which to speak, and its difficult and disturbing location in Hegel’s thought demands the questions: what kind of speaking position would this be? what kind of legitimacy does it grant? what kind of speech does it enable? The hope for the African that is set forth by Hegel reveals the importance of the master and slave relationship, not only in the context of Hegel’s ‘world history’ but also in the political strategies of the discourse of the postcolonial. In the first instance we find the notion that a consciousness of freedom arrives only in and through the condition of oppression. Slavery for Hegel opens up the possibility for movement, change, and crucially, since he is concerned with consciousness, a progression that is

144

able to deliver the self from a slave like consciousness, that is a slave to life, to embrace the possibility of the Absolute. There is thus the romantic sense that it is in the condition of slavery that a more authentic understanding of being is established. Since no idea of freedom can be forged outside an inequitable situation no idea of freedom prevails. It’s a simple case of the self not knowing what freedom is until freedom has ben won in the face of unfreedom. The idea that freedom is something to be attained, worked for, underpins this notion. The possibility of the Absolute is opened up only in the labour of the self in overcoming the desire for Life, in a process of sublimation. It would seem that this slave sublime has much to offer the discourse of the postcolonial. But at the very moment in which readers await the climax of a text dedicated to destroying oppression and outlining the key to black consciousness and political struggle (the triumph of the human spirit awaits!), something quite remarkable happens. The reader turns the page upon which Hegelian defiance has begun to carve out a solid base from which to rise, and finds Hegel banished to the margins of the text. Whilst Hegel holds out a great hope, seized by Kojève, the possibility of the sublime moment for the slave, in which the condition of slavery is transformed, the master/slave dialectic exceeded, has not had the chance to arrive. I quote the note in full:

I hope I have shown that here the master differs basically from the master described be Hegel. For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work. In the same way, the slave here is in no way identifiable with the slave who loses himself in the object and finds in his work the source of his liberation. The Negro wants to be like the master. Therefore he is less independent than the Hegelian slave.

145

In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object. Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object.269

Hegel’s presence in Fanon’s text thus remains opaque and difficult. He is asserted it seems only to be crossed out. Fanon’s relationship to Hegel’s thought can thus only be considered as a kind of strange paradox. It was Hegel who in setting the scene for his grand outline of the history of the world, The Philosophy of History, found it necessary to include Africa only in order to reveal its exclusion from the main body of the work: ‘world history’. Africa, Hegel tells us, “is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit”. In keeping with his goal as an Idealist, this blatant exclusion is justified simply because the “Negro … has not yet attained to the realization of any substantial objective existence”. This means that for Hegel the African is thought to exist in a “completely wild and untamed state”, exhibiting “nothing harmonious with humanity”.270 Fanon seems to be reversing this disturbing violence upon the African. Where once the African was hastily passed over, gotten-outof-the-way-so-that-the-real-work-can-begin, or maybe included merely to give the work the appearance of scholarly thoroughness, Hegel now emerges in the text not to receive accolades, but instead to be critically located in a manner that defies the very fabric of his philosophical system. The complexity of the text’s (ab)use of Hegel signals that Fanon understood too well the difficulty of his own critical speaking position in relation to Hegelian conservatism. There is a sense in which his own critical endeavour is inhabited by exactly the problem that his work seeks to abolish: the problem of recognition. So whilst being indebted to the articulations of Hegel, Fanon finds it necessary to resist this most European of philosophical masters. It is impossible to be both master of one’s destiny and yet at the same time a slave to European philosophical thought, especially thought as conservative as Hegel’s. Fanon inhabits Hegel only to

146

gesture toward the possibility of a future free from the dominating dialectic that is at the centre of Hegel’s self-conscious progress to the Absolute. Thus, in having crossed out Hegel, remarkably Fanon leaves him behind and turns to thought that seeks to exceed the conservative limits that the master/slave dialectic imposes. In quick, perplexing succession Fanon evokes the work of Mounier, Fichte, and Nietzsche, in order to set forth the possibility of a being beyond the structures of dependence. Through Emmanuel Mounier, the controversial Catholic reformer of the forties and fifties, he writes: “The young Negroes whom he knew” in Africa “sought to maintain their alterity”(my emphasis) .271 Fichte emerges as a thinker who sets forth the notion that the “self takes place by opposing itself … Yes and no”. Fichte’s post-Kantian contention was that the thing-in-itself exists only in thought, in the I am I. To act is thus synonymous with the production of an I. The I is, effectively, the spectator of the self acting in the world of objects. As such Fichte finds an absolute space from which to construct a world, with the absolute power to do everything, to create and to destroy.272 Clearly Fanon’s violent textual manoeuvres betray a desire for the possibility of a being beyond structures of dependence, a being that acts rather than reacts. The discourse of the postcolonial, as Fanon would have it, is marked by the difficulty of taking up a dialectical location from which to ‘fight’ for freedom. Herein lies the basis for the postcolonial sublime.

Fanon’s resistance to the conservative aims of the

Hegelian dialectic, and search for modes of thought that exceed the terms of dialectics, signals what lies at the core of the postcolonial sublime. As a consequence of the process of decolonisation, a dialectical basis for politics is no longer tenable from the perspective of the former colonies. As the processes of reason continue to dominate social and cultural politics, the postcolonial, as an ambiguous entity, demands that a new politics of resistance to such a teleology must be found. The postcolonial sublime

147

represents such politics. Its excess defies the possibility of bringing unity to bear upon the cultural differences that mark the contemporary nation-state. With the difficulty of dialectics in mind, it will be useful to follow Fanon and turn to the thought of Nietzsche, who I would wish take up in some detail. Fanon declares, “Man’s behaviour is not only reactional. And there is always resentment in a reaction. Nietzsche had already pointed that out in The Will to Power”.273 It will be useful to dwell upon Nietzsche, in order to draw out the implications of action, as opposed to reaction, in the context of our consideration of the master and slave relationship. It is in Nietzsche that the possibilities of moving through and beyond the master and slave dialectic are opened up. Does Fanon utilise Nietzsche fully? Nietzsche’s Master and Slave The possibilities of a movement beyond dialectics, emerge in Nietzsche through the figure of the wandering (wanderung) self. It is this self who discovers and presents a genealogy of human morality, and a theory of the master and the slave relationship. This is a self who has been uncluttered by the demands of a stagnant time and place, a self who is free to seek an enlightenment, and thus able to speak with authority as one that is ‘world wise’, and in touch with the true excesses of the over-abundant nature of life. Nietzsche’s wanderer evokes the romantic trope of the holy traveller — Buddha, Paul the Apostle — or perhaps even the prototype Hollywood Western hero.

The

wanderer dispels the myth of the ‘tried-and-true’ perspective, in the name of a creative intervention that speaks from the uncertain and excessive flux of phenomenological experience. In the context of Idealism, Nietzsche’s thought seeks to establish a basis for knowledge upon what Idealism rejects, the body. If for Hegel the body with its sublime desire demands to be tamed, for Nietzsche it is precisely this body that opens up the possibility of ‘authentic’ being.

148

Given this insistence upon the sublime body, it is compelling that Nietzsche produces a theory of the master and the slave. He sets his master and slave forth, like Marx (though I suspect that Nietzsche never read Marx), via a class based theory of morality. He declares, “I finally discovered” that there are “two basic types” of human morality, “and one basic difference. There are master morality and slave morality”.274 Upon the surface it appears that the social conditions of life precede and determine human thinking and action. Moral categories such as good and bad seem to appear as epiphenomenon, they merely reflect class structure. This means that “good and bad ... [are] for a long time the same thing as noble and base, master and slave”.275 Morality is born out of a response to this material division.

As Nietzsche states, “moral

designations were everywhere first applied to human beings and only later, derivatively, to actions”.276 Thus the tragic legitimacy of the slave of Hegel’s Phenomenology is radically disrupted. Instead of the slave, Nietzsche champions the noble master. From a position of privilege and power, the master proudly sets forth a morality based upon the autonomy that such a material position enables. Despising the underclass, the master’s strength lies in the power of autonomy, in other words, in the power to decide for self above all other selves in a manner that does not depend upon existing moral categories. The master has the power to declare this knowing in a transcendent artfulness, and possesses the power of requital.277 Interestingly the underclass, from the perspective of the noble, are considered as “the doglike people who allow themselves to be maltreated”. These are “the begging flatterers, [who are] above all the liars”278since they hold to the illusion of the transcendent authority of the divine.

Here we find an echo of Hegel’s slave-

consciousness, which is formed in those who are not willing to face death. But rather than the transformative power that Hegel finds in this moment, Nietzsche argues that

149

slave-consciousness produces the kind of nihilistic morality that his work seeks to obliterate. The underclass, in response to the powerlessness that is linked to modernity’s slavish existence, sets forth a pessimistic, sceptical and suspicious morality that attempts to relieve the pressure inflicted as a consequence of the need to survive. The slave thus produces a morality of utility which bears more than a casual resemblance to Christ’s teachings. The slave produces a morality “to ease existence for those who suffer: here pity, the complaisant and obliging hand, the warm heart, patience, industry, humility, and friendliness are honoured — for here these are the most useful qualities and almost the only means for enduring the pressure of existence”.279 For Nietzsche the problem with slave morality is that it is an existence that is constantly preoccupied with the idea of freedom. This preoccupation thus signals that there is no real freedom in a slavish existence, because ultimately the artful existence that Nietzsche demands is negated. The slave must necessarily project an idea of freedom in order to cope with the stress that the condition of slavery brings. Like Marx, Nietzsche thus argues that real freedom can only be found in the moment in which freedom itself is not an issue, in other words, in the moment in which freedom is an always already condition.

But unlike Marx, Nietzsche never considered just how the

transformation from a slave to a master morality might be possible. This is a problem with Nietzschean thought, one that is crucial in the discourse of the postcolonial, which is forced, as Fanon’s work will reveal, to be always already located in a political struggle.280 But given this emphasis upon the artful and nomadic nature of being in Nietzsche, the problem of how to think through the observations of the wanderer in this instance becomes crucial, rather than the issue of social transformation. Like Fanon’s Hegel, Nietzsche’s theory of morality evokes questions concerning the legitimacy of

150

such a speaking position. Can these observations be read as objective propositions concerning the condition of the world?

Or are we to take what appears to be

propositional as a kind of art, a creative intervention, an artful interpretation? If the former, then Nietzsche’s claim to truth here works against the diseased nature of language,281 and the wanderer’s desire to escape nihilism. If the latter, and I suspect that this is the case, what becomes important is not so much the content of the observation, but the authority, or the authenticity of the judge in this artful intervention. A close inspection of the text reveals an anxiousness concerning a reading which would make this inattention to the possibility of social transformation, and celebration of the master as the basis for a rational defence of social inequality. Nietzsche writes:

There are master morality and slave morality — I add immediately that in all the higher and mixed cultures there also appear attempts at mediation between these two moralities, and yet more often the interpenetration and mutual misunderstanding of both, and at times they occur directly alongside each other — even in the same human being, within a single soul.282

Thus an anxiousness emerges concerning the finality of this observation. In the context of Fanon’s ambivalence concerning the systematic science of Hegel, an interesting problem emerges that remains consistent with Nietzsche’s critique of Idealism in general. The too many variations to be captured in a single statement, the excesses that cannot be contained, thwart any demand for the systematic. The excessive nature of the material world renders the wanderer’s discovery as an artful intervention, rather than a propositional truth, and means that its ‘solutions’ do not belong to the processes of reason’s logic. The wanderer, in touch with the unpresentable magnitude of experience, presents an idea which is linked to the messy and muddy world of the everyday,

151

precisely the world that the discourse of the sublime seeks to transcend.

Any

representation of morality is plagued from the beginning, ‘immediately’, with a crises of representation. Nietzsche’s observation is not a reflection in the mirror of nature. There is no pure instance of the referents of this writing. This anxiousness concerning representational accuracy ultimately works to valorise the speaking position of the wanderer. Thus Nietzsche opens up the possibility for ‘artful interventions’, as opposed to grounded ethical negations. The wanderer speaks, but from the messy space of uncertainty. The object emerges as an opaque construction. The morality set forth moves beyond the empiricism that Marx demands, to be framed as a creative reading, an intervention which draws upon the autonomy, creativity, and artfulness that the text champions. The text presents a double movement, it simultaneously sets forth a theory of morality, and at the same time collapses the distinction between the wanderer as narrator and the valorisation of the master’s autonomy. The upshot is a textual effect which valorises the creative judgement of the wanderer, whose unbelongingness allows the possibility of escape from the nihilism that slave morality implies. Cultural intervention, for Nietzsche, is thus staged in terms of the nomadic, masterful self, the artful moment beyond good and evil. This intervention as a creative act is synonymous therefore with the pure force of the will, or, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘the will to power’, that Fanon champions as an actional, rather than reactional subject position. The will to power is a radically realist, perhaps ‘hyper-real’, take upon life. It is equivalent to every possible thing that happens in experience. It is to occupy the space of the sublime, to draw the sublime in its most excessive form, in this case the plethora, the experiential excess that comprises thought and being, into the fort/da of Idealism. Nietzsche writes, “the world is the will to power — and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power — and nothing besides!”283

152

The will to power radically disrupts any sense of an essential subject behind the world of appearances. There is no essence, or substance, or ground behind the power, or force, that effects the division of self and other, and of subject and object. The will to power emerges as the plurality, the excess, of forces upon which identity is arbitrarily, and artfully constructed. Values and morals are thus built upon the excessive field of contradictory forces that Nietzsche calls the will to power, and must be affirmed, rather than discovered ‘in themselves’ as belief in transcendent systems presupposes. The will to power has no origin or purpose, and no beginning and end. Reality for Nietzsche consists of selves caught, though not to their detriment, in a world without teleology, endlessly moving and mobile, a world in the flux of constant and indeterminate transformation.

This indeterminate condition sets forth the possibility for “the

enjoyment of all kinds of uncertainty”, and opens the door for an “experimentalism, as a counterweight to ... [the] extreme fatalism” that the suppression of God’s eulogy effects. The indeterminate calls forth the “abolition of the concept of necessity ... [and the] abolition of the ‘will’” as the ground for understanding and action. It also calls forth the “abolition of ‘knowledge-in-itself’”,284 the notion that knowledge somehow transcends, and is distinct from, the world of everyday experience. Nietzsche’s theorisation of the master and slave relationship radically rejects Hegel’s celebration of the possibilities that slavery opens up. Given this, it is rather perplexing to find an endorsement of Nietzsche’s sensuous and autonomous individuality, in a section that is devoted to Hegel. Of course it could be argued that ultimately Fanon’s crossing out of Hegel amounts to nothing less than a complete turn to Nietzschean modes of thought. But this implies a total break from Hegel, a break that Black Skin, White Masks, and indeed Fanon’s work generally, in its valorisation of the necessity of conflict, refuses to validate. Moreover to claim that Fanon ultimately endorses Nietzsche is to miss the anxiousness in that textual moment in which

153

Nietzsche appears. We find him at the end of that rapid movement through Mounier to Fichte, that resists, in its sheer pace the notion that everything culminates in Nietzsche. Fanon and the Discourse of the Sublime I would contend that Fanon’s foray into matters autonomous, perhaps with a future vision in mind, hardly constitutes a complete turn away from Hegel. For even though Hegel has been crossed out (too late!) there is a sense in which his haunting presence remains. If Fanon’s gesture toward Nietzsche radically rejects the possibilities of the romantic slavery of Kojève, the valorisation of mastery void of any consideration concerning the possibility of transforming the condition of slavery, is equally problematic.

Fanon appears to be caught between the possibilities that Hegel’s

theorisation of the slave opens up, since it deals with the question of emancipation that Nietzsche’s thought fails to deal with, and the possibility of a future free from structures of dependence, as Nietzsche attempts to open up. Rather than rigid critical positions, Hegel and Nietzsche present temporal extremes that ultimately remain illusive. As Fanon declares:

The architecture of this work [Black Skins, White Masks] is rooted in the temporal. … Ideally, the present will always contribute to the building of the future. And this future is not the future of the cosmos but rather the future of my century, my country, my existence. In no fashion should I undertake to prepare the world that will come later. I belong irreducibly to my time. And it is for my time that I should live. The future should be an edifice supported by living men. This structure is connected to the present to the extent that I consider the present in terms of something to be exceeded.285

154

It is in this space, that moment caught between the present and the possibility of the future that Fanon’s work emerges.

In the context of Hegel’s thought, with its

preoccupation with the idea of progress, this temporal in-between refuses to fit into Hegel’s system, its unifying illusions, and its romantic nostalgia for the slave as hero. It is a presence that has been temporally relocated, drawn into a politics for which it is always already too late. As such Hegel becomes a strategic moment, rather than a rigid base upon which to declare the truth of being. Despite the claim that decolonisation has abolished the dialectic of domination, Fanon is thus condemned to speak as if that dialectic is still in place. As far as Fanon is concerned, Black consciousness desperately needs to be set free from its white destination. Hegel thus provides a strategic position from which to speak, but it is a position that demands to be erased in the moment that it is effected. Hegel is thus asserted at that moment that he is crossed out. What this means is that in rejecting Hegel Fanon actually embraces that contradictory moment concerning the sublime slave without assuming an ethical essence. There is no yielding to the labour of reason here, only Nietzsche’s defiant mastery. His gesture toward the possibility of a future free from structures of dependence occupies a critical space that speaks as a slave, but also attempts to cross out that speaking position. This is what is unique about political strategies that seek to overthrow oppression. It is a critical position that is legitimated through the experience of oppression. Yet it is a critical position with a politics that seeks to abolish that moment of empowerment. Fanon can thus never speak with the subversive assurance that occupies the ethical sublimity of Kojève. And he also remains ambivalent about the negritude of Senghor and Cesaire for precisely the same reasons.286 Fanon’s gesture pushes the Hegelian slave beyond the limits marked by that thought. Caught strategically in-between a past hope and a future vision, Fanon’s is a gesture that ultimately posits Hegel against Hegel. The violent relocation of Hegel

155

effectively sets the Phenomenology to work against The Philosophy of History. Africa’s exclusion from world history, and the hope that slavery opens up, when juxtaposed to Hegel’s conviction concerning the power of the slave in his theorisation of the master and slave relationship reveals a contradiction. Hegel in celebrating the slave of the Phenomenology, in a sense, interrupts the excluded slave of the Philosophy of History, and renders the latter slave a power that Hegel’s racism refused to afford to the African. According to the logic of the Phenomenology it would be possible to construct a rival history that moves from Africa to Europe, rather than from Asia to Europe, as Hegel’s ‘world history’ would have it. The self in order to overcome the unknown darkness within, to subordinate that individual bodily desire to the universal, must pass through the condition of slavery. The African slave, in having been excluded from world history thus occupies a disturbing place at the edges of Hegel’s thought. In having written the African out of world history, the Phenomenology positions the slave as the most legitimate location from which to engage in questions of culture. The figure of the slave is thus at once both inside and outside Hegel’s system. Here lies the terms of Fanon’s ambivalence concerning Hegel, and also, as the thesis demands, the discourse of the postcolonial that seems to be condemned to be caught between the possibility of constituting a politically legitimate speaking subject and the necessary disavowal of such a constitution. It is in terms of this ambivalence that the question of what is at stake in the postcolonial sublime can be staged. I would contend that in such a staging the aesthetic moment that underpins Hegel’s system is unleashed. From the hidden spaces that mark Hegel’s system, there emerges a threatening ‘other’, that defines what is at stake in the discourse of the postcolonial perfectly. It would be possible to contend, therefore, that Hegel always had Hobbes in mind when he celebrated the capacity of slavery to effect the progress of Spirit. A fear

156

of death is the pre-requisite for the necessity of law and order in Hobbes.287 It seems logical that the master’s abandonment of the fear of death is hardly a basis for constructing an ordered state. And it is also in keeping with a conservative ideology, which emphasises the development of the tried-and-true, the look-where-we-came-from as a legitimating strategy for the modern state. But I would contend that in crossing out Hegel, Fanon opens up the doubleness that haunts Hegel’s celebration/rejection of the slave. For despite the seeming Hobbesian logic that animates the necessity of the slave in the Phenomenology, that disturbing gesture toward the African in The Philosophy of History remains at the edges of this celebration. Why celebrate one and not the other? It seems, however, that this doubleness that I have suggested emerges in Fanon’s ambivalence toward Hegel, can be found in the Phenomenology itself. For the slave passes through two distinct phases that cannot be reduced to the order of the same. I have suggested that Hegel’s basic problematic is animated by the desire to subordinate the particular under the universal. This is effected through the gradual process of overcoming individual desire, in the name of the universal. It is an ethical task that seeks to make known what is hidden so that universal reason is able to dominate selfhood, as the absolute. The interesting thing about the slave is that initially the slave does the opposite, and refuses to allow the desire for life to be subordinated to the universal, and yet it is the slave, despite Hegel’s system which rewards that movement,288 who provides the spark that keeps the system moving. As such, the system relies upon a double moment that exceeds the logic of the system. The slave’s paradoxical reward reveals a thinking that is much more aesthetic in its enunciation than Hegel’s system as a science demands. It is this aesthetic task, one in which hiddenness, perhaps more accurately, the force of pure desire, the uncontained, that which precedes and calls forth the necessity of system, reason’s opposite, is permitted to thrive. The Phenomenology thus utilises what is hidden for its purposes.

157

The hidden, the

unreasonable force of bodily desire, becomes the sublime object upon which reason’s ultimate authority is able to be staged. It is Aristotle’s Poetics that provides a clue as to how it is possible to deal with the problem of the slave’s doubleness. Aristotle draws the problem of recognition into a discussion concerning the dramatic. As he proposes:

Recognition, as the name indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune. The best form of recognition is coincident with a Reversal of Intention, as in the Oedipus. … the recognition which is most intimately connected with the plot and action is … the recognition of persons. This recognition, combined with Reversal, will produce either pity or fear; and actions producing these effects are those which, by our definition, Tragedy represents.289

What Aristotle reveals is that wherever recognition is in play, there is also a prior hiddenness. In the dramatic of recognition the plot’s tensions emerge. It is upon hiddenness that dramatic tension is built. Hiddenness creates suspense, and animates the plot structure; it is that missing something, the scandal that remains to be disclosed in the dramatic climax. Tragedy as such depends upon hiddenness, it promotes it, rewards it, and seeks to carve out intricate structures around it. Hegel’s master and slave relationship is played in terms of such a dramatic tension. The hiddenness of the slave drives and animates the unfolding of the master and slave relationship, and it is via a hiddenness that the slave ultimately defies the master’s desire for disclosure, and is able to carve out the possibility for transforming the limits of being. As a moment in a philosophical system the master and slave relationship thus seems to owe more to the logic of aesthetics than to the logic of a systematic science.

158

The possibility of Hegel’s celebratory claims concerning the power of reason, is established when this hiddenness is made known. It can be seen that Hegel makes reason’s task greater, for in Kant the excesses of reason, even though seductive, are always ‘visible’. Reason in Hegel makes known what was formerly unknown, or at least leaves the unknown behind. Knowledge progresses from darkness to light, from the what was hidden to what can now be made visible. All is yielded up to the selfconsciousness reign of reason. In Hegel the manifestation of this progress can be found in reason’s capacity to systematise. In other words, rather than a chaotic desire beyond understanding, the capacity to bring order to such a manifold establishes the possibility of knowledge. To cite Hegel:

thought … becomes at home in abstractions and in progressing by means of Notions free from the sensuous substrata, develops an unsuspected power of assimilating in rational form all the various knowledges and sciences in their complex variety, of grasping and retaining them in their essential character, stripping them of their external features and in this way extracting from them the logical element — or what is the same thing, filling the abstract basis of Logic acquired by study with the substantial content of absolute truth and giving it the value of a universal which no longer stands as a particular alongside other particulars but includes them all within its grasp and is their essence, the absolutely True.290

Reason’s authority is thus drawn up in terms of its capacity to unite disparate elements under one system. Here again it is not reason’s fixity that is at issue. Rather it is reason’s capacity to produce a unity from, what appears at first to be, a multiplicity

159

(perhaps something like the discourses of multiculturalism). System(isation) is the marker of reason’s power. Now listen to the voice of the colonial as the multiplicity and the diversity of empire is unified under what is essentially a self-conscious principle:

These nations and races, divided by space and civilisation, by religion, policy, language, colour, with no common Church or Parliament or Army, are united by the lines of allegiance which converge from every part to the throne.

Not

otherwise could such an Empire be held together.291

Both Kant’s confidence and Hegel’s drama reveal that the sublime always already emerges as an excessive object that demands the necessity of some kind of clarity. In the case of Kant, reason establishes an experiential unity. In Hegel this excess is contained via reason as system.

But the problem of the slave of The

Philosophy of History remains to haunt this sense of accomplishment. I would suggest that this is because there remains within Hegel’s system a necessity, namely a figure of hiddenness, that despite reason’s exploits must somehow remain consigned to the dark spaces beyond reason’s pale. The figure of the African in The Philosophy of History signals this only too well. Fanon’s engagement with Hegel foregrounds Idealism’s racial character, and shows that despite the condition of slavery (as it is celebrated in the Phenomenology) black Africa has been banished to a space of privation, exclusion, excess, that is as much a signifier of reason’s exploits — what reason is not — as the increasing visibility of the celebration of the slave in the Phenomenology. Hegel’s celebratory discourse produces two kinds of slave. On the one hand, those unwilling to overcome sublime fears, and on the other, those who embrace such fears and the inward journey to the

160

absolute that they promote. How might these slave selves be distinguished? Fanon makes this clear when he states:

In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to reach out my right arm and take the pack of cigarettes lying at the other end of the table. The matches, however, are in the drawer on the left, and I shall have to lean back slightly. And all these movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit knowledge. A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world — such seems to be the schema.292

The black body, it would seem, gets in the way of a consciousness that is built upon negating the body. The black body impairs such a negation, and thwarts the progress to the absolute. The basis for the doubleness of the figure of the slave is a racial one. Reason’s authority over the sensory is a white accomplishment. The black body stands in its way.

Self-consciousness arises when the body ceases to structure

consciousness, and instead consciousness structures feelings, knowledges, and acts. With its crucial location in the structuring of self-consciousness, the Hegelian slave is thus white. The black slave remains behind, ever the symbol of what reason has passed beyond. Such a social space as far as reason is concerned is indispensable. The master/slave dialectic sorts out reason’s terms. And as a space of sorting, polarises the social world in racial terms.

Whilst there is reason, the Phenomenology and The

Philosophy of History reveal that there, as Fanon puts it, “will always be a world — a white world — between you and us”.293 What Fanon’s pointed engagement in Hegel

161

effectively means, is that black Africans have been excluded even from the discourse of the romantic slave. Cut out from this equation, ‘the wretched of the earth’, for Fanon, are even more wretched than romantic slaves. Thus far I have underscored Fanon’s ambivalence concerning the liberatory potential of Hegel’s thought. From this two crucial issues emerge. Firstly, the category ‘slave’, whilst endowed with a romantic quality in Idealism, appears to be highly problematic for the discourse of the postcolonial. Decolonisation effectively sets forth a freedom that wipes out the possibility, for the formerly colonised, of speaking from the space of the slave.

In conservative thought such a space is reserved for its own

accomplishments, its own myths. As such decolonisation would emerge as less a response to a growing resistance within, than a part of the processes of its own maturity. Decolonisation in many respects remains Western history, it is part of the West’s continuing accomplishment in the world. The ‘greater’ freedom of the postcolonial is a freedom, on the part of the formerly colonised, arrived at by a kind of default. Secondly, in its difficulty with the Kojèvean sublime, Fanon’s thought reveals that the material condition of the black African ! the body in space and time ! in the context of Hegel’s dynamic architectonic system is essentially invalid. Hegel’s is an undeniable celebration of the supremacy of Europe. As the closing sections of Black Skin, White Masks show, Fanon’s work can be understood as a search for modes of thought and being that are able to inhabit, and productively move beyond the gaps that emerge in the critical possibilities between thinkers such as Hegel and Nietzsche. Neither seems to be able to articulate the situation and the politics of the ‘fact of blackness’. I would contend, therefore, that what Fanon offers is a way of dealing with the conservatism of Hegel’s thought. It is in such a dealing that the postcolonial sublime can be staged.

162

Conclusion: The Sublime Postcolonial Body Idealism does not hold out great hope for oppressed Africa. In countering Idealism’s racism, Fanon declares, “I am not the slave of the Slavery that dehumanized my ancestors”.294 Inspired by Nietzsche’s ‘earthiness’, he thus turns to find a different basis for a creative, cultural, and politically affirmative self. He demands that the black body, that despised figure in Hegel’s architectonic system, become the site from which an affirmative sense of community might begin again.

As Dash rightly suggests,

“Fanon attempts to rewrite the body of colonised man, creating a new subject from the dismemberment and castration inflicted by the coloniser’s destructive gaze. ... Fanon equates a reanimated body with the liberated voice of the revolutionary intellectual”.295 It is not upon Hegel’s celebration of the romantic slave that this politics is built. Rather we find a celebration of what Hegel’s system seeks to overcome. Immediately the political resonances of this space begin to emerge. Perhaps Hegel underestimated what he dismissed so easily. What Black Skin, White Masks in its complex erasure of Hegel’s master and slave effects, is the notion that it is upon the black body, in seizing that body that the struggle against colonial oppression begins.

Crucially, such a struggle cannot be

defined in terms of the Hegelian dialectic, as an opposing force, for as we have seen the black struggle has no political legitimacy in this space. Instead such a struggle must be defined in relation to the dialectic, its rejected location within the system. Any voice that stirs in this space, of the unspeakable, the unpresentable as unpresentable, of temporal oblivion, effectively means that Hegel’s system leaks. As Hegel sought to shore up Kantian reason, to make its authority more robust than the slippage in Kant’s architectonic system would allow, gaps, contradictions, and unaccountable spaces appear. A politics of excess, of contamination begins to emerge; one which exposes the fragility of the system, and exploits the borders that have been established to mark 163

reason’s limits. On this border we can locate the work of Fanon. It is a space of questioning, defiance, a space that attempts to push reason beyond the terms of its limits. In many respects it is to be the object of the sublime, wrested from its inscription in reason’s processes. To continually open up what reason’s legislation and systematics exclude is to open up the sublime, to seize what is despised as the despised and to make it a politically productive site. From the space of what I have called this temporal oblivion the cause of resistance movements such as ‘negritude’ have been staged. Whilst Fanon concedes that such a politics is necessary to a certain degree — recapturing the past in order to legitimate a politics of the present and the future — ultimately he argues that it merely replicates the myths of authenticity that have marked the violent effects of Western Reason. Fanon instead proposes that the historical self that negritude seeks ought to be taken as a given. In other words, that something that negritude seeks is always already here; it is the history of black struggle. As Fanon asserts:

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 a shape to, and which, as soon as it is started, will be the signal for every-thing to be called in question. Let there be no mistake about it; it is to this zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come.296

In Fanon’s valorisation of Nietzsche we can thus hear possibility. The dredging up of a past merely replays the structures of European thought, and fails to engage in the productive possibilities that mark the present. This ‘zone of occult instability’, the zone banished by Hegel, with its rhythms, fluctuations, sensuality, the messy world of the everyday, of the body, is the site of such possibility. Fanon calls for a life founded upon

164

an openness to the diversity and richness of the earth’s vast fluxes, and a literature forged in and through material existence, rather than the transcendence of a reason built upon extinguishing such an existence. Such a literature, Fanon writes:

is a harsh style, full of images, for the image is the drawbridge which allows unconscious energies to be scattered on the surrounding meadows. It is a vigorous style, alive with rhythms, struck through and through with bursting life. ... The contact of the people with the new movement gives rise to a new rhythm of life and to forgotten muscular tensions, and develops the imagination.297

As an integral component in establishing the limits of Enlightenment reason, the sublime in the hands of Fanon takes on a different role. It could be said that Fanon opens up the unpresentable unpresentable, the Kantian sublime reframed in a much more extreme form. Idealism’s romantic and confident ‘play’ upon the limits of reason opens up an unpresentable in the form of nature, the divine, and the poetic hero who manages to express what has otherwise been inexpressible. In such formulations, the discourse of the sublime has been bestowed with a nobility befitting those who pretend to the status of the most supreme expression of humanity. It is the domain of Genius, of the Cultured, Educated, Civilised European man. But into the equation there bursts the debased and the lowly, those that had effectively been excluded from history, denied even the status of the slave. There lies within the discourse of the sublime, a darker and much more threatening side, as far as reason is concerned. The figure of the other as threat that has been central in conservative racial politics. Within and against Hegelian self-consciousness and its preoccupation with the systematic, Fanon’s black body emerges as a creative force that opens up the possibility of questioning the authority of reasonable systems. New modes of affirmative thinking

165

and being must be found, rather than the legislation and negations of Idealism’s reason. To question the capacity of Kant and Hegel is to contaminate reason with what it must constantly face but is unable to countenance, the possibility of its demise. It is to open up a moment of hesitation (Todorov’s fantastic) in which the authority of the system is brought into question.

Such hesitation opens up the possibility of altering the

destination of Reason. As Moraru, who I discussed in chapter one, contends, the postcolonial also needs to be understood in terms of its capacity to ‘Orientalise Europe’. Fanon finds in the despised black body, the possibility of altering reason’s destination, to produce within what it is not. In Fanon’s attacks upon colonialism, we find a sense of selfhood that, as a consequence of colonial violence, defies formulation, neat systemisation. Like the image of the exiled self in Bennett’s mirror (from chapter two of the thesis), caught inbetween the golden order of Kant and the violent chaos of dispossession, Fanon’s work, since it finds the certainties of Idealism’s neat dialectics inadequate, emerges as scandalous. In the difficult turns and contradictory juxtapositions we find a gesture toward a problematic which defies the unity of consciousness that marked Hegel, the sublime elevation of reason over the body. Not content to say this is the colonial subject, Fanon exceeds the possibility of the question. In this refusal, the defiance of the systematic, the sublime as an excess from below, rather than above, disrupts the confidence of reason, and changes the terms of its smooth ordering. In the course of what I have called the fort/da of reason, the figure of Fanon’s black man cannot be brought into the light of reason. His consciousness belongs to an order that cannot be explained in terms of the discourse of the slave. Yet like the Hegelian slave such a consciousness is creative.

Fanon’s self is a something-else-besides, a creative,

imaginative being that renders Hegel’s system incomplete. As George Lamming, in his probing The Pleasures of Exile, in dealing with Hegel’s world history puts it, “what

166

disqualifies African man from Hegel’s World History is his apparent incapacity to evolve with the logic of language which is the only aid man has in capturing the Idea. African Man, for Hegel, has no part in the common pursuit of the Universal”. It is interesting that Lamming combats such a notion with the aesthetic.

Hegel’s

formulation, in the context of African poetry, effectively means the absurd notion “that we shall have to treat the Senegalese poet, Leopold Senghor as an absolute phenomenon, a mysterious barbarian”.298 The universality of Hegel’s system in the face of the creative moment that exceeds its terms, emerges as an absurdity. For the thesis, what Fanon’s engagement in Hegel opens up is a possibility for articulating what a postcolonial sublime might be. In being faced with the task of disrupting the violent effects of reason, Fanon’s postcoloniality seizes that which is despised, the space of the sublime, that indispensable moment in reason’s fort/da, and utilises it for ‘other’ purposes: namely opening up the question of being as affirmative becoming, as actional rather than reactional. Such a critical strategy owes more to the logic of contamination than pure opposition.

Rather than deny the power of

conservatism outright, Fanon occupies spaces that have been marked for conservative purposes in order to alter the destination of such purposes. Having charted the notion that the sublime is an indispensable moment in the discourse of reason, my task for the remainder of the thesis will be to continue outlining what is at stake in a postcolonial politics that seizes the space of the sublime for its own purposes. In order to continue opening up such a critical space, I will turn firstly to the work of Lyotard, as a counterpoint to my discussion on the postcolonial sublime. Lyotard’s refusal to engage in the Hegelian sublime makes his critical strategies politically difficult for the discourse of the postcolonial. I will then turn to the work of Bhabha for a more cogent understanding of what is at stake in the postcolonial sublime. I am interested in Bhabha’s opening up of spaces of contamination, as opposed to the

167

Kantian purity of Lyotard. It seems to me that a politics of contamination marks our time, rather than the logic of differend. As I suggested in chapter one in my brief engagement in Bennedict Anderson’s lament concerning what he calls “exodus”, this is a time marked by movement, change, and border crossings.

This means that the

untenability of pure cultural sites remains a cancer that continues to threaten the pundits of purity, whose increasingly vehement reactionary politics, in many quarters, signals the great weight that ought to be afforded to postcolonial contaminations. Finally, I will turn to Rushdie in order to find a basis for a postcolonial politics that is rooted in what I have called the postcolonial sublime. Notes 214

Arthur Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains in Four Volumes, ed. Arthur Hübscher, trans. E. J. F. Payne (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1988), vol. 1, 480, 540. 215

Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 205. See also Robert Pippin’s useful account of Hegel’s indebtedness to Kant, in Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 16-41. 216

G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), 47, 51. 217

Hegel, Science of Logic, 51. See also Hegel’s The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991). He writes: “it must be said that in its true and comprehensive significance the universal is a thought that took millennia to enter into men’s consciousness; and it only achieved its full recognition through Christianity. The Greeks, although otherwise so highly cultivated, did not know God, or even man, in their true universality” (240). 218

Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 286, 288.

219

G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 54. 220

Hegel, Science of Logic, 56.

221

Friedrich von Schlegel, The Philosophy of Life and the Philosophy of Language in a Course of Lectures, trans. A. J. W. Morrison, (1847, London: G. Bell & Sons, 1913), 389. 222

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 54. 168

223

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 142.

224

Hegel, Science of Logic, 51.

225

Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 80.

226

Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience, trans. Harper & Row Publishers (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1970), 33. See also Heidegger’s, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Heidegger writes, “with self-consciousness truth is generally at home, on its own ground and soil” (130). 227

Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 136, 130.

228

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 105.

229

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr., ed. Allan Bloom (New York: Cornell University Press, 1980), 38. 230

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 106.

231

Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 39.

232

Homi Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition”, in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hemel Hempstead, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993) 114. 233

Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon”, 113.

234

Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon”, 115.

235

Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon”, 115, 120.

236

Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon”, 120.

237

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan, ed. Dirk J. Struik (New York: Lawrence and Wishart, 1964), 110. 238

Renate Zahar, Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and Alienation (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), 92. 239

Michael Kelly, Hegel in France (Birmingham: Birmingham Modern Languages Publications, 1992), 37. 240

According to Michael Kelly’s substantially complete inventory of publications relating to Hegel published in French, from 1900-1944 there were 101 publications on Hegel. From 1945-1955 there were 129. See Kelly, Hegel in France, 85-98.

169

241

See for instance Annie Cohen-Solal’s Sartre: A Life (London: Heinemann, 1988), 431-437, which details Fanon’s deep friendship with thinkers such as John-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beaviour. 242

Shadia Drury, The Roots of Postmodern Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). 243

Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 22.

244

Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 21, 20.

245

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 8. 246

Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 18. 247

See also Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture”, in Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 29-44. Fanon contends, “The setting up of the colonial system does not of itself bring about the death of native culture. Historic observation reveals, on the contrary, that the aim sought is rather a continued agony than a total disappearance of the pre-existing culture. This culture, once living and open to the future, becomes closed, fixed in the colonial status, caught in the yoke of oppression. Both present and mummified, it testifies against its members. It defines them in fact without appeal. The cultural mummification leads to a mummification of individual thinking” (34). 248

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (London: Penguin, 1967), 28, 33. 249

I would argue that Kojève’s reading of Hegel is dubious. His bracketing of the slave means that he fails to take Hegel’s conservatism into account. This bracketing strategy can be seen in Lyotard’s reading of the Kantian sublime. An issue I will take up in chapter four. 250

G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), vol. 1, 387. 251

Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996),118. 252

Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 170. 253

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 114.

254

Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 46.

255

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 117, 118.

170

256

G. W. F. Hegel, The Berlin Phenomenology, trans., ed., M. J. Petry (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing, 1981), 87. 257

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 9, 8, 10.

258

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 13.

259

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 111.

260

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 217.

261

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 219.

262

Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (London: Abacus, 1995), 216. 263

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 220.

264

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 221.

265

Julie Dowling, Julie Clampett (Perth: Art Gallery of Western Australia, 1995).

266

In the context of Hegel’s celebration of the great attainments of Spirit, the abolition of slavery occupies a central place. In The Encyclopaedia Logic in a section dealing with the supremacy of modern Europe over the ancients, he writes, “the genuine reason why there are no longer any slaves in Christian Europe is to be sought in nothing but the principle of Christianity itself” (240). 267

“Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines”, in The Concept of Empire: Burke to Attlee 1774-1947, ed. George Bennett (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1962), 103. 268

G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 96, 98, 99. 269

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, n220-221.

270

Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 99, 93.

271

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 222. Fanon has Mounier’s L’Éveil De L’Afrique Noire (1947) in mind. 272

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man, The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, vol. 1-2, trans. William Smith (London: Trübner, 1889). He writes, “I am I, myself. … What I am, I know because I am it; and that whereof I know immediately that I am it, that I am because I immediately know it. There is here no need of any tie between subject and object; my own nature is this tie. I am subject and object: - and this subject-objectivity, this return of knowledge upon itself, is what I mean by the term ‘I’” (381-382). 273

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 222. 171

274

Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future”, trans. Walter Kaufman, Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), 394. 275

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human all too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 37. 276

Nietzsche “Beyond Good and Evil”, 395.

277

Nietzsche, Human all too Human, 36-37.

278

Nietzsche “Beyond Good and Evil”, 395.

279

Nietzsche “Beyond Good and Evil”, 397.

280

On this point I follow Gilles Delueze, and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). They assert, “the first characteristic of minor literature … is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization … Prague German is a deterritorialized language… (this can be compared in another context to what blacks in America today are able to do with the English Language). The second characteristic of minor literatures is that everything in them is political. … its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. … The third characteristic of minor literature is that in it everything takes on a collective value … there are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that “master” and that could be separated from a collective enunciation (16- 17). 281

See Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Falsity in their Ultramoral Sense”, in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 2, ed. Oscar Levy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1924), 173-191. 282

Nietzsche “Beyond Good and Evil”, 394.

283

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 550. 284

Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 546.

285

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 12-13.

286

See Léopold Senghor (“Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century”, in The Africa Reader: Independent Africa, ed. Wilfred Cartey and Martin Kilson (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 170-192), who draws Bergson (a thinker embroiled in the problematics of Idealism), into the foundation of a negritude, that “humanism of the twentieth century”, as he calls it. This critical move seeks to open up the possibility, Senghor writes, of “rooting oneself in oneself, and self-confirmation: confirmation of one’s being” (180, 179). 287

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin, 1985), 102.

172

288

Interestingly Hegel celebrates the French revolution in terms that amount to a celebration of the progressive possibilities of mastery. In a Letter to Zellman (1807), Hegel writes: “Thanks to the bath of her Revolution, the French Nation has freed herself of many institutions which the human spirit had outgrown like the shoes of a child. These institutions accordingly once oppressed her, and now they continue to oppress other nations as so many fetters devoid of spirit. What is even more, however, is that the individual as well has shed the fear of death … along with the life of habit — which, with the change of scenery, is no longer self-supporting. This is what gives this Nation the great power she displays against others. She weighs down upon the impassiveness and dullness of these other nations, which, finally forced to give up their indolence in order to step into actuality, will perhaps … surpass their teachers” (“Hegel to Zellman”, Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 123. 289

Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle, trans. S. H. Butcher (London: Macmillan and Co., 1902), 41. 290

Hegel, Science of Logic, 59.

291

Bernard Holland, “The Crown and the Empire”, in The Empire and the Century (London: John Murray, 1905), 34. 292

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 110-111.

293

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 122.

294

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 230.

295

Michael Dash, “In Search of the Lost Body: Redefining the Subject in Caribbean Literature”, Kunapipi, vol. 11, no. 1 (1989), 24. 296

Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 182-183.

297

Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 177, 194.

298

George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (London: Michael Joseph, 1960), 32.

173

Chapter Four Interrogating the Lyotardian Sublime

Having located Fanon’s critical position in relation to Idealism, I would wish to take up the critical oscillation that has produced the terrain of this thesis. As I suggested from the outset, this charting of the postcolonial sublime has been engendered by the political excesses of both Lyotard’s theory of differend and Bhabha’s notion of hybridity. Each questions the terms in which universalist systems are drawn up. Each contributes a particular understanding of what is at stake in politics in the late Twentieth Century. In terms of the discourse of the postcolonial, however, important distinctions between these bodies of thought demand to drawn up. I would wish to contend that the postcolonial sublime departs from the terms of the postmodern sublime, as theorised by Lyotard. As I argued in the previous chapter, Fanon’s seizure of the black body, to disrupt Hegelian systemisation, opens up a materiality that seems to be absent in the disruptions of the postmodern sublime. With the material excess of Fanon’s politics in mind, this chapter interrogates Lyotard’s postmodernism, specifically postmodernism’s philosophical basis as charted in Le Differend, and outlines the basis for championing the postcoloniality of Fanon, Bhabha, and Rushdie over the Lyotard of the differend. No contemporary philosopher has celebrated the political and aesthetic possibilities that Kant opens up like Lyotard. Indeed his work in the late seventies to the mid eighties seems to directly correspond to Kant’s critical concerns in the three Critiques. Lyotard’s much cited La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le Savoir, which deals with questions of epistemology, can be read as a response to Critique of Pure Reason.

His Au Juste: Conversations considers the question of postmodern

justice, and can be contrasted to Critique of Practical Reason. And Le Differend takes up the question of political judgement, and directly utilises the Critique of Judgement. 174

In the wake of recent terrors such as Nazism and the former Soviet Union,299 and the contemporary ‘postmodern condition’,300 Lyotard draws upon Kant to open up the possibility of rethinking questions concerning art, politics, and justice. As I suggested in chapter one, Lyotard’s celebration of the genuine sentiment of the sublime, novatio, in which the unpresentable form continually opens up new possibilities for thinking and being, is staged in opposition to the sublime’s dark side, nostalgia, in which the unpresentable becomes an absent content.301 It is significant that according to Lyotard Kant’s majestic architectonic system is ultimately not guilty of nostalgia.302 Since I have sought to underscore the ‘colonial qualities’ of Kant’s work, specifically his utilisation of the sublime to establish the necessity of reason’s authority, Lyotard’s claim demands to be investigated. For Lyotard the radical incommensurability of the faculties in Kant means that ethics can never be reduced to the aesthetic order. The sublime, which appears as the abyss between the faculties, attests to the impossibility of such a reduction. Lyotard’s (controversial) reading of Kant thus brackets the sublime, as an aesthetic moment, in order to celebrate what is perceived as Kant’s failure to reconcile freedom and necessity, as the Critique of Judgement intends. According to Lyotard, the ‘analytic of the sublime’ as an appendix cannot be taken as an integral component in the system. “The ‘mere appendage’ to the critical elaboration of the aesthetic”, Lyotard tells us, “by natural finality ... takes a menacing turn. It indicates that another aesthetic can be not only expounded but ‘deduced’ according to the rules of the critique”.303 Given its menacing location in Kant’s architectonic system, this deduction of the sublime becomes, for Lyotard, the most apt analogy for (re)opening questions concerning art, justice, and politics.304 In what emerges as Kant’s cognisant failure, the continual opening up of this failure as novatio in art, and differend in politics, radically disrupts the nostalgic core of totalising discourse.

175

Given Lyotard’s affinity to Kant, my aim in this chapter will be to interrogate the politics that Lyotard sets forth. I would wish to argue that his critical Kantianism, whilst in many respects a useful account of injustice, fails to characterise what is at stake in the discourse of the postcolonial. This is not to say that Lyotard is of little critical value, as far as postcoloniality goes,305 it is to say, as I have maintained in chapter one, that the discourse of the postcolonial with its emphasis upon excess, contamination, negotiation, and leakage suggests that Lyotard’s bracketing of the Kantian sublime is dubious.

I think that ultimately it is necessary to establish a

distinction between the critical concerns of the discourse of the postcolonial and the critical concerns of a postmodern thinker such as Lyotard. It seems to me that Hegel’s critical distance from Kant, as exploited by Fanon, provides a more apt basis for thinking through what is stake in a postcolonial sublime. I will begin with Lyotard’s staging of Kant’s critical thought. Lyotard and Kant The French Revolution, that vast exercise in purification and Terror, transfixed, perhaps like no other eighteenth-century event, the people of Western Europe. Incisive in its impact upon art, politics, and morality, the revolution was no where more dramatically felt than in the realms of philosophy and literature. The radical idealist Fichte, for instance, celebrated the freeing of the self “from external shackles”. The revolution engaged Fichte “in an inner struggle”, and became an exemplary moment in the staging of a philosophical system which frees the self from “the fetters of things in themselves”.306 Hegel too, whilst distancing himself from what he considered the abstract nature of the Idea of the revolution,307 described it as a “glorious mental dawn” that was rightly celebrated by “all thinking beings”. The revolution was an historical moment in which “a lofty character stirred”, with such an “enthusiasm” of the spirit that it “thrilled through the world”.308 Kant, in contrast, rather than champion the events of 176

the revolution itself, sought to underscore the gap between the event and its spectators feelings of enthusiasm. “This event”, he writes, “consists neither in the momentous deeds or crimes committed by men … It is simply the mode of thinking of the spectators … this mode of thinking demonstrates a character of the human race at large and all at once; owing to its disinterestedness, a moral character of humanity”.309 It is significant that these judgements concerning the revolution’s social, political, and historical effects draw upon a language that sought to carve out a space for the autonomous self to be realised in the social world. As I have suggested throughout, the Idealist self coincides with European expansionism. Terms such as “inner struggle”, “enthusiasm”, and “disinterestedness”, belong to that elite band of German Idealists, who believed that the world is made meaningful through, and only through, the subtle movements of conscious thought. As I argued in chapter two, such thought can be understood as a crucial contribution to the assumption of European superiority on the global stage. Celebrated both directly and indirectly, the revolution symbolised the triumph of imaginative Reason in human affairs. Celebrated directly, the revolution simply erased the past and presented a clean slate for humanity to rewrite itself (Fichte). It also generated such an enthusiasm of Spirit that it signalled nothing less than the ultimate supremacy of the reasonable self (Hegel). But unlike Fichte and Hegel, Kant judged the revolution in terms of the incommensurability of the faculties, and the play of the faculty of judgement in its aesthetic mode. A “disinterestedness”, as he puts it, reveals that the revolution merely functions as a ‘sign of history’, in the sense that it marks an aesthetic ‘feeling’, a ‘feeling’ of progress rather than determinate empirical evidence of the same. Free from the object, the idea of historical progress as an aesthetic feeling reveals the (dangerous) indeterminacy that lies at the core of the faculty of judgement. Kant declares:

177

in the family of the supreme cognitive faculties there is a middle term between the understanding and the reason. This is the judgement, of which we have cause for supposing according to analogy that it may contain in itself, if not a special legislation, yet a special principle of its own to be sought according to laws, though merely subjective a priori.310

In seizing Kant’s aesthetic language, Lyotard challenges the cultural location of this language in this thesis. Not content to separate the aesthetic from knowledge and morality, or to explain knowledge and morality via the aesthetic as analogy, I have argued that the aesthetic is contaminated by the cultural as the cultural is contaminated by the aesthetic. What this means in the context of this attempt to distinguish the postcolonial from the postmodern, is that for the postcolonial the aesthetic remains less ‘pure’ than Lyotard would have it. Lyotard argues that the faculty of judgement, as it is dramatically called upon by Kant to force “‘passages’ between the faculties”, reveals at the same time, however, “a major flaw … in the area of its ability to know an object that would be proper to it”. The remarkable thing about the faculty of judgement is that “it has no determined object”,311 and is thus forced to find its own principle without reference to an ‘outside’. The emphasis upon the indeterminate nature of judgement here inspires Lyotard to link the feelings of Kant’s enthusiastic spectators to the feelings that are attended to by the sublime. Kant refused to champion the horrifying events of the revolution itself, yet at the same time found in the Idea of the revolution — freedom — a great joy. I will take issue with the place of the French revolution in postmodern thought through the work of Bhabha in the following chapter. I draw attention to Kant’s celebration of the revolution at this point in order to reveal the philosophical basis for Lyotard’s celebration of indeterminacy.

In teasing out Lyotard’s Kantian

underpinnings, I would wish to question this radical indeterminacy.

178

In the face of the revolution’s tumultuous events, the spectators felt both pain and pleasure. I have charted what I consider to be the conservative basis for Kant’s work upon the sublime in chapter two. The pain and the pleasure of the sublime moment, as Kant writes, “generates a subjective purposiveness” in which the ideas of reason, and with it the “superiority” and moral worth of humanity in the face of terror, rise up and are able to reign supreme.312 But Lyotard puts the sublime to a different use. He argues that the sublime moment, which establishes the supremacy of the Ideas over the terrifying in nature, signals that at the core of the revolution’s celebrated freedom there is indeterminate judgement. This indeterminacy suggests that politics can be understood in terms of aesthetic principles, rather than the supposed certainties of theoretical and practical reason. What becomes crucial is that the Ideas as regulating principles, in order to be realised, must utilise the faculty of judgement, which is forced to link the structures that mark thought. Such a linkage, since the faculty of judgement does not function in terms which correspond to objects but must search for the rules of its own operation, is forced to function by way of analogy, to make links between the various faculties ‘as if’ they were the same.313 This means that the idea of freedom itself can be characterised not just in terms of the regulatory effects that it attends to upon the faculty of judgement, but also, crucially, the idea means that ultimately freedom as an empirical state never actually arrives, since ideas call forth the necessity for the constant search for the rules of its own regulating principle. As such judgement itself, in its various forms — aesthetic, political — is always already marked by an indeterminacy, such that judgement, in what ever form, is forced to stage itself in terms of the search for rules, rather than the operation of a determinate concept.

The

indeterminate nature of judgement, however, rather than being cause for lament, becomes the philosophical ground for questioning conventional political and artistic

179

forms, and provides the basis for an affirmative and practical understanding of (in)justice. With the indeterminacy that lies at the core of Lyotard’s call for new modes of art and politics in mind, I would wish to ask: how does such a reformulation of art and politics figure in the discourse of the postcolonial? In the context of this thesis, this question can be formulated thus: if the discourse of the postcolonial takes as its object the complex relationship of the former colonisers and formerly colonised world, and seeks to evoke slippages and excesses, points of uncertainty that expose and disrupt Western hegemony (as I suggested in chapter one in championing Moraru as opposed to Rattansi), is Lyotardian indeterminacy an apt description of what is at stake in this process? In order to deal with this question, it will be necessary to outline Lyotard’s aesthetic and political theories. I will turn initially to his work on the event and the avant-garde, and then make my way to The Differend. My strategy will be to seize, what David Carroll insightfully calls, “the minimal element, or ‘zero degree’” of Lyotard’s “critical discourse”.314 It seems to me that the possibilities that Lyotard’s aesthetic and political theories open up are built upon a single moment within representation: the avant-garde as event, the phrase as event. I would wish to question the critical capacity of the avant-garde and the phrase events. Art: The Avant-Garde as Sublime Event The nature, or the condition, of the event emerges as a crucial moment in Lyotard’s engagement in what is at stake in avant-garde art. Indeed in Lyotard’s oeuvre generally, which can be situated biographically in terms of a widespread disillusionment with the totalising theories of Marx, and perhaps to a lesser extent Freud,315 much is demanded of the temporal singularity of the event, and the critical possibilities that this temporal caesura opens up. Lyotard’s analysis of the sublime and the avant-garde, as it is set forth in the collection of essays The Inhuman, links the event to the sublime, and 180

emerges in his argument as the “time” that is “a stranger to consciousness and cannot be constituted by it. … it is what dismantles consciousness, what consciousness cannot formulate”. Linked to the analytic of the sublime this marks “an irreversible deviation in the destination of art, a deviation affecting all the valencies of the artistic condition”,316 and makes an important break with traditional philosophical programs. The upshot of this argument is two fold. On the one hand it presents the notion that the sublime should be thought through as a temporal problem, as an event — an ‘it happens’ — that introduces to art and philosophy an indeterminacy that radically disrupts conventional notions concerning representation, politics and justice. On the other hand, the temporal nature of the event anxiously prevents the reign of the sublime imagination in the political sphere, the terror of nostalgia. In the context of this thesis, what this insistence upon the event amounts to is a basis for disrupting totalising accounts of history, such as that of Hegel. The object of Lyotard’s critical work, like the discourse of the postcolonial, is essentially the reasonable grounds for totalising history. The issue that I would wish to take with Lyotard’s work, thus concerns the terms of such a critique. Does this evoking of the event lead to the affirmative ruptures that I have suggested mark the discourse of the postcolonial? It will be necessary to outline Lyotard’s work on art, in order to gain further insight into the nature of the event. Then I will make my way to the working out of the event in the political sphere. Drawing on Cézanne, Lyotard argues that the avant-garde artist is driven by a fundamental question: ‘what is a painting?’317

What becomes apparent in this

undertaking is the notion that an avant-gardist work is less a representational object than an event that occurs in a temporal instant, a now, which includes the act of the gaze and the aesthetic ‘feeling’ that that temporal instant effects. What is at issue is that the painting as an “occurrence or event” is not expressible in the conventional sense in

181

which it stands in for something other than itself, in the cognitive realm. The actual paint on the canvas, the formal (dis)organisation of pigment, has a life of its own that directly correlates to the sensations, feelings of pleasure or displeasure, that precede thought. The avant-garde thus evokes a moment that occupies a non-conceptual, noncommunicative temporal space. This remarkable claim finds its basis in Lyotard’s detailed engagement in Kant’s analytic of aesthetic judgement, which he reads not in terms of the necessary ‘bridge’ between theoretical and practical reason, the ‘method’ of the critique, but in terms of the critique’s “manner”, in order to reveal that an aesthetic moment accompanies every act of thinking. Lyotard, in response to Kant’s analogy between “the way we linger … on an attractive object” and the manner in which thought lingers before itself, writes:

before an inquiry into the a priori conditions of judgements can be made, critical thought must be in a reflective state … Thought must “linger”, must suspend its adherence to what it thinks it knows. It must remain open to what will orientate its critical examination: a feeling.318

As Kant would have it, a priori thinking must always linger in that moment in which thought encounters the sensations (colour etc.) that necessarily accompany it. This means that Reason cannot function without the aesthetic. But it remains to be seen whether or not, in light of the notion that the aesthetic in Kant is a necessary moment in the construction of reason’s authority, this unleashing of the sublime in this “manner” is as disruptive as Lyotard claims. It is in terms of this unleashing of the aesthetic from the shackles of Kant’s architectonic system that we can begin to deal with the critical possibilities of avantgardist art.

The avant-garde foregrounds the sensation that is otherwise hidden,

182

forgotten, or negated in representational art forms. Crucially it is the instant in which sensation occurs, and nothing more that is at issue here. The aesthetic feeling that is evoked by avant-gardist painting reveals “that (something) happens” as an inexpressible event, which does “not reside in an over there, in another word, or another time”. As Lyotard understands it, the task of the avant-garde is, therefore, to guard “the occurrence ‘before’ any defence, any illustration, and any commentary, guarding before being on one’s guard, before ‘looking’ ... under the aegis of now”.319 Against the Hegelian celebration of art as the expression of Ideas, an art of the avant-garde testifies to the possibility of the event. The notion of art as event leads Lyotard’s aesthetic considerations to the Kantian and the Burkean senses of the sublime. Art as a form of ‘non-conceptual communication’,320 working in terms of a resistance to expression in the conventional sense — “the failure of expression” — produces the feeling of pain and pleasure that is characterised by the pathos of the sublime. Lyotard writes:

Here then is an account of the sublime feeling: a very big, very powerful object threatens to deprive the soul of any ‘it happens’, strikes it with ‘astonishment’ … The soul is thus dumb, immobilized, as good as dead. Art, by distancing this menace, procures a pleasure of relief, of delight. Thanks to art, the soul is returned to the agitated zone between life and death, and this agitation is its health and its life.321

The staging of the avant-garde in the agitated zone — the passage of life that is always already threatened by death — sets forth crucial possibilities for art and theory. There is a sense in which closure, in whatever form, is analogous to death, or to the condition of consciousness in which ‘nothing further happens’, as Lyotard puts it. Life thus equates

183

to a resistance to closure, and can be characterised as the constant search for rules, the desire for the possibility of an infinite stream of the ‘something happens’. Such an understanding of life can be understood contra Hegel, as the continual opening up of possibility, rather than a systemisation that divides and subsumes all before it. The agitated zone is a space that is characterised by that split in the self that Freud alluded to when anal eroticism is threatened by the smell of shit, such that satisfaction is forced “away from its sexual aim towards sublimations and displacements of libido”.322 The subject in this Freudian moment is caught between an unlimited pleasure that does not recognise the boundaries of being, Eros, and the knowledge of being in decay, and the inevitability of death, Thanatos. The aesthetic of the sublime, because it implicates being in decay, mortality, yet also testifies to the possibility of resistance to closure, thus produces the double effect of pain and pleasure: the inevitable nothing is happening has not happened yet. The avant-gardist testifies that here and “now there is this painting, rather than nothing”.323 The ‘feeling’ that constitutes this instant emerges as a pure event, divorced from thinking that reveals a knowledge of objects. The avant-garde lays bare the conditions upon which consciousness is constructed. Thought in this instant runs into itself, becomes conscious of its conceptual failure, and is forced to experiment, to invent, within the frame of this failure, new patterns of thinking. As an art form the avant-garde thus challenges conventional modes of thought, which deny, forget, that conscious thought is built upon the unstable foundation that feeling as an event evokes. Formally the avant-gardist gives “up the imitation of models that are merely beautiful”, in order to “try out surprising, strange, shocking combinations” in order to evoke this instability.

The task is to allow the event, “to present the fact that there is an

unpresentable ... to make seen what makes one see, and not what is visible”.324 As such the sublime instant presents, paradoxically, the unpresentable within representation.

184

The unpresentable does not lie outside representation as a content that exceeds possible forms.

The point is that representation is itself built upon what is already an

unpresentable moment. The event as a pure instant325 that precedes subordination to cognition thus opens up the possibility, perhaps necessity, for a search for new ways of thinking and being. There is a sense in which the event, as a radically excessive moment within representation in which sensation and thought are unable to be harmoniously integrated, is able to push the limits of consciousness beyond the teleological schemes of culture and society. Invention is enabled in that excessive moment that the event marks, and pushes thought beyond its limits. The avant-garde sets itself the task of unleashing this moment of excess, and it is crucial that this is continually opened up, lest art itself ends in death as Hegel would have it. The avant-garde is thus marked by the endless search for the excessive moment that disrupts the rules that constitute conventional thought. It resides in an indeterminate state of constant questioning — “is it happening?” — and is not unlike the Nietzschean nomad, that radically indeterminate self that is free from the conventional constraints of time and space, that Fanon ultimately found difficult to fully embrace (as I argued in chapter three of this thesis). It is thus significant that ultimately at the edges of Lyotard’s analysis of the avant-garde we can hear a romantic nostalgia for an authentic, pure space for Art, and the event, within the social domain. I would wish to take issue with the purity of the event.

Animated by metaphors of negotiation, contamination, excess, it is my

contention that the discourse of the postcolonial cannot be reduced to the pure aesthetic that Lyotard stages. This purity emerges in his lament concerning the critical reception of the avant-garde. In what could be called a reverse of the romantic poet Shelley, who sought to discover the transcendent order that makes all apparent realities possible,326 Lyotard would wish to underscore the structural resistance to order that lies at the edges

185

of thought, and that threatens in every instant the stability of apparent reality. Thus rather than develop the political possibilities of this disorder in his work on the avantgarde and the sublime (in this construction this is still waiting in the wings), Lyotard, like Shelley, merely mourns the misunderstood value of art’s capacity within the social. The destination of the avant-garde lies not with the ultimate triumph of the event, but is regrettably “dissolved into the calculation of profitability, the satisfaction of needs, selfaffirmation through success”.327 Lyotard thus does not move beyond outlining the formal parameters of a ‘questioning’ art, and as a conclusion merely laments the failure of society to understand it. We can sum up the event as follows.

The event, that pure instant in the

imagination, is not reducible to what has gone before, or to a vision for the future. It makes no promises, and resists being subordinated to past understanding. The pure instant in all of its indeterminate glory is pitted against the pure promises of political visionaries. The sublime as event emerges as a disorder, an excess, which, in its pure form, the singularity of its moment, is a guarantee, it seems, against the orders of totalitarianism and the terror of nostalgia. But at the same time the event refuses the status of a dangerous abstraction, and emerges as a force within the domain of the social, since it calls forth the demand for judgement. It is the demand of this instant, judgement, that calls forth a radical rethinking of questions of politics and justice. It is thus time to allow The Differend to find its way out of the peripheries to take centre stage in my engagement in Lyotard’s work. In preparing the ground for the postcolonial formulations of Bhabha, as I will chart them in the following chapter, I would wish to consider what I have called the problematic purity of the Lyotardian event in his engagement in the question of politics. In my struggle with both Lyotard and Bhabha, my eventual turn to Bhabha as a more cogent formulation of what is at stake in

186

contemporary national politics in the West hinges upon the purity of the Lyotardian event. Politics: The Differend I have maintained that Lyotard stages the question of art in terms that directly relate to the problem of conscious thought that arises in Kant, namely the conflation of the question of the subject and the question of the subjective. I would suggest that Lyotard at every turn resists questions that deal with art’s social and institutional production (Raymond Williams, Peter Bürger)328 in favour of an understanding of art and its relation to subjective thought. It seems to me that after Lyotard, to think the sublime one must think merely in terms of the problems of the subtle movements of consciousness. It is precisely such an emphasis upon consciousness, on thought in and for itself, that the work of Fanon, with its bodily excesses takes issue. In reading The Differend one of the most striking things is that in its work upon the problems of representation bodies are strangely absent, or are at best, simply reduced to the orders of language.329 It is significant that The Differend, Lyotard’s most important work on the question of politics, maintains this insistence upon the subjective, as opposed to the bodily. The Differend is built upon the logical extension of the singularity of the event that is occasioned by the sublime ‘failure of expression’, and attempts to set forth, if we are to attempt to rescue the work from its pessimistic disposition concerning justice, the possibility of affirmative experimentation and invention in the realm of politics. Lyotard’s sublime, in keeping with Kant, is strictly a problem concerning the subtle movements of conscious thought. A distinction between what I have called Fanon’s material sublime, and, what can be considered, Lyotard’s insistence, after Kant, upon the sublime as a problem of consciousness begins to emerge. One wonders why Lyotard insisted upon the realms of thought and language, as opposed to the messy world of the material everyday. Lyotard’s turn to the questions of 187

justice and politics demands clearly marked analytical categories, rather than ‘muddy’ ones. Such a demand for a ‘clean’ analytic, however, is problematic. It is precisely the question of analytical clarity that is the object of the material disruptions of Fanon. Lyotard works from the stability of theory in order to disrupt. Fanon works from the messy location of culture, in order to disrupt what Lyotard asserts as a starting point. I will continue with Lyotard. The task of art, as we have seen, is to provide an occasion for the event. If in the realm of art the event opens up the possibility for an artful experimentation and invention, in the realm of the social the possibility of experimentation and invention, if at all possible, is occasioned by phrase events and the differends that they effect. In its most basic form, Lyotard writes,

a differend … would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments. One side’s legitimacy does not imply the other’s lack of legitimacy. However, applying a single rule of judgement to both in order to settle their differend as though it were merely a litigation would wrong (at least) one of them (and both of them if neither side admits this rule).330

This general introduction reveals the emptiness that lies at the heart of political judgement. The differend is defined in terms of a lack, the “lack of a rule” that accompanies social dispute. What is at issue is that there are certain kinds of dispute that give rise to an instant in which thought is called upon to make a judgement, but fails to find a readily available rule to be able to equitably meet this end. This failure in this instant forces thought to invent a rule to judge the event, since no determinate rule can be found. Thought is thus forced to function reflectively in order to carry out this

188

necessary task. The differend entails the failure of thought to be able to deal with what it encounters, and calls forth the necessity of invention in the realm of political judgement and justice.

Determinate judgement, the conventional domain of politics (Marx’s

empiricism, Rousseau too) is revealed to be flawed, since, in certain instances, the lack of a determinate rule forces political judgement into a reflective state. The assumed stability of a politics that rests upon an empiricist authority, preoccupied with its own content, is thus disrupted. Whilst the differend’s “vengeance is on the prowl”331 the capacity for a conventional politics to deliver what is just must be questioned. When thought encounters the failure of expression in the domain of the social there is, however, the possibility that this failure can become an occasion for the reign of terror, for injustice, rather than an openness to the affirmative possibilities that differends open up. An injustice is occasioned, in this equation, if it is the case that thought fails to find a determinate rule to judge, and this failure is taken as a signal that the phrase that presents the case concerning the referent is not valid. In this instance the differend has been suppressed. Rather than turn to the demand for invention that this calls forth (though there is a problem with this formulation that I will deal with in due course), this thought refuses to budge from the domain of the determinate, and acts as if the dispute is a case of litigation. The addressee of the phrase that seeks expression is thus silenced, and rendered a pragmatic location within the discursive universe that is unjust. For the most part, as Lyotard’s examples testify, the differend is ignored and social disputes are treated as cases of litigation. It seems to be the case that the dominant idiom and the dominant party are synonymous in this formulation. The suppression of the ‘lack of a determinate rule’ via a dominant idiom usually favours the dominant party in the dispute. We can assume that ‘dominance’ in this instance can be drawn up around questions of race, gender, and class, and as such much of the work

189

involves an interrogation of the structures which give rise to the silences that these categories effect. A central example is the suppression of Jewish testimony to the horror of Nazi gas chambers at Auschwitz. This is enacted by the logic: to see is to bear witness, but to ‘truly’ bear witness to death in a gas chamber one has to die in a gas chamber.332 The consequence of this difficulty is that the survivors were prevented access to testifying structures, and it appeared as if they had no legitimate complaint. Other examples include: the workers that “have had to and will have to speak of their labor … as if it were … a commodity of which they were the owners” (Lyotard suggests that with “the logic of Capital, the aspect of Marxism that remains alive is, at least, this sense of the differend, which forbids any reconciliation of the parties in the idiom of either one of them”;333 “Marxism has not come to an end, as the feeling of differend”);334 there is also a

“differend

between

regret

[modern

aesthetics]

and

experimentation

[the

postmodern]”;335 and we can add, the logic that the publisher cannot fail to publish major works, because no one has ever read a major work which hasn’t been published;336 and Heidegger’s insistent silence about the Nazis and the Jews as a consequence of his failure to embrace the differend between thought on Being and thought on Law, his failure to be open to a sublime “art” which says not the unsayable, “but … that it cannot say it”.337 The critical import of the work is thus to testify to the instant of the differend, which has the potential to open up the question of judgement, to push thought beyond conventional limits toward an inventive, playful, and perhaps more just sense of the social. The differend as an idea is built upon three interrelated discursive components: the phrase regimen, proper names, and genres of discourse. My aim at this point will be to detail the function of each component. If we are to take issue with the work it is necessary to engage at this ‘nuts and bolts’ level. It is here that we will find certain

190

difficulties and assumptions that reveal the limits of Lyotard’s attempt to rethink the political. I would wish to question, as I have suggested, the temporal relation of the phrase to genres of discourse. It seems to me that the introduction of the phrase event, and the question of linkage that it calls forth, merely asserts a starting point that is ‘rooted’ in the indeterminate, as opposed to a starting point that works from the material condition of the social.

Each sets up a causal chain that produces a specific

understanding of what constitutes a just politics. The problem for Lyotard, however, is that it is questionable that his own work itself, and the demand for bearing witness to differends, is actually rooted in the indeterminate as the work suggests. Lyotard’s later work, littered by examples of historical injustices, can be read as a response to material social conditions that underscore an alteration in the destination of what might be thought a just politics. As such the possibility of a differend rooted in the indeterminate sublime seems dubious. Moreover the opening of the work seems to defy this sublime politics. It seems to me that statements such as “the decline of universalist discourses … The weariness with regard to ‘theory’ … The time has come to philosophize”338 bear a decidedly Hegelian accent. It is significant that The Differend draws upon the discursive in order to rework the question of politics. As I stated, there is a remarkable lack of bodies here. Having said this, however, readers must be careful to attend to the nuances that the discursive and language in this context give rise. It would be a mistake, for instance, to think the differend in terms of something like Roman Jakobson’s ‘verbal communication’ model. Similarly differend cannot be understood as a politicisation of Derrida’s (mis)reading, with its disruptions to self presence and determinate mimetic truth, or as a kind of Nietzschean perspectivism. In terms of the latter, The Differend’s emphasis upon the phrase regimen, as opposed to the “language games” (Wittgenstein) of The Postmodern Condition and Just Gaming, marks an important refinement in Lyotard’s search for a

191

more just sense of political judgement. I would thus suggest, after underscoring the importance of the subjective, that for Lyotard the discursive functions, in the context of The Differend, as the conscious surface upon which the social writes itself, and upon which the social is written. Lyotard is concerned with the question of what can and can’t be phrased upon, what I would wish to call, the discursive surface. As such the discursive surface calls forth a pragmatics, an ethics of the phrase. Rather than the linguistic problem of meaning, which is concerned with the content of messages passed from subject to subject, the problem of meaning that the phrase evokes is inseparably linked to ethical questions. The question of politics thus emerges in terms of this phrase ethics, since to deny a phrase, as we have seen, is to deny a social space. My contention is that such a pragmatics does not seem to ‘capture’ the postcolonial, or provide an adequate model for critique. As opposed to the excesses and contaminations of the discourse of the postcolonial, Lyotard’s aesthetic purity remains dubious.

I will

continue unpacking the outworking of the indeterminate judgement that Lyotard draws from the Kantian sublime. Lyotard’s systematic ‘phraseology’ — in which the political implications of indeterminate judgement are charted — is perhaps an oversimplified account of what is at stake in contemporary political judgement. The phrase regimen can be located at the edges of thought, and, subsequently, marks the edges of being. I would suggest that Lyotard conflates thought and being, or at least sets forth an understanding of being that is constituted in terms of the indeterminate basis for thought. Phrases reside in that ‘twilight zone’, that paradoxical space that marks the limits of thought, and yet is also the point from which thought begins. It is crucial to note that the phrase doesn’t in any sense precede the self, and the self doesn’t precede the phrase. Any consideration of the self by default thus becomes a consideration of the phrase, since subjects are “situated in a universe presented by a

192

phrase”,339 there is no transcendent outside which determines the self and its location in the phrase regimen. We may wonder about the body, the material world, and the unconscious (all crucial elements for the discourse of the postcolonial). But again these are inseparable from the discursive surface, since this surface itself doesn’t consist of language in the conventional sense, but is constituted in terms of the movements of consciousness, and as such cannot be separated from the body and its location in the material world. Phrases can include a range of gestures from speech itself, to the acts and feelings of the phenomenological body: “A wink, a shrugging of the shoulder, a taping of the foot [sic], a fleeting blush, or an attack of tachycardia can be phrases. — And the wagging of a dog’s tail, the perked ears of a cat … And a tiny speck to the West rising upon the horizon of the sea … — A silence”.340 The phrase can be understood as any act or thing that presents itself in consciousness, in whatever form. As such there is a sense in which there simply is nothing beyond the phrase, no space or site that can in some sense be occupied by something other than what always must be: conscious thought. It is not possible to speak of an empirical outside,341 such as objects, or empty space, the body as if it exists independent of phrases, and to phrase the ultimate end is to evoke Zeno’s paradoxical logic.

We can only gesture toward what could be considered the

nothingness that marks the end of all phrases, that moment in which conscious thought finally ceases, when the sun explodes and the earth disappears such that “thought will have stopped — leaving that disappearance absolutely unthought of”.342 For the time being the discursive surface remains, and it is all that there is. Social being presents itself to thought in and through phrases,

thought “is inseparable from the

phenomenological body”,343 as the phrase is inseparable from social being. I would contend, however, that these Lyotardian formulations remain too neat, too pure to be politically useful. My aim at this point, will be to continue charting what I have called

193

Lyotard’s problematic purity. My contention is that the contaminations and disturbing excesses of the discourse of the postcolonial exceed the possibilities that Lyotard’s neat formulations open up. The differend, as I have suggested, is inhabited by the logic of the event. In this instance this logic is built upon the sure foundation, for much is demanded, of the phrase universe. Lyotard writes:

It should be said by way of simplification that a phrase presents what it is about, the case … which is its referent; what is signified about the case, the sense … that to which or addressed to which this is signified about the case, the addressee; that ‘through’ which or in the name of which this is signified about the case, the addressor. The disposition of a phrase universe consists in the situating of these instances in relation to each other.344

The remarkable thing about the phrase is that it consists simply of the empty relation between various instances: the addressor, addressee, referent, and sense. It is important to note that there is no content here in the conventional sense, waiting to burst forth upon the social. Rather the phrase, as Lyotard writes, “is an event”,345 that is to say an “Is it happening”, which is distinct from “what happens” and “which is not tautological with what has happened”.346 The phrase is a temporal phenomenon, a pure instant which is designed, as I have suggested, to ward off being hijacked in the service of totalitarian regimes. The instances in the specific phrase occur, unpredictably, without a teleology, in an instant. The meaning of the phrase, its stakes, its use, always arrives as an afterthought. The phrase as event punctures the discursive surface, bursts forth in consciousness not as a content but as consciousness, becomes aware of itself, and

194

creates a vacuum, a point of low pressure, to use a physical metaphor, which is also a kind of demand toward which other phrases are forced to rush. There is no sense in which the event of the phrase is preceded by anything, the event itself is a sign that something is happening — ‘a sign of history’ (Kant) — that is attended to by the feeling that something is yet to be said, and the waiting for the moment of this occurrence.

Here we can locate what is crucial about the phrase, and begin to

understand how it relates to the social, and ultimately to whether or not Lyotard’s consideration of the social stands or falls. This occurs in that moment in which Lyotard announces that this feeling and this waiting, which seems remarkably similar to the feeling of pain and pleasure that precedes the thought that encounters the avant-garde, itself doesn’t in any sense precede the phrase, it actually is the phrase.

You can’t say everything. … But you certainly accept … ‘that something asks to be put into phrases’? — This does not imply that everything ought to or wants to be said. This implies the expectant waiting for an occurrence … that indeed everything has not been said. … This waiting is in the phrase universe. It is the specific ‘tension’ that every phrase regimen exerts upon the instances.347

The phrase occurrence presents the initial moment in the process that gives rise to what we understand as social reality. As Lyotard writes:

A phrase presents a universe. No matter what its form, a phrase entails a There is ... whether it is marked or not in the form of the phrase. What is entailed by a phrase is that it … presents a universe constituted by instances (referent, addressor, addressee, sense) which can be marked or not in the form of the phrase. The phrase is not a message passed from an addressor to an addressee who remain

195

independent of it. The latter are situated in the universe that the phrase presents, together with the referent and the sense. … The phrase universe is not presented to something or someone as if to a subject. The presentation is that there is a universe.348

The “Is it happening” presents a “There is”, a specific universe designated by the regimen of the phrase. The universe presented by the phrase cannot be understood in terms of a communicated content, a signification, that is in some sense occupied or received and understood by a subject. Rather, the universe is presented as an emptiness, a void, a relation between its instances, and as such appears as a question that demands to be made meaningful. The “Is it happening” occurs in a state of privation. The presentation, “it”, is a question mark349 — no “phrase is able to be validated from inside its own regimen”350 — that opens up the necessity for other phrases, through the process of linkage, to compete to make the phrase mean. The phrase is meaningless in this sense in its own terms. Reality, that thing that we all engage in everyday without quite knowing what it is, begins in this remarkable social theory as a void, a question mark that demands to be dealt with. I have suggested that the phrase universe appears in the form of a question that makes a demand upon the discursive surface. The form that this questioning takes, however, does not appear in isolation, but arises in relation to other phrases in and around the specific sites that make up the discursive surface. For Lyotard the discursive surface, or the term “world” is understood as “a network of proper names”.351 This should not be understood in the definitive sense, but simply as a linguistic orientation, through the naming things. The proper name is a linguistic marker that designates specific objects, places, people. Here Lyotard leans upon the antidescriptivism of Saul Kripke’s famous “Naming and Necessity” lectures in the sixties. A logician, he argued

196

that proper names designate the same object even if there has been a change in the state of that object. The descriptive phrase ‘the first Emperor of France’, for instance, designates Napoleon. Historically the truth value of the phrase can be validated, but this situation is not a necessity. The Emperor of France could have been Barry, instead of Napoleon. What this means, as far as Kripke is concerned, is that this descriptive phrase does not appear to be rigid. Its designation, even though the descriptive phrase remains the same, does not remain constant. ‘Napoleon’ on the other hand, is a rigid designator, since there are circumstances that depend upon the proper name ‘Napoleon’ in order to determine the truth-condition of certain phrases. In a descriptive phrase such as ‘Napoleon was born in Corsica’, for instance, the truth of the phrase depends upon no one else but ‘Napoleon’.352 What this suggests is that the proper name possesses a particular property. Its social working cannot be understood in terms of the notion that there is a descriptive phrase that precedes and defines it.

Proper names as rigid

designators have a deictic quality. They are rigid yet empty signifiers. This issue will become crucial in establishing what I consider to be Lyotard’s problematic demand for analytic purity. As I showed in chapter one, the discourse of the postcolonial remains far from pure. It is precisely contaminations and excesses that mark the political cogency of the discourse of the postcolonial. Such excess renders the analytic purity of Lyotard dubious. Thus as Lyotard leans upon the empty but rigid nature of proper names, I would contend that for the discourse of the postcolonial proper names demand to located in material struggle. I will take this issue up in due course. It will be useful at this point to continue with the question of the phrase and the work of the proper name. Phrases cluster around proper names, and through a process of resemblance to other phrases form heterogeneous phrase families, or regimens, that cannot be reduced to one another, or subordinated to a single rule or theory. These include among an

197

infinite number of possibilities: prescriptives, descriptives, cognitives, declarations, evaluations, etc. Phrases directly affect the referent of a single proper name by situating it upon different instances in the universe they present. The meaning of the proper name for Lyotard thus remains indeterminate since its appearance within the phrase shifts from phrase to phrase, and across phrase regimens. The proper name functions as the site for the clash of phrase regimens, as they rush toward the void that has been opened up by the phrase in its engagement with proper names, which emerge as empty signifiers that cannot be exhaustively identified or described.

Is it possible that the number of senses attached to a named referent and presented by phrases substitutable for its name increases without limit? Try to count, while respecting the principle of substitutability, the phrases which are substitutable for names like Moses, Homer, Pericles, Caesar. ... It cannot be proven that everything has been signified about a name (that “everything has been said about x”) not only because no such totality can be proven, but because the name not being by itself a designator of reality (for that to occur a sense and an ostensible referent need to be associated with it), the inflation of senses that can be attached to it is not bounded by the “real” properties of its referent.353

Proper names are thus the site for the clash of heterogeneous phrase universes. Because of the emptiness of the phrase, and the fact that there is nothing beyond it, the phrase described by metaphors such as “feeling”, “waiting”, “tension”, can be understood as that agitated zone, that Lyotard alluded to in his work on the sublime and avant-garde. As an agitated question mark waiting for the occurrence there is no possibility that the phrase itself will fail to be linked to other phrases in the process of the social. There is no option, no possibility of asking, should there be a link, should

198

there not? In the “vigil for an occurrence, the anxiety and the joy of an unknown idiom, has begun. To link is not a duty … ‘We’ cannot do otherwise”.354 The presentation, the phrase, occupies a rigid instant in time. This rigidity means that there can be only one linkage, and one genre that engages the Is it happening? and draws it toward a specific end. This temporal quality occasions an agonistics upon the discursive surface. Genres of discourse compete for that limited temporal instant that is occasioned by the phrase. It is at this point that we move from that single phrase instant, and its relation to proper names and phrase regimens, to the social, which consists of many instances, and an unlimited number of possible linkages. For Lyotard this moment is crucial, it introduces the question of politics, for “to link is necessary; how to link is contingent”.355 As such we may think of reality not as the reality of the phrase, or the reality that the phrase presents, instead reality emerges in the form of a question, “it is a state of the referent” within the phrase regimen, “which results from the effectuation of establishment procedures”356 that draw the phrase into meaning making chains.

Such genres include: the economic, narrative, the

philosophical, the declarative, dialectical, ethical, logic, metaphysical, ontological, speculative, cognitive, etc. In the agitation of the phrase the demand for linkage arises, but the question of linkage itself emerges in terms of a lack. Whilst there is an excess of possible linkages, there is no ultimate guiding principle to direct this process. After all, as Lyotard insists, there are no meaningful possibilities beyond the discursive surface. As such, one genre of linkage engaging the phrase in meaning making chains necessarily suppresses every other possibility of linkage. Everything about the phrase is at stake in the nature of the linkage. The meaning of the phrase, its referent, signified, addressor, and addressee are all determined by the nature of the linkage. The way in which phrases are linked, considering the random and indeterminate phrase mass and unlimited number of

199

possible ways to link, is thus a political question — to what end, and for whom are these phrases linked? Questions of justice also reside at the point of linkage — what phrases must be suppressed for this meaning to be privileged? The differend thus disrupts the notion of justice as a rule or theory which somehow transcends the contexts that they are applied to. Likewise the position of the judge as an objective observer independent from situations is also disrupted. The positing of a radical indeterminacy, the condition of the phrase, “prohibits any determinate subject — individual, class, nation, or even imperial humanity — from claiming itself as the sovereign author or supreme referent of right”.357 In contrast to these assumed rights, what we have before us is the question of linkage. If we adhere to the work of the phrase which arises in indeterminacy and reveals the lack that lies at the heart of political judgement, then we must accept that politics resides firmly in the domain of the reflective. Political judgement is thus not a determinant activity, since, as Kant’s celebration of the revolution shows, there is no rule to govern this process outside the process itself. The phrase by its very nature demands to be judged, but this demand must be carried out without criteria. As I have attempted to show, for Lyotard The Differend seeks to offer a philosophical basis for affirmative judgement in the social domain. Such an affirmation begins in that moment in which aesthetic groundlessness is unleashed, and demolishes the assumption that all peoples can be subordinated to a universal law. To resort to a metanarrative, derived from a universal principle such as Nature (Rousseau), is to deny the reflective character of the political, and with it the possibility of an affirmative judgement, and to effect an injustice since it is impossible to accommodate every possible procedure of meaning making within a single genre.

The resort to

metanarratives always already entails an injustice in Lyotard’s scheme of things. The

200

inability to be sensitive to differences, to tolerate the incommensurable,358 silences all that fails to find expression in the privileged genre. This silencing would be a wrong.

This is what a wrong [Tort] would be: a damage [dommage] accompanied by the loss of means to prove the damage. This is the case if the victim is deprived of life, or of all his of her liberties, or of the freedom to make his or her ideas or opinions public, or simply of the right to testify to the damage, or even more simply if the testifying phrase is itself deprived of authority.359

For Lyotard this injustice is constantly before us. He thus opens the door, via the imagination, for affirmative political judgement. He continues:

To give the differend its due is to institute new addressees, new addressors, new significations, and new referents in order for the wrong to find an expression and for the plaintiff to cease being a victim. This requires new rules for the formation and linking of phrases. No one doubts that language is capable of admitting these new phrase families or new genres of discourse. Every wrong ought to be able to be put into phrases. A new competence (or “prudence”) must be found.360

It is thus possible to find that affirmative moment in Lyotard: the call for a ‘new competence’. We may understand this new competence in terms that have been set forth in Just Gaming. In this regard Lyotard announces:

the thinker I am closest to in this regard is Aristotle, insofar as he recognizes ... that a judge worthy of the name has no true model to guide his judgements, and that the true nature of the judge is to pronounce judgements, and therefore

201

prescriptions, just so, without criteria. That is, after all, what Aristotle calls prudence. It consists in dispensing justice without models.361

Justice for Lyotard thus functions in terms of the ‘as if’ that lies at the heart of reflective judgement in Kant, and is not an object of cognition. “To be just” Lyotard continues, “is to act in such a way that ... the maxim of the will may serve as a principle of universal legislation. But ... in such a way that ... it is not a condition that defines justice”.362 The just judgement thus respects the radical indeterminacy that is attended to upon the discursive surface, and does not attempt to legitimate itself as a practice by privileging one genre, say the cognitive and its relation to descriptive phrases, over others. The question of justice thus resides in the shadow of the problem of linking phrases. The ‘as if’ does not precede judgement, or exist somehow outside it in order to act as a motivating force, it occurs in the instant in which a judgement is called forth. This means that Lyotard is attacking the liberal pluralist notion that the idea of justice is the totality of all the things that can be said about it, or at least a set of prescriptive rules, or a (pre)condition that effects a contractual agreement. The problem is that such rules privilege the cognitive genre, and exclude what can’t be phrased. For Lyotard, on the other hand, we are always obligated to judge. This is thus not a relativism, but is an obligation that functions only in terms of the failure of determinate judgement to be able to deal with the event justly, and the subsequent necessity for reflective judgement. The idea of justice itself is thus always to be determined, since it is caught up in the sublime void that resides at its heart. The just judgement emerges in that heteronomous moment, as opposed to an autonomy that is drawn from ‘outside. Always conscious of the moment of its enunciation, the just judgement is never able to move into spaces beyond that moment.

202

My aim in outlining Lyotard is to question the capacity of the phrase as event to deliver an effective politics in the context of the discourse of the postcolonial. The criteria for judging this capacity is threefold. In the first instance, I would wish to juxtapose the political claims of Lyotard with Lyotard’s desire for the work.

In

Lyotard’s lament concerning the avant-garde we can hear another agenda that cannot be reduced to the logic of the event. What I am suggesting is that in such a lament there is a something beyond the event, a forethought, a pedagogy perhaps, that exceeds and disrupts the claims concerning the art event. Secondly, in light of Fanon’s staging of the body as a disruptive site, the erasure of the body in Lyotard must be questioned. I would suggest that there is an analytic of purity at work in Lyotard, an analytic that seeks to find and privilege a pure instant to explain the social. It seems to me that this desire to find a single critical moment, in order to explain what constitutes the social bond, is critically reductive. Thirdly, since the sublime is an object of postcolonial critique, as I argued in chapters one and three, I would suggest that the sublime can no longer be considered in the terms that Lyotard maintains.

The discourse of the

postcolonial attempts to interrupt, what I have called, reason’s fort/da.

Such an

interruption, as Fanon’s body politics shows, attempts to disrupt reason’s establishment from within. It is to push the sublime elsewhere, beyond the terms and the limits that reason, in its Idealist incarnation, demands.

It could be, therefore, that Lyotard’s

bracketing of the sublime fails to adequately engage in reason’s processes. Conclusion: Lyotard and the Discourse of the Postcolonial I have situated The Differend in the anxiousness concerning the art/politics nexus that the French Revolution opened up, in order to foreground Lyotard’s desire to redefine what constitutes politics and justice. In this critical endeavour the phrase is set forth as a pure moment, and is thus granted the capacity to disrupt existing orders and effect social change. Free from the contaminating influences of history, the phrase 203

opens up the possibility, the necessity of invention within the domains of politics and justice. I have staged such a possibility, despite Lyotard’s attempt to distance the work from Idealist overtones, via the problem of consciousness that remained central to Idealism’s critical task. I would argue that ultimately the pure void that lies at the core of the phrase, as it attends to the “lack” that marks judgement, ultimately works to open up a space for the reign of imaginative reason in human affairs. Here the self judges ‘as if’ the determining forces of history have been put to an end. But it seems to me that this redefinition of the political and the just, via the demands that are attended to by the pure nature of the phrase, signals that the work itself fails to function in the manner that the phrase sets forth. In this attempt to redefine we find an interesting anomaly. Lyotard desires a pure site which is free from social contamination. Yet the utilisation of such a pure site to critique existing structures of thought must surely exceed the bounds of this purity. We could ask: why the historical necessity for redefinition if the phrase by its very nature makes this demand? It thus seems that whenever Lyotard considers the critical work of the differend he finds that it demands a thought before, and of, the limits of the thought that the phrase marks. It is significant that this forethought is already inscribed in a history of thought: philosophical, political, and social.363

The event of The Differend is therefore

contaminated with what it denies before it begins, namely the always already inscribed nature of social being. Readers, spectators — Lyotard is one among them — are very rarely, perhaps never open to the empty questioning — the ‘is it happening?’ — that The Differend in its insistence upon the phrase seems to demand.

Readers are

contaminated with the social and material structures that they inhabit, in which being is negotiated: what does the work contribute to the history of thought? What impact does it have upon social being? This chapter is no exception.

204

As such I have seized that moment in which “the lesser evil ought to be the political good”,364 in order to read The Differend as an affirmative gesture. To bend the work in this way, to highlight this aspect at the expense of others is not to open the work up to the radical emptiness and indeterminacy that lies at the heart of the phrase. Rather it reveals that readers always bring an agenda with them — the demands of the thesis, etc. — in order to negotiate what appears to be the excessive nature of texts (differance?). As a consequence, therefore, it remains to be seen if it is possible for events, the phrase, to precede the agendas that subjects bring to works as The Differend implies. It is thus possible that in its preoccupation with denying causal structures, the work merely asserts a pseudo-causality — the phrase precedes (temporally) the question of linkage — at the expense of the material condition of bodies in social spaces. I am thus not sure that this reversing gesture on the part of Lyotard actually escapes the kind of theoretical claustrophobia that the work seeks to demolish. Moreover, I would question the emptiness of the proper name in the context of the work. Lyotard’s demand for pure and empty spaces upon which to stage the indeterminate nature of linkage, seems to be too analytically convenient. Where can such pure spaces be found? The proper name rather than being a rigid designator, an empty signifier, like the phrase, is always already inscribed in the history of its designation. Who names? For what purpose? On what conditions? The capacity to name and to rename is itself a political process. To attend to the linkages upon the proper name ‘Ayres Rock’ as if ‘Ayres Rock’ is an empty signifier is to miss the trace of a history of colonisation, and it is also to miss the political nuances of changing the name of Ayres Rock to ‘Uluru’. As Žižek in examining Kripke’s antidescriptivism, to which Lyotard subscribes, rightly argues:

205

What is missed by the antidescriptivist idea of an external causal chain of communication through which reference is transmitted is ... the radical contingency of naming, the fact that naming itself retroactively constitutes its reference.

Naming is necessary but it is, so to speak, necessary afterwards,

retroactively, once we are already ‘in it’.365

What this means is that proper names are contaminated by the trace of the processes of their production within the social. The retroactive ‘in it’ suggests that rather than a causal chain that proceeds from emptiness to the necessity of linkage, as it is in Lyotard, the proper name emerges as an afterthought, a necessity that arises in and through the self’s location in a world of objects and ideas. This suggests that even at the point of the proper name, that empty unit in Lyotard, we find political struggles that reveal that The Differend does not go far enough in its critical work. It also suggests that the indeterminate nature of the phrase as it attends to the proper name, and the question of linkage are processes that are socially determined. Of course Lyotard would not deny this, the point is that it is questionable, given this political struggle, whether the phrase actually does open up the necessity for reflective judgement. Since the proper name owes its existence to social processes — naming is inseparably linked to the issue of authority: who has the authority to name? — it remains doubtful that the refusal to deal with that history actually provides a basis for an affirmative justice. It is perhaps more useful to deal with the site of the proper name’s production, its location in culture. As I will show in the following chapter, this is what Bhabha does. Lyotard would have us believe that historical transformation occurs in terms of the random and uncontaminated nature of the phrase. Historical transformation is staged in this account in terms of the disruptive capacity of the random phrase. The phrase exceeds the limits of history, it is not produced by history, it produces historical

206

transformation constantly. Change is thus a necessary structural condition. The social is marked in Idealist terms by the constant necessity to deal with indeterminacy, and consequently with the problem of indeterminate judgement. The social, in Lyotard’s thinking, is thus always already marked by the demand for invention. I would contend, however, that, whilst a certain Idealism remains at the edges of this thought — even Fichte’s celebration concerning the demolition of the past and subsequent ‘clean slate’ from which to begin again, and perhaps again and again … — one must question this accent upon invention. As a metaphor, invention in this account emerges as a necessary structural condition. It has been staged in terms that bear a remarkable resemblance to Idealism’s insistence upon the problems of conscious thought, the subjective rather than subjects, as it works upon the phenomenal world. If, however, we were to attend to the metaphors, such as ‘negotiation’, that underpin political fields such as the discourse of the postcolonial, we would find an accent upon the social construction of subjects and the impact of this construction upon conscious thought. It is in this sense that Fanon takes up the material body as a site from which to construct a politics. As such, rather than invention, the discourse of the postcolonial presents a politics of negotiation, that seeks to displace existing rules (Bhabha and Rushdie) rather than foreground the necessity for a search for a rule, as Lyotard would have it. I would contend that this important difference — negotiation as opposed to invention — sets the postcolonial endeavour apart from critical strategies that have been built upon an anxious Kantianism. If we are to engage in the discourse of the postcolonial it seems to me that this critical difference is crucial and must be opened up. Perhaps the most telling blow to the critical usefulness of the idea of differend can be found in The Differend’s final clause, which, like the phrase, emerges in the form of a question. Lyotard writes:

207

The Is it happening? is invincible to every will to gain time. But the occurrence doesn’t make a story, does it? — Indeed, it’s not a sign. But it is to be judged, all the way through to its incomparability. You can’t make a political ‘program’ with it, but you can bear witness to it. — And what if no one hears the testimony, etc. (No. 1ff.)? — Are you prejudging the Is it happening?366

Are we to consider the French master, to use Shelley’s memorable phrase, an ‘unacknowledged legislator of the world’? Is it possible that differends, like avantgardist art, are merely misunderstood and rendered a sad and lonely political location. Or is it that ultimately Lyotard must confront the difficulty of bearing witness to differends, as the work urges, since differends themselves whilst everywhere present are always already unpresentable. The problem is that this unpresentability means that differends always require a thought, an ethic, a politics that lies beyond the terms of the differend itself. As such the work seems to gesture toward, and rely upon a moment outside and beyond its analytical categories. It is in terms of this beyond — culture as material production — that Fanon’s lucid “The Fact of Blackness” can be staged. As I argued in chapter three, ‘blackness’, for Fanon, is constructed in relation to ‘whiteness’, which emerges as less a body metaphor than an issue concerning self-consciousness. White equates to mind, whilst black equates to what is bodily. In the context of Idealism, which seeks to establish the authority of reasonable thought, this means that the black body demands to be sublated, even expelled. But does Fanon’s resistance to this sublation take up the logic of differend? Whilst it is the case that Lyotard rightly diagnoses the violence of Europe’s production of its others, it is also the case that Fanon’s politics seizes that moment of vulnerability in reason’s processes, in order to push it beyond its limits. Fanon’s

208

politics is not concerned with overcoming political illegitimacy as differend. Rather, his work takes up and subverts the illegitimacy into which he has been inscribed. The body, that desiring machine that is always already antagonistic to Idealist thought, has been unleashed by Fanon as a transgressive force. Such a politics cannot be defined in terms of a Lyotardian agonistics. In maintaining the purity of the Kantian faculties, Lyotard denies the possibility of a politics of contamination. The discourse of the postcolonial is effected through a politics that can be described in the terms that Lyotard denies: contamination, translation, leakage, excess. Having charted what I consider to be the problem with Lyotard’s Kantian purity, I would wish to re-turn to the postcolonial sublime through Homi Bhabha. After Fanon, whose body seeks to inhabit and contaminate the structures of Hegel’s system, it is necessary to turn to Bhabha’s discursive transgressions, because he takes up the temporal ethic that underscores Hegel’s articulation of Western progress and radically alters its terms. Notes 299

See Lyotard’s “Lessons in Paganism”, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 122-154. 300

See Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 301

Jean-François Lyotard, “Answer to the Question: What is the Postmodern?”, in The Postmodern Explained to Children, ed. Julian Pefanis, Morgan Thomas (Sydney: Power Publications, 1992), 23-24. 302

It could be pointed out that Lyotard’s rejection of the first Critique, in order to take up the third, and as it turns out the second also, means that my claim here needs to be qualified. I would suggest in response that the privileging of the third Critique over the entire system can be read as an attempt to redeem the system. It seems to me that Lyotard reads the third Critique as a logical conclusion to the divisions that are set up in the first. 303

Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 53.

209

304

On this point I follow David Carroll, Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida (London: Routledge, 1987), 173-184. 305

See Vijay Mishra, “Postcolonial Differend: Diasporic Narratives of Salman Rushdie”, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 26, no. 3 (1995), 745. 306

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (New York: Cornell University Press, 1988), 385. 307

G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simpson (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1955), 390. 308

G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 447. 309

Immanuel Kant, Conflict of Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Abaris Books, 1979), 153. 310

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), 13. 311

Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 130. 312

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 97, 101.

313

Lyotard, The Differend, 124; Lyotard, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 75-76. 314

Carroll, Paraesthetics, 183.

315

I agree with Julian Pefanis (Heterology and the Postmodern, Sydney Allen and Unwin, 1991) who locates Lyotard’s thought, along with Bataille and Baudrillard, in the context of the changed circumstances of Eastern Europe in the 60’s, and consequent need to reconstitute critical thought outside the givens and certainties of Marxism. Pefanis argues that this critical turn was driven not by philosophical means, but by the concrete historical conditions in the USSR at the time. Lyotard’s observation of the party setting itself above the Marxist narrative of emancipation, and above the citizens from whom they were legitimated, resulted in a loss of political faith, and search for a politics and justice free from, what was understood as, totalitarian constraints. See also Geoffrey Bennington’s, Lyotard Writing the Event (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988), which argues that Lyotard’s break with Marxism involved two phases. The first, a total break (drift) from the Socialisme ou barbarie group, and the second, a (re)turn to ethical and political questions (1). 316

Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, in The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 90, 101. 317

Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, 102. 210

318

Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, 7.

319

Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, 93.

320

Lyotard, “Something Like Communication … Without Communication”, in The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 108-118. 321

Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, 99-100.

322

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. J. Riviere (London: Hogarth, 1930), 78n. 323

Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, 93.

324

Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, 100, 101-102.

325

Bill Readings in Introducing Lyotard (London: Routledge, 1991) argues that “the event is very close to the Derridean supplement” (57). I do not agree with this formulation. Unlike the event which exceeds the trace of the social, the supplement is always already contaminated. Derrida contends in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976) that the supplement “harbors within it two significations which cohabitation is as strange as it is necessary” (144). On the one hand the logic of the supplement is driven by the desire to overcome the loss of a presence: Rousseau smells the scent of his absent lover upon the pillow. But whilst the supplement “functions in her absence as a substitute for her presence … even in her presence the supplement is at work” (152): Rousseau swallows a lock of her hair whilst she dines with him. The supplement thus inhabits being in the sense that the desired presence never actually arrives but is always already deferred (159). As such the supplement is a logic that is built upon the human desire for the complete connection between the self and the object of desire, in its various forms, but this desire for presence can only emerge in terms of the absence of the desired object. It is this ‘cohabitation’ that sets the logic of the supplement apart from the logic of the event, since the event is marked not by the desire for something, a presence, but by disruptions to the grounds for that desire itself. The event emerges not in terms of a lack, but in terms which exceed. Whilst Derrida insists upon a never ending supplementarity to substitute for an absence, Lyotard underscores the empty and disruptive nature of the event. 326

See Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, ed. John. E. Jordon (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965). He writes: poets “are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion”. The imagination, Shelley argues, reveals the essential order of things. The conclusion to A Defence of Poetry thus valorises poets as the mirrors of the “gigantic shadows [of] futurity”, the “trumpets” that sing to battle, and the “influence which is moved not, but moves”. Even though hardly anybody realises it, the influence of the poets is powerful and pervasive; poets, Shelley would have us believe, “are the unacknowledged 211

legislators of the world” (31, 80). 327

Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, 105.

328

See Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformism (London: Verso, 1989); and Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnestoa Press, 1984). 329

On this point I follow Horst Ruthrof, “Differend and Agonistics: a Transcendental Argument”, Philosophy Today, vol. 34, no. 2 (1992), 324-335. He argues that the theory of differend is incomplete. The absence of bodies, non-verbal sign systems ! the tactile, aural, proxemic, olfactory and visual ! in Lyotard’s privileging of the linguistic as a model for the social “fails to account for a broad range of instances of social injustice not accessible to a description based upon phrases” (333). 330

Lyotard, The Differend, xi.

331

Lyotard, The Differend, 56.

332

Lyotard, The Differend, 3-4.

333

Jean-François Lyotard, “The Differend”, in Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 9-10. 334

Lyotard, The Differend, 171.

335

Jean-François Lyotard, “Answer to the Question: What is the Postmodern?”, 22.

336

Lyotard, The Differend, 4.

337

Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews”, trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 47. 338

Lyotard, The Differend, xiii.

339

Lyotard, The Differend, 71.

340

Lyotard, The Differend, 70.

341

Lyotard, The Differend, 28.

342

Jean-François Lyotard, “Can Thought go on Without a Body?”, in The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 9. 343

Lyotard, “Can Thought go on Without a Body?”, 23.

344

Lyotard, The Differend, 14.

345

Jean-François Lyotard, “Discussions, or Phrasing after Auschwitz”, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 371. 212

346

Lyotard, The Differend, 79. See Charles Stivale’s, “Review” of The Differend, The French Review, vol. 63, no. 4, (1990), 722-723, in which Lyotard’s notion of ‘the phrase’, is defined as a fluid, strategic term, rather than a definitive one. 347

Lyotard, The Differend, 80.

348

Lyotard, “Discussions, or Phrasing after Auschwitz”, 371-372.

349

Lyotard, The Differend, 79.

350

Lyotard, The Differend, 29.

351

Lyotard, The Differend, 79.

352

See Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980)

353

Lyotard, The Differend, 47.

354

Lyotard, The Differend, 80.

355

Lyotard, The Differend, 29.

356

Lyotard, The Differend, 4.

357

Jean Francios Lyotard and J. Rogozinski, “The Notion of the Thought Police”, Art & Text, no. 26 (1987), 29. 358

Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 66.

359

Lyotard, The Differend, 5.

360

Lyotard, The Differend, 13.

361

Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 25-26.

362

Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 47.

363

See Seyla Benhabib’s suggestion in “Epistemologies of Postmodernism”, New German Critique, no. 33 (1984), 103-127, that there is a contradiction in Lyotard’s postmodern program. It seems that Lyotard is divided between advocating a plurality of heterogeneous language games, and developing an epistemological viewpoint from which he can attack grand narratives. Benhabib argues that Lyotard is unable to make the choice. Whilst he champions a total move to the side of plurality and heterogeneity, he deprives himself of a standpoint for critique. See also Stuart Sim’s, “Lyotard and the Politics of Antifoundationalism”, Radical Philosophy, no. 44 (1986), 8-13. 364

Lyotard, The Differend, 140.

365

Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 95.

213

366

Lyotard, The Differend, 181.

214

Chapter Five Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture

Driven by the subaltern history of the margins of modernity — rather than by the failures of logocentrism — I have tried, in some small measure, to revise the known, to rename the postmodern from the position of the postcolonial.367

The thesis began by charting the dynamism of Enlightenment Reason. This dynamism remains central in the postcolonial return to the colonial past. Next, in turning to Fanon’s complex engagement in Hegel, I showed that in Hegel’s preoccupation with systems a vulnerability emerges. Fanon seizes this vulnerability by taking hold of a bodily excess that refuses to be contained by Hegel’s systems. This excess can be considered the postcolonial sublime. The sublime thus falls from its noble frame in Kant to be taken up as a base, despised form. This shift from what could be called the sacred to the profane marks the work of the postcolonial sublime. As an excess the postcolonial sublime contaminates universalising impulses. It opens up ruptures, disruptions that alter the course of such impulses. Following this exploration of the politics of excess in the context of the postcoloniality of Fanon, I then turned to the work of Lyotard. I argued that Lyotard fails to account for the processes of reason. The purity of the phrase event, its emptiness, is an inadequate description of the overfull sign of the postcolonial.

Postcolonial ruptures arise as a consequence of an

uncontainable excess, a too much that renders unifying teleologies untenable. Having launched an attack upon Lyotard’s theory of differend, I would now wish to chart what I would consider to be a more cogent political strategy for dealing with what I have called the West’s increasing conservatism. Such a strategy can be found in the discourse of the postcolonial, specifically in the work of Homi Bhabha. 215

Homi Bhabha’s collection of essays, The Location of Culture, has had a doubly disruptive impact upon the contemporary critical scene. It provides not only a challenge to the idea of culture as monolithic, but also employs a profuse and controversial prose which engages the reader in pushing the question of culture beyond the confines that the teleology of reason demands. The text consists of fragments, ironies, and clusters that are linked to various issues in order to provoke and disrupt, rather than instruct in the pedagogic sense. As such we find conflicting discourses which remain open, refusing to be reduced to a rigid understanding of the material base, or to a priori concepts.368 The text implies a reader who must negotiate the shifting and contradictory structures of being, in order to engage in the question of culture. Bhabha’s postcolonial subjects occupy excessive spaces that are transgressive, pagan, and in the process of continuous transformation. It is precisely this accent upon transgressive transformation that introduces us to the question of Bhabha’s conflictual discourse. I would suggest that much of the controversy that surrounds this work can be related directly to this question. It has been possible for some to read Bhabha, for instance, as a Marxist, others as an unabashed, apolitical pantextualist.369

I would suggest, however, that this debate, which

characterises work on Bhabha generally, ignores the productive conflicts and confrontations that are embedded in this body of work, and thus misses Bhabha’s contribution to contemporary theory. I would wish to consider the politics of Bhabha’s open form. A possible model for the structure of The Location of Culture can be drawn from Bakhtin’s theory of the polyphonic novel. Polyphony as a musical metaphor represents the presence of independent and interdependent ‘voices’ within the novel. The voices in this ‘dialogic’ relationship, as Bakhtin calls it, resist being subsumed and overruled by an authorial totality. This is an aesthetic form that thus remains open. It works to

216

promote productive possibilities, to promote debate, rather than insist upon a dominant authorial voice which objectifies its characters, as in the case of monologic literary forms.370 I would contend that Bhabha’s rhetoric draws upon a dialogic aesthetic form, via its insistence upon incompleteness, and openness. But what does this incompleteness mean in the context of a work whose organising fiction is the location of culture? How does such a form figure in the discourse of the postcolonial? My contention is that Bhabha’s insistence upon an open and diffuse architecture can be understood in terms of what I have called the postcolonial sublime. For the discourse of the postcolonial, the sublime emerges as a critical site upon which the authority of reason is written. To disrupt this conservative authority it is necessary to unleash the sublime, its unpresentable excesses, from the shackles of reason. Bhabha’s politics is marked by its insistence upon occupying structures of conservative authority, in order to unleash an excess that disrupts the terms of such authority. My purposes in this chapter are twofold. Firstly, I aim to consider Bhabha in terms of the question of excess and conflict. And secondly, I would wish to locate the implications of this excess in the context of thinking contemporary culture. As the thesis intends, I will show how Bhabha seeks to disrupt the authority of reason by unleashing the sublime. This disruptive politics takes up the conservative structures of colonial authority, and exploits the vulnerability of such structures. I will begin this study of Bhabha by drawing some productive parallels between his work and Fanon’s complex engagement with Hegel, as discussed in chapter three. Bhabha, Fanon and Hegel Although it is commonplace these days to grind Bhabha through the sieve of names such as Lacan, and Derrida etc., I would wish to resist such a reading. Whilst I think it correct that Bhabha uses the strategies of critique established by 217

poststructuralism,371 there is an attempt to deflect, to push elsewhere the terms of this critique. As such I think Bhabha needs to be read alongside Lacan and Derrida as a theorist attempting to come to terms with a specific moment within modernity, the emergence of the capitalist West as oppressor. I would, therefore, in the terms that I have drawn up in the thesis thus far, wish to situate Bhabha’s thought in a critical relation to the Idealism of Hegel. I think that this relation is necessary, firstly because it was Hegel, not Derrida or Adorno, who initially revealed how culture transforms itself qua culture, via struggle, such that new cultural and artistic forms emerge. This is crucial for Bhabha.

And secondly because it does provide a useful metaphor for

thinking through the relationship between power, identity, and agency, as they appear in various forms in Bhabha’s theorisation of a postcolonial contra-modernity. Inspired by Fanon, Hegel provides the terms for Bhabha’s critical work, and the terms for the excesses and disruptions that are crucial in his elaboration of the location of culture. In chapter three I argued that what Black Skin, White Masks effects in its complex erasure of Hegel’s master and slave, is the notion that it is upon the black body, in seizing that body that the struggle against colonial oppression begins. Crucially, such a struggle cannot be defined in terms of the Hegelian dialectic, as an opposing force, for as we have seen the black struggle has no political legitimacy in this space. Instead such a struggle must be defined in relation to the dialectic, its rejected location within and outside the system. It is from this space of rejection that Fanon’s politics begins. Any voice that stirs in this space of the unspeakable, the unpresentable as unpresentable, of temporal oblivion, effectively means that Hegel’s system leaks. As Hegel sought to shore up Kantian reason, in a sense, to make its authority more robust than the slippage in Kant’s architectonic system would allow, gaps, contradictions, unaccountable spaces, appear. A politics of excess, of contamination begins to emerge when these unpresentable spaces are seized in order to interrupt the totalising claims of

218

reason. Such a politics seeks to expose the fragility of reasonable systems. Located on that muddy borderline that Kant grappled with, the discourse of the postcolonial goes to work upon the limits of reason. It seeks to open up a space of questioning, defiance, a space that attempts to push reason beyond the terms of its limits. In many respects the discourse of the postcolonial wrests the sublime from its inscription in the drama of reason’s processes, and puts it to disruptive use. To continually open up what reason’s legislation and systematics exclude is to open up the sublime, to seize what is despised as the despised, and to make it a politically productive site. I would wish to read Bhabha in light of this conclusion concerning Fanon’s politics. In Bhabha we find an elaboration of culture that utilises the metaphor of the sublime. The sublime emerges in Bhabha as that material excess that reason fails to contain. When opened up, this space of uncontainability effects a politics that cannot be understood in terms of a neat dialectics. As I have suggested throughout the thesis, the conservative sublime has its dialectic in Idealism. But in the discourse of the postcolonial the sublime is that which exceeds dialectics. The cogency of the discourse of the postcolonial can be staged precisely in terms of the overspill, the excess, that defies the limits of dialectics. The Location of Culture begins with the essay “The Commitment to Theory”, in order to dispel the notion that to engage in ‘a politics of resistance’, is to engage in an oppositional, antagonistic, ‘them’ and ‘us’, struggle. Bhabha rejects this critical propensity, and argues that there is no point in considering intercultural encounter as a collision of homogeneous, essential, wholes. It seems that there is always the possibility that the polarities in such a schema can become unequal, and it is thus futile to resort to a politics which merely asserts, what Paul Gilroy has called, an ‘ethnic absolutism’372 to demolish Western essentialism.373 In keeping with the notion that Bhabha seeks to open the sublime as sublime, his work charts the material basis for asserting the inadequacies of dialectics. For Bhabha

219

the nature of postcolonial identity resists the kinds of neat categorisation that traditionally inhabit theories of culture. Displaced peoples, because they do not have Home as a ready reference point, dwell in-between the conventional cultural categories, such as East/West. Displaced peoples are forced to negotiate the divide between past and present, East and West, North and South, First and Third. This temporality is crucial for it evokes an understanding of culture in terms of a metaphor of material struggle; for Bhabha culture is ‘a strategy of survival’. Cultural identity emerges in situations in which ‘survival’ becomes a central issue. It is in this conflictual terrain that politics emerges, and cultural change is made possible. I will take up the question of culture as survival in greater detail in due course. What I am seeking to underscore, at present, is Bhabha’s emphasis upon cultural spaces that resist neat categorisation. It is in this resistance to system that the postcolonial sublime emerges. I would thus wish to begin by charting the outworking of this sublime in Bhabha. As the postcolonial self resists neat categorisation, it is that which is left over, the excess that reason is unable to contain that marks the moment of the postcolonial sublime. We can begin to chart the political nuances of this excess by examining Bhabha’s critique of the postmodern. The Postmodern Question Bhabha’s critique of the postmodern conception of modernity can be drawn up in terms of the phenomenological relationship between time and space. I turn to this issue in these terms, because it is this phenomenology that leads directly to the postmodern critique of Idealism. What is central here is the Idealist propensity to privilege time over space in theorising consciousness. Kant for instance privileged time over space in the imagination’s work upon the world of appearances.374

Hegel’s

conservatism is also drawn up in terms of time. As I argue in chapter three, time is a measure for the progress of Geist, it is utilised to mark reason’s authority.

This

privileging of the temporal as a marker of conservative authority is crucial for Bhabha. 220

He seeks to interrupt the universal temporality that marks Hegel, with the notion that space, cultural location, impacts upon consciousness. Bhabha attempts to open up the cultural inscriptions that are hidden beneath the universal pretensions of Western philosophy. As I showed in chapter two, for instance, Kant’s architectonic system is contaminated at every turn by its cultural location, the space of its formulation. Bhabha shows that the postmodern is not immune to such a (self)critical blindness. Bhabha’s basic argument against the postmodern is that the postmodern critique of modernity is inadequate because it fails to take its cultural location into account. We could say that the postmodern replays the spatial blindness that I have suggested inhabits Kant. In order to overcome different aspects of the modern, be it reason, the problem of legitimation, Progress, or History, thinkers at the forefront of the postmodern, such as Lyotard, set forth, what Bhabha calls, an ‘ethics of selfconstruction’.375 This is the notion that in order for the self to be truly free from the constraints of totalising systems of thought, it must be divested of any objective status in order to be ‘constantly reconstructed and reinvented’.376 As we shall see, Bhabha’s contention here is not with reconstruction itself since his work basically repeats this aim. Its interest lies in the question of the relationship between time and space in this reconstruction, and the political effects of the assumptions that underpin it. In order to outline what is at issue here, Bhabha goes to work upon Foucault. The ‘Great Event’ of the French Revolution (in Foucault’s reading of Kant’s Was ist Aufklärung?),377 as a sign of modernity, can only be named as such if it is viewed from a distance. Those in the midst of the action itself, ‘in the enunciative present’, could not view the event as a spectacle, or interpret the event as a Sign in Foucault’s terms. Events are made to mean in events that are outside, from the distance of perspective. Bhabha in response to Foucault asks: whose is this space of distance? And points out that Foucault’s perspective is nothing less than a Eurocentric one, since the ‘ontology of the

221

present’ is constructed in terms of making sense — ‘sense-as-synchronous’— from European space. This means that this reading of the past excludes, and contains, any rupture in this perspectival sense of meaning. Bhabha writes, what “if the ‘distance’ that constitutes the meaning of the ‘Revolution’ as sign, the signifying lag between event and enunciation, stretches not across the Place de la Bastille or the rue des blancsMonteaux, but spans the temporal difference of the colonial space?”.378 This question concerning the postmodern is also applicable to Lyotard’s reading of Kant on the revolution. It too lacks the spatial self-consciousness that Bhabha evokes. As I have suggested, this is one the problems with Lyotard’s reading of the sublime.

It fails to foreground the materiality of Kant’s Idealism.

Similarly, for

Foucault, the practice of making time mean, and in this instance this means historical event, is confined to a spatial perspective which assumes, for Bhabha, a continuity with a European past. This practice leads Bhabha to make a statement that can be directly linked to his critique of the postmodern: “the Eurocentricity of Foucault’s theory of cultural difference is revealed in his insistent spatializing of the time of modernity” (my emphasis).379 The point is that Bhabha considers the postmodern emphasis upon the constant reconstruction of the self to be confined to a certain cultural and social space. Instead of this Bhabha is interested in the possibility of meaning from different perspectives, those that do not assume a spatial continuity with historical events in the manner of Foucault. It seems that Bhabha is interested in emphasising the possibility of difference within the formulations of these theorists of difference.380 The critique of the postmodern that is offered here can be understood in terms of Weber’s contention concerning the time of capitalism. The use of this term has been set forth in Terry Maley’s useful reading of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which questions concerning time are drawn into a critique of instrumental rationalism. Maley writes:

222

Both Marx’s Promethean hero and Weber’s own were ... rendered anachronistic because the conceptions of historical time — both linear and developmental — that the nineteenth century had inherited from the Enlightenment were being obliterated by the temporality specific to instrumental rationalization, by chronometric time.381

Chronometric time is understood here as the abstract “time of modern scientific calculation”, which, in the case of capitalist rationality, is “implicated in bureaucratic structures, in discourses of power and disciplinary regimentation, and in the rationalization of the modern world in general.” By the end of the nineteenth century, a capitalist formulation of time emerged and demolished (what is for Weber the more humane) modern “historically developmental time (Hegel, Marx) and linear, progressive time (Condorcet, Comte, J.S. Mill)”.

The effect of this is “a certain

endlessness ... an experience of time as never-ending, the endless repetition/production of more”.382 But for Bhabha it is not simply an ‘instrumental rationality’ that is at issue here. If the perpetual splitting of the subject, the constant reconstruction in terms of interpreting the past from a distance, is the condition that frees subjects from the constraints of the modern propensity to totalise, how, Bhabha writes, “do we specify the historical conditions and theoretical configurations of ‘splitting’ in political situations of ‘unfreedom’ — in the colonial and postcolonial margins of modernity?”.383 The point is, and here Bhabha parts company with Weber, that the constant fracturing of the subject still implies a synchronous progression, or transformation, that is complicit with time as it is privileged in Idealism. For Weber the loss of synchronicity was lamented for its dehumanising effects. Hence we find Hegel among the few who offer a more

223

“humane” conception of time. The capitalist subject is caught in the trap of an endless, directionless time, and consequently human potential, namely the capacity to be free from dogmatic rationality, is lost. The time that Bhabha seems to have in mind here, however, is problematised precisely because of this continuity. Modern time enables the idea of progress, as we have seen in Hegel, and differentiates the past from the present, such that categories such as the modern and the primitive arise.384 Continuous time has enabled the West to think itself legitimate and authentic, an identity worthy of protection and propagation.

Postmodern thinkers would obviously reject linear

progression outright, the point, however, is that the meaning of the past is still constructed in terms of modern time’s differentiating function, the present judged in terms of the past from the space of Europe. The temporality that Maley’s Weber champions thus emerges in opposition to what I have called the excesses of the postcolonial. Two points need to be stressed here. The first is that modernity is understood in terms of the Enlightenment ideal of the rational free ‘man’, the discourse in which “the figure of the ‘human’ comes to be authorized”. The second relates to the first. Modernity is the consensual march of progress (developmental or linear), and economic and industrial development. It is a temporal notion, one that differentiates the past from the present and future, and which legitimates or delegitimates culture and society. These two moments converge in Tony Spybey’s description of Europe’s capitalist expansion. I note the crucial link between the social and the philosophical at work here.

The success of the European states in setting up their colonial empires gave the Europeans a tremendous sense of their own superiority. This coincided with the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution so that there appeared no limits to the frontiers, abstract or physical, that Europeans could push back. The

224

fusion of a culture of rationality with political and economic power created the positivistic world-view.385

I would suggest that in Bhabha’s critique of the postmodern the relevance of philosophical reason for the discourse of the postcolonial begins to emerge. In the construction of postmodern epistemologies, which assume the postmodern as a cultural dominant, there seems to be a disregard for the possibility of other spaces.

The

disregard for otherness is constructed in terms, as Simon During so aptly puts it, “which more or less intentionally wipe out the possibility of post-colonial identity. Indeed ... the conceptual annihilation of the post-colonial condition is actually necessary to any argument which attempts to show that ‘we’ now live in postmodernity”.386

The

postmodern thus reads much like reason’s processes: it is not immune to making universal claims, and it produces cultural spaces that are unable to be subordinated to the terms of its critique of modernity. I would suggest that what Bhabha seizes in his critique of the postmodern, are these spaces that exceed the scope and terms of the postmodern. As this chapter begins, we may gesture toward defining the discourse of the postcolonial as that which is left over when the postmodern reaches its limits. It is with this sense of the spatial limits of the postmodern in mind that I would wish to outline Bhabha’s postcolonial time. In keeping with the aim of the thesis, I will draw this temporality into my engagement in the sublime.

The sublime emerges as a

disrupting force, a critical temporality that interrupt’s the hegemony of Western reason. The Time of Politics Bhabha launches an alternative conception of space, time, and politics via Frantz Fanon’s “sense of the belatedness of the black man”.387

This recalls the

exclusion/inclusion of the African in Hegel’s Philosophy of History. Of course it has to be said that Bhabha’s reading of Fanon appears to remain selective and therefore 225

contentious, since it departs from Fanon’s more existential and Marxist moments. For many this is an unacceptable critical practice. It could be argued, in response to this charge, that Bhabha’s use of Fanon in this fashion is one which refuses to reduce his ouvre to a singular whole, and attempts to present some of the more dissenting moments, at least from Bhabha’s perspective. My own reading of Fanon in chapter three takes up such a reading strategy, though I put it to use in areas that Bhabha passes over. The outcome, however, remains consistent with Bhabha. Fanon’s unsettled Hegelianism attempts to open up, what he calls (with a different object in mind), “Fanon’s insight into the dark side of Man”.388 In order to formulate the temporality of a material politics, Bhabha focuses upon the assumed benevolence, as articulated by Fanon, toward the colonised that accompanied the European sense of superiority: “But of course, come in, sir, there is no colour prejudice among us. ... Quite, the Negro is a man like ourselves. ... It is not because he is black that he is less intelligent than we”.389 This attempts to reveal a discontinuous temporal gap between the white world of the coloniser, and the black world of the colonised desire to be like the white man. The gap reveals that the black world, despite its desire, arrives too late, it is always one step behind in the myth of progression that sustains the Western sense of superiority. We can understand this superiority in Hegelian terms as a temporal accomplishment. For Bhabha this discontinuity is further exemplified in Fanon’s unconventional grammatology: “Le nègre n’est pas.

Pas plus que le Blanc”.390 This in-between

grammatical moment (the full stop) exemplifies, in Bhabha’s scheme, the time of politics, the possibility of the seizure of the391 location of culture as an uncontainable space. Fanon’s choice to use a full stop in this instance functions temporally rather than spatially as the work’s title suggests. The full stop marks the end of the first clause, and the gap, break, interruption, between the first and the second. The choice not to use an

226

exclamation mark, or a question mark (which, apart from the full stop, are the only conventional ways to end French and English sentences), also means that one clause is not emphasised over the other. The distinction that emerges is thus a temporal one. Two clauses emerge in the space upon the page, but the relationship between them is temporal. One asserts itself in front of the other. The ‘location of culture’, as a metaphor in this instance, thus functions, paradoxically, in terms of time, since ‘location’ is a spatial term. Fanon’s formulation thus becomes the sign of the ‘time-lag of cultural difference’. The full stop marks a break, a temporal gap between black and white, and this becomes the site which makes a politics of resistance possible, or as Bhabha writes:

The power of the postcolonial translation of modernity rests in its performative, deformative structure that does not simply revalue the contents of a cultural tradition, or transpose values ‘cross culturally’.

The cultural inheritance of

slavery or colonialism is brought before modernity not to resolve its historic differences into a new totality, nor to forego its traditions. It is to introduce another locus of inscription and intervention, another hybrid, ‘inappropriate’ enunciative site, through that temporal split — or time lag — that I have opened up ... for the signification of postcolonial agency.392

If the colonised arrives too late in the myth of progression, then there is a sense in which the colonised speaks from Europe’s past. If a linear relationship between the past and the present is the legitimating strategy of modernity, then it is possible, if this past is occupied in some sense, to disrupt the present. Because the colonised occupies this past space — ‘time-lag’ — this “postcolonial ‘belatedness’... disturbs the punctum of man as the signifying, subjectifying category of Western culture”.393 Politics thus emerges in

227

this space of ‘belatedness’, in what has been left behind. Such a ‘belatedness’ when seized in terms of the logic of the colonial, effectively disrupts colonial time. Cultural struggle is a temporal notion in this scheme, it emerges in the temporal gap between coloniser and colonised in order to produce sites of the elsewhere, or the ‘hybrid’ as Bhabha formulates it elsewhere. The temporal location of the postcolonial disrupts the temporality of the colonial. Like the question of exile that Gordon Bennett’s Painting for a New Republic (The Inland Sea) opens up — where am I? (as I discussed in chapter two) — Bhabha inserts (an)other time into the space of the colonial nation. This is a strategy that seeks to disrupt what I have called the process of reason, the task of Western philosophy to produce an authoritative account of reason. In the temporal gap between the coloniser and colonised, the possibility of contesting this task is opened up. This gap can be described as the location of cultural agency. The ‘time lag’ evokes an indeterminacy, an always already ‘yet-to-be-decided’. It is a space that marks a struggle concerning the way history can be made to mean. In the context of Hegel’s thought, such struggle disturbs the capacity of reasonable systems. Thus rather then privilege time over space, as in Idealism, what Bhabha underscores is the difficult temporality of spatial marginalisation. From “the shifting margins of cultural displacement”,394 Bhabha writes, from the perspective of peoples who do not have a ‘cultural reference point that is readily available’, a people who inhabit a problematic relationship to modern time, questions concerning identity, agency, power and politics, and community emerge. This difficult cultural location can be understood in terms of the sublime. It is a space of excess, a too late, that does not fit into totalising cultural forms, the stability of Western dialectics. Bhabha's cogency derives from the following presupposition. The postcolonial inhabits a ‘space’ that cannot be unproblematically defined. It is a kind of ‘other-space’

228

that is ‘located’ in time in-between fixed categories, a place of hybridity, a space of translation, a place in which a new political object emerges being ‘neither one nor the other’. This is the “‘middle passage’ of contemporary culture”, which, as “a process of displacement and disjunction ... does not totalize experience”.395 Postcolonial identity is thus unable to be defined in terms of a unified ‘essence’. It seems that the postcolonial exists in a groundless and indeterminate space, which, from the perspective of the hegemonic West, has the potential to be a sublime threat. Rather than being cause for lament for Bhabha, the groundless ‘location’ of the postcolonial is celebrated as a space that disrupts and alters the destination of the discourses of domination. As I discussed in chapter one, such a celebration effectively takes up Moraru’s parallel model of the relationship between the West and its other. Moraru contends that this relationship can be staged as oblique and politically conflictual. Parallel discourses, running as it were in opposite directions, suggests that colonial and postcolonial nationalisms cannot simply be understood in terms of a dialectic of self-consciousness. What Moraru opens up is the possibility of thinking of the colonisers and their relation to the colonies and former colonies through metaphors of contamination and disruption, rather than antagonism or consensus. I would contend, along with Moraru, who explains that the ‘Orientalising of Europe’ has been staged ‘on different scales and with varying political bearings’, that the possibility of this Orientalisation, precisely because of the inequality of (post)colonial relations, arises as a disturbing threat to the authority of the colonial. Such disturbances are less antagonistic challenges to pedagogic authority, or consensual, cultural ‘sharing’, than cultural excesses that disrupt the structural terms of that authority. In this regard, Bhabha’s thought is indispensable. The pedagogic authority of the (former) colonial, expressed through the myth of nationalist unity, contends not just with the structural necessities of self-consciousness, but also with the possibility of a disturbance to that structure. The

229

‘Orientalisation of Europe’ can thus be understood as an instance in which the postcolonial sublime takes effect. It will be useful to turn to some of the key critical terms that Bhabha employs in order to explain the critical task of the postcolonial inbetween, its sublime possibilities. Bhabha’s Infrastructures Bhabha undertakes the task of opening up the space of what I have called the postcolonial sublime via an examination of colonial discourse through novelists such as Morrison, Gordimer, Walcott, Rushdie, and Conrad, archival documents from the Indian Mutiny, Third World Cinema, and nineteenth century colonial history. Several key terms are set forth in order to open up a disruptive postcoloniality within colonial discourse. In chapter one I suggested that the discourse of the postcolonial is grounded in the notion that the nationalism of ‘third world’ liberation movements effectively delivered the former colonies back into the hands of the old colonial powers (Chatterjee, Davidson, Dirks). The term ‘postcolonial’ thus directly relates to colonialism, and suggests that colonial power has not diminished but has merely shifted its structure of authority (Prakash). I would suggest that in Bhabha such a proposition concerning a reformulated colonial power is central. It is significant that in a critical undertaking that takes up the postcolonial to prise open the question of culture, there does not seem to be a great deal of discrimination between texts that obviously occupy the height of colonialism and texts that have emerged after colonialism. This lack of discrimination implies, as I have suggested, that the political, economic, and cultural world is still indelibly marked by subtle and not so subtle structures of colonial power. It seems that for Bhabha, and the discourse of the postcolonial in general, the term ‘postcolonial’ marks the necessity of (re)turning to the primal scene of colonial domination in order to articulate a politics for today. If reason is compelled to repeat the possibility of its collapse (the conservative sublime) in order to establish its authority, the discourse of 230

the postcolonial compulsively returns to the terror of colonialism to find a ground for a contemporary politics. The discourse of the postcolonial hinges upon this assumption concerning a restructured colonial power. Is it a valid assumption? I would suggest unmistakably so. At the core of such a pessimistic assumption there is the stark reality of the failure of liberal democracy to deliver a more equitable world. Bound in a conservatism that continues to be preoccupied with myths of national unity, the polyglot nature of the contemporary world remains, in the formulations that mark this thesis, the object of reason’s teleology. It is precisely this accent upon the dominance of conservative politics that leads us to what I have called Bhabha’s infrastructures. In this (re)turn to the primal scene of colonial domination Bhabha’s infrastructures set forth the grounds for a politics of postcoloniality. Such a politics seeks to disrupt the conservative insistence upon symbols of oneness, and the political consequences of oneness, with a discourse of excess. In the context of this thesis, this insistence upon excessive and disruptive sites means that the sublime can never be as contained as the pundits of a confident Idealism presupposed. Several interrelated terms are marshalled in order to examine colonial discourse, some of which have become the standard critical terms for postcolonial criticism.396 Among these, mimicry, sly civility, subaltern agency, hybridity, the third space of enunciation, and culture as a strategy of survival, have emerged as the most pivotal. I shall outline the key features of each term, and subsequently make some connections to the vulnerable structure of the colonial that I have suggested is at the core of Bhabha’s work. My aim is to examine the staging of the location of culture. I shall begin this outline with the term mimicry. Bhabha writes:

231

colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite … the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference.397

Whilst ‘mimicry’ in this formulation is set forth in the language of Freud (fantasy) and Lacan (camouflage), it is also a formulation that calls an understanding of the teleology of colonial reason into play. I would contend that ultimately the political possibilities that Bhabha seeks to open up come to the fore only in and through disruptions to Hegelian systemisation. Lacan and Freud function in this context precisely as sites from which to draw the possibility of such a disruption. As I argued concerning Hegel in chapter three, the importance of Hegelian thought in the context of Europe’s colonial expansion, and, therefore, for the discourse of the postcolonial, with its emphasis upon conflict, liberation, becomes apparent in Hegel’s reworking of the Kantian sublime. Hegel’s theory of the self is drawn up around one basic problematic. Proceeding from the assumption that Absolute Spirit (unity) is greater than the individual self, it becomes the task of the self to overcome the unknown darkness within, in order to be at one with the Absolute. Whilst Kant argued that the Absolute perspective is impossible, and remained content to locate reason’s dynamism in relation to reason’s dark side, for Hegel the absolute perspective is as necessary as it is indispensable in reason’s historical teleology. This history marks the progressive movement of human consciousness from darkness to light, from the obscure to the axiomatic, from slavery to mastery. In the colonial encounter in Bhabha, this formulation of reason takes an interesting turn.

As the colonial draws his subject into a narcissistic structure of

identification, to make them ‘the same’, to draw ‘them’ into the light of reason, a gap

232

between the possibility of that sameness and its impossibility, ‘but not quite’, appears. This gap emerges as a necessary part of the colonial game.

As Hegel reveals,

possession demands its object continuously, but such a demand is necessitated on the basis of the object always remaining an object. The demand for mimicry by the coloniser thus reveals a major pitfall that disrupts the grounds for colonial authority. The subject of mimicry is marked by a sameness that is also a difference, a visibility that is at once a menacing camouflage (Lacan), and, in the language of Freud (on the nature of fantasy), as Bhabha writes, problematises “the very notion of ‘origins’ … It is a form of colonial discourse that is uttered inter dicta: a discourse at the crossroads of what is known and permissible and that which though known must be kept concealed”.398 It is this difference/camouflage/metonymy of presence that Bhabha puts to a political use. In the context of Hegel’s thought — which is driven by a process of unconcealment — the possibility of concealment disturbs the authority of the system that reason produces. Bhabha writes, the discursive “excess or slippage produced by the ambivalence of mimicry … does not merely ‘rupture’ the discourse [of the colonial], but becomes transformed into an uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a ‘partial’ presence”.399 The colonial subject thus ‘resembles’ the colonial, yet at the same time becomes a ‘menace’, as Bhabha puts it, since this resemblance can never be complete. This means that colonial authority is never a totalising discourse, there remains a subjectivity that exceeds the limits of that authority. The subject of mimicry, a subject of the ‘knowing’ colonial, the subject made visible by the cognitive powers of Enlightenment, remains in many ways hidden and not known, beyond the authority of reason. That hidden moment within mimicry, the unpresentable, is thus a political disruption only insofar as it opens up the possibility of the question within the discourse of colonial mastery, and with it the possibility of changing the terms of that colonial

233

imposition. Mimicry is a menace precisely because it unleashes a hidden space within the confines of reason. The civil discourse — sly civility — of the colonial also struggles in the face of ambivalence. Bhabha writes:

What threatens the authority of colonial command is the ambivalence of its address … which will not be resolved in a dialectical play of power. … Between the civil address and its colonial signification — each axis displaying a problem of recognition and repetition — shuttles the signifier of authority in search of a strategy of surveillance, subjection, and inscription. Here there can be no dialectic of the master-slave for where discourse is so disseminated can there ever be the passage from trauma to transcendence? From alienation to authority? Both colonizer and colonized are in a process of miscognition where each point of identification is always a partial and double repetition of the otherness of the self.400

What is at issue here, once again, is the attempt to disrupt the process of reason. If Fanon celebrated and unleashed what reason attempts to subdue — the body — Bhabha seeks the disturbing hidden spaces within reason’s processes to disrupt the terms of its authority.

Hegel’s model provides the grounds for the colonial encounter, it

characterises colonial desire initially — to systematise — but at the same time must be effaced, for the encounter with the other resists this possibility. The imposition of authority is thus less the smooth drawing together of disparate elements, than a process of splitting. The colonial is caught between its desire to make concrete its abstract thought, and, what could be considered, the actual discursive encounter. In the case of sly civility we find that the coloniser/colonised relationship is defined in terms of

234

miscognition,

rather

than

the

recognition

that

can

be

found

in

Hegel’s

phenomenological model. Again the accent upon miscognition produces a subject that disrupts the dialectic of unconcealment. In similar fashion to the ideas that cluster around mimicry, we find the colonial desire for repetition, and the problem that the demand for repetition produces: it never produces the same but the difference of the same. Subaltern agency is also staged in terms of a slippage that works against the sureties of colonial authority:

This emphasis on the disjunctive present of utterance enables the historian to get away from defining subaltern consciousness as binary, as having positive or negative dimensions. It allows the articulation of subaltern agency to emerge as relocation and reinscription.

In the seizure of the sign … there is neither

dialectical sublation nor the empty signifier: there is a contestation of the given symbols of authority that shift the terrains of antagonism. The synchronicity in the social ordering of symbols is challenged within its own terms, but the grounds of engagement have been displaced in a supplementary movement that exceeds those terms.401

The ‘disjunctive present’, as opposed to abstract desire, is the crucial element in engagement in thought concerning colonialism. The contact between the coloniser and the colonised is theorised in the temporal and spatial terms that Bhabha opens up in his critique of the postmodern. The moment of the event of communication, the now of colonial encounter, is marked by a radical disjunction between the coloniser and colonised. The now of colonialism in this formulation is less an event in Lyotard’s terms than an overdetermined site, marked by both the structures of colonial desire and

235

the desire of the objects of colonial desire. What is at issue in the space of the now of colonialism, for Bhabha, is the meaning of signs, and the possibilities that the ownership of signs opens up, or shuts down. We can recall Derrida’s lucid argument in Dissemination concerning the relationship between speech and writing here. Derrida points out that Plato’s mistrust of writing, as opposed to the valorisation of speech, in the Phaedrus, where writing presupposes the absence of the author’s authority over the communicative event, and is deemed a threat to the interests of morality and truth, is, paradoxically, condemned itself to be written in the interests of the same. Writing is thus constituted in terms of the logic of the Pharmakon: it is both a remedy that is able to counteract the deficiencies of speech, and a poison, since it operates in terms of the absence of authority. Derrida attempts to disrupt the assumption of Western philosophy that constitutes itself in terms of speech, but which must always be condemned to writing. We could say that Bhabha takes up this logic in his analysis of colonial acts. Colonial desire, for Bhabha, cannot operate solely in terms of the spatial demands of speech. Like Plato’s mistrust of writing, colonial desire demands a wide dissemination that calls upon the discursive to supplement the spatial drawback of speech.

This means that colonial logic, like

Western philosophy, is inscribed in the logic of the pharmakon. Derrida writes, “the pharmakon is ‘ambivalent’ because it constitutes the element in which opposites are opposed, the movement and play by which each relates back to the other, reverses itself and passes into the other … The pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play (the production) of difference”.402 Bhabha champions this play between texts and their colonial authors. The movement, rupture, and disjunctions that are inscribed in the logic of the pharmakon open up the possibility for contesting the meaning of colonial signs. In fact we could go a step further and say that it is not the possibility of contestation that is what is at issue

236

here, it is that contestation itself is a structural necessity.

Indeed as Lord Alfred

Tennyson would write in 1872:

... The Loyal to their crown Are loyal to their own far sons, who love Our ocean-empire with her boundless homes For ever-broadening England, and her throne In our vast Orient, and one isle, one isle, That knows not her own greatness: if she knows And dreads it we are fall’n.403

What struck the imagination of Britain during the height of its colonial reign was a stark awareness of Britain as an Island with a relatively small population. We are ‘one isle’, the poet repeats, yet masters of a vast empire. The issue of maintaining such a vastness, administratively, economically, and culturally, remained at the forefront of the colonial mind. The uniting of the plethora of differences under one flag was as an immense task. To achieve a sense of unity across such a vast space would indeed be a great accomplishment. Just as Idealism established the authority of reason via its capacity to bring a unity to bear upon the manifold (Kant), to unite disparate elements (Hegel), the Empire shone as an example of the greatness of Britain. But was the Empire ever unified? Or was it always haunted at its edges by the nagging thought that ultimately this robust image of unity was extremely costly (economically, administratively, socially), and fragile? dismissal of the value of empire:

237

Consider Adam Smith’s

The rulers of Great Britain have, for more than a century past, amused the people with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic. This empire, however, has hitherto existed in imagination only. It has hitherto been, not an empire, but the project of an empire; not a gold mine, but the project of a gold mine; a project which has cost, which continues to cost, and which, if pursued in the same way as it has been hitherto, is likely to cost, immense expence, without being likely to bring any profit [sic].404

The notion of the incompleteness of the accomplishments of empire animates Smith’s concern for profitability. The empire for Smith was clearly in process, as his repeated insistence upon the term “project” suggests. His acute economic analysis reveals the disjunction between colonial desire and its actuality in the space and time of the colonies that Bhabha underscores. Reason’s colonial teleology remains an abstract desire that was forced to face the complicated and irreconcilable demands of colonialism. As a discursive regime that effects images of the unity of empire, colonial authority is haunted by the logic of the pharmakon. Colonial authority thus can never arrive in terms of the demands of colonial desire. There are uncontainable sites that disrupt the desire to subsume the object under the ruling principles of reason. In practice the colonial was very rarely reasonable. Perhaps the most stark instance of this emphasis upon the impossibility of a dominant cultural sign, can be found in Bhabha’s notion of hybridity:

To grasp the ambivalence of hybridity, it must be distinguished from an inversion that would suggest that the originary is, really, only an ‘effect’. Hybridity has no such perspective of depth or truth to provide: it is not a third term that resolves the

238

tension between two cultures, or the two scenes of the book, in a dialectical play of ‘recognition’. The displacement from symbol to sign creates a crisis for any concept of authority based on a system of recognition: colonial specularity, doubly inscribed, does not produce a mirror where the self apprehends itself; it is always the split screen of the self and its doubling, the hybrid.405

Hybridity is set forth in terms of a crisis in the process of reason. Again we find doubling, repetition, and an excessive displacement that cannot be contained. The colonial subject as the mirror of the colonial, can never reflect back the kind of recognition that the coloniser demands. There is a rupture, a disjunction in the process, which means that authority can never be unified. In order to maintain mastery the colonial, as a structural necessity, must disavow unity. Mastery can never be a fixed imposition. It is marked by movement, change, and transformations. It can never draw upon fixed traditions of knowledge, but, like the capitalist logic in which it is embedded, must efface those traditions in order to take up new ones in the struggle for mastery. The colonial encounter produces sites which cannot be reduced to the terms of that encounter. New spaces are produced which disrupt and force the processes of reason to constantly move elsewhere in an irresolvable crises. Of the mobile army of figures deployed in order to articulate the politics of the postcolonial, ‘hybridity’ perhaps emerges as the most pivotal,406 at least in the context of Bhabha’s critical reception. The example outlined in The Location of Culture is that of the Hindu response to the message of Christian missionaries in India.407 It seems that Hindus resisted Christianity not through a straight out rejection of the Christian message but by articulating a ‘supplementary’ discourse: ‘give us the vegetarian Bible and we will convert’. Bhabha notes that this construction ! the vegetarian Bible ! is not prefigured in the Hindu/Christian dialectic, but goes beyond it. The construction of a

239

‘hybrid’ object by Hindus in this instance, functions as a sign of resistance that cannot be contained dialectically, it pushes dialectics elsewhere.

As a consequence the

Christian missionary is frustrated by the emergence of the hybrid, and must redefine, reevaluate, and change, in order to maintain status as the teacher of the faith. Hybridity thus emerges as a disturbance to the assumed authority of colonial pedagogy.

Its

nuances relate to the issue of spatial displacement and its effect upon the time of culture, and identity that I have outlined. Hybridity is the moment in which colonial desire is frustrated by a politics that contaminates, transgresses, pushes meaning beyond the limits that have been marked by the colonial. In the now of colonial pedagogy, colonial desire is thus less the total imposition of a predictable, monolithic cultural unity upon an otherwise empty native signifier, than a frantic attempt to ‘pin down’ the meanings that the native other subverts.

The grounds for the certitude of the colonial are

problematised, Bhabha writes, “not by the simple assertion of an antagonistic cultural tradition”, but by a “process of translation” which opens up “another contentious political and cultural site at the heart of colonial representation”.408 I would contend that the hybrid as a space of excess can be understood as an instance in which the postcolonial sublime emerges. The possibility of contesting cultural signs ultimately means that colonial desire can never be fully present to itself. When this desire is employed in the dissemination of the sign of cultural unity, it suffers a kind of violence. For the coloniser the sign bears the trace of the colonial ! its materiality means that it is recognisable (the Bible as a sacred text) ! but to the colonised the colonial sign is understood in terms of a different cultural sign system. The colonial sign is thus subverted, structurally disrupted by the native: the Bible is a sacred text, but its sacredness is dependent upon … . This process of doubling can be understood in terms of the politics of excess that is the subject of this thesis. The production of a hybrid site that exceeds the limits of colonial desire disempowers the 240

colonial as it empowers the native. The coloniser recognises the structural limitations of its desire and, in order to maintain the authoritative hand, transforms what is otherwise considered to be his unitary cultural discourse. The colonial process thus gives rise to hybridity for both the coloniser, in the act of self negation that is necessary for the practice of domination, and the colonised, in resisting the coloniser. As can be seen, the political site for this process is never fixed and unitary, the simple conflict of a unified master and slave. Such a site is in flux, always already in a state of emergency as the hybrid as sublime excess emerges to alter the destination of the coloniser and the colonised relationship. The critical terminology that I have briefly outlined must be understood in temporal and spatial terms. The now of colonial encounter, its location in space and time, is set against the abstract teleology of reason. There is an important distinction between the abstract and the actual, between reason’s teleology and actual colonial encounter at work here. Bhabha’s terms of engagement in colonial discourse seek to move beyond the abstract, in order to resist totalising colonial encounters.

It is

important to note that the now of colonial encounter, as I have outlined, cannot be understood in terms of the Lyotardian event. The enunciative space is a space of confrontation, a conflict concerning reason’s fort/da, unlike the event which functions as a moment in itself. The excesses that the space of the now can be considered disruptive precisely because there is a teleology at work, or at least a teleology figures in the political nuances that can be drawn up around excess. Rather than a moment of prefiguration, as in the Lyotardian event, the indeterminacy that characterises postcolonial excess can be considered a residue that is left over after the encounter, after the dissemination of colonial desire. It is in this temporal space that the confrontation of the coloniser and colonised is staged. This confrontation can be characterised as a discursive event,409 a struggle

241

concerning the authority of dominant cultural signs. As I have suggested, there is a sense in which colonial desire is inhabited by the logic of the pharmakon.

The

dissemination of the abstract colonial sign of unity does not seem to be able to arrive at its colonial destination as a self-presence. To use the well worn distinction between the motivated and purposeful nature of the symbol and the arbitrary sign, the abstract symbol of colonial authority at the point of dissemination emerges as an arbitrary sign. The possibilities of the sign exceeds the intentions of the symbolic forms of authors. The disjunction between authors and signs in the temporal and spatial singularity of the colonial moment becomes the site for transgression on the part of the colonised subject. Colonial conflict is thus a cultural concern, a struggle concerning the sign/symbol of cultural unity. I would suggest, and I will deal with this in a moment, that the discursive space that characterises the colonial encounter can be understood as a space of conflicting desires. But one would wonder, and Bhabha doesn’t really deal with this, why the space of the now, as a space concerning the sign/symbol of unity, is privileged in the colonial encounter over the notion that colonialism itself, whilst it does operate discursively, is also a spatial imposition? I have suggested that Bhabha’s emphasis upon the complex relation of the temporal and the spatial is drawn from one of Derrida’s infrastructures, the pharmakon, but this doesn’t ultimately deal with the problem of spatial imposition. The modern colonial built jails, railroads, power stations, and schools, and established plantations. The process of colonial modernity was a very physical one. It designed buildings, introduced machines, and built infrastructures that changed the landscape and reorganised the structures of human relationships. It would be valid to understand the building of a church in a native village as a discursive act, but to suggest that a church building is nothing but a discursive act, as Bhabha seems to, is to overlook the physicality of buildings, and the impact they have upon bodies, feelings, and the

242

libidinal drives. If this is the case then the question of resistance cannot be reduced to the working out of a discursive desire. Resistance must involve a physical dimension. What I am suggesting is that to resist a colonial presence such as the church requires much more than a struggle concerning the sign of unity. It also involves taking hold of the infrastructures that are built around the institution in order to effect social change. A reconsideration of colonial encounter as a spatial phenomenon, to use a phrase from Manuel Castells, based upon the notion that “space is not a ‘reflection of society’, it is society”,410 would open up possibilities for the questions of agency and resistance that Bhabha doesn’t engage in. This renders Bhabha’s propensity for the discursive temporal as a limited engagement in the question of colonial encounter. But as I have suggested, the scope of Bhabha’s infrastructures seems to be much broader than simply detailing what took place in the history of colonialism. I would argue that his work lends itself to a contemporary politics in which the discursive is paramount to any politics. What is pointed in Bhabha’s ‘discursive turn’, as opposed to the Lyotard of The Differend, is the struggle of desire that animates the discursive. I will attend to this in due course. Having suggested that Bhabha’s discursive turn is marked by the figure of desire, I would contend, contra Benita Parry, that this discursive and temporal staging of the colonial encounter depends upon, rather than excludes, the dialectic of colonial domination. Parry argues that the groundlessness that is implied in the privileging of the discursive does not empower the native and give cause to resistance. Writing from a Marxist vantage point, she argues that Bhabha has been seduced by a poststructuralist pantextualism — “there is no knowledge outside representation” — in his insistence upon mobilising “the language model to explain colonialism’s past social processes and contemporary postcolonial situations”.411

For Parry, Bhabha presents the terror of

colonialism as a kind of writing which is somehow destabilised by Derridean différance.

243

Moreover the utilisation of ‘hybridity’ as a conceptual term to undermine colonialism’s pretension to order — by disrupting the system of oppositions that make this order possible — is an ‘agonistic’ politics that denies the possibility of oppositional conflict between the coloniser and colonised, and thus the reality of colonial oppression. The crux of the matter is that an agonistic strategy implies that the coloniser and colonised do not inhabit a dialectic of domination.

For Parry, Bhabha has subsumed the

ontological conflicts that constitute colonial encounter beneath an Ontology that subordinates human experience to language, and which does not engage in the material base. This means that instead of approaching the question of colonialism as the hostile struggle between two opposing, ‘antagonistic’ forces, in which the distribution of power is not equal, Bhabha stages the coloniser and the colonised relationship as a competition upon a level playing field for the appropriation of cultural symbols. For Parry this means that Bhabha’s concern with hybridity as a product of colonisation — where cultural difference is translated “in the third space of enunciation, where it is reiterated differently from its prior context”412 — sets him apart from the more general, and useful, use of the term by Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, among others, as denoting culture’s multiple accents. For my purposes two things are at issue here. The first concerns the claim that Bhabha refuses to think resistance in terms of a dialectic of domination, or at least stages the question of resistance in terms which demand the abolition of the antagonism that constitutes the dialectic of domination.

The second is what I perceive as a

conceptual error in Parry’s engagement in Bhabha’s work. Her argument conflates the now of colonial encounter with the abstract, in a way that is not consistent with Bhabha’s text. She fails to consider Bhabha’s textualism in terms of the relationship between desire and the processes of signification. This means the argument, whilst it does point towards the limits of pure textualism, misses what is at stake in this attempt

244

to relocate the question of culture. If Lyotard and Foucault were interested in the meaning of the revolution from a distance, as I have outlined, Bhabha is concerned with the event from the space of the revolution itself. But this insistence upon the now of the event is not to take up the postmodern preoccupation with the local, as Parry implies. The now of colonial encounter in Bhabha, is excessive and disruptive precisely because it can be located in relation to global economic and cultural discourses. In Bhabha the local emerges as less a site in itself, which somehow disrupts metanarratives, than a site of inscription. In the colonial context, what Bhabha opens up is what happens when the metanarrative as process comes to the village. Thus far I have argued that Bhabha’s terms of engagement in colonial contestation can be characterised as singular events that render the space of domination as uncertain. This temporal and spatial emphasis aims at dealing with colonial acts in terms of the instant in which they take place. I have suggested that, because of this singularity, these are terms that attempt to resist a pretension to abstraction. Bhabha does, however, set this process of contestation forth in abstract terms. This is the function of the much used term, the ‘third space of enunciation’. This term provides an interesting opening for a consideration of the desire, which, as I have suggested, emerges in the context of discursive disruption, and also of Bhabha’s critical position on the question of contemporary culture. Here the figure of the migrant comes to the fore. If mimicry, sly civility, subaltern agency, and hybridity underscore contingent disruptions to colonial discourse, the third space builds upon these insights and marks the disturbing figure of the migrant for the Western nation. He writes:

It is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of

245

culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew.413

The third space is set forth as a kind transcendental condition (Kant). It is the structural space that characterises the overlap in intercultural encounter. It is a space which is set forth under the demands of consensus, assimilation, but which ultimately is unable to deliver, and leads to conflict and excess. In itself it is ‘unrepresentable’, it does not precede the actual encounter itself. As such the third space seems to be both inside and outside the discursive. It seems to function as an alterity within the communicative act, which means that inter-cultural encounter is necessarily marked by a process of translation on the part of the desiring subject. Intercultural encounter is marked by the presence of the unpresentable. Bhabha does not develop the use of the term fully. But it seems to open up an idea of desire and its role in the processes of signification in a way which underscores the textual disjunctions of the colonial encounter and migrancy, and which enables Bhabha to champion ambivalence as productive rather than negative from the perspective of the colonised/migrant.

The third space works against both the

“primordial unity” and “the notion of fixity”, expressed in the desire of the Western nation. It promotes transgression and subversion which, in the context of myths of national unity, can be seen to be productive for the migrant and disruptive to the nationstate. Clearly Bhabha in abstraction seeks a term in order to stage an alternative desire, one which confronts the desire of the conservative nation-state. I say this because his work is littered with telling phrases such as, “the everyday existence of the Western metropolis”, and “Maggie Torture’s Britain” (Rushdie), that are opposed to the “revenge of the migrant”, “hybridity is heresy”, and cultural translation is blasphemy.414 This means that the third space is marked as transgressive (the subversion of the object

246

of the referent for its own ends). The location of an excessive cultural space, the scandalous ‘third space’, contests both the discourses of cultural relativism and its opposite, assimilation. But why the scandal? I would suggest that what Bhabha opens up is the question of the unpresentable, the disturbing sublime.

In this context, with its excesses and contaminations, the

unpresentable remains to haunt the myth of unity, it refuses to be drawn into its order. This renders unifying systems untenable.

The unpresentability in a dialectic of

domination, as played out in Bhabha’s infrastructures, marks the impossibility of totalising discourse. If Lyotard found the impossibility of the analytic of the sublime to be drawn into Kant’s architectonic system as the marker of the unpresentable, for Bhabha the unpresentable can be found in relation to a dialectical process.

The

postcolonial sublime is that cultural excess that refuses to be drawn into the teleology of a reason driven order. The third space is animated by a linguistic theory: Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator”. Benjamin makes a point concerning the impossibility of fixed language, and the impossibility of fixity in translation that can be drawn into what I have suggested is unpresentable about the postcolonial. No translation, he tells us, “would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. For in its afterlife — which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living — the original undergoes a change”. Conversely, whilst the fluidity of the original implies the necessity of translation, “the language of a translation” must find a logic of its own, it must “let itself go, so that it gives voice to the intentio of the original not as reproduction but as harmony, as a supplement to the language in which it expresses itself, as its own kind of intentio”.415 Translation thus is not constituted as the (re)production of the original literally, its subject matter, as if the original is a pure site that is somehow cut off from the translation’s impurity. The

247

reproduction is part of what is already integral to the life of the original, its poetic (Romanticism) ‘afterlife’, its active energy in history. What does a literary work say when what it says it not what it says? This is Benjamin’s point of departure: “In all language and linguistic creations there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated”.416 In the case of the literary, if such a thing exists, the literal translation can be totally inadequate. Bhabha seizes this inadequacy, that moment of untranslatability — the subject-matter of the original — as a metaphor for the postcolonial migrant. Thus whilst Benjamin disrupts translation as information, as telling those who don’t understand what the work says what the work says,417 Bhabha insists that migrant culture is marked by the impossibility of translating that what. But what is untranslatable here? I would suggest, to pursue Benjamin as Bhabha insists, that what is at issue is less the possibility of the translation of cultural essence, the pure original, than the notion that the translated is itself untranslatable. Benjamin makes this lucid point:

The higher the level of a work, the more does it remain translatable even if its meaning is touched upon only fleetingly. This, of course, applies to originals only. Translations, on the other hand, prove to be untranslatable not because of any inherent difficulty, but because of the looseness with which meaning attaches to them.418

It is thus the defiance of the possibility of the original, of a cultural essence, that renders the migrant translation untranslatable. This untranslatability is scandalous, it can be understood as an excess that refuses to be subordinated to an ordered language. As Bhabha cogently points out, untranslatability “moves the question of culture’s appropriation beyond the assimilationist’s dream, or the racist’s nightmare, of a ‘full

248

transmissal of subject-matter’”.419

The impossibility of such a transmissal is

scandalously disruptive to any notion of culture that would pretend to the progress of Hegel. There is a threatening excessiveness, an uncontainment here that works against the discourses of cultural purity. Such an excess can be understood as that which is sublime, that which defies the order the cognition when cognition is the order of the day. The sublime that emerges in Bhabha thus cannot be understood in the romantic terms of Lyotard. What Lyotard’s reading of the sublime lacks is an account of the sublime in reason’s teleology. Such a process, however, is crucial for Bhabha. The unpresentable as unpresentable, that moment of hesitancy that distinguishes the monstrous Saladin Chamcha from the disturbing figure of Gibreel Farishta, as I discussed in chapter one, emerges when reason is confounded by what it fails to comprehend. Bhabha unleashes this moment of incomprehension in order to attack the hegemony of Western reason. Conclusion: Bhabha and the Postcolonial Sublime For Bhabha a postcolonial politics makes a priori principles obsolete. Political struggle is best theorised in terms of the ‘now’ of the colonial encounter, the ‘third space of enunciation’, rather than as a conflict between monolithic discourses. He writes:

The language of critique is effective not because it keeps forever separate the terms of the master and the slave, the mercantilist and the Marxist, but to the extent to which it overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of translation: a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other,

249

properly alienates our political expectations, and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics.420

The commitment to politics is thus a commitment to the process of ‘negotiating’, as Bhabha calls it, the passage of reason, in order to open up sites that exceed the terms of this passage. As the thesis contended in the previous chapter, ‘negotiation’ as a political metaphor departs from the postmodern purity of Lyotard. If the contenders in any conflictual relation are never unitary in themselves, their interaction has the possibility of always setting up other political sites in which the ratio of power is transformed,421 and as such culture itself.

I have contended that Bhabha’s

infrastructures effectively seek to lay hold of the sublime, in order to undertake the disruptive work that emerges as a necessity in the discourse of the postcolonial. Where colonial desire is reason’s authoritative processes, for the discourse of the postcolonial the sublime is the material real, that which is unable to be contained.

The

infrastructures, mimicry, sly civility, subaltern agency, hybridity, all open up spaces of excess in order to disturb the authority of the colonial. As such the postcolonial sublime emerges from the dark spaces within reason’s processes. In colonial terms, Bhabha’s infrastructures arise as an obligation, but quickly exceed the terms of such an obligation. If in Fanon the disruptive capacity of excess is unleashed through the black body, in Bhabha a disruptive untranslatable excess emerges in the colonial demands upon the native. In each the teleology of Western reason is interrupted by a sublime that is less a noble pursuit (Kant) than the sublime that contaminates. Such is the sublime of the despised. I have also contended that Bhabha takes what I have called a politics of the postcolonial sublime and sets it to work against contemporary formulations of the nation-state. Here the figure of the postcolonial migrant (re)enters what is essentially a

250

colonial relation. As Anderson in his article “Exodus” laments, such a (re)entering disturbs the sustainability of the unifying myth of nation (as I discussed in chapter one of the thesis). I will deal with this issue in greater detail in the following chapter on Rushdie. What I would wish to note at this point is that Anderson’s lament, which is built upon the ‘problem’ of the migrant’s relationship to ‘homeland’, reveals that colonial residues remain embedded in contemporary Western culture. Indeed in the wake of Said’s seminal works, Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, the question of culture demands to be linked to the colonial residues that continue to inhabit Western culture. The pervasiveness of colonial acts, and the outworking of colonialism in the shape of the contemporary world, means that colonialism lies at the heart of both Western Culture and all that have been forced to negotiate, directly or indirectly, the teleology of that culture. In interrogating this fundamental teleology, Bhabha finds two crucial and interrelated signs that suggest that culture as monologic form can never actually arrive. The first is the notion that colonial encounter is never the clash of two unified wholes, or the imposition of one unified whole upon an empty other. As I discussed in chapter one, such a formulation underpins what could be considered the logic of the discourse of the postcolonial. In the models that I set forth from the outset, this logic can be understood in terms of Rattansi’s intertwined metaphor. But there is another important moment in Bhabha, that pushes the discourse of the postcolonial beyond the Hegelian frame of Rattansi to the much more disruptive parallel model of Moraru.

As a

consequence of the ‘inbetween’ space, which is occupied by the postcolonial subject, the diasporic, dispossessed, colonised, and culturally dislocated, or in other words, those that occupy a cultural space that does not fit into conventional, homogeneous national and racial typologies, Bhabha is able to open up excessive spaces that interrupt the terms of such conventions. The presence of the postcolonial subject, since culture is

251

staged via colonialism, thus demands a rethinking of culture, in terms of both its constitution and its transformation. Bhabha’s infrastructures seize what I have called the postcolonial sublime in order to undertake this task. Further insight into the disturbing and sublime character of the discourse of the postcolonial can be found in Bhabha’s comments concerning his articulation of the notion of the third space. The third space, as an articulation in a body of work that consists of a series of open fragments, ironies, and clusters linked to various issues in order to provoke and disrupt rather than instruct (an apt description of the discourse of the postcolonial as outlined in chapter one), in many ways remains consistent with the postcolonial sublime. It is significant that Benjamin’s translator is drawn upon merely as the “motif or trope” for the third space. Bhabha tells us, therefore, that this “theory of culture is close to a theory of language” (my emphasis). A similar point is made concerning the location of psychoanalysis: it serves as an “analogy” for hybridity.422 Bhabha’s critical relation to ‘culture’ can thus be thought of itself as a kind of translation that is marked by the unpresentable. To say close is also to imply a gap, a not quite, a something beyond. It is to ask as it explains: how is culture not like a language? How does culture exceed theory? To say close is thus to blur that distinction between art and the world. Cultural theory as description or prescription has thus been exceeded by scandalous displacement in Bhabha. It would be tempting to consider this scandalous displacement a Nietzschean artfulness.

But as Fanon reveals, such an artfulness

demands to be located. This is what is implied in the location metaphor that titles Bhabha’s work. The location of culture works against the idea of the Nietzschean nomad, and the Lyotardian event.

The critical work of both of these notions is

established on the basis of not being able to be located. The Location of Culture doesn’t quite fit what would constitute an assertion concerning culture: ‘culture is this!’ as the

252

definite article implies. Any assertion seems at once to take on the character of a question. Bhabha seizes this space of questioning, its excess, and opens it up as a productive site. I would contend that such an opening up, a questioning, in the context of the monolithic understandings of culture that have been reinvigorated of late, takes on the character of the sublime, that I have suggested lies at the core of the third space of enunciation. I would thus wish to propose another analogy to draw out the transgressive nature of the Bhabha’s work. This analogy can be found in the Lyotard of the body and desire, as opposed to the Lyotard of the Kantian turn, to which the previous chapter is devoted. I would wish to take up what Lyotard rejected, in order to articulate what is at stake in Bhabha’s work: Lyotard’s distinction between ‘figure’ and ‘discourse’.423 In order to disrupt Enlightenment reason, Lyotard at this earlier stage in his career, sought to liberate the libidinal intensities. The “object of the desire of every ‘science’”, he writes, “is the regulation of displacements, the law: thus the exclusion of libidinal intensities from its object and thus, also, from its discourse”.424 In another setting, with semiotics in his sight, he also writes, “signs are not only terms, stages, set in relation and made explicit in a conquest; they can also be, indissociably, singular and vain intensities in exodus”.425 I would suggest that these are apt terms for an engagement in Bhabha’s evocation of the colonial encounter as discursive. Drawing on Freud, desire for Lyotard operates in two distinct ways: there is the sense of wish (Wunsch) and that of force or energy (Nietzsche’s Wille)”. The human psyche is thus marked by a tension which erupts between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Through a process of repression the reality principle — reason, order — asserts itself over the pleasure principle — “a force beyond the rules of negation, of implication, of alternation, of temporal succession”.426 For Lyotard this process corresponds to the rule of science, in

253

which the abstract reigns over the liberation of the creative forces of art. He thus seeks to realise, what he terms the figural, or the sphere of unbounded pleasure in Freud’s language, via art movements. The accent here is upon the transgressive and disruptive capacity of art, which attacks Enlightenment reason in order to set libidinal intensities adrift in a world of creativity and production. Transgression finds its feet in art, and it corresponds to the ‘artfulness’ of the transgressive moment in colonial encounter. What I would wish to take up, perhaps erroneously, is the distinction between figure and discourse. But it is important to note, and here we can make a distinction between the power of the figural as a precursor to the postmodern and its failure in the postcolonial, that the figural does not exercise a total privilege over discourse. It does not constitute a new totality.

Desire has two distinct dimensions.

Whilst it may function

transgressively, it also is able to affirm new discourses in which the figural is present. It is interesting in the colonial context, as we find in Bhabha, that the work of affirmation does not seem to be developed. Bhabha’s work underscores the productive capacity of transgression alone.

Hybridity, for instance, in its production of the ‘vegetarian

bible’427 functions transgressively, rather than affirms an object with a new life of its own. The new object, whilst it is not prefigured in the Hindu/Christian dialectic, can only be understood, like all transgressions,428 in relation to the force or the rule that it seeks to transgress. The hybrid object does not have a life of its own apart from its transgressive, its sublime function. In the context of colonial encounter the new object functions to disrupt the ratio of power between the colonial and the native,429 rather than effect a positive political program. This means that Bhabha paints a rather bleak picture for the libidinal intensities.

Creativity in the colonial context corresponds to

transgression.

254

The terms that I have outlined thus situate the question of politics in a distinct in-between location. On the one hand we have the colonial which is characterised in terms of Hegelian reason, or the work of discourse in Lyotard’s scheme. This is what drives the colonial encounter, this is the structure of (Western) being, or at least is the ontology upon which the West has been built, and which the colonised subject seeks to dismantle. Bhabha’s own critical work engages in this undertaking both in its open structure, and as it marshals the support of Lacan, Derrida, among others, thinkers at the forefront of critical attempts to demolish Hegel.

On the other hand we have a

productive transgressive desire, the figural, which manifests itself in the contest of signs. Hegelian being is thus asserted and disavowed at the same time. Figure and discourse arise simultaneously, each working against the other, but neither is ultimately able to be erased or transcended. The process of disavowal presupposes the process of assertion, and vice versa. What this means is that the dialectic of domination is always present in this discursive encounter. This is a clash of desires, which pits reason and order, its teleology, against an other which must partially assimilate, or set forth a figural desire in order to push the dialectic of domination elsewhere. It is significant that Bhabha champions the transgressive, rather than the affirmative. It suggests that the colonised self is on the defensive, that there is an aggressor. And the fact that the only option that seems available, in Bhabha’s scheme, reveals that this is never a level field of play. Bhabha’s assertion that culture is a strategy of survival reveals the pessimistic consequences of the location of the postcolonial. He writes:

Culture as a strategy of survival is both translational and transnational. It is transnational because contemporary postcolonial discourses are rooted in specific histories of cultural displacement … Culture is translational because

255

such spatial histories of displacement … make the question of how culture signifies, or what is signified by culture, a rather complex issue.430

Survival in this context consists of negotiating (negating?) the complexes that emerge through cultural displacement. The metaphor is split between a sense of hardship and loss, but at the same time of productivity and resourcefulness. In the context of the organising fiction for this collection of essays — ‘the location of culture’ — survival emerges as a productive force which seeks to overcome the demands of the Hegelian desire for social unity. “Culture is the strategic activity of ‘authorizing’ agency: not the interpellation of pre-given sites of celebration or struggle”.431 The metaphor thus comes into play in situations in which a threat becomes an overruling force. There is the possibility that something can be destroyed, or removed. Survival implies that the threat has been faced and is overcome, defeated, or at the very least postponed. Survival emerges as a material metaphor, it is staged in that muddy and disturbing space that wrests the sublime from its conservative trajectory. In a critical response to Arlene Croce’s essay “Discussing the Undiscussable” ! in which she announces her refusal to see the dance work Still/Here, “on the grounds that [the] use of HIV positive dancers, and of video testimony by AIDS patients turned the art of dance into “victim art”, a “travelling medicine show”432 ! he sets forth the idea that culture is ‘survival’ in defence of this ‘victim art’. Bhabha suggests:

Could it be that identifying Still/Here as a narcissistic art of victimage, Croce may be missing the show’s spectacular performance of survival — the attempt ... to counter the privacy and primacy of the individual self with the collective historical memory?”433

256

The notion of survival thus emerges as inseparably linked to questions concerning identity and community. If there is an inbetween temporal moment, that is a people free from the myth of a continuous past, then what constitutes the social bond, the sense of solidarity that ‘victims’ are able, in this instance anyway, to articulate?

To survive, technically, is to continue after the cessation of a thing, event, or process; to carry on in the light and shadow of a break, a trauma, a trial, a challenge. Survival demands a bridging, a negotiation, an articulation of the moments “before” and “after” without necessarily assuming a historical or temporal continuity between them. Survival also requires the courage to live through the flux and transition of cessation. ... She cannot envisage an art that would short-circuit the sublime, transcendent option to plug into a dialogue with a community that establishes its solidarity and group identity through sharing a desolate interruption, a cessation ! death, mourning, melancholia.434

The upshot is a theory for cultural transformation, and a call for a rethinking of questions concerning the constitution of the social bond.435 The metaphor of survival demands a location that is set in relation to an act which seeks to deprive. The point of the metaphor is that it highlights the temporal disjunctions that characterise the threat of depravation, and calls forth the necessity for dealing with the condition of imposition. As such ‘survival’ underscores the necessity of the transgressive nature of desire, rather than the affirmative. The Bhabharian subject is caught in the space inbetween acts of domination, that seek to impose an order, and acts of transgression, that seek to dismantle the propensity to order. The work of Bhabha is thus embedded in what could be called a dualism, which takes the question of culture beyond the confines of the

257

monolithic, toward questions of power and transgression.

In this dualism the

transgressive force of the postcolonial sublime is played out. The implication of this dualism can be considered pragmatically. Every act of domination is animated by the demands of Hegelian systemisation.

Any act of

resistance must move beyond that mode of thinking and being to modes of desire that are rooted in production, rather than lack. If the question of survival is the fundamental condition of culture, then it is impossible to move beyond the conflictual terrain that marks the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. This condition is always already inscribed in culture, there is no space that enables a movement beyond it. This is why Bhabha insists, via the terms that I have outlined, that the disruptive capacity of resistance does not erase the relationship between coloniser and colonised, the hegemonic West and the postcolonial, but simply transforms the ratio of power between them. It is this dualism that marks the question of culture. Bhabha’s work can thus be characterised as an attempt to deal with Hegel’s ontology, and ultimately to disavow it with a sublime desire rooted in an excessive materiality. Bhabha’s dualism is crucial in the context of contemporary cultural theory. In the Australian context in which I write, a nostalgic cultural monolith has raised its head. The Australian political climate is marked by a reactionary conservatism (Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party),436 and the return of a conservative government, which, in its insistence upon ‘one rule for all’, gives no room to the possibility of alternative ways of thinking. Any opposition is discounted as misinformed,437 as subject to the ‘misrepresentations of the media’. The assumption is that this so called politics of ‘fairness’, of oneness, is not only irresistible, it is set in transcendent stone. It is a climate that gives no room to ‘debate’, no space of questioning, and it thus reinforces the tenor of, what I have called, Bhabha’s dualistic pessimism.

258

The recent return of a conservative government, and public re-emergence of nationalism signals that colonial desire remains embedded in ‘white Australia’s’ psyche. In similar fashion, there is no ground for the outworking of affirmative desire in situations in which reason’s processes are on the prowl. Those that are not included in this rhetoric, are forced to negotiate the structures that seek to produce a totality from the disparate elements that mark the social. As Bhabha suggests, it seems futile to contend this rhetoric with a resistance that finds its basis in an opposite cultural purism, an opposed force that corresponds in its moment of enunciation to the desires of discourse, as opposed to the figural. Such a politics merely reinforces the tenor of Hegelian desire, which demands an enemy, a task, to generate its own sense of legitimation, and its conservative use of the sublime as a dialectical other. The crucial contribution that Bhabha makes to theory is that he puts back a perspective upon culture that is grounded in reason processes, that has been lost in recent preoccupations with the postmodern. Whilst it has been suggested that Bhabha has been lulled into the false securities of the we-are-all-homeless-signifiers-floatingaround cliché, his work consistently deals with the reality of a Hegelianism that is alive and well in the West. What we find in Bhabha is a staging of culture as radically divided. As governments refuse to deal with cultural difference, and outmoded slogans such as ‘we are monocultural’ begin to re-emerge in the public sphere as a matter of serious debate, the disruptive force, the scandal, of the migrant and the dispossessed that Bhabha underscores could not be more valid. All this suggests that cultural identity is always already relational, always already worked out in and through the complex workings of desire: discourse? figural? This, whilst I have attempted to reveal Bhabha’s limitations, still opens up the possibility of thinking culture in discursive terms as a clash between strategies of unity, and strategies of transgression. This is what marks the present day. It is a pessimistic and bleak picture, but I would suggest that it represents

259

an apt ‘snap-shot’ of the West as it is. If ever there is the possibility that the world’s differences and myriad accents will come to the fore in public life, then the process of affirmative desire must be preceded by the transgressive engagement in the West’s continuing preoccupation with racial, cultural, and national purity. Bhabha’s work takes up this challenge. I have undertaken an outline of Bhabha’s work in order to stage the postcolonial sublime. Bhabha clearly opens up sites of excess, uncontainment, in order to disrupt Western hegemony. Given the conservative use of the sublime in establishing reason’s authority, what Bhabha seizes is the excess of the excess, that which the process of unity fails to bring to a coherent order. As such Bhabha effectively unleashes the sublime from the shackles of reason.

His work, in its polyphonic form, and the

infrastructures of excess, sets forth a critique of reason as a process. A politics of transgression emerges. As I have shown, this process of transgression is built upon the question of the sublime.

In having charted the terms of the postcolonial sublime

through Bhabha, I would wish to turn to the texts of Rushdie, to further explore the outworking of the postcolonial sublime in a literary context.

Notes

367

Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 175.

368

Robert Young in White Mythologies (London: Routledge, 1990) champions Bhabha’s eclectic use of a wide range of theories and ideas, which have no obvious logical linkage, as exemplary postcolonial criticism. Such a strategy for Young resists being reduced to a “consistent metalanguage”, and the postcolonial critical tools that are set forth cannot be reified “into static concepts” (146-147). 369

W.J.T. Mitchell, in an interview with Bhabha (“Translator Translated”, Artforum, (March 1995), 80-83, 110, 114, 118-119): “the book has been controversial; I’ve heard 260

it characterized as too difficult, as too political, as not political enough” (81). Compare Kwame Appiah, “The Hybrid Age”, Times Literary Supplement (27 May 1994), 5, who reads Bhabha as a ‘leftist’; and Benita Parry, “Signs of our times”, Third Text, vol. 28/29 (1994), 5-24, who argues that Bhabha has been seduced by a poststructuralist textualism. See also Aijaz Ahmad, “The Politics of Postcoloniality”, Race and Class, vol. 36, no. 3 (1995), 1-20; and Asha Varadharajan, Exotic Parodies (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1995), 22-23, who take up a similar position to Parry. 370

See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, trans. R.W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis), 1973. 371

See for example Mitchell and Bhabha, “Translator Translated”, 14. Bhabha’s celebration of the moment of indeterminacy, as the moment in which freedom and politics is possible, is drawn directly from Derrida. See also Homi Bhabha, “Freedom’s Basis in the Indeterminate”, October, no. 61 (1992), 46-57. He writes, “it has been my growing conviction that encounters and negotiations of differential meanings and values within the governmental discourses and cultural practices that make up “colonial” textuality have enacted, avant la lettre, many of the problematics of signification and judgement that have become current in contemporary theory” (48). 372

See Paul Gilroy’s, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 373

Lyotard makes this point in Driftworks, trans. R. McKeon (New York: Semiotext(e), 1984), about dialectical criticism. The problem is that dialectical critique functions as a kind of photographic negative of capitalism, preserving itself within the same representational framework. The critique instead of surpassing capitalism thus consolidates it. 374

See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1933), 77. 375

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 241.

376

Bhabha cites Mladan Dolar’s unpublished manuscript, The Legacy of the Enlightenment: Foucault and Lacan. 377

See Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”, trans. Catherine Porter, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1984), 32-50. 378

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 244.

379

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 243.

380

Bhabha’s critique is akin to Spivak’s interrogation of Deleuze and Foucault in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Gary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988), 271-311. Spivak argues that Deleuze and Foucault, in voicing their opposition to capitalist exploitation, homogenise the international division of labour, and overlook crucial differences between third world and first world workers. By masking the differences between workers within the context of global capitalism, the narrative fabricated in Deleuze’s and Foucault’s “Intellectuals and Power” is seen to be complicit with the anonymous subject that is 261

concealed in the narrative of Western history. Both of these French intellectuals refuse to acknowledge what Spivak calls a “sign, structure operating experience” (279). Such a refusal allows them to collapse the European “Subject of desire and power” with the “subject of the oppressed”. This leads to, Spivak continues, an “essentialist, utopian politics” (276). 381

Terry Maley, “The Politics of Time: Subjectivity and Modernity in Max Weber”, in The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment, ed. Asher Horowitz and Terry Maley (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1994), 147. 382

Maley, “The Politics of Time”, 147-148.

383

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 240.

384

See J. Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 1-41. 385

Tony Spybey, Social Change and Dependency (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 113.

386

Simon During, “Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today”, Textual Practice, vol. 1, no. 1 (1987), 33. 387

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 236.

388

Homi Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition”, in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hemel Hempstead, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 114. 389

Fanon cited in Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 237.

390

Frantz Fanon, Peau Noire Masques Blancs (Paris: Éditions Du Seuil, 1954), 207.

391

Bhabha writes, “I claim a generality for Fanon’s argument because he talks not simply of the historicity of the black man, as much he writes in ‘The fact of blackness’ about the temporality of modernity within which the figure of the ‘human’ comes to be authorized” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 236). 392

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 241-242.

393

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 237.

394

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 21.

395

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 25, 5.

396

See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989). 397

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86.

398

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 89.

399

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86.

400

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 97. 262

401

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 193.

402

Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 127.

403

Lord Alfred Tennyson, “Idylls of the King”, in The Concept of Empire: Burke to Attlee, 1774-1947, ed. George Bennett (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1962), 256. 404

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776; New York: The Modern Library, 1937), 899-900. 405

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 113-114.

406

Bhabha writes, “my contention, elaborated in my writings on postcolonial discourse in terms of mimicry, hybridity, sly civility, is that this liminal moment of identification ! eluding resemblance ! produces a subversive strategy of subaltern agency that negotiates its own authority through a process of iterative ‘unpicking’ and incommensurable, insurgent relinking. It singularizes the ‘totality’ of authority by suggesting that agency requires a grounding, but it does not require a totalization of those grounds; it requires movement and manoeuvre, but it does not require a temporality of continuity or accumulation; it requires direction and contingent closure but no teleology and holism (Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 184-185). 407

See Homi Bhabha, “Signs taken for Wonders”, in The Location of Culture, 102-122.

408

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 33.

409

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 23.

410

Manuel Castells, The City and the Grass Roots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 4. 411

Benita Parry, “Signs of Our Times”, 9, 7.

412

Parry, “Signs of Our Times”, 13.

413

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 37.

414

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 223, 228, 226, 225.

415

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 73, 79. 416

Benjamin, Illuminations, 80.

417

Benjamin, Illuminations, 69.

418

Benjamin, Illuminations, 81.

419

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 224.

420

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 25.

421

Homi Bhabha, David Bennett, and Terry Collits, “The Postcolonial Critic”, Arena, no. 96 (1991), 62. 263

422

Homi Bhabha, “The Third Space”, in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 210, 211. 423

Jean-François Lyotard, Driftworks, trans. R. McKeon (New York: Semiotext(e), 1984), 57-68. 424

Jean-François Lyotard, “On a Figure of Discourse”, in Toward the Postmodern, ed. Robert Harvey and Mark Roberts (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993), 14. 425

Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 50. 426

Lyotard, “On a Figure of Discourse”, 13, 14.

427

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 102-122.

428

See Michel Foucault’s “A Preface to Transgression”, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 29-52. 429

Bhabha, “The Postcolonial Critic”, 62.

430

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 172.

431

Bhabha, “The Postcolonial Critic”, 50-51.

432

Homi Bhabha, “Dance this Diss Around”, Artforum, April (1995), 19.

433

Bhabha, “Dance this Diss Around”, 20.

434

Bhabha, “Dance this Diss Around”, 20. See also Homi Bhabha, “A Question of Survival: Nations and Psychic States”, in Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory, ed. James Donald (Houndsmill: Macmillan, 1991), 96. 435

See Homi Bhabha’s, “Black Male”, Artforum (February 1995), 86-87. See also Bhabha’s “Novel Metropolis”, New Statesman (16 February 1990), 16-18. 436

See Pauline Hanson’s “One Nation” web site: http//:www.gwb.com.au/onenation/

437

For an interesting comparison of a similar phenomena in France in the 50’s, see Roland Barthes, “A Few Words from Monsieur Poujáde”, The Eiffel Tower and other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 51-53.

264

Chapter Six Rushdie’s Politics of Excess

A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.438

Two interrelated notions have animated my exploration of the postcolonial sublime. Firstly, the postcolonial sublime arises as a material excess that marks the impossibility of the tenability of myths of cultural unity. I have drawn upon the Kantian sublime and its Hegelian reformulation as a conservative trope to underscore what is at stake in evoking this excess. What emerges is the notion that in order to disrupt reason’s authority it is necessary to unleash the sublime from its conservative shackles. In the face of the threat of the sublime, European reason was supremely confident that such a threat would never overtake its capacity to unify conscious thought, and by extension the social. We could say that the discourse of the postcolonial begins when this supreme confidence is put into doubt. Fanon’s bodily excesses underscore this task. Secondly, the discourse of the postcolonial can be located alongside the postmodern, rather than implicated in it. I have argued in my critical engagement with Lyotard and Bhabha that postcolonial excesses demand to be understood in material terms. The sublime excess that the discourse of the postcolonial opens up, signals that the pure event that lies at the critical core of Lyotard’s postmodern sublime is inadequate. For the discourse of the postcolonial the signs of culture and history are overfull, rather than empty question marks.

Thus instead of the pure sites that preoccupy Lyotardian

incommensurability, a politics of contamination and negotiation emerges in the discourse of the postcolonial. In this chapter I propose to bring these concerns together. I will follow several interrelated lines of inquiry. Firstly I will outline what I consider to be an important 265

assumption concerning the social framing of Rushdie’s literature. ‘Rushdiecriticism’ is caught in a Romantic literary model, that either denounces or celebrates his work on the basis of its complicity in the myth of a heroic literature. I have in mind here my discussion in chapter three on Hegel’s Romantic slave. As Fanon reveals, such a binary formulation fails to adequately describe the literature of the postcolonial. I would contend that this is true of Rushdie’s literature also. His work resists at every turn the romantic model that dominates ‘Rushdiecriticism’.

In continuing the thesis’

engagement with the question of the postmodern and the postcolonial, I will then turn to Aijaz Ahmad’s well known denouncement of Rushdie as an irresponsible postmodern. I would wish to challenge such a reading on two interrelated fronts. Firstly, I will show that in Ahmad’s rigid critical practice a leakage, a moment of excess arises that exemplifies, perfectly, the strategies employed in Rushdie’s sublime resistance to neat categorisation. And Secondly, in a reading of the remarkable Midnight’s Children, with the support of Shame, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor’s Last Sigh, I will show that Rushdie’s politics can be understood in terms of the excessive disruptions and contaminations that mark what I have called the postcolonial sublime. Finally I will take up Rushdie’s literature in social terms, and with his own statements concerning the public necessity of the artist in mind, I will further develop the postcolonial sublime by theorising his work in terms of its disturbances to conservative political teleologies. Rushdiecriticism In the wake of Marxist models of literary production the mystique that surrounds the art of the exiled has been contested. Indeed in celebrations of the high modernist art that ranges from Joyce’s Ulysses to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India to D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent, and from Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon the alienated exile has emerged in aesthetic theory as a gifted social figure. Exile as a form of alienation was considered 266

a metaphor for the dehumanising effects of modernity. The splintering of the frame and rejection of realism in Picasso’s painting and Modernist literature, were built upon a fascination with dislocation and displacement as instances that necessitate the destruction of form. Against such a celebration of exile, Marxists such Lukács have defended and redefined realism.

Ahmad’s argument concerning Rushdie’s

irresponsibility can be read in terms of Lukács’ rejection of the power of alienation. His concern with the (ir)responsibility of Rushdie’s artistic form is drawn up in terms of the problematic figure of the migrant intellectual, who, for many, corresponds to that great myth of the exiled genius at the core of Modernism. Denouncements of Rushdie can be formulated as follows: since Rushdie enjoys both economic and intellectual privileges, and is distanced from his subject(s), his art fails to engage in the struggle that makes History. In more general terms, Rushdie can be considered a detached, masculine, bourgeois Idealist who produces texts that perpetuate dominant myths.

Harveen Sachdeva Mann argues in such terms.

The

Satanic Verses, Mann contends, works through a problematic in which the postmodern attack upon materialism is simply an intellectual elitism that alienates ‘the people’. Mann writes:

there is … a disjunction between Rushdie’s stated desire and textual practice, that, in fact, the “average,” majority Indian migrant in Britain is not his principal target reader in The Satanic Verses becomes amply clear from the author’s linguistic practices. While his multilingualism in The Satanic Verses can, on the one hand, be read as a metaphor of resistance to the imperialism of English — much as Derrida reads Joyce’s polyglotism in Finnegans Wake — such resistance remains largely inaccessible to the non-literary reader unfamiliar with the Joycean

267

wordplay of modernism, the elitist learning of the privileged academic, and the postmodernist rhetoric of pastiche.439

Jean M. Kane similarly (contra Linda Hutcheon’s reading of the dissemination of Saleem as the creative centre440) reads Midnight’s Children in terms of its moment of production: Rushdie’s limited recollection of India from the metropolitan centre. The limits of this cultural location are reflected in the text through the figure of Saleem, who accepts the part for the whole, and writes his history through the metaphor of sexual competence upon the body of woman. Kane contends that the fluidity of the Midnight’s narrative remains far from open, and is secure in the domain of its creator, the master Saleem. The “phallic model”, Kane declares, “emphasises Saleem’s singular agency as a masculine writer remote from his co-citizens.”441 Rushdie thus speaks for a literary model, in this instance, that corresponds in its epistemological moment to the masculinist creator author that was valorised by the English literary establishment. If Ahmad, Kane, and Mann question Rushdie’s political status, it is significant that ‘Rushdiecriticism’ is driven largely by a popular celebration that bears a remarkable resemblance to the Kantian Genius and Hegel’s valorisation of the romantic slave (as I discussed chapter’s two and three of this thesis). The figure of the exiled artist, the underling that lay at the core of eighteenth-century aesthetic celebrations, has been replayed, perhaps too quickly, in discussions concerning the figure of the migrant intellectual.

If Ahmad, Kane, and Mann draw the trope of the modern artist as

outsider/underling into their reservations concerning the political value of Rushdie, others have taken this trope in order to champion Rushdie as a kind of twentieth-century literary genius.442 We hear echoes of the figure of exile as genius in Dieter Riemenschneider’s celebration of Rushdie’s work. In seizing Saleem as a metaphor for the value of aesthetic reflection, Riemenschneider announces:

268

there is, after all, some meaning, and this lies in employing one’s recollection in order to give history immortality. This suggests that man’s purpose in life as well as in history is to preserve it, hand its ‘meaning’ down to others for them to listen to, and, perhaps, to learn from. Saleem, so it appears, has learnt his moral lesson. Yet underneath we detect another more embracing dimension to Saleem’s account, a philosophical quest. Rushdie, apart from telling a moral story, is basically concerned with the crucial question of Indian philosophy and the Indian mind.443

The implication is that the ‘Indian’ mind is able to be accessed more fully at a distance. Rather than the immediacy and contingency of national space, Riemenschneider champions creative possibilities that are opened up through distance. We can recall Kant’s spectators of the French revolution here. As I suggested in chapter four, for Lyotard the supremacy of the Ideas over the terrifying in nature signals that at the core of the revolution’s celebrated Freedom, there is indeterminate judgement.

This

indeterminacy suggests that politics can be understood in terms of aesthetic principles, rather than the supposed certainties of theoretical and practical reason. Bhabha, on the other hand, takes issue with the universal tone that is implicated in this celebration of the creative possibilities of aesthetic judgement (as I discussed in chapter five of this thesis). I would suggest that such a universality underpins Riemenschneider’s Rushdie. Bhabha’s mistrust of the universal overtones that mark postmodern thinkers such as Lyotard, leaves us with a difficult question: does Rushdie’s excess like Lyotard’s avantgarde merely assert a new universal? I will take up this issue in detail in due course. For the moment it is sufficient to claim that this is not the case. It seems to me that Rushdie’s excess opens up a politics of contamination and negotiation that cannot be

269

understood as a new universal.444 As I have shown, the purity of Lyotard’s postmodern spaces are not what is at issue in the discourse of the postcolonial. Rather the reverse is the case, namely that the discourse of the postcolonial sets out to reveal the impossibility of pure spaces. The echoes of Riemenschneider’s celebration of the detached artist, in its various forms, almost drown out Rushdie’s dissenters. Alongside Riemenschneider we find Durix, who similarly champions Rushdie’s unbelonging and belonging. “Being a man of the ‘First’ and of the ‘Third’ world at the same time”, Durix writes, “he may be better equipped than many to approach contemporary political and social problems”.445 And Aikant likewise celebrates Rushdie’s self imposed exile from India as the most apt vantage point from which to contest the totalising narratives of Western historiography.446

The infamous fatwa merely compounds what is essentially a

celebration of the Kantian disinterested aesthetic that was historically located by Hegel: the artist as authoritative outsider/underling. Paul Gray’s review of East, West pushes such a celebration to extremes. The assumption is that a truly ‘free’ art is forged in the face of death. The political cogency of Hegel’s theorisation of the master and slave relationship is no where more apparent. He declares:

Since these stories cannot make things worse for Rushdie than they already are, he has, on the page, the luxury of total freedom.447

To Paul Gray’s Hegelian concerns we can add, Pico Iyer’s announcement on East, West:

270

[...] all these perverse twists in have a special authority when coming from a man who discovered riches in the same breath as a death-sentence, and acquired fame at precisely the moment when he could no longer enjoy it.448

Tom Wilhelmus likewise celebrates The Moor’s Last Sigh as a great triumph against adversity. In a state of depravation (Rushdie hiding as a consequence of the fatwa) the literary value of the work is intensified. Because “of its energy”, Wilhelmus writes, “and tolerance, its courage and its sheer entertainment value, it is difficult not to view it as heroic.”449 I have no problem with the notion that Rushdie has displayed nothing less than great courage in the face of adversity. What I would wish to take issue with is the notion that this courage belongs to, and indeed is a driving force in, myths of progress. Such a myth, for instance, can be found at the edges of Al-Azm’s celebration of Rushdie as a great dissident.

In lending credence to Hegel’s concern for the

undiminished spirit of slave culture, he frames Rushdie as a dissident, and The Satanic Verses as the expression of an historically valid struggle, a “lesson”. Al-Azm writes:

If Louis Althusser can take pride in praising Spinoza’s philosophy for “terrifying its time” by providing “one of the great lessons in heresy the world has seen,” then I see no reason why we cannot take pride in praising Rushdie’s novel also for “terrifying its time” by providing “one of the greatest lessons in heresy that the Muslim world has seen”.450

Samir Dayal’s “Talking Dirty: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children” takes Azm’s point of entry into the field of ‘Rushdiecriticism’ a step further. I would suggest that the celebration of dissidence that underscores the surety of Dayal’s argument

271

presents important difficulties. Dayal draws upon the famous French dissident Bataille to unpack and to politicise the visceral language of Midnight’s Children, and The Satanic Verses. The plotted line from dissident to dissident, however, produces an interesting critical formulation that can be drawn up around similarity and difference. We thus find a politics of “displacement” in both Bataille and Rushdie. Dayal writes, Rushdie “shares Bataille’s rejection of the presumed hegemony of the high, pure, and intellectual over its supplement, the low, impure, visceral”451. But in having asserted Bataille, Dayal is also anxious to stress Rushdie’s differences.

Bataille’s visceral

essentialism should not be conflated with viscerality in Rushdie. Dayal thus brackets off Bataille’s essentialism as a difference — he repeats: “Admittedly, Rushdie does not go as far in this direction”; “Rushdie does not risk Bataille’s incendiary and essentialist assertion”452 — and concentrates on what he considers to be useful similarities. But such an approach produces a limited critical practice, and a restricted understanding of Rushdie. The shadow of Hegelian progress still looms large upon Dayal’s critical landscape. It is difficult to see how Rushdie escapes the romantic celebration of the slave that is at the core of Hegelian progress. This is not to suggest that Bataille is Hegelian (though he is decidedly Kojèvean); it is to suggest that the relationship between Rushdie and Bataille that Dayal charts is Hegelian. I would question the critical strength of such a charting. Dayal’s celebration is constrained by a structure of similarity, a structure that is just one step away from the tradition of influence that preoccupies traditional literary studies. I would wish to ask in response to this approach, what is at stake in this bracketing? What happens to Bataille if you remove the essence from his celebration of the visceral? What stops Rushdie from crossing the line that Dayal has drawn? I ask this because Dayal, and indeed the celebration of Rushdie generally, tends to isolate the critical capacity of his work. By this I mean that criticism such as Dayal’s isolates Rushdie in the same manner that

272

Lyotard isolates the Kantian sublime. Such an approach fails to deal with Rushdie’s leakages, contaminations, his politics of excess. I would contend that Dayal’s attempt to draw a line from Bataille to Rushdie, in order to explain and to demystify Rushdie’s viscerality, and nothing more, misses the space of the bracket as an excessive and uncontainable site. As such the presence of this great European dissident, though fundamentally flawed according to Dayal, is still able to explain postcolonial literature. This is a puzzling critical practice. Bataille has at once been drawn upon as a ‘pure’ site from which to judge, and yet has also been rejected. The gesture of this rejection is undoubtedly the essay’s strength, but it is also the site of its weakness, for in having opened up the possibility of difference, Dayal refuses to read Rushdie’s visceral excesses back against Bataille’s essentialism. Rather than pay attention to the nuances of Rushdie as a disruption to Bataille, as antagonistic, as Dayal anxiously tells us, he is content to conflate, to categorise, and to ignore productive differences. Thus instead of a diverse and rich field built upon critical contaminations that produce new sites, disruption, and perhaps even critical dialogue, Dayal reduces Rushdie to the mere repetition of the critical strategies of the famous theoretical dissidents. Against defining and categorising Rushdie in terms of a great tradition of some sort, I would thus argue that studies that situate Rushdie as a kind of heroic dissident have missed what troubles thinkers such as Ahmad. Even though Ahmad is prone to an Hegelian vision of art, he still sees something much more disturbing, more excessive, more resistant to the comparative approach of Dayal, or the Hegelian insistence upon the regenerative capacity of slave culture.

With this sense of more troubling

disturbances, I would wish to turn to work of Ahmad. For it is Ahmad who, perhaps unwittingly, opens a much more politically cogent Rushdie. And we can understand this cogency in terms of the postcolonial sublime.

273

Ahmad and the Politics of Excess When the Indian Marxist Aijaz Ahmad writes in his In Theory that Rushdie’s “art can only be an art of despair”453 we are drawn into a specific understanding concerning the political capacity of postcolonial art.

In the context of Ahmad’s

argument this aesthetic despair functions as a negative symptom, and is situated in a broad social and historical polemic against current intellectual trends. Rushdie’s Shame is understood by Ahmad as the deplorable formal product of the pernicious link between the formation of a ‘Third World’ literary counter-canon, and an academic climate that is preoccupied with debunking nationalism and rejecting materialism. For Ahmad this hostility to nationalism and materialism is based upon an indulgent avant-gardist literary model that produces questioning strategies that exclude crucial issues such as gender, class, global capitalism, and the social determination of critical practices.454 Rushdie’s ‘art of despair’ thus emerges as the logical product of an existential being animated by metaphors which privilege uncertainty and unbelonging, and an academic institution that is historically and politically implicated in late capitalism. Ahmad’s denouncement of Rushdie thus takes up the bracketed sublime of Lyotard, as manifest in his work upon the avant-garde, as a model for Rushdie’s art. As I maintained in my discussion on Bhabha in the previous chapter, such a model is an inadequate description of the discourse of the postcolonial. An uncompromisingly ideological reading of Rushdie by Ahmad — and it is clear that this is so throughout — sets forth what I would consider to be several oversimplifications in its formal engagement with Rushdie’s text.

These

oversimplifications are underpinned by the notion that Shame, and Rushdie’s work generally, represents only the unmediated perspective of the privileged class, and excludes the heroic struggle of the under-class. Rushdie is thus condemned to represent a ‘Pakistan in slices’. The totality, which necessarily includes the historic struggle of an 274

underclass against oppression, is thus ignored. A text that has lost sight of the totality in this manner thus loses sight of the real issues, and represents the real tragedy of tyrants comically,455 perpetuates misogyny against women, and plummets into the depths of narcissistic despair.456 If we are persuaded, after Ahmad we are obliged to conclude that there is no political worth in Rushdie’s avant-gardist, “depthless” form! But is this link between Rushdie’s art and the avant-garde tenable? Is it valid to assume that avant-gardist art and theory have seduced Rushdie’s postcoloniality such that the form and stakes of his texts can only be considered the mere reflection of the avant-gardist master texts? For the thesis this question is crucial. I have maintained that the discourse of the postcolonial cannot simply be defined as a moment within the postmodern. As I argued in the previous chapter on Bhabha, the postcolonial exceeds postmodern formulations. I would contend that Rushdie’s art refuses at every turn to be contained in the neat oppositions that underpin such judgements. In its sheer excess this is an art that poses questions that more conventional political and artistic models fail to deal with. Ahmad’s judgement upon Rushdie draws upon the age-old opposition between the socialist realist novel form and the fragmented and ‘unmediated totalities’ that characterise modernism. We hear echoes of Lukács’ famous edict:

[the modernist self] is an ahistorical being. … This negation of history takes two different forms in modernist literature. First, the hero is strictly confined within the limits of his own experience.

There is not for him — and

apparently not for his creator — any pre-existent reality beyond his own self, acting upon him or being acted upon by him. Secondly, the hero himself is without personal history. unfathomably.

He is ‘thrown-into-the-world’: meaninglessly,

He does not develop through contact with the world; he

275

neither forms nor is formed by it. The only ‘development’ in this literature is the gradual revelation of the human condition.457

Lukács draws a dividing line between modernism and critical realism. What is at issue is the manner in which the artist negotiates the dialectic between the subjective self and the historical world. Art in Lukács’ language occupies the space between the poles of this opposition, or at least is able to reproduce an ontological space that holds this opposition in a tension, such that one side is not reduced to the other. This is a problem for modernist art, which, Lukács argues, mistakenly confuses the objective world for the subjective self. Consequently modernist art plummets into melancholy. Freud defines melancholy, that dark side of romanticism, as the unconscious ‘loss of a love object’, a sentimental ‘excess’ that “casts a pathological shade on the grief, forcing it to express itself in the form of self-reproaches, to the effect that the mourner himself is to blame for the loss of the loved one”.458 Self-blame, or at least the sense of hopelessness that comes from the realisation that nothing could, or can be done, produces a narcissistic withdrawal into a relation with the lost object. If we are to follow Lukács this is the narcissistic tendency that manifests itself in modernist art. Modernism, as a melancholic form, has lost the material world as an object, and redirected its energy into the subjective, Idealist world of the self. For Ahmad, Rushdie’s art is nothing more than (post)modernism’s melancholic paragon. Marked by a “conceptual flaw of a fundamental kind”, Rushdie, like Lukács’ modernist, simply fails to “include integral regenerative possibilities within the Grotesque world of his imaginative creation”.459

Rushdie is driven by what is

understood as a kind of political despair in which “one acts … not because one hopes to change anything but because one is condemned, by existential necessity, to act”.460 There appears from this perspective to be no discontinuity between Beckett’s complex

276

(post)modernist formulation: “I can’t go on ... I will go on”,461 and Rushdie’s aesthetic. Such despair thus lends itself to the political conclusion that this is an ‘art’ form that is politically irresponsible. The finality of Ahmad’s political judgement suggests that Rushdie has been ‘summed up’, that the secret that underpins his work has been revealed in its entirety. This is also a judgement that becomes prescriptive in its enunciation. After Ahmad there appears to be no room for debate. A politically productive art is possible only if certain formal practices are adhered to. But in the weave of Ahmad’s text we find a significant anomaly that works against this sense of finality, and opens up a useful space for engaging in Rushdie’s fiction, and ultimately in the discourse of the postcolonial. This anomaly emerges initially in the moment that Ahmad necessarily concedes that he also has given us only a slice of his object. In staging an attack based upon Rushdie’s class affiliations — and hence a partial representation of Pakistan that excludes the role of the historical and heroic underclass struggling against the conditions of oppression — Ahmad is anxious to point out that the Rushdie that he presents is ‘pure’. In other words, his pre-fatwa Rushdie has not been tainted by that frenzy of publication that marked the Satanic Verses Affair. Ahmad’s is a cool, detached speculative reason. This means that Rushdie’s Shame merely articulates as its organising fiction what for Ahmad is a claim that attempts to reveal the ‘pure’ nature of his inquiry. Of course the assumption is that this pure part directly relates to, and in a sense informs, Rushdie’s art as a whole. But there is no solid ground for this assumption. A quick glance at the Rushdie affair, for instance, reveals that Rushdie’s art occupies a messy and conflictual terrain that is marked by various voices disputing (violently) how Rushdie’s art can be made to mean. The Satanic Verses has been resisted and championed in a variety of concrete national contexts, and upon divergent political fronts. The proper name, ‘Rushdie’, has been subject to an agonistic process of

277

inscription that renders its meaning illusive and uncertain. ‘Rushdie’ has been the site for dispute, clash, struggle. We find ‘Rushdie’ contested, for instance, in the cultural imaginary of the postcolonial Indian parliament,462 in the struggle of British Muslims for equity and justice,463 and in the political opportunism of Iran’s powerful clerics.464 We also find ‘Rushdie’ inscribed into the discourse of ‘free expression’, the valorisation of the autonomy of the artist and aesthetic object,465 the defence of capitalist consumption,466 and the assimilationist racism of British purity: “British Muslims should know their Koran, of course, but they should also know their Shakespeare”.467 Rushdie’s inscription, despite the appearance of a rigid set of critical agendas, thus remains far from settled. The affair reveals that an official version of Rushdie is yet to arrive. Cultural ownership of this proper name and what it means is illusory. As English Literature, Rushdie’s work remains a disputed entity, a signal that the literary landscape can no longer be considered a homogeneous contribution to humanity’s Geist. This historical moment reveals that Rushdie’s art in many ways exceeds the possibility of formulation. There is simply too much Rushdie to be contained in the part. Just as Rushdie concedes there is too much Pakistan to be contained as a totality in a single novel.468 This means that Ahmad’s study reveals that a final judgement about Rushdie’s art is yet to be made. For the attempt to contain and confine the aesthetic, like all attempts at a universal politics, can only ever be incomplete. The problem of excess and its relation to the political can be found in that moment in which an excess bursts forth and haunts Ahmad’s controlled social and historical text. At a point in the argument that attempts to set forth the political seriousness of art, Ahmad makes an interesting turn to the language of traditional aesthetics and concedes, “both the parody and the burlesque are at times delicious, inventive, hilarious”. But this brief lapse into aesthetic pleasure is immediately subordinated to a political judgement.

278

Ahmad

continues, “Rushdie has given us a Laughter which laughs, unfortunately, much too often … that one is in danger of forgetting that Bhutto and Zia were in reality no buffoons, but highly capable and calculating men whose cruelties were entirely methodical”.469 I would contend that this lapse into the ‘delicious’ pleasure of the text by Ahmad produces an interesting problematic. For this is a lapse that reveals that Rushdie’s fiction works in (at least) two distinct ways, and suggests that the relationship between the aesthetic and the political in the postcolonial context is much more complex than Ahmad would have us believe. How is it possible for a text to be pleasurable and at the same time in a state of political despair? What strategies of thinking enable this opposition between aesthetic pleasure and political judgement? If we turn to the language of Kant — as Ahmad’s own discussion demands that we should — it seems that a direct cognitive judgement of the work has been privileged over a purely aesthetic feeling. The metaphor ‘delicious’ functions as a non-conceptual inner feeling. There is a sense in which Ahmad relaxes and doesn’t maintain the rule that governs the object. This is a pleasure in the literary characters as they are in themselves, in the form in which they appear in the imagination. The “hilarity” that Ahmad concedes, in this instance, is thus not in any way related to the laughter that, as Bergson writes, “does not belong to the province of esthetics alone, since unconsciously … it pursues a utilitarian aim of general improvement” (sic).470

Ahmad’s laughter reveals the possibility of the Kantian

aesthetic; he assigns no symbolic value to this aesthetic pleasure in this instance. Thus a certain aesthetic ‘deliciousness’ is enjoyed, and with it all of the trappings of Kant’s judgement of taste: a disinterest in the object that bypasses cognitive knowledge,471 the universal validity of aesthetic pleasure,472 a pure harmonious pleasure that is without a concept in order to judge what the object ought to be,473 and perhaps even the possibility of the ‘exemplary satisfaction’ and subsequent ‘senus communis’ that accompany

279

judgements of taste.474 But it is striking to find that Ahmad is at great pains to break with this aesthetic disinterestedness in order to judge the work in purely political terms. In relegating aesthetic pleasure to what appears to be an isolated domain, Ahmad introduces a puzzling moment. The excessive “Laughter” seems to move beyond the limits of aesthetic pleasure, enters the symbolic and produces a negative political effect. Perhaps this textual moment in Rushdie can be described as a movement beyond the beautiful to the sublime. This would mean that Ahmad’s rejection of Rushdie is based upon a rejection of the conservatism, as I argued in chapter two, of the Kantian Sublime. I intend to deal with this issue in due course. For the moment, however, I am interested in the problematics of this textual movement. Why does Ahmad seem to embrace aesthetic pleasure in one moment, and then in the next reject the excesses that this pleasure produces? Clearly, for Ahmad, pleasure and politics are incommensurable. I use the term incommensurable because I am not sure just where the line between a disinterested aesthetic pleasure and politics in this instance can be drawn, and I am not convinced that Ahmad would have us draw it either. I would contend, however, that what this puzzling moment reveals is that there is another agenda at work in this consideration of art and politics and the politics of art. It seems that Ahmad has made a theoretical switch without telling us. I would suggest that this is a switch, subtle and allusive as it is, from Kant’s aesthetic, as I have outlined, to a more Hegelian conception of art. Ahmad makes a very clear point: “too much” laughter detracts from social reality. When aesthetic pleasure becomes excessive — “Laughter” — it disrupts the capacity of the text to deliver what could be called a representation that reveals the object’s rules. Rushdie’s excesses seem to work against this representational capacity, and instead produce a condition of ‘forgetting’ what constitutes objects (in this case Bhutto and Zia) in the actual world. The issue for Ahmad has thus moved beyond

280

aesthetic pleasure to questions concerning adequate representation. Ahmad is interested in the denotative capacity of art. Art is thus an object of cognition, it tells us something about the state of the world. It seems that aesthetic excess interferes in that cognitive process, and thus produces falsity, or at the very least detracts from objective reality. Aristotle’s notion concerning an art of the material everyday is in play here. Again I call upon Lukács in order to exemplify Ahmad’s theoretical platform. He writes:

The Aristotelian dictum [zoon politikon] is applicable to all great realistic literature. Achilles and Werther, Oedipus and Tom Jones, Antigone and Anna Kerenina: their individual existence — their Sein an sich, in the Hegelian terminology; their ‘ontological being’, as a more fashionable terminology has it — cannot be distinguished from their social and historical environment.475

This formulation is crucial in a conception of art as a representation of the object’s rules. The problem of the author’s social context — the ‘context of creation’ — and the degree to which that context is able to be dealt with in an individual and imaginative way, is vital in Ahmad’s implicit demand for a representational art. How is it possible for art to be at once determined by the social everyday and open to the possibilities of imaginative creation? Lukács draws upon Hegel to triumphantly solve this problem. He introduces the category of potentiality to stage the crucial relation between the inner subjective self and the outer social world.476 This relation is characterised as the essential opposition between the abstract and the concrete nature of human existence. Hegel writes:

281

In order to comprehend what development is, what may be called two different states must be distinguished. The first is what is known as capacity, power, what I call being-in-itself … the second principle is that of being-for-itself, actuality.477

Here we find a notion in which the individual self, with an inner world, coincides with the world of social relations, the outer world. It is an opposition which, for Lukács, effects two basic responses: on the one hand, the idealism of subjective interiority which can imagine an infinite number of historical possibilities for the self, and on the other, the concrete actions, the willing interaction of the inner self with objective reality in order to achieve the self’s inner intentions. The creative self is thus always already located in relation to the social world. Authentic acts of creation therefore negotiate the social, and it is precisely the failure to stage this relation in an adequate way, on the part of Rushdie who seemingly errs on the side of the subjective, that Ahmad denounces. The question of art has thus moved in Ahmad’s text from the domain of the purely aesthetic, with its subjective pleasures, to the domain of knowledge, and subsequently politics, from the realm of Kant’s Critique of Judgement to that of Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy.478 Ultimately it is the domain of knowledge that attempts to reject and close down aesthetic excess in the name of a pure politics. Ahmad’s reading strategy thus produces a textual tension, an opposition between pleasure and politics.

In his implicit insistence upon potentiality the opposition

functions, like all oppositions, hierarchically, and representational art is privileged over what is considered to be unmediated pleasure. But I would contend that this attempt to depoliticise the pleasure of the text, precisely because of the theoretical switch that informs it, is inadequate in its engagement with Rushdie. Ahmad’s turn to a Hegelian conception of art, despite conceding that aesthetic pleasure in terms of Kant’s outline of the judgement of taste is at certain points legitimate (what a delicious text!), fails to deal

282

with the nuances of the art/politics nexus that inhabits Rushdie. Put simply, Ahmad’s judgement upon Rushdie amounts to a theoretical plug for a rigid Hegelian/Lukácsian approach to art, at the expense of the nuances of a questioning art that seeks to disrupt rigid theoretical paradigms, and open up the question of politics itself.479 Ahmad reads Rushdie’s excesses as an abdication of artistic responsibility. He is content to reduce questions concerning Rushdie’s postcoloniality to a squabble over what side of the Marxist/Postmodernist fence the artist seems to sit. But in having evoked excess as disturbance, as his problematic handling reveals, after Ahmad we are compelled to rethink Rushdie’s politics, and politics itself. I would wish to take up the excesses that Ahmad finds troubling. Clearly such excess belongs to the discourse of the sublime. And whilst I have utilised Kant to open up this sublime, I would contend that ultimately the excess that Rushdie opens up moves beyond the conservative formulations of Kant. I will turn to a reading of Midnight’s Children in order to unpack the politics of Rushdie’s excess. In this work the relation between the issues of migrancy and nationalism are taken up as a site upon which an historical excess may be written. I would wish to theorise this historical excess and its political capacity in terms of the postcolonial sublime. Midnight’s Children as Essay on the Postcolonial Sublime I had been mysteriously hand-cuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country.480

[…] you should never underestimate a spittoon.481

As Ahmad’s more general conclusions concerning Rushdie reveal, Midnight’s Children can be considered a seminal work that draws a politics of excess into questions concerning historical responsibility. My contention is, however, that 283

Rushdie stages a politics not by putting history to death, thus denying social obligation, but, through the notion that history itself is excessive as opposed to insular and singular, foregrounds the necessity of judgement. His is thus not an abdication of responsibility, but an exploration of what constitutes a responsible historicism in the face of the real as excess. In other words, the most compelling issue in Rushdie, in the context of this thesis, is the ‘too much’ history that an elite Indian nationalism is forced struggle with. The problematic replays what I have suggested is at the core of the postcolonial sublime. As opposed to the unifying teleology of nationalism, the postcolonial sublime is the excess that such a teleology is unable to subordinate to its rule. Rushdie is interested in this excess. Thus as soon as we enter the terrain of history in Rushdie we are in the terrain of the postcolonial sublime. I will unpack what is at stake in Rushdie’s sublime by exploring the construction of the historical self in Midnight’s Children. I will begin with the question: how does an artist write history? For Ahmad, Rushdie simply produces history in an Idealist/Romantic fashion. In such a formulation, Rushdie’s art can be understood as a radicalisation of Addison’s eighteenth-century assertion: “it is the part of the Poet to humour the Imagination ... by mending and perfecting Nature”482 (as discussed in chapter two of the thesis).

Such an assertion, for Ahmad, is

underpinned by the principles of the Marxist understanding of history as class struggle. Thus, with prescriptive overtones, art ought to objectively symbolise that struggle. But the relation of the objective scientist to the object is not the same as the artist’s relation to the object, at least as we might understand ‘art’ since Kant. Art intervenes in the perception of objects, in the experience of things in themselves. As such art that deals with what could loosely be called ‘history’, takes up a relation to the object that does not necessarily correspond to the epistemological concerns of the

284

objective scientist.

Rushdie is a case in point.

Yet an artistic relation to the

historical cannot be confined simply to the positivist implications that underpin Kantian formulations of ‘art’, as if art is an end in itself devoid of objective historical concerns and consequences, either. Art, unlike objective science, has not only its own history, it also takes up science’s claim to objectivity in order to reveal the subjective base that lays beneath its own creative core. Rushdie again is a case in point. So what does he mean by history? Objective historical writing assumes that there is a History, a dominant narrative to be recorded. This assumption is driven by the comfortable ease in which the object reveals itself to the subject. In this regard Ahmad’s Marxism owes much to a reworked Hegelian Idealism. But Rushdie’s version of the subcontinent exceeds the formulations of the rigid Ahmad. History is less a ‘grand narrative’, in the singular, than too much, an excess, many narratives. As such, rather than deny historical obligations, Rushdie attempts to remain receptive to history as excess. Thus we find in Midnight’s Children a concern for the impossibility of separating historical fact from both the history of the writing of historical facts, and the creative politics of the subject that engages in such facts. In such a formulation the relation of the subject to the object is not impossible, but difficult and unsettled. I have begun my discussion of Midnight’s Children with this difficult epistemology, to underscore what has been my concern throughout the thesis: what are the political implications of a politics of excess? Whilst excess has been, and continues to be, central in conservative cultural and national constructions, the problem of excess, as I have maintained throughout the thesis, takes an interesting turn in the discourse of the postcolonial.

The temporal complexities of the

postcolonial location (Bhabha) cannot be contained by the neat formulations of conservatism. I have traced these neat formulations in my engagement in Idealism

285

and the sublime (chapter’s two and three). Since the discourse of the postcolonial works against conservative teleologies — it arises as an uncontainable site — it demands to be understood as a disturbing presence for such a teleology. Rushdie’s work is crucial in this undertaking since it takes up historical excess in order to open up questions concerning historical responsibility. Thus it must be noted that Rushdie’s art refuses the pretension to objectivity that underpins Ahmad’s determinate judgement, and which problematically structures his vision for objective creative writing. However, on the other hand, we do not find the disinterested aesthetic that has been erected in the name of Kant either. Rushdie occupies an unsettling space in-between. This is not to occupy a creative space that assumes that the subjective and the objective have no relation, or conversely, that they must be held in a rigid tension. Rather, it is to foreground both the form and the stakes of such a relation. We can think Rushdie’s excess in terms of this foregrounding. Such a foregrounding lends itself to the question of judgment: how should we judge history? Thus, at the outset, Midnight’s Children confronts the reader with the first person narrator, Saleem, who is in the process of writing himself/India. Saleem’s act of narration is far from naive, it is self-consciously located in the split that I have suggested inhabits the term ‘history’. Saleem seems to be caught in a strange struggle that would render the space of the objective and the subjective, as discrete spaces in themselves, highly problematic. Saleem introduces himself and the aim and the scope of the project by telling us that he is a midnight’s child, who is fortuitously linked to India’s triumphant independence from colonial rule. His relation to this historical event, to Indian history, is set forth via a metaphor — ‘handcuffed’ — that evokes notions of connection, inseparability, and in some respects, servitude.

Similar metaphors

occupy a central place in Rushdie’s oeuvre: “joined, if only by elastic bands”;483 “‘to

286

be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta, tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die’;484 the comma in-between East, West;485 and, “here-I-stand-or-sit with my life’s sentences nailed to the landscape”.486

Given such an emphasis upon the

impossibility of disconnection from history, it is strange to find that Saleem’s aim in writing is to dispel the meaningless void that haunts the edges of his being.

[…] time (having no further use for me) is running out. I will soon be thirtyone years old. Perhaps. If my crumbling, over-used body permits. But I have no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having even a thousand nights and a night. I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning — yes, meaning — something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.487

We can understand this ominous meaninglessness — the absurd — in spite of the metaphor of connection in the terms that Lyotard set forth in his discussion on the avant-garde. The threat of the ‘nothing further happens’ is synonymous to closure, death.

Meaning for Lyotard is opened up in the ‘something happens’,488 the

possibility of meaning is staged in temporal terms. To stop time, to put a halt upon its effects, to ignore the something happens, is to close down affirmative possibilities. I use the term ‘affirmative’ in the sense that I outlined in my discussion on Lyotard in chapter four.

‘Affirmative’ suggests a sense of doing justice, a

responsibility for outcomes.

Thus despite the meaningless void, that sense of

closure, Saleem desperately clings to the possibility of affirmative being. The possibility of such an affirmation, as I will show, cannot be understood in terms of the simple divide of the subject and the object. Rushdie writes from the muddy space in-between these clearly marked categories. His texts seek to remain

287

open to what he perceives is the excess of history, and the difficulties that such an excess presents. We can understand Rushdie’s art in terms of its disturbances to neat formulations. This, as I have suggested, is an issue Ahmad fails to take into account. I would thus wish to suggest that a more cogent reading of Rushdie can be undertaken by paying attention to the political force of excess in his work. No other image in the Rushdie corpus portrays excess more aptly than Aurora Zogoiby’s bedroom painting. Here we find what could be called a logic of the palimpsest. Such a logic underpins Rushdie’s work generally, and becomes the grounds for the problem of judgement that I have suggested is at the core of Rushdie’s political project. It will be useful to include the quote in full. The implied narrator declares:

Every inch of the walls and even the ceiling of the room pullulated with figures, human and animal, real and imaginary, drawn in a sweeping black line that transformed itself constantly, that filled here and there into huge blocks of colour, the red of the earth, the purple and vermilion of the sky, the forty shades of green; a line so muscular and free, so teeming, so violent, that Camoens with a proud father’s bursting heart found himself saying, ‘But it is the great swarm of being itself.’ [...] she had put history on the walls, King Gondophares inviting St Thomas the Apostle to India; and from the North, Empora Asoka with his Pillars of Law, and the lines of people waiting to stand with their backs against the pillars to see if they could join their hands behind them for good luck; and her versions of erotic temple-carvings, whose explicit details made Camoens blanch, and of the building of the Taj Mahal, after which, as she unflinchingly showed, its great masons were mutilated, their hands cut off, so that they could never build anything finer; and from her own

288

South she had chosen the battle of Srirangapatnam and the sword of Tipu Sultan and the magic fortress of Golconda where a man speaking normally in the gatehouse may be heard clearly in the citadel and the coming long ago of the Jews. Modern history was there too, there were jails full of passionate men, Congress and Muslim league, Nehru Gandhi Jinnah Patel Bose Azad, and British soldiers whispering rumours of an approaching war; and beyond history were the creatures of her fancy, the hybrids, half-woman half-tiger, half-man half-snake, there were sea-monsters and mountain ghouls. In an honoured place was Vasco da Gama himself, setting his foot on Indian soil, sniffing the air, and seeking out whatever was spicy and hot and made money.489

I would contend that the palimpsest opens up the question: How should we judge history as excess? Such a question emerges in this instance as a matter of crises. With polemical overtones it corresponds to the political landscape of which it is an integral part: how is history currently being judged? In the context of my concern with the question of excess, the latter judgement can be understood in terms of a unifying teleology. India as palimpsest emerges as a counter to historical teleologies. It is thus in this split and torn space, between the registers of absolute possibility and the constraints of political necessity (survival?), that we hear at the edges of Saleem’s desire for affirmative meaning the term ‘rewrite’. Saleem’s desire to “commence the business of remaking my life”,490 is played out in writing. There is a strong sense in which the younger Saleem’s cyclical separation from history, which can be understood only as the closing down of Aurora Zogoiby’s remarkable palimpsest, is countered by the mature Saleem’s writing history.

The younger

Saleem appears to be teleological history’s victim, the object of political necessity, the mature Saleem, a champion of history as excess, an object of writing. I would

289

thus wish to argue that in the multifarious layers that comprise Midnight’s Children, the proper name ‘Saleem’ is a site upon which (at least) two incommensurable discourses clash. ‘Saleem’ is both the subject in and object of this historical writing. These two formal subject positions cannot be unproblematically reconciled. I am not saying that the two Saleems are not the same person, I am saying that the mature Saleem is writing against himself, his own failures as a midnight’s child, his disconnection from history as excess.

The text is driven by the problem of

reconciling Saleem as subject, and Saleem as object. I am not convinced that this is achieved, and I am not convinced that either position is valorised as the most apt vantage point for writing history. What we find is a subjectivity constructed on the basis of the dispute of the subject and the object. We find an unsettling in the face of excess, and an opening of the question of judgement that resides in the split space of both possibility and necessity. A Politics of the Spittoon The mature Saleem deals with failures concerning the relation of the self to India’s historical palimpsest.

For even though the younger Saleem becomes

increasingly disconnected from history, as postcolonial India and partitioned Pakistan demand, the mature Saleem undertakes the writing task with the aim of establishing connections across the divide that partition, and language divisions effect. To claim to be handcuffed to history is to question the divisiveness of the politics of postcolonial India and partitioned Pakistan. With this task at hand the mature Saleem manages to forge a complicated narrative, littered with difficulties, confusions, inversions, and excesses. Faced with the proposition that there is too much to include — as Saleem tells us against the grain of his increasingly disconnected life, “I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well”491 — the narrative resists both a pretension to

290

objectivity and also its opposite, a disconnected Idealist subjectivity. Readers of Midnight’s Children are thus faced with the task of unravelling just what kind of narrative Saleem seems to be writing. I would suggest, therefore, that to read the work as an interplay between the subjective and the objective alone, to say for instance that ultimately Rushdie champions the subjective domain of memory and recollection over the objective domain of historical science, would be to miss what is crucial about Saleem’s difficult struggle against the void that is eating him away. What Rushdie produces in the narrative that Saleem writes, and in the struggles that mark that writing, is a crucial statement about the location and the political capacity of art. Located in neither the camp of the objective or the subjective, but somewhere else besides, Rushdie’s art defies the limits that this Idealist binary sets forth. Thus rather than a romantic conception of art as the reign of the subjective self (as played out in the Hegelian progress to the absolute), or the mimetic overtones of Ahmad, Rushdie seeks to unsettle such formulations, to open up a politics that begins with an historical excess. The construction of the space of this unsettling can be articulated by the interesting historical possibilities that the figure of the silver spittoon opens up in Midnight’s Children. The spittoon marks the excesses and the contaminations that I suggested through my earlier engagement in Bhabha, the untenability of pure cultural sites. The discourse of the postcolonial seeks to foreground this untenability. The sliver spittoon is a historical object that establishes connections across the temporal breaks that mark the text. As an object which appears to be both a part of the historical weave of the narrative, and an object in itself that is laden with meanings, the silver spittoon occupies an interesting location in the novel’s architecture. It passes from the first book to the second and third. As a counterpoint to Saleem’s shifting relation to history, the silver spittoon emerges as a constant site from which

291

such shifts are able to be articulated, and politicised. Against the attempt to put history to death, the silver spittoon opens up the obligations and affirmative possibilities that mark historical being. Its presence across the divisions that mark the work — Book 1, Book 2, Book 3 — can be read in terms of connections, contaminations.

Rather than neat divisions, Midnight’s Children is a text that

foregrounds what has been central in this thesis, the untenability of contained spaces. The silver spittoon is marked as a symbolically excessive site. The object is at once a utensil for the artful dispensing of spit and betel-juice and a symbolic, meaning laden figure in itself. Its symbolic value outweighs its use-value, or at least its use-value, as far as Rushdie is concerned, is subordinate to its symbolic function, namely the spaces of excess that it marks. Midnight’s Children draws out the social and political artfulness of the spittoon, as opposed to its objective function as a receptacle of spit and juices. It constitutes an apt site for exploring the political implications of excess that are drawn up around that difficult space of disconnection and connection in which Saleem is located. Apart from the narrative energy that is generated around the spittoon, the object itself takes on meaningful nuances that remain constant throughout the text, and which ultimately mirror Saleem’s aim as a writer. The silver spittoon appears as a textual object that belongs to the modernist poet (of sorts) Nadir Khan. Saleem gazes upon a mildewing photograph of Mian Abdullah’s Free Islam Convocation, and evokes, to Padma’s chagrin, words from the figures of Nadir and Rani of Cooch Naheen:

‘I do not believe in high art … art must be beyond categories; my poetry and — oh — the game of hit-the-spittoon are equals’. … So now the Rani, kind woman that she is, jokes, ‘Well, I shall set aside a room, perhaps; for paan-

292

eating and spittoon-hittery. I have a superb silver spittoon, inlaid with lapis lazuli, and you must all come and practise. Let the walls be splashed with our inaccurate expectorating! They will be honest stains, at least.’492

As a narrative device this memory of the silver spittoon engenders a narrative thread that leads to the underground home of Nadir and Mumtaz, who consummate their love by just such spittoon-hittery, and the magicians ghetto, which is explored in the third book.

Saleem’s (creative) elaboration of the Free Islam Convocation photo,

reveals what is the case concerning spittoons throughout the text. Laden not just with betel-juice and spit, the figure of the spittoon is a historical object, it marks the presence of subjectivity. What can we say concerning the subjectivity that marks this cultural site? The words of Saleem tell us the spittoon functions as a site for the gathering of selves in what could be called an other space. It is an object that belongs to the pasttime of the people, gathered around it we find a community that cannot be defined in terms of the auspices of the nation-state. The spittoon can be found in the spaces of speculation, social freedom, myth and legend, and ultimately is utilised as a metaphor for the collapse of the high/low art binary. Thus in both brass and silver the figure of the spittoon is a site upon which the desire of the people, regardless of social privilege or unprivilege, is powerfully staged in and against the auspices of authoritative rule. In the work, the figure of the spittoon first appears in brass on the streets of Agra. The shift from brass to silver in the text, rather than mark difference, produces an effective valorisation of the symbolic value of the figure of the spittoon. The spittoon in silver takes on the meanings of the spittoon in brass. Doctor Aziz, that inbetween self who is open to new possibilities, has contracted, what Saleem calls, “a highly dangerous form of optimism” concerning Mian Abdullah, “the hope of India’s hundred million Muslims”. With the aim of bringing together “dozens of Muslim splinter groups” the

293

Free Islam Convocation opposes itself to the Muslim League, “who demand partitioned India”.493 It is in this context, one haunted by the possibility of violence, that we first encounter the figure of the spittoon. Linked to the optimistic possibilities that such a context presents — newness perforating the world — the spittoon emerges as the site upon which such possibilities are engendered. With the subject matter of myth and legend, gossip, and tales, the spittoon is a site for a public imagining, intellectual pursuit, and cultural theory.

The betel-chewers at the paan-shop had begun to talk about omens; calming themselves with their game of hit-the-spittoon, they speculated upon the numberless nameless Godknowswhats that might issue from the fissuring earth.494

In similar terms the space of a public imagining that gathers around the spittoon in colonial India is also inextricably political. The same spittoon is central in a street scene that can be characterised by what Bakhtin called the carnivalesque.495

The

carnival, with its boy kings and excessive caricatures, occupies the muddy space, the tension, between autonomous identities: ruler and subject, employer and worker, teacher and pupil, husband and wife. It is a space that disturbs what appears to be a balanced binary, as it celebrates extremes, negation, inversion, subversion, and transgression. Marked by an excessive role play, the carnival is the great leveller that interrupts the hierarchical forces of monologism. Thus the spaces of the streets, in this instance, are marked as a disturbing excess that renders the poverty stricken street dweller a theorist of culture rather than a subject of the state. It is worth quoting the scene at length:

Late into the evening they nudge each other with, ‘Do you remember when-’ and ‘Dried up like a skeleton on a washing line! He couldn’t even ride his-’ and ‘-I

294

tell you, baba, that woman could do terrible things. I heard she could even dream her daughters’ dreams, just to know what they were getting up to!’ But as evening settles in the nudges die away, because it is time for the contest. Rhythmically, in silence, their jaws move; then all of a sudden there is a pursing of lips, but what emerges is not air-made-sound. No whistle, but instead a long red jet of betel-juice passes decrepit lips, and moves in unerring accuracy towards an old brass spittoon.

There is much slapping of thighs and self-admiring

utterance of ‘Wah, wah, sir!’ and, ‘Absolute master shot!’ … Around the oldsters, the town fades into desultory evening pastimes. Children play hoop and kabaddi and draw beards on posters of Mian Abdullah. And now the old men place the spittoon in the street, further and further from their squatting-place, and aim longer and longer jets at it. Still the fluid flies true. ‘Oh too good, yara!’ The street urchins make a game of dodging in and out between the red streams, superimposing this game of chicken upon the serious art of hit-the-spittoon … But here is an army staff car, scattering urchins as it comes … here, Brigadier Dodson, the town’s military commander, stifling with heat … and here, his A.D.C., Major Zulfikar, passing him a towel. Dodson mops his face; urchins scatter; the car knocks over the spittoon. A dark red fluid with clots in it like blood congeals like a red hand in the dust of the street and points accusingly at the retreating power of the Raj.496

Built upon the principles of civility, law and order, the nation-state obligates its subjects. Rushdie’s texts relish in the visible markers of authority, the repressive apparatus: the military, the police, the military police. Thus within the jurisdiction of this surveillance there are social spaces that disturb its smooth operation. It is in this disturbing guise that the space of the spittoon becomes crucial.

295

The spittoon space is in many ways hidden from, or at least is concealed from, the visible demands of the nation-state. As a space of gossip, of legend making, endless stories and tales, it emerges in its boundless capacity to tell, as simply too much to contain. Like the space of carnival, it is not an oppositional space, of anti, or counterstories that seek an open contest upon the plains of officialdom.

Rather, the spittoon

space is marked as a disturbing force in its sheer excess, in its refusal to subordinate this excess to the pedagogic power of the rulership. It is an uncontrollable space with an overspill that remains an unknown entity, from the perspective of the ruler.

The

possibilities of such an unknown, when hidden from view in this way, become a nagging disturbance in the sureties of the discourse of power: what is this unknown entity really capable of? Thus within this graphic depiction of a carnival space, the overflow from the spittoon merely bursts forth artfully, almost magically, and pronounces the end to British tyranny when it is run over by a military car. If in this carnival space the disturbing excesses of the spittoon pronounces judgement upon the forces of colonial rule, there is also a sense in which this disturbing excess belongs to India’s destiny, or at least to a hope for a free India. In the same street the figure of authority, frustrated by hidden spaces — the underground lodging of the Free Islam Convocation outlaw, Nadir Khan and his secret wife, Mumtaz and their silver spittoon — attacks the spittoon on the street.

O awesome rage of Major Zulfy when he found that the bird [Nadir Khan] had flown! […] Enraged Zulfy […] pelted past the cycle-rickshaw rank. Old men were playing hit-the-spittoon and the spittoon was out in the street. Urchins dodging in and out of the streams of betel-juice. Major Zulfy ran, ononon. Between the old men and their target, but he lacked the urchins’ skill. What an unfortunate moment: a low hard jet of red fluid caught him squarely in the crotch.

296

A stain like a hand clutched at the groin of his battledress; squeezed; arrested his progress. Major Zulfy stopped in almighty wrath. O even more unfortunate; because a second player, assuming the mad soldier would keep on running, had unleashed a second jet. A second red hand clasped the first and completed Major Zulfy’s day … slowly, with deliberation, he went to the spittoon and kicked it over, into the dust. He jumped on it — once! twice! again! — flattening it, and refusing to show that it had hurt his foot. 497

The scene closes in upon the futility of Major Zulfy’s violent act against the figure of the spittoon. In concluding this comic image of Major Zulfy’s lack of competence in the spaces of the people, Saleem tellingly announces, the “old ones retrieved their brutalized receptacle and began to knock it back into shape”.498 The political import of this reshaping reveals not only Saleem’s respect for the space of the spittoon, it also reveals the un-oppositional nature of resistance that is the object of this respect. Rather than a direct attack against the rule of authority, the old ones preserve the site upon which the disturbing excesses of telling are able to be written. There is a sense in which the space of the spittoon, and the endless possibilities that it generates, is inextricably linked to what constitutes hope.

Saleem’s writing gestures in its epistemological

underpinning to a hope for the impunity of the spaces of the spittoon in art and in life. He writes, thus revealing the narrative authority that he grants to such social spaces:

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts. According to legend, then — according to the polished gossip of the ancients at the paan-shop — Mian Abdullah owed his downfall to his purchase, at Agra railway station, of a peacock-feather fan […] And so it was that none of the Hummingbird’s optimists were prepared for what happened. They played hit-the-

297

spittoon, and ignored the cracks in the earth. […] the assassins reached the campus.499

A similar narrative authority is granted to the plethora of stories and the delicious gossip in Shame: the implied narrator declares, “then (the legend goes)”;500 we find instances of the “tribals who bore this tale into the bazaar”;501 the tale of Raza Hyder’s shame “was in the wind, and in the bazaars and at the bus depots and over the tables of cheap cafés”;502 and Rani’s shawls speak powerfully of the unspeakable violence of her husband Iskander Harappa.503 I would suggest that like Midnight’s Children, Shame inserts itself into the tale telling practice that gives the narrative its form, and to speak the unspeakable in order to defy the forces of a tyrannical nationstate.

Gossip is like water. It probes surfaces for their weak places, until it finds the breakthrough point”.504

Gossip is an integral part in the working out of self-identity. We tell stories about each other, as I tell this story about Rushdie, as subjects in relations of power and economic exchange. Gossip is a kind of public imagining which functions, in this context, as a counter-discourse against the formalities of a dictatorship. A sense of resistance thus emerges in the public speaking of the secrets of rulers. There is power in leakage, and it is the task of tyrants to contain it, as it was the task of Raza Hyder to contain knowledge of the violence that lay beneath his rise to power:

Raza summoned his triumvirate of Generals. Radi, Bekar, and Phisaddi arrived, to hear Hyder dredge up, for the last time, a few shards of his old authority. ‘Arrest

298

these subversives!’ he demanded, waving newspapers at the Generals. ‘I want them in the darkest jail, I want them finished, defunct, kaput!’.505

Like the gossip in Shame, the spittoon thus represents an excess, a critical mass of sorts, that poses a threat to unifying teleologies. The uncontainable space of the spittoon, that mixture of spit and discourse, in many respects engenders the necessity of state violence in this context. Violence is a necessity precisely because of the slippage that uncontainability calls forth. Just as the excess and slippage in Kant’s architectonics engenders the authority of reason, the violence that Rushdie’s texts foreground can be considered a last ditch effort to contain a plethora of stories and theories. Where pedagogy (propaganda) ends, physical violence begins. Indeed in the light of the disturbing excesses of Bhabha’s infrastructures, it could be argued that the colonial equipped with Enlightenment reason resorts to physical violence precisely because reason’s teleology encounters an excess that ultimately renders its success untenable. In having been engendered with the excessive and disturbing nuances that I have opened up, the spittoon passes from the first to the second book and enters the space of historical memory. In the second book the spittoon is a ‘precious possession’506 that symbolises connections to, and differentiation from, the past. As such it occupies a muddy inbetween space. It doesn’t belong wholly to the past or to the present. Thus its presence in the household of Ahmed and Amina is a visible sign, on the part of Amina at least, that her identity is constituted by what is present in this time and place, and also by what is absent, what has been constituted elsewhere. Despite her re-invention — Mumtaz becomes Amina — the impossibility of being either one or the other is at stake here. For Amina the migrant is caught in-between her past — her underground home with Nadir in Agra — and her new life with Ahmed in Delhi. She is dislocated: “‘It’s [the sun] come up in the wrong place!’”, and, “something of its jumbling influence

299

remained with her and prevented her from feeling entirely at ease”, and thus is condemned, like her parents, to “fall in love with her husband bit by bit”, whilst always remaining “susceptible to the forbidden dream-images of …”507 Mumtaz/Amina as migrant in many ways exceeds the possibilities that her new world would present to her. She is marked by the telling image of having too much past to accompany her to a new life:

And now Aadam Aziz lifted his daughter (with his own arms), passing her up after the dowry into the care of this man who had renamed and so re-invented her […] In the compartment the new Amina Sinai sat (in mint condition) with her feet on the green tin trunk which had been an inch too high to fit under the seat”.508

It is in this context of the spectres that accompany migrants, spectres that characterise Rushdie’s vision of India as a palimpsest of movement and change, that the secret and the forbidden excess of that past is attended to by the figure of the spittoon. Stolen with some other precious items, and then discovered in the bed roll of Musa the servant a short time later, the silver spittoon continues to be linked to the disturbing power of what cannot be spoken. To hide the spittoon in a bed roll, only in the hope that it will be discovered by its owners — Mary Pereira, burdened with her interference in Saleem’s parentage (she switched the name tags) framed Musa, to whom she had shared her secret — leads the novel into questions concerning the constitution of truth, specifically historical truth. The silver spittoon as a marker of possibility, is marshalled into the service of falsity in this instance. Hidden from view in a bed roll the spittoon’s presence falsely accuses Musa. There is a sense in which the space of the spittoon, despite the possibilities that it generates, is able to be thwarted by forces that would put it to ill use.

300

Interestingly this sense of ill use is not openly condemned in the novel. The spittoon speaks Musa’s guilt, despite his seeming innocence. The space of the spittoon thus remains far from utopian, and is in no way presented as a pure site from which an innocent becoming is able to be maintained. What this resistance to innocence reveals is that the idealistic egalitarian spaces toward which my suggestions concerning the spittoon gesture, are fraught with individual interests, differences, struggle. I would thus suggest that it is not until Mary Pereira hides the silver spittoon in the bed roll that the spittoon emerges as a truly productive site. This is a site that is marked by an agonistics rather than a concern for the truth. The spittoon is as much marked by dispute as consensus. But it is the possibility of dispute, and the possibility of reframing reality as dispute, that marks the strength of the space of the spittoon. The disturbing character of the space of the spittoon in the discourses of authority is disturbing precisely because its reality remains unsettled, subject to dispute. Contaminations, Leakages, Negotiations The various issues that I have drawn up around Rushdie’s spittoon — the carnivalesque, an excessive space that disturbs the pretension to order, a space of dispute rather than Truth, a space that unsettles neat binary logics — clearly inhabit a logic that defies the possibility of myths of national unity. The materiality of the social location of the spittoon defies the radical historical disjunctions that mark myths of unity, and which are central in Midnight’s Children. I would wish to turn at this point to consider some of the problems that this defiance of gaps and divisions raises. One of the most crucial problems that Midnight’s Children engages in, is India’s passage from the colonial to the postcolonial. The issues that I would wish to raise here, directly relate to my contention that the discourse of the postcolonial cannot be easily identified in terms of homogeneous schemes. In Chatterjee, the nationalist liberation struggle merely effected the structures

301

of the colonial which had claimed to have been displaced. In Fanon, Hegel’s slave failed to provide a metaphor for the struggle of black Africa. In Bhabha, the discourse of the postcolonial is alway already a transgressive, rather than an affirmative force. Each suggests that the postcolonial emerges in a kind of crises. Colonialism is not dead and buried, but has merely changed the terms of its rule. We can read Rushdie’s historical excess much like Fanon’s excessive body, and the spaces of uncontainability in Bhabha. That is to say, Rushdie attempts to unleash an excess of history, in order to disrupt the teleological claims of Western historiography. The framing of the first book by Saleem as his history, when in fact the point of Mary’s burden is that it is not actually his history, can be read as a crucial statement concerning the discourse of the postcolonial. As I framed Fanon’s work in chapter three, the rug-pulling act of decolonisation — specifically the notion that for Fanon the emancipation of the colonised peoples, set forth in the guise of simply abolishing the master/slave dialectic, merely writes them out of an equation that in some sense provided an opportunity to confront the injustice of colonialism — that Fanon sought to overcome is a problem for Rushdie also. It is significant that in a novel about a character who is increasingly disconnected from history, that we read the novel’s first book at all. The inclusion of this colonial past in Saleem’s (re)writing suggests that a postcolonial art draws such a past into its orbit, in order to take up a disturbing location within the Western imagination. The shift from colonial to postcolonial India, and the refusal to leave that colonial moment behind, is ultimately a refusal of an Indian history as British History. If Aadam Aziz had “learned that India — like radium — had been ‘discovered’ by the Europeans,”509 pragmatically speaking, the decolonisation of India by the British in no way disrupts what Aziz had learned. Decolonisation actually becomes a part of that history of discovery, it is thus still the history of the British in India, the history of their leaving. The comic image of Methwold’s estate, and the

302

“little game” of this parting colonial, who insisted that the houses be “bought complete with every last thing in them”, and “that the entire contents be retained by the new owners”,510 reveals a desire for the lasting legacy of that history.

But Saleem’s

inclusion of a history, perhaps more accurately, histories that are both his and not his, disturbs the grip of the colonial masters upon the historical.

Thus rather than a

reverence for the British Raj’s rule, or even a politics of blame that would evoke a reverence of sorts, colonial India emerges as a space with its own historical struggle, its own magic, its own resourceful people. Colonial India is an effect, in many ways, of the colonial occupation of Britain, yet at the same time its history is unique to the characters that think, feel, and act both inside and outside that colonial occupation. Saleem’s narrative in connecting itself with that past effectively counters the rug-pulling tactic that lies at the core of decolonisation. To ignore that past, to fail to find a life and energy that in no way reflects the othering demands of the colonial, would to be complicit with the divisiveness of what Aziz had learned. This narrative with its magical sites, its sheer excess, occupies a terrain within the auspices of colonial authority. Such an occupation, just by virtue of the fact that it is possible to upset a centre/margin mentality with subjectivities that can’t be situated in such a binary — Kashmir, the ghetto of Bombay — disturbs the historical assumptions of the colonial and his predecessors centrality. This is the strange space that Rushdie’s art seeks to occupy. Decolonisation is a political reality, it represents a historical break, but, like Amina’s Mumtaz, such a break is politically charged. The parting colonial left with an agenda, rather than withdrew from one.

Rushdie’s difficult narrative thus refuses to allow the break to set up

counterproductive divisions — past/present — that play into the hands of the hierarchical pretensions of colonialism.511 Rather than blot out colonial India the text utilises the break as a kind of connection that demands to be negotiated. It is in this

303

negotiation that the question, ‘who are we’?, is able to be inscribed into a history of becoming.

To deny that becoming as the site for this question is to refuse to

acknowledge the social and historical nature of being, and to plummet into a conservatism that would champion the cause of an isolated individuality, the heroic underling that structures Hegel’s Phenomenology. Thus Saleem is exiled from what is not his, but that what that is not his is inextricably linked to the structures of his identification, national, local. To be hand-cuffed to this history is thus a gesture that evokes an unforgetting, it is to recognise the trace of the past that continually emerges in the present as an absence that demands to be engaged with. What is this absence? Nothing other than the myriad of possibilities that is India, the plethora that deifies by virtue of its excess the limits of the colonial pretension to historical order. To treat this historical break as radically discrete rather than a complex of connections and leaks is to blot out the palimpsest that lays beneath the surface of the face of the new. Thus Rushdie, in this novel, confronts the reality of the past as it leaks into the present, and the futility of living in a void that refuses to engage in that leak. Saleem’s impending plummet into the nothing further happens is inextricably linked to this issue of the historical leak. To defy the leak is to close down affirmative possibilities in Saleem’s economy. We can read this defiance of the leak in the terms that I have set forth in my reading of the Kantian and the Hegelian sublime. The possibility of unifying the excess of sensory experience is crucial for reason’s claim to authority in Kant, and in Hegel, the capacity of reason to unify disparate elements under one principle signals its authority. The former is subjective, the latter puts the subjective to work in the social domain. Colonialism can be understood in terms of the subjective/objective split that preoccupied Idealism. Taking a unified subjectivity as a model of authenticity, the colonial sought to establish an empire with the principle of unity as a teleology.

304

Rushdie seeks to interrupt the possibility of such a unity with an excess, that can be understood in terms of what I have called the postcolonial sublime. The most telling blow upon the refusal to engage in the productive possibilities of temporal leakage is, as I have suggested, set forth via Saleem’s migration to Pakistan. Saleem as a midnight’s child, despite being a symbol of new possibilities for the nation, absurdly plummets into obscurity. His increasing extraction from history, his increasing sense of unbelonging, signals that rather than new possibilities, he is a sign of the failure of the nation’s political imagination. Thus this gradual extraction reads like a tale of innocence lost. From the wide eyed infant who had to be taught how to blink in his beloved Bombay, too much Bombay — “the city, basking like a bloodsucker lizard in the summer heat. Our Bombay: it looks like a hand but it’s really a mouth, always open, always hungry, swallowing food and talent from everywhere else in India”512 — Saleem plummets into a state of despair.

I would wish to map this increasing

disconnection from history with the notion that the mature Saleem ultimately undermines the possibility of such a disconnection. In other words, if there is a seeming disconnection at work here there is always already the presence of the past as an excessive absence. As I have suggested, the text is built upon a tension between a disconnected and a connected Saleem. And it is in this difficult tension that the political cogency of the postcolonial sublime emerges. Through rejection and displacement Saleem as a symbol of the new, the mirror of the nation, becomes increasingly decentred, removed from Indian national life. In the context of book two, he doesn’t seem to overcome this specific relation to the nation, and is constantly frustrated at never being able to actively and literally participate in its historical processes. It is tempting to read this distance as a universal rejection of Marxism, as Ahmad perhaps would, but I would contend that it deals specifically with the time of partition, and with Pakistan’s difficult status as a Muslim homeland. As

305

such Saleem’s historical and national identity can only be a negative one. It is doomed to be charted in a gap as a mirrored reversal of the nation-state. The time of Saleem’s being disrupts the emptying of the time of Pakistan’s birth as a nation. Again Rushdie’s critique of Pakistan in Shame articulates what is at stake here. In building Pakistan, he declares, “it was necessary to cover up Indian history, to deny that Indian centuries lay just beneath the surface of Pakistani Standard Time”.513

Saleem contradicts what

Pakistan deems about its new beginning. Culturally he is anything but pure. He is contaminated, a kind of cultural palimpsest that has been written upon by centuries of subcontinental time. Thus on the brink of being torn apart by language differences, Saleem attempts to remain open to the excessive possibilities of centuries of time, rather than the resurrection of rigid ancient authenticities. In what is essentially a bleak political outlook, Saleem seems to remain history’s victim, rather than its main protagonist, as the promise of his symbolic national function suggested. The Hindu raised as a Muslim by default, the Kasmiri/Bombay Indian who becomes a Pakistani national, by extension a similar default, is forced to tread the false boundaries that such oppositions set up. So instead of the increasing influence of the midnight’s children and the possibilities that they open up, in a kind of reverse Hegelianism the ‘new’ nation closes them down. Without Saleem as (re)writer of this history at its edge, this book would mercilessly remain politically pessimistic. Failures

So among the midnight children were infants with powers of transmutation, flight, prophecy and wizardry … but two of us were born on the stroke of midnight. Saleem and Shiva, Shiva and Saleem, nose and knees and knees and nose … to

306

Shiva, the hour had given the gifts of war […] and to me, the greatest talent of all — the ability to look into the hearts and minds of men.514

In the face of the great hope that the children of midnight promised, such a pessimism can be understood in terms of the historical connections that the text seeks to establish. Beginning with the demise of this hope, the mature Saleem seeks to affirm being as excess. For my purposes, the historical excess that I have connected to the postcolonial sublime is a crucial site in the context of contemporary conservatism. Thus with its remarkable membership the Midnight’s Children Conference (MCC) promised much. It equates to a concentration of the productive excesses that are attended to by the figure of the spittoon. The ability to be able to draw the thought of the nation, that vast plethora of ideas and feelings into one space and time, had been Saleem’s gift. Yet remarkably the tale of the MCC, like the nation, is one of division, struggle, and ultimately demise.

Given such an excess of ideas and possibilities, it remained

impossible to even generate discussion concerning what could be the Conference’s sole purpose. Saleem tells us, “I introduced the Conference to the notions which plagued me all this time: the notions of purpose, and meaning. ‘We must think,’ I said, ‘what we are for’”. I would suggest that Saleem is not necessarily calling for a singleness of purpose in the positive sense here. His unblinking nature, his voyeurism, and the obvious differences that constituted the Conference, suggest that he sought a strategy of negotiating difference, rather than a commitment to a monologic politics. But the answers that filled and overflowed the mind of the Conference convener rendered his openness to difference impossible. Among the philosophies and aims dogmatically suggested: collectivism, individualism, filial duty, capitalism, altruism, science, religion, cowardice, women’s rights, improving the fortunes of the untouchables, land claims, political power.515 Thus the MCC ultimately splits and fractures into the image

307

of the nation that it mirrored. Driven by the prejudices of the adult world, the hope that the image of innocence, of becoming, of the future that children engender, disintegrates into factions, dogmatisms, and a counter-productive rigidity: innocence lost. Saleem fails to convince the declining Conference that they be a “third principle […] the force which drives between the horns of the dilemma”: the duality of masses and classes, capital and labour, them and us.516 The third principle, Saleem explains, via the recurring metaphor of innocence, is “childhood”;517 the newness, endless possibility, incompletion, the undecidability, and, in many ways, indeterminacy that characterises pre-adult life, and which disturbs the adult pretension to a divisive order. Children know no boundaries, and are free to explore their world before the imposition of adult-hood sets in and begins to regiment thought and life. Midnight’s Children is a plea for an innocent becoming. But such a becoming, as I have suggested, has already been contaminated by Saleem’s desire for the centrality of the aesthetic in the sociopolitical sphere. Thus, just as Padma foregrounded the politics of inclusion and exclusion, Shiva opposes Saleem’s call for the artful negotiation of the political in terms that bear a remarkable likeness to Ahmad’s Marxist judgement upon Rushdie. Shiva pronounces Saleem’s emphasis upon the productive capacity of undecidability as nothing but elitist sentiment.

‘No, little rich boy; there is no third principle; there is only money-and-poverty, and have-and-lack, and right-and-left; there is only me against the world! The world is not ideas, rich boy; the world is no place for dreamers or their dreams, the world, little snotnose, is things.518

308

This materialist attack upon what appears to be an Idealism becomes a central concern in this text.

But such a concern, despite Saleem’s hierarchical pretension, is

complicated by the problem of history that I have suggested is at the core of Saleem’s ‘masterful’ (re)writing. Inhabited by the switched name tags — ‘Shiva’ and ‘Saleem’ had been subject to Mary Pereira’s class based interruption of familial history — the conflict between them deals directly with Saleem’s ‘disconnection’ from the past. Shiva’s argument is that Saleem is caught up in a disinterested idea (Kant), rather than the thing in itself. We can recall Marx and Engels’ opposition to Idealism’s central tenants in The German Ideology: “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life”.519 But such an attack in this instance, as Saleem’s advantageous re-writing reveals, falls short. For it is not that Saleem has ideologically plummeted into the false economy of an aesthetic Idealism, it is that his own cultural location — ‘determined’ as it is by a kind of in-betweenness — demands a politics that doesn’t directly correspond to the interests of European Marxism. It could be that even though Marxist political strategies formed the basis of Europe’s critique of Imperialism in the decades after the turn of the century (Lenin’s analysis of Hobson),520 in the cultural inbetween, as Rushdie’s India is predominantly defined through tropes of migrancy, such a critique fails to be viable. The figure of the spittoon as dispute refuses to allow either an aesthetic disconnection or the socio-historical determinism that underpins Shiva’s attack. Rushdie’s Saleem is thus not quite an Idealist (the romantic genius) nor an outright materialist, but something else. The path from the subject to the object, or from the object to the subject, depending upon the critic’s point of view, remains flawed by the excesses that render the gaps and the divisions that such schemes depend upon as highly problematic. Reading Rushdie in terms of the postcolonial sublime enables the political nuances of his work to opened up. Rather than the Marxist/postmodernist battle that

309

characterises Rushdiecriticism, Rushdie can be considered in terms of an excess that refuses to be reduced to such a theoretical framework. My contention is that Rushdie demands to be taken up in terms of the politics of material excess — the real that is left over when unifying teleologies have gone to work — and the contaminations that refuse to be reduced to homogeneous typologies. Connections, Border Crossings, Possibilities How does Saleem’s mastery figure in relation to that eighteenth-century propensity for the creative centrality of the Romantic genius? I would suggest that Saleem’s mastery cannot be understood via such a figure. As Europe’s aesthetic and intellectual ‘development’ haunts ‘Rushdiecriticism’, as the celebration of his exilic status continues to be a site for both celebration and denouncement, Rushdie’s ‘mastery’ in Midnight’s Children becomes elusive. To claim to be the master of the fragment from the space of the migrant is not to evoke the mastery of the romantic outsider, it is to turn away from the centre/margin model that structures the myth of the Romantic genius, and which finds its way into the domains of postcolonial literary departments. In many respects to claim to be a master of the fragment is to write as if the fragment itself were the centre. Given its productive moment — Rushdie sat down to write Midnight’s Children as a relative unknown — the argument that Saleem’s mastery can be conflated with Rushdie’s acclaim as an “Indian born British writer” is a retrospective fallacy. With Rushdie’s own stated resistance to the trope of the artist as outsider,521 I would suggest that his fiction seeks to escape the dialectical ethic that underpins such tropes. Saleem’s mastery in no way corresponds to the aesthetic disconnection that preoccupied Shiva and Ahmad after him. Thus we find that even when Saleem is seemingly totally removed from all visible forms of a past, utterly dispossessed, the past plummets from the sky out of the ruins of that dispossession, and, in the figure of the spittoon, strikes him on the head.

310

The novel’s second book, which charts the demise of the MCC and Saleem’s gradual disconnection, concludes with just such a strike. During the Pakistan-India war of 65, which was driven by the demand for a radical historical disjunction, Saleem writes:

I pick myself up dizzily after the blast, something twisting turning somersaulting down, silver as moonlight, a wondrously worked silver spittoon inlaid with lapis lazuli, the past plummeting towards me like a vulture-dropped hand to become what-purifies-and-sets-me-free, because now as I look up there is a feeling at the back of my head and after that there is only a tiny but infinite moment of utter clarity while I tumble forwards to prostrate myself before my parents’ funeral pyre, a minuscule but endless instant of knowing, before I am stripped of past present memory time shame and love, a fleeting but also timeless explosion in which I bow my head yes I acquiesce yes in the necessity of the blow, and then I am empty and free, because all Saleems go pouring out of me.522

There is a certain historical resilience at work here. As I have suggested, this resilience, this unwillingness on the part of the mature Saleem to be expelled from history, compels us to think through what is at stake in the question of nationalism. It is the myth of unity that animates this war. But despite the violent imposition of war, and the alteration of the landscape that marks any invasion, the historical body remains. The figure of the spittoon works against Saleem’s emptiness. There is, in this case, a receptacle of historical being, physical evidence from that obliterated past. Moreover, the presence of the narrative that precedes this event, like the persistent inclusion of the spittoon, testifies to the impossibility of Saleem’s complete disconnection from history and the impossibility of the emptying of time (Weber).

311

The third book politicises this theme. We find an empty, heedless Saleem, known as the “buddha”, with his sanity in question, serving the Pakistani military in a war, from Rushdie’s perspective, between enemies who belong to the same historical palimpsest. The spittoon in this scene of dispossession marks a figurative connection.

His teeth are stained; betel-juice reddens his gums. A red stream of expectorated paan-fluid leaves his lips, to hit, with commendable accuracy, a beautifullywrought silver spittoon, which sits before him on the ground. Ayooba Shaheed Farooq are staring in amazement. ‘Don’t try to get it away from him,’ Sgt-Mjr Najmuddin indicates the spittoon, ‘it sends him wild’.523

In this relative obscurity the spittoon remains and signals that despite the intentions on the part of the Pakistani authorities to empty time and space, to deny the centuries of Indian history that lay beneath its surface, the past leaks through, this Pakistani Muslim soldier carries a small piece of his Indianness. It is just such a leakage that redeems and restores the mature Saleem, and, moreover, opens up questions concerning the unleashing of a postcolonial sublime.

The third book in the triadic structure of

Midnight’s Children re-opens once again the issue of the historical self, and attempts to define the bridges between the radically displaced Saleem and the reflective, mature Saleem. Saleem, the Kashmiri/Bombayite Hindu who was raised as a Muslim and who migrated to Pakistan, embarks upon a journey of self-discovery (invention?). As a dutiful tracker in the Pakistani military in their war against India, this journey begins, paradoxically, by way of escape into the realm of dreams. Remaining torn between two worlds, in a kind of cultural non-space defined only by duty—which remains no less problematic than his desire for the centrality of the MCC — the

312

buddha, (mis)leading three fellow soldiers, flees to the jungle of the Sundarbans. What does he flee from? Obligation.

the buddha, finally incapable of continuing in the submissive performance of his duty, took to his heels and fled.

Infected by the soul-chewing maggots of

pessimism futility shame, he deserted, into the historyless anonymity of rainforests.524

It is significant that the spittoon again features as a motif for hope, for the possibility of historical being across the Pakistan/India divide. Saleem in (re)writing expresses the distance, as I have suggested, between himself and the character of his narrative, who remains stripped of history. Total anonymity is the logical conclusion to a self torn apart by the ravages of a history denied. Its expression is violence, as the buddha knows no other way than obedience to his military masters. Saleem explains to Padma:

What I hope to immortalize in pickles as well as words: that condition of the spirit in which the consequences of acceptance could not be denied, in which an overdose of reality gave birth to a miasmic longing for flight into the safety of dreams […] ‘I am glad,’ my Padma says, ‘I am happy you ran away.’ But I insist: not I. He. He, the buddha. Who, until the snake, would remain not-Saleem; who, in spite of running-from, was still separated from his past; although he clutched, in his limpet fist, a certain silver spittoon.525

In the directionless, timeless, seemingly purposeless, and hostile jungle, survival itself overshadows the war and the concerns of soldiers:

313

the chase, which had begun far away in the real world, acquired in the altered light of the Sundarbans a quality of absurd fantasy which enabled them to dismiss it once and for all.

So it was that Ayooba Shaheed Farooq and the buddha

surrendered to the terrible phantasms of the dream-forest.526

In this disordered space the buddha is bitten by a snake — the scene is a confusion of Buddhist and Christian iconography — and begins to reclaim “all lost histories, all the myriad complex processes that go to make a man”.527 The Sundarbans is a place of confrontation. History emerges as a matter of survival against an anonymous oblivion. History as a palimpsest of possibilities stands against the threat of nothing further happening, or at least of not being aware that something happens. The buddha’s articulations thus enact a handcuffing. The only time he speaks in the jungle is to articulate an historical self, excessive as he is. To be able to articulate stories is to be joined, to be engaged, to be an agent in the invention of self-hood. Without a sense of movement or change, and the memories and stories of such, cultural identity would not be possible. Midnight’s Children contests any notion that would set forth self-hood as a historyless agent, or which would presume to locate an authentic self-hood, as in Romanticism, as somehow outside of the constraints and the enablements of time.528 The anonymous dreamscape of the Sundarbans defy such a possibility. Thus as each book marks a division within the text’s architecture, each division remains far from self-contained. Despite Saleem’s seeming disconnection from the historical divides that the text’s architecture mark, Saleem’s emergence from the space of oblivion marks a border crossing. Concealed in a wicker basket with the spittoon by his side, he escapes from that other partition, Bangladesh, back to India. Again a dangerous anonymity looms in this situation. The safety of the wicker basket as womb

314

tempts Saleem to the oblivion of isolation. But as is characteristic of Rushdie’s texts generally, this temptation is transformed through the power of anger. Saleem writes:

In the grip of Parvati’s sorcery, I felt my hold on the world slip away — and how easy, how peaceful not to never return! — to float in this cloud nowhere, wafting further further further, like a seed-spore blown on the breeze — in short, I was in mortal danger. What I held on to in that ghostly time-and-space: a silver spittoon. Which, transformed like myself by Parvati-whispered words, was nevertheless a reminder of the outside … clutching finely-wrought silver, which glittered in that nameless dark, I survived. […] I was saved, not only by the glints of a spittoon, but also by another transformation […] I discovered anger.529

In the context of the border crossings that mark this text, Anger is an understated social concept. It is either a psychological disorder or a sin. Feminists on the other hand have cautiously seized its liberatory power.530 For Rushdie too anger generates a series of contradictory possibilities. Anger occupies an important location in all of his major works. In Shame the body of the innocent Sufiya, written over by Pakistan’s violence, erupts to judge the rulers of the nation. In The Satanic Verses Saladin Chamcha discovers anger and manages to overcome his goat like form, that physicality that mirrored British nationalist attitudes toward the Indian migrant. In The Moor’s Last Sigh Aurora Zogoiby dances her anger in the form of a protest, high above the fundamentalist Hindu procession. But in Midnight’s Children the redemptive power of anger is raised only in order to reveal its limits. The mature Saleem writes his failures in order to underscore the political necessity of an openness to historical excess. Saleem’s anger reveals an object of overcoming. It is significant that this object — his increasing displacement from and lack of historical centrality — cannot be

315

overcome via the cool detachment of Kantian reason. Anger transgresses the limits of Reason, it cannot be constrained by the moral sublimity that underpins the authority of the Kantian self. Rushdie’s anger is a material force, an affirmative, as opposed to a reactionary, bodily eruption that is able to confront, as Fanon’s complex rejection of Hegel reveals, where no confrontation is possible.

But anger also produces rigid

oppositions, essentialisms, violent preconceptions, and the possibility of being drained (the widow). The mature Saleem thus calmly counters his impetuous youthful rage with a fluid identity, “to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world”.531

The

transformative power of anger thus fades, not in the name of Kantian rationality, but in the name of excess. Unlike the pain of a wrong, anger lifts the feeling that can’t be phrased above and beyond and makes a demand for a determinate judgement. Rushdie’s mature Saleem prefers the spaces of excess. The closed space of the wicker basket, as a repeated metaphor, becomes a womb for a rebirth of sorts. This cyclical pattern characterises this narrative text: birth, the desire for historical centrality, the demise of that desire, seeming obscurity, rebirth. One constant remains: the figure of the spittoon, that marker of historical processes. In the third book, however, Saleem’s anger engenders the desire for centrality in the nation’s affairs that had been thwarted before. In this instance he attempts to join the public service. But again the possibilities that such a social location afford are denied. He returns to the magicians slum, to finally lose everything, even the sliver spittoon that accompanied him throughout this cyclical process. Indira crushes the resistive space of the magicians ghetto. With the loss of his wife, Pavarti-the-witch, as a consequence of Indira’s purge, Saleem announces a nostalgia for the spittoon. I would suggest that this important moment marks a shift from anger as an animating principle to nostalgia.

316

I was consumed by nostalgia for my bulldozed spittoon.

Picture Singh had

provided me with a spittoon-surrogate, an empty Dalda Vanaspati can, but although I used this to entertain my son with my expertise in the gentle art of spittoon-hittery, sending long jets of betel-juice across the grimy air of the magicians’ colony, I was not consoled. A question: why such grief over a mere receptacle of juices? My reply is that you should never underestimate a spittoon. Elegant in the salon of the Rani of Cooch Naheen, it permitted intellectuals to practise the art-forms of the masses; gleaming in a cellar, it transformed Nadir Khan’s underworld into a second Taj Mahal; gathering dust in an old tin trunk, it was nevertheless present throughout my history, covertly assimilating incidents in washing-chests, ghost visions, freeze-unfreeze, drainage, exiles; falling from the sky like a piece of the moon, it perpetrated a transformation. O talismanic spittoon! O beauteous lost receptacle of memories as well as spittle-juice! What sensitive person could not fail to sympathize with me in my nostalgic agony at its loss?532

How should we understand this nostalgia? Several interrelated factors intervene in our understanding. Firstly it is significant that a writer who is supposedly caught up in the so called postmodernist rejection of historic nostalgia, evokes such a crucial moment. The postmodern disrupts the oppression of conventional Historical representation, by positing a multiplicity of representations. An excess of history thus emerges in this textual space as less India’s Truth, than the presentation of truths, for India’s marginalised voices, the stories from the slums, and the underworld invade the text with their own histories. In this context this multiplicity disrupts the telling of historical Truth, or as Linda Hutcheon puts it, “we now get the histories (in the plural) of the losers as well as the winners, of the regional (and colonial) as well as the centrist, of the

317

unsung many as well as the much sung few, and I might add, of women as well as men”.533 The postmodern form thus enables alternative histories to be presented, and this gives rise to the notion that there can no longer be a privileged voice in historical discourse, or a nostalgic longing for such a space. But history here, despite this postmodern revision, remains representation. Does this signal an end to the totalitarian injustices that the postmodern seeks to demolish? I would like to argue, in contrast to the version of the postmodern that I have touched upon here, that this faith in the power of language to present its object is just as repressive. What I am saying is that despite history’s postmodern revision it remains, to bend an argument Derrida made against Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation, the rule that represses the silent.534 In other words repression does not simply take place in conventional History, it begins in the modernist, and even postmodernist, thought of history as representation.

Postmodern history here merely expands its horizon to

include the marginalised. I would wish to argue that the space of the spittoon, as I have outlined in the current study, presents a marked departure from the postmodern revision of history. Marked by incommensurabilities and the problem of representation, the postmodern fails to account for the border crossings, the contaminations, the unrepresentable moments within representation, that are played out in Midnight’s Children. I would suggest that these sites of excess can be understood as the postcolonial sublime. The text closes with the image of Saleem teaching his adopted son (Shiva is his father) the art of spittoon-hittery. Such a scene is staged in and against the knowledge that Indira’s quest to delete the midnight’s children had not been totally successful. There remains a second, perhaps stronger, generation to open up a myriad of possibilities. The mature Saleem thus leaves his son a legacy, thirty glass jars filled with chutney and one jar that is empty. It is in this context that Saleem’s nostalgia is staged. He leaves his son not

318

with a prescription, as the postmodern rejection of nostalgia implies, but with a nostalgia for the possibility of India as an excessive cultural space. Significantly, the relation of the empty jar to the thirty full jars thwarts Lyotard’s thesis. Given the presence of thirty full jars, the implication is that the empty jar doesn’t occur in isolation. It is not an event in the Lyotardian sense that demands invention. Its filling can only be undertaken in relation to the excess, the too much, that the thirty full jars represent. Despite its emptiness there is a sense in which it has already begun to be filled, already contaminated by Saleem’s nostalgia for the Indian Palimpsest. The empty jar is not connected causally to the others, nor is it isolated. This means that its filling stages not a rejection of history, but a reimagining of history as a presentation of the unpresentable.

The future contents of the empty jar will only be able to be

understood in relation to the excess — thirty other jars — that it is unable to present. History for Rushdie is thus not a matter of finding a space for representation, it is a matter of articulating the unpresentabilities that lay beneath and which leak into its surface. I have attempted to read Rushdie in terms of what I have called the postcolonial sublime.

Several interrelated issues have emerged.

Firstly, the excess of history

presented in the novel can be understood as a critical moment in which the impossibility of cultural unity is powerfully staged. Rushdie’s texts stage uncontainable material sites as disruptions to totalising teleologies.

This excess is the postcolonial sublime.

Secondly, Rushdie’s texts are deeply engaged in the postmodern question. In defending his work against Ahmad’s claim that he has been seduced by a postmodern irresponsibility, I have argued that excess in Rushdie demands to be understood in material terms. What this means is that Rushdie actually raises the issue of historical responsibility: what can be done with too much history? Such a question emerges as a polemic against a nationalist violence that is preoccupied with myths of cultural and

319

historical purity. The sublime excess that Rushdie opens up demands that the question of historical responsibility be radically rethought. Thirdly, even though the postmodern insistence upon difference can be located at the edges of Rushdie’s work, I would contend that ultimately the materiality of the excess, and the impossibility of breaking free from this excess, signals that the pure event that lies at the critical core of Lyotard’s postmodern sublime does not adequately describe Rushdie. For Rushdie the sign of culture and history is overfull, rather than an empty question mark. Finally, I have underscored the productive capacity of the postcolonial sublime. To consider Rushdie’s refusal to be homogenised is to open up a disruptive politics. I would wish to conclude the chapter by turning to consider the disruptive capacity of Rushdie’s literature in the context of the conservative cultural politics that marks our time. Conclusion: Rushdie’s Art It will be useful to juxtapose these conclusions to Rushdie’s wider articulations concerning art.

The juxtaposition of my discussion concerning the excesses of

Midnight’s Children, its articulation of the unpresentable within representation, Ahmad’s judgement, which fails to take the political possibilities of excess into account, and Rushdie’s celebration as triumphant artist, reveals important disjunctions between Romanticism and the politics of Rushdie’s art. But when it comes to Rushdie’s stated aims concerning art, he is decidedly anthropomorphic. The subject is the source, and total controller of human destiny. For Rushdie there are no ultimate guiding principles outside the human will, history, politics and religion are merely the manifestations of this. This idea can be traced to Ludwig Feuerbach’s assertion that human beings ‘are what they eat’, and that religion is a human invention.

For Feuerbach God is a

projection of human potentiality, an expression of our unrealised ideals. Religion works by taking this imaginary construction and demanding devotion to it, rather than working to overcome the shortcomings which led to the construction in the first place. This is 320

argued in the influential work, The Essence of Christianity, which seeks to demystify God, the upshot being the notion that human beings can only become free through rejecting religious limits to self assertion. In other words, freedom is effected by rebelling against God,535 or god in the guise of totalising systems of philosophical thought. It is easy to see the influence of such ideas in the contemporary world. Rushdie is one among many who has consciously or unconsciously adopted Feuerbach’s view of the world. He expresses it this way:

The dream is part of our very essence. Given the gift of self-consciousness, we can dream versions of ourselves, new selves for old. Waking as well as sleeping, our response to the world is essentially imaginative: that is, picture-making. We live in our pictures, our ideas. I mean this literally. We first construct pictures of the world and then we step inside the frames. We come to equate the picture with the world, so that, in certain circumstances, we will even go to war because we find someone else’s picture less pleasing than our own.536

Here Truth is identified as an anthropomorphic construct, which, when considered as such, makes violence in the name of truth seem ludicrous. The constructed nature of truth, for Rushdie, disrupts the authority, and legitimacy, of such claims. If we all recognised the unfixed and constructed nature of our truths we would be less willing to defend them violently, and more open to new ideas.

Rushdie thus buys into

Feuerbach’s argument as the affirmation of a freedom from the constraints of dogmatism. He announces, the “elevation of the quest for the Grail over the Grail itself, the acceptance that all that is solid has melted into air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins”.537

321

Interestingly, Rushdie describes this condition as a ‘postmodern’ one, citing Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition as an articulation of this freedom.538 Clearly the emphasis upon overturning grand narratives, which is Lyotard’s project, is crucial in his understanding of the function of art and literature, and the role of the artist in today’s world. Even though the discourse of the postcolonial shares the same object as the postmodern, I have contested the critical capacity of Lyotard (in chapter four of the thesis), and I would argue that ultimately Rushdie does too. For Rushdie art, more specifically literature, is the medium which is at the forefront of this project. Art functions as a critical weapon against totalitarianism, it is a medium which seeks to reimagine, or as Rushdie puts it in defence of The Satanic Verses, to “see the world anew”.539 People, he writes, “understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the unsayable; not by bowing the knee, whether to gods or to men”.540 Literature thus has an overtly political function, one which provides space for the effectuation of social change.

Rushdie’s project is

indicative of Karl Marx’s reading of Feuerbach, and the declaration, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”.541 Rushdie’s writer is thus faced with a unique task in this revolutionary project. The task involves articulating new versions of the world in order to set captives free from the constraints of totalitarianism. The path that such a political gesture, if we were to read it as such, bears a remarkable likeness to the valorisation of the writer as Romantic genius. The writer is an extraordinary being, with an extraordinary project. He writes:

What draws us to an author is his or her ‘unlikeness’, even if the apparatus of literary criticism then sets to work to demonstrate that he or she is really no more than an accumulation of influences.

322

Unlikeness, the thing that makes it

impossible for a writer to stand in any regimented line, is a quality novelists share with the Caped Crusaders of the comics, though they are only rarely capable of leaping tall buildings in a single stride.542

Rushdie’s writer is a kind of super hero, exceptional being, a genius who has, somehow, not only managed to break the moulds that constrain the rest of us, but also has managed to find a form for this, in order to bring refreshment and newness to our lives. Perhaps there is room here for piety toward these ground breaking heroes. Rushdie’s Rushdie, the writer, is the modernist creative genius, ‘who can do nothing but write’. These terms are utilised by Farrukh Dhondy in defending Rushdie’s work. He writes, the fatwa is “the most desperate and fearful threat ever laid on the life of an innocent man trying to do, quite brilliantly, what he conceives of as his metier, something he cannot avoid doing: being a writer”.543 This notion shows its true colours in Rushdie’s defence of the novel as a sacred, if not holy, form. He contends that the function of literature is analogous to the function of religion. This means that literature is an absolute necessity in a world which has forgotten God. Literature is the medium which fills the godless vacuum. Rushdie writes:

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.544

Among these basic human needs Rushdie includes: the need to understand why life makes us feel so small, and subsequent need to know that despite this we have been

323

destined for something; the need for answers to the unanswerable, such as, how did we get here?; and the need for codes to live by. In the past these needs were met by religion, now, given the decline of belief in grand narratives, literature has been forced into this space. The writer thus deals with these most human questions, and provides, for the discerning reader, as Rushdie puts it, “explanations of the heart”.545 The implication here, as I see it, is that the world can’t do without literature or art if it is to move beyond, what must be, its current unjust and stagnant state. Literature is a specialised domain which deals with the issues of life, with the true ‘essence of humanity’. It is a domain which deals in freedoms, at least as Feuerbach and Rushdie consider it. protected.

It follows that such an important domain needs to be preserved and Art is synonymous with freedom.

It is a space for breaking through

constraints and articulating ‘newness’, which is an integral part of our human identity. The right of writers to freely express ideas is crucial, given the importance of art in Rushdie’s economy.

The reason for ensuring that privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want the absolute freedom to say and do what ever they please. It is that we, all of us, readers and writers and citizens and generals and godmen, need that little, unimportant-looking room. We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to remember that it is necessary.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. Without the freedom to challenge, even to satirize all orthodoxies, including religious orthodoxies, it ceases to exist. Language and the imagination cannot be imprisoned, or art will die, and with it, a little of what makes us human. 546

324

But despite the Romantic artistic heritage that inhabits these well worn lines, and Rushdie’s unexplained keenness for the Eighteenth Century, “the great century”547 as he put it, there is a disjunction, a disturbing ‘not quite’ at work here. Rushdie ultimately fails to mirror the Romanticism that began in eighteenth-century British aesthetics, and which was crucial in myths concerning the glory of empire. Caught in a conception of the sublime as elevation, eighteenth-century aesthetics carved out a space for the heroic outsider. Rushdie’s heroic status is marked by the almost but not quite that Fanon announces and Bhabha seizes (as I showed in chapter five of the thesis). As I have argued, in its excesses Rushdie’s work contaminates the totalising teleologies of the Western imagination. Just as Rushdie feels uncomfortable with the tag, “Indian-born British writer”548 — which has similar overtones to the colonial formulation that Twinings of London employ to promote their English Breakfast Tea: “A blend of Ceylon and Indian teas, producing a full-bodied, typically English brew” — his own valorisation of the Romantic artist doesn’t quite match V. S. Naipaul’s.549 This is because, unlike Naipaul, there is something materially confrontative, invasive, disturbing, something dangerously scandalous at work in his fiction. The arrival, for instance, of Gibreel Farishta to the shores of Britain parallels the Norman Conquest. As Rosa Diamond watches the ghosts of Britain’s past, “the Norman fleet had sailed right through this Englishwoman’s home”,550 Gibreel announces:

‘Rise ’n’ shine! Let’s take this place by storm’, Turning his back on the sea, blotting out the bad memory of in order to make room for the next things, passionate as always for newness, he would have planted (had he owned one) a flag, to claim in the name of whoknowswho this white country, his new-found land.551

325

This image of the migrant as conqueror has been aptly celebrated by Uma Parameswaran.

I read yet another prophecy in Rushdie’s novel. He sees non-white immigrants coming into their own, and I see them going further — I see them taking over these countries [...]

In my fantasy, the conquering armies marching from

immigrant and Asian wombs will outnumber, out-think and outshine the others and take over.

Not an unfit retribution for the races that have annihilated

aboriginal cultures and peoples in five continents over the past five hundred years.552

As I have suggested, the conservative sublime always occurs as a disjunction between thought and the object of thought, it is a state of privation, a lack, a want. The sublime, as I have shown in my engagement in Kant (in chapter two of the thesis), is a term linked to the West’s desire for elevation, detachment, a pure domain for Culture, Art, and Society. The sublime is that oppositional moment, in which the self faced with danger, or a great and seemingly invincible magnitude, is able to take up imaginative reason, and thus rise above the perils of nature, or the onslaught of the perceived enemy. The momentary possibility of the breakdown (in every sense of the word) of the capacity of reason, the pain that attends to this moment, is accompanied by the pleasure of the triumph of imaginative reason. The possibility of the sublime, as it is attended to by metaphors of overcoming obstacles, has been a crucial component in the Western myth of progress (Hegel). But something has happened. The postcolonial subject, once the object of the colonial, now returns as a greater force, one that poses a threat to the authority of Reason (Kant). But

326

it is not a threat that finds its base in an equal and opposite force. As Gibreel Farishta claims the land in the name of “whoknowswho”, the discourse of the postcolonial can be understood as a force which contaminates and upsets the capacity of Reason, and the myth of cultural purity. Rather than perpetuate the space of the genius, Rushdie writes in the name of an intense dissatisfaction against that space. If the lowly were able to seize the space of victimage in order to legitimate a case in the myth of European progress (as Fanon acknowledged and rejected), the in-between self exceeds such spaces, and is rendered a scandalous disturber rather than a contributor to the romantic ethic that is at the core of the conservative myth of progress. Rushdie’s ‘too much’ simply gets in the way of Reason’s pleasure. It is in an agonistic relation to this regard for an ethical romanticism that Rushdie’s metaphors such as, ‘hand-cuffed to history’, joined by elastic bands, the comma in-between, and nailed to history become politically charged. As a kind of freedom from the auspices of cognitive authority, this emphasis upon a connection to historical excess disturbs any sense of history as ethical progress. We can understand this disruption through excess, in political terms, as an opening up of the ‘how’ in the question: ‘how do we judge history?’ Such a questioning by its very nature defies essence. With its emphasis upon being connected to too much, Rushdie’s excess, rather than give grounds for abdicating social and political responsibility, demands a judgement that arises as a response to historical excess. Rushdie’s sense of justice is driven by the affirmative capacity of the excess. Its logic begins with an excess, and moves toward a politics, a representational practice, that is able to accommodate excess, the unrepresentable that lies in representation. Consequently, a Western actuality built upon the pure narrative of progress loses its validity. The art of the postcolonial Rushdie exceeds the actualities of the colonial imagination: India has always been, centuries of subcontinental history drown out the orders of historical colonialism. We

327

can understand the political nuances of this excess through Uma Parameswaran’s claim that Rushdie ultimately disrupts the Western imagination from postcolonial space. “Rushdie’s delineation of the status and ethos of Indians-in-Britain and of British racism is so insightful, so excellent”, she writes, “that one tends to think that he is certainly one-of-us-Indians as different from one-of-them-Angrez”.553 Rushdie’s fiction occupies that muddy space between the real and the free play of the imagination. His work is at once unreal in its reality and real in its unreality. This is not to suggest that his fiction refuses to deal with the real and becomes completely detached and unreal, or that the unreal itself is a new and more legitimate reality (aestheticism), it is to situate Rushdie on that muddy border between the referential, or the symbolic function of art, and the imaginative possibilities that are opened up in that referential play.554 I would suggest that this artistic location, neither symbolic nor an outright aestheticism, is what disturbs Ahmad. What can be said about this referential play? The migrant intellectual in this instance deals with history, specifically a history that has been structured in the West’s imagination through the trope of the heroic struggle of the outsider/underling. Rushdie too buys into the myth and describes his relation to this imagination through the protest metaphors of slavery, of limits, of defilement — ‘handcuffed to history’, ‘joined by elastic bands’, falling, ‘nailed’.

But ultimately these are metaphors that enact a

connection to an excess that disturbs the ethical limits of the Western myth of progress. Rushdie thus writes from a critical space that squarely faces the West. His is a looking back, but such a critical direction as it opens up history as excess, undoes the past as it has been constructed in the Western imagination. Rushdie utilises the tools that lay within the Western imagination, only in order to disrupt, to disturb. Rushdie is the devil within the Western fold, that contamination that the West struggles to look at. Forced by the demands of unifying teleologies, where there must remain nothing that is unable

328

to be accounted for, the West must look. But such a look is accompanied by the nagging thought that Rushdie is nothing other than a prince of darkness. Who is Rushdie? Who does he write for? In the impossibility of authoritatively claiming Rushdie as ‘one of the West’s own’ we find a hesitation, a moment that Todorov calls the fantastic. There is something about Rushdie that cannot be articulated in terms of the homogeneous impulses of Western literary departments. There remains an excess, a postcolonial sublime, that cannot be accounted for. Thus we can think Rushdie as a disturbance to the West’s ethical imagination. In its excess his work gestures toward the possibility of newness without knowing what that newness is, as Saleem’s empty chutney jar testifies. Rather than utopian visions, his is a disturbance that opens up the postcolonial sublime, which emerges, as I have contended throughout, in order to disrupt unifying teleologies. Notes 438

Søren Kierkegarrd, Fear and Trembling, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 61. 439

Harveen Sachdeva Mann, “‘Being Born Across’: Translation and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses”, Criticism, vol. 42, no. 2 (1995), 290. 440

Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of the Postmodern: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), 161-164. 441

Jean M. Kane, “The Migrant Intellectual and the Body of History: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children”, Contemporary Literature, vol. 37, no. 1 (1996), 112. 442

I would contend that the metaphor of the suffering exiled artist has remained a constant factor in ‘Rushdiecriticism’. It would be tempting to argue that the Satanic Verses Affair marks a shift in the critical reception of Rushdie, but such a shift has not taken place. The affair merely intensified that sense of the outsider/underling artist that has been utilised by critical work on Rushdie since it began. 443

Dieter Riemenschneider, “History and the Individual in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day”, Kunapipi, vol. 6, no. 2 (1984), 61-62. 444

In contrast see the English Journal, which, in its editorial entitled “Children of Modernism”, vol 81, no 1 (1992), 98-99, utilises the trope of the postmodern to 329

universalise Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. The editorial declares, “Saleem is a quintessential postmodern. By extension, he represents us all. All children of the twentieth century are Midnight Children — our students as well as their teachers” (98). 445

Jean-Pierre Durix, “It Was So, It Was Not So”, in A Shaping of Connections: Commonwealth Literature Studies — Then and Now: Essays in Honour of A. N. Jeffares, ed. Hena Maes-Jelinek, Kirsten Holst Peterson, and Anna Rutherford (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1989), 226. 446

Satish Aikant, “Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: The Middle Ground of Diaspora”, in Interrogating Postcolonialism: Theory, Text and Context, ed. Harish Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukerjee (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, 1996), 213-220. 447

Paul Gray, “East, West (book review)”, Time, vol. 145, no. 3 (1995), 1.

448

Pico Iyer, “After-Raj Tales”, Times Literary Supplement (30 September 1994), 23. See also Albert Camus’ interesting article on Oscar Wilde, “The Artist in Prison”, trans. Antonia White, Encounter, vol. 2, no. 3 (1954), 26-29. He writes, “Wilde realised that, in wanting to divorce art from suffering, he had severed one of its roots and thus cut himself off from real life. ... Now that he wore the livery of a convict, he knew that he had dragged beauty down to sub-human level, since such art conveys nothing to those who are deprived of everything. ... But the sorrow and joy in King Lear or War and Peace can be recognised by all who pine in our houses of injustice. Nothing could console him now but the great voice of genius which transforms man’s common pain into glory” (27-28). 449

Tom Wilhelmus, “Between Cultures”, The Hudson Review, vol. 49, no. 2 (1996), 318. 450

Sadik Jalal Al-Azm, “The Importance of Being Earnest about Salman Rushdie”, in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. D. M. Fletcher (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 257. 451

Samir Dayal, “Talking Dirty: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children”, College English, vol. 54, no. 4 (1992), 435. 452

Dayal, “Talking Dirty”, 434, 435.

453

Aijaz. Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 155.

454

Ahmad, In Theory, 6.

455

Ahmad, In Theory, 139-141.

456

Ahmad, In Theory, 150, 155.

457

Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (London: Merlin Press, 1963), 21.

330

458

Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”, in Collected Papers, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Basic Books, 1959), vol. 4, 161. 459

Ahmad, In Theory, 151.

460

Ahmad, In Theory, 155.

461

Ahmad, In Theory, 155.

462

See Syed Shahabuddin, “Yes, Mr Rushdie, We Shall Not Permit Literary Colonialism, Nor Religious Pornography”, Impact International, vol. 18, no. 21 (1988), 17-18. See also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (“Reading The Satanic Verses”, Public Culture, vol. 2, no. 1 (1989), 87-88) who contends that the Indian parliament’s decision to ban the book was not a religious one, but a ‘rational abstraction’ to ease the tension between racial groups. See also Midge Decter’s, “The Rushdiad”, Commentary, vol. 87, no. 6 (1989), 18-23. 463

See M. M. Ahsan, and A. R. Kidwai, Sacrilege Verses Civility (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1991), 25-60. See also S. Akhtar, “Holy Freedom and the ‘Liberals’”, Impact International, vol. 20, no.4 (1990), 10. 464

Spivak, “Reading The Satanic Verses,” 91. For alternative readings: Daniel Pipes, “The Ayatollah, the Novelist, and the West,” Commentary, vol. 87, no. 6 (1989), 9-17; Alex Knonagel, “The Satanic Verses: Narrative Structure and Islamic Doctrine,” International Fiction Review, vol. 18, no. 2 (1991), 69-75; A. Ali, “The Westernisation of a Nice Muslim Boy”, The Universal Message, vol. 12, no.10 (1991), 25-32; and M. A. Anees, The Kiss of Judas: Affairs of a Brown Sahib (Kuala Lumpur: Quill Publishers, 1989). 465

Anthony Close, “The Empirical Author: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Philosophy and Literature, vol. 14, no. 1 (1990), 248-267. 466

“Right to be Read”, The Daily Telegraph (17 January 1989), 16. For a useful critique of this consumerist defence, see Aamir Mufti, “Reading the Rushdie Affair: An Essay on Islam and Politics”, Social Text, no. 29 (1991), 95-116. 467

“Race, Religion, Rushdie”, The Times, July 25, 1989, 15. See also Clifford Longley, “A very British Lesson Muslim’s Must Learn”, The Times (8 July 1989), 12; and his “Rushdie to the Rescue”, The Times (29 December 1990), 10. 468

469

Rushdie, Shame, 69. Ahmad, In Theory, 141.

470

Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Bereton and Fred Rothwell (London: Macmillan and Co., 1911), 20. 471

Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. J.H. Bernard (London: Macmillan and Co., 1914), 54-55. 472

Kant, The Critique of Judgement, 67, 165. 331

473

Kant, The Critique of Judgement, 81.

474

Kant, The Critique of Judgement, 170.

475

Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 19.

476

It is significant that potentiality does not appear in Hegel’s controversial considerations upon art. Potentiality is the principle that governs development, specifically philosophical development. In Hegel’s thought art precedes religion, and ultimately reaches its absolute manifestation, via a synthesis with religion, in philosophy. Art is limited (poetry, as opposed to painting and music, is situated in this regard) because it “destroys the fusion of spiritual ideality with external existence” (The Philosophy of Fine Art, vol. IV, 16). Art in its most complete form — poetry — resides merely on the side of the Ideal in this system. Lukács’ use of the concept in this context suggests, contra Hegel, that he considers art a philosophical, and ultimately a political, form of expression. 477

G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simpson (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.,1892) vol. 1, 2021. 478

Hegel’s critique of Kant in The Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), 51, is also applicable here. Hegel argues that there is no distinction between the I that thinks and the concepts, for the I is only (self)realised in the act of thinking. The I doesn’t precede the concepts as Kant presupposed. Similarly this also means that there are no objects which precede the act of thinking. The object presupposes I as I presupposes the object, there is no sharp distinction. What is important is that the self comes to be realised only in relation to the object. Both are realised simultaneously. It is this lived relation that is crucial in both Ahmad’s, and before him, Lukács’ aesthetic considerations. 479

On this point I follow Tim Brennan’s, “Review: Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory”, Textual Practice, vol. 8, no. 2 (1994), 327-335. He writes: Ahmad “cannot bring himself to grant the double-edged nature of history — its creativity and its powerful discomfort with specific forms of power, not only its evanescence and pretence” (328). 480

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Pan Books, 1982), 9.

481

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 448.

Joseph Addison, The Spectator (no. 418, Monday June 30), (1712, reprint. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), vol. 3, 569. 482

483

Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Jonathan Cape), 28.

484

Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988, reprint. Dover, Delaware: The Consortium, 1992), 3. 485

Salman Rushdie, East, West (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994).

332

486

Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 4.

487

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 9.

488

Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, in The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 99-100. 489

Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 59.

490

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 10.

491

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 9.

492

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 45.

493

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 39, 40, 46.

494

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 39.

495

See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1968). See also Philip Engblom’s “A Multitude of Voices Carnivalization and Dialogicality in the Novels of Salman Rushdie”, in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. D. M. Fletcher (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 293-304. 496

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 44.

497

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 62-63.

498

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 63.

499

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 47.

500

Rushdie, Shame, 16.

501

Rushdie, Shame, 54.

502

Rushdie, Shame, 261.

503

Rushdie, Shame, 191-195.

504

Rushdie, Shame, 48.

505

Rushdie, Shame, 261.

506

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 146.

507

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 66, 68, 69.

508

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 66. 333

509

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 11.

510

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 95.

511

Sarah Saleri, “Contraband Histories: Salman Rushdie and the Embodiment of Blasphemy” (The Yale Review, vol. 78, no. 4 (1990), 604-624), in similar terms situates Rushdie on the borders of both devotion and sacrilege. His ‘blasphemous’ work — The Satanic Verses — must evoke both and neither categories at once, in order to undertake disturbances to the space of rigid faith. The upshot reveals the difficulty in rigidly locating Rushdie’s work. 512

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 125-126.

513

Rushdie, Shame, 87.

514

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 200.

515

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 228.

516

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 255.

517

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 256.

518

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 255.

519

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. R. Pascal, trans. W. Lough and C. P. Magill (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1938), 15. 520

See Vladmir Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966); and J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (1902, reprint. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968). 521

Salman Rushdie, “Salman Rushdie”, Lateline, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, n.p., 1994. 522

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 343.

523

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 348.

524

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 360.

525

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 360.

526

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 363.

527

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 365.

528

For an interesting contrast to the historical connections in Rushdie, see Marcel Proust, Time Regained, trans. C. K. Scott Moncreiff, Terrance Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor, in Remembrance of Things Past (New York: Random House, 1981), vol. 3, 7091107. 334

529

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 381-382.

530

See Mary Valentis, Female Rage: Unlocking its Secrets, Claiming its Power (New York: Carol Southern Books, 1994). 531

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 383.

532

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 448.

533

Linda Hutcheon, A Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 66.

534

Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 35. 535

Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1990). 536

Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta, 1992), 377-378.

537

Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 422.

538

Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 422.

539

Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 393.

540

Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 394-395.

541

Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”, in Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1946), 68. Marx champions Feuerbach’s work as it performs the dissolution of the religious world into its secular basis, but goes on to argue that Feuerbach fails to see that religion is the product of social relations. 542

Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 426.

543

Farrukh Dhondy, cited in The Rushdie File, ed. Lisa Appignanesi, and Sarah Maitland (London: Fourth Estate, 1989), 183. 544

Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 421.

545

Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 421.

546

Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 429, 396.

547

Una Chaudhuri, “Imaginative Maps: Excerpts from a Conversation with Salman Rushdie”, Turnstile, vol. 2, no. 1 (1990), 37. 548 549

Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 67. See for instance Rushdie’s review of Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival. “V. S. 335

Naipaul”, in Imaginary Homelands, 148-151. He writes, “All this is evoked in delicate, precise prose of the highest quality, but it is a bloodless prose. The idea that the British have lost their way because of ‘an absence of authority, an organization in decay’, that the fall of the manor encourages ordinary folk ‘to hasten decay, to loot, to reduce to junk’, is an unlikable, untenable one” (150-151). 550

Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 129

551

Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 131.

552

Uma Parameswaran, “The We/They Paradigm in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses”, in Us/Them: Translation, Transcription and Identity in Post-Colonial Literary Cultures, ed. Gordon Collier (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), 198-199. 553

Parameswaran, “The We/They Paradigm in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses”, 193.

554

See Uma Parameswaran, “Salman Rushdie’s Shame: An overview of a Labyrinth”, in The New Indian Novel in English: A study of the 1980’s, ed. Viney Kirpal (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1990), 121-130; Kumkum Sangari, “The Politics of the Possible”, Cultural Critique, no. 7 (1987), 157-186: Patricia Merivale, “Saleem Fathered by Oskar: Intertextual Strategies in ‘Midnight’s Children’ and ‘The Tin Drum’, Ariel, vol. 21, no. 3 (1990), 5-21.

336

Conclusion This mapping of the discourse of the postcolonial can proceed indefinitely, since its meaning refuses to be fixed. In taking up an ambivalent architecture, the discourse of the postcolonial imposes its ambivalence upon conventional understandings of culture and nation.

Aijaz Ahmad argues, on the contrary, that the supposed

ambivalence of contemporary culture and experience manifests the ambiguity of the discourse of the postcolonial. Not able to embrace Ahmad’s hope for a ‘proletarian’ revolution, the discourse of the postcolonial attempts to open up a ‘third space’ (Bhabha), in order to play with and upon the game of reason obliquely. It is not by some ideological conspiracy that the discourse of the postcolonial takes up Western reason as both its strategy and its object. The pervasive Idealism of Kant and Hegel is constructed anxiously. It can be read as an apologetic for colonial expansion, an apologetic that is, ultimately, insecure. The insecurity of Western reason — empirical vertigo and the threat of madness in Kant, the impossibility of system in Hegel — can, however, serve to reveal what might be called the object of the discourse of the postcolonial. For it is clear that the ambivalent architecture of the discourse of the postcolonial can be understood in transgressive terms as an attempt to overcome the subjectivism of Idealism and the objectivism of what could be called Ahmad’s Marxism. This attempt is realised in the space of convergence in Bennett’s painting, in Fanon’s celebration of the black body and its location both inside and outside Hegel’s phenomenology, in Bhabha’s discursive infrastructures, which seek to alter the course of colonial desire, and in Rushdie’s excessive historical art, which refuses to be contained by Western historiography. These thinkers have one crucial thing in common: they all return to the scene of colonial domination in order to set forth a politics of excess to combat the teleological desire of contemporary conservatism.

In the complicity of colonial expansion and Kant’s 337

philosophy, we have seen how excess plays a vital role in establishing the authority of reason.

A crises mentality both engenders and empowers conservatism.

These

postcolonial thinkers seek to exploit this crises, to push it beyond its structured location in Idealism. They aim not at system building, but at transgressing the infrastructures of all thought, especially systematic thought. Is there not, in sum, a resolve to take up excess, the sublime, to perform such a task? The Kantian sublime makes sense only as a colonial metaphor. This is why there is a postcolonial sublime. The location of the sublime in Kant’s architectonic system engenders the authority of reason, which, in the context of European expansionism, becomes the stable ground upon which knowledge can securely travel. The sublime as excess is thus a threat to a secure knowledge, and when tamed, as Kant and Hegel attempt, it becomes a symbol of the power of reason. But this attempt to tame the sublime is fraught with difficulty. The Kantian sublime as a colonial metaphor is able to be pushed beyond the limits of Idealism’s systems. This pushing, or opening up of the excessive residues that remain embedded within such systems is disruptive of the colonial claims that have been enacted in its wake. This is the postcolonial sublime. Located in the muddy space inbetween Hegelian conservatism and the groundless Nietzschean wanderer, Fanon’s body politics radicalises the Kantian sublime. Into the confident nobility of Kant’s dialectical play upon the sublime, there bursts the based and the lowly, who are, despite being excluded from the progress of history, creative beings. Fanon’s celebration of the black body thus emerges as a creative force that questions the authority of the Western pretension to the systematic. It opens up a space of hesitation, of questioning, that ultimately demands a deviation in the destination of reason’s teleology. Where Hegel confesses — “I was fully conscious ... of the inherent difficulty of the subject matter and of its exposition ... I have tried after many years ... to remedy this imperfection [and] feel I still have reason enough to

338

claim the indulgence of the reader”555 — and proceeds with confidence, Fanon’s black body, rooted as it were in the excesses of material desire as situated inside Hegel’s system, reveals the impossible grounds for such confidence. Bhabha’s transgressive infrastructures, too, effectively seek to push the Kantian sublime beyond its limits, its location in the construction of the authority of reason. The infrastructures, mimicry, sly civility, subaltern agency, and hybridity open up spaces of excess in order to disturb the assumed power of the colonial gaze. Each arises in the form of an obligation, but the untranslatable excess that is produced in the dissemination of colonial authority contaminates and alters the destination of that authority. Such spaces thus take on the disturbing character of the postcolonial sublime. Where colonial desire is reason’s teleology, for Bhabha the sublime is the material real that is unable to be contained in such a teleology. In the excessive play of Rushdie’s fiction we also find a play upon the Kantian sublime. Bursting with possibilities, his fiction, rather than define and demystify in the classical Marxian sense, ultimately opens up the question of politics. One of the most striking things about the spaces from which life is staged in his texts, is that they all leak. The textual spaces that presuppose the fixed boundaries that give rise to Ahmad’s despair, are spaces that collapse, spaces of the uncontainable. But it is precisely this accent upon leakage that constitutes the possibility of a politics that disrupts the violence of unifying teleologies. Rushdie’s fiction sets forth a politics of leakage. Midnight’s Children inserts itself into the everyday world of the pleasure and the power of gossip and the telling of stories, the space of the spittoon, and seeks to speak the unspeakable, that which has been overwritten by a hegemonic Western imagination. Like all gossip it is a politics that is delicious and yet disturbing. And, in the context of reason’s teleology, it is a politics of excess that pushes Kant’s quaint musing upon the reality of meaninglessness, beyond its inscription in European confidence.

339

I have linked each of these thinkers to the anxiousness that emerges in the critical tension between Kant and Hegel.

In this tension there is an unsettling, a

vulnerability. As Hegel in his quest to champion the attainments of Europe focuses upon Kant’s incomplete Idealism, the postcolonial sublime arises when this vulnerability is foregrounded and maintained. In my study of some of the key moments in the discourse of the postcolonial, I have shown that it is precisely the uncontained, that which exceeds the limits of unifying teleologies, that can be considered both the object and the subject of the discourse of the postcolonial. In effecting a politics that disturbs the Western myths of unity and cultural purity, the excess of the postcolonial goes to work upon the Kantian sublime and wrests it from its dialectical location in his architectonic system. But the question is whether the postcolonial sublime can be understood in terms of a postmodern groundlessness. By ‘groundlessness’ I mean the Lyotardian event, the phrase as an empty question mark that demands to be dealt with. The discourse of the postcolonial, however, begins with a material excess, as opposed to an empty questioning, and then proceeds to affirm this excess. If Lyotard championed the event as a lack, the discourse of the postcolonial opens up the material real as a site of too much. It is clear that the fruitfulness of the discourse of the postcolonial lies in its effort to exploit the anxiousness that lies at the core of Western reason. Any engagement with it clearly must take place on this basis. The appropriation of the sublime moment as both material excess and a rhetorical strategy — to the extent that the ambivalent architecture of the discourse of the postcolonial is neither a shallow deviousness nor an eclecticism without theoretical depth — meets the demands of the time very well. And if I concur with Bhabha’s return to Fanon in order to access the ‘dark side of man’, it is

340

because postcoloniality seems to signify the possibility of disrupting the increasing capacity of the forces of conservatism upon the global scene. Notes G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969), 31. 555

341

Bibliography

Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. London: Oxford University Press, 1953. Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa”, Research in African Literatures, vol. 9, no. 1 (1978): 1-15. Addison, Joseph. The Spectator. Vol. 3, 1712, reprint. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992. ________ “The Politics of Postcoloniality”, Race and Class, vol. 36, no. 3 (1995): 1-20. Ahsan, M. M, and A. R. Kidwai, ed. Sacrilege Verses Civility. Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1991. Aikant, Satish. “Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: The Middle Ground of Diaspora”, in Interrogating Postcolonialism: Theory, Text and Context, ed. Harish Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukerjee, 213-220. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, 1996. Akhtar, S. “Holy Freedom and the ‘Liberals’”, Impact International, vol. 20, no.4 (1990): 10. Akinside, Mark. The Pleasures of the Imagination: A Poem. London: R. Dodsley, 1744. Al-Azm, Sadik Jalal. “The Importance of Being Earnest about Salman Rushdie”, in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. D. M. Fletcher, 255-292. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. Ali, A. “The Westernisation of a Nice Muslim Boy”, The Universal Message, vol. 12, no.10 (1991): 25-32. Althusser, Louis and Etienne Balibar. Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1970. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1991.

342

________ “Exodus”, Critical Inquiry, 20 (1994): 314-327. Anees, M. A. The Kiss of Judas: Affairs of a Brown Sahib. Kuala Lumpur: Quill Publishers, 1989. Anson, Stan. “The Postcolonial Fiction”, Arena, no. 96 (1991): 64-66. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?”, Critical Inquiry, 17 (1991): 336-357. ________ “The Hybrid Age”, Times Literary Supplement, (27 May 1994): 5. Appignanesi, Lisa. and Sarah Maitland, ed. The Rushdie File. London: Fourth Estate, 1989. Appleby, Joyce. Capitalism and a New Social Order. New York: New York University Press, 1984. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle, trans. S. H. Butcher. London: Macmillan and Co., 1902. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy: an Essay in political and Social Criticism. London: Smith, Elder, 1875. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. Baille, John. “An Essay on the Sublime”, in The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, ed. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, 87-100. 1747, reprint. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Bassett, Susan. and Harish Travedi. ed. Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, 1998. Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, trans. Allan Stoekl, ed. Carl R. Lovitt, Donald M. Leslie, Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

343

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World, trans. H. Iswolsky. Cambridge Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1968. ________ Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, trans. R.W. Rotsel. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973. Barthes, Roland. The Eiffel Tower and other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1979. Beattie, James. Dissertations Moral and Critical. 1783, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1971. Behler, Ernst. German Romantic Criticism, ed. A. Leslie Willson. New York: Continuum, 1882. Benhabib, Seyla. “Epistemologies of Postmodernism”, New German Critique, no. 33 (1984): 103-127. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Bennett, Gordon. Painting for a New Republic (The Inland Sea). Perth: Art Gallery of Western Australia, 1994. Bennington, Geoffrey. Lyotard Writing the Event. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. Berger, Mark. “The End of the Third World”, Third World Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 2 (1994): 257-275. Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Bereton and Fred Rothwell. London: Macmillan and Co., 1911. ________ An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme. London: Macmillan & Co., 1913. ________ Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell. London: Macmillan & Co., 1913. Bhabha, Homi. “Novel Metropolis”, New Statesman (16 February 1990): 16-18. ________ “The Third Space”, in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 207-221. 344

________ David Bennett, and Terry Collits. “The Postcolonial Critic”, Arena, no. 96. 1991), 47-63. ________ “A Question of Survival: Nations and Psychic States”, in Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory, ed. James Donald, 89-103. Houndsmill: Macmillan, 1991. ________ “Freedom’s Basis in the Indeterminate”, October, no. 61 (1992): 46-57. ________ “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition”, in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura, 112-123. Chrisman. Hemel Hempstead, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. ________ The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. ________ “Dance this Diss Around”, Artforum, April (1995): 19-20. ________ “Black Male”, Artforum, February (1995): 86-87. Bhari, Deepika. “Once More with Feeling: What is Postcolonialism?”, Ariel, vol. 26, no. 1 (1995): 51-82. Blackmore, Richard. Essays Upon Several Subjects. 1716, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1971. Blackwell, Thomas. An Inquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer. 1735, reprint. New York: Garland, 1970. Blair, Hugh. Lectures on Rhetoric and belles lettres. 3 vols. 1785, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1970. _________ A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossain, the Son of Fingal. 1765, reprint. New York: Garland, 1970. Bloom, Harold. Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Bongie, Chris. Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literatures. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. 345

Breckenridge, Carol. and Peter van der Veer. ed., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Brennan, Tim. “Review: Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory”, Textual Practice, vol. 8, no. 2 (1994): 327-335. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnestoa Press, 1984. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and The Beautiful. 1759, reprint. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958. Camus, Albert. “The Artist in Prison”, trans. Antonia White. Encounter, vol. 2, no. 3 (1954): 26-29. Carroll, David. Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida. London: Routledge, 1987. Castells, Manuel. The City and the Grass Roots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Subaltern Studies and Critique of History”, Arena, no. 96 (1991): 105-120. Chambers, Iain. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London: Routledge, 1994. Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. London: Zed Press, 1986. Chaudhuri, Una. “Imaginative Maps: Excerpts from a Conversation with Salman Rushdie”, Turnstile, vol. 2, no. 1 (1990): 36-47. “Children of Modernism”, English Journal, vol 81, no 1 (1992): 98-99. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1988. Close, Anthony. “The Empirical Author: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Philosophy and Literature, vol. 14, no. 1 (1990): 248-267. Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life. London: Heinemann, 1988.

346

Cole, Sarah. “Conradian Alienation and Imperial Intimacy”, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 44, no. 2 (1998): 251-281. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, vol, 7, ed. James Engwell, and W. Jackson Bate. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983. Condillac, Etienne Bonnot Abbé de. Philosophical Writings of Etienne Bonnot Abbé de Condillac. trans. Franklin Philip Hillsdale. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1982. Conrad, Joseph. Youth, A Narrative and Two Other Stories. London: J. M. Dent, 1923. Constable, John. Reflections upon Accuracy of Style. London: Henry Lintot, 1731. Cooper, Anthony Ashley. Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “Characteristics”, in The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, ed. Andrew Ashfield, Peter de Bolla, 72-79. 1714, reprint. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Crowther, Paul. The Kantian Sublime. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Dash, Michael. “In Search of the Lost Body: Redefining the Subject in Caribbean Literature”, Kunapipi, vol. 11, no. 1 (1989): 17-26. Davidson, Basil. The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State. London: James Currey, 1992. Dayal, Samir. “Talking Dirty: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children”, College English, vol. 54, no. 4 (1992): 431-445. Decter, Midge. “The Rushdiad”, Commentary, vol. 87, no. 6 (1989): 18-23. Descartes, Rene. A Discourse on Method, trans. John Veitch. London: J. M. Dent, 1912. ________ Principles of Philosophy, trans. Valentine Roger Miller, and Reese P. Miller. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983. Delueze, Gilles. and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

347

Dennis, John. The Advancement of Modern Poetry: A Critical Discourse. 1704, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1971. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976. ________ Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. ________ Dissemination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. ________ The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington, Ian Mcleod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Dirks, Nicholas. ed., Colonialism and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Dirlik, Arif. “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism”, Critical Inquiry, 20 (1994): 328-356. Dodwell, H. H. ed. The Cambridge History of the British Empire, vol. 5, The Indian Empire: 1858-1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932. Dowling, Julie. Julie Clampett. Perth: Art Gallery of Western Australia, 1995. Drury, Shadia. The Roots of Postmodern Politics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Duff, William. An Essay on Original Genius. 1767, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1971. During, Simon. “Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today”, Textual Practice, vol. 1, no. 1 (1987): 32-47. Durix, Jean-Pierre. “It Was So, It Was Not So”, in A Shaping of Connections: Commonwealth Literature Studies — Then and Now: Essays in Honour of A. N. Jeffares, ed. Hena Maes-Jelinek, Kirsten Holst Peterson, and Anna Rutherford, 225-231. Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1989. Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology. London: Verso, 1976. Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960. 348

Engblom, Philip. “A Multitude of Voices Carnivalization and Dialogicality in the Novels of Salman Rushdie”, in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. D. M. Fletcher, 293-304. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. Fabian, J. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Fanon, Frantz. Peau Noire Masques Blancs. Paris: Éditions Du Seuil, 1952. ________ “Racism and Culture”, in Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays, trans. Haakon Chevalier, 29-44. New York: Grove Press, 1967. ________ Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. ________ The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington. London: Penguin, 1967. ________ A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakan Chevalier. Harmondworth: Penguin, 1970. Felton, Henry. A Dissertation on Reading the Classics and Forming a Just Style. London: Jonah Bowyer, 1713. Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1990. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. The Vocation of Man, The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 2 vols., trans. William Smith. London: Trübner, 1889. ________ Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale. New York: Cornell University Press, 1988. Foucault, Michel. “A Preface to Transgression”, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. ed. Donald F. Bouchard, 29-52. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. ________ “What is Enlightenment?”, trans. Catherine Porter, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, 32-50. London: Penguin, 1984. François, Pierre. “Salman Rushdie’s Philosophical Materialism in The Satanic Verses”, in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. D. M. Fletcher, 305-319. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. 349

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny”, Collected Papers, vol. 4, trans. Joan Riviere, 368407. London: Hogarth Press, 1925. ________ Civilisation and Its Discontents. trans. Joan. Riviere. London: Hogarth, 1930. ________ “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, 7-64. London: The Hogarth Press, 1955. ________ “Mourning and Melancholia”, in Collected Papers, vol. 4, trans. Joan Riviere, 152-170. New York: Basic Books, 1959. Garvin, James. “The Maintenance of Empire: A Study in the Economics of Power”, in The Empire and the Century, 69-143. London: John Murray, 1905. ________ The Economic Foundations of Peace: or World-Partnership as the Truer Basis of the League of Nations. London: Macmillan & Co., 1919. Gates, Jr. Henry Louis. “Editor’s Introduction: Writing “Race” and the Difference It Makes”, Critical Inquiry, 12 (1985): 1-20. Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. New York: Cornell University Press, 1983. Gerard, Alexander. An Essay on Taste. 1759, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1970. Ghose, Zulfikar. The Loss of India. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1964. Giddens, Anthony. The Nation-State and Violence. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985. Gide, André. Fruits of the Earth, trans. Dorothy Bussey. London: Secker and Warburg, 1962. ________ The Journals of André Gide, 2 vols. trans. Justin O’Brien. London: Secker and Warburg, 1948. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A. Developing Countries in British Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1977.

350

Goss, Jasper. “Postcolonialism: Subverting Whose Empire?”, Third World Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 2 (1996): 239-250. Gray, Paul. “East, West (book review)”, Time, vol. 145, no. 3 (23 January 1995): 1. Guha, Ranajit. “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India”, in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 37-44. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathon Rutherford, 222-237. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. Hawkins, Hunt. “Conrad and the Psychology of Colonialism”, in Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, ed. Ross Murfin, 71-88. Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1985. Hegel, G. W. F. The Philosophy of Fine Art, 4 vols. London: G. Bell, 1920. ________ Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 4 vols, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simpson. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1955. ________ The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree. New York: Dover Publications, 1956. ________ Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969. ________ Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols., trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. ________ Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. ________ The Berlin Phenomenology, trans. and ed. M. J. Petry. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing, 1981. ________ Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. ________ The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991.

351

Heidegger, Martin, Hegel’s Concept of Experience, trans. Harper & Row Publishers. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1970. ________ Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Helvetius, Claude Adrien. “Men are Reasonable”, trans. W. Hooper, in The Portable Age of Reason Reader, ed. Crane Brinton, 257-262. New York: The Viking Press, 1969. Hewitt, Andrew. Fascist Modernism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. London: Penguin, 1985. Hobsbawm, Eric. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ________ Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991. London: Abacus, 1995. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Hobson, J. A. Imperialism: A Study. 1902, reprint. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968. Holbach, Paul Henry Thiery Baron d’. The System of Nature; or The Laws of the Moral and Physical World, 3 vols., trans. M. De Mirabaud. London: R. Helder, 1821. Holland, Bernard. “The Crown and the Empire”, in The Empire and the Century. ed. George Bennett, 29-36. London: John Murray, 1905. Holy Bible, The. King James Version. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908. Howes, Graig. “Burke, Poe, and ‘Usher’: The Sublime and Rising Woman”, Emerson Society Quarterly, no. 31 (1985): 173-189. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888. ________ An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Charles W. Hendel. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1955. 352

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of the Postmodern: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988. ________ A Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989. ________ “The Post Always Rings Twice: the Postmodern and the Postcolonial”, Textual Practice, vol. 8, no. 3 (1994): 205-238. Hyppolite, Jean. Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974. Iyer, Pico. “After-Raj Tales”, Times Literary Supplement (30 September 1994): 23. Jacob, Hildebrand. The Works of Hildebrand Jacob. London: R. Dodsley, 1735. Jain, Jasbir. Problems of Postcolonial Literatures and other Essays. Jaipur: Printwell, 1991. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. Juan, Jr. E. San. “On the Limits of ‘Postcolonial’ Theory: Trespassing Letters from the ‘Third World’”, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 26, no. 3 (1995): 89-115. Kane, Jean M. “The Migrant Intellectual and the Body of History: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children”, Contemporary Literature, vol. 37, no. 1 (1996): 94-118. Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena to any Metaphysics that can Qualify as a Science, trans. Paul Carus. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1902. ________ Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman kemp Smith. London: Macmillan, 1933. ________ Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard. New York: Hafner Press, 1951. ________ Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyte H. Hudson. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960. ________ Conflict of Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor. New York: Abaris Books, 1979. 353

________ “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’”, trans. H. Nisbet, in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, 54-60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ________ Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1993. Kelly, Michael. Hegel in France. Birmingham: Birmingham Modern Languages Publications, 1992. Kenrick, William. Introduction to the School of Shakespeare. 1749, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1970. Kierkegarrd, Søren. Fear and Trembling, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. ________ The Concept of Irony, ed. trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. King, Bruce. ed. New National and Post-colonial Literatures: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. King, Richard. Orientalism and Religion: Post-colonial Theory, India, and the Mystic. London: Routledge, 1999. Knonagel, Alex. “The Satanic Verses: Narrative Structure and Islamic Doctrine,” International Fiction Review, vol. 18, no. 2 (1991): 69-75. Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. New York: Cornell University Press, 1980. Kripke, Saul. Naming and Necessity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Colombia University Press, 1982. La Mettrie, Julien Offray de. “Man a Machine”, in Les Philosophes, ed. Norman L. Torrey, 168-177. New York: Capricorn Books, 1960. Lamming, George. The Pleasures of Exile. London: Michael Joseph, 1960.

354

Lawrence, D. H. “Why the Novel Matters”, in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald, 533-538. London: William Heineman, 1936. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von. Monadology, trans. George R. Montgomery. La Salle, Illinois: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1902. Lennin, Vladmir. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 2 vols. New York: Dover Publishers, 1959. Longinus, “On the Sublime”, in Classical Literary Criticism, trans. T. S. Dorsch, 97158. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. Longley, Clifford. “A Very British Lesson Muslim’s Must Learn”, The Times (8 July 1989): 12 ________ “Rushdie to the Rescue”, The Times (29 December 1990): 10. Loomba, Ania. “Overworlding the Third World”, Oxford Literary Review, vol. 13, no. 1-2 (1991): 164-192. ________ Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 1998. Lukács, Georg. The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. London: Merlin Press, 1963. Lyotard, Jean-François. Driftworks, trans R. McKeon. New York: Semiotext(e), 1984. ________ The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. ________ Peregrinations: Law, Form Event. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. ________ Heidegger and “the jews”, trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. ________ The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. 355

________ “Discussions or Phrasing after Auschwitz”, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin, 360-392. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. ________ “Lessons in Paganism”, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin, 122154. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. ________ The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. ________ The Postmodern Explained to Children, ed. Julian Pefanis, Morgan Thomas. Sydney: Power Publications, 1992. ________ Toward the Postmodern, ed. Robert Harvey and Mark Roberts. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993. ________ Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. ________ Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ________ Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenburg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Lyotard, Jean-François. and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Lyotard, Jean-François. and J. Rogozinski, “The Notion of the Thought Police”, Art & Text, no. 26 (1987): 24-31. Macherey, Peirre. A Theory of Literary Production. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Magdoff, Harry. Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978. Maley, Terry. “The Politics of Time: Subjectivity and Modernity in Max Weber”, in The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment, ed. Asher Horowitz and Terry Maley, 139-166. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1994. Man, Paul de. Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 356

Mann, Harveen Sachdeva. “‘Being Born Across’: Translation and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses”, Criticism, vol. 42, no. 2 (1995): 281-308. Marx, Karl. “Theses on Feuerbach”, in Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1946. ________ Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan, ed. Dirk J. Struik. New York: Lawrence and Wishart, 1964. Marx, Karl. and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. R. Pascal, trans. W. Lough and C. P. Magill. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1938. Mason, John. Essay on the Power of Numbers. 1749, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1970. McClintock, Anne. “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the term Post-Colonialism”, Social Text, vol. 31. no. 32 (1992): 84-98. Mclean, Ian. and Bennett, Gordon. The Art of Gordon Bennett. Roseville East, NSW: Craftsman House, 1996. Merivale, Patricia. “Saleem Fathered by Oskar: Intertextual Strategies in ‘Midnight’s Children’ and ‘The Tin Drum’, Ariel, vol. 21, no. 3 (1990): 5-21. Michel, Martina. “Positioning the Subject: Locating Postcolonial Studies”, Ariel, vol. 26, no. 1 (1995): 83-99. Mishra, Vijay. The Gothic Sublime. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. ________ “The Postcolonial Differend: Diasporic Narratives of Salman Rushdie”, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 26, no 3 (1995): 7-45. ________ Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Mishra, Vijay. and Bob Hodge. “What is Post(-)colonialism?”, Textual Practice, vol. 5, no. 3 (1991): 399-414. ________ Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Post-Colonial Mind. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991.

357

Mitchell, W.J.T. and Homi Bhabha, “Translator Translated”, Artforum (March 1995): 80-83, 110, 114, 118-119. Monk, Samuel Holt. The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England. Ann Abor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. Moraru, Christian. “Refiguring the Postcolonial: The Transnational Challenges”, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 28, no. 4 (1997): 171-185. Morretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders, trans. David Forgacs. London: Verso, 1983. Morris, Meaghan. The Pirate’s Fiancee: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism. London: Verso, 1988. Mphahlele, Ezekiel. The African Image. London: Faber and Faber, 1962. Mufti, Aamir. “Reading the Rushdie Affair: An Essay on Islam and Politics”, Social Text, no. 29 (1991): 95-116. Mukherjee, Arun. “Whose Post-Colonialism and Whose Postmodernism?”, World Literature Written in English, vol. 30, no. 2 (1990): 1-9. Needler, Henry. “On the Excellency of Divine Contemplation”, in The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, eds. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, 80-82. 1724, reprint. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Nicholls, Brett. “Disrupting Time: Postcolonial Politics in Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture”, Southern Review, vol. 30, no. 1 (1997): 4-25. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Falsity in Their Ultramoral Sense”, in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 2, ed. Oscar Levy, 173-191. London: Allen and Unwin, 1924. ________Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. ________ Basic Writings of Nietzsche. trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: The Modern Library, 1968. ________ The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. 358

________ Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin, 1969. ________ The Gay Science, trans, Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. ________ Human all too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Parameswaran, Uma. “Salman Rushdie’s Shame: An overview of a Labyrinth”, in The New Indian Novel in English: A study of the 1980’s, ed. Viney Kirpal, 121-130. New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1990. ________ “The We/They Paradigm in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses”, in Us/Them: Translation, Transcription and Identity in Post-Colonial Literary Cultures, ed. Gordon Collier, 189-199. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992. Parry, Benita. Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers. Houndsmill: The Macmillan Press, 1983. ________ “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse”, The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 9, no. 1-2 (1987): 27-58. ________ “Signs of Our Times”, Third Text, vol. 28/29 (1994): 5-24. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer. London: Penguin, 1966. Patten, Chris. “Of Tigers, Bulls, and Bears: Collusion and Cronyism Cannot be the Basis for Sustained Economic Growth”, Time (2 February 1998): 60-62. Pefanis, Julian. Heterology and the Postmodern. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991. Pipes, Daniel. “The Ayatollah, the Novelist, and the West,” Commentary, vol. 87, no. 6 (1989): 9-17. Pippin, Robert. Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Plato, Phaedo, trans. R. Hackworth, in Greek Philosophy: Thales to Aristotle, ed. Reginald E. Allen, 155-196. New York: The Free Press 1991. ________ The Republic, trans. F. M. Cornford, in Greek Philosophy: Thales to Aristotle, ed. Reginald E. Allen, 197-245. New York: The Free Press, 1991. 359

Poole, Ross, “How European is Nationalism? A Response to Philip Gerrans”, Political Theory Newsletter, 7 (1995): 60-66. Pope, Alexander. An Essay on Man, vol. 1, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt. London: Methuen & Co, 1954. Prakash, Gyan. “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism”, American Historical Review, vol. 99 (1994): 1475-1490. ________ ed. After Colonialism. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995. Proust, Marcel. Kilmartin, 1981.

Swans Way, vol. 1, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terrance Remembrance of Things Past, 3-462. New York: Random House,

________ Time Regained, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terrance Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 3, 709-1107. New York: Random House, 1981. “Race, Religion, Rushdie”, The Times (25 July 1989): 15. Radhakrishnan, R. Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Rattansi, Ali. “Postcolonialism and its Discontents”, Economy and Society, vol. 26, no. 4 (1997): 480-500. Readings, Bill. Introducing Lyotard. London: Routledge, 1991. Reid, Thomas. Essays on the Intellectual powers of Man. 1785, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1971. Renan, Ernest. “What is a Nation?”, trans. Martin Thom, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha, 8-22. London: Routledge, 1990. “Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines”, in The Concept of Empire: Burke to Attlee 1774-1947, ed. George Bennett, 103-106. 1837, reprint. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1962. Reynolds, Frances. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste and of the Origin of Our Ideas of Beauty. 1785, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1972. 360

Richardson, Jonathan. An Essay on the Theory of Painting. 1725, reprint. Menston: Scolar Press, 1971. Riemenschneider, Dieter. “History and the Individual in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day”, Kunapipi, vol. 6, no. 2 (1984): 53-66. “Right to be Read”, The Daily Telegraph (17 January 1989): 16. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1973. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Pan Books, 1982. ________ Shame. London: Jonathan Cape, 1983. ________ Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta, 1992. ________ The Satanic Verses. 1988, reprint. Dover, Delaware: The Consortium, 1992. ________ “Salman Rushdie”, Lateline, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, n.p., 1994. ________ East, West. London: Jonathan Cape, 1994. ________ The Moor’s Last Sigh. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995. Ruthrof, Horst. “Differend and Agonistics: a Transcendental Argument”, Philosophy Today, vol. 34, no. 2 (1992): 324-335. Said, Edward. “Foreword”, in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed., Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, v-x. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. ________ Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1991. ________ Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Saleri, Sarah. “Contraband Histories: Salman Rushdie and the Embodiment of Blasphemy”, The Yale Review, vol. 78, no. 4 (1990): 604-624.

361

Sangari, Kumkum. “The Politics of the Possible”, Cultural Critique, no. 7 (1987): 157186. Schiller, Friedrich von. On the Sublime, trans. Julius A. Elias. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1966. Schlegel, Friedrich von. The Philosophy of Life and the Philosophy of Language in a Course of Lectures, trans. A. J. W. Morrison,. London: G. Bell & Sons, 1913. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols., trans. E. F J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications, 1966. ________ Manuscript Remains in Four Volumes, ed. Arthur Hübscher, trans. E. J. F. Payne. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1988. Senghor, Léopold. “Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century”, in The Africa Reader: Independent Africa, ed. Wilfred Cartey and Martin Kilson, 170-192. New York: Vintage Books, 1970. Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana. “At the Margins of Postcolonial Studies”, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 26, no. 3 (1995): 47-71. Shahabuddin, Syed. “Yes, Mr Rushdie, We Shall Not Permit Literary Colonialism, Nor Religious Pornography”, Impact International, vol. 18, no. 21 (1988): 17-18. Sharpe, Jenny. “Figures of Colonial Resistance”, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 35. no. 1 (1989):137-155. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. A Defence of Poetry, ed. John E. Jordon. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965. Shohat, Ella. “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’”, Social Text, vol. 31/32 (1992): 99-113. Sim, Stuart. “Lyotard and the Politics of Antifoundationalism”, Radical Philosophy, no. 44 (1986): 8-13. Slemon, Stephen. “The Scramble for Post-colonialism”, in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed., Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, 45-52. London: Routledge, 1995. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776. reprint (2 vols. in 1). New York: The Modern Library, 1937. 362

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “The Rani of Sirmur”, in Europe and its Others, vol. 1. ed. Francis Barker, 128-151. Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985. ________ “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson, Lawrence Grossberg, 271-313. Urbana: University of Illinios Press, 1988. ________ “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography”, in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 3-32. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. ________ “Reading The Satanic Verses”, Public Culture, vol. 2, no. 1 (1989): 79-99. Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Spybey, Tony. Social Change and Dependency. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. Stivale, Charles. “Review” of The Differend, The French Review, vol. 63, no. 4 (1990): 722-723. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Tennyson, Lord Alfred. “Idylls of the King”, in The Concept of Empire: Burke to Attlee, 1774-1947, ed. George Bennett, 256. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1962. Thieme, John. ed. The Arnold Anthology of Post-colonial Literatures in English. London: Arnold, 1996. “The Moor’s Last Sigh (book review)”, The Economist (9 September 1995): 88. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard. Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973. Usher, James. Clio; or, a Discourse on Taste. 1769, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1970. Valentis, Mary. Female Rage: Unlocking its Secrets, Claiming its Power. New York: Carol Southern Books, 1994. Varadharajan, Asha. Exotic Parodies. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1995. 363

Walder, Dennis. Post-colonial Literatures in English: History, Language, Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1976. Wilhelmus, Tom. “Between Cultures”, The Hudson Review, vol. 49, no. 2 (1996): 316322. Williams, Bernard. Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. Williams, Patrick. “Problems of Post-colonialism”, Paragraph, vol. 16, no. 1 (1993): 91-102. Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformism. London: Verso, 1989. Young, Edward. Conjectures on Original Composition. 1759, reprint. Leeds: The Scolar Press, 1966. Young, Robert. White Mythologies. London: Routledge, 1990. ________ Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. London: Routledge, 1995. Zahar, Renate. Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and Alienation. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989. ________ “Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism”, New Left Review, 225 (1997): 28-51.

364